Chapter V…

Chapter V

“Learn to know all, but keep thyself unknown.”--GNOSTIC MAXIM.

“There is one God supreme over all gods, diviner than mortals, Whose form is not like unto man’s, and as unlike his nature; But vain mortals imagine that gods like themselves are begotten With human sensations, and voice, and corporeal members.” --XENOPHANES: Clem. Al. Strom., v. 14, § 110.

“TYCHIADES.--Can you tell me the reason, Philocles, why most men desire to lye, and delight not only to speak fictions themselves, but give busie attention to others who do? “PHILOCLES.--There be many reasons, Tychiades, which compell some to speak lyes, because they see ’tis profitable.”--A Dialogue of Lucian.

“SPARTAN.--Is it to thee, or to God, that I must confess? “PRIEST.--To God. “SPARTAN.--Then, MAN, stand back!”--PLUTARCH: Remarkable Lacedemonian Sayings.

We will now give attention to some of the most important Mysteries of the Kabala, and trace their relations to the philosophical myths of various nations.

In the oldest Oriental Kabala, the Deity is represented as three circles in one, shrouded in a certain smoke or chaotic exhalation. In the preface to the Sohar, which transforms the three primordial circles into THREE HEADS, over these is described an exhalation or smoke, neither black nor white, but colorless, and circumscribed within a circle. This is the unknown Essence.[394] The origin of the Jewish image may, perhaps, be traced to Hermes’ Pimander, the Egyptian Logos, who appears within a cloud of a humid nature, with a smoke escaping from it.[395] In the Sohar the highest God is, as we have shown in the preceding chapter, and as in the case of the Hindu and Buddhist philosophies, a pure abstraction, whose objective existence is denied by the latter. It is Hakama, the “SUPREME WISDOM, that cannot be understood by reflection,” and that lies within and without the CRANIUM of LONG FACE[396] (Sephira), the uppermost of the three “Heads.” It is the “boundless and the infinite En-Soph,” the No-Thing.

The “three Heads,” superposed above each other, are evidently taken from the three mystic triangles of the Hindus, which also superpose each other. The highest “head” contains the Trinity in Chaos, out of which springs the manifested trinity. En-Soph, the unrevealed forever, who is boundless and unconditioned, cannot create, and therefore it seems to us a great error to attribute to him a “creative thought,” as is commonly done by the interpreters. In every cosmogony this supreme Essence is passive; if boundless, infinite, and unconditioned, it can have no thought nor idea. It acts not as the result of volition, but in obedience to its own nature, and according to the fatality of the law of which it is itself the embodiment. Thus, with the Hebrew kabalists, En-Soph is non-existent עַיִן, for it is incomprehensible to our finite intellects, and therefore cannot exist to our minds. Its first emanation was Sephira, the crown כתר. When the time for an active period had come, then was produced a natural expansion of this Divine essence from within outwardly, obedient to eternal and immutable law; and from this eternal and infinite light (which to us is darkness) was emitted a spiritual substance.[397] This was the First Sephiroth, containing in herself the other nine ספירות Sephiroth, or intelligences. In their totality and unity they represent the archetypal man, Adam Kadmon, the πρωτόγονος, who in his individuality or unity is yet dual, or bisexual, the Greek Didumos, for he is the prototype of all humanity. Thus we obtain three trinities, each contained in a “head.” In the first head, or face (the three-faced Hindu Trimurti), we find Sephira, the first androgyne, at the apex of the upper triangle, emitting Hackama, or Wisdom, a masculine and active potency--also called Jah, יה--and Binah, בינה, or Intelligence, a female and passive potency, also represented by the name Jehovah יהוה. These three form the first trinity or “face” of the Sephiroth. This triad emanated Hesed, חסד, or Mercy, a masculine active potency, also called El, from which emanated Geburah דין, or Justice, also called Eloha, a feminine passive potency; from the union of these two was produced Tiphereth תפארת, Beauty, Clemency, the Spiritual Sun, known by the divine name Elohim; and the second triad, “face,” or “head,” was formed. These emanating, in their turn, the masculine potency Netzah, נצח, Firmness, or Jehovah Sabaoth, who issued the feminine passive potency Hod, הוד, Splendor, or Elohim Sabaoth; the two produced Jesod, יסוד, Foundation, who is the mighty living one El-Chai, thus yielding the third trinity or “head.” The tenth Sephiroth is rather a duad, and is represented on the diagrams as the lowest circle. It is Malchuth or Kingdom, מלכות, and Shekinah שכינה, also called Adonai, and Cherubim among the angelic hosts. The first “Head” is called the Intellectual world; the second “Head” is the Sensuous, or the world of Perception, and the third is the Material or Physical world.

“Before he gave any shape to the universe,” says the Kabala, “before he produced any form, he was alone without any form and resemblance to anything else. Who, then, can comprehend him, how he was before the creation, since he was formless? Hence, it is forbidden to represent him by any form, similitude, or even by his sacred name, by a single letter, or a single point.... The Aged of the Aged, the Unknown of the Unknown, has a form, and yet no form. He has a form whereby the universe is preserved, and yet has no form, because he cannot be comprehended. When he first assumed a form (in Sephira, his first emanation), he caused nine splendid lights to emanate from it.”[398]

And now we will turn to the Hindu esoteric Cosmogony and definition of “Him who is, and yet is not.”

“From him who is,[399] from this immortal Principle which exists in our minds but cannot be perceived by the senses, is born Purusha, the Divine male and female, who became Narayana, or the Divine Spirit moving on the water.”

Swayambhuva, the unknown essence of the Brahmans, is identical with En-Soph, the unknown essence of the kabalists. As with the latter, the ineffable name could not be pronounced by the Hindus, under the penalty of death. In the ancient primitive trinity of India, that which may be certainly considered as pre-Vedic, the germ which fecundates the mother-principle, the mundane egg, or the universal womb, is called Nara, the Spirit, or the Holy Ghost, which emanates from the primordial essence. It is like Sephira, the oldest emanation, called the primordial point, and the White Head, for it is the point of divine light appearing from within the fathomless and boundless darkness. In Manu it is “NARA, or the Spirit of God, which moves on Ayana (Chaos, or place of motion), and is called NARAYANA, or moving on the waters.”[400] In Hermes, the Egyptian, we read: “In the beginning of the time there was naught in the chaos.” But when the “verbum,” issuing from the void like a “colorless smoke,” makes its appearance, then “this verbum moved on the humid principle.”[401] And in Genesis we find: “And darkness was upon the face of the deep (chaos). And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” In the Kabala, the emanation of the primordial passive principle (Sephira), by dividing itself into two parts, active and passive, emits Chochma-Wisdom and Binah-Jehovah, and in conjunction with these two acolytes, which complete the trinity, becomes the Creator of the abstract Universe; the physical world being the production of later and still more material powers.[402] In the Hindu Cosmogony, Swayambhuva emits Nara and Nari, its bisexual emanation, and dividing its parts into two halves, male and female, these fecundate the mundane egg, within which develops Brahma, or rather Viradj, the Creator. “The starting-point of the Egyptian mythology,” says Champollion, “is a triad ... namely, Kneph, Neith, and Phtah; and Ammon, the male, the father; Muth, the female and mother; and Khons, the son.”

The ten Sephiroth are copies taken from the ten Prâdjapatis created by Viradj, called the “Lords of all beings,” and answering to the biblical Patriarchs.

Justin Martyr explains some of the “heresies” of the day, but in a very unsatisfactory manner. He shows, however, the identity of all the world-religions at their starting-points. The first beginning opens invariably with the unknown and passive deity, producing from himself a certain active power or virtue, “Rational,” which is sometimes called WISDOM, sometimes the SON, very often God, Angel, Lord, and LOGOS.[403] The latter is sometimes applied to the very first emanation, but in several systems it proceeds from the first androgyne or double ray produced at the beginning by the unseen. Philo depicts this wisdom as male and female. But though its first manifestation had a beginning, for it proceeded from Oulom[404] (Aiôn, time), the highest of the Æons, when emitted from the Fathers, it had remained with him before all creations, for it is part of him.[405] Therefore, Philo Judæus calls Adam Kadmon “mind” (the Ennoia of Bythos in the Gnostic system). “The mind, let it be named Adam.”[406]

Strictly speaking, it is difficult to view the Jewish Book of Genesis otherwise than as a chip from the trunk of the mundane tree of universal Cosmogony, rendered in Oriental allegories. As cycle succeeded cycle, and one nation after another came upon the world’s stage to play its brief part in the majestic drama of human life, each new people evolved from ancestral traditions its own religion, giving it a local color, and stamping it with its individual characteristics. While each of these religions had its distinguishing traits, by which, were there no other archaic vestiges, the physical and psychological status of its creators could be estimated, all preserved a common likeness to one prototype. This parent cult was none other than the primitive “wisdom-religion.” The Israelitish Scriptures are no exception. Their national history--if they can claim any autonomy before the return from Babylon, and were anything more than migratory septs of Hindu pariahs, cannot be carried back a day beyond Moses; and if this ex-Egyptian priest must, from theological necessity, be transformed into a Hebrew patriarch, we must insist that the Jewish nation was lifted with that smiling infant out of the bulrushes of Lake Moeris. Abraham, their alleged father, belongs to the universal mythology. Most likely he is but one of the numerous aliases of Zeruan (Saturn), the king of the golden age, who is also called the old man (emblem of time).[407]

It is now demonstrated by Assyriologists that in the old Chaldean books Abraham is called Zeru-an, or Zerb-an--meaning one very rich in gold and silver, and a mighty prince.[408] He is also called Zarouan and Zarman--a decrepit old man.[409]

The ancient Babylonian legend is that Xisuthrus (Hasisadra of the Tablets, or Xisuthrus) sailed with his ark to Armenia, and his son Sim became supreme king. Pliny says that Sim was called Zeruan; and Sim is Shem. In Hebrew, his name writes שם, Shem--a sign. Assyria is held by the ethnologists to be the land of Shem, and Egypt called that of Ham. Shem, in the tenth chapter of Genesis is made the father of all the children of Eber, of Elam (Oulam or Eilam), and Ashur (Assur or Assyria). The “nephelim,” or fallen men, Gebers, mighty men spoken of in Genesis (vi. 4), come from Oulam, “men of Shem.” Even Ophir, which is evidently to be sought for in the India of the days of Hiram, is made a descendant of Shem. The records are purposely mixed up to make them fit into the frame of the Mosaic Bible. But Genesis, from its first verse down to the last, has naught to do with the “chosen people;” it belongs to the world’s history. Its appropriation by the Jewish authors in the days of the so-called restoration of the destroyed books of the Israelites, by Ezra, proves nothing, and, until now, has been self-propped on an alleged divine revelation. It is simply a compilation of the universal legends of the universal humanity. Bunsen says that in the “Chaldean tribe immediately connected with Abraham, we find reminiscences of dates disfigured and misunderstood, as genealogies of single men, or indications of epochs. The Abrahamic recollections go back at least three millenia beyond the grandfather of Jacob.”[410]

Alexander Polyhistor says that Abraham was born at Kamarina or Uria, a city of soothsayers, and invented astronomy. Josephus claims the same for Terah, Abraham’s father. The tower of Babel was built as much by the direct descendants of Shem as by those of the “accursed” Ham and Canaan, for the people in those days were “one,” and the “whole earth was of one language;” and Babel was simply an astrological tower, and its builders were astrologers and adepts of the primitive Wisdom-Religion, or, again, what we term Secret Doctrine.

The Berosian Sybil says: Before the Tower, Zeru-an, Titan, and Yapetosthe governed the earth, Zeru-an wished to be supreme, but his two brothers resisted, when their sister, Astlik, intervened and appeased them. It was agreed that Zeru-an should rule, but his male children should be put to death; and strong Titans were appointed to carry this into effect.

Sar (circle, saros) is the Babylonian god of the sky. He is also Assaros or Asshur (the son of Shem), and Zero--Zero-ana, the chakkra, or wheel, boundless time. Hence, as the first step taken by Zoroaster, while founding his new religion, was to change the most sacred deities of the Sanscrit Veda into names of evil spirits, in his Zend Scriptures, and even to reject a number of them, we find no traces in the Avesta of Chakkra--the symbolic circle of the sky.

Elam, another of the sons of Shem, is Oulam עולם, and refers to an order or cycle of events. In Ecclesiastes iii. 11, it is termed “world.” In Ezekiel xxvi. 20, “of old time.” In Genesis iii. 22, the word stands as “forever;” and in chapter ix. 16, “eternal.” Finally, the term is completely defined in Genesis vi. 4, in the following words: “There were nephelim (giants, fallen men, or Titans) on the earth.” The word is synonymous with Æon, αιων. In Proverbs viii. 23, it reads: “I was effused from Oulam, from Ras” (wisdom). By this sentence, the wise king-kabalist refers to one of the mysteries of the human spirit--the immortal crown of the man-trinity. While it ought to read as above, and be interpreted kabalistically to mean that the I (or my eternal, immortal Ego), the spiritual entity, was effused from the boundless and nameless eternity, through the creative wisdom of the unknown God, it reads in the canonical translation: “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old!” which is unintelligible nonsense, without the kabalistic interpretation. When Solomon is made to say that I was “from the beginning ... while, as yet, he (the Supreme Deity) had not made the earth nor the highest part of the dust of the world ... I was there,” and “when he appointed the foundations of the earth ... then I was by him, as one brought up with him,” what can the kabalist mean by the “I,” but his own divine spirit, a drop effused from that eternal fountain of light and wisdom--the universal spirit of the Deity?

The thread of glory emitted by En-Soph from the highest of the three kabalistic heads, through which “all things shine with light,” the thread which makes its exit through Adam Primus, is the individual spirit of every man. “I was daily his (En-Soph’s) delight, rejoicing always before him ... and my delights were with the sons of men,” adds Solomon, in the same chapter of the Proverbs. The immortal spirit delights in the sons of men, who, without this spirit, are but dualities (physical body and astral soul, or that life-principle which animates even the lowest of the animal kingdom). But, we have seen that the doctrine teaches that this spirit cannot unite itself with that man in whom matter and the grossest propensities of his animal soul will be ever crowding it out. Therefore, Solomon, who is made to speak under the inspiration of his own spirit, that possesses him for the time being, utters the following words of wisdom: “Hearken unto me, my son” (the dual man), “blessed are they who keep my ways.... Blessed is the man that heareth me, watching daily at my gates.... For whoso findeth me, findeth life, and shall obtain favor of the Lord.... But he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul ... and loves death” (Proverbs vii. 1-36).

This chapter, as interpreted, is made by some theologians, like everything else, to apply to Christ, the “Son of God,” who states repeatedly, that he who follows him obtains eternal life, and conquers death. But even in its distorted translation it can be demonstrated that it referred to anything but to the alleged Saviour. Were we to accept it in this sense, then, the Christian theology would have to return, nolens volens, to Averroism and Buddhism; to the doctrine of emanation, in short; for Solomon says: “I was effused” from Oulam and Rasit, both of which are a part of the Deity; and thus Christ would not be as their doctrine claims, God himself, but only an emanation of Him, like the Christos of the Gnostics. Hence, the meaning of the personified Gnostic Æon, the word signifying cycles or determined periods in the eternity and at the same time, representing a hierarchy of celestial beings--spirits. Thus Christ is sometimes termed the “Eternal Æon.” But the word “eternal” is erroneous in relation to the Æons. Eternal is that which has neither beginning nor end; but the “Emanations” or Æons, although having lived as absorbed in the divine essence from the eternity, when once individually emanated, must be said to have a beginning. They may be therefore endless in this spiritual life, never eternal.

These endless emanations of the one First Cause, all of which were gradually transformed by the popular fancy into distinct gods, spirits, angels, and demons, were so little considered immortal, that all were assigned a limited existence. And this belief, common to all the peoples of antiquity, to the Chaldean Magi as well as to the Egyptians, and even in our day held by the Brahmanists and Buddhists, most triumphantly evidences the monotheism of the ancient religious systems. This doctrine calls the life-period of all the inferior divinities, “one day of Parabrahma.” After a cycle of fourteen milliards, three hundred and twenty-millions of human years--the tradition says--the trinity itself, with all the lesser divinities, will be annihilated, together with the universe, and cease to exist. Then another universe will gradually emerge from the pralaya (dissolution), and men on earth will be enabled to comprehend SWAYAMBHUVA as he is. Alone, this primal cause will exist forever, in all his glory, filling the infinite space. What better proof could be adduced of the deep reverential feeling with which the “heathen” regard the one Supreme eternal cause of all things visible and invisible.

This is again the source from which the ancient kabalists derived identical doctrines. If the Christians understood Genesis in their own way, and, if accepting the texts literally, they enforced upon the uneducated masses the belief in a creation of our world out of nothing; and moreover assigned to it a beginning, it is surely not the Tanaïm, the sole expounders of the hidden meaning contained in the Bible, who are to be blamed. No more than any other philosophers had they ever believed either in spontaneous, limited, or ex nihilo creations. The Kabala has survived to show that their philosophy was precisely that of the modern Nepäl Buddhists, the Svâbhâvikas. They believed in the eternity and the indestructibility of matter, and hence in many prior creations and destructions of worlds, before our own. “There were old worlds which perished.”[411] “From this we see that the Holy One, blessed be His name, had successively created and destroyed sundry worlds, before he created the present world; and when he created this world he said: ‘This pleases me; the previous ones did not please me.’”[412] Moreover, they believed, again like the Svâbhâvikas, now termed Atheists, that every thing proceeds (is created) from its own nature and that once that the first impulse is given by that Creative Force inherent in the “Self-created substance,” or Sephira, everything evolves out of itself, following its pattern, the more spiritual prototype which precedes it in the scale of infinite creation. “The indivisible point which has no limit, and cannot be comprehended (for it is absolute), expanded from within, and formed a brightness which served as a garment (a veil) to the indivisible points.... It, too, expanded from within.... Thus, everything originated through a constant upheaving agitation, and thus finally the world originated.”[413]

In the later Zoroastrian books, after that Darius had restored both the worship of Ormazd and added to it the purer magianism of the primitive Secret Wisdom--חכמות־נסתרה, of which, as the inscription tells us, he was himself a hierophant, we see again reappearing the Zeru-ana, or boundless time, represented by the Brahmans in the chakkra, or a circle; that we see figuring on the uplifted finger of the principal deities. Further on, we will show the relation in which it stands to the Pythagorean, mystical numbers--the first and the last--which is a zero (0), and to the greatest of the Mystery-Gods IAO. The identity of this symbol alone, in all the old religions, is sufficient to show their common descent from one primitive Faith.[414] This term of “boundless time,” which can be applied but to the ONE who has neither beginning nor end, is called by the Zoroastrians Zeruana-Akarene, because he has always existed. “His glory,” they say, is too exalted, his light too resplendent for either human intellect or mortal eyes to grasp and see. His primal emanation is eternal light which, from having been previously concealed in darkness, was called out to manifest itself, and thus was formed Ormazd, “the King of Life.” He is the first-born of boundless time, but like his own antitype, or preëxisting spiritual idea, has lived within primitive darkness from all eternity. His Logos created the pure intellectual world. After the lapse of three grand cycles[415] he created the material world in six periods. The six Amshaspands, or primitive spiritual men, whom Ormazd created in his own image, are the mediators between this world and himself. Mithras is an emanation of the Logos and the chief of the twenty-eight izeds, who are the tutelary angels over the spiritual portion of mankind--the souls of men. The Ferouers are infinite in number. They are the ideas or rather the ideal conceptions of things which formed themselves in the mind of Ormazd or Ahuramazda before he willed them to assume a concrete form. They are what Aristotle terms “privations” of forms and substances. The religion of Zarathustra, as he is always called in the Avesta, is one from which the ancient Jews have the most borrowed. In one of the Yashts, Ahuramazda, the Supreme, gives to the seer as one of his sacred names, Ahmi, “I am;” and in another place, ahmi yat ahmi, “I am that I am,” as Jehovah is alleged to have given it to Moses.

This Cosmogony, adopted with a change of names in the Rabbinical Kabala, found its way, later, with some additional speculations of Manes, the half-Magus, half-Platonist, into the great body of Gnosticism. The real doctrines of the Basilideans, Valentinians, and the Marcionites cannot be correctly ascertained in the prejudiced and calumnious writings of the Fathers of the Church; but rather in what remains of the works of the Bardesanesians, known as the Nazarenes. It is next to impossible, now that all their manuscripts and books are destroyed, to assign to any of these sects its due part in dissenting views. But there are a few men still living who have preserved books and direct traditions about the Ophites, although they care little to impart them to the world. Among the unknown sects of Mount Lebanon and Palestine the truth has been concealed for more than a thousand years. And their diagram of the Ophite scheme differs with the description of it given by Origen and hence with the diagram of Matter.[416]

The kabalistic trinity is one of the models of the Christian one. “The ANCIENT whose name be sanctified, is with three heads, but which make only one.”[417] Tria capita exsculpa sunt, unum intra alterum, et alterum supra alterum. Three heads are inserted in one another, and one over the other. The first head is the Concealed Wisdom (Sapientia Abscondita). Under this head is the ANCIENT (Pythagorean Monad), the most hidden of mysteries; a head which is no head (caput quod non est caput); no one can know what that is in this head. No intellect is able to comprehend this wisdom.[418] This Senior Sanctissimus is surrounded by the three heads. He is the eternal LIGHT of the wisdom; and the wisdom is the source from which all the manifestations have begun. These three heads, included in ONE HEAD (which is no head); and these three are bent down (overshadow) SHORT-FACE (the son) and through them all things shine with light.[419] “En-Soph emits a thread from El or Al (the highest God of the Trinity), and the light follows the thread and enters, and passing through makes its exit through Adam Primus (Kadmon), who is concealed until the plan for arranging (statum dispositionis) is ready; it threads through him from his head to his feet; and in him (in the concealed Adam) is the figure of A MAN.”[420]

“Whoso wishes to have an insight into the sacred unity, let him consider a flame rising from a burning coal or a burning lamp. He will see first a two-fold light--a bright white, and a black or blue light; the white light is above, and ascends in a direct light, while the blue, or dark light, is below, and seems as the chair of the former, yet both are so intimately connected together that they constitute only one flame. The seat, however, formed by the blue or dark light, is again connected with the burning matter which is under it again. The white light never changes its color, it always remains white; but various shades are observed in the lower light, whilst the lowest light, moreover, takes two directions; above, it is connected with the white light, and below with the burning matter. Now, this is constantly consuming itself, and perpetually ascends to the upper light, and thus everything merges into a single unity.”[421]

Such were the ancient ideas of the trinity in the unity, as an abstraction. Man, who is the microcosmos of the macrocosmos, or of the archetypal heavenly man, Adam Kadmon, is likewise a trinity; for he is body, soul, and spirit.

“All that is created by the ‘Ancient of the Ancients’ can live and exist only by a male and a female,” says the Sohar.[422] He alone, to whom no one can say, “Thou,” for he is the spirit of the WHITE-HEAD in whom the “THREE HEADS” are united, is uncreated. Out of the subtile fire, on one side of the White Head, and of the “subtile air,” on the other, emanates Shekinah, his veil (the femininized Holy Ghost). “This air,” says Idra Rabba, “is the most occult (occultissimus) attribute of the Ancient of the Days.[423] The Ancienter of the Ancienter is the Concealed of the Concealed.[424] All things are Himself, and Himself is concealed on every way.[425] The cranium of the WHITE-HEAD has no beginning, but its end has a shining reflection and a roundness which is our universe.”

“They regard,” says Klenker, “the first-born as man and wife, in so far as his light includes in itself all other lights, and in so far as his spirit of life or breath of life includes all other life spirits in itself.”[426] The kabalistic Shekinah answers to the Ophite Sophia. Properly speaking, Adam Kadmon is the Bythos, but in this emanation-system, where everything is calculated to perplex and place an obstacle to inquiry, he is the Source of Light, the first “primitive man,” and at the same time Ennoia, the Thought of Bythos, the Depth, for he is Pimander.

The Gnostics, as well as the Nazarenes, allegorizing on the personification, said that the First and Second man loved the beauty of Sophia, (Sephira) the first woman, and thus the Father and the Son fecundated the heavenly “Woman” and, from primal darkness procreated the visible light (Sephira is the Invisible, or Spiritual Light), “whom they called the ANOINTED CHRISTUM, or King Messiah.”[427] This Christus is the Adam of Dust before his fall, with the spirit of the Adonai, his Father, and Shekinah Adonai, his mother, upon him; for Adam Primus is Adon, Adonai, or Adonis. The primal existence manifests itself by its wisdom, and produces the Intelligible LOGOS (all visible creation). This wisdom was venerated by the Ophites under the form of a serpent. So far we see that the first and second life are the two Adams, or the first and the second man. In the former lies Eva, or the yet unborn spiritual Eve, and she is within Adam Primus, for she is a part of himself, who is androgyne. The Eva of dust, she who will be called in Genesis “the mother of all that live,” is within Adam the Second. And now, from the moment of its first manifestation, the LORD MANO, the Unintelligible Wisdom, disappears from the scene of action. It will manifest itself only as Shekinah, the GRACE; for the CORONA is “the innermost Light of all Lights,” and hence it is darkness’s own substance.[428]

In the Kabala, Shekinah is the ninth emanation of Sephira, which contains the whole of the ten Sephiroth within herself. She belongs to the third triad and is produced together with Malchuth or “Kingdom,” of which she is the female counterpart. Otherwise she is held to be higher than any of these; for she is the “Divine Glory,” the “veil,” or “garment,” of En-Soph. The Jews, whenever she is mentioned in the Targum, say that she is the glory of Jehovah, which dwelt in the tabernacle, manifesting herself like a visible cloud; the “Glory” rested over the Mercy-Seat in the Sanctum Sanctorum.

In the Nazarene or Bardesanian System, which may be termed the Kabala within the Kabala, the Ancient of Days--Antiquus Altus, who is the Father of the Demiurgus of the universe, is called the Third Life, or Abatur; and he is the Father of Fetahil, who is the architect of the visible universe, which he calls into existence by the powers of his genii, at the order of the “Greatest;” the Abatur answering to the “Father” of Jesus in the later Christian theology. These two superior Lives then, are the crown within which dwells the greatest Ferho. “Before any creature came into existence the Lord Ferho existed.”[429] This one is the First Life, formless and invisible; in whom the living Spirit of LIFE exists, the Highest GRACE. The two are ONE from eternity, for they are the Light and the CAUSE of the Light. Therefore, they answer to the kabalistic concealed wisdom, and to the concealed Shekinah--the Holy Ghost. “This light, which is manifested, is the garment of the Heavenly Concealed,” says Idra Suta. And the “heavenly man” is the superior Adam. “No one knows his paths except Macroprosopus” (Long-face)--the Superior active god.[430] “Not as I am written will I be read; in this world my name will be written Jehovah and read Adonai,”[431] say the Rabbins, very correctly. Adonai is the Adam Kadmon; he is FATHER and MOTHER both. By this double mediatorship the Spirit of the “Ancient of the Ancient” descends upon the Microprosopus (Short-face) or the Adam of Eden. And the “Lord God breathes into his nostrils the breath of life.”

When the woman separates herself from her androgyne, and becomes a distinct individuality, the first story is repeated over again. Both the Father and Son, the two Adams, love her beauty; and then follows the allegory of the temptation and fall. It is in the Kabala, as in the Ophite system, in which both the Ophis and the Ophiomorphos are emanations emblematized as serpents, the former representing Eternity, Wisdom, and Spirit (as in the Chaldean Magism of Aspic-worship and Wisdom-Doctrine in the olden times), and the latter Cunning, Envy, and Matter. Both spirit and matter are serpents; and Adam Kadmon becomes the Ophis who tempts himself--man and woman--to taste of the “Tree of Good and Evil,” in order to teach them the mysteries of spiritual wisdom. Light tempts Darkness, and Darkness attracts Light, for Darkness is matter, and “the Highest Light shines not in its Tenebræ.” With knowledge comes the temptation of the Ophiomorphos, and he prevails. The dualism of every existing religion is shown forth by the fall. “I have gotten a man from the Lord,” exclaims Eve, when the Dualism, Cain and Abel--evil and good--is born. “And the Adam knew Hua, his woman (astu), and she became pregnant and bore Kin, and she said: קינתי איש את־יהוה: Kiniti ais Yava.--I have gained or obtained a husband, even Yava--Is, Ais--man.” “Cum arbore peccati Deus creavit seculum.”

And now we will compare this system with that of the Jewish Gnostics--the Nazarenes, as well as with other philosophies.

The ISH AMON, the pleroma, or the boundless circle within which lie “all forms,” is the THOUGHT of the power divine; it works in SILENCE, and suddenly light is begotten by darkness; it is called the SECOND life; and this one produces, or generates the THIRD. This third light is “the FATHER of all things that live,” as EUA is the “mother of all that live.” He is the Creator who calls inert matter into life, through his vivifying spirit, and, therefore, is called the ancient of the world. Abatur is the Father who creates the first Adam, who creates in his turn the second. Abatur opens a gate and walks to the dark water (chaos), and looking down into it, the darkness reflects the image of Himself ... and lo! a SON is formed--the Logos or Demiurge; Fetahil, who is the builder of the material world, is called into existence. According to the Gnostic dogma, this was the Metatron, the Archangel Gabriel, or messenger of life; or, as the biblical allegory has it, the androgynous Adam-Kadmon again, the SON, who, with his Father’s spirit, produces the ANOINTED, or Adam before his fall.

When Swayambhuva, the “Lord who exists through himself,” feels impelled to manifest himself, he is thus described in the Hindu sacred books.

Having been impelled to produce various beings from his own divine substance, he first manifested the waters which developed within themselves a productive seed.

The seed became a germ bright as gold, blazing like the luminary with a thousand beams; and in that egg he was born himself, in the form of BRAHMA, the great principle of all the beings (Manu, book i., slokas 8, 9).

The Egyptian Kneph, or Chnuphis, Divine Wisdom, represented by a serpent, produces an egg from his mouth, from which issues Phtha. In this case Phtha represents the universal germ, as well as Brahmä, who is of the neuter gender, when the final a has a diaresis on it;[432] otherwise it becomes simply one of the names of the Deity. The former was the model of the THREE LIVES of the Nazarenes, as that of the kabalistic “Faces,” PHARAZUPHA, which, in its turn, furnished the model for the Christian Trinity of Irenæus and his followers. The egg was the primitive matter which served as a material for the building of the visible universe; it contained, as well as the Gnostic Pleroma, the kabalistic Shekinah, the man and wife, the spirit and life, “whose light includes all other lights” or life-spirits. This first manifestation was symbolized by a serpent, which is at first divine wisdom, but, falling into generation, becomes polluted. Phtha is the heavenly man, the Egyptian Adam-Kadmon, or Christ, who, in conjunction with the female Holy Ghost, the ZOE, produces the five elements, air, water, fire, earth, and ether; the latter being a servile copy from the Buddhist A’d, and his five Dhyana Buddhas, as we have shown in the preceding chapter. The Hindu Swayambhuva-Nara, develops from himself the mother-principle, enclosed within his own divine essence--Nari, the immortal Virgin, who, when impregnated by his spirit, becomes Taumâtra, the mother of the five elements--air, water, fire, earth, and ether. Thus may be shown how from the Hindu cosmogony all others proceed.

Knorr von Rosenroth, busying himself with the interpretation of the Kabala, argues that, “In this first state (of secret wisdom), the infinite God Himself can be understood as ‘Father’ (of the new covenant). But the Light being let down by the Infinite through a canal into the ‘primal Adam,’ or Messiah, and joined with him, can be applied to the name SON. And the influx emitted down from him (the Son) to the lower parts (of the universe), can be applied to the character of the Holy Ghost.”[433] Sophia-Achamoth, the half-spiritual, half-material LIFE, which vivifies the inert matter in the depths of chaos, is the Holy Ghost of the Gnostics, and the Spiritus (female) of the Nazarenes. She is--be it remembered--the sister of Christos, the perfect emanation, and both are children or emanations of Sophia, the purely spiritual and intellectual daughter of Bythos, the Depth. For the elder Sophia is Shekinah, the Face of God, “God’s Shekinah, which is his image.”[434]

“The Son Zeus-Belus, or Sol-Mithra is an image of the Father, an emanation from the Supreme Light,” says Movers. “He passed for Creator.”[435]

“Philosophers say the first air is anima mundi. But the garment (Shekinah) is higher than the first air, since it is joined closer to the En-Soph, the Boundless.”[436] Thus Sophia is Shekinah, and Sophia-Achamoth the anima mundi, the astral light of the kabalists, which contains the spiritual and material germs of all that is. For the Sophia-Achamoth, like Eve, of whom she is the prototype, is “the mother of all that live.”

There are three trinities in the Nazarene system as well as in the Hindu philosophy of the ante and early Vedic period. While we see the few translators of the Kabala, the Nazarene Codex, and other abstruse works, hopelessly floundering amid the interminable pantheon of names, unable to agree as to a system in which to classify them, for the one hypothesis contradicts and overturns the other, we can but wonder at all this trouble, which could be so easily overcome. But even now, when the translation, and even the perusal of the ancient Sanscrit has become so easy as a point of comparison, they would never think it possible that every philosophy--whether Semitic, Hamitic, or Turanian, as they call it, has its key in the Hindu sacred works. Still facts are there, and facts are not easily destroyed. Thus, while we find the Hindu trimurti triply manifested as

Nara (or Para-Pouroucha), Agni, Brahma, the Father, Nari (Mariama), Vaya, Vishnu, the Mother, Viradj (Brahmä), Surya, Siva, the Son,

and the Egyptian trinity as follows:

Kneph (or Amon), Osiris, Ra (Horus), the Father, Maut (or Mut), Isis, Isis, the Mother, Khons, Horus, Malouli, the Son;[437]

the Nazarene System runs,

Ferho (Ish-Amon), Mano, Abatur, the Father, Chaos (dark water), Spiritus (female), Netubto, the Mother, Fetahil, Ledhaio, Lord Jordan, the Son.

The first is the concealed or non-manifested trinity--a pure abstraction. The other the active or the one revealed in the results of creation, proceeding out of the former--its spiritual prototype. The third is the mutilated image of both the others, crystallized in the form of human dogmas, which vary according to the exuberance of the national materialistic fancy.

The Supreme Lord of splendor and of light, luminous and refulgent, before which no other existed, is called Corona (the crown); Lord Ferho, the unrevealed life which existed in the former from eternity; and Lord Jordan--the spirit, the living water of grace.[438] He is the one through whom alone we can be saved; and thus he answers to the Shekinah, the spiritual garment of En-Soph, or the Holy Ghost. These three constitute the trinity in abscondito. The second trinity is composed of the three lives. The first is the similitude of Lord Ferho, through whom he has proceeded forth; and the second Ferho is the King of Light--MANO (Rex Lucis). He is the heavenly life and light, and older than the Architect of heaven and earth.[439] The second life is Ish Amon (Pleroma), the vase of election, containing the visible thought of the Iordanus Maximus--the type (or its intelligible reflection), the prototype of the living water, who is the “spiritual Jordan.”[440] Third life, which is produced by the other two, is ABATUR (Ab, the Parent or Father). This is the mysterious and decrepit “Aged of the Aged,” the “Ancient Senem sui obtegentem et grandævum mundi.” This latter third Life is the Father of the Demiurge Fetahil, the Creator of the world, whom the Ophites call Ilda-Baoth,[441] though Fetahil is the only-begotten one, the reflection of the Father, Abatur, who begets him by looking into the “dark water;”[442] but the Lord Mano, “the Lord of loftiness, the Lord of all genii,” is higher than the Father, in this kabalistic Codex--one is purely spiritual, the other material. So, for instance, while Abatur’s “only begotten” one is the genius Fetahil, the Creator of the physical world, Lord Mano, the “Lord of Celsitude,” who is the son of Him, who is “the Father of all who preach the Gospel,” produces also an “only-begotten” one, the Lord Lehdaio, “a just Lord.” He is the Christos, the anointed, who pours out the “grace” of the Invisible Jordan, the Spirit of the Highest Crown.

In the Arcanum, “in the assembly of splendor, lighted by MANO, to whom the scintillas of splendor owe their origin,” the genii who live in light “rose, they went to the visible Jordan, and flowing water ... they assembled for a counsel ... and called forth the Only-Begotten Son of an imperishable image, and who cannot be conceived by reflection, Lehdaio, the just Lord, and sprung from Lehdaio, the just lord, whom the life had produced by his word.”[443]

Mano is the chief of the seven Æons, who are Mano (Rex Lucis) Aiar Zivo, Ignis Vivus, Lux, Vita, Aqua Viva (the living water of baptism, the genius of the Jordan), and Ipsa Vita, the chief of the six genii, which form with him the mystic seven. The Nazarene Mano is simply the copy of the Hindu first Manu--the emanation of Manu Swayambhuva--from whom evolve in succession the six other Manus, types of the subsequent races of men. We find them all represented by the apostle-kabalist John in the “seven lamps of fire” burning before the throne, which are the seven spirits of God,[444] and in the seven angels bearing the seven vials. Again in Fetahil we recognize the original of the Christian doctrine.

In the Revelation of Joannes Theologos it is said: “I turned and saw in the midst of the seven candlesticks one like unto the Son of man ... his head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire ... and his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace” (i. 13, 14, 15). John here repeats, as is well known, the words of Daniel and Ezekiel. “The Ancient of Days ... whose hair was white as pure wool ... etc.” And “the appearance of a man ... above the throne ... and the appearance of fire, and it had brightness round about.”[445] The fire being “the glory of the Lord.” Fetahil is son of the man, the Third Life, and his upper part is represented as white as snow, while standing near the throne of the living fire he has the appearance of a flame.

All these “apocalyptic” visions are based on the description of the “white head” of the Sohar, in whom the kabalistic trinity is united. The white head, “which conceals in its cranium the spirit,” and which is environed by subtile fire. The “appearance of a man” is that of Adam Kadmon, through which passes the thread of light represented by the fire. Fetahil is the Vir Novissimis (the newest man), the son of Abatur,[446] the latter being the “man,” or the third life,[447] now the third personage of the trinity. John sees “one like unto the son of man,” holding in his right hand seven stars, and standing between “seven golden candlesticks” (Revelation i.). Fetahil takes his “stand on high,” according to the will of his father, “the highest Æon who has seven sceptres,” and seven genii, who astronomically represent the seven planets or stars. He stands “shining in the garment of the Lord’s, resplendent by the agency of the genii.”[448] He is the Son of his Father, Life, and his mother, Spirit, or Light.[449] The Logos is represented in the Gospel according to John as one in whom was “Life, and the life was the light of men” (i. 4). Fetahil is the Demiurge, and his father created the visible universe of matter through him.[450] In the Epistle of Paul to the Ephesians (iii. 9), God is said to have “created all things by Jesus.” In the Codex the Parent-LIFE says: “Arise, go, our son first-begotten, ordained for all creatures.”[451] “As the living father hath sent me,” says Christ, “God sent his only-begotten son that we might live.”[452] Finally, having performed his work on earth, Fetahil reascends to his father Abatur. “Et qui, relicto quem procreavit mundo, ad Abatur suum patrem contendit.”[453] “My father sent me ... I go to the Father,” repeats Jesus.

Laying aside the theological disputes of Christianity which try to blend together the Jewish Creator of the first chapter of Genesis with the “Father” of the New Testament, Jesus states repeatedly of his Father that “He is in secret.” Surely he would not have so termed the ever-present “Lord God” of the Mosaic books, who showed Himself to Moses and the Patriarchs, and finally allowed all the elders of Israel to look on Himself.[454] When Jesus is made to speak of the temple at Jerusalem as of his “Father’s house,” he does not mean the physical building, which he maintains he can destroy and then again rebuild in three days, but of the temple of Solomon; the wise kabalist, who indicates in his Proverbs that every man is the temple of God, or of his own divine spirit. This term of the “Father who is in secret,” we find used as much in the Kabala as in the Codex Nazaræus, and elsewhere. No one has ever seen the wisdom concealed in the “Cranium,” and no one has beheld the “Depth” (Bythos). Simon, the Magician, preached “one Father unknown to all.”[455]

We can trace this appellation of a “secret” God still farther back. In the Kabala the “Son” of the concealed Father who dwells in light and glory, is the “Anointed,” the Seir-Anpin, who unites in himself all the Sephiroth, he is Christos, or the Heavenly man. It is through Christ that the Pneuma, or the Holy Ghost, creates “all things” (Ephesians iii. 9), and produces the four elements, air, water, fire, and earth. This assertion is unquestionable, for we find Irenæus basing on this fact his best argument for the necessity of there being four gospels. There can be neither more nor fewer than four--he argues. “For as there are four quarters of the world, and four general winds (καθολικὰ πνεύματα) ... it is right that she (the Church) should have four pillars. From which it is manifest that the Word, the maker of all, he who sitteth upon the Cherubim ... as David says, supplicating his advent, ‘Thou that sittest between the Cherubim, shine forth!’ For the Cherubim also are four-faced and their faces are symbols of the working of the Son of God.”[456]

We will not stop to discuss at length the special holiness of the four-faced Cherubim, although we might, perhaps, show their origin in all the ancient pagodas of India, in the vehans (or vehicles) of their chief gods; as likewise we might easily attribute the respect paid to them to the kabalistic wisdom, which, nevertheless, the Church rejects with great horror. But, we cannot resist the temptation to remind the reader that he may easily ascertain the several significances attributed to these Cherubs by reading the Kabala. “When the souls are to leave their abode,” says the Sohar, holding to the doctrine of the pre-existence of souls in the world of emanations, “each soul separately appears before the Holy King, dressed in a sublime form, with the features in which it is to appear in this world. It is from this sublime form that the image proceeds” (Sohar, iii., p. 104 ab). Then it goes on to say that the types or forms of these faces are four in number--those of the angel or man, of the lion, the bull, and the eagle. Furthermore, we may well express our wonder that Irenæus should not have re-enforced his argument for the four gospels--by citing the whole Pantheon of the four-armed Hindu gods?

Ezekiel in representing his four animals, now called Cherubim, as types of the four symbolical beings, which, in his visions support the throne of Jehovah, had not far to go for his models. The Chaldeo-Babylonian protecting genii were familiar to him; the Sed, Alap or Kirub (Cherubim), the bull, with the human face; the Nirgal, human-headed lion; Oustour the Sphinx-man; and the Nathga, with its eagle’s head. The religion of the masters--the idolatrous Babylonians and Assyrians--was transferred almost bodily into the revealed Scripture of the Captives, and from thence came into Christianity.

Already, we find Ezekiel addressed by the likeness of the glory of the Lord, “as Son of man.” This peculiar title is used repeatedly throughout the whole book of this prophet, which is as kabalistic as the “roll of a book” which the “Glory” causes him to eat. It is written within and without; and its real meaning is identical with that of the Apocalypse. It appears strange that so much stress should be laid on this peculiar appellation, said to have been applied by Jesus to himself, when, in the symbolical or kabalistic language, a prophet is so addressed. It is as extraordinary to see Irenæus indulging in such graphic descriptions of Jesus as to show him, “the maker of all, sitting upon a Cherubim,” unless he identifies him with Shekinah, whose usual place was among the Charoubs of the Mercy Seat. We also know that the Cherubim and Seraphim are titles of the “Old Serpent” (the orthodox Devil) the Seraphs being the burning or fiery serpents, in kabalistic symbolism. The ten emanations of Adam Kadmon, called the Sephiroth, have all emblems and titles corresponding to each. So, for instance, the last two are Victory, or Jehovah-Sabaoth, whose symbol is the right column of Solomon, the Pillar Jachin; while GLORY is the left Pillar, or Boaz, and its name is “the Old Serpent,” and also “Seraphim and Cherubim.”[457]

The “Son of man” is an appellation which could not be assumed by any one but a kabalist. Except, as shown above, in the Old Testament, it is used but by one prophet--Ezekiel, the kabalist. In their mysterious and mutual relations, the Æons or Sephiroth are represented in the Kabala by a great number of circles, and sometimes by the figure of a MAN, which is symbolically formed out of such circles. This man is Seir-Anpin, and the 243 numbers of which his figure consists relate to the different orders of the celestial hierarchy. The original idea of this figure, or rather the model, may have been taken from the Hindu Brahma, and the various castes typified by the several parts of his body, as King suggests in his Gnostics. In one of the grandest and most beautiful cave-temples at Ellora, Nasak, dedicated to Vishvakarma, son of Brahma, is a representation of this God and his attributes. To one acquainted with Ezekiel’s description of the “likeness of four living creatures,” every one of which had four faces and the hands of a man under its wings, etc.,[458] this figure at Ellora must certainly appear absolutely biblical. Brahma is called the father of “man,” as well as Jupiter and other highest gods.

It is in the Buddhistic representations of Mount Meru, called by the Burmese Myé-nmo, and by the Siamese Sineru, that we find one of the originals of the Adam Kadmon, Seir-Anpin, the “heavenly man,” and of all the Æons, Sephiroth, Powers, Dominions, Thrones, Virtues, and Dignities of the Kabala. Between two pillars, which are connected by an arch, the key-stone of the latter is represented by a crescent. This is the domain in which dwells the Supreme Wisdom of A’di Buddha, the Supreme and invisible Deity. Beneath this highest central point comes the circle of the direct emanation of the Unknown--the circle of Brahma with some Hindus, of the first avatar of Buddha, according to others. This answers to Adam Kadmon and the ten Sephiroth. Nine of the emanations are encircled by the tenth, and occasionally represented by pagodas, each of which bears a name which expresses one of the chief attributes of the manifested Deity. Then below come the seven stages, or heavenly spheres, each sphere being encircled by a sea. These are the celestial mansions of the devatas, or gods, each losing somewhat in holiness and purity as it approaches the earth. Then comes Meru itself, formed of numberless circles within three large ones, typifying the trinity of man; and for one acquainted with the numerical value of the letters in biblical names, like that of the “Great Beast,” or that of Mithra μειθρας αβραξας, and others, it is an easy matter to establish the identity of the Meru-gods with the emanations or Sephiroth of the kabalists. Also the genii of the Nazarenes, with their special missions, are all found on this most ancient mythos, a most perfect representation of the symbolism of the “secret doctrine,” as taught in archaic ages.

King gives a few hints--though doubtless too insufficient to teach anything important, for they are based upon the calculations of Bishop Newton[459]--as to this mode of finding out mysteries in the value of letters. However, we find this great archæologist, who has devoted so much time and labor to the study of Gnostic gems, corroborating our assertion. He shows that the entire theory is Hindu, and points out that the durga, or female counterpart of each Asiatic god, is what the kabalists term active Virtue[460] in the celestial hierarchy, a term which the Christian Fathers adopted and repeated, without fully appreciating, and the meaning of which the later theology has utterly disfigured. But to return to Meru.

The whole is surrounded by the Maha Samut, or the great sea--the astral light and ether of the kabalists and scientists; and within the central circles appears “the likeness of a man.” He is the Achadoth of the Nazarenes, the twofold unity, or the androgyne man; the heavenly incarnation, and a perfect representation of Seir-Anpin (short-face), the son of Arich Anpin (long-face).[461] This likeness is now represented in many lamaseries by Gautama-Buddha, the last of the incarnated avatars. Still lower, under the Meru, is the dwelling of the great Naga, who is called Rajah Naga, the king-serpent--the serpent of Genesis, the Gnostic Ophis--and the goddess of the earth, Bhumây Nari, or Yâma, who waits upon the great dragon, for she is Eve, “the mother of all that live.” Still lower is the eighth sphere, the infernal regions. The uppermost regions of Brahma are surrounded by the sun, moon, and planets, the seven stellars of the Nazarenes, and just as they are described in the Codex.

“The seven impostor-Dæmons who deceive the sons of Adam. The name of one is Sol; of another Spiritus Venereus, Astro; of the third Nebu, Mercurius a false Messiah; ... the name of a fourth is Sin Luna; the fifth is Kiun, Saturnus; the sixth, Bel-Zeus; the seventh, Nerig-Mars.”[462] Then there are “Seven Lives procreated,” seven good Stellars, “which are from Cabar Zio, and are those bright ones who shine in their own form and splendor that pours from on high.... At the gate of the HOUSE OF LIFE the throne is fitly placed for the Lord of Splendor, and there are THREE habitations.”[463] The habitations of the Trimurti, the Hindu trinity, are placed beneath the key-stone--the golden crescent, in the representation of Meru. “And there was under his feet (of the God of Israel) as it were a paved work of a sapphire-stone” (Exodus xxiv. 10). Under the crescent is the heaven of Brahma, all paved with sapphires. The paradise of Indra is resplendent with a thousand suns; that of Siva (Saturn), is in the northeast; his throne is formed of lapis-lazuli and the floor of heaven is of fervid gold. “When he sits on the throne he blazes with fire up to the loins.” At Hurdwar, during the fair, in which he is more than ever Mahadeva, the highest god, the attributes and emblems sacred to the Jewish “Lord God,” may be recognized one by one in those of Siva. The Binlang stone,[464] sacred to this Hindu deity, is an unhewn stone like the Beth-el, consecrated by the Patriarch Jacob, and set up by him “for a pillar,” and like the latter Binlang is anointed. We need hardly remind the student that the linga, the emblem sacred to Siva and whose temples are modelled after this form, is identical in shape, meaning, and purpose with the “pillars” set up by the several patriarchs to mark their adoration of the Lord God. In fact, one of these patriarchal lithoï might even now be carried in the Sivaitic processions of Calcutta, without its Hebrew derivation being suspected. The four arms of Siva are often represented with appendages like wings; he has three eyes and a fourth in the crescent, obtained by him at the churning of the ocean, as Pâncha Mukhti Siva has four heads.

In this god we recognize the description given by Ezekiel, in the first chapter of his book, of his vision, in which he beholds the “likeness of a man” in the four living creatures, who had “four faces, four wings,” who had one pair of “straight feet ... which sparkled like the color of burnished brass ... and their rings were full of eyes round about them four.” It is the throne and heaven of Siva that the prophet describes in saying “... and there was the likeness of a throne as the appearance of a sapphire stone ... and I saw as the color of amber (gold) as the appearance of fire around about ... from his loins even upward, and from the appearance of his loins even downward, I saw as it were the appearance of fire” (Ezekiel i. 27). “And his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace” (Revelation i. 15). “As for their faces ... one had the face of a cherub, and the face of a lion ... they also had the face of an ox and the face of an eagle” (Ezekiel i. 10, x. 14). This fourfold appearance which we find in the two cherubims of gold on the two ends of the ark; these symbolic four faces being adopted, moreover, later, one by each evangelist, as may be easily ascertained from the pictures of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,[465] prefixed to their respective gospels in the Roman Vulgate and Greek Bibles.

“Taaut, the great god of the Phœnicians,” says Sanchoniathon, “to express the character of Saturn or Kronos, made his image having four eyes ... two before, two behind, open and closed, and four wings, two expanded, two folded. The eyes denote that the god sees in sleep, and sleeps in waking; the position of the wings that he flies in rest, and rests in flying.”

The identity of Saturn with Siva is corroborated still more when we consider the emblem of the latter, the damara, which is an hour-glass, to show the progress of time, represented by this god in his capacity of a destroyer. The bull Nardi, the vehan of Siva and the most sacred emblem of this god, is reproduced in the Egyptian Apis; and in the bull created by Ormazd and killed by Ahriman. The religion of Zoroaster, all based upon the “secret doctrine,” is found held by the people of Eritene; it was the religion of the Persians when they conquered the Assyrians. From thence it is easy to trace the introduction of this emblem of LIFE represented by the Bull, in every religious system. The college of the Magians had accepted it with the change of dynasty;[466] Daniel is described as a Rabbi, the chief of the Babylonian astrologers and Magi;[467] therefore we see the Assyrian little bulls and the attributes of Siva reappearing under a hardly modified form in the cherubs of the Talmudistic Jews, as we have traced the bull Apis in the sphinxes or cherubs of the Mosaic Ark; and as we find it several thousand years later in the company of one of the Christian evangelists, Luke.

Whoever has lived in India long enough to acquaint himself even superficially with the native deities, must detect the similarity between Jehovah and other gods besides Siva. As Saturn, the latter was always held in great respect by the Talmudists. He was held in reverence by the Alexandrian kabalists as the direct inspirer of the law and the prophets; one of the names of Saturn was Israel, and we will show, in time, his identity in a certain way with Abram, which Movers and others hinted at long since. Thus it cannot be wondered at if Valentinus, Basilides, and the Ophite Gnostics placed the dwelling of their Ilda-Baoth, also a destroyer as well as a creator, in the planet Saturn; for it was he who gave the law in the wilderness and spoke through the prophets. If more proof should be required we will show it in the testimony of the canonical Bible itself. In Amos the “Lord” pours vials of wrath upon the people of Israel. He rejects their burnt-offerings and will not listen to their prayers, but inquires of Amos, “have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel?” “But ye have borne the tabernacles of your Moloch and Chiun your images, the star of your god” (v. 25, 26). Who are Moloch and Chiun but Baal--Saturn--Siva, and Chiun, Kivan, the same Saturn whose star the Israelites had made to themselves? There seems no escape in this case; all these deities are identical.

The same in the case of the numerous Logoï. While the Zoroastrian Sosiosh is framed on that of the tenth Brahmanical Avatar, and the fifth Buddha of the followers of Gautama; and we find the former, after having passed part and parcel into the kabalistic system of king Messiah, reflected in the Apostle Gabriel of the Nazarenes, and Æbel-Zivo, the Legatus, sent on earth by the Lord of Celsitude and Light; all of these--Hindu and Persian, Buddhist and Jewish, the Christos of the Gnostics and the Philonean Logos--are found combined in “the Word made flesh” of the fourth Gospel. Christianity includes all these systems, patched and arranged to meet the occasion. Do we take up the Avesta--we find there the dual system so prevalent in the Christian scheme. The struggle between Ahriman,[468] Darkness, and Ormazd, Light, has been going on in the world continually since the beginning of time. When the worst arrives and Ahriman will seem to have conquered the world and corrupted all mankind, then will appear the Saviour of mankind, Sosiosh. He will come seated upon a white horse and followed by an army of good genii equally mounted on milk-white steeds.[469] And this we find faithfully copied in the Revelation: “I saw heaven opened, and beheld a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called faithful and true.... And the armies which were in heaven followed him upon white horses” (Revelation xix. 11, 14). Sosiosh himself is but a later Persian permutation of the Hindu Vishnu. The figure of this god may be found unto this day representing him as the Saviour, the “Preserver” (the preserving spirit of God), in the temple of Rama. The picture shows him in his tenth incarnation--the Kalki avatar, which is yet to come--as an armed warrior mounted upon a white horse. Waving over his head the sword destruction, he holds in his other hand a discus, made up of rings encircled in one another, an emblem of the revolving cycles or great ages,[470] for Vishnu will thus appear but at the end of the Kaliyug, answering to the end of the world expected by our Adventists. “And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword ... on his head were many crowns” (Revelation xix. 12). Vishnu is often represented with several crowns superposed on his head. “And I saw an angel standing on the Sun” (17). The white horse is the horse of the Sun.[471] Sosiosh, the Persian Saviour, is also born of a virgin,[472] and at the end of days he will come as a Redeemer to regenerate the world, but he will be preceded by two prophets, who will come to announce him.[473] Hence the Jews who had Moses and Elias, are now waiting for the Messiah. “Then comes the general resurrection, when the good will immediately enter into this happy abode--the regenerated earth; and Ahriman and his angels (the devils),[474] and the wicked, be purified by immersion in a lake of molten metal.... Henceforward, all will enjoy unchangeable happiness, and, headed by Sosiosh, ever sing the praises of the Eternal One.”[475] The above is a perfect repetition of Vishnu in his tenth avatar, for he will then throw the wicked into the infernal abodes in which, after purifying themselves, they will be pardoned--even those devils which rebelled against Brahma, and were hurled into the bottomless pit by Siva,[476] as also the “blessed ones” will go to dwell with the gods, over the Mount Meru.

Having thus traced the similarity of views respecting the Logos, Metatron, and Mediator, as found in the Kabala and the Codex of the Christian Nazarenes and Gnostics, the reader is prepared to appreciate the audacity of the Patristic scheme to reduce a purely metaphysical figure into concrete form, and make it appear as if the finger of prophecy had from time immemorial been pointing down the vista of ages to Jesus as the coming Messiah. A theomythos intended to symbolize the coming day, near the close of the great cycle, when the “glad tidings” from heaven should proclaim the universal brotherhood and common faith of humanity, the day of regeneration--was violently distorted into an accomplished fact.

“Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is God,” says Jesus. Is this the language of a God? of the second person in the Trinity, who is identical with the First? And if this Messiah, or Holy Ghost of the Gnostic and Pagan Trinities, had come in his person, what did he mean by distinguishing between himself the “Son of man,” and the Holy Ghost? “And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but unto him that blasphemeth against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven,” he says.[477] And how account for the marvellous identity of this very language, with the precepts enunciated, centuries before, by the Kabalists and the “Pagan” initiates? The following are a few instances out of many.

“No one of the gods, no man or Lord, can be good, but only God alone,” says Hermes.[478]

“To be a good man is impossible, God alone possesses this privilege,” repeats Plato, with a slight variation.[479]

Six centuries before Christ, the Chinese philosopher Confucius said that his doctrine was simple and easy to comprehend (Lûn-yù, chap. 5, § 15). To which one of his disciples added: “The doctrine of our Master consists in having an invariable correctness of heart, and in doing toward others as we would that they should do to us.”[480]

“Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles,”[481] exclaims Peter, long after the scene of Calvary. “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John,”[482] says the fourth Gospel, thus placing the Baptist on an equality with Jesus. John the Baptist, in one of the most solemn acts of his life, that of baptizing Christ, thinks not that he is going to baptize a God, but uses the word man. “This is he of whom I said, after me cometh a man.”[483] Speaking of himself, Jesus says, “You seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth, which I have heard of God.”[484] Even the blind man of Jerusalem, healed by the great thaumaturgist, full of gratitude and admiration for his benefactor, in narrating the miracle does not call Jesus God, but simply says, “... a man that is called Jesus, made clay.”[485]

We do not close the list for lack of other instances and proofs, but simply because what we now say has been repeated and demonstrated by others, many times before us. But there is no more incurable evil than blind and unreasoning fanaticism. Few are the men who, like Dr. Priestley, have the courage to write, “We find nothing like divinity ascribed to Christ before Justin Martyr (A.D. 141), who, from being a philosopher, became a Christian.”[486]

Mahomet appeared nearly six hundred years[487] after the presumed deicide. The Græco-Roman world was still convulsed with religious dissensions, withstanding all the past imperial edicts and forcible Christianization. While the Council of Trent was disputing about the Vulgate, the unity of God quietly superseded the trinity, and soon the Mahometans outnumbered the Christians. Why? Because their prophet never sought to identify himself with Allah. Otherwise, it is safe to say, he would not have lived to see his religion flourish. Till the present day Mahometanism has made and is now making more proselytes than Christianity. Buddha Siddhârtha came as a simple mortal, centuries before Christ. The religious ethics of this faith are now found to far exceed in moral beauty anything ever dreamed of by the Tertullians and Augustines.

The true spirit of Christianity can alone be fully found in Buddhism; partially, it shows itself in other “heathen” religions. Buddha never made of himself a god, nor was he deified by his followers. The Buddhists are now known to far outnumber Christians; they are enumerated at nearly 500,000,000. While cases of conversion among Buddhists, Brahmanists, Mahometans, and Jews become so rare as to show how sterile are the attempts of our missionaries, atheism and materialism spread their gangrenous ulcers and gnaw every day deeper at the very heart of Christianity. There are no atheists among heathen populations, and those few among the Buddhists and Brahmans who have become infected with materialism may always be found to belong to large cities densely thronged with Europeans, and only among educated classes. Truly says Bishop Kidder: “Were a wise man to choose his religion from those who profess it, perhaps Christianity would be the last religion he would choose!”

In an able little pamphlet from the pen of the popular lecturer, J. M. Peebles, M.D., the author quotes, from the London Athenæum, an article in which are described the welfare and civilization of the inhabitants of Yarkand and Kashgar, “who seem virtuous and happy.” “Gracious Heavens!” fervently exclaims the honest author, who himself was once a Universalist clergyman, “Grant to keep Christian missionaries away from ‘happy’ and heathen Tartary!”[488]

From the earliest days of Christianity, when Paul upbraided the Church of Corinth for a crime “as is not so much as named among the Gentiles--that one should have his father’s wife;” and for their making a pretext of the “Lord’s Supper” for debauch and drunkenness (1 Corinthians, v. 1), the profession of the name of Christ has ever been more a pretext than the evidence of holy feeling. However, a correct form of this verse is: “Everywhere the lewd practice among you is heard about, such a lewd practice as is nowhere among the heathen nations--even the having or marrying of the father’s wife.” The Persian influence would seem to be indicated in this language. The practice existed “nowhere among the nations,” except in Persia, where it was esteemed especially meritorious. Hence, too, the Jewish stories of Abraham marrying his sister, Nahor, his niece, Amram his father’s sister, and Judah his son’s widow, whose children appear to have been legitimate. The Aryan tribes esteemed endogamic marriages, while the Tartars and all barbarous nations required all alliances to be exagamous.

There was but one apostle of Jesus worthy of that name, and that was Paul. However disfigured were his Epistles by dogmatic hands before being admitted into the Canon, his conception of the great and divine figure of the philosopher who died for his idea can still be traced in his addresses to the various Gentile nations. Only, he who would understand him better yet must study the Philonean Logos reflecting now and then the Hindu Sabda (logos) of the Mimansa school.

As to the other apostles, those whose names are prefixed to the Gospels--we cannot well believe in their veracity when we find them attributing to their Master miracles surrounded by circumstances, recorded, if not in the oldest books of India, at least in such as antedated Christianity, and in the very phraseology of the traditions. Who, in his days of simple and blind credulity, but marvelled at the touching narrative given in the Gospels according to Mark and Luke of the resurrection of the daughter of Jairus? Who has ever doubted its originality? And yet the story is copied entirely from the Hari-Purana, and is recorded among the miracles attributed to Christna. We translate it from the French version:

“The King Angashuna caused the betrothal of his daughter, the beautiful Kalavatti, with the young son of Vamadeva, the powerful King of Antarvédi, named Govinda, to be celebrated with great pomp.

“But as Kalavatti was amusing herself in the groves with her companions, she was stung by a serpent and died. Angashuna tore his clothes, covered himself with ashes, and cursed the day when he was born.

“Suddenly, a great rumor spread through the palace, and the following cries were heard, a thousand times repeated: ‘Pacya pitaram; pacya gurum!’ ‘The Father, the Master!’ Then Christna approached, smiling, leaning on the arm of Ardjuna.... ‘Master!’ cried Angashuna, casting himself at his feet, and sprinkling them with his tears, ‘See my poor daughter!’ and he showed him the body of Kalavatti, stretched upon a mat....

“‘Why do you weep?’ replied Christna, in a gentle voice. ‘Do you not see that she is sleeping? Listen to the sound of her breathing, like the sigh of the night wind which rustles the leaves of the trees. See, her cheeks resuming their color, her eyes, whose lids tremble as if they were about to open; her lips quiver as if about to speak; she is sleeping, I tell you; and hold! see, she moves, Kalavatti! Rise and walk!’

“Hardly had Christna spoken, when the breathing, warmth, movement, and life returned little by little, into the corpse, and the young girl, obeying the injunction of the demi-god, rose from her couch and rejoined her companions. But the crowd marvelled and cried out: ‘This is a god, since death is no more for him than sleep?’”[489]

All such parables are enforced upon Christians, with the addition of dogmas which, in their extraordinary character, leave far behind them the wildest conceptions of heathenism. The Christians, in order to believe in a Deity, have found it necessary to kill their God, that they themselves should live!

And now, the Supreme, unknown one, the Father of grace and mercy, and his celestial hierarchy are managed by the Church as though they were so many theatrical stars and supernumeraries under salary! Six centuries before the Christian era, Xenophones had disposed of such anthropomorphism by an immortal satire, recorded and preserved by Clement of Alexandria:

“There is one God Supreme ... Whose form is not like unto man’s, and as unlike his nature; But vain mortals imagine that gods like themselves are begotten With human sensations, and voice, and corporeal members; So if oxen or lions had hands and could work in man’s fashion, And trace out with chisel or brush their conception of Godhead Then would horses depict gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, Each kind the Divine with its own form and nature endowing.”[490]

And hear Vyasa--the poet-pantheist of India, who, for all the scientists can prove, may have lived, as Jacolliot has it, some fifteen thousand years ago--discoursing on Maya, the illusion of the senses:

“All religious dogmas only serve to obscure the intelligence of man.... Worship of divinities, under the allegories of which is hidden respect for natural laws, drives away truth to the profit of the basest superstitions” (Vyasa Maya).

It was given to Christianity to paint us God Almighty after the model of the kabalistic abstraction of the “Ancient of Days.” From old frescos on cathedral ceilings; Catholic missals, and other icons and images, we now find him depicted by the poetic brush of Gustave Doré. The awful, unknown majesty of Him, whom no “heathen” dared to reproduce in concrete form, is figuring in our own century in Doré’s Illustrated Bible. Treading upon clouds that float in mid-air, darkness and chaos behind him and the world beneath his feet, a majestic old man stands, his left hand gathering his flowing robes about him, and his right raised in the gesture of command. He has spoken the Word, and from his towering person streams an effulgence of Light--the Shekinah. As a poetic conception, the composition does honor to the artist, but does it honor God? Better, the chaos behind Him, than the figure itself; for there, at least, we have a solemn mystery. For our part, we prefer the silence of the ancient heathens. With such a gross, anthropomorphic, and, as we conceive, blasphemous representation of the First Cause, who can feel surprised at any iconographic extravagance in the representation of the Christian Christ, the apostles, and the putative Saints? With the Catholics St. Peter becomes quite naturally the janitor of Heaven, and sits at the door of the celestial kingdom--a ticket-taker to the Trinity!

In a religious disturbance which recently occurred in one of the Spanish-American provinces, there were found upon the bodies of some of the killed, passports signed by the Bishop of the Diocese and addressed to St. Peter; bidding him “admit the bearer as a true son of the Church.” It was subsequently ascertained that these unique documents were issued by the Catholic prelate just before his deluded parishioners went into the fight at the instigation of their priests.

In their immoderate desire to find evidence for the authenticity of the New Testament, the best men, the most erudite scholars even among Protestant divines, but too often fall into deplorable traps. We cannot believe that such a learned commentator as Canon Westcott could have left himself in ignorance as to Talmudistic and purely kabalistic writings. How then is it that we find him quoting, with such serene assurance as presenting “striking analogies to the Gospel of St. John,” passages from the work of The Pastor of Hermas, which are complete sentences from the kabalistic literature? “The view which Hermas gives of Christ’s nature and work is no less harmonious with apostolic doctrine, and it offers striking analogies to the Gospel of St. John.... He (Jesus) is a rock higher than the mountains, able to hold the whole world, ancient, and yet having a new gate!... He is older than creation, so that he took counsel with the Father about the creation which he made.... No one shall enter in unto him otherwise than by his Son.”[491]

Now while--as the author of Supernatural Religion well proves--there is nothing in this which looks like a corroboration of the doctrine taught in the fourth gospel, he omits to state that nearly everything expressed by the pseudo-Hermas in relation to his parabolic conversation with the “Lord” is a plain quotation, with repeated variations, from the Sohar and other kabalistic books. We may as well compare, so as to leave the reader in no difficulty to judge for himself.

“God,” says Hermas, “planted the vineyard, that is, He created the people and gave them to His Son; and the Son ... himself cleansed their sins, etc.;” i.e., the Son washed them in his blood, in commemoration of which Christians drink wine at the communion. In the Kabala it is shown that the Aged of the Aged, or “Long-Face,” plants a vineyard, the latter typifying mankind; and a vine, meaning Life. The Spirit of “King Messiah” is, therefore, shown as washing his garments in the wine from above, from the creation of the world.[492] Adam, or A-Dam is “blood.” The life of the flesh is in the blood (nephesh--soul), Leviticus xvii. And Adam-Kadmon is the Only-Begotten. Noah also plants a vineyard--the allegorical hot-bed of future humanity. As a consequence of the adoption of the same allegory, we find it reproduced in the Nazarene Codex. Seven vines are procreated, which spring from Iukabar Ziva, and Ferho (or Parcha) Raba waters them.[493] When the blessed will ascend among the creatures of Light, they shall see Iavar-Zivo, Lord of LIFE, and the First VINE![494] These kabalistic metaphora are thus naturally repeated in the Gospel according to John (xv. 1): “I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman.” In Genesis (xlix.), the dying Jacob is made to say, “The sceptre shall not depart from Judah (the lion’s whelp), nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh (Siloh) comes.... Binding his colt unto the vine, and his ass’s colt unto the choice vine, he washed his garments in wine, and his clothes in the blood of grapes.” Shiloh is “King Messiah,” as well as the Shiloh in Ephraim, which was to be made the capital and the place of the sanctuary. In The Targum of Onkelos, the Babylonian, the words of Jacob read: “Until the King Messiah shall come.” The prophecy has failed in the Christian as well as in the kabalistico-Jewish sense. The sceptre has departed from Judah, whether the Messiah has already or will come, unless we believe, with the kabalists, that Moses was the first Messiah, who transferred his soul to Joshua--Jesus.[495]

Says Hermas: “And, in the middle of the plain, he showed me a great white rock, which had risen out of the plain, and the rock was higher than the mountains, rectangular, so as to be able to hold the whole world; but that rock was old, having a gate hewn out of it, and the hewing out of the gate seemed to me to be recent.” In the Sohar, we find: “To 40,000 superior worlds the white of the skull of His Head (of the most Sacred Ancient in absconditus) is extended.[496]... When Seir (the first reflection and image of his Father, the Ancient of the Ancient) will, through the mystery of the seventy names of Metatron, descend into Iezirah (the third world), he will open a new gate.... The Spiritus Decisorius will cut and divide the garment (Shekinah) into two parts.[497]... At the coming of King Messiah, from the sacred cubical stone of the Temple a white light will be arising during forty days. This will expand, until it encloses the whole world.... At that time King Messiah will allow himself to be revealed, and will be seen coming out of the gate of the garden of Odan (Eden). ‘He will be revealed in the land Galil.’[498]... When ‘he has made satisfaction for the sins of Israel, he will lead them on through a new gate to the seat of judgment.’[499] At the Gate of the House of Life, the throne is prepared for the Lord of Splendor.”[500]

Further on, the commentator introduces the following quotation: “This rock and this gate are the Son of God. ‘How, Lord,’ I said, ‘is the rock old and the gate new?’ ‘Listen,’ He said, ‘and understand, thou ignorant man. The Son of God is older than all of his creation, so that he was a Councillor with the Father in His works of creation; and for this is he old.’”[501]

Now, these two assertions are not only purely kabalistic, without even so much as a change of expression, but Brahmanical and Pagan likewise. “Vidi virum excellentem cœli terræque conditore natu majorem.... I have seen the most excellent (superior) MAN, who is older by birth than the maker of heaven and earth,” says the kabalistic Codex.[502] The Eleusinian Dionysus, whose particular name was Iacchos (Iaccho, Iahoh)[503]--the God from whom the liberation of souls was expected--was considered older than the Demiurge. At the mysteries of the Anthesteria at the lakes (the Limnæ), after the usual baptism by purification of water, the Mystæ were made to pass through to another door (gate), and one particularly for that purpose, which was called “the gate of Dionysus,” and that of “the purified.”

In the Sohar, the kabalists are told that the work-master, the Demiurge, said to the Lord: “Let us make man after our image.”[504] In the original texts of the first chapter of Genesis, it stands: “And the Elohim (translated as the Supreme God), who are the highest gods or powers, said: Let us make man in our (?) image, after our likeness.” In the Vedas, Brahma holds counsel with Parabrahma, as to the best mode to proceed to create the world.

Canon Westcott, quoting Hermas, shows him asking: “And why is the gate new, Lord? I said. ‘Because,’ he replied, ‘he was manifested at the last of the days of the dispensation; for this cause the gate was made new, in order that they who shall be saved might enter by it into the Kingdom of God.’”[505] There are two peculiarities worthy of note in this passage. To begin with, it attributes to “the Lord” a false statement of the same character as that so emphasized by the Apostle John; and which brought, at a later period, the whole of the orthodox Christians, who accepted the apostolic allegories as literal, to such inconvenient straits. Jesus, as Messiah, was not manifested at the last of the days; for the latter are yet to come, notwithstanding a number of divinely-inspired prophecies, followed by disappointed hopes, as a result, to testify to his immediate coming. The belief that the “last times” had come, was natural, when once the coming of King Messiah had been acknowledged. The second peculiarity is found in the fact that the prophecy could have been accepted at all, when even its approximate determination is a direct contradiction of Mark, who makes Jesus distinctly state that neither the angels, nor the Son himself, know of that day or that hour.[506] We might add that, as the belief undeniably originated with the Apocalypse, it ought to be a self-evident proof that it belonged to the calculations peculiar to the kabalists and the Pagan sanctuaries. It was the secret computation of a cycle, which, according to their reckoning, was ending toward the latter part of the first century. It may also be held as a corroborative proof, that the Gospel according to Mark, as well as that ascribed to John, and the Apocalypse, were written by men, of whom neither was sufficiently acquainted with the other. The Logos was first definitely called petra (rock) by Philo; the word, moreover, as we have shown elsewhere, means, in Chaldaic and Phœnician, “interpreter.” Justin Martyr calls him, throughout his works, “angel,” and makes a clear distinction between the Logos and God the Creator. “The Word of God is His Son ... and he is also called Angel and Apostle, for he declares whatever we ought to know (interprets), and is sent to declare whatever is disclosed.”[507]

“Adan Inferior is distributed into its own paths, into thirty-two sides of paths, yet it is not known to any one but Seir. But no one knows the SUPERIOR ADAN nor His paths, except that Long Face”--the Supreme God.[508] Seir is the Nazarene “genius,” who is called Æbel Zivo; and Gabriel Legatus--also “Apostle Gabriel.”[509] The Nazarenes held with the kabalists that even the Messiah who was to come did not know the “Superior Adan,” the concealed Deity; no one except the Supreme God; thus showing that above the Supreme Intelligible Deity, there is one still more secret and unrevealed. Seir-Anpin is the third God, while “Logos,” according to Philo Judæus, is the second one.[510] This is distinctly shown in the Codex. The false Messiah shall say: “I am Deus, son of Deus; my Father sent me here.... I am the first Legate, I am Æbel Zivo, I am come from on high! But distrust him; for he will not be Æbel Zivo. Æbel Zivo will not permit himself to be seen in this age.”[511] Hence the belief of some Gnostics that it was not Æbel Zivo (Archangel Gabriel) who “overshadowed” Mary, but Ilda-Baoth, who formed the material body of Jesus; Christos uniting himself with him only at the moment of baptism in the Jordan.

Can we doubt Nork’s assertion that “the Bereshith Rabba, the oldest part of the Midrash Rabboth, was known to the Church Fathers in a Greek translation?”[512]

But if, on the one hand, they were sufficiently acquainted with the different religious systems of their neighbors to have enabled them to build a new religion alleged to be distinct from all others, their ignorance of the Old Testament itself, let alone the more complicated questions of Grecian metaphysics, is now found to have been deplorable. “So, for instance, in Matthew xxvii. 9 f., the passage from Zechariah xi. 12, 13, is attributed to Jeremiah,” says the author of Supernatural Religion. “In Mark i. 2, a quotation from Malachi iii. 1, is ascribed to Isaiah. In 1 Corinthians, ii. 9, a passage is quoted as Holy Scripture, which is not found in the Old Testament at all, but which is taken, as Origen and Jerome state, from an apocryphal work, The Revelation of Elias (Origen: Tract. xxxv.), and the passage is similarly quoted by the so-called Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians (xxxiv.)”. How reliable are the pious Fathers in their explanations of divers heresies may be illustrated in the case of Epiphanius, who mistook the Pythagorean sacred Tetrad, called in the Valentinian Gnosis, Kol-Arbas, for a heretic leader.[513] What with the involuntary blunders, and deliberate falsifications of the teachings of those who differed in views with them; the canonization of the mythological Aura Placida (gentle breeze), into a pair of Christian martyrs--St. Aura and St. Placida;[514] the deification of a spear and a cloak, under the names of SS. Longimus and Amphibolus;[515] and the Patristic quotations from prophets, of what was never in those prophets at all; one may well ask in blank amazement whether the so-called religion of Christ has ever been other than an incoherent dream, since the death of the Great Master.

So malicious do we find the holy Fathers in their unrelenting persecution of pretended “hæresies,”[516] that we see them telling, without hesitation the most preposterous untruths, and inventing entire narratives, the better to impress their own otherwise unsupported arguments upon ignorance. If the mistake in relation to the tetrad had at first originated as a simple consequence of an unpremeditated blunder of Hippolytus, the explanations of Epiphanius and others who fell into the same absurd error[517] have a less innocent look. When Hippolytus gravely denounces the great heresy of the Tetrad, Kol-Arbas, and states that the imaginary Gnostic leader is, “Kalorbasus, who endeavors to explain religion by measures and numbers,”[518] we may simply smile. But when Epiphanius, with abundant indignation, elaborates upon the theme, “which is Heresy XV.,” and pretending to be thoroughly acquainted with the subject, adds: “A certain Heracleon follows after Colorbasus, which is Heresy XVI.,”[519] then he lays himself open to the charge of deliberate falsification.

If this zealous Christian can boast so unblushingly of having caused “by his information seventy women, even of rank, to be sent into exile, through the seductions of some in whose number he had himself been drawn into joining their sect,” he has left us a fair standard by which to judge him. C. W. King remarks, very aptly, on this point, that “it may reasonably be suspected that this worthy renegade had in this case saved himself from the fate of his fellow-religionists by turning evidence against them, on the opening of the persecution.”[520]

And thus, one by one, perished the Gnostics, the only heirs to whose share had fallen a few stray crumbs of the unadulterated truth of primitive Christianity. All was confusion and turmoil during these first centuries, till the moment when all these contradictory dogmas were finally forced upon the Christian world, and examination was forbidden. For long ages it was made a sacrilege, punishable with severe penalties, often death, to seek to comprehend that which the Church had so conveniently elevated to the rank of divine mystery. But since biblical critics have taken upon themselves to “set the house in order,” the cases have become reversed. Pagan creditors now come from every part of the globe to claim their own, and Christian theology begins to be suspected of complete bankruptcy. Such is the sad result of the fanaticism of the “orthodox” sects, who, to borrow an expression of the author of “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” never were, like the Gnostics, “the most polite, the most learned, and most wealthy of the Christian name.” And, if not all of them “smelt garlic,” as Renan will have it, on the other hand, none of these Christian saints have ever shrunk from spilling their neighbor’s blood, if the views of the latter did not agree with their own.

And so all our philosophers were swept away by the ignorant and superstitious masses. The Philaletheians, the lovers of truth, and their eclectic school, perished; and there, where the young Hypatia had taught the highest philosophical doctrines; and where Ammonius Saccas had explained that “the whole which Christ had in view was to reinstate and restore to its primitive integrity the wisdom of the ancients--to reduce within bounds the universally prevailing dominion of superstition ... and to exterminate the various errors that had found their way into the different popular religions”[521]--there, we say, freely raved the οι πολλοι of Christianity. No more precepts from the mouth of the “God-taught philosopher,” but others expounded by the incarnation of a most cruel, fiendish superstition.

“If thy father,” wrote St. Jerome, “lies down across thy threshold, if thy mother uncovers to thine eyes the bosom which suckled thee, trample on thy father’s lifeless body, trample on thy mother’s bosom, and, with eyes unmoistened and dry, fly to the Lord who calleth thee!!”

This sentence is equalled, if not outrivalled, by this other, pronounced in a like spirit. It emanates from another father of the early Church, the eloquent Tertullian, who hopes to see all the “philosophers” in the gehenna fire of Hell. “What shall be the magnitude of that scene!... How shall I laugh! How shall I rejoice! How shall I triumph when I see so many illustrious kings who were said to have mounted into heaven, groaning with Jupiter, their god, in the lowest darkness of hell! Then shall the soldiers who have persecuted the name of Christ burn in more cruel fire than any they had kindled for the saints!”[522]

These murderous expressions illustrate the spirit of Christianity till this day. But do they illustrate the teachings of Christ? By no means. As Eliphas Levi says, “The God in the name of whom we would trample on our mother’s bosom we must see in the hereafter, a hell gaping widely at his feet, and an exterminating sword in his hand.... Moloch burned children but a few seconds; it was reserved to the disciples of a god who is alleged to have died to redeem humanity on the cross, to create a new Moloch whose burning stake is eternal!”[523]

That this spirit of true Christian love has safely crossed nineteen centuries and rages now in America, is fully instanced in the case of the rabid Moody, the revivalist, who exclaims: “I have a son, and no one but God knows how I love him; but I would see those beautiful eyes dug out of his head to-night, rather than see him grow up to manhood and go down to the grave without Christ and without hope!!”

To this an American paper, of Chicago, very justly responds: “This is the spirit of the inquisition, which we are told is dead. If Moody in his zeal would ‘dig out’ the eyes of his darling son, to what lengths may he not go with the sons of others, whom he may love less? It is the spirit of Loyola, gibbering in the nineteenth century, and prevented from lighting the fagot flame and heating red-hot the instruments of torture only by the arm of law.”

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Chapter VI

“The curtains of Yesterday drop down, the curtains of To-morrow roll up; but Yesterday and To-morrow both are.”--Sartor Resartus: Natural Supernaturalism.

“May we not then be permitted to examine the authenticity of the Bible? which since the second century has been put forth as the criterion of scientific truth? To maintain itself in a position so exalted, it must challenge human criticism.”--Conflict between Religion and Science.

“One kiss of Nara upon the lips of Nari and all Nature wakes.”--VINA SNATI (A Hindu Poet).

We must not forget that the Christian Church owes its present canonical Gospels, and hence its whole religious dogmatism, to the Sortes Sanctorum. Unable to agree as to which were the most divinely-inspired of the numerous gospels extant in its time, the mysterious Council of Nicea concluded to leave the decision of the puzzling question to miraculous intervention. This Nicean Council may well be called mysterious. There was a mystery, first, in the mystical number of its 318 bishops, on which Barnabas (viii. 11, 12, 13) lays such a stress; added to this, there is no agreement among ancient writers as to the time and place of its assembly, nor even as to the bishop who presided. Notwithstanding the grandiloquent eulogium of Constantine,[524] Sabinus, the Bishop of Heraclea, affirms that “except Constantine, the emperor, and Eusebius Pamphilus, these bishops were a set of illiterate, simple creatures, that understood nothing;” which is equivalent to saying that they were a set of fools. Such was apparently the opinion entertained of them by Pappus, who tells us of the bit of magic resorted to to decide which were the true gospels. In his Synodicon to that Council Pappus says, having “promiscuously put all the books that were referred to the Council for determination under a communion-table in a church, they (the bishops) besought the Lord that the inspired writings might get upon the table, while the spurious ones remained underneath, and it happened accordingly.” But we are not told who kept the keys of the council chamber over night!

On the authority of ecclesiastical eye-witnesses, therefore, we are at liberty to say that the Christian world owes its “Word of God” to a method of divination, for resorting to which the Church subsequently condemned unfortunate victims as conjurers, enchanters, magicians, witches, and vaticinators, and burnt them by thousands! In treating of this truly divine phenomenon of the self-sorting manuscripts, the Fathers of the Church say that God himself presides over the Sortes. As we have shown elsewhere, Augustine confesses that he himself used this sort of divination. But opinions, like revealed religions, are liable to change. That which for nearly fifteen hundred years was imposed on Christendom as a book, of which every word was written under the direct supervision of the Holy Ghost; of which not a syllable, nor a comma could be changed without sacrilege, is now being retranslated, revised, corrected, and clipped of whole verses, in some cases of entire chapters. And yet, as soon as the new edition is out, its doctors would have us accept it as a new “Revelation” of the nineteenth century, with the alternative of being held as an infidel. Thus, we see that, no more within than without its precincts, is the infallible Church to be trusted more than would be reasonably convenient. The forefathers of our modern divines found authority for the Sortes in the verse where it is said: “The lot is cast into the lap, but the whole disposing thereof is of the Lord;”[525] and now, their direct heirs hold that “the whole disposing thereof is of the Devil.” Perhaps, they are unconsciously beginning to endorse the doctrine of the Syrian Bardesanes, that the actions of God, as well as of man, are subject to necessity?

It was no doubt, also, according to strict “necessity” that the Neo-platonists were so summarily dealt with by the Christian mob. In those days, the doctrines of the Hindu naturalists and antediluvian Pyrrhonists were forgotten, if they ever had been known at all, to any but a few philosophers; and Mr. Darwin, with his modern discoveries, had not even been mentioned in the prophecies. In this case the law of the survival of the fittest was reversed; the Neo-platonists were doomed to destruction from the day when they openly sided with Aristotle.

At the beginning of the fourth century crowds began gathering at the door of the academy where the learned and unfortunate Hypatia expounded the doctrines of the divine Plato and Plotinus, and thereby impeded the progress of Christian proselytism. She too successfully dispelled the mist hanging over the religious “mysteries” invented by the Fathers, not to be considered dangerous. This alone would have been sufficient to imperil both herself and her followers. It was precisely the teachings of this Pagan philosopher, which had been so freely borrowed by the Christians to give a finishing touch to their otherwise incomprehensible scheme, that had seduced so many into joining the new religion; and now the Platonic light began shining so inconveniently bright upon the pious patchwork, as to allow every one to see whence the “revealed” doctrines were derived. But there was a still greater peril. Hypatia had studied under Plutarch, the head of the Athenian school, and had learned all the secrets of theurgy. While she lived to instruct the multitude, no divine miracles could be produced before one who could divulge the natural causes by which they took place. Her doom was sealed by Cyril, whose eloquence she eclipsed, and whose authority, built on degrading superstitions, had to yield before hers, which was erected on the rock of immutable natural law. It is more than curious that Cave, the author of the Lives of the Fathers, should find it incredible that Cyril sanctioned her murder on account of his “general character.” A saint who will sell the gold and silver vessels of his church, and then, after spending the money, lie at his trial, as he did, may well be suspected of anything. Besides, in this case, the Church had to fight for her life, to say nothing of her future supremacy. Alone, the hated and erudite Pagan scholars, and the no less learned Gnostics, held in their doctrines the hitherto concealed wires of all these theological marionettes. Once the curtain should be lifted, the connection between the old Pagan and the new Christian religions would be exposed; and then, what would have become of the Mysteries into which it is sin and blasphemy to pry? With such a coincidence of the astronomical allegories of various Pagan myths with the dates adopted by Christianity for the nativity, crucifixion, and resurrection, and such an identity of rites and ceremonies, what would have been the fate of the new religion, had not the Church, under the pretext of serving Christ, got rid of the too-well-informed philosophers? To guess what, if the coup d’état had then failed, might have been the prevailing religion in our own century would indeed, be a hard task. But, in all probability, the state of things which made of the middle ages a period of intellectual darkness, which degraded the nations of the Occident, and lowered the European of those days almost to the level of a Papuan savage--could not have occurred.

The fears of the Christians were but too well founded, and their pious zeal and prophetic insight was rewarded from the very first. In the demolition of the Serapeum, after the bloody riot between the Christian mob and the Pagan worshippers had ended with the interference of the emperor, a Latin cross, of a perfect Christian shape, was discovered hewn upon the granite slabs of the adytum. This was a lucky discovery, indeed; and the monks did not fail to claim that the cross had been hallowed by the Pagans in a “spirit of prophecy.” At least, Sozomen, with an air of triumph, records the fact.[526] But, archæology and symbolism, those tireless and implacable enemies of clerical false pretences, have found in the hieroglyphics of the legend running around the design, at least a partial interpretation of its meaning.

According to King and other numismatists and archæologists, the cross was placed there as the symbol of eternal life. Such a Tau, or Egyptian cross, was used in the Bacchic and Eleusinian Mysteries. Symbol of the dual generative power, it was laid upon the breast of the initiate, after his “new birth” was accomplished, and the Mystæ had returned from their baptism in the sea. It was a mystic sign that his spiritual birth had regenerated and united his astral soul with his divine spirit, and that he was ready to ascend in spirit to the blessed abodes of light and glory--the Eleusinia. The Tau was a magic talisman at the same time as a religious emblem. It was adopted by the Christians through the Gnostics and kabalists, who used it largely, as their numerous gems testify, and who had the Tau (or handled cross) from the Egyptians, and the Latin cross from the Buddhist missionaries, who brought it from India, where it can be found until now, two or three centuries B.C. The Assyrians, Egyptians, ancient Americans, Hindus, and Romans had it in various, but very slight modifications of shape. Till very late in the mediæval ages, it was considered a potent spell against epilepsy and demoniacal possession; and the “signet of the living God,” brought down in St. John’s vision by the angel ascending from the east to “seal the servants of our God in their foreheads,” was but the same mystic Tau--the Egyptian cross. In the painted glass of St. Dionysus (France), this angel is represented as stamping this sign on the forehead of the elect; the legend reads, SIGNVM ΤΑΥ. In King’s Gnostics, the author reminds us that “this mark is commonly born by St. Anthony, an Egyptian recluse.”[527] What the real meaning of the Tau was, is explained to us by the Christian St. John, the Egyptian Hermes, and the Hindu Brahmans. It is but too evident that, with the apostle, at least, it meant the “Ineffable Name,” as he calls this “signet of the living God,” a few chapters further on,[528] the “Father’s name written in their foreheads.”

The Brahmâtma, the chief of the Hindu initiates, had on his head-gear two keys, symbol of the revealed mystery of life and death, placed cross-like; and, in some Buddhist pagodas of Tartary and Mongolia, the entrance of a chamber within the temple, generally containing the staircase which leads to the inner daghôba,[529] and the porticos of some Prachida[530] are ornamented with a cross formed of two fishes, and as found on some of the zodiacs of the Buddhists. We should not wonder at all at learning that the sacred device in the tombs in the Catacombs, at Rome, the “Vesica piscis,” was derived from the said Buddhist zodiacal sign. How general must have been that geometrical figure in the world-symbols, may be inferred from the fact that there is a Masonic tradition that Solomon’s temple was built on three foundations, forming the “triple Tau,” or three crosses.

In its mystical sense, the Egyptian cross owes its origin, as an emblem, to the realization by the earliest philosophy of an androgynous dualism of every manifestation in nature, which proceeds from the abstract ideal of a likewise androgynous deity, while the Christian emblem is simply due to chance. Had the Mosaic law prevailed, Jesus should have been lapidated.[531] The crucifix was an instrument of torture, and utterly common among Romans as it was unknown among Semitic nations. It was called the “Tree of Infamy.” It is but later that it was adopted as a Christian symbol; but, during the first two decades, the apostles looked upon it with horror.[532] It is certainly not the Christian Cross that John had in mind when speaking of the “signet of the living God,” but the mystic Tau--the Tetragrammaton, or mighty name, which, on the most ancient kabalistic talismans, was represented by the four Hebrew letters composing the Holy Word.

The famous Lady Ellenborough, known among the Arabs of Damascus, and in the desert, after her last marriage, as Hanoum Medjouyé, had a talisman in her possession, presented to her by a Druze from Mount Lebanon. It was recognized by a certain sign on its left corner, to belong to that class of gems which is known in Palestine as a “Messianic” amulet, of the second or third century, B.C. It is a green stone of a pentagonal form; at the bottom is engraved a fish; higher, Solomon’s seal;[533] and still higher, the four Chaldaic letters----Jod, He, Vau, He, IAHO, which form the name of the Deity. These are arranged in quite an unusual way, running from below upward, in reversed order, and forming the Egyptian Tau. Around these there is a legend which, as the gem is not our property, we are not at liberty to give. The Tau, in its mystical sense, as well as the crux ansata, is the Tree of Life.

It is well known, that the earliest Christian emblems--before it was ever attempted to represent the bodily appearance of Jesus--were the Lamb, the Good Shepherd, and the Fish. The origin of the latter emblem, which has so puzzled the archæologists, thus becomes comprehensible. The whole secret lies in the easily-ascertained fact that, while in the Kabala, the King Messiah is called “Interpreter,” or Revealer of the mystery, and shown to be the fifth emanation, in the Talmud--for reasons we will now explain--the Messiah is very often designated as “DAG,” or the Fish. This is an inheritance from the Chaldees, and relates--as the very name indicates--to the Babylonian Dagon, the man-fish, who was the instructor and interpreter of the people, to whom he appeared. Abarbanel explains the name, by stating that the sign of his (Messiah’s) coming “is the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in the sign Pisces.”[534] Therefore, as the Christians were intent upon identifying their Christos with the Messiah of the Old Testament, they adopted it so readily as to forget that its true origin might be traced still farther back than the Babylonian Dagon. How eagerly and closely the ideal of Jesus was united, by the early Christians, with every imaginable kabalistic and Pagan tenet, may be inferred from the language of Clemens, of Alexandria, addressed to his brother co-religionists.

When they were debating upon the choice of the most appropriate symbol to remind them of Jesus, Clemens advised them in the following words: “Let the engraving upon the gem of your ring be either a dove, or a ship running before the wind (the Argha), or a fish.” Was the good father, when writing this sentence, laboring under the recollection of Joshua, son of Nun (called Jesus in the Greek and Slavonian versions); or had he forgotten the real interpretation of these Pagan symbols? Joshua, son of Nun, or Nave (Navis), could have with perfect propriety adopted the image of a ship, or even of a fish, for Joshua means Jesus, son of the fish-god; but it was really too hazardous to connect the emblems of Venus, Astarte, and all the Hindu goddesses--the argha, dove, and fish--with the “immaculate” birth of their god! This looks very much as if in the early days of Christianity but little difference was made between Christ, Bacchus, Apollo, and the Hindu Christna, the incarnation of Vishnu, with whose first avatar this symbol of the fish originated.

In the Hari-purana, in the Bagaved-gitta, as well as in several other books, the god Vishnu is shown as having assumed the form of a fish with a human head, in order to reclaim the Vedas lost during the deluge. Having enabled Visvamitra to escape with all his tribe in the ark, Vishnu, pitying weak and ignorant humanity, remained with them for some time. It was this god who taught them to build houses, cultivate the land, and to thank the unknown Deity whom he represented, by building temples and instituting a regular worship; and, as he remained half-fish, half-man, all the time, at every sunset he used to return to the ocean, wherein he passed the night.

“It is he,” says the sacred book, “who taught men, after the diluvium, all that was necessary for their happiness.

“One day he plunged into the water and returned no more, for the earth had covered itself again with vegetation, fruit, and cattle.

“But he had taught the Brahmas the secret of all things” (Hari-purana).

So far, we see in this narrative the double of the story given by the Babylonian Berosus about Oannes, the fish-man, who is no other than Vishnu--unless, indeed, we have to believe that it was Chaldea which civilized India!

We say again, we desire to give nothing on our sole authority. Therefore we cite Jacolliot, who, however criticised and contradicted on other points, and however loose he may be in the matter of chronology (though even in this he is nearer right than those scientists who would have all Hindu books written since the Council of Nicea), at least cannot be denied the reputation of a good Sanscrit scholar. And he says, while analyzing the word Oan, or Oannes, that O in Sanscrit is an interjection expressing an invocation, as O, Swayambhuva! O, God! etc; and An is a radical, signifying in Sanscrit a spirit, a being; and, we presume, what the Greeks meant by the word Dæmon, a semi-god.

“What an extraordinary antiquity,” he remarks, “this fable of Vishnu, disguised as a fish, gives to the sacred books of the Hindus; especially in presence of the fact that the Vedas and Manu reckon more than twenty-five thousand years of existence, as proved by the most serious as the most authentic documents. Few peoples, says the learned Halhed, have their annals more authentic or serious than the Hindus.”[535]

We may, perhaps, throw additional light upon the puzzling question of the fish-symbol by reminding the reader that according to Genesis the first created of living beings, the first type of animal life, was the fish. “And the Elohim said: ‘Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life’ ... and God created great whales ... and the morning and the evening were the fifth day.” Jonah is swallowed by a big fish, and is cast out again three days later. This the Christians regard as a premonition of the three days’ sepulture of Jesus which preceded his resurrection--though the statement of the three days is as fanciful as much of the rest, and adopted to fit the well-known threat to destroy the temple and rebuild it again in three days. Between his burial and alleged resurrection there intervened but one day--the Jewish Sabbath--as he was buried on Friday evening and rose to life at dawn on Sunday. However, whatever other circumstance may be regarded as a prophecy, the story of Jonah cannot be made to answer the purpose.

“Big Fish” is Cetus, the latinized form of Keto-κητω and keto is Dagon, Poseidon, the female gender of it being Keton Atar-gatis--the Syrian goddess, and Venus, of Askalon. The figure or bust of Der-Keto or Astarte was generally represented on the prow of the ships. Jonah (the Greek Iona, or dove sacred to Venus) fled to Jaffa, where the god Dagon, the man-fish, was worshipped, and dared not go to Níneveh, where the dove was revered. Hence, some commentators believe that when Jonah was thrown overboard and was swallowed by a fish, we must understand that he was picked up by one of these vessels, on the prow of which was the figure of Keto. But the kabalists have another legend, to this effect: They say that Jonah was a run-away priest from the temple of the goddess where the dove was worshipped, and desired to abolish idolatry and institute monotheistic worship. That, caught near Jaffa, he was held prisoner by the devotees of Dagon in one of the prison-cells of the temple, and that it is the strange form of the cell which gave rise to the allegory. In the collection of Mose de Garcia, a Portuguese kabalist, there is a drawing representing the interior of the temple of Dagon. In the middle stands an immense idol, the upper portion of whose body is human, and the lower fish-like. Between the belly and the tail is an aperture which can be closed like the door of a closet. In it the transgressors against the local deity were shut up until further disposal. The drawing in question was made from an old tablet covered with curious drawings and inscriptions in old Phœnician characters, describing this Venetian oubliette of biblical days. The tablet itself was found in an excavation a few miles from Jaffa. Considering the extraordinary tendency of Oriental nations for puns and allegories, is it not barely possible that the “big fish” by which Jonah was swallowed was simply the cell within the belly of Dagon?

It is significant that this double appellation of “Messiah” and “Dag” (fish), of the Talmudists, should so well apply to the Hindu Vishnu, the “Preserving” Spirit, and the second personage of the Brahmanic trinity. This deity, having already manifested itself, is still regarded as the future Saviour of humanity, and is the selected Redeemer, who will appear at its tenth incarnation or avatar, like the Messiah of the Jews, to lead the blessed onward, and restore to them the primitive Vedas. At his first avatar, Vishnu is alleged to have appeared to humanity, in form like a fish. In the temple of Rama, there is a representation of this god which answers perfectly to that of Dagon, as given by Berosus. He has the body of a man issuing from the mouth of a fish, and holds in his hands the lost Veda. Vishnu, moreover, is the water-god, in one sense, the Logos of the Parabrahm, for as the three persons of the manifested god-head constantly interchange their attributes, we see him in the same temple represented as reclining on the seven-headed serpent, Ananta (eternity), and moving, like the Spirit of God, on the face of the primeval waters.

Vishnu is evidently the Adam Kadmon of the kabalists, for Adam is the Logos or the first Anointed, as Adam Second is the King Messiah.

Lakmy, or Lakshmi, the passive or feminine counterpart of Vishnu, the creator and the preserver, is also called Ada Maya. She is the “Mother of the World,” Damatri, the Venus Aphrodite of the Greeks; also Isis and Eve. While Venus is born from the sea-foam, Lakmy springs out from the water at the churning of the sea; when born, she is so beautiful that all the gods fall in love with her. The Jews, borrowing their types wherever they could get them, made their first woman after the pattern of Lakmy. It is curious that Viracocha, the Supreme Being in Peru, means, literally translated, “foam of the sea.”

Eugene Burnouf, the great authority of the French school, announces his opinion in the same spirit: “We must learn one day,” he observes, “that all ancient traditions disfigured by emigration and legend, belong to the history of India.” Such is the opinion of Colebrooke, Inman, King, Jacolliot, and many other Orientalists.

We have said above, that, according to the secret computation peculiar to the students of the hidden science, Messiah is the fifth emanation, or potency. In the Jewish Kabala, where the ten Sephiroth emanate from Adam Kadmon (placed below the crown), he comes fifth. So in the Gnostic system; so in the Buddhistic, in which the fifth Buddha--Maitree, will appear at his last advent to save mankind before the final destruction of the world. If Vishnu is represented in his forthcoming and last appearance as the tenth avatar or incarnation, it is only because every unit held as an androgyne manifests itself doubly. The Buddhists who reject this dual-sexed incarnation reckon but five. Thus, while Vishnu is to make his last appearance in his tenth, Buddha is said to do the same in his fifth incarnation.[536]

The better to illustrate the idea, and show how completely the real meaning of the avatars, known only to the students of the secret doctrine was misunderstood by the ignorant masses, we elsewhere give the diagrams of the Hindu and Chaldeo-Kabalistic avatars and emanations.[537] This basic and true fundamental stone of the secret cycles, shows on its very face, that far from taking their revealed Vedas and Bible literally, the Brahman-pundits, and the Tanaïm--the scientists and philosophers of the pre-Christian epochs--speculated on the creation and development of the world quite in a Darwinian way, both anticipating him and his school in the natural selection of species, gradual development, and transformation.

We advise every one tempted to enter an indignant protest against this affirmation to read more carefully the books of Manu, even in the incomplete translation of Sir William Jones, and the more or less careless one of Jacolliot. If we compare the Sanchoniathon Phœnician Cosmogony, and the record of Berosus with the Bhagavatta and Manu, we will find enunciated exactly the same principles as those now offered as the latest developments of modern science. We have quoted from the Chaldean and Phœnician records in our first volume; we will now glance at the Hindu books.

“When this world had issued out of darkness, the subtile elementary principles produced the vegetal seed which animated first the plants; from the plants, life passed into fastastical bodies which were born in the ilus of the waters; then, through a series of forms and various animals, it reached MAN.”[538]

“He (man, before becoming such) will pass successively through plants, worms, insects, fish, serpents, tortoises, cattle, and wild animals; such is the inferior degree.”

“Such, from Brahma down to the vegetables, are declared the transmigrations which take place in this world.”[539]

In the Sanchoniathonian Cosmogony, men are also evolved out of the ilus of the chaos,[540] and the same evolution and transformation of species are shown.

And now we will leave the rostrum to Mr. Darwin: “I believe that animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors.”[541]

Again: “I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth, have descended from some one primordial form.[542]... I view all beings, not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited.”[543]

In short, they lived in the Sanchoniathonian chaos, and in the ilus of Manu. Vyasa and Kapila go still farther than Darwin and Manu. “They see in Brahma but the name of the universal germ; they deny the existence of a First Cause; and pretend that everything in nature found itself developed only in consequence of material and fatal forces,” says Jacolliot.[544]

Correct as may be this latter quotation from Kapila, it demands a few words of explanation. Jacolliot repeatedly compares Kapila and Veda Vyasa with Pyrrho and Littré. We have nothing against such a comparison with the Greek philosopher, but we must decidedly object to any with the French Comtist; we find it an unmerited fling at the memory of the great Aryan sage. Nowhere does this prolific writer state the repudiation by either ancient or modern Brahmans of God--the “unknown,” universal Spirit; nor does any other Orientalist accuse the Hindus of the same, however perverted the general deductions of our savants about Buddhistic atheism. On the contrary, Jacolliot states more than once that the learned Pundits and educated Brahmans have never shared the popular superstitions; and affirms their unshaken belief in the unity of God and the soul’s immortality, although most assuredly neither Kapila, nor the initiated Brahmans, nor the followers of the Vedanta school would ever admit the existence of an anthropomorphic creator, a “First Cause” in the Christian sense. Jacolliot, in his Indo-European and African Traditions, is the first to make an onslaught on Professor Müller, for remarking that the Hindu gods were “masks without actors ... names without being, and not beings without names.”[545] Quoting, in support of his argument, numerous verses from the sacred Hindu books, he adds: “Is it possible to refuse to the author of these stanzas a definite and clear conception of the divine force, of the Unique Being, master and Sovereign of the Universe?... Were the altars then built to a metaphor?”[546]

The latter argument is perfectly just, so far as Max Müller’s negation is concerned. But we doubt whether the French rationalist understands Kapila’s and Vyasa’s philosophy better than the German philologist does the “theological twaddle,” as the latter terms the Atharva-Veda. Professor Müller and Jacolliot may have ever so great claims to erudition, and be ever so familiar with Sanscrit and other ancient Oriental languages, but both lack the key to the thousand and one mysteries of the old secret doctrine and its philosophy. Only, while the German philologist does not even take the trouble to look into this magical and “theological twaddle,” we find the French Indianist never losing an opportunity to investigate. Moreover, he honestly admits his incompetency to ever fathom this ocean of mystical learning. In its existence he not only firmly believes, but throughout his works he incessantly calls the attention of science to its unmistakable traces at every step in India. Still, though the learned Pundits and Brahmans--his “revered masters” of the pagodas of Villenoor and Chélambrum in the Carnatic,[547] as it seems, positively refused to reveal to him the mysteries of the magical part of the Agrouchada-Parikshaï,[548] and of Brahmâtma’s triangle,[549] he persists in the honest declaration that everything is possible in Hindu metaphysics, even to the Kapila and Vyasa systems having been hitherto misunderstood.

M. Jacolliot weakens his assertion immediately afterward with the following contradiction:

“We were one day inquiring of a Brahman of the pagoda of Chélambrum, who belonged to the skeptical school of the naturalists of Vyasa, whether he believed in the existence of God. He answered us, smiling: ‘Aham eva param Brahma’--I am myself a god.

“‘What do you mean by that?’

“‘I mean that every being on earth, however humble, is an immortal portion of the immortal matter.’”[550]

The answer is one which would suggest itself to every ancient philosopher, Kabalist and Gnostic, of the early days. It contains the very spirit of the delphic and kabalistic commandment, for esoteric philosophy solved, ages ago, the problem of what man was, is, and will be. If persons believing the Bible verse which teaches that the “Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,” reject at the same time the idea that every atom of this dust, as every particle of this “living soul,” contains “God” within itself, then we pity the logic of that Christian. He forgets the verses which precede the one in question. God blesses equally every beast of the field and every living creature, in the water as in the air, and He endows them all with life, which is a breath of His own Spirit, and the soul of the animal. Humanity is the Adam Kadmon of the “Unknown,” His microcosm, and His only representative on earth, and every man is a god on earth.

We would ask this French scholar, who seems so familiar with every sloka of the books of Manu, and other Vedic writers, the meaning of this sentence so well known to him:

“Plants and vegetation reveal a multitude of forms because of their precedent actions; they are surrounded by darkness, but are nevertheless endowed with an interior soul, and feel equally pleasure and pain” (Manu, book i.).

If the Hindu philosophy teach the presence of a degree of soul in the lowest forms of vegetable life, and even in every atom in space, how is it possible that it should deny the same immortal principle to man? And if it once admit the immortal spirit in man, how can it logically deny the existence of the parent source--I will not say the first, but the eternal Cause? Neither rationalists nor sensualists, who do not comprehend Indian metaphysics, should estimate the ignorance of Hindu metaphysicians by their own.

The grand cycle, as we have heretofore remarked, includes the progress of mankind from its germ in the primordial man of spiritual form to the deepest depth of degradation he can reach--each successive step in the descent being accompanied by a greater strength and grossness of the physical form than its precursor--and ends with the Flood. But while the grand cycle, or age, is running its course, seven minor cycles are passed, each marking the evolution of a new race out of the preceding one, on a new world. And each of these races, or grand types of humanity, breaks up into subdivisions of families, and they again into nations and tribes, as we see the earth’s inhabitants subdivided to-day into Mongols, Caucasians, Indians, etc.

Before proceeding to show by diagrams the close resemblance between the esoteric philosophies of all the ancient peoples, however geographically remote from each other, it will be useful to briefly explain the real ideas which underlie all those symbols and allegorical representations and have hitherto so puzzled the uninitiated commentators. Better than anything, it may show that religion and science were closer knit than twins in days of old; that they were one in two and two in one from the very moment of their conception. With mutually convertible attributes, science was spiritual and religion was scientific. Like the androgyne man of the first chapter of Genesis--“male and female,” passive and active; created in the image of the Elohim. Omniscience developed omnipotency, the latter called for the exercise of the former, and thus the giant had dominion given him over all the four kingdoms of the world. But, like the second Adam, these androgynes were doomed to “fall and lose their powers” as soon as the two halves of the duality separated. The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge gives death without the fruit of the Tree of Life. Man must know himself before he can hope to know the ultimate genesis even of beings and powers less developed in their inner nature than himself. So with religion and science; united two in one they were infallible, for the spiritual intuition was there to supply the limitations of physical senses. Separated, exact science rejects the help of the inner voice, while religion becomes merely dogmatic theology--each is but a corpse without a soul.

The esoteric doctrine, then, teaches, like Buddhism and Brahmanism, and even the persecuted Kabala, that the one infinite and unknown Essence exists from all eternity, and in regular and harmonious successions is either passive or active. In the poetical phraseology of Manu these conditions are called the “day” and the “night” of Brahma. The latter is either “awake” or “asleep.” The Svâbhâvikas, or philosophers of the oldest school of Buddhism (which still exists in Nepaul), speculate but upon the active condition of this “Essence,” which they call Svabhâvât, and deem it foolish to theorize upon the abstract and “unknowable” power in its passive condition. Hence they are called atheists by both Christian theology and modern scientists; for neither of the two are able to understand the profound logic of their philosophy. The former will allow of no other God than the personified secondary powers which have blindly worked out the visible universe, and which became with them the anthropomorphic God of the Christians--the Jehovah, roaring amid thunder and lightning. In its turn, rationalistic science greets the Buddhists and the Svâbhâvikas as the “positivists” of the archaic ages. If we take a one-sided view of the philosophy of the latter, our materialists may be right in their own way. The Buddhists maintain that there is no Creator but an infinitude of creative powers, which collectively form the one eternal substance, the essence of which is inscrutable--hence not a subject for speculation for any true philosopher. Socrates invariably refused to argue upon the mystery of universal being, yet no one would ever have thought of charging him with atheism, except those who were bent upon his destruction. Upon inaugurating an active period, says the Secret Doctrine, an expansion of this Divine essence, from within outwardly, occurs in obedience to eternal and immutable law, and the phenomenal or visible universe is the ultimate result of the long chain of cosmical forces thus progressively set in motion. In like manner, when the passive condition is resumed, a contraction of the Divine essence takes place, and the previous work of creation is gradually and progressively undone. The visible universe becomes disintegrated, its material dispersed; and “darkness,” solitary and alone, broods once more over the face of the “deep.” To use a metaphor which will convey the idea still more clearly, an outbreathing of the “unknown essence” produces the world; and an inhalation causes it to disappear. This process has been going on from all eternity, and our present universe is but one of an infinite series which had no beginning and will have no end.

Thus we are enabled to build our theories solely on the visible manifestations of the Deity, on its objective natural phenomena. To apply to these creative principles the term God is puerile and absurd. One might as well call by the name of Benvenuto Cellini the fire which fuses the metal, or the air that cools it when it is run in the mould. If the inner and ever-concealed spiritual, and to our minds abstract, Essence within these forces can ever be connected with the creation of the physical universe, it is but in the sense given to it by Plato. IT may be termed, at best, the framer of the abstract universe which developed gradually in the Divine Thought within which it had lain dormant.

In Chapter VIII. we will attempt to show the esoteric meaning of Genesis, and its complete agreement with the ideas of other nations. The six days of creation will be found to have a meaning little suspected by the multitude of commentators, who have exercised their abilities to the full extent in attempting to reconcile them by turns with Christian theology and un-Christian geology. Disfigured as the Old Testament is, yet in its symbolism are preserved enough of the original in its principal features to show the family likeness to the cosmogonies of older nations than the Jews.

We here give the diagrams of the Hindu and the Chaldeo-Jewish cosmogonies. The antiquity of the diagram of the former may be inferred from the fact that many of the Brahmanical pagodas are designed and built on this figure, called the “Sri-Iantara.”[551] And yet we find the highest honors paid to it by the Jewish and mediæval kabalists, who call it “Solomon’s seal.” It will be quite an easy matter to trace it to its origin, once we are reminded of the history of the king-kabalist and his transactions with King Hiram and Ophir--the country of peacocks, gold, and ivory--for which land we have to search in old India.

EXPLANATION OF THE TWO DIAGRAMS

REPRESENTING THE

CHAOTIC AND THE FORMATIVE PERIODS, BEFORE AND AFTER OUR UNIVERSE BEGAN TO BE EVOLVED.

FROM THE ESOTERIC BRAHMANICAL, BUDDHISTIC, AND CHALDEAN STANDPOINTS, WHICH AGREE IN EVERY RESPECT WITH THE EVOLUTIONARY THEORY OF MODERN SCIENCE.

THE HINDU DOCTRINE. THE CHALDEAN DOCTRINE. The Upper Triangle The Upper Triangle

Contains the Ineffable Name. Contains the Ineffable Name. It is the AUM--to be It is En-Soph, the pronounced only mentally, Boundless, the Infinite, under penalty of death. The whose name is known to no Unrevealed Para-Brahma, the one but the initiated, and Passive-Principle; absolute could not be pronounced and unconditioned “mukta,” aloud under the penalty of which cannot enter into the death. condition of a Creator, as the latter, in order to No more than Para-Brahma can think, will, and plan, En-Soph create, for he is in must be bound and the same condition of conditioned (baddha); hence, non-being as the former; he in one sense, be a finite is עין non-existent so long being. “THIS (Para-Brahma) as he lies in his latent or was absorbed in the passive state within Oulom non-being, imperceptible, (the boundless and termless without any distinct time); as such he is not the attribute, non-existent for Creator of the visible our senses. He was absorbed universe, neither is he the in his (to us) eternal (to Aur (Light). He will himself) periodical, sleep,” become the latter when the for it was one of the period of creation shall “Nights of Brahma.” have compelled him to expand Therefore he is not the the Force within himself, First but the Eternal according to the Law of Cause. He is the Soul of which he is the embodiment Souls, whom no being can and essence. comprehend in this state. But “he who studies the “Whosoever acquaints himself secret Mantras and with ה״ד the Mercaba and the comprehends the Vâch” (the lahgash (secret speech or Spirit or hidden voice of incantation),[552] will the Mantras, the active learn the secret of manifestation of the latent secrets.” Force) will learn to understand him in his “revealed” aspect.

Both “THIS” and En-Soph, in their first manifestation of Light, emerging from within Darkness, may be summarized in the Svabhâvât, the Eternal and the uncreated Self-existing Substance which produces all; while everything which is of its essence produces itself out of its own nature.

_The Space Around the _The Space Around the Upper Triangle. Upper Triangle.

When the “Night of Brahma” When the active period had was ended, and the time came arrived, En-Soph sent forth for the Self-Existent to from within his own eternal manifest Itself by essence, Sephira, the active revelation, it made its Power, called the Primordial glory visible by sending Point, and the Crown, forth from its Essence an Keter. It is only through active Power, which, female her that the “Un-bounded at first, subsequently Wisdom” could give a becomes androgyne. It is concrete form to his Aditi, the “Infinite,”[553] abstract Thought. Two sides the Boundless, or rather the of the upper triangle, the “Un-bounded.” Aditi is the right side and the base, are “mother” of all the gods, composed of unbroken lines; and Aditi is the Father and the third, the left side, is the Son.[554] “Who will give dotted. It is through the us back to the great Aditi, latter that emerges Sephira. that I may see father and Spreading in every mother?”[555] It is in direction, she finally conjunction with the latter encompasses the whole female, Force, that the triangle. In this emanation Divine but latent Thought of the female active produces the great principle from the left side “Deep”--water. “Water is of the mystic triangle, is born from a transformation foreshadowed the creation of of light ... and from a Eve from Adam’s left rib. modification of the water Adam is the Microcosm of the is born the earth,” says Macrocosm, and is created in Manu (book i.). the image of the Elohim. In the Tree of Life עצחיום the “Ye are born of Aditi from triple triad is disposed in the water, you who are born such a manner that the three of the earth, hear ye all my male Sephiroth are on the call.”[556] right, the three female on the left, and the four In this water (or primeval uniting principles in the chaos) the “Infinite” centre. From the Invisible androgyne, which, with the Dew falling from the Higher Eternal Cause, forms the “Head” Sephira creates first abstract Triad, primeval water, or chaos rendered by AUM, deposited taking shape. It is the the germ of universal life. first step toward the It is the Mundane Egg, in solidification of Spirit, which took place the which through various gestation of Pūrūsha, or the modifications will produce manifested Brahma. The germ earth.[557] “_It requires which fecundated the earth and water to make a Mother Principle (the living soul_,” says Moses. water) is called Nara, the Divine Spirit or Holy When Sephira emerges like an Ghost,[558] and the waters active power from within the themselves, are an emanation latent Deity, she is female; of the former, Nari, while when she assumes the office the Spirit which brooded of a creator, she becomes a over it is called male; hence, she is Narayana.[559] androgyne. She is the “Father and Mother Aditi,” “In that egg, the great of the Hindu Cosmogony. Power sat inactive a whole After brooding over the year of the Creator, at “Deep,” the “Spirit of God” the close of which, by his produces its own image in thought alone, he caused the the water, the Universal egg to divide itself.”[560] Womb, symbolized in Manu The upper half became by the Golden Egg. In the heaven, the lower, the earth kabalistic Cosmogony, Heaven (both yet in their ideal, and Earth are personified by not their manifested form). Adam Kadmon and the second Adam. The first Ineffable Thus, this second triad, Triad, contained in the only another name for the abstract idea of the “Three first one (never pronounced Heads,” was a “mystery aloud), and which is the name.” It was composed of real pre-Vedic and En-Soph, Sephira, and Adam primordial secret Kadmon, the Protogonos, the Trimurti, consisted of latter being identical with the former, when Nara, Father-Heaven, bisexual.[561] In every Nari, Mother-Earth, triad there is a male, a Viradj, the Son--or Universe. female, and an androgyne. Adam-Sephira is the Crown The Trimurti, comprising (Keter). It sets itself to Brahma, the Creator, Vishnu, the work of creation, by the Preserver, and Siva, the first producing Chochmah, Destroyer and Regenerator, Male Wisdom, a masculine belongs to a later period. active potency, represented It is an anthropomorphic by חה, jah, or the Wheels of afterthought, invented for Creation, אפּוַים, from which the more popular proceeds Binah, Intelligence, comprehension of the female and passive potency, uninitiated masses. The which is Jehovah, יהוה, Dikshita, the initiate, whom we find in the Bible knew better. Thus, also, the figuring as the Supreme. But profound allegory under the this Jehovah is not the colors of a ridiculous kabalistic Jodcheva. The fable, given in the binary is the fundamental Aytareya Brahmana,[562] corner-stone of Gnosis. As which resulted in the the binary is the Unity representations in some multiplying itself and temples of Brahm-Nara, self-creating, the kabalists assuming the form of a bull, show the “Unknown” passive and his daughter, En-Soph, as emanating from Aditi-Nari, that of a himself, Sephira, which, heifer, contains the same becoming visible light, is metaphysical idea as the said to produce Adam Kadmon. “fall of man,” or that of But, in the hidden sense, the Spirit into Sephira and Adam are one and generation--matter. The the same light, only latent All-pervading Divine Spirit and active, invisible and embodied under the symbols visible. The second Adam, as of Heaven, the Sun, and Heat the human tetragram, (fire)--the correlation of produces in his turn Eve, cosmic forces--fecundates out of his side. It is this Matter or Nature, the second triad, with which the daughter of Spirit. And kabalists have hitherto Para-Brahma himself has to dealt, hardly hinting at the submit to and bear the Supreme and Ineffable One, penance of the curses of the and never committing other gods (Elohim) for such anything to writing. All an incest. (See knowledge concerning the corresponding column.) latter was imparted orally. According to the immutable, It is the second Adam, and, therefore, fatal law, then, who is the unity both Nara and Nari are represented by Jod, emblem mutually Father and Mother, of the kabalistic male as well as Father and principle, and, at the same Daughter.[563] Matter, time, he is Chochmah, through infinite Wisdom, while Binah or transformation, is the Jehovah is Eve; the first gradual product of Spirit. Chochmah issuing from Keter, The unification of one or the androgyne, Adam Eternal Supreme Cause Kadmon, and the second, required such a correlation; Binah, from Chochmah. If we and if nature be the product combine with Jod the three or effect of that Cause, in letters which form the name its turn it has to be of Eve, we will have the fecundated by the same divine tetragram pronounced divine Ray which produced IEVO-HEVAH, Adam and Eve, יחוה, nature itself. The most Jehovah, male and female, or absurd cosmogonical the idealization of humanity allegories, if analyzed embodied in the first man. without prejudice, will be Thus is it that we can prove found built on strict and that, while the Jewish logical necessarianism. kabalists, in common with their initiated masters, the “Being was born from Chaldeans and the Hindus, not-being,” says a verse in adored the Supreme and the Rig-Veda.[564] The Unknown God, in the sacred first being had to become silence of their androgyne and finite, by the sanctuaries, the ignorant very fact of its creation as masses of every nation were a being. And thus even the left to adore something sacred Trimurti, containing which was certainly less Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva than the Eternal Substance will have an end when the of the Buddhists, the “night” of Para-Brahma so-called Atheists. As succeeds the present “day,” Brahma, the deity manifested or period of universal in the mythical Manu, or activity. the first man (born of Swayambhuva, or the The second, or rather the Self-existent), is finite, first, triad---as the so Jehovah, embodied in Adam highest one is a pure and Eve, is but a human abstraction--is the god. He is the symbol of intellectual world. The Vâch humanity, a mixture of good which surrounds it is a more with a portion of definite transformation of unavoidable evil; of spirit Aditi. Besides its occult fallen into matter. In significance in the secret worshipping Jehovah, we Mantrâm, Vâch is personified simply worship nature, as as the active power of embodied in man, Brahma proceeding from him. half-spiritual and In the Vedas she is made half-material, at best: we to speak of herself as the are Pantheists, when not supreme and universal soul. fetich worshippers, like the “I bore the Father on the idolatrous Jews, who head of the universal mind, sacrificed on high places, and my origin is in the in groves, to the midst of the ocean; and personified male and female therefore do I pervade all principle, ignorant of IAO, beings.... Originating all the Supreme “Secret Name” of beings, I pass like the the Mysteries. breeze (Holy Ghost). I am above this heaven, beyond Shekinah is the Hindu Vâch, this earth; and what is the and praised in the same Great One that am I.”[565] terms as the latter. Though Literally, Vâch is speech, shown in the kabalistic Tree the power of awakening, of Life as proceeding from through the metrical the ninth Sephiroth, yet arrangement contained in Shekinah is the “veil” of the number and syllables En-Soph, and the “garment” of the Mantras,[566] of Jehovah. The “veil,” for corresponding powers in it succeeded for long ages the invisible world. In in concealing the real the sacrificial Mysteries supreme God, the universal Vâch stirs up the Brahma Spirit, and masking Jehovah, (Brahma jinvati), or the exoteric deity, made the the power lying latent at Christians accept him as the the bottom of every magical “father” of the initiated operation. It existed from Jesus. Yet the kabalists, eternity as the Yajna (its as well as the Hindu latent form), lying dormant Dikshita, know the power in Brahma from of the Shekinah or Vâch, “no-beginning,” and and call it the “secret proceeded forth from him as wisdom,” חכמח־נסהדח. Vâch (the active power). It is the key to the The triangle played a “Traividyâ,” the thrice prominent part in the sacred science which teaches religious symbolism of every the Yajus (the sacrificial great nation; for everywhere Mysteries).[567] it represented the three great principles--spirit, Having done with the force, and matter; or the unrevealed triad, and the active (male), passive first triad of the (female), and the dual or Sephiroth, called the correlative principle which “intellectual world,” little partakes of both and binds remains to be said. In the the two together. It was the great geometrical figure Arba or mystic “four,”[568] which has the double the mystery-gods, the Kabeiri, triangle in it, the central summarized in the unity of circle represents the world one supreme Deity. It is within the universe. The found in the Egyptian double triangle belongs to pyramids, whose equal sides one of the most important, tower up until lost in one if it is not in itself the crowning point. In the most important, of the kabalistic diagram the mystic figures in India. It central circle of the is the emblem of the Brahmanical figure is Trimurti three in one. The replaced by the cross; the triangle with its apex celestial perpendicular and upward indicates the male the terrestrial horizontal principle, downward the base line.[569] But the idea female; the two typifying, is the same: Adam Kadmon is at the same time, spirit and the type of humanity as a matter. This world within collective totality within the infinite universe is the the unity of the creative microcosm within the God and the universal macrocosm, as in the Jewish spirit. Kabala. It is the symbol of the womb of the universe, “Of him who is formless, the the terrestrial egg, whose non-existent (also the archetype is the golden eternal, but not First mundane egg. It is from Cause), is born the heavenly within this spiritual bosom man.” But after he created of mother nature that the form of the heavenly proceed all the great man אדמעלאה, he “used it as saviours of the a vehicle wherein to universe--the avatars of the descend,” says the Kabala. invisible Deity. Thus Adam Kadmon is the avatar of the concealed “Of him who is and yet is power. After that the not, from the not-being, heavenly Adam creates or Eternal Cause, is born the engenders by the combined being Pouroucha,” says Manu, power of the Sephiroth, the the legislator. Pouroucha is earthly Adam. The work of the “divine male,” the creation is also begun by second god, and the Sephira in the creation of avatar, or the Logos of the ten Sephiroth (who are Para-Brahma and his divine the Pradjapatis of the son, who in his turn Kabala, for they are produced Viradj, the son, or likewise the Lords of all the ideal type of the beings). universe. “Viradj begins the work of creation by The Sohar asserts the producing the ten same. According to the Pradjapati, ‘the lords of kabalistic doctrine there all beings.’” were old worlds (see Idra Suta: Sohar, iii., p. 292 According to the doctrine of b). Everything will return Manu, the universe is some day to that from which subjected to a periodical it first proceeded. “All and never-ending succession things of which this world of creations and consists, spirit as well as dissolutions, which periods body, will return to their of creation are named principal, and the roots Manvântara. from which they proceeded” (Sohar, ii., 218 b). The “It is the germ (which the kabalists also maintain the Divine Spirit produced from indestructibility of matter, its own substance) which albeit their doctrine is never perishes in the being, shrouded still more for it becomes the soul of carefully than that of the Being, and at the period of Hindus. The creation is pralaya (dissolution) it eternal, and the universe is returns to absorb itself the “garment,” or “the veil again into the Divine of God”--Shekinah; and the Spirit, which itself rests latter is immortal and from all eternity within eternal as Him within whom Swayambhuva, the it has ever existed. Every ‘Self-Existent’” world is made after the (Institutes of Manu, pattern of its predecessor, book i.). and each more gross and material than the preceding As we have shown, neither one. In the Kabala all the Svâbhâvikas, Buddhist were called sparks. Finally, philosophers--nor the our present grossly Brahmans believe in a materialistic world was creation of the universe ex formed. nihilo, but both believe in the Prakriti, the In the Chaldean account of indestructibility of matter. the period which preceded the Genesis of our world, The evolution of species, Berosus speaks of a time and the successive when there existed nothing appearance of various new but darkness, and an abyss types is very distinctly of waters, filled with shown in Manu. hideous monsters, “produced of a two-fold principle .... “From earth, heat, and These were creatures in water, are born all which were combined the creatures, whether animate limbs of every species of or inanimate, produced by animals. In addition to the germ which the Divine these fishes, reptiles, Spirit drew from its own serpents, with other substance. Thus has Brahma monstrous animals, which established the series of assumed each other’s shape transformations from the and countenance.”[571] plant up to man, and from man up to the primordial essence.... Among them each succeeding being (or element) acquires the quality of the preceding; and in as many degrees as each of them is advanced, with so many properties is it said to be endowed” (Manu, book i., sloka 20).[570]

This, we believe, is the veritable theory of the modern evolutionists.

In the first book of Manu, we read: “Know that the sum of 1,000 divine ages, composes the totality of one day of Brahma; and that one night is equal to that day.” One thousand divine ages is equal to 4,320,000,000 of human years, in the Brahmanical calculations.

“At the expiration of each night, Brahma, who has been asleep, awakes, and through the sole energy of the motion causes to emanate from himself the spirit, which in its essence is, and yet is not.”

“Prompted by the desire to create, the Spirit (first of the emanations) operates the creation and gives birth to ether, which the sages consider as having the faculty of transmitting sound.

“Ether begets air whose property is tangible, and which is necessary to life.

“Through a transformation of the air, light is produced.

“From air and light, which begets heat, water is formed, and the water is the womb of all the living germs.”

Throughout the whole immense period of progressive creation, covering 4,320,000,000 years, ether, air, water and fire (heat), are constantly forming matter under the never-ceasing impulse of the Spirit, or the unrevealed God who fills up the whole creation, for he is in all, and all is in him. This computation, which was secret and which is hardly hinted at even now, led Higgins into the error of dividing every ten ages into 6,000 years. Had he added a few more ciphers to his sums he might have come nearer to a correct explanation of the neroses, or secret cycles.[572]

In the Sepher Jezireh, the kabalistic Book of Creation, the author has evidently repeated the words of Manu. In it, the Divine Substance is represented as having alone existed from the eternity, boundless and absolute; and emitted from itself the Spirit. “One is the Spirit of the living God, blessed be His Name, who liveth for ever! Voice, Spirit, and Word, this is the Holy Spirit;”[573] and this is the kabalistic abstract Trinity, so unceremoniously anthropomorphized by the Fathers. From this triple ONE emanated the whole Cosmos. First from ONE emanated number TWO, or Air, the creative element; and then number THREE, Water, proceeded from the air; Ether or Fire complete the mystic four, the Arba-il.[574] “When the Concealed of the Concealed wanted to reveal Himself, he first made a point (primordial point, or the first Sephira, air or Holy Ghost), shaped it into a sacred form (the ten Sephiroth, or the Heavenly man), and covered it with a rich and splendid garment, that is the world.”[575] “He maketh the wind His messengers, flaming Fire his servants,” says the Jezireh, showing the cosmical character of the later euhemerized angels,[576] and that the Spirit permeates every minutest atom of the Cosmos.[577]

When the cycle of creation is run down, the energy of the manifested word is weakening. He alone, the Unconceivable, is unchangeable (ever latent), but the Creative Force, though also eternal, as it has been in the former from “no beginning,” yet must be subject to periodical cycles of activity and rest; as it had a beginning in one of its aspects, when it first emanated, therefore must also have an end. Thus, the evening succeeds the day, and the night of the deity approaches. Brahma is gradually falling asleep. In one of the books of Sohar, we read the following:

“As Moses was keeping a vigil on Mount Sinai, in company with the Deity, who was concealed from his sight by a cloud, he felt a great fear overcome him and suddenly asked: ‘Lord, where art Thou ... sleepest thou, O Lord?’ And the Spirit answered him: ‘I never sleep; were I to fall asleep for a moment before my time, all the Creation would crumble into dissolution in one instant.’” And Vamadeva-Modēly describes the “Night of Brahma,” or the second period of the Divine Unknown existence, thus:

“Strange noises are heard, proceeding from every point.... These are the precursors of the Night of Brahma; dusk rises at the horizon and the Sun passes away behind the thirtieth degree of Macara (sign of the zodiac), and will reach no more the sign of the Minas (zodiacal pisces, or fish). The gurus of the pagodas appointed to watch the rās-chakr (Zodiac), may now break their circle and instruments, for they are henceforth useless.

“Gradually light pales, heat diminishes, uninhabitable spots multiply on the earth, the air becomes more and more rarefied; the springs of waters dry up, the great rivers see their waves exhausted, the ocean shows its sandy bottom, and plants die. Men and animals decrease in size daily. Life and motion lose their force, planets can hardly gravitate in space; they are extinguished one by one, like a lamp which the hand of the chokra (servant) neglects to replenish. Sourya (the Sun) flickers and goes out, matter falls into dissolution (pralaya), and Brahma merges back into Dyäus, the Unrevealed God, and his task being accomplished, he falls asleep. Another day is passed, night sets in and continues until the future dawn.

“And now again re-enter into the golden egg of His Thought, the germs of all that exist, as the divine Manu tells us. During His peaceful rest, the animated beings, endowed with the principles of action, cease their functions, and all feeling (manas) becomes dormant. When they are all absorbed in the SUPREME SOUL, this Soul of all the beings sleeps in complete repose, till the day when it resumes its form, and awakes again from its primitive darkness.”[578]

If we now examine the ten mythical avatars of Vishnu, we find them recorded in the following progression:

1. Matsya-Avatar: as a fish. It will also be his tenth and last avatar, at the end of the Kali-yug.

2. Kurm-Avatar: as a tortoise.

3. Varaha: as a boar.

4. Nara-Sing: as a man-lion; last animal stage.

5. Vamuna: as a dwarf; first step toward the human form.

6. Parasu-Rama: as a hero, but yet an imperfect man.

7. Rama-Chandra: as the hero of Ramayâna. Physically a perfect man; his next of kin, friend and ally Hanoumā, the monkey-god. The monkey endowed with speech.[579]

8. Christna-Avatar: the Son of the Virgin Devanaguy (or Devaki) one formed by God, or rather by the manifested Deity Vishnu, who is identical with Adam Kadmon.[580] Christna is also called Kaneya, the Son of the Virgin.

9. Gautama-Buddha, Siddhârtha, or Sakya-muni. (The Buddhists reject this doctrine of their Buddha being an incarnation of Vishnu.)

10. This avatar has not yet occurred. It is expected in the future, like the Christian Advent, the idea of which was undoubtedly copied from the Hindu. When Vishnu appears for the last time he will come as a “Saviour.” According to the opinion of some Brahmans he will appear himself under the form of the horse Kalki. Others maintain that he will be mounting it. This horse is the envelope of the spirit of evil, and Vishnu will mount it, invisible to all, till he has conquered it for the last time. The “Kalki-Avataram,” or the last incarnation, divides Brahmanism into two sects. That of the Vaïhnâva refuses to recognize the incarnations of their god Vishnu in animal forms literally. They claim that these must be understood as allegorical.

In this diagram of avatars we see traced the gradual evolution and transformation of all species out of the ante-Silurian mud of Darwin and the ilus of Sanchoniathon and Berosus. Beginning with the Azoic time, corresponding to the ilus in which Brahma implants the creative germ, we pass through the Palæozoic and Mesozoic times, covered by the first and second incarnations as the fish and tortoise; and the Cenozoic, which is embraced by the incarnations in the animal and semi-human forms of the boar and man-lion; and we come to the fifth and crowning geological period, designated as the “era of mind, or age of man,” whose symbol in the Hindu mythology is the dwarf--the first attempt of nature at the creation of man. In this diagram we should follow the main-idea, not judge the degree of knowledge of the ancient philosophers by the literal acceptance of the popular form in which it is presented to us in the grand epical poem of Maha-Bharata and its chapter the Bagaved-gitta.

Even the four ages of the Hindu chronology contain a far more philosophical idea than appears on the surface. It defines them according to both the psychological or mental and the physical states of man during their period. Crita-yug, the golden age, the “age of joy,” or spiritual innocence of man; Treta-yug, the age of silver, or that of fire--the period of supremacy of man and of giants and of the sons of God; Dwapara-yug, the age of bronze--a mixture already of purity and impurity (spirit and matter), the age of doubt; and at last our own, the Kali-yug, or age of iron, of darkness, misery, and sorrow. In this age, Vishnu had to incarnate himself in Christna, in order to save humanity from the goddess Kali, consort of Siva, the all-annihilating--the goddess of death, destruction, and human misery. Kali is the best emblem to represent the “fall of man;” the falling of spirit into the degradation of matter, with all its terrific results. We have to rid ourselves of Kali before we can ever reach “Moksha,” or Nirvana, the abode of blessed Peace and Spirit.

With the Buddhists the last incarnation is the fifth. When Maitree-Buddha comes, then our present world will be destroyed; and a new and a better one will replace it. The four arms of every Hindu Deity are the emblems of the four preceding manifestations of our earth from its invisible state, while its head typifies the fifth and last Kalki-Avatar, when this would be destroyed, and the power of Budh--Wisdom (with the Hindus, of Brahma), will be again called into requisition to manifest itself--as a Logos--to create the future world.

In this diagram, the male gods typify Spirit in its deific attributes, while their female counterparts--the Sakti, represent the active energies of these attributes. The Durga (active virtue), is a subtile, invisible force, which answers to Shekinah--the garment of En-Soph. She is the Sakti through which the passive “Eternal” calls forth the visible universe from its first ideal conception. Every one of the three personages of the exoteric Trimurti are shown as using their Sakti as a Vehan (vehicle). Each of them is for the time being the form which sits upon the mysterious wagon of Ezekiel.

Nor do we see less clearly carried out in this succession of avatars, the truly philosophical idea of a simultaneous spiritual and physical evolution of creatures and man. From a fish the progress of this dual transformation carries on the physical form through the shape of a tortoise, a boar, and a man-lion; and then, appearing in the dwarf of humanity, it shows Parasu Rama physically, a perfect, spiritually, an undeveloped entity, until it carries mankind personified by one god-like man, to the apex of physical and spiritual perfection--a god on earth. In Christna and the other Saviours of the world we see the philosophical idea of the progressive dual development understood and as clearly expressed in the Sohar. The “Heavenly man,” who is the Protogonos, Tikkun, the first-born of God, or the universal Form and Idea, engenders Adam. Hence the latter is god-born in humanity, and endowed with the attributes of all the ten Sephiroth. These are: Wisdom, Intelligence, Justice, Love, Beauty, Splendor, Firmness, etc. They make him the Foundation or basis, “the mighty living one,” אלחי, and the crown of creation, thus placing him as the Alpha and Omega to reign over the “kingdom”--Malchuth. “Man is both the import and the highest degree of creation,” says the Sohar. “As soon as man was created, everything was complete, including the upper and nether worlds, for everything is comprised in man. He unites in himself all forms” (iii., p. 48 a).

But this does not relate to our degenerated mankind; it is only occasionally that men are born who are the types of what man should be, and yet is not. The first races of men were spiritual, and their protoplastic bodies were not composed of the gross and material substances of which we see them composed now-a-day. The first men were created with all the faculties of the Deity, and powers far transcending those of the angelic host; for they were the direct emanations of Adam Kadmon, the primitive man, the Macrocosm; while the present humanity is several degrees removed even from the earthly Adam, who was the Microcosm, or “the little world.” Seir Anpin, the mystical figure of the Man, consists of 243 numbers, and we see in the circles which follow each other that it is the angels which emanated from the “Primitive Man,” not the Sephiroth from angels. Hence, man was intended from the first to be a being of both a progressive and retrogressive nature. Beginning at the apex of the divine cycle, he gradually began receding from the centre of Light, acquiring at every new and lower sphere of being (worlds each inhabited by a different race of human beings) a more solid physical form and losing a portion of his divine faculties.

In the “fall of Adam” we must see, not the personal transgression of man, but simply the law of the dual evolution. Adam, or “Man,” begins his career of existences by dwelling in the garden of Eden “dressed in the celestial garment, which is a garment of heavenly light” (Sohar, ii., 229 b); but when expelled he is “clothed” by God, or the eternal law of Evolution or necessarianism, with coats of skin. But even on this earth of material degradation--in which the divine spark (Soul, a corruscation of the Spirit) was to begin its physical progression in a series of imprisonments from a stone up to a man’s body--if he but exercise his WILL and call his deity to his help, man can transcend the powers of the angel. “Know ye not that we shall judge angels?” asks Paul (1 Corinthians, vi. 3). The real man is the Soul (Spirit), teaches the Sohar. “The mystery of the earthly man is after the mystery of the heavenly man ... the wise can read the mysteries in the human face” (ii., 76 a).

This is still another of the many sentences by which Paul must be recognized as an initiate. For reasons fully explained, we give far more credit for genuineness to certain Epistles of the apostles, now dismissed as apocryphal, than to many suspicious portions of the Acts. And we find corroboration of this view in the Epistle of Paul to Seneca. In this message Paul styles Seneca “my respected master,” while Seneca terms the apostle simply “brother.”

No more than the true religion of Judaic philosophy can be judged by the absurdities of the exoteric Bible, have we any right to form an opinion of Brahmanism and Buddhism by their nonsensical and sometimes disgusting popular forms. If we only search for the true essence of the philosophy of both Manu and the Kabala, we will find that Vishnu is, as well as Adam Kadmon, the expression of the universe itself; and that his incarnations are but concrete and various embodiments of the manifestations of this “Stupendous Whole.” “I am the Soul, O, Arjuna. I am the Soul which exists in the heart of all beings; and I am the beginning and the middle, and also the end of existing things,” says Vishnu to his disciple, in Bagaved-gitta (ch. x., p. 71).

“I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.... I am the first and the last,” says Jesus to John (Rev. i. 6, 17).

Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva are a trinity in a unity, and, like the Christian trinity, they are mutually convertible. In the esoteric doctrine they are one and the same manifestation of him “whose name is too sacred to be pronounced, and whose power is too majestic and infinite to be imagined.” Thus by describing the avatars of one, all others are included in the allegory, with a change of form but not of substance. It is out of such manifestations that emanated the many worlds that were, and that will emanate the one--which is to come.

Coleman, followed in it by other Orientalists, presents the seventh avatar of Vishnu in the most caricatured way.[581] Apart from the fact that the Ramayana is one of the grandest epic poems in the world--the source and origin of Homer’s inspiration--this avatar conceals one of the most scientific problems of our modern day. The learned Brahmans of India never understood the allegory of the famous war between men, giants, and monkeys, otherwise than in the light of the transformation of species. It is our firm belief that were European academicians to seek for information from some learned native Brahmans, instead of unanimously and incontinently rejecting their authority, and were they, like Jacolliot--against whom they have nearly all arrayed themselves--to seek for light in the oldest documents scattered about the country in pagodas, they might learn strange but not useless lessons. Let any one inquire of an educated Brahman the reason for the respect shown to monkeys--the origin of which feeling is indicated in the story of the valorous feats of Hanoumā, the generalissimo and faithful ally of the hero of Ramayana,[582] and he would soon be disabused of the erroneous idea that the Hindus accord deific honors to a monkey-god. He would, perhaps, learn--were the Brahman to judge him worthy of an explanation--that the Hindu sees in the ape but what Manu desired he should: the transformation of species most directly connected with that of the human family--a bastard branch engrafted on their own stock before the final perfection of the latter.[583] He might learn, further, that in the eyes of the educated “heathen” the spiritual or inner man is one thing, and his terrestrial, physical casket another. That physical nature, the great combination of physical correlations of forces ever creeping on toward perfection, has to avail herself of the material at hand; she models and remodels as she proceeds, and finishing her crowning work in man, presents him alone as a fit tabernacle for the overshadowing of the Divine spirit. But the latter circumstance does not give man the right of life and death over the animals lower than himself in the scale of nature, or the right to torture them. Quite the reverse. Besides being endowed with a soul--of which every animal, and even plant, is more or less possessed--man has his immortal rational soul, or nous, which ought to make him at least equal in magnanimity to the elephant, who treads so carefully, lest he should crush weaker creatures than himself. It is this feeling which prompts Brahman and Buddhist alike to construct hospitals for sick animals, and even insects, and to prepare refuges wherein they may finish their days. It is this same feeling, again, which causes the Jaïn sectarian to sacrifice one-half of his life-time to brushing away from his path the helpless, crawling insects, rather than recklessly deprive the smallest of life; and it is again from this sense of highest benevolence and charity toward the weaker, however abject the creature may be, that they honor one of the natural modifications of their own dual nature, and that later the popular belief in metempsychosis arose. No trace of the latter is to be found in the Vedas; and the true interpretation of the doctrine, discussed at length in Manu and the Buddhistic sacred books, having been confined from the first to the learned sacerdotal castes, the false and foolish popular ideas concerning it need occasion no surprise.

Upon those who, in the remains of antiquity, see evidence that modern times can lay small claim to originality, it is common to charge a disposition to exaggerate and distort facts. But the candid reader will scarcely aver that the above is an example in point. There were evolutionists before the day when the mythical Noah is made, in the Bible, to float in his ark; and the ancient scientists were better informed, and had their theories more logically defined than the modern evolutionists.

Plato, Anaxagoras, Pythagoras, the Eleatic schools of Greece, as well as the old Chaldean sacerdotal colleges, all taught the doctrine of the dual evolution; the doctrine of the transmigration of souls referring only to the progress of man from world to world, after death here. Every philosophy worthy of the name, taught that the spirit of man, if not the soul, was preëxistent. “The Essenes,” says Josephus, “believed that the souls were immortal, and that they descended from the ethereal spaces to be chained to bodies.”[584] In his turn, Philo Judæus says, the “air is full of them (of souls); those which are nearest the earth, descending to be tied to mortal bodies, παλινδρομοῦσι αὖθις, return to other bodies, being desirous to live in them.”[585] In the Sohar, the soul is made to plead her freedom before God: “Lord of the Universe! I am happy in this world, and do not wish to go into another world, where I shall be a handmaid, and be exposed to all kinds of pollutions.”[586] The doctrine of fatal necessity, the everlasting immutable Law, is asserted in the answer of the Deity: “Against thy will thou becomest an embryo, and against thy will thou art born.”[587] Light would be incomprehensible without darkness, to make it manifest by contrast; good would be no good without evil, to show the priceless nature of the boon; and so, personal virtue could claim no merit, unless it had passed through the furnace of temptation. Nothing is eternal and unchangeable, save the Concealed Deity. Nothing that is finite--whether because it had a beginning, or must have an end--can remain stationary. It must either progress or recede; and a soul which thirsts after a reünion with its spirit, which alone confers upon it immortality, must purify itself through cyclic transmigrations, onward toward the only Land of Bliss and Eternal Rest, called in the Sohar, “The Palace of Love,” היבל אהבת; in the Hindu religion, “Moksha;” among the Gnostics, the “Pleroma of eternal Light;” and by the Buddhists, Nirvana. The Christian calls it the “Kingdom of Heaven,” and claims to have alone found the truth, whereas he has but invented a new name for a doctrine which is coëval with man.

The proof that the transmigration of the soul does not relate to man’s condition on this earth after death, is found in the Sohar, notwithstanding the many incorrect renderings of its translators. “All souls which have alienated themselves in heaven from the Holy One--blessed be His Name--have thrown themselves into an abyss at their very existence, and have anticipated the time when they are to descend on earth.[588]... Come and see when the soul reaches the abode of Love.... The soul could not bear this light, but for the luminous mantle which she puts on. For, just as the soul, when sent to this earth, puts on an earthly garment to preserve herself here, so she receives above a shining garment, in order to be able to look without injury into the mirror, whose light proceeds from the Lord of Light.”[589] Moreover, the Sohar teaches that the soul cannot reach the abode of bliss, unless she has received the “holy kiss,” or the re-union of the soul with the substance from which she emanated--spirit. All souls are dual, and, while the latter is a feminine principle, the spirit is masculine. While imprisoned in body, man is a trinity, unless his pollution is such as to have caused his divorce from the spirit. “Woe to the soul which prefers to her divine husband (spirit), the earthly wedlock with her terrestrial body,” records a text of the Book of the Keys.[590]

These ideas on the transmigrations and the trinity of man, were held by many of the early Christian Fathers. It is the jumble made by the translators of the New Testament and ancient philosophical treatises between soul and spirit, that has occasioned the many misunderstandings. It is also one of the many reasons why Buddha, Plotinus, and so many other initiates are now accused of having longed for the total extinction of their souls--“absorption unto the Deity,” or “reunion with the universal soul,” meaning, according to modern ideas, annihilation. The animal soul must, of course, be disintegrated of its particles, before it is able to link its purer essence forever with the immortal spirit. But the translators of both the Acts and the Epistles, who laid the foundation of the Kingdom of Heaven, and the modern commentators on the Buddhist Sutra of the Foundation of the Kingdom of Righteousness, have muddled the sense of the great apostle of Christianity, as of the great reformer of India. The former have smothered the word φυχικος, so that no reader imagines it to have any relation with soul; and with this confusion of soul and spirit together, Bible readers get only a perverted sense of anything on the subject; and the interpreters of the latter have failed to understand the meaning and object of the Buddhist four degrees of Dhyâna.

In the writings of Paul, the entity of man is divided into a trine--flesh, psychical existence or soul, and the overshadowing and at the same time interior entity or SPIRIT. His phraseology is very definite, when he teaches the anastasis, or the continuation of life of those who have died. He maintains that there is a psychical body which is sown in the corruptible, and a spiritual body that is raised in incorruptible substance. “The first man is of the earth earthy, the second man from heaven.” Even James (iii. 15) identifies the soul by saying that its “wisdom descendeth not from the above but is terrestrial, psychical, demoniacal” (see Greek text). Plato, speaking of the Soul (psuché), observes that “when she allies herself to the nous (divine substance, a god, as psuché is a goddess), she does everything aright and felicitously; but the case is otherwise when she attaches herself to Annoia.” What Plato calls nous, Paul terms the Spirit; and Jesus makes the heart what Paul says of the flesh. The natural condition of mankind was called in Greek αποστασια; the new condition αναστασις. In Adam came the former (death), in Christ the latter (resurrection), for it is he who first publicly taught mankind the “Noble Path” to Eternal life, as Gautama pointed the same Path to Nirvana. To accomplish both ends there was but one way, according to the teachings of both. “Poverty, chastity, contemplation or inner prayer; contempt for wealth and the illusive joys of this world.”

“Enter on this Path and put an end to sorrow; verily the Path has been preached by me, who have found out how to quench the darts of grief. You yourselves must make the effort; the Buddhas are only preachers. The thoughtful who enter the Path are freed from the bondage of the Deceiver (Marâ).[591]

“Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction.... Follow me.... Every one that heareth these sayings and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man” (Matthew vii. and viii.). “I can of mine own self do nothing” (John v. 30). “The care of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, choke the word” (Matthew xiii. 22), say the Christians; and it is only by shaking off all delusions that the Buddhist enters on the “Path” which will lead him “away from the restless tossing waves of the ocean of life,” and take him “to the calm City of Peace, to the real joy and rest of Nirvana.”

The Greek philosophers are alike made misty instead of mystic by their too learned translators. The Egyptians revered the Divine Spirit, the One-Only One, as NOUT. It is most evident that it is from that word that Anaxagoras borrowed his denominative nous, or, as he calls it, Νοῦς αυτοκρατης--the Mind or Spirit self-potent, the αρχητης κινησεως. “All things,” says he, “were in chaos; then came Νοῦς and introduced order.” He also denominated this Νοῦς the One that ruled the many. In his idea Νοῦς was God; and the Logos was man, the emanation of the former. The external powers perceived phenomena; the nous alone recognized noumena or subjective things. This is purely Buddhistic and esoteric.

Here Socrates took his clew and followed it, and Plato after him, with the whole world of interior knowledge. Where the old Ionico-Italian world culminated in Anaxagoras, the new world began with Socrates and Plato. Pythagoras made the Soul a self-moving unit, with three elements, the nous, the phren and the thumos; the latter two, shared with the brutes; the former only, being his essential self. So the charge that he taught transmigration is refuted; he taught no more than Gautama-Buddha ever did, whatever the popular superstition of the Hindu rabble made of it after his death. Whether Pythagoras borrowed from Buddha, or Buddha from somebody else, matters not; the esoteric doctrine is the same.

The Platonic School is even more distinct in enunciating all this.

The real selfhood was at the basis of all. Socrates therefore taught that he had a δαιμόνιον (daimonion), a spiritual something which put him in the road to wisdom. He himself knew nothing, but this put him in the way to learn all.

Plato followed him with a full investigation of the principles of being. There was an Agathon, Supreme God, who produced in his own mind a paradeigma of all things.

He taught that in man was “the immortal principle of the soul,” a mortal body, and a “separate mortal kind of soul,” which was placed in a separate receptacle of the body from the other; the immortal part was in the head (Timæus xix., xx.) the other in the trunk (xliv.).

Nothing is plainer than that Plato regarded the interior man as constituted of two parts--one always the same, formed of the same entity as Deity, and one mortal and corruptible.

“Plato and Pythagoras,” says Plutarch, “distribute the soul into two parts, the rational (noëtic) and irrational (agnoia); that that part of the soul of man which is rational, is eternal; for though it be not God, yet it is the product of an eternal deity, but that part of the soul which is divested of reason (agnoia) dies.”

“Man,” says Plutarch, “is compound; and they are mistaken who think him to be compounded of two parts only. For they imagine that the understanding is a part of the soul, but they err in this no less than those who make the soul to be a part of the body, for the understanding (nous) as far exceeds the soul, as the soul is better and diviner than the body. Now this composition of the soul (φυχη) with the understanding (νοῦς) makes reason; and with the body, passion; of which the one is the beginning or principle of pleasure and pain, and the other of virtue and vice. Of these three parts conjoined and compacted together, the earth has given the body, the moon the soul, and the sun the understanding to the generation of man.

“Now of the deaths we die, the one makes man two of three, and the other, one of (out of) two. The former is in the region and jurisdiction of Demeter, whence the name given to the Mysteries τελειν resembled that given to death, τελευταν. The Athenians also heretofore called the deceased sacred to Demeter. As for the other death it is in the moon or region of Persophoné. And as with the one the terrestrial, so with the other the celestial Hermes doth dwell. This suddenly and with violence plucks the soul from the body; but Proserpina mildly and in a long time disjoins the understanding from the soul. For this reason she is called Monogenes, only-begotten, or rather begetting one alone; for the better part of man becomes alone when it is separated by her. Now both the one and the other happens thus according to nature. It is ordained by Faith that every soul, whether with or without understanding (νοῦς), when gone out of the body, should wander for a time, though not all for the same, in the region lying between the earth and moon. For those that have been unjust and dissolute suffer there the punishment due to their offences; but the good and virtuous are there detained till they are purified, and have, by expiation, purged out of them all the infections they might have contracted from the contagion of the body, as if from foul health, living in the mildest part of the air, called the Meadows of Hades, where they must remain for a certain prefixed and appointed time. And then, as if they were returning from a wandering pilgrimage or long exile into their country, they have a taste of joy, such as they principally receive who are initiated into Sacred Mysteries, mixed with trouble, admiration, and each one’s proper and peculiar hope.”

The dæmonium of Socrates was this νοῦς, mind, spirit, or understanding of the divine in it. “The νοῦς of Socrates,” says Plutarch, “was pure and mixed itself with the body no more than necessity required.... Every soul hath some portion of νοῦς, reason, a man cannot be a man without it; but as much of each soul as is mixed with flesh and appetite is changed and through pain or pleasure becomes irrational. Every soul doth not mix herself after one sort; some plunge themselves into the body, and so, in this life their whole frame is corrupted by appetite and passion; others are mixed as to some part, but the purer part [nous] still remains without the body. It is not drawn down into the body, but it swims above and touches (overshadows) the extremest part of the man’s head; it is like a cord to hold up and direct the subsiding part of the soul, as long as it proves obedient and is not overcome by the appetites of the flesh. The part that is plunged into the body is called soul. But the incorruptible part is called the nous and the vulgar think it is within them, as they likewise imagine the image reflected from a glass to be in that glass. But the more intelligent, who know it to be without, call it a Daëmon” (a god, a spirit).

“The soul, like to a dream, flies quick away, which it does not immediately, as soon as it is separated from the body, but afterward, when it is alone and divided from the understanding (nous).... The soul being moulded and formed by the understanding (nous), and itself moulding and forming the body, by embracing it on every side, receives from it an impression and form; so that although it be separated both from the understanding and the body, it nevertheless so retains still its figure and resemblance for a long time, that it may, with good right, be called its image.

“And of these souls the moon is the element, because souls resolve into her, as the bodies of the deceased do into earth. Those, indeed, who have been virtuous and honest, living a quiet and philosophical life, without embroiling themselves in troublesome affairs, are quickly resolved; because, being left by the nous, understanding, and no longer using the corporeal passions, they incontinently vanish away.”

We find even Irenæus, that untiring and mortal enemy of every Grecian and “heathen” heresy, explain his belief in the trinity of man. The perfect man, according to his views, consists of flesh, soul, and spirit. “... carne, anima, spiritu, altero quidem figurante, spiritu, altero quod formatur, carne. Id vero quod inter haec est duo, est anima, quae aliquando subsequens spiritum elevatur ab eo, aliquando autem consentient carni in terrenas concupiscentias” (Irenæus v., 1).

And Origen, in his Sixth Epistle to the Romans, says: “There is a threefold partition of man, the body or flesh, the lowest part of our nature, on which the old serpent by original sin inscribed the law of sin, and by which we are tempted to vile things, and as oft as we are overcome by temptations are joined fast to the Devil; the spirit, in or by which we express the likeness of the divine nature in which the very Best Creator, from the archetype of his own mind, engraved with his finger (that is, his spirit), the eternal law of honesty; by this we are joined (conglutinated) to God and made one with God. In the third, the soul mediates between these, which, as in a factious republic, cannot but join with one party or the other, is solicited this way and that and is at liberty to choose the side to which it will adhere. If, renouncing the flesh, it betakes itself to the party of the spirit it will itself become spiritual, but if it cast itself down to the cupidities of the flesh it will degenerate itself into body.”

Plato (in Laws x.) defines soul as “the motion that is able to move itself.” “Soul is the most ancient of all things, and the commencement of motion.” “Soul was generated prior to body, and body is posterior and secondary, as being, according to nature, ruled over by the ruling soul.” “The soul which administers all things that are moved in every way, administers likewise the heavens.”

“Soul then leads everything in heaven, and on earth, and in the sea, by its movements--the names of which are, to will, to consider, to take care of, to consult, to form opinions true and false, to be in a state of joy, sorrow, confidence, fear, hate, love, together with all such primary movements as are allied to these ... being a goddess herself, she ever takes as an ally NOUS, a god, and disciplines all things correctly and happily; but when with Annoia--not nous--it works out everything the contrary.”

In this language, as in the Buddhist texts, the negative is treated as essential existence. Annihilation comes under a similar exegesis. The positive state, is essential being but no manifestation as such. When the spirit, in Buddhistic parlance, entered nirvana, it lost objective existence but retained subjective. To objective minds this is becoming absolute nothing; to subjective, NO-thing, nothing to be displayed to sense.

These rather lengthy quotations are necessary for our purpose. Better than anything else, they show the agreement between the oldest “Pagan” philosophies--not “assisted by the light of divine revelation,” to use the curious expression of Laboulaye in relation to Buddha--and the early Christianity of some Fathers. Both Pagan philosophy and Christianity, however, owe their elevated ideas on the soul and spirit of man and the unknown Deity to Buddhism and the Hindu Manu. No wonder that the Manicheans maintained that Jesus was a permutation of Gautama; that Buddha, Christ, and Mani were one and the same person,[592] for the teachings of the former two were identical. It was the doctrine of old India that Jesus held to when preaching the complete renunciation of the world and its vanities in order to reach the kingdom of Heaven, Nirvana, where “men neither marry nor are given in marriage, but live like the angels.”

It is the philosophy of Siddhârtha-Buddha again that Pythagoras expounded, when asserting that the ego (νοῦς) was eternal with God, and that the soul only passed through various stages (Hindu Rupa-locas) to arrive at the divine excellence; meanwhile the thumos returned to the earth, and even the phren was eliminated. Thus the metempsychosis was only a succession of disciplines through refuge-heavens (called by the Buddhists Zion),[593] to work off the exterior mind, to rid the nous of the phren, or soul, the Buddhist “Winyanaskandaya,” that principle that lives from Karma and the Skandhas (groups). It is the latter, the metaphysical personations of the “deeds” of man, whether good or bad, which, after the death of his body, incarnate themselves, so to say, and form their many invisible but never-dying compounds into a new body, or rather into an ethereal being, the double of what man was morally. It is the astral body of the kabalist and the “incarnated deeds” which form the new sentient self as his Ahancara (the ego, self-consciousness), given to him by the sovereign Master (the breath of God) can never perish, for it is immortal per se as a spirit; hence the sufferings of the newly-born self till he rids himself of every earthly thought, desire, and passion.

We now see that the “four mysteries” of the Buddhist doctrine have been as little understood and appreciated as the “wisdom” hinted at by Paul, and spoken “among them that are perfect” (initiated), the “mystery-wisdom” which “none of the Archons of this world knew.”[594] The fourth degree of the Buddhist Dhyâna, the fruit of Samâdhi, which leads to the utmost perfection, to Viconddham, a term correctly rendered by Burnouf in the verb “perfected,”[595] is wholly misunderstood by others, as well as in himself. Defining the condition of Dhyâna, St. Hilaire argues thus:

“Finally, having attained the fourth degree, the ascetic possesses no more this feeling of beatitude, however obscure it may be ... he has also lost all memory ... he has reached impassibility, as near a neighbor of Nirvana as can be.... However, this absolute impassibility does not hinder the ascetic from acquiring, at this very moment, omniscience and the magical power; a flagrant contradiction, about which the Buddhists no more disturb themselves than about so many others.”[596]

And why should they, when these contradictions are, in fact, no contradictions at all? It ill behooves us to speak of contradictions in other peoples’ religions, when those of our own have bred, besides the three great conflicting bodies of Romanism, Protestantism, and the Eastern Church, a thousand and one most curious smaller sects. However it may be, we have here a term applied to one and the same thing by the Buddhist holy “mendicants” and Paul, the Apostle. When the latter says: “If so be that I might attain the resurrection from among the dead [the Nirvana], not as though I had already attained, or were already perfect” (initiated),[597] he uses an expression common among the initiated Buddhists. When a Buddhist ascetic has reached the “fourth degree,” he is considered a rahat. He produces every kind of phenomena by the sole power of his freed spirit. A rahat, say the Buddhists, is one who has acquired the power of flying in the air, becoming invisible, commanding the elements, and working all manner of wonders, commonly, and as erroneously, called meipo (miracles). He is a perfect man, a demi-god. A god he will become when he reaches Nirvana; for, like the initiates of both Testaments, the worshippers of Buddha know that they “are gods.”

“Genuine Buddhism, overleaping the barrier between finite and infinite mind, urges its followers to aspire, by their own efforts, to that divine perfectibility of which it teaches that man is capable, and by attaining which man becomes a god,” says Brian Houghton Hodgson.[598]

Dreary and sad were the ways, and blood-covered the tortuous paths by which the world of the Christians was driven to embrace the Irenæan and Eusebian Christianity. And yet, unless we accept the views of the ancient Pagans, what claim has our generation to having solved any of the mysteries of the “kingdom of heaven?” What more does the most pious and learned of Christians know of the future destiny and progress of our immortal spirits than the heathen philosopher of old, or the modern “Pagan” beyond the Himalaya? Can he even boast that he knows as much, although he works in the full blaze of “divine” revelation? We have seen a Buddhist holding to the religion of his fathers, both in theory and practice; and, however blind may be his faith, however absurd his notions on some particular doctrinal points, later engraftings of an ambitious clergy, yet in practical works his Buddhism is far more Christ-like in deed and spirit than the average life of our Christian priests and ministers. The fact alone that his religion commands him to “honor his own faith, but never slander that of other people,”[599] is sufficient. It places the Buddhist lama immeasurably higher than any priest or clergyman who deems it his sacred duty to curse the “heathen” to his face, and sentence him and his religion to “eternal damnation.” Christianity becomes every day more a religion of pure emotionalism. The doctrine of Buddha is entirely based on practical works. A general love of all beings, human and animal, is its nucleus. A man who knows that unless he toils for himself he has to starve, and understands that he has no scapegoat to carry the burden of his iniquities for him, is ten times as likely to become a better man than one who is taught that murder, theft, and profligacy can be washed in one instant as white as snow, if he but believes in a God who, to borrow an expression of Volney, “once took food upon earth, and is now himself the food of his people.”

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