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 [pg 499] 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 [pg 500] 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 [pg 501] 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!

Whence the Christian idea that God cursed the Devil? The God of the Jews, whosoever he was, forbids cursing Satan. Philo Judæus and Josephus both state that the Law (the Pentateuch and the Talmud) undeviatingly forbid one to curse the Adversary, and also the Gods of the Gentiles. “Thou shalt not revile the Gods,” quoth the God of Moses,1090 for it is God who “hath divided [them] unto all nations”;1091 and those who speak evil of “Dignities” (Gods) are called “filthy dreamers” by Jude.

Finally the same is repeated in the Talmud:1093

This piece of Talmudic information shows plainly (a) that St. Michael is called “God” in the Talmud, and somebody else the “Lord,” and (b) that Satan is a God, of whom even the “Lord” is in fear. All we read in the Zohar and other kabalistic works on Satan shows plainly that this “personage” is simply the personification of the abstract Evil, which is the weapon of Karmic Law and Karma. It is our human nature and man himself, as it is said that “Satan is always near and inextricably interwoven with man.” It is only a question of that Power being latent or active in us.

It is a well-known fact—to learned Symbologists at all events—that in every great religion of antiquity, it is the Logos Demiurge—the Second Logos, or the first emanation from the Mind, Mahat—who is made to strike, so to say, the key-note of that which may be called the correlation of Individuality and Personality in the subsequent scheme [pg 502] of evolution. It is the Logos who is shown, in the mystic symbolism of Cosmogony, Theogony, and Anthropogony, playing two parts in the drama of Creation and Being—that of the purely human Personality and the divine Impersonality of the so-called Avatâras, or divine Incarnations, and of the Universal Spirit, called Christos by the Gnostics, and the Fravarshi (or Ferouer) of Ahura Mazda in the Mazdean Philosophy. On the lower rungs of Theogony the Celestial Beings of lower Hierarchies had each a Fravarshi, or a Celestial “Double.” It is the same, only still more mystic, reässertion of the kabalistic axiom, “Deus est Demon inversus”; the word “Demon,” however, as in the case of Socrates, and in the spirit of the meaning given to it by the whole of antiquity, standing for the Guardian Spirit, an “Angel,” not a Devil of Satanic descent as Theology would have it. The Roman Catholic Church shows its usual logic and consistency by accepting St. Michael as the Ferouer of Christ. This Ferouer was his “Angel Guardian,” as proved by St. Thomas,1095 who, however, calls the prototypes and synonyms of Michael, such as Mercury for example, Devils!

The Church positively accepts the tenet that Christ has his Ferouer as any other God or mortal has. Writes De Mirville:

This is almost correct.

Among other absurdities, the Kabalists maintain that the word Metatron, being divided into meta-thronon (μετὰ, θρόνον), means “near the throne.”1097 It means quite the reverse, as meta means “beyond” and not “near.” This is of great importance in our argument. St. Michael, then, the “quis ut Deus,” is the translator, so to speak, of the invisible world into the visible and the objective.

They maintain, furthermore, along with the Roman Catholic Church, that in the Biblical and Christian Theology there does not exist a “higher celestial personality, after the Trinity, than that of the Archangel, [pg 503] or the Seraphim, Michael.” According to them, the conqueror of the Dragon is the Archisatrap of the Sacred Militia, the Guardian of the Planets, the King of the Stars, the Slayer of Satan and the Powerful Rector. In the mystic Astronomy of these gentlemen, he is the Conqueror of Ahriman, who having upset the Sidereal Throne of the usurper, bathes in his stead in the Solar Fires; and, Defender of the Christ-Sun, he approaches so near his Master, “that he seems to become one with him.”1098 Owing to this fusion with the Word (Verbum) the Protestants, and among them Calvin, ended by losing sight entirely of the duality, and saw no Michael “but only his Master,” writes the Abbé Caron. The Roman Catholics, and especially their Kabalists, know better; and it is they who explain to the world this duality, which affords them the means of glorifying the chosen ones of the Church, and of rejecting and anathematizing all those Gods who may be in the way of their dogmas.

Thus the same titles and the same names are given in turn to God and the Archangel. Both are called Metatron, “both have the name of Jehovah applied to them when they speak one in the other” (sic), for, according to the Zohar, the term signifies equally the Master and the Ambassador. Both are the Angel of the Face, because, as we are informed, if on the one hand the “Word” is called “the Face [or the Presence] and the Image of the Substance of God,” on the other, “when speaking of the Saviour to the Israelites, Isaiah [?] tells them” that “the Angel of his Presence saved them in their affliction”—“so he was their Saviour.”1099 Elsewhere Michael is called very plainly the “Prince of the Faces of the Lord,” the “Glory of the Lord.” Both Jehovah and Michael are the “Guides of Israel1100 ... Chiefs of the Armies of the Lord, Supreme Judges of the Souls and even Seraphs.”1101

The whole of the above is given on the authority of various works by Roman Catholics, and must, therefore, be orthodox. Some expressions are translated to show what subtle Theologians and Casuists mean by the term Ferouer,1102 a word borrowed by some French writers from the Zend Avesta, as said, and utilized in Roman Catholicism for a purpose [pg 504] Zoroaster was very far from anticipating. In Fargard xix (verse 14), of the Vendîdâd it is said:

The French Orientalists translate Fravarshi by Ferouer.

Now what is a Ferouer, or Fravarshi? In some Mazdean works it is plainly implied that Fravarshi is the inner, immortal Man, or the Ego which reïncarnates; that it existed before the physical body and survives all such bodies it happens to be clothed in.

This shows as plainly as can be shown that the Ferouer is the “spiritual counterpart” of either God, animal, plant, or even element, i.e., the refined and the purer part of the grosser creation, the soul of the body, whatever the body may happen to be. Therefore does Ahura Mazda recommend Zarathushtra to invoke his Fravarshi and not himself (Ahura Mazda); that is to say, the impersonal and true Essence of Deity, one with Zoroaster's own Âtmâ (or Christos), not the false and personal appearance. This is quite clear.

Now it is on this divine and ethereal prototype that the Roman Catholics have seized so as to build up the supposed difference between their God and Angels and the Deity and its aspects, or the Gods of the old religions. Thus, while calling Mercury, Venus, Jupiter (whether as Gods or Planets) Devils, they at the same time make of the same Mercury the Ferouer of their Christ. This fact is undeniable. Vossius1105 proves that Michael is the Mercury of the Pagans, and Maury and other French writers corroborate him, and add that according to great Theologians Mercury and the Sun are one, (?) and no wonder, they think, since Mercury being so near the Wisdom and the Verbum (the Sun), must be absorbed by and confounded with him.1106

This “Pagan” view was accepted from the first century of our era, as shown in the original Acts of the Apostles (the English translation being worthless). So much is Michael the Mercury of the Greeks and other nations, that when the inhabitants of Lystra mistook Paul and [pg 505] Barnabas for Mercury and Jupiter, saying, “The Gods have come down to us in the likeness of men”—the text adds: “And they called Barnabas Zeus, and Paul, Hermes, because he was the leader of the Word (Logos),” and not “the chief speaker,” as erroneously translated in the Authorized, and repeated even in the Revised, English Bible. Michael is the Angel of the vision in Daniel, the Son of God, “who was like unto a Son of Man.” It is the Hermes-Christos of the Gnostics, the Anubis-Syrius of the Egyptians, the Counsellor of Osiris in Amenti, the Leontoid Michael-Ophiomorphos (ὀφιομόρφος) of the Ophites, who wears on certain Gnostic jewels a lion's head, like his father Ildabaoth.1107

Now to all this the Roman Catholic Church tacitly consents, many of her writers even avowing it publicly. Unable to deny the flagrant “borrowing” of their Church, who “spoiled” her seniors of their symbols, as the Jews had “spoiled” the Egyptians of their jewels of silver and gold, they explain the fact quite coolly and seriously. Thus the writers who have hitherto been timid enough to see, in this repetition by Christian dogmas of old Pagan ideas, “a legendary plagiarism perpetrated by man,” are gravely assured that, far from such a simple solution of the almost perfect resemblance, it has to be attributed to quite another cause—“to a pre-historical plagiarism, of a superhuman origin.”

If the reader would know how, he must again kindly turn to the same volume of De Mirville's work.1108 Please note that this author was the official and recognized defender of the Roman Church, and was helped by the learning of all the Jesuits. There we read:

The “ruffians” (les drôles), are of course Demons whose manager is [pg 506] Satan. Now this is the easiest and the most sublime and simple way of getting out of the difficulty! The Rev. Dr. Lundy, a Protestant De Mirville, followed the happy suggestion in his Monumental Christianity, and so did Dr. Sepp of Munich in his works written to prove the divinity of Jesus and the Satanic origin of all other Saviours. So much greater the pity that a systematic and collective plagiarism which went on for several centuries on the most gigantic scale, should be explained by another plagiarism, this time in the fourth Gospel. For the sentence quoted from it, “All that ever came before me,” etc., is a verbatim repetition of words written in the Book of Enoch. In the Introduction to Archbishop Laurence's translation from an Ethiopic MS. in the Bodleian Library, the editor, author of the Evolution of Christianity, remarks:

It is too late in the day to claim that it is Enoch who borrowed from the New Testament, instead of vice versâ. Jude (14, 15) quotes verbatim from Enoch a long passage about the coming of the Lord with his ten thousand saints, and naming the prophet specifically acknowledges the source.

[pg 507]

“Antediluvian,” truly; but if the phraseology of the text dates hardly a few centuries or even millenniums before the historical era, then it is no longer the original prediction of the events to come, but is, in its turn, a copy of some scripture of a pre-historic religion.

Truly so; the Veda of the earliest Âryans, before it was written, went forth into every nation of the Atlanto-Lemurians, and sowed the first seeds of all the now existing old religions. The off-shoots of the never dying Tree of Wisdom have scattered their dead leaves even on Judæo-Christianity. And at the end of the Kali, our present Age, Vishnu, or the “Everlasting King,” will appear as Kalki, and reëstablish righteousness upon earth. The minds of those who live at that time shall be awakened, and become as pellucid as crystal.

i.e., it shall be the Seventh Race, the Race of “Buddhas,” the “Sons of God,” born of immaculate parents.

B. The Gods Of Light Proceed From The Gods Of Darkness.

Thus it is pretty well established that Christ, the Logos, or the God in Space and the Saviour on Earth, is but one of the echoes of this same antediluvian and sorely misunderstood Wisdom. Its history begins by the descent on Earth of the “Gods” who incarnate in mankind, and this is the “Fall.” Whether Brahmâ hurled down on Earth by Bhagavân in the allegory, or Jupiter by Cronus, all are the symbols of the human races. Once having touched this Planet of dense Matter, the snow-white wings of even the highest Angel can no longer remain immaculate, or the Avatâra (or incarnation) be perfect, as every such Avatâra is the fall of a God into generation. Nowhere is the metaphysical [pg 508] truth more clear, when explained Esoterically, or more hidden from the average comprehension of those who instead of appreciating the sublimity of the idea can only degrade it—than in the Upanishads, the Esoteric glossaries of the Vedas. The Rig Veda, as Guignault characterized it, “is the most sublime conception of the great highways of humanity.” The Vedas are, and will remain for ever, in the Esotericism of the Vedânta and the Upanishads, “the mirror of the Eternal Wisdom.”

For upwards of sixteen centuries the new masks, forced over the faces of the old Gods, have screened them from public curiosity, but they have finally proved a misfit. Yet the metaphorical Fall, and the as metaphorical Atonement and Crucifixion, have led Western Humanity through roads knee-deep in blood. Worse than all, they have led it to believe in the dogma of the Evil Spirit distinct from the Spirit of all Good, whereas the former lives in all Matter and preëminently in man. Finally it has created the God-slandering dogma of Hell and eternal perdition; it has spread a thick film between the higher intuitions of man and divine verities; and, most pernicious result of all, it has made people remain ignorant of the fact that there were no fiends, no dark demons in the Universe before man's own appearance on this, and probably on other Earths. Hence the people have been led to accept, as the problematical consolation for this world's sorrows, the thought of original sin.

The philosophy of that Law in Nature, which implants in man as well as in every beast a passionate, inherent, and instinctive desire for freedom and self-guidance, pertains to Psychology and cannot be touched on now, for to demonstrate this feeling in higher Intelligences, to analyze and give a natural reason for it, would necessitate an endless philosophical explanation for which there here is no room. Perhaps the best synthesis of this feeling is found in three lines of Milton's Paradise Lost. Says the “Fallen One”:

Here we may reign secure; and in my choice,

To reign is worth ambition, though in hell!

Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven!

Better be man, the crown of terrestrial production and king over its opus operatum, than be lost among the will-less Spiritual Hosts in Heaven.

We have said elsewhere that the dogma of the first Fall rested on a few verses in Revelation, which are now shown to be a plagiarism from Enoch by some scholars. These have given rise to endless theories [pg 509] and speculations, which have gradually acquired the importance of dogma and inspired tradition. Every one sought to explain the verse about the seven-headed dragon with his ten horns and seven crowns, whose tail “drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth,” and whose place, with that of his Angels, “was found no more in heaven.” What the seven heads of the Dragon (or Cycle) mean, and its five wicked kings also, may be learned in the Addenda which close Part III of this Volume.

From Newton to Bossuet speculations were incessantly evolved in Christian brains with regard to these obscure verses. Says Bossuet:

The star that falls is the heresiarch Theodosius.... The clouds of smoke are the heresies of the Montanists.... The third part of the stars are the martyrs, and especially the doctors of divinity.

Bossuet ought to have known, however, that the events described in Revelation were not original, and may, as shown, be found in other and Pagan traditions. There were no scholastics nor Montanists during Vedic times, nor yet far earlier in China. But Christian Theology had to be protected and saved.

This is only natural. But why should truth be sacrificed in order to protect from destruction the lucubrations of Christian Theologians?

The “princeps aeris hujus,” the “Prince of the Air,” of St. Paul, is not the Devil, but the effects of the Astral Light, as Éliphas Lévi correctly explains. The Devil is not the “God of this period,” as he says, for it is the Deity of every age and period since Man appeared on Earth, and Matter in its countless forms and states had to fight for its evanescent existence against other disintegrating Forces.

The “Dragon” is simply the symbol of the Cycle and of the “Sons of Manvantaric Eternity,” who had descended on Earth during a certain epoch of its formative period. The “clouds of smoke” are geological phenomena. The “third part of the stars of heaven,” cast down to the Earth, refers to the Divine Monads—the Spirits of the Stars in Astrology—that circumambulate our Globe; i.e., the human Egos destined to perform the whole Cycle of Incarnations. The sentence, “qui circumambulat terram,” however, is again referred to the Devil in Theology, the mythical Father of Evil being said to “fall like lightning.” Unfortunately for this interpretation, the “Son of Man,” or Christ, is expected, on the personal testimony of Jesus, to descend on Earth likewise, “as the lightning cometh out of the East,”1113 just in [pg 510] the same shape and under the same symbol as Satan, who is seen to fall “as lightning ... from heaven.”1114 All these metaphors and figures of speech, preëminently Oriental in their character, must have their origin searched for in the East. In all the ancient Cosmogonies Light comes from Darkness. In Egypt, as elsewhere, Darkness was “the principle of all things.” Hence Pymander, the “Thought Divine,” issues as Light from Darkness. Behemoth1115 is the principle of Darkness, or Satan, in Roman Catholic Theology, and yet Job says of him that Behemoth is “the chief [principle] of the ways of God”—“Principium viarum Domini Behemoth!”1116

Consistency does not seem to be a favourite virtue in any portion of Divine Revelation, so-called—not as interpreted by Theologians, at any rate.

The Egyptians and the Chaldæans referred the birth of their Divine Dynasties to that period when creative Earth was in her last final throes in giving birth to her pre-historic mountain ranges, which have since disappeared, her seas and her continents. Her face was covered with “deep Darkness and in that [Secondary] Chaos was the principle of all things” that developed on the Globe later on. Our Geologists have now ascertained that there was such a terrestrial conflagration in the early geological periods, several hundred millions of years ago.1117 As to the tradition itself, every country and nation had it, each under its respective national form.

It is not alone Egypt, Greece, Scandinavia or Mexico, that had its Typhon, Python, Loki, and its “falling” Demon, but China also. The Celestials have a whole literature upon the subject. It is said that in consequence of the rebellion against Ti of a proud Spirit, who said he was Ti himself, seven Choirs of Celestial Spirits were exiled upon Earth, which “brought a change in all Nature, Heaven itself bending down and uniting with Earth.”

In the Y-King, one reads:

[pg 511]

Again, the Tchoon-Tsieoo says allegorically:

One night the stars ceased shining in darkness, and deserted it, falling down like rain upon the Earth, where they are now hidden.

These stars are the Monads.

Chinese Cosmogonies have their “Lord of the Flame” and their “Celestial Virgin,” with little “Spirits to help and minister to her; and big Spirits to fight those who are the enemies of other Gods.” But all this does not prove that the said allegories are presentments or prophetic writings which all refer to Christian Theology.

The best proof one can offer to Christian Theologians that the Esoteric statements in the Bible—in both Testaments—are the assertion of the same idea as in our Archaic Teachings, to wit, that the “Fall of the Angels” referred simply to the Incarnation of Angels “who had broken through the Seven Circles”—is found in the Zohar. Now the Kabalah of Simeon Ben Iochaï is the soul and essence of the allegorical narrative, as the later Christian Kabalah is the “dark cloaked” Mosaic Pentateuch. And it says (in the Agrippa MSS.):

Every sentence in the ancient Cosmogonies unfolds to him who can read between the lines the identity of the ideas, though under different garbs.

The first lesson taught in Esoteric Philosophy is, that the Incognizable Cause does not put forth evolution, whether consciously or unconsciously, but only exhibits periodically different aspects of Itself to the perception of finite minds. Now the Collective Mind—the Universal—composed of various and numberless Hosts of Creative Powers, however infinite in Manifested Time, is still finite when contrasted with the Unborn and Undecaying Space in its supreme essential aspect. That which is finite cannot be perfect. Therefore there are inferior [pg 512] Beings among those Hosts, but there never have been any Devils or “disobedient Angels,” for the simple reason that they are all governed by Law. The Asuras (call them by any other name you will) who incarnated, followed in this a law as implacable as any other. They had manifested prior to the Pitris, and as Time (in Space) proceeds in Cycles, their turn had come—hence the numerous allegories. The name “Asura” was first given by the Brâhmans indiscriminately to those who opposed their mummeries and sacrifices, as did the great Asura called Asurendra. It is to those ages, probably, that the origin of the idea of the Demon, as opposer and adversary, has to be traced.

The Hebrew Elohim, called “God” in the translations, who create “Light,” are identical with the Âryan Asuras. They are also referred to as the “Sons of Darkness,” as a philosophical and logical contrast to Light Immutable and Eternal. The earliest Zoroastrians did not believe in Evil or Darkness being coëternal with Good or Light, and they give the same interpretation. Ahriman is the manifested Shadow of Ahura Mazda (Asura Mazda), himself issued from Zeruâna Âkerne, the “Boundless [Circle of] Time,” or the Unknown Cause. They say of the latter:

Its glory is too exalted, its light too resplendent for either human intellect or mortal eye to grasp and see.

Its primal emanation is Eternal Light, which, from having been previously concealed in Darkness, was called to manifest itself and thus was formed Ormazd, the “King of Life.” He is the “First-born” in Boundless Time, but, like his own antetype (preëxisting spiritual idea), has lived within Darkness from all Eternity. The six Amshaspands—seven with himself, the Chief of all—the primitive Spiritual Angels and Men, are collectively his Logos. The Zoroastrian Amshaspands create the World in six Days or periods also, and rest on the seventh; but in the Esoteric Philosophy, that seventh is the first period or “Day,” the so-called Primary Creation in Âryan Cosmogony. It is that intermediate Æon which is the Prologue to Creation, and which stands on the borderland between the Uncreated Eternal Causation and the produced finite effects; a state of nascent activity and energy as the first aspect of the Eternal Immutable Quiescence. In Genesis, on which no metaphysical energy has been spent, but only an extraordinary acuteness and ingenuity to veil the Esoteric Truth, Creation begins at the third stage of manifestation. “God” or the Elohim are the “Seven Regents” of Pymander. They are identical with all the other Creators. [pg 513] But even in Genesis that period is hinted at by the abruptness of the picture, and the “Darkness” that was on the face of the Deep. The Elohim are shown to “create”—that is to say, to build or to produce the two Heavens or “double” Heaven (not Heaven and Earth); which means, in so many words, that they separated the upper manifested (Angelic) Heaven, or plane of consciousness, from the lower or terrestrial plane; the (to us) Eternal and Immutable Æons from those Periods that are in space, time and duration; Heaven from Earth, the Unknown from the Known—to the profane. Such is the meaning of the sentence in Pymander, which says that:

Thought, the divine, which is Light and Life [Zeruâna Âkerne] produced through its Word, or first aspect, the other, operating Thought, which being the God of Spirit and Fire, constructed Seven Regents enclosing within their Circle the World of Senses named “Fatal Destiny.”

The latter refers to Karma; the “Seven Circles” are the seven planets and planes, as also the seven Invisible Spirits, in the Angelic Spheres, whose visible symbols are the seven planets,1119 the seven Rishis of the Great Bear and other glyphs. As said of the Âdityas by Roth:

It is they—the “Seven Hosts”—who, having “considered in their Father [Divine Thought] the plan of the operator,” as says Pymander, desired to operate (or build the world with its creatures) likewise; for, having been born “within the Sphere of Operation”—the manifesting Universe—such is the Manvantaric Law. And now comes the second portion of the passage, or rather of two passages merged into one to conceal the full meaning. Those who were born within the Sphere of Operation were “the brothers who loved him well.” The latter—the “him”—were the Primordial Angels; the Asuras, the Ahriman, the Elohim, or “Sons of God,” of whom Satan was one—all those Spiritual Beings who were called the “Angels of Darkness,” because that Darkness is absolute Light, a fact now neglected if not entirely forgotten in Theology. Nevertheless, the spirituality of those much abused “Sons of Light” which is Darkness, must be evidently as great, in comparison with that of the Angels next in order, as the ethereality of the latter would be when contrasted with the density of the human body. The former are the “First-born,” and therefore so near to the confines of [pg 514] Pure Quiescent Spirit as to be merely the “privations”—in the Aristotelian sense—the Ferouers or the ideal types of those who followed. They could not create material, corporeal things; and, therefore, were said in process of time to have “refused” to create, as “commanded” by “God”—otherwise, to have “rebelled.”

Perchance, this is justified on the principle of the scientific theory which teaches us as to the effect of two sound waves of equal length meeting:

If the two sounds be of the same intensity, their coincidence produces a sound four times the intensity of either, while their interference produces absolute silence.

While explaining some of the “heresies” of his day, Justin Martyr shows the identity of all the world religions at their starting points. The first Beginning opens invariably with the Unknown and Passive Deity, from which emanates a certain Active Power or Virtue, the Mystery that is sometimes called Wisdom, sometimes the Son, very often God, Angel, Lord, and Logos.1120 The latter is sometimes applied to the very first Emanation, but in several systems it proceeds from the first Androgyne or Double Ray produced at the beginning by the Unseen. Philo depicts this Wisdom as male and female. But though its first manifestation had a beginning—for it proceeded from Oulom1121 (Aiôn, Time), the highest of the Æons when emitted from the Father—it had remained with the Father before all creations, for it is part of him.1122 Therefore Philo Judæus calls Adam Kadmon by the name “Mind”—the Ennoia of Bythos in the Gnostic System. “The Mind, let it be named Adam.”1123

As the old Magian books explain it, the whole event becomes clear. A thing can only exist through its opposite—Hegel teaches us; and only a little philosophy and spirituality are needed to comprehend the origin of the later dogma, which is so truly satanic and infernal in its cold and cruel wickedness. The Magians accounted for the Origin of Evil in their exoteric teachings in this way. “Light can produce nothing but Light, and can never be the origin of Evil”; how then was Evil produced, since there was nothing coëqual or like the Light in its production? Light, say they, produced several Beings, all of them spiritual, luminous, and powerful. But a Great One (the “Great Asura,” Ahriman, Lucifer, etc.) had an evil thought, contrary to the Light. He doubted, and by that doubt he became dark.

[pg 515]

This is a little nearer to the truth, but still wide of the mark. There was no “evil thought” that originated the opposing Power, but simply Thought per se; something which, being cogitative, and containing design and purpose, is therefore finite, and must thus find itself naturally in opposition to pure Quiescence, the as natural state of absolute Spirituality and Perfection. It was simply the Law of Evolution that asserted itself; the progress of Mental Unfolding, differentiated from Spirit, involved and entangled already with Matter, into which it is irresistibly drawn. Ideas, in their very nature and essence, as conceptions bearing relation to objects, whether true or imaginary, are opposed to Absolute Thought, that Unknowable All of whose mysterious operations Mr. Spencer predicates that nothing can be said, but that “it has no kinship of nature with Evolution”1124—which it certainly has not.1125

The Zohar gives it very suggestively. When the “Holy One” (the Logos) desired to create man, he called the highest Host of Angels and spake unto them what he wanted, but they doubted the wisdom of this desire and answered: “Man will not continue one night in his glory”—for which they were burnt (annihilated?), by the “Holy” Lord. Then he called another, lower Host, and said the same. And they contradicted the “Holy One”: “What is the good of Man?”—they argued. Still Elohim created Man, and when Man sinned there came the Hosts of Uzza and Azael, and twitted God: “Here is the Son of Man that thou hast made”—they said. “Behold, he sinned!” Then the Holy One replied: “If you had been among them [Men] you would have been worse than they.” And he threw them from their exalted position in Heaven even down on to the Earth; and “they were changed [into Men] and sinned after the women of the earth.”1126 This is quite plain. No mention is made in Genesis (vi) of these “Sons of God” receiving punishment. The only reference to it in the Bible is in Jude:

[pg 516]

And this means simply that the “Angels,” doomed to incarnation, are in the chains of flesh and matter, under the darkness of ignorance, till the “Great Day,” which will come as always after the Seventh Round, after the expiration of the “Week,” on the Seventh Sabbath, or in the Post-Manvantaric Nirvâna.

How truly Esoteric and consonant with the Secret Doctrine is Pymander, the Thought Divine, of Hermes, may be inferred from its original and primitive translations in Latin and Greek only. On the other hand how disfigured it has been later on by Christians in Europe, is seen from the remarks and unconscious confessions made by De St. Marc, in his Preface and Letter to the Bishop of Ayre, in 1578. Therein, the whole cycle of transformations from a Pantheistic and Egyptian into a Mystic Roman Catholic treatise is given, and we see how Pymander has become what it is now. Still, even in St. Marc's translation, traces are found of the real Pymander—the “Universal Thought” or “Mind.” This is the translation from the old French translation, the original being given in the foot-note1128 in its quaint old French:

Metaphysically, the Father and the Son are the “Universal Mind” and the “Periodical Universe”; the “Angel” and the “Man.” It is the Son and the Father at one and the same time; in Pymander, the active Idea and the passive Thought that generates it; the radical keynote in Nature which gives birth to the seven notes—the septenary scale of the Creative Forces, and to the seven prismatic aspects of colour, all born from the one White Ray, or Light—itself generated in Darkness.