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Our present quarrel is exclusively with theology. The Church enforces belief in a personal god and a personal devil, while Occultism shows the fallacy of such a belief. And though for the Pantheists and Occultists, as much as for the Pessimists, Nature is no better than “ a comely mother, but stone cold ” — this is true only so far as regards external physical nature. They both agree that, to the superficial observer, she is no better than an immense slaughter-house wherein butchers become victims, and victims executioners in their turn. It is quite natural that the pessimistically inclined profane, once convinced of Nature’s numerous shortcomings and failures, and especially of her autophagous propensities, should imagine this to be the best evidence that there is no deity in abscondito within Nature, nor anything divine in her. Nor is it less natural that the materialist and the physicist should imagine that everything is due to blind force and chance, and to the survival of the strongest, even more often than of the fittest. But the Occultists, who regard physical nature as a bundle of most varied illusions on the plane of deceptive perceptions ; who recognise in every pain and suffering but the necessary pangs of incessant procreation : a series of stages toward an ever-growing perfectibility, which is visible in the silent influence of never-erring Karma, or abstract nature — the Occultists, we say, view the great Mother otherwise. Woe to those who live without suffering. Stagnation and death is the future of all that vegetates without a change. And how can there be any change for the better without proportionate suffering during the preceding stage ? Is it not those only who have learnt the deceptive value of earthly hopes and the illusive allurements of external nature who are destined to solve the great problems of life, pain, and death ?
If our modern philosophers — preceded by the mediæval scholars — have helped themselves to more than one fundamental idea of antiquity, theologians have built their God and his Archangels, their Satan and his Angels, along with the Logos and his staff, entirely out of the dramatis personæ of the old heathen Pantheons. They would have been
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welcome to these, had they not cunningly distorted the original characters, perverted the philosophical meaning, and taking advantage of the ignorance of Christendom — the result of long ages of mental sleep, during which humanity was permitted to think only by proxy — tossed every symbol into the most inextricable confusion. One of their most sinful achievements in this direction, was the transformation of the divine alter ego into the grotesque Satan of their theology.
As the whole philosophy of the problem of evil hangs upon the correct comprehension of the constitution of the inner being of nature and man, of the divine within the animal, and hence also the correctness of the whole system as given in these pages, with regard to the crown piece of evolution — Man — we cannot take sufficient precautions against theological subterfuges. When the good St. Augustine and the fiery Tertullian called the Devil “ the monkey of God,” this could be attributed to the ignorance of the age they lived in. It is more difficult to excuse our modern writers on the same ground. The translation of Mazdean literature has afforded to the Roman Catholic writers the pretext for proving their point in the same direction once more. They have taken advantage of the dual nature of Ahura Mazda in the Zend Avesta and the Vendidad, and of his Amshaspends, to emphasize still further their wild theories. Satan is the plagiarist and the copyist by anticipation of the religion which came ages later. This was one of the master strokes of the Latin Church, its best trump-card after the appearance of Spiritualism in Europe. Though only a succès d’estime, in general, even among those who are not interested in either Theosophy or Spiritualism, yet the weapon is often used by the Christian (Roman Catholic) Kabalists against the Eastern Occultists.
Now even the Materialists are quite harmless, and may be regarded as the friends of Theosophy, when compared to some fanatical “ Christian ” (as they call themselves, “ Sectarian ” as we call them) Kabalists, on the Continent. These read the Zohar, not to find in it ancient Wisdom, but to discover in its verses, by mangling the texts and meaning, Christian dogmas, where none could ever have been meant ; and, having fished them out with the collective help of Jesuitical casuistry and learning, the supposed “ Kabalists ” proceed to write books and to mislead less far-sighted students of the Kabala. *
* Such a pseudo-Kabalist was the Marquis de Mirville in France, who, having studied the Zohar and other old remnants of Jewish Wisdom under the “ Chevalier ” Drach, an ancient Rabbi Kabalist converted to the Romish Church — wrote with his help half a dozen volumes full of slander and calumnies against every prominent Spiritualist and Kabalist. From 1848 up to 1860 he persecuted unrelentingly the old Count d’Ourches, one of the earliest Eastern Occultists in France, a man the scope of whose occult knowledge will never be appreciated correctly by his survivors, because he screened his real beliefs and knowledge under the mask of Spiritism.
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May we not then be permitted to drag the deep rivers of the Past, and thus bring to the surface the root idea that led to the transformation of the Wisdom-God, who had first been regarded as the creator of everything that exists, into an Angel of Evil — a ridiculous horned biped, half goat and half monkey, with hoofs and a tail ? We need not go out of the way to compare the pagan demons of either Egypt, India, or Chaldea with the devil of Christianity, for no such comparison is possible. But we may stop to glance at the biography of the Christian Devil, a piratical reprint from the Chaldeo-Judæan mythology : —
The primitive origin of this personification rests upon the Akkadian conception of the cosmic powers — the Heavens and the Earth — in eternal feud and struggle with Chaos. Their Silik-Muludag, “ the God amongst all the Gods,” the “ merciful guardian of men on Earth,” was the Son of Hea (or Ea) the great God of Wisdom, called by the Babylonians Nebu. With both peoples — as in the case of the Hindu gods — their deities were both beneficent and maleficent. As Evil and punishment are the agents of Karma, in an absolutely just retributive sense, so Evil was the servant of the good (Hibbert Lect. 1887, pp. 101-115). The reading of the Chaldeo-Assyrian tiles has now demonstrated it beyond a shadow of doubt. We find the same idea in the Zohar. Satan was a Son, and an Angel of God. With all the Semitic nations, the Spirit of the Earth was as much the Creator in his own realm as the Spirit of the Heavens. They were twin brothers and interchangeable in their functions, when not two in one. Nothing of that which we find in Genesis is absent from the Chaldeo-Assyrian religious beliefs, even in the little that has hitherto been deciphered. The great “ Face of the Deep ” of Genesis is traced in the Tohu-bohu, “ Deep,” “ Primeval Space,” or Chaos of the Babylonians. Wisdom (the Great Unseen God) — called in Genesis chap. i. the “ Spirit of God ” — lived, for the older Babylonians as for the Akkadians, in the Sea of Space. Toward the days described by Berosus, this sea became the visible waters on the face of the Earth — the crystalline abode of the great mother, the mother of Ea and all the gods, which became, still later, the great Dragon Tiamat, the Sea Serpent. Its last stage of development was the great struggle of Bel with the Dragon — the Devil !
Whence the Christian idea that God cursed the Devil ? The God of the Jews, whomsoever he was, forbids cursing Satan. Philo Judæus and Josephus both state that the Law (the Pentateuch and the Talmud) undeviatingly forbid one to curse the adversary, as also the gods of the gentiles. “ Thou shalt not revile the gods,” quoth the god of Moses (Exodus xxii. 28), for it is God who “ hath divided (them) unto all nations ” (Deut. iv. 19) ; and those who speak evil of
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“ Dignities ” (gods) are called “ filthy dreamers ” by Jude (8). For even Michael the Archangel durst not bring against him (the devil) a railing accusation, but said : “ The Lord rebuke thee ” (ibid 9). Finally the same is repeated in the Talmud. * “ Satan appeared one day to a man who used to curse him daily, and said to him : ‘ Why dost thou this ? ’ Consider that God himself would not curse me, but merely said : ‘ The Lord rebuke thee, Satan.’ ” †
This bit of Talmudic information shows plainly two things : ( a ) that St. Michael is called “ God ” in the Talmud, and somebody else “ the Lord ” ; and (b) that Satan is a God, of whom even the “ Lord ” is in fear. All we read in the Zohar and other Kabalistic works on Satan shows plainly that this “ personage ” is simply the personification of the abstract evil, which is the weapon of Karmic law and Karma. It is our human nature and man himself, as it is said that “ Satan is always near and inextricably interwoven with man.” It is only a question of that Power being latent or active in us.
It is a well-known fact — to learned Symbologists at all events — that in every great religion of antiquity, it is the Logos Demiurge (the second logos), or the first emanation from the mind (Mahat), who is made to strike, so to say, the key-note of that which may be called the correlation of individuality and personality in the subsequent scheme of evolution. The Logos it is, who is shown in the mystic symbolism of cosmogony, theogony, and anthropogony, playing two parts in the drama of Creation and Being, i.e., that of the purely human personality and the divine impersonality of the so-called Avatars, or divine incarnations, and of the universal Spirit, called Christos by the Gnostics, and the Farvarshi (or Ferouer) of Ahura Mazda in the Mazdean philosophy. On the lower rungs of theogony the celestial Beings of lower Hierarchies had each a Farvarshi, or a celestial “ Double.” It is the same, only a still more mystic, reassertion of the Kabalistic axiom, “ Deus est Demon inversus ” ; the word “ demon,” however, as in the case of Socrates, and in the spirit of the meaning given to it by the whole of antiquity, standing for the guardian Spirit, an “ Angel,” not a devil of Satanic descent, as theology will have it. The Roman Catholic Church shows its usual logic and consistency by accepting, as the ferouer of Christ, St. Michael, who was “ his Angel Guardian,” as proved by St. Thomas, ‡ while he calls the prototypes of Michael and his synonyms, such as Mercury, for example, devils.
* Vide Isis Unveiled, Vol. II., 487, et seq.
† Treat. Kiddusheem, 81. But see the Qabbala by Mr. I. Myer, pp. 92, 94, and the Zohar, quoted in his Volume.
‡ In the work of Marangone “ Delle grandezze del Archangelo Sancto Mikaele,” the author exclaims : “ O Star, the greatest of those that follow the Sun who is Christ ! . . .
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The Church accepts positively the tenet that Christ has his Ferouer as any other god or mortal has. Writes de Mirville : “ Here we have the two heroes of the Old Testament, the Verbum (?), or the second Jehovah, and his face (‘ Presence,’ as the Protestants translate) forming both but one, and yet being two, a mystery which seemed to us unsolvable before we had studied the doctrine of the Mazdean ferouers, and learnt that the ferouer was the spiritual potency, at once image, face, and the guardian of the Soul which finally assimilates the ferouer.” (Mémoires à l’Académie, Vol. v., p. 516.) This is almost correct.
Among other absurdities, the Kabalists maintain that the word metatron being divided into μετά θρόνον, means near the throne. It means quite the reverse, as meta means “ beyond ” and not “ near.” This is of great importance in our argument. St. Michael, then, the quis ut Deus, is the translator, so to speak, of the invisible world into the visible and the objective.
They maintain, furthermore, along with the Roman Catholic Church, that in the Biblical and Christian theology there does not exist a “ higher celestial personality, after the Trinity, than that of the Archangel or the Seraphim, Michael.” According to them, the conqueror of the Dragon is “ the archisatrap of the sacred militia, the guardian of the planets, the King of the Stars, the slayer of Satan and the most powerful Rector.” In the mystic astronomy of these gentlemen, he is “ the conqueror of Ahriman, who having upset the sidereal throne of the usurper, bathes in his stead in the solar fires ” ; and, defender of the Christ-Sun, he approaches so near his Master, “ that he seems to become one with him . . . . Owing to this fusion with the Word (Verbum) the Protestants, and among them Calvin, ended by losing sight entirely of the duality, and saw no Michael but only his Master,” writes the Abbé Caron. The Roman Catholics, and especially their Kabalists, know better ; and it is they who explain to the world this duality, which affords to them the means of glorifying the chosen ones of the Church, and of rejecting and anathematizing all those Gods who may be in the way of their dogmas.
Thus the same titles and the same names are given in turn to God and the Archangel. Both are called Metatron, “ both have the name of Jehovah applied to them when they speak one in the other ” ( sic ) as, according to the Zohar, the term signifies equally “ the Master and the Ambassador.” Both are the Angel of the Face, because, as we are informed, if, on the one hand, the “ Word ” is called “ the face (or the Presence) and the image of the substance of God,” on the other, “ when
O living image of Divinity ! O great thaumaturgist of the old Testament ! O invisible Vicar of Christ within his Church ! . . .” etc., etc. The work is in great honour in the Latin Church.
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speaking of the Saviour to the Israelites, Isaiah (?) tells them ” that “ the angel of his presence saved them in their affliction ” — “ so he was their Saviour.” * Elsewhere he (Michael) is called very plainly “ the Prince of the Faces of the Lord, the glory of the Lord.” Both (Jehovah and Michael) are “ the guides of Israel † . . . chiefs of the armies of the Lord, Supreme Judges of the souls and even Seraphs.” ‡
The whole of the above is given on the authority of various works by Roman Catholics, and must, therefore, be orthodox. Some expressions are translated to show what subtle theologians and casuists mean by the term Ferouer, § a word borrowed by some French writers from the Zend Avesta, as said, and utilized in Roman Catholicism for a purpose Zoroaster was very far from anticipating. In Fargard XIX. of the Vendidad it is said (verse 14), “ Invoke, O Zarathustra ! my Farvarshi, who am Ahura Mazda, the greatest, the best, the fairest of all beings, the most solid, the most intelligent, . . . . and whose soul is the Holy Word ” (Mâthra Spenta). The French Orientalists translate Farvarshi by “ Ferouer.”
Now what is a Ferouer, or Farvarshi ? In some Mazdean works (e.g., Ormazd Ahriman, §§ 112, 113), it is plainly implied that Farvarshi is the inner, immortal man (or that Ego which reincarnates) ; that it existed before its physical body and survives all such it happens to be clothed in. “ Not only man was endowed with the Farvarshi, but gods too, and the sky, fire, waters, and plants.” (Introduction to the Vendidad, by J. Darmesteter). This shows as plainly as can be shown that the ferouer is the “ spiritual counterpart ” of whether god, animal, plant, or even element, i.e., the refined and the purer part of the grosser creation, the soul of the body, whatever the body may happen to be. Therefore does Ahura Mazda recommend Zarathustra to invoke his Farvarshi and not himself (Ahura-Mazda) ; that is to say, the impersonal and true Essence of Deity, one with Zoroaster’s own Atman (or Christos), not the false and personal appearance. This is quite clear.
Now it is on this divine and ethereal prototype that the Roman Catholics seized so as to build up the supposed difference between their god and angels, and the deity and its aspects, or the gods of the old religions. Thus, while calling Mercury, Venus, Jupiter (whether as gods or planets) Devils, they yet make of the same Mercury the ferouer of their Christ. This fact is undeniable. Vossius (De Idol., II., 373)
* Isaiah, lxiii. 8-9.
† Metator and ἡγεμών.
‡ “ La Face et le Représentant du Verbe,” p. 18, de Mirville.
§ That which is called in the Vendidad “ Farvarshi,” the immortal part of an individual, that which outlives man — the Higher Ego, say the Occultists, or the divine Double.
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proves that Michael is the Mercury of the pagans, and Maury and other French writers corroborate him, and add that “ according to great theologians Mercury and the Sun are one,” (?) and no wonder, they think, since “ Mercury being so near the Wisdom of the Verbum (the Sun), must be absorbed by and confounded with him.”
This “ pagan ” view was accepted from the first century of our era, as shown in the original Acts of the Apostles (the English translation being worthless). So much is Michael the Mercury of the Greeks and other nations, that when the inhabitants of Lystra mistook Paul and Barnabas for Mercury and Jupiter — “ the gods have come down to us in the likeness of men,” — verse 12 (xiv.) adds : “ And they called Barnabas Zeus, and Paul, Hermes (or Mercury), because he was the leader of the word ( Verbum ),” and not “ the chief speaker,” as erroneously translated in the authorised, and repeated even in the revised, English Bible. Michael is the angel in the Vision, the Son of God, “ who was like unto a Son of Man.” It is the Hermes-Christos of the Gnostics, the Anubis-Syrius of the Egyptians, the Counsellor of Osiris in Amenti, the Michael leontoid ὀφιομορφος of the Ophites, who wears on certain Gnostic jewels a lion head, like his father Ildabaoth. (See King’s Gnostics.)
Now to all this the Roman Catholic Church consents tacitly, many of her writers avowing it publicly. And, unable to deny the flagrant “ borrowing ” of their Church, who “ spoilt ” the symbols of her seniors, as the Jews had “ spoilt ” the Egyptians of their jewels of silver and gold, they explain the fact quite coolly and as seriously. Thus the writers who were hitherto timid enough to see, in this repetition by Christian dogmas of old Pagan ideas, “ a legendary plagiarism perpetrated by man,” are gravely assured that, far from such a simple solution of the almost perfect resemblance, it has to be attributed to quite another cause : “ to a prehistorical plagiarism, of a superhuman origin.”
If the reader would know how, he must kindly turn to the same fifth volume of de Mirville’s work. Please note that this author was the official and recognised defender of the Roman Church, and was helped by the learning of all the Jesuits. On page 518 we read : —
“ We have pointed out several demi-gods, and also very historical heroes of the pagans, who were predestined from the moment of their birth, to ape while dishonouring it, the nativity of the hero, who was quite God, before whom the whole earth had to bow ; we traced them being born as he was, from an immaculate mother ; we saw them strangling serpents in their cradles, fighting against demons, performing miracles, dying as martyrs, descending to the nether world and rising again from the dead. And we have bitterly deplored that timid and shy Christians should feel compelled to explain all such identities on the ground of
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coincidence of myth and symbol. They forgot apparently these words of the Saviour : ‘ All that came before me are thieves and robbers,’ a word which explains all without any absurd negation and which I commented in these words ‘ The Evangel is a sublime drama, parodied and played before its appointed time by ruffians.’ ”
The “ ruffians ” (les drôles), are of course demons whose manager is Satan. Now this is the easiest and the most sublime and simple way of getting out of the difficulty ! The Rev. Dr. Lundy, a Protestant de Mirville, followed the happy suggestion in his “ Monumental Christianity,” and so did Dr. Sepp of Munich in his works written to prove the divinity of Jesus and the Satanic origin of all other Saviours. So much greater the pity that a systematic and collective plagiarism, which went on for several centuries on the most gigantic scale, should be explained by another plagiarism, this time in the fourth Gospel. For the sentence quoted from it, “ All that ever came before me, etc.,” is a verbatim repetition of words written in the “ Book of Enoch ” lxxxix. In the Introduction to Archbishop Lawrence’s translation of it from an Ethiopic MS. in the Bodleian Library, the editor, author of the “ Evolution of Christianity,” remarks : —
“ In revising the proof-sheets of the Book of Enoch . . . . . the parable of the sheep, rescued by the good Shepherd from hireling guardians and ferocious wolves, is obviously borrowed by the fourth Evangelist from Enoch, lxxxix., in which the author depicts the shepherds as killing . . . the sheep before the advent of their Lord, and thus discloses the true meaning of that hitherto mysterious passage in the Johannine parable — ‘ All that ever came before me are thieves and robbers ’ — language in which we now detect an obvious reference to the allegorical shepherds of Enoch.”
It is too late in the day to claim that it is Enoch who borrowed from the New Testament, instead of vice versâ. Jude (14-15) quotes verbatim from Enoch a long passage about the coming of the Lord with his 10,000 saints, and naming specifically the prophet, acknowledges the source. This “ parallelism between prophet and apostle, have placed beyond controversy that, in the eyes of the author of an Epistle accepted as divine revelation, the Book of Enoch was the inspired production of an antediluvian patriarch . . . ” and further “ . . . the cumulative coincidence of language and ideas in Enoch and the authors of N.T. Scripture, . . . clearly indicates that the work of the Semitic Milton was the inexhaustible source from which Evangelists and Apostles, or the men who wrote in their names, borrowed their conceptions of the resurrection, judgment, immortality, perdition, and of the universal reign of righteousness under the eternal dominion of the Son of Man. This Evangelical plagiarism culminates in the Revelation of John, which adapts the visions
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of Enoch to Christianity, with modifications in which we miss the sublime simplicity of the great Master of apocalyptic prediction, who prophesied in the name of the antediluvian Patriarch.” (Int. xxxv.)
“ Antediluvian,” truly ; but if the phraseology of the text dates hardly a few centuries or even millenniums before the historical era, then it is no more the original prediction of the events to come, but, in its turn, a copy of some scripture of a prehistoric religion. . . . .” “ In the Krita age, Vishnu, in the form of Kapila and other (inspired sages). . . imparts to the world true wisdom as Enoch did. In the Tretá age he restrains the wicked, in the form of a universal monarch (the Chakravartin or the ‘ Everlasting King ’ of Enoch *) and protects the three worlds (or races). In the Dwâpara age, in the person of Veda-Vyâsa, he divides the one Veda into four, and distributes it into hundreds (Sata) of branches.” Truly so ; the Veda of the earliest Aryans, before it was written, went forth into every nation of the Atlanto-Lemurians, and sowed the first seeds of all the now existing old religions. The off-shoots of the never dying tree of wisdom have scattered their dead leaves even on Judæo-Christianity. And at the end of the Kali, our present age, Vishnu, or the “ Everlasting King ” will appear as Kalki, and re-establish righteousness upon earth. The minds of those who live at that time shall be awakened, and become as pellucid as crystal. “ The men who are thus changed by virtue of that peculiar time (the sixth race) shall be as the seeds of other human beings, and shall give birth to a race who shall follow the laws of the Krita age of purity ” ; i.e., it shall be the seventh race, the race of “ Buddhas,” the “ Sons of God,” born of immaculate parents.