A. Cross And Circle.

In the minds of the ancient Philosophers something of the divine and the mysterious has ever been ascribed to the shape of the circle. The old world, consistent in its symbolism and with its Pantheistic intuitions, uniting the visible and the invisible Infinitudes into one, represented Deity and its outward Veil alike—by a circle. This merging of the two into a unity, and the name Theos being given indifferently to both, is explained, and becomes thereby still more scientific and philosophical. Plato's etymological definition of the word theos (θεός) has, been given elsewhere. In his Cratylus, he derives it from the verb the-ein (θέειν), “to move,” as suggested by the motion of the heavenly bodies which he connects with Deity. According to the Esoteric Philosophy, this Deity, during its “Nights” and its “Days,” or Cycles of Rest and Activity, is the “Eternal Perpetual Motion,” the “Ever-Becoming, as well as the ever universally Present, and the Ever-Existing.” The latter is the root-abstraction; the former is the only possible conception in the human mind, if it disconnects this Deity from any shape or form. It is a perpetual, never-ceasing evolution, circling back in its incessant progress through æons of duration into its original status—Absolute Unity.

It was only the minor Gods who were made to carry the symbolical attributes of the higher ones. Thus, the God Shoo, the personification [pg 576] of Ra, who appears as the “Great Cat of the Basin of Persæa in An”1283 was often represented in the Egyptian monuments seated and holding a cross, symbol of the four Quarters, or the Elements, attached to a circle.

In that very learned work, The Natural Genesis, by Gerald Massey, under the heading, “Typology of the Cross,” there is more information to be had on the cross and circle than in any other work we know of. He who would fain have proofs of the antiquity of the cross is referred to these two volumes. The author says:

Nor was the double glyph sacred with the profane, but only with the Initiates. For Raoul Rochette shows that:1285

This proves that so far back as those early days the cross had already become the symbol of human procreation, and that oblivion of the divine origin of cross and circle had begun.

Another form of the cross is given from the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society:1286

This is the astronomical aspect of the double glyph. There are six more aspects, however, and an attempt may be made to interpret a few of these. The subject is so vast that it would require in itself alone many volumes.

But the most curious of these Egyptian symbols of cross and circle, spoken of in the above cited work, is one which receives its full explanation and final colour from Âryan symbols of the same nature. Says the author:

Now this, again, is entirely astronomical and phallic. The Paurânic version in India gives the whole matter another colour. Without [pg 578] destroying the above interpretation, it is made to reveal a portion of its mysteries with the help of the astronomical key, and thus offers a more metaphysical rendering. The Ankh-tie [Symbol: Horizontal oval with tail to the right] does not belong to Egypt alone. It exists under the name of Pâsha, a cord which the four-armed Shiva holds in the hand of his right back arm.1290 The Mahâdeva is represented in the posture of an ascetic, as Mahâyogî, with his third eye [Symbol: Vertical oval with dot in the middle], which is “the Ru [Symbol: Horizontal oval with dot in the middle], set upright on the Tau-cross” in another form. The Pâsha is held in the hand in such a way that the first finger and hand near the thumb make the cross, or loop and crossing. Our Orientalists would have it to represent a cord to bind refractory offenders with, because, forsooth, Kâlî, Shiva's consort, has the same as an attribute!

The Pâsha has here a double significance, as also has Shiva's Trisûla and every other divine attribute. This dual significance lies in Shiva, for Rudra has certainly the same meaning as the Egyptian Ansated Cross in its cosmic and mystic meaning. In the hand of Shiva, the Pâsha becomes lingyonic. Shiva, as said before, is a name unknown to the Vedas. It is in the White Yajur Veda that Rudra appears for the first time as the Great God, Mahâdeva, whose symbol is the Lingam. In the Rig Veda he is called Rudra, the “howler,” the beneficent and the maleficent Deity at the same time, the Healer and the Destroyer. In the Vishnu Purâna, he is the God who springs from the forehead of Brahmâ, who separates into male and female, and he is the parent of the Rudras or Maruts, half of whom are brilliant and gentle, others, black and ferocious. In the Vedas, he is the Divine Ego aspiring to return to its pure, deific state, and at the same time that Divine Ego imprisoned in earthly form, whose fierce passions make of him the “roarer,” the “terrible.” This is well shown in the Brihadâranyaka Upanishad, wherein the Rudras, the progeny of Rudra, God of Fire, are called the “ten vital breaths (prâna, life), with the heart (manas), as eleventh,”1291 whereas as Shiva, he is the destroyer of that life. Brahmâ calls him Rudra, and gives him, besides, seven other names, signifying seven forms of manifestation, and also the seven powers of nature which destroy but to recreate or regenerate.

Hence the cruciform noose, or Pâsha, in the hand of Shiva, when he [pg 579] is represented as an ascetic, the Mahâyogin, has no phallic signification, and, indeed, it requires an imagination strongly bent in this direction to find such a signification even in an astronomical symbol. As an emblem of “door, gate, mouth, the place of outlet” it signifies the “strait gate” that leads to the Kingdom of Heaven, far more than the “birthplace” in a physiological sense.

It is a cross in a circle and Crux Ansata, truly; but it is a cross on which all the human passions have to be crucified before the Yogî passes through the “strait gate,” the narrow circle that widens into an infinite one, as soon as the Inner Man has passed the threshold.

As to the mysterious seven Rishis in the constellation of the Great Bear; if Egypt made them sacred to “the oldest genitrix, Typhon,” India has connected these symbols ages ago with Time or Yuga-revolutions, and the Saptarshis are intimately connected with our present age-the dark Kali Yuga.1292 The great Circle of Time, on the face of which, Indian fancy has represented the Porpoise, or Shishumâra, has the cross placed on it by nature in its division and localization of stars, planets and constellations. In Bhâgavata Purâna,1293 it is said:

This is then the first and earliest cross and circle, formed by the Deity, symbolized by Vishnu, the Eternal Circle of Boundless Time, Kâla, on whose plane lie crossways all the Gods, creatures, and creations born in Space and Time-who, as the Philosophy has it, all die at the Mahâpralaya.

Meanwhile it is the seven Rishis who mark the time and the duration of events in our septenary Life-cycle. They are as mysterious as their supposed wives, the Pleiades, of whom only one-she who hides-has proven virtuous. The Pleiades, or Krittikâs, are the nurses of Kârttikeya, the God of War (the Mars of the Western Pagans), who is called the Commander of the Celestial Armies, or rather of the Siddhas—Siddha-sena (translated Yogîs in Heaven, and holy Sages on the Earth)—which would make Kârttikeya identical with Michael, the “Leader of [pg 580] the Celestial Hosts” and, like himself, a virgin Kumâra.1295 Verily he is the Guha, the “Mysterious One,” as much so as are the Saptarshis and the Krittikâs, the seven Rishis and the Pleiades, for the interpretation of all these combined reveal to the Adept the greatest mysteries of Occult Nature. One point is worth mention in this question of cross and circle, as it bears strongly upon the elements of Fire and Water, which play such an important part in the circle and cross symbolism. Like Mars, who is alleged by Ovid to have been born of his mother Juno alone, without the participation of a father, or like the Avatâras (Krishna, for instance)—in the West as in the East—Kârttikeya is born, but in a still more miraculous manner, begotten by neither father nor mother, but out of a seed of Rudra-Shiva, which was cast into the Fire (Agni) and then received by the Water (Ganges). Thus he is born from Fire and Water—a “boy bright as the Sun and beautiful as the Moon.” Hence he is called Agnibhû (son of Agni) and Gangâputra (son of Ganges). Add to this the fact that the Krittikâ, his nurses, as the Matsya Purâna shows, are presided over by Agni, or, in the authentic words, “the seven Rishis are on a line with the brilliant Agni,” and hence “Krittika has Âgneya as a synonym”1296—and the connection is easy to follow.

It is, then, the Rishis who mark the time and the periods of Kali Yuga, the age of sin and sorrow. As the Bhâgavata Purâna tells us:

This is the revolution of the Rishis—

—as a hater of Nanda makes Parâshara say. According to Bentley, it was in order to show the quantity of the precession of the equinoxes that this notion originated among the Astronomers.

[pg 581]

There has been, and there still exists, a seemingly endless controversy about the chronology of the Hindûs. Here is, however, a point that could help to determine—approximately at least—the age when the symbolism of the seven Rishis and their connection with the Pleiades began. When Kârttikeya was delivered to the Krittikâ by the Gods to be nursed, they were only six, whence Kârttikeya is represented with six heads; but when the poetical fancy of the early Âryan Symbologists made of them the consorts of the seven Rishis, they were seven. Their names are given, and these are Amba, Dulâ, Nitatui, Abrayanti, Maghâyanti, Varshayanti, and Chupunika. There are other sets of names which differ, however. Anyhow, the seven Rishis were made to marry the seven Krittikâ before the disappearance of the seventh Pleiad. Otherwise, how could the Hindû astronomers speak of a star which no one can see without the help of the strongest telescopes? This is why, perhaps, in every such case the majority of the events described in the Hindû allegories is fixed upon as “a very recent invention, certainly within the Christian era.”

The oldest Sanskrit MSS. on Astronomy begin their series of Nakshatras, the twenty-seven lunar asterisms, with the sign of Krittikâ, and this can hardly make them earlier than 2,780 b.c. This is according to the “Vedic Calendar,” which is accepted even by the Orientalists, though they get out of the difficulty by saying that the said Calendar does not prove that the Hindûs knew anything of Astronomy at that date, and assure their readers that, Calendars notwithstanding, the Indian Pandits may have acquired their knowledge of the lunar mansions headed by Krittikâ from the Phœnicians, etc. However that may be, the Pleiades are the central group of the system of sidereal symbology. They are situated in the neck of the constellation Taurus, regarded by Mädler and others, in Astronomy, as the central group of the system of the Milky Way, and in the Kabalah and Eastern Esotericism, as the sidereal septenate born from the first manifested side of the upper triangle, the concealed [triangle]. This manifested side is Taurus, the symbol of One [pg 582] (the figure 1), or of the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Aleph (א) “bull” or “ox,” whose synthesis is Ten (10), or Yod (י), the perfect letter and number. The Pleiades (Alcyone, especially), are thus considered, even in Astronomy, as the central point around which our universe of fixed stars revolves, the focus from which, and into which, the Divine Breath, Motion, works incessantly during the Manvantara. Hence, in the sidereal symbols of the Occult Philosophy, it is this circle with the starry cross on its face which plays the most prominent part.

The Secret Doctrine teaches us that everything in the Universe, as well as the Universe itself, is formed (“created”) during its periodical manifestations—by accelerated Motion set into activity by the Breath of the Ever-to-be-unknown Power—unknown to present mankind, at any rate—within the phenomenal world. The Spirit of Life and Immortality was everywhere symbolized by a circle; hence the serpent biting its tail, represents the Circle of Wisdom in Infinity; as does the astronomical cross—the cross within a circle—and the globe, with two wings added to it, which then became the sacred Scarabæus of the Egyptians, its very name being suggestive of the secret idea attached to it. For the Scarabæus is called in the Egyptian papyri, Khopirron and Khopri from the verb khopron, “to become,” and has thus been made a symbol and an emblem of human life and of the successive “becomings” of man, through the various peregrinations and metempsychoses, or reïncarnations, of the liberated soul. This mystical symbol shows plainly that the Egyptians believed in reïncarnation and the successive lives and existences of the Immortal Entity. As this, however, was an Esoteric Doctrine, revealed only during the Mysteries, by the Priest-hierophants and the King-initiates to the Candidates, it was kept secret. The Incorporeal Intelligences (the Planetary Spirits, or Creative Powers) were always represented under the form of circles. In the primitive Philosophy of the Hierophants these invisible circles were the prototypic causes and builders of all the heavenly orbs, which were their visible bodies or coverings, and of which they were the souls. It was certainly a universal teaching in antiquity.1299 As Proclus says:

[pg 583]

“Deus enim et circulus est,” says Pherecydes, in his Hymn to Jupiter. This was a Hermetic axiom, and Pythagoras prescribed such a circular prostration and posture during the hours of contemplation. “The devotee must approach as much as possible the form of a perfect circle,” prescribes the Secret Book. Numa tried to spread the same custom among the people, Pierius tells his readers; and Pliny says:

The Vision of the prophet Ezekiel reminds one forcibly of this mysticism of the circle, when he beheld a “whirlwind” from which came out “one wheel upon the earth” whose work “was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel”—“for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels.”1302

“[Spirit] whirleth about continually, and ... returneth again according to his circuits”—says Solomon,1303 who is made in the English translation to speak of the “wind,” and in the original text to refer both to the spirit and the sun. But the Zohar, the only true gloss of the Kabalistic Preacher—in explanation of this verse, which is, perhaps, rather hazy and difficult to comprehend—says:

The Brâhmanical “Golden Egg,” from within which emerges Brahmâ, the Creative Deity, is the “Circle with the Central Point” of Pythagoras, and its fitting symbol. In the Secret Doctrine the concealed Unity—whether representing Parabrahman, or the “Great Extreme” of Confucius, or the Deity concealed by Phtah, the Eternal Light, or again the Jewish Ain Suph, is always found to be symbolized by a circle or the “nought” (absolute No-Thing and Nothing, because [pg 584] it is Infinite and the All); while the God-manifested (by its works) is referred to as the Diameter of that Circle. The symbolism of the underlying idea is thus made evident: the right line passing through the centre of a circle has, in the geometrical sense, length, but neither breadth nor thickness; it is an imaginary and feminine symbol, crossing eternity, and made to rest on the plane of existence of the phenomenal world. It is dimensional, whereas its circle is dimensionless, or, to use an algebraical term, it is the dimension of an equation. Another way of symbolizing the idea is found in the Pythagorean sacred Decad which synthesizes, in the dual numeral Ten (the one and a circle or cipher), the Absolute All manifesting itself in the Word or Generative Power of Creation.

B. The Fall Of The Cross Into Matter.

Those who would feel inclined to argue upon this Pythagorean symbol by objecting that it is not yet ascertained, so far, at what period of antiquity the nought or cipher occurs for the first time—especially in India—are referred to Isis Unveiled.1305

Admitting for argument's sake that the ancient world was not acquainted with our modes of calculation or Arabic figures—though in reality we know it was—yet the circle and diameter idea is there to show that it was the first symbol in Cosmogony. Before the Trigrams of Fo-hi, Yang, the unity, and Yin, the binary, explained cunningly enough by Éliphas Lévi,1306 China had her Confucius, and her Tao-ists. The former circumscribes the “Great Extreme” within a circle with a horizontal line across; the latter place three concentric circles beneath the great circle, while the Sung Sages showed the “Great Extreme” in an upper circle, and Heaven and Earth in two lower and smaller circles. The Yangs and the Yins are a far later invention. Plato and his school never understood the Deity otherwise, notwithstanding the many epithets applied by him to the “God over all” (ὁ ἐπὶ πᾶσι θεός). Plato, having been initiated, could not believe in a personal God—a gigantic shadow of man. His epithets of [pg 585] “Monarch” and “Law-giver of the Universe” bear an abstract meaning well understood by every Occultist, who, no less than any Christian, believes in the One Law that governs the Universe, and recognizes it at the same time as immutable. As Plato says:

Beyond all finite existences and secondary causes, all laws, ideas and principles, there is an Intelligence or Mind (νοῦς), the first principle of all principles, the Supreme Idea on which all other ideas are grounded, ... the ultimate substance from which all things derive their being and essence, the First and efficient Cause of all the order, and harmony, and beauty and excellency, and goodness, which pervade the Universe.

This Mind is called, by way of preëminence and excellence, the Supreme Good,1307 “The God” (ὁ θεός), and the “God over all.” These words apply, as Plato himself shows, neither to the “Creator” nor to the “Father” of our modern Monotheist, but to the Ideal and Abstract Cause. For, as he says: “This θεός, the God over all, is not the truth or the intelligence, but the Father of it,” and its Primal Cause. Is it Plato, the greatest pupil of the archaic Sages, a Sage himself, for whom there was but a single object of attainment in this life—Real Knowledge—who would have ever believed in a Deity that curses and damns men for ever, on the slightest provocation?1308 Surely not he who considered only those to be genuine Philosophers and students of truth who possessed the knowledge of the really-existing in opposition to mere seeming; of the always-existing in opposition to the transitory: and of that which exists permanently in opposition to that which waxes, wanes, and is developed and destroyed alternately.1309 Speusippus and Xenocrates followed in his footsteps. The One, the original, had no existence, in the sense applied to it by mortal men. The τίμιον (the honoured) dwells in the centre as in the circumference, but it is only the reflection of the Deity—the World Soul1310—the plane of the surface of the circle. The cross and circle are a universal conception—as old as the human mind itself. They stand foremost on the list of the long series of, so [pg 586] to say, international symbols, which expressed very often great scientific truths, besides their direct bearing upon psychological, and even physiological mysteries.

It is no explanation to say, as does Éliphas Lévi, that God, the universal Love, having caused the male Unit to dig an abyss in the female Binary, or Chaos, thereby produced the world. In addition to the grossness of the conception, it does not remove the difficulty of conceiving it without losing one's veneration for the rather too human-like ways of the Deity. It is to avoid such anthropomorphic conceptions that the Initiates never used the epithet “God” to designate the One and Secondless Principle in the Universe; and that—faithful in this to the oldest traditions of the Secret Doctrine the world over—they deny that such imperfect and often not very clean work could ever be produced by Absolute Perfection. There is no need to mention here other still greater metaphysical difficulties. Between speculative Atheism and idiotic Anthropomorphism there must be a philosophical mean, and a reconciliation. The Presence of the Unseen Principle throughout all Nature, and the highest manifestation of it on Earth—Man, can alone help to solve the problem, which is that of the mathematician whose x must ever elude the grasp of our terrestrial algebra. The Hindûs have tried to solve it by their Avatâras, the Christians think they have done so—by their one divine Incarnation. Exoterically—both are wrong; Esoterically both of them are very near the truth. Alone, among the Apostles of the Western religion, Paul seems to have fathomed—if not actually revealed—the archaic mystery of the cross. As for the rest of those who, by unifying and individualizing the Universal Presence, have synthesized it into one symbol—the central point in the crucifix—they show thereby that they have never seized the true spirit of the teaching of Christ, but rather that they have degraded it in more than one way by their erroneous interpretations. They have forgotten the spirit of that universal symbol and have selfishly monopolized it—as though the Boundless and the Infinite could ever be limited and conditioned to one manifestation individualized in one man, or even in a nation!

The four arms of the [Symbol: cross like the letter “X”], or decussated cross, and of the Hermetic cross, pointing to the four cardinal points—were well understood by the mystical minds of the Hindûs, Brâhmans and Buddhists, hundreds of years before it was heard of in Europe, for that symbol was and is found all over the world. They bent the ends of the cross and made [pg 587] of it their Svastika, 卐 now the Wan of the Mongolian Buddhist.1311 It implies that the “central point” is not limited to one individual, however perfect; that The Principle (God) is in Humanity, and Humanity, as all the rest, is in It, like drops of water are in the ocean, the four ends being toward the four cardinal points, hence losing themselves in infinity.

Isarim, an Initiate, is said to have found at Hebron, on the dead body of Hermes, the well known Smaragdine Tablet, which, it is said, contained the essence of Hermetic Wisdom. Upon it were traced, among others, the sentences:

The riddle of the cross is contained in these words, and its double mystery is solved—to the Occultist.

Again:

[pg 588]

The Egyptian Hierophant had a square head-dress which he had to wear always during his functions. These square hats are worn unto this day by the Armenian priests. The perfect Tau—formed of the perpendicular (descending male ray) and the horizontal line (Matter, female principle)—and the mundane circle were attributes of Isis, and it was only at death that the Egyptian cross was laid on the breast of the mummy. The claim that the cross is purely a Christian symbol introduced after our era, is strange indeed, when we find Ezekiel stamping the foreheads of the men of Judah who feared the Lord,1315 with the signum Thau, as it is translated in the Vulgate. In the ancient Hebrew this sign was formed thus [Symbol: Cross, tilted towards the northeast], but in the original Egyptian hieroglyphics as a perfect Christian cross ☦ (Tat, the emblem of stability). In the Revelation, also, the “Alpha and Omega”—Spirit and Matter—the first and the last, stamps the name of his Father on the foreheads of the elect. Moses1316 orders his people to mark their door-posts and lintels with blood, lest the “Lord God” should make a mistake and smite some of his chosen people, instead of the doomed Egyptians. And this mark is a Tau!—the identical Egyptian handled cross, with the half of which talisman Horus raised the dead, as is shown on a sculptured ruin at Philæ.

Enough has been said in the text about the Svastika and the Tau. Verily may the cross be traced back into the very depths of the unfathomable archaic ages! Its mystery deepens rather than clears, as we find it on the statues of Easter Island, in old Egypt, in Central Asia, engraved on rocks as the Tau and Svastika, in Pre-Christian Scandinavia, everywhere! The author of the Source of Measures stands perplexed before the endless shadow it throws back into antiquity, and is unable to trace it to any particular nation or man. He shows the Targums handed down by the Hebrews, obscured by translation. In Joshua1317 read in Arabic, and in the Targum of Jonathan, it is said: “The king of Ai he crucified upon a tree.”

So it is, but the spirit of it has been ever misunderstood. “To crucify before (not against) the Sun” is a phrase used of Initiation. It [pg 589] comes from Egypt, and primarily from India. The enigma can be unriddled only by searching for its key in the Mysteries of Initiation. The Initiated Adept, who had successfully passed through all the trials, was attached, not nailed, but simply tied on a couch in the form of a Tau, Τ, in Egypt, of a Svastika without the four additional prolongations (☩ not 卐) in India, plunged in a deep sleep—the “Sleep of Siloam,” as it is called to this day among the Initiates in Asia Minor, in Syria, and even higher Egypt. He was allowed to remain in this state for three days and three nights, during which time his Spiritual Ego was said to “confabulate” with the “Gods,” descend into Hades, Amenti, or Pâtâla—according to the country—and do works of charity to the invisible Beings, whether Souls of men or Elemental Spirits; his body remaining all the time in a temple crypt or subterranean cave. In Egypt it was placed in the Sarcophagus in the King's Chamber of the Pyramid of Cheops, and carried during the night of the approaching third day to the entrance of a gallery, where at a certain hour the beams of the rising Sun struck full on the face of the entranced Candidate, who awoke to be initiated by Osiris and Thoth, the God of Wisdom.

Let the reader who doubts the statement consult the Hebrew originals before he denies. Let him turn to some most suggestive Egyptian bas reliefs. One especially from the temple of Philæ, represents a scene of initiation. Two God-Hierophants, one with the head of a hawk (the Sun), the other ibis-headed (Mercury, Thoth, the God of Wisdom and Secret Learning, the assessor of Osiris-Sun), are standing over the body of a Candidate just initiated. They are in the act of pouring on his head a double stream of “water” (the Water of Life and of New-birth), the streams being interlaced in the shape of a cross and full of small ansated crosses. This is allegorical of the awakening of the Candidate who is now an Initiate, when the beams of the morning Sun, Osiris, strike the crown of his head; his entranced body being placed on its wooden Tau so as to receive the rays. Then appeared the Hierophant-Initiators, and the sacramental words were pronounced, ostensibly to the Sun-Osiris, in reality to the Spirit-Sun within, enlightening the newly-born man.

Let the reader meditate on the connection of the Sun with the cross from the highest antiquity, in both its generative and spiritually regenerative capacities. Let him examine the tomb of Bait-Oxly, in the reign of Ramses II, where he will find the crosses in every shape and position; as also on the throne of that sovereign, and finally on a fragment [pg 590] representing the adoration of Bakhan-Alearé, from the Hall of the ancestors of Totmes III, now preserved in the National Library of Paris. In this extraordinary sculpture and painting one sees the disk of the Sun beaming upon an ansated cross placed upon a cross of which those of the Calvary are perfect copies. The ancient MSS. mention these as the “hard couches of those who were in [spiritual] travail, the act of giving birth to themselves.” A quantity of such cruciform “couches,” on which the Candidate, thrown into a dead trance at the end of his supreme Initiation, was placed and secured, were found in the underground halls of the Egyptian Temples after their destruction. The worthy and holy Fathers of the Cyril and Theophilus types used them freely, believing they had been brought and concealed there by some new converts. Alone Origen, and after him Clemens Alexandrinus and other ex-initiates, knew better. But they preferred to keep silent.

Again, let the reader read the Hindû “fables,” as the Orientalists call them, and remember the allegory of Vishvakarmâ, the Creative Power, the Great Architect of the World, called in the Rig Veda the “All-seeing God,” who “sacrifices himself to himself.” The Spiritual Egos of mortals are his own essence, one with him, therefore. Remember that he is called Deva-vardhika, the “Builder of the Gods,” and that it is he who ties the Sun, Sûrya, his son-in-law, on his lathe—in the exoteric allegory, but on the Svastika, in Esoteric tradition, for on Earth he is the Hierophant-Initiator—and cuts away a portion of his brightness. Vishvakarmâ, remember again, is the son of Yoga-siddhâ, i.e., the holy power of Yoga, and the fabricator of the “fiery weapon,” the magic Agneyastra.1319 The narrative is given more fully elsewhere.

The author of the kabalistic work so often quoted from, asks:

The author proves these points by further elucidation, and reveals the secret meaning of more than one dead-letter narrative, by showing that probably, איש, man, was the primordial word:

This is demonstrated by the Hindû Vittoba, a form of Vishnu, as has already been stated. The figure of Vittoba, even to the nail-marks on the feet,1322 is that of Jesus crucified, in all its details save the cross. That man was meant is proved to us further by the fact of the Initiate being reborn after his crucifixion on the Tree of Life. This “Tree” has now become exoterically—through its use by the Romans as an instrument of torture and the ignorance of the early Christian schemers—the tree of death!

Thus, one of the seven Esoteric meanings intended by this mystery of crucifixion by the mystic inventors of the system—the original elaboration and adoption of which dates back to the very establishment of the Mysteries—is discovered in the geometrical symbols containing the history of the evolution of man. The Hebrews—whose prophet Moses was so learned in the Esoteric Wisdom of Egypt, and who adopted their numerical system from the Phœnicians, and later from the Gentiles, from whom also they borrowed most of their Kabalistic Mysticism—most ingeniously adapted the cosmic and anthropological symbols of the “Heathen” nations to their peculiar secret records. If Christian sacerdotalism has lost the key of this to-day, the early compilers of the Christian Mysteries were well versed in Esoteric Philosophy and the Hebrew Occult Metrology, and used it dexterously. Thus they took the word Aish, one of the Hebrew word-forms for man, and used it in conjunction with that of Shânâh or lunar year, so mystically connected with the name of Jehovah, the supposed “Father” of [pg 592] Jesus, and embosomed the mystic idea in an astronomical value and formula.

The original idea of the “man crucified” in space certainly belongs to the ancient Hindûs. Moor shows this in his Hindû Pantheon in the engraving that represents Vittoba. Plato adopted it in his decussated cross in space, the [Symbol: cross like the letter “X”], the “second God who impressed himself on the universe in the form of the cross”; Krishna is likewise shown “crucified.”1323 Again it is repeated in the Old Testament in the queer injunction to crucify men before the Lord, the Sun—which is no prophecy at all, but has a direct phallic significance. In that same most suggestive work on the kabalistic meanings, we read again:

Thus, while the phallic or sexual meaning of the “crucifixion nails” is proven by the geometrical and numerical reading, its mystical meaning is indicated by the short remarks upon it, as given above, in its connection with, and bearing upon, Prometheus. He is another victim, for he is crucified on the Cross of Love, on the rock of human passions, a sacrifice to his devotion to the cause of the spiritual element in Humanity.

Now, the primordial system, the double glyph that underlies the idea of the cross, is not of “human invention,” for Cosmic Ideation and the spiritual representation of the Divine Ego-man are at its basis. Later, it expanded into the beautiful idea adopted by, and represented in, the Mysteries, that of regenerated man, the mortal, who, by crucifying the man of flesh and his passions on the Procrustean bed of torture, became reborn as an Immortal. Leaving the body, the animal-man, behind him, tied on the Cross of Initiation like an empty chrysalis, the Ego-Soul became as free as a butterfly. Still [pg 593] later, owing to the gradual loss of spirituality, the cross became in Cosmogony and Anthropology no higher than a phallic symbol.

With the Esotericists from the remotest times, the Universal Soul or Anima Mundi, the material reflection of the Immaterial Ideal, was the Source of Life of all beings and of the Life-Principle of the three kingdoms. This was septenary with the Hermetic Philosophers, as with all Ancients. For it is represented as a sevenfold cross, whose branches are respectively, light, heat, electricity, terrestrial magnetism, astral radiation, motion, and intelligence, or what some call self-consciousness.

As we have said elsewhere, long before the cross or its sign were adopted as symbols of Christianity, the sign of the cross was used as a mark of recognition among Adepts and Neophytes, the latter being called Chrests—from Chrestos, the man of tribulation and sorrow. Says Éliphas Lévi:

The “militant and official Church” did more: having helped herself to what had never belonged to her, she took only that which the “Profane” had—the kabalistic meaning of the male and female Sephiroth. She never lost the inner and higher meaning since she never had it—Éliphas Lévi's pandering to Rome notwithstanding. The sign of the cross adopted by the Latin Church was phallic from the beginning, while that of the Greeks was the cross of the Neophytes, the Chrestoi.