A. Cross And Circle…

A. Cross And Circle

In the minds of the ancient Philosophers something of the divine and the mysterious has ever been ascribed to the shape of the circle. The old world, consistent in its symbolism and with its Pantheistic intuitions, uniting the visible and the invisible Infinitudes into one, represented Deity and its outward Veil alike—by a circle. This merging of the two into a unity, and the name Theos being given indifferently to both, is explained, and becomes thereby still more scientific and philosophical. Plato’s etymological definition of the word theos (θεός) has, been given elsewhere. In his Cratylus, he derives it from the verb the‐ein (θέειν), “to move,” as suggested by the motion of the heavenly bodies which he connects with Deity. According to the Esoteric Philosophy, this Deity, during its “Nights” and its “Days,” or Cycles of Rest and Activity, is the “Eternal Perpetual Motion,” the “Ever‐Becoming, as well as the ever universally Present, and the Ever‐Existing.” The latter is the root‐ abstraction; the former is the only possible conception in the human mind, if it disconnects this Deity from any shape or form. It is a perpetual, never‐ceasing evolution, circling back in its incessant progress through æons of duration into its original status—Absolute Unity.

It was only the minor Gods who were made to carry the symbolical attributes of the higher ones. Thus, the God Shoo, the personification of Ra, who appears as the “Great Cat of the Basin of Persæa in An”(1283) was often represented in the Egyptian monuments seated and holding a cross, symbol of the four Quarters, or the Elements, attached to a circle.

In that very learned work, The Natural Genesis, by Gerald Massey, under the heading, “Typology of the Cross,” there is more information to be had on the cross and circle than in any other work we know of. He who would fain have proofs of the antiquity of the cross is referred to these two volumes. The author says:

The circle and cross are inseparable.... The Crux Ansata unites the circle and cross of the four corners. From this origin the circle and the cross came to be interchangeable at times. For example, the Chakra, or Disk of Vishnu, is a circle. The name denotes the circling, wheeling round, periodicity, the wheel of time. This the god uses as a weapon to hurl at the enemy. In like manner, Thor throws his weapon, the Fylfot, a form of the four‐ footed cross [Svastika], and a type of the four quarters. Thus the cross is equivalent to the circle of the year. The wheel emblem unites the cross and circle in one, as does the hieroglyphic cake and the Ankh‐tie ☥.(1284)

Nor was the double glyph sacred with the profane, but only with the Initiates. For Raoul Rochette shows that:(1285)

The sign ♀ occurs as the reverse of a Phœnician coin, with a Ram as the obverse.... The same sign, sometimes called Venus’ Looking‐ Glass, because it typified reproduction, was employed to mark the hind‐quarters of valuable brood mares of Corinthian and other beautiful breeds of horses.

This proves that so far back as those early days the cross had already become the symbol of human procreation, and that oblivion of the divine origin of cross and circle had begun.

Another form of the cross is given from the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society:(1286)

At each of the four corners is placed a quarter arc of an oviform curve, and when the four are put together they form an oval; thus the figure combines the cross with the circle round it in four parts, corresponding to the four corners of the cross. The four segments answer to the four feet of the Swastica cross and the Fylfot of Thor. The four‐leaved lotus flower of Buddha, is likewise figured at the centre of this cross, the lotus being an Egyptian and Hindu type of the four quarters. The four quarter arcs, if joined together, would form an ellipse, and the ellipse is also figured on each arm of the cross. This ellipse therefore denotes the path of the earth.... Sir J. Y. Simpson copied the following specimen, [Symbol: Oval, with large letter “Z” inside, with horizontal crossbar] which is here presented, as the cross of the two equinoxes and the two solstices placed within the figure of the earth’s path. The same ovoid or boat‐shaped figure appears at times in the Hindu drawings with seven steps at each end as a form or a mode of Meru.

This is the astronomical aspect of the double glyph. There are six more aspects, however, and an attempt may be made to interpret a few of these. The subject is so vast that it would require in itself alone many volumes.

But the most curious of these Egyptian symbols of cross and circle, spoken of in the above cited work, is one which receives its full explanation and final colour from Âryan symbols of the same nature. Says the author:

The four‐armed Cross is simply the cross of the four quarters, but the cross‐sign is not always simple.(1287) This is a type that was developed from an identifiable beginning, which was adapted to the expression of various ideas afterwards. The most sacred cross of Egypt that was carried in the hands of the Gods, the Pharaohs, and the mummied dead, is the Ankh ☥ the sign of life, the living, an oath, the covenant.... The top of this is the hieroglyphic Ru [Symbol: Horizontal oval] set upright on the Tau‐cross. The Ru is the door, gate, mouth, the place of outlet. This denotes the birthplace in the northern quarter of the heavens, from which the Sun is reborn. Hence the Ru of the Ankh‐sign is the feminine type of the birthplace, representing the north. It was in the northern quarter that the Goddess of the Seven Stars, called the “Mother of the Revolutions,” gave birth to time in the earliest cycle of the year. The first sign of this primordial circle and cycle made in heaven is the earliest shape of the Ankh‐cross [Symbol: Horizontal oval with tail to the right], a mere loop which contains both a circle and the cross in one image. This loop or noose is carried in front of the oldest genitrix, Typhon of the Great Bear; as her Ark, the ideograph of a period, an ending, a time, shown to mean one revolution. This, then, represents the circle made in the northern heaven by the Great Bear which constituted the earliest year of time, from which fact we infer that the loop or Ru of the North represents that quarter, the birthplace of time when figured as the Ru of the Ankh symbol. Indeed this can be proved. The noose is an Ark or Rek type of reckoning. The Ru of the Ankh‐cross was continued in the Cypriote R, [Symbol: Circle with horizontal line beneath], and the Coptic Ro, [Symbol: Figure like a Rho].(1288) The Ro was carried into the Greek cross [Symbol: Large Greek Rho with letter Chi beneath it], which is formed of the Ro and Chi or R‐k.... The Rek, or Ark, was the sign of all beginning (Arche) on this account, and the Ark‐tie is the cross of the North, the hind part of heaven.(1289)

Now this, again, is entirely astronomical and phallic. The Paurânic version in India gives the whole matter another colour. Without destroying the above interpretation, it is made to reveal a portion of its mysteries with the help of the astronomical key, and thus offers a more metaphysical rendering. The Ankh‐tie [Symbol: Horizontal oval with tail to the right] does not belong to Egypt alone. It exists under the name of Pâsha, a cord which the four‐armed Shiva holds in the hand of his right back arm.(1290) The Mahâdeva is represented in the posture of an ascetic, as Mahâyogî, with his third eye [Symbol: Vertical oval with dot in the middle], which is “the Ru [Symbol: Horizontal oval with dot in the middle], set upright on the Tau‐cross” in another form. The Pâsha is held in the hand in such a way that the first finger and hand near the thumb make the cross, or loop and crossing. Our Orientalists would have it to represent a cord to bind refractory offenders with, because, forsooth, Kâlî, Shiva’s consort, has the same as an attribute!

The Pâsha has here a double significance, as also has Shiva’s Trisûla and every other divine attribute. This dual significance lies in Shiva, for Rudra has certainly the same meaning as the Egyptian Ansated Cross in its cosmic and mystic meaning. In the hand of Shiva, the Pâsha becomes lingyonic. Shiva, as said before, is a name unknown to the Vedas. It is in the White Yajur Veda that Rudra appears for the first time as the Great God, Mahâdeva, whose symbol is the Lingam. In the Rig Veda he is called Rudra, the “howler,” the beneficent and the maleficent Deity at the same time, the Healer and the Destroyer. In the Vishnu Purâna, he is the God who springs from the forehead of Brahmâ, who separates into male and female, and he is the parent of the Rudras or Maruts, half of whom are brilliant and gentle, others, black and ferocious. In the Vedas, he is the Divine Ego aspiring to return to its pure, deific state, and at the same time that Divine Ego imprisoned in earthly form, whose fierce passions make of him the “roarer,” the “terrible.” This is well shown in the Brihadâranyaka Upanishad, wherein the Rudras, the progeny of Rudra, God of Fire, are called the “ten vital breaths (prâna, life), with the heart (manas), as eleventh,”(1291) whereas as Shiva, he is the destroyer of that life. Brahmâ calls him Rudra, and gives him, besides, seven other names, signifying seven forms of manifestation, and also the seven powers of nature which destroy but to recreate or regenerate.

Hence the cruciform noose, or Pâsha, in the hand of Shiva, when he is represented as an ascetic, the Mahâyogin, has no phallic signification, and, indeed, it requires an imagination strongly bent in this direction to find such a signification even in an astronomical symbol. As an emblem of “door, gate, mouth, the place of outlet” it signifies the “strait gate” that leads to the Kingdom of Heaven, far more than the “birthplace” in a physiological sense.

It is a cross in a circle and Crux Ansata, truly; but it is a cross on which all the human passions have to be crucified before the Yogî passes through the “strait gate,” the narrow circle that widens into an infinite one, as soon as the Inner Man has passed the threshold.

As to the mysterious seven Rishis in the constellation of the Great Bear; if Egypt made them sacred to “the oldest genitrix, Typhon,” India has connected these symbols ages ago with Time or Yuga‐revolutions, and the Saptarshis are intimately connected with our present age‐the dark Kali Yuga.(1292) The great Circle of Time, on the face of which, Indian fancy has represented the Porpoise, or Shishumâra, has the cross placed on it by nature in its division and localization of stars, planets and constellations. In Bhâgavata Purâna,(1293) it is said:

At the extremity of the tail of that animal, whose head is directed toward the south, and whose body is in the shape of a ring [circle], Dhruva [the ex‐pole star] is placed; along its tail are Prajâpati, Agni, Indra, Dharma, etc.; across its loins the seven Rishis.(1294)

This is then the first and earliest cross and circle, formed by the Deity, symbolized by Vishnu, the Eternal Circle of Boundless Time, Kâla, on whose plane lie crossways all the Gods, creatures, and creations born in Space and Time‐who, as the Philosophy has it, all die at the Mahâpralaya.

Meanwhile it is the seven Rishis who mark the time and the duration of events in our septenary Life‐cycle. They are as mysterious as their supposed wives, the Pleiades, of whom only one‐she who hides‐has proven virtuous. The Pleiades, or Krittikâs, are the nurses of Kârttikeya, the God of War (the Mars of the Western Pagans), who is called the Commander of the Celestial Armies, or rather of the Siddhas—Siddha‐sena (translated Yogîs in Heaven, and holy Sages on the Earth)—which would make Kârttikeya identical with Michael, the “Leader of the Celestial Hosts” and, like himself, a virgin Kumâra.(1295) Verily he is the Guha, the “Mysterious One,” as much so as are the Saptarshis and the Krittikâs, the seven Rishis and the Pleiades, for the interpretation of all these combined reveal to the Adept the greatest mysteries of Occult Nature. One point is worth mention in this question of cross and circle, as it bears strongly upon the elements of Fire and Water, which play such an important part in the circle and cross symbolism. Like Mars, who is alleged by Ovid to have been born of his mother Juno alone, without the participation of a father, or like the Avatâras (Krishna, for instance)—in the West as in the East—Kârttikeya is born, but in a still more miraculous manner, begotten by neither father nor mother, but out of a seed of Rudra‐Shiva, which was cast into the Fire (Agni) and then received by the Water (Ganges). Thus he is born from Fire and Water—a “boy bright as the Sun and beautiful as the Moon.” Hence he is called Agnibhû (son of Agni) and Gangâputra (son of Ganges). Add to this the fact that the Krittikâ, his nurses, as the Matsya Purâna shows, are presided over by Agni, or, in the authentic words, “the seven Rishis are on a line with the brilliant Agni,” and hence “Krittika has Âgneya as a synonym”(1296)—and the connection is easy to follow.

It is, then, the Rishis who mark the time and the periods of Kali Yuga, the age of sin and sorrow. As the Bhâgavata Purâna tells us:

When the splendour of Vishnu, named Krishna, departed for heaven, then did the Kali age, during which men delight in sin, invade the world....

When the seven Rishis were in Maghâ, the Kali age, comprising 1,200 [divine] years [432,000 common years] began; and, when, from Maghâ, they shall reach Pûrvâshâdhâ, then will this Kali age attain its growth, under Nanda and his successors.(1297)

This is the revolution of the Rishis—

When the two first stars of the seven Rishis (the Great Bear) rise in the heavens, and some lunar asterism is seen at night, at an equal distance between them, then the seven Rishis continue stationary in that conjunction for a hundred years,

—as a hater of Nanda makes Parâshara say. According to Bentley, it was in order to show the quantity of the precession of the equinoxes that this notion originated among the Astronomers.

This was by assuming an imaginary line, or great circle, passing through the poles of the ecliptic and the beginning of the fixed Maghâ, which circle was supposed to cut some of the stars in the Great Bear.... The seven stars in the Great Bear being called the Rishis, the circle so assumed was called the line of the Rishis; and, being invariably fixed to the beginning of the lunar asterism Maghâ, the precession would be noted by stating the degree, etc., of any movable lunar mansion cut by that line or circle, as an index.(1298)

There has been, and there still exists, a seemingly endless controversy about the chronology of the Hindûs. Here is, however, a point that could help to determine—approximately at least—the age when the symbolism of the seven Rishis and their connection with the Pleiades began. When Kârttikeya was delivered to the Krittikâ by the Gods to be nursed, they were only six, whence Kârttikeya is represented with six heads; but when the poetical fancy of the early Âryan Symbologists made of them the consorts of the seven Rishis, they were seven. Their names are given, and these are Amba, Dulâ, Nitatui, Abrayanti, Maghâyanti, Varshayanti, and Chupunika. There are other sets of names which differ, however. Anyhow, the seven Rishis were made to marry the seven Krittikâ before the disappearance of the seventh Pleiad. Otherwise, how could the Hindû astronomers speak of a star which no one can see without the help of the strongest telescopes? This is why, perhaps, in every such case the majority of the events described in the Hindû allegories is fixed upon as “a very recent invention, certainly within the Christian era.”

The oldest Sanskrit MSS. on Astronomy begin their series of Nakshatras, the twenty‐seven lunar asterisms, with the sign of Krittikâ, and this can hardly make them earlier than 2,780 B.C. This is according to the “Vedic Calendar,” which is accepted even by the Orientalists, though they get out of the difficulty by saying that the said Calendar does not prove that the Hindûs knew anything of Astronomy at that date, and assure their readers that, Calendars notwithstanding, the Indian Pandits may have acquired their knowledge of the lunar mansions headed by Krittikâ from the Phœnicians, etc. However that may be, the Pleiades are the central group of the system of sidereal symbology. They are situated in the neck of the constellation Taurus, regarded by Mädler and others, in Astronomy, as the central group of the system of the Milky Way, and in the Kabalah and Eastern Esotericism, as the sidereal septenate born from the first manifested side of the upper triangle, the concealed [triangle]. This manifested side is Taurus, the symbol of One (the figure 1), or of the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Aleph (א) “bull” or “ox,” whose synthesis is Ten (10), or Yod (י), the perfect letter and number. The Pleiades (Alcyone, especially), are thus considered, even in Astronomy, as the central point around which our universe of fixed stars revolves, the focus from which, and into which, the Divine Breath, Motion, works incessantly during the Manvantara. Hence, in the sidereal symbols of the Occult Philosophy, it is this circle with the starry cross on its face which plays the most prominent part.

The Secret Doctrine teaches us that everything in the Universe, as well as the Universe itself, is formed (“created”) during its periodical manifestations—by accelerated Motion set into activity by the Breath of the Ever‐to‐be‐unknown Power—unknown to present mankind, at any rate—within the phenomenal world. The Spirit of Life and Immortality was everywhere symbolized by a circle; hence the serpent biting its tail, represents the Circle of Wisdom in Infinity; as does the astronomical cross—the cross within a circle—and the globe, with two wings added to it, which then became the sacred Scarabæus of the Egyptians, its very name being suggestive of the secret idea attached to it. For the Scarabæus is called in the Egyptian papyri, Khopirron and Khopri from the verb khopron, “to become,” and has thus been made a symbol and an emblem of human life and of the successive “becomings” of man, through the various peregrinations and metempsychoses, or reïncarnations, of the liberated soul. This mystical symbol shows plainly that the Egyptians believed in reïncarnation and the successive lives and existences of the Immortal Entity. As this, however, was an Esoteric Doctrine, revealed only during the Mysteries, by the Priest‐hierophants and the King‐initiates to the Candidates, it was kept secret. The Incorporeal Intelligences (the Planetary Spirits, or Creative Powers) were always represented under the form of circles. In the primitive Philosophy of the Hierophants these invisible circles were the prototypic causes and builders of all the heavenly orbs, which were their visible bodies or coverings, and of which they were the souls. It was certainly a universal teaching in antiquity.(1299) As Proclus says:

Before the mathematical numbers, there are the self‐moving numbers; before the figures apparent—the vital figures, and before producing the material worlds which move in a circle, the Creative Power produced the invisible circles.(1300)

“Deus enim et circulus est,” says Pherecydes, in his Hymn to Jupiter. This was a Hermetic axiom, and Pythagoras prescribed such a circular prostration and posture during the hours of contemplation. “The devotee must approach as much as possible the form of a perfect circle,” prescribes the Secret Book. Numa tried to spread the same custom among the people, Pierius tells his readers; and Pliny says:

During our worship, we roll up, so to say, our body in a ring—totum corpus circumagimur.(1301)

The Vision of the prophet Ezekiel reminds one forcibly of this mysticism of the circle, when he beheld a “whirlwind” from which came out “one wheel upon the earth” whose work “was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel”—“for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels.”(1302)

“[Spirit] whirleth about continually, and ... returneth again according to his circuits”—says Solomon,(1303) who is made in the English translation to speak of the “wind,” and in the original text to refer both to the spirit and the sun. But the Zohar, the only true gloss of the Kabalistic Preacher—in explanation of this verse, which is, perhaps, rather hazy and difficult to comprehend—says:

It seems to say that the sun moves in circuits, whereas it refers to the Spirit under the sun, called the Holy Spirit, that moves circularly, toward both sides, that they [It and the sun] should be united in the same Essence.(1304)

The Brâhmanical “Golden Egg,” from within which emerges Brahmâ, the Creative Deity, is the “Circle with the Central Point” of Pythagoras, and its fitting symbol. In the Secret Doctrine the concealed Unity—whether representing Parabrahman, or the “Great Extreme” of Confucius, or the Deity concealed by Phtah, the Eternal Light, or again the Jewish Ain Suph, is always found to be symbolized by a circle or the “nought” (absolute No‐ Thing and Nothing, because it is Infinite and the All); while the God‐ manifested (by its works) is referred to as the Diameter of that Circle. The symbolism of the underlying idea is thus made evident: the right line passing through the centre of a circle has, in the geometrical sense, length, but neither breadth nor thickness; it is an imaginary and feminine symbol, crossing eternity, and made to rest on the plane of existence of the phenomenal world. It is dimensional, whereas its circle is dimensionless, or, to use an algebraical term, it is the dimension of an equation. Another way of symbolizing the idea is found in the Pythagorean sacred Decad which synthesizes, in the dual numeral Ten (the one and a circle or cipher), the Absolute All manifesting itself in the Word or Generative Power of Creation.

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B. The Fall Of The Cross Into Matter

Those who would feel inclined to argue upon this Pythagorean symbol by objecting that it is not yet ascertained, so far, at what period of antiquity the nought or cipher occurs for the first time—especially in India—are referred to Isis Unveiled.(1305)

Admitting for argument’s sake that the ancient world was not acquainted with our modes of calculation or Arabic figures—though in reality we know it was—yet the circle and diameter idea is there to show that it was the first symbol in Cosmogony. Before the Trigrams of Fo‐hi, Yang, the unity, and Yin, the binary, explained cunningly enough by Éliphas Lévi,(1306) China had her Confucius, and her Tao‐ists. The former circumscribes the “Great Extreme” within a circle with a horizontal line across; the latter place three concentric circles beneath the great circle, while the Sung Sages showed the “Great Extreme” in an upper circle, and Heaven and Earth in two lower and smaller circles. The Yangs and the Yins are a far later invention. Plato and his school never understood the Deity otherwise, notwithstanding the many epithets applied by him to the “God over all” (ὁ ἐπὶ πᾶσι θεός). Plato, having been initiated, could not believe in a personal God—a gigantic shadow of man. His epithets of “Monarch” and “Law‐ giver of the Universe” bear an abstract meaning well understood by every Occultist, who, no less than any Christian, believes in the One Law that governs the Universe, and recognizes it at the same time as immutable. As Plato says:

Beyond all finite existences and secondary causes, all laws, ideas and principles, there is an Intelligence or Mind (νοῦς), the first principle of all principles, the Supreme Idea on which all other ideas are grounded, ... the ultimate substance from which all things derive their being and essence, the First and efficient Cause of all the order, and harmony, and beauty and excellency, and goodness, which pervade the Universe.

This Mind is called, by way of preëminence and excellence, the Supreme Good,(1307) “The God” (ὁ θεός), and the “God over all.” These words apply, as Plato himself shows, neither to the “Creator” nor to the “Father” of our modern Monotheist, but to the Ideal and Abstract Cause. For, as he says: “This θεός, the God over all, is not the truth or the intelligence, but the Father of it,” and its Primal Cause. Is it Plato, the greatest pupil of the archaic Sages, a Sage himself, for whom there was but a single object of attainment in this life—Real Knowledge—who would have ever believed in a Deity that curses and damns men for ever, on the slightest provocation?(1308) Surely not he who considered only those to be genuine Philosophers and students of truth who possessed the knowledge of the really‐existing in opposition to mere seeming; of the always‐existing in opposition to the transitory: and of that which exists permanently in opposition to that which waxes, wanes, and is developed and destroyed alternately.(1309) Speusippus and Xenocrates followed in his footsteps. The One, the original, had no existence, in the sense applied to it by mortal men. The τίμιον (the honoured) dwells in the centre as in the circumference, but it is only the reflection of the Deity—the World Soul(1310)—the plane of the surface of the circle. The cross and circle are a universal conception—as old as the human mind itself. They stand foremost on the list of the long series of, so to say, international symbols, which expressed very often great scientific truths, besides their direct bearing upon psychological, and even physiological mysteries.

It is no explanation to say, as does Éliphas Lévi, that God, the universal Love, having caused the male Unit to dig an abyss in the female Binary, or Chaos, thereby produced the world. In addition to the grossness of the conception, it does not remove the difficulty of conceiving it without losing one’s veneration for the rather too human‐like ways of the Deity. It is to avoid such anthropomorphic conceptions that the Initiates never used the epithet “God” to designate the One and Secondless Principle in the Universe; and that—faithful in this to the oldest traditions of the Secret Doctrine the world over—they deny that such imperfect and often not very clean work could ever be produced by Absolute Perfection. There is no need to mention here other still greater metaphysical difficulties. Between speculative Atheism and idiotic Anthropomorphism there must be a philosophical mean, and a reconciliation. The Presence of the Unseen Principle throughout all Nature, and the highest manifestation of it on Earth—Man, can alone help to solve the problem, which is that of the mathematician whose x must ever elude the grasp of our terrestrial algebra. The Hindûs have tried to solve it by their Avatâras, the Christians think they have done so—by their one divine Incarnation. Exoterically—both are wrong; Esoterically both of them are very near the truth. Alone, among the Apostles of the Western religion, Paul seems to have fathomed—if not actually revealed—the archaic mystery of the cross. As for the rest of those who, by unifying and individualizing the Universal Presence, have synthesized it into one symbol—the central point in the crucifix—they show thereby that they have never seized the true spirit of the teaching of Christ, but rather that they have degraded it in more than one way by their erroneous interpretations. They have forgotten the spirit of that universal symbol and have selfishly monopolized it—as though the Boundless and the Infinite could ever be limited and conditioned to one manifestation individualized in one man, or even in a nation!

The four arms of the [Symbol: cross like the letter “X”], or decussated cross, and of the Hermetic cross, pointing to the four cardinal points—were well understood by the mystical minds of the Hindûs, Brâhmans and Buddhists, hundreds of years before it was heard of in Europe, for that symbol was and is found all over the world. They bent the ends of the cross and made of it their Svastika, 卐 now the Wan of the Mongolian Buddhist.(1311) It implies that the “central point” is not limited to one individual, however perfect; that The Principle (God) is in Humanity, and Humanity, as all the rest, is in It, like drops of water are in the ocean, the four ends being toward the four cardinal points, hence losing themselves in infinity.

Isarim, an Initiate, is said to have found at Hebron, on the dead body of Hermes, the well known Smaragdine Tablet, which, it is said, contained the essence of Hermetic Wisdom. Upon it were traced, among others, the sentences:

Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross....

Ascend ... from the earth to heaven and then descend again to earth.

The riddle of the cross is contained in these words, and its double mystery is solved—to the Occultist.

The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the Occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master‐key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession, birth, life, death, and immortality.(1312)

“Attach thyself,” says the Alchemist, “to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner. The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters.”(1313)

Again:

The Tau, Τ, and the astronomical cross of Egypt, [Symbol: Circle with cross within] are conspicuous in several apertures of the remains of Palenque. In one of the basso‐relievos of the Palace of Palenque, on the west side, sculptured as a hieroglyphic right under the seated figure, is a Tau. The standing figure, which leans over the first one, is in the act of covering its head with the left hand with the veil of initiation; while it extends its right with the index and middle finger pointing to heaven. The position is precisely that of a Christian bishop giving his blessing, or the one in which Jesus is often represented while at the Last Supper.(1314)

The Egyptian Hierophant had a square head‐dress which he had to wear always during his functions. These square hats are worn unto this day by the Armenian priests. The perfect Tau—formed of the perpendicular (descending male ray) and the horizontal line (Matter, female principle)—and the mundane circle were attributes of Isis, and it was only at death that the Egyptian cross was laid on the breast of the mummy. The claim that the cross is purely a Christian symbol introduced after our era, is strange indeed, when we find Ezekiel stamping the foreheads of the men of Judah who feared the Lord,(1315) with the signum Thau, as it is translated in the Vulgate. In the ancient Hebrew this sign was formed thus [Symbol: Cross, tilted towards the northeast], but in the original Egyptian hieroglyphics as a perfect Christian cross ☦ (Tat, the emblem of stability). In the Revelation, also, the “Alpha and Omega”—Spirit and Matter—the first and the last, stamps the name of his Father on the foreheads of the elect. Moses(1316) orders his people to mark their door‐posts and lintels with blood, lest the “Lord God” should make a mistake and smite some of his chosen people, instead of the doomed Egyptians. And this mark is a Tau!—the identical Egyptian handled cross, with the half of which talisman Horus raised the dead, as is shown on a sculptured ruin at Philæ.

Enough has been said in the text about the Svastika and the Tau. Verily may the cross be traced back into the very depths of the unfathomable archaic ages! Its mystery deepens rather than clears, as we find it on the statues of Easter Island, in old Egypt, in Central Asia, engraved on rocks as the Tau and Svastika, in Pre‐Christian Scandinavia, everywhere! The author of the Source of Measures stands perplexed before the endless shadow it throws back into antiquity, and is unable to trace it to any particular nation or man. He shows the Targums handed down by the Hebrews, obscured by translation. In Joshua(1317) read in Arabic, and in the Targum of Jonathan, it is said: “The king of Ai he crucified upon a tree.”

The Septuagint rendering is of suspension from a double word or cross. (Wordsworth on Joshua.) ... The strangest expression of this kind is in Numbers (xxv. 4) where, by Onkelos (?) it is read: “Crucify them before the Lord (Jehovah) against the sun.” The word here is יקע, to nail to, rendered properly (Fuerst) by the Vulgate, to crucify. The very construction of this sentence is mystic.(1318)

So it is, but the spirit of it has been ever misunderstood. “To crucify before (not against) the Sun” is a phrase used of Initiation. It comes from Egypt, and primarily from India. The enigma can be unriddled only by searching for its key in the Mysteries of Initiation. The Initiated Adept, who had successfully passed through all the trials, was attached, not nailed, but simply tied on a couch in the form of a Tau, Τ, in Egypt, of a Svastika without the four additional prolongations (☩ not 卐) in India, plunged in a deep sleep—the “Sleep of Siloam,” as it is called to this day among the Initiates in Asia Minor, in Syria, and even higher Egypt. He was allowed to remain in this state for three days and three nights, during which time his Spiritual Ego was said to “confabulate” with the “Gods,” descend into Hades, Amenti, or Pâtâla—according to the country—and do works of charity to the invisible Beings, whether Souls of men or Elemental Spirits; his body remaining all the time in a temple crypt or subterranean cave. In Egypt it was placed in the Sarcophagus in the King’s Chamber of the Pyramid of Cheops, and carried during the night of the approaching third day to the entrance of a gallery, where at a certain hour the beams of the rising Sun struck full on the face of the entranced Candidate, who awoke to be initiated by Osiris and Thoth, the God of Wisdom.

Let the reader who doubts the statement consult the Hebrew originals before he denies. Let him turn to some most suggestive Egyptian bas reliefs. One especially from the temple of Philæ, represents a scene of initiation. Two God‐Hierophants, one with the head of a hawk (the Sun), the other ibis‐headed (Mercury, Thoth, the God of Wisdom and Secret Learning, the assessor of Osiris‐Sun), are standing over the body of a Candidate just initiated. They are in the act of pouring on his head a double stream of “water” (the Water of Life and of New‐birth), the streams being interlaced in the shape of a cross and full of small ansated crosses. This is allegorical of the awakening of the Candidate who is now an Initiate, when the beams of the morning Sun, Osiris, strike the crown of his head; his entranced body being placed on its wooden Tau so as to receive the rays. Then appeared the Hierophant‐Initiators, and the sacramental words were pronounced, ostensibly to the Sun‐Osiris, in reality to the Spirit‐Sun within, enlightening the newly‐born man.

Let the reader meditate on the connection of the Sun with the cross from the highest antiquity, in both its generative and spiritually regenerative capacities. Let him examine the tomb of Bait‐Oxly, in the reign of Ramses II, where he will find the crosses in every shape and position; as also on the throne of that sovereign, and finally on a fragment representing the adoration of Bakhan‐Alearé, from the Hall of the ancestors of Totmes III, now preserved in the National Library of Paris. In this extraordinary sculpture and painting one sees the disk of the Sun beaming upon an ansated cross placed upon a cross of which those of the Calvary are perfect copies. The ancient MSS. mention these as the “hard couches of those who were in [spiritual] travail, the act of giving birth to themselves.” A quantity of such cruciform “couches,” on which the Candidate, thrown into a dead trance at the end of his supreme Initiation, was placed and secured, were found in the underground halls of the Egyptian Temples after their destruction. The worthy and holy Fathers of the Cyril and Theophilus types used them freely, believing they had been brought and concealed there by some new converts. Alone Origen, and after him Clemens Alexandrinus and other ex‐initiates, knew better. But they preferred to keep silent.

Again, let the reader read the Hindû “fables,” as the Orientalists call them, and remember the allegory of Vishvakarmâ, the Creative Power, the Great Architect of the World, called in the Rig Veda the “All‐seeing God,” who “sacrifices himself to himself.” The Spiritual Egos of mortals are his own essence, one with him, therefore. Remember that he is called Deva‐vardhika, the “Builder of the Gods,” and that it is he who ties the Sun, Sûrya, his son‐in‐law, on his lathe—in the exoteric allegory, but on the Svastika, in Esoteric tradition, for on Earth he is the Hierophant‐ Initiator—and cuts away a portion of his brightness. Vishvakarmâ, remember again, is the son of Yoga‐siddhâ, i.e., the holy power of Yoga, and the fabricator of the “fiery weapon,” the magic Agneyastra.(1319) The narrative is given more fully elsewhere.

The author of the kabalistic work so often quoted from, asks:

The theoretical use of crucifixion then, must have been somehow connected with the personification of this symbol [the structure of the Garden of Paradise symbolized by a crucified man]. But how? And as showing what? The symbol was of the origin of measures, shadowing forth creative law or design. What, practically, as regards humanity, could actual crucifixion betoken? Yet, that it was held as the effigy of some mysterious working of the same system, is shown from the very fact of the use. There seems to be deep below deep as to the mysterious workings of these number values—[the symbolization of the connection of 113: 355, with 20612: 6561, by a crucified man]. Not only are they shown to work in the cosmos but, ... by sympathy, they seem to work out conditions relating to an unseen and spiritual world, and the prophets seem to have held knowledge of the connecting links. Reflection becomes more involved when it is considered that, the power of expression of the law, exactly, by numbers clearly defining a system, was not the accident of the language, but was its very essence, and of its primary organic construction; therefore, neither the language, nor the mathematical system attaching to it, could be of man’s invention, unless both were founded upon a prior language which afterwards became obsolete.(1320)

The author proves these points by further elucidation, and reveals the secret meaning of more than one dead‐letter narrative, by showing that probably, איש, man, was the primordial word:

The very first word possessed by the Hebrews, whoever they were, to carry the idea, by sound, of a man. The essential of this word was 113 [the numerical value of that word] from the beginning, and carried with it the elements of the cosmical system displayed.(1321)

This is demonstrated by the Hindû Vittoba, a form of Vishnu, as has already been stated. The figure of Vittoba, even to the nail‐marks on the feet,(1322) is that of Jesus crucified, in all its details save the cross. That man was meant is proved to us further by the fact of the Initiate being reborn after his crucifixion on the Tree of Life. This “Tree” has now become exoterically—through its use by the Romans as an instrument of torture and the ignorance of the early Christian schemers—the tree of death!

Thus, one of the seven Esoteric meanings intended by this mystery of crucifixion by the mystic inventors of the system—the original elaboration and adoption of which dates back to the very establishment of the Mysteries—is discovered in the geometrical symbols containing the history of the evolution of man. The Hebrews—whose prophet Moses was so learned in the Esoteric Wisdom of Egypt, and who adopted their numerical system from the Phœnicians, and later from the Gentiles, from whom also they borrowed most of their Kabalistic Mysticism—most ingeniously adapted the cosmic and anthropological symbols of the “Heathen” nations to their peculiar secret records. If Christian sacerdotalism has lost the key of this to‐ day, the early compilers of the Christian Mysteries were well versed in Esoteric Philosophy and the Hebrew Occult Metrology, and used it dexterously. Thus they took the word Aish, one of the Hebrew word‐forms for man, and used it in conjunction with that of Shânâh or lunar year, so mystically connected with the name of Jehovah, the supposed “Father” of Jesus, and embosomed the mystic idea in an astronomical value and formula.

The original idea of the “man crucified” in space certainly belongs to the ancient Hindûs. Moor shows this in his Hindû Pantheon in the engraving that represents Vittoba. Plato adopted it in his decussated cross in space, the [Symbol: cross like the letter “X”], the “second God who impressed himself on the universe in the form of the cross”; Krishna is likewise shown “crucified.”(1323) Again it is repeated in the Old Testament in the queer injunction to crucify men before the Lord, the Sun—which is no prophecy at all, but has a direct phallic significance. In that same most suggestive work on the kabalistic meanings, we read again:

In symbol, the nails of the cross have for the shape of the heads thereof a solid pyramid, and a tapering square obeliscal shaft, or phallic emblem, for the nail. Taking the position of the three nails in the man’s extremities and on the cross, they form or mark a triangle in shape, one nail being at each corner of the triangle. The wounds, or stigmata, in the extremities are necessarily four, designative of the square.... The three nails with the three wounds are in number 6, which denotes the 6 faces of the cube unfolded [which make the cross or man‐form, or 7, counting three horizontal and four vertical squares], on which the man is placed; and this in turn points to the circular measure transferred on to the edges of the cube. The one wound of the feet separates into two when the feet are separated, making three together for all, and four when separated, or 7 in all—another and most holy [with the Jews] feminine base number.(1324)

Thus, while the phallic or sexual meaning of the “crucifixion nails” is proven by the geometrical and numerical reading, its mystical meaning is indicated by the short remarks upon it, as given above, in its connection with, and bearing upon, Prometheus. He is another victim, for he is crucified on the Cross of Love, on the rock of human passions, a sacrifice to his devotion to the cause of the spiritual element in Humanity.

Now, the primordial system, the double glyph that underlies the idea of the cross, is not of “human invention,” for Cosmic Ideation and the spiritual representation of the Divine Ego‐man are at its basis. Later, it expanded into the beautiful idea adopted by, and represented in, the Mysteries, that of regenerated man, the mortal, who, by crucifying the man of flesh and his passions on the Procrustean bed of torture, became reborn as an Immortal. Leaving the body, the animal‐man, behind him, tied on the Cross of Initiation like an empty chrysalis, the Ego‐Soul became as free as a butterfly. Still later, owing to the gradual loss of spirituality, the cross became in Cosmogony and Anthropology no higher than a phallic symbol.

With the Esotericists from the remotest times, the Universal Soul or Anima Mundi, the material reflection of the Immaterial Ideal, was the Source of Life of all beings and of the Life‐Principle of the three kingdoms. This was septenary with the Hermetic Philosophers, as with all Ancients. For it is represented as a sevenfold cross, whose branches are respectively, light, heat, electricity, terrestrial magnetism, astral radiation, motion, and intelligence, or what some call self‐ consciousness.

As we have said elsewhere, long before the cross or its sign were adopted as symbols of Christianity, the sign of the cross was used as a mark of recognition among Adepts and Neophytes, the latter being called Chrests—from Chrestos, the man of tribulation and sorrow. Says Éliphas Lévi:

The sign of the cross adopted by the Christians does not belong to them exclusively. It is also kabalistic, and represents the opposition and quaternary equilibrium of the elements. We see by the occult verse of the Paternoster ... that there were originally two ways of doing it, or, at least two very different formulas to express its meaning: one reserved for the priests and initiates; the other given to neophytes and the profane. Thus, for example, the initiate, carrying his hand to his forehead, said, To thee; then he added, belong; and continued, carrying his hand to the breast, the kingdom; then to the left shoulder, justice; to the right shoulder, and mercy. Then he joined the two hands, adding, throughout the generating cycles—Tibi sunt Malchut et Geburah et Chesed per Æonas—an absolutely and magnificently kabalistic sign of the cross, which the profanations of Gnosticism made the militant and official Church completely lose.(1325)

The “militant and official Church” did more: having helped herself to what had never belonged to her, she took only that which the “Profane” had—the kabalistic meaning of the male and female Sephiroth. She never lost the inner and higher meaning since she never had it—Éliphas Lévi’s pandering to Rome notwithstanding. The sign of the cross adopted by the Latin Church was phallic from the beginning, while that of the Greeks was the cross of the Neophytes, the Chrestoi.

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Section IX. The Upanishads in Gnostic Literature

We are reminded in King’s Gnostics and their Remains that the Greek language had but one word for vowel and voice. This has led the uninitiated to many erroneous interpretations. On the simple knowledge, however, of this well‐known fact a comparison may be attempted, and a flood of light thrown upon several mystic meanings. Thus the words, so often used in the Upanishads and the Purânas, “Sound” and “Speech,” may be collated with the Gnostic “Vowels” and the “Voices” of the Thunders and Angels in Revelation. The same will be found in Pistis Sophia, and other ancient Fragments and MSS. This was remarked even by the matter‐of‐ fact author of the above mentioned work.

Through Hippolytus, an early Church Father, we learn what Marcus—a Pythagorean rather than a Christian Gnostic, and a Kabalist most certainly—had received in mystic revelation. It is said that Marcus had it revealed unto him that:

The seven heavens(1326) ... sounded each one vowel, which, all combined together, formed a single doxology, “the sound whereof being carried down [from these seven heavens] to earth, becomes the creator and parent of all things that be on earth.”(1327)

Translated from the Occult phraseology into still plainer language this would read: The Sevenfold Logos having differentiated into seven Logoi, or Creative Potencies (Vowels), these (the Second Logos, or “Sound”) created all on Earth.

Assuredly one who is acquainted with Gnostic literature can hardly help seeing in St. John’s Apocalypse, a work of the same school of thought. For we find John saying:

Seven thunders uttered their voices ... [and] I was about to write ... [but] I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and write them not.(1328)

The same injunction is given to Marcus, the same to all other semi and full Initiates. The very sameness of the expressions used, and of the underlying ideas, always betrays a portion of the Mysteries. We must always seek for more than one meaning in every mystery allegorically revealed, especially in those in which the number seven and its multiplication seven by seven, or forty‐nine, appear. Now when, in Pistis Sophia, the Rabbi Jesus is requested by his disciples to reveal to them the “Mysteries of the Light of his Father”—i.e., of the Higher Self enlightened by Initiation and Divine Knowledge—Jesus answers:

Do ye seek after these mysteries? No mystery is more excellent than they; which shall bring your souls unto the Light of Lights, unto the place of Truth and Goodness, unto the place where there is neither male nor female, neither form in that place but Light, everlasting, not to be uttered. Nothing therefore is more excellent than the mysteries which ye seek after, saving only the mystery of the seven Vowels and their forty and nine Powers, and their numbers thereof. And no name is more excellent than all these (Vowels).(1329)

As says the Commentary, speaking of the “Fires”:

The Seven Fathers and the Forty‐nine Sons blaze in Darkness, but they are the Life and Light and the continuation thereof through the Great Age.

Now it becomes evident that, in every Esoteric interpretation of exoteric beliefs expressed in allegorical forms, there is the same underlying idea—the basic number seven, the compound of three and four, preceded by the divine three ([triangle]) making the perfect number ten.

Also, these numbers apply equally to divisions of time, to cosmography, metaphysical and physical, as well as to man and everything else in visible Nature. Thus these seven Vowels with their forty‐nine Powers are identical with the three and the seven Fires of the Hindûs and their forty‐nine Fires; identical with the numerical mysteries of the Persian Simorgh; identical with those of the Jewish Kabalists. The latter, dwarfing the numbers (their mode of “blinds”), made the duration of each successive Renewal, or what we call in Esoteric parlance Round, 1,000 years only or of the seven Renewals of the Globe 7,000 years, instead of, as is more likely, 7,000,000,000, and assigned to the total duration of the Universe 49,000 years only.(1330)

Now, the Secret Doctrine furnishes a key which reveals to us on the Indisputable grounds of comparative analogy that Garuda, the allegorical and monstrous half‐man and half‐bird—the Vâhana or vehicle on which Vishnu, as Kâla or “Time,” is shown to ride—is the origin of all such allegories. He is the Indian Phœnix, the emblem of cyclic and periodical time, the “Man‐lion” (Sinha), of whose representations the so‐called Gnostic gems are so full.(1331)

Over the seven rays of the lion’s crown, and corresponding to their points, stand often the seven vowels of the Greek alphabet, ΑΕΗΙΟΥΩ, testifying to the Seven Heavens.(1332)

This is the Solar Lion and the emblem of the Solar Cycle, as Garuda(1333) is that of the Great Cycle, the Mahâ Kalpa, coëternal with Vishnu, and also, of course, the emblem of the Sun and Solar Cycle. This is shown by the details of the allegory. At his birth, Garuda, on account of his “dazzling splendour,” is mistaken for Agni, the God of Fire, and was thence called Gaganeshvara, “Lord of the Sky.” Its representation as Osiris, on the Abraxas (Gnostic) gems, and by many heads of allegorical monsters, with the head and beak of an eagle or a hawk—both solar birds—denotes Garuda’s solar and cyclic character. His son is Jatâyu, the cycle of 60,000 years. As well remarked by C. W. King:

Whatever its primary meaning [of the gem with the solar lion and vowels] it was probably imported in its present shape from India (that true fountain head of Gnostic iconography).(1334)

The mysteries of the seven Gnostic Vowels, uttered by the Thunders of St. John, can be unriddled only by the primeval and original Occultism of Âryâvarta, brought into India by the primeval Brâhmans, who had been initiated in Central Asia. And this is the Occultism we study and try to explain, as much as is possible, in these pages. Our doctrine of seven Races, and seven Rounds of life and evolution around our Terrestrial Chain of Spheres, may be found even in Revelation.(1335) When the seven “Thunders,” or “Sounds,” or “Vowels”—one meaning out of the seven for each such vowel relates directly to our own Earth and its seven Root‐Races in each Round—“had uttered their voices,” but had forbidden the Seer to write them, and made him “seal up those things,” what did the Angel, “standing upon the sea and upon the earth,” do?

He lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, ... that there should be time no longer: but in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God [of the Cycle] should be finished.(1336)

This means, in Theosophic phraseology, that when the Seventh Round is completed, then Time will cease. “There shall be time no longer”—very naturally, since Pralaya shall set in and there will remain no one on Earth to keep a division of time, during that periodical dissolution and arrest of conscious life.

Dr. Kenealy and others believed that the calculations of the cyclic seven and forty‐nine were brought by the Rabbins from Chaldæa. This is more than likely. But the Babylonians, who had all those cycles and taught them only at their great initiatory mysteries of astrological Magic, got their wisdom and learning from India. It is not difficult, therefore, to recognize in them our own Esoteric Doctrine. In their secret computations, the Japanese have the same figures in their cycles. As to the Brâhmans, their Purânas and Upanishads are good proof of it. The latter have passed entirely into Gnostic literature; and a Brâhman needs only to read Pistis Sophia(1337) to recognize his forefathers’ property, even to the phraseology and similes used. Let us compare. In Pistis Sophia the disciples say to Jesus:

Rabbi, reveal unto us the mysteries of the Light [i.e., the “Fire of Knowledge or Enlightenment”], ... forasmuch as we have heard thee saying that there is another baptism of smoke, and another baptism of the Spirit of Holy Light [i.e. the Spirit of Fire].(1338)

As John says of Jesus:

I indeed baptize you with water; ... but he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.

The real significance of this statement is very profound. It means that John, a non‐initiated ascetic, can impart to his disciples no greater wisdom than the Mysteries connected with the plane of Matter, of which Water is the symbol. His Gnosis was that of exoteric and ritualistic dogma, of dead‐letter orthodoxy;(1339) while the wisdom which Jesus, an Initiate of the Higher Mysteries, would reveal to them, was of a higher character, for it was the “Fire” Wisdom of the true Gnosis or real Spiritual Enlightenment. One was Fire, the other the Smoke. For Moses, the Fire on Mount Sinai and the Spiritual Wisdom; for the multitudes of the “people” below, for the profane, Mount Sinai in (through) Smoke, i.e., the exoteric husks of orthodox or sectarian ritualism.

Now, having the above in view, read the dialogue between the sages Nârada and Devamata in the Anugîtâ,(1340) an episode from the Mahâbhârata, the antiquity and importance of which one can learn in the “Sacred Books of the East,” edited by Prof. Max Müller.(1341) Nârada is discoursing upon the “breaths” or the “life‐winds,” as they are called in the clumsy translations of such words as Prâna, Apâna, etc., whose full Esoteric meaning and application to individual functions can hardly be rendered in English. He says of this science that:

It is the teaching of the Veda, that the fire verily is all the deities, and knowledge (of it) arises among Brâhmanas, being accompanied by intelligence.(1342)

By “fire,” says the Commentator, he means the Self. By “intelligence,” the Occultist says, Nârada meant neither “discussion” nor “argumentation,” as Arjuna Mishra believes, but “intelligence” truly, or the adaptation of the Fire of Wisdom to exoteric ritualism for the profane. This is the chief concern of the Brâhmans, who were the first to set the example to other nations who thus anthropomorphized and carnalized the grandest metaphysical truths. Nârada shows this plainly and is made to say:

The smoke of that (fire) which is of excellent glory (appears) in the shape of ... darkness [verily so!]; (its) ashes, ... [are] passion; and ... goodness is that in connection with it, in which the offering is thrown.(1343)

That is to say, that faculty in the disciple which apprehends the subtle truth (the flame) which escapes heavenward, while the objective sacrifice remains as a proof and evidence of piety only to the profane. For what else can Nârada mean by the following?

Those who understand the sacrifice understand the Samâna and the Vyâna as the principal (offering). The Prâna and Apâna are portions of the offering, ... and between them is the fire. That is the excellent seat of the Udâna as understood by Brâhmanas. As to that which is distinct from these pairs, hear me speak about that. Day and night are a pair, between them is the fire.... That which exists and that which does not exist are a pair, between them is the fire....(1344)

And after every such contrast Nârada adds:

That is the excellent seat of the Udâna as understood by Brâhmanas.

Now many people do not know the full meaning of the statement that Samâna and Vyâna, Prâna and Apâna—which are explained to be “life‐winds,” but which we say are principles and their respective faculties and senses—are offered up to Udâna, the soi‐disant principal “life‐wind,” which is said to act at all the joints. And so the reader who is ignorant that the word “Fire” in these allegories means both the “Self” and the higher Divine Knowledge, will understand nothing in this, and will entirely miss the point of our argument, as the translator and even the editor, the great Oxford Sanskritist, F. Max Müller, have missed the true meaning of Nârada’s words. Exoterically, this enumeration of “life‐winds” has, of course, the meaning, approximately, which is surmised in the foot‐notes, namely:

The sense appears to be this: The course of worldly life is due to the operations of the life‐winds which are attached to the self and lead to its manifestations as individual souls [?]. Of these, the Samâna and Vyâna are controlled and held under check by the Prâna and Apâna.... The latter two are held in check and controlled by the Udâna, which thus controls all. And the control of this, which is the control of all five, ... leads to the supreme self.(1345)

The above is given as an explanation of the text, which records the words of the Brâhmana, who narrates how he reached the ultimate Wisdom of Yogism, and in this wise reached All‐knowledge. Saying that he had “perceived by means of the self the seat abiding in the self,”(1346) where dwells the Brahma free from all; and explaining that that indestructible principle was entirely beyond the perception of senses—i.e., of the five “life‐winds”—he adds that:

In the midst of all these (life‐winds) which move about in the body and swallow up one another, blazes the Vaishvânara fire sevenfold.(1347)

This “Fire,” according to Nîlakantha’s commentary, is identical with the “I,” the Self, which is the goal of the ascetic; Vaishvânara being a word often used for the Self. Then the Brâhmana goes on to enumerate that which is meant by the word “sevenfold,” and says:

The nose [or smell], and the tongue [taste], and the eye, and the skin, and the ear as the fifth, the mind, and the understanding, these are the seven tongues of the blaze of Vaishvânara.(1348)... Those are the seven (kinds of) fuel for me.(1349)... These are the seven great officiating priests.(1350)

These seven priests are accepted by Arjuna Mishra in the sense of meaning “the soul distinguished as so many [souls, or principles] with reference to these several powers”; and, finally, the translator seems to accept the explanation, and reluctantly admits that “they may mean” this; though he himself takes the sense to mean:

The powers of hearing etc. [the physical senses, in short], which are presided over by the several deities.

But whatever it may mean, whether in scientific or orthodox interpretations, this passage on page 259 explains Nârada’s statements on page 276, and shows them referring to exoteric and esoteric methods and contrasting them. Thus the Samâna and the Vyâna, though subject to the Prâna and the Apâna, and all the four to Udâna in the matter of acquiring the Prânâyâma (of the Hatha Yogî, chiefly, or the lower form of Yoga), are yet referred to as the principal offering, for, as rightly argued by K. Trimbak Telang, their “operations are more practically important for vitality”; i.e., they are the grossest, and are offered in the sacrifice, in order that they may disappear, so to speak, in the quality of darkness of that fire or its smoke—mere exoteric ritualistic form. But Prâna and Apâna, though shown as subordinate (because less gross or more purified), have the Fire between them; the Self and the Secret Knowledge possessed by that Self. So for the good and evil, and for “that which exists and that which does not exist”; all these “pairs”(1351) have Fire between them, i.e., Esoteric Knowledge, the Wisdom of the Divine Self. Let those who are satisfied with the smoke of the Fire remain wherein they are, that is to say within the Egyptian darkness of theological fictions and dead‐letter interpretations.

The above is written only for the Western students of Occultism and Theosophy. The writer presumes to explain these things neither to the Hindûs, who have their own Gurus; nor to the Orientalists, who think they know more than all the Gurus and Rishis, past and present, put together. These rather lengthy quotations and examples are necessary, if only to point out to the student the works he has to study so as to derive benefit and learning from comparison. Let him read Pistis Sophia in the light of the Bhagavad Gîtâ, the Anugîtâ and others; and then the statement made by Jesus in the Gnostic Gospel will become clear, and the dead‐letter “blinds” disappear at once. Read the following and compare it with the explanation from the Hindû scriptures just given.

And no Name is more excellent than all these, a Name wherein be contained all Names, and all Lights, and all the [forty‐nine] Powers. Knowing that Name, if a man quits this body of matter,(1352) no smoke [i.e., no theological delusion],(1353) no darkness, nor Power, nor Ruler of the Sphere [no Personal Genius or Planetary Spirit called God] of Fate [Karma] ... shall be able to hold back the Soul that knoweth that Name.... If he shall utter that Name unto the fire, ... the darkness shall flee away.... And if he shall utter that name unto ... all their Powers, nay, even unto Barbelo,(1354) and the Invisible God, and the three triple‐powered Gods, so soon as he shall have uttered that name in those places, they shall all be thrown one upon the other, so that they shall be ready to melt and perish, and shall cry aloud, O Light of every light that is in the boundless lights, remember us also and purify us!(1355)

It is easy to see what this Light and Name are: the Light of Initiation and the name of the “Fire‐Self,” which is no name, no action, but a Spiritual, Ever‐living Power, higher even than the real “Invisible God,” as this Power is Itself.

But if the able and learned author of the Gnostics and their Remains has not sufficiently allowed for the spirit of allegory and mysticism in the fragments translated and quoted by him, in the above named work, from Pistis Sophia—other Orientalists have done far worse. Having neither his intuitional perception of the Indian origin of the Gnostic Wisdom still less of the meaning of their “gems,” most of them, beginning with Wilson and ending with the dogmatic Weber, have made most extraordinary blunders with regard to almost every symbol. Sir M. Monier Williams and others show a very decided contempt for the “Esoteric Buddhists” as Theosophists are now called; yet no student of Occult Philosophy has ever mistaken a cycle for a living personage and vice versâ, as is very often the case with our learned Orientalists. An instance or two may illustrate the statement more graphically. Let us choose the best known.

In the Râmâyana, Garuda is called “the maternal uncle of Sagara’s 60,000 sons”; and Amshumat, Sagara’s grandson, “the nephew of the 60,000 uncles” who were reduced to ashes by the look of Kapila—the Purushottama, or Infinite Spirit, who caused the horse which Sagara was keeping for the Ashvamedha sacrifice to disappear. Again, Garuda’s son(1356);—Garuda being himself the Mahâ Kalpa or Great Cycle—Jatâyu, the king of the feathered tribe (when on the point of being slain by Râvana who carries off Sîtâ) says, speaking of himself: “It is 60,000 years O king, that I am born”; after which, turning his back on the Sun—he dies.

Jatâyu is, of course, the cycle of 60,000 years within the Great Cycle of Garuda; hence he is represented as his son, or nephew, ad libitum, since the whole meaning rests on his being placed in the line of Garuda’s descendants. Then, again, there is Diti, the mother of the Maruts, whose descendants and progeny belonged to the posterity of Hiranyâksha, “whose number was 77 crores (or 770 millions) of men,” according to the Padma Purâna. All such narratives are pronounced “meaningless fictions” and absurdities. But—truth is the daughter of time, verily; and time will show.

Meanwhile, what could be easier than an attempt, at least, to verify Paurânic chronology? There are many Kapilas; but the Kapila who slew king Sagara’s progeny—60,000 men strong—was undeniably Kapila, the founder of the Sânkhya philosophy, since it is so stated in the Purânas; although one of them flatly denies the imputation without explaining its Esoteric meaning. It is the Bhâgavata Purâna(1357) which says that:

The report is not true that the sons of the king were scorched by the wrath of the sage. For how can the quality of darkness, the product of anger, exist in a Sage whose body was goodness and who purified the world—the earth’s dust, as it were, attributed to heavens! How should mental perturbation distract that sage, identified with the Supreme Spirit, who has steered here (on earth) that solid vessel of the Sânkhya (philosophy), with the help of which he who desires to obtain liberation crosses the dreaded ocean of existence, that path to death?(1358)

The Purâna is in duty bound to speak as it does. It has a dogma to promulgate and a policy to carry out—that of great secrecy with regard to mystical divine truths divulged for countless ages only at Initiation. It is not in the Purânas, therefore, that we have to look for an explanation of the mystery connected with various transcendental states of being. That the story is an allegory is seen upon its very face: the 60,000 “sons,” brutal, vicious, and impious, are the personification of the human passions that a “mere glance of the Sage”—the Self who represents the highest state of purity that can be reached on Earth—reduces to ashes. But it has also other significations, cyclic and chronological meanings, a method of marking the periods when certain Sages flourished, found also in other Purânas.

Now it is as well ascertained as any tradition can be, that it was at Hardwar, or Gangâdvâra, the “door or gate of the Ganges,” at the foot of the Himâlayas, that Kapila sat in meditation for a number of years. Not far from the Sewalik range, the pass of Hardwar is called to this day “Kapila’s Pass,” and the place also is named “Kapilasthen” by the ascetics. It is there that the Ganges, Gangâ, emerging from its mountainous gorge, begins its course over the sultry plains of India. And it is clearly ascertained by geological survey that the tradition which claims that the ocean washed the base of the Himâlayas ages ago, is not entirely without foundation, for distinct traces of this still remain.

The Sânkhya Philosophy may have been brought down and taught by the first, and written out by the last Kapila.

Now Sâgara is the name of the ocean, and especially of the Bay of Bengal, at the mouth of the Ganges, to this day in India.(1359) Have Geologists ever calculated the number of millenniums it must have taken the sea to recede the distance it is now from Hardwar, which is at present 1,024 feet above its level? If they had, those Orientalists who show Kapila flourishing from the first to the ninth century A.D., might change their opinions, if only for one of two very good reasons. Firstly, the true number of years which have elapsed since Kapila’s day is unmistakably in the Purânas, though the translators may fail to see it; and secondly, the Kapila of the Satya, and the Kapila of the Kali Yugas, may be one and the same individuality, without being the same personality.

Kapila, besides being the name of a personage, of the once living Sage and the author of the Sânkhya Philosophy, is also the generic name of the Kumâras, the celestial Ascetics and Virgins; therefore the very fact of the Bhâgavata Purâna calling that Kapila—whom it had showed just before as a portion of Vishnu—the author of the Sânkhya Philosophy, ought to have warned the reader of a “blind” containing an Esoteric meaning. Whether he was the son of Vitatha, as the Harivamsha shows him to be, or of any one else, the author of the Sânkhya cannot be the same as the Sage of the Satya Yuga—at the very beginning of the Manvantara, when Vishnu is shown in the form of Kapila, “imparting to all creatures true Wisdom”; for this relates to that primordial period when the “Sons of God” taught to the newly created men those arts and sciences, which have since been cultivated and preserved in the sanctuaries by the Initiates. There are several well‐known Kapilas in the Purânas. First the primeval Sage, then Kapila one of the three “secret” Kumâras, and Kapila son of Kashyapa and Kadrû—the “many‐headed serpent”(1360)—besides Kapila the great Sage and Philosopher of the Kali Yuga. The latter, being an Initiate, a “Serpent of Wisdom,” a Nâga, was purposely blended with the Kapilas of the former ages.

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Section X. The Cross and the Pythagorean Decad

The early Gnostics claimed that their Science, the Gnosis, rested on a square, the angles of which represented respectively Sigê (Silence), Bythos (Depth), Nous (Spiritual Soul or Mind), and Aletheia (Truth).

It is they who were the first to reveal to the world that which had remained concealed for ages; namely, the Tau, in the shape of a Procrustean bed, and Christos as incarnating in Chrestos, he who became for certain purposes a willing candidate for a series of tortures, mental and physical.

For them the whole of the Universe, metaphysical and material, was contained within, and could be expressed and described by the digits contained in the number 10, the Pythagorean Decad.

This Decad, representing the Universe and its evolution out of Silence and the Unknown Depths of the Spiritual Soul, or Anima Mundi, presented two sides or aspects to the student. It could be, and was at first, applied to the Macrocosm, after which it descended to the Microcosm, or man. There was, then, the purely intellectual and metaphysical, or the “Inner Science,” and the as purely materialistic or “surface science,” both of which could be expounded by and contained in the Decad. It could be studied, in short, both by the deductive method of Plato, and the inductive method of Aristotle. The former started from a divine comprehension, when the plurality proceeded from unity, or the digits of the Decad appeared, only to be finally reäbsorbed, lost in the infinite Circle. The latter depended on sensuous perception alone, when the Decad could be regarded either as the unity that multiplies, or matter which differentiates; its study being limited to the plane surface, to the cross, or the seven which proceeds from the ten, or the perfect number, on Earth as in Heaven.

This dual system was brought, together with the Decad, by Pythagoras from India. That it was that of the Brachmans and Iranians, as they are called by the ancient Greek Philosophers, is warranted to us by the whole range of Sanskrit literature, such as the Purânas and the Laws of Manu. In these Laws or Ordinances of Manu, it is said that Brahmâ first creates the “ten Lords of Being,” the ten Prajâpati or Creative Forces; which ten produce seven other Manus, or, rather, as some MSS. have it, Munîn (instead of Manûn) “devotees,” or holy beings, which are the seven Angels of the Presence in the Western religion. This mysterious number seven, born from the upper Triangle △, the latter itself born from the apex thereof, or the Silent Depths of the Unknown Universal Soul (Sigê and Bythos), is the sevenfold Saptaparna plant, born and manifested on the surface of the soil of mystery, from the threefold root buried deep under that impenetrable soil. This idea is fully elaborated in one of the Sections of Volume I, Part II, Section III, “Primordial Substance and Divine Thought,” which the reader should notice carefully, if he would grasp the metaphysical idea involved in the above symbol. In man as in nature, according to the Cis‐Himâlayan Esoteric Philosophy, which is that of the Cosmogony of the original Manu, it is the septenary division that is intended by Nature herself. The seventh principle (Purusha) alone is the Divine Self, strictly speaking; for, as said in Manu, “he [Brahmâ] having pervaded the subtile parts of those six, of unmeasured brightness,”(1361) created or called them forth to “Self”‐consciousness or the consciousness of that One Self. Of these six, five elements (or principles, or Tattvas, as Medhâtithi, the commentator thinks) “are called the atomic destructible elements”;(1362) these are described in the above‐ named Section.(1363)

We have now to speak of the mystery language, that of the prehistoric races. It is not a phonetic, but a purely pictorial and symbolical tongue. It is known at present in its fulness to the very few, having become with the masses for more than 5,000 years an absolutely dead language. Yet most of the learned Gnostics, Greeks and Jews, knew it, and used it, though very differently. A few instances may be given.

On the plane above, the number is no number but a nought—a circle. On the plane below, it becomes one—which is an odd number. Each letter of the ancient alphabets had its philosophical meaning and raison d’être. The number one (1) signified with the Alexandrian Initiates a body erect, a living standing man, he being the only animal that has this privilege. And, by adding to the “I” a head, it was transformed into a “P,” a symbol of paternity, of the creative potency; while “R” signified a “moving man,” one on his way. Hence Pater Zeus had nothing sexual or phallic either in its sound or the form of its letters; nor had Πατὴρ Δεὺς (according to Ragon).(1364) If we turn now to the Hebrew alphabet, we shall find that while one or Aleph (א) has a bull or an ox for its symbol, ten, the perfect number, or one of the Kabalah, is a Yod (י, y, i, or j), and means, as the first letter of Jehovah, the procreative organ, and the rest.

The odd numbers are divine, the even numbers are terrestrial, devilish, and unlucky. The Pythagoreans hated the Binary. With them it was the origin of differentiation, hence of contrasts, discord, or matter, the beginning of evil. In the Valentinian Theogony, Bythos and Sigê (Depth, Chaos, Matter born in Silence) are the primordial Binary. With the early Pythagoreans, however, the Duad was that imperfect state into which the first manifested being fell when it got detached from the Monad. It was the point from which the two roads—the good and the evil—bifurcated. All that which was double‐faced or false was called by them “binary.” One was alone good and harmony, because no disharmony can proceed from One alone. Hence the Latin word Solus in relation to the One and Only God, the Unknown of Paul. Solus, however, very soon became Sol—the Sun.

The Ternary is the first of the odd numbers, as the triangle is the first of the geometrical figures.(1365) This number is truly the number of mystery par excellence. To study it on the exoteric lines one has to read Ragon’s Cours Philosophique et Interprétatif des Initiations, on the Esoteric—the Hindû symbolism of numerals; for the combinations which were applied to it are numberless. It is on the Occult properties of the three equal sides of the triangle that Ragon based his studies and founded the famous Masonic Society of the Trinosophists—those who study three sciences; an improvement upon the ordinary three Masonic degrees, given to those who study nothing except eating and drinking at the meetings of their Lodges. As the founder writes:

The first line of the triangle offered to the apprentice for study is the mineral kingdom, symbolized by Tubalc [Symbol: Three dots in a triangle] [Tubal‐Cain].

The second side on which the companion has to meditate, is the vegetable kingdom, symbolized by Schibb [Symbol: Three dots in a triangle] [Schibboleth]. In this kingdom begins the generation of the bodies. This is why the letter G is presented radiant before the eyes of the adept [?!].

The third side is left to the master mason, who has to complete his education by the study of the animal kingdom. It is symbolized by Maoben [Symbol: Three dots in a triangle] (son of putrefaction).(1366)

The first solid figure is the Quaternary, the symbol of immortality. It is the Pyramid, for the Pyramid stands on a triangular base, and terminates with a point at the top, thus yielding the Triad and the Quaternary or the 3 and 4.

The Pythagoreans taught the connection and relation between the Gods and the numbers, in a science called Arithmomancy. The Soul is a number, they said, which moves of itself and contains the number 4; and spiritual and physical man is number 3, as the Ternary represented for them not only the surface but also the principle of the formation of the physical body. Thus animals were Ternaries only, man alone being a Septenary, when virtuous; a Quinary when bad, for:

Number Five was composed of a Binary and a Ternary, and of these the Binary threw everything in the perfect form into disorder and confusion. The perfect man, they said, was a Quaternary and a Ternary, or four material and three immaterial elements; and these three Spirits or Elements we likewise find in Five when it represents the microcosm. The latter is a compound of a Binary directly relating to gross Matter and of three Spirits. Since, as Ragon says:

This ingenious figure is the union of two Greek breathings placed over vowels which have or have not to be aspirated. The first sign (῾) is called the “strong” or superior “spiritus,” the Spirit of God aspired (spiratus) and breathed by man. The second sign (᾿) the lower, is the soft “spiritus” representing the secondary spirit; ... the whole embraces the whole man. It is the universal quintessence, the vital fluid or life.(1367)

The more mystic meaning of the number Five is given in an excellent article by Mr. T. Subba Row, in Five Years of Theosophy, in an article entitled “The Twelve Signs of the Zodiac,” in which he gives some rules that may help the enquirer to ferret out “the deep significance of ancient Sanskrit nomenclature in the old Âryan myths and allegories.” Meanwhile, let us see what has been hitherto stated about the constellation Capricornus in Theosophical publications, and what is known of it generally. Every one knows that ♑ is the tenth sign of the Zodiac, into which the Sun enters at the winter solstice, about December 21st. But very few are those who know—even in India, unless they are initiated—the real mystic connection which seems to exist, as we are told, between the names Makara and Kumâra. The first means some amphibious animal, flippantly called the “crocodile,” as some Orientalists think, and the second is the title of the great patrons of Yogins, according to the Shaiva Purânas, the sons of, and even one with, Rudra (Shiva), who is a Kumâra himself. It is through their connection with Man that the Kumâras are likewise connected with the Zodiac. Let us try to find out what the word Makara means.

Says the author of “The Twelve Signs of the Zodiac”:

Makara ... contains within itself the clue to its correct interpretation. The letter ma is equivalent to number 5, and kara means hand. Now in Sanskrit Tribhujam means a triangle, bhujam or karam (both synonymous) being understood to mean a side. So, Makaram or Panchakaram means a Pentagon.(1368)

Now the five‐pointed star or pentagon represents the five limbs of man.(1369) Under the old system, we are told, Makara was the eighth instead of the tenth sign.(1370)

The sign in question is intended to represent the faces of the universe, and indicates that the figure of the universe is bounded by Pentagons.(1371)

The Sanskrit writers “speak also of Ashtadisha or eight faces bounding Space,” referring thus to the Loka‐pâlas, the eight points of the compass, the four cardinal and the four intermediate points.

From an objective point of view the “microcosm” is represented by the human body. Makaram may be taken to represent simultaneously both the microcosm and the macrocosm, as external objects of perception.(1372)

But the true Esoteric sense of the word Makara is not, in truth, “crocodile” at all, even when it is compared with the animal depicted on the Hindû Zodiac. For it has the head and the fore‐legs of an antelope and the body and tail of a fish. Hence the tenth sign of the Zodiac has been taken variously to mean a shark, a dolphin, etc.; as it is the Vâhana of Varuna, the Ocean God, and is often called, for this reason, Jala‐rûpa or “water‐form.” The dolphin was the vehicle of Poseidon‐Neptune with the Greeks, and one with him, Esoterically; and this “dolphin” is the “sea‐ dragon” as much as the crocodile of the Sacred Nile is the Vehicle of Horus, and Horus himself. Says the mummy‐form God with the crocodile’s head:

I am the fish [and seat] of the great Horus of Kem‐oor.(1373)

With the Peratæ Gnostics it is Chozzar (Neptune) who converts the dodecagonal pyramid into a sphere, “and paints its gate with many colours.”(1374) He has five androgyne ministers—he is Makara, the Leviathan.

As the rising Sun was considered the Soul of the Gods sent to manifest itself to men every day, and as the crocodile rose out of the water at the first sunbeam, that animal came finally to personify a solar‐fire devotee in India, as it personified that Fire, or the highest Soul with the Egyptians.

In the Purânas, the number of the Kumâras changes according to the exigencies of the allegory. For Occult purposes their number is given in one place as seven, then as four, then as five. In the Kûrma Purâna it is said of them:

These five [Kumâras], O Brâhman, were Yogins who acquired entire exemption from passion.

Their very name shows their connection with the said constellation Makara, and with some other Paurânic characters connected with the zodiacal signs. This is done in order to veil what was one of the most suggestive glyphs of the primitive Temples. The Kumâras are mixed up, astronomically, physiologically, and mystically in general, with a number of Paurânic personages and events. Hardly hinted at in the Vishnu, they figure in various dramas and events throughout all the other Purânas and sacred literature; so that the Orientalists, having to pick up the threads of connection hither and thither, have ended by proclaiming the Kumâras “due chiefly to the fancy of the Purânic writers.” But—

Ma—we are told by the author of the “Twelve Signs of the Zodiac”—is “five”; kara, a “hand” with its five fingers, as also a five‐sided sign or a Pentagon. The Kumâra (in this case an anagram for Occult purposes), as Yogîs, are five in Esotericism, because the last two names have ever been kept secret; they are the fifth order of Brahma‐devas, and the five‐ fold Chohans, having the Soul of the five Elements in them, Water and Ether predominating, and therefore their symbols were both aquatic and fiery.

Wisdom lies concealed under the couch of him who rests on the Golden Lotus (Padma) floating on the Water.

In India this is Vishnu, one of whose Avatâras was Buddha, as claimed in days of old. The Prachetasas, the worshippers of Nârâyana—who, like Poseidon, moved or dwelt over not under the Waters—plunged into the depths of the Ocean for their devotions and remained therein 10,000 years; and the Prachetasas are ten exoterically, but five, Esoterically. Prachetâs is, in Sanskrit, the name of Varuna, the Water God, Nereus, an aspect of Neptune, the Prachetasas being thus identical with the “five ministers” of the male‐female Chozzar (Χωζζάρ or Χορζάρ), or Poseidon, of the Peratæ Gnostics. These are respectively called Ou, Aoai, Ouô, Ouôab and ... (Οὔ, Ἀοαὶ, Οὐώ, Οὐωάβ ...),(1375) the fifth, a triple name (making seven in all) being lost(1376)—i.e., kept secret. Thus much for the “aquatic” symbol; the “fiery” connecting them with the fiery symbol—spiritually. For purposes of identity, let us remember that as the mother of the Prachetasas was Savarnâ, the daughter of the Ocean, so was Amphitrite the mother of Neptune’s mystic “ministers.”

Now the reader is reminded that these “five ministers” are symbolized both in the Dolphin, who had overcome the chaste Amphitrite’s unwillingness to wed Poseidon, and in Triton their son. The latter, whose body above the waist is that of a man and below a dolphin, a fish, is, again, most mysteriously connected with Oannes, the Babylonian Dag, and further also with the Matsya (Fish) Avatâra of Vishnu, both teaching mortals Wisdom. The Dolphin, as every Mythologist knows, was placed, for his service, by Poseidon, among the constellations, and became with the Greeks, Capricornus, the Goat, whose hind part is that of a dolphin, and is thus identical with Makara, whose head is also that of an antelope and the body and tail those of a fish. This is why the sign of the Makara was borne on the banner of Kâmadeva, the Hindû God of Love, identified, in the Atharva Veda, with Agni, the Fire‐god, the son of Lakshmî, as correctly given by the Harivamsha. For Lakshmî and Venus are one, and Amphitrite is the early form of Venus. Now Kâma, the Makara‐ketu, is Aja, the “unborn,” and Âtmâ‐bhû, the “self‐existent,” and Aja is the Logos in the Rig Veda, as he is shown therein to be the first manifestation of the One; for “Desire first arose in It, which was the primal germ of mind,” that “which connects entity with non‐entity”—or Manas, the fifth, with Âtmâ, the seventh, Esoterically—say the Sages. This is the first stage. The second, on the following plane of manifestation, shows Brahmâ—whom we select as a representative for all the other First Gods of the nations—causing to issue from his body his Mind‐born Sons, “Sanandana and others,” who, in the fifth “creation,” and again in the ninth (for purposes of a “blind”) become the Kumâra. Let us close by reminding the reader that goats were sacrificed to Amphitrite and the Nereids on the sea‐shore—as goats are sacrificed to this day to Durgâ Kâlî, who is only the black side of Lakshmî (Venus), the white side of Shakti—and by suggesting what connection these animals may have with Capricornus, in which appear twenty‐eight stars in the form of a goat, which goat was transformed by the Greeks into Amalthæa, Jupiter’s foster‐mother. Pan, the God of Nature, had goat’s feet, and changed himself into a goat at the approach of Typhon. But this is a mystery which the writer dares not dwell upon at length, not being sure of being understood. Thus the mystical side of the interpretation must be left to the intuition of the student. Let us note one more thing in relation to the mysterious number Five. It symbolizes at one and the same time the Spirit of Life Eternal and the spirit of life and love terrestrial—in the human compound; and, it includes divine and infernal magic, and the universal and the individual quintessence of being. Thus, the five mystic words or vowels uttered by Brahmâ at “creation,” which forthwith became the Panchadasha (certain Vedic Hymns, attributed to that God), are in their creative and magical potentiality, the white side of the black Tântric five Ma‐kâras, or the five m’s. Makara, the constellation, is a seemingly meaningless and absurd name; yet, even besides its anagrammatical significance in conjunction with the term Kumâra, the numerical value of its first syllable and its Esoteric resolution into five has a very great and Occult meaning in the mysteries of Nature.

Suffice it to say that, as the sign of Makara is connected with the birth of the spiritual Microcosm, and the death or dissolution of the physical Universe—its passage into the realm of the Spiritual,(1377) so the Dhyân Chohans, called in India Kumâras, are connected with both. Moreover, in the exoteric religions, they have become the synonyms of the Angels of Darkness. Mâra is the God of Darkness, the Fallen One, and Death;(1378) and yet it is one of the names of Kâma, the First God in the Vedas, the Logos, from whom have sprung the Kumâras, and this connects them still more with our “fabulous” Indian Makara, and the crocodile‐headed God in Egypt.(1379) The Crocodiles in the Celestial Nile are five, and the God Toom, the Primordial Deity, creating the heavenly bodies and living beings, calls forth these Crocodiles in his fifth “creation.” When Osiris, the “Defunct Sun,” is buried and enters into Amenti, the sacred Crocodiles plunge into the abyss of primordial Waters—the “Great Green One.” When the Sun of Life rises, they reëmerge out of the sacred river. All this is highly symbolical, and shows how primeval Esoteric truths found their expression in identical symbols. But, as Mr. T. Subba Row truly declares:

The veil that was dexterously thrown over certain portions of the mystery connected with these [Zodiacal] signs by the ancient philosophers, will never be lifted up for the amusement or edification of the uninitiated public.(1380)

Nor was number Five less sacred with the Greeks. The “Five Words” of Brahmâ have become with the Gnostics the “Five Words” written upon the Âkâshic (Shining) Garment of Jesus at his glorification—the words “Zama Zama Ôzza Rachama Ôzai” (ΖΑΜΑ ΖΑΜΑ ΩΖΖΑ ΡΑΧΑΜΑ ΩΖΑΙ), translated by the Orientalists “the robe, the glorious robe of my strength.” These words were, in their turn, the anagrammatic “blind” of the five mystic Powers represented on the robe of the “resurrected” Initiate after his last trial of three days’ trance; the five becoming seven only after his “death,” when the Adept became the full Christos, the full Krishna‐Vishnu, i.e., merged in Nirvâna. The E Delphicum, a sacred symbol, was the numeral five, again; and how sacred it was is shown by the fact that the Corinthians, according to Plutarch, replaced the wooden numeral in the Delphic Temple by a bronze one, and this one was transmuted by Livia Augusta into a facsimile in gold.(1381)

It is easy to recognize in the two “Spiritus”—the Greek signs (!) spoken of by Ragon—Âtmâ and Buddhi, or Divine Spirit and its Vehicle, the Spiritual Soul.

The Six or the Senary is dealt with later in this Section, while the Septenary will be fully treated in the course of this Volume in the Section on “The Mysteries of the Hebdomad.”

The Ogdoad or Eight symbolizes the eternal and spiral motion of cycles, the 8, ∞, and is symbolized in its turn by the Caduceus. It shows the regular breathing of the Kosmos presided over by the Eight Great Gods—the Seven from the primeval Mother, the One and the Triad.

Then comes the number Nine, or the triple Ternary. It is the number which reproduces itself incessantly under all shapes and figures in every multiplication. It is the sign of every circumference, since its value in degrees is equal to 9, i.e., to 3 + 6 + 0. It is a bad number under certain conditions, and very unlucky. If number 6 was the symbol of our Globe ready to be animated by a divine Spirit, 9 symbolized our Earth informed by a bad or evil Spirit.

Ten, or the Decad, brings all these digits back to unity, and ends the Pythagorean table. Hence this figure, [Symbol: Circle with line through the middle]—unity within zero—was the symbol of Deity, of the Universe, and of Man. Such is the secret meaning of “the strong grip of the lion’s paw, of the tribe of Judah” (the “master mason’s grip”) between two hands, the joint number of whose fingers is ten.

If we now give our attention to the Egyptian cross, or the Tau, we may discover this letter, which was so exalted by Egyptians, Greeks, and Jews, to be mysteriously connected with the Decad. The Tau is the Alpha and the Omega of Secret Divine Wisdom, which is symbolized by the initial and the final letters of Thot (Hermes). Thot was the inventor of the Egyptian alphabet, and the letter Tau closed the alphabets of the Jews and the Samaritans, who called this character the “end” or “perfection,” “culmination” and “security.” Hence, Ragon tells us, the words Terminus, “end,” and Tectum, “roof,” are symbols of shelter and security—which is rather a prosaic definition. But such is the usual destiny of ideas and things in this world of spiritual decadence, though at the same time of physical progress. Pan was at one time Absolute Nature, the One and Great All; but when history catches a first glimpse of him, Pan has already tumbled down into a godling of the fields, a rural God; history will not recognize him, while theology makes of him the Devil! Yet his seven‐piped flute, the emblem of the seven forces of Nature, of the seven planets, the seven musical notes, of all the septenary harmony in short, shows well his primordial character. So with the cross. Far earlier than the Jews had devised their golden candlestick of the Temple with three sockets on one side and four on the other, and made of number seven a feminine number of generation(1382)—thus introducing the phallic element into religion—the more spiritually‐minded nations had made of the cross (as 3 + 4 = 7) their most sacred divine symbol. In fact, circle, cross, and seven—the latter being made a base of circular measurement—are the first primordial symbols. Pythagoras, who brought his wisdom from India, left to posterity a glimpse into this truth. His School regarded number 7 as a compound of numbers 3 and 4, which they explained in a dual manner. On the plane of the noumenal world, the Triangle was, as the first conception of the manifested Deity, its image, “Father‐Mother‐Son”; and the Quaternary, the perfect number, was the noumenal, ideal root of all numbers and things on the physical plane. Some students, in view of the sacredness of the Tetraktys and the Tetragrammaton, mistake the mystic meaning of the Quaternary. The latter was with the Ancients only a secondary “perfection,” so to speak, because it related only to the manifested planes. Whereas it is the Triangle, the Greek Delta (Δ), which was the “vehicle of the unknown Deity.” A good proof of it lies in the name of the Deity beginning with Delta. Zeus was written Δεύς (Deus) by the Bœotians, thence the Deus of the Latins. This, in relation to the metaphysical conception, with regard to the meaning of the septenary in the phenomenal world; but for purposes of profane or exoteric interpretation, the symbolism changed. Three became the ideograph of the three material Elements—Air, Water, Earth; and four became the principle of all that which is neither corporeal nor perceptible. But this has never been accepted by the real Pythagoreans. Viewed as a compound of 6 and 1, the Senary and the Unity, number 7 was the invisible centre, the Spirit of everything, as there exists no hexagonal body without a seventh property being found as the central point in it, as, for instance, crystals and snow‐flakes in so‐called “inanimate” nature. Moreover, number seven, they said, has all the perfection of the unit—the number of numbers. For as absolute unity is uncreated, and impartite, hence number‐less, and no number can produce it, so is the seven; no digit contained within the Decad can beget or produce it. And it is four which affords an arithmetical division between unity and seven, for it surpasses the former by the same number (three), as it is itself surpassed by the seven, since four is by as many numbers above one, as seven is above four.(1383)

“With the Egyptians number 7 was the symbol of life eternal,” says Ragon, and adds that this is why the Greek letter Z, which is but a double 7, is the initial letter of Zaô, “I live,” and of Zeus, the “father of all living.”

Moreover, figure 6 was the symbol of the Earth during the autumn and winter “sleeping” months, and figure 7 during spring and summer, as the Spirit of Life animated her at that time—the seventh or central informing Force. We find the same in the Egyptian mythos and symbol of Osiris and Isis, personifying Fire and Water metaphysically, and the Sun and the Nile physically. The number of the solar year, 365 in days, is the numerical value of the word Neilos (Nile). This, together with the Bull, with the crescent and the ansated cross between its horns, and the Earth under its astronomical symbol (♁), are the most phallic symbols of later antiquity.

The Nile was the river of time with the number of a year, or year and a day (364 + 1 = 365). It represented the parturient water of Isis, or Mother Earth, the moon, the woman, and the cow, also the workshop of Osiris, representing the T’sod Olaum of the Hebrews. The ancient name of this river was Eridanus, or the Hebrew Iardan, with the Coptic or old Greek suffix. This was the door of the Hebrew word Jared, or source, or descent ... of the river Jordan, which had the same mythical use with the Hebrews that the Nile had with the Egyptians,(1384) it was the source of descent, and held the waters of life.(1385)

It was, to put it plainly, the symbol of the personified Earth, or Isis regarded as the womb of that Earth. This is shown clearly enough; and Jordan—the river so sacred now to Christians—held no more sublime or poetical meaning in it than the parturient waters of the Moon—Isis, or Jehovah in his female aspect. Now, as shown by the same scholar, Osiris was the Sun, and the river Nile, and the year of 365 days; while Isis was the Moon, the bed of that river, or Mother Earth “for the parturient energies of which water was a necessity,” as also the lunar year of 354 days, “the time‐maker of the periods of gestation.” All this then is sexual and phallic, our modern scholars seeming to find in these symbols nothing beyond a physiological or phallic meaning. Nevertheless, the three figures 365, or the number of days in a solar year, have but to be read with the Pythagorean key to find in them a highly philosophical and moral meaning. One instance will be sufficient. It can read:

The Earth (3)—animated by (6)—the Spirit of Life (5).

Simply because 3 is equivalent to the Greek Gamma (Γ) which is the symbol of Gaia, the Earth, while the figure 6 is the symbol of the animating or informing principle, and the 5 is the universal quintessence which spreads in every direction and forms all matter.(1386)

The few instances and examples brought forward reveal only one small portion of the methods used to read the symbolical ideographs and numerals of antiquity. The system being of an extreme and complex difficulty, very few, even among the Initiates, could master all the seven keys. Is it to be wondered, then, that the metaphysical gradually dwindled down into the physical Nature; that the Sun, once upon a time the symbol of Deity, became, as æons glided by, that of its creative ardour only; and that thence it fell into a glyph of phallic significance? But surely, it is not those whose method, like Plato’s, was to proceed from universals down to particulars, who could ever have begun by symbolizing their religions by sexual emblems! It is quite true, though uttered by that incarnated paradox Éliphas Lévi, that “man is God on Earth, and God is man in Heaven.” But this could not, and never did apply to the One Deity, only to the Hosts of Its incarnated beams, called by us Dhyân Chohans, by the Ancients Gods, and now transformed by the Church into Devils on the left, and into the Saviour on the right side!

But all such dogmas grew out of the one root, the root of Wisdom, which grows and thrives on the Indian soil. There is not an Archangel that could not be traced back to its prototype in the sacred land of Âryâvarta. These prototypes are all connected with the Kumâras who appear on the scene of action by “refusing”—as Sanatkumâra and Sananda—to “create progeny.” Yet they are called the “creators” of (thinking) man. More than once they are brought into connection with Nârada—another bundle of apparent incongruities, yet a wealth of philosophical tenets. Nârada is the leader of the Gandharvas, the celestial singers and musicians; Esoterically, the reason for this is explained by the fact that the Gandharvas are “the instructors of men in the Secret Sciences.” It is they, who “loving the women of the Earth” disclosed to them the mysteries of creation; or, as in the Veda, the “heavenly” Gandharva is a deity who knew and revealed the secrets of heaven and divine truths, in general. If we remember what is said of this class of Angels in Enoch and in the Bible, then the allegory is plain; their leader, Nârada, while refusing to procreate, leads men to become Gods. Moreover, all of these, as stated in the Vedas, are Chhandajas, “will‐born,” or incarnated, in different Manvantaras, of their own will. They are shown in exoteric literature as existing age after age; some being “cursed to be reborn,” others incarnating as a duty. Finally, as the Sanakadikas, the seven Kumâras who went to visit Vishnu on the “White Island” (Shveta‐dvîpa), the Island inhabited by the Mahâ Yogins—they are connected with Shâka‐dvîpa and the Lemurians and Atlanteans of the Third and Fourth Races.

In the Esoteric Philosophy, the Rudras (Kumâras, Âdityas, Gandharvas, Asuras, etc.) are the highest Dhyân Chohans or Devas as regards intellectuality. They are those who, owing to their having acquired by self‐development the five‐fold nature—hence the sacredness of number five—became independent of the pure Arûpa Devas. This is a mystery very difficult to realize and understand correctly. For we see that those who were “obedient to law” are, equally with the “rebels,” doomed to be reborn in every age. Nârada, the Rishi, is cursed by Brahmâ to incessant peripateticism on Earth, i.e., to be constantly reborn. He is a rebel against Brahmâ, and yet has no worse fate than the Jayas—the twelve great Creative Gods produced by Brahmâ as his assistants in the functions of creation. For the latter, lost in meditation, only forgot to create; and for this, they were equally cursed by Brahmâ to be born in every Manvantara. And still they are termed—together with the rebels—Chhandajas, or those born of their own will in human form.

All this is very puzzling to one who is unable to read and understand the Purânas except in their dead‐letter sense.(1387) Hence we find the Orientalists refusing to be puzzled, and cutting the Gordian knot of perplexity by declaring the whole scheme “figments ... of Brâhmanical fancy and love of exaggeration.” But to the student of Occultism, the whole is pregnant with deep philosophical meaning. We willingly leave the rind to the Western Sanskritist, but claim the essence of the fruit for ourselves. We do more: we concede that in one sense much in these so‐ called “fables” refers to astronomical allegories about constellations, asterisms, stars, and planets. Yet, while the Gandharva of the Rig Veda may there be made to personify the fire of the Sun, the Gandharva Devas are entities both of a physical and psychic character, while the Apsarasas (with other Rudras) are both qualities and quantities. In short, if ever unravelled, the Theogony of the Vedic Gods will reveal fathomless mysteries of Creation and Being. Truly says Parâshara:

These classes of thirty‐three divinities ... exist age after age, and their appearance and disappearance is in the same manner as the sun sets and rises again.(1388)

There was a time, when the Eastern symbol of the cross and circle, the Svastika, was universally adopted. With the Esoteric, and for the matter of that exoteric, Buddhist, the Chinaman and the Mongolian, it means the “ten thousand truths.” These truths, they say, belong to the mysteries of the Unseen Universe and Primordial Cosmogony and Theogony.

Since Fohat crossed the Circle like two lines of flame [horizontally and vertically], the Hosts of the Blessed Ones have never failed to send their representatives upon the Planets they are made to watch over from the beginning.

This is why the Svastika is always placed—as the ansated cross was in Egypt—on the breast of the defunct Mystics. It is found on the heart of the images and statues of Buddha, in Tibet and Mongolia. It is the seal placed also on the hearts of the living Initiates, burnt into the flesh for ever with some. This, because they have to keep these truths inviolate and intact, in eternal silence and secrecy to the day they are perceived and read by their chosen successors—new Initiates—“worthy of being entrusted with the ten thousand perfections.” So degraded, however, has it now become, that it is often placed on the headgear of the “Gods,” the hideous idols of the sacrilegious Bhons—the Dugpas or Sorcerers, of the Tibetan borderlands—until found out by a Galukpa, and torn off together with the head of the “God,” though it would be better were it that of the worshipper which was severed from his sinful body. Still, it can never lose its mysterious properties. Throw a retrospective glance, and see it used alike by the Initiates and Seers, as by the Priests of Troy, for many specimens of it have been found by Schliemann on the site of that old city. One finds it with the old Peruvians, the Assyrians, Chaldæans, as well as on the walls of the old‐world Cyclopean buildings; in the catacombs of the New World, and in those of the Old (?), at Rome, where—because the first Christians are supposed to have concealed themselves and their religion—it is called Crux Dissimulata.

According to De Rossi the Swastika from an early period was a favourite form of the cross employed with an occult signification which shows the secret was not that of the Christian cross. One Swastika cross in the catacombs is the sign of an inscription which reads “ΖΩΤΙΚΩ ΖΟΤΙΚΗ [? ΖΩΤΙΚΗ], Vitalis Vitalia,” or life of life.(1389)

But the best evidence to the antiquity of the cross is that which is brought forward by the author of The Natural Genesis himself:

The value of the cross as a Christian symbol is supposed to date from the time when Jesus Christ was crucified. And yet in the “Christian” iconography of the catacombs no figure of a man appears upon the Cross during the first six or seven centuries. There are all forms of the cross except that—the alleged starting‐ point of the new religion. That was not the initial but the final form of the Crucifix.(1390) During some six centuries after the Christian era the foundation of the Christian religion in a crucified Redeemer is entirely absent from Christian art! The earliest known form of the human figure on the cross is the crucifix presented by Pope Gregory the Great to Queen Theodolinde of Lombardy, now in the Church of St. John at Monza, whilst no image of the Crucified is found in the catacombs at Rome earlier than that of San Giulio, belonging to the seventh or eighth century.... There is no Christ and no Crucified; the Cross is the Christ even as the Stauros (Cross) was a type and a name of Horus the Gnostic Christ. The Cross, not the Crucified, is the primary symbol of the Christian Church. The Cross, not the Crucified, is the essential object of representation in its art, and of adoration in its religion. The germ of the whole growth and development can be traced to the cross. And that cross is pre‐ Christian, is pagan and heathen, in half a dozen different shapes. The Cult began with the cross, and Julian was right in saying he waged a “Warfare with the X”; which he obviously considered had been adopted by the A‐Gnostics and Mytholators to convey an impossible significance.(1391) During centuries the cross stood for the Christ, and was addressed as if it were a living being. It was divinized at first and humanized at last.(1392)

Few world‐symbols are more pregnant with real Occult meaning than the Svastika. It is symbolized by the figure 6. Like that figure, it points, in its concrete imagery, as does the ideograph of the number, to the Zenith and the Nadir, to North, South, West, and East; one finds the unit everywhere, and that unit reflected in all and every unit. It is the emblem of the activity of Fohat, of the continual revolution of the “Wheels,” and of the Four Elements, the “Sacred Four,” in their mystical, and not alone in their cosmical meaning; further, its four arms, bent at right angles, are intimately related, as shown elsewhere, to the Pythagorean and Hermetic scales. One initiated into the mysteries of the meaning of the Svastika, say the Commentaries, “can trace on it, with mathematical precision, the evolution of Kosmos and the whole period of Sandhyâ.” Also “the relation of the Seen to the Unseen,” and “the first procreation of man and species.”

To the Eastern Occultist the Tree of Knowledge, in the Paradise of man’s own heart, becomes the Tree of Life Eternal, and has nought to do with man’s animal senses. It is an absolute mystery that reveals itself only through the efforts of the imprisoned Manas, the Ego, to liberate itself from the thraldom of sensuous perception, and see in the light of the one eternal present Reality. To the Western Kabalist, and far more now to the superficial Symbologist, nursed in the lethal atmosphere of Materialistic Science, the chief explanation of the mysteries of the cross is—its sexual element. Even the otherwise spiritualistic modern commentator discerns this feature in the cross and Svastika before all others.

The cross was used in Egypt as a protecting talisman and a symbol of saving power. Typhon, or Satan, is actually found chained to and bound by the cross. In the Ritual, the Osirian cries, “The Apophis is overthrown, their cords bind the South, North, East, and West, their cords are on him. Har‐ru‐bah has knotted him.”(1393) These were the Cords of the four quarters, or the cross. Thor is said to smite the head of the serpent with his hammer, ... a form of Swastika or four‐footed cross.... In the primitive sepulchres of Egypt the model of the Chamber had the form of a cross.(1394) The pagoda of Mathura ... the birth‐place of Krishna, was built in the form of a cross.(1395)

This is perfect, and no one can discern in it that “sexual worship,” with which the Orientalists love to break the head of Paganism. But how about the Jews, and the exoteric religions of some Hindû sects, especially the rites of the Vallabâchâryas? For, as said, Shiva‐worship, with its Lingam and Yoni, stands too high philosophically, its modern degeneration notwithstanding, to be called a simple phallic worship. But the Tree‐ or Cross‐worship(1396) of the Jews, as denounced by their own Prophets, can hardly escape the charge. The “sons of the sorcerers, the seed of the adulterer,”(1397) as Isaiah calls them, never lost an opportunity of “enflaming themselves with idols under every green tree”(1398)—which denotes no metaphysical recreation. It is from these monotheistic Jews that the Christian nations have derived their religion, their “God of Gods, the One living God,” while despising and deriding the worship of the Deity of the ancient Philosophers. Let such believe in and worship the physical form of the cross, by all means.

But to the follower of the true Eastern Archaic Wisdom, to him who worships in spirit nought outside the Absolute Unity, that ever‐pulsating great Heart that beats throughout, as in, every atom of Nature, each such atom contains the germ from which he may raise the Tree of Knowledge, whose fruits give Life Eternal and not physical life alone. For him, the cross and circle, the Tree or the Tau—even after every symbol relating thereto has been referred to and read, one after another—still remain a profound mystery in their Past, and it is to that Past alone that he directs his eager gaze. He cares little whether it be the Seed from which grows the genealogical Tree of Being, called the Universe. Nor is it the Three in One, the triple aspect of the Seed—its form, colour, and substance—that interest him, but rather the Force which directs its growth, the ever mysterious, as the ever unknown. For this vital Force, that makes the Seed germinate, burst open and throw out shoots, then form the trunk and branches, which, in their turn, bend down like the boughs of the Ashvattha, the holy Tree of Bodhi, throw their seed out, take root and procreate other trees—this is the only Force that has reality for him, as it is the never‐dying Breath of Life. The Pagan philosopher sought for the cause, the modern is content with only the effects and seeks the former in the latter. What is beyond, he does not know, nor does the modern A‐ gnostic care; thus rejecting the only knowledge upon which he can with full security base his Science. Yet this manifested Force has an answer for him who seeks to fathom it. He who sees in the cross, the decussated circle of Plato, the Pagan, not the antitype of circumcision, as Christian (St.) Augustine did,(1399) is forthwith regarded by the Church as a heathen; by Science, as a lunatic. This, because, while refusing to worship the God of physical generation, he confesses that he can know nothing of the Cause which underlies the so‐called First Cause, the Causeless Cause of this Vital Cause. Tacitly admitting the All‐Presence of the Boundless Circle and making of it the Universal Postulate upon which the whole of the Manifested Universe is based, the Sage keeps a reverential silence concerning that upon which no mortal man should dare to speculate. “The Logos of God is the revealer of man, and the Logos (the Verb) of man is the revealer of God,” says Éliphas Lévi in one of his paradoxes. To this, the Eastern Occultist would reply: On this condition, however, that man should be dumb on the Cause that produced both God and its Logos. Otherwise, he becomes invariably the reviler, not the revealer, of the Incognizable Deity.

We have now to approach a mystery—the Hebdomad in Nature. Perchance, all that we may say, will be attributed to coincidence. We may be told that this number in Nature is quite natural—as indeed we say it is—and has no more significance than the illusion of motion which forms the so‐called “strobic circles.” No great importance was given to these “singular illusions” when Professor Sylvanus Thompson exhibited them at the meeting of the British Association in 1877. Nevertheless we should like to learn the scientific explanation why seven should ever form itself as a preeminent number—six concentric circles around a seventh, and seven rings within one another round a central point, etc.—in this illusion, produced by a swaying saucer, or any other vessel. We give the solution refused by Science in the Section which follows.

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Section XI. The Mysteries of the Hebdomad

We must not close this Part on the Symbolism of Archaic History, without an attempt to explain the perpetual recurrence of this truly mystic number, the Hebdomad, in every scripture known to the Orientalists. As every religion, from the oldest to the latest, reveals its presence, and explains it on its own grounds agreeably with its own special dogmas, this is no easy task. We can, therefore, do no better or more explanatory work than to give a bird’s‐eye view of all. The numbers, 3, 4, 7, are the sacred numbers of Light, Life, and Union—especially in this present Manvantara, our Life‐Cycle; of which number seven is the special representative, or the factor number. This has now to be demonstrated.

If one should ask a Brâhman learned in the Upanishads, which are so full of the Secret Wisdom of old, why “he, of whom seven forefathers have drunk the juice of the Moon‐plant,” is Trisuparna, as Bopaveda is credited with saying;(1400) and why the Somapa Pitris should be worshipped by the Brâhman Trisuparna—very few could answer the question; or, if they knew, they would still less satisfy one’s curiosity. Let us, then, hold to what the old Esoteric Doctrine teaches. As says the Commentary:

When the first Seven appeared on Earth, they threw the seed of everything that grows on the land into the soil. First came Three, and Four were added to these as soon as stone was transformed into plant. Then came the second Seven, who, guiding the Jîvas of the plants, produced the middle [intermediate] natures between plant and moving living animal. The third Seven evolved their Chhâyâs.... The fifth Seven imprisoned their Essence.... Thus man became a Saptaparna.

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A. Saptaparna

Such is the name given in Occult phraseology to man. It means, as shown elsewhere, a seven‐leaved plant, and the name has a great significance in the Buddhist legends. So it had, also, under disguise, in the Greek myths. The T, or τ (Tau), formed from the figure 7, and the Greek letter Γ (Gamma), was, as stated in the last Section, the symbol of life, and of Life Eternal: of earthly life, because Γ (Gamma) is the symbol of the Earth (Gaia)(1401); and of Life Eternal, because the figure 7 is the symbol of the same life linked with Divine Life, the double glyph expressed in geometrical figures being:

[Symbol: a triangle over a square]

—a Triangle and a Quaternary, the symbol of Septenary Man.

Now, the number six has been regarded in the Ancient Mysteries as an emblem of physical Nature. For six is the representation of the six dimensions of all bodies—the six directions which compose their form, namely, the four directions extending to the four cardinal points, North, South, East, and West, and the two directions of height and thickness that answer to the Zenith and the Nadir. Therefore, while the Senary was applied by the Sages to physical man, the Septenary was for them the symbol of that man plus his immortal Soul.(1402)

J. M. Ragon gives a very good illustration of the “hieroglyphical senary,” as he calls our double equilateral triangle.

The hieroglyphical senary is the symbol of the commingling of the philosophical three fires and three waters, whence results the procreation of the elements of all things.(1403)

The same idea is found in the Indian double equilateral triangle. For, though it is called in that country the sign of Vishnu, yet in truth it is the symbol of the Triad, or Tri‐mûrti. For, even in the exoteric rendering, the lower triangle, [Symbol: triangle], with the apex downward, is the symbol of Vishnu, the God of the Moist Principle and Water, Nârâyana being the Moving Principle in the Nârâ, or Waters;(1404) while the triangle, with its apex upward, [Symbol: triangle], is Shiva, the Principle of Fire, symbolized by the triple flame in his hand.(1405) It is these two interlaced triangles, wrongly called “Solomon’s Seal”—which also form the emblem of our Society—that produce the Septenary and the Triad at one and the same time, and are the Decad. Whatever way this [Symbol: 6‐point star] is examined, all the ten numbers are contained therein. For with a point in the middle or centre, [Symbol: 6‐point star with middle dot], it is a sevenfold sign or Septenary; its triangles denote number three, or the Triad; the two triangles show the presence of the Binary; the triangles with the central point common to both yield the Quaternary; the six points are the Senary; and the central point, the Unit; the Quinary being traced by combination, as a compound of two triangles, the even number, and of three sides in each triangle, the first odd number. This is the reason why Pythagoras and the ancients made the number six sacred to Venus, since:

The union of the two sexes, and the spagyrization of matter by triads, are necessary to develop the generative force, that prolific virtue and tendency to reproduction which is inherent in all bodies.(1406)

Belief in “Creators,” or the personified Powers of Nature, is in truth no polytheism, but a philosophical necessity. Like all the other Planets of our system, the Earth has seven Logoi—the emanating Rays of the one “Father‐Ray”—the Protogonos, or the Manifested Logos, he who sacrifices his Esse (or “Flesh,” the Universe) that the World may live and every creature therein have conscious being.

Numbers 3 and 4 are respectively male and female, Spirit and Matter, and their union is the emblem of Life Eternal in Spirit on its ascending arc, and in Matter as the ever resurrecting Element—by procreation and reproduction. The spiritual male line is vertical [Symbol: bar]; the differentiated matter‐line is horizontal; the two forming the cross or ☩. The 3 is invisible; the 4 is on the plane of objective perception. This is why all the Matter of the Universe, when analyzed to its ultimates by Science, can be reduced to four Elements only—Carbon, Oxygen, Nitrogen, and Hydrogen; and why the three primaries, the noumena of the four, or graduated Spirit or Force, have remained a terra incognita, and mere speculations, mere names, to exact Science. Her servants must believe in and study first the primary causes, before they can hope to fathom the nature, and acquaint themselves with the potentialities, of the effects. Thus, while the men of Western learning had, and still have, the four, or Matter, to toy with, the Eastern Occultists and their disciples, the great Alchemists the world over, have the whole septenate to study from.(1407) As those Alchemists have it:

When the Three and the Four kiss each other, the Quaternary joins its middle nature with that of the Triangle [or Triad, i.e., the face of one of its plane surfaces becoming the middle face of the other], and becomes a Cube; then only does it [the Cube unfolded] become the vehicle and the number of Life, the Father‐Mother Seven.

Now we are taught that all these earliest forms of organic life also appear in septenary groups of numbers. From minerals or “soft stones that hardened,” to use the phraseology of the Stanzas, followed by the “hard plants that softened,” which are the product of the mineral, for “it is from the bosom of the stone that vegetation is born”;(1408) and then to man—all the primitive models in every kingdom of Nature begin by being ethereal, transparent, films. This, of course, takes place only in the first beginning of life. With the next period they consolidate, and at the seventh begin to branch off into species, all except men, the first of the mammalian animals(1409) in the Fourth Round.

Virgil, versed as every ancient poet was, more or less, in Esoteric Philosophy, sang of evolution in the following strains:

Principio cælum ac terras camposque liquentes Lucentemque globum Lunæ, Titaniaque astra Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus Mens agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet. Inde hominum pecudumque genus vitæque volantum Et quæ marmoreo fert monstra sub æquore pontus.(1410)

“First came three, or the Triangle.” This expression has a profound meaning in Occultism, and the fact is corroborated, in Mineralogy, Botany, and even in Geology—as has been demonstrated in the Section on “The Chronology of the Brâhmans”—by the compound number seven, the three and the four, being contained in it. Salt in solution proves this. For when its molecules, clustering together, begin to deposit themselves as a solid, the first shape they assume is that of triangles, of small pyramids and cones. It is the figure of Fire, whence the word “Pyramis”; while the second geometrical figure in manifested Nature is a Square or a Cube, 4 and 6; for, as Enfield says, “the particles of earth being cubical, those of fire are pyramidal”—truly. The pyramidal shape is that assumed by the pines—the most primitive tree after the fern period. Thus the two opposites in cosmic Nature—fire and water, heat and cold—begin their metrographical manifestations, one by a trimetric, the other by a hexagonal system. For the stellate crystals of snow, viewed under a microscope, are all and each of them a double or a treble six‐pointed star, with a central nucleus, like a miniature star within the larger one. Says Mr. Darwin—showing that the inhabitants of the sea‐shore are greatly affected by the tides:

The most ancient progenitors in the kingdom of the Vertebrata ... apparently consisted of a group of marine animals.... Animals living either about the mean high‐water mark, or about the mean low‐water mark, pass through a complete cycle of tidal changes in a fortnight.... Now it is a mysterious fact that in the higher and now terrestrial Vertebrata ... many normal and abnormal processes have one or more weeks [septenates] as their periods ... such as gestation of mammals, the duration of fevers.(1411)

The eggs of the pigeon are hatched in two weeks [or 14 days]; those of the fowl in three; those of the duck in four; those of the goose in five; and those of the ostrich in seven.(1412)

This number is closely connected with the Moon, whose Occult influence is ever manifesting itself in septenary periods. It is the Moon which is the guide of the Occult side of terrestrial Nature, while the Sun is the regulator and factor of manifested life. This truth has ever been evident to the Seers and the Adepts. Jakob Böhme, by insisting on the fundamental doctrine of the seven properties of everlasting Mother Nature, proved himself thereby a great Occultist.

But to return to the consideration of the septenary in ancient religious symbolism. To the metrological key of the symbolism of the Hebrews, which reveals numerically the geometrical relations of the Circle (All‐Deity) to the Square, Cube, Triangle, and all the integral emanations of the divine area, may be added the theogonic key. This key explains that Noah, the Deluge‐Patriarch, is in one aspect the permutation of the Deity (the Universal Creative Law), for the purpose of the formation of our Earth, its population, and the propagation of life on it, in general.

Now bearing in mind the septenary division in divine Hierarchies, as in cosmic and human constitutions, the student will readily understand that Jah‐Noah is at the head of, and is the synthesis of the lower cosmic Quaternary. The upper Sephirothal Triad, △—of which Jehovah‐Binah (Intelligence) is the left, female, angle—emanates the Quaternary, □. The latter, symbolizing by itself the Heavenly Man, the sexless Adam Kadmon, viewed as Nature in the abstract, becomes a septenate again by emanating from itself the additional three principles, the lower terrestrial or manifested physical Nature, Matter and our Earth—the seventh being Malkuth, the “Bride of the Heavenly Man”—thus forming, with the higher Triad, or Kether, the Crown, the full number of the Sephirothal Tree—the 10, the Total in Unity, or the Universe. Apart from the higher Triad, the lower creative Sephiroth are seven.

The above is not directly to our point, though it is a necessary reminder to facilitate the comprehension of what follows. The question at issue is to show that Jah‐Noah, or the Jehovah of the Hebrew Bible, the alleged Creator of our Earth, of man and all upon it, is:

(a) The lowest Septenary, the Creative Elohim—in his cosmic aspect.

(b) The Tetragrammaton or the Adam Kadmon, the “Heavenly Man” of the four letters—in his theogonic and kabalistic aspects.

(c) The Noah—identical with the Hindû Shishta, the human Seed, left for the peopling of the Earth from a previous creation, or Manvantara, as expressed in the Purânas, or the pre‐diluvian period as rendered allegorically in the Bible—in his cosmic character.

But whether a Quaternary (Tetragrammaton) or a Triad, the biblical Creative God is not the Universal 10, unless blended with Ain Suph (as Brahmâ with Parabrahman), but a septenary, one of the many septenaries of the Universal Septenate. In the explanation of the question now in hand, his position and status as Noah may best be shown by placing the 3, △, and 4, □, on parallel lines with the cosmic and human principles. For the latter, the old familiar classification is made use of.

As an additional demonstration of the statement, let the reader turn to kabalistic works.

“Ararat = the mount of descent = הר‐י‐רד, Hor‐Jared. Hatho mentions it out of composition by Arath = ארת. Editor of Moses Cherenensis says: ‘By this, they say, is signified the first place of descent (of the ark).’ ” (Bryant’s Anal., vol. iv. pp. 5, 6, 15.) Under “Berge,” mountain, Nork says of Ararat: “אררט, for ארת (i.e., Ararat for Arath) earth, Aramaic reduplication.” Here it is seen that Nork and Hatho make use of the same equivalent, in Arath, ארש, with the meaning of earth.(1413)

Noah thus symbolizing both the Root‐Manu and the Seed‐Manu, or the Power which developed the Planetary Chain, and our Earth, and the Seed‐Race, the Fifth, which was saved while the last sub‐races of the Fourth, Vaivasvata Manu, perished, the number seven will be seen to recur at every step. It is Noah who, as Jehovah’s permutation, represents the septenary Host of the Elohim, and is thus the Father or Creator (the Preserver) of all animal life. Hence the verses of Genesis: “Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male [3], and the female [4]; of fowls also of the air by sevens,”(1414) etc., followed by all the sevening of days and the rest.

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B. The Tetraktys In Relation To The Heptagon

Thus number seven, as a compound of 3 and 4, is the factor element in every ancient religion, because it is the factor element in Nature. Its adoption must be justified, and it must be shown to be the number par excellence, for, since the appearance of Esoteric Buddhism, frequent objections have been made, and doubts expressed as to the correctness of these assertions.

And here let the student be told at once, that in all such numerical divisions the One universal Principle—although referred to as (the) one, because the Only One—never enters into the calculations. It stands, in its character of the Absolute, the Infinite, and the Universal Abstraction, entirely by Itself and independent of every other Power whether noumenal or phenomenal. Says the author of the article “Personal and Impersonal God”:

This entity is neither matter nor spirit; it is neither Ego nor non‐Ego; and it is neither object nor subject.

In the language of Hindû philosophers it is the original and eternal combination of Purusha [Spirit] and Prakriti [Matter]. As the Advaitîs hold that an external object is merely the product of our mental states, Prakriti is nothing more than illusion, and Purusha is the only reality; it is the one existence which remains in the universe of Ideas. This ... then, is the Parabrahman of the Advaitîs. Even if there were to be a personal God with anything like a material Upâdhi (physical basis of whatever form), from the standpoint of an Advaitî there will be as much reason to doubt his noumenal existence, as there would be in the case of any other object. In their opinion, a conscious God cannot be the origin of the universe, as his Ego would be the effect of a previous cause, if the word conscious conveys but its ordinary meaning. They cannot admit that the grand total of all the states of consciousness in the universe is their deity, as these states are constantly changing, and as cosmic idealism ceases during Pralaya. There is only one permanent condition in the Universe, which is the state of perfect unconsciousness, bare Chidâkâsham (the field of consciousness) in fact.

When my readers once realize the fact that this grand universe is in reality but a huge aggregation of various states of consciousness, they will not be surprised to find that the ultimate state of unconsciousness is considered as Parabrahman by the Advaitîs.(1415)

Although itself entirely out of human reckoning or calculation, yet this “huge aggregation of various states of consciousness” is a septenate, in its totality entirely composed of septenary groups—simply because “the capacity of perception exists in seven different aspects corresponding to the seven conditions of matter,”(1416) or the seven properties, or states of matter. And, therefore, the series from one to seven, begins in the Esoteric calculations with the first manifested principle, which is number one if we commence from above, and number seven when reckoning from below, or from the lowest principle.

The Tetrad is esteemed in the Kabalah, as it was by Pythagoras, the most perfect, or rather sacred number, because it emanated from the One, the first manifested Unit, or rather the Three in One. And the latter has ever been impersonal, sexless, incomprehensible, though within the possibility of the higher mental perceptions.

The first manifestation of the eternal Monad was never meant to stand as the symbol of another symbol, the Unborn for the Element‐born, or the one Logos for the Heavenly Man. Tetragrammaton, or the Tetraktys of the Greeks, is the Second Logos, the Demiurgos.

The Tetrad, as Thomas Taylor thinks, is, however, the animal itself of Plato who, as Syrianus justly observes, was the best of the Pythagoreans; subsists at the extremity of the intelligible triad, as is most satisfactorily shown by Proclus in the third book of his treatise on the theology of Plato. And between these two triads [the double triangle], the one intelligible, and the other intellectual, another order of gods exists, which partakes of both extremes.(1417)...

The Pythagorean world, according to Plutarch,(1418) consisted of a double quaternary.

This statement corroborates what is said about the choice, by the exoteric theologies, of the lower Tetraktys. For:

The quaternary of the intellectual world [the world of Mahat] is T’Agathon, Nous, Psyche, Hyle; while that of the sensible world [of Matter], which is properly what Pythagoras meant by the word Kosmos, is Fire, Air, Water, and Earth. The four elements are called by the name of rhizômata, the roots or principles of all mixed bodies.(1419)

That is to say, the lower Tetraktys is the root of illusion, of the World of Matter; and this is the Tetragrammaton of the Jews, and the “mysterious deity,” over which the modern Kabalists make such a fuss!

This number [four] forms the arithmetical mean between the monad and the heptad; and this comprehends all powers, both of the productive and produced numbers; for this, of all numbers under ten, is made of a certain number; the duad doubled makes a tetrad, and the tetrad doubled [or unfolded] makes the hebdomad [the septenary]. Two multiplied into itself produces four; and retorted into itself makes the first cube. This first cube is a fertile number, the ground of multitude and variety, constituted of two and four [depending on the monad, the seventh]. Thus the two principles of temporal things, the pyramis and cube, form and matter, flow from one fountain, the tetragon [on earth, the monad, in heaven].(1420)

Here Reuchlin, the great authority on the Kabalah, shows the cube to be “matter,” whereas the pyramid or the triad is “form.” With the Hermesians the number four becomes the symbol of truth only when amplified into a cube, which, unfolded, makes seven, as symbolizing the male and female elements and the element of Life.(1421)

Some students have been puzzled to account for the vertical line,(1422) which is male, becoming, in the cross, a four‐partitioned line (four being a female number), while the horizontal (the line of matter) becomes three‐divisioned. But this is easy of explanation. Since the middle face of the “cube unfolded” is common to both the vertical and the horizontal bar, or double‐line, it becomes neutral ground so to say, and belongs to neither. The spirit line remains triadic, and the matter line two‐fold—two being an even and therefore a female number also. Moreover, according to Theon in his Mathematica, the Pythagoreans, who gave the name of Harmony to the Tetraktys, “because it is a diatessaron in sesquitertia,” were of opinion that:

The division of the canon of the monochord was made by the tetraktys in the duad, triad, and tetrad; for it comprehends a sesquitertia, a sesquialtera, a duple, a triple, and a quadruple proportion, the section of which is 27. In the ancient musical notation, the tetrachord consisted of three degrees or intervals, and four terms of sounds called by the Greeks diatessaron, and by us a fourth.(1423)

Moreover, the quaternary though an even, therefore a female (“infernal”) number, varied according to its form. This is shown by Stanley.(1424) The four was called by the Pythagoreans the Key‐Keeper of Nature; but in union with the three, which made it seven, it became the most perfect and harmonious number—nature herself. The four was “the masculine of feminine form,” when forming the cross; and seven is the “Master of the Moon,” for this Planet is forced to alter her appearance every seven days. It is on number seven that Pythagoras composed his doctrine on the Harmony and Music of the Spheres, calling a “tone” the distance of the Moon from the Earth; from the Moon to Mercury half a tone, from thence to Venus the same; from Venus to the Sun one and a half tones; from the Sun to Mars a tone; from thence to Jupiter half a tone; from Jupiter to Saturn half a tone; and thence to the Zodiac a tone; thus making seven tones—the diapason harmony.(1425) All the melody of Nature is in those seven tones, and therefore is called the “Voice of Nature.”

Plutarch explains(1426) that the most ancient Greeks regarded the Tetrad as the root and principle of all things, since it was the number of the elements which gave birth to all visible and invisible created things.(1427) With the brothers of the Rosy Cross, the figure of the cross, or cube unfolded, formed the subject of a disquisition in one of the Theosophic degrees of Peuvret, and was treated according to the fundamental principles of light and darkness, or good and evil.(1428)

The intelligible world proceeds out of the divine mind [or unit] after this manner. The Tetraktys, reflecting upon its own essence, the first unit, productrix of all things, and on its own beginning, saith thus: Once one, twice two, immediately ariseth a tetrad, having on its top the highest unit, and becomes a Pyramis, whose base is a plain tetrad, answerable to a superficies, upon which the radiant light of the divine unity produceth the form of incorporeal fire, by reason of the descent of Juno (matter) to inferior things. Hence ariseth essential light, not burning but illuminating. This is the creation of the middle world, which the Hebrews call the Supreme, the world of the [their] deity. It is termed Olympus, entirely light, and replete with separate forms, where is the seat of the immortal gods, deûm domus alta, whose top is unity, its wall trinity, and its superficies quaternity.(1429)

The “superficies” has thus to remain a meaningless surface, if left by itself. Unity only “illuminating” quaternity, the famous lower four has to build for itself also a wall from trinity, if it would be manifested. Moreover, the Tetragrammaton, or Microprosopus, is “Jehovah” arrogating to himself very improperly the “Was, Is, Will Be,” now translated into the “I am that I am,” and interpreted as referring to the highest abstract Deity; while Esoterically and in plain truth, it means only periodically chaotic, turbulent, and eternal Matter, with all its potentialities. For the Tetragrammaton is one with Nature, or Isis, and is the exoteric series of androgyne Gods such as Osiris‐Isis, Jove‐Juno, Brahmâ‐Vâch, or the Kabalistic Jah‐Hovah; all male‐females. Every anthropomorphic God, in old nations, as Marcellus Ficin well observed, has his name written with four letters. Thus with the Egyptians, he was Teut; the Arabs, Alla; the Persians, Sire; the Magi, Orsi; the Mahometans, Abdi; the Greeks, Teos; the ancient Turks, Esar; the Latins, Deus; to which John Lorenzo Anania adds the German Gott; the Sarmatian Bouh; etc.(1430)

The Monad being one, and an odd number, the Ancients therefore said that the odd were the only perfect numbers; and—selfishly, perhaps, yet as a fact—considered them all as masculine and perfect, being applicable to the celestial Gods, while even numbers, such as two, four, six, and especially eight, as being female, were regarded as imperfect, and given only to the terrestrial and infernal Deities. Virgil records the fact by saying, “Numero deus impare gaudet.” “The God is pleased with an odd number.”(1431)

But number seven, or the Heptagon, the Pythagoreans considered to be a religious and perfect number. It was called Telesphoros, because by it all in the Universe and mankind is led to its end, i.e., its culmination.(1432) The doctrine of the Spheres ruled by the seven Sacred Planets(1433) shows, from Lemuria to Pythagoras, the seven Powers of terrestrial and sublunary Nature, as well as the seven great Forces of the Universe, proceeding and evolving in seven tones, which are the seven notes of the musical scale.

The Heptad [our Septenary] was considered to be the number of a virgin, because it is unborn [like the Logos or the Aja of the Vedântins]:

Without a father ... or a mother, ... but proceeding directly from the monad, which is the origin and crown of all things.(1434)

And if the Heptad is made to proceed from the Monad directly, then it is, as taught in the Secret Doctrine of the oldest schools, the perfect and sacred number of this Mahâmanvantara of ours.

The Septenary, or Heptad, was sacred indeed to several Gods and Goddesses; to Mars, with his seven attendants, to Osiris, whose body was divided into seven and twice seven parts; to Apollo, the Sun, amid his seven planets, and playing the hymn to the seven‐rayed on his seven‐stringed harp; to Minerva, the fatherless and the motherless, and others.(1435)

Cis‐Himâlayan Occultism with its sevening, and because of such sevening, must be regarded as the most ancient, the original of all. It is opposed by some fragments left by Neo‐Platonists; and the admirers of the latter, who hardly understand what they defend, say to us: See, your forerunners believed only in triple man, composed of Spirit, Soul, and Body. Behold, the Târaka Râja Yoga of India limits that division to 3, we, to 4, and the Vedântins to 5 (Koshas). To this, we of the Archaic school ask:

Why then does the Greek poet say that it is not four but seven who sing the praise of the Spiritual Sun?

Ἑπτά με κ.τ.λ. Seven sounding letters sing the praise of me, The immortal God, the almighty Deity.

Why again is the triune Iao, the Mystery God, called the “fourfold,” and yet the triadic and tetradic symbols come under one unified name with the Christians—the Jehovah of the seven letters? Why again in the Hebrew Shebâ is the Oath (the Pythagorean Tetraktys) identical with number 7? Or, as Mr. Gerald Massey has it:

Taking an oath was synonymous with “to seven,” and the 10 expressed by the letter Jod, was the full number of Iao‐Sabaoth [—the ten‐lettered God].(1436)

In Lucian’s Auction:

Pythagoras asks, “How do you reckon?” The reply is, “One, Two, Three, Four.” Then Pythagoras says, “Do you see? In what you conceive Four there are Ten, a perfect Triangle and our Oath [Tetraktys, Four!—or Seven in all].”(1437)

Why again does Proclus say:

The Father of the golden verses celebrates the Tetraktys as the fountain of perennial nature?(1438)

Simply because those Western Kabalists who quote the exoteric proofs against us have no idea of the real Esoteric meaning. All the ancient Cosmologies—the oldest Cosmographies of the two most ancient people of the Fifth Root‐Race, the Hindû Âryans and the Egyptians, together with the early Chinese races, the remnants of the Fourth or Atlantean Race—based the whole of their Mysteries on number 10; the higher Triangle standing for the invisible and metaphysical World, the lower three and four, or the Septenate, for the physical Realm. It is not the Jewish Bible that brought number seven into prominence. Hesiod used the words, “the seventh is the sacred day,” before the Sabbath of “Moses” was ever heard of. The use of number seven was never confined to any one nation. This is well testified by the seven vases in the Temple of the Sun, near the ruins of Babian in Upper Egypt; the seven fires burning continually for ages before the altars of Mithra; the seven holy fanes of the Arabians; the seven peninsulas, the seven islands, seven seas, mountains, and rivers of India; and of the Zohar; the Jewish Sephiroth of the seven splendours; the seven Gothic deities; the seven worlds of the Chaldæans and their seven Spirits; the seven constellations mentioned by Hesiod and Homer; and all the interminable sevens which the Orientalists find in every MS. they discover.(1439)

What we have to say finally is this: Enough has been brought forward to show why the human principles were and are divided in the Esoteric Schools into seven. Make it four and it will either leave man minus his lower terrestrial elements, or, if viewed from a physical standpoint, make of him a soulless animal. The Quaternary must be the higher or the lower—the celestial or terrestrial Tetraktys; to become comprehensible, according to the teachings of the ancient Esoteric School, man must be regarded as a septenary. This was so well understood, that even the so‐called Christian Gnostics adopted this time‐honoured system.(1440) This remained for a long time a secret, for though it was suspected, no MSS. of that time spoke of it clearly enough to satisfy the sceptic. But there comes to our rescue the literary curiosity of our age—the oldest and best preserved Gospel of the Gnostics, Pistis Sophia. To make the proof absolutely complete, we shall quote from an authority, C. W. King, the only Archæologist who has had a faint glimmer of this elaborate doctrine, and the best writer of the day on the Gnostics and their gems.

According to this extraordinary piece of religious literature—a true Gnostic fossil—the human Entity is the Septenary Ray from the One,(1441) just as our School teaches. It is composed of seven elements, four of which are borrowed from the four kabalistical manifested worlds. Thus:

From Asiah it gets the Nephesh, or seat of the physical appetites [vital breath, also]; from Jezirah, the Ruach, or seat of the passions [? !]; from Briah, the Neshamah or reason; and from Aziluth it obtains the Chaiah, or principle of spiritual life. This looks like an adaptation of the Platonic theory of the Soul’s obtaining its respective faculties from the Planets in its downward progress through their spheres. But the Pistis‐Sophia, with its accustomed boldness, puts this theory into a much more poetical shape (§ 282). The Inner Man is similarly made up of four constituents, but these are supplied by the rebellious Æons of the Spheres, being the Power—a particle of the Divine light (“Divinæ particula auræ”) yet left in themselves; the Soul [the fifth] “formed out of the tears of their eyes, and the sweat of their torments”; the Ἀντιμῖμον Πνεύματος, Counterfeit of the Spirit (seemingly answering to our Conscience) [the sixth]; and lastly the Μοῖρα, Fate(1442) [Karmic Ego], whose business it is to lead the man to the end appointed for him: if he hath to die by the fire, to lead him into the fire; if he hath to die by a wild beast, to lead him unto the wild beast—[the seventh]!(1443)

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C. The Septenary Element In The Vedas

It Corroborates the Occult Teaching Concerning the Seven Globes and the Seven Races.

We have to go to the very source of historical information, if we would bring our best evidence to testify to the facts enunciated. For, though entirely allegorical, the Rig Vedic hymns are none the less suggestive. The seven Rays of Sûrya, the Sun, are therein made parallel to the seven Worlds, of every Planetary Chain, to the seven Rivers of Heaven and Earth, the former being the seven creative Hosts, and the latter the seven Men, or primitive human groups. The seven ancient Rishis—the progenitors of all that lives and breathes on Earth—are the seven friends of Agni, his seven “Horses,” or seven “Heads.” The human race has sprung from Fire and Water, it is allegorically stated; fashioned by the Fathers, or the Ancestor‐ sacrificers, from Agni; for Agni, the Ashvins, the Âdityas,(1444) are all synonymous with those “Sacrificers,” or the Fathers, variously called Pitaras (or Pitris), Angirasas,(1445) and Sâdhyas, “Divine Sacrificers,” the most Occult of all. They are all called Deva‐putra Rishayah or the “Sons of God.”(1446) The “Sacrificers,” moreover, are collectively the One Sacrificer, the Father of the Gods, Vishvakarman, who performed the great Sarva‐medha ceremony, and ended by sacrificing himself.

In these Hymns the “Heavenly Man” is called Purusha, the “Man,”(1447) from whom Virâj was born(1448); and from Virâj, the (mortal) man. It is Varuna—lowered from his sublime position to be the chief of the Lords—Dhyânîs or Devas—who regulates all natural phenomena, who “makes a path for the Sun, for him to follow.” The seven Rivers of the Sky (the descending Creative Gods), and the seven Rivers of the Earth (the seven primitive Mankinds), are under his control, as will be seen. For he who breaks Varuna’s laws (Vratâni, or “courses of natural action,” active laws), is punished by Indra(1449) the Vedic powerful God, whose Vrata, or law or power, is greater than the Vratâni of any other God.

Thus, the Rig Veda, the oldest of all the known ancient records, may be shown to corroborate the Occult Teachings in almost every respect. Its Hymns, which are the records written by the earliest Initiates of the Fifth (our) Race concerning the Primordial Teachings, speak of the Seven Races (two still to come), allegorizing them by the seven “Streams”(1450) and of the Five Races (Panchakrishtayah) which have already inhabited this world(1451) on the five Regions (Panchapradishah)(1452) as also of the three Continents that were.(1453)

It is only those scholars who will master the secret meaning of the Purusha Sukta—in which the intuition of the modern Orientalists has chosen to see “one of the very latest hymns of the Rig Veda”—who may hope to understand how harmonious are its teachings and how corroborative of the Esoteric Doctrines. He must study, in all the abstruseness of their metaphysical meaning, the relations therein between the (Heavenly) Man (Purusha), sacrificed for the production of the Universe and all in it,(1454) and the terrestrial mortal man(1455) before he realizes the hidden philosophy of the verse:

15. He [“Man,” Purusha, or Vishvakarman] had seven enclosing logs of fuel, and thrice seven layers of fuel; when the Gods performed the sacrifice, they bound the Man as victim.

This relates to the three septenary primeval Races, and shows the antiquity of the Vedas, which knew of no other sacrifice, probably, in these earliest oral teachings; and also to the seven primeval groups of Mankind, as Vishvakarman represents divine Humanity collectively.(1456)

The same doctrine is found reflected in the other old religions. It may, it must, have come down to us disfigured and misinterpreted, as in the case of the Parsîs who read it in their Vendîdâd and elsewhere, though without understanding the allusions therein contained any better than do the Orientalists; yet the doctrine is plainly mentioned in their old works.(1457)

Comparing the Esoteric Teaching with the interpretations by Prof. James Darmesteter, one may see at a glance where the mistake is made, and the cause that produced it. The passage runs thus:

The Indo‐Iranian Asura [Ahura] was often conceived as sevenfold; by the play of certain mythical [?] formulæ and the strength of certain mythical [?] numbers, the ancestors of the Indo‐Iranians had been led to speak of seven worlds,(1458) and the supreme god was often made sevenfold, as well as the worlds over which he ruled. The seven worlds became in Persia the seven Karshvare of the earth: the earth is divided into seven Karshvare, only one of which is known and accessible to man, the one on which we live, namely, Hvaniratha; which amounts to saying that there are seven earths.(1459) Parsi mythology knows also of seven heavens. Hvaniratha itself is divided into seven climes. (Orm. Ahr. § 72.)(1460)

The same division and doctrine is to be found in the oldest and most revered of the Hindû scriptures—the Rig Veda. Mention is made therein of six Worlds, besides our Earth: the six Rajamsi above Prithivî, the Earth, or “this” (Idam) as opposed to “that which is yonder” (i.e., the six Globes on the three other planes or Worlds).(1461)

The italics are ours to point out the identity of the tenets with those of the Esoteric Doctrine, and to accentuate the mistake that is made. The Magi or Mazdeans only believed in what other people believed in: namely, in seven “Worlds” or Globes of our Planetary Chain, of which only one is accessible to man, at the present time, our Earth; and in the successive appearance and destruction of seven Continents or Earths on this our Globe, each Continent being divided, in commemoration of the seven Globes (one visible, six invisible), into seven islands or continents, seven “climes,” etc. This was a common belief in those days when the now Secret Doctrine was open to all. It is this multiplicity of localities in septenary divisions, which has made the Orientalists—who have, moreover, been further led astray by the oblivion of their primitive doctrines of both the uninitiated Hindûs and Parsîs—feel so puzzled by this ever‐ recurring seven‐fold number as to regard it as “mythical.” It is this oblivion of first principles which has led the Orientalists off the right track and made them commit the greatest blunders. The same failure is found in the definition of the Gods. Those who are ignorant of the Esoteric Doctrine of the earliest Âryans, can never assimilate or even understand correctly the metaphysical meaning contained in these Beings.

Ahura Mazda (Ormazd) was the head and synthesis of the seven Amesha Spentas, or Amshaspands, and, therefore, an Amesha Spenta himself. Just as Jehovah‐Binah‐Elohim was the head and synthesis of the Elohim, and no more; so Agni‐Vishnu‐Sûrya was the synthesis and head, or the focus whence emanated in physics and also in metaphysics, from the spiritual as well as from the physical Sun, the seven Rays, the seven Fiery Tongues, the seven Planets or Gods. All these became supreme Gods and the One God, but only after the loss of the primeval secrets; i.e., the sinking of Atlantis, or the “Flood,” and the occupation of India by the Brâhmans, who sought safety on the summits of the Himâlayas, for even the high table‐lands of what is now Tibet became submerged for a time. Ahura Mazda is addressed only as the “Most Blissful Spirit, Creator of the Corporeal World” in the Vendîdâd. Ahura Mazda in its literal translation means the “Wise Lord” (Ahura “lord” and Mazda “wise”). Moreover, this name of Ahura, in Sanskrit Asura, connects him with the Mânasaputras, the Sons of Wisdom who informed the mindless man, and endowed him with his mind (Manas). Ahura (Asura) may be derived from the root ah “to be,” but in its primal signification it is what the Secret Teaching shows it to be.

When Geology shall have found out how many thousands of years ago the disturbed waters of the Indian Ocean reached the highest plateaux of Central Asia, when the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf made one with it, then only will they know the age of the existing Âryan Brâhmanical nation, and also the time of its descent into the plains of Hindûstan, which did not take place till millenniums later.

Yima, the so‐called “first man” in the Vendîdâd, as much as his twin‐ brother Yama, the son of Vaivasvata Manu, belongs to two epochs of Universal History. He is the Progenitor of the Second human Race, hence the personification of the Shadows of the Pitris, and the Father of the Postdiluvian Humanity. The Magi said, “Yima,” as we say “man” when speaking of mankind. The “fair Yima,” the first mortal who converses with Ahura Mazda, is the _first “man” who dies_ or disappears, not the first who is born. The “son of Vîvanghat”(1462) was, like the son of Vaivasvata, the symbolical man, who stood in Esotericism as the representative of the first three Races and the collective Progenitor thereof. Of these Races the first two never died(1463) but only vanished, absorbed in their progeny, and the Third knew death only towards its close, after the separation of the sexes and its “Fall” into generation. This is plainly alluded to in Fargard ii of the Vendîdâd. Yima refuses to become the bearer of the law of Ahura Mazda, saying:

“I was not born, I was not taught to be the preacher and the bearer of thy law.”(1464)

And then Ahura Mazda asks him to make his men increase and “watch over” his world.

He refuses to become the priest of Ahura Mazda, because he is his own priest and sacrificer, but he accepts the second proposal. He is made to answer:

“Yes!... Yes, I will nourish, and rule, and watch over thy world. There shall be, while I am king, neither cold wind nor hot wind, neither disease nor death.”

Then Ahura Mazda brings him a golden ring and a poniard, the emblems of sovereignty.

Thus, under the sway of Yima, three hundred winters passed away, and the earth was replenished with flocks and herds, with men and dogs and birds and with red blazing fires.

Three hundred winters mean three hundred periods or cycles. “Replenished,” mark well; that is to say, all this had been on it before; and thus is proven the knowledge of the doctrine about the successive Destructions of the World and its Life‐Cycles. Once the “three hundred winters” were over, Ahura Mazda warns Yima that the Earth is becoming too full, and men have nowhere to live. Then Yima steps forward, and with the help of Spenta Ârmaita, the female Genius, or Spirit of the Earth, makes that Earth stretch out and become larger by one‐third, after which “new flocks and herds and men” appear upon it. Ahura Mazda warns him again, and Yima makes the Earth by the same magic power to become larger by two‐thirds. “Nine hundred winters” pass away, and Yima has to perform the ceremony for the third time. The whole of this is allegorical. The three processes of stretching the Earth, refer to the three successive Continents and Races issuing one after and from the other, as explained more fully elsewhere. After the third time, Ahura Mazda warns Yima in an assembly of “celestial gods” and “excellent mortals” that upon the material world the fatal winters are going to fall, and all life will perish. This is the old Mazdean symbolism for the “Flood,” and the coming cataclysm to Atlantis, which sweeps away every Race in its turn. Like Vaivasvata Manu and Noah, Yima makes a Vara—an Enclosure, an Ark—under the God’s direction, and brings thither the seed of every living creature, animals and “Fires.”

It is of this “Earth” or new Continent that Zarathushtra became the law‐ giver and ruler. This was the Fourth Race in its beginning, after the men of the Third began to die out. Till then, as said above, there had been no regular death, but only a transformation, for men had no personality as yet. They had Monads—“Breaths” of the One Breath, as impersonal as the source from which they proceeded. They had bodies, or rather shadows of bodies, which were sinless, hence Karma‐less. Therefore, as there was no Kâma Loka—least of all Nirvâna or even Devachan—for the “Souls” of men who had no personal Egos, there could be no intermediate periods between the incarnations. Like the Phœnix, primordial man resurrected out of his old into a new body. Each time, and with each new generation, he became more solid, more physically perfect, agreeably with the evolutionary law, which is the Law of Nature. Death came with the complete physical organism, and with it—moral decay.

This explanation shows one more old religion agreeing in its symbology with the Universal Doctrine.

Elsewhere the oldest Persian traditions, the relics of Mazdeism of the still older Magians, are given, and some of them explained. Mankind did not issue from one solitary couple. Nor was there ever a first man—whether Adam or Yima—but a first mankind.

It may, or may not, be “mitigated polygenism.” Once that both Creation ex nihilo (an absurdity) and a superhuman Creator or Creators (a fact) are made away with by Science, polygenism presents no more difficulties or inconveniences—rather fewer from a scientific point of view—than monogenism does.

In fact, it is as scientific as any other claim. For in his Introduction to Nott and Gliddon’s Types of Mankind, Agassiz declares his belief in an indefinite number of “primordial races of men created separately”; and remarks that, “whilst in every zoological province animals are of different species, man, in spite of the diversity of his races, always forms one and the same human being.”

Occultism defines and limits the number of primordial races to seven, because of the seven “Progenitors,” or Prajâpatis, the evolvers of beings. These are neither Gods, nor supernatural Beings, but advanced Spirits from another and lower Planet, reborn on this Planet, and giving birth in their turn in the present Round to present Humanity. This doctrine is again corroborated by one of its echoes—among the Gnostics. In their anthropology and genesis of man they taught that “a certain company of seven Angels,” formed the first men, who were no better than senseless, gigantic, shadowy forms—“a mere wriggling worm” (!) writes Irenæus,(1465) who takes, as usual, the metaphor for reality.

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D. The Septenary In The Exoteric Works

We may now examine other ancient scriptures and see whether they contain the septenary classification, and, if so, to what degree.

Scattered about in thousands of other Sanskrit texts, some still unopened, others yet unknown, as well as in all the Purânas, as much as, if not much more than, even in the Jewish Bible, the numbers seven and forty‐ nine (7 × 7) play a most prominent part. In the Purânas they are found from the seven Creations, in the first chapters, down to the seven Rays of the Sun at the final Pralaya, which expand into seven Suns and absorb the material of the whole Universe. Thus the Matsya Purâna has:

For the sake of promulgating the Vedas, Vishnu, in the beginning of a Kalpa, related to Manu the story of Narasimha and the events of seven Kalpas.(1466)

Then again the same Purâna shows that:

In all the Manvantaras, classes of Rishis(1467) appear by seven and seven, and having established a code of law and morality depart to felicity.(1468)

The Rishis, however, represent many other things besides living sages.

In Dr. Muir’s translation of the Atharva Veda, we read:

1. Time carries (us) forward, a steed, with seven rays, a thousand eyes, undecaying, full of fecundity. On him intelligent sages mount; his wheels are all the worlds.

2. Thus Time moves on seven wheels; he has seven naves; immortality is his axle. He is at present all these worlds. Time hastens onward the first God.

3. A full jar is contained in Time. We behold him existing in many forms. He is all these worlds in the future. They call him “Time in the highest Heaven.”(1469)

Now add to this the following verse from the Esoteric Volumes:

Space and Time are one. Space and Time are nameless, for they are the incognizable That, which can be sensed only through its seven Rays—which are the seven Creations, the seven Worlds, the seven Laws, etc.

Remembering that the Purânas insist on the identity of Vishnu with Time and Space,(1470) and that even the Rabbinical symbol for God is Maqom, “Space,” it becomes clear why, for purposes of a manifesting Deity—Space, Matter, and Spirit—the one central Point became the Triangle and Quaternary—the perfect Cube—hence seven. Even the Pravaha Wind—the mystic and occult force that gives the impulse to, and regulates the course of the stars and planets—is septenary. The Kûrma and Linga Purânas enumerate seven principal winds of that name, which winds are the principles of Cosmic Space.(1471) They are intimately connected with Dhruva(1472) (now Alpha), the Pole‐Star, which is connected in its turn with the production of various phenomena through cosmic forces.

Thus, from the seven Creations, seven Rishis, Zones, Continents, Principles, etc., in the Âryan Scriptures, the number has passed through Indian, Egyptian, Chaldæan, Greek, Jewish, Roman, and finally Christian mystic thought, until it landed in, and remained indelibly impressed on, every exoteric theology. The seven old books stolen out of Noah’s Ark by Ham, and given to Cush, his son, and the seven Brazen Columns of Ham and Cheiron, are a reflection and a remembrance of the seven primordial Mysteries instituted according to the “seven secret Emanations,” the seven Sounds, and seven Rays—the spiritual and sidereal models of the seven thousand times seven copies of them in later æons.

The mysterious number is once more prominent in the no less mysterious Maruts. The Vâyu Purâna shows, and the Harivamsha corroborates, concerning the Maruts—the oldest as the most incomprehensible of all the secondary or lower Gods in the Rig Veda:

That they are born in every Manvantara [Round], seven times seven (or forty‐nine); that, in each Manvantara, four times seven (or twenty‐eight) obtain emancipation, but their places are filled up by persons reborn in that character.(1473)

What are the Maruts in their Esoteric meaning, and who those persons “reborn in that character”? In the Rik and other Vedas, the Maruts are represented as the Storm Gods and the friends and allies of Indra; they are the “Sons of Heaven and of Earth.” This led to an allegory that makes them the children of Shiva, the great patron of the Yogîs:

The Mahâ Yogî, the great ascetic, in whom is centred the highest perfection of austere penance and abstract meditation, by which the most unlimited powers are attained, marvels and miracles are worked, the highest spiritual knowledge is acquired, and union with the great spirit of the universe is eventually gained.(1474)

In the Rig Veda the name Shiva is unknown, but the corresponding God is called Rudra, a name used for Agni, the Fire‐God, the Maruts being called therein his sons. In the Râmâyana and the Purânas, their mother, Diti—the sister, or complement, and a form of Aditi—anxious to obtain a son who would destroy Indra, is told by Kashyapa, the Sage, that if, “with thoughts wholly pious and person entirely pure,” she carries the babe in her womb “for a hundred years,”(1475) she will have such a son. But Indra foils her in the design. With his thunderbolt he divides the embryo in her womb into seven portions, and then divides every such portion into seven pieces again, which become the swift‐moving deities, the Maruts.(1476) These Deities are only another aspect, or a development, of the Kumâras, who are patronymically Rudras, like many others.(1477)

Diti, being Aditi—unless the contrary is proven to us—Aditi, we say, or Âkâsha in her highest form, is the Egyptian seven‐fold Heaven. Every true Occultist will understand what this means. Diti, we repeat, is the sixth principle of metaphysical Nature, the Buddhi of Âkâsha. Diti, the Mother of the Maruts, is one of her terrestrial forms, made to represent, at one and the same time, the Divine Soul in the ascetic, and the divine aspirations of mystic Humanity toward deliverance from the webs of Mâyâ, and consequent final bliss. Indra is now degraded, because of the Kali Yuga, when such aspirations are no more general but have become abnormal through a general spread of Ahamkâra, the feeling of Egotism, or “I‐am‐ ness” and ignorance; but in the beginning Indra was one of the greatest Gods of the Hindû Pantheon, as the Rig Veda shows. Surâdhipa the “chief of the gods,” has fallen down from Jishnu, the “Leader of the Celestial Host”—the Hindû St. Michael—to an opponent of asceticism, the enemy of every holy aspiration. He is shown married to Aindrî (Indrânî), the personification of Aindriyaka, the evolution of the element of senses, whom he married “because of her voluptuous attractions”; after which he began sending celestial female demons to excite the passions of holy men, Yogîs, and “to beguile them from the potent penances which he dreaded.” Therefore, Indra, now characterized as “the god of the firmament, the personified atmosphere”—is in reality the cosmic principle Mahat, and the fifth human principle, Manas in its dual aspect—as connected with Buddhi, and as allowing itself to be dragged down by the Kâma principle, the body of passions and desires. This is demonstrated by Brahmâ telling the conquered God that his frequent defeats were due to Karma, and were a punishment for his licentiousness, and the seduction of various nymphs. It is in this latter character that he seeks, to save himself from destruction, to destroy the coming “babe,” destined to conquer him—the babe, of course, allegorizing the divine and steady will of the Yogî, determined to resist all such temptations, and thus destroy the passions within his earthly personality. Indra succeeds again, because flesh conquers spirit.(1478) He divides the “embryo” (of new divine Adeptship, begotten once more by the Ascetics of the Âryan Fifth Race) into seven portions (a reference not alone to the seven sub‐races of the new Root‐ Race, in each of which there will be a Manu,(1479) but also to the seven degrees of Adeptship), and then each portion into seven pieces—alluding to the Manu‐Rishis of each Root‐Race, and even sub‐race.

It does not seem difficult to perceive what is meant by the Maruts obtaining “four times seven” emancipations in every Manvantara, and by those persons who are re‐born in that character, viz., of the Maruts in their Esoteric meaning, and who “fill up their places.” The Maruts represent (a) the passions that storm and rage within every Candidate’s breast, when preparing for an ascetic life—this mystically; (b) the Occult potencies concealed in the manifold aspects of Âkâsha’s lower principles—her body, or Sthûla Sharîra, representing the terrestrial, lower atmosphere of every inhabited Globe—this mystically and sidereally; (c) actual conscious existences, beings of a cosmic and psychic nature.

At the same time, Marut in Occult parlance is one of the names given to those Egos of great Adepts who have passed away, and are known also as Nirmânakâyas; of those Egos for whom—since they are beyond illusion—there is no Devachan, who, having either voluntarily renounced Nirvâna for the good of mankind, or who not yet having reached it, remain invisible on Earth. Therefore are the Maruts(1480) shown, firstly, as the sons of Shiva‐Rudra, the Patron Yogî, whose Third Eye (mystically) must be acquired by the Ascetic before he becomes an Adept; then, in their cosmic character, as the subordinates of Indra and his opponents, under various characters. The “four times seven” emancipations have a reference to the four Rounds, and the four Races that preceded ours, in each of which Maruta‐Jîvas (Monads) have been re‐born, and would have obtained final liberation, if only they had chosen to avail themselves of it. But instead of this, out of love for the good of mankind, which would struggle still more hopelessly in the meshes of ignorance and misery were it not for this extraneous help, they are re‐born over and over again “in that character,” and thus “fill up their own places.” Who they are, “on Earth”—every student of Occult Science knows. And he also knows that the Maruts are Rudras, among whom also the family of Tvashtri, a synonym of Vishvakarman, the great Patron of the Initiates, is included. This gives us an ample knowledge of their true nature.

The same for the septenary division of cosmos and the human principles. The Purânas, along with other sacred texts, teem with allusions to this. First of all, the Mundane Egg which contained Brahmâ, or the Universe, was externally invested with seven natural elements, at first loosely enumerated as Water, Air, Fire, Ether, and three secret elements; then the “World” is said to be “encompassed on every side” by seven elements, also within the Egg—as explained:

The world is encompassed on every side, and above, and below, by the shell of the egg (of Brahmâ) [Andakatâha].(1481)

Around the shell flows Water, which is surrounded with Fire; Fire by Air; Air by Ether; Ether by the Origin of the Elements (Ahamkâra); the latter by Universal Mind, or “Intellect,” as Wilson translates. It relates to Spheres of Being as much as to Principles. Prithivî is not our Earth but the World, the Solar System, and means the “broad,” the “wide.” In the Vedas—the greatest of all authorities, though needing a key to be read correctly—three terrestrial and three celestial Earths are mentioned as having been called into existence simultaneously with Bhûmi, our Earth. We have often been told that six, not seven, appears to be the number of spheres, principles, etc. We answer that there are, in fact, only six principles in man; since his body is no principle, but the covering, the shell of a principle. So with the Planetary Chain; therein, speaking Esoterically, the Earth—as well as the seventh, or rather fourth plane, one that stands as the seventh, if we count from the first triple kingdom of the Elementals that begin its formation—may be left out of consideration, being (to us) the only distinct body of the seven. The language of Occultism is varied. But supposing that three Earths only, instead of seven, are meant in the Vedas, what are those three, since we still know of but one? Evidently there must be an Occult meaning in the statement under consideration. Let us see. The “Earth that floats” on the Universal Ocean of Space, which Brahmâ divides in the Purânas into seven Zones, is Prithivî, the World divided into seven principles—a cosmic division, looking metaphysical enough, but, in reality, physical in its Occult effects. Many Kalpas later, our Earth is mentioned, and again, in its turn, is divided into seven Zones according to the law of analogy which guided ancient Philosophers. After which we find on it seven Continents, seven Isles, seven Oceans, seven Seas and Rivers, seven Mountains, seven Climates, etc.(1482)

Furthermore, it is not only in the Hindû scriptures and philosophy that one finds references to the seven Earths, but in the Persian, Phœnician, Chaldæan, and Egyptian cosmogonies, and even in Rabbinical literature. The Phœnix(1483)—called by the Hebrews Onech ענק, from Phenoch, Enoch, the symbol of a secret cycle and initiation, and by the Turks, Kerkes—lives a thousand years, after which, kindling a flame, it is self‐consumed; and then, reborn from itself, it lives another thousand years, up to seven times seven,(1484) when comes the Day of Judgment. The “seven times seven,” or forty‐nine, are a transparent allegory, and an allusion to the forty‐nine Manus, the seven Rounds, and the seven times seven human Cycles in each Round on each Globe. The Kerkes and the Onech stand for a Race Cycle, and the mystical Tree Ababel, the “Father Tree” in the Kurân, shoots out new branches and vegetation at every resurrection of the Kerkes or Phœnix; the “Day of Judgment” meaning a minor Pralaya. The author of the Book of God and the Apocalypse believes that:

The Phœnix is ... very plainly the same as the Simorgh of Persian romance; and the account which is given us of this last bird yet more decisively establishes the opinion that the death and revival of the Phœnix exhibit the successive destruction and reproduction of the world, which many believed to be effected by the agency of a fiery deluge [and also a watery one in its turn]. When the Simorgh was asked her age, she informed Caherman that this world is very ancient, for it has been already seven times replenished, with beings different from men, and seven times depopulated:(1485) that the age of the human race in which we now are, is to endure seven thousand years, and that she herself had seen twelve of these revolutions, and knew not how many more she had to see.(1486)

The above, however, is no new statement. From Bailly, in the last century, down to Dr. Kenealy, in the present, these facts have been noticed by a number of writers; but now a connection can be established between the Persian oracle and the Nazarene prophet. Says the author of the Book of God:

The Simorgh is in reality the same as the winged Singh of the Hindûs, and the Sphinx of the Egyptians. It is said that the former will appear at the end of the world ... [as a] monstrous lion‐bird.... From these the Rabbins have borrowed their mythos of an enormous Bird, sometimes standing on the earth, sometimes walking in the ocean ... while its head props the sky; and with the symbol, they have also adopted the doctrine to which it relates. They teach that there are to be seven successive renewals of the globe; that each reproduced system will last seven thousand years [?]; and that the total duration of the Universe will be 49,000 years. This opinion, which involves the doctrine of the preëxistence of each renewed creature, they may either have learned during their Babylonian captivity, or it may have been part of the primeval religion which their priests had preserved from remote times.(1487)

It shows rather that the initiated Jews borrowed, and their non‐ initiated successors, the Talmudists, lost, the sense, and applied the seven Rounds, and the forty‐nine Races, etc., wrongly.

Not only their priests, but those of every other country. The Gnostics, whose various teachings are the many echoes of the one primitive and universal doctrine, put the same numbers, under another form, in the mouth of Jesus in the very occult Pistis Sophia. We say more: even the Christian editor or author of Revelation has preserved this tradition and speaks of the seven Races, four of which, with part of the fifth, are gone, and two have to come. It is stated as plainly as can be. Thus saith the angel:

And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth. And there are seven kings; five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come.(1488)

Who, in the least acquainted with the symbolical language of old, will fail to discern in the five Kings that have fallen, the four Root‐Races that were, and part of the Fifth, the one that is; and in the other, that “is not yet come,” the Sixth and Seventh coming Root‐Races, as also the sub‐races of this, our present Race? Another still more forcible allusion to the seven Rounds and the forty‐nine Root‐Races in Leviticus, will be found elsewhere, Part III.(1489)

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E. Seven In Astronomy, Science, And Magic

Again, number seven is closely connected with the Occult significance of the Pleiades, those seven daughters of Atlas, “the six present, the seventh hidden.” In India they are connected with their nursling, the war God, Kârttikeya. It was the Pleiades (in Sanskrit, Krittikâs) who gave this name to the God, Kârttikeya being the planet Mars, astronomically. As a God he is the son of Rudra, born without the intervention of a woman. He is a Kumâra, a “virgin youth” again, generated in the fire from the Seed of Shiva—the Holy Spirit—hence called Agni‐bhû. The late Dr. Kenealy believed that, in India, Kârttikeya is the secret symbol of the Cycle of the Naros, composed of 600, 666, and 777 years, according to whether solar or lunar, divine or mortal, years are counted; and that the six visible, or the seven actual sisters, the Pleiades, are needed for the completion of this most secret and mysterious of all the astronomical and religious symbols. Therefore, when intended to commemorate one particular event, Kârttikeya was shown, of old, as a Kumâra, an Ascetic, with six heads—one for each century of the Naros. When the symbolism was needed for another event, then, in conjunction with the seven sidereal sisters, Kârttikeya is seen accompanied by Kaumârî, or Senâ, his female aspect. He is then riding on a peacock, the bird of Wisdom and Occult Knowledge, and the Hindû Phœnix, whose Greek relation with the 600 years of the Naros is well known. A six‐rayed star (double triangle), a Svastika, a six and occasionally seven‐pointed crown, is on his brow; the peacock’s tail represents the sidereal heavens; and the twelve signs of the Zodiac are hidden on his body; for which he is also called Dvâdasha‐kara, the “twelve‐handed,” and Dvâdashâksha, “twelve‐eyed.” It is as Shakti‐dhara, however, the “spear‐holder,” and the conqueror of Târaka, Târaka‐jit, that he is shown to be most famous.

As the years of the Naros are, in India, counted in two ways, either by one hundred “years of the gods” (divine years), or one hundred “mortal years,” we can see the tremendous difficulty the non‐initiated have in arriving at a correct comprehension of this cycle, which plays such an important part in St. John’s Revelation. It is the truly apocalyptic cycle, because of its being of various lengths and relating to various pre‐historic events, and in none of the numerous speculations about it have we found any but a few approximate truths.

Against the duration claimed by the Babylonians for their divine ages, it has been urged that Suidas shows the Ancients counting days for years, in their chronological computations. It is to Suidas and his authority that Dr. Sepp appeals in his ingenious plagiarism—which we have already exposed—of the Hindû figures 432. These they give in thousands and millions of years, the duration of their Yugas, but Sepp dwarfed them to 4,320 lunar years,(1490) “before the birth of Christ,” as “foreordained” in the sidereal, in addition to the invisible, heavens, and proved “by the apparition of the Star of Bethlehem.” But Suidas had no other warrant for this assertion than his own speculations, and he was not an Initiate. He cites, as a proof, Vulcan, and shows him reigning 4,477 years, or 4,477 days, as he thinks, or again rendered in years, 12 years, 3 months, and 7 days; he has, however, 5 days in his original—thus committing an error even in such an easy calculation.(1491) True, there are other ancient writers guilty of like fallacious speculations; Calisthenes, for instance, who assigns to the astronomical observations of the Chaldæans only 1,903 years, whereas Epigenes recognizes 720,000 years.(1492) The whole of these hypotheses made by profane writers are due to a misunderstanding. The chronology of the Western peoples, ancient Greeks and Romans, was borrowed from India. Now, it is said in the Tamil edition of Bagavadam that 15 solar days make a Paccham; two Pacchams, or 30 days, make a month of mortals, which is only one day of the Pitara Devatâ or Pitris. Again, 2 of these months constitute a Rûdû, 3 Rûdûs make an Ayanam, and 2 Ayanams a year of mortals, which is only a day of the Gods. It is from such misunderstood teachings that some Greeks have imagined that all the initiated priests had transformed days into years!

This mistake of the ancient Greek and Latin writers became pregnant with results in Europe. At the close of the past and the beginning of the present century, Bailly, Dupuis, and others, relying upon the purposely mutilated accounts of Hindû chronology, brought from India by certain unscrupulous and too zealous missionaries, built quite a fantastic theory on the subject. Because the Hindûs had made of half a revolution of the moon a measure of time; and because a month composed of only fifteen days, of which Quintus Curtius speaks,(1493) is found mentioned in Hindû literature, therefore, it becomes a verified fact that their year was only half a year, when it was not called a day! The Chinese, also, divided their Zodiac into twenty‐four parts, and hence their year into twenty‐four fortnights, but such computation did not, nor does it, prevent them having an astronomical year just the same as ours. They also have a period of 60 days—the Southern Indian Rûdû—to this day in some provinces. Moreover, Diodorus Siculus(1494) calls “thirty days an Egyptian year,” or that period during which the moon performs a complete revolution. Pliny and Plutarch(1495) both speak of it; but does it stand to reason that the Egyptians, who knew Astronomy as well as any other nation, made the lunar month consist of 30 days, when it is only 28 days with fractions? This lunar period had an Occult meaning surely as well as had also the Ayanam and the Rûdû of the Hindûs. The year of 2 months’ duration, and the period of 60 days also, was a universal measure of time in antiquity, as Bailly himself shows in his Traité de l’ Astronomie Indienne et Orientale. The Chinamen, according to their own books, divided their year into two parts, from one equinox to the other;(1496) the Arabs anciently divided the year into six seasons, each composed of two months; in the Chinese astronomical work called Kioo‐tche, it is said that two moons make a measure of time, and six measures a year; and to this day the aborigines of Kamschatka have their years of six months, as they had when visited by Abbé Chappe.(1497) But is all this any reason for claiming that when the Hindû Purânas say a solar year, they mean one solar day!

It was the knowledge of the natural laws which make of seven the root nature‐number, so to say, in the manifested world, or at any rate in our present terrestrial life‐cycle, and the wonderful comprehension of its workings, that unveiled to the Ancients so many of the mysteries of Nature. It is these laws, again, and their processes on the sidereal, terrestrial, and moral planes, which enabled the old Astronomers to calculate correctly the duration of the cycles and their respective effects on the march of events; to record beforehand—to prophesy, it is called—the influence which they would have on the course and development of the human races. The Sun, Moon, and Planets being the never‐erring time‐measurers, whose potency and periodicity were well known, became thus respectively the great ruler and rulers of our little system in all its seven domains, or “spheres of action.”(1498)

This has been so evident and remarkable, that even many of the modern men of Science, Materialists as well as Mystics, have had their attention called to this law. Physicians and Theologians, Mathematicians and Psychologists, have repeatedly drawn the attention of the world to this fact of periodicity in the behaviour of “Nature.” These numbers are explained in the Commentaries in the following words:

_The Circle is not the __“__One__”__ but the __“__All.__”_

In the higher [Heaven], the impenetrable Rajah,(1499) it [the Circle] becomes One, because [it is] the indivisible, and there can be no Tau in it.

_In the second [of the three Rajamsi, or the three __“__Worlds__”__], the One becomes Two [male and female], and Three [with the Son or Logos], and the Sacred Four [the Tetraktys, or Tetragrammaton]._

In the third [the lower World or our Earth], the number becomes Four, and Three, and Two. Take the first two, and thou wilt obtain Seven, the sacred number of life; blend [the latter] with the middle Rajah, and thou wilt have Nine, the sacred number of Being and Becoming.(1500)

When the Western Orientalists have mastered the real meaning of the Rig Vedic divisions of the World—the two‐fold, three‐fold, six‐ and seven‐ fold, and especially the nine‐fold division—the mystery of the cyclic divisions applied to Heaven and Earth, Gods and Men, will become clearer to them than it is now. For:

There is a harmony of numbers in all nature; in the force of gravity, in the planetary movements, in the laws of heat, light, electricity, and chemical affinity, in the forms of animals and plants, in the perceptions of the mind. The direction, indeed, of modern natural and physical science is towards a generalization which shall express the fundamental laws of all, by one simple numerical ratio. We would refer to Professor Whewell’s Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, and to Mr. Hay’s researches into the laws of harmonious colouring and form. From these it appears that the number seven is distinguished in the laws regulating the harmonious perception of forms, colours, and sounds, and probably of taste also, if we could analyze our sensations of this kind with mathematical accuracy.(1501)

So much so, indeed, that more than one Physician has stood aghast at the septenary periodical return of the cycles in the rise and fall of various complaints, and Naturalists have felt themselves at an utter loss to explain this law.

The birth, growth, maturity, vital functions, healthy revolutions of change, diseases, decay and death, of insects, reptiles, fishes, birds, mammals, and even of man, are more or less controlled by a law of completion in weeks [or seven days].(1502)

Dr. Laycock, writing on the “Periodicity of Vital Phenomena,”(1503) records a “most remarkable illustration and confirmation of the law in insects.”(1504)

To all of which Mr. Grattan Guinness remarks very pertinently, as he defends biblical chronology:

And man’s life ... is a week, a week of decades. “The days of our years are three‐score years and ten.” Combining the testimony of all these facts, we are bound to admit that there prevails in organic nature a law of septiform periodicity, a law of completion in weeks.(1505)

Without accepting the conclusions, and especially the premises of the learned founder of “The East London Institute for Home and Foreign Missions,” the writer accepts and welcomes his researches in the Occult chronology of the Bible; just as, while rejecting the theories, hypotheses, and generalizations of Modern Science, we bow before its great achievements in the world of the Physical, or in all the minor details of material Nature.

There is most assuredly an Occult “chronological system in Hebrew scripture,” the Kabalah being its warrant; moreover there is in it “a system of weeks,” based on the archaic Indian system, which may still be found in the old Jyotisha.(1506) And there are in it cycles of the “week of days,” of the “week of months,” of years, of centuries, and even of millenniums, and more, of the “week of years of years.”(1507) But all this can be found in the Archaic Doctrine. And if the common source of the chronology in every scripture, however veiled, is denied in the case of the Bible; then it will have to be shown how, in face of the six days and the seventh (a Sabbath), we can escape connecting the Genetic with the Paurânic Cosmogonies. For the first “week of creation” shows the septiformity of its chronology and thus connects it with Brahmâ’s “seven creations.” The able volume from the pen of Mr. Grattan Guinness, in which he has collected in some 760 pages every proof of this septiform calculation, is good evidence. For if the biblical chronology is, as he says, “regulated by the law of weeks,” and if it is septenary, whatever the measures of the creation week and the length of its days may be, and if, finally, “the Bible system includes weeks on a great variety of scales,” then this system is shown to be identical with all the Pagan systems. Moreover, the attempt to show that 4,320 years, in lunar months, elapsed between the “Creation” and the “Nativity,” is a clear and unmistakable connection with the 4,320,000 years of the Hindû Yugas. Otherwise, why make such efforts to prove that these figures, which are preëminently Chaldæan and Indo‐Âryan, play such a part in the New Testament? This we shall now prove still more forcibly.

Let the impartial critic compare the two accounts—the Vishnu Purâna and the Bible—and he will find that the “seven creations” of Brahmâ are at the foundation of the “week of creation” in Genesis. The two allegories are different, but the systems are both built on the same foundation‐ stone. The Bible can be understood only by the light of the Kabalah. Take the Zohar, the “Book of Concealed Mystery,” however now disfigured, and compare. The seven Rishis and the fourteen Manus, of the seven Manvantaras, issue from Brahmâ’s head; they are his “Mind‐born Sons,” and it is with them that begins the division of mankind into its Races from the Heavenly Man, the manifested Logos, who is Brahmâ Prajâpati. Speaking of the “Skull” (Head) of Macroprosopus, the Ancient One(1508) (in Sanskrit Sanat is an appellation of Brahmâ), the Ha Idra Rabba Qadisha, or “Greater Holy Assembly,” says that in every one of his hairs is a hidden fountain issuing from the concealed brain.

And it shineth and goeth forth through that hair unto the hair of Microprosopus, and from it [which is the manifest Quaternary, the Tetragrammaton] is his brain formed; and thence that brain goeth forth into thirty and two paths [or the Triad and the Duad, or again 432].

And again:

Thirteen curls of hair exist on the one side and on the other of the skull [i.e., six on one and six on the other, the thirteenth being also the fourteenth, as it is male‐female]; ... and through them commenceth the division of the hair [the division of things, of mankind and the races].(1509)

“We six are lights which shine forth from a seventh (light),” saith Rabbi Abba; “thou art the seventh light”—the synthesis of us all—he adds, speaking of Tetragrammaton and his seven “companions,” whom he calls the “eyes of Tetragrammaton.”(1510)

Tetragrammaton is Brahmâ Prajâpati, who assumed four forms, in order to create four kinds of supernal creatures, i.e., made himself four‐ fold, or the manifest Quaternary;(1511) after that, he is re‐born in the seven Rishis, his Mânasaputras, “Mind‐born Sons,” who became later, nine, twenty‐one, and so on, and who are all said to be born from various parts of Brahmâ.(1512)

There are two Tetragrammatons: the Macroprosopus and the Microprosopus. The first is the absolute perfect Square, or the Tetraktys within the Circle, both abstract conceptions, and is therefore called Ain—Non‐being, i.e., illimitable or absolute “Be‐ness.” But when viewed as Microprosopus, or the Heavenly Man, the Manifested Logos, he is the Triangle in the Square—the sevenfold Cube, not the fourfold, or the plane Square. For it is written in “The Greater Holy Assembly”:

And concerning this, the children of Israel wished to inquire in their hearts [know in their minds], like as it is written, Exod. xvii. 7: “Is the Tetragrammaton in the midst of us, or the Negatively Existent One?”(1513)

—where they distinguished between Microprosopus, who is called Tetragrammaton, and between Macroprosopus, who is called Ain, the Negatively Existent.(1514)

Therefore, Tetragrammaton is the Three made four and the Four made three, and is represented on this Earth by his seven “Companions,” or “Eyes”—the “seven eyes of the Lord.” Microprosopus is, at best, only a secondary manifested Deity. For “The Greater Holy Assembly” elsewhere says:

We have learned that there were ten (Rabbis) [Companions] entered into (the Assembly) [the Sod, “mysterious assembly or mystery”] and that seven came forth(1515) [i.e., ten for the unmanifested, seven for the manifested Universe].

1158. And when Rabbi Schimeon revealed the Arcana, there were found none present there save those [seven] (companions). And Rabbi Schimeon called them the seven eyes of Tetragrammaton, like as it is written, Zach. iii. 9: “These are the seven eyes [or principles] of Tetragrammaton” [—i.e., the four‐fold Heavenly Man, or pure Spirit, is resolved into septenary man, pure Matter and Spirit].(1516)

Thus the Tetrad is Microprosopus, and the latter is the male‐female Chokmah‐Binah, the second and third Sephiroth. The Tetragrammaton is the very essence of number seven, in its terrestrial significance. Seven stands between four and nine—the basis and foundation, astrally, of our physical world and man, in the kingdom of Malkuth.

For Christians and believers, this reference to Zechariah and especially to the Epistle of Peter,(1517) ought to be conclusive. In the old symbolism, “man,” chiefly the Inner Spiritual Man is called a “stone.” Christ is the corner‐stone, and Peter refers to all men as “lively” (living) stones. Therefore a “stone with seven eyes” on it can only mean a man whose constitution (i.e., his “principles”) is septenary.

To demonstrate more clearly the seven in Nature, it may be added that not only does the number seven govern the periodicity of the phenomena of life, but that it is also found dominating the series of chemical elements, and equally paramount in the world of sound and in that of colour as revealed to us by the spectroscope. This number is the factor, sine quâ non, in the production of occult astral phenomena.

It is needless to refer in detail to the number of vibrations constituting the notes of the musical scale; they are strictly analogous to the scale of chemical elements, and also to the scale of colour as unfolded by the spectroscope, although in the latter case we deal with only one octave, while both in music and chemistry we find a series of seven octaves represented theoretically, of which six are fairly complete and in ordinary use in both sciences. Thus, to quote Hellenbach:

It has been established that, from the standpoint of phenomenal law, upon which all our knowledge rests, the vibrations of sound and light increase regularly, that they divide themselves into seven columns, and that the successive numbers in each column are closely allied; i.e., that they exhibit a close relationship which not only is expressed in the figures themselves, but also is practically confirmed in chemistry as in music, in the latter of which the ear confirms the verdict of the figures.... The fact that this periodicity and variety is governed by the number seven is undeniable, and it far surpasses the limits of mere chance, and must be assumed to have an adequate cause, which cause must be discovered.

Verily, then, as Rabbi Abba said:

We are six lights which shine forth from a seventh (light); thou [Tetragrammaton] art the seventh light (the origin of) us all.

For assuredly there is no stability in those six, save (what they derive) from the seventh. For all things depend from the seventh.(1518)

The ancient and modern Western American Zuñi Indians seem to have entertained similar views. Their present‐day customs, their traditions and records, all point to the fact that, from time immemorial, their institutions, political, social and religious, were, and still are, shaped according to the septenary principle. Thus all their ancient towns and villages were built in clusters of six, around a seventh. It is always a group of seven, or of thirteen, and always the six surround the seventh. Again, their sacerdotal hierarchy is composed of six “Priests of the House” seemingly synthesized in the seventh, who is a woman, the “Priestess Mother.” Compare this with the “seven great officiating priests” spoken of in the Anugîtâ, the name given to the “seven senses,” exoterically, and to the seven human principles, Esoterically. Whence this identity of symbolism? Shall we still doubt the fact of Arjuna going over to Pâtâla, the Antipodes, America, and there marrying Ulûpî, the daughter of the Nâga, or rather Nargal, king? But to the Zuñi priests.

These receive, to this day, an annual tribute of corn of seven colours. Undistinguished from other Indians during the rest of the year, on a certain day they come out—six priests and one priestess—arrayed in their priestly robes, each of a colour sacred to the particular God whom the priest serves and personifies; each of them representing one of the seven regions, and each receiving corn of the colour corresponding to that region. Thus, the white represents the East, because from the East comes the first sun‐light; the yellow corresponds to the North, from the colour of the flames produced by the Aurora Borealis; the red, the South, as from that quarter comes the heat; the blue stands for the West, the colour of the Pacific Ocean, which lies to the West; black is the colour of the nether underground region—darkness; corn with grains of all colours on one ear represents the colours of the upper region—of the firmament, with its rosy and yellow clouds, shining stars, etc. The “speckled” corn, each grain containing all the colours, is that of the “Priestess‐Mother”—woman containing in herself the seeds of all races past, present and future; Eve being the mother of all living.

Apart from these was the Sun—the Great Deity—whose priest was the spiritual head of the nation. These facts were ascertained by Mr. F. Hamilton Cushing, who, as many are aware, became a Zuñi, lived with them, was initiated into their religious mysteries, and has learned more about them than any other man now living.

Seven is also the great magic number. In the Occult Records the weapon mentioned in the Purânas and the Mahâbhârata—the Âgneyâstra or “fiery weapon” bestowed by Aurva upon his Chelâ Sagara—is said to be constructed of seven elements. This weapon—supposed by some ingenious Orientalists to have been a “rocket” (!)—is one of the many thorns in the side of our modern Sanskritists. Wilson exercises his penetration over it, on several pages in his Specimens of the Hindû Theatre, and finally fails to explain it. He can make nothing out of the Âgneyâstra, for he argues:

These weapons are of a very unintelligible character. Some of them are occasionally wielded as missiles; but, in general, they appear to be mystical powers exercised by the individual—such as those of paralyzing an enemy, or locking his senses fast in sleep, or bringing down storm, and rain, and fire, from heaven.(1519)... They are supposed to assume celestial shapes, endowed with human faculties.... The Râmâyana calls them the sons of Krishâshva.(1520)

The Shastra‐devatâs, “Gods of the divine weapons,” are no more Âgneyâstras, the weapons, than the gunners of modern artillery are the cannon they direct. But this simple solution did not seem to strike the eminent Sanskritist. Nevertheless, as he himself says of the armiform progeny of Krishâshva, “the allegorical origin of the Âgneyâstra weapons is, undoubtedly, the more ancient.”(1521) It is the fiery javelin of Brahmâ.

The seven‐fold Âgneyâstra, like the seven senses and the seven principles, symbolized by the seven priests, are of untold antiquity. How old is the doctrine believed in by Theosophists, the following Section will tell.

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