The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 2 of 4

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Title: The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 2 of 4
Author: Blavatsky, H. P. (Helena Petrovna)
Language: English
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The Secret Doctrine

The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

Author of “Isis Unveiled.”

Third and Revised Edition.

SATYÂT NÂSTI PARO DHARMAH.

“There is no Religion higher than Truth.”

Volume II.

Anthropogenesis

The Theosophical Publishing House

London

1893

CONTENTS

Preliminary Notes on The Archaic Stanzas, and the Four Pre‐Historic
Continents.
Part I. Anthropogenesis.
Text.
Stanza I.
Stanza II.
Stanza III.
Stanza IV.
Stanza V.
Stanza VI.
Stanza VII.
Stanza VIII.
Stanza IX.
Stanza X.
Stanza XI.
Stanza XII.
Commentaries On the Twelve Stanzas and Their Terms, According To Their
Numeration, In Stanzas And Shlokas.
Stanza I. Beginnings of Sentient Life.
Two Antediluvian Astronomers.
Stanza II. Nature Unaided Fails.
Creation of Divine Beings in the Exoteric Accounts.
Stanza II.—_Continued._
The Chronology of the Brâhmans.
Stanza III. Attempts To Create Man.
Stanza IV. Creation Of The First Races.
On The Identity And Differences Of The Incarnating Powers.
Stanza IV.—_Continued._
Stanza V. The Evolution of the Second Race.
The Divine Hermaphrodite.
Stanza VI. The Evolution Of The “Sweat‐Born.”
A Few Words About “Deluges” And “Noahs.”
Stanza VII. From The Semi‐Divine Down To The First Human Races.
I. Fission.
II. Budding.
III. Spores.
IV. Intermediate Hermaphroditism.
V. True Sexual Union.
Stanza VIII. Evolution Of The Animal Mammalians: The First Fall.
What May Be The Objections To The Foregoing.
Stanza IX. The Final Evolution Of Man.
Edens, Serpents, And Dragons.
The “Sons Of God” And The “Sacred Island.”
Stanza X. The History Of The Fourth Race.
Archaic Teachings In The “Purânas” And “Genesis.” Physical
Evolution.
A Panoramic View Of The Early Races.
Are Giants A Fiction?
The Races With The “Third Eye.”
The Primeval Manus Of Humanity.
Stanza XI. The Civilization And Destruction Of The Fourth And Fifth
Races.
Cyclopean Ruins And Colossal Stones As Witnesses To Giants.
Stanza XII. The Fifth Race And Its Divine Instructors.
Serpents And Dragons Under Different Symbolisms.
The Sidereal And Cosmic Glyphs.
Our Divine Instructors.
The Origin Of The Satanic Myth.
Noah Was A Kabir, Hence He Must Have Been A Demon.
The Oldest Persian Traditions About The Polar, And The Submerged
Continents.
Western Speculations, Founded On The Greek And Paurânic
Traditions.
The “Curse” From A Philosophical Point Of View.
Additional Fragments From A Commentary On The Verses Of Stanza
XII.
Conclusion.
Part II. The Archaic Symbolism Of The World‐Religions.
Section I. Esoteric Tenets Corroborated in Every Scripture.
Section II. Adam=Adami.
Section III. The “Holy of Holies.” Its Degradation.
Section IV. On the Myth of the “Fallen Angels” in its Various Aspects.
A. The Evil Spirit: Who, And What?
B. The Gods Of Light Proceed From The Gods Of Darkness.
C. The Many Meanings Of The “War In Heaven.”
Section V. Is Plerôma Satan’s Lair?
Section VI. Prometheus, the Titan.
His Origin In Ancient India.
Section VII. Enoïchion‐Henoch.
Section VIII. The Symbolism of the Mystery‐Names Iao and Jehovah, with
their Relation to the Cross and Circle.
A. Cross And Circle.
B. The Fall Of The Cross Into Matter.
Section IX. The Upanishads in Gnostic Literature.
Section X. The Cross and the Pythagorean Decad.
Section XI. The Mysteries of the Hebdomad.
A. Saptaparna.
B. The Tetraktys In Relation To The Heptagon.
C. The Septenary Element In The Vedas.
D. The Septenary In The Exoteric Works.
E. Seven In Astronomy, Science, And Magic.
F. The Seven Souls Of The Egyptologists.
Part III. Addenda. Science And The Secret Doctrine Contrasted.
Section I. Archaic, or Modern Anthropology?
Section II. The Ancestors Mankind is Offered by Science.
Plastidular Souls, And Conscious Nerve‐Cells.
Section III. The Fossil Relics of Man and the Anthropoid Ape.
A. Geological Facts Bearing On The Question Of Their Relationship.
B. Western Evolutionism: The Comparative Anatomy Of Man And The
Anthropoid In No Way A Confirmation Of Darwinism.
C. Darwinism And The Antiquity Of Man: The Anthropoids And Their
Ancestry.
Section IV. Duration of the Geological Periods, Race Cycles, and the
Antiquity of Man.
A. Modern Scientific Speculations About The Ages Of The Globe,
Animal Evolution, And Man.
B. On Chains Of Planets And Their Plurality.
C. Supplementary Remarks On Esoteric Geological Chronology.
Section V. Organic Evolution and Creative Centres.
A. The Origin And Evolution Of The Mammalia: Science And Esoteric
Phylogeny.
B. The European Palæolithic Races: Whence, And How Distributed.
Section VI. Giants, Civilizations, and Submerged Continents Traced in
History.
A. Some Statements About The Sacred Islands And Continents In The
Classics, Explained Esoterically.
Section VII. Scientific and Geological Proofs of the Existence of
Several Submerged Continents.
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.]

Ἡ ἐμὴ διδαχὴ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμή, ἀλλὰ τοῦ πέμψαντός με.

My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me.

JOHN vii. 16.

Modern Science insists upon the doctrine of evolution; so do human
reason and the Secret Doctrine, and the idea is corroborated by
the ancient legends and myths, and even by the _Bible_ itself,
when it is read between the lines. We see a flower slowly
developing from a bud, and the bud from its seed. But whence the
latter, with all its predetermined programme of physical
transformation, and its invisible, therefore _spiritual_, forces
which gradually develop its form, colour, and odour? The word
_evolution_ speaks for itself. The germ of the present human race
must have preëxisted in the parent of this race, as the seed, in
which lies hidden the flower of next summer, was developed in the
capsule of its parent flower; the parent may be but _slightly_
different, but it still differs from its future progeny. The
antediluvian ancestors of the present elephant and lizard were,
perhaps, the mammoth and the plesiosaurus; why should not the
progenitors of our human race have been the “giants” of the
_Vedas_, the _Voluspa_, and the _Book of Genesis_? While it is
positively absurd to believe the “transformation of species” to
have taken place according to some of the more materialistic views
of the Evolutionists, it is but natural to think that each genus,
beginning with the molluscs and ending with monkey‐man, has
modified from its own primordial and distinctive form.—ISIS
UNVEILED, I. 152‐3.

PRELIMINARY NOTES ON THE ARCHAIC STANZAS, AND THE FOUR PRE‐HISTORIC
CONTINENTS.

Facies totius universi, quamvis infinitis modis variet,
Manet tamen semper eadem.—SPINOZA.

The Stanzas, with the Commentaries thereon, in this Volume, are drawn from
the same Archaic Records as the Stanzas on Cosmogony in Volume I. As far
as possible a verbatim translation is given: but some of the Stanzas are
too obscure to be understood without explanation, and therefore, as in
Volume I, they are first given in full as they stand, and then, when taken
verse by verse with their Commentaries, an attempt is made to make them
clearer, by words added in foot‐notes, in anticipation of the fuller
explanation of the Commentary.

As regards the Evolution of mankind, the Secret Doctrine postulates three
new propositions, which stand in direct antagonism to Modern Science as
well as to current religious dogmas. It teaches: (_a_) the simultaneous
evolution of seven human Groups on seven different portions of our globe;
(_b_) the birth of the _astral_, before the _physical_ body, the former
being a model for the latter; and (_c_) that man, in this Round, preceded
every mammalian—the anthropoids included—in the animal kingdom.(1)

The Secret Doctrine is not alone in speaking of primeval Men born
simultaneously on the seven divisions of our Globe. In the _Divine
Pymander_ of Hermes Trismegistus, we find the same seven primeval Men(2)
evolving from Nature and the Heavenly Man, in the collective sense of the
word, namely, from the Creative Spirits; and in the fragments of Chaldæan
tablets, collected by George Smith, on which is inscribed the Babylonian
Legend of Creation, in the first column of the Cutha tablet, seven human
Beings “with the faces of ravens,” that is to say, of black swarthy
complexions, whom “the [seven] Great Gods created,” are mentioned. Or, as
explained in lines 16, 17 and 18:

In the midst of the earth they grew up and became great,
And increased in number,
Seven kings, brothers of the same family.(3)

These are the seven Kings of Edom to whom reference is made in the
_Kabalah_; the First Race, which was _imperfect_, that is to say, was born
before the “balance” (sexes) existed, and which was therefore
destroyed.(4)

Seven Kings, brethren, appeared and begat children, 6,000 in
number were their peoples. The God Nergas [death] destroyed them.
“How did he destroy them?” By bringing into equilibrium [or
balance] those who did not yet exist.(5)

They were “destroyed,” as a Race, by being merged in their own progeny (by
exudation): that is to say, the sexless Race reïncarnated in the
(potentially) bisexual; the latter, in the androgynes; these again, in the
sexual, the later Third Race. Were the tablets less mutilated, they would
be found to contain word for word the same account as is given in the
Archaic Records and in Hermes, at least as regards the fundamental facts,
if not as regards minute details; for Hermes is a good deal disfigured by
mistranslations.

It is quite certain that the seeming supernaturalism of these teachings,
although allegorical, is so diametrically opposed to the dead‐letter
statements of the Bible,(6) as well as to the latest hypotheses of
Science, that it will evoke passionate denial. The Occultists, however,
know that the traditions of Esoteric Philosophy must be the right ones,
simply because they are the most logical, and reconcile every difficulty.
Besides, we have the Egyptian _Books of Thoth_, and _Book of the Dead_,
and the Hindû _Purânas_ with their seven Manus, as well as the Chaldæo‐
Assyrian accounts, whose tiles mention seven primitive Men, or Adams, the
real meaning of which name may be ascertained by means of the _Kabalah_.
Those who know anything of the Samothracian Mysteries will also remember
that the generic name of the Kabiri was the “Holy Fires,” which created on
seven localities of the island of Electria, or Samothrace, the “Kabir born
of the Holy Lemnos”—the island sacred to Vulcan.

According to Pindar, this Kabir, whose name was Adamas,(7) was, in the
traditions of Lemnos, the type of the primitive man born from the bosom of
the Earth. He was the archetype of the first males in the order of
generation, and was one of the seven autochthonous ancestors or
progenitors of mankind.(8) If, coupling with this the fact that Samothrace
was colonized by the Phœnicians, and before them by the mysterious
Pelasgians who came from the East, we also remember the identity of the
“Mystery” Gods of the Phœnicians, Chaldæans, and Israelites, it will be
easy to discover whence came also the confused account of the Noachian
Deluge. It has become undeniable of late that the Jews, who obtained their
primitive ideas about creation from Moses, who had them from the
Egyptians, compiled their Genesis and first cosmogonic traditions, when
rewritten by Ezra and others, from the Chaldæo‐Akkadian account. It is,
therefore, sufficient to examine the Babylonian and Assyrian cuneiform and
other inscriptions to find also therein, scattered here and there, not
only the original meaning of the name Adam, Admi, or Adami, but also the
creation of seven Adams or roots of Men, born of Mother Earth, physically,
and of the Divine Fire of the Progenitors, spiritually or astrally. The
Assyriologists, ignorant of the Esoteric teachings, could hardly be
expected to pay any greater attention to the mysterious and ever‐recurring
number _seven_ on the Babylonian cylinders, than they pay to it on finding
it in _Genesis_ and the rest of the _Bible_. Yet the numbers of the
ancestral spirits and their seven groups of human progeny are on the
cylinders, notwithstanding the dilapidated condition of the fragments, and
are to be found as plainly, as they are in _Pymander_ and in the _Book of
the Concealed Mystery_ of the _Kabalah_. In the latter Adam Kadmon is the
Sephirothal Tree, as also the “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.”
And that Tree, says verse 32, “hath around it seven columns,” or palaces,
of the seven creative Angels operating in the Spheres of the seven Planets
on our Globe. As Adam Kadmon is a _collective_ name, so also is the name
of the man Adam. Says George Smith, in his _Chaldean Account of Genesis_:

The word Adam used in these legends for the first human being is
evidently _not a proper name, but is only used as a term for
mankind_. Adam appears as a proper name in _Genesis_, but
certainly in some passages is only used in the same sense as the
Assyrian word.(9)

Moreover, neither the Chaldæan nor the Biblical Deluge, with their stories
of Xisuthrus and Noah, is based on the universal or even on the Atlantean
Deluges, recorded in the Indian allegory of Vaivasvata Manu. They are the
exoteric allegories based on the Esoteric Mysteries of Samothrace. If the
older Chaldæans knew the Esoteric truth concealed in the Purânic legends,
the other nations were aware only of the Samothracian Mystery, and
allegorized it. They adapted it to their astronomical and anthropological,
or rather phallic, notions. Samothrace is known historically to have been
famous in antiquity for a deluge, which submerged the country and reached
the top of the highest mountains; an event which happened before the age
of the Argonauts. It was overflowed very suddenly by waters from the
Euxine, which had been regarded up to that time as a lake.(10) But the
Israelites had, moreover, another legend upon which to base their
allegory, the legend of the Deluge, that transformed the present Gobi
Desert into a sea _for the last time_, some 10,000 or 12,000 years ago,
and which drove many Noahs and their families to the surrounding
mountains. As the Babylonian accounts are only now restored from hundreds
of thousands of broken fragments—the mound of Kouyunjik alone having
yielded from Layard’s excavations upwards of twenty thousand fragments of
inscriptions—the proofs here cited are comparatively scanty; yet such as
they are, they corroborate almost every one of our teachings; three most
certainty, at the very least. These are:

(1) That the race which was the first to fall into generation was a dark
race (zalmat‐qaqadi), which they call the Adamu or Dark Race, and that
Sarku, or the Light Race, remained pure for a long while subsequently.

(2) That the Babylonians recognized two principal Races at the time of the
Fall, the Race of the Gods, the Ethereal Doubles of the Pitris, having
preceded these two. This is Sir H. Rawlinson’s opinion. These Races are
our Second and Third Root‐Races.

(3) That these seven Gods, each of whom created a Man, or Group of men,
were “the Gods imprisoned or incarnated.” These Gods were: the God Zi; the
God Zi‐ku, Noble Life, Director of Purity; the God Mir‐ku, Noble Crown,
“Saviour from death of the Gods [later on] imprisoned,” and the creator of
“the dark races which his hand has made”; the God Libzu, “wise among the
Gods”; the God Nissi; the God Suhhab; and Hea or Sa, their synthesis, the
God of Wisdom and of the Deep, identified with Oannes‐Dagon, at the time
of the Fall, and called, collectively, the Demiurge, or Creator.(11)

There are two “Creations” so‐called, in the Babylonian fragments, and as
_Genesis_ has adhered to this, we find its first two chapters
distinguished as the Elohite and the Jehovite Creations. Their proper
order, however, is not preserved in these or in any other exoteric
accounts. Now these “Creations,” according to the Occult Teachings, refer
respectively to the formation of the primordial seven Men by the
Progenitors, the Pitris, or Elohim, and to that of the human Groups after
the Fall.

All this will be examined in the light of Science and comparisons drawn
from the scriptures of all the ancient nations, the _Bible_ included, as
we proceed. Meanwhile, before we turn to the Anthropogenesis of the
prehistoric Races, it may be useful to agree upon the names to be given to
the Continents on which the four great Races, which preceded our Adamic
Race, were born, lived, and died. Their archaic and Esoteric names were
many, and varied with the language of the nation which mentioned them in
its annals and scriptures. That which in the _Vendîdâd_, for instance, is
referred to as Airyana Vaêjô(12) wherein was born the original
Zoroaster,(13) is called in the Purânic literature Shveta Dvîpa, Mount
Meru, the Abode of Vishnu, etc.; and in the Secret Doctrine is simply
named the “Land of the Gods,” under their chiefs, the “Spirits of this
Planet.”

Therefore, in view of the possible, and even very probable confusion, that
may arise, it is considered more convenient to adopt, for each of the four
Continents constantly referred to, a name more familiar to the cultured
reader. It is proposed, then, to call the first Continent, or rather the
first _terra firma_ on which the First Race was evolved by the divine
Progenitors:

I. The Imperishable Sacred Land.

The reason for the name is that it is stated that: this “Imperishable
Sacred Land” never shared the fate of the other Continents, because it is
the only one whose destiny it is to last from the beginning to the end of
the Manvantara throughout each Round. It is the cradle of the first man
and the dwelling of the last _divine_ mortal, chosen as a Shishta for the
future seed of humanity. Of this mysterious and sacred land very little
can be said, except, perhaps, according to a poetical expression in one of
the Commentaries, that the “_Pole‐star has its watchful eye upon it, from
the dawn to the close of the twilight of a Day of the Great Breath_.”(14)

II. The Hyperborean.

This will be the name chosen for the second Continent, the land which
stretched out its promontories southward and westward from the North Pole
to receive the Second Race, and comprised the whole of what is now known
as Northern Asia. Such was the name given by the oldest Greeks to the far‐
off and mysterious region, whither their tradition made Apollo, the
Hyperborean, travel every year. Astronomically, Apollo is, of course, the
Sun, who, abandoning his Hellenic sanctuaries, loved to annually visit his
far‐away country, where the Sun was said to never set for one half of the
year. “Ἐγγὺς γὰρ νυκτός τε καὶ ἤματος εἰσι κέλευθοι,” says a verse in the
Odyssey.(15)

But historically, or better, perhaps, ethnologically and geologically, the
meaning is different. The land of the Hyperboreans, the country that
extended beyond Boreas, the frozen‐hearted God of snows and hurricanes,
who loved to slumber heavily on the chain of Mount Rhipæus, was neither an
ideal country, as surmized by the Mythologists, nor yet a land in the
neighbourhood of Scythia and the Danube.(16) It was a real Continent, a
_bonâ fide_ land, which knew no winter in those early days, nor have its
sorry remains more than one night and day during the year, even now. The
nocturnal shadows never fall upon it, said the Greeks; for it is the “Land
of the Gods,” the favourite abode of Apollo, the God of light, and its
inhabitants are his beloved priests and servants. This may be regarded as
poetized _fiction_ now; but it was poetized _truth_ then.

III. Lemuria.

The third Continent, we propose to call Lemuria. The name is an invention,
or an idea, of Mr. P. L. Sclater, who, between 1850 and 1860, asserted on
zoological grounds the actual existence, in prehistoric times, of a
Continent which he showed to have extended from Madagascar to Ceylon and
Sumatra. It included some portions of what is now Africa; but otherwise
this gigantic Continent, which stretched from the Indian Ocean to
Australia, has now wholly disappeared beneath the waters of the Pacific,
leaving here and there only some of its highland tops which are now
islands. Mr. A. R. Wallace, the Naturalist, writes Mr. Charles Gould:

Extends the Australia of Tertiary periods to New Guinea and the
Solomon Islands, and perhaps to Fiji, and from its marsupial types
infers a connection with the northern continent during the
Secondary period.(17)

The subject is treated at length elsewhere.(18)

IV. Atlantis.

Thus we name the fourth Continent. It would be the first historical land,
were the traditions of the Ancients to receive more attention than they
have hitherto. The famous island of Plato of that name was but a fragment
of this great Continent.(19)

V. Europe.

The fifth Continent was America; but, as it is situated at the Antipodes,
it is Europe and Asia Minor, almost coëval with it, which are generally
referred to by the Indo‐Aryan Occultists as the fifth. If their teaching
followed the appearance of the Continents in their geological and
geographical order, then this classification would have to be altered. But
as the sequence of the Continents is made to follow the order of evolution
of the Races, from the First to the Fifth, our Âryan Root‐Race, Europe
must be called the fifth great Continent. The Secret Doctrine takes no
account of islands and peninsulas, nor does it follow the modern
geographical distribution of land and sea. Since the day of its earliest
teachings and the destruction of the great Atlantis, the face of the Earth
has changed more than once. There was a time when the delta of Egypt and
Northern Africa belonged to Europe, before the formation of the Straits of
Gibraltar and a further upheaval of the Continent entirely changed the
face of the map of Europe. The last serious change occurred some 12,000
years ago,(20) and was followed by the submersion of Plato’s little
Atlantic island, which he calls Atlantis after its parent continent.
Geography was part of the Mysteries, in days of old. Says the _Zohar_:

These secrets [of land and sea] were divulged to the _men of the
secret science_, but not to the geographers.(21)

The claim that physical man was originally a colossal pre‐tertiary giant,
and that he existed 18,000,000 years ago, must of course appear
preposterous to admirers of, and believers in, modern learning. The whole
_posse comitatus_ of Biologists will turn away from the conception of this
Third Race Titan of the Secondary Age, a being fit to fight successfully
with the then gigantic monsters of the air, sea, and land; so his
forefathers, the ethereal prototypes of the Atlantean, had little need to
fear that which could not hurt them. The modern Anthropologist is quite
welcome to laugh at our Titans, as he laughs at the Biblical Adam, and as
the Theologian laughs at the former’s pithecoid ancestor. The Occultists
and their severe critics may feel that they have pretty well mutually
squared their accounts by this time. Occult Sciences claim less and give
more, at all events, than either Darwinian Anthropology or Biblical
Theology.

Nor ought the Esoteric Chronology to frighten anyone; for, with regard to
figures, the greatest authorities of the day are as fickle and as
uncertain as the Mediterranean waves. As regards the duration of the
geological periods alone, the learned men of the Royal Society are all
hopelessly at sea, and jump from one million to five hundred millions of
years with the utmost ease, as will be seen more than once during this
comparison.

Take one instance for our present purpose—the calculations of Mr. Croll.
Whether, according to this authority, 2,500,000 years represent the time
since the beginning of the Tertiary Age, or the Eocene period, as an
American geologist makes him say;(22) or whether again Mr. Croll “allows
fifteen millions since the beginning of the Eocene period,” as quoted by
an English geologist,(23) both sets of figures cover the claims made by
the Secret Doctrine.(24) For assigning as the latter does from four to
five million years between the incipient and the final evolution of the
Fourth Root‐Race, on the Lemuro‐Atlantean Continents; one million years
for the Fifth, or Âryan Race, to the present date; and about 850,000 since
the submersion of the last large peninsula of the great Atlantis—all this
may have easily taken place within the 15,000,000 years conceded by Mr.
Croll to the Tertiary Age. But, chronologically speaking, the duration of
the period is of secondary importance, as we have, after all, certain
American Scientists to fall back upon. These gentlemen, unmoved by the
fact that their assertions are called not only dubious but absurd, yet
maintain that man existed so far back as in the Secondary Age. They have
found human footprints on rocks of that formation; and furthermore, M. de
Quatrefages finds no valid scientific reason why man should not have
existed during the Secondary Age.

The Ages and periods in Geology are, in sober truth, purely conventional
terms, as they are still barely delineated, and, moreover, no two
Geologists or Naturalists agree as to the figures. Thus, there is a wide
margin for choice offered to the Occultist by the learned fraternity.
Shall we take for one of our supports Mr. T. Mellard Read? This gentleman,
in a paper on “Limestone as an Index of Geological Time,” read by him in
1878 before the Royal Society, claims that the _minimum_ time required for
the formation of the sedimentary strata and the elimination of the
calcareous matter is in round numbers 600 million years;(25) or shall we
ask support for our chronology from Mr. Darwin’s works, wherein, according
to his theory, he demands for the organic transformations from 300 to 500
million years? Sir Charles Lyell and Prof. Houghton were satisfied with
placing the beginning of the Cambrian Age at 200 and 240 millions of years
ago, respectively. Geologists and Zoologists claim the maximum time,
though Mr. Huxley, at one time, placed the beginning of the incrustation
of the earth at 1,000 million years ago, and would not surrender a
millennium of it.

But the main point for us lies not in the agreement or disagreement of the
Naturalists as to the duration of geological periods, but rather in their
perfect accord on one point, for a wonder, and this a very important one.
They all agree that during the Miocene Age—whether one or ten million
years ago—Greenland and even Spitzbergen, the remnants of our second or
Hyperborean Continent, “had an almost tropical climate.” Now the pre‐
Homeric Greeks had preserved a vivid tradition of this “Land of the
Eternal Sun,” whither their Apollo journeyed yearly. Science tells us:

During the Miocene age, Greenland (in N. Lat. 70°) developed an
abundance of trees, such as the yew, the redwood, the sequoia,
allied to the Californian species, beeches, planes, willows, oaks,
poplars and walnuts, as well as a magnolia and a zamia.(26)

In short Greenland had southern plants unknown to northern regions.

And now arises this natural question. If the Greeks, in the days of Homer,
knew of a Hyperborean land, _i.e._, a blessed land beyond the reach of
Boreas, the God of winter and of the hurricane, an ideal region which the
later Greeks and their writers have vainly tried to locate beyond Scythia,
a country where nights were short and days long, and beyond that a land
where the Sun never set and the palm grew freely—if they knew of all this,
who then told them of it? In their day, and for ages previously, Greenland
must certainly have been already covered with perpetual snows, with never‐
thawing ice, just as it is now. Everything tends to show that the land of
the short nights and the long days was Norway or Scandinavia, beyond which
was the blessed land of eternal light and summer. For the Greeks to know
of this, the tradition must have descended to them from some people more
ancient than themselves, who were acquainted with those climatic details
of which the Greeks themselves could know nothing. Even in our day,
Science suspects that beyond the Polar seas, at the very circle of the
Arctic Pole, there exists a sea which never freezes and a continent which
is ever green. The Archaic Teachings, and also the _Purânas_—for one who
understands their allegories—contain the same statements. Suffice, then,
for us the strong probability that, during the Miocene period of Modern
Science, at a time when Greenland was an almost tropical land, there lived
a people, now unknown to history.

NOTE.

The reader is requested to bear in mind that the following Sections are
not strictly consecutive in order of time. In Part I the Stanzas which
form the skeleton of the exposition are given, and certain important
points commented upon and explained. In the subsequent Sections of Parts
II and III various additional details are gathered, and a fuller
explanation of the subject is attempted.

PART I. ANTHROPOGENESIS.

Twelve Stanzas From the “Book Of Dzyan,”(27)

With Commentaries.

In primeval times, a maiden,
Beauteous Daughter of the Ether,
Passed for ages her existence
In the great expanse of Heaven.

Seven hundred years she wandered,

Seven hundred years she laboured,
Ere her first‐born was delivered.

Ere a beauteous duck descending,
Hastens toward the water‐mother,

Lightly on the knee she settles,
Finds a nesting‐place befitting,
Where to lay her eggs in safety.

Lays her eggs within, at pleasure,
Six, the golden eggs she lays there,
Then a Seventh, an egg of iron.

_Kalevala_ (CRAWFORD).

Text.

Stanza I.

1. The Lha which turns the Fourth is Servant to the Lha(s) of the Seven,
they who revolve, driving their Chariots around their Lord, the One Eye of
our World. His Breath gave Life to the Seven. It gave Life to the First.

2. Said the Earth: “Lord of the Shining Face, my House is empty.... Send
thy Sons to people this Wheel. Thou hast sent thy Seven Sons to the Lord
of Wisdom. Seven times doth he see thee nearer to himself, seven times
more doth he feel thee. Thou hast forbidden thy Servants, the small Rings,
to catch thy Light and Heat, thy great Bounty to intercept on its passage.
Send now to thy Servant the same.”

3. Said the Lord of the Shining Face: “I shall send thee a Fire when thy
work is commenced. Raise thy voice to other Lokas; apply to thy Father,
the Lord of the Lotus, for his Sons.... Thy People shall be under the rule
of the Fathers. Thy Men shall be mortals. The Men of the Lord of Wisdom,
not the Sons of Soma, are immortal. Cease thy complaints. Thy Seven Skins
are yet on thee.... Thou art not ready. Thy Men are not ready.”

4. After great throes she cast off her old Three and put on her new Seven
Skins, and stood in her first one.

Stanza II.

5. The Wheel whirled for thirty crores more. It constructed Rûpas; soft
Stones that hardened, hard Plants that softened. Visible from invisible,
Insects and small Lives. She shook them off her back whenever they overran
the Mother.... After thirty crores, she turned round. She lay on her back:
on her side.... She would call no Sons of Heaven, she would ask no Sons of
Wisdom. She created from her own Bosom. She evolved Water‐Men, terrible
and bad.

6. The Water‐Men, terrible and bad, she herself created from the remains
of others. From the dross and slime of her First, Second, and Third, she
formed them. The Dhyâni came and looked ... the Dhyâni from the bright
Father‐Mother, from the White Regions they came, from the Abodes of the
immortal Mortals.

7. Displeased they were. “Our Flesh is not there. No fit Rûpas for our
Brothers of the Fifth. No Dwellings for the Lives. Pure Waters, not
turbid, they must drink. Let us dry them.”

8. The Flames came. The Fires with the Sparks; the Night‐Fires and the
Day‐Fires. They dried out the turbid dark Waters. With their heat they
quenched them. The Lhas of the High, the Lhamayin of Below, came. They
slew the Forms which were two‐ and four‐faced. They fought the Goat‐Men,
and the Dog‐Headed Men, and the Men with fishes’ bodies.

9. Mother‐Water, the Great Sea, wept. She arose, she disappeared in the
Moon, which had lifted her, which had given her birth.

10. When they were destroyed, Mother Earth remained bare. She asked to be
dried.

Stanza III.

11. The Lord of the Lords came. From her Body he separated the Waters, and
that was Heaven above, the First Heaven.

12. The great Chohans called the Lords of the Moon, of the Airy Bodies:
“Bring forth Men, Men of your nature. Give them their Forms within. She
will build Coverings without. Males‐Females will they be. Lords of the
Flame also....”

13. They went each on his allotted Land; Seven of them, each on his Lot.
The Lords of the Flame remain behind. They would not go, they would not
create.

Stanza IV.

14. The Seven Hosts, the Will‐Born Lords, propelled by the Spirit of Life‐
Giving, separate Men from themselves, each on his own Zone.

15. Seven times seven Shadows of Future Men were born, each of his own
Colour and Kind. Each inferior to his Father. The Fathers, the Boneless,
could give no Life to Beings with Bones. Their progeny were Bhûta, with
neither Form nor Mind. Therefore they are called the Chhâyâ Race.

16. How are the Manushya born? The Manus with minds, how are they made?
The Fathers called to their help their own Fire, which is the Fire that
burns in Earth. The Spirit of the Earth called to his help the Solar Fire.
These Three produced in their joint efforts a good Rûpa. It could stand,
walk, run, recline, or fly. Yet it was still but a Chhâyâ, a Shadow with
no Sense....

17. The Breath needed a Form; the Fathers gave it. The Breath needed a
Gross Body; the Earth moulded it. The Breath needed the Spirit of Life;
the Solar Lhas breathed it into its Form. The Breath needed a Mirror of
its Body; “We gave it our own!”—said the Dhyânis. The Breath needed a
Vehicle of Desires; “It has it!”—said the Drainer of Waters. But Breath
needs a Mind to embrace the Universe; “We cannot give that!”—said the
Fathers. “I never had it!”—said the Spirit of the Earth. “The Form would
be consumed were I to give it mine!”—said the Great Fire.... Man remained
an empty senseless Bhûta.... Thus have the Boneless given Life to those
who became Men with Bones in the Third.

Stanza V.

18. The First were the Sons of Yoga. Their sons, the children of the
Yellow Father and the White Mother.

19. The Second Race was the product by budding and expansion, the A‐sexual
from the Sexless.(28) Thus was, O Lanoo, the Second Race produced.

20. Their Fathers were the Self‐born. The Self‐born, the Chhâyâ from the
brilliant Bodies of the Lords, the Fathers, the Sons of Twilight.

21. When the Race became old, the old Waters mixed with the fresher
Waters. When its Drops became turbid, they vanished and disappeared in the
new Stream, in the hot Stream of Life. The Outer of the First became the
Inner of the Second. The old Wing became the new Shadow, and the Shadow of
the Wing.

Stanza VI.

22. Then the Second evolved the Egg‐born, the Third. The Sweat grew, its
Drops grew, and the Drops became hard and round. The Sun warmed it; the
Moon cooled and shaped it; the Wind fed it until its ripeness. The White
Swan from the Starry Vault overshadowed the big Drop. The Egg of the
Future Race, the Man‐swan of the later Third. First male‐female, then man
and woman.

23. The Self‐born were the Chhâyâs, the Shadows from the Bodies of the
Sons of Twilight. Neither water nor fire could destroy them. Their sons
were.

Stanza VII.

24. The Sons of Wisdom, the Sons of Night, ready for rebirth, came down.
They saw the vile forms of the First Third. “We can choose,” said the
Lords, “we have wisdom.” Some entered the Chhâyâs. Some projected a Spark.
Some deferred till the Fourth. From their own Rûpa they filled the Kâma.
Those who entered became Arhats. Those who received but a Spark, remained
destitute of knowledge; the Spark burned low. The Third remained mind‐
less. Their Jîvas were not ready. These were set apart among the Seven.
They became narrow‐headed. The Third were ready. “In these shall we
dwell,” said the Lords of the Flame and of the Dark Wisdom.

25. How did the Mânasa, the Sons of Wisdom, act? They rejected the Self‐
born. They are not ready. They spurned the Sweat‐born. They are not quite
ready. They would not enter the first Egg‐born.

26. When the Sweat‐born produced the Egg‐born, the twofold, the mighty,
the powerful with bones, the Lords of Wisdom said: “Now shall we create.”

27. The Third Race became the Vâhan of the Lords of Wisdom. It created
Sons of Will and Yoga, by Kriyâshakti it created them, the Holy Fathers,
Ancestors of the Arhats....

Stanza VIII.

28. From the drops of sweat, from the residue of the substance, matter
from dead bodies of men and animals of the Wheel before, and from cast‐off
dust, the first animals were produced.

29. Animals with bones, dragons of the deep, and flying Sarpas were added
to the creeping things. They that creep on the ground got wings. They of
the long necks in the water became the progenitors of the fowls of the
air.

30. During the Third, the boneless animals grew and changed; they became
animals with bones, their Chhâyâs became solid.

31. The animals separated the first. They began to breed. The two‐fold man
separated also. He said: “Let us as they; let us unite and make
creatures.” They did....

32. And those which had no Spark took huge she‐animals unto them. They
begat upon them dumb races. Dumb they were themselves. But their tongues
untied. The tongues of their progeny remained still. Monsters they bred. A
race of crooked red‐hair‐covered monsters going on all fours. A dumb race
to keep the shame untold.

Stanza IX.

33. Seeing which, the Lhas who had not built men, wept, saying:

34. “The Amânasa have defiled our future abodes. This is Karma. Let us
dwell in the others. Let us teach them better, lest worse should happen.”
They did....

35. Then all men became endowed with Manas. They saw the sin of the
mindless.

36. The Fourth Race developed speech.

37. The one became two; also all the living and creeping things that were
still one, giant fish, birds and serpents with shell‐heads.

Stanza X.

38. Thus, two by two, on the seven Zones, the Third Race gave birth to the
Fourth; the Sura became A‐sura.

39. The First, on every Zone, was moon‐coloured; the Second yellow like
gold; the Third red; the Fourth brown, which became black with sin. The
first seven human shoots were all of one complexion. The next seven began
mixing.

40. Then the Third and Fourth became tall with pride. “We are the kings;
we are the gods.”

41. They took wives fair to look upon. Wives from the mindless, the
narrow‐headed. They bred monsters, wicked demons, male and female, also
Khado, with little minds.

42. They built temples for the human body. Male and female they
worshipped. Then the Third Eye acted no longer.

Stanza XI.

43. They built huge cities. Of rare earths and metals they built. Out of
the fires vomited, out of the white stone of the mountains and of the
black stone, they cut their own images, in their size and likeness, and
worshipped them.

44. They built great images nine yatis high, the size of their bodies.
Inner fires had destroyed the land of their fathers. The water threatened
the Fourth.

45. The first great waters came. They swallowed the seven great islands.

46. All holy saved, the unholy destroyed. With them most of the huge
animals, produced from the sweat of the earth.

Stanza XII.

47. Few remained. Some yellow, some brown and black, and some red
remained. The moon‐coloured were gone for ever.

48. The Fifth produced from the holy stock remained; it was ruled over by
the first Divine Kings.

49. ... The Serpents who re‐descended, who made peace with the Fifth, who
taught and instructed it....

Commentaries On the Twelve Stanzas and Their Terms, According To Their
Numeration, In Stanzas And Shlokas.

Stanza I. Beginnings of Sentient Life.

1. The Lha, or Spirit of the Earth. 2. Invocation of the Earth to
the Sun. 3. What the Sun answers. 4. Transformation of the Earth.

1. THE LHA (_a_) WHICH TURNS THE FOURTH(29) IS SERVANT TO THE LHA(S) OF
THE SEVEN(30) (_b_), THEY WHO REVOLVE, DRIVING THEIR CHARIOTS AROUND THEIR
LORD, THE ONE EYE(31) OF OUR WORLD. HIS BREATH GAVE LIFE TO THE SEVEN.(32)
IT GAVE LIFE TO THE FIRST (_c_).

“_They are all Dragons of Wisdom_,” adds the Commentary (_d_).

(_a_) “Lha” is the ancient term in Trans‐Himâlayan regions for “Spirit,”
any celestial or _super‐human_ Being, and it covers the whole series of
heavenly hierarchies, from an Archangel, or Dhyâni, down to an Angel of
darkness, or terrestrial Spirit.

(_b_) This expression shows in plain language that the Spirit‐Guardian of
our Globe, which is the fourth in the Chain, is subordinate to the chief
Spirit (or God) of the Seven Planetary Genii or Spirits. As already
explained, the Ancients had, in their Kyriel of Gods, seven chief Mystery‐
Gods, whose leader was, _exoterically_, the visible Sun, or the eighth,
and, _Esoterically_, the Second Logos, the Demiurge. The Seven—who have
now, in the Christian religion, become the “Seven Eyes of the Lord”—were
the Regents of the seven _chief_ planets; but these were not reckoned
according to the enumeration devised later by people who had forgotten, or
who had an inadequate notion of, the real Mysteries, and included neither
the Sun, the Moon, nor the Earth. The Sun was the chief, exoterically, of
the twelve Great Gods, or zodiacal constellations; and, Esoterically, the
Messiah, the Christos—the subject “anointed” by the Great Breath, or the
One—surrounded by his twelve subordinate powers, also subordinate, in
turn, to each of the seven Mystery‐Gods of the planets.

“_The Seven Higher make the Seven Lhas create the world_,” states a
Commentary; which means that our Earth—to leave aside the rest—was
“created” or fashioned by Terrestrial Spirits, the Regents being simply
the supervisors. This is the first germ of that which grew later into the
Tree of Astrology and Astrolatry. The Higher Ones were the Cosmocratores,
the fabricators of our Solar System. This is borne out by all the ancient
Cosmogonies, such as those of Hermes, of the Chaldæans, of the Aryans, of
the Egyptians, and even of the Jews. The Signs of the Zodiac—the “_Sacred
Animals_” or “Heaven’s Belt”—are as much the Bne’ Alhim—Sons of the Gods
or the Elohim—as the Spirits of the Earth; but they are prior to them.
Soma and Sin, Isis and Diana, are all lunar Gods or Goddesses, called the
Fathers and Mothers of our Earth, which is subordinate to them. But these,
in their turn, are subordinate to their “Fathers” and “Mothers”—the latter
being interchangeable and varying with each nation—the Gods and their
Planets, such as Jupiter, Saturn, Bel, Brihaspati, etc.

(_c_) “His Breath gave Life to the Seven,” refers as much to the Sun, who
gives life to the Planets, as to the “High One,” the _Spiritual Sun_, who
gives life to the whole Kosmos. The astronomical and astrological keys
opening the gate leading to the mysteries of Theogony can be found only in
the later glossaries, which accompany the Stanzas.

In the apocalyptic Shlokas of the Archaic Records, the language is as
symbolical, if less mythical, than in the _Purânas_. Without the help of
the later Commentaries, compiled by generations of Adepts, it would be
impossible to understand the meaning correctly. In the ancient
Cosmogonies, the visible and the invisible worlds are the double links of
one and the same chain. As the Invisible Logos, with its Seven
Hierarchies—each represented or personified by its chief Angel or
Rector—form one POWER, the inner and the invisible; so, in the world of
Forms, the Sun and the seven chief Planets constitute the visible and
active potency; the latter Hierarchy being, so to speak, the visible and
objective Logos of the Invisible and—except in the lowest grades—ever‐
subjective Angels.

Thus—to anticipate a little by way of illustration—every Race in its
evolution is said to be born under the direct influence of one of the
Planets; Race the First receiving its breath of life from the Sun, as will
be seen later on; while the Third Humanity—those who fell into generation,
or from androgynes became separate entities, one male and the other
female—is said to be under the direct influence of Venus, “_the
__‘__little sun__’__ in which the solar orb stores his light_.”

The summary of the Stanzas in Volume I showed the genesis(33) of Gods and
men taking rise in, and from, one and the same Point, which is the One
Universal, Immutable, Eternal, and Absolute UNITY. In its primary
manifested aspect we have seen it become: (1) in the sphere of objectivity
and Physics, PRIMORDIAL SUBSTANCE and FORCE—centripetal and centrifugal,
positive and negative, male and female, etc.; (2) in the world of
Metaphysics, the SPIRIT OF THE UNIVERSE, or Cosmic Ideation, called by
some the LOGOS.

This Logos is the apex of the Pythagorean Triangle. When the Triangle is
complete it becomes the Tetraktys, or the Triangle in the Square, and is
the dual symbol of the four‐lettered Tetragrammaton in the manifested
Kosmos, and of its radical triple Ray in the unmanifested—its Noumenon.

Put more metaphysically, the classification given here of Cosmic
Ultimates, is more one of convenience than of absolute philosophical
accuracy. At the commencement of a great Manvantara, Parabrahman manifests
as Mûlaprakriti and then as the Logos. This Logos is equivalent to the
“Unconscious Universal Mind,” etc., of Western Pantheists. It constitutes
the Basis of the _subject_‐side of manifested Being, and is the source of
all manifestations of individual consciousness. Mûlaprakriti or Primordial
Cosmic Substance, is the foundation of the _object_‐side of things—the
basis of all objective evolution and cosmo‐genesis. Force, then, does not
emerge with Primordial Substance from Parabrahmanic latency. It is the
_transformation into energy of the supra‐conscious thought of the Logos_,
infused, so to speak, into the objectivation of the latter out of
potential latency in the One Reality. Hence spring the wondrous laws of
Matter; hence the “primal impress” so vainly discussed by Bishop Temple.
Force thus is _not synchronous_ with the first objectivation of
Mûlaprakriti. Nevertheless as, apart from it, the latter is absolutely and
necessarily inert—_a mere abstraction_—it is unnecessary to weave too fine
a cobweb of subtleties as to the order of succession of the Cosmic
Ultimates. Force _succeeds_ Mûlaprakriti; but, _minus_ Force, Mûlaprakriti
is for all practical intents and purposes non‐existent.(34)

The Heavenly Man or Tetragrammaton, who is the Protogonos, Tikkoun, the
Firstborn from the passive Deity and the first manifestation of that
Deity’s Shadow, is the Universal Form and Idea, which engenders the
Manifested Logos, Adam Kadmon, or the four‐lettered symbol, in the
Kabalah, of the Universe itself, also called the Second Logos. The Second
springs from the First and develops the Third Triangle;(35) from the last
of which (the lower host of Angels) _Men_ are generated. It is with this
third aspect that we shall deal at present.

The reader must bear in mind that there is a great difference between the
Logos and the Demiurgos, for one is _Spirit_ and the other is _Soul_; or
as Dr. Wilder has it:

Dianoia and Logos are synonymous, Nous being superior and closely
in affinity with Τὸ Ἀγαθὸν, one being the superior apprehending,
the other the comprehending—one noëtic and the other phrenic.

Moreover, Man was regarded in several systems as the Third Logos. The
Esoteric meaning of the word Logos—Speech or Word, Verbum—is the rendering
in objective expression, as in a photograph, of the concealed thought. The
Logos is the mirror reflecting DIVINE MIND, and the Universe is the mirror
of the Logos, though the latter is the _esse_ of that Universe. As the
Logos reflects _all_ in the Universe of Plerôma, so Man reflects in
himself all that he sees and finds in _his_ Universe, the Earth. It is the
Three Heads of the Kabalah—“_unum intra alterum, et alterum super
alterum._”(36) “Every Universe (World or Planet) has its own Logos,” says
the Doctrine. The Sun was always called by the Egyptians the “Eye of
Osiris,” and was himself the Logos, the First‐begotten, or Light made
manifest to the world, “which is the Mind and divine Intellect of the
Concealed.” It is only by the seven‐fold Ray of this Light that we can
become cognizant of the Logos through the Demiurge, regarding the latter
as the “Creator” of our Planet and everything pertaining to it, and the
former as the guiding Force of that “Creator”—good and bad at the same
time, the origin of good and the origin of evil. This “Creator” is neither
good nor bad _per se_, but its differentiated aspects in Nature make it
assume one or the other character. With the invisible and the unknown
Universes disseminated through Space, none of the Sun‐Gods had anything to
do. The idea is expressed very clearly in the Books of Hermes, and in
every ancient folk‐lore. It is symbolized generally by the Dragon and the
Serpent—the Dragon of Good and the Serpent of Evil, represented on Earth
by the right and the left‐hand Magic. In the epic poem of Finland, the
_Kalevala_,(37) the origin of the Serpent of Evil is given: it is born
from the spittle of Suoyatar, and endowed with a Living Soul by the
Principle of Evil, Hisi. A strife is described between the two, the “thing
of evil,” the Serpent or Sorcerer, and Ahti, the Dragon of the white
magician, Lemminkainen. The latter is one of the seven sons of Ilmatar,
the virgin “daughter of the air,” she “who fell from heaven into the sea,”
before Creation, _i.e._, Spirit transformed into the matter of sensuous
life. There is a world of meaning and Occult thought in the following few
lines, admirably rendered by Dr. J. M. Crawford, of Cincinnati. The hero
Lemminkainen,

Hews the wall with might of magic,
Breaks the palisade in pieces,
Hews to atoms _seven_ pickets,
Chops the _serpent‐wall_ to fragments.

When the monster little heeding,

Pounces with his mouth of venom
At the head of Lemminkainen.
But the hero, quick recalling,
Speaks the _master‐words of knowledge_,
Words that came from distant ages,
Words his ancestors had taught him.

(_d_) In China the men of Fohi, or the “Heavenly Man,” are called the
twelve Tien‐Hoang, the twelve Hierarchies of Dhyânis or Angels, with human
faces, and dragon bodies; the Dragon standing for Divine Wisdom or
Spirit;(38) and they create men by incarnating themselves in seven figures
of clay—earth and water—made in the shape of these Tien‐Hoang, a third
allegory.(39) The twelve Æsers of the Scandinavian Eddas do the same. In
the Secret Catechism of the Druses of Syria—a legend which is repeated
word for word by the oldest tribes about and around the Euphrates—men were
created by the “Sons of God,” who descended on Earth, and after gathering
seven Mandragoras, they animated the roots, which forthwith became
men.(40)

All these allegories point to one and the same origin—to the dual and
triple nature of man; dual, as male and female; triple, as being of
spiritual and psychic essence _within_, and of a material fabric without.

2. SAID THE EARTH, “LORD OF THE SHINING FACE,(41) MY HOUSE IS EMPTY....
SEND THY SONS TO PEOPLE THIS WHEEL.(42) THOU HAST SENT THY SEVEN SONS TO
THE LORD OF WISDOM (_A_). SEVEN TIMES DOTH HE SEE THEE NEARER TO HIMSELF;
SEVEN TIMES MORE DOTH HE FEEL THEE (_B_). THOU HAST FORBIDDEN THY
SERVANTS, THE SMALL RINGS, TO CATCH THY LIGHT AND HEAT, THY GREAT BOUNTY
TO INTERCEPT ON ITS PASSAGE. SEND NOW TO THY SERVANT THE SAME!”

(_a_) The “Lord of Wisdom” is Mercury, or Budha.

(_b_) The modern Commentary explains the words as a reference to a well‐
known astronomical fact, that Mercury receives seven times more light and
heat from the Sun than the Earth, or even the beautiful Venus, which
receives but twice the amount falling on our insignificant Globe. Whether
the fact was known in antiquity may be inferred from the prayer of the
“Earth Spirit” to the Sun as given in the text.(43) The Sun, however,
refuses to people the Globe, as it is not ready to receive life as yet.

Mercury, as an astrological Planet, is still more Occult and mysterious
than Venus. It is identical with the Mazdean Mithra, the Genius, or God,
“established between the Sun and the Moon, the perpetual companion of the
‘Sun’ of Wisdom.” Pausanias (Bk. v.) shows him as having an altar in
common with Jupiter. He had wings to express his attendance upon the Sun
in its course; and he was called the Nuntius and Sun‐wolf, “_solaris
luminis particeps_.” He was the leader and evocator of Souls, the great
Magician and the Hierophant. Virgil depicts him as taking his wand to
evoke from Orcus the souls plunged therein—_tum virgam capit, hac animas
ille evocat Orco_.(44) He is the Golden‐coloured Mercury, the Χρυσοφαὴς
Ἑρμῆς whom the Hierophants forbade to name. He is symbolized in Grecian
mythology by one of the “dogs” (vigilance), which watch over the celestial
flock (Occult Wisdom), or Hermes Anubis, or again Agathodæmon. He is the
Argus watching over the Earth, mistaken by the latter for the Sun itself.
It is through the intercession of Mercury that the Emperor Julian prayed
to the Occult Sun every night; for, as says Vossius:

All the theologians assert that _Mercury and the Sun are one_....
He was the most eloquent and the most wise of all the Gods, which
is not to be wondered at, since _Mercury is in such close
proximity to the Wisdom and the Word of God_ [the Sun] that he was
confused with both.(45)

Vossius here utters a greater Occult truth than he suspected. The Hermes
of the Greeks is closely related to the Hindû Saramâ and Sârameya, the
divine watchman, “who watches over the golden flock of stars and solar
rays.”

In the clearer words of the Commentary:

_The Globe, propelled onward by the Spirit of the Earth and his six
Assistants, gets all its vital forces, life, and powers through the medium
of the seven planetary Dhyânis from the Spirit of the Sun. They are his
messengers of Light and Life._

_Like each of the Seven Regions of the Earth, each of the seven_(_46_)_
First‐born [the primordial Human Groups] receives its light and life from
its own especial Dhyâni—spiritually, and from the Palace [House, the
Planet] of that Dhyâni—physically; so with the seven great Races to be
born on it. The First is born under the Sun; the Second under Brihaspati
[Jupiter]; the Third under Lohitânga [Mars, the __“__Fiery‐bodied,__”__
and also under Venus or Shukra]; the Fourth, under Soma [the Moon, our
Globe also, the Fourth Sphere being born under and from the Moon] and
Shani, Saturn,_(_47_)_ the Krûra‐lochana [Evil‐eyed], and the Asita [the
Dark]; the Fifth, under Budha [Mercury]._

_So also with man and every __“__man__”__ [every principle] in man. Each
gets its specific quality from its Primary [the Planetary Spirit],
therefore every man is a septenate [or a combination of principles, each
having its origin in a quality of that special Dhyâni]. Every active power
or force __ of the Earth comes to her from one of the seven Lords. Light
comes through Shukra [Venus], who receives a triple supply, and gives one‐
third of it to the Earth. Therefore the two are called __“__Twin‐
sisters,__”__ but the Spirit of the Earth is subservient to the
__“__Lord__”__ of Shukra. Our wise men represent the two Globes, one over,
the other under the double Sign [the primeval Svastika bereft of its four
arms, or the cross, ☩]._(48)

The “double sign” is, as every student of Occultism knows, the symbol of
the male and the female principles in Nature, of the positive and the
negative, for the Svastika or 卐 is all that and much more. All antiquity,
ever since the birth of Astronomy—imparted to the Fourth Race by one of
the Kings of the Divine Dynasty—and also of Astrology, represented Venus
in its astronomical tables as a _Globe poised over a Cross_, and the
Earth, as a _Globe under a Cross_. The Esoteric meaning of this is the
Earth fallen into generation, or into the production of its species
through sexual union. But the later Western nations have not failed to
give it quite a different interpretation. They explained the sign through
their Mystics—guided by the light of the Latin Church—as meaning that our
Earth and all on it were redeemed _by the Cross_, while Venus—otherwise
Lucifer or Satan—was trampling upon it. Venus is the most Occult,
powerful, and mysterious of all the Planets; the one whose influence upon,
and relation to, the Earth is most prominent. In exoteric Brâhmanism,
Venus or Shukra—a male deity(49)—is the son of Bhrigu, one of the
Prajâpati and a Vedic sage, and is Daitya‐Guru, or the priest‐instructor
of the primeval giants. The whole history of Shukra in the _Purânas_,
refers to the Third and Fourth Races. As says the Commentary:

_It is through Shukra that the __“__double ones__”__ [the hermaphrodites]
of the Third [__Root‐Race__] descended from the first __“__Sweat‐
born.__”__ Therefore it is represented under the symbol [Symbol: circle
with horizontal line through it] [the circle and diameter], during the
Third [Race], and [Symbol: circle with horizontal line through it, and
another from center to bottom], during the Fourth._

This needs explanation. The diameter, when found isolated in a circle,
stands for female Nature; for the first ideal World, _self‐generated_ and
_self‐impregnated_ by the universally diffused Spirit of Life—thus also
referring to the primitive Root‐Race. It becomes androgynous as the Races
and all else on Earth develop into their physical forms, and the symbol is
transformed into a circle with a diameter from which runs a vertical line,
expressive of male and female, not separated as yet—the first and earliest
Egyptian Tau; [Symbol: circle with horizontal line through it, and another
from center to bottom] after which it becomes ☩, or male female
separated(50) and fallen into generation. Venus (the Planet), is
symbolized by the sign of a globe over a cross, which shows the former as
presiding over the natural generation of man. The Egyptians symbolized
Ankh, “life,” by the ansated cross, or ☥, which is only another form of
Venus (Isis), ♀, and meant, Esoterically, that mankind and all animal life
had stepped out of the divine spiritual circle and had fallen into
physical male and female generation. This sign, from the end of the Third
Race, has the same phallic significance as the “_Tree_ of Life” in Eden.
Anouki, a form of Isis, is the Goddess of Life; and Ankh was taken by the
Hebrews from the Egyptians. It was introduced into the language by Moses,
one learned in the Wisdom of the priests of Egypt, with many other
mystical words. The word Ankh in Hebrew, with the personal suffix, means
“my life”—my being—which “is the personal pronoun Anochi,” from the name
of the Egyptian Goddess Anouki.(51)

In one of the most ancient Catechisms of Southern India, Madras
Presidency, the hermaphrodite Goddess Ardhanârî,(52) has the ansated
cross, the Svastika, the “male and female sign,” right in the central
part, to denote the pre‐sexual state of the Third Race. Vishnu, who is now
represented with a lotus growing out of his navel—or the Universe of
Brahmâ evolving out of the central point, Nara—is shown in one of the
oldest carvings as double‐sexed (Vishnu and Lakshmî) standing on a lotus‐
leaf floating on the water, the water rising in a semicircle and pouring
through the Svastika, “the source of generation,” or of the descent of
man.

Pythagoras calls Shukra‐Venus the _Sol alter_, the “other Sun.” Of the
“seven Palaces of the Sun,” that of Lucifer‐Venus is the third in
Christian and Jewish Kabalah, the _Zohar_ making of it the abode of
Samael. According to the Occult Doctrine, this Planet is our Earth’s
_primary_, and its spiritual prototype. Hence, Shukra’s car (Venus‐
Lucifer’s) is said to be drawn by an _Ogdoad_ of “_earth‐born_ horses,”
while the steeds of the chariots of the other Planets are different.

_Every sin committed on Earth is felt by Ushanas‐Shukra. The Guru of the
Daityas is the Guardian Spirit of the Earth and Men. Every change on
Shukra is felt on, and reflected by, the Earth._

Shukra, or Venus, is thus represented as the Preceptor of the Daityas, the
giants of the Fourth Race, who, in the Hindû allegory, at one time
obtained the sovereignty of all the Earth, and defeated the minor Gods.
The Titans of the Western allegory also are as closely connected with
Venus‐Lucifer, which was identified by later Christians with Satan. And,
as Venus, equally with Isis, was represented with cow’s horns on her head,
the symbol of mystic Nature—one convertible with, and significant of, the
Moon, since all these were lunar Goddesses—the configuration of this
Planet is now placed by theologians between the horns of the mystic
Lucifer.(53) It is owing to the fanciful interpretation of the archaic
tradition, which states that Venus changes simultaneously (geologically)
with the Earth, that whatever takes place on the one takes place on the
other, and that many and great were their common changes—it is for these
reasons that St. Augustine repeats it, applying the several changes of
configuration, colour, and even of the orbital paths, to that
theologically‐woven character of Venus‐Lucifer. He even goes so far in his
pious fancy as to connect the last changes of the Planet with the Noachian
and mythical Deluge alleged to have taken place 1796 B.C.(54)

As Venus has no satellites, it is stated allegorically, that Âsphujit
(this “Planet”) adopted the Earth, the progeny of the Moon, “_who overgrew
its parent and gave much trouble_”—a reference to the Occult connection
between the two. The Regent (of the Planet) Shukra(55) loved his adopted
child so well that he incarnated as Ushanas and gave it perfect laws,
which were disregarded and rejected in later ages. Another allegory, in
the _Harivansha_, is that Shukra went to Shiva and asked him to protect
his pupils, the Daityas and Asuras, from the fighting Gods; and that to
further his object he performed a Yoga rite “imbibing the _smoke_ of chaff
with his _head downwards_ for 1,000 years.” This refers to the great
inclination of the axis of Venus—amounting to fifty degrees—and to its
being enveloped in eternal clouds. But it relates only to the physical
constitution of the Planet. It is with its Regent, the informing Dhyân
Chohan, that Occult Mysticism has to deal. The allegory which states that
Vishnu was cursed by Shukra to be _reborn seven times_ on the Earth as a
punishment for killing his (Shukra’s) mother, is full of Occult
philosophical meaning. It does not refer to Vishnu’s Avatâras, since these
number nine—the tenth being still to come—but to the Races on Earth.
Venus, or Lucifer—also Shukra and Ushanas—the Planet, is the light‐bearer
of our Earth, in both the physical and mystic sense. The Christians knew
it well in early times, since one of the earliest popes of Rome is known
by his pontiff‐name as Lucifer.

_Every world has its parent Star and sister Planet. Thus Earth is the
adopted, child and younger brother of Venus, but its inhabitants are of
their own kind.... All sentient complete beings [full septenary men or
higher beings] are furnished, in their beginnings, with forms and
organisms in full harmony with the nature and state of the Sphere they
inhabit._(56)

_The Spheres of Being, or Centres of Life, which are isolated nuclei
breeding their men and their animals, are numberless; not one has any
resemblance to its sister‐companion or to any other in its own special
progeny._(57)

_All have a double physical and spiritual nature._

_The nucleoles are eternal and everlasting; the nuclei periodical and
finite. The nucleoles form part of the Absolute. They are the embrasures
of that black impenetrable fortress, which is for ever concealed from
human or even Dhyânic sight. The nuclei are the light of eternity escaping
therefrom._

_It is that __LIGHT__ which condenses into the Forms of the __“__Lords of
Being__”__—the first and the highest of which are, collectively,
__JÎVÂTMÂ__, or Pratyagâtmâ [which is said figuratively to issue from
Paramâtmâ. It is the Logos of the Greek philosophers—appearing at the
beginning of every new Manvantara]. From these downwards—formed from the
ever‐consolidating waves of that Light, which becomes on the objective
plane gross Matter—proceed the numerous Hierarchies of the Creative
Forces; some formless, others having their own distinctive form, others,
again, the lowest [Elementals], having no form of their own, but assuming
every form according to the surrounding conditions._

_Thus there is but one Absolute Upâdhi [Basis] in the spiritual sense,
from, on, and in which, are built for manvantaric purposes the countless
basic centres on which proceed the universal, cyclic, and individual
Evolutions during the active period._

_The informing Intelligences, which animate these various Centres of
Being, are referred to indiscriminately by men beyond the Great
Range_(_58_)_ as the Manus, the Rishis, the Pitris,_(_59_)_ the Prajâpati,
and so on; and as Dhyâni‐Buddhas, the Chohans, Melhas [Fire‐Gods],
Bodhisattvas,_(_60_)_ and others, on this side. The truly ignorant call
them Gods; the learned profane, the One God; and the wise, the Initiates,
honour in them only the manvantaric manifestations of __THAT__ which
neither our Creators [the Dhyân Chohans] nor their creatures can ever
discuss or know anything about. The __ABSOLUTE__ is not to be defined, and
no mortal or immortal has ever seen or comprehended it during the periods
of Existence. The mutable cannot know the Immutable, nor can that which
lives perceive Absolute Life._

“Therefore, man cannot know higher Beings than his own Progenitors.” “_Nor
shall he worship them_,” but he ought to learn _how_ he came into the
world.

Number Seven, the fundamental figure among all other figures in every
national religious system, from Cosmogony down to man, must have its
_raison d’être_. It is found among the ancient Americans, as prominently
as among the archaic Âryans and Egyptians. The question will be fully
dealt with in the second Part of this Volume; meanwhile a few facts may be
given here. Says the author of the _Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and
the Quiches, 11,500 years ago_:(61)

Seven seems to have been the sacred number _par excellence_ among
all civilized nations of antiquity. Why? This query has never been
satisfactorily answered. Each separate people has given a
different explanation, according to the peculiar tenets of their
[exoteric] religion. That it was the number of numbers for those
initiated to the sacred mysteries there can be no doubt.
Pythagoras ... calls it the “Vehicle of life,” containing body and
soul, since it is formed of a quaternary, that is: _Wisdom and
Intellect_; and a Trinity, or _action_ and _matter_. The Emperor
Julian, in _Matrem_ and in _Oratio_,(62) expresses himself thus:
“Were I to touch upon the initiation into our secret mysteries,
which the Chaldees bacchized respecting the _seven‐rayed_ god,
lighting up the soul through him, I should say things unknown to
the rabble, very unknown, but well known to the blessed
Theurgists.”(63)

And who that is acquainted with the _Purânas_, the _Book of the Dead_, the
_Zendavesta_, the Assyrian Tiles, and finally the _Bible_, and has
observed the constant occurrence of the number seven in these records of
people from the remotest times upwards unconnected and so far apart, can
regard as a coincidence the following fact, given by the same explorer of
ancient Mysteries? Speaking of the prevalence of seven as a mystic number,
among the inhabitants of the “Western Continent” of America, he adds that
it is not less remarkable. For:

It frequently occurs in the _Popul‐Vuh_. We find it besides in the
_seven families_ said by Sahagun and Clavigero to have accompanied
the mystical personage named _Votan_, the reputed founder of the
great city of Nachan, identified by some with Palenque. In the
_seven caves_(64) from which the ancestors of the Nahualts are
reported to have emerged. In the _seven cities_ of Cibola,
described by Coronado and Niza.... In the _seven Antilles_; in the
_seven heroes_ who, we are told, escaped the Deluge.

Heroes, moreover, whose number is found the same in every Deluge
story—from the seven Rishis who were saved with Vaivasvata Manu, down to
Noah’s ark, into which beasts, fowls, and living creatures were taken by
“sevens.” Thus we see the figures 1, 3, 5, 7, as perfect, because
thoroughly mystic, numbers playing a prominent part in every Cosmogony and
evolution of living Beings. In China, 1, 3, 5, 7, are called “celestial
numbers” in the canonical “Book of Changes”—_Yi King_, or
_transformation_, as in “evolution.”

The explanation of it becomes evident when one examines the ancient
Symbols: all these are based upon and start from the figures given from
the Archaic Manuscript in the Proem of Volume I. [Symbol: circle with
horizontal line through it, and another from center to bottom], the symbol
of evolution and fall into generation or Matter, is reflected in the old
Mexican sculptures or paintings, as it is in the Kabalistic Sephiroth, and
the Egyptian Tau. Examine the Mexican MS. (_Add. MSS._ Brit. Mus.
9789)(65); you will find it in a tree whose trunk is covered with _ten_
fruits ready to be plucked by a male and female, one on each side of it,
while from the top of the trunk two branches shoot horizontally to the
right and left, thus forming a perfect Τ (Tau), the ends of the two
branches, moreover, each bearing a triple bunch, with a bird—the bird of
immortality, Âtmâ or the Divine Spirit—sitting between the two, and thus
making the _seventh_. This represents the same idea as the Sephirothal
Tree, _ten_ in all, yet, when separated from its upper triad, leaving
_seven_. These are the celestial fruits, the ten, or [Symbol: circle with
“i” inside], 10, born out of the two invisible male and female seeds,
making up the 12, or the Dodecahedron of the Universe. The mystic system
contains the ·, the central point; the 3, or [symbol: triangle]; the 5,
[symbol: 5‐point star]; and the 7, or [symbol: triangle in square]; or
again [symbol: 6‐point star]; the triangle in the square and the
synthesizing point in the interlaced double triangles. This for the world
of the archetypes. The phenomenal world receives its culmination and the
reflex of all in MAN. Therefore he is the mystic square—in his
metaphysical aspect—the Tetraktys; and becomes the Cube on the creative
plane. His symbol is the cube unfolded(66) and 6 becoming 7, or the
[Symbol: cross], 3 crossways (the female) and 4 vertically; and this is
man, the culmination of the deity on earth, whose body is the cross of
flesh, _on_, _through_, and _in_ which he is ever crucifying and putting
to death the divine Logos, or his HIGHER SELF. Says every Philosophy and
Cosmogony:

The universe hath a Ruler [Rulers collectively] set over it, which
is called the WORD (Logos); the fabricating Spirit is its Queen:
which two are the First Power after the ONE.

These are the Spirit and Nature, which two form our Illusory Universe. The
two inseparables remain in the _Universe of Ideas_ so long as it lasts,
and then merge back into Parabrahman, the One ever changeless. “The
Spirit, whose essence is eternal, one and self‐existent,” emanates a pure
ethereal Light—a dual light not perceptible to the elementary
senses—according to the _Purânas_, the _Bible_, the _Sepher Yetzirah_, the
Greek and Latin Hymns, the _Book of Hermes_, the Chaldæan _Book of
Numbers_, the Esotericism of Lao‐tse, and everywhere else. In the Kabalah,
which explains the secret meaning of _Genesis_, this Light is the Dual‐
Man, or the Androgyne (rather Sexless) Angels, whose generic name is Adam
Kadmon. It is they who complete man, whose ethereal form is emanated by
other divine, but far lower Beings, who solidify the body with clay, or
the “dust of the ground”—an allegory indeed, but as scientific as any
Darwinian evolution and more _true_.

The author of the _Source of Measures_ says that the foundation of the
Kabalah and of all its mystic books is made to rest upon the _ten_
Sephiroth; which is a fundamental truth. He shows these Ten Sephiroth or
the 10 Numbers as follows:

[Illustration: Circle with numbers 2 through 9, and vertical line through
it]

The circle is the _naught_; its vertical diameter line is the first or
primal _One_ [the Word or Logos], from which spring the 2, the 3, and so
on to 9, the limit of the digits. The 10 is the first Divine
Manifestation,(67) which contains every possible power of exact expression
of proportion—the sacred _Jod_. By this Cabbalah we are taught that these
Sephiroth were the _numbers_ or emanations of the heavenly Light (20612 to
6561), they were the 10 Words, DBRIM, 41224, the light of which they were
the flux was the Heavenly man, the Adam‐KDM (the 144‐144); and the Light,
by the New Testament or Covenant (41224) created God; just as by the Old
Testament God (Alhim, 31415) creates Light (20612 to 6561).(68)

Now there are three kinds of Light in Occultism, as in the Kabalah. (1)
The Abstract and Absolute Light, which is Darkness; (2) The Light of the
Manifested‐Unmanifested, called by some the Logos: and (3) The latter
Light reflected in the Dhyân Chohans, the minor Logoi—the Elohim,
collectively—who, in their turn, shed it on the objective Universe. But in
the Kabalah—reëdited and carefully adjusted to fit the Christian tenets by
the Kabalists of the thirteenth century—the three Lights are described as:
(1) The clear and penetrating, that of Jehovah; (2) reflected light; and
(3) light _in the abstract_.

This Light, abstractly taken, (in a metaphysical or symbolical
sense) is Alhim (Elohim, God), while the clear penetrating Light
is Jehovah. The light of Alhim belongs to the world in general, in
its allness and general fulness, but the light of Jehovah is that
pertaining to the chiefest production, man, whom this light
penetrated to and made.(69)

The author of the _Source of Measures_ pertinently refers the reader to
Inman’s _Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names_, ii. 648. There, an
engraving of

The _vesica piscis_, Mary, and the female emblem, copied from a
Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, which was printed at Venice,
1542,

and therefore, as Inman remarks, “with a licence from the Inquisition, and
consequently orthodox,” will show the reader what the Latin Church
understood by this “penetrating power of light and its effects.” How sadly
disfigured—applied as they were to the grossest anthropomorphic
conceptions—have, under Christian interpretation, become the noblest and
grandest, as the most exalted, ideas of Deity of the Eastern Philosophy!

The Occultists in the East call this Light Daiviprakriti, and in the West
the Light of Christos. It is the Light of the Logos, the direct reflection
of the ever Unknowable on the plane of Universal Manifestation. But here
is the interpretation thereof given by the modern Christians from the
Kabalah. As declared by the author just cited;

To the fulness of the world in general with its chiefest content,
man, the term Elohim‐Jehovah applies. In extracts from Sohar, the
Rev. Dr. Cassell [a Kabalist], to prove that the Cabbalah sets
forth the doctrine of the Trinity, among other things says:
“Jehovah is Elohim (Alhim)” ... By _three_ steps God, (Alhim) and
Jehovah become the same, and though separated, each and together
they are of the same One.(70)

Similarly, Vishnu becomes the Sun, the visible symbol of the Impersonal
Deity. Vishnu is described as “striding through the seven regions of the
Universe in _three steps_.” But with the Hindûs this is an _exoteric_
account, a surface tenet and an allegory, while the Kabalists give it out
as the Esoteric and final meaning. But to proceed:

Now Light, as shown, is 20612 to 6561, as the proper enunciation
of the integral and numerical relation of diameter to
circumference of a circle. God (Alhim, that is, 31415 to One, a
modified form of the above) is the reduction of this, so as to
obtain a standard unit _One_, as the basis, in general, of all
calculation and all mensuration. But for the production of animal
life, and for especial _time measure_, or the lunar year, that
influence which causes conception and embryotic development, the
numbers of the Jehovah measure (the “_man even Jehovah_” measure),
viz., 113 to 355, have to be specialized.(71) But this last ratio
is but a modified form of Light, or 20612 to 6561, as a _pi
value_, being only a variation of the same (that is 20612 to 6561
is 31415 to one, and 355 to 113 is 31415 or Alhim or God), and in
such a manner that one can be made to flow into and be derived
from the other:—and these are the three steps by which the _Unity_
and sameness can be shown of the Divine names. That is, the two
are but variations of the same ratio, viz., that of _pi_. The
object of this comment is to show the same symbolic measuring use
for the Cabbalah, as taught, with that of the Three Covenants of
the _Bible_, and with that of Masonry as just noticed.

First, then, the Sephiroth are described as _Light_, that is, they
themselves are a function of, indeed, the same as, the
manifestation of the Ain Soph; and they are so from the fact that
“_Light_” represents the ratio 20612 to 6561, as part of the
“Words,” DBRIM, 41224, or, as to the Word, Dabar, 206 (= 10
cubits). “_Light_” is so much the burden of the Cabbalah as to
explaining the Sephiroth, that the most famous book on the
Cabbalah is called _Sohar_, or “_Light_.” In this we find
expressions of this kind: “The infinite was entirely unknown and
diffused no light before the luminous point violently broke
through into vision.” “When He first assumed the form (of the
crown, or the first Sephira), He caused 9 splendid lights to
emanate from it, which, shining through it, diffused a bright
light in all directions:”—that is, these 9 with his one (which was
the origin, as above, of the 9), together, made the 10, that is
[Symbol: circle with vertical line through it], or [Symbol: circle
with “x” inside], or the sacred Ten (numbers or Sephiroth), or
_Jod_—and these numbers were “_the Light_.” Just as in the Gospel
of St. John, God (Alhim, 31415 to one) was that Light (20612 to
6561) by which (Light) all things were made.(72)

In the _Sepher Yetzirah_, or “Number of Creation,” the whole process of
evolution is given out in numbers. In its “thirty‐two Paths of Wisdom” the
number 3 is repeated four times, and the number 4 five times. Therefore,
the Wisdom of God is contained in numbers (Sephrim or Sephiroth), for
Sepher (or S‐ph‐r when unvowelled) means “to cipher.” And therefore, also,
we find Plato stating that the Deity “geometrizes” in fabricating the
Universe.

The Kabalistic book, the _Sepher Yetzirah_, opens with a statement of the
hidden wisdom of Alhim in Sephrim, _i.e._, the Elohim in the Sephiroth.

In thirty and two paths, hidden wisdom, established Jah, IHVH,
Tzabaoth, Elohi of Israel, Alhim of Life, El of Grace and
Mercy—exalted uplifted Dweller on high, and King of Everlasting,
and His name—Holy! in Three Sephrim, viz.:

B—S’ph‐r, V—S’ph‐r, V—Siph‐o‐r.

Mr. Ralston Skinner goes on to say:

This comment sets forth the “_hidden wisdom_” of the original text
by hidden wisdom, that is, by the use of words carrying a special
set of numbers and a special phraseology, which will set forth the
very explanatory system which we find to fit so accurately in the
Hebrew Bible.... In setting forth his scheme, to enforce it, and
to finish out his detailed exposition in a general
postulate,—viz., the one word “_Sephrim_” (_Sephiroth_), of the
Number Jezirah, the author explains the separation of this word in
the three subordinate ones, a play upon a common word, _s‐ph‐r_,
or number.

The prince Al‐Chazari(73) says to the Rabbi: “I wish now that thou
wouldest impart to me some of the chiefest or leading principles
of _Natural Philosophy_, which, as thou sayest, were in former
times worked out by them (the ancient wise ones);”—to which the
Rabbi makes answer: “To such principles appertains the Number of
Creation of our race‐father Abraham” that is Abram and Abraham, or
numbers 41224 and 41252. He then says that this book of number
treats of teaching the “_Alhim_‐ness and _One_‐ness through
(DBRIM)” viz., the numbers of the word “_Words_.” That is, it
teaches the use of the ratio 31415 to One, through 41224, which
last, in the description of the Ark of the Covenant, was divided
into two parts by the _two_ tables of stone, on which these DBRIM,
or 41224, were written or engraved—or 20612 × 2. He then comments
on these three subordinately used words, and takes care as to one
of them to make the comment, “and _Alhim_ (31415 to One) said let
there be Light (20612 to 6561).”

The words as given in the text are:

ספר ספר סיפור

and the Rabbi, in commenting upon them, says: “It teaches the
_Alhim_‐ness (31415) and _One_‐ness (the diameter to Alhim),
through Words (DBRIM = 41224), by which on the one side there is
infinite expression in heterogeneous creations, and on the other a
final harmonic tendency to _One_‐ness” (which, as everyone knows,
is the mathematical function of _pi_ of the schools, which
measures, weighs, and numbers the stars of heaven, and yet
resolves them back into the final oneness of the Uni‐verse)
“through Words. Their final accord perfects itself in that
_One_‐ness that ordains them, and which consists in

ספר ספר ספור ”

that is, the Rabbi, in his first comment, leaves the _jod_, or
_i_, out of one of the words, whereas afterwards he restores it
again. If we take the values of those subordinate words, we find
them to be 340, 340 and 346;—together these are 1026, and the
division of the general word into these has been to produce these
numbers—which by T’mura may be changed in various ways, for
various purposes.(74)

The reader is asked to turn to Stanza IV of Volume I, Shloka 3 and
Commentary,(75) to find that the 3, 4, (7), and the thrice seven, or 1065,
the number of Jehovah, is the number of the 21 Prajâpati mentioned in the
_Mahâbhârata_, or the three Sephrim (words in ciphers or figures). And
this comparison between the Creative Powers of Archaic Philosophy and the
anthropomorphic Creator of _exoteric_ Judaism (since the _Esotericism_ of
the Jews shows its identity with the Secret Doctrine) will lead the
student to perceive and discover that, in truth, Jehovah is but a “lunar”
and “generation” God. It is a fact well known to every conscientious
student of the Kabalah, that the deeper he dives into it, the more he
feels convinced that unless the Kabalah—or what is left of it—is read by
the light of the Eastern Esoteric Philosophy, its study leads only to the
discovery that, on the lines traced by exoteric Judaism and Christianity,
the monotheism of both is nothing more exalted than ancient Astrolatry,
now vindicated by modern Astronomy. The Kabalists never cease to repeat
that Primal Intelligence can never be understood. It cannot be
comprehended, nor can it be located, therefore it has to remain nameless
and negative. Hence the Ain Suph—the “Unknowable” and “UNNAMEABLE”—as It
could not be made manifest, was imagined as emanating Manifesting Powers.
It is then with its Emanations alone that human intellect has to, and can,
deal. Christian theology, having rejected the doctrine of Emanations and
replaced them with direct, conscious Creations of Angels and the rest out
of _nothing_, now finds itself hopelessly stranded between
Supernaturalism, or Miracle, and Materialism. An _extra_‐cosmic God is
fatal to Philosophy: an _intra_‐cosmic Deity—_i.e._, Spirit and Matter
inseparable from each other—is a philosophical necessity. Separate them
and that which is left is a gross superstition under a mask of
emotionalism. But why “geometrize,” as Plato has it, why represent these
Emanations under the form of an immense arithmetical table? The question
is well answered by the author just cited, who says:

Mental perception, to become physical perception, must have the
cosmic principle of _Light_:—and, by this, our mental circle must
become visible through light; or, for its complete manifestation,
the circle must be that of physical visibility, or Light itself.

Such conceptions, thus formulated, became the ground‐work of the
philosophy of the Divine manifesting in the universe.(76)

This is Philosophy. It is otherwise when we find the Rabbi in _Al‐Chazari_
saying that:

Under s’ph‐r is to be understood—_calculation_ and _weighing_ of
the created bodies. For the _calculation_, by means of which a
body must be constructed in harmony or symmetry, by which it must
be in construction rightly arranged and made to correspond to the
object in design, consists at last in _number_, _extension_,
_mass_, _weight_;—co‐ordinate relation of movements, then harmony
of music, must consist altogether _by number_, that is s’ph‐r....
By Sippor (s’phor) is to be understood the words of Alhim (206—1
of 31415 to one), whereunto joins or adapts itself the design to
the frame or form of construction; for example—it was said “Let
Light be.” The work became as the _words_ were spoken, that is, as
the numbers of the work came forth.(77)

This is _materializing_ the _spiritual_ without scruple. But the Kabalah
was not always so well adapted to anthropo‐monotheistic conceptions.
Compare this with any of the six schools of India. For instance in
Kapila’s Sânkhya Philosophy, unless, allegorically speaking, Purusha
mounts on the shoulders of Prakriti, the latter remains irrational, while
the former remains inactive without her. Therefore Nature (in man) must
become a compound of Spirit and Matter before he becomes what he is; and
the Spirit latent in Matter must be awakened to life and consciousness
gradually. The Monad has to pass through its mineral, vegetable and animal
forms, before the Light of the Logos is awakened in the animal man.
Therefore, till then, the latter cannot be referred to as “man,” but has
to be regarded as a Monad imprisoned in ever‐changing forms. _Evolution_,
not _Creation_, by means of _Words_ is recognized in the Philosophies of
the East, even in their exoteric records. _Ex oriente lux._ Even the name
of the first man in the Mosaic _Bible_ had its origin in India, Professor
Max Müller’s negation notwithstanding. The Jews got their Adam from
Chaldæa; and Adam‐Adami is a compound word and therefore a manifold
symbol, and proves the Occult dogmas.

This is no place for philological disquisitions. But the reader may be
reminded that the words _Ad_ and _Adi_ mean in Sanskrit the “first”; in
Aramæan, “one” (_Ad‐ad_, the “only one”); in Assyrian, “Father,” whence
_Ak‐ad_ or “father‐creator.”(78) And once the statement is found correct,
it becomes rather difficult to confine Adam to the Mosaic _Bible_ alone,
and to see therein simply a Jewish name.

There is frequent confusion in the attributes and genealogies of the Gods
in their Theogonies, the Alpha and the Omega of the records of that
symbolical science, as given to the world by the half‐initiated writers,
Brâhmanical and Biblical. Yet there could be no such confusion made by the
earliest nations, the descendants and pupils of the Divine Instructors;
for both the attributes and the genealogies were inseparably linked with
cosmogonical symbols, the “Gods” being the life and animating “soul‐
principle” of the various regions of the Universe. Nowhere and by no
people was speculation allowed to range _beyond_ those _manifested_ Gods.
The boundless and infinite Unity remained with every nation a virgin
forbidden soil, untrodden by man’s thought, untouched by fruitless
speculation. The only reference made to it was the brief conception of its
diastolic and systolic property, of its periodical expansion, or
dilatation, and contraction. In the Universe, with all its incalculable
myriads of Systems and Worlds disappearing and reäppearing in eternity,
the anthropomorphized Powers, or Gods, their Souls, had to disappear from
view with their Bodies. As our _Catechism_ says:

“_The Breath returning to the Eternal Bosom which exhales and inhales
them_.”

Ideal Nature, the Abstract Space in which everything in the Universe is
mysteriously and invisibly generated, is the same female side of the
procreative power in Nature in the Vedic as in every other Cosmogony.
Aditi is Sephira, and the Sophia of the Gnostics, and Isis, the Virgin
Mother of Horus. In every Cosmogony, behind and higher than the “Creative”
Deity, there is a Superior Deity, a Planner, an Architect, of whom the
Creator is but the executive agent. And still higher, _over_ and _around_,
_within_ and _without_, there is the Unknowable and the _Unknown_, the
Source and Cause of all these Emanations.

It thus becomes easy to account for the reason why Adam‐Adami is found in
the Chaldæan scripture, certainly earlier than the Mosaic Books. In
Assyrian _Ad_ is the “father,” and in Aramæan _Ad_ is “one,” and _Ad‐ad_
the “only one,” while _Ak_ is in Assyrian “creator.” Thus _Ad‐am‐ak‐ad‐
mon_ became Adam‐Kadmon in the Kabalah (_Zohar_), meaning as it did, the
“One (Son) of the divine Father, or the Creator,” for the words _am_ and
_om_ meant at one time in nearly every language the _divine_, or the
_deity_. Thus Adam‐Kadmon and Adam‐Adami came to mean “The first Emanation
of the Father‐Mother or Divine Nature,” and literally the “first Divine
One.” And it is easy to see that _Ad_‐Argat (or Aster’t, the Syrian
Goddess, the consort of _Ad‐on_, the Lord God of Syria or the Jewish
Adonai), and Venus, Isis, Ister, Mylitta, Eve, etc., are identical with
the Aditi and Vâch of the Hindûs. They are all the “Mothers of all living”
and “of the Gods.” On the other hand—cosmically and astronomically—all the
male Gods became at first “Sun‐Gods,” then, theologically, the “Suns of
Righteousness,” and the Logoi, all symbolized by the Sun.(79) They are all
Protogonoi—First‐born—and Mikroprosopoi. With the Jews Adam‐Kadmon was the
same as Athamaz, Tamaz, or the Adonis of the Greeks—“the One _with_, and
_of_ his Father”—the “Father” becoming during the later Races Helios, the
Sun, as Apollo Karneios,(80) for instance, who was the “Sun‐born”; Osiris,
Ormazd, and so on, were all followed by, and found themselves transformed
later on into, still more earthly types: such as Prometheus, the crucified
of Mount Kajbee, Hercules, and so many others, Sun‐Gods and Heroes, until
all of them came to have no better significance than phallic symbols.

In the _Zohar_ it is said:

Man was created by the Sephiroth (Elohim‐Javeh, also) and they
engendered by common power the _earthly_ Adam.

Therefore in _Genesis_ the Elohim say: “Behold Man is become _as one of
us_.” But in Hindû Cosmogony or “Creation,” Brahmâ‐Prajâpati _creates_
Virâj and the Rishis, spiritually; therefore the latter are distinctly
called the “Mind‐born Sons of Brahmâ”; and this specified mode of
_engendering_ precluded every idea of Phallicism, at any rate in the
earlier human nations. This instance well illustrates the respective
_spirituality_ of the two nations.

3. SAID THE LORD OF THE SHINING FACE: “I SHALL SEND THEE A FIRE WHEN THY
WORK IS COMMENCED. RAISE THY VOICE TO OTHER LOKAS; APPLY TO THY FATHER,
THE LORD OF THE LOTUS(81) (_A_), FOR HIS SONS.... THY PEOPLE SHALL BE
UNDER THE RULE OF THE FATHERS.(82) THY MEN SHALL BE MORTALS. THE MEN OF
THE LORD OF WISDOM,(83) NOT THE SONS OF SOMA,(84) ARE IMMORTAL. CEASE THY
COMPLAINTS (_B_). THY SEVEN SKINS ARE YET ON THEE.... THOU ART NOT READY.
THY MEN ARE NOT READY” (_C_).

(_a_) Kumuda‐Pati is the Moon, the Earth’s parent, in his region of Soma‐
loka. Though the Pitris, or Fathers, are Sons of the Gods, elsewhere Sons
of Brahmâ and even Rishis, they are generally known as the Lunar
Ancestors.

(_b_) Pitri‐Pati is the Lord or King of the Pitris, Yama, the God of Death
and the Judge of mortals. The men of Budha, Mercury, are metaphorically
“immortal” through their Wisdom. Such is the common belief of those who
credit every Star or Planet with being inhabited—and there are men of
Science, M. Flammarion among others, who believe in this fervently, on
logical as well as on astronomical data. The Moon being an inferior
body—even to the Earth, to say nothing of other Planets, the terrestrial
men produced by her Sons—the Lunar Men or Ancestors—from her shell or
body, cannot be immortal. They cannot hope to become real, self‐conscious
and intelligent men, unless they are “finished,” so to say, by other
creators. Thus in the Purânic legend, the son of the Moon (Soma) is Budha
(Mercury), the intelligent and the wise, because he is the offspring of
Soma, the Regent of the visible Moon, not of Indu, the physical Moon. Thus
Mercury is the elder brother of the Earth, metaphorically—his step‐
brother, so to say, the offspring of Spirit—while she (the Earth) is the
progeny of the Body. These allegories have a deeper and more scientific
meaning—astronomically and geologically—than our modern Physicists are
willing to admit. The whole cycle of the first “War in Heaven,” the
Târakâ‐maya, is as full of philosophical as of cosmogonical and
astronomical truths. One can trace therein the biographies of all the
Planets by the history of their Gods and Rulers. Ushanas (Shukra, or
Venus), the bosom‐friend of Soma and the foe of Brihaspati (Jupiter), the
“Instructor of the Gods,” whose wife Târâ, or Tarakâ, had been carried
away by the Moon, Soma—“of whom he begat Budha”—took also an active part
in this war against the “Gods” and forthwith was degraded into a Demon
(Asura) Deity, and so he remains to this day.(85)

Here the word “men” refers to the Celestial men, or what are called in
India the Pitaras or Pitris, the Fathers, the Progenitors of men. This
does not remove the seeming difficulty, in view of modern hypotheses, of
the teaching, which shows these Progenitors or Ancestors creating the
first human Adams out of their sides, as astral shadows. And though it is
an improvement on Adam’s rib, still geological and climatic difficulties
will be brought forward. Such, however, is the teaching of Occultism.

(_c_) Man’s organism was adapted in every Race to its surroundings. The
first Root‐Race was as ethereal as ours is material. The progeny of the
Seven Creators, who evolved the Seven Primordial Adams,(86) surely
required no purified gases to breathe and live upon. Therefore, however
strongly the impossibility of this teaching may be urged by the devotees
of Modern Science, the Occultist maintains that the case was as stated
_æons of years_ before even the evolution of the Lemurian, the first
physical man, which took place 18,000,000 years ago. Archaic Scripture
teaches that at the commencement of every local Kalpa, or Round, the Earth
is reborn, and preliminary evolution is described in one of the _Books of
Dzyan_ and the Commentaries thereon in this wise:

“_As the human Jîva [Monad], when passing into a new womb, gets recovered
with a new body, so does the Jîva of the Earth; it gets a more perfect and
solid covering with each Round after reëmerging once more from the matrix
of space into objectivity._”

This process is attended, of course, by the throes of the new birth, or
geological convulsions.

The only reference to it is contained in one verse of the volume of the
_Book of Dzyan_ before us, where it says:

4. AFTER GREAT THROES SHE(87) CAST OFF HER OLD THREE AND PUT ON HER NEW
SEVEN SKINS, AND STOOD IN HER FIRST ONE.

This refers to the growth of the Earth, whereas in the Stanza treating of
the First Round it is said in the Commentary:

“_After the changeless [Avikâra] immutable Nature [Essence, Sadaikarûpa]
had awakened and changed [differentiated] into [a state of] causality
[Avyakta], and from cause [Kârana] had become its own discrete effect
[Vyakta], from invisible it became visible. The smallest of the small [the
most atomic of atoms, or anîyânsam anîyasâm] became one and the many
[Ekânekarûpa]; and producing the Universe produced also the fourth Loka
[our Earth] in the garland of the seven lotuses. The Achyuta then became
the Chyuta._”(88)

The Earth is said to cast off “her old _three_” Skins, because this refers
to the three preceding Rounds she has already passed through; the present
being the Fourth Round out of the seven. At the beginning of every new
Round, after a period of Obscuration, the Earth—as do also the other six
“Earths”—casts off, or is supposed to cast off, her old Skins as the
Serpent does; therefore she is called in the _Aitareya‐Brâhmana_ the
Sarpa‐Râjnî, the “Queen of the Serpents,” and “the mother of all that
moves.” The “Seven Skins,” in the first of which she now stands, refer to
the seven geological changes which accompany and correspond to the
evolution of the Seven Root‐Races of Humanity.

Stanza II, which speaks of this Round, begins with a few words of
information concerning the age of our Earth. The chronology will be given
in its place. In the Commentary appended to the Stanza, two personages are
mentioned, Nârada and Asuramaya, especially the latter. All the
calculations are attributed to this archaic celebrity; and what follows
will make the reader superficially acquainted with some of these figures.

Two Antediluvian Astronomers.

To the mind of the Eastern student of Occultism, two figures are
indissolubly connected with mystic Astronomy, Chronology, and their
cycles. Two grand and mysterious figures, towering like two giants in the
Archaic Past, emerge before him, whenever he has to refer to Yugas and
Kalpas. When, at what period of pre‐history they lived, none save a few
men in the world know, or ever can know, with that certainty which is
required by exact chronology. It may have been 100,000 years ago, it may
have been 1,000,000, for all that the outside world will ever know. The
mystic West and Freemasonry talk loudly of Enoch and Hermes. The mystic
East speaks of Nârada, the old Vedic Rishi, and of Asuramaya, the
Atlantean.

It has already been hinted that of all the incomprehensible characters in
the _Mahâbhârata_ and the _Purânas_, Nârada, the son of Brahmâ in the
_Matsya Purâna_, the progeny of Kashyapa and the daughter of Daksha, in
the _Vishnu Purâna_, is the most mysterious. He is referred to by the
honourable title of Deva‐Rishi (Divine Rishi, rather than Demi‐God) by
Parâshara, and yet he is cursed by Daksha and even by Brahmâ. He informs
Kansha that Bhagavân, or Vishnu in exotericism, would incarnate in the
eighth child of Devakî, and thus brings the wrath of the Indian Herod upon
Krishna’s mother; and then, from the cloud on which he is seated—invisible
as a true Mânasaputra—he lauds Krishna, in delight at the Avatâr’s feat of
killing the monster Keshin. Nârada is here, there, and everywhere; and
yet, none of the _Purânas_ gives the true characteristics of this great
enemy of physical procreation. Whatever those characteristics may be in
Hindû Esotericism, Nârada—who is called in Cis‐Himâlayan Occultism Pesh‐
Hun, the “Messenger,” or the Greek Angelos—is the sole confidant and the
executor of the universal decrees of Karma and Adi‐Budha: a kind of active
and ever‐incarnating Logos, who leads and guides human affairs from the
beginning to the end of the Kalpa.

Pesh‐Hun is a general not a special Hindû possession. He is the mysterious
guiding intelligent power, which gives the impulse to, and regulates the
impetus of Cycles, Kalpas and universal events.(89) He is Karma’s visible
adjuster on a general scale; the inspirer and the leader of the greatest
heroes of this Manvantara. In the exoteric works he is referred to by some
very uncomplimentary names; such as Kali‐kâraka, Strife‐maker, Kapi‐
vaktra, Monkey‐faced, and even Pishuna, the Spy, though elsewhere he is
called Deva‐Brahmâ. Even Sir William Jones was strongly impressed with
this mysterious character from what he gathered in his Sanskrit studies.
He compares him to Hermes and Mercury, and calls him “the eloquent
messenger of the gods.”(90) All this, besides the fact that the Hindûs
believe him to be a great Rishi, “who is for ever wandering about the
earth, giving good counsel,” led the late Dr. Kenealy(91) to see in him
one of his twelve Messiahs. He was, perhaps, not so far off the real track
as some imagine.

What Nârada _really_ is, cannot be explained in print; nor would the
modern generations of the profane gather much from the information. But it
may be remarked, that if there be in the Hindû Pantheon a Deity which
resembles Jehovah, in tempting by “suggestion” of thoughts, and
“hardening” of the hearts of those whom he would make his tools and
victims, it is Nârada. Only with the latter it is no desire to obtain a
pretext for “plaguing,” and thus showing that “_I am_ the Lord God.” Nor
is it through any ambitious or selfish motive; but, verily, to serve and
guide universal progress and evolution.

Nârada is one of the few prominent characters, if we except some Gods, in
the _Purânas_, who visit the so‐called nether or infernal regions, Pâtâla.
Whether or not it was from his intercourse with the thousand‐headed
Shesha, the Serpent who bears the Seven Pâtâlas and the entire world like
a diadem upon his heads, and who is the great teacher of Astronomy,(92)
that Nârada learned all that he knew, certain it is that he surpasses
Garga’s Guru in his knowledge of cyclic intricacies. It is he who has
charge of our progress and national weal or woe. It is he who brings on
wars and puts an end to them. In the old Stanzas, Pesh‐Hun is credited
with having calculated and recorded all the astronomical and cosmic Cycles
to come, and with having taught the Science to the first gazers at the
starry vault. And it is Asuramaya, who is said to have based all his
astronomical works upon those records, to have determined the duration of
all the past geological and cosmical periods, and the length of all the
Cycles to come, till the end of this Life‐Cycle, or the end of the Seventh
Race.

There is a work among the Secret Books, called the _Mirror of Futurity_,
wherein all the Kalpas within Kalpas, and Cycles within the bosom of
Shesha, or infinite Time, are recorded. This work is ascribed to Pesh‐Hun‐
Nârada. There is another old work which is attributed to various
Atlanteans. It is these two records which furnish us with the figures of
our Cycles, and the possibility of calculating the date of Cycles to come.
The chronological calculations which will presently be given are, however,
those of the Brâhmans, as explained further on: but most of them are also
those of the Secret Doctrine.

The chronology and computations of the Brâhman Initiates are based upon
the zodiacal records of India, and the works of the above‐mentioned
Astronomer and Magician—Asuramaya. The Atlantean zodiacal records cannot
err, as they were compiled under the guidance of those who first taught
Astronomy, among other things, to mankind.

But here again we are deliberately and recklessly facing a new difficulty.
We shall be told that our statement is contradicted by Science, in the
person of a man regarded as a great authority (in the West) upon all
subjects of Sanskrit literature—Professor Albrecht Weber, of Berlin. This,
to our great regret, cannot be helped; and we are ready to maintain what
is now stated. Asuramaya, to whom the epic tradition points as the
earliest Astronomer in Âryâvarta, one to whom “the Sun‐God imparted the
knowledge of the stars,” _in propriâ personâ_, as Dr. Weber himself
states, is identified by him, in some very mysterious way, with the
“Ptolemaios” of the Greeks. No more valid reason is given for this
identification than that:

This latter name (Ptolemaios), as we see from the inscription of
Piyadasi, became the Indian “Turamaya,” out of which the name
“Asura Maya” might very easily grow.

No doubt it “might,” but the vital question is: Are there any good proofs
that it _has_ thus grown? The only evidence that is given for this is,
that it _must_ be so:

Since ... this Maya is distinctly assigned to Romaka‐pura in the
West.(93)

The Mâyâ is evident, since no Sanskritist among Europeans can tell where
that locality of Romaka‐pura was, except, indeed, that it was somewhere
“in the West.” In any case, as no member of the Asiatic Society, or
Western Orientalist, will ever listen to a Brâhmanical teaching, it is
useless to take the objections of European Orientalists into
consideration. Romaka‐pura was “in the West,” certainly, since it was part
and parcel of the lost continent of Atlantis. And it is equally certain
that it is Atlantis, to which is assigned in the Hindû _Purânas_ the
birth‐place of Asuramaya, “as great a Magician as he was an Astrologer and
an Astronomer.” Moreover, Prof. Weber refuses to assign any great
antiquity to the Indian Zodiac, and feels inclined to think that the
Hindûs never knew of a Zodiac at all till

They had borrowed one from the Greeks.(94)

This statement clashes with the most ancient traditions of India, and must
therefore be ignored. We are the more justified in ignoring it, as the
learned German Professor himself tells us in the introduction to his work,
that:

In addition to the natural obstacles which impede investigation
[in India], there still prevails a dense mist of prejudice and
preconceived opinions hovering over the land, and enfolding it as
with a veil.(95)

Caught in that veil, it is no wonder that Dr. Weber should himself have
been led into involuntary errors. Let us hope that he knows better now.

Now whether Asuramaya is to be considered a modern myth, a personage who
flourished in the day of the Macedonian Greeks, or that which he is
claimed to be by the Occultists, in any case his calculations agree
entirely with those of the Secret Records.

From fragments of immensely old works attributed to the Atlantean
Astronomer, and found in Southern India, the calendar elsewhere mentioned
was compiled by two very learned Brâhmans(96) in 1884 and 1885. The work
is proclaimed by the best Pandits as faultless—from the Brâhmanical
standpoint—and thus far relates to the chronology of the orthodox
teachings. If we compare its statements with those made several years
earlier in _Isis Unveiled_, with the fragmentary teachings published by
some Theosophists, and with the present data derived from the Secret Books
of Occultism, the whole will be found to agree perfectly, save in some
details which may not be explained; for secrets of higher Initiation—as
unknown to the writer as they are to the reader—would have to be revealed,
and that _cannot be done_.

Stanza II. Nature Unaided Fails.

5. After enormous periods the Earth creates monsters. 6. The
“Creators” are displeased. 7. They dry the Earth. 8. The forms are
destroyed by them. 9. The first great tides. 10. The beginning of
incrustation.

5. THE WHEEL WHIRLED FOR THIRTY CRORES MORE.(97) IT CONSTRUCTED RÛPAS;(98)
SOFT STONES THAT HARDENED,(99) HARD PLANTS THAT SOFTENED.(100) VISIBLE
FROM INVISIBLE, INSECTS AND SMALL LIVES.(101) SHE(102) SHOOK THEM OFF HER
BACK WHENEVER THEY OVERRAN THE MOTHER (_A_).... AFTER THIRTY CRORES, SHE
TURNED ROUND. SHE LAY ON HER BACK; ON HER SIDE.... SHE WOULD CALL NO SONS
OF HEAVEN, SHE WOULD ASK NO SONS OF WISDOM. SHE CREATED FROM HER OWN
BOSOM. SHE EVOLVED WATER‐MEN, TERRIBLE AND BAD (_B_).

(_a_) This relates to an inclination of the axis—of which there were
several—to a consequent deluge and chaos on Earth (having, however, no
reference to Primeval Chaos), in which monsters, half‐human, half‐animal,
were generated. We find it mentioned in the _Book of the Dead_, and also
in the Chaldæan account of creation, on the Cutha Tablets, however
mutilated.

It is not even allegory. Here we have _facts_, that are found repeated in
the account of the _Pymander_, as well as in the Chaldæan tablets of
creation. The verses may almost be checked by the Cosmogony, as given by
Berosus, which has been disfigured out of recognition by Eusebius, but
some of the features of which may yet be found in fragments left by
ancient Greek authors—Apollodorus, Alexander Polyhistor, etc. “The water‐
men terrible and bad”—who were the production of Physical Nature alone, a
result of the “evolutionary impulse” and the first attempt to create
“man,” the crown, and the aim and goal of all animal life on Earth—are
shown to be failures in our Stanzas. Do we not find the same in the
Berosian Cosmogony, denounced with such vehemence as the culmination of
heathen absurdity? And yet who of the Evolutionists can say that things in
the beginning have not come to pass as they are described? That, as
maintained in the _Purânas_, the Egyptian and Chaldæan fragments, and even
in _Genesis_, there have not been two, and even more, “creations,” before
the last formation of the Globe; which, changing its geological and
atmospheric conditions, changed also its flora, its fauna, and its men?
This claim agrees not only with every ancient Cosmogony, but also with
Modern Science, and even, to a certain degree, with the theory of
evolution, as may be demonstrated in a few words.

There is no “Dark Creation,” no “Evil Dragon” conquered by a Sun‐God, in
the earliest World‐Cosmogonies. Even with the Akkads, the Great Deep—the
Watery Abyss, or Space—was the birthplace and abode of Ea, Wisdom, the
incognizable infinite Deity. But with the Semites and the later Chaldæans,
the fathomless Deep of Wisdom becomes gross Matter, sinful substance, and
Ea is changed into Tiamat, the Dragon slain by Merodach, or Satan, in the
astral waves.

In the Hindû _Purânas_, Brahmâ, the Creator, is seen recommencing _de
novo_ several “Creations” after as many failures; and two great Creations
are mentioned,(103) the Pâdma and the Vârâha, the present, when the Earth
was lifted out of the water by Brahmâ, in the shape of a Boar, the Varâha
Avatâra. Creation is shown as a sport, an amusement (Lîlâ) of the Creative
God. The _Zohar_ speaks of primordial worlds, which perished as soon as
they came into existence. And the same is said in the _Midraish_, Rabbi
Abahu explaining distinctly(104) that “the Holy One” had successively
created and destroyed sundry Worlds, before he succeeded in the present
one. This does not relate only to other Worlds in Space, but to a mystery
of our own Globe contained in the allegory about the “Kings of Edom.” For
the words, “This one pleases me,” are repeated in _Genesis_,(105) though
in disfigured terms, as usual. The Chaldæan fragments of Cosmogony in the
cuneiform inscriptions, and elsewhere, show two distinct creations of
animals and men, the first being destroyed, as it was a failure. The
Cosmogonical tablets prove that this our actual creation was preceded by
others;(106) and as shown by the author of _The Qabbalah_, in the _Zohar_,
_Siphra Dtzenioutha_, in _Jovah Rabba_, 128a, etc., the Kabalah states the
same.

(_b_) Oannes, or Dagon, the Chaldæan “Man‐fish,” divides his Cosmogony and
Genesis into two portions. First the abyss of waters and darkness, wherein
resided most hideous beings—men with wings, four and two‐winged men, human
beings with two heads, with the legs and horns of a goat—our “goat‐
men”(107)—hippocentaurs, bulls with the heads of men, and dogs with tails
of fishes. In short, combinations of various animals and men, of fishes,
reptiles and other monstrous animals, assuming each other’s shapes and
countenances. The feminine element they resided in is personified by
Thalatth—the Sea, or “Water”—which was finally conquered by Belus, the
male principle. And Polyhistor says:

Belus came, and cut the woman asunder; and of one half of her he
formed the earth, and of the other half the heavens; and at the
same time destroyed the animals within her.(108)

As pertinently remarked by Isaac Myer:

With the Akkadians each object and power of Nature had its _Zi_ or
Spirit. The Akkadians formed their deities into triads, usually of
males [sexless, rather?], the Semites also had triadic deities,
but introduced sex(109)

—or phallicism. With the Âryan and the earliest Akkadians all things are
emanations _through_, not _by_, a Creator or Logos. With the Semites
everything is _begotten_.

6. THE WATER‐MEN, TERRIBLE AND BAD, SHE HERSELF CREATED FROM THE REMAINS
OF OTHERS.(110) FROM THE DROSS AND SLIME OF HER FIRST, SECOND, AND
THIRD,(111) SHE FORMED THEM. THE DHYÂNI CAME AND LOOKED.... THE DHYÂNI
FROM THE BRIGHT FATHER‐MOTHER, FROM THE WHITE(112) REGIONS THEY(113) CAME,
FROM THE ABODES OF THE IMMORTAL MORTALS (_A_).

(_a_) The explanations given in our Stanzas are far more clear than that
which the legend of creation from the Cutha tablet would give, even were
it complete. What is preserved on it, however, corroborates them. For, in
the tablet, the “Lord of Angels” destroys the men in the abyss, when
“there were not left the carcases and waste” after they were slaughtered.
After which they, the Great Gods, create men with the bodies of birds of
the desert, human beings, “seven kings, brothers of the same family,”
etc., which is a reference to the locomotive qualities of the primary
ethereal bodies of men, which could fly as well as they could walk,(114)
but who “were destroyed” because they were not “perfect,” _i.e._, they
“were sexless, like the Kings of Edom.”

Weeded of metaphors and allegories, what will Science say to this idea of
a primordial creation of species? It will object to the “Angels” and
“Spirits” having anything to do therewith; but if it be Nature and the
physical law of evolution that are the creators of all there is now on
Earth, why could there be “no such abyss,” when the Globe was covered with
waters, in which numbers of monstrous beings were generated? Is it the
“human beings” and animals with human heads and double faces, which are a
point of the objection? But if man is only a higher animal and has evolved
from the brute species by an infinite series of transformations, why could
not the “missing links” have had human heads attached to the bodies of
animals, or, being two‐headed, have heads of beasts and _vice versâ_, in
Nature’s early efforts? Are we not shown, during the geological periods,
in the ages of the reptiles and the mammalia, lizards with birds’ wings,
and serpents’ heads on animal bodies?(115) And, arguing from the
standpoint of Science, does not even our modern human race occasionally
furnish us with monster‐specimens: two‐headed children, animal bodies with
human heads, dog‐headed babies, etc.? And this proves that, if Nature will
still play such freaks now that she has been settled for ages in the order
of her evolutionary work, monsters, like those described by Berosus, were
a possibility in her opening programme; a possibility which may even have
existed once upon a time as a law, before she sorted out her species and
began regular work upon them. And this indeed now admits of definite proof
by the bare fact of “Reversion,” as Science puts it.

This is what the Doctrine teaches, and demonstrates by numerous proofs.
But we shall not wait for the approval of either dogmatic Theology or
Materialistic Science, but proceed with the Stanzas. Let these speak for
themselves, with the help of the light thrown on them by the Commentaries
and their explanations; the scientific aspect of these questions will be
considered later on.

Thus Physical Nature, when left to herself in the creation of animal and
man, is shown to have failed. She can produce the first two kingdoms, as
well as that of the lower animals, but when it comes to the turn of man,
spiritual, independent and intelligent powers are required for his
creation, besides the “coats of skin” and the “breath of animal life.” The
human Monads of preceding Rounds need something higher than purely
physical materials with which to build their personalities, under the
penalty of remaining even below any “Frankenstein” animal.(116)

7. DISPLEASED THEY WERE. “OUR FLESH IS NOT THERE.(117) NO FIT RÛPAS FOR
OUR BROTHERS OF THE FIFTH. NO DWELLINGS FOR THE LIVES.(118) PURE WATERS,
NOT TURBID, THEY MUST DRINK (_A_). LET US DRY THEM.”(119)

(_a_) Says the _Catechism_ on the Commentaries:

_It is from the material Worlds that descend they, who fashion physical
man at the new Manvantaras. They are inferior Lha [Spirits], possessed of
a dual body [an Astral within an Ethereal Form]. They are the fashioners
and creators of our body of illusion_....

_Into the forms projected by the Lha [Pitris] the Two Letters_(_120_)_
[the Monad, called also the __“__Double Dragon__”__] descend from the
Spheres of Expectation._(_121_)_ But they are like a roof with no walls,
nor pillars to rest upon_....

_Man needs four Flames and three Fires to become one on Earth, and he
requires the essence of the forty‐nine Fires_(_122_)_ to be perfect. It is
those who have deserted the Superior Spheres, the Gods of Will,_(_123_)_
who complete the Manu of illusion. For the __“__Double Dragon__”__ has no
hold upon the mere form. It is like the breeze where there is no tree or
branch to receive and harbour it. It cannot affect the form where there is
no agent of transmission [Manas, __“__Mind__”__] and the form knows it
not._

_In the highest worlds, the three are one,_(_124_)_ on Earth [at first]
the one becomes two. They are like the two [side] lines of a triangle that
has lost its bottom line—which is the third Fire._(125)

Now this requires some explanation before proceeding any further. To do so
especially for the benefit of our Âryan Hindû brethren—whose Esoteric
interpretations may differ from our own—we shall have to explain to them
the foregoing by certain passages in their own exoteric books, namely, the
_Purânas_. In the allegories of the latter, Brahmâ, who is collectively
the Creative Force of the Universe, is thus described:

At the beginning of the Yugas [Cycles] ... possessed of the desire
and of the power to create, and impelled by the potencies of what
is to be created, again and again does he, at the outset of a
Kalpa, put forth a similar creation.(126)

It is now proposed to examine the exoteric account in the _Vishnu Purâna_,
and see how much it may agree or disagree with our Occult version.

Creation of Divine Beings in the Exoteric Accounts.

In the _Vishnu Purâna_, which is certainly the earliest of all the
scriptures of that name, we find, as in all the others, Brahmâ, as the
male God, assuming, for purposes of creation, “_four_ Bodies invested by
_three_ qualities.”(127) It is said:

In this manner, Maitreya, Jyotsnâ (dawn), Râtri (night), Ahan
(day), and Sandhyâ (evening [twilight]) are the four bodies of
Brahmâ.(128)

As Parâshara explains it, when Brahmâ wishes to create the world anew and
construct progeny _through his will_, in the fourfold condition, or the
four Orders of Beings, termed Gods (Dhyân Chohans), Demons(129) (_i.e._,
more material Devas), Progenitors (Pitris) and Men, “he collects [Yoga‐
like] his mind into itself” (Yûyuge).

Strange to say, he begins by creating Demons, who thus take precedence
over the Angels or Gods. This is no incongruity, nor is it due to
inconsistency, but has, like all the rest, a profound Esoteric meaning,
quite clear to one free from Christian theological prejudice. He who bears
in mind that the principle Mahat, or Intellect, the “Universal Mind”
(literally the “Great”), which Esoteric Philosophy explains as the
“Manifested Omniscience”—the “first product” of Pradhâna, Primordial
Matter, as the _Vishnu Purâna_ says, but the first Cosmic Aspect of
Parabrahman or the Esoteric Sat, the Universal Soul,(130) as Occultism
teaches—is at the root of SELF‐Consciousness, will understand the reason
why. The so‐called Demons—who are Esoterically the Self‐asserting and
intellectually active Principle—are the _positive pole of creation_, so to
say; hence, the first produced. This is in brief the process as narrated
allegorically in the _Purânas_.

Having concentrated his mind into itself and the Quality of
Darkness pervading Brahmâ’s assumed body, the Asuras, issuing from
his Thigh, were first produced; after which, abandoning this body,
it was transformed into Night.

Two important points are involved herein: (_a_) Primarily in the _Rig
Veda_, the Asuras are shown as _spiritual divine Beings_; their etymology
is derived from Asu, breath, the “Breath of God,” and they mean the same
as the Supreme Spirit or the Zoroastrian Ahura. It is later on, for
purposes of theology and dogma, that they are shown issuing from Brahmâ’s
Thigh, and that their name began to be derived from _a_, privative, and
_Sura_, a God, or “not‐a‐God,” and that they became the enemies of the
Gods. (_b_) Every ancient Theogony without exception—from the Aryan and
the Egyptian down to that of Hesiod—in the order of Cosmogonical
evolution, places Night before Day; even _Genesis_, where “darkness is
upon the face of the deep” before the “first day.” The reason for this is
that every Cosmogony—except in the Secret Doctrine—begins by the
“Secondary Creation” so‐called; to wit, the _Manifested_ Universe, the
Genesis of which has to begin by a marked differentiation between the
eternal Light of “Primary Creation,” whose mystery must remain for ever
“Darkness” to the prying finite conception and intellect of the profane,
and the Secondary Evolution of manifested visible Nature. The _Veda_
contains the whole philosophy of that division, without having ever been
correctly explained by our Orientalists, since it has _never been
understood_ by them.

Continuing to create, Brahmâ assumes another form, that of the Day, and
creates from his Breath the Gods, who are endowed with the Quality of
Goodness (Passivity).(131) In his next body the Quality of great Passivity
prevailed, which is also (negative) goodness, and from the side of that
personage issued the Pitris, the Progenitors of men, because, as the text
explains, Brahmâ “thought of himself [during the process] as the father of
the world.”(132) This is Kriyâ‐shakti—the mysterious Yoga‐power explained
elsewhere. This body of Brahmâ when cast off became the Sandhyâ, Evening
Twilight, the interval between Day and Night.

Finally Brahmâ assumed his last form pervaded by the Quality of Foulness.

And from this, Men, in whom foulness (or passion) predominates,
were produced.

This body when cast off became the Dawn, or Morning Twilight—the Twilight
of Humanity. Here Brahmâ stands Esoterically for the Pitris. He is
collectively the Pitâ, “Father.”

The true Esoteric meaning of this allegory must now be explained. Brahmâ
here symbolizes personally the Collective Creators of the World and
Men—the Universe with all its numberless productions of things movable and
(seemingly) immovable.(133) He is collectively the Prajâpatis, the Lords
of Being; and the four bodies typify the four Classes of Creative Powers
or Dhyân Chohans, described in the Commentary on Shloka I, Stanza VII, in
Volume I. The whole philosophy of the so‐called “Creation” of the good and
evil in this World, and of the whole Cycle of Manvantaric results
therefrom, hangs on the correct comprehension of these Four Bodies of
Brahmâ.

The reader will now be prepared to understand the real, the Esoteric
significance of what follows. Moreover there is an important point to be
cleared up. Christian Theology having arbitrarily settled and agreed that
Satan with his Fallen Angels belonged to the earliest creation, Satan
being the first‐created, the wisest and most beautiful of God’s
Archangels, the word was given, the key‐note struck. Henceforth all the
Pagan Scriptures were made to yield the same meaning, and all were shown
to be demoniacal, and it _was_ and _is_ claimed that _truth and fact_
belong to, and commence only with, Christianity. Even the Orientalists and
Mythologists, some of them no Christians at all but “infidels,” or men of
Science, entered, unconsciously to themselves and by the mere force of
association of ideas and habit, into the theological groove.

Purely Brâhmanical considerations, based on greed of power and ambition,
allowed the masses to remain in ignorance of great truths; and the same
causes led the Initiates among the early Christians to remain silent,
while those who had never known the truth disfigured the order of things,
judging of the Hierarchy of “Angels” by their exoteric form. Thus, as the
Asuras had become the rebellious inferior Gods fighting the higher ones in
popular creeds, so the highest Archangel, in truth the Agathodæmon, the
eldest benevolent Logos, became in theology the “Adversary” or Satan. But
is this warranted by the correct interpretation of any old Scripture? The
answer is: most certainly not. As the Mazdean Scriptures of the _Zend
Avesta_, the _Vendidâd_ and others correct and expose the later cunning
shuffling of the Gods in the Hindû Pantheon, and restore through Ahura the
Asuras to their legitimate place in Theogony, so the recent discoveries of
the Chaldæan tablets vindicate the good name of the first divine
Emanations. This is easily proved. Christian Angelology is directly and
solely derived from that of the Pharisees, who brought their tenets from
Babylonia. The Sadducees, the real guardians of the Laws of Moses, knew
not of any Angels, opposing even the immortality of the human Soul (not
the impersonal Spirit). In the _Bible_ the only Angels spoken of are the
“Sons of God” mentioned in _Genesis_ vi—who are now regarded as the
Nephilim, the Fallen Angels—and several Angels in human form, the
“Messengers” of the Jewish God, whose own rank needs a closer analysis
than heretofore given. As shown above, the early Akkadians called Ea
Wisdom, which was disfigured by the later Chaldees and Semites into
Tiamat, Tisalat and the Thalatth of Berosus, the female Sea Dragon, now
Satan. Truly—“How art thou fallen [by the hand of man], O bright Star and
Son of the Morning”!

Now what do the Babylonian accounts of “Creation,” as found on the
Assyrian fragments of tiles, tell us; those very accounts upon which the
Pharisees built their Angelology? Compare Mr. George Smith’s _Assyrian
Discoveries_,(134) and his _Chaldean Account of Genesis_.(135) The Tablet
with the story of the Seven Wicked Gods or Spirits, has the following
account; we print the important passages in italics:

1. In the _first days_ the evil Gods,

2. the _angels who were in rebellion_, who _in the lower part of
heaven_

3. _had been created_,

4. they caused their evil work

5. devising with wicked heads ... etc.

Thus we are shown, as plainly as can be, on a fragment which remained
unbroken, so that there can be no dubious reading, that the “Rebellious
Angels” had been created in the “lower part of heaven,” _i.e._, that they
belonged and do belong to a _material plane of evolution_, although as it
is not the plane of which we are made cognizant through our senses, it
remains generally invisible to us, and is thus regarded as subjective.
Were the Gnostics so wrong, after this, in affirming that this our Visible
World, and especially the Earth, had been created by _Lower_ Angels, the
inferior Elohim, of which, as they taught, the God of Israel was one?
These Gnostics were nearer in time to the records of the Archaic Secret
Doctrine, and therefore ought to be allowed to have known what it
contained better than non‐initiated Christians, who took upon themselves,
hundreds of years later, to remodel and _correct_ what was said. But let
us see what the same Tablet says further on:

7. There were seven of them [the wicked gods].

Then follows the description of these, the fourth being a “serpent,” the
phallic symbol of the Fourth Race in human Evolution.

15. The seven of them, messengers of the God Anu their king.

Now Anu belongs to the Chaldæan Trinity, and is identical with Sin, the
“Moon,” in one aspect. And the Moon in the Hebrew Kabalah is the Argha of
the seed of all material life, and is still more closely connected,
kabalistically, with Jehovah, who is double‐sexed, as Anu is. They are
both represented in Esotericism, and viewed, from a dual aspect: male or
spiritual, female or material, or Spirit and Matter, the two antagonistic
principles. Hence the “Messengers of Anu,” who is Sin, the “Moon,” are
shown, in lines 28 to 41, as being finally overpowered by the same Sin
with the help of Bel, the Sun, and Ishtar, Venus. This is regarded as a
contradiction by the Assyriologists, but it is simply _metaphysics_ in the
Esoteric teaching.

There is more than one interpretation, for there are seven keys to the
mystery of the “Fall.” Moreover there are two “Falls” in Theology: the
rebellion of the Archangels and their “Fall,” and the “Fall” of Adam and
Eve. Thus the lower as well as the higher Hierarchies are charged with a
supposed crime. The word “supposed” is the true and correct term, for in
both cases it is founded on misconception. Both are considered in
Occultism as Karmic effects, and both belong to the law of
Evolution—intellectual and spiritual on the one hand, physical and psychic
on the other. The “Fall” is a universal allegory. It sets forth at one end
of the ladder of Evolution the “rebellion,” _i.e._, the action of
differentiating intellection, or consciousness, on its various planes,
seeking union with Matter; and at the other, the lower end, the rebellion
of Matter against Spirit, or of action against spiritual inertia. And here
lies the germ of an error which has had such disastrous effects on the
intelligence of civilized societies for over 1,800 years. In the original
allegory it is Matter—hence the more material Angels—which was regarded as
the conqueror of Spirit, or the Archangels who “fell” on this plane.

They of the _flaming sword_ [or animal passions] had put to flight
the Spirits of Darkness.

Yet it is the latter who fought for the supremacy of the conscious and
divine spirituality on Earth and failed, succumbing to the power of
Matter. But in theological dogma we see the reverse. It is Michael, “who
is like unto God,” the representative of Jehovah, who is the Leader of the
Celestial Hosts—as Lucifer, in Milton’s fancy, is of the Infernal
Hosts—who has the best of Satan. It is true that the nature of Michael
depends upon that of his Creator and Master. Who the latter is, one may
find out by carefully studying the allegory of the “War in Heaven” with
the astronomical key. As shown by Bentley, the “War of the Titans against
the Gods” in Hesiod, and also the War of the Asuras, or the Târakâmaya,
against the Devas in Purânic legend, are identical in all save the names.
The aspects of the stars show—Bentley taking the year 945 B.C. as the
nearest date for such conjunction—that:

All the planets, except Saturn, were on the same side of the
heavens as the Sun and Moon.

And hence were his opponents. And yet it is Saturn, or the Jewish “Moon‐
God,” who is shown as prevailing, both by Hesiod and Moses, neither of
whom was understood. Thus it was that the real meaning became distorted.

Stanza II.—_Continued._

8. THE FLAMES CAME. THE FIRES WITH THE SPARKS; THE NIGHT‐FIRES AND THE
DAY‐FIRES (_A_). THEY DRIED OUT THE TURBID DARK WATERS. WITH THEIR HEAT
THEY QUENCHED THEM. THE LHAS(136) OF THE HIGH; THE LHAMAYIN(137) OF BELOW,
CAME (_B_). THEY SLEW THE FORMS, WHICH WERE TWO‐ AND FOUR‐FACED. THEY
FOUGHT THE GOAT‐MEN, AND THE DOG‐HEADED MEN, AND THE MEN WITH FISHES’
BODIES.

(_a_) The “Flames” are a Hierarchy of Spirits parallel to, if not
identical with, the “burning” fiery Saraph (Seraphim), mentioned by
Isaiah(138) those who, according to Hebrew Theogony, attend the “Throne of
the Almighty.” Melha is the Lord of the “Flames.” When he appears on
Earth, he assumes the personality of a Buddha, says a popular legend. He
is one of the most ancient and revered Lhas, a Buddhist St. Michael.

(_b_) The word “Below” must not be taken to mean Infernal Regions, but
simply a spiritual, or rather ethereal, Being of a lower grade, because
nearer to the Earth, or one step higher than our Terrestrial Sphere; while
the Lhas are Spirits of the highest Spheres—whence the name of the capital
of Tibet, Lha‐ssa.

Besides a statement of a purely physical nature and belonging to the
evolution of life on Earth, there may be another allegorical meaning
attached to this shloka, or indeed, as is taught, several. The “Flames,”
or “Fires,” represent Spirit, or the male element, and “Water,” Matter, or
the opposite element. And here again we find, in the action of the Spirit
slaying the purely material form, a reference to the eternal struggle, on
the physical and psychic planes, between Spirit and Matter, besides a
scientific cosmic fact. For, as said in the next verse:

9. MOTHER‐WATER, THE GREAT SEA, WEPT. SHE AROSE, SHE DISAPPEARED IN THE
MOON, WHICH HAD LIFTED HER, WHICH HAD GIVEN HER BIRTH.

Now what can this mean? Is it not an evident reference to tidal action in
the early stage of the history of our Planet in its Fourth Round? Modern
research has been busy of late in its speculations on the Palæozoic high‐
tides. Mr. G. H. Darwin’s theory was that not less than 52,000,000 years
ago—and probably much more—the Moon originated from the Earth’s plastic
mass. Starting from the point where research was left by Helmholtz,
Ferrel, Sir William Thomson and others, he retraced the course of tidal
retardation of the Earth’s rotary motions far back into the very night of
time, and placed the Moon during the infancy of our Planet at only “a
fraction of its present distance.” In short, his theory was that it was
the Moon which separated from the Earth. The tidal elevation concurring
with the swing of the globular mass—centrifugal tendency being then nearly
equal to gravity—the latter was overcome, and the tidally elevated mass
could thus separate completely from the Earth.(139)

The Occult teaching is the reverse of this. The Moon is far older than the
Earth; and, as explained in Volume I, it is the latter which owes its
being to the former, however Astronomy and Geology may explain the fact.
Hence, the tides and the attraction to the Moon, as shown by the liquid
portion of the Globe ever striving to raise itself towards its parent.
This is the meaning of the sentence that the Mother‐Water “arose, she
disappeared in the Moon, which had lifted her, which had given her birth.”

10. WHEN(140) THEY WERE DESTROYED, MOTHER EARTH REMAINED BARE.(141) SHE
ASKED TO BE DRIED.(142)

The time for the Earth’s incrustation had arrived. The waters had
separated and the process was started. It was the beginning of a new life.
This is what one key divulges to us. Another key teaches the origin of
Water, its admixture with Fire—“Liquid Fire” it calls it—and enters upon
an Alchemical description of the progeny of the two—solid matters such as
minerals and earths. From the “Waters of Space,” the progeny of the male
Spirit‐Fire and the female (gaseous) Water has become the Oceanic expanse
on Earth. Varuna is dragged down from the infinite Space, to reign as
Neptune over the finite Seas. As always, the popular fancy is found to be
based on a strictly scientific foundation.

Water is the symbol of the Female Element everywhere; Mater, from which
comes the letter M, is derived pictorially from [Symbol like three
mountains, rather like the letter “M”], a water hieroglyph. It is the
Universal Matrix or the “Great Deep.” Venus, the great Mother‐Virgin,
issues forth from the sea‐wave, and Cupid or Erôs is her son. But Venus is
the later mythological variant of Gæa, Gaia, the Earth, which, in its
higher aspect is Prakriti, Nature, and metaphysically Aditi, and even
Mûlaprakriti, the Root of Prakriti, or its noumenon.

Hence Cupid or Love in his primitive sense is Erôs, the Divine Will, or
Desire of manifesting itself through visible creation. Thence Fohat, the
prototype of Erôs, becomes on Earth the Great Power “Life‐Electricity,” or
the Spirit of “Life‐giving.” Let us remember the Greek Theogony and enter
into the spirit of its Philosophy. We are taught by the Greeks that all
things, Gods included, owe their being to the Ocean and his wife Tethys,
the latter being Gæa, the Earth or Nature. But who is Ocean? Ocean is the
immeasurable Space—Spirit in Chaos—which, is the Deity; and Tethys is not
the Earth, but Primordial Matter in the process of formation. In our case
it is no longer Aditi‐Gæa who begets Ouranos or Varuna, the chief Âditya
among the seven Planetary Gods, but Prakriti, materialized and localized.
The Moon, masculine in its theogonic character, is, in its cosmic aspect
only, the female generative principle, as the Sun is the male emblem
thereof. Water is the progeny of the Moon, an androgyne deity with every
nation.

Evolution proceeds on the laws of analogy in Kosmos as in the formation of
the smallest Globe. Thus the above, applying to the _modus operandi_ at
the time when the Universe was appearing, applies also in the case of our
Earth’s formation.

The Stanza now being commented upon opens by speaking of thirty crores,
300,000,000 of years. We may be asked: What could the ancients know of the
duration of geological periods, when no modern Scientist or Mathematician
is able to calculate their duration with anything like approximate
accuracy? Whether they had or had not better means—and it is maintained
that they had them as is evidenced by their Zodiacs—still the chronology
of the ancient Brâhmans shall now be given as faithfully as possible.

The Chronology of the Brâhmans.

No greater riddle exists in Science, no problem is more hopelessly
insoluble, than the question: How old—even approximately—are the Sun and
Moon, the Earth and Man? What does Modern Science know of the duration of
the Ages of the World, or even of the length of Geological Periods?

Nothing; absolutely nothing.

If one turns to Science for chronological information, one is told by
those who are straightforward and truthful, as for instance Mr. Pengelly,
the eminent Geologist, “We do not know.”(143) One will learn that, so far,
no trustworthy numerical estimate of the ages of the World and Man could
be made, and that both Geology and Anthropology are at sea. Yet when a
student of Esoteric Philosophy presumes to bring forward the teachings of
Occult Science, he is at once sat upon. Why should this be so, since, when
reduced to their own physical methods, the greatest Scientists have failed
to arrive even at an approximate agreement?

It is true that Science can hardly be blamed for it. Indeed, in the
Cimmerian darkness of the prehistoric ages, the explorers are lost in a
labyrinth, whose great corridors are doorless, allowing no visible exit
into the archaic past. Lost in the maze of their own conflicting
speculations, rejecting, as they have always done, the evidence of Eastern
tradition, without any clue, or one single certain milestone to guide
them, what can Geologists or Anthropologists do but pick up the slender
thread of Ariadne where they first perceive it, and then proceed at
perfect random? Therefore we are first told that the farthest date to
which documentary record extends is now generally regarded by Anthropology
as but “the earliest distinctly visible point of the pre‐historic
period”—in the words of the writer of the article in the _Encyclopædia
Britannica_.

At the same time it is confessed that “beyond that period stretches back a
vast indefinite series of pre‐historic ages.”

It is with those specified “ages” that we shall begin. They are “pre‐
historic” to the naked eye of Matter only. To the spiritual eagle eye of
the Seer and the Prophet of every race, Ariadne’s thread stretches beyond
that “historic period” without break or flaw, surely and steadily, into
the very night of time; and the hand which holds it is too mighty to drop
it, or even let it break. Records exist, although they may be rejected as
fanciful by the profane; though, indeed, many of them are tacitly accepted
by Philosophers and men of great learning, and meet with an unvarying
refusal only from the official and collective body of _orthodox_ Science.
And since the latter refuses to give us even an approximate idea of the
duration of the geological Ages—save in a few conflicting and
contradictory hypotheses—let us see what Âryan Philosophy can teach us.

Such computations as are given in _Manu_ and the _Purânas_—save trifling
and most evidently _intentional_ exaggerations—are, as already stated,
almost identical with those taught in Esoteric Philosophy. This may be
seen by comparing the two in any Hindû calendar of recognized orthodoxy.

The best and most complete of all such calendars, at present, as vouched
for by the learned Brâhmans of Southern India, is the already mentioned
Tamil calendar called the _Tirukkanda Panchanga_, compiled, as we are
told, from, and in full accordance with, secret fragments of Asuramaya’s
data. As Asuramaya is said to have been the greatest Astronomer, so he is
whispered to have also been the most powerful “Sorcerer” of the “White
Island, which had become Black with sin,” _i.e._, of the islands of
Atlantis.

The “White Island” is a symbolical name. Asuramaya is said to have lived,
as in the tradition of the _Jñâna‐bhâskara_, in Romaka‐pura, in the West;
because the name is an allusion to the land and cradle of the “Sweat‐born”
of the Third Race. That land or continent had disappeared ages before
Asuramaya lived, since he was an Atlantean; but he was a direct descendant
of the Wise Race, _the Race that never dies_. Many are the legends
concerning this hero, the pupil of Sûrya, the Sun‐God, himself, as the
Indian accounts allege. It matters little whether he lived on one or
another island, but the question is to prove that he was no myth, as Dr.
Weber and others would make him. The fact of Romaka‐pura, in the West,
being named as the birthplace of this hero of the Archaic Ages, is the
more interesting because it is so very suggestive of the Esoteric Teaching
about the Sweat‐born Races, the men born from the “pores of their
parents.” “_Roma‐kûpas_” mean “hair‐pores” in Sanskrit. In the
_Mahâbhârata_,(144) a people named Raumas are said to have been created
from the pores of Vîrabhadra, the terrible giant, who destroyed Daksha’s
sacrifice. Other tribes and people are also represented as born in this
way. All these are references to the later Second and the earlier Third
Root‐Races.

The following figures are from the calendar just referred to; a foot‐note
marks the points of disagreement with the figures of the Ârya Samâj
school:

I. From the beginning of Cosmic Evolution,(145) up to the Hindû year
Tarana (or 1887), 1,955,884,687 years.

II. The (astral), mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms up to Man, have
taken to evolve, 300,000,000 years.(146)

III. Time, from the first appearance of “Humanity” (on our Planetary
Chain), 1,664,500,987 years.(147)

IV. The number that elapsed since the Vaivasvata, Manvantara(148)—or the
_Human_ Period—up to the year 1887, is just 18,618,728 years.

V. The full period of one Manvantara is 308,448,000 years.

VI. Fourteen Manvantaras, _plus_ the period of one Satya Yuga make one Day
of Brahmâ, or a complete Manvantara, or 4,320,000,000 years.

Therefore a Mahâ Yuga consists of 4,320,000 years.(149)

The year 1887 is from the commencement of Kali Yuga, 4,989 years.

To make this still clearer in its details, the following computations by
Rao Bahadur P. Sreenivas Row, are given from the _Theosophist_ of
November, 1885.

360 days of mortals make a year

Krita Yuga contains 1,728,000

Tretâ Yuga contains 1,296,000

Dvâpara Yuga contains 864,000

Kali Yuga contains 432,000

The total of the said four Yugas constitute a Mahâ Yuga, 4,320,000

Seventy‐one of such Mahâ Yugas form the period of the reign of one
Manu, 306,720,000

The reign of fourteen Manus embraces the duration of 994 Mahâ
Yugas, which is equal to 4,294,080,000

Add Sandhis, _i.e._, intervals between the reign of each Manu,
which amount to six Mahâ Yugas, equal to 25,920,000

The total of these reigns and interregnums of fourteen Manus, is
1,000 Mahâ Yugas, which constitute a Kalpa, _i.e._, one Day of
Brahmâ, 4,320,000,000

As Brahmâ’s Night is of equal duration, one Day and Night of
Brahmâ would contain 8,640,000,000

360 of such days and nights make one Year of Brahmâ equal to
3,110,400,000,000

100 such Years constitute the whole period of Brahmâ’s Age,
_i.e._, Mahâ Kalpa, 311,040,000,000,000

These are the exoteric figures accepted throughout India, and they
dovetail pretty nearly with those of the Secret Works. The latter,
moreover, amplify them by a division into a number of Esoteric Cycles,
never mentioned in Brâhmanical popular writings—one of which, the division
of the Yugas into Racial Cycles, is given elsewhere as an instance. The
rest, in their details, have of course never been made public. They are,
nevertheless, known to every “Twice‐born” (Dvija, or Initiated) Brâhman,
and the _Purânas_ contain references to some of them in veiled terms,
which no matter‐of‐fact Orientalist has yet endeavoured to make out, nor
could he if he would.

These sacred Astronomical Cycles are of immense antiquity, and most of
them pertain, as stated, to the calculations of Nârada and Asuramaya. The
latter has the reputation of a Giant and a Sorcerer. But the Antediluvian
Giants—the Gibborim of the Bible—were not all bad or Sorcerers, as
Christian Theology, which sees in every Occultist a servant of the Evil
One, would have it; nor were they worse than many of “the faithful sons of
the Church.” A Torquemada and a Catherine de Médicis certainly did more
harm in their day, and in the name of their Master, than any Atlantean
Giant or Demigod of antiquity ever did, whether named Cyclops, or Medusa,
or yet the Orphic Titan, the anguipedal monster known as Ephialtes. There
were _good_ “giants” in days of old just as there are _bad_ “pigmies” now;
and the Râkshasas and Yakshas of Lankâ are no worse than our modern
dynamiters, and certain Christian and civilized generals during modern
wars. Nor are they myths.

He who would laugh at Briareus and Orion ought to abstain from
going to, or even talking of, Carnac or Stonehenge.

remarks somewhere a modern writer.

As the Brâhmanical figures given above are approximately the basic
calculations of our Esoteric System, the reader is requested to carefully
keep them in mind.

In the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ we find, as the last word of Science,
that the antiquity of man is allowed to stretch _only over_ “tens of
thousands of years.” It becomes evident that as these figures may be made
to fluctuate between 10,000 and 100,000, therefore they mean very little
if anything, and only render still denser the darkness surrounding the
question. Moreover, what matters it that Science places the birth of man
in the “pre‐ or post‐ glacial drift,” if we are told at the same time that
the so‐called “Ice Age” is simply a long succession of ages which

Shaded without abrupt change of any kind into what is termed the
human or recent period ... the overlapping of geological periods
having been the rule from the beginning of time.(150)

The latter “rule” only results in the still more puzzling, even if
strictly scientific and correct, information, that:

Even to‐day man is contemporary with the ice‐age in the Alpine
valleys and in the Finmark.(151)

Thus, had it not been for the lessons taught by the Secret Doctrine, and
even by exoteric Hindûism and its traditions, we should to this day be
left to float in perplexed uncertainty between the indefinite “Ages” of
one school of Science, the “tens of thousands” of years of the other, and
the 6,000 years of the Bible interpreters. This is one of the several
reasons why, with all the respect due to the conclusions of the men of
learning of our modern day, we are forced to ignore them in all such
questions of pre‐historic antiquity.

Modern Geology and Anthropology must, of course, disagree with our views.
But Occultism will find as many weapons against these two Sciences as it
has against astronomical and physical theories, in spite of Mr. Laing’s
assurances that:

In [chronological] calculations of this sort, concerning older and
later formations, there is no _theory_, they are based on positive
facts, limited only by a certain possible [?] amount of error
either way.(152)

Occultism will prove, scientific confessions in hand, that Geology is very
much in error, and very often even more so than Astronomy. In this very
passage by Mr. Laing, which gives to Geology preëminence for correctness
over Astronomy, we find a passage in flagrant contradiction to the
admissions of the best Geologists themselves. Says the author:

In short, the conclusions of Geology, at any rate up to the
Silurian period(153) when the present order of things was fairly
inaugurated, are approximate [truly so] _facts_ and not
_theories_, while the astronomical conclusions are _theories_
based on _data_ so uncertain, that while in some cases they give
results incredibly short, ... in others they give results almost
incredibly long.(154)

After which, the reader is advised that the “safest course”

Seems to be to assume that Geology really proves the duration of
the present order of things to have been somewhere over 100
millions of years, and that Astronomy gives an enormous though
unknown time beyond in the past, and to come in the future, for
the birth, growth, maturity, decline, and death of the solar
system, of which our earth is a small planet now passing through
the habitable phase.(155)

Judging from past experience, we do not entertain the slightest doubt
that, once called upon to answer “the absurd unscientific and preposterous
claims of exoteric (and Esoteric) Âryan chronology,” the Scientist of the
“results incredibly short,” _i.e._, only 15,000,000 years, and the
Scientist, who “would require 600,000,000 years,” together with those who
accept Mr. Huxley’s figures of 1,000,000,000(156) “since sedimentation
began in Europe,” would all be as dogmatic the one as the other. Nor would
they fail to remind the Occultist and the Brâhman, that it is the modern
men of Science alone who represent exact Science, whose duty it is to
fight “inaccuracy” and “superstition.”

The Earth is passing through the “habitable phase” only for the _present
order_ of things, and as far as our present mankind is concerned with its
actual “coats of skin” and phosphorus for bones and brain.

We are ready to concede the 100 millions of years offered by Geology,
since we are taught that our present physical mankind—or the Vaivasvata
Humanity—began only eighteen millions of years ago. But Geology has no
facts to give us for the duration of geological periods, as we have shown,
no more indeed than has Astronomy. The authentic letter from Mr. W.
Pengelly, F.R.S., quoted elsewhere, says:

It is at present, and perhaps always will be, _impossible_ to
reduce, even approximately, geological time into years or even
into millenniums.

And having never, hitherto, excavated a fossil man of any other than the
_present form_—what does Geology know of him? It has traced zones or
strata and, with these, primordial zoological life, down to the Silurian.
When it has, in the same way, traced man down to his primordial
protoplasmic form, then we will admit that it may know something of
primordial man. If it is not very material to “the bearings of modern
scientific discovery on modern thought,” whether

Man has existed in a state of constant though slow progression for
the last 50,000 years of a period of 15 millions, or for the last
500,000 years of a period of 150 millions,(157)

as Mr. S. Laing tells his readers, it is very much so for the claims of
the Occultists. Unless the latter show that it is a _possibility_, if not
a perfect certainty, that man lived eighteen millions of years ago, the
_Secret Doctrine_ might as well have remained unwritten. An attempt must,
therefore, be made in this direction, and it is our modern Geologists and
men of Science generally who will be brought to testify to this fact in
the Third Part of this Volume. Meanwhile, and notwithstanding the fact
that Hindû Chronology is constantly represented by the Orientalists as a
fiction based on no “actual” computation,(158) but simply a “childish
boasting,” it is nevertheless often twisted out of recognition to make it
yield to, and fit in with, Western theories. No figures have ever been
more meddled with and tortured than the famous 4, 3, 2, followed by
cyphers, of the Yugas and Mahâ Yugas.

As the whole Cycle of pre‐historic events, such as the evolution and
transformation of Races and the extreme antiquity of man, hangs upon the
said Chronology, it becomes extremely important to check it by other
existing calculations. If the Eastern Chronology is rejected, we shall at
least have the consolation of proving that no other—whether in the figures
of Science or of the Churches—is one whit more reliable. As Professor Max
Müller expresses it, it is often as useful to prove what a thing is not as
to show what it may be. And once we succeed in pointing out the fallacies
of both Christian and Scientific computations—by allowing them a fair
chance of comparison with our Chronology—neither of these will have a
reasonable ground to stand upon, in pronouncing the Esoteric figures less
reliable than its own.

We may here refer the reader to our earlier work, _Isis Unveiled_,(159)
for some remarks concerning the figures which were cited a few pages back.

To‐day a few more facts may be added to the information there given, which
is already known to every Orientalist. The sacredness of the cycle of
4,320, with additional cyphers, lies in the fact that the figures which
compose it, taken separately or joined in various combinations, are each
and all symbolical of the greatest mysteries in Nature. Indeed, whether
one takes the 4 separately, or the 3 by itself, or the two together making
7, or again the three, 4, 3, 2, added together and yielding 9, all these
numbers have their application in the most sacred and Occult matters, and
record the workings of Nature in her eternally periodical phenomena. They
are never erring, perpetually recurring numbers, unveiling, to him who
studies the secrets of Nature, a truly divine System, an intelligent plan
in Cosmogony, which results in natural cosmic divisions of times, seasons,
invisible influences, astronomical phenomena, with their action and
reäction on terrestrial and even moral nature; on birth, death, and
growth, on health and disease. All these natural events are based and
depend upon cyclical processes in the Kosmos itself, producing periodic
agencies which, acting from without, affect the Earth and all that lives
and breathes on it, from the one end to the other of any Manvantara.
Causes and effects are esoteric, exoteric and “endexoteric,” so to say.

In _Isis Unveiled_ we wrote that which we now repeat: _We are at the
bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state_. Plato divides the
intellectual progress of the Universe during every Cycle into fertile and
barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various
elements remain eternally in perfect harmony with the Divine Nature, he
says; “but their parts,” owing to a too close proximity to earth, and
their commingling with the earthly (which is Matter, and therefore the
realm of evil), “are sometimes according, and sometimes contrary to
(Divine) Nature.” When those circulations—which Éliphas Lévi calls
“currents of the Astral Light”—in the universal Ether which contains in
itself every element, take place in harmony with the Divine Spirit, our
Earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The Occult
powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the
“superior natures,” and the Divine Soul of man is in perfect intelligence
with these “inferior” ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose
their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of mankind
is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers of its own
Divine Spirit. We are in a barren period; the eighteenth century, during
which the malignant fever of scepticism broke out so irrepressibly, has
entailed unbelief as a hereditary disease upon the nineteenth. The divine
intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain alone “philosophizes.” And
philosophizing alone, how can it understand the “Soul Doctrine”?

In order not to break the thread of the narrative we shall give some
striking proofs of these cyclic laws in Part II, proceeding meanwhile with
our explanations of Geological and Racial Cycles.

Stanza III. Attempts To Create Man.

11. The Descent of the Demiurge. 12. The Lunar Gods ordered to
create. 13. The Higher Gods refuse.

11. THE LORD OF THE LORDS CAME. FROM HER BODY HE SEPARATED THE WATERS, AND
THAT WAS HEAVEN ABOVE, THE FIRST HEAVEN.(160)

Here tradition falls again into the Universal. As in the earliest version,
repeated in the _Purânas_, so in the latest, the Mosaic account. In the
first it is said:

He the Lord [the God who has the form of Brahmâ], when the world
had become one ocean, concluding that within the waters lay the
earth, and desirous to raise it up [to separate it], created
himself in another form. As in the preceding Kalpa [Manvantara] he
had assumed the shape of a tortoise, so in this one he took the
shape of a boar, etc.(161)

In the Elohistic “creation,”(162) “God” creates “a firmament in the midst
of the waters,” and says “let _dry land_ appear.” And now comes the
traditional peg whereunto is hung the Esoteric portion of the Kabalistic
interpretation.

12. THE GREAT CHOHANS(163) CALLED THE LORDS OF THE MOON, OF THE AIRY
BODIES: “BRING FORTH MEN,(164) MEN OF YOUR NATURE. GIVE THEM(165) THEIR
FORMS WITHIN. SHE(166) WILL BUILD COVERINGS WITHOUT.(167) MALES‐FEMALES
WILL THEY BE. LORDS OF THE FLAME ALSO....”

Who are the “Lords of the Moon”? In India they are called Pitris or “Lunar
Ancestors,” but in the Hebrew scrolls it is Jehovah himself who is the
“Lord of the Moon,” collectively as the Host, and also as one of the
Elohim. The Astronomy of the Hebrews and their “observance of _times_” was
regulated by the Moon. A Kabalist, having shown that “Daniel ... told off
God’s providence by set _times_” and that the _Revelation_ of John “speaks
of a carefully measured _cubical_ city descending out of the heavens,”
etc., adds:

But the vitalizing power of heaven lay chiefly with _the moon_....
It was the Hebrew יהוה [Jehovah],—and St. Paul enjoins:—“Let no
man judge you for your observance of the 7th day, and the day of
_new moon,—which are a shadow of things to come_; but the body (or
substance) is of Christ,” _i.e._, Jehovah,—that function of this
power that “made the barren woman the joyful mother of
children,”—“for they are the gift of Jehovah,” ... which is a key
to the objection which her husband made to the Shunamite, as to
her going to the man of God:—“for it is neither the 7th day nor
the day of _new moon_.” The living spiritual powers of the
constellations had mighty wars marked by the movements and
positions of the stars and planets, and especially as the result
of the conjunction of the moon, earth and sun. Bentley comments on
the Hindû “war between the gods and the giants,” as marked by the
eclipse of the sun at the ascending node of the moon, 945 B.C.
[!], at which time was born,(168) or produced from the sea, SRI
(Sarai), S‐r‐i, the wife of the Hebrew Abram(169), who was the
Venus‐Aphroditus [_sic_] of the Westerns, emblem “of the luni‐
solar year, or the moon, [as Sri is the wife of the Moon; see
foot‐note], the goddess of increase.”(170) ... [Therefore] the
grand monument and land‐mark of the exact period of the lunar year
and month, by which this cycle [of 19 tropical years of the sun
and 235 revolutions of the moon] could be calculated, was Mount
Sinai,—the Lord Jehovah coming down thereon.... Paul speaks [then]
as a mystagogue, when he says concerning the freed woman and bond
woman of Abraham:—“For this Hagar (the bond woman of Abraham) is
Mount Sinai in Arabia.” How could a woman be a mountain? and such
a mountain! Yet, in one sense, ... she was, and in a very
marvellously true one. Her name was Hagar, הגר whose numbers read
235, or in exact measure, the very number of lunar months to equal
19 tropical years to complete this cycle and make the likeness and
similitude good; Mount Sinai being, in the esoteric language of
this wisdom, the monument of the exact time of the lunar year and
month, by which this spiritual vitalizing cycle could be computed,
and which mountain, indeed, was called (Fuerst) “the Mountain of
the Moon (Sin).” So also Sarai (SRI), the wife of Abram, could
have no child until her name was changed to Sarah, שרה, giving to
her the property of this lunar influence.(171)

This may be regarded as a digression from the main subject; but it is a
very necessary one with a view to Christian readers. For who, after
studying dispassionately the respective legends of Abram or Abraham, Sarai
or Sarah, who was “fair to look upon,” and those of Brahmâ and Sarasvatî,
or Shrî, Lakshmî‐Venus, with the relations of all these to the Moon and
Water;—and especially one who understands the real Kabalistic meaning of
the name Jehovah and its relation to, and connection with, the Moon—who
can doubt that the story of Abram is based upon that of Brahmâ, or that
_Genesis_ was written upon the old lines used by every ancient nation? All
in the ancient Scriptures is allegorical—all based upon and inseparably
connected with Astronomy and Cosmolatry.

13. THEY(172) WENT EACH ON HIS ALLOTTED LAND: SEVEN OF THEM, EACH ON HIS
LOT. THE LORDS OF THE FLAME REMAIN BEHIND. THEY WOULD NOT GO, THEY WOULD
NOT CREATE.

The Secret Teachings show the divine Progenitors creating men on seven
portions of the Globe “each on his lot”—_i.e._, each a different Race of
men externally and internally, and on different Zones. This polygenistic
claim is considered elsewhere, in Stanza VII. But who are “They” who
create, and the “Lords of the Flame,” “who would not”? Occultism divides
the “Creators” into Twelve Classes; of which four have reached
“Liberation” to the end of the “Great Age,” the fifth is ready to reach
it, but still remains active on the intellectual planes, while seven are
still under direct Karmic Law. These last act on the man‐bearing Globes of
our Chain.

Exoteric Hindû books mention Seven Classes of Pitris, and among them two
distinct kinds of Progenitors or Ancestors: the Barhishad and the
Agnishvâtta; or those possessed of the “sacred fire” and those devoid of
it. Hindû ritualism seems to connect them with sacrificial fires, and with
Grihastha Brâhmans in earlier incarnations; those who have, and those who
have _not_ attended as they should to their household sacred fires in
their previous births. The distinction, as said, is derived from the
_Vedas_. The first and highest class (Esoterically), the Agnishvâtta, are
represented in the exoteric allegory as Grihastha or Brâhman‐householders,
who, having failed to maintain their domestic fires and to offer burnt
sacrifices, in their past births in other Manvantaras, have lost every
right to have oblations with fire presented to them. Whereas the
Barhishad, being Brâhmans who have kept up their household sacred fires,
are thus honoured to this day. Thence the Agnishvâtta are represented as
devoid of, and the Barhishad as possessed of, fires.

But Esoteric Philosophy explains the original qualifications as being due
to the difference between the natures of the two Classes: the Agnishvâtta
Pitris are devoid of “fire” _i.e._, of creative passion, because they are
too divine and pure; whereas the Barhishad, being the Lunar Spirits more
closely connected with Earth, became the creative Elohim of form, or the
Adam of dust.

The allegory says that Sanandana and other Vedhas, the Sons of Brahmâ, his
first progeny:

Were without desire or passion, inspired with holy wisdom,
estranged from the universe and _undesirous of progeny_.(173)

This also is what is meant in the shloka by the words, “They would not
create,” and is explained as follows:

“_The Primordial Emanations from the Creative Power are too near the
Absolute Cause. They are transitional and latent forces, which will
develop only in the next and subsequent removes._”

This makes it plain. Hence Brahmâ is said to have felt wrathful when he
saw that those

Embodied spirits, produced from his limbs [_gâtra_], would not
multiply themselves.

After which, in the allegory, he creates other seven Mind‐born Sons(174)
namely, Marichi, Atri, Angiras, Pulastya, Pulaha, Kratu and Vasishtha, the
latter being often replaced by Daksha, the most prolific of the Creators.
In most of the texts these Seven Sons of Vasishtha‐Daksha are called the
Seven Rishis of the _Third_ Manvantara; the latter referring both to the
Third Round and also to the Third Root‐Race and its Branch‐Races in the
Fourth Round. These are all the Creators of the various Beings on this
Earth, the Prajâpati, and at the same time they appear as divers
reïncarnations in the early Manvantaras or Races.

It thus becomes clear why the Agnishvâtta, devoid of the grosser “creative
fire,” hence unable to create physical man, having no Double, or Astral
Body, to project, since they were without any “form,” are shown in
exoteric allegories as Yogîs, Kumâras (chaste youths), who became
“rebels,” Asuras, fighting and opposing Gods,(175) etc. Yet it is they
alone who could complete man, _i.e._, make of him a self‐conscious, almost
a divine Being—a God on Earth. The Barhishad, though possessed of
“creative fire,” were devoid of the higher Mahat‐ic element. Being on a
level with the lower “Principles”—those which precede gross objective
matter—they could only give birth to the outer man, or rather to the model
of the physical, the astral man. Thus, though we see them intrusted with
the task by Brahmâ—the collective Mahat or Universal Divine Mind—the
“Mystery of Creation” is repeated on Earth, only in an inverted sense, as
in a _mirror_.

It is those who are unable to create the spiritual immortal man, who
project the senseless model (the Astral) of the physical Being; and, as
will be seen, it was those who would not multiply, who sacrificed
themselves to the good and salvation of Spiritual Humanity. For, to
complete the _septenary man_, to add to his three lower Principles and
cement them with the Spiritual Monad—which could never dwell in such a
form otherwise than in an _absolutely latent state_—two connecting
“Principles” are needed: Manas and Kâma. This requires a living Spiritual
Fire of the middle Principle from the Fifth and Third States of Plerôma.
But this Fire is the possession of the Triangles, not of the (perfect)
Cubes, which symbolize the Angelic Beings;(176) the former having from the
First Creation possessed themselves of it and being said to have
appropriated it for themselves, as in the allegory of Prometheus. These
are the active, and therefore—in Heaven—no longer “pure” Beings. They have
become the independent and free Intelligences, shown in every Theogony as
fighting for that independence and freedom, and hence—in the ordinary
sense—“rebellious to the divine passive law.” These are then those
“Flames”—the Agnishvâtta—who, as shown in the shloka, “remain behind,”
instead of going along with the others to create men on Earth. But the
true Esoteric meaning is that most of them were destined to incarnate as
the Egos of the forthcoming crop of Mankind.

The human Ego is neither Âtman nor Buddhi, but the Higher Manas; the
intellectual fruitage and the efflorescence of the intellectual self‐
conscious Egotism—in the higher spiritual sense. The ancient works refer
to it as Kârana Sharîra on the plane of Sûtrâtmâ, which is the “golden
thread” on which, like beads, the various Personalities of this Higher Ego
are strung. If the reader were told, as in the _semi‐Esoteric_ allegories,
that these Beings were returning Nirvânîs from preceding
Mahâ‐Manvantaras—Ages of incalculable duration which have rolled away in
the Eternity, a still more incalculable time ago—he would hardly
understand the text correctly; while some Vedântins might say: “This is
not so; the Nirvânî can never return”; which is true during the Manvantara
he belongs to, and erroneous where Eternity is concerned. For it is said
in the Sacred Shlokas:

“_The Thread of Radiance which is imperishable and dissolves only in __
Nirvâna, reëmerges from it in its integrity on the day when the Great Law
calls all things back into action._”

Hence, as the higher Pitris or Dhyânîs had no hand in his physical
creation, we find Primeval Man—issued from the bodies of his _spiritually_
“fireless” Progenitors—described as aëriform, devoid of compactness, and
“mindless.” He had no middle Principle to serve him as a medium between
the Highest and the Lowest—the Spiritual Man and the physical brain—for he
lacked Manas. The Monads which incarnated in those _empty_ Shells,
remained as unconscious as when separated from their previous incomplete
forms and vehicles. There is no potentiality for Creation, or Self‐
Consciousness, in a _pure_ Spirit on this our plane, unless its too
homogeneous, perfect—because divine—nature is, so to say, mixed with, and
strengthened by, an essence already differentiated. It is only the lower
line of the Triangle—representing the first Triad that emanates from the
Universal Monad—that can furnish this needed consciousness on the plane of
differentiated Nature. But how could these pure Emanations, which, on this
principle, must have originally been themselves “unconscious” (in our
sense), be of any use in supplying the required Principle, as they could
hardly have possessed it themselves?

The answer is difficult to comprehend, unless one is well acquainted with
the philosophical metaphysics of a beginningless and endless series of
Cosmic Re‐births, and becomes well impressed and familiarized with that
immutable law of Nature which is ETERNAL MOTION, cyclic and
spiral—therefore progressive even in its seeming retrogression. The one
Divine Principle, the nameless THAT of the _Vedas_, is the Universal
Total, which, neither in its spiritual aspects and emanations, nor in its
physical Atoms, can ever be at “Absolute Rest” except during the Nights of
Brahmâ. Hence, also, the “First‐born” are those who are first set in
motion at the beginning of a Manvantara, and thus the first to fall into
the lower spheres of materiality. They who are called in Theology the
“Thrones,” and are the “Seat of God,” must be the first incarnated men on
Earth; and it becomes comprehensible, if we think of the endless series of
past Manvantaras, to find that the last had to come first, and the first
last. We find, in short, that the higher Angels had broken, countless æons
before, through the “Seven Circles,” and thus “robbed” them of the Sacred
Fire; this means in plain words, that they had assimilated during their
past incarnations, in lower as well as in higher Worlds, all the wisdom
therefrom—the reflection of Mahat in its various degrees of intensity. No
Entity, whether angelic or human, can reach the state of Nirvâna, or of
absolute purity, except through æons of suffering and the _knowledge_ of
evil as well as of good, as otherwise the latter would remain
incomprehensible.

Between man and the animal—whose Monads, or Jîvas, are fundamentally
identical—there is the impassable abyss of Mentality and Self‐
consciousness. What is human mind in its higher aspect, whence comes it,
if it be not a portion of the essence—and, in some rare cases of
incarnation, the _very essence_—of a higher Being; one from a higher and
divine plane? Can man—a God in the animal form—be the product of Material
Nature by evolution alone, even as is the animal which differs from man in
external shape, but by no means in the materials of its physical fabric,
and is informed by the same, though undeveloped, Monad—seeing that the
intellectual potentialities of the two differ as the sun does from the
glow‐worm? And what is it that creates such difference, unless man is an
animal _plus a living God_ within his physical shell? Let us pause and ask
ourselves seriously the question, regardless of the vagaries and sophisms
of both the materialistic and the psychological modern Sciences.

To some extent, it is admitted that even the Esoteric Teaching is
allegorical. To make the latter comprehensible to the average
intelligence, the use of symbols cast in an intelligible form is needed.
Hence the allegorical and semi‐mythical narratives in the exoteric, and
the only _semi_‐metaphysical and objective representations in the Esoteric
Teachings. For the purely and transcendentally spiritual conceptions are
adapted only to the perceptions of those who “_see without eyes, hear
without ears, and sense without organs_,” according to the graphic
expression of the Commentary. The too puritan Idealist is at liberty to
spiritualize the tenet, whereas the modern Psychologist would simply try
to spirit away our “fallen,” yet still divine, human Soul—divine in its
connection with Buddhi.

The mystery attached to the highly spiritual Ancestors of the _Divine_ Man
within the earthly man is very great. His dual creation is hinted at in
the _Purânas_, though its Esoteric meaning can be approached only by
collating together the many varying accounts, and reading them in their
symbolical and allegorical character. So it is in the _Bible_, both in
_Genesis_ and even in the _Epistles_ of Paul. For that “Creator,” who is
called in the second chapter of _Genesis_ the “Lord God,” is in the
original the Elohim, or Gods (the Lords), in the plural; and while one of
them makes the earthly Adam of Dust, the other breathes into him the
Breath of Life, and the third makes of him a Living Soul, all of which
readings are implied in the plural number of the word Elohim.(177) Or
again, as Paul says:

The first man is of the earth, the second [the last, or rather
highest] is the Lord from heaven.(178)

In the Âryan allegory the rebellious Sons of Brahmâ are all represented as
holy Ascetics and Yogîs. Re‐born in every Kalpa, they generally try to
impede the work of human procreation. When Daksha, the chief of the
Prajâpatis or Creators, brings forth 10,000 sons for the purpose of
peopling the world, Nârada—a son of Brahmâ, the great Rishi, and
_virtually_ a Kumâra, if not so in name—interferes with, and twice
frustrates Daksha’s aim, by persuading those Sons to remain holy Ascetics
and eschew marriage. For this, Daksha curses Nârada to be “re‐born as a
man,” as Brahmâ had cursed him before for refusing to marry, and obtain
progeny, saying: “Perish in thy (present [Deva or Angelic] form); and take
up thy abode in the womb”—_i.e._, become a man.(179)

Notwithstanding several conflicting versions of the same story, it is easy
to see that Nârada belongs to that Class of Brahmâ’s “First‐born,” who
have all proven rebellious to the law of animal procreation, for which
they had to incarnate as _men_. Of all the Vedic Rishis, Nârada, as
already shown, is the most incomprehensible, because the most closely
connected with the Occult Doctrines—especially with the Secret Cycles and
Kalpas.

Certain contradictory statements about this Sage have much distracted the
Orientalists. Thus he is shown as refusing positively to “create” or have
progeny, and even as calling his father Brahmâ a “false teacher” for
advising him to get married, as related in the _Nârada‐Pancha‐Râtra_;
nevertheless, he is referred to as one of the Prajâpatis or Progenitors!
In the _Nâradîya Purâna_, he describes the laws and the duties of the
celibate Adepts; and as these Occult duties do not happen to be found in
the fragment of about 3,000 Stanzas in the possession of European museums,
the Brâhmans are proclaimed liars; the Orientalists forgetting that the
_Nâradîya_ is credited with containing 25,000 Stanzas, and that it is not
very likely that such MSS. should be found in the hands of the Hindû
profane, those who are ready to sell any precious Olla for a red pottage.
Suffice it to say, that Nârada is _the_ Deva‐Rishi of Occultism _par
excellence_, and that the Occultist who does not ponder, analyze, and
study Nârada from his seven Esoteric facets, will never be able to fathom
certain anthropological, chronological, and even cosmic Mysteries. He is
one of the Fires above‐mentioned, and plays a part in the evolution of
this Kalpa from its incipient down to its final stage. He is an actor who
appears in each of the successive acts, or Root‐Races, of the present
Manvantaric drama, in the world‐allegories which strike the key‐note of
Esotericism, and are now becoming more familiar to the reader. But shall
we turn to other ancient Scriptures and documents for the corroboration of
the “Fires,” “Sparks,” and “Flames”? They are plentiful, if one only seeks
for them in the right places.

In the Kabalistic _Book of the Concealed Mystery_ they are clearly
enunciated, as also in the _Ha Idra Zuta Qadisha_, or “The Lesser Holy
Assembly.” The language is very mystical and veiled, yet still
comprehensible. In the latter, among the sparks of Prior Worlds,
“vibrating Flames and Sparks,” from the divine flint, the “Workman”
proceeds to create man, “male and female” (427). These “Flames and
Sparks”—Angels and their Worlds, Stars and Planets—are said, figuratively,
to become extinct and die, that is to say, remain “unmanifested” until a
certain process of Nature is accomplished. To show how thickly veiled from
public view are the most important facts of Anthropogenesis, two passages
are now quoted from two Kabalistic books. The first is from the _Ha Idra
Zuta Qadisha_:

429. From a Light‐Bearer [one of the Seven Sacred Planets] of
insupportable brightness proceeded a Radiating Flame, dashing off
like a vast and mighty hammer those sparks which were the Prior
Worlds.

430. And with most subtle ether were these intermingled and bound
mutually together, but _only when they were conjoined together_,
even the Great Father and Great Mother.

431. From _Hoa_, Himself, is AB, the Father; and from _Hoa_,
Himself, is Ruach, the Spirit; Who are hidden in the Ancient of
Days, and therein is that ether concealed.

432. And It was connected with a light‐bearer [a Planet and its
Angel or Regent], which went forth from that Light‐Bearer of
insupportable brightness, which is hidden in the bosom of Aima,
the Great Mother.(180)

Now the following extract from the _Zohar_,(181) under the heading, “The
Pre‐Adamite Kings,” also deals with the same mystery:

We have learned in the Siphrah D’Tznioothah: That the _At‐tee’ kah
D’At‐tee’ keen_, Ancient of Ancients, before He prepared His Form,
built kings and engraved kings, and sketched out kings [men, the
“kings” of the animals], and they could not exist: till He
overthrew them and _hid them until after a time_, therefore it is
written; “And these are the kings which reigned in the land of
Edom.”... And they could not exist till _Resha’Hiv’rah_, the White
Head, the _At’‐tee’‐kah D’At‐tee’‐keen_, Ancient of the Ancients,
arranged Himself. When he arranged Himself He formed all forms
Above and Below.... Before He arranged Himself in His Form, had
not been formed all those whom He desired to form, and all worlds
have been destroyed.... They did not remain in their places,
because the form of the kings had not been formed as it ought to
be, and _the Holy City had not been prepared_.(182)

Now the plain meaning of these two allegorical and metaphysical
disquisitions is simply this: Worlds and men were in turn formed and
destroyed, _under the law of evolution_ and _from preëxisting material_,
until both the Planets and their men, in our case our Earth and its animal
and human races, became what they are now in the present cycle—opposite
polar forces, an equilibrized compound of Spirit and Matter, of the
positive and the negative, of the male and the female. Before man could
become male and female _physically_, his prototype, the creating Elohim,
had to arrange his Form on this sexual plane _astrally_. That is to say,
the Atoms and the organic forces, descending into the plane of the given
differentiation, had to be marshalled in the order intended by Nature, so
as to be ever carrying out, in an immaculate way, that law which the
Kabalah calls the “Balance,” through which everything that exists does so
as male and female in its final perfection, in this present stage of
materiality. Chokmah, Wisdom, the Male Sephira, had to diffuse itself
_in_, and _through_, Binah, intelligent Nature, or Understanding.
Therefore the First Root‐Race of men, sexless and mindless, had to be
overthrown and “hidden until after a time”; _i.e._, the First Race,
instead of dying, disappeared _in_ the Second Race, as certain lower lives
and plants do in their progeny. It was a wholesale transformation. The
First became the Second Root‐Race, without either begetting it,
procreating it, or dying.

“They _passed by_ together,” as it is written: “And he died” and
another “reigned in his stead.”(183)

Why? Because the “_Holy City_ had not been prepared.” And what is the
“Holy City”? The Ma‐qom—the Secret Place or the Shrine—on Earth; in other
words, the human womb, the microcosmic copy and reflection of the Heavenly
Matrix, the female Space or primeval Chaos, in which the male Spirit
fecundates the germ of the Son, or the visible Universe. So much so, that
in the paragraph on “The Emanation of the Male and Female Principles” in
the _Zohar_, it is said that, on this Earth, the Wisdom from the “Holy
Ancient” “does not shine except in male and female.”

(_Hokhmah_ Wisdom, is the Father, and _Binah_ Understanding, is
the Mother.)... And when they connect one with the other, they
bring forth and diffuse and emanate Truth. In the sayings of Rabbi
Ye‐yeva, Sabbah, _i.e._, the Old, we learned this; What is Binah
Understanding? But when they connect in one another, the י (Yod)
in the ה (Heh), they become impregnated and produce a Son. And,
therefore, it is called _Binah_, Understanding. It means BeN YaH,
_i.e._, Son of YaH. This is the completeness of the Whole.(184)

This is also the “completeness” of phallicism by the Rabbis, its perfect
apotheosis, the divine being dragged into the animal, the sublime into the
grossness of the terrestrial. Nothing so graphically gross exists in
Eastern Occultism, nor in the primitive Kabalah—the Chaldæan _Book of
Numbers_. We have said so already in _Isis Unveiled_:

We find it rather unwise on the part of Catholic writers to pour
out their vials of wrath in such sentences as these: “In a
multitude of pagodas, the phallic stone, ever and always assuming,
like the Grecian _batylos_, the brutally indecent form of the
_lingham_ ... the Mahâ Deva.” Before casting slurs on a symbol
whose profound metaphysical meaning is too much for the modern
champions of that religion of sensualism _par excellence_, Roman
Catholicism, to grasp, they are in duty bound to destroy their
oldest churches, and change the form of the cupolas of their own
temples. The Mahadeo of Elephanta, the Round Tower of Bhagulpore,
the minarets of Islam—either rounded or pointed—are the originals
of the Campanile column of San Marco, at Venice, of Rochester
Cathedral, and of the modern Duomo of Milan. All of these
steeples, turrets, domes, and Christian temples, are the
reproductions of the primitive idea of the _lithos_, the upright
phallus.(185)

Nevertheless, and however it may be, the fact that all these Hebrew
Elohim, Sparks, and Cherubs are identical with the Devas, Rishis and the
Fires and Flames, the Rudras and the forty‐nine Agnis of the ancient
Âryas, is sufficiently proven by and in the Kabalah.

Stanza IV. Creation Of The First Races.

14. Creation of men. 15. They are empty shadows. 16. The Creators
are perplexed how to create a _thinking_ man. 17. What is needed
for the formation of a perfect Man.

14. THE SEVEN HOSTS, THE WILL‐BORN(186) LORDS, PROPELLED BY THE SPIRIT OF
LIFE‐GIVING,(187) SEPARATE MEN FROM THEMSELVES, EACH ON HIS OWN ZONE.

They threw off their “Shadows” or Astral Bodies—if such an ethereal being
as a “Lunar Spirit” may be supposed to rejoice in an Astral, besides a
hardly tangible Body. In another Commentary it is said that the Ancestors
_breathed_ out the first man, as Brahmâ is explained to have breathed out
the Suras, or Gods, when they became Asuras (from Asu, breath). In a third
it is said that they, the newly‐created Men, were the “shadows of the
Shadows.”

With regard to this sentence—“They were the shadows of the Shadows”—a few
more words may be said and a fuller explanation attempted. This first
process of the evolution of mankind is far easier to accept than the one
which follows it, though one and all such processes will be rejected and
doubted even by some Kabalists, especially the Western, who study the
present effects, but have neglected to study their primary causes. Nor
does the writer feel competent to explain a mode of procreation so
difficult of appreciation save for an Eastern Occultist. Therefore it is
useless to enter here into details concerning the process, though it is
minutely described in the Secret Books, as it would only lead to speaking
of facts hitherto unknown to the profane world, and hence to their being
misunderstood. An Adam made of the dust of the ground will always be found
preferable, by a certain class of students, to one projected out of the
ethereal body of his creator; though the former process has never been
heard of, while the latter is familiar, as all know, to many Spiritualists
in Europe and America, who, of all men, ought to understand it. For who of
those who have witnessed the phenomenon of a materializing form oozing out
of the pores of a medium or, at other times, out of his _left side_, can
fail to credit the possibility, at least, of such a _birth_? If there are
in the Universe such beings as Angels or Spirits, whose _incorporeal_
essence may constitute an intelligent Entity, notwithstanding the absence
of any (to us) solid organism; and if there are those who believe that a
God made the first man out of dust, and breathed into him a living
Soul—and there are millions upon millions who believe both—what does this
doctrine of ours contain that is so impossible? Very soon the day will
dawn, when the world will have to choose whether it will accept the
miraculous creation of man (and Kosmos too) out of _nothing_, according to
the dead letter of _Genesis_, or a first man born from a fantastic
link—absolutely “missing” so far—the common ancestor of man, and of the
“true ape.”(188) Between these two fallacies, Occult Philosophy steps in.
It teaches that the first human stock was projected by higher and semi‐
divine Beings out of their own essences. If the latter process is to be
considered as abnormal or even inconceivable—because obsolete in Nature at
this point of evolution—it is yet proven possible on the authority of
certain “spiritualistic” _facts_. Which, then, we ask of the three
hypotheses or theories is the most reasonable and the least absurd?
Certainly no one—provided he be not a soul‐blind Materialist—can ever
object to the Occult Teaching.

Now, as shown, we gather from the latter that man was not “created” the
complete being he is now, however imperfect he still remains. There was a
spiritual, a psychic, an intellectual, and an animal evolution, from the
highest to the lowest, as well as a physical development—from the simple
and homogeneous, up to the more complex and heterogeneous; though not
quite on the lines traced for us by the modern Evolutionists. This double
evolution in two contrary directions, required various ages, of divers
natures and degrees of spirituality and intellectuality, to fabricate the
being now known as man. Furthermore, the one absolute, ever acting and
never erring law, which proceeds on the same lines from one Eternity (or
Manvantara) to the other—ever furnishing an ascending scale for the
manifested, or that which we call the great Illusion (Mahâ‐Mâyâ), but
plunging Spirit deeper and deeper into materiality on the one hand, and
then _redeeming it through flesh_ and liberating it—this law, we say, uses
for these purposes the Beings from other and higher planes, men, or Minds
(Manus), in accordance with their Karmic exigencies.

At this juncture, the reader is again asked to turn to the Indian
Philosophy and Religion. The Esotericism of both is at one with our Secret
Doctrine, however much the form may differ and vary.

On The Identity And Differences Of The Incarnating Powers.

The Progenitors of Man, called in India Fathers, Pitaras, or Pitris, are
the “Creators” of our bodies and lower principles. They are ourselves, as
the _first personalities_, and _we are they_. Primeval man would be “the
bone of their bone and the flesh of their flesh,” if they had bones and
flesh. As stated, they were “Lunar Beings.”

The endowers of man with his conscious, immortal Ego, are the “Solar
Angels”—whether so regarded metaphorically or literally. The mysteries of
the Conscious Ego or Human Soul are great. The Esoteric name of these
Solar Angels is, literally, the “Lords” (Nâth) of “persevering ceaseless
devotion” (Pranidhâna). Therefore they of the _Fifth_ Principle (Manas)
seem to be connected with, or to have originated the system of the Yogîs
who make of Pranidhâna their _fifth_ observance.(189) It has already been
explained why the Trans‐Himâlayan Occultists regard them as evidently
identical with those who in India are termed Kumâras, Agnishvâttas, and
the Barhishads.

How precise and true is Plato’s expression, how profound and philosophical
his remark on the (Human) Soul or Ego, when he defined it as “a compound
of the _same_ and the _other_.” And yet how little this hint has been
understood, since the world took it to mean that the Soul was the Breath
of God, of Jehovah. It is “the _same_ and the _other_,” as the great
Initiate‐Philosopher said; for the Ego—the “Higher Self” when merged with
and in the Divine Monad—is Man, and yet the _same_ as the “_other_”; the
Angel in him incarnated is the same with the Universal Mahat. The great
classical writers and philosophers felt this truth, when saying that:

There must be something within us which produces our thoughts.
Something very subtle; it is a breath; it is fire; it is ether; it
is quintessence; it is a slender likeness; it is an intellection;
it is a number; it is harmony.(190)

All these are the Mânasas and Râjasas; the Kumâras, Asuras, and other
Rulers and Pitris, who incarnated in the Third Race, and in this and
various other ways endowed mankind with Mind.

There are Seven Classes of Pitris, as shown below, three Incorporeal and
four Corporeal; and two kinds, the Agnishvâtta and the Barhishad. And we
may add that, as there are two kinds of Pitris, so there is a double and a
triple set of Barhishad and Agnishvâtta. The former, having given birth to
their Astral Doubles, are reborn as Sons of Atri, and are the “Pitris of
the Demons,” or Corporeal Beings, on the authority of Manu;(191) while the
Agnishvâtta are reborn as Sons of Marîchi, a Son of Brahmâ, and are the
“Pitris of the Gods.”(192)

The _Vâyu Purâna_ declares the Seven Orders of Pitris to have been
originally the _first Gods_, the Vairâjas, whom Brahmâ, with the
eye of Yoga, beheld in the eternal spheres, and who are the _gods
of the gods_.... The _Matsya_ ... adds, that the Gods worshipped
them.(193)

The _Harivamsha_ distinguishes the Vairâjas as one class of the Pitris
only,(194) a statement corroborated in the Secret Teachings, which,
however, identify the Vairâjas with the _elder_ Agnishvâttas(195) and the
Râjasas, or Âbhûtarajasas, who are Incorporeal without even an Astral
Phantom. Vishnu is said, in most of the MSS., to have incarnated in and
through them.

In the Raivata Manvantara, again, Hari, best of gods, was born of
Sambhûti, as the divine Mânasa—originating with the deities called
Râjasas.(196)

Sambhûti was a daughter of Daksha, and wife of Marîchi, the father of the
Agnishvâtta, who, along with the Râjasas, are ever associated with
Mânasas. As remarked by a far more able Sanskritist than Wilson, Mr.
Fitzedward Hall:

Mânasa is no inappropriate name for a deity associated with the
Râjasas. We appear to have in it _mânasam_—the same as
_manas_—with the change of termination required to express male
personification.(197)

All the Sons of Virâja are Mânasa, says Nîlakantha. And Virâja is Brahmâ,
and, therefore, the Incorporeal Pitris are called Vairâjas from being the
Sons of Virâja, says _Vayu Purâna_.

We could multiply our proofs _ad infinitum_, but it is useless. The wise
will understand our meaning, the unwise are not required to. There are
thirty‐three crores, or three hundred and thirty millions, of Gods in
India. But, as remarked by the learned lecturer on the _Bhagavad Gîtâ_:

They may be all devas, but are by no means all “gods,” in the high
spiritual sense one attributes to the term.

This is an unfortunate blunder generally committed by Europeans.
Deva is a kind of spiritual being, and because the same word is
used in ordinary parlance to mean god, it by no means follows that
we have and worship thirty‐three crores of gods. These beings, as
may be naturally inferred, have a _certain affinity_ with one of
the three component Upâdhis [basic principles] into which we have
divided man.(198)

The names of the deities of a certain mystic class change with every
Manvantara. Thus the twelve Great Gods, Jayas, created by Brahmâ to assist
him in the work of creation in the very beginning of the Kalpa, and who,
lost in Samâdhi, neglected to create—whereupon they were cursed to be
repeatedly born in each Manvantara till the seventh—are respectively
called Ajitas, Tushitas, Satyas, Haris, Vaikunthas, Sâdhyas, and
Adityas:(199) they are Tushitas, in the second Kalpa, and Âdityas in this
Vaivasvata Period,(200) besides other names for each age. But they are
identical with the Mânasas or Râjasas, and these with our incarnating
Dhyân Chohans.

Yes; besides those Beings, who, like the Yakshas, Gandharvas, Kinnaras,
etc., taken in their _individualities_, inhabit the Astral Plane, there
are real Devas, and to these classes belong the Adityas, the Vairâjas, the
Kumâras, the Asuras, and all those high celestial Beings whom Occult
teaching calls Manasvin, the Wise, foremost of all, and who would have
made all men the _self‐conscious_ spiritually intellectual Beings they
will be, had they not been “cursed” to fall into generation, and to be
reborn themselves as mortals for their neglect of duty.

Stanza IV.—_Continued._

15. SEVEN TIMES SEVEN SHADOWS(201) OF FUTURE MEN(202) (_A_) WERE(203)
BORN, EACH OF HIS OWN COLOUR(204) AND KIND (_B_). EACH(205) INFERIOR TO
HIS FATHER.(206) THE FATHERS, THE BONELESS, COULD GIVE NO LIFE TO BEINGS
WITH BONES. THEIR PROGENY WERE BHÛTA,(207) WITH NEITHER FORM NOR MIND.
THEREFORE THEY ARE CALLED THE CHHÂYÂ(208) RACE(_C_).

(_a_) Manu, as already remarked, comes from the root _man_, to think,
hence a “thinker.” It is from this Sanskrit word very likely that sprung
the Latin _mens_, Mind, the Egyptian _Menes_, the “Master‐Mind,” the
Pythagorean _monas_, or conscious “thinking unit,” mind also, and even our
_manas_ or mind, the fifth principle in man. Hence these Shadows are
called _Amânasa_, “Mindless.”

With the Brâhmans, the Pitris are very sacred, because they are the
Progenitors,(209) or Ancestors of men—the first Manushyas on this
Earth—and offerings are made to them by the Brâhman when a son is born
unto him. They are more honoured and their ritual is more important than
the worship of the Gods.(210)

May we not now search for a philosophical meaning in this dual group of
Progenitors?

The Pitris being divided into _seven_ Classes, we have here the mystic
number again. Nearly all the _Purânas_ agree that three of these are
Arûpa, formless, while four are Corporeal; the former being intellectual
and spiritual, the latter material and devoid of intellect. Esoterically,
it is the Asuras who form the first three Classes of Pitris—“born in the
Body of Night”—whereas the other four were produced from the “Body of
Twilight.” Their Fathers, the Gods, were doomed to be born fools on Earth,
according to the _Vâyu Purâna_. The legends are purposely mixed up and
made very hazy: the Pitris being in one the Sons of the Gods, and, in
another, those of Brahmâ; while a third makes them instructors of their
own Fathers. It is the Hosts of the four material Classes who create men
simultaneously on the seven Zones.

Now, with regard to the seven Classes of Pitris, each of which is again
divided into seven, a word to students and a query to the profane. That
Class of the “Fire Dhyânîs,” which we identify on undeniable grounds with
the Agnishvâttas, is called in our school the “Heart” of the Dhyân‐
Chohanic Body, and is said to have incarnated in the Third Race of men and
made them perfect. The Esoteric Mystagogy speaks of the mysterious
relation existing between the hebdomadic essence or substance of this
angelic Heart and that of man, whose every physical organ, and psychic,
and spiritual function, is a reflection, so to say, a copy on the
terrestrial plane, of the model or prototype _above_. Why, it is asked,
should there be such a strange repetition of the number seven in the
anatomical structure of man? Why should the heart have _four lower_
cavities and _three higher_ divisions, answering so strangely to the
septenary division of the human principles, separated into two groups, the
higher and the lower; and why should the same division be found in the
various classes of Pitris, and especially our Fire Dhyânîs? For, as
already stated, these Beings fall into four Corporeal, or grosser, and
three Incorporeal, or subtler, “Principles,” or call them by any other
name you please. Why do the seven nervous plexuses of the body radiate
seven rays? Why are there these seven plexuses, and why seven distinct
layers in the human skin?

Says the Commentary:

_Having projected their Shadows and made men of one Element [Ether], the
Progenitors reäscend to Mahâ‐Loka, whence they descend periodically, when
the World is renewed, to give birth to new Men._

_The Subtle Bodies remain without understanding [Manas] until the advent
of the Suras [Gods] now called Asuras [Not‐Gods]._

“Not‐Gods,” for the Brâhmans, perhaps, but the highest “Breaths,” for the
Occultist; since those Progenitors (Pitaras), the formless and the
intellectual, refuse to build man, but endow him with Mind; the four
corporeal Classes creating only his body.

This is very plainly shown in various texts of the _Rig Veda_—the highest
authority for a Hindû of any sect whatever. Therein Asura means
“spiritual, divine,” and the word is used as a synonym for Supreme Spirit,
and the term Asura, in the sense of a “God,” is applied to Varuna and
Indra and preëminently to Agni—the three having been in days of old the
three _highest_ Gods, before Brâhmanical Theo‐Mythology distorted the true
meaning of almost everything in the Archaic Scriptures. But, as the key is
now lost, the Asuras are hardly mentioned.

In the _Zend Avesta_ the same is found. In the Mazdean, or Magian,
religion, Asura is the Lord Asura Vishvavedas, the “all‐knowing” or
“omniscient Lord”; and Asura Mazdhâ, becoming later Ahura Mazdhâ, is, as
Benfey shows, “the Lord who bestows _Intelligence_”—Asura Medhâ and Ahura
Mazdâo.(211) Elsewhere in this work it is shown, on equally good
authority, that the Indo‐Iranian Asura was always regarded as _sevenfold_.
This fact, combined with the name Mazdhâ, as above, which makes of the
sevenfold Asura the “Lord,” or “Lords” collectively “who bestow
_Intelligence_,” connects the Amshaspands with the Asuras and with our
incarnating Dhyân Chohans, as well as with the Elohim, and the seven
informing Gods of Egypt, Chaldæa, and every other country.

Why these “Gods” refused to create men is not, as stated in exoteric
accounts, because their pride was too great to share the celestial power
of their essence with the Children of Earth, but for reasons already
suggested. However, allegory has indulged in endless fancies and Theology
has taken advantage thereof in every country, to make out its case against
these First‐born, or the Logoi, and to impress it as a truth on the minds
of the ignorant and credulous.(212)

The Christian system is not the only one which has degraded these Gods
into Demons. Zoroastrianism and even Brâhmanism have profited thereby to
obtain hold over the people’s mind. Even in Chaldæan exotericism, Beings
who _refuse to create_, and are said to oppose thereby the Demiurgus, are
also denounced as Spirits of Darkness. The Suras, who win their
intellectual independence, fight the Suras, who are devoid thereof and are
shown as passing their lives in profitless ceremonial worship based on
blind faith—a hint now ignored by the _orthodox_ Brâhmans—and forthwith
the former become _A_‐Suras. The First‐ and Mind‐born Sons of the Deity
refuse to create progeny, and are _cursed_ by Brahmâ to be _born as men_.
They are hurled _down to Earth_, which, later on, is transformed, in
theological dogma, into the _Infernal_ Regions. Ahriman destroys the Bull
created by Ormazd—which is the emblem of terrestrial _illusive_ life, the
“germ of sorrow”—and, forgetting that the perishing finite seed must die,
in order that the plant of immortality, the plant of spiritual, eternal
life, should sprout and live, Ahriman is proclaimed the enemy, the
opposing power, the Devil. Typhon cuts Osiris into fourteen pieces, in
order to prevent him peopling the world and thus creating misery; and
Typhon becomes, in the exoteric, theological teaching, the Power of
Darkness. But all this is the exoteric shell. It is the worshippers of the
latter who attribute to disobedience and rebellion the effort and self‐
sacrifice of those who would help men to their original status of divinity
through _self‐conscious_ efforts; and it is these worshippers of _form_
who have made Demons of the Angels of Light.

Esoteric Philosophy, however, teaches that _one‐third_(213) of the
Dhyânîs—_i.e._, the three Classes of the Arûpa Pitris, endowed with
intelligence, “which is a formless breath, composed of _intellectual_ not
elementary substances”(214)—was simply _doomed by the law of Karma and
evolution to be re‐born_, or incarnated, on Earth.(215) Some of these were
Nirmânakâyas from other Manvantaras. Hence we see them, in all the
_Purânas_, re‐appearing on this Globe, in the Third Manvantara—read Third
Root‐Race—as Kings, Rishis and Heroes. This tenet, being too philosophical
and metaphysical to be grasped by the multitudes, was, as already stated,
disfigured by the priesthood for the purpose of preserving a hold over the
former through superstitious fear.

The supposed “Rebels,” then, were simply those who, compelled by Karmic
law to drink the cup of gall to its last bitter drop, _had to incarnate_
anew, and thus make responsible thinking entities of the astral statues
projected by their inferior brethren. Some are said to have refused,
because they had not in them the requisite materials—_i.e._, an astral
body—for they were Arûpa. The refusal of others had reference to their
having been Adepts and Yogîs of long past preceding Manvantaras; another
mystery. But, later on, as Nirmânakâyas, they sacrificed themselves for
the good and salvation of the Monads which were waiting for their turn,
and which otherwise would have had to linger for countless ages in
irresponsible, animal‐like, though in appearance human, forms. It may be a
parable and an allegory _within an allegory_. Its solution is left to the
intuition of the student, if he only reads that which follows with his
_spiritual_ eye.

As to their Fashioners or Ancestors—those Angels who, in the exoteric
legends, obeyed the law—they must be identical with the Barhishad Pitris,
or the Pitri‐Devatâs, _i.e._, those possessed of the _physical creative
fire_. They could only create, or rather clothe, the human Monads with
their own astral Selves, but they could not make man in their image and
likeness. “Man must not be like one of us,” say the _Creative_ Gods,
entrusted with the fabrication of the lower animal—but higher.(216) Their
creating the semblance of men out of their own divine Essence means,
Esoterically, that it is they who became the First Race, and thus shared
its destiny and further evolution. They _would_ not, simply because they
_could_ not, give to man that sacred spark which burns and expands into
the flower of human reason and self‐consciousness, for they had it not to
give. This was left to that Class of Devas who became symbolized in Greece
under the name of Prometheus; to those who had nought to do with the
physical body, yet everything with the purely spiritual man.

Each Class of Creators endows man with what it has to give: the one builds
his external form; the other gives him its essence, which later on becomes
the Human Higher Self owing to the _personal exertion of the individual_;
but they could not make men as they were themselves—perfect, because
sinless; sinless, because having only the first, pale shadowy outlines of
attributes, and these all perfect—from the human standpoint—white, pure
and cold as the virgin snow. Where there is no struggle, there is no
merit. Humanity, “of the earth earthy,” was not destined to be created by
the Angels of the First Divine Breath. Therefore they are said to have
_refused_ to create, and man had to be formed by more material
Creators,(217) who, in their turn, could give only what they had in their
own natures, and no more. Subservient to eternal law, the pure Gods could
only project out of themselves _shadowy_ men, a little less ethereal and
spiritual, less _divine_ and _perfect_ than themselves—shadows still. The
first Humanity, therefore, was a pale copy of its Progenitors; too
material, even in its ethereality, to be a hierarchy of Gods; too
spiritual and pure to be Men—endowed as it is with every _negative_
(nirguna) perfection. Perfection, to be fully such, must be born out of
imperfection, the _incorruptible_ must grow out of the corruptible, having
the latter as its vehicle and basis and contrast. Absolute Light is
absolute Darkness, and _vice versâ_. In fact, there is neither Light nor
Darkness in the realms of Truth. Good and Evil are twins, the progeny of
Space and Time, under the sway of Mâyâ. Separate them, by cutting off one
from the other, and they will both die. Neither exists _per se_, since
each has to be generated and created out of the other, in order to come
into being; both must be known and appreciated before becoming objects of
perception, hence, in mortal mind, they must be divided.

Nevertheless, as the illusionary distinction exists, it requires a _lower_
Order of Creative Angels to “create” inhabited Globes—especially ours—or
to deal with Matter on this earthly plane. The philosophical Gnostics were
the first to think so, in the historical period, and to invent various
systems upon this theory. Therefore in their schemes of creation, one
always finds their “Creators” occupying a place at the very foot of the
ladder of Spiritual Being. With them, those who created our Earth and its
mortals were placed on the very limit of mâyâvic Matter, and their
followers were taught to think—to the great disgust of the Church
Fathers—that for the creation of those wretched races, in a spiritual and
moral sense, which grace our Globe, no high Divinity could be made
responsible, but only Angels of a low Hierarchy,(218) to which Class they
relegated the Jewish God, Jehovah.

Mankinds different from the present are mentioned in all the ancient
Cosmogonies. Plato speaks, in the _Phædrus_, of a “winged” race of men.
Aristophanes, in Plato’s _Banquet_, speaks of a race androgynous and with
round bodies. In _Pymander_, all the animal kingdom even is double‐sexed.
Thus it is said:

The circuit having been accomplished, _the knot was loosened_ ...
and all the animals, which were equally androgynous, were _untied_
[separated] _together with man_ ... [for] ... the causes had to
produce effects on earth.(219)

Again, in the ancient Quiché Manuscript, the _Popol Vuh_—published by the
late Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg—the first men are described as a race
“whose sight was unlimited, and who knew all things at once”; thus showing
the _divine knowledge of Gods_, not mortals. The Secret Doctrine,
correcting the unavoidable exaggerations of popular fancy, gives the facts
as they are recorded in the archaic symbols.

(_b_) These “Shadows” were born “each of his own colour and kind,” each
also “inferior to his Father,” or Creator, because the latter was a
complete Being of his kind. The Commentaries refer the first sentence to
the colour or complexion of each human race thus evolved. In _Pymander_,
the Seven Primitive Men, created by Nature from the “Heavenly Man,” all
partake of the qualities of the Seven “Governors,” or Rulers, who loved
Man—their own reflection and synthesis.

In the Norse Legends, one recognizes in Asgard, the habitat of the Gods,
as also in the Ases themselves, the same mystical Loci and
personifications woven into the popular “myths,” as in our Secret
Doctrine; and we find them in the _Vedas_, the _Purânas_, the Mazdean
Scriptures and the _Kabalah_. The Ases of Scandinavia, the Rulers of the
World which preceded ours, whose name means literally the “Pillars of the
World,” its “Supports,” are thus identical with the Greek Cosmocratores,
the seven “Workmen” or Rectors of _Pymander_, the seven Rishis and Pitris
of India, the seven Chaldæan Gods and seven Evil Spirits, the seven
Kabalistic Sephiroth, synthesized by the upper Triad, and even the seven
Planetary Spirits of the Christian Mystics. The Ases create the earth, the
seas, the sky and the clouds, the whole visible world, from the remains of
the slain giant Ymir; but they do not create MAN, but only his form from
the Ask or Ash tree. It is Odin who endows him with life and soul, after
Lodur had given him blood and bones, and finally it is Hönir who furnishes
him with his intellect (Manas) and with his conscious senses.(220) The
Norse Ask, the Hesiodic Ash‐tree, whence issued the men of the generation
of bronze, the Third Root‐Race, and the Tzité tree of the _Popol Vuh_, out
of which the Mexican _third_ race of men was created, are all one. This
may be plainly seen by any reader. But the Occult reason why the Norse
Yggdrasil, the Hindû Ashvattha, the Gogard, the Hellenic tree of life, and
the Tibetan Zampun, are one with the Kabalistic Sephirothic Tree, and even
with the Holy Tree made by Ahura Mazda, and the Tree of Eden—who among the
Western scholars can tell?(221) Nevertheless, the fruits of all those
“Trees,” whether Pippala, or Haoma, or even the more prosaic Apple, are
the “plants of life,” in fact and verity. The prototypes of our races were
all enclosed in the Microcosmic Tree, which grew and developed _within and
under_ the great mundane Macrocosmic Tree;(222) and the mystery is half
revealed in the _Dîrghotamas_, where it is said:

Pippala, the sweet fruit of that tree upon which come _spirits who
love the science_, and where the gods produce all marvels.

As in the Gogard, among the luxuriant branches of all these Mundane Trees,
the “Serpent” dwells. But while the Macrocosmic Tree is the Serpent of
Eternity and of absolute Wisdom itself, those who dwell in the Microcosmic
Tree are the Serpents of the Manifested Wisdom. One is the One and All;
the others are its _reflected_ parts. The “Tree” is man himself, of
course, and the Serpent dwelling in each, the conscious Manas, the
connecting link between Spirit and Matter, Heaven and Earth.

Everywhere, it is the same. The “Creating” Powers produce Man, but fail in
their final object. All these Logoi strive to endow man with _conscious_
immortal Spirit, reflected in the Mind (Manas) alone; they fail, and they
are all represented as being punished for the failure, if not for the
attempt. What is the nature of the punishment? A sentence of imprisonment
in the lower or nether region, which is _our Earth, the lowest_ in its
Chain; an “Eternity”—meaning the duration of the Life‐cycle—in the
_darkness_ of Matter, or _within animal Man_. It pleased the half ignorant
and half designing Church Fathers to disfigure the graphic symbol. They
took advantage of the metaphor and allegory in every old religion to turn
them to the benefit of the new one. Thus man was transformed into the
darkness of a material Hell; his divine consciousness, obtained from his
indwelling Principle, the Mânasa, or the incarnated Deva, became the
glaring flames of the Infernal Region, and our Globe that Hell itself.
Pippala, Haoma, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, were denounced as the
_forbidden_ fruit, and the “Serpent of Wisdom,” the voice of reason and
consciousness, remained identified for ages with the Fallen Angel, which
is the old Dragon, the Devil!

The same for the other high symbols. The Svastika, the most sacred and
mystic symbol in India, the “Jaina Cross” as it is now called by the
Masons, notwithstanding its direct connection, and even identity, with the
Christian Cross, has become dishonoured in the same manner. It is the
“devil’s sign,” we are told by the Indian missionaries. Does it not shine
on the head of the great Serpent of Vishnu, on the thousand‐headed Shesha‐
Ananta, in the depths of Pâtâla, the Hindû Naraka or Hell? It does: but
what is Ananta? As Shesha, it is the almost endless Manvantaric Cycle of
Time, and becomes _Infinite_ Time itself, when called Ananta, the great
Seven‐headed Serpent, on which rests Vishnu, the _Eternal Deity_, during
Pralayic inactivity. What has Satan to do with this highly metaphysical
symbol? The Svastika is the most philosophically scientific of all
symbols, as also the most comprehensible. It is the summary in a few lines
of the whole work of “creation,” or evolution as one should rather say,
from Cosmotheogony down to Anthropogony, from the indivisible unknown
Parabrahman to the humble Moneron of materialistic Science, whose _genesis
is as unknown_ to that Science as is that of the All‐Deity Itself. The
Svastika is found heading the religious symbols of every old nation. It is
the “Worker’s Hammer” in the Chaldæan _Book of Numbers_, the “Hammer,”
above referred to, in the _Book of Concealed Mystery_, “which striketh
sparks from the flint” (Space), those sparks becoming Worlds. It is Thor’s
Hammer, the magic weapon forged by the Dwarfs against the Giants, or the
Pre‐cosmic Titanic Forces of Nature, which rebel and, while alive in the
region of Matter, will not be subdued by the Gods—the agents of Universal
Harmony—but have first to be destroyed. This is why the World is formed
out of the relics of the murdered Ymir. The Svastika is the Miölnir, the
“Storm‐hammer”; and therefore it is said that when the Ases, the holy
Gods, after having been purified by fire—the fire of the passions and
suffering in their life‐incarnations—become fit to dwell in Ida in eternal
peace, then Miölnir will become useless. This will be when the bonds of
Hel—the Goddess‐queen of the region of the Dead—will bind them no longer,
for the kingdom of evil will have passed away.

Surtur’s flames had not destroyed them, nor yet had the raging
waters [of the several deluges].... There were ... the sons of
Thor. They brought Miölnir with them, not as a weapon of war, but
as the hammer with which to consecrate the new heavens and the new
earth.(223)

Verily many are its meanings! In the macrocosmic work, the “Hammer of
Creation,” with its four arms bent at right angles, refers to the
continual _motion_ and revolution of the invisible Kosmos of Forces. In
that of the manifested Cosmos and our Earth, it points to the rotation in
the Cycles of Time of the world’s axes and their equatorial belts; the two
lines forming the Svastika 卐, meaning Spirit and Matter, the four hooks
suggesting the motion in the revolving cycles. Applied to the microcosm,
Man, it shows him to be a link between Heaven and Earth; the right hand
being raised at the end of a horizontal arm, the left pointing to the
Earth. In the _Smaragdine Tablet_ of Hermes, the uplifted right hand is
inscribed with the word “Solve,” the left with the word “Coagula.” It is
at one and the same time an Alchemical, Cosmogonical, Anthropological, and
Magical sign, with seven keys to its inner meaning. It is not too much to
say that the compound symbolism of this universal and most suggestive of
signs contains the key to the seven great mysteries of Kosmos. Born in the
mystical conceptions of the early Âryans, and by them placed at the very
threshold of eternity, on the head of the serpent Ananta, it found its
spiritual death in the scholastic interpretations of mediæval
Anthropomorphists. It is the Alpha and the Omega of universal Creative
Force, evolving from pure Spirit and ending in gross Matter. It is also
the key to the Cycle of Science, divine and human; and he who comprehends
its full meaning is for ever liberated from the toils of Mahâ‐Mâyâ, the
great Illusion and Deceiver. The Light that shines from under the Divine
Hammer, now degraded into the mallet or gavel of the Grand Masters of
Masonic Lodges, is sufficient to dissipate the darkness of any human
schemes or fictions.

How prophetic are the songs of the three Norse Goddesses, to whom the
ravens of Odin whisper of the past and the future, as they flutter round
in their abode of crystal beneath the flowing river. The songs are all
written down in the “Scrolls of Wisdom,” of which many are lost but some
still remain; and they repeat in poetical allegory the teachings of the
Archaic Ages. To summarize from Dr. Wagner’s _Asgard and the Gods_,
concerning the “Renewal of the World,” which is a prophecy about the
Seventh Race of our Round told in the past tense.

The Miölnir had done its duty in this Round, and:

On the field of Ida, the field of resurrection [for the Fifth
Round], the sons of the highest gods assembled, and _in them their
fathers rose again_ [the Egos of all their past incarnations].
They talked of the Past and the Present, and remembered the wisdom
and prophecies of their ancestors which had all been fulfilled.
Near them, but _unseen by them_, was the strong, the mighty One,
who rules all things, makes peace between those who are angry with
each other, and ordains the eternal laws that govern the world.
_They all knew he was there, they felt his presence and his power,
but were ignorant of his name. At his command the new earth rose
out of the waters_ [of Space]. To the south above the Field of
Ida, he made another heaven called Audlang, and further off, a
third, known as Widblain. Over Gimil’s cave a wondrous palace was
erected, which was covered with gold and shining bright in the
sun. [These are the three gradually ascending Globes of our
Chain.] There the gods were enthroned, as _they used to be_, and
they rejoiced in the restoration and in the better time. From
Gimil’s heights [the Seventh Globe, the highest and purest], they
looked down upon the happy descendants of Lif [and Lifthrasir, the
coming Adam and Eve of purified Humanity] and signed to them to
_climb up higher_, to _rise in knowledge and wisdom_, in piety and
in deeds of love, step by step, from one heaven to another, until
they were at last fit to be united to the divinities in the house
of All father.(224)

He who knows the doctrines of Esoteric Budhism, or Wisdom, though so
imperfectly sketched hitherto, will see clearly the allegory contained in
the above.

Its more philosophical meaning will be better understood if the reader
thinks carefully over the myth of Prometheus. It is examined, further on,
in the light of the Hindû Pramantha. Degraded into a purely physiological
symbol by some Orientalists, and taken in connection with terrestrial fire
only, their interpretation is an insult to every religion, including
Christianity, whose greatest mystery is thus dragged down to Matter. The
“friction” of divine Pramantha and Arani could suggest itself under this
image only to the brutal conceptions of the German Materialists—than whom
there are none worse. It is true that the Divine Babe, Agni with the
Sanskrit‐speaking Race, who became Ignis with the Latins, is born from the
conjunction of Pramantha and Arani—the Svastika—during the sacrificial
ceremony. But what of that? Tvashtri (Vishvakarman) is the “divine artist
and _carpenter_,”(225) and is also the Father of the Gods and of “Creative
Fire” in the _Vedas_. So ancient is the symbol and so sacred, that there
is hardly an excavation made on the sites of old cities without its being
found. A number of such terra‐cotta discs, called _fusaïoles_, were found
by Dr. Schliemann _under_ the ruins of ancient Troy. Both the forms,
[Symbol: swastika with dots around the center] and [Symbol: Cross with dot
in the middle], were excavated in great abundance; their presence being
one more proof that the ancient Trojans and their ancestors were pure
Aryans.

(_c_) Chhâyâ, as already explained, is the Astral Image. It bears this
meaning in Sanskrit works. Thus Sanjnâ, Spiritual Consciousness, the wife
of Sûrya, the Sun, is shown retiring into the jungle to lead an ascetic
life, and leaving behind to her husband her Chhâyâ, Shadow or Image.

16. HOW ARE THE MANUSHYA(226) BORN? THE MANUS WITH MINDS, HOW ARE THEY
MADE? (_A_) THE FATHERS(227) CALLED TO THEIR HELP THEIR OWN FIRE,(228)
WHICH IS THE FIRE THAT BURNS IN EARTH. THE SPIRIT OF THE EARTH CALLED TO
HIS HELP THE SOLAR FIRE.(229) THESE THREE(230) PRODUCED IN THEIR JOINT
EFFORTS A GOOD RÛPA. IT(231) COULD STAND, WALK, RUN, RECLINE, OR FLY. YET
IT WAS STILL BUT A CHHÂYÂ, A SHADOW WITH NO SENSE. (_B_) ...

(_a_) Here an explanation again becomes necessary in the light and with
the help of the exoteric added to the Esoteric Scriptures. The Manushyas
(Men) and the Manus are here equivalent to the Chaldæan Adam—this term not
meaning at all the first man, as with the Jews, or one solitary
individual, but Mankind collectively, as with the Chaldæans and Assyrians.
It is the four Orders or Classes of Dhyân Chohans out of the Seven, says
the Commentary, “_who were the Progenitors of the Concealed Man_”—_i.e._,
the subtle Inner Man. The Lha of the Moon, the Lunar Spirits, were, as
already stated, only the Ancestors of his Form, _i.e._, of the model
according to which Nature began her external work upon him. Thus Primitive
Man was, when he appeared, only a senseless Bhûta(232) or “phantom.” This
“creation” was a failure.

(_b_) This attempt again was a failure. It allegorizes the vanity of
_physical_ Nature’s unaided attempts to construct even a perfect
animal—let alone man. For the Fathers, the Lower Angels, are all Nature‐
Spirits, and the higher Elementals also possess an intelligence of their
own; but this is not enough to construct a _thinking_ man. “_Living_ Fire”
was needed, that Fire which gives the human mind its self‐perception and
self‐consciousness, or Manas; and the progeny of Pârvaka and Shuchi are
the Animal‐Electric and Solar Fires, which create animals, and could thus
furnish only a physical living constitution to that first astral model of
man. The first Creators, then, were the Pygmalions of Primeval Man: they
failed to animate the statue—_intellectually_.

This Stanza we shall see is very suggestive. It explains the mystery of,
and fills the gap between, the Informing Principle in man—the Higher Self
or Human Monad—and the Animal Monad, both one and the same, although the
former is endowed with _divine_ intelligence, the latter with
_instinctual_ faculty alone. How is the difference to be explained, and
the presence of that Higher Self in man accounted for?

Says the Commentary:

_The Sons of Mahat are the quickeners of the human Plant. They are the
Waters falling upon the arid soil of latent life, and the Spark that
vivifies the human Animal. They are the Lords of Spiritual Life
Eternal.... In the beginning [in the Second Race] some [of the Lords] only
breathed of their essence into Manushya [men], and some took in man their
abode._

This shows that not all men became incarnations of the “Divine Rebels,”
but only a few among them. The remainder had their fifth Principle simply
quickened by the spark thrown into it, which accounts for the great
difference between the intellectual capacities of men and races. Had not
the “Sons of Mahat,” speaking allegorically, skipped the Intermediate
Worlds, in their impulse toward intellectual freedom, the animal man would
never have been able to reach upward from this Earth, and attain through
self‐exertion his ultimate goal. The Cyclic Pilgrimage would have had to
be performed through all the planes of existence half unconsciously, if
not entirely so, as in the case of the animals. It is owing to this
rebellion of intellectual life against the morbid inactivity of pure
spirit, that we are what we are—self‐conscious, thinking men, with the
capabilities and attributes of Gods in us, for good as much as for evil.
Hence the Rebels are our Saviours. Let the Philosopher ponder well over
this, and more than one mystery will become clear to him. It is only by
the attractive force of the contrasts that the two opposites—Spirit and
Matter—can be cemented together on Earth, and, smelted in the fire of
self‐conscious experience and suffering, find themselves wedded in
Eternity. This will reveal the meaning of many hitherto incomprehensible
allegories, foolishly called “fables.”

It explains, to begin with, the statement made in _Pymander_, that the
“Heavenly Man,” the “Son of the Father,” who partook of the nature and
essence of the Seven Governors, or Creators and Rulers of the Material
World,

Peeped through the Harmony, and breaking through the strength of
the [Seven] Circles [of Fire], so showed and made manifest the
downward‐borne nature.(233)

It explains every verse in the Hermetic narrative, as also the Greek
allegory of Prometheus. Most important of all, it explains the many
allegorical accounts about the “Wars in Heaven,” including that of
_Revelation_ with respect to the Christian dogma of the “Fallen Angels.”
It explains the “Rebellion” of the oldest and highest Angels, and the
meaning of their being cast down from Heaven into the depths of Hell,
_i.e._, Matter. It even solves the recent perplexity of the
Assyriologists, who express their wonder through the late George Smith, as
follows:

My first idea of this part [of the rebellion] was that the war
with the powers of evil _preceded_ the Creation; I now think it
followed the account of the Fall.(234)

In the same work,(235) Mr. George Smith gives an engraving, from an early
Babylonian Cylinder, of the Sacred Tree, the Serpent, man and woman. The
Tree has seven branches; _three_ on the man’s side, _four_ on that of the
female. These branches are typical of the seven Root‐Races, in the _third_
of which, at its very close, occurred the separation of the sexes and the
so‐called Fall into generation. The three earliest Races were sexless,
then hermaphrodite; the other four, male and female, as distinct from each
other. As the writer tells us:

The dragon, which, in the Chaldean account of the Creation, leads
man to sin, is the creature of Tiamat, the living principle of the
sea and of chaos ... which was opposed to the deities at the
creation of the world.(236)

This is an error. The Dragon is the male principle, or Phallus,
personified, or rather _animalized_; and Tiamat, “the embodiment of the
spirit of chaos,” of the Deep, or Abyss, is the female principle, the
Womb. The “spirit of chaos and disorder” refers to the mental perturbation
which it led to. It is the sensual, attractive, magnetic principle which
fascinates and seduces, the ever‐living active element which throws the
whole world into disorder, chaos and sin. The Serpent seduces the woman,
but it is the latter who seduces man, and both are included in the Karmic
curse, though only as a natural result of a cause produced. Says George
Smith:

It is clear that the dragon is included in the curse for the Fall,
and that the gods [the Elohim, jealous at seeing the man of clay
becoming a Creator in his turn, like all the animals] invoke on
the head of the human Race all the evils which afflict humanity.
Wisdom and knowledge shall injure him, he shall have family
quarrels, shall submit to tyranny, he will anger the gods ... he
shall be disappointed in his desires, he shall pour out _useless
prayer_, ... he shall commit future sin. No doubt subsequent lines
continue these topics, but again our narrative is broken, and it
only reopens where the gods are preparing for war with the powers
of evil, which are led by Tiamat (the woman).(237)

This account is omitted in _Genesis_, for monotheistic purposes. But it is
a mistaken policy—born no doubt of fear, and regard for dogmatic religion
and its superstitions—to seek to restore the Chaldæan fragments by
_Genesis_, whereas it is the latter, far younger than any of the
fragments, which ought to be explained by the former.

17. THE BREATH(238) NEEDED A FORM; THE FATHERS GAVE IT. THE BREATH NEEDED
A GROSS BODY; THE EARTH MOULDED IT. THE BREATH NEEDED THE SPIRIT OF LIFE;
THE SOLAR LHAS BREATHED IT INTO ITS FORM. THE BREATH NEEDED A MIRROR OF
ITS BODY;(239) “WE GAVE IT OUR OWN!”—SAID THE DHYÂNÎS. THE BREATH NEEDED A
VEHICLE OF DESIRES;(240) “IT HAS IT!”—SAID THE DRAINER OF WATERS.(241) BUT
BREATH NEEDS A MIND TO EMBRACE THE UNIVERSE; “WE CANNOT GIVE THAT!”—SAID
THE FATHERS. “I NEVER HAD IT!”—SAID THE SPIRIT OF THE EARTH. “THE FORM
WOULD BE CONSUMED WERE I TO GIVE IT MINE!”—SAID THE GREAT FIRE.(242)...
MAN(243) REMAINED AN EMPTY SENSELESS BHÛTA.... THUS HAVE THE BONELESS
GIVEN LIFE TO THOSE WHO(244) BECAME MEN WITH BONES IN THE THIRD.(245)

As a full explanation is found in the commentary on Stanza V, a few
remarks will now suffice. The “Father” of primitive physical man, or of
his body, is the Vital Electric Principle residing in the Sun. The Moon is
its “Mother,” because of that mysterious power in the Moon, which has as
decided an influence upon human gestation and generation, which it
regulates, as it has on the growth of plants and animals. The “Wind” or
Ether, standing in this case for the agent of transmission by which those
influences are carried down from the two luminaries and diffused upon
earth, is referred to as the “Nurse”;(246) while “Spiritual Fire” alone
makes of man a divine and perfect entity.

Now what is that “Spiritual Fire”? In Alchemy it is Hydrogen, in general;
while in Esoteric actuality it is the emanation, or the Ray which proceeds
from its Noumenon, the “Dhyân of the First Element.” Hydrogen is _gas_
only on our terrestrial plane. But even in Chemistry, Hydrogen “would be
the only existing form of matter, in our sense of the term,”(247) and is
very nearly allied to Protyle, which is our Layam. It is the father and
generator, so to say, or rather the Upâdhi (basis), of both Air and Water,
and is “fire, air and water,” in fact: _one_ under three aspects; hence
the chemical and alchemical trinity. In the world of manifestation, or
Matter, it is the objective symbol and the material emanation from the
subjective and purely spiritual entitative Being in the region of Noumena.
Well might Godfrey Higgins have compared Hydrogen to, and even identified
it with, the To On, the “One” of the Greeks. For, as he remarks, Hydrogen
is _not_ water, though it generates it; Hydrogen is not fire, though it
manifests or creates it; nor is it air, though air may be regarded as a
product of the union of water and fire—since Hydrogen is found in the
aqueous element of the atmosphere. It is three in one.

If one studies comparative Theogony, it is easy to find that the secret of
these “Fires” was taught in the Mysteries of every ancient people,
preëminently in Samothrace. There is not the smallest doubt that the
Kabiri, the most arcane of all the ancient Deities, Gods and Men, great
Deities and Titans, are identical with the Kumâras and Rudras headed by
Kârttikeya—a Kumâra also. This is quite evident even exoterically; and
these Hindû Deities were, like the Kabiri, the _personified sacred Fires
of the most Occult Powers of Nature_. The several branches of the Âryan
Race, the Asiatic and the European, the Hindû and the Greek, did their
best to conceal their true nature, if not their importance. As in the case
of the Kumâras, the number of the Kabiri is uncertain. Some say that there
were three or four only; others say seven. Axierus, Axiocersa, Axiocersus,
and Casmilus may very well stand for the _alter egos_ of the four
Kumâras—Sanat‐Kumâra, Sananda, Sanaka, and Sanâtana. The former deities,
whose reputed father was Vulcan, were often confounded with the Dioscori,
Corybantes, Anactes, etc.; just as the Kumâras, whose reputed father is
Brahmâ—or rather, the “Flame of his Wrath,” which prompted him to perform
the ninth or Kaumâra Creation, resulting in Rudra or Nîlalohita (Shiva)
and the Kumâras—were confounded with the Asuras, the Rudras, and the
Pitris, for the simple reason that they are all one—_i.e._, correlative
Forces and Fires. There is no space to describe these “Fires” and their
real meaning here, though we may attempt to do so if the rest of this work
is ever published. Meanwhile a few more explanations may be added.

The foregoing are all mysteries which must be left to the personal
intuition of the student for solution, rather than described. If he would
learn something of the secret of the Fires, let him turn to certain works
of the Alchemists, who very correctly connect Fire with every Element, as
do the Occultists. The reader must remember that the Ancients considered
Religion and the Natural Sciences along with Philosophy, as closely and
inseparably linked together. Æsculapius was the Son of Apollo—the Sun or
Fire of Life; at once Helius, Pythius, and the God of oracular Wisdom. In
exoteric religions, as much as in Esoteric Philosophy, the
Elements—especially Fire, Water, and Air—are made the Progenitors of our
_five physical senses_, and hence are directly connected, in an Occult
way, with them. These physical senses pertain even to a lower Creation
than the one called in the _Purânas_ Pratisarga, or “Secondary Creation.”
“_Liquid Fire proceeds from Indiscrete Fire_,” says an Occult axiom.

_The Circle is the Thought; the Diameter [or the line] is the Word; and
their union is Life._

In the Kabalah, Bath‐Kol is the Daughter of the Divine Voice, or
Primordial Light, Shekinah. In the _Purânas_ and Hindû exotericism, Vâch,
the Voice, is the female Logos of Brahmâ—a permutation of Aditi,
Primordial Light. And if Bath‐Kol, in Jewish Mysticism, is an articulate
præter‐natural voice from heaven, revealing to the “chosen people” the
sacred traditions and laws, it is only because Vâch was called, before
Judaism, the “Mother of the _Vedas_,” who entered into the Rishis and
inspired them by her revelations; just as Bath‐Kol is said to have
inspired the prophets of Israël and the Jewish High‐Priests. And both
exist to this day, in their respective sacred symbologies, because the
Ancients associated Sound or Speech with the Ether of Space, of which
Sound is the characteristic. Hence Fire, Water and Air are the primordial
Cosmic Trinity.

I am thy Thought, thy God, more ancient than the Moist Principle,
the _Light that radiates within Darkness_ [Chaos], and the shining
Word of God [Sound] is the Son of the Deity.(248)

Thus we have to study well the “Primary Creation” before we can understand
the Secondary. The first Race had three _rudimentary_ Elements in it; and
_no Fire_ as yet; because, with the Ancients, the evolution of man, and
the growth and development of his spiritual and physical senses, were
subordinate to the evolution of the Elements on the Cosmic plane of this
Earth. All proceeds from Prabhavâpyaya, the evolution of the creative and
sentient principles in the Gods, and even of the so‐called Creative Deity
himself. This is found in the names and appellations given to Vishnu in
exoteric Scriptures. As the Orphic Protologos, he is called Pûrvaja,
“pregenetic,” and the other names connect him in their descending order
more and more with Matter.

The following order on parallel lines may be found in the evolution of the
Elements and the Senses; or in Cosmic Terrestrial “Man” or “Spirit,” and
mortal physical man:

1. Ether ... Hearing ... Sound.
2. Air ... Touch ... Sound and Touch.
3. Fire, or Light ... Sight ... Sound, Touch and Colour.
4. Water ... Taste ... Sound, Touch, Colour and Taste.
5. Earth ... Smell ... Sound, Touch, Colour, Taste and Smell.

As seen, each Element adds to its own characteristics, those of its
predecessor; as each Root‐Race adds the characterizing sense of the
preceding Race. The same is true in the septenary “creation” of man, who
evolves gradually in seven stages, and on the same principles, as will be
shown further on.

Thus, while Gods, or Dhyân Chohans (Devas), proceed from the First
Cause—which is not Parabrahman, for the latter is the ALL CAUSE, and
cannot be referred to as the “_First_ Cause,”—which First Cause is called
in the Brâhmanical Books Jagad‐Yoni, the “Womb of the World,” mankind
emanates from these active agents in Kosmos. But men, during the First and
Second Races, were not physical beings, but merely _rudiments_ of the
future men; Bhûtas, which proceeded from Bhûtâdi, “origin,” or the
“original place whence sprang the Elements.” Hence they proceeded with all
the rest from Prabhavâpyaya, “the place whence is the origination, and
into which is the resolution of all things,” as explained by the
Commentator on the _Vishnu Purâna_. Whence also our physical senses.
Whence even the highest “created” Deity itself, in our Philosophy. As one
with the Universe, whether we call him Brahmâ, Îshvara, or Purusha, he is
a Manifested Deity—hence “created,” or limited and conditioned. This is
easily proven, even from the exoteric teachings.

After being called the _incognizable_, eternal Brahma (neuter or
abstract), the Pundarîkâksha, “supreme and imperishable glory,” once that
instead of Sadaika‐Rûpa, “changeless” or “immutable” Nature, he is
addressed as Ekâneka‐Rûpa, “both single and manifold,” he, the Cause,
becomes merged with his own effects; and his names, if placed in Esoteric
order, show the following descending scale:

Mahâpurusha or Paramâtman: Supreme Spirit.
Âtman or Pûrvaja (Protologos): The Living Spirit of Nature.
Indriyâtman, or Hrishîkesha: Spiritual or Intellectual Soul (one with the
senses).
Bhûtâtman: The Living, or Life Soul.
Kshetrajña: Embodied Soul, or the Universe of Spirit and Matter.
Bhrântidarshanatah: False Perception—Material Universe.

The last name means something perceived or conceived of, owing to false
and erroneous apprehension, as a material form, but is, in fact, only
Mâyâ, Illusion, as all is in our physical universe.

It is in strict analogy with the attributes of this Brahma in both the
spiritual and material worlds, that the evolution of the Dhyân‐Chohanic
Essences takes place; the characteristics of the latter being reflected,
in their turn, in Man, collectively, and in each of his principles; _every
one of which contains in itself, in the same progressive order, a portion
of their various __“__Fires__”__ and Elements_.

Stanza V. The Evolution of the Second Race.

18. The Sons of Yoga. 19. The Sexless Second Race. 20. The Sons of
the “Sons of Twilight.” 21. The “Shadow,” or the Astral Man,
retires within, and man develops a Physical Body.

18. THE FIRST(249) WERE THE SONS OF YOGA. THEIR SONS, THE CHILDREN OF THE
YELLOW FATHER AND THE WHITE MOTHER.

In the later Commentary, the sentence is translated:

_The Sons of the Sun and of the Moon, the nursling of Ether [or the
__“__Wind__”__] (a)_....

_They were the shadows of the Shadows of the Lords (b). They [the shadows]
expanded. The Spirits of the Earth clothed them; the Solar Lhas warmed
them [__i.e.__, preserved the Vital Fire in the nascent physical Forms].
The Breaths had life, but had no understanding. They had no Fire or Water
of their own (c)._

(_a_) Remember in this connection the _Tabula Smaragdina_ of Hermes, the
Esoteric meaning of which has seven keys to it. The Astro‐chemical is well
known to students, the Anthropological may now be given. The “One Thing”
mentioned in it is Man. It is said:

The Father of that One Only Thing is the Sun; its Mother the Moon;
the Wind carries it in his bosom, and its Nurse is the Spirituous
Earth.

In the Occult rendering of the same it is added: “and _Spiritual_ Fire is
its instructor [Guru].”

This Fire is the Higher Self, the Spiritual Ego, or that which is
eternally reïncarnating under the influence of its lower personal Selves,
changing with every re‐birth, full of Tanha or desire to live. It is a
strange law of Nature that, on this plane, the higher (Spiritual) Nature
should be, so to say, in bondage to the lower. Unless the Ego takes refuge
in the Âtman, the ALL‐SPIRIT, and merges entirely into the essence
thereof, the personal Ego may goad it to the bitter end. This cannot be
thoroughly understood unless the student makes himself familiar with the
mystery of evolution, which proceeds on triple lines—Spiritual, Psychic
and Physical.

That which propels towards, and forces evolution, _i.e._, compels the
growth and development of Man towards perfection, is (_a_) the Monad, or
that which acts in it unconsciously through a Force inherent in itself;
and (_b_) the lower Astral Body or the _Personal_ Self. The former,
whether imprisoned in a vegetable or an animal body, is endowed with, is
indeed itself, that Force. Owing to its identity with the ALL‐FORCE,
which, as said, is inherent in the Monad, it is all‐potent on the Arûpa,
or formless plane. On our plane, its essence being too pure, it remains
all‐potential, but individually becomes inactive. For instance, the rays
of the Sun, which contribute to the growth of vegetation, do not select
this or that plant to shine upon. Uproot the plant and transfer it to a
piece of soil where the sunbeam cannot reach it, and the latter will not
follow it. So with the Âtman: unless the Higher Self or Ego gravitates
towards its Sun—the Monad—the Lower Ego, or _Personal_ Self, will have the
upper hand in every case. For it is this Ego, with its fierce selfishness
and animal desire to live a senseless life (Tanha), which is the “maker of
the tabernacle,” as Buddha calls it in the _Dhammapada_.(250) Hence the
expression, the Spirits of the Earth clothed the shadows and expanded
them. To these “Spirits” belong temporarily the human Astral Selves; and
it is they who give, or build, the physical tabernacle of man, for the
Monad and its conscious principle, Manas, to dwell in. But the “Solar”
Lhas, or Spirits, warm the Shadows. This is physically and literally true;
metaphysically, or on the psychic and spiritual plane, it is equally true
that the Âtman alone _warms_ the Inner Man; _i.e._, it enlightens it with
the Ray of Divine Life and alone is able to impart to the Inner Man, or
the Reïncarnating Ego, its immortality. Thus, we shall find, for the first
three and a half Root‐Races, up to the middle or turning point, it is the
Astral Shadows of the “Progenitors,” the Lunar Pitris, which are the
formative powers in the Races, and which build and gradually force the
evolution of the physical form towards perfection—this, at the cost of a
proportionate loss of Spirituality. Then, from the turning point, it is
the Higher Ego, or Incarnating Principle, the Nous or Mind, which reigns
over the Animal Ego, and rules it whenever it is not carried down by the
latter. In short, Spirituality is on its ascending arc, and the animal or
physical impedes it from steadily progressing on the path of its
evolution, only when the selfishness of the Personality has so strongly
infected the real Inner Man with its lethal _virus_, that the upward
attraction has lost all its power on the thinking reasonable man. In sober
truth, vice and wickedness are an _abnormal, unnatural_ manifestation, at
this period of our human evolution—at least they ought to be so. The fact
that mankind was never more selfish and vicious than it is now—civilized
nations having succeeded in making of the former an ethical
characteristic, of the latter an art—is an additional proof of the
exceptional nature of the phenomenon.

The entire scheme is in the _Chaldæan Book of Numbers_, and even in the
_Zohar_, if one only understands the meaning of the apocalyptic hints.
First comes Ain Suph, the “Concealed of the Concealed,” then the _Point_,
Sephira and the later Sephiroth; then the Atzilatic World, a _World of
Emanations_ that gives birth to three other Worlds—the first the Briatic
World called the Throne, the abode of pure Spirits; the second, the _World
of Formation_, or Jetziratic, the habitat of the Angels who sent forth the
Third, or _World of Action_, the Asiatic World, which is the Earth or
_our_ World; and yet it is said of this World—also called Kliphoth,
containing the (six other) Spheres, נלגלים, and Matter—that it is the
residence of the “Prince of Darkness.” This is as clearly stated as can
be; for Metatron, the Angel of the second Briatic World, the first
habitable World, means Messenger, Ἄγγελος, Angel, called the great
Teacher; and under him are the Angels of the third World, or Jetziratic,
whose ten and seven classes are the Sephiroth,(251) of whom it is said
that:

They inhabit or vivify this world as essential [_entities_ and]
_intelligences_, and their _correlates_ and logical _contraries_
inhabit the third habitable world, called the Asiatic.

These “contraries” are called the “Shells,” קליפות, or Demons,(252) who
inhabit the seven habitations called Sheba Hachaloth, which are simply the
seven Zones of our Globe.(253) Their prince is called in the Kabalah
Samaël, the Angel of Death, who is also the seducing Serpent Satan; but
this Satan is also Lucifer, the bright Angel of Light, the Light‐ and
Life‐bringer, the “Soul” alienated from the Holy Ones, the other Angels,
and for a period, _anticipating the time_ when they would descend on Earth
to incarnate in their turn.

The _Book of Wisdom_ teaches that:

All Souls [Monads] are preëxistent in the Worlds of
Emanations.(254)

And the _Zohar_ teaches that in the “Soul” is the _real man_, _i.e._, the
Ego and the conscious _I am_, the Manas.

Says Josephus, repeating the belief of the Essenes,

[Souls] descend from the pure air to be _chained to bodies_.(255)

And Philo states that:

The air was full of [Souls], and that those which were nearest the
earth, descending to be tied to mortal bodies, return back to
bodies, being desirous to live in them.(256)

Because through, and in, the human form they will become _progressive_
Beings, whereas the nature of the Angel is purely _intransitive_;
therefore Man has in him the potency of transcending the faculties of the
Angels. Hence the Initiates in India say that it is the Brâhman, the
Twice‐born, who rules the Gods or Devas; and Paul repeated it in his
_Epistle to the Corinthians_:

Know ye not that we [the Initiates] shall judge angels?(257)

Finally, it is shown in every ancient Scripture and Cosmogony that man
evolved primarily as a _luminous incorporeal form_, over which, like
molten brass poured into the model of the sculptor, the physical frame of
his body was built by, through and from, the lower forms and types of
animal terrestrial life. Says the _Zohar_:

The Soul and the _Form_ when descending on Earth put on an earthly
garment.

His protoplastic body was not formed of that matter of which our mortal
frames are fashioned.

When Adam dwelled in the garden of Eden, he was dressed in the
celestial garment, which is the garment of heavenly light ...
_light of that light which was used in the garden of Eden_.(258)
Man [the Heavenly Adam] was _created_ by the ten Sephiroth of the
Jetziratic World, and by their _common power_ the seven Angels of
a still lower World engendered the Earthly Adam. First Samaël
fell, and then _deceiving_ (?) man, caused his fall also.

(_b_) The sentence, “they were the shadows of the Shadows of the
Lords”—_i.e._, the Progenitors created man out of their own Astral
Bodies—explains a universal belief. The Devas are credited in the East
with having no “shadows” of their own. “The Devas cast no shadows,” and
this is the sure sign of a _good holy Spirit_.

(_c_) Why had they “no Fire or Water of their own”?(259) Because that
which Hydrogen is to the elements and gases on the objective plane, its
Noumenon is in the world of mental or subjective phenomena; since its
trinitarian latent nature is mirrored in its three active emanations from
the three higher principles in man, namely, Spirit, Soul, and Mind, or
Âtmâ, Buddhi, and Manas. It is the spiritual and also the material human
basis. Rudimentary man, having been nursed by the “Air” or the “Wind,”
becomes the perfect man later on; when, with the development of “Spiritual
Fire,” the Noumenon of the “Three in One” within his Self, he acquires
from his Inner Self, or Instructor, the Wisdom of Self‐Consciousness,
which he does not possess in the beginning. Thus here again Divine Spirit
is symbolized by the Sun or Fire; Divine Soul by Water and the Moon, both
standing for the Father and Mother of Pneuma, the Human Soul, or Mind,
symbolized by the Wind or Air, for Pneuma, means “Breath.”

Hence in the _Smaragdine Tablet_, disfigured by Christian hands:

The Superior agrees with the Inferior; and the Inferior with the
Superior; to effect that one truly wonderful work—[which is Man].

For the Secret Work of Chiram, or King Hiram in the Kabalah, “one in
essence, but three in aspect,” is the Universal Agent or Lapis
Philosophorum. The culmination of the Secret Work is Spiritual Perfect
Man, at one end of the line; the union of the three Elements is the Occult
Solvent in the “Soul of the World,” the Cosmic Soul or Astral Light, at
the other; and, on the material plane, it is Hydrogen in its relation to
the other gases. The TO ON, truly; the ONE “whom no person has seen except
the Son”; this sentence applying both to the metaphysical and physical
Kosmos, and to the spiritual and material Man. For how could the latter
understand the TO ON, the “One Father,” if his Manas, the “Son,” does not
become (_as_) “One with the Father,” and through this absorption receive
enlightenment from the divine “Instructor,” or Guru—Âtmâ‐Buddhi?

As says the Commentary:

_If thou would’st understand the_ SECONDARY [“Creation,” so‐called], _O
Lanoo, thou should’st first study its relation to the_ PRIMARY.(260)

The First Race had three Elements, but no _Living_ Fire. Why? Because:

“We say _four_ Elements, my Son, but ought to say three,” says Hermes
Trismegistus. “In the Primary Circle,” or Creation that which is marked
[Symbol: Like a large letter H, with dots above and below, and tildes
above and below] reads “Root,” as in the Secondary likewise.

Thus in Alchemy or Western Hermeticism—a variant on Eastern Esotericism—we
find:

Sulphur ... Flamma ... Spiritus
Mercury ... Natura ... Aqua
Salt ... Mater ... Sanguis

And these three are all quaternaries completed by their Root, Fire. The
Spirit, beyond Manifested Nature, is the Fiery BREATH in its absolute
Unity. In the Manifested Universe, it is the Central Spiritual Sun, the
electric Fire of all Life. In our System it is the visible Sun, the Spirit
of Nature, the terrestrial God. And in, on, and around the Earth, the
fiery spirit thereof—Air, fluidic Fire; Water, liquid Fire; Earth, solid
Fire. All is Fire—Ignis, in its ultimate constitution, or I, the root of
which is 0 (nought) in our conceptions, the All in Nature and its Mind.
“Pro‐Metor” is divine Fire. It is the Creator, the Destroyer, the
Preserver. The primitive names of the Gods are all connected with fire,
from Agni, the Âryan, to the Jewish God who is a “consuming fire.” In
India, God is called in various dialects, Eashoor, Esur, Iswur, and
Îshvara, in Sanskrit, the Lord, from Isha, but this is primarily the name
of Shiva, the Destroyer; and the three chief Vedic Gods are Agni (Ignis),
Vâyu, and Sûrya—Fire, Air, and the Sun, three Occult degrees of Fire. In
the Hebrew, אזא (Aza) means to “illuminate,” and אשא (Asha) is “Fire.” In
Occultism, to “kindle a fire” is synonymous to evoking one of the three
great Fire‐powers, or to “call on God.” In Sanskrit the root Ush is fire
or heat; and the Egyptian word Osiris is compounded, as shown by
Schelling, of the two primitives Aish and Asr, or a “fire‐enchanter.”
Aesar in the old Etruscan meant a God, being perhaps derived from Asura of
the _Vedas_. Îshvara is an analogous term, as Dr. Kenealy thought, who
quotes the _Bhagavad Gitâ_ to the effect that:

Îshvara resides in every mortal being and puts in motion, by his
supernatural powers, all things which mount on the wheel of time.

It is the Creator and the Destroyer, truly.

The primitive Fire was supposed to have an insatiable appetite for
devouring. Maximus of Tyre relates that the ancient Persians threw
into the fire combustible matter crying, _Devour, O Lord!_ In the
Irish language _easam_, or _asam_, means to _make_ or _create_.

[And] _Aesar_ was the name also of one of the ancient Irish gods;
the literal meaning of the word is “to kindle a fire.”(261)

The Christian Kabalists and Symbologists who disfigured
_Pymander_—prominent among them the Bishop of Ayre, François de Tours, in
the 16th century—divide the Elements in the following way:

_The four Elements formed from divine Substances and the Spirits of the
Salts of Nature represented by_:

[Symbol: Root symbol] ... St. Matthew ... Angel‐Man ... Water (Jesus‐
Christ, Angel‐Man, Mikael)
Α‐Ω ... St. Mark ... The Lion ... Fire
Ε‐Υ ... St. Luke ... The Bull ... Earth
Ι‐Ο ... St. John ... The Eagle ... Air(262)
Η ... _The Quintessence_, Ἡ ΦΛΟΞ, _Flamma‐Virgo_ [Virgin Oil], _Flamma
Durissima_, _Virgo_, _Lucis Æterna Mater_.

The First Race of men were, then, simply the Images, the Astral Doubles,
of their Fathers, who were the pioneers, or the most progressed Entities
from a preceding though _lower_ Sphere, the shell of which is now our
Moon. But even this shell is all‐potential, for, the Moon having generated
the Earth, its _phantom_, attracted by magnetic affinity, sought to form
its first inhabitants, the pre‐human monsters. To assure himself of this,
the student has again to turn to the Chaldæan Fragments, and read what
Berosus says. Berosus obtained his information, he tells us, from Ea, the
male‐female Deity of Wisdom. While the Gods were generated in the
androgynous bosom of this Wisdom (Svabhâvat, Mother‐Space), its
reflections became on Earth the woman Omorôka, who is the Chaldæan
Thavatth (or Thalatth), the Greek Thalassa, the Deep or the Sea, which
Esoterically and even exoterically is the _Moon_. It was the Moon
(Omorôka) who presided over the monstrous creation of nondescript beings
which were slain by the Dhyânîs.(263)

Evolutionary law compelled the Lunar Fathers to pass, in their monadic
condition, through all the forms of life and being on this Globe; but at
the end of the Third Round, they were already human in their divine
nature, and were thus called upon to become the creators of the forms
destined to fashion the tabernacles of the less progressed Monads, whose
turn it was to incarnate. These “Forms” are called “Sons of Yoga,” because
Yoga—union with Brahmâ, exoterically—is the supreme condition of the
passive infinite Deity, since it contains all the divine energies and is
the essence of Brahmâ, who is said, as Brahmâ, to create everything
through Yoga power. Brahmâ, Vishnu and Shiva are the most powerful
energies of God, Brahma (Neuter), says a Paurânic text. Yoga here is the
same as Dhyâna, which word is again synonymous with Yoga in the Tibetan
text, where the “Sons of Yoga” are called “Sons of Dhyâna,” or of that
abstract meditation through which the Dhyâni‐Buddhas create their
celestial sons, the Dhyâni‐Bodhisattvas.

All the creatures in the world have each a superior above. This
superior, whose inner pleasure it is _to emanate into them_,
cannot impart efflux until they have adored [_i.e._, meditated as
during Yoga].(264)

19. THE SECOND RACE (WAS) THE PRODUCT BY BUDDING AND EXPANSION, THE A‐
SEXUAL(265) FROM THE SEXLESS.(266) THUS WAS, O LANOO, THE SECOND RACE
PRODUCED.

What will be most contested by scientific authorities is this A‐sexual
Race, the Second, the Fathers of the “Sweat‐born” so‐called, and perhaps
still more the Third Race, the “Egg‐born” Androgynes. These two modes of
procreation are the most difficult to comprehend, especially for the
Western mind. It is evident that no explanation can be attempted for those
who are not students of Occult Metaphysics. European language has no words
to express things which Nature repeats no more at this stage of evolution,
things which therefore can have no meaning for the Materialist. But there
are analogies. It is not denied that in the beginning of physical
evolution there must have been processes in Nature, spontaneous
generation, for instance, now extinct, which are repeated in other forms.
Thus we are told that microscopic research shows no permanence of any
particular mode of reproducing life. For it shows that:

The same organism may run through various metamorphoses in the
course of its life‐cycle, during some of which it may be _sexual_,
and in others _a‐sexual_, _i.e._, it may reproduce itself
alternately by the coöperation of two beings of opposite sex, and
also by fissure or _budding_ from one being only, which is of no
sex.(267)

“Budding” is the very word used in the Stanza. How could these Chhâyâs
reproduce themselves otherwise; viz., procreate the Second Race, since
they were ethereal, a‐sexual, and even devoid, as yet, of the vehicle of
desire, or Kâma Rûpa, which evolved only in the Third Race? They evolved
the Second Race unconsciously, as do some plants. Or, perhaps, as the
Amœba, only on a more ethereal, impressive, and larger scale. If, indeed,
the cell‐theory applies equally to Botany and Zoology, and extends to
Morphology, as well as to the Physiology of organisms, and if the
microscopic cells are looked upon by Physical Science as independent
living beings—just as Occultism regards the “Fiery Lives”—there is no
difficulty in the conception of the primitive process of procreation.

Consider the first stages of the development of a germ‐cell. Its nucleus
grows, changes, and forms a double cone or spindle, thus, [Symbol: Large X
with horizontal lines across tops and bottoms] _within_ the cell. This
spindle approaches the surface of the cell, and one half of it is
_extruded_ in the form of what are called the “polar cells.” These polar
cells _now_ die, and the embryo develops from the growth and segmentation
of the remaining part of the nucleus which is _nourished_ by the substance
of the cell. Then why could not beings have lived thus, and been created
in _this_ way—at the very beginning of _human and mammalian evolution_?

This may, perhaps, serve as an analogy to give some idea of the process by
which the Second Race was formed from the First.

The Astral Form clothing the Monad was surrounded, as it still is, by its
egg‐shaped sphere of Aura, which here corresponds to the substance of the
germ‐cell or Ovum. The Astral Form itself is the nucleus, now, as then,
instinct with the Principle of Life.

When the season of reproduction arrives, the _Sub_‐astral “extrudes” a
miniature of itself from the egg of surrounding Aura. This germ grows and
feeds on the Aura till it becomes fully developed, when it gradually
separates from its parent, carrying with it its own sphere of Aura; just
as we see living cells reproducing their like by growth and subsequent
division into two.

The analogy with the “polar cells” would seem to hold good, since their
death would _now_ correspond to the change introduced by the separation of
the sexes, when gestation _in utero_, _i.e._, within the cell, became the
rule.

As the Commentary tells us:

_The early Second [Root] Race were the Fathers of the __“__Sweat‐
born__”__; the later Second [Root] Race were __“__Sweat‐born__”__
themselves._

This passage from the Commentary refers to the work of evolution from the
beginning of a Race to its close. The “Sons of Yoga,” or the Primitive
Astral Race, had seven stages of evolution _racially_, or collectively; as
every individual Being in it had, and has now. It is not Shakespeare only
who divided the ages of man into a series of seven, but Nature herself.
Thus the first Sub‐races of the Second Race were born at first by the
process described on the law of analogy; while the last began gradually,
_pari passu_ with the evolution of the human body, to be formed otherwise.
The process of reproduction had seven stages also in each Race, each
covering æons of time. What Physiologist or Biologist can tell whether the
present mode of generation, with all its phases of gestation, is older
than half a million, or at most one million of years, since their cycle of
observation began hardly half a century ago?

Primeval human Hermaphrodites are a fact in Nature well known to the
Ancients, and form one of Darwin’s greatest perplexities. Yet there is
certainly no impossibility, but, on the contrary, a great probability that
hermaphroditism existed in the evolution of the early Races; while on the
grounds of analogy, and on that of the existence of one universal law in
physical evolution, acting indifferently in the construction of plant,
animal, and man, it must be so. The mistaken theories of Monogenesis, and
the descent of man from the mammal, instead of the mammals from man, are
fatal to the completeness of evolution as taught in modern schools on
Darwinian lines, and they will have to be abandoned in view of the
insuperable difficulties which they encounter. Occult tradition—if the
terms Science and Knowledge are denied in this particular to Antiquity—can
alone reconcile the inconsistencies and fill the gap. Says a Talmudic
axiom:

If thou wilt know the invisible, open thine eyes wide on the
visible.

In the _Descent of Man_ occurs the following passage, which shows how near
Darwin came to the acceptance of this ancient teaching.

It has long been known that in the vertebrate kingdom one sex
bears rudiments of various accessory parts, appertaining to the
reproductive system, which properly belong to the opposite sex....
Some remote progenitor of the whole vertebrate kingdom appears to
have been hermaphrodite or androgynous.(268) But here we encounter
a singular difficulty. _In the mammalian class the males possess
rudiments of a uterus with the adjacent passages in the vesiculæ
prostaticæ; they bear also rudiments of mammæ, and some male
marsupials have traces of a marsupial sac._ Other analogous facts
could be added. Are we, then, to suppose that some extremely
ancient mammal continued androgynous, after it had acquired the
chief distinctions of its class, and therefore after it had
diverged from the lower classes of the vertebrate kingdom? This
seems very improbable,(269) _for we have to look to fishes, the
lowest of all the classes, to find any still existent androgynous
forms_.(270)

Mr. Darwin is evidently strongly disinclined to adopt the hypothesis which
the facts so forcibly suggest, viz., that of a primeval androgynous stem
from which the Mammalia sprang. His explanation runs:

That various accessory organs, proper to each sex, are found in a
rudimentary condition in the opposite sex, may be explained by
such organs having been gradually acquired by the one sex, and
then transmitted in a more or less imperfect state to the
other.(271)

He instances the case of “spurs, plumes, and brilliant colours, acquired
for battle or ornament by male birds” and only _partially_ inherited by
their female descendants. In the problem to be dealt with, however, the
need of a more satisfactory explanation is evident, the facts being of so
much more prominent and important a character than the mere superficial
details with which they are compared by Darwin. Why not candidly admit the
argument in favour of the hermaphroditism which characterizes the old
fauna? Occultism proposes a solution which embraces the facts in a most
comprehensive and simple manner. These relics of a prior androgyne stock
must be placed in the same category as the pineal gland, and other organs
equally mysterious, which afford us silent testimony as to the reality of
functions which have long since become atrophied in the course of animal
and human progress, but which once played a signal part in the general
economy of primeval life.

The Occult doctrine, in any case, can be advantageously compared with that
of the most liberal men of Science, who have theorized upon the origin of
the first man.

Long before Darwin, Naudin, who gave the name of Blastema to that which
the Darwinists call Protoplasm, put forward a theory half Occult and half
scientifico‐materialistic. He made Adam, the A‐sexual, spring suddenly
from the _clay_, as it is called in the _Bible_, the Blastema of Science.
As Naudin explains:

It is from this larval form of mankind, that the evolutive force
effected the completion of species. For the accomplishment of this
great phenomenon, Adam had to pass through a phase of immobility
and unconsciousness, very analogous to the nymphal state of
animals undergoing metamorphosis.(272)

For the eminent Botanist, Adam was not one man, however, but _mankind_,
which remained

Concealed within a temporary organism, already distinct from all
others, and incapable of contracting an alliance with any of them.

He shows the differentiation of sexes accomplished by

A process of germination similar to that of medusæ and ascidians.

Mankind, thus constituted physiologically,

Would retain a sufficient evolutive force for the rapid production
of the various great human races.

De Quatrefages criticizes this position in _The Human Species_. It is
_unscientific_, he says, or, properly speaking, Naudin’s ideas “do not
form a scientific theory,” inasmuch as Primordial Blastema is connected in
his theory with the “_first cause_,” which is credited with having made
potentially in the Blastema all past, present, and future beings, and thus
of having in reality _created_ these beings _en masse_; moreover, Naudin
does not even consider the “_second causes_,” or their action in this
evolution of the organic world. Science, which is only occupied with
“second causes,” has thus

Nothing to say to the theory of M. Naudin.(273)

Nor will it have any more to say to the Occult teachings, which are to
some extent approached by Naudin. For if we but see in his “Primordial
Blastema” the Dhyân‐Chohanic Essence, the Chhâyâ or Double of the Pitris,
which contains within itself the potentiality of all forms, we are quite
in accord. But there are two real and vital differences between our
teachings. M. Naudin declares that evolution has progressed by sudden
leaps and bounds, instead of extending slowly over millions of years; and
his Primordial Blastema is endowed only with blind instincts—a kind of
_unconscious_ First Cause in the Manifested Kosmos—which is an absurdity.
Whereas it is our Dhyân‐Chohanic Essence—the _Causality_ of the Primal
Cause which creates _physical_ man—which is the living, active and
potential Matter (pregnant _per se_ with that animal consciousness of a
superior kind, such as is found in the ant and the beaver) which produces
the long series of physiological differentiations. Apart from this, his
“ancient and general process of _creation_” from Proto‐organisms is as
Occult as any theory of Paracelsus or Khunrath could be.

Moreover, the Kabalistic works are full of the proof of this. The _Zohar_,
for instance, says that every type in the visible has its prototype in the
invisible Universe.

All that which is in the Lower (our) World is found in the Upper.
The Lower and the Upper act and reäct upon each other.(274)

20. THEIR FATHERS WERE THE SELF‐BORN. THE SELF‐BORN, THE CHHÂYÂ FROM THE
BRILLIANT BODIES OF THE LORDS, THE FATHERS, THE SONS OF TWILIGHT.

The “Shadows,” or Chhâyâs, are called the Sons of the “Self‐born,” as the
latter name is applied to all the Gods and Beings, born through the Will,
whether of Deity or Adept. The Homunculi of Paracelsus would, perhaps, be
also given this name, though the latter process is on a far more material
plane. The name “Sons of Twilight” shows that the “Self‐born” Progenitors
of our Doctrine are identical with the Pitris of the Brâhmanical System,
as the title is a reference to their mode of birth; these Pitris being
stated to have issued from Brahmâ’s “Body of Twilight,” as stated in the
_Purânas_.

21. WHEN THE RACE BECAME OLD, THE OLD WATERS MIXED WITH THE FRESHER WATERS
(_A_). WHEN ITS DROPS BECAME TURBID, THEY VANISHED AND DISAPPEARED IN THE
NEW STREAM, IN THE HOT STREAM OF LIFE. THE OUTER OF THE FIRST BECAME THE
INNER OF THE SECOND (_B_). THE OLD WING BECAME THE NEW SHADOW, AND THE
SHADOW OF THE WING (_C_).

(_a_) The old or Primitive Race merged in the Second Race, and became one
with it.

(_b_) This is the mysterious process of the transformation and evolution
of mankind. The material of the first Forms—shadowy, ethereal, and
negative—was drawn or absorbed into, and thus became the complement of the
Forms of the Second Race. The Commentary explains this by saying that, as
the First Race was simply composed of the Astral Shadows of the Creative
Progenitors, having of course neither astral nor physical bodies of its
own—the Race _never died_. Its “Men” melted gradually away, becoming
absorbed in the bodies of their own “Sweat‐born” progeny, more solid than
their own. The old Form vanished and was absorbed by, disappeared in, the
new Form, more human and physical. There was no death in those days of a
period more blissful than the Golden Age; but the first, or parent,
material was used for the formation of the new being, to form the Body and
even the inner or _lower_ Principles or Bodies of the progeny.

(_c_) When the “Shadow” retires, _i.e._, when the Astral Body becomes
covered with more solid flesh, man develops a Physical Body. The “Wing,”
or the ethereal Form that produced its Shadow and Image, became the Shadow
of the Astral Body and its own progeny. The expression is queer and
original.

As there may be no occasion to refer to this mystery later, it is as well
to point out at once the dual meaning contained in the Greek myth bearing
upon this particular phase of evolution. It is found in the several
variants of the allegory of Leda and her two sons Castor and Pollux, each
of which variants has a special meaning. Thus in Book XI of the _Odyssey_,
Leda is spoken of as the spouse of Tyndarus, who gave birth by her husband
“to two sons of valiant heart”—Castor and Pollux. Jupiter endows them with
a marvellous gift and privilege. They are semi‐immortal; they live and
die, each in turn, and every alternate day (ἑτερήμεροι(275)). As the
Tyndaridæ, the twin brothers are an astronomical symbol, and stand for Day
and Night; their two wives, Phœbe and Hilaeira, the daughters of Apollo or
the Sun, personifying the Dawn and the Twilight.(276) Again, in the
allegory where Zeus is shown as the father of the two heroes—born from the
Egg to which Leda gives birth—the myth is entirely theogonical. It relates
to that group of cosmic allegories in which the world is described as born
from an Egg. For Leda assumes in it the shape of a white swan, when
uniting herself to the Divine Swan or Brahma‐Kalahamsa. Leda is the
mythical Bird, then, to which, in the traditions of various peoples of the
Âryan race, are attributed various ornithological forms of birds which all
lay golden Eggs.(277) In the _Kalevala_, the Epic Poem of Finland, the
beauteous daughter of the Ether, the “Water‐Mother,” creates the World in
conjunction with a “Duck”—another form of the Swan or Goose, Kalahamsa—who
lays six golden eggs, and the seventh, an “egg of iron,” in her lap. But
the variant of the Leda allegory which has a direct reference to mystic
man is found in Pindar(278) only, with a slighter reference to it in the
Homeric Hymns.(279) Castor and Pollux are in it no longer the Dioscuri of
Apollodorus(280); but become the highly significant symbol of the dual
man, the Mortal and the Immortal. Not only this, but as will now be seen,
they are also the symbol of the Third Race, and its transformation from
the Animal‐man into a God‐man with only an animal body.

Pindar shows Leda uniting herself in the same night to her husband and
also to the Father of the Gods—Zeus. Thus Castor is the son of the Mortal,
Pollux the progeny of the Immortal. In the allegory made up for the
occasion, it is said that in a riot of vengeance against the
Apharides,(281) Pollux kills Lynceus—“of all mortals he whose sight is the
most penetrating”—but Castor is wounded by Idas, “he who sees and knows.”
Zeus puts an end to the fight by hurling his thunderbolt and killing the
last two combatants. Pollux finds his brother dying.(282) In his despair
he calls upon Zeus to slay him also. “Thou canst not die altogether,”
answers the master of the Gods; “thou art of a divine race.” But he gives
him the choice: Pollux will either remain immortal, living eternally in
Olympus; or, if he would share his brother’s fate in all things, he must
pass half his existence underground, and the other half in the golden
heavenly abodes. This semi‐immortality, which is also to be shared by
Castor, is accepted by Pollux.(283) _And thus the twin brothers live
alternately, one during the day, and the other during the night._(284)

Is this a poetical fiction only? An allegory, one of those “solar myth”
interpretations, higher than which no modern Orientalist seems able to
soar? Indeed, it is much more. Here we have an allusion to the “Egg‐born”
Third Race; the first half of which is mortal, _i.e._, unconscious in its
Personality, and having nothing within itself to survive;(285) and the
latter half of which becomes immortal in its Individuality, by reason of
its Fifth Principle being called to life by the _Informing Gods_, and thus
connecting the Monad with this Earth. This is Pollux; while Castor
represents the _personal_, mortal man, an animal of not even a superior
kind, when unlinked from the divine _Individuality_. “Twins” truly; yet
divorced by death for ever, unless Pollux, moved by the voice of twinship,
bestows on his less favoured mortal brother a share of his own divine
nature, thus associating him with his own immortality.

Such is the Occult meaning of the metaphysical aspect of the allegory. The
widely spread modern interpretation of it—so celebrated in antiquity,
Plutarch tells us,(286) as symbolical of brotherly devotion—namely, that
it was an image of the Sun and Moon borrowed from the spectacle of Nature,
is weak and inadequate to explain the secret meaning. Besides the fact
that the Moon, with the Greeks, was feminine in exoteric mythology, and
could therefore hardly be regarded as Castor, and at the same time be
identified with Diana, ancient Symbologists who held the Sun, the king of
all sidereal orbs, as the visible image of the highest Deity, would not
have personified it by Pollux, a demi‐god only.(287)

If from Greek mythology we pass to the Mosaic allegories and symbolism, we
shall find a still more striking corroboration of the same tenet under
another form. Unable to trace in them the “Egg‐born,” we shall still
unmistakably find in the first four chapters of _Genesis_ the Androgynes
and the first Three Races of the Secret Doctrine, hidden under most
ingenious symbology.

The Divine Hermaphrodite.

An impenetrable veil of secrecy was thrown over the Occult and Religious
Mysteries, after the submersion of the last remnant of the Atlantean Race,
some 12,000 years ago, lest they should be shared by the unworthy, and so
desecrated. Of these Sciences several have now become exoteric—such as
Astronomy, for instance, in its purely mathematical and physical aspects.
But their dogmas and tenets, being all symbolized and left to the sole
guardianship of parable and allegory, have been forgotten, and hence the
meaning has become perverted. Nevertheless, one finds the Hermaphrodite in
the scriptures and traditions of almost every nation; and why such
unanimous agreement if the statement is only a fiction?

Under cover of this secrecy the Fifth Race were led to the establishment,
or rather the reëstablishment of the Religious Mysteries, in which ancient
truths might be taught to the coming generations under the veil of
allegory and symbolism. Behold the imperishable witness to the evolution
of the Human Races from the Divine, and especially from the Androgynous
Race—the Egyptian Sphinx, that riddle of the Ages! Divine Wisdom
incarnating on Earth, and forced to taste of the bitter fruit of personal
experience of pain and suffering, generated on Earth only under the shade
of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil—a secret first known only to
the Elohim, the Self‐Initiated, “Higher Gods.”(288)

In the _Book of Enoch_ we have Adam,(289) the first Divine Androgyne,
separating into man and woman, and becoming Jah‐Heva in one form, or Race,
and Cain and Abel(290)—male and female—in its other form or Race—the
double‐sexed Jehovah,(291) an echo of its Âryan prototype, Brahmâ‐Vâch.
After which come the Third and Fourth Root‐Races of mankind(292)—that is
to say, Races of men and women, or individuals of opposite sexes, no
longer sexless Semi‐spirits and Androgynes, as were the two Races which
precede them. This fact is hinted at in every Anthropogony. It is found in
fable and allegory, in myth and revealed Scriptures, in legend and
tradition. For, of all the great Mysteries, inherited by Initiates from
hoary antiquity, this is _one of the greatest_. It accounts for the bi‐
sexual element found in every Creative Deity, in Brahmâ‐Virâj‐Vâch, as in
Adam‐Jehovah‐Eve, also in Cain‐Jehovah‐Abel. For “The Book of the
Generations of Adam” does not even mention Cain and Abel, but says only:

Male and female created he them; ... and called their name
Adam.(293)

Then it proceeds to say:

And Adam ... begat a son in _his own likeness_, after his image;
and called his name Seth.(294)

After which he begets other sons and daughters, thus proving that Cain and
Abel are his own allegorical permutations. Adam stands for the primitive
_Human_ Race, especially in its cosmo‐sidereal sense. Not so, however, in
its theo‐anthropological meaning. The compound name of Jehovah, or Jah‐
Hovah, meaning _male life_ and _female life_—first androgynous, then
separated into sexes—is used in this sense in _Genesis_ from Chapter V
onwards. As the author of the _Source of Measures_ says:

The two words of which _Jehovah_ is composed make up the original
idea of male‐female, as the birth originator.(295)

For the Hebrew letter _Jod_ was the _membrum virile_ and _Hovah_ was Eve,
the mother of all living, or the procreatrix, Earth and Nature. The author
believes, therefore, that:

It is seen that the _perfect one_ [the perfect female circle or
Yoni, 20612, numerically], as _originator of measures_, takes also
the form of _birth_ origin, as _hermaphrodite one_; hence the
phallic form and use.

Precisely; only “the phallic form and use” came long ages later; and the
first and original meaning of Enos, the son of Seth, was the first Race
born in the present usual way from man and woman—for Seth is no man, but a
_race_. Before him humanity was hermaphrodite. While Seth is the first
result (physiologically) after the “Fall,” he is also the first _man_;
hence his son Enos is referred to as the “Son of _Man_.” Seth represents
the _later_ Third Race.

To screen the real mystery name of Ain Suph—the Boundless and Endless No‐
Thing—the Kabalists have brought forward the compound attribute‐
appellation of one of the personal Creative Elohim, whose name was Yah or
Jah—the letters _i_ or _j_ or _y_ being interchangeable—or Jah‐Hovah,
_i.e._, _male_ and _female_;(296) Jah‐Eve a hermaphrodite, or the _first
form of humanity_, the original Adam of Earth, not even Adam Kadmon, whose
“Mind‐born Son” is the earthly Jah‐Hovah, mystically. And knowing this,
the crafty Rabbin‐Kabalist has made of it a name so _secret_, that he
could not divulge it later on without exposing the whole scheme; and thus
he was obliged to make it _sacred_.

How close is the identity between Brahmâ‐Prajâpati and Jehovah‐Sephiroth,
between Brahmâ‐Virâj and Jehovah‐Adam, the _Bible_ and the _Purânas_
compared alone can show. Analyzed, and read in the same light, they afford
cogent evidence that they are two copies of the same original—made at two
periods far distant from each other. Compare once more in relation to this
subject _Genesis_ iv. 1 and 26 and _Manu_ i. 32 and they will both yield
their meaning. In Manu, Brahmâ, who, like Jehovah or Adam in _Genesis_, is
both man and God, and divides his body into male and female, stands, in
his Esoteric meaning, for the symbolical personification of creative and
_generative_ power, both divine and human. The _Zohar_ affords still more
convincing proof of identity, while some Rabbins repeat word for word
certain original Paurânic expressions; _e.g._, the “creation” of the world
is generally considered in the Brâhmanical books to be the Lîlâ, the
delight or sport, the amusement of the Supreme Creator.

Vishnu, being thus discrete and indiscrete substance, spirit, and
time, sports like a playful boy, as you shall learn by listening
to his frolics.(297)

Now compare this with what is said in the Book, _Nobeleth ’Hokhmah_:

The Qabbalists say, that the entering into existence of the worlds
happened through delight, in that Ain Suph [? !] rejoiced in
Itself, and flashed and beamed from Itself to Itself ... which are
all called delight.(298)

Thus it is not a “curious idea of the Qabbalists,” as the author just
quoted remarks, but a purely Paurânic, Âryan idea. Only, why make of Ain
Suph a Creator?

The “Divine Hermaphrodite” is, then, Brahmâ‐Vâch‐Virâj; and that of the
Semites, or rather of the Jews, is Jehovah‐Cain‐Abel. Only the “Heathen”
were, and are, more sincere and frank than were the later Israëlites and
Rabbis, who undeniably knew the real meaning of their exoteric deity. The
Jews regard the name given to them—the Yah‐oudi—as an insult. Yet they
have, or would have if they only wished it, as undeniable a right to call
themselves the ancient Yah‐oudi, “Jah‐hovians,” as the Brâhmans have to
call themselves Brâhmans _after their national deity_. For Jah‐hovah is
the generic name of that Group or Hierarchy of Creative Planetary Angels,
under whose Star their nation has evolved. He is one of the Planetary
Elohim of the Regent Group of Saturn. Verse 26 of Chapter iv of _Genesis_,
when read correctly, would alone give them such a right, for it calls the
new Race of men—sprung from Seth and Enos—_Jehovah_, something quite
different from the translation adopted in the _Bible_, which ought to
read:

To him also, was born a son, Enos; then began men to call
themselves Jah, or Yah‐hovah,

to wit, _men and women_, the “Lords of Creation.” One has but to read the
above‐mentioned verse in the original Hebrew text and by the light of the
Kabalah, to find that, instead of the words as they now stand translated,
the correct translation should be:

Then began men to _call themselves_ Jehovah;

and not:

Then began men to call upon the name of the Lord

the latter being a mistranslation, whether deliberate or not. Again the
well‐known passage:

I have gotten a man from the Lord,

should read:

I have gotten a man, even Jehovah.(299)

Luther translated the passage one way, the Roman Catholics quite
differently. Bishop Wordsworth renders it:

Cain—_I have gotten—Kain_, from _Kâ’nithi, I have gotten_.

Luther:

I have gotten a man—even the Lord [Jehovah].

And the author of _The Source of Measures_:

I have _measured a man_, even _Jehovah_.

The last is the correct rendering for—(_a_) a famous Rabbin, a Kabalist,
explained the passage to the writer in precisely this way, and (_b_) this
rendering is identical with that in the Secret Doctrine of the East with
regard to Brahmâ.

In _Isis Unveiled_,(300) it was explained by the writer that:

Cain ... is the son of the “Lord” not of Adam.

The “Lord” is Adam Kadmon, the “Father” of Yod‐Heva, “Adam‐Eve,” or
Jehovah, the son of sinful thought, not the progeny of flesh and blood.
Seth, on the other hand, is the _leader and the progenitor of the Races of
the Earth_; for he is the son of Adam, exoterically, but Esoterically he
is the progeny of Cain and Abel, since Abel or Hebel is a female, the
counterpart and female half of the male Cain, and Adam is the collective
name for man and woman:

Male and female (_zachar va nakobeh_) created he them ... and
called _their_ name Adam.

The verses in _Genesis_ from Chapters i to v, are purposely mixed up for
Kabalistic reasons. After the “Man” of _Genesis_ i. 26, and Enos, the Son
of Man, of iv. 26; after Adam, the first Androgyne; after Adam Kadmon—the
sexless (the first) Logos—Adam and Eve once separated, come finally
Jehovah‐Eve and Cain‐Jehovah. These represent distinct Root‐Races, for
millions of years elapsed between them.

Hence the Âryan and the Semitic Theo‐anthropographies are two leaves on
the same stem; their respective personifications and symbolic personages
standing in relation to each other in the following way:

I. The “Unknowable” referred to in various ways in Rig Vedic verse, such
as “_Nought_ was,” called, later on, Parabrahman—the אין, Ain, No‐thing,
or Ain Suph of the Kabalists—and again, the “Spirit” (of God) that moves
upon the face of the Waters, in _Genesis_. All these are _identical_.
Moreover, in _Genesis_ i, verse 2 is placed as verse 1 in the _secret_
Kabalistic texts, where it is followed by the Elohim “creating the Heaven
and the Earth.” This deliberate shifting of the order of the verses was
necessary for _monotheistic_ and Kabalistic purposes. Jeremiah’s curse
against those Elohim (Gods) who _have not created_ the Heavens and the
Earth,(301) shows that there were other Elohim who had.

II. The Heavenly Manu‐Svâyambhuva, who sprang from Svayambhû‐Nârâyana, the
“Self‐existent,” the Adam Kadmon of the Kabalists, and the Androgyne
“Man,” of _Genesis_ i, are also identical.

III. Manu‐Svâyambhuva is Brahmâ, or the Logos; and he is Adam Kadmon, who
in _Genesis_, iv. 5, separates himself into two halves, male and female,
thus becoming Jah‐Hovah or Jehovah‐Eve; as Manu‐Svâyambhuva, or Brahmâ,
separates himself to become “Brahmâ‐Virâj and Vâch‐Virâj,” male and
female. All the rest of the texts and versions are “blinds.”

IV. Vâch is the daughter of Brahmâ and is named Shata‐Rûpâ, “the hundred‐
formed,” and Sâvitrî, Generatrix, the Mother of the Gods and of all
living. She is identical with Eve, “the Mother [of all the Lords or Gods
or] of all living.” Besides this there are many other Occult meanings.

What is written on the subject in _Isis Unveiled_, although scattered
about and very cautiously expressed at the time, is correct.

Explaining Esoterically Ezekiel’s Wheel, it is said of Jodhevah or
Jehovah:

When the Ternary is taken in the beginning of the Tetragram, it
expresses the Divine Creation _spiritually_, _i.e._, without any
carnal sin: taken at its opposite end it expresses the latter; it
is feminine. The name of Eve is composed of three letters, that of
the primitive or heavenly Adam, is written with one letter, Jod or
Yod; therefore it must not be read Jehovah but Ieva, or Eve. The
Adam of the first chapter is the spiritual, therefore pure
androgyne, Adam Kadmon. When woman issues from the left rib of the
second Adam (of dust), the pure Virgo is separated, and falling
into “generation,” or the downward cycle, becomes Scorpio, emblem
of sin and matter. While the ascending cycle points to the purely
Spiritual Races, or the ten Prediluvian Patriarchs, the Prajâpatis
and Sephiroth, led on by the creative Deity itself, who is Adam
Kadmon or Yodcheva, [spiritually,] the lower one [Jehovah] is that
of the Terrestrial Races, led on by Enoch or Libra, the seventh;
who, because he is half‐divine, half‐terrestrial, is said to have
been taken by God alive. Enoch, or Hermes, or Libra, are one.(302)

This is only one of the several meanings. No need to remind the scholar
that Scorpio is the astrological sign of the organs of reproduction. Like
the Indian Rishis, the Patriarchs are all convertible in their numbers, as
well as interchangeable. According to the subject to which they relate
they become ten, twelve, seven or five, and even _fourteen_, and they have
the same Esoteric meaning as the Manus or Rishis.

Moreover, Jehovah, as may be shown, has a variety of etymologies, but only
those are _true_ which are found in the Kabalah. יהוה (Ieve) is the _Old
Testament_ term, and was pronounced Ya‐va. Inman suggests that it is
contracted from the two words יהו יה, Yaho‐Iah, Jaho‐Jah, or Jaho is Jah.
Punctuated it is יְהוֶֹה, which is, however, a Rabbinical caprice to
associate it with the name Adoni, or אֲדנָי, which has the same points. It
is curious, and indeed hardly conceivable, that the Jews anciently read
the name יהוה Adoni, when they had so many names of which Jeho, and Jah,
and Iah, constituted a part. But so it was; and Philo Byblus, who gives us
the so‐called fragment of Sanchuniathon, spelt it in Greek letters Ιευω,
Javo or Jevo. Theodoret says that the Samaritans pronounced it Yahva, and
the Jews Yaho. Prof. Gibbs, however, suggests its punctuation thus:
יֵהִוֶה (Ye‐hou‐vih); and he cut the Gordian knot of its true Occult
meaning. For in this last form, as a Hebrew verb, it means “he
will—be.”(303) It was also derived from the Chaldaic verb הֲוָא, or הִוָה,
eue (eve), or eua (eva), “to be.” And so it was, since from Enosh, the
“Son of Man,” only, were the truly human Races to begin and “to be,” as
males and females. This statement receives further corroboration, inasmuch
as Parkhurst makes the verb הוה to mean, (1) “to fall down” (_i.e._ into
generation or Matter); and (2) “to be, to continue”—as a _race_. The
aspirate of the word eua (Eva), “to be,” being הוה, Heve (Eve), which is
the feminine of יהוה, and the same as Hebe, the Grecian Goddess of youth
and the Olympian bride of Heracles, makes the name Jehovah appear still
more clearly in its primitive double‐sexed form.

Finding in Sanskrit such syllables as Jah and Yah, _e.g._, Jâh‐navî,
“Ganges,” and Jagan‐nâtha, “Lord of the World,” it becomes clear why Mr.
Rawlinson is so very confident in his works of an Âryan or Vedic influence
on the early mythology of Babylon. Nor is it to be much wondered at that
the alleged ten tribes of Israel disappeared during the captivity period,
without leaving a trace behind them, when we are informed that the Jews
had _de facto_ but two tribes—those of Judah and of Levi. The Levites,
moreover, were not a tribe at all, but a priestly caste. The descendants
have only followed their progenitors, the various patriarchs, into thin,
sidereal air. There were _Brahms_ and _A‐brahms_, in days of old, truly,
and before the first Jew had been born. Every nation held its first God
and Gods to be androgynous; nor could it be otherwise, since they regarded
their distant primeval progenitors, their dual‐sexed ancestors, as divine
Beings and Gods, just as do the Chinese to this day. And they were divine
in one sense, as also was their first human progeny, the “mind‐born”
primitive humanity, which was most assuredly bi‐sexual, as all the more
ancient symbols and traditions show.

Under the emblematical devices and peculiar phraseology of the
priesthood of old, lie latent hints of sciences as yet
undiscovered during the present cycle. Well acquainted as may be a
scholar with the hieratic writing and hieroglyphical system of the
Egyptians, he must first of all learn to sift their records. He
has to assure himself, compasses and rule in hand, that the
picture‐writing he is examining fits, to a line, _certain fixed
geometrical figures_ which are the hidden keys to such records,
before he ventures on an interpretation.

But there are myths which speak for themselves. In this class we
may include the double‐sexed first creators of every Cosmogony.
The Greek Zeus‐Zên (Æther), and Chthonia (the Chaotic Earth) and
Metis (Water), his wives; Osiris and Isis‐Latona—the former God
also representing Æther, the first emanation of the Supreme Deity,
Amun, the primeval source of Light; the Goddess Earth and Water
again; Mithras, 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).(304)

All these are records of the primeval divine Hermaphrodite.

Stanza VI. The Evolution Of The “Sweat‐Born.”

22. The evolution of the three Races continued. 23. The Second
Race creates the Third and perishes.

22. THEN THE SECOND EVOLVED THE EGG‐BORN, THE THIRD.(305) THE SWEAT GREW,
ITS DROPS GREW, AND THE DROPS BECAME HARD AND ROUND. THE SUN WARMED IT;
THE MOON COOLED AND SHAPED IT; THE WIND FED IT UNTIL ITS RIPENESS. THE
WHITE SWAN FROM THE STARRY VAULT(306) OVERSHADOWED THE BIG DROP. THE EGG
OF THE FUTURE RACE, THE MAN‐SWAN(307) OF THE LATER THIRD (_A_). FIRST
MALE‐FEMALE, THEN MAN AND WOMAN (_B_).

(_a_) The text of the Stanza clearly implies that the human embryo was
nourished _ab extra_ by Cosmic Forces, and that the “Father‐Mother”
furnished apparently the germ that ripened; in all probability a “sweat‐
born egg,” to be hatched out, in some mysterious way, disconnected from
the “double” parent. It is comparatively easy to conceive of an oviparous
humanity, since even now man is, in one sense, “egg‐born.” Magendie,
moreover, in his _Precis Élémentaire de Physiologie_, citing

A case where the umbilical cord was ruptured and perfectly
cicatrized,

yet the infant was born alive, pertinently asks:

How was the circulation carried on in this organ?

On the next page he says:

Nothing is at present known respecting the use of digestion in the
fœtus.

And respecting its nutrition, he propounds this query:

What, then, can we say of the nutrition of the fœtus?
Physiological works contain only _vague conjectures_ on this
point.

“Ah, but,” the sceptic may urge, “Magendie’s book belongs to the last
generation, and Science has since made such strides that his stigma of
ignorance can no longer be fixed upon the profession.” Indeed; then let us
turn to a very great authority upon Physiology, viz., Sir Michael Foster,
and, to the disadvantage of Modern Science, we shall find him saying:

Concerning the rise and development of the functional activities
of the embryo, our knowledge is almost a blank. We know scarcely
anything about the various steps by which the primary fundamental
qualities of the protoplasm of the ovum are differentiated into
the complex phenomena which we have attempted in this book to
explain.(308)

The students of Trin. Coll. Cantab, will now kindly draw a veil before the
statue of Hygieia and bandage the eyes of the busts of Galen and
Hippocrates, lest they look reproachfully at their degenerate descendants.
One further fact we must note. Sir Michael Foster is discreetly silent
about the case of the ruptured umbilical cord cited by his great French
_confrère_.

(_b_) This is a very curious statement as explained in the Commentaries.
To make it clear: The First Race having created the Second by “budding,”
as explained above, the Second Race gives birth to the Third—which itself
is separated into three distinct divisions, consisting of men differently
procreated. The first two of these are produced by an oviparous method,
presumably unknown to modern Natural History. While the early sub‐races of
the Third Humanity procreated their species by a kind of exudation of
moisture or vital fluid, the drops of which coalescing formed an oviform
ball—or shall we say egg—that served as an extraneous vehicle for the
generation therein of a fœtus and child, the mode of procreation by the
later sub‐races changed, in its results at all events. The little ones of
the earlier sub‐races were entirely sexless—shapeless even for all one
knows;(309) but those of the later sub‐races were born androgynous. It is
in the Third Race that the separation of sexes occurred. From being
previously a‐sexual, Humanity became distinctly hermaphrodite or bi‐
sexual; and finally the man‐bearing Eggs began to give birth, gradually
and almost imperceptibly in their evolutionary development, first, to
beings in which one sex predominated over the other, and, finally, to
distinct men and women. And now let us search for corroboration of these
statements in the religious legends of East and West. Let us take the
“Egg‐born Race” first. Think of Kashyapa, the Vedic sage, and the most
prolific of creators. He was the son of Marichi, Brahmâ’s Mind‐born Son;
and he is made to become the father of the Nâgas, or Serpents, among other
beings. Exoterically, the Nâgas are semi‐divine beings which have a human
face and the tail of a serpent. Yet there was a race of Nâgas, said to be
a thousand in number only, born or rather sprung from Kadrû, Kashyapa’s
wife, for _the purpose of peopling Pâtâla_, which is undeniably America,
as will be shown; and there was a Nâga‐Dvîpa, one of the seven divisions
of Bhâratavarsha, India, inhabited by a people bearing the same name, who
are allowed, even by some Orientalists, to be _historical_, and to have
left many a trace behind them to this day.

Now the point most insisted upon at present is that, whatever origin be
claimed for man, his evolution took place in this order: (1) sexless, as
all the earlier forms are; (2) then, by a natural transition, he became a
“solitary hermaphrodite,” a bi‐sexual being; and (3) finally separated and
became what he is now. Science teaches us that all the primitive forms,
though sexless, “still retained the power of undergoing the processes of
a‐sexual multiplication”; why, then, should man be excluded from that law
of Nature? Bi‐sexual reproduction is an evolution, a specialized and
perfected form on the scale of Matter of the fissiparous act of
reproduction. Occult teachings are preëminently panspermic, and the early
history of humanity is hidden only “from ordinary mortals”; nor is the
history of the primitive Races buried for the Initiates in the tomb of
time, as it is for profane Science. Therefore, supported on the one hand
by that Science which shows us progressive development and an internal
cause for every external modification, as a law in Nature; and, on the
other hand, by an implicit faith in the Wisdom—we may say Pansophia
even—of the universal traditions gathered and preserved by the Initiates,
who have perfected them into an almost faultless system—thus supported, we
venture to state the doctrine clearly.

In an able article, written some fifteen years ago, our learned and
respected friend Prof. Alexander Wilder, of New York, shows the absolute
logic and necessity of believing “The Primeval Race Double‐Sexed,” and
gives a number of scientific reasons for it.(310) He argues firstly, that
a large part of the vegetable creation exhibits the phenomenon of bi‐
sexuality, the Linnæan classification enumerating thus almost all plants.
This is the case in the superior families of the vegetable kingdoms as
much as in the lower forms, from the hemp to the Lombardy poplar and
ailanthus. In the animal kingdom also it is the same. In insect life, the
moth generates a worm, and the worm becomes a moth, as in the Mysteries
the great secret was expressed—_Taurus __ Taurus Draconem genuit, et
Taurum Draco_. The coral‐producing family, which, according to Agassiz,
has spent many hundreds of thousands of years, during the present
geological period, in building out the peninsula of Florida, produce their
offspring from themselves like the buds and ramifications in a tree. Bees
are somewhat in the same line. The aphides, or plant lice, keep house like
Amazons, and _virgin parents_ perpetuate the race for ten successive
generations.

What say the old Sages, the Philosopher‐teachers of antiquity?
Aristophanes speaks thus on the subject in Plato’s _Banquet_:

Our nature of old was not the same as it is now. It was
_androgynous_; the form and name partaking of, and being common to
both the male and female.... Their bodies ... were round, and the
manner of their running circular.(311) They were terrible in force
and strength and had prodigious ambition. Hence Zeus divided each
of them into two, making them weaker; Apollo, under his direction,
closed up the skin.

Meshia and Meshiane were but a single individual with the old Persians.

They also taught that man was the product of the Tree of Life,
growing in androgynous pairs, till they were separated at a
subsequent modification of the human form.

In the Book of the Generations (_Toleduth_) of Adam, the verse:

God created (_bara_, brought forth) man in his image, in the image
of God created he him, male and female created he them,

—if read Esoterically will yield the true sense, viz.:

The Elohim [Gods] brought forth from themselves [by modification]
man in their image ... created they _him_ [collective Humanity, or
Adam], male and female created _he_ [collective Deity] them.(312)

This will show the Esoteric point. The _Sexless_ Race was their first
production, a modification _of_ and _from_ themselves, the pure Spiritual
Existences; and this was Adam _solus_. Thence came the _Second_ Race:
Adam‐Eve, or Jod‐Heva, inactive Androgynes; and finally the _Third_, or
the “_Separating_ Hermaphrodite,” Cain and Abel, who produce the Fourth,
Seth‐Enos, etc. It is this Third, the last semi‐spiritual Race, which was
also the last vehicle of the divine and innate Wisdom, ingenerate in the
Enochs, the Seers of that Mankind. The _Fourth_, which had tasted of the
fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil—Wisdom already united to earthy, and
therefore _impure_, intelligence(313)—had consequently to acquire that
Wisdom by initiation and great struggle. And the union of Wisdom and
Intelligence, the former _ruling_ the latter, is called in the Hermetic
books “the God possessing the double fecundity of the two sexes.”

Mystically Jesus was held to be man‐woman. So also in the Orphic Hymns,
sung during the Mysteries, we find: “Zeus is a male, Zeus is an immortal
maid.” The Egyptian Ammon was the Goddess Neïth, in his other half.
Jupiter has female breasts, Venus is bearded in some of her statues, and
Ilâ, the Goddess, is also Su‐dyumna, the God, as Vaivasvata’s progeny.

Says Professor Wilder:

The name _Adam_, or man, itself implies this double form of
existence. It is identical with _Athamas_, or _Thomas_ (Tamil,
_Tam_), which is rendered by the Greek _Didumos_, a twin; if,
therefore, the first woman was formed subsequently to the first
man, she must, as a logical necessity, be “taken out of man.”
Accordingly we read: “And the _side_ which the Lord God [Elohim]
had taken from man, made he a woman.” The Hebrew word here used is
_Tzala_, which bears the translation we have given. It is easy to
trace the legend in Berosus, who says that _Thalatth_ (the
_Omorôka_, or Lady of Urka) was the beginning of creation. She was
also Telita [? Melita], the queen of the Moon....

The two memorable twin‐births of _Genesis_, that of Cain and Abel,
and of Esau and Jacob, shadow the same idea. The name _Hebel_ is
the same as Eve, and its characteristic seems to be feminine.
“Unto thee shall be his desire,” said the Lord God to Cain; “and
thou shalt rule over him.” The same language had been uttered to
Eve: “Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over
thee.”

Thus the pristine bi‐sexual unity of the human Third Root‐Race is an axiom
in the Secret Doctrine. Its virgin individuals were raised to “Gods,”
because that Race represented their “Divine Dynasty.” The moderns are
satisfied with worshipping the male heroes of the Fourth Race, who created
Gods after their own sexual image, whereas the Gods of primeval mankind
were “male _and_ female.”

As stated in Volume I, the Humanities developed coördinately, and on
parallel lines with the four Elements, every new Race being
physiologically adapted to meet the additional Element. Our Fifth Race is
rapidly approaching the Fifth Element—call it interstellar ether, if you
will—which has more to do, however, with psychology than with physics. We
men have learned to live in every climate, whether frigid or tropical, but
the first two Races had nought to do with climate, nor were they
subservient to any temperature or change therein. And thus, we are taught,
men lived down to the close of the Third Root‐Race, when eternal spring
reigned over the whole Globe, such as is now enjoyed by the inhabitants of
Jupiter; a world, which, as M. Camille Flammarion says:

Is not subject like our own to the vicissitudes of seasons nor to
abrupt alternations of temperature, but is enriched with all the
treasures of eternal spring.(314)

Those Astronomers who maintain that Jupiter is in a molten condition, in
our sense of the term, are invited to settle their dispute with this
learned French Astronomer.(315) It must, however, be always borne in mind
that the “eternal spring” referred to is only a condition _cognized as
such by the Jovians_. It is not “spring,” _as we know it_. In this
reservation is to be found the reconciliation between the two theories
here cited. Both embrace _partial_ truths.

It is thus a universal tradition that mankind has evolved gradually into
its present shape from an almost transparent condition of texture, and
neither by miracle nor by sexual intercourse. Moreover, this is in full
accord with the ancient Philosophies; from those of Egypt and India, with
their Divine Dynasties, down to that of Plato. And all these universal
beliefs must be classed with the “presentiments” and “obstinate
conceptions,” some of them ineradicable, in popular faiths. Such beliefs,
as remarked by Louis Figuier, are:

Frequently the outcome of the wisdom and observation of an
infinite number of generations of men.... [For], a tradition which
has a uniform and universal existence, has all the weight of
scientific testimony.(316)

And there is more than one such tradition in the Paurânic allegories, as
has been shown. Moreover, the doctrine that the First Race of mankind was
formed out of the Chhâyâs, or Astral Images, of the Pitris, is fully
corroborated in the _Zohar_:

In the _Tzelem_, shadow image of Elohim [the Pitris], He made Adam
(man).(317)

It has been repeatedly urged as an objection that, however high the degree
of metaphysical thought in ancient India, yet the old Egyptians had
nothing but crass idolatry and zoolatry to boast of; Hermes, as alleged,
being the work of Greek Mystics who lived in Egypt. To this, an answer can
be given: a direct proof that the Egyptians believed in the Secret
Doctrine is, that it was taught to them at Initiation. Let the objectors
open the _Eclogæ Physicœ et Ethicæ_ of Stobæus, the Greek compiler of
ancient fragments, who lived in the fifth century, A.D. The following is a
transcription by him of an old Hermetic fragment, showing the Egyptian
theory of the Soul. Translated word for word, it says:

From one Soul, that of All, spring all the souls, which spread
themselves as if purposely distributed through the world. These
souls undergo many transformations; those which are already
creeping creatures turn into aquatic animals; from these aquatic
animals are derived land animals; and from the latter the birds.
From the beings who live aloft in the air (heaven) men are born.
On reaching that status of men, the souls receive the principle of
(conscious) immortality, become spirits, then pass into the choir
of Gods.

23. THE SELF‐BORN WERE THE CHHÂYÂS, THE SHADOWS FROM THE BODIES OF THE
SONS OF TWILIGHT. NEITHER WATER NOR FIRE COULD DESTROY THEM. THEIR SONS
WERE.(318)

This verse cannot be understood without the help of the Commentaries. It
means that the First Root‐Race, the “Shadows” of the Progenitors, could
not be injured, or destroyed by death. Being so ethereal and so little
human in constitution, they could not be affected by any element—flood or
fire. But their “Sons,” the Second Root‐Race, could be and were so
destroyed. As the Progenitors merged wholly in their own Astral Bodies,
which were their progeny, so that progeny was absorbed in its descendants,
the “Sweat‐born.” These were the Second Humanity—composed of the most
heterogeneous gigantic semi‐human monsters—the first attempts of material
nature at building human bodies. The ever‐blooming lands (Greenland, among
others) of the Second Continent were transformed, successively, from Edens
with their eternal spring, into hyperborean Hades. This transformation was
due to the displacement of the great waters of the Globe, to oceans
changing their beds; and the bulk of the Second Race perished in this
first great throe of the evolution and consolidation of the Globe during
the human period. Of such great cataclysms there have already been
four.(319) And we may expect a fifth for ourselves in due course of time.

A Few Words About “Deluges” And “Noahs.”

The accounts in the various _Purânas_ about our Progenitors are as
contradictory, _in their details_, as everything else. Thus while, in the
_Rig Veda_, Idâ, or Ilâ, is called the Instructress of Vaivasvata Manu,
Sâyana makes of her a Goddess presiding over the Earth, and the
_Shatapatha Brâhmana_ shows her to be the Manu’s daughter, an offspring of
_his sacrifice_, and later on, his (Vaivasvata’s) _wife, by whom he begat
the race of Manus_. In the _Purânas_ she is, again, Vaivasvata’s daughter,
yet the wife of Budha (Wisdom), the illegitimate son of the Moon (Soma)
and the planet Jupiter’s (Brihaspati’s) wife, Târâ. All this, which seems
a jumble to the profane, is full of philosophical meaning to the
Occultist. On the very face of the narrative a secret and sacred meaning
is perceivable; all the details, however, being so purposely mixed up that
the experienced eye of an Initiate alone can follow them and place the
events in their proper order.

The story as told in the _Mahâbhârata_ strikes the key‐note, and yet it
needs to be explained by the secret sense contained in the _Bhagavad
Gîtâ_. It is the _prologue_ to the drama of our (Fifth) Humanity. While
Vaivasvata was engaged in devotion on the river bank, a fish craves his
protection from a bigger fish. He saves it and places it in a jar; where,
growing larger and larger, it communicates to him the news of the
forthcoming Deluge. This Fish is the well‐known Matsya Avatâra, the first
Avatâra of Vishnu, the Dagon(320) of the Chaldæan Xisuthrus, and many
other things besides. The story is too well known to need repetition.
Vishnu orders a ship to be built, in which Manu is saved along with the
seven Rishis, according to the _Mahâbhârata_; this, however, being absent
from other texts. Here the seven Rishis stand for the seven Races, the
seven Principles, and various other things; for there is again a double
mystery involved in this manifold allegory.

We have said elsewhere that the Great Flood had several meanings, and that
it referred, as also does the “Fall,” to both spiritual and physical, both
cosmic and terrestrial, events: as above, so it is below. The Ship or
Ark—Navis—in short, being the symbol of the female generative Principle,
is typified in the heavens by the Moon, and on Earth by the Womb; both
being the vessels and bearers of the seeds of life and being, which the
Sun, or Vishnu, the male Principle, vivifies and fructifies. The First
Cosmic Flood refers to Primordial Creation, or the formation of Heaven and
the Earths; in which case Chaos and the great Deep stand for the “Flood,”
and the Moon for the “Mother,” from whom proceed all the life‐germs.(321)
But the Terrestrial Deluge and its story has also its dual application. In
one case it has reference to that mystery when mankind was saved from
utter destruction, by the mortal woman being made the receptacle of the
human seed at the end of the Third Race,(322) and in the other to the real
and historical Atlantean Submersion. In both cases the “Host”—or the Manu
which saved the “seed”—is called Vaivasvata Manu. Hence the diversity
between the Paurânic and other versions; while in the _Shatapatha
Brâhmana_, Vaivasvata produces a daughter and begets from her the race of
Manu—a reference to the first human Manushyas, who had to create women by
Will (Kriyâshakti), before they were naturally born from the
Hermaphrodites as an independent sex, and were, therefore, regarded as
their creator’s “daughters.” The Paurânic accounts make Idâ, or Ilâ, the
wife of Budha (Wisdom). This version refers to the events of the Atlantean
Flood, when Vaivasvata, the great Sage on Earth, saved the Fifth Root‐Race
from being destroyed along with the remnants of the Fourth.

This is shown very clearly in the _Bhagavad Gîtâ_, where Krishna is made
to say:

The seven Great Rishis, the _four preceding_ Manus, partaking of
my essence, were born from my mind: from them sprang (was born)
the human race and the world.(323)

Here the four preceding Manus, out of the seven, are the four Races(324)
which have already lived, for Krishna belongs to the Fifth Race, his death
having inaugurated the Kali Yuga. Thus Vaivasvata Manu, the son of Sûrya,
the Sun, and the Saviour of our Race, is connected with the “Seed of
Life,” both physically and spiritually. But, at present, while speaking of
all, we have to concern ourselves only with the first two.

The “Deluge” is undeniably a “universal tradition.” “Glacial Periods” were
numerous, and so were the “Deluges,” for various reasons. Stockwell and
Croll enumerate some half‐dozen Glacial Periods and subsequent Deluges—the
earliest of all being dated by them 850,000, and the last about 100,000
years ago.(325) But which was _our_ Deluge? Assuredly the former, the one
which to this date remains recorded in the traditions of all the peoples
from the remotest antiquity; the one that finally swept away the last
peninsulas of Atlantis, beginning with Ruta and Daitya and ending with the
comparatively small island mentioned by Plato. This is shown by the
agreement of certain details in all the legends. It was the last of its
gigantic character. The little deluge, the traces of which Baron Bunsen
found in Central Asia, and which he places at about 10,000 years B.C., had
nothing to do with either the _semi_‐universal Deluge, or Noah’s Flood—the
latter being a purely mythical rendering of old traditions—nor even with
the submersion of the last Atlantean island; or, at least, having with
them only a moral connection.

Our Fifth Race—the non‐initiated portions of it—hearing of many Deluges,
have confused them, and now know of but one. This one altered the whole
aspect of the Globe in its interchange, and shifting, of land and sea.

We may compare the tradition of the Peruvians that:

The Incas, _seven_ in number, have repeopled the earth after the
deluge.(326)

Humboldt mentions the Mexican version of the same legend, but confuses
somewhat the details of the still‐preserved legend concerning the American
Noah. Nevertheless, the eminent Naturalist mentions _twice seven_
companions and the “divine bird” which preceded the boat of the Aztecs,
and thus makes fifteen elect instead of the seven and the fourteen. This
was written probably under some involuntary reminiscence of Moses, who is
said to have mentioned fifteen grandsons of Noah, who escaped with their
grandsire. Then again Xisuthrus, the Chaldæan Noah, is saved and
translated “alive” to heaven—like Enoch—with the seven Gods, the Kabirim,
or the seven divine Titans. Again the Chinese Yao has _seven_ figures
which sail with him and which he will “animate” when he lands, and use for
“human seed.” Osiris, when he enters the Ark, or Solar Boat, takes _seven_
Rays with him, etc.

Sanchuniathon makes the Aletæ or Titans (the Kabirim) contemporary with
Agruerus, the great Phœnician God—whom Faber sought to identify with
Noah;(327) further, it is suspected that the name “Titan” is derived from
Tit‐Ain,—the “fountains of the chaotic abyss”(328) (Tit‐Theus, or Tityus
is the “divine deluge”); and thus the Titans, who are _seven_, are shown
to be connected with the Flood and the seven Rishis saved by Vaivasvata
Manu.(329)

These Titans are the sons of Kronos, Time, and Rhea, the Earth; and as
Agruerus, Saturn and Sydyk are one and the same personage, and as the
seven Kabiri are also said to be the sons of Sydyk or Kronos‐Saturn, the
Kabiri and Titans are identical. For once the pious Faber was right in his
conclusions when he wrote:

I have no doubt of the seven Titans or Cabiri being the same also
as the seven Rishis of the Hindoo mythology (?), who are said to
have escaped in a boat along with Menu the head (?) of the
family.(330)

But he is less fortunate in his speculations when he adds:

The Hindoos, in their wild _legends_ have variously perverted the
_history_ of the Noachidæ (? !), yet it is remarkable that they
seem to have religiously adhered to the number seven:(331) hence
Capt. Wilford very judiciously observes, that, “perhaps, the seven
Menus, the seven Brahmâdicas, with the seven Rishis, are the same,
and make only seven individual persons.(332) The seven Brahmâdicas
were _prajâpatis_, or lords of the _prajas_, or creatures. From
them mankind was born, and they are probably the same with the
seven Menus.... These seven grand ancestors of the human race were
... created for the purpose of replenishing the earth with
inhabitants.”(333) The mutual resemblance of the Cabiri, the
Titans, the Rishis, and the Noëtic family, is too striking to be
the effect of mere accident.(334)

Faber was led into this mistake, and subsequently built his entire theory
concerning the Kabiri, on the fact that the name of the scriptural Japhet
is on the list of the Titans contained in a verse of the Orphic Hymns.
According to Orpheus the names of the seven Arkite Titans—whom Faber
refuses to identify with the _impious_ Titans, their descendants—were
Kœus, Krœus, Phorcys, Cronus, Oceanus, Hyperion, and _Iapetus_.

Κοιον τε, Κροιον τε μεγαν, Φορκυν τε κραταιον,
Και Κρονον, Ὠκεανον θ᾽, Ὑπεριονα τ᾽, Ἰαπετον τε.(335)

But why could not the Babylonian Ezra have adopted the name of Iapetus for
one of Noah’s sons? The Kabiri, who are the Titans, are also called Manes
and their mother Mania, according to Arnobius.(336) The Hindûs can
therefore claim with far more reason that the Manes mean their Manus, and
that Mania is the _female_ Manu of the _Râmâyana_. Mania is Ilâ, or Idâ,
the wife and daughter of Vaivasvata Manu, from whom “he begat the race of
Manus.” Like Rhea, the mother of the Titans, she is the Earth—Sâyana
making her the Goddess of the Earth—and she is but the second edition and
repetition of Vâch. Both Idâ and Vâch are turned into males and females;
Idâ becoming Sudyumna, and Vâch, the “female Virâj,” turning into a woman
in order to punish the Gandharvas; one version referring to cosmic and
divine Theogony, the other to the later period. The Manes and Mania of
Arnobius are names of Indian origin, appropriated by the Greeks and Latins
and disfigured by them.

Thus it is no accident, but the result of one archaic doctrine, common to
all, of which the Israëlites, through Ezra, the author of the modernized
Mosaic books, were the latest adapters. So unceremonious were they with
other people’s property, that the Pseudo‐Berosus,(337) shows that Titæa—of
whom Diodorus Siculus(338) makes the mother of the Titans or Diluvians—was
the _wife of Noah_. Faber calls him the “Pseudo‐Berosus,” yet accepts the
information in order to register one proof more that the Pagans have
borrowed all their Gods from the Jews, by transforming patriarchal
material. According to our humble opinion, this is one of the best proofs
possible of exactly the reverse. It shows as clearly as facts can show,
that it is the Biblical pseudo‐personages which are all borrowed from
Pagan myths, if myths they must be. It shows, at any rate, that Berosus
was well aware of the source of _Genesis_, and that it bore the same
cosmic astronomical character as the allegories of Isis‐Osiris, and the
Ark, and other older “Arkite” symbols. For, Berosus says that “Titæa
Magna” was afterwards called Aretia,(339) and worshipped with the Earth;
and this identifies Titæa, Noah’s consort, with Rhea, the Mother of the
Titans, and with Idâ; both being Goddesses who preside over the Earth, and
the Mothers of the Manus and Manes, or Titan‐Kabiri. And Titæa‐Aretia was
worshipped as Horchia, says the same Berosus, and this is a title of
Vesta, Goddess of the Earth.

Sicanus deificavit Aretiam, et nominavit eam linguâ Janigenâ
Horchiam.(340)

Scarcely an ancient poet of historic or prehistoric days fails to mention
the sinking of the two continents—often called isles—in one form or
another. Hence the destruction, besides Atlantis, of the Phlegyan Island.
Pausanius and Nonnus both tell how:

From its deep‐rooted base the Phlegyan isle
Stern Neptune shook, and plunged beneath the waves
Its impious inhabitants.(341)

Faber felt convinced that the Phlegyan Island was Atlantis. But all such
allegories are more or less distorted echoes of the Hindû tradition about
that great Cataclysm, which befell the Fourth, really human, though
gigantic, Race, the one which preceded the Âryan. Yet, as just said, like
all other legends, the legend of the Deluge has more than one meaning. It
refers, in Theogony, to _pre‐cosmic transformations_, to _spiritual
correlations_—however absurd the term may sound to a scientific ear—and
also to subsequent Cosmogony; to the great Flood of Waters (Matter) in
Chaos, awakened and fructified by those Spirit‐Rays which were swamped by,
and _perished_ in, the mysterious differentiation—a pre‐cosmic mystery,
the Prologue to the drama of Being. Anu, Bel, and Noah preceded Adam
Kadmon, Adam the Red, and Noah; just as Brahmâ, Vishnu, and Shiva preceded
Vaivasvata and the rest.(342)

All this goes to show that the _semi_‐universal deluge known to
Geology—the first Glacial Period—must have occurred just at the time
allotted to it by the Secret Doctrine: namely, 200,000 years, in round
numbers, after the commencement of our Fifth Race, or about the time
assigned by Messrs. Croll and Stockwell for the first Glacial Period:
_i.e._, about 850,000 years ago. Thus, as the latter disturbance is
attributed by Geologists and Astronomers to “an extreme eccentricity of
the earth’s orbit,” and as the Secret Doctrine attributes it to the same
source, but with the addition of another factor, the shifting of the
Earth’s axis—a proof of which may be found in the _Book of Enoch_,(343) if
the veiled language of the _Purânas_ be not understood—all this should
tend to show that the Ancients knew something of the “modern discoveries”
of Science. Enoch, when speaking of “the great inclination of the Earth,”
which “is in travail,” is quite significant and clear.

Is not this evident? Nuah is Noah, _floating on the waters_ in his
ark; the latter being the emblem of the Argha, or Moon, the
feminine Principle; Noah is the “Spirit” falling into Matter. We
find him, as soon as he descends upon the Earth, planting a
vineyard, drinking of the wine, and getting drunk thereon, _i.e._,
the pure Spirit becomes intoxicated as soon as it is finally
imprisoned in Matter. The seventh chapter of _Genesis_ is only
another version of the first. Thus, while the latter reads: “And
darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God
moved upon the face of the waters”; in the former it is said: “And
the waters prevailed; ... and the ark went [with Noah, the Spirit]
upon the face of the waters.” Thus Noah, if identical with the
Chaldæan Nuah, is the Spirit vivifying Matter, which latter is
Chaos, represented by the Deep, or the Waters of the Flood. In the
Babylonian legend (the pre‐cosmical blended with the terrestrial
event) it is Istar (Ashteroth, or Venus, the Lunar Goddess) who is
shut up in the ark and sends out a _dove_ in search of dry
land.(344)

George Smith notes in the “Tablets,” first the creation of the
Moon, and then that of the Sun: “Its beauty and perfection are
extolled, and the regularity of its orbit, which led to its being
considered the type of a judge and the regulator of the world.” If
this story related simply to a cosmogonical cataclysm‐even were
this latter universal‐why should the goddess Istar or Ashteroth,
the Moon, speak of the _creation of the sun_ after the deluge? The
waters might have reached as high as the mountain of Nizir of the
Chaldæan version, or Jebel Djudi, the deluge mountains of the
Arabian legend, or yet Ararat of the Biblical narrative, and even
the Himalaya of the Hindû tradition, and yet not have reached the
Sun; the _Bible_ itself stopped short of such a miracle! It is
evident that the deluge to the people who first recorded it had
another meaning, less problematical and far more philosophical
than that of a _universal_ deluge, of which there are no
geological traces whatever.(345)

As all such Cataclysms are periodical and cyclical, and as Manu Vaivasvata
figures as a _generic_ character, under various circumstances and events,
there seems to be no serious objection to the supposition that the first
“great flood” had an allegorical, as well as a cosmic meaning, and that it
happened at the end of the Satya Yuga, the “Age of Truth,” when the Second
Root‐Race, “the Manu with bones,” made its primeval appearance as the
“Sweat‐born.”

The Second Flood—the so‐called “universal”—which affected the Fourth Root‐
Race—now conveniently regarded by Theology as “the accursed race of
giants,” the Cainites, and the “sons of Ham”—is the flood which was first
perceived by Geology. If one carefully compares the accounts in the
various legends of the Chaldees and other exoteric works of the nations,
it will be found that all of them agree with the orthodox narratives given
in the Brâhmanical books. And it may be perceived that while, in the first
account, “there is no God or mortal yet on Earth,” when Manu Vaivasvata
lands on Himavân, in the second, the Seven Rishis are allowed to keep him
company; thus showing that whereas some accounts refer to the Sidereal and
Cosmic Flood before the so‐called “Creation,” the others treat, one of the
Great Flood of Matter on Earth, and the other of a real watery deluge. In
the _Shatapatha Brâhmana_, Manu finds that the Flood had swept away all
living creatures, and he alone was left—_i.e._, _the seed of life_ alone
remained from the previous Dissolution of the Universe, or Mahâpralaya,
after a “Day of Brahmâ”; and the _Mahâbhârata_ refers simply to the
geological cataclysm which swept away nearly all the Fourth Race to make
room for the Fifth. Therefore is Vaivasvata Manu shown under three
distinct attributes in our Esoteric Cosmogony:(346) as the “Root‐Manu,” on
Globe A, in the First Round; (_b_) as the “_Seed_ of Life,” on Globe D, in
the Fourth Round; and (_c_) as the “Seed of Man,” at the beginning of
every Root‐Race—in our Fifth Race especially. The very commencement of the
latter witnesses, during the Dvâpara Yuga,(347) the destruction of the
accursed sorcerers;

Of that island [Plato speaks only of its last island] beyond the
Pillars of Hercules, in the Atlantic Ocean, from which there was
an easy transition to other islands in the neighbourhood of
another _large continent_ [America].

It is this Atlantic Land which was connected with the “White Island,” and
this White Island was Ruta; but it was not the Atala and the “White Devil”
of Colonel Wilford,(348) as already shown. It may well be remarked here
that the Dvâpara Yuga lasts 864,000 years, according to the Sanskrit
texts; and that, if the Kali Yuga began only about 5,000 years ago, that
it is just 869,000 years since that destruction took place. Again, these
figures are not very widely different from those given by the Geologists,
who place their Glacial Period at 850,000 years ago.

The _Shatapatha_ then tells us that a woman was produced who came to Manu
and declared _herself his daughter, with whom he lived and begat the
offspring of Manu_. This refers to the physiological transformation of
sexes during the Third Root‐Race. And the allegory is too transparently
clear to need much explanation. Of course, as already remarked, in the
separation of sexes an androgyne being was supposed to divide his body
into two halves—as in the case of Brahmâ and Vâch, and even of Adam and
Eve—and thus the female is, in a certain sense, his daughter, just as he
will be her son, “the flesh of his [and her] flesh and the bone of his
[and her] bone.” Let it be also well remembered that not one of our
Orientalists has yet learned to discern in those “contradictions and
amazing nonsense,” as some call the _Purânas_, that a reference to a Yuga
may mean a Round, a Root‐Race, and often a sub‐race, as well as form a
page torn out of pre‐cosmic Theogony. This double and triple meaning is
proved by various references to one and the same individual apparently,
under an identical name, while in reality the references are to events
divided by entire Kalpas. A good instance is that of Ilâ. She is first
represented as one thing and then as another. In the exoteric legends it
is said that Manu Vaivasvata, desiring to create sons, instituted a
sacrifice to Mitra and Varuna; but, through a mistake of the officiating
Brâhman, a daughter only was obtained—Ilâ or Idâ. Then, “through the
favour of the two deities,” her _sex is changed_ and she becomes a man,
Sudyumna. Then she is again turned into a woman, and so on; the fable
adding that Shiva and his consort were pleased that “she should be a male
one month and a female another.” This has a direct reference to the Third
Root‐Race, whose men were androgynes. But some very learned
Orientalists(349) think and have declared that:

Idâ is primarily food, nourishment, or a libation of milk; thence
a stream of praise, personified as the goddess of speech.

The “profane” are not told, however, the reason why “a libation of milk,”
or “a stream of praise,” should be _male_ and _female_ by turn: unless,
indeed, there is some “internal evidence” which the Occultists fail to
perceive.

In its most mystical meaning, the union of Svâyambhuva Manu with Vâch‐
Shata‐Rûpâ, his own daughter—this being the first “euhemerization” of the
dual principle of which Vaivasvata Manu and Ilâ are a secondary and a
third form—stands in cosmic symbolism as the Root‐Life, the Germ from
which spring all the Solar Systems, the Worlds, Angels and the Gods. For,
as says Vishnu:

From Manu all creation, gods, Asuras, man must be produced:
By him the world must be created, that which moves and moveth not.

But we may find worse opponents than even the Western Scientists and
Orientalists. If, on the question of figures, Brâhmans may agree with our
teaching, we are not so sure that some of the orthodox conservatives may
not raise objections to the modes of procreation attributed to their Pitri
Devatâs. We shall be called upon to produce the works from which we quote,
and we will invite them to read their own _Purânas_ a little more
carefully and with an eye to the esoteric meaning. And then, we repeat
again, they will find, under the veil of more or less transparent
allegories, every statement made herein corroborated by their own works.
One or two instances have already been given as regards the appearance of
the Second Race, which is called the “Sweat‐born.” This allegory is
regarded as a fairy‐tale, and yet it conceals a psycho‐physiological
phenomenon, and one of the greatest mysteries of Nature.

But in view of the chronological statements made herein, it is natural to
ask:

COULD MEN EXIST 18,000,000 YEARS AGO?

To this Occultism answers in the affirmative, notwithstanding all
scientific objectors. Moreover, this duration covers only the Vaivasvata‐
Manu Man, _i.e._, the male and female entity already separated into
distinct sexes. The two and a half Races that preceded that event may have
lived 300,000,000 years ago for all that Science can tell. For the
geological and physical difficulties in the way of the theory could not
exist for the _primeval, ethereal_ Man of the Occult Teachings. _The whole
issue of the quarrel between the Profane and the Esoteric Sciences depends
upon the belief in, and demonstration of, the existence of an Astral Body
within the Physical_, the former independent of the latter. Paul d’Assier,
the Positivist, seems to have proven the fact pretty plainly,(350) not to
speak of the accumulated testimony of the ages, and that of the modern
“Spiritualists” and Mystics. It will be found difficult to reject this
fact in our age of proofs, tests, and ocular demonstrations.

The Secret Doctrine maintains that, notwithstanding the general cataclysms
and disturbances of the Fourth Round of our Globe, which—owing to its
being the period of its greatest physical development, for the Fourth
Round is the middle‐point of the Life Cycle allotted to it—were far more
terrible and intense than during any of the three preceding Rounds—the
Cycles of its earlier psychic and spiritual life and of its semi‐ethereal
conditions—Physical Humanity has existed upon it for the last 18,000,000
years.(351) This period was preceded by 300,000,000 years of the mineral
and vegetable development. To this, all those who refuse to accept the
theory of a “boneless,” purely ethereal, man, will object. Science, which
knows only of physical organisms, will feel indignant; and materialistic
Theology still more so. The former will object on logical and reasonable
grounds, based on the preconception that all animate organisms have always
existed on the same plane of materiality in all the ages; the latter on a
tissue of most absurd fictions. The ridiculous claim usually brought
forward by Theologians is based on the virtual assumption that mankind
(read Christians) on this Planet have the honour of being the only human
beings in the whole Kosmos, who dwell on a Globe, and that they are
consequently, the best of their kind.(352)

The Occultists, who believe firmly in the teachings of the Mother‐
Philosophy, repel the objections of both Theologians and Scientists. They
maintain, on their side, that, even during those periods when there must
have been insufferable heat, even at the two poles, with successive
floods, upheaval of the valleys and constant shifting of the great waters
and seas, none of these circumstances could form an impediment to human
life and organization, such _as is assigned by them_ to early mankind.
Neither the heterogeneity of ambient regions, full of deleterious gases,
nor the perils of a crust hardly consolidated, could prevent the First and
Second Races from making their appearance even during the Carboniferous,
or the Silurian Age itself.

Thus the Monads destined to animate future Races were ready for the new
transformation. They had passed their phases of “immetalization,” of plant
and animal life, from the lowest to the highest, and were waiting for
their human, more intelligent form. Yet what could the Plastic Modellers
do but follow the laws of evolutionary Nature? Could they, as claimed by
the biblical dead‐letter, form, “Lord‐God”‐like, or as Pygmalion in the
Greek allegory, Adam‐Galatea out of volcanic dust, and breathe a “Living
Soul” into Man? No; because the Soul was already there, latent in its
Monad, and needed but a “coating.” Pygmalion, who fails to _animate his
statue_, and Bahak Zivo of the Nazaræan Gnostics, who fails to construct
“a human soul in the creature,” are, as conceptions, far more
philosophical and scientific than Adam, taken in the dead‐letter sense, or
the biblical Elohim‐Creators. Esoteric Philosophy, which teaches
spontaneous generation—after the Shishta and Prajâpati have thrown the
seed of life on the Earth—shows the Lower Angels able to construct
_physical_ man only, even with the help of Nature, after having evolved
the Ethereal Form out of themselves, and leaving the physical form to
evolve gradually from its ethereal, or what would now be called,
protoplasmic, model.

This will again be objected to; “spontaneous generation” is an exploded
theory, we shall be told. Pasteur’s experiments disposed of it twenty
years ago, and Professor Tyndall is against it. Well, suppose he is? He
ought to know that, should spontaneous generation be indeed proven
impossible in our present world‐period and actual conditions—which the
Occultists deny—still it would be no demonstration that it could not have
taken place under different cosmic conditions, not only in the seas of the
Laurentian Period, but even on the then convulsed Earth. It would be
interesting to know how Science could ever account for the appearance of
species and life on Earth, especially of Man, once that she rejects both
the biblical teachings and spontaneous generation. Pasteur’s observations,
however, are far from being perfect or proven. Blanchard and Dr. Lutaud
reject their importance, and, in fact, show that they have none. The
question is so far left _sub judice_, as well as the other as to when, at
what period, life appeared on the Earth? As to the idea that Hæckel’s
Moneron—a pinch of salt!—has solved the problem of the origin of life; it
is simply absurd. Those Materialists, who feel inclined to pooh‐pooh the
theory of the “Self‐existent,” the “Self‐born Heavenly Man,” represented
as an Ethereal, Astral Man, must excuse even a tyro in Occultism laughing,
in his turn, at some speculations of Modern Thought. After proving most
learnedly that the primitive speck of Protoplasm (Moneron) is neither
animal nor plant, but both, and that it has _no ancestors_ among either of
these, since it is that Moneron which serves as a point of departure for
all organized existence, we are finally told that the Monera are _their
own ancestors_. This may be very scientific, but it is very metaphysical
also; too much so, even for the Occultist.

If spontaneous generation has changed its methods now—owing, perhaps, to
accumulated material on hand—so as to almost escape detection, it was,
nevertheless, in full swing in the genesis of terrestrial life. Even the
simple physical form and the evolution of species show how Nature
proceeds. The scale‐bound, gigantic Saurian, the winged Pterodactyl, the
Megalosaurus, and the hundred feet long Iguanodon of the later period, are
the transformations of the earliest representatives of the animal kingdom
found in the sediments of the primary epoch. There was a time when all the
above enumerated “antediluvian” monsters appeared as filamentoid Infusoria
without shell or crust, with neither nerves, muscles, organs nor sex, and
reproduced their kind by gemmation; as do microscopical animals also, the
architects and builders of our mountain ranges, agreeably to the teachings
of Science. Why not man in this case? Why should he not have followed the
same law in his growth, _i.e._, gradual condensation? Every unprejudiced
person would prefer to believe that Primeval Humanity had at first an
Ethereal—or, if so preferred, a huge filamentoid, jelly‐like Form, evolved
by Gods or natural “Forces,” which grew, condensed throughout millions of
ages, and became gigantic in its physical impulse and tendency, until it
settled into the huge, physical form of the Fourth Race Man—rather than
believe him created of the dust of the Earth (literally), or from some
unknown anthropoid ancestor.

Nor does our Esoteric theory clash with scientific data, except on first
appearance, as Dr. A. Wilson, F.R.S., says, in a letter to _Knowledge_
(Dec. 23, 1881):

Evolution—rather nature, in the light of evolution—has only been
studied for some _twenty‐five years or so_. That is, of course, a
mere fractional space in the history of human thought.

And just because of this we do not lose all hope that Materialistic
Science will amend its ways, and will gradually accept the Esoteric
Teachings—if even at first divorced from their (to Science) too
metaphysical elements.

Has the last word on the subject of human evolution yet been said? As
Processor Huxley says:

Each such answer to the great question [man’s real place in
nature], invariably asserted by the followers of its propounder,
if not by himself, to be _complete and final_, remains in high
authority and esteem, it may be for one century, it may be for
twenty: but, as invariably, Time proves each reply to have been a
_mere approximation to the truth—tolerable chiefly on account of
the ignorance of those by whom it was accepted, and wholly
intolerable when tested by the larger knowledge of their
successors_.(353)

Will this eminent Darwinian admit the possibility of his “Pithecoid
Ancestry” being assignable to the list of “wholly intolerable beliefs,” in
the “larger knowledge” of Occultists? But whence the savage? Mere “rising
to the civilized state” does not account for the evolution of form.

In the same letter, “The Evolution of Man,” Dr. Wilson makes other strange
confessions. Thus, he observes, in answer to the queries put to
_Knowledge_, by “G. M.”:

“Has evolution effected any change in man? If so, what change? If
not, why not?”... If we refuse to admit [as science does] that man
was created a perfect being, and then became degraded, there
exists only another supposition—that of evolution. If man has
arisen from a savage to a civilized state, that surely is
evolution. _We do not yet know because such knowledge is difficult
to acquire, if the human frame is subject to the same influences
as those of lower animals._ But there is little doubt that
elevation from savagery to civilized life means and implies
“evolution,” and that of considerable extent. Mentally, man’s
evolution cannot be doubted; the ever‐widening sphere of thought
has sprung from small and rude beginnings, like language itself.
But man’s ways of life, his power of adaptation to his
surroundings, and countless other circumstances, have made the
facts and course of his “evolution” very difficult to trace.

This very difficulty ought to make the Evolutionists more cautious in
their affirmations. But why is evolution impossible, if “man was created a
perfect being, and then became degraded”? At best it can only apply to the
_outward, physical man_. As remarked in _Isis Unveiled_, Darwin’s
evolution begins at the middle point, instead of commencing for man, as
for everything else, from universals. The Aristotle‐Baconian method may
have its advantages, but it has, undeniably, already demonstrated its
defects. Pythagoras and Plato, who proceeded from universals downwards,
are now shown more learned, in the light of Modern Science, than was
Aristotle. For the latter opposed and denounced the idea of the revolution
of the Earth and even of its rotundity, when writing:

Almost all those who affirm that they have studied heaven in its
uniformity, claim that the earth is in the centre, but the
philosophers of the Italian School, otherwise called the
Pythagoreans, teach entirely the contrary.

This, because the Pythagoreans were Initiates, and followed the deductive
method. Whereas Aristotle, the father of the inductive system, complained
of those who taught that:

The centre of our system was occupied by the sun, and the earth
was only a star, which by a rotatory motion around the same
centre, produces night and day.(354)

The same with regard to man. The theory taught in the Secret Doctrine, and
now expounded, is the only one, which—without falling into the absurdity
of a “miraculous” man created out of the dust of the earth, or the still
greater fallacy of man evolving from a pinch of lime‐salt, the ex‐
protoplasmic Moneron—can account for his appearance on Earth.

_Analogy_ is the guiding law in Nature, the only true Ariadne’s thread
that can lead us, through the inextricable paths of her domain, toward her
primal and final mysteries. Nature, as a creative potency, is infinite,
and no generation of Physical Scientists can ever boast of having
exhausted the list of her ways and methods, however uniform the laws upon
which she proceeds. If we can conceive of a ball of “fire‐mist”—as it
rolls through æons of time in the interstellar spaces—becoming gradually a
Planet, a self‐luminous Globe, to settle into a _man‐bearing_ World or
Earth, thus having passed from a soft plastic body into a rock‐bound
Globe; and if we see on it everything evolving from the non‐nucleated
jelly‐speck that becomes the Sarcode(355) of the Moneron, then passes from
its protistic state(356) into the form of an animal, to grow into a
gigantic reptilian monster of the Mesozoic times; then dwindling again
into the (comparatively) dwarfish crocodile, now confined solely to
tropical regions, and the universally common lizard(357)—if we can
conceive all this, then how can man alone escape the general law? “There
were giants on earth in those days” says _Genesis_, repeating the
statement of all the other Eastern Scriptures; and the Titans are founded
on an anthropological and physiological fact.

And, as the hard‐shelled crustacean was once upon a time a jelly‐speck, a
“thoroughly homogeneous particle of albumen in a firmly adhesive
condition,” so was the outward covering of primitive man, his early “coat
of skin,” _plus_ an immortal spiritual Monad, and a psychic temporary form
and body within that shell. The modern, hard, muscular man, almost
impervious to any climate, was, perhaps, some 25,000,000 years ago, just
what the Hæckelian Moneron is, strictly an “organism without organs,” an
entirely homogeneous substance with a structureless albumen body within,
and a human form only outwardly.

No man of Science has the right, in this century, to find the figures of
the Brâhmans in the question of chronology preposterous; for their own
calculations often exceed by far the claims made by Esoteric Science. This
may easily be shown.

Helmholtz calculated that the cooling of our Earth from a temperature of
2,000° to 200° Cent. must have occupied a period of no less than
350,000,000 years. Western Science (including Geology) seems generally to
allow our Globe an age of about 500,000,000 years altogether. Sir William
Thomson, however, limits the appearance of the earliest vegetable life to
100,000,000 years ago—a statement respectfully contradicted by the Archaic
Records. Speculations, furthermore, vary daily in the domains of Science.
Meanwhile, some Geologists are very much opposed to such limitation.
Volger calculates:

That the time requisite for the deposit of the strata known to us
must at least have amounted to 648 millions of years.

Both time and space are infinite and eternal.

The earth, as a material existence, is indeed infinite; the
changes only which it has undergone can be determined by finite
periods of time....

We must therefore assume that the starry heaven is not merely in
space, which no astronomer doubts, but also in time, without
beginning or end; that it never was created, and is
imperishable.(358)

Czolbe repeats exactly what the Occultists say. But the Âryan Occultists,
we may be told, knew nothing of these later speculations. As Coleman says:

They were even ignorant of the globular form of our earth.

To this the _Vishnu Purâna_ contains a reply, which has forced certain
Orientalists to open their eyes very wide.

The sun is stationed, for all time, in the middle of the day, and
over against mid‐night, in all the Dvîpas [Continents], Maitreya.
But the rising and the setting _of the sun_ being perpetually
opposite _to each other_,—and, in the same way, all the cardinal
points, and so the cross‐points, Maitreya, people speak of the
rising of the sun where they see it; and where the sun disappears,
there, _to them_, is his setting. Of the sun, which is always _in
one and the same place_, there is neither setting nor rising; for
what is called rising and setting are _only_ the seeing and the
not seeing the sun.(359)

To this Fitzedward Hall remarks:

The heliocentricism taught in this passage is remarkable. It is
contradicted, however, a little further on.(360)

Contradicted _purposely_, because it was a secret temple‐teaching. Martin
Haug remarked the same teaching in another passage. It is useless to
calumniate the Âryans any longer.

To return to the chronology of the Geologists and Anthropologists. We are
afraid Science has no reasonable grounds on which she could oppose the
views of the Occultists in this direction. Except that “of man, the
highest organic being of creation, not a trace was found in the primary
strata; only in the uppermost, the so‐called alluvial layer,” is all that
can be urged, so far. That man was _not the last member in the mammalian
family_, but the _first_ in _this_ Round, is something that Science will
be forced to acknowledge one day. A similar view also has already been
mooted in France on very high authority.

That man can be shown to have lived in the Mid‐Tertiary Period, and in a
geological age _when there did not yet exist one single specimen of the
now known species of mammals_, is a statement that Science _cannot_ deny
and which has now been proven by de Quatrefages.(361) But even supposing
his existence in the Eocene Period is not yet demonstrated, what period of
time has elapsed since the Cretaceous Period? We are aware of the fact
that only the boldest Geologists dare place man further back than the
Miocene Age. But how long, we ask, is the duration of those ages and
periods since the Mesozoic time? On this, after a good deal of speculation
and wrangling, Science is silent, the greatest authorities upon the
subject being compelled to answer to the question: “We do not know.” This
ought to show that the men of Science are no greater authorities in this
matter than are the profane. If, according to Professor Huxley, “the time
represented by the Coal formation alone would be six millions of
years,”(362) how many more millions would be required to cover the time
from the Jurassic Period, or the middle of the so‐called Reptilian
Age—when the Third Race appeared—up to the Miocene, when the bulk of the
Fourth Race was submerged?(363)

The writer is aware that those specialists, whose computations of the ages
of the Globe and Man are the most liberal, have always had the shyer
majority against them. But this proves very little, since the majority
rarely, if ever, turns out to be right in the long run. Harvey stood alone
for many years. The advocates for crossing the Atlantic with steamers were
in danger of ending their days in a lunatic asylum. Mesmer is classed to
this day—in the Encyclopædias—along with Cagliostro and St. Germain, as a
charlatan and impostor. And now that Messrs. Charcot and Richet have
vindicated Mesmer’s claims, and that Mesmerism under its new name of
“Hypnotism”—a false nose on a very old face—is accepted by Science, it
does not strengthen our respect for that majority, when we see the ease
and unconcern with which its members treat of “Hypnotism,” of “telepathic
impacts,” and its other phenomena. They speak of it, in short, as if they
had believed therein since the days of Solomon, and had not, only a few
years ago, called its votaries lunatics and impostors!(364)

The same revulsion of thought is in store for the long period of years
which Esoteric Philosophy claims as the age of sexual and physiological
mankind. Therefore even the Stanza which says: “_The Mind‐born, the
boneless, gave being to the Will‐born with bones_;”—adding that this took
place in the middle of the Third Race 18,000,000 years ago—has yet a
chance of being accepted by future Scientists.

As far as nineteenth century thought is concerned, we shall be told, even
by some personal friends who are imbued with an abnormal respect for the
shifting conclusions of Science, that such a statement is absurd. How much
more improbable will appear our further assertion, viz., that the
antiquity of the First Race dates back millions of years beyond this
again. For, although the exact figures are withheld—and it is out of the
question to refer the incipient evolution of the primeval Divine Races
with _certainty_ to either the early Secondary, or the Primary Ages of
Geology—one thing is clear, that the figures 18,000,000 of years, which
embrace the duration of _sexual, physical_, man, have to be enormously
increased if the whole process of spiritual, astral and physical
development is taken into account. Many Geologists, indeed, consider that
the duration of the Quaternary and Tertiary Ages demands the concession of
such an estimate; and it is quite certain that no terrestrial conditions
whatever negative the hypothesis of an Eocene man, if evidence for his
reality is forthcoming. Occultists, who maintain that the above date
carries us far back into the Secondary or “Reptilian” Age, may refer to M.
de Quatrefages in support of the possible existence of man in that remote
antiquity. But with regard to the earliest Root‐Races the case is very
different. If the thick agglomeration of vapours, charged with carbonic
acid, that escaped from the soil, or was held in suspension in the
atmosphere since the commencement of sedimentation, offered a fatal
obstacle to the life of human organisms as now known, how, it will be
asked, could the primeval men have existed? This consideration is, in
reality, out of court. Such terrestrial conditions as were then operative
had no touch with the plane on which the evolution of the _ethereal
astral_ Races proceeded. Only in relatively recent geological periods, has
the spiral course of cyclic law swept mankind into the lowest grade of
physical evolution—the plane of gross material causation. In those early
ages, _astral_ evolution was alone in progress, and the two planes, the
astral and the physical,(365) though developing on parallel lines, had no
direct point of contact with one another. It is obvious that a shadow‐like
_ethereal_ man is related by virtue of his organization—if such it can be
called—only to that plane from which the substance of his Upâdhi is
derived.

There are things, perhaps, that may have escaped the far‐seeing—but not
_all‐seeing_—eyes of our modern Naturalists; yet it is Nature herself who
undertakes to furnish the missing links. Agnostic speculative thinkers
have to choose between the version given by the Secret Doctrine of the
East, and the hopelessly materialistic Darwinian and Biblical accounts of
the origin of man; between no soul and no spiritual evolution, and the
Occult doctrine which repudiates “special creation” and the “Evolutionist”
anthropogenesis equally.

Again, to take up the question of “spontaneous generation”; life—as
Science shows—has not always reigned on this terrestrial plane. There was
a time when even the Hæckelian Moneron—that simple globule of
Protoplasm—had not yet appeared at the bottom of the seas. Whence came the
_Impulse_ which caused the molecules of Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, etc., to
group themselves into the Urschleim of Oken, that organic “Slime,” now
christened Protoplasm? What were the prototypes of the Monera? They, at
least, could not have fallen in meteorites from other Globes already
formed, Sir William Thomson’s wild theory to this effect notwithstanding.
And even if they had so fallen; if our Earth got its supply of life‐germs
from other Planets; who, or _what_, had carried them on to these Planets?
Here, again, unless the Occult Teaching is accepted, we are compelled once
more to face a _miracle_—to accept the theory of a personal,
anthropomorphic Creator, the attributes and definitions of whom, as
formulated by the Monotheists, clash as much with philosophy and logic, as
they degrade the ideal of an infinite Universal Deity, before whose
incomprehensible awful grandeur the highest human intellect feels dwarfed.
Let not the modern Philosopher, while arbitrarily placing himself on the
highest pinnacle of human intellectuality hitherto evolved, show himself
spiritually and intuitionally so far below the conceptions of even the
ancient Greeks, themselves on a far lower level, in these respects, than
the Philosophers of Eastern Âryan antiquity. Hylozoism, when
philosophically understood, is the highest aspect of Pantheism. It is the
only possible escape from idiotic Atheism based on lethal materiality, and
the still more idiotic anthropomorphic conceptions of the Monotheists;
between which it stands on its own entirely neutral ground. Hylozoism
_demands_ absolute Divine Thought, which would _pervade_ the numberless
active, creating Forces, or “Creators,” which _Entities_ are moved by, and
have their being in, from, and through, that Divine Thought; the latter,
nevertheless, having no more personal concern in them or _their_
creations, than the Sun has in the sun‐flower and its seeds, or in
vegetation in general. Such active “Creators” are known to exist and are
believed in, because perceived and sensed by the _Inner_ Man in the
Occultist. Thus the latter says that an Absolute Deity, having to be
unconditioned and unrelated, cannot be thought of at the same time as an
active, creating, one living God, without immediate degradation of the
ideal.(366) A Deity that manifests in Space and Time—these two being
simply the forms of THAT which is the Absolute ALL—can be but a fractional
part of the whole. And since that “All” cannot be divided in its
absoluteness, therefore that _sensed_ Creator (we say Creators) can be at
best but the mere _aspect_ thereof. To use the same metaphor—inadequate to
express the full idea, yet well adapted to the case in hand—these Creators
are like the numerous rays of the solar orb, which remains unconscious of,
and unconcerned in, the work; while its mediating agents, the rays, become
the instrumental media every spring—the Manvantaric dawn of the Earth—in
fructifying and awakening the dormant vitality inherent in Nature and its
differentiated matter. This was so well understood in antiquity, that even
the moderately religious Aristotle remarked that such work of direct
creation would be quite unbecoming to God—ἀπρεπὲς τῷ Θεῷ. Plato and other
philosophers taught the same: deity cannot set its own hand to
creation—αὐτουργεῖν ἅπαντα. This Cudworth calls “Hylozoism.” As old Zeno
is credited by Laërtius with having said:

Nature is a habit moved from itself, according to seminal
principles; perfecting and containing those several things which
in determinate times are produced from it, and acting agreeably to
that from which it was secreted.(367)

Let us return to our subject, pausing to think over it. Indeed, if there
was vegetable life during those periods that could feed on the then
deleterious elements; and if there was even animal life whose aquatic
organization could be developed, notwithstanding the supposed scarcity of
Oxygen, why could there not be human life also, in its incipient physical
form, _i.e._, in a race of beings adapted for that geological period and
its surroundings? Besides, Science confesses that it knows nothing of the
real length of geological periods.

But the chief question before us is, whether it is quite certain that,
from the time of that which is called the Azoic Age, there ever was such
an atmosphere as that hypothesized by the Naturalists. Not all the
Physicists agree with this idea. Were the writer anxious to corroborate
the teachings of the Secret Doctrine by exact Science, it would be easy to
show, on the admission of more than one Physicist, that the atmosphere has
changed little, if at all, since the first condensation of the
oceans—_i.e._, since the Laurentian Period, the Pyrolithic Age. Such, at
any rate, is the opinion of Blanchard, S. Meunier, and even of Bischof—as
the experiments of the last Scientist with basalts have shown. For were we
to take the word of the majority of Scientists as to the quantity of
deadly gases, and of elements entirely saturated with Carbon and Nitrogen,
in which the vegetable and animal kingdoms are shown to have lived,
thriven, and developed, then one would have to come to the curious
conclusion that there were, in those days, oceans of _liquid carbonic
acid_, instead of water. With such an element, it becomes doubtful whether
the Ganoids, or even the Primitive Trilobites themselves could live in the
oceans of the Primary Age—let alone in those of the Silurian, as shown by
Blanchard.

The conditions that were necessary for the earliest Race of mankind,
however, require no elements, whether simple or compound. That which was
stated at the beginning is maintained. The spiritual ethereal Entity which
lived in Spaces unknown to Earth, before the first sidereal “jelly‐speck”
evolved in the Ocean of crude Cosmic Matter—billions and trillions of
years before our globular speck in infinity, called Earth, came into being
and generated the Monera in its drops, called oceans—needed no “elements.”
The “Manu with soft bones,” could well dispense with Calcium Phosphate, as
he had no bones, save in a figurative sense. And while even the Monera,
however homogeneous their organism, still required physical conditions of
life that would help them toward further evolution, the Being which became
Primitive Man and the “Father of Man,” after evolving on planes of
existence undreamed of by Science, could well remain impervious to any
state of atmospheric conditions around him. The primitive ancestor, in
Brasseur de Bourbourg’s _Popol Vuh_, who—in the Mexican legends—could act
and live with equal ease under ground and water as upon the earth, answers
only to the Second and early Third Races in our texts. And if the three
kingdoms of Nature were so different in pre‐diluvian ages, why should not
man have been composed of materials and combinations of atoms now entirely
unknown to Physical Science? The plants and animals now known, in almost
numberless varieties and species, have all developed, according to
scientific hypotheses, from primitive and far fewer organic forms. Why
should not the same have occurred in the case of man, the elements, and
the rest? As the Commentary says:

_Universal Genesis starts from the One, breaks into Three, then Five, and
finally culminates in Seven, to return into Four, Three, and One._

Stanza VII. From The Semi‐Divine Down To The First Human Races.

24. The higher Creators reject in their pride the Forms evolved by
the “Sons of Yoga.” 25. They will not incarnate in the early Egg‐
born. 26. They select the later Androgynes. 27. The first man
endowed with mind.

24. THE SONS OF WISDOM, THE SONS OF NIGHT,(368) READY FOR REBIRTH, CAME
DOWN. THEY SAW THE VILE(369) FORMS OF THE FIRST THIRD(370) (_A_). “WE CAN
CHOOSE,” SAID THE LORDS, “WE HAVE WISDOM.” SOME ENTERED THE CHHÂYÂS. SOME
PROJECTED A SPARK. SOME DEFERRED TILL THE FOURTH.(371) FROM THEIR OWN RÛPA
THEY FILLED(372) THE KÂMA.(373) THOSE WHO ENTERED BECAME ARHATS. THOSE WHO
RECEIVED BUT A SPARK, REMAINED DESTITUTE OF KNOWLEDGE;(374) THE SPARK
BURNED LOW (_B_). THE THIRD REMAINED MIND‐LESS. THEIR JÎVAS(375) WERE NOT
READY. THESE WERE SET APART AMONG THE SEVEN.(376) THEY BECAME NARROW‐
HEADED. THE THIRD WERE READY. “IN THESE SHALL WE DWELL,” SAID THE LORDS OF
THE FLAME AND OF THE DARK WISDOM (_C_).

This Stanza contains, in itself, the whole key to the mysteries of evil,
the so‐called Fall of the Angels, and the many problems that have puzzled
the brains of the Philosophers from the time that the memory of man began.
It solves the secret of the subsequent inequalities or intellectual
capacity, of birth or social position, and gives a logical explanation to
the incomprehensible Karmic course throughout the æons which followed. The
best explanation which can be given, in view of the difficulties of the
subject, will now be attempted.

(_a_) Up to the Fourth Round, and even to the later part of the Third Race
in this Round, _Man_—if the ever‐changing forms that clothed the Monads
during the first three Rounds and the first two and a half Races of the
present Round can be given that misleading name—is, so far, only an animal
intellectually. It is only in the present _midway_ Round that he entirely
develops in himself the Fourth Principle as a fit vehicle for the Fifth.
But Manas will be relatively _fully_ developed only in the following
Round, when it will have an opportunity of becoming entirely divine until
the end of the Rounds. As Christian Schœttgen says in _Horæ Hebraicæ_,
etc., the first terrestrial Adam “had only the breath of life,”—Nephesh,
_but not the living Soul_.

(_b_) Here the inferior Races, of which there are still some analogues
left—as the Australians, now fast dying out, and some African and Oceanic
tribes—are meant. “They were not ready” signifies that the Karmic
development of these Monads had not yet fitted them to occupy the forms of
men destined for incarnation in higher intellectual Races. But this is
explained later on.

(_c_) The _Zohar_ speaks of “Black Fire,” which is Absolute Light—Wisdom.
To those who, prompted by old theological prejudice, may say: But the
Asuras are the rebel Devas, the opponents of the Gods—hence Devils, and
the Spirits of Evil—it is answered: Esoteric Philosophy admits neither
good nor evil _per se_, as existing independently in Nature. The cause for
both is found, as regards the Kosmos, in the necessity of contraries or
contrasts, and with respect to man, in his human nature, his ignorance and
passions. There are no Devils or the utterly depraved, as there are no
Angels absolutely perfect, though there may be Spirits of Light and of
Darkness; thus Lucifer—the Spirit of Intellectual Enlightenment and
Freedom of Thought—is metaphorically the guiding beacon, which helps man
to find his way through the rocks and sand‐banks of Life, for Lucifer is
the Logos in his highest, and the “Adversary” in his lowest aspect—both of
which are reflected in our Ego. Lactantius, speaking of the Nature of
Christ, makes the Logos, the Word, “the _first‐born brother of Satan_, and
_the first of all creatures_.”(377)

The _Vishnu Purâna_ describes these primeval creatures (Tiryaksrotas) with
_crooked_ digestive canals:

[They were] endowed with inward manifestations, but mutually in
ignorance _about their kind and nature_.(378)

The twenty‐eight kinds of Badhas, or “imperfections,” do not apply, as
Wilson thought, to the animals now known, which are specified by him, for
they did not exist in those geological periods. This is quite plain from
the said work, in which the first created are the “five‐fold (immovable)
world,” minerals and vegetables; then come those fabulous animals,
Tiryaksrotas—the monsters of the Abyss, slain by the “Lords,” of Stanzas
II and III; then the Ûrdhvasrotas, the happy celestial beings, which feed
on ambrosia; and lastly, the Arvâksrotas, human beings—Brahmâ’s seventh
“creation” so‐called. But these “creations,” including the latter, did not
occur on this Globe, wherever else they may have taken place. It is not
Brahmâ who creates things and men on this Earth, but the Chief and Lord of
the Prajâpatis, the Lords of Being and terrestrial Creation. “Obeying the
command of Brahmâ,” Daksha—the synthesis, or the aggregate, of the
Terrestrial Creators and Progenitors, the Pitris included—made superior
and inferior (vara and avara) things, “referring to putra” progeny, and
“_bipeds_ and _quadrupeds_, and subsequently, by his will [referring to
the Sons of Will and Yoga], gave birth to females”(379)—_i.e._, separated
the androgynes. Here, again, we have “bipeds” or men, created before the
“quadrupeds” as in the Esoteric Teachings.

Since, in the exoteric accounts, the Asuras are the first Beings created
from the “Body of Night,” while the Pitris issue from that of “Twilight”;
the “Gods” being placed by Parâshara, in the _Vishnu Purâna_, between the
two, and shown to evolve from the “Body of the Day,” it is easy to
discover a determined purpose to veil the order of creation. Man is the
Arvâksrota coming from the “Body of the Dawn”; and elsewhere, man is again
referred to, when the Creator of the World, Brahmâ, is shown “creating
fierce beings, who were denominated Bhûtas, and eaters of flesh,” or as
the text has it, “fiends, frightful from being monkey‐coloured and
carnivorous.”(380) Whereas the Râkshasas are generally translated by “evil
Spirits” and “enemies of the Gods,” which identifies them with the Asuras.
In the _Râmâyana_, when Hanumân is reconnoitering the enemy in Lankâ, he
finds there Râkshasas, some hideous, “while some were beautiful to look
upon,” and, in the _Vishnu Purâna_, there is a direct reference to their
becoming the Saviours of “Humanity,” or of Brahmâ.

The allegory is very ingenious. Great intellect and too much knowledge are
a two‐edged weapon in life, and instruments for evil as well as for good.
When combined with selfishness, they will make of the whole of Humanity a
footstool for the elevation of him who possesses them, and a means for the
attainment of his objects; while, applied to altruistic humanitarian
purposes, they may become the means of the salvation of many. At all
events, the absence of self‐consciousness and intellect will make of man
an idiot, a brute in human form. Brahmâ is Mahat, the Universal Mind;
hence the too selfish among the Râkshasas showing the desire to become
possessed of it all—to “devour” Mahat. The allegory is transparent.

At any rate, Esoteric Philosophy identifies the pre‐Brâhmanical Asuras,
Rudras,(381) Râkshasas and all the “Adversaries” of the Gods in the
allegories, with the Egos, which, by incarnating in the still witless man
of the Third Race, made him _consciously_ immortal. They are, then, during
the cycle of Incarnations, the true _dual_ Logos—the conflicting and two‐
faced Divine Principle in Man. The Commentary that follows, and the next
Stanzas may, no doubt, throw more light on this very difficult tenet, but
the writer does not feel competent to give it out fully. Of the succession
of Races, however, the Commentary says:

_First come the __SELF‐EXISTENT__ on this Earth. They are the
__“__Spiritual Lives__”__ projected by the absolute __WILL__ and __LAW__,
at the Dawn of every Rebirth of the Worlds. These Lives are the divine
__“__Shishta__”__ [the Seed‐Manus, or the Prajâpatis and the Pitris]._

From these proceed:

1. _The First Race, the __“__Self‐born,__”__ which are the [Astral]
Shadows of their Progenitors. The Body was devoid of all understanding
[mind, intelligence, and will]. The Inner Being [the Higher Self, or
Monad], though within the earthly frame, was unconnected with it. The
link, the Manas, was not there as yet._

2. _From the First [Race] emanated the Second, called the __“__Sweat‐
born__”_(_382_)_ and the __“__Boneless.__”__ This is the Second Root‐Race,
endowed by the Preservers [Râkshasas]_(_383_)_ and the Incarnating Gods
[the Asuras and Kumâras] with the first primitive and weak Spark [the germ
of intelligence]...._

And from these in turn proceeds:

3. _The Third Root‐Race, the __“__Two‐fold__”__ [Androgynes]. The first
Races thereof are Shells, till the last is __“__inhabited__”__ [i.e.,
informed] by the Dhyânîs._

The Second Race, as stated above, being also sexless, evolved out of
itself, at its beginning, the Third, Androgyne Race by an analogous, but
already more complicated process. As described in the Commentary, the very
earliest of that Race were:

_The __“__Sons of Passive Yoga.__”_(_384_)_ They issued from the Second
Manushyas [Human Race], and became oviparous. The emanations that came out
of their bodies during the seasons of procreation were ovulary; the small
spheroidal nuclei developing into a large soft, egg‐like vehicle,
gradually hardened, when, after a period of gestation, it broke and the
young human animal issued from it unaided, as the fowls do in our Race._

This must seem to the reader ludicrously absurd. Nevertheless, it is
strictly on the lines of evolutionary analogy, which Science perceives in
the development of the living animal species. First the moneron‐like
procreation by “self‐division”; then, after a few stages, the oviparous,
as in the case of the reptiles, which are followed by the birds; then,
finally, the mammals with their ovoviviparous modes of producing their
young ones.

If the term “ovoviviparous” is applied to some fish and reptiles, which
hatch their eggs within their bodies, why should it not be applied to
female mammalians, including woman? The ovule, in which, after
impregnation, the development of the fœtus takes place, is an egg.

At all events, this conception is more philosophical than that of Eve with
a suddenly created placenta giving birth to Cain, because of the “apple,”
when even the marsupial, the earliest of mammals, is not placental yet.

Moreover, the progressive order of the methods of reproduction, as
unveiled by Science, is a brilliant confirmation of Esoteric Ethnology, It
is only necessary to tabulate the data in order to prove our
assertion.(385)

I. Fission.

(_a_) As seen in the division of the homogeneous speck of Protoplasm,
known as Moneron or Amœba, into two.

(_b_) As seen in the division of the nucleated cell, in which the cell‐
nucleus splits into two sub‐nuclei, which either develop within the
original cell‐wall or burst it, and multiply outside as independent
entities. (_Cf._ the First Root‐Race.)

II. Budding.

A small portion of the parent structure swells out at the surface and
finally parts company, growing to the size of the original organism;
_e.g._, many vegetables, the sea‐anemone, etc. (_Cf._ the Second Root‐
Race.)(386)

III. Spores.

A single cell thrown off by the parent organism, which develops into a
multicellular organism reproducing the features of the latter, _e.g._,
Bacteria and mosses.

IV. Intermediate Hermaphroditism.

Male and female organs inhering in the same individual; _e.g._, the
majority of plants, worms, and snails, etc.; allied to budding. (_Cf._
Second and early Third Root‐Races.)

V. True Sexual Union.

(_Cf._ later Third Root‐Race.)

We now come to an important point with regard to the double evolution of
the human race. The Sons of Wisdom, or the _Spiritual_, Dhyânîs had become
“intellectual” through their contact with Matter, because they had already
reached, during previous cycles of incarnation, that degree of intellect
which enabled them to become independent and self‐conscious entities, _on
this plane_ of Matter. They were reborn only by reason of Karmic effects.
They _entered_ those who were “ready,” and became the Arhats, or Sages,
alluded to above. This needs explanation.

It does not mean that Monads entered Forms in which other Monads already
were. They were “Essences,” “Intelligences,” and Conscious Spirits;
Entities seeking to become still more conscious by uniting with more
developed Matter. Their essence was too pure to be distinct from the
Universal Essence; but their “Egos,” or Manas (since they are called
Mânasaputra, born of Mahat, or Brahmâ) had to pass through earthly human
experiences to become _all‐wise_, and be able to start on the returning
ascending cycle. The Monads are not _discrete_ principles, limited or
conditioned, but rays from that one universal _absolute_ Principle. The
entrance of one ray of sunlight following another through the same
aperture into a dark room will not constitute _two_ rays, but one ray
intensified. It is not in the course of natural law that man should become
a _perfect_ Septenary Being before the Seventh Race in the Seventh Round.
Yet he has all these principles latent in him from his birth. Nor is it
part of the evolutionary law that the Fifth Principle (Manas), should
receive its complete development before the Fifth Round. All such
prematurely developed intellects (on the _spiritual_ plane) in our Race
are _abnormal_; they are those whom we have called the “Fifth‐Rounders.”
Even in the coming Seventh Race, at the close of this Fourth Round, while
our four lower principles will be fully developed, that of Manas will be
only proportionately so. This limitation, however, refers solely to the
spiritual development. The intellectual, on the physical plane, was
reached during the Fourth Root‐Race. Thus, those who were “half ready,”
who received “but a spark,” constitute the average humanity which have to
acquire their intellectuality during the present Manvantaric evolution,
after which they will be ready in the next for the full reception of the
“Sons of Wisdom.” While those which “were not ready” at all, the latest
Monads, which had hardly evolved from their last transitional and lower
animal forms at the close of the Third Round, remained the “narrow‐
brained” of the Stanza. This explains the otherwise unaccountable degrees
of intellectuality among the various races of men—the savage Bushman and
the European—even now. Those tribes of savages, whose reasoning powers are
very little above the level of the animals, are not the unjustly
disinherited, or the “unfavoured,” as some may think—nothing of the kind.
They are simply those _latest arrivals_ among the human Monads, which
“were not ready”; which have to evolve during the present Round, as also
on the three remaining Globes—hence on four different planes of being—so
as to arrive at the level of the average class when they reach the Fifth
Round. One remark may prove useful, as food for thought to the student in
this connection. The Monads of the lowest specimens of humanity—the
“narrow‐brained”(387) savage South‐Sea Islander, the African, the
Australian—_had no Karma to work out when first born as men, as their more
favoured brethren in intelligence had_. The former are spinning out Karma
only now; the latter are burdened with past, present and future Karma. In
this respect the poor savage is more fortunate than the greatest genius of
_civilized countries_.

Let us pause before giving any more such strange teachings. Let us try and
find out how far any ancient Scriptures, and even Science, permit the
possibility of, or even distinctly corroborate, such wild notions as are
found in our Anthropogenesis.

Recapitulating that which has been said, we find that the Secret Doctrine
claims for man: (1) a polygenetic origin; (2) a variety of modes of
procreation before humanity fell into the ordinary method of generation;
(3) that the evolution of animals—of the mammalians at any rate—follows
that of man instead of preceding it. And this is diametrically opposed to
the now generally accepted theories of evolution and the descent of man
from an animal ancestor.

Let us, giving to Cæsar what is Cæsar’s, examine, first of all, the
chances for the polygenetic theory among the men of Science.

Now the majority of the Darwinian Evolutionists incline to a polygenetic
explanation of the origin of races. On this particular question, however,
as in many other cases, Scientists are at sixes and sevens; they agree to
disagree.

Does man descend from one _single couple_ or from _several
groups_—monogenism or polygenism? As far as one can venture to
pronounce on what in the absence of witnesses [?] will never be
known [?], the second hypothesis is far the most probable.(388)

Abel Hovelacque, in his _Science of Language_, comes to a similar
conclusion, arguing from the evidence available to a linguistic enquirer.

In an address delivered before the British Association, Professor W. H.
Flower remarked on this question:

The view which appears best to accord with what is now known of
the characters and distribution of the races of man ... is a
modification of the monogenistic hypothesis[!]. Without entering
into the difficult question of the method of man’s first
appearance upon the world, we must assume for it a vast antiquity,
at all events as measured by any historical standard. _If we had
any approach to a complete palæontological record, the history of
man could be re‐constructed, but nothing of the kind is
forthcoming._

Such an admission must be regarded as fatal to the dogmatism of the
Physical Evolutionists, and as opening a wide margin to Occult
speculations. The opponents of the Darwinian theory were, and still
remain, polygenists. Such “intellectual giants” as John Crawford and James
Hunt discussed the problem and favoured polygenesis, and in their day
there was a far stronger feeling in favour of than against this theory. It
was only in 1864 that Darwinians began to be wedded to the theory of
unity, of which Messrs. Huxley and Lubbock became the first coryphæi.

As regards the other question, of the priority of man to the animals in
the order of evolution, the answer is as promptly given. If man is really
the Microcosm of the Macrocosm, then the teaching has nothing so very
impossible in it, and is but logical. For, man becomes that Macrocosm for
the three lower kingdoms under him. Arguing from a physical standpoint,
all the lower kingdoms, save the mineral—which is light itself,
crystallized and immetallized—from plants to the creatures which preceded
the first mammalians, all have been consolidated in their physical
structures by means of the “cast‐off dust” of those minerals, and _the
refuse of the human matter, whether from living or dead bodies, on which
they fed and which gave them their outer bodies_. In his turn also, man
grew more physical, by reäbsorbing into his system that which he had given
out, and which became transformed in the living animal crucibles through
which it had passed, owing to Nature’s alchemical transmutations. There
were animals in those days of which our Modern Naturalists have never
dreamed; and the stronger became physical material man—the giants of those
times—the more powerful were his emanations. Once that Androgyne Humanity
separated into sexes, transformed by Nature into child‐bearing engines, it
ceased to procreate its like through drops of vital energy oozing out of
the body. But while man was still ignorant of his procreative powers on
the human plane—before his Fall, as a believer in Adam would say—all this
vital energy, scattered far and wide from him, was used by Nature for the
production of the first mammal‐animal forms. Evolution is _an eternal
cycle of becoming_, we are taught; and Nature never leaves an atom unused.
Moreover, from the beginning of the Round, all in Nature tends to become
Man. All the impulses of the dual, centripetal and centrifugal Force are
directed towards one point—_Man_. The progress in the succession of
beings, says Agassiz:

Consists in an increasing similarity of the living fauna, and
among the vertebrates, especially, in the increasing resemblance
to man. Man is the end towards which all _animal_ creation has
tended from the first appearance of the first palæozoic
fishes.(389)

Just so; but the “palæozoic fishes” are at the lower curve of the arc of
the evolution of _forms_, and this Round began with Astral Man, the
_reflection_ of the Dhyân Chohans, called the “Builders.” Man is the
_alpha and the omega_ of objective creation. As said in _Isis Unveiled_:

All things had their origin in Spirit—evolution having originally
begun from above and proceeding downwards, instead of the reverse,
as taught in the Darwinian theory.(390)

Therefore, the tendency spoken of by the eminent Naturalist above quoted
is one inherent in every atom. Only, were one to apply it to both sides of
evolution, the observations made would greatly interfere with the modern
theory, which has now almost become (Darwinian) law.

But in citing the passage from Agassiz’ work with approval, it must not be
understood that the Occultists are making any _concession_ to the theory
which derives man from the animal kingdom. The fact that in this Round he
preceded the mammalia is obviously not impugned by the consideration that
the latter follow in the wake of man.

25. HOW DID THE MÂNASA, THE SONS OF WISDOM, ACT? THEY REJECTED THE SELF‐
BORN.(391) THEY ARE NOT READY. THEY SPURNED THE SWEAT‐BORN.(392) THEY ARE
NOT QUITE READY. THEY WOULD NOT ENTER THE FIRST EGG‐BORN.(393)

To a Theist or a Christian this verse would suggest a rather theological
idea: that of the Fall of the Angels through Pride. In the Secret
Doctrine, however, the reasons for the refusal to incarnate in _half‐
ready_ physical bodies seem to be more connected with physiological than
metaphysical reasons. Not all the organisms were sufficiently ready. The
Incarnating Powers chose the ripest fruits and spurned the rest.

By a curious coincidence, when selecting a familiar name for the continent
on which the first Androgynes, the Third Root‐Race, separated, the writer
chose, on geographical considerations, that of “Lemuria,” invented by Mr.
P. L. Sclater. It was only later that, on reading Hæckel’s _Pedigree of
Man_, it was found that the German “Animalist” had chosen the name for his
late continent. He traces, properly enough, the centre of human evolution
to Lemuria, but with a slight scientific variation. Speaking of it as that
“cradle of mankind,” he pictures the gradual transformation of the
anthropoid mammal into the primeval savage!! Vogt, again, holds that in
America man sprang from a branch of the platyrrhine apes, _independently_
of the origination of the African and Asian root‐stocks from the old world
catarrhinians. Anthropologists are, as usual, at loggerheads on this
question, as on many others. We shall examine this claim in the light of
Esoteric Philosophy in Stanza VIII. Meanwhile, let us give a few moments
of attention to the various consecutive modes of procreation according to
the laws of Evolution.

Let us begin by the mode of reproduction of the later sub‐races of the
Third Human Race, by those who found themselves endowed with the “Sacred
Fire” from the Spark of higher and then independent Beings, who were the
psychic and spiritual Parents of Man, as the lower Pitri Devatâs (the
Pitris) were the Progenitors of his physical body. That Third and holy
Race consisted of men who, at their zenith, were described as “towering
giants of godly strength and beauty, and the depositories of all the
mysteries of Heaven and Earth.” Have they likewise _fallen_, if, then,
incarnation was the “Fall”?

Of this presently. The only thing now to be noted of these is, that the
chief Gods and Heroes of the Fourth and Fifth Races, as of later
antiquity, are the _deified images of these Men of the Third_. The days of
their physiological purity, and those of their so‐called Fall, have
equally survived in the hearts and memories of their descendants. Hence,
the dual nature shown in these Gods, both virtue and sin being exalted to
their highest degree, in the biographies composed by posterity. They were
the Pre‐Adamite and the Divine Races, with which even Theology, in whose
sight they are all the “accursed Cainite races,” now begins to busy
itself.

But the action of the “Spiritual Progenitors” of that Race has first to be
disposed of. A very difficult and abstruse point has to be explained with
regard to Shlokas 26 and 27.

26. WHEN THE SWEAT‐BORN PRODUCED THE EGG‐BORN, THE TWO‐FOLD,(394) THE
MIGHTY, THE POWERFUL WITH BONES, THE LORDS OF WISDOM SAID: “NOW SHALL WE
CREATE.”

Why “now”—and not earlier? This the following Shloka explains.

27. THE THIRD RACE BECAME THE VÂHAN(395) OF THE LORDS OF WISDOM. IT
CREATED SONS OF WILL AND YOGA, BY KRIYÂSHAKTI IT CREATED THEM, THE HOLY
FATHERS, ANCESTORS OF THE ARHATS....

How did they “create,” since the “Lords of Wisdom” are identical with the
Hindû Devas, who refuse to “create”? Clearly they are the Kumâras of the
Hindû Pantheon and _Purânas_, those Elder Sons of Brahmâ:

Sanandana and the other sous of Vedhas [who], previously created
by him ... without desire or passion, [remained chaste] inspired
with holy wisdom ... and undesirous of progeny.(396)

The power, by which they first created, is that which has since caused
them to be degraded from their high status to the position of Evil
Spirits, of Satan and his Host—created in their turn by the unclean fancy
of exoteric creeds. It was by Kriyâshakti, that mysterious and divine
power, latent in the _will_ of every man, which, if not called to life,
quickened and developed by Yoga‐training, remains dormant in 999,999 men
out of a million, and so gets atrophied. This power is explained in the
“Twelve Signs of the Zodiac,”(397) as follows:

_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 [and _will_] is deeply
concentrated upon it. Similarly, an intense volition will be
followed by the desired result.

A Yogî generally performs his wonders by means of Ichchhâshakti
(Will‐power) and Kriyâshakti.

The Third Race had thus created the so‐called “Sons of Will and Yoga,” or
the “Ancestors”—the _Spiritual_ Forefathers—of all the subsequent and
present Arhats, or Mahâtmâs, in a truly _immaculate_ way. They were indeed
_created_, not _begotten_, as were their brethren of the Fourth Race, who
were generated sexually after the separation of sexes, the “Fall of Man.”
For Creation is but the result of Will acting on phenomenal Matter, the
calling forth out of it the Primordial Divine Light and Eternal Life. They
were the “Holy Seed Grain” of the future Saviours of Humanity.

Here we have to again make a break, in order to explain certain difficult
points, of which there are so many. It is almost impossible to avoid such
interruptions.(398)

The order of the evolution of the Human Races stands as follows in the
Fifth Book of the Commentaries, and has already been given:

_The first men were Chhâyâs (1); the Second, the __“__Sweat‐born__”__ (2);
the Third, __“__Egg‐born,__”__ and the holy Fathers born by the power of
Kriyâshakti (3); the Fourth were the children of the Padmapâni [Chenresi]
(4)._

Of course such primeval modes of procreation—by the evolution of one’s
image; through drops of perspiration; after that by Yoga; and then by what
people will regard as magic (Kriyâshakti)—are doomed beforehand to be
regarded as fairy‐tales. Nevertheless, beginning with the first and ending
with the last, there is really nothing miraculous in them, nor anything
which may not be shown to be natural. This must be proven.

1. Chhâyâ‐birth, or that primeval mode of _sexless_ procreation—the First
Race having _oozed out_, so to say, from the bodies of the Pitris—is
hinted at in a cosmic allegory in the _Purânas_.(399) It is the beautiful
allegory and story of Sanjñâ, the daughter of Vishvakarman—married to the
Sun, who, “unable to endure the fervours of her Lord,” gave him her Chhâyâ
(shadow, image, or astral body), while she herself repaired to the jungle
to perform religious devotions, or Tapas. The Sun, supposing the Chhâyâ to
be his wife, begat by her children, like Adam with Lilith—an _ethereal
shadow_ also, as in the legend, though an actual living female monster
millions of years ago.

But, perhaps, this instance proves little except the exuberant fancy of
the Paurânic authors. We have another proof ready. If the materialized
forms, which are sometimes seen oozing out of the bodies of certain
mediums could, instead of vanishing, be fixed and made solid—the
“creation” of the First Race would become quite comprehensible. This kind
of procreation cannot fail to be suggestive to the student. Neither the
mystery nor the impossibility of such a mode is certainly any
greater—while it is far more comprehensible to the mind of the true
metaphysical thinker—than the mystery of the conception of the fœtus, its
gestation and birth as a child, as we now know it.

Now to the curious and little understood corroboration in the _Purânas_
about the “Sweat‐born.”

2. Kandu is a sage and a Yogî, eminent in holy wisdom and pious
austerities, which, finally, awaken the jealousy of the Gods, who are
represented in the Hindû Scriptures as being in never‐ending strife with
the Ascetics. Indra, the “King of the Gods,”(400) finally sends one of his
female Apsarases to tempt the sage. This is no worse than Jehovah sending
Sarah, Abraham’s wife, to tempt Pharaoh; but in truth it is these Gods
(and God), who are ever trying to disturb Ascetics and thus make them lose
the fruit of their austerities, who ought to be regarded as “tempting
demons,” instead of applying the term to the Rudras, Kumâras, and Asuras,
whose great sanctity and chastity seem a standing reproach to the Don
Juanic Gods of the Pantheon. But it is the reverse that we find in all the
Paurânic allegories, and not without good esoteric reason.

The King of the Gods, or Indra, sends a beautiful Apsaras (nymph) named
Pramlochâ to seduce Kandu and disturb his penance. She succeeds in her
unholy purpose and “nine hundred and seven years six months and three
days”(401) spent in her company seem to the Sage as one day. When this
psychological or hypnotic state ends, the Muni bitterly curses the
creature who has seduced him, thus disturbing his devotions. “Depart,
begone!” he cries, “vile bundle of delusions!” And Pramlochâ, terrified,
flies away, _wiping the perspiration __ from her body_ with the leaves of
the trees as she passes through the air.

The nymph went from tree to tree, and, as, with the dusky shoots
that crowned their summits, she dried her limbs, the child she had
conceived by the Rishi came forth from the pores of her skin in
drops of perspiration. The trees received the living dews; and the
winds collected them into one mass. “This,” said Soma [the Moon],
“I matured by my rays; and gradually it increased in size, till
the exhalation that had rested on the tree tops became the lovely
girl named Mârishâ.”(402)

Now Kandu stands for the First Race. He is a son of the Pitris, hence one
“devoid of mind,” a fact hinted at by his being unable to discern a period
of nearly one thousand years from one day; therefore he is shown to be so
easily deluded and blinded. Here is a variant of the allegory in
_Genesis_, of Adam, born an image of clay, into which the “Lord God”
breathes the “breath of life” but not of intellect and discrimination,
which are developed only after he had tasted of the fruit of the Tree of
Knowledge; in other words when he has acquired the first development of
Mind, and had implanted in him Manas, whose terrestrial aspect is of the
earth earthy, though its highest faculties connect it with Spirit and the
Divine Soul. Pramlochâ is the Hindû Lilith of the Âryan Adam; and Mârishâ,
the daughter born of the perspiration from her pores, is the “Sweat‐born,”
and stands as a symbol for the Second Race of mankind.

It is not Indra, who in this case figures in the _Purânas_, but Kâmadeva,
the God of love and desire, who sends Pramlochâ on Earth. Logic, as well
as the Esoteric Doctrine, shows that it must be so. For Kâma is the king
and lord of the Apsarases, of whom Pramlochâ is one; and, therefore, when
Kandu, cursing her, exclaims: “Thou hast performed the office assigned by
the monarch of the gods, go!”—he must mean by that monarch Kâma, and not
Indra, to whom the Apsarases are not subservient. For Kâma, again, is in
the _Rig Veda_(403) the personification of that feeling which leads and
propels to creation. He was the _First Movement_ that stirred the ONE,
after its manifestation from the purely Abstract Principle, to create.

Desire first arose in IT, which was the Primal Germ of Mind; and
which Sages, searching with their intellect, have discovered to be
the bond which connects Entity with Non‐Entity.

A Hymn in the _Atharva Veda_ exalts Kâma into a supreme God and Creator,
and says:

Kâma was born the first. Him, neither Gods nor Fathers [Pitris]
nor Men have equalled.

The _Atharva Veda_ identifies him with Agni, but makes him superior to
that God. The _Taittirîya Brâhmana_ makes him allegorically the son of
Dharma (moral religious duty, piety and justice) and of Shraddhâ (faith).
Elsewhere Kâma is born from the heart of Brahmâ; therefore he is Âtmabhû
“Self‐Existent,” and Aja, the “Unborn.” His sending Pramlochâ has a deep
philosophical meaning; sent by Indra—the narrative has none. As Erôs was
connected in early Greek mythology with the world’s creation, and only
afterwards became the sexual Cupid, so was Kâma in his original Vedic
character; the _Harivamsha_ making him a son of Lakshmî, who is Venus. The
allegory, as said, shows the psychic element developing the physiological,
before the birth of Daksha—_the progenitor of real physical men_—who is
made to be born from Mârishâ and before whose time living beings and men
were procreated “by the will, by sight, by touch, and by yoga,” as will be
shown.

This, then, is the allegory on the mode of procreation of the Second or
the “Sweat‐born.” The same for the Third Race in its final development.

Mârishâ, through the exertions of Soma, the Moon, is taken to wife by the
Prachetases, the production of the “Mind‐born” sons of Brahmâ also,(404)
from whom they beget the Patriarch Daksha—a son of Brahmâ also in a former
Kalpa or life, explain and add the _Purânas_, in order to mislead, yet
speaking the truth.

3. The early Third Race, then, is formed from drops of “Sweat,” which,
after many a transformation, grow into human bodies. This is not more
difficult to imagine or realize than the growth of the fœtus from an
imperceptible germ, and its subsequent development into a child, and then
into a strong, heavy man. But the Third Race changes yet again its mode of
procreation according to the Commentaries. It is said to have emanated a
_vis formativa_, which changed the drops of perspiration into greater
drops, which grew, expanded, and became ovoid bodies—huge eggs. In these
the human fœtus gestated for several years. In the _Purânas_, Mârishâ, the
daughter of Kandu, the sage, becomes the wife of the Prachetases, and the
mother of Daksha. Now Daksha is the father of the first _human‐like_
Progenitors, having been born in this way. He is mentioned later on. The
evolution of man, the microcosm, is analogous to that of the universe, the
macrocosm. His evolution stands between that of the latter and that of the
animal, for which man, in his turn, is a macrocosm.

Then the Third Race becomes:

4. The Androgyne, or Hermaphrodite. This process of men‐bearing explains,
perhaps, why Aristophanes, in Plato’s _Banquet_, describes the nature of
the old race as “androgynous,” the form of every individual being rounded,
“having the back and sides as _in a circle_,” whose “manner of running was
circular ... terrible in force and strength and with prodigious ambition.”
Therefore, to make them weaker, “Zeus divided them [in the Third Root‐
Race] into two, and Apollo [the Sun], under his direction, closed up the
skin.”

The Madagascans—the island belonged to Lemuria—have a tradition about the
first man. He lived at first without eating, and, having indulged in food,
a swelling appeared in his leg; this bursting, there emerged from it a
female, who became the mother of their race. Truly, “we have our sciences
of Heterogenesis and Parthenogenesis, showing that the field is yet
open.... The polyps ... produce their offspring from themselves, like the
buds and ramifications of a tree....” Why not the primitive _human_ polyp?
The very interesting polyp Stauridium passes alternately from gemmation
into the sex method of reproduction. Curiously enough, though it grows
merely as a polyp on a stalk, it produces gemmules, which ultimately
develop into a sea‐nettle or Medusa. The Medusa is utterly dissimilar to
its parent‐organism, the Stauridium. It also reproduces itself
differently, by sexual method, and from the resulting eggs Stauridia once
more put in an appearance. This striking fact may assist many to
understand that a form may be evolved—as in the _sexual_ Lemurians from
_hermaphrodite_ parentage—quite unlike its immediate progenitors. It is,
moreover, unquestionable that in the case of _human_ incarnations the law
of Karma, racial or individual, overrides the subordinate tendencies of
Heredity, its servant.

The meaning of the last sentence in the above‐quoted Commentary on Shloka
27, namely, that the Fourth Race were the children of Padmapâni, may find
its explanation in a certain letter from the Inspirer of _Esoteric
Buddhism_:

_The majority of mankind belongs to the seventh sub‐race of the Fourth
Root‐Race—the above‐mentioned Chinamen and their off‐shoots and branchlets
(Malayans, Mongolians, Tibetans, Hungarians, Finns, and even the Esquimaux
are all remnants of this last offshoot)._

Padmapâni or Avalokiteshvara, in Sanskrit, is, in Tibetan, Chenresi. Now,
Avalokiteshvara is the great Logos in its higher aspect and in the divine
regions. But in the manifested planes, he is, like Daksha, the Progenitor
(in a spiritual sense) of men. Padmapâni‐Avalokiteshvara is called
_esoterically_ Bodhisattva (or Dhyân Chohan) Chenresi Vanchug, “the
powerful and all‐seeing.” He is considered now as the greatest protector
of Asia in general, and of Tibet in particular. In order to guide the
Tibetans and Lamas in holiness, and preserve the great Arhats in the
world, this heavenly Being is credited with manifesting himself from age
to age in human form. A popular legend has it that whenever faith begins
to die out in the world, Padmapâni Chenresi, the “Lotus‐bearer,” emits a
brilliant ray of light, and forthwith incarnates himself in one of the two
great Lamas—the Dalai and Teschu Lamas; finally, it is believed that he
will incarnate as the “most perfect Buddha” in Tibet, instead of in India,
where his predecessors, the great Rishis and Manus had appeared in the
beginning of our Race, but now appear no longer. Even the exoteric
appearance of Dhyâni Chenresi is suggestive of the Esoteric Teaching. He
is evidently, like Daksha, the synthesis of all the preceding Races and
the progenitor of all the _human_ Races after the Third—the first complete
one—and thus is represented as the _culmination_ of the _four_ Primeval
Races in his _eleven‐faced_ form. This is a column built in four rows,
each series having three faces or heads of different complexions; the
three faces for each Race being typical of its three fundamental
physiological transformations. The first is white (moon‐coloured); the
second is yellow; the third, red‐brown; the fourth, in which are only two
faces—the third face being left a blank; a reference to the untimely end
of the Atlanteans—is brown‐black. Padmapâni (Daksha) is seated on the
column, and forms the apex. In this reference compare Shloka 39. The Dhyân
Chohan is represented with four arms, another allusion to the four Races.
For while two are folded, the third hand holds a lotus—Padmapâni, the
“Lotus‐bearer”; the flower symbolizing generation—and the fourth holds a
serpent, emblem of the Wisdom in his power. On his neck is a rosary, and
on his head the sign of water [Symbol: two horizontal rows of wave‐like
symbols]—matter, deluge—while on his brow rests the third eye, Shiva’s
eye, that of spiritual insight. His name is “Protector” (of Tibet),
“Saviour of Humanity.” On other occasions when he has only two arms, he is
Chenresi the Dhyânî, and Bodhisattva, Chakna Padma Karpo, “he who holds a
white lotus.” His other name is Chantong, “he of the thousand eyes,” when
he is endowed with a thousand arms and hands, on the palm of each of which
is represented an eye of Wisdom, these arms radiating from his body like a
forest of rays. Another of his names in Sanskrit is Lokapati or Lokanâtha,
“Lord of the World”; and in Tibetan Jigten Gonpo, “Protector and Saviour”
against evil of any kind.(405)

Padmapâni, however, is the “Lotus‐bearer” symbolically only for the
profane; esoterically, it means the supporter of the Kalpas, the last of
which is called Pâdma, and represents one half of the life of Brahmâ.
Though really a minor Kalpa, it is called Mahâ, “great,” because it
comprises the age in which Brahmâ sprang from a lotus. Theoretically, the
Kalpas are infinite, but practically they are divided and subdivided in
Space and Time, each division—down to the smallest—having its own Dhyânî
as patron or regent. Padmapâni (Avalokiteshvara) becomes, in China, in his
female aspect, Kwan‐yin, “who assumes any form, at pleasure, in order to
save mankind.” The knowledge of the astrological aspect of the
constellations on the respective “birthdays” of these Dhyânîs—Amitabha
(the A‐mi‐to Fo, of China), included: _e.g._, on the 19th day of the
second month, on the 17th day of the eleventh month, and on the 7th day of
the third month,(406) etc.—gives the Occultist the greatest facilities for
performing what are called “magic” feats. The future of an individual is
seen, with all its coming events marshalled in order, in a _magic_ mirror
placed under the ray of certain constellations. But—beware of the reverse
of the medal, SORCERY.

Stanza VIII. Evolution Of The Animal Mammalians: The First Fall.

28. How the first mammals were produced. 29. A quasi‐Darwinian
evolution. 30. The animals get solid bodies. 31. Their separation
into sexes. 32. The first sin of the mindless men.

28. FROM THE DROPS OF SWEAT, FROM THE RESIDUE OF THE SUBSTANCE, MATTER
FROM DEAD BODIES OF MEN AND ANIMALS OF THE WHEEL BEFORE,(407) AND FROM
CAST‐OFF DUST, THE FIRST ANIMALS(408) WERE PRODUCED.

The Occult Doctrine maintains that, in this Round, the mammalians were a
later work of evolution than man. Evolution proceeds in Cycles. The great
Manvantaric Cycle of Seven Rounds, beginning in the First Round with the
mineral, vegetable, and animal, brings its evolutionary work on the
descending arc to a dead stop in the middle of the Fourth Race, at the
close of the first half of the Fourth Round. It is on our Earth, then—the
Fourth Sphere and the lowest—and in the present Round, that this middle
point has been reached. And since the Monad has passed, after its first
“immetallization” on Globe A, through the mineral, vegetable, and animal
worlds in every degree of the three states of matter, except the last
degree of the third or solid state, which it reached only at the “mid‐
point of evolution,” it is but logical and natural that at the beginning
of the Fourth Round on Globe D, Man should be the first to appear; and
also that his frame should be of the most tenuous matter that is
compatible with objectivity. To make it still clearer: if the Monad begins
its cycle of incarnations through the three objective kingdoms on the
descending curved line, it has necessarily to enter on the reäscending
curved line of the Sphere as a man also. On the descending arc it is the
spiritual which gradually transforms into the material. On the middle line
of the base, Spirit and Matter are equilibrized in Man. On the ascending
arc, Spirit is slowly reässerting itself at the expense of the physical,
or Matter, so that, at the close of the Seventh Race of the Seventh Round,
the Monad will find itself as free from Matter and all its qualities as it
was in the beginning; having gained in addition the experience and wisdom,
the fruitage of all its personal lives, without their evil and
temptations.

This order of evolution is found also in the first and second chapters of
_Genesis_, if one reads it in its true esoteric sense; for Chapter i
contains the history of the first Three Rounds, as well as that of the
first Three Races of the Fourth, up to the moment when Man is called to
conscious life by the Elohim of Wisdom. In Chapter i, animals, whales and
fowls of the air, are created before the androgyne Adam.(409) In Chapter
ii, Adam (the sexless) comes first, and the animals only appear after him.
Even the state of mental torpor and unconsciousness of the first two
Races, and of the first half of the Third Race, is symbolized, in the
second chapter of _Genesis_, by the _deep sleep of Adam_. It is the
dreamless sleep of mental inaction, the slumber of the Soul and Mind,
which is meant by that “sleep,” and not at all the physiological process
of differentiation of sexes, as a learned French theorist, M. Naudin,
imagined.

The _Purânas_, the Chaldæan and Egyptian fragments, and also the Chinese
traditions, all show an agreement with the Secret Doctrine as to the
process and order of evolution. We find in them the corroboration of
almost all our teaching: for instance, the statement concerning the
oviparous mode of procreation of the Third Race, and even a hint at a less
innocent mode of procreation of the first mammal forms. “_Gigantic,
transparent, dumb and monstrous they were_,” says the Commentary. Study in
this connection the stories of the several Rishis and their multifarious
progeny. Pulastya is the father of all the Serpents and Nâgas—an oviparous
brood; Kashyapa is grandsire, through his wife Tâmrâ, of the birds and of
Garuda, king of the feathered tribe; while by his wife Surabhi, he was the
parent of cows and buffaloes, etc.

In the Secret Doctrine, the first Nâgas—Beings wiser than Serpents—are the
“Sons of Will and Yoga,” born before the complete separation of the sexes,
“matured in the man‐bearing eggs(410) produced by the power (Kriyâshakti)
of the holy Sages” of the early Third Race.(411)

“In these were incarnated the Lords of the three [upper] worlds—the
various classes of Rudras, who had been Tushitas, who had been Jayas, who
are Âdityas;” for, as explained by Parâshara: “There are a hundred
appellations of the immeasurably mighty Rudras.”

Some of the descendants of the primitive Nâgas, the Serpents of Wisdom,
peopled America, when its continent arose during the palmy days of the
great Atlantis; America being the Pâtâla or Antipodes of Jambu‐dvîpa, not
of Bhârata‐varsha. Otherwise, whence the traditions and legends—the latter
_always more true than history_, as says Augustin Thierry—and even the
identity in the names of certain “medicine men” and priests, who exist to
this day in Mexico? We shall have to say something of the Nargals and the
Nagals, and also of Nagalism, called “devil‐worship” by the missionaries.

In almost all the _Purânas_, the story of the “Sacrifice of Daksha” is
given, the oldest account of which is to be found in the _Vâyu Purâna_.
Allegorical as it is, there is more meaning and biological revelation in
it to a Naturalist, than in all the pseudo‐scientific vagaries, which are
regarded as learned theories and hypotheses.

Daksha, who is regarded as the Chief Progenitor, is, moreover, pointed out
as the creator of _physical man_, in the “fable” which makes him lose his
head from his body in the general strife between the Gods and the Raumas.
This head, being burnt in the fire, is replaced by the _head of a ram_,
according to the Kâshi Khanda of the _Skanda Purâna_. Now the ram’s head
and horns are ever the symbol of generating power and of reproductive
force, and are phallic. As we have shown, it is Daksha who establishes the
era of men engendered by sexual intercourse. This mode of procreation did
not occur suddenly, however, as one might think, but required long ages
before it became the one “natural” way. Therefore, Daksha’s sacrifice to
the Gods is shown to have been interfered with by Shiva—the _Destroying_
Deity, _Evolution and Progress personified_, who is the _Regenerator_ at
the same time; who destroys things under one form but to recall them to
life under another more perfect type. Shiva‐Rudra creates the terrible
Vîrabhadra, born of his breath, the “thousand‐headed, thousand‐armed”
monster, and commissions him to destroy the sacrifice prepared by Daksha.
Then Vîrabhadra, “abiding in the region of ghosts (ethereal men) ...
created from _the pores of his skin_ (Roma‐kûpas) powerful Raumas.”(412)
Now, however mythical the allegory, the _Mahâbhârata_(413)—which is as
much history as is the _Iliad_—shows the Raumas and other races springing
in the same manner from the Roma‐kûpas, hair or skin pores. This
allegorical description of Daksha’s “sacrifice” is full of significance to
the students of the Secret Doctrine who know of the “Sweat‐born.”

In the _Vâyu Purâna’s_ account of the sacrifice, moreover, it is said to
have taken place in the presence of creatures _born from the egg_, from
the vapour, vegetation, pores of the skin, and, finally only, from the
womb.(414)

Daksha typifies the early Third Race, holy and pure, as yet devoid of an
Individual Ego, and possessing passive capacities only. Brahmâ, therefore,
commands him to create (in the exoteric texts); when, obeying the command,
he made “inferior and superior” (Avara and Vara) progeny (Putra), _bipeds_
and _quadrupeds_; and by his _will_, gave birth to females, to the Gods,
the Daityas (Giants of the Fourth Race), the snake‐gods, animals, cattle
and the Dânavas (Titans and Demon Magicians) and other beings.

From that period forward, _living creatures were engendered by
sexual intercourse. Before the time of Daksha, they were variously
propagated_—by the _will_, by sight, by touch, and by the
influence of religious austerities practised by devout sages and
holy saints.(415)

And now comes the simply zoölogical teaching.

29. ANIMALS WITH BONES, DRAGONS OF THE DEEP, AND FLYING SARPAS(416) WERE
ADDED TO THE CREEPING THINGS. THEY THAT CREEP ON THE GROUND GOT WINGS.
THEY OF THE LONG NECKS IN THE WATER BECAME THE PROGENITORS OF THE FOWLS OF
THE AIR.

This is a point on which the teachings and modern biological speculation
are in perfect accord. The missing links representing this transition
process between reptile and bird are apparent to the veriest bigot,
especially in the Ornithoscelidæ, Hesperornis, and the Archæopteryx of
Vogt.

30. DURING THE THIRD,(417) THE BONELESS ANIMALS GREW AND CHANGED; THEY
BECAME ANIMALS WITH BONES, THEIR CHHÂYÂS BECAME SOLID.(418)

Vertebrates, and after that mammalians. Before that the animals were also
ethereal proto‐organisms, just as man was.

31. THE ANIMALS SEPARATED THE FIRST.(419) THEY BEGAN TO BREED. THE TWO‐
FOLD MAN(420) SEPARATED ALSO. HE(421) SAID: “LET US AS THEY; LET US UNITE
AND MAKE CREATURES.” THEY DID....

32. AND THOSE WHICH HAD NO SPARK(422) TOOK HUGE SHE‐ANIMALS UNTO THEM.
THEY BEGAT UPON THEM DUMB RACES. DUMB THEY(423) WERE THEMSELVES. BUT THEIR
TONGUES UNTIED.(424) THE TONGUES OF THEIR PROGENY REMAINED STILL. MONSTERS
THEY BRED. A RACE OF CROOKED RED‐HAIR‐COVERED MONSTERS GOING ON ALL
FOURS.(425) A DUMB RACE, TO KEEP THE SHAME UNTOLD.(426)

The fact of former hermaphrodite mammals and the subsequent separation of
sexes is now indisputable, even from the standpoint of Biology. As Prof.
Oscar Schmidt, an avowed Darwinist, shows:

Use and disuse, combined with selection, elucidate [?] _the
separation of the sexes_, and the existence, otherwise totally
incomprehensible, of rudimentary sexual organs. In the Vertebrata
especially, _each sex possesses such distinct traces of the
reproductive apparatus characteristic of the other_, that even
antiquity assumed hermaphroditism as a natural primæval condition
of mankind.... The tenacity with which these rudiments of sexual
organs are inherited is remarkable. In the class of mammals,
actual hermaphroditism is unheard of, although through the whole
period of their development they drag along with them these
residues, borne by _their unknown ancestry_, no one can say how
long.(427)

“The animals separated the first,” says Shloka 31. Bear in mind that at
that period men were different, even physiologically, to what they are
now; the middle point of the Fifth Race being already passed. We are not
told what the “huge she‐animals” were; but they certainly were as
different from any we now know, as were the “men” from the men of to‐day.

This was the first physical “fall into matter” of some of the then
existing and lower races. Bear in mind Shloka 24. The “Sons of Wisdom” had
spurned the _early_ Third Race, _i.e._, the non‐developed, and are shown
incarnating in, and thereby endowing with intellect, the _later_ Third
Race. Thus the sin of the brainless or “mindless” Races, who had no
“spark” and were irresponsible, fell upon those who failed to do by them
their Karmic duty.

What May Be The Objections To The Foregoing.

Thus Occultism rejects the idea that Nature developed man from the ape, or
even from an ancestor common to both; but, on the contrary, traces some of
the most anthropoid species to the Third Race man of the early Atlantean
Period. As this proposition will be maintained and defended elsewhere, a
few words more are all that are needed at present. For greater clearness,
however, we shall repeat in brief what was said previously in Volume I,
Stanza VI.

Our teachings show that, while it is quite correct to say that Nature had,
at one time, built round the human astral form an _ape‐like external_
shape, it is also as correct that this shape was no more that of the
“missing link,” than were the multitudinous other coverings of that astral
form, during the course of its natural evolution through all the kingdoms
of Nature. Nor was it, as has been shown, on this Fourth Round Planet that
such evolution took place, but only during the First, Second, and Third
Rounds, when Man was, in turn, “a stone, a plant, and an animal” until he
became what he was in the First Root‐Race of present Humanity. The real
line of evolution differs from the Darwinian, and the two systems are
irreconcilable, unless the latter is divorced from the dogmas of “natural
selection” and the like. Indeed, between the Moneron of Hæckel and the
Sarîsripa of Manu, there lies an impassable chasm in the shape of the
Jîva; for the “human” Monad, whether “immetallized” in the stone‐atom, or
“in‐vegetalized” in the plant, or “inanimalized” in the animal, is still
ever a divine, hence also a _human_ Monad. It ceases to be human only when
it becomes _absolutely divine_. The terms “mineral,” “vegetable” and
“animal” Monad are intended to create a superficial distinction: there is
no such thing as a Monad (Jîva) other than divine, and consequently having
once been, or having in the future to become, human. The latter term has
to remain meaningless unless this difference is well understood. The Monad
is a drop out of the Shoreless Ocean beyond, or, to be correct, _within_,
the plane of primæval differentiation. It is _divine_ in its higher and
_human_ in its lower condition—the adjectives “higher” and “lower” being
used for lack of better words—but a Monad it remains at all times, save in
the Nirvânic state, under whatever conditions, or whatever external forms.
As the Logos reflects the Universe in the Divine Mind, and the Manifested
Universe reflects itself in each of its Monads, as Leibnitz put it
repeating an Eastern teaching, so the Monad has, during the cycle of its
incarnations, to reflect in itself every _root‐form_ of each kingdom.
Therefore, the Kabalists say correctly that “Man becomes a stone, a plant,
an animal, a man, a spirit, and finally God,” thus accomplishing his cycle
or circuit and returning to the point from which he had started as the
_Heavenly Man_. But by “Man” the Divine Monad is meant, and not the
Thinking Entity, much less his Physical Body. The men of Science now try
to trace the immortal Soul, while rejecting its existence, through a
series of animal forms from the lowest to the highest; whereas, in truth,
all the present fauna are the descendants of those primordial monsters of
which the Stanzas speak. The animals—the creeping beasts and those in the
waters that preceded Man in this Fourth Round, as well as those
contemporary with the Third Race, and again the mammalia that are
posterior to the Third and Fourth Races—all are either directly or
indirectly the mutual and correlative product, _physically_, of Man. It is
correct to say that the man of this Manvantara, _i.e._, of the three
preceding Rounds, has passed through all the kingdoms of Nature. That he
was “a stone, a plant, an animal.” But (_a_) these stones, plants, and
animals were the prototypes, the filmy presentments of those of the Fourth
Round; and (_b_) even those at the beginning of the Fourth Round were the
astral shadows, as the Occultists express it, of the present stones,
plants and animals. And finally, neither the forms nor genera of either
man, animal, or plant were what they became later. Thus the astral
prototypes of the lower beings of the animal kingdom of the Fourth Round,
which _preceded_ the Chhâyâs of Men, were the consolidated, though still
very ethereal _sheaths_ of the still more ethereal forms, or models,
produced at the close of the Third Round on Globe D, as set forth in
_Esoteric Buddhism_; produced “from the residue of the substance; matter
from dead bodies of men and [other _extinct_] animals of the Wheel
before,” or the previous _Third_ Round—as Shloka 28 tells us. Hence, while
the nondescript “animals” that preceded the Astral Man at the beginning of
this Life‐cycle on our Earth were still, so to speak, the progeny of the
Man of the Third Round, the mammalians of this Round owe their existence,
in a great measure, to Man again. Moreover, the “ancestor” of the present
anthropoid animal, the ape, is the direct production of the yet mindless
Man, who desecrated his human dignity by putting himself physically on the
level of an animal.

The above accounts for some of the alleged physiological proofs, brought
forward by the Anthropologists as a demonstration of the descent of man
from the animals.

The point most insisted upon by the Evolutionists is that, “The history of
the embryo is an epitome of that of the race.” That:

Every organism, in its development from the egg, runs through a
series of forms, through which, in like succession, its ancestors
have passed in the long course of earth’s history.(428) The
history of the embryo ... is a picture in little, and outline of
that of the race. _This conception forms the gist of our
fundamental biogenetic law, which we are obliged to place at the
head of the study of the fundamental law of organic
development._(429)

This modern theory was known as a fact to, and far more philosophically
expressed by, the Sages and Occultists from the remotest ages. A passage
from _Isis Unveiled_ may here be cited to furnish a few points of
comparison. It was asked why, with all their great learning, Physiologists
were unable to explain teratological phenomena?

Any Anatomist who has made the development and growth of the
embryo ... “a subject of special study,” can tell, without much
brain‐work, what daily experience and the evidence of his own eyes
show him, viz., that up to a certain period, the human embryo is a
facsimile of a young batrachian in its first remove from the
spawn—a tadpole. But no Physiologist or Anatomist seems to have
had the idea of applying to the development of the human
being—from the first instant of its physical appearance as a germ
to its ultimate formation and birth—the Pythagorean esoteric
doctrine of metempsychosis, so erroneously interpreted by critics.
The meaning of the Kabalistic axiom: “A stone becomes a plant; a
plant, a beast; a beast, a man,” etc., was mentioned in another
place in relation to the spiritual and physical evolution of men
on this Earth. We will now add a few more words to make the matter
clearer.

What is the primitive shape of the future man? A grain, a
corpuscle, say some Physiologists; a molecule, an ovum of the
ovum, say others. If it could be analyzed—by the microscope or
otherwise—of what ought we to expect to find it composed?
Analogically, we should say, of a nucleus of inorganic matter,
deposited from the circulation at the germinating point, and
united with a deposit of organic matter. In other words, this
infinitesimal nucleus of the future man is composed of the same
elements as a stone—of the same elements as the Earth, which the
man is destined to inhabit. Moses is cited by the Kabalists as
authority for the remark, that it required earth and water to make
a living being, and thus it may be said that man first appears as
a stone.

At the end of three or four weeks the ovum has assumed a plant‐
like appearance, one extremity having become spheroidal and the
other tapering, like a carrot. Upon dissection it is found to be
composed, like an onion, of very delicate laminæ or coats,
enclosing a liquid. The laminæ approach each other at the lower
end, and the embryo hangs from the root of the umbilicus almost
like the fruit from the bough. The stone has now become changed,
by “metempsychosis,” into a plant. Then the embryonic creature
begins to shoot out, from the inside outward, its limbs, and
develops its features. The eyes are visible as two black dots; the
ears, nose, and mouth form depressions, like the points of a
pineapple, before they begin to project. The embryo develops into
an animal‐like fœtus—the shape of a tadpole—and, like an
amphibious reptile, lives in water and develops from it. Its monad
has not yet become either human or immortal, for the Kabalists
tell us that this only occurs at the “fourth hour.” One by one the
fœtus assumes the characteristics of the human being, the first
flutter of the immortal breath passes through its being: it moves;
... and the divine essence settles in the infant frame, which it
will inhabit until the moment of physical death, when man becomes
a spirit.

This mysterious process of a nine‐months’ formation, the Kabalists
call the completion of the “individual cycle of evolution.” As the
fœtus develops amidst the _liquor amnii_ in the womb, so the
Earths germinate in the Universal Ether, or Astral Fluid, in the
Womb of the Universe. These cosmic children, like their pigmy
inhabitants, are first nuclei; then ovules; then gradually mature;
and becoming mothers, in their turn, develop mineral, vegetable,
animal, and human forms. From centre to circumference, from the
imperceptible vesicle to the uttermost conceivable bounds of the
cosmos, those glorious thinkers, the Occultists, trace cycle
merging into cycle, containing and contained in an endless series.
The embryo evolving in its pre‐natal sphere, the individual in his
family, the family in the state, the state in mankind, the earth
in our system, that system in its central universe, the universe
in the Kosmos, and the Kosmos in the ONE CAUSE—the Boundless and
Endless.(430)

Thus runs _their_ philosophy of evolution, differing as we see, from that
of Hæckel.

All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and (Parabrahm) the Soul.

These are the proofs of Occultism, and they are rejected by Science. But
how is the chasm between the mind of man and animal to be bridged in this
case? How, if the anthropoid and homo primigenius had, _argumenti gratiâ_,
a common ancestor—in the way modern speculation puts it—how did the two
groups diverge so widely from one another as regards mental capacity?
True, the Occultist may be told that in every case Occultism does what
Science repeats; it gives a _common_ ancestor to ape and man, since it
makes the former issue from Primæval Man. Aye, but that “Primæval Man” was
_man_ only in external form. He was _mindless_ and _soulless_ at the time
he begot, with a female animal monster, the forefather of a series of
apes. This speculation—if speculation it be—is at least logical, and fills
the chasm between the mind of man and animal. Thus it accounts for and
explains the hitherto unaccountable and inexplicable. The fact—of which
Science is almost certain—that, in the present stage of evolution, no
issue can follow from the union of man and animal, is considered and
explained elsewhere.

Now what is the fundamental difference between the accepted (or nearly so)
conclusions—as enunciated in _The Pedigree of Man_—that man and ape have a
common ancestor, and the teachings of Occultism, which deny this
conclusion and accept the fact that all things and all living beings have
originated from one common source? Materialistic Science makes man evolve
gradually to what _he is now_. Starting from the first protoplasmic speck
called Moneron—which we are told has, like the rest, “originated in the
course of immeasurable ages from a few, or from one simple, _spontaneously
arising_ original form, that has obeyed one law of evolution”—he is made
to pass through “unknown and unknowable” types up to the ape, and thence
to the human being. Where the transitional shapes are discoverable we are
not told; for the simple reason that no “missing‐links” between man and
the apes have ever yet been found, though this fact in no way prevents men
like Hæckel from inventing them _ad libitum_.

Nor will they ever be met with; simply, again, because that link which
unites man with his real ancestry is searched for on the objective plane
and in the material world of forms, whereas it is safely hidden from the
microscope and dissecting knife _within_ the animal tabernacle of man
himself. We repeat what we have said in _Isis Unveiled_:

All things had their origin in Spirit—evolution having originally
begun from above and proceeded downward, instead of the reverse,
as taught in the Darwinian theory. In other words, there has been
a gradual materialization of forms until a fixed ultimate of
debasement is reached. This point is that at which the doctrine of
modern evolution enters into the arena of speculative hypothesis.
Arrived at this period we shall find it easier to understand
Hæckel’s _Anthropogeny_, which traces the pedigree of man “from
its protoplasmic root, sodden in the mud of seas which existed
before the oldest of the fossiliferous rocks were deposited,”
according to Mr. Huxley’s exposition. We may more easily still
believe man (of the Third Round) evolved “by gradual modification
of an [astral] mammal of ape‐like organization,” when we remember
that the same theory, in a more condensed and less elegant, but
equally comprehensible, phraseology, was said by Berosus to have
been taught many thousands of years before his time by the man‐
fish Oannes or Dagon, the semi‐demon of Babylonia(431) (though on
somewhat modified lines).

But what lies back of the Darwinian line of descent? So far as
Darwin is concerned nothing but “unverifiable hypotheses.” For, as
he puts it, he views all beings “as the lineal descendants of some
few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian
system was deposited.”(432) He does not attempt to show us what
these “few beings” were. But it answers our purpose quite as well,
for, in the bare admission of their existence, recourse to the
ancients for corroboration and elaboration of the idea receives
the stamp of scientific approbation.(433)

Truly, as we said in our first work, if we accept Darwin’s theory of the
development of species, we find that his starting‐point lies in front of
an open door. We are at liberty either to remain within with him, or cross
the threshold, beyond which lies the limitless and the incomprehensible,
or rather the Unutterable. If our mortal language is inadequate to express
what our spirit—while on this earth—dimly foresees in the great “Beyond,”
it _must_ realize it at some point in the timeless Eternity. But what lies
“beyond” Hæckel’s theory? Why Bathybius Hæckelii, and no more!

Stanza IX. The Final Evolution Of Man.

33. The creators repent. 34. They atone for their neglect. 35. Men
become endowed with minds. 36. The Fourth Race develops perfect
speech. 37. Every androgynous unit is separated and becomes
bisexual.

33. SEEING WHICH,(434) THE LHAS(435) WHO HAD NOT BUILT MEN,(436) WEPT,
SAYING:

34. “THE AMÂNASA(437) HAVE DEFILED OUR FUTURE ABODES. THIS IS KARMA. LET
US DWELL IN THE OTHERS. LET US TEACH THEM BETTER, LEST WORSE SHOULD
HAPPEN.” THEY DID....

35. THEN ALL MEN BECAME ENDOWED WITH MANAS.(438) THEY SAW THE SIN OF THE
MINDLESS.

But they had already _separated_, before the ray of divine reason had
enlightened the dark region of their hitherto slumbering minds, and had
_sinned_. That is to say, they had committed evil unconsciously, by
producing an effect which was unnatural. Yet, like the other six primitive
brother or fellow races, even so this seventh, henceforth degenerated
race, which will have to bide its time for its final development on
account of the _sin_ committed—even this race will find itself _on the
last day_ on one of the Seven Paths. For:

The Wise(439) guard the home of nature’s order, they assume
excellent forms in secret.(440)

But we must see whether the “animals” tampered with, were of the same kind
as those known to Zoölogy.

The “Fall” occurred, according to the testimony of ancient Wisdom and the
old records, as soon as Daksha—the reïncarnated Creator of men and things
in the early Third Race—disappeared to make room for that portion of
mankind which had “separated.” This is how one Commentary explains the
details that preceded the “Fall”:

_In the initial period of man’s Fourth Evolution, the human kingdom
branched off in several and various directions. The outward shape of its
first specimens was not uniform, for the vehicles [the egg‐like, external
shells, in which the future fully physical man gestated] were often
tampered with, before they hardened, by huge animals, of species now
unknown, and belonging to the tentative efforts of Nature. The result was
that intermediate races of monsters, half animals, half men, were
produced. But as they were failures, they were not allowed to breathe long
and live, although, the intrinsically paramount power of psychic over
physical nature being yet very weak, and hardly established, the __“__Egg‐
born__”__ Sons had taken several of their females unto themselves as
mates, and bred other human monsters. Later, animal species and human
races becoming gradually equilibrized, they separated, and mated no
longer. Man created no more—he begot. But he also begot animals as well as
men, in days of old. Therefore the Sages [or wise men], who speak of males
who had no more will‐begotten offspring, but begat various animals along
with Dânavas [Giants] on females of other species—animals being as [or in
the manner of] sons putative to them; and they [the human males] refusing
in time to be regarded as [putative] fathers of dumb creatures—spoke
truthfully and wisely. Upon seeing this [state of things], the Kings and
Lords of the last Races [of the Third and the Fourth] placed the seal of
prohibition upon the sinful intercourse. It interfered with Karma, it
developed new [Karma]_(_441_)_. They [the Divine Kings] struck the
culprits with sterility. They destroyed the Red and Blue Races._(442)

In another we find:

_There were blue and red‐faced animal‐men even in later times; not from
actual intercourse [between the human and animal species], but by
descent._

And still another passage mentions:

_Red‐haired, swarthy men going on all‐fours, who bend and unbend [stand
erect and fall on their hands again], who speak as their forefathers, and
run on their hands as their giant fore‐mothers._

Perchance in these specimens Hæckelians might recognize, not the “Homo
Primigenius,” but some of the lower tribes, such as some tribes of the
Australian savages. Nevertheless, even these are not descended from the
anthropoid apes, but from human fathers and semi‐human mothers, or, to
speak more correctly, from human monsters—those “failures” mentioned in
the first Commentary. The real anthropoids, Hæckel’s Catarrhini and
Platyrrhini, came far later, in the closing times of Atlantis. The Orang‐
Outang, the Gorilla, the Chimpanzee and Cynocephalus are the latest and
purely physical evolutions from lower anthropoid mammalians. They have a
spark of the purely human essence in them; man on the other hand, has not
one drop of pithecoid(443) blood in his veins. Thus saith old Wisdom and
universal tradition.

How was the separation of sexes effected? it is asked. Are we to believe
in the old Jewish fable of the rib of Adam yielding Eve? Even such belief
is more logical and reasonable than the descent of man from the Quadrumana
without any reservation; as the former hides an Esoteric truth under a
fabulous version, while the latter conceals no deeper fact than a desire
to force upon mankind a materialistic fiction. The rib is bone, and when
we read in _Genesis_ that Eve was made out of the rib, it only means that
the Race “with bones” was produced out of a previous Race and Races, which
were “boneless.” This is an Esoteric tenet spread far and wide. It is
almost universal under its various forms. A Tahitian tradition states that
man was created out of Aræa, “red earth.” Taaroa, the Creative Power, the
chief God, “put man to sleep for long years, for several lives.” This
means racial periods, and is a reference to his _mental sleep_, as shown
elsewhere. During that time the deity pulled an Ivi (bone) out of man and
she became a woman.(444)

Nevertheless, whatever the allegory may signify, even its exoteric meaning
necessitates a _divine_ Builder of man—a “Progenitor.” Do we then believe
in such “supernatural” Beings? We say: No. Occultism has never believed in
anything, whether animate or inanimate, _outside_ Nature. Nor are we
Cosmolaters or Polytheists for believing in “Heavenly Man” and Divine Men,
for we have the accumulated testimony of the ages, with its unvarying
evidence on every essential point, to support us in this; the Wisdom of
the Ancients and _universal_ tradition. We reject, however, such
groundless and baseless traditions as have outgrown strict allegory and
symbolism, although they may have found acceptance in exoteric creeds. But
that which is preserved in _unanimous_ tradition, only the wilfully blind
could reject. Hence we believe in races of Beings other than our own in
far remote geological periods; in races of ethereal, following
_incorporeal_ (Arûpa) Men, with form but no solid substance, giants who
preceded us pigmies; in Dynasties of Divine Beings, those Kings and
Instructors of the Third Race in arts and sciences, compared with which
our little Modern Science stands less chance than elementary arithmetic
with geometry.

No, certainly not. We do not believe in _supernatural_ but only in
_superhuman_, or rather _interhuman_, intelligences. One can easily
appreciate the feeling of reluctance that an educated person would have to
being classed with the superstitious and ignorant; and even realize the
great truth uttered by Renan when he says that:

The supernatural has become like the original sin, a blemish that
everyone seems ashamed of—even those most religious persons who
refuse in our day to accept be it a minimum of Bible miracles in
all their crudeness, and who, seeking to reduce them to the
minimum, hide and conceal it in the furthermost corners of the
past.(445)

But the “supernatural” of Renan belongs to dogma and its dead letter. It
has nought to do with its spirit nor with the reality of facts in Nature.
If Theology asks us to believe that it was only four or five thousand
years ago that men lived 900 years and more, that a portion of mankind,
the enemies of the people of Israel exclusively, was composed of giants
and monsters, we decline to believe that such a thing existed in Nature
only five _thousand_ years back. For Nature never proceeds by jumps and
starts, and logic and common sense, besides Geology, Anthropology and
Ethnology, have justly rebelled against such assertions. But if this same
Theology, giving up her fantastic chronology, had claimed that men lived
969 years—the age of Methuselah—five _million_ years ago, we should have
nothing to say against the claim. For in those days the physical frame of
men was, compared to the present human body, as that of a Megalosaurus to
a common lizard.

A Naturalist suggests another difficulty. The human is the only species
which, however unequal in its races, can breed together. “There is no
question of selection between _human races_,” say the anti‐Darwinists, and
no Evolutionist can deny the argument—one which very triumphantly proves
_specific unity_. How then can Occultism insist that a portion of the
Fourth Race humanity begot young ones from females of another, only semi‐
human, if not quite an animal, race; the hybrids resulting from which
union not only bred freely but produced the ancestors of the modern
anthropoid apes? Esoteric Science replies to this that it was in the very
beginnings of physical man. Since then, Nature has changed her ways, and
sterility is the only result of the crime of man’s bestiality. But we have
even to‐day proofs of this. The Secret Doctrine teaches that the _specific
unity of mankind_ is not without exceptions even now. For there are, or
rather still were a few years ago, descendants of these half‐animal tribes
or races, both of remote Lemurian and Lemuro‐Atlantean origin. The world
knows them as Tasmanians (now extinct), Australians, Andaman Islanders,
etc. The descent of the Tasmanians can be almost proved by a fact, which
struck Darwin a good deal, without his being able to make anything of it.
This fact deserves notice.

De Quatrefages and other Naturalists, who seek to prove Monogenesis by the
very fact of every race of mankind being capable of crossing with every
other, have left out of their calculations _exceptions_, which do not in
this case confirm the rule. Human crossing may have been a general rule
from the time of the separation of sexes, but this does not prevent
another law asserting itself, viz., sterility between two human races,
just as between two animal species of different kinds, in those rare cases
when a European, condescending to see in a female of a savage tribe a
mate, happens to choose a member of such mixed tribes.(446) Darwin notes
such a case in a Tasmanian tribe, whose women were suddenly struck with
sterility, _en masse_, some time after the arrival among them of European
colonists. The great Naturalist tried to explain this fact by change of
diet, food conditions, etc., but finally gave up the solution of the
mystery. For the Occultist it is very evident. “Crossing,” as it is
called, of Europeans with Tasmanian women—_i.e._, the representatives of a
race, whose progenitors were a “soulless”(447) and mindless monster, with
a real human, though still as mindless a man—brought on sterility; and
this, not only as a consequence of a physiological law, but also as a
decree of Karmic evolution in the question of further survival of the
abnormal race. In no one point of the above is Science prepared to believe
_as yet_—but it will have to in the long run. Esoteric Philosophy, let us
remember, only fills the gaps left by Science and corrects her false
premisses.

Yet, in this particular, Geology and even Botany and Zoology support the
Esoteric Teachings. It has been suggested by many Geologists that the
Australian native—coëxisting as he does with an _archaic fauna and
flora_—must date back to an enormous antiquity. The whole environment of
this mysterious race, about whose origin Ethnology is silent, is a
testimony to the truth of the Esoteric position. As Jukes says:

It is a very curious fact that not only these marsupial animals
[the mammals found in the Oxfordshire Stone‐field Slates], but
several of the shells—as for instance, the Trigonias and even some
of the plants found fossil in the Oolitic rocks—much more nearly
resemble those now living in Australia than the living forms of
any other part of the globe. This might be explained on the
supposition that, since the Oolitic [Jurassic] period _less change
has taken place in Australia than elsewhere_, and that the
Australian flora and fauna consequently retain something of the
Oolitic type, _while it had been altogether supplanted and
replaced on the rest of the globe_ [! !].(448)

Now why has less change taken place in Australia than elsewhere? Where is
the _raison d’être_ for such a “curse of retardation”? It is simply
because the nature of the environment develops _pari passu_ with the race
concerned. Correspondences rule in every quarter. The survivors of those
later Lemurians, who escaped the destruction of their fellows when the
main Continent was submerged, became the ancestors of a portion of the
present native tribes. Being a very low sub‐race, begotten originally of
animals, of monsters, whose very fossils are now resting miles under the
sea floors, their stock has since existed in an environment strongly
subjected to the _law of retardation_. Australia is one of the oldest
lands now above the waters, and in the senile decrepitude of old age, its
“_virgin_ soil” notwithstanding. It can produce no new forms, unless
helped by new and fresh races, and artificial cultivation and breeding.

To return once more, however, to the history of the Third Race, the
“Sweat‐born,” the “Egg‐bearing,” and the “Androgyne.” Almost sexless, in
its early beginnings, it became bisexual or androgynous; very gradually of
course. The passage from the first to the last transformation required
numberless generations, during which the simple cell that issued from the
earliest parent (the two in one), first developed into a bisexual being;
and then the cell, becoming a regular egg, gave forth a unisexual
creature. The Third Race mankind is the most mysterious of all the five
hitherto developed Races. The mystery of the “How” of the generation of
the distinct sexes must, of course, be very obscure here, as it is the
business of an embryologist and a specialist; the present work giving only
faint outlines of the process. But it is evident that the units of the
Third Race humanity began to separate in their pre‐natal shells, or
eggs,(449) and to issue out of them as distinct male and female babes,
ages after the appearance of its early progenitors. And, as time rolled on
its geological periods, the newly born sub‐races began to lose their natal
capacities. Toward the end of the fourth sub‐race of the Third Race, the
babe lost its faculty of walking as soon as liberated from its shell, and
by the end of the fifth, mankind was born under the same conditions and by
identically the same process as our historical generations. This required,
of course, millions of years. The reader has been made acquainted with the
approximate figures, at least of the exoteric calculations.(450)

We are approaching the turning‐point of the evolution of the Races. Let us
see what Occult Philosophy says on the origin of language.

36. THE FOURTH RACE DEVELOPED SPEECH.

The Commentaries explain that the First Race—the ethereal or astral Sons
of Yoga, also called “Self‐born”—was, in our sense, speechless, for it was
devoid of mind on our plane. The Second Race had a “sound‐language,” to
wit, chant‐like sounds composed of vowels alone. The Third Race developed
in the beginning a kind of language which was only a slight improvement on
the various sounds in Nature, on the cry of gigantic insects and of the
first animals, which, however, were hardly nascent in the day of the
“Sweat‐born” or the _early_ Third Race. In its second half, when the
“Sweat‐born” gave birth to the “Egg‐born,” the _middle_ Third Race; and
when these, instead of “hatching out”—may the reader pardon the rather
ridiculous expression when applied to human beings in our age—as
androgynous beings, began to evolve into separate males and females; and
when the same law of evolution led them to reproduce their kind
sexually—an act which forced the Creative Gods, compelled by Karmic law,
to incarnate in _mindless_ men; then only was speech developed. But even
then it was still no better than a tentative effort. The whole human race
was at that time of “one language and of one lip.” This did not prevent
the last two sub‐races of the Third Race(451) from building cities, and
sowing far and wide the first seeds of civilization under the guidance of
their Divine Instructors,(452) and their own already awakened minds. Let
the reader also bear in mind that, as each of the seven Races is divided
into four Ages—the Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron Age—so is every
smallest division of such Races. Speech then developed, according to
Occult Teaching, in the following order:

I. _Monosyllabic speech_: that of the first approximately fully developed
human beings at the close of the Third Root‐Race, the “golden‐coloured,”
yellow‐complexioned men, after their separation into sexes, and the full
awakening of their minds. Before that, they communicated through what
would now be called “thought‐transference,” though, with the exception of
the Race called the “Sons of Will and Yoga”—the first in whom the “Sons of
Wisdom” had incarnated—thought was but very little developed in nascent
physical man, and never soared above a low terrestrial level. Their
physical bodies belonging to the Earth, their Monads remained on a higher
plane altogether. Language could not be well developed before the full
acquisition and development of their reasoning faculties. This
monosyllabic speech was the vowel‐parent, so to speak, of the monosyllabic
languages mixed with hard consonants, still in use amongst the yellow
races which are known to the Anthropologist.(453)

II. _Agglutinative speech_: these linguistic characteristics developed
into the agglutinative languages. The latter were spoken by some Atlantean
races, while other parent stocks of the Fourth Race preserved the mother‐
language. And as languages have their cyclic evolution, their childhood,
purity, growth, _fall into matter_, admixture with other languages,
maturity, decay and finally death,(454) so the primitive speech of the
most civilized Atlantean races—that language, which is referred to as
Râkshasî Bhâshâ, in old Sanskrit works—decayed and almost died out. While
the “cream” of the Fourth Race gravitated more and more toward the apex of
physical and intellectual evolution, thus leaving as an heirloom to the
nascent Fifth (the Âryan) Race the inflectional, highly developed
languages, the agglutinative decayed and remained as a fragmentary fossil
idiom, now scattered, and nearly limited to the aboriginal tribes of
America.

III. _Inflectional speech_: the root of the Sanskrit, very erroneously
called the “elder sister” of the Greek, instead of its mother—was the
first language, now the mystery tongue of the Initiates, of the Fifth
Race. The “Semitic” languages are the bastard descendants of the first
phonetic corruptions of the eldest children of the early Sanskrit. The
Occult Doctrine admits of no such divisions as the Âryan and the Semite,
and accepts even the Turanian with ample reservations. The Semites,
especially the Arabs, are later Âryans—degenerate in spirituality and
perfected in materiality. To these belong all the Jews and the Arabs. The
former are a tribe descended from the Chandâlas of India, the outcasts,
many of them ex‐Brâhmans, who sought refuge in Chaldæa, in Scinde, and
Aria (Iran), and were truly born from their father A‐Bram (No‐Brâhman)
some 8,000 years B.C. The latter, the Arabs, are the descendants of those
Âryans who would not go into India at the time of the dispersion of
nations, some of whom remained on the borderlands thereof, in Afghanistan
and Kabul(455) and along the Oxus, while others penetrated into and
invaded Arabia. But this was when Africa had already been raised as a
continent.

We have meanwhile to follow, as closely as limited space will permit, the
gradual evolution of the now truly human species. It is in the suddenly
arrested evolution of certain sub‐races, and their forced and violent
diversion into the purely animal line by artificial cross‐breeding, truly
analogous to the hybridization which we have now learned to utilize in the
vegetable and animal kingdoms, that we have to look for the origin of the
anthropoids.

In these red‐haired and hair‐covered monsters, the fruit of the unnatural
connection between men and animals, the “Lords of Wisdom” did not
incarnate, as we see. Thus through a long series of transformations due to
unnatural cross‐breeding—unnatural “sexual selection”—originated in due
course of time the lowest specimens of humanity; while further bestiality
and the fruit of their first animal efforts of reproduction begat a
species which developed into mammalian apes ages later.(456)

As to the separation of sexes, it did not occur suddenly, as one may
think. Nature proceeds slowly in whatever she does.

37. THE ONE(457) BECAME TWO; ALSO ALL THE LIVING AND CREEPING THINGS THAT
WERE STILL ONE, GIANT FISH, BIRDS AND SERPENTS WITH SHELL‐HEADS.

This relates evidently to the so‐called age of amphibious reptiles, during
which Science denies that man existed! But what could the Ancients know of
antediluvian prehistoric animals and monsters? Nevertheless, in Book VI of
the Commentaries is found a passage which, freely translated, says:

_When the Third separated and fell into sin by breeding men‐animals, these
[the animals] became ferocious, and men and they mutually destructive.
Till then, there was no sin, no life taken. After [the separation] the
Satya [Yuga] was at an end. The eternal spring became constant change and
seasons succeeded. Cold forced men to build shelters and devise clothing.
Then man appealed to the superior Fathers [the higher Gods or Angels]. The
Nirmânakâyas, of the Nâgas, the wise Serpents and Dragons of Light, came,
and the precursors of the Enlightened [the Buddhas]. Divine Kings
descended and taught men sciences and arts, for man could live no longer
in the first land [Âdi‐Varsha, the Eden of the first Races], which had
turned into a white frozen corpse._

The above is suggestive. We will see what can be inferred from this brief
statement. Some may incline to think that there is more in it than is
apparent at first sight.

Edens, Serpents, And Dragons.

Whence the idea, and the true meaning of the term “Eden”? Christians will
maintain that the Garden of Eden is the holy Paradise, the place
_desecrated by the sin_ of Adam and Eve; the Occultist will deny this
dead‐letter interpretation, and show the reverse. One need not believe in
the _Bible_ and see in it divine revelation, to say that this ancient
book, if read esoterically, is based upon the same universal traditions as
the other ancient scriptures. What Eden was is partially shown in _Isis
Unveiled_, where it is said that:

The Garden of Eden as a locality is no myth at all; it belongs to
those landmarks of history which occasionally disclose to the
student that the _Bible_ is not all mere allegory. “Eden, or the
Hebrew גן עדן, Gan‐Eden, meaning the Park or the Garden of Eden,
is an archaic name of the country watered by the Euphrates and its
many branches, from Asia and Armenia to the Erythraian sea.”(458)
In the Chaldæan _Book of Numbers_, its location is designated in
numerals, and in the cypher Rosicrucian manuscript, left by Count
St. Germain, it is fully described. In the Assyrian _Tablets_ it
is rendered Gan‐duniyas. “Behold,” say the אלהִם, Elohim, of
_Genesis_, “the man is become as one of us.” The Elohim may be
accepted in one sense for _gods_ or powers, and in another for
Aleim, or priests—the hierophants initiated into the good and evil
of this world; for there was a college of priests called the
Aleim, while the head of their caste, or the chief of the
hierophants, was known as Java‐Aleim. Instead of becoming a
neophyte, and gradually obtaining his esoteric knowledge through a
regular initiation, an Adam, or Man, uses his intuitional
faculties and, prompted by the serpent—_Woman_ and Matter—tastes
of the Tree of Knowledge, the Esoteric or Secret Doctrine,
unlawfully. The priests of Hercules, or Mel‐karth, the “Lord” of
the Eden, all wore “coats of skin.” The text says: “And Java‐Aleim
made for Adam and his wife, כתנותעור. Chitonuth‐our.” The first
Hebrew word, Chiton, is the Greek Χιτὼν (Chitôn). It became a
Slavonic word by adoption from the _Bible_, and means a _coat_, an
upper garment.

Though containing the same substratum of esoteric truth as does
every early Cosmogony, the Hebrew Scripture wears on its face the
marks of a double origin. Its _Genesis_ is purely a reminiscence
of the Babylonian captivity. The names of places, men, and even
objects, can be traced from the original text to the Chaldæans and
the Akkadians, the progenitors and Âryan instructors of the
former. It is strongly contested that the Akkad tribes of Chaldæa,
Babylonia and Assyria were in any way cognate with the Brâhmans of
Hindûstan; but there are more proofs in favour of this opinion
than otherwise. The Shemite or Assyrian ought, perchance, to have
been called the Turanian, and the Mongolians have been denominated
Scyths. But if the Akkadians ever existed, otherwise than in the
imagination of some Philologists and Ethnologists, they certainly
would never have been a Turanian tribe, as some Assyriologists
have striven to make us believe. They were simply emigrants on
their way to Asia Minor from India, the cradle of humanity, and
their sacerdotal adepts tarried to civilize and initiate a
barbarian people. Halévy proved the fallacy of the Turanian mania
in regard to Akkadian people, and other scientists have proved
that the Babylonian civilization was neither born nor developed in
that country. It was imported from India, and the importers were
Brâhmanical Hindûs.(459)

And now, ten years after this was written, we find ourselves corroborated
by Professor Sayce, who says in his first Hibbert Lecture that the culture
of the Babylonian city Eridu was of “foreign importation.” It came from
India.

Much of the theology was borrowed by the Semites from the non‐
Semitic Akkadians or Proto‐Chaldæans, whom they supplanted, and
whose local cults they had neither the will nor the power to
uproot. Indeed, throughout a long course of ages the two races,
Semites and Akkadians, lived side by side, their notions and
worship of the gods blending insensibly together.

Here, the Akkadians are called “non‐Semitic,” as we had insisted they were
in _Isis Unveiled_, which is another corroboration. Nor are we less right
in always maintaining that the Jewish biblical history was a compilation
of _historical_ facts, arranged from other people’s history in Jewish
garb—_Genesis_ excluded, which is Esotericism pure and simple. But it is
really from the Euxine to Kashmir, and beyond, that Science has to search
for the cradle—or rather one of the chief cradles—of mankind and the sons
of Ad‐ah; especially in after times, when the Garden of Ed‐en on the
Euphrates became the College of the Astrologers and Magi, the Aleim.

But this College and this Eden belong to the Fifth Race, and are simply a
faint reminiscence of the Âdi‐Varsha, of the primeval Third Race. What is
the etymological meaning of the word Eden? In Greek it is ἡδονὴ,
signifying “voluptuousness.” In this aspect it is no better than the
Olympus of the Greeks, Indra’s Heaven, Svarga, on Mount Meru, and even the
Paradise full of Houris, promised by Mahomet to the faithful. The Garden
of Eden was never the property of the Jews, for China, which can hardly be
suspected of having known anything of the Jews 2,000 B.C., had such a
primitive Garden in Central Asia inhabited by the “Dragons of Wisdom,” the
Initiates. And according to Klaproth, the hieroglyphical chart copied from
a Japanese Cyclopædia in the book of _Foĕ‐kouĕ‐ki_(460) places its “Garden
of Wisdom” on the Plateau of Pamir between the highest peaks of the
Himâlayan ranges; and, describing it as the culminating point of Central
Asia, shows the four rivers—Oxus, Indus, Ganges, and Silo—flowing from a
common source, the “Lake of the Dragons.”

But this is not the Genetic Eden; nor is it the Kabalistical Garden of
Eden. For the former—Eden Illa‐ah—means in one sense Wisdom, a state like
that of Nirvâna, a Paradise of Bliss; while in another sense it refers to
Intellectual Man himself, the container of the Eden in which grows the
Tree of Knowledge of good and evil; man being the Knower thereof.

Renan and Barthélemy St. Hilaire, basing themselves “on the most solid
inductions,” think it impossible to doubt any longer, and both place the
cradle of humanity “in the region of the Timaus.” Finally, the _Journal
Asiatique_(461) concludes that:

All the traditions of the human race gathering its primitive
families at the region of their birth‐place, show them to us
grouped around the countries where Jewish tradition places the
Garden of Eden; where the Âryans [Zoroastrians] established their
Airyana Vaêjô or the Meru [?]. They are hemmed in to the North by
the countries which join Lake Aral, and to the South by Baltistan,
or Little Tibet. Everything concurs in proving that there was the
abode of that primitive humanity to which we have to be traced.

That “primitive humanity” was in its Fifth Race, when the “Four‐mouthed
Dragon,” the lake, of which very few traces are now left, was the abode of
the “Sons of Wisdom,” the first Mind‐born Sons of the Third Race. Yet it
was neither the only nor the primitive cradle of humanity, though it was
the copy of the cradle, verily, of the first thinking _divine_ Man. It was
the Paradesha, the highland of the first Sanskrit‐speaking people, the
Hedone, the country of delight of the Greeks, but it was not the “Bower of
Voluptuousness” of the Chaldæans, for the latter was but the reminiscence
of it; nor again was it there that the “Fall of Man” occurred after the
“separation.” The Eden of the Jews was _copied_ from the Chaldæan _copy_.

That the Fall of Man into generation occurred during the earliest portion
of what Science calls the Mesozoic times, or the age of the reptiles, is
evidenced by the bible phraseology concerning the serpent, the nature of
which is explained in the _Zohar_. The question is not whether Eve’s
incident with the tempting reptile is allegorical or textual, for no one
can doubt that it is the former, but to show the antiquity of the
symbolism on the very face of it, and that it was not a Jewish but a
universal idea.

Now we find in the _Zohar_ a very strange assertion, one that is
calculated to provoke the reader to merry laughter by its ludicrous
absurdity. It tells us that the serpent, which was used by Shamaël, the
supposed Satan, to seduce Eve, was a kind of “flying
camel”—καμηλόμορφον.(462)

A “flying camel” is indeed too much for the most liberal‐minded F.R.S.
Nevertheless, the _Zohar_, which can hardly be expected to use the
language of a Cuvier, was right in its description; for we find it called
in the old Zoroastrian MSS. Aschmogh, which in the _Avesta_ is represented
as having after the Fall lost its _nature_ and its _name_, and is
described as a huge serpent with a camel’s neck.

Salverte asserts that:

There are no winged serpents nor veritable dragons....
Grasshoppers are still called by the Greeks _winged serpents_, and
this metaphor may have created several narratives on the existence
of winged serpents.(463)

There are none _now_; but there is no reason why they should not have
existed during the Mesozoic Age; and Cuvier, who has reconstructed their
skeletons, is a witness to “flying camels.” Already, after finding simple
fossils of certain saurians, the great Naturalist has written, that:

If anything can justify the hydras and other monsters, whose
figures were so often repeated by mediæval historians, it is
incontestably the Plesiosaurus.(464)

We are unaware if Cuvier has added anything in the way of a further _mea
culpa_, but we may well imagine his confusion for all his slanders against
archaic veracity, when he found himself in the presence of a _flying_
saurian, the Pterodactyl, found in Germany, seventy‐eight feet long, and
carrying vigorous wings attached to its reptilian body. This fossil is
described as a reptile, the _little fingers of whose hands_ are so
elongated as to bear a long membranous wing. Here, then, the “flying
camel” of the _Zohar_ is vindicated. For surely, between the long neck of
the Plesiosaurus and the membranous wing of the Pterodactyl, or still
better the Mosasaurus, there is enough scientific probability on which to
build a “flying camel,” or a long‐necked dragon. Prof. Cope, of
Philadelphia, has shown that the Mosasaurus fossil in the chalk was a
winged serpent of this kind. There are characters in its vertebræ, which
indicate union with the Ophidia rather than with the Lacertilia.

And now to the main question. It is well known that Antiquity has never
claimed Palæontography and Palæontology among its arts and sciences; and
it never had its Cuviers. Yet on Babylonian tiles, and especially in old
Chinese and Japanese drawings, in the oldest Pagodas and monuments, and in
the Imperial Library at Pekin, many a traveller has seen and recognized
perfect representations of Plesiosauri and Pterodactyls in the multiform
Chinese dragons.(465) Moreover, the prophets speak in the _Bible_ of the
flying fiery serpents,(466) and Job mentions the Leviathan.(467) Now the
following questions are put very directly:

I. How could the ancient nations know anything of the extinct monsters of
the Carboniferous and Mesozoic times, and even represent and describe them
orally and pictorially, unless they had either _seen those monsters
themselves_ or _possessed descriptions of them in their traditions_; which
descriptions necessitate _living and intelligent eye‐witnesses_?

II. And if such eye‐witnesses are once admitted (unless retrospective
clairvoyance is granted), how can humanity and the first palæolithic men
be no earlier than about the middle of the Tertiary period? We must bear
in mind that most of the men of Science do not allow man to have appeared
before the Quaternary period, and thus shut him out completely from the
Cainozoic times. Here we have extinct species of animals, which
disappeared from the face of the Earth millions of years ago, described
by, and known to, nations whose civilization, it is said, could hardly
have begun a few thousand years ago. How is this? Evidently either the
Mesozoic time has to be made to overlap the Quaternary period, or man must
be made the contemporary of the Pterodactyl and the Plesiosaurus.

It does not follow that, because the Occultists believe in and defend
Ancient Wisdom and Science, even though winged saurians are called “flying
camels” in the translations of the _Zohar_, we therefore as readily
believe in all the stories which the Middle Ages give us of such dragons.
Pterodactyls and Plesiosauri ceased to exist with the bulk of the Third
Race. When, therefore, we are gravely asked by Roman Catholic writers to
credit Christopher Scherer’s and Father Kircher’s cock‐and‐bull stories of
their having seen with their own eyes living fiery and flying dragons,
respectively in 1619 and 1669, we may be allowed to regard their
assertions as either dreams or fibs.(468) Nor shall we regard otherwise
than as a “poetical license” the story told of Petrarch, who, while
following one day his Laura in the woods and passing near a cave, is
credited with having found a dragon, whom he forthwith stabbed with his
dagger and killed, thus preventing the monster from devouring the lady of
his heart.(469) We would willingly believe the story had Petrarch lived in
the days of Atlantis, when such antediluvian monsters may still have
existed. We deny their existence in our present era. The sea‐serpent is
one thing, the dragon quite another. The former is denied by the majority
because it lives in the very depths of the ocean, is very scarce, and
rises to the surface only when compelled, perhaps, by hunger. Thus keeping
invisible, it may exist and still be denied. But if there was such a thing
as a dragon of the above description, how could it have ever escaped
detection? It is a creature contemporary with the earliest Fifth Race, and
exists no more.

The reader may enquire why we speak of dragons at all? We answer: firstly,
because the knowledge of such animals is a proof of the enormous antiquity
of the human race; and, secondly, to show the difference between the real
zoological meaning of the words “Dragon,” “Nâga,” and “Serpent,” and the
metaphorical meaning, when used symbolically. The profane reader, who
knows nothing of the mystery language, is likely, whenever he finds one of
these words mentioned, to accept it literally. Hence, the _quidproquos_
and unjust accusations. A couple of instances will suffice.

“Sed et Serpens?” Aye: but what was the nature of the serpent? Mystics
intuitionally see in the serpent of _Genesis_ an animal emblem and a high
spiritual essence: a cosmic force, superintelligent, a “great fallen
light,” a spirit, sidereal, aërial and tellurian at the same time, “whose
influence circumambulates the globe” (_qui circumambulat terram_), as De
Mirville,(470) a Christian fanatic of the dead‐letter, has it, and which
only “manifested itself under the physical emblem which agreed the better
with its moral and intellectual _coils_”—_i.e._, under the ophidian form.

But what will Christians make of the Brazen Serpent, the “Divine Healer,”
if the serpent is to be regarded as the emblem of cunning and evil; the
“Evil One” itself? How can the line of demarcation ever be settled, when
it is traced arbitrarily in a sectarian theological spirit? For, if the
followers of the Roman Church are taught that Mercury and Æsculapius, or
Asclepios, who are, in truth, one, are “devils and sons of devils,” and
the wand and serpent of the latter, the “Devil’s wand”; how about the
Brazen Serpent of Moses? Every scholar knows that both the Heathen “wand”
and the Jewish “serpent” are one and the same, namely, the Caduceus of
Mercury, son of Apollo‐Python. It is easy to comprehend why the Jews
adopted the ophidian shape for their “seducer.” With them it was purely
_physiological_ and _phallic_; and no amount of casuistical reasoning on
the part of the Roman Catholic Church can give it another meaning, once
that the mystery language is well studied, and that the Hebrew scrolls are
read numerically. The Occultists know that the Serpent, the Nâga, and the
Dragon have each a septenary meaning; that the Sun, for instance, was the
astronomical and cosmic emblem of the two contrasted Lights and the two
Serpents of the Gnostics, the good and the evil. They also know that, when
_generalized_, the conclusions of both Science and Theology present two
most ridiculous extremes. For, when the former tells us that it is
sufficient to trace the legends of the serpents to their primal source,
the astronomical legend, and to meditate seriously on the Sun, the
conqueror of Python, and the celestial Virgin in the Zodiac forcing back
the devouring Dragon, if we would have the key of all the subsequent
religious dogmas—it is easy to perceive that, instead of generalizing, the
author simply has his eye on Christian religion and _Revelation_. We call
this the one extreme. We see the other when Theology, repeating the famous
decision of the Council of Trent, seeks to convince the masses that:

From the fall of man until the hour of his baptism the Devil has
full power over him, and possesses him _by right_—_diabolum
dominium et potestatem super homines habere et jure eos
possidere_.(471)

To this Occult Philosophy answers: Prove first the existence of the Devil
_as an entity_, and then we may believe in such congenital possession. A
very small amount of observation and knowledge of human nature may be
sufficient to prove the fallacy of this theological dogma. Had Satan any
reality, in the objective or even subjective world (in the ecclesiastical
sense), it is the poor Devil who would find himself chronically obsessed
and even possessed by the wicked—hence by the bulk of mankind. It is
humanity itself, and especially the clergy, headed by the haughty,
unscrupulous and intolerant Roman Church, which has begotten, given birth
to, and reared in love the Evil One. But this is a digression.

The whole world of thought is reproached by the Church with having
adored the serpent.

The whole of humanity burnt incense to it or stoned it. The
_Zends_ speak of it as do the _Kings_ and _Vedas_, as the _Edda_
... and the _Bible_.... Everywhere the sacred serpent [the Nâga]
has its shrine and its priest; in Rome it is the Vestal who ...
prepares its meal with the same care that she bestows on the
sacred fire. In Greece, Æsculapius cannot cure without its
assistance, and delegates to it his powers. Every one has heard of
the famous Roman embassy sent by the Senate to the god of medicine
and its return with the not less famous serpent, which proceeded
of its own will and by itself toward its master’s temple on one of
the islands of the Tiber. Not a Bacchante that did not wind it
[the serpent] in her hair, not an Augur but questioned it with
care, not a Necromancer whose tombs are free from its presence!
The Cainites and the Ophites call it Creator, while recognizing,
as Schelling did, that the serpent is “evil in substance and in
person.”(472)

Yes, the author is right, and if one would have a complete idea of the
prestige which the serpent enjoys to our own day, he ought to study the
matter in India and learn all that is believed about, and still attributed
to, the Nâgas (cobras) in that country; one should also visit the Africans
of Whydah, the Voodoos of Port‐au‐Prince and Jamaica, the Nagals of
Mexico, and the Pâ, or Men‐serpents of China, etc. But why wonder that the
serpent is “adored” and at the same time cursed, since we know that from
the beginning it was a symbol? In every ancient language the word _dragon_
signified what it now does in Chinese, _long_ or “the being who excels in
intelligence,” and in Greek, δράκων, or “he who sees and watches.”(473) Is
it to the animal of this name that any of these epithets can apply? Is it
not evident, wherever superstition and oblivion of the primitive meaning
may have led savages now, that the above qualifications were intended to
apply to the human originals, who were symbolized by Serpents and Dragons?
These originals—called to this day in China the “Dragons of Wisdom”—were
the first disciples of the Dhyânîs, who were their Instructors; in short,
the Primitive Adepts of the Third Race, and later, of the Fourth and Fifth
Races. The name became universal, and no sane man before the Christian era
would ever have confounded the man and the symbol.

The symbol of Chnouphis, or the Soul of the World, writes Champollion:

Is among others that of an enormous serpent standing on human
legs; this reptile, the emblem of the Good Genius, is a veritable
Agathodæmon. It is often represented bearded.... This sacred
animal, identical with the serpent of the Ophites, is found
engraved on numerous Gnostic or Basilidean stones.... The serpent
has various heads, but is constantly inscribed with the letters
ΧΝΟΥΒΙΣ.(474)

Agathodæmon was endowed “with the knowledge of good and evil,” _i.e._,
with Divine Wisdom, for without the latter the former is impossible.(475)
Repeating Jamblichus, Champollion shows him to be:

The deity called Εἰχτῶν [or the Fire of the Celestial Gods—the
Great Thot‐Hermes],(476) to whom Hermes Trismegistus attributes
the invention of magic.(477)

The “invention of magic”! A strange term to use, as though the unveiling
of the eternal and actual mysteries of Nature could be _invented_! As well
attribute, millenniums hence, the _invention_ instead of the discovery of
radiant matter to Mr. Crookes. Hermes was not the inventor, or even the
discoverer, for, as said in the last footnote but one, Thot‐Hermes is a
generic name, as is Enoch—Enoïchion, the “inner, spiritual eye”—Nebo, the
prophet and seer, etc. It is not the proper name of any one living man,
but a generic title of many Adepts. Their connection with the serpent in
symbolic allegories is due to their enlightenment by the Solar and
Planetary Gods during the earliest intellectual Race, the Third. They are
all the representative patrons of the Secret Wisdom. Asclepios is the son
of the Sun‐God Apollo, and he is Mercury; Nebo is the son of Bel‐Merodach;
Vaivasvata Manu, the great Rishi, is the son of Vivasvat—the Sun or Sûrya,
etc. And while, astronomically, the Nâgas along with the Rishis, the
Gandharvas, Apsarases, Grâmanîs (or Yakshas, minor Gods), Yâtudhânas and
Devas, are the Sun’s attendants throughout the twelve solar months; in
theogony, and also in anthropological evolution, they are Gods and
Men—when incarnated in the _Nether_ World. Let the reader be reminded, in
this connection, of the fact that Apollonius met in Kashmir Buddhist
Nâgas. These are neither serpents zoologically, nor yet the Nâgas
ethnologically, but “wise men.”

The _Bible_, from _Genesis_ to _Revelation_, is but a series of historical
records of the great struggle between White and Black Magic, between the
Adepts of the Right Path, the Prophets, and those of the Left, the
Levites, the clergy of the brutal masses. Even the students of Occultism,
though some of them have more archaic MSS. and direct teaching to rely
upon, find it difficult to draw a line of demarcation between the Sodales
of the Right Path and those of the Left. The great schism that arose
between the sons of the Fourth Race, as soon as the first Temples and
Halls of Initiation had been erected under the guidance of the “Sons of
God,” is allegorized in the Sons of Jacob. That there were two Schools of
Magic, and that the orthodox Levites did not belong to the holy one, is
shown in the words pronounced by the dying Jacob. And here it may be well
to quote a few sentences from _Isis Unveiled_.(478)

The dying Jacob thus describes his sons: “Dan,” he says, “shall be
a _serpent_ by the way, an _adder_ in the path, that biteth the
horse‐heels, so that his rider shall fall backwards [_i.e._, he
will teach candidates _Black_ Magic]. I have waited for thy
salvation, O Lord!” Of Simeon and Levi the patriarch remarks that
they “are brethren; instruments of _cruelty_ are in their
habitations. O my soul, come not thou into their _secret_; unto
their _assembly_.”(479) Now in the original, the words “their
secret” read—“their Sod.”(480) And Sod was the name for the great
Mysteries of Baal, Adonis and Bacchus, who were all Sun‐Gods and
had serpents for symbols. The Kabalists explain the allegory of
the fiery serpents by saying that this was the name given to the
tribe of Levi, to all the Levites, in short, and that Moses was
the chief of the Sodales.(481)

It is to the Mysteries that the original meaning of the “Dragon‐Slayers”
has to be traced, and the question is fully treated of hereafter.

Meanwhile it follows that, if Moses was the Chief of the Mysteries, he was
the Hierophant thereof; and further, if, at the same time, we find the
Prophets thundering against the “abominations” of the people of Israël,
that there were two Schools. “Fiery serpents” was, then, simply the
epithet given to the Levites of the priestly caste, after they had
departed from the Good Law, the traditional teachings of Moses, and to all
those who followed Black Magic. Isaiah, when referring to the “rebellious
children” who will have to carry their riches into the lands whence come
“the viper and _fiery_ flying _serpent_,”(482) or Chaldæa and Egypt, whose
Initiates had already greatly degenerated in his day (700 B.C.), meant the
sorcerers of those lands.(483) But these must be carefully distinguished
from the “Fiery Dragons of Wisdom” and the “Sons of the Fire‐Mist.”

In the _Great Book of the Mysteries_ we are told that:

_Seven Lords created seven Men; three Lords [Dhyân Chohans or Pitris] were
holy and good, four less heavenly and full of passion.... The Chhâyâs
[phantoms] of the Fathers were as they._

This accounts for the differences in human nature, which is divided into
seven gradations of good and evil. There were seven tabernacles ready to
be inhabited by Monads under seven different Karmic conditions. The
Commentaries explain on this basis the easy spread of evil, as soon as the
human Forms had become real men. Some ancient philosophers, however, in
their genetical accounts, ignored the seven and gave only four. Thus the
Mexican local _Genesis_ has “four _good_ men,” described as the four real
ancestors of the human race, “who were neither begotten by the Gods nor
born of woman”; but whose creation was a wonder wrought by the Creative
Powers, and who were made only after “_three attempts at manufacturing men
had failed_.” The Egyptians in their theology had only “four Sons of
God”—whereas in _Pymander_ _seven_ are given—thus avoiding any mention of
the evil nature of man. When, however, Set from a God sank into Set‐
Typhon, he began to be called the “seventh son”; whence probably arose the
belief that “the seventh son of the seventh son” is always a natural‐born
magician—though at first only a _sorcerer_ was meant. Apap, the serpent
symbolizing evil, is slain by Aker, Set’s serpent;(484) therefore Set‐
Typhon could not be that evil. In the _Book of the Dead_, it is commanded
that Chapter clxiii should be read “in the presence of a serpent on two
legs,” which means a high Initiate, a Hierophant, for the discus and ram’s
horns(485) that adorn his “serpent’s” head in the hieroglyphics of the
title of the said chapter, denote this. Over the “serpent” are represented
the two mystic eyes of Ammon,(486) the hidden “Mystery God.” The above
passages corroborate our assertion, and show what the word “serpent”
really meant in antiquity.

But as to the Nagals and Nargals; whence came the similarity or names
between the Indian Nâgas and the American Nagals?

The Nargal was the Chaldæan and Assyrian chief of the Magi [Rab‐
Mag], and the Nagal was the chief sorcerer of the Mexican Indians.
Both derive their names from Nergal‐Serezer, the Assyrian god, and
the Hindû Nâgas. Both have the same faculties and the power to
have an attendant Dæmon, with whom they identify themselves
completely. The Chaldæan and Assyrian Nargal kept his Dæmon, in
the shape of some animal considered sacred, inside the temple; the
Indian Nagal keeps his wherever he can—in the neighbouring lake,
or wood, or in the house, in the shape of some household
animal.(487)

Such similarity cannot be attributed to _coincidence_. A new world is
discovered, and we find that, for our forefathers of the Fourth Race, it
was already an old one; that Arjuna, Krishna’s companion and Chelâ, is
said to have descended into Pâtâla, the “antipodes” and therein married
Ulûpî,(488) a Nâga, or Nâgî rather, the daughter of the king of the Nâgas,
Kauravya.(489)

And now it may be hoped the full meaning of the serpent emblem is proven.
It is neither that of evil, nor, least of all, that of the devil; but is,
indeed, the ΣΕΜΕΣ ΕΙΛΑΜ ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞ, the “Eternal Sun Abrasax,” the Central
Spiritual Sun of all the Kabalists, represented in some diagrams by the
circle of Tiphereth.

And here, again, we may quote from our earlier volumes and enter into
further explanations.

From this region of unfathomable Depth (Bythos, Aditi, Shekinah,
the Veil of the Unknown) issues forth a Circle formed of spirals.
This is Tiphereth; which, in the language of symbolism, means a
grand Cycle, composed of smaller ones. Coiled within, so as to
follow the spirals, lies the Serpent—emblem of Wisdom and
Eternity—the Dual Androgyne; the cycle representing Ennoia, or the
Divine Mind (a Power which does not create but which must
assimilate), and the Serpent, the Agathodæmon, the Ophis, the
_Shadow_ of the Light (non‐eternal, yet the greatest Divine Light
on our plane). Both were the Logoi of the Ophites; or the Unity as
Logos manifesting itself as a double principle of Good and
Evil.(490)

Were it Light alone, inactive and absolute, the human mind could not
appreciate nor even realize it. Shadow is that which enables Light to
manifest itself, and gives it objective reality. Therefore, Shadow is not
evil, but is the necessary and indispensable corollary which completes
Light or Good; it is its _creator_ on Earth.

According to the views of the Gnostics, these two principles are immutable
Light and Shadow; Good and Evil being virtually one and having existed
through all eternity, as they will ever continue to exist so long as there
are manifested worlds.

This symbol accounts for the adoration by this sect of the
Serpent, as the Saviour, coiled either round the sacramental loaf,
or a Tau (the phallic emblem). As a unity, Ennoia and Ophis are
the Logos. When separated, one is the Tree of Spiritual Life, the
other, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Therefore, we find
Ophis urging the first human couple—the material production of
Ilda‐baoth, but owing its spiritual principle to Sophia‐
Achamoth—to eat of the forbidden fruit, although Ophis represents
divine Wisdom.

The Serpent, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the Tree
of Life, are all symbols transplanted from the soil of India. The
Arasa‐maram [?], the banyan tree, so sacred with the Hindûs—since
Vishnu during one of his incarnations, reposed under its mighty
shade and there taught human philosophy and sciences—is called the
Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. Under the protecting
foliage of this king of the forests, the Gurus teach their pupils
their first lessons on immortality and initiate them into the
mysteries of life and death. The Java‐Aleim of the Sacerdotal
College are said, in the Chaldæan tradition, to have taught the
sons of men to become like one of them. To the present day Foh‐
tchou(491) who lives in his Foh‐Maëyu, or the temple of Buddha, on
the top of the Kouin‐Long‐Sang,(492) the great mountain, produces
his greatest religious miracles under a tree called in Chinese
Sung‐Ming‐Shŭ, or the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life, for
ignorance is death, and knowledge alone gives immortality. This
marvellous display takes place every three years, when an immense
concourse of Chinese Buddhists assembles in pilgrimage at the holy
place.(493)

Now it may become comprehensible why the earliest Initiates and Adepts, or
the “Wise Men,” who are claimed to have been initiated into the Mysteries
of Nature by the Universal Mind, represented by the highest Angels, were
named the “Serpents of Wisdom” and “Dragons”; and also how the first
physiologically complete couples—after being initiated into the Mystery of
Human Creation through Ophis, the Manifested Logos and the Androgyne, by
eating of the fruit of knowledge—gradually began to be accused by the
material spirit of posterity of having _committed sin_, of having
disobeyed the “Lord God,” and of having been tempted by the Serpent.

So little have the first Christians—who despoiled the Jews of their
_Bible_—understood the first four chapters of _Genesis_ in their esoteric
meaning, that they have never perceived that not only was no sin intended
in this disobedience, but that the “Serpent” was actually the “Lord God”
himself, who, as the Ophis, the Logos, or the bearer of divine creative
wisdom, taught mankind to become creators in their turn.(494) They never
realized that the Cross was an evolution from the Tree and the Serpent,
and thus became the _salvation of mankind_. By this it would become the
very first fundamental symbol of Creative Cause, applying to geometry, to
numbers, to astronomy, to measure and to animal reproduction. According to
the _Kabalah_, _the curse on man came with the formation of woman_.(495)
The circle was separated from its diameter line.

From the possession of the double principle in one, that is, the
Androgyne condition, the separation of the dual principle was
made, presenting two opposites, whose destiny it was, for ever
after, to seek reünion into the original _one_ condition. The
curse was this, viz., that Nature, impelling the search, evaded
the desired result by the production of a new being, distinct from
that reünion or oneness desired, by which the natural longing to
recover a lost state was and is for ever being cheated. It is by
this tantalizing process of a continued curse that Nature
lives.(496)

The allegory of Adam being driven away from the Tree of Life means,
Esoterically, that the newly separated Race abused and dragged down the
mystery of Life into the region of animalism and bestiality. For, as the
_Zohar_ shows, Matronethah—Shekinah, the wife of Metatron symbolically—“is
the way to the great Tree of Life, the Mighty Tree,” and Shekinah is
Divine Grace. As explained, this Tree reaches the heavenly vale and is
hidden between three mountains (the upper Triad of Principles, in man).
From these three mountains, the Tree ascends above (the Adept’s knowledge
aspires heavenward), and then redescends below (into the Adept’s Ego on
earth). This Tree is revealed in the day time and is hidden during the
night, _i.e._, revealed to an enlightened mind and hidden to ignorance,
which is night.(497) As says the Commentary:

_The Tree of the Knowledge of the Good and the Evil grows from the roots
of the Tree of Life._

But then also, as the author of _The Source of Measures_ writes:

In the Kabalah it is plainly to be found that the “Tree of Life”
was the ansated cross in its sexual aspect, and that the “Tree of
Knowledge” was the separation and the coming together again to
fulfil the fatal condition. To display this in numbers the values
of the letters composing the word Otz (עץ), tree, are 7 and 9, the
seven being the holy feminine number and the nine the number of
the phallic or male energy. This ansated cross is the symbol of
the Egyptian _female‐male_, Isis‐Osiris, the germinal principle in
all forms, based on the primal manifestation applicable in all
directions and in all senses.

This is the Kabalistic view of the Western Occultists, and it differs from
the more philosophical Eastern or Âryan views upon the subject.(498) The
separation of the sexes was in the programme of Nature and of natural
evolution; and the creative faculty in male and female was a gift of
Divine Wisdom. In the truth of such traditions the whole of Antiquity,
from the patrician philosopher to the humblest spiritually inclined
plebeian, has believed. And as we proceed, we may successfully show that
the _relative_ truth of such legends, if not their absolute
exactness—vouched for by such giants of intellect as were Solon,
Pythagoras, Plato, and others—begins to dawn upon more than one modern
Scientist. He is perplexed; he stands startled and confused before proofs
that are being daily accumulated before him; he feels that there is no way
of solving the many historical problems that stare him in the face, unless
he begins by accepting ancient traditions. Therefore, in saying that we
believe absolutely in ancient records and _universal_ legends, we need
hardly plead guilty before the impartial observer, for other and far more
learned writers, and that too among those who belong to the modern
Scientific School, evidently believe in much that the Occultists do—in
“dragons,” for instance, and not only symbolically, but also in their
actual existence at one time.

It would have indeed been a bold step for anyone, some thirty
years ago, to have thought of treating the public to a collection
of stories ordinarily reputed fabulous, and of claiming for them
the consideration due to genuine realities, or to have advocated
tales, time‐honoured as fictions, as actual facts; and those of
the nursery as being, in many instances, legends, more or less
distorted, descriptive of real beings or events. Nowadays it is a
less hazardous proceeding.(499)

Thus opens the Introduction to a recent (1886) and most interesting work
by Mr. Charles Gould, called _Mythical Monsters_. He boldly states his
belief in most of these monsters. He submits that:

Many of the so‐called mythical animals, which throughout long ages
and in all nations have been the fertile subjects of fiction and
fable, come legitimately within the scope of plain matter‐of‐fact
Natural History, and that they may be considered, not as the
outcome of exuberant fancy, but as creatures which really once
existed, and of which, unfortunately, only imperfect and
inaccurate descriptions have filtered down to us, probably very
much refracted, through the mists of time; ... traditions of
creatures _once coëxisting with man, some of which are so weird
and terrible as to appear at first sight to be impossible_....

For me the major part of those creatures are not chimeras but
objects of rational study. The dragon, in place of being a
creature evolved out of the imagination of Âryan man by the
contemplation of lightning flashing through the caverns which he
tenanted, as is held by some mythologists, is an animal which once
lived and dragged its ponderous coils and perhaps flew....

To me the specific existence of the unicorn seems not incredible,
and, in fact, more probable than that theory which assigns its
origin to a lunar myth.(500)...

For my part I doubt the general derivation of myths from “the
contemplation of the visible workings of external nature.” It
seems to me easier to suppose that the palsy of time has enfeebled
the utterance of these oft‐told tales until their original
appearance is almost unrecognizable, than that _uncultured savages
should possess powers of imagination and poetical invention far
beyond those enjoyed by the most instructed nations of the present
day_; less hard to believe that these wonderful stories of gods
and demigods, of giants and dwarfs, of dragons and monsters of all
descriptions are _transformations_ than to believe them to be
_inventions_.(501)

It is shown by the same Geologist that:

Palæontologists have successively traced back the existence of man
to periods variously estimated at from _thirty thousand to one
million_ years—to periods when he coëxisted with animals which
have long since become extinct.(502)

These animals, “weird and terrible,” were, to give a few instances: (1)
The genus Cidastes, whose huge bones and vertebræ show them to have
attained a length of nearly two hundred feet. The remains of such
monsters, no less than ten in number, were seen by Professor Marsh in the
Mauvaises Terres of Colorado, strewn upon the plains. (2) The Titanosaurus
Montanus, reaching fifty or sixty feet in length. (3) The Dinosaurians, in
the Jurassic beds of the Rocky Mountains, of still more gigantic
proportions. (4) The Atlantosaurus Immanis, a femur of which alone is over
six feet in length, and which would be thus over one hundred feet in
length. But even yet the line has not been reached, and we hear of the
discovery of remains of such titanic proportions as to possess a thigh‐
bone over twelve feet in length!(503) Then we read of the monstrous
Sivatherium in the Himâlayas, the four‐horned stag, as large as an
elephant, and exceeding the latter in height; of the gigantic Megatherium;
of colossal flying lizards, Pterodactyli, with crocodile jaws on a duck’s
head, etc. _All these were coëxistent with man, most probably attacked
man, as man attacked them._ And we are asked to believe that the said man
was no larger then than he is now! Is it possible to conceive that,
surrounded in Nature with such monstrous creatures, man, unless himself a
colossal giant, could have survived, while all his foes have perished? Is
it with his stone hatchet that he had the best of a Sivatherium or a
gigantic flying saurian? Let us always bear in mind that at least one
great man of Science, de Quatrefages, sees no good scientific reasons why
man should not have been “contemporaneous with the earliest mammalia and
go back _as far as the Secondary Period_.”(504)

The very conservative Professor Jukes writes:

It appears that the flying dragons of romance had something like a
real existence in former ages of the world.(505)

And the author goes on to ask.

Does the written history of man, comprising a few thousand years,
embrace the whole course of his intelligent existence? Or have we
in the long mythical eras, extending over hundreds of thousands of
years, and recorded in the chronologies of Chaldæa and China,
shadowy mementoes of prehistoric man, handed down by tradition,
and perhaps transported by a few survivors to existing lands, from
others which, like the fabled Atlantis of Plato, may have been
submerged, or the scene of some great catastrophe which destroyed
them with all their civilization?(506)

The few remaining giant animals, such as elephants—themselves smaller than
their ancestors the Mastodons—and hippopotami, are the only surviving
relics, and tend to disappear more entirely every day. But even they have
already had a few pioneers of their future genus, and have decreased in
size in the same proportion as men have done. For the remains of a pigmy
elephant, E. Falconeri, were found in the cave deposits of Malta; and the
same author asserts that they were associated with the remains of pigmy
hippopotami, the former being only two feet six inches high. There is also
the still existing Hippopotamus (Chœropsis) Liberiensis, “which M. Milne‐
Edwards figures as little more than two feet in height.”(507)

Sceptics may smile and denounce our work as full of nonsense or fairy‐
tales. But by so doing they only justify the wisdom of the Chinese
philosopher Chuang, who said that:

The things that men do know can in no way be compared, numerically
speaking, to the things that are unknown.(508)

Thus they laugh only at their own ignorance.

The “Sons Of God” And The “Sacred Island.”

The “legend” given in _Isis Unveiled_(509) in relation to a portion of the
globe which Science now concedes to have been the cradle of
humanity—though it was but one of the _seven_ cradles, in truth—runs as
follows:

Tradition says, and the records of the _Great Book_ (the _Book of
Dzyan_) explain, that long before the days of Ad‐am, and his
inquisitive wife, He‐va, where now are found but salt lakes and
desolate barren deserts, there was a vast inland sea, which
extended over Middle Asia, north of the proud Himâlayan range, and
its western prolongation. In it an island, which, for its
unparalleled beauty, had no rival in the world, was inhabited by
the last remnant of the Race which preceded ours.

“The last remnant” means the “Sons of Will and Yoga,” who, with a few
tribes, survived the great cataclysm. For it was the Third Race,
inhabiting the great Lemurian Continent, which preceded the veritable and
complete human Races—the Fourth and the Fifth. Therefore was it said in
_Isis Unveiled_ that:

This race could live with equal ease in water, air, or fire, for
it had an unlimited control over the elements. These were the
“Sons of God”; not those who saw the daughters of men, but the
real Elohim, though in the oriental _Kabalah_ they have another
name. It was they who imparted Nature’s most weird secrets to men,
and revealed to them the ineffable, and now _lost_ “word.”

The “Island,” according to belief, exists to the present hour, as an oasis
surrounded by the dreadful wildernesses of the great Gobi Desert—whose
sands “no foot hath crossed in the memory of man.”

This word, which is no word, has travelled once round the globe,
and still lingers as a far‐off dying echo in the hearts of some
privileged men. The hierophants of all the Sacerdotal Colleges
were aware of the existence of this island; but the “word” was
known only to the Java Aleim (Mahâ Chohan in another tongue), or
chief Lord of every College, and was passed to his successor only
at the moment of death. There were many such Colleges, and the old
classical authors speak of them.

There was no communication with the fair island by sea, but
subterranean passages, known only to the chiefs, communicated with
it in all directions.(510)

Tradition asserts, and Archæology accepts the truth of the legend, that
there is more than one city now flourishing in India, which is built on
several other cities, making thus a subterranean city of six or seven
stories high. Delhi is one of them, Allahabad another; examples being
found even in Europe, _e.g._, in Florence, which is built on several
defunct Etruscan and other cities. Why, then, could not Ellora, Elephanta,
Karli, and Ajunta have been built over subterranean labyrinths and
passages, as it is claimed? Of course we do not allude to the caves which
are known to every European, whether _de visu_ or by hearsay,
notwithstanding their enormous antiquity, though that even is disputed by
modern Archæology; but to a fact, known to the initiated Brâhmans of India
and especially to Yogîs, viz., that there is not a cave‐temple in the
country but has its subterranean passages running in every direction, and
that these underground caves and endless corridors have in their turn
_their_ caves and corridors.

Who can tell whether the lost Atlantis—which is also mentioned in
the _Secret Book_, but, again, under another name, peculiar to the
sacred language—did not still exist in those days?—

we went on to ask. It _did_ exist most assuredly, for it was approaching
its greatest days of glory and civilization when the last of the Lemurian
continents went down.

The great lost Continent might have, perhaps, been situated south
of Asia, extending from India to Tasmania.(511) If the
hypothesis—now so much doubted, and positively denied by some
learned authors, who regard it as a joke of Plato—is ever
verified, then, perhaps, will the Scientists believe that the
description of the God‐inhabited continent was not altogether a
fable.(512) And they may then perceive that Plato’s guarded hints
and his attributing the narrative to Solon and the Egyptian
priests, were but a prudent way of imparting the fact to the
world, and at the same time, by cleverly combining truth and
fiction, of disconnecting himself from a story which the
obligations imposed at Initiation forbade him to divulge.

To continue the tradition, we have to add that the class of
hierophants was divided into two distinct categories;(513) those
who were instructed by the “Sons of God” of the island, and who
were initiated in the divine doctrine of pure revelation; and
others who inhabited the lost Atlantis—if such must be its
name—and who, being of another race (produced _sexually_ but of
_divine_ parents), were born with a sight which embraced all
hidden things, and was independent of both distance and material
obstacle. In short, they were the Fourth Race of men mentioned in
the _Popol Vuh_, whose sight was unlimited, and who knew all
things at once.

In other words, they were the Lemuro‐Atlanteans, the first who had a
Dynasty of Spirit‐Kings; not of Manes, or “Ghosts,” as some believe,(514)
but of actual living Devas, or Demi‐gods or Angels, again, who had assumed
bodies to rule over this Race, and who, in their turn, instructed them in
arts and sciences. Only, as these Dhyânîs were Rûpa or material Spirits,
they were not always good. Their King Thevetat was one of the latter, and
it is under the evil influence of this King‐Demon that the Atlantis‐Race
became a nation of wicked “magicians.”

In consequence of this, war was declared, the story of which would
be too long to narrate; its substance may be found in the
disfigured allegories of the race of Cain, the giants, and that of
Noah and his righteous family. The conflict came to an end by the
submersion of Atlantis, which finds its imitation in the stories
of the Babylonian and Mosaic flood. The giants and magicians “and
all flesh died ... and every man.” All except Xisuthrus and Noah,
who are substantially identical with the great Father of the
Thlinkithians,(515) who, they say, also escaped in a large boat
like the Hindû Noah Vaivasvata.

If we believe the tradition at all, we have to credit the further
story that, from the intermarrying of the progeny of the
hierophants of the island and the descendants of the Atlantean
Noah, a mixed race of righteous and wicked sprang up. On the one
side the world had its Enochs, Moseses, various Buddhas, its
numerous “Saviours,” and great hierophants; on the other hand, its
“_natural_ magicians” who, through lack of the restraining power
of proper spiritual enlightenment, ... perverted their gifts to
evil purposes.

We may supplement this by the testimony of some records and traditions. In
_L’Histoire des Vierges: les Peuples et les Continents Disparus_, Louis
Jacolliot says:

One of the most ancient legends of India, preserved in the temples
by oral and written tradition, relates that several hundred
thousand years ago there existed in the Pacific Ocean an immense
continent, which was destroyed by geological upheaval, and the
fragments of which must be sought in Madagascar, Ceylon, Sumatra,
Java, Borneo, and the principal isles of Polynesia.

The high plateaux of Hindûstan and Asia, according to this
hypothesis, would only have been represented in those distant
epochs by great islands contiguous to the central continent....
According to the Brâhmans, this country had attained a high
civilization, and the peninsula of Hindûstan, enlarged by the
displacement of the waters, at the time of the grand cataclysm,
has but continued the chain of the primitive traditions born in
this place. These traditions give the name of Rutas to the peoples
which inhabited this immense equinoctial continent, and from their
speech _was derived the Sanskrit_. The Indo‐Hellenic tradition,
preserved by the most intelligent population which emigrated from
the plains of India, also relates the existence of a continent and
a people to which it gives the name of Atlantis and Atlantides,
and which it locates in the Atlantic in the northern portion of
the Tropics.

Apart from this fact, the supposition of an ancient continent in
those latitudes, the vestiges of which may be found in the
volcanic islands and mountainous surface of the Azores, the
Canaries and Cape de Verd Islands, is not devoid of geographical
probability. The Greeks, who, moreover, never dared to pass beyond
the Pillars of Hercules, on account of their dread of the
mysterious Ocean, appeared too late in antiquity for the stories
preserved by Plato to be anything else than an echo of the Indian
legend. Moreover, when we cast a look on a planisphere, at the
sight of the islands and islets strewn from the Malayan
Archipelago to Polynesia, from the Straits of Sunda to Easter
Island, it is impossible, upon the hypothesis of continents
preceding those which we inhabit, not to place there the most
important of all.

A religious belief, common to Malacca and Polynesia, that is to
say, to the two opposite extremes of the Oceanic world, affirms
“that all these islands once formed two immense countries,
inhabited by yellow men and black men, always at war; and that the
gods, wearied with their quarrels, having charged Ocean to pacify
them, the latter swallowed up the two continents, and, since then,
it has been impossible to make him give up his captives. Alone,
the mountain‐peaks and high plateaux escaped the flood, by the
power of the gods, who perceived too late the mistake they had
committed.”

Whatever there may be in these traditions, and whatever may have
been the place where a civilization more ancient than that of
Rome, of Greece, of Egypt, and of India was developed, it is
certain that this civilization did exist, and it is highly
important to Science to recover its traces, however feeble and
fugitive they may be.(516)

This Oceanic tradition corroborates the legend given from the “Records of
the Secret Doctrine.” The war mentioned between the yellow and the black
men, relates to a struggle between the “Sons of Gods” and the “Sons of
Giants,” or the inhabitants and magicians of Atlantis.

The final conclusion of the author, who personally visited all the islands
of Polynesia, and devoted years to the study of the religion, language,
and traditions of nearly all the peoples, is as follows:

As to the Polynesian continent which disappeared at the time of
the final geological cataclysms, its existence rests on such
proofs that to be logical we can doubt no longer.

The three summits of this continent, the Sandwich Islands, New
Zealand, Easter Island, are distant from each other from fifteen
to eighteen hundred leagues, and the groups of intermediate
islands, Viti (Fiji), Samoa, Tonga, Foutouna (? Foutouha), Ouvea
(? Oueeha), the Marquesas, Tahiti, Poumoutou (? Pomatou), the
Gambiers, are themselves distant from these extreme points from
seven or eight hundred to one thousand leagues.

All navigators agree in saying that the extreme and the central
groups could never have communicated in view of their actual
geographical position, and with the insufficient means they had at
hand. It is physically impossible to cross such distances in a
pirogue ... without a compass, and travel months without
provisions.

On the other hand, the aborigines of the Sandwich Islands, of
Viti, of New Zealand, of the central groups, of Samoa, Tahiti,
etc., _had never known each other, had never heard of each other_,
before the arrival of the Europeans. _And yet each of these people
maintained that their island had at one time formed part of an
immense stretch of land which extended towards the West on the
side of Asia._ And all, brought together, were found to speak the
same language, to have the same usages, the same customs, the same
religious belief. And all to the question, “Where is the cradle of
your race?” for sole response, _extended their hand toward the
setting sun_.(517)

Geographically, this description clashes slightly with the facts in the
Secret Records; but it shows the existence of such traditions, and this is
all one cares for. For, as there is no smoke without fire, so a tradition
must be based on some approximate truth.

In its proper place we will show Modern Science fully corroborating the
above and other traditions of the Secret Doctrine with regard to the two
lost Continents. The Easter Island relics, for instance, are the most
astounding and eloquent memorials of the primeval giants. They are as
grand as they are mysterious; and one has but to examine the heads of the
colossal statues, that have remained unbroken, to recognize at a glance
the features of the type and character attributed to the Fourth Race
giants. They seem of one cast though different in features—of a distinctly
sensual type, such as the Atlanteans (the Daityas and “Atalantians”) are
said to have had in the Esoteric Hindû books. Compare these with the faces
of some other colossal statues in Central Asia—those near Bamian, for
instance—the portrait‐statues, tradition tells us, of Buddhas belonging to
_previous_ Manvantaras; of those Buddhas and heroes who are mentioned in
the Buddhist and Hindû works, as men of fabulous size,(518) the good and
holy brothers of their wicked coüterine brothers generally, just as
Râvana, the giant king of Lankâ, was the brother of Kumbhakarna; all
descendants of the Gods through the Rishis, and thus, like “Titan and his
enormous brood,” all “Heaven’s first‐born.” These “Buddhas,” though often
spoilt by the symbolical representation of great pendent ears, show a
suggestive difference, perceived at a glance, in the expression of their
faces from that of the Easter Island statues. They may be of one race—but
the former are “Sons of Gods”; the latter the brood of mighty sorcerers.
All these are reïncarnations however, and, apart from unavoidable
exaggerations in popular fancy and tradition, they are _historical
characters_.(519) When did they live? How long ago lived the two Races,
the Third and Fourth; and how long after did the various tribes of the
Fifth begin their strife, the wars between Good and Evil? We are assured
by the Orientalists that chronology is both hopelessly mixed and absurdly
exaggerated in the _Purânas_ and other Hindû Scriptures. We feel quite
prepared to agree with the accusation. But, if Âryan writers have
occasionally allowed their chronological pendulum to swing too far one
way, beyond the legitimate limit of fact; nevertheless, when the distance
of that deviation is compared with the distance of the Orientalists’
deviation in the opposite direction, moderation will be found on the
Brâhmanical side. It is the Pandit who will, in the long run, be found
more truthful and nearer to fact than the Sanskritist. The Sanskritist’s
curtailing—even when proved to have been resorted to in order to fit a
personal hobby—is regarded by Western public opinion as “a _cautious_
acceptance of facts,” whereas the Pandit is brutally treated in print as a
“_liar_.” But, surely, this is no reason why everyone should be compelled
to see this in the same light! An impartial observer may judge it
otherwise. He may either proclaim both unscrupulous historians, or justify
both, each on his respective ground, and say: Hindû Âryans wrote for their
Initiates, who read truth between the lines; not for the masses. If they
did mix up events and confuse Ages _intentionally_, it was not with the
view of deceiving any one, but in order to preserve their knowledge from
the prying eye of the foreigner. But, to him who can count the
_generations_ from the Manus, and the _series of incarnations_ specified
in the cases of some heroes,(520) in the _Purânas_, the meaning and
chronological order are very clear. As for the Western Orientalist, he
must be excused, on account of his undeniable ignorance of the methods
used by archaic Esotericism.

But such existing prejudices will have to give way and disappear very soon
before the light of new discoveries. Already Dr. Weber’s and Prof. Max
Müller’s favourite theories—namely, that writing was not known in India,
even in the days of Pânini (!); that the Hindûs had all their arts and
sciences—even to the Zodiac and their architecture (Fergusson)—from the
Macedonian Greeks; these and other such cock‐and‐bull hypotheses, are
threatened with ruin. It is the ghost of old Chaldæa that comes to the
rescue of truth. In his third Hibbert Lecture (1887) Professor Sayce of
Oxford, speaking of newly‐discovered Assyrian and Babylonian cylinders,
refers at length to Ea, the God of Wisdom, now identified with the Oannes
of Berosus, the half‐man, half‐fish, who taught the Babylonians culture
and the _art of writing_. This Ea, to whom, thanks only to the Biblical
Deluge, an antiquity of hardly 1,500 B.C. had been hitherto allowed, is
now spoken of in the following terms, to summarize from the Professor:

The city of Ea was Eridu, which stood 6,000 years ago on the
shores of the Persian Gulf. The name means “the good city,” a
particularly holy spot, since it was the centre from which the
earliest Chaldæan civilization made its way to the north. As the
culture‐god was represented as coming from the sea, it was
possible that the culture of which Eridu was the seat was of
foreign importation. We now know that there was intercourse at a
very early period between Chaldæa and the Sinaitic peninsula, as
well as with India. The statues discovered by the French at Tel‐
loh (dating from at latest B.C. 4,000) were made of the extremely
hard stone known as diorite, and the inscriptions on them stated
the diorite to have been brought from Magan—_i.e._, the Sinaitic
peninsula, which was then ruled by the Pharaohs. The statues are
known to resemble in general style the diorite statue, Kephren,
the builder of the second Pyramid, while, according to Mr. Petrie,
the unit of measurement marked on the plan of the city, which one
of the Tel‐loh figures holds on his lap, is the same as that
employed by the Pyramid builders. Teak wood has been found at
Mugheir, or Ur of the Chaldees, although that wood is an Indian
special product; add to this that an ancient Babylonian list of
clothing mentions _sindhu_ or “muslin,” explained as “vegetable
cloth.”(521)

Muslin, best known now as Dacca muslin, known in Chaldæa as Hindu
(Sindhu), and teak wood used 4,000 years B.C., and yet the Hindûs, to whom
Chaldæa owes its civilization, as has been well proven by Colonel Vans
Kennedy, were _ignorant of the art of writing_ before the Greeks taught
them their alphabet—if, at least, we have to believe Orientalists!

Stanza X. The History Of The Fourth Race.

38. The birth of the Fourth (Atlantean) Race. 39. The sub‐races of
the Fourth Humanity begin to divide and interblend; they form the
first mixed races of various colours. 40. The superiority of the
Atlantean over other Races. 41. They fall into sin and beget
children and monsters. 42. The first germs of anthropomorphism and
sexual religion. They lose their “third eye.”

38. THUS, TWO BY TWO, ON THE SEVEN ZONES, THE THIRD RACE GAVE BIRTH TO THE
FOURTH; THE SURA BECAME A‐SURA.(522)

39. THE FIRST,(523) ON EVERY ZONE, WAS MOON‐COLOURED;(524) THE SECOND
YELLOW LIKE GOLD; THE THIRD RED; THE FOURTH BROWN, WHICH BECAME BLACK WITH
SIN.(525) THE FIRST SEVEN HUMAN SHOOTS WERE ALL OF ONE COMPLEXION.(526)
THE NEXT SEVEN,(527) BEGAN MIXING.(528)

To understand Shloka 38, it must be read together with the Shlokas of
Stanza IX. Up to this point of evolution man belongs more to metaphysical
than physical Nature. It is only after the so‐called “Fall,” that the
Races began to develop rapidly into a purely human shape. In order that
the student may correctly comprehend the full meaning of the Fall—so
mystic and transcendental in its real significance—he must at once be told
the details which preceded it, seeing that modern Theology has made of the
event a pivot on which its most pernicious and absurd dogmas and beliefs
are made to turn.

The Archaic Commentaries, as the reader may remember, explain that, of the
Host of Dhyânîs, whose turn it was to incarnate as the Egos of the
immortal, but, _on this plane_, senseless Monads—some “obeyed” (the Law of
Evolution) immediately the men of the Third Race became physiologically
and physically ready, _i.e._, when they had separated into sexes. These
were those early conscious Beings who, now adding conscious knowledge and
will to their inherent divine purity, “created” by Kriyâshakti the semi‐
divine man, who became the Seed on Earth for future Adepts. Those, on the
other hand, who, jealous of their intellectual freedom—unfettered as it
then was by the bonds of Matter—said: “We can choose, ... we have
wisdom,”(529) and so incarnated far later—these had their first Karmic
punishment prepared for them. They got bodies inferior (physiologically)
to their Astral Models, because their Chhâyâs had belonged to Progenitors
of an inferior degree in the seven Classes. As to those “Sons of Wisdom”
who “deferred” their incarnation till the Fourth Race, which was already
tainted (physiologically) with sin and impurity, these produced a terrible
cause, the Karmic result of which weighs on them to this day. It was
produced in themselves, and they became the carriers of that seed of
iniquity for æons to come, because the bodies they had to inform had
become defiled through their own procrastination.(530)

This was the “Fall of the Angels,” owing to their rebellion against Karmic
Law. The “fall of _man_” was no fall, _for he was irresponsible_. But
“creation” having been invented on the dualistic system as the
“prerogative of God alone”—the legitimate _attribute_ patented by Theology
in the name of an _infinite_ Deity of their own making—the power of
Kriyâshakti had to be regarded as “Satanic,” and as a usurpation of divine
rights. Thus, in the light of such narrow views, the foregoing must
naturally be considered as a terrible slander on man, “created in the
image of God,” and a still more dreadful blasphemy in the face of the
dead‐letter dogma. “Your doctrine,” the Occultists have already been told,
“makes of man, created out of dust in the likeness of his God, a vehicle
of the Devil, from the first.” “Why do you make of your God a Devil—both,
moreover, created in _your own_ image?”—is our reply. The Esoteric
interpretation of the _Bible_, however, sufficiently refutes this
slanderous invention of Theology; the Secret Doctrine must some day become
the just Karma of the Churches—more anti‐Christian than the representative
assemblies of the most confirmed Materialists and Atheists.

The true meaning of the old doctrine of the “Fallen Angels,” in its
anthropological and evolutionary sense, is contained in the _Kabalah_, and
explains the _Bible_. It is found preëminently in _Genesis_ when the
latter is read in a spirit of research for truth, with no eye to dogma,
and in no mood of preconception. This is easily proven. In _Genesis_ (vi),
the “Sons of God”—B’ne Aleim—become enamoured of the daughters of men,
marry, and reveal to their wives the mysteries unlawfully learnt by them
in Heaven, according to Enoch; and this is the “Fall of the Angels.”(531)
But what, in reality, is the _Book of Enoch_ itself, from which the author
of _Revelation_ and even the St. John of the Fourth Gospel(532) have so
profusely quoted? Simply a _Book of Initiation_, giving out in allegory
and cautious phraseology the programme of certain Archaic Mysteries
performed in the _inner_ Temples. The author of the _Sacred Mysteries
among the Mayas and Quichés_ very justly suggests that the so‐called
“Visions” of Enoch relate to his (Enoch’s) experience at Initiation, and
what he learned in the Mysteries; while he very erroneously states his
opinion that Enoch had learned them before being converted to Christianity
(! !); furthermore, he believes that this book was written “at the
beginning of the Christian era, when ... the customs and religion of the
Egyptians fell into decadency”! This is hardly possible, since Jude, in
his Epistle,(533) quotes from the _Book of Enoch_; and, therefore, as
Archbishop Laurence, the translator of the _Book of Enoch_ from the
Ethiopic version, remarks, it “could not have been the production of a
writer who lived after ... or was even coëval with” the writers of the
_New Testament_, unless, indeed, Jude and the Gospels, and all that
follows, were also a production of the already established Church—which,
some critics say, is not impossible. But we are now concerned with the
“Fallen Angels” of Enoch, rather than with Enoch himself.

In Indian exotericism, these Angels (Asuras) are also denounced as the
“enemies of the Gods”; those who oppose sacrificial worship offered to the
Devas. In Christian Theology they are broadly referred to as the “Fallen
Spirits,” the heroes of various conflicting and contradictory legends,
gathered from Pagan sources. The _coluber tortuosus_, the “tortuous
snake”—a qualification said to have originated with the Jews—had quite
another meaning before the Roman Church distorted it; among others, _a
purely astronomical_ signification.

The “Serpent” fallen from on high (_deorsum fluens_) was credited with the
possession of the Keys of the Empire of the Dead (τοῦ θανάτου ἀρχή) to the
day when Jesus saw it fall “as lightning ... from heaven,”(534)
notwithstanding the Roman Catholic interpretation of “_cadebat ut
fulgur_.” It means indeed that even “the devils are subject” to the
Logos—who is Wisdom, but at the same time, as the opponent of ignorance,
Satan or Lucifer. This remark refers to divine Wisdom falling like
lightning on, and so quickening, the intellects of those who fight the
devils of ignorance and superstition. Up to the time when Wisdom, in the
shape of the incarnating Spirits of Mahat, descended from on high to
animate and call the Third Race to real conscious life—Humanity, if it can
be so called in its animal, senseless state, was of course doomed to
_moral_ as well as to physical death. The Angels _fallen into generation_
are referred to metaphorically as Serpents and Dragons of Wisdom. On the
other hand, regarded in the light of the Logos, the Christian Saviour,
like Krishna, whether as man or Logos, may be said to have saved those who
believed in the Secret Teachings, from “eternal death,” and to have
conquered the Kingdom of Darkness, or Hell, as every Initiate does. This
is the human, terrestrial form of the Initiates, and also—because the
Logos is Christos—that “principle” of our inner nature which develops in
us into the Spiritual Ego—the Higher Self—formed of the indissoluble union
of Buddhi, the sixth, and the spiritual efflorescence of Manas, the fifth
“principle.”(535) “The Logos is passive Wisdom in Heaven and conscious,
self‐active Wisdom on Earth,” we are taught. It is the Marriage of the
“Heavenly Man” with the “Virgin of the World,” or Nature, as described in
_Pymander_; the result of which is their progeny—immortal man. It is this
which is called in St. John’s _Revelation_(536) the marriage of the Lamb
with his Bride. This “wife” is now identified with the Church of Rome
owing to the arbitrary interpretations of her votaries. But they seem to
forget that her “linen” may be “clean and white” _outwardly_, like the
“whited sepulchre,” but that the rottenness she is inwardly filled with,
is not the “righteousness of saints,”(537) but rather the blood of the
saints she has “slain upon the earth.”(538) Thus the remark made by the
great Initiate, in _Luke_—referring allegorically to the ray of
enlightenment and reason, _falling like lightning_ from on high into the
hearts and minds of the converts to the old Wisdom‐Religion, then
presented in a new form by the wise Galilean Adept(539)—was distorted out
of all recognition, as was also his own personality, and made to fit in
with one of the most cruel and the most pernicious of all theological
dogmas.

But if Western Theology alone holds the patent and copyright of Satan—in
all the dogmatic horror of that fiction—other nationalities and religions
have committed equal errors in their misinterpretation of a tenet, which
is one of the most profoundly philosophical and ideal conceptions of
ancient thought. They have both disfigured, and hinted at, the correct
meaning of it in their numerous allegories on the subject. Nor have the
semi‐esoteric dogmas of Paurânic Hindûism failed to evolve very suggestive
symbols and allegories concerning the rebellious and fallen Gods. The
_Purânas_ teem with them; and we find a direct hint at the truth in the
frequent allusions of Parâshara, in the _Vishnu Purâna_, to all those
Rudras, Rishis, Asuras, Kumâras and Munis, who have _to be born in every
age_—to reïncarnate in every Manvantara. This, Esoterically, is equivalent
to saying that the “Flames” born of the Universal Mind, or Mahat, owing to
the mysterious workings of Karmic Will and the impulse of Evolutionary
Law, had—without any gradual transition—landed on this Earth, after
having, as in _Pymander_, broken through the “Seven Circles of Fire,” or,
in short, the seven intermediate Worlds.

There is an Eternal Cyclic Law of Re‐births, and the series is headed at
every new Manvantaric Dawn by those who have enjoyed their rest from
reïncarnations in previous Kalpas for incalculable Æons—by the highest and
the earliest Nirvânîs. It was the turn of these “Gods” to incarnate in the
present Manvantara; hence their presence on Earth, and the ensuing
allegories; hence, also, the perversion of the original meaning.(540) The
Gods who had “_fallen_ into generation,” whose mission it was to complete
_Divine_ Man, are found represented later on as Demons, Evil Spirits, and
Fiends, at feud and war with Gods, or the irresponsible agents of the one
Eternal Law. But no conception of such creatures as the Devils and the
Satan of the Christian, Jewish, and Mahommedan religions was ever intended
by these thousand and one Âryan allegories.(541)

The true Esoteric view about “Satan,” the opinion held on this subject by
the whole of philosophic antiquity, is admirably brought out in an
Appendix, entitled “The Secret of Satan,” to the second edition of Dr. A.
Kingsford’s _Perfect Way_.(542) No better and clearer indication of the
truth could be offered to the intelligent reader, and it is therefore
quoted here at some length:

1. And on the seventh day [seventh creation of the Hindûs],(543)
there went forth from the presence of God a _mighty Angel_, full
of wrath and consuming, and God gave him the dominion of the
outermost sphere.(544)

2. Eternity brought forth Time; the Boundless gave birth to Limit;
Being descended into generation.(545)

4. _Among the Gods is none like unto him_, into whose hands are
committed the kingdoms, the power and the glory of the worlds:

5. Thrones and empires, the dynasties of kings,(546) the fall of
nations, the birth of churches, the triumphs of Time.

For, as is said in Hermes:

20. Satan is the door‐keeper of the _Temple of the King_; he
standeth in Solomon’s porch; he holdeth _the Keys of the
Sanctuary_;

21. That no man may enter therein save the anointed, having the
arcanum of Hermes.

These suggestive and majestic verses had reference, with the ancient
Egyptians and other civilized peoples of antiquity, to the _creative and
__ generative Light of the Logos_—Horus, Brahmâ, Ahura Mazda, etc., as
primeval manifestations of the Ever‐unmanifested Principle, whether called
Ain Suph, Parabrahman, or Zeruâna Akerne, or Boundless Time, Kâla—but the
meaning is now degraded in the _Kabalah_. The “Anointed”—who has the
secrets and mysteries of Hermes, or Budha, Wisdom, and who alone is
entrusted with the “Keys of the Sanctuary,” the Womb of Nature, in order
to fructify it and call to active life and being the whole Kosmos—has
become, with the Jews, Jehovah, the “God of Generation” on the Lunar
Mountain—Sinai, the Mountain of the Moon (Sin). The “Sanctuary” has become
the “Holy of Holies,” and the arcanum has been anthropomorphized, and
“phallicized,” and dragged down into Matter, indeed. Hence arose the
necessity of making of the “Dragon of Wisdom,” the “Serpent” of _Genesis_;
of the conscious God who needed a body to clothe his too subjective
divinity, Satan. But the “innumerable incarnations of Spirit,” and “the
ceaseless pulse and current of Desire,”(547) refer, the first, to our
doctrine of Karmic and Cyclic Rebirths, the second—to Erôs, not the later
God of material, physiological love, but to the Divine Desire in the Gods,
as well as in all Nature, to create and give life to Beings. This, the
Rays of the one “Dark,” because invisible and incomprehensible, “Flame”
could achieve only by themselves descending into Matter. Therefore, as
continued in the Appendix:

12. Many names hath God given him [Satan], names of mystery,
secret and terrible.

13. ... The Adversary, because Matter opposeth Spirit, and Time
accuseth even the saints of the Lord.

28. Stand in awe of him, and sin not: speak his name with
trembling....

29. For Satan is the magistrate of the Justice of God [Karma]; he
beareth the balance and the sword.

31. For to him are committed _Weight and Measure and Number_.

Compare the last sentence with what the Rabbi, who explains the Kabalah to
the Prince in the Book of _Al Chazari_, says, and it will be found that
Weight and Measure and Number are, in the _Sepher Jetzirah_, the
attributes of the Sephiroth (the three Sephrim, or figures, ciphers),
covering the whole collective number of 10; and that the Sephiroth are the
collective Adam Kadmon, the “Heavenly Man” or the Logos. Thus Satan and
the Anointed were identified in ancient thought. Therefore:

33. Satan is the minister of God, Lord of the seven mansions of
Hades, the Angel of the manifest Worlds.

The seven Lokas, or Saptaloka, of the Earth with the Hindûs; for Hades, or
the Limbo of Illusion, of which Theology makes a region bordering on Hell,
_is simply our Globe_, the Earth, and thus Satan is called the “Angel of
the _manifest_ Worlds.”

It is “Satan who is the God of our planet and _the only_ God,” and this
without any metaphorical allusion to its wickedness and depravity. For he
is one with the Logos.

The first and “eldest of the gods,” in the order of microcosmic
[divine] evolution, Saturn (Satan) [astronomically] is the
_seventh and last_ in the order of macrocosmic emanation, being
the circumference of the Kingdom of which Phœbus [the Light of
Wisdom, also the Sun] is the centre.

The Gnostics were right, then, in calling the Jewish God an “Angel of
Matter,” or he who breathed (conscious) life into Adam, and whose Planet
was Saturn.

34. And God hath put a girdle about his loins [the rings of
Saturn], and the name of the girdle is Death.

In Anthropogony this “girdle” is the human body with its two lower
principles. These three die, while the innermost Man is immortal. And now
we approach the _secret_ of Satan.

37. ... Upon Satan only _is the shame of generation_.

38. He hath lost his virginal estate [so hath the Kumâra, by
incarnating]: _uncovering heavenly secrets_, he hath entered into
bondage.

39. He encompasseth with bonds and limits all things....

42. Twain are the armies of God: in heaven the hosts of Michael;
in the abyss [the manifested world] the legions of Satan.

43. These are the Unmanifest and the Manifest; the free and the
bound [in Matter]; the virginal and the fallen.

44. And both are the ministers of the Father, fulfilling the Word
divine.

Therefore:

55. Holy and venerable is the Sabbath of God: _blessed and
sanctified is the name of the Angel of Hades_ [Satan].

For:

41. The glory of Satan is the shadow of the Lord [God in the
manifested World]: the throne of Satan is the footstool of Adonai
[the whole Kosmos].

When the Church, therefore, curses Satan, it curses the Kosmic reflection
of God; it anathematizes God made manifest in Matter or in the objective;
it maledicts God, or the ever‐incomprehensible Wisdom, revealing itself as
Light and Shadow, Good and Evil in Nature, in the only manner
comprehensible to the limited intellect of Man.

This is the true philosophical and metaphysical interpretation of Samael,
or Satan, the Adversary in the _Kabalah_; the same tenets and spirit being
found in the allegorical interpretations of every other ancient religion.
This philosophical view does not interfere, however, with the historical
records connected with it. We say “historical,” because allegory and
mythical ornamentation round the kernel of tradition, in nowise prevent
that kernel being a record of real events. Thus, the _Kabalah_, repeating
the time‐honoured revelations of the once universal history of our Globe
and the evolution of its Races, has presented it under the legendary form
of the various records which have formed the _Bible_. Its historical
foundation, in however imperfect a form, is now offered in these pages
from the Secret Doctrine of the East; and thus the allegorical and
symbolical meaning of the Serpent of _Genesis_ is found explained by the
“Sons of Wisdom”—or Angels from higher Spheres, though all and each
pertain to the Kingdom of Satan, or Matter—revealing to men the mysteries
of Heaven. Hence, also, all the so‐called myths of the Hindû, Grecian,
Chaldæan, and Jewish Pantheons are found to be built on fact and truth.
The Giants of _Genesis_ are the historical Atlanteans of Lankâ, and the
Greek Titans.

Who can forget that Troy was once upon a time proclaimed a myth, and Homer
a non‐existent personage, while the existence of such cities as
Herculaneum and Pompeii was denied, and attributed to mere fairy legends?
Yet Schliemann has proved that Troy did really exist, and the two latter
cities, though buried for long ages under the Vesuvian lava, have had
their resurrection day, and live again on the surface of the Earth. How
many more cities and localities called “fabulous” are on the list of
future discoveries, how many more personages regarded as mythical(548)
will one day become historical, those alone can tell who read the decrees
of Fate in the Astral Light.

As the tenets of the Eastern Doctrine, however, have always been kept
secret, and as the reader can hardly hope to be shown the original texts
unless he becomes an accepted disciple, let the Greek and Latin scholar
turn to the original texts of Hermetic literature. Let him, for instance,
read carefully the opening pages of the _Pymander_ of Hermes Trismegistus,
and he will see our doctrines corroborated therein, however veiled its
text. There also he will find the evolution of the Universe, of our Earth,
called “Nature” in _Pymander_, as of everything else, from the “Moyst
Principle,” or the great Deep, Father‐Mother—the first differentiation in
the manifested Kosmos. First the “Universal Mind,” which the hand of the
Christian translator has metamorphosed in the earliest renderings into
God, the Father; then the “Heavenly Man,”(549) the great Total of that
Host of Angels, which was too pure for the creation of the inferior Worlds
or of the Men of our Globe, but which nevertheless _fell_ into Matter by
virtue of that same evolution, as the Second Logos of the “Father.”(550)

Synthetically, every Creative Logos, or “the Son who is one with the
Father,” is the Host of the Rectores Mundi in itself. Even Christian
Theology makes of the seven “Angels of the Presence” the Virtues, or the
personified attributes, of God, which, being created by him, as the Manus
were by Brahmâ, became Archangels. The Roman Catholic Theodice itself,
recognizing in its creative Verbum Princeps the Head of these Angels
(_caput angelorum_) and the Angel of the great Counsel (_magni consilii
angelus_), thus recognizes the identity of Christ with them.

“The Sura became A‐Sura”—the Gods became No‐Gods—says the text; _i.e._,
Gods became Fiends—Satan, when read literally. But Satan will now be
shown, in the teaching of the Secret Doctrine, to be allegorized as Good
and Sacrifice, a God of Wisdom, under different names.

The _Kabalah_ teaches that Pride and Presumption—the two chief prompters
of Selfishness and Egotism—are the causes that emptied Heaven of _one‐
third_ of its divine denizens, mystically, and of _one‐third_ of the
stars, astronomically; in other words, the first statement is an allegory,
and the second a fact. The former, nevertheless, is, as shown, intimately
connected with humanity.

In their turn the Rosicrucians, who were well acquainted with the secret
meaning of the tradition, kept it to themselves, teaching merely that the
whole of “creation” was due to, and the result of, that legendary “War in
Heaven,” brought on by the rebellion of the Angels(551) against Creative
Law, or the Demiurge. The statement is correct, but the _inner_ meaning is
to this day a mystery. To elude further explanation of the difficulty, by
appealing to divine mystery, or to the sin of prying into its policy—is to
say nothing at all. It may prove sufficient for believers in the Pope’s
infallibility, but will hardly satisfy the philosophical mind. Yet the
truth, although known to most of the higher Kabalists, has never been told
by any of their number. One and all, Kabalists and Symbologists, have
shown an extraordinary reluctance to confess the primitive meaning of the
Fall of the Angels. In a Christian such silence is only natural. Neither
Alchemist nor Philosopher during the Mediæval Ages could have uttered
that(552) which in the sight of Orthodox Theology was terrible blasphemy,
for it would have led them directly through the “Holy” Office of the
Inquisition, to rack and stake. But for our modern Kabalists and
Freethinkers the case is different. With the latter, we fear, it is merely
human pride, vanity based on a loudly rejected but ineradicable
superstition. Since the Church, in her struggle with Manicheeïsm, invented
the Devil, and by placing a theological extinguisher on the radiant Star‐
God Lucifer, the “Son of the Morning,” thus created the most gigantic of
all her paradoxes, _a black and tenebrous_ Light—the myth has struck its
roots too deeply into the soil of blind faith to permit, in our age, even
those, who do not acquiesce in her dogmas, and laugh at her horned and
cloven‐footed Satan, to come out bravely and confess the antiquity of the
oldest of all traditions. In a few brief words it is this. Semi‐
exoterically, the “First‐born” of the Almighty—Fiat Lux—or the Angels of
Primordial Light, were commanded to “create”; one‐third of them rebelled
and “refused”; while those who “obeyed” as Fetahil did—_failed_ most
signally.

To realize the refusal and failure in their correct physical meaning, one
must study and understand Eastern Philosophy; one has to be acquainted
with the fundamental mystical tenets of the Vedântins, as to the utter
fallacy of attributing functional activity to the Infinite and Absolute
Deity. Esoteric Philosophy maintains that during the Sandhyâs, the
“Central Sun” emits _Creative Light_—passively, so to say. Causality is
latent. It is only during the active periods of Being that it gives rise
to a stream of ceaseless Energy, whose vibrating currents acquire more
activity and potency with every rung of the hebdomadic ladder of Being
which they descend. Hence it becomes comprehensible how the process of
“creating,” or rather of fashioning, the organic Universe, with all its
units of the seven kingdoms, necessitated intelligent Beings—who became
collectively a Being or Creative God, differentiated already from the One
Absolute Unity, unrelated as the latter is to conditioned “creation.”(553)

Now the Vatican MS. of the _Kabalah_—the only copy of which (in Europe) is
said to have been in the possession of Count St. Germain—contains the most
complete exposition of the doctrine, including the peculiar version
accepted by the Luciferians(554) and other Gnostics; and in that parchment
the “Seven Suns of Life” are given in the order in which they are found in
the Saptasûrya. Only four of these, however, are mentioned in the editions
of the _Kabalah_ which are procurable in public libraries, and that even
in a more or less veiled phraseology. Nevertheless even this reduced
number is amply sufficient to show an identical origin, as it refers to
the quaternary group of the Dhyân Chohans, and proves the speculation to
have had its origin in the Secret Doctrines of the Âryans. As is well
known, the _Kabalah_ did not originate with the Jews, for the latter got
their ideas from the Chaldæans and the Egyptians.

Thus even the _exoteric_ Kabalistic teachings speak of a “Central Sun,”
and of three secondary Suns in each Solar System—our own included. As
shown in that able though too materialistic work, _New Aspects of Life and
Religion_, which is a synopsis of the views of the Kabalists in an aspect
deeply thought out and assimilated:

The central sun ... was to them [as much as to the Âryans] the
_centre of rest_; the centre to which all motion was to be
ultimately referred. Round this central sun ... “the first of
three systemic suns ... revolved on a polar plane ... the second,
on an equatorial plane” ... and the third only was our visible
sun. These four solar bodies were “_the organs on whose action
what man calls the creation, the evolution of life on the planet
earth, depends_.” The channels through which the influence of
these bodies was conveyed to the earth they [the Kabalists] held
to be electrical.... The radiant energy flowing from the central
sun(555) called the earth into being as a watery globe, ... [whose
tendency], as the nucleus of a planetary body, was to rush to the
(central) sun ... within the sphere of whose attraction it had
been created.... But the radiant energy, similarly electrifying
both, withheld the one from the other, and so changed motion
towards into motion round the centre of attraction, which the
revolving planet [earth] thus sought to reach.

In the organic cell the _visible sun_ found its own proper matrix,
and produced through this the animal [while maturing the
vegetable] kingdom, finally placing man at its head, in whom,
through the animating action of that kingdom, it originated the
psychic cell. But the man so placed at the head of the animal
kingdom, at the head of the creation, was the animal, the _soul‐
less, the perishable man_.... Hence man, although apparently its
crown, would, by his advent have marked the close of creation;
since creation, culminating in him, would at his death have
entered on its decline.(556)

This Kabalistic view is here quoted, to show its perfect identity in
spirit with the Eastern Doctrine. Explain, or complete the teaching of the
Seven Suns with the seven systems of Planes of Being, of which the “Suns”
are the central bodies, and you have the seven Angelic Planes, whose
“Host” collectively are the Gods thereof.(557) They are the Head Group
divided into four Classes, from the Incorporeal down to the Semi‐
corporeal. These Classes are directly connected—though in very different
ways as regards voluntary connection and functions—with our mankind. They
are three, synthesized by the fourth, the first and highest, which is
called the “Central Sun” in the Kabalistic doctrine just quoted. This is
the great difference between the Semitic and the Âryan Cosmogony—one
materializing, humanizes the mysteries of Nature; the other spiritualizes
Matter, and its physiology is always made subservient to metaphysics.
Thus, though the seventh “principle” reaches man through all the phases of
Being, pure as an indiscrete element and an impersonal unity, it passes
through—the _Kabalah_ teaches _from_—the Central Spiritual Sun and Group
the Second, the Polar Sun, which two radiate on man his Âtmâ. Group Three,
the Equatorial Sun, cements the Buddhi to Âtman and the higher attributes
of Manas; while Group Four, the Spirit of our visible Sun, endows him with
his Manas and its vehicle, the Kâma Rûpa, or body of passions and
desires—the two elements of Ahamkâra which evolve _individualized
consciousness_, the personal Ego. Finally, it is the Spirit of the Earth,
in its triple unity, that builds the Physical Body, attracting to it the
Spirits of Life and forming his Linga Sharîra.

But everything proceeds cyclically, the evolution of man like everything
else, and the order in which he is generated is described fully in the
Eastern Teachings, whereas it is only hinted at in the _Kabalah_. Says the
_Book of Dzyan_ with regard to Primeval Man when first projected by the
“Boneless,” the Incorporeal Creator:

_First, the Breath, then Buddhi, and the Shadow‐Son [the Body] were
__“__created.__”__ But where was the Pivot [the Middle Principle, Manas]?
Man is doomed. When alone, the Indiscrete [Undifferentiated Element] and
the Vâhan [Buddhi]—the Cause of the Causeless—break asunder from
manifested life._

“_Unless_,” explains the Commentary:

_Unless cemented and held together by the Middle Principle, the Vehicle of
the personal consciousness of Jîva._

In other words, the two higher “principles” _can have no individuality on
Earth_, cannot be _man_, unless there is (_a_) the Mind, the Manas‐Ego, to
cognize itself, and (_b_) the terrestrial false Personality, or the Body
of egotistical desires and personal Will, to cement the whole, as if round
a Pivot—which it is, truly—to the physical form of man. It is the _fifth_
and the _fourth_ “principles”(558)—Manas and Kâma Rûpa—that contain the
dual Personality; the real immortal Ego, if it assimilates itself to the
two higher, and the false and transitory Personality, the Mâyâvi or Astral
Body, so‐called, or the Animal‐human Soul—the two having to be closely
blended for purposes of a _full_ terrestrial existence. Incarnate the
Spiritual Monad of a Newton, grafted on that of the greatest saint on
Earth, in a physical body the most perfect you can think of—_i.e._, in a
two or even a three‐principled Body composed of its Sthûla Sharîra, Prâna
(Life‐principle) and Linga Sharîra—and, if it lacks its middle and fifth
“principles,” you will have created _an idiot_—at best a beautiful, soul‐
less, empty and unconscious appearance. “_Cogito—ergo sum_” can find no
room in the brain of such a creature, not on this plane, at any rate.

There are students, however, who have long ago understood the
philosophical meaning underlying the allegory—so tortured and disfigured
by the Roman Church—of the “Fallen Angels.”

The kingdom of spirits and spiritual action, which flows from and
is the product of spirit volition, is outside and contrasted with
and in contradiction to the kingdom of [divine] souls and divine
action.(559)

As said in the text of Commentary xiv:

_Like produces like and no more at the genesis of Being, and evolution
with its limited conditioned laws comes later. The Self Existent_(_560_)_
are called __“__Creations,__”__ for they appear in the Spirit‐Ray,
manifested through the potency inherent in its Unborn Nature, which is
beyond Time and [limited or conditioned] Space. Terrene products, animate
and inanimate, including mankind, are falsely called creation and
creatures; they are the development [evolution] of the Discrete Elements._

Again:

_The Heavenly Rûpa [Dhyân Chohan] creates [man] in his own form; it is a
spiritual ideation consequent on the first differentiation and awakening
of the universal [manifested] Substance; that form is the ideal Shadow of
Itself: and this is the Man of the First Race._

To express it in still clearer form, limiting the explanation to this
Earth only, it was the duty of the first “differentiated” Egos—the Church
calls them Archangels—to imbue Primordial Matter with the evolutionary
impulse and guide its formative powers in the fashioning of its
productions. This it is which is referred to in the sentences both in the
Eastern and Western tradition—“the Angels were _commanded to create_.”
After the Earth had been made ready by the _lower_ and more material
Powers, and its three Kingdoms fairly started on their way to be “fruitful
and multiply,” the higher Powers, the Archangels or Dhyânîs, were
compelled by the Evolutionary Law to descend on Earth, in order to
construct the crown of its evolution—Man. Thus the “Self‐created” and the
“Self‐existent” projected their pale Shadows; but Group the Third, the
Fire‐Angels, _rebelled and refused_ to join their fellow Devas.

Hindû exotericism represents them all as Yogins, whose piety inspired them
to refuse to “create,” as they desired to remain eternally Kumâras,
“Virgin Youths,” in order, if possible, to anticipate their fellows in
progress towards Nirvâna‐the final liberation. But, agreeably to Esoteric
interpretation, it was a self‐sacrifice for the benefit of mankind. The
“Rebels” would not create will‐less irresponsible men, as the “obedient”
Angels did; nor could they endow human beings with even the temporary
reflections of their own attributes; for the latter, belonging to another
and a so much higher plane of consciousness, would leave man still
irresponsible, hence interfere with any possibility of higher progress. No
spiritual and psychic evolution is possible on Earth—the lowest and most
material plane—for one who, on that plane at all events, is inherently
_perfect_ and cannot accumulate either merit or demerit. Had Man remained
the pale Shadow of the inert, immutable, and motionless Perfection, the
one negative and passive attribute of the real _I am that I am_, he would
have been doomed to pass through life on Earth as in a heavy dreamless
sleep; hence a failure on this plane. The Beings, or the Being,
collectively called Elohim, who first pronounced (if, indeed, they ever
were pronounced) the cruel words, “Behold, the man is become _as one of
us_, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take
also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever ...”—must have been
indeed the Ilda‐baoth, the Demiurge of the Nazarenes, filled with rage and
envy against his own creature, the reflection of which created
Ophiomorphos. In this case it is but natural—even from the dead‐letter
standpoint—to view Satan, the Serpent of _Genesis_, as the real creator
and benefactor, the Father of Spiritual Mankind. For it is he who was the
“Harbinger of Light,” bright radiant Lucifer, who opened the eyes of the
automaton “created” by Jehovah, as alleged. And he who was the first to
whisper, “in the day ye eat thereof ye shall be as Elohim, knowing good
and evil,” can only be regarded in the light of a Saviour. An “Adversary”
to Jehovah, the “_personating_ spirit,” he still remains in Esoteric Truth
the ever‐loving “Messenger,” the Angel, the Seraphim and Cherubim who both
“knew” well, and “loved” still more, and who conferred on us Spiritual,
instead of Physical Immortality—the latter a kind of _static_ immortality
that would have transformed man into an undying “Wandering Jew.”

As narrated in King’s _Gnostics and their Remains_ concerning Ildabaoth,
whom several sects regarded as the God of Moses:

Ildabaoth was far from being a pure spirit; ambition and pride
dominated in his composition. He therefore resolved to break off
all connection with his mother, Achamoth, and to create a world
entirely for himself. Aided by his own Six Spirits, he created
Man, intending him for the image of his power; but he failed
utterly in his work, his Man proving a vast, soulless monster,
crawling upon the earth. The Six Spirits were obliged to bring
their work again before their father, to be animated: he did so by
communicating the ray of Divine Light which he himself had
inherited from Achamoth, who by this loss punished him for his
pride and self‐sufficiency.

Man, thus favoured by Achamoth at the expense of her own son,
followed the impulse of the Divine Light that she had transferred
to him, collected a further supply out of the creation with which
it was intermingled, and began to present not the image of his
creator Ildabaoth, but rather that of the Supreme Being, the
“Primal Man.” At this spectacle the Demiurgus was filled with rage
and envy at having produced a being so superior to himself. His
looks, inspired by his passions, were reflected in the Abyss, as
in a mirror, the image became instinct with life, and forth arose
“Satan Serpent‐formed,” _Ophiomorphos_, the embodiment of envy and
cunning.(561)

This is the exoteric rendering of the Gnostics, and the allegory, though a
sectarian version, is suggestive, and seems true to life. It is the
natural deduction from the dead‐letter text of Chapter iii of _Genesis_.
Hence the allegory of Prometheus, who steals the Divine Fire so as to
allow men to proceed consciously on the path of Spiritual Evolution, thus
transforming the most perfect of _animals_ on Earth into a potential God,
and making him free to “take the kingdom of heaven by violence.” Hence,
also, the _curse_ pronounced by Zeus against Prometheus, and by Jehovah‐
Ilda‐baoth against his “rebellious son,” Satan. The cold, pure snows of
the Caucasian mountain and the never‐dying, singeing fire and flames of an
inextinguishable Hell, two poles, yet the same idea, the dual aspect of a
refined torture; a “Fire‐producer”—the personified emblem of Φωσφόρος
(_Phósphoros_), of the Astral Fire and Light in the Anima Mundi (that
Element of which the German materialist philosopher Moleschott said: “ohne
_Phosphor_ kein Gedanke,” or “without phosphorus no thought”)—burning in
the fierce Flames of his terrestrial Passions; the conflagration fired by
his Thought, discerning as it now does good from evil, and yet a slave to
the passions of its earthly Adam; feeling the vulture of doubt and full
consciousness gnawing at its heart—a Prometheus indeed, because a
_conscious_, and hence a _responsible_ entity.(562) The curse of life is
great, yet, with the exception of some Hindû and Sufi mystics, how few are
those who would exchange all the tortures of conscious life, all the evils
of a responsible existence, for the unconscious perfection of a passive
(objectively) _incorporeal_ Being, or even the universal static Inertia
personified in Brahmâ during his “Night’s” Rest. For, to quote from an
able article by one(563) who, confusing the planes of existence and
consciousness, fell a victim thereto:

Satan [or Lucifer] represents the _Active_, or, as [M. Jules]
Baissac calls it, the “Centrifugal” Energy of the Universe [in a
cosmic sense]. He is Fire, Light, Life, Struggle, Effort, Thought,
Consciousness, Progress, Civilization, Liberty, Independence. At
the same time he is _Pain_, which is the Reaction of the
_Pleasure_ of Action, and _Death_—which is the Revolution of
_Life_—Satan, burning in his own Hell, produced by the fury of his
own momentum—the expansive disintegration of the Nebula which is
to concentrate into New Worlds. And fitly is he again and again
baffled by the Eternal Inertia of the _Passive_ Energy of the
Kosmos—the inexorable “_I am_”—the Flint from which the sparks are
beaten out. And fitly ... are he and his adherents ... consigned
to the “Sea of Fire”—because _it is_ the Sun [in one sense only in
the cosmic allegory], the Fount of Life in _our_ system, where
they are purified (meaning thereby disintegrated) and churned up
to reärrange them for another life (the Resurrection)—that _Sun_
which, as the Origin of the Active Principle of our Earth, is at
once the _Home_ and the _Source_ of the Mundane Satan....

Furthermore, as if to demonstrate the accuracy of Baissac’s
general theory [in _Le Diable et Satan_] cold is known to have a
“Centripetal” effect. Under the influence of Cold everything
contracts.... Under it Life _hybernates_, or dies out, Thought
congeals, and Fire is extinguished. Satan is immortal in his own
Fire‐Sea—it is only in the “Nifl‐Heim” [the cold Hell of the
Scandinavian _Eddas_] of the “_I am_” that he cannot exist. But
for all that there is a kind of _Immortal_ Existence in Nifl‐Heim,
and that Existence must be _Painless_ and _Peaceful_, because it
is _Unconscious_ and _Inactive_. In the Kingdom of _Jehovah_ [if
this God were all that the Jews and Christians claim for him]
there is no misery, no war, no marrying and giving in marriage, no
change, no _Individual Consciousness_.(564) All is absorbed in the
spirit of the Most Powerful. _It is emphatically a Kingdom of
Peace and loyal Submission, as that of the __“__Arch‐Rebel__”__ is
one of War and Revolution...._ It [the former] is in fact what
Theosophy calls Nirvâna. But then Theosophy teaches that
Separation from the Primal Source _having once occurred_, Reünion
can only be achieved by _Will‐Effort_—which is distinctly Satanic
in the sense of this essay.(565)

It _is_ “Satanic” from the standpoint of orthodox Romanism, for it is
owing to the prototype of that which became in time the Christian Devil—to
the Radiant Archangels, Dhyân Chohans, who refused to create, because they
wanted Man _to become his own creator_ and an immortal God—that men can
reach Nirvâna and the Haven of heavenly Divine Peace.

To close this rather lengthy comment, the Secret Doctrine teaches that the
Fire‐Devas, the Rudras, and the Kumâras, the “Virgin‐Angels,” (to whom the
Archangels, Michael and Gabriel, both belong,) the Divine “Rebels”—called
by the all‐materializing and positive Jews, the Nahash or
“Deprived”—preferred the _curse_ of _incarnation_ and the long cycles of
terrestrial existence and rebirths, to seeing the misery, even if
_unconscious_, of the beings who were evolved as Shadows out of their
Brethren, through the semi‐passive energy of their _too spiritual_
Creators. If “man’s uses of life should be such as neither to animalize
nor to spiritualize, but to _humanize_ Self,”(566) to do so, he must be
born _human_ not angelic. Hence, tradition shows the celestial Yogîs
offering themselves as voluntary victims in order to redeem Humanity,
which was created god‐like and perfect at first, and endow him with human
affections and aspirations. To do this they had to give up their natural
status, descend on our Globe, and take up their abode on it for the whole
cycle of the Mahâyuga, thus exchanging their impersonal Individualities
for individual Personalities—the bliss of sidereal existence for the curse
of terrestrial life. This voluntary sacrifice of the Fiery Angels, whose
nature was _Knowledge_ and _Love_, has been construed by the exoteric
theologies into a statement that shows “the Rebel Angels hurled down from
Heaven into the darkness of Hell”—our Earth. Hindû Philosophy hints at the
truth by teaching that the Asuras, hurled down by Shiva, are only in an
_intermediate state_, in which they prepare for higher degrees of
purification and redemption from their wretched condition; but Christian
Theology—claiming to be based on the rock of the divine love, charity, and
justice of him it appeals to as its Saviour—to paradoxically enforce that
claim, has invented the dreary dogma of Hell, that Archimedean lever of
Roman Catholic philosophy.

Whereas Rabbinical wisdom—than which there is none more positive,
materialistic, or grossly terrestrial, as it brings everything down to
physiological mysteries—calls these Beings, the “Evil One”; and the
Kabalists—Nahash, “Deprived,” as just said, and the Souls that have,
_after having been alienated in Heaven from the Holy One_, thrown
themselves into an Abyss at the dawn of their very existence, and have
anticipated the time when they are to descend on Earth.(567)

And let me explain at once that our quarrel is not with the _Zohar_ or any
other book of the _Kabalah_ in its right interpretation—for the latter is
the same as our own—but only with the gross, _pseudo_‐esoteric
explanations of the later, and especially of the Christian Kabalists.

Says the Commentary:

_Our earth and man [are] the products of the three Fires._

The names of these three answer, in Sanskrit, to the “Electric Fire,” the
“Solar Fire,” and the “Fire produced by Friction.” Explained on the cosmic
and human planes, these three Fires are Spirit, Soul, and Body, the three
great Root Groups, with their four additional divisions. These vary with
the Schools, and—according to their applications—become the Upâdhis and
the Vehicles, or the Noumena of these. In the exoteric accounts, they are
personified by the “three sons of surpassing brilliancy and splendour” of
Agni Abhimânin, the eldest son of Brahmâ, the Cosmic Logos, by Svâhâ, one
of Daksha’s(568) daughters. In the metaphysical sense, the “Fire by
Friction” means the union between Buddhi, the sixth, and Manas, the fifth
“principle,” which thus are united or cemented together, the fifth merging
partially into and becoming part of the Monad; in the physical, it relates
to the “creative spark,” or germ, which fructifies and generates the human
being. The three Fires, whose names are Pâvaka, Pavamâna and Shuchi, were
condemned, it is said, by a curse of Vasishtha, the great Sage, “to be
born over and over again.”(569) This is clear enough.

Therefore, the Flames, whose functions are confused in the exoteric books,
and who are called indifferently Prajâpatis, Pitris, Manus, Asuras,
Rishis, Kumâras,(570) etc., are said to incarnate personally in the Third
Root‐Race and thus find themselves “reborn over and over again.” In the
Esoteric Doctrine they are generally named Asuras, or the Asura Devatâ or
Pitar Devatâ (Gods), for, as said, they were first Gods—and the
highest—before they became “_No_‐Gods,” and had from Spirits of Heaven
fallen into Spirits of Earth(571)—_exoterically_, note well, in orthodox
dogma.

No Theologian or Orientalist can ever understand the genealogies of the
Prajâpatis, the Manus, and the Rishis, or the direct connection of
these—their correlation rather—with the Gods, unless he has the key to the
old primitive Cosmogony and Theogony, which all nations originally had in
common. All these Gods and Demi‐gods are found reborn on Earth, in various
Kalpas and in as various characters; each, moreover, _having his Karma
distinctly traced, and every effect assigned to its cause_.

Before other Stanzas could be explained, it was, as may be seen,
absolutely necessary to show that the Sons of “Dark Wisdom,” though
identical with the Archangels which Theology has chosen to call the
“Fallen,” are as divine and as pure, if not more pure, than all the
Michaels and Gabriels so glorified in the Churches. The “Old Book” also
goes into various details of Astral Life, which at this juncture would be
quite incomprehensible to the reader. It must, therefore, be left for
later explanation, and the First and Second Races will now receive only
bare notice. Not so the Third Race—the Root‐Race which separated into
sexes, and which was the first to be endowed with reason; men evolving
_pari passu_ with the Globe, and the latter having “incrustated” more than
a hundred millions of years before the first human sub‐race had yet begun
to materialize or solidify, so to say. But, as the Stanza has it:

_The Inner Man [the Conscious Entity] was not._

This “Conscious Entity” Occultism says, comes from, nay, in many cases
_is_, the very essence and _esse_ of the high Intelligences, condemned, by
the undeviating law of Karmic evolution, to reïncarnate in this
Manvantara.

(_b_) Shloka 39 relates exclusively to the racial divisions. Strictly
speaking, Esoteric Philosophy teaches a modified polygenesis. For, while
it assigns to humanity a oneness of origin, in so far that its Forefathers
or “Creators” were all Divine Beings—though of different classes or
degrees of perfection in their Hierarchy—it teaches that men were
nevertheless born at seven different centres of the Continent of that
period. Though all were of one common origin, yet, for reasons given,
their potentialities and mental capabilities, outward or physical forms,
and future characteristics, were very different.(572) As to their
complexions, there is a suggestive allegory told in _Linga Purâna_. The
Kumâras—the Rudra Gods, so called—are described as incarnations of Shiva,
the Destroyer (of _outward forms_), called also Vâmadeva. The latter, as a
Kumâra, the “Eternal Celibate,” the chaste Virgin Youth, springs from
Brahmâ in each great Manvantara, and “again becomes four”; a reference to
the four great divisions of the human Races, as regards complexion and
type—and the three chief variations of these. Thus in the twenty‐ninth
Kalpa—in this case a reference to the transformation and evolution of the
human form, which Shiva ever destroys and remodels periodically down to
the great Manvantaric turning point, about the middle of the Fourth
(Atlantean) Race—in the twenty‐ninth Kalpa, Shiva, as Shvetalohita, the
Root‐Kumâra, from moon‐coloured becomes _white_; in his next
transformation, he is _red_ (and in this the exoteric version differs from
the Esoteric Teaching); in the third, _yellow_; in the fourth, _black_.

Esotericism now classes these seven variations, with their four great
divisions, into only three distinct primeval Races—as it does not take
into consideration the First Race, which had neither type nor colour, and
a hardly objective, though colossal, form. The evolution of these Races,
their formation and development, proceeded on parallel lines with the
evolution, formation, and development of three geological strata, from
which the human complexion was as much derived as it was determined by the
climates of these zones. The Esoteric Teaching names three great
divisions, namely, the _red‐yellow_, the _black_, and the _brown‐
white_.(573) The Âryan races, for instance, now varying from dark brown,
almost black, red‐brown‐yellow, down to the whitest creamy colour, are
nevertheless all of one and the same stock, the Fifth Root‐Race, and
spring from one single Progenitor, called in Hindû _exotericism_ by the
generic name of Vaivasvata Manu; the latter, remember, being that Generic
Personage, the Sage, who is said to have lived over 18,000,000 years ago,
and also 850,000 years ago—at the time of the sinking of the last remnants
of the Great Continent of Atlantis,(574) and who is said to live even now
in his mankind.(575) The light yellow is the colour of the first _solid_
human race, which appeared after the middle of the Third Root‐Race—after
its fall into generation, as just explained—bringing on the final changes.
For, it is only at that period that the last transformation took place,
which brought forth man as he is now, only on a magnified scale. This Race
gave birth to the Fourth Race; “Shiva” gradually transforming that portion
of Humanity which became “black with sin” into red‐yellow, of which the
red Indians and the Mongolians are the descendants, and finally into
brown‐white races—which now, together with the yellow races, form the
great bulk of Humanity. The allegory in _Linga Purâna_ is curious, as
showing the great ethnological knowledge of the ancients.

When reading of the “last transformation,” which is said to have taken
place 18,000,000 years ago, let the reader at this juncture, consider how
many millions more it must have required to reach that final stage. And if
Man, in his gradual consolidation, developed _pari passu_ with the Earth,
how many millions of years must have elapsed during the First, Second, and
the first half of the Third Race. For the Earth was in a comparatively
ethereal condition before it reached its last consolidated state. The
Archaic Teachings, moreover, tell us that, during the middle period of the
Lemuro‐Atlantean Race, three and a half Races after the Genesis of Man,
the Earth, Man, and everything on the Globe, were of a still grosser and
more material nature, while such things as corals and some shells were
still in a semi‐gelatinous, astral state. The cycles that have intervened
since then, have already carried us onward, on the opposite ascending arc,
some steps toward our “dematerialization,” as the Spiritualists would say.
The Earth, ourselves, and all things have softened since then—aye, even
our brains. But it has been objected by some Theosophists that an ethereal
Earth even some 15 or 20,000,000 years ago, “does not square with
Geology,” which teaches us that winds blew, rains fell, waves broke on the
shore, sands shifted and accumulated, etc.; that, in short, all natural
causes now in operation were then in force, “in the very earliest ages of
geological time, aye, that of the oldest palæozoic rocks.” To this the
following answers are given. Firstly, what is the date assigned by Geology
to these “oldest palæozoic rocks”? And secondly, why could not the winds
blow, rain fall, and waves—of “carbonic acid” apparently, as Science seems
to imply—break on the shore, on an Earth semi‐astral, _i.e._, viscid? The
word “astral” does not necessarily, in Occult phraseology, mean as thin as
smoke, but rather “starry,” shining or pellucid, in various and numerous
degrees, from a quite filmy to a viscid state, as just observed. But it is
further objected: “How could an astral Earth have affected the other
Planets in this System? Would not the whole process get out of gear now if
the attraction of one Planet were suddenly removed?” The objection is
evidently invalid, since our System is composed of older and younger
Planets, some dead—like the Moon—others in process of formation, for all
that Astronomy knows to the contrary. Nor has the latter ever affirmed, so
far as we know, that all the bodies of our System have sprung into
existence and developed simultaneously. The Cis‐Himâlayan Secret Teachings
differ from those of India in this respect. Hindû Occultism teaches that
the Vaivasvata Manu Humanity is 18,000,000 and odd years old. We say, yes;
but only so far as _physical_ or approximately physical, Man is concerned,
who dates from the close of the Third Root‐Race. Beyond that period _Man_,
or his filmy image, may have existed for 300,000,000 years, for all we
know; _since we are not taught figures_ which are and will remain secret
with the Masters of Occult Science, as justly stated in _Esoteric
Buddhism_. Moreover, whereas the Hindû _Purânas_ speak of one Vaivasvata
Manu, we affirm that there were several, the name being a generic one.

We must now say a few more words on the physical evolution of man.

Archaic Teachings In The “Purânas” And “Genesis.” Physical Evolution.

The writer cannot give too much proof that the system of Cosmogony and
Anthropogony above described actually existed, that its records _are_
preserved, and that it is found mirrored even in the modern versions of
ancient Scriptures.

The _Purânas_ on the one hand, and the Jewish Scriptures on the other, are
based on the same scheme of evolution, which, if read Esoterically and
expressed in modern language, would be found to be quite as scientific as
much of what now passes current as the final word of recent discovery. The
only difference between the two schemes is, that the _Purânas_, giving as
much, and perhaps more, attention to causes than to effects, allude to the
pre‐cosmic and pre‐genetic periods rather than to those of so‐called
“creation,” whereas the _Bible_, after saying only a few words on the
former period, plunges forthwith into material genesis, and, while almost
skipping the Pre‐Adamic races, proceeds with its allegories concerning the
Fifth Race.

Now, whatever the onslaught made on the “order of creation” in
_Genesis_—and its dead‐letter account certainly lends itself admirably to
criticism(576)—the Hindû _Purânas_, notwithstanding their allegorical
exaggerations will be found quite in accordance with Physical Science.

Even what, on the face of it, appears to be the perfectly nonsensical
allegory of Brahmâ assuming the form of a Boar to rescue the Earth from
under the waters, finds a perfectly scientific explanation in the Secret
Commentaries, relating as it does to the many risings and sinkings, the
constant alternation of water and land from the earliest to the latest
geological periods of our Globe; for Science teaches us now that nine‐
tenths of the stratified formations of the Earth’s crust have been
gradually constructed beneath the water at the bottom of the seas. The
ancient Âryans are credited with having known nothing whatever of Natural
History, Geology, and so on. The Jewish race is, on the other hand,
proclaimed even by its severest critic, an uncompromising opponent of the
_Bible_, to have the merit of having conceived the idea of monotheism
“earlier, and retained it more firmly, than any of the _less philosophical
and more immoral religions_ (!!) of the ancient world.”(577) Only, while
in biblical Esotericism, we find physiological sexual mysteries
symbolized, and very little more, something for which _very little real
Philosophy_ is requisite—in the _Purânas_ one can find the most scientific
and philosophical “dawn of creation,” which, if impartially analyzed and
rendered into plain language from its fairy‐tale‐like allegories, would
show that modern Zoology, Geology, Astronomy, and nearly all the branches
of modern knowledge, have been anticipated in ancient Science, and were
known to ancient Philosophers in their general features, if not in such
detail as at present.

Paurânic Astronomy, with all its deliberate concealment and confusion for
the purpose of leading the profane off the real track, has been shown even
by Bentley to be a real science; and those who are versed in the mysteries
of Hindû astronomical treatises, will prove that the modern theories of
the progressive condensation of nebulæ, nebulous stars and suns, with the
most minute details about the cyclic progress of asterisms for
chronological and other purposes—far more correct than Europeans have even
now—were known in India to perfection.

If we turn to Geology and Zoology we find the same. What are all the myths
and endless genealogies of the seven Prajâpatis, of their sons, the seven
Rishis or Manus, and of their wives, sons and progeny, but a vast detailed
account of the progressive development and evolution of animal creation,
one species after the other? Were the highly philosophical and
metaphysical Âryans—the authors of the most perfect philosophical system
of transcendental Psychology, of codes of Ethics, of such a grammar as
Pânini’s, of the Sânkhya and Vedânta systems, of a moral code (Buddhism),
proclaimed by Max Müller the most perfect on earth—were the Âryans such
fools, or children, as to lose their time in writing “fairy tales,” such
as the _Purânas_ now seem to be in the eyes of those who have not the
remotest idea of their secret meaning? What is the “fable,” the genealogy
and origin of Kashyapa, with his twelve wives by whom he had a numerous
and diversified progeny of serpents (Nâgas), reptiles, birds, and all
kinds of living things, who was thus the “father” of all kinds of animals,
but a _veiled_ record of the order of evolution in _this_ Round? So far,
we do not see that any Orientalist has ever had the remotest conception of
the truths concealed under the allegories and personifications. The
_Shatapatha Brâhmana_, says one, gives “_a not very intelligible_ account”
of Kashyapa’s origin.

According to the _Mahâbhârata_, the _Râmâyana_, and the _Purânas_,
he was the son of Marîchi, the son of Brahmâ, the father of
Vivasvat, the father of Manu, the progenitor of mankind.

According to the _Shatapatha Brahmâna_: Having assumed the form of
a tortoise, Prajâpati created offspring. That which he created he
made (_akarot_); hence the word _kûrma_ (tortoise). Kashyapa means
tortoise; hence men say, “All creatures are descendants of
Kashyapa.”(578)

He was all this; he was also the father of the bird Garuda, the “king of
the feathered tribe,” who _descends from_, and is of one stock with _the
reptiles_, the Nâgas, and who becomes their mortal enemy _subsequently_—as
he is also a _cycle_, a period of time, when, in the course of evolution,
the birds which developed from reptiles in their “struggle for life” and
“survival of the fittest,” etc., turned in preference on those from whom
they issued to devour them, perhaps prompted by natural law, in order to
make room for other and more perfect species.

In that admirable epitome, _Modern Science and Modern Thought_, a lesson
in Natural History is offered to Mr. Gladstone, showing the utter variance
of the _Bible_ with it. The author remarks that Geology traces the “dawn
of creation” through a line of scientific research:

Commencing with the earliest known fossil, the Eozoon Canadense of
the Laurentian, and continued in a chain, every link of which is
firmly welded, through the Silurian, with its abundance of
molluscous, crustacean, and vermiform life, and first indication
of fishes; the Devonian, with its predominance of fish and first
appearance of reptiles; the Mesozoic with its batrachians; the
Secondary formations, in which reptiles of the sea, land and air
preponderated, and the first humble forms of vertebrate land
animals began to appear; and finally the Tertiary, in which
mammalian life has become abundant, and type succeeding to type
and species to species, are gradually differentiated and
specialized, through the Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene periods,
until we arrive at the Glacial and Prehistoric periods, and at
positive proof of the existence of man.(579)

The same order, _plus_ the description of animals unknown to Modern
Science, is found in the Commentaries on the _Purânas_ in general, and in
the _Book of Dzyan_ especially. The only difference—a grave one, no doubt,
as implying a spiritual and divine nature of man independent of his
physical body in this illusionary world, in which the _false personality_
and its cerebral basis alone is known to orthodox Psychology—is as
follows. Having been in all the so‐called seven “creations,” which stand
allegorically for the seven evolutionary changes, or sub‐races, as we may
call them, of the First Root‐Race of Mankind—Man has been on Earth in this
Round from the beginning. Having passed through all the Kingdoms of Nature
in the previous _three_ Rounds,(580) his _physical_ frame—one adapted to
the thermal conditions of those early periods—was ready to receive the
Divine Pilgrim at the first dawn of human life, _i.e._, 18,000,000 years
ago. It is only at the mid‐point of the Third Root‐Race that man was
endowed with Manas. Once united, the Two and then the Three made One; for
though the lower animals, from the amœba to man, received _their_ Monads,
in which all the higher qualities are potential, these qualities have to
remain dormant till the animal reaches its human form, before which stage
Manas (mind) has no development in them. In the animals every principle is
paralyzed, and in a fœtus‐like state, save the second, the Vital, and the
third, the Astral, and the rudiments of the fourth, Kâma, which is desire,
instinct—whose intensity and development varies and changes with the
species. To the materialist wedded to the Darwinian theory, this will read
like a fairy‐tale, a mystification; to the believer in the inner,
spiritual man, the statement will have nothing unnatural in it.

As Commentary ix says:

_Men are made complete only during their Third, toward the Fourth Cycle
[Race]. They are made __“__Gods__”__ for good and evil, and responsible,
only when the two arcs meet [after three and a half Rounds towards the
Fifth Race]. They are made so by the Nirmânakâya [Spiritual or Astral
remains] of the Rudra‐Kumâras, __“__cursed to be reborn on Earth
again__”__ [meaning—doomed in their natural turn to reïncarnation in the
higher ascending arc of the terrestrial Cycle]._

Now the writer is certain to be met with what will be termed insuperable
objections. We shall be told that the line of embryology, the gradual
development of every individual life, and the progress of what is known to
take place in the order of progressive stages of specialization—that all
this is opposed to the idea of man preceding mammals. Man begins as the
humblest and most primitive vermiform creature:

From the primitive speck of protoplasm, and the nucleated cell in
which all life originates ... and “is developed through stages
undistinguishable from those of fish, reptile and mammal, until
the cell finally attains the highly specialized development of the
quadrumanous, and, last of all, of the human type.”(581)

This is perfectly scientific, and we have nothing against _that_; for it
all relates to the _shell_ of man—his body, which, in its growth, is
subject, of course, like every other once so‐called morphological unit, to
such metamorphoses. It is not those who teach the transformation of the
mineral atom through crystallization—which is the same function, and bears
the same relation to its so‐called _inorganic_ Upâdhi, or basis, as the
formation of _cells_ to their organic nuclei, through plant, insect and
animal into man—it is not they who will reject this theory, as it will
finally lead to the recognition of a Universal Deity in Nature, ever‐
present, and as ever invisible and unknowable, and of intra‐cosmic Gods,
who were all once men.(582)

But we would ask, what does Science and its exact discoveries and now
axiomatic theories prove against _our_ Occult theory? Those who believe in
the law of evolution and gradual progressive development from a cell—which
from a vital became a morphological cell, until it finally awoke as
protoplasm pure and simple—can surely never limit their belief to one line
of evolution! The types of life are innumerable; and the progress of
evolution, moreover, does not go at the same rate in every kind of
species. The constitution of primordial matter in the Silurian age—we mean
the “primordial” _matter_ of Science—was the same in every essential
particular, save its degree of present grossness, as the primordial
_living_ matter of to‐day. Nor do we find that which ought to be found, if
the now orthodox theory of evolution were _quite_ correct, namely, a
constant, ever‐flowing progress in every species of being. Instead of
this, what does one see? While the intermediate groups of animal beings
all tend toward a higher type, and while specializations, now of one type
and now of another, develop through the geological ages, change forms,
assume new shapes, appear and disappear with a kaleidoscopic rapidity, in
the description of Palæontologists from one period to another, the two
solitary exceptions to the general rule are those at the two opposite
poles of life and type, namely—_man_ and the _lower genera_ of being!

Certain well‐marked forms of living beings have existed through
enormous epochs, surviving not only the changes of physical
conditions, _but persisting comparatively unaltered_, while other
forms of life have appeared and disappeared. Such forms may be
termed “persistent types” of life; and examples of them are
abundant enough in both the animal and the vegetable worlds.(583)

Nevertheless, we are not given any good reason why Darwin links together
reptiles, birds, amphibians, fishes, mollusca, etc., as off‐shoots of a
moneric ancestry. Nor are we told whether reptiles, for instance, are
direct descendants of the amphibia, the latter of fishes, and fishes of
lower forms—which they certainly are. For the Monads have passed through
all these forms of being up to Man, on every Globe, in the _three
preceding_ Rounds; every Round, as well as every subsequent Globe, from A
to G, having been, and still having to be, the arena of the same
evolution, only repeated each time on a more solid material basis.
Therefore the question, “What relation is there between the Third Round
astral prototypes and ordinary physical development in the course of the
origination of pre‐mammalian organic species?”—is easily answered. One is
the shadowy prototype of the other, the preliminary, hardly defined, and
evanescent sketch on the canvas, of objects which are destined to receive
their final and vivid form under the brush of the painter. The fish
evolved into an amphibian—a frog—in the _shadows_ of ponds, and man passed
through all his metamorphoses on this Globe in the Third Round as he did
in this, his Fourth Cycle. The Third Round types contributed to the
formation of the types in the present Round. On strict analogy, the cycle
of seven Rounds in their work of the gradual formation of man through
every Kingdom of Nature, is repeated on a microscopical scale in the first
seven months of gestation of a future human being. Let the student think
over and work out this analogy. As the seven months’ old unborn baby,
though quite ready, yet needs two months more in which to acquire strength
and consolidate; so man, having perfected his evolution during seven
Rounds, remains two periods more in the womb of Mother‐Nature before he is
born, or rather reborn a Dhyâni, still more perfect than he was before he
launched forth as a Monad on the newly built Chain of Worlds. Let the
student ponder over this mystery, and then he will easily convince himself
that, as there are also physical links between many classes, so there are
precise domains wherein the Astral merges into Physical Evolution. Of this
Science breathes not one word. Man has evolved with and from the monkey,
it says. But now see the contradiction.

Huxley proceeds to point out plants, ferns, club‐mosses, some of them
generically identical with those now living, which are met with in the
Carboniferous epoch, for:

The cone of the oolitic Araucaria is hardly distinguishable from
that of existing species.... Sub‐kingdoms of animals yield the
same instances. The Globigerina of the Atlantic soundings is
identical with the cretaceous species of the same genus ... the
tabulate corals of the Silurian epoch are wonderfully like the
millepores of our own seas.... The Arachnida, the highest group of
which, the scorpions, is represented in the coal by a genus
differing from its living congeners only in ... the eyes. [etc.]

All of which may be closed with Dr. Carpenter’s authoritative statement
about the Foraminifera:

There is no evidence of any fundamental modification or advance in
the foraminiferous type from the palæozoic period to the present
time.... The foraminiferous fauna of our own series probably
present a greater range of variety than existed at any previous
period; but _there is no indication of any tendency to elevation
towards a higher type_.(584)

Now, as in the Foraminifera, Protozoa of the lowest type of life,
mouthless and eyeless, there is no indication of change except their now
greater variety—so man, who is on the uppermost rung of the ladder of
being, indicates still less change, as we have seen; the skeleton of his
palæolithic ancestor being even found superior in some respects to his
present frame. Where is, then, the uniformity of law which is claimed—the
_absolute rule_ for one species shading off into another and thus, by
insensible gradations, into higher types? We see Sir William Thomson
admitting as much as 400,000,000 years for the time since the surface of
the Globe became sufficiently cool to permit of the presence of living
things;(585) and during that enormous lapse of time in the Oolitic period
alone, the so‐called “Age of Reptiles,” we find a most extraordinary
variety and abundance of Saurian forms, the Amphibian type reaching _its
highest development_. We learn of Ichthyosauri and Plesiosauri in the
lakes and rivers, and of winged crocodiles or lizards flying in the air.
After which, in the Tertiary period:

We find the Mammalian type exhibiting remarkable divergences from
previously existing forms ... Mastodons, Megatheriums, and other
unwieldy denizens of the ancient forests and plains.

And, subsequently, we are notified of:

The gradual modification of one of the ramifications of the
Quadrumanous order, into those beings from whom primeval Man
himself may claim to have been evolved.(586)

He _may_; but no one, except a Materialist, can see why he should; as
there is not the slightest necessity for it, nor is such an evolution
warranted by facts, for those most interested in the proofs thereof
confess their utter failure to find one single fact to support their
theory. There is no need for the numberless types of life to represent the
members of one progressive series. They are “the products of various and
different evolutional divergences, taking place now in one direction and
now in another.” Therefore it is far more justifiable to say that the
monkey evolved into the quadrumanous order, than that primeval man—who has
_remained stationary_ in his human specialization since the first fossil
skeleton found in the oldest strata, and of whom no variety is found save
in colour and facial type—has developed from a common ancestor together
with the ape.

That man originates like other animals in a cell and develops “through
stages indistinguishable from those of fish, reptile, and mammal until the
cell attains the highly specialized development of the quadrumanous and
_at last the human type_,” is an Occult axiom thousands of years old. The
Kabalistic axiom: “A stone becomes a plant; a plant a beast; a beast a
man; a man a God,” holds good throughout the ages. Hæckel, in his
_Schöpfungsgeschichte_, shows a double drawing representing two
embryos—that of a dog six weeks old, and that of a man, eight weeks. The
two, with the exception of a slight difference in the head, which is
larger and wider about the brain in the man, are indistinguishable.

In fact, we may say that every human being passes through the
stage of fish and reptile before arriving at that of mammal, and
finally of man.

If we take him up at the more advanced stage, where the embryo has
already passed the reptilian form, we find that for a considerable
time, the line of development remains the same as that of other
mammalia. The rudimentary limbs are exactly similar, the five
fingers and toes develop in the same way, and the resemblance
after the first four weeks’ growth _between the embryo of a man
and a dog is such that it is scarcely possible to distinguish
them_. Even at the age of eight weeks the embryo man is an animal
with a tail, hardly to be distinguished from an embryo puppy.(587)

Why, then, not make man and dog evolve from a common ancestor, or from a
reptile—a Nâga, instead of coupling man with the Quadrumana? This would be
just as logical as the latter, if not more so. The shape and the stages of
the human embryo have not changed since historical times, and these
metamorphoses were known to Æsculapius and Hippocrates as well as to Mr.
Huxley. Therefore, since the Kabalists had remarked it from prehistoric
times, it is no new discovery.(588)

As the embryo of man has no more of the ape in it than of any other
mammal, but contains in itself _the totality of the kingdoms of nature_,
and since it seems to be a “persistent type” of life, far more so than
even the Foraminifera, it seems as illogical to make him evolve from the
ape as it would be to trace his origin to the frog or the dog. Both Occult
and Eastern Philosophies believe in Evolution, which Manu and Kapila(589)
give with far more clearness than any Scientist does at present. No need
to repeat what has been fully debated in _Isis Unveiled_, as the reader
may find all these arguments and the description of the basis on which all
the Eastern doctrines of Evolution rest, in our earlier volumes.(590) But
no Occultist can accept the unreasonable proposition that all the now
existing forms, “from the structureless Amœba to man,” are the direct
lineal descendants of organisms which lived millions and millions of years
before the birth of man, in the pre‐Silurian epochs, in the sea or land‐
mud. The Occultists believe in an _Inherent Law of Progressive
Development_.(591) Mr. Darwin never did, and says so himself; for we find
him stating that, since _there can be no advantage_ “to the infusorian
animalcule or an intestinal worm ... to become highly organized,”
therefore, “natural selection,” _not necessarily including progressive
development_—leaves the animalcule and the worm, the “persistent types,”
quiet.(592)

There does not appear much _uniform_ law in such behaviour of Nature; and
it looks more like the discriminative action of some _super_‐physical
selection; perhaps, that aspect of Karma, which Eastern Occultists would
call the “Law of Retardation,” may have something to do with it.

But there is every reason to doubt whether Mr. Darwin himself ever gave
such an importance to his law as is now given to it by his atheistic
followers. The knowledge of the various living forms in the geological
periods that have gone by is very meagre. The reasons given for this by
Dr. Bastian are very suggestive:

First, on account of the imperfect manner in which the several
forms may be represented in the strata pertaining to the period;
secondly, on account of the extremely limited nature of the
explorations which have been made in these imperfectly
representative strata; and, thirdly, because so many parts of the
record are absolutely inaccessible to use—nearly all beneath the
Silurian system having been blotted out by time, whilst those two‐
thirds of the earth’s surface in which the remaining strata are to
be found are now covered over by seas. Hence Mr. Darwin says: “For
my part, following out Lyell’s metaphor, I look at the geological
record as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in
a changing dialect; _of this history we possess the last volume
alone_, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume,
_only here and there a short chapter has been preserved_; and of
each page _only here and there a few lines_.”(593)

It is not on such meagre data, certainly, that the last word of Science
can be said. Nor is it on any ground of human pride, or unreasonable
belief in man’s representing even here on Earth—in _our_ period,
perhaps—the highest type of life, that Occultism denies that all the
preceding forms of human life belonged to types lower than our own; for it
is not so. But simply because the “missing link,” which will prove the
existing theory undeniably, will never be found by Palæontologists.
Believing as we do that man has, during the preceding Rounds, evolved
from, and passed through, the lowest forms of every life, vegetable and
animal, on Earth, there is nothing very degrading in the idea of having
the Orang Outang as an ancestor of our physical form. Quite the reverse;
as it would most irresistibly forward the Occult Doctrine with regard to
the final evolution of everything in terrestrial nature into man. One may
even enquire how it is that Biologists and Anthropologists, having once
firmly accepted the theory of the descent of man from the ape—how it is
that they have hitherto left untouched the future evolution of the
existing apes into man? This is only a logical sequence of the first
theory—unless Science would make of man a privileged being, and his
evolution a _non_‐precedent in Nature, quite a _special_ and unique case.
And that is what all this leads Physical Science to. The reason, however,
why the Occultists reject the Darwinian, and especially the Hæckelian,
hypothesis is because it is the ape, not man, which is, in sober truth, a
special and unique instance. The Pithecoid is _an accidental creation_, a
forced growth, the result of an unnatural process.

The Occult Doctrine is, we think, more logical. It teaches a cyclic, never
varying Law in Nature, the latter having no personal “special design,” but
acting on a uniform plan that prevails through the whole Manvantaric
period and deals with the land‐worm as it deals with man. Neither the one
nor the other have sought to come into being, hence both are under the
same Evolutionary Law, and both have to progress according to Karmic Law.
Both have started from the same Neutral Centre of Life and both have to
re‐merge into it at the consummation of the Cycle.

It is not denied that in the preceding Round man _was_ a gigantic ape‐like
creature; and when we say “man” we ought perhaps to say, the rough mould
that was developing for the use of man in this Round only—the middle, or
the transition, point of which we have hardly reached. Nor was man during
the first two and a half Root‐Races what he is now. That point he reached,
as said before, only 18,000,000 years ago, during the Secondary period, as
we claim.

Till then he was, according to tradition and Occult Teaching, “a God on
Earth who had fallen into Matter,” or generation. This may or may not be
accepted, since the Secret Doctrine does not impose itself as an
infallible dogma, and since, whether its prehistoric records are accepted
or rejected, it has nothing to do with the question of the _actual_ Man
and his Inner Nature; the Fall mentioned above having left no “original
sin” on Humanity. But all this has been sufficiently dealt with.

Furthermore, we are taught that the transformations through which man
passed on the descending arc—which is centrifugal for Spirit and
centripetal for Matter—and those he is preparing to go through,
henceforward, on his ascending path, which will reverse the direction of
the two forces—viz., Matter will become centrifugal and Spirit
centripetal—that all such transformations _are next in store for the
anthropoid apes also_; all those, at any rate, who have reached the remove
next to man in this Round—for these will all be men in the Fifth Round,
just as the present men inhabited ape‐like forms in the Third, the
preceding Round.

Behold, then, in the modern denizens of the great forests of Sumatra the
degraded and dwarfed examples—“blurred copies,” as Mr. Huxley has it—of
ourselves, as we (the majority of mankind) were in the earliest sub‐races
of the Fourth Root‐Race during the period of what is called the “fall into
generation.” The ape we know is not the product of natural evolution but
an _accident_, a cross‐breed between an animal being, or form, and man. As
has been shown in the present volume, it is the speechless animal that
first began sexual connection, for it was the first to separate into male
and female. Nor was it intended by Nature that man should follow this
bestial example—as is now shown by the comparatively painless procreation
of their species by animals, and the terrible suffering and danger of the
same in woman. The ape is, indeed, as remarked in _Isis Unveiled_:

A 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_.(594)

The apes are millions of years later than the speaking human being, and
are the latest contemporaries of our Fifth Race. Thus, it is most
important to remember that the “Egos” of the apes are entities compelled
by their Karma to incarnate in the animal forms, which resulted from the
bestiality of the _latest_ Third and the earliest Fourth Race men. They
are entities who had already reached the “human stage” before this Round.
Consequently, they form an exception to the general rule. The numberless
traditions about Satyrs are no fables, but represent an extinct race of
animal men. The animal “Eves” were their foremothers, and the human
“Adams” their forefathers; hence the Kabalistic allegory of Lilith or
Lilatu, Adam’s _first_ wife, whom the Talmud describes as a “charming”
woman, “with long wavy hair,” _i.e._—a female hairy animal of a character
now unknown, still a female animal, who in the Kabalistic and Talmudic
allegories is called the female reflection of Samael, Samael‐Lilith, or
man‐animal united, a being called, in the _Zohar_, Hayo Bischat, the Beast
or Evil Beast. It is from this unnatural union that the present apes
descended. The latter are truly “speechless men,” and will become speaking
animals, or men of a lower order, in the Fifth Round, while the Adepts of
a certain School hope that some of the “Egos” of the apes of a higher
intelligence will reäppear at the close of the Sixth Root‐Race. What their
form will be is of secondary consideration. The form means nothing. Genera
and species of the flora, fauna, and the highest animal, its crown—man,
change and vary according to the environments and climatic variations, not
only with every Round, but every Root‐Race likewise, as well as after
every geological cataclysm that puts an end to, or produces a turning
point in, the latter. In the Sixth Root‐Race, the fossils of the Orang,
the Gorilla and the Chimpanzee will be those of extinct quadrumanous
mammals; and new forms—though fewer and ever wider apart as ages pass on
and the close of the Manvantara approaches—will develop from the “cast
off” types of the human races as they revert once again to astral, out of
the mire of physical, life. There were no apes before man, and they will
be extinct before the Seventh Race develops. Karma will lead on the Monads
of the unprogressed men of our Race and lodge them in the newly evolved
human frames of the thus physiologically regenerated Baboon.

This will take place, of course, millions of years hence. But the picture
of this cyclic precession of all that lives and breathes now on Earth, of
each species in its turn, is a true one, and needs no “special creation”
or miraculous formation of man, beast, and plant _ex nihilo_.

This is how Occult Science explains the absence of any link between ape
and man, and shows the former evolving from the latter.

A Panoramic View Of The Early Races.

There is a period of a few millions of years to cover between the first
“mindless” race and the highly intelligent and intellectual later
Lemurians; there is another between the earliest civilization of the
Atlanteans and the historic period.

As witnesses to the Lemurians but a few silent records in the shape of
half a dozen broken colossi and old cyclopean ruins are left. These are
not allowed a hearing, as they are “productions of blind natural forces,”
we are assured by some; “quite modern” we are told by others. Tradition is
left contemptuously unnoticed by Sceptic and Materialist, and made
subservient to the _Bible_ in every case by the too zealous Churchman.
Whenever a legend, however, refuses to fit in with the Noachian Deluge
theory, it is declared by the Christian clergy to be “the insanely
delirious voice of old superstition.” Atlantis is denied, when not
confused with Lemuria and other departed Continents, because, perhaps,
Lemuria is half the creation of Modern Science, and has, therefore, to be
believed in; while Plato’s Atlantis is regarded by most of the Scientists
as a dream.

Atlantis is often described by believers in Plato as a prolongation of
Africa. An old continent is also suspected to have existed on the Eastern
coast. But Africa, as a continent, was never part and parcel of either
Lemuria or Atlantis, as we have agreed to call the Third and Fourth
Continents. Their archaic appellations are never mentioned in the
_Purânas_, nor anywhere else. But with only one of the Esoteric keys in
hand, it becomes an easy task to identify these departed lands in the
numberless “Lands of the Gods,” Devas and Munis described in the
_Purânas_, in their Varshas, Dvîpas, and Zones. Their Shveta‐dvîpa, during
the early days of Lemuria, stood out like a giant‐peak from the bottom of
the sea; the area between Atlas and Madagascar being occupied by the
waters till about the early period of Atlantis, after the disappearance of
Lemuria, when Africa emerged from the bottom of the ocean, and Atlas was
half‐sunk.

It is of course impossible to attempt, within the compass of even several
volumes, a consecutive and detailed account of the evolution and progress
of the first three Races‐except so far as to give a general view of it, as
will be done presently. Race the First had no history of its own. Of Race
the Second the same may be said. We shall have, therefore, to pay careful
attention to the Lemurians and the Atlanteans only, before the history of
our own Race, the Fifth, can be attempted.

What is known of other Continents, besides our own, and what does history
know or accept of the early Races? Everything outside the repulsive
speculations of Materialistic Science is daubed with the contemptuous term
“superstition.” The wise men of to‐day will believe nothing. Plato’s
“winged” and “hermaphrodite” races, and his Golden Age, under the reign of
Saturn and the Gods, are quietly brought back by Hæckel to their _new_
place in Nature; our Divine Races are shown to be the descendants of
Catarrhine apes, and our ancestor, a piece of “sea slime”!

Nevertheless, as expressed by Faber:

The _fictions_ of ancient poetry ... will be found to comprehend
some portion of historical truth.

However one‐sided the efforts of the learned author of _A Dissertation on
the Mysteries of the Cabiri_—efforts directed throughout his two volumes
to constrain the classical myths and symbols of old Paganism, “to bear
testimony to the truth of Scripture”—time and further research have
avenged, partially at least, that “truth” by showing it unveiled. Thus it
is the clever adaptations of Scripture, on the contrary, which are made to
bear evidence to the great wisdom of Archaic Paganism. This,
notwithstanding the inextricable confusion into which the truth about the
Kabiri—the most mysterious Gods of antiquity—has been thrown by the wild
and contradictory speculations of Bishop Cumberland, Dr. Shuckford,
Cudworth, Vallancey, etc., and finally by Faber. Nevertheless, all of
these scholars, from first to last, had to come to a certain conclusion
framed by the latter, as follows:

We have no reason to think that the idolatry of the Gentile world
was of a merely arbitrary contrivance; on the contrary, it seems
to have been built, almost universally, upon _a traditional
remembrance of certain real events. These events I apprehend to be
the destruction of the first_ [the Fourth in Esoteric Teaching]
_race of mankind by the waters of the Deluge_.(595)

To this, Faber adds:

I am persuaded that the tradition of the sinking of the Phlegyan
isle is the very same as that of the sinking of the island
Atlantis. They both appear to me to allude to one great event, the
sinking of the whole world beneath the waters of the deluge, or,
if we suppose the arch of the earth to have remained in its
original position, the rising of the central water above it. M.
Bailly indeed in his work upon the Atlantis of Plato, the object
of which is evidently to depreciate the authority of the
scriptural chronology, labours to prove that the Atlantians were a
very ancient northern nation, long prior to the Hindoos, the
Phenicians, and the Egyptians.(596)

In this Faber is in agreement with Bailly, who shows himself more learned
and intuitional than those who accept biblical chronology. Nor is the
latter wrong when saying that the Atlanteans were the same as the Titans
and the Giants.(597) Faber adopts the more willingly the opinion of his
French _confrère_, as Bailly mentions Cosmas Indicopleustes, who preserved
an ancient tradition about Noah—that he “formerly inhabited the _island_
Atlantis.” This island, whether it was the “Poseidonis” mentioned in
_Esoteric Buddhism_, or the Continent of Atlantis, does not much matter.
The tradition is there, recorded by a Christian.

No Occultist would ever think of dispossessing Noah of his prerogatives if
he is claimed to be an Atlantean; for this would simply show that the
Israelites repeated the story of Vaivasvata Manu, Xisuthrus, and so many
others, and that they only changed the name, which they had the same right
to do as any other nation or tribe. What we object to is the literal
acceptation of biblical chronology, as it is absurd, and in accord with
neither geological data nor reason. Moreover, if Noah was an Atlantean,
then he was a Titan, a Giant, as Faber shows; and if a Giant, then why is
he not shown as such in _Genesis_?(598)

Bailly’s mistake was to reject the submersion of Atlantis, and to call the
Atlanteans simply a Northern and _post‐diluvian_ nation, which, however,
as he says, certainly flourished before the foundation of the Hindû,
Egyptian, and Phœnician empires. In this, had he only known of the
existence of what we have agreed to call Lemuria, he would have again been
right. For the Atlanteans were post‐diluvian to the Lemurians, and Lemuria
was not submerged as Atlantis was, but was _sunk_ under the waves, owing
to earthquakes and subterranean fires, as Great Britain and Europe will be
one day. It is the ignorance of our men of Science, who will accept
neither the tradition that several Continents have already sunk, nor the
periodical law which acts throughout the Manvantaric Cycle—it is this
ignorance that is the chief cause of all the confusion. Nor is Bailly
wrong again in assuring us that the Hindûs, Egyptians, and Phœnicians came
after the Atlanteans, for the latter belonged to the Fourth, while the
Âryans and their Semitic Branch are of the Fifth Race. Plato, while
repeating the story as narrated to Solon by the priests of Egypt,
intentionally confuses—as every Initiate would—the two Continents, and
assigns to the small island which last sunk, all the events pertaining to
the two enormous Continents, the prehistoric and traditional. Therefore,
he describes the _first couple_, from whom the whole island was peopled,
as being formed of the Earth. In so saying, he means neither Adam and Eve,
nor yet his own Hellenic forefathers. His language is simply allegorical,
and by alluding to “Earth,” he means Matter, as the Atlanteans were really
the first purely _human_ and _terrestrial_ Race—those that preceded it
being more divine and ethereal than human and solid.

Yet Plato must have known, as would any other initiated Adept, about the
history of the Third Race after its “Fall,” though as one pledged to
silence and secrecy he never showed his knowledge in so many words.
Nevertheless, it may become easier now, after acquainting oneself with
even the approximate chronology of the Eastern nations—all of which was
based upon, and followed the early Âryan calculations—to realize the
immense periods of time that must have elapsed since the separation of the
sexes, without mentioning the First or even the Second Root‐Races. As
these must remain beyond the comprehension of minds trained in Western
thought, it is found useless to speak in detail of the First and Second,
and even of the Third Race in its earliest stage.(599) It is only when the
latter has reached its full human period that a beginning can be made,
without the uninitiated reader finding himself hopelessly bewildered.

The Third Race _fell_—and created no longer; it _begat_ its progeny. Being
still mindless at the period of separation, it begat, moreover, anomalous
offspring, until its physiological nature had adjusted its instincts in
the right direction. Like the “Lords Gods” of the _Bible_, the “Sons of
Wisdom,” the Dhyân Chohans, had warned it to leave alone the fruit
forbidden by Nature; but the warning proved of no value. Men realized the
unfitness—we must not say sin—of what they had done, only when too late;
after the Angelic Monads from higher Spheres had incarnated in, and
endowed them with understanding. To that day they had remained simply
physical, like the animals generated from them. For what is the
distinction? The Doctrine teaches that the only difference between animate
and inanimate objects on Earth, between an animal and a human frame, is
that in some the various “Fires” are latent, and in others they are
active. The _Vital_ Fires are in all things and not an atom is devoid of
them. But no animal has the three higher “principles” awakened in him;
they are simply potential, latent, and thus _non‐existing_. And so would
the animal frames of men be to this day, had they been left as they came
out from the bodies of their Progenitors, whose Shadows they were, to
grow, unfolded only by the powers and forces immanent in Matter. But as
said in _Pymander_:

This is a Mystery that to this day was sealed and hidden.
Nature(600) being mingled with Man(601) brought forth a wondrous
miracle; the harmonious commingling of the _essence of the Seven_
[Pitris, or Governors] and her own; the _Fire_ and the _Spirit_
and _Nature_ [the Noumenon of Matter]; which [commingling]
forthwith brought forth seven men of opposite sexes [negative and
positive] according to the essences of the Seven Governors.(602)

Thus saith Hermes, the thrice great Initiate,(603) the “Power of the
Thought Divine.” St. Paul, another Initiate, called our World, “the
enigmatical mirror of pure truth,” and St. Gregory of Nazianzen
corroborated Hermes by stating that:

Things visible are but the shadow and delineation of things that
we cannot see.

It is an eternal combination, and images are repeated from the higher rung
of the Ladder of Being down to the lower. The “Fall of the Angels,” and
the “War in Heaven” are repeated on every plane, the lower “mirror”
disfiguring the image of the superior “mirror,” and each repeating it in
its own way. Thus the Christian dogmas are but the reminiscences of the
paradigms of Plato, who spoke of these things cautiously, as every
Initiate would. But it is all as expressed in these few sentences of the
_Desatir_:

All that is on earth, saith the Lord [Ormazd], is the _shadow of
something that is in the superior spheres_. This luminious object
[light, fire, etc.] is the shadow of that which is still more
luminous than itself, and so on till it reaches me, who am the
light of lights.

In the Kabalistic books, in the _Zohar_ prëeminently, the idea that every
objective thing on Earth or in this Universe is the “Shadow” (Dyooknah) of
the eternal Light or Deity, is very strong.

The Third Race was prëeminently the bright “Shadow,” at first, of the
Gods, whom tradition exiles on to the Earth after the allegorical War in
Heaven. This became still more allegorical on Earth, for it was the War
between Spirit and Matter. This War will last till the Inner and Divine
Man adjusts his outer terrestrial self to his own spiritual nature. Till
then the dark and fierce passions of that self will be at eternal feud
with his Master, the Divine Man. But the animal will be tamed one day,
because its nature will be changed, and harmony will reign once more
between the two as before the “Fall,” when even mortal man was “created”
by the Elements and was not born.

The above is made clear in all the great Theogonies, principally in the
Grecian, as in that of Hesiod. The _mutilation_ of Uranus by his son
Cronus, who thus condemns him to impotency, has never been understood by
the modern Mythographers. Yet, it is very plain; and as it was
universal(604) it must have contained a great abstract and philosophical
idea, now lost to our modern sages. This punishment in the allegory marks,
indeed, “a new period, a second phase in the development of creation,” as
justly remarked by Decharme,(605) who, however, does not attempt to
explain it. Uranus tried to oppose an impediment to that development, or
natural evolution, by _destroying all his children as soon as born_.
Uranus, who personifies all the creative powers of, and in, Chaos—Space,
or the Unmanifested Deity—is thus made to pay the penalty; for it is these
powers which cause the Pitris to evolve primordial “men” from
themselves—as, later on, these men, in their turn, evolve _their_
progeny—without any sense or desire for procreation. The work of
generation, suspended for a moment, passes into the hands of Cronus
(_Chronos_) Time,(606) who unites himself with Rhea (the Earth—‐in
Esotericism, Matter in general), and thus produces celestial and
terrestrial Titans. The whole of this symbolism relates to the mysteries
of evolution.

This allegory is the exoteric version of the Esoteric Doctrine given in
this part of our work. For in Cronus we see the same story repeated again.
As Uranus destroyed his children by Gæa (one in the world of manifestation
with Aditi, or the Great Cosmic Deep), by confining them in the bosom of
the Earth, Titæa, so Cronus, at this second stage of creation, destroyed
his children by Rhea—by devouring them. This is an allusion to the
fruitless efforts of Earth, or Nature, alone to create real _human_
“men.”(607) Time swallows its own fruitless work. Then comes Zeus,
Jupiter, who dethrones his father in his turn.(608) Jupiter the Titan, is
Prometheus, in one sense,(609) and varies from Zeus, the great “Father of
the Gods.” He is the “disrespectful son” in Hesiod. Hermes calls him the
“Heavenly Man” in _Pymander_; and even in the _Bible_ he is found again
under the name of Adam, and, later on—by transmutation—under that of Ham.
Yet these are all personifications of the “Sons of Wisdom.” The necessary
corroboration that Jupiter belongs to the purely _human_ Atlantean
Cycle—if Uranus and Cronus who precede him are found insufficient—may be
read in Hesiod, who tells us that:

The Immortals made the race of the Golden and Silver Age [First
and Second Races]; Jupiter made the generation of Bronze [an
admixture of _two_ elements], that of the Heroes, and of the Iron
Age.(610)

After this he sends his fatal present, Pandora, to Epimetheus.(611) Hesiod
calls this present of the _first woman_ “a fatal gift.” It was a
punishment, he explains, sent to man “for the theft of [divine creative]
fire.” Her apparition on Earth is the signal for every kind of evil.
Before her appearance, the human races lived happy, exempt from sickness
and suffering—as the same races are made to live under Yima’s rule, in the
Mazdean _Vendidâd_.

Two Deluges may also be traced, in universal tradition, by carefully
comparing Hesiod, the _Rig Veda_, the _Zend Avesta_, etc., but no _first_
man is ever mentioned in any of the Theogonies save in the _Bible_.(612)
Everywhere the man of _our_ Race appears after a cataclysm of water. After
this, tradition mentions only the several designations of continents and
islands which sink under the ocean waves in due time.(613) Gods and
mortals have one common origin according to Hesiod;(614) and Pindar echoes
the statement.(615) Deucalion and Pyrrha, who escape the Deluge by
constructing an Ark like Noah’s,(616) ask Jupiter to reänimate the human
race whom he had made to perish under the waters of the Flood. In the
Slavonian mythology all men are drowned, and two old people, a man and his
wife, alone remain. Then Pram’zimas, the “master of all,” advises them to
jump seven times on the rocks of the Earth, and seven new races (couples)
are born, from which come the nine Lithuanian tribes.(617) As well
understood by the author of _Mythologie de la Grèce Antique_—the Four Ages
signify periods of time, and are also an allegorical allusion to the
Races. As he says:

The successive races, destroyed and replaced by others, without
any period of transition, are characterized in Greece by the name
of metals, to express their ever‐decreasing value. Gold, the most
brilliant and precious of all, symbol of brightness ... qualifies
the first race.... The men of the second race, those of the Age of
Silver, are already far inferior to the first. Inert and weak
creatures, all their life is no better than a long and stupid
infancy.... They disappear.... The men of the Age of Bronze are
robust and violent [the Third Race]; ... their strength is
extreme. “They had arms made of bronze, habitations of bronze;
used nought but bronze. Iron, the black metal, was yet
unknown.”(618) The fourth race is, with Hesiod, that of the heroes
who fell before Thebes,(619) or under the walls of Troy.(620)

Thus, as the four Races are found mentioned by the oldest Greek poets,
though very much confused and anachronistically, our doctrines are once
more corroborated in the classics. But this is all “mythology” and poetry.
What can Modern Science have to say to such a euhemerization of old
fictions? The verdict is not difficult to foresee. Therefore, an attempt
must be made to answer by anticipation, and to prove that so much of the
domain of this same Science is taken up by fictions and empirical
speculations that none of the men of learning have the slightest right,
with such a heavy beam in their own eye, to point to the speck in the eye
of the Occultist, even supposing that speck were not a figment of their
own imagination.

40. THEN THE THIRD AND FOURTH(621) BECAME TALL WITH PRIDE. “WE ARE THE
KINGS;(622) WE ARE THE GODS” (_A_).

41. THEY TOOK WIVES FAIR TO LOOK UPON. WIVES FROM THE MINDLESS, THE
NARROW‐HEADED. THEY BRED MONSTERS, WICKED DEMONS, MALE AND FEMALE, ALSO
KHADO,(623) WITH LITTLE MINDS (_B_).

42. THEY BUILT TEMPLES FOR THE HUMAN BODY. MALE AND FEMALE THEY WORSHIPPED
(_C_). THEN THE THIRD EYE ACTED NO LONGER (_D_).

(_a_) Such were the first truly physical men, whose first characteristic
was—pride! It is the memory of this Third Race and the gigantic
Atlanteans, which has lingered from one generation and race to another
generation and race down to the days of Moses, and has found an objective
form in those antediluvian giants, those terrible sorcerers and magicians,
of whom the Roman Church has preserved such vivid, and at the same time
distorted, legends. Anyone who has read and studied the Commentaries on
the Archaic Doctrine, will easily recognize in some of these Atlanteans
the prototypes of the Nimrods, the Builders of the Tower of Babel, the
Hamites, and all those _tutti quanti_ of “accursed memory,” as theological
literature expresses it; of those, in short, who have furnished posterity
with the orthodox types of Satan. And this naturally leads us to enquire
into the religious ethics of these early Races, mythical as they may be.

What was the religion of the Third and Fourth Races? In the common
acceptation of the term, neither the Lemurians, nor yet their progeny, the
Lemuro‐Atlanteans, had any; for they knew no dogma, nor had they to
believe _on faith_. No sooner had the mental eye of man been opened to
understanding, than the Third Race felt itself one with the ever‐present,
as also the ever to be unknown and invisible, All, the One Universal
Deity. Endowed with divine powers, and feeling in himself his _inner_ God,
each felt he was a Man‐God in his nature, though an animal in his physical
self. The struggle between the two began from the very day they tasted of
the fruit of the Tree of Wisdom; a struggle for life between the spiritual
and the psychic, the psychic and the physical. Those who conquered the
lower “principles” by obtaining mastery over the body, joined the “Sons of
Light.” Those who fell victims to their lower natures, became the slaves
of Matter. From “Sons of Light and Wisdom” they ended by becoming the
“Sons of Darkness.” They fell in the battle of mortal life with Life
Immortal, and all those so fallen became the seed of the future
generations of Atlanteans.(624)

At the dawn of his consciousness, the man of the Third Root‐Race had thus
no beliefs that could be called _religion_. That is to say, he was not
only ignorant of “gay religions, full of pomp and gold” but even of any
system of faith or outward worship. But if the term is to be defined as
the binding together of the masses in one form of reverence paid to those
we feel higher than ourselves, of piety—as a feeling expressed by a child
toward a loved parent—then even the earliest Lemurians from the very
beginning of their intellectual life, had a religion, and a most beautiful
one. Had they not their bright Gods of the Elements around them, and even
within themselves?(625) Was not their childhood passed with, nursed and
tended by, those who had given them being and called them forth to
intelligent, conscious life? We are assured it was so, and we believe it.
For the evolution of Spirit into Matter could never have been achieved,
nor would it have received its first impulse, had not the bright Spirits
sacrificed their own respective super‐ethereal essences to animate the man
of clay, by endowing each of his inner “principles” with a portion, or
rather, a reflection, of that essence. The Dhyânîs of the Seven
Heavens—the seven planes of Being—are the Noumena of the actual and the
future Elements, just as the Angels of the Seven Powers of Nature—the
grosser effects of which we perceive in what Science is pleased to call
“modes of motion,” the imponderable forces and what not—are the still
higher Noumena of still higher Hierarchies.

It was the “Golden Age” in those days of old, the Age when the “Gods
walked the earth, and mixed freely with the mortals.” When it ceased, the
Gods departed—_i.e._, became invisible—and later generations ended by
worshipping their kingdoms—the Elements.

It was the Atlanteans, the first progeny of semi‐divine man after his
separation into sexes—hence the first‐begotten and humanly‐born
mortals—who became the first “sacrificers” to the _God of Matter_. They
stand, in the dim far‐away past, in ages more than prehistoric, as the
prototype on which the great symbol of Cain was built,(626) as the first
Anthropomorphists who worshipped Form and Matter—a worship which very soon
degenerated into _self‐worship_, and thence led to phallicism, which
reigns supreme to this day in the symbolism of every exoteric religion of
ritual, dogma, and form. Adam and Eve _became matter_, or furnished the
soil, Cain and Abel—the latter the life‐bearing soil, the former “the
tiller of that ground or field.”

Thus the first Atlantean races, born on the Lemurian Continent, separated
from their earliest tribes into the righteous and the unrighteous; into
those who worshipped the one unseen Spirit of Nature, the Ray of which man
feels within himself—or the Pantheists, and those who offered fanatical
worship to the Spirits of the Earth, the dark, cosmic, anthropomorphic
Powers, with whom they made alliance. These were the earliest Gibborim,
the “mighty men ... of renown” in those days,(627) who become with the
Fifth Race the Kabirim, Kabiri with the Egyptians and the Phœnicians,
Titans with the Greeks, and Râkshasas and Daityas with the Indian races.

Such was the secret and mysterious origin of all the subsequent and modern
religions, especially of the worship of the later Hebrews for their tribal
God. At the same time this sexual religion was closely allied to, based
upon, and, so to say, blended with, astronomical phenomena. The Lemurians
gravitated toward the North Pole, or the Heaven of their Progenitors—the
Hyperborean Continent; the Atlanteans, toward the South Pole, the “_Pit_,”
cosmically and terrestrially—whence breathe the hot passions blown into
hurricanes by the cosmic Elementals, whose abode it is. The two Poles were
denominated, by the Ancients, Dragons and Serpents—hence good and bad
Dragons and Serpents, and also the names given to the “Sons of God”—Sons
of Spirit and Matter—the good and bad Magicians. This is the origin of the
dual and triple nature in man. The legend of the “Fallen Angels” in its
Esoteric signification, contains the key to the manifold contradictions of
human character; it points to the secret of man’s self‐consciousness; it
is the support on which hinges his entire Life‐Cycle—the history of his
evolution and growth.

On a firm grasp of this doctrine depends the correct understanding of
Esoteric Anthropogenesis. It gives a clue to the vexed question of the
Origin of Evil; and shows how man himself is the separator of the One into
various contrasted aspects.

The reader, therefore, will not be surprised if so much space is devoted
to an attempt to elucidate this difficult and obscure subject every time
it presents itself. A good deal must necessarily be said on its
symbological aspect; because, by so doing, hints are given to the
thoughtful student for his own investigations, and more light can thus be
suggested than it is possible to convey in the technical phrases of a more
formal, philosophical exposition. The “Fallen Angels,” so‐called, are
_Humanity_ itself. The Demon of Pride, Lust, Rebellion, and Hatred, had no
being _before_ the appearance of physical conscious man. It is man who has
begotten and nurtured the fiend, and allowed it to develop in his heart;
it is he, again, who has contaminated the Indwelling God in himself, by
linking the pure Spirit with the impure Demon of Matter. And, if the
Kabalistic saying, “_Demon est Deus inversus_,” finds its metaphysical and
theoretical corroboration in dual manifested Nature, nevertheless, its
practical application is found in Mankind alone.

Thus it has now become self‐evident that, postulating as we do, (_a_) the
appearance of Man before that of other Mammalia, and even before the Ages
of the huge Reptiles; (_b_) Periodical Deluges and Glacial Periods owing
to the Karmic disturbance of the axis; and chiefly (_c_) the birth of man
from a Superior Being, or what Materialism would call a “supernatural”
Being, though it is only super‐_human_—our teachings have very few chances
of an impartial hearing. Add to it the claim that a portion of Mankind in
the Third Race—all those Monads of men who had reached the highest point
of Merit and Karma in the preceding Manvantara—owed their psychic and
rational natures to divine Beings “hypostasizing” into their Fifth
Principles, and the Secret Doctrine must lose caste in the eyes of not
only Materialism but even of dogmatic Christianity. For, no sooner will
the latter have learned that these Angels are identical with their
“Fallen” Spirits, than the Esoteric tenet will be proclaimed most terribly
heretical and pernicious.(628) The _Divine_ Man dwelt in the animal, and
therefore, when the physiological separation took place in the natural
course of evolution—when also “all the animal creation was _untied_,” and
males were attracted to females—_that race fell_; not because they had
eaten of the Fruit of Knowledge and knew Good from Evil, but because they
knew no better. Propelled by the sexless creative instinct, the early sub‐
races had evolved an intermediate race in which, as hinted in the Stanzas,
the higher Dhyân Chohans had incarnated.(629) “When we have ascertained
the extent of the universe (and learnt to know all that there is in it) we
will multiply our race,” answer the Sons of Will and Yoga to their
brethren of the same race, who invite them to do as they do. This means
that the great Adepts and Initiated Ascetics will “multiply,” _i.e._, once
more produce “mind‐born” immaculate sons—in the Seventh Root‐Race.

It is so stated in the _Vishnu_ and _Brahmâ Purânas_, in the
_Mahâbhârata_(630) and in the _Harivamsha_. In one portion of the
_Pushkara Mâhâtmya_, moreover, the separation of the sexes is allegorized
by Daksha, who, seeing that his will‐born progeny, the “Sons of passive
Yoga,” will not create men, “_converts half himself into a female_ by whom
he begets daughters,” the future females of the Third Race which begat the
Giants of Atlantis, the Fourth Race, so called. In the _Vishnu Purâna_ it
is simply said that Daksha, the father of mankind, established sexual
intercourse as the means of peopling the world.(631)

Happily for the Human Race the “Elect Race” had already become the vehicle
of incarnation of the highest Dhyânîs (intellectually and spiritually)
before Humanity had become quite material. When the last sub‐races—save
some of the lowest—of the Third Race had perished with the great Lemurian
Continent, the “Seeds of the _Trinity of Wisdom_” had already acquired the
secret of immortality on Earth, that gift which allows the same Great
Personality to step _ad libitum_ from one worn‐out body into another.

(_b_) The first War that Earth knew, the first shedding of human gore, was
the result of man’s eyes and senses being opened, which made him see that
the daughters of his brethren were fairer than his own—and their wives
also. There were rapes committed before that of the Sabines, and
Menelauses robbed of their Helens before the Fifth Race was born. The
Titans or Giants were the stronger; their adversaries, the wiser. This
took place during the Fourth Race—that of the Giants.

For “there _were_ Giants” in the days of old, indeed.(632) The
evolutionary series of the animal world is a warrant that the same thing
took place within the human races. Lower still in the order of creation we
find witnesses for the same proportionate size in the flora going _pari
passu_ with the fauna. The pretty ferns we collect and dry among the
leaves of our favourite volumes are the descendants of the gigantic ferns
which grew during the Carboniferous period.

Scriptures, and fragments of philosophical and scientific works—in short,
almost every record that has come down to us from antiquity—contain
references to Giants. No one can fail to recognize the Atlanteans of the
Secret Doctrine in the Râkshasas of Lankâ—the opponents conquered by Râma.
Are these accounts no better than the production of empty fancy? Let us
give the subject a few moments’ attention.

Are Giants A Fiction?

Here, again, we come into collision with Science, which so far denies that
man has ever been much larger than the average of tall and powerful men
now met with occasionally. Dr. Henry Gregor denounces the traditions of
Giants as resting upon ill‐digested facts, and instances of mistaken
judgments are brought forward as disproof of such traditions. Thus, in
1613, in a locality, called from time immemorial the “Field of Giants,” in
Lower Dauphiné, France, four miles from St. Romans, enormous bones were
found deeply buried in the sandy soil. They were attributed to human
remains, and even to Teutobodus, the Teuton chief slain by Marius. But
Cuvier’s later research proved them to be the fossil remains of the
Dinotherium Giganteum, 18 feet long. Ancient buildings are pointed to as
an evidence that our earliest ancestors were not much larger than we are,
the entrance doors being of no larger size then than now. The tallest man
of antiquity known to us, we are told, was the Roman Emperor Maximus,
whose height was only seven and a half feet. Nevertheless, in our modern
day, every year we see men taller than this. The Hungarian who exhibited
himself in the London Pavilion was nearly 9 feet high. In America a giant
was shown 9 feet 6 inches tall; the Montenegrin Danilo was 8 feet 7
inches. In Russia and Germany one often sees men in the lower classes
above 7 feet. Now, as the ape‐theorists are told by Mr. Darwin that the
species of animals which result from cross breeding always betray “_a
tendency to revert to the original type_,” they ought to apply the same
law to men. Had there been no giants as a type in ancient days, there
would be none now.

All this applies only to the historic period. And if the skeletons of the
prehistoric ages have failed so far to prove undeniably in the opinion of
Science the claim here advanced, it is but a question of time. We,
however, positively deny the reality of the failure. Moreover, as already
stated, human stature is little changed since the last Racial Cycle. The
giants of old are all buried under the oceans, and hundreds of thousands
of years of constant friction by water would reduce to dust a brazen, much
more a human skeleton. And whence the testimony of well‐known classical
writers, of philosophers and men who, otherwise, never had the reputation
for lying? Let us bear in mind, furthermore, that before the year 1847,
when Boucher de Perthes forced it upon the attention of Science, hardly
anything was known of fossil man, for Archæology complacently ignored his
existence. Of giants who were “in the earth in those days” of old, the
_Bible_ alone had spoken to the wise men of the West; the Zodiac being the
solitary witness called upon to corroborate the statement in the persons
of Orion or Atlas, whose mighty shoulders were said to support the world.

Nevertheless, even the giants have not been left without their witnesses,
and one may as well examine both sides of the question. The three
Sciences—geological, sidereal and scriptural, the latter in its universal
character—may furnish us with the needed proofs. To begin with Geology: it
has already confessed that the older the excavated skeletons, the larger,
taller and the more powerful their structure. This is already a certain
proof in hand. Frédéric de Rougemont, who, though believing too piously in
the _Bible_ and Noah’s Ark, is none the less a scientific witness, writes:

All those bones, found in the Departments of the Gard, in Austria,
Liège, etc., those skulls which all remind one of the negro type
... and which by reason of their type might be mistaken for
animals, have all belonged to men of _high stature_.(633)

The same is repeated by Lartet, an authority, who attributes a “tall
stature” to those who were submerged in the Deluge—not necessarily
“Noah’s”—and a smaller stature to the races which lived subsequently.

As for the evidence furnished by ancient writers, we need not trouble
ourselves with that of Tertullian, who assures us that in his day a number
of giants were found at Carthage—for, before his testimony can be
accepted, his own identity,(634) if not actual existence, would have to be
proven. We may, however, turn to the papers of 1858, which speak of a
“sarcophagus of giants” found that year on the site of this same city. As
to the ancient Pagan writers, we have the evidence of Philostratus, who
speaks of a giant skeleton twenty‐two cubits long, as well as of another
of twelve cubits, seen by himself on the promontory of Sigæum. This
skeleton may perhaps not have belonged, as believed by Protesilas, to the
giant killed by Apollo at the siege of Troy; nevertheless, it was that of
a giant, as was that of the other discovered by Messecrates of Stira, in
Lemnos—“horrible to behold,” according to Philostratus.(635) Is it
possible that prejudice would carry Science so far as to class _all_ these
men as either fools or liars?

Pliny speaks of a giant in whom he thought he recognized Orion, or Otus,
the brother of Ephialtes.(636) Plutarch declares that Sertorius saw the
tomb of Antæus, the Giant; and Pausanias vouches for the actual existence
of the tombs of Asterius and of Geryon, or of Hillus, son of Hercules—all
Giants, Titans and mighty men. Finally the Abbé Pegues, affirms in his
curious work, _Les Volcans de la Grèce_, that:

In the neighbourhood of the volcanoes of the isle of Thera, giants
with enormous skulls were found laid out under colossal stones,
the erection of which in every place must have necessitated the
use of titanic powers, and which tradition associates in all
countries with the ideas about giants, volcanoes and magic.(637)

In the same work above cited, the author wonders why in the _Bible_ and
tradition the Gibborim, the giants or the “mighty ones,” the Rephaim, the
spectres or the “phantoms,” the Nephilim, or the “fallen ones”
(_irruentes_), are shown as if identical, though they are “all _men_,”
since the _Bible_ calls them the primitive and the mighty ones—_e.g._,
Nimrod. The Secret Doctrine explains the secret. These names, which belong
by right only to the four preceding Races and the earliest beginning of
the Fifth, allude very clearly to the first two _Phantom_ (Astral) Races,
to the “Fallen” Race—the Third, and to the Race of the Atlantean
Giants—the Fourth, after which “men began to decrease in stature.”

Bossuet sees the cause of subsequent universal idolatry in the “original
sin.” “Ye shall be as Gods,” says the Serpent of _Genesis_ to Eve, thus
laying the first germ of the worship of _false divinities_.(638) Hence, he
thinks, came idolatry, or the cult and adoration of _images_, of
anthropomorphized or human figures. But, if it is this that idolatry is
made to rest upon, then the two Churches—the Greek, and the Latin
especially—are as idolatrous and pagan as any other religion.(639) It was
only in the Fourth Race that men, who had lost all right to be considered
divine, resorted to body worship, in other words to phallicism. Till then,
they had been truly Gods, as pure and as divine as their Progenitors, and
the expression of the allegorical “Serpent,” as has been sufficiently
shown in the preceding pages, does not refer at all to the physiological
“Fall” of men, but to their acquiring the Knowledge of Good and Evil; and
this knowledge came to them _prior_ to their fall. It must not be
forgotten that it is only after his forced expulsion from Eden that “Adam
knew Eve his wife.” We shall not, however, check the tenets of the Secret
Doctrine by the dead‐letter of the Hebrew _Bible_, but rather point out
the great similarities between the two in their Esoteric meaning.

It was only after his defection from the Neo‐Platonists, that Clement of
Alexandria began to translate _gigantes_ by _serpentes_, explaining that
“serpents and giants signify _demons_.”(640)

We may be told that, before we draw parallels between our tenets and those
of the _Bible_, we have to show better evidence of the existence of the
Giants of the Fourth Race than the reference to them found in _Genesis_.
We answer, that the proofs we give are more satisfactory, at any rate are
supported by more literary and scientific evidence, than those of Noah’s
Deluge will ever be. Even the historical works of China are full of such
reminiscences about the Fourth Race. In the French translation of the
_Shoo‐King_,(641) we read:

When the Miao‐tse (that antediluvian and perverted race [explains
the annotator] which retired in the days of old to the rocky
caves, and the descendants of whom are said to be still found in
the neighbourhood of Canton),(642) _according to our ancient
documents_, had, owing to the beguilements of Tchy‐Yeoo, troubled
all the earth, it became full of brigands.... The Lord (Chang‐ty
[a King of the _Divine_ Dynasty]) cast his eyes over the people,
and saw no longer among them any trace of virtue. Then he
commanded Tchong and Ly [two lower Dhyân Chohans] to cut away
every communication between heaven and earth. Since then, there
has been no more _going up and down_!(643)

“Going up and down” means an untrammelled communication and intercourse
between the two Worlds.

As we are not in a position to give out a full and detailed history of the
Third and Fourth Races, as many isolated facts concerning them as are
permitted must be now collated together, especially those corroborated by
direct as well as by inferential evidence found in ancient literature and
history. As the “coats of skin” of men thickened, and they fell more and
more into physical sin, the intercourse between Physical and Ethereal
_Divine_ Man was stopped. The Veil of Matter between the two planes became
too dense for even the Inner Man to penetrate. The Mysteries of Heaven and
Earth, revealed to the Third Race by their Celestial Teachers in the days
of their purity, became a great focus of light, the rays from which became
necessarily weakened as they were diffused and shed upon an uncongenial,
because too material, soil. With the masses they degenerated into Sorcery,
taking later on the shape of exoteric religions, of idolatry full of
superstitions, and man‐, or hero‐worship. Alone a handful of primitive
men—in whom the spark of Divine Wisdom burnt bright, and became only
strengthened in its intensity as it got dimmer and dimmer with every age
in those who turned it to evil purposes—remained the elect custodians of
the Mysteries revealed to mankind by the Divine Teachers. There were those
among them, who remained in their Kaumâric condition from the beginning;
and tradition whispers, what the Secret Teachings affirm, namely, that
these Elect were the germ of a Hierarchy _which has never died since that
period_. As the _Catechism_ of the Inner Schools says:

_The Inner Man of the First ... only changes his body from time to time;
he is ever the same, knowing neither rest nor Nirvâna, spurning Devachan
and remaining constantly on Earth for the salvation of mankind.... Out of
the seven Virgin‐men [Kumâra]_(_644_)_ four sacrificed themselves for the
sins of the world and the instruction of the ignorant, to remain till the
end of the present Manvantara. Though unseen, they are ever present. When
people say of one of them, __“__He is dead__”__; behold, he is alive __
and under another form. These are the Head, the Heart, the Soul, and the
Seed of undying Knowledge [Jñâna]. Thou shall never speak, O Lanoo, of
these great ones [Mahâ ...] before a multitude, mentioning them by their
names. The wise alone will understand._(645)

It is these sacred “Four” who have been allegorized and symbolized in the
_Linga Purâna_, which states that Vâmadeva (Shiva) as a Kumâra is reborn
in each Kalpa (Race, in this instance), as four youths—four, white; four,
red; four, yellow; and four, dark or brown. Let us remember that Shiva is
preëminently and chiefly an ascetic, the patron of all Yogîs and Adepts,
and the allegory will become quite comprehensible. It is the spirit of
Divine Wisdom and chaste Asceticism itself which incarnates in these
Elect. It is only after _getting married_ and being dragged by the Gods
from his terrible ascetic life, that Rudra becomes Shiva, a God—and not
one of a very virtuous or merciful type—in the Hindû Pantheon. Higher than
the “Four” is only ONE on Earth as in Heavens—that still more mysterious
and solitary Being described in Volume I.

We have now to examine the nature of the “Sons of the Flame” and of “Dark
Wisdom,” as well as the _pros_ and _cons_ of the Satanic assumption.

Such broken sentences as could be made out from the fragments of the tile,
which George Smith calls “The Curse after the Fall,”(646) are of course
allegorical; yet they corroborate that which is taught of the true nature
of the Fall of the Angels in our Books. Thus, it is said that the “Lord of
the Earth his name called out, the Father Elu [Elohim],” and pronounced
his “curse,” which “the God Hea heard, and his liver was angry, because
_his_ man [Angelic Man] had corrupted his purity,” for which Hea expresses
the desire that “_wisdom and knowledge_ hostilely may they injure him
[man].”(647)

The latter sentence points to the direct connection of the Chaldæan with
the Genetic account. While Hea tries to bring to nought the wisdom and
knowledge gained by man, through his newly‐acquired intellectual and
conscious capacity of creating in his turn—thus taking the monopoly of
creation out of the hands of God (the Gods)—the Elohim do the same in the
third chapter of _Genesis_. Therefore the Elohim sent him out of Eden.

But this was of no avail. For the Spirit of Divine Wisdom being upon and
_in_ man—verily the Serpent of Eternity and all Knowledge, that Mânasic
Spirit, which made him learn the secret of “creation” on the Kriyâshaktic,
and of procreation on the Earthly planes—led him as naturally to discover
his way to immortality, notwithstanding the jealousy of all the Gods.

The early Atlanto‐Lemurians are charged with taking unto themselves (the
divine incarnations) wives of a lower race, namely, the race of the
hitherto mindless men. Every ancient Scripture has the same, more or less
disfigured, legend. Primarily, the Angelic “Fall,” which has transformed
the “First‐born” of God into the Asuras, or into the Ahriman or Typhon of
the “Pagans”—_i.e._, if the accounts given in the _Book of Enoch_,(648)
and in _Hermes_, in _Purânas_ and _Bible_ are taken literally—has, when
read Esoterically, the following simple signification:

Sentences such as, “In his [Satan’s] ambition he raises his hand against
the Sanctuary of the God of Heaven,” etc., ought to read: Prompted by the
Law of Eternal Evolution and Karma, the Angel incarnated on Earth in Man;
and as his Wisdom and Knowledge are still divine, although his Body is
earthly, he is (allegorically) accused of divulging the Mysteries of
Heaven. He combines and uses the two for purposes of human, instead of
super‐human, procreation. Henceforth, “man will _beget_, not
_create_.”(649) But as, by so doing, he has to use his weak Body as the
means of procreation, that Body will pay the penalty for this Wisdom,
carried from Heaven down to the Earth; hence the corruption of physical
purity will become a temporary curse.

The Mediæval Kabalists knew this well, since one of them did not fear to
write:

The Kabalah was first taught by God himself to a select Company of
Angels who formed a theosophic school in Paradise. After the Fall
the Angels most _graciously communicated this heavenly doctrine to
the disobedient child of Earth_, to furnish the protoplasts with
the means of returning to their pristine nobility and
felicity.(650)

This shows how the incident of the Sons of God, marrying and imparting the
Divine Secrets of Heaven to the Daughters of Men—as allegorically told by
Enoch and in the sixth chapter of _Genesis_—was interpreted by the
Christian Kabalists. The whole of this period may be regarded as the
_pre_‐human period, that of Divine Man, or as plastic Protestant Theology
now has it—the _Pre_‐Adamite period. But even _Genesis_ begins its _real_
history (Chap. vi) by the giants of “those days” and the “sons of God”
marrying and teaching their wives—the “daughters of men.”

This period is the one described in the _Purânas_; and relating as it does
to days lost in archaic ages, hence pre‐historic, how can any
Anthropologist feel certain whether the mankind of that period was or was
not as he knows it now? The whole _personnel_ of the _Brâhmanas_ and
_Purânas_—the Rishis, Prajâpatis, Manus, their wives and progeny—belong to
that pre‐human period. All these are the _Seed_ of Humanity, so to speak.
It is around these “Sons of God,” the “mind‐born” astral Children of
Brahmâ, that our physical frames have grown and developed to what they are
now. For, the Paurânic histories of all those men are those of our Monads,
in their various and numberless incarnations on this and other Spheres,
events perceived by the “Shiva Eye” of the ancient Seers—the “Third Eye”
of our Stanzas—and described allegorically. Later on, they were disfigured
for sectarian purposes; mutilated, but still left with a considerable
ground‐work of truth in them. Nor is the philosophy less profound in such
allegories for being so thickly veiled by the overgrowth of fancy.

But with the Fourth Race we reach the purely human period. Those who were
hitherto semi‐divine Beings, self‐imprisoned in bodies which were human
only in appearance, became physiologically changed and took unto
themselves wives who were entirely human and fair to look upon, but in
whom _lower, more material_, though sidereal, Beings had incarnated. These
Beings in female forms—Lilith is the prototype of them in the Jewish
traditions—are called in the Esoteric accounts Khado (Dâkinî, in
Sanskrit). Allegorical legends call the Chief of these Liliths Sangye
Khado (Buddha Dâkinî, in Sanskrit); all are credited with the art of
“walking in the air,” and the “greatest _kindness to mortals_;” but with
no _mind_—only animal instinct.(651)

(_c_) This is the beginning of a worship which, ages later, was doomed to
degenerate into phallicism and sexual worship. It began by the worship of
the human body—that “miracle of miracles,” as an English author calls
it—and ended by that of its respective sexes. The worshippers were giants
in stature; but they were not giants in knowledge and learning, though it
came to them more easily than it does to the men of our modern times.
Their science was innate in them. The Lemuro‐Atlantean had no need of
discovering and fixing in his memory that which his informing principle
_knew_ at the moment of its incarnation. Time alone, and the ever‐growing
obtuseness of the Matter in which the “principles” had clothed themselves,
could, the one, weaken the memory of their pre‐natal knowledge, the other,
blunt and even extinguish every spark of the spiritual and divine in them.
Therefore had they, from the first, fallen victims to their animal natures
and bred “monsters”—_i.e._, men of distinct varieties from themselves.

Speaking of the Giants, Creuzer well describes them in saying that:

Those children of Heaven and Earth were endowed at their birth by
the _Sovereign Powers_, the authors of their being, with
extraordinary faculties both moral and physical. They _commanded
the Elements, knew the secrets of Heaven and the Earth, of the sea
and the whole world, and read futurity in_ the stars.... It seems,
indeed, as though, when reading of them, one has to deal _not with
men as we are_ but with Spirits of the Elements sprung from the
bosom of Nature and having full sway over her.... All these beings
are marked with a character of _magic_ and _sorcery_....

And so they were, those now legendary heroes of the pre‐historic, still
once really existing, races. Creuzer was wise in his generation, for he
did not charge with deliberate deceit, or dulness and superstition, an
endless series of recognized Philosophers, who mention these races and
assert that, even in their own time, they had seen their fossils. There
were sceptics in days of old—as many and great as they are now. But even a
Lucian, a Democritus and an Epicurus, yielded to the evidence of _facts_
and showed the discriminative capacity of really great intellects, which
can distinguish fiction from fact, and truth from exaggeration and fraud.
Ancient writers were no more fools than are our modern wise men; for, as
well remarked by the author of “Notes on Aristotle’s Psychology in
Relation to Modern Thought,” in _Mind_:

The common division of history into ancient and modern is ...
misleading. The Greeks in the fourth century, B.C., were in many
respects moderns; especially, we may add, in their scepticism.
They were not very likely to accept _fables_ so easily.

Yet the Lemurians and the Atlanteans, those “children of Heaven and
Earth,” were indeed marked with a character of _sorcery_; for the Esoteric
Doctrine charges them precisely with what, if believed, would put an end
to the difficulties of Science with regard to the origin of man, or
rather, his anatomical similarities to the anthropoid ape. It accuses them
of having committed the (to us) abominable crime of breeding with so‐
called “animals,” and thus producing a truly pithecoid species, now
extinct. Of course, as also in the question of spontaneous generation—in
which Esoteric Science believes, and which it teaches—the possibility of
such a cross‐breed between man and an animal of any kind will be denied.
But apart from the consideration that in those early days, as already
remarked, neither the human Atlantean Giants, nor yet the “animals,” were
the physiologically perfect men and mammalians that are now known to us,
the modern notions upon this subject—those of the Physiologists
included—are too uncertain and fluctuating to permit them an absolute _à
priori_ denial of such a fact.

A careful perusal of the Commentaries would make one think that the Being
with which the new “Incarnate” bred, was called an “animal,” not because
he was no human being, but rather because he was so dissimilar physically
and mentally to the more perfect races, which had developed
physiologically at an earlier period. Remember Stanza VII and what is said
in Shloka 24, viz., that when the “Sons of Wisdom” came to incarnate the
first time, some of them incarnated fully, others projected into the forms
only a Spark, while some of the Shadows were left over from the _filling_
and perfecting, till the Fourth Race. Those races, then, which “remained
destitute of knowledge,” or those again which were left “mindless,”
remained as they were, even after the natural separation of the sexes. It
is these who committed the first cross‐breeding, so to speak, and bred
monsters; and it is from the descendants of these that the Atlanteans
chose their wives. Adam and Eve, with Cain and Abel, were supposed to be
the only _human_ family on Earth. Yet we see Cain going to the land of Nod
and taking there a wife. Evidently one race only was supposed perfect
enough to be called human; and, even in our own day, while the Sinhalese
regard the Veddhas of their jungles as _speaking animals_ and no more,
some British people, in their arrogance, firmly believe that every other
human family—especially the dark Indians—is an _inferior_ race. Moreover
there are Naturalists who have seriously considered the problem whether
some savage tribes—like the Bushmen, for instance—can be regarded as _men_
at all. The Commentary says, in describing that species (or race) of
animals “fair to look upon,” as a biped:

_Having human shape, but having the lower extremities, from the waist
down, covered with hair._

Hence the race of the satyrs, perhaps.

If men existed two million years ago, they must have been—just as were the
animals—quite different physically and anatomically from what they have
now become, and nearer then to the type of pure mammalian animal than they
are now. Anyhow, we learn that the animal world has bred strictly _inter
se_—_i.e._, in accordance with genus and species—only since the appearance
_on this Earth_ of the Atlantean Race. As demonstrated by the author of
that able work, _Modern Science and Modern Thought_, this idea of the
refusal to breed with another species, or that sterility is the only
result of such breeding, “appears to be a _primâ facie_ deduction rather
than an absolute law” even now. He shows that:

Different species do, in fact, often breed together, as is seen in
the familiar instance of the horse and ass. It is true that in
this case the mule is sterile.... But this rule is not universal,
and quite recently one new hybrid race, that of the leporine, or
hare‐rabbit, has been created which is perfectly fertile.

The progeny of wolf and dog is also instanced, as also that of several
other domestic animals; foxes and dogs again, and the modern Swiss cattle
shown by Rütimeyer as descended from “three distinct species of fossil‐
oxen, the _Bos primigenius_, _Bos longifrons_ and _Bos frontosus_.”(652)
Yet some of those species, _as the ape family_, which so clearly resembles
man in physical structure, contain, we are told,

Numerous branches, which graduate into one another, but the
extremes of which differ more widely than man does from the
highest of the ape series.

The gorilla and chimpanzee, for instance.

Thus Mr. Darwin’s remark—or shall we say the remark of Linnæus?—_natura
non facit saltum_, is not only corroborated by Esoteric Science but
would—were there any chance of the real doctrine being accepted by any
others than its direct votaries—reconcile the modern evolution theory, in
more than one way, if not entirely, with facts, as also with the absolute
failure of the Anthropologists to meet with the “missing link” in our
Fourth Round geological formations.

We will show elsewhere that Modern Science, however unconsciously to
itself, pleads our case by its own admissions, and that de Quatrefages is
perfectly right, when he suggests in his last work, that it is far more
likely that the anthropoid ape should be discovered to be _the descendant
of man_, than that these two types should have a common, fantastic and
nowhere‐to‐be‐found ancestor. Thus the wisdom of the compilers of the old
Stanzas is vindicated by at least one eminent man of Science, and the
Occultist prefers to believe, as he has ever done, that, as the Commentary
says:

_Man was the first and highest [mammalian] animal that appeared in this
[Fourth Round] creation. Then came still huger animals; and last of all
the dumb man who walks on all fours. [For] the Râkshasas [Giant‐Demons]
and Daityas [Titans] of the White Dvipa [Continent] spoiled his [the dumb
man’s] sires._

Furthermore, as we see, there are Anthropologists who have traced man back
to an epoch which goes far to break down the apparent barrier that exists
between the chronologies of Modern Science and the Archaic Doctrine. It is
true that English Scientists generally have declined to commit themselves
to the sanction of the hypothesis of even a Tertiary man. They, each and
all, measure the antiquity of Homo Primigenius by their own lights and
prejudices. Huxley, indeed, ventures to speculate on a possible Pliocene
or Miocene man. Prof. Seeman and Mr. Grant Allen have relegated his advent
to the Eocene, but, speaking generally, English Scientists consider that
we cannot safely go beyond the Quaternary. Unfortunately, the facts do not
accommodate the too cautious reserve of these latter. The French school of
Anthropology, basing their views on the discoveries of l’Abbé Bourgeois,
Capellini, and others, has accepted, almost without exception, the
doctrine that the traces of our ancestors are certainly to be found in the
Miocene, while M. de Quatrefages now inclines to postulate a Secondary‐Age
man. Further on we shall compare such estimates with the figures given in
the Brâhmanical exoteric books which approximate to the Esoteric Teaching.

(_d_) “Then the Third Eye acted no longer,” says the Shloka, because Man
had sunk too deep into the mire of Matter.

What is the meaning of this strange and weird statement in Shloka 42,
concerning the Third Eye of the Third Race which had died and acted no
longer?

A few more Occult Teachings must now be given with reference to this point
as well as some others. The history of the Third and Fourth Races must be
amplified, in order that it may throw some more light on the development
of our present humanity; and show how the faculties, called into activity
by Occult training, restore man to the position he previously occupied in
reference to spiritual perception and consciousness. But the phenomenon of
the Third Eye has to be first explained.

The Races With The “Third Eye.”

The subject is so unusual, the paths pursued so intricate, so full of
dangerous pitfalls prepared by adverse theories and criticism, that good
reasons have to be given for every step taken. While turning the light of
the bull’s‐eye, called Esotericism, on almost every inch of the Occult
ground travelled over, we have also to use its lens to throw into stronger
objectivity the regions explored by exact Science; this, not only in order
to contrast the two, but to defend our position.(653)

It may be complained by some that too little is said of the physical,
_human_ side of the extinct races, in the history of their growth and
evolution. Much more might be said, assuredly, if simple prudence did not
make us hesitate at the threshold of every new revelation. All that finds
possibility and landmarks in the discoveries of Modern Science, is given;
all that of which exact knowledge knows nothing and upon which it is
unable to speculate—and therefore denies as fact in nature—is withheld.

But even such statements as, for instance, that, of all the mammalians,
man was the earliest, that it is man who is the indirect ancestor of the
ape, and that he was a kind of Cyclops in days of old—all will be
contested; yet Scientists will never be able to prove, except to their own
satisfaction, that _it was not so_. Nor can they admit that the first two
Races of men were too ethereal and phantom‐like in their constitution,
organism, and _shape_ even, to be called physical men. For, if they do, it
will be found that this is one of the reasons why their relics can never
be expected to be exhumed among other fossils. Nevertheless all this is
maintained. Man was the Store‐house, so to speak, of _all the seeds of
life_ for this Round, vegetable and animal alike.(654) As Ain Suph is
“One, _notwithstanding the innumerable forms which are in him_,”(655) so
is man, on Earth the microcosm of the macrocosm.

As soon as man appeared, everything was complete ... for
everything is comprised in man. He _unites in himself all
forms_.(656)

The mystery of the _earthly_ man is after the mystery of the
Heavenly Man.(657)

The human form—so called because it is the vehicle (under whatever shape)
of the _Divine_ Man—is, as so intuitionally remarked by the author of
“Esoteric Studies,” the _new type_, at the beginning of every Round.

As man never can be, so he never has been, manifested in a shape
belonging to the animal kingdom _in esse_, _i.e._, he never formed
part of that kingdom. Derived, only derived, from the most
finished class of the latter, a new human form must always have
been _the_ new type of the cycle. The human shape in one ring [?],
as I imagine, becomes cast‐off clothes in the next; it is then
appropriated by the highest order in the servant‐kingdom
below.(658)

If the idea is what we understand it to mean—for the “rings” spoken of
somewhat confuse the matter—then it is the correct Esoteric Teaching.
Having appeared at the very beginning, and at the head of sentient and
conscious life, Man—the Astral, or the “Soul,” for the _Zohar_, repeating
the Archaic Teaching, distinctly says that “the _real_ man is the soul,
and his material frame no part of him”—Man became the living and animal
_Unit_, from which the “cast‐off clothes” determined the shape of every
life and animal in this Round.(659)

Thus, he “created,” for ages, the insects, reptiles, birds, and animals,
unconsciously to himself, from his remains and relics from the Third and
the Fourth Rounds. The same idea and teaching are as distinctly given in
the _Vendîdâd_ of the Mazdeans, as they are in the Chaldæan and Mosaic
allegory of the Ark, all of which are the many national versions of the
original legend given in the Hindû Scriptures. It is found in the allegory
of Vaivasvata Manu and _his_ Ark with the Seven Rishis, each of whom is
shown the Father and Progenitor of specified animals, reptiles, and even
monsters, as in the _Vishnu_ and other _Purânas_. Open the Mazdean
_Vendîdâd_, and read the command of Ahura Mazda to Yima, a Spirit of the
Earth, who symbolizes the three Races, after telling him to build a
Vara—“an enclosure,” an Argha or Vehicle.

Thither [into the Vara] thou shalt bring _the seeds of men and
women_, of the greatest, best, and finest kinds on this earth;
thither thou shalt bring the seeds of every kind of cattle,
etc.... All those seeds shalt thou bring, two of every kind _to be
kept inexhaustible there_, so long _as those men shall stay in the
Vara_.(660)

Those “men” in the “Vara” are the “Progenitors,” the Heavenly Men or
Dhyânîs, the future Egos who are commissioned to inform mankind. For the
Vara, or Ark, or again the Vehicle, simply means _Man_.(661)

Thou shalt seal up the Vara [after filling it up with the seeds],
and thou shalt make a door, and a window _self‐shining within_
[which is the Soul].(662)

And when Yima enquires of Ahura Mazda how he shall manage to make that
Vara, he is answered:

Crush the earth ... and knead it with thy hands, as the potter
does when kneading the potter’s clay.(663)

The Egyptian ram‐headed God makes man of clay on a potter’s wheel, and so
in _Genesis_ do the Elohim fashion him out of the same material.

When the “Maker of the material world,” Ahura Mazda, is asked,
furthermore, what is to give light “to the Vara which Yima made,” he
answers that:

There are _uncreated_ lights and _created_ lights. There [in
Airyana Vaêjô, where Vara is built], the stars, the moon, and the
sun are only once (a year) seen to rise and set, and a year seems
only as a day [and night].(664)

This is a clear reference to the “Land of the Gods” or the (now) Polar
Regions. Moreover another hint is contained in this verse, a distinct
allusion to the “uncreated lights” which enlighten man within—his
“principles.” Otherwise, no sense or reason could be found in Ahura
Mazda’s answer which is forthwith followed by the words:

Every fortieth year, to every couple [hermaphrodite] _two are
born, a male and female_.(665)

The latter is a distinct echo of the Secret Doctrine, of a Stanza which
says:

_At the expiration of every forty [annual] Suns, at the end of every
fortieth Day, the double one becomes four; male and female in one, in the
first and second and the third...._

This is clear, since every “Sun” meant a whole year, the latter being
composed of one Day then, as in the Arctic Circle it is now composed of
six months. According to the old teaching, the axis of the Earth gradually
changes its inclination to the ecliptic, and at the period referred to,
this inclination was such that a polar Day lasted during the whole period
of the Earth’s revolution about the Sun, when a kind of twilight of very
short duration intervened; after which the polar land resumed its position
directly under the solar rays. This may be contrary to Astronomy as now
taught and understood; but who can say that changes in the motion of the
Earth, which do not take place now, did not occur millions of years back?

Returning once more to the statement that Vara meant the Man of the Fourth
Round, as much as the Earth of those days, the Moon, and even Noah’s Ark,
if one will so have it—this is again shown in the dialogue between Ahura
Mazda and Zarathushtra. Thus when the latter asks:

O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One! Who is he who
brought the law of Mazda into the Vara which Yima made?

Ahura Mazda answered: “It was the bird Karshipta, O holy
Zarathushtra!”(666)

And the note explains:

The bird Karshipta dwells in the heavens: were he living on the
earth, he would be king of birds. He brought the law into the Var
of Yima, and recites the Avesta _in the language of birds_.(667)

This again is an allegory and a symbol misunderstood by the Orientalists
only, who see in this bird “an incarnation of lightning,” and say its song
was “often thought to be the utterance of a god and a revelation,” and
what not. Karshipta is the human Mind‐Soul, and the deity thereof,
symbolized in ancient Magianism by a bird, as the Greeks symbolized it by
a butterfly. No sooner had Karshipta entered the Vara or Man, than he
understood the law of Mazda, or Divine Wisdom. In the “Book of Concealed
Mystery” it is said of the Tree, which is the Tree of knowledge of good
and evil:

In its branches the birds lodge and build their nests (the _souls_
and the angels have their place).(668)

Therefore, with the Kabalists it was a like symbol. “Bird” was a Chaldæan,
and has become a Hebrew, synonym and symbol for Angel, a Soul, a Spirit,
or Deva; and the “Bird’s Nest” was, with both, Heaven, and is God’s Bosom,
in the _Zohar_. The perfect Messiah enters Eden “into that place which is
called the Bird’s Nest.”(669)

“Like a bird that is flying from its nest,” and that is the Soul
from which the She’kheen‐ah [divine wisdom or grace] does not move
away.(670)

_The Nest of the Eternal Bird, the flutter of whose wings produces Life,
is boundless Space_,

—says the Commentary, meaning Hamsa, the Bird of Wisdom.

It is Adam Kadmon who is the tree of the Sephiroth, and it is he who
becomes the “tree of knowledge of good and evil,” Esoterically. And that
“tree hath around it seven columns [seven pillars] of the world, or
Rectores [the same Progenitors or Sephiroth again], operating through the
respective orders of Angels in the spheres of the seven planets,” etc.,
one of which orders begets Giants (Nephilim) on Earth.

It was the belief of all antiquity, Pagan and Christian, that the earliest
mankind was a race of giants. Certain excavations in America in mounds and
in caves, have already, in isolated cases, yielded groups of skeletons of
nine and twelve feet high.(671) These belong to tribes of the early Fifth
Race, now degenerated to an average size of between five and six feet. But
we can easily believe that the Titans and Cyclopes of old really belonged
to the Fourth (Atlantean) Race, and that all the subsequent legends and
allegories found in the Hindû _Purânas_ and the Greek poems of Hesiod and
Homer, were based on the hazy reminiscences of real Titans—men of a
tremendous super‐human physical power, which enabled them to defend
themselves, and hold at bay the gigantic monsters of the Mesozoic and
early Cenozoic times—and of actual Cyclopes, “three‐eyed” mortals.

It has been often remarked by observant writers, that the “origin of
nearly every popular myth and legend could be traced invariably to a fact
in Nature.”

In these fantastic creations of an exuberant subjectivism, there is always
an element of the objective and real. The imagination of the masses,
disorderly and ill‐regulated as it may be, could never have conceived and
fabricated _ex nihilo_ so many monstrous figures, such a wealth of
extraordinary tales, had it not had, to serve it as a central nucleus,
those floating reminiscences, obscure and vague, which unite the broken
links of the chain of time to form with them the mysterious, dream
foundation of our collective consciousness.(672)

The evidence for the Cyclopes—a race of Giants—will, in forthcoming
Sections, be pointed out in the Cyclopean remnants, which are so called to
this day. An indication that the early Fourth Race—during its evolution
and before the final adjustment of the human organism, which became
perfect and symmetrical only in the Fifth Race—may have been three‐eyed,
without having necessarily a third eye in the middle of the brow, like the
legendary Cyclops, is also furnished by Science.

To Occultists who believe that spiritual and psychic _involution_ proceeds
on parallel lines with physical _evolution_—that the _inner_ senses,
innate in the first human races, atrophied during racial growth and the
material development of the outer senses—to the students of Esoteric
symbology the above statement is no conjecture or possibility, but simply
_a phase of the law of growth_, a proven fact, in short. They understand
the meaning of the passage in the Commentaries which says:

_There were four‐armed human creatures in those early days of the male‐
females [hermaphrodites]; with one head, yet three eyes. They could see
before them and behind them._(_673_)_ A Kalpa later [after the separation
of the sexes] men having fallen into matter, their spiritual vision became
dim; and coördinately the Third Eye commenced to lose its power.... When
the Fourth [Race] arrived at its middle age, the Inner Vision had to be
awakened, and acquired by artificial stimuli, the process of which was
known to the old Sages._(_674_)_... The Third Eye, likewise, getting
gradually petrified,_(_675_)_ soon disappeared. The double‐faced became
the one‐faced, and the eye was drawn deep into the head and is now buried
under the hair. During the activity of the Inner Man [during trances and
spiritual visions] the eye swells and expands. The Arhat sees and feels
it, and regulates his action accordingly.... The undefiled Lanoo
[Disciple, Chelâ] need fear no danger; he who keeps himself not in purity
[who is not chaste] will receive no help from the __“__Deva Eye.__”_

Unfortunately not. The “Deva Eye” exists no more for the majority of
mankind. The Third Eye _is dead_, and acts no longer; but it has left
behind a witness to its existence. This witness is now the Pineal Gland.
As for the “four‐armed” men, it is they who became the prototypes of the
four‐armed Hindû Gods, as shown in a preceding footnote.

Such is the mystery of the _human eye_ that some Scientists have been
forced to resort to Occult explanations in their vain endeavours to
explain and account for all the difficulties surrounding its action. The
development of the human eye gives more support to Occult Anthropology
than to that of the Materialistic Physiologists. “The eyes in the human
embryo grow _from within without_”—out of the brain, instead of being part
of the skin, as in the insects and cuttlefish. Professor
Lankester—thinking the brain a queer place for the eye, and attempting to
explain the phenomenon on Darwinian lines—suggests the curious view that
“our” earliest vertebrate ancestor was a “_transparent_” creature and
hence did not mind where the eye was! And so was man a “transparent
creature” once upon a time, we are taught; and hence our theory holds
good. But how does the Lankester hypothesis square with the Hæckelian view
that the vertebrate eye originated by changes _in the epidermis_? If it
started _inside_, the latter theory goes into the waste basket. This seems
to be proved by embryology. Moreover, Professor Lankester’s extraordinary
suggestion—or shall we say admission?—is perhaps rendered necessary by
evolutionist necessities. Occultism, with its teaching as to the gradual
development of senses “_from within without_,” from astral prototypes, is
far more satisfactory. The Third Eye _retreated inwards_ when its course
was run—another point in favour of Occultism.

The allegorical expression of the Hindû mystics who speak of the “Eye of
Shiva,” the Tri‐lochana, or “three‐eyed,” thus receives its justification
and _raison d’être_: the transference of the Pineal Gland (once that Third
Eye) to the forehead, being an exoteric licence. This throws also a light
on the mystery—incomprehensible to some—of the connection between
_abnormal_, or spiritual Seership, and the physiological purity of the
Seer. The question is often asked: Why should celibacy and chastity be a
_sine quâ non_ condition of regular Chelâship, or the development of
psychic and occult powers? The answer is contained in the Commentary. When
we learn that the Third Eye was once a physiological organ, and that later
on, owing to the gradual disappearance of spirituality and increase of
materiality, the spiritual nature being extinguished by the physical, it
became an atrophied organ, as little understood now by Physiologists as is
the spleen—when we learn this, the connection becomes clear. During human
life the greatest impediment in the way of spiritual development, and
especially to the acquirement of Yoga powers, is the activity of our
physiological senses. Sexual action also being closely connected, by
interaction, with the spinal cord and the grey matter of the brain, it is
useless to give any longer explanation. Of course, the normal and abnormal
state of the brain, and the degree of active work in the Medulla
Oblongata, reacts powerfully on the Pineal Gland, for, owing to the number
of “centres” in that region, which controls by far the greatest number of
the physiological actions of the animal economy, and also owing to the
close and intimate neighbourhood of the two, a very powerful “inductive”
action must be exerted by the Medulla on the Pineal Gland.

All this is quite plain to the Occultist, but is very vague in the sight
of the general reader. The latter must then be shown the possibility of a
three‐eyed man in Nature, in those periods when his formation was yet in a
comparatively chaotic state. Such a possibility may be inferred from
anatomical and zoological knowledge, first of all, and then it may rest on
the assumptions of Materialistic Science itself.

It is asserted upon the authority of Science, and upon evidence, which is
this time not merely a fiction of theoretical speculation, that many of
the animals—especially among the lower orders of the vertebrata—have a
_third_ eye, now atrophied, but which was necessarily active in its
origin.(676) The Hatteria species, a lizard of the order Lacertilia,
recently discovered in New Zealand—_a part of ancient Lemuria so called,
mark well_—presents this peculiarity in a most extraordinary manner; and
not only the Hatteria Punctata, but the Chameleon, and certain reptiles,
and even fishes. It was thought, at first, that this was no more than the
prolongation of the brain which ended with a small protuberance, called
Epiphysis, a little bone separated from the main bone by a cartilage, and
found in every animal. But it was soon found to be more than this. As its
development and anatomical structure showed, it offered such an analogy
with that of the eye, that it was found impossible to see in it anything
else. There are Palæontologists who to this day feel convinced that this
Third Eye originally functioned, and they are certainly right. For this is
what is said of the Pineal Gland in Quain’s _Anatomy_:

It is from this part, constituting at first the whole and
subsequently the hinder part of the anterior primary encephalic
vesicle, that the optic vesicles are developed in the earliest
period, and the fore part is that in connection with which the
cerebral hemispheres and accompanying parts are formed. The
thalamus opticus of each side is formed by a lateral thickening of
the medullary wall, while the interval between, descending towards
the base, constitutes the cavity of the third ventricle with its
prolongation in the infundibulum. The grey commissure afterwards
stretches across the ventricular cavity.... The hinder part of the
roof is developed by a peculiar process to be noticed later into
the pineal gland, which remains united on each side by its
pedicles to the thalamus, and behind these a transverse band is
formed as posterior commissure.

The lamina terminalis (lamina cinerea) continues to close the
third ventricle in front, below it the optic commissure forms the
floor of the ventricle, and further back the infundibulum descends
to be united in the sella turcica with the tissue adjoining the
posterior lobe of the pituitary body.

The two _optic thalami_, formed from the posterior and outer part
of the anterior vesicle, consist at first of a single hollow sac
of nervous matter, the cavity of which communicates on each side
in front with that of the commencing cerebral hemispheres, and
behind with that of the middle cephalic vesicle (corpora
quadrigemina). Soon, however, by increased deposit taking place in
their interior behind, below, and at the sides, the thalami become
solid, and at the same time a cleft or fissure appears between
them above, and penetrates down to the internal cavity, which
continues open at the back part opposite the entrance of the
Sylvian aqueduct. This cleft or fissure is the _third ventricle_.
Behind, the two thalami continue united by the _posterior
commissure_, which is distinguishable about the end of the third
month, and also by the _peduncles of the pineal gland_....

At an early period the _optic tracts_ may be recognized as hollow
prolongations from the outer part of the wall of the thalami while
they are still vesicular. At the fourth month these tracts are
distinctly formed. They subsequently are prolonged backwards into
connection with the corpora quadrigemina.

The formation of the pineal gland and pituitary body presents some
of the most interesting phenomena which are connected with the
development of the thalamencephalon.(677)

The above is specially interesting when it is remembered that, were it not
for the development of the posterior part of the cerebral hemispheres, the
Pineal Gland would be perfectly visible on the removal of the parietal
bones. It is very interesting also to note the obvious connection which
can be traced between the originally hollow Optic Tract and the Eyes
anteriorly, and the Pineal Gland and its Peduncles posteriorly, and
between all of these and the Optic Thalami. So that the recent discoveries
in connection with the third eye of Hatteria Punctata have a very
important bearing on the history of the development of the human senses,
and on the Occult assertions in the text.

It is well known that Descartes saw in the Pineal Gland the _Seat of the
Soul_, though this is now regarded as a fiction by those who have ceased
to believe in the existence of an immortal principle in man. Although the
Soul is joined to every part of the body, he said, there is one special
portion of the latter in which the Soul exercises its functions more
specially than in any other. And, as neither the heart, nor yet the brain
could be that “special” locality, he concluded that it was that little
gland which was tied to the brain, and yet had an action independent of
it, as it could easily be put into a kind of swinging motion “by the
_animal spirits_(678) which cross the cavities of the skull in every
sense.”

Unscientific as this may appear in our day of exact learning, Descartes
was yet far nearer the Occult truth than is any Hæckel. For the Pineal
Gland is, as shown, far more closely connected with Soul and Spirit than
with the physiological senses of man. Had the leading Scientists a glimmer
of the _real_ processes employed by the Evolutionary Impulse, and the
winding _cyclic_ course of this great Law, they would _know_ instead of
conjecturing, and would feel certain of the future physical
transformations which await the human kind by the knowledge of its past
forms. Then would they see the fallacy and the absurdity of their modern
“blind‐force” and “mechanical” processes of Nature; and, in consequence of
such knowledge, would realize that the said Pineal Gland, for instance,
could not but be disabled for _physical_ use at this stage of our Cycle.
If the odd “eye” is now atrophied in man, it is a proof that, as in the
lower animal, it has once been active; for Nature never creates the
smallest, the most insignificant, form without some definite purpose and
for some use. It was an active organ, we say, at that stage of evolution
when the spiritual element in man reigned supreme over the hardly nascent
intellectual and psychic elements. And, as the Cycle ran down towards that
point where the physiological senses were developed by, and went _pari
passu_ with, the growth and consolidation of physical man—the interminable
and complex vicissitudes and tribulations of zoological development—this
median “eye” at last atrophied together with the early spiritual and
purely psychic characteristics in man. The eye is the mirror and also the
window of the Soul, says popular wisdom,(679) and _Vox populi, vox Dei_.

In the beginning, every class and family of the living species was
hermaphrodite and objectively one‐eyed. In the animal—whose form was as
ethereal (astrally) as that of man, before the bodies of both began to
evolve their “coats of skin,” viz., to evolve, from _within without_, the
thick coating of physical substance or matter with its internal
physiological mechanism—the Third Eye was primarily, as in man, the only
seeing organ. The two physical front eyes only developed(680) later on in
both brute and man, whose organ of physical sight was, at the commencement
of the Third Race, in the same position as that of some of the blind
vertebrates, in our day, _i.e._, beneath an opaque skin.(681) Only, the
stages of the odd, or primeval, eye, in man and brute, are now inverted,
as the former has already passed that animal non‐rational stage in the
Third Round, and is ahead of mere brute creation by a whole plane of
consciousness. Therefore, while the Cyclopean eye was, and still _is_, in
man the organ of _spiritual_ sight, in the animal it was that of objective
vision. And this eye, having performed its function, was replaced, in the
course of physical evolution from the simple to the complex, by two eyes,
and thus was stored and laid aside by Nature for further use in æons to
come.

This explains why the Pineal Gland reached its highest development
proportionately with the lowest physical development. It is in the
Vertebrata that it is the most prominent and objective, whereas in man it
is most carefully hidden and inaccessible, except to the Anatomist. No
less light, however, is thereby thrown on the future physical, spiritual,
and intellectual state of mankind, in periods corresponding on parallel
lines with other past periods, and always on the lines of ascending and
descending cyclic evolution and development. Thus, a few centuries before
the Kali Yuga—the Age which began nearly 5,000 years ago—it was said in
Commentary Twenty, if it is paraphrased into comprehensible sentences:

_We [the Fifth Root‐Race] in our first half [of duration] onward [on the
now ascending arc of the Cycle] are on the mid point of [or between] the
First and Second Races—falling downward [i.e., the Races were then on the
descending arc of the Cycle].... Calculate for thyself, Lanoo, and see._

Calculating as advised, we find that during that transitional
period—namely, in the second half of the First spiritual ethereo‐astral
Race—nascent mankind was devoid of the intellectual brain element, as it
was on its _descending_ line. And as we are parallel to it, on the
_ascending_, we are, therefore, devoid of the spiritual element, which is
now replaced by the intellectual. For, remember well, as we are in the
Mânasa period of our Cycle of Races, or in the Fifth, we have, therefore,
crossed the meridian point of the perfect adjustment of Spirit and
Matter—or the equilibrium between brain intellect and spiritual
perception. One important point, has, however, to be borne in mind.

[Illustration: Evolution of Root‐Races in the Fourth Round]

[Transcriber’s Note: The graph shows, to the left, “Downward Cycle.
Evolution of Physical and Intellectual Nature and the Gradual Regression
of Spirituality.” To the right is “Ascending Cycle. Reëvolution or
Reversion of Spirituality and the Gradual Decrease of Materiality and mere
Brain‐intellectuality.” Below is “Meridian of Races.”]

We are only in the Fourth Round, and it is in the Fifth that the full
development of Manas, as a direct ray from the Universal Mahat—a ray
unimpeded by Matter—will be finally reached. Nevertheless, as every sub‐
race and nation have their cycles and stages of evolutionary development
repeated on a smaller scale, much more must it be so in the case of a
Root‐Race. Our Race then has, as a Root‐Race, crossed the equatorial line
and is cycling onward on the spiritual side; but some of our sub‐races
still find themselves on the shadowy descending arc of their respective
national cycles; while others again—the oldest—having crossed the crucial
point, which alone decides whether a race, a nation, or a tribe, will live
or perish, are at the apex of spiritual development as sub‐races.

It now becomes comprehensible why the Third Eye was gradually transformed
into a simple gland, after the physical Fall of those we have agreed to
call the Lemurians.

It is a curious fact that in human beings the cerebral hemispheres and the
lateral ventricles have been especially developed, whereas it is the Optic
Thalami, Corpora Quadrigemina, and Corpora Striata which are the principal
parts developed in other mammalian brains. Moreover, it is asserted that
the intellect of a man may, to some extent, be gauged by the development
of the central convolutions and the fore part of the cerebral hemispheres.
It would seem a natural corollary to this that if the development of the
Pineal Gland may be considered to be an index of the astral capacities and
spiritual proclivities of any man, there will be a corresponding
development of that part of the cranium, or an increase in the size of the
Pineal Gland at the expense of the posterior part of the cerebral
hemispheres. This is a curious speculation and would receive confirmation
in the present case. We should see, below and behind, the cerebellum which
has been held to be the seat of all the animal proclivities of the human
being, and which is allowed by Science to be the great centre for all the
physiologically coördinated movements of the body, such as walking,
eating, etc.; in front, the fore‐part of the brain, the cerebral
hemispheres, the part especially connected with the development of the
intellectual powers in man; and in the middle, dominating them both, and
especially the animal functions, the developed Pineal Gland, in connection
with the more highly evolved, or spiritual man.

It must be remembered that these are only physical correspondences; just
as the ordinary human brain is the registering organ of memory, but not
memory itself.

This is, then, the organ which has given rise to so many legends and
traditions, among others to that of men with one head but two faces. These
legends may be found in several Chinese works, besides being referred to
in the Chaldæan fragments. Apart from the work already cited, the _Shan
Hai King_, compiled by Kung Chia from engravings on nine urns made by the
Emperor Yü, 2,255 B.C., they may be found in another work, called the
_Bamboo Books_, and in a third, the _’Rh Ya_, whose author was “initiated
according to tradition by Chow Kung, uncle of Wu Wang, the first Emperor
of the Chow Dynasty, 1,122 B.C.” The _Bamboo Books_ contain the ancient
annals of China, found A.D. 279 on opening the grave of King Seang of Wei,
who died 295 B.C.(682) Both these works mention men with two faces on one
head—one in front and one behind.

Now what students of Occultism ought to know is that the Third Eye _is
indissolubly connected with Karma_. The tenet is so mysterious that very
few have heard of it.

The “Eye of Shiva” did not become entirety atrophied before the close of
the Fourth Race. When spirituality and all the divine powers and
attributes of the Deva‐Man of the Third Race had been made the hand‐
maidens of the newly‐awakened physiological and psychic passions of the
physical man, instead of the reverse, the Eye lost its powers. But such
was the law of evolution, and it was, in strict accuracy, no _Fall_. The
sin was not in using those newly‐developed powers, but in _misusing_ them;
in making of the tabernacle, designed to contain a God, the fane of every
_spiritual_ iniquity. And if we say “sin” it is merely that everyone
should understand our meaning, for Karma(683) would be the more correct
term to use in this case; moreover the reader who should feel perplexed at
the use of the term “spiritual” instead of “physical” iniquity, is
reminded of the fact that there can be no physical iniquity. The body is
simply the irresponsible organ, the tool of the Psychic, if not of the
Spiritual, Man. And in the case of the Atlanteans, it was precisely the
Spiritual Being which sinned, the Spirit Element being still the “Master”
Principle in man, in those days. Thus it is in those days that the
heaviest Karma of the Fifth Race was generated by our Monads.

As this sentence may again be found puzzling, it is better that it should
be explained for the benefit of those who are ignorant of Theosophical
Teachings.

Questions with regard to Karma and Re‐births are constantly being put
forward, and great confusion seems to exist upon the subject. Those who
are born and bred in the Christian faith, and have been trained in the
idea that a new Soul is created by God for every newly‐born infant, are
among the most perplexed. They ask whether the number of Monads
incarnating on Earth is limited; to which they are answered in the
affirmative. For, however countless, in our conception, the number of the
incarnating Monads, still, there must be a limit. This is so even if we
take into account the fact that ever since the Second Race, when their
respective seven Groups were furnished with bodies, several births and
deaths may be allowed for every second of time in the æons already passed.
It has been stated that Karma‐Nemesis, whose bond‐maid is Nature, adjusted
everything in the most harmonious manner; and that, therefore, the fresh
pouring‐in, or arrival of new Monads, ceased as soon as Humanity had
reached its full physical development. No fresh Monads have incarnated
since the middle‐point of the Atlanteans. Let us remember that, save in
the case of young children, and of individuals whose lives have been
violently cut off by some accident, no Spiritual Entity can reïncarnate
before a period of many centuries has elapsed, and such gaps alone must
show that the number of Monads is necessarily finite and limited.
Moreover, a reasonable time must be given to other animals for their
evolutionary progress.

Hence the assertion that many of us are now working off the effects of the
evil Karmic causes produced by us in Atlantean bodies. The Law of Karma is
inextricably interwoven with that of Reïncarnation.

It is only the knowledge of the constant re‐births of one and the same
Individuality throughout the Life‐Cycle; the assurance that the same
Monads—among whom are many Dhyân Chohans, or the “Gods” themselves—have to
pass through the “Circle of Necessity,” rewarded or punished by such
rebirth for the suffering endured or crimes committed in the former life;
that those very Monads, which entered the empty, senseless Shells, or
Astral Figures of the First Race emanated by the Pitris, are the same who
are now amongst us—nay, ourselves, perchance; it is only this doctrine, we
say, that can explain to us the mysterious problem of Good and Evil, and
reconcile man to the terrible _apparent_ injustice of life. Nothing but
such certainty can quiet our revolted sense of justice. For, when one
unacquainted with the noble doctrine looks around him, and observes the
inequalities of birth and fortune, of intellect and capacities; when one
sees honour paid to fools and profligates, on whom fortune has heaped her
favours by mere privilege of birth, and their nearest neighbour, with all
his intellect and noble virtues—far more deserving in every way—perishing
of want and for lack of sympathy; when one sees all this and has to turn
away, helpless to relieve the undeserved suffering, one’s ears ringing and
heart aching with the cries of pain around him—that blessed knowledge of
Karma alone prevents him from cursing life and men, as well as their
supposed Creator.(684)

Of all the terrible blasphemies and what are virtually accusations thrown
at their God by the Monotheists, none is greater or more unpardonable than
that (almost always) false humility which makes the presumably “pious”
Christian assert, in the face of every evil and undeserved blow, that
“such _is the will_ of God.”

Dolts and hypocrites! Blasphemers and impious Pharisees who speak in the
same breath of the endless merciful love and care of their God and Creator
for helpless man, and of that God _scourging the good, the very best of
his creatures, bleeding them to death like an insatiable Moloch_! Shall we
be answered to this, in Congreve’s words:

But who shall dare to tax Eternal Justice?

Logic and simple common sense, we answer. If we are asked to believe in
“original sin,” in _one_ life _only_ on this Earth for every Soul, and in
an anthropomorphic Deity, who seems to have created some men only for the
pleasure of condemning them to eternal hell‐fire—and this whether they be
good or bad, says the Predestinarian(685)—why should not everyone of us
who is endowed with reasoning powers, condemn in his turn such a
villainous Deity? Life would become unbearable, if one had to believe in
the God created by man’s unclean fancy. Luckily he exists only in human
dogmas, and in the unhealthy imagination of some poets, who believe they
have solved the problem by addressing him as:

Thou great Mysterious Power, who hast _involved_
The pride of human wisdom, _to confound_
The _daring scrutiny_ and prove _the faith_
Of thy _presuming_ creatures!

Truly a robust “faith” is required to believe that it is “presumption” to
question the justice of one, who creates helpless little man but to
“perplex” him, and to test a “faith” with which that “Power,” moreover,
may have forgotten, if not neglected, to endow him, as happens sometimes.

Compare this blind faith with the philosophical belief, based on every
reasonable evidence and on life‐experience, in Karma‐Nemesis, or the Law
of Retribution. This Law—whether Conscious or Unconscious—predestines
nothing and no one. It exists from and in Eternity, truly, for it is
Eternity itself; and as such, since no act can be coëqual with Eternity,
it cannot be said to act, for it is Action itself. It is not the _wave_
which drowns a man, but the _personal_ action of the wretch who goes
deliberately and places himself under the _impersonal_ action of the laws
that govern the _ocean’s_ motion. Karma creates nothing, nor does it
design. It is man who plans and creates causes, and Karmic Law adjusts the
effects, which adjustment is not an act, but universal harmony, tending
ever to resume its original position, like a bough, which, bent down too
forcibly, rebounds with corresponding vigour. If it happen to dislocate
the arm that tried to bend it out of its natural position, shall we say
that it is the bough which broke our arm, or that our own folly has
brought us to grief? Karma has never sought to destroy intellectual and
individual liberty, like the God invented by the Monotheists. It has not
involved its decrees in darkness purposely to perplex man; nor shall it
punish him who dares to scrutinize its mysteries. On the contrary, he who
through study and meditation unveils its intricate paths, and throws light
on those dark ways, in the windings of which so many men perish owing to
their ignorance of the labyrinth of life—is working for the good of his
fellow‐men. Karma is an Absolute and Eternal Law in the World of
Manifestation; and as there can only be one Absolute, as One eternal ever‐
present Cause, believers in Karma cannot be regarded as Atheists or
Materialists—still less as Fatalists,(686) for Karma is one with the
Unknowable, of which it is an aspect, in its effects in the phenomenal
world.

Intimately, or rather indissolubly, connected with Karma, then, is the Law
of Re‐birth, or of the reïncarnation of the same spiritual Individuality
in a long, almost interminable, series of Personalities. The latter are
like the various characters played by the same actor, with each of which
that actor identifies himself and is identified by the public, for the
space of a few hours. The _inner_, or real Man, who personates those
characters, knows the whole time that he is Hamlet only for the brief
space of a few acts, which, however, on the plane of human illusion,
represent the whole life of Hamlet. He knows also that he was, the night
before, King Lear, the transformation in his turn of the Othello of a
still earlier preceding night. And though the outer, visible character is
supposed to be ignorant of the fact, and in actual life that ignorance is,
unfortunately, but too real, nevertheless, the _permanent_ Individuality
is fully aware of it, and it is through the atrophy of the “spiritual” Eye
in the physical body, that that knowledge is unable to impress itself on
the consciousness of the false Personality.

The possession of a physical Third Eye, we are told, was enjoyed by the
men of the Third Root‐Race down to nearly the middle period of the third
sub‐race of the Fourth Root‐Race, when the consolidation and perfection of
the human frame caused it to disappear from the outward anatomy of man.
Psychically and spiritually, however, its mental and visual perception
lasted till nearly the end of the Fourth Race, when its functions, owing
to the materiality and depraved condition of mankind, died out altogether.
This was prior to the submersion of the bulk of the Atlantean Continent.
And now we may return to the Deluges and their many “Noahs.”

The student has to bear in mind that there were many such Deluges as that
mentioned in _Genesis_, and three far more important ones, which will be
mentioned and described in the Section of Part III devoted to the subject
of pre‐historic “Submerged Continents.” To avoid erroneous conjectures,
however, with regard to the claim that the Esoteric Doctrine has much in
common with the legends contained in the Hindû Scriptures; that, again,
the chronology of the latter is almost that of the former—only explained
and made clear; and that finally the belief that Vaivasvata Manu—a generic
term indeed!—was the Noah of the Âryans and the prototype of the biblical
patriarch, all this—as pertaining also to the belief of the
Occultists—necessitates a new explanation at this juncture.

The Primeval Manus Of Humanity.

Those who are aware that the “Great Flood,” which was connected with the
sinking of an entire Continent (save only a few islands) could not have
happened so far back as 18,000,000 years ago, and that Vaivasvata Manu is
the Indian Noah connected with the Matsya, or the Fish, Avatâra of Vishnu,
may feel perplexed at the apparent discrepancy between the facts stated
and the chronology previously given. But there is no discrepancy in truth.
The reader is asked to turn to _The Theosophist_ of July, 1883, for by
studying the article therein, on “The Septenary Principle in Esotericism,”
the whole question can be explained to him. It is in the explanation there
given, I believe, that the Occultists differ from the Brâhmans.

For the benefit of those, however, who may not have _The Theosophist_ of
that date to hand, a passage or two may now be quoted from it:

Who was Manu, the son of Svâyambhuva? The Secret Doctrine tells us
that _this_ Manu was no man, but the representation of the first
human races, evolved with the help of the Dhyân Chohans (Devas),
at the beginning of the First Round. But we are told in his _Laws_
(i. 80) that there are fourteen Manus for every Kalpa, or
“interval from creation to creation”—read rather interval from one
_minor_ Pralaya to another(687)—and that “in the present divine
age, there have been as yet _seven_ Manus.” Those who know that
there are seven Rounds, of which we have passed three, and are now
in the Fourth; and who are taught that there are seven Dawns and
seven Twilights, or fourteen Manvantaras; that at the beginning of
every Round and at the end, and on, and between, the planets
[Globes] there is an “awakening to _illusive_ life,” and an
“awakening to _real_ life”; and that, moreover, there are Root‐
Manus, and what we have to clumsily translate as Seed‐Manus—_the
seeds for the human races of the forthcoming_ Round (or the
Shishtas—the surviving fittest(688); a mystery divulged only to
those who have passed their third degree in Initiation)—those who
have learned all this will be better prepared to understand the
meaning of the following. We are told in the Hindû Sacred
Scriptures that, “The first Manu produced _six_ other Manus
[_seven_ primary Manus in all], and these produced in their turn
each seven other Manus”(689) (_Bhrigu_, i. 61‐63)—the production
of the latter standing in the Occult treatises as 7 x 7. Thus it
becomes clear that Manu—the last one, the Progenitor of our
Fourth‐Round Humanity—must be the _seventh_, since we are on our
Fourth Round,(690) and there is a _Root_‐Manu at Globe A, and a
_Seed_‐Manu at Globe G. Just as each planetary Round commences
with the appearance of a Root‐Manu (Dhyân Chohan) and closes with
a Seed‐Manu, so a Root‐ and a Seed‐Manu appear respectively at the
beginning and the termination of the human period on any
particular planet [Globe].(691) It will be easily seen from the
foregoing statement that a Manvantaric period (Manu‐antara) means,
as the term implies, the time _between_ the appearance of two
Manus or Dhyân Chohans; and hence a Minor Manvantara is the
duration of the _seven_ Races on any particular planet [Globe],
and a Major Manvantara is the period of one human Round along the
Planetary Chain. Moreover, as it is said that each of the seven
Manus _creates_ 7 x 7 Manus, and that there are 49 Root‐Races on
the seven planets [Globes] during each Round, then every Root‐Race
has its Manu. The present seventh Manu is called “Vaivasvata” and
stands in the exoteric texts for that Manu who in India represents
the Babylonian Xisuthrus and the Jewish Noah.

But in the Esoteric books we are told that Manu Vaivasvata, the
progenitor of our _Fifth_ Race—who saved it from the flood that
nearly exterminated the Fourth or Atlantean—is not the seventh
Manu, mentioned in the nomenclature of the Root or Primitive
Manus, but one of the 49 Manus emanated from this Root‐Manu.

For clearer comprehension we here give the names of the 14 Manus
in their respective order and in their relation to each Round:

1st Round, 1st (Root) Manu on Planet A—Svâyambhuva.
1st Round, 1st (Seed) Manu on Planet G—Svârochi, or Svârochisha.
2nd Round, 2nd (Root) Manu on Planet A—Auttami.
2nd Round, 2nd (Seed) Manu on Planet G—Tâmasa.
3rd Round, 3rd (Root) Manu on Planet A—Raivata.
3rd Round, 3rd (Seed) Manu on Planet G—Châkshusha.
4th Round, 4th (Root) Manu on Planet A—Vaivasvata (our
Progenitor).
4th Round, 4th (Seed) Manu on Planet G—Sâvarna.
5th Round, 5th (Root) Manu on Planet A—Daksha‐sâvarna.
5th Round, 5th (Seed) Manu on Planet G—Brahma‐sâvarna.
6th Round, 6th (Root) Manu on Planet A—Dharma‐sâvarna.
6th Round, 6th (Seed) Manu on Planet G—Rudra‐sâvarna.
7th Round, 7th (Root) Manu on Planet A—Rauchya.
7th Round, 7th (Seed) Manu on Planet G—Bhautya.

Vaivasvata, thus, though seventh in the order given, is the
primitive Root‐Manu of our Fourth Human Wave (the reader must
always remember that Manu is not a man but collective humanity),
while _our_ Vaivasvata was but one of the seven Minor Manus, who
are made to preside over the seven Races of this our planet
[Globe]. Each of these has to become the witness of one of the
periodical and ever‐recurring cataclysms (by fire and water) that
close the cycle of every Root‐Race. And it is this Vaivasvata—the
Hindû ideal embodiment, called respectively Xisuthrus, Deucalion,
Noah and other names—who is the allegorical “Man” who rescued our
Race, when nearly the whole population of one hemisphere perished
by water, while the other hemisphere was awakening from its
temporary obscuration.(692)

Thus it is shown that there is no real discrepancy in speaking of the
Vaivasvata Manvantara (Manu‐antara, lit., “between two Manus”) as
18,000,000 odd years ago, when physical, or the truly human, Man first
appeared in his Fourth Round on this Earth; and of the other Vaivasvatas,
_e.g._, the Manu of the Great Cosmic or Sidereal Flood—a mystery—or again
the Manu Vaivasvata of the submerged Atlantis, when the _Racial_
Vaivasvata saved the elect of Humanity, the Fifth Race, from utter
destruction. As these several and quite distinct events are purposely
blended in the _Vishnu_ and other _Purânas_ in one narrative, there may
yet be a great deal of perplexity left in the profane reader’s mind.
Therefore, as constant elucidation is needed, we must be forgiven
unavoidable repetitions. The “blinds” which conceal the real mysteries of
Esoteric Philosophy are great and puzzling, and even now the last word
cannot be given. The veil, however, may be a little more removed, and some
explanations, hitherto denied, may now be offered to the earnest student.

As Colonel Vans Kennedy, if we do not mistake, remarked: “the first
principle in Hindû religious philosophy is _unity in diversity_.” If all
those Manus and Rishis are called by one generic name, it is due to the
fact that they are one and all the manifested Energies of one and the same
Logos, the celestial as well as the terrestrial Messengers and
Permutations of that Principle which is ever in a state of
activity—conscious during the period of Cosmic Evolution, unconscious
(from our point of view) during Cosmic Rest—for the Logos sleepeth in the
bosom of THAT which “sleepeth not,” nor is it ever awake, for it is Sat or
“Be‐ness,” not a Being. It is from IT that issues the great _Unseen_
Logos, who evolves all the other Logoi; the Primeval Manu who gives being
to the other Manus, who emanate the universe and all in it collectively,
and who represent in their aggregate the _Manifested_ Logos.(693) Hence we
learn in the Commentaries that while no Dhyân Chohan, not even the
highest, can realize completely

_The condition of the preceding Cosmic Evolution, ... the Manus retain a
knowledge of their experiences in all the Cosmic Evolutions throughout
Eternity._

This is very plain: the first Manu is called Svâyambhuva, the “Self‐
manifested,” the Son of the _Unmanifested_ Father. The Manus are the
Creators of the Creators of our First Race—the Spirit of Mankind—which
does not prevent the _seven_ Manus from having been the first “Pre‐Adamic”
Men on Earth.

Manu declares himself created by Virâj,(694) or Vaishvânara, the Spirit of
Humanity,(695) which means that his Monad emanates from the never resting
Principle in the beginning of every new Cosmic Activity—that Logos or
Universal Monad (collective Elohim) which radiates _from within himself_
all those Cosmic Monads that become the centres of activity—Progenitors of
the numberless Solar Systems as well as of the yet undifferentiated
_human_ Monads of Planetary Chains as well as of every being thereon.
Svâyambhuva, or Self‐born, is the name of every Cosmic Monad _which
becomes the Centre of Force, from within which emerges a Planetary Chain_
(of which Chains there are seven in our System). And the radiations of
this Centre become again so many Manus Svâyambhuva (a mysterious generic
name, meaning far more than appears), each of them becoming, as a Host,
the Creator of his own Humanity.

As to the question of the four distinct Races of mankind that preceded our
Fifth Race, there is nothing mystical in the subject, except the ethereal
bodies of the first Races; and this is a matter of legendary, nevertheless
very correct, history. The legend is universal. And if the Western
_savant_ pleases to see in it only a myth, it does not make the slightest
difference. The Mexicans had, and still have, the tradition of the
fourfold destruction of the world by fire and water, just as the Egyptians
had, and the Hindûs have, to this day.

Trying to account for the community of legends held by Chinese, Chaldæans,
Egyptians, Indians and Greeks, in remote antiquity, and for the absence of
any certain vestige of civilization more ancient than 5,000 years, the
author of _Mythical Monsters_ remarks that:

We must ... not be surprised if we do not immediately discover the
vestiges of the people of ten, fifteen, or twenty thousand years
ago. With an ephemeral architecture ... [as in China], the sites
of vast cities may have become entirely lost to recollection in a
few thousands of years from natural decay, and how much more ...
if ... minor cataclysms have intervened, such as local
inundations, earthquakes, deposition of volcanic ashes, ... the
spread of sandy deserts, destruction of life by deadly pestilence,
by miasma, or by the outpour of sulphurous fumes.(696)

How many of such cataclysms have changed the whole surface of the earth
may be inferred from the following Stanza of Commentary Twenty‐two:

_During the first seven crores [70,000,000 years] of the Kalpa the Earth
and its two Kingdoms [mineral and vegetable], one already having achieved
its seventh circle, the other, hardly nascent, are luminous and semi‐
ethereal, cold, lifeless, and translucid. In the eleventh crore_(_697_)_
the Mother [Earth] grows opaque, and in the fourteenth_(_698_)_ the throes
of adolescence take place. These convulsions of Nature [geological
changes] last till her twentieth crore of years, uninterruptedly, after
which they become periodical, and at long intervals._

_The last change took place nearly twelve crores [120,000,000] of years
ago. But the Earth with everything on her face had become cool, hard and
settled ages earlier._

Thus, if we are to believe Esoteric Teaching, _universal_ geological
disturbances and changes have not occurred for the last 120 million years,
but the Earth, even before that time, was ready to receive her human
stock. The appearance of the latter, however, in its full physical
development, as already stated, took place only about 18,000,000 years
ago, after the first great failure of Nature to create beings
alone—_i.e._, without the help of the divine “Fashioners”—had been
followed by the successive evolution of the first three Races.(699) The
actual duration of the first two and a half Races is withheld from all but
the higher Initiates. The history of the Races begins at the separation of
the sexes, when the preceding egg‐bearing androgynous Race perished
rapidly, and the subsequent sub‐races of the Third Root‐Race appeared as
an entirely new race _physiologically_. It is this “Destruction” which is
allegorically called the great “Vaivasvata Manu Deluge,” when the account
shows Vaivasvata Manu, or Humanity, remaining alone on Earth in the Ark of
Salvation towed by Vishnu in the shape of a monstrous fish, and the Seven
Rishis “with him.” The allegory is very plain.

In the symbolism of every nation, the “Deluge” stands for chaotic
unsettled Matter—Chaos itself; and Water for the Feminine Principle—the
“Great Deep.” As the Greek Lexicon of Parkhurst gives it:

Ἀρχὴ answers to the Hebrew _rasit_, or Wisdom ... and [at the same
time] to the emblem of the female generative power, the _arg_ or
_arca_, in which the germ of nature [and of mankind] floats or
broods on the great abyss of the waters, during the interval which
takes place after every mundane [or racial] cycle.

Archê (Ἀρχὴ) or Ark is also the mystic name of the Divine Spirit of Life
which broods over Chaos. Now Vishnu _is_ the Divine Spirit, as an abstract
principle, and also as the Preserver and Generator, or Giver of Life—the
third Person of the Trimûrti—composed of Brahmâ, the Creator, Shiva, the
Destroyer, and Vishnu, the Preserver. Vishnu is shown, in the allegory,
under the form of a _Fish_, guiding the Ark of Vaivasvata Manu across the
Waters of the Flood. There is no use in expatiating upon the esoteric
meaning of the word _Fish_ (as Payne Knight, Inman, Gerald Massey, and
others have done). Its theological meaning is phallic, but the
metaphysical, divine. Jesus was called the Fish, as were Vishnu and
Bacchus; ΙΗΣ, the “Saviour” of Mankind, being but the monogram of the God
Bacchus, who was also called ΙΧΘΥΣ, the Fish.(700) Moreover, the Seven
Rishis in the Ark symbolized the seven “principles,” which became complete
in man only after he had separated, and become a _human_, and thus ceased
to be a divine creature.

But to return to the Races; details as to the submersion of the Continent
inhabited by the Second Root‐Race are not numerous. The history of the
Third, or Lemuria, is given, as is also that of Atlantis, but the others
are only alluded to. Lemuria is said to have perished about 700,000 years
before the commencement of what is now called the Tertiary Age (the
Eocene).(701) During this Deluge—an actual geological deluge this
time—Vaivasvata Manu is also shown saving mankind, allegorically—in
reality, a portion of it, the Fourth Race—just as he saved the Fifth Race
during the destruction of the last Atlanteans, the remnants that perished
850,000 years ago,(702) after which there was no great submersion until
the day of Plato’s Atlantis, or Poseidonis, which was known to the
Egyptians only because it happened in such relatively recent times.

It is the submersion of the great Atlantis which is the most interesting.
This is the Cataclysm of which the old records, as in the _Book of Enoch_,
say, “the ends of the Earth got loose”; and upon which have been built the
legends and allegories of Vaivasvata, Xisuthrus, Noah, Deucalion and all
the _tutti quanti_ of the Elect Saved. Tradition, not taking into account
the difference between sidereal and geological phenomena, calls both
“Deluges” indifferently. Yet there is a great difference. The Cataclysm
which destroyed the huge Continent of which Australia is the largest
relic, was due to a series of subterranean convulsions and the breaking
asunder of the ocean floors. That which put an end to its successor—the
Fourth Continent—was brought on by successive disturbances in the axial
rotation. It began during the earliest Tertiary periods, and, continuing
for long ages, carried away successively the last vestige of Atlantis,
with the exception, perhaps, of Ceylon and a small portion of what is now
Africa. It changed the face of the globe, and no memory of its flourishing
continents and isles, of its civilizations and sciences, have remained in
the annals of history, save in the Sacred Records of the East.

Hence, Modern Science denies the existence of Atlantis. It even denies any
violent shiftings of the Earth’s axis, and would attribute the change of
climate to other causes. But this question is still an open one. If Dr.
Croll will have it that all such alterations can be accounted for by the
effects of nutation and the precession of the equinoxes, there are others,
such as Sir Henry James and Sir John Lubbock,(703) who feel more inclined
to accept the idea that they are due to a change in the position of the
axis of rotation. Against this the majority of the Astronomers are again
arrayed. But then, what have they not denied before now, and what have
they not denounced—only to accept it later on, whenever the hypothesis
became undeniable fact?

How far our figures agree, or rather disagree, with Modern Science will be
seen further in the Addenda to this Volume, where the Geology and
Anthropology of our modern day are carefully compared with the teachings
of Archaic Science. At any rate, the period assigned by the Secret
Doctrine for the sinking of Atlantis, does not seem to disagree very much
with the calculations of Modern Science, which, however, calls Atlantis
“Lemuria” whenever it accepts such a submerged Continent. With regard to
the pre‐human period, all that can be said, at present, is, that even
prior to the appearance of the “mindless” First Race, the Earth was not
without its inhabitants. We might, however, add that what Science, which
recognizes _physical man only_, has a right to regard as the _pre‐human_
period, may be conceded to have extended from the First Race down to the
first half of the Atlantean Race, since it is only then that man became
the “complete _organic_ being he is now.” And this would make Adamic Man
no older than a few millions of years.(704)

The author of the _Qabbalah_ truly remarks that: “Man to‐day, as an
individual, is only a concatenation of the being‐hood of precedent human
life,” or _lives_, rather.

According to the Qabbalah, the soul sparks contained in Adam, went
into three principal classes corresponding to his three sons,
viz.: _Hesed_, Habel, _Ge’boor‐ah_, Qai‐yin and _Ra’h‐min_ Seth.
These three were divided into ... 70 species, called; the
principal roots of the human race.(705)

Said Rabbi Yehudah: “How many garments [of the incorporeal man]
are these which are crowned (from the day man was created)?” Said
R. El’azar: “The mountains of the world (the great men of the
generation) are in discussion upon it, but there are three: one to
clothe in that garment the _Rua’h_ spirit, which is in the garden
(of Eden) on earth: one which is more precious than all, in which
the _Neshamah_ is clothed in that Bundle of Life, between the
angels of the Kings ...: and one outside garment, which exists and
does not exist, is seen and not seen. In that garment, the
_Nephesh_ is clothed, and she goes and flies in it, to and fro in
the world.”(706)

This relates to the Races, their “garments,” or degree of materiality, and
to the three “principles” of man in their three vehicles.

Stanza XI. The Civilization And Destruction Of The Fourth And Fifth Races.

43. The Lemuro‐Atlanteans build cities and spread civilization.
The incipient stage of anthropomorphism. 44. Statues, witnesses to
the size of the Lemuro‐Atlanteans. 45. Lemuria destroyed by fire,
Atlantis by water. The Flood. 46. The destruction of the Fourth
Race and of the last antediluvian monster‐animals.

43. THEY(707) BUILT HUGE CITIES. OF RARE EARTHS AND METALS THEY BUILT. OUT
OF THE FIRES(708) VOMITED, OUT OF THE WHITE STONE(709) OF THE MOUNTAINS
AND OF THE BLACK STONE,(710) THEY CUT THEIR OWN IMAGES, IN THEIR SIZE AND
LIKENESS, AND WORSHIPPED THEM.

At this point, as the history of the first two _human_ races—the last of
the Lemurians and the first of the future Atlanteans—proceeds, we have to
blend the two, and speak of them for a time collectively.

Here reference is also made to the _divine_ Dynasties, which were claimed
by the Egyptians, Chaldæans, Greeks, etc., to have preceded their _human_
Kings. These are still believed in by the modern Hindûs, and are
enumerated in their sacred books. Of these, however, we shall treat in
their proper place. What remains to be shown is, that our modern
Geologists are now being driven into admitting the demonstrable existence
of submerged continents. But to confess the existence of the continents is
quite a different thing from admitting that there were men on them during
the early geological periods(711)—ay, men and civilized nations, not
Palæolithic savages only; who, under the guidance of their _divine_
Rulers, built large cities, cultivated Arts and Sciences, and knew
Astronomy, Architecture and Mathematics to perfection. The primeval
civilization of the Lemurians did not, as one may think, immediately
follow their physiological transformation. Between the final physiological
evolution and the first city built, many hundred thousands of years had
passed. Nevertheless, we find the Lemurians in their sixth sub‐race
building their first rock‐cities out of stone and lava.(712) One of these
great cities of primitive structure was built entirely of lava, some
thirty miles west from where Easter Island now stretches its narrow strip
of sterile ground, and was totally destroyed by a series of volcanic
eruptions. The oldest remains of Cyclopean buildings were all the
handiwork of the last sub‐races of the Lemurians; and an Occultist,
therefore, shows no surprise on learning that the stone relics which were
found on the small piece of land called Easter Island by Captain Cook, are

Very much like the walls of the Temple of Pachacamac or the Ruins
of Tia‐Huanaco in Peru,(713)

and also that they are in the _Cyclopean style_. The first large cities,
however, were built in that region of the Continent which is now known as
the island of Madagascar. There were civilized people and savages in those
days as there are now. Evolution achieved its work of perfection on the
former, and Karma—its work of destruction on the latter. The Australians
and their like are the descendants of those, who, instead of vivifying the
Spark projected into them by the “Flames,” extinguished it by long
generations of bestiality.(714) Whereas the Âryan nations could trace
their descent through the Atlanteans from the more spiritual races of the
Lemurians, in whom the “Sons of Wisdom” had personally incarnated.(715)

It is with the advent of the divine Dynasties that the first civilizations
were started. And while, in some regions of the Earth, a portion of
mankind preferred leading a nomadic and patriarchal life, and in others
savage man was hardly learning to build a fire and to protect himself
against the Elements—his brothers, more favoured than he by their Karma,
and helped by the divine intelligence which informed them, built cities,
and cultivated Arts and Sciences. Nevertheless, notwithstanding
civilization, while their pastoral brethren enjoyed wondrous powers as
their birthright, the “builders” could now obtain their powers only
gradually; even those they did obtain being generally used for conquest
over physical nature and selfish and unholy purposes. Civilization has
ever developed the physical and the intellectual at the cost of the
psychic and spiritual. The command over and the guidance of one’s own
psychic nature, which foolish men now associate with the supernatural,
were with early Humanity innate and congenital, and came to man as
naturally as walking and thinking.

“There is no such thing as magic” philosophizes “She”—the author
forgetting that “magic” in early days still meant the great Science of
Wisdom, and that Ayesha could not possibly know anything of the modern
perversion of thought—“though,” she adds, “there is such a thing as
knowledge of the Secrets of Nature.”(716) But they have become “Secrets”
only in our Race, and were public property with the Third.

Gradually, mankind decreased in stature, for, even before the real advent
of the Fourth or Atlantean Race, the majority of mankind had fallen into
iniquity and sin, save only the Hierarchy of the “Elect,” the followers
and disciples of the “Sons of Will and Yoga”—called later the “Sons of the
Fire‐Mist.”

Then came the Atlanteans; the giants whose physical beauty and strength
reached their climax, in accordance with evolutionary law, toward the
middle period of their fourth sub‐race. But, as said in the Commentary:

_The last survivors of the fair child of the White Island [the primitive
Shveta‐dvîpa] had perished ages before. Their [Lemuria’s] Elect, had taken
shelter on the Sacred Island [now the __“__fabled__”__ Shamballah, in the
Gobi Desert], while some of their accursed races, separating from the main
stock, now lived in the jungles and underground [__“__cave‐men__”__], when
the golden yellow Race [the Fourth] became in its turn __“__black with
sin.__”__ From pole to pole the Earth had changed her face for the third
time, and was no longer inhabited by the Sons of Shveta‐dvîpa, the
blessed, and Adbhitanya [?], east and west, the first, the one and the
pure, had become corrupted.... The Demi‐Gods of the Third had made room
for the Semi‐Demons of the Fourth Race. Shveta‐dvîpa,_(_717_)_ the White
Island, had veiled her face. Her children now lived on the Black Land,
wherein, later on, Daityas from the seventh Dvîpa (Pushkara) and Râkshasas
from the seventh climate replaced the Sâdhus and the Ascetics of the Third
Age, who had descended to them from other and higher regions...._

In their dead letter, the _Purânas_, in general, read like an absurd
tissue of fairy tales and no better. And if one were to read the first
three chapters of Book II of _Vishnu Purâna_ and accept _verbatim_ the
geography, geodesy, and ethnology in the account of Priyavrata’s seven
sons among whom their father divides the seven Dvîpas (Islands or
Continents); and then proceed to study how his eldest son, Agnîdhra, the
King of Jambu‐dvîpa, apportioned Jambu‐dvîpa among his nine sons; and then
how Nâbhi, _his_ son, had a hundred sons and apportioned lands to all
these in his turn—he would most likely throw the book away and pronounce
it a farrago of nonsense. But the student of Esotericism will understand
that, when the _Purânas_ were written, their true meaning was intended to
be clear only to the Initiated Brâhmans, and so the compilers wrote these
works allegorically and would not give the _whole_ truth to the masses.
And he will, further, explain to the Orientalists—who, beginning with
Colonel Wilford and ending with Professor Weber, have made and still are
making such a mess of it—that the first three chapters purposely confuse
the following subjects and events:

I. The series of Kalpas, or Ages, and also of Races, are never taken into
account; and events which have happened in one are allowed to stand along
with those which took place in another. The chronological order is
entirely ignored. This is shown by several of the Sanskrit commentators,
who explain the incompatibility of events and calculations in saying:

Whenever any contradictions in different Purânas are observed,
they are ascribed ... to differences of Kalpas and the like.

II. The several meanings of the words “Manvantara” and “Kalpa” or Age, are
withheld, the general signification only being given.

III. In the genealogy of the Kings and the geography of their dominions,
the Varshas (countries) and Dvîpas are all regarded as terrestrial
regions.

Now, the truth is that, without entering into too minute details, it is
permissible and easy to show that:

(_a_) The Seven Dvîpas apportioned to Priyavrata’s septenary progeny refer
to several localities—first of all to our Planetary Chain. In this Jambu‐
dvîpa alone represents our Globe, while the six others are the (to us)
invisible companion Globes of the Chain. This is shown by the very nature
of the allegorical and symbolic descriptions. Jambu‐dvîpa “is _in the
centre of all_ these”—the so‐called “Insular Continents”—and is surrounded
by a _sea of salt water_ (Lavana), whereas Plaksha, Shâlmalia, Kusha,
Krauncha, Shâka, and Pushkara, are surrounded severally “by great seas ...
of sugar‐cane juice, of wine, of clarified butter, of curds, of milk,”
etc., and such like metaphorical names.(718)

(_b_) Bhâskara Âchârya, who uses expressions from the books of the Secret
Doctrine, in his description of the sidereal position of all these Dvîpas,
speaks of: “the sea of milk and the sea of curds,” etc., as meaning the
Milky Way, and the various congeries of Nebulæ; the more so, since he
calls “the country to the south of the equator” Bhûr Loka, that to the
north Bhuva, Svar, Mahar, Jana, Tapo and Satya Lokas; and adds: “These
lokas are gradually attained by increasing religious merits,” _i.e._, they
are various “Paradises.”(719)

(_c_) That this geographical distribution of seven allegorical continents,
islands, mountains, seas and countries, does not belong only to _our_
Round, or even to _our_ Races—the name of Bhârata‐varsha (India)
notwithstanding—is explained in the texts themselves by the narrator of
_Vishnu Purâna_, who tells us that:

Bharata [the son of Nâbhi, who gave his name to Bhârata‐varsha or
India] ... consigned the kingdom to his son Sumati ... and
abandoned his life at ... Shâlagrâma. He was afterwards born
again, as a Brahman, in a distinguished family of ascetics....
Under these princes [Bharata’s descendants] Bhârata‐varsha was
divided into nine portions; and their descendants successively
held possession of the country for seventy‐one periods of the
aggregate of the four ages (or for the reign of a Manu)
[representing a Mahâyuga of 4,320,000 years].(720)

But having said so much, Parâshara suddenly explains that:

This was the creation of Svâyambhuva (Manu), by which the earth
was peopled when he presided over the _first_ Manvantara, in the
Kalpa of Varâha [_i.e._, the _Boar_ incarnation, or Avatâra].

Now every Brâhman knows that _our_ Humanity began on this Earth (or Round)
_only with Vaivasvata Manu_. And if the Western reader turns to the sub‐
section on “The Primeval Manus of Humanity,”(721) he will see that
Vaivasvata is the _seventh_ of the fourteen Manus who preside over our
Planetary Chain during its Life Cycle; but as every Round has two Manus (a
Root‐ and a Seed‐Manu), he is the Root‐Manu of the Fourth Round, hence the
seventh. Wilson finds in this only incongruity, and speculates that:

The patriarchial genealogies are older than the chronological
system of Manvantaras and Kalpas, and [thus] have been rather
clumsily distributed amongst the different periods.

It is nothing of the kind; but as Orientalists know nothing of the Secret
Teaching, they persist in taking everything _literally_, and then turn
round and abuse the writers for that which they do not comprehend!

These Genealogies embrace a period of _three and a half_ Rounds; they
speak of _pre‐human_ periods, and explain the descent into generation of
every Manu—the first manifested sparks of the One Unity—and, furthermore,
show each of these human Sparks dividing into, and multiplying by, first,
the Pitaras, the human Ancestors, then by the human Races. No Being can
become God, or Deva, unless he passes through the human Cycles. Therefore
the Shloka says:

Happy are those who are born, even from the [latent] condition of
gods, _as men_, in Bhârata‐varsha; as that is the way to ... final
liberation.(722)

In Jambu‐dvîpa Bhârata is considered _the best of its divisions_, because
it is _the land of works_. In it alone it is that:

The succession of four Yugas, or ages, the Krita, the Tretâ, the
Dvâpara, and Kali take place.

When, therefore, Parâshara, on being asked by Maitreya “to give him the
descriptions of the Earth,” returns again to the enumeration of the same
Dvîpas with the same seas, etc., as those he had described in the
Svâyambhuva Manvantara—it is simply a “blind”; yet, to him who reads
between the lines, the Four great Races and the Fifth are there, ay, with
their sub‐divisions, islands and continents, some of which were called by
the names of celestial Lokas, and by those of other Globes. Hence the
confusion.

All these islands and lands are called by the Orientalists “mythical” and
“fabulous.”(723) Very true, some are _not of this Earth_, but they still
exist. The White Island and Atala, at all events, are no myths, since
Atala was the name contemptuously applied by the earliest pioneers of the
Fifth Race to the Land of Sin—Atlantis, in general, not to Plato’s island
alone; and since the White Island was (_a_) the Shveta‐dvîpa of Theogony,
and (_b_) Shâka‐dvîpa, or Atlantis (its earliest portions rather) in its
beginnings. This was when it yet had its “seven holy rivers that washed
away all sin,” and its “seven districts, wherein there was no dereliction
of virtue, no contention, no deviation from virtue,” as it was then
inhabited by the caste of the Magas—that caste which even the Brâhmans
acknowledged as not inferior to their own, and which was the nursery of
the first Zarathushtra. The Brâhmans are shown consulting with Gauramukha,
on Nârada’s advice, who told them to invite the Magas as priests of the
Sun to the temple built by Sâmba the _reputed_ son of Krishna, for in
reality the latter had none. In this the _Purânas_ are _historical_,
allegory notwithstanding, and Occultism is stating facts.

The whole story is told in _Bhavishya Purâna_. It is stated that Sâmba
having been cured of leprosy by Sûrya (the Sun), built a temple and
dedicated it to the Deity. But when he was looking for pious Brâhmans to
perform the appointed rites in it, and receive donations made to the God,
Nârada—the virgin Ascetic who is found in every age in the
_Purânas_—advised him not to do so, as Manu forbade the Brâhmans to
receive emoluments for the performance of religious rites. He therefore
referred Sâmba to Gauramukha (White‐face), the Purohita, or family priest,
of Ugrasena, King of Mathura, who would tell him whom he could best
employ. The priest directed Sâmba to invite the Magas, the worshippers of
Sûrya, to discharge the duty. But as he was ignorant of the place where
they lived, Sûrya, the Sun himself, directs Sâmba to Shâka‐dvîpa _beyond
the salt water_. Then Sâmba performs the journey, using Garuda, the Great
Bird, the vehicle of Vishnu and Krishna, who transports him to the Magas,
etc.(724)

Now Krishna, who lived 5,000 years ago, and Nârada, who is found reborn in
every Cycle (or Race), in addition to Garuda—the symbol Esoterically of
the Great Cycle—give the key to the allegory; nevertheless the Magas are
the Magi of Chaldæa, and their caste and worship were born on the earlier
Atlantis, in Shâka‐dvîpa, the Sinless. All the Orientalists are agreed
that the Magas of Shâka‐dvîpa are the forefathers of the fire‐worshipping
Parsîs. Our quarrel with them rests, as usual, on their dwarfing periods
of hundreds of thousands of years this time into only a few centuries; in
spite of Nârada and Sâmba, they carry the event only to the days of the
flight of the Parsîs to Gujerat. This is simply absurd, as this took place
only in the eighth century of our era. True, the Magas are credited in the
_Bhavishya Purâna_ with still living in Shâka‐dvîpa in the day of
Krishna’s “son,” nevertheless the last portion of that Continent—Plato’s
“Atlantis”—had perished 6,000 years before. They were Magas “late of”
Shâkadvîpa, and in those days lived in Chaldæa. This, again, is an
intentional confusion.

The earliest pioneers of the Fourth Race were not Atlanteans, nor yet were
they the human Asuras and the Râkshasas which they became later. In those
days large portions of the future Continent of Atlantis were yet part and
parcel of the ocean floors. Lemuria, as we have called the Continent of
the Third Race, was then a gigantic land.(725) It covered the whole area
from the foot of the Himâlayas, which separated it from the inland sea
rolling its waves over what is now Tibet, Mongolia, and the Great Desert
of Shamo (Gobi); from Chittagong, westward to Hardwar, and eastward to
Assam [? Annam]. From thence, it stretched south across what is known to
us as Southern India, Ceylon, and Sumatra; then embracing on its way, as
we go south, Madagascar on its right hand and Australia and Tasmania on
its left, it ran down to within a few degrees of the Antarctic Circle; and
from Australia, an inland region on the Mother Continent in those ages, it
extended far into the Pacific Ocean, beyond Rapa‐nui (Teapy, or Easter
Island) which now lies in latitude 26°S., and longitude 110°W.(726) This
statement seems to be corroborated by Science—even if only partially. When
discussing continental trends, and showing the infra‐Arctic masses
trending generally with the meridian, several ancient continents are
mentioned, though inferentially. Among such are mentioned the “Mascarene
continent,” which included Madagascar, stretching north and south, and
another ancient continent which “stretched from Spitzbergen to the Straits
of Dover, while most of the other parts of Europe were sea bottom.”(727)
This corroborates the Occult teaching which says that what are now the
polar regions were formerly the earliest of the seven cradles of Humanity,
and the tomb of the bulk of the Mankind of that region during the Third
Race, when the gigantic Continent of Lemuria began separating into smaller
continents. This is due, according to the explanation in the Commentary,
to a decrease of velocity in the Earth’s rotation:

_When the Wheel runs at the usual rate, its extremities [the poles] agree
with its middle Circle [the equator], when it runs slower and tilts in
every direction, there is a great disturbance on the face of the Earth.
The waters flow toward the two ends, and new lands arise in the middle
Belt [equatorial lands], while those at the ends are subject to Pralayas
by submersion._

And again:

_Thus the Wheel [the Earth] is subject to, and regulated by, the Spirit of
the Moon, for the breath of its waters [tides]. Toward the close of the
age [Kalpa] of a great [Root‐] Race, the Regents of the Moon [the Fathers,
or Pitris] begin drawing harder, and thus flatten the Wheel about its
Belt, when it goes down in some places and swells in others, and the
swelling running toward the extremities [poles], new lands will arise and
old ones be sucked in._

We have only to read astronomical and geological works, to see the meaning
of the above very clearly. Scientists—_modern_ Specialists—have
ascertained the influence of the tides on the geological distribution of
land and water on the planet, and have noted the shifting of the oceans
with a corresponding subsidence and rise of continents and new lands.
Science knows, or thinks it knows, that this occurs periodically.(728)
Professor Todd believes he can trace the series of oscillations backward
to the periods of the Earth’s first incrustation.(729) Therefore it seems
easy for Science to verify the Esoteric statement. We propose to treat of
this at greater length in the Addenda.

Some Theosophists who have understood from a few words in _Esoteric
Buddhism_ that “old continents” which have been submerged will reäppear,
have asked the question: “What will Atlantis be like when raised?” Here,
again, there is a slight misconception. Were identically the _same_ lands
of Atlantis that were submerged to be raised again, then they would,
indeed, be _barren for ages_. But because the Atlantic sea‐bottom is
covered with some 5,000 feet of chalk at present, and more is forming—a
new “cretaceous formation” of strata, in fact—that is no reason why, when
the time for a new Continent to appear arrives, a geological convulsion
and upraising of the sea‐bottom should not dispose of these 5,000 feet of
chalk for the formation of some mountains and 5,000 more come to the
surface. The Racial Cataclysms are not a Noah’s Deluge of forty days—a
kind of Bombay monsoon.

That the periodical sinking and reäppearance of the mighty Continents, now
called Atlantis and Lemuria by modern writers, is no fiction, will be
demonstrated in the Section in which all the evidence has been collated
together. The most archaic Sanskrit and Tamil works teem with references
to both Continents. The seven sacred Islands (Dvîpas) are mentioned in the
_Sûrya Siddhânta_, the oldest astronomical work in the whole world, and in
the works of Asura Maya, the Atlantean Astronomer whom Professor Weber has
made out to be “reïncarnated” in Ptolemy. Yet, it is a mistake to call
these “Sacred Islands” Atlantean—as is done by us; for, like everything
else in the Hindû Sacred Books, they are made to refer to several things.
The heirloom left by Priyavrata, the Son of Svâyambhuva Manu, to his seven
sons—was not Atlantis, even though one or two of these Islands survived
the subsidence of their fellows, and offered shelter, ages later, to
Atlanteans, whose Continent had been submerged in its turn. When first
mentioned by Parâshara in the _Vishnu Purâna_, the seven refer to an
Esoteric Doctrine which is explained further on. In this connection, of
all the seven Islands, Jambu‐dvîpa (our Globe) is the only one that is
terrestrial. In the _Purânas_ every reference to the North of Meru is
connected with that Primeval Eldorado, now the North Polar region, which,
when the magnolia blossomed where now we see an unexplored endless desert
of ice, was then a Continent. Science speaks of an “ancient continent”
which stretched from Spitzbergen down to the Straits of Dover. The Secret
Doctrine teaches that, in the earliest geological periods, these regions
formed a horse‐shoe‐like continent, whose one end, the Eastern, far more
northward than North Cornwall, included Greenland, and the other contained
Behring’s Straits as an inland piece of ground, and descended southward in
its natural trend down to the British Isles, which in those days must have
been right under the lower curve of the semi‐circle. This Continent was
raised simultaneously with the submersion of the equatorial portions of
Lemuria. Ages later, some of the Lemurian remains reäppeared again on the
face of the oceans. Therefore, though it can be said, without departing
from truth, that Atlantis is included in the seven great Insular
Continents since the Fourth Race Atlanteans came into possession of some
of the Lemurian relics, and settling on the islands, included them among
_their_ lands and continents, yet a difference should be made and an
explanation given, once that a fuller and more accurate account is
attempted, as in the present work. Easter Island was also taken possession
of in this manner by some Atlanteans; who, having escaped from the
Cataclysm which befell their own land, settled on this remnant of Lemuria,
but only to perish thereon, when it was destroyed in one day by volcanic
fires and lava. This may be regarded as fiction by certain Geographers and
Geologists; to the Occultists, however, it is _history_. What does Science
know to the contrary?

Until the appearance of a map, published at Basle in 1522, wherein
the name of America appears for the first time, _the latter was
believed to be part of India_.... Science also refuses to sanction
the wild hypothesis that there was a time when the Indian
peninsula at one end of the line, and South America at the other,
connected by a belt of islands and continents. The India of the
pre‐historic ages ... was doubly connected with the two Americas.
The lands of the ancestors of those whom Ammianus Marcellinus
calls the “Brâhmans of Upper India,” stretched from Kashmir far
into the (now) deserts of Shamo. A pedestrian from the north might
then have reached—hardly wetting his feet—the Alaskan Peninsula,
through Manchooria, across the _future_ Gulf of Tartary, the
Kurile and Aleutian Islands; while another traveller, furnished
with a canoe, and starting from the south, could have walked over
from Siam, crossed the Polynesian Islands and trudged into any
part of the continent of South America.(730)

This was written from the words of a Master—a rather doubtful authority
for the Materialists and Sceptics. But here we have one of their own
flock, and a bird of the same feather, Ernst Hæckel, who, in _his_
distribution of races, corroborates the statement almost _verbatim_:

It would seem that the region on the earth’s surface where the
evolution of these primitive men from the _closely related
catarrhine apes_ [!!] took place, must be sought either in
Southern Asia or Eastern Africa [which, by the bye, was not even
in existence when the Third Race flourished], or in Lemuria.
Lemuria is an ancient continent now sunk beneath the waters of the
Indian Ocean which, lying to the South of the Asia of to‐day,
stretched on the one hand eastwards to Upper India and Sunda
Island, on the other westward as far as Madagascar and
Africa.(731)

In the epoch of which we are treating, the Continent of Lemuria had
already broken asunder in many places, and formed new separate continents.
Nevertheless, neither Africa nor the Americas, still less Europe, existed
in those days; all of them slumbering as yet on the ocean‐floors. Nor was
there much of present Asia; for the Cis‐Himâlayan regions were covered
with seas, and beyond them stretched the “lotus leaves” of Shveta‐dvîpa,
the countries now called Greenland, Eastern and Western Siberia, etc. The
immense Continent, which had once reigned supreme over the Indian,
Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans, now consisted of huge islands which were
gradually disappearing one after the other, until the final convulsion
engulfed the last remains of it. Easter Island, for instance, belongs to
the earliest civilization of the Third Race. It was a volcanic and sudden
uplifting of the ocean‐floor, which raised this small relic of the Archaic
Ages—after it had been submerged with the rest—untouched, with its volcano
and statues, during the Champlain epoch of north polar submersion, as a
standing witness to the existence of Lemuria. It is said that some of the
Australian tribes are the last remnants of the last descendants of the
Third Race.

In this we are again corroborated to a degree by Materialistic Science.
Hæckel, when speaking of Blumenbach’s brown or Malay race, and the
Australians and Papuans, remarks:

There is much likeness between these last and the Aborigines of
Polynesia, that Australian island‐world, that _seems to have been
once on a time a gigantic and continuous continent_.(732)

It certainly was “a gigantic and continuous continent,” for, during the
Third Race, it stretched east and west, as far as where the two Americas
now lie. The present Australia was but a portion of it, and in addition to
this there are a few surviving islands strewn hither and thither on the
face of the Pacific, and a large strip of California, which belonged to
it. Funnily enough, Hæckel, in his fantastic _Pedigree of Man_, considers:

The Australians of to‐day as the lineal descendants, almost
unchanged [?!], of that _second_ branch of the primitive human
race ... that spread northwards, at first chiefly in Asia, from
the home of man’s infancy, and seems to have been the parent of
all the other straight‐haired races of men.... The one, woolly‐
haired, migrated in part westwards [_i.e._, to Africa and
eastwards to New Guinea, which countries had then, as said, no
existence as yet].... The other, straight‐haired, was evolved
farther to the North, in Asia, and ... peopled Australia.(733)

As writes a Master:

Behold the relics of that once great nation [Lemuria of the Third
Race] in _some_ of the flat‐headed aborigines of your
Australia.(734)

But they belong to the last remnants of the seventh sub‐race of the Third.
Professor Hæckel must also have _dreamt_ a dream and seen for once a
_true_ vision!

It is to this period that we have to look for the first appearance of the
ancestors of those, whom we term the most ancient peoples of the world—now
called respectively the Âryan Hindûs, the Egyptians, and the oldest
Persians, on the one hand, and the Chaldees and Phœnicians on the other.
These were governed by the Divine Dynasties, _i.e._, Kings and Rulers who
had of mortal man only his physical appearance _as it was then_, but who
were Beings from Spheres higher and more celestial than our own Sphere
will be, long Manvantaras hence. It is, of course, useless to attempt to
force the existence of such Beings on sceptics. _Their_ greatest pride
consists in proving their patronymic denomination as Catarrhinides—a fact
which they try to demonstrate on the alleged authority of the Coccyx
appended to their Os Sacrum, that rudimentary tail which, if it were only
long enough, they would wag with joy and for ever, in honour of its
eminent discoverer. These will remain as faithful to their Ape‐ancestors
as Christians will to tailless Adam. The Secret Doctrine, however, sets
Theosophists and students of the Occult Sciences right on this point.

If we regard the second portion of the Third Race as the first
representatives of the _really human race_ with solid bones, then Hæckel’s
surmise that “the evolution of the primitive men took place ...in _either_
Southern Asia or ... Lemuria”—Africa, whether Eastern or Western being out
of the question—is correct enough, if not entirely so. To be accurate,
however, just as the evolution of the First Race, from the bodies of the
Pitris, took place on seven distinctly separated regions, at the Arctic
Pole of the (then) only Earth—so did the ultimate transformation of the
Third occur. It began in those northern regions, which have just been
described as including Behring’s Straits, and what there then was of dry
land in Central Asia, when the climate was semi‐tropical even in the
Arctic regions and excellently adapted to the primitive wants of nascent
physical man. That region, however, has been more than once frigid and
tropical in turn since the appearance of man. The Commentary tells us that
the Third Race was only about the middle point of its development when:

_The axle of the Wheel tilted. The Sun and Moon shone no longer over __
the heads of that portion of the Sweat‐born; people knew snow, ice, and
frost, and men, plants, and animals were dwarfed in their growth. Those
that did not perish remained as half‐grown babes_(_735_)_ in size and
intellect. This was the third Pralaya of the Races._(736)

This means again, that our Globe is subject to seven periodical and
_entire_ changes which go _pari passu_ with the Races. For the Secret
Doctrine teaches that, during this Round, there must be seven terrestrial
Pralayas, occasioned by the change in the inclination of the Earth’s axis.
It is a Law which acts at its appointed time, and not at all blindly, as
Science may think, but in strict accordance and harmony with Karmic Law.
In Occultism this Inexorable Law is referred to as the “Great Adjuster.”
Science confesses its ignorance of the cause producing climatic
vicissitudes and also the changes in the axial direction, which are always
followed by these vicissitudes. In fact, it does not seem at all sure of
the axial changes. And being unable to account for them, it is prepared to
deny the axial phenomena altogether, rather than admit the intelligent
hand of the Karmic Law which alone can reasonably explain these sudden
changes and their accompanying results. It has tried to account for them
by various and more or less fantastic speculations; one of which, as de
Boucheporn imagined, would be the sudden collision of our Earth with a
Comet, thus causing all the geological revolutions. But we prefer holding
to our Esoteric explanation, since Fohat is as good as any Comet, and, in
addition, has universal Intelligence to guide him.

Thus, since Vaivasvata Manu’s Humanity appeared on this Earth, there have
already been four such axial disturbances. The old Continents—save the
first—were sucked in by the oceans, other lands appeared, and huge
mountain chains arose where there had been none before. The face of the
Globe was completely changed each time; the “survival of the fittest”
nations and races was secured through timely help; and the unfit ones—the
failures—were disposed of by being swept off the Earth. Such sorting and
shifting does not happen between sunset and sunrise, as one may think, but
requires several thousands of years before the new house is set in order.

The sub‐races are also subject to the same cleansing process, and the
side‐branchlets or family‐races as well. Let any one, well acquainted with
astronomy and mathematics, throw a retrospective glance into the twilight
and shadows of the Past. Let him observe and take notes of what he knows
of the history of peoples and nations, and collate their respective rises
and falls with what is known of astronomical cycles—especially with the
Sidereal Year, which is equal to 25,868 of our solar years.(737) Then, if
the observer is gifted with the faintest intuition, he will find how the
weal and woe of nations are intimately connected with the beginning and
close of this Sidereal Cycle. True, the non‐occultist has the disadvantage
that he has no such far distant times to rely upon. He knows nothing,
through exact Science, of what took place nearly 10,000 years ago; yet he
may find consolation in the knowledge of, or—if he so prefers—speculation
about, the fate of every one of the modern nations he knows of—some 16,000
years hence. Our meaning is very clear. Every Sidereal Year the tropics
recede from the pole _four degrees_ in each revolution from the
equinoctial points, as the equator turns through the Zodiacal
constellations. Now, as every Astronomer knows, at present the tropic is
only twenty‐three degrees and a fraction less than half a degree from the
equator. Hence it has still two and a half degrees to run before the end
of the Sidereal Year. This gives humanity in general, and our civilized
races in particular, a reprieve of about 16,000 years.

After the Great Flood of the Third Race (the Lemurians) as Commentary
Thirty‐three tells us:

_Men decreased considerably in stature, and the duration of their lives
was diminished. Having fallen down in godliness they mixed with animal
races, and intermarried among giants and pigmies [the dwarfed races of the
Poles].... Many acquired divine, nay more—unlawful knowledge, and followed
willingly the Left Path._

Thus were the Atlanteans approaching destruction in their turn. How many
geological periods it took to accomplish this _fourth_ destruction who can
tell! But we are told that:

44. THEY(738) BUILT GREAT IMAGES NINE YATIS HIGH,(739) THE SIZE OF THEIR
BODIES (_a_). INNER FIRES HAD DESTROYED THE LAND OF THEIR FATHERS.(740)
WATER THREATENED THE FOURTH(741) (_b_).

(_a_) It is well worth noticing that most of the gigantic statues
discovered on Easter Island, a portion of an undeniably submerged
continent, as also those found on the outskirts of Gobi, a region which
had been submerged for untold ages, are all between twenty and thirty feet
high. The statues found by Cook on Easter Island measured almost all
twenty‐seven feet in height, and eight feet across the shoulders.(742) The
writer is well aware that the modern Archæologists have decided that
“these statues are not very old,” as declared by one of the high officials
of the British Museum, where some of them now are. But this is one of
those arbitrary decisions of Modern Science which does not carry much
weight.

We are told that after the destruction of Lemuria by subterranean fires
men went on steadily decreasing in stature—a process already commenced
after their _physical_ Fall—and that finally, some millions of years
later, they decreased to between six and seven feet, and are now, as in
the older Asiatic races, dwindling down to nearer five than six feet. As
Pickering shows, there is in the Malay race (a sub‐race of the Fourth
Root‐Race) a singular diversity of stature; the members of the Polynesian
family, such as the Tahitians, Samoans, and Tonga islanders, are of a
_higher stature than the rest of mankind_; but the Indian tribes and the
inhabitants of the Indo‐Chinese countries are decidedly below the general
average. This is easily explained. The Polynesians belong to the very
earliest of the surviving sub‐races, the others to the very latest and
most transitory stock. As the Tasmanians are now completely extinct, and
the Australians rapidly dying out, so will the other old races soon
follow.

(_b_) How could those records have been preserved? we may be asked. Even
the knowledge of the Zodiac by the Hindûs is denied by our kind and
learned Orientalists, who conclude that the Âryan Hindûs knew nothing of
it, before the Greeks brought it into the country. This uncalled‐for
slander has been so sufficiently refuted by Bailly, and what is more, by
the clear _evidence of facts_, as not to need very much additional
refutation. While the Egyptian Zodiacs(743) preserve irrefutable proofs of
records embracing more than three‐and‐a‐half Sidereal Years—or about
87,000 years—the Hindû calculations cover nearly thirty‐three such years,
or 850,000 years. The Egyptian priests assured Herodotus that the Pole of
the Earth and the Pole of the Ecliptic had formerly coincided. But, as
remarked by the author of the _Sphinxiad_:

These _poor benighted_ Hindoos have registered a knowledge of
Astronomy for ten times 25,000 years since the [last local] Flood
[in Asia], or Age of Horror.

And they possess recorded observations from the date of the first Great
Flood within the Âryan _historical_ memory—the Flood which submerged the
last portions of Atlantis 850,000 years ago. The Floods which preceded
are, of course, more traditional than historical.

The sinking and transformation of Lemuria began nearly at the Arctic
Circle (Norway), and the Third Race ended its career in Lankâ, or rather
on that which became Lankâ with the Atlanteans. The small remnant now
known as Ceylon is the Northern highland of ancient Lankâ, while the
enormous Island of that name was, in the Lemurian period, the gigantic
Continent already described. As a Master says:

_Why should not your geologists bear in mind that under the continents
explored and fathomed by them ... there may be hidden, deep in the
fathomless, or rather unfathomed ocean beds, other and far older
continents whose strata have never been geologically explored; and that
they may some day upset entirely their present theories? Why not admit
that our present continents have, like Lemuria and Atlantis, been several
times already submerged, and had the time to reäppear again, and bear
their new groups of mankind and civilizations; and that at the first great
geological upheaval at the next cataclysm, in the series of periodical
cataclysms that occur from the beginning to the end of every Round, our
already autopsized continents will go down, and the Lemurias and
Atlantises come up again?_(744)

Not identically the _same_ Continents, of course. But here an explanation
is needed. No confusion need arise as regards the postulation of a
Northern Lemuria. The prolongation of that great Continent into the North
Atlantic Ocean is in no way subversive of the opinions so widely held as
to the site of the lost Atlantis, and one corroborates the other. It must
be noted that the Lemuria, which served as the cradle of the Third Root‐
Race, not only embraced a vast area in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, but
extended in the shape of a horse‐shoe past Madagascar, round “South
Africa” (then a mere fragment in process of formation), through the
Atlantic up to Norway. The great English fresh‐water deposit called the
Wealden—which every Geologist regards as the mouth of a former great
river—is the bed of _the main stream which drained Northern Lemuria in the
Secondary age_. The former actual existence of this river is a fact of
Science—its votaries acknowledge the necessity of accepting the Secondary‐
age Northern Lemuria, demanded by their data? Professor Berthold Seemann
not only accepted the reality of such a mighty continent, but regarded
Australia and Europe _as formerly portions of one continent_—thus
corroborating the whole “horse‐shoe” doctrine already enunciated. No more
striking confirmation of our position could be given, than the fact that
the _elevated ridge_ in the Atlantic basin, 9,000 feet in height, which
runs for some two or three thousand miles southwards from a point near the
British Islands, first slopes towards South America, then _shifts almost
at right angles_ to proceed in a _south‐easterly_ line _toward the African
coast_, whence it runs on southward to Tristan d’Acunha. This ridge is a
remnant of an Atlantic continent, and, could it be traced further, would
establish the reality of a submarine horse‐shoe junction with a former
continent in the Indian Ocean.(745)

The _Atlantic portion of Lemuria_ was the geological basis of what is
generally known as Atlantis, but which must be regarded rather as a
development of the Atlantic prolongation of Lemuria than as an entirely
new mass of land upheaved to meet the special requirements of the Fourth
Root‐Race. Just as in the case of Race evolution, so in that of the
shifting and re‐shifting of Continental masses, no hard and fast line can
be drawn as to where a new order ends and another begins. Continuity in
natural processes is never broken. Thus the Fourth‐Race Atlanteans were
developed from a nucleus of Northern Lemurian Third‐Race Men, centred,
roughly speaking, toward a point of land in what is now the mid‐Atlantic
Ocean. Their Continent was formed by the coalescence of many islands and
peninsulas which were upheaved in the ordinary course of time and
ultimately became the true home of the great Race known as the Atlanteans.
After this consummation was once attained it follows, as stated on the
highest Occult authority, that:

_Lemuria should no more be confounded with the Atlantis Continent, than
Europe with America._(746)

The above, coming from quarters so discredited by orthodox Science, will,
of course, be regarded as a more or less happy fiction. Even the clever
work of Donnelly, already mentioned, is put aside, notwithstanding that
its statements are all confined within a frame of strictly scientific
proofs. But we write for the future. New discoveries in this direction
will vindicate the claim of the Asiatic Philosophers, that
sciences—Geology, Ethnology, and History included—were pursued by the
Antediluvian nations who lived untold ages ago. Future “finds” will
justify the correctness of the present observations of such acute minds as
H. A. Taine and Renan. The former shows that the civilizations of such
archaic nations as the Egyptians, Âryans of India, Chaldæans, Chinese, and
Assyrians are the result of preceding civilizations lasting “_myriads_ of
centuries”;(747) and the latter points to the fact that:

Egypt at the beginning appears mature, old, and entirely without
mythical and heroic ages, as if the country had never known youth.
Its civilization has no infancy, and its art no archaic period.
The civilization of the Old Monarchy did not begin with infancy.
It was already mature.(748)

To this Professor R. Owen adds that:

Egypt is recorded to have been a civilized and governed community
_before_ the time of Menes.

And Winchell states that:

At the epoch of Menes the Egyptians were already a civilized and
numerous people. Manetho tells us that Athotis, the son of this
first king Menes, built the palace of Memphis; that he was a
physician, and left _anatomical books_.

This is quite natural if we are to believe the statement of Herodotus, who
records in Euterpe (cxlii), that the written history of the Egyptian
priests dated from about 12,000 years before his time. But what are 12,000
or even 120,000 years compared with the millions of years which have
elapsed since the Lemurian period? The latter, however, has not been left
without witnesses, notwithstanding its tremendous antiquity. The complete
records of the growth, development, social and even political life of the
Lemurians, have been preserved in the Secret Annals. Unfortunately, few
are those who can read them; and those who could would still be unable to
understand the language, unless acquainted with all the seven keys of its
symbolism. For the comprehension of the Occult Doctrine is based on that
of the Seven Sciences; and these Sciences find their expression in the
seven different applications of the Secret Records to the exoteric texts.
Thus we have to deal with modes of thought on seven entirely different
planes of Ideality. Every text relates to, and has to be rendered from,
one of the following standpoints:

1. The Realistic Plane of Thought.

2. The Idealistic.

3. The purely Divine or Spiritual.

The other planes too far transcend the average consciousness, especially
of the materialistic mind, to admit of their being even symbolized in
terms of ordinary phraseology. There is no purely _mythical_ element in
any of the ancient religious texts; but the mode of thought in which they
were originally written has to be found out and closely adhered to during
the process of interpretation. For it is symbolical, the archaic mode of
thought; emblematical, a later though very ancient mode of thought;
parabolical or allegorical; hieroglyphical; or again logogrammical, the
most difficult method of all; every letter, as in the Chinese language,
representing a whole word. Thus, almost every proper name, whether in the
_Vedas_, the _Book of the Dead_, or, to a certain degree, in the _Bible_,
is composed of such logograms. No one not initiated into the mystery of
the Occult religious logography can presume to know what a name in any
ancient fragment means, before he has mastered the meaning of every letter
that composes it. How is it to be expected that the merely profane
thinker, however great may be his erudition in orthodox symbolism, so to
say—_i.e._, in that symbolism which can never get out of the old grooves
of solar myth and sexual worship—how is it to be expected that the profane
scholar should penetrate into the arcana behind the veil? One who deals
with the husk or shell of the dead‐letter, and devotes himself to the
kaleidoscopic transformation of barren word‐symbols, can never expect to
get beyond the vagaries of modern Mythologists.

Thus, Vaivasvata, Xisuthrus, Deucalion, Noah, etc.,—all the head‐figures
of the World‐Deluges, universal and partial, astronomical or
geological—all furnish in their very names the records of the causes and
effects which led to the event, if one can but read them fully. All such
Deluges are based on events that took place in Nature, and stand as
_historical_ records, therefore—whether they were sidereal, geological, or
even simply allegorical—of a moral event on other and higher planes of
being. This we believe has now been sufficiently demonstrated during the
long explanation necessitated by the allegorical Stanzas.

To speak of a race nine “yatis,” or twenty‐seven feet, high, in a work
claiming a more scientific character than, let us say, the story of “Jack
the Giant‐Killer,” is a somewhat unusual proceeding. Where are your
proofs?—the writer will be asked. In history and tradition, is the answer.
Traditions about a race of giants in days of old are universal; they exist
in oral and written lore. India had her Dânavas and Daityas; Ceylon had
her Râkshasas; Greece, her Titans; Egypt, her colossal Heroes; Chaldæa,
her Izdubars (Nimrod); and the Jews their Emims of the land of Moab, with
the famous giants, Anakim.(749) Moses speaks of Og, a king whose
“bedstead” was nine cubits long (15ft. 4in.) and four wide,(750) and
Goliath was “six cubits and a span in height” (or 10ft. 7in.). The only
difference found between “revealed scripture” and the evidence furnished
to us by Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Homer, Pliny, Plutarch,
Philostratus, etc., is this: While the Pagans mention only the _skeletons
of giants_, dead untold ages before, relics that some of them _had
personally seen_, the _Bible_ interpreters unblushingly demand that
Geology and Archæology should believe, that several countries were
inhabited by such giants in the day of Moses; giants before whom the Jews
were as grasshoppers, and who still existed in the days of Joshua and
David. Unfortunately their own chronology is in the way. Either the latter
or the giants has to be given up.

Of yet standing witnesses to the submerged Continents, and the colossal
men that inhabited them, there are still a few. Archæology claims several
such on this Earth, though beyond wondering “what these may be”—it has
never made any serious attempt to solve the mystery. Not to speak of the
Easter Island statues already mentioned, to what epoch belong the colossal
statues, still erect and intact near Bamian? Archæology, as usual, assigns
them to the first centuries of Christianity, and errs in this as it does
in many other speculations. A few words of description will show the
readers what are the statues of both Easter Isle and Bamian. We will first
examine what is known of them to orthodox Science.

Teapi, Rapa‐nui, or Easter Island, is an isolated spot almost
2,000 miles from the South American coast.... In length it is
about twelve miles, in breadth four ... and there is an extinct
crater 1,050 feet high in its centre. The island abounds in
craters, which have been extinct for so long that no tradition of
their activity remains.(751)

But who made the great stone images(752) which are now the chief
attraction of the island to visitors? “_No one knows_,” says a reviewer.

It is more than likely that they were here when the present
inhabitants [a handful of Polynesian savages] arrived.... Their
workmanship _is of a high order_, ... and it is believed that the
race who formed them were the frequenters of the natives of Peru
and other portions of South America.... Even at the date of Cook’s
visit, some of the statues, measuring twenty‐seven feet in height
and eight across the shoulders, were lying overthrown, while
others still standing appeared much larger. One of the latter was
so lofty that the shade was sufficient to shelter a party of
thirty persons from the heat of the sun. The platforms on which
these colossal images stood averaged from thirty to forty feet in
length, twelve to sixteen broad ... all built of hewn stone in the
Cyclopean style, very much like the walls of the Temple of
Pachacamac, _or the ruins of Tia‐Huanaco in Peru_.(753)

“_There is no reason to believe that any of the statues have been built
up, bit by bit, by scaffolding erected around them_,” adds the reviewer
very suggestively—without explaining _how_ they could be built otherwise,
unless made by giants of the same size as the statues themselves. Two of
the best of these colossal images are now in the British Museum. The
images at Ronororaka are four in number, three deeply sunk in the soil,
and one resting on the back of its head like a man asleep. Their types,
though all are long‐headed, are different; and they are evidently meant
for portraits, as the noses, the mouths, and chins differ greatly in form;
their head‐dress, moreover—a kind of flat cap with a piece attached to it
to cover the back portion of the head—shows that the originals were no
savages of the stone period. Verily the question may be asked, Who made
them?—but it is not Archæology nor yet Geology that is likely to answer,
even though the latter recognizes in the island a portion of a submerged
continent.

But who cut the Bamian, still more colossal, statues, the tallest and the
most gigantic in the whole world?—for Bartholdi’s “Statue of Liberty,” now
at New York, _is a dwarf_ when compared with the largest of the five
images. Burnes, and several learned Jesuits who have visited the place,
speak of a mountain “all honeycombed with gigantic cells,” with two
immense giants cut in the same rock. They are referred to as the modern
Miaotse (_vide supra_, quotation from _Shoo‐King_), the last surviving
witnesses of the Miaotse who had “troubled the earth”; the Jesuits are
right, and the Archæologists, who see Buddhas in the largest of these
statues, are mistaken. For all those numberless gigantic ruins which are
discovered one after the other in our day, all those immense avenues of
colossal ruins that cross North America along and beyond the Rocky
Mountains, are the work of the Cyclopes, the true and actual Giants of
old. “Masses of enormous human bones” were found “in America, near Munte
[?]” a celebrated modern traveller tells us, precisely on the spot which
local tradition points out as the landing spot of those giants who overran
America when it had hardly arisen from the waters.(754)

Central Asian traditions say the same of the Bamian statues. What are
they, and what is the place where they have stood for countless ages,
defying the cataclysms around them, and even the hand of man, as in the
instance of the hordes of Timoor and the Vandal‐warriors of Nadir Shah?
Bamian is a small, miserable, half‐ruined town in Central Asia, half‐way
between Cabul and Balkh, at the foot of Koh‐i‐baba, a huge mountain of the
Paropamisian, or Hindu‐Kush, Chain, some 8,500 feet above the level of the
sea. In days of old, Bamian was a portion of the ancient city of
Djooljool, ruined and destroyed to the last stone by Tchengis‐Khan in the
thirteenth century. The whole valley is hemmed in by colossal rocks, which
are full of partially natural and partially artificial caves and grottoes,
once the dwellings of Buddhist monks who had established in them their
Vihâras. Such Vihâras are to be met with in profusion, to this day, in the
rock‐cut temples of India and the valleys of Jellalabad. In front of some
of these caves five enormous statues—of what is regarded as Buddha—have
been discovered or rather _rediscovered_ in our century, for the famous
Chinese traveller Hiouen Thsang speaks of having seen them, when he
visited Bamian in the seventh century.

The contention that no larger statues exist on the whole globe, is easily
proven on the evidence of all the travellers who have examined them and
taken their measurements. Thus, the largest is 173 feet high, or _seventy_
feet higher than the “Statue of Liberty” now at New York, as the latter is
only 105 feet or 34 mètres high. The famous Colossus of Rhodes itself,
between whose legs the largest vessels of those days passed with ease,
measured only 120 to 130 feet in height. The second largest statue, which
is also cut out in the rock like the first, is only 120 feet or fifteen
feet taller than the said “Liberty.”(755) The third statue is only 60 feet
high, the two others still smaller, the last being only a little larger
than the average tall man of our present Race. The first and largest of
the colossi represents a man draped in a kind of “toga”; M. de Nadeylac
thinks that the general appearance of the figure, the lines of the head,
the drapery, and especially the large hanging ears, are undeniable
indications that Buddha was meant to be represented. But they really prove
nothing. Notwithstanding the fact that most of the now existing figures of
Buddha, represented in the posture of Samâdhi, have large drooping ears,
this is a later innovation and an afterthought. The primitive idea was due
to Esoteric allegory. The unnaturally large ears symbolize the omniscience
of wisdom, and were meant as a reminder of the power of Him who _knows and
hears all_, and whose benevolent love and attention for all creatures
nothing can escape. As a Shloka says:

_The merciful Lord, our Master, hears the cry of agony of the smallest of
the small, beyond vale and mountain, and hastens to its deliverance._

Gautama Buddha was an Âryan Hindû, and an approach to such ears is found
only among the Mongolian Burmese and Siamese, who, as in Cochin, distort
their ears artificially. The Buddhist monks, who turned the grottoes of
the Miao‐tse into Vihâras and cells, came into Central Asia about or in
the first century of the Christian era. Therefore, Hiouen Thsang, speaking
of the colossal statue, says that “the shining of the gold ornamentation
that overlaid the statue” in his day “dazzled one’s eyes,” but of such
gilding there remains not a vestige in modern times. The drapery, in
contrast to the figure itself, which is cut out of the standing rock, is
made of plaster and modelled over the stone image. Talbot, who has made
the most careful examination, found that this drapery belonged to a far
later epoch. The statue itself has therefore to be assigned to a far
earlier period than Buddhism. In such case, it may be asked, Whom does it
represent?

Once more tradition, corroborated by written records, answers the query,
and explains the mystery. The Buddhist Arhats and Ascetics found the five
statues, and many more, now crumbled down to dust. Three of them standing
in colossal niches at the entrance of their future abode, they covered
with plaster, and, over the old, modelled new statues made to represent
Lord Tathâgata. The interior walls of the niches are covered to this day
with bright paintings of human figures, and the sacred image of Buddha is
repeated in every group. These frescoes and ornaments—which remind one of
the Byzantine style of painting—are all due to the piety of the monk‐
ascetics, as also are some other minor figures and rock‐cut
ornamentations. But the five statues belong to the handiwork of the
Initiates of the Fourth Race, who, after the submersion of their
Continent, sought refuge in the fastnesses and on the summits of the
Central Asian mountain chains. Thus, the five statues are an imperishable
record of the Esoteric Teaching as to the gradual evolution of the Races.

The largest is made to represent the First Race of mankind, its ethereal
body being commemorated in hard, everlasting stone, for the instruction of
future generations, as its remembrance would otherwise never have survived
the Atlantean Deluge. The second—120 feet high—represents the Sweat‐born;
and the third—measuring 60 feet—immortalizes the Race that fell, and
thereby inaugurated the first _physical_ Race, born of father and mother,
the last descendants of which are represented in the statues found on
Easter Isle. These were only from 20 to 25 feet in stature at the epoch
when Lemuria was submerged, after it had been nearly destroyed by volcanic
fires. The Fourth Race was still smaller, though gigantic in comparison
with our present Fifth Race, and the series culminated finally in the
latter.

These are, then, the “Giants” of antiquity, the ante‐ and post‐diluvian
Gibborim of the _Bible_. They lived and flourished one million years ago
rather than between three and four thousand only. The Anakim of Joshua,
whose hosts were as “grasshoppers” in comparison with the Jews, are thus a
piece of Israelite fancy, unless indeed the people of Israel claim for
Joshua an antiquity and origin in the Eocene, or at any rate in the
Miocene age, and change the millenniums of their chronology into millions
of years.

In everything that pertains to prehistoric times the reader ought to bear
in mind the wise words of Montaigne. Saith the great French Philosopher:

It is a sottish presumption to disdaine and condemne that for
false, which unto us seemeth to beare no show of likelihood or
truth: which is an ordinarie fault in those who perswade
themselves to be of more sufficiencie than the vulgar sort....

But reason hath taught me, that so resolutely to condemne a thing
for false and impossible, is to assume unto himself the advantage
to have the bounds and limits of God’s will, and the power of our
common mother Nature tied to his sleeve, and that there is no
greater folly in the world than to reduce them to the measure of
our capacitie and bounds of our sufficiencie....

If we term those things monsters or miracles to which our reason
cannot attain, how many such doe daily present themselves unto our
sight? Let us consider through what cloudes, and how blinde‐folde,
we are led to the knowledge of most things that passe our hands;
verily we shall finde it is rather custome than science that
receiveth the strangenesse of them from us: and that those things,
were they newly presented unto us, wee should doubtless deeme them
as much or more unlikely and incredible than any other.(756)

A fair‐minded scholar, before denying the possibility of _our_ history and
records, should search modern history, as well as the universal traditions
scattered throughout ancient and modern literature, for traces left by
these marvellous early races. Few among the unbelievers suspect the wealth
of corroborative evidence which is to be found scattered about and buried,
even in the British Museum alone. The reader is asked to throw one more
glance at the subject‐matter treated of in the Section which follows.

Cyclopean Ruins And Colossal Stones As Witnesses To Giants.

De Mirville, in his enormous works, “Mémoires Adressées aux Académies,”
carrying out the task of proving the reality of the Devil and showing his
abode in every ancient and modern idol, has collected several hundred
pages of “historical evidence” that, in the days of “miracle,” both pagan
and biblical, stones walked, spoke, delivered oracles, and even sang. That
finally, the “Christ‐stone,” or Christ‐rock, “the spiritual Rock” that
followed Israel,(757) “became a Jupiter‐lapis,” swallowed by his father
Saturn, “under the shape of a stone.”(758) We will not stop to discuss the
evident misuse and materialization of biblical metaphors simply for the
sake of proving the “Satanism” of idols, though a good deal might be
said(759) on this subject. But without claiming any such peripateticism
and innate psychic faculties for our stones, we may collect, in our turn,
every available evidence to hand, to show that: (_a_) had there been no
giants to move such colossal rocks, there could never have been a
Stonehenge, a Carnac (Brittany), or other such Cyclopean structures; and
(_b_) were there no such thing as Magic, there could never have been so
many witnesses to “oracular” and “speaking” stones.

In the _Achaica_ we find Pausanias confessing that, in beginning his work,
he had regarded the Greeks as mighty _stupid_ “for worshipping stones.”
But, having reached Arcadia, he adds: “I have changed my way of
thinking.”(760) Therefore, without worshipping stones or stone idols and
statues, which is the same thing—a crime with which Roman Catholics are
unwise to reproach Pagans, as they do—one may be allowed to believe in
what so many great Philosophers and holy men have believed in, without
deserving to be called an “idiot” by modern Pausaniuses.

The reader is referred to the _Académie des Inscriptions_, if he would
study the various properties of flints and pebbles from the standpoint of
magic and psychic powers. In a poem on “Stones” attributed to Orpheus,
these stones are divided into Ophites and Sideritês, the “Serpent‐stone”
and “Star‐stone.”

The Ophitês is shaggy, hard, heavy, black, and has _the gift of
speech_; when one prepares to cast it away, it produces a sound
_similar to the cry of a child_. It is by means of this stone that
Helenus foretold the ruin of Troy, his fatherland.(761)

Sanchuniathon and Philo Byblus, in referring to these “bétyles,” call them
“_animated_ stones.” Photius repeats what Damascius, Asclepiades, Isidorus
and the physician Eusebius had asserted before him. Eusebius especially
never parted with his Ophitês, which he carried in his bosom, and received
oracles from it, delivered _in a small voice resembling a low
whistling_.(762) Arnobius, a holy man, who “from a Pagan had become one of
the _lights of the Church_,” as Christians tell their readers, confesses
he could never meet with one of such stones without putting it a question,
“which it answered occasionally in a _clear and sharp small voice_.”
Where, then, is the difference between the Christian and the Pagan
Ophitês, we ask?

The famous stone at Westminster was called _liafail_, “the speaking
stone,” and raised its voice only to name the king that had to be chosen.
Cambry, in his _Monuments Celtiques_, says he saw it when it still bore
the inscription:(763)

_Ni fallat fatum, Scoti quocumque locatum_
_Invenient lapidem, regnasse tenentur ibidem_.

Finally, Suidas speaks of a certain Heræscus, who could distinguish at a
glance the inanimate stones from those which were endowed with motion; and
Pliny mentions stones which “ran away when a hand approached them.”(764)

De Mirville—who seeks to justify the _Bible_—enquires very pertinently,
why the monstrous stones of Stonehenge were called in days of old _chior‐
gaur_ or the “dance of giants” (from _côr_, “dance,” whence _chorea_, and
_gaur_, “giant”)? And then he sends the reader to receive his reply from
the Bishop St. Gildas. But the authors of such works as _Voyage dans le
Comté de Cornouailles, sur les Traces des Géants_, and of various learned
works on the ruins of Stonehenge,(765) Carnac, and West Hoadley, give far
fuller and more reliable information upon this particular subject. In
those regions—true forests of rocks—immense monoliths are found, “some
weighing over 500,000 kilograms.” These “hanging stones” of Salisbury
Plain are believed to be the remains of a Druidical temple. But the Druids
were historical men and not Cyclopes, or giants. Who then, _if not
giants_, could ever raise such masses—especially those at Carnac and West
Hoadley—range them in such symmetrical order that they should represent
the planisphere, and place them in such wonderful equipoise that they seem
to hardly touch the ground, and though set in motion at the slightest
touch of the finger, would nevertheless resist the efforts of twenty men
should they attempt to displace them.

Now if we say that most of these stones are relics of the last Atlanteans,
we shall be answered that all the Geologists claim them to be of a natural
origin; that, a rock when “weathering”—_i.e._, losing flake after flake of
its substance under the influence of the weather—assumes this form; that,
the “tors” in West England exhibit curious forms, also produced by this
cause. And thus since all Scientists consider the “rocking stones to be of
purely natural origin, wind, rain, etc., causing disintegration of rocks
in layers”—our statement will be justly denied, especially as “we see this
process of rock‐modification in progress around us to‐day.” Let us then
examine the case.

First read what Geology has to say, and you will then learn that often
these gigantic masses are entire strangers in the countries wherein they
are now fixed; that their geological congeners often pertain to strata
unknown in those countries and which are only to be found far beyond the
seas. Mr. William Tooke, in speculating upon the enormous blocks of
granite which are strewn over Southern Russia and Siberia, tells the
reader that where they now rest, there are neither rocks nor mountains;
and that they must have been brought over “from immense distances and with
prodigious efforts.”(766) Charton speaks of a specimen of such rock from
Ireland, which had been submitted to the analysis of an eminent English
Geologist, who assigned to it a foreign origin “_perhaps even
African_.”(767)

This is a strange _coincidence_, for Irish tradition attributes the origin
of her circular stones to a _Sorcerer who brought them from Africa_. De
Mirville sees in this Sorcerer “an accursed Hamite.”(768) We see in him a
dark Atlantean, or perhaps even some earlier Lemurian, who had survived
till the birth of the British Islands—a giant in any and every case.(769)
Says Cambry, naively:

Men have nothing to do with it ... for never could _human_ power
and industry undertake anything of this kind. Nature alone has
accomplished it all [!!] and Science will demonstrate it some day
[!!].(770)

Nevertheless, it was _human_, though gigantic power, which accomplished
it, and no more “Nature” alone than God or Devil.

“Science,” having undertaken to demonstrate that even the Mind and Spirit
of man are simply the production of “blind forces,” is quite capable of
accepting the task, and it may be that she will come out some fine
morning, and seek to prove that Nature alone has marshalled the gigantic
rocks of Stonehenge, traced their position with mathematical precision,
given them the form of the Dendera planisphere and of the signs of the
Zodiac, and brought stones weighing over one million of pounds from Africa
and Asia to England and Ireland!

It is true that Cambry recanted later on, when saying:

I believed for a long time in _Nature_, but I _recant_, ... for
chance _is unable to create_ such marvellous combinations, ... and
those who placed the said rocks in equipoise, are the same who
have raised the moving masses of the pond of Huelgoat, near
Concarneau.

Dr. John Watson, quoted by the same author, when speaking of the _moving_
rocks, or “rocking stones” situated on the slope of Golcar (the
“Enchanter”) says:

The astonishing movement of those masses poised in equilibrium
made the Celts compare them to Gods.(771)

In _Stonehenge_, by Flinders Petrie, it is said that:

Stonehenge is built of the stone of the district, a red sandstone,
or “sarsen” stone, locally called “grey wethers.” But some of the
stones, especially those which are said to have been devoted to
astronomical purposes, have been brought from a distance, probably
the North of Ireland.

To close, the reflections of a man of Science, in an article upon the
subject published in 1850 in the _Revue Archéologique_, are worthy of
being quoted:

Every stone is a block whose weight would try the most powerful
machines. There are, in a word, scattered throughout the globe,
masses, before which the word _materials_ seems to remain
inexplicable, at the sight of which imagination is confounded, and
that had to be endowed with a name as colossal as the things
themselves. Besides which, these _immense rocking_ stones, called
sometimes _routers_, placed upright on one of their sides as on a
point, their equipoise being so perfect that the slightest touch
is sufficient to set them in motion ... betray a most positive
knowledge of statics. Reciprocal counter‐motion, surfaces, plane,
convex and concave, in turn ... all this allies them to Cyclopean
monuments, of which it can be said with good reason, repeating De
la Vega, that “the demons seem to have worked on them more than
men.”(772)

For once we agree with our friends and foes, the Roman Catholics, and ask
whether such prodigies of statics and equilibrium, with masses weighing
millions of pounds, can be the work of Palæolithic _savages_, of cave‐men,
taller than the average man in our century, yet ordinary mortals as we
are? It is not our purpose to refer to the various traditions attached to
the rocking stones. Still, it may be as well to remind the English reader
of Giraldus Cambrensis, who speaks of such a stone on the Isle of Mona,
which returned to its place, notwithstanding every effort to keep it
elsewhere. At the time of the conquest of Ireland by Henry II, a Count
Hugo Cestrensis, desiring to convince himself of the reality of the fact,
tied the Mona stone to a far larger one and had them thrown into the sea.
On the following morning it was found in its accustomed place. The learned
William of Salisbury warrants the fact by testifying to its presence in
the wall of a church where he had seen it in 1554. And this reminds one of
what Pliny said of the stone left by the Argonauts at Cyzicum, which the
Cyzicans had placed in the Prytaneum, “whence it _ran away several times_,
and so they were forced to weight it with lead.”(773) Here we have immense
stones stated by all antiquity to be “living, moving, speaking, and self‐
perambulating.” They were also capable, it seems, of making people run
away, since they were called _routers_, from the word to “rout,” or “put
to flight”; and Des Mousseaux shows them all to be prophetic stones, and
sometimes called “_mad_ stones.”(774)

The rocking stone is accepted by Science. But why did it rock? One must be
blind not to see that this motion was one more means of divination, and
that they were called for this very reason the “stones of truth.”(775)

_This is history_, the past of prehistoric times warranting the same in
later ages. The Dracontia, sacred to the Moon and the Serpent, were the
more ancient “rocks of destiny” of older nations; and their motion, or
_rocking_, was a code perfectly clear to the initiated priests, who alone
had the key to this ancient _reading_. Vormius and Olaus Magnus show that
it was according to the orders of the oracle, whose voice spoke through
“these immense rocks raised by the colossal powers of [ancient] giants,”
that the kings of Scandinavia were elected. Says Pliny:

In India and Persia it is she (the Persian Otizoë) whom the Magi
had to consult for the election of their sovereigns;(776)

and he further describes a rock overshadowing Harpasa, in Asia, and placed
in such a manner that “a single finger can move it, while the weight of
the whole body makes it resist.”(777) Why then should not the rocking
stones of Ireland, or those of Brimham, in Yorkshire, have served for the
same mode of _divination_ or oracular communications? The hugest of them
are evidently the relics of the Atlanteans; the smaller, such as Brimham
Rocks, with revolving stones on their summit, are copies from the more
ancient lithoi. Had not the Bishops of the Middle Ages destroyed all the
plans of the Dracontia they could lay their hands on, Science would know
more of these.(778) As it is, we know that they were universally used
during long prehistoric ages, and all for the same purposes of prophecy
and _magic_. É. Biot, a member of the Institute of France, published in
the _Antiquités de France_ (vol. ix), an article showing the Chatampéramba
(the “Field of Death,” or ancient burial ground in Malabar), to be
identical in situation with the old tombs at Carnac; that is to say, “a
prominence and a central tomb.” Bones are found in the tombs, and Mr.
Halliwell tells us that some of these are enormous, the natives calling
the tombs the “dwellings of the Râkshasas” or giants. Several stone
circles, “considered the work of the Panch Pândava (five Pândus), as all
such monuments are in India, where they are to be found in such great
numbers,” when opened by the direction of Rajah Vasariddi, “were found to
contain _human bones of a very large size_.”(779)

Again, De Mirville is right in his _generalization_, if not in his
conclusions. As the long cherished theory that the Dracontia are mostly
witnesses to “great natural geological commotions” (Charton), and “the
work of Nature” (Cambry), is now exploded, his remarks are very just:

We advise Science to reflect .... and, above all, no longer to
class Titans and Giants among primitive legends; for their works
are there, under our eyes, and those rocking masses will oscillate
on their basis to the end of the world to help them to realize
once for all, that one is not altogether a candidate for Charenton
for believing in wonders certified to by the whole of
Antiquity.(780)

This is just what we can never repeat too often, though it may be that the
voices of both Occultists and Roman Catholics are raised in the desert.
Nevertheless, no one can fail to see that Science is as inconsistent, to
say the least, in its modern speculations, as was ancient and mediæval
Theology in _its_ interpretations of the so‐called _Revelation_. Science
would have men descend from the pithecoid ape—a transformation requiring
millions of years—and yet fears to make Mankind older than 100,000 years!
Science teaches the gradual transformation of species, natural selection
and evolution from the lowest form to the highest, from mollusc to fish,
from reptile to bird and mammalian—yet it refuses to man, who is
physiologically only a higher mammal and animal, such a transformation of
his external form. But if the monstrous Iguanodon of the Wealden may have
been the ancestor of the diminutive Iguana of to‐day, why could not the
monstrous man of the Secret Doctrine have become the modern man—the link
between Animal and Angel? Is there anything more unscientific in this
“theory” than in that of refusing to man a spiritual immortal Ego, making
of him an automaton, and ranking him, at the same time, _as a distinct
genus_ in the system of Nature? Occult Sciences may be less scientific
than the present Exact Sciences, they are nevertheless more logical and
consistent in their teachings. Physical forces, and the natural affinities
of atoms may be sufficient as factors to transform a plant into an animal;
but it requires more than the mere interplay between certain material
aggregates and their environment, to call to life a _fully conscious man_,
even though he were no more indeed than a ramification between two “poor
cousins” of the quadrumanous order. Occult Sciences admit with Hæckel that
(objective) Life on our Globe “is a logical postulate of scientific
natural history,” but add that the rejection of a like _spiritual_
involution, from _within without_, of invisible subjective Spirit‐
Life—Eternal and a Principle in Nature—is more illogical, if possible,
than to say that the Universe and all in it has been gradually built by
“blind forces” inherent in Matter, without any _external_ help.

Suppose an Occultist were to claim that the first grand organ of a
cathedral had come originally into being as follows: first, there was a
progressive and gradual elaboration in space of an organizable material,
which resulted in the production of a state of matter named _organic
protein_; then, under the influence of incident forces, these states
having been thrown into a phase of unstable equilibrium, they slowly and
majestically evolved into new combinations of carved and polished wood, of
brass pins and staples, of leather and ivory, wind‐pipes and bellows;
after which, having adapted all its parts into one harmonious and
symmetrical machine, the organ suddenly pealed forth Mozart’s “Requiem”;
this was followed by a Sonata of Beethoven, etc., _ad infinitum_, its keys
playing of themselves and the wind blowing into the pipes by its own
inherent force and fancy. What would Science say to such a theory? Yet, it
is precisely in such wise that the materialistic _savants_ tell us that
the Universe was formed, with its millions of beings, and man, its
spiritual crown.

Whatever may have been the real inner thought of Mr. Herbert Spencer, when
writing on the subject of the gradual transformation of species, his words
apply to our doctrine.

Construed in terms of evolution, every kind of being is conceived
as a product of modifications wrought by insensible gradations _on
a preëxisting kind of being_.(781)

Then why, in this case, should not historical man be the product of a
modification on a preëxistent and prehistorical kind of man, even
supposing for argument’s sake that there is _nothing_ within him to last
longer than, or live independently of, his physical structure? But this is
not so! For, when we are told that “organic matters are produced in the
laboratory by what we may literally call _artificial evolution_”(782)—we
answer the distinguished English philosopher, that Alchemists and great
Adepts did as much, and, indeed, far more, before the Chemists ever
attempted to “build out of dissociated elements complex combinations.” The
Homunculi of Paracelsus are a fact in Alchemy, and will become one in
Chemistry very likely, and then Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein’s monster will
have to be regarded as a prophecy. But no Chemist, or Alchemist either,
will ever endow such a monster with more than animal instinct, unless
indeed he does that with which the “Progenitors” are credited, namely,
leave his own Physical Body, and incarnate in the “Empty Form.” But even
this would be an _artificial_, not a natural man, for our “Progenitors”
had, in the course of eternal evolution, to become _Gods_ before they
became Men.

The above digression—if indeed it is one—is an attempt at justification
before the few thinking men of the coming century who may read this.

It also gives the reason why the best and most spiritual men of our
present day can no longer be satisfied with either Science or Theology,
and why they prefer any “psychic craze” to the dogmatic assertions of the
pair, since neither of them, in its infallibility, has anything better to
offer than _blind_ faith. _Universal_ tradition is by far the safer guide
in life. And universal tradition shows Primitive Man living for ages
together with his Creators and first Instructors—the Elohim—in the World’s
“Garden of Eden,” or “Delight.”(783)

45. THE FIRST GREAT WATERS CAME. THEY SWALLOWED THE SEVEN GREAT ISLANDS
(_A_).

46. ALL HOLY SAVED, THE UNHOLY DESTROYED. WITH THEM MOST OF THE HUGE
ANIMALS, PRODUCED FROM THE SWEAT OF THE EARTH (_B_).

(_a_) As this subject—the fourth great Deluge on our Globe in this
Round—is fully treated in the Sections that follow the last Stanza, to say
anything more at present would be a mere anticipation. The seven Great
Islands (Dvîpas) belonged to the Continent of Atlantis. The Secret
Teachings show that the Deluge overtook the Fourth, Giant Race, not on
account of its depravity, or because it had become “black with sin,” but
simply because such is the fate of every Continent, which—like everything
else under our Sun—is born, lives, becomes decrepit, and dies. This was
when the Fifth Race was in its infancy.

(_b_) Thus the Giants perished—the Magicians and the Sorcerers, adds the
fancy of popular tradition. But “all holy saved,” and alone the “unholy”
were “destroyed.” This was due, however, as much to the _prevision_ of the
“holy” ones, who had not lost the use of their Third Eye, as to Karma and
Natural Law. Speaking of the subsequent Race, our Fifth Humanity, the
Commentary says:

_Alone the handful of those Elect, whose Divine Instructors had gone to __
inhabit that Sacred Island—__“__from whence the last Saviour will
come__”__—now kept mankind from becoming one‐half the exterminator of the
other [as mankind is now_—H. P. B.]. _It [mankind] became divided. Two‐
thirds of it were ruled by Dynasties of lower, material Spirits of the
Earth, who took possession of the easily accessible bodies; one‐third
remained faithful, and joined with the nascent Fifth Race—the Divine
Incarnates. When the Poles moved [for the fourth time] this did not affect
those who were protected, and who had separated from the Fourth Race. Like
the Lemurians—alone the ungodly Atlanteans perished, and __“__were seen no
more__”__...!_

Stanza XII. The Fifth Race And Its Divine Instructors.

47. The remnants of the first two Races disappear for ever. Groups
of the various Atlantean races saved from the Deluge along with
the Forefathers of the Fifth. 48. The origins of our present Race,
the Fifth. The first Divine Dynasties. 49. The earliest
glimmerings in history, now pinned to the allegorical chronology
of the _Bible_, and “universal” history slavishly following it.
The nature of the first Instructors and Civilizers of mankind.

47. FEW(784) REMAINED. SOME YELLOW, SOME BROWN AND BLACK, AND SOME RED
REMAINED. THE MOON‐COLOURED(785) WERE GONE FOR EVER (_A_).

48. THE FIFTH(786) PRODUCED FROM THE HOLY STOCK REMAINED; IT WAS RULED
OVER BY THE FIRST DIVINE KINGS.

49. ... THE SERPENTS WHO RE‐DESCENDED, WHO MADE PEACE WITH THE FIFTH,(787)
WHO TAUGHT AND INSTRUCTED IT (_b_)....

(_a_) This Shloka relates to the Fifth Race. History does not begin with
it, but living and ever‐recurring tradition does. History—or what is
called history—does not go back further than the fantastic origins of our
fifth sub‐race, a “few thousands” of years. It is the sub‐divisions of the
first sub‐race of the Fifth Root‐Race which are referred to in the
sentence, “Some yellow, some brown and black, and some red remained.” The
“moon‐coloured”—_i.e._, the First and the Second Races—were gone for ever;
ay, without leaving any traces whatever—and that, so far back as the third
“Deluge” of the Third Lemurian Race, that “Great Dragon,” whose tail
sweeps whole nations out of existence in the twinkling of an eye. And this
is the true meaning of the verse in the Commentary which says:

_The Great Dragon has respect but for the Serpents of Wisdom, the Serpents
whose holes are now under the Triangular Stones._

Or in other words, “the pyramids, at the four corners of the world.”

(_b_) This puts clearly what is mentioned more than once elsewhere in the
Commentaries; namely, that the Adepts or “Wise” men of the Third, Fourth
and Fifth Races dwelt in subterranean habitats, generally under some kind
of pyramidal structure, if not actually under a pyramid. For such
“pyramids” existed in the “four corners of the world” and were never the
monopoly of the land of the Pharaohs, though indeed until they were found
scattered all over the two Americas, under and above ground, beneath and
amidst virgin forests, and also in plain and vale, they were generally
supposed to be the exclusive property of Egypt. If true geometrically
correct pyramids are no longer found in European regions, nevertheless
many of the supposed early neolithic caves, of the colossal triangular
pyramidal and conical “menhirs” in Morbihan, and Brittany generally, many
of the Danish “tumuli” and even of the “giant tombs” of Sardinia with
their inseparable companions, the “nuraghi,” are so many more or less
clumsy copies of the pyramids. Most of these are the works of the first
settlers on the newly‐born continent and isles of Europe, the “some
yellow, some brown and black, and some red” races that remained after the
submersion of the last Atlantean continents and islands, 850,000 years
ago—Plato’s Island excepted—and before the arrival of the great Âryan
races; while others were built by the earliest immigrants from the East.
Those who can hardly accept the placing of the antiquity of the human race
so far back as the 57,000 years, the age assigned by Dr. Dowler to the
skeleton found by him at New Orleans on the banks of the Mississippi,
will, of course, reject these facts. But they may find themselves mistaken
some day. We may disparage the foolish self‐glorification of the Arcadians
who styled themselves “older than the Moon” (προσέληνοι), and of the
people of Attica, who claimed that they had existed before the Sun
appeared in Heaven—but not their undeniable antiquity. Nor can we laugh at
the universal belief that we had giant ancestors. The fact that the bones
of the Mammoth and Mastodon, and, in one case, those of a gigantic
Salamander, have been mistaken for human bones, does not make away with
the difficulty that, of all the Mammalians, man is the only one whom
Science will not allow to have dwarfed down, like all other animal frames,
from the giant Homo Diluvii to the creature between five and six feet that
he is now.

But the “Serpents of Wisdom” have preserved their records well, and the
history of human evolution _is_ traced in Heaven as it is traced on
underground walls. Humanity and the _Stars_ are bound together
indissolubly, because of the _Intelligences_ that rule the latter.

Modern Symbologists may scoff at this and call it “fancy,” but as Mr.
Staniland Wake writes:

It is unquestionable that the Deluge has [ever] been associated in
the legends of some Eastern peoples not only with the Pyramids,
but also with the constellations.(788)

The “Old Dragon” is identical with the “Great Flood,” says Mr. Proctor:

We know that in the past the constellation of the Dragon was at
the pole, or boss, of the celestial sphere. In stellar temples,
... the Dragon would be the uppermost or ruling constellation....
It is singular how closely these constellations ... correspond in
sequence and in range of right ascension with the events recorded
respecting the [Biblical] Flood.(789)

The reasons for this _singularity_, however, have been made abundantly
clear in this work. It only shows that there were _several_ Deluges
confused in the memories and traditions of the sub‐races of the Fifth
Race. The first great Flood was astronomical and cosmical, while several
others were terrestrial. And yet our very learned friend Mr. Gerald
Massey—an initiate truly in the mysteries of the British Museum, still
only a self‐initiate—declared and insisted that the Atlantean Submersion
and Deluge were only the anthropomorphized fancies of ignorant people, and
that Atlantis was no better than an “astronomical allegory.” But the great
zodiacal allegory is based upon historical events, and allegory can hardly
interfere with history; moreover, every student of Occultism knows what
that astronomical and zodiacal allegory means. Dr. Smith shows in the
Nimrod Epic of the Assyrian tablets the real meaning of the allegory.

[Its twelve cantos] refer to the annual course of the Sun through
the twelve months of the year. Each tablet answers to a special
month, and contains a distinct reference to the animal forms in
the signs of the Zodiac; ... [the eleventh canto being]
consecrated to Rimmon, the God of storms and rain, and harmonizes
with the eleventh sign of the Zodiac—Aquarius, or the
Waterman.(790)

But even this is preceded in the old Records by the _pre_‐astronomical
Cosmic Flood, which became allegorized and symbolized in the above
Zodiacal or Noah’s Flood. But this has nothing to do with Atlantis. The
Pyramids are closely connected with the ideas of both the constellation of
the Great Dragon, the “Dragons of Wisdom,” or the great Initiates of the
Third and Fourth Races, and the floods of the Nile, regarded as a divine
reminder of the great Atlantic Flood. The astronomical records of
Universal History, however, are said to have had their beginnings with the
third sub‐race of the Fourth Root‐Race or the Atlanteans. When was it?
Occult data show that even since the time of the regular establishment of
the zodiacal calculations in Egypt, _the poles have been thrice inverted_.

We will presently return again to this statement. Such symbols as are
represented by the Signs of the Zodiac—a fact which offers a handle to
Materialists upon which to hang their one‐sided theories and opinions—have
too profound a signification, and their bearing upon our Humanity is too
important, to suffer dismissal in a few words. Meanwhile, we have to
consider the meaning of the statement, in Shloka 48, concerning the “first
Divine Kings,” who are said to have “redescended,” guided and _instructed_
our Fifth Race after the last Deluge! We shall consider this last claim
historically in the Sections that follow, but must end with a few more
details on the subject of “Serpents.”

The rough commentaries on the Archaic Stanzas have to end here. Further
elucidation requires proofs obtained from ancient, mediæval, and modern
works which have treated of these subjects. All such evidence has now to
be gathered in, collated and brought together in better order, so as to
compel the attention of the reader to this wealth of historical proofs.
And as the manifold meaning of the weird and suggestive symbol (so often
referred to) of the “tempter of man”—in the orthodox light of the
Church—can never be too strongly insisted upon, it seems more advisable to
exhaust the subject by every available proof, at this juncture, even at
the risk of repetition. The Titans and Kabirs have been invariably made
out by our Theologians and some pious Symbologists to be indissolubly
connected with the grotesque personage called the “Devil,” and every proof
which goes against their theory has been hitherto as invariably rejected
and ignored. The Occultist must, therefore, neglect nothing which may tend
to defeat this conspiracy of slander. And so we propose to divide the
subjects involved in these last three Verses into several groups, and to
examine them as carefully and as fully as space permits. A few more
details may thus be added to the general evidences of antiquity, on the
most disputed tenets of Occultism and the Esoteric Doctrine—the bulk of
which, however, will be found in Part II, on Symbology.

Serpents And Dragons Under Different Symbolisms.

The name of the Dragon in Chaldæa was not written phonetically, but was
represented by two monograms, meaning _probably_, according to the
Orientalists, the “scaly one.” “This description,” very pertinently
remarks G. Smith, “of course might apply either to a fabulous dragon, a
serpent, or a fish.” To this we may add that, in one aspect, it applies to
Makara, the tenth Zodiacal Sign, the Sanskrit term for a nondescript
amphibious animal, generally called Crocodile, but really signifying
something else. This, then, is a virtual admission that the
Assyriologists, at all events, know nothing certain as to the status of
the Dragon in ancient Chaldæa. It was from Chaldæa that the Hebrews got
_their_ symbolism, only to be afterwards robbed of it by the Christians,
who made of the “scaly one” a living entity and a maleficent power.

A specimen of Dragons, “winged and scaled,” may be seen in the British
Museum. In this representation of the events of the Fall, according to the
same authority, there are also two figures sitting on each side of a
“tree,” and holding out their hands to the “apple,” while at the back of
the “tree” is the Dragon‐Serpent. Esoterically, the two figures are two
“Chaldees” ready for Initiation, the Serpent symbolizing the Initiator;
while the jealous Gods, who curse the three, are the exoteric profane
clergy. Not much of the literal “biblical event” there, as any Occultist
can see!

“The Great Dragon has respect but for the Serpents of Wisdom,” says the
Stanza; thus proving the correctness of our explanation of the two figures
and the “Serpent.”

“The Serpents who redescended, .... who taught and instructed” the Fifth
Race. What sane man, in our day, is capable of believing that _real_
serpents are hereby meant? Hence the rough guess—now become almost an
axiom with men of Science—that those who in antiquity wrote upon various
sacred Dragons and Serpents were either superstitious and credulous
people, or were bent upon deceiving those more ignorant than themselves.
Yet, from Homer downwards, the term implied something hidden from the
Profane.

“Terrible are the Gods when they manifest themselves”—those _Gods_ whom
men call _Dragons_. And Ælianus, treating in his _De Naturâ Animalium_ of
these ophidian symbols, makes certain remarks which show that he well
understood the nature of these most ancient of symbols. Thus with
reference to the above Homeric verse he most pertinently explains:

For the Dragon, while sacred and to be worshipped, _has within
himself something still more of the divine nature_ of which it is
better [for others?] to remain in ignorance.(791)

The “Dragon” symbol has a septenary meaning, and of these seven meanings,
the highest and the lowest may be given. The highest is identical with the
“Self‐born,” the Logos, the Hindû Aja. With the Christian Gnostics called
the Naasenians, or Serpent‐worshippers, he was the Second Person of the
Trinity, the Son. His symbol was the constellation of the Dragon.(792) Its
seven “Stars” are the seven stars held in the hand of the “Alpha and
Omega” in _Revelation_. In its most terrestrial meaning, the term “Dragon”
was applied to the “Wise” men.

This portion of the religious symbolism of antiquity is very abstruse and
mysterious, and may remain incomprehensible to the profane. In our modern
day it so jars on the Christian ear that, in spite of our boasted
civilization, it can hardly escape being regarded as a direct denunciation
of the most cherished of Christian dogmas. Such a subject required, to do
it justice, the pen and genius of Milton, whose poetical fiction has now
taken root in the Church as a revealed dogma.

Did the allegory of the Dragon and his supposed conqueror in Heaven
originate with St. John, in his _Revelation_? Emphatically we answer—No.
St. John’s “Dragon” is Neptune, the symbol of Atlantean Magic.

In order that we may demonstrate this negation, the reader is asked to
examine the symbolism of the Serpent or the Dragon under its several
aspects.

The Sidereal And Cosmic Glyphs.

Every Astronomer—not to speak of Occultists and Astrologers—knows that,
figuratively speaking, the Astral Light, the Milky Way, and also the Path
of the Sun to the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, as well as the Circles
of the Sidereal or Tropical Year, were always called “Serpents” in the
allegorical and mystic phraseology of the Adepts.

This, cosmically, as well as metaphorically. Poseidon is a “Dragon”—the
Dragon “Chozzar, called by the profane Neptune” according to the Peratæ
Gnostics, the “Good and Perfect Serpent,” the Messiah of the Naaseni,
whose symbol in Heaven is Draco.

But we ought to discriminate between the various characters of this
symbol. Now Zoroastrian Esotericism is identical with that of the Secret
Doctrine, and when an Occultist reads in the _Vendîdâd_ complaints uttered
against the “Serpent,” whose bites have transformed the beautiful, eternal
spring of Airyana Vaêjô, changing it into winter, generating disease and
death, and at the same time mental and psychic consumption—he knows that
the Serpent alluded to is the North Pole, and also the Pole of the
Heavens.(793) These two axes produce the seasons according to their angle
of inclination to each other. The two axes were _no more parallel_; hence
the eternal spring of Airyana Vaêjô “by the good river Dâitya” had
disappeared, and “the Âryan Magi had to emigrate to Sogdiana”—say the
exoteric accounts. But the Esoteric Teaching states that the pole had
passed from the equator, and that the “Land of Bliss” of the Fourth Race,
its inheritance from the Third, had now become the region of desolation
and woe. This alone ought to be an incontrovertible proof of the great
antiquity of the Zoroastrian Scriptures. The Neo‐Âryans of the post‐
diluvian age could, of course, hardly recognize the mountains, on the
summits of which their forefathers had met _before_ the Flood, and
conversed with the pure “Yazatas” or celestial Spirits of the Elements,
whose life and _food_ they had once shared. As shown by Eckstein:

The _Vendîdâd_ seems to point out a great change in the atmosphere
of central Asia; strong volcanic eruptions and the collapse of a
whole range of mountains in the neighbourhood of the Kara‐Korum
chain.(794)

The Egyptians, according to Eusebius, who, for a wonder, once wrote the
truth, symbolized Kosmos by a large fiery circle, with a serpent with a
hawk’s head lying across its diameter.

Here we see the pole of the earth within the plane of the
ecliptic, attended with all the fiery consequences that must arise
from such a state of the heavens: when the whole Zodiac, in 25,000
[odd] years, must have “redden’d with the solar blaze”; and _each
sign must have been vertical_ to the polar region.(795)

Meru, the Abode of the Gods, as explained before, was placed in the North
Pole, while Pâtâla, the Nether Region, was supposed to lie towards the
South. As each symbol in Esoteric Philosophy has _seven_ keys, Meru and
Pâtâla have, geographically, one significance and represent localities,
while, astronomically, they have another, and mean the “two poles”; the
latter meaning led to their being often rendered in _exoteric_
sectarianism as the “Mountain” and the “Pit,” or Heaven and Hell. If we
for the present hold only to the astronomical and geographical
significance, it may be found that the Ancients knew the topography and
nature of the Arctic and Antarctic regions better than any of our modern
Astronomers. They had reasons, and good ones, for naming one the
“Mountain” and the other the “Pit.” As the author just quoted half
explains, Helion and Acheron meant nearly the same. “Heli‐on is the Sun in
his highest,” Heli‐os or Eli‐os meaning the “most high,” and Acheron is 32
degrees above the pole, and 32 below it, the allegorical river being thus
supposed to touch the northern horizon in the latitude of 32 degrees. The
vast concave, that is for ever hidden from our sight and which surrounded
the southern pole, the first astronomers called the Pit, while observing,
toward the northern pole, that a certain circuit in the heavens always
appeared above the horizon—they called it the Mountain. As Meru is the
high abode of the Gods, these were said to _ascend_ and _descend_
periodically; by which (astronomically) the _Zodiacal_ Gods were meant,
the passing of the original north pole of the Earth to the south pole of
the Heaven.

In that age at noon, the ecliptic would be parallel with the
meridian, and part of the Zodiac would descend from the north pole
to the north horizon; crossing the _eight coils of the serpent_
[eight sidereal years, or over 200,000 solar years], which would
seem like an imaginary _ladder_ with _eight staves_ reaching from
the earth up to the pole, _i.e._, the throne of Jove. Up this
ladder, then, the Gods, _i.e._, the Signs of the Zodiac, ascended
and descended. [Jacob’s ladder and the Angels] .... It is more
than 400,000 years since the Zodiac formed the sides of this
ladder.(796)

This is an ingenious explanation, even if it is not altogether free from
Occult heresy. Yet it is nearer the truth than many of a more scientific
and especially theological character. As said, the Christian Trinity was
purely astronomical from its beginning. This it was which made Rutilius
say of those who euhemerized it: “_Judæa gens, radix stultorum_.”

But the profane, and especially Christian fanatics who are ever in search
of scientific corroboration for their dead‐letter texts, persist in seeing
in the Celestial Pole the true Serpent of _Genesis_, Satan, the enemy of
mankind; whereas it is really—a cosmic metaphor. When the Gods are said to
forsake the Earth, it means not only the Gods, the Protectors and
Instructors, but also the _minor_ Gods—the Regents of the Zodiacal Signs.
The former, as actual and existing Entities which gave birth to, nursed,
and instructed Mankind in its early youth, appear in every Scripture, in
that of the Zoroastrians as well as in the Hindû Gospels. Ormazd, or Ahura
Mazda, the “Lord of Wisdom,” is the synthesis of the Amshaspands, or
Amesha Spentas, the “Immortal Benefactors,”(797) the “Word,” or the Logos,
and its six highest aspects in Mazdeanism. These “Immortal Benefactors”
are described in _Zamyad Yasht_ as:

The Amesha Spentas, the shining, having efficacious eyes, great,
helpful ... imperishable and pure ... which are all seven of like
mind, like speech, all seven doing alike ... which are _the
creators and destroyers of the creatures_ of Ahura Mazda, their
creators and overseers, their protectors and rulers.

These few lines are sufficient to indicate the dual and even the triple
character of the Amshaspands, our Dhyân Chohans or the “Serpents of
Wisdom.” They are identical with, and yet separate from Ormazd (Ahura
Mazda). They are also the Angels of the Stars of the Christians—the Star‐
Yazatas of the Zoroastrians—or again the seven Planets (including the Sun)
of every religion.(798) The epithet, “the shining, having efficacious
eyes,” proves it. This on the physical and sidereal planes. On the
spiritual, they are the Divine Powers of Ahura Mazda; but on the astral or
psychic plane again, they are the “Builders,” the “Watchers,” the Pitris,
or Fathers, and the first Preceptors of Mankind.

When mortals have become sufficiently spiritualized, there will be no more
need of _forcing_ them into a correct comprehension of ancient Wisdom. Men
will _know_ then, that there never yet was a great World‐reformer whose
name has passed into our generation, who (_a_) was not a direct emanation
of the Logos (under whatever name known to us) _i.e._, an _essential_
incarnation of one of the “Seven,” of the “Divine Spirit who is
sevenfold”; and (_b_) who had not appeared before, in past Cycles. They
will recognize, then, the cause which produces certain riddles of the
ages, in both history and chronology; the reason, for instance, why it is
impossible _for them_ to assign any reliable date to Zoroaster, who is
found multiplied by twelve and fourteen in the _Dabistan_; why the numbers
and individualities of the Rishis and Manus are so mixed up; why Krishna
and Buddha speak of themselves as reïncarnations, Krishna identifying
himself with the Rishi Nârâyana, and Gautama giving a series of his
previous births; and why the former, especially, being “the _very supreme_
Brahmâ,” is yet called Anshânshâvatâra—“a part of a part” only of the
Supreme on Earth; finally, why Osiris is a Great God, and at the same time
a “Prince on Earth,” who reäppears in Thoth Hermes; and why Jesus (in
Hebrew, Joshua) of Nazareth is recognized, kabalistically, in Joshua, the
son of Nun, as well as in other personages. The Esoteric Doctrine explains
all this by saying that each of these, as also many others, had first
appeared on Earth as one of the Seven Powers of the Logos, individualized
as a God or Angel (Messenger); then, mixed with Matter, they had
reäppeared in turn as great Sages and Instructors who “taught” the Fifth
Race, after having instructed the two preceding Races, had ruled during
the Divine Dynasties, and had finally sacrificed themselves, to be reborn
under various circumstances for the good of Mankind, and for its salvation
at certain critical periods; until in their last incarnations they had
become truly only the “parts of a part” on Earth, though _de facto_ the
One Supreme in Nature.

This is the metaphysics of Theogony. Now every “Power” among the Seven,
once he is individualized, has in his charge one of the elements of
creation, and rules over it;(799) hence the many meanings in every symbol.
These, unless interpreted according to the Esoteric methods, generally
lead to inextricable confusion.

Does the Western Kabalist, who is generally an opponent of the Eastern
Occultist, require a proof? Let him open Éliphas Lévi’s _Histoire de la
Magie_,(800) and carefully examine his “Grand Symbole Kabbalistique” from
the _Zohar_. He will find there, in the engraving, a development of the
“interlaced triangles,” a _white_ man above and a _black_ woman below
reversed, the legs passing under the extended arms of the male figure, and
protruding behind the shoulders, while their hands join at an angle on
each side. Éliphas Lévi makes of this symbol, God and Nature; or God,
“Light,” mirrored inversely in Nature and Matter, “Darkness.”
Kabalistically and symbolically he is right; but only so far as
emblematical cosmogony goes. Neither has he invented the symbol, nor have
the Kabalists. The two figures in white and black stone have existed in
the temples of Egypt from time immemorial, agreeably to tradition, and
historically‐ever since the day of King Cambyses, who personally saw them.
Therefore the symbol must have been in existence for nearly 2,500 years.
This, at the very least, for Cambyses, who was a son of Cyrus the Great,
succeeded his father in the year 529 B.C. These figures were the two
Kabiri personifying the _opposite poles_. Herodotus(801) tells posterity
that when Cambyses entered the temple of the Kabirim, he burst into an
inextinguishable fit of laughter, on perceiving what he thought to be a
man erect and a woman standing on the top of her head before him. These
were the poles, however, whose symbol was intended to commemorate “the
passing of the original north pole of the earth to the south pole of the
heaven,” as perceived by Mackey.(802) But they also represented the poles
_inverted_, in consequence of the great inclination of the axis, which
each time resulted in the displacement of the oceans, the submersion of
the polar lands, and the consequent upheaval of new continents in the
equatorial regions, and _vice versâ_. These Kabirim were the “Deluge”
Gods.

This may help us to get at the key of the seemingly hopeless confusion
among the numbers of names and titles given to one and the same Gods, and
classes of Gods. Faber, at the beginning of this century, showed the
identity of the Corybantes, Curetes, Dioscuri, Anactes, Dii Magni, Idei,
Dactyli, Lares, Penates, Manes,(803) Titans, and Aletæ with the Kabiri.
And we have shown that the latter were the same as the Manus, the Rishis,
and our Dhyân Chohans who incarnated in the Elect of the Third and Fourth
Races. Thus, while in Theogony the Kabiri‐Titans were seven Great Gods,
cosmically and astronomically the Titans were called Atlantes, because,
perhaps, as Faber says, they were connected with _at‐al‐as_, the “divine
sun,” and with _tit_, the “deluge.” But this, if true, is only the
exoteric version. Esoterically, the meaning of their symbols depends on
the appellation, or title, used. The seven mysterious, awe‐inspiring Great
Gods—the Dioscuri,(804) the deities surrounded with the darkness of Occult
Nature—become the Idei Dactyli, or Ideic “Fingers,” with the Adept‐healers
by metals. The true etymology of the name Lares, now signifying “Ghosts,”
must be sought in the Etruscan word _lars_, “conductor,” “leader.”
Sanchuniathon translates the word Aletæ as “fire worshippers,” and Faber
believes it to be derived from _al‐orit_, the “God of fire.” Both are
right, for in both cases it is a reference to the Sun, the “highest” God,
toward whom the Planetary Gods “gravitate” (astronomically and
allegorically), and whom they worship. As Lares, they are truly the Solar
Deities, though Faber’s etymology, that “Lar is a contraction of El‐Ar,
the solar deity,”(805) is not very correct. They are the Lares, the
Conductors and Leaders of men. As Aletæ, they were the seven
Planets—astronomically; and as Lares, the Regents of these Planets, our
Protectors and Rulers—mystically. For purposes of exoteric or phallic
worship, and also cosmically, they were the Kabiri, whose attributes and
dual capacities were denoted by the names of the temples to which they
respectively belonged, and also by those of their priests. They all
belonged, however, to the septenary creative and informing groups of Dhyân
Chohans. The Sabæans, who worshipped the “Regents of the Seven Planets”
just as the Hindûs worship their Rishis, held Seth and his son Hermes
(Enoch or Enos) as the highest among the Planetary Gods. Seth and Enos
were borrowed from the Sabæans and then disfigured by the Jews
(exoterically); but the truth about them can still be discovered even in
_Genesis_.(806) Seth is the “Progenitor” of those early men of the Third
Race in whom the Planetary Angels had incarnated; he was himself a Dhyân
Chohan and belonged to the _informing_ Gods, and Enos (Hanoch or Enoch),
or Hermes, was said to be his _son_—Enos being a generic name for all the
early “Seers” (Enoïchion). Thence the worship. The Arabic writer Soyuti
says that the earliest records mention Seth, or Set, as the founder of
Sabaism, and that the pyramids which embody the planetary system were
regarded as the place of sepulchre of both Seth and Idrus (Hermes or
Enoch);(807) that thither Sabæans proceeded on pilgrimage, and chanted
prayers _seven times_ a day, _turning to the North_ (Mount Meru, Kaph,
Olympus, etc.).(808) Abd Allatif also tells us some curious things about
the Sabæans and their books. So also does Eddin Ahmed Ben Yahya, who wrote
200 years later. While the latter maintains “that each pyramid was
consecrated to a _star_” (a Star _Regent_ rather), Abd Allatif assures us
that he had read in ancient Sabæan books that “one pyramid was the tomb of
Agathodæmon and the other of Hermes”:(809)

Agathodæmon was none other than Seth, and, according to some
writers, Hermes was his son,

adds Mr. Staniland Wake in _The Great Pyramid_.(810)

Thus, while in Samothrace and the oldest Egyptian temples the Kabiri were
the Great Cosmic Gods—the Seven and the _Forty‐nine_ Sacred Fires—in the
Grecian fanes their rites became mostly phallic, and therefore, to the
profane, obscene. In the latter case they were three and four, or
seven—the male and female principles—the _crux ansata_. This division
shows why some classical writers held that they were only three, while
others named four. And these were Axieros (in his female aspect Demeter);
Axiokersa (Persephone);(811) Axiokersos (Pluto or Hades); and Kadmos or
Kasmilos (Hermes—not the ithyphallic Hermes mentioned by Herodotus,(812)
but “he of the sacred legend,” which was explained only during the
Samothracian Mysteries). This identification, which is due, according to
the Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius,(813) to an indiscretion of Mnaseas,
is really no identification at all, as names alone do not reveal
much.(814) Others again have maintained, being equally right in their way,
that there were only two Kabiri. These were, esoterically, the two
Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, and exoterically, Jupiter and Bacchus. These
two personified the terrestrial poles, geodesically; the terrestrial pole,
and the pole of the heavens, astronomically; and also the physical and the
spiritual man. The story of Semele and Jupiter and the birth of Bacchus,
Bimater, with all the circumstances attending it, needs only to be read
esoterically for the understanding of the allegory. The parts played in
the event by the Fire, Water, Earth, etc., in the many versions, will show
how the “Father of the Gods” and the “merry God of Wine” were also made to
personify the two terrestrial poles. The telluric, metalline, magnetic,
electric and the fiery elements are all so many allusions and references
to the cosmic and astronomic character of the diluvian tragedy. In
Astronomy, the poles are indeed the “heavenly measure”; and so are the
Kabiri‐Dioscuri, as will be shown, and the Kabiri‐Titans, to whom Diodorus
ascribes the “invention of Fire”(815) and the art of manufacturing iron.
Moreover, Pausanias(816) shows that the original Kabiric deity was
Prometheus.

But the fact that, astronomically, the Titan‐Kabirim were also the
Generators and Regulators of the Seasons, and, cosmically, the great
Volcanic Energies—the Gods presiding over all the metals and terrestrial
works—does not prevent them from being, in their original divine
characters, the beneficent Entities who, symbolized in Prometheus, brought
light to the world, and endowed Humanity with intellect and reason. They
are preëminently in every Theogony—especially in the Hindû—the Sacred
Divine Fires, Three, Seven, or Forty‐nine, according as the allegory
demands it. Their very names prove it, for they are the Agni‐putra, or
Sons of the Fire, in India, and the Genii of the Fire under numerous names
in Greece and elsewhere. Welcker, Maury, and now Decharme, show the name
_kabeiros_ meaning “the powerful through fire,” from the Greek καίω “to
burn.” The Semitic word _kabirim_ contains the idea of “the powerful, the
mighty, and the great,” answering to the Greek μεγάλοι, δυνατοί, but these
are later epithets. These Gods were universally worshipped, and their
origin is lost in the night of time. Yet whether propitiated in Phrygia,
Phœnicia, the Troad, Thrace, Egypt, Lemnos or Sicily, their cult was
always connected with Fire, their temples ever built in the most volcanic
localities, and in exoteric worship they belonged to the Chthonian
Divinities, and therefore has Christianity made of them _Infernal_ Gods.

They are truly “the great, beneficent and powerful Gods,” as Cassius
Hermone calls them.(817) At Thebes, Core and Demeter, the Kabirim, had a
sanctuary,(818) and at Memphis, the Kabiri had a temple so sacred, that
none, excepting the priests, were suffered to enter its holy
precincts.(819) But we must not, at the same time, lose sight of the fact
that the title of Kabiri was generic; that the Kabiri, the mighty Gods as
well as mortals, were of both sexes, and also terrestrial, celestial and
cosmic; that while, in their later capacity of rulers of sidereal and
terrestrial powers, a purely geological phenomenon—as it is now
regarded—was symbolized in the persons of those rulers, they were also, in
the beginning of times, the Rulers of Mankind, when, incarnated as Kings
of the “Divine Dynasties,” they gave the first impulse to civilization,
and directed the mind with which they had endued men, to the invention and
perfection of all the arts and sciences. Thus the Kabiri are said to have
appeared as the benefactors of men, and as such they lived for ages in the
memory of nations. To these Kabiri or Titans is ascribed the invention of
letters (the Deva‐nâgari, or alphabet and language of the Gods), of laws
and legislature, of architecture, as also of the various modes of magic,
so‐called, and of the medical use of plants. Hermes, Orpheus, Cadmus,
Asclepius, all those Demi‐gods and Heroes, to whom is ascribed the
revelation of sciences to men, and in whom Bryant, Faber, Bishop
Cumberland, and so many other Christian writers—too zealous for plain
truth—would force posterity to see only Pagan copies of one sole
prototype, named Noah—all are generic names.

It is the Kabiri who are credited with having revealed the great boon of
agriculture, by _producing_ corn or wheat. What Isis‐Osiris, the once
living Kabiria, did in Egypt, that Ceres is said to have done in Sicily;
they all belong to one class.

That serpents were ever emblems of wisdom and prudence is again shown by
the Caduceus of Mercury, one with Thot, the God of Wisdom, with Hermes,
and so on. The two serpents, entwined round the rod, are phallic symbols
of Jupiter and other Gods who transformed themselves into snakes for
purposes of seducing Goddesses—only in the unclean fancies of profane
Symbologists. The serpent has ever been the symbol of the Adept, and of
his powers of immortality and divine knowledge. Mercury, in his
psychopompic character, conducting and guiding the souls of the dead to
Hades with his Caduceus and even raising them to life with it, is a simple
and very transparent allegory. It shows the dual power of the Secret
Wisdom: black and white Magic. It shows this personified Wisdom guiding
the Soul after death, and displaying the power of calling to life that
which is dead—a very deep metaphor if one but thinks over its meaning. All
the peoples of antiquity, with one exception, reverenced this symbol; the
exception being the Christians, who chose to forget the “brazen serpent”
of Moses, and even the implied acknowledgment of the great wisdom and
prudence of the “serpent” by Jesus himself, “Be ye _wise_ as serpents and
harmless as doves.” The Chinese, one of the oldest nations of our Fifth
Race, made of it the emblem of their Emperors, who are thus the degenerate
successors of the “Serpents” or Initiates, who ruled the early races of
the Fifth Humanity. The Emperor’s throne is the “Dragon’s Seat,” and his
dresses of State are embroidered with the likeness of the Dragon. The
aphorisms in the oldest books of China, moreover, say plainly that the
Dragon is a human, albeit _divine_, Being. Speaking of the “Yellow
Dragon,” the chief of the others, the _Twan‐ying‐t’u_ says:

His wisdom and virtue are unfathomable ... he does not go in
company and does not live in herds [he is an ascetic].... He
wanders in the wilds beyond the heavens. He goes and comes,
fulfilling the decree [Karma]; at the proper seasons if there is
perfection he comes forth, if not he remains [invisible].

And Lü‐lan asserts that Confucius said:

The Dragon feeds in the pure (water) [of Wisdom] and disports in
the clear (water) [of Life].(820)

Our Divine Instructors.

Now Atlantis and the Phlegyan Isle are not the only records left of the
Deluge. China has also her tradition and the story of an island or
continent, which it calls Ma‐li‐ga‐si‐ma, and which Kæmpfer and Faber
spell “Maurigasima,” for some mysterious phonetic reasons of their own.
Kæmpfer, in his _Japan_,(821) gives the tradition: The island, owing to
the iniquity of its giants, sinks to the bottom of the ocean, and Peiruun,
the king, the Chinese Noah, escapes alone with his family owing to a
warning of the Gods through two idols. It is that pious prince and his
descendants who have peopled China. The Chinese traditions speak of the
Divine Dynasties of Kings as frequently as do those of any other nation.

At the same time there is not an old fragment but shows belief in a
multiform and even multigeneric evolution of human beings—spiritual,
psychic, intellectual, and physical—just as is described in the present
work. A few of these claims have now to be considered.

Our races—they all show—have sprung from Divine Races, by whatever name
the latter may be called. Whether we deal with the Indian Rishis or
Pitris; with the Chinese Chim‐nang and Tchan‐gy—their “Divine Man” and
Demi‐gods; with the Akkadian Dingir and Mul‐lil—the Creative God and the
“Gods of the Ghost‐world”; with the Egyptian Isis‐Osiris and Thot; with
the Hebrew Elohim; or again with Manco‐Capac and his Peruvian progeny—the
story varies nowhere. Every nation has either the _seven_ and _ten_ Rishi‐
Manus and Prajâpatis; the seven and ten Ki‐y; or _ten_ and _seven_
Amshaspands(822) (six exoterically); ten and seven Chaldæan Annedoti; ten
and seven Sephiroth, etc. One and all have been derived from the primitive
Dhyân Chohans of the Esoteric Doctrine, or the “Builders” of the Stanzas
of Volume I. From Manu, Thot‐Hermes, Oannes‐Dagon, and Edris‐Enoch, down
to Plato Panodorus, all tell us of seven Divine Dynasties, of seven
Lemurian, and seven Atlantean divisions of the Earth; of the seven
primitive and dual Gods who descend from their Celestial Abode(823) and
reign on Earth, teaching mankind Astronomy, Architecture, and all the
other sciences that have come down to us. These Beings appear first as
Gods and Creators; then they merge in nascent man, to finally emerge as
“Divine Kings and Rulers.” But this fact has been gradually forgotten. As
Basnage shows, the Egyptians themselves confessed that Science had
flourished in their country only since the time of Isis‐Osiris, whom they
continued to adore as Gods, “though they had become princes in human
form.” And he adds of the Divine Androgyne:

It is said that this prince [Isis‐Osiris] built cities in Egypt,
stopped the overflowing of the Nile; invented agriculture, the use
of the vine, music, astronomy, and geometry.

When Abul Feda, in his _Historia Anteïslamitica_,(824) says that the
“Sabæan language” was established by Seth and Edris (Enoch)—he means
Astronomy. In the _Melelwa Nahil_,(825) Hermes is called the disciple of
Agathodæmon. And in another account,(826) Agathodæmon is mentioned as a
“King of Egypt.” The _Celepas Geraldinus_ gives us some curious traditions
about Henoch, who is called the “Divine Giant.” In his _Book of the
Various Names of the Nile_, the historian Ahmed Ben Yusouf Eltiphas tells
us of the belief among the Semitic Arabs that Seth, who became later the
Egyptian Typhon, Set, had been one of the Seven Angels, or Patriarchs, in
the _Bible_; then he became a mortal and Adam’s son, after which he
communicated the gift of prophecy and astronomical science to Jared, who
passed it to his son Henoch. But Henoch (Idris), “the author of thirty
books,” was “Sabæan by origin”—_i.e._, belonged to the Saba, “a Host”:

Having established the rites and ceremonies of primitive worship,
he went to the East, where he constructed one hundred and forty
cities, of which Edessa was the least important, then returned to
Egypt where he became its King.(827)

Thus, he is identified with Hermes. But there were five Hermes—or rather
one, who appeared, as did some Manus and Rishis, in several different
characters. In the _Burham i Kati_, he is mentioned as Hormig, a name of
the Planet Mercury or Budha; and Wednesday was sacred both to Hermes and
Thot.(828) The Hermes of Oriental tradition was worshipped by the
Phineatæ, and is said to have fled after the death of Argus into Egypt,
and civilized it under the name of Thoth.(829) But under whichever of
these characters, he is always credited with having transferred all the
sciences from _latent to active potency_, _i.e._, with having been the
first to teach Magic to Egypt and to Greece, before the days of Magna
Græcia, and when the Greeks were not even Hellenes.

Not only does Herodotus, the “father of history,” tell us of the
marvellous Dynasties of Gods that preceded the reign of mortals, followed
by the Dynasties of Demi‐gods, Heroes, and finally men, but the whole
series of classical authors support him. Diodorus, Eratosthenes, Plato,
Manetho, etc., repeat the same story, and never vary in the order given.

As Creuzer shows:

It is, indeed, from the spheres of the stars wherein dwell the
gods of light, that wisdom descends to the inferior spheres.... In
the system of the ancient priests [Hierophants and Adepts] all
things without exception, Gods, Genii, Souls [Manes], the whole
world, are conjointly developed in space and duration. The pyramid
may be considered as the symbol of this magnificent hierarchy of
spirits.(830)

It is the modern historians—French Academicians, like Renan, chiefly—who
have made more efforts to suppress truth by ignoring the ancient annals of
Divine Kings, than is strictly consistent with honesty. But M. Renan could
never have been more unwilling than was Eratosthenes (260 B.C.) to accept
the unpalatable fact; and yet the latter found himself obliged to
recognize its truth. For this, the great Astronomer is treated with much
contempt by his colleagues 2,000 years later. Manetho becomes with them “a
superstitious priest born and bred in the atmosphere of other lying
priests of Heliopolis.” As the Demonologist De Mirville justly remarks:

All those historians and priests, so _veracious_ when repeating
stories of _human_ kings and men, suddenly become _extremely
suspicious_ no sooner do they go back _to their gods_.

But there is the synchronistic table of Abydos, which, thanks to the
genius of Champollion, has now vindicated the good faith of the priests of
Egypt (of Manetho above all), and of Ptolemy, in the Turin papyrus, the
most remarkable of all. In the words of the Egyptologist, De Rougé:

Champollion, struck with amazement, found that he had under his
own eyes the remains of a list of Dynasties embracing the furthest
mythic times, or the _Reigns of the Gods and Heroes_.... At the
very beginning of this curious papyrus we have to arrive at the
conviction that, so far back as even the period of Ramses, these
mythic and heroical traditions were just as Manetho had
transmitted them to us; we see figuring in them, as Kings of
Egypt, the Gods Seb, Osiris, Set, Horus, Thoth‐Hermes, and the
Goddess Ma, a long period of centuries being assigned to the reign
of each of these.(831)

These synchronistic tables, besides the fact that they were disfigured by
Eusebius for dishonest purposes, had never gone beyond Manetho. The
chronology of the Divine Kings and Dynasties, like that of the age of
humanity, has ever been in the hands of the priests, and kept secret from
the profane multitudes.

Now though Africa, as a continent, it is said, appeared before that of
Europe, nevertheless it came up later than Lemuria and even the earliest
Atlantis. The whole region of what is now Egypt and the deserts was once
upon a time covered with the sea. This was made known, firstly, by
Herodotus, Strabo, Pliny, and others, and, secondly, through Geology.
Abyssinia was once upon a time an island, and the Delta was the first
country occupied by the pioneer emigrants who came with their Gods from
the north‐east.

When was it? History is silent upon the subject. Fortunately we have the
Dendera Zodiac, the planisphere on the ceiling of one of the oldest
Egyptian temples, to record the fact. This Zodiac, with its mysterious
three Virgos between Leo and Libra, has found its Œdipus to understand the
riddle of its signs, and justify the truthfulness of those priests who
told Herodotus, that their Initiates taught (_a_) that the poles of the
Earth and the Ecliptic had formerly coincided, and (_b_) that even since
their first Zodiacal records were commenced, the Poles have been three
times within the plane of the Ecliptic.

Bailly had not sufficient words at command to express his surprise at the
_sameness_ of all such traditions about the Divine Races, and exclaims:

What are finally all those reigns of Indian Devas and [Persian]
Peris; or, those reigns of the Chinese legends; those Tien‐hoang
or the Kings of Heaven, quite distinct from the Ti‐hoang, or Kings
on Earth, and the Gin‐hoang, the King men, distinctions which are
in perfect accord with those of the Greeks and Egyptians, in
enumerating their Dynasties of Gods, of Demi‐gods and
Mortals.(832)

As says Panodorus:

Now, it is during these thousand years [before the Deluge], that
the _Reign of the Seven Gods_ who rule the world took place. It
was during that period that those benefactors of humanity
_descended_ on Earth and taught men to calculate the course of the
sun and moon by the twelve signs of the Ecliptic.(833)

Nearly five hundred years before the present era, the priests of Egypt
showed Herodotus the statues of their human Kings and Pontiffs‐Piromis—the
Arch‐prophets or Mahâ Chohans of the temples, _born one from the other_,
without the intervention of woman—who had reigned before Menes, their
first _human_ King. These statues, he says, were enormous colossi in wood,
three hundred and forty‐five in number, _each of which had its name,
history and annals_. They also assured Herodotus—unless the most truthful
of historians, the “father of history,” is now to be accused of fibbing,
_just in this instance_—that no historian could ever understand or write
an account of these superhuman Kings, unless he had studied and learned
the history of the _three_ Dynasties that preceded the human—namely, the
Dynasties of the Gods, of the Demi‐gods, and of the Heroes, or
Giants.(834) These “three” Dynasties are the three Races.

Translated into the language of the Esoteric Doctrine, these three
Dynasties would also be those of the Devas, of the Kimpurushas, and of the
Dânavas and Daityas—otherwise Gods, Celestial Spirits, and Giants or
Titans. “Happy are those who are born, even from the condition of Gods, as
men in Bhârata‐varsha!”—exclaim the incarnated Gods themselves, during the
Third Root‐Race. Bhârata is generally India, but in this case it
symbolizes the Chosen Land of those days, which was considered the best of
the divisions of Jambu‐dvîpa, as it was the land of active (spiritual)
works _par excellence_; the land of Initiation and of Divine
Knowledge.(835)

Can one fail to recognize in Creuzer great powers of intuition, when,
although he was almost unacquainted with the Âryan Hindû philosophies,
which were but little known in his day, we find him writing:

We modern Europeans feel surprised when hearing talk of the
Spirits of the Sun, Moon, etc. But we repeat again, _the natural
good sense and the upright judgment_ of the ancient peoples, quite
foreign to our _entirely material_ ideas of mechanics and physical
sciences ... could not see in the stars and planets nothing but
simple masses of light, or opaque bodies moving in circuits in
sidereal space, merely according to the laws of attraction or
repulsion; they saw in them _living_ bodies, _animated_ by spirits
as they saw the same in every kingdom of nature.... _This doctrine
of spirits, so consistent and conformable to nature_, from which
it was derived, formed a grand and unique conception, wherein the
physical, the moral, and the political aspects were all blended
together.(836)

It is such a conception only that can lead man to form a correct
conclusion about his origin and the genesis of everything in the
Universe—of Heaven and Earth, between which he is a living link. Without
such a psychological link, and the feeling of its presence, no Science can
ever progress, and the realm of knowledge must be limited to the analysis
of physical matter only.

Occultists believe in “spirits,” because they _feel_—and some
see—themselves surrounded by them on every side.(837) Materialists do not.
They live on this Earth, just as some creatures, in the world of insects
and even of fishes, live surrounded by myriads of their own genus, without
seeing, or so much as sensing them.(838)

Plato is the first sage among classical writers who speaks at length of
the Divine Dynasties. He locates them on a vast continent which he calls
Atlantis. Nor was Bailly the first or last to believe this. He had been
preceded and anticipated in this theory by Father Kircher, the learned
Jesuit, who in his _Œdipus Ægyptiacus_, writes:

I confess, for a long time I had regarded all this [the Dynasties
and Atlantis] as pure fables (_meras nugas_) to the day when,
better instructed in Oriental languages, I judged that all those
legends must be, after all, only the development of a great
truth.(839)

As De Rougemont shows, Theopompus, in his _Meropis_, made the priests of
Phrygia and Asia Minor speak exactly as did the priests of Saïs when they
revealed to Solon the history and fate of Atlantis. According to
Theopompus, it was a unique continent of an indefinite size, containing
two countries inhabited by two races—a fighting, warrior race, and a
pious, meditative race(840)—which Theopompus symbolizes by two
cities.(841) The pious “city” was _continually visited by the Gods_: the
belligerent “city” was inhabited by various beings _invulnerable_ by iron,
who could be _mortally wounded_ only by stone and wood.(842) De Rougemont
treats this as a pure _fiction_ of Theopompus and even sees a fraud
(_supercherie_) in the assertion of the Saïtic priests. This was denounced
by the Demonologists as illogical. In the ironical words of De Mirville:

A _supercherie_ which was based on a belief, the product of the
faith of the whole of antiquity; a _supposition_ which yet gave
its name to a whole mountain chain (Atlas); which specified with
the greatest precision a topographical region (by placing this
land at a small distance from Cadiz and the Strait of Calpe),
which prophesied, 2,000 years before Columbus, _the great
transoceanic land_ situated beyond that Atlantis and which “is
reached,” it said, “by the Islands not of the Blessed, but of the
Good Spirits,” εὐδαιμόνια (our Îles Fortunées)—such a supposition
can well be nothing else but a _universal chimera_!(843)

It is certain that, whether “chimera” or reality, the priests of the whole
world had it from one and the same source—the universal tradition about
the third great Continent which perished some 850,000 years ago,(844) a
Continent inhabited by two distinct races, distinct physically and
especially morally, both deeply versed in primeval wisdom and the secrets
of nature, and mutually antagonistic in their struggle, during the course
and progress of their double evolution. For whence even the Chinese
teachings upon the subject, if it is but a “fiction”? Have they not
recorded the existence once upon a time of a _Holy_ Island beyond the sun,
Tcheou, beyond which were situated the lands of _Immortal_ Men?(845) Do
they not still believe that the remnants of those Immortal Men—who
survived when the Holy Island became black with sin and perished—have
found refuge in the great Desert of Gobi, where they still reside,
invisible to all and defended from approach by hosts of Spirits?

As the very unbelieving Boulanger writes:

If one has to lend ear to traditions, the latter place before the
reign of Kings, that of the Heroes and Demi‐gods; and still
earlier beyond they place the marvellous reign of the Gods and all
the fables of the Golden Age.... One feels surprised that annals
so interesting should have been rejected by almost all our
historians. And yet the ideas presented by them were once
universally admitted and revered by all nations; not a few revere
them still, making them the basis of their daily life. Such
considerations seem to necessitate a less hurried judgment.... The
ancients, from whom we hold these traditions, which _we accept no
longer because we no longer understand them_, must have had
motives for believing in them, furnished by their greater
proximity to the first ages, which the distance that separates us
from them refuses to us.... Plato in the fourth book of his
_Laws_, says that, long before the construction of the first
cities, Saturn had established on earth a _certain_ form of
government under which man was very happy. Now as it is the Golden
Age he refers to, or to that reign of Gods so celebrated in
ancient fables, ... let us see the ideas he had of that happy age,
and what was the occasion he had to introduce this _fable_ into a
treatise on politics. According to Plato, in order to obtain clear
and precise ideas on royalty, its origin and power, one has to
turn back to the first principles of history and tradition. Great
changes, he says, have occurred in days of old, _in heaven and on
earth_, and the present state of things is one of the results
[Karma]. Our traditions tell us of many marvels, of changes that
have taken place in the course of the sun, of Saturn’s reign, and
of a thousand other matters that remain scattered in human memory;
but _one never hears anything of the evil which has produced these
revolutions, nor of the evil which directly followed them_. Yet
... that Evil is the principle one has to talk about, to be able
to treat of royalty and the origin of power.(846)

That Evil, Plato seems to see in the sameness or consubstantiality of the
natures of the rulers and the ruled, for he says that long before man
built his cities, in the Golden Age, there was naught but happiness on
Earth, for there were no needs. Why? Because Saturn, knowing that man
could not rule man, without injustice forthwith filling the universe
through his whims and vanity, would not allow any mortal to obtain power
over his fellow creatures. To do this the God used the same means we
ourselves use with regard to our flocks. We do not place a bullock or a
ram over our bullocks and rams, but give them a leader, a shepherd,
_i.e._, _a being of a species quite different from their own and of a
superior nature_. This is just what Saturn did. He loved mankind and
placed to rule over it no mortal king or prince but—“Spirits and Genii
(δαίμονες) of a divine nature more excellent than that of man.”

It was God (the Logos, the Synthesis of the Host), who thus presiding over
the Genii became the first Shepherd and Leader of men.(847) When the world
had ceased to be so governed and the Gods retired, ferocious beasts
devoured a portion of mankind. Left to their own resources and industry,
Inventors then appeared among them successively and discovered fire,
wheat, wine; and public gratitude deified them.(848)

And mankind was right, as fire by friction was the first mystery of
nature, the first and chief property of matter that was revealed to man.

As say the Commentaries:

_Fruits and grain, unknown to Earth to that day, were brought by the
__“__Lords of Wisdom,__”__ for the benefit of those they ruled from other
Lokas [Spheres]._

Now:

The earliest inventions [?] of mankind are the most wonderful that
the race has ever made.... The _first use of fire_, and the
discovery of the methods by which it can be kindled; the
domestication of animals; and, above all, _the processes by which
the various cereals were first developed_ out of some wild grasses
[?]—these are all _discoveries with which, in ingenuity and in
importance, no subsequent discoveries may compare_. They are all
unknown to history—all lost in the light of an _effulgent
dawn_.(849)

This will be doubted and denied in our proud generation. But if it be
asserted that there are no grains and fruits _unknown to earth_, then we
may remind the reader _that wheat has never been found in the wild state;
it is not a product of the earth_. All the other cereals have been traced
to their primogenital forms in various species of wild grasses, but wheat
has hitherto defied the efforts of Botanists to trace it to its origin.
And let us bear in mind, in this connection, how sacred was this cereal
with the Egyptian priests; wheat was placed even in their mummies, and has
been found thousands of years later in their coffins. Remember how the
servants of Horus glean the wheat in the field of Aanroo, wheat _seven
cubits high_.(850)

Says the Egyptian Isis:

I am the Queen of these regions; I was the first to reveal to
mortals the mysteries of wheat and corn.... I am she who rises in
the constellation of the Dog.... Rejoice, O Egypt! thou who wert
my nurse.(851)

Sirius was called the Dog‐star. It was the star of Mercury or Budha,
called the great Instructor of Mankind.

The Chinese _Y‐King_ attributes the discovery of agriculture to “the
instruction given to men by celestial genii.”

Woe, woe to the men who know nought, observe nought, nor will they
see. They are all blind,(852) since they remain ignorant how full
the world is of various and invisible creatures which crowd even
in the most sacred places.(853)

The “Sons of God” _have_ existed and _do_ exist. From the Hindû
Brahmaputras and Mânasaputras, Sons of Brahmâ and Mind‐born Sons, down to
the Bne Aleim of the Jewish _Bible_, the faith of the centuries and
universal tradition force reason to yield to such evidence. Of what value
is “independent criticism” so‐called, or “internal evidence”—based usually
on the respective hobbies of the critics—in the face of the universal
testimony, which has never varied throughout the historical cycles? For
instance, read Esoterically the sixth chapter of _Genesis_, which repeats
the statements of the Secret Doctrine, though slightly changing its form,
and drawing a different conclusion which clashes even with the _Zohar_.

There were giants in the earth in those days; _and also after
that_, when the sons of God Bne Aleim came in unto the daughters
of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men
which were of old, men of renown [or giants].(854)

What does this sentence, “and also after that,” signify unless it means:
There were Giants in the Earth _before_, _i.e._, before the Sinless Sons
of the Third Race; _and also after that_ when other Sons of God, lower in
nature, inaugurated sexual connection on Earth—as Daksha did, when he saw
that his Mânasaputras would not people the Earth? And then comes a long
break in the chapter between verses 4 and 5. For surely, it was not in or
through the wickedness of the “mighty men ... men of renown,” among whom
is placed Nimrod the “mighty hunter before the Lord,” that “God saw that
the wickedness of man was great,” nor in the builders of Babel, for this
was _after_ the Deluge; but in the progeny of the Giants who produced
_monstra quædam de genere giganteo_, monsters from whence sprang the lower
races of men, now represented on Earth by a few miserable dying‐out tribes
and the huge anthropoid apes.

And if we are taken to task by Theologians, whether Protestant or Roman
Catholic, we have only to refer them to their own literal texts. The above
quoted verse has ever been a dilemma, not alone for the men of Science and
biblical scholars, but also for priests. For, as the Rev. Father Péronne
puts it:

Either they (the Bne Aleim) were good Angels, and in such case how
could they fall? Or they were bad (Angels), and in that case could
not be called Bne Aleim, or sons of God.(855)

This biblical riddle—“the real sense of which no author has ever
understood,” as is candidly confessed by Fourmont(856)—can only be
explained by the Occult doctrine, through the _Zohar_ to the Western, and
the _Book of Dzyan_ to the Eastern. What the latter says we have seen;
what the _Zohar_ tells us is that Bne Aleim was a name common to the
Malachim, the good Messengers, and to the Ischins, the lower Angels.(857)

We may add for the benefit of the Demonologists that their Satan, the
“Adversary,” is included in _Job_ among the “sons” of God or Bne Aleim who
visit their father.(858) But of this later on.

Now the _Zohar_ says that the Ischins, the beautiful Bne Aleim, were _not_
guilty, but mixed _themselves with mortal men because they were sent on
earth to do so_.(859) Elsewhere the same volume shows these Bne Aleim
belonging to the tenth sub‐division of the “Thrones.”(860) It also
explains that the Ischins—“Men‐spirits,” _viri spirituales_(861)—now that
men can see them no longer, help Magicians to produce, by their Science,
Homunculi which are not “small men” but “men _smaller_ (in the sense of
inferiority) than men.” Both show themselves under the form that the
Ischins had then, _i.e._, gaseous and ethereal. Their chief is Azazel.

But Azazel, whom the Church dogma persists in associating with Satan, is
nothing of the kind. Azazel is a _mystery_, as explained elsewhere, and it
is so expressed by Maimonides:

There is an impenetrable mystery in the narrative concerning
Azazel.(862)

And so there is, as Lanci, a librarian to the Vatican, whom we have quoted
before, and one who ought to know, says:

This venerable divine name (_nome divino e venerabile_) has become
through the pen of biblical scholars, a devil, a wilderness, a
mountain, and a he‐goat.(863)

Therefore it seems foolish to derive the name, as Spencer does, from Azal
(separated) and El (God), hence “one separated from God”—the Devil. In the
_Zohar_, Azazel is rather the “sacrificial victim” than the “formal
adversary of Jehovah,” as Spencer would have it.(864)

The amount of malicious fancy and fiction bestowed on this “Host” by
various fanatical writers is quite extraordinary. Azazel and his “Host”
are simply the Hebrew “Prometheus,” and ought to be viewed from the same
standpoint. The _Zohar_ shows the Ischins chained to the mountain in the
desert. This is allegorical, and simply alludes to these “Spirits” as
being chained to the Earth during the Cycle of Incarnation. Azazel, or
Azazyel, is one of the chiefs of the “transgressing” Angels in the _Book
of Enoch_, who descending upon Ardis, the top of Mount Armon, bound
themselves by swearing loyalty to each other. It is said that Azazyel
taught men to make swords, knives, shields, to fabricate mirrors (?), to
make _one see what is behind him_—viz., “magic mirrors.” Amazarak taught
all the sorcerers and dividers of roots; Amers taught the solution of
Magic; Barkayal, Astrology; Akibeel, the meaning of portents and signs;
Tamiel, Astronomy; and Asaradel taught the motion of the Moon.(865) “These
seven were the first instructors of the fourth man” (_i.e._, of the Fourth
Race). But why should allegory be always understood as meaning just what
its dead‐letter expresses?

It is the symbolical representation of the great struggle between Divine
Wisdom, Nous, and its Earthly Reflection, Psyche, or between Spirit and
Soul, in Heaven and on Earth. In Heaven—because the Divine Monad had
voluntarily exiled itself therefrom, to descend, for incarnating purposes,
to a lower plane and thus transform the _animal_ of clay into an immortal
_God_. For, as Éliphas Lévi tells us:

The Angels aspire to become Men; for the perfect Man, the Man‐God,
is above even Angels.

On Earth—because no sooner had Spirit descended than it was strangled in
the coils of Matter.

Strange to say, the Occult Teaching reverses the characters; it is the
anthropomorphous Archangel in the case of the Christians, and the man‐like
God with the Hindûs, which represent Matter in this case; and the Dragon,
or Serpent, Spirit. Occult symbolism furnishes the key to the mystery;
theological symbolism conceals it still more. For the former explains many
a saying in the _Bible_ and even in the _New Testament_ which has hitherto
remained incomprehensible; while the latter, owing to its dogma of Satan
and his rebellion, has belittled the character and nature of its would‐be
infinite, absolutely perfect God, and created the greatest evil and curse
on Earth—belief in a personal Devil. This mystery is now partially
revealed. The key to its metaphysical interpretation has now been
restored, while the key to its theological interpretation shows the Gods
and Archangels standing as symbols for the dead‐letter or dogmatic
religions, as arrayed against the pure truths of Spirit, naked and
unadorned with fancy.

Many were the hints thrown out in this direction in _Isis Unveiled_, and a
still greater number of references to the mystery may be found scattered
throughout these volumes. To make the point clear once for all; that which
the clergy of every dogmatic religion, preëminently the Christian, points
out as Satan, the enemy of God, is, in reality, the highest divine
Spirit—Occult Wisdom on Earth—which is naturally antagonistic to every
worldly, evanescent illusion, dogmatic or ecclesiastical religions
included. Thus, the Latin Church, intolerant, bigoted and cruel to all who
do not choose to be its slaves, the Church which calls itself the “bride”
of Christ, and at the same time the trustee of Peter, to whom the rebuke
of the Master “Get thee behind me, Satan” was justly addressed; and again
the Protestant Church which, while calling itself Christian, paradoxically
replaces the New Dispensation by the old Law of Moses which Christ openly
repudiated—both these Churches are fighting against divine Truth, when
repudiating and slandering the Dragon of Esoteric Divine Wisdom. Whenever
they anathematize the Gnostic Solar Chnouphis, the Agathodæmon Christos,
or the Theosophical Serpent of Eternity, or even the Serpent of
_Genesis_—they are moved by the same spirit of dark fanaticism that moved
the Pharisees to curse Jesus with the words: “Say we not well thou hast a
devil?”

Read the account of Indra (Vâyu) in the _Rig Veda_, the Occult volume _par
excellence_ of Âryanism, and then compare it with the same in the
_Purânas_—the exoteric version thereof, and the purposely garbled account
of the true Wisdom Religion. In the _Rig Veda_, Indra is the highest and
greatest of the Gods, and his Soma‐drinking is allegorical of his highly
spiritual nature. In the _Purânas_, Indra becomes a profligate, and a
regular drunkard on the Soma‐juice, in the ordinary terrestrial way. He is
the conqueror of all the “enemies of the Gods” the Daityas, Nâgas
(Serpents), Asuras, all the Serpent‐gods, and of Vritra, the Cosmic
Serpent. Indra is the St. Michael of the Hindû Pantheon—the chief of the
_militant_ Host. Turning to the _Bible_, we find Satan, one of the “Sons
of God,”(866) becoming in exoteric interpretation the Devil, and the
Dragon, in its infernal, evil sense. But in the _Kabalah_,(867) Samael,
who is Satan, is shown to be identical with St. Michael, the Slayer of the
Dragon. How is this, when it is said that Tselem (the Image) reflects
alike Michael and Samael, _who are one_? Both proceed, it is taught, from
Ruach (Spirit), Neshamah (Soul) and Nephesh (Life). In the Chaldæan _Book
of Numbers_ Samael is the concealed (Occult) Wisdom, and Michael the
higher _terrestrial_ Wisdom, both emanating from the same source, but
diverging after their issue from the Mundane Soul, which on Earth is
Mahat, intellectual understanding, or Manas, the seat of intellect. They
diverge, because the one (Michael) is _influenced_ by Neshamah, while the
other (Samael) remains _uninfluenced_. This tenet was perverted by the
dogmatic spirit of the Church, which, loathing independent Spirit,
uninfluenced by the external form, hence by dogma, forthwith made of
Samael‐Satan—the most wise and spiritual spirit of all—the Adversary of
its anthropomorphic God and sensual physical man, the Devil!

The Origin Of The Satanic Myth.

Let us, then, fathom this creation of the Patristic fancy still deeper,
and find its prototype with the Pagans. The origin of the new Satanic myth
is easy to trace. The tradition of the Dragon and the Sun is echoed in
every part of the world, both in its civilized and semi‐savage regions. It
took rise in the whisperings about secret Initiations among the profane,
and was once universally established through the formerly universal
heliolatrous religion. There was a time when the four parts of the world
were covered with the temples sacred to the Sun and the Dragon; but the
cult is now preserved mostly in China and Buddhist countries,

Bel and the Dragon being uniformly coupled together, and the
priest of the Ophite religion as uniformly assuming the name of
his God.(868)

Among the religions of the past, it is in Egypt we have to seek for its
Western origin. The Ophites adopted their rites from Hermes Trismegistus,
and heliolatrous worship with its Sun‐gods crossed over into the land of
the Pharaohs from India. In the Gods of Stonehenge we recognize the
divinities of Delphi and Babylon, and in those of the latter the Devas of
the Vedic nations. Bel and the Dragon, Apollo and Python, Krishna and
Kâliya, Osiris and Typhon, are all one under many names—the latest of
which are Michael and the Red Dragon, and St. George and his Dragon. As
Michael is “one as God,” or his “Double” for terrestrial purposes, and is
one of the Elohim, the fighting Angel, he is thus simply a permutation of
Jehovah. Whatever the cosmic or astronomical event that first gave rise to
the allegory of the “War in Heaven,” its earthly origin has to be sought
in the temples of Initiation and archaic crypts; and the proof is that we
find (_a_) the priests assuming the name of the Gods they served; (_b_)
the “Dragons” held throughout all antiquity as the symbols of Immortality
and Wisdom, of secret Knowledge and of Eternity; and (_c_) the Hierophants
of Egypt, of Babylon, and India, styling themselves generally the “Sons of
the Dragon” and “Serpents”; thus corroborating the teachings of the Secret
Doctrine.

There were numerous catacombs in Egypt and Chaldæa, some of them of a very
vast extent. The most renowned of these were the subterranean crypts of
Thebes and Memphis. The former, beginning on the western side of the Nile,
extended towards the Libyan desert, and were known as the Serpent’s
Catacombs, or passages. It was there that were performed the Sacred
Mysteries of the Kuklos Anagkês, the “Unavoidable Cycle,” more generally
known as the “Circle of Necessity”; the inexorable doom imposed upon every
Soul after bodily death, when it has been judged in the Amentian region.

In De Bourbourg’s book, Votan, the Mexican Demi‐god, in narrating his
expedition, describes a subterranean passage which ran on underground, and
terminated at the root of the heavens, adding that this passage was a
Snake’s hole, “_un agujero de colubra_”; and that he was admitted to it
because he was himself a “Son of the Snakes,” or a Serpent.(869)

This is, indeed, very suggestive; for his description of the “Snake’s
hole” is that of the ancient Egyptian crypt, as above mentioned. The
Hierophants, moreover, of Egypt, and also of Babylon, generally styled
themselves during the Mysteries, the “Sons of the Serpent‐god,” or “Sons
of the Dragon.”

“The Assyrian priest always bore the name of his God,” says Movers. The
Druids of the Celto‐Britannic regions also called themselves Snakes. “I am
a Serpent, I am a Druid,” they exclaimed. The Egyptian Karnak is twin
brother to the Carnac of Bretagne, the latter Carnac meaning the Serpent’s
Mount. The Dracontia once covered the surface of the globe, and these
temples were sacred to the Dragon, only because it was the symbol of the
Sun, which, in its turn, was the symbol of the Highest God—the Phœnician
Elon or Elion, whom Abraham recognized as El Elion.(870) Besides the
surname of Serpents, they had also the appellation of “Builders” or
“Architects,” for the immense grandeur of their temples and monuments was
such that even now the pulverized remains of them “frighten the
mathematical calculations of our modern engineers,” as Taliesin says.(871)

De Bourbourg hints that the chiefs of the name of Votan, the Quetzo‐
Cohuatl, or Serpent deity of the Mexicans, are the descendants of Ham and
Canaan. “I am Hivim,” they say. “Being a Hivim, I am of the great race of
the Dragon (Snake). I am a Snake myself, for I am a Hivim.”(872)

Furthermore, the “War in Heaven” is shown, in one of its significations,
to have referred to those terrible struggles in store for the Candidate
for Adeptship—struggles between himself and his (by Magic) personified
human passions, when the enlightened _Inner Man_ had to either slay them
or fail. In the former case he became the “Dragon‐Slayer,” as having
happily overcome all the temptations, and a “Son of the Serpent” and a
Serpent himself, having cast off his old skin and being born in a _new_
body, becoming a Son of Wisdom and Immortality in Eternity.

Seth, the reputed forefather of Israel, is only a Jewish travesty of
Hermes, the God of Wisdom, called also Thoth, Tat, Seth, Set, and Satan.
He is also Typhon, the same as Apophis, the Dragon slain by Horus; for
Typhon was also called Set. He is simply the _dark side_ of Osiris, his
brother, as Angra Mainyu is the black shadow of Ahura Mazda.
Terrestrially, all these allegories were connected with the trials of
Adeptship and Initiation. Astronomically, they referred to the Solar and
Lunar eclipses, the mythical explanations of which we find to this day in
India and Ceylon, where anyone can study the allegorical narratives and
traditions which have remained unchanged for many thousands of years.

Râhu, mythologically, is a Daitya—a Giant, a Demi‐god, the lower part of
whose body ended in a Dragon’s or Serpent’s tail. During the Churning of
the Ocean, when the Gods produced the Amrita, the Water of Immortality, he
stole some of it, and, drinking, became immortal. The Sun and Moon, who
had detected him in his theft, denounced him to Vishnu, who placed him in
the stellar spheres, the upper portion of his body representing the
Dragon’s head and the lower (Ketu) the Dragon’s tail; the two being the
ascending and descending nodes. Since then, Râhu wreaks his vengeance on
the Sun and Moon by occasionally swallowing them. But this fable has
another mystic meaning, for Râhu, the Dragon’s head, played a prominent
part in the Mysteries of the Sun’s (Vikartana’s) Initiation, when the
Candidate and the Dragon had a supreme fight.

The caves of the Rishis, the abodes of Teiresias and the Greek seers, were
modelled on those of the Nâgas—the Hindû King‐Snakes, who dwelt in
cavities of the rocks under the ground. From Shesha, the thousand‐headed
Serpent, on which Vishnu rests, down to Python, the Dragon‐serpent oracle,
all point to the secret meaning of the myth. In India we find the fact
mentioned in the earliest _Purânas_. The children of Surasâ are the mighty
“Dragons.” The _Vâyu Purâna_ replacing the “Dragons” of Surasâ of the
_Vishnu Purâna_ by the Dânavas, the descendants of Danu by the sage
Kashyapa, and these Dânavas being the Giants, or Titans, who warred
against the Gods, they are thus shown identical with the “Dragons” and
“Serpents” of Wisdom.

We have only to compare the Sun‐gods of every country, to find their
allegories agreeing perfectly with each other; and the more the
allegorical symbol is Occult the more its corresponding symbol in exoteric
systems agrees with it. Thus, if from three systems widely differing from
each other in appearance—the old Âryan, the ancient Greek, and the modern
Christian schemes—several Sun‐gods and Dragons are selected at random,
they will be found to be copied from each other.

Let us take Agni the Fire‐god, Indra the firmament, and Kârttikeya from
the Hindûs; the Greek Apollo; and Michael, the “Angel of the Sun,” the
first of the Æons, called by the Gnostics the “Saviour”—and proceed in
order.

(1) Agni, the Fire‐god, is called Vaishvânara in the _Rig Veda_. Now
Vaishvânara is a Dânava, a Giant‐demon,(873) whose daughters Pulomâ and
Kâlakâ are the mothers of numberless Dânavas (30 millions), by
Kashyapa,(874) and live in Hiranyapura, “_the golden city, floating in the
air_.”(875) Therefore, Indra is, in a fashion, the step‐son of these two
as a son of Kashyapa; and Kashyapa is, in this sense, identical with Agni,
the Fire‐god, or Sun (Kashyapa‐Âditya). To this same group belongs Skanda
or Kârttikeya, God of War, the _six‐faced_ planet Mars astronomically, a
Kumâra, or Virgin‐youth, born of Agni,(876) for the purpose of destroying
Târaka, the Dânava Demon, the grandson of Kashyapa by his son
Hiranyâksha.(877) Târaka’s Yoga austerities were so extraordinary that
they became formidable to the Gods, who feared such a rival in power.(878)
While Indra, the bright God of the Firmament, kills Vritra, or Ahi, the
Serpent‐Demon—for which feat he is called Vritra‐han, the “Destroyer of
Vritra”—he also leads the hosts of Devas (Angels or Gods) against other
Gods who rebel against Brahmâ, for which he is surnamed Jishnu, “Leader of
the Celestial Host.” Kârttikeya is also found bearing the same titles. For
killing Târaka, the Dânava, he is called Târaka‐jit, “Vanquisher of
Târaka,”(879) Kumâra Guha, the “mysterious Virgin‐youth,” Siddha‐sena,
“Leader of the Siddhas,” and Shakti‐dhara, “Spear‐holder.”

(2) Now take Apollo, the Grecian Sun‐god, and by comparing the mythical
accounts given of him, see whether he does not answer both to Indra,
Kârttikeya, and even Kashyapa‐Âditya, and at the same time to Michael (as
the Angelic form of Jehovah) the “Angel of the Sun,” who is “like,” and
“one with, God.” Later ingenious interpretations for monotheistic
purposes, elevated though they be into not‐to‐be‐questioned Church dogmas,
prove nothing, except, perhaps, the abuse of human authority and power.

Apollo is Helios, the Sun, Phoibos‐Apollo, the “Light of Life and of the
World,”(880) who arises out of the Golden‐winged Cup (the Sun); hence he
is the Sun‐god _par excellence_. At the moment of his birth he asks for
his bow to kill Python, the Demon Dragon, who attacked his mother before
his birth,(881) and whom he is divinely commissioned to destroy—like
Kârttikeya, who is born for the purpose of killing Târaka, the _too holy
and wise_ Demon. Apollo is born on a sidereal island called Asteria—the
“golden star island,” the “earth which floats in the air,” which is the
Hindû golden Hiranyapura; he is called the Pure (ἁγνὸς) Agnus Dei, the
Indian Agni, as Dr. Kenealy thinks; and in the primal myth he is exempt
“from all sensual love.”(882) He is, therefore, a Kumâra, like Kârttikeya,
and as Indra was in his earlier life and biographies. Python, moreover,
the “red Dragon,” connects Apollo with Michael, who fights the Apocalyptic
Dragon, seeking to attack the woman in child‐birth, as Python attacks
Apollo’s mother. Can any one fail to see the identity? Had the Rt. Hon. W.
E. Gladstone, who prides himself on his Greek scholarship and
understanding of the spirit of Homer’s allegories, ever had a real inkling
of the _esoteric_ meaning of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, he would have
understood St. John’s _Revelation_, and even the _Pentateuch_, better than
he does. For the way to the _Bible_ lies through Hermes, Bel, and Homer,
as the way to these is through the Hindû and Chaldæan religious symbols.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is at present no need to touch upon the mystic and manifold meaning
of the name Jehovah in its abstract sense, one independent of the Deity
falsely called by that name. It was a “blind” purposely created by the
Rabbins, a secret preserved by them with ten‐fold care after the
Christians had despoiled them of this God‐name which was their own
property.(899) The following statement, however, is now made. The
personage who is named in the first four chapters of _Genesis_ variously
as “God,” the “Lord God,” and “Lord” simply, is not one and the same
person; certainly it is not Jehovah. There are three distinct classes or
groups of the Elohim called Sephiroth in the _Kabalah_. Jehovah appears
only in chapter iv of _Genesis_, in the first verse of which he is named
Cain, and in the last transformed into _mankind_—male and female, Jah‐
veh.(900) The Serpent, moreover, is not Satan, but the bright Angel, one
of the Elohim clothed in radiance and glory, who—promising the woman, if
they ate of the forbidden fruit, “ye shall not surely die”—kept his
promise, and made man immortal in his _incorruptible nature_. He is the
Iao of the Mysteries, the chief of the Androgyne Creators of men. Chapter
iii contains (Esoterically) the withdrawal of the veil of ignorance that
closed the perceptions of the Angelic Man, made in the image of the
“boneless” Gods, and the opening of his consciousness to his real nature;
thus showing the Bright Angel (Lucifer) in the light of a giver of
Immortality, and as the “Enlightener”; while the real Fall into generation
and matter is to be sought in chapter iv. There, Jehovah‐Cain, the male
part of Adam the _dual_ man, having separated himself from Eve, creates in
her Abel, _the first natural woman_,(901) and sheds the _virgin blood_.
Now Cain, being shown identical with Jehovah, on the authority of the
correct reading of the first verse of chapter iv of _Genesis_, in the
original Hebrew text, and the Rabbins teaching that “Kin (Cain) the Evil
was the Son of Eve by Samael, the Devil, who occupied the place of
Adam,”(902) and the _Talmud_ adding that “the evil Spirit, Satan, and
Samael, the angel of Death, are the same”(903)—it becomes easy to see that
Jehovah (mankind, or Jah‐hovah) and Satan (therefore the tempting Serpent)
are one and the same in every particular. _There is no Devil, no Evil
outside mankind to produce a Devil._ Evil is a necessity in, and one of
the supporters of the Manifested Universe. It is a necessity for progress
and evolution, as night is necessary for the production of day, and death
for that of life—_that man may live for ever_.

Satan represents metaphysically simply the _reverse_ or the _polar
opposite_ of everything in Nature.(904) He is the “Adversary,”
allegorically, the “Murderer,” and the great Enemy of _all_, because there
is nothing in the whole Universe that has not two sides—the reverses of
the same medal. But in that case, light, goodness, beauty, etc., may be
called Satan with as much propriety as the Devil, since they are the
Adversaries of darkness, badness, and ugliness. And now the philosophy and
the _rationale_ of certain early Christian sects—called _heretical_ and
viewed as the abomination of the times—will become more comprehensible. We
may understand how it was that the sect of Satanians came to be degraded,
and were anathematized without any hope of vindication in a future day,
since they kept their tenets secret. How, on the same principle, the
Cainites came to be degraded, and even the (Judas) Iscariotes; the true
character of the _treacherous_ apostle having never been correctly
presented before the tribunal of humanity.

As a direct consequence, the tenets of the Gnostic sects also become
clear. Each of these sects was founded by an Initiate, while their tenets
were based on the correct knowledge of the symbolism of every nation. Thus
it becomes comprehensible why Ilda‐baoth was regarded by most of them as
the God of Moses, and was held to be a proud, ambitious, and impure
Spirit, who had abused his power by usurping the place of the Highest God,
though he was no better, and in some respects far worse than his brother
Elohim; the latter representing the all‐embracing, manifested Deity only
in their collectivity, since they were the Fashioners of the first
differentiations of the primary Cosmic Substance for the creation of the
phenomenal Universe. Therefore Jehovah was called by the Gnostics the
Creator of, and one with, Ophiomorphos, the Serpent, Satan, or Evil.(905)
They taught that Iurbo and Adonai were names of Iao‐Jehovah, who is an
emanation of Ilda‐baoth.(906) This, in their language, amounted to saying
what the Rabbins expressed in a more veiled way, by stating that “Cain had
been generated by Samael or Satan.”

The Fallen Angels, in every ancient system, are made the prototypes of
_fallen_ men—allegorically, and _those men themselves_—Esoterically. Thus
the Elohim of the hour of creation became the Beni‐Elohim, the Sons of
God, among whom is Satan, in the Semitic traditions. War in Heaven between
Thrætaona and Azhi‐dahaka, the destroying Serpent, ends on Earth,
according to Burnouf, in the battle of pious men against the power of
Evil, “of the Iranians with the Âryan Brâhmans of India.” And the conflict
of the Gods with the Asuras is repeated in the Great War—the Mahâbhârata.
In the latest religion of all, Christianity, all the combatants, Gods and
Demons, Adversaries in both the camps, are now transformed into Dragons
and Satans, simply in order to connect Evil personified with the Serpent
of _Genesis_, and thus prove the new dogma.

Noah Was A Kabir, Hence He Must Have Been A Demon.

It matters little whether it were Isis, or Ceres, the Kabiria, or again
the Kabiri, who taught men agriculture; but it is very important to
prevent fanatics from monopolizing all the facts in history and legend,
and from fathering their distortions of truth, history, and legend upon
one man. Noah is either a _myth_ along with the others, or one whose
legend was built upon the Kabirian or Titanic tradition, as taught in
Samothrace; he has, therefore, no claim to be monopolized by either Jew or
Christian. If, as Faber tried to demonstrate at such cost of learning and
research, Noah is an Atlantean and a Titan, and his family are the Kabiri
or pious Titans, etc.—then biblical chronology falls by its own weight,
and along with it all the Patriarchs—the Antediluvian and Pre‐Atlantean
Titans. As has now been discovered and proven, Cain is Mars, the God of
_power and generation_, and of the first (sexual) bloodshed.(907) Tubal‐
Cain is a Kabir, “an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron”;
or—if this will please better—he is one with Hephæstus or Vulcan. Jabal
again is taken from the Kabiri, instructors in agriculture, “such as have
cattle,” and Jubal is “the father of all those who handle the harp,” he,
or _they_ who fabricated the harp for Cronus and the trident for
Poseidon.(908)

The history or “fables” about the mysterious Telchines—fables echoing each
and all the archaic events of our Esoteric Teachings—furnish us with a key
to the origin of Cain’s genealogy in the third chapter of _Genesis_; they
give the reason why the Roman Catholic Church identifies “the accursed
blood” of Cain and Ham with Sorcery, and makes it responsible for the
Deluge. Were not the Telchines—it is argued—the mysterious ironworkers of
Rhodes; they who were the first to raise statues to the Gods, furnish them
with weapons, and men with magic arts? And is it not they who were
destroyed by a Deluge at the command of Zeus, as the Cainites were by that
of Jehovah?

The Telchines are simply the Kabiri and the Titans, in another form. They
are the Atlanteans also. Says Decharme:

Like Lemnos and Samothrace, Rhodes, the birth‐place of the
Telchines, is an island of volcanic formation.(909)

The island of Rhodes emerged suddenly out of the seas, after having been
previously engulfed by the Ocean, say the traditions. Like the Samothrace
of the Kabiri, it is connected by the memory of men with the Flood
legends. As enough has been said on this subject, however, it may be left
for the present.

But we may add a few more words about Noah, the Jewish representative of
nearly every Pagan God in one or another character. The Homeric songs
contain, in poetized form, all the later fables about the Patriarchs, who
are all sidereal, cosmic, and numerical symbols and signs. The attempt to
disconnect the two genealogies of Seth and Cain,(910) and the further
equally futile attempt to show them as _real_, _historical_ men, has only
led to more serious enquiries into the history of the past, and to
discoveries which have damaged for ever the supposed _revelation_. For
instance, the identity of Noah and Melchizedek being established, the
further identity of Melchizedek, or Father Sadik, with Cronus‐Saturn is
also proved.

That it is so may be easily demonstrated. It is not denied by any of the
Christian writers. Bryant(911) concurs with all those who are of opinion
that Sydic, or Sadic, was the Patriarch Noah, and also Melchizedek; and
that the name by which he is called, Sadic, corresponds with the character
given him in _Genesis_.(912)

He was צדיק, Sadic, a _just man_, and perfect in his generation.
All science and every useful art were attributed to him, and
through his sons transmitted to posterity.(913)

Now it is Sanchuniathon, who informs the world that the Kabiri were the
Sons of Sydic or Zedek (Melchi‐zedek). True enough, as this information
has descended to us through the _Preparatio Evangelica_ of Eusebius, it
may be regarded with a certain amount of suspicion, as it is more than
likely that he dealt with Sanchuniathon’s works as he has with Manetho’s
Synchronistic Tables. But let us suppose that the identification of Sydic,
Cronus, or Saturn, with Noah and Melchizedek, is based on one of the
Eusebian pious hypotheses. Let us accept it as such, along with Noah’s
characteristic as a _just man_, and his supposed duplicate, the mysterious
Melchizedek, “king of Salem, and priest of the most high God,” after “his
own order”;(914) and finally, having seen what they all were spiritually,
astronomically, psychically and cosmically, let us now see what they
became rabbinically and kabalistically.

In speaking of Adam, Cain, Mars, etc., as _personifications_, we find the
author of the _Source of Measures_ enunciating our very Esoteric Teachings
in his kabalistic researches. Thus he says:

Now, Mars was the Lord of _birth_, and of _death_, of _generation_
and of _destruction_, of _ploughing_, of _building_, of
_sculpture_ or stone‐cutting, of _architecture_, ... in fine, of
all comprised under our English word ARTS. He was the _primal
principle_, disintegrating into the modification of _two opposites
for production_. Astronomically, too,(915) he held the birthplace
of the day and year, _the place of its increase of strength_,
Aries, and likewise the place of its death, Scorpio. He held the
house of Venus, and that of the Scorpion. He, as _birth_, was
_Good_; as _death_, was _Evil_. As _good_, he was _light_; as
_bad_, he was _night_. As _good_, he was _man_; as _bad_, he was
_woman_. He held the cardinal points, and as _Cain_, or
_Vulcan_,(916) or _Pater Sadic_, or _Melchizadek_, he was lord of
the _ecliptic_, or _balance_, or _line of adjustment_, and
therefore was _The Just One_. The ancients held to there being
seven planets, or great gods, growing out of eight, and Pater
Sadic, _The Just or Right One_, was Lord of the eighth, which was
_Mater Terra_.(917)

This makes their functions, after they had been degraded, plain enough,
and establishes the identity.

The Noachian Deluge, as described in its dead‐letter and within the period
of biblical chronology, having been shown to have never existed, the
pious, but very arbitrary, supposition of Bishop Cumberland has but to
follow that Deluge into the land of fiction. Indeed it seems rather
fanciful to any impartial observer to be told that:

There were two distinct races of Cabiri, the first consisting of
Ham and Mizraim, whom he conceives to be Jupiter and Dionusus of
Mnaseas; the second, of the children of Shem, who are the Cabiri
of Sanchoniatho, while their father Sydyk is consequently the
scriptural Shem.(918)

The Kabirim, the “Mighty Ones,” are identical with our primeval Dhyân
Chohans, with the corporeal and the incorporeal Pitris, and with all the
Rulers and Instructors of the primeval races, who are referred to as the
Gods and Kings of the Divine Dynasties.

The Oldest Persian Traditions About The Polar, And The Submerged
Continents.

Legendary lore could not distort facts so effectually as to reduce them to
unrecognizable shape. Between the traditions of Egypt and Greece on the
one hand, and Persia on the other—a country ever at war with the
former—there is too great a similarity of figures and numbers to admit of
such coincidence being due to simple chance. This has been well proven by
Bailly. Let us pause for a moment to examine these traditions from every
available source, in order to the better compare those of the Magi with
the so‐called Grecian “fables.”

Those legends have now passed into popular tales, the folklore of Persia,
as many a real fiction has found its way into our universal history. The
stories of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table are also fairy
tales to all appearance; yet they are based on facts, and pertain to the
history of England. Why should not the folklore of Iran be part and parcel
of the history and the pre‐historic events of Atlantis? That folklore says
as follows:

Before the creation of Adam, two races lived on Earth, the one succeeding
the other; the Devs who reigned 7,000 years, and the Peris (the Izeds) who
reigned but 2,000, and while the former were still in existence. The Devs
were giants, strong and wicked; the Peris were smaller in stature, but
wiser and kinder.

Here we recognize the Atlantean Giants and the Âryans, or the Râkshasas of
the _Râmâyana_ and the children of Bharata‐varsha, or India; the Ante‐ and
the Post‐diluvians of the _Bible_.

Gyan (or Gnan, Jnâna, True or Occult Wisdom and Knowledge), also called
Gian‐ben‐Gian (or Wisdom, son of Wisdom), was the king of the Peris.(919)
He had a shield as famous as that of Achilles, only instead of serving
against an enemy in war, it served as a protection against black magic,
the _sorcery_ of the Devs. Gian‐ben‐Gian had reigned 2,000 years when
Iblis, the Devil, was permitted by God to defeat the Peris and scatter
them to the other end of the world. Even the magic shield, which, by being
produced on the principles of Astrology, destroyed charms, enchantments,
and bad spells, could not prevail against Iblis, who was an agent of Fate,
or Karma.(920) They count ten kings in their last metropolis called
Khanoom, and make the tenth, Kaimurath, identical with the Hebrew Adam.
These kings answer to the ten antediluvian generations of kings as given
by Berosus.

Distorted as these legends are now found to be, one can hardly fail to
identify them with the Chaldæan, Egyptian, Greek, and even Hebrew
traditions, for the Jewish myth, though disdaining in its exclusiveness to
speak of Pre‐Adamite nations, nevertheless allows these to be clearly
inferred, by sending out Cain—_one of the only two living men on
earth_—into the land of Nod, where he gets married and builds a city.(921)

Now if we compare the 9,000 years mentioned by the Persian tales with the
9,000 years which Plato declared had passed since the submersion of the
last Atlantis, a very strange fact is made apparent. Bailly remarked on
this, but distorted it by his interpretation. The Secret Doctrine may
restore the figures to their true meaning. We read in the _Critias_:

First of all one must remember that 9,000 years have elapsed
_since the war of the nations_, which lived above and outside the
Pillars of Hercules, and those which peopled the lands on this
side.

In the _Timæus_ Plato says the same. The Secret Doctrine declaring that
most of the later islander Atlanteans perished in the interval between
850,000 and 700,000 years ago, and that the Âryans were 200,000 years old
when the first great “Island,” or Continent, was submerged, there seems
hardly any reconciliation possible between the figures. But there is, in
truth. Plato, being an Initiate, had to use the veiled language of the
Sanctuary, and so had the Magi of Chaldæa and Persia through whose
exoteric revelations the Persian legends were preserved and passed to
posterity. Thus, we find the Hebrews calling a week “seven days,” and
speaking of a “week of years” when each of its days represents 360 solar
years, and the whole “week” is 2,520 years, in fact. They had a Sabbatical
week, a Sabbatical year, etc., and their Sabbath lasted indifferently 24
hours or 24,000 years, in the secret calculations of their Sods. We of the
present times call an age a “century.” They of Plato’s day, the initiated
writers, at any rate, by a millennium meant not 1,000 but 100,000 years;
while the Hindûs, more independent than any, have never concealed their
chronology. Thus, for 9,000 years, the Initiates will read 900,000 years,
during which space of time—_i.e._, from the first appearance of the Âryan
Race, when the Pliocene portions of the once great Atlantis began
gradually sinking(922) and other continents to appear on the surface, down
to the final disappearance of Plato’s small island of Atlantis—the Âryan
races had never ceased to fight with the descendants of the first giant
races. This war lasted till nearly the close of the age which preceded the
Kali Yuga, and was the Mahâbhârata, or Great War, so famous in Indian
history. Such blending of events and epochs, and the bringing down of
hundreds of thousands into thousands of years, does not interfere with the
numbers of years that have elapsed, according to the statement made by the
Egyptian priests to Solon, since the destruction of the last portion of
Atlantis. The 9,000 years were the correct figures. The latter event had
never been kept a secret, and had only faded out of the memory of the
Greeks. The Egyptians had their records complete, because of their
isolation; being surrounded by sea and desert, they had been left
untrammelled by other nations, till about a few millenniums before our
era.

History catches a glimpse of Egypt and its great Mysteries for the first
time through Herodotus, if we do not take into account the _Bible_, and
its queer chronology.(923) And how little Herodotus _could_ tell is
confessed by himself when, speaking of a mysterious tomb of an Initiate at
Saïs, in the sacred precinct of Minerva, he says:

Behind the chapel ... is the tomb of One, _whose name I consider
it impious to divulge_.... In the enclosure stand large obelisks
and there is a _lake_ near, surrounded with a stone wall formed
_in a circle_.... In this lake they perform by night, that
person’s adventures, which the Egyptians call _Mysteries_: on
these matters, however, though I am accurately acquainted with the
particulars of them, _I must observe a discreet silence_.(924)

On the other hand, it is well to know that no secret was so well preserved
and so sacred with the Ancients, as that of their cycles and computations.
From the Egyptians down to the Jews it was held as the highest sin to
divulge anything pertaining to the correct measure of time. It was for
divulging the secrets of the Gods, that Tantalus was plunged into the
infernal regions; the keepers of the sacred Sibylline Books were
threatened with the death penalty for revealing a word from them.
Sigalions, or images of Harpocrates, were in every temple—especially in
those of Isis and Serapis—each pressing a finger to the lips. And the
Hebrews taught that to divulge the secrets of the Kabalah, after
initiation into the Rabbinical Mysteries, was like eating of the fruit of
the Tree of Knowledge; it was punishable by death.

And yet we Europeans have accepted the exoteric chronology of the Jews!
What wonder that it has ever since influenced and coloured all our
conceptions of Science and the duration of things!

The Persian traditions, then, are full of two nations or races, now
entirely extinct, as some think. But this is not so; they are only
transformed. These traditions are ever speaking of the Mountains of Kaf
(Kafaristan?), which contain a gallery built by the giant Argeak, wherein
statues of the ancient men under all their forms are preserved. They call
them Sulimans (Solomons) or the wise kings of the East, and count seventy‐
two kings of that name.(925) Three among them reigned for 1,000 years
each.(926)

Siamek, the beloved son of Kaimurath (Adam), their first king, was
murdered by his giant brother. His father had a perpetual fire preserved
in the tomb which contained his cremated ashes; hence—the origin of fire‐
worship, as some Orientalists think!

Then came Huschenk, the prudent and the wise. It was his Dynasty which re‐
discovered metals and precious stones, after they had been concealed by
the Devs or Giants in the bowels of the Earth, and also how to make brass‐
work, to cut canals, and improve agriculture. As usual, it is Huschenk,
again, who is credited with having written the work called _Eternal
Wisdom_, and even with having built the cities of Luz, Babylon and
Ispahan, though indeed they were built ages later. But as modern Delhi is
built on six other older cities, so these cities may be built on
emplacements of other cities of an immense antiquity. As to his date, it
can only be inferred from another legend.

In the same tradition this wise prince is credited with having made war
against the Giants on a twelve‐legged Horse, whose birth is attributed to
the _amours_ of a crocodile with a female hippopotamus. This “Dodecapod”
was found on the “dry island” or new continent; much force and cunning had
to be used to secure the wonderful animal, but no sooner had Huschenk
mounted him, than he defeated every enemy. No Giants could withstand his
tremendous power. Finally, however, this king of kings was killed by an
enormous rock which the Giants threw at him from the great mountains of
Damavend.(927)

Tahmurath is the third king of Persia, the St. George of Iran, the knight
who always has the best of, and finally kills, the Dragon. He is the great
enemy of the Devs who, in his day, dwelt in the Mountains of Kaf, and
occasionally made raids on the Peris. The old French chronicles of the
Persian folklore call him the Dev‐bend, the conqueror of the Giants. He,
too, is credited with having founded Babylon, Nineveh, Diarbek, etc. Like
his grand‐sire Huschenk, Tahmurath (Taimuraz) also had his steed, only far
more rare and rapid—a bird called Simorgh‐Anke. A marvellous bird, in
truth, intelligent, a polyglot, and even very religious.(928) What says
that Persian Phœnix? It complains of its old age, for it was born cycles
and cycles before the days of Adam (Kaimurath). It has witnessed the
revolutions of long centuries. It has seen the birth and the close of
twelve cycles of 7,000 years each, which multiplied Esoterically will give
us again 840,000 years.(929) Simorgh is born with the last Deluge of the
Pre‐Adamites, says the “Romance of Simorgh and the good Khalif”!(930)

What says the _Book of Numbers_? Esoterically, Adam Rishoon is the Lunar
Spirit (Jehovah, in a sense, or the Pitris), and his three sons—Ka‐yin,
Habel, and Seth—represent the three Races, as already explained. Noah‐
Xisuthrus represents, in his turn (in the cosmo‐geological key), the Third
Race separated, and his three sons, its last three races; Ham, moreover,
symbolizing that race which uncovered the “nakedness” of the Parent Race,
and of the “Mindless,” _i.e._, committed sin.

Tahmurath visits on his winged steed the Mountains of Koh‐Kaf or Kaph. He
finds there the Peris ill‐treated by the Giants, and slays Argen, and the
giant Demrusch. Then he liberates the good Peri, Mergiana,(931) whom
Demrusch had kept as a prisoner, and takes her over to the “dry island,”
_i.e._, the new continent of Europe.(932) After him came Giamschid, who
builds Esikekar, or Persepolis. This king reigns 700 years, and, in his
great pride, believes himself immortal, and demands divine honours. Fate
punishes him; he wanders for 100 years in the world under the name of
Dhulkarnayn, the “two‐horned.” But this epithet has no connection with the
“two‐horned” gentleman of the cloven foot. The “two‐horned” is the epithet
given in Asia—which is uncivilized enough to know nothing of the
attributes of the Devil—to those conquerors who have subdued the world
from the East to the West.

Then come the usurper Zohac, and Feridan, one of the Persian heroes, who
vanquishes the former, and shuts him up in the mountains of Damavend.
These are followed by many others down to Kaikobad, who founded a new
Dynasty.

Such is the legendary history of Persia, and we have to analyze it. To
begin with, what are the Mountains of Kaf?

Whatever they may be in their geographical status, whether they are the
Caucasian or Central Asian mountains, legend places the Devs and Peris far
beyond these mountains to the North, the Peris being the remote ancestors
of the Parsîs or Farsîs. Oriental tradition is ever referring to an
unknown glacial, gloomy sea, and to a dark region, within which,
nevertheless, are situated the “Fortunate Islands,” wherein, from the
beginning of life on earth, bubbles the “Fountain of Life.”(933) The
legend asserts, moreover, that a portion of the first “dry island”
(continent), having detached itself from the main body, has remained,
since then, beyond the Mountains of Koh‐Kaf, “the stony girdle that
surrounds the world.” A journey of seven months’ duration will bring him
who is possessed of “Soliman’s Ring” to that “Fountain,” if he keep on
journeying North, straight before him as the bird flies. Journeying,
therefore, from Persia _straight_ North, will bring one along the sixtieth
degree of longitude, holding to the West, to Nova Zembla; and from the
Caucasus to the eternal ice beyond the Arctic Circle would land one
between the sixtieth and forty‐fifth degrees of longitude, or between Nova
Zembla and Spitzbergen. This, of course, if one has the dodecapodian Horse
of Huschenk or the winged Simorgh of Tahmurath, or Taimuraz, upon which to
cross over the Arctic Ocean.(934)

Nevertheless, the wandering songsters of Persia and the Caucasus will
maintain, to this day, that far beyond the snow‐capped summits of Kap, or
Caucasus, _there is a great continent now concealed from all_; that it is
reached by those who can secure the services of the twelve‐legged progeny
of the crocodile and the female hippopotamus, whose legs become at will
twelve _wings_,(935) or by those who have the patience to wait for the
good pleasure of Simorgh‐Anke, who promised that before she dies she will
reveal the hidden continent to all, and make it once more visible and
within easy reach, by means of a bridge, which the Ocean Devs will build
between that portion of the “dry island” and its severed parts.(936) This
relates, of course, to the Seventh Race, Simorgh being the Manvantaric
Cycle.

It is very curious that Cosmas Indicopleustes, who lived in the sixth
century A.D., should have always maintained that man was born, and dwelt
at first, in a country “beyond the Ocean,” a proof of which had been given
him in India, by a learned Chaldæan. He says:

The lands we live in are surrounded by the Ocean, but beyond that
Ocean there is another land which touches the walls of the sky;
and it is in this land that man was created and lived in Paradise.
During the Deluge, Noah was carried in his ark into the land his
posterity now inhabits.(937)

The twelve‐legged Horse of Huschenk was found on that continent named the
“dry island.”

The “Christian Topography” of Cosmas Indicopleustes and its merits are
well known; but here the good father repeats a universal tradition, which
has now, moreover, been corroborated by facts. Every arctic traveller
suspects a continent or a “dry island” beyond the line of eternal ice.
Perhaps now the meaning of the following passage from one of the
Commentaries may become clearer.

_In the first beginnings of [human] life, the only dry land was on the
right end_(_938_)_ of the Sphere, where it [the Globe] is
motionless._(_939_)_ The whole Earth was one vast watery desert, and the
waters were tepid.... There, man was born on the seven zones of the
immortal, the indestructible of the Manvantara._(_940_)_ There was eternal
spring in darkness. [But] that which is darkness to the man of to‐day, was
light to the man of his dawn. There, the Gods rested, and Fohat_(_941_)_
reigns ever since.... Thus the wise Fathers say that man is born in the
head of his Mother [Earth], and that her feet at the left end generated
[begot] the evil winds that blow from the mouth of the lower Dragon ...
Between the First and Second [Races] the Eternal Central [Land] was
divided by the Water of Life._(_942_)

_It flows around and animates her [Mother Earth’s] body. Its one end
issues from her head; it becomes foul at her feet [the Southern Pole]. It
gets purified [on its return] to her heart—which beats under the foot of
the sacred Shambalah, which then [in the beginnings] was not yet born. For
it is in the belt of man’s dwelling [the Earth] that lies concealed the
life and health of all that lives and breathes._(_943_)_ During the First
and Second [Races] the belt was covered with the great waters. [But] the
great __ Mother travailed under the waves and a new land was joined to the
first one which our wise men call the head‐gear [the cap]. She travailed
harder for the Third [Race] and her waist and navel appeared above the
water. It was the belt, the sacred Himavat, which stretches around the
World._(_944_)_ She broke toward the setting Sun from her neck_(_945_)_
downward [to the South‐West], into many lands and islands, but the Eternal
Land [the cap] broke not asunder. Dry lands covered the face of the silent
waters to the four sides of the World. All these perished [in their turn].
Then appeared the abode of the wicked [the Atlantis]. The Eternal Land was
now hid, for the waters became solid [frozen] under the breath of her
nostrils and the evil winds from the Dragon’s mouth, etc._

This shows that Northern Asia is as old as the Second Race. One may even
say that Asia is contemporary with man, since from the very beginnings of
human life its Root‐Continent, so to speak, already existed, and that part
of the world now known as Asia was only cut off from it in a later age,
and divided by the glacial waters.

If, then, the teaching is understood correctly, the first Continent which
came into existence capped over the whole North Pole like one unbroken
crust, and remains so to this day, beyond that inland sea which seemed
like an unreachable _mirage_ to the few arctic travellers who perceived
it.

During the Second Race more land emerged from under the waters as a
continuation of the “head” from the “neck.” Beginning on both hemispheres,
on the line above the most noryhern part of Spitzbergen,(946) on
Mercator’s Projection, on our side, it may have included, on the American
side, the localities that are now occupied by Baffin’s Bay and the
neighbouring islands and promontories. _There_ it hardly reached,
southward, the seventieth degree of latitude; _here_ it formed the
horseshoe continent of which the Commentary speaks; of the two ends of
which, one included Greenland with a prolongation which crossed the
fiftieth degree a little South‐West, and the other Kamschatka, the two
ends being united by what is now the northern fringe of the coasts of
Eastern and Western Siberia. This broke asunder and disappeared. In the
early part of the Third Race, Lemuria was formed. When it was destroyed in
its turn, Atlantis appeared.

Western Speculations, Founded On The Greek And Paurânic Traditions.

Thus it becomes natural to find that, on even such meagre data as have
reached the profane historian, Rudbeck, a Swedish Scientist, about two
centuries ago, tried to prove that Sweden was the Atlantis of Plato. He
even thought that he had found in the configuration of ancient Upsala, the
situation and measurements of the capital of “Atlantis” as given by the
Greek sage. As Bailly proved, Rudbeck was mistaken; but so was Bailly
likewise, and still more so, for Sweden and Norway had formed part and
parcel of ancient Lemuria, and also of Atlantis on the European side, just
as Eastern and Western Siberia and Kamschatka had belonged to it, on the
Asiatic. Only, once more, when was it? We can find it out approximately
only by studying the _Purânas_, that is to say if we will have nought to
do with the Secret Teachings.

Three‐quarters of a century have already elapsed since Wilford brought
forward his fanciful theories about the British islands being the “White
Island,” the Atala of the _Purânas_. This was sheer nonsense, as the Atala
is one of the seven Dvîpas, or Islands, belonging to the nether Lokas, one
of the seven regions of Pâtâla (the antipodes). Moreover, as Wilford(947)
shows, the _Purânas_ place it “on the seventh zone or seventh
climate”—rather, on the seventh measure of heat—which thus locates it
between the latitudes of 24° and 28° North. It is then to be sought on the
same degree as the Tropic of Cancer, whereas England is between the
latitudes of 50° and 60°. Wilford speaks of it as Atala, Atlantis, the
White Island. Its enemy is called the “White Devil,” the Demon of Terror,
for he says:

In their [the Hindû and Persian] romances, we see Cai‐caus going
to the mountain of _Az‐burj_, or _As‐burj_, _at the foot of which_
the sun sets, to fight the _Div‐sefid_, or white devil, the _Târa‐
daitya_ of the _Purânas_, and whose abode was on the _seventh
stage_ of the world, answering to the seventh zone of the
Bauddhists; ... or, in other words, to the White Island.(948)

Now here the Orientalists have been, and are still, facing the Sphinx’s
riddle, the erroneous solution of which will ever destroy their
authority—if not their persons—in the eyes of every Hindû scholar, whether
or not an Initiate. For there is not a statement in the _Purânas_—on the
conflicting details of which Wilford based his speculations—which has not
several meanings, and which does not apply to both the physical and the
metaphysical worlds. If the old Hindûs divided the face of the Globe into
seven Zones, Climates, Dvîpas, geographically, and into seven Hells and
seven Heavens, allegorically, the measure of seven did not apply in both
cases to the same localities. Now it is the North Pole, the country of
“Meru,” which is the seventh division, as it answers to the seventh
Principle (or fourth metaphysically), of the Occult calculation. It
represents the region of Âtmâ, of pure Soul, and Spirituality. Hence
Pushkara is shown as the seventh Zone, or Dvîpa, which encompasses the
Kshîra Ocean, or Ocean of Milk (the ever‐frozen white region) in the
_Vishnu_ and other _Purânas_.(949) And Pushkara, with its two Varshas,
lies directly at the foot of Meru. For it is said that:

The two countries north and south of Meru are _shaped like a bow_,
... [and that] one half of the surface of the earth is on the
south of Meru and the other half on the north of Meru—_beyond
which is half of Pushkara_.

Geographically, then, Pushkara is America, Northern and Southern; and
allegorically it is the prolongation of Jambu‐dvîpa,(950) in the middle of
which stands Meru, for it is the country inhabited by beings who live ten
thousand years, who are free from sickness or failing; where there is
neither virtue nor vice, caste or laws, for these men are “of the same
nature as the Gods.”(951) Wilford is inclined to see Meru in Mount Atlas,
and locates there also the Lokâloka. Now Meru, we are told, which is the
Svar‐loka, the abode of Brahmâ, of Vishnu, and the Olympus of Indian
exoteric religions, is described geographically as “passing through the
middle of the earth‐globe, and protruding on either side.”(952) On its
upper station are the Gods, at the nether, or South Pole, is the abode of
Demons (Hells). How then can Meru be Mount Atlas? Besides which,
Târadaitya, a Demon, cannot be placed on the seventh zone if the latter be
identified with the White Island, which is Shveta‐dvîpa, for reasons given
in the foot‐note above.

Wilford accuses the modern Brâhmans “of having jumbled them [islands and
countries] all together”; but it is _he_ who has jumbled them still more.
He believes that as the _Brahmânda_ and _Vâyu Purânas_ divide the old
Continent into seven Dvîpas, said to be surrounded by a vast ocean, beyond
which lie the regions and mountains of Atala, hence:

Most probably the Greeks derived their notion of the celebrated
Atlantis, which, as it could not be found after having once been
discovered, they conceived to have been destroyed by some shock of
nature.(953)

As we find certain difficulties in believing that the Egyptian priests,
Plato, and even Homer, all built their notions of Atlantis on Atala—a
nether region located at the Southern Pole—we prefer holding to the
statements given in the Secret Books. We believe in the seven Continents,
four of which have already lived their day, the fifth still exists, and
two are to appear in the future. We believe that each of these is not
strictly a continent in the modern sense of the word, but that each name,
from Jambu down to Pushkara,(954) refers to the geographical names given
(i) to the dry lands covering the face of the whole Earth during the
period of a Root‐Race, in general; (ii) to what remained of these after a
geological Race Pralaya, as Jambu, for instance; and (iii) to those
localities which will enter, after future cataclysms, into the formation
of new universal Continents, Peninsulas, or Dvîpas(955)—each Continent
being, in one sense, a greater or smaller region of dry land surrounded
with water. Thus, that whatever “jumble” the nomenclature of these may
represent to the profane, there is none, in fact, to him who has the key.

Thus, we believe we know that, though two of the Paurânic Islands—the
Sixth and Seventh Continents—are yet to come, nevertheless there _were_,
or there _are_, lands which will enter into the composition of the future
dry lands, of new Earths whose geographical faces will be entirely
changed, as were those of the past. Therefore we find in the _Purânas_
that Shâka‐dvîpa is (or will be) a Continent, and that Shankha‐dvîpa, as
shown in the _Vâyu Purâna_, is only “a minor island,” one of the nine
divisions (to which _Vâyu_ adds six more) of Bhârata‐varsha. Because
Shankha‐dvîpa was peopled by “Mlechchhas [unclean foreigners], who
worshipped Hindû divinities,” therefore they were connected with
India.(956) This accounts for Shankhâsura, a King of a portion of Shankha‐
dvîpa, who was killed by Krishna; that King who resided in the palace
“which was an ocean shell, and whose subjects lived in shells also,” says
Wilford.

On the banks of the Nîlâ(957) there were frequent contests between
the Devatâs [Divine Beings, Demi‐gods] and the Daityas [Giants]:
but the latter tribe having prevailed, their king and leader,
Shankhâsura, who resided in the ocean, made frequent incursions
... in the night.(958)

It is not on the banks of the Nile, as Wilford supposes, but on the coasts
of Western Africa, South of where now lies Morocco, that these battles
took place. There was a time when the whole of the Sahara Desert was a
sea, then a continent as fertile as the Delta, and then, only after
another temporary submersion, it became a desert similar to that other
wilderness, the Desert of Shamo or Gobi. This is shown in Paurânic
tradition, for on the same page as above cited, it is said:

The people were between two fires; for, while Shankhâsura was
ravaging one side of the continent, Cracacha [or Krauncha], king
of Crauncha‐dwîp [Krauncha‐dvîpa], used to desolate the other:
both armies ... thus _changed the most fertile of regions into a
barren desert_.

That not only the last island of Atlantis, spoken of by Plato, but a large
Continent, first divided, and then broken later on into seven peninsulas
and islands (called Dvîpas), preceded Europe, is sure. It covered the
whole of the North and South Atlantic regions, as well as portions of the
North and South Pacific, and had islands even in the Indian Ocean (relics
of Lemuria). The claim is corroborated by Indian _Purânas_, Greek writers,
and Asiatic, Persian, and Mahommedan traditions. Wilford, who sorely
confuses the Hindû and the Mussulman legends, shows this, however,
clearly.(959) His facts and quotations from the _Purânas_ give direct and
conclusive evidence that the Âryan Hindûs and other ancient nations were
earlier navigators than the Phœnicians, who are now credited with having
been the first seamen that appeared in the post‐diluvian times. This is
what we read in the _Asiatick Researches_:

In this distress the few natives, who survived [in the war between
Devatâs and Daityas] raised their hands and hearts to Bhagavân,
and exclaimed, “Let him that can deliver us ... be our king”;
using the word ÎT [a _magic_ term not understood by Wilford,
evidently] which reëchoed through the whole country.(960)

Then comes a violent storm, the waters of the Kâlî are strangely agitated,
“when there appeared from the waves ... a man, afterwards called ÎT, at
the head of a numerous army, saying ‘_abhayan_,’ or _there is no fear_”;
and scattered the enemy. “The King ÎT,” explains Wilford, “is a
subordinate incarnation of Mrīra”—Mrida, a form of Rudra, probably?—who
“reëstablished peace and prosperity throughout all Shankha‐dvîpa, through
Barbaradêsa, Misra‐st’hân and Arva‐st’hân, or Arabia,”(961) etc.

Surely, if the Hindû _Purânas_ give a description of wars on continents
and islands situated beyond Western Africa in the Atlantic Ocean; if their
writers speak of Barbaras and other people such as Arabs—they who were
never known to navigate, or cross the Kâla‐pâni, the Black Waters of the
Ocean, in the days of Phœnician navigation—then these _Purânas_ must be
older than those Phœnicians who are placed at from 2,000 to 3,000 years
B.C. At any rate, their traditions must have been older,(962) for an Adept
writes:

_In the above accounts, the Hindûs speak of this island as existing and in
great power; it must, therefore, have been more than eleven thousand years
ago._

But another proof may be adduced of the great antiquity of these Hindû
Âryans who described the last surviving island of Atlantis, or rather of
that remnant of the Eastern portion of that Continent which had perished
soon after the upheaval of the two Americas(963)—the two Varshas of
Pushkara. And they described what they knew, for they had once dwelt on
it. This may be demonstrated, moreover, on an astronomical calculation by
an Adept who criticizes Wilford. Recalling what that Orientalist had
brought forward concerning the Mount Ashburj “at the foot of which the sun
sets,” where was the war between the Devatâs and the Daityas,(964) he
says:

_We will consider, then, the latitude and longitude of the lost island,
and of the remaining Mount Ashburj. It was on the seventh stage of the
world_, _i.e._, _in the seventh climate (which is between the latitude of
24 degrees and latitude 28 degrees north).... This island, the daughter of
the Ocean, is frequently described as lying in the West; and the Sun is
represented as setting at the foot of its mountain (Ashburj, Atlas,
Teneriffe or Nila, no matter the name), and fighting the White Devil of
the __“__White Island.__”_

Now, if we consider this statement from its astronomical aspect, as
Krishna is the incarnated Sun (Vishnu), a solar God, and as he is said to
have killed Div‐sefid, the White Devil—a _possible_ personification of the
ancient inhabitants at the foot of the Atlas—he may perchance be only a
representation of the vertical beams of the Sun. Again, these inhabitants,
the Atlantides, as we have seen, are accused by Diodorus of daily
_cursing_ the Sun, and ever fighting his influence. This is, however, only
an astronomical interpretation. It will now be proved that Shankhâsura,
and Shankha‐dvîpa, and all their history, is also geographically and
ethnologically Plato’s Atlantis in Hindû dress.

It has just been remarked that since, in the Paurânic accounts, the island
is _still existing_, these accounts must be older than the 11,000 years
which have elapsed since Shankha‐dvîpa, or the Poseidonis of Atlantis,
disappeared. But is it not barely possible that Hindûs should have known
the island still earlier? Let us turn again to astronomical
demonstrations, which make this quite plain if with the said Adept one
assumes that:

_At the time when the summer tropical __“__colure__”__ passed through the
Pleiades, when Cor Leonis would be upon the equator, and when Leo_ was
vertical _to Ceylon at sunset, then would Taurus be vertical to the island
of Atlantis at noon_.

This explains, perhaps, why the Sinhalese, the heirs of the Râkshasas and
Giants of Lankâ, and the direct descendants of Sinha, or Leo, became
connected with Shankha‐dvîpa or Poseidonis (Plato’s Atlantis). Only, as
shown by Mackey’s _Sphinxiad_, this must have occurred about 23,000 years
ago, _astronomically_; at which time the obliquity of the ecliptic must
have been rather more than 27 degrees, and consequently Taurus must have
passed over Atlantis or Shankha‐dvîpa. And that it was so is clearly
demonstrated. Say the Commentaries:

_The sacred bull Nandi was brought from Bhârata to Shankha to meet
Rishabha [Taurus] every Kalpa. But when those of the White Island [who
descended originally from Shveta‐dvîpa],_(_965_)_ who had mixed with the
Daityas [Giants] of the land of iniquity, had become black with sin, then
Nandi remained for ever in the White Island [or Shveta‐dvîpa].... Those of
the Fourth World [Race] lost AUM._

Asburj, or Azburj, whether the peak of Teneriffe or not, was a volcano,
when the sinking of the “Western Atala,” or Hell, began, and those who
were saved told the tale to their children. Plato’s Atlantis perished
between water below and fire above; the great mountain vomiting flames all
the while.

_The __“__fire‐vomiting Monster__”__ survived alone out of the ruins of
the unfortunate island._

Do the Greeks, who are accused of borrowing a Hindû fiction (Atala), and
inventing from it another (Atlantis), stand also accused of getting their
geographical notions and the number seven from them?

“The famous Atlantis exists no longer, but we can hardly doubt
that it did once,” says Proclus, “for Marcellus, who wrote a
history of Ethiopian affairs, says that such, and so great, an
island once existed, and this is evidenced by those who composed
histories relative to the external sea. For _they relate that in
this time there were seven islands_ in the Atlantic sea sacred to
Proserpine; and besides these, three of immense magnitude, sacred
to Pluto, ... Jupiter, ... and Neptune. And, besides this, the
inhabitants of the last island [Poseidonis] _preserved the memory
of the prodigious magnitude_ of the Atlantic island as related by
their ancestors, and of its governing for many periods all the
islands in the Atlantic sea. From this _isle_ one may pass to
other large islands beyond, which are not far from the firm land,
near which is the true sea.”

These seven Dvîpas [inaccurately rendered islands] constitute,
according to Marcellus, the body of the famous Atlantis.... This
evidently shows that _Atlantis is the old continent_.... The
Atlantis was destroyed after a violent storm [?]: this is well
known to the Paurâunics, some of whom assert that in consequence
of this dreadful convulsion of nature, six of the Dvîpas
disappeared.(966)

Enough proofs have now been given to satisfy the greatest sceptic.
Nevertheless, direct proofs based on exact Science will also be added. And
yet even though volumes were written, it would be to no purpose for those
who will neither see nor hear, except through the eyes and ears of their
respective authorities.

Hence the teaching of the Roman Catholic scholiasts, namely, that Hermon,
the mount in the land of Mizpeth—meaning “anathema,” “destruction”—is the
same as Mount Armon. As a proof of this, Josephus is often quoted, as
affirming that still in his own day enormous bones of giants were daily
discovered on it. But it was the land of Balaam the prophet, whom the
“Lord loved well.” And so mixed up are facts and personages in the said
scholiasts’ brains, that, when the _Zohar_ explains the “Birds” which
inspired Balaam to mean “Serpents,” to wit, the Wise Men and Adepts at
whose School he had learnt the mysteries of prophecy—the opportunity is
again taken of showing Mount Hermon inhabited by the “winged dragons of
Evil, whose chief is Samael”—the Jewish Satan! As Spencer says:

It is to those unclean spirits chained on Mount Hermon of the
Desert, that the scape‐goat of Israel, who assumed the name of one
of them [Azaz(y)el], was sent.

We say it is not so. The _Zohar_ has the following explanation on the
practice of magic which is called in Hebrew Nehhaschim, or the “Serpents’
Works.” It says (part iii. col. 302):

It is called Nehhaschim, because the magicians [practical
Kabalists] work _surrounded by the light of the Primordial
Serpent_, which they perceive in heaven as a luminous zone
composed of myriads of small stars.

This means simply the Astral Eight, so called by the Martinists, by
Éliphas Lévi, and now by all the modern Occultists.

The “Curse” From A Philosophical Point Of View.

The foregoing teachings of the Secret Doctrine, supplemented by universal
traditions, must now have demonstrated that the _Brâhmanas_ and _Purânas_,
the _Vendîdâd_ and other Mazdean scriptures, down to the Egyptian, Greek,
and Roman, and finally to the Jewish sacred records, all have the same
origin. None are meaningless and baseless stories, invented to entrap the
unwary profane; all are allegories intended to convey, under a more or
less fantastic veil, the great truths gathered in the same field of pre‐
historic tradition. Space forbids us, in these volumes, from entering into
further and more minute details with respect to the four Races which
preceded our own. But before offering to the student the history of the
psychic and spiritual evolution of the direct antediluvian fathers of our
Fifth (Âryan) Humanity, and before demonstrating its bearing upon all the
other side branches grown from the same trunk, we have to elucidate a few
more facts. It has been shown, on the evidence of the whole ancient
literary world, and the intuitional speculations of more than one
Philosopher and Scientist of the later ages, that the tenets of our
Esoteric Doctrine are, in almost every case, corroborated by inferential
as well as by direct proof, that neither the “legendary” Giants, nor the
lost Continents, nor yet the evolution of the preceding Races, are quite
baseless tales. In the Addenda which close this volume, Science will find
itself more than once unable to reply; these Addenda, will, it is hoped,
finally dispose of every sceptical remark with regard to the sacred number
in nature, and our figures in general.

Meanwhile, one task is left incomplete—the disposing of that most
pernicious of all the theological dogmas, the Curse under which man‐kind
is alleged to have suffered ever since the supposed disobedience of Adam
and Eve in the bower of Eden.

Creative powers in man were the gift of Divine Wisdom, not the result of
sin. This is clearly instanced in the paradoxical behaviour of Jehovah,
who first _curses_ Adam and Eve (or Humanity) for the supposed crime
committed, and then _blesses_ his “chosen people” by saying, “Be fruitful,
and multiply, and replenish the earth.”(967) The Curse was not brought on
mankind by the Fourth Race, for the comparatively sinless Third Race, the
still more gigantic Antediluvians, had perished in the same way; hence the
Deluge was no punishment, but simply a result of a periodical and
geological law. Nor was the Curse of Karma called down upon them for
seeking _natural_ union, as all the mindless animal‐world does in its
proper seasons; but, for abusing the creative power, for desecrating the
divine gift, and wasting the life‐essence for no purpose except bestial
personal gratification. When understood, the third chapter of _Genesis_
will be found to refer to the Adam and Eve of the closing Third and the
commencing Fourth Races. In the beginning, conception was as easy for
woman as it was for all animal creation. Nature had never intended that
woman should bring forth her young ones “in sorrow.” Since that period,
however, during the evolution of the Fourth Race, there came enmity
between its seed and the “Serpent’s” seed, the seed or product of Karma
and Divine Wisdom. For the seed of woman, or lust, _bruised the head_ of
the seed of _the fruit of wisdom and knowledge_, by turning the holy
mystery of procreation into animal gratification; hence the Law of Karma
“bruised the _heel_” of the Atlantean Race, by gradually changing
physiologically, morally, physically, and mentally, the whole nature of
the Fourth Race of mankind,(968) until, from being the healthy king of
animal creation in the Third Race, man became in the Fifth, our Race, a
helpless, scrofulous being, and has now become the wealthiest heir on the
Globe to constitutional and hereditary diseases, the most consciously and
intelligently bestial of all animals!(969)

This is the real Curse from the physiological standpoint, almost the only
one touched upon in Kabalistic Esotericism. Viewed from this aspect, the
Curse is undeniable, for it is evident. The intellectual evolution, in its
progress hand‐in‐hand with the physical, has certainly been a curse
instead of a blessing—a gift quickened by the “Lords of Wisdom,” who have
poured on the human Manas the fresh dew of their own Spirit and Essence.
The Divine Titan has then suffered in vain; and one feels inclined to
regret his benefaction to mankind, and sigh for those days so graphically
depicted by Æschylus in his “Prometheus Bound,” when, at the close of the
first Titanic Age (the Age that followed that of Ethereal Man, of the
pious Kandu and Pramlochâ), nascent, physical mankind, still mindless and
(physiologically) senseless, is described as—

Seeing, they saw in vain;
Hearing, they heard not; but like shapes in dreams,
Through the long time all things at random mixed.

Our Saviours, the Agnishvâtta and other divine “Sons of the Flame of
Wisdom”—personified by the Greeks in Prometheus(970)—may well be left
unrecognized and unthanked, in the injustice of the human heart. They may,
in our ignorance of the truth, be indirectly cursed for Pandora’s gift;
but to find themselves proclaimed and declared by the mouth of the clergy,
as the Evil Ones, is too heavy a Karma for “Him” who, when Zeus “ardently
desired” to quench the entire human race, “dared alone” to save that
“mortal race” from perdition, or, as the suffering Titan is make to say:

From sinking blasted down to Hades’ gloom.
For this by these dire tortures I am bent,
Grievous to suffer, piteous to behold,
I who did mortals pity....

The chorus remarking very pertinently:

Vast boon was this thou gavest unto mortals!

Prometheus answers:

Yea, and besides ’twas I that gave them fire.

CHORUS: Have now these short‐lived creatures flame‐eyed fire?

PROM.: Ay, and by it full many arts will learn....

But, with the arts, the “fire” received has turned into the greatest
curse; the animal element, and _consciousness_ of its possession, has
changed periodical instinct into chronic animalism and sensuality.(971) It
is this which hangs over humanity like a heavy funereal pall. Thus arises
the responsibility of free‐will; the Titanic passions which represent
humanity in its darkest aspect;

The restless insatiability of the lower passions and desires,
when, with self‐asserting insolence, they bid defiance to the
restraints of law.(972)

Prometheus having endowed man, according to Plato’s _Protagoras_, with
that “wisdom which ministers to physical well‐being,” but the lower aspect
of Manas of the animal (Kâma) having remained unchanged, instead of “an
untainted mind, heaven’s first gift,” there was created the eternal
vulture of ever unsatisfied desire, of regret and despair, coupled with
“the dreamlike feebleness that fetters the blind race of mortals” (556),
unto the day when Prometheus is released by his heaven‐appointed
deliverer, Herakles.

Now Christians—Roman Catholics especially—have tried to prophetically
connect this drama with the coming of Christ. No greater mistake could be
made. The true Theosophist, the pursuer of Divine Wisdom and worshipper of
Absolute Perfection—the Unknown Deity which is neither Zeus nor
Jehovah—will demur to such an idea. Pointing to antiquity he will prove
that there never has been an _original_ sin, but only an abuse of physical
intelligence—the Psychic being guided by the Animal, and both putting out
the light of the Spiritual. He will say: All you who can read between the
lines, study Ancient Wisdom in the old dramas, the Indian and the Greek;
read carefully the “Prometheus Bound,” enacted in the theatres of Athens
2,400 years ago! The myth belongs to neither Hesiod nor Æschylus; but, as
Bunsen says, it “is older than the Hellenes themselves,” for it belongs,
in truth, to the dawn of human consciousness. The _crucified_ Titan is the
personified symbol of the collective Logos, the “Host,” and of the “Lords
of Wisdom” or the Heavenly Man, who incarnated in Humanity. Moreover, as
his name (_Pro_‐me‐_theus_, “he who sees before him” or futurity)
shows(973)—in the arts he devised and taught to humanity, psychological
insight was not the least. For as he complains to the daughters of
Oceanus:

Of prophecies the various modes I fixed, (492)
And among dreams did first discriminate
The truthful vision ... and mortals guided
To a mysterious art....
All arts to mortals from Prometheus came....

Leaving for a few pages the main subject, let us pause and see what may be
the hidden meaning of this, the most ancient as it is the most suggestive
of traditional allegories. As it relates directly to the early Races, this
will be no real digression.

The subject of Æschylus’ trilogy, of which two plays are lost, is known to
all cultured readers. The Demi‐god robs the Gods (the Elohim) of their
secret—the mystery of the _Creative Fire_. For this sacrilegious attempt
he is struck down by Cronus(974) and delivered unto Zeus, the Father and
Creator of a mankind which he would have wished to have blind
intellectually, and animal‐like; a _Personal_ Deity, which will not see
Man “like one of us.” Hence Prometheus, the “Fire and Light‐giver,” is
chained on Mount Caucasus and condemned to suffer torture. But the triform
Fates (Karma), whose decrees, as the Titan says, even Zeus—

E’en he the fore‐ordained cannot escape....

—ordain that those sufferings will last only to that day when a son of
Zeus—

Ay, a son bearing stronger than his sire (787)

One of thine [Io’s] own descendants it must be (791)

—is born. This “Son” will deliver Prometheus (suffering Humanity) from his
own fatal gift. His name is, “He who has to come.”

On the authority, then, of these few lines, which, like any other
allegorical sentence, may be twisted into almost any meaning—on the
authority of the words pronounced by Prometheus and addressed to Io, the
daughter of Inachus, persecuted by Zeus—a whole prophecy is constructed by
some Catholic writers. Says the crucified Titan:

And, portent past belief, the speaking oaks
By which full clearly, in no riddling phrase,
Wast hailed _as the illustrious spouse of Zeus_ ... (853)
... stroking thee
With _touch alone of unalarming hand_;
Then thou _dark Epaphos_ shalt bear, whose name
Records his sacred gendering ... (870).

This was construed by several fanatics—Des Mousseaux and De Mirville
amongst others—into a clear prophecy. Io “is the mother of God,” we are
told, and “dark Epaphos”—Christ. But, the latter has not dethroned his
Father, except metaphorically, if one has to regard Jehovah as that
Father; nor has the Christian Saviour hurled _his_ Father down into Hades.
Prometheus says (in verse 930) that Zeus will be humbled yet:

... such marriage he prepares
Which from his throne of power to nothingness
Shall hurl him down; so shall be all fulfilled
His father Kronos’ curse....
.... Then let him sit
Confiding in his lofty thunder‐peals,
And wielding with both hands the fiery bolt;
For _these shall not avail, but fall he shall,_
_A fall disgraceful_, not to be endured.... (980).

“Dark Epaphos” was the Dionysus‐Sabasius, the son of Zeus and of Demeter
in the Sabasian Mysteries, during which the “Father of the Gods,” assuming
the shape of a _Serpent_, begot on Demeter Dionysus, or the Solar Bacchus.
Io is the Moon, and at the same time the Eve of a _new race_, and so is
Demeter—in the present case. The Promethean myth is a prophecy indeed; but
it does not relate to any of the cyclic Saviours who have appeared
periodically in various countries and among various nations, in their
transitionary conditions of evolution. It points to the last of the
mysteries of cyclic transformations, in the series of which mankind,
having passed from the ethereal to the solid physical state, from
spiritual to physiological procreation, is now carried onward on the
opposite arc of the cycle, toward that second phase of its primitive
state, when _woman knew no man_, and human progeny _was created, not
begotten_.

That state will return to it and to the world at large, when the latter
shall discover and really appreciate the truths which underlie this vast
problem of sex. It will be like “the light that never shone on sea or
land,” and has to come to men through the Theosophical Society. That light
will lead on and up to _true spiritual intuition_. Then, as expressed once
in a letter to a Theosophist,

_The world will have a race of Buddhas and Christs, for the world
will have discovered that individuals have it in their own powers
to procreate Buddha‐like children—or Demons_.... When that
knowledge comes, all dogmatic religions, and with these the
Demons, will die out.

If we reflect upon the serial development of the allegory, and the
character of the heroes, the mystery may be unriddled. Cronus is of course
“Time” in its cyclic course. He swallows his children—the _personal_ Gods
of exoteric dogmas included. Instead of Zeus he has swallowed his stone
idol; but the symbol has grown, and has only developed in human fancy as
mankind has been cycling down toward only its physical and
intellectual—not spiritual—perfection. When it is as far advanced in its
spiritual evolution Cronus will be no longer deceived. Instead of the
stone image he will have swallowed the anthropomorphic fiction itself.
Because, the Serpent of Wisdom, represented in the Sabasian Mysteries by
the anthropomorphized Logos, the unity of spiritual and physical Powers,
will have begotten in Time (Cronus) a progeny—Dionysus‐Bacchus, or the
“dark Epaphos,” the “mighty one,” the Race that will overthrow him. Where
will he be born? Prometheus traces him to his origin and birth‐place in
his prophecy to Io. Io is the Moon‐goddess of generation—for she is Isis
and she is Eve, the Great Mother.(975) He traces the path of the (racial)
wanderings as plainly as words can express it. She has to quit Europe and
go to Asia’s continent, reaching there the highest of the mountains of
Caucasus (v. 737), the Titan telling her:

When thou hast crossed the flood, limit betwixt
Two continents, fronting the burning East.... (810)—

that she must travel Eastward, after passing the “Kimmerian Bosphorus,”
and cross what is evidently the Volga and now Astrakhân on the Caspian
Sea. After this she will encounter “fierce northern blasts” and cross
thither to the land of the “Arimaspian host” (East of Herodotus’ Scythia)
to—

Pluto’s gold‐abounding flood.... (825).

This is rightly conjectured by Professor Newman to have meant the Ural,
the Arimaspi of Herodotus being “the recognized inhabitants of this golden
region.”

And here comes (between verses 825 and 835) a puzzle to all the European
interpreters. Says the Titan:

To these [Arimaspi and Grypes] approach not; a far border land
Thou next shalt reach, where dwells a swarthy race
Near the Sun’s founts, whence is the Æthiop river;
Along its banks proceed till thou attain
The mighty rapids, where from Bybline heights
Pure draughts of sacred water Neilos sends.

There Io was ordained to found a colony for herself and her sons. Now we
must see how the passage is interpreted. Io is told that she has to travel
Eastward till she comes to the river Ethiops, which she is to follow till
it falls into the Nile—hence the perplexity. “According to the
geographical theories of the earliest Greeks,” we are informed by the
author of the version of “Prometheus Bound”:

This condition was fulfilled by the river Indus. Arrian (vi. 1)
mentions that Alexander the Great, when preparing to sail down the
Indus [having seen crocodiles in the river Indus, and in no other
river except the Nile ...], seemed to himself to have discovered
the sources of the Nile; as though the Nile, rising from some
place in India, and flowing through much desert land, and thereby
losing its name Indus, next ... flowed through inhabited land,
being now called Nile by the Ethiopians of those parts and
afterwards by the Egyptians. Virgil in the IVth Georgic echoes the
obsolete error.(976)

Both Alexander and Virgil may have erred considerably in their
geographical notions; but the prophecy of Prometheus has not in the least
so sinned—not, at any rate, in its Esoteric spirit. When a certain Race is
symbolized, and events pertaining to its history are rendered
allegorically, no topographical accuracy ought to be expected in the
itinerary traced for its personification. Yet it so happens, that the
river Ethiops is certainly the Indus, and it is also the Nîl or Nîlâ. It
is the river born on the Kailâsa Heaven mountain, the Mansion of the
Gods—22,000 feet above the level of the sea. It was the Ethiops river, and
was so called by the Greeks, long before the days of Alexander, because
its banks, from Attock down to Sind, were peopled by tribes generally
referred to as the Eastern Ethiopians. India and Egypt were two kindred
nations, and the Eastern Ethiopians—the mighty builders—have come from
India, as is pretty well proved, it is hoped, in _Isis Unveiled_.(977)

Then why could not Alexander, and even the learned Virgil, have used the
word Nile or Neilos when speaking of the Indus, since it is one of its
names? To this day the Indus is called, in the regions around Kalabagh,
Nîl, “blue,” and Nîlâ, the “blue river.” The water there is of such a dark
blue colour that this name was given to it from time immemorial; a small
town on its banks being called by the same name, and existing to this day.
Evidently Arrian, who wrote far later than the days of Alexander, and who
was ignorant of the old name of the Indus, has unconsciously slandered the
Greek conqueror. Nor are our modern historians much wiser, in judging as
they do, for they often make the most sweeping declarations on mere
appearances, as much as their ancient colleagues ever did in days of old,
when no Encyclopædias were yet ready for them.

The race of Io, the “cow‐horned maid,” is then simply the first pioneer
race of the Æthiopians brought by her from the Indus to the Nile, which
received its name in memory of the mother river of the colonists from
India.(978) Therefore Prometheus says to Io(979) that the sacred
Neilos—the God, not the river—shall guide her “to the land, _three‐
cornered_,” namely, to the Delta, where her sons are foreordained to found
“that far‐off colony.” (833 _et seqq._)

It is there that a new race (the Egyptians) will begin, and a “female
race” (873) which, “fifth in descent” from dark Epaphos—

Fifty in number shall return to Argos.

Then one of the fifty virgins will fail through love and shall—

... A kingly race in Argos bear....

But from this seed shall dauntless heroes spring,
Bow—famous, who shall free me from these ills.

When these heroes shall arise, the Titan does not reveal; for as he
remarks:

This, to set forth at large needs lengthy speech.

But “Argos” is Arghyavarsha, the Land of Libations of the old Hierophants,
whence the Deliverer of Humanity will appear, a name which became ages
later that of its neighbour, India—the Aryâvarta of old.

That the subject formed part of the Sabasian Mysteries is made known by
several ancient writers; among others by Cicero(980) and by Clemens
Alexandrinus.(981) The latter writers are the only ones who attribute the
fact of Æschylus being charged by the Athenians with sacrilege and
condemned to be stoned to death to its true cause. They say that being
himself uninitiated, Æschylus had profaned the Mysteries by exposing them
in his Trilogies on a public stage.(982) But he would have incurred the
same condemnation had he been initiated; which must have been the case, as
otherwise he must, like Socrates, have had a Daimon to reveal to him the
secret and sacred allegorical Drama of Initiation. At all events, it is
not the “father of the Greek tragedy” who invented the prophecy of
Prometheus; for he only repeated in dramatic form that which was revealed
by the priests during the Mysteria of the Sabasia.(983) The latter was one
of the oldest sacred festivals, whose origin is to this day unknown to
history. Mythologists connect it through Mithras, the Sun, called Sabasius
on some old monuments, with Jupiter and Bacchus. It was never, however,
the property of the Greeks, but dates from days immemorial.

The translator of the drama wonders how Æschylus could become guilty of
such

Discrepancy between the character of Zeus as portrayed in the
“Prometheus Bound” and that depicted in the remaining dramas.(984)

This is just because Æschylus, like Shakespeare, was and will ever remain
the intellectual “Sphinx” of the ages. Between Zeus, the Abstract Deity of
Grecian thought, and the Olympic Zeus, there was an abyss. The latter
represented in the Mysteries no higher a principle than the lower aspect
of human physical intelligence—Manas wedded to Kâma; whereas
Prometheus—the divine aspect of Manas merging into and aspiring to
Buddhi—was the divine Soul. Zeus, whenever shown as yielding to his lower
passions, is the Human Soul and nothing more—the _jealous_ God, revengeful
and cruel in its Egotism or “I‐am‐ness.” Hence, Zeus is represented as a
Serpent—the intellectual tempter of man—which, nevertheless, begets in the
course of cyclic evolution the “Man‐Saviour,” the Solar Bacchus or
Dionysus—_more than a man_.

Dionysus is one with Osiris, with Krishna, and with Buddha, the heavenly
Wise One, and with the coming (tenth) Avatâra, the glorified Spiritual
Christos, who will deliver the suffering Chrestos—mankind, or Prometheus,
on its trial. This, say Brâhmanical and Buddhistic legends, echoed by the
Zoroastrian and now by the Christian teachings (the latter only
occasionally), will happen at the end of the Kali Yuga. It is only after
the appearance of Kalki Avatâra, or Sosiosh, that man will be born from
woman without sin. Then will Brahmâ, the Hindû deity, Ahura Mazda
(Ormazd), the Zoroastrian, Zeus, the Greco‐Olympian Don Juan, Jehovah, the
jealous, repenting, cruel, tribal God of the Israelites, and all their
likes in the universal Pantheon of human fancy—vanish and disappear in
thin air. And along with these will vanish their shadows, the _dark
aspects_ of all these Deities, ever represented as their “twin brothers”
and creatures, in exoteric legend—their own _reflection_ on Earth, in
Esoteric Philosophy. The Ahrimans and Typhons, the Samaels and Satans,
must be all dethroned on that day, when every dark evil passion will be
subdued.

There is one Eternal Law in Nature, one that always tends to adjust
contraries, and to produce final harmony. It is owing to this Law of
spiritual development superseding the physical and purely intellectual,
that mankind will become freed from its false Gods, and find itself
finally—Self‐redeemed.

In its final revelation, the old myth of Prometheus, of whom the proto‐
and anti‐types are found in every ancient Theogony, stands in each of them
at the very origin of physical evil, because at the threshold of human
physical life. Cronus is “Time,” whose first law is that the order of the
successive and harmonious phases, in the process of evolution during
cyclic development, should be strictly preserved—under the severe penalty
of abnormal growth with all its ensuing results. It was not in the
programme of natural development, that man—higher animal though he may
be—should become at once, intellectually, spiritually, and psychically,
the Demi‐god he is on Earth, while his physical frame remains weaker, more
helpless and ephemeral, than that of almost any huge mammal. The contrast
is too grotesque and violent; the tabernacle much too unworthy of its
indwelling God. The gift of Prometheus thus became a Curse—though
_foreknown_ and _foreseen_ by the Host personified in that personage, as
his name well shows.(985) It is in this that rests, at one and the same
time, its sin and its redemption. For the Host that incarnated in a
portion of humanity, though led to it by Karma or Nemesis, preferred free‐
will to passive slavery, intellectual self‐conscious pain and even
torture, “while myriad time shall flow,” to inane, imbecile, instinctual
beatitude. Knowing such an incarnation was premature and not in the
programme of Nature, the Heavenly Host, “Prometheus,” still sacrificed
itself to benefit thereby, at least, one portion of mankind.(986) But
while saving man from mental darkness, they inflicted upon him the
tortures of the self‐consciousness of his responsibility—the result of his
free will—besides every ill to which mortal man and flesh are heir. This
torture Prometheus accepted for himself, since the Host became
henceforward blended with the tabernacle prepared for them, which was
still un‐achieved at that period of formation.

Spiritual evolution being incapable of keeping pace with the physical,
once its homogeneity was broken by the admixture, the gift thus became the
chief cause, if not the sole origin, of Evil.(987) Highly philosophical is
the allegory which shows Cronus cursing Zeus for dethroning him, in the
primitive Golden Age of Saturn, when all men were Demi‐gods, and for
creating a physical race of men weak and helpless in comparison; and then
as delivering to his (Zeus’) revenge the culprit, who despoiled the Gods
of their prerogative of creation and who thereby raised man to their
level, intellectually and spiritually. In the case of Prometheus, Zeus
represents the Host of the Primeval Progenitors, of the Pitaras, the
“Fathers” who created man senseless and without mind; while the Divine
Titan stands for the Spiritual Creators, the Devas who “fell” into
generation. The former are spiritually lower, but physically stronger,
than the “Prometheans”; therefore, the latter are shown conquered. “The
lower Host, whose work the Titan spoiled and thus defeated the plans of
Zeus,” was on this Earth in its own sphere and plane of action; whereas
the superior Host was an exile from Heaven, who had got entangled in the
meshes of Matter. The inferior Host were masters of all the Cosmic and
lower Titanic Forces; the higher Titan possessed only the Intellectual and
Spiritual Fire. This drama of the struggle of Prometheus with the Olympic
tyrant and despot, sensual Zeus, one sees enacted daily within our actual
mankind; the lower passions chain the higher aspirations to the rock of
Matter, to generate in many a case the vulture of sorrow, pain, and
repentance. In every such case one sees once more—

A god ... in fetters, anguish fraught;
The foe of Zeus, in hatred held of all—

a God, bereft even of that supreme consolation of Prometheus, who suffered
in self‐sacrifice—

For that to men he [I] bore too fond a mind—

as the divine Titan is moved by altruism, but the mortal man by
selfishness and egoïsm in every instance.

The modern Prometheus has now become Epi‐metneus, “he who sees only after
the event”; because the universal philanthropy of the former has long ago
degenerated into selfishness and self‐adoration. Man will become the
_free_ Titan of old, but not before cyclic evolution has reestablished the
broken harmony between the two natures—the terrestrial and the divine;
after which he becomes impermeable to the lower Titanic Forces,
invulnerable in his Personality, and immortal in his Individuality—but
this cannot happen before every animal element is eliminated from his
nature. When man understands that “_Deus non __ fecit mortem_,”(988) but
that man has created it himself, he will re‐become the Prometheus before
his Fall.

For the full symbolism of Prometheus and the origin of this mythos in
Greece, the reader is referred to Part II of this Volume, Section XX,
“Prometheus, the Titan,” etc. In the said Part—a kind of supplement to the
present portion—every additional information is given upon those tenets
that will be the most controverted and questioned. This work is so
heterodox, when confronted with the acknowledged standards of Theology and
Modern Science, that no proof which tends to show that these standards
often usurp an illegal authority should be neglected.

Additional Fragments From A Commentary On The Verses Of Stanza XII.

The MS. from which these additional explanations are taken belongs to the
group called _Tongshaktchi Sangye Songa_, or the “Records of the Thirty‐
five Buddhas of Confession,” as they are _exoterically_ called. These
personages, however, though called in the Northern Buddhist religion
Buddhas, may just as well be called Rishis, Avatâras, etc., as they are
“Buddhas who have preceded Shâkyamuni” only for the Northern followers of
the ethics preached by Gautama. These great Mahâtmâs, or Buddhas, are a
universal and common property; they are _historical_ Sages—at any rate for
all the Occultists who believe in such a Hierarchy of Sages, and who have
had its existence proved to them by the learned ones of the Fraternity.
They are chosen from among some ninety‐seven Buddhas in one group, and
fifty‐three in another,(989) mostly imaginary personages, who are really
the personifications of the powers of the first‐named.(990) These
“Baskets” of the oldest writings on “palm leaves” are kept very secret.
Each MS. has appended to it a short synopsis of the history of that sub‐
race to which the particular Buddha‐Lha belonged. The one special MS. from
which the fragments which follow have been extracted, and then rendered
into more comprehensible language, is said to have been copied from stone
tablets which belonged to a Buddha of the earliest days of the Fifth Race,
who had witnessed the Deluge and the submersion of the chief continents of
the Atlantean Race. The day when much, if not all, of that which is given
here from the Archaic Records, will be found correct, is not far distant.
Then the modern Symbologists will acquire the certitude that even Odin, or
the God Woden, the highest God in the German and Scandinavian mythology,
is one of these thirty‐five Buddhas; one of the earliest, indeed, for the
Continent to which he and his Race belonged is also one of the earliest—so
early, in truth, that in those days tropical nature was to be found, where
now lie eternal unthawing snows, and one could cross almost by dry land
from Norway _viâ_ Iceland and Greenland, to the lands that at present
surround Hudson’s Bay.(991) In similar fashion, in the palmy days of the
Atlantean Giants, the sons of the “Giants from the East,” a pilgrim could
perform a journey from what in our days is termed the Sahara Desert, to
the lands which now rest in dreamless sleep at the bottom of the waters of
the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. Events which were never written
outside the human memory, but which were religiously transmitted from one
generation to another, and from race to race, may have been preserved by
constant transmission “within the book volume of the brain,” and through
countless æons, with more truth and accuracy than inside any written
document or record. “That which is part of our souls is eternal,” says
Thackeray; and what can be nearer to our Souls than that which happens at
the dawn of our lives? Those lives are countless, but the Soul or Spirit
that animates us throughout these myriads of existences is the same; and
though “the book volume” of the _physical brain_ may forget events within
the scope of one terrestrial life, the bulk of collective recollections
can never desert the Divine Soul within us. Its whispers may be too soft,
the sound of its words too far off the plane perceived by our physical
senses; yet the shadow of events _that were_, just as much as the shadow
of the events _that are to come_, is within its perceptive powers, and is
ever present before its mind’s eye.

It is this Soul‐voice, perhaps, which tells those who believe in tradition
more than in written history, that what is said below is all true, and
relates to pre‐historic facts.

This is what is written in one passage:

_The Kings of Light have departed in wrath. The sins of men have become so
black that Earth quivers in her great agony.... The Azure Seats remain
empty. Who of the Brown, who of the Red, or yet among the Black [Races],
can sit in the Seats of the Blessed, the Seats of Knowledge and Mercy? Who
can assume the Flower of Power, the Plant of the Golden Stem and the Azure
Blossom?_

The “Kings of Light” is the name given in all old records to the
Sovereigns of the Divine Dynasties. The “Azure Seats” are translated
“Celestial Thrones” in certain documents. The “Flower of Power” is now the
Lotus; what it may have been at that period, who can tell?

The writer proceeds, like the later Jeremiah, to bewail the fate of his
people. They had become bereft of their “Azure” (Celestial) Kings, and
“they of the deva‐hue,” the moon‐like complexion, and “they of the
refulgent (golden) face” have gone “to the Land of Bliss, the Land of Fire
and Metal”—or, agreeably with the rules of symbolism, to the lands lying
North and East, from whence “the Great Waters have been swept away, sucked
in by the Earth and dissipated in the Air.” The wise races had perceived
“the black Storm‐dragons, called down by the Dragons of Wisdom”—and “had
fled, led on by the shining Protectors of the most Excellent Land”—the
great ancient Adepts, presumably; those the Hindûs refer to as their Manus
and Rishis. One of them was Vaivasvata Manu.

They “of the yellow hue” are the forefathers of those whom Ethnology now
classes as the Turanians, the Mongols, Chinese and other ancient nations;
and the land they fled to was no other than Central Asia. There, entirely
new races were born; there, they lived and died until the separation of
the nations. But this “separation” did not take place either in the
localities assigned for it by Modern Science, nor in the way the Âryans
are shown to have divided and separated by Prof. Max Müller and other
Âryanists. Nearly two‐thirds of one million years have elapsed since that
period. The yellow‐faced giants of the Post‐Atlantean day had ample time,
through this forced confinement to one part of the world, with the same
racial blood and without any fresh infusion or admixture in it, during a
period of nearly 700,000 years, to branch off into the most heterogeneous
and diversified types. The same is shown in Africa; nowhere does a more
extraordinary variability of types exist, from black to almost white, from
gigantic men to dwarfish races; and this only because of their forced
isolation. The Africans have not left their continent for several hundred
thousands of years. If to‐morrow the continent of Europe were to disappear
and other lands to reëmerge instead, and if the African tribes were to
separate and scatter on the face of the Earth, it is they who, in about a
hundred thousand years hence, would form the bulk of the civilized
nations. And it is the descendants of those of our highly cultured
nations, who might have survived on some one island, without any means of
crossing the new seas, that would fall back into a state of relative
savagery. Thus the reason given for dividing humanity into _superior_ and
_inferior_ races falls to the ground and becomes a fallacy.

Such are the facts given in the Archaic Records. Collating and comparing
them with some modern theories of evolution, _minus_ Natural
Selection,(992) these statements appear quite reasonable and logical.
Thus, while the Âryans are the descendants of the _yellow_ Adam, the
gigantic and highly civilized Atlanto‐Âryan race, the Semites—and the Jews
along with them—are those of the _red_ Adam, and thus both De Quatrefages
and the writers of the Mosaic _Genesis_ are right. For, could chapter v of
the First Book of Moses be compared with the genealogies found in our
Archaic Bible, the period from Adam unto Noah would be found noticed
therein, though of course under different names, the respective years of
the Patriarchs being turned into periods, and the whole being symbolical
and allegorical. In the MS. under consideration many and frequent are the
references to the great knowledge and civilization of the Atlantean
nations, showing the polity of several of them and the nature of their
arts and sciences. If the Third Root‐Race, the Lemuro‐Atlanteans, are
already spoken of as having been drowned “with their high civilizations
and Gods,”(993) how much more may the same be said of the Atlanteans!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still, in another passage, it is said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Staniland Wake adds:

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

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

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

As says Lenormant:

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

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

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

But we are also told that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The thing was derided as a monstrous impossibility; yet within a
few years were discovered, on the shores of Newfoundland, cuttle‐
fishes with arms extending to thirty feet in length, and capable
of dragging a good‐sized boat beneath the surface; and their
action has been reproduced _for centuries past_ ... by Japanese
artists.(1023)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Section I. Esoteric Tenets Corroborated in Every Scripture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Barth says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Section II. Adam=Adami.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the _human_ Root‐Race.

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

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

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

This will be demonstrated in the following Section.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is how a scholar explains it:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Therefore,

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

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

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

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

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

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

אהיה אשר אהיה ;

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

345.

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

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

Âhiyé is ה י ה א, or 5 10 5 1.

Asher is ר ש א, or 200 300 1.

Âhiyé is ה י ה א, or 5 10 5 1.

Add the numbers of these separate words and you have:

אהיה (21) אשר (501) אהיה (21).

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

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

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

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

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

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

Religion is a wise prudential feeling grounded on _mere
calculation_—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But who was Abraxas? As the same author shows:

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

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

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

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

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

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

A. The Evil Spirit: Who, And What?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is _almost_ correct.

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

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

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

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

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

The French Orientalists translate _Fravarshi_ by _Ferouer_.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the _Y‐King_, one reads:

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

Again, the _Tchoon‐Tsieoo_ says allegorically:

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

These stars are the Monads.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In _Ezekiel_, it is said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once more, it is a simple question of priority. Had John’s _Revelation_
been written during the Vedic period, and were not one sure now of its
being simply another version of the _Book of Enoch_ and the Dragon legends
of Pagan antiquity—the grandeur and the beauty of the imagery might have
biassed the critics’ opinion in favour of the Christian interpretation of
that first War, whose battle‐field was starry Heaven, and the first
slaughterers—the Angels. As the matter now stands, however, one has to
trace _Revelation_, event by event, to other and far older visions. For
the better comprehension of the apocalyptic allegories and of the Esoteric
epos we ask the reader to turn to _Revelation_, and to read chapter xii,
from verse 1 to verse 7.

This has several meanings, and much has been found out with regard to the
astronomical and numerical keys of this universal myth. That which may be
now given, is a fragment, a few hints as to its secret meaning, as
embodying the record of a real war, the struggle between the Initiates of
the two Schools. Many and various are the still existing allegories built
on this same foundation stone. The true narrative—that which gives the
full Esoteric meaning—is in the Secret Books, but the writer has had no
access to these.

In the exoteric works, however, the episode of the Târaka War, and some
Esoteric Commentaries, may offer a clue perhaps. In every _Purâna_ the
event is described with more or less variations which show its allegorical
character.

In the Mythology of the earliest Vaidic Âryans as in the later Paurânic
narratives, mention is made of Budha, the “Wise,” one “learned in the
Secret Wisdom,” who is the planet Mercury in his euhemerization. The
_Hindû Classical Dictionary_ credits Budha with being the author of a hymn
in the _Rig Veda_. Therefore, he can by no means be “a later fiction of
the Brâhmans,” but is a very old personation indeed.

It is by enquiring into his genealogy, or theogony rather, that the
following facts are disclosed. As a myth, he is the son of Târâ, the wife
of Brihaspati, the “gold coloured,” and of Soma, the (male) Moon who,
Paris‐like, carries this new Helen of the Hindû Sidereal Kingdom away from
her husband. This causes a great strife and _war_ in Svarga (Heaven). The
episode brings on a battle between the Gods and the Asuras. King Soma
finds allies in Ushanas (Venus), the leader of the Dânavas; and the Gods
are led by Indra and Rudra, who side with Brihaspati. The latter is helped
by Shankara (Shiva), who, having had for his Guru Brihaspati’s father,
Angiras, befriends his son. Indra is here the Indian prototype of Michael,
the Archistrategus and the slayer of the “Dragon’s” Angels—since one of
his names is Jishnu, “leader of the celestial host.” Both fight, as some
Titans did against other Titans in defence of revengeful Gods, the one
party in defence of Jupiter Tonans (in India, Brihaspati is the planet
Jupiter, which is a curious coincidence); the other in support of the
ever‐thundering Rudra. During this war, Indra is deserted by his body‐
guard, the Storm‐Gods (Maruts). The story is very suggestive in some of
its details.

Let us examine some of them, and seek to discover their meaning.

The presiding Genius, or “Regent” of the planet Jupiter is Brihaspati, the
wronged husband. He is the Instructor or Spiritual Guru of the Gods, who
are the representatives of the Procreative Powers. In the _Rig Veda_, he
is called Brahmanaspati, the name “of a deity in whom _the action of the
worshipped_ upon the gods is personified.” Hence Brahmanaspati represents
the materialization of the “Divine Grace,” so to say, by means of ritual
and ceremonies, or the exoteric worship.

Târâ,(1148) his wife, is, on the other hand, the personification of the
powers of one initiated into Gupta Vidyâ (Secret Knowledge), as will be
shown.

Soma is the Moon astronomically; but in mystical phraseology it is also
the name of the sacred beverage drunk by the Brâhmans and the Initiates
during their mysteries and sacrificial rites. The Soma plant is the
_asclepias acida_, which yields a juice from which that mystic beverage,
the Soma drink, is made. Alone the descendants of the Rishis, the
Agnihotris, or Fire‐priests, of the great Mysteries knew all its powers.
But the real property of the _true_ Soma was (and _is_) to make a “new
man” of the Initiate, after he is “reborn,” namely once that he begins to
live in his _Astral_ Body;(1149) for, his spiritual nature overcoming the
physical, he would soon snap it off and part even from that etherealized
form.(1150)

Soma was never given in days of old to the non‐initiated Brâhman—the
simple Grihasta, or priest of the exoteric ritual. Thus Brihaspati, “Guru
of the Gods” though he was, still represented the dead‐letter form of
worship. It is Târâ, his _wife_, the symbol of one who, though wedded to
dogmatic worship, longs for true Wisdom, who is shown as initiated into
his mysteries by King Soma, the giver of that Wisdom. Soma is thus made
_to carry her away_ in the allegory. The result of this is the birth of
Budha, _Esoteric Wisdom_—Mercury, or Hermes, in Greece and Egypt. He is
represented as “so beautiful,” that even the husband, though well aware
that Budha is not the progeny of his dead‐letter worship—claims the “new‐
born” as his Son, the fruit of his ritualistic and meaningless
forms.(1151) Such is, in brief, _one_ of the meanings of the allegory.

The War in Heaven refers to several events of this kind on various and
different planes of being. The first is a purely astronomical and cosmical
fact pertaining to Cosmogony. Mr. John Bentley thought that with the
Hindûs the War in Heaven was only a figure referring to their calculations
of time periods.(1152)

This served as a prototype, he thinks, for the Western nations to build
their War of the Titans upon. The author is not quite wrong, but neither
is he quite right. If the sidereal prototype refers indeed to a pre‐
manvantaric period, and rests entirely on the knowledge which the Âryan
Initiates claim they have of the whole programme and progress of
cosmogony,(1153) the War of the Titans is but a legendary and deified copy
of the real war that took place in the Himâlayan Kailâsa (Heaven) instead
of in the depths of cosmic interplanetary Space. It is the record of the
terrible strife between the “Sons of God” and the “Sons of the Shadow” of
the Fourth and the Fifth Races. It is on these two events, blended
together by legends borrowed from the exoteric account of the War waged by
the Asuras against the Gods, that every subsequent national tradition on
the subject has been built.

Esoterically, the Asuras, transformed subsequently into evil Spirits and
lower Gods, who are eternally at war with the _Great_ Deities—are the Gods
of the Secret Wisdom. In the oldest portions of the _Rig Veda_, they are
the Spiritual and the Divine, the term Asura being used for the Supreme
Spirit and being the same as the great Ahura of the Zoroastrians.(1154)
There was a time when the Gods Indra, Agni, and Varuna themselves belonged
to the Asuras.

In the _Taittirîya Brâhmana_, the Breath (Asu) of Brahmâ‐Prajâpati became
alive, and from that Breath he created the Asuras. Later on, after the
War, the Asuras are called the enemies of the Gods, hence—“_A_‐suras,” the
initial _a_ being a negative prefix—or “_No_‐Gods”; the “Gods” being
referred to as Suras. This then connects the Asuras and their “Hosts,”
enumerated further on, with the “Fallen Angels” of the Christian Churches,
a Hierarchy of Spiritual Beings to be found in every Pantheon of ancient
and even modern nations—from the Zoroastrian down to that of the Chinaman.
They are the Sons of the primeval Creative Breath at the beginning of
every new Mahâ Kalpa, or Manvantara, in the same rank as the Angels who
had remained “faithful.” These were the _allies_ of Soma (the parent of
the Esoteric Wisdom) as against Brihaspati (representing ritualistic or
ceremonial worship). Evidently they have been degraded in Space and Time
into opposing Powers or Demons by the ceremonialists, on account of their
rebellion against hypocrisy, sham‐worship, and the dead‐letter form.

Now what is the real character of all those who fought along with them?
They are:

(1) Ushanas, or the “Host” of the Planet Venus, become now in Roman
Catholicism Lucifer, the Genius of the “day star,”(1155) the Tsaba, or
Army of “Satan.”

(2) The Daityas and Dânavas are the Titans, the Demons and Giants whom we
find in the _Bible_(1156)—the progeny of the “Sons of God” and the
“Daughters of Men.” Their generic name shows their alleged character, and
discloses at the same time the secret _animus_ of the Brâhmans; for they
are the Kratu‐dvishas—the “enemies of the sacrifices” or exoteric _shams_.
These are the “Hosts” that fought against Brihaspati, the representative
of _exoteric_ popular and national religions; and Indra—the God of the
_visible_ Heaven, the Firmament, who, in the early _Veda_, is the
_highest_ God of cosmic Heaven, the fit habitation for an _extra_‐cosmic
and personal God, higher than whom no exoteric worship can ever soar.

(3) Then come the Nâgas,(1157) the Sarpas, Serpents or Seraphs. These,
again, show their character by the hidden meaning of their glyph. In
mythology they are _semi‐divine_ beings with a human face and the tail of
a dragon. They are therefore, undeniably, the Jewish Seraphim (compare
Serapis, Sarpa, Serpent); the singular being Saraph, “burning, fiery.”
Christian and Jewish angelology distinguishes between the Seraphim and the
Cherubim or Cherubs, who come second in order: Esoterically, and
kabalistically, they are identical; the Cherubim being simply the name for
the images or likenesses of any of the divisions of the celestial Hosts.
Now, as said before, the Dragons and Nâgas were the names given to the
Initiate‐hermits, on account of their great Wisdom and Spirituality and
their living in caves. Thus, when Ezekiel(1158) applies the adjective
Cherub to the King of Tyre, and tells him that by his _wisdom_ and his
_understanding_ there is _no secret_ that can be hidden from him, he shows
the Occultist that it is a “Prophet,” perhaps still a follower of
_exoteric_ worship, who fulminates against an Initiate of another school
and not against an imaginary Lucifer, a fallen Cherub from the stars, and
then from the Garden of Eden. Thus the so‐called “War” is, in one of its
many meanings, also an allegorical record of the strife between the two
classes of Adepts—of the Right and of the Left Path. There were three
classes of Rishis in India, who were the earliest Adepts known; the Royal,
or Râjarshis, kings and princes, who adopted the ascetic life; the Divine,
or Devarshis, or the sons of Dharma or Yoga; and the Brahmarshis,
descendants of those Rishis who were the founders of Gotras of Brâhmans,
or caste‐races. Now, leaving the mythical and astronomical keys for one
moment aside, the secret teachings show many Atlanteans who belonged to
these divisions; and there were strifes and wars between them, _de facto_
and _de jure_. Nârada, one of the greatest Rishis, was a Devarshi; and he
is shown in constant and everlasting feud with Brahmâ, Daksha, and other
Gods and Sages. Therefore we may safely maintain that whatever the
_astronomical_ meaning of this universally accepted legend may be, its
human phase is based on real and historical events, disfigured into a
theological dogma only to suit ecclesiastical purposes. As above so below.
Sidereal phenomena, and the behaviour of the celestial bodies in the
Heavens, were taken as a model, and the plan was carried out below, on
Earth. Thus, Space, in its abstract sense, was called the “realm of divine
knowledge,” and by the Chaldees or Initiates Ab Soo, the habitat (or
father, _i.e._, the source) of knowledge, because it is in Space that
dwell the intelligent Powers which _invisibly_ rule the Universe.(1159)

In the same manner, and on the plan of the Zodiac in the _upper_ Ocean or
the Heavens, a certain realm on Earth, an inland sea, was consecrated and
called the “Abyss of Learning”; twelve centres on it, in the shape of
twelve small islands, representing the Zodiacal Signs—two of which
remained for ages the “mystery Signs”(1160)—were the abodes of twelve
Hierophants and Masters of Wisdom. This “Sea of Knowledge” or
learning(1161) remained for ages there, where now stretches the Shamo or
Gobi Desert. It existed until the last great glacial period, when a local
cataclysm, which swept the waters South and West and so formed the present
great desolate desert, left only a certain oasis, with a lake and one
island in the midst of it, as a relic of the Zodiacal Ring on Earth. For
ages the Watery Abyss—which, with the nations that preceded the later
Babylonians, was the abode of the “Great Mother,” the terrestrial post‐
type of the “Great Mother Chaos” in Heaven, the parent of Ea (Wisdom),
himself the early prototype of Oannes, the Man‐Fish of the Babylonians—for
ages, then, the “Abyss” or Chaos was the abode of Wisdom and not of Evil.
The struggle of Bel and then of Merodach, the Sun‐God, with Tiamat, the
Sea and its Dragon—a “War” which ended in the defeat of the latter—has a
purely cosmic and geological meaning, as well as a historical one. It is a
page torn out of the history of the Secret and Sacred Sciences, their
evolution, growth and _death—for the profane masses_. It relates (_a_) to
the systematic and gradual drying up of immense territories by the fierce
Sun at a certain pre‐historic period, one of the terrible droughts which
ended by a gradual transformation of once fertile lands abundantly watered
into the sandy deserts which they are now; and (_b_) to the as systematic
persecution of the Prophets of the Right Path by those of the Left. The
latter, having inaugurated the birth and evolution of the sacerdotal
castes, have finally led the world into all those exoteric religions,
which have been invented to satisfy the depraved taste of the “hoi polloi”
and the ignorant for ritualistic pomp and the materialization of the ever‐
immaterial and Unknowable Principle.

This was a certain improvement on the Atlantean sorcery, the memory of
which lingers in the remembrance of all the literary and Sanskrit‐reading
portion of India, as well as in the popular legends. Still it was a parody
on, and the desecration of, the Sacred Mysteries and their Science. The
rapid progress of anthropomorphism and idolatry led the early Fifth, as it
had already led the Fourth Race, into sorcery once more, though on a
smaller scale. Finally, even the four “Adams” (symbolizing, under other
names, the four preceding Races) were forgotten, and, passing from one
generation into another, each loaded with some additional myths, were at
last drowned in that ocean of popular symbolism called the Pantheons. Yet
they exist to this day in the oldest Jewish traditions: the first as the
Tzelem, the “Shadow‐Adam,” the Chhâyâs of our doctrine; the second, the
“Model” Adam, the copy of the first, and the “male and female” of the
exoteric _Genesis_; the third, the “Earthly Adam” before the Fall, an
androgyne; and the fourth, the Adam after his “fall,” _i.e._, separated
into sexes, or the pure Atlantean. The Adam of the Garden of Eden, or the
forefather of our Race—the fifth—is an ingenious compound of the above
four. As stated in the _Zohar_, Adam, the first Man, is not found now on
Earth, he “is not found in all Below.” For where does the lower Earth come
from? “From the _Chain of the Earth_, and from the _Heaven Above_,”
_i.e._, from the superior Globes, those which precede and are above our
Earth.

And there came out from it [the Chain] creatures differing one
from the other. Some of them in garments [solid] (skins), some in
shells (_Q’lippoth_), ... some in red shells, some in black, some
in white, and some from all the colours.(1162)

As in the Chaldæan Cosmogony of Berosus and the Stanzas just given, some
treatises on the _Kabalah_ speak of creatures with two faces, some with
four, and some with one face; for “the highest Adam did not come down in
all the countries, or produce progeny and have many wives,” but is a
mystery.

So is the Dragon a mystery. Truly says Rabbi Simeon Ben Iochaï, that to
understand the meaning of the Dragon is not given to the “companions”
(students, or Chelâs), but only to the “little ones,” _i.e._, the perfect
Initiates.(1163)

The work of the beginning the companions understand; but it is
only the little ones who understand the parable on the work in the
Principium by the _Mystery of the Serpent of the Great Sea_.(1164)

And those Christians, who may happen to read this, will also understand by
the light of the above sentence who their “Christ” was. For Jesus states
repeatedly that he who “shall not receive the Kingdom of God as a _little
child_, he shall not enter therein”; and if some of his sayings have been
meant to apply to children without any metaphor, most of the references to
the “little ones” in the Gospels, relate to the Initiates, _of whom Jesus
was one_. Paul (Saul) is referred to in the _Talmud_ as the “little one.”

The “Mystery of the Serpent” was this: Our Earth, or rather _terrestrial
life_, is often referred to in the Secret Teachings as the Great Sea, the
“Sea of Life” having remained to this day a favourite metaphor. The
_Siphra Dtzenioutha_ speaks of Primeval Chaos and the Evolution of the
Universe after a Destruction (Pralaya), comparing it to an uncoiling
serpent:

Extending hither and thither, its tail in its mouth, the head
twisting on its neck, it is enraged and angry.... It watches and
conceals itself. Every thousand _Days_ it is manifested.(1165)

A commentary on the _Purânas_ says:

Ananta‐Shesha is a form of Vishnu, the Holy Spirit of
Preservation, and a symbol of the Universe, on which it is
supposed to sleep during the intervals of the _Days_ of Brahmâ.
The seven heads of Shesha support the Universe.

So the Spirit of God “sleeps,” or is “breathing” over the Chaos of
Undifferentiated Matter, before each new “Creation,” says the _Siphra
Dtzenioutha_. Now one Day of Brahmâ is composed, as already explained, of
_one thousand_ Mahâ Yugas; and as each Night, or period of rest, is equal
in duration to this Day, it is easy to see what this sentence in the
_Siphra Dtzenioutha_ refers to—viz., that the Serpent manifests “once in a
thousand days.” Nor is it more difficult to see whither the initiated
writer of the _Siphra_ is leading us, when he says:

Its head is broken in the waters of the Great Sea, as it is
written: Thou dividest the sea by thy strength, thou brakest the
_heads_ of the _dragons_ in the waters.(1166)

It refers to the trials of the Initiates in this physical life, the “Sea
of Sorrow,” if read with one key; it hints at the successive destruction
of the seven Spheres of a Chain of Worlds in the Great Sea of Space, when
read with another key; for every sidereal globe or sphere, every world,
star, or group of stars, is called in symbolism a “Dragon’s Head.” But
however it may read, the Dragon was never regarded as Evil, nor was the
Serpent either—in antiquity. In the metaphors, whether astronomical,
cosmical, theogonical or simply physiological (or phallic), the Serpent
was always regarded as a _divine_ symbol. When mention is made of “the
[Cosmic] Serpent which runs with 370 leaps,”(1167) it means the cyclic
periods of the great Tropical Year of 25,868 years, divided in the
Esoteric calculation into 370 periods or cycles, as one solar year is
divided into 365 days. And if Michael was regarded by the Christians as
the Conqueror of Satan, the Dragon, it is because in the _Talmud_ this
fighting personage is represented as the Prince of Waters, who had seven
subordinate Spirits under him—a good reason why the Latin Church made him
the patron saint of every promontory in Europe. In the _Siphra
Dtzenioutha_ the Creative Force “makes sketches and spiral lines of his
creation _in the shape of a Serpent_.” It “holds its tail in its mouth,”
because it is the symbol of endless eternity and of cyclic periods. Its
meanings, however, would require a volume, and we must end.

Thus the reader may now see for himself what are the several meanings of
the “War in Heaven,” and of the “Great Dragon.” Thus the most solemn and
dreaded of Church dogmas, the alpha and omega of the Christian faith, and
the pillar of its Fall and Atonement, dwindles down to a Pagan symbol, in
the many allegories of these pre‐historic struggles.

Section V. Is Plerôma Satan’s Lair?

The subject is not yet exhausted, and has to be examined from still other
aspects.

Whether Milton’s grandiose description of the three _days’_ Battle of the
Angels of Light against those of Darkness justifies the suspicion that he
must have heard of the corresponding Eastern tradition—it is impossible to
say. Nevertheless, if not himself in connection with some Mystic, then it
must have been through some one who had obtained access to the secret
works of the Vatican. Among these there is a tradition concerning the
“Beni Shamash”—the “Children of the Sun”—relating to the Eastern allegory,
with far more minute details _in its triple version_, than one can get
either from the _Book of Enoch_, or the far more recent _Revelation_ of
St. John concerning the “Old Dragon” and his various Slayers, as has been
just shown.

It seems inexplicable to find, to this day, authors belonging to mystical
societies who yet continue in their preconceived doubts as to the
“alleged” antiquity of the _Book of Enoch_. Thus, while the author of the
_Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and Quiches_ is inclined to see in Enoch
an Initiate converted to Christianity (!!),(1168) the English compiler of
Éliphas Lévi’s works, _The Mysteries of Magic_, is also of a like opinion.
He remarks that:

Outside the erudition of Dr. Kenealy, no modern scholarship
attributes any more remote antiquity to the latter work [the _Book
of Enoch_] than the fourth century B.C.(1169)

Modern scholarship has been guilty of worse errors than this one. It seems
but yesterday that the _greatest_ literary critics in Europe denied the
very authenticity of that work, together with the Orphic Hymns, and even
the Book of Hermes or Thoth, until whole verses from the latter were
discovered on Egyptian monuments and tombs of the earliest dynasties. The
opinion of Archbishop Laurence is quoted elsewhere.

The “Old Dragon” and Satan, which have now become singly and collectively
the symbol of, and the theological term for, the “Fallen Angel,” are not
so described either in the _original_ Kabalah (the Chaldæan _Book of
Numbers_) or in the modern. For the most learned, if not the greatest of
modern Kabalists, namely Éliphas Lévi, describes Satan in the following
glowing terms:

It is that Angel who was proud enough to believe himself God;
brave enough to buy his independence at the price of eternal
suffering and torture; beautiful enough to have adored himself in
full divine light; strong enough to still reign in darkness amidst
agony, and to have made himself a throne out of his
inextinguishable pyre. It is the Satan of the republican and
heretical Milton ... the prince of anarchy, served by a hierarchy
of pure spirits(!!).(1170)

This description—one which reconciles so cunningly Theological dogma and
Kabalistic allegory, and even contrives to include a political compliment
in its phraseology—is, when read in the right spirit, quite correct.

Yes, indeed; it is this grandest of ideals, this ever‐living symbol—nay
apotheosis—of self‐sacrifice for the intellectual independence of
humanity; this ever Active Energy protesting against Static Inertia—the
principle to which Self‐assertion is a crime, and Thought and the Light of
Knowledge odious. As Éliphas says with unparalleled justice and irony:

It is this pretended hero of tenebrous eternities, who,
slanderously charged with ugliness, is decorated with horns and
claws, which would fit far better his implacable tormentor.(1171)

It is he who has been finally transformed into a Serpent—the Red Dragon.
But Éliphas Lévi was yet too subservient to his Roman Catholic
authorities—one may add, too jesuitical—to confess that this Devil was
mankind, and never had any existence on Earth outside of that
mankind.(1172)

In this, Christian Theology, although following slavishly in the steps of
Paganism, has only been true to its own time‐honoured policy. It had to
isolate itself, and to assert its authority. Hence it could not do better
than turn every Pagan Deity into a Devil. Every bright Sun‐God of
antiquity—a glorious Deity by day, and its own Opponent and Adversary by
night, named the Dragon of Wisdom, because it was supposed to contain the
germs of night and day—has now been turned into the antithetical Shadow of
God, and has become Satan on the sole and unsupported authority of
despotic human dogma. After which all these producers of light and shadow,
all the Sun‐ and the Moon‐Gods, have been cursed, and thus the one God
chosen out of the many and Satan have both been anthropomorphized. But
Theology seems to have lost sight of the human capacity for discriminating
and finally analyzing all that is artificially forced upon its reverence.
History shows in every race and even tribe, especially in the Semitic
nations, the natural impulse to exalt its own tribal deity above all
others to the hegemony of the Gods, and proves that the God of the
Israelites was such a _tribal_ God, and no more, even though the Christian
Church, following the lead of the “chosen” people, is pleased to enforce
the worship of that one particular deity, and to anathematize all the
others. Whether originally a conscious or an unconscious blunder,
nevertheless, it _was_ one. Jehovah has ever been in antiquity only a God
“among” other “Gods.”(1173) The _Lord_ appears to Abraham, and while
saying, “I am the _Almighty God_,” yet adds, “I will establish my covenant
... to be _a_ God unto thee” (Abraham); and unto _his seed_ after
him(1174)—but not unto Âryan Europeans.

But, then, there was the grandiose and ideal figure of Jesus of Nazareth
to be set off against a dark background, to gain in radiance by the
contrast; _and a darker one the Church could hardly invent_. Lacking the
_Old Testament_ symbology, ignorant of the real connotation of the name of
Jehovah—the Rabbinical secret substitute for the Ineffable and
Unpronounceable Name—the Church mistook the cunningly fabricated shadow
for the reality, the anthropomorphized _generative_ symbol for the one
Secondless Reality, the ever Unknowable Cause of All. As a logical
sequence the Church, for purposes of duality, had to invent an
anthropomorphic Devil—created, as taught by her, by God himself. Satan has
now turned out to be the monster fabricated by the Jehovah‐
Frankenstein—his father’s curse and a thorn in the divine side, a monster,
than whom no earthly Frankenstein could have fabricated a more ridiculous
bogey.

The author of _New Aspects of Life_ describes the Jewish God very
correctly from the kabalistic standpoint as:

The Spirit of the Earth, which had revealed itself to the Jew as
Jehovah.(1175)... It was that Spirit again who, after the death of
Jesus, assumed his form and personated him as the risen Christ

—the doctrine of Cerinthus and several Gnostic sects with slight
variation, as one can see. But the author’s explanations and deductions
are remarkable:

None knew ... better than Moses, ... [and] so well as he, how
great was the power of those [Gods of Egypt] with whose priests he
had contended, ... the gods of which Jehovah is claimed to be the
God [by the Jews only].

Asks the author:

What were these gods, these Achar of which Jehovah, the Achad, is
claimed to be the God ... by overcoming them?

To which our Occultism answers: Those whom the Church now calls the Fallen
Angels and collectively Satan, the Dragon—overcome, if we have to accept
_her_ dictum, by Michael and his Host, that Michael being simply Jehovah
himself, one of the subordinate Spirits at best. Therefore, the author is
again right in saying:

The Greeks believed in the existence of ... _daimons_. But ...
they were anticipated by the Hebrews, who held _that there was a
class of personating spirits_ which they designated _demons_,
“personators.”... Admitting with Jehovah, who expressly asserts
it, the existence of other gods, which ... were personators of the
One God, were these other gods simply a higher class of
personating spirits, ... which had acquired and exercised greater
powers? And is not personation _the key to the mystery of the
spirit state_? But once granting this position, _how are we to
know that Jehovah was not a personating spirit_, a spirit which
arrogated to itself that it was, and thus became, the personator
of the one unknown and unknowable God? Nay, how do we know that
the spirit calling itself Jehovah, in arrogating to itself his
attributes did not thus cause its own designation to be imputed to
the One who is in reality as nameless as incognizable?(1176)

Then the author shows that “the spirit Jehovah _is_ a personator” on its
own admission. It acknowledged to Moses “that it had appeared to the
patriarchs as the God Shaddai” and the “God Helion.”

With the same breath it assumed the name of Jehovah; and it is on
the faith of the assertion of this personator that the names El,
Eloah, Elohim, and Shaddai, have been read and interpreted in
juxtaposition with Jehovah as the “Lord God Almighty.” [Then when]
the name Jehovah became ineffable, the designation Adonai, “Lord,”
was substituted for it, and ... it was owing to this substitution
that the “Lord” passed from the Jewish to the Christian “Word” and
World as a designation of God.(1177)

And how are we to know, the author may add, that Jehovah was not many
spirits personating even that seemingly one—Jod or Jod‐He?

But if the Christian Church was the first to make the existence of Satan a
dogma, it was because, as shown in _Isis Unveiled_, the Devil—the powerful
Enemy of God (?!!) had to become the corner stone and pillar of the
Church. For, as a Theosophist, M. Jules Baissac, truly observes in his
_Satan ou le Diable_:

Il fallait éviter de paraître autoriser le dogme du double
principe en faisant de ce Satan créateur une puissance réelle, et
pour expliquer le mal originel, on profère contre Manes
l’hypothèse d’une permission de l’unique Tout‐Puissant.(1178)

The choice and policy were unfortunate, anyhow. Either the personator of
the lower God of Abraham and Jacob ought to have been made entirely
distinct from the mystic “Father” of Jesus, or—the “Fallen” Angels should
have been left unslandered by further fictions.

Every God of the Gentiles is connected with, and closely related to,
Jehovah—the Elohim; for they are all One Host, whose units differ only in
name in the Esoteric Teachings. Between the “Obedient” and the “Fallen”
Angels there is no difference whatever, except in their respective
functions, or rather in the inertia of some, and the activity of others,
among those Dhyân Chohans, or Elohim, who were “commissioned to create,”
_i.e._, to fabricate the manifested world out of the eternal material.

The Kabalists say that the true name of Satan is that of Jehovah turned
upside down, for “Satan is not a black God but the negation of the white
Deity,” or the Light of Truth. God is Light and Satan is the necessary
Darkness or _Shadow_ to set it off, without which pure Light would be
invisible and incomprehensible.(1179) “For the Initiates,” says Éliphas
Lévi, “the Devil is not a person but a creative Force, for Good as for
Evil.” The Initiates represented this Force, which presides at physical
generation, under the mysterious form of God Pan—or Nature; whence the
horns and hoofs of that mythical and symbolic figure, as also the
Christian “goat” of the “Witches’ Sabbath.” With regard to this too,
Christians have imprudently forgotten that the “goat” was also the victim
selected for the atonement of all the sins of Israel, that the scape‐goat
was indeed the sacrificial martyr, the symbol of the greatest mystery on
earth—the “fall into generation.” Only, the Jews have long forgotten the
real meaning of their (to the non‐initiated) ridiculous hero, selected
from the drama of life in the Great Mysteries enacted by them in the
desert; and the Christians have never known it.

Éliphas Lévi seeks to explain the dogma of his Church by paradoxes and
metaphors, but succeeds very poorly in the face of the many volumes
written by pious Roman Catholic Demonologists under the approbation and
auspices of Rome, in this nineteenth century of ours. For the true Roman
Catholic, the Devil or Satan is a _reality_; the drama enacted in the
Sidereal Light according to the seer of Patmos—who desired, perhaps, to
improve upon the narrative in the _Book of Enoch_—is as real, and as
historical a fact as any other allegory and symbolical event in the
_Bible_. But the Initiates give an explanation which differs from that
given by Éliphas Lévi, whose genius and crafty intellect had to submit to
a certain compromise dictated to him from Rome.

Thus, the true and “uncompromising” Kabalists admit that, for all purposes
of Science and Philosophy, it is enough that the profane should know that
the Great Magic Agent—called by the followers of the Marquis de St.
Martin, the Martinists, the Astral Light, by the mediæval Kabalists and
Alchemists the Sidereal Virgin and the Mysterium Magnum, and by the
Eastern Occultists Æther, the reflection of Âkâsha—is that which the
Church calls Lucifer. That the Latin scholastics have succeeded in
transforming the Universal Soul and Plerôma—the _Vehicle of Light_ and the
receptacle of all forms, a Force spread throughout the whole Universe,
with its direct and indirect effects—into Satan and his works, is no news
to any one. But now they are prepared to give out to the above‐mentioned
profane even the secrets hinted at by Éliphas Lévi, without _adequate
explanation_, for the latter’s policy of veiled revelations could only
lead to further superstition and misunderstanding. What, indeed, can a
student of Occultism, who is a beginner, gather from the following highly
poetical sentences of Éliphas Lévi, which are as apocalyptic as the
writings of any of the Alchemists?

Lucifer [the Astral Light] ... is an intermediate force existing
in all creation; it serves to create and to destroy, and the Fall
of Adam was an erotic intoxication which has rendered his
generation a slave to this fatal Light, ... every sexual passion
that overpowers our senses is a whirlwind of that Light which
seeks to drag us towards the abyss of death. Madness,
hallucinations, visions, extasies, are all forms of a very
dangerous excitation due to this _interior phosphorus_[?]. Thus
light, finally, is of the nature of fire, the intelligent use of
which warms and vivifies, and the excess of which, on the
contrary, dissolves and annihilates.

Thus man is called upon to assume a sovereign empire over this
[Astral] Light and conquer thereby his immortality, and is
threatened at the same time with being intoxicated, absorbed, and
eternally destroyed by it.

This Light, therefore, inasmuch as it is devouring, revengeful,
and fatal, would thus really be hell‐fire, the serpent of the
legend; the tormented errors of which it is full, the tears and
the gnashing of teeth of the abortive beings it devours, the
phantom of life that escapes them, and seems to mock and insult
their agony, all this would be the Devil or Satan indeed.(1180)

There is no _false_ statement in all this; nothing save a superabundance
of ill‐applied metaphors, as, for instance, in the application of the myth
of Adam to the illustration of the astral effects. Âkâsha,(1181) the
Astral Light, can be defined in a few words; it is the Universal Soul, the
Matrix of the Universe, the Mysterium Magnum from which all that exists is
born by separation or _differentiation_. It is the cause of existence; it
fills all the infinite Space, _is_ Space itself, in one sense, or both its
_sixth_ and seventh principles.(1182) But as the finite in the Infinite,
as regards manifestation this Light must have its _shadowy_ side—as
already remarked. And as the Infinite can never be manifested, hence the
finite world has to be satisfied with the _shadow alone_, which its
actions draw upon humanity and which men attract and _force into __
activity_. Hence, while the Astral Light is the Universal Cause in its
unmanifested unity and infinity, it becomes, with regard to mankind,
simply the effects of the causes produced by men in their sinful lives. It
is not its bright denizens—whether they are called Spirits of Light or
Darkness—that produce Good or Evil, but mankind itself that determines the
unavoidable action and reaction in the Great Magic Agent. It is mankind
which has become the “Serpent of Genesis,” and thus causes daily and
hourly the Fall and Sin of the “Celestial Virgin”—which thus becomes the
Mother of Gods and Devils at one and the same time; for she is the ever‐
loving, beneficent Deity to all those who stir her _Soul_ and _Heart_,
instead of attracting to themselves her shadowy manifested essence, called
by Éliphas Lévi—the “fatal light” which kills and destroys. Humanity, in
its units, can overpower and master its effects; but only by the holiness
of their lives and by producing good causes. It has power only on the
manifested _lower_ principles—the shadow of the Unknown and Incognizable
Deity in Space. But in antiquity and _reality_, Lucifer, or Luciferus, is
the name of the Angelic Entity presiding over the Light of Truth as over
the light of the day. In the great Valentinian Gospel _Pistis Sophia_ it
is taught that of the three Powers emanating from the Holy Names of the
three Triple Powers (Τριδυνάμεις), that of Sophia (the Holy Ghost
according to these Gnostics—the most cultured of all), resides in the
planet Venus or Lucifer.

Thus to the profane, the Astral Light may be God and Devil at once—_Demon
est Deus inversus_—that is to say, through every point of Infinite Space
thrill the magnetic and electrical currents of _animate_ Nature, the life‐
giving and death‐giving waves, for death on earth becomes life on another
plane. Lucifer is divine and terrestrial Light, the “Holy Ghost” and
“Satan,” at one and the same time, _visible_ Space being truly filled with
the differentiated Breath invisibly; and the Astral Light, the manifested
effects of the two who are one, guided and attracted by ourselves, is the
_Karma_ of Humanity, both a personal and impersonal entity—personal,
because it is the mystic name given by St. Martin to the Host of Divine
Creators, Guides and Rulers of this Planet; _impersonal_, as the Cause and
Effect of Universal Life and Death.

The Fall was the _result of man’s knowledge_, for his “eyes were opened.”
Indeed, he was taught Wisdom and the Hidden Knowledge by the “Fallen
Angel,” for the latter had become from that day his Manas, Mind and Self‐
consciousness. In each of us that golden thread of continuous
Life—periodically broken into active and passive cycles of sensuous
existence on Earth, and super‐sensuous in Devachan—_is_ from the beginning
of our appearance upon this Earth. It is the Sûtrâtmâ, the luminous thread
of immortal _impersonal_ Monadship, on which our earthly “lives” or
evanescent Egos are strung as so many beads—according to the beautiful
expression of the Vedântic Philosophy.

And now it stands proven that Satan, or the Red Fiery Dragon, the “Lord of
Phôsphoros”—brimstone was a Theological improvement—and Lucifer, or
“Light‐Bearer,” is in us: it is our Mind, our Tempter and Redeemer, our
intelligent Liberator and Saviour from pure animalism. Without this
principle—the emanation of the very essence of the pure divine principle
Mahat (Intelligence), which radiates direct from the Divine Mind—we would
be surely no better than animals. The first _man_ Adam was made only a
_living soul_ (Nephesh), the last Adam was made a _quickening
spirit_(1183)—says Paul, his words referring to the building or _creation_
of man. Without this _quickening_ spirit, or _human mind_ or soul, there
would be no difference between man and beast; as there is none, in fact,
between animals with respect to their actions. The tiger and the donkey,
the hawk and the dove, are each one as pure and as innocent as the other,
because _irresponsible_. Each follows its instinct, the tiger and the hawk
killing with the same unconcern as the donkey eats a thistle, or the dove
pecks at a grain of corn. If the Fall had the significance given to it by
Theology; if that Fall occurred as a result of an act never intended by
Nature—a _sin_, how about the animals? If we are told that they procreate
their species in consequence of that same “original sin,” for which God
cursed the Earth—hence everything living on it—we will put another
question. We are told by Theology, as also by Science, that the animal was
on Earth far earlier than man. We ask the former: How did it _procreate
its species_, before the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil
had been plucked off? As said:

The Christians—far less clear‐sighted than the great Mystic and
Liberator whose name they have assumed, whose doctrines they have
misunderstood and travestied, _and whose memory they have
blackened by their deeds_—took the Jewish Jehovah as he was, and
of course strove vainly to reconcile the _Gospel of Light and
Liberty_ with the Deity of Darkness and Submission.(1184)

But it is sufficiently proven now that all the _soi‐disant_ evil Spirits
who are credited with having made war on the Gods, are identical as
personalities; that, moreover, all the ancient religions taught the same
tenet, save the final conclusion, which differs from the Christian. The
seven primeval Gods had all a dual state, one essential, the other
accidental. In their essential state they were all the Builders or
Fashioners, the Preservers and the Rulers of this World; and in the
accidental state, clothing themselves in visible corporeality, they
descended on the Earth and reigned on it as Kings and Instructors of the
lower Hosts, who had incarnated once more upon it as men.

Thus, Esoteric Philosophy shows that man is truly the manifested deity in
both its aspects—good and evil, but Theology cannot admit this
philosophical truth. Teaching as it does the dogma of the Fallen Angels in
its dead‐letter meaning, and having made of Satan the corner‐stone and
pillar of the dogma of redemption—to do so would be suicidal. Having once
shown the rebellious Angels _distinct_ from God and the Logos in their
personalities, to admit that the downfall of the _disobedient_ Spirits
means simply their fall into generation and matter, would be equivalent to
saying that God and Satan were identical. For since the Logos, or God, is
the aggregate of that once divine Host accused of having fallen, it would
naturally follow that the Logos and Satan are one.

Yet such was the real philosophical view in antiquity of the now
disfigured tenet. The Verbum, or the “Son,” was shown in a dual aspect by
the Pagan Gnostics—in fact, he was a _duality_ in full _unity_. Hence, the
endless and various national versions. The Greeks had Jupiter, the son of
Cronus, the Father, who hurls him down into the depths of Kosmos. The
Âryans had Brahmâ (in later theology) precipitated by Shiva into the Abyss
of Darkness, etc. But the Fall of all these Logoi and Demiourgoi from
their primitive exalted position, contained in all cases one and the same
Esoteric signification; the Curse, in its philosophical meaning, of being
incarnated on this Earth; an unavoidable rung in the Ladder of Cosmic
Evolution, a highly philosophical and fitting Karmic Law, without which
the presence of Evil on Earth would have to remain for ever a closed
mystery to the understanding of true Philosophy. To say, as the author of
_Esprits Tombés des Paiens_ does, that since—

Christianity is made to rest on two pillars, that of evil
(πουηροῦ), and of good (ἀγαθοῦ); on two forces, in short (ἀγαθαὶ
καὶ κακαὶ δυνάμεις): hence, if we suppress the punishment of the
_evil forces_, the protecting mission of the good powers will have
neither value nor sense

—is to utter the most unphilosophical absurdity. If it fits in with, and
explains, Christian dogma, it obscures the facts and truths of the
primitive Wisdom of the ages. The cautious hints of Paul have all the true
Esoteric meaning, and it took centuries of scholastic casuistry to give
them the false colouring in their present interpretations. The Verbum and
Lucifer are one in their dual aspect; and the “Prince of the Air”
(_princeps aeris hujus_) is not the “God of _that_ period,” but an
everlasting principle. When the latter was said to be ever _circling_
around the world (_qui circumambulat terram_), the great Apostle referred
simply to the never‐ceasing cycles of human incarnations, in which evil
will ever predominate unto the day when Humanity is redeemed by the true
divine Enlightenment which gives the correct perception of things.

It is easy to disfigure vague expressions written in dead and long‐
forgotten languages, and palm them off on the ignorant masses as truths
and _revealed_ facts. The identity of thought and meaning is the one thing
that strikes the student in all the religions which mention the tradition
of the Fallen Spirits, and in those great religions there is not one that
fails to mention and describe it in one or another form. Thus, Hoang‐ty,
the Great Spirit, sees his Sons, who had acquired _active wisdom_, falling
into the Valley of Pain. Their leader, the Flying Dragon, having drunk of
the forbidden Ambrosia, _fell to the Earth_ with his Host (Kings). In the
_Zend Avesta_, Angra Mainyu (Ahriman), surrounding himself with Fire (the
“Flames” of the Stanzas), seeks to conquer the Heavens,(1185) when Ahura
Mazda, descending from the _solid_ Heaven he inhabits, to the help of the
Heavens _that revolve_ (in time and space, the manifested worlds of cycles
including those of incarnation), and the Amshaspands, the “seven bright
Sravah,” accompanied by their stars, fight Ahriman, and the vanquished
Devas fall to the Earth along with him.(1186) In the _Vendîdâd_ the Daêvas
are called “evil‐doing,” and are shown to rush away “into the depths of
the ... world of hell,” or Matter.(1187) This is an allegory which shows
the Devas _compelled to incarnate_, once that they have separated
themselves from their Parent Essence, or, in other words, after the Unit
had become multiple, after differentiation and manifestation.

Typhon the Egyptian Python, the Titans, the Suras and the Asuras, all
belong to the same legend of Spirits peopling the Earth. They are not
“_Demons_ commissioned to create and organize this visible universe,” but
the Fashioners or “Architects” of the Worlds, and the Progenitors of Man.
They are the _Fallen_ Angels, metaphorically—the “true mirrors” of the
“Eternal Wisdom.”

What is the complete truth as well as the Esoteric meaning about this
universal myth? The whole essence of truth _cannot be transmitted from
mouth to ear_. Nor can any pen describe it, not even that of the Recording
Angel, unless man finds the answer in the sanctuary of his own heart, in
the innermost depths of his divine intuition. It is the great _Seventh
Mystery_ of Creation, the first and the last; and those who read St.
John’s _Apocalypse_ may find its shadow lurking under the _seventh seal_.
It can be represented only in its apparent, objective form, like the
eternal riddle of the Sphinx. If the Sphinx threw herself into the sea and
perished, it is not because Œdipus _had_ unriddled the secret of the ages,
but because, by anthropomorphizing the ever‐spiritual and the subjective,
he had dishonoured the great truth for ever. Therefore, we can give it
only from its philosophical and intellectual planes, unlocked with three
keys respectively—for the last four keys of the seven that throw wide open
the portals to the Mysteries of Nature are in the hands of the highest
Initiates, and cannot be divulged to the masses at large—not in this
century, at any rate.

The dead‐letter is everywhere the same. The dualism in the Mazdean
religion was born from exoteric interpretation. The holy Airyaman, the
“bestower of weal,”(1188) invoked in the prayer called Airyama‐ishyô, is
the divine aspect of Ahriman, “the deadly, the Daêva of the Daêvas,”(1189)
and Angra Mainyu is the dark material aspect of the former. “Keep us from
our hater, O Mazda and Ârmaita Spenta,”(1190) has, as a prayer and
invocation, an identical meaning with “Lead us not into temptation,” and
is addressed by man to the terrible _spirit of duality_ in man himself.
For Ahura Mazda is the Spiritual, Divine, and Purified Man, and Ârmaita
Spenta, the Spirit of the Earth or materiality, is the same as Ahriman or
Angra Mainyu in one sense.

The whole of the Magian or Mazdean literature—or what remains of it—is
magical, occult, hence allegorical and symbolical, even its “mystery of
the law.”(1191) Now the Mobed and the Parsî keep their eye on the Baresma
during the sacrifice—the divine twig off Ormazd’s “Tree” having been
transformed into a bunch of metallic rods—and wonder why neither the
Amesha Spentas, nor “the high and beautiful golden Haômas, nor even their
Vohu‐Manô (good thoughts), nor their Râta (sacrificial offering),” help
them much. Let them meditate on the “Tree of Wisdom,” and by study
assimilate, one by one, the fruits thereof. The way to the Tree of Eternal
Life, the white Haôma, the Gaokerena, is through one end of the Earth to
the other; and Haôma is in Heaven as it is on Earth. But to become once
more a priest of it, and a “healer,” man must heal himself, for this must
be done before he can heal others.

This proves once more that, in order to be dealt with, with at least an
approximate degree of justice, the so‐called “myths” have to be closely
examined from all their aspects. In truth, every one of the seven keys has
to be used in its right place, and never mixed with the others—if we would
unveil the entire cycle of mysteries. In our day of dreary soul‐killing
Materialism, the ancient Priest‐Initiates have become, in the opinion of
our learned generations, the synonyms of clever impostors, kindling the
fires of superstition in order to obtain an easier sway over the minds of
men. This is an unfounded calumny, generated by scepticism and
uncharitable thoughts. No one believed more than they did in Gods—or, we
may call them, the spiritual and now invisible Powers, or Spirits, the
Noumena of the phenomena; and they believed simply because _they knew_.
And though after being initiated into the Mysteries of Nature, they were
forced to withhold their knowledge from the profane, who would have surely
abused it, such secrecy was undeniably less dangerous than the policy of
their usurpers and successors. The former taught only that which they well
knew. The latter, teaching what _they do not know_, have invented, as a
secure haven for their ignorance, a jealous and cruel Deity, who forbids
man to pry into his mysteries under the penalty of damnation; as well they
may, for _his_ mysteries can at best be only hinted at in polite ears,
never described. Turn to King’s _Gnostics and their Remains_, and see for
yourself what was the primitive Ark of the Covenant, according to the
author, who says:

There is a Rabbinical tradition ... that the Cherubim placed over
it were represented as male and female, in the act of copulation,
in order to express the grand doctrine of the Essence of _Form_
and _Matter_, the two principles of all things. When the Chaldeans
broke into the Sanctuary and beheld this most astounding emblem,
they naturally enough exclaimed, “Is this your God, of whom you
boast, that He is such a lover of purity!”(1192)

King thinks that this tradition “savours too much of Alexandrian
philosophy to demand any credit,” to which we demur. The shape and form of
the wings of the two Cherubim standing on the right and left sides of the
Ark, these wings meeting over the “Holy of Holies,” are an _emblem_ quite
eloquent in itself, not to speak of the “holy” Jod within the Ark! The
Mystery of Agathodæmon, whose legend states, “I am Chnumis, Sun of the
Universe, 700,” can alone solve the mystery of Jesus, the number of whose
name is “888.” It is not the key of St. Peter, or the Church dogma, but
the Narthex—the Wand of the Candidate for Initiation—that has to be
wrenched from the grasp of the long‐silent Sphinx of the ages. Meanwhile:

The augurs, who, upon meeting each other, have to thrust their tongues
into their cheeks to suppress a fit of laughter, may be more numerous in
our own age than they ever were in the day of Sylla.

Section VI. Prometheus, the Titan.

His Origin In Ancient India.

In our modern day there is not the slightest doubt in the minds of the
best European symbologists that the name Prometheus possessed the greatest
and most mysterious significance in antiquity. While giving the history of
Deucalion, whom the Bœotians regarded as the ancestor of the human races,
and who was the son of Prometheus, according to the significant legend,
the author of the _Mythologie de la Grèce Antique_ remarks:

Thus Prometheus is something more than the archetype of humanity;
he is its _generator_. In the same way that we saw Hephæstus
moulding the first woman [Pandora] and endowing her with life, so
Prometheus kneads the moist clay, of which he fashions the body of
the first man whom he will endow with the soul‐spark.(1193) After
the flood of Deucalion, Zeus, they said, had commanded Prometheus
and Athena to call forth a new race of men from the mire left by
the waters of the deluge,(1194) and, in the day of Pausanias, the
slime which the hero had used for this purpose was still shown in
Phocis.(1195) On several archaic monuments we still see Prometheus
modelling a human body, either alone or with Athena’s help.(1196)

The same author reminds us of another equally mysterious personage, though
one less generally known than Prometheus, whose legend offers remarkable
analogies with that of the Titan. The name of this second ancestor and
generator is Phoroneus, the hero of an ancient poem, now unfortunately no
longer extant, the Phoroneidæ. His legend was localized in Argolis, where
a perpetual flame was preserved on his altar as a reminder that he was the
bringer of fire upon earth.(1197) A benefactor of men, like Prometheus, he
had made them participators of every bliss on earth. Plato(1198) and
Clemens Alexandrinus(1199) say that Phoroneus was the first man, or the
“father of mortals.” His genealogy, which assigns to him the river Inachos
as his father, reminds us of that of Prometheus, which makes that Titan
the son of the Oceanid Clymene. But the mother of Phoroneus was the nymph
Melia: a significant descent which distinguishes him from
Prometheus.(1200)

Melia, Decharme thinks, is the personification of the “Ash‐tree,” whence,
according to Hesiod, issued the race of the age of Bronze,(1201) and which
with the Greeks is the _celestial tree_ common to every Âryan mythology.
This Ash is the Yggdrasil of Norse antiquity, which the Norns sprinkle
daily with the waters from the fountain of Urd, that it may not wither. It
remains verdant till the last days of the Golden Age. Then the Norns—the
three sisters who gaze respectively into the Past, the Present, and the
Future—make known the decree of Orlog or Fate (Karma), but men are
conscious only of the Present.

[But when] Gultweig (gold‐ore) comes, the bewitching enchantress
... who, thrice cast into the fire, arises each time more
beautiful than before and fills the souls of gods and men with
unappeasable longing, then the Norns ... enter into being, and the
blessed peace of childhood’s dreams passes away, and sin comes
into existence with all its evil consequences [and Karma].(1202)

The thrice‐purified Gold is—Manas, the Conscious Soul.

With the Greeks, the Ash‐tree represented the same idea. Its luxuriant
boughs are the Sidereal Heaven, golden by day and studded with stars by
night—the fruits of Melia and Yggdrasil, under whose protecting shadow
humanity lived during the Golden Age without desire as without fear. “That
tree had a fruit, or an inflamed bough, _which was lightning_”—Decharme
guesses.

And here steps in the killing Materialism of the age, that peculiar twist
in the modern mind, which, like a Northern blast, bends all on its way,
and freezes every intuition, allowing it no hand in the physical
speculations of the day. After having seen in Prometheus no more than
“fire by friction,” the learned author of the _Mythologie de la Grèce
Antique_ perceives in this “fruit” a trifle more than an allusion to
terrestrial fire and its discovery. It is no longer fire, owing to the
fall of lightning setting some dry fuel in a blaze, and thus revealing all
its priceless benefits to palæolithic men—but something more mysterious
this time, though still as earthly!

A divine bird, nestled in the branches [of the celestial Ash‐
tree], stole that bough [or the fruit] and carried it down on the
earth in its bill. Now the Greek word Φορώνευς is the rigid
equivalent of the Sanskrit word _bhuranyu_, “the rapid,” an
epithet of Agni, considered as the carrier of the divine spark.
Phoroneus, son of Melia or of the celestial ash, thus corresponds
to a conception far more ancient, probably, than that one which
transformed the _pramantha_ [of the old Âryan Hindûs] into the
Greek Prometheus. Phoroneus is the [personified] bird, that brings
the heavenly lightning to the earth. Traditions relating to the
birth of the race of Bronze, and those which made of Phoroneus the
father of the Argolians, are an evidence to us that this
thunderbolt [or lightning], as in the legend of Hephæstus or
Prometheus, was the origin of the human race.(1203)

This still affords us no more than the external meaning of the symbols and
the allegory. It is now supposed that the name of Prometheus has been
unriddled. But the modern Mythologists and Orientalists see in it no
longer what their fathers saw on the authority of the whole of classical
antiquity. They only find therein something far more appropriate to the
spirit of the age, namely, a phallic element. But the name of Phoroneus,
as well as that of Prometheus, bears not one, nor even two, but a series
of esoteric meanings. Both relate to the _seven_ Celestial Fires; to Agni
Abhimânin, his three sons, and their forty‐five sons, constituting the
Forty‐nine Fires. Do all these numbers relate only to the terrestrial mode
of fire and to the flame of sexual passion? Did the Hindû Âryan mind never
soar above such purely sensual conceptions; that mind which is declared by
Prof. Max Müller to be the most spiritual and mystically inclined on the
whole globe? The number of those fires alone ought to have suggested an
inkling of the truth.

We are told that one is no longer permitted, in this age of rational
thought, to explain the name of Pro‐metheus as the old Greeks did. The
latter, it seems:

Basing themselves on the apparent analogy of προμηθεύς with the
verb προμανθύνειν, saw in him the type of the “foreseeing” man, to
whom, for the sake of symmetry, a brother was added—Epi‐metheus,
or “he who takes counsel _after_ the event.”(1204)

But now the Orientalists have decided otherwise. They know the real
meaning of the two names better than those who invented them. The legend
is based upon an event of universal importance. It was built to
commemorate

A great event which must have strongly impressed itself upon the
imagination of the first witnesses, and its remembrance has never
since faded out from popular memory.(1205)

What was this? Laying aside every poetical _fiction_, all those dreams of
the Golden Age, let us imagine—argue the modern scholars—in all its gross
realism, the first miserable state of humanity, the striking picture of
which was traced for us after Æschylus by Lucretius, and the exact truth
of which is now confirmed by Science; and then we may understand better
that a new life really began for man, on that day when he saw the first
spark produced by the friction of two pieces of wood, or from the veins of
a flint. How could men help feeling gratitude to that mysterious and
marvellous being which they were henceforth enabled to create at their
will, and which was no sooner born, than it grew and expanded, developing
with singular power.

This terrestrial flame, was it not analogous in nature to that
which sent them from above its light and heat, or which frightened
them in the thunderbolt? Was it not derived from the same source?
And if its origin was in heaven, must it not have been brought
down some day on earth? If so, who was the powerful being, the
beneficent being, God or man, who had conquered it? Such are the
questions which the curiosity of the Âryans offered in the early
days of their existence, and which found their answer in the myth
of Prometheus.(1206)

The Philosophy of Occult Science finds two weak points in the above
reflections, and proceeds to point them out. The miserable state of
Humanity described by Æschylus and Lucretius was no more wretched then, in
the early days of the Âryans, than it is now. That “state” was limited to
the savage tribes; and the now‐existing savages are not a whit more happy
or unhappy than their forefathers were a million years ago.

It is an accepted fact in Science that “rude implements, exactly
resembling those in use _among existing savages_,” are found in river‐
gravels and caves, geologically “implying an enormous antiquity.” So great
is that resemblance that, as the author of _The Modern Zoroastrian_ tells
us:

If the collection in the Colonial Exhibition of stone celts and
arrow‐heads used by the Bushmen of South Africa were placed side
by side with one from the British Museum of similar objects from
Kent’s Cavern or the Caves of Dordogne, no one but an expert could
distinguish between them.(1207)

And if there are Bushmen existing now, in our age of the highest
civilization, who are no higher intellectually than the race of men which
inhabited Devonshire and Southern France during the Palæolithic age, why
could not the latter have lived simultaneously with, and have been the
contemporary of, other races as highly civilized for their day as we are
for ours? That the sum of knowledge increases daily in mankind, “but that
intellectual capacity does not increase with it,” is shown when the
intellect, if not the physical knowledge, of the Euclids, Pythagorases,
Pâninis, Kapilas, Platos, and Socrates, is compared with that of the
Newtons, Kants, and the modern Huxleys and Hæckels. On comparing the
results obtained by Dr. J. Barnard Davis, the Craniologist,(1208) with
regard to the internal capacity of the skull—its volume being taken as the
standard and test for judging of the intellectual capacities—Dr. Pfaff
finds that this capacity among the French (certainly in the highest rank
of mankind) is 88.4 cubic inches, being thus “perceptibly smaller than
that of the Polynesians generally, which, even among many Papuans and
Alfuras of the lowest grade, amounts to 89 and 89.7 cubic inches”; which
shows that it is the _quality_ and not the _quantity_ of the brain that is
the cause of intellectual capacity. The average index of skulls among
various races having been now recognized to be “one of the most
characteristic marks of difference between different races,” the following
comparison is suggestive:

The index of breadth among the Scandinavians [is] at 75; among the
English at 76; among Holsteiners at 77; in Bresgau at 80;
Schiller’s skull shows an index of breadth even of 82 ... the
Madurese also 82!

Finally, the same comparison between the oldest skulls known and the
European, brings to light the startling fact that:

_Most of these old skulls, belonging to the stone period, are
above rather than below the average of the brain of the now living
man in volume._

Calculating the measures for the height, breadth, and length in inches
from the average measurements of several skulls, the following sums are
obtained:

1. Old Northern skulls of the stone age: 18.877 ins.
2. Average of 48 skulls of the same period from England: 18.858 ins.
3. Average of 7 skulls of the same period from Wales: 18.649 ins.
4. Average of 36 skulls of the stone age from France: 18.220 ins.

The average of the now living Europeans is 18.579 inches; of Hottentots,
17.795 inches!

These figures show plainly that:

The size of the brain of the oldest populations known to us is not
such as to place them on a lower level than that of the now living
inhabitants of the Earth.(1209)

Besides which, they show the “missing link” vanishing into thin air. Of
these, however, more anon: we must return to our direct subject.

As the “Prometheus Vinctus” of Æschylus tells us, the race which Jupiter
so ardently desired “to quench, and plant a new one in its stead” (v.
241), suffered _mental_, not physical misery. The first boon Prometheus
gave to mortals, as he tells the Chorus, was to hinder them “from
_foreseeing_ death” (v. 256); he “saved the mortal race from sinking
blasted down to Hades’ gloom” (v. 244); and then only, “besides” that, he
gave them fire (v. 260). This shows plainly the dual character at any rate
of the Promethean myth, if Orientalists will not accept the existence of
the _seven keys_ taught in Occultism. This relates to the first opening of
man’s spiritual perceptions, not to his first seeing or “discovering”
fire. For fire was never _discovered_, but existed on Earth since its
beginning. It existed in the seismic activity of the early ages, volcanic
eruptions being as frequent and constant in those periods as fog is in
England now. And if we are told that men appeared so late on Earth that
all but a few volcanoes were already extinct, and that geological
disturbances had made room for a more settled state of things, we answer:
Let a new race of men—whether evolved from Angel or Gorilla—appear now on
any uninhabited spot of the Globe, with the exception perhaps of the
Sahara, and a thousand to one it would not be a year or two old before
“discovering fire,” through lightning setting the grass or something else
in flames. This assumption, that primitive man lived ages on Earth before
he was made acquainted with fire, is one of the most painfully illogical
of all. But old Æschylus was an Initiate, and knew well what he was giving
out.(1210)

No Occultist acquainted with symbology and the fact that Wisdom came to us
from the East, will for a moment deny that the myth of Prometheus has
reached Europe from Âryâvarta. Nor is he likely to deny that in one sense
Prometheus represents “fire by friction.” Therefore, he admires the
sagacity of M. F. Baudry, who shows in “Les Mythes du Feu et du Breuvage
Céleste”(1211) one of the aspects of Prometheus and his origin from India.
He shows the reader the _supposed_ primitive process to obtain fire, still
in use to‐day in India to light the sacrificial flame. This is what he
says:

This process, such as it is minutely described in the Vedic
Sûtras, consists in rapidly turning a stick in a socket made in
the centre of a piece of wood. The friction develops intense heat
and ends by setting on fire the particles of wood in contact. The
motion of the stick is not a continuous rotation, but a series of
motions in contrary senses, by means of a cord fixed to the stick
in its middle; the operator holds one of the ends in each hand and
pulls them alternately.... The full process is designated in
Sanskrit by the verb _manthâmi, mathnáni_, which means “to rub,
agitate, shake and obtain by rubbing,” and is especially applied
to rotatory friction, as is proved by its derivative _mandala_,
which signifies a circle.... The pieces of wood serving for the
production of fire have each their name in Sanskrit. The stick
which turns is called _pramantha_; the discus which receives it is
called _arani_ and _aranî_: “the two aranis” designating the
_ensemble_ of the instrument.(1212)

It remains to be seen what the Brâhmans will say to this. But even
supposing that Prometheus, in one of the aspects of his myth, was
conceived as the producer of fire by means of the Pramantha, or as an
animate and divine Pramantha, would this imply that the symbolism had no
other than the phallic meaning attributed to it by modern symbologists?
Decharme, at any rate, seems to have a correct glimmering of the truth;
for he unconsciously corroborates all that the Occult Sciences teach with
regard to the Mânasa Devas, who have endowed man with the consciousness of
his immortal soul—that consciousness which hinders man “from foreseeing
death,” and makes him _know_ he is immortal.(1213) “How did Prometheus
come into possession of the [divine] spark?” he asks.

Fire having its abode in heaven, it is there he must have gone to
find it before he could carry it down to men, and, to approach the
gods, he must have been a god himself.(1214)

The Greeks held that he was of the _Divine_ Race, “the son of the Titan
Iapetos”;(1215) the Hindûs, that he was a Deva.

But celestial fire belonged in the beginning to the gods alone; it
was a treasure they reserved for themselves ... over which they
jealously watched.... “The prudent son of Iapetus,” says Hesiod,
“deceived Jupiter by stealing and concealing in the cavity of a
narthex, the indefatigable fire of the resplendent glow.”(1216)
... Thus the gift made by Prometheus to men was a conquest made
from heaven. Now according to Greek ideas [in this identical with
those of the Occultists], this possession forced from Jupiter,
this human trespassing upon the property of the gods, had to be
followed by an expiation.... Prometheus, moreover, belongs to that
race of Titans who had rebelled(1217) against the gods, and whom
the master of Olympus had hurled down into Tartarus; like them, he
is the genius of evil, doomed to cruel suffering.(1218)

What is most revolting in the explanations that follow, is the one‐sided
view taken of this grandest of all myths. The most intuitional among
modern writers cannot, or will not, rise in their conceptions above the
level of the Earth and cosmic phenomena. It is not denied that the moral
idea in the myth, as presented in the _Theogony_ of Hesiod, plays a
certain part in the primitive Greek conception. The Titan is more than a
thief of the celestial fire. He is the representation of humanity—active,
industrious, intelligent, but at the same time ambitious, which aims at
equalling divine powers. Therefore it is humanity punished in the person
of Prometheus, but it is only so with the Greeks. With them, Prometheus is
not a criminal, save in the eyes of the Gods. In his relation with the
Earth, he is, on the contrary, a God himself, a friend of mankind
(φιλάνθρωπος), which he has raised to civilization and initiated into the
knowledge of all the arts; a conception which found its most poetical
expounder in Æschylus. But with all other nations Prometheus is—what? The
Fallen Angel, Satan, as the Church would have it? Not at all. _He is
simply the image of the pernicious and dreaded effects of lightning._ He
is the “evil fire” (_mal feu_)(1219) _and the symbol of the divine
reproductive male organ_.

Reduced to its simple expression, the myth we are trying to
explain is then simply a [cosmic] genius of fire.(1220)

It is the former idea (the phallic) which was _preëminently_ Âryan, if we
believe Adalbert Kuhn(1221) and F. Baudry. For:

The fire used by man being the result of the action of _pramantha_
in the _arani_, the Âryas _must have_ ascribed [?] the same origin
to celestial fire, and they _must have_(1222) imagined [?] that a
god armed with the pramantha, or a divine pramantha, caused a
violent friction in the bosom of the clouds, which gave birth to
lightning and thunderbolts.(1223)

This idea is supported by the fact that, according to Plutarch’s
testimony,(1224) the Stoics thought that thunder was the result of
the struggle of storm‐clouds, and lightning a conflagration due to
friction; while Aristotle saw in the thunderbolt only the action
of clouds which clashed with each other. What was this theory, if
not the scientific translation of the production of fire by
friction?... Everything leads us to think that, from the highest
antiquity, and before the dispersion of the Âryas, it was believed
that the pramantha lighted the fire in the storm‐cloud as well as
in the aranis.(1225)

Thus, suppositions and idle hypotheses are made to stand for discovered
truths. Defenders of the biblical dead‐letter could not help the writers
of missionary tracts more effectually than do materialistic Symbologists
in thus taking for granted that the ancient Âryans based their religious
conceptions on no higher thought than the physiological.

But it is not so, and the very spirit of Vedic Philosophy is against such
an interpretation. For if, as Decharme himself confesses:

This idea of the creative power of fire is explained ... by the
ancient assimilation of the human soul to a celestial spark(1226)

—as shown by the imagery often made use of in the _Vedas_ when speaking of
Arani, it would mean something higher than simply a gross sexual
conception. A Hymn to Agni in the _Veda_ is cited as an example:

Here is the pramantha; the generator is ready. Bring the mistress
of the race (the female aranî). Let us produce Agni by attrition,
according to ancient custom.

This means no worse than an abstract idea expressed in the tongue of
mortals. The female Aranî, the “mistress of the race,” is Aditi, the
Mother of the Gods, or Shekinah, Eternal Light—in the World of Spirit, the
“Great Deep” and Chaos; or Primordial Substance in its first remove from
the Unknown, in the Manifested Kosmos. If, ages later, the same epithet is
applied to Devakî, the Mother of Krishna, or the incarnated Logos; and if
the symbol, owing to the gradual and irrepressible spread of exoteric
religions, may now be regarded as having a sexual significance, this in no
way mars the original purity of the image. The subjective had been
transformed into the objective; Spirit had fallen into Matter. The
universal kosmic polarity of Spirit‐Substance had become, in human
thought, the mystic, but still sexual, union of Spirit and Matter, and had
thus acquired an anthropomorphic colouring which it had never had in the
beginning. Between the _Vedas_ and the _Purânas_ there is an abyss of
which they are the poles, like as are the seventh principle, the Âtmâ, and
the first or lowest principle, the Physical Body, in the septenary
constitution of Man. The primitive and purely spiritual language of the
_Vedas_, conceived many decades of millenniums earlier than the Paurânic
accounts, found a purely human expression for the purpose of describing
events which took place 5,000 years ago, the date of Krishna’s death, from
which day the Kali Yuga, or Black Age, began for mankind.

As Aditi is called Surârani, the Matrix or “Mother” of the Suras or Gods,
so Kuntî, the mother of the Pândavas, is called in the _Mahâbhârata_
Pândavârani(1227)—and the term is now _physiologized_. But Devakî, the
antetype of the Roman Catholic Madonna, is a later anthropomorphized form
of Aditi. The latter is the Goddess‐mother, or Deva‐mâtri, of seven Sons
(the six and the seven Âdityas of early Vedic times); the mother of
Krishna, Devakî, has six embryos conveyed into her womb by Jagad‐dhâtri,
the “Nurse of the World,” the seventh, Krishna, the Logos, being
transferred to that of Rohinî. Mary, the mother of Jesus, is the mother of
seven children, of five sons and two daughters (a later transformation of
sex), in Matthew’s Gospel.(1228) No one of the worshippers of the Roman
Catholic Virgin would object to reciting in her honour the prayer
addressed by the Gods to Devakî. Let the reader judge.

Thou art that Prakriti [essence], infinite and subtile, which
formerly bore Brahmâ in its womb.... Thou, eternal being,
comprising, in thy substance, the essence of all created things,
wast identical with creation; thou wast the parent of the tri‐form
sacrifice, becoming the germ of all things. Thou art sacrifice,
whence all fruit proceeds; thou art the Aranî, whose attrition
engenders fire.(1229) As Aditi, thou art the parent of the
gods.... Thou art light [Jyotsnâ, the morning twilight],(1230)
whence day is begotten. Thou art humility [Samnati, a daughter of
Daksha], the mother of wisdom; thou art Niti, the parent of
harmony (Naya);(1231) thou art modesty, the progenitrix of
affection [Prashraya, explained by Vinaya]; thou art desire, of
whom love is born.... Thou art ... the mother of knowledge
[Avabodha]; thou art patience [Dhriti], the parent of fortitude
[Dhairya].(1232)

Thus Aranî is shown here to be the same as the Roman Catholic “Vase of
Election.” As to its primitive meaning, it was purely metaphysical. No
unclean thought traversed these conceptions in the ancient mind. Even in
the _Zohar_—far less metaphysical in its symbology than any other
symbolism—the idea is an abstraction and nothing more. Thus, when the
_Zohar_ says:

All that which exists, all that which has been formed by the
ancient, whose name is holy, can only exist through a male and
female principle.(1233)

It means no more than that the divine Spirit of Life is ever coalescing
with Matter. It is the Will of the Deity that acts; and the idea is purely
Schopenhauerian.

When Atteekah Kaddosha, the ancient and the concealed of the
concealed, desired to form all things, it formed all things like
male and female. This wisdom comprises _all_ when it goeth forth.

Hence Chokmah (male Wisdom) and Binah (female Consciousness or Intellect)
are said to create all between the two—the active and the passive
principles. As the eye of the expert jeweller discerns under the rough and
uncouth oyster shell the pure immaculate pearl, enshrined within its
bosom, his hand touching the shell but to get at its contents, so the eye
of the true Philosopher reads between the lines of the _Purânas_ the
sublime Vedic truths, and corrects the form with the help of the Vedântic
Wisdom. Our Orientalists, however, never perceive the pearl under the
thick coating of the shell and—act accordingly.

From all that has been said in this Section, one sees clearly that,
between the Serpent of Eden and the Devil of Christianity, there is an
abyss. Alone the sledge hammer of Ancient Philosophy can kill this dogma.

Section VII. Enoïchion‐Henoch.

The history of the evolution of the Satanic Myth would not be complete if
we omitted to notice the character of the mysterious and cosmopolitan
Enoch, variously called Enos, Hanoch, and finally Enoïchion by the Greeks.
It is from his book that the first notions of the Fallen Angels were taken
by the early Christian writers.

The _Book of Enoch_ is declared apocryphal. But what is an _apocryphon_?
The very etymology of the term shows that it is simply a _secret_ book,
_i.e._, one that belonged to the catalogue of temple‐libraries under the
guardianship of the Hierophants and Initiated Priests, and was never meant
for the profane. _Apocryphon_ comes from the verb _crypto_ (κρύπτω), “to
hide.” For ages the _Enoïchion_, the Book of the Seer, was preserved in
the “city of letters” and secret works—the ancient Kirjath‐sepher, later
on, Debir.(1234)

Some of the writers interested in the subject—especially Masons—have tried
to identify Enoch with Thoth of Memphis, the Greek Hermes, and even with
the Latin Mercury. As individuals, all of these are distinct one from the
other; professionally—if one may use this word, now so limited in its
sense—one and all belong to the same category of sacred writers, of
Initiators and Recorders of Occult and ancient Wisdom. Those who in the
_Korân_(1235) are generically termed the Edris, or the “Learned,” the
Initiated, bore in Egypt the name of “Thoth,” the inventor of Arts,
Sciences, of writing or letters, of Music and Astronomy. Among the Jews
Edris became “Enoch,” who, according to Bar‐Hebræus, “was the first
inventor of writing,” books, Arts, and Sciences, the first who reduced to
a system the progress of the planets.(1236) In Greece he was called
Orpheus, and thus changed his name with every nation. The number seven
being attached to, and connected with, each of those primitive
Initiators,(1237) as well as the number 365, of the days in the year,
astronomically, it identifies the mission, character, and the sacred
office of all these men, but certainly not their personalities. Enoch is
the _seventh_ Patriarch; Orpheus is the possessor of the Phorminx, the
seven‐stringed lyre, which is the seven‐fold mystery of Initiation. Thoth,
with the seven‐rayed Solar Discus on his head, travels in the Solar Boat
(the 365 degrees), jumping out every fourth (leap) year for one day.
Finally, Thoth‐Lunus is the septenary God of the seven days, or the week.
Esoterically and spiritually, Enoïchion means the “Seer of the Open Eye.”

The story about Enoch, told by Josephus, namely, that he had concealed his
precious Rolls or Books under the pillars of Mercury or Seth, is the same
as that told of Hermes, the “Father of Wisdom,” who concealed his Books of
Wisdom under a pillar, and then, discovering the two pillars of stone,
found the Science written thereon. Yet Josephus, notwithstanding his
constant efforts in the direction of Israel’s unmerited glorification, and
though he does attribute that Science (of Wisdom) to the _Jewish_
Enoch—writes _history_. He shows these pillars as still existing during
his own time.(1238) He tells us that they were built by Seth; and so they
may have been, only neither by the Patriarch of that name, the fabled son
of Adam, nor by the Egyptian God of Wisdom—Teth, Set, Thoth, Tat, Sat (the
later Sat‐an), or Hermes, who are all one—but by the “Sons of the Serpent‐
God,” or “Sons of the Dragon,” the name under which the Hierophants of
Egypt and Babylon were known before the Deluge, as were their forefathers,
the Atlanteans.

What Josephus tells us, therefore, with the exception of the application
made of it, must be true _allegorically_. According to his version the two
famous pillars were entirely covered with hieroglyphics, which, after
their discovery, were copied and reproduced in the most secret corners of
the inner temples of Egypt, and thus became the source of its Wisdom and
exceptional learning. These two “pillars,” however, are the prototypes of
the two “tables of stones” hewn by Moses at the command of the “Lord.”
Hence, in saying that all the great Adepts and Mystics of antiquity—such
as Orpheus, Hesiod, Pythagoras and Plato—got the elements of their
Theology from those hieroglyphics, he is right in one sense, and wrong in
another. The Secret Doctrine teaches us that the Arts, Sciences, Theology,
and especially the Philosophy of every nation which preceded the last
_universally known_, but not universal, Deluge, had been recorded
ideographically from the primitive oral records of the Fourth Race, and
that these were the inheritance of the latter from the early Third Root‐
Race before the allegorical Fall. Hence, also, the Egyptian pillars, the
tablets, and even the “white oriental porphyry stone” of the Masonic
legend—which Enoch, fearing that the real and precious secrets would be
lost, concealed before the Deluge in the bowels of the Earth—were simply
the more or less symbolical and allegorical copies from the primitive
Records. The _Book of Enoch_ is one of such copies, and is, moreover, a
Chaldæan, and now very incomplete, compendium. As already said, Enoïchion
means in Greek the “Inner Eye,” or the Seer; in Hebrew, _with the help of
Masoretic points_, it means the “Initiator” and “Instructor” (חֲנוֹךּ).
Enoch is a generic title; and, moreover, his legend is that of several
other prophets, Jewish and Heathen, with changes of made‐up details, the
root‐form being the same. Elijah is also taken up into Heaven “alive”; and
the Astrologer, at the court of Isdubar, the Chaldæan Hea‐bani, is
likewise raised to Heaven by the God Hea, who was _his_ patron, as Jehovah
was of Elijah, whose name means in Hebrew “God‐Jah,” Jehovah
(אֶלְיָה),(1239) and again of Elihu, which has the same meaning. This kind
of easy death, or _euthanasia_, has an Esoteric meaning. It symbolizes the
“death” of any Adept who has reached the power and degree, and also the
purification, which enable him to “die” in the Physical Body, and _still
live and lead a conscious life_ in his Astral Body. The variations on this
theme are endless, but the secret meaning is ever the same. The Pauline
expression,(1240) “that he should not see death” (_ut non videret
mortem_), has thus an Esoteric meaning, but nothing _supernatural_ in it.
The mangled interpretation given of some biblical hints to the effect that
Enoch, “whose years will equal those of the world” (of the _solar_ year,
365 days), will share with Christ and the prophet Elijah the honours and
bliss of the last Advent and of the destruction of
Antichrist(1241)—signify Esoterically, that some of the Great Adepts will
return in the Seventh Race, when all Error will be made away with, and the
advent of Truth will be heralded by those Shishta, the holy “Sons of
Light.”

The Latin Church is not always logical, nor prudent. She declares the
_Book of Enoch_ an _apocryphon_, and has gone so far as to claim, through
Cardinal Cajetan and other luminaries of the Church, the rejection from
the Canon of even the Book of Jude, who, otherwise, as an _inspired_
apostle, would quote from and thus sanctify the _Book of Enoch_, which is
alleged to be an apocryphal work. Fortunately, some of the dogmatics
perceived the peril in time. Had they accepted Cajetan’s resolution, they
would have been forced to reject likewise the Fourth Gospel; as St. John
borrows literally from Enoch, and places _a whole sentence_ from him, in
the mouth of Jesus!(1242)

Ludolph, the “father of Ethiopic literature,” commissioned to investigate
the various Enochian MSS. presented by Pereisc, the traveller, to the
Mazarine Library, declared that “no _Book of Enoch_ could exist among the
Abyssinians”! Further researches and discoveries worsted this too dogmatic
assertion, as all know. Bruce and Ruppel did find the _Book of Enoch_ in
Abyssinia, and what is more, brought it to Europe some years later, and
Bishop Laurence translated it. But Bruce despised it, and scoffed at its
contents; as did all the rest of the Scientists. He declared it a
_Gnostic_ work, concerning the Age of Giants who devour men—and bearing a
strong resemblance to the _Apocalypse_.(1243) Giants! another _fairy‐
tale_!

Such, however, has not been the opinion of all the best critics. Dr.
Hanneberg places the _Book of Enoch_ along with the _Third Book of the
Maccabees—at the head of the list of those whose authority stands the
nearest to that of the canonical works_.(1244)

Verily, “where doctors disagree...”!

As usual, however, they are all right and all wrong. To accept Enoch as a
biblical character, a single living person, is like accepting Adam as the
first man. Enoch was a generic title, applied to, and borne by, scores of
individuals, at all times and ages, and in every race and nation. This may
be easily inferred from the fact that the ancient Talmudists and the
teachers of Midrashim are not agreed generally in their views about
Hanokh, the Son of Yered. Some say Enoch was a great Saint, beloved by
God, and “taken alive to heaven,” _i.e._, one who reached Mukti or
Nirvâna, on Earth, as Buddha did and others still do; and others maintain
that he was a sorcerer, a wicked magician. This shows only that “Enoch,”
or its equivalent, was a term, even during the days of the later
Talmudists, which meant “Seer,” “Adept in the Secret Wisdom,” etc.,
without any specification as to the character of the title‐bearer.
Josephus, speaking of Elijah and Enoch,(1245) remarks that:

It is written in the sacred books they [Elijah and Enoch]
disappeared, but so that nobody knew that they died.

It means simply that _they had died in their personalities_, as Yogîs die
to this day in India, or even some Christian monks—to the world. They
disappear from the sight of men and die—on the terrestrial plane—even for
themselves. A seemingly figurative way of speaking, yet _literally true_.

“Hanokh transmitted the science of (astronomical) calculation and of
computing the seasons to Noah,” says the Midrash _Pirkah_;(1246) R.
Eliezar referring to Enoch that which others did to Hermes Trismegistus,
for the two are identical in their Esoteric meaning. “Hanokh” in this
case, and his “Wisdom,” belong to the cycle of the Fourth Atlantean
Race,(1247) and Noah to that of the Fifth.(1248) In this case both
represent the Root‐Races, the present one and the one that preceded it. In
another sense, Enoch disappeared, “he walked with God, and he was not, for
God took him”; the allegory referring to the disappearance of the Sacred
and Secret Knowledge from among men; for “God” (or Java Aleim—the high
Hierophants, the Heads of the Colleges of Initiated Priests(1249)) took
him; in other words, the Enochs or the Enoïchions, the Seers and their
Knowledge and Wisdom, became strictly confined to the Secret Colleges of
the Prophets with the Jews, and to the Temples with the Gentiles.

Interpreted with the help of merely the symbolical key, Enoch is the type
of the dual nature of man—spiritual and physical. Hence he occupies the
centre of the Astronomical Cross, as given by Éliphas Lévi from a secret
work, which is a Six‐pointed Star, the “Adonai.” In the upper angle of the
upper Triangle is the Eagle; in the left lower angle stands the Lion; in
the right, the Bull; while between the Bull and the Lion, over them and
under the Eagle, is the face of Enoch or Man.(1250) Now the figures on the
upper Triangle represent the Four Races, omitting the First, the Chhâyâs
or Shadows, and the “Son of Man,” Enos or Enoch, is in the centre, where
he stands between the Fourth and the Fifth Races, for he represents the
Secret Wisdom of both. These are the four Animals of _Ezekiel_ and of the
_Revelation_. This Double Triangle which, in _Isis Unveiled_, is faced by
the Hindû Ardhanârî, is by far the best. For in the latter, only the three
(for us) historical Races are symbolized; the Third, the Androgynous, by
Ardha‐nârî; the Fourth, symbolized by the strong, powerful Lion; and the
Fifth, the Âryan, by that which is its most sacred symbol to this day, the
Bull (and the Cow).

A man of great erudition, a French _savant_, M. de Sacy, finds several
most singular statements in the _Book of Enoch_, “worthy of the most
serious examination,” he says. For instance:

The author [Enoch] makes the solar year consist of 364 days, and
seems to know periods of three, of five, and of eight years,
followed by _four_ supplementary days, which, in his system,
appear to be those of the equinoxes and solstices.(1251)

To which he adds, later on:

I see but one means to palliate them [these “absurdities”]; it is
to suppose that the author expounds some fanciful system which may
have existed _before the order of Nature had been altered at the
period of the Universal Deluge_.(1252)

Precisely so; and the Secret Doctrine teaches that this “order of nature”
has been thus altered, and the series of the Earth’s humanities too. For,
as the angel Uriel tells Enoch:

Behold, I have showed thee all things, O Enoch; and all things
have I revealed to thee. 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_.... The moon shall change
its laws....(1253)

In those days also, years before the Great Deluge that carried away the
Atlanteans and changed the face of the whole Earth (because “the _Earth_
[or its axis] _became inclined_”), Nature, geologically, astronomically,
and cosmically in general, could not have been the same, just because the
Earth _had inclined_. To quote from Enoch:

And Noah cried with a bitter voice, Hear me; hear me; hear me;
three times. And he said,... The earth labours and is violently
shaken. Surely, I shall perish with it.(1254)

This, by the way, looks like one of those many “inconsistencies,” if the
_Bible_ is read literally. For, to say the least, this is a very strange
fear in one who had “found grace in the eyes of the Lord” and been told to
build an Ark! But here we find the venerable Patriarch expressing as much
fear as if, instead of a “friend” of God, he had been one of the Giants
doomed by the wrathful Deity. The Earth had already _inclined_, and the
deluge of waters had become simply a question of time, and yet Noah seems
to know nothing of his intended salvation.

A decree had come indeed; the decree of Nature and the Law of Evolution,
that the Earth should change its Race, and that the Fourth Race should be
destroyed to make room for a better one. The Manvantara had reached its
turning point of _three and a half_ Rounds, and gigantic physical Humanity
had reached the acme of gross materiality. Hence the apocalyptic verse
that speaks of a commandment gone forth that they may be destroyed, “that
_their end may be_”—the end of the Race:

For they _knew_ [truly] every secret of the angels, every
oppressive and secret power of the _Satans_, and every power of
those who commit sorcery, as well as of those who make molten
images in the whole earth.(1255)

And now a natural question. Who could have informed the apocryphal author
of this powerful vision—no matter to what age he may be assigned before
the day of Galileo—that the Earth could occasionally incline her axis?
Whence did he derive such astronomical and geological knowledge if the
Secret Wisdom, of which the ancient Rishis and Pythagoras had drunk, is
but a fancy, an invention of later ages? Has Enoch read prophetically
perchance in Fréderic Klée’s work on the Deluge the lines:

The position of the terrestrial globe with reference to the sun
has evidently been, in primitive times, different from what it is
now; and this difference must have been caused by a displacement
of the axis of rotation of the earth.

This reminds one of that _unscientific_ statement made by the Egyptian
priests to Herodotus, namely, that the Sun has not always risen where it
rises _now_, and that in former times the ecliptic had cut the equator at
right angles.(1256)

There are many such “dark sayings” scattered throughout the _Purânas_,
_Bible_ and other Mythologies, and to the Occultist they divulge two
facts; (_a_) that the Ancients knew as well as, and perhaps better than,
the moderns do, Astronomy, Geognosy and Cosmography in general; and (_b_)
that the behaviour of the Globe has altered more than once since the
primitive state of things. Thus, Xenophantes—on the _blind_ faith of _his_
“ignorant” religion, which taught that Phaeton, in his desire to learn the
_hidden_ truth, made the Sun deviate from its usual course—asserts
somewhere that, “the Sun turned toward another country”; which is a
parallel—slightly more scientific, however, if not as bold—of Joshua
stopping the course of the Sun altogether. Yet it may explain the teaching
of the Northern Mythology that before the _actual order_ of things the Sun
arose in the South, and its placing the Frigid Zone (Jeruskoven) in the
East, whereas now it is in the North.(1257)

The _Book of Enoch_, in short, is a _résumé_, a compound of the main
features of the history of the Third, Fourth and Fifth Races; a very few
prophecies from the present age of the world; a long retrospective,
introspective and prophetic summary of universal and quite _historical_
events—geological, ethnological, astronomical, and psychic—with a touch of
Theogony out of the antediluvian records. The Book of this mysterious
personage is referred to and quoted copiously in the _Pistis Sophia_, and
also in the _Zohar_ and its most ancient Midrashim. Origen and Clement of
Alexandria held it in the highest esteem. To say, therefore, that it is a
Post‐Christian forgery is to utter an absurdity and to become guilty of an
anachronism, for Origen, among others, who lived in the second century of
the Christian era, mentions it as an ancient and venerable work. The
secret and sacred Name and its potency are well and clearly though
allegorically described in the old volume. From the eighteenth to the
fiftieth chapter, the Visions of Enoch are all descriptive of the
Mysteries of Initiation, one of which is the Burning Valley of the “Fallen
Angels.”

Perhaps St. Augustine was quite right in saying that the Church rejected
the _Book of Enoch_ out of her canon owing to its too great antiquity (_ob
nimiam antiquitatem_).(1258) There was no room for the events noticed in
it within the limit of the 4004 years B.C. assigned to the world from its
“creation”!

Section VIII. The Symbolism of the Mystery‐Names Iao and Jehovah, with
their Relation to the Cross and Circle.

When the Abbé Louis Constant, better known as Éliphas Lévi, said in his
_Histoire de la Magie_ that the _Sepher Jetzirah_, the _Zohar_, and the
_Apocalypse_ of St. John, are the masterpieces of the Occult Sciences, he
ought, if he had wished to be correct and clear, to have added—in Europe.
It is quite true that these works contain “more _significance_ than
words”; and that their “expression is poetical,” while “in numbers” they
are “exact.” Unfortunately, however, before any one can appreciate the
_poetry_ of the expressions, or the _exactness_ of the numbers, he will
have to learn the real significance and meaning of the terms and symbols
employed. But man will never learn this so long as he remains ignorant of
the fundamental principle of the Secret Doctrine, whether in Oriental
Esotericism, or in the kabalistical Symbology—the _key, or value, in all
their aspects_, of the God‐names, Angel‐names, and Patriarch‐names in the
_Bible_, their mathematical or geometrical value, and their relations to
manifested Nature.

Therefore, if, on the one hand, the _Zohar_ “astonishes” the mystic, by
the profundity of its views and the great simplicity of its images, or the
other hand, that work misleads the student by such expressions as those
used with respect to Ain Suph and Jehovah, notwithstanding the assurance
that:

The book is careful to explain that the human form with which it
clothes God is but _an image of the Word_, and that God should not
be expressed by any thought, or any form.

It is well known that Origen Clement, and the Rabbis confessed that the
_Kabalah_ and the _Bible_ were _veiled and secret_ books; but few know
that the Esotericism of the kabalistic books in their present _reëdited_
form is simply another and still more cunning veil thrown upon the
primitive symbolism of these secret volumes.

The idea of representing the _hidden_ Deity by the circumference of a
circle, and the Creative Power—male and female, or the Androgynous Word—by
the diameter across it, is one of the oldest symbols. It is upon this
conception that every great Cosmogony has been built. With the old Âryans,
the Egyptians, and the Chaldæans, the symbol was complete, as it embraced
the idea of the eternal and immovable Divine Thought in its absoluteness,
separated entirely from the incipient stage of the so‐called “creation,”
and comprised psychological and even spiritual evolution, and its
mechanical work, or cosmogonical construction. With the Hebrews, however,
though the former conception is to be distinctly found in the _Zohar_, and
the _Sepher Jetzirah_, or what remains of the latter—that which has been
subsequently embodied in the _Pentateuch_ proper, and especially in
_Genesis_, is simply this secondary stage, to wit, the mechanical law of
creation, or rather of construction; while Theogony is hardly, if at all,
outlined.

It is only in the first six chapters of _Genesis_, in the rejected _Book
of Enoch_, and the misunderstood and mistranslated poem of _Job_, that
true echoes of the Archaic Doctrine may now be found. The key to it is
lost now, even among the most learned Rabbis, whose predecessors in the
early period of the Middle Ages, in their national exclusiveness and
pride, and especially in their profound hatred of Christianity, preferred
to cast it into the deep sea of oblivion, rather than to share their
knowledge with their relentless and fierce persecutors. Jehovah was their
own tribal property, inseparable from, and unfit to play a part in, any
other but the Mosaic Law. Violently torn out of his original frame, which
he fitted and which fitted him, the “Lord God of Abraham and Jacob” could
hardly be crammed without damage and breakage into the new Christian
Canon. Being the weaker, the Judeans could not help the desecration. They
kept, however, the secret of the origin of their Adam Kadmon, or male‐
female Jehovah, and the new tabernacle proved a complete misfit for the
old God. They were, indeed, avenged!

The statement that Jehovah was the tribal God of the Jews and no higher,
will be denied like many other things. Yet the Theologians are not in a
position to tell us, in that case, the meaning of the verses in
_Deuteronomy_, which say quite plainly:

When the Most High [not the “Lord,” or “Jehovah” either] divided
to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of
Adam, he set the bounds ... according to the number of the
children of Israel.... _The Lord’s_ [Jehovah’s] _portion is his
people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance_.(1259)

This settles the question. So impudent have been the modern translators of
Bibles and Scriptures, and so damaging are these verses, that, following
in the steps traced for them by their worthy Church Fathers, each
translator has rendered these lines in his own way. While the above‐cited
quotation is taken _verbatim_ from the English Authorized Version, in the
French Bible,(1260) we find the “Most High” translated by “Souverain”
(Sovereign!!), the “sons of Adam” rendered by “the children of men,” and
the “Lord” changed into the “Eternal.” For impudent sleight‐of‐hand, the
French Protestant Church seems thus to have surpassed even English
ecclesiasticism.

Nevertheless, one thing is patent: the “Lord’s [Jehovah’s] portion” is his
“chosen people” and none else, for, _Jacob alone is the lot of his
inheritance_. What, then, have other nations, who call themselves Âryans,
to do with this Semitic Deity, the tribal God of Israel? Astronomically,
the “Most High” is the Sun, and the “Lord” is one of his seven planets,
whether it be Iao, the Genius of the Moon, or Ildabaoth‐Jehovah, the
Genius of Saturn, according to Origen and the Egyptian Gnostics.(1261) Let
the “Angel Gabriel,” the “Lord” of Iran, watch over his people, and
Michael‐Jehovah, over his Hebrews. These are not the Gods of other
nations, nor were they ever those of Jesus. As each Persian Dev is chained
to his planet,(1262) so each Hindû Deva (a “Lord”) has its allotted
portion, a world, a planet, a nation or a race. Plurality of worlds
implies plurality of Gods. We believe in the former, and may recognize,
but will never worship the latter.(1263)

It has been repeatedly stated in this work that every religious and
philosophical symbol had seven meanings attached to it, each pertaining to
its legitimate plane of thought, _i.e._, either purely metaphysical or
astronomical; psychic or physiological, etc. These seven meanings and
their applications are difficult enough to learn when taken by themselves;
but the interpretation and the right comprehension of them become tenfold
more puzzling, when, instead of being correlated, or made to flow
consecutively out of, and to follow, each other, each, or any one of these
meanings, is accepted as the one and sole explanation of the whole
symbolical idea. An instance may be given, as it admirably illustrates the
statement. Here are two interpretations, given by two learned Kabalists
and scholars, of one and the same verse in _Exodus_. Moses beseeches the
Lord to show him his “glory.” Evidently it is not the crude dead‐letter
phraseology as found in the _Bible_ that is to be accepted. There are
_seven_ meanings in the _Kabalah_, of which we may give two as interpreted
by the said two scholars. One of them translates while explaining:

“Thou canst not see My face;... I will put thee in a cleft of the
rock and I will cover thee with My hand while I pass by. And then
I will take away Mine hand, and thou shalt see My _a’hoor_,”
_i.e._, My back.(1264)

And then the translator adds in a gloss:

That is, I will show you “My back,” _i.e._, My visible universe,
My lower manifestations, but, as a man still in the flesh, thou
canst not see My invisible nature. So proceeds the Qabbalah.(1265)

This is correct, and is the cosmo‐metaphysical explanation. And now speaks
the other Kabalist, giving the numerical meaning. As it involves a good
many suggestive ideas, and is far more fully given, we may allow it more
space. This synopsis is from an unpublished MS., and explains more fully
what was given in Section III, on the “Holy of Holies.”(1266)

The numbers of the name “Moses” are those of “I am that I am,” so that the
names Moses and Jehovah are at one in numerical harmony. The word Moses is
משה (5 + 300 + 40), and the sum of the values of its letters is 345;
Jehovah—the Genius _par excellence_ of the Lunar Year—assumes the value of
543, or the reverse of 345.

In the third chapter of Exodus, in the 13th and 14th verses, it is
said: And Moses said, ... Behold I come unto the children of
Israel, and shall say unto them. The God of your fathers hath sent
me unto you; and they shall say unto me, What is his name? What
shall I say unto them? And God said unto Moses,

I Am That I Am.

The Hebrew words for this expression are _âhiyé asher âhiyé_, and in the
value of the sums of their letters stand thus:

אהיה אשר אהיה
21 501 21

... This being his [God’s] name, the sum of the values composing
it, 21, 501, 21 is 543, or simply a use of the simple digit
numbers in the name of Moses, ... but now so ordered that the name
of 345 is reversed, and reads 543.

So that when Moses asks, “Let me see Thy face or glory,” the other rightly
and truly replies, “Thou canst not see my face ... but thou _shalt see me
behind_”—the true sense, though not the precise words; for the corner and
the _behind_ of 543 is the _face_ of 345. This is

For check and to keep a _strict use_ of a set of numbers to
develop certain _grand_ results, for the object of which they are
specifically employed.

As the learned Kabalist adds:

In other uses of the numbers, they saw each other face to face. It
is strange that if we add 345 to 543 we have 888, which was the
Gnostic Cabbalistic value of the name Christ, who was Jehoshua or
Joshua. And so also the division of the 24 hours of the day gives
three eights as quotient.... The chief end of all this system of
Number Checks was to preserve in perpetuity the exact value of the
Lunar Year in the Natural measure of Days.

These are the astronomical and numerical meanings in the secret Theogony
of sidereo‐cosmical Gods invented by the Chaldæo‐Hebrews,—two meanings out
of seven. The other five would astonish the Christians still more.

The series of Œdipuses who have endeavoured to interpret the riddle of the
Sphinx, is long indeed. For many ages she has been devouring the brightest
and the noblest intellects of Christendom; but now the Sphinx is
conquered. In the great intellectual struggle which has ended in the
complete victory of the Œdipuses of Symbolism, it is, however, not the
Sphinx, who, burning with the shame of defeat, has had to bury herself in
the sea, but verily the many‐sided symbol, named Jehovah, whom
Christians—the _civilized_ nations—have accepted for their God. The
Jehovah symbol has collapsed under the too close analysis, and is—drowned.
Symbologists have discovered with dismay that their adopted Deity was only
a mask for many other Gods, a _euhemerized_ extinct planet, at best, the
Genius of the Moon and Saturn with the Jews, of the Sun and Jupiter with
early Christians; that the Trinity—unless they accepted the more abstract
and metaphysical meanings given to it by the Gentiles—was, in truth, only
an astronomical triad, composed of the Sun (the Father), and the two
planets Mercury (the Son) and Venus (the Holy Ghost), Sophia, the Spirit
of Wisdom, Love and Truth, and Lucifer, as Christ, the “bright and morning
star.”(1267) For, if the Father is the Sun (the “Elder Brother,” in the
Eastern Inner Philosophy), the nearest planet to it is Mercury (Hermes,
Budha, Thoth), the name of whose Mother on Earth was Maia. Now this planet
receives seven times more light than any other; a fact which led the
Gnostics to call their Christos, and the Kabalists their Hermes (in the
astronomical meaning), the “Seven‐fold Light.” Finally, _this_ God was
Bel—the Sun being Bel with the Gauls; Helios, with the Greeks; Baal, with
the Phœnicians; El, in Chaldæan, hence El‐ohim, Emanu‐el, and El, “God,”
in Hebrew. But even the kabalistic God has vanished in the rabbinical
workmanship, and one has now to turn to the innermost metaphysical sense
of the _Zohar_ to find in it anything like Ain Suph, the Nameless Deity
and the Absolute, so authoritatively and loudly claimed by the Christians.
But it is certainly not to be found in the Mosaic books, at any rate by
those who try to read without a key to them. Ever since this key was lost,
Jews and Christians have tried their best to blend these two conceptions,
but in vain. They have only succeeded in finally robbing even the
Universal Deity of Its majestic character and primitive meaning.

As was said in _Isis Unveiled_:

It would seem, therefore, but natural to make a difference between
the mystery‐god Ιαω, adopted from the highest antiquity by all who
participated in the esoteric knowledge of the priests, and his
phonetic counterparts, whom we find treated with so little
reverence by the Ophites and other Gnostics.(1268)

In the Ophite gems of King,(1269) we find the name of Iao
repeated, and often confounded with that of Ievo, while the latter
simply represents one of the Genii antagonistic to Abraxas.... But
the name Iao neither originated with, nor was it the sole property
of the Jews. Even if it had pleased Moses to bestow the name upon
the tutelary “Spirit,” the alleged protector and national deity of
the “chosen people of Israel,” there is yet no possible reason why
other nationalities should receive Him as the Highest and One‐
living God. But we deny the assumption altogether. Besides, there
is the fact that Iaho or Iao was a “mystery name” from the
beginning, for יהיה and יה never came into use before the time of
king David. Anterior to his time, few or no proper names were
compounded with Iah or Jah. It looks rather as though David, being
a sojourner among the Tyrians and Philistines,(1270) brought
thence the name of Jehovah. He made Zadok high priest, from whom
came the Zadokites or Sadducees. He lived and ruled first at
Hebron (חברון), Habir‐on or Kabeir‐town, where the rites of the
four (mystery‐gods) were celebrated. Neither David nor Solomon
recognized either Moses or the law of Moses. They aspired to build
a temple to יהוה, like the structures erected by Hiram to Hercules
and Venus, Adon and Astarte.

Says Fürst: “The very ancient name of God, Yâho, written in the
Greek Ιαω, appears, apart _from its derivation_, to have been an
old mystic name of the Supreme Deity of the Shemites. Hence it was
told to Moses when he was initiated at Hor‐eb—the _Cave_—under the
direction of Jethro, the Kenite (or Cainite) priest of Midian. In
an old religion of the Chaldæans, whose remains are to be found
among the Neo‐Platonists, the highest Divinity, enthroned above
the seven Heavens, representing the Spiritual Light‐Principle, ...
and also conceived of as Demiurgus,(1271) was called Ιαω (יהו),
who was, like the Hebrew Yâho, mysterious and unmentionable, and
whose name was communicated to the Initiated. The Phœnicians had a
Supreme God, whose name was triliteral and _secret_, and he was
Ιαω.”(1272)

The cross, say the Kabalists, repeating the lesson of the Occultists, is
one of the most ancient—nay, perhaps, the _most_ ancient of symbols. This
has been demonstrated at the very beginning of the Proem in Volume I. The
Eastern Initiates show it coëval with the circle of Deific Infinitude and
the first differentiation of the Essence, the union of Spirit and Matter.
This interpretation has been rejected, and the astronomical allegory alone
has been accepted and made to fit into cunningly imagined terrestrial
events.

Let us demonstrate this statement. In Astronomy, as said, Mercury is the
son of Cœlus and Lux—of the Sky and Light, or the Sun; in Mythology he is
the progeny of Jupiter and Maia. He is the “Messenger” of his Father
Jupiter, the Messiah of the Sun; in Greek, his name Hermes means, among
other things, the “Interpreter”—the Word, the Logos, or Verbum. Now
Mercury is born on Mount Cyllene among shepherds, and is the patron of the
latter. As a psychopompic Genius, he conducted the Souls of the Dead to
Hades and brought them back again, an office attributed to Jesus after his
Death and Resurrection. The symbols of Hermes‐Mercury (Dii Termini) were
placed along, and at the turning points of, highways, as crosses are now
placed in Italy, and they were _cruciform_.(1273) Every seventh day the
priests anointed these Termini with oil, and once a year hung them with
garlands, hence they were the _anointed_. Mercury, when speaking through
his oracles, says:

I am he whom you call the Son of the Father [Jupiter] and Maia.
Leaving the King of Heaven [the Sun] I come to help you, mortals.

Mercury heals the blind and restores sight, mental and physical.(1274) He
was often represented as three‐headed and called Tricephalus, Triplex, as
one with the Sun and Venus. Finally, Mercury, as Cornutus(1275) shows, was
sometimes figured under a cubic form, without arms, because “the power of
speech and eloquence can prevail without the assistance of arms or feet.”
It is this cubic form which connects the Termini directly with the cross,
and it is the eloquence or the power of speech of Mercury which made the
crafty Eusebius say, “Hermes is the emblem of the Word which creates and
interprets all,” for it is the Creative Word; and he shows Porphyry
teaching that the Speech of Hermes—now interpreted “Word of God” (!) in
_Pymander_—a Creative Speech (Verbum), is the Seminal Principle scattered
throughout the Universe.(1276) In Alchemy “Mercury” is the radical “Moyst”
Principle, Primitive or Elementary Water, containing the Seed of the
Universe, fecundated by the Solar Fires. To express this fecundating
principle, a phallus was often added to the cross (the male and female, or
the vertical and the horizontal united) by the Egyptians. The cruciform
Termini also represented this dual idea, which was found in Egypt in the
_cubic_ Hermes. The author of _Source of Measures_ tells us why.(1277)

As shown by him, the cube unfolded becomes in display a cross of the Tau,
or the Egyptian, form; or again, “the circle attached to the Tau gives the
ansated cross” of the old Pharaohs. They had known this from their priests
and their “King‐Initiates” for ages, and also what was meant by “the
attachment of a man to the cross,” which idea “was made to coördinate with
that of the origin of human life, and hence the _phallic form_.” Only the
latter came into action æons and ages after the idea of the Carpenter and
Artificer of the Gods, Vishva‐karmâ, crucifying the “Sun‐Initiate” on the
cruciform lathe. As the same author writes:

_The attachment of a man to the cross_ ... was made use of in this
form of display by the Hindûs.(1278)

But, it was made “to coördinate” with the idea of the new rebirth of man
by _spiritual_, not physical regeneration. The Candidate for Initiation
was attached to the Tau or astronomical cross with a far grander and
nobler idea than that of the origin of mere _terrestrial_ life.

On the other hand, the Semites seem to have had no other or higher purpose
in life than that of procreating their species. Thus, geometrically, and
according to the reading of the _Bible_ by means of the numerical method,
the author of _The Source of Measures_ is quite correct.

The entire [Jewish] system seems to have been anciently regarded
as one resting in nature, and one which was adopted by nature, or
God, as the _basis or law_ of the exertion practically of creative
power—_i.e._, it was the _creative design_, of which creation was
practically the application. This seems to be established by the
fact that, under the system set forth, measures of _planetary
times_ serve coördinately as measures of the _size_ of planets,
and of the peculiarity of their shapes—_i.e._, in the extension of
their equatorial and polar diameters.... This system [that of
creative design] seems to underlie the whole Biblical structure,
as a foundation for its _ritualism_ and for its display of the
works of the Deity in the way of _architecture_, by use of the
sacred unit of measure in the Garden of Eden, the Ark of Noah, the
Tabernacle, and the Temple of Solomon.(1279)

Thus, on the very showing of the defenders of this system, the Jewish
Deity is proved to be, at best, only the manifested Duad, never the One
Absolute All. Geometrically demonstrated, he is a _number_; symbolically,
a _euhemerized_ Priapus; and this can hardly satisfy a mankind thirsting
after the demonstration of real spiritual truths, and the possession of a
God with a divine, not anthropomorphic, nature. It is strange that the
most learned of modern Kabalists can see in the cross and circle nothing
but a symbol of the manifested _creative_ and _androgyne_ Deity in its
relation to, and interference with, this phenomenal world.(1280) One
author believes that:

However man [read, the Jew and Rabbi] obtained knowledge of the
practical measure, ... by which nature was thought to adjust the
planets in size to harmonize with the notation of their movements,
it seems he did obtain it, and esteemed its possession as the
means of his realization of the Deity—that is, he approached _so
nearly to a conception of a Being having a mind like his own_,
only infinitely more powerful, as to be able to realize _a law of
creation_ established by that Being, which must have existed prior
to any creation (kabalistically called the Word).(1281)

This may have satisfied the practical _Semite_ mind, but the Eastern
Occultist has to decline the offer of such a God; indeed, a Deity, a
Being, “having a mind like that of man, only infinitely more powerful,” is
_no_ God that has any room _beyond_ the cycle of creation. He has nought
to do with the _ideal_ conception of the Eternal Universe. He is, at best,
one of the _subordinate creative_ powers, the Totality of which is called
the Sephiroth, the Heavenly Man, and Adam Kadmon, the Second Logos of the
Platonists.

This very same idea is clearly found at the bottom of the ablest
definitions of the _Kabalah_ and its mysteries, _e.g._, by John A. Parker,
as quoted in the same work:

The key of the Kabala is _thought to be the geometrical relation
of the area of the circle inscribed in the square_, or of the cube
to the sphere, giving rise to the relation of diameter to
circumference of a circle, with the numerical value of this
relation expressed in integrals. The relation of diameter to
circumference, being a supreme one connected with the god‐names
Elohim and Jehovah (which terms are expressions numerically of
these relations, respectively—the first being of circumference,
the latter of diameter), embraces all other subordinations under
it. Two expressions of circumference to diameter in integrals are
used in the Bible: (1) The perfect, and (2) The imperfect. One of
the relations between these is such that (2) subtracted from (1)
will leave a _unit_ of a diameter value in terms, or in the
denomination of the circumference value of the perfect circle, or
a unit straight line having a perfect circular value, or a factor
of circular value.(1282)

Such calculations can lead one no further than to unriddle the mysteries
of the _third_ stage of Evolution, or the “Third Creation of Brahmâ.” The
initiated Hindûs know how to “square the circle” far better than any
European. But of this more anon. The fact is that the Western Mystics
commence their speculation only at that stage when the Universe “falls
into matter,” as the Occultists say. Throughout the whole series of
kabalistic books we have not met with one sentence that would hint in the
remotest way at the psychological and spiritual, as well as at the
mechanical and _physiological_ secrets of “creation.” Shall we, then,
regard the evolution of the Universe as simply a prototype, on a gigantic
scale, of the act of procreation; as “divine” _phallicism_, and rhapsodize
on it as the evilly‐inspired author of a late work of this name has done?
The writer does not think so. And she feels justified in saying so, since
the most careful reading of the _Old Testament_—esoterically, as well as
exoterically—seems to have carried the most enthusiastic enquirers no
further than a certainty on mathematical grounds that from the first to
the last chapter of the _Pentateuch_ every scene, every character or event
are shown connected, directly or indirectly, with the _origin of birth_ in
its crudest and most brutal form. Thus, however interesting and ingenious
the rabbinical methods, the writer, in common with other Eastern
Occultists, must prefer those of the Pagans.

It is not, then, in the _Bible_ that we have to search for the origin of
the cross and circle, but beyond the Flood. Therefore, returning to
Éliphas Lévi and the _Zohar_, we answer for the Eastern Occultists and say
that, applying practice to principle, they agree entirely with Pascal, who
says that:

God is a circle, the centre of which is everywhere and the
circumference nowhere.

Whereas the Kabalists say the reverse, and maintain it, solely out of
their desire to veil their doctrine. By the way, the definition of Deity
by the circle is not Pascal’s at all, as Éliphas Lévi thought. It was
_borrowed_ by the French Philosopher from either Mercury Trismegistus or
Cardinal Cusa’s Latin work, _De Doctâ Ignorantiâ_, in which he makes use
of it. It is, moreover, disfigured by Pascal, who replaces the words
“Cosmic Circle,” which stand symbolically in the original inscription, by
the word Theos. With the Ancients both words were synonymous.

A. Cross And Circle.

In the minds of the ancient Philosophers something of the divine and the
mysterious has ever been ascribed to the shape of the circle. The old
world, consistent in its symbolism and with its Pantheistic intuitions,
uniting the visible and the invisible Infinitudes into one, represented
Deity and its outward Veil alike—by a circle. This merging of the two into
a unity, and the name Theos being given indifferently to both, is
explained, and becomes thereby still more _scientific_ and philosophical.
Plato’s etymological definition of the word _theos_ (θεός) has, been given
elsewhere. In his _Cratylus_, he derives it from the verb _the‐ein_
(θέειν), “to move,” as suggested by the motion of the heavenly bodies
which he connects with Deity. According to the Esoteric Philosophy, this
Deity, during its “Nights” and its “Days,” or Cycles of Rest and Activity,
is the “Eternal Perpetual Motion,” the “Ever‐Becoming, as well as the ever
universally Present, and the Ever‐Existing.” The latter is the root‐
abstraction; the former is the only possible conception in the human mind,
if it disconnects this Deity from any shape or form. It is a perpetual,
never‐ceasing evolution, circling back in its incessant progress through
æons of duration into its original status—Absolute Unity.

It was only the minor Gods who were made to carry the symbolical
attributes of the higher ones. Thus, the God Shoo, the personification of
Ra, who appears as the “Great Cat of the Basin of Persæa in An”(1283) was
often represented in the Egyptian monuments seated and holding a cross,
symbol of the four Quarters, or the Elements, attached to a circle.

In that very learned work, _The Natural Genesis_, by Gerald Massey, under
the heading, “Typology of the Cross,” there is more information to be had
on the cross and circle than in any other work we know of. He who would
fain have proofs of the antiquity of the cross is referred to these two
volumes. The author says:

The circle and cross are inseparable.... The Crux Ansata unites
the circle and cross of the four corners. From this origin the
circle and the cross came to be interchangeable at times. For
example, the Chakra, or Disk of Vishnu, is a circle. The name
denotes the circling, wheeling round, periodicity, the wheel of
time. This the god uses as a weapon to hurl at the enemy. In like
manner, Thor throws his weapon, the Fylfot, a form of the four‐
footed cross [Svastika], and a type of the four quarters. Thus the
cross is equivalent to the circle of the year. The wheel emblem
unites the cross and circle in one, as does the hieroglyphic cake
and the Ankh‐tie ☥.(1284)

Nor was the double glyph sacred with the profane, but only with the
Initiates. For Raoul Rochette shows that:(1285)

The sign ♀ occurs as the _reverse_ of a Phœnician coin, with a Ram
as the obverse.... The same sign, sometimes called Venus’ Looking‐
Glass, because it typified reproduction, was employed to mark the
hind‐quarters of valuable brood mares of Corinthian and other
beautiful breeds of horses.

This proves that so far back as those early days the cross had already
become the symbol of human procreation, and that oblivion of the _divine_
origin of cross and circle had begun.

Another form of the cross is given from the _Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society_:(1286)

At each of the four corners is placed a quarter arc of an oviform
curve, and when the four are put together they form an oval; thus
the figure combines the cross with the circle round it in four
parts, corresponding to the four corners of the cross. The four
segments answer to the four feet of the Swastica cross and the
Fylfot of Thor. The four‐leaved lotus flower of Buddha, is
likewise figured at the centre of this cross, the lotus being an
Egyptian and Hindu type of the four quarters. The four quarter
arcs, if joined together, would form an ellipse, and the ellipse
is also figured on each arm of the cross. This ellipse therefore
denotes the path of the earth.... Sir J. Y. Simpson copied the
following specimen, [Symbol: Oval, with large letter “Z” inside,
with horizontal crossbar] which is here presented, as the cross of
the two equinoxes and the two solstices placed within the figure
of the earth’s path. The same ovoid or boat‐shaped figure appears
at times in the Hindu drawings with seven steps at each end as a
form or a mode of Meru.

This is the astronomical aspect of the double glyph. There are six more
aspects, however, and an attempt may be made to interpret a few of these.
The subject is so vast that it would require in itself alone many volumes.

But the most curious of these Egyptian symbols of cross and circle, spoken
of in the above cited work, is one which receives its full explanation and
final colour from Âryan symbols of the same nature. Says the author:

The four‐armed Cross is simply the cross of the four quarters, but
the cross‐sign is not always simple.(1287) This is a type that was
developed from an identifiable beginning, which was adapted to the
expression of various ideas afterwards. The most sacred cross of
Egypt that was carried in the hands of the Gods, the Pharaohs, and
the mummied dead, is the Ankh ☥ the sign of life, the living, an
oath, the covenant.... The top of this is the hieroglyphic Ru
[Symbol: Horizontal oval] set upright on the Tau‐cross. The Ru is
the door, gate, mouth, the place of outlet. This denotes the
_birthplace_ in the northern quarter of the heavens, from which
the Sun is reborn. Hence the _Ru of the Ankh‐sign is the feminine
type of the birthplace, representing the north_. It was in the
_northern quarter_ that the Goddess of the Seven Stars, called the
“Mother of the Revolutions,” gave birth to time in the earliest
cycle of the year. The first sign of this primordial circle and
cycle made in heaven is the earliest shape of the Ankh‐cross
[Symbol: Horizontal oval with tail to the right], a mere loop
which contains both a circle and the cross in one image. This loop
or noose is carried in front of the oldest genitrix, _Typhon of
the Great Bear_; as her _Ark_, the ideograph of a _period_, _an
ending_, _a time_, shown to mean one revolution. This, then,
represents the circle made in the northern heaven by the Great
Bear which constituted the earliest year of time, from which fact
we infer that the loop or Ru of the North represents that quarter,
the birthplace of time when figured as the Ru of the Ankh symbol.
Indeed this can be proved. The noose is an _Ark_ or _Rek_ type of
reckoning. The Ru of the Ankh‐cross was continued in the Cypriote
R, [Symbol: Circle with horizontal line beneath], and the Coptic
Ro, [Symbol: Figure like a Rho].(1288) The Ro was carried into the
Greek cross [Symbol: Large Greek Rho with letter Chi beneath it],
which is formed of the Ro and Chi or _R‐k_.... The Rek, or Ark,
was the sign of all beginning (_Arche_) on this account, and the
Ark‐tie is the cross of the North, the hind part of heaven.(1289)

Now this, again, is entirely astronomical and phallic. The Paurânic
version in India gives the whole matter another colour. Without destroying
the above interpretation, it is made to reveal a portion of its mysteries
with the help of the astronomical key, and thus offers a more metaphysical
rendering. The Ankh‐tie [Symbol: Horizontal oval with tail to the right]
does not belong to Egypt alone. It exists under the name of Pâsha, a cord
which the four‐armed Shiva holds in the hand of his right back arm.(1290)
The Mahâdeva is represented in the posture of an ascetic, as Mahâyogî,
with his third eye [Symbol: Vertical oval with dot in the middle], which
is “the Ru [Symbol: Horizontal oval with dot in the middle], set upright
on the Tau‐cross” in another form. The Pâsha is held in the hand in such a
way that the first finger and hand near the thumb make the cross, or loop
and crossing. Our Orientalists would have it to represent a cord to bind
refractory offenders with, because, forsooth, Kâlî, Shiva’s consort, has
the same as an attribute!

The Pâsha has here a double significance, as also has Shiva’s Trisûla and
every other divine attribute. This dual significance lies in Shiva, for
Rudra has certainly the same meaning as the Egyptian Ansated Cross in its
cosmic and mystic meaning. In the hand of Shiva, the Pâsha becomes
lingyonic. Shiva, as said before, is a name unknown to the _Vedas_. It is
in the _White Yajur Veda_ that Rudra appears for the first time as the
Great God, Mahâdeva, whose symbol is the Lingam. In the _Rig Veda_ he is
called Rudra, the “howler,” the beneficent and the maleficent Deity at the
same time, the Healer and the Destroyer. In the _Vishnu Purâna_, he is the
God who springs from the forehead of Brahmâ, who separates into male and
female, and he is the parent of the Rudras or Maruts, half of whom are
brilliant and gentle, others, black and ferocious. In the _Vedas_, he is
the Divine Ego aspiring to return to its pure, deific state, and at the
same time that Divine Ego imprisoned in earthly form, whose fierce
passions make of him the “roarer,” the “terrible.” This is well shown in
the _Brihadâranyaka Upanishad_, wherein the Rudras, the progeny of Rudra,
God of Fire, are called the “ten vital breaths (_prâna_, life), with the
heart (_manas_), as eleventh,”(1291) whereas as Shiva, he is the
_destroyer_ of that life. Brahmâ calls him Rudra, and gives him, besides,
seven other names, signifying seven forms of manifestation, and also the
seven powers of nature which destroy but to recreate or regenerate.

Hence the cruciform noose, or Pâsha, in the hand of Shiva, when he is
represented as an ascetic, the Mahâyogin, has no phallic signification,
and, indeed, it requires an imagination strongly bent in this direction to
find such a signification even in an astronomical symbol. As an emblem of
“door, gate, mouth, the place of outlet” it signifies the “strait gate”
that leads to the Kingdom of Heaven, far more than the “birthplace” in a
physiological sense.

It is a cross in a circle and Crux Ansata, truly; but it is a cross on
which all the human passions have to be crucified before the Yogî passes
through the “strait gate,” the narrow circle that widens into an infinite
one, as soon as the Inner Man has passed the threshold.

As to the mysterious seven Rishis in the constellation of the Great Bear;
if Egypt made them sacred to “the oldest genitrix, Typhon,” India has
connected these symbols ages ago with Time or Yuga‐revolutions, and the
Saptarshis are intimately connected with our present age‐the dark Kali
Yuga.(1292) The great Circle of Time, on the face of which, Indian fancy
has represented the Porpoise, or Shishumâra, has the cross placed on it by
nature in its division and localization of stars, planets and
constellations. In _Bhâgavata Purâna_,(1293) it is said:

At the _extremity of the tail of that animal, whose head is
directed toward the south_, and whose body is _in the shape of a
ring_ [circle], Dhruva [the ex‐pole star] is placed; _along its
tail_ are Prajâpati, Agni, Indra, Dharma, etc.; _across its loins_
the seven Rishis.(1294)

This is then the first and earliest cross and circle, formed by the Deity,
symbolized by Vishnu, the Eternal Circle of Boundless Time, Kâla, on whose
plane lie crossways all the Gods, creatures, and creations born in Space
and Time‐who, as the Philosophy has it, all die at the Mahâpralaya.

Meanwhile it is the seven Rishis who mark the time and the duration of
events in our septenary Life‐cycle. They are as mysterious as their
supposed wives, the Pleiades, of whom only one‐she who hides‐has proven
virtuous. The Pleiades, or Krittikâs, are the nurses of Kârttikeya, the
God of War (the Mars of the Western Pagans), who is called the Commander
of the Celestial Armies, or rather of the Siddhas—Siddha‐sena (translated
Yogîs in Heaven, and holy Sages on the Earth)—which would make Kârttikeya
identical with Michael, the “Leader of the Celestial Hosts” and, like
himself, a virgin Kumâra.(1295) Verily he is the Guha, the “Mysterious
One,” as much so as are the Saptarshis and the Krittikâs, the seven Rishis
and the Pleiades, for the interpretation of all these combined reveal to
the Adept the greatest mysteries of Occult Nature. One point is worth
mention in this question of cross and circle, as it bears strongly upon
the elements of Fire and Water, which play such an important part in the
circle and cross symbolism. Like Mars, who is alleged by Ovid to have been
born of his mother Juno alone, without the participation of a father, or
like the Avatâras (Krishna, for instance)—in the West as in the
East—Kârttikeya is born, but in a still more miraculous manner, begotten
by neither father nor mother, but out of a seed of Rudra‐Shiva, which was
cast into the Fire (Agni) and then received by the Water (Ganges). Thus he
is born from Fire and Water—a “boy bright as the Sun and beautiful as the
Moon.” Hence he is called Agnibhû (son of Agni) and Gangâputra (son of
Ganges). Add to this the fact that the Krittikâ, his nurses, as the
_Matsya Purâna_ shows, are presided over by Agni, or, in the authentic
words, “the seven Rishis are on a line with the brilliant Agni,” and hence
“Krittika has Âgneya as a synonym”(1296)—and the connection is easy to
follow.

It is, then, the Rishis who mark the time and the periods of Kali Yuga,
the age of sin and sorrow. As the _Bhâgavata Purâna_ tells us:

When the splendour of Vishnu, named Krishna, departed for heaven,
then did the Kali age, during which men delight in sin, invade the
world....

When the seven Rishis were in Maghâ, the Kali age, comprising
1,200 [divine] years [432,000 common years] began; and, when, from
Maghâ, they shall reach Pûrvâshâdhâ, then will this Kali age
attain its growth, under Nanda and his successors.(1297)

This is the revolution of the Rishis—

When the two first stars of the seven Rishis (the Great Bear) rise
in the heavens, and some lunar asterism is seen at night, at an
equal distance between them, then the seven Rishis continue
stationary in that conjunction for a hundred years,

—as a hater of Nanda makes Parâshara say. According to Bentley, it was in
order to show the quantity of the precession of the equinoxes that this
notion originated among the Astronomers.

This was by assuming an imaginary line, or great circle, passing
through the poles of the ecliptic and the beginning of the fixed
Maghâ, which circle was supposed to cut some of the stars in the
Great Bear.... The seven stars in the Great Bear being called the
Rishis, the circle so assumed was called the line of the Rishis;
and, being invariably fixed to the beginning of the lunar asterism
Maghâ, the precession would be noted by stating the degree, etc.,
of any movable lunar mansion cut by that line or circle, as an
index.(1298)

There has been, and there still exists, a seemingly endless controversy
about the chronology of the Hindûs. Here is, however, a point that could
help to determine—approximately at least—the age when the symbolism of the
seven Rishis and their connection with the Pleiades began. When Kârttikeya
was delivered to the Krittikâ by the Gods to be nursed, they were only
six, whence Kârttikeya is represented with _six_ heads; but when the
poetical fancy of the early Âryan Symbologists made of them the consorts
of the seven Rishis, they were _seven_. Their names are given, and these
are Amba, Dulâ, Nitatui, Abrayanti, Maghâyanti, Varshayanti, and
Chupunika. There are other sets of names which differ, however. Anyhow,
the seven Rishis were made to marry the seven Krittikâ before the
disappearance of the seventh Pleiad. Otherwise, how could the Hindû
astronomers speak of a star which no one can see without the help of the
strongest telescopes? This is why, perhaps, in every such case the
majority of the events described in the Hindû allegories is fixed upon as
“a very recent invention, certainly _within_ the Christian era.”

The oldest Sanskrit MSS. on Astronomy begin their series of Nakshatras,
the twenty‐seven lunar asterisms, with the sign of Krittikâ, and this can
hardly make them earlier than 2,780 B.C. This is according to the “Vedic
Calendar,” which is accepted even by the Orientalists, though they get out
of the difficulty by saying that the said Calendar does not _prove_ that
the Hindûs knew anything of Astronomy at that date, and assure their
readers that, Calendars notwithstanding, the Indian Pandits may have
acquired their knowledge of the lunar mansions headed by Krittikâ from the
Phœnicians, etc. However that may be, the Pleiades are the central group
of the system of sidereal symbology. They are situated in the neck of the
constellation Taurus, regarded by Mädler and others, in Astronomy, as the
_central group_ of the system of the Milky Way, and in the _Kabalah_ and
Eastern Esotericism, as the _sidereal septenate_ born from the first
manifested side of the upper triangle, the concealed [triangle]. This
manifested side is Taurus, the symbol of One (the figure 1), or of the
first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Aleph (א) “bull” or “ox,” whose
synthesis is Ten (10), or Yod (י), the perfect letter and number. The
Pleiades (Alcyone, especially), are thus considered, even in Astronomy, as
the central point around which _our universe of fixed stars revolves_, the
focus from which, and into which, the Divine Breath, Motion, works
incessantly during the Manvantara. Hence, in the sidereal symbols of the
Occult Philosophy, it is this circle with the starry cross on its face
which plays the most prominent part.

The Secret Doctrine teaches us that everything in the Universe, as well as
the Universe itself, is formed (“created”) during its periodical
manifestations—by accelerated Motion set into activity by the Breath of
the Ever‐to‐be‐unknown Power—unknown to present mankind, at any
rate—within the phenomenal world. The Spirit of Life and Immortality was
everywhere symbolized by a circle; hence the serpent biting its tail,
represents the Circle of Wisdom in Infinity; as does the astronomical
cross—the cross within a circle—and the globe, with two wings added to it,
which then became the sacred Scarabæus of the Egyptians, its very name
being suggestive of the secret idea attached to it. For the Scarabæus is
called in the Egyptian papyri, Khopirron and Khopri from the verb
_khopron_, “to become,” and has thus been made a symbol and an emblem of
human life and of the successive “becomings” of man, through the various
peregrinations and metempsychoses, or reïncarnations, of the liberated
soul. This mystical symbol shows plainly that the Egyptians believed in
reïncarnation and the successive lives and existences of the Immortal
Entity. As this, however, was an Esoteric Doctrine, revealed only during
the Mysteries, by the Priest‐hierophants and the King‐initiates to the
Candidates, it was kept secret. The Incorporeal Intelligences (the
Planetary Spirits, or Creative Powers) were always represented under the
form of circles. In the primitive Philosophy of the Hierophants these
_invisible_ circles were the prototypic causes and builders of all the
heavenly orbs, which were their _visible_ bodies or coverings, and of
which they were the souls. It was certainly a universal teaching in
antiquity.(1299) As Proclus says:

Before the mathematical numbers, there are the _self‐moving_
numbers; before the figures apparent—the vital figures, and before
producing the material worlds _which move in a circle_, the
Creative Power produced the _invisible_ circles.(1300)

“_Deus enim et circulus est_,” says Pherecydes, in his Hymn to Jupiter.
This was a Hermetic axiom, and Pythagoras prescribed such a circular
prostration and posture during the hours of contemplation. “The devotee
must approach as much as possible the form of a perfect circle,”
prescribes the Secret Book. Numa tried to spread the same custom among the
people, Pierius tells his readers; and Pliny says:

During our worship, we roll up, so to say, our body in a
ring—_totum corpus circumagimur_.(1301)

The Vision of the prophet Ezekiel reminds one forcibly of this mysticism
of the circle, when he beheld a “whirlwind” from which came out “one
_wheel_ upon the earth” whose work “_was_ as it were a wheel in the middle
of a wheel”—“for the spirit of the living creature _was_ in the
wheels.”(1302)

“[_Spirit_] whirleth about continually, and ... returneth again according
to his circuits”—says Solomon,(1303) who is made in the English
_translation_ to speak of the “wind,” and in the original text to refer
both to the _spirit_ and the _sun_. But the _Zohar_, the only true gloss
of the Kabalistic Preacher—in explanation of this verse, which is,
perhaps, rather hazy and difficult to comprehend—says:

It seems to say that the sun moves in circuits, whereas it refers
to the Spirit _under the sun_, called the Holy Spirit, that moves
circularly, toward both sides, that they [It and the sun] _should
be united in the same Essence_.(1304)

The Brâhmanical “Golden Egg,” from within which emerges Brahmâ, the
Creative Deity, is the “Circle with the Central Point” of Pythagoras, and
its fitting symbol. In the Secret Doctrine the concealed Unity—whether
representing Parabrahman, or the “Great Extreme” of Confucius, or the
Deity concealed by Phtah, the Eternal Light, or again the Jewish Ain Suph,
is always found to be symbolized by a circle or the “nought” (absolute No‐
Thing and Nothing, because it is Infinite and the All); while the God‐
manifested (by its works) is referred to as the Diameter of that Circle.
The symbolism of the underlying idea is thus made evident: the right line
passing through the centre of a circle has, in the geometrical sense,
length, but neither breadth nor thickness; it is an imaginary and feminine
symbol, crossing eternity, and made to rest on the plane of existence _of
the phenomenal world_. It is _dimensional_, whereas its circle is
dimensionless, or, to use an algebraical term, it is the dimension of an
equation. Another way of symbolizing the idea is found in the Pythagorean
sacred Decad which synthesizes, in the dual numeral Ten (the one and a
circle or cipher), the Absolute All manifesting itself in the Word or
Generative Power of Creation.

B. The Fall Of The Cross Into Matter.

Those who would feel inclined to argue upon this Pythagorean symbol by
objecting that it is not yet ascertained, so far, at what period of
antiquity the nought or cipher occurs for the first time—especially in
India—are referred to _Isis Unveiled_.(1305)

Admitting for argument’s sake that the ancient world was not acquainted
with our modes of calculation or Arabic figures—though in reality we know
it was—yet the circle and diameter idea is there to show that it was the
first symbol in Cosmogony. Before the Trigrams of Fo‐hi, Yang, the unity,
and Yin, the binary, explained cunningly enough by Éliphas Lévi,(1306)
China had her Confucius, and her Tao‐ists. The former circumscribes the
“Great Extreme” within a circle with a horizontal line across; the latter
place three concentric circles beneath the great circle, while the Sung
Sages showed the “Great Extreme” in an upper circle, and Heaven and Earth
in two lower and smaller circles. The Yangs and the Yins are a far later
invention. Plato and his school never understood the Deity otherwise,
notwithstanding the many epithets applied by him to the “God over all” (ὁ
ἐπὶ πᾶσι θεός). Plato, having been initiated, could not believe in a
personal God—a gigantic shadow of man. His epithets of “Monarch” and “Law‐
giver of the Universe” bear an abstract meaning well understood by every
Occultist, who, no less than any Christian, believes in the One Law that
governs the Universe, and recognizes it at the same time as immutable. As
Plato says:

Beyond all _finite_ existences and _secondary_ causes, all laws,
ideas and principles, there is an Intelligence or Mind (νοῦς), the
first principle of all principles, the Supreme Idea on which all
other ideas are grounded, ... the _ultimate_ substance _from which
all things derive their being and essence_, the First and
efficient Cause of all the order, and harmony, and beauty and
excellency, and goodness, which pervade the Universe.

This Mind is called, by way of preëminence and excellence, the Supreme
Good,(1307) “The God” (ὁ θεός), and the “God over all.” These words apply,
as Plato himself shows, neither to the “Creator” nor to the “Father” of
our modern Monotheist, but to the _Ideal_ and Abstract Cause. For, as he
says: “This θεός, the God over all, _is not the truth or the
intelligence_, but the Father of it,” and its Primal Cause. Is it Plato,
the greatest pupil of the archaic Sages, a Sage himself, for whom there
was but a single object of attainment in this life—Real Knowledge—who
would have ever believed in a Deity that curses and damns men for ever, on
the slightest provocation?(1308) Surely not he who considered only those
to be genuine Philosophers and students of truth who possessed the
knowledge of the _really‐existing_ in opposition to mere seeming; of the
_always‐existing_ in opposition to the transitory: and of that which
exists _permanently_ in opposition to that which waxes, wanes, and is
developed and destroyed alternately.(1309) Speusippus and Xenocrates
followed in his footsteps. The One, the original, had no _existence_, in
the sense applied to it by mortal men. The τίμιον (the honoured) dwells in
the centre as in the circumference, but it is only _the reflection_ of the
Deity—the World Soul(1310)—the plane of the surface of the circle. The
cross and circle are a universal conception—as old as the human mind
itself. They stand foremost on the list of the long series of, so to say,
international symbols, which expressed very often great scientific truths,
besides their direct bearing upon psychological, and even physiological
mysteries.

It is no explanation to say, as does Éliphas Lévi, that God, the universal
Love, having caused the male Unit to dig an abyss in the female Binary, or
Chaos, thereby produced the world. In addition to the grossness of the
conception, it does not remove the difficulty of conceiving it without
losing one’s veneration for the rather too human‐like ways of the Deity.
It is to avoid such anthropomorphic conceptions that the Initiates never
used the epithet “God” to designate the One and Secondless Principle in
the Universe; and that—faithful in this to the oldest traditions of the
Secret Doctrine the world over—they deny that such imperfect and often not
very clean work could ever be produced by Absolute Perfection. There is no
need to mention here other still greater metaphysical difficulties.
Between speculative Atheism and idiotic Anthropomorphism there must be a
philosophical mean, and a reconciliation. The Presence of the Unseen
Principle throughout all Nature, and the highest manifestation of it on
Earth—Man, can alone help to solve the problem, which is that of the
mathematician whose _x_ must ever elude the grasp of our terrestrial
algebra. The Hindûs have tried to solve it by their Avatâras, the
Christians _think_ they have done so—by their one divine Incarnation.
Exoterically—both are wrong; Esoterically both of them are very near the
truth. Alone, among the Apostles of the Western religion, Paul seems to
have fathomed—if not actually revealed—the archaic mystery of the cross.
As for the rest of those who, by unifying and individualizing the
Universal Presence, have synthesized it into one symbol—the central point
in the crucifix—they show thereby that they have never seized the true
spirit of the teaching of Christ, but rather that they have degraded it in
more than one way by their erroneous interpretations. They have forgotten
the spirit of that universal symbol and have selfishly monopolized it—as
though the Boundless and the Infinite could ever be limited and
conditioned to one manifestation individualized in one man, or even in a
nation!

The four arms of the [Symbol: cross like the letter “X”], or decussated
cross, and of the Hermetic cross, pointing to the four cardinal
points—were well understood by the mystical minds of the Hindûs, Brâhmans
and Buddhists, hundreds of years before it was heard of in Europe, for
that symbol was and is found all over the world. They bent the ends of the
cross and made of it their Svastika, 卐 now the Wan of the Mongolian
Buddhist.(1311) It implies that the “central point” is not limited to one
individual, however perfect; that The Principle (God) is in Humanity, and
Humanity, as all the rest, is in It, like drops of water are in the ocean,
the four ends being toward the four cardinal points, hence losing
themselves in infinity.

Isarim, an Initiate, is said to have found at Hebron, on the _dead body_
of Hermes, the well known Smaragdine Tablet, which, it is said, contained
the essence of Hermetic Wisdom. Upon it were traced, among others, the
sentences:

Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross....

Ascend ... from the earth to heaven and then descend again to
earth.

The _riddle_ of the cross is contained in these words, and its double
mystery is solved—to the Occultist.

The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite
directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and
breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting
point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific
quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the
basis of the Occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the
master‐key which opens the door of every science, physical as well
as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of
life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent
in succession, birth, life, death, and _immortality_.(1312)

“Attach thyself,” says the Alchemist, “to the four letters of the
tetragram disposed in the following manner. The letters of the
ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at
first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained
therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the
masters.”(1313)

Again:

The Tau, Τ, and the astronomical cross of Egypt, [Symbol: Circle
with cross within] are conspicuous in several apertures of the
remains of Palenque. In one of the _basso‐relievos_ of the Palace
of Palenque, on the west side, sculptured as a hieroglyphic right
under the seated figure, is a Tau. The standing figure, which
leans over the first one, is in the act of covering its head with
the left hand with the veil of initiation; while it extends its
right with the index and middle finger pointing to heaven. The
position is precisely that of a Christian bishop giving his
blessing, or the one in which Jesus is often represented while at
the Last Supper.(1314)

The Egyptian Hierophant had a square head‐dress which he had to wear
always during his functions. These square hats are worn unto this day by
the Armenian priests. The perfect Tau—formed of the perpendicular
(descending male ray) and the horizontal line (Matter, female
principle)—and the mundane circle were attributes of Isis, and it was only
at death that the Egyptian cross was laid on the breast of the mummy. The
claim that the cross is purely a Christian symbol introduced after our
era, is strange indeed, when we find Ezekiel stamping the foreheads of the
men of Judah who feared the Lord,(1315) with the _signum Thau_, as it is
translated in the Vulgate. In the ancient Hebrew this sign was formed thus
[Symbol: Cross, tilted towards the northeast], but in the original
Egyptian hieroglyphics as a perfect Christian cross ☦ (Tat, the emblem of
stability). In the _Revelation_, also, the “Alpha and Omega”—Spirit and
Matter—the first and the last, stamps the name of his Father on the
foreheads of the _elect_. Moses(1316) orders his people to mark their
_door‐posts_ and _lintels_ with blood, lest the “Lord God” should make a
mistake and smite some of his chosen people, instead of the doomed
Egyptians. And this mark is a Tau!—the identical Egyptian handled cross,
with the half of which talisman Horus raised the dead, as is shown on a
sculptured ruin at Philæ.

Enough has been said in the text about the Svastika and the Tau. Verily
may the cross be traced back into the very depths of the unfathomable
archaic ages! Its mystery deepens rather than clears, as we find it on the
statues of Easter Island, in old Egypt, in Central Asia, engraved on rocks
as the Tau and Svastika, in Pre‐Christian Scandinavia, everywhere! The
author of the _Source of Measures_ stands perplexed before the endless
shadow it throws back into antiquity, and is unable to trace it to any
particular nation or man. He shows the Targums handed down by the Hebrews,
obscured by translation. In _Joshua_(1317) read in Arabic, and in the
_Targum of Jonathan_, it is said: “The king of Ai he _crucified_ upon a
tree.”

The Septuagint rendering is of suspension from a _double word_ or
_cross_. (Wordsworth on Joshua.) ... The strangest expression of
this kind is in _Numbers_ (xxv. 4) where, by Onkelos (?) it is
read: “_Crucify them before the Lord (Jehovah) against the sun_.”
The word here is יקע, _to nail to_, rendered properly (Fuerst) by
the Vulgate, _to crucify_. The very construction of this sentence
is mystic.(1318)

So it is, but the spirit of it has been ever misunderstood. “To crucify
before (not against) the Sun” is a phrase used of Initiation. It comes
from Egypt, and primarily from India. The enigma can be unriddled only by
searching for its key in the Mysteries of Initiation. The Initiated Adept,
who had successfully passed through all the trials, was _attached_, not
_nailed_, but simply tied on a couch in the form of a Tau, Τ, in Egypt, of
a Svastika without the four additional prolongations (☩ not 卐) in India,
plunged in a deep sleep—the “Sleep of Siloam,” as it is called to this day
among the Initiates in Asia Minor, in Syria, and even higher Egypt. He was
allowed to remain in this state for three days and three nights, during
which time his Spiritual Ego was said to “confabulate” with the “Gods,”
descend into Hades, Amenti, or Pâtâla—according to the country—and do
works of charity to the invisible Beings, whether Souls of men or
Elemental Spirits; his body remaining all the time in a temple crypt or
subterranean cave. In Egypt it was placed in the Sarcophagus in the King’s
Chamber of the Pyramid of Cheops, and carried during the night of the
approaching third day to the entrance of a gallery, where at a certain
hour the beams of the rising Sun struck full on the face of the entranced
Candidate, who awoke to be initiated by Osiris and Thoth, the God of
Wisdom.

Let the reader who doubts the statement consult the Hebrew originals
before he denies. Let him turn to some most suggestive Egyptian _bas
reliefs_. One especially from the temple of Philæ, represents a _scene of
initiation_. Two God‐Hierophants, one with the head of a hawk (the Sun),
the other ibis‐headed (Mercury, Thoth, the God of Wisdom and Secret
Learning, the assessor of Osiris‐Sun), are standing over the body of a
Candidate just initiated. They are in the act of pouring on his head a
double stream of “water” (the Water of Life and of New‐birth), the streams
being interlaced in the shape of a cross and full of small ansated
crosses. This is allegorical of the awakening of the Candidate who is now
an Initiate, when the beams of the morning Sun, Osiris, strike the crown
of his head; his entranced body being placed on its wooden Tau so as to
receive the rays. Then appeared the Hierophant‐Initiators, and the
sacramental words were pronounced, ostensibly to the Sun‐Osiris, in
reality to the Spirit‐Sun within, enlightening the newly‐born man.

Let the reader meditate on the connection of the Sun with the cross from
the highest antiquity, in both its generative and spiritually regenerative
capacities. Let him examine the tomb of Bait‐Oxly, in the reign of Ramses
II, where he will find the crosses in every shape and position; as also on
the throne of that sovereign, and finally on a fragment representing the
adoration of Bakhan‐Alearé, from the Hall of the ancestors of Totmes III,
now preserved in the National Library of Paris. In this extraordinary
sculpture and painting one sees the disk of the Sun beaming upon an
ansated cross placed upon a cross of which those of the Calvary are
perfect copies. The ancient MSS. mention these as the “hard couches of
those who were in [spiritual] travail, the _act of giving birth to
themselves_.” A quantity of such cruciform “couches,” on which the
Candidate, thrown into a dead trance at the end of his supreme Initiation,
was placed and secured, were found in the underground halls of the
Egyptian Temples after their destruction. The worthy and holy Fathers of
the Cyril and Theophilus types used them freely, believing they had been
brought and concealed there by some new converts. Alone Origen, and after
him Clemens Alexandrinus and other ex‐initiates, knew better. But they
preferred to keep silent.

Again, let the reader read the Hindû “fables,” as the Orientalists call
them, and remember the allegory of Vishvakarmâ, the Creative Power, the
Great Architect of the World, called in the _Rig Veda_ the “All‐seeing
God,” who “sacrifices himself to himself.” The Spiritual Egos of mortals
are his own essence, _one with him_, therefore. Remember that he is called
Deva‐vardhika, the “Builder of the Gods,” and that it is he who ties the
Sun, Sûrya, his son‐in‐law, on his lathe—in the exoteric allegory, but on
the Svastika, in Esoteric tradition, for on Earth he is the Hierophant‐
Initiator—and cuts away a portion of his brightness. Vishvakarmâ, remember
again, is the son of Yoga‐siddhâ, _i.e._, the holy power of Yoga, and the
fabricator of the “fiery weapon,” the magic Agneyastra.(1319) The
narrative is given more fully elsewhere.

The author of the kabalistic work so often quoted from, asks:

The theoretical use of crucifixion then, must have been somehow
connected with the personification of this symbol [the structure
of the Garden of Paradise symbolized by a crucified man]. But how?
And as showing what? The symbol was of the origin of measures,
shadowing forth _creative law_ or _design_. What, practically, as
regards humanity, could actual crucifixion betoken? Yet, that it
was held as the effigy of some mysterious working of the same
system, is shown from the very fact of the use. There seems to be
deep below deep as to the mysterious workings of these number
values—[the symbolization of the connection of 113: 355, with
20612: 6561, by a _crucified man_]. Not only are they shown to
work in the cosmos but, ... by sympathy, they seem to work out
conditions relating to an unseen and spiritual world, and the
prophets seem to have held knowledge of the connecting links.
Reflection becomes more involved when it is considered that, the
power of expression of the law, _exactly_, by numbers clearly
defining a system, was not the _accident_ of the language, but was
its very _essence_, and of its _primary organic construction_;
therefore, neither the language, nor the mathematical system
attaching to it, could be of man’s invention, unless both were
_founded upon a prior language which afterwards became
obsolete_.(1320)

The author proves these points by further elucidation, and reveals the
secret meaning of more than one dead‐letter narrative, by showing that
probably, איש, _man_, was the _primordial_ word:

The very first word possessed by the Hebrews, whoever they were,
to carry the idea, by sound, of _a man_. The _essential_ of this
word was 113 [the numerical value of that word] from the
beginning, and carried with it the elements of the cosmical system
displayed.(1321)

This is demonstrated by the Hindû Vittoba, a form of Vishnu, as has
already been stated. The figure of Vittoba, even to the nail‐marks on the
feet,(1322) is that of _Jesus crucified_, in all its details save the
cross. That _man_ was meant is proved to us further by the fact of the
Initiate being _reborn_ after his _crucifixion_ on the _Tree of Life_.
This “Tree” has now become exoterically—through its use by the Romans as
an instrument of torture and the ignorance of the early Christian
schemers—the _tree of death_!

Thus, one of the seven Esoteric meanings intended by this mystery of
crucifixion by the mystic inventors of the system—the original elaboration
and adoption of which dates back to the very establishment of the
Mysteries—is discovered in the geometrical symbols containing the history
of the evolution of man. The Hebrews—whose prophet Moses was so learned in
the Esoteric Wisdom of Egypt, and who adopted their numerical system from
the Phœnicians, and later from the Gentiles, from whom also they borrowed
most of their Kabalistic Mysticism—most ingeniously adapted the cosmic and
anthropological symbols of the “Heathen” nations to their peculiar
_secret_ records. If Christian sacerdotalism has lost the key of this to‐
day, the early compilers of the Christian Mysteries were well versed in
Esoteric Philosophy and the Hebrew Occult Metrology, and used it
dexterously. Thus they took the word Aish, one of the Hebrew word‐forms
for _man_, and used it in conjunction with that of Shânâh or _lunar year_,
so mystically connected with the name of Jehovah, the supposed “Father” of
Jesus, and embosomed the mystic idea in an astronomical value and formula.

The original idea of the “man crucified” in space certainly belongs to the
ancient Hindûs. Moor shows this in his _Hindû Pantheon_ in the engraving
that represents Vittoba. Plato adopted it in his decussated cross in
space, the [Symbol: cross like the letter “X”], the “second God who
impressed himself on the universe in the form of the cross”; Krishna is
likewise shown “crucified.”(1323) Again it is repeated in the _Old
Testament_ in the queer injunction to crucify men before the Lord, the
Sun—which is no prophecy at all, but has a direct phallic significance. In
that same most suggestive work on the kabalistic meanings, we read again:

In symbol, the nails of the cross have for the shape of the heads
thereof a solid pyramid, and a tapering square obeliscal shaft, or
phallic emblem, for the nail. Taking the position of the _three_
nails in the man’s extremities and on the cross, they form or mark
a _triangle_ in shape, one nail being at each corner of the
triangle. The wounds, or _stigmata_, in the extremities are
necessarily _four_, designative of the _square_.... The three
nails with the three wounds are in number 6, which denotes the 6
faces of the cube _unfolded_ [which make the cross or man‐form, or
7, counting three horizontal and four vertical squares], on which
the man is placed; and this in turn points to the circular measure
transferred on to the edges of the cube. The _one_ wound of the
feet separates into _two_ when the feet are separated, making
_three_ together _for all_, and _four when separated_, or 7 in
all—another and _most holy_ [_with the Jews_] feminine base
number.(1324)

Thus, while the phallic or sexual meaning of the “crucifixion nails” is
proven by the geometrical and numerical reading, its mystical meaning is
indicated by the short remarks upon it, as given above, in its connection
with, and bearing upon, Prometheus. He is another victim, for he is
crucified on the Cross of Love, on the rock of human passions, a sacrifice
to his devotion to the cause of the spiritual element in Humanity.

Now, the primordial system, the double glyph that underlies the idea of
the cross, is not of “human invention,” for Cosmic Ideation and the
spiritual representation of the Divine Ego‐man are at its basis. Later, it
expanded into the beautiful idea adopted by, and represented in, the
Mysteries, that of regenerated man, the mortal, who, by crucifying the man
of flesh and his passions on the Procrustean bed of torture, became reborn
as an Immortal. Leaving the body, the animal‐man, behind him, tied on the
Cross of Initiation like an empty chrysalis, the Ego‐Soul became as free
as a butterfly. Still later, owing to the gradual loss of spirituality,
the cross became in Cosmogony and Anthropology no higher than a _phallic
symbol_.

With the Esotericists from the remotest times, the Universal Soul or Anima
Mundi, the material reflection of the Immaterial Ideal, was the Source of
Life of all beings and of the Life‐Principle of the three kingdoms. This
was _septenary_ with the Hermetic Philosophers, as with all Ancients. For
it is represented as a sevenfold cross, whose branches are respectively,
_light_, _heat_, _electricity_, _terrestrial magnetism_, _astral
radiation_, _motion_, and _intelligence_, or what some call self‐
consciousness.

As we have said elsewhere, long before the cross or its sign were adopted
as symbols of Christianity, the sign of the cross was used as a mark of
recognition among Adepts and Neophytes, the latter being called
Chrests—from Chrestos, the man of tribulation and sorrow. Says Éliphas
Lévi:

The sign of the cross adopted by the Christians does not belong to
them exclusively. It is also kabalistic, and represents the
opposition and quaternary equilibrium of the elements. We see by
the occult verse of the _Paternoster_ ... that there were
originally two ways of doing it, or, at least _two_ very different
formulas to express its meaning: one reserved for the priests and
initiates; the other given to neophytes and the profane. Thus, for
example, the initiate, carrying his hand to his forehead, said,
_To thee_; then he added, _belong_; and continued, carrying his
hand to the breast, _the kingdom_; then to the left shoulder,
_justice_; to the right shoulder, _and mercy_. Then he joined the
two hands, adding, _throughout the generating cycles—Tibi sunt
Malchut et Geburah et Chesed per Æonas_—an absolutely and
magnificently kabalistic sign of the cross, which the profanations
of Gnosticism made the militant and official Church completely
_lose_.(1325)

The “militant and official Church” did more: having helped herself to what
had never belonged to her, she took only that which the “Profane” had—the
kabalistic meaning of the _male_ and _female_ Sephiroth. She never lost
the _inner_ and higher meaning since she never had it—Éliphas Lévi’s
pandering to Rome notwithstanding. The sign of the cross adopted by the
Latin Church was _phallic_ from the beginning, while that of the Greeks
was the cross of the Neophytes, the Chrestoi.

Section IX. The Upanishads in Gnostic Literature.

We are reminded in King’s _Gnostics and their Remains_ that the Greek
language had but one word for _vowel_ and _voice_. This has led the
uninitiated to many erroneous interpretations. On the simple knowledge,
however, of this well‐known fact a comparison may be attempted, and a
flood of light thrown upon several mystic meanings. Thus the words, so
often used in the _Upanishads_ and the _Purânas_, “Sound” and “Speech,”
may be collated with the Gnostic “Vowels” and the “Voices” of the Thunders
and Angels in _Revelation_. The same will be found in _Pistis Sophia_, and
other ancient Fragments and MSS. This was remarked even by the matter‐of‐
fact author of the above mentioned work.

Through Hippolytus, an early Church Father, we learn what Marcus—a
Pythagorean rather than a Christian Gnostic, and a Kabalist most
certainly—had received in mystic revelation. It is said that Marcus had it
revealed unto him that:

The _seven heavens_(1326) ... sounded each one vowel, which, all
combined together, formed a single doxology, “the _sound_ whereof
being carried down [from these seven heavens] to earth, becomes
the creator and parent of all things that be on earth.”(1327)

Translated from the Occult phraseology into still plainer language this
would read: The Sevenfold Logos having differentiated into seven Logoi, or
Creative Potencies (Vowels), these (the Second Logos, or “Sound”) created
all on Earth.

Assuredly one who is acquainted with Gnostic literature can hardly help
seeing in St. John’s _Apocalypse_, a work of the same school of thought.
For we find John saying:

Seven thunders uttered their voices ... [and] I was about to write
... [but] I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Seal up
those things which the seven thunders uttered, and write them
not.(1328)

The same injunction is given to Marcus, the same to all other _semi_ and
_full_ Initiates. The very sameness of the expressions used, and of the
underlying ideas, always betrays a portion of the Mysteries. We must
always seek for more than one meaning in every mystery allegorically
revealed, especially in those in which the number seven and its
multiplication seven by seven, or forty‐nine, appear. Now when, in _Pistis
Sophia_, the Rabbi Jesus is requested by his disciples to reveal to them
the “Mysteries of the Light of his Father”—_i.e._, of the Higher Self
enlightened by Initiation and Divine Knowledge—Jesus answers:

Do ye seek after these mysteries? No mystery is more excellent
than they; which shall bring your souls unto the Light of Lights,
unto the place of Truth and Goodness, unto the place where there
is neither male nor female, neither form in that place but Light,
everlasting, not to be uttered. 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
their numbers thereof. And no name is more excellent than all
these (Vowels).(1329)

As says the Commentary, speaking of the “Fires”:

_The Seven Fathers and the Forty‐nine Sons blaze in Darkness, but they are
the Life and Light and the continuation thereof through the Great Age._

Now it becomes evident that, in every Esoteric interpretation of exoteric
beliefs expressed in allegorical forms, there is the same underlying
idea—the basic number _seven_, the compound of _three_ and _four_,
preceded by the divine _three_ ([triangle]) making the perfect number
_ten_.

Also, these numbers apply equally to divisions of time, to cosmography,
metaphysical and physical, as well as to man and everything else in
visible Nature. Thus these seven Vowels with their forty‐nine Powers are
identical with the three and the seven Fires of the Hindûs and their
forty‐nine Fires; identical with the numerical mysteries of the Persian
Simorgh; identical with those of the Jewish Kabalists. The latter,
dwarfing the numbers (their mode of “blinds”), made the duration of each
successive Renewal, or what we call in Esoteric parlance Round, 1,000
years only or of the seven Renewals of the Globe 7,000 years, instead of,
as is more likely, 7,000,000,000, and assigned to the total duration of
the Universe 49,000 years only.(1330)

Now, the Secret Doctrine furnishes a key which reveals to us on the
Indisputable grounds of comparative analogy that Garuda, the allegorical
and monstrous half‐man and half‐bird—the Vâhana or vehicle on which
Vishnu, as Kâla or “Time,” is shown to ride—is the origin of all such
allegories. He is the Indian Phœnix, the emblem of cyclic and periodical
time, the “Man‐lion” (Sinha), of whose representations the so‐called
Gnostic gems are so full.(1331)

Over the seven rays of the lion’s crown, and corresponding to
their points, stand often the seven vowels of the Greek alphabet,
ΑΕΗΙΟΥΩ, testifying to the Seven Heavens.(1332)

This is the Solar Lion and the emblem of the Solar Cycle, as Garuda(1333)
is that of the Great Cycle, the Mahâ Kalpa, coëternal with Vishnu, and
also, of course, the emblem of the Sun and Solar Cycle. This is shown by
the details of the allegory. At his birth, Garuda, on account of his
“dazzling splendour,” is mistaken for Agni, the God of Fire, and was
thence called Gaganeshvara, “Lord of the Sky.” Its representation as
Osiris, on the Abraxas (Gnostic) gems, and by many heads of allegorical
monsters, with the head and beak of an eagle or a hawk—both solar
birds—denotes Garuda’s solar and cyclic character. His son is Jatâyu, the
cycle of 60,000 years. As well remarked by C. W. King:

Whatever its primary meaning [of the gem with the solar lion and
vowels] it was probably imported in its present shape from India
(that true fountain head of Gnostic iconography).(1334)

The mysteries of the seven Gnostic Vowels, uttered by the Thunders of St.
John, can be unriddled only by the primeval and original Occultism of
Âryâvarta, brought into India by the primeval Brâhmans, who had been
_initiated in Central Asia_. And this is the Occultism we study and try to
explain, as much as is possible, in these pages. Our doctrine of seven
Races, and seven Rounds of life and evolution around our Terrestrial Chain
of Spheres, may be found even in _Revelation_.(1335) When the seven
“Thunders,” or “Sounds,” or “Vowels”—one meaning out of the seven for each
such vowel relates directly to our own Earth and its seven Root‐Races in
each Round—“had uttered their voices,” but had forbidden the Seer to write
them, and made him “seal up those things,” what did the Angel, “standing
upon the sea and upon the earth,” do?

He lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by him that liveth for
ever and ever, ... that there _should be time no longer_: but in
the days of the voice of the _seventh_ angel, when he shall begin
to sound, the mystery of God [of the Cycle] should be
finished.(1336)

This means, in Theosophic phraseology, that when the Seventh Round is
completed, then Time will cease. “There shall be time no longer”—very
naturally, since Pralaya shall set in and there will remain no one on
Earth to keep a division of time, during that periodical dissolution and
arrest of conscious life.

Dr. Kenealy and others believed that the calculations of the cyclic seven
and forty‐nine were brought by the Rabbins from Chaldæa. This is more than
likely. But the Babylonians, who had all those cycles and taught them only
at their great initiatory mysteries of astrological Magic, got their
wisdom and learning from India. It is not difficult, therefore, to
recognize in them our own Esoteric Doctrine. In their secret computations,
the Japanese have the same figures in their cycles. As to the Brâhmans,
their _Purânas_ and _Upanishads_ are good proof of it. The latter have
passed entirely into Gnostic literature; and a Brâhman needs only to read
_Pistis Sophia_(1337) to recognize his forefathers’ property, even to the
phraseology and similes used. Let us compare. In _Pistis Sophia_ the
disciples say to Jesus:

Rabbi, reveal unto us the mysteries of the Light [_i.e._, the
“Fire of Knowledge or Enlightenment”], ... forasmuch as we have
heard thee saying that there is another baptism of _smoke_, and
another baptism of the Spirit of Holy Light [_i.e._ the Spirit of
Fire].(1338)

As John says of Jesus:

I indeed baptize you with water; ... but he shall baptize you with
the Holy Ghost and with fire.

The real significance of this statement is very profound. It means that
John, a non‐initiated ascetic, can impart to his disciples no greater
wisdom than the Mysteries connected with the plane of Matter, of which
Water is the symbol. His Gnosis was that of exoteric and ritualistic
dogma, of dead‐letter orthodoxy;(1339) while the wisdom which Jesus, an
Initiate of the Higher Mysteries, would reveal to them, was of a higher
character, for it was the “Fire” Wisdom of the true Gnosis or _real_
Spiritual Enlightenment. One was Fire, the other the Smoke. For Moses, the
Fire on Mount Sinai and the Spiritual Wisdom; for the multitudes of the
“people” below, for the profane, Mount Sinai in (through) Smoke, _i.e._,
the exoteric husks of orthodox or sectarian ritualism.

Now, having the above in view, read the dialogue between the sages Nârada
and Devamata in the _Anugîtâ_,(1340) an episode from the _Mahâbhârata_,
the antiquity and importance of which one can learn in the “Sacred Books
of the East,” edited by Prof. Max Müller.(1341) Nârada is discoursing upon
the “breaths” or the “life‐winds,” as they are called in the clumsy
translations of such words as Prâna, Apâna, etc., whose full Esoteric
meaning and application to individual functions can hardly be rendered in
English. He says of this science that:

It is the teaching of the Veda, that the _fire_ verily is all the
deities, and knowledge (of it) arises among Brâhmanas, being
accompanied by intelligence.(1342)

By “fire,” says the Commentator, he means the Self. By “intelligence,” the
Occultist says, Nârada meant neither “discussion” nor “argumentation,” as
Arjuna Mishra believes, but “intelligence” truly, or the adaptation of the
_Fire of Wisdom_ to _exoteric ritualism_ for the profane. This is the
chief concern of the Brâhmans, who were the first to set the example to
other nations who thus anthropomorphized and carnalized the grandest
metaphysical truths. Nârada shows this plainly and is made to say:

The _smoke_ of that (fire) which is of excellent glory (appears)
in the shape of ... darkness [verily so!]; (its) ashes, ... [are]
passion; and ... goodness is that in connection with it, in which
the offering is thrown.(1343)

That is to say, that faculty in the disciple which apprehends the subtle
truth (the flame) which escapes heavenward, while the objective sacrifice
remains as a proof and _evidence of piety_ only to the profane. For what
else can Nârada mean by the following?

Those who understand the sacrifice understand the Samâna and the
Vyâna as the _principal_ (offering). The Prâna and Apâna are
portions of the offering, ... and between them is the _fire_. That
is the excellent seat of the Udâna as understood by Brâhmanas. As
to that which is distinct from these pairs, hear me speak about
that. Day and night are a pair, between them is the fire.... That
_which exists_ and _that which does not exist_ are a pair, between
them is the fire....(1344)

And after every such contrast Nârada adds:

That is the excellent seat of the Udâna as understood by
Brâhmanas.

Now many people do not know the full meaning of the statement that Samâna
and Vyâna, Prâna and Apâna—which are explained to be “life‐winds,” but
which we say are principles and their respective faculties and senses—are
offered up to Udâna, the _soi‐disant_ principal “life‐wind,” which is said
to act at all the joints. And so the reader who is ignorant that the word
“Fire” in these allegories means both the “Self” and the higher Divine
Knowledge, will understand nothing in this, and will entirely miss the
point of our argument, as the translator and even the editor, the great
Oxford Sanskritist, F. Max Müller, have missed the true meaning of
Nârada’s words. Exoterically, this enumeration of “life‐winds” has, of
course, the meaning, _approximately_, which is surmised in the foot‐notes,
namely:

The sense _appears_ to be this: The course of worldly life is due
to the operations of the life‐winds which are attached to the self
and lead to its manifestations as individual souls [?]. Of these,
the Samâna and Vyâna are controlled and held under check by the
Prâna and Apâna.... The latter two are held in check and
controlled by the Udâna, which thus controls all. And the control
of this, which is the control of all five, ... leads to the
supreme self.(1345)

The above is given as an explanation of the text, which records the words
of the Brâhmana, who narrates how he reached the ultimate Wisdom of
Yogism, and in this wise reached All‐knowledge. Saying that he had
“perceived by means of the self the seat abiding in the self,”(1346) where
dwells the Brahma free from all; and explaining that that indestructible
principle was entirely _beyond the perception of senses_—_i.e._, of the
five “life‐winds”—he adds that:

In the midst of all these (life‐winds) which move about in the
body and swallow up one another, blazes the Vaishvânara fire
_sevenfold_.(1347)

This “Fire,” according to Nîlakantha’s commentary, is identical with the
“I,” the Self, which is the goal of the ascetic; Vaishvânara being a word
often used for the Self. Then the Brâhmana goes on to enumerate that which
is meant by the word “sevenfold,” and says:

The nose [or smell], and the tongue [taste], and the eye, and the
skin, and the ear as the fifth, the mind, and the understanding,
these are the seven tongues of the blaze of Vaishvânara.(1348)...
Those are the seven (kinds of) fuel for me.(1349)... These are the
_seven great officiating priests_.(1350)

These seven priests are accepted by Arjuna Mishra in the sense of meaning
“the soul distinguished as so many [souls, or principles] with reference
to these several powers”; and, finally, the translator seems to accept the
explanation, and reluctantly admits that “they may mean” this; though he
himself takes the sense to mean:

The powers of hearing etc. [the physical senses, in short], which
are presided over by the several deities.

But whatever it may mean, whether in scientific or orthodox
interpretations, this passage on page 259 explains Nârada’s statements on
page 276, and shows them referring to exoteric and esoteric methods and
contrasting them. Thus the Samâna and the Vyâna, though subject to the
Prâna and the Apâna, and all the four to Udâna in the matter of acquiring
the Prânâyâma (of the Hatha Yogî, chiefly, or the lower form of Yoga), are
yet referred to as the principal offering, for, as rightly argued by K.
Trimbak Telang, their “operations are more practically important for
vitality”; _i.e._, they are the grossest, and are offered in the
sacrifice, in order that they may disappear, so to speak, in the quality
of darkness of that fire or its _smoke_—mere exoteric ritualistic form.
But Prâna and Apâna, though shown as subordinate (because less gross or
more purified), have the Fire between them; the Self and the Secret
Knowledge possessed by that Self. So for the good and evil, and for “that
which exists and that which does not exist”; all these “pairs”(1351) have
Fire between them, _i.e._, Esoteric Knowledge, the Wisdom of the Divine
Self. Let those who are satisfied with the _smoke_ of the Fire remain
wherein they are, that is to say within the Egyptian darkness of
theological fictions and dead‐letter interpretations.

The above is written only for the Western students of Occultism and
Theosophy. The writer presumes to explain these things neither to the
Hindûs, who have their own Gurus; nor to the Orientalists, who think they
know more than all the Gurus and Rishis, past and present, put together.
These rather lengthy quotations and examples are necessary, if only to
point out to the student the works he has to study so as to derive benefit
and learning from comparison. Let him read _Pistis Sophia_ in the light of
the _Bhagavad Gîtâ_, the _Anugîtâ_ and others; and then the statement made
by Jesus in the Gnostic Gospel will become clear, and the dead‐letter
“blinds” disappear at once. Read the following and compare it with the
explanation from the Hindû scriptures just given.

And no Name is more excellent than all these, a Name wherein be
contained all Names, and all Lights, and all the [forty‐nine]
Powers. Knowing that Name, if a man quits this body of
matter,(1352) no _smoke_ [_i.e._, no theological delusion],(1353)
no darkness, nor Power, nor Ruler of the Sphere [no _Personal_
Genius or Planetary Spirit called God] of Fate [Karma] ... shall
be able to hold back the Soul that knoweth that Name.... If he
shall utter that Name unto the fire, ... the darkness shall flee
away.... And if he shall utter that name unto ... all their
Powers, nay, even unto Barbelo,(1354) and the Invisible God, and
the three triple‐powered Gods, so soon as he shall have uttered
that name in those places, they shall all be thrown one upon the
other, so that they shall be ready to melt and perish, and shall
cry aloud, O Light of every light that is in the boundless lights,
remember us also and purify us!(1355)

It is easy to see what this Light and Name are: the Light of Initiation
and the name of the “Fire‐Self,” which is no name, no action, but a
Spiritual, Ever‐living Power, higher even than the real “Invisible God,”
as this Power is Itself.

But if the able and learned author of the _Gnostics and their Remains_ has
not sufficiently allowed for the spirit of allegory and mysticism in the
fragments translated and quoted by him, in the above named work, from
_Pistis Sophia_—other Orientalists have done far worse. Having neither his
intuitional perception of the Indian origin of the Gnostic Wisdom still
less of the meaning of their “gems,” most of them, beginning with Wilson
and ending with the dogmatic Weber, have made most extraordinary blunders
with regard to almost every symbol. Sir M. Monier Williams and others show
a very decided contempt for the “Esoteric Buddhists” as Theosophists are
now called; yet no student of Occult Philosophy has ever mistaken a cycle
for a living personage and _vice versâ_, as is very often the case with
our learned Orientalists. An instance or two may illustrate the statement
more graphically. Let us choose the best known.

In the _Râmâyana_, Garuda is called “the maternal uncle of Sagara’s 60,000
sons”; and Amshumat, Sagara’s grandson, “the nephew of the 60,000 uncles”
who were reduced to ashes by the look of Kapila—the Purushottama, or
Infinite Spirit, who caused the horse which Sagara was keeping for the
Ashvamedha sacrifice to disappear. Again, Garuda’s son(1356);—Garuda being
himself the Mahâ Kalpa or Great Cycle—Jatâyu, the king of the feathered
tribe (when on the point of being slain by Râvana who carries off Sîtâ)
says, speaking of himself: “It is 60,000 years O king, that I am born”;
after which, _turning his back_ on the Sun—he dies.

Jatâyu is, of course, the cycle of 60,000 years within the Great Cycle of
Garuda; hence he is represented as his son, or nephew, _ad libitum_, since
the whole meaning rests on his being placed in the line of Garuda’s
descendants. Then, again, there is Diti, the mother of the Maruts, whose
descendants and progeny belonged to the posterity of Hiranyâksha, “whose
number was 77 crores (or 770 millions) of men,” according to the _Padma
Purâna_. All such narratives are pronounced “meaningless fictions” and
absurdities. But—truth is the daughter of time, verily; and time _will_
show.

Meanwhile, what could be easier than an attempt, at least, to verify
Paurânic chronology? There are many Kapilas; but the Kapila who slew king
Sagara’s progeny—60,000 men strong—was undeniably Kapila, the founder of
the Sânkhya philosophy, since it is so stated in the _Purânas_; although
one of them flatly denies the imputation without explaining its Esoteric
meaning. It is the _Bhâgavata Purâna_(1357) which says that:

The report is not true that the sons of the king were scorched by
the wrath of the sage. For how can the quality of darkness, the
product of anger, exist in a Sage whose body was goodness and who
purified the world—the earth’s dust, as it were, attributed to
heavens! How should mental perturbation distract that sage,
identified with the Supreme Spirit, who has steered here (on
earth) that solid vessel of the Sânkhya (philosophy), with the
help of which he who desires to obtain liberation crosses the
dreaded ocean of existence, that path to death?(1358)

The _Purâna_ is in duty bound to speak as it does. It has a dogma to
promulgate and a policy to carry out—that of great secrecy with regard to
mystical _divine_ truths divulged for countless ages only at Initiation.
It is not in the _Purânas_, therefore, that we have to look for an
explanation of the mystery connected with various transcendental states of
being. That the story is an allegory is seen upon its very face: the
60,000 “sons,” brutal, vicious, and impious, are the personification of
the _human passions_ that a “mere glance of the Sage”—the Self who
represents the highest state of purity that can be reached on
Earth—reduces to ashes. But it has also other significations, cyclic and
chronological meanings, a method of marking the periods when certain Sages
flourished, found also in other _Purânas_.

Now it is as well ascertained as any tradition can be, that it was at
Hardwar, or Gangâdvâra, the “door or gate of the Ganges,” at the foot of
the Himâlayas, that Kapila sat in meditation for a number of years. Not
far from the Sewalik range, the pass of Hardwar is called to this day
“Kapila’s Pass,” and the place also is named “Kapilasthen” by the
ascetics. It is there that the Ganges, Gangâ, emerging from its
mountainous gorge, begins its course over the sultry plains of India. And
it is clearly ascertained by geological survey that the tradition which
claims that the ocean washed the base of the Himâlayas ages ago, is not
entirely without foundation, for distinct traces of this still remain.

The Sânkhya Philosophy may have been _brought down_ and taught by the
first, and written out by the _last_ Kapila.

Now Sâgara is the name of the ocean, and especially of the Bay of Bengal,
at the mouth of the Ganges, to this day in India.(1359) Have Geologists
ever calculated the number of millenniums it must have taken the sea to
recede the distance it is now from Hardwar, which is at present 1,024 feet
above its level? If they had, those Orientalists who show Kapila
flourishing from the first to the ninth century A.D., might change their
opinions, if only for one of two very good reasons. Firstly, the true
number of years which have elapsed since Kapila’s day is unmistakably in
the _Purânas_, though the translators may fail to see it; and secondly,
the Kapila of the Satya, and the Kapila of the Kali Yugas, may be one and
the same _individuality_, without being the same _personality_.

Kapila, besides being the name of a personage, of the once living Sage and
the author of the Sânkhya Philosophy, is also the generic name of the
Kumâras, the celestial Ascetics and Virgins; therefore the very fact of
the _Bhâgavata Purâna_ calling _that_ Kapila—whom it had showed just
before as a portion of Vishnu—the author of the Sânkhya Philosophy, ought
to have warned the reader of a “blind” containing an Esoteric meaning.
Whether he was the son of Vitatha, as the _Harivamsha_ shows him to be, or
of any one else, the author of the Sânkhya cannot be the same as the Sage
of the Satya Yuga—at the very beginning of the Manvantara, when Vishnu is
shown _in the form of Kapila_, “imparting to all creatures true Wisdom”;
for this relates to that primordial period when the “Sons of God” taught
to the newly created men those arts and sciences, which have since been
cultivated and preserved in the sanctuaries by the Initiates. There are
several well‐known Kapilas in the _Purânas_. First the primeval Sage, then
Kapila one of the three “secret” Kumâras, and Kapila son of Kashyapa and
Kadrû—the “many‐headed serpent”(1360)—besides Kapila the great Sage and
Philosopher of the Kali Yuga. The latter, being an Initiate, a “Serpent of
Wisdom,” a Nâga, was purposely blended with the Kapilas of the former
ages.

Section X. The Cross and the Pythagorean Decad.

The early Gnostics claimed that their Science, the Gnosis, rested on a
square, the angles of which represented respectively Sigê (Silence),
Bythos (Depth), Nous (Spiritual Soul or Mind), and Aletheia (Truth).

It is they who were the first to reveal to the world that which had
remained concealed for ages; namely, the Tau, in the shape of a
Procrustean bed, and Christos as incarnating in Chrestos, he who became
for certain purposes a willing candidate for a series of tortures, mental
and physical.

For them the whole of the Universe, metaphysical and material, was
contained within, and could be expressed and described by the digits
contained in the number 10, the Pythagorean Decad.

This Decad, representing the Universe and its evolution out of Silence and
the Unknown Depths of the Spiritual Soul, or Anima Mundi, presented two
sides or aspects to the student. It could be, and was at first, applied to
the Macrocosm, after which it descended to the Microcosm, or man. There
was, then, the purely intellectual and metaphysical, or the “Inner
Science,” and the as purely materialistic or “surface science,” both of
which could be expounded by and contained in the Decad. It could be
studied, in short, both by the deductive method of Plato, and the
inductive method of Aristotle. The former started from a divine
comprehension, when the plurality proceeded from unity, or the digits of
the Decad appeared, only to be finally reäbsorbed, lost in the infinite
Circle. The latter depended on sensuous perception alone, when the Decad
could be regarded either as the unity that multiplies, or matter which
differentiates; its study being limited to the plane surface, to the
cross, or the _seven_ which proceeds from the _ten_, or the perfect
number, on Earth as in Heaven.

This dual system was brought, together with the Decad, by Pythagoras from
India. That it was that of the Brachmans and Iranians, as they are called
by the ancient Greek Philosophers, is warranted to us by the whole range
of Sanskrit literature, such as the _Purânas_ and the _Laws of Manu_. In
these Laws or Ordinances of Manu, it is said that Brahmâ first creates the
“_ten_ Lords of Being,” the ten Prajâpati or Creative Forces; which ten
produce _seven_ other Manus, or, rather, as some MSS. have it, Munîn
(instead of Manûn) “devotees,” or holy beings, which are the seven Angels
of the Presence in the Western religion. This mysterious number seven,
born from the upper Triangle △, the latter itself born from the apex
thereof, or the Silent Depths of the Unknown Universal Soul (Sigê and
Bythos), is the sevenfold Saptaparna plant, born and manifested on the
surface of the soil of mystery, from the threefold root buried deep under
that impenetrable soil. This idea is fully elaborated in one of the
Sections of Volume I, Part II, Section III, “Primordial Substance and
Divine Thought,” which the reader should notice carefully, if he would
grasp the metaphysical idea involved in the above symbol. In man as in
nature, according to the Cis‐Himâlayan Esoteric Philosophy, which is that
of the Cosmogony of the _original_ Manu, it is the septenary division that
is intended by Nature herself. The seventh principle (Purusha) alone is
the Divine Self, strictly speaking; for, as said in Manu, “he [Brahmâ]
having pervaded the subtile parts of those six, of unmeasured
brightness,”(1361) created or called them forth to “Self”‐consciousness or
the consciousness of that One Self. Of these six, five elements (or
principles, or Tattvas, as Medhâtithi, the commentator thinks) “are called
the atomic destructible elements”;(1362) these are described in the above‐
named Section.(1363)

We have now to speak of the mystery language, that of the prehistoric
races. It is not a phonetic, but a purely pictorial and symbolical tongue.
It is known at present in its fulness to the very few, having become with
the masses for more than 5,000 years an absolutely dead language. Yet most
of the learned Gnostics, Greeks and Jews, knew it, and used it, though
very differently. A few instances may be given.

On the plane above, the number is no number but a _nought_—a _circle_. On
the plane below, it becomes _one_—which is an odd number. Each letter of
the ancient alphabets had its philosophical meaning and _raison d’être_.
The number _one_ (1) signified with the Alexandrian Initiates a _body
erect_, a living standing man, he being the only animal that has this
privilege. And, by adding to the “I” a head, it was transformed into a
“P,” a symbol of _paternity_, of the creative potency; while “R” signified
a “moving man,” one on his way. Hence Pater Zeus had nothing sexual or
phallic either in its sound or the form of its letters; nor had Πατὴρ Δεὺς
(according to Ragon).(1364) If we turn now to the Hebrew alphabet, we
shall find that while _one_ or Aleph (א) has a bull or an ox for its
symbol, _ten_, the perfect number, or _one_ of the _Kabalah_, is a Yod (י,
_y_, _i_, or _j_), and means, as the first letter of Jehovah, the
procreative organ, and the rest.

The _odd_ numbers are divine, the _even_ numbers are terrestrial,
devilish, and unlucky. The Pythagoreans hated the Binary. With them it was
the origin of differentiation, hence of contrasts, discord, or matter, the
beginning of evil. In the Valentinian Theogony, Bythos and Sigê (Depth,
Chaos, Matter born in Silence) are the primordial Binary. With the early
Pythagoreans, however, the Duad was that imperfect state into which the
first manifested being fell when it got detached from the Monad. It was
the point from which the two roads—the good and the evil—bifurcated. All
that which was double‐faced or false was called by them “binary.” One was
alone good and harmony, because no disharmony can proceed from One alone.
Hence the Latin word Solus in relation to the One and Only God, the
Unknown of Paul. Solus, however, very soon became Sol—the Sun.

The Ternary is the first of the odd numbers, as the triangle is the first
of the geometrical figures.(1365) This number is truly the number of
mystery _par excellence_. To study it on the exoteric lines one has to
read Ragon’s _Cours Philosophique et Interprétatif des Initiations_, on
the Esoteric—the Hindû symbolism of numerals; for the combinations which
were applied to it are numberless. It is on the Occult properties of the
three equal sides of the triangle that Ragon based his studies and founded
the famous Masonic Society of the Trinosophists—those who study _three_
sciences; an improvement upon the ordinary three Masonic degrees, given to
those who study nothing except eating and drinking at the meetings of
their Lodges. As the founder writes:

The first line of the triangle offered to the apprentice for study
is the _mineral kingdom_, symbolized by Tubalc [Symbol: Three dots
in a triangle] [Tubal‐Cain].

The second side on which the companion has to meditate, is the
_vegetable kingdom_, symbolized by Schibb [Symbol: Three dots in a
triangle] [Schibboleth]. In this kingdom begins the _generation of
the bodies_. This is why the letter G is presented radiant before
the eyes of the adept [?!].

The third side is left to the master mason, who has to complete
his education by the study of the _animal kingdom_. It is
symbolized by Maoben [Symbol: Three dots in a triangle] (son of
putrefaction).(1366)

The first solid figure is the Quaternary, the symbol of immortality. It is
the Pyramid, for the Pyramid stands on a triangular base, and terminates
with a point at the top, thus yielding the Triad and the Quaternary or the
3 and 4.

The Pythagoreans taught the connection and relation between the Gods and
the numbers, in a science called Arithmomancy. The Soul is a number, they
said, which moves of itself and contains the number 4; and spiritual and
physical man is number 3, as the Ternary represented for them not only the
surface but also the principle of the formation of the physical body. Thus
animals were Ternaries only, man alone being a Septenary, _when virtuous_;
a Quinary when bad, for:

Number Five was composed of a Binary and a Ternary, and of these the
Binary threw everything in the perfect form into disorder and confusion.
The _perfect man_, they said, was a Quaternary and a Ternary, or _four_
material and _three_ immaterial elements; and these three Spirits or
Elements we likewise find in Five when it represents the microcosm. The
latter is a compound of a Binary directly relating to gross Matter and of
three Spirits. Since, as Ragon says:

This ingenious figure is the union of two Greek breathings placed
over vowels which have or have not to be aspirated. The first sign
(῾) is called the “strong” or superior “spiritus,” the Spirit of
God aspired (_spiratus_) and breathed by man. The second sign (᾿)
the lower, is the soft “spiritus” representing the secondary
spirit; ... the whole embraces the whole man. It is the _universal
quintessence_, the vital fluid or life.(1367)

The more mystic meaning of the number Five is given in an excellent
article by Mr. T. Subba Row, in _Five Years of Theosophy_, in an article
entitled “The Twelve Signs of the Zodiac,” in which he gives some rules
that may help the enquirer to ferret out “the deep significance of ancient
Sanskrit nomenclature in the old Âryan myths and allegories.” Meanwhile,
let us see what has been hitherto stated about the constellation
Capricornus in Theosophical publications, and what is known of it
generally. Every one knows that ♑ is the tenth sign of the Zodiac, into
which the Sun enters at the winter solstice, about December 21st. But very
few are those who know—even in India, unless they are initiated—the real
mystic connection which seems to exist, as we are told, between the names
Makara and Kumâra. The first means some amphibious animal, flippantly
called the “crocodile,” as some Orientalists think, and the second is the
title of the great patrons of Yogins, according to the Shaiva _Purânas_,
the sons of, and even one with, Rudra (Shiva), who is a Kumâra himself. It
is through their connection with Man that the Kumâras are likewise
connected with the Zodiac. Let us try to find out what the word Makara
means.

Says the author of “The Twelve Signs of the Zodiac”:

Makara ... contains within itself the clue to its correct
interpretation. The letter _ma_ is equivalent to number 5, and
_kara_ means hand. Now in Sanskrit Tribhujam means a triangle,
_bhujam_ or _karam_ (both synonymous) being understood to mean a
side. So, Makaram or Panchakaram means a Pentagon.(1368)

Now the five‐pointed star or pentagon represents the five limbs of
man.(1369) Under the old system, we are told, Makara was the _eighth_
instead of the tenth sign.(1370)

The sign in question is intended to represent the faces of the
universe, and indicates that the figure of the universe is bounded
by Pentagons.(1371)

The Sanskrit writers “speak also of Ashtadisha or eight faces bounding
Space,” referring thus to the Loka‐pâlas, the eight points of the compass,
the four cardinal and the four intermediate points.

From an objective point of view the “microcosm” is represented by
the human body. Makaram may be taken to represent simultaneously
both the microcosm and the macrocosm, as external objects of
perception.(1372)

But the true Esoteric sense of the word Makara is not, in truth,
“crocodile” at all, even when it is compared with the animal depicted on
the Hindû Zodiac. For it has the head and the fore‐legs of an antelope and
the body and tail of a fish. Hence the tenth sign of the Zodiac has been
taken variously to mean a shark, a dolphin, etc.; as it is the Vâhana of
Varuna, the Ocean God, and is often called, for this reason, Jala‐rûpa or
“water‐form.” The dolphin was the vehicle of Poseidon‐Neptune with the
Greeks, and one with him, Esoterically; and this “dolphin” is the “sea‐
dragon” as much as the crocodile of the Sacred Nile is the Vehicle of
Horus, and Horus himself. Says the mummy‐form God with the crocodile’s
head:

I am the fish [and seat] of the great Horus of Kem‐oor.(1373)

With the Peratæ Gnostics it is Chozzar (Neptune) who converts the
dodecagonal pyramid into a sphere, “and paints its gate with many
colours.”(1374) He has _five androgyne_ ministers—he is Makara, the
Leviathan.

As the rising Sun was considered the Soul of the Gods sent to manifest
itself to men every day, and as the crocodile rose out of the water at the
first sunbeam, that animal came finally to personify a solar‐fire devotee
in India, as it personified that Fire, or the highest Soul with the
Egyptians.

In the _Purânas_, the number of the Kumâras changes according to the
exigencies of the allegory. For Occult purposes their number is given in
one place as seven, then as four, then as five. In the _Kûrma Purâna_ it
is said of them:

These _five_ [Kumâras], O Brâhman, were Yogins who acquired entire
exemption from passion.

Their very name shows their connection with the said constellation Makara,
and with some other Paurânic characters connected with the zodiacal signs.
This is done in order to veil what was one of the most suggestive glyphs
of the primitive Temples. The Kumâras are mixed up, astronomically,
physiologically, and mystically in general, with a number of Paurânic
personages and events. Hardly hinted at in the _Vishnu_, they figure in
various dramas and events throughout all the other _Purânas_ and sacred
literature; so that the Orientalists, having to pick up the threads of
connection hither and thither, have ended by proclaiming the Kumâras “due
chiefly to the fancy of the Purânic writers.” But—

_Ma_—we are told by the author of the “Twelve Signs of the Zodiac”—is
“five”; _kara_, a “hand” with its five fingers, as also a five‐sided sign
or a Pentagon. The Kumâra (in this case an anagram for Occult purposes),
as Yogîs, are _five_ in Esotericism, because the last two names have ever
been kept secret; they are the fifth order of Brahma‐devas, and the five‐
fold Chohans, having the Soul of the five Elements in them, Water and
Ether predominating, and therefore their symbols were both _aquatic_ and
_fiery_.

Wisdom lies concealed under the couch of him who rests on the
Golden Lotus (Padma) floating on the Water.

In India this is Vishnu, one of whose Avatâras was Buddha, as claimed in
days of old. The Prachetasas, the worshippers of Nârâyana—who, like
Poseidon, moved or dwelt _over_ not under the Waters—plunged into the
depths of the Ocean for their devotions and remained therein 10,000 years;
and the Prachetasas are _ten_ exoterically, but _five_, Esoterically.
Prachetâs is, in Sanskrit, the name of Varuna, the Water God, Nereus, an
aspect of Neptune, the Prachetasas being thus identical with the “five
ministers” of the male‐female Chozzar (Χωζζάρ or Χορζάρ), or Poseidon, of
the Peratæ Gnostics. These are respectively called Ou, Aoai, Ouô, Ouôab
and ... (Οὔ, Ἀοαὶ, Οὐώ, Οὐωάβ ...),(1375) the _fifth_, a _triple_ name
(making seven in all) being lost(1376)—_i.e._, kept secret. Thus much for
the “aquatic” symbol; the “fiery” connecting them with the fiery
symbol—spiritually. For purposes of identity, let us remember that as the
mother of the Prachetasas was Savarnâ, the daughter of the Ocean, so was
Amphitrite the mother of Neptune’s mystic “ministers.”

Now the reader is reminded that these “five ministers” are symbolized both
in the Dolphin, who had overcome the chaste Amphitrite’s unwillingness to
wed Poseidon, and in Triton their son. The latter, whose body above the
waist is that of a man and below a dolphin, a fish, is, again, most
mysteriously connected with Oannes, the Babylonian Dag, and further also
with the Matsya (Fish) Avatâra of Vishnu, both teaching mortals Wisdom.
The Dolphin, as every Mythologist knows, was placed, for his service, by
Poseidon, among the constellations, and became with the Greeks,
Capricornus, the Goat, whose hind part is that of a dolphin, and is thus
identical with Makara, whose head is also that of an antelope and the body
and tail those of a fish. This is why the sign of the Makara was borne on
the banner of Kâmadeva, the Hindû God of Love, identified, in the _Atharva
Veda_, with Agni, the Fire‐god, the son of Lakshmî, as correctly given by
the _Harivamsha_. For Lakshmî and Venus are one, and Amphitrite is the
early form of Venus. Now Kâma, the Makara‐ketu, is Aja, the “unborn,” and
Âtmâ‐bhû, the “self‐existent,” and Aja is the Logos in the _Rig Veda_, as
he is shown therein to be the first manifestation of the One; for “Desire
first arose in It, which was the primal germ of mind,” that “which
connects entity with non‐entity”—or Manas, the _fifth_, with Âtmâ, the
_seventh_, Esoterically—say the Sages. This is the _first_ stage. The
second, on the following plane of manifestation, shows Brahmâ—whom we
select as a representative for all the other First Gods of the
nations—causing to issue from his body his Mind‐born Sons, “Sanandana and
others,” who, in the _fifth_ “creation,” and again in the ninth (for
purposes of a “blind”) become the Kumâra. Let us close by reminding the
reader that goats were sacrificed to Amphitrite and the Nereids on the
sea‐shore—as goats are sacrificed to this day to Durgâ Kâlî, who is only
the _black_ side of Lakshmî (Venus), the _white_ side of Shakti—and by
suggesting what connection these animals may have with Capricornus, in
which appear twenty‐eight stars in the form of a goat, which goat was
transformed by the Greeks into Amalthæa, Jupiter’s foster‐mother. Pan, the
God of Nature, had goat’s feet, and changed himself into a goat at the
approach of Typhon. But this is a mystery which the writer dares not dwell
upon at length, not being sure of being understood. Thus the mystical side
of the interpretation must be left to the intuition of the student. Let us
note one more thing in relation to the mysterious number Five. It
symbolizes at one and the same time the Spirit of Life Eternal and the
spirit of life and love terrestrial—in the human compound; and, it
includes divine and infernal magic, and the universal and the individual
quintessence of being. Thus, the five mystic words or vowels uttered by
Brahmâ at “creation,” which forthwith became the Panchadasha (certain
Vedic Hymns, attributed to that God), are in their creative and magical
potentiality, the _white_ side of the _black_ Tântric _five_ Ma‐kâras, or
the five _m’s_. Makara, the constellation, is a seemingly meaningless and
absurd name; yet, even besides its anagrammatical significance in
conjunction with the term Kumâra, the numerical value of its first
syllable and its Esoteric resolution into _five_ has a very great and
Occult meaning in the mysteries of Nature.

Suffice it to say that, as the sign of Makara is connected with the birth
of the spiritual Microcosm, and the death or dissolution of the physical
Universe—its passage into the realm of the Spiritual,(1377) so the Dhyân
Chohans, called in India Kumâras, are connected with both. Moreover, in
the exoteric religions, they have become the synonyms of the Angels of
Darkness. Mâra is the God of Darkness, the Fallen One, and Death;(1378)
and yet it is one of the names of Kâma, the First God in the Vedas, the
Logos, from whom have sprung the Kumâras, and this connects them still
more with our “fabulous” Indian Makara, and the crocodile‐headed God in
Egypt.(1379) The Crocodiles in the Celestial Nile are _five_, and the God
Toom, the Primordial Deity, creating the heavenly bodies and living
beings, calls forth these Crocodiles in his _fifth_ “creation.” When
Osiris, the “Defunct Sun,” is buried and enters into Amenti, the sacred
Crocodiles plunge into the abyss of primordial Waters—the “Great Green
One.” When the Sun of Life rises, they reëmerge out of the sacred river.
All this is highly symbolical, and shows how primeval Esoteric truths
found their expression in identical symbols. But, as Mr. T. Subba Row
truly declares:

The veil that was dexterously thrown over certain portions of the
mystery connected with these [Zodiacal] signs by the ancient
philosophers, _will never be lifted up for the amusement or
edification of the uninitiated public_.(1380)

Nor was number Five less sacred with the Greeks. The “Five Words” of
Brahmâ have become with the Gnostics the “Five Words” written upon the
Âkâshic (Shining) Garment of Jesus at his glorification—the words “Zama
Zama Ôzza Rachama Ôzai” (ΖΑΜΑ ΖΑΜΑ ΩΖΖΑ ΡΑΧΑΜΑ ΩΖΑΙ), translated by the
Orientalists “the robe, the glorious robe of my strength.” These words
were, in their turn, the anagrammatic “blind” of the five mystic Powers
represented on the robe of the “resurrected” Initiate after his last trial
of three days’ trance; the five becoming _seven_ only after his “death,”
when the Adept became the full Christos, the full Krishna‐Vishnu, _i.e._,
merged in Nirvâna. The E Delphicum, a sacred symbol, was the numeral
_five_, again; and how sacred it was is shown by the fact that the
Corinthians, according to Plutarch, replaced the wooden numeral in the
Delphic Temple by a bronze one, and this one was transmuted by Livia
Augusta into a facsimile in gold.(1381)

It is easy to recognize in the two “Spiritus”—the Greek signs (!) spoken
of by Ragon—Âtmâ and Buddhi, or Divine Spirit and its Vehicle, the
Spiritual Soul.

The Six or the Senary is dealt with later in this Section, while the
Septenary will be fully treated in the course of this Volume in the
Section on “The Mysteries of the Hebdomad.”

The Ogdoad or Eight symbolizes the eternal and spiral motion of cycles,
the 8, ∞, and is symbolized in its turn by the Caduceus. It shows the
regular breathing of the Kosmos presided over by the Eight Great Gods—the
Seven from the primeval Mother, the One and the Triad.

Then comes the number Nine, or the triple Ternary. It is the number which
reproduces itself incessantly under all shapes and figures in every
multiplication. It is the sign of every circumference, since its value in
degrees is equal to 9, _i.e._, to 3 + 6 + 0. It is a _bad_ number under
certain conditions, and very unlucky. If number 6 was the symbol of our
Globe ready to be animated by a _divine_ Spirit, 9 symbolized our Earth
informed by a _bad_ or evil Spirit.

Ten, or the Decad, brings all these digits back to unity, and ends the
Pythagorean table. Hence this figure, [Symbol: Circle with line through
the middle]—_unity_ within _zero_—was the symbol of Deity, of the
Universe, and of Man. Such is the secret meaning of “the strong grip of
the lion’s paw, of the tribe of Judah” (the “master mason’s grip”) between
two hands, the joint number of whose fingers is _ten_.

If we now give our attention to the Egyptian cross, or the Tau, we may
discover this letter, which was so exalted by Egyptians, Greeks, and Jews,
to be mysteriously connected with the Decad. The Tau is the Alpha and the
Omega of Secret Divine Wisdom, which is symbolized by the initial and the
final letters of Thot (Hermes). Thot was the inventor of the Egyptian
alphabet, and the letter Tau closed the alphabets of the Jews and the
Samaritans, who called this character the “end” or “perfection,”
“culmination” and “security.” Hence, Ragon tells us, the words Terminus,
“end,” and Tectum, “roof,” are symbols of shelter and security—which is
rather a prosaic definition. But such is the usual destiny of ideas and
things in this world of spiritual decadence, though at the same time of
physical progress. Pan was at one time Absolute Nature, the One and Great
All; but when history catches a first glimpse of him, Pan has already
tumbled down into a _godling_ of the fields, a rural God; history will not
recognize him, while theology makes of him the Devil! Yet his seven‐piped
flute, the emblem of the seven forces of Nature, of the seven planets, the
seven musical notes, of all the septenary harmony in short, shows well his
primordial character. So with the cross. Far earlier than the Jews had
devised their golden candlestick of the Temple with _three_ sockets on one
side and _four_ on the other, and made of number _seven_ a feminine number
of generation(1382)—thus introducing the phallic element into religion—the
more spiritually‐minded nations had made of the cross (as 3 + 4 = 7) their
most sacred divine symbol. In fact, circle, cross, and seven—the latter
being made a base of _circular_ measurement—are the first primordial
symbols. Pythagoras, who brought his wisdom from India, left to posterity
a glimpse into this truth. His School regarded number 7 as a compound of
numbers 3 and 4, which they explained in a dual manner. On the plane of
the noumenal world, the Triangle was, as the first conception of the
manifested Deity, its image, “Father‐Mother‐Son”; and the Quaternary, the
perfect number, was the noumenal, ideal root of all numbers and things on
the physical plane. Some students, in view of the sacredness of the
Tetraktys and the Tetragrammaton, mistake the mystic meaning of the
Quaternary. The latter was with the Ancients only a _secondary_
“perfection,” so to speak, because it related only to the manifested
planes. Whereas it is the Triangle, the Greek Delta (Δ), which was the
“vehicle of the unknown Deity.” A good proof of it lies in the name of the
Deity beginning with Delta. Zeus was written Δεύς (Deus) by the Bœotians,
thence the Deus of the Latins. This, in relation to the metaphysical
conception, with regard to the meaning of the septenary _in the phenomenal
world_; but for purposes of profane or exoteric interpretation, the
symbolism changed. _Three_ became the ideograph of the three _material_
Elements—Air, Water, Earth; and _four_ became the principle of all that
which is neither corporeal nor perceptible. But this has never been
accepted by the real Pythagoreans. Viewed as a compound of 6 and 1, the
Senary and the Unity, number 7 was the invisible centre, the Spirit of
everything, as there exists no hexagonal body without a _seventh_ property
being found as the central point in it, as, for instance, crystals and
snow‐flakes in so‐called “inanimate” nature. Moreover, number _seven_,
they said, has all the perfection of the _unit_—the number of numbers. For
as absolute _unity_ is uncreated, and impartite, hence number‐less, and no
number can produce it, so is the _seven_; no digit contained within the
Decad can beget or produce it. And it is _four_ which affords an
arithmetical division between _unity_ and _seven_, for it surpasses the
former by the same number (_three_), as it is itself surpassed by the
_seven_, since _four_ is by as many numbers above _one_, as _seven_ is
above _four_.(1383)

“With the Egyptians number 7 was the symbol of _life_ eternal,” says
Ragon, and adds that this is why the Greek letter Z, which is but a double
7, is the initial letter of Zaô, “I live,” and of Zeus, the “father of all
living.”

Moreover, figure 6 was the symbol of the Earth during the autumn and
winter “sleeping” months, and figure 7 during spring and summer, as the
Spirit of Life animated her at that time—the seventh or central informing
Force. We find the same in the Egyptian mythos and symbol of Osiris and
Isis, personifying Fire and Water metaphysically, and the Sun and the Nile
physically. The number of the solar year, 365 in days, is the numerical
value of the word Neilos (Nile). This, together with the Bull, with the
crescent and the ansated cross between its horns, and the Earth under its
astronomical symbol (♁), are the most phallic symbols of later antiquity.

The Nile was the river of time with the number of a year, or year
and a day (364 + 1 = 365). It represented the parturient water of
Isis, or Mother Earth, the moon, the woman, and the cow, also the
_workshop_ of Osiris, representing the T’sod Olaum of the Hebrews.
The ancient name of this river was Eridanus, or the Hebrew Iardan,
with the Coptic or old Greek suffix. This was the door of the
Hebrew word Jared, or _source_, or _descent_ ... of the river
Jordan, which had the same mythical use with the Hebrews that the
Nile had with the Egyptians,(1384) it was the source of descent,
and held the waters of life.(1385)

It was, to put it plainly, the symbol of the personified Earth, or Isis
regarded as the womb of that Earth. This is shown clearly enough; and
Jordan—the river so sacred now to Christians—held no more sublime or
poetical meaning in it than the parturient waters of the Moon—Isis, or
Jehovah in his female aspect. Now, as shown by the same scholar, Osiris
was the Sun, and the river Nile, and the year of 365 days; while Isis was
the Moon, the bed of that river, or Mother Earth “for the parturient
energies of which water was a necessity,” as also the lunar year of 354
days, “the time‐maker of the periods of gestation.” All this then is
sexual and phallic, our modern scholars seeming to find in these symbols
nothing beyond a physiological or phallic meaning. Nevertheless, the three
figures 365, or the number of days in a solar year, have but to be read
with the Pythagorean key to find in them a highly philosophical and moral
meaning. One instance will be sufficient. It can read:

The Earth (3)—animated by (6)—the Spirit of Life (5).

Simply because 3 is equivalent to the Greek Gamma (Γ) which is the symbol
of Gaia, the Earth, while the figure 6 is the symbol of the animating or
informing principle, and the 5 is the universal quintessence which spreads
in every direction and forms all matter.(1386)

The few instances and examples brought forward reveal only one small
portion of the methods used to read the symbolical ideographs and numerals
of antiquity. The system being of an extreme and complex difficulty, very
few, even among the Initiates, could master _all_ the seven keys. Is it to
be wondered, then, that the metaphysical gradually dwindled down into the
physical Nature; that the Sun, once upon a time the symbol of Deity,
became, as æons glided by, that of its creative ardour only; and that
thence it fell into a glyph of phallic significance? But surely, it is not
those whose method, like Plato’s, was to proceed from universals down to
particulars, who could ever have begun by symbolizing their religions by
sexual emblems! It is quite true, though uttered by that incarnated
paradox Éliphas Lévi, that “man is God on Earth, and God is man in
Heaven.” But this could not, and never did apply to the One Deity, only to
the Hosts of Its incarnated beams, called by us Dhyân Chohans, by the
Ancients Gods, and now transformed by the Church into Devils on the
_left_, and into the Saviour on the _right_ side!

But all such dogmas grew out of the one root, the root of Wisdom, which
grows and thrives on the Indian soil. There is not an Archangel that could
not be traced back to its prototype in the sacred land of Âryâvarta. These
prototypes are all connected with the Kumâras who appear on the scene of
action by “refusing”—as Sanatkumâra and Sananda—to “create progeny.” Yet
they are called the “creators” of (thinking) man. More than once they are
brought into connection with Nârada—another bundle of _apparent_
incongruities, yet a wealth of philosophical tenets. Nârada is the leader
of the Gandharvas, the celestial singers and musicians; Esoterically, the
reason for this is explained by the fact that the Gandharvas are “the
instructors of men in the Secret Sciences.” It is they, who “loving the
women of the Earth” disclosed to them the mysteries of creation; or, as in
the _Veda_, the “heavenly” Gandharva is a deity who knew and revealed the
secrets of heaven and divine truths, in general. If we remember what is
said of this class of Angels in _Enoch_ and in the _Bible_, then the
allegory is plain; their leader, Nârada, while refusing to procreate,
leads men to become Gods. Moreover, all of these, as stated in the
_Vedas_, are Chhandajas, “will‐born,” or incarnated, in different
Manvantaras, _of their own will_. They are shown in exoteric literature as
existing age after age; some being “cursed to be reborn,” others
incarnating as a duty. Finally, as the Sanakadikas, the seven Kumâras who
went to visit Vishnu on the “White Island” (Shveta‐dvîpa), the Island
inhabited by the Mahâ Yogins—they are connected with Shâka‐dvîpa and the
Lemurians and Atlanteans of the Third and Fourth Races.

In the Esoteric Philosophy, the Rudras (Kumâras, Âdityas, Gandharvas,
Asuras, etc.) are the highest Dhyân Chohans or Devas as regards
intellectuality. They are those who, owing to their having acquired by
self‐development the _five‐fold_ nature—hence the sacredness of number
_five_—became independent of the pure Arûpa Devas. This is a mystery very
difficult to realize and understand correctly. For we see that those who
were “obedient to law” are, equally with the “rebels,” _doomed to be
reborn in every age_. Nârada, the Rishi, is cursed by Brahmâ to incessant
peripateticism on Earth, _i.e._, to be constantly reborn. He is a rebel
against Brahmâ, and yet has no worse fate than the Jayas—the twelve great
Creative Gods produced by Brahmâ as his assistants in the functions of
creation. For the latter, lost in meditation, only _forgot to create_; and
for this, they were equally cursed by Brahmâ to be born in every
Manvantara. And still they are termed—together with the rebels—Chhandajas,
or those born of their own will in human form.

All this is very puzzling to one who is unable to read and understand the
_Purânas_ except in their dead‐letter sense.(1387) Hence we find the
Orientalists refusing to be puzzled, and cutting the Gordian knot of
perplexity by declaring the whole scheme “figments ... of Brâhmanical
fancy and love of exaggeration.” But to the student of Occultism, the
whole is pregnant with deep philosophical meaning. We willingly leave the
rind to the Western Sanskritist, but claim the essence of the fruit for
ourselves. We do more: we concede that in one sense much in these so‐
called “fables” refers to astronomical allegories about constellations,
asterisms, stars, and planets. Yet, while the Gandharva of the _Rig Veda_
may there be made to personify the fire of the Sun, the Gandharva Devas
are entities both of a physical and psychic character, while the Apsarasas
(with other Rudras) are both _qualities_ and _quantities_. In short, if
ever unravelled, the Theogony of the Vedic Gods will reveal fathomless
mysteries of Creation and Being. Truly says Parâshara:

These classes of thirty‐three divinities ... exist age after age,
and their appearance and disappearance is in the same manner as
the sun sets and rises again.(1388)

There was a time, when the Eastern symbol of the cross and circle, the
Svastika, was universally adopted. With the Esoteric, and for the matter
of that exoteric, Buddhist, the Chinaman and the Mongolian, it means the
“ten thousand truths.” These truths, they say, belong to the mysteries of
the Unseen Universe and Primordial Cosmogony and Theogony.

_Since Fohat crossed the Circle like two lines of flame
[horizontally and vertically], the Hosts of the Blessed Ones have
never failed to send their representatives upon the Planets they
are made to watch over from the beginning._

This is why the Svastika is always placed—as the ansated cross was in
Egypt—on the breast of the defunct Mystics. It is found on the heart of
the images and statues of Buddha, in Tibet and Mongolia. It is the _seal_
placed also on the hearts of the living Initiates, burnt into the flesh
for ever with some. This, because they have to keep these truths inviolate
and intact, in eternal silence and secrecy to the day they are perceived
and read by their chosen successors—new Initiates—“worthy of being
entrusted with the ten thousand perfections.” So degraded, however, has it
now become, that it is often placed on the headgear of the “Gods,” the
hideous idols of the sacrilegious Bhons—the Dugpas or Sorcerers, of the
Tibetan borderlands—until found out by a Galukpa, and torn off together
with the head of the “God,” though it would be better were it that of the
worshipper which was severed from his sinful body. Still, it can never
lose its mysterious properties. Throw a retrospective glance, and see it
used alike by the Initiates and Seers, as by the Priests of Troy, for many
specimens of it have been found by Schliemann on the site of that old
city. One finds it with the old Peruvians, the Assyrians, Chaldæans, as
well as on the walls of the old‐world Cyclopean buildings; in the
catacombs of the _New_ World, and in those of the _Old_ (?), at Rome,
where—because the first Christians are supposed to have concealed
themselves and their religion—it is called Crux Dissimulata.

According to De Rossi the Swastika from an early period was a
favourite form of the cross _employed with an occult
signification_ which shows the secret was not that of the
Christian cross. One Swastika cross in the catacombs is the sign
of an inscription which reads “ΖΩΤΙΚΩ ΖΟΤΙΚΗ [? ΖΩΤΙΚΗ], _Vitalis
Vitalia_,” or life of life.(1389)

But the best evidence to the antiquity of the cross is that which is
brought forward by the author of _The Natural Genesis_ himself:

The value of the cross as a Christian symbol is supposed to date
from the time when Jesus Christ was crucified. And yet in the
“Christian” _iconography of the catacombs no figure of a man
appears upon the Cross during the first six or seven centuries_.
There are all forms of the cross except that—the alleged starting‐
point of the new religion. That was not the initial but the final
form of the Crucifix.(1390) During some six centuries after the
Christian era the foundation of the Christian religion in a
crucified Redeemer is entirely absent from Christian art! The
earliest known form of the human figure on the cross is the
crucifix presented by Pope Gregory the Great to Queen Theodolinde
of Lombardy, now in the Church of St. John at Monza, whilst no
image of the Crucified is found in the catacombs at Rome earlier
than that of San Giulio, belonging to the seventh or eighth
century.... There is no Christ and no Crucified; the Cross is the
Christ even as the Stauros (Cross) was a type and a name of Horus
the Gnostic Christ. The Cross, not the Crucified, is the primary
symbol of the Christian Church. The Cross, not the Crucified, is
the essential object of representation in its art, and of
adoration in its religion. The germ of the whole growth and
development can be traced to the cross. And that cross is pre‐
Christian, is pagan and heathen, in half a dozen different shapes.
The Cult began with the cross, and Julian was right in saying he
waged a “Warfare with the X”; which he obviously considered had
been adopted by the A‐Gnostics and Mytholators to convey an
impossible significance.(1391) During centuries the cross stood
for the Christ, and was addressed as if it were a living being. It
was divinized at first and humanized at last.(1392)

Few world‐symbols are more pregnant with real Occult meaning than the
Svastika. It is symbolized by the figure 6. Like that figure, it points,
in its concrete imagery, as does the ideograph of the number, to the
Zenith and the Nadir, to North, South, West, and East; one finds the unit
everywhere, and that unit reflected in all and every unit. It is the
emblem of the activity of Fohat, of the continual revolution of the
“Wheels,” and of the Four Elements, the “Sacred Four,” in their mystical,
and not alone in their cosmical meaning; further, its four arms, bent at
right angles, are intimately related, as shown elsewhere, to the
Pythagorean and Hermetic scales. One initiated into the mysteries of the
meaning of the Svastika, say the Commentaries, “can trace on it, with
mathematical precision, the evolution of Kosmos and the whole period of
Sandhyâ.” Also “the relation of the Seen to the Unseen,” and “the first
procreation of man and species.”

To the Eastern Occultist the Tree of Knowledge, in the Paradise of man’s
own heart, becomes the Tree of Life Eternal, and has nought to do with
man’s animal senses. It is an absolute mystery that reveals itself only
through the efforts of the imprisoned Manas, the Ego, to liberate itself
from the thraldom of sensuous perception, and see in the light of the one
eternal present Reality. To the Western Kabalist, and far more now to the
superficial Symbologist, nursed in the lethal atmosphere of Materialistic
Science, the chief explanation of the mysteries of the cross is—its sexual
element. Even the otherwise spiritualistic modern commentator discerns
this feature in the cross and Svastika before all others.

The cross was used in Egypt as a protecting talisman and a symbol
of saving power. Typhon, or Satan, is actually found chained to
and bound by the cross. In the _Ritual_, the Osirian cries, “_The
Apophis is overthrown, their cords bind the South, North, East,
and West, their cords are on him. Har‐ru‐bah has knotted
him._”(1393) These were the Cords of the four quarters, or the
cross. Thor is said to smite the head of the serpent with his
hammer, ... a form of Swastika or four‐footed cross.... In the
primitive sepulchres of Egypt the model of the Chamber had the
form of a cross.(1394) The pagoda of Mathura ... the birth‐place
of Krishna, was built in the form of a cross.(1395)

This is perfect, and no one can discern in it that “sexual worship,” with
which the Orientalists love to break the head of Paganism. But how about
the Jews, and the exoteric religions of some Hindû sects, especially the
rites of the Vallabâchâryas? For, as said, Shiva‐worship, with its Lingam
and Yoni, stands too high philosophically, its modern degeneration
notwithstanding, to be called a simple phallic worship. But the Tree‐ or
Cross‐worship(1396) of the Jews, as denounced by their own Prophets, can
hardly escape the charge. The “sons of the sorcerers, the seed of the
adulterer,”(1397) as Isaiah calls them, never lost an opportunity of
“enflaming themselves with idols under every green tree”(1398)—which
denotes no metaphysical recreation. It is from these _monotheistic_ Jews
that the Christian nations have derived their religion, their “God of
Gods, the One living God,” while despising and deriding the worship of the
Deity of the ancient Philosophers. Let such believe in and worship the
physical form of the cross, by all means.

But to the follower of the true Eastern Archaic Wisdom, to him who
worships in spirit nought outside the Absolute Unity, that ever‐pulsating
great Heart that beats throughout, as in, every atom of Nature, each such
atom contains the germ from which he may raise the Tree of Knowledge,
whose fruits give Life Eternal and not physical life alone. For him, the
cross and circle, the Tree or the Tau—even after every symbol relating
thereto has been referred to and read, one after another—still remain a
profound mystery in their Past, and it is to that Past alone that he
directs his eager gaze. He cares little whether it be the Seed from which
grows the genealogical Tree of Being, called the Universe. Nor is it the
Three in One, the triple aspect of the Seed—its form, colour, and
substance—that interest him, but rather the Force which directs its
growth, the ever mysterious, as the ever unknown. For this vital Force,
that makes the Seed germinate, burst open and throw out shoots, then form
the trunk and branches, which, in their turn, bend down like the boughs of
the Ashvattha, the holy Tree of Bodhi, throw their seed out, take root and
procreate other trees—this is the only Force that has reality for him, as
it is the never‐dying Breath of Life. The Pagan philosopher sought for the
cause, the modern is content with only the effects and seeks the former in
the latter. What is beyond, he does not know, nor does the modern A‐
gnostic care; thus rejecting the only knowledge upon which he can with
full security base his Science. Yet this manifested Force has an answer
for him who seeks to fathom it. He who sees in the cross, the decussated
circle of Plato, the Pagan, not the antitype of circumcision, as Christian
(St.) Augustine did,(1399) is forthwith regarded by the Church as a
heathen; by Science, as a lunatic. This, because, while refusing to
worship the God of physical generation, he confesses that he can know
nothing of the Cause which underlies the so‐called _First_ Cause, the
Causeless Cause of this Vital Cause. Tacitly admitting the All‐Presence of
the Boundless Circle and making of it the Universal Postulate upon which
the whole of the Manifested Universe is based, the Sage keeps a
reverential silence concerning that upon which no mortal man should dare
to speculate. “The Logos of God is the revealer of man, and the Logos (the
Verb) of man is the revealer of God,” says Éliphas Lévi in one of his
paradoxes. To this, the Eastern Occultist would reply: On this condition,
however, that man should be dumb on the Cause that produced both God and
its Logos. Otherwise, he becomes invariably the _reviler_, not the
_revealer_, of the Incognizable Deity.

We have now to approach a mystery—the Hebdomad in Nature. Perchance, all
that we may say, will be attributed to coincidence. We may be told that
this number in Nature is quite _natural_—as indeed we say it is—and has no
more significance than the illusion of motion which forms the so‐called
“strobic circles.” No great importance was given to these “singular
illusions” when Professor Sylvanus Thompson exhibited them at the meeting
of the British Association in 1877. Nevertheless we should like to learn
the scientific explanation why seven should ever form itself as a
preeminent number—six concentric circles around a seventh, and seven rings
within one another round a central point, etc.—in this _illusion_,
produced by a swaying saucer, or any other vessel. We give the solution
refused by Science in the Section which follows.

Section XI. The Mysteries of the Hebdomad.

We must not close this Part on the Symbolism of Archaic History, without
an attempt to explain the perpetual recurrence of this truly mystic
number, the Hebdomad, in every scripture known to the Orientalists. As
every religion, from the oldest to the latest, reveals its presence, and
explains it on its own grounds agreeably with its own special dogmas, this
is no easy task. We can, therefore, do no better or more explanatory work
than to give a bird’s‐eye view of all. The numbers, 3, 4, 7, are the
sacred numbers of Light, Life, and Union—especially in this present
Manvantara, our Life‐Cycle; of which number _seven_ is the special
representative, or the _factor_ number. This has now to be demonstrated.

If one should ask a Brâhman learned in the _Upanishads_, which are so full
of the Secret Wisdom of old, why “he, of whom seven forefathers have drunk
the juice of the Moon‐plant,” is Trisuparna, as Bopaveda is credited with
saying;(1400) and why the Somapa Pitris should be worshipped by the
Brâhman Trisuparna—very few could answer the question; or, if they knew,
they would still less satisfy one’s curiosity. Let us, then, hold to what
the old Esoteric Doctrine teaches. As says the Commentary:

_When the first Seven appeared on Earth, they threw the seed of everything
that grows on the land into the soil. First came Three, and Four were
added to these as soon as stone was transformed into plant. Then came the
second Seven, who, guiding the Jîvas of the plants, produced the middle
[intermediate] natures between plant and moving living animal. The third
Seven evolved their Chhâyâs.... The fifth Seven imprisoned their
Essence.... Thus man became a Saptaparna._

A. Saptaparna.

Such is the name given in Occult phraseology to man. It means, as shown
elsewhere, a seven‐leaved plant, and the name has a great significance in
the Buddhist legends. So it had, also, under disguise, in the Greek myths.
The T, or τ (Tau), formed from the figure 7, and the Greek letter Γ
(Gamma), was, as stated in the last Section, the symbol of life, and of
Life Eternal: of earthly life, because Γ (Gamma) is the symbol of the
Earth (Gaia)(1401); and of Life Eternal, because the figure 7 is the
symbol of the same life _linked_ with Divine Life, the double glyph
expressed in geometrical figures being:

[Symbol: a triangle over a square]

—a Triangle and a Quaternary, the symbol of Septenary Man.

Now, the number _six_ has been regarded in the Ancient Mysteries as an
emblem of _physical_ Nature. For six is the representation of the six
dimensions of all bodies—the _six_ directions which compose their form,
namely, the four directions extending to the four cardinal points, North,
South, East, and West, and the two directions of height and thickness that
answer to the Zenith and the Nadir. Therefore, while the Senary was
applied by the Sages to _physical_ man, the Septenary was for them the
symbol of that man _plus_ his immortal Soul.(1402)

J. M. Ragon gives a very good illustration of the “hieroglyphical senary,”
as he calls our double equilateral triangle.

The hieroglyphical senary is the symbol of the commingling of the
_philosophical three_ fires and _three_ waters, whence results the
procreation of the elements of all things.(1403)

The same idea is found in the Indian double equilateral triangle. For,
though it is called in that country the sign of Vishnu, yet in truth it is
the symbol of the Triad, or Tri‐mûrti. For, even in the exoteric
rendering, the lower triangle, [Symbol: triangle], with the apex downward,
is the symbol of Vishnu, the God of the Moist Principle and Water,
Nârâyana being the Moving Principle in the Nârâ, or Waters;(1404) while
the triangle, with its apex upward, [Symbol: triangle], is Shiva, the
Principle of Fire, symbolized by the triple flame in his hand.(1405) It is
these two interlaced triangles, wrongly called “Solomon’s Seal”—which also
form the emblem of our Society—that produce the Septenary and the Triad at
one and the same time, and are the Decad. Whatever way this [Symbol:
6‐point star] is examined, all the ten numbers are contained therein. For
with a point in the middle or centre, [Symbol: 6‐point star with middle
dot], it is a _sevenfold_ sign or Septenary; its triangles denote number
three, or the Triad; the two triangles show the presence of the Binary;
the triangles with the central point common to both yield the Quaternary;
the six points are the Senary; and the central point, the Unit; the
Quinary being traced by combination, as a compound of _two_ triangles, the
even number, and of _three_ sides in each triangle, the first odd number.
This is the reason why Pythagoras and the ancients made the number _six_
sacred to Venus, since:

The union of the two sexes, and the spagyrization of matter by
triads, are necessary to develop the generative force, that
prolific virtue and tendency to reproduction which is inherent in
all bodies.(1406)

Belief in “Creators,” or the personified Powers of Nature, is in truth no
polytheism, but a philosophical necessity. Like all the other Planets of
our system, the Earth has seven Logoi—the emanating Rays of the one
“Father‐Ray”—the Protogonos, or the Manifested Logos, he who sacrifices
his Esse (or “Flesh,” the Universe) that the World may live and every
creature therein have conscious being.

Numbers 3 and 4 are respectively male and female, Spirit and Matter, and
their union is the emblem of Life Eternal in Spirit on its ascending arc,
and in Matter as the ever resurrecting Element—by procreation and
reproduction. The spiritual male line is vertical [Symbol: bar]; the
differentiated matter‐line is horizontal; the two forming the cross or ☩.
The 3 is invisible; the 4 is on the plane of objective perception. This is
why all the Matter of the Universe, when analyzed to its ultimates by
Science, can be reduced to four Elements only—Carbon, Oxygen, Nitrogen,
and Hydrogen; and why the three primaries, the noumena of the four, or
graduated Spirit or Force, have remained a _terra incognita_, and mere
speculations, mere names, to exact Science. Her servants must believe in
and study first the primary causes, before they can hope to fathom the
nature, and acquaint themselves with the potentialities, of the effects.
Thus, while the men of Western learning had, and still have, the four, or
Matter, to toy with, the Eastern Occultists and their disciples, the great
Alchemists the world over, have the whole septenate to study from.(1407)
As those Alchemists have it:

_When the Three and the Four kiss each other, the Quaternary joins its
middle nature with that of the Triangle [or Triad, i.e., the face of one
of its plane surfaces becoming the middle face of the other], and becomes
a Cube; then only does it [the Cube unfolded] become the vehicle and the
number of Life, the Father‐Mother Seven._

Now we are taught that all these earliest forms of organic life also
appear in septenary groups of numbers. From minerals or “soft stones that
hardened,” to use the phraseology of the Stanzas, followed by the “hard
plants that softened,” which are the product of the mineral, for “it is
from the bosom of the stone that vegetation is born”;(1408) and then to
man—all the primitive models in every kingdom of Nature begin by being
ethereal, transparent, films. This, of course, takes place only in the
first beginning of life. With the next period they consolidate, and at the
_seventh_ begin to branch off into species, _all except men_, the first of
the mammalian animals(1409) in the Fourth Round.

Virgil, versed as every ancient poet was, more or less, in Esoteric
Philosophy, sang of evolution in the following strains:

_Principio cælum ac terras camposque liquentes_
Lucentemque globum Lunæ, Titaniaque astra
_Spiritus_ intus alit, totamque infusa per artus
_Mens_ agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet.
Inde hominum pecudumque genus vitæque volantum
Et quæ marmoreo fert monstra sub æquore pontus.(1410)

“First came three, or the Triangle.” This expression has a profound
meaning in Occultism, and the fact is corroborated, in Mineralogy, Botany,
and even in Geology—as has been demonstrated in the Section on “The
Chronology of the Brâhmans”—by the compound number seven, the three and
the four, being contained in it. Salt in solution proves this. For when
its molecules, clustering together, begin to deposit themselves as a
solid, the first shape they assume is that of triangles, of small pyramids
and cones. It is the figure of Fire, whence the word “Pyramis”; while the
second geometrical figure in _manifested_ Nature is a Square or a Cube, 4
and 6; for, as Enfield says, “the particles of earth being cubical, those
of fire are pyramidal”—truly. The pyramidal shape is that assumed by the
pines—the most primitive tree after the fern period. Thus the two
opposites in cosmic Nature—fire and water, heat and cold—begin their
metrographical manifestations, one by a trimetric, the other by a
hexagonal system. For the stellate crystals of snow, viewed under a
microscope, are all and each of them a double or a treble six‐pointed
star, with a central nucleus, like a miniature star within the larger one.
Says Mr. Darwin—showing that the inhabitants of the sea‐shore are greatly
affected by the tides:

The most ancient progenitors in the kingdom of the Vertebrata ...
apparently consisted of a group of marine animals.... Animals
living either about the _mean_ high‐water mark, or about the
_mean_ low‐water mark, pass through a complete cycle of tidal
changes in a fortnight.... Now it is a mysterious fact that in the
higher and now terrestrial Vertebrata ... many normal and abnormal
processes have one or more weeks [septenates] as their periods ...
such as gestation of mammals, the duration of fevers.(1411)

The eggs of the pigeon are hatched in two weeks [or 14 days];
those of the fowl in three; those of the duck in four; those of
the goose in five; and those of the ostrich in seven.(1412)

This number is closely connected with the Moon, whose Occult influence is
ever manifesting itself in septenary periods. It is the Moon which is the
guide of the Occult side of terrestrial Nature, while the Sun is the
regulator and factor of manifested life. This truth has ever been evident
to the Seers and the Adepts. Jakob Böhme, by insisting on the fundamental
doctrine of the seven properties of everlasting Mother Nature, proved
himself thereby a great Occultist.

But to return to the consideration of the septenary in ancient religious
symbolism. To the metrological key of the symbolism of the Hebrews, which
reveals numerically the geometrical relations of the Circle (All‐Deity) to
the Square, Cube, Triangle, and all the integral emanations of the divine
area, may be added the theogonic key. This key explains that Noah, the
Deluge‐Patriarch, is in one aspect the permutation of the Deity (the
Universal Creative Law), for the purpose of the formation of our Earth,
its population, and the propagation of life on it, in general.

Now bearing in mind the septenary division in divine Hierarchies, as in
cosmic and human constitutions, the student will readily understand that
Jah‐Noah is at the head of, and is the synthesis of the lower cosmic
Quaternary. The upper Sephirothal Triad, △—of which Jehovah‐Binah
(Intelligence) is the left, female, angle—emanates the Quaternary, □. The
latter, symbolizing by itself the Heavenly Man, the sexless Adam Kadmon,
viewed as Nature in the abstract, becomes a septenate again by emanating
from itself the additional three principles, the lower terrestrial or
manifested physical Nature, Matter and our Earth—the seventh being
Malkuth, the “Bride of the Heavenly Man”—thus forming, with the higher
Triad, or Kether, the Crown, the full number of the Sephirothal Tree—the
10, the Total in Unity, or the Universe. Apart from the higher Triad, the
lower creative Sephiroth are seven.

The above is not directly to our point, though it is a necessary reminder
to facilitate the comprehension of what follows. The question at issue is
to show that Jah‐Noah, or the Jehovah of the Hebrew _Bible_, the alleged
Creator of our Earth, of man and all upon it, is:

(_a_) The lowest Septenary, the Creative Elohim—in his cosmic aspect.

(_b_) The Tetragrammaton or the Adam Kadmon, the “Heavenly Man” of the
four letters—in his theogonic and kabalistic aspects.

(_c_) The Noah—identical with the Hindû Shishta, the human Seed, left for
the peopling of the Earth from a previous creation, or Manvantara, as
expressed in the _Purânas_, or the pre‐diluvian period as rendered
allegorically in the _Bible_—in his cosmic character.

But whether a Quaternary (Tetragrammaton) or a Triad, the biblical
Creative God is not the Universal 10, unless blended with Ain Suph (as
Brahmâ with Parabrahman), but a septenary, one of the many septenaries of
the Universal Septenate. In the explanation of the question now in hand,
his position and status as Noah may best be shown by placing the 3, △, and
4, □, on parallel lines with the cosmic and human principles. For the
latter, the old familiar classification is made use of.

As an additional demonstration of the statement, let the reader turn to
kabalistic works.

“_Ararat_ = _the mount of descent_ = הר‐י‐רד, _Hor‐Jared_. Hatho
mentions it out of composition by _Arath_ = ארת. Editor of Moses
Cherenensis says: ‘By this, they say, is signified _the first
place of descent_ (of the ark).’ ” (Bryant’s _Anal._, vol. iv. pp.
5, 6, 15.) Under “_Berge_,” _mountain_, Nork says of _Ararat_:
“אררט, for ארת (_i.e._, _Ararat_ for _Arath_) _earth, Aramaic_
reduplication.” Here it is seen that Nork and Hatho make use of
the same equivalent, in Arath, ארש, with the meaning of
_earth_.(1413)

Noah thus symbolizing both the Root‐Manu and the Seed‐Manu, or the Power
which developed the Planetary Chain, and our Earth, and the Seed‐Race, the
Fifth, which was saved while the last sub‐races of the Fourth, Vaivasvata
Manu, perished, the number _seven_ will be seen to recur at every step. It
is Noah who, as Jehovah’s permutation, represents the septenary Host of
the Elohim, and is thus the Father or Creator (the Preserver) of all
animal life. Hence the verses of _Genesis_: “Of every clean beast thou
shalt take to thee by sevens, the male [3], and the female [4]; of fowls
also of the air by sevens,”(1414) etc., followed by all the _sevening_ of
days and the rest.

B. The Tetraktys In Relation To The Heptagon.

Thus number _seven_, as a compound of 3 and 4, is the factor element in
every ancient religion, because it is _the factor element in Nature_. Its
adoption must be justified, and it must be shown to be _the_ number _par
excellence_, for, since the appearance of _Esoteric Buddhism_, frequent
objections have been made, and doubts expressed as to the correctness of
these assertions.

And here let the student be told at once, that in all such numerical
divisions the One universal Principle—although referred to as (the) one,
because the Only One—never enters into the calculations. It stands, in its
character of the Absolute, the Infinite, and the Universal Abstraction,
entirely by Itself and independent of every other Power whether noumenal
or phenomenal. Says the author of the article “Personal and Impersonal
God”:

This entity is neither matter nor spirit; it is neither Ego nor
non‐Ego; and it is neither object nor subject.

In the language of Hindû philosophers it is the original and
eternal combination of Purusha [Spirit] and Prakriti [Matter]. As
the Advaitîs hold that an external object is merely the product of
our mental states, Prakriti is nothing more than illusion, and
Purusha is the only reality; it is the _one_ existence which
remains in the universe of Ideas. This ... then, is the
Parabrahman of the Advaitîs. Even if there were to be a personal
God with anything like a material Upâdhi (physical basis of
whatever form), from the standpoint of an Advaitî there will be as
much reason to doubt his noumenal existence, as there would be in
the case of any other object. In their opinion, a conscious God
cannot be the origin of the universe, as his Ego would be the
effect of a previous cause, if the word conscious conveys but its
ordinary meaning. They cannot admit that _the grand total of all
the states of consciousness in the universe_ is their deity, as
these states are constantly changing, and as cosmic idealism
ceases during Pralaya. There is only one permanent condition in
the Universe, which is the state of perfect unconsciousness, bare
Chidâkâsham (the field of consciousness) in fact.

When my readers once realize the fact that this grand universe is
in reality but a huge aggregation of various states of
consciousness, they will not be surprised to find that the
ultimate state of unconsciousness is considered as Parabrahman by
the Advaitîs.(1415)

Although itself entirely out of human reckoning or calculation, yet this
“huge aggregation of various states of consciousness” is a septenate, in
_its_ totality entirely composed of septenary groups—simply because “the
capacity of perception _exists in seven different aspects corresponding to
the seven conditions of matter_,”(1416) or the seven properties, or states
of matter. And, therefore, the series from one to seven, begins in the
Esoteric calculations with the first manifested principle, which is number
one if we commence from above, and number seven when reckoning from below,
or from the lowest principle.

The Tetrad is esteemed in the _Kabalah_, as it was by Pythagoras, the most
perfect, or rather _sacred_ number, because it emanated from the One, the
first manifested Unit, or rather the Three in One. And the latter has ever
been impersonal, sexless, incomprehensible, though within the possibility
of the higher mental perceptions.

The first manifestation of the eternal Monad was never meant to stand as
the symbol of another symbol, the Unborn for the Element‐born, or the one
Logos for the Heavenly Man. Tetragrammaton, or the Tetraktys of the
Greeks, is the Second Logos, the Demiurgos.

The Tetrad, as Thomas Taylor thinks, is, however, the _animal
itself_ of Plato who, as Syrianus justly observes, was the best of
the Pythagoreans; subsists at the extremity of the intelligible
triad, as is most satisfactorily shown by Proclus in the third
book of his treatise on the theology of Plato. And between these
two triads [the double triangle], the one intelligible, and the
other intellectual, another order of gods exists, which partakes
of both extremes.(1417)...

The Pythagorean world, according to Plutarch,(1418) _consisted of a double
quaternary_.

This statement corroborates what is said about the choice, by the exoteric
theologies, of the _lower_ Tetraktys. For:

The quaternary of the intellectual world [the world of Mahat] is
T’Agathon, Nous, Psyche, Hyle; while that of the sensible world
[of Matter], which is properly what Pythagoras meant by the word
Kosmos, is Fire, Air, Water, and Earth. The four elements are
called by the name of _rhizômata_, the roots or principles of all
_mixed bodies_.(1419)

That is to say, the lower Tetraktys is the root of _illusion_, of the
World of Matter; and this is the Tetragrammaton of the Jews, and the
“mysterious deity,” over which the modern Kabalists make such a fuss!

This number [_four_] forms the arithmetical mean between the monad
and the heptad; and this comprehends all powers, both of the
productive and produced numbers; for this, of all numbers under
ten, is made of a certain number; the duad doubled makes a tetrad,
and the tetrad doubled [or unfolded] makes the hebdomad [the
septenary]. Two multiplied into itself produces four; and retorted
into itself makes the first cube. This first cube is a _fertile
number_, the ground of multitude and variety, constituted of two
and four [depending on the monad, the _seventh_]. Thus the two
principles of temporal things, the pyramis and cube, form and
matter, flow from one fountain, the tetragon [on earth, the monad,
in heaven].(1420)

Here Reuchlin, the great authority on the _Kabalah_, shows the cube to be
“matter,” whereas the pyramid or the triad is “form.” With the Hermesians
the number four becomes the symbol of truth only when _amplified into a
cube_, which, unfolded, makes seven, as symbolizing the male and female
elements and the element of Life.(1421)

Some students have been puzzled to account for the vertical line,(1422)
which is male, becoming, in the cross, a four‐partitioned line (_four_
being a female number), while the horizontal (the line of matter) becomes
three‐divisioned. But this is easy of explanation. Since the middle face
of the “cube unfolded” is _common_ to both the vertical and the horizontal
bar, or double‐line, it becomes _neutral_ ground so to say, and belongs to
neither. The spirit line remains triadic, and the matter line two‐fold—two
being an even and therefore a female number also. Moreover, according to
Theon in his _Mathematica_, the Pythagoreans, who gave the name of Harmony
to the Tetraktys, “because it is a diatessaron in sesquitertia,” were of
opinion that:

The division of the canon of the monochord was made by the
tetraktys in the duad, triad, and tetrad; for it comprehends a
sesquitertia, a sesquialtera, a duple, a triple, and a quadruple
proportion, the section of which is 27. In the ancient musical
notation, the tetrachord consisted of _three_ degrees or
intervals, and _four_ terms of sounds called by the Greeks
diatessaron, and by us a fourth.(1423)

Moreover, the quaternary though an even, therefore a female (“infernal”)
number, varied according to its form. This is shown by Stanley.(1424) The
four was called by the Pythagoreans the Key‐Keeper of Nature; but in union
with the three, which made it seven, it became the most perfect and
harmonious number—_nature herself_. The four was “the masculine of
feminine form,” when forming the cross; and seven is the “Master of the
Moon,” for this Planet is forced to alter her appearance every seven days.
It is on number seven that Pythagoras composed his doctrine on the Harmony
and Music of the Spheres, calling a “tone” the distance of the Moon from
the Earth; from the Moon to Mercury half a tone, from thence to Venus the
same; from Venus to the Sun one and a half tones; from the Sun to Mars a
tone; from thence to Jupiter half a tone; from Jupiter to Saturn half a
tone; and thence to the Zodiac a tone; thus making seven tones—the
diapason harmony.(1425) All the melody of Nature is in those seven tones,
and therefore is called the “Voice of Nature.”

Plutarch explains(1426) that the most ancient Greeks regarded the Tetrad
as the root and principle of all things, since it was the number of the
elements which gave birth to all visible and invisible _created_
things.(1427) With the brothers of the Rosy Cross, the figure of the
cross, or _cube unfolded_, formed the subject of a disquisition in one of
the Theosophic degrees of Peuvret, and was treated according to the
fundamental principles of light and darkness, _or good and evil_.(1428)

The intelligible world proceeds out of the divine mind [or unit]
after this manner. The Tetraktys, reflecting upon its own essence,
_the first unit, productrix of all things_, and on its own
beginning, saith thus: Once one, twice two, immediately ariseth a
tetrad, having on its top the highest unit, and _becomes a
Pyramis_, whose base is a plain tetrad, answerable to a
superficies, upon which the radiant light of the divine unity
produceth the form of incorporeal fire, by reason of the descent
of Juno (matter) to inferior things. Hence ariseth essential
light, not burning but illuminating. This is _the creation of the
middle world_, which the Hebrews call the _Supreme_, the world of
the [_their_] deity. It is termed Olympus, entirely light, and
replete with separate forms, where is the seat of the immortal
gods, _deûm domus alta_, whose top is _unity_, its wall _trinity_,
and its superficies _quaternity_.(1429)

The “superficies” has thus to remain a _meaningless surface_, if left by
itself. _Unity_ only “illuminating” _quaternity_, the famous lower four
has to build for itself also a wall from _trinity_, if it would be
manifested. Moreover, the Tetragrammaton, or Microprosopus, is “Jehovah”
arrogating to himself very improperly the “Was, Is, Will Be,” now
translated into the “I am that I am,” and interpreted as referring to the
highest abstract Deity; while Esoterically and in plain truth, it means
only periodically chaotic, turbulent, and eternal Matter, with all its
potentialities. For the Tetragrammaton is one with Nature, or Isis, and is
the exoteric series of androgyne Gods such as Osiris‐Isis, Jove‐Juno,
Brahmâ‐Vâch, or the Kabalistic Jah‐Hovah; all male‐females. Every
anthropomorphic God, in old nations, as Marcellus Ficin well observed, has
his name written with four letters. Thus with the Egyptians, he was Teut;
the Arabs, Alla; the Persians, Sire; the Magi, Orsi; the Mahometans, Abdi;
the Greeks, Teos; the ancient Turks, Esar; the Latins, Deus; to which John
Lorenzo Anania adds the German Gott; the Sarmatian Bouh; etc.(1430)

The Monad being one, and an _odd_ number, the Ancients therefore said that
the odd were the only perfect numbers; and—selfishly, perhaps, yet as a
fact—considered them all as masculine and perfect, being applicable to the
_celestial_ Gods, while even numbers, such as two, four, six, and
especially eight, as being female, were regarded as imperfect, and given
only to the _terrestrial and infernal_ Deities. Virgil records the fact by
saying, “_Numero deus impare gaudet_.” “The God is pleased with an odd
number.”(1431)

But number _seven_, or the Heptagon, the Pythagoreans considered to be a
_religious and perfect number_. It was called Telesphoros, because by it
all in the Universe and mankind is led _to its end_, _i.e._, its
culmination.(1432) The doctrine of the Spheres ruled by the seven Sacred
Planets(1433) shows, from Lemuria to Pythagoras, the seven Powers of
terrestrial and sublunary Nature, as well as the seven great Forces of the
Universe, proceeding and evolving in seven tones, which are the seven
notes of the musical scale.

The Heptad [our Septenary] was considered to be _the number of a virgin,
because it is unborn_ [like the Logos or the Aja of the Vedântins]:

Without a father ... or a mother, ... _but proceeding directly
from the monad_, which is the origin and crown of all
things.(1434)

And if the Heptad is made to proceed from the Monad directly, then it is,
as taught in the Secret Doctrine of the oldest schools, the perfect and
sacred number of this Mahâmanvantara of ours.

The Septenary, or Heptad, was sacred indeed to several Gods and Goddesses;
to Mars, with his seven attendants, to Osiris, whose body was divided into
seven and twice seven parts; to Apollo, the Sun, amid his seven planets,
and playing the hymn to the seven‐rayed on his seven‐stringed harp; to
Minerva, the fatherless and the motherless, and others.(1435)

Cis‐Himâlayan Occultism with its sevening, and because of such sevening,
must be regarded as the most ancient, the original of all. It is opposed
by _some_ fragments left by Neo‐Platonists; and the admirers of the
latter, who hardly understand what they defend, say to us: See, your
forerunners believed only in _triple_ man, composed of Spirit, Soul, and
Body. Behold, the Târaka Râja Yoga of India limits that division to 3, we,
to 4, and the Vedântins to 5 (Koshas). To this, we of the Archaic school
ask:

Why then does the Greek poet say that it is not four but _seven_ who sing
the praise of the Spiritual Sun?

Ἑπτά με κ.τ.λ.
Seven sounding letters sing the praise of me,
The immortal God, the almighty Deity.

Why again is the _triune_ Iao, the Mystery God, called the “fourfold,” and
yet the triadic and tetradic symbols come under one unified name with the
Christians—the Jehovah of the seven letters? Why again in the Hebrew Shebâ
is the Oath (the Pythagorean Tetraktys) identical with number 7? Or, as
Mr. Gerald Massey has it:

Taking an oath was synonymous with “to seven,” and the 10
expressed by the letter Jod, was the full number of Iao‐Sabaoth
[—the ten‐lettered God].(1436)

In Lucian’s _Auction_:

Pythagoras asks, “How do you reckon?” The reply is, “One, Two,
Three, Four.” Then Pythagoras says, “Do you see? In _what you
conceive_ Four there are Ten, _a perfect Triangle and our Oath_
[Tetraktys, Four!—or Seven in all].”(1437)

Why again does Proclus say:

The Father of the golden verses celebrates the Tetraktys as the
fountain of perennial nature?(1438)

Simply because those Western Kabalists who quote the _exoteric_ proofs
against us have no idea of the real _Esoteric_ meaning. All the ancient
Cosmologies—the oldest Cosmographies of the two most ancient people of the
Fifth Root‐Race, the Hindû Âryans and the Egyptians, together with the
early Chinese races, the remnants of the Fourth or Atlantean Race—based
the whole of their Mysteries on number 10; the higher Triangle standing
for the invisible and metaphysical World, the lower three and four, or the
Septenate, for the physical Realm. It is not the Jewish _Bible_ that
brought number seven into prominence. Hesiod used the words, “the seventh
is the sacred day,” before the Sabbath of “Moses” was ever heard of. The
use of number seven was never confined to any one nation. This is well
testified by the seven vases in the Temple of the Sun, near the ruins of
Babian in Upper Egypt; the seven fires burning continually for ages before
the altars of Mithra; the seven holy fanes of the Arabians; the seven
peninsulas, the seven islands, seven seas, mountains, and rivers of India;
and of the _Zohar_; the Jewish Sephiroth of the seven splendours; the
seven Gothic deities; the seven worlds of the Chaldæans and their seven
Spirits; the seven constellations mentioned by Hesiod and Homer; and all
the interminable sevens which the Orientalists find in every MS. they
discover.(1439)

What we have to say finally is this: Enough has been brought forward to
show why the human principles were and are divided in the Esoteric Schools
into seven. Make it four and it will either leave man _minus_ his lower
terrestrial elements, or, if viewed from a physical standpoint, make of
him a soulless animal. The Quaternary must be the higher or the lower—the
celestial or terrestrial Tetraktys; to become comprehensible, according to
the teachings of the _ancient_ Esoteric School, man must be regarded as a
septenary. This was so well understood, that even the so‐called Christian
Gnostics adopted this time‐honoured system.(1440) This remained for a long
time a secret, for though it was suspected, no MSS. of that time spoke of
it clearly enough to satisfy the sceptic. But there comes to our rescue
the literary curiosity of our age—the oldest and best preserved Gospel of
the Gnostics, _Pistis Sophia_. To make the proof absolutely complete, we
shall quote from an authority, C. W. King, the only Archæologist who has
had a faint glimmer of this elaborate doctrine, and the best writer of the
day on the Gnostics and their gems.

According to this extraordinary piece of religious literature—a true
Gnostic fossil—the human Entity is the Septenary Ray from the One,(1441)
just as our School teaches. It is composed of seven elements, four of
which are borrowed from the four kabalistical manifested worlds. Thus:

From Asiah it gets the Nephesh, or seat of the physical appetites
[vital breath, also]; from Jezirah, the Ruach, or seat of the
passions [? !]; from Briah, the Neshamah or reason; and from
Aziluth it obtains the Chaiah, or principle of spiritual life.
This looks like an adaptation of the Platonic theory of the Soul’s
obtaining its respective faculties from the Planets in its
downward progress through their spheres. But the Pistis‐Sophia,
with its accustomed boldness, puts this theory into a much more
poetical shape (§ 282). The _Inner Man_ is similarly made up of
_four_ constituents, _but these are supplied by the rebellious
Æons of the Spheres_, being the _Power_—a particle of the Divine
light (“Divinæ particula auræ”) yet left in themselves; the _Soul_
[the fifth] “formed out of the tears of their eyes, and the sweat
of their torments”; the Ἀντιμῖμον Πνεύματος, _Counterfeit of the
Spirit_ (seemingly answering to our _Conscience_) [_the sixth_];
and lastly the Μοῖρα, _Fate_(1442) [Karmic Ego], whose business it
is to lead the man to the end appointed for him: if he hath to die
by the fire, to lead him into the fire; if he hath to die by a
wild beast, to lead him unto the wild beast—[the _seventh_]!(1443)

C. The Septenary Element In The Vedas.

_It Corroborates the Occult Teaching Concerning the Seven Globes and the
Seven Races._

We have to go to the very source of historical information, if we would
bring our best evidence to testify to the facts enunciated. For, though
entirely allegorical, the Rig Vedic hymns are none the less suggestive.
The seven Rays of Sûrya, the Sun, are therein made parallel to the seven
Worlds, of every Planetary Chain, to the seven Rivers of Heaven and Earth,
the former being the seven creative Hosts, and the latter the seven Men,
or primitive human groups. The seven ancient Rishis—the progenitors of all
that lives and breathes on Earth—are the seven friends of Agni, his seven
“Horses,” or seven “Heads.” The human race has sprung from Fire and Water,
it is allegorically stated; fashioned by the Fathers, or the Ancestor‐
sacrificers, from Agni; for Agni, the Ashvins, the Âdityas,(1444) are all
synonymous with those “Sacrificers,” or the Fathers, variously called
Pitaras (or Pitris), Angirasas,(1445) and Sâdhyas, “Divine Sacrificers,”
the most Occult of all. They are all called Deva‐putra Rishayah or the
“Sons of God.”(1446) The “Sacrificers,” moreover, are collectively the One
Sacrificer, the Father of the Gods, Vishvakarman, who performed the great
Sarva‐medha ceremony, and ended by sacrificing himself.

In these Hymns the “Heavenly Man” is called Purusha, the “Man,”(1447) from
whom Virâj was born(1448); and from Virâj, the (mortal) man. It is
Varuna—lowered from his sublime position to be the chief of the
Lords—Dhyânîs or Devas—who regulates all natural phenomena, who “makes a
path for the Sun, for him to follow.” The seven Rivers of the Sky (the
descending Creative Gods), and the seven Rivers of the Earth (the seven
primitive Mankinds), are under his control, as will be seen. For he who
breaks Varuna’s laws (Vratâni, or “courses of natural action,” active
laws), is punished by Indra(1449) the Vedic powerful God, whose Vrata, or
law or power, is greater than the Vratâni of any other God.

Thus, the _Rig Veda_, the oldest of _all the known_ ancient records, may
be shown to corroborate the Occult Teachings in almost every respect. Its
Hymns, which are the records written by the earliest Initiates of the
Fifth (our) Race concerning the Primordial Teachings, speak of the Seven
Races (two still to come), allegorizing them by the seven “Streams”(1450)
and of the Five Races (Panchakrishtayah) which have already inhabited this
world(1451) on the five Regions (Panchapradishah)(1452) as also of the
three Continents that were.(1453)

It is only those scholars who will master the secret meaning of the
Purusha Sukta—in which the intuition of the modern Orientalists has chosen
to see “one of the very latest hymns of the _Rig Veda_”—who may hope to
understand how harmonious are its teachings and how corroborative of the
Esoteric Doctrines. He must study, in all the abstruseness of their
metaphysical meaning, the relations therein between the (Heavenly) Man
(Purusha), _sacrificed_ for the production of the Universe and all in
it,(1454) and the terrestrial mortal man(1455) before he realizes the
hidden philosophy of the verse:

15. He [“Man,” Purusha, or Vishvakarman] had seven enclosing logs
of fuel, and _thrice seven_ layers of fuel; when the Gods
performed the sacrifice, they bound the Man as victim.

This relates to the three septenary primeval Races, and shows the
antiquity of the _Vedas_, which knew of no other sacrifice, probably, in
these earliest _oral_ teachings; and also to the seven primeval groups of
Mankind, as Vishvakarman represents divine Humanity collectively.(1456)

The same doctrine is found reflected in the other old religions. It may,
it must, have come down to us disfigured and misinterpreted, as in the
case of the Parsîs who read it in their _Vendîdâd_ and elsewhere, though
without understanding the allusions therein contained any better than do
the Orientalists; yet the doctrine is plainly mentioned in their old
works.(1457)

Comparing the Esoteric Teaching with the interpretations by Prof. James
Darmesteter, one may see at a glance where the mistake is made, and the
cause that produced it. The passage runs thus:

The Indo‐Iranian Asura [Ahura] was often conceived as _sevenfold_;
by the play of certain mythical [?] formulæ and the strength of
certain mythical [?] numbers, the ancestors of the Indo‐Iranians
had been led to speak of seven worlds,(1458) and the supreme god
was often made sevenfold, as well as the worlds over which he
ruled. The seven worlds became in Persia the seven Karshvare of
the earth: the earth is divided into seven Karshvare, _only one of
which is known and accessible to man_, the one on which we live,
namely, Hvaniratha; which amounts to saying that there are _seven
earths_.(1459) Parsi mythology knows also of seven heavens.
Hvaniratha itself is divided into seven climes. (Orm. Ahr. §
72.)(1460)

The same division and doctrine is to be found in the oldest and most
revered of the Hindû scriptures—the _Rig Veda_. Mention is made therein of
six Worlds, _besides_ our Earth: the six Rajamsi above Prithivî, the
Earth, or “this” (Idam) as opposed to “that which is _yonder_” (_i.e._,
the six Globes on the _three_ other planes or Worlds).(1461)

The italics are ours to point out the identity of the tenets with those of
the Esoteric Doctrine, and to accentuate the mistake that is made. The
Magi or Mazdeans only believed in what other people believed in: namely,
in seven “Worlds” or Globes of our Planetary Chain, of which _only one_ is
accessible to man, at the present time, our Earth; and in the successive
appearance and destruction of seven Continents or Earths on this our
Globe, each Continent being divided, in commemoration of the seven Globes
(one visible, six invisible), into seven islands or continents, seven
“climes,” etc. This was a common belief in those days when the now Secret
Doctrine was open to all. It is this multiplicity of localities in
septenary divisions, which has made the Orientalists—who have, moreover,
been further led astray by the oblivion of their primitive doctrines of
both the uninitiated Hindûs and Parsîs—feel so puzzled by this ever‐
recurring seven‐fold number as to regard it as “mythical.” It is this
oblivion of first principles which has led the Orientalists off the right
track and made them commit the greatest blunders. The same failure is
found in the definition of the Gods. Those who are ignorant of the
Esoteric Doctrine of the earliest Âryans, can never assimilate or even
understand correctly the metaphysical meaning contained in these Beings.

Ahura Mazda (Ormazd) was the head and synthesis of the seven Amesha
Spentas, or Amshaspands, and, therefore, an Amesha Spenta himself. Just as
Jehovah‐Binah‐Elohim was the head and synthesis of the Elohim, and no
more; so Agni‐Vishnu‐Sûrya was the synthesis and head, or the focus whence
emanated in physics and also in metaphysics, from the spiritual as well as
from the physical Sun, the seven Rays, the seven Fiery Tongues, the seven
Planets or Gods. All these became supreme Gods and _the_ One God, but only
after the loss of the primeval secrets; _i.e._, the sinking of Atlantis,
or the “Flood,” and the occupation of India by the Brâhmans, who sought
safety on the summits of the Himâlayas, for even the high table‐lands of
what is now Tibet became submerged for a time. Ahura Mazda is addressed
only as the “Most Blissful Spirit, Creator of the _Corporeal_ World” in
the _Vendîdâd_. Ahura Mazda in its literal translation means the “Wise
Lord” (Ahura “lord” and Mazda “wise”). Moreover, this name of Ahura, in
Sanskrit Asura, connects him with the Mânasaputras, the Sons of Wisdom who
informed the mindless man, and endowed him with his mind (Manas). Ahura
(Asura) may be derived from the root _ah_ “to be,” but in its primal
signification it is what the Secret Teaching shows it to be.

When Geology shall have found out how many thousands of years ago the
disturbed waters of the Indian Ocean reached the highest plateaux of
Central Asia, when the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf made one with it,
then only will they know the age of the existing Âryan Brâhmanical nation,
and also the time of its descent into the plains of Hindûstan, which did
not take place till millenniums later.

Yima, the so‐called “first man” in the _Vendîdâd_, as much as his twin‐
brother Yama, the son of Vaivasvata Manu, belongs to two epochs of
Universal History. He is the Progenitor of the Second human Race, hence
the personification of the Shadows of the Pitris, and the Father of the
Postdiluvian Humanity. The Magi said, “Yima,” as we say “man” when
speaking of mankind. The “fair Yima,” the first mortal who converses with
Ahura Mazda, is the _first _“man”_ who dies_ or disappears, not the first
who is born. The “son of Vîvanghat”(1462) was, like the son of Vaivasvata,
the symbolical man, who stood in Esotericism as the representative of the
_first three_ Races and the collective Progenitor thereof. Of these Races
the first two never died(1463) but only vanished, absorbed in their
progeny, and the Third knew death only towards its close, after the
separation of the sexes and its “Fall” into generation. This is plainly
alluded to in Fargard ii of the _Vendîdâd_. Yima refuses to become the
bearer of the law of Ahura Mazda, saying:

“I was not born, I was not taught to be the preacher and the
bearer of thy law.”(1464)

And then Ahura Mazda asks him to make his men increase and “watch over”
his world.

He refuses to become the priest of Ahura Mazda, because he is _his own
priest and sacrificer_, but he accepts the second proposal. He is made to
answer:

“Yes!... Yes, I will nourish, and rule, and watch over thy world.
There shall be, while I am king, neither cold wind nor hot wind,
_neither disease nor death_.”

Then Ahura Mazda brings him a golden ring and a poniard, the emblems of
sovereignty.

Thus, under the sway of Yima, three hundred _winters_ passed away,
and the earth was _replenished_ with flocks and herds, with men
and dogs and birds and with red blazing fires.

Three hundred winters mean three hundred periods or cycles. “Replenished,”
mark well; that is to say, all this had been on it before; and thus is
proven the knowledge of the doctrine about the successive Destructions of
the World and its Life‐Cycles. Once the “three hundred winters” were over,
Ahura Mazda warns Yima that the Earth is becoming too full, and men have
nowhere to live. Then Yima steps forward, and with the help of Spenta
Ârmaita, the female Genius, or Spirit of the Earth, makes that Earth
stretch out and become larger by one‐third, after which “new flocks and
herds and men” appear upon it. Ahura Mazda warns him again, and Yima makes
the Earth by the same magic power to become larger by two‐thirds. “Nine
hundred winters” _pass_ away, and Yima has to perform the ceremony for the
_third_ time. The whole of this is allegorical. The three processes of
stretching the Earth, refer to the three successive Continents and Races
issuing one after and from the other, as explained more fully elsewhere.
After the _third_ time, Ahura Mazda warns Yima in an assembly of
“celestial gods” and “excellent mortals” that upon the material world the
fatal winters are going to fall, and all _life_ will perish. This is the
old Mazdean symbolism for the “Flood,” and the coming cataclysm to
Atlantis, which sweeps away every Race in its turn. Like Vaivasvata Manu
and Noah, Yima makes a Vara—an Enclosure, an Ark—under the God’s
direction, and brings thither the seed of every living creature, animals
and “Fires.”

It is of this “Earth” or new Continent that Zarathushtra became the law‐
giver and ruler. This was the Fourth Race in its beginning, after the men
of the Third began to die out. Till then, as said above, there had been no
regular death, but only a transformation, for _men had no personality_ as
yet. They had Monads—“Breaths” of the One Breath, as impersonal as the
source from which they proceeded. They had bodies, or rather shadows of
bodies, which were sinless, hence Karma‐less. Therefore, as there was no
Kâma Loka—least of all Nirvâna or even Devachan—for the “Souls” of men who
had no personal Egos, there could be no intermediate periods between the
incarnations. Like the Phœnix, primordial man resurrected out of his old
into a new body. Each time, and with each new generation, he became more
solid, more physically perfect, agreeably with the evolutionary law, which
is the Law of Nature. Death came with the complete physical organism, and
with it—moral decay.

This explanation shows one more old religion agreeing in its symbology
with the Universal Doctrine.

Elsewhere the oldest Persian traditions, the relics of Mazdeism of the
still older Magians, are given, and some of them explained. Mankind did
not issue from one solitary couple. Nor was there ever a first man—whether
Adam or Yima—but a first mankind.

It may, or may not, be “mitigated polygenism.” Once that both Creation _ex
nihilo_ (an absurdity) and a superhuman Creator or Creators (a fact) are
made away with by Science, polygenism presents no more difficulties or
inconveniences—rather fewer from a scientific point of view—than
monogenism does.

In fact, it is as scientific as any other claim. For in his Introduction
to Nott and Gliddon’s _Types of Mankind_, Agassiz declares his belief in
an indefinite number of “primordial races of men created _separately_”;
and remarks that, “whilst in every zoological province animals are of
_different_ species, _man_, in spite of the diversity of his races, always
forms _one and the same_ human being.”

Occultism defines and limits the number of primordial races to seven,
because of the seven “Progenitors,” or Prajâpatis, the evolvers of beings.
These are neither Gods, nor supernatural Beings, but advanced Spirits from
another and lower Planet, reborn on this Planet, and giving birth in their
turn in the present Round to present Humanity. This doctrine is again
corroborated by one of its echoes—among the Gnostics. In their
anthropology and genesis of man they taught that “a certain company of
_seven_ Angels,” formed the first men, who were no better than senseless,
gigantic, shadowy forms—“a mere wriggling worm” (!) writes Irenæus,(1465)
who takes, as usual, the metaphor for reality.

D. The Septenary In The Exoteric Works.

We may now examine other ancient scriptures and see whether they contain
the septenary classification, and, if so, to what degree.

Scattered about in thousands of other Sanskrit texts, some still unopened,
others yet unknown, as well as in all the _Purânas_, as much as, if not
much more than, even in the Jewish _Bible_, the numbers seven and forty‐
nine (7 × 7) play a most prominent part. In the _Purânas_ they are found
from the seven Creations, in the first chapters, down to the seven Rays of
the Sun at the final Pralaya, which expand into seven Suns and absorb the
material of the whole Universe. Thus the _Matsya Purâna_ has:

For the sake of promulgating the Vedas, Vishnu, in the beginning
of a Kalpa, related to Manu the story of Narasimha and the events
of _seven_ Kalpas.(1466)

Then again the same _Purâna_ shows that:

In all the Manvantaras, classes of Rishis(1467) appear by seven
and _seven_, and having established a code of law and morality
depart to felicity.(1468)

The Rishis, however, represent many other things besides living sages.

In Dr. Muir’s translation of the _Atharva Veda_, we read:

1. Time carries (us) forward, a steed, with _seven_ rays, a
thousand eyes, undecaying, full of fecundity. On him intelligent
sages mount; his wheels are all the worlds.

2. Thus Time moves on _seven_ wheels; he has _seven_ naves;
immortality is his axle. He is at present _all these worlds_. Time
hastens onward the first God.

3. A full jar is contained in Time. We behold him existing in many
forms. He is all these worlds in the future. They call him “Time
in the highest Heaven.”(1469)

Now add to this the following verse from the Esoteric Volumes:

_Space and Time are one. Space and Time are nameless, for they are the
incognizable That, which can be sensed only through its seven Rays—which
are the seven Creations, the seven Worlds, the seven Laws, etc._

Remembering that the _Purânas_ insist on the identity of Vishnu with Time
and Space,(1470) and that even the Rabbinical symbol for God is Maqom,
“Space,” it becomes clear why, for purposes of a manifesting Deity—Space,
Matter, and Spirit—the one central Point became the Triangle and
Quaternary—the perfect Cube—hence _seven_. Even the Pravaha Wind—the
mystic and occult force that gives the impulse to, and regulates the
course of the stars and planets—is septenary. The _Kûrma_ and _Linga
Purânas_ enumerate seven principal winds of that name, which winds are the
principles of Cosmic Space.(1471) They are intimately connected with
Dhruva(1472) (now Alpha), the Pole‐Star, which is connected in its turn
with the production of various phenomena through cosmic forces.

Thus, from the seven Creations, seven Rishis, Zones, Continents,
Principles, etc., in the Âryan Scriptures, the number has passed through
Indian, Egyptian, Chaldæan, Greek, Jewish, Roman, and finally Christian
mystic thought, until it landed in, and remained indelibly impressed on,
every exoteric theology. The seven old books stolen out of Noah’s Ark by
Ham, and given to Cush, his son, and the seven Brazen Columns of Ham and
Cheiron, are a reflection and a remembrance of the seven primordial
Mysteries instituted according to the “seven secret Emanations,” the seven
Sounds, and seven Rays—the spiritual and sidereal models of the seven
thousand times seven copies of them in later æons.

The mysterious number is once more prominent in the no less mysterious
Maruts. The _Vâyu Purâna_ shows, and the _Harivamsha_ corroborates,
concerning the Maruts—the oldest as the most incomprehensible of all the
secondary or lower Gods in the _Rig Veda_:

That they are _born in every Manvantara [Round], seven times
seven_ (or forty‐nine); that, in each Manvantara, _four times
seven_ (or twenty‐eight) obtain emancipation, but their places are
_filled up by persons reborn in that character_.(1473)

What are the Maruts in their Esoteric meaning, and who _those persons_
“reborn in that character”? In the _Rik_ and other _Vedas_, the Maruts are
represented as the Storm Gods and the _friends and allies_ of Indra; they
are the “Sons of Heaven and of Earth.” This led to an allegory that makes
them the children of Shiva, the great patron of the Yogîs:

The Mahâ Yogî, the great _ascetic_, in whom is centred the highest
perfection of austere penance and abstract meditation, _by which
the most unlimited powers are attained, marvels and miracles are
worked, the highest spiritual knowledge is acquired, and union
with the great spirit of the universe is eventually gained_.(1474)

In the _Rig Veda_ the name Shiva is unknown, but the corresponding God is
called Rudra, a name used for Agni, the Fire‐God, the Maruts being called
therein his sons. In the _Râmâyana_ and the _Purânas_, their mother,
Diti—the sister, or complement, and a form of Aditi—anxious to obtain a
son who would destroy Indra, is told by Kashyapa, the Sage, that if, “with
thoughts wholly pious and person entirely pure,” she carries the babe in
her womb “for a hundred years,”(1475) she will have such a son. But Indra
foils her in the design. With his thunderbolt he _divides the embryo in
her womb into seven portions_, and then divides every such portion _into
seven pieces again_, which become the swift‐moving deities, the
Maruts.(1476) These Deities are only another _aspect_, or a development,
of the Kumâras, who are patronymically Rudras, like many others.(1477)

Diti, being Aditi—unless the contrary is proven to us—Aditi, we say, or
Âkâsha in her highest form, is the Egyptian _seven‐fold_ Heaven. Every
true Occultist will understand what this means. Diti, we repeat, is the
sixth principle of _metaphysical_ Nature, the Buddhi of Âkâsha. Diti, the
Mother of the Maruts, is one of her terrestrial forms, made to represent,
at one and the same time, the Divine Soul in the ascetic, and the divine
aspirations of mystic Humanity toward deliverance from the webs of Mâyâ,
and consequent final bliss. Indra is now degraded, because of the Kali
Yuga, when such aspirations are no more general but have become abnormal
through a general spread of Ahamkâra, the feeling of Egotism, or “I‐am‐
ness” and ignorance; but in the beginning Indra was one of the greatest
Gods of the Hindû Pantheon, as the _Rig Veda_ shows. Surâdhipa the “chief
of the gods,” has fallen down from Jishnu, the “Leader of the Celestial
Host”—the Hindû St. Michael—to an opponent of asceticism, the enemy of
every holy aspiration. He is shown married to Aindrî (Indrânî), the
personification of Aindriyaka, the evolution of the element of senses,
whom he married “because of her _voluptuous attractions_”; after which he
began sending celestial female demons to excite the passions of holy men,
Yogîs, and “to beguile them from the potent penances which he dreaded.”
Therefore, Indra, now characterized as “the god of the firmament, the
personified atmosphere”—is in reality the cosmic principle Mahat, and the
fifth human principle, Manas in its dual aspect—as connected with Buddhi,
and as allowing itself to be dragged down by the Kâma principle, the body
of passions and desires. This is demonstrated by Brahmâ telling the
conquered God that his frequent defeats were due to Karma, and were a
punishment for his licentiousness, and the seduction of various nymphs. It
is in this latter character that he seeks, to save himself from
destruction, to destroy the coming “babe,” destined to conquer him—the
babe, of course, allegorizing the divine and steady will of the Yogî,
determined to resist all such temptations, and thus destroy the passions
within his earthly personality. Indra succeeds again, because flesh
conquers spirit.(1478) He divides the “embryo” (of new _divine_ Adeptship,
begotten once more by the Ascetics of the Âryan Fifth Race) into _seven_
portions (a reference not alone to the seven sub‐races of the new Root‐
Race, in each of which there will be a Manu,(1479) but also to the seven
degrees of Adeptship), and then each portion into seven pieces—alluding to
the Manu‐Rishis of each Root‐Race, and even sub‐race.

It does not seem difficult to perceive what is meant by the Maruts
obtaining “four times seven” emancipations in every Manvantara, and by
those persons who are _re‐born_ in that character, viz., of the Maruts in
their Esoteric meaning, and who “fill up their places.” The Maruts
represent (_a_) the passions that storm and rage within every Candidate’s
breast, when preparing for an ascetic life—this mystically; (_b_) the
Occult potencies concealed in the manifold aspects of Âkâsha’s lower
principles—her body, or Sthûla Sharîra, representing the terrestrial,
lower atmosphere of every inhabited Globe—this mystically and sidereally;
(_c_) actual conscious existences, beings of a cosmic and psychic nature.

At the same time, Marut in Occult parlance is one of the names given to
those Egos of great Adepts who have passed away, and are known also as
Nirmânakâyas; of those Egos for whom—_since they are beyond
illusion_—there is no Devachan, who, having either voluntarily renounced
Nirvâna for the good of mankind, or who not yet having reached it, remain
invisible on Earth. Therefore are the Maruts(1480) shown, firstly, as the
sons of Shiva‐Rudra, the Patron Yogî, whose Third Eye (mystically) must be
acquired by the Ascetic before he becomes an Adept; then, in their cosmic
character, as the subordinates of Indra and his opponents, under various
characters. The “four times seven” emancipations have a reference to the
four Rounds, and the four Races that preceded ours, in each of which
Maruta‐Jîvas (Monads) have been re‐born, and would have obtained final
liberation, if only they had chosen to avail themselves of it. But instead
of this, out of love for the good of mankind, which would struggle still
more hopelessly in the meshes of ignorance and misery _were it not for
this extraneous help_, they are re‐born over and over again “in that
character,” and thus “fill up their own places.” _Who_ they are, “on
Earth”—every student of Occult Science knows. And he also knows that the
Maruts are Rudras, among whom also the family of Tvashtri, a synonym of
Vishvakarman, the great Patron of the Initiates, is included. This gives
us an ample knowledge of their true nature.

The same for the septenary division of cosmos and the human principles.
The _Purânas_, along with other sacred texts, teem with allusions to this.
First of all, the Mundane Egg which contained Brahmâ, or the Universe, was
externally invested with _seven_ natural elements, at first loosely
enumerated as Water, Air, Fire, Ether, and _three secret_ elements; then
the “World” is said to be “encompassed on every side” by seven elements,
also _within_ the Egg—as explained:

The world is encompassed on every side, and above, and below, by
the shell of the egg (of Brahmâ) [Andakatâha].(1481)

Around the shell flows Water, which is surrounded with Fire; Fire by Air;
Air by Ether; Ether by the Origin of the Elements (Ahamkâra); the latter
by Universal Mind, or “Intellect,” as Wilson translates. It relates to
Spheres of Being as much as to Principles. Prithivî is not our Earth but
the World, the Solar System, and means the “broad,” the “wide.” In the
_Vedas_—the greatest of all authorities, though needing a key to be read
correctly—three terrestrial and three celestial Earths are mentioned as
having been called into existence simultaneously with Bhûmi, our Earth. We
have often been told that six, not _seven_, appears to be the number of
spheres, principles, etc. We answer that there are, in fact, only six
principles in man; since his body is _no_ principle, but the covering, the
shell of a principle. So with the Planetary Chain; therein, speaking
Esoterically, the Earth—as well as the seventh, or rather fourth plane,
one that stands as the seventh, if we count from the first triple kingdom
of the Elementals that begin its formation—may be left out of
consideration, being (to us) the only distinct body of the seven. The
language of Occultism is varied. But supposing that _three_ Earths only,
instead of seven, are meant in the _Vedas_, what are those three, since we
still know of but one? Evidently there _must be_ an Occult meaning in the
statement under consideration. Let us see. The “Earth that floats” on the
Universal Ocean of Space, which Brahmâ divides in the _Purânas_ into seven
Zones, is Prithivî, the World divided into seven principles—a cosmic
division, looking metaphysical enough, but, in reality, _physical_ in its
Occult effects. Many Kalpas later, our Earth is mentioned, and again, in
its turn, is divided into seven Zones according to the law of analogy
which guided ancient Philosophers. After which we find on it seven
Continents, seven Isles, seven Oceans, seven Seas and Rivers, seven
Mountains, seven Climates, etc.(1482)

Furthermore, it is not only in the Hindû scriptures and philosophy that
one finds references to the seven Earths, but in the Persian, Phœnician,
Chaldæan, and Egyptian cosmogonies, and even in Rabbinical literature. The
Phœnix(1483)—called by the Hebrews Onech ענק, from Phenoch, Enoch, the
symbol of a secret cycle and initiation, and by the Turks, Kerkes—lives a
thousand years, after which, kindling a flame, it is self‐consumed; and
then, reborn from itself, it lives another thousand years, up to _seven
times seven_,(1484) when comes the Day of Judgment. The “seven times
seven,” or forty‐nine, are a transparent allegory, and an allusion to the
forty‐nine Manus, the seven Rounds, and the seven times seven human Cycles
in each Round on each Globe. The Kerkes and the Onech stand for a Race
Cycle, and the mystical Tree Ababel, the “Father Tree” in the _Kurân_,
shoots out new branches and vegetation at every resurrection of the Kerkes
or Phœnix; the “Day of Judgment” meaning a minor Pralaya. The author of
the _Book of God_ and the _Apocalypse_ believes that:

The Phœnix is ... very plainly the same as the Simorgh of Persian
romance; and the account which is given us of this last bird yet
more decisively establishes the opinion that the death and revival
of the Phœnix exhibit the successive destruction and reproduction
of the world, which many believed to be effected by the agency of
a fiery deluge [and also a watery one in its turn]. When the
Simorgh was asked her age, she informed Caherman that this world
is very ancient, for it has been already _seven times
replenished_, with beings different from men, and _seven times
depopulated_:(1485) that the age of the human race in which we now
are, is to endure seven thousand years, and that she herself had
seen _twelve_ of these revolutions, and knew not how many more she
had to see.(1486)

The above, however, is no new statement. From Bailly, in the last century,
down to Dr. Kenealy, in the present, these facts have been noticed by a
number of writers; but now a connection can be established between the
Persian oracle and the Nazarene prophet. Says the author of the _Book of
God_:

The Simorgh is in reality the same as the winged Singh of the
Hindûs, and the Sphinx of the Egyptians. It is said that the
former will appear at the end of the world ... [as a] monstrous
lion‐bird.... From these the Rabbins have borrowed their mythos of
an enormous Bird, sometimes standing on the earth, sometimes
walking in the ocean ... while its head props the sky; and with
the symbol, they have also adopted the doctrine to which it
relates. They teach that there are to be _seven successive
renewals_ of the globe; that each reproduced system will last
_seven_ thousand years [?]; and that the _total duration of the
Universe_ will be 49,000 years. This opinion, which involves the
doctrine of the preëxistence of each renewed creature, they may
either have learned during their Babylonian captivity, or _it may
have been part of the primeval religion_ which their priests had
preserved from remote times.(1487)

It shows rather that the initiated Jews _borrowed_, and their non‐
initiated successors, the Talmudists, lost, the sense, and applied the
seven Rounds, and the forty‐nine Races, etc., wrongly.

Not only _their_ priests, but those of every other country. The Gnostics,
whose various teachings are the many echoes of the one primitive and
universal doctrine, put the same numbers, under another form, in the mouth
of Jesus in the very occult _Pistis Sophia_. We say more: even the
Christian editor or author of _Revelation_ has preserved this tradition
and speaks of the _seven_ Races, four of which, with part of the fifth,
are gone, and two have to come. It is stated as plainly as can be. Thus
saith the angel:

And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven
mountains, on which the woman sitteth. And there are _seven_
kings; _five_ are fallen, and one _is_, and the other is not yet
come.(1488)

Who, in the least acquainted with the symbolical language of old, will
fail to discern in the _five_ Kings that have fallen, the four Root‐Races
that were, and part of the Fifth, the one that _is_; and in the _other_,
that “is not yet come,” the Sixth and Seventh coming Root‐Races, as also
the sub‐races of this, our present Race? Another still more forcible
allusion to the seven Rounds and the forty‐nine Root‐Races in _Leviticus_,
will be found elsewhere, Part III.(1489)

E. Seven In Astronomy, Science, And Magic.

Again, number _seven_ is closely connected with the Occult significance of
the Pleiades, those seven daughters of Atlas, “the six present, the
seventh _hidden_.” In India they are connected with their nursling, the
war God, Kârttikeya. It was the Pleiades (in Sanskrit, Krittikâs) who gave
this name to the God, Kârttikeya being the planet Mars, _astronomically_.
As a God he is the son of Rudra, born without the intervention of a woman.
He is a Kumâra, a “virgin youth” again, generated in the fire from the
Seed of Shiva—the Holy Spirit—hence called Agni‐bhû. The late Dr. Kenealy
believed that, in India, Kârttikeya is the secret symbol of the Cycle of
the Naros, composed of 600, 666, and 777 years, according to whether solar
or lunar, divine or mortal, years are counted; and that the six visible,
or the seven actual sisters, the Pleiades, are needed for the completion
of this most secret and mysterious of all the astronomical and religious
symbols. Therefore, when intended to commemorate one particular event,
Kârttikeya was shown, of old, as a Kumâra, an Ascetic, with _six_
heads—one for each century of the Naros. When the symbolism was needed for
another event, then, in conjunction with the seven sidereal sisters,
Kârttikeya is seen accompanied by Kaumârî, or Senâ, his female aspect. He
is then riding on a peacock, the bird of Wisdom and Occult Knowledge, and
the Hindû Phœnix, whose Greek relation with the 600 years of the Naros is
well known. A six‐rayed star (double triangle), a Svastika, a six and
occasionally seven‐pointed crown, is on his brow; the peacock’s tail
represents the sidereal heavens; and the twelve signs of the Zodiac are
_hidden on his body_; for which he is also called Dvâdasha‐kara, the
“twelve‐handed,” and Dvâdashâksha, “twelve‐eyed.” It is as Shakti‐dhara,
however, the “spear‐holder,” and the conqueror of Târaka, Târaka‐jit, that
he is shown to be most famous.

As the years of the Naros are, in India, counted in two ways, either by
one hundred “years of the gods” (divine years), or one hundred “mortal
years,” we can see the tremendous difficulty the non‐initiated have in
arriving at a correct comprehension of this cycle, which plays such an
important part in St. John’s _Revelation_. It is the truly apocalyptic
cycle, because of its being of various lengths and relating to various
pre‐historic events, and in none of the numerous speculations about it
have we found any but a few _approximate_ truths.

Against the duration claimed by the Babylonians for their divine ages, it
has been urged that Suidas shows the Ancients counting days for years, in
their chronological computations. It is to Suidas and his authority that
Dr. Sepp appeals in his ingenious plagiarism—which we have already
exposed—of the Hindû figures 432. These they give in thousands and
millions of years, the duration of their Yugas, but Sepp dwarfed them to
4,320 _lunar_ years,(1490) “before the birth of Christ,” as “foreordained”
in the sidereal, in addition to the invisible, heavens, and proved “by the
apparition of the Star of Bethlehem.” But Suidas had no other warrant for
this assertion than his own speculations, and he was not an Initiate. He
cites, as a proof, Vulcan, and shows him reigning 4,477 years, or 4,477
_days_, as he thinks, or again rendered in years, 12 years, 3 months, and
7 days; he has, however, 5 days in his original—thus committing an error
even in such an easy calculation.(1491) True, there are other ancient
writers guilty of like fallacious speculations; Calisthenes, for instance,
who assigns to the astronomical observations of the Chaldæans only 1,903
years, whereas Epigenes recognizes 720,000 years.(1492) The whole of these
hypotheses made by profane writers are due to a misunderstanding. The
chronology of the Western peoples, ancient Greeks and Romans, was borrowed
from India. Now, it is said in the Tamil edition of _Bagavadam_ that 15
solar days make a Paccham; two Pacchams, or 30 days, make a month of
mortals, which is only one _day_ of the Pitara Devatâ or Pitris. Again, 2
of these months constitute a Rûdû, 3 Rûdûs make an Ayanam, and 2 Ayanams a
year of mortals, which is only a _day_ of the Gods. It is from such
misunderstood teachings that some Greeks have imagined that all the
initiated priests had transformed days into years!

This mistake of the ancient Greek and Latin writers became pregnant with
results in Europe. At the close of the past and the beginning of the
present century, Bailly, Dupuis, and others, relying upon the purposely
mutilated accounts of Hindû chronology, brought from India by certain
unscrupulous and too zealous missionaries, built quite a fantastic theory
on the subject. Because the Hindûs had made of half a revolution of the
moon a measure of time; and because a month composed of only fifteen days,
of which Quintus Curtius speaks,(1493) is found mentioned in Hindû
literature, therefore, it becomes a verified fact that their _year_ was
only half a year, when it was not called a _day_! The Chinese, also,
divided their Zodiac into twenty‐four parts, and hence their year into
twenty‐four fortnights, but such computation did not, nor does it, prevent
them having an astronomical year just the same as ours. They also have a
period of 60 days—the Southern Indian Rûdû—to this day in some provinces.
Moreover, Diodorus Siculus(1494) calls “_thirty days_ an Egyptian year,”
or that period during which the moon performs a complete revolution. Pliny
and Plutarch(1495) both speak of it; but does it stand to reason that the
Egyptians, who knew Astronomy as well as any other nation, made the
_lunar_ month consist of 30 days, when it is only 28 days with fractions?
This lunar period had an Occult meaning surely as well as had also the
Ayanam and the Rûdû of the Hindûs. The year of 2 months’ duration, and the
period of 60 days also, was a universal measure of time in antiquity, as
Bailly himself shows in his _Traité de l’ Astronomie Indienne et
Orientale_. The Chinamen, according to their own books, divided their year
into two parts, from one equinox to the other;(1496) the Arabs anciently
divided the year into six seasons, each composed of two months; in the
Chinese astronomical work called _Kioo‐tche_, it is said that two moons
make a measure of time, and six measures a year; and to this day the
aborigines of Kamschatka have their years of six months, as they had when
visited by Abbé Chappe.(1497) But is all this any reason for claiming that
when the Hindû _Purânas_ say a solar _year_, they mean one solar _day_!

It was the knowledge of the natural laws which make of seven the root
nature‐number, so to say, in the manifested world, or at any rate in our
present terrestrial life‐cycle, and the wonderful comprehension of its
workings, that unveiled to the Ancients so many of the mysteries of
Nature. It is these laws, again, and their processes on the sidereal,
terrestrial, and moral planes, which enabled the old Astronomers to
calculate correctly the duration of the cycles and their respective
effects on the march of events; to record beforehand—to prophesy, it is
called—the influence which they would have on the course and development
of the human races. The Sun, Moon, and Planets being the never‐erring
time‐measurers, whose potency and periodicity were well known, became thus
respectively the great ruler and rulers of our little system in all its
seven domains, or “spheres of action.”(1498)

This has been so evident and remarkable, that even many of the modern men
of Science, Materialists as well as Mystics, have had their attention
called to this law. Physicians and Theologians, Mathematicians and
Psychologists, have repeatedly drawn the attention of the world to this
fact of periodicity in the behaviour of “Nature.” These numbers are
explained in the Commentaries in the following words:

_The Circle is not the __“__One__”__ but the __“__All.__”_

_In the higher [Heaven], the impenetrable Rajah,_(_1499_)_ it [the Circle]
becomes One, because [it is] the indivisible, and there can be no Tau in
it._

_In the second [of the three Rajamsi, or the three __“__Worlds__”__], the
One becomes Two [male and female], and Three [with the Son or Logos], and
the Sacred Four [the Tetraktys, or Tetragrammaton]._

_In the third [the lower World or our Earth], the number becomes Four, and
Three, and Two. Take the first two, and thou wilt obtain Seven, the sacred
number of life; blend [the latter] with the middle Rajah, and thou wilt
have Nine, the sacred number of Being and Becoming._(1500)

When the Western Orientalists have mastered the real meaning of the Rig
Vedic divisions of the World—the two‐fold, three‐fold, six‐ and seven‐
fold, and especially the nine‐fold division—the mystery of the cyclic
divisions applied to Heaven and Earth, Gods and Men, will become clearer
to them than it is now. For:

_There is a harmony of numbers in all nature; in the force of
gravity, in the planetary movements, in the laws of heat, light,
electricity, and chemical affinity, in the forms of animals and
plants, in the perceptions of the mind._ The direction, indeed, of
modern natural and physical science is towards a generalization
which shall express the fundamental laws of all, by one simple
numerical ratio. We would refer to Professor Whewell’s _Philosophy
of the Inductive Sciences_, and to Mr. Hay’s researches into the
laws of harmonious colouring and form. _From these it appears that
the number seven is distinguished in the laws regulating the
harmonious perception of forms, colours, and sounds_, and probably
of taste also, if we could analyze our sensations of this kind
with mathematical accuracy.(1501)

So much so, indeed, that more than one Physician has stood aghast at the
_septenary_ periodical return of the cycles in the rise and fall of
various complaints, and Naturalists have felt themselves at an utter loss
to explain this law.

The birth, growth, maturity, vital functions, healthy revolutions
of change, diseases, decay and death, of insects, reptiles,
fishes, birds, mammals, and even of man, are more or less
controlled by a law of _completion in weeks_ [or seven
days].(1502)

Dr. Laycock, writing on the “Periodicity of Vital Phenomena,”(1503)
records a “most remarkable illustration and confirmation of the law in
insects.”(1504)

To all of which Mr. Grattan Guinness remarks very pertinently, as he
defends biblical chronology:

And man’s life ... is a _week_, a _week of decades_. “The days of
our years are three‐score years and ten.” Combining the testimony
of all these facts, we are bound to admit that _there prevails in
organic nature a law of septiform periodicity, a law of completion
in weeks_.(1505)

Without accepting the conclusions, and especially the premises of the
learned founder of “The East London Institute for Home and Foreign
Missions,” the writer accepts and welcomes his researches in the Occult
chronology of the _Bible_; just as, while rejecting the theories,
hypotheses, and generalizations of Modern Science, we bow before its great
achievements in the world of the Physical, or in all the minor details of
material Nature.

There is most assuredly an Occult “chronological system in Hebrew
scripture,” the _Kabalah_ being its warrant; moreover there is in it “a
system of weeks,” based on the archaic Indian system, which may still be
found in the old Jyotisha.(1506) And there are in it cycles of the “_week_
of days,” of the “_week_ of months,” of years, of centuries, and even of
millenniums, and more, of the “week of years of years.”(1507) But all this
can be found in the Archaic Doctrine. And if the common source of the
chronology in every scripture, however _veiled_, is denied in the case of
the _Bible_; then it will have to be shown how, in face of the six days
and the seventh (a Sabbath), we can escape connecting the Genetic with the
Paurânic Cosmogonies. For the first “week of creation” shows the
septiformity of its chronology and thus connects it with Brahmâ’s “seven
creations.” The able volume from the pen of Mr. Grattan Guinness, in which
he has collected in some 760 pages every proof of this septiform
calculation, is good evidence. For if the biblical chronology is, as he
says, “regulated by the law of weeks,” and if it is septenary, whatever
the measures of the creation week and the length of its days may be, and
if, finally, “the Bible system includes weeks on a great variety of
scales,” then this system is shown to be identical with all the Pagan
systems. Moreover, the attempt to show that 4,320 years, in lunar months,
elapsed between the “Creation” and the “Nativity,” is a clear and
unmistakable connection with the 4,320,000 years of the Hindû Yugas.
Otherwise, why make such efforts to prove that these figures, which are
preëminently Chaldæan and Indo‐Âryan, play such a part in the _New
Testament_? This we shall now prove still more forcibly.

Let the impartial critic compare the two accounts—the _Vishnu Purâna_ and
the _Bible_—and he will find that the “seven creations” of Brahmâ are at
the foundation of the “week of creation” in _Genesis_. The two allegories
are different, but the systems are both built on the same foundation‐
stone. The _Bible_ can be understood _only by the light of_ the _Kabalah_.
Take the _Zohar_, the “Book of Concealed Mystery,” however now disfigured,
and compare. The seven Rishis and the fourteen Manus, of the seven
Manvantaras, issue from Brahmâ’s head; they are his “Mind‐born Sons,” and
it is with them that begins the division of mankind into its Races from
the Heavenly Man, the manifested Logos, who is Brahmâ Prajâpati. Speaking
of the “Skull” (Head) of Macroprosopus, the Ancient One(1508) (in Sanskrit
Sanat is an appellation of Brahmâ), the _Ha Idra Rabba Qadisha_, or
“Greater Holy Assembly,” says that in every one of his hairs is a hidden
fountain issuing from the concealed brain.

And it shineth and goeth forth through that hair unto the hair of
Microprosopus, and from it [which is the manifest Quaternary, the
Tetragrammaton] is his brain formed; and thence that brain goeth
forth into _thirty_ and _two_ paths [or the Triad and the Duad, or
again 432].

And again:

Thirteen curls of hair exist on the one side and on the other of
the skull [_i.e._, six on one and six on the other, the thirteenth
being also the fourteenth, as it is male‐female]; ... and through
them commenceth the division of the hair [the division of things,
of mankind and the races].(1509)

“We _six_ are lights which shine forth from a _seventh_ (light),” saith
Rabbi Abba; “_thou art the seventh light_”—the synthesis of us all—he
adds, speaking of Tetragrammaton and his seven “companions,” whom he calls
the “eyes of Tetragrammaton.”(1510)

Tetragrammaton is Brahmâ Prajâpati, who assumed _four_ forms, in order to
create four kinds of _supernal_ creatures, _i.e._, made himself _four‐
fold_, or the manifest Quaternary;(1511) after that, he is re‐born in the
_seven_ Rishis, his Mânasaputras, “Mind‐born Sons,” who became later,
nine, twenty‐one, and so on, and who are all said to be born from various
parts of Brahmâ.(1512)

There are two Tetragrammatons: the Macroprosopus and the Microprosopus.
The first is the absolute perfect Square, or the Tetraktys within the
Circle, both abstract conceptions, and is therefore called Ain—Non‐being,
_i.e._, illimitable or absolute “Be‐ness.” But when viewed as
Microprosopus, or the Heavenly Man, the Manifested Logos, he is the
Triangle in the Square—the _sevenfold_ Cube, not the fourfold, or the
plane Square. For it is written in “The Greater Holy Assembly”:

And concerning this, the children of Israel wished to inquire in
their hearts [know in their minds], like as it is written, Exod.
xvii. 7: “Is the Tetragrammaton in the midst of us, or the
Negatively Existent One?”(1513)

—where they distinguished between Microprosopus, who is called
Tetragrammaton, and between Macroprosopus, who is called Ain, the
Negatively Existent.(1514)

Therefore, Tetragrammaton is the Three _made_ four and the Four made
three, and is represented on this Earth by his seven “Companions,” or
“Eyes”—the “seven eyes of the Lord.” Microprosopus is, at best, only a
_secondary_ manifested Deity. For “The Greater Holy Assembly” elsewhere
says:

We have learned that there _were ten_ (_Rabbis_) [Companions]
entered into (_the Assembly_) [the Sod, “mysterious assembly or
mystery”] and that _seven_ came forth(1515) [_i.e._, _ten_ for the
unmanifested, seven for the manifested Universe].

1158. And when Rabbi Schimeon revealed the Arcana, there were
found none present there save those [seven] (_companions_). And
Rabbi Schimeon called them the seven eyes of Tetragrammaton, like
as it is written, Zach. iii. 9: “These are the seven eyes [or
principles] of Tetragrammaton” [—_i.e._, the four‐fold Heavenly
Man, or pure Spirit, is resolved into septenary man, pure Matter
and Spirit].(1516)

Thus the Tetrad is Microprosopus, and the latter is the male‐female
Chokmah‐Binah, the second and third Sephiroth. The Tetragrammaton is the
very essence of number _seven_, in its terrestrial significance. Seven
stands between four and nine—the basis and foundation, astrally, of our
physical world and man, in the kingdom of Malkuth.

For Christians and believers, this reference to _Zechariah_ and especially
to the _Epistle of Peter_,(1517) ought to be conclusive. In the old
symbolism, “man,” chiefly the Inner Spiritual Man is called a “stone.”
Christ is the corner‐stone, and Peter refers to all men as “lively”
(living) stones. Therefore a “stone with seven eyes” on it can only mean a
man whose constitution (_i.e._, his “principles”) is septenary.

To demonstrate more clearly the seven in Nature, it may be added that not
only does the number seven govern the periodicity of the phenomena of
life, but that it is also found dominating the series of chemical
elements, and equally paramount in the world of sound and in that of
colour as revealed to us by the spectroscope. This number is the factor,
_sine quâ non_, in the production of occult astral phenomena.

It is needless to refer in detail to the number of vibrations constituting
the notes of the musical scale; they are strictly analogous to the scale
of chemical elements, and also to the scale of colour as unfolded by the
spectroscope, although in the latter case we deal with only _one_ octave,
while both in music and chemistry we find a series of _seven_ octaves
represented theoretically, of which _six_ are fairly complete and in
ordinary use in both sciences. Thus, to quote Hellenbach:

It has been established that, from the standpoint of phenomenal
law, upon which all our knowledge rests, the vibrations of sound
and light increase regularly, that they divide themselves into
_seven_ columns, and that the successive numbers in each column
are closely allied; _i.e._, that they exhibit a close relationship
which not only is expressed in the figures themselves, but also is
practically confirmed in chemistry as in music, in the latter of
which the ear confirms the verdict of the figures.... The fact
that this periodicity and variety is governed by the number
_seven_ is undeniable, and it far surpasses the limits of mere
chance, and must be assumed to have an adequate cause, which cause
must be discovered.

Verily, then, as Rabbi Abba said:

We are six lights which shine forth from a seventh (_light_); thou
[Tetragrammaton] art the seventh light (_the origin of_) us all.

For assuredly there is no stability in those six, save (_what they
derive_) from the seventh. For all things depend from the
seventh.(1518)

The ancient and modern Western American Zuñi Indians seem to have
entertained similar views. Their present‐day customs, their traditions and
records, all point to the fact that, from time immemorial, their
institutions, political, social and religious, were, and still are, shaped
according to the septenary principle. Thus all their ancient towns and
villages were built in clusters of six, around a seventh. It is always a
group of seven, or of thirteen, and always the six surround the seventh.
Again, their sacerdotal hierarchy is composed of six “Priests of the
House” seemingly synthesized in the seventh, who is a woman, the
“Priestess Mother.” Compare this with the “seven great officiating
priests” spoken of in the _Anugîtâ_, the name given to the “seven senses,”
exoterically, and to the seven human principles, Esoterically. Whence this
identity of symbolism? Shall we still doubt the fact of Arjuna going over
to Pâtâla, the Antipodes, America, and there marrying Ulûpî, the daughter
of the Nâga, or rather Nargal, king? But to the Zuñi priests.

These receive, to this day, an annual tribute of corn of seven colours.
Undistinguished from other Indians during the rest of the year, on a
certain day they come out—six priests and one priestess—arrayed in their
priestly robes, each of a colour sacred to the particular God whom the
priest serves and personifies; each of them representing one of the seven
regions, and each receiving corn of the colour corresponding to that
region. Thus, the white represents the East, because from the East comes
the first sun‐light; the yellow corresponds to the North, from the colour
of the flames produced by the Aurora Borealis; the red, the South, as from
that quarter comes the heat; the blue stands for the West, the colour of
the Pacific Ocean, which lies to the West; black is the colour of the
nether underground region—darkness; corn with grains of all colours on one
ear represents the colours of the upper region—of the firmament, with its
rosy and yellow clouds, shining stars, etc. The “speckled” corn, each
grain containing all the colours, is that of the “Priestess‐Mother”—woman
containing in herself the seeds of all races past, present and future; Eve
being the mother of all living.

Apart from these was the Sun—the Great Deity—whose priest was the
spiritual head of the nation. These facts were ascertained by Mr. F.
Hamilton Cushing, who, as many are aware, became a Zuñi, lived with them,
was initiated into their religious mysteries, and has learned more about
them than any other man now living.

Seven is also the great magic number. In the Occult Records the weapon
mentioned in the _Purânas_ and the _Mahâbhârata_—the Âgneyâstra or “fiery
weapon” bestowed by Aurva upon his Chelâ Sagara—is said to be constructed
of seven elements. This weapon—supposed by some ingenious Orientalists to
have been a “rocket” (!)—is one of the many thorns in the side of our
modern Sanskritists. Wilson exercises his penetration over it, on several
pages in his _Specimens of the Hindû Theatre_, and finally fails to
explain it. He can make nothing out of the Âgneyâstra, for he argues:

These weapons are of a very unintelligible character. Some of them
are occasionally wielded as missiles; but, in general, they
_appear to be mystical powers exercised by the individual_—such as
those of paralyzing an enemy, or _locking his senses fast in
sleep_, or bringing down storm, and rain, and fire, from
heaven.(1519)... They are supposed to assume celestial shapes,
endowed with human faculties.... The _Râmâyana_ calls them the
sons of Krishâshva.(1520)

The Shastra‐devatâs, “Gods of the divine weapons,” are no more
Âgneyâstras, the weapons, than the gunners of modern artillery are the
cannon they direct. But this simple solution did not seem to strike the
eminent Sanskritist. Nevertheless, as he himself says of the armiform
progeny of Krishâshva, “the allegorical origin of the Âgneyâstra weapons
is, undoubtedly, the more ancient.”(1521) It is the fiery javelin of
Brahmâ.

The seven‐fold Âgneyâstra, like the seven senses and the seven principles,
symbolized by the seven priests, are of untold antiquity. How old is the
doctrine believed in by Theosophists, the following Section will tell.

F. The Seven Souls Of The Egyptologists.

If one turns to those wells of information, _The Natural Genesis_ and the
_Lectures_ of Mr. Gerald Massey, the proofs of the antiquity of the
doctrine under analysis become positively overwhelming. That the belief of
the author differs from ours can hardly invalidate the facts. He views the
symbol from a purely natural standpoint, one perhaps a trifle too
materialistic, because too much that of an ardent Evolutionist and
follower of the modern Darwinian dogmas. Thus he shows that:

The student of Böhme’s books finds much in them concerning these
Seven “Fountain Spirits,” and primary powers, treated as seven
properties of Nature in the alchemistic and astrological phase of
the mediæval mysteries....

The followers of Böhme look on such matter as the divine
revelation of his inspired Seership. They know nothing of the
natural genesis, the history and persistence of the “Wisdom”(1522)
of the past (or of the broken links), and are unable to recognize
the physical features of the ancient “Seven Spirits” beneath their
modern metaphysical or alchemist mask. A second connecting link
between the theosophy of Böhme and the physical origins of
Egyptian thought, is extant in the fragments of _Hermes
Trismegistus_.(1523) No matter whether these teachings are called
Illuminatist, Buddhist, Kabalist, Gnostic, Masonic, or Christian,
the elemental types can only be truly known in their
beginnings.(1524) When the prophets or visionary showmen of
cloudland come to us claiming original inspiration, and utter
something new, we judge of its value by what it is in itself. But
if we find they bring us the ancient matter which they cannot
account for, and we can, it is natural that we should judge it by
the primary significations rather than the latest
pretensions.(1525) It is useless for us to read our later thought
into the earliest types of expression, and then say the ancients
meant that!(1526) Subtilized interpretations which have become
doctrines and dogmas in theosophy have now to be tested by their
genesis in physical phenomena, in order that we may explode their
false pretensions to supernatural origin or supernatural
knowledge.(1527)

But the able author of _The Book of the Beginnings_ and of _The Natural
Genesis_ does—very fortunately, for us—quite the reverse. He demonstrates
most triumphantly our Esoteric (Buddhist) teachings, by showing them
identical with those of Egypt. Let the reader judge from his learned
lecture on “The Seven Souls of Man.”(1528) Says the author:

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.(1529)

Just so, for the Hindûs place their seven primitive Rishis in the Great
Bear, and call this constellation the abode of the Saptarshi, Riksha and
Chitra‐shikhandinas. And their Adepts claim to know whether it is only an
astronomical myth, or a primordial mystery having a deeper meaning than it
bears on its surface. We are also told that:

The Egyptians divided the face of the sky by night into seven
parts. The primary Heaven was sevenfold.(1530)

So it was with the Âryans. One has but to read the _Purânas_ about the
beginnings of Brahmâ and his Egg, to see this. Have the Âryans then, taken
the idea from the Egyptians? But, as the lecturer proceeds:

The earliest forces recognized in Nature were reckoned as seven in
number. These became Seven Elementals, devils [?], or later
divinities. Seven properties were assigned to Nature—as matter,
cohesion, fluxion, coagulation, accumulation, station, and
division—and _seven elements or souls to man_.(1531)

All this was taught in the Esoteric Doctrine, but it was interpreted and
its mysteries unlocked, as already stated, with _seven_, not two or, at
the utmost, three keys; hence the causes and their effects worked in
invisible or mystic as well as in psychic Nature, and were made referable
to Metaphysics and Psychology as much as to Physiology. As the author
says:

A principle of _sevening_, so to say, was introduced, and the
number seven supplied a sacred type _that could be used for
manifold purposes_.(1532)

And it was so used. For:

The seven souls of the Pharaoh are often mentioned in the Egyptian
texts.... _Seven souls, or principles in man were identified by
our British Druids_.... The Rabbins also ran the number of souls
up to seven: so, likewise, do the Karens of India.(1533)

And then, the author, with several misspellings, tabulates the two
teachings—the Esoteric and the Egyptian—and shows that the latter had the
same series and in the same order.

[Esoteric] Indian. Egyptian.
1. Rûpa, body or element of 1. Kha, body.
form.
2. Prâna, the breath of life. 2. Ba, the soul of breath.
3. Astral body. 3. Khaba, the shade.
4. Manas, or 4. Akhu, intelligence or
intelligence.(1534) perception.
5. Kâma Rûpa, or animal soul. 5. Seb, ancestral soul.
6. Buddhi, or spiritual soul. 6. Putah, the first
intellectual father.
7. Âtmâ, pure spirit. 7. Atmu, a divine, or eternal
soul.(1535)

Further on, the lecturer formulates these seven (Egyptian) Souls, as (1)
The Soul of Blood—the _formative_; (2) The Soul of Breath—that _breathes_;
(3) The Shade or Covering Soul—that _envelopes_; (4) The Soul of
Perception—that _perceives_; (5) The Soul of Pubescence—that _procreates_;
(6) The Intellectual Soul—that _reproduces intellectually_; and (7) The
Spiritual Soul—that is _perpetuated permanently_.

From the exoteric and physiological standpoint this may be very correct;
it becomes less so from the Esoteric point of view. To maintain this, does
not at all mean that the “Esoteric Buddhists” _resolve men into a number
of elementary spirits_, as Mr. G. Massey, in the same lecture, accuses
them of maintaining. No “Esoteric Buddhist” has ever been guilty of any
such absurdity. Nor has it been ever imagined that these shadows “become
spiritual beings in another world,” or “seven potential spirits or
elementaries of another life.” What is maintained is simply that every
time the immortal Ego incarnates it becomes, as a total, a compound unit
of Matter and Spirit, which together act on seven different planes of
being and consciousness. Elsewhere, Mr. Gerald Massey adds:

The seven souls [our “principles”] ... are often mentioned in the
Egyptian texts. The moon‐god, Taht‐Esmun, or the later sun‐god,
expressed the seven nature‐powers that were prior to himself, and
were summed up in him as his seven souls [we say “principles”]....
The seven stars in the hand of the Christ in Revelation, have the
same significance.(1536)

And a still greater one, as these stars represent also the _seven keys_ of
the Seven Churches or the Sodalian Mysteries, kabalistically. However, we
will not stop to discuss, but add that other Egyptologists have also
discovered that the septenary constitution of man was a cardinal doctrine
with the old Egyptians. In a series of remarkable articles in the
_Sphinx_, of Munich, Herr Franz Lambert gives incontrovertible proof of
his conclusions from the _Book of the Dead_ and other Egyptian records.
For details the reader must be referred to the articles themselves.

Böhme, the prince of all the mediæval seers, says:

We find seven especial properties in nature whereby this only
Mother works all things [which he calls fire, light, sound (the
upper three) and _desire_, _bitterness_, _anguish_, and
_substantiality_, thus analyzing the lower in his own mystic way];
whatever the six forms are spiritually, that the seventh [the body
or substantiality], is essentially. These are the seven forms of
the Mother of all Beings, from whence all that is in this world is
generated.(1537)

And again:

The Creator hath, in the body of this world, generated himself as
it were _creaturely_ in his qualifying or Fountain Spirits, and
all the stars are ... God’s powers, and the whole body of the
world consisteth in the seven qualifying or fountain
spirits.(1538)

This is rendering in mystical language our theosophical doctrine. But how
can we agree with Mr. Gerald Massey when he states that:

The Seven Races of Men that have been sublimated and made
Planetary [?] by Esoteric Buddhism,(1539) may be met with in the
Bundahish as (1) the earth‐men; (2) water‐men; (3) breast‐eared
men; (4) breast‐eyed men; (5) one‐legged men; (6) bat‐winged men;
(7) men with tails.(1540)

Each of these descriptions, allegorical and even perverted in their later
form, is, nevertheless, an echo of the Secret Doctrine teaching. They all
refer to the pre‐human evolution of the “Water‐men terrible and bad” by
_unaided_ Nature through millions of years, as previously described. But
we deny point‐blank the assertion that “these were never real races,” and
point to the Archaic Stanzas for our answer. It is easy to infer and to
say that our “instructors have mistaken these shadows of the Past, for
things human and spiritual”; but that “they are neither, and never were
either,” it is less easy to prove. The assertion must ever remain on a par
with the Darwinian claim that man and the ape had a common pithecoid
ancestor. What the lecturer takes for a “mode of expression” and nothing
more, in the Egyptian _Ritual_, we take as having quite another and an
important meaning. Here is one instance. Says the _Ritual_, the _Book of
the Dead_:

“I am the mouse.” “I am the hawk.” “I am the ape.”... “_I am the
crocodile whose soul comes from_ MEN.”... “_I am the soul of the
gods._”(1541)

The last sentence but one is explained by the lecturer, who says
parenthetically, “_that is, as a type of intelligence_,” and the last as
meaning, “the Horus, or Christ, as the outcome of all.”

The Occult Teaching answers: It means far more.

It gives first of all a corroboration of the teaching that, while the
human Monad has passed on Globe A and others, in the First Round, through
all the three kingdoms—the mineral, the vegetable, and the animal—in this
our Fourth Round, every mammal has sprung from Man, if the semi‐ethereal,
many‐shaped creature with the _human_ Monad in it, of the first two Races,
can be regarded as Man. But it must be so called; for, in the Esoteric
language, it is not the form of flesh, blood, and bones, now referred to
as man, which is in any way the Man, but the inner divine Monad with its
manifold principles or aspects.

The lecture referred to, however, much as it opposes _Esoteric Buddhism_
and its teachings, is an eloquent answer to those who have tried to
represent the whole as a new‐fangled doctrine. And there are many such, in
Europe, America, and even India. Yet, between the Esotericism of the old
Arhats, and that which has now survived in India among the few Brâhmans
who have seriously studied their Secret Philosophy, the difference does
not appear so very great. It seems centred in, and limited to, the
question of the order of the evolution of cosmic and other principles,
more than anything else. At all events it is no greater divergence than
the everlasting question of the _filioque_ dogma, which since the eighth
century has separated the Roman Catholic from the older Greek Eastern
Church. Yet, whatever the differences in the forms in which the septenary
dogma is presented, the substance is there, and its presence and
importance in the Brâhmanical system may be judged by what one of India’s
learned meta‐physicians and Vedântic scholars says of it:

The real esoteric seven‐fold classification is one of the most
important, if not the most important classification, which has
received its arrangement from the mysterious constitution of this
eternal type. I may also mention in this connection that the four‐
fold classification claims the same origin. The light of life, as
it were, seems to be refracted by the treble‐faced prism of
Prakriti, having the three Gunams for its three faces, and divided
into seven rays, which develop in course of time the seven
principles of this classification. The progress of development
presents some points of similarity to the gradual development of
the rays of the spectrum. While the four‐fold classification is
amply sufficient for all practical purposes, this real seven‐fold
classification is of great theoretical and scientific importance.
It will be necessary to adopt it to explain certain classes of
phenomena noticed by occultists; and it is perhaps better fitted
to be the basis of a perfect system of psychology. It is not the
peculiar property of the “Trans‐Himâlayan Esoteric Doctrine.” In
fact, it has a closer connection with the Brâhmanical Logos than
with the Buddhist Logos. In order to make my meaning clear I may
point out here that the Logos has seven forms. In other words,
there are seven kinds of Logoi in the Cosmos. Each of these has
became the central figure of one of the seven main branches of the
ancient Wisdom‐Religion. This classification is not the seven‐fold
classification we have adopted. I make this assertion without the
slightest fear of contradiction. The real classification has all
the requisites of a scientific classification. It has seven
distinct principles, which correspond with seven distinct states
of Prajñâ or consciousness. It bridges the gulf between the
objective and subjective, and indicates the mysterious circuit
through which ideation passes. The seven principles are allied to
seven states of matter, and to seven forms of force. These
principles are harmoniously arranged between two poles, which
define the limits of _human_ consciousness.(1542)

The above is perfectly correct, save, perhaps, on one point. The “seven‐
fold classification” in the Esoteric System has never (to the writer’s
knowledge) been claimed by any one belonging to it, as “the peculiar
property of the ‘Trans‐Himâlayan Esoteric Doctrine’ ”; but only as having
survived in that old School alone. It is no more the property of the
Trans‐, than it is of the Cis‐Himâlayan Esoteric Doctrine, but is simply
the common inheritance of all such Schools, left to the Sages of the Fifth
Root‐Race by the great Siddhas(1543) of the Fourth. Let us remember that
the Atlanteans became the terrible sorcerers, now celebrated in so many of
the oldest MSS. of India, only toward their “Fall,” whereby the submersion
of their Continent was brought on. What is claimed is simply that the
Wisdom imparted by the “Divine Ones”—born through the Kriyâshaktic powers
of the Third Race before its Fall and separation into sexes—to the Adepts
of the early Fourth Race, has remained in all its pristine purity in a
certain Brotherhood. The said School or Fraternity being closely connected
with a certain island of an inland sea—believed in by both Hindûs and
Buddhists, but called “mythical” by Geographers and Orientalists—the less
one talks of it, the wiser he will be. Nor can one accept the said “seven‐
fold classification” as having “a closer connection with the Brâhmanical
Logos than with the Buddhist Logos,” since both are identical, whether the
one Logos is called Îshvara or Avalokiteshvara, Brahmâ or Padmapâni. These
are, however, very small differences, more fanciful than real, in fact.
Brâhmanism and Buddhism, both viewed from their orthodox aspects, are as
inimical and as irreconcilable as water and oil. Each of these great
bodies, however, has a vulnerable place in its constitution. While even in
their esoteric interpretation both can agree but to disagree, once that
their respective vulnerable points are confronted, every disagreement must
fall, for the two will find themselves on common ground. The “Achilles’
heel” of orthodox Brâhmanism is the Advaita philosophy, whose followers
are called by the pious “Buddhists in disguise”; as that of orthodox
Buddhism is Northern Mysticism, as represented by the disciples of the
philosophies of the Yogâchârya School of Âryâsangha and the Mahâyâna, who
are twitted in their turn by their co‐religionists as “Vedântins in
disguise.” The Esoteric Philosophy of both these can be but one if
carefully analyzed and compared, as Gautama Buddha and Shankarâchârya are
most closely connected, if one believes tradition and certain Esoteric
Teachings. Thus every difference between the two will be found one of form
rather than of substance.

A most mystic discourse, full of septenary symbology, may be found in the
_Anugita_(1544) There the Brâhmana narrates the bliss of having crossed
beyond the regions of illusion:

In which fancies are the gadflies and mosquitoes, in which grief
and joy are cold and heat, in which delusion is the blinding
darkness, in which avarice is the beasts of prey and reptiles, in
which desire and anger are the obstructors.

The sage describes the entrance into and exit from the forest—a symbol for
man’s life‐time—and also that forest itself:(1545)

In that forest are seven large trees [the senses, mind and
understanding, or Manas and Buddhi, included], seven fruits, and
seven guests; seven hermitages, seven (forms of) concentration,
and seven (forms of) initiation. This is the description of the
forest. That forest is filled with trees producing splendid
flowers and fruits of five colours.

The senses, says the commentator:

Are called trees, as being producers of the fruits ... pleasures
and pains ...; the guests are the powers of each sense
personified—they receive the fruits above described; the
hermitages are the trees ... in which the guests take shelter; the
seven forms of concentration are the exclusion from the self of
the seven functions of the seven senses, etc., already referred
to; the seven forms of initiation refer to the initiation into the
higher life, by repudiating as not one’s own the actions of each
member out of the group of seven.(1546)

The explanation is harmless, if unsatisfactory. Says the Brâhmana,
continuing his description:

That forest is filled with trees producing flowers and fruits of
four colours. That forest is filled with trees producing flowers
and fruits of three colours, and mixed. That forest is filled with
trees producing flowers and fruits of two colours, and of
beautiful colours. That forest is filled with trees producing
flowers and fruits of one colour, and fragrant. That forest is
filled [instead of with seven] with two large trees producing
numerous flowers and fruits of undistinguished colours [mind and
understanding—the two higher senses, or theosophically, Manas and
Buddhi]. There is one fire [the Self] here, connected with the
Brahman,(1547) and having a good mind [or _true knowledge_,
according to Arjuna Mishra]. And there is fuel here, (namely) the
five senses [or human passions]. The seven (forms of) emancipation
from them are the seven (forms of) initiation. The qualities are
the fruits.... There ... the great sages receive hospitality. And
when they have been worshipped and have disappeared, another
forest shines forth, in which _intelligence_ is the tree, and
emancipation the fruit, and which possesses shade (in the form of)
tranquillity, which depends on knowledge, which has contentment
for its water, and which has the Kshetrajña(1548) within for the
sun.

Now, all the above is very plain, and no Theosophist, even among the least
learned, can fail to understand the allegory. And yet, we see great
Orientalists making a perfect mess of it in their explanations. The “great
sages” who “receive hospitality” are explained as meaning the senses,
“which, having worked _as unconnected with the self_ are finally absorbed
into it.” But one fails to understand, if the senses are “unconnected”
with the “Higher Self,” in what manner they can be “absorbed into it.” One
would think, on the contrary, that it is just because the _personal_
senses gravitate and strive to be connected with the _impersonal_ Self,
that the latter, which is Fire, burns the lower five and purifies thereby
the higher two, “mind and understanding,” or the higher aspects of
Manas(1549) and Buddhi. This is quite apparent from the text. The “great
sages” _disappear_ after having “been worshipped.” Worshipped by whom if
they (the presumed senses) are “unconnected with the self”? By Mind, of
course; by Manas (in this case merged in the _sixth sense_) which is not,
and cannot be, the Brahman, the Self, or Kshetrajña—the Soul’s Spiritual
Sun. Into the latter, in time, Manas itself must be absorbed. It has
worshipped “great sages” and given hospitality to _terrestrial_ wisdom;
but once that “another forest shone forth” upon it, it is Intelligence
(Buddhi, the seventh sense, but sixth principle) which is transformed into
_the_ Tree—that Tree whose fruit is emancipation—which finally destroys
the very roots of the Ashvattha tree, the symbol of _life_ and of its
illusive joys and pleasures. And therefore, those who attain to that state
of emancipation have, in the words of the above‐cited Sage, “no fear
afterwards.” In this state “the end cannot be perceived because it extends
on all sides.”

“There always dwell seven females there,” he goes on to say, carrying out
the imagery. These females—who, according to Arjuna Mishra, are the Mahat,
Ahamkâra and five Tanmâtras—have always their faces turned downwards, as
they are obstacles in the way of spiritual ascension.

In that same [Brahman, the Self] the seven perfect sages, together
with their chiefs, ... abide, and again emerge from the same.
Glory, brilliance and greatness, enlightenment, victory,
perfection and power—these seven rays follow after this same sun
[Kshetrajña, the Higher Self].... Those whose wishes are reduced
[the unselfish]; ... whose sins [passions] are burnt up by
penance, merging the self in the self,(1550) devote themselves to
Brahman. Those people who understand the forest of knowledge
[Brahman, or the Self], praise tranquillity. And aspiring to that
forest, they are [re‐] born so as not to lose courage. Such,
indeed, is this holy forest.... And understanding it, they [the
sages] act (accordingly), being directed by the Kshetrajña.

No translator among the Western Orientalists has yet perceived in the
foregoing allegory anything higher than mysteries connected with
sacrificial ritualism, penance, or ascetic ceremonies, and Hatha Yoga. But
he who understands symbolical imagery, and hears the voice of _Self within
Self_, will see in this something far higher than mere ritualism, however
often he may err in minor details of the Philosophy.

And here we must be allowed a last remark. No true Theosophist, from the
most ignorant up to the most learned, ought to claim infallibility for
anything he may say or write upon Occult matters. The chief point is to
admit that, in many a way, in the classification of either cosmic or human
principles, in addition to mistakes in the order of evolution, and
especially on metaphysical questions, those of us who pretend to teach
others more ignorant than ourselves—are all liable to err. Thus mistakes
have been made in _Isis Unveiled_, in _Esoteric Buddhism_, in _Man_, in
_Magic: White and Black_, etc., and more than one mistake is likely to be
found in the present work. This cannot be helped. For a large or even a
small work on such abstruse subjects to be entirely exempt from error and
blunder, it would have to be written from its first to its last page by a
great Adept, if not by an Avatâra. Then only should we say, “This is
verily a work without sin or blemish in it!” But so long as the artist is
imperfect, how can his work be perfect? “Endless is the search for truth!”
Let us love it and aspire to it for its own sake, and not for the glory or
benefit a minute portion of its revelation may confer on us. For who of us
can presume to have the _whole_ truth at his fingers’ ends, even upon one
minor teaching of Occultism?

Our chief point in the present subject, however, has been to show that the
septenary doctrine, or division of the constitution of man, was a very
ancient one, and was not invented by us. This has been successfully done,
for we are supported in this, consciously and unconsciously, by a number
of ancient, mediæval, and modern writers. What the former said, was well
said; what the latter repeated, has generally been distorted. An instance:
Read the Pythagorean Fragments, and study the septenary man as given by
the Rev. G. Oliver, the learned Mason, in his _Pythagorean Triangle_, who
speaks as follows:

The Theosophic Philosophy ... counted seven properties [or
principles] in man—viz.:

(1) The divine golden man.

(2) The inward holy body from fire and light, like pure silver.

(3) The elemental man.

(4) The mercurial ... paradisiacal man.

(5) The martial soul‐like man.

(6) The venerine, ascending to the outward desire.

(7) The solar man, [a witness to and] an inspector of the wonders
of God [the Universe].

They had also seven fountain spirits or powers of nature.(1551)

Compare this jumbled account and distribution of Western Theosophic
Philosophy with the latest Theosophic explanations by the Eastern School
of Theosophy, and then decide which is the more correct. Verily:

Wisdom hath builded her house,
She hath hewn out her _seven pillars_.(1552)

As to the charge that our School has not adopted the sevenfold
classification of the Brâhmans, but has confused it, this is quite unjust.
To begin with, the “School” is one thing, its exponents (to Europeans)
quite another. The latter have first to learn the A B C of practical
Eastern Occultism, before they can be made to understand correctly the
tremendously abstruse classification based on the seven distinct states of
Prajñâ or Consciousness; and, above all, to realize thoroughly what Prajñâ
_is_, in Eastern metaphysics. To give a Western student that
classification is to try to make him suppose that he can account for the
origin of consciousness, by accounting for the process by which a certain
knowledge, though _only one of the states_ of that consciousness, came to
him; in other words, it is to make him account for something he knows on
_this_ plane, by something he knows nothing about on the other planes;
_i.e._, to lead him from the spiritual and the psychological, direct to
the ontological. This is why the primary, old classification was adopted
by the Theosophists—of which classifications in truth there are many.

To busy oneself, after such a tremendous number of independent witnesses
and proofs have been brought before the public, with an additional
enumeration from theological sources, would be quite useless. The seven
capital sins and seven virtues of the Christian scheme are far less
philosophical than even the seven liberal and the seven accursed
sciences—or the seven arts of enchantment of the Gnostics. For one of the
latter is now before the public, pregnant with danger in the present as
for the future. The modern name for it is _Hypnotism_; used as it is by
scientific and ignorant Materialists, in the general ignorance of the
seven principles, it will soon become _Satanism_ in the full acceptation
of the term.

PART III. ADDENDA. SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED.

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. Archaic, or Modern Anthropology?

Whenever the question of the Origin of Man is offered seriously to an
unbiassed, honest, and earnest man of Science, the answer comes
invariably: “We do not know.” De Quatrefages with his agnostic attitude is
one of such Anthropologists.

This does not imply that the rest of the men of Science are neither fair‐
minded nor honest, as such a remark would be questionably discreet. But it
is estimated that 75 per cent. of European Scientists are Evolutionists.
Are these representatives of Modern Thought all guilty of flagrant
misrepresentation of the facts? No one says this—but there are a few very
exceptional cases. However, the Scientists, in their anti‐clerical
enthusiasm and in despair of any alternative theory to Darwinism except
that of “special creation,” are unconsciously insincere in “forcing” a
hypothesis the elasticity of which is inadequate, and which resents the
severe strain to which it is now subjected. Insincerity on the same
subject is, however, patent in ecclesiastical circles. Bishop Temple has
come forward as a thorough‐going supporter of Darwinism in his _Religion
and Science_. This clerical writer goes so far as to regard Matter—after
it has received its “primal impress”—as the unaided evolver of all cosmic
phenomena. This view only differs from that of Hæckel, in postulating a
hypothetical Deity at “the back of beyont,” a Deity which stands entirely
aloof from the interplay of forces. Such a metaphysical entity is no more
the Theological God than is that of Kant. Bishop Temple’s truce with
materialistic Science is, in our opinion, impolitic—apart from the fact
that it involves a total rejection of the biblical cosmogony. In the
presence of this display of flunkeyism before the materialism of our
“learned” age, we Occultists can but smile. But how about loyalty to the
Master such theological truants profess to serve—Christ, and Christendom
at large?

However, we have no desire, for the present, to throw down the gauntlet to
the clergy, our business being now with materialistic Science alone. The
latter, in the person of its best representatives, answers to our
question, “We do not know;” yet the majority of them act as though
Omniscience were their heirloom, and they knew all things.

For, indeed, this negative reply has not prevented the majority of
Scientists from speculating on the question, each seeking to have his own
special theory accepted to the exclusion of all others. Thus, from Maillet
in 1748, down to Hæckel in 1870, theories on the origin of the human race
have differed as much as the personalities of their inventors themselves.
Buffon, Bory de St. Vincent, Lamarck, E. Geoffroy St. Hilaire, Gaudry,
Naudin, Wallace, Darwin, Owen, Hæckel, Filippi, Vogt, Huxley, Agassiz,
etc., each has evolved a more or less scientific hypothesis of genesis. De
Quatrefages arranges these theories in two principal groups—one based on a
rapid, and the other on a very gradual transmutation; the former favouring
a new type (man) produced by a being entirely different, the latter
teaching the evolution of man by progressive differentiations.

Strangely enough, it is from the most scientific of these authorities that
has emanated the most unscientific of all the theories upon the subject of
the Origin of Man. This is now so evident, that the hour is rapidly
approaching when the current teaching about the descent of man from an
ape‐like mammal will be regarded with less respect than the formation of
Adam out of clay, and of Eve out of Adam’s rib. For

It is evident, especially after the most fundamental principles of
Darwinism, that an organized being cannot be a descendant of
another whose development is in an inverse order to its own.
Consequently, in accordance with these principles, man cannot be
considered as the descendant of any simian type whatever.(1553)

Lucae’s argument _versus_ the Ape‐theory, based on the different flexures
of the bones constituting the axis of the skull in the cases of man and
the anthropoids, is fairly discussed by Schmidt. He admits that:

The ape as he grows becomes more bestial; man ... more human—

and seems, indeed, to hesitate a moment before he passes on:

This flexure of the cranial axis may, therefore, still be
emphasized as a human character, in contradistinction to the apes;
the peculiar characteristic of an order can scarcely be elicited
from it; and especially as to the doctrine of descent, this
circumstance seems in no way decisive.(1554)

The writer is evidently not a little disquieted by his own argument. He
assures us that it upsets any possibility of the present apes having been
the progenitors of mankind. But does it not also negative the bare
possibility of the man and the anthropoid having had a common—though, so
far, an absolutely theoretical—ancestor?

Even “Natural Selection” itself is with every day more threatened. The
deserters from the Darwinian camp are many, and those who were at one time
its most ardent disciples are, owing to new discoveries, slowly but
steadily preparing to turn over a new leaf. In the _Journal of the Royal
Microscopical Society_ for October, 1886, we may read as follows:

PHYSIOLOGICAL SELECTION.—Mr. G. J. Romanes finds certain
difficulties in regarding natural selection as a theory for the
origin of species, as it is rather a theory of the origin of
adaptive structures. He proposes to replace it by what he calls
physiological selection, or segregation of the fit. His view is
based on the extreme sensitiveness of the reproductive system to
small changes in the conditions of life, and he thinks that
variations in the direction of greater or less sterility must
frequently occur in wild species. If the variation be such that
the reproductive system, while showing some degree of sterility
with the parent form, continues to be fertile within the limits of
the varietal form, the variation would neither be swamped by
intercrossing nor die out on account of sterility. When a
variation of this kind occurs, the physiological barrier must
divide the species into two parts. The author, in fine, regards
mutual sterility, not as one of the effects of specific
differentiation, but as the cause of it.(1555)

An attempt is made to show the above to be a complement of, and sequence
to, the Darwinian theory. This is a clumsy attempt at best. The public
will soon be asked to believe that Mr. C. Dixon’s _Evolution without
Natural Selection_ is also Darwinism—expanded, as the author certainly
claims it to be!

But it is like splitting the body of a man into three pieces, and then
maintaining that each piece is the identical man he was before,
only—expanded. Yet the author states:

Let it be clearly understood that not one single syllable in the
foregoing pages has been written antagonistic to Darwin’s theory
of Natural Selection. All I have done is to explain _certain_
phenomena ... the more one studies Darwin’s works, the more one is
convinced of the truth of his hypothesis [! !].(1556)

And before this, he alludes to:

The overwhelming array of facts which Darwin gave in support of
his hypothesis, and which triumphantly carried the theory of
Natural Selection over all obstacles and objections.(1557)

This does not prevent the learned author, however, from upsetting this
theory as “triumphantly,” and from even openly calling his work
_Evolution_ without _Natural Selection_, or, in so many words, with
Darwin’s fundamental idea knocked to atoms in it.

As to Natural Selection itself, the utmost misconception prevails among
many present‐day thinkers, who tacitly accept the conclusions of
Darwinism. It is, for instance, a mere device of rhetoric to credit
Natural Selection with the power of _originating_ species. Natural
Selection is no entity; it is merely a convenient phrase for describing
the mode in which the survival of the fit and the elimination of the unfit
among organisms are brought about by the Struggle for Existence. Every
group of organisms tends to multiply beyond the means of subsistence; the
constant battle for life—the “struggle to obtain enough to eat and to
escape being eaten” added to the environmental conditions—necessitates a
perpetual weeding out of the unfit. The _élite_ of any stock, thus sorted
out, propagate the species and transmit their organic characteristics to
their descendants. All useful variations are thus perpetuated, and a
progressive improvement is effected. But Natural Selection—in the writer’s
humble opinion, “Selection, _as a Power_”—is in reality a pure myth;
especially when it is resorted to as an explanation of the Origin of
Species. It is merely a representative term expressive of the manner in
which “useful variations” are stereotyped when produced. Of itself, “it”
can _produce_—_nothing_, and only operates on the rough material presented
to “it.” The real question at issue is: What _cause_—combined with other
secondary causes—produces the “variations” in the organisms themselves?
Many of these secondary causes are purely physical—climatic, dietary, etc.
Very well. But beyond the secondary aspects of organic evolution, a deeper
principle has to be sought for. The Materialist’s “spontaneous
variations,” and “_accidental_ divergencies” are self‐contradictory terms
in a universe of “Matter, Force and _Necessity_.” Mere variability of
type, apart from the supervisory presence of a quasi‐intelligent impulse,
is powerless to account for the stupendous complexities and marvels of the
human body, for instance. The insufficiency of the Darwinists’ mechanical
theory has been exposed at length by Dr. Von Hartmann among other purely
negative thinkers. It is an abuse of the reader’s intelligence to write,
as does Hæckel, of _blind_ indifferent cells, “arranging themselves into
organs.” The Esoteric solution of the origin of animal species is given
elsewhere.

Those purely _secondary_ causes of differentiation, grouped under the head
of sexual selection, natural selection, climate, isolation, etc., mislead
the Western Evolutionist and offer no real explanation whatever of the
“whence” of the “ancestral types” which served as the _starting point_ for
physical development. The truth is that the differentiating “causes” known
to Modern Science only come into operation after the _physicalization of
the primeval animal root‐types out of the astral_. Darwinism only meets
Evolution at its midway point—that is to say, when astral evolution has
given place to the play of the ordinary physical forces with which our
present senses acquaint us. But even here the Darwinian Theory, even with
the “expansions” recently attempted, is inadequate to meet the facts of
the case. The cause underlying physiological variation in species—one to
which all other laws are subordinate and secondary—is a sub‐conscious
intelligence pervading matter, ultimately traceable to a _reflection_ of
the Divine and Dhyân‐Chohanic wisdom.(1558) A not altogether dissimilar
conclusion has been arrived at by so well known a thinker as Ed. von
Hartmann, who, despairing of the efficacy of _unaided_ Natural Selection,
regards Evolution as being intelligently guided by the Unconscious—the
Cosmic Logos of Occultism. But the latter acts only mediately through
Fohat, or Dhyân‐Chohanic energy, and not quite in the direct manner which
the great pessimist describes.

It is this divergence among men of Science, their mutual, and often their
_self_‐contradictions, that gives the writer of the present volumes the
courage to bring to light other and older teachings—if only as hypotheses
for _future_ scientific appreciation. So evident, even to the humble
recorder of this archaic teaching, though not in any way very learned in
Modern Sciences, are the scientific fallacies and gaps, that she has
determined to touch upon all these, in order to place the two teachings on
parallel lines. For Occultism, it is a question of self‐defence, and
nothing more.

So far, _The Secret Doctrine_ has concerned itself with metaphysics, pure
and simple. It has now landed on Earth, and finds itself within the domain
of physical Science and practical Anthropology, or those branches of study
which materialistic Naturalists claim as their rightful domain, coolly
asserting, furthermore, that the higher and more perfect the working of
the Soul, the more amenable it is to the analysis and explanations _of the
Zoologist and the Physiologist alone_.(1559) This stupendous pretension
comes from one, who, to prove his pithecoid descent, has not hesitated to
include the Lemuridæ among the ancestors of man; these have been promoted
by him to the rank of Prosimiæ, _indeciduate_ mammals, to which he very
incorrectly contributes a _decidua_ and a discoidal placenta.(1560) For
this Hæckel was taken severely to task by de Quatrefages, and criticised
by his own brother Materialists and Agnostics—Virchow and du Bois‐Reymond,
as great, if not greater authorities than himself.(1561)

Such opposition notwithstanding, Hæckel’s wild theories are, to this day,
still called by some scientific and logical. The mysterious nature of
Consciousness, of Soul, of Spirit in Man being now explained as a mere
advance on the functions of the protoplasmic molecules of the lively
Protista, and the gradual evolution and growth of human mind and “social
instincts” toward civilization having to be traced back to their origin in
the civilization of ants, bees, and other creatures—the chances left for
an impartial hearing of the doctrines of Archaic Wisdom are few indeed.
The _educated_ profane are told that:

The social instincts of the lower animals have, of late, been
regarded for various reasons _as clearly the origin of morals_,
even of those of man [?], ...

—and that our divine consciousness, our soul, intellect, and aspirations
have worked their “way up from the lower stages of the simple cell‐soul”
of the gelatinous Bathybius—(1562) and they seem to believe it. For such
men, the Metaphysics of Occultism must produce the effect that our
grandest oratorios produce on the Chinaman—sounds that jar upon their
nerves.

Yet, are our Esoteric teachings about “Angels,” the first three pre‐animal
human Races, and the downfall of the Fourth, _on a lower level of fiction
and self‐delusion_ than the Hæckelian “plastidular,” or the inorganic
“molecular souls of the Protista”? Between the evolution of the spiritual
nature of man from the above amœbian souls, and the alleged development of
his physical frame from the protoplastic dweller in the ocean slime, there
is an abyss which will not easily be crossed by any man in the _full_
possession of his intellectual faculties. Physical Evolution, as Modern
Science teaches it, is a subject for open controversy; spiritual and moral
development on the same lines is the insane dream of a crass Materialism.

Furthermore, past as well as present daily experience teaches that no
truth has ever been accepted by learned bodies unless it has dovetailed
with the habitually preconceived ideas of their professors. “The crown of
the innovator is a crown of thorns”—said Geoffroy St. Hilaire. It is only
that which fits in with popular hobbies and accepted notions that as a
general rule gains ground. Hence the triumph of the Hæckelian ideas,
notwithstanding that they are proclaimed by Virchow, du Bois‐Reymond, and
others as the “_testimonium paupertatis_ of Natural Science.”

Diametrically opposed as may be the materialism of the German
Evolutionists to the spiritual conceptions of Esoteric Philosophy,
radically inconsistent as is their accepted anthropological system with
the real facts of Nature—the pseudo‐idealistic bias now colouring English
thought is almost more pernicious. The pure Materialistic Doctrine admits
of a direct refutation and an appeal to the logic of facts. The Idealism
of the present day, not only contrives to absorb, on the one hand, the
basic negations of Atheism, but lands its votaries in a tangle of
_unreality_, which culminates in a practical Nihilism. Argument with such
writers is almost out of the question. Idealists, therefore, will be still
more antagonistic than even the Materialists to the Occult teachings now
given. But as no worse fate can befall the exponents of Esoteric
Anthropogenesis at the hands of their foes than being openly called by
their old and time‐honoured names of “lunatics” and “ignoramuses,” the
present archaic theories may be safely added to the many modern
speculations, and bide their time for their full or even partial
recognition. Only, as the very existence of these archaic theories will
probably be denied, we have to give our best proofs and stand by them to
the bitter end.

In our race and generation the one “temple in the universe” is in rare
cases—_within_ us; but our body and mind have been too defiled by both
“sin” and “science” to be outwardly anything better _now_ than a fane of
iniquity and error. And here our mutual position—that of Occultism and
Modern Science—ought to be once for all defined.

We, Theosophists, are willing to bow before such men of learning as the
late Prof. Balfour Stewart, Messrs. Crookes, de Quatrefages, Wallace,
Agassiz, Butlerof, and others, though, from the stand‐point of the
Esoteric Philosophy, we may not agree with all they say. But nothing will
make us consent to even a show of respect for the opinions of such other
men of Science as Hæckel, Carl Vogt, or Ludwig Büchner, in Germany, or
even Mr. Huxley and his co‐thinkers in Materialism in England—the colossal
erudition of the first named, notwithstanding. Such men are simply the
intellectual and moral murderers of future generations; especially Hæckel,
whose crass Materialism often rises to the height of idiotic _naivetés_ in
his reasonings. One has but to read his _Pedigree of Man, and Other
Essays_ (Aveling’s Translation) to feel a desire that, in the words of
Job, his remembrance should perish from the Earth, and that he “shall have
no name in the streets.” Hear the creator of the mythical Sozura deriding
the idea of the origin of the human race “as a supernatural [?]
phenomenon,” as one—

That could not result from simple mechanical causes, from physical
and chemical forces, but requires the direct intervention of a
creative personality.... Now the central point of Darwin’s
teaching ... lies in this, that it demonstrates the simplest
mechanical causes, purely physico‐chemical phenomena of nature, as
wholly sufficient to explain the highest and most difficult
problems. Darwin puts in the place of a conscious creative force,
building and arranging the organic bodies of animals and plants on
a designed plan, a series of natural forces working blindly (as we
say) without aim, without design. In place of an arbitrary act of
operation, we have a necessary law of Evolution.... [So had Manu
and Kapila, and, at the same time, guiding, conscious and
intelligent Powers]. Darwin very wisely ... had put on one side
the question as to the first appearance of life. But very soon
that consequence, so full of meaning, so wide‐reaching, was openly
discussed by able and brave scientific men, such as Huxley, Carl
Vogt, Ludwig Büchner. A mechanical origin of the earliest living
form was held as the necessary sequence to Darwin’s teaching ...
we are at present only concerned with a single consequence of the
theory, the natural origin of the human race through almighty
Evolution.(1563)

To this, unabashed by such a scientific farrago, Occultism replies: In the
course of Evolution, when the physical triumphed over the spiritual and
mental evolution, and nearly crushed it under its weight, the great gift
of Kriyâshakti remained the heirloom of only a few elect men in every age.
Spirit strove vainly to _manifest itself in its fulness in purely organic
forms_ (as has been explained in Part I of this Volume), and the faculty,
which had been a natural attribute in the early humanity of the Third
Race, became one of the class regarded as simply phenomenal by
Spiritualists and Occultists, and as _scientifically impossible_ by
Materialists.

In our modern day the mere assertion that there exists a power which can
create human forms—ready‐made Sheaths within which can incarnate the
_conscious_ Monads or Nirmânakâyas of past Manvantaras—is, of course,
absurd, ridiculous! That which is regarded as quite natural, on the other
hand, is the production of a Frankenstein’s monster, _plus_ moral
consciousness, religious aspirations, genius, and a feeling of his own
immortal nature within himself—by “physico‐chemical forces,” guided by
blind “Almighty Evolution.” As to the origin of that man, not _ex nihilo_,
cemented by a little red clay, but from a living divine Entity
consolidating the Astral Body with surrounding materials—such a conception
is too absurd even to be mentioned, in the opinion of the Materialists.
Nevertheless, Occultists and Theosophists are ready to have their claims
and theories compared as to their intrinsic value and probability with
those of the modern Evolutionists—however unscientific and superstitious
these theories may at the first glance appear. Hence the Esoteric teaching
is _absolutely_ opposed to the Darwinian evolution, as applied to man, and
_partially_ so with regard to other species.

It would be interesting to obtain a glimpse of the mental representation
of Evolution in the scientific brain of a Materialist. What _is_
Evolution? If asked to define the full and complete meaning of the term,
neither Huxley nor Hæckel will be able to do so any better than does
Webster:

The act of unfolding; the process of growth, development; as the
evolution of a flower from a bud, or an animal from the egg.

Yet the bud must be traced through its parent‐plant to the seed, and the
egg to the animal or bird that laid it; or at any rate to the speck of
protoplasm from which it expanded and grew. And both the seed and the
speck must have the latent potentialities in them for the reproduction and
gradual development, the unfolding of the thousand and one forms or phases
of evolution, through which they must pass before the flower or the animal
is fully developed? Hence, the future plan—if not a design—_must be
there_. Moreover, that seed _has to be traced_, and its nature
ascertained. Have the Darwinians been successful in this? Or will the
Moneron be cast in our teeth? But this atom of the Watery Abysses is _not_
homogeneous matter; and there must be something or somebody that had
moulded and cast it into being.

Here Science is once more silent. But since there is no self‐consciousness
as yet in speck, seed, or germ, according to both Materialists and
Psychologists of the modern school—Occultists agreeing in this for once
with their natural enemies—what is it that guides the force or forces so
unerringly in this process of Evolution? “Blind force”? As well call
“blind” the brain which evolved in Hæckel his _Pedigree of Man_ and other
lucubrations. We can easily conceive that the said brain lacks an
important centre or two; for whoever knows anything of the anatomy of the
human, or even of any animal, body, and is still an Atheist and a
Materialist, must be “hopelessly insane,” according to Lord Herbert, who
rightly sees in the frame of man’s body and the coherence of its parts,
something so strange and paradoxical that he holds it to be the “greatest
miracle of nature.” _Blind_ forces and “_no_ design” in anything under the
Sun! When no sane man of Science would hesitate to say that, even from the
little he knows and has hitherto discovered of the forces at work in
Kosmos, he sees very plainly that every part, every speck and atom, are in
harmony with their fellow atoms, and these with the whole, each having its
distinct mission throughout the life‐cycle. But, fortunately, the
greatest, the most eminent Thinkers and Scientists of the day are now
beginning to rise against this “Pedigree,” and even against Darwin’s
Natural Selection theory, though its author had never, probably,
contemplated such widely stretched conclusions. The Russian scientist N.
T. Danilevsky, in his remarkable work, _Darwinism, a Critical
Investigation of the Theory_, upsets such Darwinism completely and without
appeal, and so does de Quatrefages in his last work. Our readers are
recommended to examine the learned paper by Dr. Bourges, a member of the
Paris Anthropological Society, read by its author at a recent meeting of
that society and called “Evolutionary Psychology; the Evolution of Spirit,
etc.” In it he completely reconciles the two teachings—namely of physical
and spiritual evolution. He explains the origin of the variety of organic
forms—which are made to fit their environments with such evidently
intelligent design—by the existence and the mutual help and interaction of
two Principles in manifested Nature, the inner conscious Principle
adapting itself to physical Nature and the innate potentialities of the
latter. Thus the French scientist has to return to our old friend Archæus,
or the Life‐Principle—without naming it—as Dr. Richardson has done in
England in his Nerve‐Force. The same idea was recently developed in
Germany by Baron Hellenbach, in his remarkable work, _Individuality in the
Light of Biology and Modern Philosophy_.

We find the same conclusions arrived at in yet another excellent volume by
a deep thinking Russian, N. N. Strachof, who says in his _Fundamental
Conceptions of Psychology and Physiology_:

The most clear, as the most familiar, type of development may be
found in our own mental or physical evolution, which has served
others as a model to follow.... If organisms are entities ... then
it is only just to conclude and assert that the organic life
strives to beget psychic life; but it would be still more correct
and in accordance with the spirit of these two categories of
evolution to say, that the true cause of organic life is the
tendency of spirit to manifest in substantial forms, to clothe
itself in substantial reality. It is the highest form which
contains the complete explanation of the lowest, never the
reverse.

This is admitting, as Bourges does in the Mémoire above mentioned, the
identity of this mysterious, integrally acting and organizing Principle
with the Self‐Conscious and Inner Subject, which we call the Ego and the
world at large the Soul. Thus all the best Scientists and Thinkers are
gradually approaching the Occultists in their general conclusions.

But such metaphysically inclined men of Science are out of court and will
hardly be listened to. Schiller, in his magnificent poem on the Veil of
Isis, makes the mortal youth who dared to lift the impenetrable covering
fall down dead, after beholding the naked Truth in the face of the stern
Goddess. Have some of our Darwinians, so tenderly united in natural
selection and affinity, also gazed at the Saïtic Mother bereft of her
veils? One might almost suspect it after reading their theories. Their
great intellects must have collapsed while gauging too closely the
uncovered face of Nature, leaving only the grey matter and ganglia in
their brains to respond to “blind” physico‐chemical forces. At any rate
Shakspere’s lines apply admirably to our modern Evolutionist, who
symbolizes that “proud man,” who—

Drest in a little brief authority;
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven,
As make the angels weep!(1564)

These have nought to do with the “Angels.” Their only concern is with the
human ancestor, the pithecoid Noah who gave birth to three sons—the tailed
Cynocephalus, the tailless Ape, and the “arboreal” Palæolithic man. On
this point, they will not be contradicted. Every doubt expressed is
immediately set down as an attempt to cripple scientific enquiry. The
insuperable difficulty at the very foundation of the Evolution theory,
namely, that no Darwinian is able to give even an approximate definition
of the period _at_ which, and the form _in_ which, the first man appeared,
is smoothed down to a trifling impediment, which is “really of no
account.” Every branch of knowledge is in the same predicament, we are
informed. The Chemist bases his most abstruse calculations simply

Upon a hypothesis of atoms and molecules, of which not one has
ever been seen, isolated, weighed, or defined. The electrician
speaks of magnetic fluids which have never tangibly revealed
themselves. No definite origin can be assigned either to molecules
or magnetism. Science cannot and does not pretend to any knowledge
of the beginnings of law, matter, or life.(1565)

And, withal, to reject a _scientific hypothesis_, however absurd, is to
commit the one unpardonable sin! We risk it.

Section II. The Ancestors Mankind is Offered by Science.

The question of questions for mankind—the problem which underlies
all others, and is more deeply interesting than any other—is the
ascertainment of the place which man occupies in Nature, and of
his relations to the universe of things.(1566)

The world stands divided this day and hesitates between _Divine
Progenitors_—be they Adam and Eve or the Lunar Pitris—and _Bathybius
Hæckelii_, the gelatinous hermit of the briny deep. Having explained the
Occult theory, it may now be compared with that of Modern Materialism. The
reader is invited to choose between the two after having judged them on
their respective merits.

We may derive some consolation for the rejection of our Divine Ancestors,
in finding that the Hæckelian speculations receive no better treatment at
the hands of strictly _exact_ Science than do our own. Hæckel’s
Phylogenesis is no less laughed at by the foes of his fantastic evolution,
by other and greater Scientists, than our primeval Races will be. As du
Bois‐Reymond puts it, we may believe him easily when he says that the

Ancestral trees of our race sketched in the _Schöpfungsgeschichte_
are of about as much value as are the pedigrees of the Homeric
heroes in the eyes of the historical critic.

This settled, everyone will see that one hypothesis is as good as another.
And as we find Hæckel himself confessing that neither Geology in its
history of the past nor the ancestral history of organisms will ever “rise
to the position of a real ‘exact’ science,”(1567) a large margin is thus
left to Occult Science to make its annotations and lodge its protests. The
world is left to choose between the teachings of Paracelsus, the “father
of modern chemistry,” and those of Hæckel, the “father of the mythical
Sozura.” We demand no more.

Without presuming to take part in the quarrel of such very learned
Naturalists as du Bois‐Reymond and Hæckel _à propos_ of our blood
relationship to

Those ancestors [of ours] which have led up from the unicellular
classes, Vermes, Acrania, Pisces, Amphibia, Reptilia to the Aves

—we may put a brief question or two, for the information of our readers.
Availing ourselves of the opportunity, and bearing in mind Darwin’s
theories of Natural Selection, etc., we would ask Science—with regard to
the origin of the human and animal species—which theory of Evolution of
the two herewith described is the more scientific, or the more
unscientific, if so preferred.

(1) Is it that of an Evolution which starts from the beginning with sexual
propagation?

(2) Or that teaching which shows the gradual development of organs; their
solidification, and the procreation of each species, at first by simple
easy separation from one into two or even several individuals; then a
fresh development—the first step to a species of separate distinct
sexes—the hermaphrodite condition; then again, a kind of parthenogenesis,
“virginal reproduction,” when the egg‐cells are formed within the body,
issuing from it in atomic emanations and becoming matured outside of it;
until, finally, after a definite separation into sexes, the human beings
begin procreating through sexual connection?

Of these two, the first “theory”—or rather, a “revealed fact”—is
enunciated by all the exoteric Bibles, except the _Purânas_, preëminently
by the Jewish Cosmogony. The second is that which is taught by the Occult
Philosophy, as has been explained.

An answer is found to our question in a volume just published by Mr.
Samuel Laing—the best lay exponent of Modern Science.(1568) In Chapter
viii of his latest work, _A Modern Zoroastrian_, the author begins by
twitting “all ancient religions and philosophies” for “assuming a male and
female principle for their gods.” At first sight, he says:

This distinction of sex appears as fundamental as that of plant
and animal.... The Spirit of God brooding over Chaos and producing
the world is only a later edition, revised according to
monotheistic ideas, of the far older Chaldean legend which
describes the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos by the coöperation
of great gods, male and female.... Thus, in the orthodox Christian
creed we are taught to repeat “begotten, not made,” a phrase which
is absolute nonsense, or _non‐sense_—that is, an instance of using
words like counterfeit notes, which have no solid value of an idea
behind them. For “begotten” is a very definite term, which implies
the conjunction of two opposite sexes to produce a new
individual.(1569)

However we may agree with the learned author as to the inadvisability of
using wrong words, and the terrible anthropomorphic and phallic element in
the old Scriptures—especially in the orthodox Christian
_Bible_—nevertheless, there may be two extenuating circumstances in the
case. Firstly, all these “ancient philosophies” and “modern religions”
are—as has been sufficiently shown in these two Volumes—an exoteric veil
thrown over the face of Esoteric Truth; and—as the direct result of
this—they are allegorical, _i.e._, mythological in form; but still they
are immensely more philosophical in essence than any of the new scientific
theories, so‐called. Secondly, from the Orphic Theogony down to Ezra’s
last remodelling of the Pentateuch, every old Scripture, having in its
origin borrowed its facts from the East, has been subjected to constant
alterations by friend and foe, until of the original version there has
remained but the name, a dead shell from which the spirit had been
gradually eliminated.

This alone ought to show that no religious work now extant can be
understood without the help of the Archaic Wisdom, the primitive
foundation on which they were all built.

But to return to the direct answer expected from Science to our direct
question. It is given by the same author, when, following his train of
thought on the unscientific euhemerization of the powers of Nature in
ancient creeds, he pronounces a condemnatory verdict upon them in the
following terms:

Science, however, makes sad havoc with this impression of sexual
generation being the original and only mode of reproduction, and
the microscope and dissecting knife of the naturalist introduce us
to new and altogether unsuspected [?] worlds of life.

So little “unsuspected,” indeed, that the original a‐sexual “modes of
reproduction” must have been known to the ancient Hindûs, at any rate—Mr.
Laing’s assertion to the contrary notwithstanding. In view of the
statement in the _Vishnu Purâna_, quoted by us elsewhere, that Daksha
“established sexual intercourse as the means of multiplication,” only
after a series of other “modes,” which are all enumerated therein,(1570)
it becomes difficult to deny the fact. This assertion, moreover, is found,
note well, in an _exoteric_ work. Next, Mr. Laing goes on to tell us that:

By far the larger proportion of living forms, in number at any
rate if not in size, have come into existence, without the aid of
sexual propagation.

He then instances Hæckel’s Moneron, “multiplying by self‐division.” The
next stage the author shows in the nucleated cell, “which does exactly the
same thing.” The following stage is that in

Which the organism does not divide into two equal parts, but a
small portion of it swells out ... and finally parts company and
starts on a separate existence, which grows to the size of the
parent by its inherent faculty of manufacturing fresh protoplasm
from surrounding inorganic materials.(1571)

This is followed by a many‐celled organism which is formed by

Germ‐buds reduced to spores, or single cells, which are emitted
from the parent.... We are now at the threshold of that system of
sexual propagation, which has [now] become the rule in all the
higher families of animals.... This organism, having advantages in
the struggle for life, established itself permanently ... and
special organs developed to meet the altered conditions. Thus at
length the distinction would be firmly established of a female
organ or ovary containing the egg or primitive cell from which the
new being was to be developed, and a male organ supplying the
fertilizing spore or cell.... This is confirmed by a study of
embryology, which shows that in the _human_ and higher animal
species the distinction of sex is not developed until a
considerable progress has been made in the growth of the
embryo.... In the great majority of plants, and in some of the
lower families of animals ... the male and female organs are
developed within the same being, and they are what is called
hermaphrodites. Another transition form is Parthenogenesis, or
virginal reproduction, in which germ‐cells, apparently similar in
all respects to egg‐cells, develop themselves into new
individuals, without any fructifying element.(1572)

Of all this we are as perfectly well aware as we are aware that the above
was never applied by the very learned English popularizer of Huxley‐
Hæckelian theories to the _genus homo_. He limits this to specks of
protoplasm, plants, bees, snails, and so on. But if he would be true to
the theory of descent, he must be as true to ontogenesis, in which the
fundamental biogenetic law, we are told, runs as follows:

The development of the embryo (ontogeny) is a condensed and
abbreviated repetition of the evolution of the race (phylogeny).
This repetition is the more complete, the more the true original
order of evolution (palingenesis) has been retained by continual
heredity. On the other hand, this repetition is the less complete,
the more by varying adaptations the later spurious development
(cænogenesis) has obtained.(1573)

This shows us that every living creature and thing on Earth, including
man, evolved from _one common primal form_. Physical man must have passed
through the same stages of the evolutionary process in the various modes
of procreation as other animals have done; he must have _divided_ himself;
then, hermaphrodite, have given birth _parthenogenetically_ (on the
immaculate principle) to his young ones; the next stage would be the
_oviparous_—at first “without any fructifying element,” then “with the
help of the fertilitary spore”; and only after the final and definite
evolution of both sexes, would he become a distinct “male and female,”
when reproduction through sexual union would grow into universal law. So
far, all this is scientifically proven. There remains but one thing to be
ascertained; viz., the plain and comprehensively described processes of
such ante‐sexual reproduction. This is done in the Occult books, a slight
outline of which has been attempted by the writer in Part I of this
Volume.

Either this, or—man is a distinct being. Occult Philosophy may call him
that, because of his distinctly _dual_ nature. Science cannot do so, once
that it rejects every interference save mechanical laws, and admits of no
principle outside Matter. The former—Archaic Science—allows the human
physical frame to have passed through every form, from the lowest to the
very highest, its present one, or from the simple to the complex—to use
the accepted terms. But it claims that in this Cycle, the Fourth, the
frame having already existed among the types and models of Nature from the
preceding Rounds—it was quite ready for man from the beginning of this
Round.(1574) The Monad had but to step into the Astral Body of the
Progenitors, in order that the work of physical consolidation should begin
around the shadowy prototype.(1575)

What would Science say to this? It would answer, of course, that as man
appeared on Earth as the latest of the mammalians, he had no need, any
more than these mammals, to pass through the primitive stages of
procreation as above described. His mode of procreation was already
established on Earth when he appeared. In this case, we may reply: Since
to this day not the remotest sign of a link between man and the animal has
yet been found, then (if the Occult Doctrine is to be repudiated) he must
have sprung _miraculously_ in Nature, like a fully armed Minerva from
Jupiter’s brain; and in such case the _Bible_ is right, along with other
national “revelations.” Hence the scientific scorn, so freely lavished by
the author of _A Modern Zoroastrian_ upon ancient philosophies and
exoteric creeds, becomes premature and uncalled for. Nor would the sudden
discovery of a “missing‐link”‐like fossil mend matters at all. For neither
one such solitary specimen nor the scientific inductions therefrom, could
insure its being the long‐sought‐for relic, _i.e._, that of an
undeveloped, still a once‐speaking, Man. Something more would be required
as a final proof. Besides this, even _Genesis_ takes up man, her Adam of
dust, only where the Secret Doctrine leaves her “Sons of God and Wisdom”
and picks up the physical man of the Third Race. Eve is _not_ “begotten,”
but is extracted out of Adam in the manner of “Amœba A,” contracting in
the middle and splitting into Amœba B—by division.(1576)

Nor has human speech developed from the various animal sounds. Hæckel’s
theory that “speech arose gradually from a few simple, crude animal
sounds,” as such “speech still remains amongst a few races of lowest
rank,”(1577) is altogether unsound, as argued by Professor Max Müller,
among others. He contends that no plausible explanation has yet been given
as to how the “roots” of language came into existence. A _human_ brain is
necessary for _human_ speech. And figures relating to the size of the
respective brains of man and ape show how deep is the gulf which separates
the two. Vogt says that the brain of the largest ape, the gorilla,
measures no more than 30·51 cubic inches; while the average brains of the
flat‐headed Australian natives—the lowest now of the human races—amount to
99·35 cubic inches! Figures are awkward witnesses and cannot lie.
Therefore, as truly observed by Dr. F. Pfaff, whose premises are as sound
and correct as his biblical conclusions are silly:

The brain of the apes most like man does not amount to quite a
third of the brain of the lowest races of men: it is not half the
size of the brain of a new‐born child.(1578)

From the foregoing it is thus very easy to perceive that in order to prove
the Huxley‐Hæckelian theories of the descent of man, it is not one, but a
great number of “missing links”—a true ladder of progressive evolutionary
steps—that would have to be first found and then presented by Science to
thinking and reasoning humanity, before it would abandon belief in Gods
and the immortal Soul for the worship of quadrumanic ancestors. Mere myths
are now greeted as “axiomatic truths.” Even Alfred Russel Wallace
maintains with Hæckel that primitive man was a speechless ape‐creature. To
this Prof. Joly answers:

Man never was, in my opinion, this pithecanthropus alalus whose
portrait Hæckel has drawn as if he had seen and known him, whose
singular and completely hypothetical genealogy he has even given,
from the mere mass of living protoplasm to the man endowed with
speech and a civilization analogous to that of the Australians and
Papuans.(1579)

Hæckel, among other things, often comes into direct conflict with the
“science of languages.” In the course of his attack on Evolutionism(1580)
Prof. Max Müller stigmatized the Darwinian theory as “vulnerable at the
beginning and at the end.” The fact is, that only the partial truth of
many of the secondary “laws” of Darwinism is beyond question—M. de
Quatrefages evidently accepting natural selection, the struggle for
existence, and transformation within species, as proven not once and for
ever, but only _pro tempore_. But it may not be amiss, perhaps, to
condense the linguistic case against the “ape ancestor” theory:

Languages have their phases of growth, etc., like all else in Nature. It
is almost certain that the great linguistic families pass through three
stages.

(1) All words are roots and are merely placed in juxtaposition (Radical
languages).

(2) One root defines the other, and becomes merely a determinative element
(Agglutinative).

(3) The determinative element (the determinating meaning of which has long
lapsed) unites into a whole with the formative element (Inflected).

The problem then is: Whence these roots? Prof. Max Müller argues that the
existence of these _ready‐made materials of speech_ is a proof that man
cannot be the crown of a long organic series. This _potentiality of
forming roots_ is the great crux which Materialists almost invariably
avoid.

Von Hartmann explains it as a manifestation of the “Unconscious,” and
admits its cogency _versus_ mechanical Atheism. Hartmann is a fair
representative of the Metaphysician and Idealist of the present age.

The argument has never been met by the non‐pantheistic Evolutionists. To
say with Schmidt: “Forsooth we are to halt before the origin of
language!”—is an avowal of dogmatism and of speedy defeat.(1581)

We respect those men of Science who, wise in their generation, say: The
Prehistoric Past being utterly beyond our powers of direct observation, we
are too honest, too devoted to the truth—or what we regard as truth—to
speculate upon the unknown, giving out our unproven theories along with
facts absolutely established in Modern Science.

The borderland of [metaphysical] knowledge is, therefore, best
left to time, which is the best test as to truth.(1582)

This is a wise and an honest sentence in the mouth of a Materialist. But
when a Hæckel, after just saying that “historical events of past time,”
having “occurred many millions of years ago,(1583) ... are for ever
removed from direct observation,” and that neither Geology nor
Phylogeny(1584) can or will “rise to the position of a real ‘exact’
science,” then insists on the development of all organisms—“from the
lowest vertebrate to the highest, from amphioxus to man”—we ask for a
weightier proof than he can give. Mere “empirical sources of knowledge,”
so extolled by the author of _Anthropogeny_—when he has to be satisfied
with the qualification for his own views—are not competent to settle
problems lying beyond their domain; nor is it the province of exact
Science to place any reliance on them.(1585) If “empirical”—and Hæckel
himself declares so repeatedly—then they are no better, nor any more
reliable, in the sight of _exact_ research, when extended into the remote
past, than are our Occult teachings of the East, both having to be placed
on the same level. Nor are his phylogenetic and palingenetic speculations
treated any more favourably by the real Scientists, than are our cyclic
repetitions of the evolution of the great in the minor races, and the
original order of Evolution. For the province of exact, real Science,
materialistic though it be, is to carefully avoid anything like guess‐
work, speculation which _cannot_ be verified; in short, all _suppressio
veri_ and all _suggestio falsi_. The business of the men of exact Science
is to observe, each in his chosen department, the phenomena of Nature; to
record, tabulate, compare and classify the facts, down to the smallest
minutiæ which are presented to the observation of the senses _with the
help of all the exquisite mechanism that modern invention supplies_, not
by the aid of metaphysical flights of fancy. All that he has a legitimate
right to do, is to correct by the assistance of physical instruments the
defects or illusions of his own coarser vision, auditory powers, and other
senses. He has no right to trespass on the grounds of Metaphysics and
Psychology. His duty is to verify and to rectify all the facts that _fall
under his direct observation_; to profit by the experiences and mistakes
of the Past in endeavouring to trace the working of a certain
concatenation of cause and effect, which—but only by its constant and
unvarying repetition—may be called a Law. This it is which a man of
Science is expected to do, if he would become a teacher of men and remain
true to his original programme of natural or physical Sciences. Any side
path from this royal road becomes speculation.

Instead of keeping to this, what does many a so‐called man of Science do
in these days? He rushes into the domain of pure Metaphysics, while
deriding them. He delights in rash conclusions and calls them “a deductive
law from the inductive law” of a theory based upon and drawn out of the
depths of his own consciousness—that consciousness being perverted by, and
honeycombed with, one‐sided Materialism. He attempts to explain the
“origin” of things, which are yet embosomed only in his own conceptions.
He attacks spiritual beliefs and religious traditions millenniums old, and
denounces everything, save his own hobbies, as superstition. He suggests
theories of the Universe, a cosmogony developed by blind, mechanical
forces of Nature alone, far more _miraculous and impossible_ than even one
based upon the assumption of _fiat lux ex nihilo_—and tries to astonish
the world by his wild theory; and this theory, being known to emanate from
a scientific brain, is taken, on _blind faith_, as very scientific and as
the outcome of Science.

Are these the opponents Occultism should dread? Most decidedly not. For
such theories are treated no better by _real_ Science than are our own by
empirical Science. Hæckel, hurt in his vanity by du Bois‐Reymond, is never
tired of publicly complaining of the latter’s onslaught on his fantastic
theory of descent. Rhapsodizing on “the exceedingly rich storehouse of
empirical evidence,” he calls those “recognized Physiologists” who oppose
every speculation of his drawn from the said “storehouse”—ignorant men,
and declares:

If many men, and among them even some Scientists of repute—hold
that the whole of phylogeny is a castle in the air, and
genealogical trees [from monkeys?] are empty plays of phantasy,
they only in speaking thus demonstrate their ignorance of that
wealth of _empirical sources of knowledge_ to which reference has
already been made.(1586)

We open Webster’s Dictionary and read the definitions of the word
“empirical”:

Depending upon experience or observation alone, _without due
regard to modern science and theory_.

This applies to the Occultists, Spiritualists, Mystics, etc. Again:

An empiric; one who confines himself to applying the results of
his own observations only [which is Hæckel’s case]; one _wanting
science_ ... an ignorant and unlicensed practitioner; a quack; a
charlatan.

No Occultist or “Magician,” has ever been treated to any worse epithets.
Yet the Occultist remains on his own metaphysical grounds, and does not
endeavour to rank _his knowledge_, the fruits of _his_ personal
observation and experience, among the _exact_ Sciences of modern learning.
He keeps within his legitimate sphere, where he is master. But what is one
to think of a rank Materialist, whose duty is clearly traced before him,
who uses such an expression as this:

The origin of man from other mammals, and most directly from the
catarrhine ape, is a deductive law, that follows necessarily from
the inductive law of the Theory of Descent.(1587)

A “theory” is simply a hypothesis, a speculation, and _not_ a law. To say
otherwise is one of the many liberties taken now‐a‐days by Scientists.
They enunciate an absurdity, and then hide it behind the shield of
Science. A deduction from theoretical speculation is nothing more than a
_speculation on a speculation_. Sir William Hamilton has already shown
that the word theory is now used

In a very loose and improper sense ... that it is convertible into
_hypothesis_, and _hypothesis_ is commonly used as another term
for _conjecture_, whereas the terms “theory” and “theoretical” are
properly used in opposition to the terms practice and practical.

But Modern Science puts an extinguisher on the latter statement, and mocks
at the idea. Materialistic Philosophers and Idealists of Europe and
America may be agreed with the Evolutionists as to the physical origin of
man, yet it will never become a general truth with the true Metaphysician;
and the latter defies the Materialists to make good their arbitrary
assumptions. That the ape‐theory theme(1588) of Vogt and Darwin, on which
the Huxley‐Hæckelians have of late composed such extraordinary variations,
is far less scientific—because clashing with the fundamental laws of that
theme itself—than ours can ever be shown to be, is very easy of
demonstration. Let the reader only turn to the excellent work on _Human
Species_ by the great French Naturalist de Quatrefages, and our statement
will at once be verified.

Moreover, between the Esoteric teaching concerning the Origin of Man and
Darwin’s speculations, no man, unless he is a rank Materialist, will
hesitate. This is the description given by Mr. Darwin of “the early
progenitors of man.”

They must have been once covered with hair, both sexes having
beards; their ears were probably pointed and capable of movement;
and their bodies were provided with a tail, having the proper
muscles. Their limbs and bodies were also acted on by many muscles
which now only occasionally reäppear, but are normally present in
the Quadrumana.... The foot was then prehensile, judging from the
condition of the great toe in the fœtus; and our progenitors, no
doubt, were arboreal in their habits, and frequented some warm
forest‐clad land. The males had great canine teeth, which served
them as formidable weapons.(1589)

Darwin connects man with the type of the tailed catarrhines:

And consequently removes him a stage backward in the scale of
evolution. The English naturalist is not satisfied to take his
stand upon the ground of his own doctrines, and, like Hæckel, on
this point places himself in direct variance with one of the
fundamental laws which constitute the principal charm of
Darwinism.

And then the learned French Naturalist proceeds to show how this
fundamental law is broken. He says:

In fact, in the theory of Darwin, transmutations do not take
place, either by chance or in every direction. They are ruled by
certain laws which are due to the organization itself. If an
organism is once modified in a given direction, it can undergo
secondary or tertiary transmutations, but will still preserve the
impress of the original. It is the law of _permanent
characterization_, which _alone_ permits Darwin to explain the
filiation of groups, their characteristics, and their numerous
relations. It is by virtue of this law that _all_ the descendants
of the first mollusc have been molluscs; _all_ the descendants of
the first vertebrate have been vertebrates. It is clear that this
constitutes one of the foundations of the doctrine. It follows
that two beings belonging to two distinct types can be referred to
_a common ancestor_, but the one cannot be the descendant of the
other.

Now man and apes present a very striking contrast in _respect to
type_. Their organs ... correspond almost exactly term for term:
but these organs are arranged after a very different plan. In man
they are so arranged that he is essentially a _walker_, while in
apes they necessitate his being a _climber_.... There is here an
anatomical and mechanical distinction.... A glance at the page
where Huxley has figured side by side a human skeleton and the
skeletons of the most highly developed apes is a sufficiently
convincing proof.

The consequence of these facts, from the point of view of the
logical application of the law of _permanent characterizations_,
is that man cannot be descended from an ancestor who is already
characterized as an ape, any more than a catarrhine tailless ape
can be descended from a tailed catarrhine. A _walking animal_
cannot be descended from a _climbing_ one. This was clearly
understood by Vogt.

In placing man among the primates, he declares without hesitation
that the lowest class of apes have passed the landmark (the common
ancestor), from which the different types of this family have
originated and diverged. [This ancestor of the apes, Occult
Science sees in the lowest human group during the Atlantean
period, as shown before.] We must, then, place the origin of man
beyond the last ape [corroborating our doctrine], if we wish to
adhere to one of the laws most emphatically necessary to the
Darwinian theory. We then come to the prosimiæ of Hæckel, the
loris, indris, etc. But these animals also are climbers; we must
go further, therefore, in search of our first direct ancestor. But
the genealogy by Hæckel brings us from the latter to the
_marsupials_. From men to the kangaroo the distance is certainly
great. Now neither living nor extinct fauna show the intermediate
types which ought to serve as landmarks. This difficulty causes
but slight embarrassment to Darwin.(1590) We know that he
considers the want of information upon similar questions as a
proof in his favour. Hæckel doubtless is as little embarrassed. He
admits the existence of an absolutely theoretical _pithecoid man_.

Thus, since it has been proved that, according to Darwinism
itself, the origin of man must be placed beyond the eighteenth
stage, and since it becomes, in consequence, _necessary_ to fill
up the gap between marsupials and man, will Hæckel admit the
existence of _four unknown intermediate groups_ instead of one?
Will he complete his genealogy in this manner? It is not for me to
answer.(1591)

But see Hæckel’s famous genealogy, in _The Pedigree of Man_, called by him
the “Ancestral Series of Man.” In the “Second Division” (eighteenth stage)
he describes—

Prosimiæ, allied to the Loris (Stenops) and Makis (Lemur), without
marsupial bones and cloaca, _with placenta_.(1592)

And now turn to de Quatrefages’ _The Human Species_,(1593) and see his
proofs, based on the latest discoveries, to show that the Prosimiæ of
Hæckel have no decidua and a diffuse placenta. They cannot be the
ancestors of the apes even, let alone man, according to a fundamental law
of Darwin himself, as the great French Naturalist shows. But this does not
dismay the “animal theorists” in the least, for self‐contradiction and
paradoxes are the very soul of modern Darwinism. Witness—Mr. Huxley;
having himself shown, with regard to fossil man and the “missing link,”
that:

Neither in Quaternary ages nor at the present time does any
intermediary being fill the gap which separates man from the
Troglodyte;

and that to “deny the existence of this gap _would be as reprehensible as
absurd_,” the great man of Science denies his own words _in actu_ by
supporting with all the weight of his scientific authority that _most_
“absurd” of all theories—the _descent of man from an ape_!

Says de Quatrefages:

This genealogy is wrong throughout, and is founded on a material
error.

Indeed, Hæckel bases his descent of man on the seventeenth and eighteenth
stages, the Marsupialia and Prosimiæ—(genus Hæckelii?). Applying the
latter term to the Lemuridæ—hence making of them animals with a
placenta—he commits a zoological blunder. For after having himself divided
mammals according to their anatomical differences into two groups—the
_indeciduata_, which have no decidua (or special membrane uniting the
placentæ), and the _deciduata_, those who possess it—he includes the
Prosimiæ in the latter group. Now we have shown elsewhere what other men
of Science had to say to this. As de Quatrefages says:

The anatomical investigations of ... Milne Edwards and Grandidier
upon the animals ... place it beyond all doubt that the Prosimiæ
of Hæckel have no decidua and a diffuse placenta. They are
_indeciduata_. Far from any possibility of their being the
ancestors of the apes, according to the principles laid down by
Hæckel himself, they cannot even be regarded as the ancestors of
the zonoplacental mammals ... and ought to be connected with the
Pachydermata, the Edentata, and the Cetacea.(1594)

And yet Hæckel’s inventions pass with some as _exact Science_!

The above mistake, if indeed it be one, is not even hinted at in Hæckel’s
_Pedigree of Man_, translated by Aveling. If the excuse may stand good
that at the time the famous “genealogies” were made, “the embryogenesis of
the Prosimiæ was not known,” it is familiar now. We shall see whether the
next edition of Aveling’s translation will have this important error
rectified, or if the seventeenth and eighteenth stages will remain as they
are to blind the profane, as one of the _real_ intermediate links. But, as
the French Naturalist observes:

Their [Darwin’s and Hæckel’s] process is always the same,
considering the unknown as a _proof_ in favour of their theory.

It comes to this. Grant to man an immortal Spirit and Soul; endow the
whole animate and inanimate creation with the monadic principle gradually
evolving from latent and passive into active and positive polarity—and
Hæckel will not have a leg to stand upon, whatever his admirers may say.

But there are important divergencies even between Darwin and Hæckel. While
the former makes us proceed from the _tailed_ catarrhine, Hæckel traces
our hypothetical ancestor to the _tailless_ ape, though, at the same time,
he places him in a hypothetical “stage” immediately preceding
this—Menocerca with tails (nineteenth stage).

Nevertheless, we have one thing in common with the Darwinian school, that
is the law of gradual and extremely slow Evolution, embracing many million
years. The chief quarrel, it appears, is with regard to the nature of the
primitive “ancestor.” We shall be told that the Dhyân Chohan, or the
“progenitor” of Manu, is a hypothetical being unknown on _the physical
plane_. We reply that it was believed in by the whole of Antiquity, and is
by nine‐tenths of the present humanity; whereas not only is the pithecoid
man, or ape‐man, a purely hypothetical creature of Hæckel’s creation,
unknown and untraceable on this Earth, but further its genealogy—as
invented by him—clashes with scientific facts and all the known data of
modern discovery in Zoology. It is simply absurd, even as a fiction. As de
Quatrefages demonstrates in a few words, Hæckel “admits the existence of
an absolutely theoretical pithecoid man”—a hundred times more difficult to
accept than any Deva ancestor. And it is not the only instance in which he
proceeds in a similar manner in order to complete his genealogical table.
In fact he very naïvely admits his inventions himself. Does he not confess
the non‐existence of his Sozura (fourteenth stage)—a creature entirely
unknown to Science—by confessing over his own signature, that:

The proof of its existence arises from the necessity of an
intermediate type between the thirteenth and the fourteenth
stages[!].

If so, we might maintain with as much scientific right, that the proof of
the existence of our three ethereal Races, and of the three‐eyed men of
the Third and Fourth Root‐Races, “arises also from the necessity of an
intermediate type” between the animal and the Gods. What reason would the
Hæckelians have to protest in this special case?

Of course there is a ready answer: Because we do not grant the presence of
the Monadic Essence. The manifestation of the Logos as individual
consciousness in the animal and human creation is not accepted by exact
Science, nor does it cover the whole ground, of course. But the failures
of Science and its arbitrary assumptions are far greater on the whole than
any “extravagant” Esoteric doctrine can ever furnish.(1595) Even thinkers
of the school of Von Hartmann have become tainted with the general
epidemic. They accept the Darwinian Anthropology (more or less), though
they also postulate the individual Ego as a manifestation of the
Unconscious (the Western presentation of the Logos or Primeval Divine
Thought). They say the evolution of the physical man is from the animal,
but that mind in its various phases is altogether a thing apart from
material facts, though organism, as a Upâdhi, is necessary for its
manifestation.

Plastidular Souls, And Conscious Nerve‐Cells.

But one can never see the end of such wonders with Hæckel and his school,
whom the Occultists and Theosophists have every right to consider as
materialistic tramps trespassing on private metaphysical grounds. Not
satisfied with the paternity of Bathybius (Hæckelii), “plastidular souls”
and “atom‐souls”(1596) are now invented, on the basis of purely blind
mechanical forces of matter. We are informed that:

The study of the evolution of soul‐life shows us that this has
worked its way up from the lower stages of the simple cell‐soul,
through an astonishing series of gradual stages in evolution, up
to the soul of man.(1597)

“Astonishing,” truly—based as this wild speculation is on the
_consciousness_ of the “nerve cells.” For as he tells us:

Little as we are in a position, at the present time, to explain
fully the nature of consciousness,(1598) yet the comparative and
genetic observation of it clearly shows, that it is only a higher
and more complex function of the nerve cells.(1599)

Mr. Herbert Spencer’s song on consciousness—is sung, it seems, and may
henceforth be safely stored up in the lumber room of obsolete
speculations. Where, however, do Hæckel’s “complex functions” of _his_
scientific “nerve‐cells” land him? Once more right into the Occult and
mystic teachings of the _Kabalah_ about the descent of Souls as conscious
and unconscious Atoms; among the Pythagorean Monad and the Monads of
Leibnitz, and the “Gods, Monads, and Atoms” of our Esoteric
teaching;(1600) into the _dead letter_ of Occult teachings, left to the
_amateur_ Kabalists and professors of ceremonial Magic. For this is what
he says, in explaining his newly‐coined terminology:

Plastidule‐Souls. The plastidules or protoplasmic molecules, the
smallest, homogeneous parts of the protoplasm are, on our plastid
theory, to be regarded as the active factors of all life‐
functions. The plastidular soul differs from the inorganic
molecular soul in that it possesses memory.(1601)

This he develops in his mirific lecture on the “Perigenesis of Plastidule,
or the Wave‐motions of Living Particles.” It is an improvement on Darwin’s
theory of “Pangenesis,” and a further approach, a cautious move, towards
“Magic.” The former is a conjecture that:

Some of the actual identical atoms which formed part of ancestral
bodies are thus transmitted through their descendants for
generation after generation, so that we are literally “flesh of
the flesh” of the primeval creature who has developed into man

—explains the author of _A Modern Zoroastrian_.(1602) The latter,
Occultism, teaches that—(_a_) the life‐atoms of our (Prâna) Life‐
Principle, are never entirely lost when a man dies. That the atoms best
impregnated with the Life‐Principle, an independent, eternal, conscious
factor, are partially transmitted from father to son by heredity, and are
partially drawn once more together and become the animating principle of
the new body in every new incarnation of the Monads. Because (_b_), as the
Individual Soul is ever the same, so are the atoms of the lower principles
(the body, its astral, or life‐double, etc.), drawn as they are by
affinity and Karmic law always to the same individuality in a series of
various bodies.(1603)

To be just and, to say the least, logical, our modern Hæckelians ought to
pass a resolution that henceforth the “Perigenesis of the Plastidule,” and
other similar lectures, should be bound up with those on “Esoteric
Buddhism” and “The Seven Principles in Man.” Thus the public will have a
chance, at any rate, of comparing the two teachings and then of judging
which is the more or the less absurd, even from the standpoint of
materialistic and exact Science.

Now the Occultists, who trace every atom in the Universe, whether an
aggregate or single, to One Unity, the Universal Life; who do not
recognize that anything in Nature can be inorganic; who know of no such
thing as dead Matter—the Occultists are consistent with their doctrine of
Spirit and Soul when speaking of memory in every atom, of will and
sensation. But what can a Materialist mean by the qualification? The law
of biogenesis, in the sense applied to it by the Hæckelians, is the result
of the ignorance on the part of the man of Science of _Occult_ Physics. We
know and speak of “life‐atoms,” and of “sleeping‐atoms,” because we regard
these two forms of energy—the kinetic and the potential—as produced by one
and the same force, or the One Life, and regard the latter as the source
and mover of all. But what is it that furnished with energy, and
especially with memory, the “plastidular souls” of Hæckel? The “wave
motion of living particles” becomes comprehensible on the theory of a
Spiritual One Life, of a universal Vital Principle independent of _our_
Matter, and manifesting as atomic energy only on _our_ plane of
consciousness. It is that which, individualized in the human cycle, is
transmitted from father to son.

Now Hæckel, modifying Darwin’s theory, suggests “more plausibly,” as the
author of _A Modern Zoroastrian_ thinks:

That not the identical atoms, but their peculiar motions and mode
of aggregation have been thus transmitted [by heredity].(1604)

If Hæckel, or any other Scientist, knew more than any of them does know of
the nature of the atom, he would not have improved the occasion in this
way. For he only states, in more metaphysical language than Darwin, one
and the same thing. The Life‐Principle, or Life Energy, which is
omnipresent, eternal, indestructible, is a Force and a Principle as
_noumenon_, while it is Atoms, as _phenomenon_. It is one and the same
thing, and cannot be considered as separate except in Materialism.(1605)

Further, Hæckel enunciates concerning the Atom‐Souls that which, at first
sight, appears as occult as the Monad of Leibnitz:

The recent contest as to the nature of atoms, which we must regard
as in some form or other the ultimate factors in all physical and
chemical processes, seems to be capable of easiest settlement by
the conception that these very minute masses possess, as centres
of force, a persistent soul, that every atom has sensation and the
power of movement.(1606)

He does not say a word concerning the fact that this is Leibnitz’ theory,
and one that is preëminently Occult. Nor does he understand the term
“soul” as we do; for, with Hæckel it is simply, along with consciousness,
the product of the grey matter of the brain, a thing which, as the cell‐
soul

Is as indissolubly bound up with the protoplasmic body as is the
human soul with the brain and spinal cord.(1607)

He rejects the conclusions of Kant, Herbert Spencer, of du Bois‐Reymond
and Tyndall. The latter expresses the opinion of all the great men of
Science, as of the greatest thinkers of this and past ages, in saying
that:

The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding
facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Were our minds and senses
so ... illuminated as to enable us to see and feel the very
molecules of the brain; were we capable of following all their
motions, all their groupings ... electric discharges ... we should
be as far as ever from the solution of the problem.... The chasm
between the two classes of phenomena would still remain
intellectually impassable.

But the complex function of the nerve‐cells of the great German Empiric,
or, in other words, his consciousness, will not permit him to follow the
conclusions of the greatest thinkers of our globe. _He is greater than
they._ He asserts this, and _protests_ against all:

No one has the right to hold that in the future we shall not be
able to pass beyond these limits of our knowledge that to‐day seem
impassable.(1608)

And he quotes from Darwin’s introduction to _The Descent of Man_ the
following words, which he modestly applies to his scientific opponents and
himself:

It is always those who know little, and not those who know much,
that positively affirm that this or that problem will never be
solved by Science.

The world may rest satisfied. The day is not far off when the “thrice
great” Hæckel will have shown, to his own satisfaction, that the
consciousness of Sir Isaac Newton was, physiologically speaking, but the
reflex action (or _minus_ consciousness) caused by the perigenesis of the
plastidules of our common ancestor and old friend, the Moneron Hæckelii.
Though, the said Bathybius has been found out and exposed as a pretender
simulating the organic substance _it is not_, and though among the
children of men, Lot’s wife alone—and even this, only after her
disagreeable metamorphosis—could claim as her forefather the pinch of salt
_it is_; all this will not dismay him in the least. He will go on
asserting, as coolly as he has always done, that it was only the peculiar
mode and motion of the ghost of the long‐vanished atoms of our Father
Bathybius, which—transmitted across æons of time into the cell‐tissue of
the grey matter of the brains of every great man—caused Sophocles and
Æschylus, and Shakspere as well, to write their tragedies, Newton, his
_Principia_, Humboldt, his _Cosmos_, etc. It also prompted Hæckel to
invent Græco‐Latin names three inches long, pretending to mean a good
deal, and meaning—nothing.

Of course we are quite aware that the true, honest Evolutionist agrees
with us; and that he is the first to say that not only is the geological
record imperfect, but that there are enormous gaps in the series of
hitherto discovered fossils, which can never be filled. He will tell us,
moreover, that “no Evolutionist assumes that man is descended from any
existing ape or any extinct ape either,” but that man and apes originated
_probably_ æons back, in some common root stock. Still, as de Quatrefages
points out, he will urge as an evidence corroborating his claim this
wealth of absent proofs as well, saying that:

All living forms have not been preserved in the fossil series, the
chances of preservation being few and far between ... [even
primitive man] burying or burning his dead.

This is just what we ourselves claim. It is just as _possible_ that the
future may have in store for us the discovery of the giant skeleton of an
Atlantean, thirty feet high, as of the fossil of a pithecoid “missing
link”; only the former is more _probable_.

Section III. The Fossil Relics of Man and the Anthropoid Ape.

A. Geological Facts Bearing On The Question Of Their Relationship.

The data derived from scientific research as to “primeval man” and the ape
lend no countenance to theories deriving the former from the latter.
“Where, then, must we look for primeval man?”—still queries Mr. Huxley,
after having vainly searched for him in the very depths of the Quaternary
strata.

Was the oldest Homo sapiens Pliocene or Miocene, or yet more
ancient? In still older strata do the fossilized bones of an ape
more anthropoid, or a man more pithecoid than any yet known, await
the researches of some unborn palæontologist? Time will
show.(1609)

It will—undeniably—and thus vindicate the Anthropology of the Occultists.
Meanwhile, in his eagerness to vindicate Mr. Darwin’s _Descent of Man_,
Mr. Boyd Dawkins believes that he has all but found the “missing link”—in
theory. It was due to Theologians more than to Geologists that, till
nearly 1860, man had been considered as a relic no older than the Adamic
orthodox 6,000 years. As Karma would have it, though, it was left to a
French Abbé—Bourgeois—to give this easy‐going theory even a worse blow
than had been given to it by the discoveries of Boucher de Perthes.
Everyone knows that the Abbé discovered and brought to light good evidence
that man was already in existence during the Miocene period, for flints of
undeniably human making were excavated from Miocene strata. In the words
of the author of _Modern Science and Modern Thought_:

They must either have been chipped by man, or, as Mr. Boyd Dawkins
supposes, by the dryopithecus or some other anthropoid ape which
had a dose of intelligence so much superior to the gorilla or
chimpanzee, as to be able to fabricate tools. But in this case the
problem would be solved and the missing link discovered, for such
an ape might well have been the ancestor of Palæolithic man.(1610)

Or—_the descendant of Eocene man_, which is a variant offered to the
theory. Meanwhile, the dryopithecus with such fine mental endowments is
yet to be discovered. On the other hand, Neolithic and even Palæolithic
man having become an absolute certainty, and as the same author justly
observes:

If 100,000,000 years have elapsed since the earth became
sufficiently solidified to support vegetable and animal life, the
Tertiary period may have lasted for 5,000,000; or for 10,000,000
years, if the life‐sustaining order of things has lasted, as Lyell
supposes for at least 200,000,000 years—(1611)

why should not another theory be tried? Let us carry man, as a hypothesis,
to the close of Mesozoic times—admitting _argumenti causâ_ that the (much
more recent) higher apes then existed! This would allow ample time for man
and the modern apes to have diverged from the mythical “ape more
anthropoid,” and even for the latter to have degenerated into those that
are found _mimicking_ man in using “branches of trees as clubs, and
cracking cocoa‐nuts with hammer and stones.”(1612) Some savage tribes of
hillmen in India build their abodes on trees, just as the gorillas build
their dens. The question, which of the two, the beast or the man, has
become the imitator of the other, is scarcely an open one, even granting
Mr. Boyd Dawkins’ theory. The fanciful character of this hypothesis, is,
however, generally admitted. It is argued that while in the Pliocene and
Miocene periods there were true apes and baboons, and man was undeniably
contemporaneous with the former of these times—though, as we see, orthodox
Anthropology still hesitates, in the teeth of facts, to place him in the
era of the dryopithecus, which latter—

Has been considered by some anatomists as in some respects
superior to the chimpanzee or the gorilla ... (1613)

yet, in the Eocene there have been no other fossil _primates_ unearthed
and no pithecoid stocks found save a few extinct lemurian forms. And we
find it also hinted that the dryopithecus _may have been_ the “missing
link,” though the brain of the creature no more warrants the theory than
does the brain of the modern gorilla. (See also Gaudry’s speculations.)

Now we would ask who among the Scientists is ready to prove that _there
was no man_ in existence in the early Tertiary period? What is it that
prevented his presence? Hardly thirty years ago his existence any farther
back than six or seven thousand years was indignantly denied. Now he is
refused admission into the Eocene age. Next century it may become a
question whether man was not contemporary with the “flying dragon,” the
pterodactyl, the plesiosaurus and iguanodon, etc. Let us listen, however,
to the echo of Science.

Now, wherever anthropoid apes lived it is clear that, whether as a
question of anatomical structure, or of climate and surroundings,
man, or some creature which was the ancestor of man, might have
lived also. Anatomically speaking, apes and monkeys are as much
special variations of the mammalian type as man, whom they
resemble bone for bone, and muscle for muscle, and the physical
animal man is simply an instance of the quadrumanous type
specialized for erect posture and a larger brain(1614).... If he
could survive, as we know he did, the adverse conditions and
extreme vicissitudes of the Glacial period, there is no reason why
he might not have lived in the semi‐tropical climate of the
Miocene period, when a genial climate extended even to Greenland
and Spitzbergen.(1615)

When most of the men of Science who are uncompromising in their belief in
the descent of man from an “extinct anthropoid mammal;” will not accept
even the bare tenability of any other theory than an ancestor common to
man and the dryopithecus, it is refreshing to find in a work of real
scientific value such a margin for compromise. Indeed, it is as wide as it
can be made under the circumstances, _i.e._, without immediate danger of
getting knocked off one’s feet by the tidal wave of science‐adulation.
Believing that the difficulty of accounting—

For the development of intellect and morality by evolution is not
so great as that presented by the difference as to physical
structure(1616) between man and the highest animal—

the same author says:

But it is not so easy to see how this difference of physical
structure arose, and how a being came into existence which had
such a brain and hand, and such undeveloped capabilities for an
almost unlimited progress. The difficulty is this: the difference
in structure between the lowest existing race of man and the
highest existing ape is too great to admit of the possibility of
one being the direct descendant of the other. The negro in some
respects makes a slight approximation towards the Simian type. His
skull is narrower, his brain less capacious, his muzzle more
projecting, his arm longer than those of the average European man.
Still he is essentially a man, and separated by a wide gulf from
the chimpanzee or the gorilla. Even the idiot or crétin, whose
brain is no larger and intelligence no greater than that of the
chimpanzee, is an arrested man, not an ape.

If, therefore, the Darwinian theory holds good in the case of man
and ape, we must go back to some common ancestor from whom both
may have originated.... But to establish this as a _fact_ and not
a _theory_ we require to find that ancestral form, or, at any
rate, some intermediate forms tending towards it ... in other
words ... the “missing link.” Now it must be admitted that,
hitherto, not only have no such missing links been discovered, but
the oldest known human skulls and skeletons which date from the
Glacial period, and are probably at least 100,000 years old, show
no very decided approximation towards any such pre‐human type. On
the contrary, one of the oldest types, that of the men of the
sepulchral cave of Cro‐Magnon,(1617) is that of a fine race, tall
in stature, large in brain, and on the whole superior to many of
the existing races of mankind. The reply of course is that the
time is insufficient, and if man and the ape had a common
ancestor, that as a highly developed anthropoid ape, certainly,
and man, probably, already existed in the Miocene period, such
ancestor must be sought still further back at a distance compared
with which the whole Quaternary period sinks into
insignificance.... All this is true, and it may well make us
hesitate before we admit that man ... is alone an exception to the
general law of the universe, and is the creature of a special
creation. This is the more difficult to believe, as the ape family
which man so closely resembles [?] in physical structure contains
numerous branches which graduate into one another, but the
extremes of which differ more widely than man does from the
highest of the ape series. If a special creation is required for
man, must there not have been special creations for the
chimpanzee, the gorilla, the orang, and for at least 100 different
species of apes and monkeys which are all built on the same
lines?(1618)

There _was_ a “special creation” for man, and a “special creation” for the
ape, _his_ progeny; only on other lines than ever bargained for by
Science. Albert Gaudry and others give some weighty reasons why man cannot
be regarded as the crown of an ape‐stock. When one finds that not only was
the “primeval savage” (?) a reality in the Miocene times, but that, as de
Mortillet shows, the flint relics he has left behind him were splintered
_by fire_ in that remote epoch; when we learn that the dryopithecus,
_alone of the anthropoids_, appears in those strata, what is the natural
inference? That the Darwinians are in a quandary. The very man‐like gibbon
is _still in the same low grade of development, as it was when it
coëxisted with man at the close of the Glacial period_. It has not
appreciably altered since the Pliocene times. Now there is little to
choose between the dryopithecus and the existing anthropoids—gibbon,
gorilla, etc. If, then, the Darwinian theory is all‐sufficient, how are we
to “explain” the evolution of this ape into man during the first half of
the Miocene? The time is far too short for such a theoretical
transformation. The extreme slowness with which variation in species
supervenes renders the thing inconceivable—more especially on the “natural
selection” hypothesis. The enormous mental and structural gulf between a
savage acquainted with fire and the mode of kindling it, and a brutal
anthropoid, is too great to bridge even in idea, during so contracted a
period. Let the Evolutionists push back the process into the preceding
Eocene, if they prefer to do so; let them even trace both man and
dryopithecus to a common ancestor; the unpleasant consideration has,
nevertheless, to be faced that in Eocene strata the anthropoid fossils are
as conspicuous by their absence, as is the fabulous pithecanthropus of
Hæckel. Is an exit out of this _cul de sac_ to be found by an appeal to
the “unknown,” and a reference, with Darwin, to the “imperfection of the
geological record”? So be it; but the same right of appeal must then be
equally accorded to the Occultists, instead of remaining the monopoly of
puzzled Materialism. Physical man, we say, existed before the first bed of
the Cretaceous rocks was deposited. In the early part of the Tertiary age,
the most brilliant civilization the world has ever known flourished at a
period when the Hæckelian man‐ape is conceived as roaming through primeval
forests, and Mr. Grant Allen’s putative ancestor as swinging himself from
bough to bough with his hairy mates, the degenerated Liliths of the Third
Race Adam. Yet there were no anthropoid apes in the brighter days of the
civilization of the Fourth Race; but Karma is a mysterious law, and no
respecter of persons. The monsters bred in sin and shame by the Atlantean
Giants, “blurred copies” of their bestial sires, and hence of modern man,
according to Huxley, now mislead and overwhelm with error the speculative
Anthropologist of European Science.

Where did the first men live? Some Darwinists say in Western Africa, some
in Southern Asia, others again believe in an independent origin of human
stocks in Asia and America from a simian ancestry. Hæckel, however,
advances gaily to the charge. Starting from his prosimia, “the ancestor
common to all other catarrhini including man”—a “link” now, however,
disposed of for good by recent anatomical discoveries—he endeavours to
find a habitat for the primeval pithecanthropus alalus.

In all probability it [the transformation of animal into man]
occurred in Southern Asia, in which region many evidences are
forthcoming that here was the original home of the different
species of man. Probably Southern Asia itself was not the earliest
cradle of the human race, but Lemuria, a continent that lay to the
south of Asia, and sank later on beneath the surface of the Indian
Ocean. The period during which the evolution of the anthropoid
apes into ape‐like men took place was probably the last part of
the Tertiary period, the Pliocene age, and perhaps the Miocene
age, its forerunner.(1619)

Of the above speculations, the only one of any worth is that referring to
Lemuria, which _was_ the cradle of mankind—of the physical sexual creature
who materialized through long æons out of the ethereal hermaphrodites.
Only, if it is proved that Easter Island is an actual relic of Lemuria, we
must believe that according to Hæckel the “dumb ape‐men,” just removed
from a brutal mammalian monster, built the gigantic portrait‐statues, two
of which are now in the British Museum. Critics are mistaken in terming
Hæckelian doctrines “abominable, revolutionary, immoral”—though
Materialism is the legitimate outcome of the ape‐ancestor myth—they are
simply too absurd to demand disproof.

B. Western Evolutionism: The Comparative Anatomy Of Man And The Anthropoid
In No Way A Confirmation Of Darwinism.

We are told that while every other heresy against Modern Science may be
disregarded, this, our denial of the Darwinian theory as applied to man,
will be the one “unpardonable” sin. The Evolutionists stand firm as rock
on the evidence of similarity of structure between the ape and man. The
anatomical evidence, it is urged, is quite overpowering in this case; it
is bone for bone, and muscle for muscle, even the brain conformation being
very much the same.

Well, what of that? All this was known before King Herod; and the writers
of the _Râmâyana_, the poets who sang the prowess and valour of Hanumân,
the Monkey‐God, “whose feats were great and wisdom never rivalled,” must
have known as much about his anatomy and brain as does any Hæckel or
Huxley in our modern day. Volumes upon volumes have been written upon this
similarity, in antiquity as in more modern times. Therefore, there is
nothing new given to the world or to philosophy in such volumes as
Mivart’s _Man and Apes_, or Messrs. Fiske and Huxley’s defence of
Darwinism. But what are those crucial proofs of man’s descent from a
pithecoid ancestor? If the Darwinian theory is not the true one, we are
told, if man and ape do not descend from a common ancestor, then we must
explain the reason of:

(i) The similarity of structure between the two; the fact that the higher
animal world—man and beast—is physically of one type or pattern.

(ii) The presence of rudimentary organs in man, _i.e._, traces of former
organs now atrophied by disuse. Some of these organs, it is asserted,
could not have had any scope for employment, except in a semi‐animal,
semi‐arboreal monster. Why, again, do we find in man those “rudimentary”
organs—as useless as its rudimentary wing is to the apteryx of
Australia—the vermiform appendix of the cæcum, the ear muscles,(1620) the
“rudimentary tail” with which children are still sometimes born, etc.?

Such is the war cry; and the cackle of the smaller fry among the
Darwinians is louder, if possible, than even that of the scientific
Evolutionists themselves!

Furthermore, the latter—with their great leader Mr. Huxley, and such
eminent Zoologists as Mr. Romanes and others—while defending the Darwinian
theory, are the first to confess the almost insuperable difficulties in
the way of its final demonstration. And there are as great men of Science
as the above‐named, who deny, most emphatically, the uncalled‐for
assumption, and loudly denounce the unwarrantable exaggerations on the
question of this supposed similarity. It is sufficient to glance at the
works of Broca, Gratiolet, Owen, Pruner‐Bey, and finally at the last great
work of de Quatrefages, _Introduction à __ l’Étude des Races Humaines,
Questions Générales_, to discover the fallacy of the Evolutionists. We may
say more: the exaggerations concerning this alleged similarity of
structure between man and the anthropomorphous ape have become so glaring
and absurd of late, that even Mr. Huxley has found himself forced to
protest against the too sanguine expectations. It was that great Anatomist
personally who called the “smaller fry” to order, by declaring in one of
his articles that the differences between the structure of the human body
and that of the highest anthropomorphous pithecoid, were not only _far
from being trifling and unimportant_, but were, on the contrary, very
great and suggestive:

Every bone of a gorilla bears marks by which it might be
distinguished from the corresponding bone of a man.(1621)

Among the existing creatures there is not one single intermediate form
that could fill the gap between man and the ape. To ignore that gap, he
added, “would be no less wrong than absurd.”

Finally, the absurdity of such an _unnatural_ descent of man is so
palpable in the face of all the proofs and evidence as to the skull of the
pithecoid compared to that of man, that de Quatrefages resorted
unconsciously to our Esoteric theory by saying that it is rather the apes
that can claim descent from man than _vice versâ_. As proven by Gratiolet,
with regard to the cavities of the brain of the anthropoids—in which
species that organ develops in an inverse ratio to what would be the case
were the corresponding organs in man really the product of the development
of the said organs in the apes—the size of the human skull and its brain,
as well as the cavities, increase with the individual development of man.
His intellect develops and increases with age, while his facial bones and
jaws diminish and straighten, thus becoming more and more spiritualized;
whereas with the ape it is the reverse. In its youth the anthropoid is far
more intelligent and good‐natured, while with age it becomes duller; and,
as its skull recedes and seems to diminish as it grows, its facial bones
and jaws develop, the brain being finally crushed, and thrown entirely
back, to make with every day more room for the animal type. The organ of
thought—the brain—recedes and diminishes, entirely conquered and replaced
by that of the wild beast—the jaw apparatus.

Thus, as wittily remarked in the French work, a gorilla could with perfect
justice address an Evolutionist, claiming its right of descent from him.
It would say to him: We, anthropoid apes, form a retrogressive departure
from the human type, and therefore our development and evolution are
expressed by a transition from a human‐like to an animal‐like structure of
organism; but in what way could _you_, men, descend from us—how can you
form a continuation of our genus? For, to make this possible, your
organization would have to differ still more than ours does from the human
structure, it would have to approach still closer to that of the beast
than ours does; and in such a case justice demands that you should give up
to us your place in nature. You are lower than we are, once that you
insist on tracing your genealogy from our kind; for the structure of our
organization and its development are such that we are unable to generate
forms of a higher organization than our own.

This is where the Occult Sciences agree entirely with de Quatrefages.
Owing to the very type of his development man cannot _descend_ from either
an ape or an ancestor common to both apes and men, but shows his origin to
be from a type far superior to himself. And this type is the “Heavenly
Man”—the Dhyân Chohans, or the Pitris so‐called, as shown in the first
Part of this Volume. On the other hand, the pithecoids, the orang‐outang,
the gorilla, and the chimpanzee _can_, and, as the Occult Sciences teach,
_do_, descend from the animalized Fourth human Root‐Race, being the
product of man and an extinct species of mammal—whose remote ancestors
were themselves the product of Lemurian bestiality—which lived in the
Miocene age. The ancestry of this semi‐human monster is explained in the
Stanzas as originating in the sin of the “mind‐less” races of the middle
Third Race period.

When it is borne in mind that all forms which now people the Earth are so
many variations on _basic types_ originally thrown off by the Man of the
Third and Fourth Round, such an evolutionist argument as that insisting on
the “unity of structural plan” characterizing all vertebrates, loses its
edge. The basic types referred to were very few in number in comparison
with the multitude of organisms to which they ultimately gave rise; but a
general unity of type has, nevertheless, been preserved throughout the
ages. The economy of Nature does not sanction the coëxistence of several
utterly opposed “ground plans” of organic evolution on one planet. Once,
however, that the general drift of the Occult explanation is formulated,
inference as to detail may well be left to the intuitive reader.

Similarly with the important question of the “rudimentary” organs
discovered by Anatomists in the human organism. Doubtless this line of
argument, when wielded by Darwin and Hæckel against their European
adversaries, proved of great weight. Anthropologists, who ventured to
dispute the derivation of man from an animal ancestry, were sorely puzzled
how to deal with the presence of gill‐clefts, with the “tail” problem, and
so on. Here again Occultism comes to our assistance with the necessary
data.

The fact is that, as previously stated, the human type is the repertory of
all potential organic forms, and the central point from which these latter
radiate. In this postulate we find a true “evolution” or “unfolding”—in a
sense which cannot be said to belong to the mechanical theory of Natural
Selection. Criticizing Darwin’s inference from “rudiments,” an able writer
remarks:

Why is it not just as probably a true hypothesis to suppose that
man was first created with these rudimentary sketches in his
organization, and that they became useful appendages in the lower
animals into which man degenerated, as it is to suppose that these
parts existed in full development, activity and practical use, in
the lower animals out of whom man was generated?(1622)

Read for “into which man degenerated,” “the prototypes which man _shed_ in
the course of his astral developments,” and an aspect of the true Esoteric
solution is before us. But a wider generalization is now to be formulated.

So far as our present Fourth Round terrestrial period is concerned, the
mammalian fauna are alone to be regarded as traceable to prototypes shed
by Man. The amphibia, birds, reptiles, fishes, etc., are the resultants of
the Third Round, astral fossil forms stored up in the auric envelope of
the Earth and projected into physical objectivity subsequent to the
deposition of the first Laurentian rocks. “Evolution” has to deal with the
progressive modifications, which Palæontology shows to have affected the
lower animal and vegetable kingdoms in the course of geological time. It
does not, and from the nature of things cannot, touch on the subject of
the pre‐physical types which served as the basis for future
differentiation. Tabulate the general laws controlling the development of
physical organisms it certainly may, and to a certain extent it has
acquitted itself ably of the task.

To return to the immediate subject of discussion. The mammalia, whose
first traces are discovered in the marsupials of the Triassic rocks of the
Secondary period, were evolved from _purely_ astral progenitors
contemporary with the Second Race. They are thus _post‐human_, and,
consequently, it is easy to account for the general resemblance between
their embryonic stages and those of Man, who necessarily embraces in
himself and epitomizes in his development the features of the group he
originated. This explanation disposes of a portion of the Darwinist brief.

But how to account for the presence of the gill‐clefts in the
human fœtus, which represent the stage through which the branchiæ
of the fish are developed;(1623) for the pulsating vessel
corresponding to the heart of the lower fishes, which constitutes
the fœtal heart; for the entire analogy presented by the
segmentation of the human ovum, the formation of the blastoderm,
and the appearance of the “gastrula” stage, with corresponding
stages in lower vertebrate life and even among the sponges; for
the various types of lower animal life which the form of the
future child shadows forth in the cycle of its growth?... How
comes it to pass that stages in the life of fishes, whose
ancestors swam [æons before the epoch of the First Root‐Race] in
the seas of the Silurian period, as well as stages in that of the
later amphibian, reptilian fauna, are mirrored in the “epitomized
history” of human fœtal development?

This plausible objection is met by the reply that the Third Round
terrestrial animal forms were just as much referable to types thrown off
by Third Round Man, as that new importation into our planet’s area—the
mammalian stock—is to the Fourth Round Humanity of the Second Root‐Race.
The process of human fœtal growth epitomizes not only the general
characteristics of the Fourth, but of the Third Round terrestrial life.
The diapason of type is run through in brief. Occultists are thus at no
loss to “account for” the birth of children with an actual caudal
appendage, or for the fact that the tail in the human fœtus is, at one
period, double the length of the nascent legs. The potentiality of every
organ useful to animal life is locked up in Man—the Microcosm of the
Macrocosm—and abnormal conditions may not unfrequently result in the
strange phenomena which Darwinists regard as “reversion to ancestral
features.”(1624) Reversion, indeed, but scarcely in the sense contemplated
by our present‐day empiricists!

C. Darwinism And The Antiquity Of Man: The Anthropoids And Their Ancestry.

The public has been notified by more than one eminent modern Geologist and
man of Science, that:

All estimate of geological duration is not merely imperfect, but
necessarily impossible; for we are ignorant of the causes, though
they must have existed, which quickened or retarded the progress
of the sedimentary deposits.(1625)

And now another man of Science, as well known (Croll) calculating that the
Tertiary age began either fifteen or two‐and‐a‐half million years ago—the
former being a more correct calculation, according to Esoteric Doctrine,
than the latter—there seems in this case, at least, no very great
disagreement. Exact Science, refusing to see in man a “special creation”
(to a certain degree the Secret Sciences do the same), is at liberty to
ignore the first three, or rather two‐and‐a‐half Races—the spiritual, the
semi‐astral, and the semi‐human—of our teachings. But it can hardly do the
same in the case of the Third, at its closing period, the Fourth, and the
Fifth Races, since it already divides mankind into Palæolithic and
Neolithic man.(1626) The Geologists of France place man in the Mid‐Miocene
age (Gabriel de Mortillet), and some even in the Secondary period, as de
Quatrefages suggests; while the English _savants_ do not generally accept
such antiquity for their species. But they may know better some day. For,
as says Sir Charles Lyell:

If we consider the absence or extreme scarcity of human bones and
works of art in all strata, whether marine or fresh‐water, even in
those formed in the immediate proximity of land inhabited by
millions of human beings, we shall be prepared for the general
dearth of human memorials in glacial formations, whether recent,
pleistocene, or of more ancient date. If there were a few
wanderers over lands covered with glaciers, or over seas infested
with icebergs, and if a few of them left their bones or weapons in
moraines or in marine drifts, the chances, after the lapse of
thousands of years, of a geologist meeting with one of them must
be infinitesimally small.(1627)

The men of Science avoid pinning themselves down to any definite statement
concerning the age of man, as indeed they are hardly able to make any, and
thus leave enormous latitude to bolder speculations. Nevertheless, while
the majority of the Anthropologists carry back the existence of man _only_
into the period of the post‐glacial drift, or what is called the
Quaternary period, those of them who, as Evolutionists, trace man to a
common origin with the monkey, do not show great consistency in their
speculations. The Darwinian hypothesis demands, in reality, a far greater
antiquity for man, than is even dimly suspected by superficial thinkers.
This is proven by the greatest authorities on the question—Mr. Huxley, for
instance. Those, therefore, who accept the Darwinian evolution, _ipso
facto_ hold very tenaciously to an antiquity of man so very great, indeed,
that it falls not so far short of the Occultist’s estimate.(1628) The
modest thousands of years of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ and the 100,000
years, to which Anthropology in general limits the age of Humanity, seem
quite microscopical when compared with the figures implied in Mr. Huxley’s
bold speculations. The former, indeed, makes of the original race of men
ape‐like cave‐dwellers. The great English Biologist, in his desire to
prove man’s pithecoid origin, insists that the transformation of the
primordial ape into a human being must have occurred _millions of years
back_. For in criticizing the excellent cranial capacity of the
Neanderthal skull, notwithstanding his assertion that it is overlaid with
“pithecoid bony walls,” coupled with Mr. Grant Allen’s assurances that
this skull—

Possesses large bosses on the forehead, strikingly [?] suggestive
of those which give the gorilla its peculiarly fierce
appearance(1629)—

still Mr. Huxley is forced to admit that, in the said skull, his theory is
once more defeated by the—

Completely human proportions of the accompanying limb‐bones,
together with the fair development of the Engis skull.

In consequence of all this we are notified that these skulls—

Clearly indicate that the first traces of the primordial stock
whence man has proceeded, need no longer be sought by those who
entertain any form of the doctrine of progressive development in
the newest Tertiaries; but that they may be looked for in an epoch
more distant from the age of the elephas primigenius than that is
from us.(1630)

An _untold_ antiquity for man is thus, then, the scientific _sine quâ non_
in the question of Darwinian Evolution, since the oldest Palæolithic man
shows as yet no appreciable differentiation from his modern descendant. It
is only of late that Modern Science has with every year begun to widen the
abyss that now separates her from ancient Science, as that of Pliny and
Hippocrates; none of the old writers would have derided the Archaic
Teachings with respect to the evolution of the human races and animal
species, as the present day Scientist—Geologist or Anthropologist—is sure
to do.

The pendulum of thought oscillates between extremes. Having now finally
emancipated herself from the shackles of Theology, Science has embraced
the opposite fallacy; and in the attempt to interpret Nature on purely
materialistic lines, she has built up that most extravagant theory of the
ages—the derivation of man from a ferocious and brutal ape. So rooted has
this doctrine now become, in one form and another, that the most Herculean
efforts will be needed to bring about its final rejection. The Darwinian
Anthropology is the incubus of the Ethnologist, a sturdy child of modern
Materialism, which has grown up and acquired increasing vigour, as the
ineptitude of the theological legend of Man’s “creation” became more and
more apparent. It has thriven on account of the strange delusion that—as a
Scientist of repute puts it:

All hypotheses and theories with respect to the rise of man can be
reduced to two [the evolutionist and the biblical exoteric
account].... There is no other hypothesis conceivable [!!].

The anthropology of the Secret Volumes is, however, the best possible
answer to such a worthless contention.

The anatomical resemblance between man and the higher ape, so frequently
cited by Darwinists as pointing to some former ancestor common to both,
presents an interesting problem, the proper solution of which is to be
sought for in the Esoteric explanation of the genesis of the pithecoid
stocks. We have given it as far as it was useful, by stating that the
bestiality of the primeval mindless races resulted in the production of
huge man‐like monsters—the offspring of human and animal parents. As time
rolled on, and the still semi‐astral forms consolidated into the physical,
the descendants of these creatures were modified by external conditions,
until the breed, dwindling in size, culminated in the lower apes of the
Miocene period. With these the later Atlanteans renewed the sin of the
“Mindless”—this time with full responsibility. The resultants of their
crime were the apes now known as anthropoid.

It may be useful to compare this very simple theory—and we are willing to
offer it merely as a hypothesis to the unbelievers—with the Darwinian
scheme, so full of insurmountable obstacles, that no sooner is one of them
overcome by a more or less ingenious hypothesis, than ten worse
difficulties are forthwith discovered behind the one disposed of.

Section IV. Duration of the Geological Periods, Race Cycles, and the
Antiquity of Man.

Millions of years have sunk into Lethe, leaving no more recollection in
the memory of the profane than the few millenniums of the orthodox Western
chronology as to the Origin of Man and the history of the primeval races.

All depends on the proofs found for the antiquity of the Human Race. If
the still‐debated man of the Pliocene or even the Miocene period was the
Homo primigenius, then Science _may_ be right (_argumenti causâ_) in
basing its present Anthropology—as to the date and mode of origin of Homo
sapiens—on the Darwinian theory.(1631) But if the skeletons of man should
at any time be discovered in the Eocene strata, while no fossil ape is
found there, and the existence of man is thus proved to be prior to that
of the anthropoid—then Darwinians will have to exercise their ingenuity in
another direction. Moreover, it is said in well‐informed quarters that the
twentieth century will be still in its earliest teens when such undeniable
proof of man’s priority will be forthcoming.

Even now much evidence is being brought forward to prove that the dates
hitherto assigned for the foundations of cities, civilizations and various
other historical events have been absurdly curtailed. This was done as a
peace‐offering to biblical chronology. The well‐known Palæontologist Ed.
Lartet writes:

No date is to be found in Genesis, which assigns a time for the
birth of primitive humanity.

But Chronologists have for fifteen centuries endeavoured to force the
_Bible_ facts into agreement with their systems. Thus, no less than one
hundred and forty different opinions have been formed about the single
date of “Creation.”

And between the extreme variations there is a discrepancy of 3,194
years, in the reckoning of the period between the beginning of the
world and the birth of Christ. Within the last few years,
archæologists have had also to throw back by nearly 3,000 years
the beginnings of Babylonian civilization. On the foundation
cylinder deposited by Nabonidus, the Babylonian king, conquered by
Cyrus—are found the records of the former, in which he speaks of
his discovery of the foundation stone that belonged to the
original temple built by Naram‐Sin, son of Sargon, of Accadia, the
conqueror of Babylonia, who, says Nabonidus, lived 3,200 years
before his own time.(1632)

We have shown in _Isis Unveiled_ that those who based history on the
chronology of the Jews—a race which had none of its own and rejected the
Western till the twelfth century—would lose their way, for the Jewish
account could only be followed through kabalistic computation, and only
then with key in hand. We characterized the late George Smith’s chronology
of the Chaldæans and Assyrians, which he had made to fit in with that of
Moses, as quite fantastic. And now, in this respect at least, later
Assyriologists have corroborated our denial. For, whereas George Smith
makes Sargon I (the prototype of Moses) reign in the city of Akkad about
1600 B.C.—probably out of a latent respect for Moses, whom the _Bible_
makes to flourish 1571 B.C.—we now learn from the first of the six Hibbert
Lectures delivered by Professor A. H. Sayce, of Oxford, in 1887, that:

Old views of the early annals of Babylonia and its religions have
been much modified by recent discovery. The first Semitic Empire,
it is now agreed, was that of Sargon of Accad, who established a
great library, patronized literature, and extended his conquests
across the sea into Cyprus. It is now known that he reigned as
early as B.C. 3,750.... The Accadian monuments found by the French
at Tel‐loh must be even older, reaching back to about B.C. 4,000.

In other words, to the fourth year of the World’s creation agreeably with
_Bible_ chronology, and when Adam was in his swaddling clothes. Perchance,
in a few years more, the 4,000 years may be further extended. The well‐
known Oxford lecturer remarked in his disquisitions upon “The Origin and
Growth of Religion as Illustrated by the Religion of the Ancient
Babylonians,” that:

The difficulties of systematically tracing the origin and history
of the Babylonian Religion were considerable. The sources of our
knowledge of the subject were almost wholly monumental, very
little help being obtainable from classical or Oriental writers.
Indeed, it was an undeniable fact that the Babylonian priesthood
intentionally swaddled up the study of the religious texts in
coils of almost insuperable difficulty.

That they have confused the dates, and especially the order of events
“intentionally,” is undeniable, and for a very good reason: their writings
and records were all Esoteric. The Babylonian priests did no more than the
priests of other ancient nations. Their records were meant only for the
Initiates and their disciples, and it is only the latter who were
furnished with the keys to the true meaning. But Professor Sayce’s remarks
are promising. For he explains the difficulty by saying that as:

The Nineveh library contained mostly copies of older Babylonian
texts, and the copyists pitched upon such tablets only as were of
special interest to the Assyrian conquerors, belonging to a
comparatively late epoch, this added much to the greatest of all
our difficulties—namely, our being so often left in the dark as to
the age of our documentary evidence, and the precise worth of our
materials for history.

Thus one has a right to infer that some still fresher discovery may lead
to a new necessity for pushing the Babylonian dates so far beyond the year
4,000 B.C., as to make them _pre‐cosmic_ in the judgment of every _Bible_
worshipper.

How much more would Palæontology have learned had not millions of works
been destroyed! We talk of the Alexandrian Library, which has been thrice
destroyed, namely, by Julius Cæsar 48 B.C., in A.D. 390, and lastly in the
year A.D. 640 by the general of Kaliph Omar. What is this in comparison
with the works and records destroyed in the primitive Atlantean Libraries,
wherein records are said to have been traced on the tanned skins of
gigantic antediluvian monsters? Or again in comparison with the
destruction of the countless Chinese books by command of the founder of
the Imperial Tsin dynasty, Tsin Shi Hwang‐ti, in 213 B.C.? Surely the
brick‐clay tablets of the Imperial Babylonian Library, and the priceless
treasures of the Chinese collections, could never have contained such
information as one of the aforesaid “Atlantean” skins would have furnished
to the ignorant world.

But even with the extremely meagre data at hand, Science has been able to
see the necessity of throwing back nearly every Babylonian date, and has
done so quite generously. We learn from Professor Sayce that even the
archaic statues at Tel‐loh, in Lower Babylonia, have suddenly been
assigned a date contemporary with the fourth dynasty in Egypt.(1633)
Unfortunately, dynasties and pyramids share the fate of geological
periods; their dates are arbitrary, and depend on the whims of the
respective men of Science. Archæologists know now, it is said, that the
afore‐mentioned statues are fashioned out of green diorite, that can only
be got in the Peninsula of Sinai; and

They accord in the style of art, and in the standard of
measurement employed, with the similar diorite statues of the
pyramid builders of the third and fourth Egyptian dynasties....
Moreover, the only possible period for a Babylonian occupation of
the Sinaitic quarries must be placed shortly after the close of
the epoch at which the pyramids were built; and thus only can we
understand how the name of Sinai could have been derived from that
of Sin, the primitive Babylonian moon‐god.

This is very logical, but what is the date fixed for these dynasties?
Sanchuniathon’s and Manetho’s synchronistic tables—or whatever remained of
these after holy Eusebius had the handling of them—have been rejected; and
still we have to remain satisfied with the four or five thousand years
B.C., so liberally allotted to Egypt. At all events one point is gained.
There is, at last, a city on the face of the Earth which is allowed, at
least, 6,000 years, and it is Eridu. Geology has discovered it. According
to Professor Sayce again:

They are now also able to obtain time for the silting up of the
head of the Persian Gulf, which demands a lapse of between 5,000
and 6,000 years since the period when Eridu, now twenty‐five miles
inland, was the seaport at the mouth of the Euphrates, and the
seat of Babylonian commerce with Southern Arabia and India. More
than all, the new chronology gives time for the long series of
eclipses recorded in the great astronomical work called “The
Observations of Bel”; and we are also enabled to understand the
otherwise perplexing change in the position of the vernal equinox,
which has occurred since our present zodiacal signs were named by
the earliest Babylonian astronomers. When the Accadian calendar
was arranged and the Accadian months were named, the sun at the
vernal equinox was not, as now, in Pisces, or even in Aries, but
in Taurus. The rate of the precession of the equinoxes being
known, we learn that at the vernal equinox the sun was in Taurus
from about 4,700 years B.C., and we thus obtain astronomical
limits of date which cannot be impugned.(1634)

It may make our position plainer if we state at once that we use Sir C.
Lyell’s nomenclature for the ages and periods, and that when we talk of
the Secondary and Tertiary age, of the Eocene, Miocene and Pliocene
periods—this is simply to make our facts more comprehensible. Since these
ages and periods have not yet been allowed fixed and determined durations,
two‐and‐a‐half and fifteen million years being assigned at different times
to one and the same age (the Tertiary); and since no two Geologists or
Naturalists seem to agree on this point—Esoteric Teachings may remain
quite indifferent to the appearance of man in the Secondary or the
Tertiary age. If the latter age may be allowed even so much as fifteen
million years’ duration—well and good; for the Occult Doctrine, jealously
guarding its real and correct figures so far as concerns the First,
Second, and two‐thirds of the Third Root‐Race, gives clear information
upon one point only—the age of Vaivasvata Manu’s humanity.(1635)

Another definite statement is that during the so‐called Eocene period the
Continent to which the Fourth Race belonged, and on which it lived and
perished, showed the first symptoms of sinking, and that it was in the
Miocene age that it was finally destroyed—save the small island mentioned
by Plato. These points have now to be checked by scientific data.

A. Modern Scientific Speculations About The Ages Of The Globe, Animal
Evolution, And Man.

May we not be permitted to throw a glance at the works of specialists? The
work on _World‐Life: Comparative Geology_, by Prof. A. Winchell, furnishes
us with curious data. Here we find an opponent of the nebular theory
smiting with all the force of the hammer of his _odium theologicum_ on the
rather contradictory hypotheses of the great stars of Science, in the
matter of sidereal and cosmic phenomena based on their respective
relations to terrestrial durations. The “too imaginative physicists and
naturalists” do not fare very easily under this shower of their own
speculative computations placed side by side, and cut rather a sorry
figure. Thus he writes:

Sir William Thompson, on the basis of the observed principles of
cooling, concludes that no more than 10 million years [elsewhere
he makes it 100,000,000] can have elapsed since the temperature of
the earth was sufficiently reduced to sustain vegetable
life.(1636) Helmholz calculates that 20 million years would
suffice for the original nebula to condense to the present
dimensions of the sun. Prof. S. Newcomb requires only 10 millions
to attain a temperature of 212° Fahr.(1637) Croll estimates 70
million years for the diffusion of the heat....(1638) Bischof
calculates that 350 million years would be required for the earth
to cool from a temperature of 2,000° to 200° Centigrade. Reade,
basing his estimate on observed rates of denudation, demands 500
million years since sedimentation began in Europe.(1639) Lyell
ventured a rough guess of 240 million years; Darwin thought 300
million years demanded by the organic transformations which his
theory contemplates, and Huxley is disposed to demand 1,000
millions [!!].... Some biologists ... seem to close their eyes
tight and leap at one bound into the abyss of millions of years,
of which they have no more adequate estimate than of
infinity.(1640)

Then he proceeds to give what he takes to be more correct geological
figures: a few will suffice.

According to Sir William Thompson “the whole incrusted age of the world is
80,000,000 years”; and agreeably with Prof. Houghton’s calculations of a
minimum limit for the time since the elevation of Europe and Asia, three
hypothetical ages for three _possible_ and different modes of upheaval are
given, varying from the modest figure of 640,730 years, through 4,170,000
years to the tremendous figure of 27,491,000 years!!

This is enough, as one can see, to cover our claims for the four
Continents and even the figures of the Brâhmans.

Further calculations, the details of which the reader may find in Prof.
Winchell’s work,(1641) bring Houghton to an approximation of the
sedimentary age of the globe—11,700,000 years. These figures are found too
small by the author, who forthwith extends them to 37,000,000 years.

Again, according to Croll,(1642) 2,500,000 years “represents the time
since the beginning of the Tertiary age” in one work; and according to
another modification of his view, 15,000,000 only have elapsed since the
beginning of the Eocene period,(1643) this, being the first of the three
Tertiary periods, leaves the student suspended between two‐and‐a‐half and
fifteen millions. But if one has to hold to the former moderate figures,
then the whole incrusted age of the world would be 131,600,000
years.(1644)

As the last Glacial period extended from 240,000 to 80,000 years ago
(Prof. Croll’s view), therefore, man must have appeared on Earth from
100,000 to 120,000 years ago. But, as says Prof. Winchell with reference
to the antiquity of the Mediterranean race:

It is generally believed to have made its appearance during the
later decline of the continental glaciers. It does not concern,
however, the antiquity of the Black and Brown races, since there
are numerous evidences of their existence in more southern
regions, in times remotely pre‐glacial.(1645)

As a specimen of geological _certainty_ and _agreement_, these figures
also may be added. Three authorities—Messrs. T. Belt, F.G.S., Robert Hunt,
F.R.S., and J. Croll, F.R.S.,—in estimating the time that has elapsed
since the Glacial epoch, give figures that vary to an almost incredible
extent:

Belt: 20,000 years.
Hunt: 80,000 years
Croll: 240,000 years(1646)

No wonder that Mr. Pengelly confesses that:

It is at present and perhaps always will be impossible to reduce,
even approximately, geological time into years or even into
millenniums.

A wise word of advice from the Occultists to the gentlemen Geologists;
they ought to imitate the cautious example of Masons. As chronology, they
say, cannot measure the era of the creation, therefore, their “Antient and
Primitive Rite” uses 000,000,000 as the nearest approach to reality.

The same uncertainty, contradictions and disagreement reign on all other
subjects.

The scientific authorities on the Descent of Man are again, for all
practical purposes, a delusion and a snare. There are many Anti‐Darwinists
in the British Association, and Natural Selection begins to lose ground.
Though at one time the saviour, which seemed to rescue the learned
theorists from a final intellectual collapse into the abyss of fruitless
hypothesis, it begins to be distrusted. Even Mr. Huxley is showing signs
of truancy, and thinks “natural selection _not the sole_ factor”:

We greatly suspect that she [Nature] does make considerable jumps in the
way of variation now and then, and that these saltations give rise to some
of the gaps which appear to exist in the series of known forms.(1647)

Again, C. R. Bree, M.D., argues in this wise in considering the fatal gaps
in Mr. Darwin’s theory:

It must be again called to mind that the intermediate forms must
have been vast in numbers.... Mr. St. George Mivart believes that
change in evolution may occur more quickly than is generally
believed; but Mr. Darwin sticks manfully to his belief, and again
tells us “_natura non facit saltum_.”(1648)

Herein the Occultists are at one with Mr. Darwin.

Esoteric teaching fully corroborates the idea of Nature’s slowness and
dignified progression. “Planetary impulses” are all periodical. Yet this
Darwinian theory, correct as it is in minor particulars, agrees no more
with Occultism than with Mr. Wallace, who, in his _Contributions to the
Theory of Natural Selection_, shows pretty conclusively that something
_more_ than Natural Selection is requisite to produce physical man.

Let us, meanwhile, examine the _scientific_ objections to this scientific
theory, and see what they are.

Mr. St. George Mivart is found arguing that:

It will be a moderate computation to allow 25,000,000 for the
deposit of the strata down to and including the Upper Silurian.
If, then, the evolutionary work done during this deposition only
represents a hundredth part of the sum total, we shall require
2,500,000,000 (two thousand five hundred million) years for the
complete development of the whole animal kingdom to its present
state. Even one quarter of this, however, would far exceed the
time which physics and astronomy seem able to allow for the
completion of the process.

Finally, a difficulty exists as to the reason of the absence of
rich fossiliferous deposits in the oldest strata—if life was then
as abundant and varied, as, on the Darwinian theory, it must have
been. Mr. Darwin himself admits “the case at present must remain
inexplicable; and this may be truly urged as a valid argument
against the views” entertained in his book.

Thus, then, we find a remarkable (and on Darwinian principles all
but inexplicable) absence of minutely graduated transitional
forms. All the most marked groups—bats, pterodactyles, chelonians,
ichthyosaurians, amoura, etc.—appear at once upon the scene. Even
the horse, the animal whose pedigree has been probably best
preserved, affords no conclusive evidence of specific origin by
significant fortuitous variations; while some forms, as the
labyrinthodonts and trilobites, which seemed to exhibit gradual
change, are shown by further investigation to do nothing of the
sort.... All these difficulties are avoided if we admit that new
forms of animal life of all degrees of complexity appear from time
to time with comparative suddenness, being evolved according to
laws in part depending on surrounding conditions, in part
internal—similar to the way in which crystals (and, perhaps from
recent researches, the lowest forms of life) build themselves up
according to the internal laws of their component substance, and
in harmony and correspondence with all environing influences and
conditions.(1649)

“The internal laws of their component substance.” These are wise words,
and the admission of the possibility is prudent. But how can these
internal laws be ever recognized, if Occult teaching be discarded? As a
friend writes, while drawing our attention to the above speculations:

In other words, the doctrine of Planetary Life‐Impulses must be
admitted. Otherwise, why are species now _stereotyped_, and why do
even domesticated breeds of pigeons and many animals relapse into
their ancestral types when left to themselves?

But the teaching about Planetary Life‐Impulses has to be clearly defined
and as clearly understood, if present confusion is not to be made still
more perplexing. All these difficulties would vanish as the shadows of
night disappear before the light of the rising Sun, if the following
Esoteric Axioms were admitted:

(_a_) The existence and the enormous antiquity of our Planetary Chain;

(_b_) The actuality of the Seven Rounds

(_c_) The separation of human Races (outside the purely anthropological
division) into seven distinct Root‐Races, of which our present European
Humanity is the Fifth;

(_d_) The antiquity of man in this (Fourth) Round; and finally

(_e_) That as these Races evolve from ethereality to materiality, and from
the latter back again into relative physical tenuity of texture, so every
living (so‐called) _organic_ species of animals, with vegetation included,
changes with every new Root‐Race.

Were this admitted, if even only along with other, and surely, on maturer
consideration, no less absurd, suppositions—if Occult theories have to be
considered “absurd” at present—then every difficulty would be made away
with. Surely Science ought to try and be more logical than it now is, as
it can hardly maintain the theory of man’s descent from an anthropoidal
ancestor, and deny in the same breath any reasonable antiquity to such a
man! Once Mr. Huxley talks of “the vast intellectual chasm between the ape
and man,” and “the present enormous gulf between them,”(1650) and admits
the necessity of extending scientific allowances for the age of man on
Earth for such slow and progressive development, then all those men of
Science who are of his way of thinking, at any rate, ought to come to at
least some approximate figures, and agree upon the probable duration of
those Pliocene, Miocene, and Eocene periods of which so much is said, and
about which nothing definite is known—even if they dare not venture
_beyond_. But no two Scientists seem to agree. Every period seems to be a
mystery in its duration, and a thorn in the side of the Geologists; and,
as just shown, they are unable to harmonize their conclusions even with
regard to the comparatively recent geological formations. Thus, no
reliance can be placed on their figures when they do give any, for with
them it is all either millions or simply thousands of years!

That which is said may be strengthened by the confessions made by
themselves and the synopsis of these, to be found in that “Circle of
Sciences,” the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, which shows the mean accepted in
the geological and anthropological riddles. In that work the cream of the
most authoritative opinions is skimmed off and presented; nevertheless, we
find in it a refusal to assign any definite chronological date, even to
such comparatively speaking late epochs as the Neolithic era, though, for
a wonder, an age is established for the beginnings of certain geological
periods; at any rate for some few, the duration of which could hardly be
any more shortened, without an immediate conflict with facts.

Thus, it is surmised in the great Encyclopædia that:

One hundred million years have passed ... since the solidification
of our earth, when the earliest form of life appeared upon
it.(1651)

But it seems quite as hopeless to try to convert the modern Geologists and
Ethnologists, as it is to make Darwinian Naturalists perceive their
mistakes. About the Âryan Root‐Race and its origins, Science knows as
little as of the men from other Planets. With the exception of Flammarion,
and of a few Mystics among Astronomers, even the habitableness of other
Planets is mostly denied. Yet such great Adept Astronomers were the
Scientists of the earliest races of the Âryan stock, that they seem to
have known far more about the races of Mars and Venus than the modern
Anthropologist knows of those of the early stages of the Earth.

Let us leave Modern Science aside for a moment and turn to Ancient
Knowledge. As we are assured by Archaic Scientists that all such
geological cataclysms—from the upheaval of oceans, deluges, and shifting
of continents, down to the present year’s cyclones, hurricanes,
earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, and even the extraordinary
weather and seeming shifting of seasons which are perplexing all European
and American Meteorologists—are due to, and depend on the Moon and
Planets; aye, that even modest and neglected constellations have the
greatest influence on the meteorological and cosmical changes, over, and
within our Earth—let us give one moment’s attention to our sidereal
despots, the rulers of our globe and men. Modern Science denies any such
influence; Archaic Science affirms it. We will see what both say with
regard to this question.

B. On Chains Of Planets And Their Plurality.

Did the Ancients know of Worlds besides their own? What are the data of
the Occultists in affirming that every Globe is a Septenary Chain of
Worlds—of which only one member is visible—and that these are, were, or
will be, “man‐bearing,” just as is every visible Star or Planet? What do
they mean by “a moral and physical influence” exerted on our Globe by the
Sidereal Worlds?

Such are the questions often put to us, and they have to be considered
from every aspect. To the first of the two queries the answer is: We
believe it because the first law in nature is uniformity in diversity, and
the second is analogy. “As above, so below.” The time is gone by for ever
when our pious ancestors believed that our Earth was in the centre of the
Universe, and the Church and her arrogant servants could insist that the
supposition that any other Planet could be inhabited should be regarded as
blasphemy. Adam and Eve, the Serpent and Original Sin, followed by
Atonement through Blood, have been too long in the way of progress, and
universal truth has thus been sacrificed to the insane conceit of us
little men.

Now what are the proofs thereof? Beyond inferential evidence and logical
reasoning, there are none for the profane. To the Occultists, who believe
in the knowledge acquired by countless generations of Seers and Initiates,
the data offered in the Secret Books are all‐sufficient. The general
public needs other proofs, however. There are some Kabalists, and even
some Eastern Occultists, who, failing to find uniform evidence upon this
point in all the mystic works of the nations, hesitate to accept the
teaching. Even such “uniform evidence” will be forthcoming presently.
Meanwhile, we may approach the subject from its general aspect, and see
whether belief in it is so very absurd, as some Scientists along with
other Nicodemuses would have it. Unconsciously, perhaps, in thinking of a
plurality of inhabited “Worlds,” we imagine them to be like the Globe we
inhabit, and to be peopled by beings more or less resembling ourselves.
And in so doing we are only following a natural instinct. Indeed, so long
as the enquiry is confined to the life‐history of this Globe, we can
speculate on the question with some profit, and ask ourselves, with some
hope of at least asking an intelligible question, what were the “Worlds”
spoken of in all the ancient scriptures of Humanity? But how do we know
(_a_) what kind of beings inhabit the Globes in general; and (_b_) whether
those who rule Planets superior to our own do not exercise the same
influence on our Earth _consciously_, that we may exercise
_unconsciously_, say on the small planets (planetoids or asteroids) in the
long run, by our cutting the Earth in pieces, opening canals, and thereby
entirely changing our climates. Of course, like Cæsar’s wife, the
planetoids, cannot be affected by our suspicion. They are too far, etc.
Believing in Esoteric Astronomy, however, we are not so sure of that.

But when, extending our speculations beyond our Planetary Chain, we try to
cross the limits of the Solar System, then indeed we act as do
presumptuous fools. For—while accepting the old Hermetic axiom, “as above,
so below”—as we may well believe that Nature on Earth displays the most
careful economy, utilizing every vile and waste thing in her marvellous
transformations, and withal _never_ repeating herself, so we may justly
conclude that there is no other Globe in all her infinite systems so
closely resembling this Earth, that the ordinary powers of man’s thought
should be able to imagine and reproduce its semblance and
containment.(1652)

And indeed we find in the romances as in all the so‐called scientific
fictions and spiritistic “revelations” from Moon, Stars, and Planets,
merely fresh combinations or modifications of the men and things, the
passions and forms of life, with which we are familiar, though even on the
other Planets of our own System nature and life are entirely different
from those prevailing on our own. Swedenborg was preeminent in inculcating
such an erroneous belief.

But even more. The ordinary man has no experience of any state of
consciousness other than that to which the physical senses link him. Men
dream; they sleep the profound sleep which is too deep for its dreams to
impress the physical brain; and in these states there must still be
consciousness. How, then, while these mysteries remain unexplored, can
_we_ hope to speculate with profit on the nature of Globes which, in the
economy of Nature, must needs belong to states of consciousness other and
quite different from _any_ which man experiences here?

And this is true to the letter. For even great Adepts (those initiated of
course), trained Seers though they be, can only claim thorough
acquaintance with the nature and appearance of Planets and their
inhabitants belonging to our Solar System. They _know_ that almost all the
Planetary Worlds are inhabited, but—even in spirit—they can have access
only to those of our System; and they are also aware how difficult it is,
_even for them_, to put themselves into full rapport even with the planes
of consciousness _within_ our System, differing as they do from the states
of consciousness possible on this Globe; such, for instance, as those
which exist on the Chain of Spheres on the three planes beyond that of our
Earth. Such knowledge and intercourse are possible to them because they
have learned how to penetrate to planes of consciousness which are closed
to the perceptions of ordinary men; but were they to communicate their
knowledge, the world would be no wiser, because men lack that experience
of other forms of perception which alone could enable them to grasp what
they might be told.

Still the fact remains that most of the Planets, like the Stars beyond our
System, are inhabited, a fact which has been admitted by the men of
Science themselves. Laplace and Herschel believed it, though they wisely
abstained from imprudent speculation; and the same conclusion has been
worked out and supported with an array of scientific considerations by C.
Flammarion, the well‐known French Astronomer. The arguments he brings
forward are strictly scientific, and are such as appeal even to a
materialistic mind, which would remain unmoved by such thoughts as those
of Sir David Brewster, the famous Physicist, who writes:

Those “barren spirits” or “base souls,” as the poet calls them,
who might be led to believe that the earth is the only inhabited
body in the universe, would have no difficulty in conceiving the
earth also to have been destitute of inhabitants. What is more, if
such minds were acquainted with the deductions of geology, they
would admit that it was uninhabited for myriads of years; and here
we come to the impossible conclusion that during these myriads of
years there was not a single intelligent creature in the vast
domains of the Universal King, and that before the protozoic
formations there existed neither plant nor animal in all the
infinity of space.(1653)

Flammarion shows, in addition, that all the conditions of life—even as
_we_ know it—are present on some at least of the Planets, and points to
the fact that these conditions must be much more favourable on them than
they are on our Earth.

Thus scientific reasoning, as well as observed facts, concurs with the
statements of the Seer, and the innate voice in man’s own heart in
declaring that life—intelligent, conscious life—_must_ exist on other
worlds than ours.

But this is the limit beyond which the ordinary faculties of man cannot
carry him. Many are the romances and tales, some purely fanciful, others
bristling with scientific knowledge, which have attempted to imagine and
describe life on other Globes. But one and all they give but some
distorted copy of the drama of life around us. It is either, with
Voltaire, the men of our own race under a microscope, or, with de
Bergerac, a graceful play of fancy and satire; but we always find that at
bottom the new world is but the one we ourselves live in. So strong is
this tendency that even great natural, though non‐initiated, Seers, fall
victims to it when untrained; witness Swedenborg, who goes so far as to
dress the inhabitants of Mercury, whom he meets with in the spirit‐world,
in clothes such as are worn in Europe!

Commenting on this tendency, Flammarion says:

It seems as if in the eyes of those authors who have written on
this subject, the Earth were the type of the Universe, and the man
of Earth, the type of the inhabitants of the Heavens. It is, on
the contrary, much more probable, that, since the nature of other
planets is essentially varied, and the surroundings and conditions
of existence essentially different, while the forces which preside
over the creation of beings and the substances which enter into
their mutual constitution are essentially distinct, it would
follow that our mode of existence cannot be regarded as in any way
applicable to other globes. Those who have written on this subject
have allowed themselves to be dominated by terrestrial ideas, and
have therefore fallen into error.(1654)

But Flammarion himself falls into the very error which he here condemns,
for he tacitly takes the conditions of life on Earth as the standard by
which to determine the degree to which other Planets are adapted for
habitation by “other humanities.”

Let us, however, leave these profitless and empty speculations, which,
though they seem to fill our hearts with a glow of enthusiasm and to
enlarge our mental and spiritual grasp, do but in reality cause a
factitious stimulation, and blind us more and more to our ignorance not
only of the world we inhabit, but even of the infinitude contained within
ourselves.

When, therefore, we find “other worlds” spoken of in the Bibles of
Humanity, we may safely conclude that they not only refer to other states
of our Planetary Chain and Earth, but also to other inhabited Globes—Stars
and Planets; withal, that no speculations were ever made about the latter.
The whole of antiquity believed in the Universality of Life. But no really
initiated Seer of any civilized nation has ever taught that life on other
Stars could be judged by the standard of terrestrial life. What is
generally meant by “Earths” and “Worlds,” relates (_a_) to the “rebirths”
of our Globe after each Manvantara and a long period of Obscuration; and
(_b_) to the periodical and entire changes of the Earth’s surface, when
continents disappear to make room for oceans, and oceans and seas are
violently displaced and sent rolling to the poles, to cede their
emplacements to new continents.

We may begin with the _Bible_—the youngest of the World‐scriptures. In
_Ecclesiastes_, we read these words of the King‐Initiate:

One generation passeth away and another generation cometh, but the
earth abideth for ever.... The thing that hath been, it is that
which shall be; and that which is done, is that which shall be
done, and there is no new thing under the sun.(1655)

Under these words it is not easy to see the reference to the successive
cataclysms by which the Races of mankind are swept away, or, going further
back, to the various transitions of the Globe during the process of its
formation. But if we are told that this refers only to _our_ world _as we
now see it_, then we shall refer the reader to the _New Testament_, where
St. Paul speaks of the Son (the manifested Power) whom God hath appointed
heir of all things, “by whom also he made the worlds” (plural).(1656) This
“Power” is Chokmah, the Wisdom and the Word.

We shall probably be told that by the term “worlds,” the stars, heavenly
bodies, etc., were meant. But apart from the fact that “stars” were not
known as “worlds” to the ignorant editors of the Epistles, even if they
must have been thus known to Paul, who was an Initiate, a “Master‐
Builder,” we can quote on this point an eminent Theologian, Cardinal
Wiseman. In his work (i. 309) treating of the indefinite period of the six
days—or shall we say “too definite” period of the six days—of creation and
the 6,000 years, he confesses that we are in total darkness as to the
meaning of this statement of St. Paul, unless we are permitted to suppose
that allusion is made in it to the period which elapsed between the
_first_ and _second_ verses of chapter i of _Genesis_, and thus to those
primitive revolutions, _i.e._, the destructions and the reproductions of
the world, indicated in chapter i of _Ecclesiastes_; or, to accept, with
so many others, and in its _literal sense_, the passage in chapter i of
_Hebrews_, that speaks of the creation of “worlds”—in the plural. It is
very singular, he adds, that all the cosmogonies should agree to suggest
the same idea, and preserve the tradition of a first series of
revolutions, owing to which the world was destroyed and again renewed.

Had the Cardinal studied the _Zohar_ his doubts would have been changed
into certainties. Thus saith the “Idra Suta”:

There were old worlds which perished as soon as they came into
existence; worlds with and without form called Scintillas—for they
were like the sparks under the smith’s hammer, flying in all
directions. Some were the primordial worlds which could not
continue long, because the “Aged”—his name be sanctified—had not
as yet assumed his form,(1657) the workman was not yet the
“Heavenly Man.”(1658)

Again in the _Midrash_, written long before the _Kabalah_ of Simeon Ben
Iochai, Rabbi Abahu explains:

The Holy One, blessed be his name, has successively formed and
destroyed sundry worlds before this one(1659).... Now this refers
both to the first races [the “Kings of Edom”] and to the worlds
destroyed.(1660)

“Destroyed” means here what we call “obscuration.” This becomes evident
when we read the explanation given further on:

Still when it is said that they [the worlds] _perished_, it is
only meant thereby that they [their humanities] lacked the true
form, till the human [our] form came into being, in which all
things are comprised and which contains all forms ...—it does not
mean death, but only denotes a sinking down from their status
[that of worlds in activity].(1661)

When, therefore, we read of the “destruction” of the Worlds, the word has
many meanings, which are very clear in several of the Commentaries on the
_Zohar_ and in Kabalistic treatises. As said elsewhere, it means not only
the destruction of many Worlds which have ended their life‐career, but
also that of the several Continents which have disappeared, as also their
decline and geographical change of place.

The mysterious “Kings of Edom” are sometimes referred to as the “Worlds”
that had been destroyed; but it is a “cloak.” The Kings who reigned in
Edom before there reigned a King in Israel, or the “Edomite Kings,” could
never symbolize the “prior worlds,” but only the “attempts at men” on this
Globe—the Pre‐Adamite Races, of which the _Zohar_ speaks, and which we
explain as the First Root‐Race. For as, speaking of the six Earths (the
six “Limbs” of Microprosopus), it is said that the seventh (our Earth)
came not into the computation when the six were created (the six Spheres
above our Globe in the Terrestrial Chain), so the first seven Kings of
Edom are left out of calculation in _Genesis_. By the law of analogy and
permutation, in the Chaldæan _Book of Numbers_, as also in the _Books of
Knowledge_ and of _Wisdom_, the “seven primordial worlds” mean also the
“seven primordial” races (sub‐races of the First Root‐Race of the
Shadows); and, again, the Kings of Edom are the sons of “Esau, the father
of the Edomites”;(1662) _i.e._, Esau represents in the _Bible_ the race
which stands between the Fourth and the Fifth, the Atlantean and the
Âryan. “Two _nations_ are in thy womb,” said the Lord to Rebekah; and Esau
was _red_ and _hairy_. From verse 24 to 34, chapter xxv of _Genesis_
contains the allegorical history of the birth of the Fifth Race.

Says the _Siphra Dtzenioutha_:

And the Kings of ancient days died and their chiefs [crowns] were
found no more.

And the _Zohar_ states:

The Head of a nation that has not been formed at the beginning in
the likeness of the White Head: its people is not from this
Form.... Before it [the White Head, the Fifth Race or Ancient of
the Ancients] arranged itself in its [own, or present] Form ...
all Worlds have been destroyed; therefore it is written: and Bela,
the Son of Beor, reigned in Edom [_Gen._, xxxvi. Here the “Worlds”
stand for Races]. And he [such or another King of Edom] died, and
another reigned in his stead.

No Kabalist who has hitherto treated of the symbolism and allegory hidden
under these “Kings of Edom” seems to have perceived more than one aspect
of them. They are neither the “worlds that were destroyed,” nor the “Kings
that died”—alone; but both, and much more, to treat of which there is no
space at present. Therefore, leaving the mystic parables of the _Zohar_,
we will return to the hard facts of materialistic Science; first, however,
citing a few from the long list of great thinkers who have believed in the
plurality of inhabited Worlds in general, and in Worlds that preceded our
own. These are, the great mathematicians Leibnitz and Bernouilli, Sir
Isaac Newton himself, as may be read in his _Optics_; Buffon, the
Naturalist; Condillac, the Sceptic; Bailly, Lavater, Bernardin de St.
Pierre, and, as a contrast to the two last named—suspected at least of
Mysticism—Diderot and most of the writers of the _Encyclopædia_. Following
these come Kant, the founder of modern Philosophy; the poet Philosophers,
Goethe, Krause, Schelling; and many Astronomers, from Bode, Fergusson and
Herschel, to Lalande and Laplace, with their many disciples in more recent
years.

A brilliant list of honoured names indeed; but the facts of physical
Astronomy speak even more strongly than these names in favour of the
presence of life, of even organized life, on other Planets. Thus in four
meteorites which fell respectively at Alais in France, in the Cape of Good
Hope, in Hungary, and again in France, on analysis, there was found
graphite, a form of carbon known to be invariably associated with organic
life on this Earth of ours. And that the presence of this carbon is not
due to any action occurring within our atmosphere is shown by the fact
that carbon has been found in the very centre of a meteorite; while in one
which fell at Argueil, in the south of France, in 1857, there was found
water and turf, the latter being always formed by the decomposition of
vegetable substances.

And further, examining the astronomical conditions of the other Planets,
it is easy to show that several are far better adapted for the development
of life and intelligence—even under the conditions with which men are
acquainted—than is our Earth. For instance, on the Planet Jupiter the
seasons, instead of varying between wide limits as do ours, change by
almost imperceptible degrees, and last twelve times as long as ours. Owing
to the inclination of its axis the seasons on Jupiter are due almost
entirely to the eccentricity of its orbit, and hence change slowly and
regularly. We shall be told, that no life is possible on Jupiter, as it is
in an incandescent state. But not all Astronomers agree with this. For
instance, what we state is declared by M. Flammarion; and _he_ ought to
know.

On the other hand Venus would be less adapted for human life such as
exists on Earth, since its seasons are more extreme and its changes of
temperature more sudden; though it is curious that the duration of the day
is nearly the same on the four inner planets, Mercury, Venus, the Earth
and Mars.

On Mercury, the Sun’s heat and light are seven times what they are on the
Earth, and Astronomy teaches that it is enveloped in a very dense
atmosphere. And as we see that life appears more active on Earth in
proportion to the light and heat of the Sun, it would seem more than
probable that its intensity is far, far greater on Mercury than here.

Venus, like Mercury, has a very dense atmosphere, as also has Mars, and
the snows which cover their poles, the clouds which hide their surface,
the geographical configuration of their seas and continents, the
variations of seasons and climates, are all closely analogous—at least to
the eye of the physical Astronomer. But such facts and the considerations
to which they give rise have reference only to the possibility of the
existence on these Planets of human life as known on Earth. That some
forms of life such as we know are _possible_ on these Planets, has been
long since abundantly demonstrated, and it seems perfectly useless to go
into detailed questions of the physiology, etc., of these hypothetical
inhabitants, since, after all, the reader can arrive only at an imaginary
extension of his familiar surroundings. It is better to rest content with
the three conclusions which M. Flammarion, whom we have so largely quoted,
formulates as rigorous and exact deductions from the known _facts_ and
laws of Science.

i. The various forces which were active in the beginning of evolution gave
birth to a great variety of beings on the several worlds; both in the
organic and inorganic kingdoms.

ii. The animated beings were constituted from the first according to forms
and organisms in correlation with the physiological state of each
inhabited globe.

iii. The humanities of other worlds differ from us, as much in their inner
organization as in their external physical type.

Finally the reader who may be disposed to question the validity of these
conclusions as being opposed to the _Bible_, may be referred to an
Appendix in M. Flammarion’s work dealing in detail with this question,
since in a work like the present it seems unnecessary to point out the
logical absurdity of those churchmen who deny the plurality of worlds on
the ground of biblical authority.

In this connection we may well recall those days when the burning zeal of
the Primitive Church opposed the doctrine of the Earth’s rotundity, on the
ground that the nations at the Antipodes would be outside the pale of
salvation; and again, we may remember how long it took for a nascent
Science to break down the idea of a solid firmament, in the grooves of
which the stars moved for the special edification of terrestrial humanity.

The theory of the Earth’s rotation was met by a like opposition—even to
the martyrdom of its discoverers—because, besides depriving our orb of its
dignified central position in space, the theory produced an appalling
confusion of ideas as to the Ascension—the terms “up” and “down” being
proved to be merely relative, thus complicating not a little the question
of the precise locality of Heaven!(1663)

According to the best modern calculations, there are no less than
500,000,000 Stars of various magnitudes, within the range of the best
telescopes. As to the distances between them, they are incalculable. Is,
then, our microscopical Earth—a “grain of sand on an infinite sea‐
shore”—the only centre of intelligent life? Our own Sun, itself 1,300,000
times larger than our Planet, sinks into insignificance beside the giant
Sun, Sirius, and the latter in its turn is dwarfed by other luminaries in
infinite Space. The self‐centred conception of Jehovah as the special
guardian of a small and obscure semi‐nomadic tribe, is tolerable beside
that which confines sentient existence to our microscopical Globe. The
primary reasons were without doubt: (_a_) astronomical ignorance on the
part of the early Christians, coupled with an exaggerated appreciation of
man’s own importance—a crude form of selfishness; and (_b_) the dread
that, if the hypothesis of millions of other inhabited Globes were
accepted, the crushing rejoinder would ensue: “Was there then a Revelation
to each World?”—involving the idea of the Son of God eternally “going the
rounds,” as it were. Happily it is now unnecessary to waste time and
energy in proving the possibility of the existence of such Worlds. All
intelligent persons admit it. That which now remains to be demonstrated
is, that if it is once proven that there are inhabited Worlds besides our
own, with humanities entirely different from each other as from our own—as
maintained in the Occult Sciences—then the evolution of the preceding
Races is half proved. For where is that Physicist or Geologist who is
prepared to maintain that the Earth has not changed scores of times, in
the millions of years which have elapsed in the course of its existence;
and that changing its “skin,” as it is called in Occultism, the Earth has
not had each time her special Humanities adapted to such atmospheric and
climatic conditions as were entailed by such change? And if so, why should
not our preceding four and entirely different Mankinds have existed and
thrived before our Adamic Fifth Root Race?

Before closing our debate, however, we have to examine the so‐called
organic evolution more closely. Let us search well and see whether it is
quite impossible to make our Occult data and chronology agree—up to a
certain point—with those of Science.

C. Supplementary Remarks On Esoteric Geological Chronology.

It seems possible to calculate the approximate duration at any rate of the
geological periods from the combined data of Science and Occultism now
before us. Geology is, of course, able to determine one thing with almost
certainty—the thickness of the several deposits. Now, it also stands to
reason that the time required for the deposition of any stratum on a sea‐
bottom must bear a strict proportion to the thickness of the mass thus
formed. Doubtless the _rate_ of the erosion of land, and of the sorting
out of matter on to ocean beds, has varied from age to age, and
cataclysmic changes of various kinds have broken the “uniformity” of
ordinary geological processes. Provided, then, that we have some definite
numerical basis on which to work, our task is rendered less difficult than
it might at first sight appear. Making due allowance for variations in the
rate of deposit, Professor Lefèvre gives us the relative figures which sum
up geological time. He does not attempt to calculate the lapse of years
since the first bed of the Laurentian rocks was deposited, but postulating
that time as _x_, he presents us with the relative proportions in which
the various periods stand to it. Let us premise our estimate by stating
that, roughly speaking, the Primordial rocks are 70,000 ft., the Primary
42,000 ft., the Secondary 15,000 ft., the Tertiary 5,000 ft., and the
Quaternary some 500 ft. in thickness:

Dividing into a hundred parts the time, _whatever its actual
length_, that has passed since the dawn of life on this earth
[lower Laurentian strata], we shall be led to attribute to the
Primordial age more than half of the whole duration, say 53.5; to
the Primary 32.2; to the Secondary 11.5; to the Tertiary 2.3; to
the Quaternary 0.5 or one‐half per cent.(1664)

Now, as it is certain, on Occult data, that the time which has elapsed
since the first sedimentary deposits is 320,000,000 years, we are able to
construct the following table:

ROUGH APPROXIMATIONS OF LENGTH OF GEOLOGICAL PERIODS IN YEARS.

Primordial (Laurentian, Cambrian, Silurian): 171,200,000.

Primary (Devonian, Coal, Permian): 103,040,000.

Secondary (Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous): 36,800,000.

Tertiary (Eocene, Miocene, Pliocene): 7,360,000.

Quaternary: 1,600,000.(1665)

Such estimates harmonize with the statements of Esoteric Ethnology in
almost every particular. The Tertiary Atlantean part‐cycle, from the “apex
of glory” of that Race in the early Eocene to the great Mid‐Miocene
cataclysm, would appear to have lasted some three‐and‐a‐half to four
million years. If the duration of the Quaternary is not, as seems likely,
rather over‐estimated, the sinking of Ruta and Daitya would be Post‐
Tertiary. It is probable that the results here given allow somewhat too
long a period to both the Tertiary and Quaternary, as the Third Race goes
very far back into the Secondary age. Nevertheless, the figures are most
suggestive.

But the argument from geological evidence being in favour of only
100,000,000 years, let us compare our claims and teachings with those of
exact Science.

Mr. Edward Clodd,(1666) in referring to M. de Mortillet’s work _Matériaux
pour l’Histoire de l’Homme_, which places man in the Mid‐Miocene
period,(1667) remarks that:

It would be in defiance of all that the doctrine of evolution
teaches, and moreover win no support from believers in special
creation and the fixity of species, to seek for so highly
specialized a mammalian as man at an early stage in the life‐
history of the globe.

To this, one could answer: (_a_) the doctrine of evolution, as inaugurated
by Darwin and developed by later evolutionists, is not only the reverse of
infallible, but it is repudiated by several great men of Science, _e.g._,
de Quatrefages, in France, Dr. Weismann, an ex‐evolutionist in Germany,
and many others, the ranks of the Anti‐Darwinists growing stronger with
every year;(1668) and (_b_) truth to be worthy of its name, and remain
truth and fact, hardly needs to beg for support from any class or sect.
For were it to win support from believers in special creation, it would
never gain the favour of the evolutionists, and _vice versâ_. Truth must
rest upon its own firm foundation of facts, and take its chance of
recognition, when every prejudice in the way is disposed of. Though the
question has been already fully considered in its main aspect, it is,
nevertheless, advisable to combat every so‐called “scientific” objection
as we go along, when making what are regarded as heretical and anti‐
scientific statements.

Let us briefly glance at the divergencies between orthodox and Esoteric
Science, on the question of the age of the globe and of man. With the two
respective synchronistic tables before him, the reader will be enabled to
see at a glance the importance of these divergencies; and to perceive, at
the same time, that it is not impossible—nay, it is most likely—that
further discoveries in Geology and the finding of fossil remains of man
will force Science to confess that it is Esoteric Philosophy which is
right after all, or, at any rate, nearer to the truth.

PARALLELISM OF LIFE.

SCIENTIFIC HYPOTHESES: Science divides the period of the Globe’s history,
since the beginning of life on Earth (or the Azoic age), into five main
divisions or periods, according to Hæckel.(1669)

ESOTERIC THEORY: Leaving the classification of the geological periods to
Western Science, Esoteric Philosophy divides only the Life‐periods on the
Globe. In the present Manvantara the actual period is separated into seven
Kalpas and seven great human Races. Its first Kalpa, answering to the
Primordial Epoch is the age of the Primeval.

SCIENTIFIC: PRIMORDIAL EPOCH: Laurentian, Cambrian, Silurian. The
Primordial epoch, Science tells us, is by no means devoid of vegetable and
animal life. In the Laurentian deposits are found specimens of the Eozoon
canadense—a chambered shell. In the Silurian are discovered sea‐weeds
(algæ), molluscs, crustacea, and lower marine organisms, also the first
trace of fishes. The Primordial epoch shows algæ, molluscs, crustacea,
polyps, and marine organisms, etc. Science teaches, therefore, that marine
life was present from the very beginnings of time, leaving us, however, to
speculate for ourselves as to _how_ life appeared on Earth. If it rejects
the biblical “creation” (as we do), why does it not give us another,
approximately plausible hypothesis?

ESOTERIC: “PRIMEVAL”(1670): Devas or Divine Men, the “Creators” and
Progenitors.(1671) The Esoteric Philosophy agrees with the statement made
by Science (see preceding), demurring, however, to one particular. The
300,000,000 years of vegetable life (see “Brâhmanical Chronology”)
preceded the “Divine Men,” or Progenitors. Also, no teaching denies that
there were traces of life _within_ the Earth, besides the Eozoon
canadense, in the Primordial Epoch. Only, whereas the said vegetation
belonged to this Round, the zoological relics now found in the Laurentian,
Cambrian, and Silurian systems, so called, are the _relics_ of the Third
Round. At first astral like the rest, they consolidated and materialized
_pari passu_ with the new vegetation.

SCIENTIFIC: PRIMARY: Devonian,(1672) Coal, Permian. “Fern‐forests,
sigillaria, coniferæ, fishes, first trace of reptiles.” Thus saith Modern
Science.

ESOTERIC: “PRIMARY”: Divine Progenitors (Secondary Groups), and the two
and a half Races. The Esoteric Doctrine repeats that which was said above.
These are all relics of the preceding Round.(1673)

Once, however, the prototypes are projected out of the Astral Envelope of
the Earth, an indefinite amount of modification ensues.

SCIENTIFIC: SECONDARY: Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous. This is the age of
Reptiles, of the gigantic megalosauri, ichthyosauri, plesiosauri, etc.
Science denies the presence of man in this period. But it has still to
explain how men came to know of these monsters and describe them _before_
the age of Cuvier! The old annals of China, India, Egypt, and even of
Judea are full of them, as demonstrated elsewhere. In this period also
appear the first marsupial mammals(1674)—insectivorous, carnivorous,
phytophagous; and, as Prof. Owen thinks, a herbiferous hoofed mammal.

Science does not admit the appearance of man before _the close_ of the
Tertiary period.(1675) Why? Because man has to be shown younger than the
higher mammals. But Esoteric Philosophy teaches us the reverse. And as
Science is quite unable to come to anything like an approximate conclusion
as to the age of man, or even as to the geological periods, the Occult
teaching is, therefore, more logical and reasonable, even if accepted only
as a hypothesis.

ESOTERIC: “SECONDARY”: According to every calculation the Third Race had
already made its appearance, as during the Triassic there were already a
few mammals, and it must have separated before their appearance.

This, then, is the age of the Third Race, in which the origins of the
early Fourth may be perhaps also discoverable. We are, however, here left
entirely to conjecture, as no definite data are yet given out by the
Initiates.

The analogy is but a poor one, still it may be argued that, as the early
mammalia and pre‐mammalia are shown in their evolution merging from one
kind into a higher one, anatomically, so are the human races in their
procreative processes. A parallel might certainly be found between the
monotremata, didelphia (or marsupialia) and the placental mammals, divided
in their turn into three orders(1676) like the First, Second, and Third
Root‐Races of men.(1677) But this would require more space than can be now
allotted to the subject.

SCIENTIFIC: TERTIARY(1678): Eocene, Miocene, Pliocene. No man is yet
allowed to have lived during this period.

Says Mr. E. Clodd, in _Knowledge_: “Although the placental mammals and the
order of primates to which man is related, appear in Tertiary times, and
the climate, tropical in the Eocene age, warm in the Miocene, and
temperate in the Pliocene, was favourable to his presence, the proofs of
his existence in Europe before the close of the Tertiary epoch ... are not
generally accepted here.”

ESOTERIC: “TERTIARY”: The Third Race has now almost utterly disappeared,
carried away by the fearful geological cataclysms of the Secondary age,
leaving behind it but a few hybrid races.

The Fourth, born millions of years before(1679) the said cataclysm took
place, perished during the Miocene period,(1680) when the Fifth (our Âryan
Race) had had one million years of independent existence.(1681) How much
older it is from its origin—who knows? As the “historical” period began
with the Indian Âryans, with their _Vedas_ for their multitudes,(1682) and
far earlier in the Esoteric Records, it is useless to establish here any
parallels.

Geology has now divided the periods and placed man in the Quaternary.

SCIENTIFIC: QUATERNARY: Palæolithic Man, Neolithic Man, Historical Period.

ESOTERIC: “QUATERNARY”: If the Quaternary period is allowed 1,500,000
years, then only does our Fifth Race belong to it.

Yet—_mirabile dictu_—while the non‐cannibal Palæolithic man, who must have
certainly antedated cannibal Neolithic man by hundreds of thousands of
years,(1683) is shown to be a remarkable artist, Neolithic man is made out
to be almost an abject savage, his lake dwellings notwithstanding.(1684)
For see what a learned Geologist, Mr. Charles Gould, tells the reader in
his _Mythical Monsters_:

Palæolithic men were unacquainted with pottery and the art of
weaving, and apparently had no domesticated animals or system of
cultivation; but the Neolithic lake‐dwellers of Switzerland had
looms, pottery, cereals, sheep, horses, etc. Implements of horn,
bone, and wood were in common use among both races, but those of
the older are frequently distinguished by their being sculptured
with great ability, or ornamented with life‐like engravings of the
various animals living at the period; whereas there appears to
have been a marked absence of any similar artistic ability(1685)
on the part of Neolithic man.(1686)

Let us give the reasons for this.

(1) The oldest fossil man, the primitive cave‐men of the old Palæolithic
period, and of the Pre‐Glacial period (of whatever length, and however far
back), is always the same genus man, and there are no fossil remains
proving for him

What the Hipparion and Anchitherium have proved for the genus
horse—that is, gradual progressive specialization from a simple
ancestral type to more complex existing forms.(1687)

(2) As to the so‐called Palæolithic hatchets:

When placed side by side with the rudest forms of stone hatchets
actually used by the Australian and other savages, it is difficult
to detect any difference.(1688)

This goes to prove that there have been savages _at all times_; and the
inference would be that there might have been civilized people in those
days as well, cultured nations contemporary with those rude savages. We
see such a thing in Egypt 7,000 years ago.

(3) An obstacle which is the direct consequence of the two preceding: Man,
if no older than the Palæolithic period, could not possibly have had the
actual time necessary for his transformation from the “missing link” into
what he is known to have been even during that remote geological time,
_i.e._, even _a finer specimen of manhood than many of the now existing
races_.

The above lends itself naturally to the following syllogism: (1) The
_primitive_ man (known to Science) was, in some respects, even a finer man
of his genus than he is now. (2) The earliest monkey known, the lemur, was
_less_ anthropoid than the modern pithecoid species. (3) Conclusion: Even
though a _missing link_ were found, the balance of evidence would remain
more in favour of the ape _being a degenerated man_, made dumb by some
fortuitous circumstances,(1689) than in favour of the descent of man from
a pithecoid ancestor. The theory cuts both ways.

On the other hand, if the existence of Atlantis be accepted, and the
statement be believed that in the Eocene age—

Even in its very first part, the great cycle of the Fourth Race
men, the Atlanteans, had already reached its highest point,(1690)

then some of the present difficulties of Science might easily be made to
disappear. The rude workmanship of the Palæolithic tools proves nothing
against the idea that, side by side with their makers, there lived nations
highly civilized. We are told that:

Only a very small portion of the earth’s surface has been
explored, and of this a very small portion consists of ancient
land surfaces or fresh water formations, where alone we can expect
to meet with traces of the higher forms of animal life. And even
these have been so imperfectly explored, that where we now meet
with thousands and tens of thousands of undoubted human remains
lying almost under our feet, it is only within the last thirty
years that their existence has even been suspected.(1691)

It is very suggestive also that along with the rude hatchets of the lowest
savage, explorers meet with specimens of workmanship of such artistic
merit as could hardly be found, or expected, in a modern peasant belonging
to any European country—unless in exceptional cases. The “portrait” of the
“Reindeer Feeding,” from the Thayngin grotto in Switzerland, and those of
the man running, with two horses’ heads sketched close to him—a work of
the Reindeer period, _i.e._, at least 50,000 years ago—are pronounced by
Mr. Laing to be not only exceedingly well done, but the former, the
“Reindeer Feeding,” is described as one that “would do credit to any
modern animal painter”—by no means exaggerated praise, as anyone may see,
by glancing at the sketch given below from Mr. Gould’s work. Now, since we
have our greatest painters of Europe side by side with the modern
Esquimaux, who also have a tendency, like their Palæolithic ancestors of
the Reindeer period, the rude and savage human species, to be constantly
drawing with the point of their knives sketches of animals, scenes of the
chase, etc., why could not the same have happened in those days? Compared
with the specimens of Egyptian drawing and sketching—7,000 years ago—the
“earliest portraits” of men, horses’ heads, and reindeer, made 50,000
years ago, _are certainly superior_. Nevertheless, the Egyptians of those
periods are known to have been a highly civilized nation, whereas the
Palæolithic men are called _savages_ of the lower type. This is a small
matter seemingly, yet it is extremely suggestive as showing how every new
geological discovery is made to fit in with current theories, instead of
fitting the theories to include the discovery. Yes; Mr. Huxley is right in
saying, “Time will show.” It will, and it must vindicate Occultism.

Meanwhile, the most uncompromising Materialists are driven by necessity
into the most Occult‐like admissions. Strange to say, it is the most
materialistic—those of the German school—who, with regard to _physical_
development, come the nearest to the teachings of the Occultists. Thus,
Professor Baumgärtner believes that:

The germs for the higher animals could only be the eggs of the
lower animals; ... besides the advance of the vegetable and animal
world in development, there occurred in that period the formation
of _new original germs_ [which formed the basis of new
metamorphoses, etc.] ... the first men who proceeded from the
germs of animals beneath them, lived first in a larva state.

Just so; in a larva state, we say too, only from no “animal” germ; and
that larva was the soulless astral form of the pre‐physical Races. And we
believe, as the German professor does, with several other men of Science
in Europe now, that the human races—

Have not descended from one pair, but appeared immediately in
numerous races.(1692)

Therefore, when we read _Force and Matter_, and find that Emperor of
Materialists, Büchner, repeating after Manu and Hermes, that:

Imperceptibly the plant glides into the animal, the animal into
the man(1693)

—we need only add “and man into a spirit,” to complete the kabalistic
axiom. The more so, since we read the following admission:

Evolved by spontaneous generation ... that whole rich and
multiform organic world ... has developed itself progressively, in
the course of endless periods of time, by the aid of natural
phenomena.(1694)

The whole difference lies in this: Modern Science places her materialistic
theory of primordial germs on Earth, and the _last germ_ of life on this
Globe, of man, and everything else, between _two voids_. Whence the
_first_ germ, if both spontaneous generation and the interference of
external forces, are absolutely rejected now? Germs of organic life, we
are told, by Sir William Thompson, came to our Earth in some meteor. This
helps in no way, and only shifts the difficulty from this Earth to the
supposed meteor.

These are our agreements and disagreements with Science. About the
“endless periods” we are, of course, at one even with materialistic
speculation; for we believe in Evolution, though on different lines.
Professor Huxley very wisely says:

If any form of the doctrine of progressive development is correct,
we must extend by long epochs the most liberal estimate that has
yet been made of the antiquity of man.(1695)

But when we are told that this man is a product of the natural forces
inherent _in_ Matter—Force, according to modern views, being but a quality
of Matter, a “mode of motion,” etc.—and when we find Sir William Thompson
repeating in 1885 what was asserted by Büchner and his school thirty years
ago, we fear all our reverence for real Science is vanishing into thin
air! One can hardly help thinking that Materialism is, in certain cases, a
_disease_. For when men of Science, in the face of magnetic phenomena and
the attraction of iron particles through insulating substances, like
glass, maintain that the said attraction is due to “molecular motion,” or
to the “rotation of the molecules of the magnet,” then, whether the
teaching comes from a “credulous” Theosophist innocent of any notion of
Physics, or from an eminent man of Science, it is equally ridiculous. The
individual who asserts such a theory in the teeth of _fact_, is only one
more proof that: “When people have not a niche in their minds into which
to shoot facts, so much the worse for the facts.”

At present the dispute between the spontaneous generationists and their
opponents is at rest, having ended in the provisional victory of the
latter. But even they are forced to admit, as Büchner did, and Messrs.
Tyndall and Huxley still do—that spontaneous generation _must have
occurred once_, under “special thermal conditions.” Virchow refuses even
to argue the question; it _must_ have taken place some time in the history
of our planet; and there’s an end of it. This seems to look more natural
than Sir William Thompson’s hypothesis just quoted, that the germs of
organic life fell on our Earth in some meteor; or the other “scientific”
hypothesis coupled with the recently adopted belief that there exists _no_
“vital principle” whatever, but only vital phenomena, which can all be
traced to the molecular forces of the original protoplasm. But this does
not help Science to solve the still greater problem—the origin and the
_descent_ of Man, for here is a still worse plaint and lamentation.

While we can trace the skeletons of Eocene mammals through several
directions of specialization in succeeding Tertiary times, man
presents the phenomenon of an _unspecialized_ skeleton which
cannot fairly be connected with any of these lines.(1696)

The secret could be soon told, not only from the Esoteric but even from
the standpoint of every religion the world over, without mentioning the
Occultists. The “specialized skeleton” is sought for in the wrong place,
where it can never be found. Scientists expect to discover it in the
physical remains of man, in some pithecoid “missing link,” with a skull
larger than that of the ape’s, and with a cranial capacity smaller than in
man, instead of looking for that specialization in _the super‐physical
essence of his inner astral constitution, which can hardly be excavated
from any geological strata_! Such a tenacious, hopeful clinging to a self‐
degrading theory is the most wonderful feature of the day.

Meanwhile, there are specimens of engravings made by Palæolithic
“savages”: Palæolithic meaning the “earlier Stone‐age” man, one supposed
to have been as savage and brutal as the brutes he lived with. Leaving the
modern South Sea islander, or even any Asiatic race, aside, we defy any
grown‐up schoolboy, or even a European youth, one who has never studied
drawing, to execute such an engraving or even a pencil sketch as good.
Here we have the true artistic _raccourci_, and correct lights and shadows
without any _plane_ model before the artist, who copied direct from
nature, thus exhibiting a knowledge of anatomy and proportion. The artist
who engraved this reindeer belonged, we are asked to believe, to the
primitive “semi‐animal” savages (contemporaneous with the mammoth and the
woolly rhinoceros), whom some over‐zealous Evolutionists once sought to
picture to us as distinct approximations to the type of their hypothetical
“pithecoid man”!

This engraved antler proves as eloquently as any fact can do, that the
evolution of the Races has ever proceeded in a series of rises and falls,
that man is, perhaps, as old as incrustated Earth, and—if we can call his
divine ancestor “man”—is far older still.

Even de Mortillet himself seems to experience a vague distrust of the
conclusions of modern Archæologists, when he writes:

The pre‐historic is a new science, far, very far, from having said
its last word.(1697)

According to Lyell, one of the highest authorities on the subject, and the
“father” of Geology:

The expectation of always meeting with a lower type of human
skull, the older the formation in which it occurs, _is based on
the theory of progressive development_, and it _may_ prove to be
sound; nevertheless we must remember that as yet _we have no
distinct geological evidence that the appearance of what are
called the inferior races of mankind has always preceded in
chronological order that of the higher races_.(1698)

Nor has such evidence been found to this day. Science is thus offering for
sale the skin of a bear, which has hitherto never been seen by mortal eye!

This concession of Lyell’s reads most suggestively with the subjoined
utterance of Professor Max Müller, whose attack on Darwinian Anthropology
from the standpoint of language has, by the way, never been satisfactorily
answered:

What do we know of savage tribes beyond the last chapter of their
history? [Compare this with the Esoteric view of the Australians,
Bushmen, as well as of Palæolithic European man, the Atlantean
offshoots retaining a relic of a lost culture, which throve when
the parent Root‐Race was in its prime.] Do we ever get an insight
into their antecedents? Can we ever understand what after all is
everywhere the most important and the most instructive lesson to
learn—how they have come to be what they are?... Their language
proves, indeed, that these so‐called heathens, with their
complicated systems of mythology, their artificial customs, their
unintelligible whims and savageries, are not the creatures of to‐
day or yesterday. Unless we admit a special creation for these
savages, they must be as old as the Hindûs, the Greeks and Romans
[far older] ... They may have passed through ever so many
vicissitudes, and what we consider as primitive, may be, for all
we know, a relapse into savagery or a corruption of something that
was more rational and intelligible in former stages.(1699)

Professor George Rawlinson, M.A., remarks:

“The primeval savage” is a familiar term in modern literature, but
there is no evidence that the primeval savage ever existed. Rather
_all the evidence looks the other way_.(1700)

In his _Origin of Nations_, he rightly adds:

_The mythical traditions of almost all nations place at the
beginning of human history a time of happiness and perfection_, a
“golden age” which has no features of savagery or barbarism, but
many of civilization and refinement.(1701)

How is the modern Evolutionist to meet this consensus of evidence?

We repeat the question asked in _Isis Unveiled_:

Does the finding of the remains in the cave of Devon prove that
there were no contemporary races then who were highly civilized?
When the present population of the Earth has disappeared, and some
Archæologist belonging to the “coming race” of the distant future
shall excavate the domestic implements of one of our Indian or
Andaman Island tribes, will he be justified in concluding that
mankind in the nineteenth century was “just emerging from the
Stone age”?(1702)

Another strange inconsistency in scientific theories is that Neolithic man
is shown as being far more of a primitive savage than Palæolithic. Either
Lubbock’s _Pre‐historic Man_, or Evans’ _Ancient Stone Implements_ must be
at fault, or—both. For this is what we learn from these works and others:

(1) As we pass from Neolithic to Palæolithic man, the stone implements
become rude lumbering makeshifts, instead of gracefully shaped and
polished instruments. Pottery, and other useful arts disappear as we
descend the scale. And yet the latter could engrave such a reindeer!

(2) Palæolithic man lived in caves which he shared with hyænas and
lions,(1703) whereas Neolithic man dwelt in lake‐villages and buildings.

Every one who has followed even superficially the geological discoveries
of our day, knows that a gradual improvement in workmanship is found, from
the clumsy chipping and rude chopping of the early Palæolithic hatchets,
to the relatively graceful stone celts of that part of the Neolithic
period immediately preceding the use of metals. But this is _in Europe_,
only a few portions of which were barely rising from the waters in the
days of the highest Atlantean civilization. There were rude savages and
highly civilized people then, as there are now. If 50,000 years hence,
pigmy Bushmen are exhumed from some African cavern together with far
earlier pigmy elephants, such as were found in the cave deposits of Malta
by Milne Edwards, will that be a reason for maintaining that in our age
all men and all elephants were pigmies? Or if the weapons of the Veddhas
of Ceylon are found, will our descendants be justified in setting us all
down as Palæolithic savages? All the articles which Geologists now
excavate in Europe can certainly never date earlier than the close of the
Eocene age, since the lands of Europe were not even above water before
that period. Nor can what we have said be in the least invalidated by
theorists telling us that these quaint sketches of animals and men by
Palæolithic man, were executed only toward the close of the Reindeer
period—for this explanation would be a very lame one indeed, in view of
the Geologists’ ignorance of even the approximate duration of periods.

The Esoteric Doctrine teaches distinctly the dogma of the risings and
falls of civilization; and now we learn that:

It is a remarkable fact that cannibalism seems to have become more
frequent as man advanced in civilization, and that while its
traces are frequent in Neolithic times they become very scarce or
altogether disappear in the age of the mammoth and the
reindeer....(1704)

—another evidence of the cyclic law and the truth of our teachings.
Esoteric history teaches that idols and their worship died out with the
Fourth Race, until the survivors of the hybrid races of the latter
(Chinamen, African negroes, etc.) gradually brought the worship back. The
_Vedas_ countenance no idols; all the modern Hindû writings do.

In the early Egyptian tombs, and in the remains of the pre‐
historic cities excavated by Dr. Schliemann, images of owl‐ and
ox‐headed goddesses, and other symbolical figures or idols, are
found in abundance. But when we ascend into Neolithic times, such
idols are no longer found, or, if found, it is so rarely that
archæologists still dispute as to their existence ... the only
ones which may be said with some certainty to have been idols are
one or two discovered by M. de Braye in some artificial caves of
the Neolithic period ... which appear to be intended for female
figures of life size.(1705)

And these may have been simply statues. Anyhow, all this is one among the
many proofs of the cyclic rise and fall of civilization and religion. The
fact that no traces of human relics or skeletons are so far found beyond
Post‐Tertiary or Quaternary times—though Abbé Bourgeois’ flints may serve
as a warning(1706)—seems to point to the truth of another Esoteric
statement, which runs thus:

_Seek for the remains of thy forefathers in the high places. The vales
have grown into mountains and the mountains have crumbled to the bottom of
the seas._

Fourth Race mankind, thinned after the last cataclysm by two‐thirds of its
population, instead of settling on the new continents and islands that
_reäppeared_—while their predecessors formed the floors of new
oceans—deserted that which is now Europe and parts of Asia and Africa for
the summits of gigantic mountains, the seas that surrounded some of the
latter having since “retreated” and made room for the table lands of
Central Asia.

The most interesting example of this progressive march is perhaps afforded
by the celebrated Kent’s Cavern at Torquay. In that strange recess,
excavated by water out of the Devonian limestone, we find a most curious
record preserved for us in the geological memoirs of the Earth. Under the
blocks of limestone, which heaped the floor of the cavern, were
discovered, embedded in a deposit of black earth, many implements of the
Neolithic period of _fairly excellent workmanship_, with a few fragments
of pottery—possibly traceable to the era of the Roman colonization. There
is no trace of Palæolithic man here. No flints or traces of the extinct
animals of the Quaternary period. When, however, we penetrate still deeper
through the dense layer of stalagmite beneath the black mould into the red
earth, which, of course, itself once formed the pavement of the retreat,
things assume a very different aspect. _Not one implement_ fit to bear
comparison with the _finely‐chipped weapons found in the overlying
stratum_ is to be seen; only a host of the rude and lumbering little
hatchets (with which the monstrous giants of the animal world were subdued
and killed by little man, we have to think?) and scrapers of the
Palæolithic age, mixed up confusedly with the bones of species now either
extinct or emigrated, driven away by change of climate. It is the
artificer of these ugly little hatchets, you see, who sculptured the
reindeer over the brook, on the antler as shown above! In all cases we
meet with the same evidence that, from historic to Neolithic and from
Neolithic to Palæolithic man, things slope downwards on an inclined plane
from the rudiments of civilization to the most abject barbarism—_in Europe
again_. We are made also to face the “Mammoth age”—the extreme or earliest
division of the Palæolithic age—in which the great rudeness of implements
reaches its maximum, and the brutal (?) appearance of contemporary skulls,
such as the Neanderthal, points to a very low type of humanity. But they
may sometimes point also to something else; to a race of men quite
distinct from our (Fifth Race) Humanity.

As said by an Anthropologist in _Modern Thought_:

The theory, scientifically based or not, of Peyrère may be
considered to be equivalent to that which divided man in two
species. Broca, Virey, and a number of the French anthropologists
have recognized that the lower race of man, comprising the
Australian, Tasmanian, and Negro race, excluding the Kaffirs and
the Northern Africans, _should be placed apart_. The fact that in
this species, or rather sub‐species, the third lower molars are
usually larger than the second, and the squamosal and frontal
bones are generally united by suture, places the _Homo afer_ on
the level of being as good a distinct species as many of the kinds
of finches. I shall abstain on the present occasion from
mentioning the facts of hybridity, whereon the late Professor
Broca has so exhaustively commented. The history, in the past ages
of the world, of this race is peculiar. It has _never originated a
system of architecture or a religion of its own_.(1707)

It is peculiar, indeed, as we have shown in the case of the Tasmanians.
However it may be, _fossil_ man in Europe can neither prove nor disprove
the antiquity of man on this Earth, nor the age of his earliest
civilizations.

It is time that the Occultists should disregard any attempts to laugh at
them, scorning the heavy guns of the satire of the men of Science as much
as the pop‐guns of the profane, since it is impossible, so far, to obtain
either proof or disproof, while their theories can stand the test better
than can the hypotheses of the Scientists, at any rate. As to the proof of
the antiquity which they claim for man, they have Darwin himself and Lyell
with them. The latter confesses that they, the Naturalists—

Have already obtained evidence of the existence of man at so
remote a period that there has been time for many conspicuous
mammalia, once his contemporaries, to die out, and _this even
before the era of the earliest_ historical records.(1708)

This is a statement made by one of England’s great authorities upon the
question. The two sentences that follow are as suggestive, and may well be
remembered by students of Occultism, for with all others he says:

In spite of the long lapse of prehistoric ages during which he
[man] must have flourished on earth, _there is no proof of any
perceptible change in his bodily structure_. If, therefore, he
ever diverged from some unreasoning brute ancestor, we must
suppose him to have existed at a far more distant epoch, _possibly
on some continents or islands now submerged_ beneath the ocean.

Thus lost continents are officially suspected. That worlds, and also
races, are periodically destroyed by fire (volcanoes and earthquakes) and
water, in turn, and are periodically renewed, is a doctrine as old as man.
Manu, Hermes, the Chaldæans, all antiquity, believed in this. Twice
already has the face of the Globe been changed by fire, and twice by
water, since man appeared on it. As land needs rest and renovation, new
forces, and a change for its soil, so does water. Thence arises a
periodical redistribution of land and water, change of climates, etc., all
brought on by geological revolution, and ending in a final change in the
axis of the Earth. Astronomers may pooh‐pooh the idea of a periodical
change in the behaviour of the Globe’s axis, and smile at the conversation
given in the _Book of Enoch_ between Noah and his “grandfather” Enoch; the
allegory is, nevertheless, a geological and an astronomical fact. There is
a secular change in the inclination of the Earth’s axis, and its appointed
time is recorded in one of the great Secret Cycles. As in many other
questions, Science is gradually moving toward our way of thinking. Dr.
Henry Woodward, F.R.S., F.G.S., writes in the _Popular Science Review_:

If it be necessary to call in extra‐mundane causes to explain the
great increase of ice at this glacial period, I would prefer the
theory propounded by Dr. Robert Hooke in 1688; since, by Sir
Richard Phillips and others; and lastly by Mr. Thomas Belt, C.E.,
F.G.S.; namely, a slight increase in the present obliquity of the
ecliptic, a proposal in perfect accord with other known
astronomical facts, and the introduction of which involves no
disturbance of the harmony which is essential to our cosmical
condition as a unit in the great solar system.(1709)

The following, quoted from a Lecture by W. Pengelly, F.R.S., F.G.S.,
delivered in March, 1885, on “The Extinct Lake of Bovey Tracey,” shows the
hesitation, in the face of every evidence in favour of Atlantis, to accept
the fact.

Evergreen figs, laurels, palms, and ferns having gigantic rhizomes
have their existing congeners _in a sub‐tropical climate, such, it
cannot be doubted, as prevailed in __ Devonshire in Miocene
times_, and are thus calculated to suggest caution when the
_present climate_ of any district is regarded as normal.

When, moreover, Miocene plants are found in Disco Island, on the
west coast of Greenland, lying between 69° 20´ and 70° 30´ N.
lat.; when we learn that among them were two species found also at
Bovey (Sequoia couttsiæ, Quercus lyelli); when, to quote Professor
Heer, we find that “the ‘splendid evergreen’ (Magnolia
inglefieldi) ‘ripened its fruits so far north as on the parallel
of 70°’ ” (_Phil. Trans._, clix. 457, 1869); when also the number,
variety, and luxuriance of the Greenland Miocene plants are found
to have been such that, had land continued so far, some of them
would in all probability have flourished at the Pole itself, the
problem of changes of climate is brought prominently into view,
but only to be dismissed apparently with the feeling that the
_time for its solution has not yet arrived_.

It seems to be admitted on all hands that the Miocene plants of
Europe have their nearest and most numerous existing analogues in
North America, and hence arises the question: How was the
migration from one area to the other effected? Was there, as some
have believed, an Atlantis?—a continent, or an archipelago of
large islands, occupying the area of the North Atlantic. There is
perhaps nothing unphilosophical in this hypothesis; for since, as
geologists state, “the Alps have acquired 4,000, and even in some
places more than 10,000 feet of their present altitude since the
commencement of the Eocene period” (Lyell’s _Principles_, 11th
ed., p. 256, 1872), a Post‐Miocene[?] depression might have
carried the hypothetical Atlantis into almost abysmal depths. But
an Atlantis is apparently unnecessary and uncalled for. According
to Professor Oliver, “A close and very peculiar analogy subsists
between the Flora of Tertiary Central Europe and the recent Floras
of the American States and of the Japanese region; an analogy much
closer and more intimate than is to be traced between the Tertiary
and recent Floras of Europe. We find the Tertiary element of the
Old World to be intensified towards its extreme eastern margin, if
not in numerical preponderance of genera, yet in features which
especially give a character to the Fossil Flora.... This accession
of the Tertiary element is rather gradual and not abruptly assumed
in the Japan islands only. Although it there attains a maximum, we
may trace it from the Mediterranean, Levant, Caucasus, and Persia
... then along the Himâlaya and through China.... We learn also
that during the Tertiary epoch, counterparts of Central European
Miocene genera certainly grew in North‐West America.... We note
further that the present Atlantic Islands’ Flora affords no
substantial evidence of a former direct communication with the
mainland of the New World.... The consideration of these facts
lead me to the opinion that botanical evidence does not favour the
hypothesis of an Atlantis. On the other hand, it strongly favours
the view that at some period of the Tertiary epoch North‐Eastern
Asia was united to North‐Western America, perhaps by the line
where the Aleutian chain of islands now extends.” (_Nat. Hist.
Rev._, ii. 164, 1862, Art., “The Atlantis Hypothesis in its
Botanical Aspect.”)

See, however, on these points, “Scientific and Geological Proofs of the
Reality of Several Submerged Continents.”

But nothing short of a pithecoid man will ever satisfy the luckless
searchers after the thrice hypothetical “missing link.” Yet, if beneath
the vast floors of the Atlantic, from the Teneriffe Pic to Gibraltar, the
ancient emplacement of the lost Atlantis, all the submarine strata were to
be broken up miles deep, no such skull as would satisfy the Darwinists
would be found. As Dr. C. R. Bree remarks, no missing links between man
and ape having been discovered in various gravels and formations above the
Tertiary strata, if these forms had gone down with the continents now
covered with the sea, they might still have been found—

In those beds of contemporary geological strata which have _not_
gone down to the bottom of the sea.(1710)

Yet they are as fatally absent from the latter as from the former. Did not
preconceptions fasten vampire‐like on man’s mind, the author of The
_Antiquity of Man_ would have found a clue to the difficulty in that same
work of his, by going ten pages back (to p. 530) and reading over a
quotation of his own from Professor G. Rolleston’s work. This
Physiologist, he says, suggests that as there is considerable plasticity
in the human frame, not only in youth and during growth, but even in the
adult, we ought not always to take for granted, as some advocates of the
development theory seem to do, that each advance in physical power depends
on an improvement in bodily structure, for why may not _the soul, or the
higher intellectual and moral faculties play the first instead of the
second part in a progressive scheme_?

This hypothesis is made in relation to evolution _not being entirely due_
to “natural selection”; but it applies as well to the case in hand. For
we, too, claim that it is the “Soul,” or the Inner Man, that descends on
Earth first, the psychic Astral, the mould on which physical man is
gradually built—his Spirit, intellectual and moral faculties awakening
later on as that physical stature grows and develops.

“Thus incorporeal spirits to smaller forms reduced their shapes immense,”
and became the men of the Third and the Fourth Races. Still later, ages
after, appeared the men of our Fifth Race, reduced from what we should
call the still gigantic stature of their primeval ancestors, to about half
that size at present.

Man is certainly _no_ special creation. He is the product of Nature’s
gradual perfective work, like any other living unit on this Earth. But
this is only with regard to the human tabernacle. That which lives and
thinks in man and survives that frame, the masterpiece of evolution—is the
“Eternal Pilgrim,” the Protean differentiation in Space and Time of the
One Absolute “Unknowable.”

In his _Antiquity of Man_(1711) Sir Charles Lyell quotes—perhaps in rather
a mocking spirit—what Hallam says in his _Introduction to the Literature
of Europe_:

If man was made in the image of God, he was also made in the image
of an ape. The framework of the body of him who has weighed the
stars and made the lightning his slave, approaches to that of a
speechless brute who wanders in the forests of Sumatra. Thus
standing on the frontier land between animal and angelic natures,
what wonder that he should partake of both!(1712)

An Occultist would have put it otherwise. He would say that man was indeed
made in the image of a type projected by his progenitor, the creating
Angel‐Force, or Dhyân Chohan; while the wanderer of the forest of Sumatra
was made _in the image of man_, since the framework of the ape, we say
again, is the revival, the resuscitation by abnormal means, of the actual
form of the Third Round and of the Fourth Round Man as well, later on.
Nothing is lost in Nature, _not an atom_: this is at least certain on
scientific data. Analogy would appear to demand that _form_ should be
equally endowed with permanency.

And yet what do we find? Says Sir William Dawson, F.R.S.:

It is farther significant that Professor Huxley, in his lectures
in New York, while resting his case as to the lower animals mainly
on the supposed genealogy of the horse, which has often been shown
to amount to no certain evidence, avoided altogether the
discussion of the origin of men from the apes, now obviously
complicated with so many difficulties that both Wallace and Mivart
are staggered by them. Professor Thomas in his recent lectures
(_Nature_, 1876), admits that there is no lower man known than the
Australian, and that there is no known link of connection with the
monkeys; and Hæckel has to admit that the penultimate link in his
phylogeny, the ape‐like man, is absolutely unknown (_History of
Creation_).... The so‐called “tallies” found with the bones of
Palæocosmic men in European caves, and illustrated in the
admirable works of Christy and Lartet, show that the rudiments
even of writing were already in possession of the oldest race of
men known to archæology or geology.(1713)

Again, in Dr. C. R. Bree’s _Fallacies of Darwinism_, we read:

Mr. Darwin justly says that the difference physically and, more
especially, mentally, between the lowest form of man and the
highest anthropomorphous ape, is enormous. Therefore, _the
time_—which in Darwinian evolution must be almost inconceivably
slow—must have been _enormous_ also during man’s development from
the monkey(1714). The chance, therefore, of some of these
variations being found in the different gravels or fresh‐water
formations above the tertiaries, must be very great. And yet not
one single variation, not one single specimen of a being between a
monkey and a man has ever been found! Neither in the gravel, not
the drift‐clay, nor the fresh‐water beds and gravel and drift, nor
in the tertiaries below them, has there ever been discovered the
remains of any member of the missing families between the monkey
and the man, as _assumed_ to have existed by Mr. Darwin. Have they
gone down with the depression of the earth’s surface and are they
now covered with the sea? If so, it is beyond all probability that
they should not also be found in those beds of contemporary
geological strata which have _not_ gone down to the bottom of the
sea; still more improbable that some portions should not be
dredged from the ocean‐bed like the remains of the mammoth and the
rhinoceros, which are also found in fresh‐water beds and gravel
and drift!... The celebrated Neanderthal skull, about which so
much has been said, belongs confessedly to this remote period
[bronze and stone ages], and yet presents, although it may have
been the skull of an idiot, immense differences from the highest
known anthropomorphous ape.(1715)

Our Globe being convulsed each time that it _reäwakens_ for a new period
of activity, like a field which has to be ploughed and furrowed before
fresh seed for its new crop is thrown into it—it does seem quite hopeless
that fossils belonging to its previous Rounds should be found in the beds
of either its oldest or its latest geological strata. Every new Manvantara
brings along with it the renovation of forms, types and species; every
type of the preceding organic forms—vegetable, animal and human—changes
and is perfected in the next, even to the mineral, which has received in
this Round its final opacity and hardness; its softer portions formed the
present vegetation; the astral relics of previous vegetation and fauna
were utilized in the formation of the lower animals, and in determining
the structure of the primeval Root‐Types of the highest mammalia. And,
finally, the form of the gigantic ape‐man of the former Round has been
reproduced in this one by human bestiality, and transfigured into the
_parent_ form in the modern anthropoid.

This doctrine, even imperfectly delineated as it is under our inefficient
pen, is assuredly more logical, more consistent with facts, and _far more_
probable, than many “scientific” theories; that, for instance, of the
first organic germ descending on a meteor to our Earth—like Ain Suph on
its Vehicle, Adam Kadmon. Only, the latter descent is allegorical, as
every one knows, and the Kabalists have never offered this figure of
speech for acceptance in its dead‐letter garb. But the germ‐in‐the‐meteor
theory, as coming from such high scientific quarters, is an eligible
candidate for axiomatic truth and law, a theory people are in honour bound
to accept, if they would be on a right level with Modern Science. What the
next theory necessitated by the materialistic premisses will be—no one can
tell. Meanwhile, the _present_ theories, as anyone can see, clash far more
discordantly among themselves than even with those of the Occultists
outside the sacred precincts of learning. For what is there, next in
order, now that exact Science has made even of the life‐principle an empty
word, a meaningless term, and insists that life is an effect _due to the
molecular action of the primordial protoplasm_? The new doctrine of the
Darwinists may be defined and summarized in the few words, from Mr.
Herbert Spencer:

The hypothesis of special creations turns out to be
worthless—worthless, by its derivation; worthless, in its
intrinsic incoherence; worthless, as absolutely without evidence;
worthless, as not supplying an intellectual need; worthless, as
not satisfying a moral want. We must, therefore, consider it as
counting for nothing in opposition to any other hypothesis
respecting the origin of organic beings.(1716)

Section V. Organic Evolution and Creative Centres.

It is argued that Universal Evolution, otherwise the gradual development
of species in all the kingdoms of Nature, works by uniform laws. This is
admitted, and the law is enforced far more strictly in Esoteric than in
Modern Science. But we are also told, that it is equally a law that:

Development works from the less to the more perfect, and from the
simpler to the more complicated, by incessant changes, small in
themselves, but constantly accumulating in the required
direction(1717).

It is from the infinitesimally small that the comparatively gigantic
species are produced.

Esoteric Science agrees with this, but adds that this law applies only to
what is known to it as the Primary Creation—the evolution of Worlds from
Primordial Atoms, and the Pre‐primordial ATOM, at the first
differentiation of the former; and that during the period of cyclic
evolution in Space and Time, this law is limited and works only in the
lower kingdoms. It did so work during the first geological periods, from
simple to complex, on the rough material surviving from the relics of the
Third Round, which relics are projected into objectivity when terrestrial
activity recommences.

No more than Science, does the Esoteric Philosophy admit “design” or
“special creation.” It rejects every claim to the “miraculous,” and
accepts nothing outside the uniform and immutable laws of Nature. But it
teaches a cyclic law, a double stream of Force (or Spirit) and of Matter,
which, starting from the Neutral Centre of Being, develops by its cyclic
progress and incessant transformations. The primitive germ from which all
vertebrate life has developed throughout the ages, being distinct from the
primitive germ from which vegetable and animal life have evolved, there
are side laws whose work is determined by the conditions in which the
materials to be worked upon are found by them, and of which
Science—Physiology and Anthropology especially—seems to be little aware.
Its votaries speak of this “primitive germ,” and maintain that it is shown
beyond any doubt that:

The design [and the “designer”], if there be any [in the case of
man, with the wonderful structure of his limbs, and his hand
especially], must be placed very much farther back, and is, in
fact, involved in the primitive germ, from which all vertebrate
life certainly, and probably all life, animal or vegetable, have
been slowly developed.(1718)

This is as true of the “primitive germ” as it is false that that “germ” is
only “very much farther back” than man is; for it is at an immeasurable
and inconceivable distance, _in Time_, though not in Space, from the
origin even of our Solar System. As the Hindû philosophy very justly
teaches, the “Aniyâmsam Anîyasâm,” can be known only through false
notions. It is the “Many” that proceed from the “One”—the living spiritual
germs _or centres of forces_—each in a septenary form, which first
generate, and then give the primary impulse to the law of evolution and
gradual slow development.

Limiting the teaching strictly to this our Earth, it may be shown that, as
the ethereal forms of the first Men are first projected on seven zones by
seven Dhyân‐Chohanic Centres of Force, so there are centres of creative
power for every root or parent species of the host of forms of vegetable
and animal life. This is, again, no “special creation,” nor is there any
“design,” except in the general “ground‐plan” worked out by the Universal
Law. But there are certainly “designers,” though these are neither
omnipotent nor omniscient in the absolute sense of the term. They are
simply Builders, or Masons, working under the impulse given them by the
ever‐to‐be‐unknown (on our plane) Master Mason—the One Life and Law.
Belonging to this sphere, they have no hand in, nor possibility of working
on any other, during the present Manvantara, at any rate. That they work
in cycles and on a strictly geometrical and mathematical scale of
progression, is what the extinct animal species amply demonstrate; that
they act by design in the details of minor lives (of side animal issues,
etc.) is sufficiently proved by natural history. In the “creation” of new
species, departing sometimes very widely from the parent stock, as in the
great variety of the genus Felis—like the lynx, the tiger, the cat,
etc.—it is the “designers” who direct the new evolution by adding to, or
depriving the species of certain appendages, either needed or becoming
useless in the new environments. Thus, when we say that Nature provides
for every animal and plant, whether large or small, we speak correctly.
For it is these terrestrial Spirits of Nature, who form the aggregated
Nature—which, if it fails occasionally in its design, is neither to be
considered blind, nor to be taxed with the failure; since, belonging to a
_differentiated_ sum of qualities and attributes, it is in virtue of that
alone _conditioned and imperfect_.

Were there no such thing as evolutionary cycles, as an eternal spiral
progress into Matter with a proportionate _obscuration_ of Spirit (though
the two are one) followed by an inverse ascent into Spirit and the defeat
of Matter—active and passive by turn—how could we explain the discoveries
of Zoology and Geology? How is it that, on the dictum of authoritative
Science, one can trace the animal life from the mollusc up to the great
sea‐dragon, from the smallest land‐worm up again to the gigantic animals
of the Tertiary period; and that the latter were once crossed is shown by
the fact of all those species decreasing, dwindling down and becoming
dwarfed. If the seeming process of development working from the less to
the more perfect, and from the simpler to the more complex, were a
universal law indeed, instead of being a very imperfect generalization of
a mere secondary nature in the great cosmic process, and if there were no
such cycles as those claimed, then the Mesozoic fauna and flora ought to
change places with the latest Neolithic. It is the plesiosauri and the
ichthyosauri that we ought to find developing from the present sea‐ and
river‐reptiles, instead of these giving place to their dwarfed modern
analogies. It is, again, our old friend, the good‐tempered elephant, that
would be the fossil antediluvian ancestor, and the mammoth of the Pliocene
age who would be in the menagerie; the megalonyx and the gigantic
megatherium would be found instead of the lazy sloth in the forests of
South America, in which the colossal ferns of the carboniferous periods
would take the place of the mosses and the present trees—dwarfs, even the
giants of California, in comparison with the Titan‐trees of past
geological periods. Surely the organisms of the megasthenian world of the
Tertiary and the Mesozoic ages must have been _more complex and perfect_
than those of the microsthenian plants and animals of the present age? The
dryopithecus, for instance, is more perfect anatomically, is more fit for
a greater development of brain power, than the modern gorilla or gibbon.
How is all this, then? Are we to believe that the constitution of all
those colossal land‐ and sea‐dragons, of the gigantic flying reptiles, was
not far more developed and complex than the anatomy of the lizards,
turtles, crocodiles, and even of the whales—in short, of all those animals
with which we are acquainted?

Let us admit, however, for argument’s sake, that all those cycles, races,
septenary forms of evolution, and the _tutti quanti_ of Esoteric teaching,
are no better than a delusion and a snare. Let us agree with Science and
say that man—instead of being an imprisoned “spirit,” and his vehicle, the
shell or body, a gradually perfected and now complete mechanism for
material and terrestrial uses, as claimed by the Occultists—is simply a
more developed animal, whose primal form emerged from one and the same
primitive germ on this Earth as the flying dragon and the gnat, the whale
and the amoeba, the crocodile and the frog, etc. In this case, he must
have passed through the identical developments and through the same
process of growth as all the other mammals. If man is an animal, _and
nothing more_, a highly intellectual “ex‐brute,” he should at least be
allowed to have been a gigantic mammal of his kind, a “meganthropus” in
his day. This is exactly what Esoteric Science shows to have taken place
in the first three Rounds, and in this, as in most other things, it is
more logical and consistent than Modern Science. It classifies the human
body with the brute creation, and maintains it in the path of animal
evolution, from first to last, while Science leaves man a parentless
orphan born of sires unknown, an “unspecialized skeleton” truly! And this
mistake is due to a stubborn rejection of the doctrine of cycles.

A. The Origin And Evolution Of The Mammalia: Science And Esoteric
Phylogeny.

Having dealt almost exclusively with the question of the origin of man in
the foregoing criticism of Western Evolutionism, it may not be amiss to
define the position of the Occultists with regard to the differentiation
of species. The pre‐human fauna and flora have been already dealt with
generally in the Commentary on the Stanzas, and the truth of much of
modern biological speculation has been admitted, _e.g._, the derivation of
birds from reptiles, the _partial_ truth of “natural selection,” and the
transformation theory generally. It now remains to clear up the mystery of
the origin of those first mammalian faunæ which M. de Quatrefages so
brilliantly endeavours to prove contemporary with the Homo primigenius of
the Secondary Age.

The somewhat complicated problem relating to the “Origin of Species”—more
especially of the varied groups of fossil or existing mammalian faunæ—will
be rendered less obscure by the aid of a diagram. It will then be apparent
to what extent the “factors of organic evolution,” relied upon by Western
Biologists,(1719) are to be considered as adequate to meet the facts. The
line of demarcation between ethereo‐spiritual, astral and physical
evolution must be drawn. Perhaps, if Darwinians deigned to consider the
possibility of the second process, they would no longer have to lament the
fact that:

We are referred entirely to conjecture and inference for the
origin of the mammals!(1720)

At present the admitted chasm between the systems of reproduction of the
oviparous vertebrates and mammalia constitutes a hopeless crux to those
thinkers who, with the Evolutionists, seek to link all existing organic
forms in a continuous line of descent.

Let us take, for instance, the case of the ungulate mammals, since it is
said that in no other division do we possess such abundant fossil
material. So much progress has been made in this direction, that in some
instances the intermediate links between the modern and Eocene ungulates
have been unearthed; a notable example being that of the complete proof of
the derivation of the present one‐toed horse from the three‐toed
anchitherium of the old Tertiary. This standard of comparison between
Western Biology and the Eastern Doctrine could not, therefore, be improved
upon. The pedigree here utilized, as embodying the views of Scientists in
general, is that of Schmidt, based on the exhaustive researches of
Rütimeyer. Its _approximate_ accuracy—from the standpoint of
evolutionism—leaves little to be desired:

[Illustration: Ungulate Mammals]

Ungulate Mammals

At this, the midway point of evolution, Science comes to a standstill.

The _root_ to which these two families lead back is unknown.(1721)

[Illustration: The Root]

The Root According to Occultism

Schmidt’s diagram represents the realm explored by Western Evolutionists,
the area in which climatic influences, “natural selection,” and all the
other _physical_ causes of organic differentiation are present. Biology
and Palæontology find their province here in investigating the many
physical agencies which so largely contribute, as has been shown by
Darwin, Spencer and others, to the “segregation of species.” But even in
this domain the sub‐conscious workings of the Dhyân‐Chohanic wisdom are at
the root of all the “ceaseless striving towards perfection,” though its
influence is vastly modified by those purely material causes which de
Quatrefages terms the “milieu” and Spencer the “environment.”

The “midway point of evolution” is that stage where the _astral_
prototypes definitely begin to pass into the physical, and thus become
subject to the differentiating agencies now operative around us. Physical
causation supervenes immediately on the assumption of the “coats of
skin”—_i.e._, the physiological equipment in general. The forms of men and
of other mammals previous to the separation of the sexes(1722) are woven
out of astral matter, and possess a structure utterly unlike that of the
physical organisms which eat, drink, digest, etc. The known physiological
contrivances requisite for these functions were almost entirely evolved
subsequently to the incipient physicalization of the seven Root‐Types out
of the astral—during the “midway halt” between the two planes of
existence. Hardly had the “ground‐plan” of evolution been limned out in
these ancestral types, than there supervened the influence of the
accessory terrestrial laws, familiar to us, resulting in the whole crop of
mammalian species. Æons of slow differentiation were, however, required to
effect this end.

The second diagram represents the domain of the purely astral prototypes
previous to their descent into gross matter. Astral matter, it must be
noted, is fourth‐state matter, having, like our gross matter, its own
“protyle.” There are several protyles in Nature, corresponding to the
various planes of matter. The two sub‐physical elemental kingdoms, the
plane of mind, Manas, or fifth‐state matter, as also that of Buddhi,
sixth‐state matter, are each and all evolved from one of the six protyles
which constitute the basis of the Object‐Universe. The three “states” so‐
called of our terrestrial matter, known as the “solid,” “liquid,” and
“gaseous,” are only, in strict accuracy, _sub_‐states. As to the former
reality of the descent into the physical, which culminated in
physiological man and animal, we have a palpable testimony in the fact of
the so‐called spiritualistic “materializations.”

In all these instances a complete temporary mergence of the astral into
the physical takes place. The evolution of _physiological_ man out of the
astral races of the _early_ Lemurian age—the Jurassic age of Geology—is
exactly paralleled by the “materialization” of “spirits” (?) in the séance
room. In the case of Professor Crookes’ “Katie King,” the presence of a
_physiological_ mechanism—heart, lungs, etc.—was indubitably demonstrated!

This, in a way, is the Archetype of Goethe. Listen to his words:

Thus much we should have gained ... all the nine perfect organic
beings ... [are] formed according to an archetype which merely
fluctuates more or less in its very persistent parts and,
moreover, day by day, completes and transforms itself by means of
reproduction.

This is a seemingly imperfect foreshadowing of the Occult fact of the
differentiation of species from the primal astral Root‐Types. Whatever the
whole _posse comitatus_ of “natural selection,” etc., may effect, the
_fundamental unity of structural plan_ remains practically unaffected by
all subsequent modifications. The “unity of type” common, in a sense, to
all the animal and human kingdoms, is not, as Spencer and others appear to
hold, a proof of the consanguinity of _all_ organic forms, but a witness
to the essential unity of the “ground‐plan” Nature has followed in
fashioning her creatures.

To sum up the case we may again avail ourselves of a tabulation of the
actual factors concerned in the differentiation of species. The stages of
the process itself need no further comment here, for they follow the basic
principles underlying organic development, and we do not need to enter on
the domain of the biological specialist.

FACTORS CONCERNED IN THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, ANIMAL AND VEGETABLE.

Basic astral prototypes pass into the physical, the Dhyân‐Chohanic
impulse, constituting Lamarck’s “inherent and necessary” law of
development. It lies behind all minor agencies: variation transmitted by
Heredity, Natural Selection, Sexual Selection Physiological Selection,
Isolation. Correlation of Growth, Adaptation to Environment. (Intelligent
as opposed to Mechanical Causation.)

B. The European Palæolithic Races: Whence, And How Distributed.

Is Science opposed to those who maintain that, down to the Quaternary
period, the distribution of the human races was widely different from what
it is now? Is Science against those who, further, maintain that the fossil
men found in Europe‐although they have almost reached a plane of sameness
and unity which continues till this day, regarded from the fundamental
physiological and anthropological aspects—still differ, sometimes greatly,
from the type of the now existing populations? The late M. Littré admits
this in an article published by him in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ (March
1st, 1859) on the Mémoire called _Antiquités Celtiques et Antediluviennes_
by Boucher de Perthes (1849). Littré therein states that: (_a_) in these
periods when the mammoths, exhumed in Picardy in company with man‐made
hatchets, lived in the latter region, there must have been an eternal
spring reigning over all the terrestrial globe;(1723) nature was the
contrary of what it is now, and thus is left _an enormous margin for the
antiquity of those __“__periods__”_; he then adds (_b_):

Spring, Professor of the Faculty of Medicine at Liège, found in a
grotto near Namur, in the mountain of Chauvaux, numerous human
bones “of a race quite distinct from ours.”

Skulls exhumed in Austria offer a great analogy with those of negro races
in Africa, according to Littré, while others, discovered on the shores of
the Danube and the Rhine, resemble the skulls of the Caribs and of the
ancient inhabitants of Peru and Chili. Still, the Deluge, whether Biblical
or Atlantean, is denied. But further geological discoveries made Gaudry
write conclusively:

Our forefathers were positively contemporaneous with the
rhinoceros tichorrhinus, the hippopotamus major.

And he added that the soil called _diluvial_ in geology—

Was formed partially at least after man’s apparition on earth.

Upon this, Littré pronounced himself finally. He then showed the
necessity, in face of “the resurrection of so many old witnesses,” of
rehandling all the origins, all the durations, and added that there was an
age hitherto unknown to study—

Either at the dawn of the actual epoch, or, as I believe, at the
beginning of the epoch which preceded it.

The types of the skulls found in Europe are of two kinds, as is well
known: the orthognathous and the prognathous, or the Caucasian and the
Negroid types—such as are now found only among the African and the lower
savage tribes. Professor Heer—who argues that the facts of Botany
necessitate the hypothesis of an Atlantis—has shown that the plants of the
Neolithic lake‐villagers are mainly of African origin. How did these
plants appear in Europe if there were no former point of union between
Europe and Africa? How many thousand years ago did the seventeen men live
whose skeletons were exhumed in the department of the Haute Garonne, in a
squatting posture near the remains of a coal fire, with some amulets and
broken crockery around them, and in company with the ursus spelæus, the
elephas primigenius, the aurochs (regarded by Cuvier as a distinct
species), the megaceros hibernicus—all antediluvian mammals? Certainly
they must have lived in a most distant epoch, but not in one which carries
us further back than the Quaternary. A much greater antiquity for man has
yet to be proved. Dr. James Hunt, the late President of the
Anthropological Society, puts it at nine million years. This man of
Science, at any rate, makes some approach to our Esoteric computation, if
we leave out of the computation the first two semi‐human, ethereal Races,
and the early Third Race.

The question, however, arises—who were these Palæolithic men of the
European Quaternary epoch? Were they aboriginal, or were they the outcome
of some immigration dating back into the unknown past? The latter is the
only tenable hypothesis, as all Scientists agree in eliminating Europe
from the category of possible “cradles of mankind.” Whence, then, radiated
the various successive streams of “primitive” men?

The earliest Palæeolithic men in Europe—about whose origin Ethnology is
silent, and whose very characteristics are but imperfectly known, though
expatiated on as “ape‐like” by imaginative writers such as Mr. Grant
Allen—were of pure Atlantean and “Africo”‐Atlantean stocks.(1724) (It must
be borne in mind that by this time the Atlantean Continent itself was a
dream of the past.) Europe in the Quaternary epoch was very different from
the Europe of to‐day, being then only in process of formation. It was
united to Northern Africa—or rather to what is now Northern Africa—by a
neck of land running across the present Straits of Gibraltar—Northern
Africa thus constituting as it were an extension of the present Spain,
while a broad sea filled the great basin of the Sahara. Of the vast
Atlantis, the main bulk of which sank in the Miocene, there remained only
Ruta and Daitya and a stray island or so. The Atlantean connections of the
forefathers(1725) of the Palæolithic cave‐men are evidenced by the
upturning of fossil skulls in Europe, reverting closely to the type of the
West Indian Carib and ancient Peruvian—a mystery indeed for all those who
refuse to sanction the “hypothesis” of a former Atlantic continent to
bridge what is now an ocean. What are we also to make of the fact that
while de Quatrefages points to that “magnificent race,” the tall Cro‐
Magnon cave‐men, and to the Guanches of the Canary Islands, as
representatives of one type, Virchow also allies the Basques with the
latter in a similar way? Professor Retzius independently proves the
relationship of the aboriginal American dolichocephalous tribes and these
same Guanches. The several links in the chain of evidence are thus
securely joined together. Legions of similar facts could be adduced. As to
the African tribes—themselves diverging offshoots of Atlanteans modified
by climate and conditions—they crossed into Europe over the peninsula
which made the Mediterranean an inland sea. Fine races were many of these
European cave‐men, as the Cro‐Magnon, for instance. But, as was to be
expected, _progress is almost non‐existent_ through the whole of the vast
period allotted by Science to the Chipped‐Stone age.(1726) _The cyclic
impulse downwards_ weighs heavily on the stocks thus transplanted—the
incubus of the Atlantean Karma is upon them. Finally, Palæolithic man
makes room for his successor—and disappears almost entirely from the
scene. Professor André Lefèvre asks in this connection:

Has the Polished succeeded the Chipped‐Stone Age by an
imperceptible transition, or was it due to an invasion of
brachycephalous Kelts? But whether the deterioration produced in
the populations of La Vézère was the result of violent crossings,
or of a general retreat northwards in the wake of the reindeer, is
of little moment to us.

He continues:

Meantime the bed of the ocean has been upheaved, Europe is now
fully formed, her flora and fauna are fixed. With the taming of
the dog begins the pastoral life. We enter on those polished stone
and bronze periods, which succeed each other at irregular
intervals, which even overlap one another in the midst of ethnical
migrations and fusions, at once more confused and of shorter
duration than less advanced and more rudimentary ages. The
primitive European populations are interrupted in their special
evolution, and without perishing, become absorbed in other races,
engulfed, as it were, by the successive waves of migration
overflowing from Africa, possibly from a lost Atlantis [? far too
late by æons of years] and from prolific Asia. On the one hand
came the Iberians, on the other Pelasgians, Ligurians, Sicanians,
Etruscans—all forerunners of the great Âryan Invasion [Fifth
Race].(1727)

Section VI. Giants, Civilizations, and Submerged Continents Traced in
History.

When statements such as are comprised in the above heading are brought
forward, the writer is, of course, expected to furnish _historical_
instead of _legendary_ evidence in support of such claims. Is this
possible? Yes; for evidence of such a nature is plentiful, and has simply
to be collected and brought together in order to become overwhelming in
the eyes of the unprejudiced.

Once the sagacious student gets hold of the guiding thread he may find out
such evidence for himself. We give _facts_ and show landmarks; let the
wayfarer follow them. What is adduced here is amply sufficient for _this_
century.

In a letter to Voltaire, Bailly finds it quite natural that the sympathies
of the “grand old invalid of Ferney” should be attracted to the
representatives of “knowledge and wisdom,” the ancient Brâhmans. He then
adds a curious statement. He says:

But your Brâhmans are very young in comparison with their archaic
instructors.(1728)

Bailly, who knew nought of the Esoteric teachings, nor of Lemuria,
believed, nevertheless, unreservedly in the lost Atlantis, and also in
several pre‐historic and civilized nations which had disappeared without
leaving any undeniable trace. He had studied the ancient classics and
_traditions_ extensively, and he saw that the Arts and Sciences known to
those we now call the “ancients,” were—

Not the achievements of any of the now or even then existing
nations, nor of any of the historical peoples of Asia....

and that, notwithstanding the learning of the Hindûs, their undeniable
priority in the early part of their race had to be referred to a people or
a race still more ancient and more learned than were even the Brâhmans
themselves.(1729)

Voltaire, the greatest sceptic of his day, the materialist _par
excellence_, shared Bailly’s belief. He thought it quite likely that:

Long before the empires of China and India, there had been nations
cultured, learned, and powerful, which a deluge of barbarians
overpowered and thus replunged into their primitive state of
ignorance and savagery, or what they call the state of pure
nature.(1730)

That which with Voltaire was the shrewd conjecture of a great intellect,
was with Bailly a “question of historical facts.” For, he wrote:

I make great case of ancient traditions preserved through a long
series of generations.

It _was_ possible, he thought, that a _foreign_ nation should, after
instructing another nation, so disappear that it should leave no traces
behind. When asked how it could have happened that this ancient, or rather
archaic, nation should not have left at least some recollection in the
human mind, he answered that Time was a pitiless devourer of facts and
events. But the history of the Past was never entirely lost, for the Sages
of old Egypt had preserved it, and “it is so preserved to this day
elsewhere.” The priests of Saïs said to Solon, according to Plato:

You are unacquainted with that most noble and excellent race of
men, who once inhabited your country, from whom you and your whole
present state are descended,(1731) though only a small remnant of
this admirable people is now remaining.... These writings relate
what a prodigious force your city once overcame, when a mighty
warlike power, rushing from the Atlantic sea, spread itself with
hostile fury over all Europe and Asia.(1732)

The Greeks were but the dwarfed and weak remnant of that once glorious
nation.(1733)

What was this nation? The Secret Doctrine teaches that it was the latest
seventh sub‐race of the Atlantean, already swallowed up in one of the
early sub‐races of the Âryan stock, one that had been gradually spreading
over the continent and islands of Europe, as soon as they had begun to
emerge from the seas. Descending from the high plateaux of Asia, where the
two races had sought refuge in the days of the agony of Atlantis, it had
been slowly settling and colonizing the freshly emerged lands. The
immigrant sub‐race had rapidly increased and multiplied on that virgin
soil; had divided into many family races, which in their turn divided into
nations. Egypt and Greece, the Phœnicians, and the Northern stocks, had
thus proceeded from that one sub‐race. Thousands of years later, other
races—the remnants of the Atlanteans—“yellow and red, brown and black,”
began to invade the new continent. There were wars in which the new comers
were defeated, and they fled, some to Africa, others to remote countries.
Some of these lands became islands in course of time, owing to new
geological convulsions. Being thus forcibly separated from the continents,
the result was that the undeveloped tribes and families of the Atlantean
stock fell gradually into a still more abject and savage condition.

Did not the Spaniards in the Cibola expeditions meet with _white_ savage
chiefs; and has not the presence of African negro types in Europe in the
pre‐historic ages been now ascertained? It is this presence of a foreign
type associated with that of the negro, and also with that of the
Mongolian, which is the stumbling‐block of Anthropology. The individual
who lived at an incalculably distant period at La Naulette, in Belgium, is
an example. Says an Anthropologist:

The caves on the banks of the Lesse, in South‐Eastern Belgium,
afford evidence of what is, perhaps, the lowest man, as shown by
the Naulette jaw. Such man, however, had amulets of stone,
perforated for the purpose of ornament; these are made of a
psammite now found in the basin of the Gironde.(1734)

Thus Belgian man was extremely ancient. The man who was antecedent to the
great flood of waters—which covered the highlands of Belgium with a
deposit of lehm or upland gravel thirty metres above the level of the
present rivers—must have combined the characters of the Turanian and the
Negro. The Canstadt, or La Naulette, man may have been black, and he had
nothing to do with the Âryan type whose remains are contemporary with
those of the cave bear at Engis. The denizens of the Aquitaine bone‐caves
belong to a far later period of history, and may not be as ancient as the
former.

If the statement be objected to on the ground that Science does not deny
the presence of man on Earth from an enormous antiquity, though that
antiquity cannot be determined, since such presence is conditioned by the
duration of geological periods, the age of which is not ascertained; if it
is argued that the Scientists object most decidedly to the claim that man
preceded the animals, for instance; or that civilization dates from the
earliest Eocene period; or again, that there have ever existed giants,
three‐eyed and four‐armed and four‐legged men, androgynes, etc.—then the
objectors are asked in their turn, “How do you know? What proof have you
besides your personal hypotheses, each of which may be upset any day by
new discoveries?” And these future discoveries are sure to prove that,
whatever this earlier type of man known to Anthropologists may have been
in complexion, he was in no respect _apish_. The Canstadt man, the Engis
man, alike possessed essentially human attributes.(1735) People have
looked for the missing link at the wrong end of the chain; and the
Neanderthal man has long since been dismissed to the “limbo of all hasty
blunders.” Disraeli divided man into the associates of the apes and the
angels. Reasons are here given in favour of an “angelic theory”—as
Christians would call it, as applicable to at least some of the races of
men. At all events, if man be held to exist only since the Miocene period,
even then humanity as a whole could not be composed of the abject savages
of the Palæolithic age, as they are now represented by the Scientists. All
they say is mere arbitrary speculative guess‐work, invented by them to
answer to, and fit in with, their own fanciful theories.

We speak of events hundreds of thousands of years old, nay, even millions
of years old—if man date from the geological periods(1736)—not of any of
those events which happened during the few thousand years of the pre‐
historic margin allowed by timid and ever‐cautious history. Yet there are
men of Science who are almost of our way of thinking. From the brave
confession of the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg, who says that:

Traditions, whose traces recur in Mexico, in Central America, in
Peru, and in Bolivia, suggest the idea that man existed in these
different countries at the time of the gigantic upheaval of the
Andes, and that he has retained the memory of it—

down to the latest Palæontologists and Anthropologists, the majority of
scientific men is in favour of just such an antiquity. _Àpropos_ of Peru,
has any satisfactory attempt been made to determine the ethnological
affinities and characteristics of the race which reared those Cyclopean
erections, the ruins of which display the relics of a great civilization?
At Cuelap, for instance, such are found, consisting—

Of a wall of wrought stones, 3,600 feet long, 560 broad, and 150
feet high, constituting a solid mass with a level summit. On this
mass was another, 600 feet long, 500 broad, and 150 feet high,
making an aggregate height of 300 feet. In it were rooms and
cells.(1737)

A most suggestive fact is the _startling resemblance between the
architecture of these colossal buildings and that of the archaic European
nations_. Mr. Fergusson regards the analogies between the ruins of “Inca”
civilization and the Cyclopean remains of the Pelasgians in Italy and
Greece, as a coincidence—

The most remarkable in the history of architecture.... It is
difficult to resist the conclusion that there may be some relation
between them.

The “relation” is simply explained by the derivation of the stocks who
devised these erections, from a common centre in an Atlantic continent.
The acceptance of the latter can alone assist us to approach a solution of
this and similar problems in almost every branch of Modern Science.

Dr. Lartet, treating upon the subject, settles the question by declaring
that:

The truth, so long contested, of the coëxistence of man with the
great extinct species [elephas primigenius, rhinoceros
tichorrhinus, hyæna spelæa, ursus spelæus, etc.], appears to me to
be henceforth unassailable and definitely conquered by
science.(1738)

It is shown elsewhere that such is also de Quatrefages’ opinion. He says:

Man has in all probability seen Miocene times(1739) and
consequently the entire Pliocene epoch. Are there any reasons for
believing that his traces will be found further back still?... He
may then have been contemporaneous with the earliest mammalia, and
go back as far as the Secondary period.(1740)

Egypt is far older than Europe as now traced on the map. Atlanto‐Âryan
tribes began to settle on it when the British Islands(1741) and France
were not even in existence. It is well known that “the tongue of the
Ægyptian Sea,” or the Delta of lower Egypt, became firm land very
gradually, and followed the highlands of Abyssinia; unlike the latter,
which arose suddenly, comparatively speaking, it was very slowly formed,
through long ages, from successive layers of sea‐slime and mud, deposited
annually by the soil brought down by a large river, the present Nile. Yet
even the Delta, as a firm and fertile land, has been inhabited for more
than 100,000 years. Later tribes, with still more Âryan blood in them than
their predecessors, arrived from the East, and _conquered_ it from a
people whose very name is lost to posterity, except in the Secret Books.
It is this natural barrier of slime, which sucked in slowly and surely
every boat that approached those inhospitable shores, that was, till
within a few thousand years B.C., the best safeguard of the later
Egyptians, who had managed to reach it through Arabia, Abyssinia, and
Nubia, led on by Manu Vînâ in the day of Vishvâmitra.(1742)

So evident does the antiquity of man become with every day, that even the
Church is preparing for an _honourable_ surrender and retreat. The learned
Abbé Fabre, professor at the Sorbonne, has categorically declared that
pre‐historic Palæontology and Archæology may, without any harm to the
Scriptures, discover in the Tertiary beds as many traces as they please of
Pre‐Adamite man.

Since it disregards all creations anterior to the last deluge but
one [that which produced the diluvium, according to the Abbé],
Bible revelation leaves us free to admit the existence of man in
the grey diluvium, in Pliocene, and even Eocene strata. On the
other hand, however, geologists are not all agreed on regarding
the men who inhabited the globe in these primitive ages as our
ancestors.(1743)

The day on which the Church shall find that its only salvation lies in the
Occult interpretation of the _Bible_ may not be so far off as some
imagine. Already many an Abbé and ecclesiastic has become an ardent
Kabalist, and as many appear publicly in the arena, breaking a lance with
Theosophists and Occultists in support of the metaphysical interpretation
of the _Bible_. But they commence, unfortunately for them, at the wrong
end. They are advised, before they begin to speculate upon the
_metaphysical_ in their Scriptures, to study and master that which relates
to the purely _physical_—_e.g._, its hints on Geology and Ethnology. For
such allusions to the septenary constitution of the Earth and Man, to the
seven Rounds and Races, abound in the _New_ as in the _Old Testament_, and
are as visible as the Sun in the heavens to him who reads both
symbolically. To what do the laws in chapter xxiii of _Leviticus_ apply?
What is the philosophy of reason for all such hebdomadal offerings and
symbolical calculations as:

Ye shall count ... from the morrow after the Sabbath ... that ye
brought the sheaf of the wave offering; seven Sabbaths shall be
complete.... And ye shall offer with the bread seven lambs without
blemish, etc.(1744)

We shall be contradicted, no doubt, when we say that all these “wave” and
“peace” offerings were in commemoration of the _seven_ “Sabbaths” of the
Mysteries. These Sabbaths are seven Pralayas between seven Manvantaras, or
what we call Rounds; for “Sabbath” is an elastic word, meaning a period of
rest of whatever nature, as explained elsewhere. And if this is not
sufficiently conclusive, then we may turn to the verse which adds:

Even unto the morrow after the seventh Sabbath shall ye number
fifty days [forty‐nine, 7 × 7, stages of activity, and forty‐nine
stages of rest, on the seven Globes of the Chain, and then comes
the rest of Sabbath, the _fiftieth_]; and ye shall offer _a new
meat offering_ unto the Lord.(1745)

That is, ye shall make an offering of your flesh or “coats of skin,” and,
divesting yourselves of your bodies, ye shall remain pure spirits. This
law of offering, degraded and materialized with ages, was an institution
that dated from the earliest Atlanteans; it came to the Hebrews _viâ_ the
“Chaldees,” who were the “wise men” of a _caste_, not of a nation, a
community of great Adepts come from their “Serpent‐holes,” who had settled
in Babylonia ages before. And if this interpretation from _Leviticus_
(full of the disfigured _Laws of Manu_) is found too far‐fetched, then
turn to _Revelation_. Whatever interpretation profane mystics may give to
the famous chapter xvii, with its riddle of the woman in purple and
scarlet; whether Protestants nod at the Roman Catholics, when reading
“Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the
Earth,” or Roman Catholics glare at the Protestants, the Occultists
pronounce, in their impartiality, that these words have applied from the
first _to all and every exoteric_ Churchianity—“ceremonial magic” of old,
with its terrible effects, and now the harmless, because distorted, farce
of ritualistic worship. The “mystery” of the woman and of the beast, are
the symbols of soul‐killing Churchianity and of Superstition.

The beast that ... was, and is not, ... and yet is. And here is
the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains
[seven Continents and seven Races] on which the woman sitteth—

the symbol of all the exoteric, barbarous, idolatrous faiths which have
covered that symbol “with the blood of the saints and the blood of the
martyrs” who protested and do protest.

And there are seven kings [seven Races]; five are fallen [our
Fifth Race included], and one is [the Fifth continues], and the
other [the Sixth and the Seventh Races] is not yet come; and when
he [the Race “king”] cometh, he must continue a short space.(1746)

There are many such apocalyptic allusions, but the student has to find
them out for himself.

If the _Bible_ combines with Archæology and Geology to show that human
civilization has passed through three more or less distinct stages, in
Europe at least; and if man, both in America and Europe, as much as in
Asia, dates from geological epochs—why should not the statements of _The
Secret Doctrine_ be taken into consideration? Is it more philosophical or
logical and scientific to _disbelieve_, with Mr. Albert Gaudry, in Miocene
man, while believing that the famous Thenay flints(1747) “were carved by
the dryopithecus monkey”; or, with the Occultist, that the
anthropomorphous monkey came ages after man? For if it is once conceded,
and even scientifically demonstrated, that:

There was not in the middle of the Miocene epoch a single species
of mammal identical with species now extant(1748)

—and that man was then just as he is now; only taller, and more athletic
than we are(1749)—then where is the difficulty? That they could hardly be
the descendants of monkeys, which are themselves not traced before the
Miocene epoch,(1750) is, on the other hand, testified to by several
eminent Naturalists:

Thus, in the savage of quaternary ages, who had to fight against
the mammoth with stone weapons for arms, we find all those
craniological characters generally considered as the sign of great
intellectual development.(1751)

Unless man emerged spontaneously, endowed with all his intellect and
wisdom, from his brainless catarrhine ancestor, he could not have acquired
such brain within the limits of the Miocene period, if we are to believe
the learned Abbé Bourgeois.

As to the matter of giants, though the tallest man hitherto found in
Europe among fossils is the “Mentone man” (6ft. 8in.), others may yet be
excavated. Nilsson, quoted by Lubbock, states that:

In a tomb of the Neolithic age ... a skeleton of extraordinary
size was found in 1807.

It was attributed to a king of Scotland, Albus McGaldus.

And if in our own day we occasionally find men and women from 7ft. to even
9ft. and 11 ft. high, this only proves—on the law of atavism, or the
reäppearance of ancestral features of character—that there was a time when
9ft. and 10ft. was the average height of humanity, even in our latest
Indo‐European race.

But as the subject has been sufficiently treated elsewhere, we may pass on
to the Lemurians and the Atlanteans, and see what the old Greeks knew of
these early races and what the moderns now know.

The great nation mentioned by the Egyptian priests, from which descended
the forefathers of the Greeks of the age of Troy, and which, as averred,
had fought with the Atlantic race, was then, as we see, assuredly no race
of Palæolithic savages. Nevertheless, even in the days of Plato, with the
exception of priests and initiates, no one seems to have preserved any
distinct recollection of the preceding races. The earliest Egyptians had
been separated from the latest Atlanteans for ages upon ages; they were
themselves descended from an _alien_ race, and had settled in Egypt some
400,000 years before,(1752) but their Initiates had preserved all the
records. Even so late as the time of Herodotus, they had still in their
possession the statues of 341 kings who had reigned over their little
Atlanto‐Aryan sub‐race.(1753) If we allow only twenty years as an average
figure for the reign of each king, the duration of the Egyptian Empire has
to be pushed back, from the days of Herodotus, about 17,000 years.

Bunsen allowed the great Pyramid an antiquity of 20,000 years. More modern
Archæologists will not give it more than 5,000, or at the utmost 6,000
years, and generously concede to Thebes, with its hundred gates, 7,000
years from the date of its foundation. And yet there are records which
show Egyptian priests—Initiates—journeying in a north‐westerly direction,
_by land_, _viâ_ what became later the Straits of Gibraltar; turning North
and travelling through the future Phœnician settlements of Southern Gaul;
then still further North, until reaching Carnac (Morbihan) they turned to
the West again and arrived, _still travelling by land_, on the north‐
western promontory of the New Continent.(1754)

What was the object of their long journey? And how far back must we place
the date of such visits? The Archaic Records show the Initiates of the
second sub‐race of the Âryan family moving from one land to the other for
the purpose of supervising the building of menhirs and dolmens, of
colossal Zodiacs in stone, and places of sepulchre to serve as receptacles
for the ashes of generations to come. When did this occur? The fact of
their crossing from France to Great Britain _by land_ may give an idea of
the date when such a journey could have been performed on _terra firma_.

It was when:

The level of the Baltic and of the North Sea was 400 feet higher
than it is at the present day. The valley of the Somme was not
hollowed to the depth it has now attained; Sicily was joined to
Africa, Barbary to Spain. Carthage, the Pyramids of Egypt, the
palaces of Uxmal and Palenque were not yet in existence, and the
bold navigators of Tyre and Sidon, who at a later date were to
undertake their perilous voyages along the coasts of Africa, were
yet unborn. What we know with certainty is that European man was
contemporaneous with the extinct species of the quaternary epoch
... that he witnessed the upheaval of the Alps(1755) and the
extension of the glaciers, in a word that he lived for thousands
of years before the dawn of the remotest historical traditions. It
is even possible that man was the contemporary of extinct mammalia
of species yet more ancient ... of the elephas meridionalis of the
sands of St. Prest, or at the least of the elephas antiquus,
assumed to be prior to the elephas primigenius, since their bones
are found in company with carved flints in several English caves,
associated with those of the rhinoceros hæemitechus and even of
the machairodus latidens, which is of still earlier date. M. Ed.
Lartet is also of opinion that there is nothing really impossible
in the existence of man as early as the Tertiary period.(1756)

If “there is nothing impossible” scientifically, in the idea, and it may
be admitted that man was already in existence as early as the Tertiary
period, then it is just as well to remind the reader that Mr. Croll places
the beginning of that period 2,500,000 years back; but there was a time
when he assigned to it 15,000,000 years.

And if all this may be said of _European_ man, how great is the antiquity
of the Lemuro‐Atlantean and of the Atlanto‐Âryan man? Every educated
person who follows the progress of Science, knows how all vestiges of man
during the Tertiary period are received. The calumnies that were poured on
Desnoyers in 1863, when he announced to the Institute of France that he
had made a discovery

In the undisturbed Pliocene sands of St. Prest near Chartres,
proving the coëxistence of man and the elephas meridionalis—

were equal to the occasion. The later discovery, in 1867, by the Abbé
Bourgeois, that man lived in the Miocene epoch, and the reception it was
given at the Pre‐historic Congress held at Brussels in 1872, proves that
the average man of Science will see _only that which he wishes to
see_.(1757)

The modern Archæologist, though speculating _ad infinitum_ upon the
dolmens and their builders, knows, in fact, nothing either of them or of
their origin. Yet these weird and often colossal monuments of unhewn
stones—which consist generally of four or seven gigantic blocks placed
together—are strewn over Asia, Europe, America, and Africa, in groups or
rows. Stones of enormous size are found placed horizontally and variously
upon two, three, four, and as in Poitou, upon six and seven blocks. People
name them “devil’s altars,” druidic stones, and giant tombs. The stones of
Carnac in Morbihan, Brittany—nearly a mile in length and numbering 11,000
ranged in eleven rows—are twin sisters of those at Stonehenge. The conical
menhir of Loch‐maria‐ker, in Morbihan, measures twenty yards in length and
nearly two yards across. The menhir of Champ Dolent (near St. Malo) rises
thirty feet above the ground, and is fifteen feet in depth below. Such
dolmens and pre‐historic monuments are met with in almost every latitude.
They are found in the Mediterranean basin; in Denmark (among the local
tumuli from twenty‐seven to thirty‐five feet in height); in Shetland; in
Sweden, where they are called Ganggriften (or tombs with corridors); in
Germany, where they are known as the giant tombs (Hünengräben); in Spain,
where is the dolmen of Antiguera near Malaga; in Africa; in Palestine and
Algeria; in Sardinia, with the Nuraghi and Sepolture dei Giganti, or tombs
of giants; in Malabar; in India, where they are called the tombs of the
Daityas (Giants) and of the Râkshasas, the Men‐demons of Lankâ; in Russia
and Siberia, where they are known as the Koorgan; in Peru and Bolivia,
where they are termed the Chulpas or burial places, etc.

There is no country from which they are absent. Who built them? Why are
they all connected with serpents and dragons, with alligators and
crocodiles? Because remains of “Palæolithic man” were, it is thought,
found in some of them, and because, in the funeral mounds of America,
bodies of later races were discovered with the usual paraphernalia of bone
necklaces, weapons, stone and copper urns, etc., they are, therefore,
ancient _tombs_! But surely the two famous mounds—one in the Mississippi
valley and the other in Ohio—known respectively as the “Alligator Mound”
and the “Great Serpent Mound,” were never meant for tombs.(1758) Yet one
is told authoritatively that the mounds, and the mound or dolmen builders,
are all “Pelasgic” in Europe, antecedent to the Incas in America, yet not
of “extremely distant times.” They are built by “no race of dolmen
builders,” who _never existed_ save in the earlier archæological fancy
(opinion of De Mortillet, Bastian, and Westropp). Finally Virchow’s
opinion of the giant tombs of Germany is now accepted as an axiom. Says
that German Biologist:

The tombs alone are gigantic, and not the bones they contain.

And Archæology has but to bow and submit to the decision.(1759)

That no gigantic skeletons have been hitherto found in the “tombs” is no
reason for saying that the remains of giants were never in them.
_Cremation was universal_ till a comparatively recent period—some 80,000
or 100,000 years ago. The real giants, moreover, were nearly all drowned
with Atlantis. Nevertheless, classical writers, as we have shown
elsewhere, often speak of giant skeletons being excavated in their day.
Moreover, human fossils may be counted on the fingers, as yet. No skeleton
ever yet found is older than between 50,000 or 60,000 years,(1760) and
man’s size was reduced from 15 to 10 or 12 feet, from the time of the
third sub‐race of the Âryan stock, which sub‐race—born and developed in
Europe and Asia Minor under new climates and conditions—had become
European. Since then, as we have said, it has been steadily decreasing. It
is truer, therefore, to say that the tombs alone are archaic, and not
necessarily the bodies of men occasionally found in them; and that those
tombs, since they are gigantic, must have contained giants,(1761) or
rather the ashes of generations of giants.

Nor were all such cyclopean structures intended for sepulchres. It is with
the so‐called Druidical remains, such as Carnac in Brittany and Stonehenge
in Great Britain, that the travelling Initiates above alluded to had to
do. And these gigantic monuments are all symbolic records of the World’s
history. They are not Druidical, but universal. Nor did the Druids build
them, for they were only the heirs of the cyclopean lore left to them by
generations of mighty builders and—“magicians,” both good and bad.

It will always be a subject of regret that History, rejecting _à priori_
the actual existence of giants, has preserved to us so little of the
records of antiquity concerning them. Yet in nearly every Mythology—which
after all _is_ Ancient History—the giants play an important part. In the
old Norse Mythology, the giants, Skrymir and his brethren, against whom
the sons of the Gods fought, were potent factors in the histories of
deities and men. The modern exegesis, that makes these giants the brethren
of the dwarfs, and reduces the combats of the Gods to the history of the
development of the Âryan Race, will only receive credence amongst the
believers in the Âryan theory as expounded by Max Müller. Granting that
the Turanian races were typified by the dwarfs (Dwergar), and that a dark,
round‐headed, and dwarfish race was driven northward by the fair‐faced
Scandinavians, or Æsir, the Gods being like unto men, there still exists
neither in history nor in any other scientific work any anthropological
proof whatever of the existence in Time or Space of a race of giants. Yet
that such exist, relatively and _de facto_ side by side with dwarfs,
Schweinfurth can testify. The Nyam‐Nyam of Africa are regular dwarfs,
while their next neighbours, several tribes of comparatively fair‐
complexioned Africans, are giants when confronted with the Nyam‐Nyams, and
very tall even among Europeans, for their women are all above six and a
half feet high.

In Cornwall and in ancient Britain the traditions of these giants are, on
the other hand, excessively common; they are said to have lived even down
to the time of King Arthur. All this shows that giants lived to a later
date amongst the Celtic than among the Teutonic peoples.

If we turn to the New World, we have traditions of a race of giants of
Tarija on the eastern slopes of the Andes and in Ecuador, who combated
Gods and men. These old beliefs, which term certain localities “Los Campos
de los Gigantes,” the “Fields of Giants,” are always concomitant with the
existence of Pliocene mammalia and the occurrence of Pliocene raised
beaches. “All the giants are not under Mount Ossa,” and it would be poor
Anthropology indeed that would restrict the traditions of giants to Greek
and Bible mythologies. Slavonian countries, Russia especially, teem with
legends about the Bogaterey (mighty giants) of old; and Slavonian
folklore, most of which has served for the foundation of national
histories, the oldest songs, and the most archaic traditions, speaks of
the giants of old. Thus we may safely reject the modern theory that would
make of the Titans mere symbols standing for cosmic forces. They were real
living men, whether twenty or only twelve feet high. Even the Homeric
heroes, who, of course, belonged to a far more recent period in the
history of the races, appear to have wielded weapons of a size and weight
beyond the strength of the strongest men of modern times.

Not twice ten men the mighty bulk could raise,
Such men as live in these degenerate days.

If the fossil footprints at Carson, Nevada, U.S.A., are human, they
indicate gigantic men, and of their genuineness there can remain no doubt.
It is to be deplored that the modern and scientific evidence for gigantic
men should rest on footprints alone. Over and over again, the skeletons of
hypothetical giants have been identified with those of elephants and
mastodons. But all such blunders before the days of Geology, and even the
traveller’s tales of Sir John Mandeville, who says that he saw giants
fifty‐six feet high, in India, only show that belief in the existence of
giants has never, at any time, died out of the thoughts of men.

That which is known and accepted is, that several races of gigantic men
have existed and left distinct traces. In the _Journal of the
Anthropological Institute_(1762) such a race is shown as having existed at
Palmyra and possibly in Midian, exhibiting cranial forms quite different
from those of the Jews. It is not improbable that another such race
existed in Samaria, and that the mysterious people who built the stone
circles in Galilee, hewed Neolithic flints in the Jordan valley, and
preserved an ancient Semitic language quite distinct from the square
Hebrew character, were of very large stature. The English translations of
the _Bible_ can never be relied upon, even in their modern revised forms.
They tell us of the Nephilim, translating the word by “giants,” and
further adding that they were “hairy” men, probably the large and powerful
prototypes of the later satyrs so eloquently described by patristic fancy;
some of the Church Fathers assuring their admirers and followers that they
had themselves seen these “satyrs”—some alive, others “pickled” and
“preserved.” The word “giants” being once adopted as a synonym of
Nephilim, the commentators have since identified them with the sons of
Anak. The filibusters who seized on the Promised Land found a preëxisting
population far exceeding their own in stature, and called it a race of
giants. But the races of really gigantic men had disappeared ages before
the birth of Moses. These tall people existed in Canaan, and even in
Bashan, and may have had representatives in the Nabatheans of Midian. They
were of far greater stature than the undersized Jews. Four thousand years
ago their cranial conformation and large stature separated them from the
children of Heber. Forty thousand years ago their ancestors may have been
of still more gigantic size, and four hundred thousand years earlier they
must have been in proportion to men in our days as the Brobdingnagians
were to the Lilliputians. The Atlanteans of the middle period were called
the “Great Dragons,” and the first symbol of their tribal deities, when
the “Gods” and the Divine Dynasties had forsaken them, was that of a giant
serpent.

The mystery veiling the origin and the religion of the Druids is as great
as that of their supposed fanes to the modern Symbologist, but not to the
initiated Occultists. Their priests were the descendants of the last
Atlanteans, and what is known of them is sufficient to allow the inference
that they were Eastern priests, akin to the Chaldæans and Indians, though
little more. It may be inferred that they symbolized their deity as the
Hindûs do their Vishnu, as the Egyptians did their Mystery God, and as the
builders of the Ohio great Serpent Mound worshipped theirs—namely under
the form of the “Mighty Serpent,” the emblem of the eternal deity Time—the
Hindû Kâla. Pliny called them the “Magi of the Gauls and Britons.” But
they were more than that. The author of _Indian Antiquities_ finds much
affinity between the Druids and the Brâhmans of India. Dr. Borlase points
to a close analogy between them and the Magi of Persia;(1763) others will
see an identity between them and the Orphic priesthood of Thrace—simply
because they were connected, in their Esoteric Teachings, with the
universal Wisdom Religion, and thus presented affinities with the exoteric
worship of all.

Like the Hindûs, the Greeks and Romans—we speak of the Initiates—the
Chaldees and the Egyptians, the Druids believed in the doctrine of a
succession of “worlds,” as also in that of seven “creations” (of new
continents) and transformations of the face of the Earth, and in a seven‐
fold night and day for each Earth or Globe. Wherever the serpent with the
egg is found, there this tenet was surely present. Their Dracontia are a
proof of it. This belief was so universal that, if we seek for it in the
Esotericism of various religions, we shall discover it in all. We shall
find it among the Âryan Hindûs and Mazdeans, the Greeks, the Latins, and
even among the old Jews and early Christians, whose modern stocks hardly
comprehend now what they read in their Scriptures. In the _Book of God_ we
read:

The world, says Seneca, being melted and having reëntered into the
bosom of Jupiter, this god continues for some time totally
concentred in himself and remains concealed, as it were, wholly
immersed in the contemplation of his own ideas. Afterwards we see
a new world spring from him, perfect in all its parts. Animals are
produced anew. An innocent race of men is formed.

And again, speaking of a mundane dissolution as involving the destruction
or death of all, he teaches us that:

When the laws of nature shall be buried in ruin, and the last day
of the world shall come, the Southern Pole shall crush, as it
falls, all the regions of Africa, and the North Pole shall
overwhelm all the countries beneath its axis. _The affrighted Sun
shall be deprived of its light_; the palace of heaven falling to
decay shall produce at once both life and death, and some kind of
dissolution shall equally seize upon all the deities, who thus
shall return into their original chaos.(1764)

One might imagine oneself reading the Paurânic account by Parâshara of the
great Pralaya. It is nearly the same thing, idea for idea. Has
Christianity nothing of the kind? It has, we say. Let the reader open any
English _Bible_ and read chapter iii of the Second _Epistle of Peter_, and
he will find there the same ideas:

There shall come in the last days scoffers ... saying, Where is
the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all
things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.
For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God
the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water
and in the water: whereby the world that then was, being
overflowed with water, perished: but the heavens and the earth
which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto
fire ... the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the
elements shall melt with fervent heat. Nevertheless we ... look
for new heavens and a new earth.(1765)

If the interpreters choose to see in this a reference to the creation, the
deluge, and the promised coming of Christ, when they shall live in a New
Jerusalem in Heaven, this is no fault of “Peter.” What the writer of the
Epistle meant was the destruction of this Fifth Race of ours by
subterranean fires and inundations, and the appearance of new continents
for the Sixth Root‐Race. For the writers of the Epistles were all learned
in symbology if not in science.

It has been mentioned elsewhere that the belief in the septenary
constitution of our Chain was the oldest tenet of the early Iranians, who
got it from the first Zarathushtra. It is time to prove it to those Parsîs
who have lost the key to the meaning of their Scriptures. In the _Avesta_
the Earth is considered septempartite and tripartite at one and the same
time. This is regarded by Dr. Geiger as an incongruity, for the following
reasons, which he calls discrepancies. The _Avesta_ speaks of the three
thirds of the Earth because the _Rig Veda_ mentions:

Three earths.... Three strata or layers, one lying above the
other, are said to be meant by this.(1766)

But he is quite mistaken, as are all exoteric profane translators. The
_Avesta_ has not borrowed the idea from the _Rig Veda_, but simply repeats
the Esoteric Teaching. The “three strata or layers” do not refer to our
Globe alone, but to three layers of the Globes of our Terrestrial
Chain—two by two, on each plane, one on the descending, the other on the
ascending arc. Thus, with reference to the six Spheres or Globes above our
Earth, the seventh and the fourth, the Earth is _septempartite_, while
with regard to the planes over our plane—it is _tripartite_. This meaning
is carried out and corroborated by the text of the _Avesta_, and even by
the speculations—most laborious and unsatisfactory guess‐work—of the
translators and commentators. It thus follows that the division of the
Earth, or rather the Earth’s Chain, into seven Karshvars is not in
contradiction with the three “zones,” if this word is read “planes.” As
Geiger remarks, this septenary division is very old—the oldest of
all—since the Gâthas already speak of the “septempartite earth.”(1767)
For:

According to the statements of the later Parsî Scriptures, the
_seven Kêrshvars are to be considered as completely disconnected
parts of the earth_ [which they surely are. For] between them
_there flows the ocean_, so that it is impossible, as stated in
several passages, to pass from one Kêrshvar to another.(1768)

The “Ocean” is _Space_, of course, for the latter was called “Waters of
Space” before it was known as Ether. Moreover, the word Karshvar is
consistently rendered as Dvîpa, and Hvaniratha is rendered by Jambudvîpa
(Neryosangh, the translator of the _Yasna_).(1769) But this fact is not
taken into account by the Orientalists, and therefore we find even such a
learned Zoroastrian and Parsî by birth as the translator of Dr. Geiger’s
work, passing unnoticed and without a word of comment sundry remarks of
the former on the “incongruities” of this kind abounding in the Mazdean
Scriptures. One of such “incongruities” and “coïncidences” concerns the
similarity of the Zoroastrian with the Indian tenet with regard to the
seven Dvîpas—islands, or continents, rather—as met with in the _Purânas_,
namely:

The Dvîpas form concentric rings, which, separated by the ocean,
surround Jambudvîpa, which is situated in the centre, [and]
according to the Iranian view, the Kêrshvar Qaniratha is likewise
situated in the centre of the rest, they form no concentric
circles, but each of them [the six other Karshvars] is a peculiar
individual space, and so they group themselves round [above]
Qaniratha.(1770)

Now Qaniratha—better Hvaniratha—is not, as believed by Geiger and his
translator, “the country inhabited by the Irânian tribes,” and “the other
names” do not mean “the adjacent territories of foreign nations in the
North, South, West, and East,” but signify our Globe or Earth. For that
which is meant by the sentence which follows the last quoted, namely,
that:

Two, Vorubarshti and Voruzarshti, lie in the North; two,
Vidadhafshu and Tradadhafshu, in the South; Savahi and Arzahi in
the East and West

—is simply the very graphic and accurate description of the Chain of our
Planet, the Earth, represented in the _Book of Dzyan_ (11) thus:

[Illustration: The Chain of Earth]

The Mazdean names given above have only to be replaced by those used in
the Secret Doctrine to present us with the Esoteric tenet. The “Earth”
(our world) _is_ tripartite, because the Chain of the Worlds is situated
on three different planes above our Globe; and it is septempartite because
of the seven Globes or Spheres which compose the Chain. Hence the further
meaning given in _Vendidâd_ (xix. 39), showing that:

Qaniratha alone is combined with _imat_, “this” (earth), while all
other Karshvares are combined with the word “_avat_,” “that” or
_those_—upper earths.

Nothing could be plainer. The same may be said of the modern comprehension
of all other ancient beliefs.

The Druids, then, understood the meaning of the Sun in Taurus, when, all
other fires being extinguished on the first of November, their sacred and
inextinguishable fires alone remained to illumine the horizon, like those
of the Magi and the modern Zoroastrians. And like the early Fifth Race and
later Chaldees, like the Greeks, and again like the Christians—who do the
same to this day, without suspecting the real meaning—they greeted the
Morning Star, the beautiful Venus‐Lucifer.(1771) Strabo speaks of an
island near to Britannia:

Where Ceres and Persephone were worshipped with the same rites as
in Samothrace and this island was Sacred Ierna(1772)—

where a perpetual fire was lit. The Druids believed in the rebirth of man,
not as Lucian explains:

That the same spirit shall animate a new body, not here, but in a
different world—

but in a series of reïncarnations in this same world; for as Diodorus
says, they declared that the souls of men, after determinate periods,
would pass into other bodies.(1773)

These tenets came to the Fifth Race Âryans from their predecessors of the
Fourth Race, the Atlanteans. They had piously preserved the teachings,
which told them how their parent Root‐Race, becoming with every generation
more arrogant, owing to the acquisition of superhuman powers, had been
gradually gliding toward its end. Those records reminded them of the giant
intellect of the preceding races as well as of their giant size. We find
the repetition of those records in every age of history, in almost every
old fragment which has descended to us from antiquity.

Ælian preserved an extract from Theophrastus written during the days of
Alexander the Great. It is a dialogue between Midas, the Phrygian, and
Silenus. The former is told of a continent that had existed in times of
old, so immense, that Asia, Europe and Africa seemed like poor islands
compared with it. _It was the last to produce_ animals and plants of
gigantic magnitudes. There, said Silenus, men grew to double the size of
the tallest man in his (the narrator’s) time, and they lived till they
were twice as old. They had wealthy cities with temples, and one of such
cities held more than a million of inhabitants in it, gold and silver
being found there in great abundance.

Grote’s suggestion that Atlantis was but a myth arisen from a
mirage—clouds on a dazzling sky taking the appearance of islands on a
golden sea—is too disingenuous to be further noticed.

A. Some Statements About The Sacred Islands And Continents In The
Classics, Explained Esoterically.

All that which precedes was known to Plato, and to many others. But as no
Initiate had the right to divulge and declare all he knew, posterity got
only hints. Aiming more to instruct as a Moralist than as a Geographer and
Ethnologist or Historian, the Greek Philosopher merged the history of
Atlantis, which covered several million years, into one event which he
located on one comparatively small island 3,000 stadia long by 2,000 wide
(or about 350 miles by 200, which is about the size of Ireland); whereas
the priests spoke of Atlantis as a continent vast as “all Asia and Lybia”
put together.(1774) But, however altered in its general aspect, Plato’s
narrative bears the impress of truth upon it.(1775) It was not he who
invented it, at any rate, since Homer, who preceded him by many centuries,
also speaks in his _Odyssey_ of the Atlantes—who are our Atlanteans—and of
their island. Therefore the tradition was older than the bard of Ulysses.
The Atlantes and the Atlantides of Mythology are based upon the Atlantes
and the Atlantides of History. Both Sanchuniathon and Diodorus have
preserved the histories of those heroes and heroines, however much their
accounts may have become mixed up with the mythical element.

In our own day we witness the extraordinary fact that such comparatively
recent personages as Shakspere and William Tell are all but denied, an
attempt being made to show one to be a _nom de plume_, and the other a
person who never existed. What wonder then, that the two powerful
Races—the Lemurians and the Atlanteans—have been merged into and
identified, in time, with a few half mythical peoples, who all bore the
same patronymic.

Herodotus speaks of the Atlantes—a people of Western Africa—who gave their
name to Mount Atlas: who were vegetarians, and “whose sleep was never
disturbed by dreams”; and who, moreover,

Daily cursed the sun at his rising and at his setting because his
excessive heat scorched and tormented them.

These statements are based upon moral and psychic facts and not on
physiological disturbance. The story of Atlas gives the key to this. If
the Atlanteans never had their sleep disturbed by dreams, it is because
that particular tradition is concerned with the earliest Atlanteans, whose
physical frame and brain were not yet sufficiently consolidated, in the
physiological sense, to permit the nervous centres to act during sleep.
With regard to the other statement—that they daily “cursed the sun”—this
again had nothing to do with the heat, but with the moral degeneration
that grew with the Race. It is explained in our Commentaries.

_They [the sixth sub‐race of the Atlanteans] used magic incantations even
against the Sun_—

failing in which they cursed it. The sorcerers of Thessaly were credited
with the power of calling down the Moon, as Greek history assures us. The
Atlanteans of the later period were renowned for their magic powers and
wickedness, their ambition and defiance of the Gods. Thence the same
traditions, taking form in the _Bible_, about the antediluvian giants and
the Tower of Babel, and found also in the _Book of Enoch_.

Diodorus records another fact or two: the Atlanteans boasted of possessing
the land in which all the Gods had received their birth; as also of having
had Uranus for their first King, he being also the first to teach them
Astronomy. Very little more than this has come down to us from antiquity.

The myth of Atlas is an allegory easily understood. Atlas is the old
Continents of Lemuria and Atlantis, combined and personified in one
symbol. The poets attribute to Atlas, as to Proteus, a superior wisdom and
a universal knowledge, and especially _a thorough acquaintance with the
depths of the ocean_; for both Continents bore Races instructed by
_divine_ Masters, and both were transferred to the bottom of the seas,
where they now slumber until their next reäppearance above the waters.
Atlas is the son of an ocean nymph, and his daughter is Calypso—the
“watery deep.” Atlantis has been submerged beneath the waters of the
ocean, and its progeny is now sleeping its eternal sleep on the ocean
floors. The _Odyssey_ makes of him the guardian and the “sustainer” of the
huge pillars that separate the Heavens from the Earth. He is their
“supporter.” And as both Lemuria, destroyed by submarine fires, and
Atlantis, submerged by the waves, perished in the ocean deeps,(1776) Atlas
is said to have been compelled to leave the surface of the Earth, and join
his brother Iapetus in the depths of Tartarus.(1777) Sir Theodore Martin
is right in interpreting this allegory as meaning:

[Atlas] standing on the solid floor of the inferior hemisphere of
the universe, and thus carrying at the same time the disc of the
earth and the celestial vault—the solid envelope of the superior
hemisphere.(1778)

For Atlas is Atlantis, which supports the new continents and their
horizons on its “shoulders.”

Decharme, in his _Mythologie de la Grèce Antique_, expresses a doubt as to
the correctness of Pierron’s translation of the Homeric word ἕχει by
_sustinet_, as it is not possible to see:

How Atlas can support or bear at once several pillars situated in
various localities.

If Atlas were an individual it would be an awkward translation. But, as he
personifies a Continent in the West said to support Heaven and Earth at
once,(1779) _i.e._, the feet of the giant tread the earth while his
shoulders support the celestial vault—an allusion to the gigantic peaks of
the Lemurian and Atlantean Continents—the epithet “supporter” becomes very
correct. The term _conservator_ for the Greek word ἕχει, which Decharme,
following Sir Theodore Martin, understands as meaning φυλάσσει and
ἐπιμελεῖταυ, does not render the same sense.

The conception was certainly due to the gigantic mountain chain running
along the terrestrial border or disc. These mountain peaks plunged their
roots into the very bottom of the seas, while they raised their heads
heavenward, their summits being lost in the clouds. The ancient continents
had more mountains than valleys on them. Atlas and the Teneriffe Peak, now
two of the dwarfed relics of the two lost Continents, were thrice as lofty
during the day of Lemuria and twice as high in that of Atlantis. Thus, the
Lybians called Mount Atlas the “Pillar of Heaven,” according to
Herodotus,(1780) and Pindar qualified the later Ætna as the “Celestial
Pillar.”(1781) Atlas was an inaccessible island peak in the days of
Lemuria, when the African continent had not yet been raised. It is the
sole Western relic which survives, _independent_, belonging to the
Continent on which the Third Race was born, developed and fell,(1782) for
Australia is now part of the Eastern Continent. Proud Atlas, according to
Esoteric tradition, having sunk one‐third of its size into the waters, its
two parts remained as an heirloom of Atlantis.

This again was known to the priests of Egypt and to Plato himself, the
solemn oath of secrecy, which extended even to the mysteries of Neo‐
Platonism, alone preventing the whole truth from being told.(1783) So
secret was the knowledge of the last island of Atlantis, indeed—on account
of the superhuman powers possessed by its inhabitants, the last direct
descendants of the Gods or Divine Kings, as it was thought—that to divulge
its whereabouts and existence was punished by death. Theopompus says as
much in his ever‐suspected _Meropis_, when he speaks of the Phœnicians as
being the only navigators in the seas which wash the Western coast of
Africa; who did it with such mystery that very often they sunk their own
vessels to make the too inquisitive foreigners lose all trace of them.

There are Orientalists and Historians—and they form the majority—who,
while feeling quite unmoved at the rather crude language of the _Bible_,
and some of the events narrated in it, show great disgust at the
“immorality” in the Pantheons of India and Greece.(1784) We may be told
that before them Euripides, Pindar, and even Plato, express the same
disgust; that they too felt irritated with the tales invented—“those
miserable stories of the poets,” as Euripides phrases it.(1785)

But there may have been another reason for this, perhaps. To those who
knew that there was more than one key to Theogonic Symbolism, it was a
mistake to have expressed it in a language so crude and misleading. For if
the educated and learned Philosopher could discern the kernel of wisdom
under the coarse rind of the fruit, and knew that the latter concealed the
greatest laws and truths of psychic and physical nature, as well as the
origin of all things—not so with the uninitiated profane. For him the
dead‐letter was religion; the interpretation—sacrilege. And this dead‐
letter could neither edify nor make him more perfect, seeing that such an
example was given him by his Gods. But to the Philosopher—especially the
Initiate—Hesiod’s _Theogony_ is as historical as any history can be. Plato
accepts it as such, and gives out as much of its truths as his pledges
permitted.

The fact that the Atlantes claimed Uranus for their first king, and that
Plato commences his story of Atlantis by the division of the great
Continent by Neptune, the grandson of Uranus, shows that there were
continents before Atlantis and kings before Uranus. For Neptune, to whose
lot the great Continent fell, finds on a small island only one human
couple made of clay—_i.e._, the first physical _human_ man, whose origin
began with the last sub‐races of the Third Root‐Race. It is their daughter
Clito that the God marries, and it is his eldest son Atlas who receives
for his part the mountain and the continent which were called by his
name.(1786)

Now all the Gods of Olympus, as well as those of the Hindû Pantheon and
the Rishis, were the septiform personations (1) of the Noumena of the
Intelligent Powers of Nature; (2) of Cosmic Forces; (3) of Celestial
Bodies; (4) of Gods or Dhyân Chohans; (5) of Psychic and Spiritual Powers;
(6) of Divine Kings on Earth, or the incarnations of the Gods; and (7) of
Terrestrial Heroes or Men. The knowledge how to discern among these seven
forms the one that is intended, belonged at all times to the Initiates,
whose earliest predecessors had created this symbolical and allegorical
system.

Thus while Uranus, or the Host representing this celestial group, reigned
and ruled over the Second Race and their then Continent, Cronus or Saturn
governed the Lemurians; and Jupiter, Neptune(1787) and others fought in
the allegory for Atlantis, which was the whole Earth in the day of the
Fourth Race. Poseidonis, or the last island of Atlantis—the “third step”
of Idas‐pati, or Vishnu, in the mystic language of the Secret Books—lasted
till about 12,000 years ago.(1788) The Atlantes of Diodorus were right in
claiming that it was their country, the region surrounding Mount Atlas,
where “the Gods were born”—_i.e._, “incarnated.” But it was after their
fourth incarnation that they became, for the first time, human kings and
rulers.

Diodorus speaks of Uranus as the first king of Atlantis, confusing, either
consciously or otherwise, the Continents; but as we have shown, Plato
indirectly corrects the statement. The first astronomical teacher of men
was Uranus, because he is one of the seven Dhyân Chohans of that Second
Period or Race. Thus also in the second Manvantara, that of Svârochisha,
among the seven sons of the Manu, the presiding Gods or Rishis of that
race, we find Jyotis,(1789) the teacher of Astronomy (Jyotisha), one of
the names of Brahmâ. And thus also the Chinese revere Tien (or the Sky,
Ouranos), and name him as their first teacher of Astronomy. Uranus gave
birth to the Titans of the Third Race, and it is they, personified by
Saturn‐Cronus, who mutilated him. For as it is the Titans who _fell into
generation_, when “creation by _will_ was superseded by physical
procreation,” they needed Uranus no more.

And here a short digression must be permitted and pardoned. In consequence
of the last scholarly production of Mr. Gladstone in the _Nineteenth
Century_, “The Greater Gods of Olympos,” the ideas of the general public
about Greek Mythology have been still further perverted and biassed. Homer
is credited with an inner thought, which is regarded by Mr. Gladstone as,
“the true key to the Homeric conception,” whereas this “key” is merely a
“blind.”

[Poseidon] is indeed essentially of the earth earthy ... strong
and self‐asserting, sensual and intensely jealous and vindictive—

but this is because he symbolizes the Spirit of the Fourth Root‐Race, the
Ruler of the Seas, that Race which lives above the surface of the
seas,(1790) which is composed of the giants, the children of Eurymedon,
the race which is the father of Polyphemus, the Titan, and the one‐eyed
Cyclops. Though Zeus reign over the Fourth Race, it is Poseidon who rules,
and who is the true key to the triad of the Cronid Brothers, and to our
_human_ races. Poseidon and Nereus are _one_; the former the Ruler or
Spirit of Atlantis before the beginning of its submersion, the latter,
after. Neptune is the titanic strength of the _living_ Race, Nereus, its
Spirit, reïncarnated in the subsequent Fifth or Âryan Race; and this is
what the Greek scholar of England has not yet discovered, or even dimly
perceived. And yet he makes many observations upon the “artfulness” of
Homer, who never names Nereus, at whose designation we arrive only through
the patronymic of the Nereids!

Thus the tendency of even the most erudite Hellenists is to confine their
speculations to the exoteric images of Mythology and to lose sight of
their inner meaning; and it is remarkably illustrated in the case of Mr.
Gladstone, as we have shown. While almost the most conspicuous figure of
our age as a statesman, he is at the same time one of the most cultured
scholars to whom England has given birth. Grecian literature has been the
beloved study of his life, and he has found time amid the bustle of public
affairs to enrich contemporary literature with contributions to Greek
scholarship, which will make his name famous through coming generations.
At the same time, as his sincere admirer, the present writer cannot but
feel a deep regret that posterity, while acknowledging his profound
erudition and splendid culture, will yet, in the greater light which
_must_ then shine upon the whole question of Symbolism and Mythology,
judge that he has failed to grasp the spirit of the religious system which
he has often criticized from the dogmatic Christian standpoint. In that
future day it will be perceived that the Esoteric key to the mysteries of
the Christian as well as of the Grecian Theogonies and Sciences, is the
Secret Doctrine of the pre‐historic nations, which, along with others, he
has denied. It is that doctrine alone which can trace the kinship of all
human religious speculations, or even of so‐called “revelations,” and it
is this teaching which infuses the spirit of life into the lay figures on
the Mounts of Meru, Olympus, Walhalla, or Sinai. If Mr. Gladstone were a
younger man, his admirers might hope that his scholastic studies would be
crowned by the discovery of this underlying truth. As it is, he but wastes
the golden hours of his declining years in futile disputations with that
giant free‐thinker, Col. Ingersoll, each fighting with the weapons of
exoteric temper, drawn from the arsenals of ignorant Literalism. These two
great controversialists are equally blind to the true Esoteric meaning of
the texts which they hurl at each other’s heads like iron bullets, while
the world alone suffers by such controversies; since the one helps to
strengthen the ranks of Materialism, and the other those of blind
Sectarianism of the dead‐letter. And now we may return once more to our
immediate subject.

Many a time Atlantis is spoken of under another name, one unknown to our
commentators. The _power of names_ is great, and has been known since the
first men were instructed by the _Divine_ Masters. And as Solon had
studied it, he translated the “Atlantean” names into names devised by
himself. In connection with the continent of Atlantis, it is desirable to
bear in mind that the accounts which have come down to us from the old
Greek writers contain a confusion of statements, some referring to the
great Continent and others to the last small island of Poseidonis. It has
become customary to take them all as referring to the latter only, but
that this is incorrect is evident from the incompatibility of the various
statements as to the size, etc., of “Atlantis.”

Thus, in the _Critias_, Plato says, that the plain surrounding the city
was itself surrounded by mountain chains, and the plain was smooth and
level, and of an oblong shape, lying north and south, three thousand
stadia in one direction and two thousand in the other; they surrounded the
plain by an enormous canal or dike, 101 feet deep, 606 feet broad, and
1,250 miles in length.(1791)

Now in other places the entire size of the _island_ of Poseidonis is given
as about the same as that assigned here to the “_plain_ around the city”
alone. Obviously, one set of statements refers to the great Continent, and
the other to its last remnant—Plato’s island.

And, again, the standing army of Atlantis is given as upwards of a million
men; its navy as 1,200 ships and 240,000 men. Such statements are quite
inapplicable to a small island state, of about the size of Ireland!

The Greek allegories give to Atlas, or Atlantis, seven daughters—seven
sub‐races—whose respective names are Maia, Electra, Taygeta, Asterope,
Merope, Alcyone, and Celæno. This ethnologically—as they are credited with
having married Gods and with having become the mothers of famous heroes,
the founders of many nations and cities. Astronomically, the Atlantides
have become the seven Pleiades (?). In Occult Science the two are
connected with the destinies of nations, those destinies being shaped by
the past events of their early lives according to Karmic Law.

Three great nations claimed in antiquity a direct descent from the kingdom
of Saturn or Lemuria, confused with Atlantis several thousands of years
before our era; and these were the Egyptians, the Phœnicians
(Sanchuniathon), and the old Greeks (Diodorus, after Plato). But the
oldest civilized country of Asia—India—can likewise be shown to claim the
same descent. Sub‐races, guided by Karmic Law or destiny, repeat
unconsciously the first steps of their respective mother‐races. As the
comparatively fair Brâhmans—when invading India with its dark‐coloured
Dravidians—have come from the North, so the Âryan Fifth Race must claim
its origin from northern regions. The Occult Sciences show that the
founders, the respective groups of the seven Prajâpatis, of the Root‐Races
have all been connected with the Pole Star. In the Commentary we find:

_He who understands the age of Dhruva_(_1792_)_ who measures 9090
mortal years, will understand the times of the Pralayas, the final
destiny of nations, O Lanoo._

Moreover there must have been a good reason why an Asiatic nation should
locate its great Progenitors and Saints in Ursa Major, a _northern
constellation_. It is 70,000 years, however, _since the Pole of the Earth
pointed to the further end of Ursa Minor’s tail_; and many more thousand
years since the seven Rishis could have been identified with the
constellation of Ursa Major.

The Âryan Race was born and developed in the far North, though after the
sinking of the Continent of Atlantis its tribes emigrated further South
into Asia. Hence Prometheus is the son of Asia, and Deucalion, his son,
the Greek Noah—he who created men out of the stones of mother Earth—is
called a northern Scythe, by Lucian, and Prometheus is made the brother of
Atlas and is tied down to Mount Caucasus amid the snows.(1793)

Greece had her _Hyperborean_ as well as her _Southern_ Apollo. Thus nearly
all the Gods of Egypt, Greece, and Phœnicia, as well as those of other
Pantheons, are of a northern origin and originated in Lemuria, towards the
close of the Third Race, after its full physical and physiological
evolution had been completed.(1794) All the “fables” of Greece would be
found to be built on historical facts, if that history had only passed to
posterity unadulterated by myths. The “one‐eyed” Cyclopes, the giants
fabled as the sons of Cœlus and Terra—three in number, according to
Hesiod—were the last three sub‐races of the Lemurians, the “one‐eye”
referring to the wisdom‐eye;(1795) for the two front eyes were fully
developed as physical organs only in the beginning of the Fourth Race. The
allegory of Ulysses, whose companions were devoured while the king of
Ithaca himself was saved by putting out the eye of Polyphemus with a fire‐
brand, is based upon the psycho‐physiological atrophy of the “third eye.”
Ulysses belongs to the cycle of the heroes of the Fourth Race, and, though
a “Sage” in the sight of the latter, must have been a profligate in the
opinion of the pastoral Cyclopes.(1796) His adventure with the latter—a
savage gigantic race, the antithesis of cultured civilization in the
_Odyssey_—is an allegorical record of the gradual passage from the
Cyclopean civilization of stone and colossal buildings to the more sensual
and physical culture of the Atlanteans, which finally caused the last of
the Third Race to lose their all‐penetrating _spiritual_ eye. The other
allegory, which makes Apollo kill the Cyclopes to avenge the death of his
son Asclepius, does not refer to the three sub‐races represented by the
three sons of Heaven and Earth, but to the Hyperborean Arimaspian
Cyclopes, the last of the race endowed with the “wisdom‐eye.” The former
have left relics of their buildings everywhere, in the South as much as in
the North; the latter were confined to the North solely. Thus Apollo—pre‐
eminently the God of the Seers, whose duty it is to punish desecration,
killed them—his shafts representing human passions, fiery and lethal—and
hid his shaft behind a mountain in the Hyperborean regions.(1797)
Cosmically and astronomically this Hyperborean God is the Sun personified,
which during the course of the Sidereal Year—25,868 years—changes the
climates on the Earth’s surface, making frigid regions of tropical, and
_vice versâ_. Psychically and spiritually his significance is far more
important. As Mr. Gladstone pertinently remarks in his “Greater Gods of
Olympos”:

The qualities of Apollo (jointly with Athenê) are impossible to be
accounted for without repairing to sources, which lie beyond the
limit of the traditions most commonly explored for the elucidation
of the Greek mythology.(1798)

The history of Latona (Leto), Apollo’s mother, is most pregnant in various
meanings. Astronomically, Latona is the polar region and the night, giving
birth to the Sun, Apollo, Phœbus, etc. She is born in the Hyperborean
countries, wherein all the inhabitants were priests of her son,
celebrating his resurrection and descent to their country every nineteen
years at the renewal of the lunar cycle.(1799) Latona is the Hyperborean
Continent, and its Race—geologically.(1800)

When the astronomical meaning cedes its place to the spiritual and
divine—Apollo and Athene transforming themselves into the form of “birds,”
the symbol and glyph of the higher divinities and angels—then the bright
God assumes divine creative powers. Apollo becomes the personification of
seership, when he sends the astral double of Æneas to the battle
field,(1801) and has the gift of appearing to his seers without being
visible to other persons present,(1802) a gift, however, shared by every
high Adept.

The King of the Hyperboreans was, therefore, the son of Boreas, the North
Wind, and the High Priest of Apollo. The quarrel of Latona with Niobe—the
Atlantean Race—the mother of seven sons and seven daughters, personifying
the seven sub‐races of the Fourth Race and their seven branches(1803)
allegorizes the history of the two Continents. The wrath of the “Sons of
God,” or of “Will and Yoga,” at seeing the steady degradation of the
Atlanteans was great;(1804) and the destruction of the children of Niobe
by the children of Latona—Apollo and Diana, the deities of light, wisdom
and purity, or the Sun and Moon astronomically, whose influence causes
changes in the Earth’s axis, deluges and other cosmic cataclysms—is thus
very clear.(1805) The fable about the never‐ceasing tears of Niobe, whose
grief causes Zeus to change her into a fountain—Atlantis covered with
water—is no less graphic as a symbol. Niobe, let it be remembered, is the
daughter of one of the Pleiades, or Atlantides, the grand‐daughter of
Atlas therefore,(1806) because she represents the last generations of the
doomed Continent.

A true remark, that of Bailly, which says that Atlantis had an enormous
influence on antiquity. He adds:

If these mythical names are mere allegories, then all that they
have of truth comes from Atlantis; if the fable is a real
tradition—however altered—then the ancient history is wholly their
history.(1807)

So much so, that all ancient writings—prose and poetry—are full of the
reminiscences of the Lemuro‐Atlanteans, the first _physical_ Races, though
the Third and the Fourth in number in the evolution of Fourth Round
Humanity on our Globe. Hesiod records the tradition about the men of the
Age of Bronze, whom Jupiter had made out of ash‐wood and who had hearts
harder than diamond. Clad in bronze from head to foot, they passed their
lives in fighting. Monstrous in size, endowed with a terrible strength,
invincible arms and hands descended from their shoulders, says the
poet.(1808) Such were the giants of the first physical Races.

The Iranians have a reference to the later Atlanteans in _Yasna_, ix. 15.
Tradition maintains that the “Sons of God,” or the great Initiates of the
Sacred Island, took advantage of the Deluge to rid the Earth of all the
Sorcerers among the Atlanteans. The said verse addresses Zarathushtra as
one of the “Sons of God.” It says:

Thou, O Zarathushtra, didst make all demons [Sorcerers], who
before roamed the world in human forms, conceal themselves in the
earth [helped them to submersion].

The Lemurians, and also the early Atlanteans, were divided into two
distinct classes—the “Sons of Night” or Darkness, and the “Sons of the
Sun” or Light. The old books tell us of terrible battles between the two,
when the former, leaving their land of Darkness, whence the Sun departed
for long months, descended from their inhospitable regions and “tried to
wrench the Lord of Light” from their better‐favoured brothers of the
equatorial regions. We may be told that the Ancients knew nothing of the
long night of six months’ duration in the polar regions. Even Herodotus,
more learned than the rest, only mentions a people who slept for six
months in the year, and remained awake the other half. Yet the Greeks knew
well that there was a country in the North where the year was divided into
a day and night each of six months’ duration, for Pliny distinctly says
so.(1809) They speak of the Cimmerians and of the Hyperboreans, and draw a
distinction between the two. The former inhabited the Palus Mæotis—between
45° and 50° latitude. Plutarch explains that they were but a _small
portion_ of a _great nation_ driven away by the Scythians—which nation
stopped near the Tanais, after _having crossed Asia_.

These warlike multitudes lived formerly on the ocean shores, in
dense forests, and _under a tenebrous sky_. There the pole is
almost touching the head, there _long nights and days divide the
year_.(1810)

As to the Hyperboreans, these peoples, as expressed by Solinus Polyhistor:

Sow in the morning, reap at noon, gather their fruits in the
evening, and store them during the night in their caves.(1811)

Even the writers of the _Zohar_ knew this fact, as it is written:

In the Book of Hammannunah, the Old [or the Ancient], we learn ...
there are some countries of the earth which are lightened, whilst
others are in darkness; these have the day, when for the former it
is night; and there are countries in which it is constantly day,
or in which at least the night continues only some instants.(1812)

The island of Delos, the Asteria of Greek Mythology, was never in Greece,
for this country, in that day, was not yet in existence, not even in its
molecular form. Several writers have shown that it represented a country
or an island, far larger than the small dots of land which became Greece.
Both Pliny and Diodorus Siculus place it in the Northern Seas. One calls
it Basilea, or “Royal”;(1813) the other, Pliny, names it Osericta,(1814) a
word which, according to Rudbeck,(1815) had

A significance in the northern languages, equivalent to the Island
of the Divine Kings or God‐kings—

or again the “Royal Island of the Gods,” because the Gods were born there,
_i.e._, the Divine Dynasties of the Kings of Atlantis proceeded from that
place. Let Geographers and Geologists seek for it among that group of
islands discovered by Nordenskiöld on his “Vega” voyage in the Arctic
regions.(1816) The Secret Books inform us that _the climate has changed in
those regions more than once_, since the first men inhabited those now
almost inaccessible latitudes. They were a Paradise before they became
Hell; the dark Hades of the Greeks, and the cold Realm of Shades where the
Scandinavian Hel, the Goddess‐Queen of the country of the dead, “holds
sway deep down in Helheim and Niflheim.” Yet it was the birthplace of
Apollo, who was the brightest of Gods, in Heaven—astronomically—as he was
the most enlightened of the Divine Kings who ruled over the early nations,
in his human meaning. The latter fact is borne out in the _Iliad_, wherein
Apollo is said to have appeared four times in his own form (as the God of
the Four Races) and six times in human form,(1817) _i.e._, as connected
with the Divine Dynasties of the earlier unseparated Lemurians.

It is those early mysterious peoples, their countries—which have now
become uninhabitable—as well as the name given to “man” both dead and
alive, which have furnished an opportunity to the ignorant Church Fathers
for inventing a Hell, which they have transformed into a burning instead
of a freezing locality.(1818)

It is, of course, evident that it is neither the Hyperboreans, nor the
Cimmerians, the Arimaspes, nor even the Scyths—known to and communicating
with the Greeks—who were our Atlanteans. But they were all the descendants
of their last sub‐races. The Pelasgians were certainly one of the root‐
races of future Greece, and were a remnant of a sub‐race of Atlantis.
Plato hints as much in speaking of the latter, whose name, it is averred,
came from _pelagus_, the “great sea.” Noah’s Deluge is astronomical and
allegorical, but it is not mythical, for the story is based upon the same
archaic tradition of men—or rather of nations—who were saved during the
cataclysms, in canoes, arks, and ships. No one would presume to say that
the Chaldæan Xisuthrus, the Hindû Vaivasvata, the Chinese Peirun—the
“Beloved of the Gods,” who rescued him from the flood in a canoe—or the
Swedish Belgamer, for whom the Gods did the same in the North, are all
identical as personages. But their legends have all sprung from the
catastrophe which involved both the Continent and the Island of Atlantis.

The allegory about the antediluvian giants and their achievements in
sorcery is no myth. Biblical events _are_ revealed indeed. But it is
neither by the voice of God amid thunder and lightning on Mount Sinai, nor
by a divine finger tracing the record on tablets of stone, but simply
through tradition _viâ_ Pagan sources. It was not surely the _Pentateuch_
that Diodorus was repeating when he wrote about the Titans—the giants born
of Heaven and Earth, or, rather, born of the Sons of God who took to
themselves for wives the daughters of men who were fair. Nor was
Pherecydes quoting from _Genesis_ when giving details on those giants
which are not to be found in the Jewish Scriptures. He says that the
Hyperboreans were of the race of the Titans, a race which descended from
the earliest giants, and that it was that Hyperborean region which was the
birthplace of the first giants. The Commentaries on the Sacred Books
explain that the said region was the far North, the Polar Lands now, the
Pre‐Lemurian earliest Continent, embracing once upon a time the present
Greenland, Spitzbergen, Sweden, Norway, etc.

But who were the Nephilim of _Genesis_ (vi. 4)? There were Palæolithic and
Neolithic men in Palestine ages before the events recorded in the Book of
the Beginnings. The theological tradition identifies these Nephilim with
hairy men or satyrs, the latter being mythical in the Fifth Race, and the
former historical in both the Fourth and Fifth Races. We have stated
elsewhere what the prototypes of these satyrs were, and have spoken of the
bestiality of the early and later Atlantean Race. What is the meaning of
Poseidon’s amours under such a variety of _animal_ forms? He became a
dolphin to win Amphitrite; a horse, to seduce Ceres; a ram, to deceive
Theophane, etc. Poseidon is not only the personation of the Spirit and
Race of Atlantis, but also of the vices of these giants. Gesenius and
others devote an enormous space to the meaning of the word Nephilim and
explain very little. But Esoteric Records show these hairy creatures to be
the last descendants of those Lemuro‐Atlantean Races, which begot children
on female animals, of species now long extinct; thus producing dumb men,
“monsters,” as the Stanzas have it.

Now Mythology, built upon Hesiod’s _Theogony_, which is but a poetized
record of actual traditions, or oral history, speaks of three giants,
called Briareus, Cottus, and Gyges, living in a dark country where they
were imprisoned by Cronus for their rebellion against him. All the three
are endowed by myth with a hundred arms and fifty heads, the latter
standing for races, the former for sub‐races and tribes. Bearing in mind
that in Mythology every personage almost is a God or Demi‐god, and also a
king or simple mortal in his second aspect,(1819) and that both stand as
symbols for lands, islands, powers of nature, elements, nations, races and
sub‐races, the Esoteric Commentary will become comprehensible. It says
that the three giants are three polar lands which have changed form
several times, at each new cataclysm, or disappearance of one continent to
make room for another. The whole Globe is convulsed periodically; and has
been so convulsed, since the appearance of the First Race, four times.
Yet, though the whole face of the Earth was transformed thereby each time,
the conformation of the Arctic and Antarctic Poles has but little altered.
The polar lands unite and break off from each other into islands and
peninsulas, yet remain ever the same. Therefore Northern Asia is called
the “Eternal or Perpetual Land,” and the Antarctic the “Ever‐living” and
the “Concealed”; while the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Pacific and other
regions disappear and reäppear in turn, into and above the Great Waters.

From the first appearance of the great Continent of Lemuria, the three
polar giants have been imprisoned in their circle by Cronus. Their gaol is
surrounded by a wall of bronze, and the exit is through gates fabricated
by Poseidon—or Neptune—hence by the seas, which they cannot cross; and it
is in that damp region, where eternal darkness reigns, that the three
brothers languish. The _Iliad_ makes it Tartarus.(1820) When the Gods and
Titans rebelled in their turn against Zeus—the deity of the Fourth
Race—the Father of the Gods bethought himself of the imprisoned giants
that they might help him to conquer the Gods and Titans, and to
precipitate the latter into Hades; or, in clearer words, to have Lemuria
hurled amid thunder and lightning to the bottom of the seas, so as to make
room for Atlantis, which was to be submerged and perish in its turn.(1821)
The geological upheaval and deluge of Thessaly was a repetition on a small
scale of the great cataclysm; and, remaining impressed on the memory of
the Greeks, was merged by them into, and confused with, the general fate
of Atlantis. So, also, the war between the Râkshasas of Lankâ and the
Bhârateans, the _mèlée_ of the Atlanteans and Âryans in their supreme
struggle, or the conflict between the Devs and Izeds, or Peris, became,
ages later, the struggle of Titans, separated into two inimical camps, and
still later the war between the Angels of God and the Angels of Satan.
Historical facts became theological dogmas. Ambitious scholiasts, men of a
small sub‐race born but yesterday, and one of the latest issues of the
Âryan stock, took upon themselves to overturn the religious thought of the
world, and succeeded. For nearly two thousand years they impressed
thinking humanity with the belief in the existence of Satan.

But as it is now the conviction of more than one Greek scholar—as it was
that of Bailly and Voltaire—that Hesiod’s _Theogony_ is based upon
historical facts,(1822) it becomes easier for the Occult Teachings to find
their way into the minds of thoughtful men, and therefore are these
passages from Mythology brought forward in our discussion upon modern
learning in this Addendum.

Such symbols as are found in all the exoteric creeds are so many landmarks
of pre‐historic truths. The sunny, happy land, the primitive cradle of the
earliest human races, has become several times since then Hyperborean and
Saturnine;(1823) thus showing the Golden Age and Reign of Saturn from
multiform aspects. It was many‐sided in its character indeed—climatically,
ethnologically and morally. For the Third, Lemurian Race must be
physiologically divided into the early androgynous and the later bi‐sexual
race; and the climate of its dwelling‐places and continents into that of
an eternal spring and eternal winter, into life and death, purity and
impurity. The cycle of legends is ever being transformed on its journey by
popular fancy. Yet it may be cleansed from the dross it has picked up on
its way through many nations, and through the countless minds which have
added their own exuberant additions to the original facts. Leaving for a
while the Greek interpretations, we may seek for some more corroborations
of the latter in the scientific and geological proofs.

Section VII. Scientific and Geological Proofs of the Existence of Several
Submerged Continents.

It may not be amiss—for the benefit of those who resolve the tradition of
a lost Miocene Atlantis into an “antiquated myth”—to append a few
scientific admissions on this point. Science, it is true, is largely
indifferent to such questions. But there are Scientists ready to admit
that, in any case, a cautious agnosticism as to geological problems
concerning the remote past is far more philosophical than _à priori_
denial, or even hasty generalizations on insufficient data.

Meanwhile two very interesting instances, that have been lately met with,
may be pointed out as “confirming” certain passages in the letter of a
Master, published in _Esoteric Buddhism_. The eminence of the authorities
will not be questioned (we italicize the corresponding passages):

Extract from _Esoteric Buddhism_, p. 70.

(1.)

The sinking of Atlantis (the group of continents and isles) began
during the Miocene period ... and it culminated first in the final
disappearance of the largest continent, _an event coincident with
the elevation of the Alps_, and second with that of the last of
the fair islands mentioned by Plato.

Extract from a Lecture by W. Pengelly, F.R.S., F.G.S.

(1.)

Was there, as some have believed, an Atlantis—a continent or
archipelago of large islands occupying the area of the North
Atlantic? There is, perhaps, nothing unphilosophical in the
hypothesis. For since, as geologists state, “_The Alps have
acquired 4,000 and even in some places more than 10,000 feet of
their present altitude since the commencement of the Eocene
epoch_” (Lyell’s _Principles_, p. 256, 2nd Ed.)—_a Post‐Miocene
depression might have carried the hypothetical Atlantis into
almost abysmal depths_.(1824)

Extract from _Esoteric Buddhism_, pp. 64, 65.

(2.)

Lemuria ... should no more be confounded with the Atlantis
Continent than Europe with America. Both sank and were drowned
with their high civilizations and “gods”; yet between the two
catastrophes a period of about 700,000 years elapsed, Lemuria
flourishing and ending her career just about that lapse of time
before the early part of the _Eocene_ age, since its Race was the
Third. Behold _the relics of that once great nation in some of the
flat‐headed aborigines of your Australia_.

Extract from an article in the _Popular Science Review_, v. 18, by
Professor Seemann, Ph.D., F.L.S., V.‐P.A.S.

(2.)

It would be premature to say, because no evidence has yet been
adduced, _that men may not have existed in the Eocene age_,
especially as it can be shown that _a race of men, the lowest we
know of, co‐exists with that remnant of the Eocene flora which
still survives on the continent and islands of Australia_.

Extract from _The Pedigree of Man_, p. 81.

Hæckel, who fully accepts the reality of a former Lemuria, also
regards the _Australians as direct descendants of the Lemurians_.
Persistent forms of both [his Lemurian] stems are in all
probability still surviving, of the former in the Papuans and
Hottentots, of the latter in the _Australians_ and in one division
of the Malays.

With regard to a former civilization, of which a _portion_ of these
degraded Australians are the last surviving offshoot, the opinion of
Gerland is strongly suggestive. Commenting upon the religion and mythology
of the tribes, he writes:

The statement that Australian civilization [?] indicates a higher
grade, is nowhere more clearly proved than here [in the province
of religion] where everything resounds like the expiring voices of
a previous and richer age.... The idea that the Australians have
no trace of religion or mythology is thoroughly false. But this
religion is certainly quite deteriorated.(1825)

As to Hæckel’s view of the relationship between the Australians and the
Malays, as two branches of a common stock, he is in error when he classes
the Australians with the rest. The Malays and Papuans are a _mixed_ stock,
resulting from the intermarriages of the low Atlantean sub‐races with the
seventh sub‐race of the Third Root‐Race. Like the Hottentots, they are of
indirect Lemuro‐Atlantean descent. It is a most suggestive fact—to those
concrete thinkers who demand a _physical_ proof of Karma—that the lowest
races of men are now rapidly dying out; a phenomenon largely due to an
extraordinary sterility setting in among the women, from the time that
they were first approached by the Europeans. A process of decimation is
taking place all over the Globe, among those races, whose “time is
up”—among just those stocks, be it remarked, which Esoteric Philosophy
regards as the senile representatives of lost archaic nations. It is
inaccurate to maintain that the extinction of a lower race is _invariably_
due to cruelties or abuses perpetrated by colonists. Change of diet,
drunkenness, etc., have done much; but those who rely on such data as
offering an all‐sufficient explanation of the crux, cannot meet the
phalanx of facts now so closely arrayed. Even the Materialist Lefèvre
says:

Nothing can save those that have run their course. It would be
necessary to extend their destined cycle.... _The peoples that
have been relatively most spared, those who have defended
themselves most valiantly, Hawaiians or Maories, have been no less
decimated than the tribes massacred or tainted by European
intrusion._(1826)

True; but is not the phenomenon here confirmed, an instance of the
operation of Cyclic Law, difficult to account for on materialist lines?
Whence the “destined cycle” and the order here testified to? Why does this
(Karmic) sterility attack and root out certain races at their “appointed
hour”? The answer that it is due to a “mental disproportion” between the
colonizing and aboriginal races is obviously evasive, since it does not
explain the sudden “checks to fertility” which so frequently supervene.
The dying out of the Hawaiians, for instance, is one of the most
mysterious problems of the day. Ethnology will sooner or later have to
recognize, with Occultists, that the true solution has to be sought for in
a comprehension of the workings of Karma. As Lèfevre remarks:

The time is drawing near when there will remain nothing but three
great human types.

The time is before the Sixth Root‐Race dawns; the three types are the
white (Âryan, Fifth Root‐Race), the yellow, and the African negro—with
their crossings (Atlanto‐European divisions). Redskins, Eskimos, Papuans,
Australians, Polynesians, etc.—all are dying out. Those who realize that
every Root‐Race runs through a gamut of seven sub‐races with seven
branchlets, etc., will understand the “why.” The tide‐wave of incarnating
Egos has rolled past them to harvest experience in more developed and less
senile stocks; and their extinction is hence a Karmic necessity. Some
extraordinary and _unexplained_ statistics as to race extinction are given
by de Quatrefages.(1827) No solution, except on Occult lines, is able to
account for these.

But we have digressed from our direct subject. Let us hear now what
Professor Huxley has to say on the subject of former Atlantic and Pacific
Continents.

He writes in _Nature_:

There is nothing, so far as I am aware, in the biological or
geological evidence at present accessible, to render untenable the
hypothesis that _an area of the Mid‐Atlantic or Pacific sea‐bed as
big as Europe_, should have been upheaved as high as Mont Blanc,
and have subsided again any time since the Palæozoic epoch, if
there were any grounds for entertaining it.(1828)

That is to say, then, that there is nothing to militate against _positive_
evidence of the fact; nothing, therefore, against the geological
postulates of the Esoteric Philosophy. Dr. Berthold Seemann assures us in
the _Popular Science Review_ that:

The facts which botanists have accumulated for reconstructing
these lost maps of the globe are rather comprehensive; and they
have not been backward in demonstrating the former existence of
several large tracts of solid land in parts now occupied by great
oceans. The many striking points of contact between the present
floras of the United States and Eastern Asia, induced them to
assume that, during the present order of things, there existed a
continental connection between South‐Eastern Asia and Western
America. The singular correspondence of the present flora of the
Southern United States with that of the lignite flora of Europe
induces them to believe that, in the Miocene period, Europe and
America were connected by a land passage, of which Iceland,
Madeira, and the other Atlantic islands are remnants; that, in
fact, the story of an Atlantis, which an Egyptian priest told to
Solon, is not purely fictitious, but rests upon a solid historical
basis.... Europe of the Eocene period received the plants which
spread over mountains and plains, valleys and river‐banks (from
Asia generally), neither exclusively from the South nor from the
East. The West also furnished additions, and if at that period
these were rather meagre, they show, at all events, that the
bridge was already building, which, at a later period, was to
facilitate communication between the two continents in such a
remarkable manner. At that time some plants of the Western
Continent began to reach Europe by means of the island of
Atlantis, then probably just [?] just rising above the
ocean.(1829)

And in another number of the same review(1830) Mr. W. Duppa Crotch, M.A.,
F.L.S., in an article entitled “The Norwegian Lemming and its Migrations,”
alludes to the same subject:

Is it probable that land could have existed where now the broad
Atlantic rolls? All tradition says so: old Egyptian records speak
of Atlantis, as Strabo and others have told us. The Sahara itself
is the sand of an ancient sea, and the shells which are found upon
its surface prove that, no longer ago than the Miocene period, a
sea rolled over what is now desert. The voyage of the “Challenger”
has proved the existence of three long ridges(1831) in the
Atlantic Ocean,(1832) one extending for more than three thousand
miles, and lateral spurs may, by connecting these ridges, account
for the marvellous similarity of the fauna of the Atlantic
islands.(1833)...

The submerged continent of _Lemuria_, in what is now the Indian
Ocean, is considered to afford an explanation of many difficulties
in the distribution of organic life, and, I think, the existence
of a _Miocene Atlantis_ will be found to have a strong elucidative
bearing on subjects of greater interest [truly so!] than the
migration of the lemming. At all events, if it can be shown that
land existed in former ages where the North Atlantic now rolls,
not only is a motive found for these apparently suicidal
migrations, but also a strong collateral proof that what we call
instincts are but the blind and sometimes even prejudicial
inheritance of previously acquired experience.

At certain periods, we learn, multitudes of these animals swim to sea and
perish. Coming, as they do, from all parts of Norway, the powerful
instinct which survives throughout ages as an inheritance from their
progenitors impels them to seek a continent, once existing but now
submerged beneath the ocean, and to court a watery grave.

In an article containing a criticism of Mr. A. R. Wallace’s _Island
Life_—a work devoted largely to the question of the distribution of
animals, etc.—Mr. Starkie Gardiner writes:

By a process of reasoning supported by a large array of facts of
different kinds, he arrives at the conclusion that the
distribution of life upon the land as we now see it has been
accomplished without the aid of important changes in the relative
positions of continents and seas. Yet if we accept his views, we
must believe that Asia and Africa, Madagascar and Africa, New
Zealand and Australia, Europe and America, have been united at
some period not remote geologically, and that seas to the depth of
1,000 fathoms have been bridged over; but we must treat as
“utterly gratuitous and entirely opposed to all the evidences at
our command” [! !], the supposition that temperate Europe and
temperate America, Australia, and South America, have ever been
connected, except by way of the Arctic or Antarctic Circles, and
that lands now separated by seas of more than 1,000 fathoms depth
have ever been united.

Mr. Wallace, it must be admitted, has succeeded in explaining the
chief features of existing life distribution, without bridging the
Atlantic or Pacific, except towards the Poles, yet I cannot help
thinking that some of the facts might perhaps be more easily
explained by admitting the former existence of the connection
between the coast of Chili and Polynesia(1834) and Great Britain
and Florida, shadowed by the sub‐marine banks which stretch
between them. Nothing is urged that renders these more direct
connections impossible, and no physical reason is advanced why the
floor of the ocean should not be upheaved from any depth. The
route by which [according to the Anti‐Atlantean and Lemurian
hypotheses of Wallace] the floras of South America and Australia
are supposed to have mingled, is beset by almost insurmountable
obstacles, and the apparently sudden arrival of a number of
subtropical American plants in our Eocenes necessitates a
connection more to the South than the present 1,000 fathom line.
Forces are unceasingly acting, and there is _no reason why an
elevating force once set in action in the centre of an ocean
should cease to act until a continent is formed_. They have acted
and lifted out from the sea, in comparatively recent geological
time, the loftiest mountains on earth. Mr. Wallace himself admits
repeatedly that sea‐beds have been elevated 1,000 fathoms, and
islands have risen up from the depths of 3,000 fathoms; and to
suppose that the upheaving forces are limited in power, is, it
seems to me, to again quote from _Island Life_, “utterly
gratuitous and entirely opposed to all the evidences at our
command.”(1835)

The “father” of English Geology—Sir Charles Lyell—was a uniformitarian in
his views of continental formation. We find him saying:

Professors Unger (_Die Versunkene Insel Atlantis_) and Heer
(_Flora Tertiaria Helvetiæ_) have advocated on botanical grounds
_the former existence of an Atlantic Continent during some part of
the tertiary period_, as affording the only plausible explanation
that can be imagined of the analogy between the Miocene flora of
Central Europe, and the existing flora of Eastern America.
Professor Oliver, on the other hand, after showing how many of the
American types found fossil in Europe are common to Japan,
inclines to the theory, first advanced by Dr. Asa Gray, that the
migration of species, to which the community of types in the
Eastern States of North America, and the Miocene flora of Europe
is due, took place when there was an overland communication from
America to Eastern Asia between the fiftieth and sixtieth
parallels of latitude, or south of Behring’s Straits, following
the direction of the Aleutian islands. By this course they may
have made their way, at any epoch, Miocene, Pliocene, or
Postpliocene, antecedently to the Glacial epoch, to Amoorland, on
the East coast of Northern Asia.(1836)

The unnecessary difficulties and complications here incurred in order to
avoid the hypothesis of an Atlantic Continent, are really too apparent to
escape notice. _If the botanical evidences stood alone_, scepticism would
be partially reasonable; but in this case all branches of Science converge
to one point. Science has made blunders, and has exposed itself to greater
errors than it would be exposed to by the admission of our two now
invisible Continents. It has denied even the undeniable, from the days of
the Mathematician Laplace down to our own, and that only a few years
ago.(1837) We have Professor Huxley’s authority for saying that there is
no _à priori_ improbability whatever against possible evidences supporting
the belief. But now that the _positive evidence is brought forward_, will
that eminent Scientist admit the corollary?

Touching on the problem in another place Sir Charles Lyell tells us:

Respecting the cosmogony of the Egyptian priests, we gather much
information from writers of the Grecian sects, who borrowed almost
all their tenets from Egypt, and amongst others that of the former
successive destruction and renovation of the world [_continental_,
not cosmic, catastrophes]. We learn from Plutarch that this was
the theme of one of the hymns of Orpheus, so celebrated in the
fabulous ages of Greece. It was brought by him from the banks of
the Nile; and we even find in his verses, as in the Indian
systems, a definite period assigned for the duration of every
successive world. The returns of great catastrophes were
determined by the period of the Annus Magnus, or great year, a
cycle composed of the revolutions of the sun, moon, and planets,
and terminating when these return together to the same sign whence
they were supposed at some remote epoch to have set out.... We
learn particularly from the _Timæus_ of Plato that the Egyptians
believed the world to be subject to occasional conflagrations and
deluges. The sect of Stoics adopted most fully the system of
catastrophes destined at certain intervals to destroy the world.
These, they taught, were of two kinds—the cataclysm, or
_destruction by deluge_, which sweeps away the whole human race,
and annihilates all the animal and vegetable productions of
nature, and the _ecpyrosis_, or _conflagration_, which destroys
the globe itself [submarine volcanoes]. From the Egyptians they
derived the doctrine of the gradual debasement of man from a state
of innocence [nascent simplicity of the first sub‐races of each
Root‐Race]. Towards the termination of each era the gods could no
longer bear with the wickedness of men [degeneracy into magical
practices and gross animality of the Atlanteans], and a shock of
the elements, or a deluge, overwhelmed them; after which calamity,
Astræa again descended on the earth to renew the golden age [dawn
of a new Root‐Race].(1838)

Astræa, the Goddess of Justice, is the last of the deities to forsake the
Earth, when the Gods are said to abandon it and to be taken up again into
heaven by Jupiter. But, no sooner does Zeus carry from Earth Ganymedes—the
object of _lust_, personified—than the Father of the Gods throws down
Astræa on the Earth again, on which she falls _upon her head_. Astræa is
Virgo, the constellation of the Zodiac. Astronomically it has a very plain
significance, and one which gives the key to the occult meaning. But it is
inseparable from Leo, the sign that precedes it, and from the Pleiades and
their sisters, the Hyades, of which Aldebaran is the brilliant leader. All
these are connected with the periodical renovations of the Earth, with
regard to its continents—even Ganymedes, who in astronomy is Aquarius. It
has already been shown that while the South Pole is the “Pit” (or the
infernal regions figuratively and cosmologically), the North Pole is
geographically the First Continent; while astronomically and
metaphorically the Celestial Pole, with its Pole Star in Heaven, is Meru,
or the Seat of Brahmâ, the Throne of Jupiter, etc. For in the age when the
Gods forsook the Earth and were said to ascend into Heaven, the ecliptic
had become parallel with the meridian, and part of the Zodiac appeared to
descend from the North Pole to the north horizon. Aldebaran was in
conjunction then with the Sun, as it was 40,000 years ago, at the great
festival in commemoration of that Annus Magnus, of which Plutarch spoke.
Since that Year—40,000 years ago—there has been a retrograde motion of the
equator, and about 31,000 years ago Aldebaran was in conjunction with the
vernal equinoctial point. The part assigned to Taurus, even in Christian
Mysticism, is too well known to need repetition. The famous Orphic Hymn on
the great periodical cataclysm divulges the whole Esotericism of the
event. Pluto, in the Pit, carries off Eurydice, bitten by the Polar
Serpent. Then Leo, the Lion, is vanquished. Now, when the Lion is “in the
Pit,” or below the South Pole, then Virgo, as the next sign, follows him,
and when her head, down to the waist, is below the southern horizon—she is
inverted. On the other hand, the Hyades are the rain or Deluge
constellations; and Aldebaran—he who follows, or _succeeds_ the daughters
of Atlas, or the Pleiades—looks down from the eye of Taurus. It is from
this point of the ecliptic that the calculations of the new cycle were
commenced. The student has to remember also, that when
Ganymedes—Aquarius—is raised to heaven—or above the horizon of the North
Pole—Virgo or Astræa, who is Venus‐Lucifer, descends head downwards below
the horizon of the South Pole, or the Pit; which Pit, or the Pole, is also
the Great Dragon, or the Flood. Let the student exercise his intuition by
placing these facts together; no more can be said. Lyell remarks:

The connection between the doctrine of successive catastrophes and
repeated deteriorations in the moral character of the human race,
is more intimate and natural than might at first be imagined. For,
in a rude state of society, all great calamities are regarded by
the people as judgments of God on the wickedness of man.... In
like manner in the account given to Solon by the Egyptian priests
of the submersion of the island of Atlantis under the waters of
the ocean, after repeated shocks of an earthquake, we find that
_the event happened when Jupiter had seen the moral depravity of
the inhabitants_.(1839)

True; but was it not owing to the fact that all Esoteric truths were given
out to the public by the Initiates of the temples _under the guise of
allegories_? “Jupiter,” is merely the personification of that immutable
Cyclic Law, which arrests the downward tendency of each Root‐Race after
attaining the zenith of its glory.(1840) We must admit allegorical
teaching, unless we hold with Prof. John Fiske’s singularly dogmatic
opinion that a myth:

Is an explanation by the uncivilized mind, of some natural
phenomenon; not an allegory, not an esoteric symbol, for the
ingenuity is wasted [!!] which strives to detect in myths the
remnants of a refined primeval science—but an explanation.
Primitive men had no profound science to perpetuate by means of
allegory [how does Mr. Fiske know?], nor were they such sorry
pedants as to talk in riddles when plain language would serve
their purpose.(1841)

We venture to say the language of the initiated few was far more “plain,”
and their Science‐Philosophy far more comprehensive and satisfying alike
to the physical and _spiritual_ wants of man, than even the terminology
and system elaborated by Mr. Fiske’s master—Herbert Spencer. What,
however, is Sir Charles Lyell’s “explanation” of the “myth”? Certainly, he
in no way countenances the idea of its “astronomical” origin, as asserted
by some writers.

The two interpreters are entirely at variance with one another. Lyell’s
solution is as follows. A disbeliever in cataclysmal changes from the
absence (?) of any reliable historical data on the point, as well as from
a strong bias to the uniformitarian conceptions of geologic changes,(1842)
he attempts to trace the Atlantis “tradition” to the following sources:

(1) Barbarous tribes connect catastrophes with an avenging God, who is
assumed in this way to punish immoral races.

(2) Hence the commencement of a new race is logically a virtuous one.

(3) The primary source of the geologic basis of the tradition was Asia—a
continent subject to violent earthquakes. Exaggerated accounts would thus
be handed down the ages.

(4) Egypt, being herself free from earthquakes, nevertheless based her not
inconsiderable geologic knowledge on these cataclysmal traditions.

An ingenious “explanation,” as all such are! But proving a negative is
proverbially a difficult task. Students of Esoteric Science, who know what
the resources of the Egyptian priesthood really were, need no such
laboured hypothesis. Moreover, while an imaginative theorist is always
able to furnish a reasonable solution of problems which, in one branch of
Science, seem to necessitate the hypothesis of periodical cataclysmic
changes on the surface of our planet, the impartial critic who is not a
specialist, will recognize the immense difficulty of explaining away the
cumulative evidences—namely, the archaeological, ethnological, geological,
traditional, botanical, and even biological—in favour of former continents
now submerged. When each science is fighting for its own hand, the
cumulative force of the evidence is almost invariably lost sight of.

In the _Theosophist_ we wrote:

We have as evidence the most ancient traditions of various and
wide‐separated peoples—legends in India, in ancient Greece,
Madagascar, Sumatra, Java, and all the principal isles of
Polynesia, as well as the legends of both Americas. Among savages,
and in the traditions of the richest literature in the world—the
Sanskrit literature of India—there is an agreement in saying,
that, ages ago, there existed in the Pacific Ocean, a large
Continent, which by a geological upheaval was engulfed by the
sea(1843) [Lemuria]. And it is our firm belief ... that most, if
not all, of the islands from the Malayan Archipelago to Polynesia,
are fragments of that once immense submerged Continent. Both
Malacca and Polynesia, which lie at the two extremities of the
ocean, and which, since the memory of man, never had nor could
have any intercourse with, or even a knowledge of each other, have
yet a tradition common to all the islands and islets, that their
respective countries extended far, far into the Sea; that there
were in the world but two immense continents, one inhabited by
yellow, the other by dark men; and that the Ocean, by command of
the Gods, and to punish them for their incessant quarrelling,
swallowed them up. Notwithstanding the geographical fact that New
Zealand, and Sandwich and Easter Islands, are at a distance from
each other of between 800 and 1,000 leagues, and that, according
to every testimony, neither these nor any other intermediate
islands, for instance, the Marquesan, Society, Fiji, Tahitian,
Samoan, and other islands, could, since they became islands,
ignorant as their people were of the compass, have communicated
with each other before the arrival of Europeans; yet they one and
all maintain that their respective countries extended far toward
the West, on the Asian side. Moreover with very small differences,
they all speak dialects evidently of the same language, and
understand each other with little difficulty, have the same
religious beliefs and superstitions, and pretty much the same
customs. And as few of the Polynesian islands were discovered
earlier than a century ago, and the Pacific Ocean itself was
unknown to Europe until the days of Columbus, and these islanders
have never ceased repeating the same old traditions since the
Europeans first set foot on their shores, it seems to us a logical
inference that our theory is nearer to the truth than any other.
Chance would have to change its name and meaning, were all this
due but to chance alone.(1844)

Professor Schmidt, writing in defence of the hypothesis of a former
Lemuria, declares:

A great series of animal‐geographical facts is explicable only on
the hypothesis of the former existence of a Southern Continent of
which the Australian mainland is a remnant.... [The distribution
of species] points to the vanished land of the south, where
perhaps the home of the progenitors of the Maki of Madagascar may
also be looked for.(1845)

Mr. A. R. Wallace, in his _Malay Archipelago_, arrives at the following
conclusion after a review of the mass of evidence at hand:

The inference that we must draw from these facts is undoubtedly
that the whole of the islands eastwards beyond Java and Borneo do
essentially form a part of a former Australian or Pacific
Continent, although some of them may never have been actually
joined to it. This continent must have been broken up not only
before the Western Islands were separated from Asia, but probably
before the extreme south‐eastern portion of Asia was raised above
the waters of the ocean, for a great part of the land of Borneo
and Java is known to be geologically of quite recent
formation.(1846)

According to Hæckel:

Probably Southern Asia itself was not the earliest cradle of the
human race; but Lemuria, a continent that lay to the South of
Asia, and sank later on beneath the surface of the Indian
Ocean.(1847)

In one sense Hæckel is right as to Lemuria—the “cradle of the human race.”
That Continent _was_ the home of the first _physical_ human stock—the
later Third‐Race Men. Previous to that epoch the Races were far less
consolidated and physiologically quite different. Hæckel makes Lemuria
extend from Sunda Island to Africa and Madagascar and eastwards to Upper
India.

Professor Rütimeyer, the eminent Palæontologist, asks:

Need the conjecture that the almost exclusively graminivorous and
insectivorous marsupials, sloths, armadilloes, ant‐eaters and
ostriches, once possessed an actual point of union in a Southern
Continent of which the present flora of Terra del Fuego and
Australia must be the remains—need this conjecture raise
difficulties at a moment when, from their fossil remains, Heer
restores to our sight the ancient forests of Smith’s Sound and
Spitzbergen?(1848)

Having now dealt generally with the broad scientific attitude on the two
questions, it will, perhaps, conduce to an agreeable brevity, if we sum up
the more striking isolated facts in favour of that fundamental contention
of Esoteric Ethnologists—the reality of Atlantis. Lemuria is so widely
accepted, that further pursuit of the subject is unnecessary. With regard,
however, to the former, it is found that:

(1) The Miocene floræ of Europe have their most numerous and striking
analogues in the floræ of the United States. In the forests of Virginia
and Florida are found the magnolias, tulip‐trees, evergreen oaks, plane
trees, etc., which correspond with European Tertiary flora, term for term.
How was the migration effected, if we exclude the theory of an Atlantic
Continent bridging the ocean between America and Europe? The proposed
“explanation” to the effect that the transition was by way of Asia and the
Aleutian Islands is a mere uncalled‐for theory, obviously upset by the
fact that a large number of these floræ only appear _East_ of the Rocky
Mountains. This also negatives the idea of a Trans‐Pacific migration. They
are now superseded by European continents and islands to the North.

(2) Skulls exhumed on the banks of the Danube and Rhine bear a _striking
similarity_ to those of the Caribs and Old Peruvians (Littré). Monuments
have been exhumed in Central America, which bear representations of
undoubted _negro_ heads and faces. How are such facts to be accounted for
except on the Atlantean hypothesis? What is now N.W. Africa was once
connected with Atlantis by a network of islands, few of which now remain.

(3) According to Farrar the “_isolated_ language” of the Basques has no
affinities with the other languages of Europe,(1849) but with:

The aboriginal languages of the vast opposite continent [America]
and those alone.(1850)

Professor Broca is also of the same opinion.

Palæolithic European man of the Miocene and Pliocene times was a pure
Atlantean, as we have previously stated. The Basques are, of course, of a
much later date than this, but their affinities, as here shown, go far to
prove the original extraction of their remote ancestors. The “mysterious”
affinity between their tongue and that of the Dravidian races of India
will be understood by those who have followed our outline of continental
formations and shiftings.

(4) Stones have been found in the Canary Islands bearing sculptured
symbols similar to those found on the shore of Lake Superior. Berthollet
was induced by such evidence to postulate the unity of race of the early
men of the Canary Islands and America.(1851)

The Guanches of the Canary Islands were lineal descendants of the
Atlanteans. This fact will account for the _great stature_ evidenced by
their old skeletons, as well as by those of their European congeners, the
Cro‐Magnon Palæolithic men.

(5) Any experienced mariner has but to navigate the fathomless ocean along
the Canary Islands to ask himself the question when or how that group of
volcanic and rocky little islands has been formed, surrounded on every
side by that vast watery space. Frequent questions of this kind led
finally to the expedition of the famous Leopold von Buch, which took place
in the first quarter of the present century. Some Geologists maintained
that the volcanic islands had been raised right from the bottom of the
ocean, the depth of which in the immediate vicinity of the island varies
from 6,000 to 18,000 feet. Others were inclined to see in these
groups—including Madeira, the Azores, and the islands of Cape de Verde—the
remnants of a gigantic but submerged continent which had once united
Africa with America. The latter men of Science supported their hypothesis
by a mass of evidence in its favour, drawn from ancient “myths.” Hoary
“superstitions,” such as the fairy‐like Atlantis of Plato, the Garden of
the Hesperides, Atlas supporting the world on his shoulders, all of them
mythoi connected with the Peak of Teneriffe, did not go far with sceptical
Science. The identity of animal and vegetable species, showing either a
previous connection between America and the remaining groups of the
islands—the hypothesis of their having been drifted from the New to the
Old World by the waves was too absurd to stand long—found more serious
consideration. But it is only quite lately, and after Donnelly’s book had
been published several years, that the theory has had a greater chance
than ever of becoming an accepted fact. Fossils found on the _Eastern
Coast_ of South America have now been _proved_ to belong to the Jurassic
formations, and are nearly identical with the Jurassic fossils of
_Western_ Europe and _Northern_ Africa. The geological structure of both
coasts is also almost identical; the resemblance between the smaller
marine animals dwelling in the more shallow waters of the South American,
the Western African, and the South European coasts, is also very great.
All such facts are bound to bring Naturalists to the conclusion that there
has been, in distant pre‐historic ages, a continent which extended from
the coast of Venezuela, across the Atlantic Ocean, to the Canarese Islands
and North Africa, and from Newfoundland nearly to the coast of France.

(6) The great resemblance between the Jurassic fossils of South America,
North Africa, and Western Europe is a striking enough fact in itself, and
admits of no explanation, unless the ocean is bridged with an Atlantis.
But why, also, is there so marked a similarity between the fauna of the
(now) isolated Atlantic islands? Why did the specimens of Brazilian fauna
dredged up by Sir C. Wyville Thompson resemble those of Western Europe?
Why does a resemblance exist between many of the West African and West
Indian animal groups? Again:

When the animals and plants of the Old and New World are compared,
one cannot but be struck with their identity; all, or nearly all,
belong to the same genera, while many, even of the species, are
common to both continents ... indicating that they radiated from a
common centre [Atlantis].(1852)

The horse, according to Science, originated in America. At least, a large
proportion of the once “missing links” connecting it with inferior forms
have been exhumed from American strata. How did the horse penetrate into
Europe and Asia, if no land communication bridged the oceanic interspaces?
Or if it is asserted that the horse originated in the Old World, how did
such forms as the hipparion, etc., get into America in the first instance
on the migration hypothesis?

Again:

Buffon had ... remarked the repetition of the African in the
American fauna, how, for example, the llama is a juvenescent and
feeble copy of the camel, and how the puma of the New represents
the lion of the Old World.(1853)

(7) The following quotation runs with No. 2, but its significance is such
and the writer cited is so authoritative, that it deserves a place to
itself:

With regard to the primitive dolichocephalæ of America, I
entertain a hypothesis still more bold, namely, that they are
nearly related to the Guanches of the Canary Islands, and to the
Atlantic populations of Africa, the Moors, Tuaricks, Copts, which
Latham comprises under the name of Egyptian‐Atlantidæ. We find one
and the same form of skull in the Canary Islands, in front of the
African coast, and in the Carib islands, on the opposite coast
which faces Africa. The colour of the skin on both sides of the
Atlantic is represented in these populations as being of a
reddish‐brown.(1854)

If, then, Basques and Cro‐Magnon Cave‐Men are of the same race as the
Canarese Guanches, it follows that the former are also allied to the
aborigines of America. This is the conclusion necessitated by the
independent investigations of Retzius, Virchow, and de Quatrefages. The
Atlantean affinities of these three types become patent.

(8) The sea‐soundings undertaken by H.M.S. “Challenger” and the “Dolphin,”
have established the fact that a huge elevation some 3,000 miles in
length, projecting upwards from the abysmal depths of the Atlantic,
extends from a point near the British Islands southwards, curving round
near Cape de Verde, and running in a south‐easterly direction along the
West African coast. This elevation averages some 9,000 feet in height, and
rises above the waves at the Azores, Ascension, and other places. In the
ocean depths around the neighbourhood of the former the ribs of a once
massive piece of land have been discovered.(1855)

The inequalities, the mountains and valleys of its surface could
never have been produced in accordance with any known laws for the
deposition of sediment, nor by submarine elevation; but, on the
contrary, must have been carved by agencies acting above the
water‐level.(1856)

It is most probable that necks of land formerly existed knitting Atlantis
to South America, somewhere above the mouth of the Amazon, to Africa near
Cape de Verde, while a similar point of juncture with Spain is not
unlikely, as contended for by Donnelly.(1857) Whether the latter existed
or not, is of no consequence, in view of the fact that what is now N.W.
Africa was—before the elevation of the Sahara and the rupture of the
Gibraltar connection—an extension of Spain. Consequently no difficulty can
be raised as to how the migration of the European fauna, etc., took place.

Enough has now been said from the purely scientific standpoint, and it is
needless, in view of the manner in which the subject has already been
developed on the lines of Esoteric Knowledge, to swell the mass of
testimony further. In conclusion, the words of one of the most intuitive
writers of the day may be cited as admirably illustrative of the opinions
of the Occultist, who awaits in patience the dawn of the coming day:

We are but beginning to understand the past; one hundred years ago
the world knew nothing of Pompeii or Herculaneum; nothing of the
lingual tie that binds together the Indo‐European nations; nothing
of the significance of the vast volume of inscriptions upon the
tombs and temples of Egypt; nothing of the meaning of the arrow‐
headed inscriptions of Babylon; nothing of the marvellous
civilizations revealed in the remains of Yucatan, Mexico, and
Peru. We are on the threshold. Scientific investigation is
advancing with giant strides. Who shall say that one hundred years
from now, the great museums of the world may not be adorned with
gems, statues, arms, and implements from Atlantis, while the
libraries of the world shall contain translations of its
inscriptions, throwing new light upon all the past history of the
human race, and all the great problems which now perplex the
thinkers of to‐day.(1858)

And now to conclude.

We have concerned ourself with the ancient records of the nations, with
the doctrine of chronological and psychic cycles, of which these records
are the tangible proof; and with many other subjects, which may, at first
sight, seem out of place in this Volume. But they are necessary in truth.
In dealing with the secret annals and traditions of so many nations, whose
very origins have never been ascertained on more secure grounds than
inferential suppositions, in giving out the beliefs and philosophy of more
than pre‐historic races, it is not quite as easy to deal with the subject
matter as it would be if only the philosophy and evolution of one special
race, were concerned. The Secret Doctrine was the common property of the
countless millions of men born under various climates, in times with which
history refuses to deal, and to which Esoteric Teachings assign dates
incompatible with the theories of Geology and Anthropology. The birth and
evolution of the Sacred Science of the Past are lost in the very night of
Time, and that even which is historic—_i.e._, that which is found
scattered hither and thither throughout ancient classical literature—is,
in almost every case, attributed by modern criticism to lack of
observation in the ancient writers, or to superstition born out of the
ignorance of antiquity. It is, therefore, impossible to treat this subject
as one would the ordinary evolution of an art or science in some well‐
known historical nation. It is only by bringing before the reader an
abundance of proofs all tending to show that in every age, under every
condition of civilization and knowledge, the educated classes of every
nation made themselves the more or less faithful echoes of one identical
system and its fundamental traditions—that he can be made to see that so
many streams of the same water must have had a common source from which
they started. What was this source? If coming events are said to cast
their shadows before, past events cannot fail to leave their impress
behind them. It is, then, by those shadows of the hoary Past and their
fantastic silhouettes on the external screen of every Religion and
Philosophy, that we can, by checking them as we go along and comparing
them, trace out finally the body that produced them. There must be truth
and fact in that which every people of antiquity accepted and made the
foundation of its religions and its faith. Moreover, as Haliburton said:

Hear one side, and you will be in the dark; hear both sides, and
all will be clear.

The public has hitherto had access to, and has heard but one side, or
rather the one‐sided views of two diametrically opposed classes of men,
whose _primâ facie_ propositions or respective premises differ widely, but
whose final conclusions are the same—the men of Science and Theology. And
now our readers have an opportunity of hearing the other, and so of
learning the defendants’ justification and the nature of our arguments.

If the public is to be left to its old opinions—namely, on one side, that
Occultism, Magic, the legends of old etc., are all the outcome of
ignorance and superstition; and on the other, that everything outside the
orthodox groove is the work of the devil—what will be the result? In other
words, had no theosophical and mystic literature obtained a hearing for
the last few years, the present work would have had but a poor chance of
impartial consideration. It would have been proclaimed—and by many will
still be proclaimed—a fairy tale woven out of abstruse problems, poised
in, and based on the air; built of soap‐bubbles, bursting at the slightest
touch of serious reflection, with no foundation to stand upon. Even the
ancient “superstitious and credulous” classical writers have no word of
reference to it in clear and unmistakable terms, and the symbols
themselves fail to yield a hint of the existence of such a system. Such
would be the verdict of all. But when it becomes undeniably proven that
the claim of the modern Asiatic nations to a Secret Science and an
Esoteric History of the world is based on fact; that though hitherto
unknown to the masses and a veiled mystery even to the learned—because
they have never had the key to a right understanding of the abundant hints
thrown out by the ancient classics—it is still no fairy tale, but an
actuality; then the present work will become but the pioneer of many more
such books. The statement that hitherto even the keys discovered by some
great scholars have proved too rusty for use, and that they are but the
silent witnesses that there do exist mysteries behind the veil which are
unreachable without a new key, is borne out by too many proofs to be
easily dismissed. An instance may be given as an illustration out of the
history of Freemasonry.

In his _Maçonnerie Occulte_, Ragon, an illustrious and learned Belgian
Mason, rightly or wrongly reproaches the English Masons with having
materialized and dishonoured Masonry, once based upon the Ancient
Mysteries, by adopting, owing to a mistaken notion of the origin of the
craft, the name of “Free Masonry” and “Free Masons.” The mistake is due,
he says, to those who connect Masonry with the _building_ of Solomon’s
Temple. He derides the idea, and says:

The Frenchman knew well, when he adopted the title of Freemason,
that it was no question of building the smallest wall, but that,
initiated into the Mysteries veiled under the name of Freemasonry,
which could only be the continuation or the renovation of the
ancient Mysteries, he was to become a “Mason” after the manner of
Apollo or Amphion. And do not we know that the ancient initiated
poets, when speaking of the _foundation of a city_, meant thereby
the establishment of a doctrine? Thus Neptune, God of reasoning,
and Apollo, God of hidden things, presented themselves as masons
before Laomedon, Priam’s father, to help him to build the city of
Troy—that is to say, to establish the Trojan religion.(1859)

Such veiled sentences with double meaning abound in ancient classical
writers. Therefore, if an attempt had been made to show that, for
instance, Laomedon was the founder of a branch of Archaic Mysteries, in
which the earth‐bound material soul, the Fourth Principle, was personified
in Menelaus’ faithless wife, the fair Helen, and if Ragon had not come to
corroborate what we asserted, we might have been told that no classical
author speaks of it, and that Homer shows Laomedon building a _city_, not
founding an _Esoteric Worship_ or _Mysteries_. Who are those left now,
save a few Initiates, who understand the language and correct meaning of
such symbolical terms?

But though we have pointed to many a misconceived symbol bearing on our
thesis, there still remains more than one difficulty to be overcome. Most
important among several such obstacles is that of chronology. But this
could hardly be helped. Wedged in between theological chronology and that
of the Geologists, backed by all the materialistic Anthropologists, who
assign dates to man and nature which fit in with their own theories
alone—what could the writer do except what she has done? Since Theology
places the Deluge 2448 B.C., and the World’s Creation only 5890 years ago;
and since the accurate researches by the methods of “exact” Science, have
led the Geologists and Physicists to assign to the incrusted age of our
Globe between ten million and one thousand million of years(1860) (a
_trifling_ difference, verily!); and since the Anthropologists, to vary
their divergence of opinion as to the appearance of man, ask for between
25,000 and 500,000 years—what can one who studies the Occult Doctrine do,
but bravely present the Esoteric calculations before the world?

But to do this, corroboration by even a few “historical” proofs has been
necessary, though all know the real value of the so‐called “historical
evidence.” For, whether man appeared on Earth 18,000 or 18,000,000 years
ago, can make no difference to profane history, since it only begins about
a couple of thousand years before our era, and since, even then, it
grapples hopelessly with the clash and din of contradictory and mutually‐
destroying opinions around it. Nevertheless, in view of the respect in
which the average reader has been brought up for exact Science, even that
short Past would remain meaningless, unless the Esoteric Teachings were
corroborated and supported on the spot—_whenever possible_—by references
to historical names of a so‐called historical period. This is the only
guide that can be given to the beginner before he is permitted to start
among the, to him, unfamiliar windings of that dark labyrinth called the
pre‐historic ages. This necessity has been complied with. It is only hoped
that the desire to do so, which has led the writer to be constantly
bringing ancient and modern evidence as a corroboration of the archaic and
quite unhistoric Past, will not bring on her the accusation of having
sorely jumbled up, without order or method, the various and widely‐
separated periods of history and tradition. But literary form and method
had to be sacrificed to the greater clearness of the general exposition.

To accomplish the proposed task, the writer has had to resort to the
rather unusual means of dividing each Volume into three Parts; the first
of which only is the consecutive, though very fragmentary, history of the
Cosmogony and the Evolution of Man on this Globe. In treating of Cosmogony
and then of the Anthropogenesis of mankind, it was necessary to show that
on religion, from the very earliest, has ever been based entirely on
fiction, that none was the object of special revelation, and that it is
dogma alone which has ever been killing primeval truth; finally, that no
human‐born doctrine, no creed, however sanctified by custom and antiquity,
can compare in sacredness with the religion of Nature. The Key of Wisdom
that unlocks the massive gates leading to the arcana of the innermost
sanctuaries can be found hidden in her bosom only; and that bosom is in
the countries pointed to by the great seer of the past century, Emanuel
Swedenborg. There lies the Heart of Nature, that shrine whence issued the
early races of primeval humanity, and which is the cradle of _physical_
man.

Thus far have proceeded the rough outlines of the beliefs and tenets of
the archaic, earliest Races, contained in their hitherto secret scriptural
Records. But our explanations are by no means complete, nor do they
pretend to give out the full text, or to have been read by the help of
more than three or four keys out of the sevenfold bunch of Esoteric
interpretation; and even this has only been partially accomplished. The
work is too gigantic for any one person to undertake, far more to
accomplish. Our main concern has been simply to prepare the soil. This, we
trust we have done. These two Volumes only constitute the work of a
pioneer who has forced his way into the well‐nigh impenetrable jungle of
the virgin forests of the Land of the Occult. A commencement has been made
in felling and uprooting the deadly upas trees of superstition, prejudice,
and conceited ignorance, so that these two Volumes should form for the
student a fitting prelude for other works. Until the rubbish of the ages
is cleared away from the minds of the Theosophists to whom these pages are
dedicated, it is impossible that the more practical teaching contained in
the Third Volume should be understood. Consequently, it entirely depends
upon the reception with which Volumes I and II shall meet at the hands of
Theosophists and Mystics, whether the last Volume will ever be published.

SATYÂT NÂSTI PARO DHARMAH.

THERE IS NO RELIGION HIGHER THAN TRUTH.

END OF VOLUME II.

[Transcriber’s Note: Obvious printer’s errors have been corrected.]

FOOTNOTES

1 See _Genesis_ ii. 19. Adam is formed in verse 7, and in verse 19 it
is said: “Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the
field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see
what he would call them.” Thus man was created _before_ the animals;
for the animals mentioned in chapter i are the signs of the Zodiac,
while the man, “male and female,” is not man, but the Host of the
Sephiroth, Forces, or Angels, “made in his [God’s] image and after
his likeness.” The Adam, man, is not made in that likeness, nor is
it so asserted in the _Bible_. Moreover, the Second Adam is
Esoterically a septenary which represents seven men, or rather
groups of men. For the first Adam, the Kadmon, is the synthesis of
the _ten_ Sephiroth. Of these, the upper Triad remains in the
Archetypal World as the future “Trinity,” while the seven lower
Sephiroth create the manifested material world; and this septennate
is the Second Adam. _Genesis_, and the mysteries upon which it was
fabricated, came from Egypt. The “God” of the 1st chapter of
_Genesis_ is the Logos, and the “Lord God” of the 2nd chapter the
Creative Elohim, the lower Powers.

2 Thus saith Pymander: “This is the mystery that to this day was
hidden. Nature being mingled with the Heavenly Man [Elohim, or
Dhyânis], brought forth a wonder ... seven Men, all males and
females [Hermaphrodite] ... according to the nature of the seven
Governors” (ii. 29), or the seven Hosts of the Pitris or Elohim, who
projected or created him. This is very clear, but yet, see the
interpretations of even our modern theologians, men supposed to be
intellectual and learned. In the _Theological and Philosophical
Works of Hermes Trismegistus, Christian [?] Neoplatonist_, a work
compiled by John David Chambers, of Oriel College, Oxford, the
translator wonders “for whom these seven Men are intended?” He
solves the difficulty by concluding that, as “the original pattern
Man [Adam Kadmon of _Genesis_ i] was masculine‐feminine, ... the
seven may signify the succeeding patriarchs named in _Genesis_” (p.
9). A truly theological way of cutting the Gordian knot!

3 George Smith’s _Chaldean Account of Genesis_, p. 103.

4 Compare _Zohar_, _Siphra Dtzenioutha_, _Idra Suta_, 2928, Franck,
_La Kabbale_, p. 205.

5 _Siphra Dtzenioutha._

6 As it is now asserted that the Chaldæan tablets, which give the
allegorical description of Creation, the Fall, and the Flood, even
to the legend of the Tower of Babel, were written “before the time
of Moses” (Smith’s _Chaldean Account of Genesis_), how can the
_Pentateuch_ be called a “revelation”? It is simply another version
of the same story.

7 _Philosophumena_, v. 7; Miller’s edition, p. 98.

8 _Ibid._, p. 108.

9 P. 86.

10 See Pliny, iv, c. 12; Strabo, 10; Herodotus, vii, c. 109; Pausanias,
vii, c. 4, etc.

11 _Chaldean Account of Genesis_, p. 82.

12 See _Bund._, 79, 12.

13 By “original” we mean the Amshaspend, called “Zarathushtra, the lord
and ruler of the Vara made by Yima in that land.” There were several
Zarathushtras or Zertusts, the _Dabistan_ alone enumerating
thirteen; but these were all reincarnations of the first one. The
last Zoroaster was the founder of the Fire‐temple of Azareksh, and
the writer of the works on the primeval sacred Magian religion
destroyed by Alexander.

14 In India called a “Day of Brahmâ.”

15 x. 86.

16 See Volcker, _Mythological Geography_, pp. 145 to 170.

17 _Mythical Monsters_, p. 47.

18 It is to be remarked, however, that Mr. Wallace does not accept Mr.
Sclater’s idea, and even opposes it. Mr. Sclater supposes a land or
continent formerly uniting Africa, Madagascar, and India but not
Australia and India; and Mr. A. R. Wallace shows, in his
_Geographical Distribution of Animals_ and _Island Life_, that the
hypothesis of such a land is quite uncalled for on the alleged
zoological grounds. But he admits that a much closer proximity of
India and Australia did certainly exist, and at a time so very
remote that it was “certainly pre‐tertiary,” adding in a private
letter that “no name has been given to this supposed land.” Yet the
land did exist, and was of course “pre‐tertiary,” for Lemuria, if we
accept this name for the third Continent, had perished before
Atlantis fully developed, and Atlantis had sunk and its chief
portions disappeared before the end of the Miocene period.

19 See _Esoteric Buddhism_.

20 One more “coincidence”:

“Now it is proved that in geologically recent times, this region of
North Africa was in fact a peninsula of Spain, and that its union
with Africa (proper) was effected on the North by the rupture of
Gibraltar, and on the South by an upheaval to which the Sahara owes
its existence. The shores of this former sea of Sahara are still
marked by the shells of the same Gastropoda that live on the shores
of the Mediterranean.” (Prof. Oscar Schmidt, _Doctrine of Descent
and Darwinism_, p. 244.)

21 iii. fol. 10a.

22 A. Winchell, Professor of Geology, _World‐Life_, p. 369.

23 Mr. Charles Gould, late geological surveyor of Tasmania, in
_Mythical Monsters_, p. 84.

24 Sir Charles Lyell, who is credited with having “happily invented”
the terms Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene, to mark the three divisions
of the Tertiary Age, ought really to have settled upon some
approximate length for his “mind‐offspring.” Having left the
duration of these periods, however, to the speculations of
specialists, the greatest confusion and perplexity are the result of
that happy thought. It seems like a hopeless task to succeed in
quoting a single set of figures from one work, without the risk of
finding it contradicted by the same author in an earlier or a
subsequent volume. Sir William Thomson, one of the most eminent
among the modern authorities, has changed his opinion about half‐a‐
dozen times upon the age of the Sun and the date of the
consolidation of the Earth’s crust. In Thomson and Tait’s _Natural
Philosophy_, we find only ten million years allowed since the time
when the temperature of the Earth permitted vegetable life to appear
on it. (App. E _et seq._; also _Trans. Roy. Soc. Edin._, xxiii. Pt.
1, 157, 1862, where 847 is cancelled.) Mr. Darwin gives Sir William
Thomson’s estimate as “a minimum of 98 and a maximum of 200 millions
of years since the consolidation of the crust.” (See Ch. Gould, _op.
cit._, p. 83.) In the same work (_Nat. Phil._) 80 millions are given
from the time of incipient incrustation to the present state of the
world. And in his last lecture, as shown elsewhere, Sir William
Thomson declares (1887) that the Sun is not older than 15 millions
of years! Meanwhile, basing his arguments as to the limits of the
age of the Sun’s heat, on figures previously established by Sir
William Thomson, Mr. Croll allows 60 millions of years since the
beginning of the Cambrian period. This is hopeful for the lovers of
_exact_ knowledge. Thus, whatever figures are given by Occult
Science, they are sure to be corroborated by those of some one among
the modern men of Science who are considered as authorities.

25 See _Proceedings_, Royal Society, London, xxviii. 281.

26 Gould, _Mythical Monsters_, p. 91.

27 Only forty‐nine Shlokas out of several hundred are here given, and
not every verse is translated verbatim, a periphrasis being
sometimes used for the sake of clearness and intelligibility, where
a literal translation would be quite unintelligible.

28 The idea and the spirit of the sentence only is here given, as a
verbal translation would convey very little to the reader.

29 The Fourth Globe, or our Earth. All the glosses on the translation
of the text of the Stanzas and Commentaries are the writer’s. In
some places they may be incomplete and even inadequate from the
Hindû standpoint; but in the meaning attached to them in Trans‐
Himâlayan Esotericism they are correct. In every case the writer
takes any blame upon herself. As she has never claimed personal
infallibility, that which is given on her own authority may leave
much to be desired, particularly in the very abstruse cases where
too deep metaphysic is involved. The teaching is offered as it is
understood; and seeing that there are seven keys of interpretation
to every symbol and allegory, a meaning which may not be suitable
from, say, the psychological or astronomical aspect, will
nevertheless be found quite correct from the physical or
metaphysical.

30 The Planetary Spirits.

31 Loka Chakshus.

32 The Planets.

33 According to Dr. A. Wilder’s learned definition, Genesis, γένεσις,
is not generation, but “_a coming out of the eternal_ into the
Cosmos and Time”; “a coming from _esse_ into _exsistere_,” or from
“Be‐ness” into “Being”—as a Theosophist would say.

34 For a clearer explanation of the origins, as contained in the
Esotericism of the _Bhagavad Gita_, see the Notes thereon published
in _The Theosophist_ for February, March and June, 1887, Madras.

35 See the Sephirothal Tree.

36 _Zohar_, _Idra Suta_, Sec. VII.

37 J. B. Alden; New York, 1888: ii. 432, 434.

38 It has been repeatedly stated that the Serpent is the symbol of
wisdom and of Occult knowledge. “The Serpent has been connected with
the god of wisdom from the earliest times of which we have any
historical notice,” writes C. Staniland Wake. “This animal was the
especial symbol of Thoth or Taut ... and of all those gods, such as
Hermes [?] and Seth who can be connected with him. This is true also
of the third member of the primitive Chaldæan triad, Hea or Hoa.”
According to Sir Henry Rawlinson, “the most important titles of this
deity refer to ‘his functions as the source of all knowledge and
science.’ Not only is he ‘the intelligent fish,’ but his name may be
read as signifying both ‘life’ and a ‘serpent’ [an initiated Adept],
and he may be considered as ‘figured by the great serpent which
occupies so conspicuous a place among the symbols of the gods on the
black stones recording Babylonian benefactions.’ ” (_The Great
Pyramid_, p. 75). Esculapius, Serapis, Pluto, Esmun and Kneph, are
all deities with the attributes of the serpent, says Dupuis. They
are all _healers_, givers of health, spiritual and physical, and of
_enlightenment_. The crown formed of an asp, the Thermuthis belongs
to Isis, Goddess of Life and Healing. The _Upanishads_ have a
treatise on the _Science of Serpents_—in other words, the Science of
Occult Knowledge; and the Nâgas of the exoteric Buddhist are not
“the fabulous creatures, of the nature of serpents ... being
superior to man, and regarded as protectors of the law of Buddha,”
as Schlagintweit believes, but real living men, some superior to men
by virtue of their Occult Knowledge, and the _protectors of Buddha’s
law_, inasmuch as _they interpret his metaphysical tenets
correctly_, others inferior _morally_ as being “black magicians.”
Therefore it is truly declared that Gautama Buddha “is said to have
taught them a more philosophical religious system than to men, who
were not sufficiently advanced to understand it at the time of his
appearance” (_ibid._, p. 72).

39 Compare the _Symbols of the Bonzes_.

40 The Mandragora is the Mandrake of the _Bible_, of Rachel and Leah.
The roots of the plant are fleshy, hairy, and forked, representing
roughly the limbs, the body, and even head of a man. Its magical and
mysterious properties have been proclaimed in fable and play from
the most archaic ages. From Rachel and Leah, who indulged in
witchcraft with them, down to Shakespeare, who speaks of
“shrieking”—

“Like mandrakes torn out of the earth
That living mortals, hearing them, run mad”

—the mandragora was _the_ magic plant _par excellence_.

These roots are without any apparent stalk, large leaves growing out
of the head of the root, like a gigantic crop of hair. They present
little similitude to man when found in Spain, Italy, Asia Minor, or
Syria, but on the Isle of Candia, and in Karamania near the city of
Adan, they have a wonderfully human form, and are very highly prized
as amulets. They are also worn by women as a charm against
sterility, and for other purposes. They are especially effective in
“Black Magic.”

41 The Sun.

42 Earth.

43 Copernicus wrote his theories on the “Revolution of the Heavenly
Bodies” in the sixteenth century, and the _Zohar_, even if compiled
by Moses de Leon in the thirteenth century, states that:

“In the Book of Hammannunah, the Old (or, the Ancient), we learn ...
that the earth turns upon itself in the form of a circle; that some
are on top, the others below; that ... there are some countries of
the earth which are lightened, whilst others are in darkness; these
have the day, when for the former it is night; and there are
countries in which it is constantly day, or in which at least the
night continues only some instants.” (_Zohar_, iii, fol. 10a, quoted
in Myer’s _Qabbalah_, p. 139.)

44 See also the 21st Fargard of the _Vendídád_ on the celestial
militia.

45 _Idolat._, II. 373.

46 Science teaches that Venus receives from the Sun twice as much light
and heat as the Earth. Thus this Planet, precursor of the dawn and
the twilight, the most radiant of all the Planets, is said to give
the Earth one‐third of the supply she receives, and has two parts
left for herself. This has an Occult as well as an astronomical
meaning.

47 “As it is above, so below,” is the fundamental axiom of Occult
Philosophy. As the Logos is seven‐fold, _i.e._, throughout Kosmos it
appears as seven Logoi under seven different forms, or, as taught by
learned Brâhmans, “each of these is the central figure of one of the
seven main branches of the ancient Wisdom Religion”; and, as the
seven principles which correspond to the seven distinct states of
Prajnâ, or Consciousness, are allied to seven states of Matter and
seven forms of Force, the division must be the same in all that
concerns the Earth.

48 Venus is thus ♀, the Earth ♁.

49 In the Esoteric Philosophy it is male and female, or hermaphrodite;
hence the “bearded” Venus in mythology.

50 Therefore, putting aside its religio‐metaphysical aspect, the Cross
of the Christians is symbolically far more phallic than the Pagan
Svastika. Compare vol. i. pp. 34, 35.

51 The ansated cross is the astronomical planetary sign of Venus,
“signifying the existence of _parturient energy_ in the sexual
sense, and this was one of the attributes of Isis, the Mother, of
Eve, Hauvah, or Mother‐Earth, and was so recognized among all the
ancient peoples in one or another mode of expression.” (From a
modern Kabalistic MS.)

52 See Moore’s _Hindû Pantheon_.

53 Athenæus shows that the first letter of Satan’s name was represented
in days of old by an arc and crescent; and some Roman Catholics,
kind, good men, would persuade the public that it is in honour of
Lucifer’s crescent‐like horns that Mussulmans have chosen the
crescent for their national arms. Venus, ever since the
establishment of Roman Catholic dogmatism, has been identified with
Satan and Lucifer, or the Great Dragon, contrary to all reason and
logic. As shown by symbologists and Astronomers:

“The association between the serpent and the idea of darkness had an
astronomical foundation. The position which the constellation Draco
at one time occupied showed that the Great Serpent was the ruler of
the night. This constellation was formerly at the very centre of the
heavens, and is so extensive that it was called the Great Dragon.
Its body spreads over seven signs of the Zodiac; and Dupuis, who
sees in the Dragon of the Apocalypse a reference to the celestial
serpent, says, ‘It is not astonishing that a constellation so
extended should be represented by the author of that book as a great
dragon with seven heads, who drew the third part of the stars from
heaven and cast them to the earth.’ ” (Staniland Wake, _The Great
Pyramid_, p. 79; Dupuis, iii. 255.)

Only Dupuis never knew _why_ Draco, once the pole‐star—the symbol of
Guide, Guru and Director—had been thus degraded by posterity. “The
Gods of our fathers are our devils,” says an Asiatic proverb. When
Draco ceased to be the “lode‐star,” the guiding sidereal divinity,
it shared the fate of all the fallen Gods. Seth and Typhon was at
one time, Bunsen tells us, “a great God universally adored
throughout Egypt, who conferred on the sovereigns of the 18th and
19th Dynasties the symbols of life and power. But subsequently, in
the course of the 20th Dynasty, he is suddenly treated as an evil
Demon, insomuch that his effigies and name are obliterated on all
the monuments and inscriptions that could be reached.” The real
Occult reason will be given in these pages.

54 _De Civitate Dei_, LXXI. viii.

55 Shukra is the son of Bhrigu the great Rishi, and one of the Seven
Prajâpati, the founder of the Race of Bhârgavas, in which Parashu
Râma is born.

56 This is a flat contradiction of Swedenborg, who _saw_, in “the first
Earth of the Astral World,” inhabitants dressed as are the peasants
in Europe; and on the Fourth Earth women clad as are the
shepherdesses in a _bal masqué_! Even the famous astronomer Huygens
laboured under the mistaken idea that other worlds and planets have
species of beings identical with those who live on our Earth,
possessing the same figures, senses, brain‐power, arts, sciences,
dwellings, even to the same fabric for their wearing apparel!
(_Théorie du Monde._)

57 This is a modern gloss. It is added to the old Commentaries for the
clearer comprehension of those disciples who study Esoteric
Cosmogony after having passed through Western learning. The earlier
Glosses are too redundant with adjectives and figures of speech to
be easily assimilated.

58 “Beyond” the Great Range, means, in this case, India, as being the
Trans‐Himâlayan region for the Tibetan region.

59 The term Pitris is used by us in these Shlokas to facilitate their
comprehension, but it is not so used in the original Stanzas, where
they have distinct appellations of their own, besides being called
“Fathers” and “Progenitors.”

60 It is erroneous to take literally the _worship_ of the human
Bodhisattvas, or Manjushrî. It is true that, exoterically, the
Mahâyâna school teaches adoration of these without distinction, and
that Huien‐Tsang speaks of some disciples of Buddha as being
worshipped. But, Esoterically, it is not the disciple or the learned
Manjushrî _personally_ that received honours, but the divine
Bodhisattvas and Dhyâni‐Buddhas that animated (_amilakha_, as the
Mongolians say) the human forms.

61 The author of this work is Augustus Le Plongeon. He and his wife are
well known in the United States for their untiring labours in
Central America. It is they who discovered the sepulchre of the
royal Kan Coh, at Cichen‐Itza. The author seems to believe and to
seek to prove that the Esoteric learning of the Âryans and the
Egyptians was derived from the Mayas. But, although certainly coëval
with Plato’s Atlantis, the Mayas belonged to the Fifth Continent,
which was preceded by Atlantis and Lemuria.

62 More correctly _In Matrem Deorum_, _Oratio_ v.

63 P. 143.

64 These _seven caves_, _seven cities_, etc., etc., stand in every case
for the seven centres, or zones, upon which the seven primitive
groups of the first Root‐Race were born.

65 The engraving is reproduced in the _Sacred Mysteries of the Mayas
and the Quiches_ on p. 134.

66 See _Source of Measures_, p. 50‐53.

67 See _Isis Unveiled_, II. pp. 300 _et seq._, for a proof of the
antiquity of the decimal system of figures.

68 See _Masonic Review_, Cincinnati, June, 1886, Art. “The
Cabbalah.—No. VI,” p. 10.

69 _Ibid._, _loc. cit._

70 _Ibid._, p. 11.

71 See _Source of Measures_, pp. 276, _et seq._, App. VII.

72 Art., _Masonic Review_, pp. 11, 12.

73 In the Book _Al‐Chazari_, by Jehuda‐ha‐Levi, translated by Dr. D.
Cassel.

74 Art. cited, pp. 12, 13.

75 i. pp. 117 _et seq._

76 Art. cited, p. 2.

77 _Ibid._, p. 14.

78 The appellation _Ak‐ad_ (or Akkadians) is of the same class as _Ad‐
m_, _Ha‐va_ (Eve) _Æd‐en_ (Eden); _Ak‐Ad_ meaning “Son of _Ad_,”
like the sons of Ad in Ancient Arabia. _Ad‐ad_, the “only one” and
the “first,” was the _Ad‐on_ or “Lord” of Syria and consort of _Ad‐
ar‐gat_ or Aster’t, the Syrian Goddess. And Gan‐Æden (Eden) or
Gandunia was Babylonia and Mesopotamia. In Assyrian _Ak_ meant
Creator, the letter _k_ being pronounced _kh_ (_ah_) gutturally.
According to Swedenborg’s mysticism Adam was not a man but a church
(?) of primitive light. In the _Vedas_, _Ad_‐iti is the primitive
light, the Âkâsha of the phenomenal world.

79 Adam‐Jehovah, Brahmâ and Mars are, in one sense, identical; they are
all symbols for primitive or initial _generative powers_ for the
purposes of human procreation. Adam is red, and so also are
Brahmâ‐Virâj and Mars—God and Planet. Water is the “blood” of the
Earth; therefore, all these names are connected with Earth and
Water. “It takes _earth_ and _water_ to create a _human_ soul,” says
Moses. Mars is identical with Kârttikeya, God of War (in one
sense)—which God is born of the Sweat of Shiva, Shiva‐gharmaja and
the Earth. In the _Mahâbhârata_ he is shown as born without the
intervention of a woman. And he is also called Lohita, the Red, like
Adam, and the other “first men.” Hence, the author of _The Source of
Measures_ is quite right in thinking that Mars (and all the other
Gods of like attributes), “being the _god of war_ and of
_bloodshed_, was but a secondary idea flowing out of the primary one
of shedding of blood in conception for the first time.” Hence
Jehovah became later a fighting God, “Lord of Hosts,” and one who
commands war. He is the aggressive Zodh—or Cain, by permutation, who
_slew_ his (female) _brother_, whose “blood crieth from the ground,”
the _Earth_ having opened _her mouth_ to receive the _blood_.
(_Genesis_ iii.)

80 Apollo Karneios is certainly a Greek transformation from the Hindû
Krishna‐Karna. Karna means radiant, and Karneios, which was a title
of Apollo with the Celts as with the Greeks, meant “Sun‐born.”

81 Kumuda‐Pati.

82 Pitri‐Pati.

83 Budha, Mercury.

84 The Moon.

85 Ushanas‐Shukra, or Venus, is our Lucifer, the Morning‐Star, of
course. The ingenuity of this allegory in its manifold meanings is
great indeed. Thus Brihaspati (the Planet Jupiter), or
Brahmanaspati, is, in the _Rig Veda_, a deity who is the symbol and
the prototype of the _exoteric_ or ritualistic worship. He is
priest, sacrificer, suppliant, and the medium through which the
prayers of mortals reach the Gods. He is the Purohita (Family
Priest, or Court Chaplain) of the Hindû Olympus and the spiritual
Guru of the Gods. Soma is the Mystery God and presides over the
mystic and Occult nature in man and the Universe. Târâ, the priest’s
wife, who symbolizes the worshipper, prefers Esoteric truths to
their mere shell, exotericism; hence she is shown as carried off by
Soma. Now Soma is the sacred juice of that name, giving mystic
visions and trance revelations, the _result of which union_ is Budha
(Wisdom), Mercury, Hermes, etc.; that Science in short which to this
day is proclaimed by the Brihaspatis of Theology as Devilish and
Satanic. What wonder that by expanding the cycle of this allegory we
find Christian Theology espousing the quarrel of the Hindû Gods, and
regarding Ushanas (Lucifer), who helped Soma against that ancient
personification of ritualistic worship (Brahmanaspati, the Lord of
the Brâhmans, now become Jupiter‐Jehovah) as Satan, the “Enemy of
God”!

86 As shown elsewhere, it is only the Heavenly Man, Adam‐Kadmon, of the
first chapter of _Genesis_, who is made “in the image and likeness
of God.” Adam of the second chapter is not said to be made in that
_image_ nor in the divine likeness, before he ate of the forbidden
fruit. The former Adam is the Sephirothal Host; the second Adam is
the mindless First human Root‐Race; the third Adam is the Race that
separated, whose eyes are opened.

87 The Earth.

88 Achyuta is an almost untranslatable term. It means that which is not
subject to fall or change for the worse: the Unfalling; and it is
the reverse of Chyuta, the Fallen. The Dhyânîs who incarnate in the
human forms of the Third Root‐Race and endow them with intellect
(Manas) are called the Chyuta for they fall into generation.

89 This is perhaps the reason why, in the _Bhagavad Gîtâ_, we are told
that Brahmâ had communicated to Nârada in the beginning that all men
whatsoever, even Mlechchhas, outcasts and barbarians, might know the
true nature of Vâsudeva and learn to have faith in that Deity.

90 See _Asiatic Researches_, i. 265.

91 _Book of God_, 60.

92 Shesha, who is also Ananta, the infinite, and the “Cycle of
Eternity” in Esotericism, is credited with having given his
astronomical knowledge to Garga, the oldest astronomer of India, who
propitiated him, and forthwith knew all about the Planets and how to
read omens.

93 See _The History of Indian Literature_, p. 253, by Prof. A. Weber:
in Trübner’s Oriental Series.

94 Even the Maya Indians of Guatemala had their Zodiac from untold
antiquity. And “primitive man acted in the same manner independently
of time or locality in every age,” observes a French writer.

95 _Ibid._, p. 2.

96 The _Tirukkanda Panchanga_, for the Kali Yuga 4986, by Chintamany
Raghauaracharya, son of the famous Government astronomer of Madras,
and Tartakamala Venkata Krishna Rao.

97 Of years, 300 million years, or Three Occult Ages. The _Rig Veda_
has the same division. In the “Physician’s Hymn,” (X 97 1) it is
said that “the plants came into being _Three Ages_ (Triyugam) before
the gods” on our Earth. (See “Chronology of the Brâhmans” at the end
of this Stanza.)

98 Forms.

99 Minerals.

100 Vegetation.

101 Sarísripa, svapada.

102 The Earth.

103 These two must not be confused with the Seven Creations or Divisions
in each Kalpa. The _Primary_ and _Secondary_ Creations are here
meant.

104 In _Bereschith Rabba_, Parscha IX.

105 i. 31.

106 See _Hibbert Lectures_, 1887, Sayce, p. 39.

107 Whence the identity of the ideas? The Chinese have the same
traditions. According to the commentator Kwoh P’oh, in the work
called _Shan‐Hai‐King_, “Wonders by Sea and Land,” a work which was
written by the historiographer Chung Ku from engravings on nine urns
made by the Emperor Yü (B.C. 2255), an interview is mentioned with
men _having two distinct faces on their heads_, before and behind,
monsters with bodies of goats and human faces, etc. Gould, in his
_Mythical Monsters_ (p. 27), giving the names of some authors on
Natural History, mentions _Shan‐Hai‐King_. “According to the
commentator Kwoh P’oh (A.D. 276‐324) this work was compiled three
thousand years before his time, or at seven dynasties’ distance.
Yang Sun of the Ming Dynasty (commencing A.D. 1368) states that it
was compiled by Kung Chia and Chung Ku (?)”—as stated above. “Chung
Ku ... at the time of the last emperor of the Hia dynasty (B.C.
1818), fearing that the emperor might destroy the books treating of
the ancient time, carried them in his flight to Yin.”

108 Cory’s _Ancient Fragments_, original edition, p. 25.

109 _Qabbalah_, p. 246.

110 From the mineral, vegetable, and animal remains.

111 Rounds.

112 Solar‐lunar.

113 Gods and Planetary Spirits, especially the Ribhus. “The three
Ribhus” who also become “thrice seven” in number of their gifts.

114 Remember the “winged races” of Plato, and the _Popol Vuh_ accounts
of the first human race, which could walk, fly, and see objects,
however distant.

115 See _Mythical Monsters_, by Charles Gould.

116 In the first volume of the lately published _Introduction à l’Étude
des Races Humaines_, by M. de Quatrefages, there is proof that since
the Post‐Tertiary Period and even before that time—since many Races
were already scattered during that Age on the face of the Earth—man
has not altered one iota in his physical structure. And if man was
surrounded for ages by a fauna that altered from one period or cycle
to another, which died out, which was reborn in other forms—so that
now there does not exist one single animal on Earth, large or small,
contemporary with the man of that period—if, then, every animal has
been transformed save man himself, this fact goes to prove not only
his antiquity, but that he is a _distinct Kingdom_. Why should he
alone have escaped transformation? Because, says de Quatrefages, the
weapon used by him, in his struggle with Nature, and the ever‐
changing geological conditions and elements, was “his _psychic
force_, not his physical strength or body,” as in the case of
animals. Give man only that dose of intelligence and reason with
which other mammalia are endowed, and with his present bodily
organization he will show himself the most helpless of creatures of
Earth. And as everything goes to prove that the human organism with
all its characteristics, peculiarities and idiosyncrasies existed
already on our Globe in those far distant geological periods when
there was not yet _one single specimen of the now‐existing forms of
mammalia_, what is the unavoidable conclusion? Why this: Since all
the human races are of one and the same species, it follows that
this species is the _most ancient of all_ the now‐living mammalia.
Therefore it is the most stable and persevering of all, and was
already as fully developed as it is now when all the other mammalia
now known had not made even their first approach to appearance on
this Earth. Such is the opinion of the great French Naturalist, who
gives thereby a terrible blow to Darwinism.

117 They said.

118 The Monads of the “presentments” of men of the Third Round, the huge
ape‐like forms.

119 The Waters.

120 In the Esoteric System the seven “principles” in man are represented
by seven letters. The first two are _more_ sacred than the four
letters of the Tetragrammaton.

121 The Intermediate Spheres, wherein the Monads, which have not reached
Nirvâna, are said to slumber in unconscious inactivity between the
Manvantaras.

122 Explained elsewhere. The Three Fires, Pâvaka, Pavamâna, and Shuchi,
who had forty‐five Sons, who, with their three Fathers, and their
Father Agni, constitute the forty‐nine Fires. Pavamâna, Fire
produced by friction, is the parent of the “Fire of the Asuras”;
Shuchi, Solar Fire, is the parent of the “Fire of the Gods”; and
Pâvaka, Electric Fire, is the Father of the “Fire of the Pitris.”
(See _Vâyu Purâna_.) But this is an explanation on the material and
terrestrial plane. The Flames are evanescent and only periodical;
the Fires—eternal in their triple unity. They correspond to the
_four_ lower, and the _three_ higher human “principles.”

123 The Suras, who become later the A‐Suras.

124 Âtmâ, Buddhi and Manas. In Devachan the higher element of the Manas
is needed to make it a state of perception and consciousness for the
disembodied Monad.

125 _Catechism_, Book iii. Sec. 9.

126 See _Vishnu Purâna_, Book I. Ch. V., closing Shloka. Fitzedward
Hall’s rendering of the text, in Wilson’s Translation, i. 88. Also
_Mânava‐Dharma Shâstra_, i. 30.

127 This has in Esotericism a direct bearing upon the seven “principles”
of the manifested Brahmâ, or Universe, in the same order as in man.
Exoterically, it is only four “principles.”

128 Wilson’s Translation, i. 81.

129 Demons is a very loose word to use, as it applies to a great number
of inferior—_i.e._, more material—Spirits, or minor Gods, who are so
termed because they “war” with the higher ones; but they are no
devils.

130 The same order of principles in man: Âtmâ (Spirit), Buddhi (Soul),
its vehicle, as Matter is the Vâhan of Spirit, and Manas (Mind), the
third, or the fifth microcosmically. On the _plane of personality_,
Manas is the first.

131 Thus, says the Commentary, the saying, “by day the Gods are most
powerful, and by night the Demons,” is purely allegorical.

132 This “thinking of oneself” as this, that, or the other, is the chief
factor in the production of every kind of psychic or even physical
phenomena. The words “whosoever shall say to this mountain be thou
removed and cast into the sea, and _shall not doubt_ ... that thing
will come to pass,” are no vain words. Only the word “faith” ought
to be translated by “Will.” Faith without Will is like a wind‐mill
without _wind_—barren of results.

133 The same idea is found in the first four chapters of _Genesis_, with
their “Lord” and “God,” which are the Elohim and the Androgynous
Eloha.

134 P. 398.

135 P. 107.

136 Spirits.

137 Also Spirits.

138 vi. 2‐6.

139 But see the difficulties suggested later, in the works of various
Geologists, against this theory. Compare Sir R. S. Ball’s articles
in _Nature_, xxv, 79‐82, 103‐107, Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 1881.

140 The Rûpas.

141 The Goddess who gave birth to these primordial monsters, in the
account of Berosus, was Thalatth, in Greek Thalassa, the “Sea.”

142 See, for comparison, the account of creation by Berosus, as
preserved in Alexander Polyhistor, and the hideous beings born from
the two‐fold principle—Earth and Water—in the abyss of Primordial
Creation: Narâs (Centaurs, men with the limbs of horses and human
bodies), and Kinnaras (men with the heads of horses) created by
Brahmâ in the commencement of the Kalpa.

143 For a similar admission see Prof. Lefèvre’s _Philosophy_, 481.

144 xii. 10,308.

145 The Esoteric Doctrine says that this “Cosmic Evolution” refers only
to our Solar System; while exoteric Hindûism makes the figures
refer, if we do not mistake, to the whole Universal System.

146 Another point of disagreement. Occultism says that the astral
prototypes of the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms up to man
have taken that time (300 million years) to evolve, reforming out of
the cast‐off materials of the preceding Round, which, though very
dense and physical in their own cycle, are relatively ethereal as
compared with the materiality of our present middle Round. At the
expiration of these 300 million years, Nature, on the way to the
physical and material, down the arc of descent, begins with mankind
and works downwards, hardening or materializing forms as it
proceeds. Thus the fossils found in strata, to which an antiquity,
not of eighteen, but of many hundreds of millions of years, must be
ascribed, belong in reality to forms of the preceding Round, which,
while living, were far more ethereal than physical, _as we know the
physical_. That we perceive and disinter them as tangible forms, is
due to the process of materialization or crystallization referred
to, which took place subsequently, at the beginning of the Fourth
Round, and reached its maximum after the appearance of man,
proceeding parallel with his physical evolution. This alone
illustrates the fact that the degree of materiality of the Earth
changes _pari passu_ with that of its inhabitants. And thus man now
finds, as tangible fossils, what were once the (to his present
senses) ethereal forms of the lower kingdoms. The above Brâhmanical
figures refer to evolution beginning on Globe A, and in the First
Round. In this Volume we speak only of this, the Fourth Round.

147 This difference and the change of cyphers in the last three triplets
of figures, the writer cannot undertake to account for. According to
every calculation, once the three hundred millions are subtracted,
the figures ought to stand, 1,655,884,687. But they are given as
stated in the Tamil calendar above‐named and as they were
translated. The school of the late Pandit Dayânand Sarasvati,
founder of the Ârya Samâj, gives a date of 1,960,852,987. See the
_Ârya Magazine_ of Lahore, the cover of which bears the words:
“Âryan era 1,960,852,987.”

148 Vaivasvata Manu is the one Human Being—some versions add to him the
seven Rishis—who in the Matsya Avatâra allegory is saved from the
Deluge in a boat, like Noah in the Ark. Therefore, this Vaivasvata
Manvantara would be the “post‐diluvian” period. This, however, does
not refer to the later “Atlantean” or Noah’s Deluge, nor to the
Cosmic “Deluge” or Pralaya of obscuration, which preceded our Round,
but to the appearance of mankind in the latter Round. There is a
great difference made, however, between the Naimitika, Occasional or
Incidental, Prâkritika, Elemental, Atyantika, the Absolute, and
Nitya, the Perpetual Pralaya; the latter being described as
“Brahmâ’s contingent recoalescence of the Universe at the end of
Brahmâ’s Day.” The question was raised by a learned Brâhman
Theosophist: “Whether there is such a thing as Cosmic Pralaya;
because, otherwise, the Logos (Krishna) would have to be reborn, and
he is Aja (unborn).” We cannot see why. The Logos is said to be born
only metaphorically, as the Sun is born daily, or rather a beam of
that Sun is born in the morning and is said to die when it
disappears, whereas it is simply reäbsorbed into the parent essence.
Cosmic Pralaya is for things visible, not for the Arûpa, Formless,
World. The Cosmic or Universal Pralaya comes only at the end of one
hundred Years of Brahmâ, when the Universal Dissolution is said to
take place. Then the Avyaya, say the exoteric Scriptures, the
Eternal Life symbolized by Vishnu, assuming the character of Rudra,
the Destroyer, enters into the Seven Rays of the Sun and drinks up
all the waters of the Universe. “Thus fed, the seven Solar Rays
dilate to _seven suns_ and set fire to the whole Cosmos.”

149 Since a Mahâ Yuga is the 1,000th part of a Day of Brahmâ.

150 _Op. cit._, Art. “Geology.”

151 _Ibid._ This allows a chance even to the Biblical “Adam Chronology”
of 6,000 years.

152 _Modern Science and Modern Thought_, 48.

153 To the Silurian period as regards molluscs and animal life—granted;
but what do they know of man?

154 _Ibid._, _loc. cit._

155 _Ibid._, 49.

156 Winchell, _World‐Life_, 180.

157 _Op. cit._, 49.

158 Wilson’s _Vishnu Purâna_, i. 51.

159 i. 32.

160 The atmosphere, or the air, the firmament.

161 _Harivamsha_, i. 36.

162 _Genesis_, i. 6‐9.

163 Lords.

164 They were told.

165 _i.e._, the Jivas or Monads.

166 Mother Earth or Nature.

167 For external bodies.

168 According to the wonderful chronology of Bentley, who wrote in days
when Biblical chronology was still undisputed; and also according to
that of those modern Orientalists who dwarf the Hindû dates as far
as they can.

169 Now Shrî is the daughter of Bhrigu, one of the Prajâpatis and
Rishis, the chief of the Bhrigus, the “Consumers,” the Aërial Class
of Gods. She is Lakshmî, the wife of Vishnu, and she is Gaurî, the
“bride of Shiva,” and she is Sarasvatî, the “watery,” the wife of
Brahmâ, because the three Gods and Goddesses are one, under three
aspects. Read the explanation by Parâshara, in _Vishnu Purâna_ (I.
viii., Wilson’s Trans., i. 119), and you will understand. “The lord
of Shrî is the moon,” he says, and “Shrî is the wife of Nârâyana,
the God of Gods”: Shrî or Lakshmî (Venus) is Indrânî, as she is
Sarasvatî, for in the words of Parâshara: “Harî [or Îshvara, the
‘Lord’] is all that is called male [in the Universe]; Lakshmî is all
that is termed female. There is nothing else than they.” Hence she
is female, and “God” is male Nature.

170 Shrî is Goddess of, and herself “Fortune and Prosperity.”

171 _Masonic Review_ (Cincinnati), June, 1886. Art. “The Cabbalah.—No.
VI,” 15‐17.

172 The Moon‐Gods.

173 _Vishnu Purâna_, I. vii., Wilson’s Trans., i. 101.

174 See _Mahâbhârata_, _Mokshadharma Parvan_.

175 Because, as the allegory shows, the Gods who had no personal merit
of their own, dreading the sanctity of those self‐striving
incarnated Beings who had become Ascetics and Yogîs, and thus
threatened to upset the power of the former by their _self‐acquired_
powers—denounced them. All this has a deep philosophical meaning and
refers to the evolution and acquirement of divine powers through
_self‐exertion_. Some Rishi‐Yogîs are shown in the _Purânas_ to be
far more powerful than the Gods. Secondary Gods or temporary Powers
in Nature (the Forces) are doomed to disappear; it is only the
spiritual Potentiality in man which can lead him to become one with
the INFINITE and the ABSOLUTE.

176 The Triangle becomes a Pentagon (five‐fold) on Earth.

177 Seth, as Bunsen and others have shown, is not only the “primitive
God” of the Semites—early Jews included—but also their “semi‐divine
ancestor.” For, says Bunsen (_God in History_, i. 233, 234): “The
Seth of Genesis, the father of Enoch (the man) must be considered as
originally running parallel with that derived from the Elohim,
Adam’s father.” “According to Bunsen, the Deity (the God Seth) was
the _primitive god_ of Northern Egypt and Palestine,” says Staniland
Wake, in _The Great Pyramid_ (p. 61). And Seth became considered in
the later Theology of the Egyptians as an “evil demon,” says the
same Bunsen, for he is one with Typhon and one with the Hindû Demons
as a logical sequel.

178 _I Corinth._, xv. 47.

179 _Vâyu Purâna_; _Harivamsha_, 170.

180 See Mather’s _Kabbalah Unveiled_, p. 302.

181 Translated in Isaac Myer’s _Qabbalah_, p. 386.

182 _Zohar_ iii., 135a, 292a, _Idra Zootah_. Brody Ed., _Idrah Zootah_.

183 _Gen._ xxvi. 31 _et seq._; Myer’s _Qabbalah_, _ibid._

184 _Zohar_, iii. 290a, Brody Ed. Indrah Zootah, quoted in Isaac Myer’s
_Qabbalah_, pp. 387, 388.

185 ii. 5.

186 Or Mind‐born.

187 Fohat.

188 “Huxley, supported by the most evident discoveries in Comparative
Anatomy, could utter the momentous sentence that the anatomical
differences between man and the highest apes are less than those
between the latter and the lowest apes. In relation to our
genealogical tree of man, the necessary conclusion follows that the
human race has _evolved gradually from the true apes_.” (_The
Pedigree of Man_, by Ernst Hæckel, translated by Ed. B. Aveling, p.
49.)

What may be the scientific and logical objections to the opposite
conclusion—we would ask? The anatomical resemblances between Man and
the Anthropoids—grossly exaggerated as they are by Darwinists, as M.
de Quatrefages shows—are simply enough accounted for when the origin
of the latter is taken into consideration.

“Nowhere, in the older deposits, is an ape to be found that
approximates more closely to man, or a man that approximates more
closely to an ape.”

“The same gulf which is found to‐day between man and ape, goes back
with undiminished breadth and depth to the Tertiary period. This
fact alone is enough to make its untenability clear.” (Dr. F. Pfaff,
Prof. of Natural Science in the University of Erlangen.)

189 See _Yoga Shâstra_, ii. 32.

190 Voltaire.

191 _Mânava‐Dharma Shâstra_, iii. 196.

192 _Matsya_ and _Padma Purânas_ and Kullûka on the _Mânava‐Dharma
Shâstra_, iii. 195. We are quite aware that the _Vâyu_ and _Matsya
Purânas_ identify (agreeably to Western interpretation) the
Agnishvâtta with the seasons, and the Barhishad Pitris with the
months; adding a fourth class—Kâvyas—cyclic years. But do not
Christian Roman Catholics identify their Angels with Planets, and
are not the Seven Rishis become the Saptarshis—a constellation? They
are Deities presiding over all the cyclic divisions.

193 _Vishnu Purâna_, Wilson, iii. 158, 159.

194 Shll. 935, 936.

195 The _Vâyu Purâna_ shows the region called Virâja‐loka inhabited by
the Agnishvâttas.

196 Wilson, _ibid._, iii. 17. Note by Fitzedward Hall.

197 _Loc. cit._, _ibid._

198 See _Theosophist_, February, 1887, p. 360.

199 See Wilson, ii. 26.

200 See _Vâyu Purâna_.

201 Chhâyâs.

202 Or Amânasas.

203 Thus.

204 Complexion.

205 Also.

206 Creator.

207 Phantoms.

208 Image or shadow.

209 This was hinted at in _Isis Unveiled_ (I. xxxviii.), though the full
explanation could not then be given: “The Pitris are not the
ancestors of the present living men, but those of the [first] human
kind or Adamic race; the spirits of _human_ races, which, on the
great scale of descending evolution, preceded our races of men, and
were physically, as well as spiritually, far superior to our modern
pigmies. In _Mânava‐Dharma Shâstra_ they are called the _Lunar_
ancestors.”

210 See the “Laws of Manu”—_Mânava‐Dharma Shâstra_, iii. 203.

211 “Sacred Books of the East,” Vol. IV, _The Zend‐Avesta_, Pt. I.
lviii, Trans. by James Darmesteter.

212 Compare also what is said about Makara and the Kumâras in connection
with the Zodiac.

213 Whence the subsequent assertions of St. John’s vision, referred to
in his Apocalypse, about, “the great red dragon having seven heads
and _ten_ horns, and seven crowns upon his heads,” whose “tail drew
the _third part_ of the stars of heaven and did cast them to the
earth.” (Ch. xii.)

214 See _Harivamsha_, 932.

215 The verse “did cast them to the earth,” plainly shows its origin in
the grandest and oldest allegory of the Âryan Mystics, who, after
the destruction of the Atlantean _giants_ and _sorcerers_, concealed
the truth—_astronomical_, _physical_, and _divine_, as it is a page
out of _pre‐cosmic_ Theogony—under various allegories. Its true
Esoteric interpretation is a veritable Theodice of the “Fallen
Angels,” so called: the _willing_ and the _unwilling_, the
_creators_ and those who _refused to create_, being now mixed up
most perplexingly by Christian Catholics, who forget that their
highest Archangel, St. Michael, who is shown to conquer (to master
and to assimilate) the _Dragon of Wisdom_ and of divine Self‐
sacrifice—now miscalled and calumniated as Satan—_was the first to
refuse to create_! This has led to endless confusion. So little does
Christian Theology understand the paradoxical language of the East
and its symbolism, that it even explains, in its _dead‐letter
sense_, the Chinese Buddhist and Hindû exoteric rite of raising a
noise during certain eclipses to scare away the “great red dragon,”
which laid a plot to carry away the “light”! But here “light” means
Esoteric Wisdom, and we have sufficiently explained the secret
meaning of the terms Dragon, Serpent, etc., all of which refer to
Adepts and Initiates.

216 See _Genesis_ and Plato’s _Timæus_.

217 In spite of all efforts to the contrary, Christian Theology—having
burdened itself with the Hebrew Esoteric account of the creation of
man, which it understands _literally_—cannot find any reasonable
excuse for its “God, the Creator,” who produces a man devoid of mind
and sense; nor can it justify the punishment following an act, for
which Adam and Eve might plead _non compos_. For if the couple be
admitted to be ignorant of good and evil before the eating of the
forbidden fruit, how could it be expected to know that _disobedience
was evil_? If primeval man was meant to remain a half‐witted, or
rather witless, being, then his creation was aimless and even
_cruel_, if produced by an omnipotent and perfect God. But Adam and
Eve are shown, even in _Genesis_, to be created by a Class of lower
divine Beings, the Elohim, who are so jealous of their personal
prerogatives as reasonable and intelligent creatures, that they will
not allow man to become “as one of us.” This is plain, even from the
dead‐letter meaning of the _Bible_. The Gnostics, then, were right
in regarding the Jewish God as belonging to a Class of lower,
material and not very holy denizens of the invisible World.

218 In _Isis Unveiled_ several of these Gnostic systems are given. One
is taken from the _Codex Nazaræus_, the Scripture of the Nazarenes,
who, although they existed long before the days of Christ, and even
before the laws of Moses, were Gnostics, and many of them Initiates.
They held their “Mysteries of Life” in Nazara (ancient and modern
Nazareth), and their doctrines are a faithful echo of the teachings
of the Secret Doctrine—some of which we are now endeavouring to
explain.

219 i. 18. See the translation from the Greek by François, Monsieur de
Foix, Evesque d’Ayre: the work dedicated to Marguerite de France,
Reine de Navarre. Edition of 1579, Bordeaux.

220 _Asgard and the Gods_, p. 4.

221 Mr. James Darmesteter, the translator of the _Vendidâd_, speaking of
it, says: “The tree, _whatever it is_....”—“Sacred Books of the
East,” vol. iv. p. 209.

222 Plato’s _Timæus_.

223 See _Asgard and the Gods_, p. 305.

224 _Ibid._, _loc. cit._

225 “The father of the sacred fire,” writes Prof. Jolly, “bore the name
of Tvashtri ... His mother was Mâyâ. He himself was styled Akta
(_anointed_ χριστὸς) after the priest had poured upon his head the
spirituous (?) Soma, and on his body butter purified by sacrifice.”
(_Man before Metals_, p. 190.) The source of his information is not
given by the French Darwinist. But the lines are quoted to show that
light begins to dawn even upon the Materialists. Adalbert Kühn, in
his _Die Herabkunft des Feuers_, identifies the two signs [Symbol:
swastika] and [Symbol: swastika with dots around the center] with
Arani, and designates them under this name. He adds: “This process
of kindling fire naturally led men to the idea of sexual
reproduction,” etc. Why could not a more dignified idea, and one
more Occult, have led man to invent this symbol, in so far as it is
connected, in one of its aspects, with human reproduction? But its
chief symbolism refers to Cosmogony.

“Agni, in the condition of Akta, or anointed, is suggestive of
Christ,” remarks Prof. Jolly. “Mâyâ, Mary, His mother; Tvashtri, St.
Joseph, the carpenter of the Bible.” In the _Rig Veda_, Vishvakarman
is the highest and oldest of the Gods and their “Father.” He is the
“carpenter or builder,” because God is called even by the
Monotheists, the “Architect of the Universe.” Still, the original
idea is purely metaphysical, and had no connection with the later
Phallicism.

226 The real Manushya.

227 Barishad (?).

228 The Kavyavâhana, electric fire.

229 Shuchi, the spirit in the Sun.

230 The Pitris and the two Fires.

231 The form.

232 It is not clear why Bhûtas should be rendered by the Orientalists as
“evil spirits” in the _Purânas_. In the _Vishnu Purâna_ (I. v,
Wilson’s Trans., Fitzedward Hall’s note, i. 83) the Shloka simply
says: “Fiends, frightful from being monkey‐coloured and
carnivorous”; and the word in India now means “ghosts,” ethereal or
_astral_ phantoms, while in Esoteric Teaching it means _elementary_
substances, something made of attenuated, non‐compound essence, and,
specifically, the astral Double of any man or animal. In this case
these primitive men are the Doubles of the first ethereal Dhyânîs or
Pitris.

233 See _Pymander_, Everard’s Trans., II. 17‐29.

234 _Chaldean Account of Genesis_, p. 92.

235 P. 91.

236 _Ibid._, _loc. cit._

237 _Ibid._, _loc. cit._

238 Human Monad.

239 Astral shadow.

240 Kâma Rûpa.

241 Shuchi, the fire of passion and animal instinct.

242 Solar Fire.

243 Nascent Man.

244 Later.

245 Race.

246 See Shloka 22.

247 See _Genesis of the Elements_, by W. Crookes, p. 21.

248 _Pymander_, i. 6. The opponents of Hindûism may call the above
Pantheism, Polytheism, or anything they may please. If Science is
not entirely blinded by prejudice, it will see in this account a
profound knowledge of Natural Sciences and Physics, as well as of
Metaphysics and Psychology. But to find this out, one has to study
the personifications, and then convert them into chemical atoms. It
will then be found to satisfy both physical and even purely
materialistic Science, as well as those who see in evolution the
work of the “Great Unknown Cause” in its phenomenal and illusive
aspects.

249 _Sc._ Race.

250 Shlokas, 153, 154.

251 It is symbolized in the Pythagorean Triangle, the ten yods within,
and the seven points of the Triangle and the Square.

252 Whence the Kabalistic name of “Shells” given to the Astral Form, the
Body called Kâma Rûpa, left behind by the Higher Angels in the shape
of the Higher Manas, when the latter leaves for Devachan, forsaking
its residue.

253 Mackenzie’s _Royal Masonic Cyclopædia_, pp. 409‐411.

254 viii. 20.

255 _De Bell. Jud._, ii. 12.

256 _De Gignat_, p. 222C.; _De Somniis_, p. 455D.; which shows that the
Essenes believed in re‐birth and many reïncarnations on Earth, as
Jesus himself did, a fact we can prove from the _New Testament_
itself.

257 I. vi. 3.

258 _Zohar_, ii. 229b.

259 It is corroborated, however, as we have shown, by the Esotericism of
_Genesis_. Not only are the animals created therein after the “Adam
of Dust,” but vegetation is shown _in_ the Earth before “the heavens
and the earth were created.” “Every plant of the field before it was
in the earth” (ii. 5). Now, unless the Occult interpretation is
accepted—which shows that in this Fourth Round the Globe was covered
with vegetation, and the First (Astral) Humanity was produced before
almost anything could grow and develop thereon—what can the dead
letter mean? Simply that the grass was in the earth of the Globe
before that Globe was created? And yet the meaning of verse 6, which
says that “there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the
whole face of the ground,” before it rained, and caused the trees,
etc., to grow, is plain enough. It shows also in what geological
period it occurred, and further what is meant by “heaven” and
“earth.” It meant the firmament and dry _incrustated_ land,
separated and ridden of its vapours and exhalations. Moreover, the
student must bear in mind that, as Adam Kadmon, the “male and female
being” of _Genesis_ i, is no physical human being but the host of
the Elohim, among which was Jehovah himself—so the animals,
mentioned in that chapter as “created” before man in the dead‐letter
text, were no animals, but the zodiacal signs and other sidereal
bodies.

260 _Book of Dzyan_, iii. 19.

261 Kenealy, _The Book of God_, pp. 114, 115.

262 To those who would enquire: What has Hydrogen to do with air or
oxygenation?—it is answered: Study first the ABC of Occult Alchemy.
In their anxiety, however, to identify Pymander, the “mouth of
mystery,” with St. John the Baptist prophetically, the Christian
Symbologists thus identified also the seven Kabiri and the Assyrian
Bulls with the Cherubs of the Jews and the Apostles. Having,
moreover, to draw a line of demarcation between the _four_ and the
_three_ the latter being the _Fallen_ Angels; and furthermore to
avoid connecting these with the “Seven Spirits of the Face,” the
Archangels, they unceremoniously threw out all they did not choose
to recognize. Hence the perversion in the order of the Elements, in
order to make them dovetail with the order of the Gospels, and to
identify the Angel‐Man with Christ. With the Chaldees, the
Egyptians—from whom Moses adopted the Chroub (Cherubs in their
animal form)—and the Ophites; with all these, the Angels, the
Planets, and the Elements, were symbolized mystically and
alchemically by the Lion (Mikael); the Bull (Uriel); the Dragon
(Raphael); the Eagle (Gabriel); the Bear (Thot‐Sabaoth); the Dog
(Era‐taoth); the Mule (Uriel or Thantabaoth). All these have a
qualificative meaning.

263 See _Hibbert Lectures_, 1887, pp. 370 _et seqq._

264 Sepher _M’bo Sha‐arim_, near the end, translated by Isaac Myer,
_Qabbalah_, p. 110.

265 Form.

266 Shadow.

267 S. Laing, _Modern Science and Modern Thought_, p. 90.

268 And why not all the progenitive First Races, human as well as
animal; and why _one_ “remote progenitor”?

269 Obviously so, on the lines of Evolutionism, which traces the
Mammalia to some amphibian ancestor.

270 Second Edition, p. 161.

271 _Ibid._, p. 162.

272 De Quatrefages, _The Human Species_, p. 124; “International
Scientific Series,” Volume XXVI.

273 _Ibid._, p. 125.

274 Fol. 186.

275 _Odyssey_, xi. 298‐305; _Iliad_, iii. 243.

276 Hyg., _Fab._, 80. Ovid., _Fast._, 700, etc. See Decharme’s
_Mythologie de la Grèce Antique_, p. 6.

277 See Decharme, _ibid._, p. 652.

278 _Nem._, x. 80 _et seqq._ Theocr., xxiv. 131.

279 XXXIV. v. 5. Theocr., xxii. 1.

280 iii. 10. 7.

281 Apollodorus, iii. 1.

282 Castor’s tomb was shown in Sparta, in days of old, says Pausanias
(iii. 13, 1); and Plutarch says that he was called at Argos the
demi‐mortal or demi‐hero, μιξαρχαγέτας. (_Quæst. Gr._, 23.)

283 Pindar, _Nem._, x. 60, _seqq._, Dissen.

284 Schol. Eurip., _Orest._, 463, Dindorf. See Decharme, _op. cit._, p.
654.

285 The Monad is impersonal and a God _per se_, albeit unconscious on
this plane. For divorced from its third (often called fifth)
principle, Manas, which is the horizontal line of the first
manifested Triangle or Trinity, it can have no consciousness or
perception of things on this earthly plane. “The highest sees
through the eye of the lowest” in the manifested world; Purusha
(Spirit) remains blind without the help of Prakriti (Matter) in the
material spheres; and so does Âtmâ‐Buddhi without Manas.

286 _Moral._, p. 484f.

287 This strange idea and interpretation are accepted by Decharme in his
_Mythologie de la Grèce Antique_ (p. 655). “Castor and Pollux,” he
says, “are nothing but the Sun and Moon, conceived as twins.... The
Sun, the immortal and powerful being that disappears every evening
from the horizon and descends under the Earth, as though he would
make room for the fraternal orb which comes to life with night, is
Pollux, who sacrifices himself for Castor; Castor, who, inferior to
his brother, owes to him his immortality; for the Moon, says
Theophrastus, is only another, but feebler Sun (_De Ventis_, 17).”

288 See _Book of Enoch_, Trans. by Bishop Laurence, 1883.

289 Adam (Kadmon) is, like Brahmâ and Mars, the symbol of the
_generative_ and _creative_ power typifying Water and Earth—an
Alchemical secret. “It takes Earth and Water to create a human
Soul,” said Moses. Mars is the Hindû Mangala, the planet Mars,
identical with Kârttikeya, the “War‐God”; he is Gharma‐ja, born of
Shiva’s _sweat_, and of the Earth. He is Lohita, the red, like
Brahmâ also and Adam. The Hindû Mars is, like Adam, born from no
woman and mother. With the Egyptians, Mars was the primeval
generative Principle, and so are Brahmâ, in exoteric teaching, and
Adam, in the Kabalah.

290 Abel is Chebel, meaning “pains of birth,” conception.

291 See _Isis Unveiled_, II. 398, where Jehovah is shown to be Adam and
Eve blended, and Hevah, and Abel, the _feminine serpent_.

292 See _Isis Unveiled_, I. 305: “The union of these two Races produced
a _third_ ... Race.”

293 _Genesis_, v. 2.

294 _Ibid._, v. 3.

295 P. 159.

296 Jod in the Kabalah has for symbol the hand, the forefinger and the
lingam, while numerically it is the perfect one; but it is also the
number 10, male and female, when divided.

297 _Vishnu Purâna_, i. ii.: Wilson’s Trans., i. 20.

298 Quoted in Myer’s _Qabbalah_, p. 110.

299 See _Source of Measures_, p. 277.

300 II. 464, _et seqq._

301 _Jeremiah_, x. 11.

302 _Isis Unveiled_, II. 462, 463.

303 See for comparison _Hosea_, xii. 6, where it is so punctuated.

304 _Isis Unveiled_, I. 156.

305 Race.

306 The Moon.

307 Hamsa.

308 _Text‐Book of Physiology_, Third Edition, 1879, p. 623.

309 See the _Timæus_.

310 See Extracts from that Essay in _The Theosophist_, of February,
1883, from which the following is condensed.

311 Compare Ezekiel’s vision (chap. i) of the four Divine Beings who
“had the likeness of a man” and yet had the appearance of a wheel,
“when they went, they went upon their four sides ... for the spirit
of the living creature was in the wheels.”

312 Eugibinus, a Christian, and the Rabbis Samuel, Menasseh ben Israel,
and Maimonides taught that “Adam had _two_ faces and _one_ person,
and from the beginning he was both male and female—male on one side
and female on the other [like Manu’s Brahmâ]; but afterwards the
parts were separated.” The one hundred and thirty‐ninth Psalm of
David was cited by Rabbi Jeremiah ben Eliazar as evidence of this:
“Thou hast _fashioned_ me _behind_ and _before_,” not _beset_ as in
the _Bible_, which is absurd and meaningless, and this shows, as
Prof. Wilder thinks, “that the primeval form of mankind was
androgynous.”

313 See the union of Chokmah, Wisdom, with Binah, Intelligence, or
Jehovah, the Demiurge, called Understanding in the _Proverbs of
Solomon_ (vii). Unto men Wisdom (divine Occult Wisdom) crieth: “Oh,
ye simple, understand Wisdom; and ye fools, be of an understanding
heart.” It is Spirit and Matter, the Nous and the Psyche; of the
latter of which St. James says that it is “earthly, sensual, and
devilish.”

314 _Pluralité des Mondes_, p. 69.

315 A hypothesis evolved in 1881 by Mr. W. Mattieu Williams seems to
have impressed Astronomers but little. Says the author of “The Fuel
of the Sun,” in _Knowledge_, Dec. 23, 1881:

“Applying now the researches of Dr. Andrews to the conditions of
solar existence ... I conclude that the sun has _no nucleus_, either
solid, liquid, or gaseous, but is composed of dissociated matter in
the critical state, surrounded, first, by a flaming envelope, due
to the recombination of the dissociated matter, and outside of this,
by another envelope of vapours due to this combination.”

This is a novel theory to be added to other hypotheses, _all
scientific and orthodox_. The meaning of the “critical state” is
explained by Mr. W. Mattieu Williams in the same journal (Dec. 9,
1881), in an article on “Solids, liquids, and Gases.” Speaking of an
experiment by Dr. Andrews on carbonic acid, the Scientist says that:

“When 88° is reached, the boundary between liquid and gas vanishes;
liquid and gas have blended into one mysterious intermediate fluid;
an indefinite fluctuating something is there filling the whole of
the tube—an etherealized liquid or a visible gas. Hold a red‐hot
poker between your eye and the light; you will see an upflowing wave
of movement of what appears like liquid air. The appearance of the
hybrid fluid in the tube resembles this, but is sensibly denser, and
evidently stands between the liquid and gaseous states of matter, as
pitch or treacle stands between solid and liquid.”

The temperature at which this occurs has been named by Dr. Andrews
the “critical temperature”; here the gaseous and the liquid states
are “continuous,” and it is probable that all other substances
capable of existing in both states have their own particular
critical temperatures.

Speculating further upon this “critical” state, Mr. W. Mattieu
Williams emits some quite Occult theories about Jupiter and other
Planets. He says:

“Our notions of solids, liquids, and gases are derived from our
experiences of the state of matter here upon this Earth. Could we be
removed to another planet, they would be curiously changed. On
Mercury water would rank as one of the condensible gases; on Mars,
as a fusible solid; but what on Jupiter?

“Recent observations justify us in regarding this as a miniature
sun, with an external envelope of cloudy matter, apparently of
partially‐condensed water, but red‐hot, or probably still hotter
within. His vaporous atmosphere is evidently of enormous depth, and
the force of gravitation being on his visible outer surface two‐and‐
a‐half times greater than that on our earth’s surface, the
atmospheric pressure, in descending below this visible surface, must
soon reach that at which the vapour of water would be brought to its
critical condition. Therefore we may infer that the oceans of
Jupiter are neither of frozen, liquid, nor gaseous water, but are
oceans, or atmospheres of _critical_ water. If any fish or birds
swim or fly therein, they must be very _critically_ organized.”

As the whole mass of Jupiter is 300 times greater than that of the
Earth, and its compressing energy towards the centre proportional to
this, its materials, if similar to those of the Earth, and no
hotter, would be considerably more dense, and the whole planet would
have a higher specific gravity; but we know by the movement of its
satellites that, instead of this, its specific gravity is less than
a fourth of that of the Earth. This justifies the conclusion that it
is intensely hot; for even hydrogen, if cold, would become denser
than Jupiter under such pressure.

“As all elementary substances may exist as solids, liquids, or
gases, or, critically, according to the conditions of temperature
and pressure, I am justified in hypothetically concluding that
Jupiter is neither a solid, a liquid, nor a gaseous planet, but a
_critical_ planet, or an orb composed internally of associated
elements in the _critical_ state, and surrounded by a dense
atmosphere of their vapours and those of some of their compounds
such as water. The same reasoning applies to Saturn and other large
and rarefied planets.”

It is gratifying to see how “scientific imagination” approaches
every year more closely to the borderland of our Occult Teachings.

316 _The Day after Death_, p. 23.

317 Cremona Ed., iii. 76a; Brody Ed., iii. 159a; _Qabbalah_. Isaac Myer,
p. 420.

318 So destroyed.

319 The first occurred when what is now the North Pole was separated
from the later Continents.

320 We must remember that at the head of all the Babylonian Gods were
Ea, Anu, and the primeval Bel; and that Ea, the first, was the God
of Wisdom, the great “God of Light” and of the Deep, and that he was
identified with Oannes, or the Biblical Dagon—the Man‐Fish who rose
out of the Persian Gulf.

321 It is far later on that the Moon became a male God; with the Hindus
it was Soma, with the Chaldæans Nanak or Nanar, and Sin, the son of
Mulil, the older Bel. The Akkadians called him the “Lord of Ghosts”;
and he was the God of Nipur (Niffer) in northern Babylonia. It is
Mulil who caused the waters of the Flood to fall from Heaven on
Earth, because of which Xisuthrus would not allow him to approach
his altar. As the modern Assyriologists have now ascertained, it is
the northern Nipur which is the centre whence Chaldæan (Black) Magic
spread; and Eridu (the Southern) which was the primitive seat of the
worship of the culture God, the God of Divine Wisdom—the Sun‐God
being the Supreme Deity everywhere. With the Jews, the Moon is
connected with Israël’s Jehovah and his seed, for Ur was the chief
seat of the worship of the Moon‐God, and Abraham is said to have
come from Ur, when from A‐bra(h)m, he becomes Abraham.

322 When Nârada, the virgin‐ascetic, threatened to put an end to the
human race by preventing Daksha’s sons from procreating it.

323 x. 6.

324 This is corroborated by a learned Brahman. In his most excellent
Lectures on the _Bhagavad Gîtâ_ (_Theosophist_, April, 1887, p. 444)
the lecturer says:

“There is a peculiarity to which I must call your attention. He
[Krishna] speaks here of four Manus. Why does he speak of four? We
are now in the seventh Manvantara—that of Vaivasvata. If he is
speaking of the past Manus, he ought to speak of six, but he only
mentions four. In some commentaries an attempt has been made to
interpret this in a peculiar manner.

“The word ‘Chatvârah’ is separated from the word ‘Manavah,’ and is
made to refer to Sanaka, Sanandana, Sanatkumâra, and Sanatsujâta,
who were also included among the mind‐born sons of Prajâpati.

“But this interpretation will lead to a most absurd conclusion, and
make the sentence contradict itself. The persons alluded to in the
text have a qualifying clause in the sentence. It is well known that
Sanaka and the other three refused to create, though the other sons
had consented to do so: therefore, in speaking of those persons from
whom humanity has sprung into existence, it would be absurd to
include these four also in the list. The passage must be interpreted
without splitting the compound into two nouns. The number of Manus
will then be four, and the statement would then contradict the
Paurânic account, though it would be in harmony with the Occult
theory. You will recollect that it is stated [in Occultism] that we
are now in the Fifth Root‐Race. Each Root‐Race is considered as the
Santati of a particular Manu. Now, the Fourth Race has passed, or,
in other words, there have been four past Manus.”

325 Stockwell, _Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge_, xviii.; R. W.
McFarland, _American Journal of Science_, III. xi. 450; and Croll’s
_Climate and Time_. Lemuria was not submerged by a flood, but was
destroyed by volcanic action, and afterwards sank.

326 Coste, I. iv. 19.

327 Agruerus is Kronos, or Saturn, and the prototype of the Israëlitish
Jehovah. As connected with Argha, the Moon or Ark of salvation, Noah
is mythologically one with Saturn. But then this cannot relate to
the terrestrial flood. (See Faber’s _Cabiri_, I. 35, 43, and 45.)

328 _Ibid._, II. 240.

329 Sanchuniathon says that the Titans were the sons of Kronos, and
seven in number; and he calls them fire‐worshippers, Aletæ (Sons of
Agni?) and diluvians. Al‐ait is the God of Fire.

330 _Ibid._, i. 130, note.

331 Of which _seven_, let us remark, the Âryans, and not the Semites,
were the originators, while the Jews got that number from the
Chaldæans.

332 Seven individual Sons of God, or Pitaras, Pitris; also in this case
the sons of Kronos or Saturn (Kâla, “Time”) and Arkites, like the
Kabiri and Titans, as their name—“_Lunar_ Ancestors”—shows; the Moon
being the Ark, or Argha, on the Watery Abyss of Space.

333 _Asiatic Researches_, v. 246.

334 _Kabiri_, _ibid._, _loc. cit._

335 Orpheus apud Proclum _in Timæum_, v. 295.

336 Arnobius, _Contra Gentes_, iii. 124; quoted by Faber, _op. cit._, i.
135.

337 _Ant._, iii. 8.

338 _Bibl._, iii. 170.

339 Aretia is the female form of Artes, the Egyptian Mars. Thence the
Chaldæan (and now Hebrew) word ארצ (Arets), “Earth.” Seyffarth, the
author of _Beiträge zur Kenntniss_ (under “_Artes_,” _Mars_) quotes
as follows: “Addit Cedrenus (Salm. I. c): Stella Martis ab Ægyptiis
vocatur Ertosi (plantare, generare). Significat autem hoc omnis
generis procreationem et _vivificationem_, omnisque substantiæ et
materiæ naturam et vim ordinantem atque procreantem.” It is Earth as
“source of being”; or, as explained by the author of _The Source of
Measures_ (p. 186), Arts is the same in Hebrew and Egyptian, and
both “combine the primal idea of _earth as source_; precisely as in
the Hebrew itself, under another form, _Adam_ and _Mâdim_, _Mars_,
are the same, and combine the idea of _earth_, with _Adam_ under the
form of _h‐adam‐h_.”

340 _Ant._, v. 64.

341 Nonnus, _Dionys._, xviii. 319. Quoted by Faber, _op. cit._, i. 328.

342 See _Isis Unveiled_, II. 420 _et seq._, where one or two of the
seven meanings are hinted at.

343 Chap. lxiv (Sect. xi).

344 _Isis Unveiled_, II. 423, 424.

345 _Ibid._, 423, note.

346 One has to remember that, in the Hindû Philosophy, every
differentiated unit is such only through the Cycles of Mâyâ, being
one in its essence with the Supreme or One Spirit. Hence arises the
seeming confusion and contradiction in the various _Purânas_, and at
times in the same _Purâna_, about the same individual. Vishnu—as the
many‐formed Brahmâ, and as Brahma (neuter)—is one, and yet he is
said to be all the twenty‐eight Vyâsas.

“In every Dvâpara (or third) age, Vishnu, in the person of Vyâsa,
divides the Veda, which is (properly, but) one, into many
portions.... Twenty‐eight times have the Vedas been arranged by the
great Rishis in the Vaivasvata Manvantara, in the Dvâpara age; and,
consequently, eight and twenty Vyâsas have passed away.” (_Vishnu
Purâna_, iii. 3; Wilson’s Trans., iii. 33, 34.) “[They who were all]
in the form of Veda‐Vyâsa; who were the Vyâsas of their respective
eras.” (_Ibid._, _loc. cit._, p. 33.) “This world is Brahmâ, in
Brahmâ, from Brahmâ ... nothing further to be known.” Then, again,
in the _Harivamsha_: “There were (in the first Manvantara) seven
celebrated sons of Vasishtha, who (in the _third_ Manvantara) were
sons of Brahmâ (_i.e._, Rishis), the illustrious progeny of Ûrjâ.”
(_Ibid._, iii. 6, note.) This is plain: the Humanity of the First
Manvantara is that of the seventh and of all the intermediate ones.
The Mankind of the First Root‐Race is the mankind of the Second,
Third, Fourth, Fifth, etc. To the last it forms a cyclic and
constant reïncarnation of the Monads belonging to the Dhyân Chohans
of our Planetary Chain.

347 The Dvâpara Yuga differs for each Race. All Races have their own
Cycles, which fact causes a great difference. For instance, the
Fourth Sub‐Race of the Atlanteans was in its Kali Yuga, when they
were destroyed, whereas the Fifth was in its Satya or Krita Yuga.
The Âryan Race is now in its Kali Yuga, and will continue to be in
it for 427,000 years longer, while various “Family Races,” called
the Semitic, Hamitic, etc., are in their own special cycles. The
forthcoming Sixth Sub‐Race—which may begin very soon—will be in its
Satya (Golden) Age while we reap the fruit of our iniquity in our
Kali Yuga.

348 See _Asiatic Researches_, viii. 280.

349 See Dowson’s _Hindû Classical Dictionary_, _sub voce_ “Idâ.”

350 See _Posthumous Humanity_: Translated by H. S. Olcott London, 1887.

351 Professor Newcomb says the heat evolved by contraction would last
only 18,000,000 years. (_Popular Astronomy_, 509.) While a
temperature permitting the existence of water could not be reached
earlier than 10,000,000 years ago. (Winchell’s _World‐Life_, 356.)
But Sir William Thomson says that the whole age of the incrustation
of the Earth is 80,000,000 years, though, this year, he has again
altered his opinion and allows only 15,000,000 years as the age of
the Sun. As will be shown in the Addenda, the divergence of
scientific opinions is so great that no reliance can ever be placed
upon _scientific_ speculation.

352 The essay on _The Plurality of Worlds_ (1853)—an anonymous work, yet
well known to have been the production of Dr. Whewell—is a good
proof of this. No Christian ought to believe in either the plurality
of Worlds or the geological age of the Globe, argues the author;
because, if it is asserted that this World is only one among the
many of its kind, which are all the work of God, as it is itself;
that all are the seat of life, all the realm and dwelling of
intelligent creatures endowed with will, subject to law and capable
of free‐will; then, it would be extravagant to think that _our_
World should have been the subject of God’s favours and His special
interference, of His communications and His _personal visit_. Can
the Earth presume to be considered the centre of the moral and
religious Universe, he asks, if it has not the slightest distinction
to rely upon in the physical Universe? Is it not as absurd to uphold
such an assertion (of the plurality of inhabited worlds), as it
would be to‐day to uphold the old hypothesis of Ptolemy, who placed
the Earth in the centre of our system? The above is quoted from
memory, yet _almost textually_. The author fails to see that he is
bursting his own soap‐bubble with such a defence.

353 _Man’s Place in Nature_, p. 58.

354 _De Cœlo_, II. 13.

355 Or what is more generally known as Protoplasm. This substance
received the name of “Sarcode” from Prof. Dujardin Beaumetz far
earlier than its present appellation.

356 The Monera are indeed Protista. They are neither animals nor plants,
writes Hæckel; “the whole body of the Moneron represents nothing
more than a single thoroughly homogeneous particle of albumen in a
firmly adhesive condition.” (_Journal of Microscopical Science_,
Jan., 1869, p. 28.)

357 Behold the Iguanodon of the Mesozoic ages—the monster 100 feet
long—now transformed into the small Iguana lizard of South America.
Popular traditions about “giants” in days of old, and their mention
in every mythology, including that of the _Bible_, may some day be
shown to be founded on fact. In nature, the logic of analogy alone
should make us accept these _traditions_ as scientific verities.

358 These are the opinions of Burmeister and Czolbe. See _Force and
Matter_, by L. Büchner, edited, by J. F. Collingwood, F.R.S.L., p.
61.

359 _Vishnu Purâna_, II. viii; Fitzedward Hall’s rendering in Wilson’s
Translation, ii. 241.

360 _Ibid._, p. 242.

361 _Introduction à l’Étude des Races Humaines._

362 _Modern Science and Modern Thought_, by S. Laing, p. 32.

363 _Esoteric Buddhism_, p. 70.

364 The same fate is in store for spiritualistic phenomena and all the
other psychological manifestations of the _inner_ man. Since the
days of Hume, whose researches culminated in a nihilistic Idealism,
Psychology has gradually shifted its position to one of crass
Materialism. Hume is regarded as a Psychologist, and yet he denied
_à priori_ the possibility of phenomena in which millions now
believe, including many men of Science. The Hylo‐Idealists of to‐day
are rank Annihilationists. The schools of Spencer and Bain are
respectively positivist and materialist, and not metaphysical at
all. It is _Psychism_ and not Psychology; it reminds one as little
of the Vedântic teaching as does the pessimism of Schopenhauer and
von Hartmann recall the Esoteric Philosophy, the heart and soul of
_true_ Buddhism.

365 It must be noted that, though the astral and physical planes of
Matter ran parallel with one another even in the earliest geological
ages, yet they were not in the same phases of manifestation in which
they are _now_. The Earth did not reach its present _grade of
density_ till 18,000,000 years ago. Since then _both_ the physical
and astral planes have become grosser.

366 The conception and definition of the Absolute by Cardinal Cusa may
satisfy only the Western mind, prisoned, so unconsciously to itself,
and entirely degenerated, by long centuries of scholastic and
theological sophistry. But this “recent philosophy of the Absolute,”
traced by Sir William Hamilton to Cusa, would never satisfy the more
acutely metaphysical mind of the Hindû Vedântin.

367 Cudworth’s _Intellectual System_, I. 328.

368 Issued from the Body of Brahmâ when it became Night.

369 Intellectually vile.

370 Still senseless Race.

371 Race.

372 Intensified.

373 The vehicle of Desire.

374 Higher knowledge.

375 Monads.

376 Primitive human species.

377 _Inst. Div._, II. viii; quoted in Myer’s _Qabbalah_, 116.

378 _Op. cit._, I. v; Wilson’s Trans., Fitzedward Hall’s rendering, i.
72.

379 _Ibid._, ii. 10.

380 _Ibid._, i. 83.

381 Whom Manu calls “paternal grandfathers” (iii. 284). The Rudras are
the seven manifestations of Rudra‐Shiva, the “destroying God,” and
_also_ the grand Yogi and Ascetic.

382 To speak of _life_ as having arisen, and of the human race as having
originated, in this _absurdly unscientific_ way, in the face of the
modern Pedigrees of Man, is to court instantaneous annihilation. The
Esoteric Doctrine risks the danger, nevertheless, and even goes so
far as to ask the impartial reader to compare the above hypothesis
(if it is one) with Hæckel’s theory—now fast becoming an axiom with
Science—which we quote verbatim as follows:

“How did life, the living world of organisms, arise? And, secondly,
the special question: How did the human race originate? The first of
these two enquiries, that as to the first appearance of living
beings, can only be decided empirically [!!] by proof of the so‐
called Archebiosis, or equivocal generation, or the spontaneous
production of organisms of the simplest conceivable kind. Such are
the Monera (Protogenes, Protamœba, Protomyxa, Vampyrella),
exceedingly simple microscopic masses of protoplasm without
structure or organization, which take in nutriment and _reproduce
themselves by division_. Such a Moneron as that primordial organism
_discovered_ by the renowned English zoologist Huxley and named
Bathybius Hæckelii, appears as a continuous thick protoplasmic
covering at the greatest depths of the ocean, between 3,000 and
30,000 feet. _It is true that the first appearance of such Monera
has not up to the present moment been actually observed_; but there
is nothing intrinsically improbable in such an Evolution.” (_The
Pedigree of Man_, Aveling’s translation, p. 33.)

The Bathybius protoplasm having recently turned out to be no organic
substance at all, there remains little to be said. Nor, after
reading this, does one need to consume further time in refuting the
further assertion that: “In that case man also has, _beyond a doubt_
[to the minds of Hæckel and his like], arisen from the lower
Mammalia, apes, the earlier simian creatures, the still earlier
Marsupialia, Amphibia, Pisces, by progressive transformations” (p.
36)—all produced by “a series of _natural forces working blindly,
... without aim, without design_.”

The above‐quoted passage bears its criticism on its own face.
Science is made to teach that, which, up to the present time, “_has
never been actually observed_.” She is made to deny the phenomenon
of an _intelligent_ nature and a vital force independent of form and
matter, and to find it more scientific to teach the miraculous
performance of “natural forces _working blindly without aim or
design_.” If so, then we are led to think that the physico‐
mechanical forces of the brains of certain eminent Scientists are
leading them on as blindly to sacrifice logic and common sense on
the altar of mutual admiration. Why should the protoplasmic Moneron
producing the first living creature through _self‐division_ be held
as a very scientific hypothesis, and an ethereal pre‐human race
generating the primeval men in the same fashion be tabooed as
unscientific superstition? Or has Materialism obtained a sole
monopoly in Science?

383 The Râkshasas, regarded in Indian popular theology as Demons, are
called the “Preservers” beyond the Himâlayas. This double meaning
has its origin in a philosophical allegory, which is variously
rendered in the _Purânas_. It is stated that when Brahmâ created the
Demons, Yakshas (from _yaksh_, to eat) and the Râkshasas, both of
which kinds of Demons, as soon as born, wished to devour their
Creator, “those among them that called out ‘Not so: oh! let him be
saved [preserved]!’ were named Râkshasas.” (_Vishnu Purâna_, I. v.;
Wilson, i. 82.) The _Bhâgavata Purâna_ (III. 20, 19‐21; _ibid._,
_loc. cit._) renders the allegory differently. “Brahmâ transformed
himself into night [or ignorance] invested with a body.” This the
Yakshas and Râkshasas seized, exclaiming, “Do not spare it; devour
it.” Brahmâ cried out, “Do not devour me; spare me.” This has an
inner meaning of course. The “Body of Night” is the darkness of
ignorance, and it is the darkness of silence and secrecy. Now the
Râkshasas are shown in almost every case to be Yogîs, pious Sâdhus
and Initiates, a rather unusual occupation for Demons. The meaning
then is that while we have power to dispel the darkness of
ignorance—“devour it”—we have to preserve the sacred truth from
profanation. “Brahmâ is for the Brâhmans alone,” says that proud
caste. The moral of the _fable_ is evident.

384 The gradual evolution of man in the Secret Doctrine shows that all
the later (to the profane the earliest) Races have their _physical_
origin in the early Fourth Race. But it is the sub‐race, which
preceded the one that separated sexually, that is to be regarded as
the _spiritual_ ancestors of our present generations, and especially
of the Eastern Âryan Races. Weber’s idea that the Indo‐Germanic Race
preceded the Âryan Vedic Race is, to the Occultist, grotesque to the
last degree.

385 _Cf._ especially Schmidt’s _Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism_, pp.
39 _et seqq._, and Laing’s _A Modern Zoroastrian_, pp. 102‐111.

386 Every process of healing and cicatrization in the higher animal
groups—even in the case of reproduction of mutilated limbs with the
Amphibians—is effected by _fission_ and _gemmation_ of the
elementary morphological elements.

387 The term here means neither the dolicho‐cephalic nor the brachyo‐
cephalic, nor yet skulls of a smaller volume, but simply brains
devoid of intellect generally. The theory which would judge of the
intellectual capacity of a man according to his cranial capacity,
seems absurdly illogical to one who has studied the subject. The
skulls of the stone period, as well as those of African races
(Bushmen included) show that the first are above rather than below
the average of the brain capacity of the modern man, and the skulls
of the last are on the whole (as also in the case of Papuans and
Polynesians generally) larger by one cubic inch than that of the
average Frenchman. Again, the cranial capacity of the Parisian of
to‐day represents an average of 1437 cubic centimetres compared to
1523 of the Auvergnat.

388 A. Lefèvre, _Philosophy_, p. 498.

389 _Principles of Zoology_, p. 206.

390 i. 154.

391 The boneless.

392 The _first_ Sweat‐born. This is explained in the Section which
follows this series of Stanzas in the allegory from the _Purânas_
concerning Kandu, the holy sage, and Pramlochâ, the nymph who is
alleged to have hypnotized him; a suggestive allegory,
scientifically, as the drops of perspiration which she exuded, are
the symbols of the spores of Science.

393 This will be explained as we proceed. This unwillingness to fashion
men, or create, is symbolized in the _Purânas_ by Daksha’s dealings
with his opponent Nârada, the “strife‐making ascetic.”

394 Androgyne Third Race. The Evolutionist Professor Schmidt alludes to
“the fact of the separation of sexes, as to the derivation of which
from species _once hermaphrodite_ all [the believers in Creation
naturally excepted] are assuredly of one accord.” (_Doctrine of
Descent and Darwinism_, p. 159.) Such indeed is the incontestable
evidence drawn from the presence of rudimentary organs. Apart from
such palpable traces of a primeval hermaphroditism, the fact may be
noted that, as Laing writes, “a study of embryology ... shows that
in the _human higher animal_ species the distinction of sex is not
developed until a _considerable progress_ has been made in the
growth of the embryo.” (_A Modern Zoroastrian_, p. 106.) The Law of
Retardation—operative alike in the case of human races, animal
species, etc., when a higher type has once been evolved—still
preserves hermaphroditism as the reproductive method of the majority
of plants and many lower animals.

395 Vehicle.

396 _Vishnu Purâna_, I. vii; Wilson, i. 100.

397 See _Five Years of Theosophy_, p. 111.

398 For explanations and a philosophical account of the nature of those
Beings, which are now viewed as the “evil” and rebellious Spirits,
the Creators by Kriyâshakti, the reader is referred to the chapters
on “The Myth of the ‘Fallen Angel,’ in its Various Aspects,” in Part
II of this Volume.

399 _Vishnu Purâna_, III. ii.

400 In the oldest MS. of the _Vishnu Purâna_ in the possession of an
Initiate in Southern India, the God is not Indra, but Kâma, the God
of love and desire.

401 These are the exoteric figures given in a purposely reversed and
distorted way, being the figure of the duration of the cycle between
the First and Second human Race. All Orientalists to the contrary,
there is not a word in any of the _Purânas_ that has not a special
esoteric meaning.

402 _Vishnu Purâna_, I. xv; Wilson, ii. 5. Compare also Vivien’s
temptation of Merlin (Tennyson)—the same legend in Irish tradition.

403 x. 129.

404 The text has: “From Brahmâ, continuing to meditate, were born mind‐
engendered progeny, with forms and faculties derived from his
corporeal nature, _embodied spirits_, produced from the limbs
(Gâtra) of Dhîmat (all‐wise deity).” All these beings were the abode
of the three qualities of Devasarga, or divine creation, which, as
the five‐fold creation, is _devoid of clearness of perception,
without reflection_, dull of nature. “But as they _did not multiply
themselves_, Brahmâ created other mind‐born sons like himself,”
namely, the Brahmarshis, or the Prajâpatis, ten and seven in number.
“Sanandana and the other sons of Vedhas (Brahmâ) were previously
created,” but as shown elsewhere, they were “_without desire or
passion_, inspired with holy wisdom, estranged from the universe and
undesirous of progeny.” (_Vishnu Purâna_, X. vii; Wilson’s Trans.,
i. 100, 101.) These Sanandana and other Kumâras are then the Gods,
who after refusing to “create progeny” are forced to incarnate in
senseless men. The reader must pardon unavoidable repetitions in
view of the great number of facts given.

405 Compare Schlagintweit’s _Buddhism in Tibet_, pp. 88‐90.

406 See Edkins’ _Chinese Buddhism_, p. 208.

407 The previous Third Round.

408 Of this Round.

409 An allegorical reference to the “Sacred Animals” of the Zodiac and
other heavenly bodies. Some Kabalists see in them the prototypes of
the animals.

410 In _Hesiod_, Zeus creates his Third Race of men out of ash‐trees. In
the _Popol Vuh_ the Third Race of men is created out of the tree
Tzita and the marrow of the reed called Sibac. But Sibac means “egg”
in the mystery language of the Artufas, or Initiation caves. In a
report sent in 1812 to the Cortes by Don Baptista Pino it is said:
“All the Pueblos have their Artufas—so the natives call subterranean
rooms with only a single door where they (secretly) assemble....
These are impenetrable temples ... and the doors are always closed
to the Spaniards.... They adore the Sun and Moon ... fire and the
great _Snake_ (the creative power), whose eggs are called Sibac.”

411 There is a notable difference _esoterically_ between the words Sarpa
and Nâga, though they are both used indiscriminately. Sarpa,
serpent, is from the root _srip_, to creep, compare, Lat., _serp‐o_;
and they are called Ahi, from _hâ_, to abandon. The Sarpas were
produced from Brahmâ’s hair, which, owing to his fright at beholding
the Yakshas, whom he had created horrible to behold, fell off from
the head, each hair becoming a serpent. They are called “Sarpa from
their creeping and Ahi because they had deserted the head.” (Wilson,
i. 83.) But the Nâgas, in the allegories, their serpent’s tail
notwithstanding, do not creep, but manage to walk, run and fight.

412 Wilson translates the word as “demigods” (_Vishnu Purâna_, i. 130);
but Raumas are simply a race, a tribe.

413 xii. 10,308.

414 Wilson, _ibid._, p. 123.

415 _Ibid._, ii. 10.

416 Serpents.

417 Race.

418 Also.

419 Into male and female.

420 Then.

421 Man.

422 The “narrow‐headed.” Compare Shloka 24.

423 The “narrow‐headed.”

424 See Commentary on Shloka 36.

425 These “animals,” or monsters, are not the anthropoid or any other
apes, but verily what the Anthropologists might call the “missing
link,” the primitive lower man.

426 The shame of their animal origin which our modern Scientists would
emphasize if they could.

427 _The Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism_, pp. 186, 187. The “unknown
ancestry” referred to are the _primæval_ astral prototypes.

428 “A very strong argument in favour of variability is supplied by the
science of embryology. Is not a man in the uterus ... a simple cell,
a vegetable with three or four leaflets, a tadpole with branchiæ, a
mammal with a tail, lastly a primate [?] and a biped? It is scarcely
possible not to recognize in the embryonic evolution a rapid sketch,
a faithful summary, of the entire organic series.” (Lefèvre,
_Philosophy_, p. 484.)

The summary alluded to is, however, only that of the _store of
types_ hoarded up in man, the microcosm. This simple explanation
meets all such objections, as the presence of the rudimentary tail
in the fœtus—a fact triumphantly paraded by Hæckel and Darwin as
conclusively in favour of the Ape‐Ancestor Theory. It may also be
pointed out that _the presence of a vegetable with leaflets_ in the
embryonic stages is _not explained_ on ordinary evolutionist
principles. Darwinists have not traced man through the vegetable,
but Occultists have. _Why then this feature in the embryo_, and how
do the former explain it?

429 “The Proofs of Evolution,” a lecture by Hæckel.

430 Vol. i. pp. 388‐390.

431 See Cory, _Ancient Fragments_, pp. 21, _et seqq._

432 _Origin of Species_, pp. 448, 449, first edition.

433 Vol. i. p. 154.

434 The sin committed with the animals.

435 The Spirits, the “Sons of Wisdom.”

436 Who had refused to “create.”

437 Mindless.

438 Mind.

439 This verse in the _Rig Veda_ (x. 5, 6): “The Seven Wise Ones [Rays
of Wisdom, Dhyânis] fashion Seven Paths [or Lines, and also Races in
another sense]. To one of these may the distressed mortal come”—a
verse interpreted solely from the astronomical and cosmic aspect, is
one of the most pregnant in occult meaning. The “Paths” may mean
Lines (Maryâdâh), but they are primarily Beams of Light falling on
the Paths leading to Wisdom. (See _Rig Veda_, iv. 5‐13.) It means
“Ways” or Paths. They are, in short, the seven Rays which fall free
from the Macrocosmic Centre, the seven Principles in the
metaphysical, the seven Races in the physical sense. All depends
upon the key used.

440 _Rig Veda_, x. 10, 5, 2.

441 It is next to impossible to translate verbally some of these old
Commentaries. We are often obliged to give the meaning only, and
thus retranslate the verbatim translations.

442 Rudra, as a Kumâra, is Nîlalohita—red and blue.

443 This, regardless of modern materialistic evolution, which speculates
in this wise: “The primitive human form, whence as we think all
human species sprang, has perished this long time. [This we deny: it
has only decreased in size and changed in texture.] But many facts
point to the conclusion that it was hairy and dolichocephalic.
[African races are even _now_ dolichocephalic in a great measure,
but the palæolithic Neanderthal skull, the oldest we know of, is of
a large size, and no nearer to the capacity of the gorilla’s cranium
than that of any other now‐living man.] Let us, for the time being,
call this hypothetical species _homo primigenius_.... This first
species, or the ape‐man, the ancestor of all the others, _probably_
arose in the _tropical regions_ of the old world from _anthropoid
apes_.” Asked for proofs, the Evolutionist, not the least daunted,
replies: “Of these _no fossil remains are as yet known to us, but
they were probably akin to the Gorilla and Orang of the present
day_.” And then the Papuan negro is mentioned as the probable
descendant in the first line. (_Pedigree of Man_, p. 80.)

Hæckel holds fast to Lemuria, which, with East Africa and South Asia
also, he mentions as the possible cradle of the primitive ape‐men.
So also do many Geologists. Mr. A. R. Wallace admits its reality,
though in a rather modified sense, in his _Geographical Distribution
of Animals_. But let not Evolutionists speak so lightly of the
comparative size of the brains of man and the ape, for this is very
_unscientific_, especially when they pretend to see no difference
between the two, or very little at any rate. For Vogt himself showed
that, while the highest of the apes, the Gorilla, has a brain of
only 30 to 51 cubic inches, the brain of the lowest of the
Australian aborigines amounts to 99·35 cubic inches. The former is
thus “not half of the size of the brain of a new‐born babe,” says
Pfaff.

444 Ellis’ _Polynesian Researches_, Vol. II, p. 38. Missionaries seem to
have pounced upon this name _Ivi_ and made of it _Eve_. But, as
shown by Professor Max Müller, Eve is not the Hebrew name but a
European transformation of חוה, Châvah, life, or mother of all
living; “while the Tahitian _ivi_, and the Maori, _wheva_, meant
bone, and bone only.” (_Introduction to the Science of Religion_, p.
304.)

445 _Chaire d’Hébreu au Collége de France_, p. 20.

446 Of such semi‐animal creatures, the sole remnants known to Ethnology
were the Tasmanians, a _portion_ of the Australians and a mountain
tribe in China, the men and women of which are entirely covered with
hair. They were the last descendants in a _direct_ line of the semi‐
animal latter‐day Lemurians referred to. There are, however,
considerable numbers of the mixed Lemuro‐Atlantean peoples produced
by various crossings with such semi‐human stocks—_e.g._, the wild
men of Borneo, the Veddhas of Ceylon, classed by Prof. Flower among
Âryans (!), most of the remaining Australians, Bushmen, Negritos,
Andaman Islanders, etc.

The Australians of the Gulf of St. Vincent and the neighbourhood of
Adelaide are _very hairy_, and the brown down on the skin of boys of
five or six years of age assumes a _furry appearance_. They are,
however, degraded _men_; not the closest approximation to the
“pithecoid man,” as Hæckel so sweepingly affirms. Only a portion of
these men are a Lemurian relic. (_Cf._ _Esoteric Buddhism_, pp. 64
_et seqq._)

447 In calling the animal “soulless” we do not deprive the beast, from
the humblest to the highest species, of a Soul, but only of a
conscious surviving Ego‐Soul, _i.e._, that principle which survives
after a man, and reïncarnates in a like man. The animal has an
Astral Body, that survives the physical form for a short period;
nevertheless its (animal) Monad does not reïncarnate in the same,
but in a higher species, and has no “Devachan” of course. It has the
_seeds_ of all the human principles in itself, but they are
_latent_.

448 _Manual of Geology_, p. 302.

449 The “fables” and “myths” about Leda and Jupiter, and such like,
could never have sprung up in people’s fancy, had not the allegory
rested on a fact in Nature. Evolution, gradually transforming man
into a mammal, did in his case only what it did in that of other
animals. But this does not prevent man from having always stood at
the head of the animal world and other organic species, and from
having preceded the former.

450 See the Section on “The Chronology of the Brâhmans,” p. 69.

451 To avoid confusion, let the reader remember that the term Root‐Race
applies to one of the seven great Races, sub‐race to one of its
great Branches, and family‐race to one of the sub‐divisions, which
include nations and large tribes.

452 In the Section on “The Fifth Race and its Divine Instructors,” in
the Commentary on Stanza XII, the nature of these “Instructors” is
explained.

453 The present yellow races are the descendants, however, of the early
branches of the Fourth Race. Of the Third, the only _pure and
direct_ descendants are, as said above, a portion of the fallen and
degenerated Australians, whose far distant ancestors belonged to a
division of the seventh sub‐race of the Third. The rest are of mixed
Lemuro‐Atlantean descent. They have since then entirely changed in
stature and intellectual capacities.

454 _Language_ is certainly coëval with reason, and could never have
been developed before men became one with the informing principles
in them—those who fructified and awoke to life the mânasic element
dormant in primitive man. For, as Professor Max Müller tells us in
his _Science of Thought_: “Thought and language are identical.” To
add to this, however, the reflection that _thoughts which are too
deep for words, do not really exist at all_, is rather risky, for
thought impressed upon the astral tablets exists in eternity whether
expressed or not. _Logos_ is both reason and speech. But language,
proceeding in cycles, is not always adequate to express _spiritual_
thoughts. Moreover, in one sense, the Greek Logos is the equivalent
of the Sanskrit Vâch, “the immortal (intellectual) ray of spirit.”
And the fact that Vâch (as Devasenâ, an _aspect_ of Sarasvatî, the
Goddess of Hidden Wisdom) is the spouse of the eternal celibate
Kumâra, unveils a suggestive, though veiled, reference to the
Kumâras, those “who refused to create,” but who were compelled later
on to complete _divine_ Man by incarnating in him. All this will be
fully explained in the Sections that follow.

455 Ptolemy, speaking in his ninth table of the Kabolitæ or Kabul
tribes, calls them Ἀριστόφυλοι, Aristophyli, the aristocratic or
noble tribes. The Afghans call themselves Ben‐Issraël, children of
Is (sa) raël, from Issa, “woman and also earth,” sons of Mother
Earth. But if you call an Afghan Yahoudi (Jew), he will kill you.
The names of the supposed twelve tribes of the Jews, and the names
of the real twelve tribes of the Afghans, are the same. The Afghans
being far older (at any rate, their Arabic stock) than the
Israëlites, no one need be surprised to find such tribal names among
them as Youssoufzic, sons of Joseph, in Punjcaure and Boonere;
Zablistanee (Zebulon); Ben‐manasseh, sons of Manasseh, among the
Khojar Tartars; Isaguri, or Issachar, now Ashnagor in Afghanistan,
etc. The whole twelve names of the so‐called twelve tribes are names
of the signs of the Zodiac, as is now well proven. In any case, the
names of the oldest Arabic tribes, re‐transliterated, yield the
names of the zodiacal signs and likewise of the mythical sons of
Jacob. Where are the traces of the Jewish twelve tribes? Nowhere.
But there is a trace, and a deep one, that the Jews have tried to
deceive people with the help of these names. For, see what happens
ages after the _ten tribes_ had wholly disappeared from Babylon.
Ptolemy Philadelphus, desiring to have the Hebrew Law translated for
him into Greek (the famous Septuagint), wrote to the high priest of
the Jews, Eleazar, to send him _six men from each of the twelve
tribes_; and the _seventy‐two representatives_ (of whom sixty were
ghosts apparently) came to the king in Egypt and translated the Law
amid miracles and wonders. See Butler’s _Horæ Biblicæ_, Josephus,
and Philo Judæus.

456 The Commentary explains that the apes are the only species, among
the animals, which has gradually, and with every generation and
variety, tended more and more to return to the original type of its
male forefather—the dark gigantic Lemurian and Atlantean.

457 Androgyne.

458 Dr. A. Wilder; who says that Gan‐duniyas is a name of Babylonia.

459 Vol. i. pp. 575, 576.

460 _Foĕ‐kouĕ‐ki; ou Relations des Royaumes Bouddhiques_; par Chy Fa‐
hian: translated by Abel Remusat.

461 Seventh year, 1855.

462 De Mirville’s _Des Esprits_, ii. 423. See also Moses Maimonides,
_More Nevochim_.

463 _Sciences Occultes_, p. 464.

464 _Révolution du Globe_, Vol. v. p. 247.

465 We read in De Mirville’s “Mémoire â l’Académie” (ii. 431) of the
“naïve astonishment of Geoffroy St. Hilaire, when M. de Paravey
showed to him, in some old Chinese works and Babylonian tiles,
dragons, ... ornithorhynchuses and saurians (aquatic animals _found
only in Australia_), etc., extinct animals that he had thought
unknown on earth ... till his own day.”

466 See _Isaiah_, xxx. 6: “The viper and the flying serpent,” and the
fiery serpents conquered by the brazen serpent of Moses.

467 The fossils, reconstructed by Science which we know, ought to be
sufficient warrant for the possibility of even a Leviathan, not to
mention Isaiah’s flying serpents, or Saraph Mehophep, words which
are translated in all the Hebrew dictionaries as “Saraph,” enflamed
or fiery venom, and “Mehophep,” flying. But, although Christian
Theology has always connected both Leviathan and Saraph Mehophep
with the Devil, the expressions are metaphorical and have nought to
do with the “Evil One.” Nevertheless, the word “Dragon” has now
become a synonym for the latter. In Bretagne the word Drouk now
signifies “Devil,” whence, as we are told by Cambry (_Monuments
Celtiques_, p. 299), the Devil’s Tomb in England, Droghedanum
Sepulcrum. In Languedoc the meteoric fires and will‐o’‐the‐wisps are
called Drac, and in Bretagne Dreag and Wraie or wraith; the castle
of Drogheda in Ireland meaning the Devil’s castle. (De Mirville,
_ibid._, ii. 423.)

468 The ultramontane writers accept the whole series of draconian
stories given by Father Kircher, in his _Œdipus Ægyptiacus_, “De
Genesi Draconum,” quite seriously. According to that Jesuit, he
himself saw a dragon which was killed in 1669 by a Roman peasant, as
the director of the Museo Barberini sent it to him, to take the
beast’s likeness, which Father Kircher did and had it published in
one of his _in‐folios_. After this he received a letter from
Christopher Scherer, Prefect of the Canton of Soleure, Switzerland,
in which that official certifies to his having seen himself, _with
his own eyes_, one fine summer night in 1619, a living dragon.
Having remained on his balcony “to contemplate the perfect purity of
the firmament,” he writes, “I saw a fiery, shining dragon rise from
one of the caves of Mount Pilatus and direct himself rapidly towards
Fluelen to the other end of the lake. Enormous in size, his tail was
still longer and his neck stretched out. His head and jaws were
those of a serpent. In flying, he emitted on his way numerous sparks
(? !).... I thought at first I was seeing a meteor, but soon,
looking more attentively, I was convinced by his flight and the
conformation of his body that I saw a _veritable dragon_. I am happy
to be thus able to enlighten your Reverence on the _very real_
existence of those animals”—in _dreams_, the writer ought to have
added, of long past ages. (_Ibid._, p. 424.)

469 As a convincing proof of the reality of the fact, a Roman Catholic
refers the reader to the picture of the incident painted by Simon de
Sienne, a friend of the poet, on the portal of the Church Notre Dame
du Don at Avignon, notwithstanding the prohibition of the Sovereign
Pontiff, who “would not allow this triumph of love to be enthroned
in the holy place”; and adds: “Time has injured the work of art, but
has not weakened its tradition.” (_Ibid._, p. 425.) De Mirville’s
“Dragon‐Devils” of our era seem to have no luck, as they disappear
most mysteriously from the museums where they are said to have been.
Thus the Dragon embalmed by Ulysses Aldovrandus and presented to the
Musée du Sénat, either in Naples or Bologna, “was there still in
1700,” but is there no more. (_Ibid._, p. 427.)

470 _Op. cit._, ii. 422.

471 _Ibid._, p. 433.

472 _Ibid._, pp. 432, 433. This is about as just as though, a few
millenniums hence, a fanatic of some future new creed, who was bent
upon glorifying _his_ religion at the expense of _ancient_
Christianity, were to say: Everywhere the quadruped lamb was adored.
The nun, calling it the Agnus, placed it on her bosom; the priest
laid it on the altar. It figured in every Paschal meal, and was
glorified loudly in every temple. And yet the Christians dreaded it
and hated it, for they slew and devoured it. Heathens, at any rate,
do not eat their sacred symbols. We know of no serpent or reptile‐
eaters, except in Christian civilized countries, where they begin
with frogs and eels, and must end with real snakes, as they have
begun with lamb and ended with horse‐flesh.

473 _Ibid._, p. 423.

474 _Pantheon_, 3.

475 The Solar Chnouphis, or Agathodæmon, is the Christos of the
Gnostics, as every scholar knows. He is intimately connected with
the Seven Sons of Sophia (Wisdom), the Seven Sons of Aditi,
Universal Wisdom, her eighth being Mârttânda, the Sun, which Seven
are the Seven Planetary Regents or Genii. Therefore Chnouphis was
the Spiritual Sun of Enlightenment, of Wisdom, hence the patron of
all the Egyptian Initiates, as Bel‐Merodach, or Bel‐Belitanus,
became later with the Chaldæans.

476 Hermes, or rather Thot, was a generic name. Abul Feda shows in his
_Historia Anti‐Islamitica_, five Hermes, and the names of Hermes,
Nebo, Thot were given respectively in various countries to great
Initiates. Thus Nebo, the son of Merodach and Zarpanitu, whom
Herodotus calls Zeus‐Belos, gave his name to all the great Prophets,
Seers and Initiates. They were all “Serpents of Wisdom,” as
connected with the Sun astronomically, and with Wisdom spiritually.

477 _Pantheon_, text 15.

478 i. 555.

479 _Genesis_, xlix. 17, 18, and 5, 6.

480 Dunlap, in his Introduction to _Sod, the Mysteries of Adoni_ (xi),
explains the word “Sod” as _arcanum_, religious mystery, on the
authority of Schindler’s _Penteglott_, 1201. “The secret of the Lord
is with them that fear him,” says _Psalm_, xxv. 14. This is a
mistranslation of the Christians, for it ought to read: “Sod Ihoh
(the Mysteries of Ihoh) are for _those who fear him_.” “Al [El] is
terrible in the great Sod of the Kedeshim (the Priests, the Holy,
the Initiated).”—_Psalm_, lxxxix. 7 (_ibid._). The Kedeshim were
very far from holy. See the Section on “The Holy of Holies,” in Part
II of this Volume.

481 “The members of the Priest‐Colleges were called Sodales,” says
Freund’s _Latin Lexicon_ (iv. 448). “Sodalities were constituted in
the Idæan Mysteries of the Mighty Mother,” writes Cicero in _De
Senectute_. (Dunlap, _ibid._, p. xii.)

482 xxx. 6.

483 The priests of Baal who jumped over the fires. But this was a Hebrew
term and a local one. Saraph means “fiery or flaming venom.”

484 _Book of the Dead_, ch. xxxix.

485 The same ram’s horns are found on the heads of Moses which were seen
on some old medals by the writer in Palestine, one of which is still
in her possession. The horns, forming part of the shining aureole on
the statue of Moses in Rome by Michael Angelo, are vertical instead
of being bent down to the ears, but the emblem is the same; hence
the Brazen Serpent.

486 But see Harris’ _Magic Papyrus_, No. v, and the ram‐headed Ammon
manufacturing men on a potter’s wheel.

487 Brasseur de Bourbourg, _Mexique_, pp. 135 and 574.

488 Ulûpî (Ulûpl) has an entirely Atlantean ring about it. Like
Atlantis, it is neither a Greek nor a Sanskrit name, but reminds one
of Mexican names.

489 _Mahâbhârata_, Âdi Parva, Shlokas 7788, 7789. The _Bhâgavata Purâna_
(ix. xx. 31), as explained by Shrîdhara, the commentator, makes
Ulûpî the daughter of the king of Manipûra (see _Vishnu Purâna_,
Wilson, iv. 160); but the late Pandit Dayânand Sarasvatî, certainly
the greatest Sanskrit and Paurânic authority in India on such
questions, personally corroborated that Ulûpî was daughter of the
king of the Nâgas in Pâtâla, or America, 5,000 years ago, and that
the Nâgas were Initiates.

490 _Isis Unveiled_, ii. 293.

491 Foh‐tchou, in Chinese meaning literally Buddha’s lord, or the
teacher of the doctrines of Buddha—Foh.

492 This mountain is situated south‐west of China, almost between China
and Tibet.

493 _Ibid._, pp. 293, 294.

494 Let the reader be reminded that in the _Zohar_, and also in all the
Kabalistic works, it is maintained that “Metatron united with
Shekinah.” Now Shekinah as the Veil (Grace) of Ain Suph,
representing the Logos, is that very Tree of Knowledge; while
Shamaël—the dark _aspect_ of the Logos—occupies only the bark of
that tree, and has the knowledge of _evil_ alone. As Lacour, who saw
in the scene of the Fall (_Genesis_, iii) an incident pertaining to
Egyptian Initiation, says: “The Tree of the Divination, or of the
Knowledge of Good and Evil ... is the science of Tzyphon, the Genius
of Doubt, _tzy_ to teach, and _phon_, doubt. Tzyphon is one of the
Aleim; we shall see him presently under the name of Nach, the
tempter” (_Les Œloim_, vol. ii. p. 218). He is now known to
Symbologists under the name of Jehovah.

495 This is the view taken and adopted by all the Church Fathers, but it
is not the real Esoteric Teaching. The _curse_ did not begin with
the formation of either man or woman, for their separation was a
natural sequence of evolution, but with _the breaking of the law_.

496 By which _human_ nature lives; not even the animal—but the
misguided, sensual and vicious nature, which _men_, not Nature,
created. See the Section “Cross and Circle.”

497 See _Zohar_, i. 172, _a_ and _b_.

498 Compare the Section on “The Mysteries of the Hebdomad” in Part II of
this Volume.

499 Gould’s _Mythical Monsters_, p. 1.

500 _The Unicorn: a Mythological Investigation_, Robert Brown, junr.,
F.S.A. London, 1881.

501 _Mythical Monsters_, pp. 2‐4.

502 _Ibid._, p. 20.

503 _Ibid._, pp. 36, 37.

504 _The Human Species_, p. 52.

505 _Manual of Geology_, p. 301.

506 _Ibid._, p. 17.

507 Gould’s _Mythical Monsters_, p. 16. See also _Recherches, etc., des
Mammifères_, plate 1. Paris, 1868 to 1874.

508 Preface to the _Shan Hai King_, or “Wonders by Land and Sea.”

509 Vol. i. pp. 589, _et seqq._

510 There are Archæologists, who, like Mr. James Fergusson, refuse any
great antiquity to even one single monument in India. In his work,
_Illustrations of the Rock‐Cut Temples of India_, he ventures to
express the very extraordinary opinion that “Egypt had ceased to be
a nation before the earliest of the cave‐temples of India was
excavated.” In short, he does not admit the existence of any cave‐
temple anterior to the reign of Ashoka, and seems anxious to prove
that most of these rock‐cut temples were executed during a period
extending from the time of that pious Buddhist king until the
destruction of the Andhra dynasty of Magadha, in the beginning of
the fifth century. We believe such a claim to be perfectly
arbitrary. Further discoveries will show that it is erroneous and
unwarranted.

511 America, at the time of its discovery, was called _Atlanta_ by some
native tribes.

512 Since then Donnelly’s _Atlantis_ has appeared, and soon its actual
existence will have become a scientific fact.

513 It is so divided to this day, and Theosophists and Occultists, who
have learned something of the occult but undeniable power of
Dugpaship at their own expense, know this but too well.

514 See De Mirville’s _Pneumatologie: Des Esprits_, iii. 57, _et seqq._

515 See Max Müller, _Chips_, i. 339; “Popol Vuh.” Compare also Holmberg,
_Ethnographische Skizzen über die Völker des Russischen Amerika_.
Helsingfors, 1855.

516 _Op. cit._, pp. 13‐15.

517 _Ibid._, p. 308.

518 An approach to the statues at Bamian—also a Buddha 200 feet high—is
found near a Jain settlement in Southern India, and appears to be
the only one that remains at present.

519 Even Wilson admits that Râma and Râvana were personages founded on
historical facts. “The traditions of the South of India uniformly
ascribe its civilization ... and the settlement of civilized Hindûs
[the Fifth Race] to the conquest of Lankâ by Râma” (_Vishnu Purâna_,
iii. 318)—the victory of the “Sons of Gods” over the Atlantean
sorcerers, says the _true_ tradition.

520 Thus we are shown one hero, to give an instance, first born as the
“unrighteous but valiant monarch” (Purusha) of the Daityas,
Hiranyakashipu, slain by the Avatâra Nara‐sinha (Man‐lion). Then he
was born as Râvana, the giant king of Lankâ, and killed by Râma;
after which he is reborn as Shishupâla, the son of Rajarshi (King
Rishi) Damaghosha, when he is again killed by Krishna, the last
incarnation of Vishnu. This parallel evolution of Vishnu (Spirit)
with a Daitya, as man, may seem meaningless, yet it gives us the key
not only to the respective dates of Râma and Krishna but even to a
certain psychological mystery.

521 Compare _Hibbert Lectures_, 1877, Sayce, pp. 134‐138.

522 The Gods became No‐Gods.

523 Race.

524 Yellow‐white.

525 Strictly speaking, it is only from the time of the Atlantean, brown
and yellow giant races, that one ought to speak of _man_, since it
was the Fourth Race only which was the first _completely human
species_, however much larger in size than we are now. In _Man:
Fragments of Forgotten History_ (by two Chelâs), all that is said of
the Atlanteans is quite correct. It is chiefly this Race which
became “black with sin,” that brought the divine names of the
Asuras, the Râkshasas and the Daityas, into disrepute, and passed
them on to posterity as the names of fiends. For, as said, the
Suras, Gods or Devas, having incarnated in the wise men of Atlantis,
the names of Asuras and Râkshasas were given to the ordinary
Atlanteans. Owing to the incessant conflicts of the latter with the
last remnants of the Third Race and the “Sons of Will and Yoga,”
their names have led to the later allegories about them in the
_Purânas_. “Asura was the generic appellation of all the Atlanteans
who were the enemies of the spiritual heroes of the Âryans (Gods).”
(_Man_, p. 77.)

526 In the beginning.

527 The sub‐races.

528 Their colours.

529 Stanza VII, Shloka 24.

530 See Shlokas 32, 34.

531 In general, the so‐called orthodox Christian conceptions about the
“fallen” Angels or Satan, are as remarkable as they are absurd.
About a dozen could be cited, of the most varied character as to
details, and all from the pens of educated lay authors, “university
graduates” of the present quarter of our century. Thus, the author
of _Earth’s Earliest Ages_, G. H. Pember, M.A., devotes a thick
volume to proving Theosophists, Spiritualists, Agnostics, Mystics,
metaphysicians, poets, and every contemporary author on Oriental
speculations, to be the devoted servants of the “Prince of the Air,”
and irretrievably damned. He describes Satan and his Antichrist in
this wise:

“Satan is the ‘Anointed Cherub’ of old.... God created Satan, the
fairest and wisest of all His creatures in this part of His
Universe, and made him Prince of the World, and of the Power of the
Air.... He was placed in an Eden, which was both far anterior to the
Eden of Genesis ... and of an altogether different and more
substantial character, resembling the New Jerusalem. Thus, Satan
being perfect in wisdom, and beauty, his vast empire is our earth,
if not the whole solar system.... Certainly no other angelic power
of greater or even equal dignity has been revealed to us. The
Archangel Michael himself is quoted by Jude as preserving towards
the Prince of Darkness _the respect due to a superior_, however
wicked he may be, until God has formally commanded his deposition.”
Then we are informed that “Satan was from the moment of his creation
surrounded by the _insignia of royalty_” (! !): that he “awoke to
consciousness to find the air filled with the rejoicing music of
those whom God had appointed.” Then the Devil “passes from the
royalty to his _priestly dignity_” (! ! !). “Satan was also a
_priest of the Most High_,” etc., etc. And now—“Antichrist will be
Satan incarnate.” (Chap. III and pp. 56‐59.) The pioneers of the
coming Apollyon have already appeared—they are the Theosophists, the
Occultists, the authors of the _Perfect Way_, of _Isis Unveiled_, of
the _Mystery of the Ages_, and even of the _Light of Asia_ ! ! The
author notes the “avowed origin” of Theosophy from the “descending
angels,” from the “Nephilim,” or the Angels of _Genesis_ (vi), and
the Giants. He ought to note his own descent from them also, as our
_Secret Doctrine_ endeavours to show—unless he refuses to belong to
the present humanity.

532 Compare x. 8, where it speaks of all who have come before Jesus,
being “thieves and robbers.”

533 Verse 14.

534 _Luke_, x. 18.

535 It is not correct to refer to Christ—as some Theosophists do—as
Buddhi, the sixth principle in man. The latter _per se_ is a passive
and latent principle, the Spiritual Vehicle of Âtmâ, inseparable
from the manifested Universal Soul. It is only in union and in
conjunction with _Self‐consciousness_ that Buddhi becomes the Higher
Self and the Divine, discriminating Soul. Christos is the seventh
principle, if anything.

536 xix. 7.

537 _Ibid._, verse 8.

538 xviii. 24.

539 To make it plainer, any one who reads the passage in _Luke_, will
see that the remark follows the report of the _seventy_, who rejoice
that “even the devils [the spirit of controversy and reasoning, or
the opposing power, since Satan means simply ‘adversary’ or
‘opponent’] are subject unto us through thy name.” (_Luke_, x. 17.)
Now, “thy name” means the name of Christos, or Logos, or the Spirit
of true Divine Wisdom, as distinct from the spirit of intellectual
or mere materialistic reasoning—the Higher Self in short. And when
Jesus remarks on this that he has “beheld Satan as lightning fall
from heaven,” it is a mere statement of his clairvoyant powers,
notifying to them that he already knew it, and a reference to the
incarnation of the Divine Ray—the Gods or Angels—which _falls into
generation_. For not all men, by any means, benefit by that
incarnation, and with some the power remains latent and dead during
the whole life. Truly “no man knoweth who the Son is, but the
Father; and who the Father is, but the Son,” as added by Jesus then
and there (verse 22)—the “Church of Christ” less than any one else.
The Initiates alone understood the secret meaning of the terms
“Father” and “Son,” and knew that it referred to Spirit and Soul on
the Earth. For the teachings of Christ were Occult teachings, which
could only be explained at Initiation. They were never intended for
the masses, for Jesus forbade the twelve to go to the Gentiles and
the Samaritans (_Matth._, x. 5), and repeated to his disciples that
the “mystery of the kingdom of God” was for them alone, not for the
multitudes (_Mark_, iv. 11).

540 So, for instance, in the _Purânas_, Pulastya, a Prajâpati, or son of
Brahmâ—the progenitor of the Râkshasas, and the grandfather of
Râvana, the great king of Lankâ in the _Râmâyana_—had, in a _former
birth_, a son named Dattoli, “who is now known as the sage Agastya,”
says _Vishnu Purâna_ (Wilson’s Trans., i. 154). This name of Dattoli
alone, has six more variants to it, or seven meanings. He is called
respectively, Dattoli, Dattâli, Dattotti, Dattotri, Dattobhri,
Dambhobhi and Dambholi. These seven variants have each a secret
sense, and refer in the Esoteric Commentaries to various
ethnological classifications, and also to physiological and
anthropological mysteries of the primitive races. For, surely, the
Râkshasas are not Demons, but simply the primitive and ferocious
Giants, the Atlanteans, who were scattered on the face of the Globe,
as the Fifth Race is now. Vasishtha is a warrant of this, if his
words addressed to Parâshara, who attempted a bit of Jadoo
(sorcery), which he calls “sacrifice,” for the destruction of the
Râkshasas, mean anything. For he says: “Let no more of these
_unoffending_ ‘Spirits of Darkness’ be consumed.” (See for details,
_Mahâbhârata_, Âdi Parvan, s. 176; also _Linga Purâna_, Pûrvârdha,
s. 64; Wilson, _ibid._, i. 8, 9.)

541 We have a passage from a Master’s letter which has a direct bearing
upon these incarnating Angels. Says the letter: “Now there are, and
there must be, failures in the ethereal Races of the many Classes of
Dhyân Chohans, or Devas [_progressed entities_ of a _previous_
Planetary Period], as well as among men. But still, as the
_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, this then happens.
Where a new Solar System has to be evolved, these Dhyân Chohans are
borne in by influx ‘ahead’ of the Elementals [entities ... to be
developed into humanity at a _future_ time] and remain as a latent
or inactive spiritual force, in the Aura of a nascent World ...
until the stage of human evolution is reached.... Then they become
an _active force_ and commingle with the Elementals, to _develop
little by little the full type of humanity_.” That is to say, to
develop in man, and endow him with his Self‐conscious Mind, or
Manas.

542 Appendix XV, pp. 369, _et seqq._

543 When the Earth with its Planetary Chain and Man were to appear.

544 Our Earth and the physical plane of consciousness.

545 When the pure, celestial Beings or Dhyân Chohans, and the great
Pitris of various classes were commissioned—the one to evolve their
Images or Chhâyâs, and make of them physical man, the others to
inform and thus endow him with divine intelligence and the
comprehension of the Mysteries of Creation.

546 The “dynasties of kings” who all regard themselves as the
“anointed,” reigning by the “Grace of God,” whereas in truth, they
reign by the grace of Matter, the Great Illusion, the Deceiver.

547 _Ibid._, _loc. cit._, verse 10.

548 See the “Primeval Manus of Humanity.”

549 The “Heavenly Man,” please mark again the word, is the “Logos” or
the “Son” Esoterically. Therefore, once that the title was applied
to Christ, who was declared to be God and the very God himself,
Christian Theology had no choice. In order to support its dogma of a
personal Trinity it had to proclaim, as it still does, that the
Christian Logos is the only true one, and that all the Logoi of
other religions are false, and are only the masquerading Evil
Principle, Satan. See whereto this has led Western Theology!

550 “For the Mind, a deity abounding in both sexes, being Light and
Life, brought forth by its Word another Mind or Workman; which,
being God of the Fire and the Spirit, fashioned and formed seven
other Governors, which in their Circles contain the Phenomenal
World, and whose disposition is called Fate or Destiny.” (Sect. ix.
c. 1, ed. of 1579.)

Here it is evident that Mind, the Primeval Universal Divine Thought,
is neither the Unknown Unmanifested One, since it abounds in both
sexes—is male and female—nor yet the Christian “Father,” as the
latter is a male and not an androgyne. The fact is that the
“Father,” “Son,” and “Man” are hopelessly mixed up in the
translations of _Pymander_.

551 The allegory of the fire of Prometheus is another version of the
rebellion of the proud Lucifer, who was hurled down to the
“bottomless pit,” or simply on to our Earth, to live as man. The
Hindû Lucifer, the Mahâsura, is also said to have become envious of
the Creator’s resplendent Light, and, at the head of inferior Asuras
(not Gods, but Spirits), to have rebelled against Brahmâ; for which
Shiva hurled him down to Pâtâla. But, as philosophy goes hand in
hand with allegorical fiction in Hindû myths, the “Devil” is made to
repent, and is afforded the opportunity to progress: he is a sinful
man _esoterically_, and can by Yoga, devotion, and adeptship, reach
his status of “one with the deity,” once more. Hercules, the Sun‐
God, descends to Hades (the Cave of Initiation) to deliver the
victims from their tortures, etc. The Christian Church alone creates
_eternal_ torment for the Devil and the damned that she has
invented.

552 Why, for instance, should Éliphas Lévi, the very fearless and
outspoken Kabalist, have hesitated to divulge the mystery of the
Fallen Angels so‐called? That he knew the fact and the real meaning
of the allegory, both in its religious and mystical, as well as in
its physiological sense, is proved by his voluminous writings and
frequent allusions and hints. Yet Éliphas, after having alluded to
it a hundred times in his previous works, says in his later
_Histoire de la Magie_ (pp. 220, 221): “We protest with all our
might against the sovereignty and the ubiquity of Satan. We _pretend
neither to deny nor affirm here the tradition on the Fall of the
Angels_.... But if so ... then the prince of the Angelic Rebels can
be at best the last and the most powerless among the condemned—now
that he is separated from deity—which is the principle of every
power.” This is hazy and evasive enough; but see what Hargrave
Jennings writes in his weird, staccato‐like style:

“Both Saint Michael and Saint George are types. They are sainted
personages, or dignified heroes, or powers apotheosized. They are
each represented with their appropriate faculties and attributes.
These are reproduced and stand multiplied—distinguished by different
names in all the mythologies [including the Christian]. But the idea
regarding each is a general one. This idea and representative notion
is that of the all‐powerful champion—child‐like in his ‘virgin
innocence’—so powerful that this God‐filled innocence (the Seraphim
‘know most,’ the Cherubim ‘love most’) can shatter the world
(articulated—so to use the word—in the magic of Lucifer, but
condemned), in opposition to the artful constructions, won out of
the permission of the Supreme—artful constructions (‘this side
life’)—of the magnificent apostate, the mighty rebel, but yet, at
the same time, the ‘Light‐bringer,’ the Lucifer—the ‘Morning Star,’
the ‘Son of the Morning’—the very highest title ‘out of heaven,’ for
in heaven it cannot be, but out of heaven it is everything. In an
apparently incredible side of his character—for let the reader
carefully remark that qualities are of no sex—this Archangel Saint
Michael is the invincible, sexless, celestial ‘Energy’—to dignify
him by his grand characteristics—the invincible ‘Virgin‐Combatant,’
clothed ... and at the same time armed, in the denying mail of the
Gnostic ‘refusal to create.’ This is another myth, a ‘myth within
myths,’ ... a stupendous ‘mystery of mysteries,’ because it is so
impossible and contradictory. Unexplainable as the Apocalypse.
Unrevealable as the ‘Revelation.’ ” (_Phallicism_, pp. 212, 213.)

Nevertheless, this _unexplainable_ and _unrevealable_ mystery will
now be explained and revealed by the doctrines of the East. Though,
of course, as the very erudite, but still more puzzling author of
_Phallicism_ gives it, no uninitiated mortal would ever understand
his real drift.

553 “Creation”—out of preëxistent eternal Substance, or Matter, of
course, which Substance, according to our teachings, is Boundless,
Ever‐existing Space.

554 The Luciferians, a sect of the fourth century who are alleged to
have taught that the soul was a _carnal_ body transmitted to the
child by its father, and the Lucianists, another and earlier sect of
the third century A.D., who taught all this, and further, that the
_animal_ soul was not immortal, philosophized on the grounds of the
real Kabalistic and Occult teachings.

555 This “Central Sun” of the Occultists even Science is obliged to
accept astronomically, for it cannot deny the presence in sidereal
space of a central body in the Milky Way, a point unseen and
mysterious, the ever‐hidden centre of attraction of our Sun and
System. But this “Sun” is viewed differently by the Occultists of
the East. While the Western and Jewish Kabalists—and even some pious
modern Astronomers—claim that in this Sun the God‐head is specially
present, referring to it the volitional acts of God—the Eastern
Initiates maintain that, as the Supra‐divine Essence of the Unknown
Absolute is equally in every domain and place, the “Central Sun” is
simply the centre of Universal Life‐Electricity; the reservoir
within which that Divine Radiance, already differentiated at the
beginning of every “creation,” is focussed. Though still in a Laya,
or neutral condition, it is, nevertheless, the one attracting, as
also the ever‐emitting, Life‐Centre.

556 _Op. cit._, pp. 287‐289.

557 See Commentary to Stanza VII, Volume I.

558 The _fourth_ and the _fifth_ from _below_ beginning with the
Physical Body; the _third_ and the _fourth_, if we reckon from Âtmâ.

559 _New Aspects of Life._

560 Angelic, Spiritual Essences, immortal in their Being, because
unconditioned in Eternity; but periodical and conditioned in their
Manvantaric manifestations.

561 _Op. cit._, pp. 97, 98, 2nd ed., 1887.

562 The history of Prometheus, Karma, and human consciousness, is to be
found in Part II, Section V.

563 By an Englishman whose erratic genius killed him. The son of a
Protestant clergyman, he became a Mohammedan; then a rabid Atheist;
after meeting with a Master, a Guru, he became a Mystic; then a
Theosophist who doubted, despaired—threw up _white_ for _black_
magic, went insane and joined the Roman Church. Then again turning
round, anathematized her, re‐became an Atheist, and died cursing
humanity, knowledge, and God, in whom he had ceased to believe.
Furnished with all the Esoteric data to write his “War in Heaven,”
he made a semi‐political article out of it, mixing Malthus with
Satan, and Darwin with the Astral Light. Peace be to his—_Shell_. He
is a warning to the Chelâs who fail. His forgotten tomb may now be
seen in the Mussulman burial ground of Joonaghur, Kathiawar, India.

564 The author talks of the _active, fighting_, damning Jehovah as
though he were a synonym of Parabrahman! We have quoted from this
article to show where it dissents from Theosophic teachings;
otherwise it would be quoted some day against us, as everything
published in the _Theosophist_ generally is.

565 _The Theosophist_, vol. iii. p. 68.

566 Explaining the _Kabalah_, Dr. Henry Pratt says: “Spirit was to man
[to the Jewish Rabbin, rather!] a bodiless, disembodied, or
deprived, and degraded being, and hence was termed by the ideograph
Nahash, ‘Deprived’; represented as appearing to and seducing the
human race—man through the woman.... In the picture from this
Nahash, this spirit was represented by a serpent, because from its
_destitution of bodily members_, the serpent was looked upon as a
deprived and depraved and degraded creature.” (_New Aspects of
Life_, p. 235.) Symbol for symbol there are those who would prefer
that of the serpent—the symbol of wisdom and eternity, deprived of
limbs as it is—to the Jod (י)—the poetical ideograph of Jehovah in
the _Kabalah_—the God of the male symbol of generation.

567 _Zohar_, iii. 61c.

568 Daksha, the “intelligent, the competent.” “This name generally
carries with it the idea of _creative power_.” He is a son of Brahmâ
and of Aditi, and agreeably to other versions, a self‐born power,
which, like Minerva, sprang from his father’s body. He is the chief
of the Prajâpatis, the Lords or Creators of Being. In _Vishnu
Purâna_, Parâshara says of him: “In every Kalpa [or Manvantara]
Daksha and the rest are born and are again destroyed.” And the _Rig
Veda_ says that “Daksha sprang from Aditi and Aditi from Daksha,” a
reference to the eternal cyclic re‐birth of the same divine Essence.

569 _Bhâgavata Purâna_, iv. 24, 4.

570 No one of these Orders is distinct from the Pitris or Progenitors.
As says Manu (iii. 284): “The wise call our fathers Vasus; our
paternal grandfathers, Rudras; our paternal great grandfathers,
Âdityas; agreeably to a text of the Vedas.” “This is an everlasting
Vedic text,” says another translation.

571 As now discovered by the late G. Smith in the Babylonian cylinder
literature, it was the same in Chaldæan Theogony. Ishtar, “eldest of
Heaven and of Earth.” Below him the Igigi or Angels of Heaven, and
the Anûnaki, or Angels of Earth. Below these again various classes
of Spirits and “Genii” called Sadu, Vadukku, Ekimu, Gallu—of which
some were good, some evil. (See Smith’s _Babylonian Mythology_, also
Sayce’s _Hibbert Lectures_, p. 141.)

572 Some superior, others inferior, _to suit the Karma_ of the various
reïncarnating Monads, which could not all be of the same degree of
purity in their last births in other Worlds. This accounts for the
difference of races, the inferiority of the savage and other human
varieties.

573 “There are,” says Topinard in the English edition of his
_Anthropology_, with a preface by Professor Broca, “_three_
fundamental elements of colour in the human organism—namely, the
_red_, the _yellow_, and the _black_, which, mixed in variable
quantities with the white of the tissues, give rise to those
numerous shades seen in the human family.” Here is Science again
unintentionally supporting Occultism.

574 It must be remembered that the “last remnants” here spoken of, refer
to those portions of the “Great Continent” which still remained, and
not to any of the numerous islands which existed contemporaneously
with the Continent. Plato’s “island,” for instance, was one of such
remnants; the others having sunk at various periods previously. An
Occult “tradition” teaches that such submersions occur whenever
there is an eclipse of the “Spiritual Sun.”

575 See the remarks on the Root and Seed Manus _infra_, and the Section
on “The Primeval Manus of Humanity,” at the end of the Commentaries
on this Stanza.

576 Mr. Gladstone’s unfortunate attempt to reconcile the Genetic account
with Science (see his “Dawn of Creation” and “Proem to Genesis,” in
_The Nineteenth Century_, 1886), has brought upon him the Jovian
thunderbolt hurled by Mr. Huxley. The dead‐letter account warranted
no such attempt; and his fourfold order, or division, of animated
creation, has turned into the stone which, instead of killing the
fly on the sleeping friend’s brow, killed the man himself. Mr.
Gladstone has killed _Genesis_ for ever. But this does not prove
that there is no Esotericism in the latter. The fact that the Jews
and all the Christians, the modern as well as the early sects, have
accepted the narrative _literally_ for two thousand years, proves
only their ignorance, and shows the great ingenuity and constructive
ability of the Initiated Rabbis, who built the two accounts—the
Elohistic and Jehovistic—Esoterically, and purposely confused the
meaning by the vowelless glyphs or word‐signs in the original text.
The six days (Yom) of creation do mean six periods of evolution, and
the seventh day is that of culmination, of perfection—not of rest.
These refer to the seven Rounds and the seven Races with a distinct
“creation” in each; though the use of the words Boker, “dawn” or
“morning,” and Ereb, “evening twilight”—which have Esoterically the
same meaning as Sandhyâ, “twilight,” in Sanskrit—have led to a
charge of the most crass ignorance of the order of evolution.

577 _Modern Science and Modern Thought_, p. 337.

578 Dowson’s _Hindû Classical Dictionary_, _sub voce_.

579 _Op. cit._, p. 335.

580 “Follow the law of analogy”—the Masters teach. Âtmâ‐Buddhi is dual
and Manas is triple, inasmuch as the former has two aspects, and the
latter three, _i.e._, as a “principle” _per se_, which gravitates,
in its higher aspect, to Âtmâ‐Buddhi, and follows, in its lower
nature, Kâma, the seat of terrestrial and animal desires and
passions. Now compare the evolution of the Races, the First and the
Second of which are of the nature of Âtmâ‐Buddhi, of which they are
the passive Spiritual progeny, while the Third Root‐Race shows three
distinct divisions or aspects physiologically and psychically—the
earliest sinless, the middle portions awakening to intelligence, and
the third and last decidedly _animal_, _i.e._, Manas succumbs to the
temptations of Kâma.

581 Laing, _op. cit._, _ibid._

582 The whole trouble is this: neither Physiologists nor Pathologists
will recognize that the cell‐germinating substance, the
Cytoblastema, and the mother‐lye from which crystals originate, are
one and the same essence, save in differentiation for certain
purposes.

583 Huxley, _Proceedings of the Royal Institution_, iii. 151.

584 _Introduction to the Study of the Foraminifera_, p. xi.

585 _Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow_, vol. iii. Very
strangely, however, he has recently again changed his opinion. The
Sun, he says, is only 15,000,000 years old.

586 Bastian, _The Beginnings of Life_, ii. 622.

587 Laing, _Modern Science and Modern Thought_, p. 171.

588 In _Isis Unveiled_, vol. i. p. 389, this is noticed and half
explained.

589 Hence the philosophy in the allegory of the 7, 10, and finally 21,
Prajâpatis, Rishis, Munis, etc., who all are made the “fathers” of
various beings and things. The order of the seven classes, or orders
of plants, animals, and even inanimate things, given at random in
the _Purânas_, is found in several commentaries in the correct
rotation. Thus, Prithu is the father of the Earth. He “milks” her,
and makes her bear every kind of grain and vegetable, all enumerated
and specified. Kashyapa is the “father” of all the reptiles, snakes,
demons, etc.

590 See vol. i. pp. 151, _et seqq._, concerning the “Tree of
Evolution”—the “Mundane Tree.”

591 Checked and modified, however, by the Law of Retardation, which
imposes a restriction on the advance of all species when a _higher
type_ makes its appearance.

592 See _Origin of Species_, p. 145.

593 Bastian, _Beginnings of Life_, ii. pp. 622, 623.

594 Vol. ii. p. 278.

595 _Op. cit._, i. 9.

596 _Ibid._, ii. 283, 284.

597 See his _Lettres sur l’Atlantide_.

598 This is shown by Faber, again a pious Christian, who says that: “The
Noëtic family also ... bore the appellations of Atlanteans and
Titans; and the great patriarch himself was called, by way of
eminence, Atlas and Titan.” (_Ibid._, ii. 285.) And if so, then,
_according to the Bible_, Noah must have been the progeny of the
Sons of God, the Fallen Angels, agreeably to the same authority, and
of the “daughters of men who were fair.” (See _Genesis_, vi.) And
why not, since his father Lamech slew a man, and was, with all his
sons and daughters, who perished in the Deluge, as bad as the rest
of mankind?

599 In that wonderful volume of Donnelly, _Atlantis, the Antediluvian
World_, the author, speaking of the Âryan colonies from Atlantis,
and of the arts and sciences—the legacy of our Fourth Race—bravely
announces that “the roots of the institutions of to‐day reach back
to the Miocene age.” This is an enormous allowance for a modern
scholar to make; but civilization dates still further back than the
Miocene Atlanteans. Secondary‐period man will be discovered, and
with him his long forgotten civilization.

600 Nature is the _Natural_ Body, the Shadow of the Progenitors.

601 Man is the “Heavenly Man,” as already stated.

602 _Divine Pymander_, i. 16.

603 The _Pymander_ of our museums and libraries is an abridgment of one
of the Books of Thoth, by a Platonist of Alexandria. In the Third
Century it was remodelled after old Hebrew and Phœnician MSS. by a
Jewish Kabalist, and called the _Genesis of Enoch_. But even its
disfigured remnants show how closely its text agrees with the
Archaic Doctrine, as is shown in the creation of the Seven Creators
and Seven Primitive Men. As to Enoch, Thoth or Hermes, Orpheus and
Cadmus, these are all generic names, branches and offshoots of the
seven primordial Sages—incarnated Dhyân Chohans or Devas, in
_illusive_, not mortal bodies—who taught Humanity all it knew, and
whose earliest disciples assumed their Master’s names. This custom
passed from the Fourth to the Fifth Race. Hence the sameness of the
traditions about Hermes—of whom Egyptologists count five—Enoch,
etc.; they are all inventors of letters; none of them die; they
still live, and are the first Initiators into, and Founders of, the
Mysteries. It was only very lately that the _Genesis of Enoch_
disappeared from among the Kabalists. Guillaume Postel saw it. It
was most certainly in a great measure a transcript from the Books of
Hermes, and far anterior to the Books of Moses, as Éliphas Lévi
tells his readers.

604 Uranus is a modified Varuna, the “universal encompasser,” the “all‐
embracer,” and one of the oldest of the Vedic Deities—Space, the
maker of Heaven and Earth, since both are manifested out of his (or
its) seed. It is only later that Varuna became the chief of the
Âdityas and a kind of Neptune riding on the “Leviathan”—Makara, now
the most sacred and mysterious of the Signs of the Zodiac. Varuna,
without whom “no creature can even wink,” was degraded like Uranus,
and, like him, _fell into generation_; his functions—“the grandest
cosmical functions,” as Muir calls them—having been degraded from
Heaven to Earth by exoteric anthropomorphism. As the same
Orientalist says: “The attributes and functions ascribed to Varuna
[in the Vedas] impart to his character a moral elevation and
sanctity far surpassing that attributed to any other Vedic Deity.”
But to understand correctly the reason of his fall, like as that of
Uranus, one has to see in every exoteric religion the imperfect and
sinful work of man’s fancy, and also to study the mysteries which
Varuna is said to have imparted to Vasishtha. Only “his secrets and
those of Mitra _are not to be revealed to the foolish_.”

605 _Mythologie de la Grèce Antique_, p. 7.

606 Cronus is not only Χρόνος, Time, but also, as Bréal showed, in his
_Hercule et Cacus_ (p. 57), comes from the root _kar_, “to make, to
create.” Whether Bréal and Decharme, who quotes him, are as right in
saying that in the _Vedas_, Krânan (_sic_) is a Creative God, we
have our doubts. Bréal probably meant Karma, or rather Visvakarman,
the Creative God, the “omnificent” and the “great architect of the
world.”

607 See Stanzas III—X, _et seqq._, and also Berosus’ account of primeval
creation.

608 The Titanic struggle, in Theogony at least, is the fight for
supremacy between the children of Uranus and Gæa (or Heaven and
Earth in their abstract sense), the Titans, against the children of
Cronus, whose chief is Zeus. It is the everlasting struggle going on
to this day between the Spiritual Inner Man and the man of flesh, in
one sense.

609 Just as the “Lord God,” or Jehovah, is Cain, esoterically, and the
“tempting serpent” as well; the male portion of the androgynous
Eve—before her “Fall,” the female portion of Adam Kadmon—the left
side, or Binah, of the right side, Chokmah, in the first Sephirothal
Triad.

610 Decharme, _op. cit._, p. 284.

611 In the Egyptian legend, called the “Two Brothers,” translated by M.
Maspéro (the ex‐director of the Boulaq Museum), the original of
Pandora is given. Noom, the famous heavenly artist, creates a
marvellous beauty, a girl whom he sends to Batoo, after which the
happiness of the latter is destroyed. Batoo is man, and the girl
Eve, of course. (See _Revue Archéologique_, March, 1878, and also
Decharme, _ibid._, p. 285.)

612 Yima is not the “first man” in the _Vendîdâd_, but only in the
theories of the Orientalists.

613 Bœotia was submerged and subsequently ancient Athens and Eleusis.

614 _Opera et Dies_, v. 108.

615 _Nem._, VI. i.

616 See _Apollod._, i. 7, 2; and Ovid, _Metam._, i. 260, _et seqq._

617 _Deutsche Mythol._, i. 545, 3rd edit., and Hanusch _Schlawische
Myth._, p. 235. See Decharme, _ibid._, p. 288, who gives “nine
times,” and not seven.

618 Hesiod, _Opera et Dies_, 143‐155.

619 See Æschylus, _Septem contra Thebas_.

620 Decharme, _ibid._, pp. 289, 290.

621 Races.

622 It was said.

623 In Sanskrit Dâkinî.

624 The name is used here in the sense, and as a synonym, of
“sorcerers.” The Atlantean Races were many, and their evolution
lasted for millions of years. All of them were not bad, but became
so towards the end of their cycle, as we, the Fifth Race, are now
fast becoming.

625 The “Gods of the Elements” are by no means the Elementals. The
latter are at best used by them as vehicles and materials in which
to clothe themselves.

626 Cain was the “sacrificer,” as shown at first in Chap. iv. of
_Genesis_, of “the fruit of the ground,” of which he was the _first
tiller_, while Abel “brought of the firstlings of his flock” to the
Lord. Cain is the symbol of the first male, Abel of the first female
humanity, Adam and Eve being the types of the Third Race. The
“murdering” is blood‐shedding, but not taking life.

627 _Genesis_, vi.

628 It is, perhaps, with an eye to this _degradation_ of the highest and
purest Spirits, who broke through the intermediate planes of lower
consciousness, the “Seven Circles of Fire” of _Pymander_, that St.
James is made to say “This wisdom (_sophia_) descendeth not from
above, but is earthly, sensual, _devilish_”; now this Sophia is
Manas, the “Human Soul,” the Spiritual Wisdom or Soul being Buddhi,
which being so near the Absolute, is, _per se_, only _latent_
consciousness, and is dependent upon Manas for manifestation beyond
its own plane.

629 This is the “Undying Race,” as it is called in Esotericism, and
exoterically the fruitless generation of the first progeny of
Daksha, who curses Nârada, the divine Rishi, for having dissuaded
the Haryashvas and the Shabalâshvas (the sons of Daksha) from
procreating their species, by saying: “Be born in the womb; there
shall not be a resting place for thee in all these regions.” After
this, Nârada, the representative of that race of _fruitless_
ascetics, is said, as soon as he dies in one body, to be reborn in
another.

630 Âdi Parvan, p. 113.

631 _Vishnu Purâna_, Wilson’s Trans., ii. 12.

632 The traditions of every country and nation point to this fact.
Donnelly quotes from Father Duran’s _Historia Antigua de la Nueva
España_ of 1885, in which a native of Cholula, a centenarian,
accounts for the building of the great pyramid of Cholula, as
follows: “In the beginning, before the light of the sun had been
created, this land [Cholula] was in obscurity and darkness ... but
immediately _after the light of the sun arose in the East_, there
appeared gigantic men ... who built the said pyramid, its builders
being scattered after that to all parts of the earth.”

“A great deal of the Central American history is taken up with the
doings of an ancient race of Giants called Quinanes,” says the
author of _Atlantis_ (p. 204).

633 _Histoire de la Terre_, p. 154.

634 There are critics who, finding no evidence for the existence of
Tertullian save in the writings of Eusebius, “the veracious,” are
inclined to doubt it.

635 _Heroica_, p. 35.

636 _Hist. Nat._, VII. xvi.

637 See for the above De Mirville, _Pneumatologie Des Esprits_, iii.
46‐48.

638 _Élévations_, p. 56.

639 And that, notwithstanding the formal prohibition at the great Church
Council of Elyrus in A.D. 303, when it was declared that “the form
of God, which is immaterial and invisible, shall not be limited by
figure or shape.” In 692, the Council of Constantinople similarly
prohibited the faithful “to paint or represent Jesus _as a lamb_,”
as also “to bow the knee in praying, as it is the act of idolatry.”
But the Council of Nicæa (787) brought this idolatry back, while
that of Rome (883) excommunicated John, the Patriarch of
Constantinople, for showing himself an enemy of image worship.

640 _Genesis_, v. Treating of the Chinese Dragon and the literature of
China, Mr. Charles Gould, in his _Mythical Monsters_ (p. 212),
writes: “Its mythologies, histories, religions, popular stories, and
proverbs, all teem with references to a mysterious being _who has a
physical nature and spiritual attributes_. Gifted with an accepted
form, which he has the supernatural power of casting off for the
assumption of others, he has the power of influencing the weather,
producing droughts or fertilizing rains at pleasure, of raising
tempests and allaying them. Volumes could be compiled from the
scattered legends which everywhere abound relating to this subject.”

This “mysterious being” is the _mythical_ Dragon, _i.e._, the symbol
of the _historical_ and actual Adept, the Master and Professor of
Occult Sciences of old. It has already been stated elsewhere, that
the great “Magicians” of the Fourth and Fifth Races were generally
called “Serpents” and “Dragons” after their Progenitors. All these
belonged to the Hierarchy of the so‐called “Fiery Dragons of
Wisdom,” the Dhyân Chohans, answering to the Agnishvâtta Pitris, the
Maruts and Rudras generally, as the issue of Rudra their father, who
is identified with the God of Fire. More is said in the text. Now
Clement, an initiated Neo‐Platonist, knew, of course, the origin of
the word “Dragon,” and why the initiated Adepts were so called, as
he knew the secret of the Agathodæmon, the Christ, the seven‐
vowelled Serpent of the Gnostics. He knew that the dogma of his new
faith required the transformation of all the _rivals_ of Jehovah—the
Angels supposed to have rebelled against that “Elohim,” as the Titan
Prometheus rebelled against Zeus, the usurper of his father’s
kingdom—and that “Dragon” was the mystic appellation of the “Sons of
Wisdom”; from this knowledge came his definition, as cruel as it was
arbitrary, “serpents and giants signify _demons_,” _i.e._, not
“Spirits,” but _Devils_, in Church parlance.

641 Part IV, Ch. xxvii, p. 291.

642 “What would you say to our affirmation that the Chinese—I now speak
of the inland, the true Chinamen, not of the hybrid mixture between
the Fourth and Fifth Races now occupying the throne—the aborigines
who belong in their unallied nationality wholly to the highest and
last branch of the Fourth Race, reached their highest civilization
when the Fifth had hardly appeared in Asia.” (_Esoteric Buddhism_,
p. 67.) And this handful of the inland Chinese are all of a very
high stature. Could the most ancient MSS. in the Lolo language (that
of the aborigines of China) be got at and correctly translated, many
a priceless piece of evidence would be found. But they are as rare
as their language is unintelligible. So far, one or two European
Archæologists only have been able to procure such priceless works.

643 Quoted in De Mirville, _op. cit._, iii. 53. Remember the same
statement in the _Book of Enoch_, as also the ladder seen by Jacob
in his dream. The “two worlds” mean, of course, the two _planes_ of
Consciousness and Being. A seer can commune with Beings of a higher
plane than the Earth, without quitting his arm‐chair.

644 See the Commentary on the Four Races—and on the “Sons of Will and
Yoga,” the immaculate progeny of the Androgynous Third Race.

645 In the _Kabalah_ the pronunciation of the four‐lettered _ineffable_
Name is “a most secret arcanum”—“a secret of secrets.”

646 _The Chaldean Account of Genesis_, p. 81.

647 _Ibid._, p. 84, lines 12, 14 and 15.

648 Returning once more to this most important subject in Archaic
Cosmogony, even in the Norse legends, in the Sacred Scrolls of the
Goddess Saga, we find Loki, the brother by blood of Odin—just as
Typhon, Ahriman, and others are respectively brothers of Osiris and
Ormazd—becoming evil only later, when he had mingled too long with
humanity. Like all other Fire or Light Gods—Fire burning and
destroying as well as warming and giving life—he ended by being
regarded in the destructive sense of “Fire.” The name _Loki_, we
learn from _Asgard and the Gods_ (p. 250), has been derived from the
old word _liuhan_, to enlighten. It has, therefore, the same origin
as the Latin _lux_, light. Hence Loki is identical with Lucifer or
Light‐bringer. This title, being given to the Prince of Darkness, is
very suggestive and is in itself a vindication against theological
slander. But Loki is still more closely related to Prometheus, for
he is shown chained to a sharp rock, while Lucifer, also identified
with Satan, was chained down in Hell; a circumstance, however, which
prevented neither of them from acting with all freedom on Earth, if
we accept the theological paradox in its fulness. Loki is a
beneficent, generous and powerful God in the beginnings of time, and
the principle of good, and not of evil, in early Scandinavian
Theogony.

649 The Greek mythos alluded to a few pages back, namely the mutilation
of Uranus by his son Cronus, is an allusion to this “theft” of the
_divine creative Fire_ by the Son of the Earth and Heavens. If
Uranus, the personification of the Celestial Powers, has to cease
creating (he is made impotent by Cronus (Chronos), the God _in
Time_), so, in the Egyptian Cosmogony, it is Thot, the God of
Wisdom, who regulates this fight between Horus and Set, the latter
being served by the former as Uranus is by Cronus. (See _Book of the
Dead_, xvii, line 26.) In the Babylonian account it is the God Zu,
who strips the “Father of the Gods” of “_umsimi_”—the ideal creative
organ, not the “crown” (!) as G. Smith thought (_op. cit._, pp. 115,
116). For, in the fragment K. 3454 (British Museum), it is said very
clearly, that Zu having stripped the “venerable of heaven” of his
_desire_, he carried away the “_umsimi_ of the gods,” and burnt
thereby “the _tereti_ [the power] of all the gods,” thus “governing
the whole of the _seed_ of all the angels.” As the _umsimi_ was “_on
the seat_” of Bel, it could hardly be the “crown.” A fourth version
is in the _Bible_. Ham is the Chaldæan Zu, and both are cursed for
the same allegorically described crime.

650 Quoted by Christian Ginsburg from the _Kabalah_.

651 Schlagintweit, _Buddhism in Tibet_, p. 248. These are the Beings
whose legendary existence has served as a ground‐work upon which to
build the Rabbinical Lilith, and what the believers in the _Bible_
would term the Antediluvian women, and the Kabalists the Pre‐Adamite
races. They are no fiction—this is certain, however fantastic the
exuberance of later growth.

652 _Op. cit._, pp. 101, 102.

653 For suggestiveness, we would recommend a short article by Visconde
de Figanière, F.T.S., in _The Theosophist_, entitled “Esoteric
Studies.” Its author expounds therein quite an Occult theory, though
to the world a new idea—“the _progress_ of the Monad concurring with
the _retrogression_ of Form, _i.e._, with decrease of the _vis
formativa_.” (Vol. viii. p. 666.) He says, “Who knows what shape
vehicled the Ego in remote rings [Rounds, or Races?]?... May not
man’s type ... have been that of the Simiadæ in its variety? Might
not the Monkey‐kingdom of Râmâyana fame rest on some far‐off
tradition relating to a period when that was the common lot, or
rather aspect, of man?” And the author winds up a very clever,
though too short, exposition of his theory by saying that which
every true Occultist will endorse: “With physico‐ethereal man there
must be _involution_ of sex. As physico‐astral man depended on
entities of the sub‐human class (evolved from animal prototypes) for
rebirth, so will physico‐ethereal man find among the graceful,
shapely orders issuing from the _air_‐plane, one or more which will
be developed for his successive embodiments _when procreated forms
are given_—a process which will include all mankind only very
gradually. The [_Pre_‐?] Adamic and Post‐Adamic races were giants;
their ethereal counterparts may possibly be liliputians—beauteous,
luminous, diaphanous—but will assuredly be giants in mind” (p. 671).

654 It may be objected that this is a contradiction. That, as the first
Root‐Race appeared 300,000,000 years after the vegetation had
evolved, the Seed of vegetable life could not be in the First Race.
We say it could; for up to man’s appearance in _this_ Round, the
vegetation was of quite another kind to what it is now, and quite
ethereal; this, for the simple reason that no grass or plants could
have been physical, before there were animal or other organisms to
breathe out the carbonic acid which vegetation has to imbibe for its
development, its nutrition and growth. They are interdependent in
their _physical_ and achieved forms.

655 _Zohar_, i. 21a.

656 _Ibid._, iii. 48a.

657 _Ibid._, ii. 76a.

658 _Op. cit._, p. 666.

659 It is stated in the _Zohar_ that the “primordial worlds” (sparks)
could not continue because _man was not as yet_. “The _human_ form
contains everything; and as it did not as yet exist, the worlds were
destroyed.”

660 “The Sacred Books of the East,” vol. iv; _The Vendîdâd_, J.
Darmesteter; Fargard ii. vv. 27 (70) and 28 (74).

661 This is the meaning when the allegory and symbol are opened and read
by means of the _human_ key, or the key to Terrestrial
Anthroposophy. This interpretation of the “Ark” symbolism does not
in the least interfere with its astronomical, or even theogonic
keys; nor with any of the other six meanings. Nor does it seem less
scientific than the modern theories about the origin of man. As
said, it has seven keys to it, like the rest.

662 _Ibid._, v. 30 (87).

663 _Ibid._, v. 31 (93).

664 _Ibid._, v. 40 (131).

665 See also _Bund._, xv.

666 _Ibid._, 42 (137).

667 _Bund._, xix and xxiv.

668 S. L. MacGregor Mathers, _Kabbalah Unveiled_, p. 104.

669 _Zohar_, ii. 8b.

670 _Zohar_, iii. 278a; Myer’s _Qabbalah_, p. 217.

671 Darwinian Evolutionists who are so wont to refer to the evidence of
_reversion to type_—the full meaning of which, in the case of human
monsters, is embraced in the Esoteric solution of the embryological
problem—as proof of their arguments, would do well to enquire into
those instances of _modern giants_ who are often 8, 9, and even 11
feet high. Such _reversions_ are imperfect, yet undeniable
reproductions of the original towering man of primeval times.

672 See _Mythical Monsters_, by Ch. Gould, from whose interesting and
scientific volume a few passages are quoted further on. See also, in
A. P. Sinnett’s _Occult World_, the description of a cavern in the
Himâlayas filled with relics of giant human and animal bones.

673 _I.e._, the Third Eye was at the back of the head. The statement
that the latest hermaphrodite humanity was “four‐armed,” unriddles
probably the mystery of all the representations and idols of the
exoteric Gods of India. On the Acropolis of Argos, there was a
ξόανον, a rudely carved wooden statue, attributed to Dædalus,
representing a three‐eyed colossus, which was consecrated to Zeus
Triôpês, the “Three‐eyed.” The head of the “god” has two eyes in its
face and one above on the top of the forehead. It is considered the
most archaic of all the ancient statues. (_Schol. Vatic, ad Eurip.
Troad._, 14.)

674 The _inner vision_ could henceforth be acquired only through
training and initiation, save in the cases of “natural and born
magicians”—sensitives and mediums, as they are called now.

675 This expression “petrified” instead of “ossified” is curious. The
“back eye,” which is of course the Pineal Gland, so‐called, the
small pea‐like mass of grey nervous matter attached to the back of
the third ventricle of the brain, is said to almost invariably
contain _mineral concretions_ and _sand_, and “nothing more.”

676 “Deeply placed within the head, covered by thick skin and muscles,
true eyes, that cannot see, are found in certain animals,” says
Hæckel. “Among the Vertebrata there are blind moles and field‐mice,
blind snakes and lizards.... They shun the daylight, dwelling ...
under the ground.... [They] were _not originally blind_, but have
evolved from ancestors that lived in the light and had well‐
developed eyes. The atrophied eye beneath the opaque skin may be
found in these blind beings in every stage of reversion.” (Hæckel,
_Pedigree of Man_, “Sense Organs.” p. 343: Aveling’s Trans.) And if
_two_ eyes could become so atrophied in lower animals, why not _one_
eye—the Pineal Gland—in man, who is but a higher animal in his
physical aspect?

677 _Op. cit._, ii. 830, 831, ninth edition; “The Thalamencephalon or
Inter‐brain.”

678 The “nervous ether” of Dr. B. W. Richardson, F.R.S.; the nerve‐aura
of Occultism. The “animal spirits” (?) are equivalent to the
currents of nerve‐auric compound circulation.

679 Let us remember that the _First_ Race is shown, in Occult Science,
as spiritual within and ethereal without; the _Second_, psycho‐
spiritual mentally, and ethereo‐physical bodily; the _Third_, still
bereft of intellect in its beginning, is astro‐physical in its body,
and lives an inner life, in which the psycho‐spiritual element is in
no way as yet interfered with by the hardly nascent physiological
senses. Its two front eyes look before them without seeing either
past or future. But the Third Eye “_embraces Eternity_.”

680 But in a very different manner to that pictured by Hæckel as an
“_evolution by Natural Selection in the struggle for existence_”
(_Pedigree of Man_, “Sense Organs,” p. 335; Aveling’s Trans.). The
mere “thermal sensibility of the skin,” to hypothetical light‐waves,
is absurdly incompetent to account for the beautiful combination of
adaptations existing in the eye. We have shown that “natural
selection” is a pure myth when credited with the _origination_ of
variations, as the “survival of the fittest” can only take place
after useful variations have sprung up, together with improved
organisms. Whence came the “useful variations,” which developed the
eye? Only from “blind forces ... without aim, without design”? The
argument is puerile. The true solution of the mystery is to be found
in the impersonal Divine Wisdom, in its Ideation—reflected through
Matter.

681 Palæontology has ascertained that in the animals of the Mesozoic
age—the Saurians especially, such as the antediluvian Labyrinthodon,
whose fossil skull exhibits a perforation otherwise inexplicable—the
third, or odd eye must have been much developed. Several
Naturalists, among others E. Korscheldt, feel convinced that
whereas, notwithstanding the opaque skin covering it, such an eye in
the reptiles of the present period can only distinguish light from
darkness (as the human eyes do when bound with a handkerchief, or
even tightly closed), in the now extinct animals that eye functioned
and was a real organ of vision.

682 Gould’s _Mythical Monsters_, p. 27.

683 Karma is a word of many meanings, and has a special term for almost
every one of its aspects. As a synonym of sin, it means the
performance of some action for the attainment of an object of
_worldly_, hence _selfish_, desire, which cannot fail to be hurtful
to somebody else. Karma is action, the cause; and Karma again is the
“Law of Ethical Causation”; the _effect_ of an act produced
egotistically, in face of the great Law of Harmony which depends on
altruism.

684 Objectors to the doctrine of Karma should recall the fact that it is
absolutely out of the question to attempt a reply to the Pessimists
on other data. A firm grasp of the principles of Karmic Law knocks
away the whole basis of the imposing fabric reared by the disciples
of Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann.

685 The doctrine and theology of the Calvinists. “The purpose of God
_from eternity_ respecting all events”—which becomes _fatalism_ and
kills free will, or any attempt of exerting it for good. “It is the
preässignment or allotment of men to everlasting happiness or
misery.” (_Catechism._) A noble and encouraging doctrine this!

686 In order to make Karma more comprehensible to the Western mind,
which is better acquainted with the Greek than with Âryan
philosophy, some Theosophists have made an attempt to translate it
by Nemesis. Had Nemesis been known to the Profane in antiquity, as
it was understood by the Initiate, this translation of the term
would be unobjectionable. As it is, Nemesis has been too much
anthropomorphized by Greek fancy to permit our using it without an
elaborate explanation. With the early Greeks, “from Homer to
Herodotus, she was no goddess, but a _moral feeling_ rather,” says
Decharme; the barrier to evil and immorality. He who transgresses
it, commits a sacrilege in the eyes of the Gods, and is pursued by
Nemesis. But, with time, that “feeling” was deified, and its
personification became an ever‐fatal and punishing Goddess.
Therefore, if we would connect Karma with Nemesis, we must do so in
her triple character as Nemesis, Adrasteia and Themis. For, while
the last is the Goddess of Universal Order and Harmony, who, like
Nemesis, is commissioned to repress every excess, and keep man
within the limits of Nature and righteousness under severe penalty,
Adrasteia, the “inevitable,” represents Nemesis as the immutable
effect of causes created by man himself. Nemesis, as the daughter of
Dikê, is the equitable Goddess reserving her wrath for those alone
who are maddened with pride, egoïsm, and impiety. (See Mesomed.,
_Hymn. Nemes._, v. 2, from Brunck, _Analecta_ II. p. 292; quoted in
_Mythologie de la Grèce Antique_, p. 304.) In short, while Nemesis
is a mythological, exoteric Goddess, or _Power_, personified and
anthropomorphized in its various aspects, Karma is a highly
philosophical truth, a most divine and noble expression of the
primitive intuition of man concerning Deity. It is a doctrine which
explains the origin of Evil, and ennobles our conceptions of what
divine immutable Justice ought to be, instead of degrading the
unknown and unknowable Deity by making it the whimsical, cruel
tyrant, which we call “Providence.”

687 Pralaya—a word already explained—is not a term that applies _only_
to every “Night of Brahmâ,” or the World’s Dissolution following
every Manvantara, equal to 71 Mahâyugas. It applies also to each
“Obscuration” as well, and even to every Cataclysm that puts an end,
by Fire or by Water in turn, to each Root‐Race. Pralaya is a general
term like the word “Manu” the generic name for the Shishtas, who,
under the appellation of “Kings,” are said in the _Purânas_ to be
preserved “with the seed of all things, in an ark, from the waters
of that inundation [or the fires of a general volcanic
conflagration, the commencement of which we already see for our
Fifth Race in the terrible earthquakes and eruptions of these late
years, and especially in the present year (1888)], which, in the
season of a Pralaya overspreads the world [the Earth].” (_Vishnu
Purâna_, Wilson’s Trans., I. lxxxi.) Time is only a form of
Vishnu—truly, as Parâshara says in the _Vishnu Purâna_. In the Hindû
Yugas and Kalpas, we have the regular descending series 4, 3, 2,
with ciphers, multiplied, as occasion requires, for Esoteric
purposes, but not, as Wilson and other Orientalists thought, for
“sectarian embellishments.” A Kalpa may be an Age, or Day of Brahmâ,
or a sidereal Kalpa, astronomical and earthly. These calculations
are found in all the _Purânas_, but some differ—as for instance, the
“Year of the seven Rishis,” 3,030 mortal years, and the “Year of
Dhruva,” 9,090, in the _Linga Purâna_, which are again Esoteric, and
_do_ represent actual (and secret) chronology. As said in the
_Brahma Vaivarta_: “Chronologers compute a Kalpa by the life of
Brahmâ. _Minor_ Kalpas, as Samvarta and the rest, are numerous.”
“Minor Kalpas” denote here every period of Destruction, as was well
understood by Wilson himself, who explains the latter as “those in
which the Samvarta wind or other destructive agents operate.”
(_Ibid._, p. 54.)

688 An intuition and a presentiment of the Shishtas may be found in Mr.
Sinnett’s _Esoteric Buddhism_. See the “Annotations”—the “Noah’s Ark
Theory,” pp. 146, 147, fifth edition.

689 The fact that Manu himself is made to declare that he was created by
Virâj, and that he then produced the ten Prajápatis, who again
produced seven Manus, who in their turn gave birth to seven other
Manus (_Manu_, i. 33‐36) relates to other still earlier mysteries,
and is at the same time a “blind” with regard to the doctrine of the
Septenary Chain, and the simultaneous evolution of seven Humanities,
or Men. However, the present work is written on the records of Cis‐
Himâlayan Secret Teachings, and Brâhmanical Esoteric Philosophy may
now differ in form as does the Kabalah. But they were identical in
hoary antiquity.

690 There is another Esoteric reason besides this for it. A Vaivasvata
is the _seventh_ Manu, because this our Round, although the Fourth,
is in the _preseptenary_ Manvantara, and the Round itself is in its
_seventh_ stage of materiality or physicality. The close of its
middle racial point occurred during the Fourth Root‐Race, when Man
and all Nature reached their lowest state of gross Matter. From that
time, _i.e._, from the end of the three and a half Races, Humanity
and Nature entered on the ascending arc of their Racial Cycle.

691 The interval that precedes each Yuga is called a Sandhyâ, composed
of as many hundreds of years as there are thousands in the Yuga; and
that which follows the latter is named Sandhyâmsha, and is of
similar duration, as we are told in _Vishnu Purâna_. “The interval
between the Sandhyâ and the Sandhyâmsha is the Yuga denominated
Krita, Tretâ, etc. The [four] Krita, Tretâ, Dvâpara, and Kali
constitute a great age, or aggregate of four ages: a thousand such
aggregates are a Day of Brahmâ; and fourteen _Manus reign within
that term_.” (_Op. cit._, _ibid._, p. 49.) Now had we to accept this
literally then there would be only one Manu for every 4,320,000,000
years. As we are taught that it took 300 million years for the two
lower kingdoms to evolve, and that our Humanity is just 18 and some
odd millions old—where were the other Manus spoken of, unless the
allegory means what the Esoteric Doctrine teaches as to the 14 being
each multiplied by 49.

692 The words “Creation,” “Dissolution,” etc., do not correctly render
the right meaning of either Manvantara or Pralaya. The _Vishnu
Purâna_ enumerates several: “The dissolution of all things is of
four kinds,” Parâshara is made to say: Naimittika (Occasional), when
Brahmâ slumbers (his Night, when, “at the end of this Day occurs a
re‐coalescence _of the Universe_, called Brahmâ’s contingent re‐
coalescence,” because Brahmâ _is_ this Universe itself); Prâkritika
(Elemental), when the return of this Universe to its original nature
is partial and physical; Âtyantika (Absolute), identification of the
_Embodied_ with the incorporeal Supreme Spirit—Mahâtmic state,
whether temporary or until the following Mahâ Kalpa: also Absolute
Obscuration—as of a whole Planetary Chain, etc.; and Nitya
(Perpetual), Mahâ Pralaya for the Universe, _Death_—for man. Nitya
is the extinction of life, like the “extinction of a lamp,” also “in
sleep at night.” Nitya Sarga is “constant or perpetual creation,” as
Nitya Pralaya is “constant or perpetual destruction of all that is
born.” “That which ensues after a minor dissolution is called
ephemeral creation.” (_Vishnu Purâna_, Wilson’s Trans., i. 113,
114.) The subject is so difficult that we are obliged to repeat our
statements.

693 But see the superb definitions of Parabrahman and the Logos in T.
Subba Row’s Lectures on the _Bhagavad Gîtâ_ in the early numbers of
_The Theosophist_ of 1887.

694 See preceding foot‐note.

695 See _Manu_, i. 32, 33. Vaishvânara is, in another sense, the living
magnetic fire that pervades the manifested Solar System. It is the
most objective (though to us the reverse) and ever present aspect of
the One Life, for it is the Vital Principle. (See _Theosophist_,
July, 1883, p. 249.) It is also a name of Agni.

696 _Op. cit._, pp. 134, 135.

697 This—in the period of _Secondary_ Creation, so called. Of the
_Primary_, when Earth is in possession of the three _Elemental_
Kingdoms, we cannot speak for several reasons, one of which is,
that, no one but a great seer, or one naturally intuitional, will be
able to realize that which can never be expressed in any existing
terms.

698 Hippocrates said that number _seven_ “by its occult virtues tended
to the accomplishment of all things, to be the dispenser of life and
fountain of all its changes.” The life of man he divided into seven
ages, as did Shakespeare, for “as the moon changes her phases every
seven days, this number influences all sublunary beings,” and even
the Earth, as we know. The teeth of a child appear in the seventh
month, and he sheds them at seven years; at twice seven puberty
begins, at three times seven his mental and vital powers are
developed, at four times seven he is in his full strength, at five
times seven his passions are most developed, etc. Thus also for the
Earth; it is now in its middle age, yet very little wiser for it.
The Tetragrammaton, the four‐lettered sacred name of the Deity, can
be resolved on Earth only by becoming septenary through the manifest
Triangle proceeding from the concealed Tetraktys. Therefore, the
number seven has to be adopted on this plane. As written in the
_Kabalah_ (“The Greater Holy Assembly,” v. 1161): “For assuredly
there is no stability in those six, save (what they derive) from the
_seventh_. For _all things depend_ from the _seventh_.” (S. L.
MacGregor Mathers’ _Kabbalah_, p. 255.)

699 Compare Stanzas III. _et seqq._

700 St. Augustin says of Jesus: “He is a _fish_ that lives in the midst
of waters.” Christians called themselves “Little
Fishes”—_Pisciculi_—in their sacred Mysteries. “So many _fishes_
bred in the _water_, and saved by _one great fish_,” says Tertullian
of the Christians and Christ and the Church.

701 _Esoteric Buddhism_, p. 55.

702 This event—viz., the destruction of the famous island of Ruta and
the smaller island Daitya—which occurred 850,000 years ago in the
later Pliocene times, must not be confounded with the submersion of
the main Continent of Atlantis during the Miocene period. Geologists
cannot bring the Miocene so near as 850,000 years, whatever they may
do; it is, in reality, several million years ago that the main
Atlantis perished.

703 See _The Athenæum_, Aug. 25th, 1860.

704 Mr. Huxley divides these races into the quintuple group of
Australoids, Negroids, Mongoloids, Xanthochroics and
Melanochroics—all issuing from imaginary Anthropoids. And yet, while
protesting against those who say “that the structural differences
between man and apes are small and insignificant,” and adding that
“every bone of the gorilla bears a mark by which it can be
distinguished from a corresponding human bone, and that in the
present state of creation, at least, no intermediary being fills the
gap which separates the man from the troglodyte”—the great Anatomist
goes on speaking of the _simian_ characteristics in man! (See de
Quatrefages, _The Human Species_, P. 113.)

705 _Op. cit._, Isaac Myer, p. 422.

706 _Zohar_, i. 119b, col. 475; _ibid._, p. 412.

707 The Lemurians.

708 Lava.

709 Marble.

710 Of the subterranean fires.

711 This is the reason, perhaps, why even Easter Island, with its
wondrous gigantic statues—a speaking witness to a submerged
continent with a civilized mankind on it—is hardly mentioned
anywhere in modern Encyclopædias. Its mention is carefully avoided
except in some books of travels. Modern Science has an undeniable
predilection for forcing hypotheses, built on personal hobbies, upon
the cultured public, as well‐established evidence: for offering it
_guesses_ instead of knowledge, and calling them “scientific
conclusions.” Its specialists will evolve a thousand and one
contradictory speculations rather than confess an _awkward self‐
evident fact_—preëminent among such specialists being Hæckel and his
English admirers and co‐thinkers. Yet “they are authorities”—we are
sternly reminded. What of that? The Pope of Rome is also an
authority and an infallible one—for _his_ followers; whereas the
remarkable fallibility of scientific speculations is being proven
periodically with every change of the moon.

712 Our best modern novelists, although they are neither Theosophists
nor Spiritualists, nevertheless begin to have very psychological and
suggestively Occult dreams; witness Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson and
his _Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_, than which no grander
psychological essay on Occult lines exists. Has the rising novelist
Mr. Rider Haggard also had a prophetic, or rather a retrospective,
clairvoyant dream before he wrote _She_? His imperial Kor, the great
city of the dead, whose surviving inhabitants sailed northwards
after the plague had killed almost a whole nation, seems, in its
general outlines, to step out from the imperishable pages of the old
archaic records. Ayesha suggests “that those men who sailed north
may have been the fathers of the first Egyptians”; and then seems to
attempt a synopsis of certain letters of a Master quoted in
_Esoteric Buddhism_, for, she says: “Time after time have nations,
ay, and rich and strong nations, learned in the arts, been, and
passed away, and been forgotten, so that no memory of them remains.
This [the nation of Kor] is but one of several; for time eats up the
work of man unless, indeed, he digs in caves like the people of Kor,
and _then mayhap the sea swallows them, or the earthquake shakes
them in_.... Yet were not these people utterly destroyed, as I
think. Some few remained in the other cities, for their cities were
many. But the barbarians ... came down upon them, and took their
women to wife, and the race of the Amahagger that is now is a
bastard brood of the mighty sons of Kor, and behold it dwelleth in
the tombs with its fathers’ bones” (pp. 180, 181).

Here the clever novelist seems to repeat the history of all the now
degraded and down‐fallen races of humanity. Geologists and
Anthropologists would place at the head of humanity—as descendants
of Homo Primigenius—the ape‐man, of which “_no fossil remains are as
yet known to us_,” though they “were _probably_ akin to the
_Gorilla_ and _Orang of the present day_” (Hæckel). In answer to
whose “probably,” Occultists point to another and a greater
probability—viz., the one given in our text.

713 Robert Brown, _The Countries of the World_, vol. iv. p. 43.

714 See Stanza II. This would account for the variation and great
difference between the intellectual capacities of races, nations,
and individual men. While incarnating into, and in other cases only
informing, the human vehicles evolved by the first brainless
(“manas‐less”) Race, the incarnating Powers and Principles had to
take into account, and make their choice between, the past Karmas of
the Monads, between which and their bodies they had to become the
connecting link. Moreover, as correctly stated in _Esoteric
Buddhism_ (p. 30), “the fifth principle, or human (intellectual)
soul, in the majority of mankind is not even yet fully developed.”

715 It is said by the incarnate Logos, Krishna, in the _Bhagavad Gîtâ_,
“The seven great Rishis, the four preceding Manus, partaking of my
nature, were born from my mind: from them sprang [emanated or were
born] the human race and the world” (x. 6).

Here, by the seven Great Rishis, the seven great Rûpa Hierarchies or
Classes of Dhyân Chohans, are meant. Let us bear in mind that the
seven Rishis, Saptarshi, are the Regents of the seven stars of the
Great Bear, and therefore, of the same nature as the Angels of the
Planets, or the seven Great Planetary Spirits. They were all reborn
as men on Earth in various Kalpas and Races. Moreover, “the four
preceding Manus” are the four Classes of the originally Arûpa
Gods—the Kumâras, the Rudras, the Asuras, etc.; who are also said
_to have incarnated_. They are not Prajâpatis, as are the first, but
their informing “principles”—some of which have incarnated in men,
while others have made other men simply the vehicles of their
“reflections.” As Krishna truly says—the same words being repeated
later by another _vehicle_ of the Logos—“I am the the same to all
beings ... those who worship me [the sixth principle or the _divine_
Intellectual Soul, Buddhi, made conscious by its union with the
higher faculties of Manas] _are in me, and I am in them_.” (_Ibid._,
x. 29.) The Logos, being no “personality” but the Universal
Principle, is represented by all the divine Powers, _born of its
Mind_—the pure Flames, or, as they are called in Occultism, the
“Intellectual Breaths”—those Angels who are said to _have made
themselves independent_, _i.e._, passed from the passive and
quiescent, into the active state of Self‐Consciousness. When this is
recognized, the true meaning of Krishna becomes comprehensible. But
see Mr. Subba Row’s excellent Lecture on the _Bhagavad Gîtâ_
(_Theosophist_, April, 1887, p. 444).

716 _Op. cit._, p. 152.

717 It was the northern parts of the Toyâmbudhi, or sea of fresh water,
in Shveta‐dvîpa, which the seven Kumâras—Sanaka, Sananda, Sanâtana,
Sanatkumâra, Jâta, Vodhu, and Panchashikha—visited agreeably with
exoteric tradition. (See the Uttara Khanda of the _Padma Purâna,
Asiatick Researches_, vol. xi. pp. 99, 100.)

718 _Vishnu Purâna_, Wilson’s Trans., ii. 109.

719 See _Bibliotheca Indica_, Trans. of the _Golâdhyâya of the
Siddhânta‐shiromani_, iii. 21‐44.

720 _Ibid._, pp. 106, 107.

721 P. 321.

722 Wilson, _ibid._, p. 137.

723 In a lecture, Professor Pengelly, F.R.S., quotes Professor Oliver to
the effect “that the present Atlantic islands’ flora affords no
substantial evidence of a former direct communication with the
mainland of the New World,” but adds himself that, at the same time,
“at some period of the Tertiary epoch, N.‐E. Asia was united to
N.‐W. America, perhaps by the line where the Aleutian chain of
islands now extends.” Thus Occult Science alone can reconcile the
contradictions and hesitations of Modern Science. But again, surely
the argument for the existence of Atlantis does not rest on Botany
alone.

724 _Vishnu Purâna_, Wilson, v. 381, 382.

725 As shown in the “Preliminary Notes” to this Volume, it stands to
reason that neither the name of Lemuria nor even of Atlantis are the
real _archaic_ names of the lost Continents. They have been adopted
by us simply for the sake of clearness. Atlantis was the name given
to those portions of the submerged Fourth Race Continent which were
“beyond the Pillars of Hercules,” and which happened to keep above
water after the general Cataclysm. The last remnant of these—Plato’s
Atlantis, or “Poseidonis,” which is another _substitute_, or rather
a translation of the real name—was the last of the Continent above
water some 11,000 years ago. Most of the correct names of the
countries and islands of both Continents are given in the _Purânas_;
but to mention them specially, as found in other more ancient works,
such as the _Sûrya Siddhânta_, would necessitate too lengthy
explanations. If, in earlier writings, the two seem to have been too
faintly distinguished, this must be due to careless reading and want
of reflection. If ages hence, Europeans are referred to as Âryans,
and a reader confuses them with the Hindûs and the latter with the
Fourth Race, because some of them lived in ancient Lankâ—the blame
will not fall on the writer.

726 See Part III, Section VI, of this Volume.

727 See Professor J. D. Dana’s article, _American Journal of Science_,
III. v. 442, 443; Winchell’s _World‐Life_, p. 352.

728 Speaking on periodical elevation and subsidence of the equatorial
and polar regions, and ensuing changes of climate, Dr. Winchell,
Professor of Geology in the University of Michigan, says: “As the
movements here contemplated are cyclical, the same conditions would
recur again and again; and accordingly the same fauna might return
again and again to the same region, with intervals of occupation by
another fauna. Progressive sedimentation would preserve the records
of such faunal alterations; and there would be presented the
phenomena of ‘colonies,’ ‘reäpparitions,’ and other faunal
dislocations in the vertical and horizontal distributions of fossil
remains. These phenomena are well known to the student of geology.”
(_Op. cit._, p. 281.)

729 See _American Naturalist_, xviii. 15‐26.

730 _Five Years of Theosophy_, pp. 339, 340.

731 _Pedigree of Man_, Aveling’s Trans., pp. 80, 81.

732 _Ibid._, p. 82.

733 _Op. cit._, p. 81.

734 _Esoteric Buddhism_, p. 65.

735 “Half‐grown babes” in comparison with their giant brethren on other
Zones. So would we now, should a like calamity overtake us.

736 This relates to Lemuria.

737 There are other cycles, of course, _cycles within cycles_—and it is
just this which creates such a difficulty in the calculations of
racial events. The circuit of the ecliptic is completed in 25,868
years, and, with regard to our Earth, it is calculated that the
equinoctial point falls back 50.1" annually. But there is another
cycle within this one. It is said that: “As the apsis goes forward
to meet it at the rate of 11.24”, annually, this would complete a
revolution in one hundred and fifteen thousand three hundred and two
years (115,302). The approximation of the equinox and the apsis is
the sum of these motions, 61.34", and hence the equinox returns to
the same position in relation to the apsis in 21,128 years. (See the
article on “Astronomy” in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_.) We
mentioned this cycle in _Isis Unveiled_ (vol. i), in relation to
other cycles. Each has a marked influence on its contemporary race.

738 The Atlanteans.

739 Twenty‐seven feet.

740 The Lemurians.

741 Race.

742 Compare the following Section, entitled “Cyclopean Ruins and
Colossal Stones as Witnesses to Giants.”

743 See Denon’s _Voyage en Egypte_, vol. ii.

744 See _Esoteric Buddhism_, p. 65.

745 _Cf._ the chart adapted from the _Challenger_ and _Dolphin_
soundings in Donnelly’s _Atlantis: the Antediluvian World_, p. 47.

746 _Esoteric Buddhism_, p. 58.

747 _History of English Literature_, p. 23.

748 Quoted in _Atlantis_, p. 132.

749 _Numbers_, xiii. 33.

750 _Deut._, iii. 11.

751 Robert Brown, _The Countries of the World_, p. 43.

752 Mentioned on pp. 44, _et seqq._

753 _Ibid._, pp. 43, 44, _et seqq._, and pp. 310, 311.

754 De la Vega, IX. ix, quoted in De Mirville’s _Pneumatologie_, iii.
55.

755 The first and second, in common with Bartholdi’s statue, have an
entrance at the foot, leading by a winding staircase cut in the rock
up into the heads. The eminent French Archæologist and
Anthropologist, the Marquis de Nadeylac, in his work, justly remarks
that there never was in ancient or in modern times a sculptured
human figure more colossal than the first of the two.

756 _Essays_, xxvi.

757 _I Corinth._, x. 4.

758 _Pneumatologie_, iii. p. 283.

759 Saturn is Chronos—“Time.” His swallowing Jupiter‐lapis may turn out
one day a prophecy. “Peter (_cephas_, _lapis_), is the _stone_ on
which the Church of Rome is built”—we are assured. But Cronus
(Chronos) is as sure to “swallow” _it_ one day, as he has swallowed
Jupiter‐lapis and still greater characters.

760 _Ibid._, p. 284.

761 M. Falconnet, _op. cit._, t. vi, _Mém._, p. 513; quoted by De
Mirville, _op. cit._, _ibid._, p. 285.

762 The same, of course, as the “small voice” heard by Elijah after the
earthquake at the mouth of the cave. (_I Kings_, xix. 12.)

763 The rocking, or “logan,” stones bear various names; such as the
_clacha‐brath_ of the Celt, the “destiny or judgment‐stone”; the
divining‐stone, or “stone of the ordeal,” and the oracle‐stone; the
moving or animated stone of the Phœnicians; the rumbling stone of
the Irish. Brittany has its “_pierres branlantes_” at Huelgoat. They
are found in the Old and the New Worlds; in the British Islands,
France, Spain, Italy, Russia, Germany, etc., as also in North
America. (See Hodson’s _Letters from North America_, vol. ii. p.
440.) Pliny speaks of several in Asia (_Hist. Nat._, i. 96); and
Apollonius Rhodius expatiates on the rocking stones, and says that
they are “stones placed on the apex of a tumulus, and so sensitive
_as to be movable by the mind_” (Ackerman’s _Arth. Index_, p. 34),
referring no doubt to the ancient priests who moved such stones by
will‐power from a distance.

764 See _Dictionnaire des Religions_, l’Abbé Bertrand, Arts., “Heræscus”
and “Bétyles”; De Mirville, _ibid._, p. 287, who has “Heraiclus”;
but see Bunsen’s _Egypt_, i. 95.

765 See among others, _History of Paganism in Caledonia_, by Dr. Th. A.
Wise, F.R.A.S., etc.

766 _Sépulture des Tartares_, arch. vii. p. 2227.

767 _Voyageurs Anciens et Modernes_, i. 230.

768 _Op. cit._, _ibid._, p. 290. If Ham was a Titan or Giant then were
Shem and Japhet also Titans. They are either all Arkite Titans, as
Faber shows—or myths.

769 Diodorus Siculus asserts that in the days of Isis, some men were
still of a vast stature, and were denominated by the Hellenes
Giants. “Οἱ δὲν Αἰγύπτῳ μυθογοῦσι κατὰ τὴν Ἰσιδὸς ἡλικίαν γεγονέναι
τίνας πολυσωμάτους.”

770 _Antiquités Celtiques_, p. 88.

771 Cambry, _ibid._, 90.

772 _Op. cit._, p. 473. “It is difficult,” writes Creuzer, “not to
suspect in the structures of Tiryns and Mycenæ planetary forces
supposed to be moved by celestial powers, analogous to the famous
Dactyli.” (_Pelasges et Cyclopes._) To this day Science is in
ignorance on the subject of the Cyclopes. They are supposed to have
built all the so‐called “Cyclopean” works whose erection would have
necessitated several regiments of Giants, and yet they were only
seventy‐seven in all, or about one hundred, as Creuzer thinks. They
are called Builders, and Occultism calls them the _Initiators_, who
by initiating some Pelasgians, thus laid the foundation stone of
true _Masonry_. Herodotus associates the Cyclops with Perseus “the
son of an Assyrian demon” (I. vi.). Raoul Rochette found that
Palæmonius, the Cyclops, to whom a sanctuary was raised, was the
“Tyrian Hercules.” In any case, he was the Builder of the sacred
columns of Gadir, covered with mysterious characters—of which
Apollonius of Tyana was the only one in his age who possessed the
key—and with figures which may still be found on the walls of
Ellora, the gigantic ruins of the temple of Vishvakarman, “the
builder and artificer of the Gods.”

773 _Hist. Nat._, t. xxxvi. p. 592; De Mirville, _op. cit._, _ibid._, p.
289.

774 _Dieu et les Dieux_, p. 567.

775 De Mirville, _op. cit._, _ibid._, p. 291. Messrs. Richardson and
Barth are said to have been amazed at finding in the Desert of
Sahara the same trilithic and raised stones which they had seen in
Asia, Circassia, Etruria, and in all the North of Europe. Mr.
Rivett‐Carnac, B.C.S., of Allahabad, the distinguished Archæologist,
shows the same amazement on finding the description, given by Sir J.
Simpson, of the cuplike markings on stones and rocks in England,
Scotland, and other Western countries; “offering an extraordinary
resemblance” to “the marks on the trap boulders which encircle the
barrows near Nagpur”—the City of Snakes. The eminent scholar saw in
this “another and very extraordinary addition to the mass of
evidence ... that a branch of the nomadic tribes, who swept at an
early date over Europe, penetrated into India also.” We say Lemuria,
Atlantis and her Giants, and the earliest races of the Fifth Root‐
Race had all a hand in these betyli, lithoi, and “magic” stones in
general. The cup‐marks noticed by Sir J. Simpson, and the “holes
scooped out on the face” of rocks and monuments found by Mr. Rivett‐
Carnac “of different sizes varying from six inches to an inch and a‐
half in diameter, and in depth from one to one and a‐half inch ...
generally arranged in perpendicular lines presenting many
permutations in the number and size and arrangement of the cups”—are
simply _written records_ of the oldest races. Whosoever examines
with attention the drawings made of such marks in _Archæological
Notes on Ancient Sculpturing on Rocks in Kumaon, India, etc._, will
find therein the most primitive style of marking or recording.
Something of the sort was adopted by the American inventors of the
Morse code of telegraphic writing, which reminds us of the Ogham
writing, a combination of long and short strokes, as Mr. Rivett‐
Carnac describes it, “cut on sandstone.” Sweden, Norway, and
Scandinavia are full of such _written_ records, for the Runic
characters follow the cup‐marks and long and short strokes. In
Johannes Magnus’ Infolio one may see the representation of the demi‐
god, the giant Starchaterus (Starkad, the pupil of Hroszharsgrani,
the Magician), holding under each arm a huge stone covered with
Runic characters. This Starkad, according to Scandinavian legend,
went to Ireland and performed marvellous deeds in the North and
South, East and West. (See _Asgard and the Gods_, pp. 218‐221.)

776 _Hist. Nat._, XXXVII. liv.

777 _Ibid._, II. xxxviii.

778 Charton, _Magasin Pittoresque_ (1853), p. 32. Quoted by De Mirville,
_op. cit._, _ibid._, p. 293.

779 T. A. Wise, _History of Paganism in Caledonia_, p. 36.

780 _Op. cit._, _ibid._, p. 288.

781 _Essays on Physiology_, p. 144.

782 _Principles of Biology_, Appendix, p. 482.

783 We shall treat of the Divine Instructors in Stanza XII.

784 Men.

785 Of the primitive Divine Stock.

786 Race.

787 Race.

788 _The Great Pyramid._

789 _Knowledge_, i. p. 243; quoted by Staniland Wake, _op. cit._, pp.
81, 82.

790 _Nineteenth Century_, 1882, p. 236; quoted by Staniland Wake,
_ibid._, p. 82.

791 _Op. cit._, XI. xvii.

792 As shown by H. Lizeray in his _Trinité Chrétienne Devoilée_, the
Dragon, being placed between the immutable Father (the Pole, a fixed
point) and mutable Matter, transmits to the latter the influences he
receives from the former, whence his name—the Verbum.

793 Symbolized by the Egyptians under the form of a serpent with a
hawk’s head.

794 _Revue Archéologique_, 1885.

795 Mackey’s _Sphinxiad: or, The Mythological Astronomy of the Ancients
Demonstrated by Restoring to their Fables and Symbols their Original
Meanings_, p. 42.

796 _Ibid._, p. 47.

797 Also translated as “Blissful Immortals” by Dr. W. Geiger; but the
first is more correct.

798 These “seven” became the eight, the Ogdoad, of the later
_materialized_ religions, the seventh, or the highest “principle,”
being no longer the pervading Spirit, the Synthesis, but becoming an
anthropomorphic number, or additional unit.

799 These elements are: the cosmic, the terrene, the mineral, the
vegetable, the animal, the aqueous, and finally the human—in their
physical, spiritual, and psychic aspects.

800 P. 53.

801 _Thalia_, lxxvii.

802 Who adds that “the Egyptians had various ways of representing the
angle of the poles. In Perry’s _View of the Levant_ there is a
figure representing the _south pole_ of the Earth in the
constellation of the _Harp_, in which the poles appear like two
_straight rods_ surmounted with hawks’ wings, to distinguish the
north from the south. But the symbols of the poles ... are,
sometimes, in the form of serpents, with the heads of hawks to
distinguish the north from the south end.” (_Op. cit._, p. 41.)

803 Faber and Bishop Cumberland would make these all the later pagan
personifications of “the Noëtic Ark, and ... no other than the
patriarch [Noah] and his family”(!), as the former writer puts it in
his _Cabiri_ (i. 136); because, we are told, that most probably
after the Deluge in commemoration of the event, the pious Noachidæ
established a religious festival, which was, later on, corrupted by
their _impious_ descendants, who made of “Noah and his family”
demons or hero‐gods; “and at length unblushing obscenity usurped the
name and garb of religion” (_ibid._, i. p. 10). Now this is indeed
putting an extinguisher upon the human reasoning powers, not only of
antiquity, but even of our present generations. Reverse the
statement, and after the words “Noah and his family” explain that
what was meant is simply the Jewish version of a Samothracian
mystery, of Saturn, or Cronus‐Cydyk and his Sons, and then we may
say _Amen_.

804 Who were later on, with the Greeks, limited to Castor and Pollux
only. But in the days of Lemuria, the Dioscuri, the “Egg‐born,” were
the Seven Dhyân Chohans (Agnishvâtta‐Kumâra) who incarnated in the
Seven Elect of the Third Race.

805 _Op. cit._, i. 133.

806 Clement of Alexandria recognized the astronomical significance of
Chapters xxv _et seqq._ of _Exodus_. He says that, according to the
Mosaic doctrine, the seven Planets help in the generation of
terrestrial things. The two Cherubs standing on the two sides of the
sacred Tetragrammaton represent Ursa Major and Ursa Minor.

807 Vyse, _Operations_, etc., ii. 258.

808 Palgrave, ii. 264.

809 Vyse, _ibid._, ii. 342.

810 P. 57.

811 The speculation of Mackey, the self‐made adept of Norwich, in his
_Mythological Astronomy_, is a curious idea—yet one perhaps not so
very far from the truth. He says that the Kabiri named Axieros and
Axiokersa (_a_) derived their names from _kab_ or _cab_, a
“measure,” and from _urim_, the “heavens”—the Kabirim being thus “a
measure of the heavens”; and (_b_) that their distinctive names,
implying the _principle of generation_, referred to the sexes. For
“the word _sex_ was formerly understood by _ax_; which ... has, in
our time, settled into sex. [And he refers to _Encyclopædia
Londiniensis_, at the word ‘aspiration.’] Now if we give the
aspirated sound to Axieros, it would become _Sax_ or _Sexieros_; and
the other pole would be _Sexiokersa_. The two poles would thus
become the generators of the other powers of nature—they would be
the _Parents_ of the other powers; therefore, the most powerful
Gods.” (_Op. cit._, p. 39.)

812 ii. 51.

813 i. 9‐17.

814 Decharme, _Mythologie de la Grèce Antique_, p. 270.

815 The word _guebra_ comes from Kabiri (_Gabiri_), and means the
Persian ancient fire‐worshippers, or Parsîs. Kabiri became Gabiri
and then remained as an appellation of the Zoroastrians in Persia.
(See Hyde’s _De Religione Persarum_, c. 29.)

816 I. ix. 751.

817 See Macrob., _Sat._, I. iii. c. 4, p. 376.

818 Pausan., ix. 22; 5.

819 Herodotus, iii. 37.

820 Quoted in Gould’s _Mythical Monsters_, p. 399.

821 Appendix, p. 13; quoted by Faber, _Cabiri_, ii. pp. 289‐291.

822 The Amshaspands are six—if Ormazd, their chief and Logos, is
excluded. But in the Secret Doctrine he is the seventh and highest,
just as Phtah is the seventh Kabir among the Kabiri.

823 In the _Purânas_ it is identified with Vishnu’s or Brahma’s Shveta‐
dvîpa of Mount Meru.

824 Ed. Fleisher, p. 16.

825 MS., 47 in Nic. Cat.

826 MS., 785, Uri’s Cat.; quoted by Col. Vyse, _Operations at the
Pyramids of Gizeh_, ii. 364; see Staniland Wake, _The Great
Pyramid_, p. 94.

827 De Mirville, _Pneumatologie_, iii. 29.

828 Staniland Wake, _ibid._, p. 96.

829 _Ibid._, p. 97.

830 _Égypte_, iv. 441; De Mirville, _op. cit._, iii. 41.

831 _Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne_, xxxii. 442; see De Mirville,
_Pneumatologie_, iii. 18.

832 _Histoire de l’Astronomie Ancienne_; see De Mirville, _op. cit._,
_ibid._, p. 15.

833 De Mirville, _ibid._, p. 41.

834 _Ibid._, pp. 16, 17.

835 In the _Vishnu Purâna_, with careful reading, may be found many
corroborations of the same (Book II, chaps, iii, iv, _et seqq._).
The reigns of Gods, lower Gods, and Men are all enumerated in the
descriptions of the seven islands, seven seas, seven mountains,
etc., ruled by Kings. Each King is invariably said to have _seven_
sons, an allusion to the seven sub‐races. One instance will do. The
King of Kushā‐Dvîpa had seven sons ... “after whom the seven
portions or Varsha of the island were called.... _There reside
mankind, along with Daityas and Dânavas, as well as with spirits of
heaven_ [_Gandharvas_, _Yakshas_, _Kimpurushas_, etc.] _and Gods._”
(Wilson’s Trans., ii. 195.) There is but one exception in the case
of King Priyavrata, the son of the first Manu, Svâyambhuva—who had
_ten_ sons. But of these, three—Medha, Agnibâhu, and Putra (_ibid._,
ii. 101)—became ascetics, and refused their portions. Thus
Priyavrata divided the Earth again into _seven_ continents.

836 _Égypte_, pp. 450‐455: De Mirville, _ibid._, pp. 41, 42.

837 As a general rule, _now_ that the very nature of the _inner_ man has
become as blind as his physical nature, man on this Globe is as the
Amphioxus is in the ocean. Seen by millions of various other fishes
and creatures that surround it, the Amphioxus species—having neither
brain nor any of the senses possessed by the other classes—sees them
not. Who knows whether, on the Darwinian theory, these Branchiostoma
are not the direct ancestors of our Materialists?

838 The Occultists have been accused of worshipping Gods or Devils! We
deny this. Among the numberless hosts of Spirits—entities that have
been or that will be men—there are some immeasurably superior to the
human race, higher and holier than the highest saint on Earth, and
wiser than any mortal without exception. And there are those again
who are no better than we are, and some also who are far worse and
inferior to the lowest savage. It is these last that command the
readiest communication with our Earth, who perceive and sense us, as
the clairvoyants perceive and sense them. The close proximity of our
respective abodes and planes of perception are, unfortunately, in
favour of such inter‐communication, as they are ever ready to
interfere with our affairs for weal or woe. If we are asked how it
is that none but sensitive hysterical natures, neuro‐ and psycho‐
pathic persons, see—and occasionally talk with—“spirits,” we answer
the question by several other queries. We ask: Do you know the
nature of hallucination, and can you define its psychic process? How
can you tell that all such visions are due merely to physical
hallucinations? What makes you feel so sure that mental and nervous
diseases, while drawing a veil over our _normal_ senses (so‐called),
_do not_ reveal at the same time vistas unknown to the healthy man,
by throwing open doors usually closed against your scientific (?)
perceptions; or that a psycho‐spiritual faculty _does not_ forthwith
replace the loss, or the temporary atrophy, of a purely physical
sense? It is disease or the exuberance of nervous fluid which
produces mediumship and visions—hallucinations, as you call them.
But what _does_ Science know even of mediumship? Truly were the
modern Charcots to pay attention to the delirium of their patients
from a more psychic standpoint, Science—Physiology especially—might
be more benefited than it is now, and truth have a wider field of
fact in its knowledge.

839 i. 70; De Mirville, _ibid._, p. 26.

840 These were the early Âryans and the bulk of the Fourth Root‐Race—the
former pious and meditative (given to yoga‐contemplation), the
latter a fighting race of sorcerers, who were rapidly degenerating
owing to their uncontrolled passions.

841 The Northern and Southern Divisions of Lemuria‐Atlantis. The
Hyperborean and the Equatorial lands of the two Continents.

842 De Rougemont, _Peuple Primitif_, iii. 157; De Mirville, _ibid._, p.
29. This is Occult and refers to the property of iron which is
attracted by some magnetic elements, and repelled by others. Such
elements, by an Occult process, can be made as impervious to it as
water to a blow.

843 _Ibid._, _loc. cit._

844 The First Continent, or Island, if so preferred, “the cap of the
North Pole,” has never perished; nor will it to the end of the Seven
Races.

845 See De Rougemont, _ibid._

846 Boulanger, _Règne des Dieux_, Introd.; see De Mirville, _op. cit._,
_ibid._, pp. 32, 33.

847 The Secret Doctrine explains and expounds what Plato says, for it
teaches that those “Inventors” were Gods and Demi‐gods (Devas and
Rishis) who had become—some deliberately, some compelled by
Karma—incarnated in man.

848 The preceding paragraphs are condensed from Plato, _Legg._, l.
iv—_id., in Crit., et in Politic._; De Mirville, _ibid._, pp. 33,
34.

849 Argyle, _Unity of Nature_.

850 _Book of the Dead_, xcix. 33; and clvi. 4. The reader is referred to
Stanza VII, Shloka 1 (i. 240), wherein this verse is explained in
another of its meanings, and also to the _Book of the Dead_, cix. 4
and 5. This is a direct reference to the Esoteric division of man’s
“principles” symbolized by the divine wheat. The legend which
inscribes the third Register of the papyrus (_Book of the Dead_,
cx.) states: “This is the region of the Manes [disembodied men]
_seven_ cubits high—[to wit, those just translated and supposed to
be still sevenfold with all their ‘principles,’ even the body being
represented _astrally_ in the Kâma Loka or Hades, before their
separation]; and there is wheat _three_ cubits high for Mummies in a
_state of perfection_ [_i.e._, those already separated, whose
_three_ higher principles are in Devachan] who are permitted to
glean it.” This region (Devachan) is called “the land of the Re‐
birth of Gods,” and is shown to be inhabited by Shoo, Tefnoot, and
Seb. The “region for the Manes _seven_ cubits high”—for the yet
imperfect Mummies—and the region for those “in a state of
perfection” who “glean wheat _three_ cubits high,” is as clear as
possible. The Egyptians had the same Esoteric Philosophy which is
now taught by the Cis‐Himâlayan Adepts, and the latter, when,
buried, have corn and wheat placed over them.

851 I. xiv. There are Egyptologists who have quite erroneously tried to
identify Osiris with Menes. Bunsen assigns to Menes an antiquity of
5,867 years B.C., and is denounced for it by Christians. But “Isis‐
Osiris” reigned in Egypt before the Zodiac was painted on the
ceiling of the temple of Dendera, and that is over 75,000 years ago!

852 In the text, “corked up” or “screwed up.”

853 _Zohar_, part i, col. 177; De Mirville, _ibid._, p. 88.

854 _Genesis_, vi. 4.

855 _Prælectiones Theol._, ch. ii; De Mirville, _ibid._, p. 84.

856 _Réflexions Critiques sur l’Origine des Anciens Peuples._

857 Rabbi Parcha.

858 i. 6.

859 _Book of Ruth and Schadash_, fol. 63, col. 3, Amsterdam edition.

860 _Zohar_, part ii, col. 73; De Mirville, _ibid._, p. 86.

861 _Ibid._, p. 87.

862 _More Nevochim_, xxvi. 8.

863 _Sagra Scrittura._

864 ii. pp. 14, 29.

865 Chap. viii; Laurence’s Translation, pp. 7 and 8.

866 _Job_, i. 6.

867 The Chaldæan _Book of Numbers_.

868 _Archæology_, xxv. 220, London.

869 _Die Phoinizier_, 70.

870 See Sanchuniathon in Eusebius, _Pr. Ev._, 36; _Genesis_, xvi.

871 _Society of Antiquaries of London_, xxv. 220.

872 _Cartas_, 51; see _Isis Unveiled_, i. 553, _et seqq._

873 He is thus named and included in the list of the Dânavas in _Vâyu
Purâna_; the Commentator of _Bhâgavata Purâna_ calls him a son of
Danu, but the name means also “Spirit of Humanity.”

874 Kashyapa is called the son of Brahmâ, and is the “Self‐born” to whom
a great part of the work of creation is attributed. He is one of the
seven Rishis; exoterically, the son of Marîchi, the son of Brahmâ;
while the _Atharva Veda_ says, “The Self‐born Kashyapa sprang from
Time,” and _Esoterically_ Time and Space are forms of the One
_incognizable_ Deity. As an Âditya, Indra is son of Kashyapa, as
also Vaivasvata Manu, our Progenitor. In the instance given in the
text, he is Kashyapa‐Âditya, the Sun and the Sun‐god, from whom all
the “Cosmic” Demons, Dragons (Nâgas), Serpent or Snake‐gods, and
Dânavas or Giants, are born. The meaning of the allegories given
above is purely astronomical and cosmical, but will serve to prove
the identity of all.

875 _Vishnu Purâna_, Wilson’s Trans., ii. 72.

876 All such stories differ in the _exoteric_ texts. In the
_Mahâbhârata_, Kârttikeya, “the six‐faced Mars,” is the son of Rudra
or Shiva, Self‐born _without a mother_ from the seed of Shiva cast
into the fire. But Kârttikeya is generally called Agnibhû, “Fire‐
born.”

877 Hiranyâksha is ruler or king of the _fifth_ region of Pâtâla, a
Snake‐god.

878 The Elohim also feared the Knowledge of Good and Evil for Adam, and
therefore are shown as expelling him from Eden or killing him
_spiritually_.

879 The story told is, that Târaka (called also Kâlanâbha), owing to his
extraordinary Yoga‐powers, had obtained all the divine knowledge of
Yoga‐vidyâ and the Occult powers of the Gods, who conspired against
him. Here we see the “obedient” Host of Archangels or minor Gods
conspiring against the (future) Fallen Angels, whom Enoch accuses of
the great crime of disclosing to the world all “the _secret things_
done in heaven.” It is Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Suryal and Uriel
who denounced to the Lord God those of their Brethren who were said
_to have pried into the divine mysteries_ and taught them to men; by
this means they themselves escaped a like punishment. Michael was
commissioned to fight the Dragon, and so was Kârttikeya, and under
the same circumstances. Both are “Leaders of the Celestial Host,”
both Virgins, both “Leaders of Saints,” “Spear‐holders” (Shakti‐
dharas), etc. Kârttikeya is the original of Michael and St. George,
as surely as Indra is the prototype of Kârttikeya.

880 The “life and the light” of the material _physical_ world, the
delight of the senses—not of the soul. Apollo is preëminently the
_human_ God, the God of emotional, pomp‐loving and theatrical Church
ritualism, with lights and music.

881 See _Revelation_ (xii) where we find Apollo’s mother persecuted by
the Python, the Red Dragon, who is also Porphyrion, the scarlet or
red Titan.

882 _Book of God_, p. 88.

883 No “God”—whether called Bel or Jehovah—who _curses_ his (supposed)
own work, because he has made it imperfect, can be the One Infinite
Absolute Wisdom.

884 In the Indian allegory of Târakâmaya, the War between the Gods and
the Asuras headed by Soma (the Moon, the King of Plants), it is
Vishvakarmâ, the artificer of the Gods, who, like Vulcan (Tubal‐
Cain), forges their weapons for them.

885 _Chaldean Account of Genesis_, p. 304. We have said elsewhere that
the “woman with child” of _Revelation_ was Aima, the Great Mother,
or Binah, the third Sephira, “whose name is Jehovah”; and the
“Dragon,” who seeks to devour her coming child (the Universe), is
the Dragon of Absolute Wisdom—that Wisdom which, recognizing the
non‐separateness of the Universe and everything in it from the
Absolute ALL, sees in it no better than the great Illusion,
Mahâmâyâ, hence the cause of misery and suffering.

886 The “seven Karshvares of the Earth”—the seven Spheres of our
Planetary Chain, the seven Worlds, also mentioned in the _Rig Veda_,
are fully referred to elsewhere. There are six Râjamsi (Worlds)
above Prithivî, the Earth, or “this” (Idâm), as opposed to that
which is _yonder_ (the six Globes on the three other planes). (See
_Rig Veda_, i. 34; iii. 56; vii. 10411, and v. 60, 6.)

887 Darmesteter’s Trans., “Sacred Books of the East,” vol. iv. p. 207.

888 _Ibid._, p. 217.

889 _Ibid._, p. 208.

890 _Book of the Dead_, xvii. 62; Anubis is Horus who melts “in him who
is eyeless.”

891 See Lenoir’s _Du Dragon de Metz_.

892 See also _Egyptian Pantheon_, pp. 20, 23.

893 _Book of the Dead_, xvii. 54 and 49.

894 These “Evil Spirits” can by no means be identified with Satan or the
Great Dragon. They are the Elementals generated or begotten by
ignorance—cosmic and human passions—or Chaos.

895 _Assyrian Discoveries_, p. 403.

896 See _Numbers_, xxi. 8, 9. God orders Moses to build a brazen Serpent
(Saraph), to _look upon_ which heals those bitten by the Fiery
Serpents. The latter were the Seraphim, each one of which, as Isaiah
shows (vi. 2), “had six wings”; they are the symbols of Jehovah, and
of all the other Demiurgi who produce out of themselves six sons or
likenesses—seven with their Creator. Thus, the Brazen Serpent _is_
Jehovah, the chief of the “Fiery Serpents.” And yet, in _II Kings_
(xviii. 4) it is shown that king Hezekiah, who, like as David his
father, “did that which was right in the sight of the Lord”—“brake
in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made ... and called it
Nehushtan,” or piece of brass.

897 “And Satan stood up against Israel and provoked David to number
Israel” (_I Chronicles_, xxi. 1). “The anger of the Lord [Jehovah]
was kindled against Israel, and he moved David ... to say, Go,
number Israel” (_II Samuel_, xxiv. 1). The two are then identical.

898 ii. 18, 22.

899 Dozens of the most erudite writers have sifted thoroughly the
various meanings of the name J’hovah (with, and without the
Masoretic points), and shown their multifarious bearings. The best
of such works is the _Source of Measures: the Hebrew Egyptian
Mystery_, by J. Ralston Skinner, so often already referred to.

900 In the above‐mentioned work (p. 233), verse 26 of chapter iv of
_Genesis_ is correctly translated “then men began to call
_themselves_ Jehovah,” but less correctly explained, perhaps, as the
last word ought to be written Jah (male) Hovah (female), to show
that from that time the race of distinctly separate man and woman
began.

901 See for explanation the excellent pages of Appendix vii of the same
work.

902 _Op. cit._, p. 293.

903 _Rabba Battra_, 16a.

904 In Demonology, Satan is the leader of the opposition in Hell, the
monarch of which was Beelzebub. He belongs to the fifth kind or
class of Demons (of which there are nine according to mediæval
Demonology), and he is at the head of witches and sorcerers. But see
elsewhere the true meaning of Baphomet, the goat‐headed Satan, one
with Azazel, the scape‐goat of Israel. Nature is the God Pan.

905 See _Isis Unveiled_, ii. 184.

906 See _Codex Nazaræus_, iii. 73.

907 He is also Vulcan or Vul‐cain, the greatest God with the later
Egyptians, and the greatest Kabir. The God of Time was Chiun in
Egypt, or Saturn, or Seth, and Chiun is the same as Cain. (_Source
of Measures_, p. 278.)

908 See Strabo, comparing them to the Cyclopes, xiv. p. 653 _sqq._
Callim., _in Del._, 31. Stat., _Silv._, iv. 6, 47, etc.

909 _Mythologie de la Grèce Antique_, p. 271.

910 Nothing could be more awkward and childish, we say, than this
fruitless attempt to disconnect the genealogies of Cain and of Seth,
or to conceal the identity of names under a different spelling.
Thus, Cain has a Son Enoch, and Seth a Son Enoch (also Enos,
Ch’anoch, Hanoch—one may do what one likes with unvowelled Hebrew
names). In the Cainite line Enoch begets Irad, Irad Mehujael, the
latter Methusael, and Methusael, Lamech. In the Sethite line, Enoch
begets Cainan, and this one Mahalaleel (a variation on Mehujael),
who gives birth to Jared (or Irad); Jared to Enoch (number 3), who
produces Methuselah (from Methusael), and finally Lamech closes the
list. (See _Genesis_, iv. v.) Now all these are symbols
(kabalistically) of solar and lunar years, of astronomical periods
and of physiological (phallic) functions, just as in any other Pagan
symbolical creed. This has been proven by a number of writers.

911 See _Analysis of Ancient Mythology_, ii. 760.

912 vi. 9.

913 See _New Encyclopædia_, by Abraham Rees, F.R.S.

914 See _Hebrews_, v. 6; vii. 1, _et seqq._

915 The Æolian name of Mars was Areus (Ἄρευς), and the Greek Ares (Ἄρης)
is a name over the etymological significance of which, Philologists
and Indianists, Greek and Sanskrit scholars, have vainly worked to
this day. Very strangely, Max Müller connects both the names Mars
and Ares with the Sanskrit root _mar_, whence he traces their
derivation, and from which, he says, comes the name of the Maruts or
Storm‐gods. Welcker, however, offers a more correct etymology. (See
_Griech. Götterlehre_, i. 415.) However it may be, etymologies of
roots and words alone will never yield the Esoteric meaning fully,
though they may help to useful guesses.

916 As the same author shows: “The very name Vulcain appears in the
reading, for in the first words (_Gen._, iv. 5) is to be found
V’elcain, or V’ulcain, agreeably to the deepened _u_ sound of the
letter _vau_. Out of its immediate context, it may be read as, ‘_and
the god Cain_,’ or Vulcain. If, however, anything is wanting to
confirm the Cain‐Vulcain idea, Fuerst says: ‘קין _Cain, the iron
point of a lance, a smith_ (blacksmith), inventor of sharp iron
tools and smith work’ ” (p. 278).

917 _Op. cit._, p. 186.

918 _Append. de Cabiris ap. Orig. Gent._, pp. 364, 376; and the latter
statement on p. 357. See Faber’s _Cabiri_, i. 8.

919 Some derive the word from Paras which produced Pars, Pers, Persia;
but it may be equally derived from Pitaras or Pitris, the Hindû
progenitors of the Fifth Race—the Fathers of Wisdom or the Sons of
“Will and Yoga”—who were called Pitaras, as were the divine Pitris
of the First Race.

920 See for these traditions the _Collection of Persian Legends_, in
Russian, Georgian, Armenian, and Persian; Herbelot’s narrative
_Légendes Persanes_, “Bibliothèque Orientale,” p. 298, 387, etc.,
and Danville’s _Mémoires_. We give in a condensed narrative that
which is scattered in hundreds of volumes in European and Asiatic
languages, as well as in oral traditions.

921 _Genesis_, iv. 16, _et seqq._

922 The _main_ Continent perished in the Miocene times, as already
stated.

923 From Bede downwards all the chronologists of the Church have
differed among themselves, and contradicted each other. “The
chronology of the Hebrew text has been grossly altered, especially
in the interval next after the Deluge”—says Whiston (_Old Test._, p.
20).

924 ii. 170, 171.

925 Hence king Solomon, whose traces are nowhere to be found outside of
the _Bible_. The description of his magnificent palace and city
dovetail with those of the Persian tales, though they were unknown
to all Pagan travellers, even to Herodotus.

926 Herbelot, _op. cit._, p. 829.

927 _Orient. Trad._, p. 454. See also Bailly’s _Lettres sur
l’Atlantide_.

928 See _Orient. Collect._, ii. 119.

929 _Ibid._ Remember that the Rabbins teach that there are to be seven
successive renewals of the Globe; that each will last 7,000 years,
the total duration being thus 49,000 years. (See Rabbi Parcha’s
_Wheel_; also Kenealy’s _Book of God_, p. 176.) This refers to seven
Rounds, seven Root‐Races, and sub‐races, the truly Occult figures,
though sorely confused.

930 _Tales of Derbent._

931 Mergain, or Morgana, the fairy sister of King Arthur, is thus shown
of Oriental descent.

932 Where we find her, indeed, in Great Britain, in the romance of the
Knights of the Round Table. Whence the identity of name and fairy‐
hood, if both heroines did not symbolize the same historical event
which passed into a legend?

933 Herbelot, p. 593; _Armenian Tales_, p. 35.

934 To this day the aborigines of Caucasus speak of their mountains as
Kap‐kaz, using the consonant _p_ instead of the usual _v_ (Kav‐kaz
or Caucasus). But their bards say that it requires seven months for
a swift horse to reach the “dry land” beyond Kaf, holding North
without ever deviating from one’s way.

935 Bailly thought he saw in this Horse a twelve‐oared ship. The Secret
Doctrine teaches that the early Third Race built boats and flotillas
before it built houses. But the “Horse,” though a much later animal,
has, nevertheless, a more occult primitive meaning. The crocodile
and the hippopotamus were considered sacred and represented divine
symbols, both with the ancient Egyptians and with the Mexicans.
Poseidon is, in Homer, the God of the Horse, and assumes that form
himself to please Ceres. Arion, their progeny, is one of the aspects
of that “Horse,” which is a Cycle.

936 The severed parts must be Norway and other lands in the
neighbourhood of the Arctic Circle.

937 Cosmas Indicopleustes in _Collect. Novâ Patrum_, t. ii. p. 188; also
see _Journ. des Savants_, Suppl. 1707, p. 20.

938 The two Poles are called the “right” and “left ends” of our
Globe—the Right being the North Pole—or the head and feet of the
Earth. Every beneficent (astral and cosmic) action comes from the
North; every lethal influence from the South Pole. They are much
connected with and influence “right” and “left” hand magic.

939 The more one approaches the Poles the less rotation is felt; at the
Poles proper, the diurnal revolution is quite neutralized. Hence the
expression that the Sphere is “motionless.”

940 It is averred in Occultism that the land or island, which crowns the
North Pole like a skull‐cap, is the only one which prevails during
the whole Manvantara of our Round. All the central continents and
lands will emerge from the sea bottom many times in turn, but this
land will never change.

941 Bear in mind that the Vedic and Avestaic name of Fohat is Apâm‐
Napât. In the _Avesta_ he stands between the Fire‐yazatas and the
Water‐yazatas. The literal meaning is “Son of the Waters,” but these
“Waters” are not the liquid we know, but Æther—the Fiery Waters of
Space. Fohat is the “Son of Æther” in its highest aspect, Âkâsha,
the Mother‐Father of the primitive Seven, and of Sound or the Logos.
Fohat is the Light of the Logos.

942 This “Water” is the blood or fluid of Life which animates the Earth,
compared here to a living body.

943 Occult teaching corroborates the popular tradition which asserts the
existence of a Fountain of Life in the bowels of the Earth and in
the North Pole. It is the blood of the Earth, the electro‐magnetic
current, which circulates through all the arteries, and which is
said to be found stored in the “navel” of the Earth.

944 Occultism points to the Himâlayan Chain as that “belt,” and
maintains that whether under the water or above, it encircles the
Globe. The “navel” is described as situated towards the setting Sun
or to the West of the Himavat in which lie the roots of Meru, which
mountain is North of the Himâlaya. Meru is _not_ “the fabulous
mountain _in_ the navel or centre of the earth,” but its roots and
foundations are in that “navel,” while it is in the far North
itself. This connects it with the “Central” Land “that never
perishes”; the land in which “the day of the mortal lasts six months
and his night another six months.” As the _Vishnu Purâna_ has it:
“For the North of Meru there is, therefore, always night during day
in _other regions_; for Meru is North of all the Dvipas and Varshas”
(islands and countries). (Book ii. chap. viii.) Meru is therefore
neither on Atlas as Wilford suggests, nor, as Wilson tried to show,
“absolutely in the centre of the globe,” only because “relatively
with the inhabitants of the several portions, to all of whom the
East is that quarter where the sun first appears.”

945 Even the Commentaries do not refrain from Oriental metaphor. The
Globe is likened to the body of a woman, “Mother‐Earth.” From her
neck downward, means from the inland sea now beyond the impassable
barrier of ice. The Earth, as Parâshara says, “is the mother and
nurse, augmented with all creatures and their qualities, the
_comprehender_ of all the worlds.”

946 For the Stanzas call this locality by a term translated in the
Commentary as _a place of no latitude_ (Niraksha), the Abode of the
Gods. As a scholiast says in the _Sûrya Siddhânta_ (xii. 42‐44):

“Above them goes the sun when situated at the equinoxes; they have
neither equinoctial shadow nor elevation of the pole (_akshonnati_).

“In both directions from Meru are two pole‐stars (_dhruvatârâ_),
fixed in the midst of the sky, to those _who are situated in places
of no latitude_ (_niraksha_), both these have their place in the
horizon.

“Hence there is, in those cities [in that land], no elevation of the
poles, the two pole‐stars being situated in their horizon; but their
degrees of co‐latitude (_lambaka_) are ninety: at Meru the degrees
of latitude (_aksha_) are of the same number.” (See _Vishnu Purâna_,
Wilson’s Trans., ii. 208.)

947 Wilford makes many mistakes. He identifies, for instance, Shveta‐
dvîpa, the White Island, the “island in the northern part of
Toyambhudi,” with England, and then tries to identify it with Atala.
(a nether region) and Atlantis. Now the Shveta‐dvîpa is the abode of
Vishnu (exoterically), and Atala is a hell. He also places it in the
Euxine or Ikshu (Black) Sea, and then seems to connect it, in
another place, with Africa and Atlas.

948 _Asiatick Researches_, viii. 280.

949 _Op. cit._, _ibid._, p. 201.

950 Every name in the _Purânas_ has to be examined at least under two
aspects, geographically and metaphysically, in its allegorical
application; _e.g._, Nîla, the (blue) mountain which is one of the
boundaries to the north of Meru, is again to be sought
geographically in a mountain range in Orissa, and yet again in a
mountain quite different from the others, in Western Africa. Jambu‐
dvîpa is Vishnu’s dominion—the World, limited in the _Purânas_ to
our Globe, the region which contains Meru _only_, and again it is
divided to contain Bharata‐varsha (India), its _best_ division, and
the fairest, says Parâshara. Likewise with Pushkara and all others.

951 _Ibid._, p. 202.

952 _Sûrya Siddhânta_, Whitney’s Trans., v. 5.

953 _Asiatick Researches_, iii. 300.

954 Jambu, Plaksha, Shâlmali, Kusha, Krauncha, Shâka, and Pushkara.

955 Such as Shâka and Pushkara, for instance, which do not yet exist,
but into which will enter such lands as some portions of America, of
Africa, and Central Asia, with the Gobi region. Let us bear in mind
that Upadvîpas mean “root” islands, or the dry land in general.

956 They were called Demons, Asuras, Giants, and monsters, because of
their wickedness; and thus their country was likened to Atala—a
Hell.

957 Not on the river Nile, surely, but near the Nila mountains of the
Atlas range.

958 _Asiatick Researches_, iii. 225.

959 See vols. viii, x, and xi, of _Asiatick Researches_.

960 _Op. cit._, iii. 326.

961 _Ibid._

962 Says Wilford of the division of Atlantis and Bhârata or India,
confusing the two accounts and Priyavrata with Medhâtithi: “This
division was made by Priyavrata.... He had ten sons, and it was his
intention to divide the whole world between them equally.... In the
same manner Neptune divided the Atlantis between his ten sons: one
of them had ... the extremity of the Atlantis”—which “is probably
the old continent, at the extremity of which is Gades.... This
Atlantis was overwhelmed with a flood; and it seems that _by the
Atlantis, we should understand the antediluvian Earth_, over which
ten princes were born to rule, according to the mythology of the
West [and of the East, also] but _seven_ of them only sate upon the
throne.” (_Op. cit._, viii. 286.) Some also are of opinion that of
the seven Dvîpas _six_ were destroyed by a flood. Wilford takes it
to be “Gades which included Spain,” but it was Plato’s
island—rather.

963 America, the “new” world, is thus, though not _much_, older—still it
_is_ older—than Europe, the “old” world.

964 If Div or Dev‐sefid’s (the Târadaitya’s) abode was on the _seventh
stage_, it is because he came from Pushkara, the Pâtâla (antipodes)
of India, or from America. The latter touched the walls, so to say,
of Atlantis, before the latter finally sank. The word Pâtâla meaning
both the antipodal countries and infernal regions, these became
synonymous in ideas and attributes as well as in name.

965 Neither Atlantis, nor yet Shankha‐dvîpa, was ever called “White
Island.” When tradition says that “the White Island became black on
account of the sins of the people,” it only means the denizens of
the “White Island,” or Siddhapura, or Shveta‐dvîpa, who descended to
the Atlantis of the Third and Fourth Races, to “inform the latter;
and who, having incarnated, became black with sin” figure of speech.
All the Avatâras of Vishnu are said to come originally from the
White Island. According to Tibetan tradition the White Island is the
only locality which escapes the general fate of other Dvipas; it can
be destroyed by neither fire nor water, for—it is the “Eternal
Land.”

966 _Asiatick Researches_, xi. 27.

967 _Genesis_, ix. 1.

968 How wise and grand, how far‐seeing and morally beneficent are the
laws of Manu on connubial life, when compared with the licence
tacitly allowed to man in civilized countries. That those laws have
been neglected for the last two millenniums does not prevent us from
admiring their forethought. The Brâhman was a Grihasta, a family
man, till a certain period of his life, when, after begetting a son,
he broke with married life and became a chaste Yogi. His very
connubial life was regulated by his Brâhman astrologer in accordance
with his nature. Therefore, in such countries as the Punjâb, for
instance, where the lethal influence of Mussulman, and later on of
European, licentiousness, has hardly touched the orthodox Âryan
castes, one still finds the finest men—so far as stature and
physical strength go—on the whole Globe; whereas the mighty men of
old have found themselves replaced in the Deccan, and especially in
Bengal, by men whose generation becomes with every century—and
almost with every year—dwarfed and weakened.

969 Diseases and over‐population are facts that can never be denied.

970 In Mrs. Anna Swanwick’s volume, _The Dramas of Æschylus_, it is said
of “Prometheus Bound” (“Bohn’s Classical Library,” p. 334), that
Prometheus truly appears in it “as the champion and benefactor of
mankind, whose condition: ... is depicted as weak and miserable in
the extreme.... Zeus, it is said, proposed to annihilate these puny
ephemerals, and to plant upon the earth a new race in their stead.”
We see the Lords of Being doing likewise, and exterminating the
first product of Nature and the Sea, in the Stanzas. “Prometheus
_represents_ himself as having frustrated this design, and as being
consequently subjected, for the sake of mortals, to the most
agonizing pain, inflicted by the remorseless cruelty of Zeus. We
have, thus, the Titan, the symbol of finite reason and free will [of
intellectual humanity, or the higher aspect of Manas], depicted _as
the sublime philanthropist_, while Zeus, the Supreme Deity of
Hellas, is portrayed as the cruel and obdurate despot, a character
peculiarly revolting to Athenian sentiment.” The reason for it is
explained further on. The “Supreme Deity” bears, in every ancient
Pantheon—including that of the Jews—a _dual_ character, composed of
light and shadow.

971 The animal world, having simple instinct to guide it, has its
_seasons of procreation_, and the sexes become neutralized during
the rest of the year. Therefore, the free animal knows sickness but
once in its life—before it dies.

972 Introduction to “Prometheus Bound,” p. 340.

973 From προ‐μῆτις, “forethought.” “Professor Kuhn,” we are told in the
above‐named volumes, _The Dramas of Æschylus_, “considers the name
of the Titan to be derived from the Sanskrit word Pramantha, the
instrument used for kindling fire. The root _mand_ or _manth_,
implies rotatory motion, and the word _manthâmi_, used to denote the
process of fire kindling, acquired the secondary sense of snatching
away; hence we find another word of the same stock, _pramatha_,
signifying theft.” This is very ingenious, but perhaps not
altogether correct; besides, there is a very prosaic element in it.
No doubt in physical nature, the higher forms may develop from the
lower ones, but it is hardly so in the world of thought. And as we
are told that the word _manthâmi_ passed into the Greek language and
became the word _manthanô_, to learn—that is to say, to appropriate
knowledge, whence _prometheia_, fore‐knowledge, fore‐thought—we may
find, in searching, a more poetical origin for the “fire‐bringer”
than that displayed in its Sanskrit origin. The Svastica, the sacred
sign and the instrument for kindling _sacred_ fire, may explain it
better. “Prometheus, the fire‐bringer, is the Pramantha
personified,” continues the author, “and finds his prototype in the
Âryan Mâtarishvan, a divine ... personage, closely associated with
Agni, the fire‐god of the Vedas.” Matih, in Sanskrit, is
“understanding,” and a synonym of Mahat and Manas, and must be of
some account in the origin of the name; Pramatih is the son of
Fohat, and has his story also.

974 Cronus is “Time,” and thus the allegory becomes very suggestive.

975 It is complained by the author of the version and translator of
“Prometheus Bound” that in this tracing of Io’s wanderings, “no
consistency with our own known geography is attainable” (p. 379).
There may be good reason for it. First of all it is the journey and
wandering from place to place of the _Race_ from which the “tenth,”
or Kalki Avatâra, so called, is to issue. This he calls the “kingly
race born in _Argos_” (888). But Argos has no reference here to
Argos in Greece. It comes from _arg_ or _arka_—the female generative
power symbolized in the Moon—the navi‐formed Argha of the Mysteries,
meaning the Queen of Heaven. Eustathius shows that, in the dialect
of the Arg‐ians, Io signified the Moon; while Esotericism explains
it as the divine Androgyne, or the mystic Ten (10); in Hebrew 10 is
the perfect number, or Jehovah. Arghya in Sanskrit is the libation
cup, the navi‐form or boat‐shaped vessel in which flowers and fruit
are offered to the Deities. Arghyanâth is a title of the Mahâ
Chohan, meaning the “Lord of Libations”; and Arghyavarsha, the “Land
of Libations,” is the mystery name of that region which extends from
Kailâsa mountain nearly to the Shamo Desert—from within which the
Kalki Avatâra is expected. The Airyâna‐Varsedya of the Zoroastrians,
as a locality, is identical with it. It is now said to have been
situated between the Sea of Aral, Baltistan, and Little Tibet; but
in olden times its area was far larger, as it was the birth‐place of
_physical_ humanity, of which Io is the mother and symbol.

976 _Op. cit._, p. 385, note.

977 i. 569, 570.

978 Alexander, who was better acquainted with Attock than with India—for
he never entered India proper—could not have failed to hear the
Indus, near its very sources, called Nîl and Nîlâ. The mistake—if
mistake it is—is thus easily accounted for.

979 That Io is identical, allegorically, with Isis and the Moon is shown
by her being “cow‐horned.” The allegory undeniably reached Greece
from India, where Vâch—the “melodious Cow” of the _Rig Veda_, “from
whom mankind was produced” (_Bhâgavata Purâna_) is shown in the
_Aitareya Brâhmana_ as pursued by her father Brahmâ, who was moved
by an illicit passion, and changed her into a Deer. Hence Io,
refusing to yield to Jupiter’s passion, becomes “horned.” The Cow
was in every country the symbol of the passive generative power of
nature, Isis, Vâch, Venus—the mother of the prolific God of Love,
Cupid, but, at the same time, that of the Logos whose symbol, with
the Egyptians and the Indians, became the Bull, as testified to by
the Apis and the Hindû Bulls in the most ancient temples. In
Esoteric Philosophy the Cow is the symbol of Creative Nature, and
the Bull (her calf) the Spirit which vivifies her, or the “Holy
Spirit,” as Dr. Kenealy shows. Hence the symbol of the horns. These
were sacred also with the Jews, who placed on the altar horns of
Shittim wood, by seizing which a criminal ensured his safety.

980 _Tuscul. Quæst._, I. ii. 20.

981 _Strom._, I. ii, _Oper._, i. 467, Ed. Potter’s.

982 Herodotus and Pausanias supposed that the cause of the condemnation
was that Æschylus, adopting the Theogony of the Egyptians, made
Diana the daughter of Ceres, and not of Latona. (See Ælian, _Var.
Hist._, I. v. xviii; i. 433, Edition Gronov.) But Æschylus _was_
initiated.

983 The Sabasia was a periodical festival with Mysteries enacted in
honour of some Gods, a variant on the Mithraic Mysteries. The whole
evolution of the Races was performed in these Mysteries.

984 Mrs. A. Swanwick, _op. cit._

985 See the foot‐note (p. 431) concerning the etymology of προ‐μῆτις or
_forethought_. Prometheus confesses it in the drama when saying:

O holy ether, swiftly‐wingèd gales....
Behold what I, a god, from gods endure.

And yet what say I? _Clearly I foreknow_
All that must happen....
... The Destined it behoves,
As best I may, to bear, for well I wot
How incontestable the strength of Fate.... (105)

“Fate” stands here for Karma, or Nemesis.

986 Mankind is obviously divided into God‐informed men and lower human
creatures. The intellectual difference between the Âryan and other
civilized nations and such savages as the South Sea Islanders, is
inexplicable on any other grounds. No amount of culture, no
generations of training amid civilization, could raise such human
specimens as the Bushmen, the Veddhas of Ceylon, and some African
tribes, to the same intellectual level as the Âryans, the Semites,
and the Turanians so‐called. The “Sacred Spark” is missing in them,
and it is they who are the only _inferior_ races on the Globe, now
happily—owing to the wise adjustment of Nature which ever works in
that direction—fast dying out. Verily mankind is “of one blood,”
_but not of the same essence_. We are the hot‐house, artificially
quickened plants in Nature, having in us a spark, which in them is
latent.

987 The philosophical view of Indian metaphysics places the Root of Evil
in the differentiation of the Homogeneous into the Heterogeneous, of
the Unit into Plurality.

988 _Sap._, i. 13.

989 Gautama Buddha, named Shâkya Thüb‐pa, is the _twenty‐seventh_ of the
last group, as most of these Buddhas belong to the Divine Dynasties
which instructed mankind.

990 Of these Buddhas, or the “Enlightened,” the far distant predecessors
of Gautama, the Buddha, who represent, we are taught, once living?
men, great Adepts and Saints, in whom the “Sons of Wisdom” had
incarnated, and who were, therefore, so to speak, minor Avatâras of
the Celestial Beings—eleven only belong to the Atlantean Race, and
twenty‐four to the Fifth Race, from its beginnings. They are
identical with the Tirthankaras of the Jainas.

991 This may account for the similarity of the artificial mounds in the
United States of America, and the tumuli in Norway. It is this
identity that has led some American Archæologists to suggest that
Norwegian mariners had _discovered_ America about one thousand years
ago. (See Holmboe’s _Traces de Bouddhisme en Norvège_, p. 23.) There
is no doubt that America is that “far distant land into which pious
men and heavy storms had transferred the sacred doctrine,” as a
Chinese writer suggested by his description to Neumann. But neither
Professor Holmboe, of Stockholm, nor the American Archæologists,
have guessed the right age of the mounds, or the tumuli. The fact
that Norwegians may have re‐discovered the land that their long‐
forgotten forefathers believed to have perished in the general
submersion, does not conflict with the other fact that the Secret
Doctrine of the land which was the cradle of physical man, and of
the Fifth Race, had found its way into the so‐called New World ages
and ages before the “Sacred Doctrine” of Buddhism.

992 See _Physiological Selection_, by G. J. Romanes, F.R.S.

993 _Esoteric Buddhism_, p. 65.

994 _Exodus_, xi.

995 Wrote the late Brahmachârî Bawa, a Yogî of great renown and
holiness: “Extensive works on ‘Ashtar Vidiâ’ and such other sciences
were at different times compiled in the languages of the times from
the Sanskrit originals. But they, together with the Sanskrit
originals, were lost at the time of the partial deluge of our
county.” (The _Theosophist_, June, 1880, “Some Things the Âryans
Knew.”) For Agnyastra, see Wilson’s _Specimens of the Hindû
Theatre_, i. 297.

996 Some wonderful, artificially‐made beast, similar in some way to
Frankenstein’s creation, which spoke and warned his master of every
approaching danger. The master was a “Black Magician,” the
mechanical animal was informed by a Djin, an Elemental, according to
the accounts. The blood of a pure man alone could destroy him. See
Part II, Section XXV, “Seven in Astronomy, Science, and Magic.”

997 The four Karmic Gods, called the Four Mahârâjahs in the Stanzas.

998 _Mythical Monsters_, p. 19.

999 _Travels in Egypt_, vol. ii.

1000 _The Mythological Astronomy of the Ancients Demonstrated_ (p. 3), by
a strangely intuitional Symbologist and Astronomer, a kind of a
self‐made Adept of Norwich, who lived in the first quartet of this
century.

1001 See Proctor, _Knowledge_, i. pp. 242, 400.

1002 Rawlinson’s _Herodotus_, ii. 345.

1003 _The Great Pyramid_, pp. 36, 37.

1004 Staniland Wake, _op. cit._, pp. 6, 7.

1005 _Ibid._

1006 _The Mythological Astronomy of the Ancients Demonstrated_, pp. 4, 5.

1007 The term “Atlantean” must not mislead the reader to regard these as
one race only, or even a nation. It is as though one said
“Asiatics.” Many, multityped, and various were the Atlanteans, who
represented several “humanities,” and almost a countless number of
races and nations, more varied indeed than would be the “Europeans,”
were this name to be given indiscriminately to the five existing
parts of the world, which, at the rate colonization is proceeding,
will be the case, perhaps, in less than two or three hundred years.
There were brown, red, yellow, white and black Atlanteans; giants
and dwarfs, as some African tribes comparatively are, even now.

1008 Says a teacher in _Esoteric Buddhism_ (p. 64): “In the Eocene age,
even in its very first part, the great cycle of the Fourth Race men,
the [Lemuro‐] Atlanteans, had already reached its highest point [of
civilization], and the great Continent, the father of nearly all the
present continents, showed the first symptoms of sinking.” And on
page 70, it is shown that Atlantis as a whole perished during the
Miocene period. To show how the continents, races, nations and
cycles overlap each other, one has but to think of Lemuria, the last
of whose lands perished about 700,000 years before the beginning of
the Tertiary period (p. 65), and the last of “Atlantis” only 11,000
years ago; thus both overlapping—one the Atlantean period, and the
other the Âryan.

1009 See _Traité de l’Astronomie Indienne et Orientale_, part iii.

1010 Ceylon.

1011 This is not so. The forefathers of the Âryan Brâhmans had their
Zodiac and Zodiacal calculations from those born by Kriyâshakti
power, the “Sons of Yoga”; the Egyptians from the Atlanteans of
Ruta.

1012 The former, therefore, may have registered time for seven or eight
millions of years, but the Egyptians _could not_.

1013 _Op. cit._, p. 6.

1014 This question was amply challenged, and as amply discussed and
answered. See _Five Years of Theosophy_, Art., “Mr. Sinnett’s
_Esoteric Buddhism_,” pp. 325‐346.

1015 _Ruins of Empires_, p. 360. Volney says that, as Aries was in its
15th degree 1,447 B.C., it follows that the first degree of Libra
could not have coincided with the Vernal Equinox more lately than
15,194 years B.C., to which if you add 1,790 since Christ, when
Volney wrote this, it appears that 16,984 years have elapsed since
the (Greek or rather Hellenic) origin of the Zodiac.

1016 The word “historical” is used, because, although historians have
almost absurdly dwarfed the dates that separate certain events from
our modern day, nevertheless, once that they are known and accepted,
they belong to history. Thus, the Trojan War _is_ a historical
event, which, though even less than 1,000 years B.C. are assigned to
it, really took place more nearly 6,000 than 5,000 years B.C.

1017 It is a historical fact that Sanchuniathon compiled the full record
of the Phœnician religion from annals and state documents in the
archives of the _older_ Phœnician cities, and wrote it in Phœnician
characters in 1,250 B.C.

1018 Prof. Virchow, in Appendix I, to Schliemann’s _Ilios_. Murray, 1880.

1019 Gosse writes of the latter: “She is set down a thorough heretic, not
at all to be believed, a manufacturer of unsound natural history, an
inventor of false facts in science.” (_Romance of Natural History_,
2nd Series, p. 227.)

1020 Pp. 9, 10.

1021 _Popular Science Monthly_, No. 60, April, 1877.

1022 Dr. Cover writes: “That famous bird of Washington was a myth; either
Audubon was mistaken, or else, as some do not hesitate to affirm, he
_lied_ about it.”

1023 _Ibid._, pp. 10, 11.

1024 _Mythical Monsters_, p. 13, note.

1025 So far back as July, 1888, at a time when the MS. of this work had
not yet left my writing table, and _The Secret Doctrine_ was utterly
unknown to the world, it was already being denounced as a product of
my brain and no more. These are the flattering terms in which the
_Evening Telegraph_ (of America) referred to this still unpublished
work in its issue of June 30, 1888: “_Among the fascinating books
for July reading_ is Mme. Blavatsky’s new book on Theosophy ... (!)
_The Secret Doctrine_.... But because she can soar back into the
Brahmin ignorance ... (!?) _is no proof that everything she says is
true_.” And once the prejudiced verdict has been given on the
mistaken notion that my book was out, and that the reviewer had read
it—neither of which was or could be the case—now that it is really
out, the critic will have to support his first statement, whether
correct or otherwise, and will get out of it, probably by a more
slashing criticism than ever.

1026 _Science of Language_, p. 168.

1027 _The Human Species_, p. 274.

1028 See above, the diagram of the Genealogical Tree of the Fifth Race.

1029 The Hegelian doctrine, which identifies Absolute Being or “Be‐ness”
with “Non‐Being,” and represents the Universe as an Eternal
Becoming, is identical with the Vedânta Philosophy.

1030 _The Religions of India_, p. xiii.

1031 Myer’s _Qabbalah_, p. 175.

1032 See De Mirville, _Pneumatologie_, iii. pp. 218 _et seqq._

1033 _Op. cit._, _ibid._

1034 See _Genesis_ and the authorized chronology. In chapter viii, “Noah
leaveth the ark”—2,348 B.C. In chapter x, “Nimrod the first
monarch,” stands over 1,998 B.C.

1035 _Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne_, June, 1860, p. 415.

1036 April 30, 1860.

1037 “I will mention to thee the writings ... respecting the belief and
institutions of the Sabæans,” he says. “The most famous is the Book,
_The Agriculture of the Nabatheans_, which has been translated by
Ibn Wahohijah. This book is full of heathenish foolishness.... It
speaks of preparations of Talismans, the drawing down of the powers
of the Spirits, Magic, Demons, and Ghouls, which make their abode in
the desert.” (Maimonides, quoted by Dr. D. Chwolsohn; _Die Ssabier
und der Ssabismus_, ii. 458.) The Nabatheans of Mount Lebanon
believed in the seven Archangels, as their forefathers had believed
in the seven Great Stars, the abodes and bodies of these Archangels,
which are believed in to this day by the Roman Catholics, as is
shown elsewhere.

1038 See _Isis Unveiled_, ii. 197.

1039 i. 354.

1040 Sayce; _cf._, p. 115, 2nd ed.

1041 _Op. cit._, pp. 418, 419.

1042 _Ibid._, p. 118.

1043 Simply, the womb, the “Holy of Holies” with the Semites.

1044 See the Valentinian Table in Epiphanius, _Adv. Hær._, I. xxxi. 2.

1045 But it was not so in reality, as witness their prophets. It is the
later Rabbis and the Talmudic scheme that killed out all
spirituality from the body of their symbols; leaving only their
Scriptures—a dead shell, from which the soul has departed.

1046 See _II Samuel_, vi. 16‐22.

1047 _Psalms_, xxiv. 3.

1048 _II Kings_, xxiii. 7; see Dunlap, _Sôd; The Mysteries of Adoni_, p.
41.

1049 _Judges_, xxi. 21, 23 _et passim_.

1050 _I Kings_, xviii. 26.

1051 _Isis Unveiled_, ii. 49.

1052 _Ibid._, ii. 444.

1053 The author of the _Qabbalah_ makes several attempts to prove
conclusively the antiquity of the _Zohar_. Thus he shows that Moses
de Leon could not be the author or the forger of the Zoharic works
in the thirteenth century, as he is accused of being, since Ibn
Gebirol gave out the same philosophical teaching 225 years before
the day of Moses de Leon. No true Kabalist or scholar will ever deny
the fact. It is certain that Ibn Gebirol based his doctrines upon
the oldest Kabalistic sources, namely, the Chaldæan _Book of
Numbers_, as well as some no longer extant Midrashim, the same, no
doubt, as those used by Moses de Leon. But it is just the difference
between the two ways of treating the same Esoteric subjects,
which—while proving the enormous antiquity of the Esoteric
System—points to a decided ring of Talmudistic and even Christian
sectarianism in the compilation and glossaries of the Zoharic system
by Rabbi Moses. Ibn Gebirol _never quoted_ from the Scriptures to
enforce the teachings (Myer’s _Qabbalah_, p. 7). Whereas Moses de
Leon has made of the _Zohar_ that which it has remained to this day,
“a running commentary on the Five Books, or Pentateuch” (_ibid._),
with a few later additions made by Christian hands. One follows the
Archaic Esoteric Philosophy; the other, only that portion which was
adapted to the _lost_ Books of Moses restored by Ezra. Thus, while
the system, or the trunk on which the primitive original _Zohar_ was
engrafted, is of an immense antiquity, many of the (later) Zoharic
offshoots are strongly coloured by the peculiar views held by
Christian Gnostics (Syrian and Chaldæan), the friends and co‐workers
of Moses de Leon who, as shown by Munk, accepted their
interpretations.

1054 See Franck’s _Kabbala_, Preface.

1055 i. 14.

1056 See Schwartze, _op. cit._, _pagg._ 359, 361, _et seqq._

1057 Sayce, _Hibbert Lectures_, 1887, p. 374.

1058 Timæus, the Locrian, speaking of “Arka” [Arche], calls her “the
principle of best things” (Ἀρχὰ τῶν ἁρίστων). The word _arcane_,
“hidden,” or secret, is derived from this. “To no one is the
_Arcane_ shown except to the ... Most High” (_Codex
Nazaræus_)—alluding to Nature the female, and Spirit, the male
Power. Æsculapius, as a Sun‐God was called _Archagetas_, “born from
the Archa,” the divine Virgin‐Mother of the Heavens. (See Kenealy,
_Book of God_, p. 10.)

1059 Kenealy, _op. cit._, _ibid._

1060 This is composed of ten dots arranged triangularly in four rows. It
is the Tetragrammaton of the Western Kabalists.

1061 From an MS.

1062 See G. Maspéro, _Guide au Musée Boulaq_, 1884, p. 168, No. 1981.

1063 _Ibid._, p. 169, No. 1998.

1064 _Ibid._, p. 172, No. 2068.

1065 The student must be aware that Jethro is not called the “father‐in‐
law” of Moses because Moses was really married to one of his seven
daughters. Moses was an Initiate, if he ever existed, and as such an
Ascetic, a Nazar, and could never have been married. It is an
allegory like everything else. Zipporah (the “shining”) is one of
the personified Occult Sciences given by Reuel‐Jethro, the Midian
priest Initiator, to Moses, his Egyptian pupil. The “well” by which
Moses sat down in his flight from the Pharaoh symbolizes the “Well
of Knowledge.”

1066 i. pp. 106‐108 and elsewhere.

1067 In Hebrew the phallic symbol Lingam and Yoni.

1068 See Vol. I, Stanza IV, Shloka 3.

1069 It is at that Step that one arrives on the plane of the level or
floor and open entrance to the King’s Chamber, the Egyptian “Holy of
Holies.”

1070 The Candidate for Initiation always personified the God of the
Temple he belonged to, as the High Priest personified the God at all
times; just as the Pope now personates Peter and even Jesus Christ
upon entering the inner sanctuary—the Christian “Holy of Holies.”

1071 _Genesis_, i. 27.

1072 Jehovah says to Moses: “the summation of my name is _sacr_, the
carrier of the germ”—phallus. “It is ... the vehicle of enunciation,
and truly enough, as the _sacr_, or carrier of the germ, its use
passed down through ages to the _sacr‐factum_ of the Roman priest,
and the _sacr‐fice_, and _sacr‐ment_ of the English speaking race.”
(_Source of Measures_, p. 236.) Hence marriage is a _sacrament_ in
the Greek and Roman Churches.

1073 4to, London, 1684, vol. i. pp. 120, 121.

1074 _Op. cit._, p. 67.

1075 _Source of Measures_, 159.

1076 _Op. cit._, p. 187.

1077 _Op. cit._, p. 271.

1078 From the same author. See also the Section on “The Symbolism of the
Mystery Names Iao and Jehovah.”

1079 In _Genesis_ (iv. 26), it is mis‐translated. “And he called his name
Enos [man]: then began men to call upon the name of the Lord”—which
has no sense in it, since Adam and the others must have done the
same.

1080 Strictly speaking, the Jews are an artificial Âryan race, born in
India, and belonging to the Caucasian division. No one who is
familiar with the Armenians and the Parsîs can fail to recognize in
the three the same Âryan, Caucasian type. From the seven primitive
types of the Fifth Race there now remain on Earth but three. As
Prof. W. H. Flower aptly said in 1885: “I cannot resist the
conclusion so often arrived at by various anthropologists—that the
primitive man, whatever he may have been, has in the course of ages
diverged into three extreme types, represented by the Caucasian of
Europe, the Mongolian of Asia, and the Ethiopian of Africa, and that
all existing individuals of the species can be ranged around these
types.” (The President’s Address at the Anthropological Institute of
Great Britain, etc.) Considering that our Race has reached its fifth
sub‐race, how can it be otherwise?

1081 Whenever such analogies between the Gentiles and the Jews, and later
the Christians, have been pointed out, it has been the invariable
custom of the latter to say that it was the work of the Devil who
forced the Pagans to imitate the Jews for the purpose of throwing a
slur on the religion of the _one, true living_ God. To this Faber
says very justly: “Some have imagined that the Gentiles were servile
copyists of the Israelites, and that each point of similitude was
borrowed from the Mosaical Institutes. But this theory will by no
means solve the problem. Both because we find the very same
resemblance in the ceremonies of nations far distant from Palestine,
as we do in the rites of those who are in its immediate vicinity,
and because it seems incredible that all should have borrowed from
one which was universally disliked and despised.” (_Pagan Idolatry_,
i. 104.)

1082 _Luke_, i. 28.

1083 Their consecrated Pillars (unhewn stones) erected by Abraham and
Jacob were _Lingams_.

1084 _Op. cit._, p. 67.

1085 See _Introduction to the Old Testament_, and also Bishop Colenso’s
_Elohistic and Jehovistic Writers_.

1086 King’s _Gnostics and their Remains_, p. 327, 2nd ed.

1087 _Ibid._, p. 326.

1088 Such a Pseudo‐Kabalist was the Marquis de Mirville in France, who
studied the _Zohar_ and other old remnants of Jewish Wisdom under
the “Chevalier” Drach, an ancient Rabbi Kabalist converted to the
Romish Church, and with his help wrote half a dozen volumes full of
slander and calumnies against every prominent Spiritualist and
Kabalist. From 1848 up to 1860 he persecuted unrelentingly the old
Count d’Ourches, one of the earliest Eastern Occultists in France, a
man the scope of whose Occult knowledge will never be appreciated
correctly by his survivors, because he screened his real beliefs and
knowledge under the mask of Spiritism.

1089 See _Hibbert Lectures_, 1887, pp. 101‐115.

1090 _Exodus_, xxii. 28.

1091 _Deut._, iv. 19.

1092 _Jude_, 8, 9.

1093 See _Isis Unveiled_, ii. 487, _et seqq._

1094 Treat, _Kiddusheem_, 81. But see Myer’s _Qabbalah_, pp. 92, 94.

1095 Marangone, in his _Delle Grandezze del Archangelo Sancti Mikaele_,
exclaims: “O grandest Star, who followest the Sun who is Christ!...
O living image of Divinity! O great thaumaturgist of the Old
Testament! O invisible Vicar of Christ in his Church!...” The work
is held in great honour in the Latin Church.

1096 _Pneumatologie_, v. 516.

1097 _Ibid._, p. 515.

1098 _Ibid._, p. 514.

1099 _Isaiah_, lxiii. 8, 9.

1100 Metator and ἡγεμών.

1101 _Pneumatologie_, p. 515. “La Face et le Représentant du Verbe.”

1102 That which is called in the _Vendidâd_ Fravarshi, the immortal part
of an individual; that which outlives man—the Higher Ego, say the
Occultists, or the Divine Double.

1103 Darmesteter’s Trans., p. 208.

1104 _Orm. Ahr._, §§ 112, 113; quoted by Darmesteter, “Sacred Books of
the East,” vol. iv. introd., p. lxxiv.

1105 _De Idol._, ii. 373.

1106 See De Mirville, _ibid._, p. 515.

1107 _Ibid._ See also plates in King’s _Gnostics and their Remains_.

1108 P. 518.

1109 _The Book of Enoch the Prophet_, p. xlviii. Ed. 1883.

1110 _Op. cit._, pp. xxxiv, xxxv.

1111 Saith Uriel in the _Book of Enoch_ (xxvi. 3): “Those who have
received mercy shall for ever bless God ... the _Everlasting
King_”—who will reign over them.

1112 _Vishnu Purâna_, III. ii; Wilson’s Trans., iii. 31.

1113 _Matthew_, xxiv. 27.

1114 _Luke_, x. 18.

1115 The Protestant _Bible_ defines Behemoth _innocently_—“The _elephant_
as some think”; see marginal note (_Job_, xl. 15) in the Authorized
Version.

1116 _Job_, xl. 19.

1117 Astronomy, however, knows nothing of stars that have _disappeared_,
unless it be simply from visibility; but never from existence since
the science of Astronomy became known. Temporary stars are only
_variable_ stars, and it is believed that even the _new_ stars of
Kepler and Tycho Brahé may still be seen.

1118 This refers to the “Kings of Edom.”

1119 Another proof, if any were needed, that the ancient Initiates knew
of more than _seven_ planets is to be found in the _Vishnu Purâna_
(II. xii) where, describing the chariots attached to Dhruva (the
Pole Star), Parâshara speaks of “the chariots of the _nine_
planets,” which are attached by aërial cords.

1120 Justin, _Cum Tryphone_, p. 284.

1121 A division indicative of time.

1122 Sanchuniathon calls Time the oldest Æon, Protogonos, the “First‐
born.”

1123 Philo Judæus, _Cain and his Birth_, p. xvii.

1124 _Principles of Psychology_, 474.

1125 It is suggestive of that spirit of paradoxical negation so
conspicuous in our day, that while the evolution hypothesis has won
its rights of citizenship in Science as taught by Darwin and Hæckel,
yet both the Eternity of the Universe and the Preëxistence of a
Universal Consciousness, are rejected by modern Psychologists.
“Should the Idealist be right, the doctrine of evolution is a
dream,” says Mr. Herbert Spencer.

1126 _Zohar_, 9b.

1127 Verse 6.

1128 Mercure Trismegiste, _Pimandre_, chap. i, sec. 16: “Oh, ma pensée,
que s’ensuit‐il? car je désire grandement ce propos. Pimandre diet,
ceci est un mystère celé, jusques à ce jour d’hui. Car nature, soit
mestant avec l’hôme, a produit le miracle très merveilleux, aîant
celluy qui ie t’av diet, la nature de l’harmonie des sept du père,
et de l’esprit. _Nature ne s’arresta pas là_, mais incontinent a
produict _sept hômes, selon les natures des sept gouverneurs_ en
puissance des deux sexes et esleuez.... La génération de ces _sept_
s’est donnée en ceste manière....”

And a gap is made in the translation, which can be filled partially
by resorting to the Latin text of Apuleius. The commentator, the
Bishop, says: “Nature produced in him [man] seven men” (seven
principles).

1129 xxviii. 2‐8.

1130 _Ibid._

1131 _Ibid._, 17.

1132 _Ibid._, 13‐16.

1133 _Ibid._, 18.

1134 _Ibid._, 19.

1135 xxxi. 16, 17. The only Pharaoh whom the _Bible_ shows going down
into the Red Sea was the king who pursued the Israelites, and who
remained unnamed, for very good reasons perhaps. The story was
surely made up from the Atlantean legend.

1136 xxviii. 13, 14.

1137 xxxi. 3‐9.

1138 _Vishnu Purâna._ I. xv.

1139 This is pure allegory. The Waters are a symbol of Wisdom and of
Occult Learning. Hermes represented the Sacred Science under the
symbol of Fire; the Northern Initiates, under that of Water. The
latter is the production of Nara, the “Spirit of God,” or rather
Paramâtman, the “Supreme Soul,” says Kullûka Bhatta; Nârâyana,
meaning “he who abides in the deep” or is plunged in the Waters of
Wisdom—“water being the body of Nara” (_Vâyu Purâna_). Hence arises
the statement that for 10,000 years they remained in austerity “in
the vast ocean”; and are shown emerging from it. Ea, the God of
Wisdom, is the “Sublime Fish,” and Dagon or Oannes is the Chaldæan
Man‐Fish, who emerges from the Waters to teach Wisdom.

1140 Chap. v; “Sacred Books of the East,” vol. viii. p. 257.

1141 This is explained by the able translator of _Anugîtâ_ in a foot‐note
(p. 258) in these words: “The sense appears to be this: The course
of worldly life is due to the operations of the life‐winds which are
attached to the Self, and lead to its manifestations as individual
souls.”

1142 Vaishvânara is a word often used to denote the Self—explains
Nîlakantha.

1143 _Ibid._, p. 259. Translated by Kâshinâth Trimbak Telang, M.A.,
Bombay.

1144 _Matthew_, iii. 10.

1145 _Isaiah_, x. 19.

1146 _Op. cit._, i. 133.

1147 1845, p. 41.

1148 See Dowson’s _Hindû Classical Dictionary_ for further information on
above.

1149 See _Five Years of Theosophy_, art., “The Elixir of Life.”

1150 The partaker of Soma finds himself both linked to his external body,
and yet away from it in his Spiritual Form. Freed from the former,
he soars for the time being in the ethereal higher regions, becoming
virtually “as one of the Gods,” and yet preserving in his physical
brain the memory of what he sees and learns. Plainly speaking, Soma
is the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge forbidden by the jealous
Elohim to Adam and Eve or Yah‐ve, “lest man should become as one of
us.”

1151 We see the same in the modern exoteric religions.

1152 _Historical View of the Hindû Astronomy._ Quoting from the work in
reference to “Argabhatta” [? Âryabhatta] who is said to give a near
approach to the true relation among the various values for the
computations of the value of π, the author of _The Source of
Measures_ reproduces a curious statement. “Mr. Bentley,” it is said,
“was greatly familiar with the Hindû astronomical and mathematical
knowledge.... This statement of his may then be taken as authentic.
The same remarkable trait, among so many Eastern and ancient
nations, of _sedulously concealing the arcana of this kind of
knowledge, is a marked one_ among the Hindûs. That which was given
out to be popularly taught, and to be exposed to public inspection,
_was but the approximate of a more exact but hidden knowledge_. And
this very formulation of Mr. Bentley will strangely exemplify the
assertion; and, explained, will show that it [the Hindû _exoteric_
astronomy and sciences] was derived _from a system exact beyond the
European one_, in which Mr. Bentley himself, of course, trusted, as
far in advance of the Hindû knowledge, at any time, in any
generation” (pp. 86, 87).

This is Mr. Bentley’s misfortune, and does not take away from the
glory of the ancient Hindû Astronomers, who were all Initiates.

1153 The Secret Doctrine teaches that every event of universal
importance, such as geological cataclysms at the end of one Race and
the beginning of a new one, involving a great change each time in
mankind, spiritual, moral and physical—is precogitated and
preconcerted, so to say, in the sidereal regions of our planetary
system. Astrology is built wholly upon this mystic and intimate
connection between the heavenly bodies and mankind; and it is one of
the great secrets of Initiation and Occult Mysteries.

1154 See Darmesteter’s _Vendidâd_, Introd., p. lviii.

1155 See _Isaiah_, xiv. 12.

1156 _Genesis_, vi.

1157 The Nâgas are described by the Orientalists as a mysterious people
whose landmarks are found abundantly in India to this day, and who
lived in Nâga‐dvîpa, one of the _seven_ continents or divisions of
Bhâratavarsha (old India); the town of Nagpur being one of the most
ancient cities in the country.

1158 xxviii. 3, 4.

1159 Not less suggestive are the qualities attributed to Rudra Shiva, the
great Yogî, the forefather of all the Adepts—in Esotericism one of
the greatest Kings of the Divine Dynasties. Called the “earliest”
and the “last,” he is the patron of the Third, Fourth, and the Fifth
Root‐Races. For, in his earliest character, he is the ascetic Dig‐
ambara, “clothed with the elements,” Tri‐lochana, the “three‐eyed,”
Pancha‐ânana, the “five‐faced,” an allusion to the past Four and the
present Fifth Race, for, though five‐faced, he is only “four‐armed,”
as the Fifth Race is still alive. He is the “God of Time,” Saturn‐
Cronus, as his “drum” Damaru, in the shape of an hour‐glass, shows;
and if he is accused of having cut off Brahma’s fifth head, and left
him with only four, it is again an allusion to a certain degree in
Initiation, and also to the Races.

1160 Gustav Seiffarth’s idea that the signs of the Zodiac were in ancient
times only ten is erroneous. Ten only were known to the profane; the
Initiates, however, knew them all, _from the time of the separation
of mankind into sexes_, whence arose the separation of Virgo‐Scorpio
into two. This separation, owing to the addition of a secret sign
and the Libra invented by the Greeks, instead of the secret name
which was not given, made twelve. (See _Isis Unveiled_, ii. 456.)

1161 The above is, perhaps, a key to the Dalaï Lama’s symbolical name—the
“Ocean” Lama, meaning the Wisdom‐Ocean. Abbé Huc speaks of this.

1162 _Zohar_, iii. 9b, 10a, Brody Ed. Cremona Ed. iii. fol. 4a, col. 14.
Myer’s _Qabbalah_, pp. 416, 417.

1163 Such was the name given in ancient Judea to the Initiates, called
also the “Innocents” and the “Infants,” _i.e._, once more “reborn.”
This _key_ opens a vista into one of the _New Testament_ mysteries;
the slaughter by Herod of the 40,000 “Innocents.” There is a legend
to this effect, and the event, which took place almost a century
B.C., shows the origin of the tradition blended at the same time
with that of Krishna and his uncle Kansa. In the case of the _New
Testament_, Herod stands for Alexander Jannæus (of Lyda), whose
persecution and murder of hundreds and thousands of Initiates led to
the adoption of the _Bible_ story.

1164 _Zohar_, ii. 34.

1165 i. § 16.

1166 _Op. cit._, lxxiv. 13.

1167 _Ibid._, § 33.

1168 P. 16.

1169 “Biographical and Critical Essay,” p. xxxviii.

1170 _Histoire de la Magic_, pp. 16, 17.

1171 _Ibid._, _loc. cit._

1172 What _devil_ could be possessed of more cunning, craft and cruelty
than the Whitechapel murderer, “Jack the Ripper” of 1888, whose
unparalleled, blood‐thirsty and cool wickedness led him to slaughter
and mutilate in cold blood seven unfortunate and _otherwise_
innocent women! One has but to read the daily papers to find in
those wife‐ and child‐beating, drunken brutes (husbands and
fathers!), a _small_ percentage of whom is daily brought before the
courts, the complete personifications of the devils of the Christian
Hell!

1173 _Psalm_, lxxxii.

1174 _Genesis_, xvii. 7.

1175 _Op. cit._, p. 209.

1176 _Ibid._, pp. 144, 145.

1177 _Ibid._, p. 146.

1178 _Op. cit._, p. 9. After the Polymorphic Pantheism of some Gnostics
came the Exoteric Dualism of Manes, who was accused of personifying
Evil and making of the Devil a God—the rival of God himself. We do
not see that the Christian Church has so much improved on that
exoteric idea of the Manicheans, for she calls God her King of
Light, and Satan the King of Darkness, to this day.

1179 To quote in this relation Mr. S. Laing, in his admirable work
_Modern Science and Modern Thought_ (p. 222): “From this dilemma
[the existence of evil in the world] there is no escape, unless we
give up altogether the idea of an anthropomorphic deity, and adopt
frankly the scientific idea of a First Cause, inscrutable and past
finding out; and of a universe whose laws we can trace, but of whose
real essence we know nothing, and can only suspect or faintly
discern a fundamental law which may make the polarity of good and
evil a necessary condition of existence.” Were Science to know “the
real essence,” instead of knowing nothing of it, the faint suspicion
would turn into the certitude of the existence of such a law, and
the knowledge that this law is connected with Karma.

1180 _Histoire de la Magie_, pp. 196, 197.

1181 Âkâsha is _not_ the Ether of Science, as some Orientalists translate
it.

1182 Says Johannes Tritheim, the Abbot of Spanheim, the greatest
Astrologer and Kabalist of his day: “The art of divine magic
consists in the ability to perceive the essence of things in the
Light of Nature [Astral Light], and by using the soul‐powers of the
spirit to produce material things from the unseen universe, and in
such operations the Above and the Below must be brought together and
made to act harmoniously. The Spirit of Nature [Astral Light] is a
unity, creating and forming everything, and by acting through the
instrumentality of man it may produce wonderful things. Such
processes take place according to law. You will learn the law by
which these things are accomplished, if you learn to know yourself.
You will know it by the power of the spirit that is in yourself, and
accomplish it by mixing your spirit with the essence that comes out
of yourself. If you wish to succeed in such a work you must know how
to separate spirit and life in Nature, and, moreover, to separate
the astral soul in yourself and to make it tangible, and then the
substance of the soul will appear visibly and tangibly, rendered
objective by the power of the spirit.” (Quoted in Dr. Franz
Hartmann’s _Paracelsus_, pp. 164, 165.)

1183 The real original text of _I Corinthians_, xv. 44, rendered
kabalistically and Esoterically would read: “It is sown a _soul_
body [not ‘natural’ body], it is raised a _spirit_ body.” St. Paul
was an Initiate, and his words have quite a different meaning when
read Esoterically. The body “is sown in _weakness_ [passivity]; it
is raised in power” (v. 43)—or in spirituality and intellect.

1184 “The War in Heaven” (_Theosophist_, iii. 24, 36, 67), by Godolphin
Mitford, later in life Murad Ali Beg. Born in India, the son of a
missionary, G. Mitford was converted to Islam, and died a Mahomedan
in 1884. He was a most extraordinary Mystic, of great learning and
remarkable intelligence. But he left the Right Path and forthwith
fell under Karmic retribution. As well shown by the author of the
article quoted, “The followers of the defeated ‘Elohim’ first
massacred by the victorious Jews [the Jehovites], and then persuaded
by the victorious Christians and Mohamedans, continued
[nevertheless].... Some [of these scattered sects] ... have lost
even the tradition of the true rationale of their belief—to worship
in secrecy and mystery the Principle of Fire, Light, and Liberty.
Why do the Sabean Bedouins (avowedly Monotheists when dwelling in
the Mohamedan cities) in the solitude of the desert night yet invoke
the starry ‘Host of Heaven’? Why do the Yezidis, the ‘Devil
Worshippers,’ worship the ‘Muluk‐Taoos’—the ‘Lord Peacock’—the
emblem of _Pride_ and of Hundred‐eyed Intelligence [and of
Initiation also], which was expelled from Heaven with Satan,
according to an old Oriental tradition? Why do the Gholaites and
their kindred Mesopotamo‐Iranian Mohamedan Sects believe in the
‘Noor Illahee’—the ‘Light of the Elohim’—transmitted in _anastasis_
through a hundred Prophet‐Leaders? It is because they have continued
in ignorant superstition the traditional religion of the ‘Light
Deities’ whom Jahveh overthrew!” (p. 69)—is _said_ to have
overthrown rather; for by overthrowing _them_ he would have
overthrown himself. The Muluk‐Taoos is Maluk, “Ruler,” as is shown
in the foot‐note. It is only a new form of Moloch, Melek, Molech,
Malayak, and Malachim—Messengers, Angels, etc.

1185 So does every Yogi and even Christian, for one must take the Kingdom
of Heaven _by violence_—we are taught. Why then should such a desire
make of any one a Devil?

1186 _Acad. des Inscrip._, xxxix. 690.

1187 Fargard, xix. 47; Darmesteter’s Trans., p. 218.

1188 _Vendidad_, Far. xx. 12; _op. cit._, p. 222.

1189 _Ibid._, Far. xix. 43; _op. cit._, p. 218.

1190 From the _Vendidad Sadah_, quoted by Darmesteter, _op. cit._, p.
223.

1191 See the Gâtha in Yasna xliv.

1192 _Op. cit._, p. 441.

1193 _Apollodorus_, I. 7, 1.

1194 Ovid., _Metam._, I. 81. _Etym. M._, v. Προμηθεύς.

1195 Pausanias, X. 4, 4.

1196 _Op. cit._, p. 264.

1197 Pausanias, II. 19, 5; _cf._ 20, 3.

1198 _Timæus_, p. 22.

1199 _Strom._, I. p. 380.

1200 Decharme, _ibid._, p. 265.

1201 _Opera et Dies_, 142‐145. According to the Occult Teaching, three
Yugas passed away during the time of the Third Root‐Race, _i.e._,
the Satya, the Tretà, and the Dvâpara Yuga—answering to the Golden
Age in its early innocence; to the Silver, when it reached its
maturity; and to the Bronze Age, when, separating into sexes, it
became the mighty Demi‐gods of old.

1202 _Asgard and the Gods_, pp. 11, 13.

1203 _Op. cit._, p. 266.

1204 _Ibid._, p. 258.

1205 _Ibid._, p. 257.

1206 _Ibid._, p. 258.

1207 _Op. cit._, p. 145.

1208 _Transactions of the Royal Society_, London, 1868.

1209 _The Age and Origin of Man._

1210 The modern attempt of some Greek scholars (poor and pseudo scholars,
they would have appeared in the day of the old Greek writers!) to
explain the real meaning of the ideas of Æschylus—which, as being an
ignorant ancient Greek, he could not express so well himself—is
absurdly ludicrous!

1211 _Revue Germanique_, 1861, pp. 356, _et seqq._ See also _Mémoires de
la Société de la Linguistique_, i. pp. 337. _et seqq._

1212 Quoted by Decharme, _op. cit._, pp. 258, 259. There is the _upper_
and _nether_ piece of timber used to produce this sacred fire by
attrition at sacrifices, and it is the Aranì which contains the
socket. This is proven by an allegory in the _Vâyu_ and other
_Purânas_, which tell us that Nimi, the son of Ikshvàku, had left no
successor, and that the Rishis, fearing to leave the Earth without a
ruler, introduced the king’s body into the socket of an Arani—like
an upper Aranì—and produced from it a prince named Janaka. “It was
by reason of the peculiar way in which he was engendered that he was
called Janaka.” See also Goldstücker’s _Sanskrit Dictionary_, _sub
voce_. (_Vishnu Purána_, Wilson’s Trans., iii. 330.) Devaki,
Krishna’s mother, in a prayer addressed to her, is called “the Aranî
whose attrition engenders fire.”

1213 The Monad of the animal is as immortal as that of man, yet the brute
knows nothing of this; it lives an animal life of sensation just as
the first human would have lived, on attaining physical development
in the Third Race, had it not been for the Agnishvâtta and the
Mânasa Pitris.

1214 _Op. cit._, p. 259.

1215 Ἰαπετιονίδης. _Theog._, p. 528.

1216 _Theog._, 565.

1217 The Fallen Angels, therefore; the Asuras of the Indian Pantheon.

1218 Decharme, _op. cit._, pp. 259, 260.

1219 _Ibid._, p. 263.

1220 _Ibid._, p. 261.

1221 _Die Herabkunft des Feuers und des Göttertranks_ (Berlin, 1859).

1222 The italics are ours; they show how assumptions are raised to laws
in our day.

1223 Decharme, _op. cit._, p. 262.

1224 _Philosoph. Placit._, iii. 3.

1225 Baudry, _Revue Germanique_, 14 avril, 1861, p. 368.

1226 _Op. cit._, pp. 264, 265.

1227 See _Vishnu Purâna_, Wilson’s Trans., v. 96, note.

1228 xiii. 55, 56.

1229 “Womb of Light,” “Holy Vessel,” are the epithets of the Virgin.

1230 The Virgin is often addressed as the “Morning Star” and the “Star of
Salvation.”

1231 Wilson translates: “Thou art kingly policy, the parent of order.”

1232 _Vishnu Purâna_, Wilson’s Trans., iv. pp. 264, 265.

1233 iii. 290.

1234 See _Joshua_, xv, 15.

1235 Surât xix.

1236 See Mackenzie’s _Royal Masonic Cyclopædia_, _sub voce_ “Enoch.”

1237 Khanoch, or Hanoch, or Enoch Esoterically means the “Initiator” and
“Teacher,” as well as Enos, the “Son of Man.” (See _Genesis_, iv.
26.)

1238 De Mirville, _Pneumatologie_, iii. 70.

1239 Mackenzie, _op. cit._, _sub voc._

1240 _Hebrews_, xi. 5.

1241 De Mirville, _ibid._, p. 71.

1242 Compare the “thieves and robbers” incident, p. 506, _supra_.

1243 De Mirville, _ibid._, p. 73.

1244 _Ibid._, p. 76.

1245 _Antiquities_, ix. 2.

1246 Cap. viii.

1247 Says the _Zohar_, “Hanokh had a book which was one with the Book of
the Generations of Adam; this is the Mystery of Wisdom.”

1248 Noah is heir to the Wisdom of Enoch; in other words, the Fifth is
heir to the Fourth Race.

1249 See _Isis Unveiled_, i. 575, _et seqq._

1250 See the illustration in _Isis Unveiled_, ii. 452.

1251 See Danielo’s criticisms upon De Sacy, in the _Annales de
Philosophie_, p. 393, deuxième article.

1252 De Mirville, _ibid._, pp. 77, 78.

1253 Ch. lxxix, Laurence’s Trans.

1254 _Ibid._, ch. lxiv.

1255 _Ibid._, _loc. cit._, v. 6.

1256 Bailly, _Astronomie Ancienne_, i. 203, and ii. 216; De Mirville,
_ibid._, p. 79.

1257 De Mirville, _ibid._, p. 80.

1258 _City of God_, XV. xxiii.

1259 _Op. cit._, xxxii. 8, 9.

1260 Of the Protestant Biblical Society of Paris, according to the
version revised in 1824 by J. E. Ostervald.

1261 With the Egyptian Gnostics it was Thoth (Hermes), who was chief of
the Seven (see _Book of the Dead_). Their names are given by Origen,
as Adonai (of the Sun), Iao (of the Moon), Eloi (Jupiter), Sabao
(Mars), Orai (Venus), Astaphai (Mercury), and, finally, Ildabaoth
(Saturn). See King’s _Gnostics and their Remains_, p. 344.

1262 See Origen’s Copy of the Chart or Diagramma of the Ophites, in his
_Contra Celsum_.

1263 See Part III of this Volume, Section IV, B, “On Chains of Planets
and their Plurality.”

1264 _Exodus_, xxxiii. 18, 19; see Myer’s _Qabbalah_, p. 226.

1265 _Ibid._, _loc. cit._

1266 _Supra_, p. 481.

1267 See _Revelation_, xxii. 16.

1268 _Op. cit._, ii. 301.

1269 _Gnostics and their Remains._

1270 _II Samuel._

1271 By very few though, for the creators of the material universe were
always considered as subordinate Gods to the Most High Deity.

1272 _Op. cit._, ii. 296, 297. Fürst gives citations from Lydus and
Cedrenus in support of his statements.

1273 See plate 77 in vol. i of Montfaucon’s _Antiquities_. The disciples
of Hermes, after their death, go to his planet, Mercury—their
Kingdom of Heaven.

1274 Cornutus.

1275 Lydus, _De Mensibus_, iv.

1276 _Preparat. Evang._, I. iii. 2.

1277 But see p. 480, _supra_, concerning the Gnostic Priapus.

1278 _Op. cit._, p. 52.

1279 _Ibid._, pp. 3, 4.

1280 Let the reader refer to the _Zohar_ and the two _Qabbalahs_ of Isaac
Myer and S. L. MacGregor Mathers, with interpretations, if he would
satisfy himself of this.

1281 _Ibid._, p. 5.

1282 _Ibid._, p. 12.

1283 See _Book of the Dead_, xvii. 45‐47.

1284 _Op. cit._, i. 421, 422.

1285 _De la Croix Ansée_, _Mem. de l’Académie des Sciences_, pl. 2, Nos.
8, 9, also 16, 2, p. 320; quoted in _Natural Genesis_, p. 423.

1286 Vol. xviii. p. 393, pl. 4; Inman, fig. 38; Gerald Massey, _op.
cit._, _ibid._, p. 422.

1287 Certainly not; for very often there are symbols _made to symbolize
other symbols_, and these are in turn used in ideographs.

1288 The R of the Slavonian and Russian alphabets (the Kyriletza
alphabet) is also the Latin P.

1289 _Ibid._, p. 423.

1290 See Moor’s _Hindû Pantheon_, plate xiii.

1291 See Dowson’s _Hindû Classical Dictionary_, _sub voc._ “Rudra.”

1292 Described in the _Mission des Juifs_, by the Marquis St. Yves
d’Alveydre, the hierophant and leader of a large party of French
Kabalists, as the Golden Age!

1293 V. xxiii.

1294 Translated from Burnouf’s French Translation, quoted by Fitzedward
Hall, in Wilson’s _Vishnu Purâna_, ii. 307.

1295 The more so since he is the reputed slayer of Tripurâsura and the
Titan Târaka. Michael is the conqueror of the dragon, and Indra and
Kârttikeya are often made identical.

1296 _Ibid._, iv. 235.

1297 _Op. cit._, XII. ii. 26‐32; quoted in _Vishnu Purâna_, Wilson’s
Trans., iv. 230. Nanda is the first Buddhist sovereign,
Chandragupta, against whom all the Brâhmans were so arrayed, he of
the Morya Dynasty, and the grandfather of Ashoka. This is one of
those passages that do not exist in the earlier Paurânic MSS. They
were added by the Vaishnavas, who, out of sectarian spite, were
almost as great interpolators as the Christian Fathers.

1298 _Historical View of the Hindû Astronomy_, p. 65, as quoted by
Wilson, _op. cit._, p. 233.

1299 See _Ezekiel_, i.

1300 _In Quint. Lib. Euclid._

1301 The Goddess Basht, or Pasht, was represented with the head of a cat.
This animal was held sacred in Egypt for several reasons. It was a
symbol of the Moon, the “Eye of Osiris” or the “Sun,” during night.
The cat was also sacred to Sokhit. One of the mystic reasons was
because of its body being rolled up in a circle when asleep. The
posture is prescribed for occult and magnetic purposes, in order to
regulate, in a certain way, the circulation of the vital fluid, with
which the cat is preëminently endowed. “The nine lives of a cat” is
a popular saying based on good physiological and occult reasons. Mr.
Gerald Massey gives also an astronomical reason for it which may be
found in vol. i. pp. 322, 323, of the present work. “The cat saw the
sun, had it in its eye by night [was the eye of night], when it was
otherwise unseen by men [for as the Moon reflects the light of the
Sun, so the cat was supposed to reflect it on account of its
phosphorescent eyes]. _We_ might say the moon _mirrored_ the solar
light, because we have _looking glasses_. With them the cat’s eye
_was_ the mirror.” (_Luniolatry Ancient and Modern_, p. 2.)

1302 _Ezekiel_, i. 4, 15, 16, 20.

1303 _Eccles._, i. 6.

1304 Fol. 87, col. 346.

1305 Vol. ii. pp. 299, 300.

1306 _Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie_, i. 124. Also in _T’sang‐t‐ung‐
ky_, by Wei‐Pa‐Yang.

1307 Cocker’s _Christianity and Greek Philosophy_, xi. p. 377.

1308 The cry of despair uttered by Count de Montlosier, in his _Mystères
de la Vie Humaine_ (p. 117), is a warrant that the Cause of
“excellence and goodness,” supposed by Plato to pervade the Universe
is neither _his_ Deity, nor _our_ World. “Au spectacle de tant de
grandeur opposé à celui de tant de misère, l’esprit qui se met à
observer ce vaste ensemble, se represente je ne sais quelle grande
divinité, _qu’ une divinité, plus grande et plus pressante_ encore,
aurait comme brisée et mise en pièces en dispersant les débris dans
tout l’Univers.” The “still greater and still more exacting
divinity” than the God of this world, supposed to be so “good”—is
Karma. And this true Divinity shows well that the lesser one, our
_inner_ God (personal for the time being), has no power to arrest
the mighty hand of this greater Deity—the Cause awakened by our
actions generating smaller causes—which is called the Law of
Retribution.

1309 See _Isis Unveiled_, i. xii and xviii.

1310 Stobæus, _Ecl._, i. 862.

1311 The Svastika is certainty one of the oldest symbols of the Ancient
Races. In our century, says Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie (_Royal Masonic
Cyclopædia_), the Svastika “has survived in the form of the mallet”
in the Masonic Fraternity. Among the many “meanings,” given by the
author, we do not find the most important, Masons evidently being
ignorant of it.

1312 _Isis Unveiled_, i. 508.

1313 _Ibid._, p. 506.

1314 _Ibid._, p. 572.

1315 _Ezekiel_, ix. 4.

1316 _Exodus_, xii. 22.

1317 viii. 29.

1318 _Op. cit._, p. 204.

1319 See Dowson’s _Hindû Classical Dictionary_.

1320 _The Source of Measures_, p. 204.

1321 _Ibid._, p. 205.

1322 See Moor’s _Hindû Pantheon_, where Vittoba’s left foot, in the
figure of his idol, bears the mark of the nails.

1323 See Dr. Lundy’s _Monumental Christianity_, fig. 72.

1324 _Source of Measures_, p. 52.

1325 _Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie_, ii. 88.

1326 The “Heavens” are identical with “Angels,” as already stated.

1327 _Philosophumena_, vi. 48; quoted by King, _op. cit._, p. 200.

1328 _Op. cit._, x. 3, 4.

1329 _Pistis Sophia_, _pag._ 378; King, _ibid._, _loc. cit._

1330 See the Section on “The Chronology of the Brâhmans,” p. 69, _supra_.

1331 As confessed by C. W. King, the great authority on Gnostic
antiquities, these “Gnostic” gems are not the work of the Gnostics,
but belong to Pre‐Christian periods, and are the work of “magicians”
(_op. cit._, p. 241).

1332 King, _ibid._, p. 218.

1333 The lack of intuition in Orientalists and Antiquarians past and
present, is remarkable. Thus, Wilson, the translator of _Vishnu
Purâna_, declares in his Preface that in the _Garuda Purâna_ he
found “no account of the birth of Garuda.” Considering that an
account of “Creation” in general is given therein, and that Garuda
is coëternal with Vishnu, the Mahâ Kalpa, or Great Life‐Cycle,
beginning with and ending with the _manifesting_ Vishnu, what other
account of Garuda’s birth could be expected!

1334 _Ibid._, _loc. cit._

1335 See _Revelation_, xvii. 2 and 10; and _Leviticus_, xxiii. 15 to 18;
the first passage speaking of the “seven Kings,” of whom _five_ have
gone; and the second about the “seven Sabbaths,” etc.

1336 _Op. cit._, x. 5‐7.

1337 _Pistis Sophia_ is an extremely important document, a genuine
Evangel of the Gnostics, ascribed, at random to Valectinus, but much
more probably a Pre‐Christian work as to its original. A Coptic MS.
of this work was brought back by Bruce from Abyssinia and discovered
by Schwartze, in the British Museum, quite accidentally, and
translated by him into Latin. The text and Schwartze’s version were
published by Petermann in the year 1853. In the text itself the
authorship of this Book is ascribed to Philip the Apostle, whom
Jesus bids sit down and write the revelation. It is genuine and
ought to be as canonical as any other Gospel. Unfortunately it
remains to this day untranslated into English.

1338 King, _op. cit._, p. 200.

1339 In the Cycle of Initiation, which was very long, Water represented
the first and lower steps toward purification, while trials
connected with Fire came last. Water could regenerate the Body of
Matter; Fire alone, that of the Inner Spiritual Man.

1340 Chap. ix.

1341 See the Introduction by Káshináth Trimbak Telang, M.A.

1342 “Sacred Books of the East,” vol. viii. p. 276.

1343 _Ibid._

1344 _Ibid._

1345 Pp. 258, 259.

1346 _Ibid._, p. 257.

1347 _Ibid._, p. 259.

1348 In the astronomical and cosmical key, Vaishvânara is Agni, son of
the Sun, or Vishvânara, but in the psycho‐metaphysical symbolism it
is the Self, in the sense of non‐separateness, _i.e._, both divine
and human.

1349 Here the speaker personifies the said divine Self.

1350 _Ibid._

1351 Compare with these “pairs of opposites,” in the _Anugîtâ_, the
“pairs” of Æons, in the elaborate system of Valentinus, the most
learned and profound Master of the Gnosis. As the “pairs of
opposites,” male and female, are all derived from Âkâsha
(undeveloped and developed, differentiated and undifferentiated, or
Self or Prajâpati), so are the Valentinian “pairs” of male and
female Æons shown to emanate from Bythos, the preëxisting eternal
Depth, and in their secondary emanation from Ampsiu‐Ouraan, or
sempiternal Depth and Silence, the second Logos. In the Esoteric
emanation there are seven chief “pairs of opposites”; and so also in
the Valentinian system there were fourteen, or twice seven.
Epiphanius “copied one pair twice over,” Mr. C. W. King thinks, “and
thus adds one pair to the proper fifteen.” (_The Gnostics and their
Remains_, pp. 263, 264.) Here King falls into the opposite error;
the pairs of Æons are not 15 (a “blind”) but 14, as the _first_ Æon
is That from which others emanate, Depth and Silence being the first
and only emanation from Bythos. As Hippolytus shows: “The Æons of
Valentinus are confessedly the _six_ Radicals of Simon (Magus),”
with the _seventh_, Fire, at their head. And these are: Mind,
Intelligence, Voice, Name, Reason and Thought, subordinate to Fire,
the Higher Self, or precisely the “Seven Winds” or the “Seven
Priests” of _Anugîtâ_.

1352 Not necessarily at death only, but during Samâdhi or mystic trance.

1353 All the words and sentences between parenthetical marks are the
writer’s. This is translated directly from the Latin translation.
King’s translation conforms too much to Gnosticism as explained by
the Church Fathers.

1354 Barbelo is one of the three “Invisible Gods,” and, as C. W. King
believes, includes the “Divine Mother of the Saviour,” or rather
Sophia Achamoth (_cf._ _Pistis Sophia_, pag. 359).

1355 _Pagg._ 378, 379.

1356 In other _Purânas_ Jatâyu is the son of Aruna, Garuda’s brother,
both the sons of Kashyapa. But all this is external allegory.

1357 IX. viii. 12, 13.

1358 From Burnouf’s Translation; see Wilson’s _Vishnu Purâna_, iii. 300.

1359 Wilson, _ibid._, p. 302, note.

1360 See _Vâyu Purâna_, which places him in the list of the forty
renowned sons of Kashyapa.

1361 _The Ordinances of Manu_, i. 16; Burnell’s Translation, p. 3, note.

1362 _Ibid._, 27; p. 5.

1363 Vol. i. pp. 355, _et seqq._

1364 _Orthodoxie Maçonnique Suivie de la Maçonnerie Occulte et de
l’Initiation Hermétique_, J. M. Ragon, p. 430; see also the whole of
Chapter XXVII, “Puissance des Nombres d’après Pythagore” for what
follows.

1365 The reason for it is simple, and was given in _Isis Unveiled_. In
geometry, one straight line fails to represent a perfect figure, nor
can two straight lines constitute a perfect figure. The triangle is
the first perfect figure.

1366 Ragon, _ibid._, p. 428, note.

1367 _Ibid._, p. 431.

1368 _Op. cit._, p. 113.

1369 Now what is the meaning and the reason of this figure? The reason is
that Manas is the _fifth_ principle, and that the Pentagon is the
symbol of Man—not only of the five‐limbed, but rather of the
_thinking, conscious_ Man.

1370 The reason for it becomes apparent when Egyptian symbology is
studied. See further on.

1371 _Ibid._, p. 114.

1372 _Ibid._, pp. 114, 115.

1373 _Book of the Dead_, lxxxviii. 2.

1374 _Philosophumena_, v. 14.

1375 See _Philosophumena_, v. 14.

1376 So is Brahma’s _fifth_ head, said to be lost, burnt to ashes by
Shiva’s “central eye”; Shiva being also Panchânana “five‐faced.”
Thus the number is preserved and secrecy maintained on the true
Esoteric meaning.

1377 “When the Sun passes away behind the 30th degree of Makara and will
reach no more the sign of the Mînam (Pisces) then the Night of
Brahmâ has come.”

1378 Death of every physical thing truly; but Mâra is also the
unconscious quickener of the birth of the Spiritual.

1379 Osiris is called in the _Book of the Dead_ (cxlii. B. 17) “Osiris,
the double crocodile.” “He is the good and the bad Principle; the
Day and the Night Sun, the God and the mortal man.” Thus far the
Macrocosm and the Microcosm.

1380 _Op. cit._, p. 117.

1381 King’s _Gnostics and their Remains_, p. 297.

1382 Reflecting on the cross, the author of _The Source of Measures_
shows that this candlestick in the Temple “was so composed that,
counting on either side, there were _four_ candle‐sockets; while, at
the apex, there being _one in common_ to both sides, there were in
fact 3 to be counted on the one side and 4 on the other, making in
all the number 7, upon the self‐same idea of one in common with the
cross display. Take a line of one unit in breadth by 3 units long,
and place it on an incline; take another of 4 units long, and lean
it upon this one, from an opposite incline, making the top unit of
the 4 in length the corner or apex of a triangle. This is the
display of the candlestick. Now, take away the line of 3 units in
length, and _cross_ it on the one of 4 units in length, and the
cross form results. The same idea is conveyed in the six days of the
week in Genesis, crowned by the seventh, which was used by itself as
a base of circular measure” (p. 51).

1383 From a MS. supposed to be by “St. Germain,” embodied by Ragon, _op.
cit._, p. 434.

1384 It had no such meaning in the beginnings, nor during the earlier
dynasties.

1385 From an unpublished MS.

1386 From St. Germain’s MS.

1387 Yet this sense, if once mastered, will turn out to be the secure
casket which holds the keys to the Secret Wisdom. True, a casket so
profusely ornamented that its fancy‐work hides and conceals entirely
any spring for opening it, and thus makes the unintuitional believe
it has not, and cannot have, any opening at all. Still the keys are
there, deeply buried, yet ever present to him who searches for them.

1388 _Vishnu Purúna_, I. xv; Wilson’s Trans., ii. 29.

1389 Quoted in Gerald Massey’s _The Natural Genesis_, i. 427.

1390 With the Christians, most undeniably. With the Pre‐Christian
Symbologists it was, as said, the Bed or Couch of Torture during the
Initiation Mystery, the “Crucifix” being placed horizontally, on the
ground, and not erect, as at the time when it became the Roman
gallows.

1391 So it was, and could not be otherwise. Julian, the Emperor, was an
Initiate, and as such knew well the “mystery‐meaning” both
metaphysical and physical.

1392 _Op. cit._, _ibid._, p. 433.

1393 _Book of the Dead._ xxxix. Apophis or Apap is the Serpent of Evil,
the symbol of human passions. The Sun (Osiris‐Horus) destroys him,
and Apap is thrown down, bound and chained. The God Aker, the “Chief
of the Gate of the Abyss” of Aker, the Realm of the Sun (xv. 39),
binds him. Apophis is the enemy of Ra (Light), but the “great Apap
has fallen!” exclaims the Defunct. “The Scorpion has hurt thy
mouth,” he says to the conquered enemy (xxxix. 7). The Scorpion is
the “worm that never dies” of the Christians. Apophis is bound on
the Tau or Tat, the “emblem of stability.” (See the erection of Tat
in Tatoo, xviii.)

1394 So have the crypts in Cis‐Himâlayan regions where Initiates live,
and where their ashes are placed for seven lunar years.

1395 _The Natural Genesis_, i. 432.

1396 The Cross and the Tree are identical and synonymous in symbolism.

1397 lvii. 3.

1398 _Ibid._, 5.

1399 Sermon clx.

1400 _Vishnu Purâna_, Wilson’s Trans., iii. 174, note by Fitzedward Hall.

1401 Hence the Initiates in Greece called the Tau Γαιήιος, “son of Gaia,”
“sprung from Earth,” like Tityos in the _Odyssey_ (vii. 324).

1402 Ragon, _Orthodoxie Maçonnique_, etc., pp. 432, 433.

1403 _Ibid._, p. 433, note.

1404 See the _Mahâbhârata_, _e.g._, III. 189, 3, where Vishnu says, “I
called the name of water Nârâ in ancient times, and am hence called
Nârâyana, for that was always the abode I moved in (Ayana).” It is
into the Water, or Chaos, the “Moist Principle” of the Greeks and
Hermes, that the first seed of the Universe is thrown. “The ‘Spirit
of God’ moves on the dark waters of Space”; hence Thales makes of it
the primordial element and prior to Fire, which was yet latent in
that Spirit.

1405 See the bronze statue of Tripurântaka Shiva, “Mahâdeva destroying
Tripurâsura,” at the Museum of the India House.

1406 Ragon, _ibid._, p. 433, note.

1407 There are learned Brâhmans who have protested against our septenary
division. They are right from their own standpoint, as we are right
from ours. Leaving the three _aspects_, or _adjunct principles_ out
of calculation, they accept only four Upâdhis, or Bases, including
the Ego—the reflected image of the Logos in the Kârana Sharîra—and
even “strictly speaking ... only three Upâdhis.” For purely
theoretical metaphysical philosophy, or purposes of meditation,
these three may be sufficient, as shown by the Târaka Yoga system;
but for _practical occult teaching_ our septenary division is the
best and easiest. It is, however, a matter of school and choice.

1408 _Commentary_, Book ix. F. 19.

1409 Protista are not animals. The reader is asked to bear in mind that
when we speak of “animals,” the mammalians alone are meant.
Crustacea, fishes, and reptiles are contemporary with, and most have
preceded, _physical_ man in this Round. All were bisexual, however,
before the age of mammalia in the closing portion of the Secondary
or Mesozoic ages, _yet nearer to the Palæozoic than the Cænozoic
ages_. Smaller marsupial mammalia are contemporary with the huge
reptilian monsters of the Secondary.

1410 _Æneid_, vi. 725‐729. “First [Divine] Spirit within sustains the
heavens, the earth and watery plains, the moon’s orb and shining
stars and the [Eternal] Mind diffused through all the parts [of
Nature], actuates the whole stupendous frame and mingles with the
vast body [of the Universe]. Thence proceed _the race of men and
beasts_, the _vital principles_ of the flying kind and the monsters
which the Ocean breeds under its smooth crystal plane.” “All
proceeds from Ether and from its seven natures”—said the Alchemists.
Science knows these only in their superficial effects.

1411 Compare _Descent of Man_, p. 164.

1412 Bartlett’s _Land and Water_.

1413 _Source of Measures_, p. 65. The author explains: “_Note_ that in
Hebrew, _Jared_, the father of Enoch, is construed to be ‘_the mount
of descent_,’ and it is said to be the same with _Ararat_, on which
the cubical structure of _Noah_, or _foundation measure_, rested.
_Jared_, in Hebrew, is י־רד. The root derivations are the same with
those of _Ararat_, of _acre_, of _earth_. The Hebrew י־רד is
_literally, in British_, Y R D; hence, in _Jared_, is to be found
_literally_, our English word _yard_ (and also י־רד, for _Jah_, or
_Jehovah, is rod_). It is noteworthy that the son of _Jared_, viz.,
_Enoch_, lived 365 years; and it is said of him, by rabbinical
commentators, that the year period of 365 days was discovered by
him, thus bringing, again, _time_ and _distance_ values together,
_i.e._, _year time_ descended, by coördination, through the _yard_,
or _Jared_, who _thus was its father_, in or through _Enoch_; and
truly enough, 1296 = _yard_ (or _Jared_) × 4 = 5184, the
characteristic value of the solar day, in _thirds_, which, as
stated, may be styled the _parent, numerically_, of the solar year”
(_ibid._). This, however, by the astronomical and numerical
kabalistic methods. Esoterically, Jared is the Third Race and Enoch
the Fourth—but as he is taken away alive he symbolizes also the
Elect saved in the Fourth, while Noah is the Fifth from the
beginning—the family saved from the Waters, eternally and
_physically_.

1414 vii. 2, 3.

1415 _Five Years of Theosophy_, pp. 202, 203.

1416 _Ibid._, p. 200.

1417 Oliver’s _Pythagorean Triangle_, p. 104.

1418 _De Anim. Procr._, 1027.

1419 Oliver, _ibid._, p. 112.

1420 Reuchlin è Cabala, l. ii; Oliver, _ibid._, p. 104.

1421 In _The Source of Measures_, the author shows (pp. 50, 51) that the
figure of the cube unfolded in connection with the circle “becomes
... a _cross proper_, or of the _tau_ form, and the attachment of
the circle to this last gives the _ansated cross_ of the
Egyptians.... While there are but 6 faces to a cube, the
representation of the cross as the cube unfolded, as to the cross‐
bars, displays one face of the cube _as common to two bars_, counted
as belonging to either [_i.e._, once counted horizontally, and once
vertically]; ... 4 for the upright, and 3 for the cross‐bar, making
_seven_ in all. Here we have the famous 4 and 3 and 7.” Esoteric
Philosophy explains that _four_ is the symbol of the Universe in its
potential state, or Chaotic Matter, and that it requires Spirit to
permeate it actively; _i.e._, the primordial _abstract_ Triangle has
to quit its one‐dimensional quality and spread across that Matter,
thus forming a _manifested_ basis on the three‐dimensional space, in
order that the Universe should manifest intelligibly. This is
achieved by the cube unfolded. Hence the _ansated_ cross as the
symbol of man, generation and life. In Egypt Ank signified “soul,”
“life” and “blood.” It is the _ensouled, living_ man, the septenary.

1422 _Supra_, p. 626.

1423 Oliver, _ibid._, p. 114.

1424 _Pythag._, p. 61.

1425 Oliver, _ibid._, p. 172.

1426 _De Plac. Phil._, p. 878.

1427 See Oliver, _ibid._, p. 106.

1428 _Ibid._, p. 108.

1429 Reuchlin, _ut supra_, p. 689; Oliver, _ibid._, pp. 112, 113.

1430 Oliver, _ibid._, p. 118.

1431 _Bucolica_, Ecl. viii. 75.

1432 Philo, _De Mund. Opif._; Oliver, _ibid._, p. 172.

1433 The seven Planets are not limited to this number because the
Ancients knew of no others, but simply because they were the
primitive or primordial “Houses” of the seven Logoi. There may be
nine and ninety‐nine other planets discovered—this does not alter
the fact of these seven alone being sacred.

1434 Oliver, _ibid._, pp. 173, 174.

1435 _Ibid._, _loc. cit._

1436 _The Natural Genesis_, i. 545.

1437 _Ibid._

1438 In _Timæus_, iii.; _ibid._

1439 Oliver, _ibid._, p. 175.

1440 See Section F., _infra_, “The Seven Souls of the Egyptologists.”

1441 The Seven Centres of Energy evolved, or rendered objective by the
action of Fohat upon the One Element; or, in fact, the “Seventh
Principle” of the Seven Elements which exist throughout manifested
Kosmos. We may here point out that they are in truth the Sephiroth
of the Kabalists; the “Seven gifts of the Holy Ghost” in the
Christian system; and in a mystical sense, the seven children or
sons of Devakî killed before the birth of Krishna by Kansa. Our
seven principles symbolize all of these. We have to part or separate
from them before we reach the Krishna or Christ‐state, that of a
Jîvanmukta, and centre ourselves entirely in the highest, the
Seventh or the One.

1442 Μοῖρα, is destiny, not “Fate,” in this case, as it is an
appellation, not a proper noun. (See Wolf’s transl., _Odyssey_,
xxii. 413.) But Moira, the Goddess of Fate, is a deity who, like
Αἶσα, _gives to all their portion of good and evil_ (Liddell and
Scott’s Lexicon), and is therefore Karma. By this abbreviation,
however, _the subject_ to Destiny or Karma is meant, the Self or
Ego, and that which is reborn. Nor is Ἀντιμῖμον Πνεύματος our
conscience, but our Buddhî; nor is it again the “counterfeit” of
Spirit but “modelled after,” or a “counterpart” (Aristoph.,
_Thesmophor._, 27) of the Spirit—which Buddhî is, as the vehicle of
Âtmâ.

1443 _The Gnostics and their Remains_, pp. 37, 38.

1444 _Rig Veda_, iii. 54. 16; ii. 29. 3, 4.

1445 Prof. Roth (in Peter’s Lexicon) defines the Angirasas as an
intermediate race of higher Beings between Gods and Men; while Prof.
Weber, according to his invariable custom of modernizing and
anthropomorphizing the divine, sees in them the original priests of
the religion which was common to the Âryan Hindûs and Persians. Roth
is right. “Angirasas” was one of the names of the Dhyânîs, or Deva‐
Instructors (Guru‐Devas), of the late Third, the Fourth, and even of
the Fifth Race Initiates.

1446 _Ibid._, x. 62. 1, 4.

1447 _Ibid._, x. 90. 1.

1448 _Ibid._, x. 90. 5.

1449 _Rig Veda_, x. 113. 5.

1450 _Ibid._, i. 35. 8.

1451 _Ibid._, _loc. cit._

1452 _Ibid._, ix. 86. 29.

1453 Only three submerged, or otherwise destroyed, Continents—for the
first Continent of the First Race exists to this day and will
prevail to the last—are described in the Occult Doctrine, the
Hyperborean, the Lemurian (adopting a name now known in Science),
and the Atlantean. Most of Asia issued from under the waters after
the destruction of Atlantis; Africa came still later, while Europe
is the fifth and the latest continent—portions of the two Americas
being far older. But of these, more anon. The Initiates who recorded
the _Vedas_—or the Rishis of our Fifth Race—wrote at a time when
Atlantis had already gone down. Atlantis is the _fourth_ Continent
that _appeared_, but the _third_ that _disappeared_.

1454 Compare Vishvakarman.

1455 _Ibid._, x. 20. 1, 16.

1456 Nor is this Archaic Teaching so very _unscientific_, since one of
the greatest Naturalists of the age—the late Professor
Agassiz—admitted the multiplicity of the geographical origins of
man, and supported it to the end of his life. The unity of the human
species was accepted by the illustrious Professor of Cambridge
(U.S.A.) in the same way as it is by the Occultists—namely, in the
sense of their essential and original homogeneity and their origin
from one and the same source, _e.g._, Negroes, Âryans, Mongols,
etc., have all originated in the same way and from the same
ancestors. These latter were all of one essence, though
differentiated, since they belonged to seven planes which differed
in degree though not in kind. That original physical difference was
only a little more accentuated by that of geographical and climatic
conditions, later on. This is not the theory of Agassiz, of course,
but the Esoteric version. It is fully discussed in the Addenda, Part
III.

1457 See the enumeration of the seven Spheres—not the “Karshvare of the
earth,” as generally believed—in Fargard xix. 30, _et seqq._

1458 The seven Worlds are, as has been said, the seven Spheres of the
Chain, each presided over by one of the seven “Great Gods” of every
religion. When the religions became degraded and anthropomorphized,
and the metaphysical ideas nearly forgotten, the synthesis or the
highest, the seventh, was separated from the rest, and that
personification became the _eighth_ God, whom Monotheism tried to
unify but—failed. In no exoteric religion is God really one, if
analyzed metaphysically.

1459 The six invisible Globes of our Chain are both “Worlds” and “Earths”
as is our own, although invisible. But where could be the _six_
invisible Earths on _this_ Globe?

1460 _Vendîdâd_, S. B. E., vol. iv. pp. lix. lx., and note.

1461 See _Rig Veda_, i. 34; iii. 56; vii. 10. 411, and v. 60. 6.

1462 _Vendîdâd_, _op. cit._, p. 13.

1463 Death came only after man had become a _physical_ creature. The men
of the First Race, and also of the Second, dissolved and disappeared
in their progeny.

1464 _Op. cit._, p. 12.

1465 I. xxiv. 1.

1466 _Vishnu Purâna_, Wilson’s Trans., i. lxxx.

1467 As Parâshara says: “These are the seven persons by whom in the
several Manvantaras created beings have been protected. Because the
whole world has been pervaded by the energy of the deity, he is
entitled Vishnu, from the root Vish, ‘to enter,’ or ‘’pervade’; for
all the gods, the Manus, the seven Rishis, the sons of the Manus,
the Indras, the sovereigns of the gods, all are but the impersonated
might [Vibhûtayah, potencies] of Vishnu.” (_Ibid._, iii. 18, 19.)
Vishnu is the Universe; and the Universe itself is divided in the
_Rig Veda_ into _seven_ regions—which ought to be sufficient
authority, for the Brâhmans at all events.

1468 _Ibid._, iii. 15.

1469 Hymn xix. 53.

1470 Vishnu is _all_—the worlds, the stars, the seas, etc. Vishnu “is all
that is, all that is not.... [But] he is not a substance
(Vastubhûta).” (_Vishnu Purâna_, Book II, Ch. xii; Wilson’s Trans.,
ii. 309.) “That which people call the highest God is not a substance
but the _cause_ of it; not one that is here, there, or elsewhere,
_not what we see_, but that in which all is—Space.”

1471 _Vishnu Purâna_, Wilson’s Trans., ii. 306.

1472 Therefore it is said in the _Purânas_ that the sight at night of
Dhruva, the polar star, and of the celestial Porpoise (Shishumâra, a
constellation) “expiates whatever sin has been committed during the
day.” (_Ibid._, p. 306.) The fact is that the rays of the four stars
in the “circle of perpetual apparition”—the Agni, Mahendra,
Kashyapa, and Dhruva, placed in the tail of Ursa Minor
(Shishumâra)—focussed in a certain way and on a certain object,
produce extraordinary results. The Astro‐magians of India will
understand what is meant.

1473 _Ibid._, iii. 15.

1474 Dowson’s _Hindû Classical Dictionary_, _sub voc._ “Shiva,” p. 298.

1475 _Vishnu Purâna_, _op. cit._, ii. 78.

1476 In the _Râmâyana_ it is Bâla‐Râma, Krishna’s elder brother, who does
this.

1477 With regard to the origin of Rudra, it is stated in several
_Purânas_ that his (spiritual) progeny, _created in him by Brahmâ_,
is not confined to either the _seven_ Kumâras or the _eleven_
Rudras, etc., but “comprehends infinite numbers of beings _in person
and equipments like their_ (virgin) father. Alarmed at their
fierceness, numbers, and _immortality_, Brahmâ desires his son Rudra
to form creatures of a different and mortal nature.” Rudra _refusing
to create_, desists, etc., hence Rudra is the first _rebel_.
(_Linga_, _Vâyu_, _Matsya_, and other _Purânas_.)

1478 Diti is shown to have been thus frustrated in the Dvâpara Yuga,
during that period when the Fourth Race was flourishing.

1479 Notwithstanding the terrible, and evidently _purposed_, confusion of
Manus, Rishis, and their progeny in the _Purânas_, one thing is made
clear: there have been and there will be seven Rishis in every Root‐
Race, called also Manvantara in the sacred books, just as there are
fourteen Manus in every Round, the presiding Gods, the Rishis and
sons of the Manus, being identical. (See _Vishnu Purâna_, III. i;
Wilson’s Trans., iii. 19.) Six Manvantaras are given, the seventh
being our own, in the _Vishnu Purâna_. The _Vâyu Purâna_ furnishes
the nomenclature of the sons of the fourteen Manus in every
Manvantara, and the sons of the seven Sages or Rishis. The latter
are the progeny of the Progenitors of mankind. All the _Purânas_
speak of the seven Prajâpatis of this period or Round.

1480 “Châkshusha was the Manu of the sixth period [Third Round and Third
Race], in which Indra was Manojava”—Mantradruma in the _Bhâgavata
Purâna_. (_Vishnu Purâna_, Wilson’s Trans., iii. 12.) As there is a
perfect analogy between the Great Round (Mahâkalpa), each of the
seven Rounds, and each of the seven great Races in every one of the
Rounds—therefore, Indra of the sixth period, or Third Round,
corresponds to the close of the Third Race, at the time of the Fall
or the separation of sexes. Rudra, as the father of the Maruts, has
many points of contact with Indra, the Marutvân, or “Lord of the
Maruts.” Rudra is said to have received his name because of his
weeping. Hence Brahmâ called him Rudra; but _he wept yet seven times
more and so obtained seven other names_—of which he uses one during
_each_ “period.”

1481 _Ibid._, ii. 231.

1482 In _Vishnu Puranâ_, Book II. Chap. iv. (Wilson, ii. 205), it is
stated that the “Earth,” “with its continents, mountains, oceans,
and exterior shell, is _fifty crores_ [five hundred millions] of
Yojanas in extent”; to which the translator remarks: “_This
comprises the planetary spheres_; for the diameter of the seven
zones and oceans—each ocean being of the same diameter as the
continent it encloses, and each successive continent being twice the
diameter of that which precedes it—amounts to but two crores or
fifty‐four lakhs.... ‘Whenever any contradictions in different
Purânas are observed, they are to be ascribed ... to differences of
Kalpas and _the like_.’ ” “The like” ought to read “occult meaning,”
an explanation which is withheld by the commentator, who wrote for
exoteric, _sectarian_ purposes, and was misunderstood by the
translator for various other reasons, the least of which
is—ignorance of the Esoteric Philosophy.

1483 The Phœnix, although generally connected with the Solar Cycle of 600
years—the Western cycle of the Greeks and other nations—is a generic
symbol for several kinds of cycles, ciphers being taken out or more
added according to which cycle is meant.

1484 See _Book of Ali_, Russian transl.

1485 The tense is past, because the book is allegorical, and has to veil
the truths it contains.

1486 _Oriental Collections_, ii. 119; quoted by Kenealy, _op. cit._, pp.
175, 176.

1487 _Ibid._, _loc. cit._

1488 _Op. cit._, xvii. 9, 10.

1489 Section VI; _Leviticus_, xxiii. 15, _et seqq._

1490 _Vie de Notre Seigneur Jésus‐Christ_, Introduction; quoted by De
Mirville, _Pneumatologie_, iv. 50.

1491 See Suidas, _sub voc._ Ἥλιος.

1492 Pliny, _Hist. Nat._, vii. 56.

1493 “Menses in quinos dies descripserunt dies” (lviii. 9).

1494 Lib. i. c. 26.

1495 _Hist. Nat._, vii. 48, and _Life of Numa_, 16.

1496 _Mèm. Acad. Ins._, xvi. c. 48; iii. 183.

1497 _Voyage en Sibérie_, iii. 19.

1498 The spheres of action of the combined Forces of Evolution and Karma
are (1) the Super‐spiritual or Noumenal; (2) the Spiritual; (3) the
Psychic; (4) the Astro‐ethereal; (5) the Sub‐astral; (6) the Vital;
and (7) the purely Physical Spheres.

1499 Adbhutam, see _Atharva Veda_, x. 105.

1500 In Hindûism, as understood by the Orientalists from the _Atharva
Veda_, the three Rajamsi refer to the three “strides” of Vishnu; his
ascending higher step being taken in the highest world (_A. V._,
vii. 99, 1; _cf._ i. 155, 5). It is the Divo Rajah, or the “sky,” as
they think it. But it is something besides this in Occultism. The
sentence, _pâreshu gûhyeshu vrateshu_ (_cf._, i. 155, 3, and ix. 75,
2, or again, x. 114), in _Atharva Veda_, has yet to be explained.

1501 _Medical Review_, July, 1844.

1502 H. Grattan Guinness, F.R.G.S., in his _Approaching End of the Age_,
p. 258.

1503 _Lancet_, 1842, 1843.

1504 Having given a number of illustrations from natural history, the
doctor adds: “The facts I have briefly glanced at are general facts,
_and cannot happen day after day in so many millions of animals of
every kind_. FROM THE LARVA OR OVUM OF A MINUTE INSECT UP TO MAN,
_at definite periods_, from a mere _chance or coincidence_.... Upon
the whole it is, I think, impossible to come to any less general
conclusion than this, that, _in animals, changes occur every three
and a half, seven, fourteen, twenty‐one, or twenty‐eight days, or at
some definite number of weeks_”—or septenary cycles. Again, the same
Dr. Laycock states that: “Whatever type the fever may exhibit,
_there will be a paroxysm on the seventh day.... fourteenth will be
remarkable as a day of amendment_ ... [either cure or death taking
place]. If the fourth [paroxysm] be severe, and the fifth less so,
the disease will end at the _seventh_ paroxysm, and ... the change
for the better ... will be seen on the fourteenth day ... namely,
about three or four o’clock a.m., when the system is most languid.”
(_Approaching End of the Age_, by Grattan Guinness, pp. 258 to 269,
wherein this is quoted).

This is pure “soothsaying” by cyclic calculations, and it is
connected with Chaldæan Astrolatry and Astrology. Thus Materialistic
Science—in its medicine, _the most materialistic of all_—applies our
Occult laws to diseases, studies natural history with its help,
recognizes its presence as a fact in Nature, and yet must needs
pooh‐pooh the same archaic knowledge when claimed by the Occultists.
For if the mysterious Septenary Cycle is a law in Nature, _and it is
one_, as proven; if it is found controlling both evolution and
_involution_ (or death) in the realms of entomology, ichthyology and
ornithology, as in the kingdom of the animal mammalia and man—why
cannot it be present and acting in Kosmos, in general, in its
natural (though occult) divisions of time, races, and _mental_
development? And why, furthermore, should not the most ancient
Adepts have studied and thoroughly mastered these cyclic laws under
all their aspects? Indeed, Dr. Stratton states as a physiological
and pathological fact, that “in health the human pulse is more
frequent in the morning than in the evening for six days out of
seven; and that on the _seventh_ day it is slower.” (_Edinburgh
Medical and Surgical Journal_, Jan. 1843; _ibid., loc. cit._) Why,
then, should not an Occultist show the same in cosmic and
terrestrial life in the pulse of the Planet and Races? Dr. Laycock
divides life by _three_ great _septenary_ periods; the first and
last, each stretching over 21 years, and the central period or prime
of life lasting 28 years, or four times seven. He subdivides the
first into _seven_ distinct stages, and the other two into _three_
minor periods, and says that: “The fundamental unit of the greater
periods is _one week of seven days_, _each day being twelve hours_,
and that single and compound _multiples_ of this unit, determine the
length of these periods by the same ratio, as multiples of the unit
of twelve hours determine the lesser periods. _This law binds all
periodic vital phenomena together, and links the periods observed in
the lowest annulose animals, with those of man himself, the highest
of the vertebrata._” (_Ibid._, p. 267.) If Science does this, why
should she scorn the Occult information, that—to use Dr. Laycock’s
language—_one_ Week of the Manvantaric (Lunar) Fortnight, of
fourteen Days (or seven Manus), that Fortnight of twelve Hours in a
Day representing seven Periods or seven Races—is now passed? This
language of Science fits our Doctrine admirably. Mankind _has_ lived
over “_a week of seven days_, each day being _twelve hours_,” since
three and a half Races are now gone for ever, the Fourth is
submerged, and we are now in the Fifth Race.

1505 _Op. cit._, p. 269.

1506 See for the length of such cycles or Yugas in _Vriddha Garga_ and
other ancient astronomical sections (Jyotisha). They vary from the
cycle of five years—which Colebrooke calls “the cycle of the Vedas,”
specified in the institutes of Parâshara, “and the basis of
calculation for larger cycles” (_Miscell. Essays_, i. 106 and
108)—up to the Mahâ Yuga or the famous cycle of 4,320,000 years.

1507 The Hebrew word for “week” is _seven_; and any length of time
divided by _seven_ would have been a “week” with them—even
49,000,000 years, as it is seven times seven millions. But their
calculation is throughout septiform.

1508 Brahmâ creates in the first Kalpa, or on the first Day, various
“sacrificial animals” (Pashavah), or the celestial bodies and the
Zodiacal signs, and “plants,” _which_ he uses in _sacrifices_ at the
opening of Tretâ Yuga. The Esoteric meaning shows him proceeding
cyclically and creating astral Prototypes on the _descending_
spiritual arc and then on the _ascending_ physical arc. The latter
is the subdivision of a _two‐fold_ creation, sub‐divided again into
seven descending and seven ascending degrees of Spirit falling, and
of Matter ascending; the inverse of what takes place—as in a mirror
which reflects the right on the left side—in this Manvantara of
ours. It is the same Esoterically in the Elohistic _Genesis_ (chap.
i), and in the Jehovistic copy, as in Hindû cosmogony.

1509 _Op. cit._, vv. 70, 71, 80; _The Kabbalah Unveiled_, S. L. MacGregor
Mathers, pp. 120, 121.

1510 “The Greater Holy Assembly,” v. 1,160.

1511 See _Vishnu Purâna_, I. v.

1512 It is very surprising to see theologians and Oriental scholars
expressing indignation at the “depraved taste” of the Hindû mystics,
who, not content with having “invented” the Mind‐born Sons of
Brahmâ, make the Rishis, Manus, and Prajâpatis of every kind spring
from _various parts of the body_ of their primal Progenitor, Brahmâ.
(See Wilson’s footnote in his _Vishnu Purâna_, i. 102.) Because the
average public is unacquainted with the Kabalah, the key to, and
glossary of, the much veiled Mosaic Books, therefore, the clergy
imagines the truth will never out. Let any one turn to the English,
Hebrew, or Latin texts of the _Kabalah_, now so ably translated by
several scholars, and he will find that the Tetragrammaton, which is
the Hebrew IHVH, is also both the “Sephirothal Tree”—_i.e._, it
contains all the Sephiroth except Kether, the crown—and the united
Body of the Heavenly Man (Adam Kadmon) from whose Limbs emanate the
Universe and everything in it. Furthermore, he will find that the
idea in the Kabalistic Books, the chief of which in the _Zohar_ are
the “Book of Concealed Mystery,” and of the “Greater” and the
“Lesser Holy Assembly,” is entirely phallic and far more crudely
expressed than is the four‐fold Brahmâ in any of the _Purânas_. (See
_The Kabbalah Unveiled_, by S. L. MacGregor Mathers, chapter xxii.
of “The Lesser Holy Assembly,” concerning the remaining members of
Microprosopus.) For, this “Tree of Life” is also the “Tree of
Knowledge of Good and Evil,” whose chief mystery is that of human
procreation. It is a mistake to regard the _Kabalah_ as _explaining_
the mysteries of Kosmos or Nature; it explains and unveils only a
few allegories in the _Bible_, and _is more esoteric_ than is the
latter.

1513 Simplified in the English _Bible_ to: “Is the Lord [!!] among us, or
not?”

1514 Verse 83; _op. cit._, p. 121.

1515 Translators often render the word “Companion” (Angel, also Adept) by
“Rabbi,” just as the Rishis are called Gurus. The _Zohar_ is, if
possible, more occult than the _Book of Moses_; to read the “Book of
Concealed Mystery” one requires the keys furnished by the genuine
Chaldæan _Book of Numbers_, which is not extant.

1516 Verses 1152, 1158, 1159; _op. cit._, p. 254.

1517 _I Peter_, ii. 2‐5.

1518 “The Greater Holy Assembly,” vv. 1160, 1161; _op. cit._, p. 255.

1519 See pp. 445, 446, _supra_.

1520 _Op. cit._, i. 297, 2nd ed.

1521 It is. But Âgneyâstra are fiery “missile weapons,” not “edged”
weapons, as there is some difference between Shastra and Astra in
Sanskrit.

1522 Yet there are some, who may know something of these, even outside
the author’s lines, wide as they undeniably are.

1523 This connecting link, like others, was pointed out by the present
writer nine years before the appearance of the work from which the
above is quoted, namely in _Isis Unveiled_, a work full of such
guiding links between ancient, mediæval, and modern thought, but,
unfortunately, too loosely edited.

1524 Ay; but how can the learned writer prove that these “beginnings”
were precisely in Egypt, and nowhere else; and only 50,000 years
ago?

1525 Precisely; and this is just what the Theosophists do. They have
never claimed “original inspiration,” not even as mediums claim it,
but have always pointed, and do now point, to the “primary
signification” of the symbols, which they trace to other countries,
older even than Egypt; significations, moreover, which emanate from
a Hierarchy (or Hierarchies, if preferred) of _living_ Wise
Men—mortals notwithstanding that Wisdom—who reject every approach to
_supernaturalism_.

1526 But where is the proof that the Ancients did not mean precisely that
which the Theosophists claim? Records exist for what they say, just
as other records exist for what Mr. Gerald Massey says. His
interpretations are very correct, but are also very one‐sided.
Surely Nature has more than one _physical aspect_; for Astronomy,
Astrology, and so on, are all on the physical, not the spiritual,
plane.

1527 _The Natural Genesis_, i. 318. It is to be feared that Mr. Massey
has not succeeded. We have our followers as he has his followers,
and Materialistic Science steps in and takes little account of both
his and our speculations!

1528 The fact that this learned Egyptologist does not recognize in the
doctrine of the “Seven Souls,” as he terms our “principles,” or
“metaphysical ‘_concepts_,’ ” anything but “the primitive biology or
physiology of the soul,” does not invalidate our argument. The
lecturer touches on only two keys, those that unlock the
astronomical and the physiological mysteries of Esotericism, and
leaves out the other five. Otherwise he would have promptly
understood that what he calls the physiological divisions of the
living Soul of man, are regarded by Theosophists as also
psychological and spiritual.

1529 _Op. cit._, p. 2.

1530 _Ibid._, _loc. cit._

1531 _Ibid._, _loc. cit._

1532 _Ibid._, _loc. cit._

1533 _Ibid._, p. 4.

1534 This is a great mistake made in the Esoteric enumeration. Manas is
the fifth, not the fourth; and Manas corresponds precisely with Seb,
the Egyptian fifth principle, for that portion of Manas which
follows the two higher principles, is the ancestral soul, indeed,
the bright, immortal thread of the higher Ego, to which clings the
spiritual aroma of all the lives or births.

1535 _Ibid._, p. 2.

1536 _Ibid._, pp. 2, 3.

1537 _Signatura Rerum_, xiv. pars. 10, 14, 15; _The Natural Genesis_, i.
317.

1538 _Aurora_, xxiv. 27.

1539 This is indeed news! It makes us fear that the lecturer had never
read _Esoteric Buddhism_ before criticizing it. There are too many
such misconceptions in his notices of it.

1540 “The Seven Souls of Man,” pp. 26, 27.

1541 _Ibid._, p. 26.

1542 _The Theosophist_, 1887 (Madras), pp. 705, 706.

1543 According to _Shvetâshvatara‐Upanishad_ (357) the Siddhas are those
who are possessed from birth of “superhuman” powers, as also of
“knowledge and indifference to the world.” According to the Occult
teachings, however, the Siddhas are Nirmânakâyas or the “spirits”—in
the sense of an individual, or _conscious_ spirit—of great Sages
from spheres on a higher plane than our own, who voluntarily
incarnate in mortal bodies in order to help the human race in its
upward progress. Hence their innate knowledge, wisdom and powers.

1544 “The Sacred Books of the East,” viii. 284, _et seqq._

1545 I propose to follow here the text and not the editor’s commentaries,
who accepts Arjuna Mishra and Nilakantha’s _dead‐letter_
explanations. Our Orientalists never trouble to think that if a
native commentator is a non‐initiate, he could not explain
correctly, and if an Initiate, would not.

1546 See _Chhândogya_, p. 219, and Shankara’s commentary thereupon.

1547 The editor explains here, saying, “I presume devoted to the
Brahman.” We venture to assert that the “Fire” or Self is the real
Higher SELF “connected with,” that is to say _one_ with Brahma, the
One Deity. The “Self” separates itself no longer from the Universal
Spirit.

1548 The “Supreme Self,” says Krishna, in the _Bhagavad Gitâ_, pp. 102,
_et seqq._

1549 As Mahat, or Universal Intelligence, is first born, or manifests, as
Vishnu, and then, when it falls into Matter and develops self‐
consciousness, becomes egoism, selfishness, so Manas is of a dual
nature. It is respectively under the Sun and Moon, for as
Shankarâchârya says: “The moon is the mind, and the sun the
understanding.” The Sun and Moon are the deities of our planetary
Macrocosmos, and therefore Shankara adds that: “The mind and the
understanding are the respective deities of the [human] organs.”
(See _Brihadâranyaka_, pp. 521, _et seqq._) This is perhaps why
Arjuna Mishra says that the Moon and the Fire (the Self, the Sun)
constitute the universe.

1550 “The body in the soul,” as Arjuna Mishra is credited with saying, or
rather “the soul in the spirit”, and on a still higher plane of
development, the Self or Âtman in the Universal Self.

1551 _Op. cit._, p. 179.

1552 _Prov._, ix. 1.

1553 De Quatrefages, _The Human Species_, p. 111. The respective
developments of the human and simian brains are referred to. “In the
ape the temporo‐sphenoidal convolutions, which form the middle lobe,
make their appearance and are completed before the anterior
convolutions which form the frontal lobe. In man, on the contrary,
the frontal convolutions are the first to appear, and those of the
middle lobe are formed later.” (_Ibid._)

1554 _Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism_, p. 290.

1555 Series II, Vol. VI, p. 769 (Ed. 1886). To this an editorial remark
adds that an “F.J.B.,” in the _Athenæum_ (No. 3069, Aug. 21, 1886,
pp. 242‐3), points out that Naturalists have long recognized that
there are “morphological” and “physiological” species. The former
have their origin in men’s minds, the latter in a series of changes
sufficient to affect the internal as well as the external organs of
a group of allied individuals. The “physiological selection” of
morphological species is a confusion of ideas; that of physiological
species a redundancy of terms.

1556 _Op. cit._, p. 79.

1557 _Ibid._, p. 48.

1558 Nägeli’s “principle of perfectibility”; von de Baer’s “striving
towards the purpose”; Braun’s “divine breath as the inward impulse
in the evolutionary history of Nature”; Professor Owen’s “tendency
to perfectibility,” etc., are all expressive of the veiled
manifestations of the universal guiding Fohat, rich with the Divine
and Dhyân‐Chohanic thought.

1559 Hæckel on “Cell‐Souls and Soul‐Cells,” _Pedigree of Man_, Aveling’s
Trans., see pp. 136, 150.

1560 See _infra_, M. de Quatrefages’ _exposé_ of Hæckel, in Section II,
“The Ancestors Mankind is offered by Science.”

1561 Strictly speaking, du Bois‐Reymond is an Agnostic, and not a
Materialist. He has protested most vehemently against the
materialistic doctrine, which affirms mental phenomena to be merely
the product of molecular motion. The most accurate _physiological_
knowledge of the structure of the brain leaves us “nothing but
matter in motion,” he asserts; “_we must go further_, and admit the
utterly incomprehensible nature of the psychical principle, which it
is _impossible to regard_ as a mere outcome of material causes.”

1562 See Hæckel’s “Present Position of Evolution,” _op. cit._, pp. 23,
24, 296, 297, notes.

1563 _Op. cit._, pp. 34, 35, 36.

1564 _Measure for Measure_, Act ii, Scene 2.

1565 _Knowledge_, January, 1882.

1566 T. Huxley, _Man’s Place in Nature_, p. 57.

1567 _Op. cit._, “The Proofs of Evolution,” p. 273.

1568 Author of _Modern Science and Modern Thought_.

1569 _Op. cit._, pp. 102, 103.

1570 _Op. cit._, ii. 12, Wilson’s Transl.

1571 _Op. cit._, p. 104. In this, as has been shown in Part I, Modern
Science has again been anticipated, far beyond its own speculations,
by Archaic Science.

1572 _Ibid._, pp. 104‐106.

1573 _Anthrop._, 3rd edition, p. 11.

1574 Theosophists will remember that, according to Occult teaching,
cyclic Pralayas so‐called are but “Obscurations,” during which
periods Nature, _i.e._, everything visible and invisible on a
resting Planet—remains _in statu quo_. Nature rests and slumbers, no
work of destruction going on upon the Globe even if no active work
be done. All forms, as well as their astral types, remain as they
were at the last moment of its activity. The “Night” of a Planet has
hardly any twilight preceding it. It is caught like a huge mammoth
by an avalanche, and remains slumbering and frozen till the next
dawn of its new Day—a very short one indeed in comparison to the Day
of Brahmâ.

1575 This will be pooh‐poohed, because it will not be understood by our
modern men of Science; but every Occultist and Theosophist will
easily realize the process. There _can be no objective_ form on
Earth, nor in the Universe either, without its astral prototype
being first formed in Space. From Phidias down to the humblest
workman in the ceramic art, a sculptor has had to create first of
all a model in his mind, then sketch it in dimensional lines, and
then only can he reproduce it in a three dimensional or objective
figure. And if the human mind is a living demonstration of such
successive stages in the process of Evolution, how can it be
otherwise when Nature’s Mind and creative powers are concerned?

1576 See _A Modern Zoroastrian_, p. 103.

1577 “Darwinian Theory” in _Pedigree of Man_, p. 22.

1578 _The Age and Origin of Man._

1579 _Man before Metals_, p. 320, “International Scientific Series.”

1580 _Mr. Darwin’s Philosophy of Language_, 1873.

1581 _Cf._ his _Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism_, p. 304.

1582 _A Modern Zoroastrian_, p. 136.

1583 It thus appears that in its anxiety to prove our noble descent from
the catarrhine “baboon,” Hæckel’s school has pushed back the times
of pre‐historic man millions of years. (See _Pedigree of Man_, p.
273.) Occultists, render thanks to Science for such corroboration of
our claims!

1584 This seems a poor compliment to pay Geology, which is not a
speculative but as exact a Science as Astronomy—save, perhaps, its
too risky chronological speculations. It is mainly a “descriptive”
as opposed to an “abstract” Science.

1585 Such newly‐coined words as “perigenesis of plastids,” “plastidule
souls” (!), and others less comely, invented by Hæckel, may be very
learned and correct in so far as they may express very graphically
the ideas in his own vivid fancy. As _facts_, however, they remain
for his less imaginative colleagues painfully cænogenetic—to use his
own terminology; _i.e._, for true Science they are spurious
speculations, so long as they are derived from “empirical sources.”
Therefore, when he seeks to prove that “the origin of man from other
mammals, and most directly from the catarrhine apes, is a deductive
law, that follows necessarily from the inductive law of the theory
of descent” (_Anthropogeny_, p. 392, quoted in _Pedigree of Man_, p.
295.)—his no less learned foes (du Bois‐Reymond—for one) have a
right to see in this sentence a mere jugglery of words; a
“_testimonium paupertatis_ of Natural Science”—as he himself
complains, speaking, in return, of du Bois‐Reymond’s “astonishing
ignorance.” (See _Pedigree of Man_, notes on pp. 295, 296.)

1586 _Pedigree of Man_, p. 273.

1587 _Anthropogeny_, p. 392. Quoted in _Pedigree of Man_, p. 295.

1588 The _mental_ barrier between man and ape, characterized by Huxley as
an “enormous gap, a distance practically immeasurable” (! !) is,
indeed, in itself conclusive. Certainly it constitutes a standing
puzzle to the Materialist, who relies on the frail reed of “natural
selection.” The physiological differences between Man and the Apes
are in reality—despite a curious community of certain
features—equally striking. Says Dr. Schweinfurth, one of the most
cautious and experienced of Naturalists:

“In modern times there are no animals in creation that have
attracted a larger amount of attention from the scientific student
of nature than these great quadrumana [the anthropoids], which are
stamped with such a singular resemblance to the human form as to
have justified the epithet of anthropomorphic.... But all
investigation at present only leads human intelligence to a
confession of its insufficiency; and nowhere is caution more to be
advocated, nowhere is premature judgment more to be deprecated than
in the attempt to bridge over the mysterious chasm which separates
man and beast.” (_Heart of Africa_, i., 520. Ed., 1873.)

1589 _The Descent of Man_, p. 160. Ed. 1888. A ridiculous instance of
evolutionist contradictions is afforded by Schmidt (_Doctrine of
Descent and Darwinism_, p. 292). He says: “Man’s kinship with the
apes is ... not impugned by the bestial strength of the teeth of a
male orang or gorilla.” Mr. Darwin, on the contrary, endows this
fabulous being with teeth used as weapons!

1590 According even to a fellow‐thinker, Professor Schmidt, Darwin has
evolved “a certainly not flattering, and perhaps in many points not
correct, portrait of our presumptive ancestors in the phase of
dawning humanity.” (_Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism_, p. 284.)

1591 _The Human Species_, pp. 106‐108.

1592 _Op. cit._, p. 77.

1593 Pp. 109, 110.

1594 _Op. cit._, p. 110.

1595 Of course the Esoteric system of Fourth Round Evolution is much more
complex than the paragraph and quotations referred to categorically
assert. It is practically a _reversal_—both in embryological
inference and succession in time of species—of the current Western
conception.

1596 According to Hæckel, there are also “cell‐souls” and “atom‐cells”;
an “inorganic molecular soul” without, and a “plastidular soul”
with, or possessing, memory. What are our Esoteric teachings to
this? The _divine and human_ soul of the seven principles in man
must, of course, pale and give way before such a stupendous
revelation!

1597 _The Pedigree of Man_, p. 296.

1598 A valuable confession, this. Only it makes the attempt to trace the
_descent_ of consciousness in man, as well as of his physical body,
from Bathybius Hæckelii, still more humorous and _empirical_ in the
sense of Webster’s second definition.

1599 _Ibid._

1600 Those who take the opposite view and look upon the existence of the
human Soul—“as a supernatural, a spiritual phenomenon, conditioned
by forces altogether different from ordinary physical forces,” mock,
he thinks, “in consequence, all explanation that is simply
scientific.” They have no right it seems, to assert that “psychology
is, in part, or in whole, a spiritual science, not a physical one.”
The new discovery by Hæckel—one taught for thousands of years in all
the Eastern religions, however—that animals have souls, will, and
sensation, hence, soul‐functions, leads him to make of Psychology
the science of the Zoologists. The archaic teaching that the “soul”
(the animal and human souls, or Kâma and Manas) “has its
developmental history”—is claimed by Hæckel as his own discovery and
innovation on an “untrodden [?] path”! He, Hæckel, will work out the
comparative evolution of the soul in man and in other animals. The
comparative morphology of the soul‐organs, and the comparative
physiology of the soul‐functions, both founded on Evolution, thus
become the psychological [really materialistic] problem of the
scientific man. (“Cell‐souls and Soul‐cells,” pp. 135, 136, 137,
_Pedigree of Man_.)

1601 _The Pedigree of Man_, note 20, p. 296.

1602 P. 119.

1603 See “Transmigration of Life‐Atoms,” in _Five Years of Theosophy_,
pp. 533‐539. The collective aggregation of these atoms forms thus
the Anima Mundi of our Solar System, the Soul of our little
Universe, each atom of which is of course a Soul, a Monad, a little
universe endowed with consciousness, hence with memory. (Vol. I,
Part III, “Gods, Monads, and Atoms.”)

1604 _Op. cit._, p. 119.

1605 In “The Transmigration of Life‐Atoms” (_Five Years of Theosophy_, p.
535), we say of the Jîva, or Life‐Principle, in order to better
explain a position which is but too often misunderstood: “It is
omnipresent ... though [on this plane of manifestation often] ... in
a dormant state [as in stone].... The definition which states that
when this indestructible force is ‘disconnected with one set of
atoms [_molecules_ ought to have been said] it becomes immediately
attracted by others,’ does not imply that it abandons entirely the
first set [because the atoms themselves would then disappear], but
only that it transfers its _vis viva_, or living power—the energy of
motion, to another set. But because it manifests itself in the next
set as what is called kinetic energy, it does not follow that the
first set is deprived of it altogether; for it is still in it, as
potential energy or life latent.” Now what can Hæckel mean by his
“not identical atoms, but their peculiar motion and mode of
aggregation,” if it is not the same kinetic energy we have been
explaining? Before evolving such theories, he must have read
Paracelsus and studied _Five Years of Theosophy_ without properly
digesting the teachings.

1606 _Op. cit._, note 21, p. 296.

1607 _Ibid._, note 19.

1608 _Ibid._, note 23.

1609 _Man’s Place in Nature_, p. 159.

1610 _Op cit._, p. 157.

1611 _Ibid._, p. 161.

1612 This the way _primitive man_ must have acted? We are not aware of
men, not even of savages, in our age, who are known to have imitated
the apes which lived side by side with them in the forests of
America and the islands. But we do know of large apes who, tamed and
living in houses, will mimic men to the length of donning hats and
coats. The writer once had a chimpanzee who, without being taught,
opened a newspaper and pretended to read it. It is the descending
generations, the children, who mimic their parents—not the reverse.

1613 _Ibid._, p. 151.

1614 It is asked, whether it would change one iota of the scientific
truth and fact contained in the above sentence if it were to read:
“the ape is simply an instance of the biped type specialized for
going on all fours generally, and with a smaller brain.”
Esoterically speaking, this is the real truth, and not the reverse.

1615 _Modern Science and Modern Thought_, pp. 151, 152.

1616 We cannot follow Mr. Laing here. When avowed Darwinists like Huxley
point to “the great gulf which intervenes between the lowest ape and
the highest man in intellectual power,” the “enormous gulf ...
between them,” the “immeasurable and practically infinite divergence
of the human from the simian stirps” (_Man’s Place in Nature_, p.
102 and note); when even the physical basis of mind—the brain—so
_vastly_ exceeds in size that of the highest existing apes; when men
like Wallace are forced to invoke the agency of extra‐terrestrial
intelligences in order to explain the rise of such a creature as the
pithecanthropus alalus, or speechless savage of Hæckel, to the level
of the large‐brained and _moral_ man of to‐day—when all this is the
case, it is idle to dismiss evolutionist puzzles so lightly. If the
_structural_ evidence is so unconvincing and, taken as a whole, so
hostile to Darwinism, the difficulties as to the “how” of the
evolution of the human _mind_ by natural selection are tenfold
greater.

1617 A race which MM. de Quatrefages and Hamy regard as a branch of the
same stock whence the Canary Island Guanches sprung—offshoots of the
Atlanteans, in short.

1618 _Ibid._, pp. 180‐182.

1619 _Pedigree of Man_, p. 73.

1620 Professor Owen believes that these muscles—the attollens, retrahens,
and attrahens aurem—were actively functioning in men of the Stone
age. This may or may not be the case. The question falls under the
ordinary “occult” explanation, and involves no postulate of an
“animal progenitor” to solve it.

1621 _Man’s Place in Nature_, p. 104. To cite another good authority: “We
find one of the most man‐like apes (gibbon) in the Tertiary period,
and this species is _still in the same low grade_, and _side by
side_ with it at the end of the Ice period, man is found in the same
high grade as to‐day, the ape not having approximated more nearly to
the man, and modern man not having become further removed from the
ape than the first (fossil) man ... these facts contradict a theory
of constant progressive development.” (Pfaff.) When, according to
Vogt, the average Australian brain = 99·35 cub. inches; that of the
gorilla 30·51, and that of the chimpanzee only 25·45, the _giant
gap_ to be bridged by the advocate of “Natural” Selection becomes
apparent.

1622 Geo. T. Curtis, _Creation or Evolution?_ p. 76.

1623 “At this period,” writes Darwin, “the arteries run in arch‐like
branches, as if to carry the blood to branchiæ which are not present
in the higher vertebrata, though the slits on the side of the neck
still remain, marking their former [?] position.”

It is noteworthy that, though gill‐clefts are absolutely useless to
all but amphibia and fishes, etc., their appearance is regularly
noted in the fœtal development of vertebrates. Even children are
occasionally born with an opening in the neck corresponding to one
of the clefts.

1624 Those who with Hæckel regard the gill‐clefts with their attendant
phenomena as illustrative of an active function in our amphibian and
piscine ancestors (see his twelfth and thirteenth stages), ought to
explain why the “vegetable with leaflets” (Prof. André Lefèvre)
represented in fœtal growth, does not appear in his twenty‐two
stages through which the Monera have passed in their ascent to Man.
Hæckel does _not_ postulate a _vegetable_ ancestor. The
embryological argument is thus a two‐edged sword and here cuts its
possessor.

1625 Lefèvre, _Philosophy Historical and Critical_, pt. ii. p. 480,
“Library of Contemporary Science.”

1626 We confess to not being able to see any good reasons for Mr. E.
Clodd’s positive statement in _Knowledge_. Speaking of the men of
Neolithic times, “concerning whom Mr. Grant Allen has given ... a
vivid and accurate sketch,” and who are “the direct ancestors of
peoples of whom remnants yet lurk in out‐of‐the‐way corners of
Europe, where they have been squeezed or stranded,” he adds, “but
the men of Palæolithic times can be identified with no existing
races; they were savages of a more degraded type than any extant;
tall, yet barely erect, with short legs and twisted knees, with
prognathous, that is, projecting ape‐like jaws, and small brains.
Whence they come we cannot tell, and their ‘grave knoweth no man to
this day.’ ”

Besides the possibility that there may be men who _know_ whence they
came and how they perished—it is not true to say that the
Palæolithic men, or their fossils, are all found with “small
brains.” The oldest skull of all those hitherto found, the
“Neanderthal skull,” is of average capacity, and Mr. Huxley was
compelled to confess that it was no real approximation whatever to
that of the “missing link.” There are aboriginal tribes in India
whose brains are far smaller and nearer to that of the ape than any
hitherto found among the skulls of Palæolithic man.

1627 _Antiquity of Man_, p. 246.

1628 The actual time required for such a theoretical transformation is
necessarily enormous. “If,” says Professor Pfaff, “in the hundreds
of thousands of years which you [the Evolutionists] accept between
the rise of palæolithic man and our own day, a greater distance of
man from the brute is not demonstrable [_the most ancient man was
just as far removed from the brute as the now living man_], what
reasonable ground can be advanced for believing that man has been
developed from the brute, and has receded further from it by
infinitely small gradations.... _The longer the interval of time
placed between our times and the so‐called palæolithic men, the more
ominous and destructive for the theory of the gradual development of
man from the animal kingdom is the result stated._” Huxley writes
(_Man’s Place in Nature_, p. 159) that the _most liberal_ estimates
for the antiquity of man _must be still further_ extended.

1629 _Fortnightly Review_, 1882. The baselessness of this assertion, as
well as that of many other exaggerations of the imaginative Mr.
Grant Allen, was ably exposed by the eminent Anatomist, Professor R.
Owen, in _Longman’s Magazine_, No. 1. Must it be repeated, moreover,
that the Cro‐Magnon Palæolithic type is superior to that of a very
large number of existing races?

1630 It thus stands to reason that Science would never dream of a Pre‐
Tertiary man, and that de Quatrefages’ Secondary man makes every
Academician and F.R.S. faint with horror because, to preserve the
ape‐theory, Science must make man Post‐Secondary. This is just what
de Quatrefages has twitted the Darwinists with, adding, that on the
whole there were more scientific reasons for tracing the ape from
man than man from the anthropoid. With this exception Science has
not one single valid argument to offer against the antiquity of man.
But in this case modern Evolution demands far more than the fifteen
million years of Croll for the Tertiary period, for two very simple
but good reasons: (_a_) no anthropoid ape has been found before the
Miocene period; (_b_) man’s flint relics have been traced to the
Pliocene and their presence _suspected_, if not accepted by all, in
the Miocene strata. Again, where is the “missing link” in such case?
And how could even a Palæolithic savage, a “man of Canstadt,” evolve
into a _thinking_ man from the brute dryopithecus of the Miocene _in
so short a time_? One sees now the reason why Darwin rejected the
theory that only 60,000,000 years had elapsed since the Cambrian
period. “He judges from the small amount of organic change since the
commencement of the glacial epoch, and adds that the previous 140
million years can hardly be considered as sufficient for the
development of the varied forms of life which certainly existed
toward the close of the Cambrian period.” (Ch. Gould, _Mythical
Monsters_, p. 84.)

1631 It may here be remarked that those Darwinians who, with Mr. Grant
Allen, place our “hairy arboreal” ancestors so far back as the
Eocene age, are landed in rather an awkward dilemma. No fossil
anthropoid ape—much less the fabulous common ancestor assigned to
man and the pithecoid—appears in Eocene strata. The first
presentment of an anthropoid ape is Miocene.

1632 Ed. Lartet, “Nouvelles Recherches sur la Coëxistence de l’Homme et
des Grands Mammifères Fossils de la Dernière Période Géologique.”
_Annales des Soc. Nat._, xv. 256.

1633 See the Hibbert Lectures for 1887, p. 33.

1634 From a Report of the Hibbert Lectures, 1887. _Lectures on the Origin
and Growth of Religion, as Illustrated by the Religion of the
Ancient Babylonians._ By A. H. Sayce.

1635 See _supra_ “Chronology of the Brâhmans.”

1636 _Nat. Philos._, by Thomson and Tait, App. D. Trans. Royal Soc.,
Edin., xxiii. pt. 1.

1637 _Popular Astronomy_, p. 509.

1638 _Climate and Time_, p. 335.

1639 Address, Liverpool Geological Society, 1876.

1640 _World‐Life_, pp. 179, 180.

1641 _Ibid._, pp. 367, 368.

1642 _Climate and Time._

1643 Quoted in Mr. Ch. Gould’s _Mythical Monsters_, p. 84.

1644 According to Bischof, 1,004,177 years, according to Chevandier’s
calculations 672,788 years, were required for the so‐called Coal
formation. “The time required for the development of the strata of
the Tertiary period, ranging from 3,000 to 5,000 feet in thickness,
must have been at least 350,000 years.” (See _Force and Matter_,
Büchner, p. 159, Ed. 1884.)

1645 _Op. cit._, p. 379.

1646 But see “The Ice‐Age Climate and Time,” _Popular Science Review_,
xiv. 242.

1647 Review of Kölliker’s Criticisms.

1648 _Fallacies of Darwinism_, p. 160.

1649 _The Genesis of Species_, Chap. VI, pp. 160‐162, Ed. 1871.

1650 _Man’s Place in Nature_, p. 102, note.

1651 Vol. x. art. “Geology,” p. 227. “100,000,000 of years is probably
amply sufficient for all the requirements of Geology,” says the
text. In France, some _savants_ do not find it nearly “sufficient.”
Le Couturier claims 350 million years; Buffon was satisfied with 34
millions—but there are those in the more modern schools who will not
be content with less than 500 million years.

1652 We are taught that the highest Dhyân Chohans, or Planetary Spirits
(beyond the cognizance of the law of analogy), are in ignorance of
what lies beyond the visible Planetary Systems, since their essence
cannot assimilate itself to that of worlds beyond our Solar System.
When they reach a higher stage of evolution these other universes
will be open to them; meanwhile they have complete knowledge of all
the worlds within the limits of our Solar System.

1653 Since no single atom in the entire Kosmos is without life and
consciousness, how much more then must its mighty globes be filled
with both—though they remain sealed books to us men who can hardly
enter even into the consciousness of the forms of life nearest us?

We do not know _ourselves_, then how can we, if we have never been
trained and initiated, fancy that we can penetrate the consciousness
of the smallest of the animals around us?

1654 _Pluralité des Mondes_, p. 439.

1655 _Op. cit._, i. 4, 9.

1656 _Hebrews_, i. 2. This relates to the Logos of every Cosmogony. The
_unknown_ Light—with which he is said to be coëternal and coëval—is
reflected in the First‐Born, the Protogonos; and the Demiurgos or
the Universal Mind directs his Divine Thought into the Chaos that
under the fashioning of minor Gods will be divided into the Seven
Oceans—Sapta Samudras. It is Purusha, Ahura Mazda, Osiris, etc., and
finally the Gnostic Christos, who is in the _Kabalah_, Chokmah, or
Wisdom, the “Word.”

1657 The _form_ of Tikkun or the Protogonos, “First‐Born,” _i.e._, the
Universal Form and Idea, had not yet been mirrored in Chaos.

1658 _Zohar_, iii. 292c. The “Heavenly Man” is Adam Kadmon—the synthesis
of the Sephiroth, as “Manu Svâyambhuva” is the synthesis of the
Prajâpatis.

1659 _Bereshith Rabba_, Parsha IX.

1660 This refers to the three Rounds that preceded our Fourth Round.

1661 “Idra Suta,” _Zohar_, iii. 136c. “A sinking down from their
status”—is plain; from active Worlds they have fallen into a
temporary obscuration—they rest, and hence are entirely changed.

1662 _Gen._, xxxvi. 43.

1663 In that learned and witty work, _God and his Book_, by the
redoubtable “Saladin” of Agnostic repute, the amusing calculation
that, if Christ had ascended with the rapidity of a cannon ball, he
would not yet have reached even Sirius, reminds one vividly of the
past. It raises, perhaps, a not ill‐founded suspicion that even our
age of scientific enlightenment may be as grossly absurd in its
materialistic negations as the men of the Middle Ages were absurd
and materialistic in their religious affirmations.

1664 _Philosophy Historical and Critical_, p. 481.

1665 Probably in excess.

1666 _Knowledge_, Art. “The Antiquity of Man in Western Europe,” March
31st, 1882.

1667 Who, in another work, _La Préhistorique Antiquité de l’Homme_, some
twenty years ago, generously allowed only 230,000 years to our
mankind! Since we learn now that he places man in the Mid‐Miocene
period, we must say that the much respected Professor of Prehistoric
Anthropology in Paris is somewhat contradictory and inconsistent, if
not _naïf_ in his views.

1668 The root and basic idea of the origin and transformation of
species—the _heredity_ of acquired faculties—seems to have found
lately very serious opponents in Germany. Du Bois‐Reymond and Dr.
Pflüger, the Physiologists, besides other men of Science as eminent
as any, find insuperable difficulties and even impossibilities in
the doctrine.

1669 _History of Creation_, p. 20.

1670 The same names are retained as those given by Science, to make the
parallels clearer. Our terms are quite different.

1671 Let the student remember that the Doctrine teaches that there are
seven degrees of Devas or “Progenitors,” or seven Classes, from the
most perfect to the less exalted.

1672 It may be said that we are inconsistent in not introducing into this
table a Primary‐age Man. The parallelism of Races and geological
periods here adopted, is, so far as the origin of the First and
Second are concerned, purely tentative, no direct information being
available. Having previously discussed the question of a possible
race in the Carboniferous age, it is needless to renew the debate.

1673 During the _interim_ between one Round and another, the Globe and
everything on it remains _in statu quo_. Remember, vegetation began
in its ethereal form before what is called the Primordial, running
through the Primary, and condensing in it, and reaching its full
physical life in the Secondary.

1674 Geologists tell us that “in the Secondary epoch, the only mammals
which have been [hitherto] discovered in Europe are the fossil
remains of a small marsupial or pouch‐bearer.” (_Knowledge_, March
31st, 1882, p. 464.) Surely the marsupial or didelphis (the only
surviving animal of the family of those which were on Earth during
the presence on it of androgyne man) cannot be the only animal that
was then on Earth? Its presence speaks loudly for that of other
(though unknown) mammals, besides the monotremes and marsupials, and
thus shows the appellation of “mammalian age” given only to the
Tertiary period to be misleading and erroneous, as it allows one to
infer that there were no mammals, but reptiles, birds, amphibians,
and fishes alone in the Mesozoic times—the Secondary.

1675 Those who feel inclined to sneer at that doctrine of Esoteric
Ethnology, which pre‐supposes the existence of Men in the Secondary
age, will do well to note the fact that one of the most
distinguished Anthropologists of the day, M. de Quatrefages,
seriously argues in that direction. He writes: “There is then
nothing impossible in the idea that he [man] ... should have
appeared upon the globe with the first representatives of the type
to which he belongs by his organization.” (_The Human Species_, p.
153.) This statement approximates most closely to our fundamental
assertion that man preceded the other mammalia.

Professor Lefèvre admits that the “labours of Boucher de Perthes,
Lartet, Christy, Bourgeois, Desnoyers, Broca, De Mortillet, Hamy,
Gaudry, Capellini, and a hundred others, have overcome all doubts,
and clearly established the progressive development of the human
organism and industries from the miocene epoch of the tertiary age.”
(_Philosophy Historical and Critical_, Pt. II, p. 499, Chapter II,
On Organic Evolution. “Library of Contemporary Science.”) Why does
he reject the possibility of a Secondary‐age man? Simply because he
is involved in the meshes of the Darwinian Anthropology. “The origin
of man is bound up with that of the higher mammals”; he appeared
“only with the _last_ types of his class”! This is not argument, but
dogmatism. Theory can never excommunicate fact. Must everything give
place to the mere working hypotheses of Western Evolutionists?
Surely not!

1676 These placentalia of the third sub‐class are divided, it appears,
into villiplacentalia (placenta composed of many separate scattered
tufts), the zonoplacentalia (girdle‐shaped placenta), and the
discoplacentalia (or discoid). Hæckel sees in the marsupialia
didelphia, one of the connecting links _genealogically_ between man
and the moneron!!

1677 This inclusion of the First Race in the Secondary is necessarily
only a provisional working hypothesis—the actual chronology of the
First, Second, and early Third Races being closely veiled by the
Initiates. For all that can be said on the subject, the First Root‐
Race may have been Pre‐Secondary, as is, indeed, taught.

1678 The above parallels stand good only if Professor Croll’s earlier
calculations are adopted, namely, of 15,000,000 years since the
beginning of the Eocene period (see Charles Gould’s _Mythical
Monsters_, p. 84), not those in his _Climate and Time_, which allow
only two‐and‐a‐half million years, or at the utmost three million
years’ duration to the Tertiary age. This, however, would make the
whole duration of the incrusted age of the world only 131,600,000
years, according to Professor Winchell, whereas in the Esoteric
Doctrine, sedimentation began in _this_ Round approximately over
320,000,000 years ago. Yet his calculations do not clash much with
ours with regard to the epochs of glacial periods in the Tertiary
age, which is called in our Esoteric books the “Age of the Pigmies.”
With regard to the 320,000,000 of years assigned to sedimentation,
it must be noted that even a greater time elapsed during the
preparation of this Globe for the Fourth Round _previous to
stratification_.

1679 Though we apply the term “truly human,” only to the Fourth Atlantean
Root‐Race, yet the Third Race is almost human in its latest portion,
since it is during its fifth sub‐race that mankind separated
sexually, and that the _first man was born_ according to the now
normal process. This “first man” answers, in the _Bible_, to Enos or
Henoch, son of Seth (_Genesis_, iv.).

1680 Geology records the former existence of a universal ocean, and
sheets of marine sediment uniformly present everywhere testify to
it; but it is not even the epoch referred to in the allegory of
Vaivasvata Manu. The latter is a Deva‐Man (or Manu) saving in an Ark
(the female principle) the germs of humanity, and also the seven
Rishis—who stand here as the symbols for the seven human
principles—of which allegory we have spoken elsewhere. The
“Universal Deluge” is the Watery Abyss of the Primordial Principle
of Berosus. (See Stanzas ii to viii, in Part I.) How, if 15 million
years are allowed by Croll to have elapsed since the Eocene period
(which we state on the authority of a Geologist, Mr. Ch. Gould),
only 60 millions are assigned by him “since the beginning of the
Cambrian period, in the Primordial age”—passes comprehension. The
Secondary strata are twice the thickness of the Tertiary, and
Geology thus shows the Secondary age alone to be of twice the length
of the Tertiary. Shall we then accept only 15 million years for both
the Primary and the Primordial? No wonder Darwin rejected the
calculation.

1681 See _Esoteric Buddhism_, pp. 53‐55, Fourth Ed.

1682 We hope that we have furnished all the scientific data for it
elsewhere.

1683 It is conceded by Geology to be “beyond doubt that a considerable
period must have supervened after the departure of Palæolithic man
and before the arrival of his Neolithic successor.” (See James
Geikie’s _Prehistoric Europe_, and Ch. Gould’s _Mythical Monsters_,
p. 98.)

1684 Resembling in a manner the pile‐villages of Northern Borneo.

1685 “The most clever sculptor of modern times would probably not succeed
very much better, if his graver were a splinter of flint, and stone
and bone were the materials to be engraved”! (Prof. Boyd Dawkins’
_Cave‐Hunting_, p. 344.) It is needless after such a concession to
further insist on Huxley’s, Schmidt’s, Laing’s, and others’
statements to the effect that Palæolithic man cannot be considered
to lead us back in any way to a pithecoid human race; thus they
demolish the fantasies of many superficial evolutionists. The relic
of artistic merit here _reäppearing_ in the Chipped‐Stone‐age men,
is traceable to their _Atlantean_ ancestry. Neolithic man was a
fore‐runner of the great Âryan invasion, and immigrated from quite
another quarter—Asia, and in a measure Northern Africa. The tribes
peopling the latter towards the North‐West, were certainly of an
Atlantean origin—dating back hundreds of thousands of years before
the Neolithic Period in Europe—but they had so diverged from the
parent type as to present no longer any marked characteristic
peculiar to it. As to the contrast between Neolithic and Palæolithic
man, it is a remarkable fact that, as Carl Vogt points out, _the
former was a cannibal, the much earlier man of the Mammoth era was
not_. Human manners and customs do not seem to improve with time,
then? Not in this instance at any rate.

1686 _Op. cit._, p. 97.

1687 _Modern Science and Modern Thought_, p. 181.

1688 _Ibid._, p. 112.

1689 On the data furnished by Modern Science, Physiology, and Natural
Selection, and without resorting to any miraculous creation, two
human negro specimens of the lowest intelligence—say idiots born
dumb—might by breeding produce a dumb Pastrana species, which would
start a new modified race, and thus produce, in the course of
geological time, the regular anthropoid ape.

1690 _Esoteric Buddhism_, p. 64.

1691 _Modern Science and Modern Thought_, p. 98.

1692 _Anfänge zu einer Physiologischen Schöpfungs‐geschichte der
Pflanzen‐ und Thierwelt, 1885._

1693 _Op. cit._, p. 212.

1694 _Ibid._, p. 11.

1695 _Man’s Place in Nature_, p. 159.

1696 Sir W. Dawson, LL.D., F.R.S., _Origin of the World_, p. 39.

1697 _Prehistoric Antiquity of Man_, 1883.

1698 _Antiquity of Man_, p. 25.

1699 _India, What can it Teach Us?_ A course of Lectures delivered before
the University of Cambridge in 1882. Lecture III., p. 110, Ed. 1892.

1700 _Antiquity of Man Historically Considered._ “Present Day Tracts,”
Vol. II, Essay IX, p. 25.

1701 _Op. cit._, pp. 10, 11.

1702 _Op. cit._, i. 4.

1703 Palæolithic man must have been endowed in his day with thrice
Herculean force and magic invulnerability, or else the lion was as
weak as a lamb at that period, for both to share the same dwelling.
We may as well be asked to believe that it is that lion or hyæna
which engraved the deer on the antler, as be told that this piece of
workmanship was done by a savage of such a kind.

1704 _Modern Science and Modern Thought_, p. 164.

1705 _Ibid._, p. 199.

1706 More than twenty specimens of fossil monkeys have been found in one
locality alone, in Miocene strata (Pikermi, near Athens). If man was
not then, the period is too short for him to have been
_transformed_—stretch it as one may. And if he was, and if no monkey
is found earlier, what follows?

1707 Dr. C. Carter Blake, Art., “The Genesis of Man.”

1708 _Antiquity of Man_, p. 530.

1709 New Series, i. 115, Art., “Evidences of the Age of Ice.”

1710 _Fallacies of Darwinism._

1711 _Op. cit._, p. 501, Ed. 1863.

1712 _Op. cit._, iv. 162.

1713 See on this question Wilson’s _Prehistoric Man_, ii. 54; _Origin of
the World_, pp. 393, 394.

1714 And how much more “enormous” if we reverse the subjects, and say
during the monkey’s development from the Third Race Man.

1715 _Op. cit._, pp. 160, 161.

1716 _Principles of Biology_, i. 345.

1717 _Modern Science and Modern Thought_, p. 94.

1718 _Ibid._

1719 The Darwinian theory has been so strained, that even Huxley was
forced at one time to deprecate its occasional degeneration into
“fanaticism.” Oscar Schmidt presents a good instance of a thinker
who unconsciously exaggerates the worth of a hypothesis. He admits
(_The Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism_, p. 158), that “natural
selection ... is in some cases ... inadequate, ... in others ... not
requisite, as the solution of the formation of species is found in
other natural conditions.” He also asserts the “intermediate grades
are ... wanting, which would entitle us to infer with certainty the
direct transition from implacental to placental mammals” (p. 271);
that “we are referred entirely to conjecture and inference for the
origin of the mammals” (p. 268); and he speaks of the repeated
failures of the framers of “hypothetical pedigrees,” more especially
of Hæckel, while regarding their attempts as valuable (p. 250).
Nevertheless he asserts (p. 194) that “what we have gained by the
doctrine of descent based on the theory of selection ... is the
knowledge of the connection of organisms as consanguineous beings.”
Knowledge, in the face of the above‐cited concessions, is, then, the
synonym for conjecture and theory only?

1720 _The Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism_, p. 268.

1721 _Ibid._, pp. 273‐275.

1722 Bear in mind, please, that though the animals—mammalians
included—have all been evolved after and partially _from_ man’s
cast‐off tissues, still, as a far lower being, the mammalian animal
became placental and separated far earlier than man.

1723 Scientists now admit that Europe enjoyed in the Miocene times a
warm, in the Pliocene or later Tertiary, a temperate climate.
Littré’s contention as to the balmy spring of the Quaternary—to
which deposits M. de Perthes’ discoveries of flint implements are
traceable (since when the Somme has worn down its valley many scores
of feet)—must be accepted with much reservation. The Somme‐Valley
relics are _post‐glacial_, and possibly point to the immigration of
savages during one of the more temperate periods intervening between
_minor_ ages of Ice.

1724 “Whence they [the old cave‐men] came, we cannot tell” (Grant Allen).
“The palæolithic hunters of the Somme Valley did not originate in
that inhospitable climate, but moved into Europe from some more
genial region” (Dr. Southall, _Epoch of the Mammoth_, p. 315).

1725 The _pure_ Atlantean stocks—of which the tall Quaternary cave‐men
were, in part, the direct descendants—immigrated into Europe long
prior to the Glacial period; in fact as far back as the Pliocene and
Miocene times in the Tertiary. The worked Miocene flints of Thenay,
and the traces of Pliocene man discovered by Professor Capellini in
Italy, are witnesses to the fact. These colonists were portions of
the once glorious Race, whose cycle from the Eocene onwards had been
running down the scale.

1726 The artistic skill displayed by the old cave‐men renders the
hypothesis which regards them as approximations to the
pithecanthropus alalus—that very mythical Hæeckelian monster—an
absurdity requiring no Huxley or Schmidt to expose it. We see in
their skill in engraving a gleam of Atlantean culture atavistically
reäppearing. It will be remembered that Donnelly regards modern
European civilization as a _renaissance_ of the Atlantean.
(_Atlantis_, pp. 237‐264.)

1727 _Philosophy Historical and Critical_, Pt. II. p. 504, chap., “On
Organic Evolution.”

1728 _Lettres sur l’Atlantide_, p. 12.

1729 _Histoire de l’Astronomie Ancienne_, pp. 25, _et seqq._

1730 _Lettres sur l’Atlantide_, p. 15. This conjecture is but a half‐
guess. There were such “deluges of barbarians” in the Fifth Race.
With regard to the Fourth, it was a _bonâ fide_ deluge of water
which swept it away. Neither Voltaire nor Bailly, however, knew
anything of the Secret Doctrine of the East.

1731 For a full discussion of the relations between the _old_ Greeks and
Romans, and the Atlantean colonists, see _Five Years of Theosophy_,
pp. 308‐346.

1732 _Timæus_, translated by H. Davis, pp. 326‐328.

1733 The story about Atlantis and all the traditions thereon were told,
as all know, by Plato in his _Timæus and Critias_. Plato, when a
child, had it from his grand‐sire Critias, aged ninety, who in his
youth had been told of it by Solon, his father Dropides’
friend—Solon, one of the Seven Sages of Greece. No more reliable
source could be found, we should think.

1734 See Dr. Carter Blake’s paper “On the Naulette Jaw,” _Anthropological
Review_, Sept., 1867.

1735 See de Quatrefages and Hamy, _Crânes des Races Humaines_.

1736 Hæckel’s “man‐ape” of the Miocene period is the dream of a
monomaniac, which de Quatrefages (_Human Species_, pp. 105‐113) has
cleverly disposed of. It is not clear why the world should accept
the lucubrations of a psychophobic Materialist—to accept whose
theory necessitates the acceptance _on faith_ of various animals
unknown to Science or Nature, like the Sozura, for instance, that
amphibian which has never existed anywhere outside Hæckel’s
imagination—rather than the traditions of antiquity.

1737 But see the mass of evidence collected by Donnelly to prove the
Peruvian colony an offshoot of the Atlanteans.

1738 _Cavernes de Périgord_, p. 35.

1739 The ingenious author of _Atlantis, the Ante‐diluvian World_, in
discussing the origin of various Grecian and Roman institutions,
expresses his conviction that “the roots of the institutions of to‐
day reach back to the Miocene age.” Ay, and further yet, as already
stated.

1740 _The Human Species_, p. 152.

1741 As we know them, however. For not only does Geology prove that the
British Islands have been _four times submerged and reëlevated_, but
that the straits between them and Europe were dry land at a former
remote epoch.

1742 See, in _Isis Unveiled_ (i. 627), what Kullûka Bhatta says.

1743 _Les Origines de la Terre et de l’Homme_, p. 454. To this, Professor
N. Joly, of Toulouse, who thus quotes the Abbé in his _Man before
Metals_, expresses the hope that M. Fabre will permit him “to differ
from him on this last point” (p. 186). So do the Occultists; for
though they claim a vast difference in the physiology and outward
appearance of the five Races so far evolved, still they maintain
that the present human species has descended from one and the same
primitive stock, evolved from the Divine Men—our common ancestors
and progenitors.

1744 _Loc. cit._, 15, 18.

1745 _Ibid._, 16.

1746 _Op. cit._, 8‐10.

1747 “The flints of Thenay bear unmistakable trace of the work of human
hands.” (G. de Mortillet, _Promenades au Musèe de St. Germain_, p.
76.)

1748 Albert Gaudry, _Les Enchainements du Monde Animal dans les Temps
Géologiques_, p. 240.

1749 Speaking of the reindeer hunters of Périgord, Joly says that they
“were of great height, athletic, with a strongly built skeleton.”
(_Man before Metals_, p. 353.)

1750 “On the shores of the lake of Beauce,” says the Abbé Bourgeois, “man
lived in the midst of a fauna which completely disappeared
(aceratherium, tapir, mastodon). With the fluviatile sands of
Orléannais came the anthropomorphous monkey (pliopitliecus
antiquus); therefore, later than man.” See _Comptes Rendus_ of the
“Prehistoric Congress” of 1867 at Paris.

1751 De Quatrefages, _The Human Species_, p. 312.

1752 “In making soundings in the slimy soil of the Nile Valley, two baked
bricks were discovered, one at the depth of 20, the other at 24
yards. If we estimate the thickness of the annual deposit formed by
the river at 8 inches a century [more careful calculations have
shown no more than from three to five per century], we must assign
to the first of these bricks an age of 12,000 years, and to the
second that of 14,000 years. By means of analogous calculations,
Burmeister supposes 72,000 years to have elapsed since the first
appearance of man upon the soil of Egypt, and Draper attributes to
the European man who witnessed the last glacial epoch, an antiquity
of more than 250,000 years.” (_Man before Metals_, p. 183.) Egyptian
Zodiacs show more than 75,000 years of observation! Note well also
that Burmeister speaks only of the Delta population.

1753 See _Esoteric Buddhism_, p. 66, Fifth Edition.

1754 Or on what are now the British Isles, which were not yet detached
from the main continent in those days. “The ancient inhabitant of
Picardy could pass into Great Britain without crossing the Channel.
The British Isles were united to Gaul by an isthmus which has since
been submerged.” (_Man before Metals_, p. 184.)

1755 He witnessed and remembered it too, as “the final disappearance of
the largest continent [of Atlantis] was an event coïncident with the
elevation of the Alps,” a Master writes (see _Esoteric Buddhism_ p.
70). _Pari passu_, as one portion of the dry land of our hemisphere
disappeared, some land of the new continent emerged from the seas.
It is on this colossal cataclysm, which lasted during a period of
150,000 years, that traditions of all the “deluges” are built, the
Jews constructing their version on an event which took place later,
on Poseidonis.

1756 “The Antiquity of the Human Race,” in _Man before Metals_, by M.
Joly, p. 184.

1757 The scientific “jury” disagreed, as usual; while de Quatrefages, de
Mortillet, Worsaæ, Engelhardt, Waldemar, Schmidt, Capellini, Hamy,
and Cartailhac, saw upon the flints the traces of human handiwork,
Steenstrup, Virchow and Desor refused to do so. Still the majority,
if we except some English Scientists, are for Bourgeois.

1758 We take the following description from a scientific work. “The first
of these animals [the alligator] designed with considerable skill,
is no less than 250 ft. long.... The interior is formed of a heap of
stones, over which the form has been moulded in fine stiff clay. The
great serpent is represented with open mouth, in the act of
swallowing an egg of which the diameter is 100 ft. in the thickest
part; the body of the animal is wound in graceful curves and the
tail is rolled into a spiral. The entire length of the animal is
1,100 ft. This work is unique ... and there is nothing on the old
continent which offers any analogy to it.” Except, however, its
symbolism of the Serpent (the Cycle of Time) swallowing the Egg
(Kosmos).

1759 It might be better, perhaps, for _fact_ had we more “specialists” in
Science and fewer “authorities” on universal questions. We have
never heard that Humboldt gave authoritative and final decisions in
the matter of polypi, or on the nature of an excrescence.

1760 57,000 years is the date assigned by Dr. Dowler to the remains of
the human skeleton, found buried beneath four ancient forests at New
Orleans on the banks of the Mississippi river.

1761 Murray says of the Mediterranean barbarians that they marvelled at
the prowess of the Atlanteans. “Their physical strength was
extraordinary [witness indeed their cyclopean buildings], the earth
shaking sometimes under their tread. Whatever they did, was done
speedily.... They were wise and communicated their wisdom to men”
(_Mythology_, p. 4).

1762 Art. by Dr. C. Carter Blake, 1871.

1763 But the Magi of Persia were never Persians—not even Chaldæans. They
came from a far‐off land, the Orientalists being of opinion that the
said land was Media. This may be so, but from what part of Media? To
this we receive no answer.

1764 _Op. cit._, p. 160.

1765 _Op. cit._, pp. 3‐13.

1766 _Civilization of the Eastern Iranians in Ancient Times_, pp. 130,
131.

1767 Bûmî haptâita, _Yasna_, xxxii. 3.

1768 _Cf._, for instance, vol. i. p. 4, of the Pahlavi Translation;
_Bdh._ xxi. 2, 3.

1769 Footnote by Dârâb Dastur Peshotan Sanjânâ, B.A., the translator of
Dr. Wilhelm Geiger’s work on the _Civilization of the Eastern
Iranians_.

1770 _Op. cit._, pp. 130, 131.

1771 Dr. Kenealy, in his _Book of God_, quotes Vallancey, who says: “I
had not been a week landed in Ireland from Gibraltar, ... where I
had studied Hebrew and Chaldaic under Jews of various countries ...
when I heard a peasant girl say to a boor standing by her, ‘Feach an
Maddin Nag’ (Behold the morning star), pointing to the planet Venus,
the Maddina Nag of the Chaldæan” (pp. 162, 163).

1772 _Lib._ iv.

1773 There was a time when the whole world, the totality of mankind, had
one religion, and when they were of “one lip.” “All the religions of
the earth were at first one and emanated from one centre,” says
Faber very truly.

1774 _Critias_, translated by Davis, p. 415.

1775 Plato’s veracity has been so unwarrantably impeached by even such
friendly critics as Professor Jowett, when the story of Atlantis has
been discussed, that it seems well to cite the testimony of a
specialist on the subject. It is sufficient to place mere literary
cavillers in a very ridiculous position:

“If our knowledge of Atlantis was more thorough, it would no doubt
appear that in every instance wherein the people of Europe accord
with the people of America, they were both in accord with the people
of Atlantis.... It will be seen that in every case where Plato gives
us any information in this respect as to Atlantis, we find this
agreement to exist. It existed in architecture, sculpture,
navigation, engraving, writing, an established priesthood, the mode
of worship, agriculture, and the construction of roads and canals;
and it is reasonable to suppose that the same correspondence
extended down to all the minor details.” (Donnelly, _Atlantis_, p.
164. Twenty‐fourth Ed.)

1776 Christians ought not to object to this doctrine of the periodical
destruction of continents by fire and water; for St. Peter speaks of
the Earth “standing out of the water, and in the water, whereby the
world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished, but [is
now] reserved unto fire” (II. iii. 5‐7. See also the _Lives of
Alchemystical Philosophers_, p. 4, London, 1815).

1777 See Hesiod’s _Theogony_, 507‐509, and _Odyssey_, i. 51‐53.

1778 _Mèmoires de l’Académie des Inscriptions_, p. 176.

1779 Æschylus, _Prometheus Vinctus_, 351, 429, etc.

1780 iv. 184.

1781 _Pyth._, i. 20; Decharme, _op. cit._, p. 315.

1782 This does not mean that Atlas is the locality where it fell, for
this took place in Northern and Central Asia; but that Atlas formed
part of the Continent.

1783 Had not Diocletian burned the Esoteric works of the Egyptians in
A.D. 296, together with their books on Alchemy, “περὶ χυμείας
ἀργύρου καὶ χρυσοῦ”; Cæsar 700,000 rolls at Alexandria; Leo Isaurus
300,000 at Constantinople (eighth cent.); and the Mahommedans all
they could lay their sacrilegious hands on—the world might know to‐
day more of Atlantis than it does. For Alchemy had its birthplace in
Atlantis during the Fourth Race, and had only its _renaissance_ in
Egypt.

1784 Professor Max Müller’s Lectures—_On the Philosophy of Mythology_—are
before us. We read his citations of Heracleitus (460 B.C.),
declaring that Homer deserved “to be ejected from public assemblies
and flogged”; and of Xenophanes “holding Homer and Hesiod
responsible for the popular superstitions of Greece,” and for
ascribing “to the gods whatever is disgraceful and scandalous among
men ... unlawful acts, such as theft, adultery, and fraud.” Finally
the Oxford Professor quotes from Professor Jowett’s translation of
Plato, where the latter tells Adaimantus (_Republic_) that “the
young man [in the state] should not be told that in committing the
worst of crimes, he is far from doing anything outrageous, and that
he may chastise his father [as Zeus did with Cronus] ... in any
manner that he likes, and in this will only be following the example
of the first and greatest of the gods.... In my opinion, these
stories are _not fit to be repeated_.” To this Prof. Max Müller
observes that: “the Greek religion was clearly a national and
_traditional_ religion, and, as such, it shared both the advantages
and disadvantages _of this form of religious belief_”; while the
Christian religion is “an _historical_ and, to a great extent, an
individual religion, and it possesses the advantage of an authorized
codex and of a settled system of faith” (p. 349). So much the worse
if it is “historical,” for surely Lot’s incident with his daughters
would only gain, were it “allegorical.”

1785 ἁοιδῶν οἶδε δυστῆνοι λόγοι, _Hercules Furens_, 1346, Dindorf’s
Edition.

1786 _Critias_, 421.

1787 Neptune or Poseidon is the Hindû Idas‐pati, identical with Nârâyana
(the Mover on the Waters) or Vishnu, and like this Hindû God he is
shown crossing the whole horizon in _three steps_. Idas‐pati means
also the “Master of the Waters.”

1788 Bailly’s assertion that the 9,000 years mentioned by the Egyptian
priests do not represent “solar years” is groundless. Bailly knew
nothing of Geology and its calculations; otherwise he would have
spoken differently.

1789 See _Matsya Purâna_, which places him among the seven Prajâpatis of
the period.

1790 _Iliad_, xxiv. 79.

1791 _Op. cit._, p. 126.

1792 The equivalent of this name is given in the original.

1793 Deucalion is said to have brought the worship of Adonis and Osiris
into Phœnicia. Now this worship is that of the Sun, lost and found
again in its astronomical significance. It is only at the Pole that
the Sun dies out for such a length of time as six months, for in
latitude 68° it remains _dead_ only for forty days, as in the
festival of Osiris. The two worships were born in the north of
Lemuria, or on that Continent of which Asia was a kind of broken
prolongation, and which stretched up to the polar regions. This is
well shown by de Gebelin’s _Allegories d’Orient_, p. 246, and by
Bailly; though neither Hercules nor Osiris are _solar myths_, save
in one of their seven aspects.

1794 The Hyperboreans, now regarded as mythical, are described (Herod.,
iv. 33‐35; Pausanius, i. 31, 32; v. 7, 8; x. 5, 7, 8) as the beloved
priests and servants of the Gods, and of Apollo chiefly.

1795 The Cyclopes are not the only “one‐eyed” representatives in
tradition. The Arimaspes were a Scythian people, and were also
credited with but one eye. (_Géographie Ancienne_, ii. 321.) It is
they whom Apollo destroyed with his shafts.

1796 Ulysses was wrecked on the isle of Ææa, where Circe changed all his
companions into pigs _for their voluptuousness_; and after that he
was thrown into Ogygia, the island of Calypso, where for some seven
years he lived with the nymph in illicit connection. Now Calypso was
a daughter of Atlas (_Odys._, xii.), and all the traditional ancient
versions, when speaking of the Isle of Ogygia, say that it was very
distant from Greece, and right in the middle of the Ocean; thus
identifying it with Atlantis.

1797 Hygin., _Astron. Poétique_, ii. 15.

1798 _Nineteenth Century_, July, 1887.

1799 Diod. Sic., ii. 307.

1800 To make a difference between Lemuria and Atlantis, the ancient
writers referred to the latter as the Northern or Hyperborean
Atlantis, and to the former as the Southern. Thus Apollodorus says
(_Mythology_, Book ii): “The golden apples carried away by Hercules
are not, as some think, in Lybia; they are in the Hyperborean
Atlantis.” The Greeks naturalized all the Gods they borrowed and
made Hellenes of them, and the moderns helped them. Thus also the
Mythologists have tried to make of Eridanus the river Po, in Italy.
In the myth of Phaeton it is said that at his death his sisters
dropped hot tears which fell into Eridanus and were changed into
amber! Now amber is found only in the northern seas, in the Baltic.
Phaeton, meeting with his death while carrying heat to the frozen
stars of the boreal regions, awakening at the Pole the Dragon made
rigid by cold, and being hurled down into the Eridanus, is an
allegory referring directly to the changes of climate in those
distant times when, from a frigid zone, the polar lands had become a
country with a moderate and warm climate. The usurper of the
functions of the Sun, Phaeton, being hurled into the Eridanus by
Jupiter’s thunderbolt, is an allusion to the second change that took
place in those regions when, once more, the land where “the magnolia
blossomed” became the desolate forbidding land of the farthest north
and eternal ice. This allegory covers then the events of two
Pralayas; and if well understood, ought to be a demonstration of the
enormous antiquity of the human races.

1801 _Iliad_, xvii. 431‐453.

1802 _Ibid._, 322‐336.

1803 See Apollodorus for this number.

1804 See “The Sons of God and the Sacred Island.”

1805 So occult and mystic is one of the aspects of Latona that she is
made to reappear even in _Revelation_ (xii), as the woman clothed
with the Sun (Apollo) and the Moon (Diana) under her feet, who being
with child “cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.”
A great red Dragon stands before the woman ready to devour the
child. She brings forth the man‐child who was to rule all nations
with a rod of iron, and who was caught unto the throne of God—the
Sun. The woman fled to the wilderness still pursued by the Dragon,
who flees again, and casts out of his mouth water as a flood, when
the Earth helped the woman and swallowed the flood; and the Dragon
went to make war with the remnant of her seed who kept the
commandments of God. (See xii. 1, 17.) Anyone who reads the allegory
of Latona pursued by the revenge of jealous Juno, will recognize the
identity of the two versions. Juno sends Python, the Dragon, to
persecute and destroy Latona and devour her babe. The latter is
Apollo, the Sun, for the man‐child of _Revelation_, “who was to rule
all nations with a rod of iron” is surely not the meek “Son of God,”
Jesus, but the physical Sun, “who rules all nations”; the Dragon
being the North Pole, gradually chasing the early Lemurians from the
lands which became more and more Hyperborean and unfit to be
inhabited by those who were fast developing into physical men, for
they now had to deal with the climatic variations. The Dragon will
not allow Latona “to bring forth”—the Sun to appear. “She is driven
from heaven, and finds no place where she can bring forth,” until
Neptune, the Ocean, in pity, makes immovable the floating isle of
Delos—the nymph Asteria, hitherto hiding from Jupiter under the
waves of the Ocean—on which Latona finds refuge, and where the
bright God Delius is born, the God, who no sooner appears than he
kills Python, the cold and frost of the Arctic region, in whose
deadly coils all life becomes extinct. In other words, Latona‐
Lemuria is transformed into Niobe‐Atlantis, over which her son
Apollo, or the Sun, reigns—with an iron rod, truly, since Herodotus
makes the Atlantes _curse_ his too great heat. This allegory is
reproduced in its other mystic meaning (another of the seven keys)
in the just cited chapter of _Revelation_. Latona became a powerful
Goddess indeed, and saw her son receive worship (solar worship) in
almost every fane of antiquity. In his Occult aspect Apollo is
patron of number Seven. He is born on the seventh of the month, and
the swans of Myorica swim seven times round Delos singing that
event; he is given seven chords to his Lyre—the seven rays of the
Sun and the seven forces of Nature. But this is only in the
astronomical meaning, whereas the above is purely geological.

1806 See Ovid, _Metamorphoses_, vi.

1807 _Lettres sur l’Atlantide_, p. 137.

1808 Hesiod, _Opera et Dies_, 143.

1809 _Hist. Nat._, iv. 12.

1810 _Marius._

1811 _Op. cit._, c. 16.

1812 Isaac Myer’s _Qabbalah_, p. 139.

1813 Diod., ii. 225.

1814 _Op. cit._, xxxvii. 2.

1815 Vol. i. pp. 462‐464.

1816 These islands were “found strewn with fossils of horses, sheep,
oxen, etc., among gigantic bones of elephants, mammoths,
rhinoceroses,” etc. If there was no man on Earth at that period “how
came horses and sheep to be found in company with the huge
antediluvians?”—asks a Master in a letter. (_Esoteric Buddhism_, p.
67.) The reply is given above in the text.

1817 _Op. cit._, iv. 239‐262.

1818 A good proof that all the Gods, and religious beliefs, and myths
have come from the North, which was also the cradle of _physical_
man, lies in several suggestive words which have originated and
remain to this day among the northern tribes in their primeval
significance; but, although there was a time when all the nations
were of “one lip,” these words have received a different meaning
with the Greeks and Latins. One such word is _mann_, _man_, a living
being, and _manes_, dead men. The Laplanders call their corpses to
this day _manee_ (_Voyage de Rénard en Laponie_, i. 184). _Mannus_
is the ancestor of the German race; the Hindû _Manu_, the thinking
being, from _man_; the Egyptian _Menes_; and _Minos_, the King of
Crete, judge of the infernal regions after his death—all proceed
from the same word or root.

1819 Thus, for instance, Gyges is a hundred‐armed and fifty‐headed
monster, a Demi‐god in one case, and a Lydian, the successor of
Candaules, king of the country, in another version. The same is
found in the Indian Pantheon, where Rishis and the Sons of Brahmâ
are reborn as mortals.

1820 _Op. cit._, viii. 13.

1821 The continents perish in turn by fire and water; either through
earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, or by sinking and the great
displacement of waters. Our continents have to perish by the former
cataclysmal process. The incessant earthquakes of the past years may
be a warning.

1822 See Decharme’s _Mythologie de la Grèce Antique_.

1823 Denis, the Geographer, tells us that the great sea north of Asia was
called glacial, or Saturnine (v. 35). Orpheus (v. 1077) and Pliny
(iv. 16) corroborate the statement by showing that it was its giant
inhabitants who gave it the name. And the Secret Doctrine explains
both assertions by telling us that all the continents were formed
from North to South; and that as the sudden change of climate
dwarfed the race that had been born on it, arresting its growth, so,
several degrees southward, various conditions had always produced
the tallest men in every new humanity, or race. We see it to this
day. The tallest men now found are those in Northern countries,
while the smallest are Southern Asiatics, Hindûs, Chinamen,
Japanese, etc. Compare the tall Sikhs and Punjabees, the Afghans,
Norwegians, Russians, Northern Germans, Scotchmen, and English, with
the inhabitants of Central India and the average European on the
continent. Thus also the Giants of Atlantis, and hence the Titans of
Hesiod, are all Northerners.

1824 Having already given several instances of the vagaries of Science,
it is delightful to find such agreement in this particular case.
Read in connection with the scientific admission (cited elsewhere)
of the Geologists’ ignorance of even the approximate duration of
periods, the following passage is highly instructive: “We are not
yet able to assign an approximate date for the most recent epoch at
which our northern hemisphere was covered with glaciers. According
to Mr. Wallace, this epoch may have occurred no more than seventy
thousand years ago, while others would assign to it an antiquity of
at least two hundred thousand years, and there are yet others who
urge strong arguments on behalf of the opinion that a million of
years is barely enough to have produced the changes which have taken
place since that event.” (Fiske, _Cosmic Philosophy_, i. 304, Ed.
1874.) Prof. Lefèvre, again, gives us as _his_ estimate one hundred
thousand years. Clearly, then, if Modern Science is unable to
estimate the date of so comparatively recent an era as the Glacial
Epoch, it can hardly impeach the Esoteric Chronology of Race‐Periods
and Geological Ages.

1825 Cited in Schmidt’s _Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism_, pp. 300,
301.

1826 _Philosophy Historical and Critical_, p. 508.

1827 _Human Species_, pp. 428, _et seqq._

1828 Art., “The First Volume of the Publications of the ’Challenger,’” p.
2, Nov. 4th, 1880.

1829 _Op. cit._, Art., “Australia and Europe formerly one Continent” (v.
19, 25). Undoubtedly a fact, and a confirmation of the Esoteric
conception of Lemuria, which originally not only embraced great
areas in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, but projected round South
Africa into the North Atlantic. Its Atlantic portion subsequently
became the geological basis of the future home of the Fourth Race
Atlanteans.

1830 _Ibid._, i. 143.

1831 _Cf._, the published reports of the “Challenger” expedition; also
Donnelly’s _Atlantis_, p. 468 and pp. 46‐56, Chap., “The Testimony
of the Sea.”

1832 Even the cautious Lefèvre speaks of the existence of Tertiary men on
“upheaved lands, islands and continents then flourishing, but since
submerged beneath the waters,” and elsewhere introduces a “possible
Atlantis” to explain ethnological facts. _Cf._, his _Philosophy
Historical and Critical_, pp. 478 and 504. Mr. Donnelly remarks with
rare intuition that “modern civilization is Atlantean ... the
inventive faculty of the present age is taking up the great
delegated work of creation where Atlantis left it thousands of years
ago” (_Atlantis_, p. 177. Twenty‐fourth Ed.). He also refers the
origin of culture to the Miocene times. It is, however, to be sought
for in the teachings given to the Third Race men by their Divine
Rulers—at a vastly earlier period.

1833 An equally “curious” similarity may be traced between some of the
West Indian and West African fauna.

1834 The Pacific portion of the giant Lemurian Continent christened by
Dr. Carter Blake, the Anthropologist, “Pacificus.”

1835 “Subsidence and Elevation,” _Geological Magazine_, pp. 241, 245,
June, 1881.

1836 _Antiquity of Man_, p. 492.

1837 When Howard read, before the Royal Society of London, a paper on the
first serious researches that were made on the aerolites, the Geneva
Naturalist Pictet, who was present, communicated, on his return to
Paris, the facts reported to the French Academy of Sciences. But he
was forthwith interrupted by Laplace, the great Astronomer, who
cried: “Stop! we have had enough of such _fables_, and know all
about them,” thus making Pictet feel very small. Globular‐shaped
lightnings or thunder‐bolts have been admitted by Science only since
Arago demonstrated their existence. Says de Rochat (_Forces Non‐
definies_, p. 4): “Every one remembers Dr. Bouilland’s misadventure
at the Academy of Medicine when he had declared Edison’s phonograph
‘_a trick of ventriloquism_’!”

1838 _Principles of Geology_, i. 9, 10.

1839 _Ibid._

1840 The Cyclic Law of Race‐Evolution is most unwelcome to Scientists. It
is sufficient to mention the fact of “primeval civilization” to
excite the frenzy of Darwinians; it being obvious that the further
culture and science is pushed back, the more precarious becomes the
basis of the ape‐ancestor theory. But as Jacolliot says: “Whatever
there may be in these traditions [submerged continents, etc.], and
whatever may have been the place where a civilization more ancient
than that of Rome, of Greece, of Egypt, and of India, was developed,
it is certain that this civilization did exist, and it is highly
important for science to recover its traces, however feeble and
fugitive they be.” (_Histoire des Vièrges; les Peuples et les
Continents Disparus_, p. 15.) Donnelly has proved the fact from the
clearest premises, but the Evolutionists will not listen. A Miocene
civilization upsets the “universal Stone age” theory, and that of a
_continuous_ ascent of man from animalism. And yet Egypt, at least,
runs counter to current hypotheses. There is no Stone age visible
there, but a more glorious culture is apparent the further back we
are enabled to carry our retrospect.

1841 _Myths and Myth‐Makers_, p. 21.

1842 Violent minor cataclysms and colossal earthquakes are recorded in
the annals of most nations—if not of all. Elevation and subsidence
of continents is always in progress. The whole coast of South
America has been raised up 10 to 15 feet and settled down again in
an hour. Huxley has shown that the British Islands have been four
times depressed beneath the ocean and subsequently raised again and
peopled. The Alps, Himâlayas and Cordilleras were all the result of
depositions drifted on to sea‐bottoms and upheaved by Titanic forces
to their present elevation. The Sahara was the basin of a Miocene
sea. Within the last five or six thousand years the shores of
Sweden, Denmark and Norway, have risen from 200 to 600 feet; in
Scotland there are raised beaches with outlying stacks and skerries
surmounting the shore now eroded by the hungry wave. The North of
Europe is still rising from the sea, and South America presents the
phenomenon of raised beaches of over 1,000 miles in length, now at a
height varying from 100 to 1,300 feet above the sea‐level. On the
other hand, the coast of Greenland is sinking fast, so much so that
the Greenlander will not build by the shore. All these phenomena are
certain. Why then may not a gradual change have given place to a
violent cataclysm in remote epochs—such cataclysms occurring on a
minor scale even now, _e.g._, the case of Sunda Island with the
destruction of 80,000 Malays?

1843 For the opinions of Jacolliot, after long travels through the
Polynesian Islands, and his proofs of a former great geological
cataclysm in the Pacific Ocean, see his _Histoire des Vièrges; les
Peuples et les Continents Disparus_, p. 308.

1844 August, 1880.

1845 _Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism_, pp. 236, 237. _Cf._ also his
lengthy arguments on the subject, pp. 231‐235.

1846 _Op. cit._, i. 22, 23, Ed. 1869.

1847 _Pedigree of Man_, p. 73.

1848 Cited in Schmidt’s _Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism_, p. 238.

1849 For further facts as to the isolation of the Basques in Europe and
their ethnological relations, see Joly, _Man before Metals_, p. 316.
B. Davis is disposed to concede, from an examination of the skulls
of the Guanches of the Canary Islands and modern Basques, that both
belong to a race proper to those _ancient_ islands, of which the
Canaries are the _remains_! This is a step in advance indeed. De
Quatrefages and Hamy also both assign the Cro‐Magnon men of South
France and the Guanches to _one_ type—a proposition which involves a
certain corollary which both these writers may not care to father.

1850 _Families of Speech._

1851 _Cf._, Benjamin, _The Atlantic Islands_, p. 130.

1852 _Westminster Review_, Jan., 1872.

1853 Schmidt, _Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism_, p. 223.

1854 Professor Retzius, _Smithsonian Report_, 1859, p. 266.

1855 See the investigations of United States ship “Dolphin” and others.

1856 _Scientific American_, July 28th, 1877.

1857 See his chart, _Atlantis_, p. 46, though he deals with only a
fragment of the _real_ Continent.

1858 Donnelly, _Atlantis_, p. 480.

1859 _Maçonnerie Occulte_, p. 44.

1860 _Vide_ Sir William Thompson and Mr. Huxley.

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