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- 3. Said the Lord of the Shining Face: “I shall send thee a Fire when thy work is commenced. Raise thy voice to other Lokas; apply to thy Father, the Lord of the Lotus* (a), for his Sons . . . . Thy People shall be under the rule of the Fathers.† Thy Men shall be mortals. The Men of the Lord of Wisdom,‡ not the Sons of Soma,§ are immortal. Cease thy complaints (b). Thy Seven Skins are yet on thee. . . . Thou art not ready. Thy Men are not ready” (c).
(a) Kumuda-Pati is the Moon, the Earth's parent, in his region of Soma-loka. Though the Pitris, or Fathers, are Sons of the Gods, elsewhere Sons of Brahmâ and even Rishis, they are generally known as the Lunar Ancestors.
(b) Pitri-Pati is the Lord or King of the Pitris, Yama, the God of Death and the Judge of mortals. The men of Budha, Mercury, are 45 ←metaphorically “immortal” through their Wisdom. Such is the common belief of those who credit every Star or Planet with being inhabited—and there are men of Science, M. Flammarion among others, who believe in this fervently, on logical as well as on astronomical data. The Moon being an inferior body—even to the Earth, to say nothing of other Planets, the terrestrial men produced by her Sons—the Lunar Men or Ancestors—from her shell or body, cannot be immortal. They cannot hope to become real, self-conscious and intelligent men, unless they are “finished,” so to say, by other creators. Thus in the Purânic legend, the son of the Moon (Soma) is Budha (Mercury), the intelligent and the wise, because he is the offspring of Soma, the Regent of the visible Moon, not of Indu, the physical Moon. Thus Mercury is the elder brother of the Earth, metaphorically—his step-brother, so to say, the offspring of Spirit—while she (the Earth) is the progeny of the Body. These allegories have a deeper and more scientific meaning—astronomically and geologically—than our modern
* Kumuda-Pati.
† Pitri-Pati.
‡ Budha, Mercury.
§ The Moon.
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Physicists are willing to admit. The whole cycle of the first “War in Heaven,” the Târakâ-maya, is as full of philosophical as of cosmogonical and astronomical truths. One can trace therein the biographies of all the Planets by the history of their Gods and Rulers. Ushanas (Shukra, or Venus), the bosom-friend of Soma and the foe of Brihaspati (Jupiter), the “Instructor of the Gods,” whose wife Târâ, or Tarakâ, had been carried away by the Moon, Soma—“of whom he begat Budha”—took also an active part in this war against the “Gods” and forthwith was degraded into a Demon (Asura) Deity, and so he remains to this day.*
Here the word “men” refers to the Celestial men, or what are called in India the Pitaras or Pitris, the Fathers, the Progenitors of men. This 46 ←does not remove the seeming difficulty, in view of modern hypotheses, of the teaching, which shows these Progenitors or Ancestors creating the first human Adams out of their sides, as astral shadows. And though it is an improvement on Adam's rib, still geological and climatic difficulties will be brought forward. Such, however, is the teaching of Occultism.
(c) Man's organism was adapted in every Race to its surroundings. The first Root-Race was as ethereal as ours is material. The progeny of the Seven Creators, who evolved the Seven Primordial Adams,† surely required no purified gases to breathe and live upon. Therefore, however strongly the impossibility of this teaching may be urged by the devotees of Modern Science, the Occultist maintains that the case was as stated æons of years before even the evolution of the Lemurian, the first physical man, which took place 18,000,000 years ago.
* Ushanas-Shukra, or Venus, is our Lucifer, the Morning-Star, of course. The ingenuity of this allegory in its manifold meanings is great indeed. Thus Brihaspati (the Planet Jupiter), or Brahmanaspati, is, in the Rig Veda, a deity who is the symbol and the prototype of the exoteric or ritualistic worship. He is priest, sacrificer, suppliant, and the medium through which the prayers of mortals reach the Gods. He is the Purohita (Family Priest, or Court Chaplain) of the Hindû Olympus and the spiritual Guru of the Gods. Soma is the Mystery God and presides over the mystic and Occult nature in man and the Universe. Târâ, the priest's wife, who symbolizes the worshipper, prefers Esoteric truths to their mere shell, exotericism; hence she is shown as carried off by Soma. Now Soma is the sacred juice of that name, giving mystic visions and trance revelations, the result of which union is Budha (Wisdom), Mercury, Hermes, etc.; that Science in short which to this day is proclaimed by the Brihaspatis of Theology as Devilish and Satanic. What wonder that by expanding the cycle of this allegory we find Christian Theology espousing the quarrel of the Hindû Gods, and regarding Ushanas (Lucifer), who helped Soma against that ancient personification of ritualistic worship (Brahmanaspati, the Lord of the Brâhmans, now become Jupiter-Jehovah) as Satan, the “Enemy of God”!
† As shown elsewhere, it is only the Heavenly Man, Adam-Kadmon, of the first chapter of Genesis, who is made “in the image and likeness of God.” Adam of the second chapter is not said to be made in that image nor in the divine likeness, before he ate of the forbidden fruit. The former Adam is the Sephirothal Host; the second Adam is the mindless First human Root-Race; the third Adam is the Race that separated, whose eyes are opened.
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Archaic Scripture teaches that at the commencement of every local Kalpa, or Round, the Earth is reborn, and preliminary evolution is described in one of the Books of Dzyan and the Commentaries thereon in this wise:
“As the human Jîva [Monad], when passing into a new womb, gets re-covered with a new body, so does the Jîva of the Earth; it gets a more perfect and solid covering with each Round after reëmerging once more from the matrix of space into objectivity.”
This process is attended, of course, by the throes of the new birth, or geological convulsions.
The only reference to it is contained in one verse of the volume of the Book of Dzyan before us, where it says: