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227 ←
38. The birth of the Fourth (Atlantean) Race. 39. The sub-races of the Fourth Humanity begin to divide and interblend; they form the first mixed races of various colours. 40. The superiority of the Atlantean over other Races. 41. They fall into sin and beget children and monsters. 42. The first germs of anthropomorphism and sexual religion. They lose their “third eye.”
- 38. Thus, two by two, on the seven Zones, the Third Race gave birth to the Fourth; the Sura became A-sura.†
- 39. The First,‡ on every Zone, was moon-coloured;§ the Second yellow like gold; the Third red; the Fourth brown, which became black with sin.‖ The first seven human shoots were all of one complexion.¶ The next seven,** began mixing.††
To understand Shloka 38, it must be read together with the Shlokas of Stanza IX. Up to this point of evolution man belongs more to meta-
† The Gods became No-Gods.
‡ Race.
§ Yellow-white.
‖ Strictly speaking, it is only from the time of the Atlantean, brown and yellow giant races, that one ought to speak of man, since it was the Fourth Race only which was the first completely human species, however much larger in size than we are now. In Man: Fragments of Forgotten History (by two Chelâs), all that is said of the Atlanteans is quite correct. It is chiefly this Race which became “black with sin,” that brought the divine names of the Asuras, the Râkshasas and the Daityas, into disrepute, and passed them on to posterity as the names of fiends. For, as said, the Suras, Gods or Devas, having incarnated in the wise men of Atlantis, the names of Asuras and Râkshasas were given to the ordinary Atlanteans. Owing to the incessant conflicts of the latter with the last remnants of the Third Race and the “Sons of Will and Yoga,” their names have led to the later allegories about them in the Purânas. “Asura was the generic appellation of all the Atlanteans who were the enemies of the spiritual heroes of the Âryans (Gods).” (Man, p. 77.)
¶ In the beginning.
** The sub-races.
†† Their colours.
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physical than physical Nature. It is only after the so-called “Fall,” that the Races began to develop rapidly into a purely human shape. In order that the student may correctly comprehend the full meaning of the Fall—so mystic and transcendental in its real significance—he must at once be told the details which preceded it, seeing that modern Theology has made of the event 228 ←a pivot on which its most pernicious and absurd dogmas and beliefs are made to turn.
The Archaic Commentaries, as the reader may remember, explain that, of the Host of Dhyânîs, whose turn it was to incarnate as the Egos of the immortal, but, on this plane, senseless Monads—some “obeyed” (the Law of Evolution) immediately the men of the Third Race became physiologically and physically ready, i.e., when they had separated into sexes. These were those early conscious Beings who, now adding conscious knowledge and will to their inherent divine purity, “created” by Kriyâshakti the semi-divine man, who became the Seed on Earth for future Adepts. Those, on the other hand, who, jealous of their intellectual freedom—unfettered as it then was by the bonds of Matter—said: “We can choose, . . . we have wisdom,”* and so incarnated far later—these had their first Karmic punishment prepared for them. They got bodies inferior (physiologically) to their Astral Models, because their Chhâyâs had belonged to Progenitors of an inferior degree in the seven Classes. As to those “Sons of Wisdom” who “deferred” their incarnation till the Fourth Race, which was already tainted (physiologically) with sin and impurity, these produced a terrible cause, the Karmic result of which weighs on them to this day. It was produced in themselves, and they became the carriers of that seed of iniquity for æons to come, because the bodies they had to inform had become defiled through their own procrastination.†
This was the “Fall of the Angels,” owing to their rebellion against Karmic Law. The “fall of man” was no fall, for he was irresponsible. But “creation” having been invented on the dualistic system as the “prerogative of God alone”—the legitimate attribute patented by Theology in the name of an infinite Deity of their own making—the power of Kriyâshakti had to be regarded as “Satanic,” and as a usurpation of divine rights. Thus, in the light of such narrow views, the foregoing must naturally be considered as a terrible slander on man, “created in the image of God,” and a still more dreadful blasphemy in the face of the dead-letter dogma. “Your doctrine,” the
* Stanza VII, Shloka 24.
† See Shlokas 32, 34.
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Occultists have already been told, “makes of man, created out of dust in the likeness of his God, a vehicle of the Devil, from the first.” “Why do you make of your God a Devil—both, moreover, created in your own image?”—is our reply. The Esoteric interpretation of the Bible, however, sufficiently refutes this slanderous invention of Theology; the Secret Doctrine must some day become the just Karma of the Churches—more anti-Christian than the representative assemblies of the most confirmed Materialists and Atheists.
The true meaning of the old doctrine of the “Fallen Angels,” in its anthropological and evolutionary sense, is contained in the Kabalah, 229 ←and explains the Bible. It is found preëminently in Genesis when the latter is read in a spirit of research for truth, with no eye to dogma, and in no mood of preconception. This is easily proven. In Genesis (vi), the “Sons of God”—B’ne Aleim—become enamoured of the daughters of men, marry, and reveal to their wives the mysteries unlawfully learnt by them in Heaven, according to Enoch; and this is the “Fall of the Angels.”* But what, in reality, is the Book of Enoch itself, from which the author of Revelation and even the St. John of the Fourth Gospel† have so profusely quoted? Simply a Book of Initiation, giving out in allegory and cautious phraseology the programme of certain Archaic Mysteries performed in the inner Temples. The author of the Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and Quichés very justly suggests that the so-called
* In general, the so-called orthodox Christian conceptions about the “fallen” Angels or Satan, are as remarkable as they are absurd. About a dozen could be cited, of the most varied character as to details, and all from the pens of educated lay authors, “university graduates” of the present quarter of our century. Thus, the author of Earth’s Earliest Ages, G. H. Pember, M.A., devotes a thick volume to proving Theosophists, Spiritualists, Agnostics, Mystics, metaphysicians, poets, and every contemporary author on Oriental speculations, to be the devoted servants of the “Prince of the Air,” and irretrievably damned. He describes Satan and his Antichrist in this wise: “Satan is the ‘Anointed Cherub’ of old. . . . God created Satan, the fairest and wisest of all His creatures in this part of His Universe, and made him Prince of the World, and of the Power of the Air. . . . He was placed in an Eden, which was both far anterior to the Eden of Genesis . . . . and of an altogether different and more substantial character, resembling the New Jerusalem. Thus, Satan being perfect in wisdom, and beauty, his vast empire is our earth, if not the whole solar system. . . . Certainly no other angelic power of greater or even equal dignity has been revealed to us. The Archangel Michael himself is quoted by Jude as preserving towards the Prince of Darkness the respect due to a superior, however wicked he may be, until God has formally commanded his deposition.” Then we are informed that “Satan was from the moment of his creation surrounded by the insignia of royalty” (! !): that he “awoke to consciousness to find the air filled with the rejoicing music of those whom God had appointed.” Then the Devil “passes from the royalty to his priestly dignity” (! ! !). “Satan was also a priest of the Most High,” etc., etc. And now—“Antichrist will be Satan incarnate.” (Chap. III and pp. 56-59.) The pioneers of the coming Apollyon have already appeared—they are the Theosophists, the Occultists, the authors of the Perfect Way, of Isis Unveiled, of the Mystery of the Ages, and even of the Light of Asia ! ! The author notes the “avowed origin” of Theosophy from the “descending angels,” from the “Nephilim,” or the Angels of Genesis (vi), and the Giants. He ought to note his own descent from them also, as our Secret Doctrine endeavours to show—unless he refuses to belong to the present humanity.
† Compare x. 8, where it speaks of all who have come before Jesus, being “thieves and robbers.”
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“Visions” of Enoch relate to his (Enoch’s) experience at Initiation, and what he learned in the Mysteries; while he very erroneously states his opinion that Enoch had learned them before being converted to Christianity (! !); 230 ←furthermore, he believes that this book was written “at the beginning of the Christian era, when . . . . the customs and religion of the Egyptians fell into decadency”! This is hardly possible, since Jude, in his Epistle,* quotes from the Book of Enoch; and, therefore, as Archbishop Laurence, the translator of the Book of Enoch from the Ethiopic version, remarks, it “could not have been the production of a writer who lived after . . . . or was even coëval with” the writers of the New Testament, unless, indeed, Jude and the Gospels, and all that follows, were also a production of the already established Church—which, some critics say, is not impossible. But we are now concerned with the “Fallen Angels” of Enoch, rather than with Enoch himself.
In Indian exotericism, these Angels (Asuras) are also denounced as the “enemies of the Gods”; those who oppose sacrificial worship offered to the Devas. In Christian Theology they are broadly referred to as the “Fallen Spirits,” the heroes of various conflicting and contradictory legends, gathered from Pagan sources. The coluber tortuosus, the “tortuous snake”—a qualification said to have originated with the Jews—had quite another meaning before the Roman Church distorted it; among others, a purely astronomical signification.
The “Serpent” fallen from on high (deorsum fluens) was credited with the possession of the Keys of the Empire of the Dead (τοῦ θανάτου ἀρχή) to the day when Jesus saw it fall “as lightning . . . . from heaven,”† notwithstanding the Roman Catholic interpretation of “cadebat ut fulgur.” It means indeed that even “the devils are subject” to the Logos—who is Wisdom, but at the same time, as the opponent of ignorance, Satan or Lucifer. This remark refers to divine Wisdom falling like lightning on, and so quickening, the intellects of those who fight the devils of ignorance and superstition. Up to the time when Wisdom, in the shape of the incarnating Spirits of Mahat, descended from on high to animate and call the Third Race to real conscious life—Humanity, if it can be so called in its animal, senseless state, was of course doomed to moral as well as to physical death. The Angels fallen into generation are referred to metaphorically as Serpents and Dragons of Wisdom. On the other hand, regarded in the light of the Logos, the Christian Saviour, like Krishna, whether as man or Logos,
* Verse 14.
† Luke, x. 18.
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may be said to have saved those who believed in the Secret Teachings, from “eternal death,” and to have conquered the Kingdom of Darkness, or Hell, as every Initiate does. This is the human, terrestrial form of the Initiates, and also—because the Logos is Christos—that “principle” of our inner nature which develops in us into the Spiritual Ego—the Higher Self—formed of the indissoluble union of Buddhi, the sixth, and the spiritual efflorescence of Manas, the 231 ←fifth “principle.”* “The Logos is passive Wisdom in Heaven and conscious, self-active Wisdom on Earth,” we are taught. It is the Marriage of the “Heavenly Man” with the “Virgin of the World,” or Nature, as described in Pymander; the result of which is their progeny—immortal man. It is this which is called in St. John’s Revelation† the marriage of the Lamb with his Bride. This “wife” is now identified with the Church of Rome owing to the arbitrary interpretations of her votaries. But they seem to forget that her “linen” may be “clean and white” outwardly, like the “whited sepulchre,” but that the rottenness she is inwardly filled with, is not the “righteousness of saints,”‡ but rather the blood of the saints she has “slain upon the earth.”§ Thus the remark made by the great Initiate, in Luke—referring allegorically to the ray of enlightenment and reason, falling like lightning from on high into the hearts and minds of the converts to the old Wisdom-Religion, then presented in a new form by the wise Galilean Adept‖—
* It is not correct to refer to Christ—as some Theosophists do—as Buddhi, the sixth principle in man. The latter per se is a passive and latent principle, the Spiritual Vehicle of Âtmâ, inseparable from the manifested Universal Soul. It is only in union and in conjunction with Self-consciousness that Buddhi becomes the Higher Self and the Divine, discriminating Soul. Christos is the seventh principle, if anything.
† xix. 7.
‡ Ibid., verse 8.
§ xviii. 24.
‖ To make it plainer, any one who reads the passage in Luke, will see that the remark follows the report of the seventy, who rejoice that “even the devils [the spirit of controversy and reasoning, or the opposing power, since Satan means simply ‘adversary’ or ‘opponent’] are subject unto us through thy name.” (Luke, x. 17.) Now, “thy name” means the name of Christos, or Logos, or the Spirit of true Divine Wisdom, as distinct from the spirit of intellectual or mere materialistic reasoning—the Higher Self in short. And when Jesus remarks on this that he has “beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven,” it is a mere statement of his clairvoyant powers, notifying to them that he already knew it, and a reference to the incarnation of the Divine Ray—the Gods or Angels—which falls into generation. For not all men, by any means, benefit by that incarnation, and with some the power remains latent and dead during the whole life. Truly “no man knoweth who the Son is, but the Father; and who the Father is, but the Son,” as added by Jesus then and there (verse 22)—the “Church of Christ” less than any one else. The Initiates alone understood the secret meaning of the terms “Father” and “Son,” and knew that it referred to Spirit and Soul on the Earth. For the teachings of Christ were Occult teachings, which could only be explained at Initiation. They were never intended for the masses, for Jesus forbade the twelve to go to the Gentiles and the Samaritans (Matth., x. 5), and repeated to his disciples that the “mystery of the kingdom of God” was for them alone, not for the multitudes (Mark, iv. 11).
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was distorted out of all recognition, as was also his own personality, and made to fit in with one of the most cruel and the most pernicious of all theological dogmas.
But if Western Theology alone holds the patent and copyright of Satan—in all the dogmatic horror of that fiction—other nationalities 232 ←and religions have committed equal errors in their misinterpretation of a tenet, which is one of the most profoundly philosophical and ideal conceptions of ancient thought. They have both disfigured, and hinted at, the correct meaning of it in their numerous allegories on the subject. Nor have the semi-esoteric dogmas of Paurânic Hindûism failed to evolve very suggestive symbols and allegories concerning the rebellious and fallen Gods. The Purânas teem with them; and we find a direct hint at the truth in the frequent allusions of Parâshara, in the Vishnu Purâna, to all those Rudras, Rishis, Asuras, Kumâras and Munis, who have to be born in every age—to reïncarnate in every Manvantara. This, Esoterically, is equivalent to saying that the “Flames” born of the Universal Mind, or Mahat, owing to the mysterious workings of Karmic Will and the impulse of Evolutionary Law, had—without any gradual transition—landed on this Earth, after having, as in Pymander, broken through the “Seven Circles of Fire,” or, in short, the seven intermediate Worlds.
There is an Eternal Cyclic Law of Re-births, and the series is headed at every new Manvantaric Dawn by those who have enjoyed their rest from reïncarnations in previous Kalpas for incalculable Æons—by the highest and the earliest Nirvânîs. It was the turn of these “Gods” to incarnate in the present Manvantara; hence their presence on Earth, and the ensuing allegories; hence, also, the perversion of the original meaning.* The Gods who had “fallen into generation,” whose mission it was to complete Divine Man, are found represented later on as Demons, Evil Spirits, and Fiends, at feud and war with Gods, or the
* So, for instance, in the Purânas, Pulastya, a Prajâpati, or son of Brahmâ—the progenitor of the Râkshasas, and the grandfather of Râvana, the great king of Lankâ in the Râmâyana—had, in a former birth, a son named Dattoli, “who is now known as the sage Agastya,” says Vishnu Purâna (Wilson’s Trans., i. 154). This name of Dattoli alone, has six more variants to it, or seven meanings. He is called respectively, Dattoli, Dattâli, Dattotti, Dattotri, Dattobhri, Dambhobhi and Dambholi. These seven variants have each a secret sense, and refer in the Esoteric Commentaries to various ethnological classifications, and also to physiological and anthropological mysteries of the primitive races. For, surely, the Râkshasas are not Demons, but simply the primitive and ferocious Giants, the Atlanteans, who were scattered on the face of the Globe, as the Fifth Race is now. Vasishtha is a warrant of this, if his words addressed to Parâshara, who attempted a bit of Jadoo (sorcery), which he calls “sacrifice,” for the destruction of the Râkshasas, mean anything. For he says: “Let no more of these unoffending ‘Spirits of Darkness’ be consumed.” (See for details, Mahâbhârata, Âdi Parvan, s. 176; also Linga Purâna, Pûrvârdha, s. 64; Wilson, ibid., i. 8, 9.)
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irresponsible agents of the one Eternal Law. But no conception of such creatures as the Devils and the Satan of the Christian, Jewish, and Mahommedan religions was ever intended by these thousand and one Âryan allegories.*
233 ← The true Esoteric view about “Satan,” the opinion held on this subject by the whole of philosophic antiquity, is admirably brought out in an Appendix, entitled “The Secret of Satan,” to the second edition of Dr. A. Kingsford’s Perfect Way.† No better and clearer indication of the truth could be offered to the intelligent reader, and it is therefore quoted here at some length:
1. And on the seventh day [seventh creation of the Hindûs],‡ there went forth from the presence of God a mighty Angel, full of wrath and consuming, and God gave him the dominion of the outermost sphere.§
2. Eternity brought forth Time; the Boundless gave birth to Limit; Being descended into generation.‖
4. Among the Gods is none like unto him, into whose hands are committed the kingdoms, the power and the glory of the worlds:
5. Thrones and empires, the dynasties of kings,¶ the fall of nations, the birth of churches, the triumphs of Time.
For, as is said in Hermes:
20. Satan is the door-keeper of the Temple of the King; he standeth in Solomon’s porch; he holdeth the Keys of the Sanctuary;
21. That no man may enter therein save the anointed, having the arcanum of Hermes.
These suggestive and majestic verses had reference, with the ancient Egyptians and other civilized peoples of antiquity, to the creative and
* We have a passage from a Master’s letter which has a direct bearing upon these incarnating Angels. Says the letter: “Now there are, and there must be, failures in the ethereal Races of the many Classes of Dhyân Chohans, or Devas [progressed entities of a previous Planetary Period], as well as among men. But still, as the failures are too far progressed and spiritualized to be thrown back forcibly from Dhyân-Chohanship into the vortex of a new primordial evolution through the lower Kingdoms, this then happens. Where a new Solar System has to be evolved, these Dhyân Chohans are borne in by influx ‘ahead’ of the Elementals [entities . . . . to be developed into humanity at a future time] and remain as a latent or inactive spiritual force, in the Aura of a nascent World . . . . until the stage of human evolution is reached. . . . Then they become an active force and commingle with the Elementals, to develop little by little the full type of humanity.” That is to say, to develop in man, and endow him with his Self-conscious Mind, or Manas.
† Appendix XV, pp. 369, et seqq.
‡ When the Earth with its Planetary Chain and Man were to appear.
§ Our Earth and the physical plane of consciousness.
‖ When the pure, celestial Beings or Dhyân Chohans, and the great Pitris of various classes were commissioned—the one to evolve their Images or Chhâyâs, and make of them physical man, the others to inform and thus endow him with divine intelligence and the comprehension of the Mysteries of Creation.
¶ The “dynasties of kings” who all regard themselves as the “anointed,” reigning by the “Grace of God,” whereas in truth, they reign by the grace of Matter, the Great Illusion, the Deceiver.
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generative Light of the Logos—Horus, Brahmâ, Ahura Mazda, etc., as primeval manifestations of the Ever-unmanifested Principle, whether called Ain Suph, Parabrahman, or Zeruâna Akerne, or Boundless Time, Kâla—but the 234 ←meaning is now degraded in the Kabalah. The “Anointed”—who has the secrets and mysteries of Hermes, or Budha, Wisdom, and who alone is entrusted with the “Keys of the Sanctuary,” the Womb of Nature, in order to fructify it and call to active life and being the whole Kosmos—has become, with the Jews, Jehovah, the “God of Generation” on the Lunar Mountain—Sinai, the Mountain of the Moon (Sin). The “Sanctuary” has become the “Holy of Holies,” and the arcanum has been anthropomorphized, and “phallicized,” and dragged down into Matter, indeed. Hence arose the necessity of making of the “Dragon of Wisdom,” the “Serpent” of Genesis; of the conscious God who needed a body to clothe his too subjective divinity, Satan. But the “innumerable incarnations of Spirit,” and “the ceaseless pulse and current of Desire,”* refer, the first, to our doctrine of Karmic and Cyclic Rebirths, the second—to Erôs, not the later God of material, physiological love, but to the Divine Desire in the Gods, as well as in all Nature, to create and give life to Beings. This, the Rays of the one “Dark,” because invisible and incomprehensible, “Flame” could achieve only by themselves descending into Matter. Therefore, as continued in the Appendix:
12. Many names hath God given him [Satan], names of mystery, secret and terrible.
13. . . . The Adversary, because Matter opposeth Spirit, and Time accuseth even the saints of the Lord.
28. Stand in awe of him, and sin not: speak his name with trembling. . . .
29. For Satan is the magistrate of the Justice of God [Karma]; he beareth the balance and the sword.
31. For to him are committed Weight and Measure and Number.
Compare the last sentence with what the Rabbi, who explains the Kabalah to the Prince in the Book of Al Chazari, says, and it will be found that Weight and Measure and Number are, in the Sepher Jetzirah, the attributes of the Sephiroth (the three Sephrim, or figures, ciphers), covering the whole collective number of 10; and that the Sephiroth are the collective Adam Kadmon, the “Heavenly Man” or the Logos. Thus Satan and the Anointed were identified in ancient thought. Therefore:
* Ibid., loc. cit., verse 10.
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33. Satan is the minister of God, Lord of the seven mansions of Hades, the Angel of the manifest Worlds.
The seven Lokas, or Saptaloka, of the Earth with the Hindûs; for Hades, or the Limbo of Illusion, of which Theology makes a region bordering on Hell, is simply our Globe, the Earth, and thus Satan is called the “Angel of the manifest Worlds.”
It is “Satan who is the God of our planet and the only God,” and this without any metaphorical allusion to its wickedness and depravity. For he is one with the Logos.
The first and “eldest of the gods,” in 235 ←the order of microcosmic [divine] evolution, Saturn (Satan) [astronomically] is the seventh and last in the order of macrocosmic emanation, being the circumference of the Kingdom of which Phœbus [the Light of Wisdom, also the Sun] is the centre.
The Gnostics were right, then, in calling the Jewish God an “Angel of Matter,” or he who breathed (conscious) life into Adam, and whose Planet was Saturn.
34. And God hath put a girdle about his loins [the rings of Saturn], and the name of the girdle is Death.
In Anthropogony this “girdle” is the human body with its two lower principles. These three die, while the innermost Man is immortal. And now we approach the secret of Satan.
37. . . . Upon Satan only is the shame of generation.
38. He hath lost his virginal estate [so hath the Kumâra, by incarnating]: uncovering heavenly secrets, he hath entered into bondage.
39. He encompasseth with bonds and limits all things. . . .
42. Twain are the armies of God: in heaven the hosts of Michael; in the abyss [the manifested world] the legions of Satan.
43. These are the Unmanifest and the Manifest; the free and the bound [in Matter]; the virginal and the fallen.
44. And both are the ministers of the Father, fulfilling the Word divine.
Therefore:
55. Holy and venerable is the Sabbath of God: blessed and sanctified is the name of the Angel of Hades [Satan].
For:
41. The glory of Satan is the shadow of the Lord [God in the manifested World]: the throne of Satan is the footstool of Adonai [the whole Kosmos].
When the Church, therefore, curses Satan, it curses the Kosmic reflection of God; it anathematizes God made manifest in Matter or in the objective; it maledicts God, or the ever-incomprehensible Wisdom,
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revealing itself as Light and Shadow, Good and Evil in Nature, in the only manner comprehensible to the limited intellect of Man.
This is the true philosophical and metaphysical interpretation of Samael, or Satan, the Adversary in the Kabalah; the same tenets and spirit being found in the allegorical interpretations of every other ancient religion. This philosophical view does not interfere, however, with the historical records connected with it. We say “historical,” because allegory and mythical ornamentation round the kernel of tradition, in nowise prevent that kernel being a record of real events. Thus, the Kabalah, repeating the time-honoured revelations of the once universal history of our Globe and the evolution of its Races, has presented it under the legendary form of the various records which have formed the Bible. Its historical foundation, in however imperfect a form, is now offered in these pages from the Secret Doctrine of the East; and thus 236 ←the allegorical and symbolical meaning of the Serpent of Genesis is found explained by the “Sons of Wisdom”—or Angels from higher Spheres, though all and each pertain to the Kingdom of Satan, or Matter—revealing to men the mysteries of Heaven. Hence, also, all the so-called myths of the Hindû, Grecian, Chaldæan, and Jewish Pantheons are found to be built on fact and truth. The Giants of Genesis are the historical Atlanteans of Lankâ, and the Greek Titans.
Who can forget that Troy was once upon a time proclaimed a myth, and Homer a non-existent personage, while the existence of such cities as Herculaneum and Pompeii was denied, and attributed to mere fairy legends? Yet Schliemann has proved that Troy did really exist, and the two latter cities, though buried for long ages under the Vesuvian lava, have had their resurrection day, and live again on the surface of the Earth. How many more cities and localities called “fabulous” are on the list of future discoveries, how many more personages regarded as mythical* will one day become historical, those alone can tell who read the decrees of Fate in the Astral Light.
As the tenets of the Eastern Doctrine, however, have always been kept secret, and as the reader can hardly hope to be shown the original texts unless he becomes an accepted disciple, let the Greek and Latin scholar turn to the original texts of Hermetic literature. Let him, for instance, read carefully the opening pages of the Pymander of Hermes Trismegistus, and he will see our doctrines corroborated therein, however veiled its text. There also he will find the evolution of the
* See the “Primeval Manus of Humanity.”
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Universe, of our Earth, called “Nature” in Pymander, as of everything else, from the “Moyst Principle,” or the great Deep, Father-Mother—the first differentiation in the manifested Kosmos. First the “Universal Mind,” which the hand of the Christian translator has metamorphosed in the earliest renderings into God, the Father; then the “Heavenly Man,”* the great Total of that Host of Angels, which was too pure for the creation of the inferior Worlds or of the Men of our Globe, but which nevertheless fell into Matter by virtue of that same evolution, as the Second Logos of the “Father.”†
237 ← Synthetically, every Creative Logos, or “the Son who is one with the Father,” is the Host of the Rectores Mundi in itself. Even Christian Theology makes of the seven “Angels of the Presence” the Virtues, or the personified attributes, of God, which, being created by him, as the Manus were by Brahmâ, became Archangels. The Roman Catholic Theodice itself, recognizing in its creative Verbum Princeps the Head of these Angels (caput angelorum) and the Angel of the great Counsel (magni consilii angelus), thus recognizes the identity of Christ with them.
“The Sura became A-Sura”—the Gods became No-Gods—says the text; i.e., Gods became Fiends—Satan, when read literally. But Satan will now be shown, in the teaching of the Secret Doctrine, to be allegorized as Good and Sacrifice, a God of Wisdom, under different names.
The Kabalah teaches that Pride and Presumption—the two chief prompters of Selfishness and Egotism—are the causes that emptied Heaven of one-third of its divine denizens, mystically, and of one-third of the stars, astronomically; in other words, the first statement is an allegory, and the second a fact. The former, nevertheless, is, as shown, intimately connected with humanity.
In their turn the Rosicrucians, who were well acquainted with the secret meaning of the tradition, kept it to themselves, teaching merely that the whole of “creation” was due to, and the result of, that
* The “Heavenly Man,” please mark again the word, is the “Logos” or the “Son” Esoterically. Therefore, once that the title was applied to Christ, who was declared to be God and the very God himself, Christian Theology had no choice. In order to support its dogma of a personal Trinity it had to proclaim, as it still does, that the Christian Logos is the only true one, and that all the Logoi of other religions are false, and are only the masquerading Evil Principle, Satan. See whereto this has led Western Theology!
† “For the Mind, a deity abounding in both sexes, being Light and Life, brought forth by its Word another Mind or Workman; which, being God of the Fire and the Spirit, fashioned and formed seven other Governors, which in their Circles contain the Phenomenal World, and whose disposition is called Fate or Destiny.” (Sect. ix. c. 1, ed. of 1579.) Here it is evident that Mind, the Primeval Universal Divine Thought, is neither the Unknown Unmanifested One, since it abounds in both sexes—is male and female—nor yet the Christian “Father,” as the latter is a male and not an androgyne. The fact is that the “Father,” “Son,” and “Man” are hopelessly mixed up in the translations of Pymander.
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legendary “War in Heaven,” brought on by the rebellion of the Angels* against Creative Law, or the Demiurge. The statement is correct, but the inner meaning is to this day a mystery. To elude further explanation of the difficulty, by appealing to divine mystery, or to the sin of prying into its policy—is to say nothing at all. It may prove sufficient for 238 ←believers in the Pope’s infallibility, but will hardly satisfy the philosophical mind. Yet the truth, although known to most of the higher Kabalists, has never been told by any of their number. One and all, Kabalists and Symbologists, have shown an extraordinary reluctance to confess the primitive meaning of the Fall of the Angels. In a Christian such silence is only natural. Neither Alchemist nor Philosopher during the Mediæval Ages could have uttered that† which in the sight of Orthodox Theology was terrible blasphemy, for it would have
* The allegory of the fire of Prometheus is another version of the rebellion of the proud Lucifer, who was hurled down to the “bottomless pit,” or simply on to our Earth, to live as man. The Hindû Lucifer, the Mahâsura, is also said to have become envious of the Creator’s resplendent Light, and, at the head of inferior Asuras (not Gods, but Spirits), to have rebelled against Brahmâ; for which Shiva hurled him down to Pâtâla. But, as philosophy goes hand in hand with allegorical fiction in Hindû myths, the “Devil” is made to repent, and is afforded the opportunity to progress: he is a sinful man esoterically, and can by Yoga, devotion, and adeptship, reach his status of “one with the deity,” once more. Hercules, the Sun-God, descends to Hades (the Cave of Initiation) to deliver the victims from their tortures, etc. The Christian Church alone creates eternal torment for the Devil and the damned that she has invented.
† Why, for instance, should Éliphas Lévi, the very fearless and outspoken Kabalist, have hesitated to divulge the mystery of the Fallen Angels so-called? That he knew the fact and the real meaning of the allegory, both in its religious and mystical, as well as in its physiological sense, is proved by his voluminous writings and frequent allusions and hints. Yet Éliphas, after having alluded to it a hundred times in his previous works, says in his later Histoire de la Magie (pp. 220, 221): “We protest with all our might against the sovereignty and the ubiquity of Satan. We pretend neither to deny nor affirm here the tradition on the Fall of the Angels. . . . But if so . . . . then the prince of the Angelic Rebels can be at best the last and the most powerless among the condemned—now that he is separated from deity—which is the principle of every power.” This is hazy and evasive enough; but see what Hargrave Jennings writes in his weird, staccato-like style: “Both Saint Michael and Saint George are types. They are sainted personages, or dignified heroes, or powers apotheosized. They are each represented with their appropriate faculties and attributes. These are reproduced and stand multiplied—distinguished by different names in all the mythologies [including the Christian]. But the idea regarding each is a general one. This idea and representative notion is that of the all-powerful champion—child-like in his ‘virgin innocence’—so powerful that this God-filled innocence (the Seraphim ‘know most,’ the Cherubim ‘love most’) can shatter the world (articulated—so to use the word—in the magic of Lucifer, but condemned), in opposition to the artful constructions, won out of the permission of the Supreme—artful constructions (‘this side life’)—of the magnificent apostate, the mighty rebel, but yet, at the same time, the ‘Light-bringer,’ the Lucifer—the ‘Morning Star,’ the ‘Son of the Morning’—the very highest title ‘out of heaven,’ for in heaven it cannot be, but out of heaven it is everything. In an apparently incredible side of his character—for let the reader carefully remark that qualities are of no sex—this Archangel Saint Michael is the invincible, sexless, celestial ‘Energy’—to dignify him by his grand characteristics—the invincible ‘Virgin-Combatant,’ clothed . . . and at the same time armed, in the denying mail of the Gnostic ‘refusal to create.’ This is another myth, a ‘myth within myths,’ . . . a stupendous ‘mystery of mysteries,’ because it is so impossible and contradictory. Unexplainable as the Apocalypse. Unrevealable as the ‘Revelation.’ ” (Phallicism, pp. 212, 213.) Nevertheless, this unexplainable and unrevealable mystery will now be explained and revealed by the doctrines of the East. Though, of course, as the very erudite, but still more puzzling author of Phallicism gives it, no uninitiated mortal would ever understand his real drift.
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led them directly through the “Holy” Office of the Inquisition, to rack and stake. But for our modern Kabalists and Freethinkers the case is different. With the latter, we fear, it is merely human pride, vanity based on a loudly rejected but ineradicable superstition. Since the Church, in her struggle with Manicheeïsm, invented the Devil, and by placing 239 ←a theological extinguisher on the radiant Star-God Lucifer, the “Son of the Morning,” thus created the most gigantic of all her paradoxes, a black and tenebrous Light—the myth has struck its roots too deeply into the soil of blind faith to permit, in our age, even those, who do not acquiesce in her dogmas, and laugh at her horned and cloven-footed Satan, to come out bravely and confess the antiquity of the oldest of all traditions. In a few brief words it is this. Semi-exoterically, the “First-born” of the Almighty—Fiat Lux—or the Angels of Primordial Light, were commanded to “create”; one-third of them rebelled and “refused”; while those who “obeyed” as Fetahil did—failed most signally.
To realize the refusal and failure in their correct physical meaning, one must study and understand Eastern Philosophy; one has to be acquainted with the fundamental mystical tenets of the Vedântins, as to the utter fallacy of attributing functional activity to the Infinite and Absolute Deity. Esoteric Philosophy maintains that during the Sandhyâs, the “Central Sun” emits Creative Light—passively, so to say. Causality is latent. It is only during the active periods of Being that it gives rise to a stream of ceaseless Energy, whose vibrating currents acquire more activity and potency with every rung of the hebdomadic ladder of Being which they descend. Hence it becomes comprehensible how the process of “creating,” or rather of fashioning, the organic Universe, with all its units of the seven kingdoms, necessitated intelligent Beings—who became collectively a Being or Creative God, differentiated already from the One Absolute Unity, unrelated as the latter is to conditioned “creation.”*
Now the Vatican MS. of the Kabalah—the only copy of which (in Europe) is said to have been in the possession of Count St. Germain—contains the most complete exposition of the doctrine, including the peculiar version accepted by the Luciferians† and other Gnostics; and
* “Creation”—out of preëxistent eternal Substance, or Matter, of course, which Substance, according to our teachings, is Boundless, Ever-existing Space.
† The Luciferians, a sect of the fourth century who are alleged to have taught that the soul was a carnal body transmitted to the child by its father, and the Lucianists, another and earlier sect of the third century a.d., who taught all this, and further, that the animal soul was not immortal, philosophized on the grounds of the real Kabalistic and Occult teachings.
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in that parchment the “Seven Suns of Life” are given in the order in which they are found in the Saptasûrya. Only four of these, however, are mentioned in the editions of the Kabalah which are procurable in public libraries, and that even in a more or less veiled phraseology. Nevertheless even this reduced number is amply sufficient to show an identical origin, as it refers to the quaternary group of the Dhyân Chohans, and proves the speculation to have had its origin in the Secret Doctrines of the Âryans. 240 ← As is well known, the Kabalah did not originate with the Jews, for the latter got their ideas from the Chaldæans and the Egyptians.
Thus even the exoteric Kabalistic teachings speak of a “Central Sun,” and of three secondary Suns in each Solar System—our own included. As shown in that able though too materialistic work, New Aspects of Life and Religion, which is a synopsis of the views of the Kabalists in an aspect deeply thought out and assimilated:
The central sun . . . was to them [as much as to the Âryans] the centre of rest; the centre to which all motion was to be ultimately referred. Round this central sun . . . “the first of three systemic suns . . . revolved on a polar plane . . . the second, on an equatorial plane” . . . and the third only was our visible sun. These four solar bodies were “the organs on whose action what man calls the creation, the evolution of life on the planet earth, depends.” The channels through which the influence of these bodies was conveyed to the earth they [the Kabalists] held to be electrical. . . . The radiant energy flowing from the central sun* called the earth into being as a watery globe, . . . [whose tendency], as the nucleus of a planetary body, was to rush to the (central) sun . . . . within the sphere of whose attraction it had been created. . . . But the radiant energy, similarly electrifying both, withheld the one from the other, and so changed motion towards into motion round the centre of attraction, which the revolving planet [earth] thus sought to reach.
In the organic cell the visible sun found its own proper matrix, and produced through this the animal [while maturing the vegetable] kingdom, finally placing man at its head, in whom, through the animating action of that kingdom, it originated the psychic cell. But the man so placed at the head of the animal kingdom, at the head of the creation, was the animal, the soul-less, the perishable man. . . .
* This “Central Sun” of the Occultists even Science is obliged to accept astronomically, for it cannot deny the presence in sidereal space of a central body in the Milky Way, a point unseen and mysterious, the ever-hidden centre of attraction of our Sun and System. But this “Sun” is viewed differently by the Occultists of the East. While the Western and Jewish Kabalists—and even some pious modern Astronomers—claim that in this Sun the God-head is specially present, referring to it the volitional acts of God—the Eastern Initiates maintain that, as the Supra-divine Essence of the Unknown Absolute is equally in every domain and place, the “Central Sun” is simply the centre of Universal Life-Electricity; the reservoir within which that Divine Radiance, already differentiated at the beginning of every “creation,” is focussed. Though still in a Laya, or neutral condition, it is, nevertheless, the one attracting, as also the ever-emitting, Life-Centre.
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Hence man, although apparently its crown, would, by his advent have marked the close of creation; since creation, culminating in him, would at his death have entered on its decline.*
This Kabalistic view is here quoted, to show its perfect identity in spirit with the Eastern Doctrine. Explain, or complete the teaching of the Seven Suns with the seven systems of Planes of Being, of which the “Suns” are the central bodies, and you have the seven Angelic Planes, 241 ←whose “Host” collectively are the Gods thereof.† They are the Head Group divided into four Classes, from the Incorporeal down to the Semi-corporeal. These Classes are directly connected—though in very different ways as regards voluntary connection and functions—with our mankind. They are three, synthesized by the fourth, the first and highest, which is called the “Central Sun” in the Kabalistic doctrine just quoted. This is the great difference between the Semitic and the Âryan Cosmogony—one materializing, humanizes the mysteries of Nature; the other spiritualizes Matter, and its physiology is always made subservient to metaphysics. Thus, though the seventh “principle” reaches man through all the phases of Being, pure as an indiscrete element and an impersonal unity, it passes through—the Kabalah teaches from—the Central Spiritual Sun and Group the Second, the Polar Sun, which two radiate on man his Âtmâ. Group Three, the Equatorial Sun, cements the Buddhi to Âtman and the higher attributes of Manas; while Group Four, the Spirit of our visible Sun, endows him with his Manas and its vehicle, the Kâma Rûpa, or body of passions and desires—the two elements of Ahamkâra which evolve individualized consciousness, the personal Ego. Finally, it is the Spirit of the Earth, in its triple unity, that builds the Physical Body, attracting to it the Spirits of Life and forming his Linga Sharîra.
But everything proceeds cyclically, the evolution of man like everything else, and the order in which he is generated is described fully in the Eastern Teachings, whereas it is only hinted at in the Kabalah. Says the Book of Dzyan with regard to Primeval Man when first projected by the “Boneless,” the Incorporeal Creator:
First, the Breath, then Buddhi, and the Shadow-Son [the Body] were “created.” But where was the Pivot [the Middle Principle, Manas]? Man is doomed. When alone, the Indiscrete [Undifferentiated Element] and the Vâhan [Buddhi]—the Cause of the Causeless—break asunder from manifested life.
* Op. cit., pp. 287-289.
† See Commentary to Stanza VII, Volume I.
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“Unless,” explains the Commentary:
Unless cemented and held together by the Middle Principle, the Vehicle of the personal consciousness of Jîva.
In other words, the two higher “principles” can have no individuality on Earth, cannot be man, unless there is (a) the Mind, the Manas-Ego, to cognize itself, and (b) the terrestrial false Personality, or the Body of egotistical desires and personal Will, to cement the whole, as if round a Pivot—which it is, truly—to the physical form of man. It is the fifth and the fourth “principles”*—Manas and Kâma Rûpa—that contain the dual Personality; the real immortal Ego, if it assimilates itself to the two higher, and the false and transitory Personality, the Mâyâvi or Astral Body, so-called, or the Animal-human Soul—the two hav242 ←ing to be closely blended for purposes of a full terrestrial existence. Incarnate the Spiritual Monad of a Newton, grafted on that of the greatest saint on Earth, in a physical body the most perfect you can think of—i.e., in a two or even a three-principled Body composed of its Sthûla Sharîra, Prâna (Life-principle) and Linga Sharîra—and, if it lacks its middle and fifth “principles,” you will have created an idiot—at best a beautiful, soul-less, empty and unconscious appearance. “Cogito—ergo sum” can find no room in the brain of such a creature, not on this plane, at any rate.
There are students, however, who have long ago understood the philosophical meaning underlying the allegory—so tortured and disfigured by the Roman Church—of the “Fallen Angels.”
The kingdom of spirits and spiritual action, which flows from and is the product of spirit volition, is outside and contrasted with and in contradiction to the kingdom of [divine] souls and divine action.†
As said in the text of Commentary xiv:
Like produces like and no more at the genesis of Being, and evolution with its limited conditioned laws comes later. The Self-Existent‡ are called “Creations,” for they appear in the Spirit-Ray, manifested through the potency inherent in its Unborn Nature, which is beyond Time and [limited or conditioned] Space. Terrene products, animate and inanimate, including mankind, are falsely called creation and creatures; they are the development [evolution] of the Discrete Elements.
* The fourth and the fifth from below beginning with the Physical Body; the third and the fourth, if we reckon from Âtmâ.
† New Aspects of Life.
‡ Angelic, Spiritual Essences, immortal in their Being, because unconditioned in Eternity; but periodical and conditioned in their Manvantaric manifestations.
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Again:
The Heavenly Rûpa [Dhyân Chohan] creates [man] in his own form; it is a spiritual ideation consequent on the first differentiation and awakening of the universal [manifested] Substance; that form is the ideal Shadow of Itself: and this is the Man of the First Race.
To express it in still clearer form, limiting the explanation to this Earth only, it was the duty of the first “differentiated” Egos—the Church calls them Archangels—to imbue Primordial Matter with the evolutionary impulse and guide its formative powers in the fashioning of its productions. This it is which is referred to in the sentences both in the Eastern and Western tradition—“the Angels were commanded to create.” After the Earth had been made ready by the lower and more material Powers, and its three Kingdoms fairly started on their way to be “fruitful and multiply,” the higher Powers, the Archangels or Dhyânîs, were compelled by the Evolutionary Law to descend on Earth, in order to construct the crown of its evolution—Man. Thus the “Self-created” 243 ←and the “Self-existent” projected their pale Shadows; but Group the Third, the Fire-Angels, rebelled and refused to join their fellow Devas.
Hindû exotericism represents them all as Yogins, whose piety inspired them to refuse to “create,” as they desired to remain eternally Kumâras, “Virgin Youths,” in order, if possible, to anticipate their fellows in progress towards Nirvâna—the final liberation. But, agreeably to Esoteric interpretation, it was a self-sacrifice for the benefit of mankind. The “Rebels” would not create will-less irresponsible men, as the “obedient” Angels did; nor could they endow human beings with even the temporary reflections of their own attributes; for the latter, belonging to another and a so much higher plane of consciousness, would leave man still irresponsible, hence interfere with any possibility of higher progress. No spiritual and psychic evolution is possible on Earth—the lowest and most material plane—for one who, on that plane at all events, is inherently perfect and cannot accumulate either merit or demerit. Had Man remained the pale Shadow of the inert, immutable, and motionless Perfection, the one negative and passive attribute of the real I am that I am, he would have been doomed to pass through life on Earth as in a heavy dreamless sleep; hence a failure on this plane. 244 ← The Beings, or the Being, collectively called Elohim, who first pronounced (if, indeed, they ever were pronounced) the cruel words, “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to
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know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever . . . .”—must have been indeed the Ilda-baoth, the Demiurge of the Nazarenes, filled with rage and envy against his own creature, the reflection of which created Ophiomorphos. In this case it is but natural—even from the dead-letter standpoint—to view Satan, the Serpent of Genesis, as the real creator and benefactor, the Father of Spiritual Mankind. For it is he who was the “Harbinger of Light,” bright radiant Lucifer, who opened the eyes of the automaton “created” by Jehovah, as alleged. And he who was the first to whisper, “in the day ye eat thereof ye shall be as Elohim, knowing good and evil,” can only be regarded in the light of a Saviour. An “Adversary” to Jehovah, the “personating spirit,” he still remains in Esoteric Truth the ever-loving “Messenger,” the Angel, the Seraphim and Cherubim who both “knew” well, and “loved” still more, and who conferred on us Spiritual, instead of Physical Immortality—the latter a kind of static immortality that would have transformed man into an undying “Wandering Jew.”
As narrated in King’s Gnostics and their Remains concerning Ildabaoth, whom several sects regarded as the God of Moses:
Ildabaoth was far from being a pure spirit; ambition and pride dominated in his composition. He therefore resolved to break off all connection with his mother, Achamoth, and to create a world entirely for himself. Aided by his own Six Spirits, he created Man, intending him for the image of his power; but he failed utterly in his work, his Man proving a vast, soulless monster, crawling upon the earth. The Six Spirits were obliged to bring their work again before their father, to be animated: he did so by communicating the ray of Divine Light which he himself had inherited from Achamoth, who by this loss punished him for his pride and self-sufficiency.
Man, thus favoured by Achamoth at the expense of her own son, followed the impulse of the Divine Light that she had transferred to him, collected a further supply out of the creation with which it was intermingled, and began to present not the image of his creator Ildabaoth, but rather that of the Supreme Being, the “Primal Man.” At this spectacle the Demiurgus was filled with rage and envy at having produced a being so superior to himself. His looks, inspired by his passions, were reflected in the Abyss, as in a mirror, the image became instinct with life, and forth arose “Satan Serpent-formed,” Ophiomorphos, the embodiment of envy and cunning.*
This is the exoteric rendering of the Gnostics, and the allegory, though a sectarian version, is suggestive, and seems true to life. It is the natural deduction from the dead-letter text of Chapter iii of Genesis.
* Op. cit., pp. 97, 98, 2nd ed., 1887.
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Hence the allegory of Prometheus, who steals the Divine Fire so as to allow men to proceed consciously on the path of Spiritual Evolution, thus transforming the most perfect of animals on Earth into a potential God, and making him free to “take the kingdom of heaven by violence.” Hence, also, the curse pronounced by Zeus against Prometheus, and by Jehovah-Ilda-baoth against his “rebellious son,” Satan. The cold, pure snows of the Caucasian mountain and the never-dying, singeing fire and flames of an inextinguishable Hell, two poles, yet the same idea, the dual aspect of a refined torture; a “Fire-producer”—the personified emblem of Φωσφόρος (Phósphoros), of the Astral Fire and Light in the Anima Mundi (that Element of which the German materialist philosopher Moleschott said: “ohne Phosphor kein Gedanke,” or “without phosphorus no thought”)—burning in the fierce Flames of his terrestrial Passions; the conflagration fired by his Thought, discerning as it now does good from evil, and yet a slave to the passions of its earthly Adam; feeling the vulture of doubt and full consciousness gnawing at its heart—a Prometheus indeed, because a conscious, and hence a responsible entity.* The curse of life is great, yet, with the exception of some Hindû and Sufi mystics, how few are those who would exchange all the tortures of conscious life, all the evils of a responsible existence, for the unconscious perfection of a passive (objectively) incorporeal Being, or even the universal static Inertia personified in Brahmâ during his “Night’s” Rest. For, to quote from an able article by one† 245 ←who, confusing the planes of existence and consciousness, fell a victim thereto:
Satan [or Lucifer] represents the Active, or, as [M. Jules] Baissac calls it, the “Centrifugal” Energy of the Universe [in a cosmic sense]. He is Fire, Light, Life, Struggle, Effort, Thought, Consciousness, Progress, Civilization, Liberty, Independence. At the same time he is Pain, which is the Reaction of the Pleasure of Action, and Death—which is the Revolution of Life—Satan, burning in his own Hell, produced by the fury of his own momentum—the expansive disintegration of the Nebula which is to concentrate into New Worlds. And fitly is he again and
* The history of Prometheus, Karma, and human consciousness, is to be found in Part II, Section V.
† By an Englishman whose erratic genius killed him. The son of a Protestant clergyman, he became a Mohammedan; then a rabid Atheist; after meeting with a Master, a Guru, he became a Mystic; then a Theosophist who doubted, despaired—threw up white for black magic, went insane and joined the Roman Church. Then again turning round, anathematized her, re-became an Atheist, and died cursing humanity, knowledge, and God, in whom he had ceased to believe. Furnished with all the Esoteric data to write his “War in Heaven,” he made a semi-political article out of it, mixing Malthus with Satan, and Darwin with the Astral Light. Peace be to his—Shell. He is a warning to the Chelâs who fail. His forgotten tomb may now be seen in the Mussulman burial ground of Joonaghur, Kathiawar, India.
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again baffled by the Eternal Inertia of the Passive Energy of the Kosmos—the inexorable “I am”—the Flint from which the sparks are beaten out. And fitly . . . . are he and his adherents . . . . consigned to the “Sea of Fire”—because it is the Sun [in one sense only in the cosmic allegory], the Fount of Life in our system, where they are purified (meaning thereby disintegrated) and churned up to reärrange them for another life (the Resurrection)—that Sun which, as the Origin of the Active Principle of our Earth, is at once the Home and the Source of the Mundane Satan. . . .
Furthermore, as if to demonstrate the accuracy of Baissac’s general theory [in Le Diable et Satan] cold is known to have a “Centripetal” effect. Under the influence of Cold everything contracts. . . . Under it Life hybernates, or dies out, Thought congeals, and Fire is extinguished. Satan is immortal in his own Fire-Sea—it is only in the “Nifl-Heim” [the cold Hell of the Scandinavian Eddas] of the “I am” that he cannot exist. But for all that there is a kind of Immortal Existence in Nifl-Heim, and that Existence must be Painless and Peaceful, because it is Unconscious and Inactive. In the Kingdom of Jehovah [if this God were all that the Jews and Christians claim for him] there is no misery, no war, no marrying and giving in marriage, no change, no Individual Consciousness.* All is absorbed in the spirit of the Most Powerful. It is emphatically a Kingdom of Peace and loyal Submission, as that of the “Arch-Rebel” is one of War and Revolution. . . . It [246 ←the former] is in fact what Theosophy calls Nirvâna. But then Theosophy teaches that Separation from the Primal Source having once occurred, Reünion can only be achieved by Will-Effort—which is distinctly Satanic in the sense of this essay.†
It is “Satanic” from the standpoint of orthodox Romanism, for it is owing to the prototype of that which became in time the Christian Devil—to the Radiant Archangels, Dhyân Chohans, who refused to create, because they wanted Man to become his own creator and an immortal God—that men can reach Nirvâna and the Haven of heavenly Divine Peace.
To close this rather lengthy comment, the Secret Doctrine teaches that the Fire-Devas, the Rudras, and the Kumâras, the “Virgin-Angels,” (to whom the Archangels, Michael and Gabriel, both belong,) the Divine “Rebels”—called by the all-materializing and positive Jews, the Nahash or “Deprived”—preferred the curse of incarnation and the long cycles of terrestrial existence and rebirths, to seeing the misery, even if unconscious, of the beings who were evolved as Shadows out of their Brethren, through the semi-passive energy of their too spiritual Creators. If “man’s uses of life should be such as neither to animalize
* The author talks of the active, fighting, damning Jehovah as though he were a synonym of Parabrahman! We have quoted from this article to show where it dissents from Theosophic teachings; otherwise it would be quoted some day against us, as everything published in the Theosophist generally is.
† The Theosophist, vol. iii. p. 68.
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nor to spiritualize, but to humanize Self,”* to do so, he must be born human not angelic. Hence, tradition shows the celestial Yogîs offering themselves as voluntary victims in order to redeem Humanity, which was created god-like and perfect at first, and endow him with human affections and aspirations. To do this they had to give up their natural status, descend on our Globe, and take up their abode on it for the whole cycle of the Mahâyuga, thus exchanging their impersonal Individualities for individual Personalities—the bliss of sidereal existence for the curse of terrestrial life. This voluntary sacrifice of the Fiery Angels, whose nature was Knowledge and Love, has been construed by the exoteric theologies into a statement that shows “the Rebel Angels hurled down from Heaven into the darkness of Hell”—our Earth. Hindû Philosophy hints at the truth by teaching that the Asuras, hurled down by Shiva, are only in an intermediate state, in which they prepare for higher degrees of purification and redemption 247 ←from their wretched condition; but Christian Theology—claiming to be based on the rock of the divine love, charity, and justice of him it appeals to as its Saviour—to paradoxically enforce that claim, has invented the dreary dogma of Hell, that Archimedean lever of Roman Catholic philosophy.
Whereas Rabbinical wisdom—than which there is none more positive, materialistic, or grossly terrestrial, as it brings everything down to physiological mysteries—calls these Beings, the “Evil One”; and the Kabalists—Nahash, “Deprived,” as just said, and the Souls that have, after having been alienated in Heaven from the Holy One, thrown themselves into an Abyss at the dawn of their very existence, and have anticipated the time when they are to descend on Earth.†
And let me explain at once that our quarrel is not with the Zohar or any other book of the Kabalah in its right interpretation—for the latter is the same as our own—but only with the gross, pseudo-esoteric explanations of the later, and especially of the Christian Kabalists.
* Explaining the Kabalah, Dr. Henry Pratt says: “Spirit was to man [to the Jewish Rabbin, rather!] a bodiless, disembodied, or deprived, and degraded being, and hence was termed by the ideograph Nahash, ‘Deprived’; represented as appearing to and seducing the human race—man through the woman. . . . In the picture from this Nahash, this spirit was represented by a serpent, because from its destitution of bodily members, the serpent was looked upon as a deprived and depraved and degraded creature.” (New Aspects of Life, p. 235.) Symbol for symbol there are those who would prefer that of the serpent—the symbol of wisdom and eternity, deprived of limbs as it is—to the Jod (י)—the poetical ideograph of Jehovah in the Kabalah—the God of the male symbol of generation.
† Zohar, iii. 61c.
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Says the Commentary:
Our earth and man [are] the products of the three Fires.
The names of these three answer, in Sanskrit, to the “Electric Fire,” the “Solar Fire,” and the “Fire produced by Friction.” Explained on the cosmic and human planes, these three Fires are Spirit, Soul, and Body, the three great Root Groups, with their four additional divisions. These vary with the Schools, and—according to their applications—become the Upâdhis and the Vehicles, or the Noumena of these. In the exoteric accounts, they are personified by the “three sons of surpassing brilliancy and splendour” of Agni Abhimânin, the eldest son of Brahmâ, the Cosmic Logos, by Svâhâ, one of Daksha’s* daughters. In the metaphysical sense, the “Fire by Friction” means the union between Buddhi, the sixth, and Manas, the fifth “principle,” which thus are united or cemented together, the fifth merging partially into and becoming part of the Monad; in the physical, it relates to the “creative spark,” or germ, which fructifies and generates the human being. The three Fires, whose names are Pâvaka, Pavamâna and Shuchi, were condemned, it is said, by a curse of Vasishtha, the great Sage, “to be born over and over again.”† This is clear enough.
Therefore, the Flames, whose functions are confused in the exoteric books, and who are called indifferently Prajâpatis, Pitris, Manus, Asuras, Rishis, Kumâras,‡ 248 ←etc., are said to incarnate personally in the Third Root-Race and thus find themselves “reborn over and over again.” In the Esoteric Doctrine they are generally named Asuras, or the Asura Devatâ or Pitar Devatâ (Gods), for, as said, they were first Gods—and the highest—before they became “No-Gods,” and had from Spirits of Heaven fallen into Spirits of Earth§—exoterically, note well, in orthodox dogma.
* Daksha, the “intelligent, the competent.” “This name generally carries with it the idea of creative power.” He is a son of Brahmâ and of Aditi, and agreeably to other versions, a self-born power, which, like Minerva, sprang from his father’s body. He is the chief of the Prajâpatis, the Lords or Creators of Being. In Vishnu Purâna, Parâshara says of him: “In every Kalpa [or Manvantara] Daksha and the rest are born and are again destroyed.” And the Rig Veda says that “Daksha sprang from Aditi and Aditi from Daksha,” a reference to the eternal cyclic re-birth of the same divine Essence.
† Bhâgavata Purâna, iv. 24, 4.
‡ No one of these Orders is distinct from the Pitris or Progenitors. As says Manu (iii. 284): “The wise call our fathers Vasus; our paternal grandfathers, Rudras; our paternal great grandfathers, Âdityas; agreeably to a text of the Vedas.” “This is an everlasting Vedic text,” says another translation.
§ As now discovered by the late G. Smith in the Babylonian cylinder literature, it was the same in Chaldæan Theogony. Ishtar, “eldest of Heaven and of Earth.” Below him the Igigi or Angels of Heaven, and the Anûnaki, or Angels of Earth. Below these again various classes of Spirits and “Genii” called Sadu, Vadukku, Ekimu, Gallu—of which some were good, some evil. (See Smith’s Babylonian Mythology, also Sayce’s Hibbert Lectures, p. 141.)
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No Theologian or Orientalist can ever understand the genealogies of the Prajâpatis, the Manus, and the Rishis, or the direct connection of these—their correlation rather—with the Gods, unless he has the key to the old primitive Cosmogony and Theogony, which all nations originally had in common. All these Gods and Demi-gods are found reborn on Earth, in various Kalpas and in as various characters; each, moreover, having his Karma distinctly traced, and every effect assigned to its cause.
Before other Stanzas could be explained, it was, as may be seen, absolutely necessary to show that the Sons of “Dark Wisdom,” though identical with the Archangels which Theology has chosen to call the “Fallen,” are as divine and as pure, if not more pure, than all the Michaels and Gabriels so glorified in the Churches. The “Old Book” also goes into various details of Astral Life, which at this juncture would be quite incomprehensible to the reader. It must, therefore, be left for later explanation, and the First and Second Races will now receive only bare notice. Not so the Third Race—the Root-Race which separated into sexes, and which was the first to be endowed with reason; men evolving pari passu with the Globe, and the latter having “incrustated” more than a hundred millions of years before the first human sub-race had yet begun to materialize or solidify, so to say. But, as the Stanza has it:
The Inner Man [the Conscious Entity] was not.
This “Conscious Entity” Occultism says, comes from, nay, in many cases is, the very essence and esse of the high Intelligences, condemned, by the undeviating law of Karmic evolution, to reïncarnate in this Manvantara.
249 ← (b) Shloka 39 relates exclusively to the racial divisions. Strictly speaking, Esoteric Philosophy teaches a modified polygenesis. For, while it assigns to humanity a oneness of origin, in so far that its Forefathers or “Creators” were all Divine Beings—though of different classes or degrees of perfection in their Hierarchy—it teaches that men were nevertheless born at seven different centres of the Continent of that period. Though all were of one common origin, yet, for reasons given, their potentialities and mental capabilities, outward or physical forms, and future characteristics, were very different.* As to their
* Some superior, others inferior, to suit the Karma of the various reïncarnating Monads, which could not all be of the same degree of purity in their last births in other Worlds. This accounts for the difference of races, the inferiority of the savage and other human varieties.
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complexions, there is a suggestive allegory told in Linga Purâna. The Kumâras—the Rudra Gods, so called—are described as incarnations of Shiva, the Destroyer (of outward forms), called also Vâmadeva. The latter, as a Kumâra, the “Eternal Celibate,” the chaste Virgin Youth, springs from Brahmâ in each great Manvantara, and “again becomes four”; a reference to the four great divisions of the human Races, as regards complexion and type—and the three chief variations of these. Thus in the twenty-ninth Kalpa—in this case a reference to the transformation and evolution of the human form, which Shiva ever destroys and remodels periodically down to the great Manvantaric turning point, about the middle of the Fourth (Atlantean) Race—in the twenty-ninth Kalpa, Shiva, as Shvetalohita, the Root-Kumâra, from moon-coloured becomes white; in his next transformation, he is red (and in this the exoteric version differs from the Esoteric Teaching); in the third, yellow; in the fourth, black.
Esotericism now classes these seven variations, with their four great divisions, into only three distinct primeval Races—as it does not take into consideration the First Race, which had neither type nor colour, and a hardly objective, though colossal, form. The evolution of these Races, their formation and development, proceeded on parallel lines with the evolution, formation, and development of three geological strata, from which the human complexion was as much derived as it was determined by the climates of these zones. The Esoteric Teaching names three great divisions, namely, the red-yellow, the black, and the brown-white.* The Âryan races, for instance, now varying from dark brown, almost black, red-brown-yellow, down to the whitest creamy colour, are nevertheless all of one and the same stock, the Fifth Root-Race, and spring 250 ←from one single Progenitor, called in Hindû exotericism by the generic name of Vaivasvata Manu; the latter, remember, being that Generic Personage, the Sage, who is said to have lived over 18,000,000 years ago, and also 850,000 years ago—at the time of the sinking of the last remnants of the Great Continent of Atlantis,† and
* “There are,” says Topinard in the English edition of his Anthropology, with a preface by Professor Broca, “three fundamental elements of colour in the human organism—namely, the red, the yellow, and the black, which, mixed in variable quantities with the white of the tissues, give rise to those numerous shades seen in the human family.” Here is Science again unintentionally supporting Occultism.
† It must be remembered that the “last remnants” here spoken of, refer to those portions of the “Great Continent” which still remained, and not to any of the numerous islands which existed contemporaneously with the Continent. Plato’s “island,” for instance, was one of such remnants; the others having sunk at various periods previously. An Occult “tradition” teaches that such submersions occur whenever there is an eclipse of the “Spiritual Sun.”
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who is said to live even now in his mankind.* The light yellow is the colour of the first solid human race, which appeared after the middle of the Third Root-Race—after its fall into generation, as just explained—bringing on the final changes. For, it is only at that period that the last transformation took place, which brought forth man as he is now, only on a magnified scale. This Race gave birth to the Fourth Race; “Shiva” gradually transforming that portion of Humanity which became “black with sin” into red-yellow, of which the red Indians and the Mongolians are the descendants, and finally into brown-white races—which now, together with the yellow races, form the great bulk of Humanity. The allegory in Linga Purâna is curious, as showing the great ethnological knowledge of the ancients.
When reading of the “last transformation,” which is said to have taken place 18,000,000 years ago, let the reader at this juncture, consider how many millions more it must have required to reach that final stage. And if Man, in his gradual consolidation, developed pari passu with the Earth, how many millions of years must have elapsed during the First, Second, and the first half of the Third Race. For the Earth was in a comparatively ethereal condition before it reached its last consolidated state. The Archaic Teachings, moreover, tell us that, during the middle period of the Lemuro-Atlantean Race, three and a half Races after the Genesis of Man, the Earth, Man, and everything on the Globe, were of a still grosser and more material nature, while such things as corals and some shells were still in a semi-gelatinous, astral state. The cycles that have intervened since then, have already carried us onward, on the opposite ascending arc, some steps toward our “dematerialization,” as the Spiritualists would say. The Earth, ourselves, and all things have softened since then—aye, even our brains. But it has been objected by some Theosophists that an ethereal Earth even some 15 or 20,000,000 years ago, “does not square with Geology,” which teaches us that winds blew, rains fell, waves broke on the shore, sands shifted and accumulated, etc.; 251 ←that, in short, all natural causes now in operation were then in force, “in the very earliest ages of geological time, aye, that of the oldest palæozoic rocks.” To this the following answers are given. Firstly, what is the date assigned by Geology to these “oldest palæozoic rocks”? And secondly, why could not the winds blow, rain fall, and waves—of “carbonic acid”
* See the remarks on the Root and Seed Manus infra, and the Section on “The Primeval Manus of Humanity,” at the end of the Commentaries on this Stanza.
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apparently, as Science seems to imply—break on the shore, on an Earth semi-astral, i.e., viscid? The word “astral” does not necessarily, in Occult phraseology, mean as thin as smoke, but rather “starry,” shining or pellucid, in various and numerous degrees, from a quite filmy to a viscid state, as just observed. But it is further objected: “How could an astral Earth have affected the other Planets in this System? Would not the whole process get out of gear now if the attraction of one Planet were suddenly removed?” The objection is evidently invalid, since our System is composed of older and younger Planets, some dead—like the Moon—others in process of formation, for all that Astronomy knows to the contrary. Nor has the latter ever affirmed, so far as we know, that all the bodies of our System have sprung into existence and developed simultaneously. The Cis-Himâlayan Secret Teachings differ from those of India in this respect. Hindû Occultism teaches that the Vaivasvata Manu Humanity is 18,000,000 and odd years old. We say, yes; but only so far as physical or approximately physical, Man is concerned, who dates from the close of the Third Root-Race. Beyond that period Man, or his filmy image, may have existed for 300,000,000 years, for all we know; since we are not taught figures which are and will remain secret with the Masters of Occult Science, as justly stated in Esoteric Buddhism. Moreover, whereas the Hindû Purânas speak of one Vaivasvata Manu, we affirm that there were several, the name being a generic one.
We must now say a few more words on the physical evolution of man.