PLEASE NOTE: 2023 is my eighth consecutive year of analysing a book of scripture central to a religion. Before The Secret Doctrine, I absorbed the teachings of The Quran (Islam - 2016), The Satanic Bible (LaVeyan Satanism - 2017), Dianetics (Scientology - 2018), The Bible (Christianity - 2019), The Book Of The Law (Thelema - 2020), the Tao Te Ching (Taoism - 2021), and The Corpus Hermeticum (Hermeticism - 2022). Check them all out and you will be different for it.
Reading back on my notes, I was amused to find the words "BE CAREFUL" scrawled at the utmost top of my first page. This is an apt representation of my self-confidence when I initially picked up The Secret Doctrine, partially owed to my impressionability, but also as a reflection of author Helena Blavatsky's reputation.
Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (HPB) was born in the USSR in 1831. From a young age, she expressed an obsession with esotericism (and, by some sources, psychic powers), which dictated her line of travel through Asia. Annoyingly, accounts of her journey are so mismatched that nobody knows what to believe, but there is no denying her hunger for knowledge and impossibly vast research abilities. By all narratives, Blavatsky thought of herself as a messianic figure, and she would expend immense energy attempting to prove that to others, which resulted in a hefty body of work from her pen.
So, who gave Blavatsky this audacious vision to speak from these prophetic platforms? Well, the Masters of the Ancient Wisdom, of course! According to HPB, she came across enlightened beings (known as the Initiates) who exist on etheric planes alternate to our boring realm. They went by names such as Morya and Koot Hoomi, and they sent her to Tibet to train her in this otherworldly awareness. During this time, she was granted access to holy texts that went beyond those found in human libraries, and when she finally returned to the West, she had a mission to bring this unorthodox insight to the masses.
Madame Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society in the States in 1875 and went on to write her two most famous (and largest!) publications. The first was 1877's Isis Unveiled, which was two volumes with a total of 1,471 pages. It came under severe scrutiny as an accused regurgitation of Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, and Spiritualism, but it sold well, with 1,000 copies gone within a week.
Eleven years later, in 1888, Blavatsky published her defining work, The Secret Doctrine, the topic at hand. Again, at two volumes and 1,478 pages, it was a monumental dumping ground for the seemingly bottomless knowledge Blavatsky possessed—or was indeed taught, as she claimed.
The Secret Doctrine is (so says Blavatsky) essentially a translation (and a detailed interpretation) of a different text titled The Book of Dzyan, the "accumulated Wisdom of the Ages". Reportedly, these ancient collections of Tibetan stanzas hold the keys to unlock the root message of every religious and mystical theology ever, but were long hidden safely away from the public eye. However, even when read, they are cryptically poetic, disguised beneath oodles of symbolism and numerology so that people like us could never comprehend it. But do not fear! The Initiates were there, helping Blavatsky to decode the material and unpick the riddles of the Universe. And that, in summary, is what a significant portion of The Secret Doctrine consists of: metaphoric verses with intricate analyses following.
In another explanation, The Secret Doctrine (or The Book of Dzyan) is one lengthy history lesson driven by unprovable yet fascinating speculation packaged as fact. The first volume, Cosmogenesis, focuses on the birth and evolution of the Universe. The second volume, Anthropogenesis, focuses on the evolution of our Earth and the human race. Coupled together, it is sold as the "synthesis of science, religion, and philosophy", and what's more, it delivers on its promise, doing its damndest to amalgamate every shred of knowledge.
Now, to satisfy the subject of philosophy is an easy feat. It is a fluid study by nature that can be debated and then moulded into whatever shape you like. Science is a tougher battle, but Blavatsky does not shy from the matter, trying her best to take these (forgivably dated) understandings on board, connecting them to her grander plan or fervently fighting its findings when incongruent with her cause (which is a brave, if not insane pursuit, and something I will highlight in deeper detail later).
But at its core, Theosophy is a religious organisation, which is undoubtedly Blavatsky's area of expertise. What's known as a "perennial philosophy", Theosophy believes (as do I) that every religious tradition shares a common origin of Ancient Wisdom, feeding from a fundamentally identical schooling. And while it spends tremendous portions discussing the Abrahamic traditions (with more weight to the Gnostics and especially Kabbalah), the Doctrine remains inescapably intertwined within the dharmic teachings of the East. I suppose it's no big surprise. One thing my quest has proven to me is that the further back on the timeline you go, the more powerful the ideas become due to their unrestricted lack of specifics. The Vedas (Hinduism) are some of the (or, very likely, the) most profound scriptures the world has seen, and Theosophy always retains its grip on that narrative. Following the Hindu soil, we have the evolution into Buddhism, of which Theosophy is directly connected. In the beginning, The Secret Doctrine frequently mentions the book Esoteric Buddhism, written by A. P. Sinnett. He was a hugely influential member of the Theosophical movement, and it is a piece I look forward to picking up.
Of course, we could still accuse this publication of potential manipulated data, but Blavatsky does not skip on extensive footnotes (at times taking up the majority of the page) along with a library worth of references. This onslaught of clarifications splits the reading experience in two and weighs heavy upon the slog-like chore that the Secret Doctrine already was. That said, these infinitely pedantic citations assist her case as something she has not just made up by herself and is instead airtight in various of its suggestions. Without the internet, I can't fathom how she's accomplished this project. How many books did she consume to build this tower? The mind spins.
As for what it teaches, perhaps it's easiest to first lump Theosophy into the Pantheism/Panentheism category, a term Blavatsky has touted while equally refusing to commit to. Here, "God" can be understood as the entirety of the Universe as a collective macrocosm in which we live (or maybe as something that exists slightly higher above this idea, greater than the sum of its parts). Theosophy refers to this as the "Absolute", which is the perfect word if there ever was one. By definition, it is the root of everything from where spirit and matter manifest. And as Theosophy ties so deeply into Hinduism, we could effortlessly trade the concept for Brahman (or Para Brahman, an unnecessary name for an even more potent Brahman, which I learned from this book). These relations to the "Ultimate Reality" have numerous names across different theologies, such as "The All" (Hermeticism), "The One" (Neoplatanism), or, most famously, "The Dao" (Daoism), which are interchangeable according to many, including me. It's an undefinable thing. Not necessarily conscious or unconscious. Deeper than anything we can comprehend in our little finite minds.
I happily concur with the above, but my commitment becomes hazy regarding the subdivisions of what should be an unconditional picture. I don't see the necessity of anything other than Everything is Everything. And with the contradicting theories and labels provided across the religious board, what gives each of them the authority to claim the exact mechanics? Because no matter what any theology claims, they are propositions and nothing more.
However, Theosophy's teachings run sickeningly obscure, making for a convincing forcefield of impenetrably intricate arguments. This places the reader in a challenging position if ever asked to repeat what they were told. Nevertheless, some bits stuck with me due to their significance and otherworldliness, and I'll try to relay those now.
Remaining in the Vedic realm, "The Great Breath" (aka Absolute Abstract Motion) is a concept Theosophy subscribes to. It illustrates the emanation from the Absolute's essence, whereby the unfathomable pre-cosmic raw substance "exhales" into an expanded state where everything manifests. Physical objects to principles, phenomena to laws, it is the creation of the illusionary reality (Maya) as we perceive it. But it is still just an exhale. And once we have evolved to the furthest extended point, the inhale will begin, and life as we know it will contract, collapsing into the source.
Within this process, there is another key component known as Fohat. You often bump into this word in Theosophy under a myriad of contexts, but it is essentially "the animating principle electrifying every atom into life." In that way, it is the force that propels atoms together to create discernible material for us to perceive. Quantum mechanics have recently caught up with this in the 1970s with electron properties and the strong interaction of hadron-bound states. Still, of course, there are spoken differences in terms of spiritual presence, even if there does not need to be.
Another reference you'll often encounter (probably above any other) is the number seven. There is not a number in Theosophy that isn't seven or at least somehow manipulated to look like a seven. In many natural ways, it checks out (seven notes on a scale, seven colours in a rainbow, etc.), but for Theosophists, it resonates on a far more profound dimension. And here we come into the evolutionary cycles.
According to the Secret Doctrine, every piece of our world advances through a circle within a circle within a circle. Each of these circles consists of seven points. 0 is the nothingness of the Absolute. 1 - 3 is the emanation away from the source, further into the tangible physical. 4 is the turning point. And 5 - 7 is when we collapse back into spirituality. It's kind of like a respiratory diagram.
Concerning the human race's distinct collective cycle, I believe we have recently surpassed the turning point (now at number 5). It is suspicious because every religion claims its current age as the "shifting era" since the dawn of the written word. Doomsday theories forever state that something is just about to happen. But it never does. It never has. "Time will tell" is what all these prophets say, and so we wait, in the case of the Secret Doctrine, for well over a century, still waiting. What has spiritually changed from its publication date? Perhaps a lot. And to be fair, it does mention that it works as a spectrum, whereby some people will have slid ahead at 6 while others are left behind at 4, etc. Again, it's down to whether you trust the specifics or not.
I could latch onto an endless amount of additional Theosophical ideas, terms, and sevens that attempt to connect to one another with stretchy pieces of gum. But armed with the above knowledge alone, we can already deduce some sort of a rough summary to cover the basics of The Secret Doctrine. Everything emanates from the same spiritual source, and the further we evolve, the more entangled with the material illusionary realm we find ourselves (Maya). However, this process goes in cycles with seven defined points, which are made up of infinitely smaller cycles with seven defined points and are part of an infinite amount of bigger cycles made up of seven defined points. As the human race, we have gone through many iterations and our current collective majority have started to return to the source, meaning higher spirituality and fewer material "truths". And this information has been passed to us from otherworldly Ascended Masters (including Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, etc.) who have taught the exact thing through all the fundamental teachings of every religion.
The biggest heartbreak of this story is that The Secret Doctrine, even at its near-thousand-and-a-half pages, is an incomplete work. Blavatsky had plans to publish volumes 3 and 4, but she fell victim to the influenza epidemic and died in London in 1891 at the age of 59. At the time of her death, public opinion was polarised. Many accused her of fraudulent assertions (especially surrounding her self-proclaimed paranormal abilities), while many others mourned the loss of profound texts that could have been. However, she did leave behind extensive notes, which were then compiled and rewritten by fellow Theosophist Annie Besant as Volume 3. This publication proved highly controversial, with most Theosophists shunning it. Hence, I am fine with not adding that to my bucket. Still, I wouldn't mind giving it a go one day. Some readers swear it's alright.
But even at only two volumes, I liken Theosophy's central texts to an esoteric bomb blasting down the historical timeline in either direction. When it comes to past holy scriptures, The Secret Doctrine incorporates every one of them, merging and reinterpreting symbolism to form a coherent-ish picture between each. If you pay attention, it is akin to a treasure chest of ideas shattering open. For me, even The Bible could never be read the same again, melting into a metaphorical putty whereby the once fascinating lores were reshaped into semi-scientific ruminations.
Yet, while the past works as a significant pillar beneath this journey, the future is brighter. Was The Secret Doctrine a result of the revival of mysticism in the late 19th century? Or perhaps it was the very cause? Either way, the influence of these teachings remains vast and undeniable. Since its publication, various prominent figures have expressed a deep fascination with the philosophy, including Lewis Carroll, Thomas Edison, Carl Jung, and even Gandhi, who stated, "It is Hinduism at its best. Theosophy is the Brotherhood of Man".
Anthroposophy (which led to Waldorf education) was a direct Theosophical baby as founder Rudolf Steiner was majorly involved in the organisation. There are also unmistakable similarities between author Helena Blavatsky's approach to writing and Aleister Crowley's vague efforts (such as The Book of the Law). Scholars have further noted the profound impact this doctrine had on Islamic mysticism (Sufism), not to mention the spread of Hinduism and Buddhism in the West. And, finally, any Western New Age branch you can name has almost certainly sprung off this trunk.
However, the difference between Blavatsky and those inspired works is that she makes everyone look like children. In every way, Steiner, Crowley, and whoever else were too lazy to pursue what Blavatsky managed and ultimately produced half-assed mimicry at best and a worthless pile of hypothetical selective research at worst. In another way, I am reminded of David Icke's writing, which inescapably feels like a poor man's Blavatsky from various comparison points. This includes his intentions to be considered a guru, hoping to follow in Helena's footsteps using the cheapest brand of philosophy he could find. One may also argue they both utilise the Gish gallop technique, whereby it's very difficult to confirm their tellings because it's a bombardment of information, overwhelming the reader's patience. In 1992, Icke wrote a book called Love Changes Everything, which is based on Theosophy, and many of his other publications allude to The Secret Doctrine, even his lizard-fixation probably stemming from her "ancient dragon men" claims.
The authority of her resume makes sense when diving into the murky thickness of her work, as like The Bible, its so convoluted that you can yank it in any direction you prefer. To make matters even more confusing, Blavatsky has said that we should not read this book before reading The Key to Theosophy, which I didn't do. Additionally, she has explicitly stated not to attempt it from cover to cover, as one will only become frustrated. I can attest to this fact. She has provided alternate sequencing, but enjoying a book in its page order is the traditional method of reading, and I'm old school. So I did so, and have no regrets.
Still, the repercussions of my actions were evident very early on. I realised I was sinking and retaliated by souping up my artillery as fast I could using outside methods. First, I watched around eight hours of video where Pablo Sender explained The Doctrine Doctrine. He is a Theosophist who really knows his stuff, and I got a lot out of that. I then read The Secret Doctrine abridged version by Michael Gomes, which is wholly ill-advised by HPB and Theosophists alike. But as it was consumed in conjunction with the real thing, it certainly assisted. Extra shout-outs to Theosophy Wiki and Theosophy World for the light when I got stuck. And I must finally note that I studied the Corpus Hermeticum in the middle of my Secret Doctrine undertaking, and this additional wisdom unlocked a ton of these teachings that I did not understand before. I imagine by investigating each religion separately, you will uncover new corners of this education that weren't available to you previously.
But despite my efforts, Blavatsky's dedication to an unavoidably theoretical field, mixed with her unrestrained flood of knowledge, leaves us with an impossible book to fully grasp—definitely the most testing I've ever attempted. Without a doubt, you'll need quite the background in spiritual scripture for any of this information to penetrate your aching skull because it drops you into an ocean of preexisting conceptions and expects you to swim on your own. I consider myself pretty versed in religious subjects, but I struggled to hold onto more than 60% of these passages, and even that may be an overestimate. My ultimate strategy was to get through four pages a day. Any more than that, my fatigue would reject it.
Yet in there lies perhaps The Doctrine's strongest weapon. The topics are so expansive that they cover everything, drawing dots based on selective research and then joining the dots they drew anyway. Utilising this method, one can compose anything they like, interpreting obscure information to fit the convictions they designed themselves. Explicit statements are made about unprovable assumptions while compartmentalising aspects of other theories repackaged with different names. Furthermore, it's so tricky to discern what's metaphorical and what's literal, and I never knew what to take note of because even the most intriguing of sections could just as easily be imaginary. Numerology is a particularly bothersome example as one cannot verify it, leaving an easy path to influence coincidence while relying on the reader to accept what it means in the context provided. I admire the boldness, but taking something's word for its word is a dangerous game, and I cannot be a part of that.
Regardless, even when meeting these complex subjects on their level, her writing often fails us too, with a waffling tendency to overexplain everything for countless pages, complicating the read further. I do blame some of this on a language barrier. Her English is fluent and articulate, but she makes the most common error second-language people make, which is over-compensating through verbosity. She unnecessarily adds poetics and fairy tale wording to stitch together strange terminology that elongates sentences to breaking point.
Following a side thought, her style reminds me of L. Ron Hubbard (or rather, chronologically, L. Ron Hubbard reminds me of her), where every sentence is amplified into pedantic theoretical explanations that muddle instead of clarifying and would be better served if simplified. There's an easier way! It's the curse of philosophers, I suppose, too smarty pants for their own good. It lifts her to an unattainable standard, producing scripture that makes less sense than any I've read, not necessarily because it's unbelievable or insane, but because it's so challenging to comprehend. This, by the way, was not the case for Hubbard, as his material could be summarised in a Tweet.
If you can handle it, my qualms with The Secret Doctrine have only just begun. Perhaps scholars' most noted issue is that the existence of the Initiates and The Book of Dzyan has only one reference point: Blavatsky herself. Due to this lack of evidence, these stanzas face much-deserved criticism and debunking. The historian community generally hypothesise that Blavatsky made it all up as the world's biggest exercise in spiritual masturbation. In fairness, however, Blavatsky counters by acknowledging the opposition, agreeing that no scholar could possibly believe her, which, in turn, makes me slightly more inclined to believe her.
But it doesn't help her case when she (rather ballsily) attacks accepted scientific theories. Initiates blessing Blavatsky with secret knowledge, sure, fine, I can suspend my disbelief for the sake of the experience. And who am I to say she's fabricating that story, anyway? But when she claims the moon is older than the sun. And when she claims we did not evolve from monkeys. And when she spends chapters trying to convince us of the former existence of giants and dragons. That's when I'd be more reluctant to defend her work in public. Although, strangely, the Biblical dragons could be dinosaurs, right? Tales may have been spun surrounding those fossils, surely? I could play that game.
Another speed bump shrouded beneath every occult text is the dedication to the ancients. We study archaic symbology for clues to a hidden knowledge once possessed that we do not. In one way, I accept this as plausible. The evolution of the human mind eventually demanded logic from a Universe that was largely built on semi-illogical energetic forces (and that is scientific, as we see now with the anti-classical unpredictable nature of quantum studies). At the same time, perhaps the truth is sillier than that, whereby the ancients were simple creatures and grasped onto things around them for profound godlike symbolism, such as the egg, the snake, and the sun. Maybe the occult is the process of studying the cryptics into the tokens, which is no better than those who take them literally.
But perhaps the trickiest conversation is Blavatsky's alleged racism. So much of her work revolves around the progression of humans, and our races play an immense role in that. This becomes problematic because, in doing so, she creates a hierarchy between human categories. Many have observed indications of antisemitism (which are reportedly the result of Blavatsky's hatred for Christianity, rooted in Judaism), and others note Theosophy's influence on Ariosophy (basically esoteric Nazism). Meanwhile, I spotted fairly horrid statements about the Indigenous Australians, among less frequent examples.
Of course, Theosophists fight back, stating that there are races who are more physically/spiritually evolved, yet we all derive from the same divine spark. That doesn't make anything better. However, what will soften me is that times were very different in 1888, and people were a product of their society, unaware of how offensive they were because those parameters had not yet been defined (as they continue to be sharpened yearly). The dregs of racism are dying out, but they still live strongest within the ignorance of older generations. They are of a contrasting period. We can't argue our way through convictions of that age, but we can smile and nod as we graph how such stances will pass from the conversation soon. There's never an excuse, but in this perception, one can find immense hope.
Be that as it may, and moving on, I consider my plethora of complaints to be of no relevance. Even if HPB is talking absolute rubbish pulled from her bum, it's the highest-quality bum-stuff I've ever come across. She took no shortcuts here. The amount of labour that has gone into such an incomprehensible undertaking can be easily weighed simply by holding these heavy books in your hand. And whatever the outcome, she was utterly committed to the task.
Perhaps making up a juicy backstory about the Initiates was a smart move to muster attention or validate her theories using some grand mystical fable. Maybe every religion requires its folklore, as they have each done so. But what is indisputable is that Blavatsky is one of the most impressive religious academics ever to author a book. For starters, she spoke Russian, Georgian, English, French, Italian, Arabic, and Sanskrit, which is exceptional by any standard. More on topic, I would bet money that nobody can find anyone who grasps exoteric and esoteric wisdom as in-depth as she does. Her obsession with these topics hardens like cement between the quantity and quality of her content, so much so that I do not have the knowledge even to suggest what she may have left out. And, remember, she achieved this in the late 1800s, internetless and all! This adds up to a compelling piece of education, one that, if nothing else, she certainly believes. Hence, no matter what was or wasn't a fabrication, the data is still far ahead of anything that came before or since, proven by the persistence of its influence. And maybe that's all the truth we need?
Because there is a transcendent fact above this: Blavatsky is not preying on stupid people. Quite the opposite, Theosophy's target market is the most educated of society, even if those readers must have some leeway when it comes to a scientifically provable reality. That is a very thin section to be aiming for! But instead of dumbing her message down to reach a larger audience, she went out of her way with a minimal payoff, considering how relatively unknown Theosophy remains.
Hence, it sits snugly in the underground library, the material far too challenging to rear its head in any commercial circles, remaining largely unheard of and unread. There is an extra mystical flavour to that result, whereby there are esoteric teachings, and then there are full-blown expert-level borderline impenetrable occult teachings. And even if they bubble into your pool of awareness, you still could never decode it, upholding the "secret" in The Secret Doctrine. If there is a more complex scripture, I can't read it.
Theosophy deserves much higher praise, and it's almost tragic how under-spread it is, considering the monumental complexities it offers. Given the era it is written, it's odd that it didn't alter the world more than it did (or that she didn't get murdered). Because if you choose to believe it, it will change everything in your life. But did I believe it? Did it change everything in my life? And the answer is... not that simple.
For me, Theosophy resonated less as a spiritual religion and more as a mental one. Even as you start to find your groove, it's a textbook education rather than an intense realisation. It spends so many of its pages arguing its case using all the logic it can—which is admirable and imperative for our current science-based mindsets—but it loses stacks of what we should feel in its arguments. Then again, Theosophists assert that The Secret Doctrine isn't meant to be understood per se. These texts are meant to be meditated upon until the reader experiences their own truths within the words. There's an intended stimulation of the spirit and development of the mind in a way that awakens a deeper level of perception. And perhaps something like that happened to me, but it's impossible to say. It took two years to complete this book, and my spiritual comprehension has leapt forward immeasurably in that time. But is this owed to Theosophy? Or my countless other readings and musings? With such a varied mix of beliefs smashed into my brain every day, how could I differentiate and credit accordingly?
Personally, I don't value that type of analysis. Whatever happens on the quest for enlightenment, you kinda have to go with it and hope pieces leap out, stick, and make changes in your thought patterns. And certainly, hefty sections of this book did just that. Like anything worthy, it operates subconsciously, where later reflections and imaginary scenarios develop profound connections to illogical notions. The answer is not about finding answers. It's about gradually accessing higher planes of spiritual awareness until you break through. But break through what, exactly? The Maya? Is that even a good idea? What then? I've met people who claim to have "escaped the Matrix", and the only aspect they had in common was that they were arrogant self-celebratory condescending assholes with zero proof of their claims.
Still, somewhere in these vague theoretical ramblings, I am more likely to locate my place than other comparable texts. The fundamental ideology of Theosophy feels 100% legit to me (even if it's nothing particularly new—although, then again, are my familiar ideas rooted in Theosophy anyway?). And if you think it's rubbish, where is the harm? It never asks anyone to perform strange rituals or obey restricting practices. It just wants to be heard because it has much to say, even if what it says is either things I've already thought of, things that were too hypothetical to resonate with me, or things entirely over my head due to their complexities.
However, none of this detracts from how impressive the work was, and perhaps most importantly, how it granted me the ability to let go and sink deeper into all realms of theology as metaphors, finding better ways to connect everything into the same picture, including philosophy and science. As I type this, my fascination with The Book of Genesis as a symbolic tale has intensified to permanent excitement, and I owe the seeds of that to The Secret Doctrine.
Futhermore, mini-epiphanies (epiph-minis?) did occur albeit with expansive spaces between them. Certain lines within this book made me feel like I was on drugs. Remembering to exist from the Hindu position of Atman (soul), and then reconnecting as one through Brahman—where you are me, I am you, we are everything, the nonduality of reality—these notions loudly clicked at certain junctures during this journey, and today I find it easier to get back there. Such concepts may not be exclusive to Theosophy; indeed, they are shared across any mystical work worth its bread. But that is the primary reason we read esoteric materials anyway. They collaborate to unhurriedly bump our perspectives into new shapes, reframing the Universe and slowly kneading out the hidden knowledge that millions of gurus have agreed upon from history until now. So while the realisations were subtle, they were there, allowing me to venture onward on this mission armed with a toolbox so fucking massive that only Blavatsky could have passed it on. I have had several religious debates recently, and my retorts have honed into something relatively unblockable.
If I reread The Secret Doctrine, it'd be a completely different experience, and if I read it a thousand times, I still would not fully understand it. But this observation is a compliment and should apply to any reputable spiritual material. You have to dedicate your life to the study, and then perhaps you will achieve enlightenment because there is an inevitable power within the repeated process. But will I ever read it again? With all the other books out there? It seems doubtful.
Closing in on the end and in some sort of an overview, I have to commend Theosophy for arriving at the same fundamental conclusions that Janthopoyism has (my religion). It's that every strand of knowledge is correct and connected. The only difference is that while Blavatsky uses a convoluted comb to twine each hair, Janthopoyism takes the opposite root of simplifying the subject to their barest bones and disregarding the rest as fat. There is no right or wrong approach here. In fact, they work quite well together in parallel studies. But unsurprisingly, I prefer Janthopoyism. One of the reasons why is that it protects me. It resonates so profoundly within my soul that it'd be difficult for any other belief system to come and swallow me up. Hence, my intentions to "BE CAREFUL" were laughable by the end, for which I am grateful.
I am honoured to be surely one of the very few who have read The Secret Doctrine in its entirety (on a side note, I carried these heavy books across 33 countries over that time, which was a nightmare in itself!). I wore my reservations on display, but I stand by the statement that, of any spiritual author I know about, Helena Blavatsky exists on a plane several dimensions above the others in terms of education, confidence, and the effort she's exerted to get her word out. Her knowledge is demonstrable, her teachings are religiously inclusive, her ideas are recent enough, and her message is endlessly intricate, warranting a lifetime of analysis that will never reach the bottom (just like every theology must be!). Because of that, I have no problem claiming Helena Blavatsky as the most impressive "prophet" I've ever researched. If she was still around, I'd more likely follow her than anybody else, feeling secure that even if I was wrong, she could at least annihilate absolutely everyone in an argument until they were a wet pulp of regret.
And that's it! Now, as customary, I shall be snipping stand-out pieces from The Secret Doctrine, calling attention to them while adding my two cents to each. Initially, I was concerned that these pull quotes would make little sense when individualised out of context, but while tying this article together, I think it might be ok. You'll get a feel for her writing and what I was dealing with anyway. As per every year, please forgive speling erors, misinterpretations, and my habit of comparing everything to Janthopoyism. Enjoy!
VOLUME I
Cosmogenesis
Cosmogenesis
The first volume, the origin and evolution of the universe! It's very Hindu-based, as previously noted.
PREFACE
This section is about the texts that have gone missing and how they unlock the magic of the ancient scripture that we have yet misunderstood because we lack certain “keys”. I was taking notes diligently at this point.
INTRODUCTORY
One God, all religions are the same. Esoteric teachings have been passed down but people weren’t ready; hence, it was bastardised then lost?
As real Occultism had been prevalent among the Mystics during the centuries that preceded our era, so Magic, or rather Sorcery, with its Occult Arts, followed the beginning of Christianity.
I am heavily spinning off into Gnostic studies lately, so this computes, but what about Kabbalah?
As to those who may reject her testimony, -- i.e., the great majority -- she will bear them no malice, for they will be as right in their way in denying, as she is right in hers in affirming, since they look at TRUTH from two entirely different stand-points. Agreeably with the rules of critical scholarship, the Orientalist has to reject a priori whatever evidence he cannot fully verify for himself. And how can a Western scholar accept on hearsay that which he knows nothing about? Indeed, that which is given in these volumes is selected from oral, as much as from written teachings. This first instalment of the esoteric doctrines is based upon Stanzas, which are the records of a people unknown to ethnology; it is claimed that they are written in a tongue absent from the nomenclature of languages and dialects with which philology is acquainted; they are said to emanate from a source (Occultism) repudiated by science; and, finally, they are offered through an agency, incessantly discredited before the world by all those who hate unwelcome truths, or have some special hobby of their own to defend. Therefore, the rejection of these teachings may be expected, and must be accepted beforehand.
I respect and appreciate her for recognising this.
Says Faigi Diwan, the "witness to the wonderful speeches of a free-thinker who belongs to a thousand sects": "In the assembly of the day of resurrection, when past things shall be forgiven, the sins of the Ka'bah will be forgiven for the sake of the dust of Christian churches." To this, Professor Max Muller replies: "The sins of Islam are as worthless as the dust of Christianity. On the day of resurrection both Muhammadans and Christians will see the vanity of their religious doctrines. Men fight about religion on earth -- in heaven they shall find out that there is only one true religion -- the worship of God's SPIRIT."
Agree with this 100.
This period, beginning with Buddha and Pythagoras at the one end and the Neo-Platonists and Gnostics at the other, is the only focus left in
History wherein converge for the last time the bright rays of light streaming from the aeons of time gone by, unobscured by the hand of bigotry and fanaticism.
I wish I understood this better. Why are those examples on each side of the spectrum?
But to the public in general and the readers of the "Secret Doctrine" I may repeat what I have stated all along, and which I now clothe in the words of Montaigne: Gentlemen, "I HAVE HERE MADE ONLY A NOSEGAY OF CULLED FLOWERS, AND HAVE BROUGHT NOTHING OF MY OWN BUT THE STRING THAT TIES THEM."
A splendidly visual introduction! She takes very little credit for this content. That's the type of attitude that separates her from any other "prophet" I can think of.
PROEM
To use a Metaphor from the Secret Books, which will convey the idea still more clearly, an out-breathing of the 'unknown essence' produces the world; and an inhalation causes it to disappear. This process has been going on from all eternity, and our present universe is but one of an infinite series, which had no beginning and will have no end."
The Great Breath is something Theosophy really got me into. We are an exhale of "God", and will retact into nothing just as quick (as in billions of years).
This passage will be explained, as far as it is possible, in the present work. Though, as it now stands, it contains nothing new to the Orientalist, its esoteric interpretation may contain a good deal which has hitherto remained entirely unknown to the Western student.
This paragraph precedes a plethora of shapes and symbols that represent different ages of evolution. I find it fascianting but it would be too much include here, and futhermore, what good does it really do?
It is not the One Unknown ever-present God in Nature, or Nature in abscondito, that is rejected, but the God of human dogma and his humanized "Word." In his infinite conceit and inherent pride and vanity, man shaped it himself with his sacrilegious hand out of the material he found in his own small brain-fabric, and forced it upon mankind as a direct revelation from the one unrevealed SPACE.
So through the truth of "God" we created a bastardised version of "God". It’s exactly how I feel.
Every atom being said to contain in itself creative energy of the divine breath.
Electron worship! Janthopoyism all the way. (This was a footnote)
The reader who is not a Theosophist, is once more invited to regard all that which follows as a fairy tale, if he likes; at best as one of the yet unproven speculations of dreamers; and, at the worst, as an additional hypothesis to the many Scientific hypotheses past, present and future, some exploded, others still lingering. It is not in any sense worse than are many of the so called Scientific theories; and it is in every case more philosophical and probable.
Lines like these work so well in her favour. I feel she knows this.
STANZA I
The core content of The Secret Doctrine is The Book of Dzyan, sacred texts revealed exclusively to Blavatsky, which she spends analysing, stanza by stanza. There are many problems with this which I have noted above, but that makes the information no less interesting.
"The number seven," says the Kabala, "is the great number of the Divine Mysteries;"
Everything in Theosophy is about the number seven. Everything. If there's a seven somewhere, it'll show you. If there's not a seven somewhere, it'll make one.
Maya or illusion is an element which enters into all finite things, for everything that exists has only a relative, not an absolute, reality, since the appearance which the hidden noumenon assumes for any observer depends upon his power of cognition. To the untrained eye of the savage, a painting is at first an unmeaning confusion of streaks and daubs of color, while an educated eye sees instantly a face or a landscape. Nothing is permanent except the one hidden absolute existence which contains in itself the noumena of all realities. The existences belonging to every plane of being, up to the highest DhyanChohans, are, in degree, of the nature of shadows cast by a magic lantern on a colourless screen; but all things are relatively real, for the cogniser is also a reflection, and the things cognised are therefore as real to him as himself.
Well-put and it agrees with my beliefs.
"The Causes of Existence" mean not only the physical causes known to science, but the metaphysical causes, the chief of which is the desire to exist, an outcome of Nidana and Maya. This desire for a sentient life shows itself in everything, from an atom to a sun, and is a reflection of the Divine Thought propelled into objective existence, into a law that the Universe should exist. According to esoteric teaching, the real cause of that supposed desire, and of all existence, remains for ever hidden, and its first emanations are the most complete abstractions mind can conceive. These abstractions must of necessity be postulated as the cause of the material Universe which presents itself to the senses and intellect; and they underlie the secondary and subordinate powers of Nature, which, anthropomorphized, have been worshipped as God and gods by the common herd of every age. It is impossible to conceive anything without a cause; the attempt to do so makes the mind a blank.
I have thought this myself yet it continues to blow my mind.
STANZA II
The question whether Hydrogen and Oxygen cease to exist, when they combine to form water, is still a moot one, some arguing that since they are found again when the water is decomposed they must be there all the while; others contending that as they actually turn into something totally different they must cease to exist as themselves for the time being; but neither side is able to form the faintest conception of the real condition of a thing, which has become something else and yet has not ceased to be itself. Existence as water may be said to be, for Oxygen and Hydrogen, a state of Non-being which is "more real being" than their existence as gases; and it may faintly symbolise the condition of the Universe when it goes to sleep, or ceases to be, during the "Nights of Brahma" -- to awaken or reappear again, when the dawn of the new Manvantara recalls it to what we call existence.
Well said, easy to understand.
If, in the Vedanta and Nyaya, nimitta is the efficient cause, as contrasted with upadana, the material cause, (and in the Sankhya, pradhana implies the functions of both); in the Esoteric philosophy, which reconciles all these systems, and the nearest exponent of which is the Vedanta as expounded by the Advaita Vedantists, none but the upadana can be speculated upon; that which is in the minds of the Vaishnavas (the Vasishta-dvaita) as the ideal in contradistinction to the real -- or Parabrahm and Isvara -- can find no room in published speculations, since that ideal even is a misnomer, when applied to that of which no human reason, even that of an adept, can conceive.
Sentences like these are a good example as to why The Secret Doctrine is so hard to read! You lose track of the train of thought by the end! You have no ideaa where you began!
STANZA III
The simile of an egg also expresses the fact taught in Occultism that the primordial form of everything manifested, from atom to globe, from man to angel, is spheroidal, the sphere having been with all nations the emblem of eternity and infinity -- a serpent swallowing its tail. To realize the meaning, however, the sphere must be thought of as seen from its centre. The field of vision or of thought is like a sphere whose radii proceed from one's self in every direction, and extend out into space, opening up boundless vistas all around. It is the symbolical circle of Pascal and the Kabalists, "whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere," a conception which enters into the compound idea of this emblem.
The symbols of eggs and snakes (ouroboros) explained, which are obvious as an enternal life type of cycle. Eggs coming out of creatures coming out of eggs. Snakes shedding their skin to become brand new.
As Balzac, the unconscious Occultist of French literature, says somewhere, the Number is to Mind the same as it is to matter: "an incomprehensible agent;" (perhaps so to the profane, never to the Initiated mind). Number is, as the great writer thought, an Entity, and, at the same time, a Breath emanating from what he called God and what we call the ALL; the breath which alone could organize the physical Kosmos, "where naught obtains its form but through the Deity, which is an effect of Number."
Numerology explained somewhat. Something here I like.
The curds are the first differentiation, and probably refer also to that cosmic matter which is supposed to be the origin of the "Milky Way" -- the matter we know. This "matter," which, according to the revelation received from the primeval Dhyani-Buddhas, is, during the periodical sleep of the Universe, of the ultimate tenuity conceivable to the eye of the perfect Bodhisatva -- this matter, radical and cool, becomes, at the first reawakening of cosmic motion, scattered through Space; appearing, when seen from the Earth, in clusters and lumps, like curds in thin milk. These are the seeds of the future worlds, the "Star-stuff."
Poetic in Blavatsky's standard verbose manner.
The essence of darkness being absolute light, Darkness is taken as the appropriate allegorical representation of the condition of the Universe during Pralaya, or the term of absolute rest, or nonbeing, as it appears to our finite minds. The "fire," "heat," and "motion" here spoken of, are, of course, not the fire, heat, and motion of physical science, but the underlying abstractions, the noumena, or the soul, of the essence of these material manifestations -- the "things in themselves," which, as modern science confesses, entirely elude the instruments of the laboratory, and which even the mind cannot grasp, although it can equally little avoid the conclusion that these underlying essences of things must exist. Fire and Water, or Father* and Mother, may be taken here to mean the divine Ray and Chaos. "Chaos, from this union with Spirit obtaining sense, shone with pleasure, and thus was produced the Protogonos (the first-born light)," says a fragment of Hermas. Damascius calls it Dis in "Theogony" -- "The disposer of all things."
Again, this does make sense. We interpret things the best we can using the only words we know.
No religious symbol can escape profanation and even derision in our days of politics and Science. In Southern India the writer has seen a converted native making pujah with offerings before a statue of Jesus clad in woman's clothes and with a ring in his nose. When asking the meaning of the masquerade we were answered that it was Jesu-Maria blended in one, and that it was done by the permission of the Padri, as the zealous convert had no money to purchase two statues or "idols" as they, very properly, were called by a witness -- another but a non-converted Hindu. Blasphemous this will appear to a dogmatic Christian, but the Theosophist and the Occultist must award the palm of logic to the
converted Hindu. The esoteric Christos in the gnosis is, of course, sexless, but in exoteric theology he is male and female.
Very cool story!
If the student bears in mind that there is but One Universal Element, which is infinite, unborn, and undying, and that all the rest -- as in the world of phenomena -- are but so many various differentiated aspects and transformations (correlations, they are now called) of that One, from Cosmical down to microcosmical effects, from super-human down to human and sub-human beings, the totality, in short, of objective existence -- then the first and chief difficulty will disappear and Occult Cosmology may be mastered.
This is 100% what I have come to understand. It’s all the same stuff manifested in different ways. I guess one could tie it into electron activity again.
"Fohat hardens and scatters the seven brothers" (Book III. Dzyan); which means that the primordial Electric Entity -- for the Eastern Occultists insist that Electricity is an Entity -- electrifies into life, and separates primordial stuff or pregenetic matter into atoms, themselves the source of all life and consciousness. "There exists an universal agent unique of all forms and of life, that is called Od, Ob, and Aour, active and passive, positive and negative, like day and night: it is the first light in Creation" (Eliphas Levi's Kabala): --- the first Light of the primordial Elohim -- the Adam, "male and female" -- or (scientifically) ELECTRICITY AND LIFE.
Again, this resonates with me.
STANZA IV
"When our Soul (mind) creates or evokes a thought, the representative sign of that thought is self-engraved upon the astral fluid, which is the receptacle and, so to say, the mirror of all the manifestations of being.
"The sign expresses the thing: the thing is the (hidden or occult) virtue of the sign.
"To pronounce a word is to evoke a thought, and make it present: the magnetic potency of the human speech is the commencement of every manifestation in the Occult World. To utter a Name is not only to define a Being (an Entity), but to place it under and condemn it through the emission of the Word (Verbum), to the influence of one or more Occult potencies. Things are, for every one of us, that which it (the Word) makes them while naming them. The Word (Verbum) or the speech of every man is, quite unconsciously to himself, a BLESSING or a CURSE; this is why our present ignorance about the properties or attributes of the IDEA as well as about the attributes and properties of MATTER, is often fatal to us.
"Yes, names (and words) are either BENEFICENT or MALEFICENT; they are, in a certain sense, either venomous or health-giving, according to the hidden influences attached by Supreme Wisdom to their elements, that is to say, to the LETTERS which compose them, and the NUMBERS correlative to these letters."
This is strictly true as an esoteric teaching accepted by all the Eastern Schools of Occultism. In the Sanskrit, as also in the Hebrew and all other alphabets, every letter has its occult meaning and its rationale; it is a cause and an effect of a preceding cause and a combination of these very often produces the most magical effect. The vowels, especially, contain the most occult and formidable potencies. The Mantras (esoterically, magical rather than religious) are chanted by the Brahmins and so are the Vedas and other Scriptures.
"The sign expresses the thing: the thing is the (hidden or occult) virtue of the sign.
"To pronounce a word is to evoke a thought, and make it present: the magnetic potency of the human speech is the commencement of every manifestation in the Occult World. To utter a Name is not only to define a Being (an Entity), but to place it under and condemn it through the emission of the Word (Verbum), to the influence of one or more Occult potencies. Things are, for every one of us, that which it (the Word) makes them while naming them. The Word (Verbum) or the speech of every man is, quite unconsciously to himself, a BLESSING or a CURSE; this is why our present ignorance about the properties or attributes of the IDEA as well as about the attributes and properties of MATTER, is often fatal to us.
"Yes, names (and words) are either BENEFICENT or MALEFICENT; they are, in a certain sense, either venomous or health-giving, according to the hidden influences attached by Supreme Wisdom to their elements, that is to say, to the LETTERS which compose them, and the NUMBERS correlative to these letters."
This is strictly true as an esoteric teaching accepted by all the Eastern Schools of Occultism. In the Sanskrit, as also in the Hebrew and all other alphabets, every letter has its occult meaning and its rationale; it is a cause and an effect of a preceding cause and a combination of these very often produces the most magical effect. The vowels, especially, contain the most occult and formidable potencies. The Mantras (esoterically, magical rather than religious) are chanted by the Brahmins and so are the Vedas and other Scriptures.
The quotes are by P. Christian, the author of "The History of Magic" and of "L'Homme Rouge des Tuileries". Basically, everything we speak (and do?) merges with the cosmos? This is stuff I think about a lot.
For, as observed by one of the modern adepts of Astrology, "Now that photography has revealed to us the chemical influence of the Sidereal system, by fixing on the sensitized plate of the apparatus milliards of stars and planets that had hitherto baffled the efforts of the most powerful telescopes to discover them, it becomes easier to understand how our solar system can, at the birth of a child, influence his brain -- virgin of any impression -- in a definite manner and according to the presence on the zenith of such or another zodiacal constellation."
I'm not an astronomy junkie but this is a great way of putting this. Undeniable, really.
STANZA V
The question will surely be asked, "Do the Occultists believe in all these 'Builders,' 'Lipika,' and 'Sons of Light' as Entities, or are they merely imageries?" To this the answer is given as plainly: "After due allowance for the imagery of personified Powers, we must admit the existence of these Entities, if we would not reject the existence of spiritual humanity within physical mankind. For the hosts of these Sons of Light and 'Mind-born Sons' of the first manifested Ray of the UNKNOWN ALL, are the very root of spiritual man." Unless we want to believe the unphilosophical dogma of a specially created soul for every human birth -- a fresh supply of these pouring in daily, since "Adam" -- we have to admit the occult teachings. This will be explained in its place.
I was waiting for this. Are these entities merely personifications of a greater force? Apparently not, they are legit. Again, I am unconvinced.
Hegel, the great German thinker, must have known or sensed intuitionally this truth when saying, as he did, that the Unconscious evolved the Universe only "in the hope of attaining clear self-consciousness," of becoming, in other words, MAN; for this is also the secret meaning of the usual Puranic phrase about Brahma being constantly "moved by the desire to create." This explains also the hidden Kabalistic meaning of the saying: "The Breath becomes a stone; the stone, a plant; the plant, an animal; the animal, a man; the man, a spirit; and the spirit, a god." The Mind-born Sons, the Rishis, the Builders, etc., were all men -- of whatever forms and shapes -- in other worlds and the preceding Manvantaras.
Evolution is Brahma's Great Breath (although, I'd prefer it if they said Brahman). I dig the "Breath becomes a stone..." bit.
The "fiery Wind" is the incandescent Cosmic dust which only follows magnetically, as the iron filings follow the magnet, the directing thought of the "Creative Forces." Yet, this cosmic dust is something more; for every atom in the Universe has the potentiality of self-consciousness in it, and is, like the Monads of Leibnitz, a Universe in itself, and for itself. It is an atom and an angel.
Following on closely from the previous, and this page turned out to be one of my favourites. The divinity of the atom agrees with my understanding completely.
Fohat, being one of the most, if not the most important character in esoteric Cosmogony, should be minutely described. As in the oldest Grecian Cosmogony, differing widely from the later mythology, Eros is the third person in the primeval trinity: Chaos, Gaea, Eros: answering to the Kabalistic En-Soph (for Chaos is SPACE, [[Chaino]], "void") the Boundless ALL, Shekinah and the Ancient of Days, or the Holy Ghost; so Fohat is one thing in the yet unmanifested Universe and another in the phenomenal and Cosmic World. In the latter, he is that Occult, electric, vital power, which, under the Will of the Creative Logos, unites and brings together all forms, giving them the first impulse which becomes in time law. But in the unmanifested Universe, Fohat is no more this, than Eros is the later brilliant winged Cupid, or LOVE. Fohat has naught to do with Kosmos yet, since Kosmos is not born, and the gods still sleep in the bosom of "Father-Mother." He is an abstract philosophical idea. He produces nothing yet by himself; he is simply that potential creative power in virtue of whose action the NOUMENON of all future phenomena divides, so to speak, but to reunite in a mystic supersensuous act, and emit the creative ray. When the "Divine Son" breaks forth, then Fohat becomes the propelling force, the active Power which causes the ONE to become TWO and THREE -- on the Cosmic plane of manifestation. The triple One differentiates into the many, and then Fohat is transformed into that force which brings together the elemental atoms and makes them aggregate and combine. We find an echo of this primeval teaching in early Greek mythology. Erebos and Nux are born out of Chaos, and, under the action of Eros, give birth in their turn to Ether and Hemera, the light of the superior and the light of the inferior or terrestrial regions. Darkness generates light. See in the Puranas Brahma's "Will" or desire to create; and in the Phoenician Cosmogony of Sanchoniathon the doctrine that Desire, [[pothos]], is the principle of creation.
A long but detailed definition for Fohat, which is essentially the Pantheistic god with unnecessary add-ons imo. We continue directly on...
Fohat is closely related to the "ONE LIFE." From the Unknown One, the Infinite TOTALITY, the manifested ONE, or the periodical, Manvantaric Deity, emanates; and this is the Universal Mind, which, separated from its Fountain-Source, is the Demiurgos or the creative Logos of the Western Kabalists, and the four-faced Brahma of the Hindu religion. In its totality, viewed from the standpoint of manifested Divine Thought in the esoteric doctrine, it represents the Hosts of the higher creative Dhyan Chohans. Simultaneously with the evolution of the Universal Mind, the concealed Wisdom of Adi-Buddha -- the One Supreme and eternal -- manifests itself as Avalokiteshwara (or manifested Iswara), which is the Osiris of the Egyptians, the Ahura-Mazda of the Zoroastrians, the Heavenly Man of the Hermetic philosopher, the Logos of the Platonists, and the Atman of the Vedantins.* By the action of the manifested Wisdom, or Mahat, represented by these innumerable centres of spiritual Energy in the Kosmos, the reflection of the Universal Mind, which is Cosmic Ideation and the intellectual Force accompanying such ideation, becomes objectively the Fohat of the Buddhist esoteric philosopher. Fohat, running along the seven principles of AKASA, acts upon manifested substance or the One Element, as declared above, and by differentiating it into various centres of Energy, sets in motion the law of Cosmic Evolution, which, in obedience to the Ideation of the Universal Mind, brings into existence all the various states of being in the manifested Solar System.
The Solar System, brought into existence by these agencies, consists of Seven Principles, like everything else within these centres. Such is the teaching of the trans-Himalayan Esotericism. Every philosophy, however, has its own way of dividing these principles.
Fohat, then, is the personified electric vital power, the transcendental binding Unity of all Cosmic Energies, on the unseen as on the manifested planes, the action of which resembles -- on an immense scale -- that of a living Force created by WILL, in those phenomena where the seemingly subjective acts on the seemingly objective and propels it to action. Fohat is not only the living Symbol and Container of that Force, but is looked upon by the Occultists as an Entity -- the forces he acts upon being cosmic, human and terrestrial, and exercising their influence on all those planes respectively. On the earthly plane his influence is felt in the magnetic and active force generated by the strong desire of the magnetizer. On the Cosmic, it is present in the constructive power that carries out, in the formation of things -- from the planetary system down to the glow-worm and simple daisy -- the plan in the mind of nature, or in the Divine Thought, with regard to the development and growth of that special thing. He is, metaphysically, the objectivised thought of the gods; the "Word made flesh," on a lower scale, and the messenger of Cosmic and human ideations: the active force in Universal Life. In his secondary aspect, Fohat is the Solar Energy, the electric vital fluid, and the preserving fourth principle, the animal Soul of Nature, so to say, or -- Electricity. In India, Fohat is connected with Vishnu and Surya in the early character of the (first) God; for Vishnu is not a high god in the Rig Veda. The name Vishnu is from the root vish, "to pervade," and Fohat is called the "Pervader" and the Manufacturer, because he shapes the atoms from crude material.* In the sacred texts of the Rig Veda, Vishnu, also, is "a manifestation of the Solar Energy," and he is described as striding through the Seven regions of the Universe in three steps, the Vedic God having little in common with the Vishnu of later times. Therefore the two are identical in this particular feature, and one is the copy of the other.
The Solar System, brought into existence by these agencies, consists of Seven Principles, like everything else within these centres. Such is the teaching of the trans-Himalayan Esotericism. Every philosophy, however, has its own way of dividing these principles.
Fohat, then, is the personified electric vital power, the transcendental binding Unity of all Cosmic Energies, on the unseen as on the manifested planes, the action of which resembles -- on an immense scale -- that of a living Force created by WILL, in those phenomena where the seemingly subjective acts on the seemingly objective and propels it to action. Fohat is not only the living Symbol and Container of that Force, but is looked upon by the Occultists as an Entity -- the forces he acts upon being cosmic, human and terrestrial, and exercising their influence on all those planes respectively. On the earthly plane his influence is felt in the magnetic and active force generated by the strong desire of the magnetizer. On the Cosmic, it is present in the constructive power that carries out, in the formation of things -- from the planetary system down to the glow-worm and simple daisy -- the plan in the mind of nature, or in the Divine Thought, with regard to the development and growth of that special thing. He is, metaphysically, the objectivised thought of the gods; the "Word made flesh," on a lower scale, and the messenger of Cosmic and human ideations: the active force in Universal Life. In his secondary aspect, Fohat is the Solar Energy, the electric vital fluid, and the preserving fourth principle, the animal Soul of Nature, so to say, or -- Electricity. In India, Fohat is connected with Vishnu and Surya in the early character of the (first) God; for Vishnu is not a high god in the Rig Veda. The name Vishnu is from the root vish, "to pervade," and Fohat is called the "Pervader" and the Manufacturer, because he shapes the atoms from crude material.* In the sacred texts of the Rig Veda, Vishnu, also, is "a manifestation of the Solar Energy," and he is described as striding through the Seven regions of the Universe in three steps, the Vedic God having little in common with the Vishnu of later times. Therefore the two are identical in this particular feature, and one is the copy of the other.
Again, apologies for the massive wall of text, but it's important to get a sense of Fohat, especially in terms of comparitive religion, which this section delivers so well.
What says the esoteric teaching with regard to fire? "Fire," it says, "is the most perfect and unadulterated reflection, in Heaven as on Earth, of the ONE FLAME. It is Life and Death, the origin and the end of every material thing. It is divine 'SUBSTANCE.' " Thus, not only the FIREWORSHIPPER, the Parsee, but even the wandering savage tribes of America, which proclaim themselves "born of fire," show more science in their creeds and truth in their superstitions, than all the speculations of modern physics and learning. The Christian who says: "God is a living Fire," and speaks of the Pentecostal "Tongues of Fire" and of the "burning bush" of Moses, is as much a fireworshipper as any other "heathen." The Rosicrucians, among all the mystics and Kabalists, were those who defined Fire in the right and most correct way. Procure a sixpenny lamp, keep it only supplied with oil, and you will be able to light at its flame the lamps, candles, and fires of the whole globe without diminishing that flame. If the Deity, the radical One, is eternal and an infinite substance ("the Lord thy God is a consuming fire") and never consumed, then it does not seem reasonable that the Occult teaching should be held as unphilosophical when it says: "Thus were the Arupa and Rupa worlds formed: from ONE light seven lights; from each of the seven, seven times seven," etc., etc.
One thing I don't blindly subscribe to but love to read is Theosophy equating fire to "god" in many ways.
This metaphysical tenet can hardly be better described than Mr. Subba Row's in "Bhagavadgita" lectures: "Mulaprakriti (the veil of Parabrahmam) acts as the one energy through the Logos (or 'Eswara'). Now Parabrahmam, is the one essence from which starts into existence a centre of energy,
which I shall for the present call the Logos. . . . It is called the Verbum . . . by the Christians, and it is the divine Christos who is eternal in the bosom of his father. It is called Avalokiteshwara by the Buddhists. . . . In almost every doctrine, they have formulated the existence of a centre of spiritual energy which is unborn and eternal, and which exists in the bosom of Parabrahmam at the time of Pralaya, and starts as a centre of conscious energy at the time of Cosmic activity. . . ." For, as the lecturer premised by saying, Parabraham is not this or that, it is not even consciousness, as it cannot be related to matter or anything conditioned. It is not Ego nor is it Non-ego, not even Atma, but verily the one source of all manifestations and modes of existence.
This was a footnote but I thought it was lovely at explaining that energy stuff.
Note well, "Christos" with the Gnostics meant the impersonal principal, the Atman of the Universe, and the Atma within every man's soul -- not Jesus; though in the old Coptic MSS. in the British Museum "Christos" is almost constantly replaced by "Jesus."
As I sit here and type this, my theology studies are running full-speed into Gnosticism.
All that science has a right to affirm, is that there are no invisible Intelligences living under the same conditions as we do. It cannot deny pointblank the possibility of there being worlds within worlds, under totally different conditions to those that constitute the nature of our world; nor can it deny that there may be a certain limited communication* between some of those worlds and our own. To the highest, we are taught, belong the seven orders of the purely divine Spirits; to the six lower ones belong hierarchies that can occasionally be seen and heard by men, and who do communicate with their progeny of the Earth; which progeny is indissolubly linked with them, each principle in man having its direct source in the nature of those great Beings, who furnish us with the respective invisible elements in us. Physical Science is welcome
to speculate upon the physiological mechanism of living beings, and to continue her fruitless efforts in trying to resolve our feelings, our sensations, mental and spiritual, into functions of their inorganic vehicles. Nevertheless, all that will ever be accomplished in this direction has already been done, and Science will go no farther.
A strong argument against atheism here. Although I am on the fence with a lot of Blavatsky's teachings, she is of great value to have on our side.
"Each world has its Fohat, who is omnipresent in his own sphere of action. But there are as many Fohats as there are worlds, each varying in power and degree of manifestations. The individual Fohats make one Universal, Collective Fohat -- the aspect-Entity of the one absolute Non-Entity, which is absolute Be-Ness, 'SAT.' "Millions and billions of worlds are produced at every Manvantara" -- it is said. Therefore there must be many Fohats, whom we consider as conscious and intelligent Forces. This, no doubt, to the disgust of scientific minds. Nevertheless the Occultists, who have good reasons for it, consider all the forces of Nature as veritable, though supersensuous, states of Matter; and as possible objects of perception to Beings endowed with the requisite senses.
Footnote and I am unsure about all of this. My understanding of Fohat is broader, more absolute. Again, Blavatsky insists of breaking things down into pieces of which their very existence are hypothetical. There is a massive degree of wankery in every occult teaching.
STANZA VI
A period of 311,040,000,000,000 years, according to Brahminical calculations.
I knew this already but just marking it down in writing. It's known as a "kalpa" in Hinduism/Buddhism, the time between creation and recreation of a universe.
The reader must bear in mind that, according to our teaching which regards this phenomenal Universe as a great Illusion, the nearer a body is to the UNKNOWN SUBSTANCE, the more it approaches reality, as being removed the farther from this world of Maya. Therefore, though the molecular constitution of their bodies is not deducible from their manifestations on this plane of consciousness, they nevertheless (from the standpoint of the adept Occultist) possess a distinctive objective if not material structure, in the relatively noumenal -- as opposed to the phenomenal -- Universe. Men of science may term them Force or Forces generated by matter, or "modes of its motion," if they will; Occultism sees in the effects "Elemental" (forces), and, in the direct causes producing them, intelligent DIVINE Workmen. The intimate connection of those Elementals (guided by the unerring hand of the Rulers) -- their correlation we might call it -- with the elements of pure Matter, results in our terrestrial phenomena, such as light, heat, magnetism, etc., etc. Of course we shall never agree with the American Substantialists* who call every Force and Energy -- whether Light, Heat, Electricity or Cohesion -- an "Entity"; for this would be equivalent to calling the noise produced by the rolling of the wheels of a vehicle an Entity -- thus confusing and identifying that "noise" with the driver outside, and the guiding Master Intelligence within the vehicle. But we certainly give that name to the "drivers" and to these guiding Intelligences -- the ruling Dhyan Chohans, as shown. The "Elementals," the Nature-Forces, are the acting, though invisible, or rather imperceptible, secondary Causes and in themselves the effects of primary Causes behind the Veil of all terrestrial phenomena.
Glimpsing through the Maya is where my research will eventually specialise, I can feel it. For now, however, I like the idea of there being a "driver" but I am never convinced about anything.
This may give rise to the idea that there is a decided contradiction between the expounders of the same doctrine; whereas the difference, in reality, arises from the incompleteness of the information given to earlier writers, who thus drew some erroneous conclusions and indulged in premature speculations, in their endeavour to present a complete system to the public. Thus the reader, who is already a student of Theosophy, must not be surprised to find in these pages the rectification of certain statements made in various Theosophical works, and also the explanation of certain points which have remained obscure, because they were necessarily left incomplete.
Calls out its own contradictions but in a way that its learning has evolved. It's fair.
A FEW EARLY THEOSOPHICAL MISCONCEPTIONS CONCERNING PLANETS, ROUNDS, AND MAN.
Goes off on a side tangent here about text they've written that was wrong. It's mostly through theft of an Esoteric Buddhism book, which I wish to read.
If, for the sake of a clearer mental conception, we imagine the human principles to be arranged as in the following scheme, we shall obtain the annexed diagram of correspondences:
There's a diagram here that looks important.
"Entity" may be thought a strange term to use in the case of a globe; but the ancient philosophers, who saw in the earth a huge "animal," were wiser in their generation than our modern geologists are in theirs; and Pliny, who called the Earth our kind nurse and mother, the only element which is not inimical to man, spoke more truly than Watts, who fancied that he saw in her the footstool of God. For Earth is only the footstool of man in his ascension to higher regions; the vestibule --
". . . . . . . to glorious mansions,
Through which a moving crowd for ever press."
". . . . . . . to glorious mansions,
Through which a moving crowd for ever press."
Beautiful.
The Moon is now the cold residual quantity, the shadow dragged after the new body, into which her living powers and "principles" are transfused. She now is doomed for long ages to be ever pursuing the Earth, to be attracted by and to attract her progeny. Constantly vampirised by her child, she revenges herself on it by soaking it through and through with the nefarious, invisible, and poisoned influence which emanates from the occult side of her nature. For she is a dead, yet a living body. The particles of her decaying corpse are full of active and destructive life, although the body which they had formed is soulless and lifeless. Therefore its emanations are at the same time beneficent and maleficent -- this circumstance finding its parallel on earth in the fact that the grass and plants are nowhere more juicy and thriving than on the graves; while at the same time it is the graveyard or corpse-emanations, which kill. And like all ghouls or vampires, the moon is the friend of the sorcerers and the foe of the unwary. From the archaic aeons and the later times of the witches of Thessaly, down to some of the present tantrikas of Bengal, her nature and properties were known to every Occultist, but have remained a closed book for physicists.
Moon stuff. Not sure I buy any of it but it sounds great on paper.
SEPTENARY DIVISION IN DIFFERENT INDIAN SYSTEMS.
"We give below in a tabular form the classifications adopted by the Buddhist and Vedantic teachers of the principles of man: --
"We give below in a tabular form the classifications adopted by the Buddhist and Vedantic teachers of the principles of man: --
There is a table here showing the different layers of humans (I think?) from an Indian-religion standpoint. Notice how there are seven entries, at least in Esoteric Buddhism.
Its Humanity develops fully only in the Fourth -- our present Round. Up to this fourth Life-Cycle, it is referred to as "humanity" only for lack of a more appropriate term. Like the grub which becomes chrysalis and butterfly, Man, or rather that which becomes man, passes through all the forms and kingdoms during the first Round and through all the human shapes during the two following Rounds. Arrived on our Earth at the commencement of the Fourth in the present series of life-cycles and races, MAN is the first form that appears thereon, being preceded only by the mineral and vegetable kingdoms -- even the latter having to develop and continue its further evolution through man. This will be explained in Book II. During the three Rounds to come, Humanity, like the globe on which it lives, will be ever tending to reassume its primeval form, that of a Dhyan Chohanic Host. Man tends to become a God and then -- GOD, like every other atom in the Universe.
I remember first reading this, thinking, hmmmm interesting. But now it's been so drilled into me that this hardly even registers. Still, it's a good explanation of the cycles.
To this day it is evident that the latter have utterly failed to understand the meaning of the term "Fifth and Sixth Rounders." But it is simply this: every "Round" brings about a new development and even an entire change in the mental, psychic, spiritual and physical constitution of man, all these principles evoluting on an ever ascending scale. Thence it follows that those persons who, like Confucius and Plato, belonged psychically, mentally and spiritually to the higher planes of evolution, were in our Fourth Round as the average man will be in the Fifth Round, whose mankind is destined to find itself, on this scale of Evolution, immensely higher than is our present humanity. Similarly Gautama Buddha -- Wisdom incarnate -- was still higher and greater than all the men we have mentioned, who are called Fifth Rounders, while Buddha and Sankaracharya are termed Sixth Rounders, allegorically. Thence again the concealed wisdom of the remark, pronounced at the time "evasive" -- that a few drops of rain do not make the Monsoon, though they presage it."
Name-dropping people who were ahead of the round? Earlier she also notes that we "are not in the Fifth Round" although I think that means we're still in the fourth round but fifth round people are growing in numbers because it's a transitional phase.
ADDITIONAL FACTS AND EXPLANATIONS CONCERNING THE GLOBES AND THE MONADS.
The evolution of “monads” goes through, you guessed it, seven stages. Its these that become thinking entities, and it’s all karmic and specific and could be absolute bullshit. Where is this coming from?
In reality the Moon is only the satellite of the Earth in one respect, viz., that physically the Moon revolves round the Earth. But in every other respect it is the Earth which is the satellite of the Moon, and not vice versa. Startling as the statement may seem it is not without confirmation from scientific knowledge. It is evidenced by the tides, by the cyclic changes in many forms of disease which coincide with the lunar phases; it can be traced in the growth of plants, and is very marked in the phenomena of human gestation and conception. The importance of the Moon and its influence on the Earth were recognized in every ancient religion, notably the Jewish, and have been remarked by many observers of psychical and physical phenomena. But, so far as Science knows, the Earth's action on the Moon is confined to the physical attraction, which causes her to circle in her orbit. And should an objector insist that this fact alone is sufficient evidence that the Moon is truly the Earth's satellite on other planes of action, one may reply by asking whether a mother, who walks round and round her child's cradle keeping watch over the infant, is the subordinate of her child or dependent upon it; though in one sense she is its satellite, yet she is certainly older and more fully developed than the child she watches.
She says a lot of contradictory-to-science stuff about the moon, which starts here, I guess.
The most developed Monads (the lunar) reach the human germ-stage in the first Round; become terrestrial, though very ethereal human beings towards the end of the Third Round, remaining on it (the globe) through the "obscuration" period as the seed for future mankind in the Fourth Round, and thus become the pioneers of Humanity at the beginning of this, the Fourth Round. Others reach the Human stage only during later Rounds, i.e., in the second, third, or first half of the Fourth Round. And finally the most retarded of all, i.e., those still occupying animal forms after the middle turning-point of the Fourth Round -- will not become men at all during this Manwantara. They will reach to the verge of humanity only at the close of the seventh Round to be, in their turn, ushered into a new chain after pralaya -- by older pioneers, the progenitors of humanity, or the Seed-Humanity (Sishta), viz., the men who will be at the head of all at the end of these Rounds.
This can be used as a decent summary of Theosophy evolution and karmaic reincarnation.
Moreover, a German scientific work is mentioned in a footnote on the same page. It says that a Hanoverian scientist had recently published a Book entitled "Ueber die Auflosung der Arten durch Naturliche Zucht-wahl," in which he shows, with great ingenuity, that Darwin was wholly mistaken in tracing man back to the ape. On the contrary, he maintains that it is the ape which is evolved from man.
Another controversial theme throughout the Secret Doctine is that man did not evolve from ape. At first, I rejected it as ludicrous, but now I'm slightly more open to it as I've come across more articles about an advanced civilisation that lived before us. Not saying I believe it though!
STANZA VI -- Continued
Thus "SATAN," once he ceases to be viewed in the superstitious, dogmatic, unphilosophical spirit of the Churches, grows into the grandiose image of one who made of terrestrial a divine MAN; who gave him, throughout the long cycle of Maha-kalpa the law of the Spirit of Life, and made him free from the Sin of Ignorance, hence of death.
Luciferianism in the more figurative vein, which Blavatsky may have very well played a part in shaping. Fun fact: she started publishing a magazine called Lucifer in 1887.
Mrs. Elizabeth Denton, one of the most learned, and also one of the most materialistic and sceptical women of her age -- the wife of Professor Denton, the well-known American geologist and the author of "The Soul of Things" -- was, nevertheless, one of the most wonderful psychometers some years ago. This is what she described in one of her experiments; with a particle of a meteorite placed on her forehead, in an envelope, the lady, not being aware of what it contained, said:
"What a difference between that which we recognise as matter here and that which seems like matter there! In the one, the elements are so coarse and so angular, I wonder that we can endure it all, much more that we can desire to continue our present relations to it; in the other, all the elements are so refined, they are so free from those great, rough angularities, which characterize the elements here, that I can but regard that as by so much the more than this, the real existence."
"What a difference between that which we recognise as matter here and that which seems like matter there! In the one, the elements are so coarse and so angular, I wonder that we can endure it all, much more that we can desire to continue our present relations to it; in the other, all the elements are so refined, they are so free from those great, rough angularities, which characterize the elements here, that I can but regard that as by so much the more than this, the real existence."
I cannot find any evidence to back this claim up.
STANZA VI -- Continued
Born in the unfathomable depths of Space, out of the homogeneous Element called the World-Soul, every nucleus of Cosmic matter, suddenly launched into being, begins life under the most hostile circumstances. Through a series of countless ages, it has to conquer for itself a place in the infinitudes. It circles round and round between denser and already fixed bodies, moving by jerks, and pulling towards some given point or centre that attracts it, trying to avoid, like a ship drawn into a channel dotted with reefs and sunken rocks, other bodies that draw and repel it in turn; many perish, their mass disintegrating through stronger masses, and, when born within a system, chiefly within the insatiable stomachs of various Suns. (See Comm. to Stanza IV). Those which move slower and are propelled into an elliptic course are doomed to annihilation sooner or later. Others moving in parabolic curves generally escape destruction, owing to their velocity.
In my developed understanding, I believe this as a good descriptor of how it all started.
We must remember, moreover, that the law of Analogy holds good for the worlds, as it does for man; and that as "The ONE (Deity) becomes Two (Deva or Angel) and Two becomes Three (or man)," etc., etc., so we are taught that the Curds (world-stuff) become wanderers, (Comets), these become stars, and the stars (the centres of vortices) our sun and planets -- to put it briefly.
I think there was something similar in the Tao Te Ching?
Let those who doubt this statement explain the mystery of the extraordinary knowledge possessed by the ancients -- alleged to have developed from lower and animal-like savages, the cave-men of the Palaeolithic age -- on any other equally reasonable grounds. Let them turn to such works as those of Vitruvius Pollio of the Augustan age, on architecture, for instance, in which all the rules of proportion are those taught anciently at initiations, if he would acquaint himself with the truly divine art, and understand the deep esoteric significance hidden in every rule and law of proportion. No man descended from a Palaeolithic cave-dweller could ever evolve such a science unaided, even in millenniums of thought and intellectual evolution. It is the pupils of those incarnated Rishis and Devas of the third Root Race, who handed their knowledge from one generation to another, to Egypt and Greece with its now lost canon of proportion; as it is the Disciples of the Initiates of the 4th, the Atlanteans, who handed it over to their Cyclopes, the "Sons of Cycles" or of the "Infinite," from whom the name passed to the still later generations of Gnostic priests. "It is owing to the divine perfection of those architectural proportions that the Ancients could build those wonders of all the subsequent ages, their Fanes, Pyramids, Cave-Temples, Cromlechs, Cairns, Altars, proving they had the powers of machinery and a knowledge of mechanics to which modern skill is like a child's play, and which that skill refers to itself as the 'works of hundred-handed giants.'" (See "Book of God," Kenealy.) Modern architects may not altogether have neglected those rules, but they have superadded enough empirical innovations to destroy those just proportions. It is Vitruvius who gave to posterity the rules of construction of the Grecian temples erected to the immortal gods; and the ten books of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio on Architecture, of one, in short, who was an initiate, can only be studied esoterically. The Druidical circles, the Dolmen, the Temples of India, Egypt and Greece, the Towers and the 127 towns in Europe which were found "Cyclopean in origin" by the French Institute, are all the work of initiated Priest-Architects, the descendants of those primarily taught by the "Sons of God," justly called "The Builders." This is what appreciative posterity says of those descendants. "They used neither mortar nor cement, nor steel nor iron to cut the stones with; and yet they were so artfully wrought that in many places the joints are not seen, though many of the stones, as in Peru, are 18 ft. thick, and in the walls of the fortress of Cuzco there are stones of a still greater size." (Acosta, vi., 14.) "Again, the walls of Syene, built 5,400 years ago, when that spot was exactly under the tropic, which it has now ceased to be, were so constructed that at noon, at the precise moment of the solar solstice, the entire disc of the Sun was seen reflected on their surface -- a work which the united skill of all the astronomers of Europe would not now be able to effect."
This is always a huge debate and is used for everyone, from esoteric educators to UFO chasers to conspiracy theorists. That said, Cusco is an interesting example having only been established around 1200 A.D. That doesn't feel that long ago in compairson to, say, 2550 to 2490 B.C. of the pyramids. What is the timeline exactly?
STANZA VII
One of the explanations of the real though hidden meaning of this Egyptian religious glyph is easy. The crocodile is the first to await and meet the devouring fires of the morning sun, and very soon came to personify the solar heat. When the sun arose, it was like the arrival on earth and among men "of the divine soul which informs the Gods." Hence the strange symbolism. The mummy donned the head of a crocodile to show that it was a soul arriving from the earth.
I'm always open to explanations.
THE ONE RAY MULTIPLIES THE SMALLER RAYS. LIFE PRECEDES FORM, AND LIFE SURVIVES THE LAST ATOM OF FORM. THROUGH THE COUNTLESS RAYS PROCEEDS THE LIFE-RAY, THE ONE, LIKE A THREAD THROUGH MANY JEWELS.
This is a direct Stanza quote. They're usually very cryptic hence these huge books deciphering them, but this one made sense.
"When the seed of the animal man is cast into the soil of the animal woman, that seed cannot germinate unless it has been fructified by the five virtues (the fluid of, or the emanation from the principles) of the six-fold Heavenly man. Wherefore the Microcosm is represented as a Pentagon, within the Hexagon Star, the "Macrocosm." ("[[Anthropos]],") a work on Occult Embryology, Book I.). Then: "The functions of Jiva on this Earth are of a five-fold character. In the mineral atom it is connected with the lowest principles of the Spirits of the Earth (the six-fold Dhyanis); in the vegetable particle, with their second -- the Prana (life); in the animal, with all these plus the third and the fourth; in man, the germ must receive the fruition of all the five. Otherwise he will be born no higher than an animal"; namely, a congenital idiot. Thus in man alone the Jiva is complete. As to his seventh principle, it is but one of the Beams of the Universal Sun. Each rational creature receives only the temporary loan of that which has to return to its source; while his physical body is shaped by the lowest terrestrial lives, through physical, chemical, and physiological evolution. "The Blessed Ones have nought to do with the purgations of matter." (Kabala, Chaldean Book of Numbers).
Breeding between different heirachies of "man". I think I noted this paragraph because it's poetic but I'm not sure about the content at this time.
This was so well understood by the Ancients that the Kabalist even made of soul and body two lives, independent of each other.* The soul, whose body vehicle is the Astral, ethero-substantial envelope, could die and man be still living on earth -- i.e., the soul could free itself from and quit the tabernacle for various reasons -- such as insanity, spiritual and physical depravity, etc. Therefore, that which living men (Initiates) can do, the Dhyanis, who have no physical body to hamper them, can do still better.
This goes on further but I just wanted to note that I agree with the duality of body and spirit. However, I am unsure about bodies living without spirits/souls. It ties into Hermeticism, how some have "mind" (nous) and some don't. But it is not my understanding.
The processes of natural development which we are now considering will at once elucidate and discredit the fashion of speculating on the attributes of the two, three, and four or more "dimensional Space;" but in passing, it is worth while to point out the real significance of the sound but incomplete intuition that has prompted -- among Spiritualists and Theosophists, and several great men of Science, for the matter of that -- the use of the modern expression, "the fourth dimension of Space." To begin with, of course, the superficial absurdity of assuming that Space itself is measurable in any direction is of little consequence. The familiar phrase can only be an abbreviation of the fuller form -- the "Fourth dimension of MATTER in Space." But it is an unhappy phrase even thus expanded, because while it is perfectly true that the progress of evolution may be destined to introduce us to new characteristics of matter, those with which we are already familiar are really more numerous than the three dimensions. The faculties, or what is perhaps the best available term, the characteristics of matter, must clearly bear a direct relation always to the senses of man. Matter has extension, colour, motion (molecular motion), taste, and smell, corresponding to the existing senses of man, and by the time that it fully develops the next characteristic -- let us call it for the moment PERMEABILITY -- this will correspond to the next sense of man -- let us call it "NORMAL CLAIRVOYANCE;" thus, when some bold thinkers have been thirsting for a fourth dimension to explain the passage of matter through matter, and the production of knots upon an endless cord, what they were really in want of, was a sixth characteristic of matter. The three dimensions belong really but to one attribute or characteristic of matter -- extension; and popular common sense justly rebels against the idea that under any condition of things there can be more than three of such dimensions as length, breadth, and thickness. These terms, and the term "dimension" itself, all belong to one plane of thought, to one stage of evolution, to one characteristic of matter. So long as there are foot-rules within the resources of Kosmos, to apply to matter, so long will they be able to measure it three ways and no more; and from the time the idea of measurement first occupied a place in the human understanding, it has been possible to apply measurement in three directions and no more. But these considerations do not militate in any way against the certainty that in the progress of time -- as the faculties of humanity are multiplied -- so will the characteristics of matter be multiplied also. Meanwhile, the expression is far more incorrect than even the familiar one of the "Sun rising or setting."
Long, but she lays into the idea of fourth dimension sooo well here, I am inclined to buy it.
In the second chapter (the Jehovistic), plants and herbs are created before water, just as in the first, light is produced before the Sun. "God made the Earth and the Heavens and every plant of the field before it was in the Earth and every herb of the field before it grew; for the Elohim ('gods') had not caused it to rain upon the earth, etc." (v. 5) -- an absurdity unless the esoteric explanation is accepted. The plants were created before they were in the earth -- for there was no earth then such as it is now; and the herb of the field was in existence before it grew as it does now in the fourth Round.
My notes told that I didn't understand this but recognised it as new information. Now I do. Plants (and indeed everything) existed on a metaphysical plane before they could be brought into the physical realm on Earth. The code was always there. Note, however, that Genesis does not order it that way.
As already indicated, a partial familiarity with the characteristic of matter -- permeability -- which should be developed concurrently with the sixth sense, may be expected to develop at the proper period in this Round. But with the next element added to our resources in the next Round, permeability will become so manifest a characteristic of matter, that the densest forms of this will seem to man's perceptions as obstructive to him as a thick fog, and no more.
Eventually we will see gases.
Thus, in the first Round, the globe, having been built by the primitive fire-lives, i.e., formed into a sphere -- had no solidity, nor qualifications, save a cold brightness, nor form nor colour; it is only towards the end of the First Round that it developed one Element which from its inorganic, so to say, or simple Essence became now in our Round the fire we know throughout the system. The Earth was in her first rupa, the essence of which is the Akasic principle named *** "that which is now known as, and very erroneously termed, Astral Light, which Eliphas Levi calls "the imagination of Nature,"|| probably to avoid giving it its correct name, as others do.
First Round is “ether”, a kind of fire, and by the end it had manifested Earth? Later in the book it equates the second with air and the third with water. Now in the 4th we are here, where matter has manifested? With consciousness? I might be way off with this though.
It might be supposed that these "fiery lives" and the microbes of science are identical. This is not true. The "fiery lives" are the seventh and highest subdivision of the plane of matter, and correspond in the individual with the One Life of the Universe, though only on that plane. The microbes of science are the first and lowest sub-division on the second plane -- that of material prana (or life). The physical body of man undergoes a complete change of structure every seven years, and its destruction and preservation are due to the alternate function of the fiery lives as "destroyers" and "builders." They are "builders" by sacrificing themselves in the form of vitality to restrain the destructive influence of the microbes, and, by supplying the microbes with what is necessary, they compel them under that restraint to build up the material body and its cells. They are "destroyers" also when that restraint is experimenters as Pasteur are the best friends and helpers of the Destroyers and the worst enemies of the Creators -- if the latter were not at the same time destroyers too. However it may be, one thing is sure in this: The knowledge of these primary causes and of the ultimate essence of every element, of its lives, their functions, properties, and conditions of change -- constitutes the basis of MAGIC. Paracelsus was, perhaps, the only Occultist in Europe, during the last centuries since the Christian era, who was versed in this mystery. Had not a criminal hand put an end to his life, years before the time allotted him by Nature, physiological Magic would have fewer secrets for the civilized world than it now has.
Not sure about all of this but there's something interesting here. I guess recognising the former "alive" creations that formed into our molecular structures is how we manipulate physical reality? That's what I got anyway, haha.
SUMMING UP.
The Universe is called, with everything in it, MAYA, because all is temporary therein, from the ephemeral life of a fire-fly to that of the Sun. Compared to the eternal immutability of the ONE, and the changelessness of that Principle, the Universe, with its evanescent ever-changing forms, must be necessarily, in the mind of a philosopher, no better than a will-o'-the-wisp. Yet, the Universe is real enough to the conscious beings in it, which are as unreal as it is itself.
If you're interested, this entire section is worth reading as a summary up until this point. I am only pulling out small ection that grabbed my interest, like this explanation of the Maya which I agree with.
The Universe is worked and guided from within outwards. As above so it is below, as in heaven so on earth; and man -- the microcosm and miniature copy of the macrocosm -- is the living witness to this Universal Law, and to the mode of its action. We see that every external motion, act, gesture, whether voluntary or mechanical, organic or mental, is produced and preceded by internal feeling or emotion, will or volition, and thought or mind. As no outward motion or change, when normal, in man's external body can take place unless provoked by an inward impulse, given through one of the three functions named, so with the external or manifested Universe. The whole Kosmos is guided, controlled, and animated by almost endless series of Hierarchies of sentient Beings, each having a mission to perform, and who -- whether we give to them one name or another, and call them DhyanChohans or Angels -- are "messengers" in the sense only that they are the agents of Karmic and Cosmic Laws. They vary infinitely in their respective degrees of consciousness and intelligence; and to call them all pure Spirits without any of the earthly alloy "which time is wont to prey upon" is only to indulge in poetical fancy. For each of these Beings either was, or prepares to become, a man, if not in the present, then in a past or a coming cycle (Manvantara). They are perfected, when not incipient, men; and differ morally from the terrestrial human beings on their higher (less material) spheres, only in that they are devoid of the feeling of personality and of the human emotional nature -- two purely earthly characteristics. The former, or the "perfected," have become free from those feelings, because (a) they have no longer fleshly bodies -- an ever-numbing weight on the Soul; and (b) the pure spiritual element being left untrammelled and more free, they are less influenced by maya than man can ever be, unless he is an adept who keeps his two personalities -- the spiritual and the physical -- entirely separated.
Another interesting section which goes on for much longer.
In its great ignorance, the public, while blindly accepting everything that emanates from "authorities," and feeling it to be its duty to regard every dictum coming from a man of Science as a proven fact -- the public, we say, is taught to scoff at anything brought forward from "heathen" sources. Therefore, as materialistic Scientists can be fought solely with their own weapons -- those of controversy and argument -- an Addendum is added to every Book contrasting our respective views and showing how even great authorities may often err. We believe that this can be done effectually by showing the weak points of our opponents, and by proving their too frequent sophisms -- made to pass for scientific dicta -- to be incorrect. We hold to Hermes and his "Wisdom" -- in its universal character; they -- to Aristotle as against intuition and the experience of the ages, fancying that Truth is the exclusive property of the Western world. Hence the disagreement. As Hermes says, "Knowledge differs much from sense; for sense is of things that surmount it, but Knowledge (gyi) is the end of sense" -- i.e., of the illusion of our physical brain and its intellect; thus emphasizing the contrast between the laboriously acquired knowledge of the senses and mind (manas), and the intuitive omniscience of the Spiritual divine Soul -- Buddhi.
I've stated these sentiments before, myself!
There were produced out of the Ideos, the elements of Fire, Water, Air and Earth, whose birth, however, did not take place in a material mode, or by simple separation," but by spiritual and dynamical, not even complex, combinations -- e.g., mechanical mixture as opposed to chemical combination -- just as fire may come out of a pebble, or a tree out of a seed, although there is originally no fire in the pebble, nor a tree in the seed. Spirit is living, and Life is Spirit, and Life and Spirit (Prakriti Purusha) (?) produce all things, but they are essentially one and not two.
Poetic.
What follows is largely pull quotes from The Definition of Asclepios, apparently compiled by Mrs A. Kingsford. I can find very little connection between title and author but the Hermetic texts are available so I'll check that out!
KRIYASAKTI. The mysterious power of thought which enables it to produce external, perceptible, phenomenal results by its own inherent energy. The ancients held that any idea will manifest itself externally if one's attention is deeply concentrated upon it. Similarly an intense volition will be followed by the desired result.
LOA anyone?
"Owing to circumstances still unknown (Karmic provision, H.P.B.) there appear from time to time great thinkers, who, devoting their lives to a single purpose, are able to anticipate the progress of mankind, and to produce a religion or a philosophy by which important effects are eventually brought about. But if we look into history we shall clearly see that, although the origin of a new opinion may be thus due to a single man, the result which the new opinion produces will depend on the condition of the people among whom it is propagated. If either a religion or a philosophy is too much in advance of a nation it can do no present service but must bide its time* until the minds of men are ripe for its reception.
Quote from H. T. Buckle's "History of Civilization". I've thought about this A LOT with Janthopoyism. So many factors have to align.
BOOK I. -- PART II.
I. SYMBOLISM AND IDEOGRAPHS
For example, when the Egyptians portrayed the moon as a Cat, they were not ignorant enough to suppose that the moon was a cat; nor did their wandering fancies see any likeness in the moon to a cat; nor was a cat-myth any mere expansion of verbal metaphor; nor had they any intention of making puzzles or riddles. . . . They had observed the simple fact that the cat saw in the dark, and that her eyes became full-orbed, and grew most luminous by night. The moon was the seer by night in heaven, and the cat was its equivalent on the earth; and so the familiar cat was adopted as a representative, a natural sign, a living pictograph of the lunar orb. . . . And so it followed that the sun which saw down in the under-world at night could also be called the cat, as it was, because it also saw in the dark. The name of the cat in Egyptian is mau, which denotes the seer, from mau, to see. One writer on mythology asserts that the Egyptians 'imagined a great cat behind the sun, which is the pupil of the cat's eye.' But this imagining is all modern.
I stole these sentiments for a section in the Janthipoyism Bible. People need to understand.
II. THE MYSTERY LANGUAGE AND ITS KEYS
RECENT discoveries made by great mathematicians and Kabalists thus prove, beyond a shadow of doubt, that every theology, from the earliest and oldest down to the latest, has sprung not only from a common source of abstract beliefs, but from one universal esoteric, or "Mystery" language. These scholars hold the key to the universal language of old, and have turned it successfully, though only once, in the hermetically closed door leading to the Hall of Mysteries. The great archaic system known from prehistoric ages as the sacred Wisdom Science, one that is contained and can be traced in every old as well as in every new religion, had, and still has, its universal language -- suspected by the Mason Ragon -- the language of the Hierophants, which has seven "dialects," so to speak, each referring, and being specially appropriated, to one of the seven mysteries of Nature. Each had its own symbolism. Nature could thus be either read in its fulness, or viewed from one of its special aspects.
Solid intro.
It is maintained that INDIA (not in its present limits, but including its ancient boundaries) is the only country in the world which still has among her sons adepts, who have the knowledge of all the seven sub-systems and the key to the entire system. Since the fall of Memphis, Egypt began to lose those keys one by one, and Chaldea had preserved only three in the days of Berosus. As for the Hebrews, in all their writings they show no more than a thorough knowledge of the astronomical, geometrical and numerical systems of symbolizing all the human, and especially the physiological functions. They never had the higher keys.
Although wildly unprovable in every word, it’s fascinating info.
Judaism having availed itself of two keys out of the seven, and these two keys having been now rediscovered, it becomes no longer a matter of individual speculation and hypothesis, least of all of "coincidence," but one of a correct reading of the Bible texts, as anyone acquainted with arithmetic reads and verifies an addition or total.* A few years longer and this system will kill the dead letter of the Bible, as it will that of all the other exoteric faiths, by showing the dogmas in their real, naked meaning.
Interesting. So there is a key in the bible, maybe??
"Adam was not the first man** created upon this earth." . . . The exhumed relics of pre-Adamic man, "instead of shaking our confidence in Scripture, supply additional proof of its veracity". How so? In the simplest way imaginable; for the author argues that, henceforth "we" (the clergy) "are enabled to leave scientific men to pursue their studies without attempting to coerce them by the fear of heresy" . . . (this must be a relief indeed to Messrs. Huxley, Tyndall, and Sir C. Lyell). . . . "The Bible narrative does not commence with creation, as is commonly supposed, but with the formation of Adam and Eve, millions of years after our planet had been created. Its previous history, so far as Scripture is concerned, is yet unwritten." . . . . . "There may have been not one, but twenty different races upon the earth before the time of Adam, just as there may be twenty different races of men on other worlds" . . . . Who, then, or what were those races, since the author still maintains that Adam is the first man of our race? It was THE SATANIC RACE AND RACES! "Satan (was) never in heaven, Angels and men (being) one species." It was the pre-Adamic race of "Angels that sinned." Satan was "the first Prince of this world," we read. Having died in consequence of his rebellion, he remained on earth as a disembodied Spirit, and tempted Adam and Eve.
This is quoting Primeval Man Unveiled, or, The Anthropology of the Bible by Rev. James Gall. This book incorrectly says author unknown. Very interesting theory about Satan predating us. This all also ties into alien genetic theory.
III. PRIMORDIAL SUBSTANCE AND DIVINE THOUGHT.
Therefore, such being the case, all those who sought to give a name to the incognizable Principle have simply degraded it. Even to speak of Cosmic Ideation -- save in its phenomenal aspect -- is like trying to bottle up primordial Chaos, or to put a printed label on ETERNITY.
What, then, is the "primordial Substance," that mysterious object of which Alchemy was ever talking, and which became the subject of philosophical speculation in every age? What can it be finally, even in its phenomenal pre-differentiation? Even that is ALL in manifested Nature and -- nothing to our senses. It is mentioned under various names in every Cosmogony, referred to in every philosophy, and shown to be, to this day, the ever grasp-eluding PROTEUS in Nature. We touch and do not feel it; we look at it without seeing it; we breathe it and do not perceive it; we hear and smell it without the smallest cognition that it is there; for it is in every molecule of that which in our illusion and ignorance we regard as Matter in any of its states, or conceive as a feeling, a thought, an emotion. . . . In short, it is the "upadhi," or vehicle, of every possible phenomenon, whether physical, mental, or psychic. In the opening sentences of Genesis, as in the Chaldean Cosmogony; in the Puranas of India, and in the Book of the Dead of Egypt, it opens everywhere the cycle of manifestation. It is termed "Chaos," and the face of the waters, incubated by the Spirit proceeding from the Unknown, under whatever name.
What, then, is the "primordial Substance," that mysterious object of which Alchemy was ever talking, and which became the subject of philosophical speculation in every age? What can it be finally, even in its phenomenal pre-differentiation? Even that is ALL in manifested Nature and -- nothing to our senses. It is mentioned under various names in every Cosmogony, referred to in every philosophy, and shown to be, to this day, the ever grasp-eluding PROTEUS in Nature. We touch and do not feel it; we look at it without seeing it; we breathe it and do not perceive it; we hear and smell it without the smallest cognition that it is there; for it is in every molecule of that which in our illusion and ignorance we regard as Matter in any of its states, or conceive as a feeling, a thought, an emotion. . . . In short, it is the "upadhi," or vehicle, of every possible phenomenon, whether physical, mental, or psychic. In the opening sentences of Genesis, as in the Chaldean Cosmogony; in the Puranas of India, and in the Book of the Dead of Egypt, it opens everywhere the cycle of manifestation. It is termed "Chaos," and the face of the waters, incubated by the Spirit proceeding from the Unknown, under whatever name.
The Tao, the unamnfested substance, the “chaos” that came before.
There is more wisdom concealed under the exoteric fables of Puranas and Bible than in all the exoteric facts and science in the literature of the world, and more OCCULT true Science, than there is of exact knowledge in all the academies. Or, in plainer and stronger language, there is as much esoteric wisdom in some portions of the exoteric Puranas and Pentateuch, as there is of nonsense and of designed childish fancy in it, when read only in the dead-letter murderous interpretations of great dogmatic religions, and especially of sects.
The keys are intentionally hidden beneath the excessive fluff of religious texts. My recent research has pointed in similar directions. But is the Secret Doctrine not much the same?
Let anyone read the first verses of chapter i. of Genesis and reflect upon them. There "God" commands to another "god," who does his bidding -- even in the cautious English Protestant translation of James the First's authorised edition.
I've written about this before, although God commands other gods plural, no?
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).
The Holy Spirirt is the energy of us all. So there are other levels? Could be, although I’m unsure what evidence there is of any of it.
This "primordial Substance" is called by some Chaos: Plato and the Pythagoreans named it the Soul of the World after it had been impregnated by the Spirit of that which broods over the Primeval Waters, or Chaos. It is by being reflected in it, say the Kabalists, that the brooding Principle created the phantasmagoria of a visible, manifested Universe. Chaos, before -- Ether, after, the "reflection;" it is still the deity that pervades all Space and things. It is the invisible, imponderable Spirit of things and the invisible, but too tangible fluid that radiates from the fingers of the healthy magnetizer, for it is Vital Electricity -- LIFE itself. Called in derision by the Marquis de Mirville "the nebulous Almighty," it is termed by the Theurgists and Occultists to this day "the living Fire"; and there is not a Hindu who practises at dawn a certain kind of meditation but knows its effects.
This is everything to me. I’m unsure of the different categorisations but this is where Theosophy and I (and so many!) are really seeing eye to eye.
Writing upon this subject in Isis Unveiled we said of it that it was: "The Chaos of the ancients, the Zoroastrian sacred fire, or the Atash-Behram of the Parsees; the Hermes-fire, the Elmes-fire of the ancient Germans; the lightning of Cybele; the burning torch of Apollo; the flame on the altar of Pan; the inextinguishable fire in the temple on the Acropolis, and in that of Vesta; the fire-flame of Pluto's helm; the brilliant sparks on the hats of the Dioscuri, on the Gorgon head, the helm of Pallas, and the staff of Mercury; the Egyptian Phtha-Ra; the Grecian Zeus Cataibates (the descending) of Pausanias; the pentacostal fire-tongues; the burning bush of Moses; the pillar of fire of the Exodus, and the "burning lamp" of Abram, the eternal fire of the "bottomless pit"; the Delphic oracular vapours; the Sidereal light of the Rosicrucians; the AKASA of the Hindu adepts; the Astral Light of Eliphas Levi; the nerve-aura and the fluid of the magnetists; the od of the Reichenbach; the Psychod and ectenic force of Thury; the psychic force of Sergeant Cox, and the atmospheric magnetism of some naturalists; galvanism; and finally, electricity -- all these are but various names for many different manifestations or effects of the same mysterious, all-pervading cause, the Greek Archeus." We now add -- it is all this and much more.
Comparative religion about this “mystic fire” in all these things.
Spirit, then, or Cosmic Ideation, and Cosmic Substance -- one of whose principles is Ether -- are one, and include the ELEMENTS, in the sense St. Paul attaches to them. These Elements are the veiled Synthesis standing for Dhyan Chohans, Devas, Sephiroth, Amshaspends, Archangels, etc., etc. The Ether of science -- the Ilus of Berosus, or the Protyle of Chemistry -- constitutes, so to speak, the rude material (relatively) out of which the above-named "Builders," following the plan traced out for them eternally in the DIVINE THOUGHT, fashion the systems in the Cosmos. They are "myths," we are told. "No more so than Ether and the Atoms," we answer. The two latter are absolute necessities of physical science; the "Builders" are as absolute a necessity of metaphysics. We are twitted with: "You never saw them." We ask the materialists: "Have you ever seen Ether, or your Atoms, or, again, your FORCE?" Moreover, one of the greatest Western Evolutionists of our modern day, the coadjutor of Darwin, Mr. A. R. Wallace, when discussing the inadequacy of Natural Selection alone to account for the physical form of Man, admits the guiding action of "higher intelligences" as a "necessary part of the great laws which govern the material Universe" ("Contributions to Theory of Natural Selection").
These "higher intelligences" are the Dhyan Chohans of the Occultists.
Indeed, there are few Myths in any religious system worthy of the name, but have an historical as well as a scientific foundation. "Myths," justly observes Pococke, "are now proved to be fables, just in proportion as we misunderstand them; truths, in proportion as they were once understood."
These "higher intelligences" are the Dhyan Chohans of the Occultists.
Indeed, there are few Myths in any religious system worthy of the name, but have an historical as well as a scientific foundation. "Myths," justly observes Pococke, "are now proved to be fables, just in proportion as we misunderstand them; truths, in proportion as they were once understood."
Again, I have selected paragraphs that resonate with my understandings. This is something I loudly use in many debates. Science has seen as many electrons as they've seen God. Conversely, ancient scripture is as factual as any science book when you learn how to read it symbolically.
Let us apply that Key to the rare fragments of long-forgotten cosmogonies and try by their scattered parts to re-establish the once Universal Cosmogony of the Secret Doctrine. The Key fits them all. No one can study ancient philosophies seriously without perceiving that the striking similitude of conception between all -- in their exoteric form very often, in their hidden spirit invariably -- is the result of no mere coincidence, but of a concurrent design: and that there was, during the youth of mankind, one languages, one knowledge, one universal religion, when there were no churches, no creeds or sects, but when every man was a priest unto himself. And, if it is shown that already in those ages which are shut out from our sight by the exuberant growth of tradition, human religious thought developed in uniform sympathy in every portion of the globe; then, it becomes evident that, born under whatever latitude, in the cold North or the burning South, in the East or West, that thought was inspired by the same revelations, and man was nurtured under the protecting shadow of the same TREE OF KNOWLEDGE.
Another explanation for the ever debated question of comparative of religions. There are so many unignorable links, and the idea of a core source does satisfy. Of all the proposed solutions, something bout Madame Blavatsky’s feels in deeper tune.
V.ON THE HIDDEN DEITY, ITS SYMBOLS AND GLYPHS
When the Theosophists and Occultists say that God is no BEING, for IT is nothing, No-Thing, they are more reverential and religiously respectful to the Deity than those who call God a HE, and thus make of Him a gigantic MALE.
To the point, and naturally I agree.
VI. THE MUNDANE EGG
WHENCE this universal symbol? The Egg was incorporated as a sacred sign in the cosmogony of every people on the Earth, and was revered both on account of its form and its inner mystery. From the earliest mental conceptions of man, it was known as that which represented most successfully the origin and secret of being. The gradual development of the imperceptible germ within the closed shell; the inward working, without any apparent outward interference of force, which from a latent nothing produced an active something, needing nought save heat; and which, having gradually evolved into a concrete, living creature, broke its shell, appearing to the outward senses of all a self-generated, and self-created being -- must have been a standing miracle from the beginning.
An entire chapter about egg symbolism? Sign me up!
VII. THE DAYS AND NIGHTS OF BRAHMA
There is a curious piece of information in the Buddhist esoteric traditions. The exoteric or allegorical biography of Gautama Buddha shows this great Sage dying of an indigestion of pork and rice, a very prosaic end, indeed, having little of the solemn element in it. This is explained as an allegorical reference to his having been born in the "Boar," or Varaha-Kalpa when Brahma assumed the form of that animal to raise the Earth out of the "Waters of Space." And as the Brahmins descend direct from Brahma and are, so to speak, identified with him; and as they are at the same time the mortal enemies of Buddha and Buddhism, we have the curious allegorical hint and combination. Brahminism (of the Boar, or Varaha Kalpa) has slaughtered the religion of Buddha in India, swept it away from its face; therefore Buddha, identified with his philosophy, is said to have died from the effects of eating of the flesh of a wild hog.
Explaining the death of Buddha as a figurative measure (it goes on). I'm more likely to believe this than the literal, due to Buddha's choice of food.
VIII. THE LOTUS, AS A UNIVERSAL SYMBOL
Burnouf, the great Orientalist, has seized the idea perfectly when saying that Brahma does not create the earth, any more than the rest of the universe. "Having evolved himself from the soul of the world, once separated from the first cause, he evaporates with, and emanates all nature out of himself. He does not stand above it, but is mixed up with it; Brahma and the universe form one Being, each particle of which is in its essence Brahma himself, who proceeded out of himself."
Footnote. I feel like anything said beyond this is irrelevant. It’s every thing I believe and nothing else really.
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 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 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.
The concluding paragraph about lotus symbolism. A lot of the info in this section could be coincendtal. It speaks of the lotus represented by a wave, and therefore the letter M. It then goes on about names like Messiah, Mary, Moses, Mithras, Monad, Maya, etc.
IX THE MOON, DEUS LUNUS, PHOEBE
In every religious system the gods were made to merge their functions as Father, Son, and Husband, into one, and the goddesses were identified as "Wife, Mother, and Sister" of the male God; the former synthesizing the human attributes as the "Sun, the giver of Life," the latter merging all the other titles in the grand synthesis known as Maia, Maya, Maria, etc., a generic name. Maia, in its forced derivation, has come to mean with the Greeks, "mother," from the root ma (nurse), and even gave its name to the month of May, which was sacred to all 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.
When I first read this, something heavily tripped me out about Mother Mary actually being a representative for Maya (the illusionary reality). But upon this revisit, I can not recreate it. Perhaps I was but a sweet summer child at this point and now my wonderment has been crushed by excessive esoterica.
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 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.
Goes on about this personification of the natural world. I find it intersting but I take these teachings lightly. Blavatsky has some strange stuff to say about the moon, which I've covered earlier and will go into more later.
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, 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.
I love the last line of this para but also noting the serpents as Eastern symbology. I am interested in this, even if Icke has kinda tainted the experience.
X. TREE, SERPENT, AND CROCODILE WORSHIP
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 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.
This is Luciferianism.
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 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.
Sorry for such a large chunk, but I am forever fascinted with serpent imagery in mythologies and I think Blavatsky's take is believable (and educated!).
XI. DEMON EST DEUS INVERSUS
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!
This has become obvious in our current age of enlightenment.
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.
The Devil is man-made. Cane and Abel are interesting examples. Shout-out to my Pantheism name-drop!
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 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?
Another huge section, but goddamn, I can't argue with it!
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.
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.
Biblical contradictions about SATAN.
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.
Gibborim might mean giants, and has been used to describe the Nephilim. Meanwhile, Rakshasa are pretty intesne, worth researching. As for Atlanteans, Blavatsky is a dedicated believer in Atlantis, which she mentions right until the end of Volume II.
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.
Blavatsky also talks about giants as a fact a lot. I have looked into it and the lack skeletal remains puts me off.
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,".
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."
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."
Bold claim if I'm understanding correctly. So Yahweh (or Elohim, rather) was the same as Vishnu??
"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 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.
Again, Vishnu and the Israeli God. It's such an incredible thought but how could one easily accept it?
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.
Another agreed upon approach though Janthopoyism.
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).
This goes on and it's all very interesting but I struggle to know how much to include here. Comparitive Religion is my real thing.
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.
". . . . . 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.
Again, the temptation to include pages of information here is strong. It's one of the most enjoyable descriptions of The One I've come across, and it goes on much longer than the above.
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.
Interesting litle incestuous side story.
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 "Virtues of God" by the Christians.
So all deities were manifested at the 3rd stage? One before us? Do I believe these specifics though? Do I care?
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 attributed 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 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.
I've written about this myself before. God is so often referred to in multiples, even in monotheistic religions. What about Islam though?
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.
Footnote and side topic but I found the animal stuff interesting. It's true about the snake.
XIII. THE SEVEN CREATIONS
"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 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.
Footnote. Karmic reincarnation.
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."
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.
The four Elements were fully characterized by Plato when he said that they were that "which composes and decomposes the compound bodies."
Hence Cosmolatry was never, even in its worst aspect, the 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.
Interesting and a lot to agree with. Like the one element. I love the “visible garb” terminology.
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, the winds, and rain." The ancients knew and could distinguish the corporeal from the spiritual elements, in the forces of nature.
I've said this before.
When included under the arts and sciences of the fourth race, the Atlanteans, the phenomenal manifestation of the four elements, justly attributed 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 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, 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.
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, 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.
Good spell techniques? I believe all of it. Corinthians 8:5 mentions "gods" plural without a doubt.
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"
Very strong argument for how science has not explained away the spiriual or anything really!
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 authenticated instance is on the records of Christian wars showing a like catastrophe on the same scale happening to one Christian fleet owing to the "prayers" of its enemy -- another Christian nation. But this is from no fault of theirs, for each prays as ardently to Jehovah for the destruction of the other, as the Athenians prayed to Boreas. Both resorted to a neat little piece of black magic con amore. Such abstinence from divine interference being hardly due to lack of prayers, sent to a common Almighty God for mutual destruction, where, then, shall we draw the line between Pagan and Christian? And who can doubt that all Protestant England would rejoice and offer thanks to the Lord, if, during some future war, 400 ships of the hostile fleet were to be wrecked owing to such holy prayers. What is, then, the difference, we ask again, between a Jupiter, a Boreas, and a Jehovah? No more than this: The crime of one's own next-of-kin -- say of one's "father" -- is always excused and often exalted, whereas the crime of our neighbour's parent is ever gladly punished by hanging. Yet the crime is the same.
So far the "blessings of Christianity" do not seem to have made any appreciable advance on the morals of the converted Pagans.
So far the "blessings of Christianity" do not seem to have made any appreciable advance on the morals of the converted Pagans.
Shots fired! And target met! The comparisons between Jupiter (Zeus) and Yahweh are documented, famous for lightening bolts to strike down those who do it wrong. But they only strike those who believe in them; if you're Greek, it was Jupiter who did it, if you're Jewish, Yahweh. So what's the difference? Are they exactly the same? And, if so, worshipping one does not promise a better life whatsoever, rendering the subdivisions redundant. That's super powerful stuff.
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 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."
Janthopoyism talks about this extensively. Prayers are spells! But then how come some were persecuted when they worked??
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 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 attributes the invention of, and the first initiation of men into, magic; and Mercury is Budh, Wisdom, Enlightenment, or "Reawakening" into the divine Science.
Just noting more repitile references here.
BOOK I. -- PART II.
In this section of the book, Blavatsky admirably leans deeper into the scientific space. From here, I took less notes. The reason being is that my knowledge on religion can just about stand up against most of them, but the scientific side bounced more off my skull. She uses a lot of jargon with many references, and I lost interest in independently researching any of it. But from what I could gather, she spends most of her time picking apart proposals from scientists one by one then offering contradictory information. As esoteric wisdom is often laughable in the scientific community, it makes sense that she'd take such a defensive approach.
Specific topics she appeared to gravitate towards the most included the mass of planets (through The Nebula Theory), large pieces about Isaac Newton (who Blavatsky spoke of warmly due to the man's spirituality), and John Ernst Worrell Keely. The latter was an inventor who claimed to have discovered a new "vaporic" or "etheric" motive force which is generally accepted as fraudulent. However, Blavatsky appears to think that Keely was onto something.
The problem with scientific books (unlike ancient religious ones) is that their subject moves so fast. There is no way for an 1888 publication to be up-to-date, and critics have noted that already.
II. MODERN PHYSICISTS ARE PLAYING AT BLIND MAN'S BUFF.
"It must not be forgotten that the several departments of Science are simply arbitrary divisions of labour. In these several departments the same physical object may be considered under different aspects. The physicist may study its molecular relations, while the chemist determines its atomic constitution. But when they both deal with the same element or agent, it cannot have one set of properties in physics, and another set contradictory of them, in chemistry. If the physicist and chemist alike assume the existence of ultimate atoms absolutely invariable in bulk and weight, the atom cannot be a cube or oblate spheroid for physical, and a sphere for chemical purposes. A group of constant atoms cannot be an aggregate of extended and absolutely inert and impenetrable masses in a crucible or retort, and a system of mere centres of force as part of a magnet or of a Clamond battery. The universal Ether cannot be soft and mobile to please the chemist, and rigid-elastic to satisfy the physicist; it cannot be continuous at the command of Sir William Thomson and discontinuous on the suggestion of Cauchy or Fresnel."*
The eminent physicist, G. A. Hirn, may likewise be quoted saying the same in the 43rd Volume of the Memoires de l'Academie Royale de Belgique, which we translate from the French, as cited: "When one sees the assurance with which are to-day affirmed doctrines which attribute the collectivity, the universality of the phenomena to the motions alone of the atom, one has a right to expect to find likewise unanimity on the qualities described to this unique being, the foundation of all that exists. Now, from the first examination of the particular systems proposed, one feels the strangest deception; one perceives that the atom of the chemist, the atom of the physicist, that of the metaphysician, and that of the mathematician . . . . have absolutely nothing in common subdivision of our sciences, each of which, in its own little pigeon-hole, constructs an atom which satisfies the requirements of the phenomena it studies, without troubling itself in the least about the requirements proper to the phenomena of the neighbouring pigeon-hole. The metaphysician banishes the principles of attraction and repulsion as dreams; the mathematician, who analyses the laws of elasticity and those of the propagation of light, admits them implicitly, without even naming them. . . . The chemist cannot explain the grouping of the atoms, in his often complicated molecules, without attributing to his atoms specific distinguishing qualities; for the physicist and the metaphysician, partisans of the modern doctrines, the atom is, on the contrary, always and everywhere the same. What am I saying? THERE IS NO AGREEMENT EVEN IN ONE AND THE SAME SCIENCE AS TO THE PROPERTIES OF THE ATOM. Each constructs an atom to suit his own fancy, in order to explain some special phenomenon with which he is particularly concerned."*
The eminent physicist, G. A. Hirn, may likewise be quoted saying the same in the 43rd Volume of the Memoires de l'Academie Royale de Belgique, which we translate from the French, as cited: "When one sees the assurance with which are to-day affirmed doctrines which attribute the collectivity, the universality of the phenomena to the motions alone of the atom, one has a right to expect to find likewise unanimity on the qualities described to this unique being, the foundation of all that exists. Now, from the first examination of the particular systems proposed, one feels the strangest deception; one perceives that the atom of the chemist, the atom of the physicist, that of the metaphysician, and that of the mathematician . . . . have absolutely nothing in common subdivision of our sciences, each of which, in its own little pigeon-hole, constructs an atom which satisfies the requirements of the phenomena it studies, without troubling itself in the least about the requirements proper to the phenomena of the neighbouring pigeon-hole. The metaphysician banishes the principles of attraction and repulsion as dreams; the mathematician, who analyses the laws of elasticity and those of the propagation of light, admits them implicitly, without even naming them. . . . The chemist cannot explain the grouping of the atoms, in his often complicated molecules, without attributing to his atoms specific distinguishing qualities; for the physicist and the metaphysician, partisans of the modern doctrines, the atom is, on the contrary, always and everywhere the same. What am I saying? THERE IS NO AGREEMENT EVEN IN ONE AND THE SAME SCIENCE AS TO THE PROPERTIES OF THE ATOM. Each constructs an atom to suit his own fancy, in order to explain some special phenomenon with which he is particularly concerned."*
This is a quote from Arthur Beiser (author of Concepts of Modern Physics). It's a fascinating observation, that different fields of science are analysing the atom in ways that suit their needs, but their conclusions render a completely different image of the atom itself. It says a lot about science but even more about the atom.
IV. IS GRAVITATION A LAW?
If we are taken to task for believing in operating "Gods" and "Spirits" while rejecting a personal God, we answer to the Theists and Monotheists: "Admit that your Jehovah is one of the Elohim, and we are ready to recognise him. Make of him, as you do, the Infinite, the ONE and the Eternal God, and we will never accept him in this character." Of tribal Gods there were many; the One Universal Deity is a principle, an abstract Root-Idea which has nought to do with the unclean work of finite Form. We do not worship the Gods, we only honour Them, as beings superior to ourselves. In this we obey the Mosaic injunction, while Christians disobey their Bible -- Missionaries foremost of all. "Thou shalt not revile the gods," says one of them -- (Jehovah) -- in Exodus xxii. 28); but at the same time in verse 20 it is commanded, "He that sacrificeth to any God, save unto the Lord, he shall be utterly destroyed."
Footnote but interesting. The Abrahamic God is a god, but only one of the gods. Even in Biblical terms, it is recognised as such. While reading this, I'm sure it blew me away, but that was so long ago and now I'm well versed in this teaching.
VVI. THE MASKS OF SCIENCE.
To conclude on the question of gravity. How can Science presume to know anything certain of it? How can it maintain its position and its hypotheses against those of the Occultists, who see in gravity only sympathy and antipathy, or attraction and repulsion, caused by physical polarity on our terrestrial plane, and by spiritual causes outside of its influence? How can they disagree with the Occultists before they agree among themselves? Indeed one hears of the conservation of energy, and in the same breath of the perfect hardness and inelasticity of the atoms; of the Kinetic theory of gases being identical with "potential energy," so called; and, at the same time, of the elementary units of mass being absolutely hard and inelastic! An Occultist opens a scientific work and reads as follows: --
"Physical atomism derives all the qualitative properties of matter from the forms of atomic motion. The atoms themselves remain as elements utterly devoid of property." (Wundt, "Die Theorie der Materie," p. 381.)
And further:
"Chemistry in its ultimate form must be atomic mechanics." (Nazesmann, "Thermochemie," p. 150.)
And a moment after he is told that:
"Gases consist of atoms which behave like solid, perfectly elastic spheres." (Kroenig, Clausius, Maxwell, etc., Philosophical Magazine, Vol. XIX., p. 18.)
Finally, to crown all, Sir W. Thomson is found declaring that:
"We are forbidden by the modern theory of the conservation of energy to assume inelasticity, or anything short of perfect elasticity of the ultimate molecules whether of ultra mundane or mundane matter." (!!!) ("Philosophical Magazine," p. 321, loc. cit.)
"Physical atomism derives all the qualitative properties of matter from the forms of atomic motion. The atoms themselves remain as elements utterly devoid of property." (Wundt, "Die Theorie der Materie," p. 381.)
And further:
"Chemistry in its ultimate form must be atomic mechanics." (Nazesmann, "Thermochemie," p. 150.)
And a moment after he is told that:
"Gases consist of atoms which behave like solid, perfectly elastic spheres." (Kroenig, Clausius, Maxwell, etc., Philosophical Magazine, Vol. XIX., p. 18.)
Finally, to crown all, Sir W. Thomson is found declaring that:
"We are forbidden by the modern theory of the conservation of energy to assume inelasticity, or anything short of perfect elasticity of the ultimate molecules whether of ultra mundane or mundane matter." (!!!) ("Philosophical Magazine," p. 321, loc. cit.)
A good method of attack, showing that, while scientists disagree with occultists in every field, they are even further disagreeing between thmeselves.
Science has no right to deny to the Occultists their claim to a more profound knowledge of the so-called Forces; which, they say, are only the effects of causes generated by Powers, substantial, yet supersensuous, and beyond any kind of matter with which they (the Scientists) have hitherto become acquainted. The most science can do is to assume the attitude of agnosticism and to maintain it. Then it can say: "Your case is no more proven than is ours; but we confess to knowing nothing in reality either about Force or matter, or that which lies at the bottom of the so-called correlations of Forces. Therefore, time alone can prove who is right and who is wrong. Let us wait patiently, and meanwhile show courtesy instead of scoffing at each other."
I hear her beef with science community, I think she explains it well here, it’s fair.
VII. AN ATTACK ON THE SCIENTIFIC THEORY OF FORCE BY A MAN OF SCIENCE.
Thus we find that Ether and elastic atoms are, in the alleged mechanical conception of the Universe, the Spirit and Soul of Kosmos, and that the theory -- put it any way and under whatever disguise -- always leaves a more widely opened issue for men of Science to speculate beyond the line drawn by modern materialism -- or call it agnosticism rather, to be more correct* -- than the majority avails itself of. Atoms, Ether, or both, modern speculation cannot get out of the circle of ancient thought; and the latter was soaked through with archaic occultism. Undulatory or corpuscular theory -- it is all one.
Ether is one of the most mentioned substances in the Secret Doctrine. According to Theosophy, it is the fifth of the seven elements, one of the unmanifested ones. It is kind of a "space" or a "light" found everywhere.
VIII. LIFE, FORCE, OR GRAVITY.
For see what another eminent physician says, who calls this (our life-fluid) "nervous Ether."
Haha, nervous ether, best name.
"The idea attempted to be conveyed by the theory is, that between the molecules of the matter, solid or fluid, of which the nervous organisms, and, indeed, of which all the organic parts of a body are composed, there exists a refined subtle medium, vaporous or gaseous, which holds the molecules in a condition for motion upon each other, and for arrangement and rearrangement of form; a medium by and through which all motion is conveyed; by and through which the one organ or part of the body is held in communion with the other parts, by which and through which the outer living world communicates with the living man: a medium, which, being present, enables the phenomena of life to be demonstrated, and which, being universally absent, leaves the body actually dead. . . . . ."
Such a great quote by Dr. B. W. Richardson. Not sure I entirely agree (or disagree) with the details but I fully believe every atom is communicating with every other atom, and this is a fairly scientific proposal on how that may be possible (also, quantum entanglement, hello).
VII. AN ATTACK ON THE SCIENTIFIC THEORY OF FORCE BY A MAN OF SCIENCE.
The Vedic Aryans were as familiar with the mysteries of sound and colour as our physiologists are on the physical plane, but they had mastered the secrets of both on planes inaccessible to the materialist. They knew of a double set of senses; spiritual and material. In a man who is deprived of one or more senses, the remaining become the more developed: e.g., the blind man will recover his sight through the senses of touch, of hearing, etc., and he who is deaf will be able to hear through sight, by seeing audibly the words uttered by the lips and mouth of the speaker. But these are cases that belong to the world of matter still. The spiritual senses, those that act on a higher plane of consciousness are rejected a priori by physiology because the latter is ignorant of the sacred science. It limits the action of ether to vibrations, and, dividing it from air -- though air is simply differentiated and compound ether -- makes it assume functions to fit in with the special theories of the physiologist. But there is more real science in the teachings of the Upanishads when these are correctly understood, than the Orientalists, who do not understand them at all, are ready to admit. Mental as well as physical correlations of the seven senses (seven on the physical and seven on the mental planes) are clearly explained and defined in the Vedas, and especially in the Upanishad called Anugita: "The indestructible and the destructible, such is the double manifestation of the Self. Of these the indestructible is the existent (the true essence or nature of Self, the underlying principles). The manifestation as an individual (or entity) is called the destructible." Thus speaks the ASCETIC in Anugita; and also: "Every one who is twice-born (initiated) knows such is the teaching of the ancients. . . . . Space is the first entity. . . . . Now Space (Akasa, or the noumenon of Ether) has one quality . . . and that is sound only . . . and the qualities of sound are Shadga, Rishabha, Gandhara, Madhyama, Panchama, and beyond these five Nishada and Dhaivata"; (the Hindu gamut). These seven notes of the scale are the principles of sound. (Vide ch. xxxvi. of Anugita.) The qualities of every Element, as of every sense, are septenary, and to judge and dogmatize on them from their manifestation (likewise sevenfold in itself) on the material or objective plane above is quite arbitrary. For it is only by the SELF emancipating itself from these (seven) causes of illusion that one acquires the knowledge (secret wisdom) of the qualities of objects of sense on their dual plane of manifestation -- the visible and the invisible. Thus it is said: --
"State this wonderful mystery . . . . . Hear the assignment of causes exhaustively. The nose, and the tongue, and the eye, and the skin, and the ear as the fifth (organ of sense) Mind and Understanding,* these seven (senses) should be understood to be the causes of (the knowledge of their) qualities. Smell, and taste, and colour, sound, and touch as the fifth, the object of the mental operation, and the object of the Understanding (the highest spiritual sense or perception), these seven are causes of action. He who smells, he who eats, he who sees, he who speaks, and he who hears as the fifth, he who thinks, and he who understands, these seven should be regarded as the causes of the agents.** These (the agents) being possessed of qualities (sattwa, rajas, tamas), enjoy their own qualities, agreeable and disagreeable" (Anugita).
Then one reads in the Bhagavadgita (chap. vii.) the Deity (or Krishna) saying: --
". . . . Only some know me truly. Earth, Water, Fire, Air, Space (or Akasa, AEther), Mind, Understanding and Egoism (or the perception of all the former on the illusive plane). . . This is a lower form of my nature. Know (that there is) another (form of my) nature, and higher than this, which is animate, O you of mighty arms! and by which this Universe is upheld. . . . All this is woven upon me, like numbers of pearls upon a thread (Mundakopanishad, p. 298). . . . I am the taste in the water, O son of Kunti! I am the light of the sun and moon. I am . . . sound ('i.e., the Occult essence which underlies all these and the other qualities of the various things mentioned,' Transl.), in space . . . the fragrant smell in the earth, refulgence in the fire . . . etc., etc."
"State this wonderful mystery . . . . . Hear the assignment of causes exhaustively. The nose, and the tongue, and the eye, and the skin, and the ear as the fifth (organ of sense) Mind and Understanding,* these seven (senses) should be understood to be the causes of (the knowledge of their) qualities. Smell, and taste, and colour, sound, and touch as the fifth, the object of the mental operation, and the object of the Understanding (the highest spiritual sense or perception), these seven are causes of action. He who smells, he who eats, he who sees, he who speaks, and he who hears as the fifth, he who thinks, and he who understands, these seven should be regarded as the causes of the agents.** These (the agents) being possessed of qualities (sattwa, rajas, tamas), enjoy their own qualities, agreeable and disagreeable" (Anugita).
Then one reads in the Bhagavadgita (chap. vii.) the Deity (or Krishna) saying: --
". . . . Only some know me truly. Earth, Water, Fire, Air, Space (or Akasa, AEther), Mind, Understanding and Egoism (or the perception of all the former on the illusive plane). . . This is a lower form of my nature. Know (that there is) another (form of my) nature, and higher than this, which is animate, O you of mighty arms! and by which this Universe is upheld. . . . All this is woven upon me, like numbers of pearls upon a thread (Mundakopanishad, p. 298). . . . I am the taste in the water, O son of Kunti! I am the light of the sun and moon. I am . . . sound ('i.e., the Occult essence which underlies all these and the other qualities of the various things mentioned,' Transl.), in space . . . the fragrant smell in the earth, refulgence in the fire . . . etc., etc."
Super long but gorgeously powerful. Everything is sound, as in vibration. And there are SEVEN musical notes on a scale so thats good. Also love the duality of the vibrational eternal SELF and the manifested individual temporary SELF. Janthopoyism writes about all of this.
VIII. LIFE, FORCE, OR GRAVITY.
And the learned gentleman might have added on the same Occult principle: "That the 'nervous Ether' of one person can be poisoned by the 'nervous Ether' of another person or his auric emanations. But see what Paracelsus said of 'Nervous Ether'": --
"The Archaeus is of a magnetic nature, and attracts or repels other sympathetic or antipathetic forces belonging to the same plane. The less power of resistance for astral influences a person possesses, the more will he be subject to such influences. The vital force is not enclosed in man, but radiates (within) and around him like a luminous sphere (aura) and it may be made to act at a distance. . . . It may poison the essence of life (blood) and cause diseases, or it may purify it after it has been made impure, and restore the health" (Paragranum; "Life of Paracelsus," by Dr. F. Hartmann.)
"The Archaeus is of a magnetic nature, and attracts or repels other sympathetic or antipathetic forces belonging to the same plane. The less power of resistance for astral influences a person possesses, the more will he be subject to such influences. The vital force is not enclosed in man, but radiates (within) and around him like a luminous sphere (aura) and it may be made to act at a distance. . . . It may poison the essence of life (blood) and cause diseases, or it may purify it after it has been made impure, and restore the health" (Paragranum; "Life of Paracelsus," by Dr. F. Hartmann.)
This is LOA looong before it was a buzz term. But it also goes into energy influencing one another, auras and such, vibration, moods, negative, positive.
IX. THE SOLAR THEORY
Thus, there is a regular circulation of the vital fluid throughout our system, of which the Sun is the heart -- the same as the circulation of the blood in the human body -- during the manvantaric solar period, or life; the Sun contracting as rhythmically at every return of it, as the human heart does. Only, instead of performing the round in a second or so, it takes the solar blood ten of its years, and a whole year to pass through its auricles and ventricles before it washes the lungs and passes thence to the great veins and arteries of the system.
I ADORE this as something I've written about loads. Everything is a living organism, a sum of its parts, yet you can go up and as down as far as you like. The Sun as our Solar System's heart is so lovely.
It is said in a work on Geology that it is the dream of Science that "all the recognized chemical elements will one day be found but modifications of a single material element." ("World-Life," p. 48.)
I totally believe there is one thing!
Thus fact and truth have once more forced the hand of "exact" Science, and compelled it to enlarge its views and change its terms which, masking the multitude, reduced them to one body -- like the Septenary Elohim and their hosts transformed by the materialistic religionists into one Jehovah. Replace the chemical terms "Molecule," "atom," "particle," etc., by the words "Hosts," "Monads," "Devas," etc., and one might think the genesis of gods, the primeval evolution of manvantaric intelligent Forces, was being described. But the learned lecturer adds something still more suggestive to his descriptive remarks; whether consciously or unconsciously, who knoweth?
The way she uses science to “prove” god is masterful.
Indeed these "signs" are many and multiply daily; but none are more important than those just quoted. For now the chasm between the occult "superstitious and unscientific" teachings and "exact" science is completely bridged, and one, at least, of the few eminent chemists of the day is in the realm of the infinite possibilities of occultism. Every new step he will take will bring him nearer and nearer to that mysterious centre, from which radiate the innumerable paths that lead down Spirit into matter, and which transform the gods and the living monads into man and sentient nature.
A nice summary of spirit evolution.
X. THE COMING FORCE.
For Sound generates, or rather attracts together, the elements that produce an ozone, the fabrication of which is beyond chemistry, but within the limits of Alchemy. It may even resurrect a man or an animal whose astral "vital body" has not been irreparably separated from the physical body by the severance of the magnetic or odic chord. As one saved thrice from death by that power, the writer ought to be credited with knowing personally something about it.
I actually read about this. Helena Blavatsky nearly died before she finished the Secret Doctrine, and then she was suddenly fine, claiming she'd been granted more life to finish these volumes. She then died shortly after. Also this was on my page 555 which means nothing really.
* In this case the American "Substantialists" are not wrong (though too anthropomorphic and material in their views to be accepted by the Occultists) when arguing through Mrs. M. S. Organ, M.D., that "there must be positive entitative properties in objects which have a constitutional relation to the nerves of animal sensations, or there can be no perception. No impression of any kind can be made upon brain, nerve, or mind -- no stimulus to action -- unless there is an actual and direct communication of a substantial force." ("Substantial" as far as it appears in the usual sense of the word in this universe of illusion and MAYA, of course; not so in reality.) "That force may be the most refined and sublimated immaterial Entity (?). Yet it must exist; for no sense, element, or faculty of the human being can have a perception, or be stimulated into action, without some substantial force coming in contact with it. This is the fundamental law pervading the whole organic and mental world. In the true philosophical sense there is no such thing as independent action: for every force or substance is correlated to some other force or substance. We can with just as much truth and reason assert that no substance possesses any inherent gustatory property or any olfactory property -- that taste and odour are simply sensations caused by vibrations; and hence mere illusions of animal perceptions. . . ."
FOOTNOTE. This is where I’m placing a lot of thought these days.
XI. ON THE ELEMENTS AND ATOMS.
Modern physics, while borrowing from the ancients their atomic theory, forgot one point, the most important of the doctrine; hence they got only the husks and will never be able to get at the kernel. They left behind, in the adoption of physical atoms, the suggestive fact that from Anaxagoras down to Epicurus, the Roman Lucretius, and finally even to Galileo, all those Philosophers believed more or less in ANIMATED atoms, not in invisible specks of so-called "brute" matter. Rotatory motion was generated in their views, by larger (read, more divine and pure) atoms forcing downwards other atoms; the lighter ones being thrust simultaneously upward. The esoteric meaning of this is the ever cyclic curve downward and upward of differentiated elements through intercyclic phases of existence, until each reaches again its starting point or birthplace. The idea was metaphysical as well as physical; the hidden interpretation embracing "gods" or souls, in the shape of atoms, as the causes of all the effects produced on Earth by the secretions from the divine bodies.* No ancient philosopher, not even the Jewish Kabalists, ever dissociated Spirit from matter or vice versa. Everything originated in the ONE, and, proceeding from the one, must finally return to the One. "Light becomes heat, and consolidates into fiery particles; which, from being ignited, become cold, hard particles, round and smooth. And this is called Soul, imprisoned in its robe of matter;"** Atoms and Souls having been synonymous in the language of the Initiates. The "whirling Souls," Gilgoolem, a doctrine in which so many learned Jews have believed (See Mackenzie's Royal Masonic Cyclopaedia), had no other meaning esoterically. The learned Jewish Initiates never meant by the "Promised land" Palestine alone, but the same Nirvana as the learned Buddhist and Brahmin do -- the bosom of the ETERNAL ONE, symbolized by that of Abraham, and by Palestine as its substitute on Earth.*** The passage of the SOUL-ATOM "through the Seven Planetary Chambers" had the same metaphysical and also physical meaning. It had the latter when it was said to dissolve into Ether (See Isis Unveiled, Vol. I., p. 297.) Even Epicurus, the model Atheist and materialist, knew and believed so much in the ancient Wisdom, that he taught that the Soul (entirely distinct from immortal Spirit when the former is enshrined latent in it, as it is in every atomic speck), was composed of a fine, tender essence, formed from the smoothest, roundest, and finest atoms.
All of this is fantastic and EXACTLY my thoughts.
XIV. FORCES -- MODES OF MOTION OR INTELLIGENCES?
It must be that which filled space -- was space -- originally, whose motion in differentiated matter was the origin of the actual movements of the sidereal bodies; and which, "in condensing itself in those very bodies, thus abandoned the space that is found void to-day." In other words, it is that same matter of which are now composed the planets, comets, and the Sun himself, which, having in the origin formed itself into those bodies, has preserved its inherent quality of motion; which quality, now centred in their nuclei, directs all motion. A very slight alteration of words is needed, and a few additions, to make of this our Esoteric Doctrine.
The formless substance now taking form, yet the space between form is still that substance.
Another quite occult doctrine is the theory of Kant, that the matter of which the inhabitants and the animals of other planets are formed is of a lighter and more subtle nature and of a more perfect conformation in proportion to their distance from the Sun. The latter is too full of Vital Electricity, of the physical, life-giving principle. Therefore, the men on Mars are more ethereal than we are, while those of Venus are more gross, though far more intelligent, if less spiritual.
What the heck is this alien stuff?
XV. GODS, MONADS, AND ATOMS.
"Perhaps this hypothesis can be simplified if we imagine yttrium to be represented by a five-shilling piece. By chemical fractionation I have divided it into five separate shillings, and find that these shillings are not counterparts, but like the carbon atoms in the benzol ring, have the impress of their position, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, stamped on them. . . . If I throw my shillings into the melting-pot or dissolve them chemically, the mint stamp disappears and they all turn out to be silver." . . .
This will be the case with all the atoms and molecules when they have separated from their compound forms and bodies -- when pralaya sets in. Reverse the case, and imagine the dawn of a new manvantara. The pure "silver" of the absorbed material will once more separate into SUBSTANCE, which will generate "Divine Essences" whose "principles"* are the primary elements, the subelements, the physical energies and subjective and objective matter; or, as these are epitomised -- GODS, MONADS, and ATOMS. If leaving for one moment the metaphysical or transcendental side of the question, -- dropping out of the present consideration the supersensuous and intelligent beings and entities believed in by the Kabalists and Christians -- we turn to the atomical theory of evolution, the occult teachings are still found corroborated by exact Science and its confessions, as far, at least, as regards the supposed "simple" elements, now suddenly degraded into poor and distant relatives -- not even second cousins to the latter.
This will be the case with all the atoms and molecules when they have separated from their compound forms and bodies -- when pralaya sets in. Reverse the case, and imagine the dawn of a new manvantara. The pure "silver" of the absorbed material will once more separate into SUBSTANCE, which will generate "Divine Essences" whose "principles"* are the primary elements, the subelements, the physical energies and subjective and objective matter; or, as these are epitomised -- GODS, MONADS, and ATOMS. If leaving for one moment the metaphysical or transcendental side of the question, -- dropping out of the present consideration the supersensuous and intelligent beings and entities believed in by the Kabalists and Christians -- we turn to the atomical theory of evolution, the occult teachings are still found corroborated by exact Science and its confessions, as far, at least, as regards the supposed "simple" elements, now suddenly degraded into poor and distant relatives -- not even second cousins to the latter.
I like the analogy. Atoms are the same.
XVI. CYCLIC EVOLUTION AND KARMA.
It is not, therefore, Karma that rewards or punishes, but it is we, who reward or punish ourselves according to whether we work with, through and along with nature, abiding by the laws on which that Harmony depends, or -- break them.
A lot to love, and in agreement with Jantho.
It is neither prevision, nor prophecy; no more than is the signalling of a comet or star, several years before its appearance. It is simply knowledge and mathematically correct computations which enable the WISE MEN OF THE EAST to foretell, for instance, that England is on the eve of such or another catastrophe; France, nearing such a point of her cycle, and Europe in general threatened with, or rather, on the eve of, a cataclysm, which her own cycle of racial Karma has led her to.
Karma for Europe's evil ways. I often feel this way but has it happened yet? Maybe England.
XVII. "THE ZODIAC AND ITS ANTIQUITY."
So patent is the fact, that the Roman Catholic writers -- especially among the French Ultramontanes -- have tacitly agreed to connect the twelve Jewish Patriarchs with the signs of the Zodiac. This is done in a kind of prophetico-mystic way, which would sound to pious and ignorant ears like a portentous sign, a tacit divine recognition of the "chosen people of God," whose finger has purposely traced in heaven, from the beginning of creation, the numbers of these patriarchs. For instance, these writers (De Mirville among others) recognise curiously enough all the characteristics of the 12 signs of the Zodiac, in the words addressed by the dying Jacob to his Sons, and in his definitions of the future of each Tribe. (Vide Genesis, ch. xlix.) Moreover, the respective banners of the same tribes are claimed to have exhibited the same symbols and the same names as the signs, repeated in the 12 stones of the Urim and Thummim, and on the 12 wings of the cherub. Leaving the proof of exactitude in the alleged correspondence to the said mystics, it is as follows: Man, or the Aquarius, is in the sphere of Reuben, who is declared as "unstable as water" (the Vulgate has it, to be "rushing like water,"; Gemini, in the strong fraternal association of Simeon and Levi; Leo, in that of Judah, "the strong Lion" of his tribe, "the lion's whelp"; the Pisces, in Zabulon, who "shall dwell at the haven of the sea"; Taurus, in Issachar, because he is "a strong ass couching down," etc., and therefore associated with the stables; Virgo-Scorpio, in Dan, who is described as "a serpent, an adder in the path that biteth," etc.; Capricornus in Naphtali, who is "a hind (a deer) let loose"; Cancer, in Benjamin, for he is "ravenous"; Libra, the "Balance," in Asher, whose "bread shall be fat"; Saggitarius in Joseph, because "his bow abode in strength." To make up for the twelfth sign, Virgo, made independent of Scorpio, is Dina, the only daughter of Jacob. (See Genesis xlix.) Tradition shows the alleged tribes carrying the 12 signs on their banners. But the Bible is, besides these, full of theo-cosmological and astronomical symbols and personifications.
This break down of Judo-Zodiac connections is pretty convincing.
Why see in the Pisces a direct reference to Christ -- one of the several world-reformers, a Saviour but for his direct followers, but only a great and glorious Initiate for all the rest -- when that constellation shines as a symbol of all the past, present, and future Spiritual Saviours who dispense light and dispel mental darkness? Christian symbologists have tried to prove that it was that of Ephraim (Joseph's son), the elect of Jacob, that therefore, it was at the moment of the Sun entering into the sign of the Fish (Pisces) that "the Elect Messiah, the [[Ichthus]] of the first Christians, had to be born. But, if Jesus of Nazareth was that Messiah -- was he really born at that "moment," or was he made to be so born by the adaptation of theologians, who sought only to make their preconceived ideas fit in with sidereal facts and popular belief? Everyone knows that the real time and year of the birth of Jesus are totally unknown. And it is the Jews, whose forefathers have made the word Dag signify both "fish" and "Messiah," who, during the forced development of their rabbinical language, are the first to deny this Christian claim. And what of the further facts that Brahmins also connect their "Messiah," the eternal Avatar Vishnu, with a fish and the Deluge, and that the Babylonians made of their Dag-On, equally a fish and a Messiah, the Man-Fish and Prophet?
I enjoy the fish meets Christ theories, and here’s Theosophy chatting about it, disagreeing with it mostly.
The observation of the year 3102, which seems to have fixed their epoch, was not a difficult one. We see that the Hindus, having once determined the moon's daily motion of 13deg. 10m. 35sec., made use of it to divide the Zodiac into 27 constellations, related to the period of the moon, which takes about 27 days to describe it.
It was by this method that they determined the positions of the stars in this Zodiac; it was thus they found that a certain star of the Lyre was in 8h. 24m., the Heart of the Hydra in 4d. 7h., longitudes which are ascribed to Hermes, but which are calculated on the Hindu Zodiac. Similarly, they discovered that the "Wheatear of Virgo" forms the commencement of their fifteenth constellation, and the "Eye of Taurus" the end of the fourth; these stars being the one in 6d. 6h. 40m., the other in 1d. 23h. 20min. of the Hindu Zodiac. This being so, the eclipse of Moon which occurred 14 days after the Kali Yug epoch, took place at a point between the "Wheat Ear" of Virgo and the star [[ ]] of the same constellation. These stars are very approximately a constellation apart, the one beginning the fifteenth, the other the sixteenth. Thus it would not be difficult to determine the moon's place by measuring her distance from one of these stars; from this they deduced the position of the sun, which is opposite to the moon, and then, knowing their average motions, they calculated that the moon was at the first point of the Zodiac according to her average longitude at midnight on the 17th-18th February of the year 3,102 before our era, and that the sun occupied the same place six hours later according to his true longitude; an event which fixes the commencement of the Hindu year.
It was by this method that they determined the positions of the stars in this Zodiac; it was thus they found that a certain star of the Lyre was in 8h. 24m., the Heart of the Hydra in 4d. 7h., longitudes which are ascribed to Hermes, but which are calculated on the Hindu Zodiac. Similarly, they discovered that the "Wheatear of Virgo" forms the commencement of their fifteenth constellation, and the "Eye of Taurus" the end of the fourth; these stars being the one in 6d. 6h. 40m., the other in 1d. 23h. 20min. of the Hindu Zodiac. This being so, the eclipse of Moon which occurred 14 days after the Kali Yug epoch, took place at a point between the "Wheat Ear" of Virgo and the star [[ ]] of the same constellation. These stars are very approximately a constellation apart, the one beginning the fifteenth, the other the sixteenth. Thus it would not be difficult to determine the moon's place by measuring her distance from one of these stars; from this they deduced the position of the sun, which is opposite to the moon, and then, knowing their average motions, they calculated that the moon was at the first point of the Zodiac according to her average longitude at midnight on the 17th-18th February of the year 3,102 before our era, and that the sun occupied the same place six hours later according to his true longitude; an event which fixes the commencement of the Hindu year.
This works as a good example of what these pages are about.
XVIII. SUMMARY OF THE MUTUAL POSITION.
Theology is taken to task and ridiculed for believing in the union of three persons in one Godhead -- one God as to substance, three persons as to individuality; and we are laughed at for our belief in unproved and unprovable doctrines, in Angels and Devils, Gods and Spirits. And, indeed, that which made the Scientists win the day over Theology in the Great "Conflict between Religion and Science," was precisely the argument that neither the identity of that substance, nor the triple individuality claimed, after having been conceived, invented, and worked out in the depths of Theological Consciousness, could be proved by any Scientific inductive process of reasoning, least of all on the evidence of our senses. Religion must perish, it is said, because it teaches mysteries. Mystery is the negation of Common Sense, and Science repels it. According to Mr. Tyndall, metaphysics is fiction, like poetry. The man of Science takes nothing on trust; rejects everything that is not proven to him, while the Theologian accepts everything on blind faith. The Theosophist and the Occultist, who take nothing on trust, not even exact Science, the Spiritualist who denies dogma but believes in Spirits and in invisible but potential influences, all share in the same contempt. Very well, then; what we have to do now, is to examine for the last time whether exact Science does not act precisely in the same way as Theosophy, Spiritualism, and Theology do.
These are some solid blows to Science here. The truth is, some of us don't blindly believe ANYTHING, even science.
No student of occultism, however, ought to be betrayed, by the usual phraseology used in the translations of Hermetic Works, into believing that the ancient Egyptians or Greeks spoke of, and referred, monk-like, at every moment in conversation, to a Supreme Being, God, the "One Father and Creator of all," etc., as found on every page of such translations. No such thing indeed; and those texts are not the original Egyptian texts. They are Greek compilations, the earliest of which does not go beyond the early period of Neo-Platonism. No Hermetic work written by Egyptians (vide "Book of the Dead") would speak of the one universal God of the Monotheistic systems -- the one Absolute cause of all, was as unnameable and unpronounceable in the mind of the ancient philosopher of Egypt, as it is for ever Unknowable in the conception of Mr. Herbert Spencer. As for the Egyptian in general, as M. Maspero well remarks, whenever he "arrived at the notion of divine Unity, the God One was never 'God,' simply." And Lepage Renouf very justly observed that the word Nouter, nouti, "god" had never ceased being a generic name with the Egyptians, nor has it ever become a personal pronoun. Every God was the "one living and unique God" with them. Their "monotheism was purely geographical. If the Egyptian of Memphis proclaimed the unity of Phtah to the exclusion of Ammon, the Thebeian Egyptian proclaimed the unity of Ammon to the exclusion of Phtah," as we now see done in India in the case of the Saivas and the Vaishnavas. "Ra, the 'One God' at Heliopolis is not the same as Osiris, the 'One God' at Abydos, and can be worshipped side by side with him, without being absorbed by his neighbour. The one god is but the god of the nome or the city, noutir, noutti, and does not exclude the existence of the one god of that town or of the neighbouring nome. In short, whenever speaking of Egyptian Monotheism, one ought to speak of the Gods 'One' of Egypt, and not of the one god" (Maspero, in the Guide au Musee de Boulak.) It is by this feature, pre-eminently Egyptian, that the authenticity of the various so-called Hermetic Books, ought to be tested; and it is totally absent from the Greek fragments known as such. This proves that a Greek Neo-Platonic, or even a Christian hand, had no small share in the editing of such works. Of course the fundamental philosophy is there, and in many a place -- intact. But the style has been altered and smoothed in a monotheistic direction, as much, if not more than that of the Hebrew Genesis in its Greek and Latin translations. They may be Hermetic works, but not works written by either of the two Hermes -- or rather, by Thot (Hermes) the directing intelligence of the Universe (See ch. xciv., Book of the Dead), or by Thot, his terrestrial incarnation called Trismegistus, of the Rosetta stone.
This is interesting and I trust Blavatsky more than myself, but my research in Hermeticism has been different.
While Materialists deny everything in the universe, save matter, Archaeologists are trying to dwarf antiquity, and seek to destroy every claim to ancient Wisdom by tampering with Chronology. Our present-day Orientalists and Historical writers are to ancient History that which the white ants are to the buildings in India. More dangerous even than those Termites, the modern Archaeologists -- the "authorities" of the future in the matter of Universal History -- are preparing for the History of past nations the fate of certain edifices in tropical countries: "History will tumble down and break into atoms in the lap of the twentieth century, devoured to its foundations by her annalists," said Michelet. Very soon, indeed, under their combined efforts, it will share the fate of those ruined cities in both Americas, which lie deeply buried under impassable virgin forests. Historical facts will remain as concealed from view by the inextricable jungles of modern hypotheses, denials and scepticism. But very happily actual History repeats herself, for she proceeds, like everything else, in cycles; and dead facts and events deliberately drowned in the sea of modern scepticism will ascend once more and reappear on the surface. . . .
End of Book Vol I and, like every scripture, it warns us of something happening SOON. Are we there yet? Would we know?
VOLUME II
Anthropogenesis
Anthropogenesis
I found the second book easier to understand, but that makes sense. Rather than the cosmology behind the universe, we now come closer to the planet and the birth of man, which is a more accessible conversation with far more provable stuff behind it. Due to this advantage, Blavatsky's writing feels more coherent, plus I had gotten used to her by this point. Regardless, I took fewer notes from this volume.
PRELIMINARY NOTES: ON THE ARCHAIC STANZAS, AND THE FOUR PRE-HISTORIC CONTINENTS.
It is, therefore, sufficient to examine the Babylonian and Assyrian cuneiform and other inscriptions to find also therein, scattered here and there, not only the original meaning of the name Adam, Admi, or Adami,* but also the creation of seven Adams or roots of men, born of Mother Earth, physically, and of the divine fire of the progenitors, spiritually or astrally. The Assyriologists, ignorant of the esoteric teachings, could hardly be expected to pay any greater attention to the mysterious and ever-recurring number seven on the Babylonian cylinders, than they paid to it on finding the same in Genesis and the Bible. Yet the number of the ancestral spirits and their seven groups of human progeny are there, notwithstanding the dilapidated condition of the fragments, as plainly as they are to be found in "Pymander" and in the "Book of the Concealed Mystery" of the Kabala. In the latter Adam Kadmon is the Sephirothal TREE, as also the "Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil." And that "Tree," says verse 32, "hath around it seven columns," or palaces, of the seven creative Angels operating in the spheres of the seven planets on our Globe. As Adam Kadmon is a collective name, so also is the name of the man Adam. Says George Smith in his "Chaldean Account of Genesis:" --
"The word Adam used in these legends for the first human being is evidently not a proper name, but is only used as a term for mankind. Adam appears as a proper name in Genesis, but certainly in some passages is only used in the same sense as the Assyrian word" (p. 86).
"The word Adam used in these legends for the first human being is evidently not a proper name, but is only used as a term for mankind. Adam appears as a proper name in Genesis, but certainly in some passages is only used in the same sense as the Assyrian word" (p. 86).
This is a snippet of a massive part of what Volume II went on about, whereby Adam is not a guy but an entire evolution of human subspecies. While I don't believe anything, this was revelationary to me and influenced a ton of my thinking.
The claim that physical man was originally a colossal pre-tertiary giant, and that he existed 18,000,000 years ago, must of course appear preposterous to admirers of, and believers in, modern learning. The whole posse comitatis of biologists will turn away from the conception of this third race Titan of the Secondary age, a being fit to fight as successfully with the then gigantic monsters of the air, sea, and land, as his forefathers -- the ethereal prototype of the Atlantean -- had little need to fear that which could not hurt him. The modern anthropologist is quite welcome to laugh at our Titans, as he laughs at the Biblical Adam, and as the theologian laughs at his pithecoid ancestor. The Occultists and their severe critics may feel that they have pretty well mutually squared their accounts by this time. Occult sciences claim less and give more, at all events, than either Darwinian Anthropology or Biblical Theology.
At the time of noting this, I figured it was talking about The Book of Enoch, but now having finished the book, I know her belief in giants goes much further than that.
BOOK II. -- PART I. ANTHROPOGENESIS.
ANTHROPOGENESIS IN THE SECRET VOLUME.
* Only forty-nine Slokas out of several hundred are here given. Not every verse is translated verbatim. A periphrasis is sometimes used for the sake of clearness and intelligibility, where a literal translation would be quite unintelligible.
Footnote. Dzyan translations are not 100% accurate. Gotta just trust her judgement.
STANZA I.* BEGINNINGS OF SENTIENT LIFE.
VERY much about planets and their associated mythological figures.
* All the words and sentences placed in brackets in the Stanzas and Commentaries are the writer's. In some places they may be incomplete and even inadequate from the Hindu standpoint; but in the meaning attached to them in Trans-Himalayan Esotericism they are correct. In every case the writer takes any blame upon herself. Having never claimed personal infallibility, that which is given on her own authority may leave much to be desired, in the very abstruse cases where too deep metaphysics is involved. The teaching is offered as it is understood; and as there are seven keys of interpretation to every symbol and allegory, that which may not fit a meaning, say from the psychological or astronomical aspect, will be found quite correct from the physical or metaphysical.
Footnote. Seems legit.
At the commencement of a great Manvantara, Parabrahm manifests as Mulaprakriti and then as the Logos. This Logos is equivalent to the "Unconscious Universal Mind," etc., of Western Pantheists.
Shout-out to my fellow Pantheists!
It has been repeatedly stated that the Serpent is the symbol of wisdom and of Occult knowledge. "The Serpent has been connected with the god of wisdom from the earliest times of which we have any historical notice," writes Staniland Wake. "This animal was the especial symbol of Thot or Taut . . . and of all those gods, such as Hermes (?) and Seth who can be connected with him. This is also the primitive Chaldean triad Hea or Hoa."
Originally I was interested in serpent iconography due to reptilian theories in more of a debunking manner, but now I'm kinda obsessed with the snake in mythology on its own.
Vossius utters here a greater occult truth than he suspected. The Hermes-Sarameyas of the Greeks is closely related to the Hindu Saram and Sarameya, the divine watchman, "who watches over the golden flock of stars and solar rays."
This is something I want to look into deeper. The Hindu Sarama is a mythological dog, "the female dog of the gods" mentioned in the Rig Veda. I have found other sources that state Greek Hermes is related to Sarama. Wtf is even going on hahaha?
Sukra, or Venus, is thus represented as the preceptor of the Daityas, the giants of the Fourth Race, who, in the Hindu allegory, obtained at one time the sovereignty of all the Earth, and defeated the minor gods. The Titans of the Western allegory are as closely connected with Venus-Lucifer, identified by later Christians with Satan. Therefore, as Venus, equally with Isis, was represented with Cow's horns on her head, the symbol of mystic Nature, and one that is convertible with, and significant of, the moon, since all these were lunar goddesses, the configuration of this planet is now placed by theologians between the horns of the mystic Lucifer.
Marking because Hail Satan stuff. But also want to note that the preceding pages are filled with symbols and associated explanations, which obviously I can't copy and paste here. But it's fascinating, and I really do love Theosophy's relationship with the Swastika which obviously predates Nazi perversion.
"Thus there is but one Absolute Upadhi (basis) in the spiritual sense, from, on, and in which, are built for Manvantaric purposes the countless basic centres on which proceed the Universal, cyclic, and individual Evolutions during the active period."
Theosophy is pantheistic irrespective of what she says.
"Seven seems to have been the sacred number par excellence among all civilised nations of antiquity. Why? Each separate people has given a different explanation, according to the peculiar tenets of their (exoteric) religion. That it was the number of numbers for those initiated into the sacred mysteries, there can be no doubt. Pythagoras . . . calls it the 'Vehicle of Life' containing body and soul, since it is formed of a Quaternary, that is Wisdom and intellect, and of a Trinity or action and matter. The Emperor Julian, 'In matrem, etc.,' expresses himself thus: 'Were I to touch upon the initiation into our Sacred Mysteries, which the Chaldees Bacchized, respecting the seven-rayed god, lighting up the soul through him, I should say things unknown to the rabble, very unknown, but well known to the blessed Theurgists.' " (p. 141).
And who, acquainted with the Puranas, the Book of the Dead, the Zendavesta, the Assyrian tiles, and finally the Bible, and who has observed the constant occurrence of the number seven, in these records of people living from the remotest times unconnected and so far apart, can regard as a coincidence the following fact, given by the same explorer of ancient Mysteries? Speaking of the prevalence of seven as a mystic number, among the inhabitants of the "Western continent" (of America), he adds that it is not less remarkable. For: --
"It frequently occurs in the Popul-vuh . . . we find it besides in the seven families said by Sahagun and Clavigero to have accompanied the mystical personage named Votan, the reputed founder of the great city of Nachan, identified by some with Palenque. In the seven caves* from which the ancestors of the Nahuatl are reported to have emerged. In the seven cities of Cibola, described by Coronado and Niza. . . . In the seven Antilles; in the seven heroes who, we are told, escaped the Deluge . . . ."
"Heroes," moreover, whose number is found the same in every "Deluge" story -- from the seven Rishis who were saved with Vaivasvata Manu, down to Noah's ark, into which beasts, fowls, and living creatures were taken by "Sevens." Thus we see the figures 1, 3, 5, 7, as perfect, because thoroughly mystic, numbers playing a prominent part in every Cosmogony and evolution of living Beings. In China, 1, 3, 5, 7, are called "celestial numbers" in the canonical "Book of Changes." (Yi King, or transformation, as in "Evolution").
And who, acquainted with the Puranas, the Book of the Dead, the Zendavesta, the Assyrian tiles, and finally the Bible, and who has observed the constant occurrence of the number seven, in these records of people living from the remotest times unconnected and so far apart, can regard as a coincidence the following fact, given by the same explorer of ancient Mysteries? Speaking of the prevalence of seven as a mystic number, among the inhabitants of the "Western continent" (of America), he adds that it is not less remarkable. For: --
"It frequently occurs in the Popul-vuh . . . we find it besides in the seven families said by Sahagun and Clavigero to have accompanied the mystical personage named Votan, the reputed founder of the great city of Nachan, identified by some with Palenque. In the seven caves* from which the ancestors of the Nahuatl are reported to have emerged. In the seven cities of Cibola, described by Coronado and Niza. . . . In the seven Antilles; in the seven heroes who, we are told, escaped the Deluge . . . ."
"Heroes," moreover, whose number is found the same in every "Deluge" story -- from the seven Rishis who were saved with Vaivasvata Manu, down to Noah's ark, into which beasts, fowls, and living creatures were taken by "Sevens." Thus we see the figures 1, 3, 5, 7, as perfect, because thoroughly mystic, numbers playing a prominent part in every Cosmogony and evolution of living Beings. In China, 1, 3, 5, 7, are called "celestial numbers" in the canonical "Book of Changes." (Yi King, or transformation, as in "Evolution").
Just slapped a huge slab of info here as an illustration of Theosophy's obsession with the number seven. This is a tiny example of it.
"Ideal nature," the abstract Space in which everything in the Universe is mysteriously and invisibly generated, is the same female side of procreative power in Nature in the Vedic as in every other Cosmogony. Aditi is Sephira, and the Sophia-Achamoth of the Gnostics, and Isis, the virgin Mother of Horus. In every Cosmogony, behind and higher than the creative deity, there is a superior deity, a planner, an Architect, of whom the Creator is but the executive agent. And still higher, over and around, within and without, there is the UNKNOWABLE and the unknown, the Source and Cause of all these Emanations. . . . .
Interesting but also crazy. Why break it down so much? Just the final unknowable is enough in Jantho.
STANZA II. NATURE UNAIDED FAILS.
Oannes (or Dagon, the Chaldean "Man-fish") divides his Cosmogony and Genesis into two portions. First the abyss of waters and darkness, wherein resided most hideous beings ---men with wings, four and two-faced men, human beings with two heads, with the legs and horns of a goat (our "goat-men,")* hippocentaurs, bulls with the heads of men, and dogs with tails of fishes. In short, combinations of various animals and men, of fishes, reptiles and other monstrous animals assuming each other's shapes and countenances.
I never know if Blavatsky is talking literally or mythologically. I was recently reading that "fish" is a mistranslation?
Weeded of metaphors and allegories, what will science say to this idea of a primordial creation of species? It will object to the "Angels" and "Spirits" having anything to do therewith: but if it is nature and the physical law of evolution that are the creators of all there is now on Earth, why could there be "no such abyss" when the globe was covered with waters, in which numbers of monstrous beings were generated? Is it the "human beings" and animals with human heads and double faces, which are a point of the objection? But if man is only a higher animal and has evolved from the brute species by an infinite series of transformations, why could not the "missing links" have had human heads attached to the bodies of animals, or, being two-headed, have heads of beasts and vice versa, in Nature's early efforts? Are we not shown during the geological periods, in the ages of the reptiles and the mammalia, lizards with birds' wings, and serpents' heads on animal bodies.*** And, arguing from the standpoint of science, does not even our modern human race occasionally furnish us with monster-specimens: twoheaded children, animal bodies with human heads, dog-headed babies, etc., etc.? And this proves that, if nature will still play such freaks now that she has settled for ages into the order of her evolutionary work, monsters, like those described by Berosus, were a possibility in her opening programme; which possibility may even have existed once upon a time as a law, before she sorted out her species and began regular work upon them; which indeed now admits of definite proof by the bare fact of "REVERSION," as science puts it.
Following on from my previous comment, this does indicate that she's speaking literally. Which is weird. But also, there are some roundabout sense here, as per always. That's her forte, I suppose.
STANZA III. ATTEMPTS TO CREATE MAN.
Now the plain meaning of these two allegorical and metaphysical disquisitions is simply this: Worlds and men were in turn formed and destroyed, under the law of evolution and from pre-existing material, until both the planets and their men, in our case our Earth and its animal and human races, became what they are now in the present cycle: opposite polar forces, an equilibrized compound of Spirit and Matter, of the positive and the negative, of the male and the female. Before man could become male and female physically, his prototype, the creating Elohim, had to arrange his Form on this sexual plane astrally. That is to say, the atoms and the organic forces, descending into the plane of the given differentiation, had to be marshalled in the order intended by Nature, so as to be ever carrying out, in an immaculate way, that law which the Kabala calls the Balance, through which everything that exists does so as male and female in its final perfection, in this present stage of materiality. Chochmah, Wisdom, the Male Sephiroth, had to diffuse itself in, and through, Binah, intelligent Nature, or Understanding. Therefore the First Root-race of men, sexless and mindless, had to be overthrown and "hidden until after a time"; i.e., the first race, instead of dying, disappeared in the second race, as certain lower lives and plants do in their progeny. It was a wholesale transformation. The First became the Second Root-race, without either begetting it, procreating it, or dying. "They passed by together," as it is written: "And he died and another reigned in his stead" (Genesis xxvi. 31 et seq. Zohar iii., 292a). Why? Because "the Holy City had not been prepared." And what is the "Holy City"? The Maquom (the Secret Place or the Shrine) on Earth: in other words, the human womb, the microcosmic copy and reflection of the Heavenly Matrix, the female space or primeval Chaos, in which the male Spirit fecundates the germ of the Son, or the visible Universe.* So much so, that in the paragraph on "the Emanation of the Male and Female Principles" in the Zohar (ibid.), it is said that, on this earth, the WISDOM from the "Holy Ancient" "does not shine except in male and female." "Hohmah, Wisdom, is the Father, and BINAH, understanding, is the Mother . . . . and when they connect one with the other they bring forth and diffuse and emanate truth. In the sayings of Rabbi Je-yeva Sabah, i.e., the Old, we learned this: What is Binah Understanding? But when they connect in one another, the [[diagram]] (Yod) in the [[diagram]] (Heh), they become impregnated and produce a Son. And, therefore, it is called Binah, Understanding. It means BeN YaH, i.e., Son of YaH. This is the completeness of the whole."*
I marked this due to the male and female creation aspect, which Theosophy has a lot to say about especially in regards to an initial hermaphrodite root race (Adam?) which then split into gender. I feel like Hermeticism inspired a lot of it.
STANZA IV. CREATION OF THE FIRST RACES.
* In spite of all efforts to the contrary, Christian theology -- having burdened itself with the Hebrew esoteric account of the creation of man, which is understood literally -- cannot find any reasonable excuse for its "God, the Creator," who produces a man devoid of mind and sense; nor can it justify the punishment following an act, for which Adam and Eve might plead non compos. For if the couple is admitted to be ignorant of good and evil before the eating of the forbidden fruit, how could it be expected to know that disobedience was evil? If primeval man was meant to remain a half-witted, or rather witless, being, then his creation was aimless and even cruel, if produced by an omnipotent and perfect God. But Adam and Eve are shown, even in Genesis, to be created by a class of lower divine Beings, the Elohim, who are so jealous of their personal prerogatives as reasonable and intelligent creatures, that they will not allow man to become "as one of us." This is plain, even from the deadletter meaning of the Bible. The Gnostics, then, were right in regarding the Jewish God as belonging to a class of lower, material and not very holy denizens of the invisible World.
When I first read this, it blew my mind and an angle I'd never considered. I have since researched Gnosticism quite intensely and they do kinda cover this, although I feel this is still a very strong addition to the argument. And may I just say, I LOVE interpretations of Genesis soooo much.
Nevertheless, as the illusionary distinction exists, it requires a lower order of creative angels to "create" inhabited globes -- especially ours -- or to deal with matter on this earthly plane. The philosophical Gnostics were the first to think so, in the historical period, and to invent various systems upon this theory. Therefore in their schemes of creation, one always finds their Creators occupying a place at the very foot of the ladder of spiritual Being. With them, those who created our earth and its mortals were placed on the very limit of mayavic matter, and their followers were taught to think -- to the great disgust of the Church Fathers -- that for the creation of those wretched races, in a spiritual and moral sense, which grace our globe, no high divinity could be made responsible, but only angels of a low hierarchy,* to which class they relegated the Jewish God, Jehovah.
And here, she mentioned the Gnostics. Which is pretty impressive considering the bulk of Gnostic material was only discovered in the 1940s!
"My first idea of this part" (of the rebellion), he says, "was that the wars with the powers of Evil preceded the Creation; I now think it followed the account of the fall" (Chaldean Account of Genesis, p. 92). In this work Mr. George Smith gives an engraving, from an early Babylonian cylinder, of the Sacred Tree, the Serpent, man and woman. The tree has seven branches: three on the man's side, four on that of the female. These branches are typical of the seven Root-Races, in the third of which, at its very close, occurred the separation of the sexes and the so-called FALL into generation. The three earliest Races were sexless, then hermaphrodite; the other four, male and female, as distinct from each other. "The Dragon," says Mr. G. Smith, "which in the Chaldean account of the creation leads man to sin, is the creation of Tiamat, the living principle of the Sea, or Chaos . . . which was opposed to the deities at the creation of the world." This is an error. The Dragon is the male principle, or Phallus, personified, or rather animalized; and Tiamat, "the embodiment of the Spirit of Chaos," of the deep, or Abyss, is the female principle, the Womb. The "Spirit of Chaos and Disorder" refers to the mental perturbation which it led to. It is the sensual, attractive, magnetic principle which fascinates and seduces, the ever living active element which throws the whole world into disorder, chaos, and sin. The Serpent seduces the woman, but it is the latter who seduces man, and both are included in the Karmic curse, though only as a natural result of a cause produced. Says George Smith: "It is clear that the Dragon is included in the curse for the Fall, and that the Gods" (the Elohim, jealous at seeing the man of clay becoming a Creator in his turn, like all the animals,) "invoke on the head of the human Race all the evils which afflict humanity. Wisdom and knowledge shall injure him, he shall have family quarrels, he will anger the gods, he shall submit to tyranny. . . . he shall be disappointed in his desires, he shall pour out useless prayers, he shall commit future sin. . No doubt subsequent lines continue this topic, but again our narrative is broken, and it re-opens only where the gods are preparing for war with the powers of evil, which are led by Tiamat (the woman). . . . " (Babylonian Legend of Creation, p. 92.)
This account is omitted in Genesis, for monotheistic purposes. But it is a mistaken policy -- born no doubt of fear, and regard for dogmatic religion and its superstitions -- to have sought to restore the Chaldean fragments by Genesis, whereas it is the latter, far younger than any of the fragments, which ought to be explained by the former.
This account is omitted in Genesis, for monotheistic purposes. But it is a mistaken policy -- born no doubt of fear, and regard for dogmatic religion and its superstitions -- to have sought to restore the Chaldean fragments by Genesis, whereas it is the latter, far younger than any of the fragments, which ought to be explained by the former.
Another interesting take on Gensis, especially where the serpent is considered phallic, everything a metaphor for sexual seduction.
17. THE BREATH (human Monad) NEEDED A FORM; THE FATHERS GAVE IT. THE BREATH NEEDED A GROSS BODY; THE EARTH MOULDED IT. THE BREATH NEEDED THE SPIRIT OF LIFE; THE SOLAR LHAS BREATHED IT INTO ITS FORM. THE BREATH NEEDED A MIRROR OF ITS BODY (astral shadow); "WE GAVE IT OUR OWN," SAID THE DHYANIS. THE BREATH NEEDED A VEHICLE OF DESIRES (Kama Rupa); "IT HAS IT," SAID THE DRAINER OF WATERS (Suchi, the fire of passion and animal instinct). THE BREATH NEEDS A MIND TO EMBRACE THE UNIVERSE; "WE CANNOT GIVE THAT," SAID THE FATHERS. "I NEVER HAD IT," SAID THE SPIRIT OF THE EARTH. "THE FORM WOULD BE CONSUMED WERE I TO GIVE IT MINE," SAID THE GREAT (solar) FIRE . . . . (nascent) MAN REMAINED AN EMPTY, SENSELESS BHUTA . . . . THUS HAVE THE BONELESS GIVEN LIFE TO THOSE WHO BECAME (later) MEN WITH BONES IN THE THIRD (race) (a).
This is an actual section from a Dzyan Stanza. A personification of concepts like we always see in Jantho.
After being called the incognizable, eternal Brahma (neuter or abstract), the Punda-Rikaksha, "supreme and imperishable glory," once that instead of Sadaika-Rupa, "changeless" or "immutable" Nature, he is addressed as Ekanaka-Rupa, "both single and manifold," he, the cause, becomes merged with his own effects; and his names, if placed in esoteric order, show the following descending scale: --
1. Mahapurusha or Paramatman ... Supreme Spirit.
2. Atman or Purvaja (Protologos) ...The living Spirit of Nature.
3. Indriyatman, or Hrishikesa ..........Spiritual or intellectual soul (One with the senses).
5. Bhutatman ................................ . The living, or Life Soul.
6. Kshetrajna .................................. Embodied soul, or the Universe of Spirit and Matter.
7. Bhrantidarsanatah .........................False perception -- Material Universe.
1. Mahapurusha or Paramatman ... Supreme Spirit.
2. Atman or Purvaja (Protologos) ...The living Spirit of Nature.
3. Indriyatman, or Hrishikesa ..........Spiritual or intellectual soul (One with the senses).
5. Bhutatman ................................ . The living, or Life Soul.
6. Kshetrajna .................................. Embodied soul, or the Universe of Spirit and Matter.
7. Bhrantidarsanatah .........................False perception -- Material Universe.
I enjoy these levels of spirit even if why or how, you know? Why 7? It feels like if they concluded 8, Blavatsky would remove one. If thy concluded 6, Blavatsky would add one.
STANZA V. THE EVOLUTION OF THE SECOND RACE.
This is all about the race that birthed itself, i.e. it wasn’t a reproduction between male and female but a singular entity self-replicating; humanity as hermaphrodites. This was all new information to me, and while I don't believe it per se, it has severely altered the scope of my thinking. I talk about it all the time.
This cannot be thoroughly understood unless the student makes himself familiar with the mystery of evolution, which proceeds on triple lines -- spiritual, psychic and physical.
Seems important enough to note. In some ways, kinda logical, perhaps even undeiniable, but idk lol.
"The Souls (Monads) are pre-existent in the world of Emanations," (Book of Wisdom viii., 20); and the Zohar teaches that in the "Soul" "is the real man, i.e., the Ego and the conscious I AM: 'Manas.' "
"They descend from the pure air to be chained to bodies," says Josephus repeating the belief of the Essenes (De Bello Judaeo, 11, 12). "The air is full of Souls," states Philo, "they descend to be tied to mortal bodies, being desirous to live in them." (De Gignat, 222 c.; De Somniis, p. 455)***; because through, and in, the human form they will become progressive beings, whereas the nature of the angel is purely intransitive, therefore man has in him the potency of transcending the faculties of the Angels. Hence the Initiates in India say that it is the Brahmin, the twice-born, who rules the gods or devas; and Paul repeated it in I Corinthians vi., 3: "Know ye not that we (the Initiates) shall judge angels"?
Finally, it is shown in every ancient scripture and Cosmogony that man evolved primarily as a luminous incorporeal form, over which, like the molten brass round the clay model of the sculptor, the physical frame of his body was built by, through, and from, the lower forms and types of animal terrestrial life. "The Soul and the Form when descending on Earth put on an earthly garment," says the Zohar. His protoplastic body was not formed of that matter of which our mortal frames are fashioned. "When Adam dwelt in the garden of Eden, he was clothed in the celestial garment, which is the garment of heavenly light. . . . light of that light which was used in the garden of Eden," (Zohar II 229 B). "Man (the heavenly Adam) was created by the ten Sephiroth of the Jetziric world, and by the common power they (the seven angels of a still lower world) engendered the earthly Adam . . . . First Samael fell, and then deceiving (?) man, caused his fall also."
(b) The sentence: "They were the shadows of the shadows of the Lords," i.e., the progenitors created man out of their own astral bodies, explains an universal belief. The Devas are credited in the East with having no shadows of their own. "The devas cast no shadows," and this is the sure sign of a good holy Spirit.
Why had they "no fire or water of their own"?* Because: --
(c) That which Hydrogen is to the elements and gases on the objective plane, its noumenon is in the world of mental or subjective phenomena; since its trinitarian latent nature is mirrored in its three active emanations from the three higher principles in man, namely, "Spirit, Soul, and Mind," or Atma, Buddhi, and Manas. It is the spiritual and also the material human basis. Rudimentary man, having been nursed by the "air" or the "wind," becomes the perfect man later on; when, with the development of "Spiritual fire," the noumenon of the "Three in One" within his Self, he acquires from his inner Self, or Instructor, the Wisdom of Self-Consciousness, which he does not possess in the beginning. Thus here again divine Spirit is symbolised by the Sun or Fire; divine Soul by Water and the Moon, both standing for the Father and Mother of Pneuma, human Soul, or Mind, symbolised by the Wind or air, for Pneuma, means "breath."
"They descend from the pure air to be chained to bodies," says Josephus repeating the belief of the Essenes (De Bello Judaeo, 11, 12). "The air is full of Souls," states Philo, "they descend to be tied to mortal bodies, being desirous to live in them." (De Gignat, 222 c.; De Somniis, p. 455)***; because through, and in, the human form they will become progressive beings, whereas the nature of the angel is purely intransitive, therefore man has in him the potency of transcending the faculties of the Angels. Hence the Initiates in India say that it is the Brahmin, the twice-born, who rules the gods or devas; and Paul repeated it in I Corinthians vi., 3: "Know ye not that we (the Initiates) shall judge angels"?
Finally, it is shown in every ancient scripture and Cosmogony that man evolved primarily as a luminous incorporeal form, over which, like the molten brass round the clay model of the sculptor, the physical frame of his body was built by, through, and from, the lower forms and types of animal terrestrial life. "The Soul and the Form when descending on Earth put on an earthly garment," says the Zohar. His protoplastic body was not formed of that matter of which our mortal frames are fashioned. "When Adam dwelt in the garden of Eden, he was clothed in the celestial garment, which is the garment of heavenly light. . . . light of that light which was used in the garden of Eden," (Zohar II 229 B). "Man (the heavenly Adam) was created by the ten Sephiroth of the Jetziric world, and by the common power they (the seven angels of a still lower world) engendered the earthly Adam . . . . First Samael fell, and then deceiving (?) man, caused his fall also."
(b) The sentence: "They were the shadows of the shadows of the Lords," i.e., the progenitors created man out of their own astral bodies, explains an universal belief. The Devas are credited in the East with having no shadows of their own. "The devas cast no shadows," and this is the sure sign of a good holy Spirit.
Why had they "no fire or water of their own"?* Because: --
(c) That which Hydrogen is to the elements and gases on the objective plane, its noumenon is in the world of mental or subjective phenomena; since its trinitarian latent nature is mirrored in its three active emanations from the three higher principles in man, namely, "Spirit, Soul, and Mind," or Atma, Buddhi, and Manas. It is the spiritual and also the material human basis. Rudimentary man, having been nursed by the "air" or the "wind," becomes the perfect man later on; when, with the development of "Spiritual fire," the noumenon of the "Three in One" within his Self, he acquires from his inner Self, or Instructor, the Wisdom of Self-Consciousness, which he does not possess in the beginning. Thus here again divine Spirit is symbolised by the Sun or Fire; divine Soul by Water and the Moon, both standing for the Father and Mother of Pneuma, human Soul, or Mind, symbolised by the Wind or air, for Pneuma, means "breath."
The nautre of souls vs. physical, and a perfect example of how thorough Theosophy is. Here, its conclusions connect the Kabbalah Zohar, the New Testaemnt, and molecular science. It's mad.
And these three are all quaternaries completed by their Root, Fire. The Spirit, beyond manifested Nature, is the fiery BREATH in its absolute Unity. In the manifested Universe, it is the Central Spiritual Sun, the electric Fire of all Life. In our System it is the visible Sun, the Spirit of Nature, the terrestrial god. And in, on, and around the Earth, the fiery Spirit thereof -- air, fluidic fire; water, liquid fire; Earth, solid fire. All is fire -- ignis, in its ultimate constitution, or I, the root of which is O (nought) in our conceptions, the All in nature and its mind. Pro-Mater is divine fire. It is the Creator, the Destroyer, the Preserver. The primitive names of the gods are all connected with fire, from AGNI, the Aryan, to the Jewish god who "is a consuming fire." In India, God is called in various dialects, Eashoor, Esur, Iswur, and Is'Vara, in Sanskrit the Lord, from Isa, but this is primarily the name of Siva, the Destroyer; and the three Vedic chief gods are Agni (ignis), Vayu, and Surya -- Fire, Air, and the Sun, three occult degrees of fire. In the Hebrew (aza), means to illuminate, and (asha) is fire. In Occultism, "to kindle a fire" is synonymous to evoking one of the three great firepowers, or "to call on God." In Sanskrit Osch or Asch is fire or heat; and the Egyptian word Osiris is compounded (as shown by Schelling) of the two primitives aish and asr, or a "fireenchanter." Aesar in the old Etruscan meant a God (being perhaps derived from Asura of the Vedas). Aeswar and Eswara are analogous terms, as Dr. Kenealy thought. In the Bhagavad Gita we read, "Iswara resides in every mortal being and puts in motion, by his supernatural power, all things which mount on the Wheel of Time." It is the creator and the destroyer, truly. "The primitive fire was supposed to have an insatiable appetite for devouring. Maximus of Tyre relates that the ancient Persians threw into the fire combustible matter crying: 'Devour, oh Lord!' In the Irish language Easam, or Asam, means 'to create,' and Aesar was the name of an ancient Irish god, meaning 'to light a fire' " (Kenealy). The Christian Kabalists and symbologists who disfigured Pymander -- prominent among them the Bishop of Ayre, Francois de Tours, in the 16th century -- divide the elements in this way: --
The four elements formed from divine substances and the Spirits of the Salts of Nature represented by --
St. Matthew. . Angel-Man . . Water . . (Jesus-Christ, Angel-Man, Mikael)
A - . St. Mark. . . . .The Lion . . . . Fire
E - Y . .St. Luke. . . . . The Bull . . . . Earth
I - O . . St. John. . . . . The Eagle . . . Air*
The four elements formed from divine substances and the Spirits of the Salts of Nature represented by --
St. Matthew. . Angel-Man . . Water . . (Jesus-Christ, Angel-Man, Mikael)
A - . St. Mark. . . . .The Lion . . . . Fire
E - Y . .St. Luke. . . . . The Bull . . . . Earth
I - O . . St. John. . . . . The Eagle . . . Air*
Names for fire in diff religions, I like this.
Long before Darwin, Naudin, who gave the name of Blastema to that which the Darwinists call protoplasm, put forward a theory half occult and half scientifico-materialistic. He made Adam, the asexual, spring suddenly from the clay, as it is called in the Bible, the Blastema of Science. "It is from this larval form of mankind that the evolutive force effected the completion of species. For the accomplishment of this great phenomenon, Adam had to pass through a phase of immobility and unconsciousness, very analogous to the nymphal state of animals undergoing metamorphosis," explains Naudin. For the eminent botanist, Adam was not one man, however, but mankind, "which remained concealed within a temporary organism . . . . distinct from all others and never contracting alliance with any of these." He shows the differentiation of sexes accomplished by "a process of germination similar to that of Medusae and Ascidians." Mankind, thus constituted physiologically, "would retain a sufficient evolutive force for the rapid production of the various great human races.
Talking about how different ages of sexless men could have birthed themselves, hermaphroditism, self born race, born through will. Again, this was a revelationary concept to me.
Is this a poetical fiction only? An allegory, one of those "solar myth" interpretations, higher than which no modern Orientalist seems able to soar? Indeed, it is much more. Here we have an allusion to the "Egg-born," Third Race; the first half of which is mortal, i.e., unconscious in its personality, and having nothing within itself to survive***; and the latter half of which becomes immortal in its individuality, by reason of its fifth principle being called to life by the informing gods, and thus connecting the Monad with this Earth. This is Pollux; while Castor represents the personal, mortal man, an animal of not even a superior kind, when unlinked from the divine individuality. "Twins" truly; yet divorced by death forever, unless Pollux, moved by the voice of twinship, bestows on his less favoured mortal brother a share of his own divine nature, thus associating him with his own immortality.
I'm only putting this piece here but the preceding paragraphs are where the actual magic lies as Blavatsky does what she does best and cleanly ties Greek mythology into her sermon.
In the Book of Enoch we have Adam,** the first divine androgyne, Moon, conceived as twins . . . The Sun, the immortal and powerful being that disappears every evening from the horizon and descends under the Earth, as though he would make room for the fraternal orb which comes to life with night, is Pollux, who sacrifices himself for Castor; Castor, who, inferior to his brother, owes to him his immortality: for the Moon, says Theophrastus, is only another, but feebler Sun." (De Ventis 17. See Decharme, p. 655.) separating into man and woman, and becoming JAH-HEVA in one form, or Race, and Cain and Abel* (male and female) in its other form or Race -- the double-sexed Jehovah** -- an echo of its Aryan prototype, Brahma-Vach. After which come the Third and Fourth Root-Races of mankind*** -- that is to say, Races of men and women, or individuals of opposite sexes, no longer sexless semi-spirits and androgynes, as were the two Races which precede them. This fact is hinted at in every Anthropogony. It is found in fable and allegory, in myth and revealed Scriptures, in legend and tradition. Because, of all the great Mysteries, inherited by Initiates from hoary antiquity, this is one of the greatest. It accounts for the bi-sexual element found in every creative deity, in Brahma-Viraj-Vach, as in AdamJehovah-Eve, also in "Cain-Jehovah-Abel." For "The Book of the Generations of Adam" does not even mention Cain and Abel, but says only: "Male and female created he them. . . and called their name Adam" (ch. v. 5). Then it proceeds to say: "And Adam begat a son in his own likeness, after his image, and called his name Seth" (v. 3); after which he begets other sons and daughters, thus proving that Cain and Abel are his own allegorical permutations. Adam stands for the primitive human race, especially in its cosmo-sidereal sense. Not so, however, in its theo-anthropological meaning. The compound name of Jehovah, or Jah-Hovah, meaning male life and female life -- first androgynous, then separated into sexes -- is used in this sense in Genesis from ch. v. onwards. As the author of "The Source of Measures" says (p. 159): "The two words of which Jehovah is composed make up the original idea of male-female, as the birth originators"; for the Hebrew letter Jod was the membrum virile and Hovah was Eve, the mother of all living, or the procreatrix, Earth and Nature. The author believes, therefore, that "It is seen that the perfect one" (the perfect female circle or Yoni, 20612, numerically), "as originator of measures, takes also the form of birth-origin, as Hermaphrodite one; hence the phallic form and use."
A lot to unpack here, and honestly, it's insane. I can confirm that the KJV Bible (and plenty others, I'm sure), states in Genesis 5.2 "Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created," which is HUGE in terms of Adam being a representative of both genders. It then TOTALLY SKIPS Cain and Abel which is like wtffff why?????
As for the Jah-Hovah eymology, I couldn't affirm that unfortuantely, which sucks cos I really wanted to!
On a side note, I love how the Book of Enoch is forever used in occult texts yet omitted from The Bible. Such a powerful book and probably why is was removed.
In "Isis Unveiled,"** it was explained by the writer that "Cain . . . is the son of the 'Lord' not of Adam (Genesis iv. I)" The "Lord" is Adam Kadmon, the "father" of Yodcheva, "Adam-Eve," or Jehovah, the son of sinful thought, not the progeny of flesh and blood. Seth, on the other hand, is the leader and the progenitor of the Races of the Earth; for he is the son of Adam, exoterically, but esoterically he is the progeny of Cain and Abel, since Abel or Hebel is a female, the counterpart and female half of the male Cain, and Adam is the collective name for man and woman: "male and female (Zachar va Nakobeh) created he them . . . and called their name Adam." The verses in Genesis from chs. i. to v., are purposely mixed up for Kabalistic reasons. After MAN of Kadmon, the sexless (the first) Logos, Adam and Eve once separated, come finally Jehovah-Eve and Cain-Jehovah. These represent distinct Root-Races, for millions of years elapsed between them.
Ooof, so much here that amplifies my energy. Everything is symbolic.
STANZA VI. THE EVOLUTION OF THE "SWEAT-BORN."
The second race creates third then perishes.
To make it clear: The First Race having created the Second by "budding," as just explained, the Second Race gives birth to the Third -- which itself is separated into three distinct divisions, consisting of men differently procreated. The first two of these are produced by an oviparous method, presumably unknown to modern Natural History. While the early sub-races of the Third Humanity procreated their species by a kind of exudation of moisture or vital fluid, the drops of which coalescing formed an oviform ball -- or shall we say egg? -- which served as an extraneous vehicle for the generation therein of a foetus and child, the mode of procreation by the later races changed, in its results at all events. The little ones of the earlier races were entirely sexless -- shapeless even for all one knows*; but those of the later races were born androgynous. It is in the Third Race that the separation of sexes occurred. From being previously a-sexual, Humanity became distinctly hermaphrodite or bi-sexual; and finally the manbearing eggs began to give birth, gradually and almost imperceptibly in their evolutionary development, first, to Beings in which one sex predominated over the other, and, finally, to distinct men and women.
Tidy summary of where we are now.
The two twin births of Genesis, that of Cain and Abel, and of Esau and Jacob, shadow the same idea. The name 'Hebel' is the same as Eve, and its characteristic seems to be feminine," continues the author. "Unto thee shall be his desire," said the Lord God to Cain, "and thou shalt rule over him." The same language had been uttered to Eve: "Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." . . .
I started wondering here if the patriarchal system is not a mistranslation whereby it’s not that women are subservient to men but that we are both born from an energy that has been pronouned as male and therefore completely misinterpreted (perhaps even intentionally).
Hylozoism, when philosophically understood, is the highest aspect of Pantheism. It is the only possible escape from idiotic atheism based on lethal materiality, and the still more idiotic anthropomorphic conceptions of the monotheists; between which two it stands on its own entirely neutral ground. Hylozoism demands absolute Divine Thought, which would pervade the numberless active, creating Forces, or "Creators"; which entities are moved by, and have their being in, from, and through that Divine Thought; the latter, nevertheless, having no more personal concern in them or their creations, than the Sun has in the sun-flower and its seeds, or in vegetation in general.
Hylozoism that that all matter is alive, which I cannot argue with. I also like how she calls atheism idiotic lol, I’m into it.
STANZA VII. FROM THE SEMI-DIVINE DOWN TO THE FIRST HUMAN RACES.
According to my rough notes, there is a mind-created race, then a “sweat” created race, which were then hemaophodites that can impregenate themselves?
Here the inferior Races, of which there are still some analogues left -- as the Australians (now fast dying out) and some African and Oceanic tribes -- are meant.
Alright, queue the racism.
There is no devil or the utterly depraved, as there are no Angels absolutely perfect, though there may be spirits of Light and of Darkness; thus LUCIFER -- the spirit of Intellectual Enlightenment and Freedom of Thought -- is metaphorically the guiding beacon, which helps man to find his way through the rocks and sandbanks of Life, for Lucifer is the LOGOS in his highest, and the "Adversary" in his lowest aspect -- both of which are reflected in our Ego. Lactantius, speaking of the Nature of Christ, makes the LOGOS, the Word, the first-born brother of Satan, the "first of all creatures."
Luciferianism.
This explains the otherwise unaccountable degrees of intellectuality among the various races of men -- the savage Bushman and the European -- even now. Those tribes of savages, whose reasoning powers are very little above the level of the animals, are not the unjustly disinherited, or the unfavoured, as some may think -- nothing of the kind. They are simply those latest arrivals among the human Monads, which were not ready: which have to evolve during the present Round, as on the three remaining globes (hence on four different planes of being) so as to arrive at the level of the average class when they reach the Fifth Round.
I disagree with this problematic statement, not only as inexcusably racist but also in argument of the theory. Theosophy misses so much of the spiritual due to its focus on appealing to the intellect. Europeans have evolved here in some regards, but have completely lost the spiritual connection, whereas the quote-unquote "savages" are actually far more in tune with the natural world, living in harmony in a way that Europeans have severed. It is a big disparity between Theosophy and Janthopoyism.
The king of the gods (or Indra) sends a beautiful Apsarasas (nymph) named Pramlocha to seduce Kandu and disturb his penance. She succeeds in her unholy purpose and "907 years six months and three days"* spent in her company seem to the sage as one day. When this psychological or hypnotic state ends, the Muni curses bitterly the creature who seduced him, thus disturbing his devotions. "Depart, begone!" he cries, "vile bundle of illusions!" . . . And Pramlocha, terrified, flies away, wiping the perspiration from her body with the leaves of the trees as she passes through the air. She went from tree to tree, and as, with the dusky shoots that crowned their summits, she dried her limbs, the child she had conceived by the Rishi came forth from the pores of her skin in drops of perspiration. The trees received the living dews; and the winds collected them into one mass. "This," said Soma (the Moon), "I matured by my rays; and gradually it increased in size, till the exhalation that had rested on the tree tops became the lovely girl named Marisha."
Now Kandu stands here for the First Race. He is a son of the Pitris, hence one devoid of mind, which is hinted at by his being unable to discern a period of nearly one thousand years from one day; therefore he is shown to be so easily deluded and blinded. Here is a variant of the allegory in Genesis, of Adam, born an image of clay, into which the "Lord-god" breathes the breath of life but not of intellect and discrimination, which are developed only after he had tasted of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge; in other words when he has acquired the first development of Mind, and had implanted in him Manas, whose terrestrial aspect is of the Earth earthy, though its highest faculties connect it with Spirit and the divine Soul. Pramlocha is the Hindu Lilith of the Aryan Adam; and Marisha, the daughter born of the perspiration from her pores, is the "sweat-born," and stands as a symbol for the Second Race of Mankind.
Now Kandu stands here for the First Race. He is a son of the Pitris, hence one devoid of mind, which is hinted at by his being unable to discern a period of nearly one thousand years from one day; therefore he is shown to be so easily deluded and blinded. Here is a variant of the allegory in Genesis, of Adam, born an image of clay, into which the "Lord-god" breathes the breath of life but not of intellect and discrimination, which are developed only after he had tasted of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge; in other words when he has acquired the first development of Mind, and had implanted in him Manas, whose terrestrial aspect is of the Earth earthy, though its highest faculties connect it with Spirit and the divine Soul. Pramlocha is the Hindu Lilith of the Aryan Adam; and Marisha, the daughter born of the perspiration from her pores, is the "sweat-born," and stands as a symbol for the Second Race of Mankind.
Nice little story with an interesting interpretation.
STANZA VIII. EVOLUTION OF THE ANIMAL MAMMALIANS. -- THE FIRST FALL.
Thus Occultism rejects the idea that Nature developed man from the ape, or even from an ancestor common to both, but traces, on the contrary, some of the most anthropoid species to the Third Race man of the early Atlantean period. As this proposition will be maintained and defended elsewhere, a few words more are all that are needed at present.
Bold claim and not something I can possibly agree with. Also hate how she speaks as if the spokeswoman for Occultism.
STANZA IX. THE FINAL EVOLUTION OF MAN.
This, regardless of modern materialistic evolution, which speculates in this wise: "The primitive human form, whence as we think all human species sprang, has perished this long time." (This we deny; it has only decreased in size and changed in texture.) "But many facts point to the conclusion that it was hairy and dolichocephalic." (African races are even now dolichocephalic in a great measure, but the palaeolithic Neanderthal skull, the oldest we know of, is of a large size, and no nearer to the capacity of the gorilla's cranium than that of any other now-living man). "Let us, for the time being, call this hypothetical species Homo primigenius. . . . This first species, or the Ape-man, the ancestor of all the others, PROBABLY arose in the tropical regions of the old world from ANTHROPOID APES." Asked for proofs, the evolutionist, not the least daunted, replies: "Of these NO FOSSIL REMAINS ARE AS YET KNOWN TO US, BUT THEY WERE probably AKIN TO THE GORILLA AND ORANG OF THE PRESENT DAY." And then the Papuan negro is mentioned as the probable descendant in the first line (Pedigree of Man, p. 80).
Footnote with big racial problems.
Human crossing may have been a general rule from the time of the separation of sexes, and yet that other law may assert itself, viz., sterility between two human races, just as between two animal species of various kinds, in those rare cases when a European, condescending to see in a female of a savage tribe a mate, happens to chose a member of such mixed tribes.* Darwin notes such a case in a Tasmanian tribe, whose women were suddenly struck with sterility, en masse, some time after the arrival among them of the European colonists. The great naturalist tried to explain this fact by change of diet, food, conditions, etc., but finally gave up the solution of the mystery. For the Occultist it is a very evident one. "Crossing," as it is called, of Europeans with Tasmanian women -- i.e., the representatives of a race, whose progenitors were a "soulless"* and mindless monster and a real human, though still as mindless a man -- brought on sterility. This, not alone as a consequence of a physiological law, but also as a decree of Karmic evolution in the question of further survival of the abnormal race. In no one point of the above is Science prepared to believe as yet -- but it will have to in the long run. Esoteric philosophy, let us remember, only fills the gaps made by science and corrects her false premises.
Yet, in this particular, geology and even botany and zoology support the esoteric teachings. It has been suggested by many geologists that the Australian native -- co-existing as he does with an archaic fauna and flora -- must date back to an enormous antiquity. The whole environment of this mysterious race, about whose origin ethnology is silent, is a testimony to the truth of the esoteric position.
Yet, in this particular, geology and even botany and zoology support the esoteric teachings. It has been suggested by many geologists that the Australian native -- co-existing as he does with an archaic fauna and flora -- must date back to an enormous antiquity. The whole environment of this mysterious race, about whose origin ethnology is silent, is a testimony to the truth of the esoteric position.
I can't find any sources to back up a significant issue with interracial breeding, so I'm calling bullshit. Janthopoyism encourages interracial relationships as a manner of speeding up a merged human race. Also, there are subtle attacks on the Indingenous Australians throughout this book, which is 100% against my position as someone who reckons they are the demographic closest to the formelss unmanifested substance, shown through their art and philosophies of The Dreaming.
EDENS, SERPENTS, AND DRAGONS.
Whence the idea, and the true meaning of the term "Eden"? Christians will maintain that the Garden of Eden is the holy Paradise, the place desecrated by the sin of Adam and Eve; the Occultist will deny this dead-letter interpretation, and show the reverse. One need not believe and see in the Bible divine revelation in order to say that this ancient book, if read esoterically, is based upon the same universal traditions.
A small bit of a bigger piece. I’m very interested in the metaphor of biblical stories. It's probably my favourite takeaway from SD.
Now we find in the Zohar a very strange assertion, one that is calculated to provoke the reader to merry laughter by its ludicrous absurdity. It tells us that the serpent, which was used by Shamael (the supposed Satan), to seduce Eve, was a kind of flying camel.
First I've heard of such a thing! These pages go on about flying serpents and connects them to dinosaurs. If you're into the snake side of mythology, seek out this section, it goes on.
The same ram's horns are found on the heads of Moses which were on some old medals seen by the writer in Palestine, one of which is in her possession. The horns, made to form part of the shining aureole on the statue of Moses in Rome (Michael Angelo), are vertical instead of being bent down to the ears, but the emblem is the same; hence the Brazen Serpent.
I actually know a lot about this, there's a statue in Sydney where Moses has horns too. It's a known Biblical mistranslation.
So little have the first Christians (who despoiled the Jews of their Bible) understood the first four chapters of Genesis in their esoteric meaning, that they never perceived that not only was no sin intended in this disobedience, but that actually the "Serpent" was "the Lord God" himself, who, as the Ophis, the Logos, or the bearer of divine creative wisdom, taught mankind to become creators in their turn. They never realised that the Cross was an evolution from the "tree and the serpent," and thus became the salvation of mankind. By this it would become the very first fundamental symbol of Creative cause, applying to geometry, to numbers, to astronomy, to measure and to animal reproduction.
This is good.
Sceptics may smile and denounce our work as full of nonsense or fairy-tales. But by so doing they only justify the wisdom of the Chinese philosopher Chuang, who said that "the things that men do know can in no way be compared, numerically speaking, to the things that are unknown"; and thus they laugh only at their own ignorance.
A solid quote. This relates to Blavatsky illustrating how crazy creatures lived at the time of man, perhaps dragons, but also possibly lots of things that have gone extinct. Maybe hey.
THE "SONS OF GOD" AND THE "SACRED ISLAND."
"As to the Polynesian continent which disappeared at the time of the final geological cataclysms, its existence rests on such proofs that to be logical we can doubt no longer.
"The three summits of this continent, the Sandwich Islands, New Zealand, Easter Island, are distant from each other from fifteen to eighteen hundred leagues, and the groups of intermediate islands, Viti, Samoa, Tonga, Foutouna, Ouvea, the Marquesas, Tahiti, Poumoutou, the Gambiers, are themselves distant from these extreme points from seven or eight hundred to one thousand leagues.
"All navigators agree in saying that the extreme and the central groups could never have communicated in view of their actual geographical position, and with the insufficient means they had at hand. It is physically impossible to cross such distances in a pirogue . . . without a compass, and travel months without provisions.
"On the other hand, the aborigines of the Sandwich Islands, of Viti, of New Zealand, of the central groups, of Samoa, Tahiti, etc., had never known each other, had never heard of each other, before the arrival of the Europeans. And yet each of these people maintained that their island had at one time formed part of an immense stretch of land which extended towards the West on the side of Asia. And all, brought together, were found to speak the same language, to have the same usages, the same customs, the same religious belief. And all to the question, 'Where is the cradle of your race?' for sole response, extended their hand toward the setting sun"
"The three summits of this continent, the Sandwich Islands, New Zealand, Easter Island, are distant from each other from fifteen to eighteen hundred leagues, and the groups of intermediate islands, Viti, Samoa, Tonga, Foutouna, Ouvea, the Marquesas, Tahiti, Poumoutou, the Gambiers, are themselves distant from these extreme points from seven or eight hundred to one thousand leagues.
"All navigators agree in saying that the extreme and the central groups could never have communicated in view of their actual geographical position, and with the insufficient means they had at hand. It is physically impossible to cross such distances in a pirogue . . . without a compass, and travel months without provisions.
"On the other hand, the aborigines of the Sandwich Islands, of Viti, of New Zealand, of the central groups, of Samoa, Tahiti, etc., had never known each other, had never heard of each other, before the arrival of the Europeans. And yet each of these people maintained that their island had at one time formed part of an immense stretch of land which extended towards the West on the side of Asia. And all, brought together, were found to speak the same language, to have the same usages, the same customs, the same religious belief. And all to the question, 'Where is the cradle of your race?' for sole response, extended their hand toward the setting sun"
I think this is taken from "Histoire des Vierges: Les Peuples et les Continents Disparus" by Louis Jacolliot. I don't know enough not to argue but it's interesting.
STANZA X. THE HISTORY OF THE FOURTH RACE.
To make it plainer, any one who reads that passage in Luke, will see that the remark follows the report of the seventy, who rejoice that "even the devils (the spirit of controversy and reasoning, or the opposing power, since Satan means simply "adversary" or opponent) are subject unto us through thy name." (Luke x. 17.) Now, "thy name" means the name of Christos, or Logos, or the spirit of true divine wisdom, as distinct from the spirit of intellectual or mere materialistic reasoning -- the HIGHER SELF in short. And when Jesus remarks to this that he has "beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven," it is a mere statement of his clairvoyant powers, notifying them that he already knew it, and a reference to the incarnation of the divine ray (the gods or angels) which falls into generation. For not all men, by any means, benefit by that incarnation, and with some the power remains latent and dead during the whole life. Truly "No man knoweth who the Son is, but the Father; and who the Father is, but the Son" as added by Jesus then and there (Ibid v. 22) -- the Church "of Christ" less than any one else. The Initiates alone understood the secret meaning of the term "Father and the Son," and knew that it referred to Spirit and Soul on the Earth. For the teachings of Christ were occult teachings, which could only be explained at the initiation. They were never intended for the masses, for Jesus forbade the twelve to go to the Gentiles and the Samaritans (Matt. x. 8), and repeated to his disciples that the "mysteries of Heaven" were for them alone, not for the multitudes (Mark iv. 11).
Worth taking note of this, especially the last line. Chrisitianity was always intended to be a SECRET, even Jesus said so. Y'all fucked up.
As narrated in King's "Gnostics," "Ilda-Baoth, whom several sects regarded as the God of Moses, was not a pure spirit, he was ambitious and proud, and rejecting the spiritual light of the middle space offered him by his mother Sophia-Achamoth, he set himself to create a world of his own. Aided by his sons, the six planetary genii, he fabricated man, but this one proved a failure. It was a monster, soulless, ignorant, and crawling on all fours on the ground like a material beast. Ilda-Baoth was forced to implore the help of his spiritual mother. She communicated to him a ray of her divine light, and so animated man and endowed him with a soul. And now began the animosity of Ilda-Baoth toward his own creature.
This is 100% what many Gnostics believe, I have read this elsewhere plenty, and its nuts. Yaldabaoth is the demiurge is Yahweh, a completely different God from the New Testament. It's a total Uno Reverse Card on the entire system.
But this does not prove that there is no esotericism in the latter. The fact that the Jews and all the Christians, the modern as well as the early sects, have accepted the narrative literally for two thousand years, shows only their ignorance; and shows the great ingenuity and constructive ability of the initiated Rabbis, who have built the two accounts -- the Elohistic and the Jehovistic -- esoterically, and have purposely confused the meaning by the vowelless glyphs or word-signs in the original text. The six days -- yom -- of creation do mean six periods of evolution, and the seventh that of culmination of perfection (not of rest), and refer to the seven Rounds and the seven Races with a distinct "creation" in each; though the use of the words boker, dawn or morning, and crib, evening twilight -- which have esoterically the same meaning as sandhya, twilight, in Sanskrit -- have led to a charge of the most crass ignorance of the order of evolution.
A lovely summary on what's going on here.
A PANORAMIC VIEW OF THE EARLY RACES.
Thus saith Hermes, the thrice great Initiate,*** "the Power of the Thought Divine." St. Paul, another Initiate, called our world "the enigmatical mirror of pure truth," and St. Gregory, of Nazianzen, corroborated Hermes by stating that "things visible are but the shadow and delineation of things that we cannot see." It is an eternal combination, and images are repeated from the higher rung of the ladder of being down to the lower. The "Fall of the Angels," and the "War in Heaven" are repeated on every plane, the lower "mirror" disfiguring the image of the superior mirror, and each repeating it in its own way. Thus the Christian dogmas are but the reminiscences of the paradigms of Plato, who spoke of these things cautiously, as every Initiate would. But it is all as expressed in these few sentences of the Desatir: --
"All that is on Earth, saith the Lord (Ormazd), is the shadow of something that is in the superior spheres. This luminous object (light, fire, etc.) is the shadow of that which is still more luminous than itself, and so on till it reaches ME, who am the light of lights."
In the Kabalistic books, and in the Zohar pre-eminently, the idea that everything objective on earth or in this Universe is the Shadow -- Dyooknah -- of the eternal Light or Deity, is very strong.
"All that is on Earth, saith the Lord (Ormazd), is the shadow of something that is in the superior spheres. This luminous object (light, fire, etc.) is the shadow of that which is still more luminous than itself, and so on till it reaches ME, who am the light of lights."
In the Kabalistic books, and in the Zohar pre-eminently, the idea that everything objective on earth or in this Universe is the Shadow -- Dyooknah -- of the eternal Light or Deity, is very strong.
Several cool quotes which are talking about the Maya, surely.
The mutilation of Uranos by his son Kronos, who thus condemns him to impotency, has never been understood by the modern Mythographers. Yet, it is very plain; and having been universal* (vide foot note infra), it must have contained a great abstract and philosophical idea, now lost to our modern sages. This punishment in the allegory marks, indeed "a new period, a second phase in the development of creation," as justly remarked by Decharme (Mythologie de la Grece Antique, p. 7), who, however, renounces the attempt to explain it. Uranos has tried to oppose an impediment to that development, or natural evolution, by destroying all his children as soon as born. Uranos, who personifies all the creative powers of, and in, Chaos (Space, or the unmanifested Deity) is thus made to pay the penalty; for it is those powers which cause the Pitris to evolve primordial men from themselves -- as, later on, these men evolve their progeny -- without any sense or desire for procreation. The work of generation, suspended during a moment, passes into the hands of Kronos,* time, who unites himself with Rhea (the earth in esotericism -- matter in general), and thus produces, after celestial -- terrestrial Titans. The whole of this symbolism relates to the mysteries of Evolution.
A delicious interpretation of the classic Greek story.
THE RACES WITH THE "THIRD EYE."
When we learn that the "third eye" was once a physiological organ, and that later on, owing to the gradual disappearance of spirituality and increase of materiality (Spiritual nature being extinguished by the physical), it became an atrophied organ, as little understood now by physiologists as the spleen is -- when we learn this, the connection will become clear.
Jantho agrees with this slow movement away from spirit into materialistic, manifested physically. There is biological evidence.
Questions with regard to Karma and re-births are constantly offered, and a great confusion seems to exist upon this subject. Those who are born and bred in the Christian faith, and have been trained in the idea that a new soul is created by God for every newly-born infant, are among the most perplexed. They ask whether in such case the number of incarnating Monads on earth is limited; to which they are answered in the affirmative. For, however countless, in our conceptions, the number of the incarnating monads -- even if we take into account the fact that ever since the Second Race, when their respective seven groups were furnished with bodies, several births and deaths may be allowed for every second of time in the aeons already passed -- still, there must be a limit. It was stated that Karma-Nemesis, whose bond-maid is Nature, adjusted everything in the most harmonious manner; and that, therefore, the fresh pouring-in, or arrival of new Monads, had ceased as soon as Humanity had reached its full physical development. No fresh Monads have incarnated since the middle-point of the Atlanteans. Hence, remembering that, save in the case of young children, and of individuals whose lives were violently cut off by some accident, no Spiritual Entity can re-incarnate before a period of many centuries has elapsed, such gaps alone must show that the number of Monads is necessarily finite and limited. Moreover, a reasonable time must be given to other animals for their evolutionary progress.
I am unconvinced about any of this.
Compare this blind faith with the philosophical belief, based on every reasonable evidence and lifeexperience, in Karma-Nemesis, or the Law of Retribution. This Law -- whether Conscious or Unconscious -- predestines nothing and no one. It exists from and in Eternity, truly, for it is ETERNITY itself; and as such, since no act can be co-equal with eternity, it cannot be said to act, for it is ACTION itself. It is not the Wave which drowns a man, but the personal action of the wretch, who goes deliberately and places himself under the impersonal action of the laws that govern the Ocean's motion. Karma creates nothing, nor does it design. It is man who plans and creates causes, and Karmic law adjusts the effects; which adjustment is not an act, but universal harmony, tending ever to resume its original position, like a bough, which, bent down too forcibly, rebounds with corresponding vigour. If it happen to dislocate the arm that tried to bend it out of its natural position, shall we say that it is the bough which broke our arm, or that our own folly has brought us to grief? Karma has never sought to destroy intellectual and individual liberty, like the God invented by the Monotheists. It has not involved its decrees in darkness purposely to perplex man; nor shall it punish him who dares to scrutinise its mysteries. On the contrary, he who unveils through study and meditation its intricate paths, and throws light on those dark ways, in the windings of which so many men perish owing to their ignorance of the labyrinth of life, is working for the good of his fellow-men. KARMA is an Absolute and Eternal law in the World of manifestation; and as there can only be one Absolute, as One eternal ever present Cause, believers in Karma cannot be regarded as Atheists or materialists -- still less as fatalists:"
And then just as quick, I am pretty much 100% on board with this version of karma!
To avoid erroneous conjectures, however, with regard to the claim that the esoteric doctrine has much in it of the legends contained in the Hindu Scriptures; that, again, the chronology of the latter is almost that of the former -- only explained and made clear; and that finally the belief that "Vaivasvata Manu" -- a generic name indeed! -- was the Noah of the Aryans and his prototype, all this, which is also the belief of the Occultists, necessitates at this juncture a new explanation. (Vide Part III. "Submerged Continents.")
According to Hinduism, Vaivasvata Manu is the current Manu (original human). Trippy to connect Noah with this.
THE PRIMEVAL MANUS OF HUMANITY.
Those who are aware that the "great Flood," which was connected with the sinking of an entire continent -- save what became a few islands -- could not have happened so far back as 18,000,000 years ago; and that Vaivasvata Manu is the Indian Noah connected with the Matsya (or the fish) Avatar of Vishnu -- may feel perplexed at this discrepancy between facts stated and the chronology previously given.
I have actually read about this elsewhere.
Hippocrates said that number seven "By its occult virtues tended to the accomplishment of all things, to be the dispenser of life and fountain of all its changes." The life of man he divided into seven ages (Shakespeare), for "As the moon changes her phases every seven days, this number influences all sublunary beings," and even the Earth, as we know. With the child, it is the teeth that appear in the seventh month and he sheds them at seven years; at twice seven puberty begins, at three times seven all our mental and vital powers are developed, at four times seven he is in his full strength, at five times seven his passions are most developed, etc., etc. Thus for the Earth. It is now in its middle age, yet very little wiser for it. The Tetragrammaton, the four-lettered sacred name of the Deity, can be resolved on Earth only by becoming Septenary through the manifest triangle proceeding from the concealed Tetraktis. Therefore, the number seven has to be adopted on this plane. As written in the Kabala "The greater Holy Assembly" v. 1161: -- "For assuredly there is no stability in those six, save (what they derive) from the seventh. For all things depend from the SEVENTH."
Footnote with stacks more seven stuff.
STANZA XI. THE CIVILIZATION AND DESTRUCTION OF THE FOURTH AND FIFTH RACES.
But as Orientalists know nothing of the secret teaching, they will take everything literally, and then turn round and abuse the writers of that which they do not comprehend!
Unsure about Orientalists but I feel the same way about atheists.
To speak of a race nine yatis, or 27 feet high, in a work claiming a more scientific character than "Jack the Giant-Killer," is a somewhat unusual proceeding. "Where are your proofs?" the writer will be asked. In History and tradition, is the answer. Traditions about a race of giants in days of old are universal; they exist in oral and written lore. India had her Danavas and Daityas; Ceylon had her Rakshasas; Greece, her Titans; Egypt, her colossal Heroes; Chaldea, her Izdubars (Nimrod); and the Jews their Emims of the land of Moab, with the famous giants, Anakim (Numbers xiii. 33). Moses speaks of Og, a king who was nine cubits high (15 ft. 4 in.) and four wide (Deut. iii. 11), and Goliath was "six cubits and a span in height" (or 10 ft. 7 in.). The only difference found between the "revealed Scripture" and the evidence furnished to us by Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Homer, Pliny, Plutarch, Philostratus, etc., etc., is this: While the pagans mention only the skeletons of giants, dead untold ages before, relics that some of them had personally seen, the Bible interpreters unblushingly demand that geology and archaeology should believe, that several countries were inhabited by such giants in the day of Moses; giants before whom the Jews were as grasshoppers, and who still existed in the days of Joshua and David. Unfortunately their own chronology is in the way. Either the latter or the giants have to be given up.
Cool list of giants.
CYCLOPEAN RUINS AND COLOSSAL STONES AS WITNESSES TO GIANTS.
Suppose an Occultist were to claim that the first grand organ of a cathedral had come originally into being in the following manner. First, there was a progressive and gradual elaboration in Space of an organizable material, which resulted in the production of a state of matter named organic PROTEIN. Then, under the influence of incident forces, those states having been thrown into a phase of unstable equilibrium, they slowly and majestically evolved into and resulted in new combinations of carved and polished wood, of brass pins and staples, of leather and ivory, wind-pipes and bellows. After which, having adapted all its parts into one harmonious and symmetrical machine, the organ suddenly pealed forth Mozart's Requiem. This was followed by a Sonata of Beethoven, etc., ad infinitum; its keys playing of themselves and the wind blowing into the pipes by its own inherent force and fancy. . . . . What would Science say to such a theory? Yet, it is precisely in such wise that the materialistic savants tell us that the Universe was formed, with its millions of beings, and man, its spiritual crown.
Really fun way of putting it. I like this a lot. I must quote this.
STANZA XII. THE FIFTH RACE AND ITS DIVINE INSTRUCTORS.
A lot of this Stanza was just about fighting dragons.
OUR DIVINE INSTRUCTORS.
In the "Book of the various names of the Nile," the same author (the historian Ahmed-Ben-Yusouf Eltiphas) tells us of the belief among the Semitic Arabs that Seth (become later the Egyptian Typhon, Set), had been one of the seven angels (or Patriarchs in the Bible): then he became a mortal and Adam's son, after which he communicated the gift of prophecy and astronomical science to Jared, who passed it to his son Henoch. But Henoch (Idris) "the author of thirty books, was Sabaean by origin" (i.e., belonging to the Saba, "a Host"); "having established the rites and ceremonies of primitive worship, he went to the East, where he constructed 140 cities, of which Edessa was the least important, then returned to Egypt where he became its King." Thus, he is identified with Hermes. But there were five Hermes -- or rather one, who appeared -- as some Manus and Rishis did -- in several different characters.
Jared is me!
THE ORIGIN OF THE SATANIC MYTH.
There is at present no need to touch upon the mystic and manifold meaning of the name Jehovah in its abstract sense, one independent of the Deity falsely called by that name. It was a blind created purposely by the Rabbins, a secret preserved by them with ten-fold care after the Christians had despoiled them of this God-name which was their own property.* But the following statement is made. The personage who is named in the first four chapters of Genesis variously as "God," the "Lord God," and "Lord" simply, is not one and the same person; certainly it is not Jehovah. There are three distinct classes or groups of the Elohim called Sephiroth in the Kabala, Jehovah appearing only in chapter iv., in the first verse of which he is named Cain, and in the last transformed into mankind -- male and female, jah-veh.** The "Serpent," moreover, is not Satan, but the bright Angel, one of the Elohim clothed in radiance and glory, who, promising the woman that if they ate of the forbidden fruit "ye shall not surely die," kept his promise, and made man immortal in his incorruptible nature. He is the Iao of the mysteries, the chief of the Androgyne creators of men. Chapter iii. contains (esoterically) the withdrawal of the veil of ignorance that closed the perceptions of the Angelic Man, made in the image of the "Boneless" gods, and the opening of his consciousness to his real nature; thus showing the bright Angel (Lucifer) in the light of a giver of Immortality, and as the "Enlightener"; while the real Fall into generation and matter is to be sought in chapter iv. There, Jehovah-Cain, the male part of Adam the dual man, having separated himself from Eve, creates in her "Abel," the first natural woman,* and sheds the Virgin blood. Now Cain, being shown identical with Jehovah, on the authority of the correct reading of verse i. (chapter iv., Genesis), in the original Hebrew text; and the Rabbins teaching that "Kin (Cain), the Evil, was the Son of Eve by Samael, the devil who took Adam's place"; and the Talmud adding that "the evil Spirit, Satan, and Samael, the angel of Death, are the same" --(Babba Battra, 16a) -- it becomes easy to see that Jehovah (mankind, or "Jah-hovah") and Satan (therefore the tempting Serpent) are one and the same in every particular. There is no Devil, no Evil, outside mankind to produce a Devil. Evil is a necessity in, and one of the supporters of the manifested universe. It is a necessity for progress and evolution, as night is necessary for the production of Day, and Death for that of Life -- that man may live for ever.
Lots of discerning of God and Satan here, I like it. It's also so true that God said Adam and Eve would die if they ate the apple, but they did not!
Satan represents metaphysically simply the reverse or the polar opposite of everything in nature.* He is the "adversary," allegorically, the "murderer," and the great Enemy of all, because there is nothing in the whole universe that has not two sides -- the reverses of the same medal. But in that case, light, goodness, beauty, etc., may be called Satan with as much propriety as the Devil, since they are the adversaries of darkness, badness, and ugliness. And now the philosophy and the rationale of certain early Christian sects -- called heretical and viewed as the abomination of the times -- will become more comprehensible. We may understand how it was that the sect of SATANIANS came to be degraded, and were anathematized without any hope of vindication in a future day, since they kept their tenets secret. How, on the same principle, the CAINITES came to be degraded, and even the (Judas) ISCARIOTES; the true character of the treacherous apostle having never been correctly presented before the tribunal of Humanity.
The balance of good and evil, the Church needs Satan. I have also heard of Christian sects that highly revere Judas, because he was actually the initiator needed for the murder of Christ that brought upon the forgiveness of the world. It's very important to remember these things.
Satan represents metaphysically simply the reverse or the polar opposite of everything in nature.* He is the "adversary," allegorically, the "murderer," and the great Enemy of all, because there is nothing in the whole universe that has not two sides -- the reverses of the same medal. But in that case, light, goodness, beauty, etc., may be called Satan with as much propriety as the Devil, since they are the adversaries of darkness, badness, and ugliness. And now the philosophy and the rationale of certain early Christian sects -- called heretical and viewed as the abomination of the times -- will become more comprehensible. We may understand how it was that the sect of SATANIANS came to be degraded, and were anathematized without any hope of vindication in a future day, since they kept their tenets secret. How, on the same principle, the CAINITES came to be degraded, and even the (Judas) ISCARIOTES; the true character of the treacherous apostle having never been correctly presented before the tribunal of Humanity.
The balance of good and evil, the Church needs Satan. I have also heard of Christian sects that highly revere Judas, because he was actually the initiator needed for the murder of Christ that brought upon the forgiveness of the world. It's very important to remember these things.
THE "CURSE" FROM A PHILOSOPHICAL POINT OF VIEW.
The foregoing teachings of the SECRET DOCTRINE, supplemented by universal traditions, must now have demonstrated that the Brahmanas and Puranas, the Yathas and other Mazdean Scriptures, down to the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman, and finally to the Jewish Sacred records, all have the same origin. None are meaningless and baseless stories, invented to entrap the unwary profane: all are allegories intended to convey, under a more or less fantastic veil, the great truths gathered in the same field of pre-historic tradition.
This is something I have come to be certain of in my research.
WESTERN SPECULATIONS, FOUNDED ON THE GREEK AND PURANIC TRADITIONS.
That state will return to it and to the world at large, when the latter shall discover and really appreciate the truths which underlie this vast problem of sex. It will be like "the light that never shone on sea or land," and has to come to men through the Theosophical Society. That light will lead on and up to the true spiritual intuition. Then (as expressed once in a letter to a theosophist), "the world will have a race of Buddhas and Christs, for the world will have discovered that individuals have it in their own powers to procreate Buddha-like children -- or demons." "When that knowledge comes, all dogmatic religions, and with these the demons, will die out."
We will be breeding divine children at will! I wanna.
ADDITIONAL FRAGMENTS FROM A COMMENTARY ON THE VERSES OF STANZA XII.
They "of the yellow hue" are the forefathers of those whom Ethnology now classes as the Turanians, the Mongols, Chinese and other ancient nations; and the land they fled to was no other than Central Asia.
Interesting but swaddles the line between racism and non. Product of the times?
CONCLUSION.
But this is the personal view of the writer; and her orthodoxy cannot be expected to have any more weight than any other "doxy," in the eyes of those to whom every fresh theory is heterodox until otherwise proved. Therefore are we Occultists fully prepared for such questions as these: "How does one know that the writer has not invented the whole scheme? And supposing she has not, how can one tell that the whole of the foregoing, as given in the Stanzas, is not the product of the imagination of the ancients? How could they have preserved the records of such an immense, such an incredible antiquity?"
The answer that the history of this world since its formation and to its end "is written in the stars," i.e., is recorded in the Zodiac and the Universal Symbolism whose keys are in the keeping of the Initiates, will hardly satisfy the doubters. The antiquity of the Zodiac in Egypt is much doubted, and it is denied point-blank with regard to India. "Your conclusions are often excellent, but your premises are always doubtful," the writer was once told by a profane friend. To this, the answer came that it was one point, at least, gained on the scientific syllogisms. For, with the exception of a few problems from the domain of purely physical science, both the premises and conclusions of the men of Science are as hypothetical as they are almost invariably erroneous. And if they do not so appear to the profane, the reason is simply this: the said profane is very little aware, taking as he does his scientific data on faith, that both premises and conclusions are generally the product of the same brains, which, however learned, are not infallible; a truism demonstrated daily by the shifting and re-shifting of scientific theories and speculations.
The answer that the history of this world since its formation and to its end "is written in the stars," i.e., is recorded in the Zodiac and the Universal Symbolism whose keys are in the keeping of the Initiates, will hardly satisfy the doubters. The antiquity of the Zodiac in Egypt is much doubted, and it is denied point-blank with regard to India. "Your conclusions are often excellent, but your premises are always doubtful," the writer was once told by a profane friend. To this, the answer came that it was one point, at least, gained on the scientific syllogisms. For, with the exception of a few problems from the domain of purely physical science, both the premises and conclusions of the men of Science are as hypothetical as they are almost invariably erroneous. And if they do not so appear to the profane, the reason is simply this: the said profane is very little aware, taking as he does his scientific data on faith, that both premises and conclusions are generally the product of the same brains, which, however learned, are not infallible; a truism demonstrated daily by the shifting and re-shifting of scientific theories and speculations.
I’m glad she addresses this but it largely goes on to highlight things that have been questioned or disregarded in the past then later proved true. Of course, this is a thing but doesn’t actually mean anything.
BOOK II., PART II.
THE ARCHAIC SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-RELIGIONS.
THE ARCHAIC SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-RELIGIONS.
§ VII. THE "HOLY OF HOLIES." ITS DEGRADATION.
Noah, a divine permutation, the supposed saviour of Humanity, who carries in his ark or argha (the moon), the germs of all living things, worships before the "body of Adam," which body is the image of, and a Creator itself. Hence Adam is called the "Prophet of the Moon," the Argha or "Holy of Holies" of the (Yodh). This also shows the origin of the Jewish popular belief that the face of Moses is in the moon -- i.e., the spots in the Moon. For Moses and Jehovah are once more permutations, as has been shown Kabalistically.
I'm not too clued up on all of this. It's followed by stacks of numerology, and while it's super interesting, I’m just not sure how to present it without slapping pages upon pages here.
§ XVIII. ON THE MYTH OF THE "FALLEN ANGEL," IN ITS VARIOUS ASPECTS.
I loved this one.
OUR present quarrel is exclusively with theology. The Church enforces belief in a personal god and a personal devil, while Occultism shows the fallacy of such a belief. And though for the Pantheists and Occultists, as much as for the Pessimists, Nature is no better than "a comely mother, but stone cold" -- this is true only so far as regards external physical nature. They both agree that, to the superficial observer, she is no better than an immense slaughter-house wherein butchers become victims, and victims executioners in their turn. It is quite natural that the pessimistically inclined profane, once convinced of Nature's numerous shortcomings and failures, and especially of her autophagous propensities, should imagine this to be the best evidence that there is no deity in abscondito within Nature, nor anything divine in her. Nor is it less natural that the materialist and the physicist should imagine that everything is due to blind force and chance, and to the survival of the strongest, even more often than of the fittest. But the Occultists, who regard physical nature as a bundle of most varied illusions on the plane of deceptive perceptions; who recognise in every pain and suffering but the necessary pangs of incessant procreation: a series of stages toward an ever-growing perfectibility, which is visible in the silent influence of never-erring Karma, or abstract nature -- the Occultists, we say, view the great Mother otherwise. Woe to those who live without suffering. Stagnation and death is the future of all that vegetates without a change. And how can there be any change for the better without proportionate suffering during the preceding stage? Is it not those only who have learnt the deceptive value of earthly hopes and the illusive allurements of external nature who are destined to solve the great problems of life, pain, and death?
A superb paragraph, a thrill to read.
As the whole philosophy of the problem of evil hangs upon the correct comprehension of the constitution of the inner being of nature and man, of the divine within the animal, and hence also the correctness of the whole system as given in these pages, with regard to the crown piece of evolution -- MAN -- we cannot take sufficient precautions against theological subterfuges. When the good St. Augustine and the fiery Tertullian called the Devil "the monkey of God," this could be attributed to the ignorance of the age they lived in. It is more difficult to excuse our modern writers on the same ground. The translation of Mazdean literature has afforded to the Roman Catholic writers the pretext for proving their point in the same direction once more. They have taken advantage of the dual nature of Ahura Mazda in the Zend Avesta and the Vendidad, and of his Amshaspends, to emphasize still further their wild theories. Satan is the plagiarist and the copyist by anticipation of the religion which came ages later. This was one of the master strokes of the Latin Church, its best trump-card after the appearance of Spiritualism in Europe. Though only a succes d'estime, in general, even among those who are not interested in either Theosophy or Spiritualism, yet the weapon is often used by the Christian (Roman Catholic) Kabalists against the Eastern Occultists.
Another incredible paragraph, this one about the Satan bluff.
A thing can only exist through its opposite -- Hegel teaches us, and only a little philosophy and spirituality are needed to comprehend the origin of the later dogma, which is so truly satanic and infernal in its cold and cruel wickedness. The Magians accounted for the origin of evil in their exoteric teachings in this way. "Light can produce nothing but light, and can never be the origin of evil"; how then was the evil produced, since there was nothing co-equal or like the Light in its production? Light, say they, produced several Beings, all of them spiritual, luminous, and powerful. But a GREAT ONE (the "Great Asura," Ahriman, Lucifer, etc., etc.) had an evil thought, contrary to the Light. He doubted, and by that doubt he became dark.
This is Hermeticism, perhaps even more so in the Kybalion. The following paragraphs were great too, if you're interested. There's also a footnote with a WONDERFUL quote, omg: "Should the Idealist be right, the doctrine of evolution is a dream," says Mr. Herbert Spencer. My brain shoots off in a billion directions because I am an idealist.
§ XIX. IS PLEROMA SATAN'S LAIR?
The "Old Dragon" and Satan, now become singly and collectively the symbol of, and the theological term for, the "Fallen Angel," is not so described either in the original Kabala (the Chaldean "Book of Numbers") or in the modern. For the most learned, if not the greatest of modern Kabalists, namely Eliphas Levi, describes Satan in the following glowing terms: -- "It is that Angel who was proud enough to believe himself God; brave enough to buy his independence at the price of eternal suffering and torture; beautiful enough to have adored himself in full divine light; strong enough to reign in darkness amidst agony, and to have built himself a throne on his inextinguishable pyre. It is the Satan of the Republican and heretical Milton. . . . . the prince of anarchy, served by a hierarchy of pure Spirits (! ! ) . . . . "(Histoire de la Magie, 16-17) This description -- one which reconciles so cunningly theological dogma and the Kabalistic allegory, and even contrives to include a political compliment in its phraseology -- is, when read in the right spirit, quite correct.
Yes, indeed; it is this grandest of ideals, this ever-living symbol -- nay apotheosis -- of self-sacrifice for the intellectual independence of humanity; this ever active Energy protesting against Static Inertia -- the principle to which Self-assertion is a crime, and Thought and the Light of Knowledge odious. It is -- as Eliphas says with unparalleled justice and irony -- "this pretended hero of tenebrous eternities, who, slanderously charged with ugliness, is decorated with horns and claws, which would fit far better his implacable tormentor -- it is he who has been finally transformed into a serpent -- the red Dragon." But Eliphas Levi was yet too subservient to his Roman Catholic authorities; one may add, too jesuitical, to confess that this devil was mankind, and never had any existence on earth outside of that mankind.*
In this, Christian theology, although following slavishly in the steps of Paganism, was only true to its own time-honoured policy. It had to isolate itself, and to assert its authority. Hence it could not do better than turn every pagan deity into a devil. Every bright sun-god of antiquity -- a glorious deity by day, and its own opponent and adversary by night, named the Dragon of Wisdom, because it was supposed to contain the germs of night and day -- has now been turned into the antithetical shadow of God, and has become Satan on the sole and unsupported authority of despotic human dogma. After which all these producers of light and shadow, all the Sun and the Moon Gods, were cursed, and thus the one God chosen out of the many, and Satan, were both anthropomorphised. But theology seems to have lost sight of the human capacity for discriminating and finally analysing all that is artificially forced upon its reverence. History shows in every race and even tribe, especially in the Semitic nations, the natural impulse to exalt its own tribal deity above all others to the hegemony of the gods; and proves that the God of the Israelites was such a tribal God, and no more, even though the Christian Church, following the lead of the "chosen" people, is pleased to enforce the worship of that one particular deity, and to anathematize all the others. Whether originally a conscious or an unconscious blunder, nevertheless, it was one. Jehovah has ever been in antiquity only "a god among other Gods," (lxxxii. Psalm). The Lord appears to Abraham, and while saying, "I am the Almighty God," yet adds, "I will establish my covenant to be a God unto thee" (Abraham), and unto his seed after him (Gen. xvii. 7) -- not unto Aryan Europeans.
But then, there was the grandiose and ideal figure of Jesus of Nazareth to be set off against a dark background, to gain in radiance by the contrast; and a darker one the Church could hardly invent. Lacking the Old Testament symbology, ignorant of the real connotation of the name of Jehovah -- the rabbinical secret substitute for the ineffable and unpronounceable name -- the Church mistook the cunningly fabricated shadow for the reality, the anthropomorphized generative symbol for the one Secondless Reality, the ever unknowable cause of all. As a logical sequence the Church, for purposes of duality, had to invent an anthropomorphic Devil -- created, as taught by her, by God himself. Satan has now turned out to be the monster fabricated by the "Jehovah-Frankenstein," -- his father's curse and a thorn in the divine side -- a monster, than whom no earthly Frankenstein could have fabricated a more ridiculous bogey.
Yes, indeed; it is this grandest of ideals, this ever-living symbol -- nay apotheosis -- of self-sacrifice for the intellectual independence of humanity; this ever active Energy protesting against Static Inertia -- the principle to which Self-assertion is a crime, and Thought and the Light of Knowledge odious. It is -- as Eliphas says with unparalleled justice and irony -- "this pretended hero of tenebrous eternities, who, slanderously charged with ugliness, is decorated with horns and claws, which would fit far better his implacable tormentor -- it is he who has been finally transformed into a serpent -- the red Dragon." But Eliphas Levi was yet too subservient to his Roman Catholic authorities; one may add, too jesuitical, to confess that this devil was mankind, and never had any existence on earth outside of that mankind.*
In this, Christian theology, although following slavishly in the steps of Paganism, was only true to its own time-honoured policy. It had to isolate itself, and to assert its authority. Hence it could not do better than turn every pagan deity into a devil. Every bright sun-god of antiquity -- a glorious deity by day, and its own opponent and adversary by night, named the Dragon of Wisdom, because it was supposed to contain the germs of night and day -- has now been turned into the antithetical shadow of God, and has become Satan on the sole and unsupported authority of despotic human dogma. After which all these producers of light and shadow, all the Sun and the Moon Gods, were cursed, and thus the one God chosen out of the many, and Satan, were both anthropomorphised. But theology seems to have lost sight of the human capacity for discriminating and finally analysing all that is artificially forced upon its reverence. History shows in every race and even tribe, especially in the Semitic nations, the natural impulse to exalt its own tribal deity above all others to the hegemony of the gods; and proves that the God of the Israelites was such a tribal God, and no more, even though the Christian Church, following the lead of the "chosen" people, is pleased to enforce the worship of that one particular deity, and to anathematize all the others. Whether originally a conscious or an unconscious blunder, nevertheless, it was one. Jehovah has ever been in antiquity only "a god among other Gods," (lxxxii. Psalm). The Lord appears to Abraham, and while saying, "I am the Almighty God," yet adds, "I will establish my covenant to be a God unto thee" (Abraham), and unto his seed after him (Gen. xvii. 7) -- not unto Aryan Europeans.
But then, there was the grandiose and ideal figure of Jesus of Nazareth to be set off against a dark background, to gain in radiance by the contrast; and a darker one the Church could hardly invent. Lacking the Old Testament symbology, ignorant of the real connotation of the name of Jehovah -- the rabbinical secret substitute for the ineffable and unpronounceable name -- the Church mistook the cunningly fabricated shadow for the reality, the anthropomorphized generative symbol for the one Secondless Reality, the ever unknowable cause of all. As a logical sequence the Church, for purposes of duality, had to invent an anthropomorphic Devil -- created, as taught by her, by God himself. Satan has now turned out to be the monster fabricated by the "Jehovah-Frankenstein," -- his father's curse and a thorn in the divine side -- a monster, than whom no earthly Frankenstein could have fabricated a more ridiculous bogey.
Sorry for the huge text dump, I actually wanted to drop more. I like it a lot, the Satan description, Yahweh is a Pagan god etc.
The Kabbalists say that the true name of Satan is that of Jehovah placed upside down, for "Satan is not a black god but the negation of the white deity," or the light of Truth. God is light and Satan is the necessary darkness or shadow to set it off, without which pure light would be invisible and incomprehensible.* "For the initiates," says Eliphas Levi, "the devil is not a person but a creative Force, for Good as for Evil." They (the Initiates) represented this Force, which presides at physical generation, under the mysterious form of God Pan -- or Nature: whence the horns and hoofs of that mythical and symbolic figure, as also the Christian "goat of the Witches' Sabbath." With regard to this too, Christians have imprudently forgotten that the goat was also the victim selected for the atonement of all the sins of Israel, that the scape-goat was indeed the sacrificial martyr, the symbol of the greatest mystery on earth -- the Fall into generation. Only the Jews have long forgotten the real meaning of their (to the non-initiated) ridiculous hero, selected from the drama of life in the great mysteries enacted by them in the desert; and the Christians never knew it.
I wonder how innovative these ideas were back in the day, but it’s just nice to read it. I've also noted Eliphas Levi's name, I must read his work.
The tiger and the donkey, the hawk and the dove, are each one as pure and as innocent as the other, because irresponsible. Each follows its instinct, the tiger and the hawk killing with the same unconcern as the donkey eats a thistle, or the dove pecks at a grain of corn. If the Fall had the significance given to it by theology; if that fall occurred as a result of an act never intended by nature, -- a sin, how about the animals? If we are told that they procreate their species in consequence of that same "original sin," for which God cursed the earth -- hence everything living on it -- we will put another question. We are told by theology, as by Science, that the animal was on earth far earlier than man? We ask the former: How did it procreate its species, before the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, of the Good and the Evil, had been plucked off? As said: "The Christians -- far less clear-sighted than the great Mystic and Liberator whose name they have assumed, whose doctrines they have misunderstood and travestied, and whose memory they have blackened by their deeds -- took the Jewish Jehovah as he was, and of course strove vainly to reconcile the Gospel of Light and Liberty with the Deity of Darkness and Submission."
Great points plus I love how she gives full props to Jesus and then brushes his followers swiftly aside.
In our day of dreary soul-killing materialism, the ancient priest Initiates have become, in the opinion of our learned generations, the synonyms of clever impostors, kindling the fires of superstition in order to obtain an easier sway over the minds of men. This is an unfounded calumny, generated by scepticism and uncharitable thoughts. No one believed more in Gods -- or, we may call them, the Spiritual and now invisible Powers, or Spirits, the noumena of the phenomena -- than they did; and they believed just because they knew. If, initiated into the Mysteries of Nature, they were forced to withhold their knowledge from the profane, who would have surely abused it, such secrecy was undeniably less dangerous than the policy of their usurpers and successors. The former taught only that which they well knew. The latter, teaching what they do not know, have invented, as a secure haven for their ignorance, a jealous and cruel Deity, who forbids man to pry into his mysteries under the penalty of damnation. As well they may, for his mysteries can at best be only hinted at in polite ears, never described.
I love how hard she is laying into just about the entirety of organised religion here.
§ XXI. ENOICHION-HENOCH.
To accept Enoch as a Biblical character, a single living man, is like accepting Adam as the first one. Enoch was a generic title, applied to, and borne by, scores of individuals, at all times and ages, and in every race and nation. This may be easily inferred from the fact that the ancient Talmudists and the teachers of Midrashim are not agreed generally in their views about Hanokh, the Son of Yered. . . . Some say Enoch was a great Saint, beloved by God, and taken alive to heaven (i.e., one who reached Mukti or Nirvana, on earth, as Buddha did and others still do); and others maintain that he was a sorcerer, a wicked magician. This shows only that Enoch, or its equivalent, was a term, even during the days of the later Talmudists, which meant "Seer," "Adept in the Secret Wisdom," etc., without any specification as to the character of the title-bearer. When Josephus, speaking of Elijah and Enoch (Antiquities, ix., 2), remarks that "it is written in the sacred books they (Elijah and Enoch) disappeared, but so that nobody knew that they died," it means simply that they had died in their personalities, as Yogis die to this day in India, or even some Christian monks to the world. They disappear from the sight of men and die -- on the terrestrial plane -- even for themselves. A seemingly figurative way of speaking, yet literally true.
Interesting stuff, worth noting. I have a thing for Enoch. Son of Jared and that.
§ XXII. THE SYMBOLISM OF THE MYSTERY-NAMES IAO AND JEHOVAH, WITH THEIR RELATION TO THE CROSS AND CIRCLE.
The numbers of the name Moses are those of "I AM THAT I AM," so that the names Moses and Jehovah are at one in numerical harmony The word Moses is and the sum of the values of its letters is 345; Jehovah -- the genius par excellence of the lunar year -- assumes the value of 543, or the reverse of 345. . . . In the third chapter of Exodus, in the 13th and 14th verses, it is said: And Moses said . . . Behold when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say, What is his name? What shall I say unto them? and God said unto Moses -- "I am that I am." The Hebrew words for this expression are ahiye asher ahiye, and in the value of the sums of their letters stand thus:-- . . . This being his (God's) name, the sum of the values composing it are 21, 501, 21 are 543, or simply a use of the simple digit numbers in the name of Moses . . . but now so ordered that the name of 345 is reversed, and reads 543. . . . So that when Moses asks "Let me see Thy face or glory," the other rightly and truly replies "Thou canst not see my face" . . . but thou shalt see me behind -- (the true sense, though not the precise words); because the comer and the behind of 543 is the face of 345 -- "for check and to keep a strict use of a set of numbers to develop certain grand results, for the object of which they are specifically employed." "In other uses," adds the learned Kabalist, "of the number they saw each other face to face. It is strange that if we add 345 to 543 we have 888, which was the gnostic Kabalistic value of the name Christ, who was Jehoshua or Joshua. And so also the division of the 24 hours of the day gives three eights as quotient. . . . The chief end of all this system of number checks was to preserve in perpetuity the exact value of the Lunar year in the natural measure of days."
Kabbalah numerology, I looove it. Sadly, some of the glyphs can't copy across here, so check the book itself for that.
B. THE FALL OF THE CROSS INTO MATTER
This chapter all about the crucifix as a symbol.
Still later, owing to the gradual loss of spirituality, the cross became in Cosmogony and Anthropology no higher than a phallic symbol.
It’s a dick thing.
§ XXIV. THE CROSS AND THE PYTHAGOREAN DECADE.
"The Nile was the river of time with the number of a year, or year and a day (364 + 1 = 365). It represented the parturient water of Isis, or Mother Earth, the moon, the woman, and the cow, also the workshop of Osiris, representing the T'sod Olaum of the Hebrews. The ancient name of this river was Eridanus, or the Hebrew Iardan, with the Coptic or old Greek suffix. This was the door of the Hebrew word Jared, or 'Source,' or Descent . . . of the river Jordan, which had the same mythical use with the Hebrews that the Nile had with the Egyptians,* it was the source of descent, and held the waters of life" in them a highly philosophical and moral meaning. One instance will be sufficient. It can read:
My name is here as "Source" but I believe it's "One Who Rules"?
But the best evidence to the antiquity of the cross is that which is brought forward by the author of Natural Genesis on page 433.
"The value of the cross," says Mr. Massey, "as a Christian symbol, is supposed to date from the time when Jesus Christ was crucified. And yet in the 'Christian' Iconography of the Catacombs no figure of a man appears upon the Cross during the first six or seven centuries. There are all forms of the cross except that -- the alleged starting-point of the new religion. That was not the initial but the final form of the Crucifix.** During some six centuries after the Christian era the foundation of the Christian religion in a crucified Redeemer is entirely absent from Christian art! The earliest known form of the human figure on the cross is the crucifix presented by Pope Gregory the Great to Queen Theodolinde of Lombardy, now in the Church of St. John at Monza, whilst no image of the Crucified is found in the Catacombs at Rome earlier than that of San Giulio, belonging to the seventh or eighth century. . . . There is no Christ and no Crucified; the Cross is the Christ even as the Stauros cross was a type and a name of Horus, the Gnostic Christ. The Cross, not the Crucified, is the essential object of representation in its art, and of adoration in its religion. The germ of the whole growth and development can be traced to the cross. And that cross is pre-Christian, is pagan and heathen, in half a dozen different shapes. The cult began with the cross, and Julian was right in saying he waged a 'Warfare with the X'; which he obviously considered had been adopted by the A-Gnostics and Mytholators to convey an impossible significance.* During centuries the cross stood for the Christ, and was addressed as if it were a living being. It was made divine at first, and humanized at last."
"The value of the cross," says Mr. Massey, "as a Christian symbol, is supposed to date from the time when Jesus Christ was crucified. And yet in the 'Christian' Iconography of the Catacombs no figure of a man appears upon the Cross during the first six or seven centuries. There are all forms of the cross except that -- the alleged starting-point of the new religion. That was not the initial but the final form of the Crucifix.** During some six centuries after the Christian era the foundation of the Christian religion in a crucified Redeemer is entirely absent from Christian art! The earliest known form of the human figure on the cross is the crucifix presented by Pope Gregory the Great to Queen Theodolinde of Lombardy, now in the Church of St. John at Monza, whilst no image of the Crucified is found in the Catacombs at Rome earlier than that of San Giulio, belonging to the seventh or eighth century. . . . There is no Christ and no Crucified; the Cross is the Christ even as the Stauros cross was a type and a name of Horus, the Gnostic Christ. The Cross, not the Crucified, is the essential object of representation in its art, and of adoration in its religion. The germ of the whole growth and development can be traced to the cross. And that cross is pre-Christian, is pagan and heathen, in half a dozen different shapes. The cult began with the cross, and Julian was right in saying he waged a 'Warfare with the X'; which he obviously considered had been adopted by the A-Gnostics and Mytholators to convey an impossible significance.* During centuries the cross stood for the Christ, and was addressed as if it were a living being. It was made divine at first, and humanized at last."
This is not something I can swallow. Jesus on the cross was originally avoided in art because it was a common form of Roman execution, nothing to be revered. There are also several 4th century depictions of Jesus with arms stretched out that would indicate the crucifiction. Still, interesting though!
§ XXV. THE MYSTERIES OF THE HEBDOMAD.
The following diagram will perhaps assist the student to grasp these parallelisms.
It's an impressive diagram which you can see here. Bringing these scientific elements along with metaphysical principles. Even if unprovable, she’s paying attention to everything.
"Note that in Hebrew, Jared, the father of Enoch, is construed to be 'the mount of descent,' and it is said to be the same with Ararat on which the cubical structure of Noah, or foundation measure rested. Jared, in Hebrew, is . The root derivations are the same with those of Ararat, of acre, of earth." As by Hebrew metrology "Jared, is, literally in British Y R D; hence in Jared is to be found literally our English word yard (and also , for Jah, or Jehovah, is rod). It is noteworthy that the son of Jared, viz., Enoch, lived 365 years, and it is said of him by rabbinical commentators, that the year period of 365 days was discovered by him, thus bringing, again, time and distance values together, i.e., year time descended by co-ordination, through the yard, or jared, who thus was its father, in or through Enoch; and truly enough, 1296 = yard (or jared) x 4 = 5184, the characteristic value of the solar day, in thirds, which as stated may be styled the parent numerically, of the solar year" (ibid. p. 65). This, however, by the astronomical and numerical Kabalistic methods. Esoterically, Jared is the Third race and Enoch the Fourth -- but as he is taken away alive he symbolizes also the Elect saved in the Fourth, while Noah is the Fifth from the beginning -- the family saved from the waters, eternally and physically.
Is it... is it me??
D. THE SEPTENARY IN THE EXOTERIC WORKS.
The Gnostics, whose various teachings are the many echoes of the one primitive and universal doctrine, put the same numbers, under another form, in the mouth of Jesus in the very occult Pistis Sophia. We say more: even the Christian editor or author of Revelation has preserved this tradition and speaks of the Seven RACES, four of which, with part of the fifth, are gone, and two have to come. It is stated as plainly as could be stated in chapter xvii., verses 9 and 10. Thus saith the angel: "And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth. And there are SEVEN Kings, five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come . . . . " Who, acquainted in the least with the symbolical language of old, will fail to discern in the five Kings that have fallen, the four Root-Races that were, and part of the fifth, the one that is; and in the other, that "is not yet come," the sixth and seventh coming root races, as also the sub-races of this, our present race?
Can confirm these sevens in the Book of Revelation are true.
The book bangs on about sevens for ages from here, which I didn't feel needed note.
BOOK II. -- PART III. ADDENDA.
SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED.
SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED.
You will notice by the headings flying past that I hardly took notes as it came to the end (over 50 pages unrepresented). I felt like we had covered it all before or maybe I was just exhausted, idk.
ADDENDA TO BOOK II.
§ I. ARCHAIC, OR MODERN ANTHROPOLOGY?
§ I. ARCHAIC, OR MODERN ANTHROPOLOGY?
§ II. THE ANCESTORS MANKIND IS OFFERED BY SCIENCE.
PLASTIDULAR SOULS, AND CONSCIOUS NERVE-CELLS.
The collective aggregation of these atoms forms thus the Anima Mundi of our Solar system, the soul of our little universe, each atom of which is of course a soul, a monad, a little universe endowed with consciousness, hence with memory.
I really take this on board. I love this theory and semi-subscribe to it.
B. ON CHAINS OF PLANETS AND THEIR PLURALITY
The theory of the earth's rotation was met by a like opposition -- even to the martyrdom of its discoverers -- because, besides depriving our orb of its dignified central position in space, this theory produced an appalling confusion of ideas as to the Ascension -- the terms "up" and "down" being proved to be merely relative, thus complicating not a little the question of the precise locality of heaven.*
* In that learned and witty work, "God and his Book," by the redoubtable "Saladin" of Agnostic repute, the amusing calculation that, if Christ had ascended with the rapidity of a cannon ball, he would not have reached even Sirius yet, reminds one vividly of the past. It raises, perhaps, a not illfounded suspicion that even our age of scientific enlightenment may be as grossly absurd in its materialistic negations, as the men of the middle ages were absurd and materialistic in their religious affirmations.
* In that learned and witty work, "God and his Book," by the redoubtable "Saladin" of Agnostic repute, the amusing calculation that, if Christ had ascended with the rapidity of a cannon ball, he would not have reached even Sirius yet, reminds one vividly of the past. It raises, perhaps, a not illfounded suspicion that even our age of scientific enlightenment may be as grossly absurd in its materialistic negations, as the men of the middle ages were absurd and materialistic in their religious affirmations.
Including the footnote with the paragraph here. Super interesting and funny.
PARALLELISM OF LIFE.
"The primeval savage is a familiar term in modern literature," remarks Professor Rawlinson, "but there is no evidence that the primeval savage ever existed. Rather all the evidence looks the other way." ("Antiq. of Man Historically Considered.") In his "Origin of Nations," pp. 10-11, he rightly adds: "The mythical traditions of almost all nations place at the beginning of human history a time of happiness and perfection, a 'golden age' which has no features of savagery or barbarism, but many of civilization and refinement." How is the modern evolutionist to meet this consensus of evidence?
I'm not even sure how to start researching this. I like the idea but it seems unlikely and it would take a lot to covince me. I do come across such statements every now and then, so hopefully as time goes on, I can start to develop a more educated stance because, at the point of writing this, I simply do not know enough.
As said by an anthropologist in "Modern Thought" (art. "The Genesis of Man"): "The theory, scientifically based or not, of Peyrere may be considered to be equivalent to that which divided man in two species. Broca, Virey, and a number of the French anthropologists have recognised that the lower race of man, comprising the Australian, Tasmanian, and Negro race, excluding the Kaffirs and the Northern Africans, should be placed apart. The fact that in this species, or rather sub-species, the third lower molars are usually larger than the second, and the squamosal and frontal bones are generally united by suture, places the Homo Afer on the level of being as good a distinct species as many of the kinds of finches. I shall abstain on the present occasion from mentioning the facts of hybridity, whereon the late Professor Broca has so exhaustively commented. The history, in the past ages of the world, of this race is peculiar. It has never originated a system of architecture or a religion of its own" (Dr. C. Carter Blake). It is peculiar, indeed, as we have shown in the case of the Tasmanians. However it may be, fossil man in Europe can neither prove nor disprove the antiquity of man on this Earth nor the age of his earliest civilizations.
This is inexcusably racist and very dangerous.
B. THE EUROPEAN, PALAEOLITHIC RACES. -- WHENCE, AND HOW DISTRIBUTED.
The types of the skulls found in Europe are of two kinds, as is well known: the orthognathous and the prognathous, or the Caucasian and the negro types; such as are now found only in the African and the lower savage tribes. Professor Heer -- who argues that the facts of Botany necessitate the hypothesis of an Atlantis -- has shown that the plants of the Neolithic lake-villagers are mainly of African origin. How did the latter come to be in Europe if there was no former point of union between Africa and Europe?
Ethnicity can be identified via the skull, which isn't something I'd really thought of before. I guess it makes sense due to climate, diet, etc.
§ VI. GIANTS, CIVILIZATIONS, AND SUBMERGED CONTINENTS TRACED IN HISTORY.
No skeleton ever yet found is older than between 50, or 60,000 years,*** and man's size was reduced from 15 to 10 or 12 feet, ever since the third sub-race of the Aryan stock, which sub-race -- born and developed in Europe and Asia Minor under new climates and conditions -- had become European.
This record has been shattered. Lucy in Ethiopia is 3.2 million years old (which I've seen), and there are other (questionable) entries. These are human ancestors though, so on the chance that Blavatsky meant homo sapien direct, I found an article about 300,000-year-old remains in Morocco. Either way, her sizing estimates are way off. Lucy is tiny!
A. SOME STATEMENTS ABOUT THE SACRED ISLANDS AND CONTINENTS IN THE CLASSICS, EXPLAINED ESOTERICALLY.
A good proof that all the gods, and religious beliefs, and myths have come from the north, which was also the cradle of physical man, lies in several suggestive words which have originated and remain to this day among the northern tribes in their primeval significance; but although there was a time when all the nations were "of one lip," these words have received a different meaning with the Greeks and Latins. One such word is Mann, Man, a living being, and Manes, dead men. The Laplanders call their corpses to this day manee, (Voyage de Renard en Laponie I., 184). Mannus is the ancestor of the German race; the Hindu Manu, the thinking being, from man; the Egyptian Menes; and Minos, the King of Crete, judge of the infernal regions after his death -- all proceed from the same root or word.
I love a game of language breadcrumbs, but to state "the cradle of physical man" comes from the north is the opposite of the general consensus these hundred-plus of years later.
§ VII. SCIENTIFIC AND GEOLOGICAL PROOFS OF THE EXISTENCE OF SEVERAL SUBMERGED CONTINENTS
Were the public to be left to its old opinions: namely, on one side, that Occultism, Magic, the legends of old, etc., were all the outcome of ignorance and superstition; and on the other, that everything outside the orthodox groove was the work of the devil, what would be the result? In other words, had no theosophical and mystic literature obtained a hearing for the few last years, the present work would have had a poor chance of impartial consideration. It would have been proclaimed -- and by many will still be so proclaimed -- a fairy tale woven out of abstruse problems, poised in, and based on the air; built of soap bubbles, bursting at the slightest touch of serious reflection, with no foundation, as it would be alleged, to stand upon.
Poetic.
In his "Franc-maconnerie Occulte," rightly or wrongly, Ragon, an illustrious and learned Belgian Mason, reproaches the English Masons with having materialized and dishonoured Masonry, once based upon the Ancient Mysteries, by adopting, owing to a mistaken notion of the origin of the craft, the name of Free Masonry and Free Masons. The mistake is due, he says, to those who connect Masonry with the building of Solomon's Temple, deriving its origin from it. He derides the idea, and says: . . "The Franc Mason (which is not macon libre, or free masonry) knew well when adopting the title, that it was no question of building a wall, but that of being initiated into the ancient Mysteries veiled under the name of Francmaconnerie (Freemasonry); that his work was only to be the continuation or the renovation of the ancient mysteries, and that he was to become a mason after the manner of Apollo or Amphion. And do not we know that the ancient initiated poets, when speaking of the foundation of a city, meant thereby the establishment of a doctrine? Thus Neptune, the god of reasoning, and Apollo, the god of the hidden things, presented themselves as masons before Laomedon, Priam's father, to help him to build the city of Troy -- that is to say, to establish the Trojan religion."
Some cool Free Masonry insights, if you trust it.
Thus far have proceeded the rough outlines of the beliefs and tenets of the archaic, earliest Races contained in their hitherto secret Scriptural records. But our explanations are by no means complete, nor do they pretend to give out the full text, or to have been read by the help of more than three or four keys out of the sevenfold bunch of esoteric interpretation, and even this has only been partially accomplished. The work is too gigantic for any one person to undertake, far more to accomplish. Our main concern was simply to prepare the soil. This, we trust we have done. These two volumes only constitute the work of a pioneer who has forced his way into the well-nigh impenetrable jungle of the virgin forests of the Land of the Occult. A commencement has been made to fell and uproot the deadly upas trees of superstition, prejudice, and conceited ignorance, so that these two volumes should form for the student a fitting prelude for Volumes III. and IV. Until the rubbish of the ages is cleared away from the minds of the Theosophists to whom these volumes are dedicated, it is impossible that the more practical teaching contained in the Third Volume should be understood. Consequently, it entirely depends upon the reception with which Volumes I. and II. will meet at the hands of Theosophists and Mystics, whether these last two volumes will ever be published, though they are almost completed.
The final full paragraph of The Secret Doctrine. And while I read it using my inside voice, my inside voice was SCREAMING in excitement. I can't believe it's over! So much of my life dedicated to this sweet moment!
THERE IS NO RELIGION HIGHER THAN TRUTH.
Quite fittingly, The Secret Doctrine Volume II ends with the line that has become the slogan for Theosophy. I am glad, because it gives me the oppertunity to express my rejection of it.
People talk of "The Truth" all the time, but if you pay attention, they are talking about their developed opinions. Indeed, any objective truth is impossible to discern, because even if it exists, we can only find it surrounded by many opposing voices claiming what it is.
"The Truth" is merely which information you trust and nothing more. Hence, Janthopoyism does not believe in such a thing. Instead, it ties deeper into the Jainist understanding, whereby there is truth in every perspective, and perhaps even reality itself is subjective, the quantum attributes changing per the viewer.
If you're interested in this, you can listen to ME chatting about objective reality (Maya) on the Janthopodcast episode here.
Ok, byeeeeeeeeee.
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