The Secret Doctrine, page 157
With the ancient ryans the hidden meaning was grandiose, sublime and poetical, however much the external appearance of their symbol may now militate against the claim. The ceremony of passing through the Holy of Holies—now symbolized by the Cow, but in the beginning through the temple Hiranya-garbha, the Radiant Egg, in itself a symbol of Universal, Abstract Nature—meant spiritual conception and birth, or rather the re-birth of the individual and his regeneration; the stooping man at the entrance of the Sanctum Sanctorum, ready to pass through the Matrix of Mother Nature, or the physical creature ready to re-become the original Spiritual Being, pre-natal Man. With the Semite, that stooping man meant the fall of Spirit into Matter, and that fall and degradation were apotheosized by him with the result of dragging Deity down to the level of man. For the ryan, the symbol represented the divorce of Spirit from Matter, its merging into and return to its primal Source; for the Semite, the wedlock of Spiritual Man with Material Female Nature, the physiological taking preëminence over the psychological and the purely immaterial. The ryan views of the symbolism were those of the whole Pagan world; the Semite interpretations emanated from, and were preëminently those of a small tribe, thus marking its national features and the idiosyncratic defects that characterize many of the Jews to this day—gross realism, selfishness, and sensuality. They had made a bargain, through their father Jacob, with their tribal deity, self-exalted above all others, and a covenant that his “seed shall be as the dust of the earth”; and that deity could have no better image henceforth than that of the symbol of generation, and as representation a number and numbers.
Carlyle has wise words for both these nations. With the Hindû ryan—the most metaphysical and spiritual people on earth—religion has ever been, in his words,
An everlasting lode-star, that beams the brighter in the heavens the darker here on earth grows the night around him.
The religion of the Hindû detaches him from this Earth; therefore, even now, the cow-symbol is one of the grandest and most philosophical among all others in its inner meaning. To the “Masters” and “Lords” of European potencies, the Israelites, certain words of Carlyle apply still more admirably; for them
Religion is a wise prudential feeling grounded on mere calculation—
and it was so from its beginnings. Having burdened themselves with it, Christian nations feel bound to defend and poetize it, at the expense of all other religions.
But it was not so with the ancient nations. For them the passage-entrance and the sarcophagus in the King's Chamber meant regeneration—not generation. It was the most solemn symbol, a Holy of Holies, indeed, wherein were created Immortal Hierophants and “Sons of God”—never mortal men and sons of lust and flesh, as now in the hidden sense of the Semite Kabalist. The reason for the difference in the views of the two races is easy to account for. The ryan Hindû belongs to the oldest races now on Earth; the Semite Hebrew to the latest. The former is nearly one million years old; the latter is a small sub-race some 8,000 years of age and no more.1080
But phallic worship has developed only with the gradual loss of the keys to the inner meaning of religious symbols, and there was a day when the Israelites had beliefs as pure as the ryans have. But now Judaism, built solely on phallic worship, has become one of the latest creeds in Asia, and theologically a religion of hate and malice toward everyone and everything outside itself. Philo Judæus shows what was the genuine Hebrew faith. The Sacred Writings, he says, prescribe what we ought to do, commanding us to hate the heathen and their laws and institutions. True, they did hate Baal or Bacchus worship publicly, but left its worst features to be followed secretly. It is with the Talmudic Jews that the grand symbols of Nature were the most profaned. With them, as now shown by the discovery of the key to the correct Bible reading, Geometry, the fifth Divine Science—“fifth” in the series of the Seven Keys to the universal Esoteric Language and Symbology—was desecrated, and by them applied to conceal the most terrestrial and grossly sexual mysteries, wherein both Deity and Religion were degraded.
We are told that it is just the same with our Brahmâ-Prajâpati, with Osiris and all other Creative Gods. Quite so, when their rites are judged exoterically and externally; the reverse when their inner meaning is unveiled, as we see. The Hindû Lingam is identical with Jacob's “Pillar”—most undeniably. But the difference, as said, seems to consist in the fact that the Esoteric significance of the Lingam was too truly sacred and metaphysical to be revealed to the profane and the vulgar; hence its superficial appearance was left to the speculations of the mob. Nor would the ryan Hierophant and Brâhman, in their proud exclusiveness and the satisfaction of their knowledge, go to the trouble of concealing its primeval nakedness under cunningly devised fables; whereas the Rabbi, having interpreted the symbol to suit his own tendencies, had to veil the crude significance; and this served a double purpose—that of keeping his secret to himself and of exalting himself in his supposed monotheism over the Heathen, whom his Law commanded him to hate1081—a commandment now gladly accepted by the Christian too, in spite of another and later commandment, “Love one another.” Both India and Egypt had and have their sacred lotuses, symbolic of the same “Holy of Holies”—the lotus growing in the water, a double feminine symbol—the bearer of its own seed and root of all. Virâj and Horus are both male symbols, emanating from Androgyne Nature, one from Brahmâ and his female counterpart Vâch, the other, from Osiris and Isis—never from the One Infinite God. In the Judæo-Christian systems it is different. Whereas the lotus, containing Brahmâ, the Universe, is shown growing out of Vishnu's Navel, the Central Point in the Waters of Infinite Space, and whereas Horus springs from the lotus of the Celestial Nile—all these abstract pantheistic ideas are dwarfed and made terrestrially concrete in the Bible. One is almost inclined to say that in the esoteric they are grosser and still more anthropomorphic, than in their exoteric rendering. Take as an example the same symbol, even in its Christian application—the lilies in the hand of the Archangel Gabriel.1082 In Hindûism—the “Holy of Holies” is a universal abstraction, whose dramatis personæ are Infinite Spirit and Nature; in Christian Judaism, it is a personal God, outside of that Nature, and the human womb—Eve, Sarah, etc.; hence, an anthropomorphic phallic God, and his image—man.
Thus it is maintained, that with regard to the contents of the Bible, one of two hypotheses has to be admitted. Either behind the symbolic substitute Jehovah, there was the Unknown, Incognizable Deity, the kabalistic Ain Suph; or, the Jews have been from the beginning no better than the dead-letter Lingam-worshippers1083 of the India of to-day. We say it was the former; and that, therefore, the secret or esoteric worship of the Jews was the same Pantheism that the Vedântin Philosophers are reproached with to-day; Jehovah was a substitute for purposes of an exoteric national faith, and had no importance or reality in the eyes of the erudite Priests and Philosophers—the Sadducees, the most refined and the most learned of all the Israelite sects, who stand as a living proof of it, with their contemptuous rejection of every belief, save the Law. For how could those who invented the stupendous scheme now known as the Bible, or their successors who knew, as all Kabalists do, that it was so invented for a popular “blind”—how could they, we ask, feel reverence for such a phallic symbol and a number, as Jehovah is shown most undeniably to be in the kabalistic works? How could anyone worthy of the name of a Philosopher, and knowing the real secret meaning of their “Pillar of Jacob,” their Bethels, oil-anointed Phalli, and their “Brazen Serpent,” worship such a gross symbol, and minister unto it, seeing in it their “Covenant”—the Lord Himself! Let the reader turn to Gemara Sanhedrim and judge. As various writers have shown, and as brutally stated in Hargrave Jennings' Phallicism:
We know from the Jewish records that the Ark contained a table of stone; and if it can be demonstrated that that stone was phallic, and yet identical with the sacred name Jehovah or Yehovah, which, written in unpointed Hebrew with four letters, is J-E-V-E or J-H-V-H (the H being merely an aspirate and the same as E). This process leaves us the two letters I and V (or in another of its forms U); then if we place the I in the U we have the “Holy of Holies”; we also have the Linga and Yoni and Argha of the Hindûs, the Iswarra (Îshvara) or “supreme Lord”; and here we have the whole secret of its mystic and arc-celestial import, confirmed in itself by being identical with the Linyoni (?) of the Ark of the Covenant.1084
The biblical Jews of to-day do not date from Moses but from David—even admitting the identity of the old and genuine with the later and remodelled Mosaic scrolls. Before that time their nationality is lost in the mists of pre-historic darkness, the veil from which is now withdrawn as much as we have space to do. It is only to the days of the Babylonian captivity that the Old Testament may be referred by the most lenient criticism as the approximately correct views that were current about the days of Moses. Even such fanatical Christians and worshippers of Jehovah as the Rev. Mr. Horne, have to admit the numerous changes and alterations made by the later compilers of the “Book of God,” since it was found by Hilkiah,1085 and since
The Pentateuch arose out of the primitive or older documents, by means of a supplementary one.
The Elohistic texts were re-written 500 years after the date of Moses; the Jehovistic 800, on the authority of the biblical chronology itself. Hence, it is maintained that the deity, represented as the organ of generation in his pillar-form, and as a symbol of the double-sexed organ in the numeral value of the letters of his name—the Yod, י or “phallus,” and Hé, ה, the “opening,” or the “womb,” according to kabalistic authority—is of a far later date than the Elohim-symbols and is borrowed from the Pagan exoteric rites; and Jehovah is thus on a par with the Lingam and Yoni found on every roadside in India.
Just as the Iao of the Mysteries was distinct from Jehovah, so was the later Iao and Abraxas, or Abrasax, of some Gnostic sects identical with the God of the Hebrews, who was the same as the Egyptian Horus. This is undeniably proven on “Heathen” as on the Gnostic “Christian” gems. In Matter's collection of such gems there is a “Horus”—
Seated on the lotus, inscribed ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞ ΙΑΩ (Abrasax Iao)—an address exactly parallel to the so frequent ΕΙΣ ΖΕΥΣ ΣΑΡΑΠΙ (Eis Zeus Sarapi) on the contemporary Heathen gems, and therefore only to be translated by “Abraxas is the One Jehovah.”1086
But who was Abraxas? As the same author shows:
The numerical or Kabbalistic value of the name Abraxas directly refers to the Persian title of the god “Mithras,” Ruler of the year, worshipped from the earliest times under the appellation of Iao.1087
Thus, he was the Sun, in one aspect, the Moon or the Lunar Genius, in another, that Generative Deity whom the Gnostics saluted as “Thou that presidest over the Mysteries of the Father and the Son, who shinest in the night-time, holding the second rank, the first Lord of Death.”
It is only in his capacity of the Genius of the Moon—the latter being credited in the old cosmogony with being the parent of our Earth—that Jehovah could ever be regarded as the Creator of our Globe and its Heaven, namely, the Firmament.
The knowledge of all this will be no proof, however, to the average bigot. Missionaries will go on with the most virulent attacks on the religions of India, and Christians read with the same benighted smile of satisfaction as ever these preposterously unjust words of Coleridge:
It is highly worthy of observation that the inspired writings received by Christians are distinguishable from all other books pretending to inspiration, from the Scriptures of the Brahmins, and even from the Koran, in their strong and frequent recommendation of truth (!!).
Section IV. On the Myth of the “Fallen Angels” in its Various Aspects.
A. The Evil Spirit: Who, And What?
Our present quarrel is exclusively with Theology. The Church enforces belief in a Personal God and a Personal Devil, while Occultism shows the fallacy of such a belief. For the Pantheists and Occultists, as much as for the Pessimists, “Nature” is no better than “a comely mother, but stone cold”; but this is true only so far as regards external Physical Nature. They both agree that, to the superficial observer, she is no better than an immense slaughter-house wherein butchers become victims, and victims executioners in their turn. It is quite natural that the pessimistically inclined profane, once convinced of Nature's numerous shortcomings and failures, and especially of her autophagous propensities, should imagine this to be the best evidence that there is no Deity in abscondito within Nature, nor anything divine in her. Nor is it less natural that the Materialist and the Physicist should imagine that everything is due to blind force and chance, and to the survival of the strongest, even more often than of the fittest. But the Occultists, who regard Physical Nature as a bundle of most varied illusions on the plane of deceptive perceptions; who recognize in every pain and suffering but the necessary pangs of incessant procreation; a series of stages toward an ever-growing perfectibility, which is visible in the silent influence of never-erring Karma, or Abstract Nature—the Occultists, we say, view the Great Mother otherwise. Woe to those who live without suffering. Stagnation and death is the future of all that vegetates without change. And how can there be any change for the better without proportionate suffering during the preceding stage? Is it not those only who have learnt the deceptive value of earthly hopes and the illusive allurements of external nature who are destined to solve the great problems of life, pain, and death?
If our modern Philosophers—preceded by the mediæval scholars—have helped themselves to more than one fundamental idea of antiquity, Theologians have built their God and his Archangels, their Satan and his Angels, along with the Logos and his staff, entirely out of the dramatis personæ of the old heathen Pantheons. They would have been welcome to these, had they not cunningly distorted the original characters, perverted the philosophical meaning, and, taking advantage of the ignorance of Christendom—the result of long ages of mental sleep, during which humanity was permitted to think only by proxy—tossed every symbol into the most inextricable confusion. One of their most sinful achievements in this direction, was the transformation of the divine Alter Ego into the grotesque Satan of their Theology.
As the whole philosophy of the problem of evil hangs upon the correct comprehension of the constitution of the Inner Being of Nature and Man, of the divine within the animal, and hence also the correctness of the whole system as given in these pages, with regard to the crown piece of evolution—Man—we cannot take sufficient precautions against theological subterfuges. When the good St. Augustine and the fiery Tertullian call the Devil the “monkey of God,” we can attribute it to the ignorance of the age they lived in. It is more difficult to excuse our modern writers on the same ground. The translation of Mazdean literature has afforded Roman Catholic writers the pretext for proving their point in the same direction once more. They have taken advantage of the dual nature of Ahura Mazda and of his Amshaspands in the Zend Avesta and the Vendîdâd, to emphasize still further their wild theories. Satan is the plagiarist and the copyist by anticipation of the religion which came ages later. This was one of the master strokes of the Latin Church, its best trump-card after the appearance of Spiritualism in Europe. Though only a succès d'estime, in general, even among those who are not interested in either Theosophy or Spiritualism, yet the weapon is often used by the Christian (Roman Catholic) Kabalists against the Eastern Occultists.
Now even the Materialists are quite harmless, and may be regarded as the friends of Theosophy, when compared to some fanatical “Christian”—as they call themselves, “Sectarian” as we call them—Kabalists, on the Continent. These read the Zohar, not to find in it ancient Wisdom, but, by mangling the texts and meaning, to discover in its verses Christian dogmas, where none could ever have been meant; and, having fished them out with the collective help of Jesuitical casuistry and learning, the supposed “Kabalists” proceed to write books and to mislead less far-sighted students of the Kabalah.1088
May we not then be permitted to drag the deep rivers of the Past, and thus bring to the surface the root idea that led to the transformation of the Wisdom-God, who had first been regarded as the Creator of everything that exists, into an Angel of Evil—a ridiculous horned biped, half goat and half monkey, with hoofs and a tail? We need not go out of the way to compare the Pagan Demons of either Egypt, India, or Chaldæa with the Devil of Christianity, for no such comparison is possible. But we may stop to glance at the biography of the Christian Devil, a piratical reprint from the Chaldæo-Judæan mythology.
The primitive origin of this personification rests upon the Akkadian conception of the Cosmic Powers—the Heavens and the Earth—in eternal feud and struggle with Chaos. Their Silik-Muludag (? Murudug), “the God amongst all the Gods,” the “merciful guardian of men on Earth,” was the son of Hea (or Ea) the great God of Wisdom, called by the Babylonians Nebo. With both peoples, as also in the case of the Hindû Gods, their deities were both beneficent and maleficent. As evil and punishment are the agents of Karma, in an absolutely just retributive sense, so Evil was the servant of the Good.1089 The reading of the Chaldæo-Assyrian tiles has now demonstrated this beyond a shadow of doubt. We find the same idea in the Zohar. Satan was a Son and an Angel of God. With all the Semitic nations, the Spirit of the Earth was as much the Creator in his own realm as the Spirit of the Heavens. They were twin brothers and interchangeable in their functions, when not two in one. Nothing of that which we find in Genesis is absent from the Chaldæo-Assyrian religious beliefs, even in the little that has hitherto been deciphered. The great “Face of the Deep” of Genesis is traced in the Tohu Bohu (“Deep” or “Primeval Space”), or Chaos, of the Babylonians. Wisdom, the Great Unseen God—called in Genesis the “Spirit of God”—lived, for the older Babylonians as for the Akkadians, in the Sea of Space. Toward the days described by Berosus, this Sea became the Visible Waters on the face of the Earth—the crystalline abode of the Great Mother, the Mother of Ea and all the Gods, which became, still later, the great Dragon Tiamat, the Sea Serpent. Its last stage of development was the great struggle of Bel with the Dragon—the Devil!
