HPB-IU v.2 ch.4: Difference between revisions

{{The Style S-Small capitals|Great First Cause}} as the {{Style S-Small capitals|One}}, the primordial germ, the unrevealed and grand {{Style S-Small capitals|All}}, existing through himself. In the

Whenever the Eternal awakes from its slumber and desires to manifest itself, it divides itself into male and female. It then becomes in every system

The Double-Sexed Deity, The universal Father and Mother.

To place it still clearer, the Babylonian System recognizes first—the One (Ad, or Ad-ad), who is never named, but only acknowledged in thought as the Hindu Swayambhuva. From this he becomes manifest as Anu or Ana—the one above all—Monas. Next comes the Demiurge called Bel or Elu, who is the active power of the Godhead. The third is the principle of Wisdom, Hea or Hoa, who also rules the sea and the underworld. Each of these has his divine consort, giving us Anata, Belta,

171 VARIOUS “ONLY-BEGOTTEN” SONS.

and Davkina. These, however, are only like the {{Style S-Italic|Saktis,}} and not especially remarked by theologists. But the female principle is denoted by Mylitta, the Great Mother, called also Ishtar. So with the three male gods, we have the Triad or Trimurti, and with Mylitta added, the {{Style S-Italic|Arba}} or Four (Tetraktys of Pythagoras), which perfects and potentializes all. Hence, the above-given modes of expression. The following Chaldean diagram may serve as an illustration for all others:

become, with the Christians,

Though he is termed the “Primitive Man,” Ennoia, who is like the Egyptian Pimander, the “Power of the Thought Divine,” the first intelligible manifestation of the Divine Spirit in material form, he is like the “Only-Begotten” Son of the “Unknown Father,” of all other nations. He is the emblem of the first appearance of the divine Presence in his own works of creation, tangible and visible, and therefore comprehensible. The mystery-God, or the ever-unrevealed Deity fecundates through His will Bythos, the unfathomable and infinite depth that exists in silence (Sigè) and darkness (for our intellect), and that represents the abstract idea of all nature, the ever-producing Cosmos. As neither the male nor female principle, blended into the idea of a double-sexed Deity in ancient conceptions, could be comprehended by an ordinary human intellect, the theology of every people had to create for its religion a Logos, or manifested word, in some shape or other. With the Ophites and other Gnostics who took their models direct from more ancient originals, the unrevealed Bythos and her male counterpart produce Ennoia, and the three in their turn produce Sophia,^{[#fn1210 1210]} thus completing the Tetraktys, which will emanate Christos, the very essence of the Father

[#fn1210anc 1210]. Sophia is the highest prototype of woman—the first {{Style S-Italic|spiritual}} Eve. In the Bible the system is reversed and the intervening emanation being omitted, Eve is degraded to simple humanity.

172 ISIS UNVEILED.

Spirit. As the unrevealed One, or concealed Logos in its latent state, he has existed from all eternity in the Arba-Il, the metaphysical abstraction; therefore, he is ONE with all others as a unity, the latter (including all) being indifferently termed Ennoia, Sigè (silence), Bythos, etc. As the revealed one, he is Androgyne, Christos, and Sophia (Divine Wisdom), who descend into the man Jesus. Both Father and Son are shown by Irenæus to have loved the beauty ({{Style S-Italic|formam}}) of the primitive woman,^{[#fn1211 1211]} who is Bythos—Depth—as well as Sophia, and as having produced conjointly Ophis and Sophia (double-sexed unity again), male and female wisdom, one being considered as the unrevealed Holy Spirit, or elder Sophia—the {{Style S-Italic|Pneuma—}}the intellectual “Mother of all things;” the other the revealed one, or {{Style S-Italic|Ophis,}} typifying divine wisdom fallen into matter, or God-man—Jesus, whom the Gnostic Ophites represented by the serpent (Ophis).

Fecundated by the Divine Light of the Father and Son, the highest spirit and Ennoia, Sophia produces in her turn two other emanations—one perfect Christos, the second imperfect Sophia-Achamoth,^{[#fn1212 1212]} from twjbx hakhamoth (simple wisdom), who becomes the mediatrix between the intellectual and material worlds.

Christos was the mediator and guide between God (the Higher), and everything spiritual in man; Achamoth—the younger Sophia—held the same duty between the “Primitive man,” Ennoia and matter. What was mysteriously meant by the general term, {{Style S-Italic|Christos,}} we have just explained.

[#fn1211anc 1211]. See “Irenæus,” book i., chap. 31-33.

[#fn1212anc 1212]. In King’s “Gnostics,” we find the system a little incorrect. The author tells us that he followed Bellermann’s “Drei Programmen uber die Abraxas Gemmen.”

173 THE “TRINITY LISTEN FOR MARY’S ANSWER.”

Christian ideas. “He” (God), he says, “prepared her (Mary’s) virginal and celestial purity, for a mother defiled could not become the mother of the Most High. The holy virgin, even in her childhood, was more pleasing than all the Cherubim and Seraphim, and from infancy to the maturing maidenhood and womanhood she grew more and more pure. By her very sanctity she reigned over the heart of God. {{Style S-Italic|When the hour came, the whole court of heaven was hushed, and the trinity listened for the answer of Mary, for without her consent the world could not have been redeemed.”}}

174 ISIS UNVEILED.

Cause and Matter, as Christos is the mediator between him and spiritual humanity.

The only difference between the Ophite cosmogony and that of the St. John Nazarenes is a change of names. We find equally an identical system in the {{Style S-Italic|Kabala, the Book of Mystery}} ({{Style S-Italic|Liber Mysterii).}}^{[#fn1213 1213]} All the three systems, especially that of the kabalists and the Nazarenes, which were the {{Style S-Italic|models}} for the Ophite Cosmogony, belong to the pure Oriental Gnosticism. The {{Style S-Italic|Codex Nazaræus}} opens with: “The Supreme King of Light, Mano, the great first one,”^{[#fn1214 1214]} etc., the latter being the emanation of Ferho—the unknown, formless Life. He is the chief of the Æons, from whom proceed (or shoot forth) five refulgent rays of Divine light. Mano is {{Style S-Italic|Rex Lucis,}} the Bythos-Ennoia of the Ophites. “{{Style S-Italic|Unus est Rex Lucis in suo regno, nec ullus qui eo altior, nullus qui ejus similitudinem retulerit, nullus qui sublatis oculis, viderit Coronam quæ in ejus capite est.”}} He is the Manifested Light around the highest of the three kabalistic heads, the concealed wisdom; from him emanate the three {{Style S-Italic|Lives.}} Æbel Zivo is the revealed Logos, Christos the “Apostle Gabriel,” and the first Legate or messenger of light. If Bythos and Ennoia are the Nazarene Mano, then the dual-natured, the semi-spiritual, semi-material Achamoth must be Fetahil when viewed from her spiritual aspect; and if regarded in her grosser nature, she is the Nazarene “Spiritus.”

[#fn1213anc 1213]. See “Idra Magna.”

[#fn1214anc 1214]. “Codex Nazaræus,” part i., p. 9.

175 THE FIRST GROUPS OF CHRISTIANS.

Fetahil,^{[#fn1215 1215]} who is the reflection of his father, Lord Abatur, the {{Style S-Italic|third}} life—as the elder Sophia is also the third emanation—is the “newest-man.” Perceiving his fruitless attempts to create a perfect material world, the “Spiritus” calls to one of her progeny, the Karabtanos—Ilda-Baoth—who is without sense or judgment (“blind matter”), to unite himself with her to create something definite out of this confused ({{Style S-Italic|turbulentos}}) matter, which task she is enabled to achieve only after having produced from this union with Karabtanos the seven stellars. Like the six sons or genii of the Gnostic Ilda-Baoth, they then frame the material world. The same story is repeated over again in Sophia-Achamoth. Delegated by her purely spiritual parent, the elder Sophia, to create the world of {{Style S-Italic|visible forms,}} she descended into chaos, and, overpowered by the emanation of matter, lost her way. Still ambitious to create a world of matter of her own, she busied herself hovering to and fro about the dark abyss, and imparted life and motion to the inert elements, until she became so hopelessly entangled in matter that, like Fetahil, she is represented sitting immersed in mud, and unable to extricate herself from it; until, by the contact of matter itself, she produces the {{Style S-Italic|Creator}} of the material world. He is the Demiurgus, called by the Ophites Ilda-Baoth, and, as we will directly show, the parent of the Jewish God in the opinion of some sects, and held by others to be the “Lord God” Himself. It is at this point of the kabalistic-gnostic cosmogony that begins the Mosaic {{Style S-Italic|Bible.}} Having accepted the Jewish {{Style S-Italic|Old Testament}} as their standard, no wonder that the Christians were forced by the exceptional position in which they were placed through their own ignorance, to make the best of it.

[#fn1215anc 1215]. See “Codex Nazaræus,” i., 181. Fetahil, sent to frame the world, finds himself immersed in the abyss of mud, and soliloquizes in dismay until the {{Style S-Italic|Spiritus}} (Sophia-Achamoth) unites herself completely with matter, and so creates the material world.

176 ISIS UNVEILED.

a sacred duty to undo. If the {{Style S-Italic|Homilies}} are considered apocryphal, and cannot very well be accepted as an infallible standard by which to measure the animosity which raged between the two apostles, we have the {{Style S-Italic|Bible,}} and the proofs afforded therein are plentiful.

So hopelessly entangled seems Irenæus in his fruitless endeavors to describe, to all outward appearance at least, the true doctrines of the many Gnostic sects of which he treats and to present them at the same time as abominable “heresies,” that he either deliberately, or through ignorance, confounds all of them in such a way that few metaphysicians would be able to disentangle them, without the {{Style S-Italic|Kabala}} and the {{Style S-Italic|Codex}} as the true keys. Thus, for instance, he cannot even tell the difference between the Sethianites and the Ophites, and tells us that they called the “God of all,” “{{Style S-Italic|Hominem,”}} a man, and his mind the second man, or the “{{Style S-Italic|Son of man.”}} So does Theodoret, who lived more than two centuries after Irenæus, and who makes a sad mess of the chronological order in which the various sects succeeded each other.^{[#fn1216 1216]} Neither the Sethianites, (a branch of the Jewish Nazarenes) nor the Ophites, a purely Greek sect, have ever held anything of the kind. Irenæus contradicts his own words by describing in another place the doctrines of Cerinthus, the direct disciple of Simon Magus. He says that Cerinthus taught that the world was not created by the first GOD, but by a virtue (virtus) or power, an Æon so distant from the First Cause that he was even ignorant of him who {{Style S-Italic|is above all things.}} This Æon subjected Jesus, he begot him physically through Joseph from one who was not a virgin, but simply the wife of that Joseph, and Jesus was born like all other men. Viewed from this physical aspect of his nature, Jesus was called the “son of man.” It is only after his {{Style S-Italic|baptism,}} that {{Style S-Italic|Christos,}} the anointed, descended from the Princeliness of above, in the figure of a dove, and then announced the unknown Father through Jesus.^{[#fn1217 1217]}

[#fn1216anc 1216]. “Irenæus,” 37, and Theodoret, quoted in the same page.

[#fn1217anc 1217]. Ibid., i, xxv.

177 CHRIST’S “DESCENT INTO HELL.”

longs to Christos the son of Sophia (the elder) and of the primitive man who produces him through his own vivifying light, which emanates from the source or {{Style S-Italic|cause}} of all, hence the {{Style S-Italic|cause}} of his light also, the “Unknown Father.” There is a great difference made in the Gnostic metaphysics between the first unrevealed Logos and the “anointed,” who is Christos. Ennoia may be termed, as Philo understands it, the {{Style S-Italic|Second}} God, but he alone is the “Primitive and First man,” and by no means the Second one, as Theodoret and Irenæus have it. It is but the inveterate desire of the latter to connect Jesus in every possible way, even in the {{Style S-Italic|Hæresies,}} with the {{Style S-Italic|Highest}} God, that led him into so many falsifications.