The Secret Doctrine, page 200
133. The same idea is found in the first four chapters of Genesis, with their “Lord” and “God,” which are the Elohim and the Androgynous Eloha.
134. P. 398.
135. P. 107.
136. Spirits.
137. Also Spirits.
138. vi. 2-6.
139. But see the difficulties suggested later, in the works of various Geologists, against this theory. Compare Sir R. S. Ball's articles in Nature, xxv, 79-82, 103-107, Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 1881.
140. The Rûpas.
141. The Goddess who gave birth to these primordial monsters, in the account of Berosus, was Thalatth, in Greek Thalassa, the “Sea.”
142. See, for comparison, the account of creation by Berosus, as preserved in Alexander Polyhistor, and the hideous beings born from the two-fold principle—Earth and Water—in the abyss of Primordial Creation: Narâs (Centaurs, men with the limbs of horses and human bodies), and Kinnaras (men with the heads of horses) created by Brahmâ in the commencement of the Kalpa.
143. For a similar admission see Prof. Lefèvre's Philosophy, 481.
144. xii. 10,308.
145. The Esoteric Doctrine says that this “Cosmic Evolution” refers only to our Solar System; while exoteric Hindûism makes the figures refer, if we do not mistake, to the whole Universal System.
146. Another point of disagreement. Occultism says that the astral prototypes of the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms up to man have taken that time (300 million years) to evolve, reforming out of the cast-off materials of the preceding Round, which, though very dense and physical in their own cycle, are relatively ethereal as compared with the materiality of our present middle Round. At the expiration of these 300 million years, Nature, on the way to the physical and material, down the arc of descent, begins with mankind and works downwards, hardening or materializing forms as it proceeds. Thus the fossils found in strata, to which an antiquity, not of eighteen, but of many hundreds of millions of years, must be ascribed, belong in reality to forms of the preceding Round, which, while living, were far more ethereal than physical, as we know the physical. That we perceive and disinter them as tangible forms, is due to the process of materialization or crystallization referred to, which took place subsequently, at the beginning of the Fourth Round, and reached its maximum after the appearance of man, proceeding parallel with his physical evolution. This alone illustrates the fact that the degree of materiality of the Earth changes pari passu with that of its inhabitants. And thus man now finds, as tangible fossils, what were once the (to his present senses) ethereal forms of the lower kingdoms. The above Brâhmanical figures refer to evolution beginning on Globe A, and in the First Round. In this Volume we speak only of this, the Fourth Round.
147. This difference and the change of cyphers in the last three triplets of figures, the writer cannot undertake to account for. According to every calculation, once the three hundred millions are subtracted, the figures ought to stand, 1,655,884,687. But they are given as stated in the Tamil calendar above-named and as they were translated. The school of the late Pandit Dayânand Sarasvati, founder of the rya Samâj, gives a date of 1,960,852,987. See the rya Magazine of Lahore, the cover of which bears the words: “ryan era 1,960,852,987.”
148. Vaivasvata Manu is the one Human Being—some versions add to him the seven Rishis—who in the Matsya Avatâra allegory is saved from the Deluge in a boat, like Noah in the Ark. Therefore, this Vaivasvata Manvantara would be the “post-diluvian” period. This, however, does not refer to the later “Atlantean” or Noah's Deluge, nor to the Cosmic “Deluge” or Pralaya of obscuration, which preceded our Round, but to the appearance of mankind in the latter Round. There is a great difference made, however, between the Naimitika, Occasional or Incidental, Prâkritika, Elemental, Atyantika, the Absolute, and Nitya, the Perpetual Pralaya; the latter being described as “Brahmâ's contingent recoalescence of the Universe at the end of Brahmâ's Day.” The question was raised by a learned Brâhman Theosophist: “Whether there is such a thing as Cosmic Pralaya; because, otherwise, the Logos (Krishna) would have to be reborn, and he is Aja (unborn).” We cannot see why. The Logos is said to be born only metaphorically, as the Sun is born daily, or rather a beam of that Sun is born in the morning and is said to die when it disappears, whereas it is simply reäbsorbed into the parent essence. Cosmic Pralaya is for things visible, not for the Arûpa, Formless, World. The Cosmic or Universal Pralaya comes only at the end of one hundred Years of Brahmâ, when the Universal Dissolution is said to take place. Then the Avyaya, say the exoteric Scriptures, the Eternal Life symbolized by Vishnu, assuming the character of Rudra, the Destroyer, enters into the Seven Rays of the Sun and drinks up all the waters of the Universe. “Thus fed, the seven Solar Rays dilate to seven suns and set fire to the whole Cosmos.”
149. Since a Mahâ Yuga is the 1,000th part of a Day of Brahmâ.
150. Op. cit., Art. “Geology.”
151. Ibid. This allows a chance even to the Biblical “Adam Chronology” of 6,000 years.
152. Modern Science and Modern Thought, 48.
153. To the Silurian period as regards molluscs and animal life—granted; but what do they know of man?
154. Ibid., loc. cit.
155. Ibid., 49.
156. Winchell, World-Life, 180.
157. Op. cit., 49.
158. Wilson's Vishnu Purâna, i. 51.
159. i. 32.
160. The atmosphere, or the air, the firmament.
161. Harivamsha, i. 36.
162. Genesis, i. 6-9.
163. Lords.
164. They were told.
165. i.e., the Jivas or Monads.
166. Mother Earth or Nature.
167. For external bodies.
168. According to the wonderful chronology of Bentley, who wrote in days when Biblical chronology was still undisputed; and also according to that of those modern Orientalists who dwarf the Hindû dates as far as they can.
169. Now Shrî is the daughter of Bhrigu, one of the Prajâpatis and Rishis, the chief of the Bhrigus, the “Consumers,” the Aërial Class of Gods. She is Lakshmî, the wife of Vishnu, and she is Gaurî, the “bride of Shiva,” and she is Sarasvatî, the “watery,” the wife of Brahmâ, because the three Gods and Goddesses are one, under three aspects. Read the explanation by Parâshara, in Vishnu Purâna (I. viii., Wilson's Trans., i. 119), and you will understand. “The lord of Shrî is the moon,” he says, and “Shrî is the wife of Nârâyana, the God of Gods”: Shrî or Lakshmî (Venus) is Indrânî, as she is Sarasvatî, for in the words of Parâshara: “Harî (or Îshvara, the ‘Lord’) is all that is called male (in the Universe); Lakshmî is all that is termed female. There is nothing else than they.” Hence she is female, and “God” is male Nature.
170. Shrî is Goddess of, and herself “Fortune and Prosperity.”
171. Masonic Review (Cincinnati), June, 1886. Art. “The Cabbalah.—No. VI,” 15-17.
172. The Moon-Gods.
173. Vishnu Purâna, I. vii., Wilson's Trans., i. 101.
174. See Mahâbhârata, Mokshadharma Parvan.
175. Because, as the allegory shows, the Gods who had no personal merit of their own, dreading the sanctity of those self-striving incarnated Beings who had become Ascetics and Yogîs, and thus threatened to upset the power of the former by their self-acquired powers—denounced them. All this has a deep philosophical meaning and refers to the evolution and acquirement of divine powers through self-exertion. Some Rishi-Yogîs are shown in the Purânas to be far more powerful than the Gods. Secondary Gods or temporary Powers in Nature (the Forces) are doomed to disappear; it is only the spiritual Potentiality in man which can lead him to become one with the Infinite and the Absolute.
176. The Triangle becomes a Pentagon (five-fold) on Earth.
177. Seth, as Bunsen and others have shown, is not only the “primitive God” of the Semites—early Jews included—but also their “semi-divine ancestor.” For, says Bunsen (God in History, i. 233, 234): “The Seth of Genesis, the father of Enoch (the man) must be considered as originally running parallel with that derived from the Elohim, Adam's father.” “According to Bunsen, the Deity (the God Seth) was the primitive god of Northern Egypt and Palestine,” says Staniland Wake, in The Great Pyramid (p. 61). And Seth became considered in the later Theology of the Egyptians as an “evil demon,” says the same Bunsen, for he is one with Typhon and one with the Hindû Demons as a logical sequel.
178. I Corinth., xv. 47.
179. Vâyu Purâna; Harivamsha, 170.
180. See Mather's Kabbalah Unveiled, p. 302.
181. Translated in Isaac Myer's Qabbalah, p. 386.
182. Zohar iii., 135a, 292a, Idra Zootah. Brody Ed., Idrah Zootah.
183. Gen. xxvi. 31 et seq.; Myer's Qabbalah, ibid.
184. Zohar, iii. 290a, Brody Ed. Indrah Zootah, quoted in Isaac Myer's Qabbalah, pp. 387, 388.
185. ii. 5.
186. Or Mind-born.
187. Fohat.
188. “Huxley, supported by the most evident discoveries in Comparative Anatomy, could utter the momentous sentence that the anatomical differences between man and the highest apes are less than those between the latter and the lowest apes. In relation to our genealogical tree of man, the necessary conclusion follows that the human race has evolved gradually from the true apes.” (The Pedigree of Man, by Ernst Hæckel, translated by Ed. B. Aveling, p. 49.)
What may be the scientific and logical objections to the opposite conclusion—we would ask? The anatomical resemblances between Man and the Anthropoids—grossly exaggerated as they are by Darwinists, as M. de Quatrefages shows—are simply enough accounted for when the origin of the latter is taken into consideration.
“Nowhere, in the older deposits, is an ape to be found that approximates more closely to man, or a man that approximates more closely to an ape.”
“The same gulf which is found to-day between man and ape, goes back with undiminished breadth and depth to the Tertiary period. This fact alone is enough to make its untenability clear.” (Dr. F. Pfaff, Prof. of Natural Science in the University of Erlangen.)
189. See Yoga Shâstra, ii. 32.
190. Voltaire.
191. Mânava-Dharma Shâstra, iii. 196.
192. Matsya and Padma Purânas and Kullûka on the Mânava-Dharma Shâstra, iii. 195. We are quite aware that the Vâyu and Matsya Purânas identify (agreeably to Western interpretation) the Agnishvâtta with the seasons, and the Barhishad Pitris with the months; adding a fourth class—Kâvyas—cyclic years. But do not Christian Roman Catholics identify their Angels with Planets, and are not the Seven Rishis become the Saptarshis—a constellation? They are Deities presiding over all the cyclic divisions.
193. Vishnu Purâna, Wilson, iii. 158, 159.
194. Shll. 935, 936.
195. The Vâyu Purâna shows the region called Virâja-loka inhabited by the Agnishvâttas.
196. Wilson, ibid., iii. 17. Note by Fitzedward Hall.
197. Loc. cit., ibid.
198. See Theosophist, February, 1887, p. 360.
199. See Wilson, ii. 26.
200. See Vâyu Purâna.
201. Chhâyâs.
202. Or Amânasas.
203. Thus.
204. Complexion.
205. Also.
206. Creator.
207. Phantoms.
208. Image or shadow.
209. This was hinted at in Isis Unveiled (I. xxxviii.), though the full explanation could not then be given: “The Pitris are not the ancestors of the present living men, but those of the (first) human kind or Adamic race; the spirits of human races, which, on the great scale of descending evolution, preceded our races of men, and were physically, as well as spiritually, far superior to our modern pigmies. In Mânava-Dharma Shâstra they are called the Lunar ancestors.”
210. See the “Laws of Manu”—Mânava-Dharma Shâstra, iii. 203.
211. “Sacred Books of the East,” Vol. IV, The Zend-Avesta, Pt. I. lviii, Trans. by James Darmesteter.
212. Compare also what is said about Makara and the Kumâras in connection with the Zodiac.
213. Whence the subsequent assertions of St. John's vision, referred to in his Apocalypse, about, “the great red dragon having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads,” whose “tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven and did cast them to the earth.” (Ch. xii.)
214. See Harivamsha, 932.
215. The verse “did cast them to the earth,” plainly shows its origin in the grandest and oldest allegory of the ryan Mystics, who, after the destruction of the Atlantean giants and sorcerers, concealed the truth—astronomical, physical, and divine, as it is a page out of pre-cosmic Theogony—under various allegories. Its true Esoteric interpretation is a veritable Theodice of the “Fallen Angels,” so called: the willing and the unwilling, the creators and those who refused to create, being now mixed up most perplexingly by Christian Catholics, who forget that their highest Archangel, St. Michael, who is shown to conquer (to master and to assimilate) the Dragon of Wisdom and of divine Self-sacrifice—now miscalled and calumniated as Satan—was the first to refuse to create! This has led to endless confusion. So little does Christian Theology understand the paradoxical language of the East and its symbolism, that it even explains, in its dead-letter sense, the Chinese Buddhist and Hindû exoteric rite of raising a noise during certain eclipses to scare away the “great red dragon,” which laid a plot to carry away the “light”! But here “light” means Esoteric Wisdom, and we have sufficiently explained the secret meaning of the terms Dragon, Serpent, etc., all of which refer to Adepts and Initiates.
216. See Genesis and Plato's Timæus.
217. In spite of all efforts to the contrary, Christian Theology—having burdened itself with the Hebrew Esoteric account of the creation of man, which it understands literally—cannot find any reasonable excuse for its “God, the Creator,” who produces a man devoid of mind and sense; nor can it justify the punishment following an act, for which Adam and Eve might plead non compos. For if the couple be admitted to be ignorant of good and evil before the eating of the forbidden fruit, how could it be expected to know that disobedience was evil? If primeval man was meant to remain a half-witted, or rather witless, being, then his creation was aimless and even cruel, if produced by an omnipotent and perfect God. But Adam and Eve are shown, even in Genesis, to be created by a Class of lower divine Beings, the Elohim, who are so jealous of their personal prerogatives as reasonable and intelligent creatures, that they will not allow man to become “as one of us.” This is plain, even from the dead-letter meaning of the Bible. The Gnostics, then, were right in regarding the Jewish God as belonging to a Class of lower, material and not very holy denizens of the invisible World.
218. In Isis Unveiled several of these Gnostic systems are given. One is taken from the Codex Nazaræus, the Scripture of the Nazarenes, who, although they existed long before the days of Christ, and even before the laws of Moses, were Gnostics, and many of them Initiates. They held their “Mysteries of Life” in Nazara (ancient and modern Nazareth), and their doctrines are a faithful echo of the teachings of the Secret Doctrine—some of which we are now endeavouring to explain.
219. i. 18. See the translation from the Greek by François, Monsieur de Foix, Evesque d'Ayre: the work dedicated to Marguerite de France, Reine de Navarre. Edition of 1579, Bordeaux.
220. Asgard and the Gods, p. 4.
221. Mr. James Darmesteter, the translator of the Vendidâd, speaking of it, says: “The tree, whatever it is....”—“Sacred Books of the East,” vol. iv. p. 209.
222. Plato's Timæus.
223. See Asgard and the Gods, p. 305.
224. Ibid., loc. cit.
225. “The father of the sacred fire,” writes Prof. Jolly, “bore the name of Tvashtri ... His mother was Mâyâ. He himself was styled Akta (anointed χριστὸς) after the priest had poured upon his head the spirituous (?) Soma, and on his body butter purified by sacrifice.” (Man before Metals, p. 190.) The source of his information is not given by the French Darwinist. But the lines are quoted to show that light begins to dawn even upon the Materialists. Adalbert Kühn, in his Die Herabkunft des Feuers, identifies the two signs (Symbol: swastika) and (Symbol: swastika with dots around the center) with Arani, and designates them under this name. He adds: “This process of kindling fire naturally led men to the idea of sexual reproduction,” etc. Why could not a more dignified idea, and one more Occult, have led man to invent this symbol, in so far as it is connected, in one of its aspects, with human reproduction? But its chief symbolism refers to Cosmogony.
“Agni, in the condition of Akta, or anointed, is suggestive of Christ,” remarks Prof. Jolly. “Mâyâ, Mary, His mother; Tvashtri, St. Joseph, the carpenter of the Bible.” In the Rig Veda, Vishvakarman is the highest and oldest of the Gods and their “Father.” He is the “carpenter or builder,” because God is called even by the Monotheists, the “Architect of the Universe.” Still, the original idea is purely metaphysical, and had no connection with the later Phallicism.
226. The real Manushya.
227. Barishad (?).
228. The Kavyavâhana, electric fire.
229. Shuchi, the spirit in the Sun.
230. The Pitris and the two Fires.
231. The form.
232. It is not clear why Bhûtas should be rendered by the Orientalists as “evil spirits” in the Purânas. In the Vishnu Purâna (I. v, Wilson's Trans., Fitzedward Hall's note, i. 83) the Shloka simply says: “Fiends, frightful from being monkey-coloured and carnivorous”; and the word in India now means “ghosts,” ethereal or astral phantoms, while in Esoteric Teaching it means elementary substances, something made of attenuated, non-compound essence, and, specifically, the astral Double of any man or animal. In this case these primitive men are the Doubles of the first ethereal Dhyânîs or Pitris.
233. See Pymander, Everard's Trans., II. 17-29.
234. Chaldean Account of Genesis, p. 92.
235. P. 91.
236. Ibid., loc. cit.
237. Ibid., loc. cit.
238. Human Monad.
239. Astral shadow.
134. P. 398.
135. P. 107.
136. Spirits.
137. Also Spirits.
138. vi. 2-6.
139. But see the difficulties suggested later, in the works of various Geologists, against this theory. Compare Sir R. S. Ball's articles in Nature, xxv, 79-82, 103-107, Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 1881.
140. The Rûpas.
141. The Goddess who gave birth to these primordial monsters, in the account of Berosus, was Thalatth, in Greek Thalassa, the “Sea.”
142. See, for comparison, the account of creation by Berosus, as preserved in Alexander Polyhistor, and the hideous beings born from the two-fold principle—Earth and Water—in the abyss of Primordial Creation: Narâs (Centaurs, men with the limbs of horses and human bodies), and Kinnaras (men with the heads of horses) created by Brahmâ in the commencement of the Kalpa.
143. For a similar admission see Prof. Lefèvre's Philosophy, 481.
144. xii. 10,308.
145. The Esoteric Doctrine says that this “Cosmic Evolution” refers only to our Solar System; while exoteric Hindûism makes the figures refer, if we do not mistake, to the whole Universal System.
146. Another point of disagreement. Occultism says that the astral prototypes of the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms up to man have taken that time (300 million years) to evolve, reforming out of the cast-off materials of the preceding Round, which, though very dense and physical in their own cycle, are relatively ethereal as compared with the materiality of our present middle Round. At the expiration of these 300 million years, Nature, on the way to the physical and material, down the arc of descent, begins with mankind and works downwards, hardening or materializing forms as it proceeds. Thus the fossils found in strata, to which an antiquity, not of eighteen, but of many hundreds of millions of years, must be ascribed, belong in reality to forms of the preceding Round, which, while living, were far more ethereal than physical, as we know the physical. That we perceive and disinter them as tangible forms, is due to the process of materialization or crystallization referred to, which took place subsequently, at the beginning of the Fourth Round, and reached its maximum after the appearance of man, proceeding parallel with his physical evolution. This alone illustrates the fact that the degree of materiality of the Earth changes pari passu with that of its inhabitants. And thus man now finds, as tangible fossils, what were once the (to his present senses) ethereal forms of the lower kingdoms. The above Brâhmanical figures refer to evolution beginning on Globe A, and in the First Round. In this Volume we speak only of this, the Fourth Round.
147. This difference and the change of cyphers in the last three triplets of figures, the writer cannot undertake to account for. According to every calculation, once the three hundred millions are subtracted, the figures ought to stand, 1,655,884,687. But they are given as stated in the Tamil calendar above-named and as they were translated. The school of the late Pandit Dayânand Sarasvati, founder of the rya Samâj, gives a date of 1,960,852,987. See the rya Magazine of Lahore, the cover of which bears the words: “ryan era 1,960,852,987.”
148. Vaivasvata Manu is the one Human Being—some versions add to him the seven Rishis—who in the Matsya Avatâra allegory is saved from the Deluge in a boat, like Noah in the Ark. Therefore, this Vaivasvata Manvantara would be the “post-diluvian” period. This, however, does not refer to the later “Atlantean” or Noah's Deluge, nor to the Cosmic “Deluge” or Pralaya of obscuration, which preceded our Round, but to the appearance of mankind in the latter Round. There is a great difference made, however, between the Naimitika, Occasional or Incidental, Prâkritika, Elemental, Atyantika, the Absolute, and Nitya, the Perpetual Pralaya; the latter being described as “Brahmâ's contingent recoalescence of the Universe at the end of Brahmâ's Day.” The question was raised by a learned Brâhman Theosophist: “Whether there is such a thing as Cosmic Pralaya; because, otherwise, the Logos (Krishna) would have to be reborn, and he is Aja (unborn).” We cannot see why. The Logos is said to be born only metaphorically, as the Sun is born daily, or rather a beam of that Sun is born in the morning and is said to die when it disappears, whereas it is simply reäbsorbed into the parent essence. Cosmic Pralaya is for things visible, not for the Arûpa, Formless, World. The Cosmic or Universal Pralaya comes only at the end of one hundred Years of Brahmâ, when the Universal Dissolution is said to take place. Then the Avyaya, say the exoteric Scriptures, the Eternal Life symbolized by Vishnu, assuming the character of Rudra, the Destroyer, enters into the Seven Rays of the Sun and drinks up all the waters of the Universe. “Thus fed, the seven Solar Rays dilate to seven suns and set fire to the whole Cosmos.”
149. Since a Mahâ Yuga is the 1,000th part of a Day of Brahmâ.
150. Op. cit., Art. “Geology.”
151. Ibid. This allows a chance even to the Biblical “Adam Chronology” of 6,000 years.
152. Modern Science and Modern Thought, 48.
153. To the Silurian period as regards molluscs and animal life—granted; but what do they know of man?
154. Ibid., loc. cit.
155. Ibid., 49.
156. Winchell, World-Life, 180.
157. Op. cit., 49.
158. Wilson's Vishnu Purâna, i. 51.
159. i. 32.
160. The atmosphere, or the air, the firmament.
161. Harivamsha, i. 36.
162. Genesis, i. 6-9.
163. Lords.
164. They were told.
165. i.e., the Jivas or Monads.
166. Mother Earth or Nature.
167. For external bodies.
168. According to the wonderful chronology of Bentley, who wrote in days when Biblical chronology was still undisputed; and also according to that of those modern Orientalists who dwarf the Hindû dates as far as they can.
169. Now Shrî is the daughter of Bhrigu, one of the Prajâpatis and Rishis, the chief of the Bhrigus, the “Consumers,” the Aërial Class of Gods. She is Lakshmî, the wife of Vishnu, and she is Gaurî, the “bride of Shiva,” and she is Sarasvatî, the “watery,” the wife of Brahmâ, because the three Gods and Goddesses are one, under three aspects. Read the explanation by Parâshara, in Vishnu Purâna (I. viii., Wilson's Trans., i. 119), and you will understand. “The lord of Shrî is the moon,” he says, and “Shrî is the wife of Nârâyana, the God of Gods”: Shrî or Lakshmî (Venus) is Indrânî, as she is Sarasvatî, for in the words of Parâshara: “Harî (or Îshvara, the ‘Lord’) is all that is called male (in the Universe); Lakshmî is all that is termed female. There is nothing else than they.” Hence she is female, and “God” is male Nature.
170. Shrî is Goddess of, and herself “Fortune and Prosperity.”
171. Masonic Review (Cincinnati), June, 1886. Art. “The Cabbalah.—No. VI,” 15-17.
172. The Moon-Gods.
173. Vishnu Purâna, I. vii., Wilson's Trans., i. 101.
174. See Mahâbhârata, Mokshadharma Parvan.
175. Because, as the allegory shows, the Gods who had no personal merit of their own, dreading the sanctity of those self-striving incarnated Beings who had become Ascetics and Yogîs, and thus threatened to upset the power of the former by their self-acquired powers—denounced them. All this has a deep philosophical meaning and refers to the evolution and acquirement of divine powers through self-exertion. Some Rishi-Yogîs are shown in the Purânas to be far more powerful than the Gods. Secondary Gods or temporary Powers in Nature (the Forces) are doomed to disappear; it is only the spiritual Potentiality in man which can lead him to become one with the Infinite and the Absolute.
176. The Triangle becomes a Pentagon (five-fold) on Earth.
177. Seth, as Bunsen and others have shown, is not only the “primitive God” of the Semites—early Jews included—but also their “semi-divine ancestor.” For, says Bunsen (God in History, i. 233, 234): “The Seth of Genesis, the father of Enoch (the man) must be considered as originally running parallel with that derived from the Elohim, Adam's father.” “According to Bunsen, the Deity (the God Seth) was the primitive god of Northern Egypt and Palestine,” says Staniland Wake, in The Great Pyramid (p. 61). And Seth became considered in the later Theology of the Egyptians as an “evil demon,” says the same Bunsen, for he is one with Typhon and one with the Hindû Demons as a logical sequel.
178. I Corinth., xv. 47.
179. Vâyu Purâna; Harivamsha, 170.
180. See Mather's Kabbalah Unveiled, p. 302.
181. Translated in Isaac Myer's Qabbalah, p. 386.
182. Zohar iii., 135a, 292a, Idra Zootah. Brody Ed., Idrah Zootah.
183. Gen. xxvi. 31 et seq.; Myer's Qabbalah, ibid.
184. Zohar, iii. 290a, Brody Ed. Indrah Zootah, quoted in Isaac Myer's Qabbalah, pp. 387, 388.
185. ii. 5.
186. Or Mind-born.
187. Fohat.
188. “Huxley, supported by the most evident discoveries in Comparative Anatomy, could utter the momentous sentence that the anatomical differences between man and the highest apes are less than those between the latter and the lowest apes. In relation to our genealogical tree of man, the necessary conclusion follows that the human race has evolved gradually from the true apes.” (The Pedigree of Man, by Ernst Hæckel, translated by Ed. B. Aveling, p. 49.)
What may be the scientific and logical objections to the opposite conclusion—we would ask? The anatomical resemblances between Man and the Anthropoids—grossly exaggerated as they are by Darwinists, as M. de Quatrefages shows—are simply enough accounted for when the origin of the latter is taken into consideration.
“Nowhere, in the older deposits, is an ape to be found that approximates more closely to man, or a man that approximates more closely to an ape.”
“The same gulf which is found to-day between man and ape, goes back with undiminished breadth and depth to the Tertiary period. This fact alone is enough to make its untenability clear.” (Dr. F. Pfaff, Prof. of Natural Science in the University of Erlangen.)
189. See Yoga Shâstra, ii. 32.
190. Voltaire.
191. Mânava-Dharma Shâstra, iii. 196.
192. Matsya and Padma Purânas and Kullûka on the Mânava-Dharma Shâstra, iii. 195. We are quite aware that the Vâyu and Matsya Purânas identify (agreeably to Western interpretation) the Agnishvâtta with the seasons, and the Barhishad Pitris with the months; adding a fourth class—Kâvyas—cyclic years. But do not Christian Roman Catholics identify their Angels with Planets, and are not the Seven Rishis become the Saptarshis—a constellation? They are Deities presiding over all the cyclic divisions.
193. Vishnu Purâna, Wilson, iii. 158, 159.
194. Shll. 935, 936.
195. The Vâyu Purâna shows the region called Virâja-loka inhabited by the Agnishvâttas.
196. Wilson, ibid., iii. 17. Note by Fitzedward Hall.
197. Loc. cit., ibid.
198. See Theosophist, February, 1887, p. 360.
199. See Wilson, ii. 26.
200. See Vâyu Purâna.
201. Chhâyâs.
202. Or Amânasas.
203. Thus.
204. Complexion.
205. Also.
206. Creator.
207. Phantoms.
208. Image or shadow.
209. This was hinted at in Isis Unveiled (I. xxxviii.), though the full explanation could not then be given: “The Pitris are not the ancestors of the present living men, but those of the (first) human kind or Adamic race; the spirits of human races, which, on the great scale of descending evolution, preceded our races of men, and were physically, as well as spiritually, far superior to our modern pigmies. In Mânava-Dharma Shâstra they are called the Lunar ancestors.”
210. See the “Laws of Manu”—Mânava-Dharma Shâstra, iii. 203.
211. “Sacred Books of the East,” Vol. IV, The Zend-Avesta, Pt. I. lviii, Trans. by James Darmesteter.
212. Compare also what is said about Makara and the Kumâras in connection with the Zodiac.
213. Whence the subsequent assertions of St. John's vision, referred to in his Apocalypse, about, “the great red dragon having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads,” whose “tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven and did cast them to the earth.” (Ch. xii.)
214. See Harivamsha, 932.
215. The verse “did cast them to the earth,” plainly shows its origin in the grandest and oldest allegory of the ryan Mystics, who, after the destruction of the Atlantean giants and sorcerers, concealed the truth—astronomical, physical, and divine, as it is a page out of pre-cosmic Theogony—under various allegories. Its true Esoteric interpretation is a veritable Theodice of the “Fallen Angels,” so called: the willing and the unwilling, the creators and those who refused to create, being now mixed up most perplexingly by Christian Catholics, who forget that their highest Archangel, St. Michael, who is shown to conquer (to master and to assimilate) the Dragon of Wisdom and of divine Self-sacrifice—now miscalled and calumniated as Satan—was the first to refuse to create! This has led to endless confusion. So little does Christian Theology understand the paradoxical language of the East and its symbolism, that it even explains, in its dead-letter sense, the Chinese Buddhist and Hindû exoteric rite of raising a noise during certain eclipses to scare away the “great red dragon,” which laid a plot to carry away the “light”! But here “light” means Esoteric Wisdom, and we have sufficiently explained the secret meaning of the terms Dragon, Serpent, etc., all of which refer to Adepts and Initiates.
216. See Genesis and Plato's Timæus.
217. In spite of all efforts to the contrary, Christian Theology—having burdened itself with the Hebrew Esoteric account of the creation of man, which it understands literally—cannot find any reasonable excuse for its “God, the Creator,” who produces a man devoid of mind and sense; nor can it justify the punishment following an act, for which Adam and Eve might plead non compos. For if the couple be admitted to be ignorant of good and evil before the eating of the forbidden fruit, how could it be expected to know that disobedience was evil? If primeval man was meant to remain a half-witted, or rather witless, being, then his creation was aimless and even cruel, if produced by an omnipotent and perfect God. But Adam and Eve are shown, even in Genesis, to be created by a Class of lower divine Beings, the Elohim, who are so jealous of their personal prerogatives as reasonable and intelligent creatures, that they will not allow man to become “as one of us.” This is plain, even from the dead-letter meaning of the Bible. The Gnostics, then, were right in regarding the Jewish God as belonging to a Class of lower, material and not very holy denizens of the invisible World.
218. In Isis Unveiled several of these Gnostic systems are given. One is taken from the Codex Nazaræus, the Scripture of the Nazarenes, who, although they existed long before the days of Christ, and even before the laws of Moses, were Gnostics, and many of them Initiates. They held their “Mysteries of Life” in Nazara (ancient and modern Nazareth), and their doctrines are a faithful echo of the teachings of the Secret Doctrine—some of which we are now endeavouring to explain.
219. i. 18. See the translation from the Greek by François, Monsieur de Foix, Evesque d'Ayre: the work dedicated to Marguerite de France, Reine de Navarre. Edition of 1579, Bordeaux.
220. Asgard and the Gods, p. 4.
221. Mr. James Darmesteter, the translator of the Vendidâd, speaking of it, says: “The tree, whatever it is....”—“Sacred Books of the East,” vol. iv. p. 209.
222. Plato's Timæus.
223. See Asgard and the Gods, p. 305.
224. Ibid., loc. cit.
225. “The father of the sacred fire,” writes Prof. Jolly, “bore the name of Tvashtri ... His mother was Mâyâ. He himself was styled Akta (anointed χριστὸς) after the priest had poured upon his head the spirituous (?) Soma, and on his body butter purified by sacrifice.” (Man before Metals, p. 190.) The source of his information is not given by the French Darwinist. But the lines are quoted to show that light begins to dawn even upon the Materialists. Adalbert Kühn, in his Die Herabkunft des Feuers, identifies the two signs (Symbol: swastika) and (Symbol: swastika with dots around the center) with Arani, and designates them under this name. He adds: “This process of kindling fire naturally led men to the idea of sexual reproduction,” etc. Why could not a more dignified idea, and one more Occult, have led man to invent this symbol, in so far as it is connected, in one of its aspects, with human reproduction? But its chief symbolism refers to Cosmogony.
“Agni, in the condition of Akta, or anointed, is suggestive of Christ,” remarks Prof. Jolly. “Mâyâ, Mary, His mother; Tvashtri, St. Joseph, the carpenter of the Bible.” In the Rig Veda, Vishvakarman is the highest and oldest of the Gods and their “Father.” He is the “carpenter or builder,” because God is called even by the Monotheists, the “Architect of the Universe.” Still, the original idea is purely metaphysical, and had no connection with the later Phallicism.
226. The real Manushya.
227. Barishad (?).
228. The Kavyavâhana, electric fire.
229. Shuchi, the spirit in the Sun.
230. The Pitris and the two Fires.
231. The form.
232. It is not clear why Bhûtas should be rendered by the Orientalists as “evil spirits” in the Purânas. In the Vishnu Purâna (I. v, Wilson's Trans., Fitzedward Hall's note, i. 83) the Shloka simply says: “Fiends, frightful from being monkey-coloured and carnivorous”; and the word in India now means “ghosts,” ethereal or astral phantoms, while in Esoteric Teaching it means elementary substances, something made of attenuated, non-compound essence, and, specifically, the astral Double of any man or animal. In this case these primitive men are the Doubles of the first ethereal Dhyânîs or Pitris.
233. See Pymander, Everard's Trans., II. 17-29.
234. Chaldean Account of Genesis, p. 92.
235. P. 91.
236. Ibid., loc. cit.
237. Ibid., loc. cit.
238. Human Monad.
239. Astral shadow.
