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SECTION XXI.
Hebrew Allegories.
How can any Kabalist, acquainted with the foregoing, deduce his conclusions with regard to the true Esoteric beliefs of the primitive Jews, from only that which he now finds in the Jewish scrolls? How can any scholar – even though one of the keys to the universal language be now positively discovered, the true key to the numerical reading of a pure geometrical system – give out anything as his final conclusion? Modern Kabalistic speculation is on a par now with modern “speculative Masonry;” for as the latter tries vainly to link itself with the ancient – or rather the archaic – Masonry;” of the Temples, failing to make the link because all its claims have been shown to be inaccurate from an archaeological standpoint, so fares it also with Kabalistic speculation. As no mystery of Nature worth running after can be revealed to humanity by settling whether Hiram Abif was a living Sidonian Builder, or a solar myth, so no fresh information will be added to Occult Lore by the details of the exoteric privileges conferred on the Collegia Fabrorum by Numa Pompilius. Rather must the symbols used in it be studies in the Âryan light, since all the Symbolism of the ancient Initiations came to the West with the light of the Eastern Sun.
Nevertheless, we find the most learned Masons and Symboligists declaring that all these weird symbols and glyphs, that run back to a common origin of immense antiquity, were nothing more than a display of cunning natural phallicism, or emblems of primitive typology. How much nearer the truth is the author of The Source of Measures, who declares that the elements of human and numerical construction in the Bible do not shut out the spiritual elements in it, albeit so few now understand them. The words we quote are as suggestive as they are true:
How desperately blinding becomes a superstitious use, through ignorance, of such emblems when they are made to possess the power of bloodshed and torture,
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through orders of propaganda of any species of religious cultus. When one thinks of the horrors of a Moloch, or Baal, or Dagon worship; of the correlated blood deluges under the Cross baptized in gore by Constantine, at the initiative of he secular Church; . . . when one thinks of all this and then that the cause of all has been simply ignorance of the real radical reading of the Moloch, and Baal, and Dagon, and the Cross and the Tphillin, all running back to a common origin, and after all being nothing more than a display of pure and natural mathematics, . . . one is apt to feel like cursing ignorance, and to lose confidence in what are called intuitions of religion; one is apt to wish for a return of the day when all the world was of one lip and of one knowledge. . . . But while these elements [of the construction of the pyramid] are rational and scientific, . . . let no man consider that with this discovery comes a cutting off of the spirituality * of the Bible intention, or of man’s relation to this spiritual foundation. Does one wish to build a house? No house was ever actually built with tangible material until first the architectural design of building had been accomplished, no matter whether the structure was palace or hovel. So with these elements and numbers. They are not of man, nor are they of his invention. They have been revealed to him to the extent of his ability to realize a system, which is the creative system of the eternal God. . . . But spiritually, to man the value of this matter is that he can actually in contemplation, bridge over all material construction of the cosmos, and pass into the very thought and mind of God, to the extent of recognizing this system of design for cosmic creation – yea, even before the words went forth: “ Let there be.” †
But true as above words may be, when coming from one who has rediscovered, more completely than anyone else has done during the past centuries, one of the keys to the universal Mystery Language, it is impossible for an Eastern Occultist to agree with the conclusion of the able author of The Source of Measures. He “has set out to find the truth,” and yet he still believes that:
The best and most authentic vehicle of communication from [the creative] God to man . . . is to be found in the Hebrew Bible.
To this we must and shall demur, giving our reasons for it in a few words. The “Hebrew Bible” exists no more, as has been shown in the foregoing pages, and the garbled accounts, the falsified and pale copies we have of the real Mosaic Bible of the Initiates, warrant the making of no such sweeping assertion and claim. All that the scholar can fairly claim is that the Jewish Bible, as now extant – in its latest and final interpretation, and according to the newly-discovered key – may give
* Aye: but that spirituality can never be discovered, far less proved, unless we turn to the Aryan Scriptures and Symbology. For the Jews it was lost, save for the Sadducees, from the day that the “chosen people” reached the Promised Land, the national Karma preventing Moses from reaching it.
† Op.cit., pp. 317-319.
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a partial presentment of the truths it contained before it was mangled. But how can he tell what the Pentateuch contained before it has been recomposed by Esdras; then corrupted still more by the ambitious Rabbis in later times, and otherwise remodelled and interfered with? Leaving aside the opinion of the declared enemies of the Jewish Scripture, one may quote simply what their most devoted followers say.
Two of these are Horne and Prideaux. The avowels of the former will be sufficient to show how much now remains of the original Mosaic books, unless indeed we accept his sublimely blind faith in the inspiration and editorship of the Holy Ghost. He writes that when a Hebrew scribe found a writing of any author he was entitled, if he thought fit, being “conscious of the aid of the Holy Spirit,” to do exactly as he pleased with it – to cut it up, or copy it, or use as much of it as he deemed right, and so to incorporate it with his own manuscript. Dr. Kenealy aptly remarks of Horne, that it is almost impossible to get any admission from him.
That makes against his church, so remarkably guarded is he [Horne] in his phraseology and so wonderfully discreet in the use of words that his language, like a diplomatic letter, perpetually suggests to the mind ideas other than those which he really means; I defy any unlearned person to read his chapter on “Hebrew characters” and to derive any knowledge from it whatever on the subject on which he professes to treat. *
And yet this same Horne writes:
We are persuaded that the things to which reference is made proceeded from the original writers or compilers of the books [Old Testament]. Sometimes they took other writings, annals, genealogies, and such like, with which they incorporated additional matter, or which they put together with greater or less condensation. The Old Testament authors used the sources they employed (that is, the writing of other people) with freedom and independence. Conscious of the aid of the Divine Spirit, they adapted their own productions, or the productions of others, to the wants of the times. But in these respects they cannot be said to have corrupted the text of Scriptures. They made the text.
But of what did they make it? Why, of the writings of other persons, justly observes Kenealy:
And this is Horne’s notion of what the Old Testament is – a cento from the writings of unknown persons collected and put together by those who, he says, were divinely inspired. No infidel that I know of has ever made so damaging a charge as this against the authenticity of the Old Testament. †
* The Book of God, pp. 388, 389.
† See Horne’s Introduction (10th edition), vol. ii. p.33. as quoted by Dr. Kenealy. p.389.
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This is quite sufficient, we think, to show that no key to the universal language-system can ever open the mysteries of Creation in a work in which, whether through design or carelessness, nearly every sentence has been made to apply to the latest outcome of religious views – to Phallicism, and to nothing else. There are a sufficient number of stray bits in the Elohistic portions of the Bible to warrant the inference that the Hebrews who wrote it were Initiates; hence the mathematical coordinations and the perfect harmony between the measures of the Great Pyramid and the numerals of the Biblical glyphs. But surely if one borrowed from the other, it cannot be the architects of the Pyramid who borrowed from Solomon’s Temple, if only because the former exists to this day as a stupendous living monument of Esoteric records, while the famous temple has never existed outside of the far later Hebrew scrolls. * Hence there is a great distance between the admission that some Hebrew Bible must be the best standard, as being the highest representative of the archaic Esoteric System.
Nowhere does the Bible say, moreover, that the Hebrew is the language of God; of this boast, at any rate, the authors are not guilty. Perhaps because in the days when the Bible was last edited the claim would have been too preposterous – hence dangerous. The compilers of the Old Testament, as it exists in the Hebrew canon, knew well that the language of the Initiates in the days of Moses was identical with that of the Egyptian Hierophants; and that none of the dialects that had sprung from the old Syriac and the pure old Arabic of Yarab – the father and progenitor of the primitive Arabians, long before the time of Abraham, in whose days the ancient Arabic had already become vitiated – that none of those languages was the one sacerdotal universal tongue. Nevertheless all of them included a number of words which could be traced to common roots. And to do this is the business of modern Philology, though to this day, with all the respect due to the labours of the eminent Philologists of Oxford and Berlin, that Science seems to be hopelessly floundering in the Cimmerian darkness of mere hypothesis.
* The author says that Parker’s quadrature is “that identical measure which was used anciently as the perfect measure, by the Egyptians, in the construction of the Great Pyramid, which was built to monument it and its uses.” and that “from it the sacred cubit-value was derived, which was the cubit-value used in the construction of the Temple of Solomon, the Ark of Noah, and the Ark of the Covenant” (p. 22). This is a grand discovery, no doubt, but it only shows that the Jews profited well by their captivity in Egypt, and that Moses was a great Initiate.
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Ahrens, when speaking of the letters as arranged in the Hebrew sacred scrolls, and remaking that they were musical notes, had probably never studied Aryan Hindu music. In the Sanskrit language letters are continually arranged in the sacred Ollas so that they may become musical notes. For the whole Sanskrit alphabet and the Vedas, from the first word to the last, are musical notations reduced to writing; the two are inseparable. * As Homer distinguished between the “language of Gods” and the “language of men.” † so did the Hindus. The Devanagari, the Sanskrit characters, are the “speech of the Gods,” and Sanskrit is the divine language.
It is argued in defence of the present version of the Mosaic Books that the mode of language adopted was an “accommodation” to the ignorance of the Jewish people. But the said “mode of language” drags down the “sacred text” of Esdras and his colleagues to the level of the most unspiritual and gross phallic religions. This plea confirms the suspicions entertained by some Christian Mystics and many philosophical critics, that;
(a) Divine Power as an Absolute Unity had never anything more to do with the Biblical Jehovah and the “Lord God” than with any other Sephiroth or number. The Ain-Suph of the Kabalah of Moses is as independent of any relation with the created Gods as is Parabrahman Itself.
(b) The teachings veiled in the Old Testament under allegorical expressions are all copied from the Magical Texts of Babylonia, by Esdras and others, while the earlier Mosaic Text had its source in Egypt.
A few instances known to almost all Symbologists of note, and especially to the French Egyptologists, may help to prove the statement. Furthermore, no ancient Hebrew Philosopher, Philo no more than the Sadducees, claimed, as do now the ignorant Christians, that
* See Theosophist, 1879, art. “Hindu Music,” p. 47.
† The Sanskrit letters are far more numerous than the poor twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. They are all musical, and they are read – or rather chanted – according to a system given in very old Tântrika works, and are called Devanâgari, the speech, or language, of the Gods. And since each letter answers to a numeral, the Sanskrit affords a far larger scope for expression, and it must necessarily be far more perfect than the Hebrew, which followed the same system but could apply it only in a very limited way. If either of these two languages were taught to humanity by the Gods, surely it would more likely be the Sanskrit, the perfect form of the most perfect language on earth, than the Hebrew, the roughest and the poorest. For once anyone believes in a language of divine origin, he can hardly believe at the same time that Angels or Gods or any divine Messengers have had to develop it from a rough monosyllable form into a perfect one, as we see in terrestrial linguistic evolution.
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the events in the Bible should be taken literally. Philo says most explicitly:
The verbal statements are fabulous [in the Book of Law]: it is in the allegory that we shall find the truth.
Let us give a few instances, beginning with the latest narrative, the Hebrew, and thus if possible trace the allegories to their origin.
1. Whence the Creation in six days, the seventh day as day of rest, the seven Elohim, * and the division of space into heaven and earth, in the first chapter of Genesis?
The division of the vault above from the Abyss, or Chaos, below is one of the first acts of creation or rather of evolution, in every cosmogony. Hermes in Pymander speaks of a heaven seen in seven circles with seven Gods in them. We examine the Assyrian tiles and find the same on them – the seven creative Gods busy each in his own sphere. The cuneiform legends narrate how Bel prepared the seven mansions of the Gods; how heaven was separated from the earth. In the Brahmanical allegory everything is septenary, from the seven zones, or envelopes, of the Mundane Egg down to the seven continents, islands, seas, etc. The six days of the week and the seventh, the Sabbath, are based primarily on the seven creations of the Hindu Brahma, the seventh being that of man; and secondarily on the number of generation. It is pre-eminently and most conspicuously phallic. In the Babylonian system the seventh day, or period, was that in which man and the animals were created.
2. The Elohim make a woman out of Adam’s rib. † This process is found in the Magical Texts translated by G. Smith.
The seven Spirits bring forth the woman from the loins of the man,
explains Mr. Sayce in his Hibbert Lectures. ‡
* In the first chapter of Genesis the word “God” represents the Elohim – Gods in the plural, not one God. This is a cunning and dishonest translation. For the whole Kabalah explains sufficiently that the Alhim (Elohim) are seven: each, creates one of the seven things enumerated in the first chapter, and these answer allegorically to the seven creations. To make this clear, count the verses in which it is said “And God saw that it was good,” and you will find that this is said seven times – in verses 4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, and 31. And though the compilers cunningly represent the creation of man as occurring on the sixth day, yet, having made man “male and female in the image of God,” the Seven Elohim repeat the sacramental sentence. “It was good, “ for the seventh time, thus making of man the seventh creation, and showing the origin of this bit of cosmogony to be in the Hindu creations. The Elohim are, of course, the seven Egyptian Khnûmû, the “assistant-architects”: the seven Amshaspends of the Zoroastrians: the Seven Spirits subordinate to Ildabaoth of the Nazareans; the seven Prajâpati of the Hindus, etc.
† Gen., ii. 21, 22.
‡ Op.cit., p. 395, note.
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The mystery of the woman who was made from the man is repeated in every national religion, and in Scriptures far antedating the Jewish. You find it in the Avestan fragments, in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and finally in Brahmâ, the male, separating from himself, as a female self, Vâch, in whom he creates Virâj.
3. The two Adams of the first and second chapters in Genesis originated from garbled exoteric accounts coming from the Chaldaeans and the Egyptian Gnostics, revised later from the Persian traditions, most of which are old Aryan allegories. As Adam Kadmon is the seventh creation, * so the Adam of dust is the eighth; and in the Purânas one finds an eighth, the Anugraha creation, and the Egyptian Gnostics had it. Irenaeus, complaining of the heretics says of the Gnostics:
Sometimes they will have him [man] to have been made on the sixth day, and sometimes on the eighth. †
The author of The Hebrew and Other Creations writes:
These two creations of man on the sixth day and on the eighth were those of the Adamic, or fleshly man, and of the spiritual man, who were known to Paul and the Gnostics as the first and second Adam, the man of earth and the man of Heaven. Irenaeus also says they insisted that Moses began with the Ogdoad of the Seven Powers and their mother, Sophia (the old Kefa of Egypt, who is the Living Word at Ombos). ‡
Sophia is also Aditi with her seven sons.
One might go on enumerating and tracing the Jewish “revelations” ad infinitum to their original sources, were it not that the task is superfluous, since so much is already done in that direction by others – and done thoroughly well, as in the case of Gerald Massey, who has sifted the subject to the very bottom.
Hundreds of volumes, treatises, and pamphlets are being written yearly in defence of the “divine- inspiration” claim for the Bible; but symbolical and archaeological research is coming to the rescue of truth and fact – therefore of the Esoteric Doctrine – upsetting every argument based on faith and breaking it as an idol with feet of clay. A curious and learned book, The Approaching End of the Age, by H. Gratton Guinness, professes to solve the mysteries of the Bible chronology and to prove thereby God’s direct revelation to man. Among other things its author thinks that:
It is impossible to deny that a septiform chronology was divinely appointed in the elaborate ritual of Judaism.
* The seventh esoterically, exoterically the sixth.
† Contra Hereses, I, xviii, 2.
‡ Op. cit. by Gerald Massey, p. 19.
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This statement is innocently accepted and firmly believed in by thousands and tens of thousands, only because they are ignorant of the Bibles of other nations. Two pages from a small pamphlet, a lecture by Mr. Gerald Massey, * so upset the arguments and proofs of the enthusiastic Mr. Grattan Guinness, spread over 760 pages of small print, as to prevent them from ever raising their heads any more. Mr. Massey treats of the Fall, and says:
Here, as before, the genesis does not begin at the beginning. There was an earlier Fall than that of the Primal Pair. In this the number of those who failed and fell was seven. We meet with those seven in Egypt – eight with the mother – where they are called the “Children of Inertness,” who were cast out from Am-Smen, the Paradise of the Eight; also in a Babylonian legend of Creation, as the Seven Brethren, who were Seven Kings, like the Seven Kings in the Book of Revelation; and the Seven Non-Sentient Powers, who became the Seven Rebel Angels that made war in heaven. The Seven Kronidae, described as the Seven Watchers, who in the beginning were formed in the interior of heaven. The heaven, like a vault, they extended or hollowed out; that which was not visible they raised, and that which had no exit they opened; their work of creation being exactly identical with that of the Elohim in the Book of Genesis. These are the Seven elemental Powers of space, who were continued as Seven Timekeepers. It is said of them: “In watching was their office, but among the stars of heaven their watch they kept not,” and their failure was the Fall. In the Book of Enoch the same Seven Watchers in heaven are stars which transgressed the commandment of God before their time arrived, for they came not in their proper season, therefore was he offended with them, and bound them until the period of the consummation of their crimes, at the end of the secret, or great year of the World, i.e., the Period of Precession, when there was to be restoration and rebeginning. The Seven deposed constellations are seen by Enoch, looking like seven great blazing mountains overthrown – the seven mountains in Revelation, on which the Scarlet Lady sits. †
There are seven keys to this, as to every other allegory, whether in the Bible or in pagan religions. While Mr. Massey has hit upon the key in the mysteries of cosmogony, John Bentley in his Hindu Astronomy claims that the Fall of the Angels, or War in Heaven, as given by the Hindus, is but a figure of the calculations of time-periods, and goes on to show that among the Western nations the same war, with like results, took the form of the war of the Titans.
In short, he makes it astronomical. So does the author of The Source of Measures:
* Op cit., p. 278.
† The Hebrew and other Creations; with a reply to Prof. A.H. Sayce, p. 19.
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The celestial sphere with the earth, was divided into twelve compartments [astronomically], and these compartments were esteemed as sexed, the lords or husbands being respectively the planets presiding over them. This being the settled scheme, want of proper correction would bring it to pass, after a time, that error and confusion would ensue by the compartments coming under the lordship of the wrong planets. Instead of lawful wedlock, there would be illegal intercourse, as between the planets, “sons of Elohim.” and these compartments, “daughters of H-Adam,” or the earth-man: and in fact the fourth verse of sixth Genesis will bear this interpretation for the usual one, viz., “In the same days, or periods, there were untimely births in the earth; and also behind that, when the sons of Elohim came to the daughters of H-Adam, they begat to them the offspring of harlotry,” etc., astronomically indicating this confusion. *
Do any of these learned explanations explain anything except a possible ingenious allegory, and a personification of the celestial bodies, by the ancient Mythologists and Priests? Carried to their last word they would undeniably explain much, and would thus furnish one of the right seven keys, fitting a great many of the Biblical puzzles yet opening none naturally and entirely, instead of being scientific and cunning master-keys. But they prove one thing – that neither the septiform chronology nor the septiform theogony and evolution of all things is of divine origin in the Bible. For let us see the sources at which the Bible sipped its divine inspiration with regard to the sacred number seven. Says Mr. Massey in the same lecture:
The Book of Genesis tells us nothing about the nature of these Elohim, erroneously rendered “God,” who are creators of the Hebrew beginning, and who are themselves preextant and seated when the theatre opens and the curtain ascends. It says that in the beginning the Elohim created the heaven and the earth. In thousands of books the Elohim have been discussed, but . . . with no conclusive result . . . The Elohim are Seven in number, whether as nature-powers, gods of constellations, or planetary gods, . . . as the Pitris and Patriarchs, Manus and Fathers of earlier times. The Gnostics, however, and the Jewish Kabalah preserve an account of the Elohim of Genesis by which we are able to identify them with other forms of the seven primordial powers . . . Their names are Ildabaoth , Jehovah (or Jao), Sabaoth, Adonai, Eloeus, Orfus, and astanphaeus. Ildabaoth signifies the Lord God of the fathers, that is the fathers who preceded the Father; and thus the seven are identical with the seven Pitris or Fathers of India (Irenaeus, B.L., xxx., 5). Moreover, the Hebrew Elohim were preextant by name and nature as Phoenician divinities or powers. Sanchoniathon mentions them by name, and describes them as Auxiliaris of Kronos or Time. In this phase, then, the Elohim are timekeepers in heaven! In the Phoenician mythology the Elohim are the Seven sons of Sydik [Melchizedek], identical with
* Op. cit., p. 243.
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the Seven Kabiri, who in Egypt are the Seven sons of Ptah, and the Seven Spirits of Ra in The Book of the Dead; . . . in America with the seven Hohgates, . . . in Assyria with the seven Lumazi . . . They are always seven in number . . . who Kab – that is, turn round, together, whence the “Kab-iri.” . . . They are also the Ili or Gods, in Assyrian, who were seven in number! . . . They were first born of the Mother in Space, * and then the Seven Companions passed into the sphere of time as auxiliaries of Kronus, or Sons of the Male Parent. As Damascius says in his Primitive Principles, the Magi consider that space and time were the source of all; and from being powers of the air the gods were promoted to become timekeepers for men. Seven constellations were assigned to them. . . . As the seven turned round in the ark of the sphere they were designated the Seven Sailors’ Companions, Rishis, or Elohim. The first “Seven Stars” are not planetary. They are the leading stars of seven constellations which turned round with the Great Bear in describing the circle of the year. † These the Assyrians called the seven Lumazi, or leaders of the flocks of stars, designated sheep. On the Hebrew line of descent or development, these Elohim are identified for us by the Kabalists and Gnostics, who retained the hidden wisdom or gnosis, the clue of which is absolutely essential to any proper understanding of mythology or theology. . . . There were two constellations with seven stars each. We call them the Two Bears. But the seven stars of the Lesser Bear were once considered to be the seven heads of the Polar Dragon, which we meet with – as the beast with seven heads – in the Akkadian Hymns and in Revelation. The mythical dragon originated in the crocodile, which is the dragon of Egypt. . . . Now in one particular cult, the Sut-Typhonian, the first god was Sevekh [the sevenfold], who wears the crocodile’s head, as well as the Serpent, and who is the Dragon or whose constellation was the Dragon. . . . In Egypt the Great Bear was the constellation of Typhon, or Kepha, the old genetrix, called the Mother of Revolutions; and the Dragon with seven heads was assigned to her son, Sevekh-Kronus, or Saturn, called the Dragon of Life. That is, the typical dragon or serpent with seven heads was female at first, and then the type was continued, as male in her son Sevekh, the Sevenfold Serpent, in Ea the Sevenfold, . . . Iao Chnubis, and others. We find these two in The Book of Revelation. One is the Scarlet Lady, the mother of mystery, the great harlot, who sat on a scarlet-coloured beast with seven heads, which is the Red Dragon of the Pole. She held in her hand the unclean things of her fornication. That means the emblems of the male and female, imaged by the Egyptians at the Polar Centre, the very uterus of creation, as was indicated by the Thigh constellation, called the Khepsh of Typhon, the old Dragon, in the northern birthplace of Time in heaven. The two revolved about the pole of heaven, or the Tree, as it was called, which was figured at the centre of the starry motion. In The Book of Enoch these two constellations are identified as Leviathan and Behemoth-Bekhmut, or the Dragon and Hippopotamus = Great Bear, and they are the primal pair that were first created in the Garden of Eden. So that the Egyptian first
* When they are the Anupâdakas (Parentless) of the Secret Doctrine. See Stanzas, i, 9, Vol. i, 56.
† These originated with the Âryans, who placed therein their “bright-crested” (Chitra-Shikhandan) Seven Rishis. But all this is far more Occult than appears on the surface.
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mother, Kefa [or Kepha] whose name signifies “mystery,” was the original of the Hebrew Chavah, our Eve; and therefore Adam is one with Sevekh the sevenfold one, the solar dragon in whom the powers of light and darkness were combined, and the sevenfold nature was shown in the seven rays worn by the Gnostic Iao-Chnubis, god of the number seven, who is Sevekh by name and a form of the first father as head of the Seven. *
All this gives the key to the astronomical prototype of the allegory in Genesis, but it furnishes no other key to the mystery involved in the sevenfold glyph. The able Egyptologist shows also that Adam himself according to Rabbinical and Gnostic tradition, was the chief of the Seven who fell from Heaven, and he connects these with the Patriarchs, thus agreeing with the Esoteric Teaching. For by mystic permutation and the mystery of primeval rebirths and adjustment, the Seven Rishis are in reality identical with the seven Prajâpatis, the fathers and creators of mankind, and also with the Kumâras, the first sons of Brahmâ, who refused to procreate and multiply. This apparent contradiction is explained by the sevenfold nature – make it fourfold on metaphysical principles and it will come to the same thing – of the celestial men, the Dhyan Chohans. This nature is made to divide and separate; and while the higher principles (Atma-Buddhi) of the “Creators of Men” are said to be the Spirits of the seven constellations, their middle and lower principles are connected with the earth and are shown.
Without desire or passion, inspired with holy wisdom, estranged from the Universe and undesirous of progeny, †
remaining Kaumâric (virgin and undefiled): therefore it is said they refuse to create. For this they are cursed and sentenced to be born and reborn “Adams,” as the Semites would say.
Meanwhile let me quote a few lines more from Mr. G. Massey’s lecture, the fruit of his long researches in Egyptology and other ancient lore, as it shows that the septenary division was at one time a universal doctrine:
Adam as the father among the Seven is identical with the Egyptians Atum, . . . whose other name of Adon is identical with the Hebrew Adonai. In this way the second Creation in Genesis reflects and continues the later creation in the mythos which explains it. The Fall of Adam to the lower world led to his being humanised on earth, by which process the celestial was turned into the mortal, and this, which
* Op.cit., pp. 19-22.
† Vishnu Purana, Wilson’s Translation, i, 101. The period of these Kumaras is Pre-Adamic. i.e. before the separation of the sexes, and before humanity had received the creative, or sacred, fire of Prometheus.
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belongs to the astronomical allegory, got literalised as the Fall of Man, or descent of the soul into matter, and the conversion of the angelic into an earthly being . . . . It is found in the [Babylonian] texts, when Ea, the first father, is said to “grant forgiveness to the conspiring gods,” for whose “redemption did he create mankind.” (Sayce; Hib. Lec.,p. 140). . . . The Elohim, then, are the Egyptian, Akkadian, Hebrew, and Phoenician form of the universal Seven Powers, who are Seven in Egypt, Seven in Akkad, Babylon, Persia, India, Britain, and Seven among the Gnostics and Kabalists. They were the Seven fathers who preceded the Father in Heaven, because they were earlier than the individualised fatherhood on earth . . . When the Elohim said: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” there were seven of them who represented the seven elements, powers, or souls that went to the making of the human being who came into existence before the Creator was represented anthropomorphically, or could have conferred the human likeness on the Adamic man. It was in the sevenfold image of the Elohim that was first created, with his seven elements, principles, or souls, * and therefore he could not have been formed in the image of the one God. The seven Gnostic Elohim tried to make a man in their own image, but could not for lack of virile power. † Thus their creation in earth and heaven was a failure . . . because they themselves were lacking in the soul of the fatherhood! When the Gnostic Ildabaoth, ‡ chief of the Seven, cried: “I am the father and God,” his mother Sophia [Achamoth] replied: “Do not tell lies, Ildabaoth, for the first man (Anthropos, son of Anthropos) § is above thee.” That is, man who had now been created in the image of the fatherhood was superior to the gods who were derived from the Mother-Parent alone! || For, as it had been first on earth, so was it afterwards in heaven [the Secret Doctrine reaches the reverse]; and thus the primary gods were held to be soulless like the earliest races of men. . . . The Gnostics taught that the Spirits of Wickedness, the inferior Seven, derived their origin from the great Mother alone, who produced without the fatherhood! It was in the image, then, of the sevenfold Elohim that the seven races were formed which we sometimes hear of as the Pre-Adamite races of men, because they were earlier than the fatherhood, which was individualised only in the second Hebrew Creation. ¶
This shows sufficiently how the echo of the Secret Doctrine – of the Third and Fourth Races of men, made complete by the incarnation in humanity of the Manasa Putra, Sons of Intelligence or Wisdom – reached every corner of the globe. The Jews, however, although they borrowed of the older nations the groundwork on which to build their
* The Secret Doctrine says that this was the second creation, nor the first, and that it took place during the Third Race, when men separated, i.e., began to be born as distinct men and women. See Vol. ii. of this work, Stanzas and Commentaries.
† This is a Western mangling of the Indian doctrine of the Kumaras.
‡ He was regarded by several Gnostic sects as one with Jehovah. See Isis Unveiled, vol ii., p. 184.
§ Or “man, son of man.” The Church found in this a prophecy and a confession of Christ, the “Son of Man!”
|| See Stanza ii. 5, Secret Doctrine, ii. 16.
¶ Op. cit., pp. 23, 24.
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revelation, never had more than three keys out of the seven in their mind, while composing their national allegories – the astronomical, or numerical (metrology) and above all the purely anthropological, or rather physiological key. This resulted in the most phallic religion of all, and has now passed, part and parcel, into Christian theology, as is proved by the lengthy quotations made from a lecture of an able Egyptologist, who can make naught of it save astronomical myths and phallicism, as is implied by his explanations of “fatherhood” in the allegories.