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This archaic symbol is the most poetical of all symbols, as also the most philosophical. The ancient Greeks brought it into prominence, and the modern poets have worn it threadbare. The Queen of Night, riding in the majesty of her peerless light in heaven, throwing all, even Hesperos, into darkness, and spreading her silver mantle over the whole sidereal world, has ever been a favourite theme with all the poets of Christendom, from Milton and Shakespeare down to the latest versifier. But the refulgent lamp of night, with her suite of stars unnumbered, spoke only to the imagination of the profane. Until lately, Religion and Science had nought to do with the beautiful mythos. Yet, the cold chaste moon, she, in the words of Shelley —
. . . . “ Who makes all beautiful on which she smiles |
stands in closer relations to Earth than any other sidereal orb. The Sun is the giver of life to the whole planetary system ; the Moon is the giver of life to our globe ; and the early races understood and knew it, even in their infancy. She is the Queen and she is the King, and was King Soma before she became transformed into Phœbe and the chaste Diana. She is pre-eminently the deity of the Christians, through the Mosaic and Kabalistic Jews, though the civilized world may have remained ignorant of the fact for long ages ; in fact, ever since the
* With the Egyptians it was the resurrection in rebirth after 3,000 years of purification, either in Devachan or “ the fields of bliss.”
† Such “ frog-goddesses ” may be seen at Bulaq, in the Cairo Museum. For the statement about the Church lamps and inscriptions it is the learned ex-director of the Bulaq Museum, Mr. Gaston Maspero, who must be held responsible. (See his “ Guide du Visiteur au Musée de Bulaq,” p. 146.)
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last initiated Father of the Church died, carrying with him into his grave the secrets of the pagan temples. For the “ Fathers ” — such as Origen or Clemens Alexandrinus — the Moon was Jehovah’s living symbol : the giver of Life and the giver of Death, the disposer of being — in our World. For, if Artemis was Luna in Heaven, and, with the Greeks, Diana on Earth, who presided over child-birth and life : with the Egyptians, she was Hekat (Hecate) in Hell, the goddess of Death, who ruled over magic and enchantments. More than this : as the personified moon, whose phenomena are triadic, Diana-Hecate-Luna is the three in one. For she is Diva triformis, tergemina, triceps — three heads on one neck, * like Brahmâ-Vishnu-Siva. Hence she is the prototype of our Trinity, which has not always been entirely male. The number seven, so prominent in the Bible, so sacred in its seventh (Sabbath) day, came to the Jews from Antiquity, deriving its origin from the four-fold number 7 contained in the 28 days of the lunar month, each septenary portion thereof being typified by one quarter of the moon.
It is worth the trouble of presenting in this work a bird’s-eye view of the origin and development of the lunar myth and worship in historical antiquity, on our side of the globe. Its earlier origin is untraceable by exact science, rejecting as it does tradition ; while for Theology, which, under the guidance of the crafty Popes, has put a brand on every fragment of literature that does not bear the imprimatur of the Church of Rome, its archaic history is a sealed book. Whether the Egyptian or the Aryan Hindu religious philosophy is the more ancient — and the Secret Doctrine says it is the latter — does not much matter in this instance, as the lunar and solar “ worship ” are the most ancient in the world. Both have survived, and prevail to this day throughout the whole world, with some openly, with others — e.g., in Christian symbolics — secretly. The cat, a lunar symbol, was sacred to Isis, herself the Moon in one sense, as Osiris was the Sun. The cat is often seen on the top of the Sistrum in the hand of the goddess. This animal was held in great veneration in the city of Bubaste, which went into deep mourning after the death of every sacred cat, because Isis, as the Moon, was particularly worshipped in this city of mysteries. The astronomical symbolism connected with it has already been given in Section I. of “ Symbolism,” and no one has better described it than Mr. G. Massey, in his Lectures and in “ The Natural Genesis.” The eye of the cat, it is said, seems to follow the lunar phases in its growth and decline, and its orbs shine like two stars in the darkness of night. Hence the mythological allegory which shows Diana hiding under the shape of a cat in the Moon, when, in company with other deities, she was seeking to
* The goddess Τρίμορφος in the statuary of Alcamenes.
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escape the pursuit of Typhon (Vide the Metamorphoses of Ovid). The moon in Egypt was both the “ Eye of Horus ” and the “ Eye of Osiris,” the Sun.
The same with the Cynocephalus. The dog-headed ape was a glyph to symbolise the sun and moon, in turn, though the Cynocephalus is more a Hermetic than a religious symbol. For it is the hieroglyph of Mercury, the planet, as of the Mercury of the Alchemical philosophers, “ as,” say the Alchemists, “ Mercury has to be ever near Isis, as her minister, as without Mercury neither Isis nor Osiris can accomplish anything in the great work.” Cynocephalus, whenever represented with the Caduceus, the Crescent, or the Lotus, is a glyph of the “ philosophical ” Mercury ; but when seen with a reed, or a roll of parchment, he stands for Hermes, the secretary and adviser of Isis, as Hanuman filled the same office with Rama.
Though the regular Sun-Worshippers, the Parsis, are few, yet not only is the bulk of the Hindu mythology and history based upon and interblended with these two worships, but so is also the Christian religion itself. From their origin down to our modern day it has coloured the theologies of both the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches. The difference, indeed, between the Aryan Hindu and the Aryan European faiths is very small, if only the fundamental ideas of both are taken into consideration. Hindus are proud of calling themselves Suryas and Chandravansas (of the Solar and Lunar dynasties). The Christians pretend to regard it as idolatry, and yet they adhere to a religion entirely based upon the solar and lunar worships. It is useless and vain for the Protestants to exclaim against the Roman Catholics for their “ Mariolatry,” based on the ancient cult of lunar goddesses, when they themselves worship Jehovah, pre-eminently a lunar god, and when both Churches have accepted in their theologies the “ Sun ”-Christ and the lunar trinity.
What is known of Chaldæan Moon-Worship, of the Babylonian god, Sin, called by the Greeks “ Deus Lunus,” is very little, and that little is apt to mislead the profane student who fails to grasp the esoteric significance of the symbols. As popularly known to the ancient profane philosophers and writers (for those who were initiated were pledged to silence) the Chaldæa were the worshippers of the moon under her (and his) various names, just as were the Jews, who came after them.
In the unpublished MSS. on the Art Speech, already mentioned, giving a key to the formation of the ancient (symbolical) language, a logical raison d’être is brought forward for this double worship. It is written by a wonderfully well-informed and acute scholar and Mystic, who gives it in the comprehensive form of a hypothesis. The latter, however, becomes forcibly a proven fact in the history of religious
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evolution in human thought, to anyone who has ever had a glimpse into the secret of ancient Symbology. Thus, he says : —
“ One of the first occupations among men, connected with those of actual necessity, would be the perception of time periods, * marked on the vaulted arch of the heavens sprung and rising over the level floor of the horizon, or the plain of still water. These would come to be marked as those of day and night, of the phases of the moon, of its stellar or synodic revolutions, and of the period of the solar year with recurrence of the seasons, and with the application to such periods of the natural measure of day or night, or of the day divided into the light and the dark. It would also be discovered that there was a longest and shortest solar day, and two solar days of equal day and night, within the period of the solar year ; and the points in the year of these could be marked with the greatest precision in the starry groups of the heavens or the constellations, subject to that retrograde movement thereof, which in time would require a correction by intercalation, as was the case in the description of the Flood, where correction of 150 days was made for a period of 600 years, during which confusion of landmarks had increased. . . . This would naturally come to pass . . . . with all races in all time ; and such knowledge must be taken to have been inherent in the human race, prior to what we call the historic period. . . . .”
On this basis, the author seeks for some natural physical function possessed in common by the human race, and connected with the periodical manifestations, such that “ the connection between the two kinds of phenomena . . . became fixed in popular usage.” He finds it “ (a) in the feminine physiological phenomena every lunar month of 28 days, or “ 4 weeks of 7 days each, so that 13 occurrences of the period should happen in 364 days, which is the solar week year of 52 weeks of 7 days each. (b) The quickening of the fœtus is marked by a period of 126 days, or 18 weeks of 7 days each. (c) That period which is called “ the period of viability ” is one of 210 days, or 30 weeks of 7 days each. (d) The period of parturition is accomplished in 280 days, or a period of 40 weeks of 7 days each, or 10 lunar months of 28 days each, or of 9 calendar months of 31 days each, counting on the royal arch of heavens for the measure of the period of traverse from the darkness of the womb to the light and glory of conscious existence, that continuing inscrutable mystery and miracle . . . Thus the observed periods of time marking the workings of the birth function would naturally become a basis of astronomical calculation . . . We may almost affirm . . . that this was the mode of reckoning among all nations, either independently, or intermediately and indirectly by tuition. It was the mode with the Hebrews, for even to-day they calculate the calendar by means of the 354 and 355 of the lunar year, and we possess a special evidence that it was the mode with the ancient Egyptians, as to which this is the proof : —
* Ancient Mythology includes ancient Astronomy as well as Astrology. The planets were the hands pointing out, on the dial of our solar system, the hours of certain periodical events. Thus, Mercury was the messenger appointed to keep time during the daily solar and lunar phenomena, and was otherwise connected with the God and Goddess of Light.
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“ The basic idea underlying the religious philosophy of the Hebrews was that God contained all things within himself * ; and that man was his image, man including woman . . . The place of the man and woman with the Hebrews was among the Egyptians occupied by the bull and the cow, sacred to Osiris and Isis, † who were represented, respectively, by a man having a bull’s head, and a woman having the head of a cow, which symbols were worshipped. Notoriously Osiris was the Sun and the river Nile, the tropical year of 365 days, which number is the value of the word Neilos, and the bull, as he was also the principle of fire and of life-giving force, while Isis was the Moon, the bed of the river Nile, or the Mother Earth, for the parturient energies of which water was a necessity, the lunar year of 354 — 364 days, the time-maker of the periods of gestation, and the cow marked by, or with, the crescent new moon.” . . . .
“ But the use of the cow of the Egyptians for the women of the Hebrews was not intended as of any radical difference of signification, but a concurrence in the teaching intended, and merely as a substitution of a symbol of common import, which was this, viz., the period of parturition with the cow and the woman was held to be the same, or 280 days, or ten lunar months of four weeks each. And in this period consisted the essential value of this animal symbol, whose mark was that of the crescent moon. ‡ . . . These parturient and natural periods are found to have been subjects of symbolism all over the world. They were thus used by the Hindus, and are found to be most plainly set forth by the ancient Americans, in the Richardson and Gest tablets, in the Palenque Cross ; and manifestly lay at the base of the formation of the calendar forms of the Mayas of Yucatan, the Hindus, the Assyrians, and the ancient Babylonians, as well as the Egyptians and old Hebrews. The natural symbols . . . would be either the phallus or the phallus and yoni, . . . or male and female. Indeed, the words translated by the generalizing terms male and female, in the 27th verse of the 1st chapter of Genesis are . . . sacr and n’cabrah, or literally, phallus and yoni, || while the representation of the phallic emblems would barely indicate the genital members of the human body, when their functions and the development of the seed-vesicles emanating from them was considered ; then would come into indication a mode of measures of lunar time, and, through lunar, of solar time.” . . .
This is the physiological or anthropological key to the Moon symbol. The key that opens the mystery of theogony, or the evolution of the Manvantaric gods, is more complicated, and has nothing phallic in it. All is mystical and divine there. But the Jews, beyond connecting Jehovah directly with the Moon as a generative god, preferred to ignore the higher hierarchies, and have made of some of them (zodiacal constellations and planetary gods) their Patriarchs, thus euhemerizing the
* A caricatured and dwarfed Vedantin notion of Parabrahmam containing within itself the whole Universe as being that boundless Universe itself, and there existing nothing outside of itself.
† Just as they are to this day in India, the bull of Siva and the cow representing several Sakti — goddesses.
‡ Hence the worship of the moon by the Hebrews.
|| “ Male and female, created he them.”
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purely theosophical idea and dragging it down to the level of sinful humanity. (See section “ Holy of Holies ” in the “ Symbolism ” of Book II.) The MSS. from which the above is extracted explains very clearly to what hierarchy of gods Jehovah belonged, and who this Jewish God was ; for it shows in clear language that which the writer has always insisted upon — namely, that the God with which the Christians have burdened themselves was no better than the lunar symbol of the reproductive or generative faculty in nature. They have ever ignored even the Hebrew secret god of the Kabalists, Ain-Soph, as grand as Parabrahmam in the earliest Kabalistic and mystical conceptions. But it it not the Kabala of Rosenroth that can ever give the true original teachings of Simeon-Ben-Iochai, as metaphysical and philosophical as any. And how many are there among the students of the Kabala who knew anything of them except in their distorted Latin translations. Let us glance at the idea which led the ancient Jews to adopt a substitute for the ever Unknowable, and which has misled the Christians into mistaking the substitute for the reality.
“ If to these organs (phallus and yoni) as symbols of creative cosmic agencies the idea of time periods can be attached, then, indeed, in the construction of Temples as Dwellings of Deity, or of Jehovah, that post designated as the Holy of Holies, or the most High Place, should borrow its title from the recognized sacredness of the generative organs, considered as symbols of measures as well as of creative Cause.”
“ With the ancient wise, there was no name, and no idea, and no symbol, of a First Cause. * With the Hebrews, the indirect conception of such was couched in a term of negation of comprehension — viz., Ain-Soph, or the Without Bounds. But the symbol of its first comprehensible manifestation, was the conception of a circle with its diameter line. . . . . (See the Proem of Book I., Part I.) to carry at once a geometric, phallic, and astronomic idea . . . . for the one takes its birth from the nought or the Circle, without which it could not be, and from one, or primal one, spring the nine digits, and, geometrically, all plane shapes. So in the Kabala this Circle, with its diameter line, is the picture of the ten Sephiroth or Emanations, composing the Adam Kadmon, the Archetypal Man, the creative origin of all things. . . . . This idea of connecting the circle and its diameter line, that is, number ten, with the signification of the reproductive organs, and the Most Holy Place, was carried out constructively in the King’s Chamber, or Holy of Holies, of the great Pyramid, in the Tabernacle of Moses, and in the Holy of Holies of the Temple of Solomon. . . . . It is the picture of a double-womb, for in Hebrew the letter hé ה is at the same time the number 5 and symbol of the womb, and twice 5 is 10, or the phallic number.”
This “ double womb ” also shows the duality of the idea carried from
* Because it was too sacred. It is referred to as That in the Vedas : it is the “ Eternal Cause,” and cannot, therefore, be spoken of as a “ First Cause,” a term implying the absence of any cause, at one time.
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the highest, spiritual, down to the lowest or terrestrial plane ; and by the Jews limited to the latter. With them, therefore the number 7 has acquired the most prominent place in their exoteric religion, a cult of external forms and empty rituals ; as their Sabbath, for instance, the seventh day sacred to their deity, the moon, symbolical of the generative Jehovah. While with other nations the number seven was typical of theogonic evolution, of cycles, cosmic planes, and the Seven Forces and Occult Powers in Kosmos, as a boundless whole, whose first upper triangle was unreachable to the finite intellect of man — while other nations, therefore, busied themselves, in their forcible limitation of Kosmos in Space and Time, only with its septenary manifested plane, the Jews centred this member solely in the moon, and based all their sacred calculations thereupon. Hence we find the thoughtful author of the MSS. just quoted, remarking, in reference to the metrology of the Jews that : “ If 20,612 be multiplied by the product will afford a base for the ascertainment of the mean revolution of the moon, and if this product be again multiplied by , this continued product will afford a base for finding the exact period of the mean solar year, . . . this form . . . becoming, for the finding of astronomical periods of time, of very great service.” This double number (male and female) is symbolized also in some well-known idols : e.g., “ Ardanari-Iswara, the Isis of the Hindus, Eridanus, or Ardan, or the Hebrew Jordan, or source of descent. She is standing on a lotus-leaf flowing on the water. But the signification is, that it is androgyne or hermaphrodite, that is phallus and yoni combined, the number 10, the Hebrew letter Jod י, the containment of Jehovah. She, or rather she-he, gives the minutes of the same circle of 360 degrees.”
“ Jehovah,” in its best aspect is Binah, “ the Upper mediating Mother, the Great Sea or Holy Spirit ; ” therefore rather a synonym of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, than of his Father ; that “ Mother, being the Latin Mare ” the Sea is here also, Venus, the Stella del Mare, or “ Star of the Sea.”
The ancestors of the mysterious Akkadians — the Chandra or Indovansas, the Lunar Kings whom tradition shows reigning at Prayag (Allahabad) ages before our era — had come from India, and brought with them the worship of their forefathers, of Soma, and his son Budha, which afterwards became that of the Chaldeans. Yet such adoration, apart from popular Astrolatry and Heliolatry, was in no sense idolatry. No more, at any rate, than the modern Roman Catholic symbolism which connects their Virgin Mary — the Magna Mater of the Syrians and Greeks — with the Moon.
Of this worship, the most pious Roman Catholics feel quite proud,
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and loudly confess to it. In a Mémoire to the French Academy, the Marquis De Mirville says : —
“ It is only natural that, as an unconscious prophecy, Ammon-Ra should be his mother’s husband, since the Magna Mater of the Christians is precisely the spouse of that son she conceives. . . . We (Christians) can understand now why Neithis throws radiance on the sun, while remaining the Moon, since the Virgin, who is the Queen of Heaven, as Neith was, clothes herself in her radiance, and clothes in his turn the Christ-Sun. “ Tu vestis solem et te sol vestit.” . . . is sung by the Roman Catholics during their service, and he adds : —
“ We (Christians) understand also how it is that the famous inscription at Sais should have stated that ‘ none has ever lifted my peplum (veil),’ considering that this sentence, literally translated, is the summary of what is sung in the Church on the day of the immaculate conception.” (Archæology of the Virgin Mother,” p. 117.)
Surely nothing could be more sincere than this ! It justifies entirely what Mr. Gerald Massey has said in his Lecture on “ Luniolatry, Ancient and Modern ” : —
“ The man in the moon (Osiris-Sut, Jehovah-Satan, Christ-Judas, and other Lunar twins) is often charged with bad conduct. . . . In the lunar phenomena the moon was one as the moon, which was two-fold in sex, and three-fold in character — as mother, child, and adult male. Thus the child of the moon became the consort of his own mother ! It could not be helped if there was to be any reproduction. He was compelled to be his own father ! These relationships were repudiated by later sociology, and the primitive man in the moon got tabooed. Yet, in its latest, most inexplicable phase, this has become the central doctrine of the grossest superstition the world has seen, for these lunar phenomena and their humanly represented relationships, the incestuous included, are the very foundations of the Christian Trinity in Unity. Through ignorance of the symbolism, the simple representation of early time has become the most profound religious mystery in modern Luniolatry. The Roman Church, without being in any wise ashamed of the proof, portrays the Virgin Mary arrayed with the sun, and the horned moon at her feet, holding the lunar infant in her arms — as child and consort of the mother moon. The mother, child, and adult male, are fundamental.”
“ In this way it can be proved that our Christology is mummified mythology, and legendary lore, which have been palmed off upon us in the Old Testament and the New, as divine revelation uttered by the very voice of God.”
A charming allegory is found in the Zohar, one which unveils better than anything ever did the true character of Jehovah or YHVH in the primitive conception of the Hebrew Kabalists. It is now found in the philosophy of I’bn Gebirol’s Kabbalah, translated by Isaac Myer. “ In the introduction written by R’Hez’quee-yah, which is very old,” says our author, “ and forms part of our Brody edition of the Zohar (I, 5b. sq.) is an account of a journey taken by R. El’azar, son of R. Shim-on b. Io’hai, and Rabbi Abbah.” They met a man with a heavy burden and asked his name ; but he refused to give it and proceeded to explain to them Thorah
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(Law). “ They asked : “ Who caused thee thus to walk and carry such a heavy load ? ’ He answered : ‘ The letter י, (Yod, which=10, and is the symbolical letter of Kether and the essence and germ of the Holy name יהוה YHVH) . . . . They said to him : ‘ If thou wilt tell us the name of thy father, we will kiss the dust of thy feet.’ He replied : ‘ As to my father, he had his dwelling in the Great Sea, and was a fish therein ’ (like Vishnu and Dagon or Oannes), ‘ which (first) destroyed the great sea ’ . . . . . and he was great and mighty and ‘ Ancient of Days,’ until he swallowed all the other fishes in the (Great) Sea . . . R. El’azar listened and said to him : ‘ Thou art the Son of the Holy Flame, thou art the Son of Rab Ham — ’nun-ah Sabah [the old : the fish in Aramaic or Chaldee is nun (noon)] thou art the Son of the Light of the Thorah, ” (Dharma) etc. Then the author explains that the feminine Sephiroth, Binah, is termed by the Kabalist the great sea : therefore Binah, whose divine names are Jehovah, Yah, and Elohim, is simply the Chaldean Tiamat, the female power, the Thalatth of Berosus, who presides over the Chaos, and was made out later by Christian theology to be the serpent and the Devil. She-He (Yah-hovah) is the supernal (Heh, and Eve). This Yah-hovah then or Jehovah, is identical with our Chaos — Father, Mother, Son, — on the material plane and in the purely physical World. Demon and Deus at one and the same time ; the sun and moon, good and evil, God and Demon.
Lunar magnetism generates life, preserves and destroys it, psychically as well as physically. And if, astronomically, she is one of the seven planets of the ancient world, in theogony she is one of the regents thereof ; with Christians now as much as with Pagans, the former referring to her under the name of one of their archangels, and the latter under that of one of their gods.
Therefore the meaning of the “ fairy tale ” translated by Chwolson from an old Chaldean MSS. translated into Arabic, about Qû-tâmy being instructed by the idol of the moon, is easily understood (vide Book III.) Seldenus tells us the secret as well as Maimonides (More Nevochim, Book III., ch. xxx). The worshippers of the Teraphim (the Jewish Oracles) “ carved images and claimed that the light of the principal stars (planets) permeating these through and through, the angelic Virtues (or the regents of the stars and planets) conversed with them, teaching them many most useful things and arts.” And Seldenus explains that the Teraphim were built and composed after the position of certain planets, those which the Greeks called στοιχεῖα, and according to figures that were located in the sky and called ἀλεξητῆροι, or the tutelary gods. Those who traced out the στοιχεῖα were called στοιχειωματιχοὶ, or the diviners by the στοιχεῖα. (De Diis Syriis, Teraph, II. Synt. p. 31) vide infra, the Teraphim.
It is such sentences, however, in the “ Nabathean agriculture,” that
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have frightened the men of science and made them proclaim the work “ either an apocrypha or a fairy tale, unworthy of the notice of an Academician.” At the same time, as shown, zealous Roman Catholics and Protestants tore it metaphorically to pieces ; the former because “ it described the worship of demons,” the latter because it is “ ungodly.” They are all wrong, once more. It is not a fairy tale ; and as far as regards pious Churchmen, the same worship may be shown in the Scriptures, however disfigured by translation. Solar and Lunar worship, as well as that of the Stars and Elements, are traced, and figure in the Christian theology ; defended by Papists, they are stoutly denied by the Protestants only at their own risk and peril. Two instances may be given.
Ammianus Marcellinus teaches that ancient divinations were always accomplished with the help of the Spirits of the Elements, “ Spiritus elementorum, and in Greek πνεύματα τῶν στοιχείων ” (1. I., 21).
But it is found now that the planets, the Elements, and the Zodiac, were figured not only in Heliopolis by the twelve stones called “ mysteries of the elements,” elementorum arcana, but also in Solomon’s temple, and, as pointed out by various writers, in several old Italian churches and even at Notre Dame de Paris where they can be seen to this day.
No symbol — the sun included — was more complex in its manifold meanings than the lunar symbol. The sex was, of course, dual. With some it was male, e.g., the Hindu “ King Soma,” and the Chaldean Sin ; with other nations it was female, the beauteous goddesses Diana-Luna, I’lythia, Lucina. In Tauris, human victims were sacrificed to Artemis, a form of the lunar goddess ; the Cretans called her Dictynna, and the Medes and Persians Anaïtis, as shown by an inscription of Koloé : ᾽Αρτέμιδι ᾽Ανάειτι. But, we are now concerned chiefly with the most chaste and pure of the virgin goddesses, Luna-Artemis, to whom Pamphos was the first to give the surname of Καλλίστη, and of whom Hippolitus wrote : Καλλίστα πολὺ παρθενῶν. (See Pausanias viii., 35, 8.) This Artemis-Lochia, the goddess that presided at conception and childbirth (Iliad, Pausanias, etc., etc.), is, in her functions and as the triple Hecate, the Orphic deity, the predecessor of the God of the Rabbins and pre-Christian Kabalists, and his lunar type. The goddess Τρίμορφος was the personified symbol of the various and successive aspects represented by the moon in each of her three phases ; and this interpretation was already that of the Stoics (Cornut. De Nat, D. 34, 1), while the Orpheans explained the epithet (Τρίμορφος) by the three kingdoms of nature over which she reigned. Jealous, blood-thirsty, revengeful and exacting, Hecate-Luna is a worthy counterpart of the “ jealous God ” of the Hebrew prophets.
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The whole riddle of the solar and lunar worship, as now traced in the churches, hangs indeed on this world-old mystery of lunar phenomena. The correlative forces in the “ Queen of Night,” that lie latent for modern science, but are fully active to the knowledge of Eastern adepts, explain well the thousand and one images under which the moon was represented by the ancients. It also shows how much more profoundly learned in the Selenic mysteries were the ancients than are now our modern astronomers. The whole Pantheon of the lunar gods and goddesses, Nephtys or Neith, Proserpina, Melytta, Cybele, Isis, Astarte, Venus, and Hecate, on the one hand, and Apollo, Dionysius, Adonis, Bacchus, Osiris, Atys, Thammuz, etc., etc., on the other, all show on the face of their names and titles — those of “ Sons ” and “ Husbands ” of their mothers — their identity with the Christian Trinity. In every religious system the gods were made to merge their functions as Father, Son, and Husband, into one, and the goddesses were identified as “ Wife, Mother, and Sister ” of the male God ; the former synthesizing the human attributes as the “ Sun, the giver of Life,” the latter merging all the other titles in the grand synthesis known as Maïa, Maya, Maria, etc., a generic name. Maïa, in its forced derivation, has come to mean with the Greeks, “ mother,” from the root ma (nurse), and even gave its name to the month of May, which was sacred to all those goddesses before it became consecrated to Mary. * Its primitive meaning, however, was Maya, Durgâ, translated by the Orientalists as “ inaccessible,” but meaning in truth the “ unreachable,” in the sense of illusion and unreality ; as being the source and cause of spells, the personification of Illusion.
In religious rites the moon served a dual purpose. Personified as a female goddess for exoteric purposes, or as a male god in allegory and symbol, in occult philosophy our satellite was regarded as a sexless Potency to be well studied, because it was to be dreaded. With the initiated Aryans, Khaldii, Greeks and Romans, Soma, Sin, Artemis Soteira (the hermaphrodite Apollo, whose attribute is the lyre, and the bearded Diana of the bow and arrow), Deus Lunus, and especially Osiris-lunus and Thot-lunus, † were the occult potencies of the moon. But whether male or female, whether Thot or Minerva, Soma or Astoreth, the Moon is the Occult mystery of mysteries, and more a symbol of evil than of good. Her seven phases (original, esoteric division) are divided into three astronomical phenomena and four
* The Roman Catholics are indebted for the idea of consecrating the month of May to the Virgin, to the pagan Plutarch, who shows that “ May is sacred to Maïa (Μαῖα) or Vesta ” (Aulus-Gellius, word Maïa) — our mother-earth, our nurse and nourisher personified.
† Thot-Lunus is “ Budha-Soma ” of India, or “ Mercury and the Moon.”
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purely psychic phases. That the moon was not always reverenced is shown in the Mysteries, in which the death of the moon-god (the three phases of gradual waning and final disappearance) was allegorized by the moon standing for the genius of evil that triumphs for the time over the light and life-giving god (the sun), and all the skill and learning of the ancient Hierophants in Magic was required to turn this triumph into a defeat.
It was the most ancient worship of all, that of the third Race of our Round, the Hermaphrodites, to whom the male-moon became sacred, when after the “ Fall ” so-called, the sexes had become separated. “ Deus Lunus ” then became an androgyne, male and female in turn ; to serve finally, for purposes of sorcery, as a dual power, to the Fourth Root-race, the Atlanteans. With the Fifth (our own) the lunar-solar worship divided the nations into two distinct, antagonistic camps. It led to events described æons later in the Mahabhâratan War, which to the Europeans is the fabulous, to the Hindus and Occultists the historical, strife between the Suryavansas and the Indovansas. Originating in the dual aspect of the moon, the worship of the female and the male principles respectively, it ended in distinct solar and lunar cults. Among the Semitic races, the sun was for a very long time feminine and the moon masculine — the latter notion being adopted by them from the Atlantean traditions. The moon was called “ the Lord of the sun,” Bel-Shemesh, * before the Shemesh worship. The ignorance of the incipient reasons for such a distinction, and of occult principles, led the nations into anthropomorphic idol-worship. But the religion of every ancient nation had been primarily based upon the Occult manifestations of a purely abstract Force or Principle now called “ God.” The very establishment of such worship shows, in its details and rites, that the philosophers who evolved those systems of nature, subjective and objective, possessed profound knowledge, and were acquainted with many facts
* During that period which is absent from the Mosaic books — from the exile of Eden to the allegorical Flood — the Jews worshipped with the rest of the Semites Dayanisi דיזניסי “ the Ruler of Men,” the “ Judge,” or the Sun. Though the Jewish canon and Christianism have made the sun become the “ Lord God ” and Jehovah in the Bible, yet the latter is full of indiscreet traces of the androgyne Deity, which was Jehovah the sun, and Astoreth the moon in its female aspect, and quite free from the present metaphorical element given to it. God is a “ consuming fire,” appears in, and is encompassed by fire.” It was not only in vision that Ezekiel (viii., 16) saw the Jews “ worshipping the sun. The Baal of the Israelites (the Shemesh of the Moabites and the Moloch of the Ammonites) was the identical “ Sun-Jehovah,” and he is till now “ the King of the Host of Heaven,” the Sun, as much as Astoreth was the “ Queen of Heaven ” — or the moon. The “ Sun of Righteousness ” has become a metaphorical expression only now.
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of a scientific nature. For besides being purely Occult, the rites of lunar worship were based, as just shown, upon a knowledge of physiology (quite a modern science with us), psychology, sacred mathematics, geometry and metrology, in their right applications to symbols and figures, which are but glyphs, recording observed natural and scientific facts ; in short, upon a most minute and profound knowledge of nature. Lunar magnetism generates life, preserves and kills it. Soma embodies the triple power of the Trimurti, though it passes unrecognized by the profane to this day. The allegory that makes Soma, the moon, produced by the churning of the Ocean of Life (Space ) by the gods in another Manvantara (i.e., in the pregenetic day of our planetary system), and that other allegory, which shows “ the Rishis milking the earth, whose calf was Soma, the moon,” has a deep cosmographical meaning ; for it is neither our earth which is milked, nor was the moon, which we know, the calf. * Had our wise men of science known as much of the mysteries of nature as the ancient Aryans did, they would surely never have imagined that the moon was projected from the Earth. Once more, the oldest of permutations in theogony, the Son becoming his own father and the mother generated by the Son, has to be remembered and taken into consideration if the symbolical language of the ancients is to be understood by us. Otherwise mythology will be ever haunting the Orientalists as simply “ the disease which springs up at a peculiar stage of human culture ! ” — as Renouf gravely observes in a Hibbert lecture.
The ancients taught the, so to speak, auto-generation of the Gods : the one divine essence, unmanifested, perpetually begetting a second-self, manifested, which second-self, androgynous in its nature, gives birth in an immaculate way to everything macro- and micro-cosmical in this universe. This was shown in the Circle and the Diameter, or the Sacred 10, a few pages back.
But our Orientalists, their extreme desire to discover one homogeneous element in nature notwithstanding, will not see it ; cramped in their researches by such ignorance, they — the Aryanists and Egyptologists — are constantly led astray from truth in their speculations. Thus, de Rougé is unable to understand, in the text which he translates, the meaning of Ammon-râ saying to King Amenophes (supposed to be Memnon), “ Thou art my Son, I have begotten thee ; ” and as he
* The earth flees for her life in the allegory, before Prithu, who pursues her. She assumes the shape of a cow, and, trembling with terror, runs away and hides even in the regions of Brahmâ. Therefore, it is not our Earth. Again, in every Purâna, the calf changes name. In one it is Manu Swayambhûva, in another Indra, in a third the Himavat (Himalayas) itself, while Meru was the milker. This is a deeper allegory than one thinks.
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finds the same idea in many a text and under various forms, this very Christian Orientalist is finally compelled to exclaim that “ for this idea to have entered the mind of a hierogrammatist, there must have been in their religion a more or less defined doctrine, indicating as a possible fact that might come to pass, a divine and immaculate incarnation under a human form.” Precisely. But why throw the explanation on an impossible prophecy, when the whole secret is explained by the later religion copying the earlier ?
That doctrine was universal, and it was not the mind of any one hierogrammatist that evolved it ; for the Indian avatars are a proof to the contrary. After which, having come “ to realize clearer ” * what “ the Divine Father and Son ” were with the Egyptians, de Rougé still fails to account for, and perceive what were the functions attributed to the feminine principle in that primordial generation. He does not find it in the goddess Neith, of Saïs. Yet he quotes the sentence of the Commander to Cambyses when introducing that king into the Saïtic temple : “ I made known to his Majesty the dignity of Saïs, which is the abode of Neith, the great (female) producer, genitrix of the Sun, who is the first-born, and who is not begotten, but only brought forth,” and hence is the fruit of an immaculate mother.
How much more grandiose, philosophical and poetical is the real distinction — for whoever is able to understand and appreciate it — made between the immaculate virgin of the ancient Pagans and the modern Papal conception. With the former, the ever-youthful mother nature, the antitype of her prototypes, the sun and moon, generates and brings forth her “ mind-born ” son, the Universe. The Sun and Moon, as male-female deities, fructify the earth, the microcosmical mother, and the latter conceives and brings forth, in her turn. With the Christians, “ the first-born ” (primogenitus) is indeed generated, i.e., begotten, “ genitum, non factum,” and positively conceived and brought forth — “ Virgo pariet,” explains the Latin Church. Thus, she drags down the noble spiritual ideal of the Virgin Mary to the earth, and, making her “ of the earth earthy,” degrades that ideal to the lowest of the anthropomorphic goddesses of the rabble.
Truly, Neith, Isis, Diana, etc., etc., were each of them “ a demiurgical goddess, at once visible and invisible, having her place in Heaven, and helping to the generation of species ” — the moon, in short. Her occult aspects and powers are numberless, and, in one of them, the moon becomes with
* His clear realization of it is, that the Egyptians prophesied Jehovah (!) and his incarnated Redeemer (the good serpent), etc., etc. ; even to identifying Typhon with the wicked dragon of the garden of Eden, and this passes as serious and sober science.
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the Egyptians Hathor, another aspect of Isis, * and both of these goddesses are shown suckling Horus. Behold in the Egyptian Hall of the British Museum, Hathor worshipped by Pharaoh Thotmes, who stands between her and the Lord of Heavens. The monolith was taken from Karnac ; and the same goddess has the following legend inscribed on her throne : “ The Divine Mother and Lady, or Queen of Heaven ; ” also “ the Morning Star,” and the “ Light of the Sea ” (Stella matutina and Lux maris). All the lunar goddesses had a dual aspect — one divine, the other infernal. All were the virgin mothers of an immaculately born Son — the Sun. Raoul Rochetti shows the moon-goddess of the Athenians — Pallas, or Cybele, Minerva, or again Diana — holding her child-son on the lap, invoked in her festivals as Μονογενὴς θεοῦ, “ the one Mother of God,” sitting on a lion, and surrounded by twelve personages ; in whom the Occultist recognises the twelve great gods, and the pious Christian Orientalist the apostles, or rather the Grecian pagan prophecy thereof.
They are both right, for the immaculate goddess of the Latin Church is a faithful copy of the older pagan goddesses ; the number (twelve) of the apostles is that of the twelve tribes, and the latter are a personification of the twelve great gods, and of the twelve signs of the Zodiac. Every detail almost in the Christian dogma is borrowed from the heathens. Semele, the wife of Jupiter and mother of Bacchus, the Sun, is, according to Nonnus, also “ carried,” or made to ascend to heaven after her death, where she presides between Mars and Venus, under the name of the Queen of the World, or the universe, πανβασιλεία ; “ at the names of which, as at the names of Hathor, Hecate, and other infernal goddesses,” “ tremble all the demons.” †
“ Σεμελῆν τρέμουσι δαίμονες.” This Greek inscription on a small temple, reproduced on a stone that was found by somebody, and copied by Montfaucon, as De Mirville tells us (113, Archæologie de la Vierge mère) informs us of the stupendous fact, that the Magna Mater of the old world was an impudent plagiarism, perpetrated by the Demon, of the Immaculate Virgin Mother of his Church. Whether so, or vice versâ, is of no importance. That which is interesting to note is the perfect identity between the archaic copy and the modern original.
Did space permit we might show the inconceivable coolness and unconcern exhibited by certain followers of the Roman Catholic Church, when made to face the revelations of the Past. To Maury’s remark that “ the Virgin took possession of all the Sanctuaries of Ceres and
* Hathor is the infernal Isis, the goddess pre-eminently of the West or the nether world.
† This is De Mirville, who proudly confesses the similarity, and he ought to know.
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Venus, and that the pagan rites, proclaimed and practised in honour of those goddesses, were in a good measure transferred to the mother of Christ,” the advocate of Rome answers : —
“ That such is the fact, and that it is just as it should be and quite natural. As the dogma, the liturgy, and the rites professed by the Roman Apostolical Church in 1862 are found engraved on monuments, inscribed on papyri, and cylinders hardly posterior to the Deluge, it does seem impossible to deny the existence of a first ante-historical (Roman) Catholicism of which our own is but the faithful continuation. . . . But while the former was the culmination, the summum of the impudence of demons and Goetic necromancy . . . . the latter is divine. If in our (Christian) Revelation (l’Apocalypse), Mary, clothed with the Sun and having the moon under her feet, has nothing more in common with the humble servant of Nazareth (sic.), it is because she has now become the greatest of theological and cosmological powers in our universe.” — (Archæol. de la Vierge, pp. 116 and 119, and by the Marquis de Mirville).
Verily so, since Pindar’s Hymns to Minerva (p. 19) . . . “ who sits at the right hand of her Father Jupiter, and who is more powerful than all the other (angels or) gods,” are likewise applied to the Virgin. It is St. Bernard, who, quoted by Cornelius a Lapide, is made to address the Virgin Mary in this wise : —
“ The Sun-Christ lives in thee and thou livest in him.” (Sermon on the Holy Virgin.) . . . .
Again the Virgin is admitted to be the moon by the same unsophisticated holy man. Being the Lucina of the Church, that is in childbirth, the verse of Virgil — “ Casta fove Lucina, tuus jam regnat Apollo ” — is applied to her. Like the moon, the Virgin is the Queen of Heaven,” adds the innocent saint ; (Apocal., ch. xii., Comm. by Cornelius a Lapide).
This settles the question. The more similarity, according to such writers as De Mirville, there exists between the pagan conceptions and the Christian dogmas, the more divine appears the Christian religion, and the more is it seen to be the only truly inspired one, especially in its Roman Catholic form. The unbelieving scientists and the academicians who think they see in the Latin Church quite the opposite of divine inspiration, and who will not believe in the satanic tricks of plagiarism by anticipation, are severely taken to ask. But then “ they believe in nothing and reject even the ‘ Nabathean Agriculture ’ as a romance and a pack of superstitious nonsense,” complains the memorialist. “ In their perverted opinion Qû-tâ-my’s ‘ idol of the moon ’ and the statue of the Madonna are one ! ” A noble Marquis wrote twenty years ago six huge volumes, or, as he calls them “ Mémoires to the French Academy,” with the sole object of showing Roman Catholicism an inspired and revealed faith. As a proof thereof, he furnishes numberless facts, all tending to show that the entire ancient world, ever since
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the deluge, had been, with the help of the devil, systematically plagiarizing the rites, ceremonies, and dogmas of the future Holy Church to be born ages later. What would that faithful son of Rome have said had he heard his co-religionist — M. Renouf, the distinguished Egyptologist of the British Museum — declaring, in one of his learned lectures, that “ neither Hebrews nor Greeks borrowed any of their ideas from Egypt ? ” *
But perhaps it is just this that M. Renouf intended to say — namely, that it is the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Aryans, who borrowed theirs from the Latin Church ? And if so, why, in the name of logic, do the Papists reject the additional information which the Occultists may give them on Moon-worship, since it all tends to show their (the Roman Catholic) worship as old as the world — of Sabæanism and Astrolatry ?
The reason of early Christian and later Roman Catholic astrolatry, or the symbolical worship of Sun and Moon — identical with that of the Gnostics, though less philosophical and pure than the “ Sun worship ” of the Zoroastrians — is a natural consequence of its birth and origin. The adoption by the Latin Church of such symbols as the water, fire, sun, moon and stars, and a good many other things, is simply a continuation by the early Christians of the old worship of Pagan nations. Thus Odin got his wisdom, power, and knowledge, by sitting at the feet of Mimir, the thrice-wise Jotun, who passed his life by the fountain of primeval Wisdom, the crystalline waters of which increased his knowledge daily. Mimir “ drew the highest knowledge from the fountain, because the world was born of water ; hence primeval wisdom was to be found in that mysterious element ” (“ Asgard and the Gods,” 86). The eye which Odin had to pledge to acquire that knowledge may be “ the Sun, which enlightens and penetrates all things ; his other eye being the moon, whose reflection gazes out of the deep, and which at last, when setting, sinks into the Ocean.” (Ibid.) But it is something more, besides this. Loki, the fire-god, is said to have hidden in the water, as well as in the moon, the light-giver, whose reflection he found therein ; and this belief that the fire finds refuge in the water was not limited to the old Scandinavians. It was shared by all nations and was finally taken up by the early Christians, who symbolized the Holy Ghost under the shape of Fire, “ cloven tongues like as fire ” — the breath of the Father-Sun. This “ Fire ” descends also into the Water or the Sea : Mar, Mary. The dove was the symbol of the Soul with several nations, it was sacred to Venus, the goddess born from the
* Quoted in Mr. G. Massey’s Lecture.
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sea-foam, and it became later the symbol of the Christian Anima Mundi, or the Holy Spirit.
One of the most occult chapters in the “ Book of the Dead ” is ch. lxxx., entitled : “ To make the transformation into the god giving light to the path of Darkness,” wherein “ Woman-light of the Shadow ” serves Thot in his retreat in the moon. Thot-Hermes is said to hide therein, because he is the representative of the Secret Wisdom. He is the manifested logos of its light side, the concealed deity or “ Dark Wisdom ” when he is supposed to retire to the opposite hemisphere. Speaking of her power, the moon calls herself repeatedly : “ The Light which shineth in Darkness,” the “ Woman-Light.” Hence it became the accepted symbol of all the Virgin-Mother goddesses. As the wicked “ evil ” spirits warred against the moon in days of yore, so they are supposed to war now, without being able to prevail, however, against the actual Queen of Heaven, Mary, the moon. Hence also the moon was intimately connected in all the Pagan theogonies with the Dragon, her eternal enemy ; the Virgin, or Madonna, standing on the mythical Satan under that form, crushed and made powerless, under her feet. This, because the head and tail of the Dragon, which represent in Eastern astronomy to this day the ascending and descending nodes of the moon, were also symbolized in ancient Greece by the two serpents. Hercules kills them on the day of his birth, and so does the babe in his virgin mother’s arms. As Mr. Gerald Massey aptly observes in this connection : “ All such symbols figured their own facts from the first, and did not pre-figure others of a totally different order. The Iconography (and dogmas, too) had survived in Rome from a period remotely pre-Christian. There was neither forgery nor interpolation of types ; nothing but a continuity of imagery with a perversion of its meaning.”