The Secret Doctrine, page 293
605. The three secret names are “Sana, Sanat Sujâta, and Kapila;” while the four exoteric Gods are called, Sanat Kumâra, Sananda, Sanaka and Sanâtana.
606. Another Kumâra, the “God of War” is called in the Hindu system the “eternal celibate”—“the virgin warrior.” He is the ryan St. Michael.
607. We give the original: “Coelestia corpora moveri a spirituali creatura, a nemine Sanctorum vel philosophorum, negatum, legisse me memini. (Opusc. X. art. iii.).... Mihi autam videtur, quod Demonstrative probari posset, quod ab aliquo intellectu corpora coelestia moveantur, vel a Deo immediate, vel a mediantibus angelis. Sed quod mediantibus angelis ca moveat, congruit rerum ordine, quem Dionysius infallibilem asserit, ut inferiora a Deo per Media secundum cursum communem administrentur” (Opusc. II. art. ii.), and if so, and God never meddles with the once for ever established laws of Nature, leaving it to his administrators, why should their being called Gods by the “heathen” be deemed idolatrous?
608. In one of Des Mousseaux's volumes on Demonology (Œuvres des Demons) if we do not mistake the statement of the Abbé Huc is found, and the author testifies to having heard the following story repeatedly from the Abbé himself. In a lamasery of Tibet, the missionary found the following:
It is a simple canvas without the slightest mechanical apparatus attached, as the visitor may prove by examining it at his leisure. It represents a moonlit landscape, but the moon is not at all motionless and dead; quite the reverse, for, according to the Abbé, one would say that our moon herself, or at least her living double, lighted the picture. Each phase, each aspect, each movement of our satellite, is repeated in her facsimile, in the movement and progress of the moon in the sacred picture. “You see this planet in the painting ride as a crescent, or full, shine brightly, pass behind the clouds, peep out or set, in a manner corresponding in the most extraordinary way with the real luminary. It is, in a word, a most perfect and resplendent reproduction of the pale queen of the night, which received the adoration of so many people in the days of old.” We know from the most reliable sources and numerous eye-witnesses, that such “machines”—not canvas paintings—do exist in certain temples of Tibet; as also the “sidereal wheels” representing the planets, and kept for the same purposes—astrological and magical. Huc's statement was translated in Isis Unveiled from Des Mousseaux's volume.
609. Cedrenus, p. 338. Whether produced by clockwork or magic power, such machines—whole celestial spheres with planets rotating—were found in the Sanctuaries, and some exist to this day in Japan, in a secret subterranean temple of the old Mikados, as well as in two other places.
610. Champollion's Égypte Moderne, p. 42.
611. Musée des Sciences, p. 230.
612. Translated by the Vicomte de Rougemont. See Les Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne, 7th year, 1861.
613. Isaiah, lxiii. 9.
614. Chapter xii. of Revelation: “There was war in heaven, Mikael and his angels fought against the Dragon,” etc. (7) and the great dragon was cast out (9).
615. He is also the informing Spirit of the Sun and Jupiter, and even of Venus.
616. Dogme et Rituel, ii. 116.
617. If enumerated, they will be found to be the Hindu “divisions” and choirs of Devas, and the Dhyân Chohans of Esoteric Buddhism.
618. But this fact has not prevented the Roman Church from adopting them all the same, accepting them from ignorant, though perchance sincere Church Fathers, who had borrowed them from Kaballists—Jews and Pagans.
619. To call “usurpers” those who preceded the Christian Beings for whose benefit these same titles were borrowed, is carrying paradoxical anachronism a little too far!
620. Or the divine ages, the “days and years of Brahmâ.”
621. De Mirville, ii. 325, 326. So we say too. And this shows that it is to the Kabalists and Magicians that the Church is indebted for her dogmas and names. Paul never condemned real Gnosis, but the false one, now accepted by the Church.
622. Sesostris, or Pharaoh Ramses II., whose mummy was unswathed in 1886 by Maspero of the Bulak Museum, and recognised as that of the greatest king of Egypt, whose grandson, Ramses III. was the last king of an ancient kingdom.
623. Op. cit., p. 422.
624. Summa, Quest. xv. Art. v., upon Astrologers, and Vol. III. pp. 2-29.
625. “The principalities and powers (born) in heavenly places” (Ephes., iii. 10). The verse, “For though there be that are called Gods, whether in heaven or on earth, as there be Gods many and lords many” (I. Corinth., viii. 5), shows, at any rate, the recognition by Paul of a plurality of “Gods” whom he calls “dæmons” (“spirits”—never devils). Principalities, Thrones, Dominions, Rectors, etc. are all Jewish and Christian names for the Gods of the ancients—the Archangels and Angels of the former being in every case the Devas and the Dhyân Chohans of the more ancient religions.
626. Answer by Reuvens to Letronne with regard to his mistaken notions about the Zodiac of Dendera.
627. St. Augustine (De Gen., I. iii.) and Delrio (Disquisit., Vol. IV., chap. iii.) are quoted by De Mirville, to show that “the more astrologers speak the truth and the better they prophesy it, the more one has to feel diffident, seeing that their agreement with the devil becomes thereby the more apparent.” The famous statement made by Juvenal (Satires, vi.) to the effect that “not one single astrologer could be found who did not pay dearly for the help he received from his genius”—no more proves the latter to be a devil than the death of Socrates proves his daimon to have been a native from the nether world—if such there be. Such argument only demonstrates human stupidity and wickedness, once reason is made subservient to prejudice and fanaticism of every sort. “Most of the great writers of antiquity, Cicero and Tacitus among them, believed in Astrology and the realization of its prophecies;” and “the penalty of death decreed nearly everywhere against those mathematicians (astrologers) who happened to predict falsely diminished neither their number nor their tranquillity of mind.”
628. Preparatio Evangelica, I. xiv.
629. Ast., iv. 60.
630. Hist., I. ii.
631. All these particulars may be found more fully and far more completely in Champollion Figeac's Égypte.
632. Op. cit., p. 230.
633. Op. cit., p. 230.
634. In the 1,326 places in the New Testament where the word “God” is mentioned nothing signifies that in God are included more beings than God. On the contrary in 17 places God is called the only God. The places where the Father is so-called amount to 320. In 105 places God is addressed with high-sounding titles. In 90 places all prayers and thanks are addressed to the Father; 300 times in the New Testament is the Son declared to be inferior to the Father; 85 times is Jesus called the “Son of Man;” 70 times is he called a man. In not one single place in the bible is it said that God holds within him three different Beings or Persons, and yet is one Being or Person.—Dr. Karl von Bergen's Lectures in Sweden.
635. Kali Yuga, the Black or Iron Age.
636. Virgil, Eclogue, iv.
637. At the close of our Race, people, it is said, through suffering and discontent will become more spiritual. Clairvoyance will become a general faculty. We shall be approaching the spiritual state of the Third and Second Races.
638. Vishnu Purâna, IV., xxiv. 228, Wilson's translation.
639. Op. cit., p. 212.
640. At any rate, the temple secret meaning was the same.
641. Asiat. Res., vol. viii. p. 470, et seq.
642. Theosophist, August, 1881.
643. Aug., 1881 to Feb., 1882.
644. Loc. cit., iv. 127.
645. Theosophist, vol. iii. p. 22.
646. The impartial study of Vaidic and Post-Vaidic works shows that the ancient ryans knew well the precession of the equinoxes, and “that they changed their position from a certain asterism to two (occasionally three) asterisms back whenever the precession amounted to two, properly speaking, to 2 11/61 asterisms or about 29°, being the motion of the sun in a lunar month, and so caused the seasons to fall back a complete lunar month.... It appears certain that at the date of Sûrya Siddhânta, Brahmâ Siddânta, and other ancient treatises on astronomy, the vernal equinoctial point had not actually reached the beginning of Ashvinî, but was a few degrees east of it.... The astronomers of Europe change westward the beginning of Aries and of all other signs of the Zodiac every year by about 50" 25, and thus make the names of the signs meaningless. But these signs are as much fixed as the asterisms themselves, and hence the Western astronomers of the present day appear to us in this respect less wary and scientific in their observations than their very ancient brethren—the ryas.”—Theosophist, iii. 23.
647. A great deal of misconception is raised by a confusion of planes of being and misuse of expressions. For instance, certain spiritual states have been confounded with the Nirvâna of Buddha. The Nirvâna of Buddha is totally different from any other spiritual state of Samâdhi or even the highest Theophania enjoyed by lesser Adepts. After physical death the kinds of spiritual states reached by Adepts differ greatly.
648. This region is the one possible point of conciliation between the two diametrically opposed poles of religion and science, the one with its barren fields of dogmas on faith, the other over-running with empty hypotheses, both overgrown with the weeds of error. They will never meet. The two are at feud, at an everlasting warfare with each other, but this does not prevent them from uniting against Esoteric Philosophy, which for two millenniums has had to fight against infallibility in both directions, or “mere vanity and pretence” as Antoninus defined it, and now finds the materialism of Modern Science arrayed against its truths.
649. Whence some of the Gnostic ideas? Cerinthus taught that the world and Jehovah having fallen off from virtue and primitive dignity the Supreme permitted one of his glorious Æons, whose name was the “Anointed” (Christ) to incarnate in the man Jesus. Basilides denied the reality of the body of Jesus, and calling it an “illusion” held that it was Simon of Cyrene who suffered on the Cross in his stead. All such teachings are echoes of the Eastern Doctrines.
650. A genuine initiated Adept will retain his Adeptship, though there may be for our world of illusion numberless incarnations of him. The propelling power that lies at the root of a series of such incarnations is not Karma, as ordinarily understood, but a still more inscrutable power. During the period of his lives the Adept does not lose his Adeptship, though he cannot rise in it to a higher degree.
651. From the so-called Brahmâ Loka—the seventh and higher world, beyond which all is arûpa, formless, purely spiritual—to the lowest world and insect, or even to an object such as a leaf, there is perpetual revolution of the condition of existence, evolution and re-birth. Some human beings attain states or spheres from which there is only a return in a new Kalpa (a day of Brahmâ); there are other states or spheres from which there is only return after 100 years of Brahmâ (Mahâ-Kalpa, a period covering 311,040,000,000,000 years). Nirvâna, it is said, is a state from which there is no return. Yet it is maintained that there may be, as exceptional cases, re-incarnation from that state; only such incarnations are illusion, like everything else on this plane, as will be shown.
652. This fact of the disappearance of the vehicle of Egotism in the fully developed Yogî, who is supposed to have reached Nirvâna on earth, years before his corporeal death, has led to the law in Manu, sanctioned by millenniums of Brâhmanical authority, that such a Paramâtmâ should be held as absolutely blameless and free from sin or responsibility, do whatever he may (see last chapter of the Laws of Manu). Indeed, caste itself—that most despotic, uncompromising and autocratic tyrant in India—can be broken with impunity by the Yogî, who is above caste. This will give the key to our statements.
653. (The word “Adept” is very loosely used by H. P. B., who often seems to have implied by it no more than the possession of special knowledge of some kind. Here it seems to mean first an uninitiated disciple and then an initiated one.—Eds.)
654. About fifty years before the birth of Copernicus, de Cusa wrote as follows: “Though the world may not be absolutely infinite, no one can represent it to himself as finite, since human reason is incapable of assigning to it any term.... For in the same way that our earth cannot be in the centre of the Universe, as thought, no more could the sphere of the fixed stars be in it.... Thus this world is like a vast machine, having its centre (Deity) everywhere, and its circumference nowhere (machina mundi, quasi habens ubique centrum, et nullibi circumferentiam).... Hence, the earth not being in the centre, cannot therefore be motionless ... and though it is far smaller than the sun, one must not conclude for all that, that she is worse (vilior—more vile).... One cannot see whether its inhabitants are superior to those who dwell nearer to the sun, or in other stars, as sidereal space cannot be deprived of inhabitants.... The earth, very likely (fortasse) one of the smallest globes, is nevertheless the cradle of intelligent beings, most noble and perfect.” One cannot fail to agree with the biographer of Cardinal de Cusa, who, having no suspicion of the Occult truth, and the reason of such erudition in a writer of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, simply marvels at such a miraculous foreknowledge, and attributes it to God, saying of him that he was a man incomparable in every kind of philosophy, by whom many a theological mystery inaccessible to the human mind (!), veiled and neglected for centuries (velata et neglecta) were once more brought to light. “Pascal might have read De Cusa's works; but whence could the Cardinal have borrowed his ideas?” asks Moreri. Evidently from Hermes and the works of Pythagoras, even if the mystery of his incarnation and re-incarnation be dismissed.
655. This is the secret meaning of the statements about the Hierarchy of Prajâpatis or Rishis. First seven are mentioned, then ten, then twenty-one, and so on. They are “Gods” and creators of men—many of them the “Lords of Beings”; they are the “Mind-born Sons” of Brahmâ, and then they became mortal heroes, and are often shown as of a very sinful character. The Occult meaning of the Biblical Patriarchs, their genealogy, and their descendants dividing among themselves the earth, is the same. Again, Jacob's dream has the same significance.
656. He “of the Seven Virtues” is one who, without the benefit of Initiation, becomes as pure as any Adept by the simple exertion of his own merit. Being so holy, his body at his next incarnation becomes the Avatâra of his “Watcher” or Guardian Angel, as the Christian would put it.
657. The title of the highest Dhyân Chohans.
658. Op. cit., ii. 367.
659. “After death, the soul continueth in the aerial (astral) body, till it is entirely purified from all angry, sensual passions; then doth it put off by a second death (when arising to Devachan) the aerial body as it did the earthly one. Wherefore the ancients say that there is a celestial body always joined with the soul, which is immortal, luminous and star-like.” It becomes natural then, that the “aerial body” of an Adept should have no such second dying, since it has been cleansed of all its natural impurity before its separation from the physical body. The high Initiate is a “Son of the Resurrection,” “being equal unto the angels,” and cannot die any more (see Luke, xx. 36).
660. St. John, xxi. 21.
661. See the extract made in the Theosophist from a glorious novel by Dostoievsky—a fragment entitled “The Great Inquisitor.” It is a fiction, naturally, still a sublime fiction of Christ returning in Spain during the palmy days of the Inquisition, and being imprisoned and put to death by the Inquisitor, who fears lest Christ should ruin the work of Jesuit hands.
662. When we say the “great Teacher,” we do not mean His Buddhic Ego, but that principle in Him which was the vehicle of His personal or terrestrial Ego.
663. Five Years of Theosophy, New Edition, p. 3.
664. Op. cit., p. 175, Fifth Edition.
665. It would be useless to raise objections from exoteric works to statements in this, which aims to expound, however superficially, the Esoteric Teachings alone. It is because they are misled by the exoteric doctrine that Bishop Bigandet and others aver that the notion of a supreme eternal di-Buddha is to be found only in writings of comparatively recent date. What is given here is taken from the secret portions of Dus Kyi Khorlo (Kâla Chakra, in Sanskrit, or the “Wheel of Time,” or duration).
666. The three bodies are (1) the Nirmânakâya (Pru-lpai-Ku in Tibetan), in which the Bodhisattva after entering by the six Pâramitâs the Path to Nirvâna, appears to men in order to teach them; (2) Sambhogakâya (Dzog-pai-Ku), the, body of bliss impervious to all physical sensations, received by one who has fulfilled the three conditions of moral perfection; and (3) Dharmakâya (in Tibetan, Chos-Ku), the Nirvânic body.
667. Five Years of Theosophy, art. “Personal and Impersonal God,” p. 129.
668. Adhishtâthâ, the active or working agent in Prakriti (or matter).
669. Vedânta-Sûtras, Ad. I. Pâda iv. Shi. 23. Commentary. The passage is given as follows in Thibaut's translation (Sacred Books of the East, xxxiv.), p. 286: “The Self is thus the operative cause, because there is no other ruling principle, and the material cause because there is no other substance from which the world could originate.”
670. In Five Years of Theosophy (art. “Shâkya Muni's Place in History,” p. 234, note) it is stated that one day when our Lord sat in the Sattapanni Cave (Saptaparna) he compared man to a Saptaparna (seven leaved) plant.
“Mendicants,” he said, “there are seven Buddhas in every Buddha, and there are six Bhikshus and but one Buddha in each mendicant. What are the seven? The seven branches of complete knowledge. What are the six? The six organs of sense. What are the five? The five elements of illusive being. And the One which is also ten? He is a true Buddha who develops in him the ten forms of holiness and subjects them all to the One.” Which means that every principle in the Buddha was the highest that could be evolved on this earth; whereas in the case of other men who attain to Nirvâna this is not necessarily the case. Even as a mere human (Manushya) Buddha Gautama was a pattern for all men. But his Arhats were not necessarily so.
