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M^BB
Harvard Depository
Brittle Book
^
r
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THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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r '
The H. p. B. Press,
4a, Henry Street, Regent's Park,
London, N.W.
(Printers to the Theosophical Society.)
(Klectrotypiug by B. Dellaoana & Co., 48, Fetter Lane, E.C)
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'AA. ^
THE
Secret Doctrine :
THE SYNTHESIS
OF
SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY.
BY
H. P. BLAYATSKY,
AUTHOR OF "ISIS UNVBII*ED."
THIRD AND REVISED EDITION.
satyAt nAsti paro dharmah.
"There is no Religion higher than Truth."
Volume II.
ANTHROPOGENESIS.
LONDON:
Thb Theosophicai, Publishing Society, 7, Duke Street, Adelphi, W.C.
NEW YORK:
The Path Office, 144, Madison Avenue.
MADRAS:
The Theosophist Office, Adyar.
1893.
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* Entered according to Act of Cofigress in t lie year iSSS, by H. P. Blavaisky,
in the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington, D,C,'*
ENTERED AT vSTATIONERS' HALL.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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lo / J
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
PAGE
Preliminary Notes
I
The Lemnos-Born Kabiri
3
The Secrets of Kouyuiijik
5
Lemuria and Atlantis .
7
Geological Periods
9
The Tropics at the Pole
II
I.
PART
Anthropogenesis.
STANZA I.
Twelve Stanzas from the Book of Dzyan ...... 15
Commentaries .
25
Beginnings of Sentient Life .
25
Cosmic Ultimates
27
Dragon and Serpent .
29
Mercury and the Sun .
31
The Celestial Governors of Humanity
33
Shukra and the Earth .
• 35
The One and the Many
37
The "Seven" Mystery .
39
The Three Kinds of Light
41
The Numbers of Creation
43
Evolution not Creation
45
Adam Kadmon .
47
The First War in Heaven
49
N^rada and Asuramaya
. 51
The Mirror of Futurity
53
STANZi
\ XL
Nature Unaided Fails .
55
What the Earth- Whirl Produced
55
The Monsters of Chaos
.
57
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VI
CONTENTS.
PAOB
Unaided Physical Nature Fails ....... 59
Creation of Divine Beings in the Exoteric Accounts
61
The Bodies of BrahmA ....
61
The Four Classes of Creators .
63
What the Gnostics say .
65
Who are the Flames? .
67
Divine Will becomes Erds
69
The Chronology of the BriLhmans
. 69
The Race that Never Dies
71
Yugas and Kalpas
73
Variations of Exact Science .
75
Cosmogony an Intelligent Plan
77
STANZi^
L IIL
Attempts to Create Man ........ 78
The Lords of the Moon
79
The Various Classes of Creators
81
The Living Spiritual Fire
S3
Man a God in Animal Form .
. 85
"Fires," "Sparks." and "Flames"
87
The Son of Yah .
89
S'
rANZ^a
i IV.
Creation of the First Races ........ 90
Man not Created Perfect .....
91
On the Identity and Differences of the Incarnating Powers
92
Pitris of the Gods and Demons .....
93
Progenitors of Men ......
95
The Refusal to Create ......
97
What Prometheus Symbolized . .
99
Records of Ancient Races .....
lOI
TheSvastika .......
103
A Prophecy of the Seventh Race ....
105
Primitive Man a Failure .....
107
Perplexity of the Assyriologists ....
109
What Hydrogen really is . . . . .
III
The Evolution of the Senses .
S
•
"3
TANZi
\ V.
The Evolution of the Second Race . . . . . . 115
The Tabula Smaragdina . . . . .115
The "Shells" of Sheba Hachaloth 1x7
The Secret Work of Chiram .
119
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CONTENTS.
vn
PAGE
The Fire Deity .......... 121
Modes of Reproduction
123
Darwin on Androgynous Forms
125
Naudin's Primordial Blastema
127
The Allegory of Castor and Pollux
129
The Divine Hermaphrodite .
131
The Riddle of the Sphinx
131
Jah-Hovah Androgjrnous
133
The Esoteric Cain
135
The Jewish God-Name .
137
STANZA VI.
The Evolution of the Sweat-Bom ....... 139
The Swan and the Egg
139
Bi-Sexual Reproduction
141
The Bi-Sexual Third Race
143
The Shadow Image of Elohim
145
\ few Words about '* Deluges*' and "Noahs
»i
147
The Ark of Mann
147
The "Deluge** a Universal Tradition
149
The Arkite Symbols .
151
The Jewish Noah and the Chaldaean Nuah
153
The "White Island*' .
155
How old is Humanity ?
157
Could Men exist 18,000,000 Years Ago?
157
Adam -Galatea ....
159
What is Evolution ? .
161
An "Organism without Organs"
163
Science is Silent
165
"Spontaneous Generation" .
X67
Oceans of Carbonic Acid ?
SI
169
'ANZA
VII.
From the Semi-Divine down to the First Human Races . . .170
The "Black Fire" of the "Zohar" ....
171
The "Adversaries" of the Gods
173
Primal Modes of Reproduction
175
Monads and Rounds ....
177
How the First Mammals were Produced
179
The Gods are Deified Men ....
181
ChhAyA-Birth
183
The Story of Kandu and PramlochA explained
185
"Sweat- Bom" and Androgynes
187
The Birthdays of the Dhyanis
189
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Viii CONTENTS.
STANZA VIII.
PAGE
Evolution of the Animal Mammalians: the First Fall .... 190
Men, the Progenitors of Animals
191
Archaic Zoology ....
. 193
The Sin of the Mindless .Alen
195
What may be the Objections to the Foregoing
195
The Darwinists Mistaken
197
The Real Primaeval Man
S'
199
FANZA IX.
The Final Creation of Man ........ 201
The Cause of Degeneration .
201
The Boneless Race ....
203
Hybridization ....
- 205
The Separation of Sexes
207
Primeval Language
209
The Transformation of the Earth .
211
Edens, Serpents and Dragons
212
The Garden of Eden, a College
. 213
Flying Camels ....
215
Kircher's Dragon
217
Has Satan any Reality?
219
Two Schools of Magic .
221
The Seventh Son of the Seventh Son
223
Buddha's Great Mountain
225
Scientific Belief in "Dragons"
227
Flying Dragons ....
229
The *'Sons of God" and the "Sacred Islan
i"
230
The Continent of the Gods
231
The Testimony of Jacolliot .
233
The Colossi of Bamian
S
235
TANZi
\ Xv
The History of the Fourth Race . . . . . . -237
The Moon-Coloured Race
237
The Mysteries among the Mayas
239
Satanic Myths .
241
Holy Satan
243
Caput Angelorum
247
Theological Snuffers .
249
** Principles" explained
251
Man, the Pale Shadow of God
253
Satan, a Centripetal Force- .
255
The Sacrifice of the Fiery Angels
257
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CONTENTS.
IX
The "Conscious Entity"
Answers to Objections .
Arcbaic Teachings in the "Purftnas" and "Genesis." Physical
Mr. Gladstone kills "Genesis"
A Lesson in Natural History .
The Contradictions of Science
The "Absolute Rule" of Science not Borne Out by Facts
The Inherent Law of Progressive Development
Nature is Uniform
Millions of Years Hence
A Panoramic View of the Early Races
Bailly and Faber . . - .
The Natural "Fall"
The Symbolism of Cronus
The Races in Greek Mythology
The Golden Age
No Devils outside Humanity .
The Giants ....
Are Giants a Fiction ? .
The Testimony of Antiquity .
Fourth Race Giants
The Sacred Four
The Children of Brahmft
Human and Animal Cross-Breeding .
The Dumb Man who Walks on All Pours
The Races with the "Third Eye" .
Man, the Storehouse of all the Seeds of Life
Mazdean Symbolism
"Three-Eyed" Mortals
Occult Physiology
The Seat of the Soul .
The Evolution of the Eye
The Odd Eye is now a Gland
The Number of Monads is Limited
The Law of Retribution
The Primeval Manns of Humanity
The Seven and Fourteen Manus
The "Blinds" of Exotericism
The Four Earlier Races
The Esoteric Meaning of "Fish"
The Inner Man in the "Zohar"
Evolution
STANZA XI.
The Civilization and Destruction of the Fourth and Fifth Races
Presentments of Truths ......
PAOB
259
261
262
263
265
267
269
271
273
275
275
277
279
281
283
285
287
289
289
291
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297
299
301
302
303
305
307
309
•3"
313
315
317
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321
323
325
327
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CONTENTS.
Degeneration of Mankind
The HindA Symbolization
The Magi in the Days of EIrishna
The Atlantic Ocean-Flow
On Foot across the Oceans
Changes of Climate
Cycles within Cycles
The Old Continents
The Secret Annals
Standing Witnesses to Submerged Continents
The Bamian Statues . . ...
The Handiwork of Initiates .....
Cyclopean Ruins and Colossal Stones as Witnesses to Giants
Animated Stones ......
The "Rocking Stones" in Europe ....
Living, Speaking, and Moving Stones
Universal Witnesses ......
It takes a God to become a Man ....
STANZA XII.
The Fifth Race and its Divine Instructors
The "Great Dragon" and the "Serpents"
The Poles have been Thrice Inverted
Serpents and Dragons under Different Symbolisms
The Naasenian Gnostics
The Sidereal and Cosmic Glyphs
The Two Mystic Poles .
God and Nature Anthropomorphized
Who were Enoch and the Others?
The Poles, the " Heavenly Measure
The Dragon Human yet Divine
Our Divine Instructors .
Hermes in Astronomy and Elsewhere
What the Priests told Herodotus
What are "Spirits"? .
Plato's Idea of Evil
Wheat brought down by the Gods
The Mystery of Azazel .
Drunken Indra .
The Origin of the Satanic Myth
The Secret of the Dragon
Agni, the Fire-God
Merodach-Michael
The Sun-Gods, Creative Powers
PAOB
333
335
337
339
341
343
345
347
349
351
353
355
356
357
359
361
363
365
366
367
369
370
371
371
373
375
377
379
381
381
383
385
387
389
391
393
395
395
397
399
401
403
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CONTENTS.
Who first Created Woman .......
Jehovah-Ophiomorphos .......
Noah was a Kabir, hence he must have been a Demon .
The Flood Legends ........
The Oldest Persian Traditions about the Polar, and the Submerged Continents
The Legends of Iran ........
Esoteric Chronology ........
The Persian Phoenix ........
The Arctic Continent ........
The Unreachable Land .......
Western Speculations, founded on the Greek and Paurftnic Traditions
Orientalists in the Wrong Box ......
Future Continents, Symbolized ......
The Puzzles of Antiquity .......
What Marcellus says ........
The "Curse" from a Philosophical Point of View ....
The Ancient and the Modem Man ......
The Travesty of Prometheus .......
Christ connected with Epaphos ......
The Mistake of Arrian explained ......
Was .^schylus Initiated ?.......
The Gift of Prometheus .......
Additional Fragments from a Commentary on the Verses of Stanza XII
The " Buddhas of Confession "......
The Oldest Records about Atlantis ......
The Doom of Atlantis ........
The "Eastern -Ethiopians" .......
The Egyptian Zodiacs ........
Theories of a Self-Made Adept ......
The Genealogical Tree of our Race ......
The Egyptian Labyrinth .......
PART II.
The Archaic Symbolism of the World-Religions.
SECTION I.
Esoteric Tenets Corroborated in every Scripture ....
The Vedas written by Initiates ......
PAOB
405
407
408
409
411
411
413
415
417
419
420
421
423
425
427
428
429
431
433
435
437
439
441
441
443
445
447
449
451
453
455
CONCLUSION.
History "Written in the Stars"
. 457
Wholesale Denial
• 459
Historical "Liars"
. 461
The Coming New Race
. 463
The Future Mankind .
. 465
469
471
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Xll
Adam-Adami
Nabathean Agriculture
Nebo, the God of Wisdom
The Kabalistic Four Adams
CONTENTS.
SECTION II.
PAGE
473
475
477
479
SECTION III
The "Holy of Holies." Its Degradation . . . . . .481
What was the Circle Dance? .
483
Christian Sym)t>olism .
485
The God lao ....
487
The Etymology of "Sacrament"
489
I Am That I Am
491
Who the Jews really are
493
Jehovah a Substitute ....
495
Who was Abraxas?
497
SECTIO
N IV.
On the Myth of the "Fallen Angels" in its Various Aspects . . .498
The Evil Spirit: Who, and What? ....
. 498
The "Monkey of God" ....
499
The Genesis of the Devil ....
501
The Angel of the Face ....
503
Fraudulent Translation of the "Bible"
■ 505
The Vedas, once Universal ....
507
The Gods of Light proceed from the Gods of Darkness
507
The Sons of Eternity .....
509
The Shadows of the Shadows
511
Who the Adityas are .....
513
The "Zohar" on the "Fallen Ones" .
5^5
The Many Meanings of the "War in Heaven"
516
Reminders of the Fate of the Atlanteans .
517
Various Names for Initiates ....
5^9
The Symbol of the "Tree" ....
521
TheTArakaWar
523
The War of the Titans ....
525
Sarpas— Serpents— Ndgas ....
527
The Origin of Exoteric Religions
529
The Sacredness of the Serpent
•
531
SECTIC
\N V.
Is Plerdma Satan's Lair ? . . . . 532
Living Devils ....
533
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CONTENTS.
Xlll
Jehovah, a Personating Spirit
Ak^ha, the Mysterium Magnum
The Soul and Heart of the Great Mother
The Logos and Satan are One
The Seventh Mystery of Creation
The Number 888
PAOR
535
537
539
541
543
545
Prometheus, the Titan. His Origin
The Ash Yggdrasil
The Poetr>' of Modern Orientalists
The Boon given by Prometheus
Greek Ideas Misunderstood
The Six Brothers of Krislina .
CTIQN VI.
in Ancient India
. 546
. 547
549
. 531
• 553
. 555
SECTION VII.
Enoichion-Henoch
The Adept Dies but to Live .
What Enoch is, Esoterically .
The Secret Power of the Satans
SECTION VIII.
The Symbolism of the Mystery-Names lao and Jehovah
to the Cross and Circle
The Jews alone the Heirloom of Jehovah
A Grotesque Verse explained .
The Antiquity of the Cross .
A Personal is a Finite God
A Plagiarism by Pascal
Cross and Circle
Variations of the Cross-Symbolism
The Heavenly ** Porpoise"
The Rishis and the Pleiades .
Deus enim et Circulus est
The Fall of the Cross into Matter
The Supreme Good of Plato .
The Riddle of the Cross
The Sleep of Siloani .
The Meaning of the Crucifixion
The Real Paternoster .
with their Relation
557
559
561
563
565
567
569
571
573
575
575
577
579
581
583
584
585
587
589
591
593
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XIV
CONTENTS.
SECTION IX
The Upanishads in Gnostic Literature
The Seven Thunders .
Pistis Sophia
Truth between Two Contrasts
The Wisdom of the Divine Self
The Antiquity of the Kapilas .
SECTION X
The Cross and the Pythagorean Decad
The Three Sciences
The Mystic Meaning of Makara
Poseidon's Five Ministers
The Puzzles of Synibolistn
The '*Golden Candlestick"
The Root of Wisdom .
The Hosts of the Blessed Ones
The *'Wonn that Never Dies"
Man, the Reviler of God
SECTION XI.
The Mysteries of the Hebdomad
Saptaparna ....
The *• Hieroglyphical Senary"
Spiritual and Physical Correspondences
The Theogonic Key
Noah in a New Dress .
The Tetraktys in Relation to the Heptagon
The Roots of Things .
The *' Voice of Nature"
The Septenary demonstrated
Proofs from a Gnostic Gospel
The Septenary Element in the Vedas
The Vetlic Teachings .
The Zoroastrian Septenary
The "Breaths" of the "One Breath"
The Septenary in the Exoteric Works
The Septenate in the Purdnas
Who are the Maruts? .
The Doom of Continual Re-birth
Persian Symbology
Seven in Astronomy, Science and Magic
The Cycle of the Naros
PAGB
594
595
597
599
6oi
603
605
607
609
611
613
615
617
619
621
623
624
625
625
627
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631
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633
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CONTENTS.
XV
PAOB
Various Cyclic Calculations .
657
The Septenate in Physiology .
659
The Hairy Symbol
661
The Number Seven in Chemistry
663
The Seven Priests of the Zufiis
665
The Seven Souls of the Egyptologists
. 666
The Septenary in Egypt
.
667
The "Principles'* in Egyptian "Metaphysics"
669
The "Watermen" of the "Bundahish"
671
The Trans- and Cis-HimAlayan Esoteric Doctrine
673
An Allegory from the "AnugitA"
.
675
Endless is the Search for Truth
.
. 677
PART III.
Addenda.
Science and the Secret Doctrine contrasted
681
SECTION I.
Archaic, or Modern Anthropology? .
"Physiological" versus "Natural" Selection
The Occult and the Modern Doctrines
"The Testimonium Paupertatis of Natural Science"
•"Almighty Evolution" ....
Physical and Spiritual Evolution reconciled
681
683
685
687
689
691
SECTION II.
The Ancestors Mankind is offered by Science
An Unverified Charge against the Ancients.
Various Modes of Reproduction
Ready-made Materials of Speech
Scientific Trespassers .
Mr. Huxley applies an "Extinguisher"
An absolutely theoretical Pithecoid Man
The Sozura, a Creature entirely unknown to Science
Plastidular Souls, and Conscious Nerve-Cells
A cautious Move towards "Magic" .
The meaning of Soul with Haeckel .
693
695
697
699
701
703
705
707
708
709
7"
SECTION III.
The Fossil Relics of Man and the Anthropoid Ape
Oeological Pacts bearing on the Question of their Relationship
713
713
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XVI
CONTENTS.
Insurmountable Difficulties ...... .l
"Blurred Copies" of their Bestial Sires . . . .
Western Evolutionism ........
HanumAn, the Monkey-God . . . . . .
The Gorilla's Address to the Evolutionists .....
The Darwinists and their Opponents .....
Darwinism and the Antiquity of Man : the Anthropoids and their Ancestry
Huxley's Bold Speculations .......
The Pedigree of the Apes .......
SECTION IV.
Duration of the Geological Periods, Race Cycles, and the Antiquity of
Babylonian Dates
Contradictory Hypotheses
Modern Scientific Speculations about the Ages of the Globe, Auimal
tion and Man
Materialists at Loggerheads .
Planetary' Life-Impulses
On Chains of Planets and their Plurality
Of Other Worlds besides Our Own .
States of Consciousness
Worlds mentioned in the "Bible"
The Kings of Edom
What Flammarion tells us
Science and Occultism may yet agree
Supplementary Remarks on Esoteric Geological Chronology
Seceders from Darwinism
The Two Sciences contrasted .
The Sufficiency of the "Animalists"
One Salvation for Science
Between Two Voids
A Palaeolithic Landseer
The Risings and Falls of Civilization
Strange Confessions of Science
A once Tropical Pole
Palaeolithic Man, a Calligraphist
Herbert Spencer on Special Creations
Man
Evolu
SECTION V
Organic Evolution and Creative Centres
The "Ground-Plan" and "Designers"
The " Megan thropus" ....
The Origin and Evolution of the Mammalia
PAGE
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CONTENTS.
XVll
Schmidt's Diagram
Factors in the Origin of Species
The European Palaeolithic Races:
Africa in Europe
A Tardy Admission
Whence and How Distributed
SECTION VI.
•Giants, Civilizations, and Submerged Continents traced in History
A Mysterious Nation . • ....
The Associates of the Apes and the Angels .
The Occult Interpretation of the "Bible" .
The Symbols of Soul-Killing Churchianity .
The Age of Egypt ......
The Tombs of the Giants .....
Races of Giants .......
Who were the Druids .'^ ......
The Mazdean View of the Seven Earths
The Druidical Belief in Rebirth ....
Some Statements about the Sacred Islands and Continents in
explained Esoterically .....
The Men "whose Sleep was never Disturbed by Dreams"
The Heirloom of Atlantis .....
"The Greater Gods of Olympos" ....
The Power of Names ......
The Sons of Ccelus and Terra .....
The Children of Niobe. .....
The "Island of the Divine Kings" ....
Who were the Nephilim ?....,
Mythology built on History . . . ^ .
the Classics,
SECTION VII.
Scientific and Geological Proofs of the Existence of several Submerged Con
tinents
Geology Corroborates Occultism
Tradition as True as History- .
Atlantis, Necessary to Ethnology
Astraea falls on her Head
Ingenious Explanations
Hsckel for once is Right
Final and Irrefutable Evidence
Enough has now been said
Hear both sides .
The Prologue to Esoteric Truth
PAGB
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779
779
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791
793
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H ifirj 8i3a)^ ovK Iotlv ifirj, dXXa tov n-i/jmf/avro^ fi€.
My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me.
John vil. i6.
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Modern Science insists upon the doctrine of evolution; so do human reason and the Secret
Doctrine, and the idea is corroborated by the ancient le^fends and mjrths, 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 transforma-
tion, 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 preexisted 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 diflfers 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 I'edas, the Vdluspa, 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 material-
istic 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.
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PRELIMINARY NOTES
ON
The Archaic Stanzas, and the Four Pre-Historic Continents.
Fades totius universi, quam\Hs infiuitis modis variet,
Manet tamen semper eadem.— Spinoza.
The Stanzas, with the Commentaries thereon, in this Volume, are
drawn from the same Archaic R^ords 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 explana-
tion, 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 Modem
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.*
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
• See Genesis ii. 19. Adam is formed in verse 7, and in verse 19 it is said: "Out of the ground the
IvOrd God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought tliem unto Adam to
see what he would call them." Thus man was created be/ore 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 Esoteri-
cally a septenary which represents seven men, or rather grroui>s of men. For the first Adam, the
Kadmon, is the synthesis of the len Sephiroth. Of these, the upper Triad remains in the Archetj^al
"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 mjrsteries upon which it was fabricated,
came from Egypt. The "God" of the 1st chapter of Genesis is the I^ogos, and the "I/>rd God" of
the 2nd chapter the Creative Elohim. the lower Powers.
B
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2 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Men* evolving from Nature and the Heavenly Man, in the collective
sense of the word, namely, from the Creative Spirits; and in the
fragments of Chaldaean 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 i6, 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.t
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 be-
fore the "balance" (sexes) existed, and which was therefore destroyed.}
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.}
They were '* destroyed," as a Race, hy being merged in their own
progeny (by exudation) : that is to say, the sexless Race reincarnated
in the (potentially) bisexual; the latter, in the androg>'nes; 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 supematuralism of these teach-
ings, although allegorical, is so diametrically opposed to the dead-letter
statements of the Bible,\\ as well as to the latest hypotheses of Science,
• Thus saith Pymander: "This is the mystery that to this day was hidden. Nature being: mingled
with the Heavenly Man [Elohim, or Dhy&nis], 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,
flee the interpretations of even our modem theologians, men supposed to be intellectual and learned.
In the Theological and Philosophical Works of Hermes THsmegistus, 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 \\ was masculine-feminine, .... the seven may signify the suc-
ceeding patriarchs named in Genesis " (p. 9). A truly theological way of cutting the Gordian knot!
t George Smith's Chaldean Account 0/ Genesis, p. 103.
t Compare Zohar, Siphra Dtzenioutha, Idra Suta, 2928, Franck, La Kabbale, p. 205.
) Siphra Dtsenioutha.
II As it is now asserted that the Chaldsean 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 amother version of the same story.
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THE LEMNOS-BORN KABIRI. 3
that it will evoke passionate denial. The Occultists, however, know
that the traditions of Esoteric Philosophy must be the rig^ht 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 Hindu Purdnas with their seven Manus, as well as the Chaldaeo-
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;* 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.f If, coupling with tfiis the fact that
Samothrace was colonized by the Phoenicians, and before them by the
mysterious Pelasgians who came from the East, we also remember the
identity of the "Mystery" Gods of the Phoenicians, Chaldaeans, 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 Chaldaeo- 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 number^ 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
• Philosophumena, v. 7 ; Miller's edition, p. 98.
+ Ibid., p. 108.
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4 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
be found as plainly, as they are in Pymander and in the Book of the Con-
cealed 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 naftie, so
also is the name of the man Adam. Says George Smith, in his Chal-
deaji Accowit 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 GeTiesis, but certainly in some passages is only used in the same sense
as the Assyrian word.*
Moreover, neither the Chaldaean 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 Chaldaeans knew the Esoteric truth concealed
in the Puranic 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. Samo-
thrace 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.f But
the Israelites had, moreover, another legend upon which to base their
allegor3% 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 surround-
ing 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 certainly, at the very least.
These are :
(1) That the race which was the first to fall into generation was a
• p. 86.
t See Pliny, iv, c. 12; Strabo, 10 ; Herodotus, vii, c. 109; Pausanias, vii, c. 4, etc.
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THE SECRETS OP KOUYUNJIK. 5
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 Cannes- Dagon, at the time of the Fall, and
called, collectively, the Demiurge, or Creator.*
There are two "Creations" so-called, in the Babylonian fragments,
and as Genesis has adhered to this, we find its first two chapters distin-
guished 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 respec-
tively to the formation of the primordial seven Men by the Progenitors,
the Pitris, or Elohini, 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
Vaidtddd, for instance, is referred to as Airyana Va^jof wherein was
born the original Zoroaster, J is called in the PurSnic literature Shveta
Dvipa, Mount Mem, the Abode of Vishnu, etc.; and in the Secret
• Chaldean Account of Genesis, p. 82.
^ See Bund., 79, 12.
X By " original " we mean the Am&haspend, called " Zarathushtra, Uie lord and ruler of the Vara
made by Vima in that land." There were several Zarathushtras or Zertusts, the Dabistan alone
enttraerating thirteen ; but these were all reincarnations of the first one. The last Zoroaster was the
founder of the Fire-tenii)le of Azareksh, and the writer of the works on the primeval sacred Magian
religion destroyed by Alexander.
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6 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 expres-*
sion 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 Breathr*
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. Astro-
nomically, 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. **'Eyyus yap wKrds tc koI
r^lJLaTO'i €10-1 KcAcu^ot," says a verse in the Odyssey.]
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
Rhipseus, was neither an ideal country, as surmized by the Mytholo-
gists, nor yet a land in the neighbourhood of Scythia and the Danube.J
• In India called a " Day of Brahmi."
+ X. 86.
t See Volcker, Mythological Geography, pp. 145 to 170.
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LEMURIA AND ATLANTIS. 7
It was a real Continent, a bond 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 abocje
of Apollo, the God of light, and its inhabitants are his beloved priests
and servants. This may be regarded as poetized yf^//^« 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 i860,
asserted on zoological grounds the actual existence, in -prehistoric
times, of a Continent which he showed to have extended from Mada-
gascar 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 be-
neath 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.*
The subject is treated at length elsewhere.f
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.]:
V. Europe.
The fifth Continent was America; but, as it is situated at the Anti-
podes, it is Europe and Asia Minor, almost coeval w4th it, which are
• Mythical Monsters, p. 47.
♦ 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 l.ije, that the h\-pothesis 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
AUantis fully developed, and Atlantis had sunk and its chief portions disappeared before the end of
the Miocene period.
X See Esoteric Buddhism,
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8 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
generally referred to by the Indo-Aryan Occultists as the fifth. If
their teaching followed the appearance of the Continents in their geo-
logical 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
Aryan 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,*
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. t
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 Anthropolo-
gist 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 An-
thropology or Biblical Theology.
• 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.)
t iii. fol. 10a.
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GEOLOGICAL PERIODS. 9
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.
CroU. 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;* or whether again Mr. Croll
"allows fifteen millions since the beginning of the Eocene period," as
quoted by an English geologist,! both sets of figures cover the claims
made by the Secret Doctrine.J 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 Aryan 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
• A. Winchell, Professor of Geology, World- Life, p. 369.
1- Mr. Charles Gould, late geologrical surveyor of Tasmania, in Mythical Monsters, p. 84.
X Sir Charles L3rell, 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 modem 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. D
etseq.; also Trans. Roy. Soc. Edin., xxiii. Pt. i. 157, i86a, 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." (Sec 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 modem men of Science who are considered as authorities.
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lO THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 conven-
tional 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 187S before the Royal Society, claims that the minimum
time required for the formation of the sedimentary strata and the elimi-
nation of the calcareous matter is in round numbers 600 million years;*
or shall we ask support for our chronology from Mr. Darwin's works,
wherein, according to his theory, he demands for the organic trans-
formations 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 impor-
tant 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 tradi-
tion 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
zaiuia.t
In short Greenland had southern plants unknown to northern
regions.
• See Proceedings, Royal Society, lyOndon, xxnii. 281.
"^ Gould, Mythical Monsters, p. 91.
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THE TROPICS AT THE POLE. II
And now arises this natural question. If the Greeks, in the days of
Homer, knew of a Hyperborean land, /.<?., 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. Every-
thing 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 Purdnas — for one who
understands their allegories — contain the same statements. Suffice,
then, for us the strong probability that, during the Miocene period of
Modem 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 impor-
tant points commented upon and explained. In the subsequent Sec-
tions of Parts II and III various additional details are gathered, and
a fuller explanation of the subject is attempted.
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PART I.
ANTHROPOGENESIS.
TWELVE STANZAS FROM THE "BOOK OF DZYAN,"
WITH COMMENTARIES.
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In primeval times, a maiden,
Beauteous Daugrhter 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-bom 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.
KaUvala (Crawford).
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Anthropogenesis.
FROM
THE STANZAS OF DZYAN.'
Stanza L
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
• 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.
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l6 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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.
^. The Wheel whirled for thirty crores more. It con-
structed Rupas; 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 Dhyani
came and looked ... the Dhyani from the bright Father-
Mother, from the White Regions they came, from the Abodes
of the Immortal Mortals.
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THE STANZAS OF DZYAN. l^
1. Displeased they were. "Our Flesh is not there. No
fit Rupas for our Brothers of the Fifth. No DweHings 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.
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l8 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 IY.
14. The Seven Hosts, the Will-Born Lords, propelled by
the Spirit of Life-Giving, separate Men from themselves, each
on his own Zone.
1 5. 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 Bhuta, with neither Form nor
Mind. Therefore they are called the Chhaya 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 Rupa. It could
stand, walk, run, recline, or fly. Ytt it was still but a Chhaya,
a Shadow with no Sense. . . .
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THE STANZAS OF DZYAN. 19
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 1 " — said the Dhyanis. The Breath needed a
Vehicle of Desires; "It has itl" — said the Drainer of Waters.
But Breath needs a Mind to embrace the Universe; "We can-
not give thatl" — said the Fathers. "I never had itl" — 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 Bhiita Thus have the Boneless
given Life to those who became Men with Bones in the Third.
Stanza Y.
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.* Thus was, O
Lanoo, the Second Race produced.
20. Their Fathers were the Self-born. The Self-born, the
Chhaya from the brilliant Bodies of the Lords, the Fathers,
the Sons of Twilight.
• The idea and the spirit of the sentence only is here given, as a verbal transla-
tion would convey very litUe to the reader.
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20 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 VL
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.
2h The Self-born were the Chhayas, the Shadows from
the Bodies of the Sons of Twilight. Neither water nor fire
could destroy them. Their sons were.
Stanza YII.
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 Chhayas. Some projected a Spark. Some
deferred till the Fourth. From their own Rupa they filled
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THE STANZAS OF DZYAN. 21
the Kama. 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
Jivas 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.
2$. How did the Manasa, the Sons of Wisdom, act? They
rejected the Self-born. They are not ready. They spurned
the Sweat-bom. 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 Vahan of the Lords of
Wisdom. It created Sons of Will and Yoga, by Kriyashakti it
created them, the Holy Fathers, Ancestors of the Arhats. . . .
Stanza YIII.
28. From the drops of sweat, from the residue of the sub-
stance, 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 flyings
Sarpas were added to the creeping things. They that creep on
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22 THB SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Chhayas
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 Amanasa 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 ... .
3?. Then all men became endowed with Manas. They
saw the sin of the mindless.
36. The Fourth Race developed speech.
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THE STANZAS OF DZYAN. 2^
?7. 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 XL
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.
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24 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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.
4?. 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 XIL
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. . . .
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COMMENTARIES
ON THE TWELVE STANZAS AND THEIR TERMS, ACCORDING TO THEIR
NUMERATION, IN STANZAS AND SHLOKAS.
STANZA I.
BEGINNINGS OF SENTIENT LIFE.
I. 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.
I. The Lha (a) which turns the Fourth* is Servant to the
Lha(s) of the Seven! C^), they who revolve, driving their
Chariots around their Lord, the One Eye J of our World.
His Breath gave Life to the Seven.§ 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-Himtlaj'an regions for
••Spirit," any celestial or super-human Being, and it covers the whole
series of heavenly hierarchies, from an Archangel, or Dhyini, 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
• 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 Hindi! standpoint ; but in the meaning attached to them in Trans-HimAIayan Esotericism
the>' are correct. In e\'ery case the writer takes any blame upon herself. As she has never claimed
personal infallibility, that which is griven on her own authority may leave much to be desired, par-
ticularly 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.
1- The Planetary Spirits.
X Loka Chakshus.
I The Planets.
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26 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 r>%/^ 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 worldy^ 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
Chaldseans, 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 astrologi-
cal 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 Purana^. Without the help of
the later Commentaries, compiled by generations of Adepts, it would be
impossible to understand the meaning correctly. In the ancient Cos-
mogonies, the visible and the invisible worlds are the double links of
one and the same chain. As the Invisible Logos, with its Seven
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COSMIC ULTIMATES. 27
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
— evet-subjective Angels.
Thus — to anticipate a little by way of illustration— every Race in its
evolution is said to be bom under the direct influence of one of the
Planets ; Race the First receiving its breath of life from the Sun, as
will be seen Idter 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 lights
The summary of the Stanzas in Volume I showed the genesis* 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 : (i) 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 unmani-
fested — 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 Mulaprakriti and then as the Logos. This Logos is equiva-
lent to the ** Unconscious Universal Mind," etc., of Western Pantheists.
It constitutes the Basis of the sudject-side of manifested Being, and is
the source of all manifestations of individual consciousness. Mulapra-
kriti or Primordial Cosmic Substance, is the foundation of the odject-
side of things — the basis of all objective evolution and cosmo-genesis.
Force, then, does not emerge with Primordial Substance from Para-
• According to Dr. A. Wildcr's learned definition, Genesis, ycKCtrts, 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.
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28 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
brahmanic 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 Mulaprakriti. Nevertheless as, apart from it, the
latter is absolutely and necessarily inert — a mere abstraction — it is un-
necessary to weave too fine a cobweb of subtleties as to the order of
succession of the Cosmic Ultimates. Force succeeds Mulaprakriti ; but,
minus Force, Mulaprakriti is for all practical intents and purposes non-
existent.*
The Heavenly Man or Tetragrammaton, who is the Protogonos,
Tikkoun, the Firstborn from the passive Deity and the first mani-
festation 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 I^gos. The Second springs from the First and develops the
Third Triangle ;t 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 diflFerence 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 To ' Ayatfov, one being the superior apprehending, the other the comprehend-
ing— one noetic 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 ail in the Universe of
Pleroma, 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 alterumy% ••Ever>' Universe (World or
• For a clearer explanation of the origrins, as contained in the Esotericism of the Bhagavad did,
aee the Notes thereon published In 7%^ Theosophist for February, March and June, 1887, Madras,
t See the Scphirothal Tree.
X Zokar, Idra StUa, Sec. VU.
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DRAGON AND SERPENT. 29
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 diflferentiated 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* 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 or
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, /.^., 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 knowkdgey
Words that came from distant ages.
Words his ancestors had taught him.
• J. B. Alden ; New York, 1888; ii. 432, 434-
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30 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
((/) In China the men of Fohi, or the "Heavenly Man," are called
the twelve Tien-Hoang, the twelve Hierarchies of DhySnis or Angels,
with human faces, and dragon bodies; the Dragon standing for Divine
Wisdom or Spirit;* 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.f The twelve -^sers 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. J
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.
• 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. Stauiland 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 Chaldasan 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 ohly is he ' the intelligent fish,' but his name may be read as signify-
ing 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 enlighUnment, The crown formed of an asp,
the Thermuthis, belongs to Isis, Goddess of Life and Healing. The Cpantshads have a treatise on
the Science of Serpents— \n other words, the Science of Occult Knowledge ; and the Nagas 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. -2).
t Compare the Symbols of the Bonzes.
t The Maudragora 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 u-ith 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."
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mercury and the sun. 3 1
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 (a). 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!"
(a) The "Lord of Wisdom" is Mercury, or Budha.
{b) The modem 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. J
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 mys-
terious 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 himinis 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 — turn virgam capit, hac animas ille
evocat Orco,% He is the Golden-coloured Mercury, the Xpv<ro<f>arj9 'Epfxrj^
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 Agatho-
• The Sun.
t Earth.
t Copernicus wrote his theories on the "Revolution of the Heavenly Bodies" in the sixteenth cen-
tury, and the Zokafs even if compiled by Moses de Leon in the thirteenth century, states that:
"In the Book of Haramannunah, 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. toa, quoted in Myer's Qabbalah,
P- »39.)
) See also the 21st Pargard of the Venditldd on the celestial militia.
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32 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
daemon. 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 Meratry 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.*
Vossius here utters a greater Occult truth than he suspected. The
Hermes of the Greeks is closely related to the Hindu SaramS and
Sarameya, 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
Assislants, gets all its vital forces, life, and powers through the medium of
the seven planetary Dhydnis 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 seve?if First-
born \the primordial Humaji Groups'] receives its light and life from its
own especial DhyaJii — spiritually, and from the Palace \^House, the
Planet'] of that Dhydni— physically ; so with the sevai great Races to be
born on it. The First is bor^i under the Suti ; the Second under Brihaspati
\^fupiter'\ ; the Third U7ider Lohitdnga [Afyrs, the '' Fiery -bodied,'' and also
under Venus. or Shukra]; the Fourth, imder Soma {the Moon, our Globe
also, the Fourth Sphere being born under and from the Moon] and Shani,
Satum,\ the Kricra-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 Dhydni]. Every active power or force
• IdolaL, II. 373-
1- 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.
X "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 Br&hmans, "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 dis-
tinct states of Prajn4, 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.
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THE CELESTIAL GOVERNORS OF HUMANITY. ^^
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 G lobes, one over, the other under the double Sign [the
primeval Svastika bereft of its four arms, or the cross^ ~h] *
The "double sign" is, as every student of Occultism knows, the
sj^mbol of the male and the female principles in Nature, of the posi-
tive and the negative, for the Svastika or y^ 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 interpreta-
tion. 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 mys-
terious of all the Planets; the one whose influence upon, and relation
to, the Earth is most prominent. In exoteric Brahmanism, Venus or
Shukra — a male deityf — is the son of Bhrigu, one of the Prajapati and
a Vedic sage, and is Daitya-Guru, or the priest-instructor of the pri-
meval giants. The whole history of Shukra in the Puranas, refers to
the Third and Fourth Races. As says the Commentar>^:
// is through Shukra that the ''double ones** [the hermaphrodites'] of the
Third [Root-Race] descended from the first "Sweat-bom** Therefore it is
represaited under the symbol Q [the circle and diameter'], during the Third
\^Race\ and ^, 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 imiversally diffused Spirit of Life — thus also
referring to the primitive Root- Race. It becomes androg>^nous 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
• Venus is thus Q , the Earth A .
+ In the Esoteric Philosophy it is male and female, or hermaphrodite ; hence the "bearded " Venus
in mythology.
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34 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
vertical line, expressive of male and female, not separated as yet — the
first and earliest Egyptian Tau; Rafter which it becomes -[-, or male
female separated* 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 9» which is only
another form of Venus (Isis), J, 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.f
In one of the most ancient Catechisms of Southern India, Madras
Presidency, the hermaphrodite Goddess Ardhanari,J 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 Uni-
verse of Brahma evolving out of the central point, Nara — is shown in
one of the oldest carvings as double-sexed (Vishnu and Lakshmi)
standing on a lotus-leaf floating on the water, the water rising in a
semicircle and pouring through the Svastika, **the source of genera-
tion," 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.
• Therefore, puttiug aside its religrio-metaphysical aspect, the Cross of the Christians is symbolically
far more phallic than the Pagan Svastika. Compare vol. i. pp. 34. Zb-
t The ansated cross is the astronomical planetary sign of Venus, "signifying the existence oi par-
iurtent 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 modem Kabalistic MS.)
% See Moore's Hindk Pantheon.
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SHUKRA AND THE EARTH. 35
Every sin committed on Earth is felt by Ushanas-Shukra. The Guru
of the Daityas is the Guardian Spirit of the Earth and Mm. 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 Hindu 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.* It is owing to the fanciful interpretation
of the archaic tradition, which states that Venus changes simulta-
neously (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.f
As Venus has no satellites, it is stated allegorically, that Asphujit
• Athenseus shows that the first letter of Satau'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
anns. 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 oin* 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 i8th and 19th Dynasties the
symbols of life and power. But subsequently, in the course of the 20th Dynasty, he is suddenly
treated as an e\'il 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.
t De Civiiate Dei, LXXI. viii.
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36 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
(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*
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 i,ooo years."
This refers to the great inclination 6f 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 Dhyan 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 Avataras, 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 on^ 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 a7id yoimger brother of Venus^ but its inhabitants are of their
own kind, . . . All sentiait complete beings \^full septenary men or
higher beings^ are furnished, in their beginnings, with forms and organisms
in full harmony with the iiatiire a7id state of the Sphere they inhabit, \
The Spheres of Being, or Centres of Life, which are isolated nuclei
breeding their men afid their animals, are fiumberless; not one has any
resemblance to its sister-companion or to any other i7i its own special
progeny.X
• Shukra is the son of Bhrigu the great Rishi, and one of the Seven Praj&pati, the founder of the
Race of Bhargavas, in which Parashu Rdma is bom.
+ 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 masqui ! Even the famous astronomer Huygens laboured under the mistaken
idea that other worlds and planets have species of beings identical uith 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 ! ( Thiorie du Monde.)
t This is a modem 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.
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THE ONE AND THE MANY. 37
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 evefi
Dhydnic sight. The nuclei are the light of eternity escapiyig therefrom.
It is that Light vjhich condenses into the Forms of the ''Lords of Being''
— the first afid the highest of which are, collectively, JiVATMA, or Pratyag-
atmd {which is said figuratively to issue from Paramdtmd, It is the
Logos of the Greek philosophers — appearing at the beginning of every new
Manvantaral- 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 {Ele-
mentals'], having no form of their ow7i, but assuming every form according
to the surrounding conditions.
Thus there is but one Absolute Upddhi {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 Evolu-
tions during the active period.
The informing Intelligences, which animate these various Centres of
Being, are referred to indiscriminately by men beyond the Great Range*
as the Manus, the Rishis, the Pitris,\ the Prajdpati, and so on; and as
Dhydni'Buddhas, the Chohans, Melhas {Fire- Gods'], Bodhisattvas,\ and
others, on this side. The truly ignorant call them Gods; the learned pro-
fane, the One God; and the wise, the hiitiates, honour in them only the
manvantaric manifestations of That which neither our Creators [the
Dhydn Cho/ians'] 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 hiow the Immutable, nor can that which lives perceive Absolute
Life,
"Therefore, man cannot know higher Beings than his own Progeni-
* ** Beyond *' the Great Range, means, in this case, India, as being the Trans-Hini41ajan region for
the Tibetan region.
^ 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."
Mt is erroneous to take literally the worship of the human Bodhisattvas, or Manjushil. It is true
that, exoterically, the Mahiyina 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 Manjushr! personally that received honours, but the divine Bodhisattvas and
Dhyini-Buddhas that animated (amilakha, as the Mongolians say) the human forms.
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38 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
tors." ''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'etre. It is found among the ancient Americans, as
A
prominently as among the archaic Aryans and Egyptians. The ques-
tion will be fully dealt with in the second Part of this Volume; mean-
while a few facts may be given here. Says the author of the Sacred
Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,^00 years ago:*
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 quater-
nary, that is: Wisdom and Intellect; and a Trinity, or action and matter. The
Emperor Julian, in Matrem and in Oratio.f 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."J
And who that is acquainted with the PiiraiiaSy the Book of the Dead,
the Zendavesta, the Assyrian Tiles, and finally the Bible, and has ob-
served 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 ex-
plorer 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 /ami lit s
said by Sahagun and Clavigero to have accompanied the mystical personage named
Volan, the reputed founder of the great city of Nachan, identified by some with
Palenque. In Xh^ seven caves ^ from which the ancestors of the Nahualts are re-
• The author of this work is Augustus Le Plongreou. 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 Aryans and the Egyptians was derived from the Mayas. But, although certainly
coeval with Plato's Atlantis, the Mayas belonged to the Fifth Continent, which was preceded by
Atlantis and lyCmuria.
♦ More correctly In Matrem Deorum, Or alio v.
X P. 143-
} 'ITiese 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 bom.
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THE "seven" mystery. 39
ported to have emerged. In the seven cities of Cibola, described by Coronado and
Niza. ... In the seven Antilles ; in the seven lierocs 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 i, 3, 5, 7, as perfect,
because thoroughly mystic, numbers playing a prominent part in every
Cosmogony and evolution of living Beings. In China, i, 3, 5, 7, are
called "celestial numbers" in the canonical "Book of Changes" — Yi
King, or irans/onnalio?i, 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. Q, 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 Sephi-
roth, and the Egyptian Tau. Examine the Mexican MS. {Add. MSS,
Brit. Mus. 9789)*; 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 "]" (Tau), the ends of the two
branches, moreover, each bearing a triple bunch, with a bird — the bird of
immortality, Atma or the Divine Spirit — sitting between the two. and thus
making the seveyith. 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 (]), 10, born out of the two in-
visible 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 ^; the 5, ^ ; and the 7, or [aJ ; or again ^; the triangle in the
square and the synthesizing point in the interlaced double triangles.
This for the world of the archet^'pes. 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 f and 6
becoming 7, or the ^, 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
• The engraving is reproduced in the Sacred Mysteries of the Mayas and the Quiches on p. 134.
T Sec Source of Measures^ p. 50-53.
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40 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Uni-
verse. The two inseparables remain in the Universe of Ideas so long as
it lasts, and then merge back into Parabrahman, the One ever change-
less. "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 PurdnaSy the Bible, the Sepher
Yetzirah, the Greek and Latin Hymns, the Book of Hermes, the Chal-
daean 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 claj', or the "dust of the ground" — an
allegory indeed, but as scientific as an}^ 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 ie?i Sephi-
roth; which is a fundamental truth. He shows these Ten Sephiroth
or the ID Numbers as follows:
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,* 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 656i).t
• See Isis Unveiled, II. pp. 300 et seg., for a proof of the antiquity of the decimal system of fi^^ures.
t See Masonic Review, Cincinnati, June, 1886, Art. "The Cabbalah.— No. VI," p. 10.
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THE THREE KINDS OF LIGHT. 4I
Now there are three kinds of Light in Occultism, as in the Kabalah.
(i) 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 Dhyan Chohans, the minor Logoi
— the Elohim, collectively — ^who, in their turn, shed it on the objective
Universe. But in the Kabalah — reedited and carefully adjusted to fit
the Christian tenets by the Kabalists of the thirteenth century — the
three Lights are described as: (i) The clear and penetrating, that of
Jehovah[3t)(2) reflected ligh/^and (3) light in the abstract^ O^C^ f
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 pene-
trated to and made.*
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 anthropo-
morphic 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 Mani-
festation. 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.t
Similarly, Vishnu becomes the Sun, the visible symbol of the Im-
• Ibid., loc, cii. + Ibid., p. xx.
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42 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
personal Deity. Vishnu is described as ''striding through the seven
regions of the Universe in three steps'' But with the Hindus 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 men-
suration. 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 **?;/«« even Jehovah^' measure), viz., 113
to 355, have to be specialized.* But this last ratio is but a modified form of Light,
or 20612 to 6561, as a // 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 aonanner
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 **Z./^A/'* 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 expres-
sions 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 finst 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 (T), or (^, or the sacred Ten (numbers or Sephiroth), or Jod—^n6.
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.t
In the Sephcr 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.
• Sec Source of AUasuri's, pp. 276, et srq., App. VII.
+ Art., Masonic Rezne^v, pp. 11, 12.
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THE NUMBERS OF CREATION. 43
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 thirtj' 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, 5-ph-ry or number.
The prince Al-Chazari* 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 teach-
ing the ''Alhim-ness and One-ness through (DBRIM) " viz., the numbers of the
word " IVords" 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 x 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 :
and the Rabbi, in commenting upon them, says: "It teaches the Alhim-ness
(31415) and Ofte-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 (7«^-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
that is, the Rabbi, in his first comment, leaves the j'od, or /, out of one of the words,
whereas afterwards he restores it again. If we take the values of those subordinate
• In the Book Al-Chazari, by Jehuda-ha-Levi, translated by Dr. D. Cassel.
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44 'THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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.*
The reader is asked to turn to Stanza IV of Volume I, Shloka 3 and
Comnientar>%t to find that the 3, 4, (7), and the thrice seven, or 1065,
the number of Jehovah, is the number of the 21 Prajapati mentioned in
the Mahabharata, or the three Sephrim (words in ciphers or figures).
And this comparison between the Creative Powers of Archaic Philo-
sophy and the anthropomorphic Creator of exoteric Judaism (since the
Esotericisni 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 discover}^ 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 Kaba-
lists never cease to repeat that Primal Intelligence can never be under-
stood. It cannot be comprehended, nor can it be located, therefore it
has to remain nameless and negative. Hence the Ain Suph — the ** Un-
knowable" 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 nothings
now finds itself hopelessly stranded between Supernaturalism, or
Miracle, and Materialism. An extra-zo^xmo. God is fatal to Philosophy ;
an 2«/m-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.
• Art. cited, pp. 12, 13.
+ i. pp. X17 elseq.
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EVOLUTION NOT CREATION. 45
Such conceptions, thus formulated, became the ground-jvork of the philosophy
of the Divine manifesting in the universe.*
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 corres-
pond 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 fmmber, that is s'ph-r. ... By Sippor (s'phor) is to be understood the words
of Alhim (206 — I 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, t
This is materializing the spiritual without scruple. But the Kabalah
was not always so well adapted to an thropo- monotheistic conceptions.
Compare this with any of the six schools of India. For instance in
Kapila^s Stnkhya 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 nteans of Words is recog-
nized 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 Miiller's negation notwithstanding.
The Jews got their Adam from Chaldaea ; and Adam-Adami is a com-
pound 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 Aramaean, ''on^'' {Ad-ad, the **onlyone"); in Assyrian, **Father,"
whence Ak-ad or ** father-creator." J And once the statement is found
• Art. cited, p. 2.
t Ibid.y p. 14.
X The appellation Ak-ad (or Akkadians) is of the same class as Ad-m, Ha-va (Evei ^d-en (Eden) ;
Ak-Ad meaning " Son of Ad^^ like the sons of Ad in Ancient Arabia. Ad-ad, the " only one " and the
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46 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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, Brahmanical and Biblical. Yet there could be no such con-
fusion 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 Uni-
verse. 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 refer-
ence 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 reappearing in eternity, the anthropomor-
phized 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 ifihales
themr
Ideal Nature, the Abstract Space in which everything in the Uni-
verse is m3'steriously and invisibly generated, is the same female side
of the procreative power in Nature in the Vedic as in every other
Cosmogony. Aditi is 6ephira, 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 aronnd, within and without, there is the Unknow-
able 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 Chaldaean scripture, certainly earlier than the Mosaic
Books. In Assyrian Ad\s the **father,** and in Aramaean ^^is **one,"
and Ad-ad the "only one,** while Ak is in Assyrian "creator.** Thus
"first," was the Ad-on or " Lord *' of Syria and consort of Ad-ar-gat or Aster't, the Syrian Goddess.
And Gan-iEden (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-\i\ is the primitive light,
the AkAsha of the phenomenal world.
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ADAM KADMON. 47
Ad-am-ak-ad'tnon 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 oni 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-Kx^'aX. (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 Vach of the
Hindus. 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 Right-
eousness," and the Logoi, all symbolized by the Sun.* 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 ^his Father" — the "Father" becoming
during the later Races Helios, the Sun, as Apollo Karneios,t for in-
stance, who was the "Sun-born"; Osiris, Orniazd, 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 (Elohira-Javeli, also) and they engendered by
common power the earthly Adam.
Therefore in Genesis the Elohim say: "Behold Man is become as one
of usy But in Hindu Cosmogony or "Creation," Brahma- Prajapati
creates Viraj and the Rishis, spiritually; therefore the latter are dis-
• Adam -Jehovah, Brahmi and Mars are, in one sense, identical : they are all symbols for primitive
m '\n\\\^\ generative powers for the purposes of human procreation. Adam is red, and so also are
Brahmi-Viraj 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 KArttikeya, God of War (in one sense)— which God is bom of the
Sweat of Shiva, Shiva-gharmaja and the Earth. In the Mahdbh&rata he is shown as bom 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 Wi^ 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.)
t Apollo Karaeios is certainly a Greek transforaiation from the Hindu Krishna-Kama. Kama
means radiant, and Kameios, which was a title of Apollo with the Celts as with the Greeks, meant
"Sun-bom."
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48 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
tinctly called the **Mind-born Sons of Brahma"; 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 w^hen thy work is commenced. Raise thy voice to other
LOKAS; APPLY TO THY FATHER, THE LORD OF THE LOTUS* (a), FOR
HIS Sons .... Thy People shall be under the rule of the
Fathers.! Thy Men shall be mortals. The Men of the Lord
OF WlSDOM,J NOT THE SONS OF SOMA,§ ARE IMMORTAL. CeASE THY
COMPLAINTS {b). Thy Seven Skins are yet on thee. . . . Thou
ART NOT READY. ThY MEN ARE NOT READY " (r).
(a) Kuniuda-Pati is the Moon, the Earth's parent, in his region of
Soma-loka. Though the Pitris, or Fathers, are Sons of the Gods, else-
where Sons of Brahma and even Rishis, they are generally known as
the Lunar Ancestors.
(J)) 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 com-
mon 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 astro-
nomical 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 in-
telligent men, unless they are ** finished," so to say, by other creators.
Thus in the Puranic 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
• Kumuda-Pati.
+ Pitri-Pati.
X Budha, Mercury.
\ The Moon.
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THE FIRST V/AR IN HEAVEN. 49
Physicists are willing to admit. The whole cycle of the first "War in
Heaven," the Taraka-maya, is as full of philosophical as of cosmo-
gonical 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 Ttra, or Taraka, 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.*
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 hypo-
theses, 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 everj'^ 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,t
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 Modem Science, the Occultist maintains that the case
was as stated csons of years before even the evolution of the Lemurian,
the first physical man, which took place 18,000,000 years ago.
• 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 Briliaspati (the Planet Jupiter), or Brah-
manaspati, is, in the Rig Veda, a deity who is the symbol and the prototype of the exoUric 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 Hinda
Olympus and the spiritual Guru of the Gods. Soma is the Mjrstery God and presides over the mystic
and Occult nature in man and the Universe. T4r4, the priest's wife, who symbolizes the worshipper,
prefers Esoteric truths to their mere shell, exotcricism; 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 expand-
ing the cycle of this allegory we find Christian Theology espousing the quarrel of the Hindu Gods,
and regarding Ushanas (Lucifer), who helped Soma against that ancient personification of ritualistic
worship (Brahmanaspati, the Lord of the Brihmans, now become Jupiter-Jehovah) as Satan, the
"Enemy of God"!
+ 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.
B
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50 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
«
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 Jiva \^Monad\ when passing into a new womb, gets re-
covered with a new body, so does the Jiva of the Earth ; it gets a more
perfect and solid coveri7ig with each Round after re'emerging 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* cast off her old Three and put
ON HER NEW SE\^N SkINS, AND STOOD IN HER FIRST ONE.
This refers to the growth of the Earth, whereas in the Stanza treat-
ing of the First Round it is said in the Commentary:
'' After the changeless [Avikdra'] immutable Nature {^Essence, Sadaika-
rupa^ had awakened and changed [differentiated'] into [a state of] caus-
ality [Avyakta], and from cause [Kdrana] had become its own discrete
effect [ Vyakta\ from invisible it became visible. The smallest of the
small [the most atomic of atoms, or aniydnsam aniyasdm] became one
and the many [Ekdnekartipa] ; and producing the Universe produced
also the fourth Loka [our Earth] in the garland of the seven lotuses.
The Achyuta then became the Chyuta^]
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 begin-
ning of ever\' 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-Brdhmana the Sarpa-Rajni, 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
• The Earth.
i- Achyuta is an almost untranslatable term. It means that which is not subject to fall or change
for the worse: the Unfailing; and it is the reverse of Chyuta, the Fallen. The Dhyinis who incar-
nate in the human forms of the Third Root-Race and endow them with intellect (Manas) are called
the Chyuta. for they fall into generation.
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NARADA AND ASURAMAYA. 5 1
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, Narada 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 NSrada, the old
Vedic Rishi, and of Asuramaya, the Atlantean.
It has already been hinted that of all the incomprehensible charac-
ters in the Mahdbharata and the Purdnas, Narada, the son of Brahm^
in the Matsya Purdna, the progeny of Kashyapa and the daughter of
Daksha, in the Vishnu Purdna, is the most mysterious. He is referred
to by the honourable title of Deva-Rishi (Divine Rishi, rather than
Demi-God) by ParSshara, and yet he is cursed by Daksha and even by
Brahma. He informs Kansha that Bhagavan, or Vishnu in exoteri-
dsm, would incarnate in the eighth child of Devaki, and thus brings
the wrath of the Indian Herod upon Krishna's mother; and then, from
the clou^ on which he is seated — invisible as a true MSnasaputra — ^he
lauds Krishna, in delight at the Avatdr's feat of killing the monster
Keshin. Narada is here, there, and ever3rwhere; and yet, none of the
Purdnas gives the true characteristics of this great enemy of physical
procreation. Whatever those characteristics may be in Hindu Eso-
tericism, NSrada — ^who is called in Cis-HimSlayan Occultism Pesh-
Hun, the "Messenger," or the Greek Angelos — is the sole confidant
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52 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Hindu possession. He is the
mysterious guiding intelligent power, which gives the impulse to, and
regulates the impetus of Cycles, Kalpas and universal events * 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-
karaka, Strife-maker, Kapi-vaktra, Monkey-faced, and even Pishuna,
the Spy, though elsewhere he is called Deva-BrahmS. 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."t All
this, besides the fact that the Hindus believe him to be a great Rishi,
**who is for ever wandering about the earth, giving good counsel," led
the late Dr. KenealyJ to see in him one of his twelve Messiahs. He
was, perhaps, not so far off the real track as some imagine.
What Narada 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 Hindu 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 Narada. 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.
NSrada is one of the few prominent characters, if we except some
Gods, in the Purdnas, who visit the so-called nether or infernal
regions, PStala. Whether or not it was from his intercourse with the
thousand-headed Shesha, the Serpent who bears the Seven Patalas and
the entire world like a diadem upon his heads, and who is the great
teacher of Astronomy, § that Narada learned all that he knevy, certain
* This is perhaps the reason why, in Uie Bhagavad Gltd, we are told that Brahmi had communi-
cated to Nirada in the beginning that all men whatsoever, even Mlechchhas, outcasts and barbarians,
might know the true nature of V&sudeva and learn to have faith in that Deity.
+ See Asiatic Researches ^ i. 265.
t Book of God, 60.
\ Shesha, who is also Ananta, the infinite, and the " Cycle of Eternity" in Bsoteridsm, is credited
with having given his astronomical knowledge to Garga, the oldest astronomer of India, who pro-
pitiated him, and forthwith knew all about the Planets and how to read omens.
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THE MIRROR OF FUTURITY. 53
it is that he surpasses Garga's Guru in his knowledge of cyclic intri-
cacies. 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 re-
cords, 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-Narada. 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, how-
ever, those of the Brahmans, as explained further on : but most of
them are also those of the Secret Doctrine.
The chronology and computations of the BrShman 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 diffi-
culty. 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 main-
tain what is now stated. Asuramaya, to whom the epic tradition points
as the earliest Astronomer in Ary^varta, one to whom ** the Sun-God
imparted the knowledge of the stars," in propria persona, 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
g[row.
No doubt it ** might," but the vital question is: Are there any good
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54 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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.*
The MSyt 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 BrShmanical teach-
ing, 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 Hindu Purdnas
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 Hindus never knew of a Zodiac at all till
They had borrowed one from the Greeks, t
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. J
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 modem 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 men-
tioned was compiled by two very learned Brahmans§ in 1884 and 1885.
The work is proclaimed by the best Pandits as faultless — from the
— ■
• See The History of Indian Literature, p. 253. by Prof. A. Weber; in Triibuer's Oriental Series.
1- 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.
X Ibid., p. 2.
\ The Tirukkanda Panchanga, for the Kali Yugra 4986, by Chintamany Raghanaracharya, son of
the famous Government astronomer of Madras, and Xartakamala Venkata Krishna Rao.
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WHAT THE EARTH-WHIRL PRODUCED. 55
BrShmanical 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.* It con-
structed RuPAS;t SOFT Stones that hardened, J hard plants
THAT S0FTENED.§ VISIBLE FROM INVISIBLE, INSECTS AND SMALL
Lives. II She^ shook them off her back whenever they over-
ran 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 Chaldsean account of creation, on the Cutha Tablets,
however mutilated.
It is not even allegory. Here we have facts, that are found repeated
• Of jrcars, 300 million years, or Three Occult Ages. The Rig Veda has the same division. In the
"Physician's Hymn," (X 97 i) it is said that "the plants came into being Three Ages (Triyugam)
before the gods " on our Earth. (See " Chronology of the Brahmans " at the end of this Stanza.)
+ Forms.
X Minerals.
) Vegetation.
[| Sarisripa, svapada.
IT The Earth.
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56 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
in the account of the Pymander, as well as in the Chaldaean 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 ab-
surdity? 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 Purdnas, the Egyptian and Chaldaean fragments,
and even in Genesis, there have not been two, and even more, "crea-
tions," 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 Cos-
mogony, but also with Modem 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 Chaldaeans, 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 Hindu Purdnas, Brahm^, the Creator, is seen recommencing
de novo several "Creations" after as many failures; and two great Crea-
tions are mentioned,* the PSdma and the Varaha, the present, when
the Earth was lifted out of the water by BrahmS, in the shape of a
Boar, the Varaha Avatara. Creation is shown as a sport, an amuse-
ment (LilS) 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 f that
"the Holy One" had successively created and destroyed sundry Worlds,
before he succeeded in the present one. This does not relate only to
• These two must not be confused with the Seven Creations or Divisions in each Kalpa. The
Primary and Secondary Creations are here meant,
t In Bereichith Rabba^ Parscha IX.
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THE MONSTERS OF CHAOS. 57
Other Worlds in Space, but to a mystery of our own Globe contained
in the allegor>' about the "Kings of Edom." For the words, **This
one pleases me," are repeated in Genesis* though in disfigured terms,
as usual. The Chaldseau 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 ;t
and as shown by the author of The Qabbalah, in the Zohar, Siphra
Dtzenioutha, in Jovah Rabba, 128a, etc., the Kabalah states the same.
{p) Cannes, or Dagon, the Chaldsean *' Man-fish," divides his Cos-
mogony 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 "J — 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 femi-
nine 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. $
As pertinently remarked by Isaac Mj'er:
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 ||
A
phallicism. With the Aryan and the earliest Akkadians all things
• i. 31.
•i Sec Hibbert Lectures, 1887, Sayce, p. 390.
% 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 Yu (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 J). 1368) states that it was compiled by Rung 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
inight destroy the books treating of the ancient time, carried them in his flight to Yin."
I Cory's Ancient Fragments, original edition, p. 25.
il Qabbalah, p. 246.
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58 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
are emanations through^ not by, a Creator or lyOgos. With the Semites
everything is begotten.
6. The Water-Men, terrible and bad, she herself createi>
FROM THE remains OF OTHERS * FrOM THE DROSS AND SLIME OF HER
First, Second, and Third, f she formed them. The Dhyani came
AND LOOKED THE DhYANI FROM THE BRIGHT FATHER-
MOTHER, FROM THE WHITE t REGIONS THEY§ 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 quali-
ties of the primary ethereal bodies of men, which could fly as well as
they could walk,|| 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 a^id vice versa, in Nature's early
efforts? Are we not shown, during the geological periods, in the ages
• From the miueral, vegretable, and animal remains.
+ Rounds.
X Solar-lunar.
\ Gods and Planetary Spirits, especially the Ribhus. " The three Ribhus" who also become "thrice
seven " in number of their gifts.
II Remember the "winged races " of Plato, and the Popol- Vuh accounts of the first human rac^
which could walk, fly, and see objects, however distant.
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UNAIDED PHYSICAL NATURE FAILS. 59
of the reptiles and the mammalia, lizards with birds* wings, and
serpents' heads on animal bodies?* 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 show^n 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" aniraaLf
♦ See Mythical Monsters ^ by Charles Gould.
+ In the first volume of the lately published Introduction h vAtude 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 ph3rsical 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 creatines 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.
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^ the secret doctrine.
7. Displeased they were. "Our Flesh is not there.* No fit
RuPAs for our Brothers of the Fifth. No Dwellings for the
LivEs.f Pure Waters, not turbid, they must drink (a). I^et us
DRY THEM."t
(a) Says the Catechism on the Commentaries:
// 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^ [^the Monad,
called also the ^'Double Dragon^''] descend from the Spheres of Expecta-
tion,\ But they are like a roof with no walls, nor pillars to rest upon, . . .
Man 7ieeds four Flames and three Fires to become one on Earth, and he
requires the essence of the forty-nine Fires^ to be perfect. It is those who
have deserted the Superior Spheres, the Gods of Will,** 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,]] on Earth [at frsf] the one
becomes two. They are like the two \_side'] lines of a triajigle that has lost
its bottom line — which is the third Fire, %%
Now this requires some explanation before proceeding any further.
To do so especially for the benefit of our Aryan Hindu brethren — ^whose
Esoteric interpretations may differ from bur own — we shall have to ex-
plain to them the foregoing by certain passages in their own exoteric
• They said.
+ The Monads of the "presentments" of men of the Third Round, the hug^ ape-like fonns.
t The Waters.
\ In the Esoteric Sjrstem the seven "principles" in man are represented by seven letters. The first
two are more sacred than the four letters of the Tetragjammaton.
II The Intermediate Spheres, wherein the Monads, which have not reached Nirvdna, are said to
slumber in unconscious inactivity between the Manvantaras.
IT Explained elsewhere. The Three Fires, Pavaka, Pavamana, and Shuchi, who had forty-five Sons,
who, with their three Fathers, and their Father Agfni, constitute the forty-nine Fires. Pavamina,
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 P&vaka, Electric Fire, is the Father of the *' Fire of the Pitris." (Sec
y&yu Purdna.) 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 th^ /our
lower, and the three higher human "principles."
•• The Suras, who become later the A -Suras.
ft Atm4, 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.
Xt Catechism, Book iii. Sec. 9.
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THE BODIES OF BRAHMA. 6l
books, namel}', the Purdnas, In the allegories of the latter, BrahmS,
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.*
It is now proposed to examine the exoteric account in the Vishnu
Piirdna, and see how much it may agree or disagree with our Occult
version.
CREATION OF DIVINE BEINGS IN THE EXOTERIC ACCOUNTS.
In the Viskfiu Purd^ia, which is certainly the earliest of all the
scriptures of that name, we find, as in all the others, BrahmS, as the
male God, assuming, for purposes of creation, ''four Bodies invested by
three qualities." f It is said :
In this manner, Maitreya, Jyotsnd (dawn), Rdtri (night), Ahan (day), and Sandhyd
(evening [twilight]) are the four bodies of Brahmd.J
As Parashara explains it, when Brahma wishes to create the world
anew and construct progeny through his will, in the fourfold condition,
or the four Orders of Beings, termed Gods(Dhyan Chohans), Demons §
(/.^., more material Devas), Progenitors (Pitris) and Men, ** he collects
[Yoga-like] his mind into itself" (Yuyuge).
Strange to say, he begins by creating Demons, who thus take pre-
cedence over the Angels or Gods. This is no incongruity, nor is it due
to inconsistency, but has, like all the rest, a profound Esoteric mean-
ing, quite clear to one free from Christian theological prejudice. He
who bears in mind that the principle Mahat, or Intellect, the ** Uni-
versal Mind" (literally the **Great"), which Esoteric Philosophy
explains as the ** Manifested Omniscience" — the ** first product" of
PradhSna, Primordial Matter, as the Vishnu Purdna says, but the
first Cosmic Aspect of Parabrahman or the Esoteric Sat, the Universal
Soul, II as Occultism teaches — is at the root of SELF-Consciousness,
• Sec yishnu PurAna, Book I. Ch. V., closing Shloka. Fitzedward Hall's rendering of the text, in
\^l£on'6 Translation, i. 88. Also Afdnava-Dharma Shdsira, i. 30.
1- This has in Esotericism a direct bearing upon the seven " principles '* of the manifested Brahmi,
or Universe, in the same order as in man. Exoterically, it is only four ** principles."
t Wilson's Translation, i. 8z.
\ Demons is a very loose word to use, as it applies to a great number of inferior— x.^., more material
—Spirits, or minor Gods, who are so termed because they " war" with the higher ones; but they are
no devils.
ii The same order of principles in man: Atmd (Spirit), Buddhi (Soul), its vehicle, as Matter is the
Vihan of Spirit, and Manas (Mind), the third, or the fifth microcosmically. On the plane 0/ person-
alitjf, Manas is the first.
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62 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
will understand the reason why. The so-called Demons — ^who are
Esoterically the Self-asserting and intellectually active Principle — are
\h^ positive pole of creation, so to say; hence, the first produced. This
is in brief the process as narrated allegorically in the Purdnas,
Having concentrated his mind into itself and the Quality of Darkness pervading
Brahmd'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
Brahmli'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. (J)) 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 Crea-
tion," whose mystery must remain for ever "Darkness " to the prying
finite conception and intellect of the profane, and the Secondary Evo-
lution of manifested visible Nature. The Veda contains the whole
philosophy of that division, without having ever been correctly ex-
plained by our Orientalists, since it has never been understood by them.
Continuing to create, BrahmS assumes another form, that of the Day,
and creates from his Breath the Gods, who are endowed with the
Quality of Goodness (Passivity).* 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, BrahmS "thought of himself [during the
process] as the father of the world." f This is KriyS-shakti — the
• Thus, says the Commentary, the saying, " by day the Gods are most powerful, and by night the
Demons," is purely allegorical.
t 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 moun-
tain 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 with-
out Will is like a wind- mill without ze/f'nef— barren of results.
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THK FOUR CM.SSES OP CREATORS. 63
mysterious Yoga-power explained elsewhere. This body of BrahmS
when cast oflF became the Sandhyt, Evening Twilight, the interval
between Day and Night.
Finally Brahma 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 oflF became the Dawn, or Morning Twilight —
the Twilight of Humanity. Here BrahmS stands Esoterically for the
Pitris. He is collectively the Pita, ** Father."
The true Esoteric meaning of this allegory must now be explained.
BrahmS here symbolizes personally the Collective Creators of the World
and Men — ^the Universe with all its numberless productions of things
movable and (seemingly) immovable.* He is collectively the PrajS-
patis, the I^ords of Being; and the four bodies typify the four Classes
of Creative Powers or DhySn 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 com-
prehension of these Four Bodies of Brahm^.
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 theo-
logical groove.
Purely BrShmatiical considerations, based on greed of power and
ambition, allowed the masses to remain in ignorance of great truths;
and the ^ame 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
• The same idea is found in the first four chapters of Genesis, with their "I/)rd" and "God,"
ivfaich are the Slohim and the Androgynous Eloha.
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64 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
exoteric form. Thus, as the Asuras had become the rebellious inferior
Gods fighting the higher ones in popular creeds, so the highest Arch-
angel, in truth the Agathodaemon, the eldest benevolent Logos, became
in theology the ** Adversar}'" or Satan. But is this warranted by the
correct interpretation of any old Scripture? The answer is: most cer-
tainly not. As the Mazdean Scriptures of the Zend Avesta, the Vendi-
dad and others correct and expose the later cunning shuffling of the
Gods in the Hindu Pantheon, and restore through Ahura the Asuras
to their legitimate place in Theogony, so the recent discoveries of the
Chaldsean tablets vindicate the good name of the first divine Emana-
tions. 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 ver>' accounts upon
which the Pharisees built their Angelology? Compare Mr. George
Smith's Assyrian Discoveries* and his Chaldean Account of Genesis.f
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 y?r5/ 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 re-
mained unbroken, so that there can be no dubious reading, that the
** Rebellious Angels" had been created in the ** lower part of heaven,"
i,e,y that they belonged and do belong to a material plane of evolution,
• p. 398. + p. 107.
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WHAT THE GNOSTICS SAY. 65
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 aflSrming 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 Chaldaean 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 "Mes-
sengers 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 Theo-
logy: 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 alle-
gory. It sets forth at one end of the ladder of Evolution the "rebel-
lion," /.^., 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
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I
66 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 allegor>^ 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 TdrakSmaya, against the Devas in PurSnic 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 W,— Continued,
8. The F1.AMES 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*
OF THE High; the LhamayinI of Bei*ow, 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
Spirits. + Also Spirits.
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WHO ARE THE FLAMES? 67
Isaiah,* 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.
(^) 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 dis-
appeared 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 histor>' of our Planet in its Fourth
Round? Modem research has been busy of late in its speculations on
the Palaeozoic 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
• vi. 2-6.
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68 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
equal to gravity — the latter was overcome, and the tidally elevated mass
could thus separate completely from the Earth.*
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."
lO. WHENf THEY WERE DESTROYED, MOTHER EaRTH REMAINED
BARE.J She asked to be DRIED.§
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 A/V\> ^ water
hieroglyph. It is the Universal Matrix or the ** Great Deep." Venus,
the gpreat Mother- Virgin, issues forth from the sea-wave, and Cupid or
Eros is her son. But Venus is the later mythological variant of Gaea,
Gaia, the Earth, which, in its higher aspect is Prakriti, Nature, and
* But see the difficulties suggested later, in the works of various Geologists, against this theoiy.
Compare Sir R. S. Ball's articles in Nature, xxv, 79-82, xo3-zo7, Nov. 24 and Dec. i, x88i.
f The Rfipas.
t The Goddess who gave birth to these primordial monsters, in the account of Beroeus, was Tha-
latth, in Greek Thalassa, the "Sea."
) See, for comparison, the account of creation by Berosus, as preserved in Alexander Polyhistor,
and the hideous beings bom from the two-fold principle— Earth and Water— in the abyss of Primor-
dial Creation : Naris (Centaurs, men with the limbs of horses and human bodies), and Kinnaros
<men with the heads of horses) created by Brahmi in the commencement of the Kalpa.
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DIVINE WILL BECOMES ER6S. 69
metaphysically Aditi, and even Mulaprakriti, the Root of Prakriti, or
its noumenon.
Hence Cupid or Love in his primitive sense is Eros, the Divine
Will, or Desire of manifesting itself through visible creation.
Thence Fohat, the prototype of Eros, 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 Gaea, 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-Gaea who begets
Ouranos or Varuna, the chief Aditya among the seven Planetary
Gods, but Prakriti, materialized and localized. The Moon, mas-
culine 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 modem 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 BrShmans shall now be
given as faithfully as possible.
THE CHRONOLOGY OF THE BRAhMANS.
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
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70 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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. Pen-
gelly, the eminent Geologist, "We do not know."* 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 Anthro-
pology are at sea. Yet when a student of Esoteric Philosophy pre-
sumes 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 pro-
ceed 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
Encyclopedia 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
* For a similar admission see Prof. I<ef^vre's Philosophy, 481.
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THE RACE THAT NEVER DIES. 71
an approximate idea of the duration of the geological Ages — save in a
few conflicting and contradictory hypotheses — let us see what Aryan
Philosophy can teach us.
Such computations as are given in Maiiu and the Purdnas — 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 Hindu calendar of recognized
orthodox}'.
The best and most complete of all such calendars, at present, as
vouched for by the learned BrShmans 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,€.y of the islands of Atlantis.
The "White Island" is a symbolical name. Asuramaya is said to
have lived, as in the tradition of the Jndna-bhdskara, in Romaka-pura,
in the West; because the name is an allusion to the land and cradle of
the ** Sweat-bom" 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 Surya,
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-bom Races,
the men bom from the "pores of their parents." "Roma-kCtpas"
mean "hair-pores" in Sanskrit. In the Mahdbhdrata* a people named
Raumas are said to have been created from the pores of Virabhadra,
the terrible giant, who destroyed Daksha's sacrifice. Other tribes and
people are also represented as bom in this way. All these are refer-
ences 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 Arya
Samaj school :
/• xii. 10^08.
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72 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
I. From the beginning of Cosmic Evolution,* up to the Hindii
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.t
III. Time, from the first appearance of *' Humanity*' (on our
Planetary Chain) 1,664,500,987 years.t
IV. The number that elapsed since the Vaivasvata, Man van tara"^
— 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 Brahmd, or a complete Manvantara, or 4,320,000,000 years.
Therefore a Mahd Yuga consists of 4,320,000 years.||
The year 1887 is from the commencement of Kali Yuga 4.989 years.
• The Esoteric Doctrine says that this " Cosmic Evolution " refers only to our Solar S>'stem ; while
exoteric Hind&ism makes the figures refer, if we do not mistake, to the whole Universal System.
t 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, re-
forming 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 crystalliza-
tion 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 Brdhmanical figures refer to evolution beginning
on Globe A, and in the First Round. In this Volume we speak only of this, the Fourth Round.
X 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 Day4nand Sarasvati,
founder of the Arya Sam^j, gives a date of 1,960,852,987. See the Arya Magazine of Lahore, the cover
of which bears the words : *' Aryan era 1,960,852,987."
I Vaivasvata Mann is the one Human Being — some versions add to him the seven Rishis— who in
the Matsya Avatara 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 Naiiuitika, Occasional or Incidental, Pr&kritika, Elemental,
Atyantika, the Absolute, and Nitya, the Perpetual Pralaya; the latter being described as "Brahmd's
contingent recoalescence of the Universe at the end of Brahma's Day." The question was raised by
a learned Brdhman Theosophist : " Whether there is such a thing as Cosmic Pralaya; because, other-
wise, the Logos (Krishna) would have to be reborn, and he is Aja (unborn)." We cannot see why.
The Logos is said to be bom only metaphorically, as the Sun is bom daily, or rather a beam of that
Sun is bom in the morning and is said to die when it disappears, whereas it is simply reSbsorbed
into the parent essence. Cosmic Pralaya is for things visible, not for the Arfipa, Formless, World.
The Cosmic or Universal Pralaya comes only at the end of one hundred Years of Brahm&, when the
Universal Dissolution is said to take place. Then the A\'yaya, say the exoteric Scriptures, the Eternal
Life symbolized by Vishnu, assuming the character of Rudra, the Destroyer, enters into the Seven
Rays of the Suu 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."
II Since a MahiL Yuga is the i, 000th part of a Day of Brahraii.
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YUGAS AND KALPAS. 73
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.
Mortal Years.
360 days of mortals make a year i
Krita Yuga contains 1,728,000
Treta Yuga contains 1,296,000
Dv^para Yuga contains 864,000
Kali Yuga contains 432,000
The total of the said four Yugas constitute a Maha
Yuga 4,320,000
Seventy-one of such MahA Yugas form the period of
the reign of one Manu 306,720,000
The reign of fourteen Manus embraces the duration
of 994 MahA Yugas, which is equal to 4,294,080,000
Add Sandhis, j.^., intervals between the reign of
each Manu, which amount to six Mahd Yugas,
equal to 25,920,000
The total of these reigns and interregnums of four-
teen Manus, is 1,000 MahA Yugas, which consti-
tute a Kalpa, i.e.y one Day of Brahmd 4,320,000,000
As Brahm&'s Night is of equal duration, one Day and
Night of BrahmA would contain 8,640,000,000
360 of such days and nights make one Year of Brahma,
equal to 3,110,400,000,000
100 such Years constitute the whole period of
Brahm4*s Age, i.e., Mahd Kalpa 31 1,040,000,000,000
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 Brahmanical 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) Brahman, and the Purdnas 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 Nirada 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
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74 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
a serv^ant of the Evil One, would have it; nor were they w^orse than
many of **the faithful sons of the Church." A Torquemada and a
Catherine de Medicis certainly did more harm in their day, and in the
name of their Master, than any Atlantean Giant or Demigod of anti-
quity 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
Rakshasas and Yakshas of Lanka are no worse than our modem
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, Kamac or Stonehenge,
remarks somewhere a modem writer.
As the Brahmanical figures given above are approximately the basic
calculations of our Esoteric System, the reader is requested to carefully
keep them in mind.
In the EncyclopcEdia Britannica we find, as the last word of Science,
that the antiquity of man is allowed to stretch only over **tens of thou-
sands 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 wdthout 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.*
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 ia
the Finmark.t
Thus, had it not been for the lessons taught by the Secret Doctrine,,
and even by exoteric Hinduism 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
• op. cit.. Art. "Geology."
t Ibid. This allows a chance even to the Biblical " Adam Chronology " of 6,000 years.
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VARIATIONS OF EXACT SCIENCE. 75
of the several reasons why, with all the respect due to the conclusions of
the men of learning of our modem 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 forma-
tions, there is no theory, they are based on positive facts, limited only by a certain
possible [?] amount of error either way.*
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 preeminence
for correctness over Astronomy, we find a passage in flagrant contra-
diction to the admissions of the best Geologists themselves. Says the
author:
In short, the conclusions of Geology, at any rate up to the Silurian periodt 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. J
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 loo 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. §
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) Aryan chronology," the
Scientist of the "results incredibly short," /.<?., 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 1| "since sedi-
mentation began in Europe," would all be as dogmatic the one as the
• Modem Science and Modern Thought, 48.
t To the Silurian period as regards molluscs and animal life — granted ; but what do they know of
man?
% rbid., loc, cit.
\ Ibid., 49.
B WincheU, World-Life, 180.
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^6 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
other. Nor would they fail to remind the Occultist and the Brahman,
that it is the modem men of Science alone who represent exact Science,
whose duty it is to fight "inaccuratcy" 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 loo millions of years oflFered by Geology,
since we are taught that our present physical mankind — or the Vaivas-
vata 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 approxi-
mately, geological time into years or even into millenniums.
And having never, hitherto, excavated a fossil man of an}^ other
than th^ 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 ver>^ material to **the
bearings of modern scientific discovery on modern thought," whether
Man has existed in a state of constant though vslow 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,*
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 Hindu Chronology is constantly represented by the
Orientalists as a fiction based on no ** actual" computation,! 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 Maha Yugas.
• op. cil., 49. + Wilson's I'ishnu Purdna, i. 51.
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COSMOGONY AN INTELLIGENT PLAN. 77
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 Miiller 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 computa-
tions— by allowing them a fair chance of comparison with our Chrono-
logy— 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, /sis Unvdledy * 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 com-
binations, 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 reaction 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, aflfect 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 "end exoteric," so to say.
In Isis Unveiled v^t, 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
• i. 3«.
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78 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Eliphas
Levi 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 ever>^hing pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period.
The Occult powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympa-
thize 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 centur>% 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.
II. The Descent of the Demiurge. 12. The Lunar Gods ordered to create. 13.
The Higher Gods refuse.
II. The Lord op the Lords came. From her Body he sepa-
rated THE Waters, and that was Heaven above, the First
Heaven.*
Here tradition falls again into the Universal. As in the earliest
version, repeated in the Purdnas, so in the latest, the Mosaic account.
In the first it is said :
• The atmosphere, or the air, the firmament.
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THE LORDS OF THE MOON. 79
He the Lord [the God who has the form of BrahmAJ 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
f Manvantara] he had assumed the shape of a tortoise, so in this one he took the
3bape of a boar, etc.*
In the Elohistic "creation,"! **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 ChohansJ called the Lords of the Moon, of
THE Airy Bodies: "Bring forth Men,§ Men of your nature.
Give them|| their Forms within. She^j will build Coverings
^WITHOUT.** 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
wlio is the "Lord of the Moon," collectively as the Host, and also as
one of the Elohim. The Astronomy of the Hebrews and their "ob-
servance of times'' was regulated by the Moon. A Kabalist, having
shown that "Daniel . . . told oflF 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 TT\XV [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 Hindfi "war between the gods and the
giants," as marked by the eclipse of the sun at the ascending node of the moon,
• Harivamsha, i. 36.
t Genesis, i. 6-9.
X Lords.
\ They were told.
II ».<»., the Jivas or Monads.
IT Mother Earth or Nature.
•• For external bodies.
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8o THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
945 B.C. [!], at which time was born,* or produced from the sea, SRI (Sarai, S-r-i, the
wife of the Hebrew Abramt), 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."} . . . [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 moun-
tain! Yet, in one sense, . . . she was, and in a very marvellously true one.
Her name was Hagar, Hebrew "i^n* 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, TtlW* giving to her the property of this lunar influence.}
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
Brahma and Sarasvati, or Shri, Lakshmi-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 BrahmS, 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 Astro-
nomy and Cosmolatry.
* According: to the wonderful chronology of Bentley, who wrote in days when Biblical chronology
was still undisputed; and also according to that of those modem Orientalists who dwarf the Hindfl
dates as far as they can.
t Now Shr! is the daughter of Bhrigu, one of the Praj&patis and Rishis, the chief of the Bhrigus,
the "Consumers," the ASrial Class of Gods. She is I^akshm!, the wife of Vishnu, and she is Gauif,
the "bride of Shiva," and she is Sarasvatt, the "watery," the wife of Brahmi, because the three
Gods and Goddesses are one, under three aspects. Read the explanation by Par&shara, in Vishnu
PurAna (I. viii., Wilson's Trans., i. 119), and you will understand. "The lord of Shri is the moon,"
he says, and "Shri is the wife of Nirilyana, the God of Gods " ; Shii or I«akshmt (Venus) is Indr&nf,
as she is Sarasvati, for in the words of Pariahara: "Hari [or Ishvara, the "I^ord"] is all that is called
male [in the Universe] ; I^akshm! is all that is termed female. There is nothing else than they."
Hence she is female, and "God" is male Nature.
X Shrt is Goddess of, and herself "Fortune and Prosi)erity."
\ Masonic Review (Cincinnati), June, 1886. Art. "The Cabbalah.— No. VI," 15-17.
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the various ci^sses of creators. 8 1
13. They* went each on his allotted Land : Seven of them,
BACH 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 diflferent
Race of men externally and internally, and on diflferent 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 Hindu books mention Seven Classes of Pitris, and among
them two distinct kinds of Progenitors or Ancestors: the Barhishad and
the Agnishvatta; or those possessed of the "sacred fire" and those
devoid of it. Hindu ritualism seems to connect them with sacrificial
fires, and with Grihastha Brahmans in earlier incarnations; those who
have, and those who have not attended as they should to their house-
hold sacred fires in their previous births. The distinction, as said, is
derived from the Vedas, The first and highest class (Esoterically), the
Agnishvatta, are represented in the exoteric allegory as Grihastha or
Brahman-householders, who, having failed to maintain their domestic
fires and to oflFer burnt sacrifices, in their past births in other Manvan-
taras, have lost every right to have oblations with fire presented to
them. Whereas the Barhishad, being Brthmans who have kept up their
household sacred fires, are thus honoured to this day. Thence the
AgnishvStta are represented as devoid of, and the Barhishad as possessed
of, fires.
But Esoteric Philosophy explains the original qualifications as being
due to the diflference between the natures of the two Classes: the
Agnishvttta Pitris are devoid of "fire" /.<?., 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
Brahmt, his first progeny:
• The Moon-Gods.
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82 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Were without desire or passion, inspired with holy wisdom, estranged from the
universe and undesirous of progeny.*
This also is what is meant in the shloka by the words, "They wotild
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 r
This makes it plain. Hence Brahma is said to have felt wrathful
when he saw that those
Embodied spirits, produced from his limbs \^gdtra\ would not multiply them-
selves.
After which, in the allegor>% he creates other seven Mind-bom Sonsf
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 refer-
ring 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 Prajapati, and at the same time they
appear as divers reincarnations in the early Manvantaras or Races.
It thus becomes clear why the Agnishvatta, 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 Yogis, KumSras (chaste youths), who
became "rebels," Asuras, fighting and opposing Gods, J 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 pos-
sessed 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 Brahma — the collective Mahat or
• Vishnu Pur&na, I. vii., Wilson's Trans., i. loi.
t See Mahabhdrata, Mokshadharma J^rvan.
t 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 Yogis, 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-Yog!s are shown in the Purdnas 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 Infinitb and the
Absolute.
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THE LIVING SPIRITUAL FIRE. 83
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 them-
selves to the good and salvation of Spiritual Humanity. For, to com-
plete 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 ** Prin-
ciples" are needed : Manas and KSma. This requires a living Spiritual
Fine of the middle Principle from the Fifth and Third States of Pleroma.
But this Fire is the possession of the Triangles, not of the (perfect)
Cubes, which symbolize the Angelic Beings;* 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 AgnishvStta — 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 Atman 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 Ktrana Sharira on the plane of SutrStmS, 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 NirvSnis from preceding
Maha-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 VedSntins might
say : " This is not so ; the NirvSn! 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
* The Triansfle becomes a Pentagon (five-fold) on Earth.
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84 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Nirvana, reemerges from it in its integrity on the day when the Great Law
calls all things back into action^
Hence, as the higher Pitris or DhySnis had no hand in his physical
creation, we find Primeval Man — issued from the bodies of his spirittmlly
"fireless" Progenitors^-described as aeriform, 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 incar-
nated in those empty Shells, remained as unconscious as when separated
from their previous incomplete forms and vehicles. There is no poten-
tiality 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 differen-
tiated. 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 VedaSy 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 BrahmS. Hence, also, the "First-bom" are
those who are first set in motion at the beginning of a Manviantara,
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 comprehen-
sible, 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 aeons 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
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MAN A GOD IN ANIMAL FORM. 85
reflection of Mahat in its various degrees of intensity. No Entity,
whether angelic or human, can reach the state of NirvSna, or of
absolute purity, except through aeons of suflFering and the knowledge
of evil as well as of good, as otherwise the latter would remain in-
comprehensible.
Between man and the animal — whose Monads, or Jivas, are funda-
mentally 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— oi a higher Being; one from a higher
and divine plane? Can man — a God in the animal form — be the pro-
duct of Material Nature by evolution alone, even as is the animal,
which diflFers 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 modem Sciences.
To some extent, it is admitted that even the Esoteric Teaching is
allegorical. To make the latter comprehensible to the average intelli-
gence, the use of symbols cast in an intelligible form is needed.
Hence the allegorical and semi-mj^hical narratives in the exoteric,
and the only ^«wf-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 Commentar>'. 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 Puranas, 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 BibUy
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
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86 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
the original the Elohim, or Gods (the Lords), in the phiral; 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.* Or again, as Paul says:
The first man is of the earth, the second [the last, or rather highest] is the Lord
from heaven, t
In the Aryan allegory the rebellious Sons of BrahmS are all repre-
sented as holy Ascetics and Yogis. Re-bom in every Kalpa, they
generally try to impede the work of human procreation. When Dak-
sha, the chief of the Prajapatis or Creators, brings forth 10,000 sons
for the purpose of peopling the world, Narada — a son of BrahmS, the
great Rishi, and virtually a Kumara, 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 NSrada
to be "re-bom as a man," as Brahnii had cursed him before for re-
fusing 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. J
Notwithstanding several conflicting versions of the same story, it is
easy to see that Narada belongs to that Class of BrahmS*s "First-
born,** w^ho have all proven rebellious to the law of animal procreation,
for which they had to incarnate as men. Of all the Vedic Rishis,
Narada, 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 dis-
tracted the Orientalists. Thus he is shown as refusing positively to
"create** or have progeny, and even as calling his father BrahmS a
"false teacher** for advising him to get married, as related in the
Narada- Pancha-Ratra ; nevertheless, he is referred to as one of the
Prajapatis or Progenitors! In the Naradiya Purdna, he describes the
• 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/r»»»«/iw^orf of Northern Egypt and Palestine," says Staniland Wake, in The Great Pyramid
(p. 61). And Seth became considered in the later Theologj' of the Egyptians as an "evil demon,"
says the same Bunsen, for he is one with Typhon and one with the Hindfi Demons as a logical sequel.
t I Corinth., xv. 47.
X Vdyu Purdna; Harivfimsha, 170.
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"FIRES," "SPARKS," AND "FLAMES." 87
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 Brahmans are proclaimed
liars; the Orientalists forgetting that the Naradiya 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 Hindu profane, those who are
ready to sell any precious OUa for a red pottage. Suffice it to say, that
NSrada is the Deva-Rishi of Occultism par excellence^ and that the
Occultist who does not ponder, analyze, and study Narada from his
seven Esoteric facets, will never be able to fathom certain anthropo-
logical, 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 Manvan-
taric drama, in the world-allegories which strike the key-note of Eso-
tericism, 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 lycsser Holy
Assembly." The language is very mystical and veiled, yet still com-
prehensible. In the latter, among the sparks of Prior Worlds, "vibra-
ting 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 "un-
manifested" 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 con-
cealed.
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88 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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.*
Now the following extract from the Zohar,\ under the heading,
"The Pre- Adamite Kings," also deals with the same mystery:
' We have learned in the Siphrah D'Tznioothah: That the At-te^kah EPAUte^kecn,
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-iee'-kah
lyAV-te^-keeHy Ancient of the Ancients, arranged Himself. When he arranged
Himself He formed all forms Above and Below. . . . Before He arranged Him-
self 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.X
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 preexisting 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 creat-
ing 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 perfec-
tion, in this present stage of materiality. Chokmah, Wisdom, the
Male Sephira, had to diffuse itself fw, 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.y the First Race, instead of dying, disappeared in the Second
Race, as certain lower lives and plants do in their progeny. It was a
• See Mather's Kabbalah Unveiled, p. 302.
+ Translated in Isaac Myer's Qabbalah, p. 386.
t Zohar iii., 135a, 292a, Idra Zootah. Brody Ed. Idrah Zootah,
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THE SON OF YAH. 89
wholesale transformation. The First became the Second Root-Race,
without either begetting it, procreating it, or dying.
"Th^y passed by together," as it is written: "And he died" and another "reigned
in his stead."*
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 *) (Yod) in the n (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. t
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
Chaldaean Book of Numbers. We have said so already in his 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 linghatn . . . the Mah^ Deva." Before casting slurs on a symbol whose
profound metaphysical meaning is too much for the modern champions of that
religion of sensualism par excellencey 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 modem
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. {
• Gen. xxvi. 31 et seq. ; Myer's Qabbalah, ibid.
+ Zohar, iii. 290a, Brody Ed. Indrah Zootah, quoted in Isaac Myer's Qabbaiah, pp. 387, 388.
t'±s-
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90 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Aryas, 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 per-
plexed how to create a thinking me^n. 17. What is needed for the formation of a
perfect Man.
14. The Seven Hosts, the Will-born* Lords, propelled by
THE Spirit of LiFE-GiviNG,t separate Men from themselves,
EACH ON HIS OWN ZONE.
They threw ofif their "Shadows" or Astral Bodies — if such an ethe-
real 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 Brahmst 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 pro-
cesses 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
• Or Mind-born. t Fohat.
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MAN NOT CREATED PERFECT. 9 1
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 nothingy
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."* Between these two fallacies, Occult
Philosophy steps in. It teaches that the first human stock was pro-
jected 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.
• " 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 neces-
sary conclusion follows that the human race has evolved gradually from the true apes.^* ( The Pedigree
of Marty by Ernst Hseckel, 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.)
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92 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
There was a spiritual, a psychic, an intellectual, . and an animal evo-
lution, from the highest to the lowest, as well as a physical develop-
ment— 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' direc-
tions, required various ages, of divers natures and degrees of spirituality
and intellectuality, to fabricate the being now known as man. Further-
more, the one absolute, ever acting and never erring law, which pro-
ceeds 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 (Maha-M^y^), 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 dififer and var>\
ON THE IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCES OF THE INCARNATING
POWERS.
The Progenitors of Man, called in liidia Fathers, Pitaras, or Pitris,
are the ** Creators" of our bodies and lower principles. They are our-
selves, 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 Eso-
teric name of these Solar Angels is, literally, the "Lords" (Nath) of
"persevering ceaseless devotion" (Pranidhana). Therefore they of the
Fifth Principle (Manas) seem to be connected with, or to have origin-
ated the system of the Yogis who make of Pranidhana their fifth
observance.* It has already been explained why the Trans-Himalayan
Occultists regard them as evidently identical with those who in India
are termed Kumaras, Agnishvittas, and the Barhishads.
How precise and true is Plato's expression, how profound and philo-
• See Yoga Shdstra, ii. 32.
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PITRIS OF THE GODS AND DEMONS. 93
sophical his remark on the (Human) Soul or Ego, when he defined it
as **a compound of the same and the others 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 Uni-
versal 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 inteUection; it is a number; it is harmony.*
All these are the MItnasas and RSjasas ; the Kumaras, 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 Agnishvatta 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 Agnishvatta. 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;t while the Agnishvatta are reborn as Sons of
Marichi, a Son of Brahmd, and are the ** Pitris of the Gods." J
The Vdyu Pur&na declares the Seven Orders of Pitris to have been originally the
first Gods, the VairAjas, whom Brahmd, with the eye of Yoga, beheld in the eternal
spheres, and who are the ^<?^<?/"//^^<?^ t\^^ Matsya .... adds,
that the Gods worshipped them.§
The Harivamsha distinguishes the Vairltjas as one class of the Pitris
only, II a statement corroborated in the Secret Teachings, which, how-
ever, identify the Vair^jas with the elder Aguish vSttas^ and the Rajasas,
or Abhutarajasas, who are Incorporeal without even an Astral Phantom.
• Voltaire.
t Manava- Dkartna Skdstra, iii. 196.
t Matsya and Padma Pur anas and Kull&ka on the M&nava-Dharma Sh^tra, iii. 195. We are quite
aware that the Vdyu and Matsya Purdnas identify (agreeably to Western interpretation) the Agni-
flhv&tta with the seasons, and the Barhishad Pitris with the months ; adding a fourth class— Kivyas—
C3rclic 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
C3^ic divisions.
\ Vishnu Purdna, Wilson, iii. 158, 159.
II ShU. 935, 936.
H The V&yu Purdna shows the region called Vir&ja-loka inhabited by the Agnishv&ttas.
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94 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 bom of Sambhilti, as
the divine M&nasa^originating with the deities called Rijasas.*
Sambhuti was a daughter of Daksha, and wife of Marichi, the father of
the AgnishvUtta, who, along with the Rajasas, are ever associated with
MSnasas, As remarked by a far more able Sanskritist than Wilson,
Mr. Fitzedward Hall:
MAnasa is no inappropriate name for a deity associated with the RAjasas. We
appear to have in it mdnasam — the same as manas—vfiWi the change of termination
required to express male personification. t
All the Sons of Vir^ja are Manasa, says Nilakantha. And Viraja is
BrahmS, and, therefore, the Incorporeal Pitris are called Vairajas from
being the Sons of Viraja, says Vayti Purdna,
We could multiply our proofs ad infiniiicm, 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 Gitd :
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 UpMhis [basic principles] into which we have divided man.^
The names of the deities of a certain mystic class change with every
Manvantara. Thus the twelve Great Gods, Jayas, created by BrahmS
to assist him in the work of creation in the very beginning of the Kalpa,
and who, lost in Samadhi, neglected to create — whereupon they were
cursed to be repeatedly bom in each Manvantara till the seventh — are
respectively called Ajitas, Tushitas, Satyas, Haris, Vaikunthas, SSdhyas,
and Adityas:§ they are Tushitas, in the second Kalpa, and Adityas in
this Vaivasvata Period, || besides other names for each age. But they are
identical with the Manasas or Rajasas, and these with our incarnating
Dhyan Chohans.
Yes; besides those Beings, who, like the Yakshas, Gandharvas,
• Wilson, ibid., iii. 17, Note by Fitzedward Hall.
t Loc. cit., ibid.
X See Ttuosophist, February, 1887, p. 360.
} See Wilson, ii. 26.
II See Vdyu Purdna.
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PROGENITORS OF MEN. 95
Kinnaras, etc., taken in their individualities, inhabit the Astral Plane,
there are real Devas, and to these classes belong the Adityas, the
VairSjas, the Kumaras, 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* OF FUTURE MENf {o) WEREJ
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 Bhuta,**
with neither Form nor Mind. Therefore they are called
THE CHHAYAft RACE (c).
(a) Manu, as already remarked, comes from the root man, to think,
hence a "thinker." It is from this Sanskrit word ver>' 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 Amdnasa, "Mindless."
With the Brahmans, the Pitris are very sacred, because they are the
Progenitors,JJ or Ancestors of men — the first Manushyas on this Earth
— and offerings are made to them by the Brahman when a son is bom
unto him. They are more honoured and their ritual is more important
than the worship of the Gods.§§
May we not now search for a philosophical meaning in this dual
group of Progenitors?
• Chh&yas.
t Or Aminasas.
t Thus.
) Complexion.
II Also.
IF Creator.
•• Phantoms.
14 Image or shadow.
tX This was hinted at in Ists 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 modem
pigmies. In M&nava-Dharma Sh&stra they are called the Lunar ancestors."
H See the "I^wsof Manu"— A/aiwiwa-Z>Aar»m ShAstra, iii. 203.
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96 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
The Pitris being divided into seve7i Classes, we have here the mystic
number again. Nearly all the Purdnas agree that three of these are
Arupa, formless, while four are Corporeal; the former being intellec-
tual and spiritual, the latter material and devoid of intellect. Esoteri-
cally, it is the Asuras who form the first three Classes of Pitris — "bom
in the Body of Night" — whereas the other four were produced from the
**Body of Twilight." Their Fathers, the Gods, were doomed to be bom
fools on Earth, according to the Vdyu Purdna, The legends are pur-
posely mixed up and made v^ry hazy: the Pitris being in one the Sons
of the Gods, and, in another, those of Brahma; 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 w^hich is
again divided into seven, a word to students and a query to the profane.
That Class of the ** Fire Dhyanis," which we identify on undeniable
grounds with the Agnishvtttas, is called in our school the ** Heart" of
the Dhyan-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 havey&«r
lower cavities and three higher divisions, answering so strangely to the
septenar\' 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 Dhytnis? 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 redscc7id to Mahd-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'].
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THE REFUSAL TO CREATE. 97
"Not-Gods," for the Brahmans, 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 Hindu 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 preeminently to Agni — the three having
been in days of old the three highest Gods, before Br^hmanical 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 Mazdh^, becoming later Ahura MazdhS,
is, as Benfey shows, "the Lord who bestows Intelligence*' — Asura MedhS
and Ahura MazdSo.* Elsewhere in this work it is shown, on equally
good authority', that the Indo- Iranian Asura was always regarded as
sevaifold. This fact, combined with the name Mazdhd, as above, which
makes of the sevenfold Asura the "Lord," or "Lords" collectively "who
bestow Intelligence'' connects the Amshaspends with the Asuras and
with our incarnating DhySn Chohans, as well as with the Elohim, and the
seven informing Gods of Egypt, Chaldaea, and every other country.
Why these "Gods" refused to create men is not, as stated in exoteric
accoimts, 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.f
The Christian system is not the only one which has degraded these
Gods into Demons. Zoroastrianism and even Brahmanism have
profited thereby to obtain hold over the people's mind. Even in
Chaldaean exotericism. Beings who refuse to create^ and are said to
oppose thereby the Demiurgus, are also denounced as Spirits of Dark-
ness. The Suras, who win their intellectual independence, fight the
• '*Sacred Books of the East," VoL rv, The Zend-Avesta, Pt. I. Iviii, Trans, by James Darmesteter.
t Compare also what is said about Makara and the Ktimaras in connection with the 2k>diac.
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98 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Brahmans — and forthwith the former become -^ -Suras.
The First- and Mind-bom Sons of the Deity refuse to create progeny,
and are cursed by Brahma to be bom as men. They are hurled dozmi 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 be-
comes, 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 eflFort and self-sacrifice
of those who would help men to their original status of divinity
through self-conscious efforts; and it is these worshippers oi fomi who
have made Demons of the Angels of Light.
Esoteric Philosophy, however, teaches that one-third^ of the Dhytnis
— Le,, the three Classes of the Arupa Pitris, endowed with intelligence,
"which is a formless breath, composed of intellectual not elementary
substances"! — was simply doomed by the law of Karma and evolution to
be re-borny or incarnated, on Earth. J Some of these were NirmSnakdyas
from other Mauvantaras. Hence we see them, in all the Purdnas, re-
appearing on this Globe, in the Third Manvantara — read Third Root-
Race — as Kings, Rishis and Heroes. This tenet, being too philo-
• 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.)
t See Harivamsha, 932.
t The verse "did cast them to thf earth," plainly shows its origin in the grandest and oldest
allegory of the Aryan Mystics, who, after the destruction of the Atlantean giants and sorcerers, con-
cealed the ttxxth— astronomical, physical, and divine, as it is a page out oi 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— ze/a^ 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
Hindfi 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 hew " 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.
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WHAT PROMETHEUS SYMBOLIZED. 99
sophical and metaphysical to be grasped by the multitudes, was, as
already stated, disfigured by the priesthood for the purpose of pre-
serving 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 in-
carnate 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 — /.^., an
astral body — ^for they were Arupa. The refusal of others had reference
to their having been Adepts and Yogis of long past preceding Man-
vantaras; another mystery. But, later on, as NirmSnakHyas, 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 ap-
pearance 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 exo-
teric legends, obeyed the law — they must be identical with the Bar-
hishad Pitris, or the Pitri-Devatas, /.<?., 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.* 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 bums 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 ihi^ personal exertion
of the individual; but they could not make men as they were them-
selves— ^perfect, because sinless ; sinless, because having only the first,
• See Genesis and Plato's Tifmtus^
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lOO THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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,* 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 Humanit}^ there-
fore, 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 bom 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 versd^
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 Maya. 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 loufer
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
• 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 f 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.
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RECORDS OF ANCIENT RACES. lOI
TnaySvic Matter, and their followers were taught to think — to the
^reat disgust of the Church Fathers — that for the creation of those
Avretched 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,* 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 Phcedrus, of a ** winged" race of
xnen. Aristophanes, in Plato's Banquet^ speaks of a race androgynous
and with round bodies. In Pymander, all the animal kingdom even is
<iouble-sexed. Thus it is said :
The circuit having been accomplished, the knot was loosened .... and all
Ihe animals, which were equally androgynous, were untied [separated] together
rvith man . . . [for] . . . the causes had to produce effects on earth.t
Again, in the ancient Quiche Manuscript, the Popol Vuh — published
by the late Abbe 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.
(^) These "Shadows" were bom "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 sen-
tence 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
• In Isis Unveiled several of these Gnostic systems are given. One is taken from the Codex
NazartFus, 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 "Msrsteries of Life" in Nazara (ancient and modem Nazareth), and their doctrines are a
faithful echo of the teachings of the Secret Doctrine— some of which we are now endeavouring to
explain.
f i. i8. Sec the translation from the Greek by Francois, Monsieur de Foix, Evesque d' Ayre : the
L dedicated to Marguerite de Prance, Reine de Navarre. Edition of 1579, Bordeaux.
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I02 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Doctrine ; and we find them in the Vedas, the Purdnas, 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 Chaldaean 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 Honir who furnishes him with his
intellect (Manas) and with his conscious senses.* The Norse Ask, the
Hesiodic Ash-tree, whence issued the men of the generation of bronze,
the Third Root-Race, and the Tzite 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 Hindu Ashvattha, the Gogard, the Hellenic tree of life,
and the Tibetan Zampun, are one w4th 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 tellPf 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 proto-
types of our races were all enclosed in the Microcosmic Tree, which
grew and developed within and under the great mundane Macrocosmic
Tree;t and the mystery is half revealed in the Dirghotamas, 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 Mun-
dane 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 con-
• Asgard and the Gods, p. 4.
+ Mr. James Darmesteter, the translator of the VendidAd, speaking of it, says: "The tree, whcU^ver
it is. . . ."—"Sacred Books of the East," vol. iv. p. 209.
t Plato's Timaus.
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THE SVASTIKA. lOJ
scious 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 sen-
tence 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 dis-
figure the graphic symbol. They took advantage of the metaphor and
allegory in ever}'' 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
Manasa, 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 "Jaiha 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 **devirs sign," we are told by the Indian missionaries. Does
it not shine on the head of the great Serpent of Vishnu, on the thou-
sand-headed Shesha-Ananta, in the depths of PatSla, the Hindu
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 Cosmo-
theogony down to Anthropogony, from the indivisible unknown Para-
brahman to the humble Moneron of materialistic Science, vj^lo^^ genesis
is as unknown to that Science as is that of the All- Deity Itself. The
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104 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Svastika is found heading the religious sj^mbols of every old nation.
It is the "Worker's Hammer" in the Chaldaean 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 de-
stroyed. .This is why the World is formed out of the relics of the
murdered Ymir. The Svastika is the Miolnir, 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
Miolnir 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
Miolnir with them, not as a weapon of war, but as the hammer with which to
consecrate the new heavens and the new earth.*
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 Cjxles of Time of the world's axes and their
equatorial belts; the two lines forming the Svastika L^, 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 q^ost suggestive of
signs contains the key to the seven great mysteries of Kosmos. Born
in the mystical conceptions of the early Aryans, and by them placed
See Asgard and the Gods, p. 305.
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A PROPHECY OF THE SEVENTH RACE. IO5
at the very threshold of eternity, on the head of the serpent Ananta, it
found its spiritual death in the scholastic interpretations of mediaeval
Anthropomorphists. It is the Alpha and the Omega of universal Crea-
tive 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
Maha-MayS, 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 Miolnir had done its duty in this Round, and : MiJivtu^ = fj^
On the field of Ida, the field of resurrection [for the Fifth Round], the sons of
the highest gods assembled, and in theni their fathers rose again [the Egos of all
their past incarnations]. They talked of the Past and the Present, and remem-
bered 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 Gimirs 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.*
He who knows the doctrines of Esoteric Budhism, or Wisdom,
• Ii>id., loc. cU.
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I06 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Hindu Pramantha. Degraded into a
purely physiological symbol by some Orientalists, and taken in con-
nection 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 concep-
tions 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''* 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 ykya/V?/^-s, were found
by Dr. Schliemann under the ruins of ancient Troy. Both the forms,
tpj and (^li were excavated in great abundance; their presence being
one more proof that the ancient Trojans and their ancestors were pure
Aryans.
{c) ChhiyS, as already explained, is the Astral Image. It bears this
meaning in Sanskrit works. Thus Sanjna, Spiritual Consciousness, the
wife of Surya, the Sun, is shown retiring into the jungle to lead an
ascetic life, and leaving behind to her husband her Chhdya, Shadow or
Image.
• "The father of the sacred fire," writes Prof. Jolly, "bore the name of Tvashtri . . . His mother
was MSyi. He himself was styled Akta {anointed ^tCTOS) 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 Kuhn, in his Die Herabkunft des
FeuerSy identifies the two signs LC and llC^ 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 S3rmbolism refers to
Cosmogony.
" Agni, in the condition of Akta, or anointed, is suggestive of Christ," remarks Prof. Jolly. " M&yi,
Mary, His mother; Tvashtri, St. Joseph, the carpenter of the Bible.!' In the Rig Veda, Vishvakar-
man 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 Phallidsm.
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PRIMITIVE MAN A FAILURE. IO7
16. How ARE THE MANUSHYA* BOIU^? ThE MANUS WITH MINDS,
HOW ARE THEY MADE? (a) ThE FATHERS f CALLED TO THEIR HELP
THEIR OWN Fire, J which is the Fire that burns in Earth. The
Spirit of the Earth called to his help the Solar Fire.§ These
ThREEII produced in their joint efforts a good RuPA. iTf COULD
STAND, WALK, RUN, RECLINE, OR FLY. YeT IT WAS STILL BUT A
Chhaya, 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 Chaldaean
Adam — this term not meaning at all the first man, as with the Jews, or
one solitary individual, but Mankind collectively, as with the Chaldaeans
and Assyrians. It is the four Orders or Classes of DhySn Chohans
out of the Seven, says the Commentary, '*wAo were the Progenitors
of the Concealed Man'' — /.<?., the subtle Inner Man. The Lha of the
Moon, the Lunar Spirits, were, as already stated, only the Ancestors
of his Form, /.^., of the model according to which Nature began her
external work upon him. Thus Primitive Man was, when he ap-
peared, only a senseless Bhuta** or "phantom." This ** creation" was
a failure.
(J)) 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-per-
ception and self-consciousness, or Manas ; and the progeny of Pirvaka
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
• The real Manushya.
f Barishad (?».
X The Kavyavahana, electric fire.
\ Shuchi, the spirit in the Sun.
It The Pitris and the two Fires.
T The form.
•• It is not clear why BhAtas should be rendered by the Orientalists as "evil spirits " in the Purdnas.
In the Vishnu Purdna (I. v; Wilson's Trans., Fitzedward Hall's note, i. 83) the Shloka simply says:
"Fiends, frisrhtful from being monkey-coloured and carnivorous"; and the word in India now
means " ghosts," ethereal or astral phantoms, while in Esoteric Teaching it means elemrntary sub-
stances, 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 Dhyani^
or Pitris.
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I08 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 intelli-
gence, the latter with instinctual faculty alone. How is the difference
to be explained, and the presence of that Higher Self in man ac-
counted 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 AfiimaL They are the Lords of Spiritual Life Eternal.
. . . . Iji the beginriing {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-con-
scious, 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 con-
trasts 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
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PERPLEXITY OF THE ASSYRIOLOGISTS. 109
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.*
It explains ever>' 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,y 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.t
In the same work.J 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, yZ^wr
on that of the female. These branches are typical of the seven Root-
Races, in the third of w^hich, at its very close, occurred the separa-
tion 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. §
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:
• See Pymander, Everard's Trans., II. 17-29.
t Chaldean Account of Genesis, p. 92.
% P. 91.
\ Ibid., loc. cit.
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no THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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).*
This account is omitted in Genesis, for monotheistic purposes. But
it is a mistaken policy — ^bom no doubt of fear, and regard for dogmatic
religion and its superstitions — ^to seek to restore the Chaldaean frag-
ments by GencsiSy whereas it is the latter, far younger than any of the
fragments, which ought to be explained by the former.
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; J
*'We gave it our own!" — SAID THE Dhyani's. The Breath
needed a Vehicle of Desires ;§ "It has it!"— said the Drainer
OF Waters. II But Breath needs a Mind to embrace the Uni-
verse; **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 FlRE.^
. . . . Man** remained an empty senseless Bhuta
Thus have the Boneless given Life to those who ft became
Men with Bones in the Third.JJ
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
• /*/</., loc. cit.
-c Human Monad.
i Astral shadow.
\ Kima Rflpa.
II Shuchi, the fire of passion and animal instinct
T Solar Fire.
•• Nascent Man.
tt Later.
%X Race.
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WHAT HYDROGEN REALLY IS. Ill
i3<rhich has as decided an influence upon human gestation and genera-
tion, 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 trans-
mission by which those influences are carried down from the two
luminaries and difiused upon earth, is referred to as the "Nurse";*
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 "DhySn of the First Ele-
ment." 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,"t and is very nearly allied to Protyle, which is
our Layam. It is the father and generator, so to say, or rather the
UpSdhi (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, preeminently 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 KumSras and
Rudras headed by Karttikeya — a Kumara also. This is quite evident
even exoterically; and these Hindu Deities were, like the Kabiri, the
personified sacred Fires of the most Occult Powers of Nature, The several
branches of the Aryan Race, the Asiatic and the European, the Hindu
and the Greek, did their best to conceal their true nature, if not their
importance. As in the case of the Kumaras, the number of the Kabiri
is uncertain. Some say that there were three or four only ; others say
• Sec Shloka aa. t See Genesis of the Elements, by W. Crookes, p. ax.
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112 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
seven. Axierus, Axiocersa, Axiocersus, and Casmilus may very well
stand for the alter egos of the four Kumdras — Sanat-Kum^ra, Sananda,
Sanaka, and San^tana. The former deities, whose reputed father was
Vulcan, were often confounded with the Dioscori, Corybantes, Anactes,
etc.; just as the Kumaras, whose reputed father is Brahm^ — or rather,
the ** Flame of his Wrath," which prompted him to perform the ninth
or KaumSra Creation, resulting in Rudra or Nilalohita (Shiva) and the
KumSras — 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, -^sculapius
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 Philosophj*, the Elements — especially Fire, Water,
and Air — are made the Progenitors oi onr five physical se7ises, 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
Puranas 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 Purdiias and Hindu exotericism,
VSch, the Voice, is the female Logos of Brahma — a permutation of
Aditi, Primordial Light. And if Bath-Kol, in Jewish Mysticism, is an
articulate praeter-natural voice from heaven, revealing to the "chosen
people" the sacred traditions and laws, it is only because Vdch 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 Israel and the Jewish High-
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THE EVOLUTION OP THE SENSES. II3
Priests. And both exist to this day, in their respective sacred sym-
bologies, 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.*
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 Prabhav^pyaya,
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 Purvaja, "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 :
I. Ether . . Hearing. . Sound.
2. Air . . Touch
3. Fire, or Light Sight
4. Water . . Taste
5. Earth . . Smell
Sound and Touch.
Sound, Touch and Colour.
Sound, Touch, Colour and Taste.
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 Dhysln Chohans (Devas), proceed from the
• Pymander, i. 6. The opponents of Hinduism may call the above Pantheism, Polytheism, or any-
thing 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.
z
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114 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
First Cause — ^which is not Parabrahman, for the latter is the Aix
Cause, and cannot be referred to as the ''First Cause/' — ^which First
Cause is called in the Brahmanical 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 ; Bhutas, which proceeded from
Bhutadi, ** origin," or the ** original place whence sprang the Elements."
Hence they proceeded with all the rest from Prabhavapyaya, "the
place whence is the origination, and into which is the resolution of all
things," as explained by the Commentator on the Vishnu Purdna,
Whence also our physical senses. Whence even the highest ** created"
Deity itself, in our Philosophy. As one with the Universe, whether we
call him Brahmt, Ishvara, 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 Pundarikaksha, "supreme and imperishable glory,"
once that instead of Sadaika-Rupa, "changeless" or "immutable"
Nature, he is addressed as Ekaneka-Rupa, "both single and mani-
fold," he, the Cause, becomes merged with his own eflfects; and his
names, if placed in Esoteric order, show the following descending
scale:
Mahapurusha or Paramdtman . . Supreme Spirit.
Atman or Purvaja (Protologos) . . The Living Spirit of Nature.
IndriyStman, or Hrishikesha Spiritual or Intellectual Soul (one
with the senses).
Bhutatman The Living, or Life Soul.
Kshetrajfta Embodied Soul, or the Universe of
Spirit and Matter.
Bhrantidarshanatah 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 MayS, 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 Dhyan-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 ifi itself y i7i the same progressive order, a portion of
their various ''Fires'' a7id Elemeiits,
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THE TABULA SMARAGDINA. II5
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. Thb First* were the Sons of Yoga. Their Sons, the
CHIUJREN of the YeU^OW 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 fcj.
(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 reincarnating 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 Atman, 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
• Sc. Race.
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Il6 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 (^) 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 Arupa,
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 Atman : unless the Higher Self or Ego gravi-
tates towards its Sun — the Monad — the Lower Ego, or Perso7ial 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 Dhamma-
pada* 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 Atman alone warms the
Inner Man ; /.^., it enlightens it with the Ray of Divine Life and alone
is able to impart to the Inner Man, or the Reincarnating 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 S^hadows 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
• Shlokas, 153, 154.
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THE "SHELLS" OF SHEBA HACHALOTH. II7
wickedness are an abnormal, unnatural manifestation, at this period of
our human evolution — at least they ought to be so. The fact that man-
kind was never more selfish and vicious than it is now — civilized
nations having succeeded in making of the former an ethical charac-
teristic, of the latter an art — is an additional proof of the exceptional
nature of the phenomenon.
The entire scheme is in the Chaldcean 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
Emanatiofis 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 Kli-
photh, containing the (six other) Spheres, ryh':hx 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, "AyycXos, 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,* 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," n'iD''Sp» or Demons,!
who inhabit the seven habitations called Sheba Hachaloth, which are
simply the seven Zones of our Globe.J Their prince is called in the
Kabalah Samael, 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 preexistent in the Worlds of Emanations. §
• It is symbolized in the Pythagorean Triangle, the ten yods within, and the seven points of the
Triangle and the Square.
1" Whence the Kabalistic name of "Shells " given to the Astral Form, the Body called Kima R&pa,
left behind by the Higher Angels in the shape of the Higher Manas, when the latter leaves for
Devachan, forsaking its residue.
X Mackenzie's Royal Masonic Cyclopeedia, pp. 409-411.
I viiL ao.
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Il8 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
And the Zohar teaches that in the **Sour' 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*
And Philo states that :
The air was full of [Souls], and that those which were nearest the earth, descend-
ing to be tied to mortal bodies, return back to bodies, being desirous to live in
them.t
Because through, and in, the human form they will become progres-
sive 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 Brahman,
the Twice-born, who rules the Gods or Devas ; and Paul repeated it in
his Epistle to the Corinthia7is :
Know ye not that we [the Initiates] shall judge angels? %
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 gardeti of Eden.^ 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 Samael fell, and
then deceiving (?) man, caused his fall also.
(J)) The sentence, "they were the shadows of the Shadows of the"
Lords " — /.<?., 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.
• De Bell. Jud., ii. 12.
t De Gignai, p. 222c. ; De Somntis, p. 455D. ; which shows that the Essenes believed in re-birth and
many reTncamations on Earth, as Jesus himself did, a fact we can prove from the Nezv TesiameiU
itself.
X I. vi. 3.
{ Zohar, ii. 229^.
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THE SECRET WORK OF CHIRAM. II9
(r) Why had they *' no Fire or Water of their own " ?* 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 emana-
tions from the three higher principles in man, namely. Spirit, Soul, and
Mind, or AtmS, 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 begin-
ning. 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
• 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.
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I20 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
**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 — ^AtmS-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.*
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 Trismegistu^. "In the Primary Circle," or Creation that
which is marked +4- reads "Root," as in the Secondary likewise.
Thus in Alchemy ^or Western Hermeticism — a variant on Eastern
Esotericism — we find:
f-
Sulphur Flam ma 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 abso-
lute 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 O (nought) in our conceptions, the All in Nature
and its Mind. "Pro-Metor" is divine Fire. It is the Creator, the De-
stroyer, the Preserver. The primitive names of the Gods are all con-
nected with fire, from Agni, the Aryan, to the Jewish God who is a
" consuming fire." In India, God is called in various dialects, Eashoor,
Esur, Iswur, and Ishvara, 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), Vayu, and Surya— Fire, Air, and the Sun, three
Occult degrees of Fire. In the Hebrew, nin (Aza) means to "illu-
minate," and NmN (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
Egj'^ptian word Osiris is compounded, as shown by Schelling, of the
two primitives Aish and Asr, or a "fire-enchanter." Aesar in the old
• Book of Dsyartf iii. 19.
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THE FIRE DEITY. 121
Ktruscan meant a God, being perhaps derived from Asura of the Vedas.
Ishvara is an analogous term, as Dr. Kenealy thought, who quotes the
Bhagavad Gitd to the effect that:
ishvara 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 asaniy means to
tnake 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."*
The Christian Kabalists and Symbologists who disfigured Pymander
— prominent among them the Bishop of Ayre, Fran9ois de Tours, in
the i6th 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 :
SlL St. Matthew. Angel-Man Water (Jesus-Christ, Angel-Man,
^ Mikael)
A-Q St. Mark. The Lion Fire
E-Y St. Luke. The Bull Earth
I-O St. John. The Eagle Airf
H The Quintessence, *H ^AOH, Flamma- Virgo [Virgin Oil], Flamma
Durissima, Virgo, Lucis j^terna Mater,
The First Race of men were, then, simply the Images, the Astral
Doubles, of their Fathers, who were the pioneers, or the most pro-
gressed 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.
• Kenealy, The Book of God, pp. 114, 115.
t To Uiose 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 identi-
fied 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 Xh^four and the ihret— 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 per-
version 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.
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122 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
To assure himself of this, the student has again to turn to the Chal-
daean 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 (SvabhSvat, Mother-Space), its reflections became on Earth
the woman Omoroka, who is the Chaldaean Thavatth (or Thalatth),
the Greek Thalassa, the Deep or the Sea, which Esoterically and even
exoterically is the Moon, It was the Moon (Omoroka) who presided
over the monstrous creation of nondescript beings which were slain by
the Dhyanis .♦
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 Brahmd, exo-
terically— is the supreme condition of the passive infinite Deity, since
it contains all the divine energies and is the essence of BrahmS, who
is said, as Brahm^, to create everything through Yoga power. BrahmS,
Vishnu and Shiva are the most powerful energies of God, Brahma
(neuter), says a Pauranic text. Yoga here is the same as DhySna,
which word is again synonymous with Yoga in the Tibetan text, where
the "Sons of Yoga" are called "Sons of Dhyana," or of that abstract
meditation through which the Dhyani-Buddhas create their celestial
sons, the Dhyani-Bodhisattvas.
All the creatures in the world have each a superior above. This superior, whose
inner pleasure it is to emanate into theiUy cannot impart efflux until they have
adored [/.^., meditated as during Yoga].t
19. The Second Race (was) the product by budding and ex-
pansion, THE A-SEXUAlJ from THE SEXLESS.§ 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
• See Hibbert Lectures, 1887, pp. 370 et seqq.
+ Sepher M'bo Sha-arim, near the end, translated by Isaac Myer, QabbaiaA, p. jxo.
t Form.
k Shadow.
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MODES OF REPRODUCTION. 1 23
perhaps still more the Third Race, the "Egg-bom" Androgynes.
These two modes of procreation are the most difficult to compre-
hend, especially for the Western mind. It is evident that no expla-
nation 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 per-
manence 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 asexual, i.e., it
may reproduce itself alternately by the cooperation of two beings of opposite sex,
and also by fissure or budding from one being only, which is of no sex.*
"Budding" is the very word used in the Stanza. How could these
ChhaySs 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 KSma Rupa, which evolved only in the Third
Race? They evolved the Second Race unconsciously, as do some
plants. Or, perhaps, as the Amoeba, only on a more ethereal, impres-
sive, and larger scale. If, indeed, the cell-theory applies equally to
Botany and Zoolog>% 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 difi&culty 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, ^
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 ?
• S. Ifiiingt Modern Science and Modem Thought^ p. 90.
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124 'THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Sud-astr^l ** 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 ^^Roof] Race were the Fathers of the ^' Sweat-born*^ ;
the later Second ^^Roof] Race were ^^ Sweat-bom'' 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 bom 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 aeons 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 observa-
tion 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 proba-
bility that hermaphroditism existed in the evolution of the early Races;
while on the grounds of analog}% and on that of the existence of one
universal law in physical evolution, acting indifi"erently in the con-
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DARWIN ON ANDROGYNOUS FORMS. 1 25
struction of plant, animal, and man, it must be so. The mistaken
theories of Monogenesis, and the descent of man from the mammals
instead of the mammals from man, are fatal to the completeness of
evolution as taught in modem schools on Darwinian lines, and they
will have to be abandoned in view of the insuperable difi&culties which
they encounter. Occult tradition — if the terms Science and Know-
ledge 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 verte-
brate kingdom appears to have been hermaphrodite or androgynous.* But here we
encounter a singular difficulty. In the mammalian class the males possess rudiments
of a uterus ivith the adjacent passages in the vesicuUe prostaticce; they bear also rudi-
ments of mammcBy 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 distinc-
tions of its class, and therefore after it had diverged from the lower classes of the
vertebrate kingdom.' This seems very improbable, t^br we have to look to fisheSy
the lowest of all the classes y to find any still existent androgynous forms, %
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 gradu-
ally acquired by the one sex, and then transmitted in a more or less imperfect state
to the other.}
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
• And why not all the progenitive First Races, human as well as animal; and why one "remote
progenitor " ?
t Obviously so, on the lines of Evolutionism, which traces the Mammalia to some amphibian
ancestor.
X Second Edition, p. i6z.
) Ilnd.y p. i6a.
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126 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Darwin. Why not candidly admit the argument in favour of the
hermaphroditism which characterizes the old fauna? Occultism pro-
poses 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 Bibky the Blastema
of Science. As Naudin explains:
It is from this larval form of mankind, that the evolutive force effected the com-
pletion of species. For the accomplishment of this great phenomenon, Adam had
to pass through a phase of immobility and unconsciousness, very analogous to the
n3anphal state of animals undergoing metamorphosis.*
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 in-
capable of contracting an alliance with any of them.
He shows the differentiation of sexes accomplished by
A process of germination similar to that of medusae 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
• De Quatrefages, The Human Species, p. 124; "International Scientific Series," Volume XXVI.
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naudin's primordial blastema. 127
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 *
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 DhySn-Chohanic Essence, the ChhSyS 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 differ-
ences 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 Dhyan-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 react upon each other. t
20. Their Fathers were the Self-born. The Self-born, the
Chhaya from the brilliant Bodies of the Lords, the Fathers,
THE Sons of Twilight.
The "Shadows,** or Chhayts, are called the Sons of the "Self- born,"
as the latter name is applied to all the Gods and Beings, bom 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-bom" Progenitors of our Doctrine are identical with the
' Ibid., p. 125. + Fol. 186.
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128 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Pitris of the Brahmanical System, as the title is a reference to their
mode of birth; these Pitris being stated to have issued from Brahma's
**Body of Twilight,** as stated in the Purdnas,
21. When the Race became old, the old Waters mixed with
THE FRESHER WATERS (o), 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 (c),
(a) The old or Primitive Race merged in the Second Race, and be-
came one with it.
(d) This is the mysterious process of the transformation and evolu-
tion of mankind. The material of the first Forms — shadowy, ethereal,
and negative — was drawn or absorbed into, and thus became the com-
plement 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
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THE ALLEGORY OF CASTOR AND POLLUX. 1 29
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 (rrcpiyficpot*). As the Tyndaridae, the twin brothers are
an astronomical symbol, and stand for Day and Night; their two wives,
Phcebe and Hilaeira, the daughters of Apollo or the Sun, personifying
the Dawn and the Twilight.f Again, in the allegory where Zeus is
shown as the father of the two heroes — ^bom 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 bom
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 Aryan race, are attributed various ornithological forms of birds
which all lay golden Eggs. J 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 " ^%%
of iron," in her lap. But the variant of the Leda allegory which has a
direct reference to mystic man is found in Pindar§ only, with a slighter
reference to it in the Homeric Hymns. || Castor and Pollux are in it
no longer the Dioscuri of ApoUodorus^; but become the highly signi-
ficant 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,** 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. ft
• Odyssey^ xi. 298-305 ; Iliads iii. 243.
♦ Hyg., Fab., 80. Ovid., Fast., 700, etc. See Decharme's Mythologie de la Grhu Antique, p. 653,
X Sec Decharme, ibid., p. 652.
\ Nem., X. 80 et seqq. Theocr., xxiv. 131.
)i XXXr^. V. 5. Theocr., xxil. i.
^ iii. 10, 7.
•• ApoUodorus, iii. 1.
-M- Castor's tomb was shown in Sparta, in days of old, says Pausanias (iii. 13, i); and Plutarch says
that he was called at Argos the demi-mortal or demi-hero, fii^ap;(ayeTa9. (Quast. Gr., 23.)
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I30 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 di\'ine
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.* And thus the twin
brothers live alternately, one during the day, and the other during the
night,\
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, ?>.,
unconscious in its Personality, and having nothing within itself to
survive; J 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 forever, 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 alle-
gor>^ The widely spread modern interpretation of it — so celebrated in
antiquity, Plutarch tells us,§ 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
• Pindar, Nem., x. 60, sfqq., Dissen.
t Schol. Eurip., Orest., 463, Dindorf. Sec Decharme, op. cit., p. 654.
X The Monad is impersonal and a God pfr 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 Atm4-Buddhi
^thout Manas.
\ Moral., p. 484f.
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THE RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX. I3I
visible image of the highest Deity, would not have personified it by
Pollux, a demi-god only *
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-
bom," we shall still unmistakably find in the first four chapters of
Getiesis the Androgynes and the first Three Races of the Secret Doc-
trine, 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 mathe-
matical 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 tradi-
tions 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 establish-
ment, or rather the reestablishment 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."t
• This strange idea and interpretation are accepted by Decharme in his Mythologie de la Grice
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)-"
t See Book of Enoch, Trans, by Bishop Laurence, 1883.
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132 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
In the Book of Enoch we have Adam,* the first Divine Androgyne,
separating into man and woman, and becoming Jah-Heva in one form,
or Race, and Cain and Abelf — male and female — in its other form or
Race — the double-sexed Jehovah, J an echo of its Aryan protot5^e,
Brahma- Vdch. After which come the Third and Fourth Root-Races
of mankind § — 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 BrahmS-VirSj-VSch, 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. |t
Then it proceeds to say:
And Adam . . . begat a son in his own likeness^ after his image; and called
his name Seth.lT
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. ♦♦
• Adam (Kadmon) is, like Brahm& and Mars, the ssrmbol of the generative and creative power typi-
fying Water and Earth— an Alchemical secret. " It takes Barth and Water to create a human Soul/*
said Moses. Mars is the Hindfi Mangala, the planet Mars, identical with Kirttikeya, the " War-God" ;
he is Gharma-ja, bom of Shiva's sweaty and of the Barth. He is Lohita, the red, like Brahmi also
and Adam. The Hindfi Mars is, like Adam, bom from no woman and mother. With the Egyptians,
Mars was the primeval generative Principle, and so are Brahm&, in exoteric teaching, and Adam, in
the Kabalah.
t Abel is Chebel, meaning "pains of birth," conception.
X See Isis Unveiled, II. 398, where Jehovah is shown to be Adam and Eve blended, and Hevah, and
Abel, the feminine serpent.
\ See Isis Unveiled, I. 305: "The union of these two Races produced a third . . . Race."
II Genesis, v. 2.
II Ibid., V. 3.
•• P. 159.
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JAH-HOVAH ANDROGYNOUS. 133
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, numeri-
cally], as originator of measures, takes also the form of birth origin, as hermaphro-
dite one; hence the phalHc 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 bom 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 / or j or y being interchangeable— or
Jah-Hovah, z.^., male ^n^ female ;* Jah-Eve a hermaphrodite, or the
first form of humariity, the original Adam of Earth, not even Adam
Eladmon, 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 Brahma-Prajdpati and Jehovah-
Sephiroth, between BrahmS-Viraj and Jehovah-Adam, the Bible and
the Purdnas compared alone can show. Analyzed, and read in the
same light, they aflFord cogent evidence that they are two copies of the
same original — made at two periods far distant from each other. Com-
pare once more in relation to this subject Genesis iv. i and 26 and Manu
i. 32 and they will both .yield their meaning. In Manu, Brahma, 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 PaurSnic ex-
pressions ; e,g., the " creation " of the world is generally considered in
• Jod in the Kabalah has for s3rmbol the hand, the forefingrer and the lingam, while numerically
it is the perfect one; but it is also the number 10, male and female, when divided.
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134 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
the Brahmanical books to be the Lil^, the delight or sport, the amuse-
ment 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.*
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.t
ThtiB it is not a ** curious idea of the Qabbalists," as the author just
quoted remarks, but a purely PaurSnic, Aryan idea. Only, why make
of Ain Suph a Creator ?
The ** Divine Hermaphrodite" is, then, BrahmS-Vach-Viraj ; 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 Israelites 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 Brthmans have to call themselves BrShmans,
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 'Bnos—Jekovah, something quite
different from the translation adopted in the Bible, which ought to
read:
To him also, was bom 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
• Vishnu Purdna, i. ii. : Wilson's Trans., i. 20. t Quoted in Myer's Qabbalah, p. xio.
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THE ESOTERIC CAIN. 135
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.*
Luther translated the passage one way, the Roman Catholics quite
differently. Bishop Wordsworth renders it:
Cain — I have gotten — Kain^ from Kd'nithU I have gotten,
Luther:
I have gotten a man— even the Lord [Jehovah].
And the author of The Source of Measures:
I have measured ?i tnan^ ^v^xa 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 (J>) this
rendering is identical with that in the Secret Doctrine of the East with
regard to BrahmS.
In Isis Unveiledy\ 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 re-
present distinct Root-Races, for millions of years elapsed between
them.
Hence the Ar>'an and the Semitic Theo-anthropographies are two
• See Source of Measures, p. 277. + II. 464, et seqq.
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136 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
leaves on the same stem; their respective personifications and sym-
bolic 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 pw,
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 i 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 necessarj'^ for monotheistic and Kabalistic purposes.
Jeremiah's curse against those Elohim (Gods) who have not created
the Heavens and the Earth,* shows that there were other Elohim
who had.
II. The Heavenly Manu-Svayambhuva, who sprang from Svayambhu-
Narayana, the "Self-existent," the Adam Kadmon of the Kabalists, and
the Androgyne "Man," of Genesis i, are also identical.
III. Manu-Svayambhuva is BrahmS, 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-SvS-
yambhuva, or Brahma, separates himself to become "BrahmS-Viraj and
Vach-Viraj," male and female. All the rest of the texts and versions
are "blinds."
IV. Vach is the daughter of Brahma and is named Shata-Rupa,
"the hundred-formed," andSSvitri, 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 y 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 leva, or Eve. The Adam of the first
chapter is the spiritual, therefore pure androgyne, Adam Kadmon. When woman
• Jeremiah, x. n.
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THE JEWISH GOD-NAME. I37
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 Prajdpatis and Sephiroth, led on by the crea-
tive 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.*
This is only one of the several meanings. No need to remind the
scholar that Scorpio is the astrological sign of the organs of reproduc-
tion. 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. mrr (leve)
is the Old Testament term, and was pronounced Ya-va. Inman
suggests that it is contracted from the two words TV "iTT, Yaho-Iah,
Jaho-Jah, or Jaho is Jah. Punctuated it is nSrr, which is, however, a
Rabbinical caprice to associate it with the name Adoni, or •'J-tm, which
has the same points. It is curious, and indeed hardly conceivable,
that the Jews anciently read the name mrr Adoni, when they had so
many names of which Jeho, and Jah, and lah, constituted a part. But
so it was; and Philo Byblus, who gives us the so-called fragment of
Sanchuniathon, spelt it in Greek letters Icvw, Javo or Jevo. Theodoret
says that the Samaritans pronounced it Yahva, and the Jews Yaho.
Prof. Gibbs, however, suggests its punctuation thus: n^rr (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.'*t It was also
derived from the Chaldaic verb Mjrj, or rnn, 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 mn to mean, (i) "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 mrr, Heve (Eve),
which is the feminine of mrh, and the same as Hebe, the Grecian
• Ins Unveiled, II. 462, 463. t Sec for comparison Hosea, xii. 6, where it is so punctuated.
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138 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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., Jah-navi,
"Ganges," and Jagan-natha, **Lord of the World," it becomes clear
why Mr. Rawlinson is so very confident in his works of an Aryan 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 progeni-
tors, 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
bom. 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 ^hich 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-Z^n (^ther),
and Chthonia (the Chaotic Earth) and Metis (Water), his wives; Osiris and Isis-
Latona — the former God also representing ^ther, 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 symljol 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).*
All these are records of the primeval divine Hermaphrodite.
• fsis Unveiled, I. 156.
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THE SWAN AND THE EGG. 139
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.*
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 J of the later Third (a).
First male-female, then man and woman (^).
(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 ^zz^ to be hatched out, in some mysterious way, dis-
connected 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 Elementaire de
Physiologic, 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 foetus.
And respecting its nutrition, he propounds this query :
What, then, can we say of the nutrition of the foetus ? Physiological works con-
tain 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:
• Race. + The Moon. x Hamsa.
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I40 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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.*
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 G^len
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 cojifrere.
(d) This is a very curious statement as explained in the Commen-
taries. 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 foetus
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 ;t 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 im-
perceptibly 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-bom
Race" first. Think of Kashyapa, the Vedic sage, and the most prolific
of creators. He was the son of Marichi, Brahma's Mind-bom Son;
and he is made to become the father of the Nagas, or Serpents, among
other beings. Exoterically, the NSgas are semi-divine beings which
have a human face and the tail of a serpent. Yet there was a race of
NSgas, said to be a thousand in number only, born or rather sprung
• Text- Book of Physiology, Third Edition, 1879, P- 623. t See the Ttmaus.
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BI-SEXUAL REPRODUCTION. I4I
from Kadru, Kashyapa's wife, for the purpose of peopling Pdtdla, which
is undeniably America, as will be shown; and there was a Naga-Dvipa,
one of the seven divisions of BhSratavarsha, 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: (i)
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 under-
going 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 preeminently
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. There-
fore, supported on the one hand by that Science which shows us pro-
gressive development and an internal cause for every external modifica-
tion, 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.* He argues
firstly, that a large part of the vegetable creation exhibits the pheno-
menon of bi-sexuality, the Linnaean 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 —
• See Extracts from that Essay in The Theosophist, of February, 1883, from which the following is
condensed.
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142 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Taurus Draconem gaiuity et Taurum Draco, The coral-producing
family, which, according to Agassiz, has spent many hundreds of thou-
sands of years, during the present geological period, in building out
the peninsula of Florida, produce their oflFspring 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.*
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 an-
drogynous pairs, till they were separated at a subsequent modification of the
human form.
In the Book of the Generations ( ToledutK) 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.t
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,
• Compare Bzekiers 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."
t Eugibinus, a Christian, and the Rabbis Samuel, Menasseh ben Israel, and Maimonides tau^t
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 Brahmd] ; but afterwards the parts were
separated." The one hundred and thirty-ninth Psalm of David was cited by Rabbi Jeremiah ben
Bliazar as evidence of this: "Thou hast fashioned me behind and be/ore,'' not beset as in the BibU,
which is absurd and meaningless, and this shows, as Prof. Wilder thinks, " that the primeval form of
mankind was androgynous."
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THE BI-SEXUAL THIRD RACE. I43
which was also the last vehicle of the divine and innate Wisdom, in-
generate 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* — ^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 Neith, in
his other half. Jupiter has female breasts, Venus is bearded in some
of her statues, and IIS, the Goddess, is also Su-dyumna, the God, as
Vaivasvata's progeny.
Says Professor Wilder :
The name Adam, or man, itself implies this double fonn of existence. It is
identical with Athamas, or Thomas (Tamil, Tarn), 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
Omardka, 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
tittered 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
modems 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 coordinately, and
• 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
Blatter, the Nous and the Psyche ; of the latter of which St. James says that it is " earthly, sensual,
and devilish.*'
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144 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
on parallel lines with the four Elements, every new Race being physio-
logically 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 psycholog>' 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 alterna-
tions of temperature, but is enriched with all the treasures of eternal spring.*
Those Astronomers who maintain that Jupiter is in a molten
condition, in our sense of the term, are invited to settle their dis-
pute with this learned French Astronomer.f It must, however, be
• IHuraliU (Us Mondes, p. 69.
t 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, i88i :
"Applying now the researches of Dr. Andrews to the conditions of solar existence .... I con-
clude 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 rajrsterious 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 evidenUy 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
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THE SHADOW IMAGE OF ELOHIM. I45
always borae in mind that the ** eternal spring" referred to is
only a condition cognized as suck by the /avians. It is not ** spring,"
us we know it. In this reservation is to be found the reconcilia-
tion 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 tex-
ture, 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 ** pre-
sentiments" and ** obstinate conceptions," some of them ineradic-
able, 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.*
And there is more than one such tradition in the Pauranic allegories,
as has been shown. Moreover, the doctrine that the First Race of man-
kind was formed out of the ChhaySs, 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).t
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
energy towards the centre proportional to this, its materials, if similar to those of the Karth, and no
hotter, would he 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 Barth. 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.
• The Day after Death, p. 23.
t Cremona Ed., iii. 76a ; Brody Bd., iii. 1590; Qabbalah, Isaac Myer, p. 420.
I.
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146 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
the Secret Doctrine is, that it was taught to them at Initiation. Let the
objectors open the Edoga Physicce et Ethica of Stobaeus, the Greek com-
piler 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 transforma-
tions ; 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 bom. 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 Chhayas, the Shadows from the
Bodies of the Sons of Twilight. Neither water nor fire
COULD DESTROY THEM. ThEIR SONS WERE.*
This verse cannot be understood without the help of the Commen-
taries. 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 aflfected
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, succes-
sively, 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.f And we may expect a fifth
for ourselves in due course of time.
• So destroyed.
t The first occurred when what is now the North Pole was separated from the later Continents.
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THE ARK OF MANU. I47
A FEW WORDS ABOUT "DELUGES" AND "NOAHS."
^ The accounts in the various Purdnas about our Progenitors are as
contradictory, in their detaihy as everything else. Thus while, in the
Rig Veday Ida, or Ila, is called the Instructress of Vaivasvata Manu,
Sayana makes of her a Goddess presiding over the Earth, and the
Shaiapatha Brdhmana shows her to be the Manu*s daughter, an off-
spring of his sacrifice, and later on, his (Vaivasvata* s) wife, by whom he
begat the race of Manus. In the Purdnas 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, TSrS.
All this, which seems a jumble to the profane, is full of philo-
sophical meaning to the Occultist. On the very face of the narrative
a secret and sacred meaning is perceivable; all the details, how-
ever, 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 Mahdbhdrata strikes the key-note, and yet
it needs to be explained by the secret sense contained in the Bhagavad
Gitd. It is Xht 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 ajar;
where, growing larger and larger, it communicates to him the news of
the forthcoming Deluge. This Fish is the well-known Matsya AvatSra,
the first Avatara of Vishnu, the Dagon* of the Chaldaean 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 Mahdbhdrata ;
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
• 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
Cnlf.
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148 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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, vivi-
fies and fructifies. The First Cosmic Flood refers to Primordial Crea-
tion, 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.* 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 destruc-
tion, by the mortal woman being made the receptacle of the human
seed at the end of the Third Race,t 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 Pauranic and other versions; while in the
Shatapatha Brdhmana, Vaivasvata produces a daughter and begets
from her the race of Manu — a reference to the first human Manushj'^as,
who had to create women by Will (Kriyashakti), before they were
naturally born from the Hermaphrodites as an independent sex, and
were, therefore, regarded as their creator's "daughters." The Pauranic
accounts make Idi, or Ila, 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 Gitd, where Krishna is
made to say:
The seven Great Rishis, \^i^four preceding Manus, partaking of my essence, were
bom from my mind: from them sprang (was bom) the human race and the
world. J
Here the four preceding Manus, out of the seven, are the four
• It is far later on that the Moon became a male God; with the Hindus it was Soma, with the Chal-
daeans Nanak or Nanar, and Sin, the son of Mulil, the older Bel. The Akkadians called him the
"I*ord 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 modem Assyriologists have now ascertained, it is the
northern Nipur which is the centre whence Chaldsean (Black) Magic spread; and Eridu (the Southern)
which was the primitive ^eat 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 Israel's
Jehovah and his seed, for Ur was the chief seat of the worship of the Moon-God, and Abraham ia
said to have come from Ur, when from A-bra(h)m, he becomes Abraham.
f When N&rada, the virgin-ascetic, threatened to put an end to the human race by preventiiig
Daksha's sons from procreating it.
% X. 6.
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THE '* deluge" a universal TRADITION. 149
Races* which have already lived, for Krishna belongs to the Fifth
Race, his death having inaugurated the Kali Yuga. Thus Vaivasvata
Manu, the son of Surya, the Sun, and the Saviour of our Race, is con-
nected 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.f 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 anti-
quity; 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 5^w/-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
• This is corroborated by a learned Br&hman. In his most excellent Lectures on the Bhagavad
G\ta {Theosophist, April, 1887,. p. 444) the lecturer says:
"There ia 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 Vaisasvata.
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 *Chatv4rah' is separated from the word 'Manavah,' and is made to refer to Sanaka,
Sanandana, Sanatkum&ra, and Sanatsuj&ta, who were also included among the mind -bom sons of
PrajApati.
" 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 PaurAnic account, though it would be in harmony with the Occult theory. You will
recollect that it ia 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."
♦ Stockwell, Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, xviii. ; R. W. McFarland, American Journal
0/ Science, III. xi. 456; and Croll's Climate and Time. Lemuria was not submerged by a flood, but
was destro3red by volcanic action, and afterwards sank.
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I50 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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.*
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 remini-
scence of Moses, who is said to have mentioned fifteen grandsons of
Noah, who escaped with their grandsire. Then again Xisuthrus, the
Chaldaean 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 Aletae or Titans (the Kabirim) contem-
porary with Agruerus, the great Phoenician God — whom Faber sought
to identify with Noah;t further, it is suspected that the name "Titan"
is derived from Tit-Ain, — the "fountains of the chaotic abyss" J (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.g
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-
Satum, 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. ||
• Coste, I. iv. 19.
+ Agruerus is Kronos, or Saturn, and the prototype of the Israelitish 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 4/j.)
X Ibid., II. 240.
\ Sanchuniathon says that the Titans were the sons of Kronos, and seven in number ; and he calls
them fire-worshippers, Aletse (Sons of Agni ?) and diluvians. Al-ait is the God of Fire.
II Ibid., i. 130, note.
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THE ARKITE SYMBOLS. I5I
But he is less fortunate in his speculations when he adds:
The Hindoos, in their wild legends have variously perverted the history of the
Noachidse (? !), yet it is remarkable that they seem to have religiously adhered to
the number seven:* hence Capt. Wilford very judiciously observes, that, "perhaps,
the seven Menus, the seven BrahmAdicas, with the seven Rishis, are the same, and
make only seven individual persons.t The seven BrahmAdicas vi^r^ prajdpatis^ 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." { The mutual resemblance of the Cabin, the Titans, the Rishis, and
the Noetic family, is too striking to be the effect of mere accident. §
Faber was led into this mistake, and subsequently built his entire
theory concerning the Kabiri, on the fact that the name of the scrip-
tural 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 Koeus, Kroeus, Phorcys, Cronus, Oceanus, Hyperion,
and lapeius.
Koiov T€, Kpoiov T€ ftcyttv, ^opKw T€ Kparaiov,
Kat Kpovov, 'Okcuvov ^, "YTrcptova t', 'laircrov t€.||
But why could not the Babylonian Ezra have adopted the name of
lapetus for one of Noah's sons? The Kabiri, who are the Titans, are
also called Manes and their mother Mania, according to Amobius.^
The Hindus can therefore claim with far more reason that the Manes
mean their Manus, and that Mania is the /emaie Manu of the Rdmayana.
Mania is Ila, or IdS, 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—Sayana making her the Goddess of the Earth
— and she is but the second edition and repetition of VSch. Both IdS
and Vach are turned into males and females; Ida becoming Sudyumna,
and VSch, the ** female Viraj," turning into a woman in order to punish
the Gandharvas; one version referring to cosmic and divine Theogony,
• Of which seven, let us remark, the Aryans, and not the Semites, were the originators, while the
Jews got that number from the Chaldseans.
t Seven individual Sons of God, or Pitaras, Pitris; also in this case the sons of Kronos or Saturn
(KUa, "Time") and Arldtes, like the Kabiri and Titans, as their name— "Z»nar Ancestors"— shows;
the Moon being the Ark, or Argha, on the Watery Abyss of Space.
X Asiatic Researches, v. 246.
\ Kabiri, ibid., loc. cit.
II Orpheus apud Proclum in Timceum, y. 295.
•1 Amobius, Contra Gentes, iii. 124; quoted by Faber, op. cit., i. 135.
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152 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
the other to the later period. The Manes and Mania of Amobius 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 Israelites, through Ezra, the author of the modern-
ized Mosaic books, were the latest adapters. So unceremonious were
they with other people's property, that the Pseudo-Berosus,* shows
that Titaea — of whom Diodorus Siculusf 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 6ther older
"Arkite" symbols. For, Berosus says that "Titaea Magna" was after-
wards called Aretia,J and worshipped with the Earth; and this identi-
fies Titaea, Noah's consort, with Rhea, the Mother of the Titans, and
with IdS; both being Goddesses who preside over the Earth, and the
Mothers of the Manus and Manes, or Titan-Kabiri. And Titaea-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 earn linguA Janigend Horchiam.}
Scarcely an ancient poet of historic or prehistoric days fails to men-
tion the sinking of the two continents — often called isles — in one form
or another. Hence the destruction, besides Atlantis, of the Phleg>^an
Island. Pausanius and Nonnus both tell how:
• Ant., iii. 8.
+ Bibl., iii. 170.
X Aretia is the female form of Artes, the Kgryptian Mars. Thence the Chaldsean (and now Hebrew)
word iHN (Arets), "Earth." Seyffarth, the author of Beitr&ge zur Kenniniss (under "Artes," Mars)
quotes as follows: "Addit Cedrenus (Salm. I. c): Stella Martis ab iEgyptiis vocatur Brtosi (plantare,
generare). Significat autem hoc omnis generis procreationem et vivificationem, omnisque substantiae
ct materiae naturam et vim ordinantem atque procreantem." It is Earth as " source of being ** ; or, as
explained by the author of The Source 0/ 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 Madim, Mars, are the same, and combine the idea of earth, with Adam
under the form of h-adam-h."
1 Ant., V. 64.
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THE JEWISH NOAH AND THE CHALDiEAN NUAH. I53
From its deep-rooted base the Phlegyan isle
Stem Neptune shook, and plunged beneath the waves
Its impious inhabitants.*
Faber felt convinced that the Phlegyan Island was Atlantis. But all
such allegories are more or less distorted echoes of the Hindu tradition
about that great Cataclysm, which befell the Fourth, really human,
though gigantic, Race, the one which preceded the Aryan. 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 transfonna-
tionsy 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 differen-
tiation— 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 BrahmS, Vishnu, and Shiva preceded Vaivasvata and
the rest.f
All this goes to show that the 5<?w/-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 y\
if the veiled language of the Puranas 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 inclina-
tion of the Earth," which **is in travail," is quite significant and clear.
Is not this evident? Nuah is Noah, floating on tlie 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
• Nonnus, Dionys., xviii. 319. Quoted by Faber, op. cit., i. 328.
♦ See /sis Unveiled, II. 420 el seg., where one or two of the seven meanings are hinted at.
t Chap. Ixiv (Sect. xi).
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J
154 'THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Chaldsean Nuah, is the Spirit vivifying
Matter, which latter is Chaos, represented by the Deep, or the Waters of the Flood.
In the Bab^'lonian 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.*
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 Chaldaean version, or Jebel Djudi, the deluge
mountains of the Arabian legend, or yet Ararat of the Biblical narrative, and even
the Him&laya of the Hindft tradition, and yet not have reached the Sun ; the BibU
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 philo-
sophical than that of a universal deluge, of which there are no geological traces
whatever, t
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 Brahmanical 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 HimavSn, 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
• Isis Unveiled, II. 423, 424. + Ibid.^ 423, note.
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THE *' WHITE ISLAND." 155
Great Flood of Matter on Earth, and the other of a real watery deluge.
In the Shatapatha Brdhmanay 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
MahSpralaya, after a "Day of BrahmS"; and the Mahdbhdrata 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 Cosmo-
gony:* as the "Root- Manu," on Globe A, in the First Round; (Jb) 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 Dvapara Yuga,t 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,J as already shown. It may well
be remarked here that the Dvapara 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
• One has to remember that, in the Hindik Philosophy, every differentiated unit is such only through
the Cycles of Mayi, being one in its essence with the Supreme or One Spirit. Hence arises the seem-
ing confusion and contradiction in the various Put anas, and at times in the same Purdna, about the
tame individual. Vishnu— as the many-formed Brahma, and as Brahma (neuter) — is one, and yet he
is said to be all the twenty-eight Vy&sas.
"In every Dvftpara (or third) age, Vishnu, in the person of Vyisa, 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 Dvdpara age ; and, consequently, eight and
twenty Vy&sas have passed away." ( Vishnu Purdna, iii. 3; Wilson's Trans., iii. 33, 34.) "[They who
were all] in the form of Veda-VyAsa; who were the Vyisas of their respective eras." {Ibid., loc, cil.,
p. 33.) "This world is Brahm&, in Brahmd, from Brahma . . . 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 BrahmA {i.e., Rishis), the illustrious progeny
of Urja.*' {Ibid.^ iiL 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 reTncamation of the
Monads belong^ing to the Dhydn Chohans of our Planetary Chain.
t The Dv¶ 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 Aryan Race is now in
it* 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.
X See Asiatic Researches, viii. 280.
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156 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 trans-
parently clear to need much explanation. Of course, as already
remarked, in the separation of sexes an androgyne being was sup-
posed to divide his body into two halves — as in the case of Brahma
and Vach, and even of Adam and Eve — and thus the female is, in a
certain sense, his daughter, jiist 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 PurdnaSy 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 Ila. She is first repre-
sented 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
Brahman, a daughter only was obtained — Ila or Ida. 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 refer-
ence to the Third Root-Race, whose men were androgj^nes. But some
very learned Orientalists* think and have declared that:
Idd is primarily food, nourishment, or a Ubation 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.
• See Dowson's HindU Classical Dictionary, sub voce "Idi."
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HOW OLD IS HUMANITY? I57
In its most mystical meaning, the union of SvSyambhuva Manu with
Vich-Shata-Riipa, his own daughter — this being the first **euhemeriza-
tion" of the dual principle of which Vaivasvata Manu and IIS 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, Brahmans may agree
with our teaching, we are not so sure that some of the orthodox con-
servatives may not raise objections to the modes of procreation attri-
buted to their Pitri Devatas. We shall be called upon to produce the
works from which we quote, and we will invite them to read their own
Purdnas a little more carefully and with an eye to the esoteric mean-
ing. And then, we repeat again, they will find, under the veil of more
or less transparent allegories, every statement made herein corrobo-
rated 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-bom." 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 afiirmative, notwithstanding all
scientific objectors. Moreover, this duration covers only the Vaivas-
vata-Manu Man, /.^., 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 difiiculties 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,*
not to speak of the accumulated testimony of the ages, and that of the
' Sec fbsthumous Humanity ; Translated by H. S. Olcott, I^ondon, 1887.
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158 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
modem "Spiritualists" and Mj'stics. 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 develop-
ment, 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.* This period was
preceded by 300,000,000 years of the mineral and vegetable develop-
ment. To this, all those who refuse to accept the theory of a "bone-
less,** 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.f
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
• Professor Newconib 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 opiuious is so great that no reliance can ever be placed upon scUniific
speculation.
+ 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 extravagrant 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 abo\'e is quoted from memory, yet almost textually. The author fails to see that he is bursting
liis own soap-bubble with such a defence.
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ADAM-GALATEA. 1 59
successive floods, upheaval of the valleys and constant shifting of the
great waters and seas, none of these circumstances could form an im-
pediment to human life and organization, such as ts assisted 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 "immetaliza-
tion," 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 ayiimaie his statue, and Bahak Zivo
of the Nazaraean 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 Prajapati 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 ex-
ploded theor\', 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 ac-
count 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 per-
fect or proven. Blanchard and Dr. Lutaud reject their importance,
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l6o THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
and, in fact, show that they have none. The question is so far left sut
judice, as well as the other as to when, at what period, life appeared on
the Earth? As to the idea that Haeckel'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-bom 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 pro\'ing
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 de-
tection, 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 unpreju-
diced 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 im-
pulse 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):
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WHAT IS EVOLUTION? l6l
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 meta-
physical elements.
Has the last word on the subject of human evolution yet been said?
As Professor 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
finals 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 approxi-
mation to the truth— tolerable chiefly on account of tlie ignorance of those by whom
it was accepted, and wholly intolerable when tested by the larger knowledge of their
successors.*
Will this eminent Darwinian admit the possibility of his ** Pithecoid
Ancestry" being assignable to the list of "wholly intolerable beliefe,"
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 eflFected 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 evolu-
tion. 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 sur-
roundings, 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 aflBrmations. 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,
• Man's Place in Naiure, p. 58.
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l62 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 pro-
ceeded from universals downwards, are now shown more learned, in
the light of Modem 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.*
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 appear-
ance 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 aeons 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 Sarcodef of the
Moneron, then passes from its protistic state J into the form of an
• De Cctlo, II. 13.
t 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.
X The Monera are indeed Protista. They are neither animals nor plants, writes Haeckel; "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.)
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AN "ORGANISM WITHOUT ORGANS." 163
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* —
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, repeat-
ing 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, mus-
cular man, almost impervious to any climate, was, perhaps, some
25,000,000 years ago, just what the Haeckelian 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 Brahmans 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 tempera-
ture 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 alto-
gether. 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
• Behold the Igruanodon 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 BibU, may some day be shown to be founded on
&ct. In nature, the logic of analogy alone should make us accept these traditions as scientific
verities.
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l64 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
astronomer doubts, but also in time, without beginning or end; that it never was
created, and is imperishable.*
Czolbe repeats exactly what the Occultists say. But the Aryan
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 Purdna 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 Dvipas [Continents], Maitreya. But the rising and the setting of
the sun being perpetually opposite to each other.SLudy in the same way, all the car-
dinal 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, lo 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.t
To this Fitzedward Hall remarks:
The heliocentricism taught in this passage is remarkable. It is contradicted,
however, a little further on.:^
Contradicted purposely, because it was a secret temple-teaching.
Martin Haug remarked the same teaching in another passage. It is
useless to calumniate the Aryans 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.§ But even
supposing his existence in the Eocene Period is not yet demonstrated,
what period of time has elapsed since the Cretaceous Period? We
• These are the opinions of Burmeister and Czolbe. Sec Force and Matter, by L. Buchner, edited
by J.F. CoUingwood, F.R.SX., p. 6x.
t VUhnu Purdna, U. viii ; Fitzedward Hall's rendering in Wilson's Translation, ii. 241.
t Ibid., p. 242.
1 Introduction d t^tude des Races Humaines.
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SCIENCE IS SILENT. 165
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 for-
mation alone would be six millions of years,"* 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?!
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 Encyclopaedias — 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 ver>' 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 be-
lieved therein since the days of Solomon, and had not, only a few years
ago, called its votaries lunatics and impostors! J
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:
• Modern Science and Modern Thought, by S. Laing, p. 32.
f Esoteric Buddhism, p. 70.
X The same fate is in store for spiritualistic phenomena and all the other psychological manifesta-
tions 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 re-
garded as a Psychologist, and yet he denied a 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
aH. It is Psychism and not Psychology ; it reminds one as little of the VedAntic teaching as does the
pessimism of Schopenhauer and von Hartmaun recall the Esoteric Philosophy, the heart and soul of
true Buddhism.
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l66 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
** The Mind'bom, the boneless, gave being to the Will-bom with
bones;'' — adding that this took place in the middle of the Third Race
18,000,000 3'ears 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 Geolo-
gists, 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. Oc-
cultists, 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 diflferent.
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, oflFered 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,* though developing on parallel lines, had
• 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.
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'* SPONTANEOUS GENERATION." 167
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 Upadhi 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 specu-
lative 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" anthropbgenesis 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 Haeckelian 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 eflFect 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 spiri-
tually and intuitionally so far below the conceptions of even the ancient
Greeks, themselves on a far lower level, in these respects, than thej
Philosophers of Eastern Ar\'an antiquity. Hylozoism, when philo-
sophically 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 Mono-
theists; between which it stands on its own entirely neutral ground.
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l68 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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.* 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 **Air*
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 fructify-
ing 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 — dirpcTres tw ©cw.
Plato and other philosophers taught the same: deity cannot set its own
hand to creation — aurovpyctv aTravra. This Cudworth calls "Hylozoism."
As old Zeno is credited by Laertius 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 tljat from which it was secreted.t
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
• 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 newr satisfy the more acutely metaphysical mind of the Hindii Vedintin.
+ Cudworth's Intellectual System, I. 328.
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OCEANS OP CARBONIC ACID? 169
incipient physical form, i.e,, in a race of beings adapted for that geo-
logical 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 ag^ee with this idea. Were the writer anxious to corro-
borate 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, how-
ever 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 im-
pervious 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
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IJO THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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
diflFerent 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 ele-
ments, 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 ifito Four, Three, and One.
STANZA \ II.
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,* ready for rebirth^
CAME DOWN. They saw the viLEf FORMS OF THE FiRST ThirdJ (a),
**WE CAN CHOOSE," SAID THE LORDS, ''WE HAVE WISDOM." SOME
ENTERED THE ChHAYAS. SoME PROJECTED A SpARK. SoME DEFERRED
TILL THE F0URTH.§ FrOM THEIR OWN RuPA THEY FILLED || THE KaMA.^
Those who entered became Arhats. Those who received but a
Spark, remained destitute of knowledge;** the Spark burned
LOW {b). The Third remained mind-less. Their JivASft were not
READY. These were set apart among the Seven. J J 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).
• Issued from the Body of Brahmii when it became Night.
+ Intellectually vile.
X Still senseless Race.
\ Race.
I< Intensified.
IT The vehicle of Desire.
"• Higher knowledge.
+"•■ Monads.
XX Primitive human species.
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.THE "BLACK FIRE" OF THE ** ZOHAR." * 171
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 of
intellectual capacity, of birth or social position, and gives a logical ex-
planation to the incomprehensible Karmic course throughout the aeons
which followed. The best explanation which can be given, in view of
the diflSculties of the subject, will now be attempted.
(fl) 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 Schoettgen says in
Horce Hebraica, etc., the first terrestrial Adam "had only the breath of
life," — Nephesh, but not the livhig 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.
(r) The Zokar 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 Philo-
sophy 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 "Adversar>'" in his lowest aspect — both of which
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172 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
are reflected in our Ego. Lactantius, speaking of the Nature of Christ,
makes the Logos, the Word, ''\h^ first-born brother of Satan, and the
first of ail creatures.''*
The Vishnu Purdna describes these primeval creatures (Tir\'aksrotas)
with crooked digestive canals:
[They were] endowed with inward manifestations, but mutually in ignorance
about their kind and nature.^
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 tirdhvasrotas, the happy
eel estiarbeings, which feed on ambrosia; and lastly, the Arvaksrotas,
human beings — BrahmS'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 Brahmli who creates things
and men on this Earth, but the Chief and Lord of the PrajSpatis, the
Lords of Being and terrestrial Creation. "Obeying the command of
Brahma," 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 quadrupedsy and subsequently, by his will [referring to the
Sons of Will and Yoga], gave birth to females" J — 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 ParSshara, in the Vishnu
Purdna, 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 Ar\^aksrota coming from the "Body of the
Dawn"; and elsewhere, man is again referred to, when the Creator of
the World, BrahmS, is shown "creating fierce beings, who were de-
nominated Bhutas, and eaters of flesh," or as the text has it, "fiends,
• Inst. Div., II. viii; quoted in Myer's Qabbalah, ii6.
t Op. cit., I. v; Wilson's Trans., Fitzedward Hall's rendering, i. 7a.
% Ibid., ii. 10.
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THE ** ADVERSARIES'* OF THE GODS. I73
frightful from being monkey-coloured and carnivorous."* Whereas
the Rlkshasas are generally translated by **evil Spirits** and "enemies
of the Gods," which identifies them with the Asuras. In the Rama-
yana^ when HanumSn is reconnoitring the enemy in LankS, he finds
there Rtkshasas, some hideous, "while some were beautiful to look
upon," and, in the , Vishnu Purdna, there is a direct reference to their
becoming the Saviours of "Humanity," or of BrahmS.
The allegory is very ingenious. Great intellect and too much know-
ledge 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.
Brahmi is Mahat, the Universal Mind; hence the too selfish among
the RSkshasas showing the desire to become possessed of it all — to
"devour" Mahat. The allegory is transparent.
At any rate. Esoteric Philosophy identifies the pre-Brahmanical
Asuras, Rudras,t RSkshasas 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 con-
flicting and two-faced Divine Principle in Man. The Commentary that
follows, and the next Stanzas may, no doubt, throw more light on this
very diflScult 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 Prajdpatis and the Purls'].
From these proceed :
I. The First Race, the ''Self bom,'' which are the {Astral] Shadows of
their Progenitors. The Body was devoid of all understanding [mind, in-
telligence, and wiW]. 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.
• Ibid., i. 83.
'^ Whom Manu calls "paternal grandfathers" (iii. 284). The Rudras are the seven manifestations
of Rndra-Shiva, the "destroying God," and also the grand Yogi and Ascetic.
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174 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
2. From the First \_Rac€\ emanated the Second, called the '* Sweat-bom "*
and the ** Boneless'' This is the Second Root- Race, endowed by the Pre-
servers [Rakshasas^ and the Incarnatiyig Gods \Jhe Asuras and Kumdrcui]
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,y informed^ by
the Dhyants.
• To speak of life as having arisen, and of the human race as havingr 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 Haeckel'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
1>eings, 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, Protamoeba, 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 fiathybius Hseckelii, appears as a continuous thick protoplas-
mic covering at the greatest depths of the ocean, between 3,000 and 30,000 feet. // is true thai 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 trans-
lation, 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 Hseckel and
his like], arisen from the lower Mammalia, apes, the earlier simian creatures, the still earlier Mar-
supialia. 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,
np 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 h3rpothesis, 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 ?
+ The R&kshasas, regarded in Indian popular theology as Demons, are called the "Preservers"
beyond the Him&layas. This double meaning has its origin in a philosophical allegory, which is
variously rendered in the Puranas. It is stated that when Brahma created the Demons, Yakshas
<from yaksh, to eat) and the R4kshasas, both of which kinds of Demons, as soon as bom, wished to
devour their Creator, " those among them that called out * Not so : oh ! let him be sawd [preserved]! '
were named R&kshasas." ( Vishnu Purdna, I. v. ; Wilson, i. 82.) The Bhdgavata Purana <III. 20,
19-21; ibid., loc. cit.) renders the allegory differently. "BrahmS, transformed himself into night [or
ignorance] invested with a body." This the Yakshas and Rikshasas seized, exclaiming, "Do not
spare it ; devour it." Brahmi 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 Rikshasas are shown in almost every case to be Yogis, pious Sidhus and Initiates,
a rather unusual occupation for Demons. The meaning then is that while we have x>ower to dispel
the darkness of ignorance— " devour it"— we have to preserve the sacred truth from profanation.
■•* Brahmi is for the Brihmans alone," says that proud caste. The moral of the fable is evident.
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PRIMAL MODES OF REPRODUCTION. 1 75
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^^ They issued from the Second Manushy as
[^Human Race\ and became oviparous. The emanations that came out
0/ 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
afiimal 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 ap-
plied to female mammalians, including woman? The ovule, in which,
after impregnation, the development of the foetus takes place, is ah ^^ig.
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.^
I. Fission,
{a) As seen in the division of the homogeneous speck of Protoplasm,
known as Moneron or Amoeba, into two.
(J>) As seen in the division of the nucleated cell, in which the cell-
nucleus splits into two sub-nuclei, which either develop within the
• The gradtial evoludon 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 Aryan Races. Weber's idea that the Indo-Ger-
manic Race preceded the Aryan Vedic Race is, to the Occultist, grotesque to the last degree.
f Cf. especially Schmidt's Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism, pp. 39 et seqq., and Laing's A
Modem Zoroastrian, pp. 102-111.
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176 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
original cell-wall or burst it, and multiply outside as independent
entities. (C/i 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; ^.^.,
many vegetables, the sea-anemone, etc. {Cf, the Second Root-Race.)*
III. Spores,
A single cell thrown oflF 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 evo-
lution of the human race. The Sons of Wisdom, or the Spiritual
Dhyinis, had become "intellectual" through their contact with Matter,
because they had already reached, during previous cycles of incarna-
tion, that degree of intellect which enabled them to become indepen-
dent and self-conscious entities, on this plane of Matter. They were
reborn only by reason of Karmic eflFects. 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 Minasaputra, bom of Mahat, or Brahma) 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
• 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.
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MONADS AND ROUNDS. 1 77
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 propor-
tionately 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 recep-
tion 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 "un-
favoured," 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 dififerent planes of being —
so as to arrive at the level of the average class when they reach the
Fifth Round. One remark may prove useftrl, as food for thought to
the student in this connection. The Monads of the lowest specimens
of humanity — the "narrow-brained"* savage South-Sea Islander, the
• 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 (Bush-
men included) show that the first are above rather than below the average of the brain capacity of
the modem man, and the skulls of the last are on the whole (as also in the case of Papuans and Poly-
nesians 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 centim&tres compared to i.«ja3
of the Attvergnat.
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178 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
African, the Australian — had no Karma to work out when first bor?i 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: (i) 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 evolu-
tion and the descent of man from an animal ancestor.
Let us, giving to Caesar what is Caesar'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 poly-
genetic 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 j^n?///>5— monogenism or
polygenism? As far as one can venture to pronounce on what in the absence of
witnesses [?] wiU never be known [?], the second hypothesis is far the most probable.*
Abel Hovelacque, in his Science of LangiiagCy comes to a similar con-
clusion, 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 pal^on-
tological 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 specu-
• A. I>f&vTe, Pfiilosophy, p. 498.
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HOW THE FIRST MAMMALS WERE PRODUCED. I79
lations. 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 coryphaei.
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 creatMres
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 reabsorbing 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 Modem 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, transfoFmed 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 energ>% 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 palaeozoic fishes.*
• Principles of Zoology, p. ao6.
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l8o THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Just so; but the **palaeozoic fishes" are at the lower curve of the
arc of the evolution oi forms, and this Round began with Astral Man,
the reflection of the Dhyin Chohans, called the "Builders." Man
is the alpha and the omega of objective creation. As said in his
Unveiled:
All things had their origin in Spirit — evolution having originally begun fix>m
above and proceeding downwards, instead of the reverse, as taught in the Dar-
winian theory. ♦
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 theor>', 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 im-
pugned by the consideration that the latter follow in the wake of
man.
25. How DID THE Man ASA, THE SONS OF WiSDOM, ACT? ThEY
REJECTED THE SELF-BORN.f ThEY ARE NOT READY. ThEY SPURNED
THE SwEAT-BORN-t ThEY ARE NOT QUITE READY. ThEY WOULD
NOT ENTER THE FIRST EGG-B0RN.§
To a Theist or a Christian this verse would suggest a rather theo-
logical 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 spumed
the rest.
By a curious coincidence, when selecting a familiar name for the
• i- 154.
+ The boneless.
% Thtfirst Sweat-born. This is explained in Uie Section which follows this series of Stanzas in the
allegory from the Purdnas concerning Kandu, the holy sage, and Pramlochi, 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.
\ This will be explained as we proceed. This unwillingness to fashion men, or create, is symbolized
in the Purdnas by Daksha's dealings with his opponent Nirada, the "strife-making ascetic."
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THE GODS ARE DEIFIED MEN. l8l
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 Haeckel'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, indeptndently 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 DevatSs (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.
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i82 the secret doctrine.
26. When the Sweat-born produced the Egg-born, the two-
fold * THE MIGHTY, THE POWERFUL WITH BONES, THE LORDS OP
Wisdom said: **Now shall we create/*
Why "now" — and not earlier? This the following Shloka explains.
27. The Third Race became the VahanI of the Lords op
Wisdom. It created Sons of Will and Yoga, by Kriyashakti it
created them, the Holy Fathers, Ancestors of the Arhats. . . .
How did they "create," since the "Lords of Wisdom" are identical
with the Hindu Devas, who refuse to "create"? Clearly they are the
KumSras of the Hindu Pantheon and Purdnas, those Elder Sons of
Brahma :
Sanandana and the other sons of Vedhas fwhoj previously created by him . . .
without desire or passion, [remained chaste] inspired with holy wisdom ....
and undesirous of progeny.}
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 un-
clean fancy of exoteric creeds. It was by Kriyashakti, that mysterious
and divine power, latent in the will of ever^^ 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," § as follows:
Kriy&shakti: — The mysterious power of thought which enables it to produce ex-
ternal, 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 Yog! generally performs his wonders by means of Ichchhdshakti (Will-power)
and Kriyashakti.
• Androgryne Third Race. The Evolutionist Professor Schmidt aUudes to " the fact of the separa-
tion of sexes, as to the derivation of which from species once htrmaphrodiU all [the believers in
Creation naturally excepted] are assuredly of one accord." (Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism,
p. 159.) Such indeed is the incontestable exndence 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 dis-
tinction of sex is not developed until a considerable progress has been made in the growth of the
embryo." {A Modem Zoroastrian^ p. 106.) The Law of Retardation — operati\'e alike in the case of
human races, animal species, etc., when a higher type has once been evolved— still preserves henna-
phroditism as the reproductive method of the majority of plants and many lower animals.
t Vehicle.
X Vishnu Purdna, I. vii ; Wilson, i. 100.
\ See Five Years of Theosophy, p. iii.
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CHHAYA-BIRTH. l8j
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 MahStmSs, 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.*
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 mat were Chhdyds (i); the Second, the ''Sweat-born'' (2); the
Third, ''Egg-bom,'' and the holy Fathers bom by the power of Kriydshakti
(3); the Fourth were the children of the Padmapdni ^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 (Kriyashakti) — 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.
I. Chh^yS-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 Purdnas.f It is the beautiful alle-
gory and story of Sanjnt, the daughter of Vishvakarman — married to
the Sun, who, *' unable to endure the fervours of her Lord," gave him
her Chhaya (shadow, image, or astral body), while she herself repaired
to the jungle to perform religious devotions, or Tapas. The Sun,
supposing the Chhaya 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.
* For explanations and a philosophical account of the nature of those Beings, which are now
▼icwed as the "evil" and rebellious Spirits, the Creators by Kriyashakti, the reader is referred
to the chapters on " The Myth of the ' Fallen Angel,' in its Various Aspects," in Part II of this
Volume.
t Vishnu Purdna, III. ii.
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l84 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
But, perhaps, this instance proves little except the exuberant fancy
of the Pauranic authors. We have another proof ready. If the mate-
rialized 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 comprehen-
sible. 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 con-
ception of the foetus, its gestation and birth as a child, as we now
know it.
Now to the curious and little understood corroboration in the
Purdnas about the ** Sweat-born."
2. Kandu is a sage and a Yogi, eminent in holy wisdom and pious
austerities, which, finally, awaken the jealousy of the Gods, who
are represented in the Hindu Scriptures as being in never-ending
strife with the Ascetics. Indra, the **King of the Gods,"* 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, Kumaras, 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 Pauranic allegories, and not without good esoteric
reason.
The King of the Gods, or Indra, sends a beautiful Apsaras (nymph)
named Pramlocha to seduce Kandu and disturb his penance. She
succeeds in her unholy purpose and "nine hundred and seven years
six months and three days"! 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 PramlochS, terrified, flies away, wipmg the perspira-
* In the oldest MS. of the yishnu Purana in the possession of an Initiate in Southern India, the
God is not Indra, but Kama, the God of love and desire.
t These are the exoteric figrures i^ven in a purposely reversed and distorted way, being the fig^ure 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 Purdnas that has not a special esoteric meaning.
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THE STORY OF KANDU AND PRAMLOCHA EXPLAINED. 1 85
ii(yn 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 Hmbs, 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
MArishfl.''*
Now Kandu stands for the First Race. He is a sou 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 dis-
■crimination, 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. Pramlocha is the Hindu
Xilith of the Aryan Adam; and MSrisha, the daughter bom 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 Purdnas, but Kama-
deva, the God of love and desire, who sends Pramlocha on Earth.
Logic, as well as the Esoteric Doctrine, shows that it must be so. For
KSma is the king and lord of the Apsarases, of whom Pramlocha 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 Kama, and not Indra, to whom the
Apsarases are not subservient. For Kama, again, is in the Rig Veda\
the personification of that feeling which leads and propels to creation.
He was the First Movanent 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.
• Vishnu Purdna, I. xv; Wilson, ii. 5. Compare also Vivien's lempation of Merlin (Tennyson) —
the same legend in Irish tradition.
1- X. I2Q.
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1 86 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
A Hymn in the Atkarva Veda exalts Kima into a supreme God and
Creator, and says:
Kdma was bom 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 Taittinya Brdhmaiia makes him allegorically the son
of Dharma (moral religious duty, piety and justice) and of Shraddha
(faith). Elsewhere Kama is bom from the heart of Brahma ; therefore
he is Atmabhu "Self- Existent," and Aja, the ** Unborn." His send-
ing PramlochS has a deep philosophical meaning; sent by Indra — the
narrative has none. As Eros was connected in early Greek mythology
with the world's creation, and only afterwards became the sexual Cupid,
so was Kama in his original Vedic character; the Harivaftsha making
him a son of Lakshmi, who is Venus. The allegory, as said, shows
the psychic element developing the physiological, before the birth of
Daksha — the progenitor of real physical mat — who is made to be bom
from Marisha and before whose time living beings and men were pro-
created **by the will, by sight, by touch, and by yoga," as will be
shown.
This, then, is the allegor>' on the mode of procreation of the Second
or the ** Sweat-born." The same for the Third Race in its final
development.
Marisha, through the exertions of Soma, the Moon, is taken to wife
by the Prachetases, the production of the ** Mind-born" sons of BrahmS.
also,* from whom they beget the Patriarch Daksha — a son of Brahm4
also in a former Kalpa or life, explain and add the Puranas, 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 foetus
• The text has : " From Brahmd, continuing: to meditate, were bom mind-engendered progeny, with
forms and faculties derived from his corporeal nature, embodied spirits, produced from the limbs
(Gdtra) of Dhimat (all-wise deity)." All these beings were the abode of the three qualities of Deva-
snrga, or divine creation, which, as the five-fold creation, is devoid of clearness of perception, xvithout
reflection, dull of nature. " But as they did not multiply themselves, Brahm& created other mind-bom
sons like himself," namely, the Brahmarshis, or the Praj&patis, ten and seven in number. "Sanan-
dana and the other sons of Vedhas (Brahni.i) were previously created," but as shown elsewhere, they
were " without desire or passion, inspired with holy wisdom, estranged from the universe and un-
desirous of progeny." ( I'ishnu Purdna, X. vii: Wilson's Trans., i. 100, loi.) These Sanandana and
other Kum4ras 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.
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"SWEAT- born" and ANDROGYNES. 1 87
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 formaitva, which changed the drops of
perspiration into greater drops, which grew, expanded, and became
ovoid bodies — huge eggs. In these the human foetus gestated for
several years. In the Puranas, MSrishS, 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 bom in this way. He is mentioned later on. The evolution of
man, the microcosm, is analogous to that of the universe, the macro-
cosm. Sis 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 iyi 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 ofispring from themselves, like the buds and ramifica-
tions 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 ulti-
mately develop into a sea-nettle or Medusa. The Medusa is utterly
dissimilar to its parent-organism, the Stauridium. It also reproduces
itself difierently, 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 imme-
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l88 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
diate progenitors. It is, moreover, unquestionable that in the case of
humaji 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 Comnientar>''
on Shloka 27, namely, that the Fourth Race were the children of Pad-
mapini, may find its explanation in a certain letter from the Inspirer
of Esoteric Buddhisvi :
The majority of mankind belongs to the seventh sub-race of the Fourth
Root' Race — the above-meiitioned Chinamen and their off-shoots and branch-
lets ( Malaya7is, Mongoliajis, Tibetans, Hmigarians, Finiis, and even the
Esquimaux are all remnants of this last offshoot),
PadmapSni 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. Padmapani-Avalo-
kiteshvara is called esoterically Bodhisattva (or Dhydn Chohan) Chen-
resi 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, Padmapani
Chenresi, the ** Lotus-bearer,'* emits a brilliant ray of light, and forth-
with 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 prede-
cessors, the great Rishis and Manus had appeared in the beginning of
our Race, but now appear no longer. Even the exoteric appearance of
Dhyini Chenresi is suggestive of the Esoteric Teaching. He is evi-
dently, 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 culmi?iation 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-coloared) ;
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. Padmapani (Daksha)
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THE BIRTHDAYS OF THE DHYANIS. 1 89
is seated on the column, and forms the apex. In this reference com-
pare Shloka 39. The Dhyan Chohan is represented with four arms,
another allusion to the four Races. For while two are folded, the third
hand holds a lotus — Padmapani, the "Lotus-bearer'*; the flower sym-
bolizing 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 ^^^^^ — 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 Dhyani, 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 Lokanatha, "Lord of
the World"; and in Tibetan Jigten Gonpo, "Protector and Saviour"
against evil of any kind.*
Padmapani, however, is the "Lotus-bearer" symbolically only for the
profane; esoterically, it means the supporter of the Kalpas, the last of
which is called PSdma, and represents one half of the life of Brahm^.
Though really a minor Kalpa, it is called Maha, "great," because it
comprises the age in which Brahm^ sprang from a lotus. Theoreti-
cally, the Kalpas are infinite, but practically they are divided and sub-
divided in Space and Time, each division — down to the smallest —
having its own Dhyani as patron or regent. Padmapani (Avalokitesh-
vara) 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 "birth-
days" of these Dhyanis — Amitabha (the A-mi-to Fo, of China), in-
cluded: 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,t 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.
• Compare Schlagintweit's Buddhism in Tibet, pp. 88-90.
+ See J^kins' Chinese Buddhism^ p. 208.
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I90 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 sub-
stance, MATTER FROM DEAD BODIES OF MEN AND ANIMALS OF THE
Wheel before,* and from cast-off dust, the first animals!
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 ako that his frame
should be of the most tenuous matter that is compatible with ob-
jectivity. 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 reascending 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 ascend-
ing arc, Spirit is slowly reasserting 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
• The previous Third Round. r Of Uiis Round.
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MEN, THE PROGENITORS OF ANIMALS. 191
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 GenesiSy if one reads it in its true esoteric sense; for Chapter i con-
tains the histor>' 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 Elohini of Wisdom. In Chapter i, animals,
whales and fowls of the air, are created before the androgyne Adam.*
In Chapter ii, Adam (the sexless) comes first, and the animals only
appear after him. Even the state of mental torpor and unconscious-
ness of the first two Races, and of the first half of the Third Race, is
sj-mbolized, in the second chapter of Geiiesis, 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 physio-
logical process of differentiation of sexes, as a learned French theorist,
M. Naudin, imagined.
The Purdiias, the Chaldaean and Eg>'ptian fragments, and also the
Chinese traditio-ns, all show an agreement with the Secret Doctrine as
to the process and order of evolution. We find in them the corrobora-
tion 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.
**GiganiiCy transparent, dumb and mo7istrous they were,^' says the Com-
mentary'. Study in this connection the stories of the several Rishis and
their multifarious progeny. Pulastya is the father of all the Serpents
and Nagas — an oviparous brood; Kashyapa is grandsire, through his
wife Tamrt, 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 Nagas — Beings wiser than Serpents
— are the "Sons of Will and Yoga," bom before the complete separa-
tion of the sexes, ** matured in the man-bearing eggsf produced by
• An allesrorical reference to the "Sacred Animals" of the Zodiac and other heavenly bodies. Some
Kabalists see in them the prototypes of the animals.
♦ In Hfsiodf Zeus creates his Third Race of men out of ash -trees. In the /b/>o/ K/*/p 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 sub-
terranean rooms with only a single door where they (secretly) assemble These are im-
penetrable 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."
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192 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
the power (Kriyashakti) of the holy Sages" of the early Third
Race*
'•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 Adityas;" for, as explained by Parashara: ** There are a
hundred appellations of the immeasurably mighty Rudras."
Some of the descendants of the primitive Nagas, the Serpents of
Wisdom, peopled America, when its continent arose during the palmy
days of the great Atlantis; America being the PStala or Antipodes of
Jambu-dvipa, not of Bharata-varsha. Otherwise, whence the traditions
and legends — the latter always more true thafi 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 Purdnas, the story of the *• Sacrifice of Daksha" is
given, the oldest account of which is to be found in the Vdyu Piirdna.
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 Kashi Khanda of the Skanda Purdna,
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, how-
ever, 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
• There is a notable difference esoterically between the words Sarpa and Niga, though they are both
used indiscriminately. Sarpa, serpent, is from the root srip^ to creep, compare, I*at., serp-o; and they
are called Ahi, from Aa, to abandon. The Sarpas were produced from Brahm&'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 N&gas, in the allegories, their serpent's tail not-
withstanding, do not creep, but manage to walk, run and fight.
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ARCHAIC Z06L0GY. ^ I93
under another more perfect type. Shiva- Rudra creates the terrible
Virabhadra, born of his breath, the "thousand-headed, thousand-
armed" monster, and commissions him to destroy the sacrifice pre-
pared by Daksha. Then Virabhadra, "abiding in the region of ghosts
(ethereal men) .... created from the pores of his skin (Roma-
kupas) powerful Raumas.'** Now, however mythical the allegory, the
Mahdbhdrata\ — ^which is as much history as is the ///afl?— shows the
Raumas and other races springing in the same manner from the Roma-
kupas, 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-bom."
In the Vdyu Purdna's account of the sacrifice, moreover, it is said
to have taken place in the presence of creatures born from the eggy from
the vapour, vegetation, pores of the skin, and, finally only, from the
womb.J
Daksha typifies the early Third Race, holy and pure, as yet devoid of
an Individual Ego, and possessing passive capacities only. BrahmS,
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 quadmpeds; 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 Dinavas (Titans and Demon
Magicians) and other beings.
From that period forward, living creatures were engendered by sexual intercourse.
Before the tifne of Daksha^ they were variously propagated— hy the will, by sight, by
touch, and by the influence of religious austerities practised by devout sages and
holy saints.}
And now comes the simply zoological teaching.
29. Animals with bones, dragons of the deep, and flying
SarpasII 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 specu-
* Wilson translates the word as "demigods" (yt'shnu Purdna, i. 130); but Raumas are simply a
race, a tribe,
t xii. 10^08. ^
X Wilson, ih'd.y p. 123.
\ Ibid., ii. 10.
il Serpents.
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194 • '^^^ SECRET DOCTRINE.
lation are in perfect accord. The missing links representing this
transition process between reptile and bird are apparent to the veriest
bigot, especially in the Ornithoscelidae, Hesperomis, and the Archae-
opteryx of Vogt.
30. During the Third * the boneless animals grew and
changed; they became animals with bones, their Chhayas
BECAME SOLID.t
Vertebrates, and after that mammalians. Before that the animals
were also ethereal proto-organisms, just as man was.
31. The animals separated the first. J 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.ft ThE TONGUES
OF THEIR PROGENY REMAINED STILL. MONSTERS THEY BRED. A
RACE OF CROOKED RED-HAIR-COVERED MONSTERS GOING ON ALL
FOURS.JJ A DUMB RACE. TO KEEP THE SHAME UNTOLD.§§
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 [?] Uie 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 primaeval 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
• Race,
t Also.
t Into male and female.
\ Then.
11 Man.
H The " narrow- headed." Compare Shloka 24.
•• The " narrow-headed."
tt See Commentary on Shloka 36.
XX These " animals," or monsters, are not the anthropoid or any other apes, but Tetily what the
Anthropologists might call the " missing link," the primitive lower man.
H The shame of their animal origin which our modem Scientists would emphasize if they could.
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THE SIN OF THE MINDLESS MEN. I95
period of their development they drag along with them these residues, borne hj
their unknown ancestry, no one can say how long •
"The animals separated the first," says Shloka 31. Bear in mind that
at that period men were diflferent, 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 diflferent 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 spumed the early Third Race, i,e.y 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 diflfers from the
Darwinian, and the two systems are irreconcilable, unless the latter
is divorced from the dogmas of "natural selection" and the like.
• The Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism, pp. 186, 187. The "unknown ancestry" referred to are
the ^maval astral prototypes.
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196 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Indeed, between the Moneron of Haeckel and the Sansripa of Manu,
there lies an impassable chasm in the shape of the Jiva; 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 (Jiva) 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 diflference is well
understood. The Monad is a drop out of the Shoreless Ocean beyond,
or, to be correct, within, the plane of primaeval 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 NirvSnic state, under what-
ever 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 Kaba-
lists 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 exis-
tence, 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 (J)) even those
at the beginning of the Fourth Round were the astral shadows, as the
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THE DARWINISTS MISTAKEN. 1 97
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
ChhaySs 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 extincf] 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
histor>' of the embryo is an epitome of that of the race." That:
Every organism, in its development from the eg%, runs through a series of forms,
through which, in like succession, its ancestors have passed in the long course of
earth's history.* 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
Inogeitetic law, which we are obliged to place at the head of the study of the funda-
mental law of organic development, \
This modem theory was known as a fact to, and far lyore philo-
sophically expressed by, the Sages and Occultists from the remotest
• " 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 branchiae, a mammal with a tail, lastly a primate [?] and a biped? It is scarcely possible not to
recognize in the embryonic c\'olution a rapid sketch, a faithful summary, of the entire organic
aeries." (I^ftvre, Philosophy, p. 484.)
The summary alluded to is, hpwever, only that of the store of types hoarded up in man, the micro-
cosm. This simple explanation meets all such objections, as the presence of the rudimentary tail In
the fcetus— a fact triumphantly paraded by Haeckel 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 ?
t "The Proofs of Evolution," a lecture by Hseckel.
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198 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 expe-
rience and the evidence of his own eyes show him, viz., that up to a certain |>eriod,
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 applyinj? 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 Pytha-
gorean 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 ana-
lyzed—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, de-
posited from the circulation at the germinating |>oint, 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 laminae
or coats, enclosing a liquid. The laminae 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 foetus — the shape of a tad-
pole— 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 foetus assumes the charac-
teristics 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 com-
pletion of the "individual cycle of evolution." As the foetus develops amidst the
liquor amnii in the womb, so the Earths germinate in the Universal Ether, or
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THE REAL PRIMiSjVAL MAN. I99
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 utter-
most 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.*
Thus runs their philosophy of evolution, diflfering as we see, from
that of Haeckel.
All are but parts of one stupendous whol%
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, argumenii gratia, a common ancestor — in the way modem specu-
lation 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
Primaeval Man. Aye, but that ** Primaeval 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 evolu-
tion, no issue can follow from the union of man and animal, is con-
sidered and explained elsewhere.
Now what is the fundamental diflPerence 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
• Vol. i. pp. 388-390.
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200 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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
Haeckel 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 withiyi the animal tabernacle
of man himself. We Jepeat what we have said in his 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 modem evolution enters into the arena of speculative hypothesis. Arrived at
this period we shall find it easier to understand Haeckel'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," accord-
ing 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, phraseolog>', 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* (though on somewhat modified lines).
But what lies back of the Darwinian line of descent? So far as Darwin is con-
cerned 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." t 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. {
Truly, as we said in our first work, if we accept Darwin's theory' of
the development of species, we find that his starting-pohit 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 in-
comprehensible, or rather the Unutterable. If our mortal language
is inadequate to express what our spirit — while on this earth — dimly
• See Cory, Ancient Fragments, pp. 21, et seqq.
f Origin of Species, pp. 448, 449, first edition.
X Vol. i. p. 154-
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THE CAUSE OF DEGENERATION. 20I
foresees in the great ** Beyond," it must realize it at some point in the
timeless Eternity. But what lies **beyond" Haeckel's theory? Why
Bathybius Haeckelii, 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,* the LhasI who had not built men, J wept,
saying:
34. **The Amanasa§ 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.
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 develop-
ment on account of the sin committed — even this race will find itself
on the last day on one of the Seven Paths. For:
The WiselF guard the home of nature's order, they assume excellent forms in
secret.**
• The sin committed with the animals.
♦ The Spirits, the " Sons of Wisdom."
X Who had refused to "create."
) Mindless.
II Mind.
1^ This verse in the Rig Veda (x. 5, 6) : "The Seven Wise Ones [Rays of Wisdom, Dhyants] 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 (Maryidih), but they are primarily
Beams of Light falling on the Paths leading to Wisdom. (See Rig I 'eda, iv. 5-13.) It means " Waj's"
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.
•• Rig Veda^ x. 10, 5, 2.
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202 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
But we must see whether the *' animals" tampered with, were of the
same kind as those known to Zoology.
The '*FaH" occurred, according to the testimony of ancient Wisdom
and the old records, as soon as Daksha — the reincarnated 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 **FaH" :
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 7iow unknown, and
belonging to the tentative efforts of Nature. The result was that inter-
mediate races of monsters, half animals, half men, were produced. But as
they were failures^ they were 7iot allowed to breathe iong 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 Ddnavas \_Giants~\ on females of other
species — ayiimals being as \or in the manner of\ sons putative to them; and
they \Jhe human males'] refusing in time to be regarded as [putative'] fat hers
of dumb creatures — spoke truthfully and wisely. Upon seeing this {state of
thijigs], the Ki7igs and Lords of the last Races {of the Third and the Fourth]
placed the seal of prohibition 2ipon the sinful intercourse. It interfered with
Karma, it developed new \_Karma].^ They [the Divine Kings] struck the
culprits with sterility. They destroyed the Red and Blue Races.\
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.
• It is next to impossible to translate verbally some of these old Commentaries. We are oflen
obliged to give the meaning only, and thus retranslate the verbatim translations.
+ Rudra, as a Kumara, is Nilalohita— red and blue.
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THE BONELESS RACE. 203
Perchance in these specimens Haeckelians 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,
Haeckel'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 pithe-
coid* blood in his veins. Thus saith old Wisdom and universal tradi-
tion.
How was the separation of sexes efiected? 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, w^hile 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 qut of Araea,
"red earth." Taaroa, the Creative Power, the chief God, "put man to
sleep for long years, for several lives." This means racial periods, and
• This, regardless of modem materialistic evolution, which speculates in this wise: "The primi-
tive 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 conclu-
sion that it was hairy and dolichocephalic. [African races are even now dolichocephalic in a great
measure, but the palaeolithic 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.] I^t 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.)
Haeckel holds fast to I«emuria, 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 9935 cubic
inches. The former is thus "not half of the size of the brain of a new-bom babe," says Pfaff.
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204 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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
«
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. Oc-
cultism has never believed in anything, whether animate or inanimate,
outside Nature. Nor are we Cosmolaters or Polytheists for belie\'ing in
"Heavenly Man" and Divine Men, for we have the accumulated testi-
mony of the ages, with its unvarying evidence on every essential point,
to support us in this; the Wisdom of the Ancients and universal tradi-
tion. We reject, however, such groundless and baseless traditions as
have outgrown strict allegor>' and symbolism, although they may have
found acceptance in exoteric creeds. But that which is preserved in
unaiiimous 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 (Arupa) 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 Modem
Science stands less chance than elementary arithmetic with geometry.
No, certainly not. We do not believe in supernatural but only in
superhumaii, or rather interhuman, intelligences. One can easily appre-
ciate 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 pastt
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 com-
• Ellis' Pttlynesian 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 Muller. Eve is not the Hebrew name but a
European transformation of iT^n, Chavah. life, or mother of all living; "while the Tahitian »w,
and the Maori, whcva, meant bone, and bone only." {fnttoduction to the Science of Religion, p. 304.)
+ Chaire (PHibieu au ColUge de France, p. 20.
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HYBRIDIZATION. 205
posed 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 Methu-
selah— 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 pro-
duced the ancestors of the modem 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 re-
sult 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 I<emuro-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 any-
thing of it. This fact deserves notice.
De Quatrefages and other Naturalists, who seek to prove Mono-
genesis by the very fact of ever>' 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
diflFerent 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
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206 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
such mixed tribes.* 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 Tas-
manian women — i.e,, the representatives of a race, whose progenitors
were a "soulless" f 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 evo-
lution 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 sup-
port the Esoteric Teachings. It has been suggested by many Geolo-
gists that the Australian native — coexisting 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 in-
stance, 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 else-
wherCy and that the Australian flora and fauna consequently retain something of
* 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— «.^., the wild men
of Borneo, the Veddhas of Ceylon, classed by Prof. Flower among Aryans (!), 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 bo3rs 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 Hseckel so
sweepingly affirms. Only a portion of these men are a Lemurian relic. i^Q'. Esoteric Buddhism^ pp.
64 et seqq.)
t 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 reTncamates 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 reincarnate in the same,
but in a higher species, and has no " Devachan" of course. It has the seeds of all the human prin-
ciples in itself, but they are latent.
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THE SEPARATION OF SEXES. 207
the Oolitic type, while it had been altogether supplanted and replaced on the rest of
theglob€\_\ !].•
Now why has less change taken place in Australia than elsewhere?
Where is the raison d'etre 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 trans-
formation 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 ^%%^ 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,t 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
bom 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,
• Manual of Geology, p. 302.
t The ** fables *' and "myUis" about l>da and Jupiter, and such like, could never have sprungr up
in people's fancy, had not the allegrory 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 pre-
irent man from having alwasrs stood at the head of the animal world and other organic species, and
from having preceded the former.
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208 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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.*
We are approaching the turning-point of the evolution of the Races.
I<et 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-bom" — 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-bom," tlie middle Third Race; and when these, instead of
** hatching out" — may the reader pardon the rather ridiculous ex-
pression 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 Kamiic law, to in-
carnate 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 Racef from building cities,
and sowing far and wide the first seeds of civilization under the
guidance of their Divine Instructors,^ 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 de-
veloped, according to Occult Teaching, in the following order:
• See the Section on " The Chronology of the Brihmans," p. 69.
t 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.
X In the Section on "The Fifth Race and its Divine Instructors," in the Commentary on Stanza XII,
the nature of these " Instructors" is explained.
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PRIMEVAL LANGUAGE. 209
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 communi-
cated 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 mono-
syllabic 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.*
II. Aggluiinaiive 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 pre-
served the mother-language And as languages have their cyclic evo-
lution, their childhood, purity, growth, /«// f;^/c7 matter, admixture with
other languages, maturity, decay and finally death,t so the primitive
speech of the most civilized Atlantean races — that language, which is
referred to as Rakshasi BhSsha, 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 lea\4ng as an heirloom to the nascent Fifth (the Ar>'an) Race the
inflectional, highly developed languages, the agglutinative decayed and
• The present yellow raceg 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 I«emuro-Atlanteau descent. They have since then entirely
changed in stature and intellectual capacities.
* Language is certainly coeval 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
manasic element dormant in primitive man. For, as Professor Max Muller 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 I/>g08 is the equivalent of the Sanskrit V4ch, " the immortal (intellectual)
ray of spirit." And the fact that Vich (as Devasenil, an aspect of Sarasvatl, the Goddess of Hidden
Wisdom) is the spouse of the eternal celibate Kumira, unveils a suggestive, though veiled, reference
to the KumAras, 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.
P
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2IO THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Aryan and the
Semite, and accepts even the Turanian with ample reservations. The
Semites, especially the Arabs, are later Aryans — degenerate in spiri-
tuality and perfected in materiality. To these belong all the Jews and
the Arabs. The former are a tribe descended from the Chandalas of
India, the outcasts, many of them ex-Brahmans, who sought refuge in
Chaldaea, in Scinde, and Aria (Iran), and were truly born from their
father A-Bram (No-Brahman) some 8,000 years B.C. The latter, the
Arabs, are the descendants of those Aryans 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* 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.
• Ptolemy, speaking in his ninth table of the Kabolitae or Kabul tribes, calls them 'AptOTOf^uAot,
Aristophvli, the aristocratic or noble tribes. The Afghans call themselves Ben-IssraSl, children of
Is (sa) racl, from Issa, "woman and also earth," sons of Mother Earth. But if you call an Afghan
Vahoudi (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, Uieir
Arabic stock) than the Israelites, 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 I^w translated for him into
Greek (the famous Septuagint), wrote to the high priest of the Jews, Bleazar, to send him six mem
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 I^w amid miracles and wonders. See
Butler's Hora Biblicct, Josephus, and Philo Judseus.
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THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE EARTH. 211
In these red-haired and hair-covered monsters, the fruit of the un-
natural connection between men and animals, the **I/)rds of Wisdom"
did not incarnate, as we see. Thus through a long series of transforma-
tions 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 efiForts of
reproduction begat a species which developed into mammalian apes
ages later.*
As to the separation of sexes, it did not occur suddenly, as one may
think. Nature proceeds slowly in whatever she does.
37. The ONEt BECAME two; also ALI, 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 destruc-
tive. 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 Nirmdnakdyas of the Ndgas, 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 [Adi- 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.
* The Commentary explains Uiat 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
Xy^ of its male forefather—the dark gigantic Lemurian and Atlantean.
+ Androgyne.
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212 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 ]*r^"P> 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."* In the
Chaldaean 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 D'^nSw*
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 hiero-
phants, 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 — Wotnan 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, 'Tl2?n'1DnD»
Chitonuth-our." The first Hebrew word. Chiton, is the Greek Xtroiv (Chiton). 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 Chaldaeans
and the Akkadians, the progenitors and Aryan instructors of the former. It is
strongly contested that the Akkad tribes of Chaldaea, Babylonia and Assyria were
in any way cognate with the Br&hmans of Hindilstan ; 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
* Dr. A. Wilder ; who says that Gan-duniyas is a name of Babylonia.
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THE GARDEN OF EDEN, A COI.I.EGE. 213
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. Hal^vy 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 Brdhmanical
Hindis.*
And now, ten years after this was written, we find ourselves corro-
borated by Professor Sayce, who saj's 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 borrow.ed by the Semites from the non-Semitic
Akkadians or Proto-Chaldaeans, 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 /sis 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 Adi-Varsha, of the primeval Third
Race. What is the etymological meaning of the word Eden? In
Greek it is 1780*^, 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 pro-
perty 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 Cyclopaedia in the book of Foe-kotie'ki] places its "Garden
• Vol. i. pp. 575, 576.
♦ Foi-koui-ki; ou Relations des Royaumes Bouddhiques; par Chy Fa-hian: translated by Abel
Semusat.
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214 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
of Wisdom" on the Plateau of Pamir between the highest peaks of the
Himalayan 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 lUa-ah — means in one sense Wisdom,
a state like that of Nirvana, 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 Barthelemy 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* 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 Aryans [Zoroastrians] established
their Airyana Va^jd or the Meru [?J. 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-bom Sons of the
Third Race. Yet it was neither the only nor the jprimitive 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 Chal-
daeans, 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 Chaldaean 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
• Seventh year, 1855.
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FLYING CAMELS. 215
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 Shamael,
the supposed Satan, to seduce Eve, was a kind of **flying camel" —
KafL7fX.6flOpif>OV, *
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 namCy 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 ztnnged serpentSy and this metaphor may have created
several narratives on the existence of winged serpents, t
There are none now; but there is no reason why they should not
have existed during the Mesozoic Age; and Cuvier, who has recon-
structed 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 mediaeval historians, it is incontestably the Plesiosaurus.}
We are unaware if Cuvier has added anything in the way of a
fiirther niea culpay 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 scien^
tific probability on which to build a "flying camel," or a long-necked
dragon. Prof. Cope, of Philadelphia, has shown that the Mosasaurus
• De Mirville's Des Espriis, ii. 423. See also Moses Maimonides, More Nevochtm.
+ -Sciences Occultes, p. 464.
t Rlvolution du Globe, Vol. v. p. 247.
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2l6 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
fossil in the chalk was a winged serpent of this kind. There are
characters in its vertebrae, 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 Palaeontography and Palaeontology 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.* Moreover, the
prophets speak in the Bible of the flying fiery serpents,! and Job
mentions the Leviathan. X 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 tradi-
tions; 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 palaeolithic
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
• We read in De Mirville's " Memoire \. rAcad6mie" (ii. 431) of the "natVe astonishment of Gcoffroy
St. Hilaire, when M. de Paravey showed to him, in some old Chinese works and Babylonian tiles,
dragons, .... ornithorhynchuses and saurians (aquatic animals y<7»n</an/ym y^vx/ra/Mi), etc.,
extinct animals that he had thought unknown on earth .... till his own day."
+ See Isaiah, xxx. 6: "The viper and the flying serpent," and the fiery serpents conquered by the
brazen serpent of Moses.
X The fossils, reconstructed by Science which we know, ought to be sufficient warrant for the possi-
bility 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 fiety 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
Cdiiques, 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.)
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kircher's dragon. 217
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 Scherefs and Father Kirchefs
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.* Nor shall we re-
gard 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, f We would willingly believe the
story had Petrarch lived in the days of Atlantis, when such ante-
diluvian 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
• The ultramontane writers accept the whole series of draconian stories given by Father Kircher,
in his (Edipus ^gyptiacus, "De Geuesi 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 otm 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 fl3ring, 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.)
1- 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." {rbid., 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 Ul3rsses Aldovrandus and presented to the
Mus6e du S^nat, either in Naples or Bologna, "was there still in 1700," but is there no more. {Ibid.,
P- 427-)
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2l8 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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,"
"NSga," 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, aerial and tellurian at the same time,
"whose influence circumambulates the globe" {qui circumambulat
terram), as De Mirville,* 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'' — /.^., 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 -^sculapius, 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 ^Mx^y 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 myster>^ language
is well studied, and that the Hebrew scrolls are read numerically. The
Occultists know that the Serpent, the NSga, and the Dragon have each
• op. cit., ii. 422.
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HAS SATAN ANY REALITY? 219
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 con-
queror 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 con-
vince the masses that:
From the fall of man until the hour of his baptism the Devil has fuU power over
him, and possesses him by right— diabolum dominium et potestatem super homines
habere et jure eos possidere.^
To this 'Occult Philosophy answers: Prove first the existence of the
Devil as an entity, and then we may believe in such congenital posses-
sion. 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. . . . Every-
where the sacred serpent [the Ndga] 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, ^sculapius cannot cure without its assistance, and dele-
gates 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
Ibid,, p. 433-
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220 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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."*
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 NSgas (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 PS, 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 how does in Chinese,
long ox **the being who excels in intelligence," and in Greek, Spoicwv, or
**he who sees and watches." f 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 Dhy^nis, 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 Cham-
poUion :
Is among others that of an enormous serpent standing on human legs; this
reptile, the emblem of the Good Genius, is a veritable Agathodaemon. 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
XNOYBIS.J
Agathodaemon was endowed **with the knowledge of good and evil,"
— , , . — - — h .
* 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 figrured 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.
1- Ibid.^ p. 423.
X Pantheon^ I.
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TWO SCHOOLS OF MAGIC. 221
/>., with Divine Wisdom, for without the latter the former is im-
possible.* Repeating Jamblichus, Champollion shows him to be:
The deity called Etxrcov [or the Fire of the Celestial Gods— the Great Thot-
Hennes],t to whom Hermes Trismegistus attributes the invention of magic.t
The "invention of magic"! A strange term to use, as though the
unveiling of the eternal and actual mysteries of Nature could be
invented I 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 — Enoichion, 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 Surya, etc.
And -while, astronomically, the NSgas along with the Rishis, the Gandh-
ar\'as, Apsarases, Gramanis (or Yakshas, minor Gods), Yatudhanas
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 NSgas. These are neither serpents zoologically, nor
yet the NSgas ethnologically, but "wise men."
The Bibiey 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 Occult-
ism, though some of them have more archaic MSS. and direct teaching
• The Solar Chnouphis, or Agathodeemon, 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, Uni-
versal Wisdom, her eighth being M&rtt&nda, 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-Bclitanus, became later with the Chaldeeans.
+ Hermes, or rather Thot, was a generic name. Abul Feda shows in his Historia Anti-lslamitica^
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-Bclos,
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.
X I\tntkeon, text 15.
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222 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 /sis
Unveiled*
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.y he will teach candidates Blaek 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.'^ f Now in the original, the words
"their secret" read — "their Sod." J And Sod was the name for the great Mysteries
of Baal, Adonis and Bacchus, who were all Sun-Gods and had serpents for S3rmbols.
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. }
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 Israel, 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 re-
ferring to the "rebellious children" who will have to carry their riches
into the lands whence come "the viper sluA fiery flying serpent,'* \\ or
• i- 555.
t Genesis, xlix. 17, 18, and 5, 6.
X Dunlap, in his Introduction to Sod, the Myslerits of Adoni (xi), explains the word **^od" as
arcanum, religious mystery, on the authority of Schindler's Penteglott, 1201. **The secret of the
I/>rd 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 PriesU, the Holy, the Initiated)."— /^ki/jw, Ixxxix. 7
{ibid.). The Kedeshim were very far fix>m holy. Sec the Section on " The Holy of Holies," in Part II
of this Volume.
\ "The members of the Priest -Colleges were called Sodales," says Preund's Latin Lexicon (iv. 448).
"Sodalities were constituted in the Idaean Mysteries of the Mighty Mother," writes Cicoro in De
Senectute. (Dunlap, ibid., p. xii.)
II XXX. 6.
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THE SEVENTH SON OF THE SEVENTH SON. 223
Chaldaea and Egypt, whose Initiates had already greatly degenerated
in his day (700 B.C.), meant the sorcerers of those lands.* 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 'seveii Meii ; three Lords \^Dhyd?i Chohans or Pitris^
were holy and goody four less heavenly and full of passion The
Chhdyds \^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 condi-
tions. 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 ''ionr good
men," described as the four real ancestors of the human race, **who
were neither begotten by the Gods nor bom of woman"; but whose
creation was a wonder wrought by the Creative Powers, and who were
made only after *' three attetnpts at majiufacturing men had failed!^ The
Eg>'ptians in their theglogy 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;!
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 J that adorn his "ser-
pent'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,§ the hidden "Mystery God." The above passages corro-
* 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."
i- Book of the Dead^ ch. xxxix.
t 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.
\ But see Harris' Magic Papyrus, No. v, and the ram-headed Ammon manufacturing men on a
potter's wheel.
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224 '^^^ SECRET DOCTRINE.
borate our assertion, and show what the word ** serpent" really meant
in antiquity.
But as to the Nagals and Nargals; whence came the similarity of
names between the Indian Nagas and the American Nagals?
The Nargal was the Chaldaean 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 Hindu Ndgas. Both have the same
faculties and the power to have an attendant Daemon, with whom they identify
themselves completely. The Chaldaean and Assyrian Nargal kept his Daemon, 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.*
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
ChelS, is said to have descended into PatSla, the "antipodes" and
therein married Ulupi,t a Naga, or NSgi rather, the daughter of the
king of the Nagas, Kauravya.J
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 SEMES EIAAM ABPASAH, 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
Agathodaemon, 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.j
• Brasseur de Bourbourg, Mexique, pp. 135 and 574.
t Ulfipi (Ulflpl) has an entirely Atlantean ring about it. Like Atlantis, it is neither a Greek nor a
Sanskrit name, but reminds one of Mexican names.
X MahdbhArata, Adi Parva, Shlokas 7788, 7789. The BhAgavata Purdna (ix. xx. 31), as explained by
Shridhara, the commentator, makes Ulfipt the daughter of the king of ManipAra (see Vishnu Pur&na,
Wilson, iv. 160); but the late Pandit Dayinand Sarasvatt, certainly the greatest Sanskrit and Paurinic
authority in India on such questions, personally corroborated that Ulupi was daughter of the king of
the N&gas in P4t&la, or America, 5,000 years ago, and that the Nigas were Initiates.
\ /sis Unveiled, ii. 293.
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BUDDHA'S GREAT MOUNTAIN. 225
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 com-
pletes Light or Good ; it is its creator on Earth.
According to the views of the Gnostics, these two principles are im-
mutable 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 Hindis — since Vishnu during one of his incarna-
tions, 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 pro-
tecting 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 Chaldaean tradition, to have
taught the sons of men to become like one of them. To the present day Foh-tchou*
who lives in his Foh-Maeyu, or the temple of Buddha, on the top of the Kouin-
Long-Sang,t the great mountain, produces his greatest religious miracles under a
tree called in Chinese Sung-Ming-Shu, or the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of
Life, for ignorance is death, and knowledge alone gives immortality. This marvel-
lous display takes place every three years, when an immense concourse of Chinese
Buddhists assembles in pilgrimage at the holy place.J
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 lyOgos and the Androgyne, by eating of the fruit
• Foh-tchou, in Chinese meaning literally Buddha's lord, or the teacher of the doctrines of
Buddha — Foh.
i- This mountain is situated south-west of China, almost between China and Tibet.
X Ibid.f pp. 293, 294.
Q
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226 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
of knowledge — gradually began to be accused by the material spirit of
posterity of having committed sin, of having disobeyed the **I/)rd 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 in-
tended in this disobedience, but that the ** Serpent" was actually the
"Lord God" himself, who, as the Ophis, the lyOgos, or the bearer of
divine creative wisdom, taught mankind to become creators in their
turn.* 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 ofwoma7i,\ The circle was separated from
its diameter line.
From the possession of the double principle in one, that is, the Androgj-ne con-
dition, the separation of the dual principle was mad^ presenting two opposites,
whose destiny it was, for ever after, to seek reunion 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 reunion 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. J
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
• Let the reader be reminded that in the Zohar, and also in all the Kabalistic works, it is main-
tained that " Metatron united with Shekinah." Now Shekinah as the Veil (Gract) of Ain Suph, repre-
senting the Logos, is that very Tree of Knowledge: while ShamaSl— 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 {Genesii, iii) an incident pertaining to Eg>'ptian Initiation, says: "The Tree of the
Divination, or of the Knowledge of Good and Evil .... is the science of Tryphon, the Genius
of Doubt, tgy to teach, and phon, doubt. Tzyphon is one of the Aleim; we shall see him presently
under the name of Nach, the tempter " {Les CEloim, vol. ii. p. 218). He is now known to Symbologists
under the name of Jehovah.
+ This is the view taken and adopted by all the Church Fathers, but it is not the real Esoteric
Teaching. The curse 6\di not l)egin with the formation of either man or woman, for their separation
was a natural sequence of evolution, but with the breaking of the law.
t 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."
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SCIENTIFIC BEUEF IN "DRAGONS." 227
lieavenly 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,y revealed to an enlightened
mind and hidden to ignorance, which is night * As says the Com-
mentary:
The Tree of the Knowledge of the Good and the Evil grows from the roots
^f 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 (^), 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 diflfers
from the more philosophical Eastern or Aryan views upon the sub-
ject.! 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 modem 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 modem 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.
• See Zohar, i. 172, a and b.
+ Compare the Section on "The Mysteries of the Hebdomad " in Part II of this Volume.
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228 'THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 fabu-
lous, 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.*
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 coexisting 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
Aryan 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.t . . .
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
fnost 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^X
It is shown by the same Geologist that:
Palaeontologists have successively traced back the existence of man to periods
variously estimated at from thirty thousand to one million years — to periods when
he coexisted with animals which have long since become extinct}
These animals, ** weird and terrible," were, to give a few instances:
(i) The genus Cidastes, whose huge bones and vertebrae show them to
have attained a len^h of nearly two hundred feet. The remains of
• Gould's Mythical Monsters, p. i.
+ The Unicorn: a Mythological Investigation, Robert Brown, junr., F.S.A. I/mdon, i88x.
X Mythical Monsters, pp. 2-4.
\ Ibid., p. 20.
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FLYING DRAGONS. 229
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!*
Then we read of the monstrous Sivatherium in the Himalayas, the
four-homed stag, as large as an elephant, and exceeding the latter in
height; of the gigantic Megatherium; of colossal flying lizards, Ptero-
dact>'li, with crocodile jaws on a duck's head, etc. All these were co-
existent 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'' \
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. %
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 Chaldaea 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?}
The few remaining giant animals, such as elephants — themselves
smaller than their ancestors the Mastodons — and hippopotami, are the
only sur\'iving relics, and tend to disappear more entirely every day.
But even they have already had a few pioneers of their future genus,
• Ibid., pp. 36, 37. i- The Human Species, p. 52. % Manual 0/ Geology, p. 301. \ Ibid., p. 17.
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230 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Hippo-
potamus (Choeropsis) Liberiensis, "which M. Milne-Edwards figures as
little more than two feet in height."*
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 speak-
ing, to the things that are unknown.t
Thus they laugh only at their own ignorance.
THE "SONS OF GOD" AND THE *' SACRED ISLAND."
The ** legend" given in /sis Unveiled % 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 severi 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-ani, and his inquisitive wife, He-va, where now are
found but salt lak-es and desolate barren deserts, there was a vast inland sea, which
extended over Middle Asia, north of the proud Himfilayan 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 Uyiveiled 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."
• Gould's Mythical MonsUrs, p. 16. See also Reckerches, etc., des Afammijires, plate 1. Paris, 186&
to 1874.
+ Preface to the Skan Hai King, or "Wonders by I«and and Sea."
X Vol. i. pp. 589, et seqq.
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THE CONTINENT OF THE GODS. 23 1
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-oflf djring 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 (Mah& 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.*
Tradition asserts, and Archaeology 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 EUora, Ele-
phanta, 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 Archaeology; but to a fact, known to the initiated BrShmans
of India and especially to Yogis, viz., that there is not a cave-temple in
the country but has its subterranean passages running in every direc-
tion, 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 languag'e — 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 Lemu-
rian continents went down.
The great lost Continent might have, perhaps, been situated south of Asia,
extending from India to Tasmania.t If the hypothesis — now so much doubted,
• There are Arcbceologists, who, like Mr. James Fergrussoii, refuse any g^reat 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 perfecUy arbitrary. Further discoveries will show that it is erroneous and un-
warranted.
t America, at the time of its discovery, was called Atlanta by some native tribes.
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232 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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.* 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 him-
self 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 ;t those who were instructed by the "Sons of
God" of the island, and who were initiated in the divine doctrine of pure revela-
tion; 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 bom
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 Vuhf 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, J
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, in-
structed them in arts and sciences. Only, as these DhyHnis were Rupa
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 ever>' man." All except Xisuthrus and Noah, who are substantially identical
with the great Father of the Thlinkithians,§ who, they say, also escaped in a large
boat like the Hindd 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 descen-
dants 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
**Sa\4ours," and great hierophants; on the other hand, its ^'natural magicians"
who, through lack of the restraining power of proper spiritual enlightenment,
. . . . perverted their gift§ to evil pusposes.
• since then Donnelly's Atlantis has appeared, and soon its actual existence will have become a
scientific fact.
+ 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.
t Sec De Mirville's Pneumatologie : Des Esprits, iii. 57, et seqq.
\ See Max Miiller, Chips, i. 339; "Popol Vuh." Compare also Holmberg, Etknographische Skizxen
aber die Vdlker des Russischen Amerika. Helsingfors, 1855.
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THE TESTIMONY OF JACOLUOT. 233
We may supplement this by the testimony of some records and tradi-
tions. In UHistoire des Vierges : les Peuples et les Continents Disparus,
Louis JacoUiot says:
One of the most ancient legends of Indies 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 up-
heaval, and the fragments of which must be sought in Madagascar, Ceylon,
Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and the principal isles of Polynesia.
The high plateaux of Hindustan 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 Br^hmans, this country had at-
tained a high civilization, and the peninsula of Hindiistan, enlarged by the displace-
ment 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 i>eoples 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 Atlan-
tides, 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.*
This Oceanic tradition corroborates the legend given from the ** Re-
cords of the Secret Doctrine." The war mentioned between the yellow
op. cit., pp. 13-15.
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234 I'H^ SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 geo-
logical 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 (? Fou-
touha), 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 in-
sufficient 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., fiad fiever known each other,
had nei'er 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, ejctended their hand toward the setting sun *
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 tradi-
tion must be based on some approximate truth.
In its proper place we will show Modern Science fully corroborating
the above and other traditions of tlie 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 recog-
nize 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
Hindu books. Compare these with the faces of some other colossal
• Ibid., p. 308.
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THE COLOSSI OF BAMIAN. 235
Statues in Central Asia — those near Bamian, for instance — the portrait-
statues, tradition tells us, of Buddhas belonging to previous Manvan-
taras; of those Buddhas and heroes who are mentioned in the Buddhist
and Hindu works, as men of fabulous size,* the good and holy brothers
of their wicked coiiterine brothers generally, just as RSvana, the giant
king of Lanka, 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
diflference, 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 reincarnations however, and, apart from unavoidable
exaggerations in popular fancy and tradition, they are historical char-
acters,\ 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 Purdnas and other Hindu Scriptures.
We feel quite prepared to agree with the accusation. But, if Aryan
writers have occasionally allowed their chronological pendulum to
swing too far one way, beyond the legitimate limit of fact; neverthe-
less, 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 Brihmanical 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 im-
partial observer may judge it otherwise. He may either proclaim both
unscrupulous historians, or justify both, each on his respective ground,
and say: Hindu Aryans wrote for their Initiates, who read truth be-
tween the lines ; not for the masses. If they did mix up events and
• An approach to the statues at Bamian— also a Buddha 200 feet high— is found near a Jain settle-
ment in Southern India, and appears to be the only one that remains at present.
t Even Wilson admits that Rima and Ravana were personages founded on historical facts. " The
traditions of the South of India uniformly ascribe its civilization . . . and the settlement of
civilized Hindis [the Fifth Race] to the conquest of LankA by Rima " ( Vishnu Purdna^ iii. 318)— the
victory of the "Sons of Gods '* over the Atlantean sorcerers, says the true tradition.
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236 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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,* in the PurdnaSy 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 Miiller^s favourite theories — namely, that writing was
not known in India, even in the days of Panini (!); that the Hindus
had all their arts and sciences — even to the Zodiac and their architec-
ture (Fergusson) — from the Macedonian Greeks ; these and other such
cock-and-bull hypotheses, are threatened with ruin. It is the ghost of
old Chaldsea that comes to the rescue of truth. In his third Hibbert
Lecture (1887) Professor Sayce of Oxford, speaking of newly-dis-
covered Assyrian and Babylonian cylinders, refers at length to Ea,
the God of Wisdom, now identified with the Cannes 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 Chaldasan 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 Chaldaea 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 stj'le 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.
• Thus we are shown one hero, to give an instance, first bom as the " unrighteous but valiant
monarch" (Purusha) of the Daityas, Hiranyakashipu, slain by the Avat&ra Nara-sinha (Man-lion).
Then he was bom as Ravana, the giant king of I^nkd, and killed by Rima ; after which he is reborn
as ShishupAla, 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 grives us the key not only to the respective dates of Rima and Krishna but
«ven to a certain psychological mystery.
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THE MOON-COLOURED RACE. 237
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." •
Muslin, best known now as Dacca muslin, known in Chaldaea as Hindu
(Sindhu), and teak wood used 4,000 years B.C., and yet the Hindus, to
whom Chaldaea 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 anthropo-
morphism 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.f
39. The FiRST,t on every Zone, was moon-coloured;§ the
Second yellow like gold; the Third red; the Fourth brown,
which became black with sin. II The first seven human shoots were
all of one complexion.^ The next seven,** began mixing. ft
To understa*nd Shloka 38, it must be read together with the Shlokas of
Stanza IX. Up to this point of evolution man belongs more to meta-
• Compare Hihbert Lectures^ 1877, Sayce, pp. 134-138.
♦ The Gods became No-Gods.
X Race.
\ Yellow-white.
I 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 Chelis), 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 Rikshasas 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 Rikshasas 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 Pur&nas. " Asura was the generic appellation of all the Atlanteans who
were the enemies of the spiritual heroes of the Aryans (Gods)." {Man, p. 77.)
•I In the beginning.
•• The sub- races.
tt Their colours.
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^38 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
physical 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 Dhyanis, 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 KriySshakti 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,"*
• 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 Chhayas 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 pro-
duced 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 aeons to come, because the bodies they "had
to inform had become defiled through their own procrastination.!
This was the "Fall of the Angels," owing to their rebellion against
Karmic Law. The "fall of man'' was no fall, y^r he was irresponsible.
But "creation" having been invented on the dualistic system as the
"prerogative of God alone" — the legitimate attHbute patented by
Theology in the name of an infinite Deity of their own making — the
power of KriySshakti 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 blas-
phemy in the face of the dead-letter dogma. "Your doctrine," the
• stanza VII, Shloka 24. t See Shlokas 32, 34.
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THE MYSTERIES AMONG THE MAYAS. 239
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
4yum image?" — is our reply. The Esoteric interpretation of the Bible,
however, sufl&ciently refutes this slanderous invention of Theologj^;
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 preeminently 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." * But what, in reality, is the Book ofEiioch itself, from which the
author of Revelation and even the St. John of the Fourth Gospel t 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 Qtiichds very justly suggests that the so-called
• In general, the so-called orthodox Christian conceptions about the " fallen" Ang-els 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
Jenisalem. Thus, Satan being perfect in wisdom, and beauty, his vast empire is our earth, if not the
wh<^e 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 0/ 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
ro3ralty to his priestly dignity*' (! ! !). "Satan was also a priest of the Most High," etc., etc. And
now—" Antichrist will be Satan incarnate." (Chap. Ill and pp. 56-59.) The pioneers of the coming
ApoUjron have already appeared— they are the Theosophists, the Occultists, the authors of the Perfect
IVay, of Tsis 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.
+ Compare x. 8, where it speaks of all who have come before Jesus, being "thie%'es and robbers."
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240 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
"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 Chris-
tianity (! !); 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,* quotes from the Book of Enoch; and, therefore,
as Archbishop I^aurence, 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 coeval 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
ofiFered to the Devas. In Christian Theology they are broadly referred
to as the ** Fallen Spirits," the heroes of various conflicting and con-
tradictor>' 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 ChufcE^istorted
it; among others, a purely astro7iomical signification.
The "Serpent" fallen from on high (deorsum fluens) was credited
with the possession of the Keys of the Empire of the Dead (rov Oavdrov
SipXn) to the day when Jesus saw it fall "as lightning .... from
heaven,"! notwithstanding the Roman Catholic interpretation of **ca-
debat ut fulgur'* It means indeed that even "the devils are subject"
to the lyOgos — ^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,
• Verse 14. •♦• Luke, x. 18.
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SATANIC MYTHS. 24I
may be said to have saved those who believed in the Secret Teach-
ings, from ** eternal death," and to have conquered the Kingdom of
Darkness, or Hell, as every Initiate does. This is the human, terres-
trial 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."* "The Logos is passive Wisdom in Heaven and con-
scious, self-active Wisdom on Earth," we are taught. It is the Mar-
riage of the "Heavenly Man" with the "Virgin of the World," or
Nature, as described in Pymander; the result of which is their pro-
geny— immortal man. It is this which is called in St. John's Revela-
tio7i\ 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 rotten-
ness she is inwardly filled with, is not the "righteousness of saints," J
but rather the blood of the saints she has "slain upon the earth." §
Thus the remark made by the great Initiate, in Zw^^^— referring allegori-
cally to the ray of enlightenment and x^?iSon, 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 || —
• 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 Atmi, 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.
t xix. 7.
t Ibid.^ verse 8.
I xviii. 24.
ij 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 tmto us through
thy name.'* {Luke, x. 17.) Now, " thy name" means the name of Christos, or I^ogos, or the Spirit of
tme 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 undetstood the secret meaning of
the terms "Father" and " Son," and knew that it referred to Spirit and Soul on the Sarth. For the
ieachingrs 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. xi).
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242 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 ipost 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 Pauranic Hinduism failed to
evolve very suggestive symbols and allegories concerning the rebellious
and fallen Gods. The Purdnas teem with them ; and we find a direct
hint at the truth in the frequent allusions of Parashara, in the Vishnu
Purdnay to all those Rudras, Rishis, Asuras, KumSras and Munis, who
have to be bom in every age — to reincarnate in every Manvantara. This,
Esoterically, is equivalent to saying that the "Flames" bom 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 inter-
mediate 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 reincarnations in previous Kalpas for incalculable -<3Sons— bj'- the
highest and the earliest Nirvanis. 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.* 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
• So, for instance, in the Purdnas, Pulastya, a Prajapati, or son of Brahmi— the progenitor of the
Rikshasas, and the grandfather of RAvana, the great king of Lanki in the Rdmayana—lkaid^ in a
former birth, a son named Dattoli, "who is now known as the sage Agastya," says Vishnu Purdna
(Wilson's Trans., i. 154). This name of Dattoli alone, has six more variants to it, or seven meanings.
He is called respectively, Dattoli, Dattili, 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 Rdkshasas 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 Parishara, who attempted a bit of Jadoo (sorcery), which
he calls "sacrifice," for the destruction of the Rikshasas, mean anything. For he says: "I«et no
more of these unoffending ^ SpiriXs of Darkness' be consumed." (See for details, MdhddhdrtUa, Adi
Parvan, s. 176; also Linga Pur Ana, Pikrv&rdha, s. 64; Wilson, ibid., i. 8, 9.)
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HOLY SATAN. 243
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 Aryan allegories.*
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.\ No better and clearer indication
of the truth could be offered to the intelligent reader, and it is there-
fore quoted here at some length :
1. And on the seventh day [seventh creation of the Hindis], J there went forth
from the presence of God a mighty Angel, fuU of wrath and consuming, and God
gave him the dominion of the outermost sphere.}
2. Eternity brought forth Time ; the Boundless gave birth to Limit ; Being de-
.scended into generation. ||
4. Among the Gods is none like unto Mm, into whose hands are committed the
kingdoms, the power and the glory of the worlds :
5. Thrones and empires, the dynasties of kings,1F 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
* 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 Dhyin Chohans, or Devas {progressed entities of a previous Planetary Period], as well
as amongr men. But still, as the failures are too far progressed and spiritualized to be thrown back
forcibly from Dhyin-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 Dhyan Chohans
are borne in by influx * ahead ' of the Blementals [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 Blementals, to develop little by little the full type of humanity y That is to say,
to develop in man, and endow him with his Self-conscious Mind, or Manas.
f Appendix XV, pp. 369, et segq.
t When the Earth with its Planetary Chain and Man were to appear.
I Our Earth and the physical plane of consciousness.
|] When the pure, celestial Beings or Dhy&n Chohans, and the great Pitris of various classes were
commissioned— the one to evolve their Images or Chh&yis, and make of them physical man, the
oUiers to inform and thus endow him with divine intelligence and the comprehension of the Mysteries
of Creation.
IT The " dynasties of kings " who all regard themselves as the " anointed," reigning by the " Grace
of God,*' whereas in truth, they rdgn by the grace of Matter, the Great niusion, the Deceiver.
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244 '^^^ SECRET DOCTRINE.
generative Light of the Logos — Horns, BrahmS, Ahura Mazda, etc., as
primeval manifestations of the Ever-unmanifested Principle, whether
called Ain Suph, Parabrahman, or ZeruSna Akeme, or Boundless
Time, KSla — ^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 Getiesis; of the
conscious God who needed a body to clothe his too subjective divinity,
Satan. But the "innumerable incarnations of Spirit," and "the cease-
less pulse and current of Desire,"* refer, the first, to our doctrine of
Karmic and Cyclic Rebirths, the second — to Eros, 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 -^/ Chazari, says, and it will be
found that Weight and Measure and Number are, in the Sepher Jetzirahy
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:
• Jbid.^ loc. cit., verse lo.
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HOLY SATAN. 245
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 Hindus; 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] evolu-
tion, Saturn (Satan) [astronomically] is the seventh and last in the order of macro -
cosmic emanation, being the circumference of the Kingdom of which Phoebus [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.. . . V^n SsXBXi only is the shame of generation,
38. He hath lost his virginal estate [so hath the Kumdra, by incarnating]: un-
eovering 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 gloiy 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 re-
flection of God; it anathematizes God made manifest in Matter or in
the objective; it maledicts God, or the ever-incomprehensible Wisdom,
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246 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
revealing itself as Ught 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 pre-
sented it under the legendary form of the various records which have
formed the Bible, Its historical foundation, in however imperfect a
form, is now oflFered 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 Hindu, Grecian, Chaldaean, and Jewish
Pantheons are found to be built on fact and truth. The Giants of
Ge7iesis are the historical Atlanteans of Lanka, 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 per-
sonages regarded as mythical* 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, how-
ever veiled its text. There also he will find the evolution of the
• See the "Primeval Manus of Humanity."
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CAPUT ANGELORUM. 247
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 "Uni-
versal Mind," which the hand of the Christian translator has meta-
morphosed in the earliest renderings into God, the Father; then the
"Heavenly Man,"* 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 I/>gos of the " Father." t
Synthetically, every Creative I/>gos, 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 attribute^, of God, which, being created by him, as the
Manus were by BrahmS, became Archangels. The Roman Catholic
Theodice itself, recognizing in its creative Verbum Princeps the Head
of these Angels {caput angelorutn) and the Angel of the great Counsel
{tnagni consilii angelus), thus recognizes the identity of Christ with them.
"The Sura became ^-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 alle-
gorized 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 o?ie-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
* 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 !
+ "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. i, ed. of 1579.)
H*TC it is evident that Mind, the Primeval Universal Divine Thought, is neither the Unknown Un-
manifested 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
hopclesaly mixed up in the translations of f^mander.
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248 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
legendary "War in Heaven," brought on by the rebellion of the Angels*
against Creative Law, or the Demiurge. The statement is correct, but
the inner meaning is to this day a mystery. To elude further explana-
tion 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 philo-
sophical 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 Philo-
sopher during the Mediaeval Ages could have uttered thatf which in the
sight of Orthodox Theology was terrible blasphemy, for it would have
• 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 Hindik
Lucifer, the Mah&sura, is also said to hav-e become envious of the Creator's resplendent Light, and, at
the head of inferior Asuras (not Gods, but Spirits), to have rebelled against Brahma; for which Shiva
hurled him down to PitAla. But, as philosophy goes hand in hand with allegorical fiction in Hindu
myths, the "Devil" is made to repent, and is afforded the opportunity to progress : he is a sinful man
esoUrically, 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 eUrnal torment for the Devil and the damned
that she has invented.
t Why, for instance, should Bliphas L6vi, 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 bliphas, after haWng alluded to it a
hundred times in his previous works, says in his later Histoire de la Afagie (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 0/ 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 per^nages, 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 oppo-
sition 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 Ludfer— the 'Morning Star,' the 'Son of the Morning'— the very high^t 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 digrnify him by his grand characteris-
tics—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 Apocal3rpse. 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 x-ery erudite, but still more puzzling author of
Phallicism gives it, no uninitiated mortal would ever understand his real drid.
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THEOLOGICAL SNUFFERS. 249
led them directly through the **Holy" Office of the Inquisition, to rack
and stake. But for our modem 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 Manicheeism, invented the Devil, and by
placing a theological extinguisher on the radiant Star-God I^ucifer, the
**Son of the Morning," thus created the most gigantic of all her para-
doxes, 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 homed 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-exoteri-
cally, the "First-bom" 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 —
Jailed 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 Vedtntins, as
to the utter fallacy of attributing functional activity to the Infinite
and Absolute Deity. Esoteric Philosophy maintains that during the
Sandhy^, 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, necessi-
tated 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."*
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 Luciferiansf and other Gnostics; and
• "Creation"— out of preSxistent eternal Substance, or Matter, of course, which Substance, according
tc our teachings, is Boundless, Bver-existing Space.
t 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, philo-
sophized on the grounds of the real Kabalistic and Occult teachings.
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250 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
in that parchment the "Seven Suns of I^ife" are given in the order itt
which they are found in the Saptasurya. 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 DhySn
Chohans, and proves the speculation to have had its origin in the
A
Secret Doctrines of the Aryans. As is well known, the Kabalah did
not originate with the Jews, for the latter got their ideas from the
Chaldseans 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 Religioyi, 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 Aryans] 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 ^Hhe organs on whose action what
man calls the creation, the evolution of life on the planet earthy 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* 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 origi-
nated 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 perisliabU inan. . . .
• This "Central Sun" of the Occultists even Science is obligfed 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 modem 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 or
Universal Life-Electricity; the reservoir within which that Divine Radiance, already differentiated at
the begrinning 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.
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"PRINCIPLES" EXPLAINED. 251
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.*
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 f They are the
Head Group divided into four Classes, from the Incorporeal down ta
the Semi-corporeal. These Classes are directly connected — though in
very difiFerent 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 doc-
trine just quoted. This is the great difiFerence between the Semitic and
the Aryan 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 "prin-
ciple" reaches man through all the phases of Being, pure as an indis-
crete 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 AtmS. Group Three, the
Equatorial Sun, cements the Buddhi to Atman and the higher attri-
butes of Manas; while Group Four, the Spirit of our visible Sun,
endows him with his Manas and its vehicle, the KSma Rupa, or body
of passions and desires — the two elements of Ahamkara which evolve
individualized consciousfuss, the personal Ego. Finally, it is the Spirit
of the Earth, in its triple unity, that builds the Physical Body, attract-
ing to it the Spirits of Life and forming his Linga Sharira.
But everything proceeds cyclically, the evolution of man like every-
thing 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 pro-
jected by the ** Boneless," the Incorporeal Creator:
First, the Breathy then Buddhi, and the Shadow-Son [the Body\ icere
'* created*' But where was the Pivot [the Middle Principle, Manas']? Man
is doomed. When alojie, the hidiscrete [ Undifferentiated Element] and the
Vahan [Buddhi] — the Cause of the Causeless — break asunder from mani-
fested life.
• op. cit., pp. 287-289. + See Commentary to Stanza VII, Volume I.
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252 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
*' Unless,'' explains the Commentary:
Unless cemented and held together by the Middle Principle, the Vehicle
of the personal consciousness ofjiva.
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 (J>) 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 Xh^ fifth
and t\i^ fourth "principles*** — Manas and KSma Rupa — that contain
the dual Personality; the real immortal Ego, if it assimilates itself to
the two higher, and the false and transitory Personality, the M^yavi or
Astral Body, so-called, or the Animal-human Soul — the two having
to be closely blended for purposes of a full terrestrial existence. In-
carnate 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— /.^., in a two or even a three-principled Body composed of its
Sthula Sharira, Pr^na (Life-principle) and Linga Sharira — 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 dis-
figured 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 king-
dom of [divine] souls and divine action. t
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 % are
called ^'Creations," for they appear in the Spirit-Ray, munifested through
the potency inherent ifi 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.
• The fourth and the Ji/th from below beginning: with the Physical Body ; the third and the fourth,
if we reckon from Atmi.
t New Aspects of Life.
X Angelic, Spiritual Essences, immortal in their Being, because unconditioned in Eternity; but
periodical and conditioned in their Manvantaric manifestations.
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MAN, THE PAI^ SHADOW OF GOD. 253
Again :
Tlhe Heavenly Rupa \^Dhydn Chokan] creates [man^ in his own form;
it is a spiritual ideation consequent on the first differentiation and awaken-
ing- 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
Karth only, it was the duty of the first **difiFerentiated'* 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 com-
manded to created 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 Arch-
angels or Dhyanis, were compelled by the Evolutionary I^aw 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.
Hindu exotericism represents them all as Yogins, whose piety in-
spired them to refuse to "create," as they desired to remain eternally
KumSras, "Virgin Youths," in order, if possible, to anticipate their
fellows in progress towards Nirvdna — the final liberation. But, agree-
ably 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 conscious-
ness, 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 / 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 pro-
nounced) the cruel words, "Behold, the man is become as one of us, to
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254 'THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Icnow 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 envj'- 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 Immor-
tality— the latter a kind of static immortality that would have trans-
formed man into an undying "Wandering Jew."
As narrated in King's Gnostics and their Remains concerning Ilda-
baoth, 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.*
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.
• op. cit., pp. 97, 98, and ed., 1887.
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SATAN, A CENTRIPETAL FORCE. 255
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 personi-
fied emblem of *<o<r<^/>os {Phosphoros), 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, dis-
cerning 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 conscious-
ness gnawing at its heart — a Prometheus indeed, because a conscious,
and hence a responsible entity.* The curse of life is great, yet, with the
exception of some Hindu 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 (ob-
jectively) incorporeal Being, or even the universal static Inertia personi-
fied in BrahmS during his "Night's" Rest. For, to quote from an able
article by onef who, confusing the planes of existence and conscious-
ness, fell a victim thereto:
Satan [or Lucifer] represents the ActivCy or, as [M. Jules] Baissac calls it, the
"Centrifugal" Energ>' of the Universe [in a cosmic sense]. He is Fire, Light, Life,
Straggle, Effort, Thought, Consciousness, Progress, Cirilization, Liberty, Indepen-
dence. At the same time he is Paifiy 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
* The history of Prometheus, Karma, and human consciousness, is to be found in Part II, Section V.
•»• By an Englishman whose erratic genius killed him. The son of a Protestant clergjrman, 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 joixied 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
Malthas with Satan, and Darwin with the Astral Light. Peace be to his— 5AW/. He is a warning to
the CheUswho fail. His forgotten tomb may now be seen in the Mussulman burial ground of Joona-
ghnr, KAthiawar, India.
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256 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
again baflaed by the Eternal Inertia of the Passive Energy of the Kosmos— the
inexorable '* / am^' — the Flint from which the sparks are beaten out. And fitly
. . . . are he and his adherents .... consigned to the "Sea of Fire" —
because il 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 rearrange 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 hybemates, 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 "/ 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 oi 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,^ All is absorbed
in the spirit of the Most Powerful. // 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 Nirvdna. But then Theosophy teaches
that Separation from the Primal Source having once occurred, Reiinion can only be
achieved by Will- Effort — which is distinctly Satanic in the sense of this essay, t
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, Dh5'an Chohans, who refused to
create, because they wanted Man to become his own creator and an im-
mortal God — that men can reach NirvSna 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 KumSras, 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
• The author talks of the active, fighting, damning Jehovah as thoujirh 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
Theosophisl generally is.
+ The Theosophist, vol. iii. p. 68.
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THE SACRIFICE OP THE FIERY ANGELS. 257
nor to spiritualize, but to humanize Self,"* to do so, he must be bom
human not angelic. Hence, tradition shows the celestial Yogis oflFer-
ing 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 MahSyuga, thus exchanging their impersonal
Individualities for individual Personalities — ^the bliss of sidereal exist-
ence for the curse of terrestrial life. This voluntary sacrifice of the
Fiery Angels, whose nature was K7iowledge and Love, has been con-
strued by the exoteric theologies into a statement that shows **the
Rebel Angels hurled down from Heaven into the darkness of Hell" —
our Earth. Hindu 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 them-
selves into an Abyss at the dawn of their very existence, and have
anticipated the time when they are to descend on Earth.f
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.
* 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 tUstituiion 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 i*— to the Jod C^)— the poetical ideograph of Jehovah in the Kabalah— XhK. God of the male symbol
of generation.
t Zohar, iii. 6ir.
8
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1
258 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Upadhis and the Vehicles, or the Noumena of these. In
the exoteric accounts, they are personified by the "three sons of sur-
passing brilliancy and splendour" of Ag^i AbhimSnin, the eldest son of
BrahmS, the Cosmic Logos, by Sv^hS, one of Daksha's* 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 PSvaka, PavamSna and Shuchi, were
condemned, it is said, by a curse of Vasishtha, the great Sage, "to be
born over and over again." f This is clear enough.
Therefore, the Flames, whose functions are confused in the exoteric
books, and who are called indifferently PrajSpatis, Pitris, Manus,
Asuras, Rishis, KumSras,J 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 DevatS or Pitar DevatS (Gods), for, as said, they were first
Gods — and the highest — before they became "A'i^-Gods," and had from
Spirits of Heaven fallen into Spirits of Earth § — exoterically, note well,
in orthodox dogma.
• Daksha, the "intelligent, the competent." "This name generally carries with it the idea of
creative power.** He is a sou of Brahmi and of Aditi, and agreeably to other versions, a self- bom
power, which, like Minerva, sprang from his father's body. He is the chief of the Prajipatis, the
Lords or Creators of Being. In Vishnu Purdna, Par&shara sasrs of him : " In every Kalpa [or Man-
van tara] Daksha and the rest are bom 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.
f Bhagavata Purdna, iv. 24, 4.
X No one of these Orders is distinct from the Pitris or Progenitors. As sasrs Mauu (iii. 284) : " The
wise call our fathers Vasus ; our paternal grandfathers, Rudras ; our paternal great grandfathers,
Adityas; agreeably to a text of the Vedas." "This is an everlasting Vedic text," says another
translation.
) As now discovered by the late G. Smith in the Babylonian cylinder literature, it was the same in
Chaldsean Theogony. Ishtar, " eldest of Heaven and of Earth." Below him the Igigi or Angels of
Heaven, and the Anunaki, 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.)
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THE ** CONSCIOUS ENTITY." 259
No Theologian or Orientalist can ever understand the genealogies
of the PrajSpatis, the Manns, and the Rishis, or the direct connec-
tion 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 expla,nation, 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 J the very essence and esse of the high Intelligences, condemned,
by the undeviating law of Karmic evolution, to reincarnate in this
Manvantara.
(J>) 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 Fore-
fathers or "Creators" were all Divine Beings — though of different
classes or degrees of perfection in their Hierarchy — ^it teaches that men
were nevertheless bom 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.* As to their
• Some superior, others inferior, to suit the Karma of the various reTncamatingr 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.
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26o THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
complexions, there is a suggestive allegory told in Linga Purdna,
The Kuniaras — the Rudra Gods, so called — are described as incarnations
of Shiva, the Destroyer (of ouiward/orms), called also Vimadeva. The
latter, as a KumSra, the "Eternal Celibate," the chaste Virgin Youth,
springs from Brahmd 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 trans-
formation 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-Kumtra, from moon-colour^
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, nameh', the red-yelloWj the black, and the
Jfrown- white,* The Aryan 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 Hindu exoteri-
cism 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,t and
• "There are," says Topinard in the English edition of his Anthropology^ with a preface by Pro-
fessor 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.
t 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 sob-
mersions occur whenever there is an eclipse of the " Spiritual Sun."
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ANSWERS TO OBJECTIONS. 261
who is said to live even now in his mankind * 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 be-
came "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 Purana 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, con-
sider 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 palaeozoic rocks."
To this the following answers are given. Firstly, what is the date
assigned by Geology to these "oldest palaeozoic rocks" ? And secondly,
why could not the winds blow, rain fall, and waves— of "carbonic acid"
* 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.
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262 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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-Himalayan Secret Teachings
differ from those of India in this respect. Hindu 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 Hindu Purdnas
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 **PURANAS" 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 Purdnas on the one hand, and the Jewish Scriptures on the
other, are based on the same scheme of evolution, which, if read Eso-
terically 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 Purdnas, giving as much, and perhaps more, attention to
causes than to effects, allude to the pre-cosmic and pre-genetic periods
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MR. GLADSTONE KILLS ** GENESIS." 263
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* — the Hindu Puranas, 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 BrahmS 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 sink-
ings, 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 Aryans 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 Bibky 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."t
Only, while in biblical Esotericism, we find physiological sexual mys-
teries symbolized, and very little more, something for which very little
real Philosophy is requisite — in the Purdnas 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, Geolog>% Astronomy, and
• 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 modem as well as the early sects, have accepted the narra-
tive 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 Clohistic and Jehovistic
— Esotcrically, 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 Sandhyi, "twilight," in
Sanskrit— have led to a charge of the most crass ignorance of the order of evolution.
t Modem Science and Modern Thought, p. 337.
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264 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
nearly all the branches of modem 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.
PaurSnic Astronomy, with all its deliberate concealment and con-
fusion 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 Hindu astronomical treatises, will prove that
the modem theories of the progressive condensation of nebulae, nebu-
lous stars and suns, with the most minute details about the cyclic pro-
gress of asterisms for chronological and other purposes — far more correct
than Europeans have even now — were known in India to perfection.
If we tum to Geology and Zoology we find the same. What are all
the myths and endless genealogies of the seven Prajapatis, 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 evolu-
tion of animal creation, one species after the other? Were the highly
philosophical and metaphysical Aryans — the authors of the most perfect
philosophical system of transcendental Psychology, of codes of Ethics,
of such a grammar as Panini's, of the Sankhya and VedSnta systems,
of a moral code (Buddhism), proclaimed by Max Miiller the most
perfect on earth — were the Aryans such fools, or children, as to lose
their time in writing ** fairy tales," such as the Puranas 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 (Nagas), 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
Brdhmana, says one, gives ''a not very intelligible account'* of Kash-
yapa*s origin.
According to the Mah&bhdrata, the Rdmdyana, and the Pur&naSy he was the son
of Marichi, the son of BrahmA, the father of Vivasvat, the father of Manu, the
progenitor of mankind.
According to the Shatapatha Brahmdna : Having assumed the form of a tortoise,
PrajApati created offspring. That which he created he made (akarot); hence the
word kitrma (tortoise). Kashyapa means tortoise; hence men say, "All creatures
are descendants of Kashyapa.*'*
• Dowson's Hindu Classical Dictionary, sub voce.
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A LESSON IN NATURAL HISTORY. 265
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 Nigas, 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
ntter 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
^pearance of reptiles; the Mesozoic with its batrachians; the Secondary forma-
tions, 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 difierentiated 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.*
The same order, plus the description of animals unknown to Modem
Science, is found in the Commentaries on the Purdnas 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 \h^ false person-
ulity 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,t his physical
• op. cit,, p. 335.
t "Follow the law of analogy "—the Masters teach. Atmi-Buddhi is dual and Manas is triple,
inasmuch as the former has two aspects, and the latter three, t.^., as a "principle" p^r se, which
.gravitates, in its higher aspect, to Atmi'Buddhi, and follows, in its lower nature. Kama, 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 Atmi-Buddhi, of which they are the passive Spiritual
progeny, while the Third Root-Race shows three distinct divisions or aspects physiologically and
p83rchically— the earliest sinless, the middle portions awakening to intelligence, and the third and
last decidedly animal, i.e., Manas succumbs to the temptations of Kama.
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266 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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, ue., 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
amoeba 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 na
development in them. In the animals every principle is paralyzed,
and in a foetus-like state, save the second, the Vital, and the third, the
Astral, and the rudiments of the fourth, KSma, 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 Thirds toward the Fourth Cycle
[^Race"], They are made ** Gods'' for good and evil, and responsibUy 07ily
when the two arcs meet [after three and a half Rounds towards the Fifth
Race\ They are made so by the Nirmdnakdya [Spiritual or Astral
remains'] of the Rudra-Kumdras, ''cursed to be reborn on Earth again"
[meaning — doomed in their statural turn to reincarnation in the higher
ascending arc of the terrestrial Cycle'],
Now the writer is certain to be met with what will be termed insuper-
able objections. We shall be told that the line of embrj-ology, the
gradual development of every individual life, and the progress of what
is known to take place in the order of progressive stages of specializa-^
tion— 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 spe-
cialized development of the quadrumanous, and, last of all, of the human type."*
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 sub-
ject, 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,
• Laing", op. cit., ibid.
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THE CONTRADICTIONS OP SCIENCE. 267-
and bears the same relation to its so-called inorganic UpSdhi, 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.*
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 dis-
appear with a kaleidoscopic rapidity, in the description of Palaeontolo-
gists 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 com-
paratively unalteredy 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, t
Nevertheless, we are not given any good reason why Darwin links
together reptiles, birds, amphibians, fishes, moUusca, 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
• The whole trouble is this: neither Phjrsiologists 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.
t Huxley, Proceedings of the Royal Institution, iii. 151.
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268 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 pre-
liminary, hardly defined, and evanescent sketch on the canvas, of ob-
jects 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 througt 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 bom, or rather reborn a DhySnl, 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 con-
vince 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
Olobigerina 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 g^nus differing from its living
congeners only in . . . the eyes, [etc.]
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THE ** ABSOLUTE RULE" OF SCIENCE NOT BORNE OUT BY FACTS. 269
All of which may be closed with Dr. Carpenter's authoritative state-
ment about the Foraminifera:
There is no evidence of any fundamental modification or advance in the forami-
niferous type from the palaeozoic period to the present time. . . . The forami-
niferous fauna of our own series probably present a greater range of variety than
existed at any previous period; but there is fio indication of any tendency to elevation
towards a higher type,*
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
palaeolithic 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 Thom-
son 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;! 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. {
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 con-
fess their utter failure to find one single fact to support their theory.
There is no need fcTr the numberless types of life to represent the
members of one progressive series. They are "the products of various
• Introduction to the Study of the Foraminifera, p. xi.
f Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, vol. iii. Very strangely, however, he has
recently ag-ain changed his opinion. The Sun, he says, is only i5,ooo,cxx) years old.
t Bastian, Tlu Beginnings of Life, ii. 62a.
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570 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
and different evolutional divergences, taking place now in one direc-
tion 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
41 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. Haeckel, in his Schopfungsgeschichte, 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 develop-
ment 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 resem-
blance 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.*
Why, then, not make man and dog evolve from a common ancestor,
or from a reptile — a Naga, instead of coupling man with the Quadru-
mana? 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 iEsculapius
and Hippocrates as well as to Mr. Huxley. Therefore, since the
Kabalists had remarked it from prehistoric times, it is no new dis-
cover3'.t
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.
• LainsT, Modern Science and Modern Thought, p. lyx-
+ In Isis UnveiUd, vol. i. p. 389, this is noticed and half explained.
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THE INHERENT IJ^W OF PROGRESSIVE DEVELOPMENT. 27 1
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* give with far more clearness than any Scientist does at present.
No need to repeat what has been fully debated in /sis 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.f But no Occultist can accept the unreasonable proposition
that all the now existing forms, "from the structureless Amoeba 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, % 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 neces-
sarily including progressive development — ^leaves the animalcule and the
worm, the "persistent types," quiet.g
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 Oc-
cultists 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 im-
• Hence the philosophy in the allegory of the 7, lo, and finally 21, Praj4patis, Rishis, Munis, etc.,
who all are made the " fathers " of various beingfs and things. The order of the seven classes, or
orders of plants, animals, and even inanimate things, given at random in the Pur Anas, 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.
t See vdl. i. pp. 151, et seqq., concerning the ** Tree of Evolution "—the " Mundane Tree."
X Checked and modified, however, by the Law of Retardation, which imposes a restriction oa the
advance of all species when a higher type makes its appearance.
i See Origin of Species^ p. 145.
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272 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
perfectly representative strata ; and, thirdly, because so many parts of the record
are absolutely inaccessible to us — 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" *
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 bere 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 exist-
ing theory undeniably, will never be found by Palaeontologists. Believ-
ing as we do that man ha3, 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 An-
thropologists, 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 Dar-
winian, and especially the Haeckelian, 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
• Bastian, Beginnings of Life, ii. pp. 622, 623.
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NATURE IS UNIFORM. 273
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 dog^a, 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, hence-
forward, 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 modem 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
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274 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 suflfering and danger of the same in
woman. The ape is, indeed, as remarked in /sis 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*
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 com-
pelled 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," /.^. —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 Zohary Hayo Bischat, the Beast or E\'il
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 reappear 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 environ-
ments 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
• Vol. II. p. 278.
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MILLIONS OF YEARS HENCE. 2^5
Manvantara approaches — will develop from the "cast oflf** 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
€x 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 Modem 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 I^emuria or Atlantis, as we have agreed to call the Third and
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276 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Fourth Cpntinetits. Their archaic appellations are never mentioned in
the Purdnas, 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 Purdnas, in their Varshas, Dvipas, and Zones. Their Shveta-
dvipa, 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 Atlan-
teans 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 con-
temptuous 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 Haeckel 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 Caiiri— 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 re-
search have avenged, partially at least, that "truth" by showing it
unveiled. Thus it is the clever adaptations of Scripture, on the con-
trary, 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 anti-
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BAILLY AND FABER. 277
quity — ^has been thrown by the wild and contradictory speculations
of Bishop Cumberland, Dr. Shuckford, Cud worth, 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 iradiUanal 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,*
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
aUude 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.t
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.J Faber adopts the more willingly the
opinion of his French confrere, as Bailly mentions Cosmas Indico-
pleustes, 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 pre-
rogatives 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,
• op. ciL, i. 9. t Ibid., ii. 283, 284. X See his Ultres sur PAtlantide.
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278 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
as Faber shows ; and if a Giant, then why is he not shown as such in.
Genesis ?*
Bailies 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
Hindu, Egyptian, and Phoenician 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 Hindus, Egyptians, and Phoenicians came after the Atlanteans,
for the latter belonged to the Fourth, while the Aryans 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 alle-
gorical, and by alluding to "Earth," he means Matter, as the Atlan-
teans 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 acquaint-
ing oneself with even the approximate chronology of the Eastern
nations — all of which was based upon, and followed the early Aryan
• This is shown by Faber, again a pious Christian, who says that: "The NoStic family also . . .
bore the appellations of Atlantians 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 I^amech
slew a man, and was, with all his sons and daughters, who perished in the Deluge, as bad as the rest
of mankind ?
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THE NATURAL **FALC 279
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 use-
less to speak in detail of the First and Second, and even of the Third
Race in its earliest stage * It is only when the latter has reached its
full human period that a beginning can be made, without the unini-
tiated 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 BibU^
the "Sons of Wisdom," the Dhyin 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 understand-
ing. 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 t being
mingled with Man J brought forth a wondrous miracle; the harmonious com-
mingling 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] forth-
• In that wonderful volume of Donnelly, Atlantis, the Antediluvian World, the author, speaking^
of the Aryan 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 modem 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.
t Nature is the Natural Body, the Shadow of the Progenitors.
% Man is the "Heavenly Man," as already stated.
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28o THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
with brought forth seven men of opposite sexes [negative and positive] according
to the essences of the Seven Governors.*
Thus saith Hermes, the thrice great Initiate,! 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 eiuth, 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 preeminently, the idea that
every objective thing on Earth or in this Universe is th4 "Shadow"
(Dyooknah) of the eternal Light or Deity, is very 3trong.
The Third Race was preeminently 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
• Divine Pymander^ i. i6.
+ The Pymander of our museums and libraries is an abridgement of one of the Books of Thoth, by
a Platonist of Alexandria. In the Third Century it was remodelled after old Hebrew and Phoenician
MSS. by a Jewish Kabalist, and called the Genesis of Enoch. But even its disfigrured 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 Dhy&n Chohans
or Devas, in illusive^ not mortal bodies— who taught Humanity all it knew, and whose earliest disci-
ples 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
Pounders 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 Eliphas L^vi tells his readers.
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THE SYMBOLISM OF CRONUS. 28 1
harmony will reign once more between the two as before the "Fall,"
when even mortal man was "created" by the Elements and was not
bom.
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* it must have contained a great abstract and philo-
sophical idea, now lost to our modern sages. This punishment in the
allegory marks, indeed, **a new period, a second phase in the develop-
ment of creation," as justly remarked by Decharme,t 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 bom, 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,t who unites himself with Rhea (the Earth — in
Esotericism, Matter in general), and thus produces celestial and ter-
restrial 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 hy Gaea (one in the world of
manifestation with Aditi, or the Great Cosmic Deep), by confining
• 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 Barth, since both are manifested out of
his (or its) seed. It is only later that Varuna became the chief of the Adityas and a kind of Neptune
tidinsT 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 Barth 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 y
* Mythologie de la Grice Antique, p. 7.
t Cronus is not only ILpovo^f Time, but also, as Br6al showed, in his Hercule et Cacus (p. 57), comes
Irom the root kar, "to make, to create." Whether Br£al and Decharme, who quotes him, are as right
in saying that in the yedas, Kr&nan {sic) is a Creative God, we have our doubts. Br6al probably
meant Karma, or rather Visvakarman, the Creative God, the "omnificent " and the "great architect
of the world."
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282 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
them in the bosom of the Earth, Titaea, so Cronus, at this second stage
of creation, destroyed his children by Rhea — by devouring them. This
is an allusion to the fruitless eflForts of Earth, or Nature, alone to create
real human **men."* Time swallows its own fruitless work. Then
comes Zeus, Jupiter, who dethrones his father in his tum.f Jupiter the
Titan, is Prometheus, in one sense,! 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 ; ' zvl^ 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.}
After this he sends his fatal present. Pandora, to Epimetheus.||
Hesiod calls this present of \h^ 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 sick-
ness and suffering — as the same races are made to live under Yima's
rule, in the Mazdean Vendidad,
Two Deluges may also be traced, in universal tradition, by carefully
comparing Hesiod, the Rig Veda^ the Zend A vesta, etc., but no first man
is ever mentioned in any of the Theogonies save in the B/d/e.^ Every-
where the man of our Race appears after a cataclysm of water. After
this, tradition mentions only the several designations of continents and
• See Stanzas III— X, et seqq., and also Berosus' account of primeval creation.
t The Titanic strugrgrle, in Thcogony at least, is the figrht for supremacy between the children of
Uranus and Gsea (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.
X 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.
) Decharme, op. cU., p. 284.
II In the Egyptian legend, called the "Two Brothers," translated by M. Masp^o (the ex-director of
the Boulaq Museum), the origrinal 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 A rcfUologique, March, 1878, and also Decharme^
ibid., p. 285.)
IT Yima is not the " first man " in the Vendidad, but only in the theories of the Orientalists.
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THE RACES IN GREEK MYTHOLOGY. 283:
islands which sink under the ocean waves in due time * Gods and
mortals have one common origin according to Hesiod;t and Pindar
echoes the statement.^ Deucalion and Pyrrha, who escape the Deluge
by constructing an Ark like Noah's,§ ask Jupiter to reanimate 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 bom, from which come the nine
Lithuanian tribes. || As well understood by the author of Mythologie
de la Grhce 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."1F The fourth race is, with Hesiod, that of the heroes who fell before
Thebes,** or under the walls of Troy. ft
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 euheme-
rization of old fictions? The verdict is not difficult to foresee. There-
fore, 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.
* Bceotia was submerged and subsequently ancient Athens and Eleusis.
-r Opera et Dies, v. 108.
t Nem., VI. i.
\ See Apollod.y i. 7, 2 ; and Ovid, Metam., i. 260, et seqq.
II Deutsche MytkoL, i. 545, 3rd edit., and Hauusch Schlawische Myth., p. 235. See Decbarme, ibicL^
p. 288, who gives "nine times," and not seven.
H Hesiod, Opera et Dies, 143-155.
•• See iEschylus, Septem contra Thebas.
t+ Decharme, ibid., pp. 289, 290.
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284 ^^^ secret doctrine.
40. Then the Third and Fourth* became tall with pride.
**We are the kings ;t we are the gods" (a),
41. They took wives pair to look upon. Wives from the
MINDLESS, THE NARROW-HEADED. ThEY BRED MONSTERS, WICKED
DEMONS, MALE AND FEMALE, ALSO KhADO,! WITH LITTLE MINDS (d).
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 recog-
nize in some of these Atlanteans the prototypes of the Nimrods, the
Builders of the Tower of Babel, the Hamites, and all those /«/// quanii
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 feel-
ing 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,
* Races. t It was said. t In Sanskrit D&kini.
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THE GOLDEN AGE. 285
and all those so fallen became the seed of the future generations of
Atlanteans.*
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?! 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 DhySnis
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, J as the
• The name is used here in the sense, and as a synon5an, 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:.
t The "Gods of the Elements" are by no means the Blementals. The latter are at best used by
them as vehicles and materials in which to clothe themselves.
X Cain was the "sacrificer," as shown at first in Chap. iv. of Genesis, of " the fruit of the ground,"
of which he was theyfrj/ tiller^ while Abel "brought of the firstlings of his flock" to the I^rd. 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.
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^86 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
first Anthropomorphists who worshipped Form and Matter — a worship
which very soon degenerated into self-worship, and thence led to phalli-
<dsm, 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, bom on the Lemurian Continent,
separated from their earliest tribes into the righteous and the un-
righteous; into those who worshipped the one unseen Spirit of Nature,
the Ray of which man feels within himself— or the Pantheists, and
those who oflFered 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,* who become with the Fifth Race the Kabirim,
Kabiri with the Egyptians and the Phoenicians, Titans with the Greeks,
and Rakshasas 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 pheno-
mena. The Lemurians gravitated toward the North Pole, or the
Heaven of their Progenitors — the Hyperborean Continent; the Atlan-
teans, 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 contra-
dictions of human character; it points to the secret of man's self-con-
sciousness; 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
• Genesis, vi.
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NO DEVII^S OUTSIDE HUMANITY. 287
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
t>€ 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 (r)
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 preced-
ing Manvantara — owed their psjxhic 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.*
The Divine Man dwelt in the animal, and therefore, when the physio-
logical 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
• It is, perhaps, with an eye to this degradation of the higrhest 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, pfr se, only latent consciousness, and is dependent
upon Manas for manifesUtion beyond its own plane.
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288 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 DhySn Chohans had incarnated.* "When we have ascer-
tained 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-bom" immaculate sons — ^in the Seventh
Root- Race.
It is so stated in the Vishnu and Brahma Purdnas, in the Mahd-
bhdrata^ and in the Harivamsha, In one portion of the Pushkara
Mdhdtmya, 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 Purdna it is simply said that Daksha, the father of man-
kind, established sexual intercourse as the means of peopling the
world 4
Happily for the Human Race the "Elect Race" had already become
the vehicle of incarnation of the highest Dhyanis (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
• This is the "Undying Race," as it is called in Esotericism, and exoterically the fruitlcs» genera-
tion of the first progeny of Daksha, who curses N&rada, the divine Rishi, for having dissuaded the
Haryashvas and the Shabalishvas (the sons of Daksha) from procreating their species, by saying:
" Be bom in the womb; there shall not be a resting place for thee in all these regions." After this,
N&rada, the representative of that race of /ruitless ascetics, is said, as soon as he dies in one body, to
be reborn in another.
+ Adi Parvan, p. 113.
t Vishnu /^r4«a, Wilson's Trans., ii. 12.
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THE GIANTS. 289
was bom. 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.* The evolu-
tionary series of the animal world is a warrant that the same thing
took place within the human races. Lower still in the order of crea-
tion 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 Atlan-
teans of the Secret Doctrine in the Rakshasas of LankS — the opponents
conquered by Rama. Are these accounts no better than the produc-
tion 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 de-
nounces 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 imme-
morial the "Field of Giants," in Lower Dauphine, 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
• The traditions of every country and nation point to this fact. Donnelly quotes from Father
Duran's Historia Antigua de la Nueva Espafia of 1885, in which a native of Cholula, a centenarian,
accounts for the building of the great pj^ramid 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 a/Ur 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).
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290 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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. More-
over, 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 Archaeology 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 furbish us with the needed proofs. To
begin with Geology; it has already confessed that the older the exca-
vated skeletons, the larger, taller and the more powerful their structure.
This is already a certain proof in hand. Frederic de Rougemont, who.
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THE TESTIMONY OF ANTIQUITY. 29 1
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, Li^ge, 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^
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 subse-
-quently.
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,! 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 Sigaeum. This skeleton may perhaps not have belonged, as believed
by Protesilas, to the giant killed by Apollo at the siege of Troy; never-
theless, 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. t Is it possible that prejudice would carry Science ^o 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.§ Plutarch declares that Sertorius
saw the tomb of Antaeus, 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
Abbe Pegues, affirms in his curious work, Les Volcans de la Grhce,
that:
In the neighbourhood of the volcanoes of the isle of Thera, giants with enor-
mous skulls were found laid out under colossal stones, the erection of which in
• Hislaire de la Terre, p. 154.
t There are critics who, finding no evidence for the existence of Tertullian save in the writings of
Bosebiiis, "the veracious," are inclined to doubt it.
X Heroica, p. 35.
» Hist, Nat., vn. xvL
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292 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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*
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" (Jrruentes)y are shown as if identical, though they are "all men,'*
since the Bible calls them the primitive and the mighty ones — e,g,y
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,^
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.J
It was onlj' in the Fourth Race that men, who had lost all right to be
considered divine, resorted to body worship, in other words to phalli-
cism. 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 sufiiciently 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.
• See for the above De Mirville, Pneumatologie : Des Esprits, iii. 46-48.
t J^Uvaiions, p. 56.
t 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 Nicaea (787) brought this idolatry back, while that of Rome (883) ex-
communicated John, the Patriarch of Constantinople, for showing himself an enemy of image
worship.
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FOURTH RACE GIANTS. 293
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 (Unions^*
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 fall of such reminiscences about the Fourth Race. In the
French translation of the ShoO'King,\ 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), t 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 Dhydn Chohans] to cut
• Genesis, v. Treating of the Chinese Dragon and the literature of China, Mr. Charles Gould, in
bis 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 subiect."
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 Dhyin Chohans, answering to the Agnishv&tta 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 Agathodaemon,
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,*'
»>., not "Spirits," but Devils, in Church parlance.
t Part rv% Ch. xxvii, p. 291.
X *' What would you say to our afilrmation 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 aU 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 .-Vrchseologists only have been able to procure
such priceless works.
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J
294 'TME SECRET DOCTRINE.
away every communication between heaven and earth. Since then, there has been
no more going up and down / ♦ ,
** 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 cor-
roborated 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 necessaril)^ 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 custo-
dians of the Mysteries revealed to mankind by the Divine Teachers.
There were those among them, who remained in their KaumSric con-
dition 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 Nirvdfia, spuming
Devachan arid remaifiing constantly oji Earth for the salvation of mankind.
. . . . Out of the seven Virgin-men [^Kumdra]"] four sacrificed them-
selves for the sins of the world and the instruction of the ignorant, to remain
till the e?id of the present Manvantara, Though unseen, they are ever
present. When people say of one of them, ''He is dead'' ; behold, he is alive
• Quoted in De Mir\*ille, op. cit., iii. 53. Remember the same statement in the Book of Enochs 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, with-
out quitting his arm-chair.
+ See the Commentary on the Four Races— and on the "Sons of Will and Yoga," the immaculate
progeny of the Androgynous Third Race.
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THE SACRED FOUR. 295
and under another form. These are the Head^ the Hearty the Soul, and the
Seed of undying Knowledge \^fridna\ Thou shall never speak, O Lanoo, of
these great ones [^Mahd . . . ] before a multitude^ mentioning them by
their names. The wise alone will understand*
It is these sacred "Four" who have been allegorized and symbolized
in the Linga Purdna, which states that VSmadeva (Shiva) as a Kumtra
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 preeminently and chiefly an ascetic, the patron
of all Yogis and Adepts, and the allegory will become quite comprehen-
sible. 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 Hindu 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 Xh^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,"t are of
course allegorical ; yet they corroborate that which is taught of the true
naturf 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 [Elohini],"
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]." J
The latter sentence points to the direct connection of the Chaldsean
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
* In the Kabalak the pronunciation of the four-lettered ituffahle Name is " a most secret arcanum'*
— " a secret of secrets."
t The Chaldean Account of Geneiis^ p. 81.
X Ibid., p. 84, lines 12, 14 and 15.
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296 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Upon and in man— verily the Serpent of Eternity and all Knowledge,
that Minasic Spirit, which made him learn the secret of "creation" on
the KriySshaktic, 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 them-
selves (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-bom" 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* and in Hermes, in Purdnas 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. Hence-
forth, "man will beget, not create''] But as, by so doing, he has to use
• Retumingr 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 leani 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 Lold 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.
f 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 *' mwww* "— 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 stripx>ed the "venerable of heaven" of his desire, he carried away the
" umsimiof the gods," and burnt thereby '• the iereii [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 Chaldsean Zu, and both are cursed for the
same allegorically described crime.
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THE CHILDREN OF BRAHMA. 297
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 Mediaeval 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 Earthy to
furnish the protoplasts with the means of returning to their pristine nobility and
felicity. *
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 /r^-human period, that of Divine Man, or as plastic
Protestant Theology now has it — the /*r^-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 Purdnas; 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 Brdhmanas
and Purdnas — the Rishis, PrajSpatis, Manus, their wives and progeny
— ^belong to that pre-human period. All these are the Seed of Hu-
manity, so to speak. It is around these "Sons of God," the "mind-
bom" astral Children of Brahma, that our physical frames have grown
and developed to what they are now. For, the PaurSnic 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 de-
scribed allegorically. Later on, they were disfigured for sectarian pur-
poses; 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
• Quoted by Christian Ginsburg: from the Kabalah.
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298 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
took unto themselves wives who were entirely human and fair to look
upon, but in whom lowery more material, though sidereal, Beings had
incarnated. These Beings in female forms — Lilith is the prototype of
them in the Jewi^ tiaditions — ^are called in the Esoteric accounts
Khado (DSkini, in Sanskrit). Allegoraal Ic^pends call the Chief of
these Liliths Sangye Khado (Buddha Dakini, in Sanskrit); all aie
credited with the art of "walking in the air," and the "greatest kind-
ness to mortals r but with no mind-^ovXy animal instinct.*
{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 wor-
shippers 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 modem 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 incarna-
tion. 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 ever>'^ 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 thatr
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 Earthy
of the sea and the whole world, and read futurity in the stars. ... It seems, in-
deed, 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 super-
stition, an endless series of recognized Philosophers, who mention
• 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.
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HTJMAN AND ANIMAI, CROSS-BREEDING. 299
these Tft0esud4issert that, even in their own time, they had seen their
fossils. There 'W«e laceptics ia days of old — as many and great as they
are now. But even a Lucian, a T^gmaciites^and^gn Epicurus, yielded to
the evidence oi facts and showed the discriminative caycUy of lealiy
great intellects, which can distinguish fiction from fact, and truth from
exaggeration and fraud. Ancient writers were no more fools than are
our modem wise men; for, as well remarked by the author of "Notes
on Aristotle's Psychology in Relation to Modem Thought," in Mind:
The common division of history into ancient and modern is . . . . mislead*
ing. The Greeks in the fourth century, B.C., were in many respects modems ; espe-
ciaUy, 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 pithe-
coid species, now extinct. Of course, as also in the question of spon-
taneous 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 con^deratipn 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 a 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 dis-
similar 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
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3CX) THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 aiiimals and no more, some
British people, in their arrogance, firmly believe that every other
human family — especially the dark Indians — is an inferior race. More-
over there are Naturalists who have seriously considered the problem
whether some savage tribes — like the Bushmen, for instance— can be
regarded as me7i at all. The Commentary says, in describing that
species (or race) of animals "fair to look upon," as a biped:
Having kumari shape, but having the lower extremitieSy from the waist
down, cova-ed 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. Modem
Science and Modem 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 prima 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 modem
Swiss cattle shown by Riitimeyer as descended from "three distinct
species of fossil-oxen, the Bos primigenius. Bos lo7igifrons and Bos
frontosusy* Yet some of those species, as the ape family, which so
clearly resembles man in physical structure, contain, we are told,
• op. cit., pp. 101, 102.
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THE DUMB MAN WHO WAI^S ON ALL FOURS. 3OI
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 Linnaeus?
— naiura 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 modem evolution
theory, in more than one way, if not entirel}*, 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 Modem 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 descen-
dant 0/ 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] ajiimal that appeared in
this {Fourth Rouyid] creation. Then came still huger animals; and last
of all the dumb man who walks 07i all fours, [For] the Rdkshasas {Giant-
Demons] and Daityas {Titans] of the White Dvipa {Continait] 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 Modem 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 T Abbe
Bourgeois, Capellini, and others, has accepted, almost without excep-
tion, the doctrine that the traces of our ancestors are certainly to be
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302 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
found in the Miocene, while M. de Quatrefages now inclines to postu-
late a Secondary-Age man. Further on we shall compare such esti-
mates with the figures given in the BrShmanical 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,
<:alled into activity by Occult training, restore man to the position he
previously occupied in reference to spiritual perception and conscious-
ness. 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 buirs-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.*
it may be complained by some that too little is said of the physical,
huma7i side of the extinct races, in the history of their growth and evo-
lution. Much more might be said, assuredly, if simple prudence did
• For sugjTCStiveness, we would recommend a short article by Visconde de Pi^fanidre, 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 w formativa.*' (Vol. viii. p. 666.) He says, "Who knows what shape vehided
the Ego in remote rings [Rounds, or Races?]? .... May not man's tsrpe .... have been
that of the Simiadte in its variety ? Might not the Monkey-kingdom of RimAsrana fame rest on some
far-off tradition relating to a period when that was the common lot, or rather aspect, of man ? ** AnA
the author winds up a very clever, though too short, exposition of his theory by saying that which
«very 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
arV-plane, one or more which will be developed for his successive embodiments when procreated forms
are given— ^ 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).
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MAN, THE STOREHOUSE OP AIM THE SEEDS OF UFE. 303
not make us hesitate at the threshold of every new revelation. All
that finds possibility and landmarks in the discoveries of Modem
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 natuse — is withheld.
But even such statements as, for instance, that, of all the mamma-
lians, 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 zV was not so. Nor can they admit that the first
two Races of men were too ethereal and phantom-like in their consti-
tution, 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. Neverthe-
less 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.* As Ain
Suph is "One, nottvithstanding the innumerable forms which are in him,^'\
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^X
The mystery of the earthly man is after the mystery of the Heavenly Man.§
The human form — so called because it is the vehicle (under whatever
shape) of the Divineyi^n — is, as so intiiitionally 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. ||
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.
* 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 Ihis 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 grrowth. They are inter-
dependent in their physical and achieved forms.
+ Zohar, i. zia.
t Ibid., iii. 48a.
\ Ibid., ii. 76tf.
(I Op. ciL, p. 666.
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304 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Having appeared at the very beginning, and at the head of sentient
and conscious life, Man — the Astral, or the "Soul," for the Zohar, re-
peating 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 Unity from which the "cast-off clothes" determined the
shape of every life and animal in this Round.*
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 Vendiddd of the Mazdeans, as they are in the Chaldsean
and Mosaic allegory of the Ark, all of which are the many national
versions of the original legend given in. the Hindu 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 Purdnas.
Open the Mazdean Vendiddd^ 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 wofnen^ 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 evety kind to
be kept inexhaustible there, so long as those men shall stay in the Vara A
Those "men" in the "Vara" are the "Progenitors," the Heavenly
Men or Dhyanis, the future Egos who are commissioned to inform man-
kind. For the Vara, or Ark, or again the Vehicle, simply means Man,X
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].§
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.||
• It is stated in the Zohdir that the "primordial worlds" (sparks) could not continue because man
tvas not as yet. " The human form contains everything ; and as it did not as yet exist, the worlds were
destroyed."
t "The Sacred Books of the East," vol. iv; The Vendidddy J. Darmesteter ; Fargard ii. w. 27 (70)
and 28 (74).
t This is the meaning: when the allegfory 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 modem theories about the origin of man. As
said, it has seven keys to it, like the rest.
\ /bid., V. 30 (87).
II fbtd., V. 31 (93).
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MAZDEAN SYMBOUSM. 305
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 Vafijd, 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].*
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 borrtj a male and
female. \
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:
• Ibid., V. 40 {131). + See also Bund., xv.
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306 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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!*'*
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, f
This again is an allegory and a symbol misunderstood by the Orien-
talists 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 lie 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). J
Therefore, with the Kabalists it was a like symbol. "Bird" was a
Chaldaean, 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."§
"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.||
The Nest of the Eiemal 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
• Ibid., 42 (137).
t Bund., xix and xxiv.
X S. \,. MacGregor Mathers, Kabbalah Unveiled, p. 104.
) Zohar, ii. 8*.
II Zohar, iii. 278a; Myer's Qabbalah, p. 217.
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"THREE-EYED" MORTALS. 307
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.* 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 Hindu
Purdnas and the Greek poems of Hesiod and Homer, were based on
the hazy reminiscences of real Titans — men of a tremendous super-
liuman physical power, which enabled them to defend themselves, and
liold 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 mys-
terious, dream foundation of our collective consciousness.!
The evidence for the Cyclopes — a race of Giants — will, in forth-
coming 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 pro-
ceeds on parallel lines with physical evolution — that the inner senses,
• Darwinian Evolutionists who are so wont to refer to the evidence of reversion to type—Wi^ 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
wwdem 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.
+ See Mythical Monsters, by Ch. Gould, from whose interesting and scientific volume a few passages
are quoted farther on. See also, in A. P. Sinnett's Occult IVorid, the description of a cavern in the
Himalayas filled with relics of giant human and animal bones.
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308 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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.* A Kalpa later {after the separation of the
sexes'] men having fallen into matter, their spiritual vision became dim;
and coordinately 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.\ .... The Third Eye, likewise, getting
gradually petrifed,X 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 Inkier 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 {Dis-
ciple, Chela] 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 proto-
types of the four-armed Hindu 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 ex-
plain and account for all the difficulties surrounding its action. The
development of the human eye gives more support to Occult Anthro-
• I.e., the Third Eye was at the back of the head. The statement that the latest hennaphrodite
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 ^oavov, a rudely can^^ wooden
statue, attributed to Deedalus, representing: a three-eyed colossus, which was consecrated to Zeus
Tri6p6s, 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. Ttoad., 14.)
t The inner vision could henceforth be acquired only through training and initiation, save in the
cases of "natural and bom magicians"— sensitives and mediums, as they are called now.
t 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."
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OCCULT PHYSIOLOGY. 309
pology 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 ''trans-
parent^ 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 Haeckelian view that the vertebrate eye
originated by changes in the epidermis? If it started inside, the latter
theor>' goes into the waste basket. This seems to be proved by embry-
olog>-. 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 develop-
ment 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 Hindu mystics who speak of the
"Eye of Shiva,** the Tri-lochana, or "three-eyed,** thus receives its
justification and raison d'etre; 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 physio-
logical purity of the Seer. The question is often asked : Why should
celibacy and chastity be a si^ie qua non condition of regular ChelSship,
or the development of psychic and occult powers? The answer is con-
tained 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 espe-
cially to the acquirement of Yoga powers, is the activity of our physio-
logical senses. Sexual action also being closely connected, by inter-
action, with the spinal cord and the grey matter of the brain, it is useless
to g^ve any longer explanation. Of course, the normal and abnormal
state of the brain, and the degree of active work in the Medulla Ob-
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3IO THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
longata, reacts powerfully on the Pineal Gland, for, owing to the num-
ber 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 verte-
brata — have a third eye, now atrophied, but which was necessarily
active in its origin.* The Hatteria species, a lizard of the order Lacer-
tilia, recently discovered in New Zealand — a part of ancient Lemuria sa
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 w^as 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 Palaeontologists
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 cere-
bral hemispheres and accompanying parts are formed. The thalamus opticus of
• " Deeply placed within the head, covered by thick skin and muscles, true eyes, that cannot see>
are found in certain animals," says Haeckel. " 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 everj' stage of reversion." {Haeck«l, 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 ?
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THE SEAT OF THE SOUL. 31I
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 ihalamU 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 hemi-
spheres, and behind with that of the middle cephalic vesicle (corpora quadrige-
mina). 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 aque-
duct. This cleft or fissure is the third vetttricle. 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 thala-
mencephalon.*
The above is specially interesting when it is remembered that, were
it not for the development of the posterior part of the cerebral hemi-
spheres, the Pineal Gland would be perfectly visible on the removal of
the parietal bones. It is very interesting also to note the obvious con-
nection 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 develop-
ment 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.
• op. cit., ii. 830, 831, ninth edition ; " The Thalamencephalon or Inter-brain."
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312 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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* 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 Haeckel.
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 in-
significant, 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 in-
tellectual 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, f and
Vox populi, vox Dei,
• 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.
t I^ 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 Thirdy still bereft
of intellect in its begrinning, is astro-physical in its body, and lives an inner life, in which the psycho-
spiritual element is in no way as 3^t interfered with by the hardly nascent physiological senses. Its
two front eyes look before them without seeing either past or future. But the Third ^ye "^*t-
^aces EUmity."
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THE EVOLUTION OF THE EYE. 313
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 with-
vut, 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* 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, /.<?., beneath an opaque skin.f Only,
the stages of the odd, or primeval, eye, in man and brute, are now in-
verted, 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 aeons 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 Anato-
mist. No less light, however, is thereby thrown on the future physical,
spiritual, and intellectual stat^ of mankind, in periods corresponding on
parallel lines with other past periods, and always on the lines of as-
cending and descending cyclic evolution and development. Thus, a
few centuries before the Kali Yuga — the Age which began nearly 5,000
• But In a very different manner to that pictured by Heeckel as an ''evolution by Natural Selection
xn 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 beaatiful combination of adaptations existing in the eye. We have shown that " natural selec-
tion" 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.
Whencecame 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.
+ Palseontology has ascertained that in the animals of the Mesozoic age— the Saurians especially,
«uch as the antediluvian Labjrrinthodon, whose fossil skull exhibits a perforation otherwise inexplic-
able—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.
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314
THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Seco7id 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 descendinglm^. And as we are parallel to it, on the ascending^.
Evolution of Root-Races in the Fourth Round.
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MERIDIAN OF RACES.
we are, therefore, devoid of the spiritual element, which is now replaced
by the intellectual. For, remember well, as we are in the Minasa
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 percep-
tion. One important point, has, however, to be borne in mind.
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 develop-
ment repeated on a smaller scale, much more must it be so in the case of
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THE ODD EYE IS NOW A GLAND. 315
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 respec-
tive 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 proclivi-
ties of the human being, and which is allowed by Science to be the great
centre for all the physiologically coordinated 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 develop-
ment 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 Chaldaean fragments. Apart from the work already
cited, the Shan Hai King, compiled by Kung Chia from engravings on
nine urns made by the Emperor Yii, 2,255 B.C., they may be found in
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3l6 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
another work, called the Bamboo Books, and in a third, the 'Rh Va, 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.* 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 iiidissolubly coimeded with Karma, The tenet is so mysterious
that very few have heard of it.
The **Eye of Shiva" did not become entirely 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 pas-
sions 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 t 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 Theo-
sophical 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-
• Gould's Mythical Monsters, p. 27.
+ Karma is a word of many meanings, and has a special tenn 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.
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THE NUMBER OF MONADS IS UMITED. 317
bom 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 aflSrmative. For, however countless, in our concep-
tion, 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 aeons 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 chil-
dren, and of individuals whose lives have been violently cut oflF by some
accident, no Spiritual Entity can reincarnate 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 g^ven to other animals for their evolutionary progress.
Hence the assertion that many of us are now working ofif the effects
of the evil Karmic causes produced by us in Atlantean bodies. The
Law of Karma is inextricably interwoven with that of Reincarnation.
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 DhySn 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 com-
mitted 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.
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3l8 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
helpless to relieve the undeserved sufifering, one's ears ringing and
heart aching with the cries of pain around him — ^that blessed know-
ledge of Karma alone prevents him from cursing life and men, as well
as their supposed Creator.*
Of all the terrible blasphemies and what are virtually accusations
thrown at their God by the Monotheists, none is greater or more un-
pardonable 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 goody
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 ojily 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 Predestinarianf — 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 \\iy presuming Qx^2Xyxx^^\
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 "per-
plex" 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
• 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 ou other data. A firm srrasp of the principles of Karmic Law
knocks away the whole basis of the imposing fabric reared by the disciples of Schopenhauer and
Von Hartmann.
+ The doctrine and theology of the Calviuists. "The purpose of God /row eternity respecting all
■events "—which becomes fatalism and kills free will, or any attempt of exerting it for good. " It is
the preHssignment or allotment of men to everlasting happiness or misery." ^Catechism.) A noble
and encouraging doctrine this I
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THE LAW OF RETRIBUTION. 319
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 coequal 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 eflFects, 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
<[estroy 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 mys-
teries. 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,*
• In order to make Karma more comprehensible to the Western mind, which is better acquainted
with the Greek than with Aryan philosophy, some Theosophists have made an attempt to trans-
late 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,"
-sajTS 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 efi'ect of causes created by
man himself. Nemesis, as the daughter of Dike, is the equitable Goddess reserving her wrath for
thooe alone who are maddened with pride, egoTsm, and impiety. (See Mesomed., Hymn. Nemes,, v. 2,
fixwn Brunck, Analecta II. p. 29a; quoted in Mylhologie de la Grice Antique, p. 304.) In short, while
Nemesis is a mythological, exoteric Goddess, or Power, personified and anthropomorphized in its
varioos 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 Bvil, 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."
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320 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 reincarnation of the same spiritual Indi-
viduality 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 intier, 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 know-
ledge 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 man-
kind, 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 Hindu 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 Aryans and the prototype of the biblical patriarch, all
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THE SEVEN AND FOURTEEN MANUS. 32I
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 Vaivas-
vata Manu is the Indian Noah connected with the Matsya, or the Fish,
Avatira 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
Theosophisi of July, 1883, for by studying the article therein, on "The
Septenary Principle in Esotericism," the whole question can be ex-
plained to him. It is in the explanation there given, I believe, that
the Occultists differ from the BrShmans.
For the benefit of those, however, who may not have The Theosophisi
of that date to hand, a passage or two may now be quoted from it:
Who was Manu, the son of Svdyambhuva? 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 Dhydn 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* — 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
• Pralaya— a word already explained— is not a term that applies only to every " Night of Brahmi," or
the World's Dissolution following every Manvantara, equal to 71 Mahayugas. 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 Pur&nas 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 earth-
quakes and eruptions of these late 3rears, and especially in the present year (1888)], which, in the
season of a Pralaya overspreads the world [the Earth]." ( Vishnu Parana, Wilson's Trans., I. Ixacxi.)
Time is only a form of Vishnu— truly, as Pardshara says in the Vishnu Purdna, In the Hindii 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 Brahmi, or 'a sidereal Kalpa, astronomical and
earthly. These calculations are found in all the Pur&nas, 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 Purdna, 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 Brahmi. Minor Kalpas, as Samvarta and the rest, are
numerous." "Minor Kalpas" denote here every i)eriod of Destruction, as was well understood by
Wilson hhnself, who explains the latter as " those in which the Samvarta wind or other destructive
agents operate." (Ilnd., p. 54.)
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322 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 — ike
seeds for the human races of the forthcoming Round (or the Shishtas— the surviving
fittest*; 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 Hindi! 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" t {BhrigUj i. 61-63) — the produc-
tion 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, J and there is a Root-^Jl^siVL at
Globe A, and a Seed-^ditiw at Globe G. Just as each planetary Round commences
with the appearance of a Root-Manu (Dhydn 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].} 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
DhyAn 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 7x7 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.
• An intuition and a presentiment of the Shishtas may be found in Mr. Siunett's Esoteric Buddh'
ism. See the "Annotations"— the " Noah's Ark Theory," pp. 146, 147, fifth edition.
t The fact that Manu himself is made to declare that he was created by VirSj, and that he then
produced the ten Prajipatis, who again produced seven Manus, who in their turn grave 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 Humani-
ties, or Men. However, the present work is written on the records of Cis-Himilayan Secret Teachings,
and Brahmanical Esoteric Philosophy may now differ in form as does the Kabalah. But they were
identical in hoary antiquity.
t 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 /r^^//^»ary 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.y from the end of the three and a half Races, Humanity and Nature entered on the ascending
arc of their Racial Cycle.
\ The interval that precedes each Yuga is called a Sandhyi, composed of as many hundreds of
years as there are thousands in the Yuga; and that which follows the latter is named Sandhyamsha,
and is of similar duration, as we are told in Vishnu PurAna. " The interval between the Sandhy&
and the Sandhyamsha is the Yuga denominated Krita, Tret4, etc. The [four] Krita, Treti, Dv4para,
and Kali constitute a great age, or aggregate of four ages : a thousand such aggregates are a Day of
Brahma ; 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.
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THE ** BUNDS OF EXOTERICISM. 323
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 :
, I 1st (Root) Manu on Planet A — Sv^yambhuva.
2nd Round |
3rd Round
4th Round j
5th Round
6th Round |
7th Round
ist (Seed) "
" G— Svdrochi, or Svdrochisha.
2nd (R)
" A — Auttami.
2nd (S)
" G— TAmasa.
3rd (R)
" A— Raivata.
3rd (S)
" G— Ch4kshusha.
4th (R)
" A— Vaisvasvata (our Progenitor).
4th (S)
** G— Sdvarna.
5th (R)
" A — Daksha-sAvarna.
5th (S)
" G — Brahma-sAvama.
6th (R)
" A — Dharma-sAvarha.
6th (S)
" G— Rudra-sAvarna.
7th (R)
" A— Rauchya.
7th (S)
" 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 js this Vaivasvata— the HindA 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.*
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 Vaivas-
• The words "Creation," "Dissolution," etc., do not correctly render the right meaning of either
Manvantara or Pralaya. The Vishnu Parana enumerates several: "The dissolution of all things is of
four kinds," Par&shara is made to say : Naimittika (Occasional), when Brahmd slumbers (his Night,
^rtien, "at the end of this Day occurs a re-coalescence 0/ the Universe, called Brahmi's contingent
re-coalcscencc," because Brahmi is this Universe itself): PrAkritika (Elemental), when the return of
this Universe to its original nature is partial and physical; Atyantika (Absolute), identification of the
Embodied with the incorporeal Supreme Spirit— Mahitmic state, whether temporary or until the
following Mahi Kalpa: also Absolute Obscuration— as of a whole Planetary Chain, etc.; and Nitya
(Perpetual), Mahi Pralaya for the Universe, Death— {or 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 bom." "That which ensues
after a minor disaolution is called ephemeral creation." ( Vishnu Purdna, Wilson's Trans., i. 113, 1x4.)
The subject is so difficult that we are obliged to repeat our statements.
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]
324 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
vatas, 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 Purdnas 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 for-
given 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 Hindu religious philosophy is unify 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 lyOgos 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.* Hence we learn in the Commentaries that while no DhySn
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 SvSyambhuva, 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 Virij,t or VaishvSnara, the Spirit
* But see the superb definitions of Parabrahman and the Logos in T. Subba Row's Lectures on the
Bhagavad Gltd in the early numbers of 77te Theosophist of 1887.
t See preceding foot-note.
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THE FOUR EARUER RACES. 325
of Humanity,* 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
Tviihin 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. Svayambhuva, 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 Svayambhuva (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 Hindus have, to this day.
Trying to account for the community of legends held by Chinese,
Chaldaeans, 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, t
How many of such cataclysms have changed the whole surface of
the earth may be inferred from the following Stanza of Commentary
Twenty-two :
• Sec Manu, i. 32, 33. Vaishv&nara is, in another sense, the livinf^^ 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 I*ife, for it is the Vital Principle. (See Theosophist, July, 1883, p. 240.) It is also a name of
Agni.
+ Op. cit., pp. 134, 135.
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326 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
During the first seven crores \^y 0,000,000 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* the Mother {Earth'\
grows opaque, and in the fourteenth^ 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 af
long ifitervals.
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 i8,ooo,ooa
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.! The actual
duration^f 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 r^c^ 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
• This— in the period of Secondary Creation, so called. Of the Primary, when Earth is in posses-
sion 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.
"•• 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 tim^ 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 stabUity
in those six, save (what they derive) from the seventh. For all things depend from the seventh.**
(S. I*. MacGregor Mathers' Kabbalah, p. 255.)
X Compare Stanzas III. et seqq.
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THE ESOTERIC MEANING OF **FISH.** 327
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 Prin-
ciple— the "Great Deep." As the Greek I^exicon of Parkhurst
gives it:
*A,pxr) answers to the Hebrew ro^/V, 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.
Arche C^PXn) 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 Trimurti — composed of BrahmS, the
Creator, Shiva, the Destroyer, and Vishnu, the Preserver. Vishnu is
shown, in the allegory, under the form of a FzsAy 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 FisA (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; IH2, the ''Saviour" of Mankind,
being but the monogram of the God Bacchus, who was also called
IX0Y2, the Fish.* 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).t 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
* St. Augustin says of Jesus: "He is ^ fish that lives in the midst of waters." Christians called
themselves '* Little Fishes "—Pifsctculi— in their sacred Mysteries. " So many fishes bred in the waUr,
and saved by one gr^at fish," says Tertullian of the Christians and Christ and the Church.
t Esoteric Buddhism, p. 55.
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328 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Atlanteans, the remnants that perished 850,000 years ago,* 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, Xisu-
thrus, 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 i^ 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 excep-
tion, 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. CroU 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,t 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 Modem Science
• This event— viz., the destruction of the famous island of Ruta and the smaller island Daitsra —
which occurred 850,000 years ago in the later Pliocene times, must not be confounded with the sub-
mersion 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.
+ Sec The Athenaum, Aug. 25th, i860.
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THE INNER MAN IN THE ZOHAR. 329
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 "lyemuria" whenever it accepts such a submerged Conti-
nent. 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 cnily, 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.*
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-tnin Seth. These three were divided into .... 70 species,
<:alled; the principal roots of the human race.t
Said Rabbi Yehudah: "How many garments [of the incorporeal man] are these
"wrhich 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 Rud'h spirit, which is in the
g^arden (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." %
This relates to the Races, their '* garments," or degree of materiality,
-and to the three '^principles" of man in their three vehicles.
• Mr. Huxley divides these races into the quintuple group of Australoids, Negroids, Mongoloids,
Xanthochroics and Melanochroics— all issuing from imaginary Anthropoids. And yet, while pro-
testiugr afifainst those who say " that the structural differences between man and apes are small and
infdgnificant," and adding that ''every bone of the gorilla bears a mark by which it can be distin-
guished from a corresponding human bone, and that in the present state of creation, at least, no
intermediary being fills the gap which separatesthe man from the troglodyte"— the great Anatomist
goes on speaking of the simian characteristics in man! (See de Quatrefages, The Human Species,
p. 113.)
f Op. cit.y Isaac Myer, p. 422.
t Zohar^ i. 119^, col. 475; ibid., p. 412.
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330 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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* built huge cities. Of rare earths and metals
they built. out of the firesf vomited, out of the white
stone t of the mountains and of the black stone,§ 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, Chaldaeans, Greeks, etc., to have preceded
their human Kings. These are still believed in by the modem Hindus,
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
modem Geologists are now being driven into admitting the demon-
strable existence of submerged continents. But to confess the exist-
ence of the continents is quite a different thing from admitting that
there were men on them during the early geological periods || — ay, men
and civilized nations, not Palaeolithic savages only; who, under the
• The Lemurians.
t Lava.
X Marble.
\ Of the subterranean fires.
II This is the reason, perhaps, why even Easter Island, with its wondrous gigantic statues— a speak-
ing witness to a submerged continent with a civilized mankind on it— is hardly mentioned anywhere
in modem Encyclopaedias. Its mention is carefully avoided except in some books of travels.
Modem Science has an undeniable predilection for forcing hypotheses, built on personal hobbies,
upon the cultured public, as well-established evidence ; for offering it gutsses instead of knowledge,
and calling them "scientific conclusions." Its specialists will evolve a thousand and one contra-
dictory speculations rather than confess an aivktvard sei/'evtd^nt /act— prominent among such
specialists being HKckel 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.
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PRESENTMENTS OF TRUTHS. 33 1
guidance of their divine Rulers, built large cities, cultivated Arts and
Sciences, and knew Astronomy, Architecture and Mathematics to per-
fection. 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.* 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 de-
stroyed 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-
Hnanaco in Peru,t
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,.
• Our best modem novelists, although they are neither Theosophists nor Spiritualists, nevertheless
begin to have very psychological and suggestively Occult dreams; witness Mr. Robert Louis Steven -
•on 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 f 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 Egyp-
tians"; and then seems to attempt a synopsis of certain letters of a Master quoted in Esoteric
Buddhism, for, she sajrs : " 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 destro3red, 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 nm'elist 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 knoTvn to us,** though
they " were probably akin to the Gorilla and Orang of the present day** (Haeckel). In answer to whose
"probably," Occultists point to another and a greater probability— viz., the one given in our text.
t Robert Brown, The Countries of the IVorld, vol. iv. p. 43.
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J
332 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
who, instead of vivifying the Spark projected into them by the "Flames,"
extinguished it by long generations of bestiality * Whereas the Aryan
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.f
It is with the advent of the divine Dynasties that the first civiliza-
tions 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, Never-
theless, notwithstanding civilization, while their pastoral brethren en-
joyed 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 intel-
lectual 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.
• See Stauza 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."
t It is said by the incarnate Logos, Krishna, in the Bhagavad Gild, " The seven great Rishis, the
four preceding Manus, partaking of my nature, were bom from my mind : from them sprang
(emanated or were bom] the human race and the world " (x. 6).
Here, by the seven Great Rishis, the seven great Rilpa Hierarchies or Classes of Dhyin 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
Planetarj' 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 Axiipa Gods — the Kumiras, the
Rudras, the Asuras, etc. ; who are also said to have incarnated. They are not Prajipatis, 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 fOiys — 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, bom 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 Gild [ Tk€(h-
sophist, April, 1887, p. 444).
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DEGENERATION OF MANKIND. 333
"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
modem perversion of thought — ** though," she adds, •* there is such a
thing as knowledge of the Secrets of Nature."* 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 \_t he primitive
Shveta-dvipa"] had perished ages before. Their [Lemuria's~\ Elect, had
taken shelter on the Sacred Island {now the 'fabled^* Shamballahy 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-dvipa, 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-dvipa,^ the White Island, had
veiled her face. Her children now lived on the Black Land, wherein, later
on, Daityas from the seventh Dvipa (Pushkara) and Rdkshasas from the
seventh climate replaced the Sddhus and the Ascetics of the Third Age, who
had descended to them from other and higher regions, , , .
In their dead letter, the Puranas, 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 Purdna and accept verbatim the geo-
graphy, geodesy, and ethnology in the account of Priyavrata's seven
sons among whom their father divides the seven Dvipas (Islands or
• op. cii.f p. 152.
t It was Uie northern parts of the Toyambudhi, or sea of fresh water, in Shveta-dvipa, which the
seven Kum&ra8--8anaka, Sananda, San&tana, Sanatkum&ra, Jita, Vodhu, and Panchashikha— visited
agreeably with exoteric tradition. (See the Uttara Khanda of the I\idma Pur&na, Asiattck Researches,
vol. xi. pp. 99, ICO.)
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334 '^^^ SECRET DOCTRINE.
Continents) ; and then proceed to study how his eldest son, Agnidhra,
the King of Jambu-dvipa, apportioned Jambu-dvipa among his nine
sons; and then how Ndbhi, 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 Purdnas were written,
their true meaning was intended to be clear only to the Initiated
Brdhmans, 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 chrono-
logical 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 PurAnas are observed, they are ascribed
... to diflferences 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 Dvipas 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 Dvipas apportioned to Priyavrata's septenary progeny
refer to several localities — first of all to our Planetary Chain. In this
Jambu-dvipa 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-dvipa
*'is in the centre of all th^st'' — the so-called "Insular Continents" — and
is surrounded by a sea of salt water (Lavana), whereas Plaksha, Shfil-
malia, Kusha, Krauncha, ShSka, 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.*
• Vishnu i^rana^ Wilson's Trans., ii. 109.
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THE HINDO SYMBOUZATION. 335
(^) BhSskara AchSrya, who uses expressions from the books of the
Secret Doctrine, in his description of the sidereal position of all these
I>vipas, speaks of: "the sea of milk and the sea of curds," etc., as
meaning the Milky Way, and the various congeries of Nebulae; the
more so, since he calls **the country to the south of the equator" Bhur
XrOka, 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."*
(J) That this geographical distribution of seven allegorical conti-
nents, islands, mountains, seas and countries, does not belong only to
our Round, or even to our Races — the name of BhSrata-varsha (India)
notwithstanding — is explained in the texts themselves by the narrator
of Vishnu Purdna, who tells us that :
Bharata [the son of N^bhi, who gave his name to Bhdrata-varsha or India]
. . , consigned the kingdom to his son Sumati . . . and abandoned his life
at . . . Sh^lag^&ma. He was afterwards born again, as a Brahman, in a dis-
tinguished family of ascetics. . . . Under these princes [Bharata's descendants]
BfaArata-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 MahAyuga of 4,320,000 years], t
But having said so much, Parishara suddenly explains that :
This was the creation of Svdyambhuva (Manu), by which the earth was peopled
-when he presided over the Jirsl Manvantara, in the Kalpa of Var4ha [i.e.y the Boar
incarnation, or Avatdra].
Now every BrShman knows that otir Humanity began on this Earth
(or Round) on/y with Vaivasvata Manu, And if the Western reader
turns to the sub-section on "The Primeval Manus of Humanity," J he
Tvill 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-Man u), 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 Manvan-
taras and Kalpas, and [thus] have been rather clumsily distributed amongst the
di£ferent periods.
It is nothing of the kind; but as Orientalists know nothing of the
Secret Teaching, they persist in taking everything literally, and then
• See Bibliotheca Indtca, Trans, of the Golddhydya of the Siddhanta'Shiromani, iii. 21-44.
f Ibid.y pp. 106, 107.
X P. 321-
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336 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
turn round and abuse the writers for that which they do not com-
prehend !
These Genealogies embrace a period of three and a half Rounds;
they speak of pre-human periods, and explain the descent into genera-
tion 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 bom, even from the [latent] condition of gods, as men,
in Bh^rata-varsha; as that is the way to . . . final liberation.*
In Jambu-dvipa BhSrata 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 TretA, the Dv¶, and
Kali take place.
When, therefore, ParSshara, on being asked by Maitreya "to g^ve
him the descriptions of the Earth," returns again to the enumeration
of the same Dvipas with the same seas, etc., as those he had described
in the Svayambhuva 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 lyokas, and by those of
other Globes. Hence the confusion.
All these islands and lands are called by the Orientalists "mythical"
and "fabulous."t Very true, some are 7iot of this Earth, but they still
exist. The White Island and Atala, at all evehts, 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-dvipa
of Theogony, and (Ji) Shaka-dvipa, 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
• Wilson, ibid., p. 137.
+ In a lecture, Professor Pengclly, F.R.S., quotes Professor Oliver to the effect " that the present
AUantic 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.
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THE MAGI IN THE DAYS OF KRISHNA. 337
virtue," as it was then inhabited by the caste of the Magas — that caste
-which even the Br&hmans acknowledged as not inferior to their own,
and which was the nursery of the first Zarathushtra. The BrShmans
are shown consulting with Gauramukha, on N^rada's advice, who told
them to invite the Magas as priests of the Sun to the temple built by
S^mba the reputed son of Krishna, for in reality the latter had none.
In this the Puranas are historical, allegory notwithstanding, and Occult-
ism is stating facts.
The whole story is told in Bhaviskya Purdna. It is stated that
SSmba having been cured of leprosy by Surya (the Sun), built a temple
and dedicated it to the Deity. But when he was looking for pious
BrShmans to perform the appointed rites in it, and receive donations
made to the God, NSrada — the virgin Ascetic who is found in every
age in the Puranas — advised him not to do so, as Manu forbade the
Br&hmans to receive emoluments for the performance of religious rites.
He therefore referred SSmba to Gauramukha (White-face), the Puro-
hita, or family priest, of Ugrasena, King of MathurS, who would tell
him whom he could best employ. The priest directed SSmba to invite
the Magas, the worshippers of Surya, to discharge the duty. But as
he was ignorant of the place where they lived, Surya, the Sun himself,
directs Sdmba to ShSka-dvipa beyond the salt water. Then SSmba per-
forms the journey, using Garuda, the Great Bird, the vehicle of Vishnu
and Krishna, who transports him to the Magas, etc.*
Now Krishna, who lived 5,000 years ago, and NSrada, 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; never-
theless the Magas are the Magi of Chaldaea, and their caste and worship
were bom on the earlier Atlantis, in ShUka-dvipa, the Sinless. All the
Orientalists are agreed that the Magas of ShSka-dvipa are the fore-
fathers of the fire-worshipping Parsis. 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 NSrada and SSmba,
they carry the event only to the days of the flight of the Parsis 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
Purdna with still living in Shaka-dvipa 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" Shaka-
• Vishnu Pur&na, Wilson, v. 381, 382.
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338 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
dvipa, and in those days lived in Chaldaea. This, again, is an inten-
tional confusion.
The earliest pioneers of the Fourth Race were not Atlanteans, nor
yet were they the human Asuras and the RSkshasas 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.* It
covered the whole area from the foot of the Himalayas, which separated
it from the inland sea rolling its waves over what is now Tibet, Mon-
golia, and the Great Desert of Shamo (Gobi); from Chittagong, west-
ward 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 iio'W.f
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."J 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
• 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 ha\'e been
adopted by us simply for the sake of clearness. Atlantis was the name griven 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 Catacl3rsm. 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 ii,ooo years ago. Most of the correct names of the
•countries and islands of both Continents are given in the Pur Anas; but to mention them specially,
as foimd in other more ancient works, such as the S&rya Siddhdnta, 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
Aryans, and a reader confuses them with the Hind&s and the latter with the Fourth Race, because
some of them lived in ancient Lanki— the blame will not fall on the writer.
t See Part III, Section VI, of this Volume.
X See Professor J. D. Dana's axticlc, American Journal of Science, III. v. 442, 443; WinchelPs World-
Life, p. 352.
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THE ATLANTIC OCEAN-FLOW. 339
of the bulk of the Mankind of that region during the Third Race,
when the gigantic Continent of Lemuria began separating into smaller
<!ontinents. This is due, according to the explanation in the Commen-
tary, to a decrease of velocity in the Earth's rotation :
When the Wheel runs at the ustial rate^ its extremities [_ihe poles'] agree
with its middle Circle [^the equatorl^y 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 [egua-
torial lands], while these at the ends are subject to Pralayas by submersion.
And again :
Thu$ 4he Wheel \jthe Earth] is subject to, and regulated by, the Spirit of
4he 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 \J>oles], 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 distri-
bution 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 periodi-
cally.* Professor Todd believes he can trace the series of oscillations
backward to the periods of the Earth's first incrustation. f 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
reappear, have asked the question: "What will Atlantis be like when
raised?" Here, again, there is a slight misconception. Were identi-
cally the same lands of Atlantis that were submerged to be raised again,
then they would, indeed, be barren for ages. But because the Atlantic
• 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,' ' reapparitions,' and other
fauna] dislocations in the vertical and horizontal distributions of fossil remains. These phenomena
are well known to the student of geology.'* {Op. cit,, p. 281.)
t See American Naturalist, tlxxH. 15-26.
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340 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 dis-
pose 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 reappearance of the mighty Conti-
nents, 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 (Dvipas)
are mentioned in the Surya Siddhanta, 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 ** reincarnated"
in Ptolemy. Yet, it is a mistake to call these "Sacred Islands" Atlan-
tean— as is done by us; for, like everything else in the Hindu Sacred
Books, they are made to refer to several things. The heirloom left by
Priyavrata, the Son of Svayambhuva Manu, to. his seven sons — was not
Atlantis, even though one or two of these Islands survived the sub-
sidence of their fellows, and offered shelter, ages later, to Atlanteans,
whose Continent had been submerged in its turn. When first men-
tioned by Parashara in the Vishnu Purdna, the seven refer to an
Esoteric Doctrine which is explained further on. In this connection,
of all the seven Islands, Jambu-dvipa (our Globe) is the only one that
is terrestrial. In the Purdnas every reference to the North of Mem is
connected with that Primeval Eldorado, now the North Polar regfion,
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
I<emuria. Ages later, some of the I^murian remains reappeared
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ON FOOT ACROSS THE OCEANS. 341
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 pari 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, con-
nected 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 "Brdhmans 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.*
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 Haeckel, 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
cither 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. t
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
• Five Years of Theosophy, pp. 339, 340. t Pedigree of Man ^ Avelinf^'s Trans., pp. 80, 8i.
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342 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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-
HimMayan regions were covered with seas, and beyond them stretched
the "lotus leaves" of Shveta-dvipa, the countries now called Green-
land, 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 disappear-
ing 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.
Haeckel, 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 con-
tintwus continent.*
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, Haeckel, 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 lirst 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.t
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.:;:
• Ibtd., p. 82. "•■ Op. cit., p. 81. ♦ Esoteric Buddhism, p. 65.
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CHANGES OF CUMATE. 343
But they belong to the last remnants of the seventh sub-race of the
Third. Professor Haeckel 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 Aryan Hindus, the Egyptians,
and the oldest Persians, on the one hand, and the Chaldees and Phoe-
nicians 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 dis-
coverer. 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 repre-
sentatives of the really human race with solid bones, then Haeckers
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 excel-
lently 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
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344 'THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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* in size and intellect.
This was the third Pralaya of the Races,\
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 ter-
restrial 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 alto-
gether, 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 dis-
posed of by being swept ofi" 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
• "Half- grown babes" in comparison with their giant brethren on other Zones. So would we
now, should a like calamity overtake us.
+ This relates to l,emuria.
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CYCLES WITHIN CYCLES. 345
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 ri^es and falls with what is known of astronomical
cycles— especially with the Sidereal Year, which is equal to 25,868 of
our solar years.* 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 consola-
tion 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 pol^ four degrees in each revolution from the
equinoctial points, as the equator turns through the Zodiacal con-
stellations. 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 Com-
mentary Thirty-three tells us:
Men decreased considerably in stature, and the duration of their lives was
diminished. Having fallen dow7i in godliness they mixed with animal
rcu:es, and ifitermarried 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 \\\\^ fourth destruc-
tion who can tell! But we are told that:
• 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 regrard to our Earth, it is calculated that the equinoctial point falls back 50. i" 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 xi.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 Encyclopedia Britannica.) We mentioned
this cycle in Isis Unveiled (vol. i), in relation to other cycles. Each has a marked influence on its
contemporary race.
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346 the secret doctrine.
44. They* built great images nine yatis high,! the size of
THEIR BODIES (a), InNER FIRES HAD DESTROYED THE LAND OF
THEIR FATHERS. J WATER THREATENED THE FOURTH § (^).
(a) It is well worth noticing that most of the gigantic statues dis-
covered on Easter Island, a portion of an undeniably submerged con-
tinent, 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. ||
The writer is well aware that the modern Archaeologists 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 tha?i 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.
(^) How could those records have been preserved ? we may be asked.
Even the knowledge of the Zodiac by the Hindus is denied by our
kind and learned Orientalists, who conclude that the Aryan Hindus
knew nothing of it, before the Greeks brought it into the country.
This uncalled-for slander has been so sufficiently refuted by Bailly,.
• The Atlanteans.
+ Twenty-seven feet.
t The I^murians.
} Race.
II Compare the following Section, entitled "Cyclopean Ruins and Colossal Stones as Witnesses t*
Giants."
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THE OLD CONTINENTS. 347
and what is more, by the clear evidence of fads ^ as not to need very
much additional refutation. While the Egyptian Zodiacs* preserve
irrefutable proofs of records embracing more than three-and-a-half
Sidereal Years — or about 87,000 years — the Hindu 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 Aryan 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 Lanka,
or rather on that which became Lankt with the Atlanteans. The
small remnant now known as Ceylon is the Northern highland of
ancient Lanka, 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 ifi 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 contifiaits
whose strata have never been geologically explored; a7id that they may some
day upset aitirely their present theories ? Why not admit that our present
continents have, like Lemuria afid Atlantis, been several times already
submerged, and had the time to reappear agaifi, and bear their new groups
of mankind and civilizations ; a?id that at the first great geological up-
heaval at the next cataclysm, i7i 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 Leviurias ayid Atlantises come up again ?f
Not identically the same Continents, of course. But here an ex-
planation is needed. No confusion need arise as regards the postula-
tion 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 serv^ed as the
• Sec Dcnon's Voyage en Egypie, vol. ii. t See Esoteric Buddhism, p. 65.
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348 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 g^eat
English fresh-water deposit called the Wealden — which every Geologist
regards as the mouth of a former great river — is the bed of the maiti
stream which drained Northern Leniuria in the Secondary age. The
former actual existence of this river is a fact of Science — ^will its
votaries acknowledge the necessity of accepting the Secondary-age
Northern Lemuria, demanded by their data? Professor Berthold See-
mann 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.*
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:
• Cf. the chart adapted from the Challenger and Dolphin soundingrs in Donnelly's Atlantis: the
A ntedilHvian IVorld, p. 47.
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THE SECRET ANNALS. 349
Lemuria should no more be confounded with the Atlantis Continent^ than
Europe with America^
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, notwith-
standing 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, Aryans of India,
Chaldaeans, Chinese, and Assyrians are the result of preceding civili-
zations lasting ''myriads of centuries'*;! 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. J
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
• EsoUric Buddhism, p. 58. t History of English Literature, p. 23. % Quoted in Atlantis, p. 132.
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350 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
acquainted with all the seven keys of its symbolism. For the compre-
hension of the Occult Doctrine is based on that of the Seven Sciences;
and these Sciences find their expression in the seven different applica-
tions 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 ; hieroglyphi-
cal; or again logogram mical, 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 BibUy is composed of such logograms. No
one not initiated into the mystery of the Occult religious logog^aphy 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 — /.^., in that sym-
bolism 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 kaleido-
scopic transformation of barren word-symbols, can never expect to get
beyond the vagaries of modem 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,
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STANDING WITNESSES TO SUBMERGED CONTINENTS. 35 1
or even simply allegorical — of a moral event on other and higher planes
of being. This we believe has now been sufl5ciently 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 DSnavas and Daityas;
Ceylon had her Rlkshasas; Greece, her Titans; Egypt, her colossal
Heroes; Chaldaea, her Izdubars (Nimrod); and the Jews their Emims
of the land of Moab, with the famous giants, Anakim.* Moses speaks
of Og, a king whose "bedstead" was nine cubits long (15ft. 4in.) and
four wide,t and Goliath was "six cubits and a span in height" (or
loft. 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 Archaeology 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. Archaeology
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? Archaeology, 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
• Numbfrst xiii. 33. t Deut., iii. 11.
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352 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
abounds in craters, which have been extinct for so long that no tradition of their
activity remains.*
But who made the great stone images f which are now the chief
attraction of the island to visitors? '*No one ktiows^ says a reviewer.
It is more than likely that they were here when the present inhabitants [a hand-
ful 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-Huan<uo
in Peru.X
** There is no reasofi to believe that any of the statues have betfi built up,
bit by bity by scaffolding erected around theniy' adds the reviewer very sug-
gestively— 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 Archaeology 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 \v\i^n 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
• Robert Brown, The Countries of the IVorld, p. 43.
+ Mentioned on pp. 44, ct seqg.
X Ibid., pp. 43, 44, etseqq.^ and pp. 310, 311.
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THE BAMIAN STATUES. 353
last surviving witnesses of the Miaotse who had "troubled the earth*';
the Jesuits are right, and the Archaeologists, 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 modem 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.*
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 VihSras. Such Vihdras 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 dis-
covered 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 metres 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
• De la Vega, IX. ix, quoted in De Mirville's Pneumatologie , iii. 55.
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354 'THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
1 20 feet or fifteen feet taller than the said ** Liberty."* 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 Samadhi, have large drooping ears, this is a later inno-
vation 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 Ar>^an Hindu, 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 Miaotse into VihSras and cells, came into
Central Asia about or in the first century of the Christian era. There-
fore, 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 modem 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
• 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 Archaeologist and An-
thropologist, the Marquis de Nadeylac, in his work, justly remarks that there ne\'er was in ancient or
in modem times a sculptured human figure more colossal than the first of the two.
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THE HANDIWORK OF INITIATES. 355
new statues made to represent Lord TathSgata, 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 other-
wise never have survived the Atlantean Deluge. The second — 120
feet high — represents the Sweat-bom; and the third — measuring 60
feet — immortalizes the Race that fell, and thereby inaugurated the
first physical Race, bom 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 sufl&ciencie than the vulgar sort. . .
But reason hath taught me, that so resolutely to condemne a thing for false and
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356 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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.*
A fair-minded scholar, before denying the possibility of our history
and records, should search modem 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 Mir\'ille, in his enormous works, "Memoires Adressees aux
Academies," carrying out the task of proving the reality of the Devil
and showing his abode in every ancient and modem 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,t "became a Jupiter-
lapis," swallowed by his father Saturn, "under the shape of a stone." J
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§ on this subject. But without
claiming any such peripateticism and innate psychic faculties for our
• Essays y xxvi.
t / Corinth., x. 4.
X Pneumatologie, iii. p. 283.
} Saturn is Chronos— " Time." His swallowing Jupiter^lapis may turn out one day a prophecy.
"Peter {cephas, lapis), is Uie stone on which the Church of Rome is built'*— we are assured. Btit
Cronus (Chronos) is as sure to " swallow " it one day, as he has swallowed Jupiter-lapis and still
greater characters.
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ANIMATED STONES. 357
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 Camac (Brittany), or other
such Cyclopean structures; and (Ji) 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 Pausanius 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."* 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 modem
Pausaniases.
The reader is referred to the Acadimie 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 Ophitis and SideritSs, the
"Serpent-stone" and "Star-stone."
The Ophitfis 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.t
Sanchuniathon and Philo Byblus, in referring to these "betyles," call
them '* animated stones." Photius repeats what Damascius, Asclepiades,
Isidorus and the physician Eusebius had asserted before him. Eusebius
especially never parted with his Ophites, which he carried in his bosom,
and received oracles from it, delivered in a small voice resembling a low
whistling.X Amobius, a holy man, who "from a Pagan had become
one of the lights of the Church'^ as Christians tell their readers, con-
fesses he could never meet with one of such stones without putting it
a question, "which it answered occasionally in a clear and sharp small
voiced Where, then, is the difference between the Christian and the
Pagan Ophites, 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
• Ibid., p. 284.
i- M. Falconnet, op. cit., t. vi, Mint., p. 513 ; quoted by De Mirvllle, op. cit., ibid., p. 285.
X The same, of course, as the "small voice " heard by Elijah after the earthquake at the mouth of
the cave. {I Kings, x\x.. 12.)
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358 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
chosen. Cambry, in his Monuments Celtiques, says he saw it when it
still bore the inscription:*
Ni fallat fatuniy Scoti quocumque locatum
Invenient lapidem, regnasse tenentur ibidem.
Finally, Suidas speaks of a certain Heraescus, 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." f
De Mirville — who seeks to justify the Bible — enquires very pertinently,
why the monstrous stones of Stonehenge were called in days of old
ckior-gaur or the "dance of giants" (from cor, "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 Comti de Cornouailles, sur les Traces des Giants, and of various
learned works on the ruins of Stonehenge, J Carnac. and West Hoadley,
give far fuller and more reliable information upon this particular sub-
ject. 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^specially 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 eiforts of twenty men should they attempt to displace them.
Now if we say that most of these stones are relics of the last Atlan-
teans, 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,
• The rocking, or "logan," stones bear various names; such as the clacha-brath of the Celt, the
" destiny or judginent-stoue " ; the divining-stone, or " stone of the ordeal," and the oracle-stone ; the
moving or animated stone of the Phcenidans ; the rumbling stone of the Irish. Brittany has its
"pierrgs 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 Apol-
lonius 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'' (Ackermau's Arth. Index, p. 34), referring
no doubt to the ancient priests who moved such stones by will-power from a distance.
+ See Dictionnaire des Religions, I'Abbd Bertrand, Arts., '•Heraescus" and "Bdtyles"; De Mirville^
ibid., p. 287, who has " Heraiclus " ; but see Bunsen's Egypt, i. 95.
t Sec among others, History of Paganism in Caledonia, by Dr. Th. A. Wise, F.R.A.S.. etc.
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THE 'Crocking stones" in Europe. 359
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." I^et 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 un-
known 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."* 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.^' \
This is a strsLXxge coincidence, for Irish tradition attributes the origin of her
circular stones to a Sorcerer who brought than from Africa, De Mi rville sees
in this Sorcerer ** an accursed Hamite." \ 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. § 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 [! !]||
Nevertheless, it was human, though gigantic power, which accom-
plished 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 mathemati-
cal 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 !
• sepulture (Us Tariares, arch. vii. p. 2227.
■*■ Voyag^urs Anciens et Modernes, i. 230.
X Op. cit,^ ibid.,, p. 290. If Hi^m was a Titan or Giant then were Shem and Japhet also Titans. They
are cither all Arkite Titans, as Fabcr shows — or myths.
\ Diodoms Siculus asserts that in the days of Isis, some men were still of a vast stature, and were
denominated by the Hellenes Giants. **0i ^Iv AiyirTTTW ^vBoXjoyoxxTf. Kara rrjv *Io"t8os
•qXiKLoy yeyovei^aj. rivas ^oXv<r<ofUiTov9."
H AntiquiUs Celtiques, p. 88.
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36o THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Concameau.
Dr. John Watson, quoted by the same author, when speaking of the
piovtng 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.*
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.
Toclose,thereflectionsof aman of Science, in an article upon the subject
published in 1850 in the Revue Arch/ologique, 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
thepiselves. 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 monu-
ments, 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." t
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 Palaeolithic savages^
of cave-men, taller than the average man in our century, yet ordinary
* Cambry, ibid., p. 90.
♦ Op. cit., p. 473. " It is difficult," writes Crcuzer, "not to suspect in the structures of Tiryns and
Mycenae planetary forces supposed to be moved by celestial powers, analogous to the famous Dactyli."
{Masges 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 regriments 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 Palsemonius, 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 ApoUonius 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 BUora, the gigantic ruins of the temple of Vishvakarman, " the builder and artificer
of the Gods."
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LIVING, SPEAKING, AND MOVING STONES. 36 1
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 eflfort
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
ra7i away several times, and so they were forced to weight it with lead."*
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 routerSy from
the word to **rout," or **put to flight"; and Des Mousseaux shows them
all to be prophetic stones, and sometimes called **»«fl^ stones." f
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 divina-
tion, and that they were called for this very reason the ** stones of truth." %
• Hist. Nat., t. xxxvi. p. 592 ; De Mirville, op. ctt., ibid., p. 289.
+ Dieu et Us Dieux, p. 567.
X De Mirvihe, op. ciL, 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, Cir-
caasia, Btruria, and in all the North of Europe. Mr. Rivett-Camac, B.C.S., of Allahabad, the distin-
j^nished Archoologist, 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
b«Ttow8 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 I^muria, Atlantis and her
Oiants, 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-Camac " 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 cui)s " — are simply written records of the oldest races. Whosoever examines with
attention the drawings made of such marks in Archaoiogical Notes on Ancient Sculpturing on Rocks
in Kumaon, India, etc., will find therein the most primitive style of marking or recording. Some-
thing 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-
Camac describes it, " cut on sandstone." Sweden, Norway, and Scandinavia are full of such written
xecords, 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 Starchatems (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 mar-
vellous deeds in the North and South, East and West. (See Asgard and the Gods, pp. 218-221.)
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362 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Otizoe) whom the Magi had to consult
for the election of their sovereigns; *
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." f 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.J As it is, we
know that they were universally used during long prehistoric ages, and
all for the same purposes of prophecy and magic. E. Biot, a member
of the Institute of France, published in the Antiquitis de France (vol.
ix), an article showing the Chatamperamba (the ** Field of Death," or
ancient burial ground in Malabar), to be identical in situation with the
old tombs at Camac; 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 "dwell-
ings of the Rakshasas" or giants. Several stone circles, "considered
the work of the Panch Pandava (five Pandus), as all such monuments
are in India, where they are to be found in such great numbers," w^hen
opened by the direction of Rajah Vasariddi, "were found to contain
human bones of a very large sizer%
Again, De Mirville is right in his generalization, if not in his con-
clusions. As the long cherished theory that the Dracontia are mostly
* Hist. Nat., XXXVII. liv.
+ Ibid.y II. xxxviii.
X Charton, Magasin Pittoresque (1853), p. 32. Quoted by De Mirville. op. cU., ibid., p. 293.
\ T. A. Wise, Hiitory of Paganism in Caledonia, p. 36.
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UNIVERSAL WITNESSES. 365
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.*
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 mediaeval Theology in Us interpretations of the so-called Revela-
tion, 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 trans-
formation 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
distijict 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 2i fully coTiscious man, even though he were no more indeed than a
ramification between two **poor cousins'* of the quadrumanous order.
Occult Sciences admit with Haeckel 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 ivithiyi without, of invisible
subjective Spirit-Life — Eternal and a Principle in Nature — is more
• op. cit., ibid., p. 288.
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364 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 preexisting kind of being,*
Then why, in this case, should not historical man be the product of
a modification on a preexistent and prehistorical kind of man, even
supposing for argument's sake that there is notki?tg 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'' ^ —
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 com-
binations." 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
Essays on Physiology, p. 144- t Principles of Biology ^ Appendix, p. 48a.
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IT TAKES A GOD TO BECOME A MAN. 365
"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 justifica-
tion 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."*
45. The first great waters came. They swallowed the seven
GREAT ISLANDS {o),
46. All holy saved, the unholy destroyed. With them most
of the huge animals, produced from the sweat of the
Earth (J>),
(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 (Dvipas) 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.
{J>) 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 y whose Divine Instructors had gone to
* We shall treat of the Divine Instructors in Stanza XII.
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366 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
inhabit that Sacred Island — ^^from whence the last Saviour will come'''' —
now kept mankind from becoming otie-half the exterminator of the other
\_as mankind is now — H. P. B.]. // \niankind'\ 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 Rc^e — the Divine Incarnates.
When the Poles moved [for the fourth time'] thi^ 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* remained. Some yellow, some brown and black,
AND some red remained. ThE MOON-COLOURED f WERE GONE FOR
EVER (a).
48. The Fifth J 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 (^) . . . .
(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
• Men. + Of the primitive Divine Stock. % Race. \ Race.
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THE "GREAT DRAGON" AND THE ''SERPENTS." 367
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 comers of the world."
(^) 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, gener-
ally 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 ex-
clusive property of Egypt. If true geometrically correct pyramids are
no longer foimd in European regions, nevertheless many of the sup-
posed 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 Aryan 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" (Trpoa-iX-qvoi), 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
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368 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Sfars 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.*
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 constellaticMi. . . . It is singular how closely these con-
stellations . . . correspond in sequence and in range of right ascension with
the events recorded respecting the [Biblical] Flood. t
The reasons for this singularity, however, have been made abundantly
clear in this work. It only shows that there were several Deluges con-
fused 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 Sub-
mersion 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 alle-
gory means. Dr. Smith shows in the Nimrod Epic of the Assyrian
tablets the real meaning of the allegor>\
[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 dis-
tinct 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.t
• The Great Pyramid.
t Knowledge, i. p. 243 ; quoted by Staniland Wake, op. cit., pp. 81, 82.
X Nineteenth Century, 1882, p. 236 ; quoted by Staniland Wake, ibid,^ p. 8a.
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THE POLES HAVE BEEN THRICE INVERTED. 369
But even this is preceded in the old Records by the ^/r-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 con-
stellation 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
Shloka48, 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, mediaeval,
and modem 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 Churchy-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
b9
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370 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Chaldsea was not written phonetically,
but was represented by two monograms, meaning probably, according
to the Orientalists, the "scaly one." "This description," very per-
tinently 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 Chaldaea. It was from Chaldaea that the Hebrews
got their symbolism, only to be afterwards robbed of it by the Chris-
tians, 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 in-
structed" 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
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THE NAASBNIAN GNOSTICS. 37 1
those more ignorant than themselves. Yet, from Homer downwards,
thie term implied something hidden from the Profane.
"Terrible are the Gods when they manifest themselves'* — those Gods
whom men call Dragons, And ^Elianus, treating in his De Naturd
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.*
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 Hindu 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.f Its seven "Stars" are the seven stars held
in the hand of the "Alpha and Omega" in Revelation, In its most ter-
restrial 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 modem 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 sub-
ject 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,
• op. at., XI. xvii.
t As shown by H. Lizeray in his TriniU ChrHienne DevoiUe, 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.
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372 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Peratae 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 Vendidad com-
plaints uttered against the "Serpent," whose bites have transformed
the beautiful, eternal spring of Airyana Valjo, 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.* These two axes produce the
seasons according to their angle of inclination to each other. The two
axes were 710 more parallel; hence the eternal spring of Airyana VaSjo
"by the good river Dditya" had disappeared, and "the Aryan 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-Aryans of the post-diluvian age could, of course,
hardly recognize the mountains, on the summits of which their fore-
fathers 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 Vendlddd 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.t
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
• S3nnboIized by the Egyptians under the form of a serpent with a hawk's head,
t Revue Archiologigue, 1885.
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THE TWO MYSTIC POLBS. 373
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.*
Meru, the Abode of the Gods, as explained before, was placed in the
North Pole, while PStSla, the Nether Region, was supposed to lie
towards the South. As each symbol in Esoteric Philosophy has seven
keys, Meru and P^tala 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 ren-
dered 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 modem 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 periodi-
call}^; 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 2k>diac 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.t
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
• Mackey*s Sphinxiad; or. The Mythological Astronomy of the Ancients Demonstrated by Restoring
to their Fables and Symbols their Original Meanings, p. 42.
t Ibid., p. 47.
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374 I'H® SECRET DOCTRINE.
Trinity was purely astronomical from its beginning. This it was whiclr
made Rutilius say of those who euhemerized it: '^Judaa gens, radix-
stultorumy
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 ^he Zoroastrians as well as in the Hindu
Gospels. Ormazd» or Ahura Mazda, the "Lord of Wisdom," is the
synthesis of the Amshaspands, or Amesha Spentas, the "Immortal
Benefactors,"* 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 .... yi)x\Qh 2lx^ the creators and destroyers of the creatures
of Ahura Mazda, their creators and overseers, their protectors and rulers.
These few lines are sufl&cient to indicate the dual and even the triple
character of the Amshaspands, our DhySn 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 Chris-
tians— the Star-Yazatas of the Zoroastrians — or again the seven Planets
(including the Sun) of every religion.f The epithet, "the shining,
having efl&cacious 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 sufl&ciently spiritualized, there will be
no more need oi forcijig 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
• Also translated as " Blissful Immortals" by Dr. W. Geiger; but the first is more correct.
+ 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.
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GOD AND NATURE ANTHROPOMORPHIZED. 375
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 chrono-
logy; the reason, for instance, why it is impossible ^r 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 reincarnations, Krishna identifying himself with the
Rishi Narayana, and Gautama giving a series of his previous births;
and why the former, especially, being **the very supreme Brahm^," is
yet called AnshSnshSvatSra — "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 reappears 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 reappeared 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;* 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 Eliphas Levi's
Histoire de la Magie,\ 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
• These elements are: the cosmic, the terrene, the mineral, the vegetoble, the animal, the aqueous,
and finally the human— in their physical, spiritual, and psychic aspects.
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37^ THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
of the male figure, and protruding behind the shoulders, while their
hands join at an angle on each side. Eliphas Levi 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 imme-
morial, 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 personi-
fying the opposite poles, Herodotus* 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.f But they also represented the poles inverted, in
consequence of the great inclination of the axis, which each time re-
sulted 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 versa. These Kabirim were the "Deluge" Gods.
This may help us to get at the key of the seemingl}' hopeless con-
fusion 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^ Titans, and
• Thalia, Ixxvii.
+ Who adds that "the Egyptians had various ways of reprwenting 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 constella-
tion 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.)
X Faber and Bishop Cumberland would make these all the later pagan personifications of *' the
Noetic 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 commemora-
tion of the event, the pious Noachidse 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-
Sydyk and his Sons, and then we may say A men.
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WHO WERE ENOCH AND THE OTHERS? 377
Aletse with the Kabiri. And we have shown that the latter were the
same as the Manus, the Rishis, and our Dhyan Chohans who incarnated
in the Elect of the Third and Fourth Races. Thus, while in Theogony
the Kabiri-Titans wefe seven Great Gods, cosmically and astronomi-
cally the Titans were called Atlantes, because, perhaps, as Faber says,
they were connected with at-al-as, the ** divine sun," and with ///, 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,* 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 larSy ** conductor," ** leader." Sanchu-
niathon translates the word Aletae 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," f is not very correct. They are the Lares, the
Conductors and Leaders of men. As Aletae, 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 DhySn Chohans. The Sabaeans, who worshipped
the "Regents of the Seven Planets" just as the Hindus 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
Sabaeans and then disfigured by the Jews (exoterically) ; but the truth
about them can still be discovered even in Genesis\ Seth is the "Pro-
• Who were Uter on, with the Greeks, limited to Castor and Pollux only. But in the days of
I«emuria, the Dioscuri, the " Egrg-bom," were the Seven Dhyan Chohans (AgTiishv4tta-Kumara) who
incarnated in the Seven Elect of the Third Race.
t Op. ciL, i. 133.
X Clement of Alexandria recogrnized the astronomical sisrnificance 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.
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378 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
genitor" of those early men of the Third Race in whom the Planetary
Angels had incarnated ; he was himself a DhySn 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"
(Enoichion). Thence the worship. The Arabic writer Soyuti says
that the earliest records mention Seth, or Set, as the founder of Saba-
ism, and that the pyramids which embody the planetary system were
regarded as the place of sepulchre of both Seth and Idrus (Hermes or
Enoch);* that thither Sabseans proceeded on pilgrimage, and chanted
prayers seven times a day, turning to the North (Mount Meru, Kaph^
Olympus, etc.).t Abd AUatif also tells us some curious things about
the Sabseans 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 AUatif
assures us that he had read in ancient Sabaean books that "one pyramid
was the tomb of Agathodaemon and the other of Hermes'*: J
Agathodsemon was none other than Seth, and, according to some writers, Hermes
was his son,
adds Mr. Staniland Wake in The Great Pyramid,%
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 cnix
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) ; || Axiokersos
(Pluto or Hades); and Kadmos or Kasmilos (Hermes — not the ithy-
phallic Hermes mentioned by Herodotus,^ but **he of the sacred
• Vyse, operations, etc., ii. 258.
+ Palgrave, ii. 264.
t Vyse, ibid.f ii. 342.
\ P. 57.
II The speculation of Mackcy, the self-made adept of Norwich, in his Mythological Astronomy, is a
curious idea— yet one perhaps not so ver>* 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, imply*
ing the principle of generation, referred to the sexes. For " the word sex was formerly understoo<^ by
ax ; which . . . has, in our time, settled into sex. [And he refers to Encyclopcedia Londiniensis^
at the word 'aspiration.'] Now if we gfive the aspirated sound to Axieros, it would become Sax or
Sexier OS ; 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.)
H ii. 51.
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THE POISES, THE "HEAVENLY MEASURE." 379
legend," which was explained only during the Samothracian Mysteries).
This identification, which is due, according to the Scholiast on ApoUo-
nius Rhodius,* to an indiscretion of Mnaseas, is really no identification
at all, as names alone do not reveal much.f Others again have main-
tained, 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 esoteri-
cally 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, metal-
line, magnetic, electric and the fier}-^ 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" J and the art of
manufacturing iron. Moreover, Pausanius§ 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 terres-
trial 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 preeminently in every Theogony — especially in the
Hindu — the Sacred Divine Fires, Three, Seven, or Forty-nine, accord-
ing 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 #cata) "to burn." The Semitic
• i. 9-17.
■»- Decharme, MythoUtgie de la Grice Antique, p. 270.
X The y9GiTdL guebra comes from Kabiri {Gabtrt), and means the Persian ancient fire-worshippers, or
Parsis. Kabiri became GabiH and then remained as an appellation of the Zoroastrians in Persia.
{Gte H3rde'8 De Religione Ptrsarum, c. 29.)
I I. ix. 751.
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38o THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
word kahirim contains the idea of **the powerful, the mighty, and the
great,'* answering to the Greek fteyoAot, Waroi, 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, Phoe-
nicia, the Troad, Thrace, Egypt, Lemnos or Sicily, their cult was
always connected with Fire, their temples ever built in the most vol-
canic 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.* At Thebes, Core and Demeter, the Kabirim.
had a sanctuary,! and at Memphis, the Kabiri had a temple so sacred,
that none, excepting the priests, were sufiered to enter its holy pre-
cincts.J 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 re-
garded— 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 civili-
zation, 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-nagari, 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 Chris-
tian 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, hy producing o^om 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
* See Macrob., 5a/., I. iti. c. 4, p. 376. t Pausaa., ix. 22; 5. % Herodotus, iii. 37.
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THE DRAGON HUMAN YET DIVINE. 381
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 them-
selves 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 anti-
quity, 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 2^ 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 Lii-lan asserts that Confucius said :
The Dragon feeds in the pure (water) [of Wisdom] and disports in the clear
(water) [of Life].*
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 Kaempfer and Faber
spell ** Maurigasima," for some mysterious phonetic reasons of their
• Quoted in Gould's Mythical Monster s^ p. 399.
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^82 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
own. Kaempfer, in his Japan,'^ gives the tradition: The island, owing
to the iniquity of its giants, sinks to the bottom of the ocean, and Peiru-'
un, 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
^peak 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 what-
ever 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 no-
where. Every nation has either the seven and ten Rishi-Manus and
Prajipatis; the seven and ten Ki-y; or ten and seven Amshaspandsf
(six exoterically); ten and seven Chaldaean Annedoti; ten and seven
Sephiroth, etc. One and all have been derived from the primitive
DhySn Chohans of the Esoteric Doctrine, or the ** Builders" of the
Stanzas of \^lume 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 J 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 Androgj'ne:
• Appendix, p. 13 ; quoted by Faber, Cadtri, ii. pp. 289-291.
t The Amshaspands are six— if Ormazd, their chief and Uygos, is excluded. But in the Secret
Doctrine he is the seventh and higrhest. just as Phtah is the seventh Kabir among the Kabiri.
t In the PurAnas it is identified with Vishnu's or Brahmi's Shveta-dvfpa of Mount Mem.
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HERMES IN ASTRONOMY AND ELSEWHERE. 383
It is said that this prince [Isis-Osiris] built cities in Egypt, stopped the over-
flowing of the Nile; invented agriculture, the use of the vine, music, astronomy,
and geometry.
When Abul Feda, in his Historia Antdslamitica,* says that the
^•Sabaean language" was established by Seth and Edris (Enoch) — he
means Astronomy. In the Melelwa Nahil,\ Hermes is called the
disciple of Agathodaemon. And in another account,^ Agathodaemon is
mentioned as a "King of Eg5i)t-'* The Celepas Geraldinus gives us
some curious traditions about Henoch, who is called the "Divine
Oiant." In his Book of the Various Names of the Nile, the historian
.^med 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
"Sabaean by origin" — ue,, 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.j
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.|| The Hermes of Oriental tradition was
worshipped by the Phineatae, and is said to have fled after the death of
Arg^s into Egypt, and civilized it under the name of Thoth.f 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 Graecia, 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
• Ed. Fldaher, p. 16.
■r MS., 47 in Nlc. Cat.
t MS., 7851 Uri'8 Cat. ; quoted by Col. Vyse, Operations at the Pyramids of Gixeh, ii. 364 ; see Staniland
Wake, The Great Pyramid, p. 94.
\ De Mirville, Pneumatologie, Ui. 29.
g Staniland Wake, ibid., p. 96.
IT Jhid., p. 97.
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384 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
the whole series of classical authors support him. Diodorus, Erato-
sthenes, 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.*
It is the modern historians — French Academicians, like Renan,
chiefly — who have made more eflForts to suppress truth by ignoring
the ancient annals of Divine Kings, than is strictly consistent witli
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 bom
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 Egyptolo-
gist, De Rouge:
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 m3rthic 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.t
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
* ^gyP^* iv. 441 ; D« Mirville, op. ciL, iii. 41.
t AnnaUs de Philosophie ChrHienne, xxxii. 442; sec De Mirville, Fiuumatologie, iii. x8.
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WHAT THE PRIESTS TOLD HERODOTUS. 385
age of humaitity, 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 lyco and Libra, has found its (Edipus
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
(d) that even since their first Zodiacal records were commenced, the
Poles have been three times within the plane of the Ecliptic.
Bailly had not suflScient 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.*
As says Panodorus:
Now, it is during these thousand years [before the Deluge], that t^e 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. t
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 Maht Chohans of the temples, bom 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 hcuL its namCy history and annals. They also assured Herodotus
• Histoire de VAstronomU Ancienne; sec Dc Mirville, op. cit.^ ibid.t p. 15.
t De Mirville, ibid., p. 41.
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386 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
— unliess the most truthful of historians, the "father of history," is now
to be accused of fibbing, yw^/ 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 * 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 DSnavas 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 BhSrata-varsha! " — exclaim the incarnated
Gods themselves, during the Third Root-Race. Bhirata 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-dvipa, as it
was the land of active (spiritual) works par excellence; the land of
Initiation and of Divine Knowledge.!
Can one fail to recognize in Creuzer great powers of intuition, w^ien,
although he was almost unacquainted with the Aryan Hindu philo-
sophies, which were but little known in his day, we find him writing:
We modem 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. J
It is such a conception only that can lead man to form a correct con-
clusion about his origin and the genesis of everything in the Universe
— of Heaven and Earth, between which he is a living link. Without
• Ibid., pp. i6, 17.
■I- In the Vishnu Purana, with careful reading^, may be found many corroborations of the same
(Book II, chaps, iii, iv, gt segg,). The reigrns 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 Kusha-Dvtpa had seven sons .... "after whom the seven portions or Varsha of the
island were called .... Tytere reside mankind, along with Daityas and Ddnavas, as well as teith
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, Sv&yambhuva —
who had ten sons. But of these, three— Medha, Agnib&hu, and Putra {ibid., ii. loi)— became ascetics,
and refused their portions. Thus Priyavrata divided the Earth again into seven continents.
X i>gypte, pp. 450-455 ; I>e Mirv'ille, ibid., pp. 41, 42.
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WHAT ARE ** SPIRITS"? 387
^uch 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.* 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.f
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 CEdipus ^gypHacus^ writes:
I confess, for a long time I had regarded all this [the Dynasties aAd 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.{
As De Rougemont shows, Theopompus, in his Meropis, made the
priests of Phrygia and Asia Minor speak exactly as did the priests of
Sai's 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,
• 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?
+ The Occultists have been accused of worshipping Gods or Devils I 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 Barth, 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 com-
munication with our Barth, 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
3rou tell that all such visions are due merely to ph3rsical 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 facility 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 modem 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.
X i. 70 ; De Mirville, ibid.j p. 26.
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388 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
warrior race, and a pious, meditative race* — ^which Theopompus sym-
bolizes by two cities.f The pious "city" was continually visited by the
Gods: the belligerent "city" was inhabited by various beings invulner-
able by iron, who could be mortally wounded only by stone and wood. J
De Rougemont treats this as a pure fiction of Theopompus and even
sees a fraud (supercherie) in the assertion of the Saitic 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," cu8aifiovta (our lies Fortun^es) — such a supposition can well be nothing
else but a universal chimera !\
It is certain that, whether "chimera" or reality, the priests of the
whole world had it from one and the same source — the universal tradi-
tion about the third great Continent which perished some 850,000 years
ago, II 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 ?f 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:
• These were the early Aryans and the bulk of the Fourth Root-Race— the former pious and
meditative (s^ven to yof^-contemplation), the latter a fighting race of sorcerers, who were rapidly
degenerating owing to their uncontrolled passions.
t The Northern and Southern Divisions of I<emuria- Atlantis. The Hyperborean and the Kquatorial
lands of the two Continents.
% De Rougemont, Ptuple 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.
\ Ibid., loc, cit.
II 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.
^ See De Rougemont, ibid.
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PI^ATO'S IDEA OF EVIL. 389
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 marvel-
lous 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 dis-
tance 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 cele-
brated 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.*
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,y 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
(8ai/Aov€s) of a divine nature more excellent than that of man."
It was God (the Logos, the Synthesis of the Host), who thus pre-
siding over the Genii became the first Shepherd and Leader of men.f
• Boulangfer. Rigne des Dieux, Introd.; see De Mirville, op, cit., ibid., pp. 32, 33.
f 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.
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390 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
When the world had ceased to be so governed and the Gods retired^
ferocious beasts devoured a portion of mankind. lycft to their own re-
sources and industry, Inventors then appeared among them successively
and discovered fire, wheat, wine; and public gratitude deified them.*
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. . . . "t)\^ first use offtrey and the discovery of the methods by which
it can be kindled; the domestication of animals; and, above aU, the processes by
which the various cereals were first developed out of some wild grasses [?]— these are
all discoveries ivith 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.\
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 eflForts 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,%
• The preceding paragraphs are condensed from Plato, Legg., 1. iv— /Vf., in Crtt., et in fblitic; De
Mirville, ilnd., pp. 33, 34.
t Argyle, Unity 0/ Nature,
t Book of the Dead, xdx. 33 ; and clvi. 4. The reader is referred to Stanza VII, Shloka i (i. 840),
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, ex.)
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 repre-
sented astrallyin the K&ma Loka or Hades, before their separation] ; and there is wheat three cubits
high for Mummies in a state of perfection [i.^., 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-Him&layan Adepts, and the latter, when,
buried, have com and wheat placed over them.
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WHEAT BROUGHT DOWN BY THE GODS. 39I
Says the Eg3T)tian Isis:
I am the Queen of these regions; I was the first to reveal to mortals the
mysteries of wheat and com. ... I am she who rises in the constellation of
the Dog. . . . Rejoice, O Egypt ! thou who wert my nurse.*
Sinus 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, t since they remain ignorant how full the world is of various and
invisible creatures which crowd even in the most sacred places. t
The "Sons of God" have existed and do exist. From the Hindu
Brahmaputras and Minasaputras, Sons of Brahml and Mind-born
Sons, down to the Bne Aleim of the Jewish BibUy the faith of the cen-
turies and universal tradition force reason to yield to such evidence.
Of what value is "independent criticism" so-called, or "internal evi-
dence"— ^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
GenesiSy which repeats the statements of the Secret Doctrine, though
slightly changing its form, and drawing a diflFerent 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].}
What does this sentence, "and also after that," signify unless it
means: There were Giants in the Earth *^r^, Le,, 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 MSnasaputras 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
• L 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!
t In the text, " corked up" or "screwed up."
X Zohar, part i, col. 177; De MirviUe, ibid., p. 88.
I Gtntsis, vi. 4.
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392 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
" 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 monsira quadam
de genere giganteoy 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 Peronne 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.*
This biblical riddle — ** the real sense of which no author has ever
understood," as is candidly confessed by Fourmontf— 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.J
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.g 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,\ Elsewhere the same volume shows these Bne Aleim
belonging to the tenth sub-division of the "Thrones." f It also
explains that the Ischins — "Men-spirits," viri spirituales^** — 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.
• Prcelectiones Theol., ch. ii ; De Mirville, ibid., p. 84.
+ Riflexions Critiques sur VOrigine des Anciens Ptuples.
X Rabbi Parcha.
\ i. 6.
II Book of Ruth and Schadash, fol. 63, col. 3, Amsterdam edition.
IT Zohar, part ii, col. 73; De Mirville, ibid., p. 86.
•• Ibid., p. 87.
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THE MYSTERY OF AZAZEL. 393
But Azazel, whom the Church dogma persists in associating with
Satan, is nothing of the kind. Azazel is a mystery, as explained else-
where, and it is so expressed by Maimonides :
There is an impenetrable mystery in the narrative concerning Azazel.*
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.t
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.J
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 "trans-
gressing" 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 on^ 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.§ "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, Psuche, 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 Eliphas L^vi tells us:
• More Nevochim, xxvi. 8.
+ Sagra Scrittura.
X ii. pp. 14, 29.
\ Chap, viii ; I^ureuce'8 Translation, pp. 7 and 8.
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394 'rHE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Hindus, 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 Testamenf
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 inter-
pretation has now been restored, while the key to its theological inter-
pretation 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, preeminently 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 ecclesi-
astical 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 Agathodaemon Christos, or the Theoso-
phical 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?"
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DRUNKEN INDRA. 395
Read the account of Indra (VSyu) in the Rig Veda, the Occult volume
par excellence of Aryanism, and then compare it with the same in
the Purdnas — 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 Purdnas, Indra becomes a profli-
gate, and a regular drunkard on the Soma-juice, in the ordinary terres-
trial way. He is the conqueror of all the "enemies of the Gods" the
Daityas, NSgas (Serpents), Asuras, all the Serpent-gods, and of Vritra^
the Cosmic Serpent. Indra is the St. Michael of the Hindu Pantheon
— the chief of the militant Host. Turning to the Bible, we find Satan,
one of the "Sons of God,"* becoming in exoteric interpretation the
Devil, and the Dragon, in its infernal, evil sense. But in the Kabalah,\
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 Chaldsean 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
infltienced 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 spiri-
tual 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
* Job, i. 6. t The Chaldaean Book of Numbers.
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J
396 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
of the world were covered with the temples sacred to the Sun and the
Dragon ; but the cult is now preserved mostlj- 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.*
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 KSliya, 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 thijs 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 cr>^pts; and the proof is that we find (a) the priests assuming
the name of the Gods they served ; (d) 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 Chaldaea, some of them
of a ver>' 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 Lybian desert, and were known
as the Serpent's Catacombs, or passages. It was there that were per-
formed the Sacred Mysteries of the Kuklos AnagkSs, the ** Unavoidable
Cycle," more generally known as the "Circle of Necessity"; the in-
exorable 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 under-
ground, and terminated at the root of the heavens, adding that this
Arcfutology, xxv. 220, London.
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THE SECRET OF THE DRAGON. 397
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*
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 them-
selves Snakes. "I am a Serpent, I am a Druid," they exclaimed.
The Eg3Tptian Kamak is twin brother to the Carnac of Bretagn^ 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 Phoenician Elon or
Elion, whom Abraham recognized as El Elion.f Besides the sur-
name of Serpents, they had also the appellation of "Builders" or
" Architects," for the immense grandeur of their temples and monu-
ments was such that even now the pulverized remains of them "frighten
the mathematical calculations of our modern engineers," as Taliesin
says.J
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."§
Furthermore, the "War in Heaven" is shown, in one of its signifi-
cations, 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 bom in a new body, becoming a Son of Wisdom and Immortality
in Eternity.
• Die Pkoinixier^ 70.
t See Sanchuniathon in Eusebius, Pr. Ev., 36; Genesis, xvi.
t Society 0/ Antiquaries of London, xxv. 220.
\ Cartas, 51 ; see Isis Unveiled, i. 553, et seqq.
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398 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 sicU 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.
RShu, mythologicall3% 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 im-
mortal. 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, RShu wreaks his vengeance on the
Sun and Moon by occasionally swallowing them. But this fable has
another mystic meaning, for Rlhu, 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 NSgas — the Hindu King-Snakes, who
dwelt in cavities of the rocks under the ground. From Shesha, the
thousand-headed Serpent, on which Vishnu rests, down to Pjrthon, the
Dragon-serpent oracle, all point to the secret meaning of the mjrth.
In India we find the fact mentioned in the earliest Purdnas. The
children of SurasS are the mighty *' Dragons." The Vdyu Purdna
replacing the "Dragons" of SurasS of the Vishnu Purdna by the
DSnavas, the descendants of Danu by the sage Kashyapa, and these
DSnavas 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 sj^mbol in
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AGNI, THE FIRK-GOD. 399
-exoteric systems agrees with it. Thus, if from three systems widely
•diflfering from each other in appearance — the old Aryan, the ancient
Greek, and the modem 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 KSrttikeya
from the Hindus; the Greek Apollo; and Michael, the "Angel of the
Sun," the first of the i©ons, called by the Gnostics the "Saviour'* —
and proceed in order.
(i) Agni, the Fire-god, is called VaishvSnara in the Rig Veda, Now
VaishvSnara is a DSnava, a Giant-demon,* whose daughters PulomS
and KSlakd are the mothers of numberless Dinavas (30 millions), by
Kashyapa,t and live in Hiranyapura, ^'the golden city, floating in the
air^X 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-Aditya). To this same group belongs
Skanda or KSrttikeya, God of War, the six-faced planet Mars astrono-
mically, a KumSra, or Virgin-youth, born of Agni,§ for the purpose of
destroying TSraka, the DSnava Demon, the grandson of Kashyapa by
his son Hiranyaksha.il TSraka's Yoga austerities were so extraordinary
that they became formidable to the Gods, who feared such a rival in
power.f 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 Brahm^, for which he is
sumamed Jishnu, ** Leader of the Celestial Host." K^rttikeya is also
found bearing the same titles. For killing Tiraka, the DSnava, he is
• He is thus named and included in the list of the Dinavas in Vdyu Purdna ; the Commentator of
Bh&gavata Purdna calls him a son of Danu, but the name means also "Spirit of Humanity."
+ Kashyapa is called the son of Brahmi, 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 Marichi, the son of
BrahmA; while the Atharva Veda says, "The Self- bom Kashyapa sprang from Time," and Esoteri-
cally Time and Space are forms of the One incognizable Deity. As an Aditya, Indra is son of
Kashyapa, as also Vaivasvata Manu, our Progenitor. In the instance given in the text, he is
Kash3rapa-Aditya, the Sun and the Sun-god, from whom all the "Cosmic" Demons, Dragons (Nagas),
Serpent or Snake-gods, and Dinavas or Giants, are bom. The meaning of the allegories given above
is purely astronomical and cosmical, but will serve to prove the identity of all.
% Vishnu PurdnOy Wilson's Trans., ii. 72.
} All such stories differ in the exoteric texts. In the Makdbhdrala, Kirttikeya, "the six- faced
Mars," is the son of Rudra or Shiva, Self-bom without a motfier from the seed of Shiva cast into the
fire. But Kirttikeya is generally called Agnibhii, ' ' Fire-bora."
II Hiranyiksha is the ruler or king of th^ fifth region of Pitala, a Snake-god.
IT 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.
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400 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
called Taraka-jit, "Vanquisher of TSraka,"* KumSra Guha, the "mys-
terious 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, KSrttikeya, and even Kashyapa-Aditya, 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," t 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,J and whom he is divinely commissioned to
destroy — like KSrttikeya, who is born for the purpose of killing Tfiraka,
the too holy and wise Demon. Apollo is bom on a sidereal island called
Asteria — the "golden star island," the "earth which floats in the air,"
which is the Hindu golden Hiranyapura; he is called the Pure (dyws)
Agnus Dei, the Indian Agni, as Dr. Kenealy thinks; and in the primal
myth he is exempt "from all sensual love."§ He is, therefore, a
KumSra, like KSrttikeya, and as Indra was in his earlier life and bio-
graphies. 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
• The story told is, that Tdraka (called also Kilanibha), owing to his extraordinary Yoga-powers,
had obtained all the divine knowledge of Yoga-vidyl and the Occult powers of the Gods, who con-
spired 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 I/wd God those of their Brethren ^^ho 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 Kirttikeya, and under the same circum-
sUnces. Both are "Leaders of the Celestial Host," both Virgins, both "Leaders of Saints," "Spear-
holders" (Shakti-dharas), etc. K4rttikeya is the original of Michael and St. George, as surely as
Indra is the protot3rpe of K&rttikeya.
+ The "life and the light" of the material physical world, the delight of the senses— not of the
soul. Apollo is preeminently the human God, the God of emotional, pomp-loving and theatrical
Church ritualism, with lights and music.
X See Revelation (zii) where we find ApoUo's mother persecuted by the Python, the Red Dragon,
who is also Porph3nion, the scarlet or red Titan.
} Book of God, p. 88.
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MERODACH-MICHAEI*. 4OI
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 Hindu and Chaldaean 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 Aryans. 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 o£fends against
his god, who curses him, and calls down on his head all the evils and troubles of
humanity.*
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,t 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.}
This War of the Gods with the Powers of the Deep, refers also, in
its last and terrestrial application, to the struggle between the Aryan
Adepts of the nascent Fifth Race and the Sorcerers of Atlantis, the
Demons of the Deep, the Islanders surrounded with water who dis-
appeared 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
• No " God "—whether called Bel or Jehovah— who curses his (supposed) own work, because he has
made it imperfect, caa be the One Infinite Absolute Wisdom.
t In the Indian allegory of Tirakimaya, the War between the Gods and the Asura^ headed by
Soma (the Moon, the ELing of Plants), it is Vishvakarma, the artificer of the Gods, who, like Vulcan
(Tubal-Cain), forges their weapons for them.
X Ckaldtan 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, Mah&m&y&, hence the cause of
misery and suffering.
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402 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 "Ene-
mies" are then the "Old Dragon" precipitated into the depths of the
Earth, in this one sense.
The Avestaic Arashaspands 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 Vendidad, Thus in Fargard xix, Zara-
thushtra is told by Ahura Mazda to "invoke the Amesha Spentas who
rule over the seven Karshvares* of the Earth" ;t which Karshvares in
their seven applications refer equally to the seven Spheres of our
Planetary Chain, to the seven Planets, the seven Heavens, etc., accord-
ing 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."! The "Sravah" — a word which the Orientalists have
given up as one "of unknown meaning" — means the same Amshas-
pands, but in their highest Occult meaning. The Sravah are the
Nounienoi 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 Armaiti), who is referred to, when personified, as "the fair
daughter of Ahura Mazda,"§ who is also the creator of the Tree (of
Occult and Spiritual Knowledge and Wisdom) from which the mj'stic
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
• 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 Rijamsi
(Worlds) above Prithivt, the Earth, or "this" (Idira), 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.)
t Darmesteter's Trans., "Sacred Books of the East," vol. iv. p. 207.
X Ibid., p. 217.
\ Ibid,, p. 208.
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THE SUN-GODS, CREATIVE POWERS. 403
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 trans-
formations 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 Horns, who pierces his opponent's head with a
spear; and Typhon is the all-destroying wind of the desert, the rebel-
lious 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. Archaeology demonstrates that Horus is identical with
An ubis,* whose efl5gy was discovered upon an Egj'ptian monument, with
a cuirass and a spear, like Michael and St. George. Anubis is also repre-
sented as slaying a Dragon, that has the head and tail of a serpent.f
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." J
In that night, the oppressor, the murderer of Osiris, otherwise called the deceiv-
ing Serpent .... calls the Sons of Rebellion in /i/>, and when they arrive to
the East of the Heavens, then there is War in Heaven and in the entire World.}
In the Scandinavian Eddas the "War" of the Ases with the Hrim-
thurses 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,"|| who began by being
simply the emblems of Chaos, have become euhemerized b^'^ the super-
stition 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 Chaldaea and Assyria as in
Bgypt. 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.ir
• Book of the Dead, xvii. 62; Anubis is Horus who melts "in him who is eyeless."
•»• Sec Lenoir's Eht Dragon de Metz.
X See also Egyptian Pantheon, pp. 20, 23.
\ Book of the Dead, xvii. 54 and 49.
n These "Evil Spirits" can by no means be identified with Satan or the Great Dragon. They are
the Blementals generated or begotten by ignorance— cosmic and human passions— or Chaos.
IT Austrian Discoveries, p. 403.
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404 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
This is only another version of the Hindu '* 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 teach-
ings, 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 vnse 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 con-
nected 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 protot>'pes
for the Seraph of Moses and his great Brazen Serpent.* 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."t
The appellation Sa'tan, in Hebrew SfitSn, an "Adversary" (from the
* 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 // 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.
t "And Satan stood up against Israel and provoked David to number Israel" (/ Chronicles,
zzi. i). "The anger of the I«ord [Jehovah] was kindled against Israel, and he moved David . . .
to say, Go, number Israel" {II Samuel, xxiv. i). The two are then identical.
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WHO FIRST CREATED WOMAN. 405
verb skatana, "to be adverse," "to persecute") belongs by right to the
first and cruellest "Adversary** of all the other G^fl&— 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 y 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 Ser-
pent 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."* 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 hypo-
theses; ihey 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.! 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 —
• ii. x8, 22.
t Dozens of the most erudite writers have sifted thoroughly the various meanings of the name
Jliovah (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.
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406 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
male and female, Jah-veh.* 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 incorrupt
able nature. He is ,the lao 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 con-
sciousness 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 sepa-
rated himself from Eve, creates in her Abel, the first natural woman, f
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,"J and the Talmud adding that
** the evil Spirit, Satan, and Samael, the angel of Death, are the same *'§
— 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 DemL
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 — thai
man may live for ever,
Satan represents metaphysically simply the reverse or the polar opposite
of everything in Nature. || 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
• In the above-mentioned work (p. 233), verse 26 of chapter iv of Genesis is correctly translated
" then men began to call themselve% 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.
i See for explanation the excellent pages of Appendix vii of the same work.
X Op, dt.y p. 293.
} Rabba Battra, i6a.
II 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
mediseval 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.
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JEHOVAH-OPHIOMORPHOS. 407
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
deg^ded, 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-embrac-
ing, manifested Deity only in their collectivity, since they were the
Fashioners of the first diflFerentiations 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.* They taught that lurbo and Adonai were
names of lao-Jehovah, who is an emanation of Ilda-baoth.f This, in
their lang^ge, 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 Thraetaona 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 Aryan
BrShmans of India." And the conflict of the Gods with the Asuras
is repeated in the Great War — the Mahabhalrata. 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,
• See Isis Unveiled, ii. 184. t See Codex Nazarceus, iii. 73.
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408 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
simply in order to connect Evil personified with the Serpent of Genesis,
and thus prove the new dog^a.
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.* Tubal-Cain is a Kabir, "an instructor of every artificer in
brass and iron"; or — if this will please better — ^he is one with Hephaes-
tus 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. f
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:
• 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 <?/"
Measures, p. 278.)
+ See Strabo, comparing them to the Cyclopes, xiv. p. 653 sqq. Callim., in Del., 31. Stat., Silv., ir,
6, 47, etc.
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THE FLOOD LEGENDS. 409
Like Lemnos and Samothrace, Rhodes, the birth-place of the Telchines, is an
island of volcanic formation.*
The island of Rhodes emerged suddenly out of the seas, after having
been previously engulfed by the Ocean, say the traditions. I<ike 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 represen-
tative 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,t 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 J concurs with all those who are of
opinion that Sydic, or Sadie, was the Patriarch Noah, and also Mel-
chizedek; and that the name by which he is called, Sadie, corresponds
with the character given him in Genesis.^
He was p^TS, Sadie, a jusi man^ and perfect in his generation. All science and
every useful art were attributed to him, and through his sons transmitted to
posterity.il
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
* Mythologie de la Grice Antique, p. 271.
t- 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 Bnos, 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.
% See Analysis of Ancient Mythology, ii. 760.
I vi. 9.
jl Sec New Encyclopadia, by Abraham Rees, F.R.S.
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4IO THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 2, just man^ and his supposed
duplicate, the mysterious Melchizedek, **king of Salem, and priest of
the most high God,** after **his own order";* and finally, having seen
what they all were spiritually, astronomically, psychically and cosmi-
cally, let us now see what they became rabbinically and kabalistically.
In speaking of Adam, Cain, Mars, etc., z,^ personifications, we find the
author of the Source of Measures enunciating our very Esoteric Teach-
ings in his kabalistic researches. Thus he says:
Now, Mars was the Lord of birth, and of dexth, 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 prin-
ciple, disintegrating into the modification of two opposites for production. Astrono-
mically, too,t 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 wa»
wofuan. He held the cardinal points, and as Cain, or Vulcan,X or Pater Smdic, or
Melchizadek, he was lord of the ecliptic, or balance, or line of adjusimemt, and there-
fore was The Just One, The ancients held to there beiBg seven planets, or great
gods, growing out of eight, and Pater Sadie, TheJuU or Right One, was Lord of the
eighth, which was Mater Terra,\
This makes their functions, after they had been degraded, plain
ent)ugh, and establishes the identity.
The Noachian Deluge, as described in its dead-letter and within
the period of biblical chronology, ha\dng been shown to have never
existed, the pious, but very arbitrary, supposition of Bishop Cumber-
• See Hebrews^ v. 6; vii. i, et seqq.
t The i^lian name of Mars was Areus ("Apcvs), and the Greek Ares (^ApTf^^ 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 Muller connects both the names Mars and Ares
with the Sanskrit root mar, whence he traces their derivation, and fVx>m which, he says, comes the
name of the Maruts or Storm-gods. Welcker, however, offers a more correct etymology. (See
Griech. GblUrlehte^ 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.
X As the same author shows: "The very name Vulcain appears in the reading, for in the first words
{Gen.y iv. 5) is to be found V'elcain, or Vulcain, agreeably to the deepened u sound of the letter van.
Out of its immediate context, it may be read as, * and the god Cain,' or Vulcain. If, however, any-
thing is wanting to confirm the Cain- Vulcain idea, Fuerst says: ']"*p Cain, the iron point of a tance^
a smith {blacksmith), inventor of sharp iron tools and smith work'" (p. 278).
i op. at., p. 186.
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THE LEGENDS OF IRAN. 4II
land 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 Cabin, 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.*
The Kabirim, the "Mighty Ones," are identical with our primeval
DhySn 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 eflFectually 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 suc-
ceeding 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 Aryans, or the
RSkshasas of the Rdmdyana and the children of Bharata-varsha, or
India; the Ante- and the Post-diluvians of the Bible.
Gyan (or Gftan, Jntnd, True or Occult Wisdom and Knowledge),
• Append, de Cabiris ap. Orig. Gent.^ pp. 364, 376; and the latter statement on p. 357. See Fabcr*»
Cabiri^ i. 8.
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412 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
also called Gian-ben-Gian (or Wisdom, son of Wisdom), was the king
of the Peris * 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.f 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 Chaldaean, Egyptian, Greek, and even
Hebrew traditions, for the Jewish myth, though disdaining in its ex-
clusiveness 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, whqre he gets married and builds
a city.t
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 sub-
mersion 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 aU 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 Timceus 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 Aryans were
200,000 years old when the first great "Island," or Continent, was
• Some derive the word from Paras which produced Pars, Pers, Persia; but it may be equally
derived from Pitaras or Pitris, the Hindii prosrenitors of the Fifth Race— the Fathers of Wtsdom or
the Sons of "Will and Yoga"— who were called Pitaras, as were the divine Pitris of the First Race.
•♦• See for these traditions the Collection of Persian Legends, in Russian, Georgfian, Armenian, and
Persian; Herbelot's narrative Ligendes Fersanes, " Bibliothftque Orientale," p. 298, 387, etc., and
DanWlle's Mimoires, 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.
X Genesis, iv. 16, et seqq.
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ESOTERIC CHRONOLOGY. 413
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 Chaldaea
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 indiflFerently 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 Hindus, 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 — /.^., from the first appearance of the Aryan
Race, when the Pliocene portions of the once great Atlantis began
gradually sinking* and other continents to appear on the surface,
down to the final disappearance of Plato's small island of Atlantis
— the Aryan 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 MahabhSrata, or Great
War, so famous in Indian history. Such blending of events and
epochs, and the bringing down of hundreds of thousands into thou-
sands 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.f And how little Herodotus could tell is con-
fessed by himself when, speaking of a mysterious tomb of an Initiate
at Sais, in the sacred precinct of Minerva, he says:
• The main Continent perished in the Miocene times^ as already stated.
♦ From Bede downwards all the chronologisU 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).
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414 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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,*
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 everj^
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 chronologj^ 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 galler>^ 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.f Three among them
reigned for i,ooo years each.J
Siamek, the beloved son of Kaimurath (Adam), their first king, was
murdered by his giant brother. His father had a, perpetual fire pre-
served 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
• ii. 170, I7I.
t Hence kin^ 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 imknown
to all Pagan travellers, even to Herodotus.
X Herbelot, op. cil., p. 829.
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THE MRSIAN PHCENIX. 415
how to make brass-work, to cut canals, and improve agriculture. As
tisual, it is Huschenk, again, who is credited with having written the
work called Etayial iVisdom, and even with having built the cities of
Iruz, Babylon and Ispahan, though indeed they were built ages later.
But as modem 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 attri-
buted to the amours of a crocodile with a female hippopotamus. This
*' Dodecapod" was fotmd on the " dry island " or new continent; much
force and ctmning 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.*
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. I^ike 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 poly-
glot, and even very religious.f What says that Persian Phoenix? It
complains of its old age, for it was bom 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.! Simorgh is bom with the last Deluge of the Pre-
Adamites, says the " Romance of Simorgh and the good Khalif " ! §
What says the Book of Numbers ? Esoterically, Adam Rishoon is the
Lunar Spirit (Jehovah, in a sense, or the Pitris), and his three sons—
• Orient. Trad., p. 454. See also Bailly's Lettres sur I'Atlantide.
♦ Sec Orient. Collect., ii. 119.
X Ibid. Remember Uiat 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 figrures, though sorely confused.
} Tales of Derbent,
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4l6 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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," Le., com-
mitted 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,* whom Demrusch had kept as a prisoner, and takes her over
to the "dry island," i,e., the new continent of Europe.f 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 Dhulkamayn, the ** two-homed." But
this epithet has no connection with the ** two-homed " gentleman of
the cloven foot. The ** two-homed" 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 ELaikobad,
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 Parsis or Farsis. 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." J 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
• Mergain, or Morgfana, the fairy sister of King Arthur, is thus shown of Oriental descent.
•♦■ 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 ?
X Herbelot, p. 593; Armenian Tales, p. 35,
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THE ARCTIC CONTINENT. 417
girdle that surrounds the world." A journey of seven months' duration
will bring him who is possessed of **Soliman's Ring" to that " Foun-
tain," 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.*
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 wingSy\ 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.J 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 Chaldaean. 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 Hved in Paradise. During the Deluge, Noah was carried in his
ark into the land his posterity now inhabits. §
* 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.
t 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 hippopota-
mus were considered sacred and represented divine symbols, both with the ancient Eg3l>tians and
with the Mexicans. Poseidon is, in Homer, the God of the Horse, and assumes that form himself to
please Ceres. Anon, their progeny, is one of the aspects of that "Horse," which is a Cycle.
X The severed parts must be Norway and other lands in the neighbourhood of the Arctic Circle.
\ Cosmas Indicopletistes in Collect, Nova Patrum^ t. ii. p, 188; also seejourn. des Savants, Suppl.
1707, p. 20.
b9
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4l8 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 \Iiuman'\ life, the only dry land was on the
right end* of the Sphere, where it \Jhe Globe] is motionless.^ The whole
Earth was one vast watery desert, and the waters were tepid, ....
There, man was bom on the seven zones of the immortal, the indestructible
of the Manvantara,X 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% reigns ever since, , , , Thus the
wise Fathers say that man is bom 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,\\
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 bom. For
it is iyi the belt of man's dwelling {the Earth] that lies concealed the life
and health of all that lives and breathes,^ During the First and Second
{Races] the belt was covered with the great waters, {But] the great
• The two Poles are called the "right" and "left ends" of our Globe— the Ri;irht being the North
Pole— or the head and feet of the Earth. Every beneficent (astral and cosmic) action conies from the
North; every lethal influence from the South Pole. They are much connected with and influence
"right" and "left" hand magic.
"♦■ The more one approaches the Poles the less rotation is felt; at the Poles proper, the diurnal revo-
lution is quite neutralized. Hence the expression that the Sphere is "motionless."
X 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 conti-
nents and lands will emerge from the sea bottom many times in turn, but this land will never change.
} Bear in mind that the Vedic and Avestaic name of Fohat is Ap&m-Napit. In the A vesta he stands
between the Pire-yazatas and the Water-yazatas. The literal meaning is "Son of the Waters." but
these "Waters" are not the liquid we know, but iEther— the Fiery Waters of Space. Fohat is the
"Son of iEther" in its highest aspect, Akisha, the Mother-Father of the primitive Seven, and of
Sou;id or the I/)gos. Fohat is the Light of the Logos.
II This "Water" is the blood or fluid of Life which animates the Earth, compared here to a li\*ing
body.
V 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 Barth, the electro-
magnetic current, which circulates through all the arteries, and which is said to be found stored in
the "navel" of the Earth.
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THE UNREACHABLE LAND. 419
Mother travailed under the waves and a new land was joined to the first
one which our Tvise men call the head-gear \_the cap'}. She travailed harder
Jbr the Third {Race} and her waist and 7iavel appeared above the water.
It was the belty the sacred Himavat, which stretches around the World.*
She broke toward the setting Sun from her neck\ downward [to the South-
West}, into many lands and islands, but the Eternal Land [the cap} broke
mot 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,
Jor 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
l)eginnings of human life its Root-Continent, so to speak, already
•existed, and that part of the world now known as Asia was only cut oflF
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 northern part of Spitzbergen,J
• Occultism points to the Himilayan 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 settingr Sun
•or to the West of the Himavat in which lie the roots of Meru, which mountain is North of the
HimAlaya. Meru is not "the fabulous mountain in the navel or centre of the earth," but its roots
and foundations arc 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 Purdna has it: "For the North of Meru there is,
therefore, always night durins: 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 Bast is that quarter where the sun first
appears."
f 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 Parashara says, "is the mother and nurse,
augmented with all creatures and their qualities, the comprehender of all the worlds."
X 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 Skrya Siddhanta (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 {dhruvatdrd), 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 degrrees of co-latitude {lambaka) are ninety: at Meru the degrees
• of latitude {aksha) are of the same number." (See Vishnu Purdna, Wilson's Trans., ii. 208.)
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420 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
on Mercator's Projection, on our side, it may have included, on the
American side, the localities that are now occupied by Bafl5n's Bay and
the neighbouring islands and promontories. There it hardly reached,
southward, the seventieth degree of latitude; here it formed the horse-
shoe 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, lyemuria was formed. When it
was destroyed in its turn, Atlantis appeared.
WESTERN SPECUI.ATIONS, FOUNDED ON THE GREEK AND
PAURANIC TRADITIONS.
Thus it becomes natural to find that, on even such meagpre 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 I^emuria, 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
Purdnas, 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 Purdnas, This was sheer nonsense, as the
Atala is one of the seven Dvipas, or Islands, belonging to the nether
Lokas, one of the seven regions of PStSla (the antipodes). Moreover, as
Wilford* shows, the Purdnas 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
• wilford makes many mistakes. He identifies, for instance, Shveta-dvipa, the White Island, the
"island in the northern part of Toyambhudi," with Ensfland, and then tries to identify it with Atala
(a nether region ) and Atlantis. Now the ShveU-dvipa is the abode of Vishnu (exoterically), and Atala
is a hell. He also places it in the Buxine or Ucshu (Black) Sea, and then seems to connect it. in
another place, with Africa and Atlas.
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ORIENTALISTS IN THE WRONG BOX. 42 1
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 HindiH 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 T&ra-daitya of the Purdnas, 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.*
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 Hindu scholar, whether or
not an Initiate. For there is not a statement in the Purdnas-^n 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 Hindus divided the face of
the Globe into seven Zones, Climates, Dvipas, 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 Atmt, of pure Soul,
and Spirituality. Hence Pushkara is shown as the seventh Zone, or
Dvipa, which encompasses the Kshira Ocean, or Ocean of Milk (the
ever-frozen white region) in the Vishnu and other Purdnas.j 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-dvipa,J in the middle
of which stands Meru, for it is the country inhabited by beings who
• Asiatick Researches, nii. 280.
t Op. cit.f tbtd.y p. 201. '
% Every name in the Purdnas has to be examined at least under two aspects, geogrraphically and
metaph3rsically, in its allegrorical application ; e.g., Nila, the (blue) mountain which is one of the
boundaries to the north of Meru, is again to be sougrht geogrraphically in a mountain range in
Orissa, and 3ret again in a mountain quite different from the others, in Western Africa. Jambu-dvtpa
te Vishnu's dominion— the World, limited in the Purdnas 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 Par&shara. Likewise with Pushkara and all others.
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422 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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."* Wilford is inclined to see Meru in
Mount Atlas, and locates there also the LokSloka. Now Meru, we
are told, which is the Svar-loka, the abode of Brahmi, 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."t 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, Tiradaitya, a Demon, cannot be placed
on the seventh zone if the latter be identified with the White Island,
which is Shveta-dvipa, for reasons given in the foot-note above.
Wilford accuses the modern BrShmans "of having jumbled them
[islands and countries] all together"; but it is h€ who has jumbled
them still more. He believes that as the Brahmanda and Vayu Purdnas
divide the old Continent into seven Dvipas, said to be stirrounded 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. J
As we find certain difiiculties 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 Conti-
nents, 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 modem sense of the word, but that each
name, from Jambu down to Pushkara,§ 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 Dvipas || — each
Continent being, in one sense, a greater or smaller region of dry land
• Ibid.^ p. 202.
♦ Stirya Stddhdnta, Whitney's Trans., v. 5.
X Asiatick Researches, iii. 300.
) Jambu, Plaksha, Shilmali, Kusha, Krauncha, Shika, and Pushkara.
II Such as Sh&ka 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 A<ria, with the Gobi region. Let us bear
in mind that Upadvipas mean "root" islands, or the dry land in general.
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FUTURE CONTINENTS, SYMBOLIZED. 423
stuTounded with water. Thus, that whatever "jumble'' the nomencla-^
ture 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 PaurSnic 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
Purdnas that ShSka-dvipa is (or will be) a Continent, and that Shankha-
dvipa, as shown in the Vdyu Purdna, is only ** a minor island," one
of the nine divisions (to which Vdyu adds six more) of Bhdrata-
varsha. Because Shankha-dvipa was peopled by "Mlechchhas [un-
clean foreigners], who worshipped Hindu divinities," therefore they
were connected with India.* This accounts for ShankhSsura, a King
of a portion of Shankha-dvipa, who was killed by Krishna; that King
who resided in the palace ** which was an ocean shell, and whose sub-
jects lived in shells also," says Wilford.
On the banks of the Nildt there were frequent contests between the DevatAs
[Divine Beings, Demi-gods] and the Daityas [Giants]: but the latter tribe having
prevailed, their king and leader, Shankhdsura, who resided in the ocean, made
frequent incursions .... in the night. J
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 o'f Shamo or Gobi. This is shown in
Pauranic tradition, for on the same page as above cited, it is said:
The people were between two fires; for, while Shankhdsura was ravaging one side
of the continent, Cracacha[or Krauncha], king of Crauncha-dwip [Krauncha-dvipa],
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 Dvipas), preceded Europe, is sure. It
covered the whole of the North and South Atlantic regions, as well as
* They were called Demons, Asuras, Giants, and monsters, because of their wickedness ; and thus
their country was Hkened to Atala— a Hell,
t Not on the river Nile, surely, but near the Nila mountains of the Atlas range.
% Asiatick Resatrc/us^ iii. 225.
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424 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
portions of the North and South Pacific, and had islands even in the
Indian Ocean (relics of Lemuria). The claim is corroborated by Indian
Purdnas, Greek writers, and Asiatic, Persian, and Mahommedan tradi-
tions. Wilford, who sorely confuses the Hindu and the Mussulman
legends, shows this, however, clearly* His facts and* quotations from
the Purdnas give direct and conclusive evidence that the Aryan Hindus
and other ancient nations were earlier navigators than the Phoenicians,
who are now credited with having been the first seamen that appeared
in the post-diluvian times. This is what we read in the Asiaiick
Researches:
In this distress the few natives, who survived [in the war between Devatis and
Daityas] raised their hands and hearts to BhagavAn, and exclaimed, " Let him that
can deliver us ... be our king'* ; using the word It [a magic term not under-
stood by Wilford, evidently] which reechoed through the whole country, t
Then comes a violent storm, the waters of the KSli are strangely
agitated, ** when there appeared from the waves ... a man, afterwards
called It, at the head of a numerous army, saying * abhayan* or there is
no fear'' \ and scattered the enemy. **The King It," explains Wilford,
"is a subordinate incarnation of Mrira" — Mrida, a form of Rudra,
probably? — who "reestablished peace and prosperity throughout all
Shankha-dvipa, through Barbaradesa, Misra-st'hSn and Arva-st'hSn, or
Arabia," J etc.
Surely, if the Hindu Purdnas 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 KSla-pSni, the Black
Waters of the Ocean, in the days of Phoenician navigation — then these
Purdnas must be older than those Phoenicians who are placed at from
2,000 to 3,000 years B.C. At any rate, their traditions must have been
older,§ for an Adept writes :
• Sec vols, viii, x, and xi, of Asiaiick R^sratch^s.
1- Op. cit.y iii. 326.
X Ibid,
\ Says Wilford of the division of Atlantis and Bhdrata or India, confusing the two accounts and
Prijravrata with Medh&tithi : '* 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 bom 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 Dvfpas six were destroyed by a flood. Wilford takes it to be
'*Gades which included Spain," but it was Plato's island— rather.
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THE PUZZLES OF ANTIQUITY. 425
In the above accounts, the Hindus speak of this island as existing and in
great power; it must^ therefore^ have been more than eleven thousand years
But another proof may be adduced of the great antiquity of these
Hindu Aryans 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* — 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
Ashbuij "at the foot of which the sun sets," where was the war between
the Devatis and the Daityas,t he says :
We will consider^ then, the latitude and longitude of the lost island,
and of the remaining Mou7it 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 Ocea7i, is frequently described as lying in the West; and the Sun is
represented as setting at the foot of its mountain (Ashbtirj, Atlas, Teneriffe
or Nila, no matter the name J, and fighting the White Devil of the " White
Island y
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 personifica-
tion of the ancient inhabitants at the foot of the Atlas — he may per-
chance 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 Shankh^ura, and Shankha-dvipa, and all their history, is
also geographically and ethnologically Plato's Atlantis in Hindu dress.
It has just been remarked that since, in the Pauranic accounts, the
island is still existing, these accounts must be older than the 11,000
years which have elapsed since Shankha-dvipa, or the Poseidonis of
Atlantis, disappeared. But is it not barely possible that Hindus should
• America, the "new" world, is thus, though not much, older— still it is older— than Europe, the
"old" world.
♦ If Div or Dev-sefid's (the TAradaitya's) abode was on the seventh stage, it is because he came from
Pushkara, the Pitila (antipodes) of India, or from America. The latter touched the walls, so to say,
of AUantis, before the latter finally sank. The word Patala meaning both the antipodal countries
and infernal regions, these became synonymous in ideas and attributes as well as in name.
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426 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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:
Ai 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 RSkshasas
and Giants of Lanka, and the direct descendants of Sinha, or Leo,
became connected with Shankha-dvipa 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-dvipa. And that
it was so is clearly demonstrated. Say the Commentaries:
The sacred bull Nandi was brought from Bhdrata to Shankha to meet
Rishabha [ Taurus^ every Kalpa, But when those of the White Island
[who descended originally from Shveta-dvtpa^* who had mixed with the
Daily as [ Giants'] of the layid of iniquity, had become black with sin, then
Nandi remained for ever in the White Island [or Shveta-dvipa], . . .
Those of the Fourth World [Race] lost A UM,
Asburj, or Azburj, whether the peak of TeneriflFe 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 Hindu 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
• Neither Atlantis, nor yet Shankha-dvipa, 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 thedeni^ms
of the "White Island." or Siddhapura, or Shveta-dv!pa, who descended to the Atlantis of the Third
and Fourth Races, to "inform the latter; and who, having incarnated, became black with sin" — a
figure of speech. All the Avat&ras 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."
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WHAT MARCELLUS SAYS. 427
composed histories relative to the external sea. For ihey 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 Nep-
tune. And, besides this, the inhabitants of the last island [Poseidonis] preserved
the ntemory of the prodigious fnagnitude 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 Dvipas [inaccurately rendered islands] constitute, according to Mar-
cellusy 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 Paurdnics, some of whom assert that in consequence of
this dreadful convulsion of nature, six of the Dvipas disappeared.*
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 enor-
mous bones of giants were daily discovered on it. But it was the land
of Balaam the prophet, whom the "I^ord loved well." And so mixed
up are facts and personages in the said scholiasts' brains, that, when
the Zokar explsiins the "Birds" which inspired Balaam to mean "Ser-
pents," 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 [Aza2(y)el], was sent.
We say it is not so. The Zokar 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 sur-
rounded 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 Light, so called by the Martinists, by
Eliphas I^evi, and now by all the modern Occultists.
• Asiatick Researches, xi. 27.
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I
428 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Brdhtnanas
and PuranaSy the Vendidad 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 (Aryan) 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."* 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-
• Genesis, ix. i.
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THE ANCIENT AND THE MODERN MAN. 429
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 begin-
ning, 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 "Ser-
pent'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 Atlan-
tean Race, by gradually changing physiologically, morally, physically,
and mentally, the whole nature of the Fourth Race of mankind,* 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 ! \
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 evolu-
tion, 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 suflFered in vain ; and one feels
inclined to regret his benefaction to mankind, and sigh for those days
so graphically depicted by ^Eschylus in his "Prometheus Bound," when,
at the close of the first Titanic Age (the Age that followed that of Ethe-
real Man, of the pious Kandu and Pramlochi), nascent, physical man-
kind, still mindless and (physiologically) senseless, is described as —
* 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 Brihman 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 Br&hman astrologer in accordance with his nature. Therefore, in such countries as the Punjib,
for instance, where the lethal influence of Mussulman, and later on of European, licentiousness, has
hardly touched the orthodox Aryan 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.
t Diseases and over-population are facts that can never be denied.
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430 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Agnishvitta and other divine "Sons of the Flame
•of Wisdom" — personified by the Greeks in Prometheus* — 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
suflFering Titan is make to say:
From sinking blsisted 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 pertinentlj^:
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
<:hanged periodical instinct into chronic animalism and sensuality.f It
is this which hangs over humanity like a heavy funereal pall. Thus
arises the responsibility of free-will ; the Titanic passions which repre-
sent humanity in its darkest aspect;
• In Mrs. Anna Swanwick's volume, The Dramas of yEschylus, it is said of "Prometheus Bound"
("Bohn's Classical Library," p. 334), that Prometheus truly appears in it "as the champion and bene-
factor 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 desigrn, and as being: consequently subjected, for the sake of mortals, to the most agfonizing: 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 higrher aspect of Manas], depicted as the sublime philan-
thropist, 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 ligrht and shadow.
+ The animal world, having simple instinct to g^uide 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.
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THE TRAVESTY OF PROMETHEUS. 43 1
The restless insatiability of the lower passions and desires, when, with self-assert-
ing insolence, they bid defiance to the restraints of law.*
Prometheus having endowed man, according to Plato's Protagoras,
^th that "wisdom which ministers to physical well-being," but the lower
aspect of Manas of the animal (Ktma) 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 pro-
phetically 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. Point-
ing to antiquity he will prove that there never has been an origiyial 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 "Prome-
theus Bound," enacted in the theatres of Athens 2,400 years ago! The
mjrth belongs to neither Hesiod nor uEschylus; 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 "I/)rds of
Wisdom " or the Heavenly Man, who incarnated in Humanity. More-
over, as his name (^Pro-m^-theuSy "he who sees before him" or futurity)
showsf — in the arts he devised and taught to humanity, psychological
• Introduction to "Prometheus Bound/.' p. 340.
+ Prom irpa-firJTL^y "forethought." "Professor Kuhn," we are told in the above-named volumes,
Th€ Dramas 0/ yEscAylus, "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 manthdmi^ 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 Jower ones, but it is hardly so in
the world of thought. And as we are told that the word manthdmi passed into the Greek language
and became the word manthand, 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-briuger "
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 per-
sonified," continues the author, "and finds his prototype in the Aryan Miltarishvan, a divine . . .
personage, closely associated with Agni, the fire-god of the Vedas." Matih, in Sanskrit, is "under-
standing," and a synonym of Mahat and Manas, and must be of some account in the origin of the
name ; Pramatih is the son of Pohat, and has his story also.
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432 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 ^Eschylus' 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 at-
tempt he is struck down by Cronus* 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 suflFer 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 suflFerings 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 bom. This "Son" will deliver Prometheus (suflFering 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
lo, 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).
• Cronus is "Time," and thus the aUesfory becomes very suggestive.
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CHRIST CONNECTED WITH EPAPHOS. 433
This was construed by several fanatics — Des Mousseaux and De
Mirville amongst others — ^into a clear prophecy. lo " 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 avails but fall lie shall,
A fall disgraceful, not to h^en^MTtd. .... (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. lo 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 dis-
covered 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
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434 '"'HE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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, re-
presented 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
bom? Prometheus traces him to his origin and birth-place in his
prophecy to lo. lo is the Moon-goddess of generation — for she is
Isis and she is Eve, the Great Mother.* 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 Bos-
phorus," and cross what is evidently the Volga and now Astrakhan 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).
• It is complained by the author of the version and translator of "Prometheus Bound*' that in
this tracing of lo'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 Ract from which the " tenth," or Kalld Avat&ra, so called, is to issue. This he calls
the " kingly race bom in A rgos " (888). But Argos has no reference here to Argos in Greece. It comes
from arg or ar*a— 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.
lo signified the Moon; while Esotericism explains it as the divine Androgyne, or the mjrstic Ten (lo) ;
in Hebrew lo 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. Arghyanith is a title
of the Mahi Chohan, meaning the "I/)rd of Libations"; and Arghyavarsha, the "Land of Liba-
tions," is the mystery name of that region which extends from KaiUsa mountain nearly to the Shame
Desert— from within which the Kalki Avatira is expected. The Airyina-Varsedya [? Airsrana Va^j6]
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 lo is the mother and symbol.
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THE MISTAKE OF ARRIAN EXPLAINED. 435
This is rightly conjectured by Professor Newman to have meant the
TJral, 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 i^thiop river;
Along its banks proceed till thou attain •
The mighty rapids, where from Bybline heights
Pure draughts of sacred water Neilos sends.
There lo was ordained to found a colony for herself and her sons.
Now we must see how the passage is interpreted. lo 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. i) mentions that
Alexander the Great, when preparing to sail down the Indus [haring seen croco-
diles 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.*
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 Nil oi' Niia. It is the
river bom on the KailSsa 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 kin-
dred nations, and the Eastern Ethiopians — the mighty builders — have
come from India, as is pretty well proved, it is hoped, in Isis Unveiled,]
• op. at., p. 385, note. t 1. 569, 570.
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436 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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, Nil, **blue," and NilS, 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 Alexandy, and who was ignorant of the old name of
the Indus, has unconsciously slandered the Greek conqueror. Nor are
our modem 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 Encyclo-
paedias were yet ready for them.
The race of lo, the ** cow-homed maid," is then simply the first
pioneer race of the -Ethiopians brought by her from the Indus to the
Nile, which received its name in memory of the mother river of the
colonists from India.* Therefore Prometheus says to lof that the
sacred Neilos^ — the God, not the river — shall guide her "to the land,
three-cornered y^ namely, to the Delta, where her sons are foreordained
to found "that far-oflF 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.
* 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 Nil and JRli. Fhe
mistake— if mistake it is— is thus easily accounted for.
+ That lo is identical, allesrorically, with Isis and the Moon is shown by her being "cow-homed."
The allegory undeniably reached Greece from India, where Vach— the "melodious Cow" of the Rig
Veda, "from whom mankind was produced" {Bh&gavata Purdna) is shown in the Aitareya Br&hmana
as pursued by her father Brahmd, who was moved by an illicit passion, and changed her into a Deer.
Hence lo, refusing to yield to Jupiter's passion, becomes "homed." The Cow was in every country
the symbol of the passive generative power of nature, Isis, Vich, Venus— the mother of the prolific
God of Love, Cupid, but, at the same time, that of the I/>gos whose symbol, with the Kg3l>tians and
the Indians, became the Bull, as testified to by the Apis and the Hindfl 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
homs. These were sacred also with the Jews, who placed on the altar horns of Shittim wood, by
seizing which a criminal ensured his safety.
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WAS iESCHYLUS INITIATED? 437
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 ArySvarta of
old.
That the subject formed part of the Sabasian Mysteries is made
known by several ancient writers; among others by Cicero* and by
Clemens Alexandrinus.f The latter writers are the only ones who
attribute the fact of uEschylus being charged by the Athenians with
sacrilege and condemned to be stoned to death to its true cause. They
say that being himself uninitiated, -^schylus had profaned the Mysteries
by exposing them in his Trilogies on a public stage.J 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.§ The latter was one of the oldest sacred
festivals, whose origin is to this day unknown to history. Mytholo-
gists 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 ^Eschylus could become
guilty of such
Discrepancy between the character of Zeus as portrayed in the "Prometheus
Bound" and that depicted in the remaining dramas. ||
This is just because ^Eschylus, 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 prin-
• Tkscul. Quiest., I. ii. 20.
t Sirom., I. ii, Oper., i. 467, Ed. Potter's.
t Herodottts and Pausanias supposed that the cause of the coudemnation was that ^schylus,
adopting the Theogony of the Egyptians, made Diana the daughter of Ceres, and not of I^atona.
<Sec iEIian, Var. Hist., I. v. xviii; i. 433, Edition Gronov.) But .^schylus was initiated.
) 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.
U Mrs. A. Swanwick, op. cit.
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438 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
ciple than the lower aspect of human physical intelligence — Manas-*
wedded to K&ma; 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 — \h^ jealous God, revengeful and cruel in its Egotism
or **I-am-ness.'* Hence, Zeus is represented as a Serpent — the intellec-
tual 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) AvatSra, the glorified
Spiritual Christos, who will deliver the suflFering Chrestos — mankind,
or Prometheus, on its trial. This, say BrShmanical 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 Yug^.
It is only after the appearance of Kalki AvatSra, or Sosiosh, that man
will be bom from woman without sin. Then will Brahmd, the Hindu
deity, Ahura Mazda (Ormazd), the Zoroastrian, Zeus, the Greco-Olym-
pian 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 re-
flection on Earth, in Esoteric Philosophy. The Ahrimans and Typhous,,
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 pro-
cess of evolution during cyclic development, should be strictly pre-
served— under the severe penalty of abnormal growth with all its
ensuing results. It was not in the programme of natural development
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THE GIFT OF PROMETHEUS. 439
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.* 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
slaver>', 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.f 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. J Highly philosophical
• See the foot-note (p. 431) concerning the etymology of irpo-fJLrjTLS or forethought. Prometheus
confesses it in the drama when saying:
O holy ether, swiftly- wingfed gales ....
Behold what I, a god, from gods endure.
And yet what say 1 ? 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.
f Mankind is obviously divided into God-informed men and lower human creatures. The intellec-
tual difference between the Aryan 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 Aryans, 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 djring 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.
X 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.
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440 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 com-
parison ; 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
**feU" into generation. The former are spiritually lower, but physically
stronger, than the "Prometheans"; therefore, the latter are shown con-
quered. **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 selfish-
ness and egoism in every instance.
The modem Prometheus has now become Epi-metheus, **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 rebecome th^/ree 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 nan
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THE "BUDDHAS OF CONFESSION.** 441
fecit mortem^* 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 Sotiga, 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, Avataras, etc., as
they are ** Buddhas who have preceded ShSkyamuni** only for the
Northern followers of the ethics preached by Gautama. These great
MahatmSs, 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, t mostly imaginary personages, who are really the personifica-
tions of the powers of the first-named.J 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
• Sap., i. 13.
t Gautama Buddha, named Shakya Thub-pa, is the twenty-seventh of the last group, as most of
these Buddhas belong to the Divine Dynasties which instructed mankind.
X Of these Buddhas, or the "Enlightened,'* the far distant predecessors of Gautama, the Buddha,
who represent, we are Uught, once living men, great Adepts and Saints, in whom the "Sons of
Wisdom" had incarnated, and who were, therefore, so to speak, minor Avatiras of the Celestial
Beings— eleven only belong to the Atlantean Race, and twenty-four to the Fifth Race, from its begin-
nings. They are identical with the Ttrthankaras of the Jainas.
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442 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 modem 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 via Iceland and Greenland, to the lands that at present sur-
round Hudson's Bay * 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 aeons, 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 recollec-
tions can never desert the Divine Soul within us. Its whispers may
be too soft, the sound of its words too far ofiF the plane perceived by
our physical senses; yet the shadow of events thai were, just as much
as the shadow of the events thai are to come, is within its perceptive
powers, and is ever present before its mind's eye.
* 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 Archceologists to suggest that
Norwegian mariners had discovered America about one thousand years ago. (See Holmboe's TVaces
de Bouddhisme en Norv^ge, 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 Archseologists, have guessed the right age of the mounds, or the tumuli. The fact that
Norwegians may have re-di.scovered 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.
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THE OUDEST RECORDS ABOUT ATLANTIS. 443
It is this Soul-voice, perhaps, which tells those who believe in tradi-
tion 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 Know-
ledge and Mercy ? Who can c^sume the Flower of Power, the Plant of the
Golden Stem and the Azure Blossom f
The "Kings of I^ight" 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 I^and 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 Hindus 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 Aryans are shown to have divided and separated by
Prof. Max Miiller and other Aryanists. 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 con-
finement 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
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444 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
types. The same is shown in Africa; nowhere does a more extra-
ordinary 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 hun-
dred thousands of years. If to-morrow the continent of Europe were
to disappear and other lands to reemerge 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 com-
paring them with some modern theories of evolution, minus Natural
Selection,* these statements appear quite reasonable and logical. Thus,
while the Aryans are the descendants of the yellow Adam, the gigantic
and highly civilized Atlanto-Aryan 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 difiFerent
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 know-
ledge 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,"t how much
more may the same be said of the Atlanteans !
It is from the Fourth Race that the early Aryans got their knowledge
of **the bundle of wonderful things," the Sabha and MstySsabha, men-
tioned in the Mahabharata, the gift of Mayasura to the Pandavas. It
is from them that they learnt aeronautics, Vimana Vidyi, the ** know-
ledge of flying in air-vehicles," and, therefore, their gteat arts of
Meteorography and Meteorology. It is from them, again, that the
Aryans inherited their most valuable Science of the hidden virtues
• See Physiological Selection, by G. J. Romaues, F.R.S. + Esoteric Buddhism, p. 65.
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THE DOOM OF ATI.ANTIS. 445
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,"* 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 [ Vimdnas'] 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 7iether Lords of the Fires {the Glomes 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 { Vidyd, the highest magical knowledge].^ 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 VimdncL of every Lord of the Dark Face to come into his hands {or posses-
sion], 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
Blaxk Face. May even they {the Sorcerers] avoid pain and suffering. May
• Exodus^ xi.
t Wrote the late Brahmachiri Bawa, a Yog! of great renown and holiness: "Extensive works on
'Ashtar Vidi4' 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 country." (The Theosophtst, June, 1880, "Some Things the Aryans Knew.")
For Agnyastra, see Wilson's Specimens of the HindU Theatre, i. 297.
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446 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
every man true to the Solar Gods bind \^paraly2e'\ every man under the
JLunar Gods, lest he should suffer or escape his destiny,
'*A7td may every Yellow Face offer of his life-water [bloody to the speak-
ing animal of a Black Face, lest he awaken his master^
** The hour has struck, the black night is ready.
**Let their destiny be accomplished. We are the servants of the Great
Four.] May the Kings of Light return."
The great King fell upon his Dazzling Fcue and wept. . . .
When the Kings assembled, the waters had already moved. . . .
{Buf] the nations had now crossed the dry lands. They were beyond the
water-mark. Their Kings reached them in their Vimdnas, and led them
jon 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 speaki7ig 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 atid of the straight eye {the frank and siTuere people].
When the Lords of the Dark Faces awoke and bethought themselves of
their Vimdnas 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 modem 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
* 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
Magfic."
f The four.KAaiUC Cods, called the Pour Mahirijahs in the Stanzas.
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THE *' EASTERN ifJTHIOPIANS." 447
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 Chaldaean 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,
liave become the Egyptian Magi, and the yellow-faced nations of the
Pifth 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 Chaldaean records belonged
to the Fifth Race, which, though generally called Aryan, was not
entirely so, as it was ever largely mixed up with races to which Ethno-
logy 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 certainly
before the advent of the "Eastern -Ethiopians," as Herodotus calls the
Eg3i)tians. 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
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448 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 aU 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 hun-
dreds of thousands of years, and recorded in the chronologies of Chaldaea and of
China, shadowy mementoes of pre-historic man, handed down by tradition, and per-
haps 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.*
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. Grould:
The Fourth Race had its periods of the highest civilization, Greek and
Roman and even Egyptian civilizations are nothing compared to the civi-
lizations 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 modem 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 Phoenician vessels had circumnavigated the Globe,
and spread civilization in regions now silent and deserted? What Archaeologist
will dare assert that the same hand which planned the Pyramids of Egypt, Kamak,
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 hiero-
glyphics 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 mediaeval cloister, nor the last cracked by a modem
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 know-
• Mythical MonsUrs, p. 19.
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THE EGYPTIAN ZODIACS. 449
ledge the monumental proofs that earlier explorers have left to mark the plateaux
they had reached and occupied ?
If modem 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 mediaeval ages in some arts, why boast of achieve-
ments which, according to strong probability, were perfectly known thousands of
years ago. The more Archaeology 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 Sufi, 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* 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.
• Travels in Egypt, vol. \\.
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450
THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 th^ first time
that the Pole had been in that position, are the Lion and the Virgin.*
Broadly calculated, it is believed by Egyptologists that the Great
Pyramid was built 3,350 B.C. ; f 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—X
is very suggestive, as destroying this hypothesis of the comparatively
modem 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 Egj'pt; and,
as M. Maspero 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. §
This was before the Great Pyramid epoch, and when Egj'pt 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. (Maspero). Now it is claimed that it is by
• The Mythological Astronomy of the Ancients Demonstrated (p.3), by a strangely intuitional Symbo-
logrlst and Astronomer, a kind of a self-made Adept of Norwich, who lived in the first quarter of this
century.
+ See Proctor, Knowledge, i. pp. 242, 400.
* R<»wlin»on'8 Herodotus, ii. 345.
i The Great Pyramid, pp. 36, 37.
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THEORIES OF A SELF-MADE ADEPT. 45 1
ineans of the Cycle of 25,868 years (the Sidereal Year) that the approxi-
mate 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
tlie Great Pyramid; but Egyptologists tell us there can absolutely be no doubt that
the later epoch is far too late."*
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.t
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 Hindu symbols and constellations well, will be
able to find out from the description of the Egyptian, whether the indi-
cations of time are correct or not. On the Dendera Zodiac, as preserved
by the modem Egyptian Coptic and Greek Adepts, and explained a
little diflferently by Mackey, the Lion 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 repre-
sented 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
• Staniland Wake, op. cit., pp. 6, 7. t Ibid.
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452 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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.*
Nevertheless, the meaning is plain, as the three 2k>diacs belong to
three diflFerent 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
"Aryan- Asiatics," witnessed the doom of the last of the populations of
the Giant Atlanteansf (the Ruta and Daitya Island-Continents) who
perished some 850,000 years ago, toward the close of the Miocene
Age.J The fourth sub-race witnessed the destruction of the last
remnant of the Atlanteans — the Aryo-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
Aryan 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 oflFshoots of the last-named are
countless, and depend on Karmic action.
Examine the Genealogical Tree hereto appended, and you will
• jyte Mythological Astronomy of the Ancients Demonstrated, pp. 4, 5.
t The term "Atlanteau" 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 AUanteans,
who represented several "humanities," and almost a coulitless 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 bla^
AUanteans; giants and dwarfs, as some African tribes comparatively are, even now.
X Says a teacher in Esoteric Buddhism (p. 64): "In the Kocene 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 sjrmptoms 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 I<emuria, the last of whose lands perished about 700,000 years before the begin-
ning of the Tertiary period (p. 65), and the last of "Atlantis" only xz/>oo years ago; thus both over-
lapping—one the AUantean period, and the other the Aryan.
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THE GENEALOGICAL TREE OP OUR RACE.
453
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
pK>ssible 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.
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 (bS b*,
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 com-
pared 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
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454 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
has lived approximately 2io,ocx) 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 Astrono-
mers 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 i8th of February in the year 3,102 B.C.
Now the Hindus 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.* 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 B 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 I^nki,t
the esoteric meaning was evidently identical. The ** three Vir^ns," or
Virgo in three diflFerent 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 pre-
• See T^aiU de tAstronomie Indientie et Orientale, part iii. t Ceylon.
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THE EGYPTIAN LABYRINTH. 455
ceded 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 P3rramids and the Zodiacs] does not exceed five millions of years:*
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 :t which I have seen upon a talisman of porcelain. {
The Egyptian priests had the Zodiacs of the Atlantean Asura Maya,
as the modem Hindus 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- Aryans" — ^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 Atlan-
teans, 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.§ 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 17,082.11
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 frag-
• This is not 80. The forefathers of the Aryan Brahmaus had their Zodiac and 2k>diacal calcula-
tions from those bom by Kriyashakti power, the "Sons of Yoga"; the Egyptians from the AUan-
teans of Ruta.
i- The former, therefore, may have registered time for seven or eight millions of years, but the
Bgyptians oiuld not.
% Op. cit., p. 6.
} 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.
i) Ruins 0/ 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 Bquinox 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
yeais have elapsed since the (Greek or rather Hellenic) origin of the Zodiac.
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456 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
ments 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; accom-
panying the statements proflFered with the most important demonstra-
tions 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* or even the legendary
beginnings of the latter — is too tremendous for us to ofiFer, 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
bom, and disappeared almost without leaving a trace, for anyone to
ofiFer 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 pos-
sess 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. Bom
and bred in European, matter-of-fact and presumably civilized, countries,
she assimilated the foregoing with the utmost difl&culty. But there are
proofs of a certain character which become irrefutable and are undeni-
* The word "historical" is used, because, although historians have almost absurdly dwarfed the
dates that separate certain events from our modem 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.
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HISTORY ** WRITTEN IN THE STARS.** 457
able in the long run, to every earnest and unprejudiced mind. For a
series of years such were oflFered 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,'* /.<?., 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 tradi-
tional, as well as the ideographic records of the East, as read by the
Adepts of the Sacred Science or Vidyi, 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 archaeological 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 know-
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458 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
ledge by the Initiates of the symbolism of every word so recorded.
Some of these records belong to an immense antiquity. Every
Archaeologist and Palaeontologist 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 know-
ledge is in the human race may be inferred from some signs, evidently
ideographic, found on hatchets of the Palaeolithic 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 diflFer-
ent 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 ideog^phs
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 Phoenicians. 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 un-
known in the days of Panini, 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
modem Royal Society, we have too long a period full of the most
ludicrous mistakes made by Science, to warrant our believing in modem
scientific assumptions rather than in the statements of our Teachers.
Writing, our Scientists say, was unknown to PSnini; 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! Pslnini is
made out to have lived barely ai 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 Panini, the Brahmans,
coming into India — are covered with writing, two and three thousand
years old, at least, and twelve thousand, according to some fearless
Palaeontologists.
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WHOLESALE DENIAL. 459
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 Phoenicians who had invented it, and knew writing as far back
as 1,500 B.C. at the earliest,* were living among the Greeks, and elbow-
ing them, all the time! All these scientific and contradictory conclu-
sions 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 (A) excavated from that site earthenware vessels
with inscriptions in characters unknown to Palaeontologists 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, t
Nor were truthful women spared any more than truthful men. Du
Chaillu, Gordon Gumming, Madame Merian,J Bruce, and a host of
others were charged with lying.
Says the author of Mythical Monsters, who gives this information in
the Introduction : §
Madame Merian was accused of deliberate falsehood in reference to her descrip-
tion 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 Nymphaea 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. ||
And, as Audubon was called a liar for this, and for his Haliaetus
Washingtonii,5f 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
• It is a historical fact that Sanchuniathon compiled the full record of the Phoenician religion from
annals and state documents in the archives of the older Phoenician cities, and wrote it in Phoenician
characters in 1,250 B.C.
t Prof. Virchow, in Appendix I, to Schlieraann's Ilios. Murray, 1880.
X Gosae writes of the latter: "She is set down a thorough heretic, not at all to be believed, a manu-
ftctuit^ of unsound natural history, an inventor of false facts in science." {Romance of Natural
History, 2nd Series, p. 227.)
\ Pp. 9, 10.
I! R>pular Science Monthly^ No. 60, April, 1877.
* 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."
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460 \ THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
thirty feet in length, and capable of dragging a good-sized boat beneath the sut-
fsLce; and their SiCtioa has been re^rodvLced /or centuries pasl . . . by Japanese
artists.*
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 Miin-
chausen's tales, why should the writer of /sis 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 (i860), which are as true as life, and too much lo 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, h priori by name, who
furnishes philosophers with their omniscience pro re naid, 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 im-
properly 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 ? t
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.J
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 a
• Ibid., pp. 10, II.
+ Mythical Monsters, p. 13, note.
t So far back as July, 1888, at a time when the MS. of this work had not yet left my writing: table,
and TJte Secret Doctrine was utterly unknown to the world, it was akeady being denounced as a pro-
duct 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, i8d8: ** Among the fuscinattng
^{?o/fe J /or yi//y rearfm^ is Mme. Blavatsky's new book on Theosophy . . . H) 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 other-
wise, and will get out of it, probably by a more slashing criticism than ever.
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HISTORICAL **UARS." 461
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 versa. 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 Aryan 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 Jacolliofs 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 Miiller ** about the silliest book that
can be read," is not altogether without facts and truths in it. The cases
when ih^ a priori negations of specialists have become justified by sub-
sequent corroborations, form but an insignificant percentage of those
that have been fully vindicated by subsequent discoveries and con-
firmed, 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 Miiller
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 Brahmans, and that the whole of Sanskrit litera-
ture was an imposition.*
The writer is quite willing and feels proud to keep company with
these BrShmans, and other historical "liars," in the opinion of our
modem Dugald Stewarts. She has lived too long, and her experience
• Science of Language, p. 168.
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462 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
has been too varied and personal, for her not to know at least some-
thing 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 oflFers the same price-
less bit of practical wisdom, when saying :
In contemplation [in any question of knowledge, we add], if a man beg^n vnth
•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 diflfer-
ence 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
grants 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
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THE COMING NEW RACE. 463
barely a few centuries, with the unbroken tradition ^nd 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 Modem Science and so-called Philosophy
do not contest that the human family is composed of a variety of well-
<iefined types and races, it is only because the fact is undeniable; no
one would say that there was no external diflference 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, /.^., 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 varia-
tions, 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 un-
certain 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
Aryan element, ii,ooo years ago. This shows the enormous over-
lapping 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 trans-
formation 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
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464 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 undetertnined.*
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 Aryan
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 lusits nature, 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 excep-
tional 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 genera-
tions, 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,
• The Human Sptcies^ p. 274.
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THE FUTURE MANKIND. 465
Still changing in stature, general physique, and mentality, just as the
Fourth overlapped our Aryan 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.* 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 emi-
grate 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 7iew 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
I^murians 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 Plltdla (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 uncon-
• See above, the diagram of the Genealogical Tree of the Fifth Race.
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466 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
sdous mission, or get rid of the burden of its cooperative 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 Elarmic I^w; 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 thy-
self f Before thou hast even begun to say **I am the progeny of the departed
moment, the child of the past,*^ thou hast become that pctst itself Before
thou ut teres t 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 Mahdmdyd of the Absolute '*/S"
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PART II.
THE
ARCHAIC SYMBOLISM
OF THE IsTORLD-RELIGIONS.
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The narratives of the Doctrine are its cloak. The simple look only at the g-arment— 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.— ZoAar (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.— Slromaieis (12; Clemens Alexandrixus).
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THE ARCHAIC SYMBOLISM OF THE
WORLD-RELIGIONS.
SECTION L
Esoteric Tenets Corroborated in Every
Scripture.
In view of the strangeness of the teachings, and of many a doctrine
which firom the modem 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 diflScult to assimi-
late than those which are embodied in Volume I, on Cosmogony. Theo-
logy, therefore, has to be questioned here, in Part II, as Science will
be in Part III, for since our doctrines diflFer 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 modem 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 teaming. 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
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470 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Eso-
tericism, the terms Sat and Asat — so freely used in the Rig Veda and
elsewhere — is thoroughly assimilated. Without this key to Aryan
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 evo-
lution. It is the ever becoming, though the never manifesting.* Sat
is bom 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 Parinirvdna.
Barth started a reflection on the Rig Veda which was meant for a
stem 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 Miiller 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
Miiller 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 raceSy
while that of Hesiod is a distorted caricature of the original image.
* The Hegelian doctrine, which identifies Absolute Being or "Be-ness" with "Non-Being/* and
lepresents the Universe as an Eternal Becoming, is identical with the Vedinta Philosophy.
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THE VEDAS WRITTEN BY INITIATES. 471
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 lan-
guage 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 revela-
tion 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 reti-
cences, 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.*
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 disagree-
ment between scholars even with regard to the external character of the
Rig Veda. What, then, can any of the modem 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, how-
ever unwilling modem 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
• 77u Religions 0/ Indian p. xiii.
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472 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Theosophists to learn, on good proof, that the speculations of modem
Psychologists — ^whether serious Idealists, like Mr. Herbert Spencer, or
wool-gathering Pseudo-idealists — are far more chimerical. Indeed, in-
stead 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 aflfirm; and
our aflSrmation 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 JudcBus 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.
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SECTION IL
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 Aryan 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
Aryans 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 Adi-Nith, also meaning First Lord, as Ad-tshvara,
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-onai (A Do Na Y), "Lord," instead of
Eh'yeh, "I am," and YHVH, and adds that, while Adonai is rendered
"Lord" in th^ Bible,
The lowest designation, or the Deity in Nature, the more general term Elohim, is
translated God.*
• Myer's Qabbalah, p. 175.
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474 '^HE SECRET DOCTRINE.
A curious work was translated in i860 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 un-
deniably authentic documents. It is an invaluable compendium, the full
epitome of the doctrines, arts and sciences, not only of the Chaldaeans,
but also of the Assyrians and Canaanites of the pre-historic ages.*
These Nabatheans — ^as some critics thought— were simply the Sabaeans,
or Chaldsean star-worshippers. The work is a retranslation from the
Arabic, into which language it was at first translated from the Chaldaean.
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.t
The translator, Chwolsohn, finds that the assertions of this historian
are in perfect accord with those of Moses in Genesis; while more irreve-
rent 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 diflSculty 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 J after the Deluge, may be left to the
Karma of the author of Genesis^ whether he is called Moses or Bzra.
That which is interesting in the work under notice, however, are its con-
tents, the doctrines enunciated in it, which are again, if read Esoteri-
cally, almost all of them identical with the Secret Teachings.
Quatremere 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 evi-
dence, that its Chaldsean original was written out from the oral discourses
and teachings of a wealthy Babylonian landowner, named Qu-t4my, who
• See De Mirville, Pneumatologie, iii. pp. 218 etseqq.
+ Op. cit., ibid.
t Sec Genesis and the authorized chronology. In chapter viii, "Noah leaveUi Uie ark"— 3,348 B.C-
In chapter x, "Nimrod the first monarch/* stands over 1,998 B.C.
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NABATHEAN AGRICUWURE. 475
had used for those lectures still more ancient materials. The first Arabia
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,
Qu-tfimy, declares that "the doctrines propounded therein, were origin-
ally told by Saturn , , . to the Moon, who communicated them to her
idoly^ and the idol revealed them to her devoteCj the writer — the Adept
Scribe of that work — Qu-timy.
The details given by the God for the benefit and instruction of
mortals, show periods of incalculable duration and a series of number-
less kingdoms and Dynasties that preceded the appearance on Barth 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 lev/e-
in-arms against the translator. He reproaches him with sacrificing
Moses to anonymous authors.* 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 Germaniquej 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 other-
wise— argues the romancer of the Vie de f^sus, since, in this in-folio on
Astrology and Sorcery:
We recognize in the personages introduced by Q^-tAmy, 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. Mean-
while 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 archaeologist and critic. For even
admitting, for argument's sake, that this literary relic has been com-
piled 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
* AnnaUs de Philosophu CkriUemne, June, i66o»p. 4x5. i April 30, z86o.
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476 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Kuran — three cen-
turies 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 Chaldaean Adept and the various criti-
cisms 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 Lemaltre "/^ Paganini du nianV^
— the worst fault found with the work is, it would seem, that the apocry-
phon 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 apocry-
phon, but the repetition of the tenets of the Secret Doctrine under the
exoteric Chaldaean form of national symbols, for the purpose of "cloak-
ing" the tenets, just as the Books of Hermes and the Purdnas are like
attempts by Egyptians and Hindus. 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 Chaldseo- Arabic MS., calling the
Nabatheans by the name of their co-religionists, the "star- worship-
pers," or Sabaeans, but yet failing to see in the disfigured word "Naba-
thean" 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.* The Nabatheans who, according to the Persian
• "I will mendon to thee the writings . . . respecting the belief and institutions of the
Sabeeans," he says. "The most famous is the Book, 71ie AgricuHure of the Nabiithtans, which has
been translated by Ibu 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; Du
Ssabier und der Ssabismus, ii. 458.) The Nabatheans of Mount I^banon believed in the seven Arch-
angels, 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 CathoUcs, as is shown elsewhere.
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NEBO, THE GOD OP WISDOM. 477
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 * Nebo is the Deity of the Planet Mercury, and
Mercury is the God of Wisdom, or Hermes, or Budha, which the
Jews called Kokab (IDD), "the Lord on high, the aspiring," and the
Greeks Nabo (NajSw), hence Nabatheans. Notwithstanding that Mai-
monides calls their doctrines '* heathenish foolishness" and their archaic
literature '' Sabaonim foetum,'' he places their "agriculture," the Bible
of Qu-tSmy, in the first rank of archaic literature; and Abarbanel
praises it in unmeasured terms. Spencer,t quoting the latter, speaks
of it as that "most excellent oriental work," adding that by Naba-
theans, the Sabaeans, the Chaldaeans, 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 Hindu 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 dis-
appear 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 Israel-
ites? "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. t
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-I^unar Dynasty, or the men of these Races and Round. Both are
• Sec Isis Unveiled, ii. 197. t i. 354. % Sayce; c/., p. 115, and ed.
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478 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
the Adams of their respective creatures. Adam-Adami is a persona-
tion of the dual Adam: of the paradigmatic Adam-Kadmon, the
Creator, and of the lower Adam, the terrestrial, who, as the S3nian
Kabalists have it, had only Nephesh, the "breath of life," but no
Living Saul, until after his Fall.
If, therefore, Renan persists in regarding the Chaldaean 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 diflferent
opinion ; and even were they not, it would still really matter very little.
These doctrines contain the teachings of Esoteric Philosophy, and this
must suflBce. 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, how-
ever, while expressing scorn for the Esotericism in the religion of
other nations, confessed Esotericism and Symbology in his own,
preached silence and secresy upon the true meaning of Mosaic say-
ings, and thus came to grief. The Doctrines of Qu-t^my, the Chal-
daean, 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 com-
bination 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 dis-
appeared" (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,
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THE KABAUSTIC FOUR ADAMS. 479
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
^mswers to the Lower Nephesh and Guff, i.e., body, united. He has the animal
power of reproduction and continuance of species.*
This is the human Root- Race.
It is just at this point that the modem 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 suflfocated 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.t
And being without this "Balance," connected with Maqom (the
mysterious "Place"),! 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,
<iown 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" pertain-
ing 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."
T^hey considered it a most fortunate circumstance if the Guru (teacher)*
found in his pupil an aptitude for the pure life of BrahmichSrya.
T^heir dual symbols were to them but the poetical imagery of the sub-
lime correlation of creative cosmic forces. And this ideal conception
is found beaming like a golden ray upon each idol, howevjr 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
• op, cit., pp. 418, 419.
t Ibid., p. 118.
X Simply, the womb, the " Holy of Holies " with the Semites.
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48o THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
*' 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 -Sons, Amphain-Essumen ("Afu^^v "Eo-o-ovfUv), and Vananin-
Lamertade ( Ovavavlv Aa/icprciSc) — Father and Mother* — ^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 bom 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 Agathodaemon, the Gnostic Saviour, and even with
Abraxas, is no longer the glyph for abstract creative Power, but symbo-
lizes 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 2l\so 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 I
* See the Valentinian Table in Bpiphanius, Adv. Har.^ I. xxxi. 2.
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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, Man-
vantaras, or the reawakenings 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 reincar-
nations— 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* —
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."
• 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.
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482 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 *
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:
Arch^ ('Ap;(^) 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 Area, 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 Resur-
rection), 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 coflfer 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
(mm); Jod ("•) meaning the membrum virile; He (n), the womb; Vau
('i), a crook or a hook, a nail, and He (n) 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 oflSce and
title of the Kadesh Kadeshim, the "holy ones," or "the consecrated to
the Temple of the Lord's—the "Holy of Holies" of these "holy ones"
may assume an aspect far from edifying.
lacchiis again is lao 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 shaU stand in the place of his Kadushu (1Qnp)?"t 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 y xxiii. 17; Hosea, iv. 14; and Genesis y xxxviii. 15-22. The "holy"
Kedeshim of the Bible were identical, as to the duties of their office, with the
Nautch-girls of the later Hindd pagodas. The Hebrew Kadeshim, or Galli, lived
• See II Samuel, vi. 16-22. t Psalms, xxiv. 3.
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WHAT WAS THE CIRCI,E-DANCE ? 483
"*'by the house of the Lord, where the women wove hangings for the grove," or the
1>tist of Venus-Astarte.*
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,t and the leaping of the prophets of Baal.J It was simply
a characteristic of the Sabaean 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, f
The Ark, in which are preserved the germs of all living things necessary to re-
people 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 Hindiis, 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 contain-
ing the germs of all living things. ||
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!^ 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
• 11 Kings, xxiii. 7; see Dunlap, Sdd; The Mysteries of Adani, p. 41-
f Judges, xxi. 21, 23 et passim.
X I Kings, xviii. 26.
) Isis Unveiled, ii. 49.
II Ibid., ii. 444.
IT 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 philo-
sophical 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,
namdy, the Chaldsean 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 glos-
saries of the Zoharic system by Rabbi Moses. Ibn Gebirol never quoUd 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 lind Chaldsean), the friends and co-workers of Moses de Leon who, as
shown by Munk, accepted their interpretations.
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484 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Rtiins and fragments, much distorted remnants still of that primitive system
which is the key to all religious systems,*
The oldest system and the Chaldsean Kabalah were identical. The
latest renderings of the Zohar are those of the Synagogue in the early
centuries — ue,y 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 Sarco-
phagus, 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 Sarco-
phagus 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," symboli-
cally, of germs or the germ of life. In India, it is the "Golden" Cow
through which the Candidate for Brihmanism has to pass if he desires
to be a Brihman, and to become Zh//-ja, "bom 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";t 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 (TptSwa/Acw), whose powers
• Sec Pranck'8 Kabbala, Preface. t i. 14.
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CHRISTIAN SYMBOUSM. 485
reside respectively in Mars, Mercury and Venus; and the higher Triad —
the three "Unseen Gods/* who dwell in the Moon, Jupiter and Saturn *
This requires no proof. Astoreth was in one sense an impersonal
sjrmbol of Nature, the Ship of Life carrying throughout the boundless
Sidereal Ocean the germs of all being. And when she was not identi-
fied with Venus, like every other "Queen of Heaven" to whom cakes
and buns were offered in sacrifice, Astoreth became the reflection of
the Chaldaean "Nuah, the Universal Mother" (the female Noah, con-
sidered as one with the Ark), and of the female Triad, Ana, Belita and
Davkina; called, when blended into one, "Sovereign Goddess, I<ady of
the Nether Abyss, Mother of Gods, Queen of the Earth, and Queen of
Fecundity." Later, Belita or Tamtuf (the sea), the Mother of the City
of Erech (the great Chaldaean 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 Hindus, 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).t 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 Koran, alludes to her as the Aim, the Immaculate Virgin
of the Hcavens.§ And — the sublime ever falling into the ridiculous — it is
from this root Aim that we have to derive the word Almeh — the Egyptian
dancing-girls. The latter are "virgins" of the same t>'pe as the Nautchees
in India, and the (female) Kadeshim, the "holy ones" of the Jewish tem-
ples— consecrated to Jehovah, who represented both sexes — ^whose holy
functions in the Israelite fanes were identical W\i\i those of the Nautchees.
Now Eustathius declares that 10 (lO) means the Moon, in the dialect
• See Schwartze, op. cit., pagg, 359, 361, ^/ seqq.
t Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, 1887, p. 374.
X Tinweua, the I/3crian, speaking of "Arka" [Arche], calls her "the principle of best thingrs'*
( ^pXpL ru}y dptOTCrtv). The word arcane, "hidden," or secret, is derived from this. "To no
one is the Arcane shown except to the . . . Most High" {Codex Nazaraus)—9\\\xd\nfs to Nature
the female, and Spirit, the male Power, i^tsculapius, as a Sun-God was called Archagetas, "bom
from the Archa," the divine Virgin-Mother of the Heavens. (See Kenealy, Book of God, p. 10.)
I Kenealy, op. cit., ibid.
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486 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
of the Argians; it was also one of the names of the Moon in Egypt^
Says Jablonski:
10) loh^ jEgyptiis Lunam significat neque habent illi, in communi sennonis usu^
aliud nof9t€n quo Lunam designent prater 10,
The Pillar and Circle (lO), which with Pythagoras was the perfect
number contained in the Tetraktys,* became later a preeminently 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 mooih (also in SeifiRarth),.
the name of the moon, used as a cycle of time, hence the lunar month, from the
hieroglyph /^^\ with -^ and 0 as determinatives, given as the Coptic I O H, or
I O H. The Hebrew "'IH may also be used as I O H, for the letter vau 0) was used
for o and for «, and for v or w. This, before the Massora, of which the point (•)•
was used as 1 = o, ^ = u, and 1 = 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, t
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 con-
founded 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 diflferent 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 (i) 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 pre-
* This is composed of ten dots arrauged triangularly in four rows. It is the Tetiagrammaton of
the Western Kabalists.
t From an MS.
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THB GOD lAO. 487
paring the events and conceiving them for those bom under his genera*
tive influence, the latter putting them into action * Under theogonic
permutations Ammon becomes Horns, Hor-Ammon, and Moot(h)-Isis
is seen suckling him in a statuette of the Saitic period.f 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 lo-tef (lo-tef ).J
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 any one who reads The Source of Measures, or "The
Hebrew-Eg5T)tian 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
LAO in Isis Unveiled:
No other deity affords such a variety of etymologies as laho, 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
" Adonai"— or Lord. Philo Byblus speUs it in Greek letters lEYQ— lEVO. Theodoret
says that the Samaritans pronounced it Iab€ (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 lAO." 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.§
The above receives corroboration in a private letter from a very
learned Kabalist. In our first volume, || it is stated that exoterically
Brahma (neuter), so flippantly and so often confused by the Orientalists
* See G. Masp6ro, Guide au Musie Boulag, 1884, p. 168, No. 198 1.
t- /Wrf., p. 169, No. 1998.
t Ibid., p. 172, No. 2068.
} 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 au allegory like eversrthing else.
Zipporah (the *' shining ") is one of the personified Occult Sciences g^iven 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."
i) i. pp. X06-X08 and elsewhere.
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488 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
with BrahmS (the male), is sometimes called K^la-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" Brahm^ the
Chatur-mukham (the Perfect Cube) forming itself within, ^vAfram^ the
Infinite Circle; and again the use of the i, 3, 5, and J = 14, as the
Esoteric Hierarchy of the DhySn Chohans, is explained. On this, the
said correspondent comments in the following manner:
Of the I, 3, 5, and twice 7, intending, and very especiaUy, 135 14, which on a
circle may be read as 31415 (or ir value), I think there cannot be a possibility of
doubting; and especially when considered with symbol marks on Sacr*,* "Chakra,"
or Circle of Vishnu.
But let me carry your description a step further: You say, "The One from the
Egg, the SiXy and the Five,\ give the numbers 1065, the value of the First-bom."
If it be so, then in 1065 we have the famous Jehovah's name, the Jve or Jave, or
Jupiter, and by change of H to D, or h to «, then "^13 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 x 3 which is circumference to a diameter of
113 X 3 = 339. Thus the first bom of Brahmft-PrajApati (or any Demiurgus) indi-
cates 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.
It is a most singular thing: At the entrance passage to the King's Chamber the
measurement from the surface of the Great StepJ 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 x
2 = 678, and these numbers are those of the ex-
^ pression 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) x 6 = 678,
and the diameter to a circumference of 1065 x 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 -\^ = 56*5 or 5*65 x 10 (rniT), or Jehovah. That is, he personifies { him
* In Hebrew the phallic symbol Lingam and Yoni.
t See Vol. I, Stanra IV, Shloka 3.
* It is at that Step that one arrives on the plane of the level or floor and open «ntrance to the
Kingr's Chamber, the Bsryptian "Holy of Holies."
} 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."
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THE ETYMOLOGY OF "SACRAMENT.*' 489
as entering the Holy of Holies. But by Hebrew Bsotericism 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 coordinately with the periods of the quickening, viability, and
^^tation— 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 Hindu 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, there-
fore. The Hebrew words Sacr* and N'cabvah are, literally translated,
Lingam (Phallus) and Yoni (Cteis), notwithstanding their translation
in the Bible "male and female."* 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 preeminently biblical, Sacr* and
N'cabvahf; 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,\ 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. . . .
• Genesis, i. 27.
t Jehovah aa3rs 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.
% 4to, I/mdon, 1684, vol. i. pp. zao, laz.
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490 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Therefore,
Noah daily prayed in the Ark before the "Body of Adam" — •
or before the Phallus in the Ark, or Holy of Holies, again. He wha
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 "^ was the mefnbrum 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.t
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; J and (*)
that Jehovah, or Jah, is Noah, for Jehovah is Noah in Hebrew would be
n^'', or literally in English, Inch.
The above aflFords, 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 (-•). This also
shows the origin of the Jewish popular belief that the face of Moses
is ifi the Moo7i — /.<?., 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
rrnN-imN-rrnN ;
a various reading of mrP. Now, Moses is nd?D, 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 com-
bination. 21 -f- 2 = 105, or, reversed, 501, so that the asher or the that in lam-that'
lam is simply a guide to a use of 21 or 7 x 3.501* = 251 +, a very valuable pyramid
number, etc.§
• Op, cit., p. 67. t Source of Measures, 159. X Op. cit.^ p. 187. \ Op. cit.^ p. 271.
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I AM THAT I AM. 491
For a clearer explanation for the benefit of Non-Kabalists we put it
thus: ** I am that I am" is in Hebrew:
Ahiye Asher Ahiye
H'^HM -|©» n^'HW
5 10 5 I 200 300 I 5 10 5 I
Add the numbers of these separate words and you have:
21 501 21
This relates to the process of descending in Fire on the Mount ta
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.*
The "Holy of Holies," both kabalistic and rabbinical, is thus shown
as an international symbol, and common property. Neither had origi-
nated with the Hebrews; but owing to the too realistic handling of
the half-initiated Levites, the symbol had acquired with them a signifi-
cance 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 Hindu is, on the face
of it, of course, no better than the rabbinical "Holy of Holies" —
but // 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 Hindus as with the ancient Egyptians
that spirit was and is entirely metaphysical and psychological; with
* From the same author. See also the Section on *'The Symbolism of the Mystery Names lao and
Jehovah."
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492 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 * 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 Judsean Tanaim, the inner sense of the
A.
symbolism was as holy in its abstraction as with the ancient Aryan
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 reedited, has become tainted with it.
With the ancient Aryans 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 sym-
bol 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, />r^-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 Aryan, the symbol repre-
sented 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 preeminence over the
psychological and the purely immaterial. The Aryan views of the
symbolism were those of the whole Pagan world ; the Semite interpre-
tations emanated from, and were preeminently 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,
* In Genesis (iv. 26), it is mis- translated, "And he called his name Bno8[man] : then begfan men to
call upon the name of the I/)rd " —which has no sense in it, since Adam and the others most have
done the same.
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WHO THE JEWS REALLY ARE. 493
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 Hindu
Aryan — 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 Hindu detaches him from this Earth; therefore,
even now, the cow-symbol is one of the grandest and most philosophi-
cal 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 regenera-
tion— 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 Aryan Hindu
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 yeiars of age and no more.*
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 Aryans have. But now
Judaism, built solely on phallic worship, has become one of the latest
• strictly speakingr, the Jews are an artificial Aryan race, bom in India, and belonging to the
Caucasian division. No one who is familiar with the Armenians and the Parsls can fail to recognize
in the three the same Aryan, Caucasian \.y^. From the seven primitive types of the Fifth Race
there now remain on Karth 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 tyi)es." (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?
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494 '^^E SECRET DOCTRINE.
-creeds in Asia, and theologically a religion of hate and malice toward
everyone and everything outside itself. Philo Judaeus 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
^nd institutions. True, they did hate Baal or Bacchus worship publicly,
but left its worst features to be followed secretly. It is with the Tal-
mudic 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, Xh^ 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 BrahmS-PrajSpati, 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 Hindu 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 specula-
tions of the mob. Nor would the Aryan Hierophant and Brdhman, 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* — a commandment now gladly
accepted by the Christian too, in spite of another and later command-
ment, "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
• Whenever such analog^ies 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." {Pstgan Idolatry^ i. 104.)
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JEHOVAH A SUBSTITUTE. 495
seed and root of all. Vir^j and Horus are both male symbols, emanat-
ing from Androgyne Nature, onjg from Brahmi and his female counter-
part VSch, the other, from Osiris and Isis — never from the One Infinite
God. In the Judaeo-Christian systems it is different. Whereas the
lotus, containing BrahmS, 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 y 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.* In Hinduism — the
"Holy of Holies" is a universal abstraction, whose dramatis persona
are Infinite Spirit and Nature; in Christian Judaism, it is a personal
Ood, 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 f 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 VedSn-
tin Philosophers are reproached with to-day; ^thov^h -^bs 2i substitute
for purposes of an exoteric national faith, and had no importance or
reality in the eyes of the erudite Priests and Philosophers — the Saddu-
•cees, 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** —
• Luke, i. a8.
^ Their consecrated Pillars (unhewn stones) erected by Abraham and Jacob were Lingams.
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496 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 B).
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 Hindds, the Iswarra [tshvara] 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.*
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 Babylo-
nian 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 worship-
pers of Jehovah as the Rev. Mr. Home, have to admit the numerous
changes and alterations made by the later compilers of the **Book of
God," since it w^s/ound by Hilkiah,t 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, '', or
"phallus," and He, n, 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 lao of the Mysteries was distinct from Jehovah, so was the
later lao and Abraxas, or Abrasax, of some Gnostic sects identical with
the God of the Hebrews, who was the same as the Egyptian Horns.
• op. cit., p. 67.
t See Introduction to the Old Testament, and also Bishop Colenso's Elohistic and Jehovistic IVriiers,
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WHO WAS ABRAXAS? 497
This is undeniably proven on "Heathen" as on the Gnostic "Christian"
gems. In Matter's collection of such gems there is a "Horns" —
Seated on the lotus, inscribed A6PA2AH lAQ (Abrasax lao) — an address exactly
paraUel to the so frequent EI2 ZEY2 SAPAIII (Eis Zeus Sarapi) on the contem-
porary Heathen gems, and therefore only to be translated by "Abraxas is the One
Jehovah."*
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 lao.t
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 hooks pretending to inspirationy from the Scriptures
of the Brahmins, and even from the Koran, in their strong and frequent recom^
fftendaiion of truth [! !].
• King's Gnostics and their Remains, p. 327, and ed. + Ibid., p. 326.
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SECTION lY.
On the Myth of the ** Fallen Angels " in
ITS Various Aspects.
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 obser\'er, 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
suflFering but the necessarj^ 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 Oc-
cultists, 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
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THE "MONKEY OF GOD." 499
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 modem Philosophers — ^preceded by the mediaeval 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 persona 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
^leep, 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 correct-
ness of the whole system as g^ven 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 TertuUian call the Devil the "monkey of God," we can attri-
bute it to the ignorance of the age they lived in. It is more difficult
to excuse our modem 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 Vendtddd, 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 Spiri-
tualism in Europe. Though only a succh destime, in general, even
among those who are not interested in either Theosophy or Spiri-
tualism, 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 " Chris-
tian " — as they call themselves, ** Sectarian" as we call them — Kabalists,
-on the Continent. These read the Zohar, not to find in it ancient
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500 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 tx>
mislead less far-sighted students of the Kabalah *
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 transforma-
tion 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 Chaldsea with the Devil of Christianity, for no such com-
parison is possible. But we may stop to glance at the biography of
the Christian Devil, a piratical reprint from the Chaldaeo-Judaean
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 (? Muru-
dug), **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
Hindu Gods, their deities were both beneficent and maleficent. As evil
and punishment are the agents of Karma, in an absolutely just retribu-
tive sense, so Evil was the servant of the Good.f The reading of the
Chaldseo-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 Chaldaeo-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
* Such a Pseudo-Kabalist was the Marquis de Mirville in Prance, 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
asrainst every prominent Spiritualist and Kabalist. From 1848 up to i860 he persecuted unrelentins^ly
the old Count d'Ourches, one of the earliest Eastern Occultists in France, a man the scope of whoee
Occult knowledge will never be appreciated correctly by his survivors, because he screened his real
beliefs and knowledge under the mask of Spiritism.
t See Hibbert Lectures, 1887, pp. T01-115.
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THE GENESIS OP THE DEVIL. 501
the "Spirit of God" — lived, for the older Babylonians as for the Akka-
dians, in the Sea of Space. Toward the days described by Berosus,
this Sea became the Visible Waters on the face of the Earth— the crys-
talline 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 Judaeus and
Josephus both state that the Law (the Pentatetuh 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,* for it is God who "hath divided [them] unto all nations";!
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.^
Finally the same is repeated in the Talfmid:%
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."||
This piece of Talmudic information shows plainly (a) that St.
Michael is called "God" in the Talmud, and somebody else the
"Lord," and {p) 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 g^eat 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
* Exodus, xxii. 28.
t Deut., iv. iq.
* Jude, 8, 9.
) See Is is Un veiled, ii. 487, fi 5<?W-
II Treat. Kiddusheem, 81. But see Myer's Qabbalah, pp. 9a, 94.
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502 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Avat^ras, or divine
Incarnations, -and of the Universal Spirit, called Christos by the Gnos-
tics, 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, reassertion 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,* who, however, calls the proto-
types 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 Minnlle:
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 imager face, and guardian of the Soul which finally
assimilates the Ferouer, f
This is almost correct.
Among other absurdities, the Kabalists maintain that the word
Metatron, being divided into meta-tkronon (fiera, $p6vov), means "near the
throne." J 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 DeuSy' 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 Arch-
• Marangone, in his DelU Grandesze del Archangelo Sancti Mikade, exclaims: " O grandest Star,
who foUowest 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.
■♦• Pneumatologie, v. 516.
t Ibid,, p. 515.
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THE ANGEL OF THE FACE. 505
angel, 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."* 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
Abbe Caron. The Roman Catholics, and especially their Kabalists,
know better; and it is they who explain to the world this duality, which
aflfords them the means of glorifying the chosen ones of the Churchy
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'' (jsic), 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."! 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 J .... Chiefs
of the Armies of the Lord, Supreme Judges of the Souls and even
Seraphs." §
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,|| a word borrowed by some French writers from the
Zend Avesta, as said, and utilized in Roman Catholicism for a purpose
• Ibid., p. 514.
+ Isaiah, bdii. 8, 9.
X Metator and -^tfjuav.
\ Pneumaiotogie, p. 515. " La Face et le Reprfsentant du Verbe."
II Thai which is called in the Vendid&d Fravarshi, the immortal part of an individual ; that which
ontlives man— the Higher Ego, say the Occultists, or the Divine Double.
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504 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Zoroaster was very far from anticipating. In Fargard xix (verse 14),
of the Vendtdad 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 (M&thra Spenta).*
The French Orientalists translate Fravarshi by Ferouer,
Now what is a Ferouer, or Fravarshi? In some Mazdean works ii is
plainly implied that Fravarshi is the inner^ immortal Man, or the Ego
which reincarnates; that it existed before the physical body and sur-
vives 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, t
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 him-
self (Ahura Mazda) ; that is to say, the impersonal and true Essence of
Deity, one with Zoroaster's own Atmd (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. VossiusJ
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.§
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
• Darmcsteter's Trans., p. 208.
+ Orm. Ahr..^, 112, 113; quoted by Darmesteter, "Sacred Books of the East," vol. iv. introd., p.
Ixxiv.
% De Idol., ii. 373-
\ See De Mirville, ibid., p. 515.
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FRAUDULENT TRANSLATION OF THE '* BIBLE." 505
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 Eg3i)tians, the Counsellor of Osiris in Amenti, the Leontoid
Michael-Ophiomorphos (6<^o/xop<^os) of the Ophites, who wears on cer-
tain Gnostic jewels a lion's head, like his father Ildabaoth .♦
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 repeti-
tion 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 2l 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.f Please note that this author was the
/>fficial 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 **ver>' 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 m)rth and symbol. They forget apparently these words
of the Saviour, all that came before me are thieves and robbers — a word which ex-
plains 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
Hme by ruffians ^
The "ruflSans" (Jes droles), are of course Demons whose manager is
Ibid, See also plates in King's Gnostics and their Remains. t P. 518.
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506 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 y.
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, **A11 that ever came before me," etc.^
is a verbatim repetition of words written in the Book of Efioch, In the
Introduction to Archbishop Laurence's translation from an Ethiopia
MS. in the Bodleian Library, the editor, author of the Evolution of
Christia7tity, 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 Ixxxix, 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 myf-
terious 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.*
It is too late in the day to claim that it is Enoch who borrowed from
the New Testament y instead of vice versa, 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 evangelicat 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.t
• The Book of Enoch the Prophet, p. xlviii. Ed. 1883. t Op cit., pp. xxjciv,
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THE VEDAS, ONCE UNIVERSAL. 507
•'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 TretA age he
restrains the wicked, in the form of a universal monarch [Chakravartin, the
"Everlasting King" of Enoch*] and protects the three worlds [or Races]. In the
Dvdpara age, in the person of Veda-vy&sa, he divides the one Veda into four, and
distributes it into hundreds (Shata) of branches, t
Truly so; the Veda of the earliest Aryans, 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 oflF-shoots of the never
dying Tree of Wisdom have scattered their dead leaves even on Judseo-
Christianity. And at the end of the Kali, our present Age, Vishnu, or
the •* Everlasting King," will appear as Kalki, and reestablish righteous-
ness 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;
Le., 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 DARKNESa
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 man-
kind, and this is the "Fall." Whether BrahmS hurled down on Earth
by Bhagav&n 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 Avat^ra (or incarnation) be perfect, as every such
AvatSra is the fall of a God into generation. Nowhere is the meta-
• Saith Uriel in the Book of Enoch (xxvi. 3): "Those who have received mercy shall for ever bless
God .... the ^w^r/aj/in^A'/wjj'"— who will reign over them,
t Vishnu Purdnat III. ii; Wilson's Trans., iii. 31.
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508 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
physical 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 Eso-
tericism of the Vedanta and the Upaniskads, "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 preeminently in man.
Finally it has created the God-slandering dog^a 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
cperatum, 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
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THE SONS OF ETERNITY. 509
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 kin^s 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 eflFects of the Astral Light, as Eliphas Levi
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 cer-
tain epoch of its formative period. The "clouds of smoke" are geo-
logical 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; /.^., the human
Egos destined to perform the whole Cycle of Incarnations. The sen-
tence, '^qui circumambulat terrain'' 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,"* just in
• Matthew^ xxiv. 27.
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3IO THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
-the same shape and under the same symbol as Satan, who is seen to
fall **as lightning . . . from heaven."* All these metaphors and
figures of speech, preeminently 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 f is the principle of Dark-
-ness, or Satan, in Roman Catholic Theology, and yet Job says of him
that Behemoth is "the chief [principle] of the ways of God" — "/Vtn-
^pium viarum Domini Behemoth /"J
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 Chaldaeans 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
ivith "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
^he early geological periods, several hundred millions of years ago.§
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.
• Luke, X. i8.
•♦• The Protestant Bible defines Behemoth innocently^" Tht elephant as some think"; sec margiml
note {Job, xl. 15) in the Authorized Version.
t Job, xl. 19.
\ Astronomy, however, knows nothing of stars that have disappeared, unless it be simpty from visi-
bility; 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 Brah6 may
still be seen.
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THE SHADOWS OF THE SHADOWS. 511
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 Theolog3\
The best proof one can offer to Christian Theologians that the Eso-
teric 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 lochai is the soul and essence of the allegori-
cal 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 Har-
mony.
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 ChhAyA of the Shadowy
Pitris].*
But those that came after them, who shooting down like falling stars were en-
shrined in the Shadows — prevailed to this day [DhyAnis, 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 diflFerent
garbs.
The first lesson taught in Esoteric Philosophy is, that the Incogniza-
ble Cause does not put forth evolution, whether consciously or uncon-
sciously, but only exhibits periodically differeyit aspects of Itself to the
perception oi finite minds. Now the Collective Mind — ^the Universal —
composed of various and numberless Hosts of Creative Powers, how-
ever 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
• This refers to the "Kings of Edom."
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512 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 in-
carnated, 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 Brihmans 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 Aryan 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 co'etemal with Good or Light, and they
give the same interpretation. Ahriman is the manifested Shadow of
Ahura Mazda (Asura Mazda), himself issued from ZeruSna Akerne, 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 Lights which, from having been pre-
viously concealed in Darkness, was called, to manifest itself and thus was
formed Ormazd, the " King of Life'' He is the ** First-born " in Bound-
less Time, but, like his own antetype (preexisting 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 Aryan Cosmogony. It is that intermediate
^on which is the Prologue to Creation, and which stands on the border-
land between the Uncreated Eternal Causation and the produced finite
eflFects; 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 in-
genuity 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.
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WHO THE ADITYAS ARE. 513
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 pro-
duce 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 terres-
trial plane; the (to us) Eternal and Immutable iEons 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 Pytnunder, which says that:
Thought, the divine, which is Light and Life [Zeru&na Akeme] 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,* the seven Rishis
of the Great Bear and other glyphs. As said of the Adityas 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 bom ''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 ^iw 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 Dark-
ness 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 con^parison
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
* AnoUier proof, if any were needed, that the ancient Initiates knew of more than seven planets is
to be found in the Vishnu Purdna (II. xii) where, describing the chariots attached to Dhruva (the Pole
Star), Parishara speaks of " the chariots of the nine planets," which are attached by atrial cords.
l3
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514 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Pure Quiescent Spirit as to be merely the "privations'* — ^in the Aristo-
telian 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 ''rebelledr
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, I^ord, and Logos * 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 Un-
seen. Philo depicts this Wisdom as male and female. But though its
first manifestation had a beginning — for it proceeded from Oulomf
(Aion, Time), the highest of the -^ons when emitted from the Father
— it had remained with the Father be/ore all creations, for it is part of
him.J Therefore Philo Judaeus calls Adam Kadmon by the name
"Mind"— the Ennoia of Bythos in the Gnostic System. "The Mind,
let it be named Adam."§
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 coequal 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.
• Justin, Cum Tryphone^ p. 284.
t A division indicative of time.
t Sanchuniathon calls Time the oldest .^on, Protog-onos, the " First -born."
) Philo Judseus, Cain and his Birth, p. xvii.
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THE "ZOHAR" on the "FAI.I.EN ONES." 515
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 Evo-
lution that asserted itself; the progress of Mental Unfolding, differen-
tiated 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"* — which it
certainly has not.f
The Zohar gives it very suggestively. When the "Holy One" (the
Logos) desired to create man, he called the highest Host of Angels and
^pake 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."J
This is quite plain. No mention is made in Genesis (vi) of these "Sons
of God" receiving punishment. The only teference to it in the Bible
is in Jude:
And the angels which kept not their first estate but left their own habitation, he
bath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great
jday,\
• Principles of Psychology y 474.
f It is sugrgestive of that si>irit 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 Haeckel,
y^X. both the Eternity of the Universe and the PreSxistence of a Universal Consciousness, are rejected
by modem Psychologists. "Should the Idealist be right, the doctrine of evolution is a dream," says
.^r. Herbert Spencer.
X Zohar ^ 9^.
} Verse 6.
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5l6 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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- Man van taric Nirvana.
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 transla-
tion, traces are found of the real Pymander — the "Universal Thpught"
or "Mind." This is the translation from the old French translation,
the original being given in the foot-note* in its quaint old French:
Seven men [principles] were generated in Man. . . . The nature of the har-
mony 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 key-
note 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
• Mercure Trismejfiste, Pimandre, chap, i, sec. i6: "Oh, ma penste, que s'ensuit-il? car je d^siie
grandement ce propos. Pimandre diet, ced est un mystftre cel6, jusques \. ce jour d'hui. Car nature,
soit mestant avec Thfime, a produit le miracle tr&s mervcilleux, aiant celluy qui ie t'ay diet, la nature
de rharmonie des sept du p^re, et de Tesprit. Nature m s'arresta pas Ut^ mais incontinent a produict
sept hdmes, selon les natures des sept gouverneurs en puissance des deux sexes et esleuez. ... La
g6n6ration de ces sept s'est donn£e en ceste mani^re ..."
And a g-ap 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).
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REMINDERS OF fHE FATE OF THE ATLANTEANS. 517
(a) of the Breath of One Universal Principle, in its primal differentia-
tion; and (d) 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 Hier-
archies ; the secondary — ^the lower, on the constantly descending planes.
Now there are many passages in the Bid/e which prove on their face,
exoterically^ that this belief was at one time universal; and the two
most convincing are Ezekiely xxviii and Isaiah, xiv. Christian Theo-
logians 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 Eigekiel, it is said :
Son of Man, say unto the prince of Tyrus, Thus saith thp 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].*
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.t
All such imprecations are not prophecy, but simply reminders of the
fate of the Atlanteans, the ** Giants on Earth."
• xxviii. 2-8. t Ibid.
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5l8 THE SECRET DOCTHINE.
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,"* may refer to the "Heavenly Man" in Py-
mander, or to the Fallen Angels, who are accused of having fallen
through pride on account of the great beauty and wisdom which be-
came 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 Initia-
tion than to retrospective clairvoyance! Says the voice, again:
Thou hast been in Bden, 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, tiU iniquity
was found in thee. Therefore I will cast thee . . . out of the mountain of
God, and . . . destroy thee.t
The "Mountain of God" means the ''Mountain of the Gods" or
Mem, 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
lapetus 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.t
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";§
• Ibid., 17. t Ibid., 13-16. t Ibid., 18. { Ibid., 19.
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VARIOUS NAMES FOR INITIATES. 519
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 I^eft
Path; finally, that the Garden of Eden is referred to by other person-
ages than the Jews of the Adamic Race, since even Pharaoh is com-
pared 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]*
— ^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 m5rth, 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"t — for every nation had and many still
have holy mountains; some Himalayan Peaks, others Parnassus and
Sinai. They were all places of Initiation and the abodes of the Chiefs
of the communities of ancient and even modem Adepts. And again :
Behold, the Assjrrian [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.^
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 Purdna 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
• xxxi. x6, 17. The only Pharaoh whom the BibU 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.
t xxviii. 13, 14.
t xxxi. 3-9.
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520 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Race — the Aryans. Other ^' trees [Adept Sorcerers] spread, and over-
shadowed the unprotected earth; and the people perished . . . un-
able to labour for ten thousand years." Then the Sages, the Rishis of
the Aryan Race, called Prachetasas, are shown "coming forth from the
deep,'"^ 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 MSrisha, the ''offspring of the trees." f 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 Aryan
Adepts.
The whole history of that period is allegorized in the Ramayana^
which is the mystic narrative in epic form of the struggle between
RSma — the first king of the Divine Dynasty of the early Aryans — and
RSvana. the symbolical personation of the Atlantean (Lankd) 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, be-
tween 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 AnugitS episode of the Mahdbhdrata, where the BrShmana
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 mtellectual
principle, t
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
• Vishnu Purdna, I. xv,
t 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 Paramitman, the
"Supreme Soul," says KuUflka Bhatta; Narayana, meaning: "he who abides in the deep" oris
plunged in the Waters of Wisdom— " water being the body of Nara" {Vdyu Purdna). 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
Chaldsean Man -Fish, who emerges from the Waters to teach Wisdom.
t Chap. V ; "Sacred Books of the East," vol. viii. p. 257.
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THE SYMBOL OF THE "TREE." 521
ftill 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 Maha-
bharata — every line of which has to be read Esoterically — discloses in
magnificent symbolism and allegory the tribulations of both Man and
Soul. Says the BrShmana in the Anugitd :
In the interior (within the body), in the midst of all these (life- winds) [? prin-
ciples], which move about in the body and swallow up one another,* blazes the
Vaishvdnara firet sevenfold.}
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 Ramayana, 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" ;§ and the king of Assyria's armies are
called "trees." II
The true meaning of the Garden of Eden has been sufficiently given
in his 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 jireceded our Fifth
Race, are mentioned in Isis Unveiled^'' wrote a critic on Esoteric Buddh-
ism on 2 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.^
• This is explained by the able translator of AnugUa 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."
t Vaishv&nara is a word often used to denote the Self— explains Nilakantha.
X Ibid,^ p. 259. Translated by Kashindth Trimbak Telang, M.A., Bombay.
} Matthew^ iii. 10.
R Isaiah, x. 19.
It op. cit., i. X33.
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522 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Reve-
lation, a grand but reedited version of the Book of Enoch, on these in^
secure 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, at dLya^al Kat at icojcal 3iWf&cis.
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 charapter 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 Archiologique, a French writer, M.
Maury, remarks:
This universal strife between good and bad spirits seems to be only the reproduce
tion of another more ancient and fnore terrible strife, which, according to an ancient
myth, took place before the creation of the universe, between the faithful and the
rebellious legions.*
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 Chris-
tian 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 Revela-
tion, and to read chapter xii, from verse i 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
• 1845. p. 4»-
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THE TARAKA WAR. 523:
meaning, as embodying the record of a real war, the struggle between
the Initiates of the two Schools. Many and various are the still exist-
ing 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 TSraka War, and
some Esoteric Commentaries, may offer a clue perhaps. In every
Purdna the event is described with more or less variations which show
its allegorical character.
In the Mythology of the earliest Vaidic Aryans as in the later
Pauranic narratives, mention is made of Budha, the "Wise," one
"learned in the Secret Wisdom," who is the planet Mercury in his
euhemerization. The Hindu 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 Brahmans," 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 TSrS, the
wife of Brihaspati, the "gold coloured," and of Soma, the (male) Moon
who, Paris-like, carries this new Helen of the Hindu 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
D^avas; 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.
lyet 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
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524 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Gods, who are the representatives of the Procreative Powers. In the
Rig Veduy 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.
TSr^,* his wife, is, on the other hand, the personification of the
powers of one initiated into Gupta VidyS (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 BrShmans 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 Astrat Body;t for, his spiritual nature
overcoming the physical, he would soon snap it oflF and part even from
that etherealized form.J
Soma was never given in days of old to the non-initiated Brahman—
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 TSrS, 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.§ Such is, in brief, one of the
meanings of the allegory.
• See Dowson's HtndU Classical Dictionary for further information on above.
+ See Five Years of Theosophy, art., "The Elixir of Ufe."
X 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."
\ We see the same in the modem exoteric religions.
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THE WAR OF THE TITANS. 525
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 Hindus the War in Heaven was only a figure referring
to their calculations of time periods.*
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 Aryan Initiates claim they have of the whole programme and pro-
gress of cosmogony,t the War of the Titans is but a legendary and
deified copy of the real war that took place in the Himalayan KailSsa
(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.J There was a time when the Gods Indra, Agni, and
Varuna themselves belonged to the Asuras.
• Historical yiew of the HindU Astronomy. Quoting from the work in reference to " Argabhatta"
[? Aiyabhatta] who is said to give a near approach to the true relation among the various values for the
computations of the value of tt, the author of Tite Source of Measures reproduces a curious statement.
"Mr. BenUey," it is said, "was greatly familiar with the Hindfi astronomical and mathematical know-
ledge. . . . 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 Hindis. 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 HindA 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 Hindis
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 Hindi!
Astronomers, who were all Initiates.
+ The Secret Doctrine teaches that every event of universal importance, such as geological cata-
clysms at the end of one Race and the beginning of a new one, involving a great change each time
in mankind, spiritual, ;noral and physical— is precogitated and preconcerted, so to say, in the
sidereal regions of our planetary system. Astrology is built wholly upon this mjrstic and intimate
connection between the heavenly bodies and mankind ; and it is one of the great secrets of Initiation
and Occult Mysteries.
t See Oarmesteter's yendldad, Introd., p. Iviii.
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526 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
In the Taittiriya Brdhtnana, the Breath (Asu) of Brahma- PrajSpati
l>ecame alive, and from that Breath he created the Asuras. Later on,
after the War, the Asuras are called the enemies of the Gods, hence
— "-^-suras," the initial a being a negative prefix — or **iVi?-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 modem 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 MahS 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:
(i) Ushanas, or the "Host" of the Planet Venus, become now in
Roman Catholicism Lucifer, the Genius of the "day star,"* the Tsaba,
or Army of "Satan."
(2) The Daityas and DSnavas are the Titans, the Demons and Giants
whom we find in the Bible\ — 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 anitntis of the
BrShmans; for they are the Kratu-dvishas — the "enemies of the sacri-
fices" or exoteric shams. These are the "Hosts" that fought against
Brihaspati, the representative of exoteric popular and national reli-
gions; 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-Q.osm\Q. and personal God, higher than whom
no exoteric worship can ever soar.
(3) Then come the NSgas,J the Sarpas> Serpents or Seraphs. These,
again, show their character by the hidden meaning of their glyph. In
• See Isaiah^ -xiv. 12.
t Genesis, vi.
X The Nigas are described by the Orientalists as a msrsterious people whose landmarks are found
abundantly in India to this day, and who lived in Ni|?a-dv1pa, one of the seven continents or divisions
^f Bhiratavarsha (old India) ; the town of Nagpur being one of the most ancient cities in the country.
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SARPAS — SERPENTS — NAGAS. 527
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, "burn-
ing, 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 Cheru-
bim 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
NSgas were the names given to the Initiate-hermits, on account of
their great Wisdom and Spirituality and their living in caves. Thus,
when Ezekiel* 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 «r(?/^^ worship, who fulminates
ragainst 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
RSjarshis, 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 BrSh-
-mans, 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 dejure, NSrada, one of the greatest Rishis,
-was a Devarshi; and he is shown in constant and everlasting feud with
^rahmS, Daksha, and other Gods and Sages. Therefore we may
safely maintain that whatever the astronomical meaning of this univer-
sally 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, z.^., the source) of knowledge, because it is in Space
• zxviii. 3, 4.
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528 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
that dwell the intelligent Powers which invisibly rule the Uni-
verse
♦
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 "Aljyss 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"! — ^were the
abodes of twelve Hierophants and Masters of Wisdom. This **Sea
of Knowledge" or learning J 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
Cannes, 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 abun-
dantly watered into the sandy deserts which they are now; and (*) to
• Not less suggestive are the qualities attributed to Rudra Shiva, the great Yogi, the forefather
of all the Adepts— in Ksoteridsm 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 PifUi Root-Races. For, in
his earliest character, he is the ascetic Dig-ambara, "clothed with the elements," Tri-lochana, the
"three-eyed," Pancha-inana, 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 ofif Brahm&'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.
♦ Gustav Seiffarth's idea that the signs of the Zodiac were in ancient times only ten is errrmeous.
Ten only were known to the profane; the Initiates, however, knew them all, /roM the lime 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.)
t The above is, perhaps, a key to the Dalai lama's symbolical name— the "Ocean" I«ania, meaning
the Wisdom-Ocean. Abb£ Hue speaks of this.
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THE ORIGIN OP EXOTERIC RELIGIONS. 529
the as systematic persecution of the Prophets of the Right Path by
those of the Left. The latter, having inaugurated the birth and evo-
lution 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 ChhSy^ 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 Chaiii of the Earth, and from
the Heaven Abave*^ 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 (Qlippoth), . . . some
in red shells, some in black, some in white, and some from all the colours.*
As in the Chaldaean 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 lochai,
* Zokar^ iii. 9^, loa, Brody Bd. Cremona Ed. iii. fol. 4a, col. 14. Myer's Qabbalahf pp. 416, 417.
2ca
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530 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
that to understand the meaning of the Dragon is not given to the
"companions" (students, or ChelSs), but only to the "little ones," i,e.^
the perfect Initiates.*
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 A
And those Christians, who may happen to read this, will also under-
stand 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 fesus was one, Paul (Saul) is referred to in the
Talmud 2^ the "little one."
The "Mystery of the Serpent" was this: Our Earth, or rather terres-
trial 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 un-
coiling 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.}
A commentary on the Purdnas 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 Brahmd. The seven heads of Shesha support the Universe.
So the Spirit of God "sleeps," or is "breathing" over the Chaos of
UndiflFerentiated Matter, before each new "Creation," says the Siphra
Dtzenioutha, Now one Day of BrahmS is composed, as already ex-
plained, of one thousand Mah^ 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 Dtzmioutha refers to — viz., that the Serpent manifests
• Such waa the name given in ancient Judea to the Initiates, called also the "Innocents" and the
** Infants," »>., once more "reborn." This key opens a vista into one of the New Testament mjrs-
teries; 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 Kausa. In the case of the New Testament, Herod sUnds
for Alexander Jannseus (of Lyda), whose persecution and murder of hundreds and thousands of
Initiates led to the adoption of the Bible story.
+ Zohaty ii. 34.
X i. \ 16.
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THE SACREDNESS OF THE SERPENT. 53 1
^'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.*
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," f
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 /« 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.
• op. cit., Ixxiv. 13. t Ibid., \ 33.
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SECTION Y.
Is Pleroma 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 day^ 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 de-
tails in its triple version, than one can get either from the Book o/Efwch,
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 cojitinue 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 (! !),* the English com-
piler of Eliphas Levi's works, The Mysteries of Magic, is also of a like
opinion. He remarks that:
Outside the erudition of Dr. Kenealy, no modem scholarship attributes any more
remote antiquity to the latter work [the Book of Enoch'] than the fourth century B.c.t
Modem 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
• p. x6. t " Biographical and Critical Essay," p. zzxviii.
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LIVING DEVILS. 533
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 Chal-
daean Book of Numbers) or in the modem. For the most learned, if not
the greatest of modem Kabalists, namely Eliphas Levi, 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 inextin-
guishable pyre. It is the Satan of the republican and heretical Milton . . .
the prince of anarchy, served by a hierarchy of pure spirits (! !).♦
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 Eliphas 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 im-
placable tormentor, t
It is he who has been finally transformed into a Serpent — the Red
Dragon. But Eliphas I^vi 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. J
In this, Christian Theology, although following slavishly in the steps
of Paganism, has only been true to its own time-honoured policy. It
• Histoire de la Magie, pp. x6, 17.
+ Ibid., loc. cit.
X What devil could be possessed of more cunning, crafl and cruelty than the Whitechapel
murderer, "Jack the Ripper" of i888, whose unparalleled, blood-thirsty and cool wickedness led him
to slau£rhter 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 j«ai/ percentage of whom is daily brought before the courts, the complete personifica-
tions of the devils of the Christian Hell !
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534 'THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 tnbal 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, neverthe-
less, it was one. Jehovah has ever been in antiquity only a God
"among" other "Gods."* 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 himf — but not unto Aryan Europeans.
But, then, there was the grandiose and ideal figure of Jesus of
Nazareth to be set oflF against a dark background, to gain in radiance
by the contrast; and a darker one the Church could hardly inve7it^
Lacking the Old Testament symbology, ignorant of the real connotation
of the name of Jehovah — the Rabbinical secret substitute for the In-
eflFable 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.
• f^lm, Ixxxii. t Genesis, xvii. 7.
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JEHOVAH, A PERSONATING SPIRIT. 535
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.* . . .
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 varia-
tion, 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, thfe 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 f But once granting
this position, how are we to know that fehovah 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 ?t
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 Jehovali; 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 substi-
• op, cU., p. 209. t Ibid., pp. 144. M5.
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536 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
tution that the •*Lord" passed from the Jewish to the Christian "Word" and
World as a designation of God.*
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 /sis Unveiled, the Devil —
the powerful Enemy of God (? ! !) had to become the comer stone
and pillar of the Church. For, as a Theosophist, M. Jules Baissac,
truly observes in his Satan ou le Diable:
II fallait ^viter de paraitre autoriser le dogme du double principe en faisant de ce
Satan cr^ateur une puissance r€elle, et pour expliquer le xnal originel, on profte
contre Manes Thj^othSse d'une permission de Tunique Tout- Puissant. t
The choice and policy were unfortunate, anyhow. Either the per-
sonator 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 diflFer
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 DhySn 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. J "For the Initiates," says
Eliphas Levi, "the Devil is not a person but a creative Force, for Good
• Jbid., p. 146.
t Op. at., 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 him-
self. 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.
X To quote in this relation Mr. S. Laing, in his admirable work Modem Science and Modem Thougki
(p. 22a) : " 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.
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AKASHA, THE MYSTERIUM MAGNUM. 537
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 figqre, 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 Mys-
teries enacted by them in the desert; and the Christians have never
known it.
Eliphas Levi seeks to explain the dog^a of his Church by parodoxes
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 diflFers
from that given by Eliphas Levi, 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
mediaeval Kabalists and Alchemists the Sidereal Virgin and the
Mysterium Magnum, and by the Eastern Occultists ^Ether, the reflec-
tion of AkSsha — is that which the Church calls Lucifer. That the Latin
scholastics have succeeded in transforming the Universal Soul and
Pleroma — ^the Vehicle of Light and the receptacle of all forms, a Force
spread throughout the whole Universe, with its direct and indirect
eflFects — ^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 Eliphas Levi, without adequate explanation, for the
latter's policy of veiled revelations could only lead to further supersti-
tion and misunderstanding. What, indeed, can a student of Occultism,
who is a beginner, gather from the following highly poetical sentences
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538 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
of Eliphas Levi, which are as apocalyptic as the writings of any of the
Alchemists?
Lucifer [the Astral Light] . . . is an intermediate fbrce existing in all
creation ; it serves to create and to destroy, and the Fall of Adam was an erotic in-
toxication 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 phos-
phorus [?]. 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 anni-
hilates.
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.*
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 eflFects. Akasha,t 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 bom 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. J 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 aloTte^ which its
actions draw upon humanity and which men attract and force into
• Histoire de la Magie, pp. 196, 197.
t Akisha is not the Ether of Science, as some Orientalists translate it.
t Says Johannes Tritheim, the Abbot of Spanheim, the greatest Astrologer and Kabalist of his day:
"The art of diWne magic consists in the ability to perceiN^e the essence of things in the T^ight 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
leani to know yourself. You will know it by the power of the spirit that is in yourself, and accom-
plish 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.
PoLracehus, pp. 164, 165.)
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THE SOUL AND HEART OF THE GREAT MOTHER. 53^
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 Eliphas Levi — 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 (TptSwa/mcts), that of Sophia (the Holy Ghost accord-
ing 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 im-
personal entity — personal, because it is the mystic name given by St.
Martin to the Host of Divine Creators, Guides and Rulers of this
Planet; iinpersonaly 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
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540 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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
SutratmS, 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 Vedfintic
Philosophy.
And now it stands proven that Satan, or the Red Fiery Dragon, the
'* Lord of Phosphoros" — 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 animal-
ism. 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* — 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 diflFerence 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 un-
concern 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 Theologj*^; 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 metnory they have blackened by their deeds— took the Jewish Jehovah as
• The real orisrinal text of / Corinthians, xv. 44, rendered kabalistically and Csoterically would
Tcad: "It is sown a soul body [not 'natural' body], it is raised a spin'i 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.
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THE LOGOS AND SATAN ARE ONE. 54I
he was, and of course strove vainly to reconcile the Gospel of Light and Liberty
with the Deity of Darkness and Submission.*
But it is suflSciently proven now that all the soi-disani 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 diflFers 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 dog^a of the Fallen
Angels in its dead-letter meaning, and having made of Satan the
comer-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 diso6edient 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
• "The War in Heaven " {Theosophist, iii. 24, 36, 67), by Godolphin Mitford, later in life Murad Ali
Beg. Bom in India, the son of a missionary, G. Mitford was converted to Islam, and died a
Mahomedan in 1884. He was a most extraordinary Myotic, of great learning and remarkable intelli-
gence. 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, I«ight, 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-Taoo8'— 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 lUahee'— 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 over-
threw!" (p. 69)— is said to have overthrown rather; for by overthrowing ihem he would have over-
thrown 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.
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542 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
-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 Aryans had BrahmS (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 Esotenc 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 Espriis
Tombes des Paiais does, that since —
Christianity is made to rest on two pillars, that of evil {Trovt\{iov), and of good
(dya^oi)); on two forces, in short (aya^al #c<u Ka.KQX Swa/xcts): 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 tra4ition 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
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THE SEVENTH MYSTERY OF CREATION. 543
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,* 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 incarna-
tion), and the Amshaspands, the "seven bright Sravah," accompanied
by their stars, fight Ahriman, and the vanquished Devas fall to the
Earth along with him.f In the Vendidad^^ Daevas are called **evil-
<ioing," and are shown to rush away "into the depths of the ....
world of hell," or Matter.J 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 diflFerentiation 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 uni-
verse," 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 cajinot 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 Seveiith 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 CEdipus had unriddled the
secret of the ages, but because, by anthropomorphizing the ever-spiri-
tual 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.
* So does every Yogi and even Christian, for one must take the Kingdom of Heaven by vioUnce
— we are taught. Why then should such a desire make of any one a Devil ?
t Acad, des Inscrip,, xxxix. 690.
t Faigard xix. 47; Darmesteter's Trans., p. 2x8.
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544 'THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
The dead-letter is everywhere the same. The dualism in the
Mazdean religion was bom from exoteric interpretation. The holy
Airyaman, the "bestower of weal,"* invoked in the prayer called
Airyama-ishyo, is the divine aspect of Ahriman, "the deadly, the
Da^va of the DaSvas/'f ^^^ Angvs, Mainyu is the dark material aspect
of the former. **Keep us from our hater, O Mazda and Armaita
Spenta,** J 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 Armaita Spenta, the Spirit of the Earth
or materiality, is the same as Ahriman or Ang^a 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."§ Now the Mobed and the Parsi keep their eye
on the Baresma during the sacrifice — ^the divine twig oflF 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 Haomas, nor even their Vohu-Mano (good thoughts), nor their
Rata (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 Haoma, the
Gaokerena, is through one end of the Earth to the other; and Haoma
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
• Vend\dAd, Far. xx. 12; op. ciL, p, 222.
t Ibid., Far. xix. 43; op. cii., p. 218.
t From the l^endidAd Sddah, quoted by Darmesteter, op. cit,, p. a^
I See the GAtha in Yasna xliv.
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THE NUMBER 888. 545
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! "•
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 Agathodaemon, whose legend states,
"I am Chnumis, Sun of the Universe, 700," can alone solve the mys-
tery 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.
• op. ciL, p. 441.
Nfl
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SECTION YL
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 Boeotians 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
Grice Antique remarks:
Thus Prometheus is something more than the archetjrpe of humanity; he is its
generator. In the same way that we saw Hephaestus moulding the first woman
[Pandora] and endowing her with life, so Prometheus kneads the moist clay, of
which he fashions the body of the lirst man whom he will endow Mdth the soul-
spark.* After the flood of Deucalion, Zeus, they said, had commanded Prome-
theus and Athena to caU forth a new race of men from the mire left by the waters
of the deluge,t and, in the day of Pausanias, the slime which the hero had used
for this purpose was still shown in Phocis.J On several archaic monuments we
still see Prometheus modelling a human body, either alone or with Athena*s help.^
The same author reminds us of another equally mysterious person-:
age, though one less generally known than Prometheus, whose legend
oflFers 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 Phoroneidae. 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, g
A benefactor of men, like Prometheus, he had made them participators
• ApollodoruSf I. 7, x.
t Ovid., Metam., I. 8x. Etym. M., v. UpOfJLTjOcvs*
t Pausanias, X. 4, 4.
{ Op. ct'L, p. 264.
II Pausanias, II. 19, 5; cf. 20, 3.
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THE ASH YGGDRASIL. 547
of every bliss on earth. Plato* and Clemens Alexandrinusf say that
Phoroneus was the first man, or the ** father of mortals." His
^nealogy, 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.J
Melia, Decharme thinks, is the personification of the ** Ash-tree,"
whence, according to Hesiod, issued the race of the age of Bronze,§
and which with the Greeks is the celestial tree common to every Aryan
mythology. This Ash is the Yggdrasil of Norse antiquity, which the
Noms 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 Noms — 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 Noms . . .
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]. ||
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 wcu lightning*' — Decharme guesses.
And here steps in the killing Materialism of the age, that peculiar
twist in the modem 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 Grice
Antiqtie perceives in this "fruit*' a trifle more than an allusion to ter-
• Tinutus, p. aa.
+ Strom., I. p. 380.
t Decharme, tbid., p. 265.
\ Opera et Dies, 142 -145. According: to the Occult Teaching, three Yugas passed away during: the
time of the Third Root-Race, i>., the Satya, the Treti, and the Dv^para Yug:a— answering: to the
Golden Ag:e in its early innocence; to the Silver, when it reached its maturity; and to the Bronxe
Age, when, separating into sexes, it became the mighty Demi-gods of old.
H Aigardandthe Gods, pp. zz, z.^.
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548 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
restrial fire ^nd 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 palaeolithic 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
<I>o/)a)V€vs is the rigid equivalent of the Sanskrit word bhuranyUy "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 Aryan
Hindils] 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 Argo-
lians, are an evidence to us that this thunderbolt [or lightning], as in the legend of
Hephaestus or Prometheus, was the origin of the human race.*
This Still aflfords us no more than the external meaning of the
symbols and the allegory. It is now supposed that the name of Pro-
metheus has been unriddled. But the modem 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 Abhimanin, 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 Hindu Aryan mind never soar above such purely
sensual conceptions; that mind which is declared by Prof. Max Miiller
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 irpofXTjOeik with the verb trpofiav
Odv€tVf 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." t
But now the Orientalists have decided otherwise. They know the
real meaning of the two names better than those who invented them.
• op. cit., p. 266. t Ibid., p. 258.
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THE POETRY OF MODERN ORIENTALISTS. 549
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.*
What was this? Laying aside every poetical ^ciiony all those dreams
of the Golden Age, let us imagine — argue the modem scholars — in all
its gross realism, the first miserable state of humanity, the striking
picture of which was traced for us after -^schylus 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 grati-
tude to that mysterious and marvellous being which they were hence-
forth enabled to create at their will, and which was no sooner bom,
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 Aryans offered in the early days of their existence, and
which found their answer in the myth of Prometheus.t
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 ^Eschylus and Lucretius was no more wretched
then, in the early days of the Aryans, 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.J
• Ibid., p. 257. t Ibid., p. 258. X Op. cit., p. 145.
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550 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Palaeo-
lithic 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, Pfininis, Kapilas, Platos, and Socrates, is compared with
that of the Newtons, Kants, and the modem Huxleys and Hseckels.
On comparing the results obtained by Dr. J. Barnard Davis, the Cranio-
logist,* 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 (cer-
tainly 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 g^ade, amounts
to 89 and 897 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 diflFerence
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 **
3. Average of 7 skulls of the same period from Wales 18*649 "
4. Average of 36 skulls of the stone age from France 18*220 "
The average of the now living Europeans is 18*579 inches; of
Hottentots, 17*795 inches!
• TransaUions of the Royal Society, London, i86«.
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THE BOON GIVEN BY PROMETHEUS. 551
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.*
Besides which, they show the "missing link'* vanishing into thin ain
Of these, however, more anon : we must return to our direct subject.
As the "Prometheus Vinctus" of iEschylus 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 sink-
ing 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 assump-
tion, 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 ^schylus was an Initiate, and knew well what he was giving out.f
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
A.
Prometheus has reached Europe from ArySvarta. 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 Celeste," | one of the aspects of
• Th€ Age and Origin of Man.
f The modem 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 .^schylua— which,
as being an ignorant ancient Greek, he could not express so well himself— is absurdly ludicrous !
t Revue Germanigue, 1861, pp. 356, ei seqq. Sec also Mimoires de la SocUU de la Linguistigue, i. pp.
337» et seqq.
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552 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Siitras, 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 manthdmi, maihndniy which
means "to rub, agitate, shake and obtain by rubbing,'' and is especially applied
to rotatory friction, as is proved by its derivative ntandaluy 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 pramaniha; the discus
which receives it is called arani and aranl: "the two aranis" designating the
ensemble of the instrument.*
It remains to be seen what the Brihmans 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 sym-
bologists? Decharme, at any rate, seems to have a correct glimmering
of the truth; for he unconsciously corroborates all that the Occtdt
Sciences teach with regard to the Manasa 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. t ** 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, t
• Quoted by Decharme, op. at., 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 Arani which contains the socket. This
is proven by an allegory in the Vdyu and other Purdnas, which tell us that Nimi, the son of Tkah-
vaku, had left no successor, and that the Rishis, fearing to leave the Earth without a ruler, intro-
duced the king's body into the socket of an Arani— like an upper Arani -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 GoldstUcker's Sanskrit Dictionary, sub voce. ( Vishnu Pur ana, Wilson's
Trans., iii. 330.) Devaki, Krishna's mother, in a prayer addressed to her, is called "the Arani whose
attrition engenders fire."
t 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 de-
velopment in the Third Race, had it not been for the Agnishvatta and the Minasa Pitris.
X Op. cit., p. 259.
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GREEK IDEAS MISUNDERSTOOD. 553
The Greeks held that he was of the Divine Race, "the son of the
Titan lapetos'*;* the Hindus, 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 lapetus,** says Hesiod, "deceived Jupiter by stealing and con-
cealing in the cavity of a narthex, the indefatigable fire of the resplendent glow." t
. . . 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 Occul-
tists], 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 X 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 suflfering.§
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 modem 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 represen-
tation 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 (<^tXav^po)7ros), which he
has raised to civilization and initiated into the knowledge of all the
arts; a conception which found its most poetical expounder in ^Es-
chylus. 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 lightnhig. He is the
"evil fire" (mat feu) \ and the symbol of the diviiie reproductive male
organ.
Reduced to its simple expression, the myth we are trying to explain is then
simply a [cosmic] genius of fire. IT
• 'laircTiovtSr/s. Theog., p. 528.
♦ Theog.,^1,
X The Fallen Angels, therefore ; the Asuras of the Indian Pantheon.
\ Decharme, op. cit., pp. 259, 260.
II Ibid., p. 263.
II Ibid., p. 261.
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554 'TH® SECRET DOCTRINE.
It is the former idea (the phallic) which was preeminently Aryan, if
we believe Adalbert Kuhn* and F. Baudry. For:
The fire used by man being the result of the action of pramaHlMa in the aranl,
the Aryas must have ascribed [?] the same origin to celestial fire, and they must
have\ 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, t
This idea is supported by the fact that, according to Plutarch's testimony, { 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, iT
not the scientific translation of the production of fire by friction ? . . . Every-
thing leads us to think that, from the highest antiquity, and before the dispersion
of the Aryas, it was believed that the pramantha lighted the fire in the storm-cloud
as well as in the aranis.||
Thus, suppositions and idle hypotheses are made to stand for dis-
covered truths. Defenders of the biblical dead-letter could not help
the writers of missionary tracts more effectually than do materialistic
A
Symbologists in thus taking for granted that the ancient Aryans 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 IT
— 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 arani). 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 Arani, 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
irst remove from the Unknown, in the Manifested Kosmos. If, ages
later, the same epithet is applied to Devaki, the Mother of Krishna, or
• Die Herabkunft des Feuers und dts GbtUrtranks (Berlin, 1859).
t The italics are ours: they show how assumptions are raised to laws in our day.
X Decharme. op. n't,, p. 262.
) Philosoph. Placit., iii. 3.
II Baudry, Revue Germanique, 14 avril, i86i, p. 368.
IT Op. cit., pp. 264, 265.
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THE SIX BROTHERS OF KRISHNA. 555,
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 objec-
tive; 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 anthropo-
morphic colouring which it had never had in the beginning. Between
the Vedas and the Purdnas there is an abyss of which they are the
poles, like as are the seventh principle, the AtmS, and the first or
lowest principle, the Physical Body, in the septenary constitution of
Man. The primitive and purely spiritual language of the Vedas, con-
ceived many decades of millenniums earlier than the PdlurSnic 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 SurSrani, the Matrix or "Mother" of the Suras or
Gods, so Kuntl, the mother of the PSndavas, is called in the Mahabhd-
rata PfindavSrani* — and the term is now physio logized. But Devaki,
the antetype of the Roman Catholic Madonna, is a later anthropomor-
phized form of Aditi. The latter is the Goddess-mother, or Deva-
mStri, of seven Sons (the six and the seven Adityas of early Vedic
times) ; the mother of Krishna, Devaki, has six embryos conveyed into
her womb by Jagad-dhttri, the ** Nurse of the World," the seventh,
Krishna, the Logos, being transferred to that of Rohini. 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.f No
one of the worshippers of the Roman Catholic Virgin would object to
reciting in her honour the prayer addressed by the Gods to Devaki.
Let the reader judge.
Thou art that Prakriti [essence], infinite and subtile, which formerly bore BrahmA
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 Arani, whose attrition engenders fire. J As Aditi, thou
art the parent of the gods. . . . Thou art light [Jyotsnd, the morning twilight], §
whence day is begotten. Thou art humility [Samnati, a daughter of Daksha], the
• See Vishnu Purdna, Wilson's Trans., v. 96, note.
+ xiii. 55, 56.
X "Womb of Ught," "Holy Vessel," are the epithets of the Virgin.
i The Virgin is often addressed as the "Morning Star" and the "Star of Salvation."
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556 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
mother of wisdom; thou art Niti, the parent of harmony (Naya);* thou art modesty,
the progenitrix of aflFection [Prashraya, explained by Vinaya]; thou art desire, of
whom love is bom. . . . Thou art . . . the mother of knowledge [Ava-
bodha]; thou art patience [Dhriti], the parent of fortitude [Dhairya].t
Thus Arani is shown here to be the same as the Roman Catholic
*' Vase of Election." As to its primitive meaning, it was purely meta-
physical. No unclean thought traversed these conceptions in the
ancient mind. Even in the Zokar—(a.r less metaphysical in its sym-
bology 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. J
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.
Wlien 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, en-
shrined 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 Puranas the sublime Vedic truths, and corrects the form \\4th
the help of the Ved^ntic 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. X
• Wilson translates: "Thou art kingly policy, the parent of order."
t Vishnu Purdna, Wilson's Trans., iv. pp. 264, 265.
X iii. 290.
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SECTION YII.
Enoichion-Henoch.
The history of the evolution of the Satanic Myth would not be com-
plete if we omitted to notice the character of the mysterious and cos-
mopolitan Enoch, variously called Enos, Hanoch, and finally EnoYchion
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 ver>' 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 (^Kpvirrta),
"to hide." For ages the Enoichion, the Book of the Seer, was preserved
in the "city of letters" and secret works — the ancient Kirjath-sepher,
later on, Debir.*
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 Kord7i\ 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, accord-
ing to Bar-Hebraeus, "was the first inventor of writing," books, Arts,
and Sciences, the first who reduced to a system the progress of the
planets. { In Greece he was called Orpheus, and thus changed his
• Stc Joshua, XV. 15.
t Surat 3dx.
X Sec Mackenzie's Royal Masonic Cyclopadia, sub voce " Enoch."
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^58 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
name with every nation. The number seven being attached to, and
-connected with, each of those primitive Initiators,* as well as the num-
ber 365, of the days in the year, astronomically, it identifies the mission,
character, and the sacred oflSce 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 mys-
tery 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, Hnoichion
means the "Seer of the Open Eye."
The story about Enoch, told by Josephus, namely, that he had con-
•cealed 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 eflForts 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.f 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 Hiero-
phants 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 applica-
tion 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
-comers 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, Pytha-
goras and Plato — got the elements of their Theology from those
* Khanoch, or Hanoch, or Enoch Esoterically means the "Initiator" and "Teacher," as well as
Enos, the "Sonof Man.*' {^^et Genesis, iv. alb,)
t De Mirville, Ptuumatologie, iii. 70.
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THE ADEPT DIES BUT TO UVE. 559
Weroglyphics, 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 ideo-
graphically 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 Chaldaean, and now very incomplete, compendium. As
already said, Enoichion means in Greek the "Inner Eye," or the Seer;
in Hebrew, lidth the help of Masoretic points, it means the "Initiator"
and "Instructor" ("Jp^ry). 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 Chaldaean 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 (J\^\i),^ 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 con-
scums life in his Astral Body. The variations on this theme are endless,
but the secret meaning is ever the same. The Pauline expression,!
"that he should not see death" («/ non videret mortem^, has thus an
Esoteric meaning, but nothing supernatural in it. The mangled inter-
pretation 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 | — ^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
• Mackenzie, op, cU,^ sub voc, t Hebrews, xL 5. t De Mirvllle, ibid.^ p. 71.
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560 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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!*
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 dis-
coveries 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
\h^ Apocalypse, \ Giants! 2ino\h^r 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 staiids the
nearest to that of the canonical works.%
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," /.^.,
one who reached Mukti or Nirvana, 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
• Compare the "thieves and robbers" incident, p. 506, supra,
■•• De Mirville, ibid., p. 73.
t Ibid,, p. 76.
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WHAT ENOCH IS, ESOTERICALLY. 561
"Seer," "Adept in the Secret Wisdom," etc., without any specifica-
tion as to the character of the title-bearer. Josephus, speaking of
Elijah and Enoch,* 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 y as Yogis
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;\
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,J and Noah to that of the Fifth.§ In this case
both represent the Root- Races, the present one and the one that pre-
ceded 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 ||) took him; in other words, the Enochs or
the Enoichions, 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 Eliphas
Levi 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.f Now the figures on the upper Triangle represent the
Four Races, omitting the First, the ChhSysis or Shadows, and the "Son
* AniiquUies^ ix. 2.
t Cap. viii.
X Says the Zohar, "Hanokh had a book which was one with the Book of the Generations of Adam;
Uiis is the Mystery of Wisdom."
1 Noah is heir to the Wisdom of Enoch ; in other words, the Fifth is heir to the Fourth Race.
U See Isis UnvetUd, i. 575, et seqq.
% See the illustration in Isis Unveiled, ii. 452.
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562 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Hindu
ArdhanSri, is by far the best. For in the latter, only the three (for us)
historical Races are symbolized; the Third, the Androgynous, by
Ardha-nSri; the Fourth, symbolized by the strong, powerful Lion;
and the Fifth, the Aryan, 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 hy four supplementary daj^
which, in his system, appear to be those ,of the equinoxes and solstices.*
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 DelugeA
Precisely so; and the Secret Doctrine teaches that this "order of
nature" has been thus altered, and the series of the Earth's humanities
top. 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. . . ,%
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, astronomi-
cally, 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§
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
* See Danielo's criticisms upon De Sacy, in the Annates de Philosophies p. 393, detuddme article.
+ De Mirville, ibid., pp. 77, 78.
t Ch. Ixxix, I<aurence'8 Trans.
I Ibid., ch. hdv.
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THB SECRET POWER OF THE SATANS. 563
fear in one who had "found grace in the eyes of the I<ord" and been
told to build an Ark I But here we find the venerable Patriarch ex-
pressing 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 ques-
tion 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 Man-
vantara had reached its turning point of three and a half Rounds, and
^gantic physical Humanity had reached the acme of g^oss 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 Saians, and every power of those who commit sorcery, as well as
^f those who make molten images in the whole earth.*
And now a natural question. Who could have informed the apocry-
phal 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 geo-
logical 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 Frederic Klee's work on
the Deluge the lines:
The position of the terrestrial globe with reference to the sun had evidently been,
in primitive times, different from what it is now; and this difference must have
l)een 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 nowy and that in former times the ecliptic had cut the equator
at right angles.f
There are many such "dark sayings" scattered throughout the
Purdnas, 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
* Ibid.f loc, cit.f V. 6. f Bailly, Astronomte Ancienne, i. 203, and ii. 216; De Mirville, ibid.f p. 79.
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$64 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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, how-
ever, if not as bold — of Joshua stopping the course of the Sun alto-
gether. 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.*
The Book of Enoch, in short, is a risumi, 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 anti-
quity {pb nimiam antiquitatem),\ 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"!
• De MirviUe, ibid., p. 80. t City of God, XV. xxiil.
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SECTION VIIL
The Symbolism of the Mystery-Names Iao
AND JeHOYAH, WITE THEIR RELATION TO
THE Cross and Circle.
When the Abbe Louis Constant, better known as Eliphas L€vi, said
in his Histoire de la Magic 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
Symbolog3' — 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," on
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, Clemens, and the Rabbis confessed that
the KaSalak and the Bible were veiled and secret books ; but few know
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566 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
that the Esotericism of the kabalistic books in their present reedited
form is simply another and still more cunning veil thrown upon the
primitive symbolism of these secret volumeis.
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 Aryans, the Egyptians, and the Chaldaeans, the symbol
was complete, as it embraced the idea of the eternal and immovable
Divine Thought in its absoluteness, separated entirely from the in-
cipient 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 concep-
tion 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 oi 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 know-
ledge 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 inta
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] Avided to the
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THE JEWS AI,ONE THE HEIRI*OOM OF JEHOVAH. 567
nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bottnds
. . . 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.^
This settles the question. So impudent have been the modem trans-
lators 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,t 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, iox, Jacob alone is the lot of his
inheritance. What, then, have other nations, who call themselves
Aryans, 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 lao, the Genius of the Moon, or
Ildabaoth-Jehovah, the Genius of Saturn, according to Origen and the
Egyptian Gnostics.J 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,§ so each Hindu 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. ||
It has been repeatedly stated in this work that every religious and
philosophical symbol had seven meanings attached to it, each pertain-
ing 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
• op. a'i., xxxii. 8, 9.
t Of the Protestant Biblical Society of Paris, according to the version revised in 1824 by J. E.
Ostervald.
t 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), lao (of the Moon), Eloi (Jupiter),
Sabao (Mars), Orai (Venus), Astaphai (Mercury), and, finally, Ildabaoth (Saturn). See King's Gnostics
and their Remains, p. 344.
I Sec Origen's Copy of the Chart or Diagramma of the Ophites, in his Contra CeUum.
I See Part in of this Volume, Section IV, B, " On Chains of Planets and their Plurality."
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568 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
them becotne 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 ad-
mirably 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 "glor>'." Evi-
dently 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.*
And then the translator adds in a gloss:
That is, I will show you "My back," i.e.. My visible universe, My lower mani-
festations, but, as a man still in the flesh, thou canst not see My invisible nature.
So proceeds the Qabbalah.t
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.":
The numbers of the n?ime ** 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 r\Wt^ (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 dhiyS asher dhiyS, and in the value of
the sums of their letters stand thus :
21 501 21
. . . This being his [God's] name, the sum of the values composing it, 21, 501,
* Exodus, xxxiii. i8, 19 ; see Myer's Qabbalah, p. 2a6. t Ibid., loc. cil. t Su^ra, p. 481.
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A GROTESQim VERSE EXPI^INED. 569
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 comer and the behind of 543 is the /ace of 345. This is
For check and to keep a slrict 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 Chaldaeo-Hebrews,
— two meanings out of seven. The other five would astonish the
Christians still more.
The series of CEdipuses 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 OEdipuses 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 euhe-
merized 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 astro-
nomical triad, composed of the Sun (the Father), and the two planets
Mercury (the Son) and Venus (the Holy Ghost), Sophia, the Spirit of
Wisdom, I<ove and Truth, and Lucifer, as Christ, the "bright and
morning star."* For, if the Father is the Sun (the "Elder Brother,"
• Sec Revelation, xxii. x6.
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570 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Phoenicians; El, in Chaldaean, hence
El-ohim, Emanu-el, and El, "God," in Hebrew. But even the kaba-
listic God has vanished in the rabbinical workmanship, and one has
now to turn to the innermost metaphysical sense of the Zokar to find
in it anything like Ain Suph, the Nameless Deity and the Absolute, sa
authoritatively and loudly claimed by the Christians. But it is cer-
tainly not to be found in the Mosaic books, at any rate by those wha
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 Uni-
versal Deity of Its majestic character and primitive meaning.
As was said in Isis Unveiled:
It would seem, therefore, but natural to make a diflference between the mystery-
god lacD, 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.*
In the Ophite gems of King,t we find the name of lao repeated, and often con-
founded with that of levo, while the latter simply represents one of the Genii
antagonistic to Abraxas. . . . But the name lao 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 assump-
tion altogether. Besides, there is the fact that laho or lao was a "mystery name"
from the beginning, for iTrP and iT never came into use before the time of king
David. Anterior to his time, few or no proper names were compounded with lah
or Jah. It looks rather as though David, being a sojourner among the Tyrians and
Philistines,^ 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
(pi!in), 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 rPiT, like the structures erected by
Hiram to Hercules and Venus, Adon and Astarte.
Says FUrst: "The very ancient name of God, YAho, written in the Greek low,
appears, apart /w;;/ its derivation^ to have been an old mystic name of the Supreme
* Op, ciL, ii. 30X. f Gnostics andtkeir Remains, X II Samuel.
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THE ANTIQUITY OP THB CROSS. 57r
Deity of the Shemites. Hence it was told to Moses when he was initiated at
Hor-eb — the Caz^^^under the direction of Jethro, the Kenite (or Cainite) priest of
Midiah. In an old religion of the Chaldaeans, 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,* was called lao) Cirp), who was, like the Hebrew YAho, mys-
terious and unmentionable, and whose name was communicated to the Initiated.
The Phoenicians had a Supreme God, whose name was triliteral and secret^ and he
was Ia(i>.'*t
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 coeval 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 Coelus and Lux— of the Sky and Light, or the Sun; in
Mythology he is the progeny of Jupiter and Maia. He is the "Mes-
senger" 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 bom 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 Ter-
mini) were placed along, and at the turning points of, highways, as
crosses are now placed in Italy, and they were cruciform, % Every
seventh day the priests anointed these Termini with oil, and once a
year hung them with garlands, hence they were the anointed. Mer-
cur>% 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.^
He was often represented as three-headed and called Tricephalus,
• By very few though, for the creators of the material universe were always considered as sub-
ordinate Gods to the Moat Higrh Deity.
t Op. ciL, ii. 296, 297. Fflrst grives citations from Lydus and Cedrenus in support of his statements.
t Sec plate 77 in vol. i of Montfaucon's AnttijuHies. The disciples of Hermes, after their death, go
to his planet, Mercury— their Kingfdom of Heaven.
I Comutus.
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572 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Triplex, as one with the Sun and Venus. Finally, Mercury, as Cor-
nutus* 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" (1) in Pymander
— a Creative Speech (Verbum), is the Seminal Principle scattered
throughout the Universe.f 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.J
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, a;id also
what was meant by "the attachment of a man to the cross," which
idea "was made to coordinate with that of the origin of human life, and
hence the phallic fornix Only the latter came into action aeons and
ages after the idea of the Carpenter and Artificer of the Gods, Vishva-
karmt, 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 Hindis. §
But, it was made "to coordinate" with the idea of the new rebirth of
man by spiritual^ not physical regeneration. The Candidate for Initia-
tion 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, geometri-
• Lydus, De Mensibus, iv.
t Preparat. Evang,, I. iii. 2.
t But see p. 480, supra, concemiug the Gnostic Priapus.
\ Op. cit.y p. 52.
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A PERSONAI,, IS A FINITE GOD. 573
cally, 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— /.^., 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 coordinately as
measures of the size of planets, and of the peculiarity of their shapes — /.^., 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 architecturCy
by use of the sacred unit of measure in the Garden of Eden, the Ark of Noah, the
Tabernacle, and the Temple of Solomon.*
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 man-
kind 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 pheno-
menal world.f 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).X
This may have satisfied the practical Setnite 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
• Ibid,, pp. 3, 4.
t I^t Uie reader refer to Uie Zohar and the two Qabbalahs of Isaac Mycr and S. I<. MacGregor
Mathers, with InterpretaUons, if he would satisfy himself of this.
% Ibid,, p. 5.
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574 'THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
is called the Sephiroth, the Heavenly Man, and Adam Kadmon, the
^cond Logos of the Platonists.
This very same idea is clearly found at the bottom of the ablest
<iefinitions 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
xircU 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 expres-
-sions numerically of these relations, respectively — the first being of circumference,
^he latter of diameter), embraces all other subordinations under it. Two expres-
-sions of circumference to diameter in integrals are used in the Bible: (i) The per-
fect, and (2) The imperfect. One of the relations between these is such that (2)
-subtracted from (i) will leave a unit of a diameter value in terms, or in the denomi-
nation of the circumference value of the perfect circle, or a unit straight line having
-a perfect circular value, or a factor of circular value.*
Such calculations can lead one no further than to unriddle the
mysteries of the third stage of Evolution, or the "Third Creation of
BrahmS." The initiated Hindus 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
^hen the Universe "falls into matter," as the Occultists say. Through-
out 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 Testamefit — 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.
• Ibid., p. 12.
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A PLAGIARISM BY PASCAI,. 575
It is not, then, in the BibU that we have to search for the origin of
"the cross and circle, but beyond the Flood. Therefore, returning to
6liphas Levi and the Zohar, we answer for the Eastern Occultists and
■say that, applying practice to principle, they ag^ee 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 6liphas Levi thought. It was
borrowed by the French Philosopher from either Mercury Trismegistus
•or Cardinal Cusa's Latin work, De Docta Ignorantid, 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,
lay the word Theos. With the Ancients both words were synonymous.
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 intui-
tions, uniting the visible and the invisible Infinitudes into one, repre-
;sented 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
lK)th, is explained, and becomes thereby still more scientific and philo-
.sophical. Plato's etymological definition of the word theos (^co?) has
1>een given elsewhere. In his Cratylus, he derives it from the verb
ike-ein (^cW), "to move," as suggested by the motion of the heavenly
bodies which he connects with Deity. According to the Esoteric Philo-
sophy, 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 aeons 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
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576 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
of Ra, who appears as the "Great Cat of the Basin of Persaea in An"*
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 comers. 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 t)rpe 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 C^.t
Nor was the double glyph sacred with the profane, but only with the
Initiates. For Raoul Rochette shows thatrj
The sign Q occurs as the reverse of at Phoenician coin, with a Ram as the obverse.
. . . The same sign, sometimes called Venus* Looking-Glass, because it t3rpified
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 : §
At each of the four comers 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
• See Book of the Dead, xvii. 45-47*
i Op. cit., i. 421, 422.
X Dela Croix Ansie, Mint, de V AcadimU des Sciences, pi. t, Noe. 8, 9, also 16. a, p. 3*0; quoted in
Natural Genesis, p. 423.
I VoL xviii. p. 393, pi. 4; Inman, fifir. 38; Gerald Maaaey. op. cit., ibid., p. 41*.
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VARIATIONS OF THE CROSS-SYMBOLISM. 577
figured on eacli arm of the cross. This ellipse therefore denotes the path of the
earth. . . . Sir J. Y. Simpson copied the following specimen, i^i 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 ex-
planation and final colour from Aryan 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.* This is a type that was developed from an identifiable be-
ginning, 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 Q» the sig^ of life, the living, an oath, the
covenant. . . . The top of this is the ■ hieroglyphic Ru <3> ®^^ 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 C/^, 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 reckon-
ing. The Ru of the Ankh-cross was continued in the Cypriote R, Q, and the Coptic
Ro, P.t The Ro was carried into the Greek cross xP , 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. {
Now this, again, is entirely astronomical and phallic. The Pauranic
version in India gives the whole matter another colour. Without
• Certainly not ; for very often there are symbols made to symbolixe other symbols, and these are in
turn used in ideographs,
t The R of the Slavonian and Russian alphabets (the Kyriletza alphabet) is also the I^tin P.
X Ibid,, p. 423- _
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578 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 C^ does
not belong to Egypt alone. It exists under the name of
Pasha, a cord which the four-armed Shiva holds in the
hand of his right back arm.* The Mahadeva is repre-
sented in the posture of an ascetic, as Mahayogi, with
his third eye Qj , which is ** the Ru <£> , set upright on the
Tau-cross" in another form. The Pasha is held in
the hand in such away 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, Kili, Shiva*s consort, has the same
as an attribute!
The Pasha has here a double significance, as also has Shiva's Trisula
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
PSsha becomes lingyonic. Shiva, as said before, is a name unknown to
the Vedas, It is in the IVkiie Yapir Veda that Rudra appears for the first
time as the Great God, Mahddeva, 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 Vishiiu Purana, he is the God who springs from the forehead of
Brahma, 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 Diidne Ego
imprisoned in earthly form, whose fierce passions make of him the
** roarer," the "terrible." This is well shown in the Brihadaranyaka
Upaiiishad, wherein the Rudras, the progeny of Rudra, God of Fire,
are called the "ten vital breaths {prdna, life), with the heart (jnanas),
as eleventh," t whereas as Shiva, he is the destroyer oi that life. Brahma
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 Pasha, in the hand of Shiva, when he
• See Moor's HindU Pantheon, plate xiii.
t See Dowson's Hindti Classical Dictionary^ sub vac. " Rudra.'
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I
THE HEAVENLY "PORPOISE." 579
is represented as an ascetic, the Mahayogin, has no phallic significa-
tion, 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 Yogi I
passes through the "strait gate," the narrow circle that widens into an j
infinite one, as soon as the Inner Man has passed the threshold. J
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.* The great Circle of Time, on the
face of which, Indian fancy has represented the Porpoise, or Shishu-
mara, has the cross placed on it by nature in its division and localiza-
tion of stars, planets and constellations. In Bhagavata Purdna,\ 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 Praj&pati, Agni, Indra, Dharma, etc. ; across its loins the seven
Rishis. t
This is then the first and earliest cross and circle, formed by the
Deity, symbolized by Vishnu, the Eternal Circle of Boundless Time,
KSla, on whose plane lie crossways all the Gods, creatures, and crea-
tions born in Space and Time — who, as the Philosophy has it, all die at
the Mahapralaya.
Ateanwhile 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
supiK)sed wives, the Pleiades, of whom only one — she who hides — has
proven virtuous. The Pleiades, or Krittik^s, are the nurses of Kartti-
keya, 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 Yogis in Heaven, and holy Sages on the Earth)
— which would make Karttikeya identical with Michael, the *' Leader of
• Described in the Afission des Juifs, by the Marquis St. Yves d'Alveydre, the hierophant and
leader of a large party of French Kabalists, as the Golden Age!
t V. xxiii.
X Translated from Bumouf's French Translation, quoted by Pitzedward Hall, in Wilson's Vishnu
PHtana, ii. 307.
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58o THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
the Celestial Hosts" and, like himself, a virgin Kumara.* Verily he is
the Guha, the "Mysterious One/* as much so as are the Saptarshis and
the KrittikSs, 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 bom of his mother
Juno alone, without the participation of a father, or like the AvatSras
(Krishna, for instance) — in the West as in the East — Karttikeya 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 Agnibhu (son of Agni) and Gangl-
putra (son of Ganges). Add to this the fact that the Krittik^ his
nurses, as the Matsya Purana 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 Agneya as a synonym"! — 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 Bhdgavaia Purana 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 MaghA, the Kali age, comprising 1,200 [divine]
years [432,000 common years] began; and, when, from Maghd, they shall reach Piir-
vdsh4dh&, then will this Kali age attain its growth, under Nanda and his successors.^
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 ParSshara 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.
• The more so since he is the reputed slayer of TripurAsura and the Titan Tiraka. Michael is the
conqueror of the dragon, and Indra and Karttikejra are often made identical.
t Ibid., iv. 235.
I Op. cii.t XII. ii. 26-32; quoted in Visknu Purana, Wilson's Trans., iv. 230. Nanda is the firtt
Buddhist sovereign, Chandragupta, against whom all the Brahmans were so arrayed, he of the Mory«
Dynasty, and the grandfather of Ashoka. This is one of those passages that do not exist in the
earlier Paurinic MSB. They were added by the Vaishnavas, who, out of sectarian spite, were almost
as great interpolators as the Christian Fathers.
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THE RISHIS AND THE PI^IADES. 58 1
This was by assuming an imaginary line, or great circle, passing through the poles
of the ecliptic and the beginning of the fixed MaghA, 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 Magh4, the precession
would be noted by stating the degree, etc., of any movable lunar mansion cut by
that line or circle, as an index.*
There has been, and there still exists, a seemingly endless controversy
about the chronology of the Hindus. 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 Karttikeya was delivered to the Krittik^ by the Gods to
be nursed, they were only six, whence KSrttikeya is represented with
six heads; but when the poetical fancy of the early Aryan Symbologists
made of them the consorts of the seven Rishis, they were seven. Their
names are given, and these are Amba, DulS, Nitatui, Abrayanti,
Maghayanti, Varshayanti, and Chupunika. There are other sets of
names which differ, however. Anyhow, the seven Rishis were made
to marry the seven Krittik^ before the disappearance of the seventh
Pleiad. Otherwise, how could the Hindu 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 Hindu 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 Krittika,
and this can hardly make them earlier than 2,780 B.C. This is accord-
ing 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 Hindus 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 KrittikS from the Phoenicians, 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 Madler
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 ^. This manifested side is Taurus, the symbol of One
• Historical View of the HindU Aitionomy, p. 65, as quoted by Wilson, op. cit., p. 233.
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582 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
(the figure i), or of the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Aleph (m)
"buir* or "ox," whose synthesis is Ten (lo), or Yod O, the perfect
letter and number. The Pleiades (Alcyone, especially), are thus con-
sidered, even in Astronomy, as the central point around which our uni-
verse 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 Im-
mortality 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 Scarabaeus of the
Egyptians, its very name being suggestive of the secret idea attached
to it. For the Scarabaeus 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 metem-
psychoses, or reincarnations, of the liberated soul. This mystical
symbol shows plainly that the Eg>T)tians believed in reincarnation 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 Planetar>' 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.* 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. t
• See EzekUl, i. + In Quint, Ub, Euclid,
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DEUS ENIM ET CIRCULUS EST. 583
**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
cirmmagimur,* •
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.** f
''\^Spirit^^ whirleth about continually, and . . . returneth again
according to his circuits** — says Solomon,J who is made in the English
translatio7i 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.^
The BrShmanical "Golden Egg," from within which emerges
Brahma, 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
* The Goddess Basht, or Pasht, was represented with the head of a cat. This animal was held
sacred in Egjrpt 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 roUed up in a circle when asleep. The posture is prescribed for occult and magnetic pur-
poses, in order to regulate, in a certain way, the circulation of the vital fluid, with which the cat is
preSminently 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 ejre 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]. IVe might say
the moon mirrored the solar light, because we have looking glasses. With them the cat's eye tvas the
mirror." {Luniolatry Ancient and Modem, p. 2.)
f Exekiel, i. a, i5» 16, 20.
X Eccles., i. 6.
\ Fol. 87, col. 346.
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584 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 under-
lying 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 algebraicml 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 his Unveiled^
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 Trig^ams
of Fo-hi, Yang, the unity, and Yin, the binary,
I
I
YANG. YIN.
explained cunningly enough by Eliphas Levi,t China had her Con-
fucius, and her Tao-ists. The former circumscribes the "Great Ex-
treme" within a circle with a horizontal line across; the latter place
three concentric circles beneath the g^eat 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" (6 hr\ -n-aa-i ^€os). Plato, having been initiated, could not
believe in a personal God — a gigantic shadow of man. His epithets of
• Vol. ii. pp. 299, 300.
+ Dogme el Riiuel de la Haute Magie, i. 124. Also in T'sang-t-ung-ky, by Wei -Pa- Yang.
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THE SUPREME GOOD OF PLATO. 585
"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 (vov?), the first principle of all principles, the
Supreme Idea on which all other ideas are grounded, . . . the ultimate sub-
stance 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 preeminence and excellence, the
Supreme Good,* **The God" (6 ^cds), and the **God over all." These
words apply, as Plato himself shows, neither to the ** Creator" nor to
the "Father" of our modem Monotheist, but to the Ideal and Abstract
Cause. For, as he says: "This Bw, 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?! Surely not he who considered
only those to be genuine Philosophers and students of truth who
possessed the knowledge of the really-existiyig 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.^ Speusippus and Xeno-
crates followed in his footsteps. The One, the original, had no exist-
ence, in the sense applied to it by mortal men. The Tt/iw)v (the honoured)
dwells in the centre as in the circumference, but it is only the reflection
of the Deity — the World Soul§ — 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
• Codcer'8 Christianity and Greek Philosophy, xi. p. 377.
t The cry of despair uttered by Count de Montlosier, in his Mysth^es 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 Am Deity, nor our World. "Au spectacle de tant de grandeur oppos<^ A celui de tant de
misftre, I'esprit qui se met & observer ce vaste ensemble, se represente je ne sais quelle grande divinity,
4iH* une diviniU, pltu grande et plus pressante encore, aurait comme bris^ et mise en pi^es en dis-
persant les debris dans tout I'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 inn^r 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.
% See Isis Unveiled^ i. xii and xviii.
\ Stobieus, EcL, i. 862.
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586 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
to say, international symbols, which expressed very often great scien-
tific truths, besides their direct bearing upon psychological, and even
physiological mysteries.
It is no explanation to say, as does Eliphas Levi, 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 difl&culty of
conceiving it without losing one's veneration for the rather too human-
like ways of the Deity. It is to avoid such anthropomorphic concep-
tions 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 difiiculties. 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 mathe-
matician whose X must ever elude the grasp of our terrestrial algebra.
The Hindus have tried to solve it by their AvatSras, the Christians
think they have done so — by their one divine Incarnation. Exoteri-
cally — both are wrong; Esoterically both of them are ver>- 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 indivi-
dualizing 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 inter-
pretations. 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 X» or decussated cross, and of the Hermetic
cross, pointing to the four cardinal points — were well understood by
the mystical minds of the Hindus, Brthmans 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
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THE RIDDLE OF THE CROSS. 587
of it their Svastika, y^, now the Wan of the Mongolian Buddhist* It
implies that the "central point" is not limited to one individual, how-
ever 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, con-
tained 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 hori-
zontal 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 immoriality.f
"Attach thyself," says the Alchemist, "to the four letters of the tetragram dis-
posed 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."!
Again :
The Tau, |^, and the astronomical cross of Eg3T)t, ^^ 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 posi-
tion is precisely that of a Christian bishop giving his blessing, or the one in which
Jesus is often represented while at the Last Supper.}
• The Svastika is certainly one of the oldest symbols of the Ancient Races. In our century, says
Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie (Royal Masonic Cyclopadia), 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.
t Isis Unveiled^ i. 508.
X Ibid., p. 506.
) Ibid., p. 572.
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588 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 intro-
duced after our era, is strange indeed, when we find Ezekiel stamping
the foreheads of the men of Judah who feared the Lord,* with the
signum Thau, as it is translated in the Vulgate. In the ancient Hebrew
this sign was formed thus ^, but in the original Egyptian hiero-
glyphics as a perfect Christian cross "h (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 eleci. Moses f orders his people to mark their door-posts and lifiiels
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 Philae.
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 un-
fathomable 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
JoshuaX 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. (Words-
worth on Joshua.) . . . The strangest expression of this kind is in Numbers
<xxv. 4) where, by Onkelos (?) it is read: ''Crucify them before the Lord f Jehovah j
against the sun" The word here is I?p^, to nail to, rendered properly (Fuerst) by the
Vulgate, to crucify. The very construction of this sentence is mystic.}
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
• Esekiel, ix. 4. + Exodus, xii. 22. X viii. 29. { Op. cit.y p. 204.
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THE SLEEP OF SILOAM. 589
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, "I", in Egypt, of a Svastika without the four additional pro-
longations (-|- not Ui) 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 PatSla — 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 galler>% 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 Philae, 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, en-
lightening 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 re-
generative 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 frag-
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590 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
ment representing the adoration of Bakhan-Aleare, 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 cruci-
form ** 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 destruc-
tion. 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 Alexan-
drinus and other ex-initiates, knew better. But they preferred to keep
silent. •
Again, let the reader read the Hindu "fables," as the Orientalists call
them, and remember the allegory of VishvakarmS, 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, Surya, his son-in-law, on his lathe — in the exo-
teric allegory, but on the Svastika, in Esoteric tradition, for on Earth he
is the Hierophant-Initiator — and cuts away a portion of his brightness.
VishvakarmS, remember again, is the son of Yoga-siddhS, /.^., the holy
power of Yoga, and the fabricator of the "fiery weapon," the magic
Agneyastra.* 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 sym-
bolized 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, practi-
cally, 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:
355f 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
• See Dowson's HindU Classical Dictionary.
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THE MEANING OF THE CRUCIFIXION. 591
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 essencCy 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,*
The author proves these points by further elucidation, and reveals
the secret meaning of more than one dead-letter narrative, by showing
that probably, QTM, man, was th^ 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. t
This is demonstrated by the Hindu Vittoba, a form of Vishnu, as has
already been stated. The figure of Vittoba, even to the nail-marks on
the feet,{ is that oi 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 establish-
ment of the Mysteries — is discovered in the geometrical symbols con-
taining 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 Phoenicians, and later
from the Gentiles, from whom also they borrowed most of their Kaba-
listic Mysticism — most ingeniously adapted the cosmic and anthro-
pological 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 Shanah or lunar year, so mysti-
cally connected with the name of Jehovah, the supposed ** Father" of
• The Source of Measures^ p. 204.
t Ibid., p. 205.
X See Moor's HindU Pantheon, where Vittoba's left foot, in the figure of his idol, bears the mark of
the nails.
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592 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Hindus. Moor shows this in his Hindu Pantheon in
the engraving that represents Vittoba. Plato adopted it in his decus-
sated cross in space, the X, the "second God who impressed himself
on the universe in the form of the cross"; Krishna is likewise shown
"crucified."* 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 yJwr, 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
inost holy [with the Jews'] feminine base number, t
Thus, while the phallic or sexual meaning of the "crucifixion nails"
is proven by the geometrical and numerical reading, its mystical mean-
ing 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 Procrus-
tean 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
• Sec Dr. I^undy's Monumental Christianity, fig. 72. + Source of Measures, p. 52.
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THE REAL PATERNOSTER. 593
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
magfietism, antral 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 Eliphas Levi:
The sign of the cross adopted by the Christians does not belong to them exclu-
sively. It is also kabalistic, and represents the opposition and quaternary equili-
brium 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 dififerent
formulas to express its meaning: one reserved for the priests and initiates; the
other given to neophj^es and the profane. Thus, for example, the initiate, carry-
ing 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 shon\^<&T, 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 yEonas — an abso-
lutely and magnificently kabalistic sign of the cross, which the profanations of
Gnosticism made the militant and official Church completely lose,*
The "militant and official Church" did more: having helped herself
to what had never belonged to her, she took only that which the "Pro-
fane** had — the kabalistic meaning of the male and female Sephiroth.
She never lost the inner and higher meaning since she never had it —
l^liphas Levi'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.
* Dogme et Rittul de la Haute Magie^ ii. 88.
Q3
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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 Puranas^
"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 P5rthagorean 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* .... 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 aU things that be
on earth." t
Translated from the Occult phraseology into still plainer language
this would read: The Sevenfold I/>gos 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:
• The "Heavens" are identical with " Angfels," as already stated,
t Philosophumenat vi. 48; quoted by King, op, cit., p. 200.
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THE SEVEN THUNDERS. 595
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.*
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 allegori-
cally 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), t
As says the Commentary, speaking of the ** Fires" :
TTie 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 under-
lying idea — ^the basic number seven, the compound of three and four,
preceded by the divine three (Ad making the perfect number ten.
Also, these numbers apply equally to divisions of time, to cosmo-
graphy, 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 Hindus
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, i,ooo 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. J
• op. at., X. 3, 4.
f Pistis Sophia^pag. 378; King, ibid.^ loc. cii.
% Sec Uie Section on "The Chronology of the Brihmans," p. 69, supra.
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596 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Now, the Secret Doctrine furnishes a key which reveals to us on the
indisputable grounds of comparative analogy that Garuda, the alle-
gorical and monstrous half-man and half-bird — the Vahana or vehicle
on which Vishnu, as KSla or "Time," is shown to ride — is the origin
of all such allegories. He is the Indian Phoenix, the emblem of cyclic
and periodical time, the ** Man-lion" (Sinha), of whose representations
the so-called Gnostic gems are so full.*
Over the seven rays of the lion's crown, and corresponding to their points, stand
often the seven vowels of the Greek alphabet, AEHIOYO, testifying to the Seven
Heavens, t
This is the Solar Lion and the emblem of the Solar Cycle, as
Garuda J is that of the Great Cycle, the MahS Kalpa, coetemal 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 JatS5ru, 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). 5
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 Arytvarta, brought into India by the primeval BrSh-
mans, who had been initiated in Central Asia. And this is the Oc-
cultism 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
• 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 ** magi-
cians" {,op, cit., p. 241).
+ King, ibid., p. 218.
t The lack of intuition in Orientalists and Antiquarians past and present, is remarkable. Thos,
Wilson, the translator of Vishnu Purdtta, declares in his Preface that in the Garuda Purdna he found
"no account of the birth of Garuda." Considering that an account of "Creation" in general is
given therein, and that Garuda is coStemal with Vishnu, the Mah& Kalpa, or Great lUfe-Cyde, begin-
ning with and ending with the manifesting Vishnu, what other account of Garuda's birth could be
expected!
\ Ibid.f loc. cit.
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PISTIS SOPHIA. 597
even in Revelation,* 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. t
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 Chaldaea.
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 Doc-
trine. In their secret computations, the Japanese have the same
figures in their cycles. As to the Brahmans, their Puranas and
Upanishads are good proof of it. The latter have passed entirely
into Gnostic literature; and a Brahman needs only to read PisHs
SophiaX 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
• See Revelation^ xvii. 2 and 10; and Leviticus ^ xxiii. 15 to 18; the first passage speaking of the
''seven Kings," of whomyftv have gone; and the second about the "seven Sabbaths," etc.
t Op. cit., X. 5-7.
X Pistis Sophia is an extremely important document, a genuine Evangel of the Gnostics, ascribed
at random to Valentinus, 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.
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598 THE SECRKT DOCTRINE.
another baptism of smoke, and another baptism of the Spirit of Holy Light [ue.
the Spirit of Fire].*
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 exo-
teric and ritualistic dogma, of dead-letter orthodoxy;! 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
NSrada and Devamata in the AnugitdyX an episode from the Maha-
bharata, the antiquity and importance of which one can learn in the
"Sacred Books of the East," edited by Prof. Max Mtiller.§ Nirada is
discoursing upon the "breaths" or the "life-winds," as they are called
in the clumsy translations of such words as Prana, ApSna, 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 yJr^? verily is all the deities, and knowledge
(of it) arises among BrAhmanas, being accompanied by intelligence. H
By "fire," says the Commentator, he means the Self. By "intelli-
gence," the Occultist says, NSrada 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 BrShmans, who were the
first to set the example to other nations who thus anthropomorphized
• King, op. cit., p. 200.
t 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.
t Chap. ix.
\ See the Introduction by Kishinith Trimbak Telang, M.A.
0 "Sacred Books of the East," vol. viii. p. 276.
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TRUTH BETWEEN TWO CONTRASTS. 599
and carnalized the grandest metaphysical truths. NSrada 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 . . . good-
ness is that in connection with it, in which the offering is thrown.*
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 NSrada mean by the following?
Those who understand the sacrifice understand the Samftna and the Vyftna as the
principal (offering). The Prdna and Ap&na are portions of the offering, . . .
and between them is the fire. That is the excellent seat of the Udftna as under-
stood by Brdhmanas. 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. . . .t
And after every such contrast NSrada adds:
That is the excellent seat of the Ud&na as understood by Br&hmanas.
Now many people do not know the full meaning of the statement
that SamSna and VySna, PrSna and Apana — ^which are explained to be
"life-winds," but which we say are principles and their respective
faculties and senses — are offered up to UdSna, 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 trans-
lator and even the editor, the great Oxford Sanskritist, F. Max Miiller,
have missed the true meaning of NSrada's words. Exoterically, this
enumeration o/ "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 Samdna and Vydna are controlled and held
nnder check by the Prftna and Ap&na. . . . The latter two are held in check
and controlled by the Udftna, which thus controls all. And the control of this,
which is the control of all live, . . . leads to the supreme self.J
The above is given as an explanation of the text, which records the
words of the Brthmana, who narrates how he reached the ultimate
Wisdom of Yogism, and in this wise reached All-knowledge. Saying
• Ibid. t Ibid. X Pp. 258, 259.
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600 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
that he had "perceived by means of the self the seat abiding in the
self,"* where dwells the Brahma free from all; and explaining that
that indestructible principle was entirely beyond the perception of senses
— t,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 Vaishv&nara fire sevenfold^
This "Fire," according to Nilakantha's commentary, is identical
with the "I," the Self, which is the goal of the ascetic; VaishvSnara
being a word often used for the Self. Then the Brdhmana goes on to
enumerate that which is meant by the word "sevenfold," and says:
The nose [or smell], and the tongue [tastej 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 Vaishvftnara.t . . . Those are the seven (kinds of) fuel for me.§
. . . These are the seven great officiating priests. I
These seven priests are accepted by Aijuna 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 interpre-
tations, this passage on page 259 explains Narada's statements on page
276, and shows them referring to exoteric and esoteric methods and
contrasting them. Thus the SamSna and the VySna, though subject to
the Prana and the Apana, and all the four to Udstna in the matter of
acquiring the PrSnaySma (of the Hatha Yogi, chiefly, or the lower
form of Yoga), are yet referred to as the principal oflFering, for, as
rightly argued by K. Trimbak Telang, their "operations are more
practically important for vitality" ; i,e,, they are the grossest, and are
oflFered in the sacrifice, in order that they may disappear, so to speak,
in the quality of darkness of that fire or its smoke— m^r^ exoteric
ritualistic form. But Prana and ApSna, though shown as subordinate
• Ibid.^ p. 257.
t Ibid., p. 259.
X In the astronomical and cosmical key, Vaishvinara is Agni, son of the Sun, or Vishv&nara, but
in the psycho-metaphjrsical symbolism it is the Self, in the sense of non-separateness, f>., both divine
and human.
\ Here the speaker personifies the said divine Self.
II Ibid,
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THE WISDOM OF THE DIVINE SELF. 6oi
^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*'* 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 Hindus, 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 PisHs Sophia in the light of the Bhagavad Gttd, the Anugiid 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
Hindu 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,t no smoke [i.e,, no theological delusion], J no dark-
ness, 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 . . .
• Compare with these "pairs of opposites," in the AnugUd^ ^he "pairs" of i^ons, in the elaborate
system of Valentinus, the most learned and profound Master of the Gnosis. As the "pairs of oppo-
sites/' male and female, are all derived from Akasha (undeveloped and developed, differentiated and
nndiflferentiated, or Self or Praj&pati), so are the Valentinian "pairs" of male and female ^^ns
shown to emanate from B3rthos, the preexisting eternal Depth, and in their secondary emanation
from Ampsiu-Ouraan, or sempiternal Depth and Silence, the second Logos. In the Esoteric emana-
tion 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 iEons are not 15 (a "blind") but 14, as the Jirst ^on is That
from which others emanate, Depth and Silence being the first and only emanation from Bythos.
As Hippolytus shows: "The JEjons 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 Anugitd.
+ Not necessarily at death only, but during Samadhi or mystic trance.
t 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 ex-
plained by the Church Fathers.
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602 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
all their Powers, nay, even unto Barbelo,* 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!t
It is easy to see what this Light and Name are: the Light of Initia-
tion 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. Havings
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 na
student of Occult Philosophy has ever mistaken a cycle for a living
personage and vice versa, 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 Rdmdyana, 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{ — Garuda being himself the MahS Kalpa or Great Cycle
— JatSyu, the king of the feathered tribe (when on the point of being
slain by Rlvana who carries oflF SitS) says, speaking of himself: "It
is 60,000 years O king, that I am bom"; after which, turning his bcuk
on the Sun — he dies.
JatSyu 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
• 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).
■»- Pagg, 378, 379.
% In other Purdnas Jatdyu is the son of Aruna, Garuda's brother, both the sons of Kashyapa. But
all this is external allegory.
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THE ANTIQUITY OF THE KAPILAS. 603
Garuda's descendants. Then, again, there is Diti, the mother of the
Maruts, whose descendants and progeny belonged to the posterity of
HiranySksha, "whose number was 77 crores (or 770 millions) of men,"
according to the Padma Purdna. All such narratives are pronounced
"meaningless fictions" and absurdities. But — truth is the daughter qf
time, verily; and time will show.
Meanwhile, what could be easier than an attempt, at least, to verify
Paurtnic 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 SSnkhya philosophy, since it is so stated in
the Purdnas; although one of them flatly denies the imputation with-
out explaining its Esoteric meaning. It is the Bhdgavata Purdna*
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 Sdnkhya (philosophy), with the help of which he who desires to obtain
liberation crosses the dreaded ocean of existence, that path to death ? t
The Purdna 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 Purdnas^ therefore, that we have to look for an explana-
tion 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 Purdnas.
Now it is as well ascertained as any tradition can be, that it was at
Hardwar, or GangSdvSra, the "door or gate of the Ganges," at the foot
of the Himalayas, 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, GangS, emerging from its
mountainous gorge, begins its course over the sultry plains of India.
• IX. viii. 12, 13. t From Burnoufs Translation ; see Wilson's Vishnu Purdna, iii. 300.
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604 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
And it is clearly ascertained by geological survey that the tradition which
claims that the ocean washed the base of the Himalayas ages ago, is
not entirely without foundation, for distinct traces of this still remain.
The Sankhya Philosophy may have been brought down and taught by
the first, and written out by the last Kapila.
Now Sagara is the name of the ocean, and especially of the Bay of
Bengal, at the mouth of the Ganges, to this day in India.* 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 Purdnas, 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 perso7iality.
Kapila, besides being the name of a personage, of the once living
Sage and the author of the SSnkhya Philosophy, is also the generic
name of the Kumaras, the celestial Ascetics and Virgins; therefore the
ver>' fact of the Bhagavata Purdna calling that Kapila — whom it had
showed just before as a portion of Vishnu — the author of the Sdnkhya
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
SSnkhya 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 Purdnas, First the primeval Sage, then
Kapila one of the three "secret" KumSras, and Kapila son of Kash-
yapa and Kadru — the "many-headed serpent"! — besides Kapila the
great Sage and Philosopher of the Kali Yuga. The latter, being an
Initiate, a "Serpent of Wisdom," a Naga, was purposely blended with
the Kapilas of the former ages.
• Wilson, ibid., p. 302, note.
t Sec Vdyu Purdna, which places him in the list of the forty renowned sons of Rashyapa.
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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 Sig^ (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 Pro-
crustean 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 lo, 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 mate-
rialistic 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 reabsorbed, 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 diflFerentiates; 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 Pytha-
goras from India. That it was that of the Brachmans and Iranians, as
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6o6 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
they are called by the ancient Greek Philosophers, is warranted to us
by the whole range of Sanskrit literature, such as the Purdnas and the
Laws of Manu, In these Laws or Ordinances of Manu, it is said that
Brahma first creates the ''ten Lords of Being," the ten Prajapati or
Creative Forces; which ten produce seven other Manus, or, rather, as
some MSS. have it, Munin (instead of Manun) "devotees," or holy
beings, which are the seven Angels of the Presence in the Western
religion. This mysterious number seven, bom from the upper Triangle
/\* the latter itself born from the apex thereof, or the Silent Depths
of the Unknown Universal Soul (Sig6 and Bythos), is the sevenfold
Saptaparna plant, bom 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 meta-
physical idea involved in the above symbol. In man as in nature,
according to the Cis-HimSlayan 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 [BrahmS] having pervaded the subtile parts of those six, of
unmeasured brightness,"* 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 MedhStithi, the commen-
tator thinks) "are called the atomic destructible elements";! these are
described in the above-named Section.J
We have now to speak of the mystery language, that of the pre-
historic races. It is not a phonetic, but a purely pictorial and symboli-
cal 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 diflFerently. 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 ^«^— which is an odd number.
Each letter of the ancient alphabets had its philosophical meaning and
raison d'etre. The number one (i) signified with the Alexandrian
• The Ordinances of Manu, i. i6; Bumeirs Translation, p. 3, note.
+ find., 27 ; p. 5.
t Vol. i. pp. 355, ei seqq.
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THE THREE SCIENCES. 607
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 oi 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 Ilar^p Aw (according to Ragon).* If we turn now
to the Hebrew alphabet, we shall find that while one or Aleph (m) has
a bull or an ox for its symbol, ten, the perfect number, or one of the
Kabalah, is a Yod ('•, y, i, or/), and means, as the first letter of Jehovah,
the procre^ative 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 diflferentiation, hence of contrasts, discord, or matter, the
beginning of evil. In the Valentinian Theogony, Bythos and Sig€
(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.f This number is truly the number
of mystery par excellence. To study it on the exoteric lines one has to
read Ragon*s Cours Philosophiqtce et Interpritatif des Initiations, on the
Esoteric — ^the Hindi! 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:
• Orthodoxie Afofonnique Suivie de la Mafonnerie OcculUet de V Initiation Hermitique, J. M. Ragon,
p. 430; see also the whole of Chapter XXVII, " Puissance des Nombres d'aprds Pythagore " for what
foUowB.
+ The reason for it is simple, and was gfiven 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.
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6o8 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
The first line of the triangle offered to the apprentice for study is the mineral
kingdom^ symbolized by Tubalc . ' . [Tubal-Cain],
The second side on which the companion has to meditate, is the vegetable king-
dom, symbolized by Schibb . " . [Schibboleth]. In this kingdom begins the genera-
tion 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 s3rmboli2ed by Maoben . * . (son of
putrefaction).*
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 repre-
sented for them not only the surface but also the principle of the forma-
tion of the physical body. Thus animals were Ternaries only, man
alone being a Septenary, when virtuotis; 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 con-
fusion. 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 ( J ) placed over voweb
which have or have not to be aspirated. The first sign (*) is called the "strong" or
superior "spirit us," 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 quint-
essence, the vital fluid or life.t
The more mystic meaning of the number Five is given in an excel-
lent 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 signifi-
cance of ancient Sanskrit nomenclature in the old Aryan myths and
allegories." Meanwhile, let us see what has been hitherto stated about
• Ragon, ibid,, p, 428, note. t Ibid,, p. 431.
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THE MYSTIC MEANING OF MAKARA. 609
the constellation Capricornus in Theosophical publications, and what
is known of it generally. Every one knows that VJ 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 KumSra. 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 Purdnas, the sons of, and
even one with, Rudra (Shiva), who is a Kumira himself. It is through
their connection with Man that the KumSras 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 under-
stood to mean a side. So, Makaram or Panchakaram means a Pentagon.*
Now the five-pointed star or pentagon represents the five limbs of
man.f Under the old system, we are told, Makara was the eighth
instead of the tenth sign 4
The sign in question is intended to represent the faces of the universe, and indi-
cates that the figure of the universe is bounded by Pentagons.}
The Sanskrit writers ** speak also of Ashtadisha or eight faces bound-
ing Space," referring thus to the Loka-pSlas, 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. I|
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 Hindu 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 Vdhana of Varuna, the Ocean God, and is often called, for this
• op. cit., p. 113.
t Now what is the meaning and the reason of this fig:ure? The reason is that Manas is the fifth
principle, and that the PenUgon is the symbol of Man— not only of the five-limbed, but rather of the
thinking^ conscious Man.
% The reason for it becomes apparent when Egyptian symbology is studied. See further on.
\ Ibid.t p. Z14.
II Ibid., pp. 114, 115.
S9
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6lO THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
reason, Jala-rupa 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.*
With the Peratae Gnostics it is Chozzar (Neptune) who converts the
dodecagonal pyramid into a sphere, "and paints its gate with many
colours." t He has Jive 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 finallj' to personify a solar-fire
devotee in India, as it personified that Fire, or the highest Soul with
the Egyptians.
In the Purdnas, the number of the KumSras 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 Kicrma
Purdna it is said of them:
These five [KumAras], O Brahman, were Yogins who acquired entire exemption
from passion.
Their very name shows their connection with the said constellation
Makara, and with some other Pauranic 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 Kumaras are mixed
up, astronomically, physiologically, and mystically in general, with a
number of Paurdnic personages and events. Hardly hinted at in the
Vishyiu, they figure in various dramas and events throughout all the
other Piirdnas and sacred literature; so that the Orientalists, having to
pick up the threads of connection hither and thither, have ended by
proclaiming the Kumaras **due chiefly to the fancy of the Purtnic
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 Kumara (in this case an anagram for Occult pur-
poses), as Yog^s, 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
Book of the Dead, Ixxxviii. 2. t Philosophumena , v. 14.
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POSEIDON'S FIVE MINISTERS. 6ll
them, Water and Ether predominating, and therefore their symbols
were both aquatic and /iery.
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 AvatSras was Buddha, as
claimed in days of old. The Prachetasas, the worshippers of Nara-
yana — 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 yfz^^,
Esoterically. PrachetSs 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 (Xwf^ap or Xopl^dp),
or Poseidon, of the Peratae Gnostics. These are respectively called
Ou, Aoai, Quo, Ouoab and . . . (OtJ, *Aoat, Ouco, OvioaP ...),*
the y^M, a trip/e name (making seven in all) being lostf — /.<?., 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 SavarnS, 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 symbo-
lized 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 Cannes, the Baby-
lonian Dag, and further also with the Matsya (Fish) AvatSra of Vishnu,
both teaching mortals Wisdom. The Dolphin, as every Mythologist
knows, was placed, for his service, by Poseidon, among the constella-
tions, and became with the Greeks, Capricomus, 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 KSma-
deva, the Hindu God of Love, identified, in the Atharva Veday with
Agni, the Fire-god, the son of Lakshmi, as correctly given by the
Harivamsha, For Lakshmi and Venus are one, and Amphitrite is the
early form of Venus. Now Kama, the Makara-ketu, is Aja, the "un-
• See PhUosophumena, v. 14.
t So is Brahma's fifth head, said to be lost, burnt to ashes by Shiva's "central eye " ; Shiva being
also Panchinana *' five-faced." Thus the number is preserved and secrecy maintained on the true
Esoteric meaning.
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6l2 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
bom," and Atm^-bhu, 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, th^ fifth, with
AtmS, the seventh, Esoterically — say the Sages. This is th^ first stage.
The second, on the following plane of manifestation, shows Brahmit —
whom we select as a representative for all the other First Gods of the
nations — causing to issue from his body his Mind-bom Sons, "Sanan-
dana and others," who, in th^ fifth "creation," and again in the ninth
(for purposes of a "blind") become the KumSra. 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 Durg4
Kill, who is only the black side of Lakshmi (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 Amalthaea,
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 interpreta-
tion 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 Brahmt 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 Tintric five Ma-kSras, 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 KumSra, 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,* so the
* '* When the Sun passes away behind the 30th degree of Makara and will reach no more the sign
of the Minam (Pisces) then the Night of Brahm4 has come."
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THE PUZZLES OF SYMBOLISM. 613
DhySn Chohans, called in India KumSras, are connected with both.
Moreover, in the exoteric religions, they have become the synonyms of
the Angels of Darkness. MSra is the God of Darkness, the Fallen
One, and Death;* and yet it is one of the names of Kama, the First
God in the Vedas, the Logos, from whom have sprung the KumSras,
and this connects them still more with our ** fabulous" Indian Makara,
and the crocodile-headed God in Egypt.f The Crocodiles in the Celes-
tial 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 reemerge out of the sacred river. All this is highly sym-
bolical, 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 con-
nected with these [Zodiacal] signs by the ancient philosophers, will never be lifted
up for the amusement or edification of tJie uninitiated publicX
Nor was number Five less sacred with the Greeks. The "Five
Words" of BrahmS have become with the Gnostics the "Five Words"
written upon the AkSshic (Shining) Garment of Jesus at his glorifica-
tion— the words "Zama Zama 6zza Rachama 6zai" (ZAMA ZAMA QZZA
PAXAMA OZAI), translated by the Orientalists "the robe, the glorious
robe of my strength." These words were, in their turn, the anagram-
matic "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, f.^., merged in Nirvtna. 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.§
It is easy to recognize in the two "Spiritus" — the Greek signs (,*)
• Death of every physical thing: truly ; but Mira is also the unconscious quickener of the birth of
the Spiritual.
■»• Osiris is called in the Book of the Z7/a^ (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 Microcosm and the Microcosm.
% Op. cit., p. 117.
I King's Gnostics and tkeir Remains, p. 297.
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6l4 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Spoken of by Ragon — Atmi 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, oo, 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 + o. 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, Q) — 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 sym-
bolized 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 recog-
nize him, while theology makes of him the Devil! Yet his seven-
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THE ** GOLDEN CANDLESTICK." 615
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 andyj?2^r on the other, and made
of number seven a feminine number of generation* — 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 cir-
cular 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 mani-
fested 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 sacred-
ness 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 mani-
fested planes. Whereas it is the Triangle, the Greek Delta (A), 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 Acvs
(Deus) by the Boeotians, thence the Deus of the Latins. This, in rela-
tion to the metaphysical conception, with regard to the meaning of the
septenary in the phenomenal world; but for purposes of profane or exo-
teric interpretation, the symbolism changed. Three became the ideo-
graph of the three material Elements — Air, Water, Earth ; and four
became the principle of all that which is neither corporeal nor per-
ceptible. But this has never been accepted by the real Pythagoreans.
Viewed as a compound of 6 and i, the Senary and the Unity, number
7 was the invisible centre, the Spirit of everything, as there exists no
• Reflecting on the cross, the author of The Source of Afeaiures 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 comer 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).
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6l6 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 sevai; 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 y&ar is
by as many numbers above one, as seven is above yZ?2^r.*
"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 Zao, "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 m5rthos 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 (J), 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 + I = 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 lardan, with the Coptic or old Greek suffix. This was the door of the
Hebrew word Jared, or sotirce, or descent ... of the river Jordan, which had
the same mythical use with the Hebrews that the Nile had with the Egyptians, t it
was the source of descent, and held the waters of life.{
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
* Prom a MS. supposed to be by "St. Germain/' embodied by Ra^n, op. cit.^ p. 434.
t It had no such meaning in the beginnings, nor during the earlier dsmasties.
X Prom an unpublished MS.
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THE ROOT OF WISDOM. 617
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 modem 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 (r) which is the
symbol of Gaia, the Earth, while the figui'e 6 is the symbol of the
animating or informing principle, and the 5 is the universal quint-
essence which spreads in every direction and forms all matter.*
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 aeons 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 Eliphas Levi,
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 DhySn 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 Arch-
angel that could not be traced back to its prototype in the sacred land
of ArySvarta. These prototypes are all connected with the KumSras
who appear on the scene of action by ** refusing" — as SanatkumSra
and Sananda — to "create progeny." Yet they are called the ** creators"
• From St. Germain's MS.
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6l8 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
of (thinking) man. More than once they are brought into connection
with Narada — another bundle of apparent incongruities, yet a wealth
of philosophical tenets. NSrada 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 Eiioch and in the Bibky then the
allegory is plain; their leader, Narada, while refusing to procreate,
leads men to become Gods. Moreover, all of these, as stated in the
VedaSy are Chhandajas, "will-born," or incarnated, in different Man-
vantaras, of their own will. They are shown in exoteric literature as
existing age after age; some being "cursed to be reborn," others incar-
nating as a duty. Finally, as the Sanakadikas, the seven Kumaras who
went to visit Vishnu on the "White Island" (Shveta-dvipa), the Island
inhabited by the Maha Yogins — they are connected with ShSka-dvipa
and the Lemurians and Atlanteans of the Third and Fourth Races.
In the Esoteric Philosophy, the Rudras (Kumaras, Adityas, Gand-
harvas, Asuras, etc.) are the highest Dhytn Chohans or Devas as
regards intellectuality. They are those who, owing to their having
acquired by self-development t\i^ five-fold nature — ^hence the sacredness
of number five — became independent of the pure Arupa 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. Narada, the Rishi, is cursed
by Brahmd to incessant peripateticism on Earth, i.e., to be constantly
reborn. He is a rebel against Brahmt, and yet has no worse fate than
the Jayas — the twelve great Creative Gods produced by Brahma 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 BrahmS to
be born in every Mmvantara. 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 under-
stand the Purdnas except in their dead-letter sense.* Hence we find
• 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 than.
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THE HOSTS OF THE BLESSED ONES. 619
the Orientalists refusing to be puzzled, and cutting the Gordian knot
of perplexity by declaring the whole scheme ** figments ... of
BrShmanical 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 alle-
gories 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 Parashara:
These classes of thirty-three divinities . . . exist age after age, and their ap-
pearance and disappearance is in the same manner as the sun sets and rises again.*
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 lilies 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,"
• Vishnu Pur&na, I. xv; Wilson's Trans., ii. 29.
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■620 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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, Chaldaeans, 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 "ZQTIKQ ZOTIKH [? ZQTIKH], Vitalis Vitalia;' or
life of life.*
But the best evidence to the antiquity of the cross is that which is
Ijrought 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
eatacombs 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.t
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 centur5\ . . .
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
diflferent 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, t
• Quoted in Gerald Massey's The Natural Genesis, i. 427.
t With the Christians, most undeniably. With the Pre-Christian S3rrabologi9t8 it was, as said, the
Bed or Couch of Torture during the Initiation Mystery, the "Crucifix" being placed horizontally, oa
the ground, and not erect, as at the time when it became the Roman gallows.
t So it was, and could not be otherwise. Julian, the Bmperor, was an Initiate, and as sach knew
well the "msrstery-meaning" both metaphysical and physicaL
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THE "WORM THAT NEVER DIES." 621
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.*
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 else-
where, 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 SandhyS." 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 eflForts 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 spiri-
tualistic modem 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,** t
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
• op. cit.y ibid., p. 433.
t 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 Reahn of the Sun (xv. 39), binds him.
Apophis is the enemy of Ra (Light), but the " great Apap has fallen I " exclaims the Defunct. " The
Scorpion has hurt thy mouth," he sa3r8 to the conquered enemy (xxxix. 7). The Scorpion is the
" worm that never dies " of the Christians. Apophis is bound on the Tan or Tat, the " emblem of
sUbility." (See the erection of Tat in Tatoo, xviii.)
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622 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
had the form of a cross.* The pagoda of Mathura . . . the birth-place of
Krishna, was built in the form of a cross. t
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 Hindu sects,
especially the rites of the Vallablicharj^as? 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 J of the Jews, as denounced
by their own Prophets, can hardly escape the charge. The ** sons of
the sorcerers, the seed of the adulterer,"§ as Isaiah calls them, never
lost an opportunity of "enflaming themselves with idols under every
green tree"|| — ^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 germi-
nate, 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
• So have the crypts in Cis-Himalayan regrions where Initiates live, and where their ashes are
placed for seven lunar years,
t The Natural Genesis, i. 432.
t The Cross and the Tree are identical and synonymous in symbolism.
\ U-ii. 3.
II Ibid., 5.
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MAN, THE REVII.ER OF GOD. 623
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 modem 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,* 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 Uni-
versal Postulate upon which the w^hole 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 Eliphas Levi 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 rroiler, 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 nattcral — 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 Thomp-
son 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.
• Sermon clx.
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SECTION XL
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 Brahman learned in the Upanishads, which are
so full of the Secret Wisdom of old, why "he, of whom seven fore-
fathers have drunk the juice of the Moon-plant," is Trisuparna, as
Bopaveda is credited with saying;* and why the Somapa Pitris should
be worshipped by the Brahman 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 Earthy they threw the seed of every-
thing 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 fivas of the plants, produced the middle
[intermediate] natures between plant and moving living animal. The
third Seven evolved their Chhdyds. . . . The fifth Seven imprisoned
their Essence. . . . Thus man became a Saptapama.
* Vishnu Purdna, Wilson's Trans., iii. 174, note by FiUedward Hall.
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THE "HIEROGLYPHICAL SENARY." 625
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 signi-
ficance in the Buddhist legends. So it had, also, under disguise, in the
Greek myths. The T, or "[" (Tau), formed from the figure 7, and the
Greek letter r (Gamma), was, as stated in the last Section, the symbol
of life, and of I^ife Eternal: of earthly life, because r (Gamma) is the
symbol of the Earth (Gaia)*; and of Life Eternal, because the figure 7
is the symbol of the same life linked with Divine Life, the double gl)^h
expressed in geometrical figures being:
A
D
— a Triangle and a Quaternary, the symbol of Septenary Man.
Now, the number six has been regarded in the Ancient Mysteries as
an emblem oi 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.f
J. M. Ragon gives a very good illustration of the "hierogl3rphical
senary," as he calls our double equilateral triangle.
The hieroglyphical senary is the symbol of the commingling of th^ philosophical
three fires and three waters, whence results the procreation of the elements of all
things, t
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-murti. For, even in the exoteric
rendering, the lower triangle, \J^ with the apex downward, is the
symbol of Vishnu, the God of the Moist Principle and Water, NSrt-
yana being the Moving Principle in the NSrS, or Waters ;§ while the
• Hence the Initiates in Greece called the Tau Fanytos, "son of Gaia," "sprung from Karth," like
HtyoA in the Odyssey (vii. 324).
t Ragon, Orthodoxie Afofonnigue, etc.» pp. 432, 433.
t Ibid., p. 433, note.
\ See the Mahdbharata, e^g., HI. 189, 3, where Vishnu says, "I called the name of water Nirl in
ancient times, and am hence called Niriyana, for that was always the abode I moved in (Ayana)." It
1» 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 Thaleft
makes of it the primordial element and prior to Fire, which was yet latent in that Spkit.
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626 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
triangle, with its apex upward, /\, is Shiva, the Principle of Fire,
symbolized by the triple flame in his hand.* It is these two inter-
laced 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 2(Jx is examined, all the ten numbers are contained therein.
For with a point in the middle or centre, XjX, 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 jdeld 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, t
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 | ; the differen-
tiated 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, Nitro-
gen, 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
fetthom the nature, and acquaint themselves with the potentialities, of
• See the bronse sutue of Tripurintaka Shiva, "Mahideva destroyinir TripnrftMra," at Ok
BCuaetun of tiie India House,
t Ragon, ikid,, p. 433, note.
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SPIRITUAL AND PHYSICAL CORRESPONDENCES.
627
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 g^eat Alchemists the world over, have the whole septenate
to study from.* 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.
The following diagram will perhaps assist the student to grasp these
parallelisms.
Human Principles.
7. Atmft.
6. Buddhi.
5. Manas.
4. K&ma Rilpa; the principle of ,
animal desire, which bums
fiercely during life in Mat-
ter, resulting in satiety; it
is inseparable from animal '
existence.
3. LingaSharira;theinertveliicle ^
or form on which the body is
moulded; the vehicle of Life.
It is dissipated very shortly 1
after the disintegration of ^
the body.
a. PrAna; Life, the active power '
producing all vital pheno-
mena, j
I. The gross matter of the body;
the substance formed and
moulded over the Linga
Shaiira (ChhAyA) by the'
action of Prftna.
HYDROGEN
NITROGBN
OZYGBN
CARBON
Principi^bs OF Physical
Nature.
, The lightest of all gases; it bums
in Oxygen giving off the most
intense heat of any substance in
combustion, and forming water,
the most stable of compounds;
Hydrogen enters largely into all
organic compounds.
'An inert gas; the vehicle with
which Oxygen is mixed to adapt
the latter for animal respiration;
it also enters largely into all
organic substances.
' The supporter of combustion ; the
life*giving gas, the active chemi-
cal agent in all organic life.
The fuel par excellence: the basis
of all organic substances, the
(chemical) element which forms
the largest variety of com-
pounds.
• There are karned Brihnuuis who hmve protetted against oar teptenaiy divisioii. They are right
ikom their oim standpoint, as we are right from ours. I^eaving the three asptcU, or adjunct principles
oat of calcolation, they accept only Ibar Upidhis, or Bases, including the Bgo— the reflected image
<d the ItOgos in the Kirana Shaitra— and eren "strictly speaking . . . only three Upidhis."
Vot pu^ theoretical meUphysical philosophy, or purposes of meditation, these three may be
sa£Bdent, as shown by the T&raka Toga system; but for pracHcal occuU teaching our septenary
dirisioo is the best and easiest. It is, however, a matter of school and choice.
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628 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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
bom";* 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 f 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 coslum ac terras camposque liquentes
Lucentemque globum Lunae, Titaniaque astra
Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus
Mens agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet.
Inde hominum pecudumque genus vitaeque volantum
Et quae marmoreo fert monstra sub aequore pontus.{
"First came three, or the Triangle." This expression has a pro-
found meaning in Occultism, and the fact is corroborated, in Minera-
logy, Botany, and even in Geology — as has been demonstrated in the
Section on "The Chronology of the BrShmans" — ^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
• Commentary^ Book ix. F. 19.
+ 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 bi-sexual, however, before the age of mam-
malia in the closing portion of the Secondary or Mesozoic ages, yet nearer to the Pcttaozoic than the
Cegnozoic ages. Smaller marsupial mammalia are contemporary with the huge reptilian monsters of
the Secondary.
t yCneid, vi. 725-729. "First [Divine! Spirit within sustains thi 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 Uni-
verse]. 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.
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The theogonic key. 629
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 — show-
ing that the inhabitants of the sea-shore are greatly affected by the
tides:
The most ancient progenitors in the kingdom of the Vertebrata . . . appa-
rently 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 ab-
normal processes have one or more weeks [septenates] as their periods . . .
such as gestation of mammals, the duration of fevers.*
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 hve; and those of the
ostrich in seven.t
This number is closely connected with the Moon, whose Occult
infiuence 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
Bohme, by insisting on the fundamental doctrine of the seven proper-
ties of everlasting Mother Nature, proved himself thereby a great
Occultist.
But to return to the consideration of the septenary in ancient reli-
gious symbolism. To the metrologfical 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
• Compare Descent of Man, p. 164. + Bartlett's Land and Water,
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630 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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,
y\— 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:
(fl) The lowest Septenary, the Creative Elohim — ^in his cosmic
aspect.
(^) The Tetragrammaton or the Adam Kadmon, the "Heavenly
Man" of the four letters — in his theogonic and kabalistic as-
pects.
(c) The Noah — identical with the Hindu Shishta, the human Seed,
left for the peopling of the Earth from a previous creation, or Manvan-
tara, as expressed in the Puranas, 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 BrahmS 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, Q, on parallel lines with the
cosmic and human principles. For the latter, the old familiar classifi-
cation is made use of. Thus:
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NOAH IN A NKW DRESS.
631
Human Aspects, or
Principi^ks.
1. Universal Spirit (Atmft).
2. Spiritual Soul (Buddhi).
3. Human Soul, Mind (Manas).
Triple aspect of
the Deity.
4. Animal Soul (Kdma Riipa). \ Spirit of the
) Earth
5. Astral Body (Linga Shanra).
CosBflc Aspects, or
Principles.
1. The Unmanifested Logos.
2. Universal Latent Ideation.*
I 3. Universal (or Cosmic) Ac-
tive t Intelligence.
drit of the /
h, Jehovah.t/
Noah. I
4. Cosmic (Chaotic) Energy.
6. Life Essence (Prdna).
7. Body (SthAla Shanra).
5. Astral Ideation, reflecting
terrestrial things.
Space containing ^ 6. Life Essence or Energy.
Life— the Waters!
of the Deluge. I
Mount Ararat} \ 7. The Earth.
As an additional demonstration of the statement, let the reader turn
to kabalistic works.
** Ararat = the mount of descent = Tl"^"^n, Hor-Jared, Hatho mentions it out
of composition by Arath = mw. Editor of Moses Cherenensis says: *By this,
they say, is signified the first place of descent (of the ark).*" (Bryant's Analy
vol. iv. pp. 5, 6, 15.) Under *'Berge,'' mountain, Nork says of Ararat: "toTIM, for
mw (1.^., Ararat for Arath) earthy Aramaic reduplication." Here it is seen that
• The Advaitin VedAntic Philosophy classifies this as the highest Trinity, or rather the Trinitarian
aspect of Chinmitra (Parabrahman) ; explained by them as the "Bare Potentiality of Prajn&," the
power or the capacity that gives rise to perception; Chid&kisham, the infinite field or plane of
Universal Consciousness; and Asat (Mfllaprakriti), or Undifferentiated Matter. (See "Personal and
Impersonal God •• in Five Years of Theosophy, p. 203.)
t Differentiated Matter existing in the Solar System— let us refrain from touching the whole
Kosmos— in seven different conditions, and Prajni, or the capacity of perception, existing likewise
in seven different aspects corresponding to the seven conditions of Matter, there must necessarily be
•even states of consciousness in man; and according to the greater or smaller development of these
states, the systems of religions and philosophies were schemed out.
t Represented as the jealous, angry, turbulent and ever-active God, revengeful, and kind only to
his "chosen people" when propitiated by them.
) Noah and his three Sons are the collective symbol of this Quaternary in many and various appli*
cations. Ham being the Chaotic principle.
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632 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. 0
Nork and Hatho make use of the same equivalent, in Arath, idlb^, with the mean-
ing of earth,*
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, repre-
sents 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,"! 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 Abstrac-
tion, entirely by Itself and independent of every other Power whether
noumenal or phenomenal. Says the author of the article "Personal
and Impersonal God":
• 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 founcUttion measure, rested, fared, in Hebrew, is TT^, The
toot derivations are the same with those of Ararat, of acre, of earth. The Hebrew TT'' is literally,
in British, Y R D; hence, in fared, is to be found literally, our Bngflish word yard (and also "TT^,
for fah, or fehovah, is rod). It is noteworthy that the son of fared, viz., Enoch, lived 365 years ; and
it is said of him, by rabbinical commentators, that the year period of 365 dajrs was discovered by
him, thus bringing, again, time and distance values together, i.e., year time descended, by codrdina-
tion, through the yard, or fared, who thus was its father, in or through Enoch; and truly enough,
1296 = yard (or fared) x 4 = .Si84» 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 PifUi
from the beginning— the family saved from the Waters, eternally ^xiA. physically.
t vii. 2, 3.
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THE ROOTS OF THINGS. 633
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 Hindii philosophers it is the original and eternal combination
-of Purusha [Spirit] and Prakriti [Matter]. As the Advaitis 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 Advaitis.
Even if there were to be a personal God with anything like a material Up^dhi
(physical basis of whatever form), from the standpoint of an Advaiti 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 con-
dition in the Universe, which is the state of perfect unconsciousness, bare Chid-
Akdsham (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 Advaitis.*
Although itself entirely out of human reckoning or calculation, yet
this "huge aggregation of various states of consciousness" is a sep-
tenate, in its totality entirely composed of septenary groups — simply
because **the capacity of perception exists in seven different aspects corres-
ponding to the seven conditions of matter,'' ] 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-
bom, 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
• Five Years of Theosophy, pp. 202, 203. •* Ibid., p. 200.
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634 *^^^ SECRET DOCTRINE.
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.* . . .
The Pythagorean world, according to Plutarch,t consisted of a double
quaternary.
This statement corroborates what is said about the choice, by the
exoteric theologies, of the /(7a/^ 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 rhizdtnata, the roots or principles of all
mixed bodies.X
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 "myste-
rious 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 aU 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 heb-
domad [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]. {
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.!|
• Oliver's Pythagorean Triangle, p. 104.
t De Anim. Procr., 1027.
X Oliver, ibid., p. 112.
\ Reuchlin ^ Cabala, 1. ii ; Oliver, ibid., p. 104.
II In The Source 0/ Measures, the author shows (pp. 50, 51) that the figrure 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, di^lays one face
The Cube of the cube as common to ttvo bars, counted as belonging to either \i,e., once counted
Unfolded, 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 Chacrtic
Matter, and that it requires Spirit to permeate it actively ; t>., the primordial abstrad
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
\ the symbol of man, generation and life. In Egypt Ank signified " soul/' " life '•
\ the ensouled, living man, the septenary.
» Q as the
"T itist
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THE ** VOICE OF NATURE." 635
Some students have been puzzled to account for the vertical line,*
which is male, becoming, in the cross, a four-partitioned line {Jour
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 Mathematical 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, t
Moreover, the quaternary though an even, therefore a female ("in-
fernal") number, varied according to its form. This is shown by
Stanley.J 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 P3rtha-
goras 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.§ All the melody of Nature is in those seven
tones, and therefore is called the "Voice of Nature."
Plutarch explains || 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.^f
• Supra, p. 626.
+ Oliver, ibid., p. 114.
X Pythag., p. 61.
\ Oliver, ibid., p. 172.
II De Ptac. Phil., p. 878.
51 See Oliver, ibid., p. 106.
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-636 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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.*
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, imme-
diately arise th 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 \th€ir'\ deity. It is termed Ol3nnpus,
entirely light, and replete with separate forms, where is the seat of the immortal
gods, deiim domus alta, whose top is unity, its wall trinity, and its superficies
.quatemity,f
The "superficies" has thus to remain a meaningless surface, if left by
itself. Unity only "illuminating" quatemity, 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" arro-
gating to himself very improperly the "Was, Is, Will Be," now trans-
lated 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, BrahmS-V^ch, 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, Alia; the Persians, Sire; the Mag^,
Orsi; the Mahometans, Abdi; the Greeks, Teos; the ancient Turks,
Esar; the Latins, Deus; to which John I/>renzo Anania adds the
German Gott; the Sarmatian Bouh; etc. J
The Monad being one, and an odd number, the Ancients therefore
said that the odd were the only perfect numbers; and — selfishly, per-
Tiaps, 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
• Ibid., p. 108. "f Reuchlin, ut supra, p. 689; Oliver, ibid., pp. 1x2, 113. X Oliver, ibid., p. 1x8.
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THE SEPTENARY DEMONSTRATED. 637
the fact by saying, ''Numcro deus impure gaudet^ "The God is pleased
with an odd number."*
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.f The
doctrine of the Spheres ruled by the seven Sacred Planets J 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 ike number of a
virgin, because it is unborn [like the Logos or the Aja of the VedSntins] :
Without a father ... or a mother, . , . but proceeding directly from the
monad, which is the origin and crown of all things. §
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 Mahstmanvantara 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. H
Cis-Himilayan 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 TSraka Rija Yoga of India limits
that division to 3, we, to 4, and the VedSntins 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?
*Fnrra fi€ ic.t.X.
Seven sounding letters sing the praise of me.
The immortal God, the almighty Deity.
• Bucolica^ Eel. viii. 75.
t Philo, De Mund. Opif. ; Oliver, ibid., p. 172.
t 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 I/>goi. There may be
nine and ninety- nine other planets discovered— this does not alter the fact of these seven alone
being sacred.
\ Oliver, ibid., pp. 173, 174.
\\ Ibid., loc. cft.
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638 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Why again is the triune lao, 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 Shebi 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 lao-Sabaoth [—the ten-lettered God].*
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]."t
Why again does Proclus say:
The Father of the golden verses celebrates the Tetraktys as the fountain of
perennial nature ? t
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 Hindii Aryans 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 meta-
physical 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 Stm, near the rtiins of
Babian in Upper Eg3T)t; 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 Chal-
daeans 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.§
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
• T%4 Naiurmi Genesis, £.545. ^ Ibid. % In Timteus, iii. ; ibid, \ OUver, ibU., p. 175.
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PROOFS FROM A GNOSTIC GOSPEI*. 639
minus his lower terrestrial elements, or, if viewed from a physical stand-
point, 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 a7icient 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.* 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 Archaeologist
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,t
just as our School teaches. It is composed of seven elements, four of
which are borrowed from the four kabalistical manifested worlds. Thus :
Prom Asiah it gets the Nephesh, or seat of the ph3rsical appetites [vital breath,
also]; from Je2irah, 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 Sonl'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 ^ons of the Spheres, being
the Power— sl particle of the Divine light ("Divinse particula aurae") yet left in
themselves; the Soul [the fifth] "formed out of the tears of their eyes, and the
sweat of their torments" ; the 'AKn/ti/xov IIvcv/Aarof, Counterfeit of the Spirit (seem-
ingly answering to our Conscience) [the sixth}; and lastly the Moipa, Fatet [Karmic
* See Section P., im/ra, '*The Seven Souls of the Egyptologists."
'¥ The Seven Centres of Bnergy evolved, or rendered objective by the action of Pohat upon the One
Element; or, in fact, the "Seventh Principle" of the Seven Elements which exist throughout mani-
fested 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 msrstical sense, the seven children
or sons ot Devakt killed before the birth of BIrishna by Kansa. Our seven principles ssrmbolise aU
of these. We have to part or separate from them before we reach the Krishna or Christ-state, that
of a JIvanmukta, and centre ourselves entirely in the highest, the Seventh or the One.
t "NLoipa is destiny, not *' Fate," in this case, as it is an appellation, not a proper noun. (See
WblTs transl., Odyssey ^ zadL 413.) But Moira, the Goddess of Pate, is a deity who, like Atcro, gives
to all their portion of good andevQ (l4ddeU and Scott's I<ezicon), 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 *AvTtfUfA€i¥ TLwSfiarof our conscience, but our Buddhi ; nor is it again the " counter-
feit" of Spirit but ''modelled after," or a ''counterpart" (Aristoph., Tkesmophor,, a;) of the Spirit—
ifhkfa Buddhi is, as the vehicle of AtmA.
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640 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
HgoX 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^.*
THE SEPTENARY ELEMENT IN THE VEDAS.
IT Corroborates the Occult Teaching Concerning the Seven Gu>bes^
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 Surya, 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-sacri-
ficers, from Agni; for Agni, the Ashvins, the Adityas,t are all synony-
mous with those "Sacrificers," or the Fathers, variously called Pitaras
(or Pitris), Angirasas,J and Sadhyas, "Divine Sacrificers," the most
Occult of all. They are all called Deva-putra Rishayah or the "Sons of
God."§ The "Sacrificers," moreover, are collectively the One Sacri-
ficer, 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," |
from whom VirSj was bornf ; and from Virlfcj, the (mortal) man. It is
Varuna — lowered from his sublime position to be the chief of the Lords-
DhySnis or Devas — who regulates all natural phenomena, who "makes
• The Gnostics and their Remains ^ pp. 37, 38.
t Rig Veda, iii. 54. 16 ; ii. 29. 3, 4.
X Prof. Roth (in Peter's lexicon) defines the Angrirasas as an intermediate race of higher Beings
between Gods and Men ; while Prof. Weber, according to his invariable custom of modernising and
anthropomorphizing the divine, sees in them the original priests of the religion which was common
t6 the Aryan Hindfis and Persians. Roth is right. "Angrirasas** was one of the names of the
Dhyinis, or Deva-Instnictors (Guru-Devas), of the late Third, the Fourth, and even of the FifUi Race-
Ihitiates.
I Ibid., X. 62. X, 4.
II Ibid., z. 90. z.
IT Ihid., X. 90. 5.
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THE VBDIC TEACHINGS. 64I
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 (Vrattni, or "courses of natural
action," active laws), is punished by Indra* the Vedic powerful God,
whose Vrata, or law or power, is greater than the VratSni 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"! and of the Five Races (Panchakrishtayah) which have
already inhabited this world J on the five Regions (Panchapradishah)§
as also of the three Continents that were.||
It is only those scholars who will master the secret meaning of the
Purusha Sukta — ^in which the intuition of the modem 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,^ and the terrestrial mortal man** 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
• Rig Veda^ x. 1x3. 5.
■r Ibid., i. 35. 8.
X Ibid.^ loc. cit.
I Ih'd., iz. 86. 29.
II 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 H3T)er-
borean, the I^emurian (adopting a name now known in Science), and the Atlantean. Most of Asia
issued from under the waters after the destruction of AUantis ; 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 yedas—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 iAird
that disappeared.
IT Compare T^shvakarman.
•• Ibid., X. 20. X, x6.
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642 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
these earliest ^?m/ teachings; and also to the seven primeval groups of
Mankind, as Vishvakarman represents divine Humanity collectively.*
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 Parsis who read it in their Vendiddd 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.f
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 [?] formulae and the strength of certain mythical [?] numbers, the
ancestors of the Indo-Iranians had been led to speak of seven worlds,} 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.^ Parsi mythology knows also of seven heavens. Hvaniratha itself
is divided into seven climes. (Orm. Ahr. \ 72.)|i
The same division and doctrine is to be found in the oldest and most
revered of the Hindu scriptures — the Rig Veda, Mention is made
therein of six Worlds, besides our Earth: the six Rajamsi above Prithivi,
the Earth, or "this" (Idam) as opposed to "that which is yonder'' (J,e,,
the six Globes on the three other planes or Worlds).^
The italics are ours to point out the identity of the tenets with those
• Nor is this Archaic Teaching so very unscientific, since one of the grreatest Naturalists of the age
— the late Professor Agassiz— admitted the multiplicity of the geographical origins of man, and sup-
ported it to the end of his life. The unity of the human species was accepted by the illustrious Pro-
fessor 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,
Aryans, 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 origrinal 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.
+ See the enumeration of the seven Spheres— not the "Karshvare of the earth," as generally
believed— in Pargard xix. 30, et seqg.
X The seven Worlds are, as has been said, the se\*en Spheres of the Chain, each presided over by one
of the seven "Great Gods" of every religion. When the religions became degraded and anthropo-
morphized, and the metaphysical ideas nearly forgotten, the S3mthesis 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 metaphjrsically.
\ 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 ?
II Vendidad, S. B. E.. vol. iv. pp. lix. Ix., and note.
II See Rig Veda, i. 34; iii. 56; vii. 10. 411, and v. 60, 6.
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THE ZOROASTRIAN SEPTENARY. 643
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 com-
memoration 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 Hind&s
and Parsis — 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 defi-
nition of the Gods. Those who are ignorant of the Esoteric Doctrine
of the earliest Aryans, can never assimilate or even understand cor-
rectly 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-Surya was the synthesis
and head, or the focus whence emanated in physics and also in meta-
physics, 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 BrShmans, who sought safety on the sum-
mits of the Himalayas, 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
Vendidad, 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 Mdnasaputras, 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 Teach-
ing shows it to be.
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644 '^HE SECRET DOCTRINE.
"WHien 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
Aryan Brdhmanical nation, and also the time of its descent into the
plains of Hindustan, which did not take place till millenniums later.
Yima, the so-called "first man" in the Vendiddd, 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 /irsf
**man'' who dies or disappears, not the first who is bom. The "son of
Vivanghat"* 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
diedf 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 Vendidad. Yima refuses to become the bearer of the law of
Ahura Mazda, saying:
"I was not bom, I was not taught to be the preacher and the bearer of thy law.**t
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 deaths*
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.
• yendidad, op. cit,^ p. 13.
t 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.
X Op. cit.f p. xa.
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THE ** BREATHS" OF THE "ONE BREATH." 645
"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 Armaita, 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 Mrd time. The whole of this is allegorical.
The three processes of stretching the Earth, refer to the three succes-
sive Continents and Races issuing one after and from the other, as
explained more fully elsewhere. After the f/iird time, Ahura Mazda
warns Yima in an assembly of "celestial gods" and "excellent mor-
tals" that upon the material world the fatal winters are going to fall,
and all It/e 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 2^ 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 Kima Loka — ^least of all NirvSna or
even Devachan — for the "Souls" of men who had no personal Egos,
there could be no intermediate periods between the incarnations. Like
the Phoenix, 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 sym-
bology with the Universal Doctrine.
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646 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Elsewhere the oldest Persian traditions, the relics of Mazdeism of
the still older Magians, are given, and some of them explained. Man-
kind 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 sepa-
rately''; 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 PrajSpatis, the evolvers of
beings. These are neither Gods, nor supernatural Beings, but ad-
vanced 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" (I) writes Irenaeus,* 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 un-
opened, others yet unknown, as well as in all the Purdnas, as much as,
if not much more than, even in the Jewish Bible, the numbers seven
and forty-nine (7 x 7) play a most prominent part. In the Puranas
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
• I. xxiv. I.
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THE SEPTENATE IN THE PURANAS. 647
seven Suns and absorb the material of the whole Universe. Thus the
Matsya Purana 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.*
Then again the same Purana shows that:
In all the Manvantaras, classes of Rishist appear by seven and seven^ and having
established a code of law and morality depart to felicity.^
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, undecay-
ing, full of fecundity. On him intelligent sages mount ; his wheels are all ther
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." §
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 Purdnas insist on the identity of Vishnu with
Time and Space, || 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 — Whence 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
Kumia and Linga Purdnas enumerate seven principal winds of that
name, which winds are the principles of Cosmic Space.^ They are
• Vishnu Purana, Wilson's Trans., i. Ixxx. •
+ As ParSshara 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 deityl
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 imper-
sonated might [VibhAtayah, 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 Br&hmans at all events.
X Ibid,, iii. 15.
\ Hymn xix. 53. '
If Vishnu is a//— the worlds, the stars, the seas, etc. Vishnu " is all that is, all that is not. . . .
[But] he is not a sabstance (Vastubhfita)." ( Vishnu Pur&na, Book U, 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."
IT Vishnu Purana, Wilson's Trans., ii. 306.
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648 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
intimately connected with Dhruva* (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 Aryan Scriptures, the number has passed
through Indian, Egyptian, Chaldaean, Greek, Jewish, Roman, and
finally Christian mystic thought, until it landed in, and remained in-
delibly 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 aeons.
The mysterious number is once more prominent in the no less
mysterious Maruts. The Vdyu Purdna shows, and the Harivamsha
corroborates, concerning the Maruts — the oldest as the most incom-
prehensible of all the secondary or lower Gods in the Rig Veda :
That they are bom in every Manvantara [Round], seven times seven (or forty-nine);
that, in each Manvantara, y^/^r times seven (or twenty-eight) obtain emancipation,
but their places 2^^ filled up by persons reborn in that character A
What are the Maruts in their Esoteric meaning, and who those persons
"reborn in that character"? In Mh& Rik and other Vedas, the Maruts
are represented as the Storm Gods and the frietids 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 Yogis:
The Mahd Yogi, 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 tidth the great spirit of the universe is eventually gained.X
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 Rdmdyana and the Purdnas,
their mother, Diti — the sister, or complement, and a form of Aditi —
* Therefore it is said in the Purdnas that the sight at night of Dhruva, the polar star, and of the
celestial Porpoise (Shishumira, 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 appari-
tion "—the Agni, Mahendra, Kashyapa, and Dhruva, placed in the tail of Ursa Minor (Shishum&ra)—
focussed in a certain way and on a certain object, produce extraordinary results. The Astro- magians
of India will understand what is meant.
t Ibid., iii. 15.
X Dowson's Hindu Classical Dictionary, sub voc. "Shiva," p. 298.
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WHO ARK THE MARUTS? 649
-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,"* 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.f These Deities are only another
aspect, or a development, of the KumSras, who are patronymically
Rudras, like many others.J
Diti, being Aditi — unless the contrary is proven to us — Aditi, we
say, or AkSsha 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 AkSsha.
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 M^y^, 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 AhamkSra, the
feeling of Egotism, or "I-am-ness" and ignorance; but in the begin-
ning Indra was one of the greatest Gods of the Hindu Pantheon, as the
Rig Veda shows. Suradhipa the "chief of the gods," has fallen down
from Jishnu, the "Leader of the Celestial Host" — the Hindu St. Michael
— to an opponent of asceticism, the enemy of every holy aspiration.
He is shown married to Aindri (IndrSni), the personification of Aindri-
yaka, 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. Yogis,
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 KSma principle.
• Viihnu Purana^ op. cti., ii. 78.
t In the Rdmdyana it is Bila-Rima, Krishna's elder brother, who does this.
X With regard to the origin of Rudra, it is stated in several Purdnas that his (spiritual) progeny,
created in him by Brahma, is not confined to either the seven Kumiras 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, Brahmi desires his son Rudra to form crea-
tures of a different and mortal nature.'* Rudra refusing to create, desists, etc., hence Rudra is the
first rebel. (Ldnga, Vdyu, Afatsya, and other Purdnas.)
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650 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
the body of passions and desires. This is demonstrated by BrahmS
telling the conquered God that his frequent defeats were due to Elarma,
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 Yogi, determined to resist all such temptations, and thus
destroy the passions within his earthly personality. Indra succeeds
again, because flesh conquers spirit.* He divides the "embryo" (of
new divine Adeptship, begotten once more by the Ascetics of the Aryan
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,t
but also to the seven degrees of Adeptship), and then each portion inta
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-bom 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; {p) the
Occult potencies concealed in the manifold aspects of AkSsha's lower
principles — her body, or Sthula Sharira, representing the terrestrial,
lower atmosphere of every inhabited Globe — this mystically and
sidereally; (f) 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 NirmtnakSyas ; of those Egos for whom — since they are
beyond illtcsion — there is no Devachan, who, having either voluntarily
renounced Nirvina for the good of mankind, or who not yet having
* Diti is shown to have been thus frustrated in the Dvipara Yuga, during that period when the
Fourth Race was flourishing.
t Notwithstanding the terrible, and evidently purposed^ confusion of Manus, Rishis, and their
progeny in the Purancts^ 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-
Purana, III. i; Wilson's Trans., iii. 19.) Six Manvantaras are given, the seventh being our own, in
the Vishnu Purdna. The Vdyu Pur&na 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 prc^reny
of the Progenitors of mankind. All the Purdnas speak of the seven Prajipatis of this period or
Round.
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THE DOOM OF CONTINUAI, RE-BIRTH. 651
reached it, remain invisible on Earth. Therefore are the Maruts*
shown, firstly, as the sons of Shiva- Rudra, the Patron Yog!, 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-Jivas (Monads)
have been re-bom, 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 hope-
lessly in the meshes of ignorance and misery were it not for this extra^
neous he/p, they are re-bom 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 in-
cluded. This gives us an ample knowledge of their true nature.
The same for the septenary division of cosmos and the human prin-
ciples. The Purdnas, along with other sacred texts, teem with allu-
sions to this. First of all, the Mundane Egg which contained Brahmt,.
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 BrahmA) [Andakatdhajt
Around the shell flows Water, which is surrounded with Fire ; Fire by
Air; Air by Ether; Ether by the Origin of the Elements (AhamkSra);
the latter by Universal Mind, or "Intellect," as Wilson translates. It
relates to Spheres of Being as much as to Principles. Prithivi 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
• ** Chikshusha was the Manu of the sixth period [Third Round and Third Race], in which Indra was
Manojava"— Mantradruma in the Bhagavata Purdna. {Vishnu Purdna, Wilson's Trans., iii. la.)
As there is a perfect analogy between the Great Round (Mahdkalpa), 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 Pall or the separation of
aexes. Rudra, as the father of the Maruts, has many points of contact with Indra, the* Marutv&n, or
"I^rd of the Maruts." Rudra is said to have received his name because of his weeping. Hence
BrahmA called him Rudra; but he wept yet seven times more and so obtained seven other names— o€
which he uses one during each "period."
+ /bid.f ii. 231.
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^52 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
key to be read correctly — three terrestrial and three celestial Earths are
mentioned as having been called into existence simultaneously with
Bhumi, 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? Evi-
dently there must be an Occult meaning in the statement under con-
sideration, lyct us see. The "Earth that floats" on the Universal
Ocean of Space, which BrahmS divides in the Purdnas into seven
Zones, is Prithivi, 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.*
Furthermore, it is not only in the Hindu scriptures and philosophy
that one finds references to the seven Earths, but in the Persian,
Phoenician, Chaldaean, and Egyptian cosmogonies, and even in
Rabbinical literature. The Phoenix t — called by the Hebrews Onech
pD27, 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.
• In Vishnu PuranA, 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 : " ThU 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
<3X)re8 or fifty- four lakhs. ... * Whenever any contradictions in different Pur&nas 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.
t The Phoeuix, 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.
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PERSIAN SYMBOLOGY. 655
it lives another thousand years, up to seven titnes seven* 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
Kuran, shoots out new branches and vegetation at every resurrection
of the Kerkes or Phoenix; the **Day of Judgment" meaning a minor
Pralaya. The author of the Book of God and the Apocalypse believes
that:
The Phoenix 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 Phoenix exhibit the successive de-
struction 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 :\ 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 oi these revolu-
tions, and knew not how many more she had to see.^
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 estab-
lished 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 Hindils, 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 mjrthos 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 preexistence
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. §
It shows rather that the initiated Jews borrowed, and their non-
* See Book of Alt, Russian transl.
t ihie tense is past, because the book is allegorical, and has to veil the truths it contains.
X Oriental Collections^ ii. X19; quoted by Kenealy, op. cit., pp. 175, 176.
\ Ibid,, loc. cit.
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654 '^^^ SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Gnos-
tics, 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 moun-
tains, on which the woman sitteth. And there are seven kings; five are fallen, and
one w, and the other is not yet come.*
Who, in the least acquainted with the symbolical language of old,
toII 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
^ther, 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 IILf
E.
SEVEN IN ASTRONOMY, SCIENCE, AND MAGIC
Again, number seven is closely connected with the Occult signifi-
•cance 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, KSrttikeya. It was the Pleiades (in Sanskrit, Krittikis)
who gave this name to the God, Klirttikeya being the planet Mars,
astronomically. As a God he is the son of Rudra, born without the
intervention of a woman. He is a KumSra, a "virgin youth" again,
generated in the fire from the Seed of Shiva — ^the Holy Spirit — hence
called Agni-bhu. The late Dr. Kenealy believed that, in India, KSrtti-
keya 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
• op. at., xvii. 9, 10. + Section VI ; Leviiicus, xxiii. 15, et seqg.
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THE CYCLE OF THE NAROS. 655
sisters, the Pleiades, are needed for the completion of this most secret
and mysterious of all the astronomical and religious symbols. There-
fore, when intended to commemorate one particular event, KSrttikeya
was shown, of old, as a KumSra, 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 seveh sidereal sisters,
Elirttikeya is seen accompanied by KaumSri, or SenS, his female
aspect. He is then riding on a peacock, the bird of Wisdom and
Occult Knowledge, and the Hindu Phoenix, 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 Dvidasha-kara, the "twelve-handed,'* and DvidashSksha,
"twelve-eyed." It is as Shakti-dhara, however, the "spear-holder,"
and the conqueror of TSraka, Taraka-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 apocal5^tic 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 Hindu 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,* "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
• Vie de Notre Seigneur J isus- Christ, Introduction; quoted by De Mirville, Pneumatologie, iv. 50.
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656 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 calcula-
tion * True, there are other ancient writers guilty of like fallacious
speculations; Calisthenes, for instance, who assigns to the astronomical
observations of the Chaldaeans only 1,903 years, whereas Epigenes
recognizes 720,000 years.f 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 DevatS or Pitris.
Again, 2 of these months constitute a Rudu, 3 Rudus 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 preg-
nant with results in Europe. At the close of the past and the begin-
ning of the present century, Bailly, Dupuis, and others, relying upon
the purposely mutilated accounts of Hindu chronology, brought from
India by certain unscrupulous and too zealous missionaries, built quite
a fantastic theory on the subject. Because the Hindus 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,J is
found mentioned in Hindu literature, therefore, it becomes a verified
fact that their ^^ar was only half a year, when it was not called a dayt
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 Rudu — to this day in some provinces. Moreover, Diodorus
Siculus§ calls 'thirty days an Egyptian year," or that period during
which the moon performs a complete revolution. Pliny and Plutarch ||
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
• Sec SuidaA, sub wt>c.*HXiO?.
+ Pliny. Hiit. Nat., vii. 56.
X "Metises in quinos dies dcscripserunt dies" (Ivlii. 9).
\ Lib. i. c. 26.
II Hist. Nat., vii. 48, and Life of Numa, \ 16.
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VARIOUS CYCLIC CALCULATIONS. 657
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 Rudu of the Hindus. The year of 2 months' duration, and
the period of 60 days also, was a universal measure of time in anti-
quity, as Bailly himself shows in his Traiti de V Astronomic Indienne et
Orientale. The Chinamen, according to their own books, divided their
year into two parts, from one equinox to the other;* 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 Abbe Chappe.f But is all this
any reason for claiming that when the Hindu Purdtias 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 mys-
teries of Nature. It is these laws, again, and their processes on the
sidereal, terrestrial, and moral planes, which enabled the old Astrono-
mers to calculate correctly the duration of the cycles and their respec-
tive 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 periodi-
city were well known, became thus respectively the great ruler and
rulers of our little system in all its seven domains, or "spheres of
action."!
This has been so evident and remarkable, that even many of the
modem men of Science, Materialists as well as Mystics, have had their
attention called to this law. Physicians and Theologians, Mathe-
maticians 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:
• Mint. Acad. Ins.^ xvi. c. 48; iii. 183.
t Voyage en Sibirie, iii. 19.
% The spheres of action of the combined Forces of Evolution and Karma are (i) the Super-spiritual
or Noumenal; (3) the Spiritual; (3) the Psychic; (4) the Astro-ethereal; (5) the Sub-astral; (6) the
Vital; and (7) the purely Physical Spheres.
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658 THE SKCRKT DOCTRINE.
The Circle is not the '* One'' but the ''Alir
In the higher \^Heaven\ the impenetrable Rajah* it \the CircW] becomes
OnCy because [it is"] the indivisiblCy and there can be no Tau in it.
In the second [of the three Rajamsi, or the three " Worlds''\ the One be-
comes Two [male and female'], and Three [tuith 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,^
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 plane-
tary 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 modem 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 WhewelPs 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 percep-
tion of forms, colours, and sounds, and probably of taste also, if we could analyze
our sensations of this kind with mathematical accuracy. ^
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].§
• Adbhutam, sec Atharva Veda^ x. 105.
t In HindiUsin, 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. K,
vii. 99, X ; cf. i. 755» 5). It is the Divo Rajah, or the '* sky," as they think it. But it is something
besides this in Occultism. The sentence, pareshu gUhyeshu vrateshu {cf., i. 155, 3, and ix. 75, 2, or
again, x. 114), in Atharva Veda, has yet to be explained.
% Medical Review, July, 1844.
) H. Grattan Guinness, F.R.G.S., in his Approaching End of the Age, p. 258.
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THE SEPTENATE IN PHYSIOLOGY. 659
Dr. Laycock, writing on the "Periodicity of Vital Phenomena/**
records a "most remarkable illustration and confirmation of the law in
insects." f
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, %
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
• Lancet, 1842, 1843.
t 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 thb larva or ovum op 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. I«aycock states that : " Whatever type the fever may exhibit, there will be a paroxysm
on the seventh day the 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 Chaldsean Astrolatry
and Astrology. Thus Materialistic Science— in its medicine, the most materialistic of a//— 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 con-
trolling both evolution and involution (or death) in the realms of entomology, ichthyology and ornith-
ology, 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 develop-
ment ? And why, furthermore, should not the most ancient Adepts have studied and thoroughly
mastered these csrclic 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 dajrs out of seven; and that on the seventh day it is slower." {Edinburgh Medical
and Surgical foumal, 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. I«aycock dindes 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. TTiis 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.** (/bid., p. 267.) If Sciencedoes this, why should she scorn the Occult information, that— to
use Dr. l,aycock's language— on^ 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.
t op. cit., p. 269.
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66o THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
the Occult chronology of the Bible; just as, while rejecting the theories,
hypotheses, and generalizations of Modem 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.* 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."t But all this
can be found in the Archaic Doctrine. And if the common source of
the chronology in every scripture, however veiledy 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 PaurSnic Cosmogonies. For the first " week of creation" shows the
septiformity of its chronology and thus connects it with BrahmS'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 jnonths, elapsed between the "Creation" and the "Nativity,"
is a clear and unmistakable connection with the 4,320,000 years of the
Hindu Yugas. Otherwise, why make such efforts to prove that these
figures, which are preeminently Chaldaean and Indo- Aryan, play such
a part in the New Testament? This we shall now prove still more
forcibly.
I^t the impartial critic compare the two accounts — the Vishnu
Purana and the Bible — and he will find that the "seven creations" of
BrahmS are at the foundation of the "week of creation" in Genesis.
• Sec for the length of such cycles or Yug^as 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 Par&shara, "and the basis of calculation for larger
cycles" (Miscell. Essays^ i. io6 and zo8) — up to the Mah& Yuga or the famous cycle of 4,320,000
years.
t 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.
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THE HAIRY SYMBOL. 66l
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
^the Kabalah, Take the Zohar, the "Book of Concealed Mystery,"
however now disfigured, and compare. The seven Rishis and the four-
teen Manus, of the seven Manvantaras, issue from Brahma'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 Brahmli Prajlipati. Speaking of the "Skull" (Head)
of Macroprosopus, the Ancient One* (in Sanskrit Sanat is an appella-
tion of Brahmli), 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 si^e and on the other of the skull [x,^.,
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], t
"We six are lights which shine forth from a sevetith (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."!
Tetragrammaton is Brahmt PrajSpati, who assumed four forms, in
order to create four kinds of supernal creatures, i.e,, made himself y&«r-
fold, or the manifest Quaternary ;§ after that, he is re-bom in the seven
Rishis, his MSnasaputras, "Mind-born Sons," who became later, nine,
* Brahmi creates in the first Kalpa, or on the first Day, various " sacrificial animals " (Pashavah), or
the celestial bodies and the Zodiacal si^s, and " plants," which he uses in sacrifices at the opening:
ofTreti Yu^a. 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 sub-
division 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— 4n this Manvantara of ours. It is the same Bsoterically in the Elohistic
Genesii tchap. i), and in the Jehovistic copy, as in Hindii cosmogony.
t Op. cit.y w. 70, 71, 80; The Kabbalah Unveiled^ S. L. MacGregor Mathers, pp. 120, zaz.
X "The Greater Holy Assembly," v. 1,160.
) See Vishnu Parana, I. v.
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662 THE SECRET DOCTiaNE.
twenty-one, and so on, and who are all said to be born from various
parts of Brahmli *
There are two Tetragrammatons: the Macroprosopus and the Micro-
prosopus. 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 sevmfold 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?"t
— where they distinguished between Microprosopus, who is called
Tetragrammaton, and between Macroprosopus, who is called Ain, the
Negatively Existent. J
Therefore, Tetragrammaton is the Three made four and the Four
made three, and is represented on this Earth by his seven "Com-
panions," 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 {
[i,e., ten for the unmanifested, seven for the manifested Universe].
• It is very surprisins: to see theologians and Oriental scholars expressing: indig:nation at the
"depraved taste" of the Hindi! mystics, who, not content with having "invented" the Mind-bom
Sons of Brahmi, make the Rishis, Manus, and Prajipatis of every kind spring from various parts of
the body of their primal Progenitor, Brahmi. (See Wilson's footnote in his Vishnu Parana, 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. I^t 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^., 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 Brahmi in any of the Purdnas. (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 m)rstery 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 alle-
gories in the Bible, and is more esoteric than is the latter.
t Simplified in the English Bible to : "Is the Lord [! I] among us, or not.>"
X Verse 83; op. cit., p. 121.
) 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 Chaldsean Book of
Numbers^ which is not extant.
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THE NUMBER SEVEN IN CHEMISTRY. 663
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].*
Thus the Tetrad is Mi^roprosopus, and the latter is the male-female
Chokmah-Binah, the second and third Sephiroth. The Tetragram-
maton is the very essence of number seven, in its terrestrial signifi-
cance. Seven stands between four and nine — the basis and founda-
tion, astrally, of our physical world and man, in the kingdom of
Malkuth.
For Christians and believers, this reference to Zecharidh and espe-
cially to the Epistle of Peter,] 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 (/.^., 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 qua non, in the production of occult astral
phenomena.
Thus, if the chemical elements are arranged in groups according
to their atomic weights, they will be found to constitute a series
of rows of seven; the first, second, etc., members of each row
bearing a close analogy in all their properties to the correspond-
ing members of the next row. The following table, copied from
Hellenbach's Magie der Zahlen, and corrected, exhibits this law
and fully warrants the conclusion he draws in the following
words:
We thus see that chemical variety, so far as we can grasp its inner nature,
depends upon numerical relations, and we have further found in this variety a
ruling law for which we can assign no cause; we find a law of periodicity governed
by the number seven.
Verse* 1152, 1158, 1159; op. cit., p. 254. + / Ptter, ii. 2-5.
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664
THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Row
Group
Group
II.
Group
ni.
Group
IV.
Group
V.
Group
VI.
Group
VII.
J
L 7 Be 9-3
Bit
C12
N14
0 16
F19
2
3
Na 23 Mg 24
K 39 Ca 40
Al27*3
Se44
Si 28
Ti48
P3X
V51
S32
Cr52*4
CI 35-4
Mn54'8
«Fe56. €058*6
JNi58. [Cu63*3]
4
Cu 63-3 ' Zn 65
Ga68*2
Ge72
As -5
Se78
Br 79-5
5
Rb 85-2 1 Sr 87-2
Y89-5
Zr90
Nb94
Mo 96
— 100
4 Ru 103. Rh 104
( Pd 106. [Ag 107*6]
6
Ag 107*6 ' Cd 111*6
In 113*4
Sn 1x8
Sb 122
Tei25
1126*5
7
8
9
10
Cs 132*5
Ba 136*8
1^139
Cei40
Di 144
—
—
AU197
Hg200
Er 170
Tl 204
Pb2o6
Tai82
Bi 210
W 184
—
s Os 196. It 196*7
) Pt 196*7. [Au 197]
The eighth element in this list is, as it vsrere, the octave of the first,
and the ninth of the second, and so on; each element being almost
identical in its properties with the corresponding element in each of
the septenary rows; a phenomenon which accentuates the septenary-
law of periodicity. For further details the reader is referred to Hellen-
bach*s work, where it is also shown that this classification is confirmed
by the spectroscopic peculiarities of the elements.
It is needless to refer in detail to the number of vibrations consti-
tuting 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; t,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 [Tetragramma-
ton] 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.*
• "The Greater Holy Assembly," w. 1160, 1161; op. cit.^ p. 255.
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THE SEVEN PRIESTS OF THE ZUNIS. 665
The ancient and modem Western American ZuAi 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 oflSciating priests" spoken of in the AnugUd, the name
given to the "seven senses," exoterically, and to the seven human
principles, Esoterically. Whence this identity of symbolism? Shall
Tve still doubt the fact of Arjuna going over to P^tSla, the Antipodes,
America, and there marrying Ulupi, the daughter of the Nliga, or
rather Nargal, king? But to the Zufti priests.
These receive, to this day, an annual tribute of com of seven colours.
TJndistinguished 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 com 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; com 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" com, 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 Gushing, who, as many are aware, became a Zufti,
lived with them, was initiated into their religious mysteries, and has
learned more about them than any other man now living.
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666 THB SBCRBT DOCTRINE.
Seven is also the great magic number. In the Occult Records the
weapon mentioned in the Purdnas and the Mahdbhdrata — ^the Agne-
ySstra or "fiery weapon" bestowed by Aurva upon his ChelS Sagara — xs-
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 modem Sanskritists. Wilson exercises
his penetration over it, on several pages in his Specimens of the Hindu
Theatre, and finally fails to explain it. He can make nothing out of
the AgneySstra, for he argues :
These weapons are of a very unintelligible character. Some of them are occa-
sionally wielded as missiles ; bat, in general, they appear to be mystical powers
exercised by the individual-^^s^^ as those of paralyzing an enemy, or locking his
senses fast ia sleeps or bringing down storm, and rain, and fire, from heaven.* . . .
They are supposed to assume celestial shapes, endowed with human faculties. . . .
The Rdmdyana calls them the sons of KrishAshva.t
The Shastra-devatSs, "Gods of the divine weapons," are no more
AgneySstras, the weapons, than the gunners of modem 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 armi-
form progeny of Krishashva, "the allegorical origin of the [Ague-
ySstra] weapons is, undoubtedly, the more ancient." J It is the fiery
javelin of Brahma.
A
The seven-fold Agneyastra, like the seven senses and the seven prin-
ciples, 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
• See pp. 445, 446, supra,
t Op. cit.t i. 297, 2nd ed.
t It is. But Asrney&stra are fiery "missile weapons," not "edged" weapons, as there is
difference between Shastra and Astra in Sanskrit.
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THE SEPTENARY IN EGYPT. 66/
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 Bohme'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 mediaeval mysteries. . . .
The followers of Bohme look on such matter as the divine revelation of his in-^
spired Seership. They know nothing of the natural genesis, the history and per-
sistence of the "Wisdom"* of the past (or of the broken links), and are unable to
recognize the physical features of the ancient "Seven Spirits" beneath their
modem metaphysical or alchemist mask. A second connecting link between the
theosophy of Bohme and the physical origins of Egyptian thought, is extant in
the fragments of Hermes Trismegistus,\ No matter whether these teachings are
called Illuminatist, Buddhist, Kabalist, Gnostic, Masonic, or Christian, the ele-
mental types can only be truly known in their beginnings.^ 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. § It is useless for us to read our later thought into the earliest types
of expression, and then say the ancients meant that!|| 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 pre-
tensions to supernatural origin or supernatural knowledge. IT
But the able author of The Book of the Begiyinings 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
• Yet there are some, who may know something of these, even outside the author's lines, wide as>
they undeniably are.
t This connectingr 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
g^uidinfiT links between ancient, mediseval, and modem thought, but, unfortunately, too loosely
edited.
X Ay; but how can the learned writer prove that these "beginnings" were precisely in Egjrpt, and
nowhere else; and only 50,000 years ago?
I Precisely: and this is just what the Theosophists do. They have never claimed "original inspira-
tion," 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; significa-
tions, moreover, which emanate from a Hierarchy (or Hierarchies, if preferred) of living Wise Men —
mortals notwithstanding that Wisdom— who reject every approach to supematuralism.
II 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.
II Tlte Natural Genesis, i. 318. It is to be feared that Mr. Massey has not succeeded. We have
ow followers as he has his followers; and Materialistic Science steps in and takes little account of
both his and our speculations !
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-668 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
from his learned lecture on **The Seven Souls of Man.*** 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, t
Just so, for the Hindus 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
ivhether 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.}
So it was with the Aryans. One has but to read the Puranas about
the beginnings of Brahmt and his Egg, to see this. Have the Aryans
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. }
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 refer-
able 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. \\
And it was so used. For:
The seven souls of the Pharaoh are often mentioned in the Egjrptian texts. . . .
Seven souls, or principles in man were identified by our British Druids, . . . The
• The fact that this learned Ejryptologrist does not recogniie 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 Ksoteridsm, and leaves out
the other five. Otherwise he would have promptly understood that what he calls the phjrsiological
divisions of the living Soul of man, are regarded by Theosophists as also psychological and spiritoaL
t Op. cil., p. 2.
t Ibid., loc. cit.
\ Ibid., loc. cit.
II Ibid., loc. cit.
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THE "PRINCIPLES" IN EGYPTIAN ** METAPHYSICS." 669.
Rabbins also ran the number of souls up to seven ; so, likewise, do the Karens of
India.*
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. Riipa, body or element of form.
2. Prllna, the breath of life.
3. Astral body.
4. Manas, or intelligence. t
5. K&ma Riipa, or animal soul.
6. Buddhi, or spiritual soul.
7. Atma, pure spirit.
1. Kha, body.
2. Ba, the soul of breath.
3. Khaba, the shade.
4. Akhu, intelligence or perception.
5. Seb, ancestral soul.
6. Putah, the first intellectual father.
7. Atmu, a divine, or eternal soul.J
Further on, the lecturer formulates these seven (Egyptian) Souls, as.
(i) 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 \s perpetuated permanently.
From the exoteric and physiological standpoint this may be very
correct; it becomes less so from the Esoteric point of view. To main-
tain 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 Egyptiaui
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. §
• Ibid., p. 4.
f This is a great mistake made in the Esoteric enumeration. Manas is the fiflh, not the fourth ;
and Manas corresponds precisely with Seb, the Esryp^i&n fifth principle, for that portion of Manas
which follows the two higher principles, is the ancestral soul, indeed, the bright, immortal thread or
the higher Ego, to which clings the spiritual aroma of all the lives or births.
% Ibid., p. 2.
) Ibid., pp. 2, 3.
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670 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
And a still greater one, as these stars represent also the sev^n 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 doc-
trine with the old Egyptians. In a series of remarkable articles in the
Sphinx, of Munich, Herr Franz I^mbert 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 them-
selves, but the following diagram, summing up the author's conclusions,
is demonstrative evidence of the identity of Egyptian Psychology with
the septenary division in Esoteric Buddhism.
On the left hand side the kabalistic names of the corresponding
human principles are placed, and on the right the hieroglyphic names
with their renderings as in the diagram of Franz I^mbert.
Kabai^ah.
Yechida
Upper circle:
Tzelem of
Neshamah
Middle circle:
Tzelem of
Ruach
Lower Circle:
Tzelem of
Nephesh
Chayah
Neshamah
Ruach*
Nephesh
Kuch
ha
Guf
Guf
Hieroglyphics.
Chu — Divine Spirit
Cheybi — Spiritual Soul.
{ Intellectual Soul,
( the Intelligence.
\ The Heart,
' Feeling,
Animal Soul.
The Astral Body,
Evestrum,
Sidereal Man.
{Vital Force,
Archaeus,
Mumia.
Chat— The Elementary Body.
Bai
Ab
Hati
Ka
This is a very fair representation of the number of the ''principles"
of Occultism, but much confused; and this is what we call the seven
"principles" in man, and what Mr. Massey calls "souls," giving the
same name to the Ego or the Monad which reincarnates and "resur-
rects," so to speak, at each rebirth, as the Egyptians did, namely — the
*' Renewed." But how can Ruach (Spirit) be lodged in KSma Rupa?
What does Bohme, the prince of all the mediaeval seers, say?
t Thert seems a confusion, lasting- for many centuries, in the minds of Western Kabalists. They
call Ruach (Spirit) what we call KAma RApa ; whereas, with us, Ruach would be the Spiritual Soul,
Buddhi, and Nephesh the fourth principle, the Vital, Animal Soul. Bliphas l^vi falls into the a
■error.
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THE '* watermen" OF THE "BUNDAHISH." 671
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,
anguishf and substantialiiy, thus analyzing the lower in his own mystic way] ; what-
ever 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.*
And again:
The Creator hath, in the body of this world, generated himself as it were creaturely
in liis 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, t
This is rendering in mystical language our theosophical doctrine.
But how can we ag^ee with Mr. Gerald Massey when he states that:
The Seven Races of Men that have been sublimated and made Planetary [?] by
Esoteric Buddhism,} may be met with in the Bundahish as (i) 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.}
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 asser-
tion 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." "lam the hawk." .*'I am the ape." . . . *^I am the
crocodile whose soul cofnes from MBi^J'' . . . ** I am the soul 0/ the gods.'^\
The last sentence" but one is explained by the lecturer, who says
parenthetically, **that is, as a type of intelligence^^ and the last as mean-
ing, "the Horns, or Christ, as the outcome of all."
• S^natura Reruntt xiv. pars. 10, 14, 15 ; The Natural Genesis, i. 317.
+ Aurora, xziv. 27.
X This is indeed news I 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.
) "The Seven Souls of Man," pp. 26, 27.
II Ibid,, p. 26.
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672 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Buddh-
ism 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 Esoteri-
cism of the old Arhats, and that which has now survived in India
among the few BrShmans 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 Brfih-
manical system may be judged by what one of India's learned meta-
physicians and VedSntic 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 con-
nection 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 develop-
ment presents some points of similarity to the gradual development of the rajrs 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 pheno-
mena 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-
Him&layan Esoteric Doctrine." In fact, it has a closer connection with the BrAh-
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THE TRANS- AND CIS-HIMAXAYAN ESOTERIC DOCTRINE. 673
manical 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 classifi-
cation 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 Prajfid 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.*
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-HimSlayan 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-Himaiayan Esoteric
Doctrine, but is simply the common inheritance of all such Schools,
left to the Sages of the Fifth Root-Race by the great Siddhast 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 Kriy^haktic 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 cer-
tain Brotherhood. The said School or Fraternity being closely con-
nected with a certain island of an inland sea — believed in by both
Hindus 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 BrShmanical Logos than with the Buddhist
Logos," since both are identical, whether the one Logos is called
Ishvara or Avalokiteshvara, Brahmit or PadmapSni. These are, how-
• The Theosophist, 1887 (Madras), pp. 705, 706.
t Accordingr to Shvet&shvatara- Upanishad (357) the Siddhas are those who are possessed from birth
of "superhuman " powers, as also of "knowledjfe and indifference to the world." According to the
Occult teachings, however, the Siddhas are Nirminakiyas 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.
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674 '^H® SECRET DOCTRINE.
ever, very small differences, more fanciful than real, in fact. BrSh-
manism 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 BrShmanism is the Advaita
philosophy, whose followers are called by the pipus "Buddhists in
disguise"; as that of orthodox Buddhism is Northern Mysticism, as
represented by the disciples of the philosophies of the YogtchSrya
School of Arydsangha and the MahSySna, who are twitted in their
turn by their co-religionists as "VedSntins in disguise." The Esoteric
Philosophy of both these can be but one if carefully analyzed and
compared, as Gautama Buddha and ShankarachSrya 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* There the BrShmana 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: t
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 ^v^
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
• "The Sacred Books of the East," viii. 284, et seqg.
t I propose to follow here the text and not the editor's commentaries, who accepts Arjuna Mishra
and Ntlakantha's dead-Utter explanations. Our Orientalists never trouble to think that if a native
<:ommentator is a non-initiate, he could not explain correctly, and if an Initiate, would not.
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AN ALLEGORY PROM THE "ANUGiTi/* 675
seven fiinctions 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.*
The explanation is harmless, if unsatisfactory. Says the BrShmana,
continuing his description :
That forest is filled with trees producing flowers and fruits of fctur 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,t 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 KshetrajAaJ 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 mean-
ing 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 § and Buddhi. This is quite apparent from the
• Sec Chhdndogya, p. 219, and Shankara's commentary thereupon.
t 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.
X The "Supreme Self," sasrs Krishna, in the Bhagavad GUd, pp. 102, et seqg,
\ As Mahat, or Universal Intelligence, is first bom, 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 Shankar&chlirya says : " The moon is the
mind, and the sun the understanding." The Sun and Moon are the deities of our planetary Macro-
cosmos, and therefore Shankara adds that: "The mind and the understanding are the respective
deities of the [human] organs." (See Brihaddranyaka, pp. 521, et seqg.) This is perhaps why Axjuna
Mishra says that the Moon and the Fire (the Self, the Sun) constitute the universe.
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676 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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
Kshetrajfta — the Soul's Spiritual Sun. Into the latter, in time, Manas
itself must be absorbed. It has worshipped "g^eat sages" and given
hospitality to /^rr^^/nW 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, carry-
ing out the imagery. These females — who, according to Aijuna
Mishra, are the Mahat, AhamkSra and five Tanmatras — 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 great-
ness, enlightenment, victory, perfection and power — these seven rays follow after
this same sun [Kshetrajfta, the Higher Self]. . . . Those whose wishes are reduced
[the unselfish]; . . . whose sins [passions] are burnt up by penance, merging the
self in the self,* 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-] bom so as not to lose courage. Such, indeed, is this holy
forest. . . . And understanding it, they [the sages] act (accordingly), being
directed by the Kshetrajfta.
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 ritual-
ism, 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 infalli-
bility for anything he may say or write upon Occult matters. The
• "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 Atman in the Universal Self.
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ENDLESS IS THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH. 677
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 /sis 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
Avatara. 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 uncon-
sciously, by a number of ancient, mediaeval, and modem writers.
What the former said, was well said; what the latter repeated, has
generally been distorted. An instance: Read the Pythagorean Frag-
ments, and study the septenary man as given by the Rev. G. Oliver,
the learned Mason, in h\s 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.*
Compare this jumbled account and distribution of Western Theo-
sophic Philosophy with the latest Theosophic explanations by the
• op. cit., p. 179.
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678 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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,*
As to the charge that our School has not adopted the sevenfold
classification of the Brdhmans, 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 Prajria or Conscioustiess ; and, above all, to realize thoroughly
what Prajfia w, 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 ike 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.
• Prov., ix. I.
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PART III.
ADDENDA.
SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED.
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The knowledgre of this nether world—
5>ay, friend, what is it, false or true?
The false, what mortal cares to know?
The true, what mortal ever knew ?
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ADDENDA.
SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE
CONTRASTED.
SECTION L
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 dis-
creet. But it is estimated that 75 per cent, of European Scientists are
Evolutionists. Are these representatives of Modem 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 in-
sincere 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 Hseckel, 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 Theo-
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682 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
logical God than is that of Kant. Bishop Temple's truce with mate-
rialistic 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 Hseckel 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, Hseckel, 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.*
* De Quatrefages, T^e Human Species, p. iii. 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.)
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** physiological" versus "natural*' selection. 685
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.*
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 everyday 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:
Physioi^ogicai, Sei^KCTIon.— 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 condi-
tions 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.t
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.
• Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism, p. 290.
-f Series II, Vol. VI, p. 769 (Ed. 1886). To this an editorial remark adds that an "P.J.B.," in the
Athenaum (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 aflfect the internal as well as the external organs
of a group of allied individuals. The " physiological selection " of morphological species is a con^
fusion of ideas; that of physiological species a redundancy of terms.
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684 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 [! !].*
And before this, he alludes to :
The overwhelming array of facts which Darwin gave in support of his hypo-
thesis, and which triumphantly carried the theory of Natural Selection over all
obstacles and objections. t
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 sub-
sistence; the constant battle for life — the "struggle to obtain enough
to eat and to escape being eaten" added to the environmental condi-
tions— necessitates a perpetual weeding out of the unfit. The ilite 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 stereo-
typed 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 secondar>' causes — pro-
Op. cit., p. 79. t Ibid., p. 48.
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THE OCCULT AND THE MODERN DOCTRINES. 685
duces the ''variations" in the organisms themselves? Many of these
secondary causes are purely physical — climatic, dietarjs etc. Very
well. But beyond the secondary aspects of organic evolution, a deeper
principle has to be sought for. The Materialist's "spontaneous varia-
tions," 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 Hseckel, 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 diflFerentiation, grouped under the
head of sexual selection, natural selection, climate, isolation, etc., mis-
lead 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 intelli-
gence pervading matter, ultimately traceable to a reflection of the
Divine and DhySn-Chohanic wisdom.* 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 Selec-
tion, regards Evolution as being intelligently guided by the Uncon-
scious— the Cosmic Logos of Occultism. But the latter acts only
mediately through Fohat, or Dhy^n-Chohanic energy, and not quite in
the direct manner which the great pessimist describes.
• N&geli'8 "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 Dhy&n-Chohanic thought.
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^86 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
It is this divergence among men of Science, their mutual, and often
their j^^-contradictions, that g^ves 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 Modem 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 alofie,^ This stupendous
pretension comes from one, who, to prove his pithecoid descent, has
not hesitated to include the Lemuridae among the ancestors of man;
these have been promoted by him to the rank of Prosimiae, i?ideciduate
mammals, to which he very incorrectly contributes a decidua and a
discoidal placenta.f For this Haeckel 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.J
Such opposition notwithstanding, Hseckel'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:
• Haeckel on " Cell-Souls and Soul-Cells," Pedigree of Man, Aveling's Trans., see pp. 136, 150.
+ See infra, M. de Quatrefages' exposi of Haeckel, in Section II, "The Ancestors Mankind is
offered by Science."
% Strictly speaking, du Bois-Reymond is an Agnostic, and not a Materialist. He has protested
most vehemently against the materialistic doctrine, which affinns 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; "««? must go furlher, and admit the
utterly incomprehensible nature of the psychical principle, which it is impossible to regard as a mere
• outcome of material causes."
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"THE TESTIMONIUM PAUPERTATIS OF NATURAL SCIENCE." 687
The social instincts of the lower animals have, of late, been regarded for various
reasons as clearly the oiHgin of fuorals, 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 — * 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 Haeckelian " plastidular," or the
inorganic "molecular souls of the Protista"? Between the evolution
of the spiritual nature of man from the above amoebian 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 Modem 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 dove-
tailed 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
Haeckelian 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,
• See Hseckel's "Present Position of Evolution," op. cit., pp. 23, 24, 296, 297, notes.
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688 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Modem 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 Haeckel, Carl Vogt, or
Ludwig Biichner, 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 Haeckel, whose crass
Materialism often rises to the height of idiotic naivetis 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 . . . Hesin 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
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"ALMIGHTY EVOLUTION." 689
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 dis-
cussed by able and brave scientific men, such as Huxley, Carl Vogt, Ludwig
Biichner. 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.*
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 KriySshakti 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 Mate-
rialists. ,
In our modem 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 NirmSnaktyas 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 nihiloy 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 represen-
tation of Evolution in the scientific brain of a Materialist. What is
Evolution? If asked to define the full and complete meaning of the
• op. cit., pp. 34, 35, 36.
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term, neither Huxley nor Hseckel 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 repro-
duction 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 — mtisi 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 modem school — Occultists agree-
ing 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 Haeckel 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,
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PHYSICAL AND SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION RECONCILED. 69I
in his remarkable work, Darwinism, a Critical Investigation of the
Theory y 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 Archaeus, 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 Modem
Philosophy.
We find the same conclusiohs 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 sub-
stantial 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 Memoire above mentioned,
the identity of this mysterious, integrally acting and organizing Prin-
ciple 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 impene-
trable covering fall down dead, after beholding the naked Truth in the
face of the stern Goddess. Have some of our Darwinians, so tenderly
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united in natural selection and affinity, also gazed at the Sai'tic 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 modem Evolu-
tionist, 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 ! ♦
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"
Palaeolithic 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 ai which, and the form in
which, the first man appeared, is smoothed down to a trifling impedi-
ment, 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 know-
ledge of the beginnings of law, matter, or life.t
And, withal, to reject a scientific hypothesis^ however absurd, is to
commit the one unpardonable sin ! We risk it.
• Measure for Measure, Act ii, Scene z. t Knowledgey January, x88a.
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SECTION II.
The Ancestors Mankind is Offered by
Science.
Tbs 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 thing^s.*
The world stands divided this day and hesitates between Divine
Progenitors — be they Adam and Eve or the Lunar Pitris — and Bathybius
HcBckeliiy the gelatinous hermit of the briny deep. Having explained
the Occult theory, it may now be compared with that of Modem
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 Haeckelian speculations receive no better
treatment at the hands of strictly exact Science than do our own.
Haeckel'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. Asdu Bois-Reymond puts it, we may believe him easily when
he says that the
Ancestral trees of our race sketched in the Sckdpfungsgeschichte are of about as
much value as are the pedigrees of the Homeric heroes in the eyes of the historical
critic.
This settled, ever>'one will see that one hypothesis is as good as
another. And as we find Haeckel himself confessing that neither Geo-
logy in its history of the past nor the ancestral history of organisms
will ever "rise to the position of a real 'exact' science,"! ^ 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 Para-
• T. Huxley, Man's Place in Nature, p. 57. t Op. cit., " The Proofs of Evolution," p. 273.
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celsus, the "father of modern chemistry," and those of Haeckel, 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 Hseckel i propos of our blood
relationship to
Those ancestors [of ours] which have led up from the unicellular classes, Vennes,
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.
(i) 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 partheno-
genesis, "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 Puranas, preeminently
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 Modem Science.* In
Chapter viii of his latest work, A Modem 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 cooperation of great
gods, male and female. . . . Thus, in the orthodox Christian creed we arc
taught to repeat "begotten, not made," a phrase which is absolute nonsense, or
* Author of Modern Science and Modem Thought,
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AN UNVERIFIED CHARGE AGAINST THE ANCIENTS. 695
non-smse—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.*
However we may agree with the learned author as to the inadvis-
ability of using wrong words, and the terrible anthropomorphic and
phallic element in the old Scriptures^-especially in the orthodox
Christian Bidie — nevertheless, there may be two extenuating circum-
stances in the case. Firstly, all these "ancient philosophies" and
" modem religions" are — as has been suflSciently 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 dissect-
ing 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 Hindus, at any
rate — Mr. Laing's assertion to the contrary notwithstanding. In view
of the statement in the Vishnu Purdna, quoted by us elsewhere, that
Daksha "established sexual intercourse as the means of multiplica-
tion," only after a series of other "modes," which are all enumerated
therein,t it becomes diflScult to deny the fact. This assertion, more-
over, is found, note well, in an exoteric work. Next, Mr. I^aing goes on
to tell us that :
• op. CI*/., pp. 102, 103. + Op. cU.y ii. 12, Wilson's Transl.
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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 HaeckeVs 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.*
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 suppl3ring the fertilizing spore or cell. . . . This is confirmed by a study
of embryology, which shows that in the human and higher animal species the dis-
tinction 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 withm
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, with-
out any fructifying element. t
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- Hseckelian theories to th^ 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 repe-
tition of the evolution of the race (phylogeny). This repetition is the more com-
plete, 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 (csenogenesis) has
obtained.^
* Op. cit., p. 104. In this, as has been shown in Part I, Modem Science has again been anticipated,
far beyond its own speculations, by Archaic Science.
+ Ibid., pp. Z04-X06.
t Anihrop., 3rd edition, p. xx.
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VARIOUS MODES OF REPRODUCTION. 697
This shows us that every living creature and thing on Earth, includ-
ing 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 partheno-
geneiically (on the immaculate principle) to his young ones; the next
stage would be the oviparous — at first "without any fructifying ele-
ment," 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.* 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.!
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
• Theosophists will remember that, according to Occult teaching, cyclic Pralayas so-called are but
"Obscurations," during which periods Nature, t.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 Brahmi.
t This will be pooh-poohed, because it will not be understood by our modem men of Science; but
«very Occultist and Theosophist will easily realize the process. There can be no objective form on
^rth, 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 liWng demonstration of such succes-
sive stages in the process of Evolution, how can it be otherwise when Nature's Mind and creative
powers are concerned?
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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 BibU-
is right, along with other national "revelations." Hence the scien-
tific scorn, so freely lavished by the author of A Modem 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 Gmesis 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 "Amoeba A," contracting in
the middle and splitting into Amoeba B — by division.*
Nor has human speech developed from the various animal sounds.
Haeckel'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," f is altogether unsound, as argued by Professor Max Miiller,
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,
tbe 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-bom
child.:
• See A Modem Zoroastrian^ p. 103.
^ " Darwinian l*heory" in Bsdigree of Marty p. 22.
t The Age and Origin of Man.
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READY-MADE MATERIAI3 OF SPEECH. 699*
From the foregoing it is thus very easy to perceive that in order to
prove the Huxley- Haeckelian theories of the descent of man, it is not
one, but a great number of "missing links" — a true ladder of progres-
sive 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 Hseckel that primi-
tive man was a speechless ape-creature. To this Prof Joly answers:
Man never was, in my opinion, this pithecanthropus alalus whose portrait Haeckelf
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.*
Haeckel, among otter things, often comes into direct conflict with the
"science of languages." In the course of his attack on Evolutionismf
Prof. Max Miiller 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, ta
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.
(i) 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 Miiller
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 oj forming roots is the great crux which Materialists almost
invariably avoid.
• Man be/ore Metals, p. 320, "International Scientific Series."
t Mr. Darwin's Philosophy of Language, 1873.
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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 Evolu-
tionists. To say with Schmidt: "Forsooth we are to halt before the
origin of language!" — is an avowal of dogmatism and of speedy
defeat.*
We respect those men of Science who, wise in their generation, say:
The Prehistoric Past being utterly beyond our powers of direct observa-
tion, 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 Modem Science.
The borderland of [metaphysical] knowledge is, therefore, best left to time,
which is the best test as to truth, t ^
This is a wise and an honest sentence in the mouth of a Materialist.
But when a Haeckel, after just saying that "historical events of past
time," having "occurred many millions of years ago, J . . . are for
•ever removed from direct observation," and that neither Geology nor
Phjdogenyg 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 know-
ledge," 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.|| If "empirical" — and
• Cf. his Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism, p. 304.
+ A Modem Zoroastrian, p. 136.
t It thus appears that in its anxiety to prove our noble descent from the catarrhine "baboon,"
Hseckel's school has pushed back the times of pre-historic man millions of years. (See Ptdigtee of
Man, p. 273.) Occultists, render thanks to Science for such corroboration of our claims!
\ This seems a poor compliment to pay Geology, which is not a speculative but as exact a Science
«8 Astronomy— save, perhaps, its too risky chronologrical speculations. It is mainly a "descriptive"
■as opposed to an "abstract" Science.
II Such newly-coined words as "perigfenesis of plastids," "plastidule souls" (!), and others less
comely, invented by Hseckel, may be very learned and correct in so far as they may express very
jrraphically the ideas in his own vivid fancy. As facts, however, they remain for his less imaginative
colleagues painfully csenogenetic— 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" {Anthro-
pogeny, p. 392, quoted in Pedigree of Man, p. 295.)— his no less learned foes (du Bois-Rejrmond— for
one) have a right to see in this sentence a mere jugglery of words; a "testimonium paupertaiisot
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.)
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SCIENTIFIC TRESPASSERS. yoi
Haeckel 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 palin-
genetic 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 minutiae which are presented to the observa-
tion of the senses with the help of all the exquisite mechanism that modem
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
re.ctify 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 Meta-
physics, 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 every-
thing, 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
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702 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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. Haeckel, 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.*
We open Webster's Dictionary and read the definitions of the word
"empirical":
Depending upon experience or observation alone, without due regard to modem
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 observa-
tions only [which is Haeckers 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 modem learn-
ing. 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 t
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
• Pedigree of Man, p. 273. t Anthropogeny, p. 392. Quoted in Pedigree of Man, p. 195.
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MR. HUXLEY APPLIES AN *' EXTINGUISHER. 703
more than a speculation on a speculation. Sir William Hamilton has
Steady shown that the word theory is now used
In a very loose and improper sense . . . that it is convertible into hypothesiSy and
Ay/{?/A^;yw 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 Modem 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* of
Vogt and Darwin, on which the Huxley- Haeckelians 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 pro-
vided with a tail, having the proper muscles. Their limbs and bodies were also
acted on by many muscles which now only occasionally reappear, but are normally
present in the Quadrumana. . . . The foot was then prehensile, judging from
the condition of the great toe in the foetus; 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.t
• 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 physio-
logical 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 modem times there are no animals in creation that have attracted a larger amount of atten-
tion 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 con-
fession 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.)
-t- 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 1
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704 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Darwin connects toan 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 Haeckel, on this point places himself in direct variance with,
one of the fundamental laws which constitute the principal charm of Dar-
winism.
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 permanettt 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 descendents of the first mollusc
have been molluscs; all the descendants of the first vertebrate have been verte-
brates. 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 essen-
tially 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 oi 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 or
the laws most emphatically necessary to the Darwinian theory. We then come to
the prosimiae of Haeckel, 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 Haeckel brings us from the latter to the marsupials. From men ta
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
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AN ABSOI.UTELY THEORETICAL PITHECOID MAN. 705
causes but slight embarrassment to Darwin.* We know that he considers the want
of information upon similar questions as a proof in his favour. Hseckel 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 conse-
quence, necessary to fill up the gap between marsupials and man, will Hseckel
admit the existence oi four unknown intermediate groups instead of one? Will he
complete his genealogy in this manner? It is not for me to answer. t
But see Haeckel's famous genealogy, in The Pedigree of Man, called
by him the "Ancestral Series of Man.'' In the **Second Division"
(eighteenth stage) he describes —
Prosimise, allied to the Loris (Stenops) and Makis (Lemur), without marsupial
bones and cloaca, Tvith placenta.X
And now turn to de Quatrefages* The Human Species,^ and see his
proofs, based on the latest discoveries, to show that the Prosimiae of
Haeckel 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-con-
tradiction 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 aciu 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, Hseckel bases his descent of man on the seventeenth and
eighteenth stages, the Marsupialia and Prosimae — (genus Haeckelii?).
Applying the latter term to the Lemuridae — hence making of them
animals with a placenta — he commits a zoological blunder. For after
• 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 Darivinism, p. 284.)
t The Human Species, pp. 106-108.
X op. cit., p. 77.
\ Pp. X09, no.
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706 THE SKCRKT DOCTRINE.
having himself divided mammals according to their anatomical diflFer-
ences into two groups — ^the incUciduata, which have no decidua (or
special membrane uniting the placentae), and the dedduaia, those who
possess it — he includes the Prosimiae 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 prosimiae of Hseckel have
no decidua and a diflfuse placenta. They are indeciduata. Far from any possibility
of their being the ancestors of the apes, according to the principles laid down by
Hseckel 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.*
And yet Haeckel's inventions pass with some as exact Science!
The above mistake, if indeed it be one, is not even hinted at in
Haeckers 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 Prosimiae 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 Haeckel's] process is always the same, considering the un-
known 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 Haeckel will not have a leg to stand upon, whatever his
admirers may say.
But there are important divergencies even between Darwin and
Haeckel. While the former makes us proceed from the tailed catarrhine,
Haeckel 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, em-
bracing many million years. The chief quarrel, it appears, is with
regard to the nature of the primitive "ancestor.'* We shall be told
that the DhySn Chohan, or the "progenitor" of Manu, is a hypothetical
• op, ciLy p. no.
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THE SOZURA A CREATURE ENTIREI.Y UNKNOWN TO SCIENCE. 707
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 Haeckers 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 modem discovery in
Zoology. It is simply absurd, even as a fiction. As de Quatrefages
demonstrates in a few words, Haeckel "admits the existence of an
absolutely theoretical pithecoid man" — a hundred times more diffi-
cult 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 naively 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 Haeckelians 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 I/)gos
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.* 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 Upfidhi, is necessary for its manifestation.
* of coune the Esoteric system of Fourth Round Kvolution is much more complex than the para-
graph and quotations referred to categorically assert. It is practically a reversal— \io\3a. in embryo*
logical inference and succession in time of species— of the current Western conception.
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708 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
PLASTIDULAR SOULS, AND CONSCIOUS NERVE-CELLS.
But one can never see the end of such wonders with Haeckel and his
school, whom the Occultists and Theosophists have every right to
consider as materialistic tramps trespassing on priv^ate metaphysical
grounds. Not satisfied with the paternity of Bathybius (Haeckelii),
**plastidular souls" and ** atom-souls"* 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.t
** Astonishing," truly — ^based as this wild speculation is on the con-
sciousness 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, { yet the comparative and genetic observation of it clearly shows,
that it is only a higher and more complex function of the nerve cells.}
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 HaeckeFs "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; || into the dead letter of Occult teachings, left to
• According to Haeckel, 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 teach-
ing^ 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 !
+ The Pedigree of Man, p. 296. •
% 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 Hseckelii, still more humorous and empirical
in the sense of Webster's second definition.
\ Ibid.
II Those who take the opposite view and look upon the existence of the human Soul—" as a super-
natural, 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 Haeckel— 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 K&ma and Manas) " has its developmental history "—is claimed by Haxkel as his
own discovery and innovation on an " untrodden [?] path " I He, Haeckel, will work out the compara-
tive 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-ccUs," pp. 135, 136, 137, Pedigree of Man.)
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A CAUTIOUS MOVE TOWARDS "MAGIC." 709
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 in-
organic molecular soul in that it possesses memory.*
This he develops in his mirific lecture on the "Perigenesis of Plasti-
dule, or the Wave-motions of Living Particles.** It is an improvement
on Parwin'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 Modem Zoroastrian.\ The latter, Occult-
ism, teaches that — (a) the life-atoms of our (Prana) 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 aflinity and Karmic law always to the same individuality in a series
of various bodies.f
To be just and, to say the least, logical, our modern Haeckelians
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 teach-
ings 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
• The Pedigree of Man, note 20, p. 296.
t P. 119.
X See "Transmigration of Ufe-Atoms." in Five Years of Theosophy, pp. 533-539. The collective
aggrregation 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 conscious-
ness, hence with memory.. (Vol. I, Part III, "Gods, Monads, and Atoms.")
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7IO THE SECRKT DOCTRINE.
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 qualifi-
cation? The law of biogenesis, in the sense applied to it by the
Haeckelians, 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 Haeckel? The "wave motion of living par-
ticles" becomes comprehensible on the theory of a Spiritual One Life,
of a universal Vital Principle independent of our Matter, and mani-
festing 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 Haeckel, 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 aggrega^
tion have been thus transmitted [by heredity].*
If Haeckel, or any other Scientist, knew more than any of them does
know of the nature of the atom, he would not have improved the occa-
sion in this way. For he only states, in more metaphj'-sical 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.!
Further, Haeckel enunciates concerning the Atom-Souls that which,
at first sight, appears as occult as the Monad of Leibnitz :
• op. cit., p. xxQ.
"f In "The Transmigration of Life- Atoms" {Five Years of Theosophy, p. 535), we say of the J!va, 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 dis-
appear], 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 Haeckel mean by his " not identical atoms, but their peculiar motion and mode of aggrega-
tion," 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 Tkeosophy without properly digesting the
teachings.
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THE MEANING OF SOUL WITH Hi^CKEL. 71I
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.*
He does not say a word concerning the fact that this is Leibnitz'
theory, and one that is preeminently Occult. Nor does he understand
the term **sour' as we do; for, with Haeckel 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.t
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 con-
sciousness 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. J
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 gpreat" Haeckel 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
* op. a't.f note 21, p. 296. t /did., note 19. t Ibid., note 23.
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Haeckelii. Though the said Bathj'bius has been found out and exposed
as a pretender simulating the organic substance // 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 aeons of time into the
cell-tissue of the grey matter of the brains of every great man — caused
Sophocles and ^Eschylus, and Shakspere as well, to write their tragedies,
Newton, his Principia, Humboldt, his Cosmos, etc. It also prompted
Haeckel to invent Graeco-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 seons 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 pre-
servation 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 mox^ probable.
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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 palaeontologist?
Time will show.*
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 i860, 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 Abbe — 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 Abbe
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 Modem Science and Modem 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 Palaeolithic nian.t
• Man^s Place in Nature^ p. 159. t Op cit., p. 157.
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Or — the descendant of Eocerie man, which is a variant oflFered to the
theory. Meanwhile, the dryopithecus with such fine mental endow-
ments is yet to be discovered. On the other hand, Neolithic and even
Palaeolithic man having become an absolute certainty, and as the same
author justly observes:
If ioo,ooo,cxx) years have elapsed since the earth became suflSciently 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 — ♦
why should not another theory be tried? Let us carry man, as a hypo-
thesis, to the close of Mesozoic times — admitting argumenti causa
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 mimickmg man in using "branches
of trees as clubs, and cracking cocoa-nuts with hammer and stones.** f
Some savage tribes of hillraen 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 dryo-
pithecus, which latter —
Has been considered by some anatomists as in some respects superior to the
chimpanzee or the gorilla— J
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 Gaudr/s specula-
tions.)
• Ibid,, p. 161.
t This the way primitive man must have acted ? We are uot 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.
% Ibid.^ p. 151.
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INSURMOUNTABLE DIFFICULTIES. 715
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 iguano*
don, 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* . . . If he could survive, as we know he did, the adverse condi-
tions 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.t
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.y
without immediate danger of getting knocked off" one*s feet by the tidal
wave of science-adiilation. Believing that the difficulty of accounting —
For the development of intellect and morality by evolution is not so great as that
presented by the diflFerence as to physical structure { between man and the highest
animal —
the same author says :
* 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.
t Modern Science and Modern Thought^ pp. 151, 152.
X Wc cannot follow Mr. I«aing 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 site 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 Hseckel, 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 himiau mind by natural selectioik
are tenfold greater.
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7l6 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 un-
developed 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 descen-
dant 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 cretin, 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,* is that of a fine raoe, 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 } t
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
* 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,
i Ibid., pp. 180-182.
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** BLURRED COPIES" OF THEIR BESTIAL SIRES. 717
left behind him were splintered by fire in that remote epoch; when we
leani 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 y as it was when it coexisted 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-sufi5cient, 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 Haeckel. 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 Mate-
rialism. 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 Hseckelian 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
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Africa, some in Southern Asia, others again believe in an independent
origin of human stocks in Asia and America from a simian ancestry.
Haeckel, 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 pithe-
■canthropus 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 diflFerent 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.*
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 aeons out of the ethereal her-
maphrodites. Only, if it is proved that Easter Island is an actual relic
■of Lemuria, we must believe that according to Haeckel the "dumb
-ape-men," just removed from a brutal mammalian monster, built the
^gantic portrait-statues, two of which are now in the British Museum.
Critics are mistaken in terming Haeckelian doctrines "abominable,
revolutionary, immoral" — though Materialism is the legitimate out-
•come 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 Modem 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.
• Ptdigree of Man, p. 73.
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HANUMAN, THB MONKEY-GOD. 719
Well, what of that? All this was known before King Herod; and
the writers of the Ramayana, the poets who sang the prowess and
valour of Hanumin, the Monkey-God, "whose feats were great and
wisdom never rivalled/' must have known as much about his anatomy
and brain as does any Haeckel or Huxley in our modem 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
<io 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, z>., 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 caecum, the
ear muscles,* the "rudimentary tail" with which children are still
sometimes bom, 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
^uch eminent Zoologists as Mr. Romanes and others — while defending
the Darwinian theory, are the first to confess the almost insuperable
<iifiBculties 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
suflSdent to glance at the works of Broca, Gratiolet, Owen, Pmner-Bey,
•and finally at the last great work of de Quatrefages, Introduction h
* ProfeMor 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
nnder the ordinary "occult" escplanation, and involves no postulate of an "animal progenitor" to
flolyeit.
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r&tude des Races Humaines, Questions Generales, to discover the fallacy
of the Evolutionists. We may say more: the exaggerations concerning
this alleged similarity of structure between man and the anthropomor-
phous 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
diflferences 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.*
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 versa. 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
• 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 ike 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 modem man not having become further removed
from the ape than the first (fossil) man . . . these facts contradict a theor>' of consUnt progres-
sive development." (Pfaff.) When, according to Vogt, the average Australian brain = 9935 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.
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THE GORIIXA'S ADDRESS TO THE EVOLUTIONIST. 72I
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 bim : We, anthropoid apes, form a retro-
gressive 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 diflFer 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 DhySn Chohans, or the Pitris so-called, as
shown in the first Part of this Volume. On the other hand, the pithe-
coids, 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 oflf by the Man
of the Third and Fourth Round, such an evolutionist argument as that
insisting on the "unity of structural plan" characterizing all verte-
brates, 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
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not sanction the coexistence 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 Haeckel against their Euro-
pean 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 "un-
folding"— 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?*
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 proto-
types 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. "Evolu-
tion" has to deal with the progressive modifications, which Palaeon-
tology shows to have aflFected 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
• Geo. T. Curtis, Creation or Bvoiution / p. 76.
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THE DARWINISTS AND THEIR OPPONENTS. 723
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 pro-
genitors 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 foetus, which
represent the stage through which the branchiae of the fish are developed;* for
the pulsating vessel corresponding to the heart of the lower fishes, which consti-
stutes the foetal heart; for the entire analogy presented by the segmentation of the
human ovum, the formation of the blastoderm, and the appearance of the "gas-
trula" 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 [aeons 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 foetal 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 foetal 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
hiuman foetus 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
• "At this period," writes Darwin, "the arteries run In arch-like branches, as if to carry the blood
to branchiae 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-clefls are absolutely useless to all but amphibia and fishes, etc.,
their appearance is regularly noted in the fcetal development of vertebrates. Even children are
occasionally bom with an opening in the neck corresponding to one of the clefts.
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724 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
regard as "reversion to ancestral features."* Reversion, indeed, but
scarcely in the sense contemplated by our present-day empiricists!
DARWINISM AND THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN: THE ANTHROPOIDS
AND THEIR ANCESTRY.
The public has been notified by more than one eminent modem
Geologist and man of Science, that :
All estimate of geological duration is not merely imperfect, but necessarily im-
possible; for we are ignorant of the causes, though they must have existed, which
quickened or retarded the progress of the sedimentary deposits.t
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 rath'er 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 Palaeolithic and Neolithic man. J 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;
• Those who with Haeckd regrard the grill-clefls 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. Andr£ I^f^vre) represented in fcetal growth,
does not appear in his twenty- two stages through which the Monera have passed in their ascent to
Man. Haeckel does not postulate a vegetable ancestor. The embryological argument is thus a two-
edged sword and here cuts its possessor.
t I^efiivre, Phiiosopky Historical and Critical^ pt. ii. p. 480, "I,ibrary of Contemporary Science."
t We confess to not being able to see any good reasons for Mr. H. 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 comers of Europe, where they have been squeezed or stranded," he adds,
'• but the men of Pakeolithic times can be identified with no existing races; they were savages of a
more degraded tjrpe 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 Palaeolithic 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 Palaeolithic man.
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HUXLEY'S BOU> SPECUI^TIONS. 725
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.*
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 super-
ficial 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
Occtdtist's estimate.f The modest thousands of years of the Encyclo-
pcedia 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
• Antiquity of Man, p. 246.
f The actual time reqtiired for such a theoretical transformation is necessarily enormous. " If/' says
Profesaor Pfaff, "in the hundreds of thousands of years which you [the Evolutionists] accept between
the rise of palaeolithic man and our own day, a greater distance of man from the brute is not demon-
strable [th€ most ancient man was just as far removed from ike 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 bettveen our times and the so-called paUsolithic 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 bg
tUU further extended.
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726 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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* —
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.t
An untold antiquity for man is thus, then, the scientific sine qua non
in the question of Darwinian Evolution, since the oldest Palaeolithic
man shows as yet no appreciable dijBFerentiation from his modern
descendant. It is only of late that Modem 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 evolu-
tion of the human races and animal species, as the present day Scientist
— Geologist or Anthropologist — is sure to do.
• Fortnightly Review^ 1882. The ba5eles8ness 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. i. Must it be repeated, moreover, that the Cro-
Magnon Palfleolithic type is superior to that of a very large number of existing races ?
t 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 modem 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; (6) 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 Paleeolithic savage, a
"man of Canstadt," evolve into a thinking man from the brute dryopithecus of the Miocene in so
short a timef 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 con-
sidered 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.)
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THE PEDIGREE OF THE APES.
727
Holding, as we do, that the mammalian type was a post-human Fourth
Round product, the following diagram — as the writer understands the
teaching — may make the process clear:
The Pedigree of the Apes.
Primeval Astral Man.
(Astral)
Mammal Prototypes.
^^- -^ - .....•..••• Second Race (Astral).
-• Third Race (Semi-Astral).
— (Separation into sexes.)
Fourth Race (Physical).
Fifth Race.
(Physical)
Lower Mammals
Lower Apes,
The unnatural union was invariably fertile, because the then mamma-
lian types were not remote enough from their root-type* — Primeval
Astral Man — to develop the necessary barrier. Medical Science records
such cases of monsters, bred from human and animal parents, even in
our own day. The possibility is, therefore, only one of degree, not of
fact. Thus it is that Occultism solves one of the strangest problems
presented to the consideration of the Anthropologist.
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 Ethno-
• I*ct ns remember in this connection the Esoteric Teaching which tells that Man in the Third
Round was possessed of a g^igantic ape-like form on the astral plane. And similarly at the close of
the Third Race in this Round. Thus it accounts for the human features of the apes, especially of the
later anthropoids— apart from the fact that these latter preserve by heredity a resemblance to their
AUanto-Lemurian sires.
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728 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
legist, 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 :
AU hjrpotheses 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.
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SECTION lY.
Duration of the Geological Periods, Race
Cycles, and the Antiquity of Man.
Millions of years have sunk into Lethe, leaving no more recol-
lection 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 bf 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 (argu-
menti causa) in basing its present Anthropology — as to the date and
mode of origin of Homo sapiens — on the Darwinian theory.* 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
Palaeontologist Ed. Lartet writes:
No date is to be found in Genesis, which assigns a time for the birth of primitive
humanity.
• 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.
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730 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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, archaeologists 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 founda-
tion 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.*
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 Chaldaeans 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 agp-eed, was that
of Sargon of Accad, who established a great library, patronized literature, and ex-
tended 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 ex-
tended. The well-known Oxford lecturer remarked in his disquisi-
tions upon "The Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by the
Religion of the Ancient Babylonians," that:
* Bd. Uirtet, " Nouvelles Recherches sur la Coexistence de rHomme et des Grands Mammifte«s>
Fossils de la Derniftre P6riode Gtoloffique." Annales dts Soc. Nat., zv. 256.
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BABYLONIAN DATBS. 73 1
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 in-
superable 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 diffi-
culty 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 discover}' 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 Palaeontology have learned had not millions
of works been destroyed ! We talk of the Alexandrian Library, which
has been thrice destroyed, namely, by Julius Caesar 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 Im-
perial 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
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732 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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.* 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. Archaeologists 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 ver\' logical, but what is the date fixed for these dynasties?
Sanchuniathon's and Manetho*s synchronistic tables — or whatever re-
mained 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. t
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
• See the Hibbert Lectures for 1887, p. 33.
t From a Report of the Hibbert Lectures, 1887. Lectures on the Origin and Growth ofReiigitm^ as
Illustrated by the Religion of the Ancient Babylonians. By A. H. Sayce.
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CONTRADICTORY HYPOTHESES. 733
talk of the Secondary and Tertiary age, of the Eocene, Miocene and
Pliocene periods — this is simply to make our facts more compre-
hensible. 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.*
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.
MODERN SCIENTIFIC SPECULATIONS ABOUT THE AGES OF THE
GIX)BE, 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, con-
clndes that no more than lo 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.t Helmholz calculates that 20 million years would suffice for the
• See supra *' Chronology of the Br&hmans."
t Nat, Philos., by Thomson and Tait, App. D. Trans. Royal Soc., Edin., xxiii. pt. i.
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734 '^^^ SECRET DOCTRINE.
-original nebula to condense to the present dimensions of the sun. Prof. S. Newcomb
requires only lo millions to attain a temperature of 212** Fahr.* Croll estimates 70
million years for the diflfusion of the heat. . . .t 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 denu-
dation, demands 500 million years since sedimentation began in EuropcJ 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 ....
jseem 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.}
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 calcu-
lations of a minimum limit for the time since the elevation of Surope
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 BrShmans.
Further calculations, the details of which the reader may find in
Prof. Winchell's work,|| bring Houghton to an approximation of the
isedimentary age of the globe — 1 1 ,700,000 years. These figures are found
too small by the author, who forthwith extends them to 37,000,000 years.
Again, according to CroU,^ 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,** 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.ft
• Popular Astronomy t p. 509.
t OimaU and TUrm, p. 335.
t Address, Uverpool Geological Society, 1876.
} World-Life, pp. 179, x8o.
II /W</., pp. 367, 368.
IT ClimaU and Time,
•• Quoted In Mr. Ch. Gould's Mythical Monsters, p. 84.
fi According to Bischof, 1,004,177 years, according to Chevandier's calculations 672,788 yean, were
lequired 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 Fbrce and Matter, BQchner, p. 159, Bd. 1884.)
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MATERIALISTS AT LOGGERHEADS. 735
As the last Glacial period extended from 240,000 to 80,000 years ago
(Prof. CroU's view), therefore, man must have appeared on Earth from
100,000 to 120,000 years ago. But, as says Prof. Winchell with refer-
ence 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.*
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. CroU, 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 „
Croll 240,000 „ t
No wonder that Mr. Pengelly confesses that:
It is at present and perhaps always will be impossible to reduce, even approxi-
nwtely, geological time into years or even into millenniums.
A wise word of advice from the Occultists to the gentlemen Geolo-
gists; they ought to imitate the cautious example of Masons. As
chronology, they say, cannot measure the era of the creation, there-
fore, 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 h3rpothesis, 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, t
• Op. ciL, p. 379.
t But see " The Ice- Age Climate and Time," fbpular Science Retnew^ xiv. a4a.
X Review of KSlliker's Criticisms.
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736 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Mi*. Darwin sticks manfully to
his belief, and again tells us ''natura non facit saltum,^**
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 some-
thing more than Natural Selection is requisite to produce physical man.
lyct 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 fossiliferons
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 inexpHc-
able) 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, aflfords no conclusive evidence of specific origin by signifi-
cant 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.t
• Fallacies of Darwinism, p. 160. t Tlie Genesis of Splits, Chap. VI, pp. 160- 16a, Ed. 1871.
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PLANETARY UFE-IMPULSES. 737
"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 dis-
carded? 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 them-
selves?
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 difi&culties 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 ;
(^) The actuality of the Seven Rounds;
{c) The separation of human Races (outside the purely anthropo-
logical division) into seven distinct Root- Races, of which our present
European Humanity is the Fifth ;
(ji) 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 difl&culty 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,"* 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
• Man's Place in Nature, p. loa, note.
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738 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 g^ve
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 Encyclopedia BritannicUy 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 Encyclopaedia that:
One hundred million years have passed . . . since the solidification of our
earth, when the earliest form of life appeared upon it.*
But it seems quite as hopeless to try to convert the modem Geolo-
gists and Ethnologists, as it is to make Darwinian Naturalists perceive
their mistakes. About the Aryan 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 Arj'^an
stock, that they seem to have known far more about the races of
Mars and Venus than the modem 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
• Vol. X. art. "Geology," p. 227. " 100,000,000 of years is probably amply sufficient for all the re-
qoirements of Geology,** says the text. In France, some savants do not find it nearly "sufficient."
Xfi Couturier claims 350 million years; Buffbn was satisfied with 34 millions— but there are those in
the more modem schools who will not be content with less than 500 million jrears.
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OF OTHER WORI.DS BESIDES OUR OWN. 739
shifting of continents, down to the present year's cyclones, hurricanes,
earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, and even the extra-
ordinary 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 constella-
tions have the greatest influence on the meteorological and cosmical
changes, over, and within our Earth — let us give one moment's atten-
tion to our sidereal despots, the rulers of our globe and men. Modem
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-suffi-
cient. 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
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740 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 (J>) 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 Caesar'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.*
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 pre-
eminent in inculcating such an erroneous belief.
• Wc are taui^ht that the highest Dhy4n 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.
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STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 74I
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 un-
explored, can we hope to speculate with profit on the nature of Globes
which, in the economy of Nature, must needs belong to states of con-
sciousness 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 ac-
quaintance with the nature and appearance of Planets and their inhabi-
tants 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 theniy 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 per-
ception which alone could enable them to grasp what they might be
told.
Siill 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 con-
clusion has been worked out and supported with an array of scientific
considerations by C. Flammarion, the well-known French Astronomer.
The arguments he brings fon\'ard 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
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742 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
admit that it was uninhabited for myriads of years; and here we come to the im-
possible 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.*
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 fanci-
ful, 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 contrar>% 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. t
* since no single atom in the entire Kosraos 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?
+ PturaliU des Mondes, p. 439.
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WORUJS MENTIONED IN THE ** BIBLE." 743
But Flammarion himself falls into the very error which he here con-
demns, 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 en-
large 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 (d) 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 Bidie— -the youngest of the World-scriptures.
In Ecdesiastes, 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 shaU be; and that
which is done, is that which shall be done, and there is no new thing under the sun.*
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
bath appointed heir of all things, "by whom also he made the worlds"
(plural).t This "Power" is Chokmah, the Wisdom and the Word.
• 0^. «/., i. 4, 9.
+ Hebrews, i. 2. This relates to the I/>firos of every Cosmogony. The unknown JUight— with which
he is said to be coetemal and coeval— is reflected in the First-Bom, the Protogonos; and the
Demiorgos 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,
Onris, etc., and finally the Gnostic Christos, who is in the Kabalah, Chokmah, or Wisdom, the " Word."
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744 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 njade 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 re-
productions 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 aU 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,* the workman was not yet the "Heavenly Man."t
Again in the Midrash, written long before the Kabalah of Simeon
Ben lochai, Rabbi Abahu explains:
The Holy One, blessed be his name, has successively formed and destroyed sundry
worlds before this one } . . . Now this refers both to the first races [the ** Kings
of Edom"] and to the worlds destroyed. §
"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
• Theybriw of Tikkun or the Protogouos, " Firet-Boni," i.e.^ the Universal Form and Idea, had not
yet been mirrored in Chaos.
t Zohar, iii. 292^. The " Heavenly Man " is Adam Kadmon— the synthesis of the Sephiroth, as
" Manu Sviyambhuva " is the synthesis of the Praj&patis.
X Bereshiih Rabba, Parsha IX.
{ This refers to the three Rounds that preceded our Fourth Round.
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THE KINGS OF EDOM. 745
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]. t
When, therefore, we read of the "destruction" of the Worlds, the
word has many meanings, which are very clear in several of the Com-
mentaries 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 Z(7^r 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. B3' the law of analogy and permutation, in the
Chaldsean Book of Numbers, as also in the Books of Knowledge and of
Wisdom, the "seven primordial worlds" mean also the "seven pri-
mordial" 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";J /.<?., Esau represents in the Bible the race which
stands between the Fourth and the Fifth, the Atlantean and the Aryan.
"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 con-
tains the allegorical history of the birth of the Fifth Race.
Says the Siphra Dlzcnioutha :
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
• This sentence contains a dual sense and a profound mystery in the Occult Sciences, the secret o^
which if, and when, known— confers tremendous powers on the Adept to change his visible form.
+ " 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.
X Gen.,, zxxvi. 43.
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746 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Zokar, 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, Bemardin 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 Encyclopedia, Following these come Kant,
the founder of modem 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
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WHAT FLAMMARION TEIXS US. 747
do OUTS, 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 ya^:/^ 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.
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748 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
iii. The humanities of other worlds diflFer 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 Bibky 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 firma-
ment, in the grooves of which the stars moved for the special edifica-
tion 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 theorj'- 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!*
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 incal-
culable. 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 J and {b) the dread that, if the hypothesis of railUoiis
• Iti that learned nnd witiy work. Gi^d tind A/i ^inu*, by thf redoubtaUle *^Sa1a4lrr* uf A
repute, the amu^ing^ cralciilutiDi] that, if Clirist hail ^u>c?tided wilh the rapidtty of ?i f^nTiTinn '
would not yet have reached en:n Sinus, rciiiinjls out viviilly of the past. Il Tin
llj-roundfd i^ti&picion that ^ven onr r«c cif -icieiitific enlightenment may tw oa ^
inatenalislic negattotis as the men of the Miikilc Aifes were ah^iurd dod raatefliail^-t>': m Hi
Kious aJfinnrition<>.
SCIENCE AND OCCULTISM MAY YET AGREE. 749
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 pre-
ceding 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.
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
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750 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
due allowance for variations in the rate of deposit, Professor Lefevre
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*
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 op Length of Geowgical Periods in
Years.
Laurentian
Primordial [ Cambrian \ 171,200,000.
Silurian
Devonian
Primary \ Coal \ 103,040,000.
Permian
Triassic
Secondary [ Jurassic \ 36,800,000.
Cretaceous
Eocene
Tertiary { Miocene \ 7,360,000.!
Pliocene
Quaternary i,6oo,ooo.t
Such estimates harmonize with the statements of Esoteric Ethnology
in almost every particular. The Tertiary Atlantean part-cycle, from
* Philosophy Historical and Critical, p. 481* ^ Probably in
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SECEDERS FROM DARWINISM. 75 1
the **apex of gloty" 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. Never-
theless, 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,* in referring to M. de Mortillet*s work Matiriaux
pour VHistoire de PHomme, which places man in the Mid-Miocene
period,t remarks that:
It would be in defiance of all that the doctrine of evolution teaches, and more-
over 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 inaugu-
rated 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; J and (Ji) 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 versa. 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,
• Knowledge^ Art. "The Antiquity of Man in Western Europe," March aist, 1882.
t Who, in anotiier work, La Prihistoriqiu AnliquiU de P 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 naif in his views.
X 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. PflSger, the Physiologists, besides other men of Science as eminent as any, find insuperable diffi-
culties and even impossibilities in the doctrine.
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752 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
when making what are regarded as heretical and an ti -scientific state-
ments.
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. Esoteric Theory.
Science divides the period of the Leaving the classification of the geo-
Globe's history, since the beginning of logical periods to Western Science, Eso-
life on Earth (or the Azoic age), into five teric Philosophy divides onlj- the Life-
main divisions or periods, according to periods on the Globe. In the present
Haeckel.* 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:
Primordial Epoch. " Primeval" t
Lauren tian, Cambrian, Silurian. Devas or Divine Men, the "Creators**
The Primordial epoch. Science tells us, and Progenitors.t
is by no means devoid of vegetable and The Esoteric Philosophy agrees with
animal life. In the Laurentian deposits the statement made by Science (see
are found specimens of the Eozoon cana- parallel column), demurring, however, to
dense — a chambered shell. In the Silurian one particular. The 300,000,000 years of
are discovered sea- weeds (algae), molluscs, vegetable life (see "Brdhmanical Chron-
crustacea, and lower marine organisms, ology**) preceded the "Divine Men,'* or
also the first trace of fishes. The Pri- Progenitors. Also, no teaching denies
mordial epoch shows algse, molluscs, cms- that there were traces of life wilhin the
tacea, polyps, and marine organisms, etc. Earth, besides the Eozoon canadense, in
Science teaches, therefore, that marine the Primordial Epoch. Only, whereas
life was present from the very beginnings the said vegetation belonged to this
of time, leaving us, however, to speculate Round, the zoological relics now found
for ourselves as to how life appeared on in the Laurentian, Cambrian, and Silurian
Earth. If it rejects the biblical "crea- systems, so called, are the relics of the
• History of Creation, p. 20.
t The same names are retained as those given by Science, to make the parallels dearer. Our
terms are quite different.
X 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.
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THE TWO SCIENCES CONTRASTED.
753
tion" (as we do), why does it not give us Third Round. At first astral like the
another, approximately plausible h3rpo- rest, they consolidated and materialized
thesis? pari passu with the new vegetation.
Primary. * * Primary."
Devonian,* Coal, Permian. Divine Progenitors (Secondary Groups),
"Fern-forests, sigillaria, coniferae, and the two and a half Races. The Eso-
fishes, first trace of reptiles." Thus teric Doctrine repeats that which was said
saith Modem Science. above. These are all relics of the preced-
ing Round. J
Once, however, the protot)rpes are pro-
/ jected out of the Astral Envelope of the
Earth, an indefinite amount of modifica-
tion ensues.
Secondary.
Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous.
This is the age of Reptiles, of the
gigantic megalosauri,ichthyosauri, plesio-
sauri, 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 t — 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
"Secondary."
According to every calculation the
Third Race had already made its appear-
ance, 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 conjec-
ture, 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 mam-
malia and pre-mammalia are shown in
their evolution merging from one kind
into a higher one, anatomically, so are the
* It may be said that we are inconsistent in not introdudngr 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.
+ Geologists tell us that "in the Secondary epoch, the only mammals which have been [hitherto]
discovered in Ettrope are the fossil remains of a small marsupial or pouch -bearer." {Knowledge,
Biarch 3xst, 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.
t During the interim between one Round and another, the Globe and ever3rthing on it remains m
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.
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754 'T^^ SECRET DOCTRINE.
period.* Why? Because man has to be human races in their procreative processes,
shown youngerthan the higher mammals. A parallel might certainly be found be-
But Esoteric Philosophy teaches us the tween the monotremata, didelphia (or
reverse. And as Science is quite unable marsupialia) and the placental mammals,
to come to anything like an approximate divided in their turn into three orders J
conclusion as to the age of man, or even like the First, Second, and Third Root-
as to the geological periods, the Occult Races of men.§ But this would require
teaching is, therefore, more logical and more space than can be now allotted to
reasonable, even if accepted only as a the subject,
hypothesis.
TERTiARY.t "Tertiary."
Eocene, Miocene, Pliocene. The Third Race has now almost utterly
No man is yet allowed to have lived disappeared, carried away by the fearful
during this period. geological cataclysms of the Secondary
Says Mr. E. Clodd, in Knowledge: "Al- age, leaving behind it but a few hybrid
though the placental mammals and the races.
order of primates to which man is related. The Fourth, bom millions of years
• 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 Leftvre 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 !
+ The above parallels stand good only if Professor CroU's earlier calculations are adopted, namely,
of 15,000,000 3rears 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 jrears, or at the
utmost three million 3rears* duration to the Tertiary age. This, however, would make the whole dura-
tion of the incrusted age of the world only 131,600,000 years, according to Professor Winchell, whereas
in the Esoteric Doctrine, sedimentation began xnthis 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.
X 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). Haeckel sees in the marsupialia didelphia, one of the connecting links
genealogically between man and the moneron ! !
I 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.
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THE SUPPICIENCV OF THE "ANIMAUSTS." 755
appearinXertiary times, and' the climate, before* the said cataclysm took place,
tropical in the Eocene age, warm in the perished during the Miocene period, t
Miocene, and temperate in the Pliocene, when the Fifth (our Aryan Race) had had
was favourable to his presence, the proofs one million years of independent exist-
of his existence in Europe before the close enccj How much older it is from its
of the Tertiary epoch .... are not origin— who knows? As the "historical"
generally accepted here." period began with the Indian Aryans,
with their Vedas for their multitudes,}
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. " Quaternary. "
Palaeolithic Man, Neolithic Man, His- If the Quaternary period is allowed
torical Period. 1,500,000 years, then only does our Fifth
Race belong to it
Yet — mirabile dicfu — ^while the non-cannibal Palaeolithic man, who
must have certainly antedated cannibal Neolithic man by hundreds of
thousands of years, || is shown to be a remarkable artist, Neolithic
man is made out to be almost an abject savage, his lake dwellings not-
withstanding.f For see what a learned Geologist, Mr. Charles Gould,
tells the reader in his Mythical Monsters :
Palseolithic 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. Im-
plements 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
• Thons^h 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 J!rsi man was born according to the now normal process. This "first man"
answers, in the BibU, to Bnos or Henoch, son of Seth {Genesis, iv.).
+ Geology records the former existence of a universal ocean, and sheets of marine sediment
tmiformly 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
Ab3rs8 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 arc 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.
X See Esoteric Buddhism, pp. 53-55, Fourth Ed.
I We hope that we have furnished all the scientific data for it elsewhere.
il It is conceded by Geology to be " beyond doubt that a considerable period must have supervened
after the departure of Palseolithic man and before the arrival of his Neolithic successor." (See James
. Geikie's Prehistoric Europe, and Ch. Gould's Mythical Monsters, p. 98.)
^ Resembling in a manner the pile-villages of Northern Borneo.
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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* on the part of Neolithic man.t
Let us give the reasons for this.
(i) The oldest fossil man, the primitive cave-men of the old Palaeo-
lithic period, and of the Pre-Glacial period (of whatever length, and
however far back), is always the same genus man, and there are no
fo3sil 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. {
(2) As to the so-called Palaeolithic 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.}
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 pre-
ceding: Man, if no older than the Palaeolithic period, could not possibly
have had the actual time necessary for his transformation froin the
"missing link" into what he is known to have been even during that
remote geological time, i.e,y even a finer specimen of manhood than many
of the now existing races.
The above lends itself naturally to the following syllogism : (i) 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 modem pithecoid species. (3)
• " The most clever sculptor of modem 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. Bo3rd
Dawkins' Caw- 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 Palaeolithic 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 reappearing in the Chipped-Stone-age men,
is traceable to their Atlantean ancestry. Neolithic man was a fore-runner of the great Aryan in-
vasion, 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 AUantean 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 Palaeolithic man, it is a remarkable fact that, as Carl Vogt
points out, the former rvas a cannibal, the much earlier man of the Mammoth era tuas not. Human
manners and customs do not seem to improve with time, then ? Not in this instance at any rate.
+ Op. cit., p. 97.
X Modern Science and Modern Thought, p. i8r.
} Ibid., p. 112.
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ONE SALVATION FOR SCIENCE. 757
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,* 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 Atlan-
teans, had aheady reached its highest point, t
then some of the present diflSculties of Science might easily be made
to disappear. The rude workmanship of the Palaeolithic 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 smsX\ 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. {
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, f.^., 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 Esqui-
maux, who also have a tendency, like their Palaeolithic ancestors of the
Reindeer period, the rude and savage human species, to be constantly
• On the data furnished by Modem Science, Physiology, and Natural Selection, and without
resortinsr to any miraculous creation, two human negro specimens of the lowest intelligence— say
idiots bom 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.
t Esoteric Buddhism, p. 64.
X Modem Science and Modern Thought, p. 98.
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758 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Palaeolithic 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 Baumgartner 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, onlj'' 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.*
Therefore, when we read Force and Matter, and find that Emperor of
Materialists, Biichner, repeating after Manu and Hermes, that:
Imperceptibly the plant glides into the animal, the animal into the man t
— 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. t
• Anf&nge zu einer Physiologischen Schdpfungs-geschichU der Pflanzen- und ThierweU, i8^
t Op. cit., p. 212.
I Ibid., p. II.
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BETWEEN TWO VOIDS. 759
The whole difference lies in this: Modern Science places her mate-
rialistic 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.*
But when we are told tjiat 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 Biichner
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 attrac-
tion 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 oi fady 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 thej'^ are forced to admit, as Biichner 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
• Man's Place in Nature, p. 159.
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THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 proto-
plasm. 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.*
The secret could be soon told, not only from the Esoteric but even
from the standpoint of every religion the world over, without mention-
ing the Occultists. The "specialized skeleton" is sought for in the
Reindeer engraved on Antler by Pal;eoi.tthic Man. (After Geikie,)\
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 cLstral 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, the above is a specimen of an engraving made by a Palaeo-
lithic "savage": Palaeolithic meaning the "earlier Stone-age" man, one
supposed to have been as savage and brutal as the brutes he lived with.
• sir W. Dawson, I^I^.D., F.R.S., Origin of the Worlds p. 39.
t Mythical Monsters, p. 97.
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A PALi^OLITHIC LANDSEER. 761
Leaving the modem 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 trvie 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 (contem-
poraneous 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 Archaeologists, when he writes:
The pre-historic is a new science, far, very far, from having said its last word.*
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 fheory of progressive developmenty
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. \
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 Miiller, whose attack on Darwinian Anthro-
pology 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
Palaeolithic European man, the Atlantean ofifshoots 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 every-
where 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-
• Prehistoric A ntiquily of Man, 1883. + A ntiquity of Man, p. 25.
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762 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Hindis, 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.*
Professor George Rawlinson, M.A., remarks:
"The primeval savage" is a familiar term in modern literature, but there is no
evidence that the primevfil savage ever existed. Rather all the evidence looks the
other way.f
In his Origin of NaiionSy 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 {
How is the modem Evolutionist to meet this consensus of evidence?
We repeat the question asked in his 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 Archaeologist 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"?§
Another strange inconsistency in scientific theories is that Neolithic
man is shown as being far more of a primitive savage than Palaeolithic.
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:
(i) As we pass from Neolithic to Palaeolithic man, the stone imple-
ments 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) Palaeolithic man lived in caves which he shared with hyaenas and
lions, II whereas Neolithic man dwelt in lake- villages and buildings.
• India, What can it Teach Us ? A course of lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge
in 1882. t,ecture III., p. no, Ed. 1892.
+ A ntiquity of Man Historically Considered. " Present Day Tracts," Vol. II, Essay IX, p. 25,
t Op. cit,, pp. 10, II.
\ Op. cit., i. 4.
Ij Paleolithic man must have been endowed in his day with thrice Herculean force and ma^fic in-
vulnerability, 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 hs^sena which engraved the deer on the
antler, as be told that this piece of workmanship was done by a savage of such a kind.
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THE RISINGS AND FALLS OF CIVILIZATION. 763.
Every one who has followed even superficially the geological dis-^
coveries of our day, knows that a gradual improvement in workman-
ship is found, from the clumsy chipping and rude chopping of the early
Palaeolithic 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 de-
scendants be justified in setting lis all down as Palaeolithic 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 Palaeolithic man, were
executed only toward the close of the Reindeer period — for this expla-
nation 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 . . .*
— 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 Hindu writings do.
In the early Egyptian tombs, and in the remains of the pre-historic cities ex-
cavated 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
archaeologists 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. do
• Modern Science and Modern Thought, p. 164.
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764 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Braye in some artificial caves of the Neolithic period . . . which appear to be
intended for female figures of life size.*
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 Abbe
Bourgeois' flints may serve as a warning f — 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 reappeared — 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 o{ fairly excellent workmanship, with
a few fragments of pottery — possibly traceable to the era of the Roman
colonization. There is no trace of Palaeolithic man here. No flints or
traces of the extinct animals of the Quaternary period. When, how-
ever, 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 \h^ 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 Palaeolithic age, mixed up confusedly with
• Ihid.y p. 199.
t More than twenty specimens of fossil monke3rs 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— ^\xtX.Q}a. it as one may. And if he was, and if no monkey is found earlier, what follows?
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STRANGE CONFESSIONS OF SCIENCE. 765
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 Palaeolithic man, things slope down-
wards 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 Palaeolithic
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 Modem Thought:
The theory, scientifically based or not, of Peyr^re 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, com-
prising 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,*
It is peculiar, indeed, as we have shown in the case of the Tasmanians.
However it may he./ossii 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, t
• Dr. C. Carter Blake, Art., "The Genesis of Man." t Antiquity of Man, p. 530.
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766 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 islaftds now submerged beneath the ocean.
Thus lost continents are ofiBcially 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 Chaldaeans, 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, ^d smile at the conversa-
tion 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 parth*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 introduc-
tion of which involves no disturbance of the harmony which is essential to our
cosmical condition as a unit in the great solar system.*
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 subtropical climate, such, it cannot be doubted^ as prevailed in
• New Series, i. 115, Art., "Evidences of the A^ of Ice.**
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A ONCE TROPICAL POLE. 767
DeiHmshire 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 couttsiae, 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 brbught 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
imphilosophical 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 alti-
tude since the commencement of the Eocene period" (LyelPs Principles^ nth 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 acces-
sion 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 £ilong the Himilaya
and through China. . . . We learn also that during the Tertiary epoch, counter-
parts of Central European Miocene genera certainly grew in North-West America.
. . . We note ftirther that the present Atlantic Islands' Flora affords no substan-
tial evidence of a former direct communication with the mainland of the New
World. . . The consideration of these facts leads 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-Eastem
Asia was united to North-Westem America, perhaps by the line where the Aleutian
chain of islands now extends." {Nat Hist. Rev,, ii. 164, 1862, Art., "The Atlantis
H3rpothe8is 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
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768 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
searchers after the thrice hypothetical "missing link." Yet, if beneath
the vast floors of the Atlantic, from the Teneriflfe 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.*
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 theor}' 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 evolu-
• Fallacies of Darwinism^
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PALiStOUTHIC MAN, A CALUGRAPHIST. 769
tion — is the "Eternal Pilgrim," the Protean diflFerentiation in Space
and Time of the One Absolute "Unknowable."
In his Antiquity of Man* 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 light-
ning 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 ! t
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 DhySn Chohan; while the wanderer of
the forest of Sumatra was made in the image of man, since the frame-
work 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 alto-
gether the discussion of the origin of men from the apes, now obviously compli-
cated 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 Austrcilian, and that there is no known link of con*
nection with the monkeys; and Haeckel 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 Palaeocosmic 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 archaeology or geology. {
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
• Op. at., p. 501, Ed. 1863.
+ Op. ciL, iv. 162.
t See on this question Wilson's Prehistoric Man, ii. 54 ; Origin of the World, pp. 393, 354.
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770 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
the monkey.* The chance, therefore, of some of these variations being found in
the diflFerent 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 be-
tween a monkey and a man has ever been found! Neither in the gravel, nor 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.t
Our Globe being convulsed each time that it reawakens 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 hard-
ness; 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 modem
anthropoid.
This doctrine, even imperfectly delineated as it is under our inefi&cient
pen, is assuredly more logical, more consistent with facts, zxA 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 oflfered this figure of
* And how much more "enormous" if we reverse Uie subjects, and say during Uie monkey's
development from the Third Race Man.
t Op, cit., pp. i6o, i6i.
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HERBERT SPENCER ON SPECIAL CREATIONS. 77 1
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 Modem
Science. What the next-theory necessitated by the materialistic pre-
misses 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 learn-
ing. 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 molecuiar 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.*
• Principles of Biology, i. 345.
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SECTION V.
Organic Evolution and Creative Centres.
It is argued that Universal Evolution, otherwise the gradual develop-
ment 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 Modem Science. But we are also told, that it is equally a law
that:
Development works from the less to the more perfect, &nd from the simpler to
the more complicated, by incessant changes, small in themselves, but constantly
accumulating in the required direction.*
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
• Modem Science and Modem Thought, p. 94.
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THB "GROUND-PLAN" AND ** DESIGNERS." 773
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.*
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 immeasur-
able and inconceivable distance, in Time, though not in Space, from the
origin even of our Solar System. As the Hindu philosophy very justly
teaches, the " AniySmsam AniyasSm," 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 Dhyan-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 some-
times 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"
•Ibid,
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774 '^HE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 differen-
tiated sum of qualities and attributes, it is in virtue of that alone con-
ditioned 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 modem analogies. It is, again, our old
friend, the good-tempered elephant, that would be the fossil ante-
diluvian 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
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THE **MEGANTHROPUS." 775
or gibbon. How is all this, then? Are we to believe that the constitu-
tion 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 iutti quanii of Esoteric
teaching, are no better than a delusion and a snare. I<et 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 com-
plete 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 morCy 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 differ-
entiation 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 selec-
tion," and the transformation theory generally. It now remains to
clear up the mystery of the origin of those first mammalian faunae
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^^6 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
which M. de Quatrefages so brilliantly endeavours to prove contem-
porary 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 faunae — ^will be rendered less obscure by the aid of a dia-
gram. It will then be apparent to what extent the "factors of organic
evolution," relied upon by Western Biologists,* 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 thr^:
We are referred entirely to conjecture and inference for the origin of the
mammals ! t
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 modem 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 em-
bodying the views of Scientists in general, is that of Schmidt, based on
the exhaustive researches of Riitimeyer. Its approximate accuracy —
from the standpoint of evolutionism — leaves little to be desired :
• The Darwinian theory has been ao 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 hsrpothesis. He admits ( The Doctrine of Descent and
Darwinism, p. 158), that " nattiral 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 entiUe ns
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
Hseckel, 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, thesynonsrm for conjecture and theory only ?
t The Doctrine 0/ Descent and Darunnism, p. 268.
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schmidt^s diagram.
Ungulate Mammals.
Tragulidae. Tapirs. Horses.
HippopotamL Antelopes. Rhinoceroses.
Pigs.
777
Deer. /
Oxen.
Hipparion.
Macrauchenidse.
Anchitiierium.
Anoplotheridae. Palaeotheridae.
At this, the midway point of evolution, Science comes to a standstill.
The irooi to which these two families lead back is unknown.*
The "Root" According to Occultism.
Anoplotheridae. Palseotheridae.
One of the seven
primeval physico-astral and bisexual Root-Tjrpes of the mammalian
animal kingdom. These were contemporaries of the early Lemurian
races — the "unknown roots" of Science.
Schmidt's diagram represents the realm explored by Western Evo-
lutionists, the area in which climatic influences, "natural selection,"
and all the other physical causes of organic differentiation are present.
Biology and Palaeontology find their province here in investigating the
many physical agencies which so largely contribute, as has been shown
ty Darwin, Spencer and others, to the "segregation of species." But
even in this domain the sub-conscious working^ of the DhySn-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 "environ-
ment."
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
• Ibid., pp. 273-275'
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jjS THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
forms of men and of other mammals previous to the separation of the
sexes* 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 physicaliza-
tion 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. u£ons of slow
differentiation were, however, required to effect this end.
The second diagram represents the domain of the purely astral proto-
types 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, corres-
ponding to the various planes of matter. The two sub-physical ele-
mental 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-Uni-
verse. The three "states" so-called of our terrestrial matter, known
as the "solid," "liquid," and "gaseous," are only, in strict accuracy,
jtt^-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 "materializa-
tions."
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 Geo-
logy— is exactly paralleled by the "materialization" of "spirits" (?) in
the seance 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.
* Bear in mind, please, that thougrh the animals— mammalians included— have all been evolved
after and partially from man's cast-off tissues, still, as a far lower bein^f, the mammalian animal
became placental and separated far earlier than man.
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FACTORS IN THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES.
779-
This is a seemingly imperfect foreshadowing of the Occult fact of
the differentiation of species from the primal astral Root-Types. What-
ever 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
Vegetabi^e.
Basic Astral Prototypes pass into the Physical.
/ I. Variation transmitted by Heredity.
2. Natural Selection.
3. Sexual Selection.
4. Physiological Selection.
5. Isolation.
6. Correlation of Growth.
7. Adaptation to Environment. (Intelligent
as opposed to Mechanical Causation.)
The DhyAn-Chohanic Impulse,
constituting Lamarck's "in-
herent and necessary" law of
development. It lies behind
all minor agencies.
Species.
B.
THE EUROPEAN PAL-^OLITHIC RACES: WHENCE, AND HOW
DIvSTRIBUTED.
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
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780 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
from the fundamental physiological and anthropological aspects — still
differ, sometimes greatly, from the type of the now existing popula-
tions? The late M. Littre admits this in an article published by him
in the Revue des Deux Mondes (March ist, 1859) on the Memoire called
Antiquitis Celtiques et Antediluvieimes by Boucher de Perthes (1849).
Littre 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;* 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 (*) :
Spring, Professor of the Faculty of Medicine at Li^ge, 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 Littre, 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 dis-
coveries made Gaudry write conclusively:
Our forefathers were positively contemporaneous with the rhinoceros tichorrhi-
nus, 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, Littr^ 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
* Scientists now admit that Europe enjoyed in the Miocene times a warm, in the Pliocene or later
Tertiary, a temperate climate. Littrfi'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.
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AFRICA IN EUROPE. 78 1
Botany necessitate the hypothesis of an Atlantis — has shown that the
plants of the Neolithic lake-villagers are mainl}' 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 spelaeus, the elephas primi-
genius, the aurochs (regarded by Cuvier as a distinct species), the
megaceros hibemicus — 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 computa-
tion, 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 Palaeolithic 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 man-
kind." Whence, then, radiated the various successive streams of
"primitive" men?
The earliest Palaeolithic men in Europe — about whose origin Ethno-
logy 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.* (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 consti-
tuting 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
• "Whence they [the old cave-men] came, we cannot tell " (Grant Allen). " The pateolithic 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).
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782 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Daitya and a stray island or so. The Atlantean connections of the
forefathers* of the Palaeolithic cave-men are evidenced by the up-
turning 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.f The cyclic impulse downwards
weighs heavily on the stocks thus transplanted — the incubus of the
Atlantean Karma is upon them. Finally, Palaeolithic man makes
room for his successor — and disappears almost entirely from the scene.
Professor Andre I<efevre asks in this connection:
Has the Polished succeeded the Chipped-Stone Age by an imperceptible transi-
tion, or was it due to an invasion of brachycephalous Kelts? But whether the
deterioration produced in the populations of La V^zdre 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.
• The pure Atlantean stocks— of which the tall Quaternary cave-men were, in part, the direct
descendants— inunisfrated into Kurope 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.
i The artistic skill displayed by the old cave-men renders the hypothesis which regards them as
approximations to the pithecanthropus alalus— that very mjrthical Hseckelian monster— an absurdity
requiring no Huxley or Schmidt to expose it. We see in their skill in engraving a gleam of Atlan-
tean culture atavistically re&ppearing. It will be remembered that Donnelly regards modem Euro-
pean civilisation as a renaissance of the AUantean. (Atlantis, pp. 237-^.)
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A TARDY ADMISSION. 783
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 migra-
tions 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 icons 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 Aryan Invasion [Fifth Race].*
• Philosophy Historical and Critical, Pt. II. p. 504, chap., "On Organic Evolution."
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SECTION YL
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 possi-
ble? 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 giv^ facts and show land-
marks; let the wayfarer follow them. What is adduced here is amply
sufl5cient 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 repre-
sentatives of "knowledge and wisdom/' the ancient Br&hmans. He
then adds a curious statement. He says:
But your Br&hmans are very young in comparison with their archaic instructors.*
Bailly, who knew nought of the Esoteric teachings, nor of I^emuria,
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 Hindus, their undeni-
able priority in the early part of their race had to be referred to a people
• Letlrei sur VAtlantide^ p. xa.
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A MYSTERIOUS NATION. yg^
or a race still more ancient and more learned than were even the
Br^hmans themselves .♦
Voltaire, the greatest sceptic of his day, the materialist par excellencey
shared Baill3^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. t
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 Sais 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, {
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.}
The Greeks were but the dwarfed and weak remnant of that once
glorious nation. II
What was this nation? The Secret Doctrine teaches that it was the
• Hisioire de tAstronomie Ancienne, pp. 25, et seqq.
t Lettres sur PAilaniide, p. 15. This conjecture is but a half-gruess. There were such "deluges of
barbarians" in the Fifth Race. With regard to the Fourth, it was a dona fide deluge of water which
swept it away. Neither Voltaire nor Bailly, however, knew anything of the Secret Doctrine of the
Bast.
X 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.
I Timaus^ translated by H. Davis, pp. 326-328.
I The story about Atlantis and all the traditions thereon were told, as all know, by Plato in his
Timetus 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.
e8
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786 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
latest seventh sub-race of the Atlantean, already swallowed up in one
of the early sub-races of the Aryan 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
Phoenicians, 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 geo-
logical 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 Anthro-
pology. 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-Eastem 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.*
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 Aryan 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.
• Sec Dr. Carter Blake's paper "Ou the Naulette Jaw/' Anthropological Review, Sept., 1867.
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THE ASSOCIATES OF THE APES AND THE ANGEI^S. 787
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 ascer-
tained; 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, andro-
gynes, 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 * 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 Palaeolithic
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 f — 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 Abbe 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 diflferent countries at the time
of the gigantic upheaval of the Andes, and that he has retained the memory of it —
• See de puatrefages and Hamy, Crhnes (Us Races Humaines.
t Hseckel'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 anjrwhere outside Hseckel's imagination— rather than the traditions of
antiquity.
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788 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
down to the latest Palaeontologists and Anthropologists, the majority
of scientific men is in favour of just such an antiquity. Apropos of
Peru, has any satisfactory attempt been made to determine the ethno-
logical 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.*
A most suggestive fact is the startling resemblance between the archi-
tecture 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
Modem Science.
Dr. Lartet, treating upon the subject, settles the question by de-
claring that :
The truth, so long contested, of the coexistence of man with the great extinct
species [elephas primigenius, rhinoceros tichorrhinus, hysena spelsea, ursus spelseus,
etc.], appears to me to be henceforth unassailable and definitely conquered by
science, t
It is shown elsewhere that such is also de Quatrefages' opinion. He
says:
Man has in all probability seen Miocene times { and consequently the entire
Pliocene epoch. Are there any reasons for believing that his traces wiU be found
further back still? . . . He may then have been contemporaneous with the
earliest mammalia, and go back as far as the Secondary period.}
Egypt is far older than Europe as now traced on the map. Atlanto-
• But aee the mass of evidence collected by Donnelly to prove the Peruvian colony an offshoot of
the Atlanteaas.
t Cdvemes de Ph^gord, p. 35.
% The ingenious author of Atlantis, the Ante-diluvian iVorld, in discussing the origin of various
Grecian and Roman institutions, expresses his conviction that "the roots of the institutionaof to-
day reach back to the Miocene age." Ay, and further yet, as already stated.
\ The Human Species, p. 152.
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THE OCCULT INTERPRBTATION OP THE "BIBLE." 789
Aryan tribes began to settle bn it when the British Islands* and
France were not even in existence. It is well known that "the tongue
of the iEg^ptian 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 Aryan 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 inhospit-
able 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 VinS in the day of
VishvSmitra.t
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 Abbe Fabre, professor at the Sorbonne, has categorically
declared that pre-historic Palaeontology and Archaeology 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 Abb€], 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. J
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 Abbe 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 in-
• As we know them, however. For not only does Gcologfy prove that the British Islands have been
four times submerged and reiUvated, but that the straits between them and Europe were dry land at a
former remote epoch.
t See, in Isis Unveiled (i. 627), what KuUfika Bhatta says.
% Les OriginfS de la Terre et de V Homme, p. 454. To this, Professor N. Joly, of Toulouse, who thus
quotes the Abb6 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.
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790 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
terpretation 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.*
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 ex-
plained 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, 7x7, stages of activity, and forty-nine stages of rest, on the seven
Globes of the Chain, and then comes the rest of Sabbath, t\i^ fiftieth\, and ye shall
offer a new meat offering unto the Lord.t
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 in-
stitution that dated from the earliest Atlanteans; it came to the Hebrews
via 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 Protes-
tants, the Occultists pronounce, in their impartiality, that these words
have applied from the first to all and every exoteric Churchianity — "cere-
• L4K, cit., 15, 18. + Ibid., i6.
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THE SYMBOLS OF SOUL-KILUNG CHURCHIANITY. 79I
monial 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 FiJElh 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.*
There are many such apocal3rptic allusions, but the student has to
find them out for himself
If the Bible combines with Archaeology 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 njuch 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 t "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}
— and that man was then just as he is now; only taller, and more
athletic than we are§ — then where is the difficulty? That they could
hardly be the descendants of monkeys, which are themselves not traced
before the Miocene epoch, || is, on the other hand, testified to by several
eminent Naturalists:
• op. ciL, 8-10.
t "The flints of Thenay bear unmistakable trace of the work of human hands." (G. dc Mortillet,
Promenades au Musie de St. Germain, p. 76.)
X Albert Gaudry, Les Enchainements du Monde Animal dans les Temps Giologiques, p. 240.
\ Speakingr of the reindeer hunters of P6rifford, Joly says that they *' were of great height, athletic,
with a strongly built skeleton." {Man before Metals, p. 353.)
II "On the shores of the lake of Beauce," says the Abb6 Bourgeois, "man lived in the midst of a
fimna which completely disappeared (aceratherium, tapir, mastodon). With the fluviatile sands of
Orltonais came the anthropomorphous monkey (pliopithecus antiquus); therefore, later than man."
See Comptes Rendus of the "Prehistoric Congress" of 1867 at Paris.)
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792 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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*
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 Abbe Bourgeois.
As to the matter of giants, though the tallest man hitherto found in
Europe among fossils is the ** Men tone 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 lift, high, this only proves— on the law of atavism,
or the reappearance of ancestral features of character — that there was
a time when 9ft. and loft. 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 modems 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 Palaeolithic 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,! 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
• De Quatrefages, The Human Species, p. 312.
t " In makiiig soundings in the slimy soil of the Nile Valley, two baked bricks were discovered, one
at the depth of 20, the other at 2 \ 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 Meials, p. 183.) Egyptian Zodiacs show more than 75.000 y^ars of observation I Note well also
that Burmeister speaks only of the Delta population.
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THB AGE OF EGYPT. 793
reigned over their little Atlanto- Aryan sub-race * 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 modem Archaeologists 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 landy via what became later the Straits of
Gibraltar; turning North and travelling through the future Phoenician
settlements of Southern Gaul; then still further North, until reaching
Camac (Morbihan) they turned to the West again and arrived, still
travelling by landy on the north-western promontory of the New
Continent.!
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 Ar>'an 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 firtna.
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 quater-
nary epoch . . . that he witnessed the upheaval of the Alpsf and the extension
• See Esoteric Buddhism, p. 66, Fifth Edition.
+ 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."
iMan be/ore Metals, p. 184.)
t He witnessed and remembered it too, as " the final disappearance of the largest continent [of
Atlantis] was an event coincident with the elevation of the Alps," a Master writes (see Esoteric
Buddhism p. 70). I\iri 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.
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794 'J^HE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 contem-
porary 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 hsemitechus 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.*
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- Aryan man?
Every educated penson 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
coexistence of man and the elephas meridionalis —
were equal to the occasion. The later discovery, in 1867, by the
Abbe 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,\
The modem Archaeologist, 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 Camac in Morbihan, Brittany
— nearly a mile in length and numbering 11,000 ranged in eleven rows
• "The Antiquity of the Human Race," in Man before Metals, by M. Joly, p. 184.
t The scientific "jury " disagfreed, as usual ; while de Quatrefages, de Mortillet, Worsaa, Engelhardty
Waldemar, Schmidt, Capellini, Hamy, and Cartailhac, saw upon the flints the traces of human handi-
work, Steenstrup, Virchow and Desor refused to do so. Still the majority, if we except some Rnglifth
Scientists, are for Bourgeois.
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THE TOMBS OP THE GIANTS. 795
— 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
(Hiinengraben); 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 Rakshasas, the Men-demons of LankS; 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 ** Palaeolithic 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 para-
phernalia 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.* Yet one is told authoritatively that the mounds,
and the mound or dolmen builders, are all '*Pelasgic" in Europe, ante-
cedent 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 archaeological fancy (opinion of De Mortillet, Bastian, and
Westropp). Finally VirchoVs 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.
• We take the following description from a scientific work. "The first of these animals [the
alli^^ator] 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 ^SS of which the diameter is 100 fl. 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, ibj symbolism of the Serpent (the
Cycle of Time) swallowing the Egg (Kosmos).
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796 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
And Archaeology has but to bow and submit to the decision *
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,t and man's size was reduced from 15 to 10 or 12 feet, from
the time of the third sub-race of the Aryan stock, which sub-race —
bom 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 occa-
sionally found in them ; and that those tombs, since they are gigantic,
must have contained giants,J 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 histor>\ They are not Druidical, but universal. Nor
did the Druids build them, for they were only the heirs of the cyclo-
pean lore left to them by generations of mighty builders and — "magi-
cians," both good and bad.
It will always be a subject of regret that History, rejecting h 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
• It might be better, perhaps, tor 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.
t 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.
% Murray says of the Mediterranean barbarians that they marvelled at the prowess of the Atlan-
teans. "Their phsrsical strength was extraordinary [witness indeed their cyclopean buildings], the
earth shaking sometimes under their tread. Whatever they did, was done speedily. . . . They
se and communicated their wisdom to men" {Mythology, p. 4).
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RACES OF GIANTS. 797
makes these giants the brethren of the dwarfs, and reduces the com-
bats of the Gods to the history of the development of the Aryan Race,
will only receive credence amongst the believers in the Aryan theory
as expounded by Max Miiller. 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
-^sir, 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-Nyani 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 locali-
ties "Los Campos de los Gigantes," the "Fields of Giants," are always
concomitant with the existence of Pliocene mammalia and the occur-
rence 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 modem times.
Not twice ten men the mighty bulk could raise.
Such men as live in these degenerate days.
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798 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Anthro-
pological Institute* 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 modem 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 preexisting 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 chil-
dren 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 Brobding-
• Art. by Dr. C. Carter Blake, 1871.
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WHO WERE THE DRUIDS? 799
nagians 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 Chaldaeans and
Indians, though little more. It may be inferred that they symbolized
their deity as the Hindus 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 Hindu K^la. 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 BrShmans of India. Dr. Borlase points to a close
analogy between them and the Magi of Persia;* 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 Hindus, 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 ^^'g 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 dis-
cover it in all. We shall find it among the Aryan Hindus and Maz-
deans, the Greeks, the Latins, and even among the old Jews and early
Christians, whose modem 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 reentered 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.
° But the Magi of Persia were never Persians— not even Chaldseans. They came from a far-oflf
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.
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800 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 pro-
duce 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.*
One might imagine oneself reading the Paurllnic account by Pari-
shara 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 scoflfers . . . saying, Where is the promise
of his coming ? for since the fathers feU 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 dis-
solved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat. Nevertheless we . . .
look for new heavens and a new earth.t
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 con-
stitution 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 Parsis
who have lost the key to the meaning of their Scriptures. In the
A vesta 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:
• op, cit., p. i6o. + op, cU,, pp. 3-13.
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THE MAZDEAN VIEW OF THE SEVEN EARTHS. 8oi
Three earths. . . . Three strata or layers, one lying above the other, are said
to be meant by this.*
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 as-
cending 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 Gathas already speak of the "septempartite earth." f
For:
According to the statements of the later Pars! Scriptures, the seven Kershvars 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 K^rshvar to another. :(
The ** Ocean" is Space, of course, for the latter was called "Waters
of Space" before it was known as Ether. Moreover, the word Karsh-
var is consistently rendered as Dvipa, and Hvaniratha is rendered by
Jambudvipa (Neryosangh, the translator of the Yasn<i),% But this fact
is not taken into account by the Orientalists, and therefore we find
even such a learned Zoroastrian and Parsi 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 "coincidences" concerns the similarity of the Zoroastrian with the
Indian tenet with regard to the seven Dvipas — islands, or continents,
rather — as met with in the Puranas, namely :
The Dvipas form concentric rings, which, separated by the ocean, surround
Jambudvipa, which is situated in the centre, [and] according to the Irdnian view,
• Civilization of the EasUrn Iranians in Ancient Times, pp. 130, 131.
t Mmi hapt^ita, Yasna, zzxii. 3.
X C/*., for instance, vol. i. p. 4, of the Pahlavi Translation ; Bdh. xxi. 2, 3.
I Footnote by Darab Dastur Peshotan Sa^jini, B.A., the translator of Dr. Wilhelm Geiger's work
fm the Civilization of the Eastern Iranians.
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802 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
the K^rshvar 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 in-
dividual space, and so they group themselves round [above] Qaniratha.*
Now Qaniratha — ^better Hvaniratha — is not, as believed by Geiger
and his translator, "the country inhabited by the Iranian 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 Tra-
dadhafshu, 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 (ii) thus:
N
(North) Vorubarshti 0 0 Voruzarshti (North)
(West) Arzahi W 0 0 E Savahi (East)
(South) Tradadhafshu % % Vidadhafshu (South)
Qaniratha
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 septem-
partite because of the seven Globes or Spheres which compose the
Chain. Hence the further meaning given in Vmdtdad (xix. 39),
showing that:
Qaniratha alone is combined with imat, <<this*' (earth), while all other Karsh-
vares are combined with the word "avat,^* "that" or those— yx^y^r earths.
Nothing could be plainer. The same may be said of the modem
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 modem 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 sus-
• op. ctL, pp. 130, 131.
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THE DRUIDICAL BEUEF IN REBIRTH. Bo$
peering the real meaning — they greeted the Morning Star, the beautiful
Venus-Lucifer.* Strabo speaks of an island near to Britannia:
Where Ceres and Persephone were worshipped with the same rites as in Samo-
thrace and this island was Sacred lemat —
-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 reincarnations in this same world; for as Diodorus
^ays, they declared that the souls of men, after determinate periods,
would pass into other bodies. J
These tenets came to the Fifth Race Aryans 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 super-
human 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.
iElian 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. // was the last to prodtcce
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 in-
habitants in it, gold and silver being found there in great abundance.
Grote's suggestion that Atlantis was but a myth arisen from a mirage
^^Kilouds on a dazzling sky taking the appearance of islands on a golden
sea — is too disingenuous to be further noticed.
• 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
<x>untries . . . when I heard a peasant girl say to a boor standing by her, ' Peach an Maddin Nag *
^Behold the morning star),'pointing to the planet Venus, the Maddina Nag of the Chaldsean " (pp.
z6a, 163).
+ Lib. Iv.
X 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.
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804 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
A.
SOME STATEMENTS ABOUT THE SACRED ISI.ANDS AND CONTI-
NENTS 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.* But, however
altered in its general aspect, Plato's narrative bears the impress of
truth upon it.f 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 compara-
tively recent personages as Shakspere and William Tell are all but
denied, an attempt being made to show one to be a nom de plunie, and
the other a person who never existed. What wonder then, that the
two powerful Races — the Ircmurians 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
• Criiiasy translated by Davis, p. 415.
t 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 ai^>ear 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 suppoee that the same correspondence
extended down to all the minor details." (Donnelly, AUaniU^ p. 164. Twenty-fourth Ed.)
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THE MEN, "WHOSE SLEEP WAS NEVER DISTURBED BY DREAMS." 805
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 degenera-
tion 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 Bibie, about the ante-
diluvian 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 reappearance 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
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8o6 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
"supporter." And as both Lemuria, destroyed by submarine fires, and
Atlantis, submerged by the waves, perished in the ocean deeps,* Atlas
is said to have been compelled to leave the surface of the Earth, and
join his brother lapetus in the depths of Tartarus.f 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, t
For Atlas is Atlantis, which supports the new continents and their
horizons on its "shoulders."
Dechanne, in his Mythologie de la Grice Antique^ expresses a doubt as
to the correctness of Pierron's translation of the Homeric word l^a by
sustiTiet, as it is not possible to see:
How Atlas can support or beiw 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,§ 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 ^€^
which Dechanne, following Sir Theodore Martin, understands as mean-
ing <^vXao-o-€i and cn-iftcXciTeu, 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,|| and Pindar qualified the
later -^tna as the "Celestial Pillar."f Atlas was an inaccessible island
peak in the days of IrCmuria, when the African continent had not yet
• 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 Alchemysiical Philosophers, p. 4, 1/>ndon, 1815).
t See Hesiod's Theogony, 507-509, and Odyssey ^ i. 51-53.
X Mhnoites de VAcadimie des Inscriptions, p. 176.
\ .^schylus, Prometheus Vinctus, 351, 429, etc.
II iv. 184.
H Pyth., i. 20; Dechanne, op. cit., p. 315.
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THE HEIRLOOM OF ATLANTIS. SOJ
been raised. It is the sole Western relic which survives, independent^
belonging to the Continent on which the Third Race was bom, de-
veloped and fell,* 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.f 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 Phoenicians 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. J 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.§
* This does not meau 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.
t Had not Diocletian burned the Esoteric works of the EsTPtians in a.d. 296, together with their books
on Alchemy, "ircpt ;(V/i€ia9 apyvpov koI )(pv<rov** ; Caesar 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.
X Professor Max Muller*8 Lectures— Of the Philosophy of Mythology— dx^ before us. We read his
citations of Heradeitus (460 B.C.), declaring that Homer deserved "to be ejected from public assem-
blies 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 Jit to be repeated." To this Prof. Max
Mfiller observes that : " the Greek religion was clearly a national and traditional religion, and, as such,
it shared both the advantages and disadvantages 0/ 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."
I doi2ci)K olhi hwrrrivOL koyoi, Hercules Furens, 1346, Dindorf s Edition.
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8o8 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 mis-
leading. 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.*
Now all the Gods of Olympus, as well as those of the Hindu Pan-
theon and the Rishis, were the septiform personations (i) of the
Noumena of the Intelligent Powers of Nature; (2) of Cosmic Forces;
(3) of Celestial Bodies; (4) of Gods or DhySn Chohans; (5) of Psychic
and Spiritual Powers; (6) of Divine Kings on Earth, or the incarna-
tions of the Gods; and (7) of Terrestrial Heroes or Men. The know-
ledge 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, Neptunef and
others fought in the allegory for Atlantis, which was the whole Earth
• Crittas, 421.
+ Neptune or Poseidon is the Hindii Idas-pati, identical with Niriyana (the Mover on the Waters)
or Vishnu, and like this Hindii God he is shown crossing the whole horizon in three steps. Idas-pati
means also the "Master of the Waters."
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"THE GREATER GODS OF OLYMPOS." 809
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.*
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,y "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 DhySn Chohans of
that Second Period or Race. Thus also in the second Manvantara,
that of SvSrochisha, among the seven sons of the Manu, the presiding
Gods or Rishis of that race, we find Jyotis,t the teacher of Astronomy
(Jyotisha), one of the names of BrahmS. 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 Yfhofell into generation, when "creation by wt/iwas
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 per-
verted and biassed. Homer is credited with an inner thought, which
is regarded hy Mr. Gladstone as, "the true key to the Homeric concep-
tion," whereas this "key" is merely a "blind."
[Poseidon] is indeed essentiaUy 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 seas4 which is composed of the giants, the children of Eury-
medon, 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
• Bailly's assertion that the 9,000 years mentioned by the EfiTptian priests do not represent "solar
years" is groundless. Ballly knew nothing of Geology and its calculations; otherwise he would
have spoken differently.
+ See Matsya PurAna, which places him among the seven Prajapatis of the period.
t Iliad, xxiv. 79.
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8lO THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Brothers, and to our human races. Poseidon and Nereus are one; the
former the Ruler or Spirit of Atlantis before the beginning of its sub-
mersion, the latter, after. Neptune is the titanic strength of the
living Race, Nereus, its Spirit, reincarnated in the subsequent Fifth or
Aryan 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 mtist 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 disputa-
tions 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
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THE POWER OF NAMES. 8ll
heads like iron bullets, while the world alone suffers by such contro-
versies; 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 thou-
sand stadia in one direction and two thousand in the other; they
surrounded the plain by an enormous canal or dike, loi feet deep,
606 feet broad, and 1,250 miles in length.*
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 Celaeno. 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.
• op. cit., p. 426.
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8 12 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Three great nations claimed in antiquity a direct descent from the
kingdom of Saturn or Lemuria, confused with Atlantis several thou-
sands of years before our era; and these were the Egyptians, the Phoe-
nicians (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 Brihmans — when invading India with its
dark-coloured Dravidians — have come from the North, so the Aryan
Fifth Race must claim its origin from northern regions. The Occult
Sciences show that the founders, the respective groups of the seven
Prajapatis, of the Root-Races have all been connected with the Pole
Star. In the Commentary we find:
He who understands the age of Dhruva* who measures gogo mortal years^
will understand the times of the Pralayas^ the final destiny of fiations, 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 con-
stellation of Ursa Major.
The Aryan Race was bom 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. f
Greece had her Hyperborean as well as her Southern Apollo. Thus
nearly all the Gods of Egypt, Greece, and Phcenicia, 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 physio-
• The equivalent of this name is given in the orig^inal.
+ Deucalion is said to have brought the worship of Adonis and Osiris into Phoenicia. 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 leng^th 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 bom 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 -(4/^^or»>j d^ Orient, p. 246, and by Bailly;
though neither Hercules nor Osiris are solar myths, save in one of their seven aspects.
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THE SONS OF CCELUS AND TERRA. 813
logical evolution had been completed.* 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 Coelus 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 ;t 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 de-
voured while the king of Ithaca himself was saved by putting out the
eye qf Polyphemus with a fire-brand, is based upon the psycho-physio-
logical 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. J 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.§
Cosmically and astronomically this Hyperborean God is the Sun per-
sonified, which during the course of the Sidereal Year — 25,868 years —
changes the climates on the Earth's surface, making frigid regions of
• 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.
t 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. i^Giographte Ancienney ii. 321.) It is they
whom Apollo destroyed with his shafts.
t Ulysses was wrecked on the isle of ^^aea, 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.y 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.
) Hygin., Astron. Pbittque, ii. 15.
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:8l4 THB SECRET DOCTRINE.
tropical, and vice versa. 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 Athen^) 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.*
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, Phoebus, etc. She is bom 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.f I<atona is the
Hyperborean Continent, and its Race — geologically.J
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 uEneas
to the battle field,§ and has the gift of appearing to his seers without
being visible to other persons present, || 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
• Nineteenth Century, July, 1887.
t Diod. sic, ii. 307.
X To make a difference between Lerauria 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 Hjrperborean Atlantis." The Greeks naturalized all the Gods they borrowed and
made Hellenes of them, and the modems helped them. Thus also the Mythologists have tried to
make of Eridanus the river Po, in Italy. In the msrth of Phaeton it is said that at his death his
sisters dropped hot tears which fell into Eridanus and were changed into amber I 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 allegor>' 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, on^
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.
\ niad, xvii. 43X'453>
U Ibid,, 222-336.
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THE CHILDREN OF NIOBE. 815
their seven branches* 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 ;t 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 astro-
nomically, whose influence causes changes in the Earth's axis, deluges
and other cosmic cataclysms — is thus very clear.J 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 there-
fore,§ because she represents the last generations of the doomed
Continent.
A true remark, that of Bailly, which says that Atlantis had an enor-
mous 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. ||
• Sec Apollodonis for this number.
t See "The Sons of God and the Sacred Island."
t So occult and mystic is one of the aspects of I^tona that she is made to reSppear 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. i, 17.) Anyone who
reads the allegory of I^tona pursued by the revenge of jealous Juno, will recognize the identity of
the two versions. Juno sends Python, the Dragon, to persecute and destroy I^atona 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 deve-
loping into physical men, for they now had to deal with the climatic variations. The Dragon will not
allow I^tona "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 n3rmph Asteria, hitherto hiding from Jupiter under the waves of the Ocean— on which
I^tona finds refuge, and where the bright God Delius is bom, 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, I^tona-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, I^tona 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 bom 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 Ljrre — 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.
) See Ovid, Metamorphoses, vi.
il Lettres sur I'Atlantide, p. 137.
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8l6 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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.* 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 Iright. 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.f They speak of the
Cimmerians and of the Hyperboreans, and draw a distinction between
the two. The former inhabited the Palus Maeotis — ^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 theyear.X
• Hesiod, Opera et Dies, 143. t Hist. Nat., iv. 12. % Marius,
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THE ** ISLAND OF THE DIVINE KINGS.*' 817
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.*
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.t
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"; J the other, Pliny,
names it Osericta,§ a word which, according to Rudbeck,|| 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, Le,, 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 Nordenskiold on his "Vega" voyage
in the Arctic regions.^ 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
ELings 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
• op. ciU, c. 16.
f Isaac Myer's QabbalcLh^ p. 139.
* Diod., ii. 225.
\ Op, cit, xxxvii. 2.
II Vol. i. pp. 462-464.
IT These islands were "foand strewn with fossils of horses, sheep, oxen, etc., amoufi: 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.
08
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8l8 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
appeared four times in his own form (as the God of the Four Races)
and six times in human form,* /.^., 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.f
It is, of course, evident that it is neither the Hyperboreans, nor the
Cimmerians, the Arimaspes, nor even the Scyths — known to and com-
municating 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 Chaldaean
Xisuthrus, the Hindu 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 via 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, bom of the
• op. ctt., \v. 239-262.
t 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 man^, dead men.
The I^aplanders call their corpses to this day mame ( Voyage de Rinard en Laponie, i. 184). Mannus is
the ancestor of the German race; the Hind(i Manu, the thinking being, from man; the Egj^tian
Menes; and Minos, the King of Crete, judge of the infernal regions after his death— all proceed from
the same word or root.
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WHO WERE THE NEPHIUM? 819
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 Scrip-
tures. 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, Spitz-
bergen, Sweden, Norway, etc.
But who were the Nephilim of Genesis (vi. 4) ? There were Palaeo-
lithic 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 Amphi trite; 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 Theogonyy 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 M5^hology every personage almost is a God or
Demi-god, and also a king or simple mortal in his second aspect,* and
that both stand as symbols for lands, islands, powers of nature, ele-
ments, nations, races and sub-races, the Esoteric Commentary will
* Thus, for instance, G3rg«8 is a hundred-armed and fifly-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 Brahmi are reborn as mortals.
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820 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 con-
formation of the Arctic and Antarctic Poles has but little altered. The
polar lands unite and break off from each other into islands and pen-
insulas, 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 reappear 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 dark-
ness reigns, that the three brothers languish. The Iliad makes it
Tartarus.* 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 tum.t The geological upheaval and
deluge of Thessaly was a repetition on a small scale of the great cata-
clysm ; 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 RSkshasas of LankS and the BhSrateans,
the melie of the Atlanteans and Aryans 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 bom but yesterday, and one of the latest
• op. cU., viii. 13.
t The continents perish in turn by fire and water; either thronsfh earthquakes and volcanic erup-
tions, or by sinking and the srreat displacement of waters. Our continents have to perish by the
former caUcljrsmal process. The incessant earthquakes of the past years may be a waminff .
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MYTHOLOGY BUILT ON HISTORY. 821
issues of the Aryan stock, took upon themselves to overturn the reli-
gious thought of the world, and succeeded. For nearly two thousand
years they impressed thinking humanity with the belief in the exist-
ence 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,* 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 modem
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 ;t 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 cor-
roborations of the latter in the scientific and geological proofs.
• See Decharme's Mythologie de la Grhe Antique.
t 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 bom 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, Hindis, Chinamen, Japanese, etc. Compare the tall Sikhs and Punjabees, the Afghans,
Norwegians, Russians, Northern Germans, Scotchmen, and Bnglish, 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.
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SECTION YIL
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 con-
cerning the remote past is far more philosophical than i 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. 7a Extract from a Lecture by W. Pengelly,
F.R.S., F.G.S.
(I.) (I.)
The sinking of Atlantis (the group of Was there, as some have believed, an
continents and isles) began during the Atlantis — a continent or archipelago of
Miocene period .... and it culminated large islands occup3dng the area of the
first in the final disappecu-ance of the North Atlantic? There is, perhaps, no-
largest continent, an event coincident with thing unphilosophical in the hypothesis.
the elevation of the Alps, and second with For since, as geologists state, ** The Alps
that of the last of the fair islands men- have acquired 4,000 and even in some pl4ues
tioned by Plato. more than 10,000 feet of their present alti-
tude since the commencement of the Eocene
epoch''* (Lyell*s Principles, p. 256, 2nd Ed.)
—a Post-Miocene depression might have
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GKOI.OGY CORROBORATES OCCUI.TISM. 825
carried the hypothetical Atlantis inta
almost (ibysmal depths.*
Extract from Esoteric Buddhism, pp. 64, Extract from an article in the Popular
65. Science Review, v. 18, by Professor See-
mann, Ph.D., FX.S., V.-P.A.S.
(2.) (2.)
Ivemoria .... should no more be It would be premature to say, because
confounded with the Atlantis Continent no evidence has yet been adduced, that
than Europe with America. Both sank men may not have existed in the Eocene
and were drowned with their high civili- age, especially as it can be shown that
zations and "gods"; yet between the two a race of men, the lowest we know of, cO'
catastrophes a period of about 700,000 exists with that remnant of the Eocene
years elapsed, Lemuria flourishing and flora which still survives on the continent
ending her career just about that lapse of and islands of Australia,
time before the early part of the Eocefie _ , ^ .,
•i. T^ *!. ^1.- J T» u 1^ Extreict trom The Pedigree of Man, p. Si,
age, since its Race was the Third. Behold s j * tr
the relics of that once great nation in some Haeckel, who fully accepts the reality
of the flat-headed aborigines of your AuS' of a former Lemuria, also regards the
tralia, 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 Papu-
ans 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 m3rthology is thoroughly false.
But this religion is certainly quite deteriorated, t
* 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, Rd. 1874.) Prof. I/*ftvre,
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.
•♦• Cited in Schmidt's Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism^ pp. 300, 301.
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824 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
As to Haeckers 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 ^A^^^^a/
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 thp
Globe, among those races, whose "time is up" — among just those stocks,
be it remarked, which Esoteric Philosophy regards as the senile repre-
sentatives of lost archaic nations. It is inaccurate to maintain that the
extinction of a lower race is invariably due to cruelties or abuses per-
petrated 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 Lef evre 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 liave defended themselves most valiantly, Hawaiians or Maories,
have been no less decitnated than the tribes massacred or tainted by European intrusion,^
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 dispropor-
tion" 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 Lef evre 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
• Philosophy Historical and Critical^ p. 508.
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TRADITION AS TRUE AS HISTORY. 825
the white (Aryan, Fifth Root- Race), the yellow, and the African negro
^— with their crossings (Atlanto-European divisions). Redskins, Eski-
mos, 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 experi-
ence 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.* No solu-
tion, 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 Palaeozoic epoch, if there
were any grounds for entertaining it.t
That is to say, then, that there is nothing to militate against positive
evidence of the fact; nothing, therefore, against the geological postu-
lates 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 con-
nected 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
• Human Species, pp. 428, et segq.
t Art., "The First Volume of the EMiblications of the 'Challenger,'" p. 2, Nov. 4th, 1880.
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826 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
contiiients 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.*
And in another number of the same review f 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 { in the Atlantic Ocean, § 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. || . . .
The submerged continent of Lemuria, in what is now the Indian Ocean, is con-
sidered 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 g^ve.
In an article containing a criticism of Mr. A. R. Wallace's Island
* op, cit.y Art., "Australia and Europe formerly one Continent " (v. 19, 25). Undoubtedly a fact, and
a confirmation of the Esoteric conception of Lemuria, which ori^nally 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.
t Ibid.^ i. 143.
X C/.y the published reports of the "Challenger" expedition; also Donnelly's Atlantis, p. 468 and
pp. 46-56, Chap., "The Testimony of the Sea."
\ Even the cautious I^f&vre 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. C/., his Philosophy Historical and Critical, pp.
478 and 504. Mr. Donnelly remarks with rare intuition that "modem 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.
II An equally "curious" similarity may be traced between some of the West Indian and West
African fauna.
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ATLANTIS, NECESSARY TO ETHNOU)GY. 827
Life--'2i work devoted largely to the question of the distribution of
animals, etc. — Mr. Starkie Gardiner writes:
By a process of reasoning supported by a leu-ge 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 sup-
position 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 sesis 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 Poljmesia* 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 in-
surmountable obstacles, and the apparently sudden arrival of a number of sub-
tropical 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.'* t
The "father" of English Geology — Sir Charles Lyell — ^was a uni-
formitarian in his views of continental formation. We find him
saying :
Professors Unger (Die Versunkene Insel Atlantis) and Heer {Flora Tertiaria HeU
vetuz) have advocated on botanical grounds the former existence of an Atlantic
Continent during some part of the tertiary period, as affording the only plausible
* The Pacific portion of the giant Lemurian Continent christened by Dr. Carter Blake, the Anthro-
pologist, "Pacificus."
t "Subsidence and Elevation," Geological Magazine, pp. 241, 245, June, i88i.
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828 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 tyi>es 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.*
The unnecessary difficulties and complications here incurred in order
to avoid the hypothesis of an Atlantic Continent, are really too appa-
rent 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 undeni-
able, from the days of the Mathematician Laplace down to our own,
and that only a few years ago.f We have Professor Huxley's authority
for saying that there is no a 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 Eg}T)t,
and amongst others that of the former successive destruction and renovation of
the world [continentaly 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 dura-
tion 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 revolu-
tions of the sun, moon, and planets, and terminating when these return together
• Antiquity of Man, p. 492.
t When Howard read, before the Royal Society of I/>ndoii, 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 in-
terrupted by Laplace, the great Astronomer, who cried: "Stop ! we have had enough of such fabUs,
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 ' / "
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ASTIL^A FAIXS ON HER HEAD. 829
to the same sign whence they were supposed at some remote epoch to have set out.
. . . We learn particularly from the Timemis of Plato that the Egyptians be-
lieved the world to be subject to occasional conflagrations and deluges. The sect
of Stoics adopted most fully the system of catastrophes destined at certain in-
tervals to destroy the world. These, they taught, were of two kinds — the cata-
clysm, 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].
Towfirds 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, Astraea again descended on the earth to renew the golden age
[dawn of a new Root-Race].*
Astraea, 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 Astraea on the Earth again, on which she falls upon
her head. Astraea is Virgo, the constellation of the Zodiac. Astrono-
mically 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 pre-
cedes 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 BrahmS, 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 conjunc-
tion 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 Albebaran was in conjunction
with the vernal equinoctial point. The part assigned to Taurus, even
• Principles of Geology, i. 9, 10.
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330 ^HE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Astraea, 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 Eg3T)tian 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,^
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
Megoriesi "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.f We must admit allegorical
teaching, unless we hold with Prof. John Fiske's singularly dogmatic
opinion that a myth :
• Ibid.
t The Cyclic I^w of Race-Bvolutiou is most unwelcome to Scientists. It is sufficient to mention
the fact of " primeval civilization " to excite the frenzy of Darwinians; it beins: obvious that the further
-culture and science is pushed back, the more precarious becomes the basis of the ape-ancestor theory.
But as Jacolliot sajrs: "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 im-
portant for science to recover its traces, however feeble and fugitive they be." {Histoire des l^iirges ;
Us Peuples et les CotUinents Dtsparus, 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 cotmter to
current hjrpotheses. There is no Stone age visible there, but a more glorious culture is apparent the
further back we are enabled to carry our retrospect.
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INGENIOUS EXPLANATIONS. 83 1
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.*
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 "as-
tronomical" 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,! he attempts to trace the Atlantis "tradition" to the following
sources :
(i) 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.
• Myths and Myth-Makers, p. 21.
t Violent minor cataclysms and colossal earthquakes are recorded in the annals of most nations —
if not of all. Elevation and subsidence of continents is alwajrs in progress. The whole coast of
South America has been raised up xo 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, Himilayas and Cordilleras were all the result of depositions drilled
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 Norvray, have risen from 200 to 600 feet; in Scotland there are raised beaches with outljring
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 varjring 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 arc 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, ^^., the case of
Sunda Island with the destruction of 80,000 Malays ?
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832 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
An ingenious "explanation," as all such are! But proving a nega-
tive 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 explain-
ing away the cumulative evidences — namely, the archaeological, ethno-
logical, 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 weU 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 en-
gulfed by the sea* [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 subpierged 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,
swaUowed them up. Notwithstanding the geographical fact that New 2^ealand, and
Sandwich and Baster 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 Euro-
peans; 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 difl&culty, have the same religious beliefs and superstitions, and pretty much
the same customs. And as few of the Polynesian islands were discovered eariier
* For the opinions of Jacolliot, after \ong travels throu^^h the Polynesian Islands, and his proofs of
a former great geological cataclysm in the Pacific Ocean, see his Histoire tUs Viirges; tes PtmpUsH
Us Continents Dtsparus, p. 308.
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HiECKEL FOR ONCE IS RIGHT. 833
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.*
Professor Schmidt, writing in defence of the h)rpothesis 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.t
Mr. A. R. Wallace, in his Malay Archipelago y 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.}
According to Haeckel:
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. }
In one sense Haeckel 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 diflferent.
Haeckel makes Lemuria extend from Sunda Island to Africa and
Madagascar and eastwards to Upper India.
Professor Riitimeyer, the eminent Palaeontologist, 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
Puego and Australia must be the remains — ^need this conjecture raise difficulties at
* August, 1880.
+ Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism^ pp. ^36, 237. Cf, also his lengthy argruments on the snbject,
pp. 231-235.
% Op. cit.^ i. 22, 23, Bd. 1869.
) Fedigree of Man, p. 73.
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834 ^HS SECRET DOCTRINE.
a moment when, from their fossil remains, Heer restores to our sight the ancient
forests of Smith's Sound and Spitzbergen?*
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:
(i) The Miocene florae of Europe have their most numerous and
striking analogues in the florae 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 effiected, if we exclude the
theory of an Atlantic Continent bridging the ocean between America
and Europe? The proposed "explanation" to the effect that the transi-
tion 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
florae 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 (Littre).
Monuments have been exhumed in Central America, which bear repre-
sentations 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,! but with :
The aboriginal languages of the vast opposite continent [America] and those
alone. {
Professor Broca is also of the same opinion.
Palaeolithic European man of the Miocene and Pliocene times was a
• cited in Schmidt's Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism, p. 238.
t For further facts as to the isolation of the Basques in Europe and their ethnologrical 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 modem Basques, that both belong to a race proper to
those ancient islands, of which the Canaries are the remains I This is a step in advance indeed. De
Quatrefages and Hamy also both assign the Cro-Magnon men of South Prance and the Guanches to
one type— a proposition which involves a certain corollary which both these writers may not care to
father.
X Families of Speech.
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FINAI. AND IRREFUTABLE EVIDENCE. 835
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 out-
line 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. Ber-
thollet was induced by such evidence to postulate the unity of race of
the early men of the Canary Islands and America.*
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 Palaeolithic 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 lycopold 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 imme-
diate 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 "super-
stitions," 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 TeneriflFe, did not go far with
sceptical Science. The identity of animal and vegetable species,
showing either a previous connection between America and the re-
maining 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
• Cf., Benjamin, The Atlantic Islands, p. 130.
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836 THB SECRET DOCTRINE.
accepted fact. Fossils found on the Eastern Coast of South America
have now been proved to belong to the Jurassic formations, and are
neariy 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 resem-
blance 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 can-
not 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].*
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.t
(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:
* IVestminster Review, Jan., 1872. t Schmidt, Doclrine of Descent and Darunnism, p. 293.
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ENOUGH HAS NOW BEEN SAID. 837
•
With regard to the primitive dolichocephalae of America, I entertain a h3rpothesi8
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 Eg3^tian-Atlantidse. 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.*
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.!
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. J
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. §
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 migra-
tion 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
• Professor Retzius, Smiihsonian Report, 1859, p. 266.
i See the investi^rations of United States ship " Dolphin " and others.
* Scientific American, July 28th, 1877.
I See his chart, Atlantis, p. 46, thoufirh he deals with only a fragment of the recti Continent
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838 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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.*
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 bom 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 evolu-
tion 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 modem criticism to lack of observation in the
ancient writers, or to superstition bom out of the ignorance of antiquity.
It is, therefore, impossible to treat this subject as one would the ordinary
Donnelly, AUantis^ p. 480.
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HEAR BOTH SIDES. 839
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 funda-
mental 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 com-
paring 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 prima facie propositions or respective premises diflFer 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 credu-
lous" 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 modem
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840 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. '
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 Magonnerie 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 mis-
take 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 imder 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.*
Such veiled sentences with double meaning abound in ancient
classical writers. Therefore, if an attempt had been made to show
that, for instance, I^aomedon was the founder of a branch of Archaic
Mysteries, in which the earth-bound material soul, the Fourth Prin-
ciple, 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
lyaomedon building a city, not founding an Esoteric Worship or Mys-
teries. 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
• Mofonnerie OccuUe, p. 44*
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THE PROLOGUE TO ESOTERIC TRUTH. 84I
on our thesis, there still remains more than one diflSculty to be over-
come. Most important among several such obstacles is that of chro-
nology. 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* (a trifling diflFerence,
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 diflFerence 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
modem 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
• Vide Sir William Thompson and Mr. Huxley.
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842 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
first of which only is the consecutive, though very fragmentary, history
of the Cosmogony and the Evolution of Man on this Globe. In treat-
ing of Cosmogony and then of the Anthropogenesis of mankind, it
was necessary to show that no 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-bom doctrine, no creed, how-
ever 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 scrip-
tural 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 accom-
plished. 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 consti-
tute 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.
SaTYAT NASTI PARC DHARMAH.
THERE IS NO RELIGION HIGHER THAN TRUTH.
End of Volume II.
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