The Secret Doctrine, page 87
It is now amply proved that even horoscopes and judiciary Astrology are not quite based on fiction, and that Stars and Constellations, consequently, have an occult and mysterious influence on, and connection with, individuals. And if with the latter, why not with nations, races, and mankind as a whole? This, again, is a claim made on the authority of the Zodiacal records. We shall then enquire how far the Zodiac was known to the Ancients, and how far it is forgotten by the Moderns.
Section XVI. The Zodiac and its Antiquity.
“All men are apt to have a high conceit of their own understanding, and to be tenacious of the opinions they profess,” said Jordan, justly adding to this—“and yet almost all men are guided by the understandings of others, not by their own; and may be said more truly to adopt, than to beget, their opinions.”
This is doubly true in regard to scientific opinions upon hypotheses offered for consideration—the prejudice and preconceptions of “authorities,” so called, often deciding upon questions of the most vital importance for history. There are several such predetermined opinions held by our learned Orientalists, and few are more unjust or illogical than the general error with regard to the antiquity of the Zodiac. Thanks to the hobby of some German Orientalists, English and American Sanskritists have accepted Professor Weber's opinion that the peoples of India had no idea or knowledge of the Zodiac prior to the Macedonian invasion, and that it is from the Greeks that the ancient Hindûs imported it into their country. We are further told, by several other “authorities,” that no Eastern nation knew of the Zodiac before the Hellenes kindly acquainted their neighbours with their invention. And this, in the face of the Book of Job, which is declared, even by themselves, to be the oldest in the Hebrew canon, and certainly prior to Moses; a book which speaks of the making of “Arcturus, Orion, and Pleiades (Osh, Kesil, and Kimah) and the chambers of the South”1109; of Scorpio and the Mazaruth—the twelve signs1110; words which, if they mean anything, imply knowledge of the Zodiac even among the nomadic Arabian tribes. The Book of Job is alleged to have preceded Homer and Hesiod by at least one thousand years—the two Greek poets having themselves flourished some eight centuries before the Christian era (!!). Though, by the bye, one who prefers to believe Plato—who shows Homer flourishing far earlier—could point to a number of Zodiacal signs mentioned in the Iliad and Odyssey, in the Orphic poems, and elsewhere. But since the cock-and-bull hypothesis of some modern critics that, so far from Orpheus, not even Homer or Hesiod has ever existed, it would seem time lost to mention these archaic authors at all. The Arabian Job will suffice; unless, indeed, his volume of lamentations, along with the poems of the two Greeks, to which we may add those of Linus, should now also be declared to be the patriotic forgery of the Jew Aristobulus. But if the Zodiac was known in the days of Job, how could the civilized and philosophical Hindûs have remained ignorant of it?
Risking the arrows of modern criticism—rather blunted by misuse—the reader may make himself acquainted with Bailly's learned opinion upon the subject. Inferred speculations may be shown to be erroneous. Mathematical calculations stand on more secure grounds. Taking as a starting point several astronomical references in Job, Bailly devised a very ingenious means of proving that the earliest founders of the Science of the Zodiac belonged to an antediluvian, primitive people. The fact that he seems willing to see some of the Biblical patriarchs in Thoth, Seth, and in the Chinese Fohi, does not interfere with the validity of his proof as to the antiquity of the Zodiac.1111 Even accepting, for argument's sake, his cautious 3700 years b.c. as the correct age of the Zodiacal Science, this date proves in the most irrefutable way that it was not the Greeks who invented the Zodiac, for the simple reason that they did not exist as a nation thirty-seven centuries b.c.—at any rate not as a historical race admitted by the critics. Bailly then calculated the period at which the constellations manifested the atmospheric influence called by Job the “sweet influences of the Pleiades,”1112 in Hebrew Kimah; that of Orion, Kesil; and that of the desert rains with reference to Scorpio, the eighth constellation; and found that in presence of the eternal conformity of these divisions of the Zodiac, and of the names of the Planets applied in the same order everywhere and always, and in presence of the impossibility of attributing it all to chance and “coincidence”—“which never creates such similarities”—a very great antiquity indeed must be allowed for the Zodiac.1113
Again, if the Bible is supposed to be an authority on any matter—and there are some who still regard it as such, whether from Christian or Kabalistical considerations—then the Zodiac is clearly mentioned in II Kings, xxiii. 5. Before the “book of the law” was “found” by Hilkiah, the high priest, the signs of the Zodiac were known and worshipped. These were held in the same adoration as the Sun and Moon, since the
priests, whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense ... unto Baal, to the sun, and to the moon, and to the planets, and to all the host of heaven,
or to the “twelve signs or constellations,” as the marginal note in the English Bible explains, had followed the injunction for centuries. They were stopped in their idolatry only by King Josiah, 624 b.c.
The Old Testament is full of allusions to the twelve zodiacal signs, and the whole scheme is built upon it—heroes, personages, and events. Thus in the dream of Joseph, who saw eleven “Stars” bowing to the twelfth, which was his “Star,” the Zodiac is referred to. The Roman Catholics have discovered in it, moreover, a prophecy of Christ, who is that twelfth Star, they say, and the others the eleven apostles; the absence of the twelfth being also regarded as a prophetic allusion to the treachery of Judas. The twelve sons of Jacob, again, are a reference to the same, as is justly pointed out by Villapandus.1114 Sir James Malcolm, in his History of Persia,1115 shows the Dabistan echoing all such traditions about the Zodiac. He traces the invention of it to the palmy days of the Golden Age of Iran, remarking that one of the said traditions maintains that the Genii of the Planets are represented under the same shapes and figures they had assumed when they showed themselves to several holy prophets, and thus led to the establishment of the rites based on the Zodiac.
Pythagoras, and after him Philo Judæus, held the number 12 as very sacred.
This duodenary number is perfect. It is that of the signs of the Zodiac, which the sun visits in twelve months, and it is to honour that number that Moses divided his nation into twelve tribes, established the twelve cakes of the shew-bread, and placed twelve precious stones upon the breast-plate of the pontiffs.1116
According to Seneca, Berosus taught prophecy of every future event and cataclysm by the Zodiac; and the times fixed by him for the conflagration of the World—Pralaya—and for a deluge, are found to answer to the times given in an ancient Egyptian papyrus. Such a catastrophe comes at every renewal of the cycle of the Sidereal Year of 25,868 years. The names of the Akkadian months were called by, and derived from, the names of the signs of the Zodiac, and the Akkadians are far earlier than the Chaldæans. Mr. Proctor shows, in his Myths and Marvels of Astronomy, that the ancient Astronomers had acquired a system of the most accurate Astronomy 2,400 years b.c.; the Hindûs date their Kali Yuga from a great periodical conjunction of the Planets thirty-one centuries b.c.; but, withal, it was the Greeks, belonging to the expedition of Alexander the Great, who were the instructors of the ryan Hindûs in Astronomy!
Whether the origin of the Zodiac is ryan or Egyptian, it is still of an immense antiquity. Simplicius, in the sixth century a.d., writes that he had always heard that the Egyptians had kept astronomical observations and records for a period of 630,000 years. This statement appears to frighten Mr. Gerald Massey, who remarks on it that:
If we read this number of years by the month which Euxodus said the Egyptians termed a year, i.e., a course of time, that would still yield the length of two cycles of precession (51,736 years).1117
Diogenes Laërtius carried back the astronomical calculations of the Egyptians to 48,863 years before Alexander the Great.1118 Martianus Capella corroborates this by telling posterity that the Egyptians had secretly studied Astronomy for over 40,000 years, before they imparted their knowledge to the world.1119
Several valuable quotations are made in Natural Genesis with the view of supporting the author's theories, but they justify the teaching of the Secret Doctrine far more. For instance, Plutarch is quoted from his Life of Sulla, saying:
One day when the sky was serene and clear, there was heard in it the sound of a trumpet, so loud, shrill, and mournful, that it affrighted and astonished the world. The Tuscan sages said that it portended a new race of men, and a renovation of the world; for they affirmed that there were eight several kinds of men, all being different in life and manners; and that Heaven had allotted each its time, which was limited by the circuit of the great year (25,868 years).1120
This reminds one strongly of our Seven Races of men, and of the eighth—the “animal man”—descended from the later Third Race; as also of the successive submersions and destruction of the continents which finally disposed of almost all that Race. Says Iamblichus:
The Assyrians have not only preserved the memorials of seven-and-twenty myriads of years (270,000 years), as Hipparchus says they have, but likewise of the whole apocatastases and periods of the Seven Rulers of the World.1121
This is as nearly as possible the calculation of the Esoteric Doctrine. For 1,000,000 years are allowed for our present Root-Race (the Fifth), and about 850,000 years have passed since the submersion of the last large island—part of the continent of Atlantis—the Ruta of the Fourth Race, the Atlanteans; while Daitya, a small island inhabited by a mixed race, was destroyed about 270,000 years ago, during the Glacial Period or thereabouts. But the Seven Rulers, or the seven great Dynasties of the Divine Kings, belong to the traditions of every great people of antiquity. Wherever twelve are mentioned, they are invariably the twelve signs of the Zodiac.
So patent is this 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 sounds to pious and ignorant ears like a portentous token, 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, curiously enough, these writers, De Mirville among others, recognize all the characteristics of the twelve 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.1122 Moreover, the respective banners of the same tribes are said to have exhibited the same symbols and the same names as the Signs, repeated in the twelve stones of the Urim and Thummim, and on the twelve wings of the two Cherubs. Leaving to the said Mystics the proof of exactitude in the alleged correspondence, we quote it as follows: Man, or Aquarius, is in the sphere of Reuben, who is declared as “unstable as water” (the Vulgate has it, “rushing like water”); Gemini, in that of Simeon and Levi, because of their strong fraternal association; Leo, in that of Judah, “the strong Lion” of his tribe, “the lion's whelp”; 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”; Sagittarius in Joseph, because “his bow abode in strength.” To make up for the twelfth Sign, Virgo, made independent of Scorpio, we have Dinah, the only daughter of Jacob. Tradition shows the alleged tribes carrying the twelve signs on their banners. But indeed the Bible, in addition to the above, is filled with theo-cosmological and astronomical symbols and personifications.
It remains to wonder, and to query—if the actual, living Patriarchs' destiny was so indissolubly wound up with the Zodiac—how it is that, after the loss of the ten tribes, the ten signs also out of the twelve have not miraculously disappeared from the sidereal fields? But this is of no great concern. Let us rather busy ourselves with the history of the Zodiac itself.
The reader may be reminded of some opinions expressed as to the Zodiac by several of the highest authorities in Science.
Newton believed that the invention of the Zodiac could be traced as far back as the expedition of the Argonauts; and Dulaure fixed its origin at 6,500 years b.c., just 2,496 years before the creation of the world, according to the Bible chronology.
Creuzer thought that it was very easy to show that most of the Theogonies were intimately connected with religious calendars, and were related to the Zodiac as to their prime origin; if not to the Zodiac known to us now, then to something very analogous with it. He felt certain that the Zodiac and its mystic relations are at the bottom of all the mythologies, under one form or another, and that it had existed in the old form for ages, before it was brought out in the present defined astronomical garb, owing to some singular coördination of events.1123
Whether the “genii of the planets,” our Dhyân Chohans of supra-mundane spheres, showed themselves to “holy prophets,” or not, as claimed in the Dabistan, it would seem that great laymen and warriors were favoured in the same way in days of old in Chaldæa, when astrological Magic and Theophania went hand in hand.
Xenophon, no ordinary man, narrates of Cyrus ... that at the moment of his death he thanked the Gods and heroes, for having so often instructed him themselves about the signs in heaven—ἐν οὐρανίοις σημείοις.1124
Unless the Science of the Zodiac is admitted to be of the highest antiquity and universality, how can we account for its Signs being traced in the oldest Theogonies? Laplace is said to have felt struck with amazement at the idea of the days of Mercury (Wednesday), Venus (Friday), Jupiter (Thursday), Saturn (Saturday), and others, being related to the days of the week in the same order and with the same names in India as in Northern Europe.
Try, if you can, with the present system of autochthonous civilizations, so much in fashion in our day, to explain how nations with no ancestry, no traditions or birthplace in common, could have succeeded in inventing a kind of celestial phantasmagoria, a veritable imbroglio of sidereal denominations, without sequence or object, having no figurative relation with the constellations they represent, and still less, apparently, with the phases of our terrestrial life they are made to signify,
—had there not been a general intention and a universal cause and belief, at the root of all this!1125 Most truly has Dupuis asserted the same:
Il est impossible de découvrir le moindre trait de ressemblance entre les parties du ciel et les figures que les astronomes y ont arbitrairement tracées; et de l'autre côté, le hasard est impossible.1126
Most certainly chance is “impossible.” There is no “chance” in Nature, wherein everything is mathematically coördinate, and inter-related in its units. Says Coleridge:
Chance is but the pseudonym of God (or Nature), for those particular cases which He does not choose to subscribe openly with His sign manual.
Replace the word “God” by Karma, and it will become an Eastern axiom. Therefore, the sidereal “prophecies” of the Zodiac, as they are called by Christian Mystics, never point to any one particular event, however solemn and sacred it may be for some one portion of humanity, but to ever-recurrent, periodical laws in Nature, understood only by the Initiates of the Sidereal Gods themselves.
No Occultist, no Astrologer of Eastern birth, will ever agree with Christian Mystics, or even with Kepler's mystical Astronomy, his great science and erudition notwithstanding; and this because, if his premisses are quite correct, his deductions therefrom are one-sided and biassed by Christian preconceptions. Where Kepler finds a prophecy directly pointing to the Saviour, other nations see a symbol of an eternal law, decreed for the actual Manvantara. Why see in Pisces a direct reference to Christ—one of the several world-reformers, a Saviour 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 this sign belonged to Ephraim, Joseph's son, the elect of Jacob, and that therefore, it was at the moment of the Sun's entering into the sign of Pisces, the Fish, that the “Elect Messiah,” the Ἰχθὺς 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 his birth-hour thus fixed by the adaptation of Theologians, who sought only to make their preconceived ideas fit in with sidereal facts and popular belief? Everyone is aware that the real time and year of the birth of Jesus are totally unknown. And it is the Jews—whose forefathers made the word Dag signify both “Fish” and “Messiah” during the forced development of their rabbinical language—who are the first to deny this Christian claim. And what of the further facts that Brâhmans connect their “Messiah,” the eternal Avatâra Vishnu, with a Fish and the Deluge, and that the Babylonians also made a Fish and a Messiah of their Dag-On, the Man-Fish and Prophet?
