BOOK I. -- PART II. THE EVOLUTION OF SYMBOLISM IN ITS APPROXIMATE ORDER

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his example. This is why in
Judaism and Christianity the Messiah is always connected with Water, Baptism, the Fishes (the sign of
the Zodiac called Meenam in Sanskrit), and even with the Matsya (fish) Avatar, and the Lotus -- the
symbol of the womb, or the water-lily, which is the same.
In the relics of ancient Egypt, the greater the antiquity of the votive symbols and emblems of the
objects exhumed, the oftener are the lotus flowers and the water found in connection with the Solar
Gods. The god Khnoom -- the moist power -- water, as Thales taught it, being the principle of all
things, sits on a throne enshrined in a lotus (Saitic epoch, Serapeum). The god Bes stands on a lotus,
ready to devour his progeny. (Ibid, Abydos.) Thot, the god of mystery and Wisdom, the sacred Scribe
of Amenti, wearing the Solar disc as head gear, sits with a bull's head (the sacred bull of Mendes being
a form of Thot) and a human body, on a full blown lotus. (IVth Dynasty.) Finally it is the goddess
Hiquet, under her shape of a frog, who rests on the lotus, thus showing her connection with water. And
it is this frog-symbol, undeniably the most ancient of their Egyptian deities, from whose unpoetical
shape the Egyptologists have been vainly trying to unravel her mystery and functions. Its adoption in
the Church by the early Christians shows that they knew it better than our modern Orientalists. The
"frog or toad goddess" was one of the chief cosmic deities connected with creation, on account of her
amphibious nature, and chiefly because of her apparent resurrection, after long ages of solitary life
enshrined in old walls, in rocks, etc. She not only participated in the organization of the world,
together with Khnoom, but was also connected with the
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* Even to the seven daughters of the Midian priest, who, coming to draw the water, had Moses water
their flock, for which service the Midian gives to Moses Zipporah (sippara = the shining wave) as
wife (Exod. ii.) All this has the same secret meaning.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 386 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

dogma of resurrection.* There must have been some very profound and sacred meaning attached to
this symbol, since, notwithstanding the risk of being charged with a disgusting form of zoolatry, the
early Egyptian Christians adopted it in their Churches. A frog or toad enshrined in a lotus flower, or
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simply without the latter emblem, was the form chosen for the Church lamps, on which were engraved
the words "I am the resurrection" "[[ego eimi anastasis]]."** These frog goddesses are also found on
all the mummies.
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[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* With the Egyptians it was the resurrection in rebirth after 3,000 years of purification, either in
Devachan or "the fields of bliss."
** Such "frog-goddesses" may be seen at Bulaq, in the Cairo Museum. For the statement about the
Church lamps and inscriptions it is the learned ex-director of the Bulaq Museum, Mr. Gaston Maspero,
who must be held responsible. (See his "Guide du Visiteur au Musee de Bulaq," p. 146.)

Next Chapter
Contents

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The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 1

Theosophical University Press Online Edition

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 386 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

[[This page continued from previous section]]
IX
THE MOON, DEUS LUNUS, PHOEBE.
THIS archaic symbol is the most poetical of all symbols, as also the most philosophical. The ancient
Greeks brought it into prominence, and the modern poets have worn it threadbare. The Queen of Night,
riding in the majesty of her peerless light in heaven, throwing all, even Hesperos, into darkness, and
spreading her silver mantle over the whole sidereal world, has ever been a favourite theme with all the
poets of Christendom, from Milton and Shakespeare down to the latest versifier. But the refulgent
lamp of night, with her suite of stars unnumbered, spoke only to the imagination of the profane. Until
lately, Religion and Science had nought to do with the beautiful mythos. Yet, the cold chaste moon,
she, in the words of Shelley -. . . . "Who makes all beautiful on which she smiles
That wandering shrine of soft, yet icy flame,
Which ever is transformed, yet still the same,
And warms, but not illumines." . . . .
stands in closer relations to Earth than any other sidereal orb. The Sun is the giver of life to the whole
planetary system; the Moon is the giver of life to our globe; and the early races understood and knew
it, even in their infancy. She is the Queen and she is the King, and was King Soma before she became
transformed into Phoebe and the chaste Diana. She is pre-eminently the deity of the Christians, through
the Mosaic and Kabalistic Jews, though the civilized world may have remained ignorant of the fact for
long ages; in fact, ever since the

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 387 A GLANCE AT THE LUNAR MYTH.

last initiated Father of the Church died, carrying with him into his grave the secrets of the pagan
temples. For the "Fathers" -- such as Origen or Clemens Alexandrinus -- the Moon was Jehovah's
living symbol: the giver of Life and the giver of Death, the disposer of being -- in our World. For, if
Artemis was Luna in Heaven, and, with the Greeks, Diana on Earth, who presided over child-birth and
life: with the Egyptians, she was Hekat (Hecate) in Hell, the goddess of Death, who ruled over magic
and enchantments. More than this: as the personified moon, whose phenomena are triadic, DianaHecate-Luna is the three in one. For she is Diva triformis, tergemina, triceps -- three heads on one
neck,* like Brahma-Vishnu-Siva. Hence she is the prototype of our Trinity, which has not always been
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entirely male. The number seven, so prominent in the Bible, so sacred in its seventh (Sabbath) day,
came to the Jews from Antiquity, deriving its origin from the four-fold number 7 contained in the 28
days of the lunar month, each septenary portion thereof being typified by one quarter of the moon.
It is worth the trouble of presenting in this work a bird's-eye view of the origin and development of the
lunar myth and worship in historical antiquity, on our side of the globe. Its earlier origin is untraceable
by exact science, rejecting as it does tradition; while for Theology, which, under the guidance of the
crafty Popes, has put a brand on every fragment of literature that does not bear the imprimatur of the
Church of Rome, its archaic history is a sealed book. Whether the Egyptian or the Aryan Hindu
religious philosophy is the more ancient -- and the Secret Doctrine says it is the latter -- does not much
matter in this instance, as the lunar and solar "worship" are the most ancient in the world. Both have
survived, and prevail to this day throughout the whole world, with some openly, with others -- e.g., in
Christian symbolics -- secretly. The cat, a lunar symbol, was sacred to Isis, herself the Moon in one
sense, as Osiris was the Sun. The cat is often seen on the top of the Sistrum in the hand of the goddess.
This animal was held in great veneration in the city of Bubaste, which went into deep mourning after
the death of every sacred cat, because Isis, as the Moon, was particularly worshipped in this city of
mysteries. The astronomical symbolism connected with it has already been given in Section I. of
"Symbolism," and no one has better described it than Mr. G. Massey, in his Lectures and in "The
Natural Genesis." The eye of the cat, it is said, seems to follow the lunar phases in its growth and
decline, and its orbs shine like two stars in the darkness of night. Hence the mythological allegory
which shows Diana hiding under the shape of a cat in the Moon, when, in company with other deities,
she was seeking to
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* The goddess [[Trimorphos]] in the statuary of Alcamenes.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 388 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

escape the pursuit of Typhon (Vide the Metamorphoses of Ovid). The moon in Egypt was both the "Eye
of Horus" and the "Eye of Osiris," the Sun.
The same with the Cynocephalus. The dog-headed ape was a glyph to symbolise the sun and moon, in
turn, though the Cynocephalus is more a Hermetic than a religious symbol. For it is the hieroglyph of
Mercury, the planet, as of the Mercury of the Alchemical philosophers, "as," say the Alchemists,
"Mercury has to be ever near Isis, as her minister, as without Mercury neither Isis nor Osiris can
accomplish anything in the GREAT WORK." Cynocephalus, whenever represented with the
Caduceus, the Crescent, or the Lotus, is a glyph of the "philosophical" Mercury; but when seen with a
reed, or a roll of parchment, he stands for Hermes, the secretary and adviser of Isis, as Hanuman filled
the same office with Rama.
Though the regular Sun-Worshippers, the Parsis, are few, yet not only is the bulk of the Hindu
mythology and history based upon and interblended with these two worships, but so is also the
Christian religion itself. From their origin down to our modern day it has coloured the theologies of
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both the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches. The difference, indeed, between the Aryan Hindu
and the Aryan European faiths is very small, if only the fundamental ideas of both are taken into
consideration. Hindus are proud of calling themselves Suryas and Chandravansas (of the Solar and
Lunar dynasties). The Christians pretend to regard it as idolatry, and yet they adhere to a religion
entirely based upon the solar and lunar worships. It is useless and vain for the Protestants to exclaim
against the Roman Catholics for their "Mariolatry," based on the ancient cult of lunar goddesses, when
they themselves worship Jehovah, pre-eminently a lunar god, and when both Churches have accepted
in their theologies the "Sun"-Christ and the lunar trinity.
What is known of Chaldaean Moon-Worship, of the Babylonian god, Sin, called by the Greeks "Deus
Lunus," is very little, and that little is apt to mislead the profane student who fails to grasp the esoteric
significance of the symbols. As popularly known to the ancient profane philosophers and writers (for
those who were initiated were pledged to silence) the Chaldaea were the worshippers of the moon
under her (and his) various names, just as were the Jews, who came after them.
In the unpublished MSS. on the Art Speech, already mentioned, giving a key to the formation of the
ancient (symbolical) languages a logical raison d'etre is brought forward for this double worship. It is
written by a wonderfully well-informed and acute scholar and Mystic, who gives it in the
comprehensive form of a hypothesis. The latter, however, becomes forcibly a proven fact in the history
of religious

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 389 A KEY NOTE TO THE MOON.

evolution in human thought, to anyone who has ever had a glimpse into the secret of ancient
Symbology. Thus, he says: -"One of the first occupations among men, connected with those of actual necessity,
would be the perception of time periods,* marked on the vaulted arch of the heavens
sprung and rising over the level floor of the horizon, or the plain of still water. These
would come to be marked as those of day and night, of the phases of the moon, of its
stellar or synodic revolutions, and of the period of the solar year with recurrence of the
seasons, and with the application to such periods of the natural measure of day or night,
or of the day divided into the light and the dark. It would also be discovered that there
was a longest and shortest solar day, and two solar days of equal day and night, within
the period of the solar year; and the points in the year of these could be marked with the
greatest precision in the starry groups of the heavens or the constellations, subject to that
retrograde movement thereof, which in time would require a correction by intercalation,
as was the case in the description of the Flood, where correction of 150 days was made
for a period of 600 years, during which confusion of landmarks had increased. . . . This
would naturally come to pass . . . . with all races in all time; and such knowledge must
be taken to have been inherent in the human race, prior to what we call the historic
period. . . . ."
On this basis, the author seeks for some natural physical function possessed in common
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by the human race, and connected with the periodical manifestations, such that "the
connection between the two kinds of phenomena . . . became fixed in popular usage." He
finds it "(a) in the feminine physiological phenomena every lunar month of 28 days, or"
4 weeks of 7 days each, so that 13 occurrences of the period should happen in 364 days,
which is the solar week year of 52 weeks of 7 days each. (b) The quickening of the
foetus is marked by a period of 126 days, or 18 weeks of 7 days each. (c) That period
which is called "the period of viability" is one of 210 days, or 30 weeks of 7 days each.
(d) The period of parturition is accomplished in 280 days, or a period of 40 weeks of 7
days each, or 10 lunar months of 28 days each, or of 9 calendar months of 31 days each,
counting on the royal arch of heavens for the measure of the period of traverse from the
darkness of the womb to the light and glory of conscious existence, that continuing
inscrutable mystery and miracle . . . Thus the observed periods of time marking the
workings of the birth function would naturally become a basis of astronomical
calculation . . . We may almost affirm . . . that this was the mode of reckoning among all
nations, either independently, or intermediately and indirectly by tuition. It was the
mode with the Hebrews, for even to-day they calculate the calendar by means of the 354
and 355 of the lunar year, and we possess a special evidence that it was the mode with
the ancient Egyptians, as to which this is the proof: -[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* Ancient Mythology includes ancient Astronomy as well as Astrology. The planets were the hands
pointing out, on the dial of our solar system, the hours of certain periodical events. Thus, Mercury was
the messenger appointed to keep time during the daily solar and lunar phenomena, and was otherwise
connected with the God and Goddess of Light.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 390 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

"The basic idea underlying the religious philosophy of the Hebrews was that God
contained all things within himself*; and that man was his image, man including woman
. . . The place of the man and woman with the Hebrews was among the Egyptians
occupied by the bull and the cow, sacred to Osiris and Isis,** who were represented,
respectively, by a man having a bull's head, and a woman having the head of a cow,
which symbols were worshipped. Notoriously Osiris was the Sun and the river Nile, the
tropical year of 365 days, which number is the value of the word Neilos, and the bull, as
he was also the principle of fire and of life-giving force, while Isis was the Moon, the
bed of the river Nile, or the Mother Earth, for the parturient energies of which water was
a necessity, the lunar year of 354-364 days, the time-maker of the periods of gestation,
and the cow marked by, or with, the crescent new moon." . . . .
"But the use of the cow of the Egyptians for the women of the Hebrews was not intended
as of any radical difference of signification, but a concurrence in the teaching intended,
and merely as a substitution of a symbol of common import, which was this, viz., the
period of parturition with the cow and the woman was held to be the same, or 280 days,
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or ten lunar months of four weeks each. And in this period consisted the essential value
of this animal symbol, whose mark was that of the crescent moon.*** . . . These
parturient and natural periods are found to have been subjects of symbolism all over the
world. They were thus used by the Hindus, and are found to be most plainly set forth by
the ancient Americans, in the Richardson and Gest tablets, in the Palenque Cross; and
manifestly lay at the base of the formation of the calendar forms of the Mayas of
Yucatan, the Hindus, the Assyrians, and the ancient Babylonians, as well as the
Egyptians and old Hebrews. The natural symbols . . . would be either the phallus or the
phallus and yoni, . . . or male and female. Indeed, the words translated by the
generalizing terms male and female, in the 27th verse of the 1st chapter of Genesis are . .
. sacr and n'cabrah, or literally, phallus and yoni,**** while the representation of the
phallic emblems would barely indicate the genital members of the human body, when
their functions and the development of the seed-vesicles emanating from them was
considered; then would come into indication a mode of measures of lunar time, and,
through lunar, of solar time." . . .
This is the physiological or anthropological key to the Moon symbol. The key that opens the mystery
of theogony, or the evolution of the Manvantaric gods, is more complicated, and has nothing phallic in
it. All is mystical and divine there. But the Jews, beyond connecting Jehovah directly with the Moon as
a generative god, preferred to ignore the higher hierarchies, and have made of some of them (zodiacal
constellations and planetary gods) their Patriarchs, thus euhemerizing the
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* A caricatured and dwarfed Vedantin notion of Parabrahmam containing within itself the whole
Universe as being that boundless Universe itself, and there existing nothing outside of itself.
** Just as they are to this day in India, the bull of Siva and the cow representing several Sakti -goddesses.
*** Hence the worship of the moon by the Hebrews.
**** "Male and female, created he them."

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 391 THE TIME PERIODS.

purely theosophical idea and dragging it down to the level of sinful humanity. (See section "Holy of
Holies" in the "Symbolism" of Book II.) The MSS. from which the above is extracted explains very
clearly to what hierarchy of gods Jehovah belonged, and who this Jewish GOD was; for it shows in
clear language that which the writer has always insisted upon -- namely, that the God with which the
Christians have burdened themselves was no better than the lunar symbol of the reproductive or
generative faculty in nature. They have ever ignored even the Hebrew secret god of the Kabalists, AinSoph, as grand as Parabrahmam in the earliest Kabalistic and mystical conceptions. But it is not the
Kabala of Rosenroth that can ever give the true original teachings of Simeon-Ben-Iochai, as
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metaphysical and philosophical as any. And how many are there among the students of the Kabala who
knew anything of them except in their distorted Latin translations. Let us glance at the idea which led
the ancient Jews to adopt a substitute for the ever UNKNOWABLE, and which has misled the
Christians into mistaking the substitute for the reality.
"If to these organs (phallus and yoni) as symbols of creative cosmic agencies the idea of
. . . . time periods can be attached, then, indeed, in the construction of Temples as
Dwellings of Deity, or of Jehovah, that post designated as the Holy of Holies, or the
most High Place, should borrow its title from the recognized sacredness of the
generative organs, considered as symbols of measures as well as of creative Cause."
"With the ancient wise, there was no name, and no idea, and no symbol, of a First
Cause.* With the Hebrews, the indirect conception of such was couched in a term of
negation of comprehension -- viz., Ain-Soph, or the Without Bounds. But the symbol of
its first comprehensible manifestation, was the conception of a circle with its diameter
line. . . . . (See the Proem of Book I., Part I.) to carry at once a geometric, phallic, and
astronomic idea . . . . for the one takes its birth from the nought or the Circle, without
which it could not be, and from one, or primal one, spring the nine digits, and,
geometrically, all plane shapes. So in the Kabala this Circle, with its diameter line, is the
picture of the ten Sephiroth or Emanations, composing the Adam Kadmon, the
Archetypal Man, the creative origin of all things. . . . . This idea of connecting the circle
and its diameter line, that is, number ten, with the signification of the reproductive
organs, and the Most Holy Place, was carried out constructively in the King's Chamber,
or Holy of Holies, of the great Pyramid, in the Tabernacle of Moses, and in the Holy of
Holies of the Temple of Solomon. . . . . It is the picture of a double-womb, for in Hebrew
the letter he
is at the same time the number 5 and symbol of the womb, and twice 5
is 10, or the phallic number."
This "double womb" also shows the duality of the idea carried from
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* Because it was too sacred. It is referred to as THAT in the Vedas: it is the "Eternal Cause," and
cannot, therefore, be spoken of as a "First Cause," a term implying the absence of any cause, at one
time.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 392 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the highest, spiritual, down to the lowest or terrestrial plane; and by the Jews limited to the latter. With
them, therefore the number 7 has acquired the most prominent place in their exoteric religion, a cult of
external forms and empty rituals; as their Sabbath, for instance, the seventh day sacred to their deity,
the moon, symbolical of the generative Jehovah. While with other nations the number seven was
typical of theogonic evolution, of cycles, cosmic planes, and the Seven Forces and Occult Powers in
Kosmos, as a boundless whole, whose first upper triangle was unreachable to the finite intellect of man
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-- while other nations, therefore, busied themselves, in their forcible limitation of Kosmos in Space and
Time, only with its septenary manifested plane, the Jews centred this member solely in the moon, and
based all their sacred calculations thereupon. Hence we find the thoughtful author of the MSS. just
quoted, remarking, in reference to the metrology of the Jews that: "If 20,612 be multiplied by 4/3 the
product will afford a base for the ascertainment of the mean revolution of the moon, and if this product
be again multiplied by 4/3, this continued product will afford a base for finding the exact period of the
mean solar year, . . . this form . . . becoming, for the finding of astronomical periods of time, of very
great service." This double number (male and female) is symbolized also in some well-known idols:
e.g., "Ardanari-Iswara, the Isis of the Hindus, Eridanus, or Ardan, or the Hebrew Jordan, or source of
descent. She is standing on a lotus-leaf flowing on the water. But the signification is, that it is
androgyne or hermaphrodite, that is phallus and yoni combined, the number 10, the Hebrew letter Jod
, the containment of Jehovah. She, or rather she-he, gives the minutes of the same circle of 360
degrees."
"Jehovah," in its best aspect is Binah, "the Upper mediating Mother, the Great Sea or Holy Spirit;"
therefore rather a synonym of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, than of his Father; that "Mother, being the
Latin Mare" the Sea is here also, Venus, the Stella del Mare, or "Star of the Sea."
The ancestors of the mysterious Akkadians -- the Chandra or Indovansas, the Lunar Kings whom
tradition shows reigning at Prayag (Allahabad) ages before our era -- had come from India, and
brought with them the worship of their forefa thers, of Soma, and his son Budha, which afterwards
became that of the Chaldeans. Yet such adoration, apart from popular Astrolatry and Heliolatry, was in
no sense idolatry. No more, at any rate, than the modern Roman Catholic symbolism which connects
their Virgin Mary -- the Magna Mater of the Syrians and Greeks -- with the Moon.
Of this worship, the most pious Roman Catholics feel quite proud,

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 393 COPIES AND ORIGINALS.

and loudly confess to it. In a Memoire to the French Academy, the Marquis De Mirville says: -"It is only natural that, as an unconscious prophecy, Ammon-Ra should be his mother's
husband, since the Magna Mater of the Christians is precisely the spouse of that son she
conceives. . . . We (Christians) can understand now why Neithis throws radiance on the
sun, while remaining the Moon, since the VIRGIN, who is the QUEEN OF HEAVEN,
as Neith was, clothes herself in her radiance, and clothes in his turn the CHRIST-SUN.
"Tu vestis solem et te sol vestit.". . . is sung by the Roman Catholics during their service,
and he adds: -"We (Christians) understand also how it is that the famous inscription at Sais should
have stated that 'none has ever lifted my peplum (veil),' considering that this sentence,
literally translated, is the summary of what is sung in the Church on the day of the
immaculate conception." (ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE VIRGIN MOTHER," p. 117.)

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Surely nothing could be more sincere than this! It justifies entirely what Mr. Gerald Massey has said in
his Lecture on "Luniolatry, Ancient and Modern": -"The man in the moon (Osiris-Sut, Jehovah-Satan, Christ-Judas, and other Lunar twins)
is often charged with bad conduct. . . . In the lunar phenomena the moon was one as the
moon, which was two-fold in sex, and three-fold in character -- as mother, child, and
adult male. Thus the child of the moon became the consort of his own mother! It could
not be helped if there was to be any reproduction. He was compelled to be his own
father! These relationships were repudiated by later sociology, and the primitive man in
the moon got tabooed. Yet, in its latest, most inexplicable phase, this has become the
central doctrine of the grossest superstition the world has seen, for these lunar
phenomena and their humanly represented relationships, the incestuous included, are the
very foundations of the Christian Trinity in Unity. Through ignorance of the symbolism,
the simple representation of early time has become the most profound religious mystery
in modern Luniolatry. The Roman Church, without being in any wise ashamed of the
proof, portrays the Virgin Mary arrayed with the sun, and the horned moon at her feet,
holding the lunar infant in her arms -- as child and consort of the mother moon. The
mother, child, and adult male, are fundamental."
"In this way it can be proved that our Christology is mummified mythology, and
legendary lore, which have been palmed off upon us in the Old Testament and the New,
as divine revelation uttered by the very voice of God."
A charming allegory is found in the Zohar, one which unveils better than anything ever did the true
character of Jehovah or YHVH in the primitive conception of the Hebrew Kabalists. It is now found in
the philosophy of I'bn Gebirol's Kabbalah, translated by Isaac Myer. "In the introduction written by
R'Hez'quee-yah, which is very old," says our author, "and forms part of our Brody edition of the Zohar
(I, 5b. sq.) is an account of a journey taken by R. El'azar, son of R. Shim-on b. Io'hai, and Rabbi
Abbah." They met a man with a heavy burden and asked his name; but he refused to give it and
proceeded to explain to them Thorah

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 394 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

(Law). "They asked: 'Who caused thee thus to walk and carry such a heavy load?' He answered: 'The
letter , (Yod, which = 10, and is the symbolical letter of Kether and the essence and germ of the Holy
name
YHVH) . . . . They said to him: 'If thou wilt tell us the name of thy father, we will kiss
the dust of thy feet.' He replied: 'As to my father, he had his dwelling in the Great Sea, and was a fish
therein' (like Vishnu and Dagon or Oannes), 'which (first) destroyed the great sea' . . . . . and he was
great and mighty and 'Ancient of Days,' until he swallowed all the other fishes in the (Great) Sea . . . R.
El'azar listened and said to him: 'Thou art the Son of the Holy Flame, thou art the Son of Rab Ham -'nun-ah Sabah [the old: the fish in Aramaic or Chaldee is nun (noon)] thou art the Son of the Light of
the Thorah," (Dharma) etc. Then the author explains that the feminine Sephiroth, Binah, is termed by
the Kabalist the great sea: therefore Binah, whose divine names are Jehovah, Yah, and Elohim, is
simply the Chaldean Tiamat, the female power, the Thalatth of Berosus, who presides over the Chaos,
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and was made out later by Christian theology to be the serpent and the Devil. She-He (Yah-hovah) is
the supernal (Heh, and Eve). This Yah-hovah then or Jehovah, is identical with our Chaos -- Father,
Mother, Son, -- on the material plane and in the purely physical World. Demon and Deus at one and
the same time; the sun and moon, good and evil, God and Demon.
Lunar magnetism generates life, preserves and destroys it, psychically as well as physically. And if,
astronomically, she is one of the seven planets of the ancient world, in theogony she is one of the
regents thereof; with Christians now as much as with Pagans, the former referring to her under the
name of one of their archangels, and the latter under that of one of their gods.
Therefore the meaning of the "fairy tale" translated by Chwolson from an old Chaldean MSS.
translated into Arabic, about Qu-tamy being instructed by the idol of the moon, is easily understood
(vide Book III.) Seldenus tells us the secret as well as Maimonides (More Nevochim, Book III., ch.
xxx). The worshippers of the Teraphim (the Jewish Oracles) "carved images and claimed that the light
of the principal stars (planets) permeating these through and through, the angelic VIRTUES (or the
regents of the stars and planets) conversed with them, teaching them many most useful things and
arts." And Seldenus explains that the Teraphim were built and composed after the position of certain
planets, those which the Greeks called [[stoicheia]], and according to figures that were located in the
sky and called [[alexeteroi]], or the tutelary gods. Those who traced out the [[stoicheia]] were called
[[stoicheiomatichoi]], or the diviners by the [[stoicheia]]. (De Diis Syriis, Teraph, II. Synt. p. 31) vide
infra, the Teraphim.
It is such sentences, however, in the "Nabathean agriculture," that

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 395 SOLAR-LUNAR WORSHIP IN THE CHURCH.

have frightened the men of science and made them proclaim the work "either an apocrypha or a fairy
tale, unworthy of the notice of an Academician." At the same time, as shown, zealous Roman
Catholics and Protestants tore it metaphorically to pieces; the former because "it described the worship
of demons," the latter because it is "ungodly." They are all wrong, once more. It is not a fairy tale; and
as far as regards pious Churchmen, the same worship may be shown in the Scriptures, however
disfigured by translation. Solar and Lunar worship, as well as that of the Stars and Elements, are
traced, and figure in the Christian theology; defended by Papists, they are stoutly denied by the
Protestants only at their own risk and peril. Two instances may be given.
Ammianus Marcellinus teaches that ancient divinations were always accomplished with the help of the
Spirits of the Elements, "Spiritus elementorum, and in Greek [[pneumata ton stoicheion]]" (1. I., 21).
But it is found now that the planets, the Elements, and the Zodiac, were figured not only in Heliopolis
by the twelve stones called "mysteries of the elements," elementorum arcana, but also in Solomon's
temple, and, as pointed out by various writers, in several old Italian churches and even at Notre Dame
de Paris where they can be seen to this day.
No symbol -- the sun included -- was more complex in its manifold meanings than the lunar symbol.
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The sex was, of course, dual. With some it was male, e.g., the Hindu "King Soma," and the Chaldean
Sin; with other nations it was female, the beauteous goddesses Diana-Luna, I'lythia, Lucina. In Tauris,
human victims were sacrificed to Artemis, a form of the lunar goddess; the Cretans called her
Dictynna, and the Medes and Persians Anaitis, as shown by an inscription of Koloe: '[[Artemidi
'Anaeiti]]. But, we are now concerned chiefly with the most chaste and pure of the virgin goddesses,
Luna-Artemis, to whom Pamphos was the first to give the surname of [[Kalliste]], and of whom
Hippolitus wrote: [[Kallista polu par thenon]]. (See Pausanias viii., 35, 8.) This Artemis-Lochia, the
goddess that presided at conception and child-birth (Iliad, Pausanias, etc., etc.), is, in her functions and
as the triple Hecate, the Orphic deity, the predecessor of the God of the Rabbins and pre-Christian
Kabalists, and his lunar type. The goddess [[Trimorphos]] was the personified symbol of the various
and successive aspects represented by the moon in each of her three phases; and this interpretation was
already that of the Stoics (Cornut. De Nat, D. 34, 1), while the Orpheans explained the epithet
([[Trimorphos]]) by the three kingdoms of nature over which she reigned. jealous, blood-thirsty,
revengeful and exacting, Hecate-Luna is a worthy counterpart of the "Jealous God" of the Hebrew
prophets.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 396 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

The whole riddle of the solar and lunar worship, as now traced in the churches, hangs indeed on this
world-old mystery of lunar phenomena. The correlative forces in the "Queen of Night," that lie latent
for modern science, but are fully active to the knowledge of Eastern adepts, explain well the thousand
and one images under which the moon was represented by the ancients. It also shows how much more
profoundly learned in the Selenic mysteries were the ancients than are now our modern astronomers.
The whole Pantheon of the lunar gods and goddesses, Nephtys or Neith, Proserpina, Melytta, Cybele,
Isis, Astarte, Venus, and Hecate, on the one hand, and Apollo, Dionysius, Adonis, Bacchus, Osiris,
Atys, Thammuz, etc., etc., on the other, all show on the face of their names and titles -- those of "Sons"
and "Husbands" of their mothers -- their identity with the Christian Trinity. In every religious system
the gods were made to merge their functions as Father, Son, and Husband, into one, and the goddesses
were identified as "Wife, Mother, and Sister" of the male God; the former synthesizing the human
attri butes as the "Sun, the giver of Life," the latter merging all the other titles in the grand synthesis
known as Maia, Maya, Maria, etc., a generic name. Maia, in its forced derivation, has come to mean
with the Greeks, "mother," from the root ma (nurse), and even gave its name to the month of May,
which was sacred to all those goddesses before it became consecrated to Mary.* Its primitive meaning,
however, was Maya, Durga, translated by the Orientalists as "inaccessible," but meaning in truth the
"unreachable," in the sense of illusion and unreality; as being the source and cause of spells, the
personification of ILLUSION.
In religious rites the moon served a dual purpose. Personified as a female goddess for exoteric
purposes, or as a male god in allegory and symbol, in occult philosophy our satellite was regarded as a
sexless Potency to be well studied, because it was to be dreaded. With the initiated Aryans, Khaldii,
Greeks and Romans, Soma, Sin, Artemis Soteira (the hermaphrodite Apollo, whose attri bute is the
lyre, and the bearded Diana of the bow and arrow), Deus Lunus, and especially Osiris-lunus and Thotlunus,** were the occult potencies of the moon. But whether male or female, whether Thot or
Minerva, Soma or Astoreth, the Moon is the Occult mystery of mysteries, and more a symbol of evil
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than of good. Her seven phases (original, esoteric division) are divided into three astronomical
phenomena and four
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* The Roman Catholics are indebted for the idea of consecrating the month of May to the Virgin, to
the pagan Plutarch, who shows that "May is sacred to Maia ([[Maia]]) or Vesta" (Aulus-Gellius, word
Maia) -- our mother-earth, our nurse and nourisher personified.
** Thot-Lunus is "Budha-Soma" of India, or "Mercury and the Moon."

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 397 THE MOON, BISEXUAL.

purely psychic phases. That the moon was not always reverenced is shown in the Mysteries, in which
the death of the moon-god (the three phases of gradual waning and final disappearance) was
allegorized by the moon standing for the genius of evil that triumphs for the time over the light and lifegiving god (the sun), and all the skill and learning of the ancient Hierophants in Magic was required to
turn this triumph into a defeat.
It was the most ancient worship of all, that of the third Race of our Round, the Hermaphrodites, to
whom the male-moon became sacred, when after the "Fall" so-called, the sexes had become separated.
"Deus Lunus" then became an androgyne, male and female in turn; to serve finally, for purposes of
sorcery, as a dual power, to the Fourth Root-race, the Atlanteans. With the Fifth (our own) the lunarsolar worship divided the nations into two distinct, antagonistic camps. It led to events described aeons
later in the Mahabharatan War, which to the Europeans is the fabulous, to the Hindus and Occultists
the historical, strife between the Suryavansas and the Indovansas. Originating in the dual aspect of the
moon, the worship of the female and the male principles respectively, it ended in distinct solar and
lunar cults. Among the Semitic races, the sun was for a very long time feminine and the moon
masculine -- the latter notion being adopted by them from the Atlantean traditions. The moon was
called "the Lord of the sun," Bel-Skemesh,* before the Shemesh worship. The ignorance of the
incipient reasons for such a distinction, and of occult principles, led the nations into anthropomorphic
idol-worship. But the religion of every ancient nation had been primarily based upon the Occult
manifestations of a purely abstract Force or Principle now called "God." The very establishment of
such worship shows, in its details and rites, that the philosophers who evolved those systems of nature,
subjective and objective, possessed profound knowledge, and were acquainted with many facts
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* During that period which is absent from the Mosaic books -- from the exile of Eden to the allegorical
"the Ruler of
Flood -- the Jews worshipped with the rest of the Semites Dayanisi
Men," the "Judge," or the SUN. Though the Jewish canon and Christianism have made the sun become
the "Lord God" and Jehovah in the Bible, yet the latter is full of indiscreet traces of the androgyne
Deity, which was Jehovah the sun, and Astoreth the moon in its female aspect, and quite free from the
present metaphorical element given to it. God is a "consuming fire," appears in, and is encompassed by
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fire." It was not only in vision that Ezekiel (viii., 16) saw the Jews "worshipping the sun." The Baal of
the Israelites (the Shemesh of the Moabites and the Moloch of the Ammonites) was the identical "SunJehovah," and he is till now "the King of the Host of Heaven," the Sun, as much as Astoreth was the
"Queen of Heaven" -- or the moon. The "Sun of Righteousness" has become a metaphorical expression
only now.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 398 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

of a scientific nature. For besides being purely Occult, the rites of lunar worship were based, as just
shown, upon a knowledge of physiology (quite a modern science with us), psychology, sacred
mathematics, geometry and metrology, in their right applications to symbols and figures, which are but
glyphs, recording observed natural and scientific facts; in short, upon a most minute and profound
knowledge of nature. Lunar magnetism generates life, preserves and kills it. Soma embodies the triple
power of the Trimurti, though it passes unrecognized by the profane to this day. The allegory that
makes Soma, the moon, produced by the churning of the Ocean of Life (Space) by the gods in another
Manvantara (i.e., in the pregenetic day of our planetary system), and that other allegory, which shows
"the Rishis milking the earth, whose calf was Soma, the moon," has a deep cosmographical meaning;
for it is neither our earth which is milked, nor was the moon, which we know, the calf.* Had our wise
men of science known as much of the mysteries of nature as the ancient Aryans did, they would surely
never have imagined that the moon was projected from the Earth. Once more, the oldest of
permutations in theogony, the Son becoming his own father and the mother generated by the Son, has
to be remembered and taken into consideration if the symbolical language of the ancients is to be
understood by us. Otherwise mythology will be ever haunting the Orientalists as simply "the disease
which springs up at a peculiar stage of human culture!" -- as Renouf gravely observes in a Hibbert
lecture.
The ancients taught the, so to speak, auto-generation of the Gods: the one divine essence,
unmanifested, perpetually begetting a second-self, manifested, which second-self, androgynous in its
nature, gives birth in an immaculate way to everything macro- and micro-cosmical in this universe.
This was shown in the Circle and the Diameter, or the Sacred 10, a few pages back.
But our Orientalists, their extreme desire to discover one homogeneous element in nature
notwithstanding, will not see it; cramped in their researches by such ignorance, they -- the Aryanists
and Egyptologists -- are constantly led astray from truth in their speculations. Thus, de Rouge is unable
to understand, in the text which he translates, the meaning of Ammon-Ra saying to King Amenophes
(supposed to be Memnon), "Thou art my Son, I have begotten thee"; and as he
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* The earth flees for her life in the allegory, before Prithu, who pursues her. She assumes the shape of
a cow, and, trembling with terror, runs away and hides even in the regions of Brahma. Therefore, it is
not our Earth. Again, in every Purana, the calf changes name. In one it is Manu Swayambhuva, in
another Indra, in a third the Himavat (Himalayas) itself, while Meru was the milker. This is a deeper
allegory than one thinks.
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[[Vol. 1, Page]] 399 THE DIGNITY OF SAIS.

finds the same idea in many a text and under various forms, this very Christian Orientalist is finally
compelled to exclaim that "for this idea to have entered the mind of a hierogrammatist, there must have
been in their religion a more or less defined doctrine, indicating as a possible fact that might come to
pass, a divine and immaculate incarnation under a human form." Precisely. But why throw the
explanation on an impossible prophecy, when the whole secret is explained by the later religion
copying the earlier?
That doctrine was universal, and it was not the mind of any one hierogrammatist that evolved it; for the
Indian avatars are a proof to the contrary. After which, having come "to realize clearer"* what "the
Divine Father and Son" were with the Egyptians, de Rouge still fails to account for, and perceive what
were the functions attri buted to the feminine principle in that primordial generation. He does not find it
in the goddess Neith, of Sais. Yet he quotes the sentence of the Commander to Cambyses when
introducing that king into the Saitic temple: "I made known to his Majesty the dignity of Sais, which is
the abode of Neith, the great (female) producer, genitrix of the Sun, who is the first-born, and who is
not begotten, but only brought forth," and hence is the fruit of an immaculate mother.
How much more grandiose, philosophical and poetical is the real distinction -- for whoever is able to
understand and appreciate it -- made between the immaculate virgin of the ancient Pagans and the
modern Papal conception. With the former, the ever-youthful mother nature, the antitype of her
prototypes, the sun and moon, generates and brings forth her "mind-born" son, the Universe. The Sun
and Moon, as male-female deities, fructify the earth, the microcosmical mother, and the latter
conceives and brings forth, in her turn. With the Christians, "the first-born" (primogenitus) is indeed
generated, i.e., begotten, "genitum, non factum," and positively conceived and brought forth -- "Virgo
pariet," explains the Latin Church. Thus, she drags down the noble spiritual ideal of the Virgin Mary
to the earth, and, making her "of the earth earthy," degrades that ideal to the lowest of the
anthropomorphic goddesses of the rabble.
Truly, Neith, Isis, Diana, etc., etc., were each of them "a demiurgical goddess, at once visible and
invisible, having her place in Heaven, and helping to the generation of species" -- the moon, in short.
Her occult aspects and powers are numberless, and, in one of them, the moon becomes with
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* His clear realization of it is, that the Egyptians prophesied Jehovah (!) and his incarnated Redeemer
(the good serpent), etc., etc.; even to identifying Typhon with the wicked dragon of the garden of Eden,
and this passes as serious and sober science.

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the Egyptians Hathor, another aspect of Isis,* and both of these goddesses are shown suckling Horus.
Behold in the Egyptian Hall of the British Museum, Hathor worshipped by Pharaoh Thotmes, who
stands between her and the Lord of Heavens. The monolith was taken from Karnac; and the same
goddess has the following legend inscribed on her throne: "THE DIVINE MOTHER AND LADY, OR
QUEEN OF HEAVEN"; also "the MORNING STAR," and the "LIGHT OF THE SEA" (Stella
matutina and Lux maris). All the lunar goddesses had a dual aspect -- one divine, the other infernal. All
were the virgin mothers of an immaculately born Son -- the SUN. Raoul Rochetti shows the moongoddess of the Athenians -- Pallas, or Cybele, Minerva, or again Diana -- holding her child-son on the
lap, invoked in her festivals as [[Monogenes Theou]], "the one Mother of God," sitting on a lion, and
surrounded by twelve personages; in whom the Occultist recognises the twelve great gods, and the
pious Christian Orientalist the apostles, or rather the Grecian pagan prophecy thereof.
They are both right, for the immaculate goddess of the Latin Church is a faithful copy of the older
pagan goddesses; the number (twelve) of the apostles is that of the twelve tribes, and the latter are a
personification of the twelve great gods, and of the twelve signs of the Zodiac. Every detail almost in
the Christian dogma is borrowed from the hea thens. Semele, the wife of Jupiter and mother of
Bacchus, the Sun, is, according to Nonnus, also "carried," or made to ascend to heaven after her death,
where she presides between Mars and Venus, under the name of the Queen of the World, or the
universe, [[panbasileia]]; "at the names of which, as at the names of Hathor, Hecate, and other infernal
goddesses," "tremble all the demons."**
"[[Semelen premousi daimones]]." This Greek inscription on a small temple, reproduced on a stone
that was found by somebody, and copied by Montfaucon, as De Mirville tells us (113, Archaeologie de
la Vierge mere) informs us of the stupendous fact, that the Magna Mater of the old world was an
impudent plagiarism, perpetrated by the Demon, of the Immaculate Virgin Mother of his Church.
Whether so, or vice versa, is of no importance. That which is interesting to note is the perfect identity
between the ARCHAIC COPY and the MODERN ORIGINAL.
Did space permit we might show the inconceivable coolness and unconcern exhibited by certain
followers of the Roman Catholic Church, when made to face the revelations of the Past. To Maury's
remark that "the Virgin took possession of all the Sanctuaries of Ceres and
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* Hathor is the infernal Isis, the goddess pre-eminently of the West or the nether world.
** This is De Mirville, who proudly confesses the similarity, and he ought to know.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 401 ANTE-HISTORICAL CATHOLICISM.

Venus, and that the pagan rites, proclaimed and practised in honour of those goddesses, were in a good
measure transferred to the mother of Christ," the advocate of Rome answers: -"That such is the fact, and that it is just as it should be and quite natural. As the dogma,
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the liturgy, and the rites professed by the Roman Apostolical Church in 1862 are found
engraved on monuments, inscribed on papyri, and cylinders hardly posterior to the
Deluge, it does seem impossible to deny the existence of a FIRST ANTE-HISTORICAL
(Roman) CATHOLICISM OF WHICH OUR OWN IS BUT THE FAITHFUL
CONTINUATION. . . . But while the former was the culmination, the summum of the
impudence of demons and Goetic necromancy . . . . the latter is divine. If in our
(Christian) Revelation (l'Apocalypse), Mary, clothed with the Sun and having the moon
under her feet, has nothing more in common with the humble servant of Nazareth (sic.),
it is because she has now become the greatest of theological and cosmological powers in
our universe." -- (Archaeol. de la Vierge, pp. 116 and 119, and by the Marquis de
Mirville).
Verily so, since Pindar's Hymns to Minerva (p. 19) . . . "who sits at the right hand of her Father Jupiter,
and who is more powerful than all the other (angels or) gods," are likewise applied to the Virgin. It is
St. Bernard, who, quoted by Cornelius a Lapide, is made to address the Virgin Mary in this wise: -"The Sun-Christ lives in thee and thou livest in him." (Sermon on the Holy Virgin.) . . . .
Again the Virgin is admitted to be the MOON by the same unsophisticated holy man. Being the Lucina
of the Church, that is in childbirth, the verse of Virgil -- "Casta fove Lucina, tuus jam regnat Apollo" -is applied to her. Like the moon, the Virgin is the Queen of Heaven," adds the innocent saint; (Apocal.,
ch. xii., Comm. by Cornelius a Lapide).
This settles the question. The more similarity, according to such writers as De Mirville, there exists
between the pagan conceptions and the Christian dogmas, the more divine appears the Christian
religion, and the more is it seen to be the only truly inspired one, especially in its Roman Catholic
form. The unbelieving scientists and the academicians who think they see in the Latin Church quite the
opposite of divine inspiration, and who will not believe in the satanic tricks of plagiarism by
anticipation, are severely taken to task. But then "they believe in nothing and reject even the
'Nabathean Agriculture' as a romance and a pack of superstitious nonsense," complains the
memorialist. "In their perverted opinion Qu-ta-my's 'idol of the moon' and the statue of the Madonna
are one!" A noble Marquis wrote twenty years ago six huge volumes, or, as he calls them "Memoires to
the French Academy," with the sole object of showing Roman Catholicism an inspired and revealed
faith. As a proof thereof, he furnishes numberless facts, all tending to show that the entire ancient
world, ever since

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 402 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the deluge, had been, with the help of the devil, systematically plagiarizing the rites, ceremonies, and
dogmas of the future Holy Church to be born ages later. What would that faithful son of Rome have
said had he heard his co-religionist -- M. Renouf, the distinguished Egyptologist of the British
Museum -- declaring, in one of his learned lectures, that "neither Hebrews nor Greeks borrowed any of
their ideas from Egypt?"*

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But perhaps it is just this that M. Renouf intended to say namely -- that it is the Egyptians, the Greeks,
and the Aryans, who borrowed theirs from the Latin Church? And if so, why, in the name of logic, do
the Papists reject the additional information which the Occultists may give them on Moon-worship,
since it all tends to show their (the Roman Catholic) worship as old as the world -- OF SABAEANISM
AND ASTROLATRY?
The reason of early Christian and later Roman Catholic astrolatry, or the symbolical worship of Sun
and Moon -- identical with that of the Gnostics, though less philosophical and pure than the "Sun
worship" of the Zoroastrians -- is a natural consequence of its birth and origin. The adoption by the
Latin Church of such symbols as the water, fire, sun, moon and stars, and a good many other things, is
simply a continuation by the early Christians of the old worship of Pagan nations. Thus Odin got his
wisdom, power, and knowledge, by sitting at the feet of Mimir, the thrice-wise Jotun, who passed his
life by the fountain of primeval Wisdom, the crystalline waters of which increased his knowledge
daily. Mimir "drew the highest knowledge from the fountain, because the world was born of water;
hence primeval wisdom was to be found in that mysterious element" ("Asgard and the Gods," 86). The
eye which Odin had to pledge to acquire that knowledge may be "the Sun, which enlightens and
penetrates all things; his other eye being the moon, whose reflection gazes out of the deep, and which
at last, when setting, sinks into the Ocean." (Ibid.) But it is something more, besides this. Loki, the firegod, is said to have hidden in the water, as well as in the moon, the light-giver, whose reflection he
found therein; and this belief that the fire finds refuge in the water was not limited to the old
Scandinavians. It was shared by all nations and was finally taken up by the early Christians, who
symbolized the Holy Ghost under the shape of Fire, "cloven tongues like as fire" -- the breath of the
Father-SUN. This "Fire" descends also into the Water or the Sea: Mar, Mary. The dove was the
symbol of the Soul with several nations, it was sacred to Venus, the goddess born from the
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* Quoted in Mr. G. Massey's Lecture.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 403 IDENTITY OF TYPOLOGY.

sea-foam, and it became later the symbol of the Christian Anima Mundi, or the Holy Spirit.
One of the most occult chapters in the "Book of the Dead" is ch. lxxx., entitled: "To make the
transformation into the god giving light to the path of Darkness," wherein "Woman-light of the
Shadow" serves Thot in his retreat in the moon. Thot-Hermes is said to hide therein, because he is the
representative of the Secret Wisdom. He is the manifested logos of its light side, the concealed deity or
"Dark Wisdom" when he is supposed to retire to the opposite hemisphere. Speaking of her power, the
moon calls herself repeatedly: "The Light which shineth in Darkness," the "Woman-Light." Hence it
became the accepted symbol of all the Virgin-Mother goddesses. As the wicked "evil" spirits warred
against the moon in days of yore, so they are supposed to war now, without being able to prevail,
however, against the actual Queen of Heaven, Mary, the moon. Hence also the moon was intimately
connected in all the Pagan theogonies with the Dragon, her eternal enemy; the Virgin, or Madonna,
standing on the mythical Satan under that form, crushed and made powerless, under her feet. This,
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because the head and tail of the Dragon, which represent in Eastern astronomy to this day the
ascending and descending nodes of the moon, were also symbolized in ancient Greece by the two
serpents. Hercules kills them on the day of his birth, and so does the babe in his virgin mother's arms.
As Mr. Gerald Massey aptly observes in this connection: "All such symbols figured their own facts
from the first, and did not pre-figure others of a totally different order. The Iconography (and dogmas,
too) had survived in Rome from a period remotely pre-Christian. There was neither forgery nor
interpolation of types; nothing but a continuity of imagery with a perversion of its meaning."
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Next Section
Contents

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The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 1

Theosophical University Press Online Edition

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 403 IDENTITY OF TYPOLOGY.

[[This page continued from previous section]]
X.
TREE, SERPENT, AND CROCODILE WORSHIP.
"Object of horror or of adoration, men have for the serpent an implacable hatred, or
prostrate themselves before its genius. Lie calls it, Prudence claims it, Envy carries it in
its heart, and Eloquence on its caduceus. In hell it arms the whip of the Furies; in heaven
Eternity makes of it its symbol."
DE CHATEAUBRIAND.
THE Ophites asserted that there were several kinds of genii, from god to man; that the relative
superiority of these was ruled by the degree

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of light that was accorded to each; and they maintained that the serpent had to be constantly called
upon and to be thanked for the signal service it had rendered humanity. For it taught Adam that if he
ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, he would raise his being immensely by the
learning and wisdom he would thus acquire. Such was the exoteric reason given.
It is easy to see whence the primal idea of this dual, Janus-like character of the Serpent: the good and
the bad. This symbol is one of the most ancient, because the reptile preceded the bird, and the bird the
mammal. Thence the belief, or rather the superstition, of the savage tribes who think that the souls of
their ancestors live under this form, and the general association of the Serpent with the tree. The
legends about the various things it represents are numberless; but, as most of them are allegorical, they
have now passed into the class of fables based on ignorance and dark superstition. For instance, when
Philostratus narrates that the natives of India and Arabia fed on the heart and liver of serpents in order
to learn the language of all the animals, the serpent being credited with that faculty, he certainly never
meant his words to be accepted literally. (See De Vita Apollonii, lib. 1, c. xiv.) As will be found more
than once as we proceed, the "Serpent" and "Dragon" were the names given to the "Wise Ones," the
initiated adepts of olden times. It was their wisdom and their learning that were devoured or
assimilated by their followers, whence the allegory. When the Scandinavian Sigurd is fabled to have
roasted the heart of Fafnir, the Dragon, whom he had slain, becoming thereby the wisest of men, it

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meant the same thing. Sigurd had become learned in the runes and magical charms; he had received
the "word" from an initiate of that name, or from a sorcerer, after which the latter died, as many do,
after "passing the word." Epiphanius lets out a secret of the Gnostics while trying to expose their
heresies. The Gnostic Ophites, he says, had a reason for honouring the Serpent: it was because he
taught the primeval men the Mysteries (Adv. Haeres. 37). Verily so; but they did not have Adam and
Eve in the garden in their minds when teaching this dogma, but simply that which is stated above. The
Nagas of the Hindu and Tibetan adepts were human Nagas (Serpents), not reptiles. Moreover, the
Serpent has ever been the type of consecutive or serial rejuvenation, of IMMORTALITY and TIME.
The numerous and extremely interesting readings, the interpretations and facts about Serpent worship,
given in "The Natural Genesis," are very ingenious and scientifically correct. But they are far from
covering the whole of the meanings implied. They divulge only the astronomical and physiological
mysteries, with the addition of some cosmic phenomena. On the lowest plane of materiality the
Serpent was, no doubt,

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"the great mystery in the mysteries," and was, very likely, "adopted as a type of feminine pubescence,
on account of its sloughing and self-renewal." It was so, however, only with regard to mysteries
concerning terrestrial animal life, for as symbol of "reclothing and rebirth in the (universal) mysteries"
its "final phase"* -- or shall we rather say its incipient and culminating phases -- they were not of this
plane. They were generated in the pure realm of ideal light, and having accomplished the round of the
whole cycle of adaptations and symbolism, the "mysteries" returned from whence they had come -into the essence of immaterial causality. They belonged to the highest gnosis. And surely this could
have never obtained its name and fame solely on account of its penetration into physiological and
especially feminine functions!
As a symbol, the Serpent had as many aspects and occult meanings as the Tree itself; the "Tree of
Life," with which it was emblematically and almost indissolubly connected. Whether viewed as a
metaphysical or a physical symbol, the Tree and Serpent, jointly, or separately, have never been so
degraded by antiquity as they are now, in this our age of the breaking of idols, not for truth's sake, but
to glorify the more gross matter. The revelations and interpretations in "The Rivers of Life" would
have astounded the worshippers of the Tree and Serpent in the days of archaic Chaldean and Egyptian
wisdom; and even the early Saivas would have recoiled in horror at the theories and suggestions of the
author of the said work. "The notion of Payne Knight and Inman that the cross or Tau is simply a copy
of the male organs in a triadic form is radically false," writes Mr. G. Massey, who proves what he says.
But this is a statement that could be as justly applied to almost all the modern interpretations of ancient
symbols. "The Natural Genesis," a monumental work of research and thought, the most complete on
that subject that has ever been published, covering as it does a wider field, and explaining much more
than all the symbologists who have hitherto written, does not yet go beyond the "psycho-theistic" stage
of ancient thought. Nor were Payne Knight and Inman altogether wrong; except in entirely failing to
see that their interpretations of the "Tree of Life," as the cross and phallus, fitted the symbol, and
approximated it, only on the lowest and last stage of the evolutionary development of the idea of the
GIVER OF LIFE. It was the last and the grossest physical transformation of nature, in animal, insect,
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bird, and even plant; for biune, creative magnetism, in the form of the attraction of the contraries, or
sexual polarization, acts in the constitution of reptile and bird as it does in that of man. Moreover, the
modern symbologists and Orientalists -- from first to last -[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* The Natural Genesis, by Gerald Massey, Vol. 1, p. 340.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 406 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

being ignorant of the real mysteries revealed by occultism, can necessarily see but this last stage. If
told that this mode of procreation, which the whole world of being has now in common on this earth,
is but a passing phase, a physical means of furnishing the conditions to, and producing the phenomena
of life which will alter with this, and disappear with the next Root-Race -- they would laugh at such a
superstitious and unscientific idea. But the most learned Occultists assert this because they know it.
The universe of living beings, of all those which procreate their species, is the living witness to the
various modes of procreation in the evolution of animal and human species and races; and the
naturalist ought to sense this truth intuitionally, even though he is yet unable to demonstrate it. And
how could he, indeed, with the present modes of thought! The landmarks of the archaic history of the
past are few and scarce, and those that men of science come across are mistaken for finger-posts of our
little era. Even so-called "universal" (?) history embraces but a tiny field in the almost boundless space
of the unexplored regions of our latest, fifth Root-Race. Hence, every fresh sign-post, every new glyph
of the hoary Past that is discovered, is added to the old stock of information, to be interpreted on the
same lines of pre-existing conceptions, and without any reference to the special cycle of thought which
that particular glyph may belong to. How can Truth ever come to light if this method is never changed!
Thus, in the beginning of their joint existence as a glyph of Immortal Being, the Tree and Serpent were
divine imagery, truly. The tree was reversed, and its roots were generated in Heaven and grew out of
the Rootless Root of all-being. Its trunk grew and developed, crossing the planes of Pleroma, it shot
out crossways its luxuriant branches, first on the plane of hardly differentiated matter, and then
downward till they touched the terrestrial plane. Thus, the Asvattha, tree of Life and Being, whose
destruction alone leads to immortality, is said in the Bhagavatgita to grow with its roots above and its
branches below (ch. xv.). The roots represent the Supreme Being, or First Cause, the LOGOS; but one
has to go beyond those roots to unite oneself with Krishna, who, says Arjuna (XI.), is "greater than
Brahman, and First Cause . . . the indestructible, that which is, that which is not, and what is beyond
them." Its boughs are Hiranyagharba (Brahma or Brahman in his highest manifestations, say Sridhara
and Madhusudana), the highest Dhyan Chohans or Devas. The Vedas are its leaves. He only who goes
beyond the roots shall never return, i.e., shall reincarnate no more during this "age" of Brahma.
It is only when its pure boughs had touched the terrestrial mud of the garden of Eden, of our Adamic
race, that this Tree got soiled by the contact and lost its pristine purity; and that the Serpent of

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[[Vol. 1, Page]] 407 THE SEVEN-HEADED DRAGONS.

Eternity -- the heaven-born LOGOS -- was finally degraded. In days of old -- of the divine Dynasties
on Earth -- the now dreaded Reptile was regarded as the first beam of light that radiated from the abyss
of divine Mystery. Various were the forms which it was made to assume, and numerous the natural
symbols adapted to it, as it crossed aeons of Time: as from Infinite Time itself -- Kala -- it fell into the
space and time evolved out of human speculation. These forms were Cosmic and astronomical, theistic
and pantheistic, abstract and concrete. They became in turn the Polar Dragon and the Southern Cross,
the Alpha Draconis of the Pyramid, and the Hindu-Buddhist Dragon, which ever threatens, yet never
swallows the Sun during its eclipses. Till then, the Tree remained ever green, for it was sprinkled by
the waters of life; the great Dragon, ever divine, so long as it was kept within the precincts of the
sidereal fields. But the tree grew and its lower boughs touched at last the infernal regions -- our Earth.
Then the great serpent Nidhogg -- he who devours the corpses of the evil-doers in the "Hall of Misery"
(human life), so soon as they are plunged into "Hwergelmir," the roaring cauldron (of human passions)
-- gnawed the World-tree. The worms of materiality covered the once healthy and mighty roots, and
are now ascending higher and higher along the trunk; while the Midgard-snake coiled at the bottom of
the Seas, encircles the Earth, and, through its venomous breath, makes her powerless to defend herself.
They are all seven-headed, the dragons and serpents of antiquity -- "one head for each race, and every
head with seven hairs on it," as the allegory has it. Aye, from Ananta, the Serpent of Eternity which
carries Vishnu through the Manvantara, from the original primordial Sesha, whose seven heads
become "one thousand heads" in the Puranic fancy, down to the seven-headed Akkadian Serpent. This
typifies the Seven principles throughout nature and man; the highest or middle head being the seventh.
It is not of the Mosaic, Jewish Sabbath that Philo speaks in his Creation of the World, when saying
that the world was completed "according to the perfect nature of number 6." For, "when that reason
(nous) which is holy in accordance with the number seven, has entered the soul (rather the living
body), the number six is thus arrested, and all the mortal things which that number makes." And again:
"Number 7 is the festival day of all the earth, the birthday of the world. I know not whether any one
would be able to celebrate the number 7 in adequate terms." . . . (Par. pp. 30 and 419). The author of
The Natural Genesis thinks that "the Septenary of Stars seen in the great bear (the Septarshis) and
seven-headed Dragon furnished a visible origin for the symbolic seven of time above. The goddess of
the seven stars," he adds --

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"Was the mother of time, as Kep; whence Kepti and Sebti for the two times and number
seven. So this is the star of the Seven by name. Sevekt (Kronos), the Son of the goddess,
has the name of the seven or seventh. So has Sefekh Abu who builds the house on high,
as Wisdom (Sophia) built hers with seven pillars. . . The primary Kronotypes were
seven, and thus the beginning of time in heaven is based on the number and the name of
seven, on account of the starry demonstrators. The seven stars as they turned round
annually kept pointing, as it were, with the forefinger of the right hand, and describing a
circle in the upper and lower heaven.* The number seven naturally suggested a measure
by seven, that led to what may be termed Sevening, and to the marking and mapping out

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of the circle in seven corresponding divisions which were assigned to the seven great
constellations; and thus was formed the celestial heptanomis of Egypt in the heavens. . .
. When the stellar heptanomis was broken up and divided into four quarters, it was
multiplied by four, and the twenty-eight signs took the place of the primary seven
constellations, the lunar zodiac of twenty-eight days being the registered result.** . . . In
the Chinese arrangement the four sevens are given to four genii that preside over the
four cardinal points. . . ." (In Chinese Buddhism and Esotericism the genii are
represented by four Dragons -- the "Maharajahs" of the Stanzas.) "The seven Northern
constellations make up the Black Warrior; the seven Eastern (Chinese autumn)
constitute the White Tiger; the seven Southern are the Vermilion Bird; and the seven
Western (called Vernal) are the Azure Dragon. Each of these four Spirits presides over
its heptanomis during one lunar week. The genetive of the first heptanomis (Typhon of
the Seven Stars) now took a lunar character; . . . in this phase we find the goddess
Sefekh, whose name signifies number 7, is the feminine word, or logos in place of the
mother of Time, who was the earlier Word, as goddess of the Seven Stars" ("Typology
of Time," Vol. II. p. 313, Nat. Gen.).
The author shows that it was the goddess of the Great Bear and mother of Time who was
in Egypt from the earliest times the "Living Word," and that "Sevekh-Kronus, whose
type was the Crocodile-Dragon, the pre-planetary form of Saturn, was called her son and
consort; he was her Word-Logos" (p. 321, Vol. I.).
The above is quite plain, but it was not the knowledge of astronomy only that led the ancients to the
process of Sevening. The primal cause goes far deeper and will be explained in its place.
The above quotations are no digressions. They are brought forward as showing (a) the reason why a
full Initiate was called a "Dragon," a "Snake" a "Naga"; and (b) that our septenary division was used
by the priests of the earliest dynasties in Egypt, for the same reason and on the same basis as by us.
This needs further elucidation, however. As already stated, that which Mr. G. Massey calls the four
genii of the four cardinal points; and the Chinese, the Black Warrior, White Tiger, Ver[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* For the same reason the division of the principles in man into seven are thus reckoned, as they
describe the same circle in the human higher and lower nature.
** Thus the septenary division is the oldest and preceded the four-fold division. It is the root of archaic
classification.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 409 DRAGON AND CROCODILE.

milion Bird, and Azure Dragon, is called in the Secret Books, -- the "Four Hidden Dragons of
Wisdom" and the "Celestial Nagas." Now, as shown, the seven-headed or septenary DRAGONLOGOS had been in course of time split up, so to speak, into four heptanomic parts or twenty-eight
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portions. Each lunar week has a distinct occult character in the lunar month; each day of the twentyeight has its special characteristics; as each of the twelve constellations, whether separately or in
combination with other signs, has an occult influence either for good or for evil. This represents the
sum of knowledge that men can acquire on this earth; yet few are those who acquire it, and still fewer
are the wise men who get to the root of knowledge symbolized by the great Root Dragon, the spiritual
LOGOS of these visible signs. But those who do, receive the name of "Dragons," and they are the
"Arhats of the Four Truths of the 28 Faculties," or attri butes, and have always been so called.
The Alexandrian Neo-Platonists asserted that to become real Chaldees or Magi, one had to master the
science or knowledge of the periods of the Seven Rectors of the world, in whom is all wisdom. In
"Proclus in Timaeus," b. 1, Jamblichus is credited with another version, which does not however, alter,
the meaning. He says that "the Assyrians have not only preserved the records of seven and twenty
myriads of years, as Hipparchus says they have, but likewise of the whole apocatastases and periods of
the Seven Rulers of the World." The legends of every nation and tribe, whether civilized or savage,
point to the once universal belief in the great wisdom and cunning of the Serpents. They are
"charmers." They hypnotise the bird with their eye, and man himself, very often, does not feel above
their fascinating influence; therefore the symbol is a most fitting one.
The crocodile is the Egyptian dragon. It was the dual symbol of Heaven and Earth, of Sun and Moon,
and was made sacred, in consequence of its amphibious nature, to Osiris and Isis. According to
Eusebius, the Egyptians represented the sun in a ship as its pilot, this ship being carried along by a
crocodile "to show the motion of the Sun in the moyst (Space)", (Prepar. Evang., 1, 3, c. 3). The
crocodile was moreover, the symbol of Egypt herself -- the lower, as being the more swampy of the
two countries. The Alchemists claim another interpretation. They say that the symbol of the sun in the
ship on the Ether of Space meant that the hermetic matter is the principle, or basis, of gold, or again
the philosophical sun; the water, within which the crocodile is swimming, is that water or matter made
liquid; the ship herself, finally, representing the vessel of nature, in which the sun, or the sulphuric,
igneous principle, acts as a pilot: because it is the sun

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 410 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

which conducts the work by his action upon the moist or mercury. The above is only for the
Alchemists.
The Serpent became the type and symbol of evil, and of the Devil, only during the middle ages. The
early Christians -- besides the Ophite Gnostics -- had their dual Logos: the Good and the Bad Serpent,
the Agathodaemon and the Kakodaemon. This is demonstrated by the writings of Marcus, Valentinus,
and many others, and especially in Pistis Sophia -- certainly a document of the earliest centuries of
Christianity. On the marble sarcophagus of a tomb, discovered in 1852 near the Porta Pia, one sees the
scene of the adoration of the Magi, "or else," remarks the late C. W. King in "The Gnostics," "the
prototype of that scene, the 'Birth of the New Sun.'" The mosaic floor exhibited a curious design which
might have represented either (a) Isis suckling the babe Harpocrates, or (b) the Madonna nursing the
infant Jesus. In the smaller sarcophagi that surrounded the larger one, eleven leaden plates rolled like
scrolls were found, three of which have been deciphered. The contents of these ought to be regarded as
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final proof of a much-vexed question, for they show that either the early Christians, up to the VIth
Century, were bond fide pagans, or that dogmatic Christianity was borrowed wholesale, and passed in
full into the Christian Church -- Sun, Tree, Serpent, Crocodile and all.
"On the first is seen Anubis . . . holding out a scroll; at his feet are two female busts;
below all are two serpents entwined . . . a corpse swathed up like a mummy. In the
second scroll . . . is Anubis, holding out a cross, the "Sign of Life." Under his feet lies
the corpse encircled in the numerous folds of a huge serpent, the Agathodaemon,
guardian of the deceased. . . . . In the third scroll, Anubis bears on his arm . . . . . the
outline of . . a complete Latin cross . . . At the god's foot is a rhomboid, the Egyptian
'Egg of the World,' towards which crawls a serpent coiled into a circle . . . . Under the
busts is the letter [[omega]] repeated seven times in a line, reminding one of the 'names' .
. . Very remarkable also is the line of characters, apparently Palmyrene, upon the legs of
the first Anubis. As for the figure of the serpent, supposing these talismans to emanate
not from the Isiac but the newer Ophite creed, it may well stand for that "True and
perfect Serpent," who leads forth the souls of all that put their trust in him out of the
Egypt of the body, and through the Red Sea of Death into the Land of Promise, saving
them on their way from the Serpents of the Wilderness, that is, from the Rulers of the
Stars." (King's "Gnostics," p. 366.)
And this "True and Perfect Serpent" is the seven-lettered God who is now credited with being Jehovah,
and Jesus One with him. To this Seven-vowelled god the candidate for initiation is sent by Christos, in
the Pistis Sophia, a work earlier than St. John's Revelation, and evidently of the same school. "The
(Serpent of the) Seven Thunders uttered

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these seven vowels," but "Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and write them not,"
says Revelation. "Do ye seek after these mysteries?" inquiries Jesus in Pistis Sophia. "No mystery is
more excellent than they (the seven vowels): for they shall bring your souls unto the Light of Lights" -i.e., true Wisdom. "Nothing, therefore, is more excellent than the mysteries which ye seek after, saving
only the mystery of the Seven Vowels and their FORTY AND NINE Powers, and the numbers
thereof."
In India, it was the mystery of the Seven FIRES and their forty-nine fires or aspects, or "the members
thereof," just the same.
These seven vowels are represented by the Swastika signs on the crowns of the seven heads of the
Serpent of Eternity, in India, among esoteric Buddhists, in Egypt, in Chaldea, etc. etc., and among the
Initiates of every other country. It is on the Seven zones of post mortem ascent, in the Hermetic
writings, that the "mortal" leaves, on each, one of his "Souls" (or Principles); until arrived on the plane
above all zones he remains as the great Formless Serpent of absolute wisdom -- or the Deity itself. The
seven-headed serpent has more than one signification in the Arcane teachings. It is the seven-headed
Draco, each of whose heads is a star of the Lesser Bear; but it was also, and pre-eminently, the Serpent
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of Darkness (i.e., inconceivable and incomprehensible) whose seven heads were the seven Logoi, the
reflections of the one and first manifested Light -- the universal LOGOS.
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Next Section
Contents

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The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 1

Theosophical University Press Online Edition

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 411 THE MYSTERY OF THE SEVEN THUNDERS.

[[This page continued from previous section]]
XI.
DEMON EST DEUS INVERSUS.
THIS symbolical sentence, in its many-sided forms, is certainly most dangerous and iconoclastic in
the face of all the dualistic later religions -- or rather theologies -- and especially so in the light of
Christianity. Yet it is neither just nor correct to say that it is Christianity which has conceived and
brought forth Satan. As an "adversary," the opposing Power required by the equilibrium and harmony
of things in Nature -- like Shadow to throw off still brighter the Light, like Night to bring into greater
relief the Day, and like cold to make one appreciate the more the comfort of heat -- SATAN has ever
existed. Homogeneity is one and indivisible. But if the homogeneous One and Absolute is no mere
figure of speech, and if heterogeneity in its dualistic aspect, is its offspring -- its bifurcous shadow or
reflection -- then even that divine Homogeneity must contain in itself the essence of

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 412 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

both good and evil. If "God" is Absolute, Infinite, and the Universal Root of all and everything in
Nature and its universe, whence comes Evil or D'Evil if not from the same "Golden Womb" of the
absolute? Thus we are forced either to accept the emanation of good and evil, of Agathodaemon and
Kakodaemon as offshoots from the same trunk of the Tree of Being, or to resign ourselves to the
absurdity of believing in two eternal Absolutes!
Having to trace the origin of the idea to the very beginnings of human mind, it is but just, meanwhile,
to give his due even to the proverbial devil. Antiquity knew of no isolated, thoroughly and absolutely
bad "god of evil." Pagan thought represented good and evil as twin brothers, born from the same
mother -- Nature; so soon as that thought ceased to be Archaic, Wisdom too became Philosophy. In
the beginning the symbols of good and evil were mere abstractions, Light and Darkness; then their
types became chosen among the most natural and ever-recurrent periodical Cosmic phenomena -- the
Day and the Night, or the Sun and Moon. Then the Hosts of the Solar and Lunar deities were made to
represent them, and the Dragon of Darkness was contrasted with the Dragon of Light (See Stanzas V.,
VII. of Book I.) The Host of Satan is a Son of God, no less than the Host of the B'ni Alhim, these
children of God coming to "present themselves before the Lord," their father (see Job ii.). "The Sons
of God" become the "Fallen Angels" only after perceiving that the daughters of men were fair,
(Genesis vi.) In the Indian philosophy, the Suras are among the earliest and the brightest gods, and

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become Asuras only when dethroned by Brahminical fancy. Satan never assumed an
anthropomorphic, individualized shape, until the creation by man, of a "one living personal god," had
been accomplished; and then merely as a matter of prime necessity. A screen was needed; a scapegoat to explain the cruelty, blunders, and but too-evident injustice, perpetrated by him for whom
absolute perfection, mercy, and goodness were claimed. This was the first Karmic effect of
abandoning a philosophical and logical Pantheism, to build, as a prop for lazy man, "a merciful father
in Heaven," whose daily and hourly actions as Natura naturans, the "comely mother but stone cold,"
belie the assumption. This led to the primal twins, Osiris-Typhon, Ormazd-Ahriman, and finally CainAbel and the tutti-quanti of contraries.
Having commenced by being synonymous with Nature, "God," the Creator, ended by being made its
author. Pascal settles the difficulty very cunningly: "Nature has perfections, in order to show that she
is the image of God: and defects, in order to show that she is only his image," he says.
The further back one recedes into the darkness of the prehistoric

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 413 DEATH IS LIFE.

ages, the more philosophical does the prototypic figure of the later Satan appear. The first
"Adversary" in individual human form that one meets with in old Puranic literature is one of her
greatest Rishis and Yogis -- Narada, surnamed the "Strife-maker."
And he is a Brahmaputra, a son of Brahma, the male. But of him later on. Who the great "Deceiver"
really is, one can ascertain by searching for him with open eyes and an unprejudiced mind, in every
old cosmogony and Scripture.
It is the anthropomorphised Demiurge, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, when separated from the
collective Hosts of his fellow-Creators, whom, so to speak, he represents and synthesizes. It is now the
God of theologies. "The thought is father to the wish." Once upon a time, a philosophical symbol left
to perverse human fancy; afterwards fashioned into a fiendish, deceiving, cunning, and jealous God.
Dragons and other fallen angels being described in other parts of this work, a few words upon the
much-slandered Satan will be sufficient. That which the student will do well to remember is that, with
every people except the Christian nations, the Devil is to this day no worse an entity than the opposite
aspect in the dual nature of the so-called Creator. This is only natural. One cannot claim God as the
synthesis of the whole Universe, as Omnipresent and Omniscient and Infinite, and then divorce him
from evil. As there is far more evil than good in the world, it follows on logical grounds that either
God must include evil, or stand as the direct cause of it, or else surrender his claims to absoluteness.
The ancients understood this so well that their philosophers -- now followed by the Kabalists -defined evil as the lining of God or Good: Demon est Deus inversus, being a very old adage. Indeed,
evil is but an antagonizing blind force in nature; it is reaction, opposition, and contrast, -- evil for
some, good for others. There is no malum in se: only the shadow of light, without which light could
have no existence, even in our perceptions. If evil disappeared, good would disappear along with it

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from Earth. The "Old Dragon" was pure spirit before he became matter, passive before he became
active. In the Syro-Chaldean magic both Ophis and Ophiomorphos are joined in the Zodiac, at the
sign of the Androgyne Virgo-Scorpio. Before its fall on earth the "Serpent" was Ophis-Christos, and
after its fall it became Ophiomorphos-CHRESTOS. Everywhere the speculations of the Kabalists treat
of Evil as a FORCE, which is antagonistic, but at the same time essential, to Good, as giving it vitality
and existence, which it could never have otherwise. There would be no life possible (in the Mayavic
sense) without Death, nor regeneration and reconstruction without destruction. Plants would perish in
eternal sunlight, and so would man, who would become an automaton without the exercise of his free
will and aspirations

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 414 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

after that sunlight, which would lose its being and value for him had he nothing but light. Good is
infinite and eternal only in the eternally concealed from us, and this is why we imagine it eternal. On
the manifested planes, one equilibrates the other. Few are those theists and believers in a personal
God, who do not make of Satan the shadow of God; or who, confounding both, do not believe they
have a right to pray to that idol asking its help and protection for the exercise and impunity of their
evil and cruel deeds. "Lead us not into Temptation" is addressed daily to "our Father, which art in
Heaven," and not to the Devil, by millions of human Christian hearts. They do so, repeating the very
words put in the mouth of their Saviour, and do not give one thought to the fact that their meaning is
contradicted point blank by James "the brother of the Lord." "Let no man say when he is tempted, I
am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man." -- (The Gen.
Ep. of James, i, 13). Why, then, say that it is the Devil who tempts us, when the Church teaches us on
the authority of Christ that it is God who does so? Open any pious volume in which the word
"temptation" is defined in its theological sense, and forthwith you find two definitions: (1) "Those
afflictions and troubles whereby God tries his people;" (2) Those means and enticements which the
Devil makes use of to ensnare and allure mankind. (St. James i., 2, 12, and Mat. vi., 13.) If accepted
literally, the two teachings of Christ and James contradict each other, and what dogma can reconcile
the two if the occult meaning is rejected?
Between the alternative allurements, wise will be that philosopher who will be able to decide where
God disappears to make room for the Devil! Therefore when we read that "the Devil is a liar and the
father of it," i.e., INCARNATE LIE, and are told in the same breath that Satan -- the Devil -- was a
son of God and the most beautiful of his archangels, rather than believe that Father and Son are a
gigantic, personified and eternal LIE, we prefer to turn to Pantheism and to Pagan philosophy for
information.
Once that the key to Genesis is in our hands, it is the scientific and symbolical Kabala which unveils
the secret. The great Serpent of the Garden of Eden and the "Lord God" are identical, and so are
Jehovah and Cain ONE -- that Cain who is referred to in theology as the "murderer" and the LIAR to
God! Jehovah tempts the King of Israel to number the people, and Satan tempts him to do the same in
another place. Jehovah turns into the fiery serpents to bite those he is displeased with; and Jehovah
informs the brazen serpent that heals them.

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These short, and seemingly contradictory, statements in the Old Testament (contradictory because the
two Powers are separated instead of being regarded as the two faces of one and the same thing) are the

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 415 THEOLOGICAL ETYMOLOGIES.

echoes -- distorted out of recognition by exotericism and theology -- of the universal and
philosophical dogmas in nature, so well understood by the primitive Sages. We find the same
groundwork in several personifications in the Puranas, only far more ample and philosophically
suggestive.
Thus Pulastya, a "Son of God" -- one of the first progeny -- is made the progenitor of Demons, the
Rakshasas, the tempters and the Devourers of men. Pisacha (female Demon) is a daughter of Daksha,
a "Son of God" too, and a God, and the mother of all the Pisachas (Padma Purana). The Demons, so
called in the Puranas, are very extraordinary devils when judged from the standpoint of European and
orthodox views about these creatures, since all of them -- Danavas, Daityas, Pisachas, and the
Rakshasas -- are represented as extremely pious, following the precepts of the Vedas, some of them
even being great Yogis. But they oppose the clergy and Ritualism, sacrifices and forms -- just what
the full-blown Yogins do to this day in India -- and are no less respected for it, though they are
allowed to follow neither caste nor ritual; hence all those Puranic giants and Titans are called Devils.
The Missionaries, ever on the watch to show, if they can, the Hindu traditions no better than a
reflection of the Jewish Bible, have evolved a whole romance on the alleged identity of Pulastya with
Cain, and of the Rakshasas with the Cainites, "the accursed," the cause of the Noachian Deluge. (See
the work of Abbe Gorresio, who "etymologises" Pulastya's name as meaning the "rejected," hence
Cain, if you please). Pulastya dwells in Kedara, he says, which means a "dug-up place," a mine, and
Cain is shown in tradition and the Bible as the first worker in metals and a miner thereof!
While it is very probable that the Gibborim (the giants) of the Bible are the Rakshasas of the Hindus,
it is still more certain that both are Atlanteans, and belong to the submerged races. However it may be,
no Satan could be more persistent in slandering his enemy, or more spiteful in his hatred, than the
Christian theologians are in cursing him as the father of every evil. Compare their vituperations and
opinions given about the Devil with the philosophical views of the Puranic sages and their Christ-like
mansuetude. When Parasara, whose father was devoured by a Rakshasa, was preparing himself to
destroy (magically) the whole race, his grandsire, Vasishta, says a few extremely suggestive words to
him. He shows the irate Sage, on his own confession, that there is Evil and Karma, but no "evil
spirits." "Let thy wrath be appeased," he says. "The Rakshasas are not culpable; thy father's death was
the work of Karma. Anger is the passion of fools; it becometh not a wise man. By whom, it may be
asked, is any one killed? Every man reaps the consequences of his own acts. Anger, my son, is the
destruction of

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 416 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

all that man obtains . . . and prevents the attainment of emancipation. The sages shun wrath. Be not
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thou, my child, subject to its influence. Let not those unoffending spirits of darkness be consumed; let
thy sacrifice cease. Mercy is the might of the righteous" (Vishnu Purana, Book i., ch. i.). Thus, every
such "sacrifice" or prayer to God for help is no better than an act of black magic. That which Parasara
prayed for, was the destruction of the Spirits of Darkness, for his personal revenge. He is called a
Pagan, and the Christians have doomed him as such, to eternal hell. Yet, in what respect is the prayer
of sovereigns and generals, who pray before every battle for the destruction of their enemy, any
better? Such a prayer is in every case black magic of the worst kind, concealed like a demon "Mr.
Hyde" under a sanctimonious "Dr. Jekyll."
In human nature, evil denotes only the polarity of matter and Spirit, a struggle for life between the two
manifested Principles in Space and Time, which principles are one per se, inasmuch they are rooted in
the Absolute. In Kosmos, the equilibrium must be preserved. The operations of the two contraries
produce harmony, like the centripetal and centrifugal forces, which are necessary to each other -mutually inter-dependent -- "in order that both should live." If one is arrested, the action of the other
will become immediately self-destructive.
Since the personification called Satan has been amply analyzed from its triple aspect -- in the Old
Testament, Christian theology and the ancient Gentile attitude of thought -- those who would learn
more of it are referred to Vol. II. of ISIS UNVEILED, chap. x. See also several sections in Book II.,
Part II. of this work. The present subject is touched upon and fresh explanations attempted for a very
good reason. Before we can approach the evolution of physical and divine man, we have first to
master the idea of cyclic evolution, to acquaint ourselves with the philosophies and beliefs of the four
races which preceded our present race, to learn what were the ideas of those Titans and giants -giants, verily, mentally as well as physically. The whole of antiquity was imbued with that philosophy
which teaches the involution of spirit into matter, the progressive, downward cyclic descent, or active,
self-conscious evolution. The Alexandrian Gnostics have sufficiently divulged the secret of
initiations, and their records are full of "the sliding down of AEons" in their double qualification of
Angelic Beings and Periods: the one the natural evolution of the other. On the other hand, Oriental
traditions on both sides of the "black water" -- the oceans that separate the two Easts -- are as full of
allegories about the downfall of Pleroma, of that of the gods and Devas. One and all, they allegorized
and explained the FALL as the

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 417 THE ANGELS SLANDERED.

desire to learn and acquire knowledge -- to KNOW. This is the natural sequence of mental evolution,
the spiritual becoming transmuted into the material or physical. The same law of descent into
materiality and re-ascent into spirituality asserted itself during the Christian era, the reaction having
stopped only just now, in our own special sub-race.
That which, perhaps ten millenniums ago, was allegorized in Pymander in a triune character of
interpretation, meant as a record of an astronomical, anthropological, and even alchemical fact,
namely, the allegory of the seven rectors breaking through the seven circles of fire, was dwarfed into
one material and anthropomorphic interpretation -- the rebellion and Fall of the Angels. The
multivocal, profoundly philosophical narrative, under its poetical form of the "Marriage of Heaven
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with Earth," the love of nature for Divine form and the "Heavenly man," enraptured with his own
beauty mirrored in nature -- i.e., Spirit attracted into matter -- has now become, under theological
handling: "the seven Rectors disobeying Jehovah, self admiration generating Satanic Pride, followed
by their FALL, Jehovah permitting no worship to be lost save upon himself." In short, the beautiful
Planet-Angels, the glorious cyclic aeons of the ancients, became henceforward synthesized in their
most orthodox shape in Samael, the chief of the Demons in the Talmud, "That great serpent with
twelve wings that draws down after himself, in his Fall, the solar system, or the Titans." But Schemal,
the alter ego and the Sabean type of Samael, meant, in his philosophical and esoteric aspect, the
"year" in its astrological evil aspect, its twelve months or wings of unavoidable evils, in nature; and in
esoteric theogony (see Chwolson in NABATHEAN AGRICULTURE, Vol. II., p. 217), both Schemal
and Samael represented a particular divinity. With the Kabalists they are "the Spirit of the Earth," the
personal god that governs it, identical de facto with Jehovah. For the Talmudists admit themselves
that SAMAEL is a god-name of one of the seven Elohim. The Kabalists, moreover, show the two,
Schemal and Samael, as a symbolical form of Saturn, CHRONOS, the twelve wings standing for the
12 months, and the symbol in its collectivity representing a racial cycle. Jehovah and Saturn are also
glyphically identical.
This leads in its turn to a very curious deduction from a Roman Catholic dogma. Many renowned
writers belonging to the Latin Church admit that a difference exists, and should be made, between the
Uranian Titans, the antediluvian giants (also Titans), and those post-diluvian giants in whom they (the
Roman Catholics) will see the descendants of the mythical Ham. In clearer words, there is a difference
to be made between the Cosmic, primordial opposing Forces -- guided by cyclic law -- the Atlantean
human giants, and the post-diluvian great adepts, whether

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 418 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

of the right or the left hand. At the same time they show that Michael, "the generalissimos of the
fighting Celestial Host, the bodyguard of Jehovah," as it would seem (see de Mirville) is also a Titan,
only with the adjective of "divine" before the cognomen. Thus those "Uranides" who are called
everywhere "divine Titans," and who, having rebelled against Kronos (Saturn), are therefore also
shown to be the enemies of Samael (an Elohim, also and synonymous with Jehovah in his
collectivity), are identical with Michael and his host. In short, the roles are reversed, all the
combatants are confused, and no student is able to distinguish clearly which is which. Esoteric
explanation may, however, bring some order into this confusion, in which Jehovah becomes Saturn,
and Michael and his army, Satan and the rebellious angels, owing to the indiscreet endeavours of the
too faithful zealots to see in every pagan god a devil. The true meaning is far more philosophical, and
the legend of the first "Fall" (of the angels) assumes a scientific colouring when correctly understood.
Kronos stands for endless (hence immovable) Duration, without beginning, without an end, beyond
divided Time and beyond Space. Those "Angels," genii, or Devas, who were born to act in space and
time, i.e., to break through the seven circles of the superspiritual planes into the phenomenal, or
circumscribed, super-terrestrial regions, are said allegorically to have rebelled against Kronos and
fought the (then) one living and highest God. In his turn, when Kronos is represented as mutilating
Uranus, his father, the meaning of this mutilation is very simple: Absolute Time is made to become
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the finite and the conditioned; a portion is robbed from the whole, thus showing that Saturn, the father
of the gods, has been transformed from Eternal Duration into a limited Period. Chronos cuts down
with his scy the even the longest and (to us) seemingly endless cycles, yet, for all that, limited in
Eternity, and puts down with the same scy the the mightiest rebels. Aye, not one will escape the scythe
of Time! Praise the god or gods, or flout, one or both, and that scy the will not be made to tremble one
millionth of a second in its ascending or descending course.
The Titans of Hesiod's Theogony were copied in Greece from the Suras and Asuras of India. These
Hesiodic Titans, the Uranides, numbered once upon a time as only six, have been recently discovered
to be seven -- the seventh being called Phoreg -- in an old fragment relating to the Greek myth. Thus
their identity with the Seven rectors is fully demonstrated. The origin of the "War in Heaven" and the
FALL has, in our mind, to be traced unavoidably to India, and perhaps far earlier than the Puranic
accounts thereof. For TARAMAYA was in a later age, and there are three accounts, each of a distinct
war, to be traced in almost every Cosmogony.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 419 THE WAR OF THE GODS.

The first war happened in the night of time, between the gods the (A)-suras, and lasted for the period
of one "divine year."* On this occasion the deities were defeated by the Daityas, under the leadership
of Hrada. After that, owing to a device of Vishnu, to whom the conquered gods applied for help, the
latter defeated the Asuras. In the Vishnu Purana no interval is found between the two wars. In the
Esoteric Doctrine, one war takes place before the building of the Solar system; another, on earth, at
the "creation" of man; and a third "war" is mentioned as taking place at the close of the 4th Race,
between its adepts and those of the 5th Race, i.e., between the Initiates of the "Sacred Island" and the
Sorcerers of Atlantis. We shall notice the first contest, as recounted by Parasara, while trying to
separate the two accounts, purposely blended together. It is there stated that as the Daityas and Asuras
were engaged in the duties of their respective orders (Varna) and followed the paths prescribed by
holy writ, practising also religious penance (a queer employment for demons if they are identical with
our devils, as it is claimed) -- it was impossible for the gods to destroy them. The prayers addressed
by the gods to Vishnu are curious as showing the ideas involved in an anthropomorphic deity. Having,
after their defeat, "fled to the Northern shore of the Milky Ocean (Atlantic Ocean),** the discomfited
gods address many supplications "to the first
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* One "Day of Brahma" lasting 4,320,000,000 years -- multiply this by 365! The Asuras here (nogods, but demons) are still Suras, gods higher in hierarchy than such secondary gods as are not even
mentioned in the Vedas. The duration of the war shows its significance, and that they are only the
personified Cosmic powers. It is evidently for sectarian purposes and out of odium theologicum that
the illusive form assumed by Vishnu Mayamoha, was attri buted in later rearrangements of old texts to
Buddha and the Daityas, in the Vishnu Purana, unless it was a fancy of Wilson himself. He also
fancied he found an allusion to Buddhism in Bhagavatgita, whereas, as proved by K. T. Telang, he
had only confused the Buddhists and the older Charvaka materialists. The version exists nowhere in
other Puranas if the inference does, as Professor Wilson claims, in the "Vishnu Purana"; the
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translation of which, especially of Book iii., ch. xviii., where the reverend Orientalist arbitrarily
introduces Buddha, and shows him teaching Buddhism to Daityas -- led to another "great war"
between himself and Col. Vans Kennedy. The latter charged him publicly with wilfully distorting
Puranic texts. "I affirm," wrote the Colonel at Bombay, in 1840, "that the Puranas do not contain what
Professor Wilson has stated is contained in them . . . until such passages are produced I may be
allowed to repeat my former conclusions, that Professor Wilson's opinion, that the Puranas as now
extant are compilations made between the eighth and seventeenth centuries (A.D.!) rests solely on
gratuitous assumptions and unfounded assertions, and that his reasoning in support of it is either
futile, fallacious, contradictory, or improbable." (See Vishnu Purana, trans. by Wilson, edit. by
Fitzedward Hall, Vol. V., Appendix.)
** This statement belongs to the third War, since the terrestrial continents, seas and rivers are
mentioned in connection with it.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 420 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

of beings, the divine Vishnu," and among others this one: "Glory to thee, who art one with the Saints,
whose perfect nature is ever blessed. . . . Glory to thee, who art one with the Serpent-race, doubletongued, impetuous, cruel, insatiate of enjoyment and abounding with wealth. . . . Glory to thee, . . . .
O Lord, who hast neither colour nor extension, nor size (ghana), nor any predicable qualities, and
whose essence (rupa), purest of the pure is appreciable only by holy Paramarshi (greatest of sages or
Rishis). We bow to thee, in the nature of Brahma uncreated, undecaying (avyaya), who art in our
bodies and in all other bodies, and in all living creatures, and beside whom nothing exists. We glorify
that Vasudeva, the lord of all, who is without soil, the seed of all things, exempt from dissolution,
unborn, eternal; being in essence Paramapadatmavat (beyond the condition of spirit) and in essence
and substance (rupa), the whole of this (Universe)." (Book III., ch. xvii., Vish. Purana.)
The above is quoted as an illustration of the vast field offered by the Puranas to adverse and erroneous
criticism, by every European bigot who forms an estimate of an alien religion on mere external
evidence. Any man accustomed to subject what he reads to thoughtful analysis, will see at a glance
the incongruity of addressing the accepted "Unknowable," the formless, and attri buteless
ABSOLUTE, such as the Vedantins define BRAHMA, as being "one with the serpent-race, doubletongued, cruel and insatiable," thus associating the abstract with the concrete, and bestowing
adjectives on that which is freed from any limitations, and conditionless. Even Dr. Wilson, who, after
living surrounded by Brahmins and Pundits in India for so many years, ought to have known better -even that scholar lost no opportunity to criticize the Hindu Scriptures on this account. Thus, he
exclaims: --*
"The Puranas constantly teach incompatible doctrines! According to this passage, the Supreme being
is not the inert cause of creation only, but exercises the functions of an active providence. The
Commentator quotes a text of the Veda in support of this view: 'Universal Soul entering into men,
governs their conduct.' Incongruities, however, are as frequent in the Vedas as in the Puranas. . . . ."
Less frequent, in sober truth, than in the Mosaic Bible. But prejudice is great in the hearts of our
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Orientalists -- especially in those of "reverend" scholars. UNIVERSAL SOUL is not the inert Cause
of Creation or (Para) Brahma, but simply that which we call the sixth principle of intellectual
Kosmos, on the manifested plane of being. It is Mahat, or Mahabuddhi, the great Soul, the vehicle of
Spirit, the first primeval reflection of the formless CAUSE, and that which is even beyond SPIRIT.
[[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------* In Book I., chap. xvii., narrating the story of Prahlada -- the Son of Hiranyakasipu, the Puranic
Satan, the great enemy of Vishnu, and the King of the three worlds -- into whose heart Vishnu
entered.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 421 THE DECEPTION OF THE GODS.

So much for Professor Wilson's uncalled-for fling. As for the apparently incongruous appeal to
Vishnu by the defeated gods, the explanation is there, in the text of Vishnu Purana, if Orientalists
would only notice it.* There is Vishnu, as Brahma, and Vishnu in his two aspects, philosophy teaches.
There is but one Brahma, "essentially prakriti and Spirit," &c.
Therefore, it is not Vishnu -- "the inert cause of creation" -- which exercised the functions of an active
Providence, but the Universal Soul, that which E. Levi calls Astral Light in its material aspect. And
this "Soul" is, in its dual aspect of spirit and matter, the true anthropomorphic God of the Theists; as
this God is a personification of that Universal Creative Agent, pure and impure both, owing to its
manifested condition and differentiation in this Mayavic World -- God and Devil -- truly. But Dr.
Wilson failed to see how Vishnu, in this character, closely resembles the Lord God of Israel,
"especially in his policy of deception, temptation, and cunning."
In the Vishnu Purana this is made as plain as can be. For it is said there, that "at the conclusion of their
prayers (stotra) the gods beheld the Sovereign Deity Hari (Vishnu) armed with the conch, the discus,
and the mace, riding on Garuda. ." Now "Garuda" is the manvantaric cycle, as will be shown in its
place. Vishnu, therefore, is the deity in space and time; the peculiar God of the Vaishnavas (a tribal or
racial God, as they are called in esoteric philosophy): i.e., one of the many Dhyanis or Gods, or
Elohim, one of whom was generally chosen for some special reasons by a nation or a tribe, and thus
became gradually a "God above all Gods" (2 Chronicles ii. 5,) the "highest God" as Jehovah, Osiris,
Bel, or any other of the Seven Regents.
"The tree is known by its fruit," -- the nature of a God by his actions. The latter, we have either to
judge by the dead-letter narratives, or to accept allegorically. If we compare the two -- Vishnu, as the
defender and champion of the defeated gods; and Jehovah, the defender and champion of the "chosen"
people, so called by antiphrasis, no doubt, as it is the Jews who had chosen that "jealous" God -- we
shall find that both use deceit and cunning. They do so on the principle of "the end justifying the
means," in order to have the best of their
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

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* This ignorance is truly and beautifully expressed in the praise of the Yogins to Brahma, "the
upholder of the earth" (in Book I., chap. iv. of V. P.), when they say, "Those who have not practised
devotion conceive erroneously of the nature of the world. The ignorant who do not perceive that this
Universe is of the nature of wisdom, and judge of it as an object of perception only, are lost in the
ocean of spiritual ignorance. But they who know true wisdom, and whose minds are pure, behold this
whole world as one with divine knowledge, as one with thee, O God! Be favourable, O universal
Spirit!"

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 422 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

respective opponents and foes -- the demons. Thus while (according to the Kabalists) Jehovah
assumes the shape of the tempting Serpent in the Garden of Eden; sends Satan with a special mission
to tempt Job; and harasses and wearies Pharaoh with Sarai, Abraham's wife, and "hardens" his heart
against Moses, lest there should be no opportunity for plaguing his victims "with great plagues"
(Genesis xii., Exodus) -- Vishnu is made in his Purana to resort to a trick no less unworthy of any
respectable god.
"Have compassion upon us, O Lord, and protect us, who have come to thee for succour
from the Daityas (demons)!" pray the defeated Gods. "They have seized upon the three
worlds, and appropriated the offerings which are our portion, taking care not to
transgress the Precepts of the Veda. Although we, as well as they, are parts of thee.* . .
. . engaged as they are in the paths prescribed by the holy writ . . . . it is impossible for
us to destroy them. Do thou, whose wisdom is immeasurable (Ameyatman) instruct us
in some device by which we may be able to exterminate the enemies of the gods!"
"When the mighty Vishnu heard their request, he emitted from his body an illusory
form (Mayamoha, "the deluder by illusion") which he gave to the Gods and thus spake:
"This Mayamoha shall wholly beguile the Daityas, so that being led astray from the
path of the Vedas, they may be put to death. . . . Go then and fear not. Let this delusive
vision precede you. It shall this day be of great service unto you, O Gods!"
"After this, the great Delusion, Mayamoha, descending to earth, beheld the Daityas
engaged in ascetic penances, and approaching them, in the semblance of a Digambara
(naked mendicant) with his head shaven . . . he thus addressed them, in gentle accents:
"Ho, lords of the Daitya race, wherefore is it that you practise these acts of penances?"
etc., etc. (Book II., xviii.).
Finally the Daityas were seduced by the wily talk of Mahamoha, as Eve was seduced by the advice of
the Serpent. They became apostates to the Vedas. As Dr. Muir translates the passage: -"The great Deceiver, practising illusion, next beguiled other Daityas, by means of many
other sorts of heresy. In a very short time, these Asuras (-Daityas) deluded by the
Deceiver (who was Vishnu) abandoned the entire system founded on the ordinances of
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the triple Veda. Some reviled the Vedas, others the Gods, others the ceremonial of
sacrifice, and others the Brahmans. This, they exclaimed, is a doctrine which will not
bear discussion. The slaughter of animals in sacrifice is not conducive to religious
merit. To say that oblations of butter consumed in the fire produce any future reward, is
the assertion of a child. . . . If it be a fact that a beast slain in sacrifice is exalted to
heaven, why does not the worshipper slaughter his own father? . . . . Infallible
utterances do not, great Asuras, fall from the skies; it is only assertions founded on
reasoning that are accepted by me and by other intelligent persons like yourselves! Thus
by numerous methods the Daityas were unsettled by the great Deceiver (Reason). . . .
When
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* "There was a day when the Sons of God came before the Lord, and Satan came with his brothers,
also before the Lord" (Job ii., Abyss., Ethiopic text).

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 423 THE DECEPTION, AN ALLEGORY.

they had entered on the path of error, the gods mustered all their energies and
approached to battle. Then followed a combat between the gods and the Asuras; and the
latter, who had abandoned the right road, were smitten by the former. In previous times
they had been defended by the armour of righteousness which they bore, but when that
had been destroyed they, also, perished." (Journal of the Royal Asiat. Society, Vol.
XIX., p. 302.)
Whatever may be thought of Hindus, no enemy of theirs can regard them as fools. A people whose
holy men and sages have left to the world the greatest and most sublime philosophies that ever
emanated from the minds of men, must have known the difference between right and wrong. Even a
savage can discern white from black, good from bad, and deceit from sincerity and truthfulness. Those
who had narrated this event in the biography of their god, must have seen that in this case it was that
God who was the arch-Deceiver, and the Daityas, who "never transgressed the precepts of the Vedas,"
who had the sunny side in the transaction, and who were the true "Gods." Thence there must have
been, and there is a secret meaning hidden under this allegory. In no class of Society, in no nation, are
deceit and craft considered as Divine virtues -- except perhaps in the clerical classes of theologians
and modern Jesuitism.
The Vishnu Purana,* like all other works of this kind, has passed at a later period into the hands of the
temple-Brahmins, and the old MSS. have, no doubt, been once more tampered with by sectarians. But
there was a time when the Puranas were esoteric works, and so they are still for the Initiates who can
read them with the key that is in their possession.
Whether the Brahmin Initiates will ever give out the full meaning of these allegories, is a question
with which the writer is not concerned. The present object is to show that, while honouring the
creative Powers in their multiple forms, no philosopher could, or ever has, accepted the allegory for
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the true Spirit, except, perhaps, some philosophers belonging to the present "superior and civilized"
Christian races. For, as shown, Jehovah is not one whit the superior of Vishnu on the plane of ethics.
This is why the Occultists and even some Kabalists, whether they regard or not those creative Forces
as living and conscious Entities -- and one does not see why they should not be so accepted -- will
never confuse the CAUSE with the effect, and accept the Spirit of the Earth for Parabrahm or AinSoph. At all events they know well the true nature of what was called Father-AEther by the Greeks,
Jupiter-Titan, etc., etc. They know that the soul of the ASTRAL LIGHT is divine, and
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* Wilson's opinion that the "Vishnu Purana" is a production of our era, and that in its present form it
is not earlier than between the VIIIth and the XVIIth (!!) century, is absurd beyond noticing.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 424 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

its body (the light-waves on the lower planes) infernal. This Light is symbolized by the "Magic Head"
in the Zohar, the double Face on the double Pyramid: the black pyramid rising against a pure white
ground, with a white head and face within its black triangle; the white pyramid, inverted -- the
reflection of the first in the dark waters, showing the black reflection of the white face. . . . .
This is the "Astral Light," or DEMON EST DEUS INVERSUS.
-------------[[This page continued in next section]]

Next Section
Contents

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The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 1

Theosophical University Press Online Edition

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 424 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

[[This page continued from previous section]]
XII.
THE THEOGONY OF THE CREATIVE GODS.
TO thoroughly comprehend the idea underlying every ancient cosmology necessitates the study, in a
comparative analysis, of all the great religions of antiquity; as it is only by this method that the root
idea will be made plain. Exact science -- could the latter soar so high, while tracing the operations of
nature to their ultimate and original sources -- would call this idea the hierarchy of Forces. The
original, transcendental and philosophical conception was one. But as systems began to reflect with
every age more and more the idiosyncracies of nations; and as the latter, after separating, settled into
distinct groups, each evolving along its own national or tribal groove, the main idea gradually became
veiled with the overgrowth of human fancy. While in some countries the FORCES, or rather the
intelligent Powers of nature, received divine honours they were hardly entitled to, in others -- as now
in Europe and the civilized lands -- the very thought of any such Force being endowed with
intelligence seems absurd, and is proclaimed unscientific. Therefore one finds relief in such statements
as are found in the Introduction to "Asgard and the Gods: Tales and Traditions of our Northern
Ancestors," by W. S. W. Anson. The author remarks, on p. 3: "Although in Central Asia, or on the
banks of the Indus, in the land of the Pyramids, and in the Greek and Italian peninsulas, and even in
the North, whither Kelts, Teutons and Slavs wandered, the religious conceptions of the people have
taken different forms, yet their common origin is still perceptible. We point out this connection
between the stories of the gods, and the deep thought contained in them, and their importance, in order
that the reader may see that it is not a magic world of erratic fancy which opens out before him, but
that . . . Life and nature formed the basis of the existence and action of these divinities." And though it
is impossible for any Occultist or student of Eastern Esotericism to concur in the strange idea that "the
religious con-

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 425 MYTH IS ORAL TRADITION.

ceptions of the most famous nations of antiquity are connected with the beginnings of civilization
amongst the Germanic races," he is yet glad to find such truths expressed as that: "These fairy tales are
not senseless stories written for the amusement of the idle; they embody the profound religion of our
forefa thers . . . "
Precisely so. Not only their religion, but likewise their History. For a myth, in Greek [[mythos]], means
oral tradition, passed from mouth to mouth from one generation to the other; and even in the modern
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etymology the term stands for a fabulous statement conveying some important truth; a tale of some
extraordinary personage whose biography has become overgrown, owing to the veneration of
successive generations, with rich popular fancy, but which is no wholesale fable. Like our ancestors,
the primitive Aryans, we believe firmly in the personality and intelligence of more than one
phenomenon-producing Force in nature.
As time rolled on, the archaic teaching grew dimmer; and those nations more or less lost sight of the
highest and One principle of all things, and began to transfer the abstract attri butes of the "causeless
cause" to the caused effects -- become in their turn causative -- the creative Powers of the Universe:
the great nations, out of the fear of profaning the IDEA, the smaller, because they either failed to grasp
it or lacked the power of philosophic conception needed to preserve it in all its immaculate purity. But
one and all, with the exception of the latest Aryans, now become Europeans and Christians, show this
veneration in their Cosmogonies. As Thomas Taylor,* the most intuitional of all the translators of
Greek Fragments, shows, no nation has ever conceived the One principle as the immediate creator of
the visible Universe, for no sane man would credit a planner and architect with having built the edifice
he admires with his own hands. On the testimony of Damascius ([[Peri archon]]) they referred to it as
"the Unknown DARKNESS." The Babylonians passed over this principle in silence: "To that god,"
says Porphyry, in [[Peri apoches empsuchon]], "who is above all things, neither external speech ought
to be addressed, nor yet that which is inward. . . . ." Hesiod begins his theogony with: "Chaos of all
things was the first produced,"** thus allowing the inference that its cause or producer must be passed
over in reverential silence. Homer in his poems ascends no higher than Night, whom he represents
Zeus as reverencing. According to all the ancient theologists, and to the doctrines of Pythagoras and
Plato, Zeus, or the
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* See "Magazine" for April, 1797.
** [[Etoi men protista chaos genet; geneto]] being considered in antiquity as meaning "Was
generated" and not simply was. (See "Taylor's Introd. to the Parmenides of Plato," p. 260.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 426 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

immediate artificer of the universe, is not the highest god; any more than Sir Christopher Wren in his
physical, human aspect is the MIND in him which produced his great works of art. Homer, therefore,
is not only silent with respect to the first principle, but likewise with respect to those two principles
immediately posterior to the first, the AEther and Chaos of Orpheus and Hesiod, and the bound and
infinity of Pythagoras and Plato.* . . . . Proclus says of this highest principle that it is. . . . "the Unity of
Unities, and beyond the first adyte. . . . . more ineffable than all silence, and more occult than all
Essence. . . . . concealed amidst the intelligible gods." (Ibid.)
To what was written by Thomas Taylor in 1797 -- namely, that the "Jews appear to have ascended no
higher. . . . than the immediate artificer of the universe"; as "Moses introduces a darkness on the face
of the deep, without even insinuating that there was any cause of its existence,"** one might add
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something more. Never have the Jews in their Bible (a purely esoteric, symbolical work) degraded so
profoundly their metaphorical deity as have the Christians, by accepting Jehovah as their one living yet
personal God.
This first, or rather ONE, principle was called "the circle of Heaven," symbolized by the hierogram of
a point within a circle or equilateral triangle, the point being the LOGOS. Thus, in the Rig Veda,
wherein Brahma is not even named, Cosmogony is preluded with the Hiranyagharha, "the Golden
Egg," and Prajapati (Brahma later on), from whom emanate all the hierarchies of "Creators." The
Monad, or point, is the original and is the unit from which follows the entire numeral system. This
Point is the First Cause, but THAT from which it emanates, or of which, rather, it is the expression, the
Logos, is passed over in silence. In its turn, the universal symbol, the point within the circle, was not
yet the Architect, but the cause of that Architect; and the latter stood to it in precisely the same relation
as the point itself stood to the circumference of the Circle, which cannot be defined, according to
Hermes Trismegistus. Porphyry shows that the Monad and the Duad of Pythagoras are identical with
Plato's infinite and finite in "Philebus" -- or what Plato calls the [[apeiron]] and [[peras]]. It is the latter
only (the mother) which is substantial, the former being the "cause of all unity and measure of all
things" (Vit. Pyth. p. 47); the Duad (Mulaprakriti, the VEIL) being thus shown to be the mother of the
Logos and, at the same time, his daughter -- i.e., the object of his perception -- the produced
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* It is the "bound" confused with the "Infinite," that Kapila overwhelms with sarcasms in his
disputations with the Brahman Yogis, who claim in their mystical visions to see the "Highest One."
** See T. Taylor's article in his Monthly Magazine quoted in the Platonist, edited by T. M. Johnson,
F.T.S., Osceola, Missouri. (Feb. Number of 1887.)

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 427 THE CREATIVE LOGOI, ANDROGYNOUS.

producer and the secondary cause of it. With Pythagoras, the MONAD returns into silence and
Darkness as soon as it has evolved the triad, from which emanate the remaining seven numbers of the
10 (ten) numbers which are at the base of the manifested universe.
In the Norse cosmogony it is again the same. "In the beginning was a great abyss (Chaos), neither day
nor night existed; the abyss was Ginnungagap, the yawning gulf, without beginning, without end. ALL
FATHER, the Uncreated, the Unseen, dwelt in the depth of the 'Abyss' (SPACE) and willed, and what
was willed came into being." (See "Asgard and the Gods.") As in the Hindu cosmogony, the evolution
of the universe is divided into two acts: called in India the Prakriti and Padma Creations. Before the
warm rays pouring from the "Home of Brightness" awake life in the Great Waters of Space, the
Elements of the first creation come into view, and from them is formed the Giant Ymir (also Orgelmir)
-- primordial matter differentiated from Chaos (literally seething clay). Then comes the cow Audumla,
the nourisher,* from whom is born Buri (the Producer) who, by Bestla, the daughter of the "FrostGiants" (the sons of Ymir) had three sons, Odin, Willi and We, or "Spirit," "Will," and "Holiness."
(Compare the Genesis of the Primordial Races, in this work.) This was when Darkness still reigned
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throughout Space, when the Ases, the creative Powers (Dhyan Chohans) were not yet evolved, and the
Yggdrasil, the tree of the universe of Time and of Life, had not yet grown, and there was, as yet, no
Walhalla, or Hall of Heroes. The Scandinavian legends of creation, of our earth and world, begin with
time and human life. All that precedes it is for them "Darkness," wherein All-Father, the cause of all,
dwells. As observed by the editor of "Asgard and the Gods," though these legends have in them the
idea of that ALL-FATHER, the original cause of all, "he is scarcely more than mentioned in the
poems," not because, as he thinks, before the preaching of the gospel, the idea "could not rise to
distinct conceptions of the Eternal," but on account of its great esoteric character. Therefore, all the
creative gods, or personal Deities, begin at the secondary stage of Cosmic evolution. Zeus is born in,
and out of Kronos -- Time. So is Brahma the production and emanation of Kala, "eternity and time,"
Kala being one of the names of Vishnu. Hence we find Odin, the father of the gods and of the Ases, as
Brahma is the father of the gods and of the Asuras, and hence also the androgyne character of all the
chief creative gods, from the second MONAD of the Greeks down to the Sephiroth Adam Kadmon,
the Brahma or Prajapati-Vach of the Vedas, and the androgyne of Plato, which is but another version
of the Indian symbol.
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* Vach -- the "melodious cow, who milks sustenance and water," and yields us "nourishment and
sustenance" as described in Rig-Veda.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 428 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

The best metaphysical definition of primeval theogony in the spirit of the Vedantins may be found in
the "Notes on the Bhagavat-Gita," by Mr. T. Subba Row. (See "Theosophist" for February, 1887.)
Parabrahmam, the unknown and the incognisable, as the lecturer tells his audience:
". . . . . Is not Ego, it is not non-ego, nor is it consciousness . . . . . it is not even Atma" . .
. . . "but though not itself an object of knowledge, it is yet capable of supporting and
giving rise to every kind of object and every kind of existence which becomes an object
of knowledge. It is the one essence from which starts into existence a centre of energy . .
. . ." which he calls Logos.
This Logos is the Sabda Brahmam of the Hindus, which he will not even call Eswara (the "lord" God),
lest the term should create confusion in the people's minds. But it is the Avalokiteswara of the Hindus,
the Verbum of the Christians in its real esoteric meaning, not in the theological disfigurement.
"It is," he says, "the Gnatha or the Ego in the Kosmos, and every other Ego . . . . . . is but
its reflection and manifestation. . . . . . It exists in a latent condition in the bosom of
Parabrahmam at the time of Pralaya. . . ." (During Manvantara) "it has a consciousness
and an individuality of its own . . . . ." (It is a centre of energy, but) . . . . . such centres of
energy are almost innumerable in the bosom of Parabrahmam . . . . ." "It must not be
supposed, that even the logos is the Creator, or that it is but a single centre of energy . . .
. . . their number is almost infinite." "This Ego," he adds, "is the first that appears in
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Kosmos, and is the end of all evolution. It is the abstract Ego" . . . . . "this is the first
manifestation (or aspect) of Parabrahmam." "When once it starts into conscious being . .
. . . . from its objective standpoint, Parabrahmam appears to it as Mulaprakriti." "Please
bear this in mind," observes the lecturer, "for here is the root of the whole difficulty
about Purusha and Prakriti felt by the various writers on Vedantic philosophy. This
Mulaprakriti is material to it (the Logos), as any material object is material to us. This
Mulaprakriti is no more Parabrahmam than the bundle of attri butes of a pillar is the
pillar itself; Parabrahmam is an unconditioned and absolute reality, and Mulaprakriti is a
sort of veil thrown over it. Parabrahmam by itself cannot be seen as it is. It is seen by the
Logos with a veil thrown over it, and that veil is the mighty expanse of Cosmic matter. .
. ." "Parabrahmam, after having appeared on the one hand as the Ego, and on the other
as Mulaprakriti, acts as the one energy through the Logos."
And the lecturer explains what he means by this acting of something which is nothing, though it is the
ALL, by a fine simile. He compares the Logos to the sun through which light and heat radiate, but
whose energy, light and heat, exist in some unknown condition in Space and are diffused in Space only
as visible light and heat, the sun being only the agent thereof. This is the first triadic hypostasis. The
quaternary is made up by the energizing light shed by the Logos.
The Hebrew Kabalists give it in a shape which esoterically is

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 429 THE ONE IS KNOWN BY THE MANY.

identical with the Vedantic. AIN-SOPH, they taught, could not be comprehended, could not be
located, nor named, though the causeless cause of all. Hence its name -- AIN-SOPH -- is a term of
negation, "the inscrutable, the incognizable, and the unnameable." They made of it, therefore, a
boundless circle, a sphere, of which human intellect, with the utmost stretch, could only perceive the
vault. In the words of one who has unriddled much in the Kabalistical system, in one of its meanings
thoroughly, in its numerical and geometrical esotericism: -- "Close your eyes, and from your own
consciousness of perception try and think outward to the extremest limits in every direction. You will
find that equal lines or rays of perception extend out evenly in all directions, so that the utmost effort
of perception will terminate in the vault of a sphere. The limitation of this sphere will, of necessity, be
a great Circle, and the direct rays of thought in any and every direction must be right line radii of the
circle. This, then, must be, humanly speaking, the extremest all-embracing conception of the Ain-Soph
manifest, which formulates itself as a geometrical figure, viz., of a circle, with its elements of curved
circumference and right line diameter divided into radii. Hence, a geometrical shape is the first
recognisable means of connection between the Ain-Soph and the intelligence of man."*
This great circle (which Eastern Esotericism reduces to the point within the Boundless Circle) is the
Avalokiteswara, the Logos or Verbum of which Mr. Subba Row speaks. But this circle or manifested
God is as unknown to us, except through its manifested universe, as the ONE, though easier, or rather
more possible to our highest conceptions. This Logos which sleeps in the bosom of Parabrahmam
during Pralaya, as our "Ego is latent (in us) at the time of sushupti, sleep"; which cannot cognize
Parabrahmam otherwise than as Mulaprakriti -- the latter being a cosmic veil which is "the mighty
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expanse of cosmic matter" -- is thus only an organ in cosmic creation, through which radiate the
energy and wisdom of Parabrahmam, unknown to the Logos, as it is to ourselves. Moreover, as the
Logos is as unknown to us as Parabrahmam is unknown in reality to the Logos, both Eastern
Esotericism and the Kabala -- in order to bring the Logos within the range of our conceptions -- have
resolved the abstract synthesis into concrete images; viz., into the reflections or multiplied aspects of
that Logos or Avalokiteswara, Brahma, Ormazd, Osiris, Adam-Kadmon, call it by any of these names -which aspects or Manvantaric emanations are the Dhyan Chohans, the Elohim, the Devas, the
Amshaspends, &c., &c. Metaphysicians explain the root and germ of the latter, according to Mr.
Subba Row, as the first manifestation of Parabrahmam, "the highest trinity that we
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* From the Masonic Review for June, 1886.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 430 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

are capable of understanding," which is Mulaprakriti (the veil), the Logos, and the conscious energy
"of the latter," or its power and light*; or -- "matter, force and the Ego, or the one root of self, of which
every other kind of self is but a manifestation or a reflection." It is then only in this "light" (of
consciousness) of mental and physical perception, that practical Occultism can throw this into
visibility by geometrical figures; which, when closely studied, will yield not only a scientific
explanation of the real, objective, existence** of the "Seven sons of the divine Sophia," which is this
light of the Logos, but show by means of other yet undiscovered keys that, with regard to Humanity,
these "Seven Sons" and their numberless emanations, centres of energy personified, are an absolute
necessity. Make away with them, and the mystery of Being and Mankind will never be unriddled, not
even closely approached.
It is through this light that everything is created. This ROOT of mental SELF is also the root of
physical Self, for this light is the permutation, in our manifested world, of Mulaprakriti, called Aditi in
the Vedas. In its third aspect it becomes Vach,*** the daughter and the mother of the Logos, as Isis is
the daughter and the mother of Osiris, who is Horus; and Mout, the daughter, wife, and mother of
Ammon, in the Egyptian Moon-glyph. In the Kabala, Sephira is the same as Shekinah, and is, in
another synthesis, the wife, daughter, and mother of the "Heavenly man," Adam Kadmon, and is even
identical with him, just as Vach is identical with Brahma, and is called the female Logos. In the RigVeda, Vach is "mystic speech," by whom Occult Knowledge and Wisdom are communicated to man,
and thus Vach is said to have "entered the Rishis." She is "generated by the gods;" she is the divine
Vach -- the "Queen of gods"; and she is associated -- like Sephira with the Sephiroth -- with the
Prajapati in their work of creation. Moreover, she is called "the mother of the Vedas," "since it is
through her power (as mystic speech) that Brahma revealed them, and also owing to her power that he
produced the universe" -- i.e., through speech, and words (synthesized by the "WORD") and
numbers.****
But Vach being also spoken of as the daughter of Daksha -- "the god who lives in all the Kalpas" -- her
Mayavic character is thereby shown:
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[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* Called, in the Bhagavat-Gita, Daiviprakriti.
** Objective -- in the world of Maya, of course; still as real as we are.
*** "In the course of cosmic manifestation, this Daiviprakriti, instead of being the mother of the
Logos, should, strictly speaking, be called his daughter." ("Notes on the Bhagavat-Gita," p. 305,
Theosophist.)
**** The wise men, like Stanley Jevons amongst the moderns, who invented the scheme which makes
the incomprehensible assume a tangible form, could only do so by resorting to numbers and
geometrical figures.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 431 THE FEMALE LOGOI.

during the pralaya she disappears, absorbed in the one, all-devouring Ray.
But there are two distinct aspects in universal Esotericism, Eastern and Western, in all those
personations of the female Power in nature, or nature -- the noumenal and the phenomenal. One is its
purely metaphysical aspect, as described by the learned lecturer in his "Notes on the Bhagavat-Gita;"
the other terrestrial and physical, and at the same time divine from the stand-point of practical human
conception and Occultism. They are all the symbols and personifications of Chaos, the "Great Deep"
or the Primordial Waters of Space, the impenetrable VEIL between the INCOGNISABLE and the
LOGOS of Creation. "Connecting himself through his mind with Vach, Brahma (the Logos) created
the primordial waters." In the Kathaka Upanishad it is stated still more clearly: "Prajapati was this
Universe. Vach was a second to him. He associated with her . . . she produced these creatures and
again re-entered Prajapati."*
And here we may incidentally point out one of the many unjust slurs thrown by the pious and good
missionaries in India on the religion of the land. This allegory -- in the "Satapatha Brahmana" -namely, that Brahma, as the father of men, performed the work of procreation by incestuous
intercourse with his own daughter Vach, also called Sandhya (twilight), and Satarupa (the hundred
formed), is incessantly thrown into the teeth of the Brahmins, as condemning their "detestable, false
religion." Besides the fact, conveniently forgotten by the Europeans, that the Patriarch Lot is shown
guilty of the same crime under the human form, whereas Brahma, or rather Prajapati, accomplished the
incest under the form of a buck with his daughter, who had that of a hind (rohit), the esoteric reading
of Genesis (ch. iii.) shows the same. Moreover, there is certainly a cosmic, not a physiological
meaning attached to the Indian allegory, since Vach is a permutation of Aditi and Mulaprakriti
(Chaos), and Brahma a permutation of Narayana, the Spirit of God entering into, and fructifying
nature; therefore, there is nothing phallic in the conception at all.
As already stated, Aditi-Vach is the female Logos, or the "word," Verbum; and Sephira in the Kabala
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is the same. These feminine Logoi are all correlations, in their noumenal aspect, of Light, and Sound,
and Ether, showing how well-informed were the ancients both in
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* This connects Vach and Sephira with the goddess Kwan-Yin, the "merciful mother," the divine
VOICE of the soul even in Exoteric Buddhism; and with the female aspect of Kwan-Shai-yin, the
Logos, the verbum of Creation, and at the same time with the voice that speaks audibly to the Initiate,
according to Esoteric Buddhism. Bath Kol, the filia Vocis, the daughter of the divine voice of the
Hebrews, responding from the mercy seat within the veil of the temple is -- a result.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 432 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

physical science (as now known to the moderns), and as to the birth of that science in the Spiritual and
Astral spheres.
"Our old writers said that Vach is of four kinds . . . . para, pasyanti, madhyama, vaikhari
(a statement found in the Rig-Veda and the Upanishads) . . . . Vaikhari Vach is what we
utter." It is sound, speech, that again which becomes comprehensive and objective to
one of our physical senses and may be brought under the laws of perception. Hence:
"Every kind of Vaikhari-Vach exists in its Madhyama . . . . Pasyanti and ultimately in its
Para form. . . . . The reason why this Pranava* is called Vach is this, that these four
principles of the great Kosmos correspond to these four forms of Vach. . . . . The whole
Kosmos in its objective form is Vaikhari Vach; the light of the Logos is the madhyama
form; and the Logos itself the pasyanti form; while Parabrahmam is the para (beyond
the noumenon of all Noumena) aspect of that Vach." (Notes on the Bhagavad-Gita).
Thus Vach, Shekinah, or the "music of the spheres" of Pythagoras, are one, if we take for our example
instances in the three most (apparently) dissimilar religious philosophies in the world -- the Hindu, the
Greek and the Chaldean Hebrew. These personations and allegories may be viewed under four (chief)
and three (lesser) aspects or seven in all, as in Esotericism. The para form is the ever subjective and
latent Light and Sound, which exist eternally in the bosom of the INCOGNISABLE; when transferred
into the ideation of the Logos, or its latent light, it is called pasyanti, and when it becomes that light
expressed, it is madhyama.
Now the Kabala gives the definition thus: "There are three kinds of light, and that (fourth) which
interpenetrates the others; (1) the clear and the penetrating, the objective light, (2) the reflected light,
and (3) the abstract light. The ten Sephiroth, the three and the Seven, are called in the Kabala the 10
words, D-BRIM (Dabarim), the numbers and the Emanations of the heavenly light, which is both
Adam Kadmon and Sephira, or (Brahma) Prajapati-Vach. Light, Sound, Number, are the three factors
of creation in the Kabala. Parabrahmam cannot be known except through the luminous Point (the
LOGOS), which knows not Parabrahmam but only Mulaprakriti. Similarly Adam Kadmon knew only
Shekinah, though he was the vehicle of Ain-Soph. And, as Adam Kadmon, he is in the esoteric
interpretation the total of the number ten, the Sephiroth (himself a trinity, or the three attri butes of the
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[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* Pranava, like Om, is a mystic term pronounced by the Yogis during meditation; of the terms called,
according to exoteric Commentators, Vyahritis, or "Om, Bhur, Bhuva, Swar" (Om, earth, sky, heaven) - Pranava is the most sacred, perhaps. They are pronounced with breath suppressed. See Manu II. 7681, and Mitakshara commenting on the Yajnavahkya-Suriti, i. 23. But the esoteric explanation goes a
great deal further.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 433 THE PYTHAGOREAN IDEA.

incognisable DEITY in One).* "When the Heavenly man (or LOGOS) first assumed the form of the
Crown** (Kether) and identified himself with Sephira, he caused seven splendid lights to emanate
from it (the Crown)," which made in their totality ten; so the Brahma-Prajapati, once he became
separated from, yet identical with Vach, caused the seven Rishis, the seven Manus or Prajapatis to
issue from that crown. In Exotericism one will always find 10 and 7, of either Sephiroth or Prajapati;
in Esoteric rendering always 3 and 7, which yield also 10. Only when divided in the manifested sphere
, the androgyne, and
, or the figure X manifested and differentiated.
into 3 and 7, they form
This will help the student to understand why Pythagoras esteemed the Deity (the Logos) to be the
centre of unity and "Source of Harmony." We say this Deity was the Logos, not the MONAD that
dwelleth in Solitude and Silence, because Pythagoras taught that UNITY being indivisible is no
number. And this is also why it was required of the candidate, who applied for admittance into his
school, that he should have already studied as a preliminary step, the Sciences of Arithmetic,
Astronomy, Geometry and Music, held as the four divisions of Mathematics.*** Again, this explains
why the Pythagoreans asserted that the doctrine of Numbers -- the chief of all in Esotericism -- had
been revealed to man by the celestial deities; that the world had been called forth out of Chaos by
Sound or Harmony, and constructed according to the principles of musical proportion; that the seven
planets which rule the destiny of mortals have a harmonious motion "and intervals corresponding to
musical diastemes, rendering various sounds, so perfectly consonant, that they produce the sweetest
melody, which is inaudible to us, only by reason of the greatness of the sound, which our ears are
incapable of receiving." (Censorinus.)
In the Pythagorean Theogony the hierarchies of the heavenly Host and Gods were numbered and
expressed numerically. Pythagoras had studied Esoteric Science in India; therefore we find his pupils
saying "The monad (the manifested one) is the principle of all things. From the Monad and the
indeterminate duad (Chaos), numbers; from
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* It is this trinity that is meant by the "three steps of Vishnu"; which means: (Vishnu being considered
as the Infinite in exotericism) -- that from the Parabrahm issued Mulaprakriti, Purusha (the Logos), and
Prakriti: the four forms (with itself, the synthesis) of Vach. And in the Kabala -- Ain-Soph, Shekinah,
Adam Kadmon and Sephirah, the four -- or the three emanations being distinct -- yet ONE.
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** Chaldean Book of Numbers. In the current Kabala the name Jehovah replaces Adam Kadmon.
*** Justin Martyr tells us that, owing to his ignorance of these four sciences, he was rejected by the
Pythagoreans as a candidate for admission into their school.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 434 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

numbers, Points; from points, Lines; from lines, Superficies; from superficies, Solids; from these, solid
Bodies, whose elements are four -- Fire, Water, Air, Earth; of all which transmuted (correlated), and
totally changed, the world consists." -- (Diogenes Laertius in Vit. Pythag.)
And this may also, if it does not unriddle the mystery altogether, at any rate lift a corner of the veil off
those wondrous allegories that have been thrown upon Vach, the most mysterious of all the
Brahmanical goddesses, she who is termed "the melodious cow who milked forth sustenance and
water" (the Earth with all her mystic powers); and again she "who yields us nourishment and
sustenance" (physical Earth). Isis is also mystic Nature and also Earth; and her cow's horns identify her
with Vach. The latter, after having been recognised in her highest form as para, becomes at the lower
or material end of creation -- Vaikhari. Hence she is mystic, though physical, Nature, with all her
magic ways and properties.
Again, as goddess of Speech and of Sound, and a permutation of Aditi -- she is Chaos, in one sense. At
any rate, she is the "Mother of the gods," and it is from Brahma (Iswara, or the Logos) and Vach, as
from Adam Kadmon and Sephira, that the real manifested theogony has to start. Beyond, all is
darkness and abstract speculation. With the Dhyan Chohans, or the gods, the Seers, the Prophets and
the adepts in general are on firm ground. Whether as Aditi, or the divine Sophia of the Greek Gnostics,
she is the mother of the seven sons: the "Angels of the Face," of the "Deep," or the "Great Green One"
of the "Book of the Dead." Says the Book of Dzyan (Knowledge through meditation) -"The great mother lay with

, and the |, and the

to bring them forth, the valiant sons of the
the

, the second | and the

* in her bosom, ready

|| (or 4,320,000, the Cycle) whose two elders are

and the (Point)."

At the beginning of every cycle of 4,320,000, the Seven (or, as some nations had it, eight) great gods,
descended to establish the new order of things and give the impetus to the new cycle. That eighth god
was the unifying Circle or LOGOS, separated and made distinct from its host, in exoteric dogma, just
as the three divine hypostases of the ancient Greeks are now considered in the Churches as three
distinct personae. "The MIGHTY ONES perform their great works, and leave behind them everlasting
monuments to commemorate their visit, every time they penetrate within our mayavic veil
(atmosphere)," says a
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

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* 31415, or [[pi]]. The synthesis, or the Host unified in the Logos and the Point called in Roman
Catholicism the "Angel of the Face," and in Hebrew

"who is (like unto, or the same) as

God" -- the manifested representation.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 435 ANTIQUITY OF THE PYRAMIDS.

Commentary.* Thus we are taught that the great Pyramids were built under their direct supervision,
"when Dhruva (the then Pole-star) was at his lowest culmination, and the Krittika (Pleiades) looked
over his head (were on the same meridian but above) to watch the work of the giants." Thus, as the
first Pyramids were built at the beginning of a Sidereal year, under Dhruva (Alpha Polaris), it must
have been over 31,000 years (31,105) ago. Bunsen was right in admitting for Egypt an antiquity of
over 21,000 years, but this concession hardly exhausts truth and fact in this question. "The stories told
by Egyptian priests and others of time-keeping in Egypt, are now beginning to look less like lies in the
sight of all who have escaped from biblical bondage," writes the author of "The Natural Genesis."
"Inscriptions have lately been found at Sakkarah, making mention of two Sothiac cycles . . . registered
at that time, now some 6,000 years ago. Thus when Herodotus was in Egypt, the Egyptians had -- as
now known -- observed at least five different Sothiac cycles of 1,461 years. The priests informed the
Greek inquirer that time had been reckoned by them for so long that the sun had twice risen where it
then set, and twice set where it then arose. This . . . can only be realized as a fact in nature by means of
two cycles of Precession, or a period of 51,736 years," (vol. ii, p. 318. But see in our Book II.,
"CHRONOLOGY OF THE BRAHMINS.")
Mor Isaac (See Kircher's OEdipus, vol. ii., p. 425) shows the ancient Syrians defining their world of
the "Rulers" and "active gods" in the same way as the Chaldeans. The lowest world was the
SUBLUNARY -- our own -- watched by the "Angels" of the first or lower order; the one that came
next in rank, was Mercury, ruled by the "ARCHANGELS"; then came Venus, whose gods were the
PRINCIPALITIES; the fourth was that of the SUN, the domain and region of the highest and mightiest
gods of our system, the solar gods of all nations; the fifth was Mars, ruled by the "VIRTUES"; the
sixth -- that of Bel or Jupiter -- was governed by the DOMINIONS; the seventh -- the world of Saturn -by the THRONES. These are the worlds of form. Above come the four higher ones, making seven
again, since the three highest are "unmentionable and unpronounceable." The eighth, composed of
1,122 stars, is the domain of the Cherubs; the ninth, belonging to the walking and numberless stars on
account of their distance, has the seraphs; as to the tenth -- Kircher, quoting Mor Isaac, says that it is
composed "of invisible stars that could be taken, they said, for clouds -- so massed are they in the zone
that we call Via Straminis, the
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* Appearing at the beginning of Cycles, as also of every sidereal year (of 25,868 years) therefore the
Kabeiri or Kabarim received their name in Chaldea, as it means the measures of Heaven from Kob -measure of, and Urim -- heavens.

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[[Vol. 1, Page]] 436 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Milky Way"; and he hastens to explain that "these are the stars of Lucifer, engulfed with him in his
terrible shipwreck." That which comes after and beyond the tenth world (our Quaternary, or the Arupa
world), the Syrians could not tell. "All they knew was that it is there that begins the vast and
incomprehensible ocean of the infinite, the abode of the true divinity without boundary or end."
Champollion shows the same belief among the Egyptians. Hermes having spoken of the Father-Mother
and Son, whose spirit (collectively the DIVINE FIAT) shapes the Universe, says: -- "Seven Agents
(mediums) were also formed, to contain the material (or manifested) worlds, within their respective
circles and the action of these agents was named DESTINY." He further enumerates seven and ten and
twelve orders, which would take too long to detail here.
As the "Rig Vidhana" together with the "Brahmanda Purana" and all such works, whether describing
the magic efficacy of the Rig-Vedic Mantras or the future Kalpas, are declared by Dr. Weber and
others to be modern compilations "belonging probably only to the time of the Puranas," it is useless to
refer the reader to their mystic explanations; and one may as well quote simply from the archaic books
utterly unknown to the Orientalists. These works explain that which so puzzles the scholars, namely
that the Saptarshi, the "mind-born sons" of Brahma, are referred to in the Satapatha Brahmana under
one set of names; in the Mahabharata under another set; and that the Vayu Purana makes even nine
instead of seven Rishis, by adding the names of Bhrigu and Daksha to the list. But the same occurs in
every exoteric Scripture. The secret doctrine gives a long genealogy of Rishis, but separates them into
many classes. Like the Gods of the Egyptians, who were divided into seven, and even twelve, classes,
so are the Indian Rishis in their Hierarchies. The first three groups are the Divine, the Cosmical and the
Sub-lunary. Then come the Solar Gods of our system, the Planetary, the Sub-Mundane, and the purely
human -- the heroes and the Manoushi.
At present, however, we are only concerned with the pre-cosmic, divine gods, the Prajapati or the
"Seven Builders." This group is found unmistakably in every Cosmogony. Owing to the loss of
Egyptian archaic documents -- since, according to M. Maspero, "the materials and historical data on
hand to study the history of the religious evolution in Egypt are neither complete nor very often
intelligible" -- in order to have the statements brought forward from the Secret Doctrine corroborated
partially and indirectly, the ancient hymns and inscriptions on the tombs must be appealed to. One
such, at any rate, shows that Osiris was, like Brahma-Prajapati, Adam Kadmon, Ormazd, and so many
other Logoi, the chief and synthesis of the

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 437 COSMIC GODS.

group of "Creators" or Builders. Before Osiris became the "One" and the highest god of Egypt he was
worshipped at Abydos as the head or leader of the Heavenly Host of the Builders belonging to the
higher of the three orders. The hymn engraved on the votive stela of a tomb from Abydos (3rd register)
addresses Osiris thus: "Salutations to thee, Osiris, elder son of Sib; thou the greatest over the six gods
issued from the goddess Noo (primordial Water), thou the great favourite of thy father Ra; father of

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fathers, King of Duration, master in the eternity . . . who, as soon as these issued from thy mother's
bosom, gathered all the crowns and attached the Uraeus (serpent or naja)* on thy head; multiform god,
whose name is unknown and who has many names in towns and provinces. . ." Coming out from the
primordial water crowned with the uraeus, which is the serpent emblem of Cosmic fire, and himself
the seventh over the six primary gods issued from Father-Mother, Nou and Nout (the sky), who can
Osiris be, but the chief Prajapati, the chief Sephiroth, the chief Amshaspend-Ormazd! That this latter
solar and cosmic god stood, in the beginning of religious evolution, in the same position as the
archangel "whose name was secret," is certain. This Archangel was the representative on earth of the
Hidden Jewish God, Michael, in short: it is his "Face" that is said to have gone before the Jews like a
"Pillar of Fire." Burnouf says, "The seven Amshaspends, who are most assuredly our archangels,
designate also the personifications of the divine Virtues." (Comment on the Yacna, p. 174.) And these
archangels, therefore, are as "certainly" the Saptarishi of the Hindus, though it is next to impossible to
class each with its pagan prototype and parallel, since, as in the case of Osiris, they have all so "many
names in towns and provinces." Some of the most important, however, will be shown in their order.
One thing is thus undeniably proven. The more one studies their Hierarchies and finds out their
identity, the more proofs one acquires that there is not one of the past and present personal gods,
known to us from the earliest days of History, that does not belong to the third stage of Cosmic
manifestation. In every religion we find the concealed deity forming the ground work; then the ray
therefrom, that falls into primordial Cosmic matter (first manifestation); then the androgyne result, the
dual Male and Female abstract Force, personified (second stage) ; this separates itself finally, in the
third, into seven Forces, called the creative Powers by all the ancient Religions, and the
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* This Egyptian word Naja reminds one a good deal of the Indian Naga, the Serpent-God. Brahma and
Siva and Vishnu are all crowned with, and connected with Nagas -- a sign of their cyclic and cosmic
character.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 438 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

"Virtues of God" by the Christians. The later explanation and metaphysical abstract qualifications have
never prevented the Roman and Greek Churches from worshipping these "Virtues" under the
personifications and distinct names of the seven Archangels. In the Book of Druschim (p. 59, 1st
Treatise) in the Talmud, a distinction between these groups is given which is the correct Kabalistical
explanation. It says:
"There are three groups (or orders) of Sephiroth. 1st. The Sephiroth called "the divine attri butes"
(abstract). 2nd. The physical or sidereal Sephiroth (personal) -- one group of seven, the other of ten.
3rd. The metaphysical Sephiroth, or periphrasis of Jehovah, who are the first three Sephiroth (Kether,
Chochma and Binah), the rest of the seven being the (personal) seven spirits of the Presence" (also of
the planets).
The same division has to be applied to the primary, secondary and tertiary evolution of gods in every
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theogony, if one wishes to translate the meaning esoterically. We must not confuse the purely
metaphysical personifications of the abstract attri butes of Deity, with their reflection -- the sidereal
gods. This reflection, however, is in reality the objective expression of the abstraction: living Entities
and the models formed on that divine prototype. Moreover, the three metaphysical Sephiroth or "the
periphrasis of Jehovah" are not Jehovah; it is the latter himself with the additional titles of Adonai,
Elohim, Sabbaoth, and the numerous names lavished on him, who is the periphrasis of the Shaddai,
, the Omnipotent. The name is a circumlocution, indeed, a too abundant figure of Jewish
rhetoric, and has always been denounced by the Occultists. To the Jewish Kabalists, and even the
Christian Alchemists and Rosicrucians, Jehovah was a convenient screen, unified by the folding of its
many flaps, and adopted as a substitute: one name of an individual Sephiroth being as good as another
name, for those who had the secret. The Tetragrammaton, the Ineffable, the sidereal "Sum Total," was
invented for no other purpose than to mislead the profane and to symbolize life and generation.* The
real secret and unpronounceable name -- "the word that is no word" -- has to be sought in the seven
names of the first seven emanations, or the "Sons of the Fire,"
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* Says the translator of Avicebron's "Qabbalah" (Mr. Isaac Myer, LL.B., of Philadelphia) of this "Sum
Total": "The letter of Kether is (Yod), of Binah
(Heh), together YaH, the feminine Name; the
YHV of
YHVH, the
third letter, that of Hokhmah, is (Vau), making together,
(Heh) of this
Tetragrammaton, and really the complete symbols of its efficaciousness. The last
Ineffable Name being always applied to the Six Lower and the last, together the Seven remaining
Sephiroth." . . . Thus the Tetragrammaton is holy only in its abstract synthesis. As a quaternary
containing the lower Seven Sephiroth, it is phallic.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 439 INCREDIBLE, BUT TRUE.

in the secret Scriptures of all the great nations, and even in the Zohar, the Kabalistic lore of that
smallest of all, the Jewish. This word, composed of seven letters in each tongue, is found embodied in
the architectural remains of every grand building in the world; from the Cyclopean remains on Easter
Island (part of a continent buried under the seas nearer four million years ago* than 20,000) down to
the earliest Egyptian pyramids.
We shall have to enter more fully upon this subject, and bring practical illustrations to prove the
statements made in the text.
For the present it is sufficient to show, by a few instances, the truth of what was asserted at the
beginning of this Monograph, namely, that no Cosmogony, the world over, with the sole exception of
the Christian, has ever attri buted to the One Highest cause, the UNIVERSAL Deific Principle, the
immediate creation of our Earth, man, or anything connected with these. This statement holds as good
for the Hebrew or Chaldean Kabala as it does for Genesis, had the latter been ever thoroughly
understood, and -- what is still more important -- correctly translated.** Everywhere there is either a
LOGOS -- a "Light shining

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[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* The statement will, of course, be found preposterous and absurd, and simply laughed at. But if one
believes in the final submersion of Atlantis 850,000 years ago, as taught in "Esoteric Buddhism" (the
gradual first sinking having begun during the Eocene age), one has to accept the statement for the socalled Lemuria, the continent of the Third Root Race, first nearly destroyed by combustion, and then
submerged. This is what the Commentary says: "The first earth having been purified by the forty-nine
fires, her people, born of Fire and Water, could not die . . . etc.; the Second Earth (with its race)
disappeared as vapour vanishes in the air . . . the Third Earth had everything consumed on it after the
separation, and went down into the lower Deep (the Ocean). This was twice eighty-two cyclic years
ago." Now a cyclic year is what we call a sidereal year, and is founded on the precession of the
equinoxes, or 25,868 years each, and this is equal, therefore, in all to 4,242,352 years. More details
will be found in the text of Book II. Meanwhile, this doctrine is embodied in the "Kings of Edom."
** The same reserve is found in the Talmud and in every national system of religion whether
monotheistic or exoterically polytheistical. From the superb religious poem by the Kabalist Rabbi
Solomon Ben Gabirol in "the Kether Malchuth," we select a few definitions given in the prayers of
Kippur. . . . "Thou art one, the beginning of all numbers, and the foundation of all edifices; Thou art
One, and in the secret of Thy unity the wisest of men are lost, because they know it not. Thou art one,
and Thy Unity is never diminished, never extended, and cannot be changed. Thou art one, but not as
an element of numeration; for Thy Unity admits not of multiplication, change or form. Thou art
existent; but the understanding and vision of mortals cannot attain to thy existence, nor determine for
thee the Where, the How, and the Why. Thou art Existent, but in thyself alone, there being none other
that can exist with thee. Thou art Existent, before all time and without Place. Thou art Existent, and
thy existence is so profound and secret that none can penetrate and discover thy secrecy. Thou art
Living, but within no time that can be fixed or known; Thou art Living, but not by a spirit or a soul, for
Thou art thyself, THE SOUL OF ALL SOULS," etc., etc. There is [[Footnote continued on next page]]

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 440 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

in DARKNESS," truly -- or the Architect of the Worlds is esoterically a plural number. The Latin
Church, paradoxical as ever, while applying the epithet of Creator to Jehovah alone, adopts a whole
Kyriel of names for the working FORCES of the latter, those names betraying the secret. For if the
said Forces had nought to do with "Creation" so-called, why call them Elohim (Alhim) in plural;
"divine workmen" and Energies ([['Energeia]]), incandescent celestial stones (lapides igniti coelorum),
and especially, "supporters of the World" ([[Kosmokratores]]), governors or RULERS of the World
(rectores mundi), the "Wheels" of the World (Rotae), Ophanim, Flames and POWERS, "Sons of God"
(B'ne Alhim), "Vigilant COUNSELLORS," etc., etc.
It was often premised (and as unjustly as usual) that China, nearly as old a country as India, had no
cosmogony. "It was unknown to Confucius, and the Buddhists extended their Cosmogony without
introducing a personal God,"* it is complained. The Yi-King, "the very essence of ancient thought and
the combined work of the most venerated sages, fails to show a distinct cosmogony." Nevertheless,
there is one, and a very distinct one. Only as Confucius did not admit of a future life** and the
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Chinese Buddhists reject the idea of One Creator, accepting one cause and its numberless effects, they
are misunderstood by the believers in a personal God. The "great Extreme" as the commencement "of
changes" (transmigrations) is the shortest and perhaps the most suggestive of all Cosmogonies, for
those who, like the Confucianists, love virtue for its own sake, and try to do good unselfishly without
perpetually looking to reward and profit. The "great Extreme" of Confucius produces "two figures."
These "two" produce in their turn "the four images"; these again "the eight symbols." It is complained
that though the Confucianists see in them "Heaven, Earth and man in miniature," . . . we can see in
them anything we like. No doubt, and so it is with regard to many symbols, especially in those of the
latest religions. But they who know something of Occult numerals, see in these "figures" the symbol,
however rude, of a harmonious progressive Evolution of Kosmos and its beings, both the Heavenly
and the Terrestrial. And any one who has studied the numerical evolution in the primeval cosmogony
of Pythagoras (a contemporary of Confucius) can never fail to find in his Triad, Tetractis and
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

[[Footnote continued from previous page]] a distance between this Kabalistical Deity and the Biblical
Jehovah, the spiteful and revengeful God of Abram, Isaac, and Jacob, who tempted the former and
wrestled with the last. No Vedantin but would repudiate such a Parabrahm.
* Rev. Joseph Edkins "On Cosmogony," p. 320. And very wisely they have acted.
** If he rejected it, it was on the ground of what he calls the changes -- in other words, rebirths -- of
man, and constant transformations. He denied immortality to the personality of man -- as we do -- not
to MAN.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 441 THE SAME IDEA IN CONFUCIANISM.

Decade emerging from the ONE and solitary Monad, the same idea. Confucius is laughed at by his
Christian biographer for "talking of divination" before and after this passage, and is represented as
saying: "The eight symbols determine good and ill fortune, and these lead to great deeds. There are no
imitable images greater than heaven and earth. There are no changes greater than the four seasons
(meaning North, South, East and West, et seq.). There are no suspended images brighter than the sun
and moon. In preparing things for use, there is none greater than the sage. In determining good and illluck there is nothing greater than the divining straws and the tortoise."*
Therefore, the "divining straws" and the "tortoise," the "symbolic sets of lines," and the great sage who
looks at them as they become one and two, and two become four, and four become eight, and the other
sets "three and six," are laughed to scorn, only because his wise symbols are misunderstood.
So the author and his colleagues will scoff no doubt at the Stanzas given in our text, for they represent
precisely the same idea. The old archaic map of Cosmogony is full of lines in the Confucian style, of
concentric circles and dots. Yet all these represent the most abstract and philosophical conceptions of
the Cosmogony of our Universe. At all events it may answer, perhaps, better to the requirements and
the scientific purposes of our age, than the cosmogonical essays of St. Augustine and the "Venerable
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Bede," though these were published over a millennium later than the Confucian.
Confucius, one of the greatest sages of the ancient world, believed in ancient magic, and practised it
himself "if we take for granted the statements of Kin-yu" . . . . and "he praised it to the skies in Yi-kin,"
we are told by his reverend critic. Nevertheless, even in his age -- i.e., 600 B.C., Confucius and his
school taught the sphericity of the Earth and even the heliocentric system; while, at about thrice 600
years after the Chinese philosopher, the Popes of Rome threatened and even burnt "heretics" for
asserting the same. He is laughed at for speaking of the "Sacred Tortoise." No unprejudiced person can
see any great difference between a tortoise and a lamb as candidates for sacredness, as both are
symbols and no more. The Ox, the Eagle,** the Lion, and occasionally
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* He may be laughed at by the Protestants; but the Roman Catholics have no right to mock him,
without becoming guilty of blasphemy and sacrilege. For it is over 200 years since Confucius was
canonized as a Saint in China by the Roman Catholics, who have thereby obtained many converts
among the ignorant Confucianists.
** The animals regarded as sacred in the Bible are not few: the goat for one, the Azaz-el, or God of
Victory. As Aben Ezra says: "If thou art capable of comprehending the mystery of Azazel, thou wilt
learn the mystery of His (God's) name, for it has similar associates in Scriptures. I will tell thee by
allusion one portion of the mystery; [[Footnote continued on next page]]

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 442 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the Dove, are "the sacred animals" of the Western Bible, the first three being found grouped round the
Evangelists; and the fourth (the human face) is a Seraph, i.e., a fiery serpent, the Gnostic
Agathodaemon probably.* As explained, the "sacred animals" and the Flames or "Sparks" within the
"Holy Four" refer to the prototypes of all that is found in the Universe in the Divine Thought, in the
ROOT, which is the perfect cube, or the foundation of the Kosmos collectively and individually. They
have all an occult reference to primordial Cosmic forms and its first concretions, work, and evolution.
In the earliest Hindu exoteric cosmogonies, it is not even the Demiurge who creates. For it is said in
one of the Puranas that: "The great Architect of the World gives the first impulse to the rotatory
motion of our planetary system by stepping in turn over each planet and body." It is this action "that
causes each sphere to turn around itself, and all around the Sun." After which action, "it is the
Brahmandica, the Solar and Lunar Pitris (the Dhyani-Chohans)" who take charge of their respective
spheres (earths and planets), to the end of the Kalpa." The Creators are the Rishis; most of whom are
credited with the authorship of the mantras or Hymns of the Rig Veda. They are sometimes seven,
sometimes ten, when they become prajapati, the "Lord of Beings"; then they rebecome the seven and
the fourteen Manus, as the representatives of the seven and fourteen cycles of Existence ("Days of
Brahma"); thus answering to the seven AEons, when at the end of the first stage of Evolution they are
transformed into the seven stellar Rishis, the Saptarishis; while their human doubles appear as heroes,
Kings and Sages on this earth.
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[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

[[Footnote continued from previous page]] when thou shalt have thirty three years of age thou wilt
comprehend me." So with the mystery of the tortoise. Rejoicing over the poetry of Biblical metaphors,
associating with the name of Jehovah, "incandescent stones," "sacred animals," etc., and quoting from
the Bible de Vence (Vol. XIX. p. 318) a French pious writer says: "Indeed all of them are Elohim like
their God; for, these Angels assume, through a holy usurpation, the very divine name of Jehovah each
time they represent him." (Pneumatologie, Vol. II., p. 294). No one ever doubted that the NAME must
have been assumed, when under the guise of the Infinite, One Incognizable, the Malachim
(messengers) descended to eat and drink with men. But if the Elohim (and even lower Beings),
assuming the god-name, were and are still worshipped, why should the same Elohim be called devils,
when appearing under the names of other Gods?
* The choice is curious, and shows how paradoxical were the first Christians in their selections. For
why should they have chosen these symbols of Egyptian paganism, when the eagle is never mentioned
in the New Testament save once, when Jesus refers to it as a carrion eater? (Matt. xxiv. 28); and in the
Old Testament it is called unclean; that the Lion is made a point of comparison with Satan, both
roaring for men to devour; and the oxen are driven out of the Temple. On the other hand the Serpent,
brought as an exemplar of wisdom to follow, is now regarded as the symbol of the Devil. The esoteric
pearl of Christ's religion degraded into Christian theology, may indeed be said to have chosen a strange
and unfitting shell to be born in and evolved from.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 443 THE MYSTERY OF BLACKNESS.

The Esoteric doctrine of the East having thus furnished and struck the key-note -- which is as scientific
as it is philosophical and poetical, as may be seen, under its allegorical garb -- every nation has
followed its lead. It is from the exoteric religions that we have to dig out the root-idea before we turn
to esoteric truths, lest the latter should be rejected. Furthermore, every symbol -- in every national
religion -- may be read esoterically, and the proof furnished for its being correctly read by
transliterating it into its corresponding numerals and geometrical forms -- by the extraordinary
agreement of all -- however much the glyphs and symbols may vary among themselves. For in the
origin those symbols were all identical. Take, for instance, the opening sentences in various
cosmogonies: in every case it is either a circle, an egg, or a head. DARKNESS is always associated
with this first symbol and surrounds it, -- as shown in the Hindu, the Egyptian, the Chaldeo-Hebrew
and even the Scandinavian systems -- hence black ravens, black doves, black waters and even black
flames; the seventh tongue of Agni, the fire-god being called "Kali," "the black," as it was a black
flickering flame. Two black doves flew from Egypt and settling on the oaks of Dodona, gave their
names to the Grecian gods. Noah lets out a black raven after the deluge, which is a symbol for the
Cosmic pralaya, after which began the real creation or evolution of our earth and humanity. Odin's
black ravens fluttered around the Goddess Saga and "whispered to her of the past and of the future."
What is the real meaning of all those black birds? They are all connected with the primeval wisdom,
which flows out of the pre-cosmic Source of all, symbolised by the Head, the Circle, the Egg; and they
all have an identical meaning and relate to the primordial Archetypal man (Adam Kadmon) the
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Chohans, beyond which all is darkness.
Let us inquire of the wisdom of the Kabala -- even veiled and distorted as it now is, -- to explain in its
numerical language an approximate meaning, at least of the word "raven." This is its number value as
given in the "Source of Measures."
"The term Raven is used but once, and taken as eth-h'orebv
, = 678, or 113 x 6; while the
Dove is mentioned five times. Its value is 71, and 71 x 5 = 355. Six diameters, or the raven, crossing,
would divide the circumference of a circle of 355 into 12 parts or compartments; and 355 subdivided
for each unit by 6, would equal 213-0, or the head ("beginning") in the first verse of Genesis. This
divided or subdivided, after the same fashion, by 2, or the 355 by 12, would give 213-2, or the word
B'rash,
, or the first word of Genesis, with its prepositional prefix, signifying the same
concreted general form

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 444 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

astronomically, with the one here intended." Now the secret reading of the first verse of Genesis being:
"In Rash (B'rash) or head, developed gods, the Heavens and the Earth" -- it is easy to comprehend the
esoteric meaning of the raven, once that the like meaning of the Flood (or Noah's Deluge) is
ascertained. Whatever the many other meanings of this emblematical allegory may be, its chief
meaning is that of a new cycle and a new Round (our Fourth Round.)* The "Raven," or the EthH'Orebv, yields the same numerical value as the "Head," and returned not to the ark, while the dove
returned, carrying the olive-branch, when Noah, the new man of the new Race (whose prototype is
Vaivasvata Manu), prepared to leave the ark, the womb (or Argha) of terrestrial nature, is the symbol
of the purely spiritual, sexless and androgyne man of the first three Races, who vanished from earth for
ever. Numerically Jehovah, Adam, Noah, are one in the Kabala: at best, then, it is Deity descending on
to Ararat (later on Sinai), to incarnate in man his image, through the natural process, henceforth: the
mother's womb, whose symbols are the ark, the mount (Sinai), etc., in Genesis. The Jewish allegory is
at once astronomical, and purely physiological rather than anthropomorphic.
And here lies the abyss between the two systems (Aryan and Semitic), though built on the same
foundation. As shown by an expounder of the Kabala, "the basic idea underlying the philosophy of the
Hebrews was that God contained all things within himself and that man was his image; man, including
woman (as Androgynes);" and that "geometry and numbers (and measures applicable to astronomy)
are contained in the terms man and woman; and the apparent incongruity of such a mode was
eliminated by showing the connection of man and woman with a particular system of numbers and
measures and geometry, by the parturient time-periods, which furnished the connecting link between
the terms and the facts shown, and perfected the mode used." It is argued that, the primal cause being
absolutely incognizable, "the symbol of its first comprehensible manifestation was the conception of a
circle with its diameter line, so as at once to carry the idea of geometry, phallicism, and astronomy;"
and this was finally applied to the "signification of simply human generative organs."** Hence the
whole cycle of events
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

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* Bryant is right in saying "Druid Bardesin says of Noah that when he came out of the ark (the birth of
a new cycle), after a stay therein of a year and a day, that 364 + 1 = 365 days, he was congratulated by
Neptune upon his birth from the waters of the Flood, who wished him a happy New Year." The "Year,"
or cycle, esoterically, was the new race of men born from woman after the separation of the sexes,
which is the secondary meaning of the allegory: its primary meaning being the beginning of the Fourth
Round, or the new Creation.
** Unpubl. MSS. (But see "Source of Measures.")

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 445 GOD IS OUR HIGHER SELF.

from Adam and the Patriarchs down to Noah is made to apply to phallic and astronomical uses, the one
regulating the other, as the lunar periods, for instance. Hence, too, their genesis begins after their
coming out of the Ark, and the close of the flood -- at the Fourth Race. With the Aryan people it is
different.
Eastern Esotericism has never degraded the One Infinite Deity, the container of all things, to such uses;
and this is shown by the absence of Brahma from the Rig Veda and the modest positions occupied
therein by Rudra and Vishnu, who became the powerful and great Gods, the "Infinites" of the exoteric
creeds, ages later. But even they, "Creators" as the three may be, are not the direct creators and
"forefa thers of men." The latter are shown occupying a still lower scale, and are called Prajapatis, the
Pitris (our lunar ancestors), etc., etc. -- never the "One Infinite God." Esoteric philosophy shows only
physical man as created in the image of the Deity: but the latter is but "the minor gods." It is the
HIGHER-SELF, the real EGO who alone is divine and GOD.
-------------[[This page continued in next section]]

Next Section
Contents

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fThe Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 1

Theosophical University Press Online Edition

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 445 GOD IS OUR HIGHER SELF.

[[This page continued from previous section]]
XIII.
THE SEVEN CREATIONS.
"THERE was neither day nor night, nor sky nor earth, nor darkness nor light, nor any other thing save
only ONE, unapprehensible by intellect, or THAT which is Brahma and Pumis (Spirit) and Pradhana
(crude matter)" (Veda: "Vishnu Purana Commentary"); or literally: "One Pradhanika Brahma Spirit:
THAT was." The "Pradhanika Brahma Spirit" is Mulaprakriti and Parabrahmam.
In Vishnu Purana, Parasara says to Maitreya, his pupil: -- "I have thus explained to you, excellent
Muni, six creations. . . . the creation of the Arvaksrotas beings was the seventh, and was that of man."
Then he proceeds to speak of two additional and very mysterious creations, variously interpreted by
the commentators.
Origen, commenting upon the books written by Celsus, his opponent -- books which were all
destroyed by the prudent Church Fathers -- evidently answers the objections of his contradictor and
reveals his system at the same time. This was evidently septenary. But his theogony, the genesis of the
stars or planets, that of sound and colour, all found as an answer satire, and no better. Celsus, you see,
"desiring to exhibit his learning," speaks of a ladder of creation with seven gates, and on the top

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 446 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

of it the eighth -- ever closed. The mysteries of the Persian Mithras are explained and "musical
reasons, moreover, are added." . . . . And to these again he strives "to add a second explanation
connected also with musical considerations,"* -- i.e., with the seven notes of the scale, the Seven
Spirits of the Stars, &c., &c.
Valentinus expatiates upon the power of the great Seven, who were called to bring forth this universe
after Ar(r)hetos, or the Ineffable, whose name is composed of seven letters, had represented the first
hebdomad. This name (Ar(r)hetos) is one to indicate the Sevenfold nature of the One (the logos). "The
goddess Rhea," says Proclus in Timaeus (p. 121), "is a Monad, Duad, and Heptad," comprehending in
herself all the Titanidae, "who are seven."
The Seven Creations are found in almost every Purana. They are all preceded by what Wilson
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translates -- "the indiscrete Principle," absolute Spirit independent of any relation with objects of
sense. They are -- (1) Mahattattwa, the Universal Soul, Infinite Intellect, or Divine Mind; (2) Bhuta or
Bhutasarga, elemental creation, the first differentiation of Universal indiscrete Substance; (3) Indriya
or Aindriyaka, organic evolution. "These three were the Prakrita creations, the developments of
indiscrete nature preceded by indiscrete principle"; (4) Mukhya, the fundamental creation of
perceptible things, was that of inanimate bodies**; (5) Tairyagyonya, or Tiryaksrotas, was that of
animals; (6) Urdhwasrotas, or that of divinities*** (?); (7) Arvaksrotas, was that of man. (See Vishnu
Purana.)
This is the order given in the exoteric texts. According to esoteric teaching there are seven primary,
and seven secondary "creations;" the former being the Forces self-evolving from the one causeless
FORCE; the latter, showing the manifested Universe emanating from the already differentiated divine
elements.
Esoterically, as well as exoterically, all the above enumerated Creations stand for the (7) periods of
Evolution, whether after an "Age" or a "Day" of Brahma. This is the teaching par excellence of Occult
Philosophy, which, however, never uses the term "creation," nor even that of evolution, "with regard
to primary 'Creation':" but calls all such forces "the aspects of the Causeless Force." In the Bible
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* Origen contra Celsum, b. vi., chap. xxii.
** The text says: "And the fourth creation is here the primary, for things immovable are emphatically
known as primary." (See Fitzedward Hall's Corrections.)
*** How can "divinities" have been created after the animals? The esoteric meaning of the expression
"animals" is the germs of all animal life including man. Man is called a sacrificial animal, and an
animal that is the only one among animal creation who sacrifices to the gods. Moreover, by the
"sacred animals," the 12 signs of the zodiac are often meant in the sacred texts, as already stated.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 447 THE ORDER OF THE EVOLUTION.

the seven periods are dwarfed into the six days of creation and the seventh day of rest, and the
Westerns adhere to the letter. In the Hindu philosophy, when the active Creator has produced the
world of gods, the germs of all the undifferentiated elements and the rudiments of future senses (the
world of noumena, in short), the Universe remains unaltered for a "Day of Brahma," a period of
4,320,000,000 years. This is the seventh passive period or the "Sabbath day" of Eastern philosophy,
that follows six periods of active evolution. In the Satapatha Brahmana "Brahma" (neuter), the
absolute Cause of all Causes, radiates the gods. Having radiated the gods (through its inherent nature)
the work is interrupted. In the 1st Book of Manu it is said, "At the expiration of each night (pralaya)
Brahma, having been asleep, awakes, and, through the sole energy of the motion, CAUSES to emanate
from itself the spirit, which in its essence is, and yet is not."

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In the Sepher Jezirah, the Kabalistic Book of Creation, the author has evidently repeated the words of
Manu. In it the Divine Substance is represented as having alone existed from the eternity, boundless
and absolute; and as having emitted from itself the Spirit. "One is the Spirit of the living God, blessed
be his Name, who liveth for ever! Voice, Spirit, and Word, this is the Holy Spirit." (Sepher Jezireh,
chap. 1, Mishna IX.) And this is the Kabalistic abstract Trinity, so unceremoniously
anthropomorphized by the Fathers. From this triple ONE emanated the whole Kosmos. First from
ONE emanated number TWO, or Air, the creative element; and then number THREE, Water,
proceeded from the air; Ether or Fire complete the mystic four, the Arba-il. (Ibid.) In the Eastern
doctrine Fire is the first Element -- Ether, synthesizing the whole (since it contains all of them).
In the Vishnu Purana, the whole seven periods are given, and the progressive Evolution of "SpiritSoul," and of the seven forms of matter (or principles) are shown. It is impossible to enumerate them
in this work. The reader is asked to peruse one of the Puranas.
"R. Yehudah began, it is written: 'Elohim said: Let there be a firmament, in the midst of waters. . . . .
At the time that the Holy . . . created the world, He (they) created seven heavens Above. He created
seven earths Below, seven seas, seven days, seven rivers, seven weeks, seven years, seven times, and
7,000 years that the world has been. . . . . the seventh of all the millennium. So here are seven earths
Below, they are all inhabited except those which are above, and those . . . . below. And . . . . between
each earth, a heaven (firmament) is spread out between each other. . . . . And there are in them (these
earths) creatures who look different from each other . . . . but if you object and say that all the children
of the world came out from Adam,

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 448 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

it is not so. . . . . And the lower earths, where do they come from? They are from the chain of the
earth, and from the heaven below," etc., etc.*
Irenaeus is our witness (and a very unwilling one, too) that the Gnostics taught the same system,
veiling very carefully the true esoteric meaning. This "veiling," however, is identical with that of the
Vishnu Purana and others. Thus Irenaeus writes of the Marcosians: "They maintain that first of all the
four elements, fire, water, earth and air, were produced after the image of the primary tetrad above,
and that then if we add their operations, namely, heat, cold, dryness and moisture, an exact likeness of
the ogdoad is presented." (B. i. ch. xvii.)
Only this "likeness" and the ogdoad itself is a blind, just as in the seven creations of the Vishnu
Puranas, to which two more are added of which the eighth, termed Anugraha, "possesses both the
qualities of goodness and darkness," a Sankhyan more than a Puranic idea. For Irenaeus says again (b.
I. xxx. 6) that "they (the Gnostics) had a like eighth creation which was good and bad, divine and
human. They affirm that man was formed on the eighth day. Sometimes they affirm that he was made
on the sixth day, and at others on the eighth; unless, perchance, they mean that his earthly part was
formed on the sixth day and his fleshly part (?) on the eighth day; these two being distinguished by
them."

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They were so "distinguished," but not as Irenaeus gives it. The Gnostics had a superior Hebdomad,
and an inferior one, in Heaven; and a third terrestrial Hebdomad, on the plane of matter. IAO, the
mystery god and the Regent of the Moon, as given in Origen's chart, was the chief of these superior
"Seven Heavens,"** hence identical with the chief of the lunar Pitris, that name being given by them
to the lunar Dhyan-Chohans. "They affirm that these seven heavens are intelligent, and speak of them
as being angels," writes the same Irenaeus; and adds that on this account they termed Iao Hebdomas,
while his mother was called "Ogdoas," because, as he explains, "she preserved the number of the first
begotten and primary Ogdoad of the Pleroma." (Ibid. b. I, v. 2).
This "first begotten Ogdoad" was (a) in theogony the second Logos (the manifested) because he was
born of the Seven-fold first Logos, hence he is the eighth on this manifested plane; and (b) in
astrolatry, it was the Sun, Marttanda -- the eighth son of Aditi, whom she rejects while preserving her
Seven Sons, the planets. For the ancients have never regarded the Sun as a planet, but as a central and
fixed Star. This, then, is the second Hebdomad born of the Seven-rayed one, Agni, the Sun
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* Qabbalah, p. 415-16, by T. Myer, Philadelphia.
** Superior to the Spirits or "Heavens" of the Earth only.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 449 THE SIX STELLAR GODS.

and what not, only not the seven planets, which are Surya's brothers, not his Sons. These Astral gods,
whose chief with the Gnostics was Ildabaoth* (from Ilda "child," and Baoth "the egg"), the son of
Sophia Achamoth, the daughter of Sophia (Wisdom), whose region is the Pleroma, were his
(Ildabaoth's) sons. He produces from himself these six stellar spirits: Jove (Jehovah), Sabaoth, Adonai,
Eloi, Osraios, Astaphaios,** and it is they who are the second, or inferior Hebdomad. As to the third,
it is composed of the seven primeval men, the shadows of the lunar gods, projected by the first
Hebdomad. In this the Gnostics did not, as seen, differ much from the esoteric doctrine except that
they veiled it. As to the charge made by Irenaeus, who was evidently ignorant of the true tenets of the
"Heretics," with regard to man being created on the sixth day, and man being created on the eighth,
this relates to the mysteries of the inner man. It will become comprehensible to the reader only after
he has read Book II., and understood well the Anthropogenesis of the Esoteric doctrine.
Ildabaoth is a copy of Manu. The latter boasts, "Oh, best of twice-born men! Know that I (Manu) am
he, the creator of all this world, whom that male Viraj . . . spontaneously produced" (I., 33). He first
creates the ten lords of Being, the Prajapatis, who, as verse 36 says . . . "produce seven other Manus."
(The Ordinances of Manu.) Ildabaoth does likewise: "I am Father and God, and there is no one above
me," he exclaims. For which his mother coolly puts him down by saying, "Do not lie, Ildabaoth, for
the father of all, the first man (Anthropos) is above thee, and so is Anthropos, the Son of Anthropos"
(Irenaeus, b. I, ch. xxx., 6). This is a good proof that there were three Logoi (besides the Seven born of
the First), one of these being the Solar Logos. And, again, who was that "Anthropos" himself, so much

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higher than Ildabaoth? The Gnostic records alone can solve this riddle. In Pistis Sophia the fourvowelled name IEOV is in each case accompanied by the epithet of "the Primal, or First man." This
shows again that the gnosis was but an echo of our archaic doctrine. The names answering to
Parabrahm, to Brahm, and Manu (the first thinking man) are composed of one-vowelled, threevowelled and seven-vowelled sounds. Marcus, whose philosophy was certainly more Pythagorean
than anything else, speaks of a revelation to him of the seven heavens sounding each one vowel as
they pronounced the seven names of the seven (angelic) hierarchies.
When spirit has permeated every minutest atom of the seven principles of Kosmos, then the secondary
creation, after the above-mentioned period of rest, begins.
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* See "Isis Unveiled," Vol. II., p. 183.
** See also King's Gnostics. Other sects regarded Jehovah as Ildabaoth himself King identifies him
with Saturn.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 450 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

"The creators (Elohim) outline in the second 'hour' the shape of man," says Rabbi Simeon (The
Nuctameron of the Hebrews). "There are twelve hours in the day," says the Mishna, "and it is during
these that creation is accomplished." The "twelve hours of the day" are again the dwarfed copy, the
faint, yet faithful, echo of primitive Wisdom. They are like the 12,000 divine years of the gods, a
cyclic blind. Every "Day of Brahma" has 14 Manus, which the Hebrew Kabalists, following, however,
in this the Chaldeans, have disguised into 12 "Hours."* The Nuctameron of Apollonius of Tyana is the
same thing. "The Dodecahedron lies concealed in the perfect Cube," say the Kabalists. The mystic
meaning of this is, that the twelve great transformations of Spirit into matter (the 12,000 divine years)
take place during the four great ages, or the first Mahayuga. Beginning with the metaphysical and the
supra-human, it ends in the physical and purely human natures of Kosmos and man. Eastern
philosophy can give the number of mortal years that run along the line of spiritual and physical
evolutions of the seen and the unseen, if Western science fails to do so.
Primary Creation is called the Creation of Light (Spirit); and the Secondary -- that of Darkness
(matter).** Both are found in Genesis, chap. i., v. 2, and at the beginning of chapter ii. The first is the
emanation of self-born gods (Elohim); the second of physical nature.
This is why it is said in the Zohar: -- "Oh, companions, companions, man as emanation was both man
and woman; as well on the side of the FATHER as on the side of the MOTHER. And this is the sense
of the words: -- And Elohim spoke: 'Let there be Light and it was Light!' . . . And this is the 'two-fold
man'" Light, moreover, on our plane, is darkness in the higher spheres.
"Man and woman on the side of the FATHER" (Spirit) refers to Primary Creation; and on the side of

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the Mother (matter) to the secondary. The two-fold man is Adam Kadmon, the male and female
abstract prototype and the differentiated Elohim. Man proceeds from the Dhyan Chohan, and is a
"Fallen Angel," a god in exile, as will be shown.
In India these creations were described as follows: -(I.) Mahat-tattwa creation -- so-called because it was the primordial self-evolution of that which had to
become Mahat -- the "divine MIND, conscious and intelligent"; esoterically, "the spirit of the
Universal soul." . . . "Worthiest of ascetics, through its potency (the potency of that cause); every
produced cause comes by its proper nature." (Vishnu Purana.) "Seeing that the potencies of all beings
are under[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* Elsewhere, however, the identity is revealed. See supra, the quotation from Ibn-Gabirol and his 7
heavens, 7 earths, etc.
** This must not be confused with precosmic "DARKNESS," the Divine ALL.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 451 MANY VERSIONS OF THE ONE TRUTH.

stood only through the knowledge of That (Brahma), which is beyond reasoning, creation, and the
like, such potencies are referable to Brahma." THAT, then, precedes the manifestation. "The first was
Mahat," says Linga Purana; for the ONE (the That) is neither first nor last, but ALL. Exoterically,
however, this manifestation is the work of the "Supreme One" (a natural effect, rather, of an Eternal
Cause); or, as the Commentator says, it might have been understood to mean that Brahma was then
created (?), being identified with Mahat, active intelligence or the operating will of the Supreme.
Esoteric philosophy renders it "the operating LAW."
It is on the right comprehension of this tenet in the Brahmanas and Puranas that hangs, we believe, the
apple of discord between the three Vedantin Sects: the Advaita, Dwaita, and the Visishtadvaitas. The
first arguing rightly that Parabrahman, having no relation, as the absolute all, to the manifested world -the Infinite having no connection with the finite -- can neither will nor create; that, therefore, Brahma,
Mahat, Iswara, or whatever name the creative power may be known by, creative gods and all, are
simply an illusive aspect of Parabrahmam in the conception of the conceivers; while the other sects
identify the impersonal Cause with the Creator, or Iswara.
Mahat (or Maha-Buddhi) is, with the Vaishnavas, however, divine mind in active operation, or, as
Anaxagoras has it, "an ordering and disposing mind, which was the cause of all things," -- [[Nous o
diakosmonte kai panton aitios]].
Wilson saw at a glance the suggestive connection between Mahat and the Phoenician Mot, or Mut,
who was female with the Egyptians -- the Goddess Mout, the "Mother" -- "which, like Mahat," he

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says, "was the first product of the mixture (?) of Spirit and matter, and the first rudiment of Creation":
"Ex connexione autem ejus spiritus prodidit Mot . . . . . From whose seed were created all living
things" -- repeats Brucker (I., 240) -- giving it a still more materialistic and anthropomorphic
colouring.
Nevertheless, the esoteric sense of the doctrine is seen through every exoteric sentence on the very
face of the old Sanscrit texts that treat of primordial Creation. "The Supreme Soul, the all permeant
(Sarvaga) Substance of the World, having entered (been drawn) into matter (prakriti) and Spirit
(purusha), agitated the mutable and the immutable principles the season of Creation (manvantara)
having arrived."* . . .
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* The nous of the Greeks, which is (spiritual or divine) mind, or mens, "Mahat," operates upon matter
in the same way; it "enters into" and agitates it:
"Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus,
Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet."
In the Phoenician Cosmogony, "Spirit mixing with its own principles gives rise to [[Footnote
continued on next page]]

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 452 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

Esoteric doctrine teaches that the Dhyan Chohans are the collective aggregate of divine Intelligence or
primordial mind, and that the first Manus -- the seven "mind-born" Spiritual Intelligences -- are
identical with the former. Hence the "Kwan-shi-yin" -- "the golden Dragon in whom are the seven," of
Stanza III. -- is the primordial Logos, or Brahma, the first manifested creative Power; and the DhyaniEnergies are the Manus, or Manu-Swayambhuva collectively. The direct connection, moreover,
between the "Manus" and "Mahat" is easy to see. Manu is from the root man, "to think"; and thinking
proceeds from the mind. It is, in Cosmogony, the pre-nebular period.
(II.) "The second Creation," "Bhuta," was of the rudimental principles (Tanmatras), thence termed the
elemental creation (Bhuta-sarga).* It is the period of the first breath of the differentiation of the preCosmic Elements or matter. Bhutadi means literally "the origin of the Elements," and precedes Bhutasarga -- the "creation" or differentiation of those Elements in primordial "Akasa" (Chaos or
Vacuity).** In the "Vishnu Purana" it is said to proceed along, and belong to, the triple aspect of
Ahankara, translated Egotism, but meaning rather that untranslateable term the "I-AM-NESS," that
which first issues from "Mahat," or divine mind; the first shadowy outline of Self-hood, for "pure"
Ahankara becomes "passionate" and finally "rudimental"
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

[[Footnote continued from previous page]] creation" also; (Brucker, I., 240); the Orphic triad shows
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an identical doctrine: for there Phanes (or Eros), Chaos, containing crude undifferentiated Cosmic
matter, and Chronos (time), are the three co-operating principles, emanating from the Unknowable
and concealed point, which produce the work of "Creation." And they are the Hindu Purusha
(phanes), Pradhana (chaos), and Kala (Chronos) or time. The good Professor Wilson does not like the
idea, as no Christian clergyman, however liberal, would. He remarks that "as presently explained,. the
mixture (of the Supreme Spirit or Soul) is not mechanical; it is an influence or effect exerted upon
intermediate agents which produce effects." The sentence in Vishnu Purana: "As fragrance affects the
mind from its proximity merely, and not from any immediate operation upon mind itself, so the
Supreme influenced the elements of creation," the reverend and erudite Sanscritist correctly explains .
. . : "As perfumes do not delight the mind by actual contact, but by the impression they make upon the
sense of smelling, which communicates it to the mind," adding: "The entrance of the Supreme into
spirit, as well as matter, is less intelligible than the view elsewhere taken of it, as the infusion of spirit,
identified with the supreme, into Prakriti or matter alone." He prefers the verse in Padma Purana: "He
who is called the male (spirit) of Prakriti . . . that same divine Vishnu entered into Prakriti." This
"view" is certainly more akin to the plastic character of certain verses in the Bible concerning the
Patriarchs, such as Lot (Gen. xix., 34-38) and even Adam (iv., v. 1), and others of a still more
anthropomorphic nature. But it is just that which led Humanity to Phallicism, Christian religion being
honeycombed with it, from the first chapter of Genesis down to the Revelation.
* All these sentences are quoted from "Vishnu Purana," Book I., ch. v.
** Vishnu is both Bhutesa, "Lord of the Elements, and all things," and Viswarupa, "Universal
Substance or Soul."

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 453 THE SEVEN CREATIONS.

(initial); it is "the origin of conscious as of all unconscious being," though the Esoteric school rejects
the idea of anything being "unconscious" -- save on this (our) plane of illusion and ignorance. At this
stage of the Second Creation, the second hierarchy of the Manus appear, the Dhyan Chohans or
Devas, who are the origin of Form (rupa): the Chitrasikhandina (bright-crested) or the Riksha -- those
Rishis who have become the informing souls of the seven stars (of the Great Bear).* In astronomical
and Cosmogonical language this Creation relates to the first stage of Cosmic-life, the Fire-Mist Period
after its Chaotic stage,** when atoms issue from Laya.
(III.) The third (the Indriya) was the modified form of Ahankara, the conception of "I," (from "Aham,"
"I") termed the organic Creation, or creation of the senses (Aindriyaka). "These three were the Prakrita
creation, the (discrete) developments of indiscrete nature preceded by the indiscrete principle."
"Preceded by," ought to be replaced here with "beginning by," Buddhi; for the latter is neither a
discrete nor an indiscrete quantity, but partakes of the nature of both, in man as in Kosmos: a unit -- a
human MONAD on the plane of illusion -- when once freed from the three forms of Ahankara and
liberated from its terrestrial manas, Buddhi becomes truly a continued quantity, both in duration and
extension, because eternal and immortal. Earlier it is stated, that the third Creation "abounding with
the quality of goodness, is termed Urdhvasrotas"; and a page or two further the Urdhvasrotas creation
is referred to as "the sixth creation . . . that of the divinities" (p. 75). This shows plainly that earlier as
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well as later manvantaras have been purposely confused, to prevent the pro[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* See concerning their post-types, the Treatise written by Trithemius (Agrippa's master, 16th cent.).
"Concerning the seven secondaries, or Spiritual Intelligences, who, after God, actuate the Universe;"
giving out, besides secret cycles and several prophecies, certain facts and beliefs about the Genii, or
the Elohim, which preside over and guide the septenary stages of the World's Course.
** From the first, the Orientalists have found themselves beset by great difficulties with regard to any
possible order in the Puranic Creations. Brahma is very often confused with Brahm, by Wilson, for
which he is criticised by his successors. The "Original Sanscrit Texts" are preferred by Mr.
Fitzedward Hall for the translation of Vishnu Purana and texts, to those used by Wilson. "Had
Professor Wilson enjoyed the advantages which are now at the comm and of the student of Indian
philosophy, unquestionably he would have expressed himself differently," as said by the editor of his
works. This reminds one of the answer given by one of Thomas Taylor's admirers to those scholars
who criticised his translations of Plato. "Thomas Taylor may have had less knowledge of the Greek
than his critics have, but he understood Plato far better than they do," he said. Our present Orientalists
disfigure the mystic sense of the Sanskrit texts far more than Wilson ever did, though the latter is
undeniably guilty of very gross errors.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 454 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

fane from perceiving the truth. This is called "incongruity" and "contradictions" by the Orientalists.*
This "creation" of the immortals, the "Deva-Sarga," is the last of the first series, and has a universal
reference; namely, to Evolutions in general, not specifically to our Manvantara; but the latter begins
with the same over and over again, showing that it refers to several distinct Kalpas. For it is said "at
the close of the past (Padma) Kalpa the divine Brahma awoke from his night of sleep and beheld the
universe void." Then Brahma is shown going once more over the "seven creations" in the secondary
stage of evolution, repeating the first three on the objective plane.
(IV.) The Mukhya, the Primary as it begins the series of four. Neither the word "inanimate" bodies nor
yet immovable things, as translated by Wilson, gives a correct idea of the Sanskrit terms used. Esoteric
philosophy is not the only one to reject the idea of any atom being inorganic, for it is found also in
orthodox Hinduism. Moreover, Wilson himself says (in his collected Works, vol. iii., p. 381): "All the
Hindu systems consider vegetable bodies as endowed with life . . . " Charachara, or the synonymous
sthavara and jangama, is, therefore, inaccurately rendered by "animate and inanimate," "sentient
beings," and "unconscious," or "conscious and unconscious beings," etc., etc. "Locomotive and fixed"
would be better, since trees are considered to possess souls." Mukhya is the "creation" or organic
evolution of the vegetable kingdom. In this secondary Period, the three degrees of Elemental or
Rudimental Kingdoms are evolved in this world, corresponding inversely in order to the three
Prakritic creations during the Primary period of Brahma's activity. As in that period, in the words of
"Vishnu Purana": "The first creation was that of Mahat (Intellect), the second, of Tanmatras
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(rudimental principles), and the third, that of the senses (Aindriyaka)"; in this one, the order of the
Elemental Forces stands thus: (1) The nascent centres of Force (intellectual and physical); (2) the
rudimental principles -- nerve force, so to say; and (3) nascent apperception, which is the Mahat of the
lower kingdoms, especially developed in the third order of Elementals; these are succeeded by the
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* "The three Creations beginning with Intelligence are elemental, but the six creations which proceed
from the series of which Intellect is the first are the work of Brahma" (Vayu-Purana). Here "creations"
mean everywhere stages of Evolution. Mahat, "Intellect" or mind (which corresponds with Manas, the
former being on the Cosmic, and the latter on the human plane) stands here, too, lower than Buddhi or
Supra-divine Intelligence. Therefore, when we read in Linga Purana that "the first Creation was that
of Mahat, Intellect being the first in manifestation," we must refer that (specified) creation to the first
evolution of our system or even our Earth, none of the preceding ones being discussed in the Puranas,
but only occasionally hinted at.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 455 CREATIONS CONTINUED.

objective kingdom of minerals, in which latter that apperception is entirely latent, to re-develop only
in the plants). The mukhya "Creation," then, is the middle point between the three lower and the three
higher kingdoms, which represent the seven esoteric kingdoms of Kosmos, as of Earth.
(V.) The Tiryaksrotas (or Tairyagyonya) creation,* that of the "(sacred) animals," corresponding only
on Earth, to the dumb animal creation. That which is meant by "animals," in primary Creation, is the
germ of awakening consciousness or of apperception, that which is faintly traceable in some sensitive
plants on Earth and more distinctly in the protistic monera.** On our globe, during the first round,
animal "creation" precedes that of man, while the former (or mammal) evolves from the latter in our
fourth round -- on the physical plane: in Round I. the animal atoms are drawn into a cohesion of
human physical form; while in Round IV. the reverse occurs according to magnetic conditions
developed during life. And this is metempsychosis (See "Mineral Monad" in "Five Years of
Theosophy," p. 276). This fifth stage of evolution, called exoterically "Creation," may be viewed in
both the Primary and Secondary periods, one as the Spiritual and Cosmic, the other as the material
and terrestrial. It is Archibiosis, or life-origination -- "origination," so far, of course, as the
manifestation of life on all the seven planes is concerned. It is at this period of Evolution that the
absolutely eternal universal motion, or vibration, that which is called in Esoteric language "the
GREAT BREATH," differentiates in the primordial, first manifested ATOM. More and more, as
chemical and physical sciences progress, does this occult axiom find its corroboration in the world of
knowledge: the scientific hypothesis, that even the simplest elements of matter are identical in nature
and differ from each other only owing to the variety of the distributions of atoms in the molecule or
speck of substance, or by the modes of its atomic vibration, gains every day more ground.
Thus, as the differentiation of the primordial germ of life has to precede the evolution of the Dhyan
Chohan of the third group or hierarchy of Being in Primary Creation, before those "gods" can become
rupa (embodied in their first ethereal form), so animal creation has to precede,
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[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* Professor Wilson translates it, as though animals were higher on the scale of "creation" than
divinities, or angels, although the truth about the devas is very plainly stated further on. This
"creation," says the text, is both primary (Prakrita) and secondary (Vaikrita). It is the latter, as regards
the origin of the gods from Brahma (the personal anthropomorphic creator of our material universe);
it is the former (primary) as affecting Rudra, who is the immediate production of the first principle.
Rudra is not alone a title of Siva, but embraces agents of creation, angels and men, as will be shown
further on.
** Neither plant nor animal, but an existence between the two.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 456 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

for that same reason, divine MAN on earth. And this is why we find in the Puranas: "The fifth, the
Tairyagyonya creation, was that of animals, and -(VI). The Urdhvasrotas creation, or that of divinities (Vishnu Purana Book I. chap. i.). But these
(divinities) are simply the prototypes of the First Race, the fathers of their "mind-born" progeny with
the soft bones.* It is these who became the Evolvers of the "Sweat-born" -- an expression explained in
Book II. Finally, the sixth "Creation" is followed, and "Creation in general, closed by -(VII.) The evolution of the "Arvaksrotas beings, which was the seventh, and was that of man" (Vishnu
Purana, Book I.).
The "eighth creation" mentioned is no Creation at all; it is a blind again, for it refers to a purely
mental process: the cognition of the "ninth" creation, which, in its turn, is an effect, manifesting in the
secondary of that which was a "Creation" in the Primary (Prakrita) Creation.** The Eighth, then,
called Anugraha (the Pratyayasarga or the intellectual creation of the Sankhyas, explained in Karika,
v. 46, p. 146), is "that creation of which we have a perception" -- in its esoteric aspect -- and "to which
we give intellectual assent (Anugraha) in contradistinction to organic creation." It is the correct
perception of our relations to the whole range of "gods" and especially of those we bear to the
Kumaras -- the so-called "Ninth Creation" -- which is in reality an aspect of or reflection of the sixth
in our manvantara (the Vaivasvata). "There is a ninth, the Kumara Creation, which is both primary
and secondary," says Vishnu Purana, the oldest of such texts.*** "The Kumaras," explains an esoteric
text,
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* "Created beings" -- explains Vishnu Purana -- "although they are destroyed (in their individual
forms) at the periods of dissolution, yet being affected by the good or evil acts of former existences,
are never exempted from their consequences. And when Brahma produces the world anew, they are
the progeny of his will . . ." "Collecting his mind into itself (Yoga willing), Brahma creates the four
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orders of beings, termed gods, demons, progenitors, and MEN" . . . "progenitors" meaning the
prototypes and Evolvers of the first Root Race of men. The progenitors are the Pitris, and are of seven
classes. They are said in exoteric mythology to be born of Brahma's side, like Eve from the rib of
Adam.
** "These notions," remarks Dr. Wilson, "the birth of Rudra and the saints, seem to have been
borrowed from the Saivas, and to have been awkwardly engrafted upon the Vaishnava system." The
esoteric meaning ought to have been consulted before venturing such a hypothesis.
*** Parasara, the Vedic Rishi, who received the Vishnu Purana from Pulastya and taught it to
Maitreya, is placed by the Orientalists at various epochs. As correctly observed, in the Hindu Class.
Dict: -- "Speculations as to his era differ widely from 575 B.C. to 1391 B.C., and cannot be trusted."
Quite so; but no less, however, than any other date as assigned by the Sanskritists, so famous in this
department of arbitrary fancy.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 457 WHO THE KUMARAS ARE.

"are the Dhyanis, derived immediately from the supreme Principle, who reappear in the Vaivasvata
Manu period, for the progress of mankind."* The commentator of the Vishnu Purana corroborates it,
by remarking that "these sages live as long as Brahma; and they are only created by him in the first
Kalpa, although their generation is very commonly and inconsistently introduced in the Varaha, or
Padma Kalpa" (the secondary). Thus, the Kumaras are, exoterically, "the creation of Rudra or
Nilalohita, a form of Siva, by Brahma, and of certain other mind-born sons of Brahma. But, in the
esoteric teaching, they are the progenitors of the true spiritual SELF in the physical man -- the higher
Prajapati, while the Pitris, or lower Prajapati, are no more than the fathers of the model, or type of his
physical form, made "in their image." Four (and occasionally five) are mentioned freely in the exoteric
texts, three Kumaras being secret.** (Compare what is said of "The Fallen Angels" in Book II.).
The Exoteric four are: Sanat-Kumara, Sananda, Sanaka, and Sanatana; and the esoteric three are:
Sana, Kapila, and Sanat-sujata. Special attention is once more drawn to this class of Dhyan Chohans,
for herein lies the mystery of generation and heredity hinted at in Book I. (See the four Orders of
Angelic Beings; Comment on Stanza VII.). Book II. explains their position in the divine Hierarchy.
Meanwhile, let us see what the exoteric texts say about them.
They do not say much; nothing to him who fails to read between the lines. "We must have recourse,
here, to other Puranas for the elucidation of this term," remarks Wilson, who does not suspect for one
moment that he is in the presence of the "Angels of Darkness," the mythical "great enemy" of his
Church. Therefore, he contrives to elucidate no more than that these (divinities) DECLINING TO
CREATE PROGENY*** (and thus rebelling against Brahma), remained, as the name
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* They may indeed mark a "special" or extra creation, since it is they who, by incarnating themselves
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race -- create, so to speak, a new race: that of thinking, self-conscious and divine men.
** "The four Kumaras (are) the mind-born Sons of Brahma. Some specify seven" (H. Class. Dict.). All
these seven Vaidhatra, the patronymic of the Kumaras, "the Maker's Sons," are mentioned and
described in Iswara Krishna's "Sankhya Karika" with the Commentary of Gaudapadacharya
(Sankaracharya's Paraguru) attached to it. It discusses the nature of the Kumaras, though it refrains
from mentioning by name all the seven Kumaras, but calls them instead "the seven sons of Brahma,"
which they are, as they are created by Brahma in Rudra. The list of names it gives us is: Sanaka,
Sanandana, Sanatana, Kapila, Ribhu, and Panchasikha. But these are again all aliases.
*** So untrustworthy are some translations of the Orientalists that in the French Translation of HariVamsa, it is said "The seven Prajapati, Rudra, Skanda (his son) [[Footnote continued on next page]]

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 458 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

of the first implies, ever boys, Kumaras: that is, ever pure and innocent, whence their creation is also
called the "Kumara." (Book I. chap. v., Vishnu Purana.) The Puranas, however, may afford a little
more light. "Being ever as he was born, he is here called a youth; and hence his name is well known as
Sanat-Kumara" (Linga purana, prior section LXX. 174.) In the Saiva Purana, the Kumaras are always
described as Yogins. The Kurma Purana, after enumerating them, says: "These five, O Brahmans,
were Yogins, who acquired entire exemption from passion." They are five, because two of the
Kumaras fell.
Of all the seven great divisions of Dhyan-Chohans, or Devas, there is none with which humanity is
more concerned than with the Kumaras. Imprudent are the Christian Theologians who have degraded
them into fallen Angels, and now call them "Satan" and Demons; as among these heavenly denizens
who refuse to create, the Archangel Michael -- the greatest patron Saint of Western and Eastern
Churches, under his double name of St. Michael and his supposed copy on earth, St. George
conquering the DRAGON -- has to be allowed one of the most prominent places. (See Book II., "The
Sacred Dragons and their Slayers.")
The Kumaras, the "mind-born Sons" of Brahma-Rudra (or Siva)
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

[[Footnote continued from previous page]] and Sanat-Kumara proceeded to create beings." Whereas,
as Wilson shows, the original is: "These seven . . . created progeny; and so did Rudra, but Skanda and
Sanat Kumara, restraining their power, abstained from creation." The "four orders of beings" are
referred to sometimes as "Ambhamsi," which Wilson renders: "literally Waters," and believes it "a
mystic term." It is one, no doubt; but he evidently failed to catch the real esoteric meaning. "Waters"
and "water" stand as the symbol for Akasa, the "primordial Ocean of Space," on which Narayana, the
self-born Spirit, moves: reclining on that which is its progeny (See Manu). "Water is the body of Nara;
thus we have heard the name of water explained. Since Brahma rests on the water, therefore he is
termed Narayana" (Linga, Vayu, and Markandeya Puranas) ". . . Pure, Purusha created the Waters
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pure . . ." at the same time Water is the third principle in material Kosmos, and the third in the realm
of the Spiritual: Spirit of Fire, Flame, Akasa, Ether, Water, Air, Earth, are the cosmic, sidereal,
psychic, spiritual and mystic principles, pre-eminently occult, in every plane of being. "Gods,
Demons, Pitris and men," are the four orders of beings to whom the term Ambhamsi is applied (in the
Vedas it is a synonym of gods): because they are all the product of WATERS (mystically), of the
Akasic Ocean, and of the Third Principle in nature. Pitris and men on earth are the transformations
(rebirths) of gods and demons (Spirits) on a higher plane. Water is, in another sense, the feminine
principle. Venus Aphrodite is the personified Sea, and the mother of the god of love, the generator of
all the gods as much as the Christian Virgin Mary is Mare (the sea), the mother of the Western God of
Love, Mercy and Charity. If the student of Esoteric philosophy thinks deeply over the subject he is
sure to find out all the suggestiveness of the term Ambhamsi, in its manifold relations to the Virgin in
Heaven, to the Celestial Virgin of the Alchemists, and even to the "Waters of Grace" of the modern
Baptist.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 459 THE PATRON-GUIDE OF ISRAEL.

the howling and terrific destroyer of human passions and physical senses, which are ever in the way
of the development of the higher spiritual perceptions and the growth of the inner eternal man -mystically,* are the progeny of Siva, the Mahayogi, the great patron of all the Yogis and mystics of
India. They themselves, being the "Virgin-Ascetics," refuse to create the material being MAN. Well
may they be suspected of a direct connection with the Christian Archangel Michael, the "Virgin
Combatant" of the Dragon Apophis, whose victim is every soul united too loosely to its immortal
Spirit, the Angel who, as shown by the Gnostics, refused to create just as the Kumaras did. (See Book
II., "The Mystic Dragons and their Slayers.") . . . Does not that patron-Angel of the Jews preside over
Saturn (Siva or Rudra), and the Sabbath, the day of Saturn? Is he not shown of the same essence with
his father (Saturn), and called the "Son of Time," Kronos, or Kala (time), a form of Brahma (Vishnu
and Siva)?" And is not "Old Time" of the Greeks, with its scy the and sand-glass, identical with the
"Ancient of Days" of the Kabalists, the latter "Ancient" being one with the Hindu "Ancient of Days,"
Brahma (in his triune form), whose name is also "Sanat," the Ancient? Every Kumara bears the prefix
of Sanat and Sana; and Sanaischara is Saturn, the planet (Sani and Sarra), the King Saturn whose
Secretary in Egypt was Thot-Hermes the first. They are thus identified both with the planet and the
god (Siva), who are, in their turn, shown the prototypes of Saturn, who is the same as Bel, Baal, Siva,
and Jehovah Sabbaoth, The angel of whose face is MIKAEL (

"who is as God"). He is the

patron, and guardian Angel of the Jews, as Daniel tells us (v. 21); and, before the Kumaras were
degraded, by those who were ignorant of their very name, into demons and fallen angels, the Greek
Ophites, the occultly inclined predecessors and precursors of the Roman Catholic Church after its
secession and separation from the primitive Greek Church, had identified Michael with their
Ophiomorphos, the rebellious and opposing spirit. This means nothing more than the reverse aspect
(symbolically) of Ophis -- divine Wisdom or Christos. In the Talmud, Mikael (Michael) is "Prince of
Water" and the chief of the seven Spirits, for the same reason that his prototype (among many others)
Sanat-Sujata,
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

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* Siva-Rudra is the Destroyer, as Vishnu is the preserver; and both are the regenerators of spiritual as
well as of physical nature. To live as a plant, the seed must die. To live as a conscious entity in the
Eternity, the passions and senses of man must first DIE before his body does. "To live is to die and to
die is to live," has been too little understood in the West. Siva, the destroyer, is the creator and the
Saviour of Spiritual man, as he is the good gardener of nature. He weeds out the plants, human and
cosmic, and kills the passions of the physical, to call to life the perceptions of the spiritual, man.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 460 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

-- the chief of the Kumaras -- is called Ambhamsi, "Waters," -- according to the commentary on
Vishnu Purana. Why? Because the "Waters" is another name of the "Great Deep," the primordial
Waters of space or Chaos, and also means "Mother," Amba, meaning Aditi and Akasa, the Celestial
Virgin-Mother of the visible universe. Furthermore, the "Waters of the flood" are also called "the
GREAT DRAGON," or Ophis, Ophio-Morphos.
The Rudras will be noticed in their Septenary character of "Fire-Spirits" in the "Symbolism" attached
to the Stanzas in Book II. There we shall also consider the Cross (3 + 4) under its primeval and later
forms, and shall use for purposes of comparison the Pythagorean numbers side by side with Hebrew
Metrology. The immense importance of the number seven will thus become evident, as the root
number of nature. We shall examine it from the standpoints of the Vedas and the Chaldean Scriptures,
as it existed in Egypt thousands of years B.C., and as treated in the Gnostic records; we shall show
how its importance as a basic number has gained recognition in physical Science; and we shall
endeavour to prove that the importance attached to the number seven throughout all antiquity was due
to no fanciful imaginings of uneducated priests, but to a profound knowledge of natural law.
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Next Section
Contents

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The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 1

Theosophical University Press Online Edition

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 460

[[This page continued from previous section]]
XIV.
THE FOUR ELEMENTS.
METAPHYSICALLY and esoterically there is but One ELEMENT in nature, and at the root of it is
the Deity; and the so-called seven elements, of which five have already manifested and asserted their
existence, are the garment, the veil, of that deity; direct from the essence whereof comes MAN,
whether physically, psychically, mentally or spiritually considered. Four elements only are generally
spoken of in later antiquity, five admitted only in philosophy. For the body of ether is not fully
manifested yet, and its noumenon is still "the Omnipotent Father -- AEther, the synthesis of the rest."
But what are these "ELEMENTS" whose compound bodies have now been discovered by Chemistry
and Physics to contain numberless sub-elements, even the sixty or seventy of which no longer
embrace the whole number suspected. (Vide Addenda, XI. and XII., quotations from Mr. Crookes'
Lectures.) Let us follow their evolution from the historical beginnings, at any rate.
The four Elements were fully characterized by Plato when he said that they were that "which
composes and decomposes the compound bodies."

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 461 ON THE ELEMENTS.

Hence Cosmolatry was never, even in its worst aspect, the fetishism which adores or worships the
passive external form and matter of any object, but looked ever to the noumenon therein. Fire, Air,
Water, Earth, were but the visible garb, the symbols of the informing, invisible Souls or Spirits -- the
Cosmic gods to whom worship was offered by the ignorant, and simple, respectful recognition by the
wiser. In their turn the phenomenal subdivisions of the noumenal Elements were informed by the
Elementals, so called, the "Nature Spirits" of lower grades.
In the Theogony of Mochus, we find Ether first, and then the air; the two principles from which Ulom
the intelligible ([[noetos]]) God (the visible universe of matter) is born.*
In the Orphic hymns, the Eros-Phanes evolves from the Spiritual Egg, which the AEthereal winds
impregnate, Wind being "the Spirit of God," who is said to move in AEther, "brooding over the
chaos" -- the Divine "Idea." In the Hindu Katakopanisad, Purusha, the Divine Spirit, already stands
before the original matter, from whose union springs the great Soul of the World, "Maha = Atma,
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Brahm, the Spirit of Life;"** these latter appellations being again identical with the Universal Soul, or
Anima Mundi, the Astral Light of the Theurgists and Kabalists, being its last and lowest division."
The [[stoicheia]] (Elements) of Plato and Aristotle, were thus the incorporeal principles attached to
the four great divisions of our Cosmic World, and it is with justice that Creuzer defines those
primitive beliefs . . . as a species of magism, a psychic paganism, and a deification of potencies; a
spiritualization which placed the believers in a close community with these potencies," (Book IX, p.
850). So close, indeed, that the hierarchies of those potencies or Forces have been classified on a
graduated scale of seven from the ponderable to the imponderable. They are Septenary, -- not as an
artificial aid to facilitate their comprehension -- but in their real Cosmic gradation, from their chemical
(or physical) to their purely spiritual composition. Gods -- with the ignorant masses -- gods
independent and supreme; daemons with the fanatics, who, intellectual as they often may be, are
unable to understand the Spirit of the philosophical sentence, in pluribus unum. With the hermetic
philosopher they are FORCES relatively "blind," or "intelligent," according to which of the principles
in them he deals with. It required long millenniums before they found themselves, in our cultured age,
finally degraded into simple chemical elements.
At any rate, good Christians, and especially the Biblical Protestants,
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* Movers: "Phoinizer," 282.
** Weber: "Akad. Vorles," 213, 214, etc.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 462 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

ought to show more reverence for the four Elements, if they would show any for Moses. For the Bible
manifests the consideration and mystic significance in which they were held by the Hebrew Lawgiver,
on every page of the Pentateuch. The tent which contained the Holy of Holies " was a Cosmic
Symbol, sacred, in one of its meanings, to the Elements, the four cardinal points, and ETHER.
Josephus shows it built in white, the colour of Ether. And this explains also why, in the Egyptian and
the Hebrew temples -- according to Clemens Alexandrinus -- a gigantic curtain, supported by five
pillars, separated the sanctum sanctorum (now represented by the altar in Christian churches) wherein
the priests alone were permitted to enter, from the part accessible to the profane. By its four colours
the curtain symbolized the four principal Elements, and signified the knowledge of the divine that the
five senses of men can enable man to acquire with the help of the four Elements. (See Stromata I., v.
6).
In Cory's Ancient Fragments, one of the "Chaldean Oracles" expresses ideas about the elements and
Ether in language singularly like that of the Unseen Universe, written by two eminent scientists of our
day.

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It states that "from ether have come all things, and to it all will return; that the images of
all things are indelibly impressed upon it; and that it is the store-house of the germs or
of the remains of all visible forms, and even ideas. It appears as if this case strangely
corroborates our assertion that whatever discoveries may be made in our days will be
found to have been anticipated by many thousand years by our 'simple-minded
ancestors.' " -- (Isis Unveiled.)
Whence came the four elements and the malachim of the Hebrews? They have been made to merge,
by a theological sleight-of-hand on the part of the Rabbins and the later Fathers of the Church into
Jehovah, but their origin is identical with that of the Cosmic gods of all other nations. Their symbols,
whether born on the shores of the Oxus, on the burning sands of Upper Egypt, or in the wild forests,
weird and glacial, which cover the slopes and peaks of the sacred snowy mountains of Thessaly, or
again, in the pampas of America, their symbols, we repeat, when traced to their source, are ever one
and the same. Whether Egyptian or Pelasgian, Aryan or Semitic, the genius loci, the local god,
embraced in its unity all nature; but not especially the four elements any more than one of their
creations, such as trees, rivers, mounts or stars. The genius loci -- a very late after-thought of the last
sub-races of the Fifth Root-race, when the primitive and grandiose meaning had become nearly lost -was ever the representative in his accumulated titles of all his colleagues. It was the god of fire,
symbolised by thunder, as Jove or Agni; the god of water, symbolised by the fluvial bull or some
sacred river or fountain, as Varuna, Neptune, etc.; the god of air, manifesting in the hurricane and
tempest, as Vayu and Indra; and the god or spirit

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 463 THE COSMIC GODS.

of the earth, who appeared in earthquakes, like Pluto, Yama, and so many others.
These were the Cosmic gods, ever synthesizing all in one, as found in every cosmogony or
mythology. Thus, the Greeks had their Dodonean Jupiter, who included in himself the four elements
and the four cardinal points, and who was recognized, therefore, in old Rome under the pantheistic
title of Jupiter Mundus; and who now, in modern Rome, has become the Deus Mundus, the one
mundane god, who is made to swallow all others in the latest theology -- by the arbitrary decision of
his special ministers.
As gods of Fire, Air, Water, they were celestial gods; as gods of the lower region, they were infernal
deities: the latter adjective applying simply to the Earth. They were "Spirits of the Earth" under their
respective names of Yama, Pluto, Osiris, the "Lord of the lower kingdom, etc., etc.," and their tellurial
character proves it sufficiently.* The ancients knew of no worse abode after death than the Kamaloka,
the limbus on this Earth. If it is argued that the Dodonean Jupiter was identified with Aidoneus, the
king of the subterranean world, and Dis, or the Roman Pluto and the Dionysius Chthonios, the
subterranean, wherein, according to Creuzer (I, vi., ch. 1), oracles were rendered, then it will become
the pleasure of the Occultists to prove that both Aidoneus and Dionysius are the bases of Adonai, or
"Jurbo Adonai," as Jehovah is called in Codex Nazaraeus. "Thou shalt not worship the Sun, who is
named Adonai, whose name is also Kadush and El-El" (Cod. Naz., I, 47; see also Psalm lxxxix., 18),
and also "Lord Bacchus." Baal-Adonis of the Sods or Mysteries of the pre-Babylonian Jews became
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the Adonai by the Massorah, the later-vowelled Jehovah. Hence the Roman Catholics are right. All
these Jupiters are of the same family; but Jehovah has to be included therein to make it complete.
Jupiter-Aerios or Pan, the Jupiter Ammon, and the Jupiter-Bel-Moloch, are all correlations and one
with Yurbo-Adonai, because they are all one cosmic nature. It is that nature and power which create
the specific terrestrial symbol, and the physical and material fabric of the latter, which proves the
Energy manifesting through it as extrinsic.
For primitive religion was something better than simple pre-occupation about physical phenomena, as
remarked by Schilling; and principles, more elevated than we modern Sadducees know of, "were
hidden under the transparent veil of such merely natural divinities as thunder,
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* The Gehenna of the Bible was a valley near Jerusalem, where the monotheistic Jews immolated
their children to Moloch, if the prophet Jeremiah is to be believed on his word. The Scandinavian Hel
or Hela was a frigid region -- again Kamaloka -- and the Egyptian Amenti a place of purification. (See
Isis Unveiled, Vol. II., p. 11.)

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 464 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the winds, and rain." The ancients knew and could distinguish the corporeal from the spiritual
elements, in the forces of nature.
The four-fold Jupiter, as the four-faced Brahma -- the aerial, the fulgurant, the terrestrial, and the
marine god -- the lord and master of the four elements, may stand as a representative for the great
Cosmic gods of every nation. While passing power over the fire to Hephaistos-Vulcan, over the sea,
to Poseidon-Neptune, and over the Earth, to Pluto-Aidoneus -- the AERIAL Jove was all these; for
AETHER, from the first, had pre-eminence over, and was the synthesis of, all the elements.
Tradition points to a grotto, a vast cave in the deserts of Central Asia, whereinto light pours through
its four seemingly natural apertures or clefts placed crossways at the four cardinal points of the place.
From noon till an hour before sunset that light streams in, of four different colours, as averred -- red,
blue, orange-gold, and white -- owing to some either natural or artificially prepared conditions of
vegetation and soil. The light converges in the centre around a pillar of white marble with a globe
upon it, which represents our earth. It is named the "grotto of Zaratushta."
When included under the arts and sciences of the fourth race, the Atlanteans, the phenomenal
manifestation of the four elements, justly attri buted by the believers in Cosmic gods to the intelligent
interference of the latter, assumed a scientific character. The magic of the ancient priests consisted, in
those days, in addressing their gods in their own language. "The speech of the men of the earth cannot
reach the Lords. Each must be addressed in the language of his respective element" -- is a sentence
which will be shown pregnant with meaning. "The Book of Rules" cited adds as an explanation of the
nature of that Element-language: "It is composed of sounds, not words; of sounds, numbers and
figures. He who knows how to blend the three, will call forth the response of the superintending
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Power" (the regent-god of the specific element needed).
Thus this "language" is that of incantations or of MANTRAS, as they are called in India, sound being
the most potent and effectual magic agent, and the first of the keys which opens the door of
communication between Mortals and the Immortals. He who believes in the words and teachings of
St. Paul, has no right to pick out from the latter those sentences only that he chooses to accept, to the
rejection of others; and St. Paul teaches most undeniably the existence of cosmic gods and their
presence among us. Paganism preached a dual and simultaneous evolution: "creation" -- "spiritualem
ac mundanum," as the Roman Church has it -- ages before the advent of that Roman Church. Exoteric
phraseology has changed little with respect to divine hierarchies since the most palmy days of
Paganism, or "Idolatry." Names alone have changed,

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 465 A CONFESSION OF SCIENCE.

along with claims which have now become false pretences. For when Plato put in the mouth of the
Highest Principle -- "Father AEther" or Jupiter -- these words, for instance: "The gods of the gods of
whom I am the maker (opifex) as I am the father of all their works (operumque parens)"; he knew the
spirit of this sentence as fully, we suspect, as St. Paul did, when saying: "For though there be that are
called gods, whether in heaven or in earth, as there be gods many and lords many," . . . . etc. (1 Cor.
viii. 5.)* Both knew the sense and the meaning of what they put forward in such guarded terms.
Says Sir W. Grove, F.R.S., speaking of the correlation of forces, "The ancients when they witnessed a
natural phenomenon, removed from ordinary analogies, and unexplained by any mechanical action
known to them, referred it to a soul, a spiritual or preternatural power. . . . Air and gases were also at
first deemed spiritual, but subsequently they became invested with a more material character; and the
same words [[pneuma]], spirit, etc., were used to signify the soul or a gas; the very word gas, from
geist, a ghost or spirit, affords us an instance of the gradual transmutation of a spiritual into a physical
conception . . . . . ." (P. 89.) This, the great man of science (in his preface to the fifth edition of
"Correlation of Physical Forces") considers as the only concern of exact science, which has no
business to meddle with the CAUSES. "Cause and effect," he explains, "are therefore, in their abstract
relation to these forces, words solely of convenience. We are totally unacquainted with the ultimate
generating power of each and all of them, and probably shall ever remain so; we can only ascertain
the norma of their actions; we must humbly refer their causation to one omnipresent influence, and
content ourselves with studying their effects and developing, by experiment, their mutual relations"
(p. xiv.).
This policy once accepted, and the system virtually admitted in the above-quoted words, namely, the
spirituality of the "ultimate generating power," it would be more than illogical to refuse to recognise
this quality which is inherent in the material elements, or rather, in their com[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* We cannot be taken to task by the Protestants for interpreting the verse from the Corinthians as we
do; for, if the translation in the English Bible is made ambiguous, it is not so in the original texts, and
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the Roman Catholic Church accepts the words of the Apostle in their true sense. For a proof see the
Commentaries on St. Paul's Epistles, by St. John Chrysostom "directly inspired by the Apostle," and
"who wrote under his dictation," as we are assured by the Marquis de Mirville, whose works are
approved by Rome. And St. Chrysostom says, commenting on that special verse, "And, though there
are (in fact) they who are called gods . . . . -- for it seems, there are really several gods -- withal, and
for all that, the God-principle and the Superior God ceasing to remain essentially one and indivisible."
. . . Thus spoke the old Initiates also, knowing that the worship of minor gods could never affect the
"God Principle" (See de Mirville, "Des Esprits," vol. ii., 322).

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 466 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

pounds -- as present in the fire, air, water or earth. The ancients knew these powers so well, that, while
concealing their true nature under various allegories, for the benefit (or to the detriment) of the
uneducated rabble, they never departed from the multiple object in view, while inverting them. They
contrived to throw a thick veil over the nucleus of truth concealed by the symbol, but they ever tried
to preserve the latter as a record for future generations, sufficiently transparent to allow their wise
men to discern that truth behind the fabulous form of the glyph or allegory. They are accused of
superstition and credulity, those ancient sages; and this by those very nations, which, learned in all the
modern arts and sciences, cultured and wise in their generation, accept to this day as their one living
and infinite God, the anthropomorphic "Jehovah" of the Jews.
What were some of the alleged "superstitions"? Hesiod believed, for instance, that "the winds were
the sons of the giant Typhoeus," who were chained and unchained at will by AEolus, and the
polytheistic Greeks accepted it along with Hesiod. Why should not they, since the monotheistic Jews
had the same beliefs, with other names for their dramatis personae, and since Christians believe in the
same to this day? The Hesiodic AEolus, Boreas, etc., etc., were named Kadim, Tzaphon, Daren, and
Ruach Hajan by the "chosen people" of Israel. What is, then, the fundamental difference? While the
Hellenes were taught that AEolus tied and untied the winds, the Jews believed as fervently that their
Lord God, "with smoke coming out of his nostrils and fire out of his mouth, rode upon a cherub and
did fly; and was seen upon the wings of the wind" (II. Sam., xxii. 9 and 11). The expressions of the two
nations are either both figures of speech, or both superstitions. We think they are neither; but only
arise from a keen sense of oneness with nature, and a perception of the mysterious and the intelligent
behind every natural phenomenon, which the moderns no longer possess. Nor was it "superstitious" in
the Greek pagans to listen to the oracle of Delphi, when, at the approach of the fleet of Xerxes, that
oracle advised them to "sacrifice to the Winds," if the same has to be regarded as Divine Worship in
the Israelites, who sacrificed as often to the wind and fire -- especially to the latter element. Do they
not say that their "God is a consuming fire" (Deut. iv., 24), who appeared generally as Fire and
"encompassed by fire"? and did not Elijah seek for him (the Lord) in the "great strong wind, and in the
earthquake"? Do not the Christians repeat the same after them? Do not they, moreover, sacrifice to
this day, to the same "God of Wind and Water?" They do; because special prayers for rain, dry
weather, trade-winds and the calming of storms on the seas exist to this hour in the prayer-books of
the three Christian churches; and the several hundred sects of the Protestant religion

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offer them to their God upon every threat of calamity? The fact that they are no more answered by
Jehovah, than they were, probably, by Jupiter Pluvius, does not alter the fact of these prayers being
addressed to the Power or Powers supposed to rule over the Elements, or of these Powers being
identical in Paganism and Christianity; or have we to believe that such prayers are crass idolatry and
absurd "superstition" only when addressed by a Pagan to his idol, and that the same superstition is
suddenly transformed into praiseworthy piety and religion whenever the name of the celestial
addressee is changed? But the tree is known by its fruit. And the fruit of the Christian tree being no
better than that of the tree of Paganism, why should the former comm and more reverence than the
latter.
Thus, when we are told by the Chevalier Drach, a converted Jew, and the Marquis de Mirville, a
Roman Catholic fanatic of the French aristocracy, that in Hebrew lightning is a synonym of fury, and
is always handled by an evil Spirit; that Jupiter Fulgur or Fulgurans is also called by the Christians
oelicius, and denounced as the soul of lightning, its daemon*; we have either to apply the same
explanation and definitions to the "Lord God of Israel," under the same circumstances, or renounce
our right of abusing the gods and creeds of other nations.
The foregoing statements emanating as they do from two ardent and learned Roman Catholics, are, to
say the least, dangerous, in the presence of the Bible and its prophets. Indeed, if Jupiter, the "chief
Daemon of the Pagan Greeks," hurled his deadly thunder-bolts and lightnings at those who excited his
wrath, so did the Lord God of Abraham and Jacob. We find in I. Samuel, that "the Lord thundered
from heaven, and the most High uttered his voice, and he sent out arrows (thunder bolts) and scattered
them (Saul's armies) with lightning, and discomforted them." (Chap. xxii. 14, 15.)
The Athenians are accused of having sacrificed to Boreas; and this "Demon" is charged with having
submerged and wrecked 400 ships of the Persian fleet on the rocks of Mount Pelion, and of having
become so furious "that all the Magi of Xerxes could hardly counteract it by offering contra-sacrifices
to Tethys" [Herodotus "Polym." cxc]. Very fortunately, no au thenticated instance is on the records of
Christian wars showing a like catastrophe on the same scale happening to one Christian fleet owing to
the "prayers" of its enemy -- another Christian nation. But this is from no fault of theirs, for each prays
as ardently to Jehovah for the destruction of the other, as the Athenians prayed to Boreas. Both
resorted to a neat little piece of black magic con amore. Such abstinence from divine interference
being hardly due to lack of
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------

* Cosmolatry, p. 415.

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 468 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

prayers, sent to a common Almighty God for mutual destruction, where, then, shall we draw the line
between Pagan and Christian? And who can doubt that all Protestant England would rejoice and offer
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thanks to the Lord, if, during some future war, 400 ships of the hostile fleet were to be wrecked owing
to such holy prayers. What is, then, the difference, we ask again, between a Jupiter, a Boreas, and a
Jehovah? No more than this: The crime of one's own next-of-kin -- say of one's "father" -- is always
excused and often exalted, whereas the crime of our neighbour's parent is ever gladly punished by
hanging. Yet the crime is the same.
So far the "blessings of Christianity" do not seem to have made any appreciable advance on the
morals of the converted Pagans.
The above is not a defence of Pagan gods, nor is it an attack on the Christian deity, nor does it mean
belief in either. The writer is quite impartial, and rejects the testimony in favour of either, neither
praying to, believing in, nor dreading any such "personal" and anthropomorphic God. The parallels
are brought forward simply as one more curious exhibition of the illogical and blind fanaticism of the
civilized theologian. For, so far, there is not a very great difference between the two beliefs, and there
is none in their respective effects upon morality, or spiritual nature. The "light of Christ" shines upon
as hideous features of the animal-man now, as the "light of Lucifer" did in days of old.
"Those unfortunate hea thens in their superstition regard even the Elements as something that has
comprehension! . . . . They still have faith in their idol Vayu -- the god or, rather, Demon of the Wind
and Air . . . they firmly believe in the efficacy of their prayers, and in the powers of their Brahmins
over the winds and storms. . . . ." (The Missionary Lavoisier, of Cochin, in the Journal des Colonies.)
In reply to this, we may quote from Luke viii., 24: "And he (Jesus) arose and rebuked the Wind and
the raging of the Water, and they ceased and there was a calm." And here is another quotation from a
prayer book: . . . "Oh, Virgin of the Sea, blessed Mother and Lady of the Waters, stay thy waves . . ."
etc., etc. (prayer of the Neapolitan and Provencal sailors, copied textually from that of the Phoenician
mariners to their Virgingoddess Astarte.) The logical and irrepressible conclusion arising from the
parallels brought forward, and the denunciation of the Missionary is this: The commands of the
Brahmins to their element-gods not remaining "ineffectual," the power of the Brahmins is thus placed
on a par with that of Jesus. Moreover, Astarte is shown not a whit weaker in potency than the "Virgin
of the Sea" of Christian sailors. It is not enough to give a dog a bad name, and then hang him; the dog
has to be proven guilty. Boreas and Astarte may be devils in theological

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 469 PRAYER IS OFTEN SORCERY.

fancy, but, as just remarked, the tree has to be judged by its fruit. And once the Christians are shown
as immoral and wicked as the pagans ever were, what benefit has humanity derived from its change of
gods and idols?
That, however, which God and the Christian Saints are justified in doing, becomes a crime, if
successful, in simple mortals. Sorcery and incantations are regarded as fables now; yet from the day of
the Institutes of Justinian down to the laws against witchcraft of England and America -- obsolete but
not repealed to this day -- such incantations, even when only suspected, were punished as criminal.
Why punish a chimera? And still we read of Constantine, the Emperor, sentencing to death the
philosopher Sopatrus for unchaining the winds, and thus preventing ships loaded with grain from
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arriving in time to put an end to famine. Pausanias, when affirming that he saw with his own eyes
"men who by simple prayers and incantations" stopped a strong hail-storm, is derided. This does not
prevent modern Christian writers from advising prayer during storm and danger, and believing in its
efficacy. Hoppo and Stadlein two magicians and sorcerers -- were sentenced to death for throwing
charms on fruit and transferring a harvest by magic arts from one field to another, hardly a century
ago, if we can believe Sprenger, the famous writer, who vouches for it: "Qui fruges excantassent
segetem pellicentes incantando."
Let us close by reminding the reader that, without the smallest shadow of superstition, one may
believe in the dual nature of every object on Earth -- in the spiritual and the material, the visible and
the invisible nature, and that science virtually proves this, while denying its own demonstration. For
if, as Sir William Grove has it, the electricity we handle is but the result of ordinary matter affected by
something invisible, the "ultimate generating power" of every Force, the "one omnipresent influence,"
then it only becomes natural that one should believe as the ancients did; namely, that every Element is
dual in its nature. "ETHEREAL fire is the emanation of the KABIR proper; the aerial is but the union
(correlation) of the former with terrestrial fire, and its guidance and application on our earthly plane
belongs to a Kabir of a lesser dignity" -- an Elemental, perhaps, as an Occultist would call it; and the
same may be said of every Cosmic Element.
No one will deny that the human being is possessed of various forces: magnetic, sympathetic,
antipa thetic, nervous, dynamical, occult, mechanical, mental -- every kind of force; and that the
physical forces are all biological in their essence, seeing that they intermingle with, and often merge
into, those forces that we have named intellectual and moral -- the first being the vehicles, so to say,
the upadhi, of the second. No one, who does not deny soul in man, would hesitate in

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 470 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

saying that their presence and commingling are the very essence of our being; that they constitute the
Ego in man, in fact. These potencies have their physiological, physical, mechanical, as well as their
nervous, ecstatic, clairaudient, and clairvoyant phenomena, which are now regarded and recognised as
perfectly natural, even by science. Why should man be the only exception in nature, and why cannot
even the ELEMENTS have their vehicles, their "Vahans" in what we call the PHYSICAL FORCES?
And why, above all, should such beliefs be called "superstition" along with the religions of old?
-------------[[This page continued in next section]]

Next Section
Contents
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THe Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, Vol 1, bk 2, ch 15

The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 1

Theosophical University Press Online Edition

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 470

[[This page continued from previous section]]
XV.
ON KWAN-SHI-YIN AND KWAN-YIN.
LIKE Avalokiteshwara, Kwan-shi-yin has passed through several transformations, but it is an error to
say of him that he is a modern invention of the Northern Buddhists, for under another appellation he
has been known from the earliest times. The Secret Doctrine teaches that "He who is the first to
appear at Renovation will be the last to come before Re-absorption (pralaya)." Thus the logoi of all
nations, from the Vedic Visvakarma of the Mysteries down to the Saviour of the present civilised
nations, are the "Word" who was "in the beginning" (or the reawakening of the energising powers of
Nature) with the One ABSOLUTE. Born of Fire and Water, before these became distinct elements, IT
was the "Maker" (fashioner or modeller) of all things; "without him was not anything made that was
made"; "in whom was life, and the life was the light of men"; and who finally may be called, as he
ever has been, the Alpha and the Omega of manifested Nature. "The great Dragon of Wisdom is born
of Fire and Water, and into Fire and Water will all be re-absorbed with him" (Fa-Hwa-King). As this
Bodhisatva is said "to assume any form he pleases" from the beginning of a Manvantara to its end,
though his special birthday (memorial day) is celebrated according to the Kin-kwang-ming-King
("Luminous Sutra of Golden Light") in the second month on the nineteenth day, and that of "Maitreya
Buddha" in the first month on the first day, yet the two are one. He will appear as Maitreya Buddha,
the last of the Avatars and Buddhas, in the seventh Race. This belief and expectation are universal
throughout the East. Only it is not in the Kali yug, our present terrifically materialistic age of
Darkness, the "Black Age," that a new Saviour of Humanity can ever appear. The Kali yug is

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 471 DISEASED IMAGINATION.

"l'Age d'Or" (!) only in the mystic writings of some French pseudo-Occultists. (See "La Mission des
Juifs.")
Hence the ritual in the exoteric worship of this deity was founded on magic. The Mantras are all taken
from special books kept secret by the priests, and each is said to work a magical effect; as the reciter
or reader produces, by simply chanting them, a secret causation which results in immediate effects.
Kwan-Shi-Yin is Avalokiteshwara, and both are forms of the seventh Universal Principle; while in its
highest metaphysical character this deity is the synthetic aggregation of all the planetary Spirits,
Dhyani Chohans. He is the "Self-manifested;" in short, the "Son of the Father." Crowned with seven

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dragons, above his statue there appears the inscription Pu-Tsi-K'iun-ling, "the universal Saviour of all
living beings."
Of course the name given in the archaic volume of the Stanzas is quite different, but Kwan-Yin is a
perfect equivalent. In a temple of Pu'to, the sacred island of the Buddhists in China, Kwan-Shi-Yin is
represented floating on a black aquatic bird (Kala-Hansa), and pouring on the heads of mortals the
elixir of life, which, as it flows, is transformed into one of the chief Dhyani-Buddhas -- the Regent of
a star called the "Star of Salvation." In his third transformation Kwan-Yin is the informing spirit or
genius of Water. In China the Dalai-Lama is believed to be an incarnation of Kwan-Shi-Yin, who in
his third terrestrial appearance was a Bodhisattva, while the Teshu Lama is an incarnation of
Amitabha Buddha, or Gautama.
It may be remarked en passant that a writer must indeed have a diseased imagination to discover
phallic worship everywhere, as do the authors of "China Revealed" (McClatchey) and "Phallicism."
The first discovers "the old phallic gods, represented under two evident symbols -- the Khan or Yang,
which is the membrum virile, and the Kwan or Yin, the pudendum muliebre." (See "Phallicism," p.
273.) Such a rendering seems the more strange as Kwan-Shi-Yin (Avalokiteswara) and Kwan-Yin,
besides being now the patron deities of the Buddhist ascetics, the Yogis of Thibet, are the gods of
chastity, and are, in their esoteric meaning, not even that which is implied in the rendering of Mr.
Rhys Davids' "Buddhism," (p. 202): "The name Avalokiteshwara . . . means 'the Lord who looks
down from on high.' "Nor is Kwan-Shi-Yin "the Spirit of the Buddhas present in the Church," but,
literally interpreted, it means "the Lord that is seen," and in one sense, "the divine SELF perceived by
Self" (the human) -- the Atman or seventh principle merged in the Universal, perceived by, or the
object of perception to, Buddhi, the sixth principle or divine Soul in man. In a still higher sense,
Avalokiteshwara = Kwan-Shi-Yin, referred to as the seventh Universal principle, is the Logos

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 472 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

perceived by the Universal Buddhi -- or Soul, as the synthetic aggregate of the Dhyani-Buddhas: and
is not the "Spirit of Buddha present in the Church," but the omnipresent universal Spirit manifested in
the temple of Kosmos or Nature. This Orientalistic etymology of Kwan and Yin is on a par with that
of "Yogini," which, we are told by Mr. Hargrave Jennings, "is a Sanskrit word, in the dialects
pronounced Yogi or Zogee (!), and is equivalent to Sena, and exactly the same as Duti or Duti-Ca' -i.e., a sacred prostitute of the temple, worshipped as Yoni or Sakti" (p. 60). "The books of morality,"
in India, "direct a faithful wife to shun the society of Yogini or females who have been adored as Sakti
. . . amongst the votaries of a most licentious description." Nothing should surprise us after this. And it
is, therefore, with hardly a smile that we find another preposterous absurdity quoted about "Budh," as
being a name "which signifies not only the sun as the source of generation but also the male organ
(Round Towers of Ireland; quoted by Mr. Hargrave Jennings in "Phallicism," p. 264). Max Muller, in
his "False Analogies," says that "the most celebrated Chinese scholar of his time, Abel Remusat,"
maintains "that the three syllables I Hi Wei (in the fourteenth chapter of the Tao-te-king) were meant
for Je-ho-vah (Science of Religion, p. 332); and again, Father Amyot, who "feels certain that the three
persons of the Trinity could be recognised" in the same work. And if Abel Remusat, why not
Hargrave Jennings? Every scholar will recognise the absurdity of ever seeing in Budh, "the
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enlightened" and "the awakened," a "phallic symbol."
Kwan-shi-yin, then, is "the Son identical with his Father" mystically, or the Logos -- the word. He is
called the "Dragon of Wisdom" in Stanza III., as all the Logoi of all the ancient religious systems are
connected with, and symbolised by, serpents. In old Egypt, the God Nahbkoon, "he who unites the
doubles," (astral light re-uniting by its dual physiological and spiritual potency the divine human to its
purely divine Monad, the prototype "in heaven" or Nature) was represented as a serpent on human
legs, either with or without arms. It was the emblem of the resurrection of Nature, as also of Christ
with the Ophites, and of Jehovah as the brazen serpent healing those who looked at him; the serpent
being an emblem of Christ with the Templars also, (see the Templar degree in Masonry). The symbol
of Knouph (Khoum also), or the soul of the world, says Champollion (Pantheon, text 3), "is
represented among other forms under that of a huge serpent on human legs; this reptile, being the
emblem of the good genius and the veritable Agathodaemon, is sometimes bearded." The sacred
animal is thus identical with the serpent of the Ophites, and is figured on a great number of engraved
stones, called Gnostic or Basilidean gems. This serpent appears with various heads (human and
animal), but its gems

[[Vol. 1, Page]] 473 SNOBS, OR DRAGONS?

are always found inscribed with the name [[CHNOUBIS]] (Chnoubis). This symbol is identical with
one which, according to Jamblichus and Champollion, was called "the first of the celestial gods"; the
god Hermes, or Mercury with the Greeks, to which god Hermes Trismegistos attri butes the invention
of, and the first initiation of men into, magic; and Mercury is Budh, Wisdom, Enlightenment, or "Reawakening" into the divine Science.
To close, Kwan-Shi-Yin and Kwan-Yin are the two aspects (male and female) of the same principle in
Kosmos, Nature and Man, of divine wisdom and intelligence. They are the "Christos-Sophia" of the
mystic Gnostics -- the Logos and its Sakti. In their longing for the expression of some mysteries never
to be wholly comprehended by the profane, the Ancients, knowing that nothing could be preserved in
human memory without some outward symbol, have chosen the (to us) often ridiculous images of the
Kwan-Yins to remind man of his origin and inner nature. To the impartial, however, the Madonnas in
crinolines and the Christs in white kid gloves must appear far more absurd than the Kwan-Shi-Yin and
Kwan-Yin in their dragon garb. The subjective can hardly be expressed by the objective. Therefore,
since the symbolic formula attempts to characterise that which is above scientific reasoning, and as
often far beyond our intellects, it must needs go beyond that intellect in some shape or other, or else it
will fade out from human remembrance.
---------------------

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