Footnotes

1.
The majority of the Pandits know nothing of the Esoteric Philosophy now, because they have lost the key to it; yet not one of these, if honest, would deny that the Upanishads, and especially the Purânas, are allegorical and symbolical; nor that there still remain in India a few great scholars who could, if they would, give them the key to such interpretations. Nor do they reject the actual existence of Mahâtmâs—initiated Yogis and Adepts—even in this age of Kali Yuga.
2.
This assertion is clearly corroborated by Plato himself, who writes: “You say that in my former discourse I have not sufficiently explained to you the nature of the First. I purposely spoke enigmatically, that in case the tablet should have happened with any accident, either by sea or land, a person without some previous knowledge of the subject might not be able to understand its contents.” (Plato, Ep., ii. 312; Cory, Ancient Fragments, p. 304.)
3.
Isis Unveiled, i. 287, 288.
4.
The Dialogues of Plato, translated by B. Jowett, Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford, iii. 523.
5.
Op. cit., p. 561.
6.
Op. cit., p. 591.
7.
This definition places (unwittingly, of course), the ancient “physical philosopher” many cubits higher than his modern “physical” confrère, since the ultima thule of the latter is to lead mankind to believe that neither universe nor man have any cause at all—not an intelligent one at all events—and that they have sprung into existence owing to blind chance and a senseless whirling of atoms. Which of the two hypotheses is the more rational and logical is left to the impartial reader to decide.
8.
Italics are mine. Every tyro in Eastern Philosophy, every Kabalist, will see the reason for such an association of persons with ideas, numbers, and geometrical figures. For number, says Philolaus, “is the dominant and self-produced bond of the eternal continuance of things.” Alone the modern Scholar remains blind to the grand truth.
9.
Here again the ancient Philosopher seems to be ahead of the modern. For he only “confuses ... first and final causes” (which confusion is denied by those who know the spirit of ancient scholarship), whereas his modern successor is confessedly and absolutely ignorant of both. Mr. Tyndall shows Science “powerless” to solve a single one of the final problems of Nature and “disciplined [read, modern materialistic], imagination retiring in bewilderment from the contemplation of the problems” of the world of matter. He even doubts whether the men of present Science possess “the intellectual elements which would enable them to grapple with the ultimate structural energies of Nature.” But for Plato and his disciples, the lower types were but the concrete images of the higher abstract ones; the immortal Soul has an arithmetical, as the body has a geometrical, beginning. This beginning, as the reflection of the great universal Archæus (Anima Mundi), is self-moving, and from the centre diffuses itself over the whole body of the Macrocosm.
10.
Op. cit., p. 523.
11.
Nowhere are the Neoplatonists guilty of such an absurdity. The learned Professor of Greek must have been thinking of two spurious works attributed by Eusebius and St. Jerome to Ammonius Saccas, who wrote nothing; or must have confused the Neoplatonists with Philo Judæus. But then Philo lived over 130 years before the birth of the founder of Neoplatonism. He belonged to the School of Aristobulus the Jew, who lived under Ptolemy Philometer (150 years b.c.), and is credited with having inaugurated the movement which tended to prove that Plato and even the Peripatetic Philosophy were derived from the “revealed” Mosaic Books. Valckenaer tries to show that the author of the Commentaries on the Books of Moses, was not Aristobulus, the sycophant of Ptolemy. But whatever he was, he was not a Neoplatonist, but lived before, or during the days of Philo Judæus, since the latter seems to know his works and follow his methods.
12.
Only Clemens Alexandrinus, a Christian Neoplatonist and a very fantastic writer.
13.
The labour of reconciling the different systems of religion.
14.
New Platonism and Alchemy, by Alex. Wilder, M.D. pp. 7, 4.
15.
It is well-known that, though born of Christian parents, Ammonius had renounced the tenets of the Church—Eusebius and Jerome notwithstanding. Porphyry, the disciple of Plotinus, who had lived with Ammonius for eleven years together, and who had no interest for stating an untruth, positively declares that he had renounced Christianity entirely. On the other hand, we know that Ammonius believed in the bright Gods, Protectors, and that the Neoplatonic Philosophy was as “pagan” as it was mystical. But Eusebius, the most unscrupulous forger and falsifier of old texts, and St. Jerome, an out-and-out fanatic, who had both an interest in denying the fact, contradict Porphyry. We prefer to believe the latter, who has left to posterity an unblemished name and a great reputation for honesty.
16.
Two works are falsely attributed to Ammonius. One, now lost, called De Consensu Moysis et Jesu, is mentioned by the same “trustworthy” Eusebius, the Bishop of Cæsaræa, and the friend of the Christian Emperor Constantine, who died, however, a heathen. All that is known of this pseudo-work is that Jerome bestows great praise upon it (Vir. Illust., § 55; and Euseb., H. E., vi. 19). The other spurious production is called the Diatesseron (or the “Harmony of the Gospels”). This is partially extant. But then, again, it exists only in the Latin version of Victor, Bishop of Capua (sixth century), who attributed it himself to Tatian, and as wrongly, probably, as later scholars attributed the Diatesseron to Ammonius. Therefore no great reliance can be placed upon it, nor on its “esoteric” interpretation of the Gospels. Is it this work, we wonder, which led Prof. Jowett to regard the Neo-platonic interpretations as “absurdities”?
17.
Op. cit., p. 7.
18.
Op. cit., iii, 524.
19.
“Imperfect knowledge” of what? That Plato was ignorant of many of the modern “working hypotheses”—as ignorant as our immediate posterity is sure to be of the said hypotheses when they in their turn after exploding join the “great majority”—is perhaps a blessing in disguise.
20.
Op. cit., p. 524.
21.
Histoire Critique du Gnosticisme, by M. J. Matter, Professor of the Royal Academy of Strasburg, “It is in Pythagoras and Plato that we find, in Greece, the first elements of [Oriental] Gnosticism,” he says. (Vol. i, pp. 48 and 50.)
22.
Asiat. Trans., i, 579.
23.
New Platonism and Alchemy, p. 4.
24.
This fact and others may be found in Chinese Missionary Reports, and in a work by Monseigneur Delaplace, a Bishop in China. Annales de la Propagation de la Foi.
25.
The regions somewhere about Udyana and Kashmir, as the translator and editor of Marco Polo (Colonel Yule) believes (i. 175).
26.
Voyage des Pélerins Bouddhistes, Vol. I.; Histoire de la Vie de Hiouen-Thsang, etc., traduit du chinois en français, par Stanislas Julien.
27.
Lao-tse, the Chinese philosopher.
28.
The Book of Ser Marco Polo, i. 318.
29.
Isis Unveiled, i. 599-601, 603, 598.
30.
Ammianus Marcellinus, xxiii. 6.
31.
The Rishis—the first group of seven in number—lived in days preceding the Vedic period. They are now known as Sages and held in reverence like demigods. But they may now be shown as something more than merely mortal Philosophers. There are other groups of ten, twelve and even twenty-one in number. Haug shows that they occupy in the Brâhmanical religion a position answering to that of the twelve sons of Jacob in the Jewish Bible. The Brâhmans claim to descend directly from the Rishis.
32.
Isis Unveiled, i. 90.
33.
See Münter “On the most Ancient Religions of the North before Odin.” Mémoires de la Société des Antiquaires de France, ii. 230.
34.
Ammianus Marcellinus, xxvi. 6.
35.
“The date of the hundreds of pyramids in the Valley of the Nile is impossible to fix by any of the rules of modern science; Herodotus informs us that each successive king erected one to commemorate his reign, and serve as his sepulchre. But, Herodotus did not tell all, although he knew that the real purpose of the pyramid was very different from that which he assigns to it. Were it not for his religious scruples, he might have added that, externally, it symbolized the creative principle of Nature, and illustrated also the principles of geometry, mathematics, astrology and astronomy. Internally, it was a majestic fane, in whose sombre recesses were performed the Mysteries, and whose walls had often witnessed the initiation scenes of members of the royal family. The porphyry sarcophagus, which Professor Piazzi Smyth, Astronomer Royal of Scotland, degrades into a corn-bin, was the baptismal font, upon emerging from which, the neophyte was ‘born again,’ and became an adept.” (Isis Unveiled, i. 518, 519.)
36.
Diog. Laërt., in “Democrit. Vit.”
37.
Satyric, ix. 3.
38.
Pliny, Hist. Nat.
39.
Isis Unveiled, i. 512.
40.
Op. cit., ii. 403.
41.
This is precisely what some of them are preparing to do, and many a “mysterious page” in sacred and profane history are touched on in these pages. Whether or not their explanations will be accepted—is another question.
42.
Ibid.
43.
This is incorrectly expressed. The true Adept of the “Right Hand” never punishes anyone, not even his bitterest and most dangerous enemy; he simply leaves the latter to his Karma, and Karma never fails to do so, sooner or later.
44.
Op. cit., ii. 239, 241, 240.
45.
See, in this connection, Pneumatologie des Esprits, by the Marquis de Mirville, who devotes six enormous volumes to show the absurdity of those who deny the reality of Satan and Magic, or the Occult Sciences—the two being with him synonymous.
46.
We think we see the sidereal phantom of the old Philosopher and Mystic—once of Cambridge University—Henry More, moving about in the astral mist over the old moss-covered roofs of the ancient town in which he wrote his famous letter to Glanvil about “witches.” The “soul” seems restless and indignant, as on that day of May, 1678, when the doctor complained so bitterly to the author of Sadducismus Triumphatus of Scot, Adie and Webster. “Our new inspired saints,” the soul is heard to mutter, “sworn advocates of the witches ... who against all sense and reason ... will have no Samuel but a confederate knave ... these in-blown buffoons, puffed up with ... ignorance, vanity and stupid infidelity!” (See “Letter to Glanvil,” and Isis Unveiled, i. 205, 206.)
47.
Études Religieuses.
48.
Études Historiques.
49.
Mémoire read at the Académie des Inscriptions des Belles Lettres, in 1859.
50.
See Alfred Maury's Histoire des Religions de la Grèce, i. 248; and the speculations of Holzmann in Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Sprach forschung, ann. 1852, p. 487, sq.
51.
Creuzer's Introduction des Mystères, iii. 456.
52.
The later Nabathæans adhered to the same belief as the Nazarenes and the Sabæans, honoured John the Baptist, and used Baptism. (See Isis Unveiled, ii. 127; Munck, Palestine, p. 525; Dunlap, Sod, the Son of Man, etc.)
53.
i. 535.
54.
By Hargrave Jennings.
55.
See De Mirville's Pneumatologie, iii. 267 et seq.
56.
Psellus, 4: in Cory's Ancient Fragments, 269.
57.
Isis Unveiled, i, 535, 536.
58.
The forty-two Sacred Books of the Egyptians, mentioned by Clement of Alexandria as having existed in his time, were but a portion of the Books of Hermes. Iamblichus, on the authority of the Egyptian priest Abammon, attributes 1,200 of such books to Hermes, and Manetho 36,000. But the testimony of Iamblichus as a Neoplatonist and Theurgist is of course rejected by modern critics. Manetho, who is held by Bunsen in the highest consideration as a “purely historical personage,” with whom “none of the later native historians can be compared” (see Égypte, i. 97), suddenly becomes a Pseudo-Manetho, as soon as the ideas propounded by him clash with the scientific prejudices against Magic and the Occult knowledge claimed by the ancient priests. However, none of the Archæologists doubt for a moment the almost incredible antiquity of the Hermetic books. Champollion shows the greatest regard for their authenticity and truthfulness, corroborated as it is by many of the oldest monuments. And Bunsen brings irrefutable proofs of their age. From his researches, for instance, we learn that there was a line of sixty-one kings before the days of Moses, who preceded the Mosaic period by a clearly-traceable civilization of several thousand years. Thus we are warranted in believing that the works of Hermes Trismegistus were extant many ages before the birth of the Jewish law-giver. “Styli and inkstands were found on monuments of the fourth Dynasty, the oldest in the world,” says Bunsen. If the eminent Egyptologist rejects the period of 48,863 years before Alexander, to which Diogenes Laërtius carries back the records of the priests, he is evidently more embarrassed with the ten thousand of astronomical observations, and remarks that “if they were actual observations, they must have extended over 10,000 years” (p. 14). “We learn, however,” he adds, “from one of their own old chronological works ... that the genuine Egyptian traditions concerning the mythological period treated of myriads of years.” (Égypte, i. 15; Isis Unveiled, i. 33.)
59.
These details are taken from Pneumatologie, iii. pp. 204, 205.
60.
Égypte, p. 143; Isis Unveiled, i. 625.
61.
Strom., VI. vii. The following paragraph is paraphrased from the same chapter.
62.
See Pneumatologie, iii. 207. Therefore Empedocles is called κωλυθάνεμος, the “dominator of the wind.” Strom., VI. iii.
63.
Ibid., iv.
64.
Summarised from Pneumatologie, iii. 209.
65.
Loc. cit.
66.
Op. cit., iii. 208.
67.
The English speaking people who spell the name of Noah's disrespectful son “Ham” have to be reminded that the right spelling is “Kham” or “Cham.”
68.
Black Magic, or Sorcery, is the evil result obtained in any shape or way through the practice of Occult Arts; hence it has to be judged only by its effects. The name of neither Ham nor Cain, when pronounced, has ever killed any one; whereas, if we have to believe that same Clemens Alexandrinus who traces the teacher of every Occultist, outside of Christianity, to the Devil, the name of Jehovah (pronounced Jevo and in a peculiar way) had the effect of killing a man at a distance. The mysterious Schemham-phorasch was not always used for holy purposes by the Kabalists, especially since the Sabbath or Saturday, sacred to Saturn or the evil Shani, became—with the Jews—sacred to “Jehovah.”
69.
Khoemnis, the pre-historic city, may or may not have been built by Noah's son, but it was not his name that was given to the town, but that of the Mystery Goddess Khoemnu or Khoemnis (Greek form); the deity that was created by the ardent fancy of the neophyte, who was thus tantalised during his “twelve labours” of probation before his final initiation. Her male counterpart is Khem. The city of Choemnis or Khemmis (to-day Akhmem) was the chief seat of the God Khem. The Greeks identifying Khem with Pan, called this city “Panopolis.”
70.
Pneumatologie, iii. 210. This looks more like pious vengeance than philology. The picture, however, seems incomplete, as the author ought to have added to the “chimney” a witch flying out of it on a broomstick.
71.
How could they escape from the Deluge unless God so willed it? This is scarcely logical.
72.
Loc. cit., p. 210.
73.
Matthew, xvi. 20.
74.
Mark, v. 43.
75.
Mark, iv. 11, 12.
76.
Is it not evident that the words: “lest at any time they should be converted (or: ‘lest haply they should turn again’—as in the revised version) and their sins be forgiven them”—do not at all mean to imply that Jesus feared that through repentance any outsider, or “them that are without,” should escape damnation, as the literal dead-letter sense plainly shows—but quite a different thing? Namely, “lest any of the profane should by understanding his preaching, undisguised by parable, get hold of some of the secret teachings and mysteries of Initiation—and even of Occult powers? ‘Be converted’ is, in other words, to obtain a knowledge belonging exclusively to the Initiated: ‘and their sins be forgiven them,’ that is, their sins would fall upon the illegal revealer, on those who had helped the unworthy to reap there where they have never laboured to sow, and had given them, thereby, the means of escaping on this earth their deserved Karma, which must thus re-act on the revealer, who, instead of good, did harm and failed.”
77.
New Platonism and Alchemy, 1869, pp. 7, 9.
78.
vii. 6.
79.
History is full of proofs of the same. Had not Anaxagoras enunciated the great truth taught in the Mysteries, viz., that the sun was surely larger than the Peloponnesus, he would not have been persecuted and nearly put to death by the fanatical mob. Had that other rabble which was raised against Pythagoras understood what the mysterious Sage of Crotona meant by giving out his remembrance of having been the “Son of Mercury”—God of the Secret Wisdom—he would not have been forced to fly for his life; nor would Socrates have been put to death, had he kept secret the revelations of his divine Daimon. He knew how little his century—save those initiated—would understand his meaning, had he given out all he knew of the moon. Thus he limited his statement to an allegory, which is now proven to have been more scientific than was hitherto believed. He maintained that the moon was inhabited and that the lunar beings lived in profound, vast and dark valleys, our satellite being airless and without any atmosphere outside such profound valleys; this, disregarding the revelation full of meaning for the few only, must be so of necessity, if there is any atmosphere on our bright Selene at all. The facts recorded in the secret annals of the Mysteries had to remain veiled under penalty of death.
80.
Stromateis, xii.
81.
See Homilies 7, in Levit., quoted in the Source of Measures, p. 307.
82.
Origen: Huet., Origeniana, 167; Franck, 121; quoted from Dunlap's Sôd, p. 176.
83.
Isis Unveiled, ii. 350.
84.
The materialistic “law-givers,” the critics and Sadducees who have tried to tear to shreds the doctrines and teachings of the great Asiatic Masters past and present—no scholars in the modern sense of the word—would do well to ponder over these words. No doubt that doctrines and secret teachings had they been invented and written in Oxford and Cambridge would be more brilliant outwardly. Would they equally answer to universal truths and facts, is the next question however.
85.
iii. fol. 1526, quoted in Myer's Qabbalah, p. 102.
86.
New-Platonism and Alchemy, p. 6.
87.
i. 2.
88.
lxiv. 10.
89.
The key is shown to be “in the source of measures originating the British inch and the ancient cubit” as the author tries to prove.
90.
The word as a plural might have better solved the mystery. God is ever-present; if he were ever-active he could no longer be an infinite God—nor ever-present in his limitation.
91.
The author is evidently a Mason of the way of thinking of General Pike. So long as the American and English Masons will reject the “Creative Principle” of the “Grand Orient” of France they will remain in the dark.
92.
Source of Measures, pp. 308, 309.
93.
In his Pneumatologie, in Vol. iv., pp. 105-112, the Marquis de Mirville claims the knowledge of the heliocentric system—earlier than Galileo—for Pope Urban VIII. The author goes further. He tries to show that famous Pope, not as the persecutor but as one persecuted by Galileo, and calumniated by the Florentine Astronomer into the bargain. If so, so much the worse for the Latin Church, since her Popes, knowing of it, still preserved silence upon this most important fact, either to screen Joshua or their own infallibility. One can understand well that the Bible having been so exalted over all the other systems, and its alleged monotheism depending upon the silence preserved, nothing remained of course but to keep quiet over its symbolism, thus allowing all its blunders to be fathered on its God.
94.
Op. cit., App. vii. p. 296. The writer feels happy to find this fact now mathematically demonstrated. When it was stated in Isis Unveiled that Jehovah and Saturn were one and the same with Adam Kadmon, Cain, Adam and Eve, Abel, Seth, etc., and that all were convertible symbols in the Secret Doctrine (see Vol. ii. pp. 446, 448, 464 et seq.); that they answered, in short, to secret numerals and stood for more than one meaning in the Bible as in other doctrines—the author's statements remained unnoticed. Isis had failed to appear under a scientific form, and by giving too much, in fact, gave very little to satisfy the enquirer. But now, if mathematics and geometry, besides the evidence of the Bible and Kabalah are good for anything, the public must find itself satisfied. No fuller, more scientifically given proof can be found to show that Cain is the transformation of an Elohim (the Sephira Binah) into Jah-Veh (or God-Eve) androgyne, and that Seth is the Jehovah male, than in the combined discoveries of Seyffarth, Knight, etc., and finally in Mr. Ralston Skinner's most erudite work. The further relations of these personifications of the first human races, in their gradual development, will be given later on in the text.
95.
The writings extant in olden times often personified Wisdom as an emanation and associate of the Creator. Thus we have the Hindu Buddha, the Babylonian Nebo, the Thoth of Memphis, the Hermes of Greece; also the female divinities, Neïtha, Metis, Athena, and the Gnostic potency Achamoth or Sophia. The Samaritan Pentateuch denominated the Book of Genesis, Akamouth, or Wisdom, and two remnants of old treatises, the Wisdom of Solomon and the Wisdom of Jesus, relate to the same matters. The Book of Mashalim—the Discourses or Proverbs of Solomon—thus personifies Wisdom as the auxiliary of the Creator. In the Secret Wisdom of the East that auxiliary is found collectively in the first emanations of Primeval Light, the Seven Dhyáni-Chohans, who have been shown to be identical with the “Seven Spirits of the Presence” of the Roman Catholics.
96.
New Platonism and Alchemy, p. 6.
97.
ii. 317. 318. Many verbal alterations from the original text of Isis Unveiled were made by H. P. B. in her quotations therefrom, and these are followed throughout.
98.
Proclus claims to have experienced this sublime ecstasy six times during his mystic life; Porphyry asserts that Apollonius of Tyana was thus united four times to his deity—a statement which we believe to be a mistake, since Apollonius was a Nirmânakâya (divine incarnation—not Avatâra)—and he (Porphyry) only once, when over sixty years of age. Theophany (or the actual appearance of a God to man), Theopathy (or “assimilation of divine nature”), and Theopneusty (inspiration, or rather the mysterious power to hear orally the teachings of a God) have never been rightly understood.
99.
Kârana Sharîra is the “causal” body and is sometimes said to be the “personal God.” And so it is, in one sense.
100.
This would be in one sense Self-worship.
101.
“The Gods exist,” said Epicurus, “but they are not what the hoi polloi [the multitude] suppose them to be. He is not an infidel or atheist who denies the existence of Gods whom the multitude worship, but he is such who fastens on the Gods the opinions of the multitude.”
102.
Esoteric, as exoteric, Buddhism rejects the theory that Gautama was an incarnation or Avatâra of Vishnu, but teaches the doctrine as herein explained. Every man has in him the materials, if not the conditions, for theophanic intercourse and Theopneusty, the inspiring “God” being, however, in every case, his own Higher Self, or divine prototype.
103.
One entirely and absolutely purified, and having nothing in common with earth except his body.
104.
Mândûkyopanishad, 4.
105.
Acts, viii. 10 (Revised Version).
106.
See the explanations given on the subject in “The Elixir of Life,” by G. M. (From a Chelâ's Diary), Five Years of Theosophy.
107.
I. Cor., xv. 47, 50.
108.
I. Cor., iii. 16. Has the reader ever meditated upon the suggestive words, often pronounced by Jesus and his Apostles? “Be ye therefore perfect as your Father ... is perfect” (Matt., v. 48), says the Great Master. The words are, “as perfect as your Father which is in heaven,” being interpreted as meaning God. Now the utter absurdity of any man becoming as perfect as the infinite, all-perfect omniscient and omnipresent Deity, is too apparent. If you accept it in such a sense, Jesus is made to utter the greatest fallacy. What was Esoterically meant is, “Your Father who is above the material and astral man, the highest Principle (save the Monad) within man, his own personal God, or the God of his own personality, of whom he is the ‘prison’ and the ‘temple.’ ” “If thou wilt be perfect (i.e., an Adept and Initiate) go and sell that thou hast” (Matt., xix. 21). Every man who desired to become a neophyte, a chelâ, then, as now, had to take the vow of poverty. The “Perfect,” was the name given to the Initiates of every denomination. Plato calls them by that term. The Essenes had their “Perfect,” and Paul plainly states that they, the Initiates, can only speak before other Adepts. “We speak wisdom among them [only] that are perfect” (I. Cor. ii. 6.)
109.
John, i. 21.
110.
John, iii. “Born” from above, viz., from his Monad or divine Ego, the seventh Principle, which remains till the end of the Kalpa, the nucleus of, and at the same time the overshadowing Principle, as the Kâranâtmâ (Causal Soul) of the personality in every rebirth. In this sense, the sentence “born anew” means “descends from above,” the last two words having no reference to heaven or space, neither of which can be limited or located, since one is a state and the other infinite, hence having no cardinal points. (See New Testament, Revised Version, loc. cit.)
111.
This can have no reference to Christian Baptism, since there was none in the days of Nicodemus and he could not therefore know anything of it, even though a “Master.”
112.
This word, translated in the New Testament “world” to suit the official interpretation, means rather an “age” (as shown in the Revised Version) or one of the periods during the Manvantara, a Kalpa, or Æon. Esoterically the sentence would read: “He who shall reach, through a series of births and Karmic law, that state in which Humanity shall find itself after the Seventh Round and the Seventh Race, when comes Nirvâna, Moksha, and when man becomes ‘equal unto the Angels’ or Dhyân Chohans, is a ‘son of the resurrection’ and ‘can die no more’; then there will be no marriage, as there will be no difference of sexes”—a result of our present materiality and animalism.
113.
Luke, xx. 27-38.
114.
John, ix. 2, 3.
115.
The conscious Ego, or Fifth Principle Manas, the vehicle of the divine Monad or “God.”
116.
Some Symbologists, relying on the correspondence of numbers and the symbols of certain things and personages, refer these “secrets” to the mystery of generation. But it is more than this. The glyph of the “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil” has no doubt a phallic and sexual element in it, as has the “Woman and the Serpent”; but it has also a psychical and spiritual significance. Symbols are meant to yield more than one meaning.
117.
Wisdom, xi. 21. Douay version.
118.
Ecclesiasticus, i. 9. Douay version.
119.
Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, i. 361.
120.
Isis Unveiled, i. 6, 7.
121.

“Synesius mentions books of stone which he found in the temple of Memphis, on one of which was engraved the following sentence: ‘One nature delights in another, one nature overcomes another, one nature overrules another, and the whole of them are one’.”

“The inherent restlessness of matter is embodied in the saying of Hermes: ‘Action is the life of Phta’; and Orpheus calls nature πολυμήχανος μάτηρ, ‘the mother that makes many things,’ or the ingenious, the contriving, the inventive mother.”—Isis Unveiled, i. 257.

122.
Source of Measures, p. x.
123.
Masonic Review, July, 1886.
124.
See Source of Measures, pp. 47-50, et pass.
125.
See Cary's translation, pp. 322, 323.
126.
Exodus, xxxiv. 29, 33.
127.
Op. cit., V. vii.
128.
The Royal Masonic Cyclopædia, under “Gnosticism.”
129.
In the Ferouers and Devs of Jacobi (Letters F. and D.) the word “ferouer” is explained in the following manner: The Ferouer is a part of the creature (whether man or animal) of which it is the type and which it survives. It is the Nous of the Greeks, therefore divine and immortal, and thus can hardly be the Devil or the satanic copy De Mirville would represent it (see Mémoires de l'Académie des Inscriptions, Vol. XXXVII. p. 623, and chap. xxxix. p. 749). Foucher contradicts him entirely. The Ferouer was never the “principle of sensations,” but always referred to the most divine and pure portion of Man's Ego—the spiritual principle. Anquetil says that the Ferouer is the purest portion of man's soul. The Persian Dev is the antithesis of the Ferouer, for the Dev has been transformed by Zoroaster into the Genius of Evil (whence the Christian Devil), but even the Dev is only finite; for having become possessed of the soul of man by usurpation, it will have to leave it at the great day of Retribution. The Dev obsesses the soul of the defunct for three days, during which the soul wanders about the spot at which it was forcibly separated from its body; the Ferouer ascends to the region of eternal Light. It was an unfortunate idea that made the noble Marquis de Mirville imagine the Ferouer to be a “satanic copy” of a divine original. By calling all the Gods of the Pagans—Apollo, Osiris, Brahmâ, Ormazd, Bel, etc., the “Ferouers of Christ and of the chief Angels,” he merely exhibits the God and the Angels he would honour as inferior to the Pagan Gods, as man is inferior to his Soul and Spirit; since the Ferouer is the immortal part of the mortal being of which it is the type and which it survives. Perchance the poor author is unconsciously prophetic; and Apollo, Brahmâ, Ormazd, Osiris, etc., are destined to survive and replace—as eternal cosmic verities—the evanescent fictions about the God, Christ and Angels of the Latin Church!
130.
See George Smith's Babylon and other works.
131.
This is as fanciful as it is arbitrary. Where is the Hindu or Buddhist who would speak of his “Crucified”?
132.
Op. cit., iv. 237.
133.
Loc. cit., 250.
134.

“Q.: Who knocks at the door?

A.: The good cowherd.

Q.: Who preceded thee?

A.: The three robbers.

Q.: Who follows thee?

A.: The three murderers,” etc., etc.

Now this is the conversation that took place between the priest-initiators and the candidates for initiation during the mysteries enacted in the oldest sanctuaries of the Himâlayan fastnesses. The ceremony is still performed to this day in one of the most ancient temples in a secluded spot of Nepaul. It originated with the Mysteries of the first Krishna, passed to the First Tirthankara and ended with Buddha, and is called the Kurukshetra rite, being enacted as a memorial of the great battle and death of the divine Adept. It is not Masonry, but an initiation into the Occult teachings of that Hero—Occultism, pure and simple.

135.
Book of Enoch, Archbishop Laurence's translation. Introduction, p. v.
136.
The Book of Enoch was unknown to Europe for a thousand years, when Bruce found in Abyssinia some copies of it in Ethiopic; it was translated by Archbishop Laurence in 1821, from the text in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
137.
Op. cit., p. xx.
138.
Loc. cit.
139.
Op. cit., p. xiv., note.
140.
Op. cit., p. xxxv.
141.
Op. cit., p. xiii.
142.
The Seventh Principle, the First Emanation.
143.
Op. cit., pp. xxxvii. and xl.
144.
Op. cit., pp. xl. and li.
145.
Who stands for the “Solar” or Manvantaric Year.
146.
Op. cit., pp. xli., xlii.
147.
Op. cit., p. xlviii.
148.
Op. cit., p. xxiii.
149.
Loc. cit.
150.
xcii. 9.
151.
Op. cit., xcii. 4.
152.
Op. cit., xcii. 4-7.
153.
At the close of every Root-Race there comes a cataclysm, in turn by fire or water. Immediately after the “Fall into generation” the dross of the third Root-Race—those who fell into sensuality by falling off from the teaching of the Divine Instructors—were destroyed, after which the Fourth Root-Race originated, at the end of which took place the last Deluge. (See the “Sons of God” mentioned in Isis Unveiled, 593 et seq.)
154.
Op. cit., xcii. 11.
155.
Op. cit., xcii. 7, 11, 13, 15.
156.
Op. cit., note, p. 152.
157.
Those interpolations and alterations are found almost in every case where figures are given—especially whenever the numbers eleven and twelve come in—as these are all made (by the Christians) to relate to the numbers of Apostles, and Tribes, and Patriarchs. The translator of the Ethiopic text—Archbishop Laurence—attributes them generally to “mistakes of the transcriber” whenever the two texts, the Paris and the Bodleian MSS., differ. We fear it is no mistake, in most cases.
158.
Op. cit., lxxxviii. 99, 100.
159.
Loc. cit., 94. This passage, as will be presently shown, has led to a very curious discovery.
160.
In the profane history of Gautama Buddha he dies at the good old age of eighty, and passes off from life to death peacefully with all the serenity of a great saint, as Barthélemy St. Hilaire has it. Not so in the Esoteric and true interpretation which reveals the real sense of the profane and allegorical statement that makes Gautama, the Buddha, die very unpoetically from the effects of too much pork, prepared for him by Tsonda. How one who preached that the killing of animals was the greatest sin, and who was a perfect vegetarian, could die from eating pork, is a question that is never asked by our Orientalists, some of whom made (as now do many charitable missionaries in Ceylon) great fun at the alleged occurrence. The simple truth is that the said rice and pork are purely allegorical. Rice stands for “forbidden fruit,” like Eve's “apple,” and means Occult knowledge with the Chinese and Tibetans; and “pork” for Brâhmanical teachings—Vishnu having assumed in his first Avatâra the form of a boar, in order to raise the earth on the surface of the waters of space. It is not, therefore, from “pork” that Buddha died, but for having divulged some of the Brâhmanical mysteries, after which, seeing the bad effects brought on some unworthy people by the revelation, he preferred, instead of availing himself of Nirvâna, to leave his earthly form, remaining still in the sphere of the living, in order to help humanity to progress. Hence his constant reincarnations in the hierarchy of the Dalai and Teshu Lamas, among other bounties. Such is the Esoteric explanation. The life of Gautama will be more fully discussed later on.
161.
Op. cit., cv. 21.
162.
In the Bible (Genesis, iv and v) there are three distinct Enochs (Kanoch or Chanoch)—the son of Cain, the son of Seth, and the son of Jared; but they are all identical, and two of them are mentioned for purposes of misleading. The years of only the last two are given, the first one being left without further notice.
163.
The eternal and incessant “in-breathing and out-breathing of Parabrahman” or Nature, the Universe in Space, whether during Manvantara or Pralaya.
164.
Op. cit., iii. 1.
165.
Op. cit., 30.
166.
Op. cit., 32.
167.
Those who are aware that the term Christos was applied by the Gnostics to the Higher Ego (the ancient Pagan Greek Initiates doing the same), will readily understand the allusion. Christos was said to be cut off from the lower Ego, Chrestos, after the final and supreme Initiation, when the two became blended in one; Chrestos being conquered and resurrected in the glorified Christos.—Franck, Die Kabbala, 75; Dunlap, Sôd, Vol. II.
168.
Stromateis, I. xiii.
169.
Op. cit., II. viii.
170.
Many are the marvels recorded as having taken place at his death, or we should rather say his translation; for he did not die as others do, but having suddenly disappeared, while a dazzling light filled the cavern with glory, his body was again seen upon its subsidence. When this heavenly light gave place to the habitual semi-darkness of the gloomy cave—then only, says Ginsburg, “the disciples of Israel perceived that the lamp of Israel was extinguished.” His biographers tell us that there were voices heard from Heaven during the preparation for his funeral, and at his interment, when the coffin was lowered into the deep cave prepared for it, a flame broke forth and a voice mighty and majestic pronounced these words: “This is he who caused the earth to quake, and the kingdoms to shake!”
171.
Pockocke, maybe, was not altogether wrong in deriving the German Heaven, Himmel, from Himâlaya; nor can it be denied that it is the Hindu Kailâsa (Heaven) that is the father of the Greek Heaven (Koilon), and of the Latin Cœlum.
172.
See Pockocke's India in Greece, and his derivation of Mount Parnassus from Parnasa, the leaf and branch huts of the Hindu ascetics, half shrine and half habitation. “Part of the Par-o-Pamisus (the hill of Bamian), is called Parnassus. ‘These mountains are called Devanica, because they are so full of Devas or Gods, called “Gods of the Earth,” Bhu Devas. They lived, according to the Purânas, in bowers or huts, called Parnasas, because they were made of leaves’ (Parnas),” p. 302.
173.
Rawlinson is justly very confident of an Âryan and Vedic influence on the early mythology and history of Babylon and Chaldæa.
174.
This is a Secret Doctrine affirmation, and may or may not be accepted. Only Abrahm, Isaac and Judah resemble terribly the Hindu Brahmâ Ikshvâku and Yadu.
175.
It is said in The Gnostics and their Remains, by C. W. King (p. 13), with regard to the names of Brahmâ and Abram; “This figure of the man, Seir Aupin, consists of 243 numbers, being the numerical value of the letters in the name ‘Abram’ signifying the different orders in the celestial Hierarchies. In fact the names Abram and Brahmâ are equivalent in numerical value.” Thus to one acquainted with Esoteric Symbolism, it does not seem at all strange to find in the Loka-pâlas (the four cardinal and intermediate points of the compass personified by eight Hindu Gods) Indra's elephant, named Abhra—(mâtanga) and his wife Abhramu. Abhra is in a way a Wisdom Deity, since it is this elephant's head that replaced that of Ganesha (Ganapati) the God of Wisdom, cut off by Shiva. Now Abhra means “cloud,” and it is also the name of the city where Abram is supposed to have resided—when read backwards—“Arba (Kirjath) the city of four ... Abram is Abra with an appended m final, and Abra read backward is Arba” (Key to the Hebrew Egyptian Mystery). The author might have added that Abra meaning in Sanskrit “in, or of, the clouds,” the cosmo-astronomical symbol of Abram becomes still plainer. All of these ought to be read in their originals, in Sanskrit.
176.
Before these theories and speculations—we are willing to admit they are such—are rejected, the following few points ought to be explained, (1) Why, after leaving Egypt, was the patriarch's name changed by Jehovah from Abram to Abraham. (2) Why Sarai becomes on the same principle Sarah (Gen., xvii.). (3) Whence the strange coincidence of names? (4) Why should Alexander Polyhistor say that Abraham was born at Kamarina or Uria, a city of soothsayers, and invented Astronomy? (5) “The Abrahamic recollections go back at least three millenniums beyond the grandfather of Jacob,” says Bunsen (Egypt's Place in History, v. 35.)
177.
Isis Unveiled, ii. 35.
178.
See Isis Unveiled, ii. 218-300. Gematria is formed by a metathesis from the Greek word γραμματεία; Notaricon may be compared to stenography; Temura is permutation—a way of dividing the alphabet and shifting letters.
179.
De Vita Pythag.
180.
We are not aware that a copy of this ancient work is embraced in the catalogue of any European library; but it is one of the “Books of Hermes,” and it is referred to and quotations are made from it in the works of a number of ancient and mediæval philosophical authors. Among these authorities are Arnoldo di Villanova's Rosarium Philosoph., Francesco Arnuphi's Opus de Lapide, Hermes Trismegistus' Tractatus de Transmutatione Metallorum and Tabula Smaragdina, and above all the treatise of Raymond Lully, Ab Angelis Opus Divinum de Quinta Essentia.
181.
Exodus, xxv. 40.
182.
Sub voce “Numbers.”
183.
See Johannes Meursius, Denarius Pythagoricus.
184.
Ragon, Maçonnerie Occulte, p. 426, note.
185.
Ibid., p. 432, note.
186.
Extracted from Ragon, Maçonnerie Occulte, p. 427, note.
187.
Summarised from Ragon, ibid., p. 428, note.
188.

Ragon mentions the curious fact that the first four numbers in German are named after the elements.

“Ein, or one, means the air, the element which, ever in motion, penetrates matter throughout, and whose continual ebb and tide is the universal vehicle of life.

“Zwei, two, is derived from the old German Zweig, signifying germ, fecundity; it stands for earth the fecund mother of all.

“Drei, three, is the trienos of the Greeks, standing for water, whence the Sea-gods, Tritons; and trident, the emblem of Neptune—the water, or sea, in general being called Amphitrite (surrounding water).

“Vier, four, a number meaning in Belgian fire.... It is in the quaternary that the first solid figure is found, the universal symbol of immortality, the Pyramid, ‘whose first syllable means fire.’ Lysis and Timæus of Locris claimed that there was not a thing one could name that had not the quaternary for its root.... The ingenious and mystical idea which led to the veneration of the ternary and the triangle was applied to number four and its figure: it was said to express a living being, 1, the vehicle of the triangle 4, vehicle of God, or man carrying in him the divine principle.”

Finally, “the Ancients represented the world by the number five. Diodorus explains it by saying that this number represents earth, fire, water, air and ether or spiritus. Hence, the origin of Pente (five) and of Pan (the God) meaning in Greek all.” (Compare Ragon, op. cit., pp. 428-430.) It is left with the Hindu Occultists to explain the relation this Sanskrit word Pancha (five) has to the elements, the Greek Pente having for its root the Sanskrit term.

189.
The system of the so-called Senzar characters is still more wonderful and difficult, since each letter is made to yield several meanings, a sign placed at the commencement showing the true meaning.
190.
Ragon, op. cit., p. 431, note.
191.
The Y exoterically signifies only the two paths of virtue or vice, and stands also for the numeral 150 and with a dash over the letter Y for 150,000.
192.
Tradition, chap. on “Numbers.”
193.
This is a kind of magical bow and arrow calculated to destroy in one moment whole armies; it is mentioned in the Râmâyana, the Purânas and elsewhere.
194.
Matthew, viii. 30-34.
195.
Dogmatic Theology, iii. 345.
196.
viii. 9, 10.
197.
Adv. Celsum.
198.
Eccles. Hist., i. 140.
199.
Contra Hæreses, I. xxiii. 1-4.
200.
Contra Hæreses, ii. 1-6.
201.
Op. cit., ii. 337.
202.

Ten is the perfect number of the Supreme God among the “manifested” deities, for number 1 is the symbol of the Universal Unit, or male principle in Nature, and number O the feminine symbol Chaos, the Deep, the two forming thus the symbol of Androgyne nature as well as the full value of the solar year, which was also the value of Jehovah and Enoch. Ten, with Pythagoras, was the symbol of the Universe; also of Enos, the Son of Seth, or the “Son of Man” who stands as the symbol of the solar year of 365 days, and whose years are therefore given as 365 also. In the Egyptian Symbology Abraxas was the Sun, the “Lord of the Heavens.”

The circle is the symbol of the one Unmanifesting Principle, the plane of whose figure is infinitude eternally, and this is crossed by a diameter only during Manvantaras.

203.
I. Cor., ii. 6-8.
204.
Compare Taylor's Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries.
205.
Isis Unveiled, ii. 89.
206.
Op. cit., ii. 395.
207.
Quoted by De Mirville, Op. cit., vi. 41 and 42.
208.
Mr. St. George Lane-Fox has admirably expressed the idea in his eloquent appeal to the many rival schools and societies in India. “I feel sure,” he said, “that the prime motive, however dimly perceived, by which you, as the promoters of these movements, were actuated, was a revolt against the tyrannical and almost universal establishment throughout all existing social and so-called religious institutions of a usurped authority in some external form supplanting and obscuring the only real and ultimate authority, the indwelling spirit of truth revealed to each individual soul, true conscience in fact, that supreme source of all human wisdom and power which elevates man above the level of the brute.” (To the Members of the Ârya Samâj, the Theosophical Society, Brahmo and Hindu Samâj and other Religious and Progressive Societies in India.)
209.
Revelation, ii. 6.
210.
This “art” is not common jugglery, as some define it now: it is a kind of psychological jugglery, if jugglery at all, where fascination and glamour are used as means of producing illusions. It is hypnotism on a large scale.
211.
The author asserts in this his Christian persuasion.
212.
Magnetic passes, evidently, followed by a trance and sleep.
213.
“Elementals” used by the highest Adept to do mechanical, not intellectual work, as a physicist uses gases and other compounds.
214.
Quoted from De Mirville, op. cit., vi. 43.
215.
Ibid., vi. 45.
216.
Ibid., p. 46.
217.
Amédée Fleury, Rapports de St. Paul avec Sénèque, ii. 100. The whole of this is summarised from De Mirville.
218.
But we can never agree with the author “that rites and ritual and formal worship and prayers are of the absolute necessity of things,” for the external can develop and grow and receive worship only at the expense of, and to the detriment of, the internal, the only real and true.
219.
H. Jennings, op. cit., pp. 37, 38.
220.
See Isis Unveiled, ii. 574.
221.
xi. 26.
222.
Art., by Dr. A. Wilder, in Evolution.
223.
Op. cit., p. 262.
224.
In its most extensive meaning, the Sanskrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply “revelation,” by no human agent, but through the “receiving of the sacred drink.” In India the initiated received the “Soma,” sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brâhmanical Vaidic rites, and the latter from the Ante-Vaidic religious Mysteries—primitive Wisdom Philosophy.
225.
It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John, but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neoplatonic school.
226.
Ibid., loc. cit. The fact that Peter persecuted the “Apostle to the Gentiles” under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the “antithesis of the Gnosis” (1. Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
227.
Taylor's Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, Wilder's ed., p. x.
228.
ii. 91-94.
229.
Bunsen, Egypt's Place in History, v. 90.
230.
Ibid.
231.
Stele, p. 44.
232.
See Dowson's Hindu Classical Dict., sub voc., “Pîtha-sthânaru.”
233.
See Preface to St. Matthew's Gospel, Baronius, i. 752, quoted in De Mirville, vi. 63. Jerome is the Father who having found the authentic and original Evangel (the Hebrew text), by Matthew the Apostle-publican, in the library of Cæsarea, “written by the hand of Matthew” (Hieronymus: De Viris, Illust. Chap. iii.)—as he himself admits—set it down as heretical, and substituted for it his own Greek text. And it is also he who perverted the text in the Book of Job to enforce belief in the resurrection in flesh (see Isis Unveiled, Vol. ii. pp. 181 and 182, et seq.), quoting in support the most learned authorities.
234.

De Mirville gives the following thrilling account of the “contest.”

“John, pressed, as St. Jerome tells us, by all the churches of Asia to proclaim more solemnly [in the face of the miracles of Apollonius] the divinity of Jesus Christ, after a long prayer with his disciples on the Mount of Patmos and being in ecstasy by the divine Spirit, made heard amid thunder and lightning his famous In Principio erat Verbum. When that sublime extasis, that caused him to be named the ‘Son of Thunder,’ had passed, Apollonius was compelled to retire and to disappear. Such was his defeat, less bloody but as hard as that of Simon, the Magician.” (“The Magician Theurgist,” vi. 63) For our part we have never heard of extasis producing thunder and lightning and we are at a loss to understand the meaning.

235.
This is the old, old story. Who of us, Theosophists, but knows by bitter personal experience what clerical hatred, malice and persecution can do in this direction; to what an extent of falsehood, calumny and cruelty these feelings can go, even in our modern day, and what exemplars of Christ-like charity His alleged and self-constituted servants have shown themselves to be!
236.
Isis Unveiled, ii. 342.
237.
Loc. cit., ii. 343, 344.
238.
Pneumatologie, vi. 62.
239.
Les Apologistes Chrétiens au Second Siècle, p. 106.
240.
Pneumatologie, vi, 62.
241.
Many are they who do not know: hence, they do not believe in them.
242.
Just so. Apollonius, during a lecture he was delivering at Ephesus before an audience of many thousands, perceived the murder of the Emperor Domitian in Rome and notified it at the very moment it was taking place, to the whole town; and Swedenborg, in the same manner, saw from Gothenburg the great fire at Stockholm and told it to his friends, no telegraph being in use in those days.
243.
No criterion at all. The Hindu Sâddhus and Adepts acquire the gift by the holiness of their lives. The Yoga-Vidyâ teaches it, and no “spirits” are required.
244.
As to the Pontiffs, the matter is rather doubtful.
245.
But this alone is no reason why people should believe in this class of spirits. There are better authorities for such belief.
246.
De Mirville's aim is to show that all such apparitions of the Manes or disembodied Spirits are the work of the Devil, “Satan's simulacra.”
247.
He might have added: like the great Shankarâchârya, Tsong-Kha-Pa, and so many other real Adepts—even his own Master, Jesus; for this is indeed a criterion of true Adeptship, though “to disappear” one need not fly up in the clouds.
248.
See Dion Cassius, XXVII. xviii. 2.
249.
Lampridius, Adrian, xxix. 2.
250.
The passage runs as follows: “Aurelian had determined to destroy Tyana, and the town owed its salvation only to a miracle of Apollonius; this man so famous and so wise, this great friend of the Gods, appeared suddenly before the Emperor, as he was returning to his tent, in his own figure and form, and said to him in the Pannonian language: ‘Aurelian, if thou wouldst conquer, abandon these evil designs against my fellow-citizens: if thou wouldst command, abstain from shedding innocent blood; and if thou wouldst live, abstain from injustice.’ Aurelian, familiar with the face of Apollonius, whose portraits he had seen in many temples, struck with wonder, immediately vowed to him (Apollonius) statue, portrait and temple, and returned completely to ideas of mercy.” And then Vopiscus adds: “If I have believed more and more in the virtues of the majestic Apollonius, it is because, after gathering my information from the most serious men, I have found all these facts corroborated in the Books of the Ulpian Library.” (See Flavius Vopiscus, Aurelianus). Vopiscus wrote in 250 and consequently preceded Philostratus by a century.
251.
Ep. ad Paulinum.
252.
The above is mostly summarised from De Mirville, loc. cit., pp. 66-69.
253.
A “true prophet” because an Initiate, one perfectly versed in Occult astronomy.
254.
Key to Hebrew-Egyptian Mystery, p. 259 et seq. Astronomy and physiology are the bodies, astrology and psychology their informing souls; the former being studied by the eye of sensual perception, the latter by the inner or “soul-eye”; and both are exact sciences.
255.
New Platonism and Alchemy, p. 12
256.
Heracles, 807.
257.
Æneid, viii., 274 ff.
258.
App., vii., p. 301.
259.
Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, ii. 88.
260.
(Hieronymus, De Viris Illust., iii.) “It is remarkable that, while all Church Fathers say that Matthew wrote in Hebrew, the whole of them use the Greek text as the genuine apostolic writing, without mentioning what relation the Hebrew Matthew has to our Greek one! It had many peculiar additions which are wanting in our (Greek) Evangel” (Olshausen, Nachweis der Echtheit der Sämmtlichen Schriften des Neuen Test., p. 32; Dunlap, Sôd, the Son of the Man, p. 44.)
261.
Commen. to Matthew (xii. 13) Book II. Jerome adds that it was written in the Chaldaic language, but with Hebrew letters.
262.
“St. Jerome,” v. 445; Dunlap, Sôd, the Son of Man, p. 46.
263.
This accounts also for the rejection of the works of Justin Martyr, who used only this “Gospel according to the Hebrews,” as also did most probably Tatian, his disciple. At what a late period the divinity of Christ was fully established we can judge by the mere fact that even in the fourth century Eusebius did not denounce this book as spurious, but only classed it with such as the Apocalypse of John; and Credner (Zur Gesch. des Kan, p. 120) shows Nicephorus inserting it, together with the Revelation, in his Stichometry, among the Antilegomena. The Ebionites, the genuine primitive Christians, rejecting the rest of the Apostolic writings, make use only of this Gospel (Adv. Hær., i. 26) and the Ebionites, as Epiphanius declares, firmly believed, with the Nazarenes, that Jesus was but a man, “of the seed of a man.”
264.
Isis Unveiled, ii. 182-3.
265.
Op. cit., ii. 5.
266.
See also Isis Unveiled, ii. 180, to end of chapter.
267.
Source of Measures, p. 299. This “stream of life” being emblematised in the Philloc basso-relievo just mentioned, by the water poured in the shape of a Cross on the initiated candidate by Osiris—Life and the Sun—and Mercury—Death. It was the finale of the rite of Initiation after the seven and the twelve tortures in the Crypts of Egypt were passed through successfully.
268.
Another untrustworthy, untruthful and ignorant writer, an ecclesiastical historian of the fifth century. His alleged history of the strife between the Pagans, Neoplatonists, and the Christians of Alexandria and Constantinople, which extends from the year 324 to 439, dedicated by him to Theodosius, the younger, is full of deliberate falsifications.
269.
Gems of the Orthodox Christians, vol. I., p. 135.
270.
Revelation, xiv. 1.
271.
A Dagoba is a small temple of globular form, in which are preserved the relics of Gautama.
272.
Prachidas are buildings of all sizes and forms, like our mausoleums, and are sacred to votive offerings to the dead.
273.
The Talmudistic records claim that, after having been hanged, he was lapidated and buried under the water at the junction of two streams. Mishna Sanhedrin, Vol. VI., p. 4; Talmud, of Babylon, same article, 43 a, 67 a.
274.
Coptic Legends of the Crucifixion, MSS. XI.
275.
We are at a loss to understand why King, in his Gnostic Gems, represents Solomon's Seal as a five-pointed star, whereas it is six-pointed, and is the signet of Vishnu in India.
276.
King (Gnostics) gives the figure of a Christian symbol, very common during the middle ages, of three fishes interlaced into a triangle, and having the FIVE letters (a most sacred Pythagorean number) ΙΧΘΥΣ engraved on it. The number five relates to the same kabalistic computation.
277.
Op. cit., ii., 253-256.
278.
Op. cit., 301. All this connects Jesus with great Initiates and solar heroes; all this is purely Pagan, under a newly-evolved variation, the Christian scheme.
279.
Op. cit., 296.
280.
Pp. 294, 295.
281.
P. 295
282.
Pp. 295, 296.
283.
Had we known the learned author before his book was printed, he might have been perchance prevailed upon to add a seventh link from which all others, far preceding those enumerated in point of time, and surpassing them in universally philosophical meaning, have been derived, aye, even to the great pyramid, whose foundation square was, in its turn, the great Âryan Mysteries.
284.
We would say cosmic Matter, Spirit, Chaos, and Divine Light, for the Egyptian idea was identical in this with the Âryan. However, the author is right with regard to the Occult Symbology of the Jews. They were a remarkably matter of fact, unspiritual people at all times; yet even with them “Ruach” was Divine Spirit, not “air.”
285.
Mr. Ralston Skinner shows that the symbol ☧, the crossed bones and skull, has the letter ק Koph, the half of the head behind the ears.
286.
Pp. 296-302. By these numbers, explains the author, “Eli is 113 (by placing the word in a circle); amah being 345, is by change of letters to suit the same value משת (in a circle) or Moses, while Sabachth is John or the dove, or Holy Spirit, because (in a circle) it is 710 (or 355 × 2). The termination ni, as meni or 5651, becomes Jehovah.”
287.
The Western personification of that power, which the Hindus call the Vija, the “one seed,” or Mahâ Vishnu—a power, not the God—or that mysterious Principle that contains in Itself the Seed of Avatârism.
288.
“Arise into Nervi from this decrepit body into which thou hast been sent. Ascend into thy former abode, O blessed Avatâr!”
289.
The Gnostics and their Remains, King, pp. 100, 101.
290.
Loc cit.
291.
Op. cit. 258.
292.
Homilies XIX., xx. 1.
293.
The Pleroma constituted the synthesis or entirety of all the spiritual entities. St. Paul still used the name in his Epistles.
294.
The “Comforter,” second Messiah, intercessor. “A term applied to the Holy Ghost.” Manes was the disciple of Terebinthus, an Egyptian Philosopher, who, according to the Christian Socrates (I. i., cited by Tillemont, iv. 584), “while invoking one day the demons of the air, fell from the roof of his house and was killed.”
295.
Cf. op. cit., vi. 169-183.
296.
“The great serpent placed to watch the temple,” comments De Mirville. “How often have we repeated that it was no symbol, no personification but really a serpent occupied by a god!”—he exclaims; and we answer that at Cairo in a Mussulman, not a heathen temple, we have seen, as thousands of other visitors have also seen, a huge serpent that lived there for centuries, we were told, and was held in great respect. Was it also “occupied by a God,” or possessed, in other words?
297.
The Mysteries of Demeter, or the “afflicted mother.”
298.
By the satyrs.
299.
This looks rather suspicious and seems interpolated. De Mirville tries to have what he says of Satan and his Court sending their imps on earth to tempt humanity and masquerade at séances, corroborated by the ex-sorcerer.
300.
This does not look like sinful food. It is the diet of Chelâs to this day.
301.
“Grafted” is the correct expression. “The seven Builders graft the divine and the beneficent forces on to the gross material nature of the vegetable and mineral kingdoms every Second Round”—says the Catechism of Lanoos.
302.
Only the Prince of the World is not Satan, as the translator would make us believe, but the collective Host of the Planetary. This is a little theological back-biting.
303.
Here the Elemental and Elementary Spirits are evidently meant.
304.
The reader has already learned the truth about them in the course of the present work.
305.
Pity the penitent Saint had not imparted his knowledge of the rotation of the earth and helio-centric system earlier to his Church. That might have saved more than one human life—that of Bruno for one.
306.
Chelâs in their trials of initiation, also see in trances artificially generated for them, the vision of the Earth supported by an elephant on the top of a tortoise standing on nothing—and this, to teach them to discern the true from the false.
307.
Relating to the days of the year, also to 7 × 7 divisions of the earth's sublunary sphere, divided into seven upper and seven lower spheres with their respective Planetary Hosts or “armies.”
308.
Daimon is not “demon,” as translated by De Mirville, but Spirit.
309.
All this is to corroborate his dogmatic assertions that Pater Æther or Jupiter is Satan! and that pestilential diseases, cataclysms, and even thunderstorms that prove disastrous, come from the Satanic Host dwelling in Ether—a good warning to the men of Science!
310.
The translator replaces the word Mediators by mediums, excusing himself in a foot-note by saying that Cyprian must have meant modern mediums!
311.
Cyprianus simply meant to hint at the rites and mysteries of Initiation, and the pledge of secresy and oaths that bound the Initiates together. His translator, however, has made a Witches' Sabbath of it instead.
312.
“Twelve centuries later, in full renaissance and reform, the world saw Luther do the same [embrace the Devil he means?]—according to his own confession and in the same conditions,” explains De Mirville in a foot-note, showing thereby the brotherly love that binds Christians. Now Cyprianus meant by the Devil (if the word is really in the original text) his Initiator and Hierophant. No Saint—even a penitent Sorcerer—would be so silly as to speak of his (the Devil's) rising from his seat to see him to the door, were it otherwise.
313.
Every Adept has “a principality after his death.”
314.
Which shows that it was the Hierophant and his disciples. Cyprianus shows himself as grateful as most of the other converts (the modern included) to his Teachers and Instructors.
315.
This is proved if we take but a single recorded instance. J. Picus de Mirandola, finding that there was more Christianity than Judaism in the Kabalah, and discovering in it the doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Divinity of Jesus, etc., wound up his proofs of this with a challenge to the world at large from Rome. As Ginsburg shows: “In 1486, when only twenty-four years old, he [Picus] published nine hundred [Kabalistic] theses, which were placarded in Rome, and undertook to defend them in the presence of all European scholars whom he invited to the Eternal City, promising to defray their travelling expenses.”
316.
This account is summarised from Isaac Myer's Qabbalah, p. 10, et seq.
317.
There is not in the decalogue one idea that is not the counterpart, or the paraphrase, of the dogmas and ethics current among the Egyptians long before the time of Moses and Aaron. (The Mosaic Law a transcript from Egyptian Sources; vide Geometry in Religion, 1890.)
318.
Book of God. Kenealy, p. 383. The reference to Klaproth is also from this page.
319.
See Asiat. Jour., N.S. vii., p. 275, quoted by Kenealy.
320.
Book of God, loc. cit.
321.
Op. cit., v. 15.
322.
Prolegomena, iii. 13, quoted by Kenealy, p. 385.
323.
See Book of God, p. 385. “Care should be taken,” says Butler (quoted by Kenealy, p. 489), “to distinguish between the Pentateuch in the Hebrew language but in the letters of the Samaritan alphabet, and the version of the Pentateuch in the Samaritan language. One of the most important differences between the Samaritan and the Hebrew text respects the duration of the period between the deluge and the birth of Abraham. The Samaritan text makes it longer by some centuries than the Hebrew text; and the Septuagint makes it longer by some centuries than the Samaritan.” It is observable that in the authentic translation of the Latin Vulgate, the Roman Church follows the computation expressed in the Hebrew text; and in her Martyrology follows that of the Seventy, both texts being inspired, as she claims.
324.
See Rev. Joseph Wolff's Journal, p. 200.
325.
A tree is symbolically a book—as “pillar” is another synonym of the same.
326.
The wife of Moses, one of the seven daughters of a Midian priest, is called Zipora. It was Jethro, the priest of Midian, who initiated Moses, Zipora, one of the seven daughters, being simply one of the seven Occult powers that the Hierophant was and is supposed to pass to the initiated novice.
327.
See for these details the Book of God, pp. 244, 250.
328.
Op. cit. v. 85.
329.
As is fully shown in the Source of Measures and other works.
330.
Surely even Masons would never claim the actual existence of Solomon? As Kenealy shows, he is not noticed by Herodotus, nor by Plato, nor by any writer of standing. It is most extraordinary, he says, “that the Jewish nation, over whom but a few years before the mighty Solomon had reigned in all his glory, with a magnificence scarcely equalled by the greatest monarchs, spending nearly eight thousand millions of gold on a temple, was overlooked by the historian Herodotus, writing of Egypt on the one hand, and of Babylon on the other—visiting both places, and of course passing almost necessarily within a few miles of the splendid capital of the national Jerusalem? How can this be accounted for?” he asks (p. 457). Nay, not only are there no proofs of the twelve tribes of Israel having ever existed, but Herodotus, the most accurate of historians, who was in Assyria when Ezra flourished, never mentions the Israelites at all; and Herodotus was born in 484 b.c. How is this?
331.
Clement, Stromateis, xxii.
332.
Book of God, p. 408.
333.
Book of God, p. 453.
334.
Asiatic Journal, vii., p. 275, quoted by Kenealy.
335.
Book of God, p. 385.
336.
Speaking of the hidden meaning of the Sanskrit words, Mr. T. Subba Row, in his able article on “The Twelve Signs of the Zodiac,” gives some advice as to the way in which one should proceed to find out “the deep significance of ancient Sanskrit nomenclature in the old Âryan myths. 1. Find out the synonyms of the word used which have other meanings. 2. Find out the numerical value of the letters composing the word according to the methods of the ancient Tântrik works [Tântrika Shâstra—works on Incantation and Magic]. 3. Examine the ancient myths or allegories, if there are any, which have any special connection with the word in question. 4. Permute the different syllables composing the word and examine the new combinations that will thus be formed and their meanings,” etc. But he does not give the principal rule. And no doubt he is quite right. The Tântrika Shâstras are as old as Magic itself. Have they also borrowed their Esotericism from the Hebrews?
337.
Their founder, Sadoc, was the pupil, through Antigonus Saccho, of Simon the Just. They had their own secret Book of the Law ever since the foundation of their sect (about 400 b.c.) and this volume was unknown to the masses. At the time of the Separation the Samaritans recognised only the Book of the Law of Moses and the Book of Joshua, and their Pentateuch is far older, and is different from the Septuagint. In 168 b.c. Jerusalem had its temple plundered, and its Sacred Books—namely, the Bible made up by Ezra and finished by Judas Maccabeus—were lost (see Burder's Josephus, vol. ii. pp. 331-335); after which the Massorah completed the work of destruction (even of Ezra's once-more adjusted Bible) begun by the change into square from horned letters. Therefore the later Pentateuch accepted by the Pharisees was rejected and laughed at by the Sadducees. They are generally called atheists; yet, since those learned men, who made no secret of their freethought, furnished from among their number the most eminent of the Jewish high-priests, this seems impossible. How could the Pharisees and the other two believing and pious sects allow notorious atheists to be selected for such posts? The answer is difficult to find for bigotry and for believers in a personal, anthropomorphic God, but very easy for those who accept facts. The Sadducees were called atheists because they believed as the initiated Moses believed, thus differing very widely from the latter made-up Jewish legislator and hero of Mount Sinai.
338.
The measurements of the Great Pyramid being those of the temple of Solomon, of the Ark of the Covenant, etc., according to Piazzi Smythe and the author of the Source of Measures, and the Pyramid of Gizeh being shown on astronomical calculations to have been built 4950 b.c., and Moses having written his books—for the sake of argument—not even half that time before our era, how can this be? Surely if any one borrowed from the other, it is not the Pharaohs from Moses. Even philology shows not only the Egyptian, but even the Mongolian, older than the Hebrew.
339.
This alone shows how the Books of Moses were tampered with. In Samuel (ix. 9), it is said: “He that is now a prophet [Nabhi] was beforetime called a Seer [Roch].” Now since before Samuel, the word “Roch” is met nowhere in the Pentateuch, but its place is always taken by that of “Nabhi,” this proves clearly that the Mosaic text has been replaced by that of the later Levites. (See for fuller details Jewish Antiquities, by the Rev. D. Jennings, D.D.)
340.
Zohar, i, 2a.
341.
Zohar, 42b.
342.
Zohar, i, 2a. See Dr. Ch. Ginsburg's essay on The Cabbalah, its Doctrines, Developments and Literature.
343.
Cudworth, I. iii, quoted by Wilson, Vishnu Purâna, i. 14, note.
344.
Vishnu Purâna, i. 14.
345.
Stanza i, 4.
346.
Mishna, i. 9.
347.
In its manifested state it becomes Ten, the Universe. In the Chaldæan Kabalah it is sexless. In the Jewish, Shekinah is female, and the early Christians and Gnostics regarded the Holy Ghost as a female potency. In the Book of Numbers “Shekina” is made to drop the final “h” that makes it a feminine name. Nârâyana, the Mover on the Waters, is also sexless; but it is our firm belief that Shekinah and Daiviprakriti, the “Light of the Logos,” are one and the same thing philosophically.
348.
The Elohim create the Adam of dust, and in him Jehovah-Binah separates himself into Eve, after which the male portion of God becomes the Serpent, tempts himself in Eve, then creates himself in her as Cain, passes into Seth, and scatters from Enoch, the Son of Man, or Humanity, as Jodheva.
349.
The Source of Measures, p. 8.
350.
This identifies Sephira, the third potency, with Jehovah the Lord, who says to Moses out of the burning bush: “(Here) I am.” (Exodus, iii, 4.) At this time the “Lord” had not yet become Jehovah. It was not the one Male God who spoke, but the Elohim manifested, or the Sephiroth in their manifested collectivity of seven, contained in the triple Sephira.
351.
The Brâhmans were wise in their generation when they gradually, for no other reason than this, abandoned Brahmâ, and paid less attention to him individually than to any other deity. As an abstract synthesis they worshipped him collectively and in every God, each of which represents him. As Brahmâ, the male, he is far lower than Shiva, the Lingam, who personates universal generation, or Vishnu, the preserver—both Shiva and Vishnu being the regenerators of life after destruction. The Christians might do worse than follow their example, and worship God in Spirit, and not in the male Creator.
352.
A plural word, signifying a collective host generically; literally, the “strong lion.”
353.
The writer possesses only a few extracts, some dozen pages in all, verbatim quotations from that priceless work, of which but two or three copies, perhaps, are still extant.
354.
Aye; but that spirituality can never be discovered, far less proved, unless we turn to the Âryan Scriptures and Symbology. For the Jews it was lost, save for the Sadducees, from the day that the “chosen people” reached the Promised Land, the national Karma preventing Moses from reaching it.
355.
Op. cit., pp. 317-319.
356.
The Book of God, pp. 388, 389.
357.
See Horne's Introduction (10th edition), vol. ii, p. 33, as quoted by Dr. Kenealy, p. 389.
358.
See Horne's Introduction (10th edition), vol. ii, p. 33, as quoted by Dr. Kenealy, p. 389.
359.
The author says that Parker's quadrature is “that identical measure which was used anciently as the perfect measure, by the Egyptians, in the construction of the Great Pyramid, which was built to monument it and its uses,” and that “from it the sacred cubit-value was derived, which was the cubit-value used in the construction of the Temple of Solomon, the Ark of Noah, and the Ark of the Covenant” (p. 22). This is a grand discovery, no doubt, but it only shows that the Jews profited well by their captivity in Egypt, and that Moses was a great Initiate.
360.
See Theosophist, November, 1879, art. “Hindu Music,” p. 47.
361.
The Sanskrit letters are far more numerous than the poor twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. They are all musical, and they are read—or rather chanted—according to a system given in very old Tântrika works, and are called Devanâgarî, the speech, or language, of the Gods. And since each letter answers to a numeral, the Sanskrit affords a far larger scope for expression, and it must necessarily be far more perfect than the Hebrew, which followed the same system but could apply it only in a very limited way. If either of these two languages, were taught to humanity by the Gods, surely it would more likely be the Sanskrit, the perfect form of the most perfect language on earth, than the Hebrew, the roughest and the poorest. For once anyone believes in a language of divine origin, he can hardly believe at the same time that Angels or Gods or any divine Messengers have had to develop it from a rough monosyllabic form into a perfect one, as we see in terrestrial linguistic evolution.
362.
In the first chapter of Genesis the word “God” represents the Elohim—Gods in the plural, not one God. This is a cunning and dishonest translation. For the whole Kabalah explains sufficiently that the Alhim (Elohim) are seven; each creates one of the seven things enumerated in the first chapter, and these answer allegorically to the seven creations. To make this clear, count the verses in which it is said “And God saw that it was good,” and you will find that this is said seven times—in verses 4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, and 31. And though the compilers cunningly represent the creation of man as occurring on the sixth day, yet, having made man “male and female in the image of God,” the Seven Elohim repeat the sacramental sentence, “It was good,” for the seventh time, thus making of man the seventh creation, and showing the origin of this bit of cosmogony to be in the Hindu creations. The Elohim are, of course, the seven Egyptian Khnûmû, the “assistant-architects”; the seven Amshaspends of the Zoroastrians; the Seven Spirits subordinate to Ildabaoth of the Nazareans; the seven Prajâpati of the Hindus, etc.
363.
Gen., ii. 21, 22.
364.
Op. cit., p. 395, note.
365.
The seventh esoterically, exoterically the sixth.
366.
Contra Hereses, I, xviii, 2.
367.
Op. cit. by Gerald Massey, p. 19.
368.
Op cit., p. 278.
369.
The Hebrew and other Creations: with a reply to Professor A. H. Sayce, p. 19.
370.
Op. cit., p. 243.
371.
When they are the Anupâdakas (Parentless) of the Secret Doctrine. See Stanzas, i, 9, Vol. i, 56.
372.
These originated with the Âryans, who placed therein their “bright-crested” (Chitra-Shikhandan) Seven Rishis. But all this is far more Occult than appears on the surface.
373.
Op. cit., pp. 19-22.
374.
Vishnu Purâna, Wilson's Trans., i, 101. The period of these Kumâras is Pre-Adamic, i.e., before the separation of sexes, and before humanity had received the creative, or sacred, fire of Prometheus.
375.
The Secret Doctrine says that this was the second creation, not the first, and that it took place during the Third Race, when men separated, i.e., began to be born as distinct men and women. See Vol. ii. of this work, Stanzas and Commentaries.
376.
This is a Western mangling of the Indian doctrine of the Kumâras.
377.
He was regarded by several Gnostic sects as one with Jehovah. See Isis Unveiled, vol. ii. p. 184.
378.
Or “man, son of man.” The Church found in this a prophecy and a confession of Christ, the “Son of Man!”
379.
See Stanza ii. 5, Secret Doctrine, ii. 16.
380.
Op. cit., pp. 23, 24.
381.
The Sepher Jetzirah now known is but a portion of the original one incorporated in the Chaldæan Book of Numbers. The fragment now in possession of the Western Kabalists is one greatly tampered with by the Rabbis of the Middle Ages, as its masoretic points show. The “Masorah” scheme is a modern blind, dating after our era and perfected in Tiberias. (See Isis Unveiled, vol. ii, pp. 430-431.)
382.
In the oldest symbolism—that used in the Egyptian hieroglyphics—when the bull's head only is found it means the Deity, the Perfect Circle, with the procreative power latent in it. When the whole bull is represented, a solar God, a personal deity is meant, for it is then the symbol of the acting generative power.
383.
It took three Root-Races to degrade the symbol of the One Abstract Unity manifested in Nature as a Ray emanating from infinity (the Circle) into a phallic symbol of generation, as it was even in the Kabalah. This degradation began with the Fourth Race, and had its raison d'etre, in Polytheism, as the latter was invented to screen the One Universal Deity from profanation. The Christians may plead ignorance of its meaning as an excuse for its acceptance. But why sing never-ceasing laudations to the Mosaic Jews who repudiated all the other Gods, preserved the most phallic, and then most impudently proclaimed themselves Monotheists? Jesus ever steadily ignored Jehovah. He went against the Mosaic commandments. He recognized his Heavenly Father alone, and prohibited public worship.
384.
Is it everything to have found out that the celestial circle of 360° is determined by “the full word-form of Elohim,” and that this yields, when the word is placed in a circle, “3.1415, or the relation of circumference to a diameter of one.” This is only its astronomical or mathematical aspect. To know the full septenary significance of the “Primordial Circle,” the pyramid and the Kabalistic Bible must be read in the light of the figure on which the temples of India are built. The mathematical squaring of the circle is only the terrestrial résumé of the problem. The Jews were content with the six days of activity and the seventh of rest. The progenitors of mankind solved the greatest problems of the Universe with their seven Rays or Rishis.
385.
Genesis begins with the third stage of “creation,” skipping the preliminary two.
386.
The three root-principles are, exoterically: Man, Soul, and Spirit (meaning by “man” the intelligent personality), and esoterically: Life, Soul, and Spirit; the four vehicles are Body, Astral double, Animal (or human) Soul, and Divine Soul (Sthûla-Sharîra, Linga-Sharîra, Kâma-rûpa, and Buddhi, the vehicle of Âtma or Spirit). Or, to make it still clearer: (1) the Seventh Principle has for its vehicle the Sixth (Buddhi); (2) the vehicle of Manas is Kâma-rûpa; (3) that of Jîva or Prâna (life) is the Linga-Sharîra (the “double” of man; the Linga-Sharîra proper can never leave the body till death; that which appears is an astral body, reflecting the physical body and serving as a vehicle for the human soul, or intelligence); and (4) the Body, the physical vehicle of all the above collectively. The Occultist recognizes the same order as existing for the cosmical totality, the psycho-cosmical Universe.
387.
St. Denys, the Areopagite, the supposed contemporary of St. Paul, his co-disciple, and first Bishop of St. Denis, near Paris, teaches that the bulk of the “work of creation” was performed by the “Seven Spirits of the Presence”—God's co-operators, owing to a participation of the divinity in them. (Hierarch., p. 196.) And Saint Augustine also thinks that “things were rather created in the angelic minds than in Nature, that is to say, that the angels perceived and knew them (all things) in their thoughts before they could spring forth into actual existence.” (Vid. De Genesis ad Litteram p. II.) (Summarized from De Mirville, Vol. II., pp. 337-338.) Thus the early Christian Fathers, even a non-initiate like St. Augustine, ascribed the creation of the visible world to Angels, or Secondary Powers, while St. Denys not only specifies these as the “Seven Spirits of the Presence,” but shows them owing their power to the informing divine energy—Fohat in the Secret Doctrine. But the egotistical darkness which caused the Western races to cling so desperately to the Geo-centric System, made them also neglect and despise all those fragments of the true Religion which would have deprived them and the little globe they took for the centre of the Universe of the signal honour of having been expressly “created” by the One, Secondless, Infinite God!
388.
De Mirville, ii. 295.
389.

To the Occultist and Chelâ the difference made between Energy and Emanation need not be explained. The Sanskrit word “Sakti” is untranslatable. It may be Energy, but it is one that proceeds through itself, not being due to the active or conscious will of the one that produces it. The “First-Born,” or Logos, is not an Emanation, but an Energy inherent in and co-eternal with Parabrahman, the One. The Zohar speaks of emanations, but reserves the word for the seven Sephiroth emanated from the first three—which form one triad—Kether, Chokmah, and Binah. As for these three, it explains the difference by calling them “immanations,” something inherent to and coëval with the subject postulated, or in other words, “Energies.”

It is these “Auxiliaries,” the Auphanim, the half-human Prajâpatis, the Angels, the Architects under the leadership of the “Angel of the Great Council,” with the rest of the Kosmos-Builders of other nations, that can alone explain the imperfection of the Universe. This imperfection is one of the arguments of the Secret Science in favour of the existence and activity of these “Powers.” And who know better than the few philosophers of our civilised lands how near the truth Philo was in ascribing the origin of evil to the admixture of inferior potencies in the arrangement of matter, and even in the formation of man—a task entrusted to the divine Logos.

390.
Psalms cxxxv. 5.
391.
Psalms xcvi. 5.
392.
Rather as Ormazd or Ahura-Mazda, Vit-nam-Ahmi, and all the unmanifested Logoi. Jehovah is the manifested Virâj, corresponding to Binah, the third Sephira in the Kabalah, a female Power which would find its prototype rather in the Prajâpati, than in Brahmâ, the Creator.
393.
Neith is Aditi, evidently.
394.
The Self-created Logos, Nârâyana, Purushottama, and others.
395.
Mère d'Apis, pp. 32-35. Quoted by De Mirville.
396.
See Republic, I. vi.
397.
Harmonie entre l'Église et la Synagogue, t. II., p. 427, by the Chevalier Drach. See De Mirville iv. 38, 39.
398.
Julian died for the same crime as Socrates. Both divulged a portion of the solar mystery, the heliocentric system being only a part of what was given during Initiation—one consciously, the other unconsciously, the Greek Sage never having been initiated. It was not the real solar system that was preserved in such secrecy, but the mysteries connected with the Sun's constitution. Socrates was sentenced to death by earthly and worldly judges; Julian died a violent death because the hitherto protecting hand was withdrawn from him, and, no longer shielded by it, he was simply left to his destiny or Karma. For the student of Occultism there is a suggestive difference between the two kinds of death. Another memorable instance of the unconscious divulging of secrets pertaining to mysteries is that of the poet, P. Ovidius Naso, who, like Socrates, had not been initiated. In his case, the Emperor Augustus, who was an Initiate, mercifully changed the penalty of death into banishment to Tomos on the Euxine. This sudden change from unbounded royal favour to banishment has been a fruitful scheme of speculation to classical scholars not initiated into the Mysteries. They have quoted Ovid's own lines to show that it was some great and heinous immorality of the Emperor of which Ovid had become unwillingly cognizant. The inexorable law of the death penalty, always following upon the revelation of any portion of the Mysteries to the profane, was unknown to them. Instead of seeing the amiable and merciful act of the Emperor in its true light, they have made it an occasion for traducing his moral character. The poet's own words can be no evidence, because as he was not an Initiate, it could not be explained to him in what his offence consisted. There have been comparatively modern instances of poets unconsciously revealing in their verses so much of the hidden knowledge as to make even Initiates suppose them to be fellow-Initiates, and come to talk to them on the subject. This only shows that the sensitive poetic temperament is sometimes so far transported beyond the bounds of ordinary sense as to get glimpses into what has been impressed on the Astral Light. In the Light of Asia there are two passages that might make an Initiate of the first degree think that Mr. Edwin Arnold had been initiated himself in the Himâlyan âshrams, but this is not so.
399.
A proof that Julian was acquainted with the heliocentric system.
400.
La Gravitation par l'Electricité, p. 7, quoted by De Mirville; iv. 156.
401.
De Mirville, iv. 157.
402.
Memoir on the Solar System, p. 7, De Mirville, iv. 157.
403.
Essai sur l' Identité des Agents Producteurs du Son, de la Lumière, etc., p. 15, Ibid.
404.
Ibid., p. 218.
405.
Summarised from Ibid., p. 213. De Mirville, iv. 158.
406.
May, 1855. Ibid., p. 139.
407.
La Terre et notre Système solaire. De Mirville, iv. 139.
408.
If, as Sir W. Herschel thought, the so-called fixed stars have resulted from, and owe their origin to nebular combustion, they cannot be fixed any more than is our sun, which was believed to be motionless and is now found to rotate around its axis every twenty-five days. As the fixed star nearest to the sun, however, is eight-thousand times farther away from him than is Neptune, the illusions furnished by the telescopes must be also eight-thousand times as great. We will therefore leave the question at rest, repeating only what A. Maury said in his work (La Terre et l'Homme, published in 1858): “It is utterly impossible, so far, to decide anything concerning Neptune's constitution, analogy alone authorising us to ascribe to him a rotary motion like that of other planets” (De Mirville, iv. 140).
409.
Exposition du vrai Système du Monde, p. 282.
410.
See the passage quoted by Herschel in Natural Philosophy, p. 165. De Mirville, iv. 105.
411.
Loc. cit.
412.
Terre et Ciel, p. 28. Ibid.
413.
Œuvres d'Arago, vol. i., p. 219; quoted by De Mirville, iii. 462.
414.

“Die Sterne sind vielleicht ein Sitz verklarter Geister;
Wie hier das Laster herrscht, ist dort die Tugend Meister.”

415.
Op. cit., p. 411.
416.
Whenever Occult doctrines were expounded in the pages of The Theosophist, care was taken each time to declare a subject incomplete when the whole could not be given in its fulness, and no writer has ever tried to mislead the reader. As to the Western “ranges of perception” concerning doctrines really Occult, the Eastern Occultists have been made acquainted with them for some time past. Thus they are enabled to assert with confidence that the West may be in possession of Hermetic philosophy as a speculative system of dialectics, the latter being used in the West admirably well, but it lacks entirely the knowledge of Occultism. The genuine Eastern Occultist keeps silent and unknown, never publishes what he knows, and rarely even speaks of it, as he knows too well the penalty of indiscretion.
417.
See The Royal Masonic Cyclopædia, art. “Sepher Jetzirah.”
418.
In the exoteric sense, the Mantra (or that psychic faculty or power that conveys perception or thought) is the older portion of the Vedas, the second part of which is composed of the Brâhmanas. In Esoteric phraseology Mantra is the Word made flesh, or rendered objective, through divine magic.
419.
The secret meaning of the word “Brahmâ” is “expansion,” “increase,” or “growth.”
420.
Why not give at once its theological meaning, as we find it in Webster? With the Roman Catholics it means simply “purgatory,” the borderland between heaven and hell (Limbus patrum and Limbus infantum), the one for all men, whether good, bad or indifferent; the other for the souls of unbaptized children! With the ancients it meant simply that which in Esoteric Buddhism is called the Kâma Loka, between Devachan and Avitchi.
421.
As Chaos, the eternal Element, not as the Kâma Loka surely.
422.
A proof that by this word Éliphas Lévi means the lowest region of the terrestrial Âkâsha.
423.
Evidently he is concerned only with our periodical world, or the terrestrial globe.
424.
In the “reäwakening” of the Forces would be more correct.
425.
An action which is incessant in eternity cannot be called “creation;” it is evolution, and the eternally or ever-becoming of the Greek Philosopher and the Hindu Vedântin; it is the Sat and the one Beingness of Parmenides, or the Being identical with Thought. Now how can the Potencies be said to “create movement,” once it is seen movement never had any beginning, but existed in the Eternity? Why not say that the reawakened Potencies transferred motion from the eternal to the temporal plane of being? Surely this is not Creation.
426.
Histoire de la Magie. Int., p. 1.
427.
Histoire de la Magie. Int., p. 2.
428.
The Vaishnavas, who regard Vishnu as the Supreme God and the fashioner of the Universe, claim that Brahmâ sprang from the navel of Vishnu, the “imperishable,” or rather from the lotus that grew from it. But the “navel” here means the Central Point, the mathematical symbol of infinitude, or Parabrahman, the One and the Secondless.
429.
Ecclesiastes, i. 12, 13.
430.
It is probably needless to say here what everyone knows. The translation of the Protestant Bible is not a word for word rendering of the earlier Greek and Latin Bibles: the sense is very often disfigured, and “God” is put where “Jahve” and “Elohim” stand.
431.
Psalms, civ. 2, 3.
432.
To avoid misunderstanding of the word “creation” so often used by us, the remarks of the author of Through the Gates of Gold may be quoted owing to their clearness and simplicity. “The words ‘to create’ are often understood by the ordinary mind to convey the idea of evolving something out of nothing. This is clearly not its meaning. We are mentally obliged to provide our Creator with chaos from which to produce the worlds. The tiller of the soil, who is the typical producer of social life, must have his material: his earth, his sky, rain and sun, and the seeds to place within the earth. Out of nothing he can produce nothing. Out of a void nature cannot arise; there is that material beyond, behind, or within, from which she is shaped by our desire for a Universe.” (P. 72.)
433.
Commentary on Stanza ix. on Cycles.
434.
Or, read from right to left, the letters and their corresponding numerals stand thus: “t,” 4; “h,” 5; “bh,” 2; “v,” 6; “v,” 6; “h,” 5; “v” or “w,” 6; which yields “thuvbhu,” 4566256, or “Tohu-vah-bohu.”
435.
Mr. Ralston Skinner's MSS.
436.
That the teraphim was a statue, and no small article either, is shown in Samuel xix., where Michal takes a teraphim (“image,” as it is translated) and puts it in bed to represent David, her husband, who ran away from Saul (see verse 13, et seq.). It was thus of the size and shape of a human figure—a statue or real idol.
437.
Op. cit., iii. 4
438.
Louis de Dieu, Genesis, xxxi. 19. See De Mirville, iii. 257.
439.
“The teraphim of Abram's father, Terah, the ‘maker of images,’ were the Kabeiri Gods, and we see them worshipped by Micah, by the Danites, and others. (Judges, xvii.-xviii., etc.) Teraphim were identical with seraphim, and these were serpent images, the origin of which is in the Sanskrit ‘Sarpa’ (the ‘serpent’) a symbol sacred to all the deities as a symbol of immortality. Kiyun, or the God Kivan, worshipped by the Hebrews in the wilderness, is Shiva, the Hindu Saturn. (The Zendic ‘h’ is ‘s’ in India; thus, ‘Hapta’ is ‘Sapta;’ ‘Hindu’ is ‘Sindbaya.’ (A. Wilder)) ‘The “s” continually softens to “h” from Greece to Calcutta, from the Caucasus to Egypt,’ says Dunlap. Therefore the letters ‘k,’ ‘h,’ and ‘s’ are interchangeable. The Greek story shows that Dardanus, the Arcadian, having received them as a dowry, carried them to Samothrace, and thence to Troy; and they were worshipped long before the days of glory of Tyre or Sidon, though the former had been built 2760 b.c. From where did Dardanus derive them?” Isis Unveiled, i. 570.
440.
Maimon, More Nevochim, III. xxx.
441.
Those dedicated to the sun were made in gold, and those to the moon in silver.
442.
De Diis Syriis, Teraph. II. Syat, p. 31.
443.
Those that the Kabalists call elementary spirits are sylphs, gnomes, undines and salamanders, nature-spirits, in short. The spirits of the angels formed a distinct class.
444.
Œdipus, ii. 444.
445.
Op. cit., xxv. 22 et seq.
446.
The ephod was a linen garment worn by the high priest, but as the thummim was attached to it, the entire paraphernalia of divination was often comprised in that single word, ephod. See I. Sam., xxviii. 6, and xxx. 7, 8.
447.
Paganism and Judaism, iv. 197.
448.
Op. cit., I. vi. 5.
449.
Discourse to the Gentiles, p. 146.
450.
De Gener., I, II. iv.
451.
See Cosmos, by Ménage, I., vi., § 101.
452.
Op. cit., I. ii.
453.
“The characters employed on those parchments,” writes De Mirville, “are sometimes hieroglyphics, placed perpendicularly, a kind of lineary tachygraphy (abridged characters), where the image is often reduced to a simple stroke; at other times placed in horizontal lines; then the hieratic or sacred writing, going from right to left as in all Semitic languages; lastly, the characters of the country, used for official documents, mostly contracts, etc., but which since the Ptolemies has been also adopted for the monuments,” v. 81, 82. A copy of the Harris papyrus, translated by Chabas—Papyrus magique—may be studied at the British Museum.
454.
And what of the “Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin,” the words that “the fingers of a man's hand,” whose body and arm remained invisible, wrote on the walls of Belshazzar's palace? (Daniel, v.) What of the writings of Simon the Magician, and the magic characters on the walls and in the air of the crypts of Initiation, without mentioning the tables of stone on which the finger of God wrote the commandments? Between the writing of one God and other Gods the difference, if any, lies only in their respective natures; and if the tree is to be known by its fruits, then preference would have to be given always to the Pagan Gods. It is the immortal “To be or not to be.” Either all of them are—or at any rate, may be—true, or all are surely pious frauds and the result of credulity.
455.
Papyrus Magique, p. 186.
456.
See Maspero's Guide to the Bulak Museum, among others.
457.
De Mirville (from whom much of the preceding is taken), v. 81, 85.
458.
See De Mirville, v. 84, 85.
459.
One sees this difficulty arise even with a perfectly known language like Sanskrit, the meaning of which is far easier to comprehend than the hieratic writings of Egypt. Everyone knows how hopelessly the Sanskritists are often puzzled over the real meaning and how they fail in rendering the meaning correctly in their respective translations, in which one Orientalist contradicts the other.
460.
Op. cit., i. 297.
461.
Book II., Commentary.
462.
Bunsen and Champollion so declare, and Dr. Carpenter says that the Book of the Dead, sculptured on the oldest monuments, with “the very phrases we find in the New Testament in connection with the Day of Judgment ... was engraved probably 2,000 years before the time of Christ.” (See Isis Unveiled, i., 518.)
463.
De Mirville, v. 88. Just such a calendar and horoscope interdictions exist in India in our day, as well as in China and all the Buddhist countries.
464.
See De Mirville, iii. 65.
465.
Pap. Mag., p. 163.
466.
Ibid., p. 168.
467.
Maimonides in his Treatise on Idolatry says, speaking of the Jewish teraphim: “They talked with men.” To this day Christian Sorcerers in Italy, and negro Voodoos at New Orleans fabricate small wax figures in the likeness of their victims, and transpierce them with needles, the wound, as on the teraphim or Menh, being repercussed on the living, often killing them. Mysterious deaths are still many, and not all are traced to the guilty hand.
468.
The Ramses of Lepsius, who reigned some 1300 years before our era.
469.
One may judge how trustworthy are the translations of such Egyptian documents when the sentence is rendered in three different ways by three Egyptologists. Rougé says: “He found her in a state to fall under the power of spirits,” or “with her limbs quite stiff,” (?) another version; and Chabas translates: “And the Scribe found the Khou too wicked.” Between her being in possession of an evil Khou and “with her limbs quite stiff,” there is a difference.
470.
De Mirville, v. 247, 248.
471.
Some translators would have Lucian speak of the inhabitants of the city, but they fail to show that this view is maintainable.
472.
De Mirville, v. 256, 257.
473.
How can de Mirville see Satan in the Egyptian God of the great divine Name, when he himself admits that nothing was greater than the name of the oracle of Dodona, as it was that of the God of the Jews, IAO, or Jehovah? That oracle had been brought by the Pelasgians to Dodona more than fourteen centuries b.c. and left with the forefathers of the Hellenes, and its history is well-known and may be read in Herodotus. Jupiter, who loved the fair nymph of the ocean, Dodona, had ordered Pelasgus to carry his cult to Thessaly. The name of the God of that oracle at the temple of Dodona was Zeus Pelasgicos, the Zeuspater (God the Father), or as De Mirville explains: “It was the name par excellence, the name that the Jews held as the ineffable, the unpronounceable Name—in short, Jaoh-pater, i.e., ‘he who was, who is, and who will be,’ otherwise the Eternal.” And the author admits that Maury is right “in discovering in the name of the Vaidic Indra the Biblical Jehovah,” and does not even attempt to deny the etymological connection between the two names—“the great and the lost name with the sun and the thunder-bolts.” Strange confessions, and still stranger contradictions.
474.
Reuvens' Letter to Letronne on the 75th number of the Papyri Anastasi. See De Mirville. v. 258.
475.
The Eleusinian Fields.
476.
Fragments, ix.
477.
De Legibus, II. iv.
478.
Judaism and Paganism, i. 184.
479.
Frag. of Styg., ap. Stob.
480.
De Special. Legi.
481.
De Mirville, v. 278, 279.
482.
Isis Unveiled, i. 25.
483.
Isis Unveiled, i. 282, 283.
484.
De Mirville, v. 248.
485.
De Mirville, v. 281.
486.
Tod's Rajasthan, i. 28.
487.
Op. cit., ix. iii. 28.
488.
Vishnu Purâna, iv. i. Wilson's translation, iii. 248-254.
489.
There were no Brâhmans as a hereditary caste in days of old. In those long-departed ages a man became a Brâhman through personal merit and Initiation. Gradually, however, despotism crept in, and the son of a Brâhman was created a Brâhman by right of protection first, then by that of heredity. The rights of blood replaced those of real merit, and thus arose the body of Brâhmans, which was soon changed into a powerful caste.
490.
Des Initiations Anciennes and Modernes. “The mysteries,” says Ragon, “were the gift of India.” In this he is mistaken, for the Âryan race had brought the mysteries of Initiation from Atlantis. Nevertheless he is right in saying that the mysteries preceded all civilisations, and that by polishing the mind and morals of the peoples they served as a base for all the laws—civil, political, and religious.
491.
De Off., i. 33.
492.
Des Initiations, p. 22.
493.
Essais Historiques sur la Franc-Maçonnerie, pp. 142, 143.
494.
The word “patriarch” is composed of the Greek word “Patria” (“family,” “tribe,” or “nation”) and “Archos” (a “chief”), the paternal principle. The Jewish Patriarchs who were pastors, passed their name to the Christian Patriarchs; yet they were no priests, but were simply the heads of their tribes, like the Indian Rishis.
495.
There is no need to observe here that the resurrection of a really dead body is an impossibility in Nature.
496.
The kings of Hungary claimed that they could cure the jaundice; the Dukes of Burgundy were credited with preserving people from the plague; the kings of Spain delivered those possessed by the devil. The prerogative of curing the king's evil was given to the kings of France, in reward for the virtues of good King Robert. Francis the First, during a short stay at Marseilles for his son's wedding, touched and cured of that disease upwards of 500 persons. The kings of England had the same privilege.
497.
See Laurens' Essais Historiques for further information as to the world-wide, universal knowledge of the Egyptian Priests.
498.
Des Initiations, p. 24.
499.
The word comes from the Greek “hieros” (“sacred”) and “glupho” (“I grave”). The Egyptian characters were sacred to the Gods, as the Indian Devanâgarî is the language of the Gods.
500.
The same author had (as Occultists have) a very reasonable objection to the modern etymology of the word “philosophy,” which is interpreted “love of wisdom,” and is nothing of the kind. The philosophers were scientists, and philosophy was a real science—not simply verbiage, as it is in our day. The term is composed of two Greek words whose meaning is intended to convey its secret sense, and ought to be interpreted as “wisdom of love.” Now it is in the last word, “love,” that lies hidden the esoteric significance: for “love” does not stand here as a noun, nor does it mean “affection” or “fondness,” but is the term used for Eros, that primordial principle in divine creation, synonymous with πόθος, the abstract desire in Nature for procreation, resulting in an everlasting series of phenomena. It means “divine love,” that universal element of divine omnipresence spread throughout Nature and which is at once the chief cause and effect. The “wisdom of love” (or “philosophia,”) meant attraction to and love of everything hidden beneath objective phenomena and the knowledge thereof. Philosophy meant the highest Adeptship—love of and assimilation with Deity. In his modesty Pythagoras even refused to be called a Philosopher (or one who knows every hidden thing in things visible; cause and effect, or absolute truth), and called himself simply a Sage an aspirant to philosophy, or to Wisdom of Love—love in its exoteric meaning being as degraded by men then as it is now by its purely terrestrial application.
501.
Lev., xix. 18.
502.
“On,” the “Sun,” the Egyptian name of Heliopolis (the “City of the Sun”).
503.
Book of God, p. 160.
504.
Mr. Kenealy quotes, in his Book of God, Vallancey, who says: “I had not been a week landed in Ireland from Gibraltar, where I had studied Hebrew and Chaldaic under Jews of various countries, when I heard a peasant girl say to a boor standing by her ‘Feach an Maddin Nag’ (‘Behold the morning star’), pointing to the planet Venus, the Maddena Nag of the Chaldeans.”
505.
There was a time when the whole world, the totality of mankind, had one religion, as they were of “one lip.” “All the religions of the earth were at first one, and emanated from one centre,” says Faber.
506.
Chips from a German Workshop, i. 69, 70.
507.
Sûrya, the Sun, is one of the nine divinities that witness all human actions.
508.
[There is a gap in H. P. B.'s MS., and the paragraph in brackets supplies what was missing.—A. B.]
509.

In Isis Unveiled, Vol. II., pp. 41, 42, a portion of this rite is referred to. Speaking of the dogma of Atonement, it is traced to ancient “heathendom” again. We say: “This cornerstone of a church which had believed herself built on a firm rock for long centuries, is now excavated by science and proved to come from the Gnostics. Professor Draper shows it as hardly known in the days of Tertullian, and as having ‘originated among the Gnostic heretics’ (see Conflict Between Religion and Science, p. 224).... But there are sufficient proofs to show that it originated among them no more than did their anointed Christos and Sophia. The former they modelled on the original of the King Messiah, the male principle of wisdom, and the latter on the third Sephiroth, from the Chaldæan Kabalah, and even from the Hindu Brahmâ and Sarasvatî, and the Pagan Dionysius and Demeter. And here we are on firm ground, if it were only because it is now proved that the New Testament never appeared in its complete form, such as we find it now, till 300 years after the period of the apostles, and the Zohar and other Kabalistic books are found to belong to the first century before our era, if not to be far older still.

“The Gnostics entertained many of the Essenean ideas; and the Essenes had their greater and minor Mysteries at least two centuries before our era. They were the Isarim or Initiates, the descendants of the Egyptian hierophants, in whose country they had been settled for several centuries before they were converted to Buddhistic monasticism by the missionaries of King Asoka, and amalgamated later with the earliest Christians: and they existed, probably, before the old Egyptian temples were desecrated and ruined in the incessant invasions of Persians, Greeks, and other conquering hordes. The hierophants had their atonement enacted in the Mystery of Initiation ages before the Gnostics, or even the Essenes, had appeared. It was known among hierophants as the Baptism of Blood, and was considered not as an atonement for the ‘fall of man’ in Eden, but simply as an expiation for the past, present, and future sins of ignorant, but nevertheless polluted mankind. The hierophant had the option of either offering his pure and sinless life as a sacrifice for his race to the gods whom he hoped to rejoin, or an animal victim. The former depended entirely on their own will. At the last moment of the solemn ‘new birth,’ the Initiator passed ‘the word’ to the initiated, and immediately after the latter had a weapon placed in his right hand, and was ordered to strike. This is the true origin of the Christian dogma of atonement.”

As Ballanche says, quoted by Ragon: “Destruction is the great God of the World,” justifying therefore the philosophical conception of the Hindu Shîva. According to this immutable and sacred law, “the Initiate was compelled to kill the Initiator; otherwise initiation remained incomplete.... It is death that generates life.” Orthodoxie maçonnique, p. 104. All that, however, was emblematic and exoteric. Weapon and killing must be understood in their allegorical sense.

510.
Orthodoxie maçonnique, pp. 102-104.
511.
Op. cit., i. 15.
512.
Five Years of Theosophy, p. 258. A curious question to start and to deny, when it is well-known even to the Orientalists that, to take but one case, there is Yaska, who was a predecessor of Pânini, and his work still exists; there are seventeen writers of Nirukta (glossary) known to have preceded Yaska.
513.
La Mère d'Apis, p. 47.
514.
One just initiated is called the “first-born,” and in India he becomes dwija, “twice born,” only after his final and supreme Initiation. Every Adept is a “Son of God” and a “Son of Light” after receiving the “Word,” when he becomes the “Word” himself, after receiving the seven divine attributes or the “lyre of Apollo.”
515.
See De Mirville, iv. 15.
516.
II. Kings, xxiii. 4-13.
517.
Judges, xiii. 18. Samson, Manoah's son, was an Initiate of that “Mystery” Lord, Ja-va; he was consecrated before his birth to become a “Nazarite” (a chela) an Adept. His sin with Dalilah, and the cropping of his long hair that “no razor was to touch” shows how well he kept his sacred vow. The allegory of Samson proves the Esotericism of the Bible, as also the character of the “Mystery Gods” of the Jews. True, Môvers gives a definition of the Phœnician idea of the ideal sunlight as a spiritual influence issuing from the highest God, Iao, “the light conceivable only by intellect—the physical and spiritual Principle of all things; out of which the soul emanates.” It was the male Essence, or Wisdom, while the primitive matter or Chaos was the female. Thus the first two principles, co-eternal and infinite, were already with the primitive Phœnicians, spirit and matter. But this is the echo of Jewish thought, not the opinion of Pagan Philosophers.
518.
See Isis Unveiled, ii. 526.
519.
Beth-San or Scythopolis in Palestine had that designation; so had a spot on Mount Parnassus. But Diodorus declares that Nyssa was between Phœnicia and Egypt; Euripides states that Dionysos came to Greece from India; and Diodorus adds his testimony: “Osiris was brought up in Nyssa, in Arabia the Happy; he was the son of Zeus, and was named from his father (nominative Zeus, genitive Dios) and the place Dio-Nysos”—the Zeus or Jove of Nyssa. This identity of name or title is very significant. In Greece Dionysos was second only to Zeus, and Pindar says: “So Father Zeus governs all things, and Bacchus he governs also.”
520.
Ex., xvii. 15.
521.
Phædrus, Cary's translation, p. 326.
522.
Life of Pythagoras, p. 297. “Since Pythagoras,” he adds, “also spent two and twenty years in the adyta of the temples in Egypt, associated with the Magians in Babylon, and was instructed by them in their venerable knowledge, it is not at all wonderful that he was skilled in Magic or Theurgy, and was therefore able to perform things which surpass merely human power, and which appear to be perfectly incredible to the vulgar” (p. 298).
523.
This expression must not be understood simply literally; for, as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods, it has a secret meaning that we have just explained; it was hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the Initiation, and says that he was crowned by the Gods in whose presence he had drunk “the waters of life”—in the Hindu Mysteries there was the fount of life, and soma, the sacred drink.
524.
Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, T. Taylor, p. 46, 47.
525.
ii. 111, 113.
526.
Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, p. 63.
527.
Op. cit., p. 65.
528.
Quoted by Taylor, p. 66.
529.
Verses 35-38.
530.
Phædrus, 64, quoted by Taylor, p. 64.
531.
Isis Unveiled, ii. 114.
532.
This is false, and the Abbé Constant (Éliphas Lévi) knew it was so. Why did he promulgate the untruth?
533.
Dogme de la Haute Magie, i. 219, 220.
534.
Orthodoxie Maçonnique, p. 99.
535.
Five Years of Theosophy, p. 214.
536.
In I. Peter, ii. 3, Jesus is called “the Lord Chrestos.”
537.
Isis Unveiled, ii. 323.
538.
Buddhism in Tibet, p. 31.
539.
The Âryans replaced the living cow by one made of gold, silver or any other metal, and the rite is preserved to this day, when one desires to become a Brâhman, a twice-born, in India.
540.
Op. cit., p. 141.
541.
In Ragon's Orthodoxie Maçonnique, p. 105, note, we find the following statement—borrowed from Albumazar the Arabian, probably: “The Virgin of the Magi and Chaldæans. The Chaldæan sphere [globe] showed in its heavens a newly-born babe, called Christ and Jesus; it was placed in the arms of the Celestial Virgin. It was to this Virgin that Eratosthenes, the Alexandrian Librarian, born 276 years before our era, gave the name of Isis, mother of Horus.” This is only what Kircher gives (in Ædipus Ægypticus, iii. 5), quoting Albumazar: “In the first decan of the Virgin rises a maid, called Aderenosa, that is pure, immaculate virgin ... sitting upon an embroidered throne nursing a boy...; a boy, named Jessus ... which signifies Issa, whom they also call Christ in Greek.” (See Isis Unveiled, ii. 491.)
542.
Now called St. Reine (Côte d'Or) on the two streams, the Ose and the Oserain. Its fall is a historical fact in Keltic Gaulish History.
543.
Orthodoxie Maçonnique, p. 22.
544.
Op. cit., p. 22.
545.
The Christian mob in 389 of our era completed the work of destruction upon what remained; most of the priceless works were saved for students of Occultism, but lost to the world.
546.
Op. cit. p. 23. J. M. Ragon, a Belgian by birth, and a Mason, knew more about Occultism than any other non-initiated writer. For fifty years he studied the ancient Mysteries wherever he could find accounts of them. In 1805, he founded at Paris the Brotherhood of Les Trinosophes, in which Lodge he delivered for years lectures on Ancient and Modern Initiation (in 1818 and again in 1841), which were published, and now are lost. Then he became the writer in chief of Hermes, a masonic paper. His best works were La Maçonnerie Occulte and the Fastes Initiatiques. After his death, in 1866, a number of his MSS. remained in the possession of the Grand Orient of France. A high Mason told the writer that Ragon had corresponded for years with two Orientalists in Syria and Egypt, one of whom is a Kopt gentleman.
547.
Op. cit., iv. 462.
548.
History of Magic, ii. 11.
549.
Neo-Platonism and Alchemy, p. 15.
550.
Loc. cit.
551.
Op. cit., pp. 9, 10.
552.
This Divine Effulgence and Essence is the light of the Logos; only the Vedântin would not use the pronoun “He,” but would say “It.”
553.
Loc. cit., note, p. 10.
554.
Loc. cit., note.
555.
See Esoteric Buddhism, by A. P. Sinnett, Fifth Edition.
556.
See Isis Unveiled, Vol. I., pp. 589-595. The “Sons of God” and their war with the giants and magicians.
557.
Loc. cit., note.
558.
Op. cit., p. 18.
559.
Op. cit., p. 8.
560.
No orthodox Christian has ever equalled, far less surpassed, in the practice of true Christ-like virtues and ethics, or in the beauty of his moral nature, Ammonius, the Alexandrian pervert from Christianity (he was born from Christian parents).
561.
Op. cit., pp. 3, 4.
562.
Quoted by Dr. Wilder, p. 5.
563.
“Mortification” is here meant in the moral, not the physical sense; to restrain every lust and passion, and live on the simplest diet possible.
564.
This is the Neo-Platonic teaching adopted as a doctrine in the Roman Catholic Church, with its worship of the Seven Spirits.
565.
The Church has made of it the worship of devils. “Daimon” is Spirit, and relates to our divine Spirit, the seventh Principle and to the Dhyân Chohans. Jesus prohibited going to the temple or church “as Pharisees do” but commanded that man should retire for prayer (communion with his God) into a private closet. Is it Jesus who would have countenanced in the face of the starving millions, the building of the most gorgeous churches?
566.
Op. cit., p. 7.
567.
Op. cit., p. 7.
568.
Op. cit., p. 18.
569.

The Talmud gives the story of the four Tanaim, who are made, in allegorical terms, to enter into the garden of delights, i.e., to be initiated into the occult and final science.

“According to the teaching of our holy masters the names of the four who entered the garden of delight, are: Ben Asai, Ben Zoma, Acher, and Rabbi Akiba....

“Ben Asai looked and—lost his sight.

“Ben Zoma looked and—lost his reason.

“Acher made depredations in the plantation” (mixed up the whole and failed). “But Akiba, who had entered in peace came out of it in peace; for the saint, whose name he blessed, had said, ‘This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.’ ”

“The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity,” says A. Franck, in his Kabbalah. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never understand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.—Isis Unveiled, ii. 119.

570.
Isis Unveiled, ii. 119.
571.
See Neo-Platonism, p. 9.
572.
See the Code published by Sir William Jones, Chapter ix. p. 11.
573.
Pliny: Hist. Nat., xxx. 1; Ib., xvi. 14; xxv. 9, etc.
574.
Pomponius ascribes to them the knowledge of the highest sciences.
575.
Cæsar, iii. 14.
576.
Pliny, xxx. Isis Unveiled, i. 18.
577.
“The care which they took in educating youth, in familiarizing it with generous and virtuous sentiments, did them peculiar honour, and their maxims and discourses, as recorded by historians, prove that they were expert in matters of philosophy, metaphysics, astronomy, morality and religion,” says a modern writer. “If kings or princes desired the advice or the blessings of the holy men, they were either obliged to go themselves, or to send messengers. To these men no secret power of either plant or mineral was unknown. They had fathomed nature to its depths, while psychology and physiology were to them open books, and the result was that science that is now termed, so superciliously, magic.”
578.
Op. cit., p. 9.
579.
Op. cit., p. 11.
580.
Hermes, iv. 6.
581.
From Saraph שרף “fiery, burning,” plural (see Isaiah, vi. 2-6). They are regarded as the personal attendants of the Almighty, “his messengers,” angels or metatrons. In Revelation they are the “seven burning lamps” in attendance before the throne.
582.
Venus with the Chaldæans and Egyptians was the wife of Proteus, and is regarded as the mother of the Kabiri, the sons of Phta or Emepth—the divine light or the Sun. The angels answer to the stars in the following order: The Sun, the Moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, and Saturn; Michael, Gabriel, Samael, Anael, Raphael, Zachariel, and Orifiel; this is in religion and Christian Kabalism; astrologically and esoterically the places of the “regents” stand otherwise, as also in the Jewish, or rather the real Chaldæan Kabalah.
583.
Loc. cit., xiv. 12.
584.
This is one more proof that the Ancients knew of seven planets besides the Sun; for otherwise which is the eighth in such a case? The seventh, with two others, as stated, were “mystery” planets, whether Uranus or any other.
585.
II. Sam., vi. 20-22.
586.
Judges, xxi. 21, et seq.
587.
I. Kings, xviii. 26.
588.
This dance—the Râsa Mandala, enacted by the Gopîs or shepherdesses of Krishna, the Sun-God, is enacted to this day in Râjputâna in India, and is undeniably the same theo-astronomical and symbolical dance of the planets and the Zodiacal signs, that was danced thousands of years before our era.
589.
Isis Unveiled, ii. 45.
590.
II. Epistle, i. 19. The English text says: “Until the day-star arise in your heart,” a trifling alteration which does not really matter—as Lucifer is the day as well as the “morning” star—and it is less shocking to pious ears. There are a number of such alterations in the Protestant bibles.
591.
Again the English translation changes the word “Sun” into “day-spring.” The Roman Catholics are decidedly braver and more sincere than the Protestant theologians. De Mirville: iv. 34, 38.
592.
Thus said the Egyptians and the Sabæans in days of old, the symbol of whose manifested gods, Osiris and Bel, was the sun. But they had a higher deity.
593.
Exiled from the Protestant bible but left in the Apocrypha which, according to Article VI. of the Church of England, “she doth read for example of life and instruction of manners” (?), but not to establish any doctrine.
594.
Cornelius a Lapide, v. 248.
595.
Ecclesiastes, xliii. The above quotations are taken from De Mirville's chapter “On Christian and Jewish Solar Theology,” iv. 35-38.
596.
Nevertheless the Church has preserved in her most sacred rites the “star-rites” of the Pagan Initiates. In the pre-Christian Mithraic Mysteries, the candidate who overcame successfully the “twelve Tortures” which preceded the final Initiation, received a small round cake or wafer of unleavened bread, symbolising in one of its meanings, the solar disc, and known as the manna (heavenly bread).... A lamb, or a bull even, was killed, and with the blood the candidate had to be sprinkled, as in the case of the Emperor Julian's initiation. The seven rules or mysteries that are represented in the Revelation as the seven seals which are opened in order were then delivered to the newly born.
597.
Truly says S. T. Coleridge: “Instinctively the reason has always pointed out to men the ultimate end of various sciences.... There is no doubt but that astrology of some sort or other will be the last achievement of astronomy; there must be chemical relations between the planets ... the difference of their magnitude compared with that of their distances is not explicable otherwise.” Between planets and our earth with its mankind, we may add.
598.
“Christ then,” the author says (p. 40), “is represented by the trunk of the candlestick.”
599.
De Mirville, iv. 41, 42.
600.
De Mirville, iv. 42.
601.
Notwithstanding the above, written in the earliest Christian period by the renegade Neo-Platonist, the Church persists to this day in her wilful error. Helpless against Galileo, she now tries to throw a doubt even on the heliocentric system!
602.
Stromateis, V., vi.
603.
The English bible has: “In them (the Heavens) hath he set a tabernacle for the sun,” which is incorrect and has no sense in view of the verse that follows, for there are things “hid from the heat thereof” if the latter word is to be applied to the sun.
604.
When the hierophant took his last degree, he emerged from the sacred recess called Manneras and was given the golden Tau, the Egyptian Cross, which was subsequently placed on his breast, and buried with him.
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 Âryan 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 Âryans 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 Âryas.”—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 Âdi-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.

671.
See Isis Unveiled, ii., 132.
672.
“Before one becomes a Buddha he must be a Bodhisattva; before evolving into a Bodhisattva he must be a Dhyâni-Buddha.... A Bodhisattva is the way and Path to his Father, and thence to the One Supreme Essence” (Descent of Buddhas, p. 17, from Âryâsanga). “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life: no man cometh unto the Father but by me” (St. John, xiv. 6). The “way” is not the goal. Nowhere throughout the New Testament is Jesus found calling himself God, or anything higher than “a son of God,” the son of a “Father” common to all, synthetically. Paul never said (I. Tim., iii. 10), “God was manifest in the flesh,” but “He who was manifested in the flesh” (Revised Edition). While the common herd among the Buddhists—the Burmese especially—regard Jesus as an incarnation of Devadatta, a relative who opposed the teachings of Buddha, the students of Esoteric Philosophy see in the Nazarene Sage a Bodhisattva with the spirit of Buddha Himself in Him.
673.
I. Corinth., xv. 36.
674.
Op. cit., Mandala x., hymn 90.
675.
Literally, “he who walks [or follows] in the way [or path] of his predecessors.”
676.
Schmidt, in Slanong Seetsen, p. 471, and Schlagintweit, in Buddhism in Tibet, p. 53, accept these precious things literally, enumerating them as “the wheel, the precious stone, the royal consort, the best treasurer, the best horse, the elephant, the best leader.” After this one can little wonder if “besides a Dhyâni-Buddhi and a Dhyâni-Bodhisattva” each human Buddha is furnished with “a female companion, a Shakti”—when in truth “Shakti” is simply the Soul-power, the psychic energy of the God as of the Adept. The “royal consort,” the third of the “seven precious gifts,” very likely led the learned Orientalist into this ludicrous error.
677.
A Bodhisattva can reach Nirvâna and live, as Buddha did, and after death he can either refuse objective reincarnation or accept and use it at his convenience for the benefit of mankind whom he can instruct in various ways while he remains in the Devachanic regions within the attraction of our earth. But having once reached Paranirvâna or “Nirvâna without remains”—the highest Dharmakâya condition, in which state he remains entirely outside of every earthly condition—he will return no more until the commencement of a new Manvantara, since he has crossed beyond the cycle of births.
678.
Tulpa is the voluntary incarnation of an Adept into a living body, whether of an adult, child, or new-born babe.
679.
Ku-sum is the triple form of the Nirvâna state and its respective duration in the “cycle of Non-Being.” The number seven here refers to the seven Rounds of our septenary System.
680.
Buddhism in Tibet, p. 52. This same generic use of a name is found among Hindus with that of Shankarâchârya, to take but one instance. All His successors bear his name, but are not reincarnations of Him. So with the “Buddhas.”
681.
[The words within brackets are supplied to introduce the following statements that are confused and contradictory as they stand, and which H. P. B. had probably intended to elucidate to some slight extent, as they are written two or three times with different sentences following them. The MS. is exceedingly confused, and everything H. P. B. said is here pieced together, the addition above made being marked in brackets to distinguish it from hers.—A. B.]
682.
King Suddhodana.
683.
There are several names marked simply by asterisks.
684.
Shankarâchârya died also at thirty-two years of age, or rather disappeared from the sight of his disciples, as the legend goes.
685.
Does “Tiani-Tsang” stand for Apollonius of Tyana? This is a simple surmise. Some things in the life of that Adept would seem to tally with the hypothesis—others to go against it.
686.
According to Esoteric teaching Buddha lived one hundred years in reality, though having reached Nirvâna in his eightieth year he was regarded as one dead to the world of the living. See article “Shâkyamuni's Place in History” in Five Years of Theosophy.
687.
It is a secret rite, pertaining to high Initiation, and has the same significance as the one to which Clement of Alexandria alludes when he speaks of “the token of recognition being in common with us, as by cutting off Christ” (Strom., 13). Schlagintweit wonders what it may be. “The typical representation of a hermit,” he says, “is always that of a man with long, uncut hair and beard.... A rite very often selected, though I am unable to state for what reason, is that of Chod (‘to cut’ or ‘to destroy’) the meaning of which is anxiously kept a profound secret by the Lamas.” (Buddhism in Tibet, p. 163.)
688.
Hlun-Chub is the divining spirit in man, the highest degree of seership.
689.
The secret meaning of this sentence is that Karma exercises its sway over the Adept as much as over any other man; “Gods” can escape it as little as simple mortals. The Adept who, having reached the Path and won His Dharmakâya—the Nirvâna from which there is no return until the new grand Kalpa—prefers to use His right of choosing a condition inferior to that which belongs to Him, but that will leave him free to return whenever He thinks it advisable and under whatever personality He may select, must be prepared to take all the chances of failure—possibly—and a lower condition than was His lot—for a certainty—as it is an occult law. Karma alone is absolute justice and infallible in its selections. He who uses his rights with it (Karma) must bear the consequences—if any. Thus Buddha's first reincarnation was produced by Karma—and it led Him higher than ever; the two following were “out of pity” and * * *.
690.
The Universe of Brahmâ (Sien-Chan; Nam-Kha) is Universal Illusion, or our phenomenal world.
691.
Âkâsha. It is next to impossible to render the mystic word “Tho-og” by any other term than “Space,” and yet, unless coined on purpose, no new appellation can render it so well to the mind of the Occultist. The term “Aditi” is also translated “Space,” and there is a world of meaning in it.
692.
Dang-ma, a purified soul, and Lha, a freed spirit within a living body; an Adept or Arhat. In the popular opinion in Tibet, a Lha is a disembodied spirit, something similar to the Burmese Nat—only higher.
693.
Kwan-yin is a synonym, for in the original another term is used, but the meaning is identical. It is the divine voice of Self, or the “Spirit-voice” in man, and the same as Vâchîshvara (the “Voice-deity”) of the Brâhmans. In China, the Buddhist ritualists have degraded its meaning by anthropomorphizing it into a Goddess of the same name, with one thousand hands and eyes, and they call it Kwan-shai-yin-Bodhisat. It is the Buddhist “daïmon”-voice of Socrates.
694.
Sangharama is the sanctum sanctorum of an ascetic, a cave or any place he chooses for his meditation.
695.
Amitâbha Buddha is in this connection the “boundless light” by which things of the subjective world are perceived.
696.
Esoterically, “the unsurpassingly merciful and enlightened heart,” said of the “Perfect Ones,” the Jîvan-muktas, collectively.
697.
These six worlds—seven with us—are the worlds of Nats or Spirits, with the Burmese Buddhists, and the seven higher worlds of the Vedântins.
698.
Two things entirely distinct from each other. The “faculty is not distinguished from the subject” only on this material plane, while thought generated by our physical brain, one that has never impressed itself at the same time on the spiritual counterpart, whether through the atrophy of the latter or the intrinsic weakness of that thought, can never survive our body; this much is sure.
699.
Vedânta Sâra, translated by Major Jacob, p. 123.
700.
Aditi is, according to the Rig Veda, “the Father and Mother of all the Gods”; and Âkâsha is held by Southern Buddhism as the Root of all, whence everything in the Universe came out, in obedience to a law of motion inherent in it; and this is the Tibetan “Space” (Tho-og).
701.
Mânava-Dharma-Shâstra, i. 6, 7.
702.
The “God” of Pythagoras, the disciple of the Âryan Sages, is no personal God. Let it be remembered that he taught as a cardinal tenet that there exists a permanent Principle of Unity beneath all forms, changes, and other phenomena of the Universe.
703.
Isis Unveiled, i. xvi.
704.
Isis Unveiled, i. xviii.
705.
Isis Unveiled i. 58.
706.
Isis Unveiled, i. 59.
707.
While they are to a great extent identical with those of Esoteric Buddhism, the Secret Doctrine of the East.
708.
Parerga, II. iii. 112; quoted in Isis Unveiled, i. 58.
709.
Five Years of Theosophy, p. 338, et seq.
710.
Prof. Max Müller, in a letter to The Times (April, 1857), maintained most vehemently that Nirvâna meant annihilation in the fullest sense of the word. (Chips from a German Workshop, i. 287.) But in 1869, in a lecture before the General Meeting of the Association of German Philologists at Kiel, “he distinctly declares his belief that the Nihilism attributed to Buddha's teaching forms no part of his doctrine, and that it is wholly wrong to suppose that Nirvâna means annihilation.” (Trubner's Amer. and Oriental Lit. Rec., Oct. 16th, 1869.)
711.
See the Kalama Sutta of the Anguttaranikayo, as quoted in A Buddhist Catechism, by H. S. Olcott, President of the Theosophical Society, pp. 55, 56.
712.
Œdipus Ægypt., II. i. 291.
713.
Sephir, or Aditi (mystic Space). The Sephiroth, be it understood, are identical with the Hindu Prajâpatis, the Dhyân Chohans of Esoteric Buddhism, the Zoroastrian Amshaspends, and finally with the Elohim—the “Seven Angels of the Presence” of the Roman Catholic Church.
714.
According to the Eastern idea, the All comes out from the One, and returns to it again. Absolute annihilation is simply unthinkable. Nor can eternal Matter be annihilated. Form may be annihilated: co-relations may change. That is all. There can be no such thing as annihilation—in the European sense—in the Universe.
715.
Isis Unveiled, i. 289.
716.
The Secret Law, the “Doctrine of the Heart,” so called in contrast to the “Doctrine of the Eye,” or exoteric Buddhism.
717.
“Illusive matter in its triple manifestation in the earthly, and the astral or fontal Soul (the body), and the Platonian dual Soul—the rational and the irrational one.”
718.
Isis Unveiled, i. 289.
719.
Isis Unveiled, i. 290.
720.
It is from the texts of all these works that the Secret Doctrine has been given. The original matter would not make a small pamphlet, but the explanations and notes from the Commentaries and Glossaries might be worked into ten volumes as large as Isis Unveiled.
721.
The monk Della Penna makes considerable fun in his Memoirs (see Markham's Tibet) of certain statements in the Books of Kiu-te. He brings to the notice of the Christian public “the great mountain 160,000 leagues high” (a Tibetan league consisting of five miles) in the Himâlayan Range. “According to their law,” he says, “in the west of this world is an eternal world ... a paradise, and in it a Saint called Hopahma, which means ‘Saint of Splendour and Infinite Light.’ This Saint has many disciples who are all Chang-chub,” which means, he adds in a footnote, “the Spirits of those who, on account of their perfection, do not care to become saints, and train and instruct the bodies of the reborn Lamas ... so that they may help the living.” Which means that the presumably “dead” Yang-Chhub (not “Chang-chub”) are simply living Bodhisattvas, some of those known as Bhante (“the Brothers”). As to the “mountain 160,000 leagues high,” the Commentary which gives the key to such statements explains that according to the code used by the writers, “to the west of the ‘Snowy Mountain’ 160 leagues [the cyphers being a blind] from a certain spot and by a direct road, is the Bhante Yul [the country or ‘Seat of the Brothers’], the residence of Mahâ-Chohan ...” etc. This is the real meaning. The “Hopahma” of Della Penna is—the Mahâ-Chohan, the Chief.
722.
In some MSS. notes before us, written by Gelung (priest) Thango-pa Chhe-go-mo, it is said: “The few Roman Catholic missionaries who have visited our land (under protest) in the last century and have repaid our hospitality by turning our sacred literature into ridicule, have shown little discretion and still less knowledge. It is true that the Sacred Canon of the Tibetans, the Kahgyur and Bstanhgyur, comprises 1707 distinct works—1083 public and 624 secret volumes, the former being composed of 350 and the latter of 77 volumes folio. May we humbly invite the good missionaries, however, to tell us when they ever succeeded in getting a glimpse of the last-named secret folios? Had they even by chance seen them I can assure the Western Pandits that these manuscripts and folios could never be understood even by a born Tibetan without a key (a) to their peculiar characters, and (b) to their hidden meaning. In our system every description of locality is figurative, every name and word purposely veiled; and one has first to study the mode of deciphering and then to learn the equivalent secret terms and symbols for nearly every word of the religious language. The Egyptian enchorial or hieratic system is child's play to our sacerdotal puzzles.”
723.
Chinese Buddhism, p. 171.
724.
“Buddhi” is a Sanskrit term for “discrimination” or intellect (the sixth principle), and “Buddha” is “wise,” “wisdom,” and also the planet Mercury.
725.
This curious contradiction may be found in Chinese Buddhism, pp. 171, 273. The reverend author assures his readers that “to the philosophic Buddhists ... Amitâbha Yoshi Fo, and the others are nothing but the signs of ideas” (p. 236). Very true. But so should be all other deific names, such as Jehovah, Allah, etc., and if they are not simply “signs of ideas” this would only show that minds that receive them otherwise are not “philosophic”; it would not at all afford serious proof that there are personal, living Gods of these names in reality.
726.
The Chinese Amitâbha (Wu-liang-sheu) and the Tibetan Amitâbha (Odpag-med) have now become personal Gods, ruling over and living in the celestial region of Sukhâvatî, or Tushita (Tibetan: Devachan); while Âdi-Buddhi, of the philosophic Hindu, and Amita Buddha of the philosophic Chinaman and Tibetan, are names for universal, primeval ideas.
727.
See Theosophist for March, 1882.
728.
The intimate relation of the twenty-five Buddhas (Bodhisattvas) with the twenty-five Tattvas (the Conditioned or Limited) of the Hindus is interesting.
729.
It is curious to note the great importance given by European Orientalists to the Dalaï Lamas of Lhassa, and their utter ignorance as to the Tda-shu (or Teshu) Lamas, while it is the latter who began the hierarchical series of Buddha-incarnations, and are de facto the “popes” in Tibet; the Dalaï Lamas are the creations of Nabang-lob-Sang, the Tda-shu Lama, who was Himself the sixth incarnation of Amita, through Tsong Kha-pa, though very few seem to be aware of that fact.
730.
The chanting of a Mantra is not a prayer, but rather a magical sentence in which the law of Occult causation connects itself with, and depends on, the will and acts of its singer. It is a succession of Sanskrit sounds, and when its string of words and sentences is pronounced according to the magical formulæ in the Atharva Veda, but understood by the few, some Mantras produce an instantaneous and very wonderful effect. In its esoteric sense it contains the Vâch (the “mystic speech”), which resides in the Mantra, or rather in its sounds, since it is according to the vibrations, one way or the other, of ether that the effect is produced. The “sweet singers” were called by that name because they were experts in Mantras. Hence the legend in China that the singing and melody of the Lohans are heard at dawn by the priests from their cells in the monastery of Fang-Kwang. (See Biography of Chi-Kai in Tien-tai-nan-tchi.)
731.
The celebrated Lohan, Mâdhyantika, who converted the king and whole country of Kashmir to Buddhism, sent a body of Lohans to preach the Good Law. He was the sculptor who raised to Buddha the famous statue one hundred feet high, which Hiuen-Tsaung saw at Dardu, to the north of the Punjab. As the same Chinese traveller mentions a temple ten Li from Peshawur—350 feet round and 850 feet high—which was at his time (a.d. 550) already 850 years old, Koeppen thinks that so far back as 292 b.c. Buddhism was the prevalent religion in the Punjab.
732.
A title of the Tda-shu-Hlum-po Lama.
733.
The twelve Nidâwas, called in Tibetan Tin-brel Chug-nyi, which are based upon the “Four Truths.”
734.
The Srotâpatti is one who has attained the first Path of comprehension in the real and the unreal; the Sakridâgâmin is the candidate for one of the higher Initiations: “one who is to receive birth once more;” the Anâgâmin is he who has attained the “third Path,” or literally, “he who will not be reborn again” unless he so wishes it, having the option of being reborn in any of the “worlds of the Gods,” or of remaining in Devachan, or of choosing an earthly body with a philanthropic object. An Arhat is one who has reached the highest Path; he may merge into Nirvâna at will, while here on earth.
735.
[The Pratyeka Buddha stands on the level of the Buddha, but His work for the world has nothing to do with its teaching, and His office has always been surrounded with mystery. The preposterous view that He, at such superhuman height of power, wisdom and love could be selfish, is found in the exoteric books, though it is hard to see how it can have arisen. H. P. B. charged me to correct the mistake, as she had, in a careless moment, copied such a statement elsewhere.—A. B.]
736.
It is an erroneous idea which makes the Orientalists take literally the teaching of the Mahâyâna School about the three different kinds of bodies, namely, the Prulpa-ku, the Longehod-drocpaig-ku, and the Chos-ku, as all pertaining to the Nirvânic condition. There are two kinds of Nirvâna: the earthly, and that of the purely disembodied Spirits. These three “bodies” are the three envelopes—all more or less physical—which are at the disposal of the Adept who has entered and crossed the six Pâramitâs, or “Paths” of Buddha. Once He enters upon the seventh, He can return no more to earth. See Cosma, Jour. As. Soc. Beng., vii. 142; and Schott, Buddhismus, p. 9, who give it otherwise.
737.
Vedânta Sâra, translated by Major Jacob, p. 119.
738.
Ibid., p. 122.
739.
Der Buddhismus, pp. 327, 357, et seq., quoted by Schlagintweit.
740.
Buddhism in Tibet, p. 41.
741.
Jour. of As. Soc. Bengal, vii. 144, quoted as above.
742.
Buddhism in Tibet, p. 44.
743.
They maintain also the existence of One Absolute pure Nature, Parabrahman; the illusion of everything outside of it; the leading of the individual Soul—a Ray of the “Universal”—into the true nature of existence and things by Yoga alone.
744.
Nirmânakâya (also Nirvânakâya, vulg.) is the body or Self “with remains,” or the influence of terrestrial attributes, however spiritualized, clinging yet to that Self. An Initiate in Dharmakâya, or in Nirvâna “without remains,” is the Jivanmukta, the Perfect Initiate, who separates his Higher Self entirely from his body during Samâdhi. [It will be noticed that these two words are here used in a sense other than that previously given.—A. B.]
745.
The “Sacred” Books of Dus-Kyi Khorlo (“Time Circle”). See Jour. As. Soc., ii. 57. These works were abandoned to the Sikkhim Dugpas, from the time of Tsong-Kha-pa's reform.
746.
Glossary of Judicial and Revenue Terms, art. “Yoga,” quoted in Buddhism in Tibet, p. 47.
747.
Buddhism in Tibet, pp. 47, 48.
748.
Buddhism in Tibet, pp. 63, 64. The objects found in the casket, as enumerated in the exoteric legend, are of course symbolical. They may be found mentioned in the Kanjur. They were said to be: (1) two hands joined; (2) a miniature Choten (Stûpa, or reliquary); (3) a talisman with “Om mani padme hum” inscribed on it; (4) a religious book, Zamatog (“a constructed vehicle”).
749.
Alterthumskunde, ii. 1072.
750.
Op. cit., ii. 470.
751.
Unless one obtains exact information and the right method, one's visions, however correct and true in Soul-life, will ever fail to get photographed in our human memory, and certain cells of the brain are sure to play havoc with our remembrances.
752.
Chinese Buddhism, p. 158. The Rev. Joseph Edkins either ignores, or—which is more probable—is utterly ignorant of the real existence of such Schools, and judges by the Chinese travesties of these, calling such Esotericism “heterodox Buddhism.” And so it is, in one sense.
753.
That country—India—has lost the records of such Schools and their teachings only so far as the general public, and especially the inappreciative Western Orientalists, are concerned. It has preserved them in full in some Mathams (refuges for mystic contemplation). But it may perhaps be better to seek them with, and from, their rightful owners, the so-called “mythical” Adepts, or Mahâtmâs.
754.
Chinese Buddhism, pp. 155-159.
755.
They certainly reject most emphatically the popular theory of the transmigration of human entities or Souls into animals, but not the evolution of men from animals—so far, at least, as their lower principles are concerned.
756.
It is quite consistent, on the contrary, when explained in the light of the Esoteric Doctrine. The “Western paradise,” or Western heaven, is no fiction located in transcendental space. It is a bonâ-fide locality in the mountains, or, to be more correct, one encircled in a desert within mountains. Hence it is assigned for the residence of those students of Esoteric Wisdom—disciples of Buddha—who have attained the rank of Lohans and Anâgâmins (Adepts). It is called “Western” simply from geographical considerations; and “the great iron mountain girdle” that surrounds the Avitchi, and the seven Lokas that encircle the “Western paradise” are a very exact representation of well-known localities and things to the Eastern student of Occultism.
757.
The word is translated by the Orientalists as “true man without a position,” (?) which is very misleading. It simply means the true inner man, or Ego, “Buddha within Buddha” meaning that there was a Gautama inwardly as well as outwardly.
758.
One of the titles of Gautama Buddha in Tibet.
759.
The “Esoteric” Schools, or sects, of which there are many in China.
760.
A school of contemplation founded by Hiuen-Tsang, the traveller, nearly extinct. Fa-siong-Tsung means “the School that unveils the inner nature of things.”
761.
Esoteric, or hidden, teaching of Yoga (Chinese: Yogi-mi-kean).
762.
The “tonsure knife” is made of meteoric iron, and is used for the purpose of cutting off the “vow-lock,” or hair from the novice's head during his first ordination. It has a double-edged blade, is sharp as a razor, and lies concealed within a hollow handle of horn. By touching a spring the blade jerks out like a flash of lightning, and recedes back with the same rapidity. A great dexterity is required in using it without wounding the head of the young Gelung and Gelung-ma (candidates to become priests and nuns) during the preliminary rites, which are public.
763.
Chagpa-Thog-mad is the Tibetan name of Âryâsanga, the founder of the Yogâchârya or Naljorchodpa School. This Sage and Initiate is said to have been taught “Wisdom” by Maitreya Buddha Himself, the Buddha of the Sixth Race, at Tushita (a celestial region presided over by Him), and as having received from Him the five books of Champaitehos-nga. The Secret Doctrine teaches, however, that he came from Dejung, or Shambhalla, called the “source of happiness” (“wisdom-acquired”) and declared by some Orientalists to be a “fabulous” place.
764.
It may not be, perhaps, amiss to remind the reader of the fact that the “mirror” was a part of the symbolism of the Thesmophoria, a portion of the Eleusinian Mysteries; and that it was used in the search for Atmu, the “Hidden One,” or “Self.” In his excellent paper on the above-named mysteries, Dr. Alexander Wilder of New York says: “Despite the assertion of Herodotus and others that the Bacchic Mysteries were Egyptian, there exists strong probability that they came originally from India, and were Shaivitic or Buddhistical. Kore-Persep-honeia was but the goddess Parasu-pani, or Bhavani, and Zagreus is from Chakra, a country extending from ocean to ocean. If this is a Turanian story we can easily recognise the ‘horns’ as the crescent worn by Lama-priests, and assume the whole legend [the fable of Dionysus-Zagreus] to be based on Lama-succession and transmigration.... The whole story of Orpheus ... has a Hindu ring all through.” The tale of “Lama-succession and transmigration” did not originate with the Lamas, who date themselves only so far back as the seventh century, but with the Chaldæans and the Brâhmans, still earlier.
765.
The state of absolute freedom from any sin or desire.
766.
The state during which an Adept sees the long series of his past births, and lives through all his previous incarnations in this and the other worlds. (See the admirable description in the Light of Asia, p. 166, 1884 ed.)
767.
See supra, ii. 188, 189.
768.
Wilson's translation, as amended by Fitzedward Hall, i. 40.
769.
Prâna is in reality the universal Life Principle.
770.
All the uterine contents, having a direct spiritual connection with their cosmic antetypes, are, on the physical plane, potent objects in Black Magic, and are therefore considered unclean.
771.
See supra, ii. Part I.
772.
The Solar System or the Earth, as the case may be.
773.
So are the animals, the plants, and even the minerals. Reichenbach never understood what he learned through his sensitives and clairvoyants. It is the odic, or rather the auric or magnetic fluid which emanates from man, but it is also something more.
774.
See supra, i. 181, for the Vedântic exoteric enumeration.
775.
See Lucifer, January, 1889, “Dialogue upon the Mysteries of After-Life.”
776.
See supra, i, 626-629.
777.
See supra, i, 228, et seq., and ii. passim.
778.
Op. cit., ii, 456, 461, 465 et seq.
779.
Jod-Hevah, or male-female on the terrestrial plane, as invented by the Jews, and now made out to mean Jehovah; but signifying in reality and literally, “giving being” and “receiving life.”
780.
See Notice sur le Calendrier, J. H. Ragon.
781.
See supra, ii. 373; and 152, et seq.
782.
See supra, ii. 302, et seq.
783.
Op. cit., ii. 81, 6.
784.
See Frank's Die Kabbala, p. 314, et seq.
785.
Genesis, ii. 7.
786.
Supra, i. 147.
787.
We may refer for confirmation to Origen's works, who says that “the seven ruling daimons” (genii or planetary rulers) are Michael, the Sun (the lion-like); the second in order, the Bull, Jupiter or Suriel, etc.; and all these, the “Seven of the Presence,” are the Sephiroth. The Sephirothal Tree is the Tree of the Divine Planets as given by Porphyry, or Porphyry's Tree, as it is usually called.
788.
Supra, i, 147.
789.
Esoterically, green, there being no black in the prismatic ray.
790.
Esoterically, light blue. As a pigment, purple is a compound of red and blue, and in Eastern Occultism blue is the spiritual essence of the colour purple, while red is its material basis. In reality, Occultism makes Jupiter blue because he is the son of Saturn, which is green, and light blue as a prismatic colour contains a great deal of green. Again, the Auric Body will contain much of the colour of the Lower Manas if the man is a material sensualist, just as it will contain much of the darker hue if the Higher Manas has preponderance over the Lower.
791.
Esoterically, the Sun cannot correspond with the eye, nose, or any other organ, since, as explained, it is no planet, but a central star. It was adopted as a planet by the post-Christian Astrologers, who had never been initiated. Moreover, the true colour of the Sun is blue, and it appears yellow only owing to the effect of the absorption of vapours (chiefly metallic) by its atmosphere. All is Mâyâ on our Earth.
792.
Esoterically, indigo, or dark blue, which is the complement of yellow in the prism. Yellow is a simple or primitive colour. Manas being dual in its nature—as is its sidereal symbol, the planet Venus, which is both the morning and evening star—the difference between the higher and the lower principles of Manas, whose essence is derived from the Hierarchy ruling Venus, is denoted by the dark blue and green. Green, the Lower Manas, resembles the colour of the solar spectrum which appears between the yellow and the dark blue, the Higher Spiritual Manas. Indigo is the intensified colour of the heaven or sky, to denote the upward tendency of Manas toward Buddhi, or the heavenly Spiritual Soul. This colour is obtained from the indigofera tinctoria, a plant of the highest occult properties in India, much used in White Magic, and occultly connected with copper. This is shown by the indigo assuming a copper lustre, especially when rubbed on any hard substance. Another property of the dye is that it is insoluble in water and even in ether, being lighter in weight than any known liquid. No symbol has ever been adopted in the East without being based upon a logical and demonstrable reason. Therefore Eastern Symbologists, from the earliest ages, have connected the spiritual and the animal minds of man, the one with dark blue (Newton's indigo), or true blue, free from green; and the other with pure green.
793.
Esoterically, yellow, because the colour of the Sun is orange, and Mercury now stands next to the Sun in distance, as it does in colour. The planet for which the Sun is a substitute was still nearer the Sun than Mercury now is, and was one of the most secret and highest planets. It is said to have become invisible at the close of the Third Race.
794.
Esoterically, violet, because, perhaps, violet is the colour assumed by a ray of sunlight when transmitted through a very thin plate of silver, and also because the Moon shines upon the Earth with light borrowed from the Sun, as the human body shines with qualifications borrowed from its double—the aërial man. As the astral shadow starts the series of principles in man, on the terrestrial plane, up to the lower, animal Manas, so the violet ray starts the series of prismatic colours from its end up to green, both being, the one as a principle and the other as a colour, the most refrangible of all the principles and colours. Besides which, there is the same great Occult mystery attached to all these correspondences, both celestial and terrestrial bodies, colours and sounds. In clearer words, there exists the same law of relation between the Moon and the Earth, the astral and the living body of man, as between the violet end of the prismatic spectrum and the indigo and the blue. But of this more anon.
795.
Magic, Magia, means, in its spiritual, secret sense, the “Great Life,” or divine life in spirit. The root is magh, as seen in the Sanskrit mahat, Zend maz, Greek megas, and Latin magnus, all signifying “great.”
796.
Philosophumena, vi. 9.
797.
Nous, Epinoia; Phône, Onoma; Logismos, Enthumêsis.
798.
Philosophumena, vi. 12.
799.
See supra, sub voce.
800.
The Great Revelation (Hê Megalê Apophasis), of which Simon himself is supposed to have been the author.
801.
Literally, standing opposite each other in rows or pairs.
802.
Philosophumena, vi. 18.
803.
Op. cit., vi. 18.
804.
Op. cit., i. 13.
805.
Op. cit., vi. 17.
806.
Op. cit., i. 5.
807.
Philosophumena, vi. 14.
808.
At first there are the omphalo-mesenteric vessels, two arteries and two veins, but these afterwards totally disappear, as does the “vascular area” on the Umbilical Vesicle, from which they proceed. As regards the “Umbilical Vessels” proper, the Umbilical Cord ultimately has entwined around it from right to left the one Umbilical Vein which takes the oxygenated blood from the mother to the Fœtus, and two Hypogastric or Umbilical Arteries which take the used-up blood from the Fœtus to the Placenta, the contents of the vessels being the reverse of that which prevails after birth. Thus Science corroborates the wisdom and knowledge of ancient Occultism, for in the days of Simon Magus no man, unless an Initiate, knew anything about the circulation of the blood or about Physiology. While this Paper was being printed, I received two small pamphlets from Dr. Jerome A. Anderson, which were printed in 1884 and 1888, and in which is to be found the scientific demonstration of the fœtal nutrition as advanced in Paper I. Briefly, the Fœtus is nourished by osmosis from the Amniotic Fluid and respires by means of the Placenta. Science knows little or nothing about the Amniotic Fluid and its uses. If any one cares to follow up this question, I would recommend Dr. Anderson's Remarks on the Nutrition of the Fœtus. (Wood & Co., New York.)
809.
Supra, vol. ii.
810.
See Eusebius, Hist. Eccles., lib. iii. cap. 26.
811.
De Mysteriis, p. 100, lines 10 to 19; p. 109, fol. 1.
812.
De Mysteriis, p. 290, lines 15 to 18, et seq., caps. v. and vii.
813.
Ibid., p. 100, sec. iii, cap. iii.
814.
See supra, i. 34; i. 4, et seq.; ii. 39, et seq., and 625, et seq.
815.

The following table lists the wave-lengths in Millimetres, and the number of vibrations in Trillions, of the various colours.

Violet extreme: 406, 759
Violet: 423, 709
Violet-Indigo: 439, 683
Indigo: 449, 668
Indigo-Blue: 459, 654
Blue: 479, 631
Blue-Green: 492, 610
Green: 512, 586
Green-Yellow: 532, 564
Yellow: 551, 544
Yellow-Orange: 571, 525
Orange: 583, 514
Orange-Red: 596, 503
Red: 620, 484
Red-extreme: 645, 465

816.
See Five Years of Theosophy, pp. 273 to 278.
817.
Apud Grêbaut Papyrus Orbiney, p. 101.
818.
See “Genius,” Lucifer, Nov., 1889, p. 227.
819.
See Voice of the Silence, pp. 68 and 94, art. 28, Glossary.
820.
The references to “Nature's Finer Forces” which follow, have respect to the eight articles which appeared in the pages of the Theosophist and not to the fifteen essays and the translation of a chapter of the Shivâgama which are contained in the book called Nature's Finer Forces. The Shivâgama in its details is purely Tântric, and nothing but harm can result from any practical following of its precepts. I would most strongly dissuade any student from attempting any of these Hatha Yoga practices, for he will either ruin himself entirely, or throw himself so far back that it will be almost impossible to regain the lost ground in this incarnation. The translation referred to has been considerably expurgated, and even now is hardly fit for publication. It recommends Black Magic of the worst kind, and is the very antipodes of spiritual Râja Yoga. Beware, I say.
821.
Prâna, on earth at any rate, is thus but a mode of life, a constant cyclic motion from within outwardly and back again, an out-breathing and in-breathing of the One Life, or Jîva, the synonym of the Absolute and Unknowable Deity. Prâna is not absolute life, or Jîva, but its aspect in a world of delusion. In the Theosophist, May, 1888, p. 478, Prâna is said to be “one stage finer than the gross matter of the earth.”
822.
Remember that our re-incarnating Egos are called the Mânasaputras, “Sons of Manas” (or Mahat), Intelligence, Wisdom.
823.
It is erroneous to call the fourth human principle “Kâma Rûpa.” It is no Rûpa or form at all until after death, but stands for the Kâmic elements in man, his animal desires and passions, such as anger, lust, envy, revenge, etc., the progeny of selfishness and matter.
824.
Here the world of effects is the Devachanic state, and the world of causes, earth life.
825.
It is this Kâma Rûpa alone that can materialize in mediumistic séances, which occasionally happens when it is not the Astral Double or Linga Sharîra, of the medium himself which appears. How, then, can this vile bundle of passions and terrestrial lusts, resurrected by, and gaining consciousness only through the organism of the medium, be accepted as a “departed angel” or the Spirit of a once human body? As well say of the microbic pest which fastens on a person, that it is a sweet departed angel.
826.
This is accomplished in more or less time, according to the degree in which the personality (whose dregs it now is) was spiritual or material. If spirituality prevailed, then the Larva, or Spook, will fade out very soon; but if the personality was very materialistic, the Kâma Rûpa may last for centuries and—in some, though very exceptional cases—even survive with the help of some of its scattered Skandhas, which are all transformed in time into Elementals. See the Key to Theosophy, pp. 141 et seq., in which work it was impossible to go into details, but where the Skandhas are spoken of as the germs of Karmic effect.
827.
Key to Theosophy, p. 141
828.
Following Shivâgama, the said author enumerates the correspondences in this wise; Âkâsha, Ether, is followed by Vâyu, Gas; Tejas, Heat; Âpas, Liquid; and Prithivî, Solid.
829.
See Fitz-Edward Hall's notes on the Vishnu Purâna.
830.
The pair which we refer to as the One Life, the Root of All, and Âkâsha in its pre-differentiating period answers to the Brahma (neuter) and Aditi of some Hindus, and stands in the same relation as the Parabrahman and Mûlaprakriti of the Vedântins.
831.
See above, i. diagram, p. 221.
832.
Anupâdaka, Opapatika in Pâli, means the “parentless,” born without father or mother, from itself, as a transformation, e.g., the God Brahmâ sprung from the Lotus (the symbol of the Universe) that grows from Vishnu's navel, Vishnu typifiying eternal and limitless Space, and Brahmâ the Universe and Logos; the mythical Buddha is also born from a Lotus.
833.
See Theosophist, February, 1888, p. 276.
834.
Sœmmerring, De Acervulo Cerebri, vol. ii. p. 322.
835.
In the Greek Eastern Church no child is allowed to go to confession before the age of seven, after which he is considered to have reached the age of reason.
836.
De Caus. Ep., vol xii.
837.
Advers. Med., ii. 322.
838.
De Lapillis Glandulæ Pinealis in Quinque Ment Alien, 1753.
839.
See “Stray Thoughts on Death and Satan” in the Theosophist, vol. iii. No. 1; also “Fragments of Occult Truth,” vols. iii. and iv.
840.
Op. cit., ii. 368, et seq.
841.
The essence of the Divine Ego is “pure flame,” an entity to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be taken; it cannot, therefore, be diminished even by countless numbers of lower minds, detached from it like flames from a flame. This is in answer to an objection by an Esotericist who asked whence was that inexhaustible essence of one and the same Individuality which was called upon to furnish a human intellect for every new personality in which it is incarnated.
842.
The brain, or thinking machinery, is not only in the head, but, as every physiologist who is not quite a materialist will tell you, every organ in man, heart, liver, lungs, etc., down to every nerve and muscle, has, so to speak, its own distinct brain or thinking apparatus. As our brain has naught to do in the guidance of the collective and individual work of every organ in us, what is that which guides each so unerringly in its incessant functions; that make these struggle, and that too with disease, throws it off and acts, each of them, even to the smallest, not in a clock-work manner, as alleged by some materialists (for, at the slightest disturbance or breakage the clock stops), but as an entity endowed with instinct? To say it is Nature is to say nothing, if it is not the enunciation of a fallacy; for Nature after all is but a name for these very same functions, the sum of the qualities and attributes, physical, mental, etc., in the universe and man, the total of agencies and forces guided by intelligent laws.
843.
See Key to Theosophy, pp. 147, 148, et seq.
844.
Kâma Rûpa, the vehicle of the Lower Manas, is said to dwell in the physical brain, in the five physical senses and in all the sense-organs of the physical body.
845.
Tanmâtra means subtle and rudimentary form, the gross type of the finer elements. The five Tanmâtras are really the characteristic properties or qualities of matter and of all the elements; the real spirit of the word is “something” or “merely transcendental,” in the sense of properties or qualities.
846.
See Theosophist, August, 1883, “The Real and the Unreal.”
847.
As the author of Esoteric Buddhism and the Occult World called Manas the Human Soul, and Buddhi the Spiritual Soul, I have left these terms unchanged in the Voice, seeing that it was a book intended for the public.
848.
In the exoteric teachings of Râja Yoga, Antahkarana is called the inner organ of perception and is divided into four parts: the (lower) Manas, Buddhi (reason), Ahankâra (personality), and Chitta (thinking faculty). It also, together with several other organs, forms a part of Jîva, Soul called also Lingadeh. Esotericists, however, must not be misled by this popular version.
849.
The Earth, or earth-life rather, is the only Avîtchi (Hell) that exists for the men of our humanity on this globe. Avîtchi is a state, not a locality, a counterpart of Devachan. Such a state follows the Soul wherever it goes, whether into Kâma Loka, as a semi-conscious Spook, or into a human body, when reborn to suffer Avîtchi. Our Philosophy recognizes no other Hell.
850.
See Voice of the Silence, p. 97.
851.
Loc. cit.
852.
Read the last footnote on p. 368, vol. ii. of Isis Unveiled, and you will see that even profane Egyptologists and men who, like Bunsen, were ignorant of Initiation, were struck by their own discoveries when they found the “Word” mentioned in old papyri.
853.
See Theosophist, vol. iii., October, 1882, p. 13.
854.
Read pp. 40 and 63 in the Voice of the Silence.
855.
See Voice of the Silence, p. viii.
856.
The following notes were contributed by students and approved by H. P. B.
857.
See page 444.
858.
All these “spaces” denote the special magnetic currents, the planes of substance, and the degrees of approach that the consciousness of the Yogî, or Chelâ, performs towards assimilation with the inhabitants of the Lokas.
859.
[If the Nidânas are read the reverse way, i.e., from 12 to 1, they give the evolutionary order.—Ed.]
860.
[I.e., an Initiate, the word Adept being used by H. P. B. to cover all grades of Initiation. As above seen, she used the words Mâyâvi Rûpa in more than one sense.—Ed.]