SECTION XXXII. TRACES OF THE MYSTERIES…

SECTION XXXII. TRACES OF THE MYSTERIES

Says the Royal Masonic Cyclopædia, art. “Sun:”

In all times, the Sun has necessarily played an important part as a symbol, and especially in Freemasonry. The W.M. represents the rising sun, the J.W. the sun at the meridian, and the S.W. the setting sun. In the Druidical rites, the Arch‐Druid represented the sun, and was aided by two other officers, one representing the Moon in the West, and the other the Sun at the South in its meridian. It is quite unnecessary to enter into any lengthened discussion on this symbol.

It is the more “unnecessary” since J. M. Ragon has discussed it very fully, as one may find at the end of Section XXIX., where part of his explanations have been quoted. Freemasonry derived her rites from the East, as we have said. And if it be true to say of the modern Rosicrucians that “they are invested with a knowledge of chaos, not perhaps a very desirable acquisition,” the remark is still more true when applied to all the other branches of Masonry, since the knowledge of their members about the full signification of their symbols is nil. Dozens of hypotheses are resorted to, one more unlikely than the other, as to the “Round Towers” of Ireland; one fact is enough to show the ignorance of the Masons, namely, that, according to the Royal Masonic Cyclopædia, the idea that they are connected with Masonic Initiation may be at once dismissed as unworthy of notice. The “Towers,” which are found throughout the East in Asia, were connected with the Mystery‐Initiations, namely, with the Vishvakarma and the Vikarttana rites. The candidates for Initiation were placed in them for three days and three nights, wherever there was no temple with a subterranean crypt close at hand. These round towers were built for no other purposes. Discredited as are all such monuments of Pagan origin by the Christian clergy, who thus “soil their own nest,” they are still the living and indestructible relics of the Wisdom of old. Nothing exists in this objective and illusive world of ours that cannot be made to serve two purposes—a good and a bad one. Thus in later ages, the Initiates of the Left Path and the anthropomorphists took in hand most of those venerable ruins, then silent and deserted by their first wise inmates, and turned them indeed into phallic monuments. But this was a deliberate, wilful, and vicious misinterpretation of their real meaning, a deflection from their first use. The Sun—though ever, even for the multitudes, μὸνος οὐρανοῦ θεὸς, “the only and one King and God in Heaven,” and the Εὐβουλῆ, “the God of Good Counsel” of Orpheus—had in every exoteric popular religion a dual aspect which was anthropomorphised by the profane. Thus the Sun was Osiris‐Typhon, Ormuzd‐Ahriman, Bel‐Jupiter and Baal, the life‐giving and the death‐giving luminary. And thus one and the same monolith, pillar, pyramid, tower or temple, originally built to glorify the first principle or aspect, might become in time an idol‐fane, or worse, a phallic emblem in its crude and brutal form. The Lingam of the Hindus has a spiritual and highly philosophical meaning, while the missionaries see in it but an “indecent emblem;” it has just the meaning which is to be found in all those baalim, chammanim, and the bamoth with the pillars of unhewn stone of the Bible, set up for the glorification of the male Jehovah. But this does not alter the fact that the pureia of the Greeks, the nur‐hags of Sardinia, the teocalli of Mexico, etc., were all in the beginning of the same character as the “Round Towers” of Ireland. They were sacred places of Initiation.

In 1877, the writer, quoting the authority and opinions of some most eminent scholars, ventured to assert that there was a great difference between the terms Chrestos and Christos, a difference having a profound and Esoteric meaning. Also that while Christos means “to live” and “to be born into a new life,” Chrestos, in “Initiation” phraseology, signified the death of the inner, lower, or personal nature in man; thus is given the key to the Brâhmanical title, the twice‐born; and finally,

There were Chrestians long before the era of Christianity, and the Essenes belonged to them.(536)...

For this epithets sufficiently opprobrious to characterise the writer could hardly be found. And yet then as well as now, the author never attempted a statement of such a serious nature without showing as many learned authorities for it as could be mustered. Thus on the next page it was said:

Lepsius shows that the word Nofre means Chrestos, “good,” and that one of the titles of Osiris, “Onnofre,” must be translated “the goodness of God made manifest.” “The worship of Christ was not universal at this early date,” explains Mackenzie, “by which I mean that Christolatry had not been introduced; but the worship of Chrestos—the Good Principle—had preceded it by many centuries, and even survived the general adoption of Christianity, as shown on monuments still in existence....” Again, we have an inscription which is pre‐Christian on an epitaphial tablet (Spon. Misc. Erud., Ant., x. xviii. 2). Υαχινθε Λαρισαιων Δησμοσιε Πρως Χρηστε Χαιρε, and de Rossi (Roma Sotteranea, tome i., tav. xxi.) gives us another example from the catacombs—“Ælia Chreste, in Pace.”(537)

To‐day the writer is able to add to all those testimonies the corroboration of an erudite author, who proves whatever he undertakes to show on the authority of geometrical demonstration. There is a most curious passage with remarks and explanations in the Source of Measures, whose author has probably never heard of the “Mystery‐God” Visvakarma of the early Âryans. Treating on the difference between the terms Chrest and Christ, he ends by saying that:

There were two Messiahs: one who went down into the pit for the salvation of this world; this was the Sun shorn of his golden rays, and crowned with blackened ones (symbolising this loss), as the thorns: the other was the triumphant Messiah mounting up to the summit of the arch of heaven, and personified as the Lion of the Tribe of Judah. In both instances he had the cross; once in humiliation and once holding it in his control as the law of creation, He being Jehovah.

And then the author proceeds to give “the fact” that “there were two Messiahs,” etc., as quoted above. And this—leaving the divine and mystic character and claim for Jesus entirely independent of this event of His mortal life—shows Him, beyond any doubt, as an Initiate of the Egyptian Mysteries, where the same rite of Death and of spiritual Resurrection for the neophyte, or the suffering Chrestos on his trial and new birth by Regeneration, was enacted—for this was a universally adopted rite.

The “pit” into which the Eastern Initiate was made to descend was, as shown before, Pâtâla, one of the seven regions of the nether world, over which ruled Vâsuki, the great “snake God.” This pit, Pâtâla, has in the Eastern Symbolism precisely the same manifold meaning as is found by Mr. Ralston Skinner in the Hebrew word shiac in its application to the case in hand. For it was the synonym of Scorpio—Pâtâla’s depths being “impregnated with the brightness of the new Sun”—represented by the “newly born” into the glory; and Pâtâla was and is in a sense, “a pit, a grave, the place of death, and the door of Hades or Sheol”—as, in the partially exoteric Initiations in India, the candidate had to pass through the matrix of the heifer before proceeding to Pâtâla. In its non‐mystic sense it is the Antipodes—America being referred to in India as Pâtâla. But in its symbolism it meant all that, and much more. The fact alone that Vâsuki, the ruling Deity of Pâtâla, is represented in the Hindu Pantheon as the great Nâga (Serpent)—who was used by the Gods and Asuras as a rope round the mountain Mandara, at the churning of the ocean for Amrita, the water of immortality—connects him directly with Initiation.

For he is Shesha Nâga also, serving as a couch for Vishnu, and upholding the seven worlds; and he is also Ananta, “the endless,” and the symbol of eternity—hence the “God of Secret Wisdom,” degraded by the Church to the rôle of the tempting Serpent, of Satan. That what is now said is correct may be verified by the evidence of even the exoteric rendering of the attributes of various Gods and Sages both in the Hindu and the Buddhist Pantheons. Two instances will suffice to show how little our best and most erudite Orientalists are capable of dealing correctly and fairly with the symbolism of Eastern nations, while remaining ignorant of the corresponding points to be found only in Occultism and the Secret Doctrine.

(1) The learned Orientalist and Tibetan traveller, Professor Emil Schlagintweit, mentions in one of his works on Tibet, a national legend to the effect that

Nâgârjuna [a “mythological” personage “without any real existence,” the learned German scholar thinks] received the book Paramârtha, or according to others, the book Avatamsaka, from the Nâgas, fabulous creatures of the nature of serpents, who occupy a place among the beings superior to man, and are regarded as protectors of the law of Buddha. To these spiritual beings Shâkyamuni is said to have taught a more philosophical religious system than to men, who were not sufficiently advanced to understand it at the time of his appearance.(538)

Nor are men sufficiently advanced for it now; for “the more philosophical religious system” is the Secret Doctrine, the Occult Eastern Philosophy, which is the corner‐stone of all sciences rejected by the unwise builders even at this day, and more to‐day perhaps than ever before, in the great conceit of our age. The allegory means simply that Nâgârjuna having been initiated by the “Serpents”—the Adepts, “the wise ones”—and driven out from India by the Brâhmans, who dreaded to have their Mysteries and sacerdotal Science divulged (the real cause of their hatred of Buddhism), went away to China and Tibet, where he initiated many into the truths of the hidden Mysteries taught by Gautama Buddha.

(2) The hidden symbolism of Nârada—the great Rishi and the author of some of the Rig‐Vaidic hymns, who incarnated again later on during Krishna’s time—has never been understood. Yet, in connection with the Occult Sciences, Nârada, the son of Brahmâ, is one of the most prominent characters; he is directly connected in his first incarnation with the “Builders”—hence with the seven “Rectors” of the Christian Church, who “helped God in the work of creation.” This grand personification is hardly noticed by our Orientalists, who refer only to that which he is alleged to have said of Pâtâla, namely, “that it is a place of sexual and sensual gratifications.” This is thought to be amusing, and the reflection is suggested that Nârada, no doubt, “found the place delightful.” Yet this sentence simply shows him to have been an Initiate, connected directly with the Mysteries, and walking, as all the other neophytes, before and after him, had to walk, in “the pit among the thorns” in the “sacrificial Chrest condition,” as the suffering victim made to descend thereinto—a mystery, truly!

Nârada is one of the seven Rishis, the “mind‐born sons” of Brahmâ. The fact of his having been during his incarnation a high Initiate—he, like Orpheus, being the founder of the Mysteries—is corroborated, and made evident by his history. The Mahâbhârata states that Nârada, having frustrated the scheme formed for peopling the universe, in order to remain true to his vow of chastity, was cursed by Daksha, and sentenced to be born once more. Again, when born during Krishna’s time, he is accused of calling his father Brahmâ “a false teacher,” because the latter advised him to get married, and he refused to do so. This shows him to have been an Initiate, going against the orthodox worship and religion. It is curious to find this Rishi and leader among the “Builders” and the “Heavenly Host” as the prototype of the Christian “leader” of the same “Host”—the Archangel Mikael. Both are the male “Virgins,” and both are the only ones among their respective “Hosts” who refuse to create. Nârada is said to have dissuaded the Hari‐ashvas, the five thousand sons of Daksha, begotten by him for the purpose of peopling the Earth, from producing offspring. Since then the Hari‐ashvas have “dispersed themselves through the regions, and have never returned.” The Initiates are, perhaps, the incarnations of these Hari‐ashvas?

It was on the seventh day, the third of his ultimate trial, that the neophyte arose, a regenerated man, who, having passed through his second spiritual birth, returned to earth a glorified and triumphant conqueror of Death, a Hierophant.

An Eastern neophyte in his Chrest condition may be seen in a certain engraving in Moor’s Hindu Pantheon, whose author mistook another form of the crucified Sun or Vishnu, Vittoba, for Krishna, and calls it “Krishna crucified in Space.” The engraving is also given in Dr. Lundy’s Monumental Christianity, in which work the reverend author has collected as many proofs as his ponderous volume could hold of “Christian symbols before Christianity,” as he expresses it. Thus he shows us Krishna and Apollo as good shepherds, Krishna holding the cruciform Conch and the Chakra, and Krishna “crucified in Space,” as he calls it. Of this figure it may be truly said, as the author says of it himself:

This representation I believe to be anterior to Christianity.... It looks like a Christian crucifix in many respects.... The drawing, the attitude, the nail‐marks in hands and feet, indicate a Christian origin, while the Parthian coronet of seven points, the absence of the wood, and of the usual inscription, and the rays of glory above, would seem to point to some other than a Christian origin. Can it be the victim‐man, or the priest and victim both in one, of the Hindu Mythology, who offered himself a sacrifice before the worlds were?

It is surely so.

Can it be Plato’s Second God who impressed himself on the universe in the form of the cross? Or is it his divine man, who would be scourged, tormented, fettered, have his eyes burnt out; and lastly ... would be crucified?

It is all that and much more; archaic religious Philosophy was universal, and its Mysteries are as old as man. It is the eternal symbol of the personified Sun—astronomically purified—in its mystic meaning regenerated, and symbolised by all the Initiates in memory of a sinless Humanity when all were “Sons of God.” Now, mankind has become the “Son of Evil” truly. Does all this take anything away from the dignity of Christ as an ideal, or of Jesus as a divine man? Not at all. On the contrary, made to stand alone, glorified above all other “Sons of God,” He can only foment evil feelings in all those many millioned nations who do not believe in the Christian system, provoking their hatred and leading to iniquitous wars and strifes. If, on the other hand, we place Him among a long series of “Sons of God” and Sons of divine Light, every man may then be left to choose for himself, among those many ideals, which he will choose as a God to call to his help, and worship on earth as in Heaven.

Many among those called “Saviours” were “good shepherds,” as was Krishna for one, and all of them are said to have “crushed the serpent’s head”—in other words to have conquered their sensual nature and to have mastered divine and Occult Wisdom. Apollo killed Python, a fact which exonerates him from the charge of being himself the great Dragon, Satan: Krishna slew the snake Kalinâga, the Black Serpent; and the Scandinavian Thor bruised the head of the symbolical reptile with his crucifixion mace.

In Egypt every city of importance was separated from its burial‐place by a sacred lake. The same ceremony of judgment, as is described in The Book of the Dead—“that precious and mysterious book” (Bunsen)—as taking place in the world of Spirit, took place on earth during the burial of the mummy. Forty‐two judges or assessors assembled on the shore and judged the departed “Soul” according to its actions when in the body. After that the priests returned within the sacred precincts and instructed the neophytes upon the probable fate of the Soul, and the solemn drama that was then taking place in the invisible realm whither the Soul had fled. The immortality of the Spirit was strongly inculcated on the neophytes by the Al‐om‐jah—the name of the highest Egyptian Hierophant. In the Crata Nepoa—the priestly Mysteries in Egypt—the following are described as four out of the seven degrees of Initiation.

After a preliminary trial at Thebes, where the neophyte had to pass through many probations, called the “Twelve Tortures,” he was commanded, in order that he might come out triumphant, to govern his passions and never lose for a moment the idea of his inner God or seventh Principle. Then, as a symbol of the wanderings of the unpurified Soul, he had to ascend several ladders and wander in darkness in a cave with many doors, all of which were locked. Having overcome all, he received the degree of Pastophoris, after which he became, in the second and third degrees, the Neocoris and Melancphoris. Brought into a vast subterranean chamber, thickly furnished with mummies lying in state, he was placed in presence of the coffin which contained the mutilated body of Osiris. This was the hall called the “Gates of Death,” whence the verse in Job:

Have the gates of Death been opened to thee, Hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death?

Thus asks the “Lord,” the Hierophant, the Al‐om‐jah, the Initiator of Job, alluding to this third degree of Initiation. For the Book of Job is the poem of Initiation par excellence.

When the neophyte had conquered the terrors of this trial, he was conducted to the “Hall of Spirits,” to be judged by them. Among the rules in which he was instructed, he was commanded:

Never to either desire or seek revenge; to be always ready to help a brother in danger, even unto the risk of his own life; to bury every dead body; to honour his parents above all; to respect old age, and protect those weaker than himself; and, finally, to ever bear in mind the hour of death, and that of resurrection in a new and imperishable body.

Purity and chastity were highly recommended, and adultery was threatened with death. Thus the Egyptian neophyte was made a Kristophoros. In this degree the mystery‐name of IAO was communicated to him.

Let the reader compare the above sublime precepts with the precepts of Buddha, and the noble commandments in the “Rule of Life” for the ascetics of India, and he will understand the unity of the Secret Doctrine everywhere.

It is impossible to deny the presence of a sexual element in many religious symbols, but this fact is not in the least open to censure, once it becomes generally known that—in the religious traditions of every country—man was not born in the first “human” race from father and mother. From the bright “mind‐born Sons of Brahmâ,” the Rishis, and from Adam Kadmon with his Emanations, the Sephiroth, down to the “parentless,” the Anupâdaka, or the Dhyâni‐Buddhas, from whom sprang the Bodhisattvas and Manushi‐Buddhas, the earthly Initiates—men—the first race of men was with every nation held as being born without father or mother. Man, the “Manushi‐Buddha,” the Manu, the “Enosh,” son of Seth, or the “Son of Man” as he is called—is born in the present way only as the consequence, the unavoidable fatality, of the law of natural evolution. Mankind—having reached the last limit, and that turning point where its spiritual nature had to make room for mere physical organisation—had to “fall into matter” and generation. But man’s evolution and involution are cyclic. He will end as he began. Of course to our grossly material minds even the sublime symbolism of Kosmos conceived in the matrix of Space after the divine Unit had entered into and fructified it with Its holy fiat, will no doubt suggest materiality. Not so with primitive mankind. The initiatory rite in the Mysteries of the self‐sacrificing Victim that dies a spiritual death to save the world from destruction—really from depopulation—was established during the Fourth Race, to commemorate an event, which, physiologically, has now become the Mystery of Mysteries among the world‐ problems. In the Jewish script it is Cain and the female Abel who are the sacrificed and sacrificing couple—both immolating themselves (as permutations of Adam and Eve, or the dual Jehovah) and shedding their blood “of separation and union,” for the sake of and to save mankind by inaugurating a new physiological race. Later still, when the neophyte, as already mentioned, in order to be re‐born once more into his lost spiritual state, had to pass through the entrails (the womb) of a virgin heifer(539) killed at the moment of the rite, it involved again a mystery and one as great, for it referred to the process of birth, or rather the first entrance of man on to this earth, through Vâch—“the melodious cow who milks forth sustenance and water”—and who is the female Logos. It had also reference to the same self‐sacrifice of the “divine Hermaphrodite”—of the third Root‐Race—the transformation of Humanity into truly physical men, after the loss of spiritual potency. When, the fruit of evil having been tasted along with the fruit of good, there was as a result the gradual atrophy of spirituality and a strengthening of the materiality in man, then he was doomed to be born thenceforth through the present process. This is the Mystery of the Hermaphrodite, which the Ancients kept so secret and veiled. It was neither the absence of moral feeling, nor the presence of gross sensuality in them that made them imagine their Deities under a dual aspect; but rather their knowledge of the mysteries and processes of primitive Nature. The Science of Physiology was better known to them than it is to us now. It is in this that lies buried the key to the Symbolism of old, the true focus of national thought, and the strange dual‐sexed images of nearly every God and Goddess in both pagan and monotheistic Pantheons.

Says Sir William Drummond in Œdipus Judaïcus:

The truths of science were the arcana of the priests because these truths were the foundations of religion.

But why should the missionaries so cruelly twit the Vaishnavas and Krishna worshippers for the supposed grossly indecent meaning of their symbols, since it is made clear beyond the slightest doubt, and by the most unprejudiced writers, that Chrestos in the pit—whether the pit be taken as meaning the grave or hell—had likewise a sexual element in it, from the very origin of the symbol.

This fact is no longer denied to‐day. The “Brothers of the Rosy Cross” of the Middle Ages were as good Christians as any to be found in Europe, nevertheless, all their rites were based on symbols whose meaning was pre‐ eminently phallic and sexual. Their biographer, Hargrave Jennings, the best modern authority on Rosicrucianism, speaking of this mystic Brotherhood, describes how

The tortures and the sacrifice of Calvary, the Passion of the Cross, were, in their [the Rose‐Croix’s] glorious blessed magic and triumph, the protest and appeal.

Protest—by whom? The answer is, the protest of the crucified Rose, the greatest and the most unveiled of all sexual symbols—the Yoni and Lingam, the “victim” and the “murderer,” the female and male principles in Nature. Open the last work of that author, Phallicism, and see in what glowing terms he describes the sexual symbolism in that which is most sacred to the Christian:

The flowing blood streamed from the crown, or the piercing circlet of the thorns of Hell. The Rose is feminine. Its lustrous carmine petals are guarded with thorns. The Rose is the most beautiful of flowers. The Rose is the Queen of God’s Garden (Mary, the Virgin). It is not the Rose alone which is the magical idea, or truth. But it is the “crucified rose,” or the “martyred rose” (by the grand mystic apocalyptic figure) which is the talisman, the standard, the object of adoration of all the “Sons of Wisdom” or the true Rosicrucians.(540)

Not of all the “Sons of Wisdom,” by any means, not even of the true Rosicrucian. For the latter would never put in such sickening relievo, in such a purely sensual and terrestrial, not to say animal light, the grandest, the noblest of Nature’s symbols. To the Rosicrucian, the “Rose” was the symbol of Nature, of the ever prolific and virgin Earth, or Isis, the mother and nourisher of man, considered as feminine and represented as a virgin woman by the Egyptian Initiates. Like every other personification of Nature and the Earth she is the sister and wife of Osiris, as the two characters answer to the personified symbol of the Earth, both she and the Sun being the progeny of the same mysterious Father, because the Earth is fecundated by the Sun—according to the earliest Mysticism—by divine insufflation. It was the pure ideal of mystic Nature that was personified in the “World Virgins,” the “Celestial Maidens,” and later on by the human Virgin, Mary, the Mother of the Saviour, the Salvator Mundi now chosen by the Christian World. And it was the character of the Jewish maiden that was adapted by Theology to archaic Symbolism,(541) and not the Pagan symbol that was modelled for the new occasion.

We know through Herodotus that the Mysteries were brought from India by Orpheus—a hero far anterior to both Homer and Hesiod. Very little is really known of him, and till very lately Orphic literature, and even the Argonauts, were attributed to Onamacritus, a contemporary of Pisistratus, Solon and Pythagoras—who was credited with their compilation in the present form toward the close of the sixth century B.C., or 800 years after the time of Orpheus. But we are told that in the days of Pausanias there was a sacerdotal family, who, like the Brâhmans with the Vedas, had committed to memory all the Orphic Hymns, and that they were usually thus transmitted from one generation to another. By placing Orpheus so far back as 1200 B.C., official Science—so careful in her chronology to choose in each case as late a period as possible—admits that the Mysteries, or in other words Occultism dramatised, belong to a still earlier epoch than the Chaldæan and Egyptians.

The downfall of the Mysteries in Europe may now be mentioned.

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SECTION XXXIII. THE LAST OF THE MYSTERIES IN EUROPE

As was predicted by the great Hermes in his dialogue with Æsculapius, the time had indeed come when impious foreigners accused Egypt of adoring monsters, and naught but the letters engraved in stone upon her monuments survived—enigmas unintelligible to posterity. Her sacred Scribes and Hierophants became wanderers upon the face of the earth. Those who had remained in Egypt found themselves obliged for fear of a profanation of the sacred Mysteries to seek refuge in deserts and mountains, to form and establish secret societies and brotherhoods—such as the Essenes; those who had crossed the oceans to India and even to the (now‐called) New World, bound themselves by solemn oaths to keep silent, and to preserve secret their Sacred Knowledge and Science; thus these were buried deeper than ever out of human sight. In Central Asia and on the northern borderlands of India, the triumphant sword of Aristotle’s pupil swept away from his path of conquest every vestige of a once pure Religion: and its Adepts receded further and further from that path into the most hidden spots of the globe. The cycle of —— being at its close, the first hour for the disappearance of the Mysteries struck on the clock of the Races, with the Macedonian conqueror. The first strokes of its last hour sounded in the year 47 B.C. Alesia(542) the famous city in Gaul, the Thebes of the Kelts, so renowned for its ancient rites of Initiation and Mysteries, was, as J. M. Ragon well describes it:

The ancient metropolis and the tomb of Initiation, of the religion of the Druids and of the freedom of Gaul.(543)

It was during the first century before our era, that the last and supreme hour of the great Mysteries had struck. History shows the populations of Central Gaul revolting against the Roman yoke. The country was subject to Cæsar, and the revolt was crushed; the result was the slaughter of the garrison at Alesia (or Alisa), and of all its inhabitants, including the Druids, the college‐priests and the neophytes; after this the whole city was plundered and razed to the ground.

Bibractis, a city as large and as famous, not far from Alesia, perished a few years later. J. M. Ragon describes her end as follows:

Bibractis, the mother of sciences, the soul of the early nations [in Europe], a town equally famous for its sacred college of Druids, its civilisation, its schools, in which 40,000 students were taught philosophy, literature, grammar, jurisprudence, medicine, astrology, occult sciences, architecture, etc. Rival of Thebes, of Memphis, of Athens and of Rome, it possessed an amphitheatre, surrounded with colossal statues, and accommodating 100,000 spectators, gladiators, a capitol, temples of Janus, Pluto, Proserpine, Jupiter, Apollo, Minerva, Cybele, Venus and Anubis; and in the midst of those sumptuous edifices the Naumachy, with its vast basin, an incredible construction, a gigantic work wherein floated boats and galleys devoted to naval games; then a Champ de Mars, an aqueduct, fountains, public baths; finally fortifications and walls, the construction of which dated from the heroic ages.(544)

Such was the last city in Gaul wherein died for Europe the secrets of the Initiations of the Great Mysteries, the Mysteries of Nature, and of her forgotten Occult truths. The rolls and manuscripts of the famous Alexandrian Library were burned and destroyed by the same Cæsar,(545) but while History deprecates the action of the Arab general, Amrus, who gave the final touch to this act of vandalism perpetrated by the great conqueror, it has not a word to say to the latter for his destruction of nearly the same amount of precious rolls in Alesia, nor to the destroyer of Bibractis. While Sacrovir—chief of the Gauls, who revolted against Roman despotism under Tiberius, and was defeated by Silius in the year 21 of our era—was burning himself alive with his fellow conspirators on a funeral pyre before the gates of the city, as Ragon tells us, the latter was sacked and plundered, and all her treasures of literature on the Occult Sciences perished by fire. The once majestic city, Bibractis, has now become Autun, Ragon explains.

A few monuments of glorious antiquity are still there, such as the temples of Janus and of Cybele.

Ragon goes on:

Arles, founded two thousand years before Christ, was sacked in 270. This metropolis of Gaul, restored 40 years later by Constantine, has preserved to this day a few remains of its ancient splendour; amphitheatre, capitol, an obelisk, a block of granite 17 metres high, a triumphal arch, catacombs, etc. Thus ended Kelto‐Gaulic civilisation. Cæsar, as a barbarian worthy of Rome, had already accomplished the destruction of the ancient Mysteries by the sack of the temples and their initiatory colleges, and by the massacre of the Initiates and the Druids. Remained Rome; but she never had but the lesser Mysteries, shadows of the Secret Sciences. The Great Initiation was extinct.(546)

A few further extracts may be given from his Occult Masonry, as they bear directly upon our subject. However learned and erudite, some of the chronological mistakes of that author are very great. He says:

After deified man (Hermes) came the King‐Priest [the Hierophant] Menes was the first legislator and the founder of Thebes of the hundred palaces. He filled that city with magnificent splendour; it is from his day that the sacerdotal epoch of Egypt dates. The priests reigned, for it is they who made the laws. It is said that there have been three hundred and twenty‐nine [Hierophants] since his time—all of whom have remained unknown.

After that, genuine Adepts having become scarce, the author shows the Priests choosing false ones from the midst of slaves, whom they exhibited, having crowned and deified them, for the adoration of the ignorant masses.

Tired of reigning in such a servile way, the kings rebelled and freed themselves. Then came Sesostris, the founder of Memphis (1613, they say, before our era). To the sacerdotal election to the throne succeeded that of the warriors.... Cheops who reigned from 1178 to 1122 built the great Pyramid which bears his name. He is accused of having persecuted theocracy and closed the temples.

This is utterly incorrect, though Ragon repeats “History.” The Pyramid called by the name of Cheops is the Great Pyramid, the building of which even Baron Bunsen assigned to 5,000 B.C. He says in Egypt’s Place in Universal History:

The Origines of Egypt go back to the ninth millennium before Christ.(547)

And as the Mysteries were performed and the Initiations took place in that Pyramid—for indeed it was built for that purpose—it looks strange and an utter contradiction with known facts in the history of the Mysteries, to suppose that Cheops, if the builder of that Pyramid, ever turned against the initiated Priests and their temples. Moreover, as far as the Secret Doctrine teaches, it was not Cheops who built the Pyramid of that name, whatever else he might have done.

Yet, it is quite true that

Owing to an Ethiopian invasion and the federated government of twelve chiefs, royalty fell into the hands of Amasis, a man of low birth.

This was in 570 B.C., and it is Amasis who destroyed priestly power. And

Thus perished that ancient theocracy which showed its crowned priests for so many centuries to Egypt and the whole world.

Egypt had gathered the students of all countries around her Priests and Hierophants before Alexandria was founded. Ennemoser asks:

How comes it that so little has become known of the Mysteries and of their particular contents, through so many ages, and amongst so many different times and people? The answer is that it is again owing to the universally strict silence of the initiated. Another cause may be found in the destruction and total loss of all the written memorials of the secret knowledge of the remotest antiquity.

Numa’s books, described by Livy, consisting of natural philosophy, were found in his tomb; but they were not allowed to be made known, lest they should reveal the most secret mysteries of the state religion.... The senate and the tribunes of the people determined ... that the books themselves should be burned, which was done.(548)

Cassain mentions a treatise, well‐known in the fourth and fifth centuries, which was accredited to Ham, the son of Noah, who in his turn was reputed to have received it from Jared, the fourth generation from Seth, the son of Adam.

Alchemy also was first taught in Egypt by her learned Priests, though the first appearance of this system is as old as man. Many writers have declared that Adam was the first Adept; but that was a blind and a pun upon the name, which is “red earth” in one of its meanings. The correct information—under its allegorical veil—is found in the sixth chapter of Genesis, which speaks of the “Sons of God” who took wives of the daughters of men, after which they communicated to these wives many a mystery and secret of the phenomenal world. The cradle of Alchemy, says Olaus Borrichius, is to be sought in the most distant times. Democritus of Abdera was an Alchemist, and a Hermetic Philosopher. Clement of Alexandria wrote considerably upon the Science, and Moses and Solomon are called proficients in it. We are told by W. Godwin:

The first authentic record on this subject is an edict of Diocletian about 300 years A.D., ordering a diligent search to be made in Egypt for all the ancient books which treated of the art of making gold and silver, that they might, without distinction, be consigned to the flames.

The Alchemy of the Chaldæans and the old Chinamen is not even the parent of that Alchemy which revived among the Arabians many centuries later. There is a spiritual Alchemy and a physical transmutation. The knowledge of both was imparted at the Initiations.

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SECTION XXXIV. THE POST‐CHRISTIAN SUCCESSORS TO THE MYSTERIES

The Eleusinian Mysteries were no more. Yet it was these which gave their principal features to the Neo‐platonic school of Ammonius Saccas, for the Eclectic System was chiefly characterised by its Theurgy and ecstasis. It was Iamblichus who added to it the Egyptian doctrine of Theurgy with its practices, and Porphyry, the Jew, who opposed this new element. The school, however, with but few exceptions, practised asceticism and contemplation, its mystics passing through a discipline as rigorous as that of the Hindu devotee. Their efforts never tended so much to develop the successful practice of thaumaturgy, necromancy or sorcery—such as they are now accused of—as to evolve the higher faculties of the inner man, the Spiritual Ego. The school held that a number of spiritual beings, denizens of spheres quite independent of the earth and of the human cycle, were mediators between the “Gods” and men, and even between man and the Supreme Soul. To put it in plainer language, the soul of man became, owing to the help of the Planetary Spirits, “recipient of the soul of the world” as Emerson puts it. Apollonius of Tyana asserted his possession of such a power in these words (quoted by Professor Wilder in his Neo‐Platonism):

I can see the present and the future in a clear mirror. The sage [Adept] need not wait for the vapours of the earth and the corruption of the air to foresee plagues and fevers; he must know them later than God, but earlier than the people. The theoi or gods see the future; common men, the present; sages, that which is about to take place. My peculiar abstemious mode of living produces such an acuteness of the senses, or creates some other faculty, so that the greatest and most remarkable things may be performed.(549)

Professor A. Wilder’s comment thereupon is remarkable:

This is what may be termed spiritual photography. The soul is the camera in which facts and events, future, past, and present, are alike fixed; and the mind becomes conscious of them. Beyond our everyday world of limits, all is as one day or state—the past and future comprised in the present. Probably this is the “great day,” the “last day,” the “day of the Lord,” of the Bible writers—the day into which everyone passes by death or ecstasis. Then the soul is freed from the constraint of the body, and its nobler part is united to higher nature and becomes partaker in the wisdom and foreknowledge of the higher beings.(550)

How far the system practised by the Neo‐Platonists was identical with that of the old and the modern Vedântins may be inferred from what Dr. A. Wilder says of the Alexandrian Theosophists.

The anterior idea of the New Platonists was that of a single Supreme Essence.... All the old philosophies contained the doctrine that θεοὶ, theoi, gods or disposers, angels, demons, and other spiritual agencies, emanated from the Supreme Being. Ammonius accepted the doctrine of the Books of Hermes, that from the divine All proceeded the Divine Wisdom or Amun; that from Wisdom proceeded the Demiurge or Creator; and from, the Creator, the subordinate spiritual beings; the world and its peoples being the last. The first is contained in the second, the first and second in the third, and so on through the entire series.(551)

This is a perfect echo of the belief of the Vedântins, and it proceeds directly from the secret teachings of the East. The same author says:

Akin to this is the doctrine of the Jewish Kabala which was taught by the Pharsi or Pharisees, who probably borrowed it, as their sectarian designation would seem to indicate, from the Magians of Persia. It is substantially embodied in the following synopsis.

The Divine Being is the All, the source of all existence, the Infinite; and He cannot be known. The Universe reveals Him, and subsists by Him. At the beginning His effulgence went forth everywhere.(552) Eventually He retired within Himself and so formed around Him a vacant space. Into this He transmitted His first Emanation, a Ray, containing in it the generative and conceptive power, and hence the name IE, or Jah. This in its turn produced the tikkun, the pattern or idea of form; and in this emanation, which also contained the male and female, or generative and conceptive potencies, were the three primitive forces of Light, Spirit and Life. This Tikkun is united to the Ray, or first emanation, and pervaded by it: and by that union is also in perpetual communication with the infinite source. It is the pattern, the primitive man, the Adam Kadmon, the macrocosm of Pythagoras and other philosophers. From it proceeded the Sephiroth.... From the Sephiroth in turn emanated the four worlds, each proceeding out of the one immediately above it, and the lower one enveloping its superior. These worlds became less pure as they descended in the scale, the lowest of all being the material world.(553)

This veiled enunciation of the Secret Teaching will be clear to our readers by this time. These worlds are:

Aziluth is peopled with the purest emanations [the First, almost spiritual, Race of the human beings that were to inhabit] the Fourth; the second, Beriah, by a lower order, the servants of the former [the second Race]; the third, Jesirah, by the cherubim and seraphim, the Elohim and B’ni Elohim [“Sons of Gods” or Elohim, our Third Race]. The fourth world, Asiah, is inhabited by the Klipputh, of whom Belial is chief [the Atlantean Sorcerers].(554)

These worlds are all the earthly duplicates of their heavenly prototypes, the mortal and temporary reflections and shadows of the more durable, if not eternal, races dwelling in other, to us, invisible worlds. The souls of the men of our Fifth Race derive their elements from these four worlds—Root Races—that preceded ours: namely, our intellect, Manas, the fifth principle, our passions and mental and corporeal appetites. A conflict having arisen, called “war in heaven,” among our prototypical worlds, war came to pass, æons later, between the Atlanteans(555) of Asiah, and those of the third Root Race, the B’ni Elohim or the “Sons of God,”(556) and then evil and wickedness were intensified. Mankind (in the last sub‐race of the third Root Race) having

Sinned in their first parent [a physiological allegory, truly!] from whose soul every human soul is an emanation,

says the Zohar, men were “exiled” into more material bodies to

Expiate that sin and become proficient in goodness.

To accomplish the cycle of necessity, rather, explains the doctrine; to progress on their task of evolution, from which task none of us can be freed, neither by death nor suicide, for each of us have to pass through the “Valley of Thorns” before he emerges into the plains of divine light and rest. And thus men will continue to be born in new bodies

Till they have become sufficiently pure to enter a higher form of existence.

This means only that Mankind, from the First down to the last, or Seventh Race, is composed of one and the same company of actors, who have descended from higher spheres to perform their artistic tour on this our planet, Earth. Starting as pure spirits on our downward journey around the world (verily!) with the knowledge of truth—now feebly echoed in the Occult Doctrines—inherent in us, cyclic law brings us down to the reversed apex of matter, which is lost down here on earth and the bottom of which we have already struck; and then, the same law of spiritual gravity will make us slowly ascend to still higher, still purer spheres than those we started from.

Foresight, prophecy, oracular powers! Illusive fancies of man’s dwarfed perceptions, which see actual images in reflections and shadows, and mistake past actualities for prophetic images of a future that has no room in Eternity. Our macrocosm and its smallest microcosm, man, are both repeating the same play of universal and individual events at each station, as on every stage on which Karma leads them to enact their respective dramas of life. False prophets could have no existence had there been no true prophets. And so there were, and many of both classes, and in all ages. Only, none of these ever saw anything but that which had already come to pass, and had been before prototypically enacted in higher spheres—if the event foretold related to national or public weal or woe—or in some preceding life, if it concerned only an individual, for every such event is stamped as an indelible record of the Past and Future, which are only, after all, the ever Present in Eternity. The “worlds” and the purifications spoken of in the Zohar and other Kabalistic books, relate to our globe and races no more and no less than they relate to other globes and other races that have preceded our own in the great cycle. It was such fundamental truths as these that were performed in allegorical plays and images during the Mysteries, the last Act of which, the Epilogue for the Mystæ, was the anastasis or “continued existence,” as also the “Soul transformation.”

Hence, the author of Neo‐platonism and Alchemy shows us that all such Eclectic doctrines were strongly reflected in the Epistles of Paul, and were

Inculcated more or less among the Churches. Hence, such passages as these “Ye were dead in errors and sins; ye walked according to the æon of this world, according to the archon that has the domination of the air.” “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against the dominations, against potencies, against the lords of darkness, and against the mischievousness of spirits in the empyrean regions.” But Paul was evidently hostile to the effort to blend his gospel with the gnostic ideas of the Hebrew‐Egyptian school, as seems to have been attempted at Ephesus; and accordingly, wrote to Timothy, his favourite disciple, “Keep safe the precious charge entrusted to thee; and reject the new doctrines and the antagonistic principles of the gnosis, falsely so‐called, of which some have made profession and gone astray from the faith.”(557)

But as the Gnosis is the Science pertaining to our Higher Self, as blind faith is a matter of temperament and emotionalism, and as Paul’s doctrine was still newer and his interpretations far more thickly veiled, to keep the inner truths hidden far away from the Gnostic, preference has been given to the former by every earnest seeker after truth.

Besides this, the great Teachers who professed the so‐called “false Gnosis” were very numerous in the days of the Apostles, and were as great as any converted Rabbi could be. If Porphyry, the Jew Malek, went against Theurgy on account of old traditional recollections, there were other teachers who practised it. Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus were all thaumaturgists, and the latter

Elaborated the entire theosophy and theurgy of his predecessors into a complete system. (558)

As to Ammonius,

Countenanced by Clemens and Athenagoras, in the Church, and by learned men of the Synagogue, the Academy, and the Grove, he fulfilled his labour by teaching a common doctrine for all.(559)

Thus it is not Judaism and Christianity that re‐modelled the ancient Pagan Wisdom, but rather the latter that put its heathen curb, quietly and insensibly, on the new faith; and this, moreover, was still further influenced by the Eclectic Theosophical system, the direct emanation of the Wisdom Religion. All that is grand and noble in Christian theology comes from Neo‐Platonism. It is too well‐known to now need much repetition that Ammonius Saccas, the God‐taught (theodidaktos) and the lover of the truth (philalethes), in establishing his school, made a direct attempt to benefit the world by teaching those portions of the Secret Science that were permitted by its direct guardians to be revealed in those days.(560) The modern movement of our own Theosophical Society was begun on the same principles; for the Neo‐Platonic school of Ammonius aimed, as we do, at the reconcilement of all sects and peoples, under the once common faith of the Golden Age, trying to induce the nations to lay aside their contentions—in religious matters at any rate—by proving to them that their various beliefs are all the more or less legitimate children of one common parent, the Wisdom Religion.

Nor was the Eclectic Theosophical system—as some writers inspired by Rome would make the world believe—developed only during the third century of our era; but it belongs to a much earlier age, as has been shown by Diogenes Laertius. He traces it to the beginning of the dynasty of the Ptolemies; to the great seer and prophet, the Egyptian Priest Pot‐Amun, of the temple of the God of that name—for Amun is the God of Wisdom. Unto that day the communication between the Adepts of Upper India and Bactria and the Philosophers of the West had never ceased.

Under Philadelphus ... the Hellenic teachers became rivals of the College of Rabbis of Babylon. The Buddhistic, Vedântic and Magian systems were expounded along with the philosophies of Greece.... Aristobulus, the Jew, declared that the ethics of Aristotle were derived from the law of Moses (!); and Philo, after him, attempted to interpret the Pentateuch in accordance with the doctrines of Pythagoras and the Academy. In Josephus it is said that, in the Book of the Genesis, Moses wrote philosophically—that is, in the figurative style; and the Essenes of Carmel were reproduced in the Therapeutæ of Egypt, who, in turn, were declared by Eusebius to be identical with the Christians, though they actually existed long before the Christian era. Indeed, in its turn, Christianity also was taught at Alexandria, and underwent an analogous metamorphosis. Pantænus, Athenagoras and Clement were thoroughly instructed in the Platonic philosophy, and comprehended its essential unity with the oriental systems.(561)

Ammonius, though the son of Christian parents, was a lover of the truth, a true Philaletheian foremost of all. He set his heart upon the work of reconciling the different systems into a harmonious whole, for he had already perceived the tendency of Christianity to raise itself on the hecatomb which it had constructed out of all other creeds and faiths. What says history?

The ecclesiastical historian, Mosheim, declares that

Ammonius, conceiving that not only the philosophers of Greece, but also all those of the different barbarous nations, were perfectly in unison with each other with regard to every essential point, made it his business so to temper and expound the tenets of all these various sects, as to make it appear they had all of them originated from one and the same source, and all tended to one and the same end. Again, Mosheim says that Ammonius taught that the religion of the multitude went hand in hand with philosophy, and with her had shared the fate of being by degrees corrupted and obscured with mere human conceits, superstition, and lies; that it ought, therefore, to be brought back to its original purity by purging it of this dross and expounding it upon philosophical principles; and that the whole which Christ had in view was to reinstate and restore to its primitive integrity the Wisdom of the Ancients.(562)

Now what was that “Wisdom of the Ancients” that the Founder of Christianity “had in view”? The system taught by Ammonius in his Eclectic Theosophical School was made of the crumbs permitted to be gathered from the antediluvian lore; those Neo‐Platonic teachings are described in the Edinburgh Encyclopædia as follows:

He [Ammonius] adopted the doctrines which were received in Egypt concerning the Universe and the Deity, considered as constituting one great whole; concerning the eternity of the world, the nature of souls, the empire of Providence [Karma] and the government of the world by demons [daimons or spirits, archangels]. He also established a system of moral discipline which allowed the people in general to live according to the laws of their country and the dictates of nature; but required the wise to exalt their minds by contemplation, and to mortify the body,(563) so that they might be capable of enjoying the presence and assistance of the demons [including their own daimon or Seventh Principle] ... and ascending after death to the presence of the Supreme [Soul] Parent. In order to reconcile the popular religions, and particularly the Christian, with this new system, he made the whole history of the heathen gods an allegory, maintaining that they were only celestial ministers(564) entitled to an inferior kind of worship; and he acknowledged that Jesus Christ was an excellent man and the friend of God, but alleged that it was not his design entirely to abolish the worship of demons,(565) and that his only intention was to purify the ancient religion.

No more could be declared except for those Philaletheians who were initiated, “persons duly instructed and disciplined” to whom Ammonius communicated his more important doctrines,

Imposing on them the obligations of secrecy, as was done before him by Zoroaster and Pythagoras, and in the Mysteries [where an oath was required from the neophytes or catechumens not to divulge what they had learned]. The great Pythagoras divided his teachings into exoteric and esoteric.(566)

Has not Jesus done the same, since He declared to His disciples that to them it was given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, whereas to the multitudes it was not given, and therefore He spoke in parables which had a two‐fold meaning?

Dr. A. Wilder proceeds:

Thus Ammonius found his work ready to his hand. His deep spiritual intuition, his extensive learning, and his familiarity with the Christian fathers, Pantænus, Clement and Athenagoras, and with the most erudite philosophers of the time, all fitted him for the labour he performed so thoroughly.... The results of his ministration are perceptible at the present day in every country of the Christian world; every prominent system of doctrine now bearing the marks of his plastic hand. Every ancient philosophy has had its votaries among the moderns; and even Judaism, oldest of them all, has taken upon itself changes which were suggested by the “God‐taught” Alexandrian.(567)

The Neo‐Platonic School of Alexandria founded by Ammonius—the prototype proposed for the Theosophical Society—taught Theurgy and Magic, as much as they were taught in the days of Pythagoras, and by others far earlier than his period. For Proclus says that the doctrines of Orpheus, who was an Indian and came from India, were the origin of the systems afterwards promulgated.

What Orpheus delivered in hidden allegories, Pythagoras learned when he was initiated into the Orphic Mysteries; and Plato next received a perfect knowledge of them from Orphic and Pythagorean writings.(568)

The Philaletheians had their division into neophytes (chelas) and Initiates, or Masters; and the eclectic system was characterised by three distinct features, which are purely Vedântic; a Supreme Essence, One and Universal; the eternity and indivisibility of the human spirit; and Theurgy, which is Mantricism. So also, as we have seen, they had their secret or Esoteric teachings like any other mystic school. Nor were they allowed to reveal anything of their secret tenets, any more than were the Initiates of the Mysteries. Only the penalties incurred by the revealers of the secrets of the latter were far more terrible, and this prohibition has survived to this day, not only in India, but even among the Jewish Kabalists in Asia.(569)

One of the reasons for such secrecy may be the undoubtedly serious difficulties and hardships of chelaship, and the dangers attending Initiation. The modern candidate has, like his predecessor of old, to either conquer or die; when, which is still worse, he does not lose his reason. There is no danger to him who is true and sincere, and, especially, unselfish. For he is thus prepared beforehand to meet any temptation.

He, who fully recognised the power of his immortal spirit, and never doubted for one moment its omnipotent protection, had naught to fear. But woe to the candidate in whom the slightest physical fear—sickly child of matter—made him lose sight and faith in his own invulnerability. He who was not wholly confident of his moral fitness to accept the burden of these tremendous secrets was doomed.(570)

There were no such dangers in Neo‐Platonic Initiations. The selfish and the unworthy failed in their object, and in the failure was the punishment. The chief aim was “reunion of the part with the all.” This All was One, with numberless names. Whether called Dui, the “bright Lord of Heaven” by the Âryan; Iao, by the Chaldæan and Kabalist; Iabe by the Samaritan; the Tiu or Tuisco by the Northman; Duw by the Briton; Zeus, by the Thracian or Jupiter by the Roman—it was the Being, the Facit, One and Supreme,(571) the unborn and the inexhaustible source of every emanation, the fountain of life and light eternal, a Ray of which every one of us carries in him on this earth. The knowledge of this Mystery had reached the Neo‐Platonists from India through Pythagoras, and still later through Apollonius of Tyana and the rules and methods for producing ecstasy had come from the same lore of the divine Vidyâ, the Gnosis. For Âryavarta, the bright focus into which had been poured in the beginning of time the flames of Divine Wisdom, had become the centre from which radiated the “tongues of fire” into every portion of the globe. What was Samâdhi but that

Sublime ecstasy, in which state things divine and the mysteries of Nature are revealed to us,

of which Porphyry speaks?

The efflux from the divine soul is imparted to the human spirit in unreserved abundance, accomplishing for the soul a union with the divine, and enabling it while in the body to be partaker of the life which is not in the body,

he explains elsewhere.

Thus under the title of Magic was taught every Science, physical and metaphysical, natural or deemed supernatural by those who are ignorant of the omnipresence and universality of Nature.

Divine Magic makes of man a God; human magic creates a new fiend.

We wrote in Isis Unveiled:

In the oldest documents now in the possession of the World—the Vedas and the older laws of Manu—we find many magical rites practised and permitted by the Brâhmans.(572) Tibet, Japan, and China, teach in the present age that which was taught by the oldest Chaldæans. The clergy of these respective countries prove moreover what they teach—namely, that the practice of moral and physical purity, and of certain austerities, developes the vital soul‐power of self‐illumination. Affording to man the control over his own immortal spirit, it gives him truly magical powers over the elementary spirits inferior to himself. In the West we find magic of as high an antiquity as in the East. The Druids of Great Britain practised it in the silent crypts of their deep caves; and Pliny devotes many a chapter to the “wisdom”(573) of the leaders of the Celts. The Semothees—the Druids of the Gauls—expounded the physical as well as the spiritual sciences. They taught the secrets of the universe, the harmonious progress of the heavenly bodies, the formation of the earth, and above all—the immortality of the Soul.(574) In their sacred groves—natural academies built by the hand of the Invisible Architect—the initiates assembled at the still hour of midnight, to learn about what man once was, and what he will be.(575) They needed no artificial illumination, nor life‐drawing gas, to light up their temples, for the chaste goddess of night beamed her most silvery rays on their oak‐crowned heads; and their white‐robed sacred bards knew how to converse with the solitary queen of the starry vault.(576)

During the palmy days of Neo‐Platonism these Bards were no more, for their cycle had run its course, and the last of the Druids had perished at Bibractis and Alesia. But the Neo‐Platonic school was for a long time successful, powerful and prosperous. Still, while adopting Âryan Wisdom in its doctrines, the school failed to follow the wisdom of the Brâhmans in practice. It showed its moral and intellectual superiority too openly, caring too much for the great and powerful of this earth. While the Brâhmans and their great Yogîs—experts in matters of philosophy, metaphysics, astronomy, morals and religion—preserved their dignity under the sway of the most powerful princes, remained aloof from the world and would not condescend to visit them or ask for the slightest favour,(577) the Emperors Alexander, Severus, and Julian, and the greatest among the aristocracy of the land, embraced the tenets of the Neo‐Platonists, who mixed freely with the world. The system flourished for several centuries and comprised within the ranks of its followers the ablest and most learned among the men of the time; Hypatia, the teacher of the Bishop Synesius, was one of the ornaments of the School until the fatal and shameful day when she was murdered by the Christian mob at the instigation of Bishop Cyril of Alexandria. The school was finally removed to Athens, and closed by order of the Emperor Justinian.

How accurate is Dr. Wilder’s remark that

Modern writers have commented upon the peculiar views of the Neo‐ Platonists upon these [metaphysical] subjects, seldom representing them correctly, even if this was desired or intended.(578)

The few speculations on the sublunary, material, and spiritual universes that they did put into writing—Ammonius never having himself written a line, after the wont of reformers—could not enable posterity to judge them rightly, even had not the early Christian Vandals, the later crusaders, and the fanatics of the Middle Ages, destroyed three parts of that which remained of the Alexandrian Library and its later schools.

Professor Draper shows that Cardinal Ximenes alone

Delivered to the flames in the squares of Granada eighty thousand Arabic manuscripts, many of them translations of classical authors.

In the Vatican Library, whole passages in the most rare and precious treatises of the Ancients were found erased and blotted out, “for the sake of interlining them with absurd psalmodies!” Moreover it is well known that over thirty‐six volumes written by Porphyry were burnt and otherwise destroyed by the “Fathers.” Most of the little that is known of the doctrines of the Eclectics is found in the writings of Plotinus and of those same Church Fathers.

Says the author of Neo‐Platonism:

What Plato was to Socrates, and the Apostle John to the head of the Christian faith, Plotinus became to the God‐taught Ammonius. To Plotinus, Origenes, and Longinus we are indebted for what is known of the Philaletheian system. They were duly instructed, initiated and entrusted with the interior doctrines.(579)

This accounts marvellously for Origen’s calling people “idiots” who believe in the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve fables; as also for the fact that so few of the writings of that Church Father have passed to posterity. Between the secrecy imposed, the vows of silence and that which was maliciously destroyed by every foul means, it is indeed miraculous that even so much of the Philaletheian tenets has reached the world.

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SECTION XXXV. SYMBOLISM OF SUN AND STARS

And the Heaven was visible in Seven Circles and the planets appeared with all their signs, in star‐form, and the stars were divided and numbered with the rulers that were in them, and their revolving course, through the agency of the divine Spirit.(580)

Here Spirit denotes Pneuma, collective Deity, manifested in its “Builders,” or, as the Church has it, “the seven Spirits of the Presence,” the mediantibus angelis of whom Thomas Aquinas says that “God never works but through them.”

These seven “rulers” or mediating Angels were the Kabiri Gods of the Ancients. This was so evident, that it forced from the Church, together with the admission of the fact, an explanation and a theory, whose clumsiness and evident sophistry are such that it must fail to impress. The world is asked to believe, that while the Planetary Angels of the Church are divine Beings, the genuine “Seraphim,”(581) these very same angels, under identical names and planets, were and are “false”—as Gods of the ancients. They are no better than pretenders; the cunning copies of the real Angels, produced beforehand through the craft and power of Lucifer and of the fallen Angels. Now, what are the Kabiri?

Kabiri, as a name, is derived from Habir חבר, great, and also from Venus, this Goddess being called to the present day Kabar, as is also her star. The Kabiri were worshipped at Hebron, the city of the Anakim, or anakas (kings, princes). They are the highest Planetary Spirits, the “greatest Gods” and “the powerful.” Varro, following Orpheus, calls these Gods εὐδυνατοί, “divine Powers.” The word Kabirim when applied to men, and the words Heber, Gheber (with reference to Nimrod, or the “giants” of Genesis, vi.) and Kabir, are all derived from the “mysterious Word”—the Ineffable and the “Unpronounceable.” Thus it is they who represent tsaba, the “host of heaven.” The Church, however, bowing before the angel Anael (the regent of Venus),(582) connects the planet Venus with Lucifer, the chief of the rebels under Satan—so poetically apostrophized by the prophet Isaiah as “O Lucifer, son of the morning.”(583) All the Mystery Gods were Kabiri. As these “seven lictors” relate directly to the Secret Doctrine their real status is of the greatest importance.

Suidas defines the Kabiri as the Gods who command all the other dæmons (Spirits), καβείρους δαίμονας. Macrobius introduces them as

Those Penates and tutelary deities, through whom we live and learn and know (Saturn, I. iii. ch. iv.).

The teraphim through which the Hebrews consulted the oracles of the Urim and the Thummim, were the symbolical hieroglyphics of the Kabiri. Nevertheless, the good Fathers have made of Kibir the synonym, of devil and of daimon (spirit) a demon.

The Mysteries of the Kabiri at Hebron (Pagan and Jewish) were presided over by the seven Planetary Gods, among the rest by Jupiter and Saturn under their mystery names, and they are referred to as ἀξιόχρσος and ἀξιόχερσα, and by Euripides as ἀξιόχρεως ὁ θεὸς. Creuzer, moreover, shows that whether in Phœnicia or in Egypt, the Kabiri were always the seven planets as known in antiquity, who, together with their Father the Sun—referred to elsewhere as their “elder brother”—composed a powerful ogdoad;(584) the eight superior powers, as παρεδοὶ, or solar assessors, danced around him the sacred circular dance, the symbol of the rotation of the planets around the Sun. Jehovah and Saturn, moreover, are one.

It is quite natural, therefore, to find a French writer, D’Anselme, applying the same terms of ἀξιόχερσος and ἀξιόχερσα to Jehovah and his word, and they are correctly so applied. For if the “circle dance” prescribed by the Amazons for the Mysteries—being the “circle dance” of the planets, and characterised as “the motion of the divine Spirit carried on the waves of the great Deep”—can now be called “infernal” and “lascivious” when performed by the Pagans, then the same epithets ought to be applied to David’s dance;(585) and to the dance of the daughters of Shiloh,(586) and to the leaping of the prophets of Baal;(587) they were all identical and all belonged to Sabæan worship. King David’s dance, during which he uncovered himself before his maid‐servants in a public thoroughfare, saying:

I will play (act wantonly) before יהוה (Jehovah), and I will yet be more vile than this,

was certainly more reprehensible than any “circle dance” during the Mysteries, or even than the modern Râsa Mandala in India,(588) which is the same thing. It was David who introduced Jehovistic worship into Judea, after sojourning so long among the Tyrians and Philistines, where these rites were common.

David knew nothing of Moses; and if he introduced the Jehovah‐ worship, it was not in its monotheistic character, but simply as that of one of the many (Kabirean) gods of the neighbouring nations, a tutelary deity of his own, יהוה to whom he had given the preference—whom he had chosen among “all other (Kabeiri) gods,”(589)

and who was one of the “associates,” Chabir, of the Sun. The Shakers dance the “circle dance” to this day when turning round for the Holy Ghost to move them. In India it is Nârâ‐yana who is “the mover on the waters;” and Nârâyana is Vishnu in his secondary form, and Vishnu has Krishna for an Avatâra, in whose honour the “circle dance” is still enacted by the Nautch‐girls of the temples, he being the Sun‐God and they the planets as symbolised by the gopis.

Let the reader turn to the works of De Mirville, a Roman Catholic writer, or to Monumental Christianity, by Dr. Lundy, a Protestant divine, if he wants to appreciate to any degree the subtlety and casuistry of their reasonings. No one ignorant of the occult versions can fail to be impressed with the proofs brought forward to show how cleverly and perseveringly “Satan has worked for long millenniums to tempt a humanity” unblessed with an infallible Church, in order to have himself recognised as the “One living God,” and his fiends as holy Angels. The reader must be patient, and study with attention what the author says on behalf of his Church. To compare it the better with the version of the Occultists, a few points may be quoted here verbatim.

St. Peter tells us: “May the divine Lucifer arise in your hearts”(590) [Now the Sun is Christ].... “I will send my Son from the Sun,” said the Eternal through the voice of prophetic traditions; and prophecy having become history the Evangelists repeated in their turn: The Sun rising from on high visited us.(591)

Now God says, through Malachi, that the Sun shall arise for those who fear his name. What Malachi meant by “the Sun of Righteousness” the Kabalists alone can tell; but what the Greek, and even the Protestant, theologians understood by the term is of course Christ, referred to metaphorically. Only, as the sentence, “I will send my Son from the Sun,” is borrowed verbatim from a Sibylline Book, it becomes very hard to understand how it can be attributed to, or classed with any prophecy relating to the Christian Saviour, unless, indeed, the latter is to be identified with Apollo. Virgil, again, says, “Here comes the Virgin’s and Apollo’s reign,” and Apollo, or Apollyon, is to this day viewed as a form of Satan, and is taken to mean the Antichrist. If the Sibylline promise, “He will send his Son from the Sun” applies to Christ, then either Christ and Apollo are one—and then why call the latter a demon?—or the prophecy had nothing to do with the Christian Saviour, and, in such a case, why appropriate it at all?

But De Mirville goes further. He shows us St. Denys, the Areopagite, affirming that

The Sun is the special signification, and the statue of God(592).... It is by the Eastern door that the glory of the Lord penetrated into the temples [of the Jews and Christians, that divine glory being Sun‐light.]... “We build our churches towards the east,” says in his turn St. Ambrose, “for during the Mysteries we begin by renouncing him who is in the west.”

“He who is in the west” is Typhon, the Egyptian god of darkness—the west having been held by them as the “Typhonic Gate of Death.” Thus, having borrowed Osiris from the Egyptians, the Church Fathers thought little of helping themselves to his brother Typhon. Then again:

The prophet Baruch(593) speaks of the stars that rejoice in their vessels and citadels (Chap. iii.); and Ecclesiastes applies the same terms to the sun, which is said to be “the admirable vessel of the most High,” and the “citadel of the Lord” φυλαχη.(594)

In every case there is no doubt about the thing, for the sacred writer says, It is a Spirit who rules the sun’s course. Hear what he says (in Eccles., i. 6), “The sun also ariseth—and its spirit lighting all in its circular path (gyrat gyrans) returneth according to his circuits.”(595)

De Mirville seems to quote from texts either rejected by or unknown to Protestants, in whose bible there is no forty‐third chapter of Ecclesiastes; nor is the sun made to go “in circuits” in the latter, but the wind. This is a question to be settled between the Roman and the Protestant Churches. Our point is the strong element of Sabæanism or Heliolatry present in Christianity.

An Œcumenical Council having authoritatively put a stop to Christian Astrolatry by declaring that there were no sidereal Souls in sun, moon, or planets, St. Thomas took upon himself to settle the point in dispute. The “angelic doctor” announced that such expressions did not mean a “soul,” but only an Intelligence, not resident in the sun or stars, but one that assisted them, “a guiding and directing intelligence.”(596)

Thereupon the author, comforted by the explanation, quotes Clement the Alexandrian, and reminds the reader of the opinion of that philosopher, the inter‐relation that exists “between the seven branches of the candlestick—the seven stars of the Revelation,” and the sun:

The six branches (says Clement) fixed to the central candlestick have lamps, but the sun placed in the midst of the wandering ones (πλανητῶν) pours his beams on them all; this golden candlestick hides one more mystery: it is the sign of Christ, not only in shape, but because he sheds his light through the ministry of the seven spirits primarily created, and who are the Seven Eyes of the Lord. Therefore the principal planets are to the seven primeval spirits, according to St. Clement, that which the candlestick‐sun is to Christ Himself, namely—their vessels, their φυλαχαὶ.

Plain enough, to be sure; though one fails to see that this explanation even helps the situation. The seven‐branched chandelier of the Israelites, as well as the “wanderers” of the Greeks, had a far more natural meaning, a purely astrological one to begin with. In fact from Magi and Chaldæans down to the much‐laughed‐at Zadkiel, every astrological work will tell its reader that the Sun placed in the midst of the planets, with Saturn, Jupiter and Mars on one side, and Venus, Mercury and the Moon on the other, the planets’ line crossing through the whole Earth, has always meant what Hermes tells us, namely, the thread of destiny, or that whose action (influence) is called destiny.(597) But symbol for symbol we prefer the sun to a candlestick. One can understand how the latter came to represent the sun and planets, but no one can admire the chosen symbol. There is poetry and grandeur in the sun when it is made to symbolize the “Eye of Ormuzd,” or of Osiris, and is regarded as the Vâhan (vehicle) of the highest Deity. But one must for ever fail to perceive that any particular glory is rendered to Christ by assigning to him the trunk of a candlestick,(598) in a Jewish synagogue, as a mystical seat of honour.

There are then positively two suns, a sun adored and a sun adoring. The Apocalypse proves it.

The Word is found in Chap. vii., in the angel who ascends with the rising of the sun, having the seal of the living God.... While commentators differ on the personality of this angel, St. Ambrose and many other theologians see in him Christ himself.... He is the Sun adored. But in Chap. xix. we find an angel standing in the sun, inviting all the nations to gather to the great supper of the Lamb. This time it is literally and simply the angel of the sun—who cannot be mistaken for the “Word,” since the prophet distinguishes him from the Word, the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords.... The angel in the sun seems to be an adoring sun. Who may be the latter? And who else can he be but the Morning Star, the guardian angel of the Word, his ferouer, or angel of the face, as the Word is the angel of the Face (presence) of his Father, his principal attribute and strength, as his name itself implies (Mikael), the powerful rector glorified by the Church, the Rector potens who will fell the Antichrist, the Vice‐Word, in short, who represents his master, and seems to be one with him.(599)

Yes, Mikael is the alleged conqueror of Ormuzd, Osiris, Apollo, Krishna, Mithra, etc., of all the Solar Gods, in short, known and unknown, now treated as demons and as “Satan.” Nevertheless, the “Conqueror” has not disdained to don the war‐spoils of the vanquished foes—their personalities, attributes, even their names—to become the alter ego of these demons.

Thus the Sun‐God here is Honover or the Eternal. The prince is Ormuzd, since he is the first of the seven Amshaspends [the demon copies of the seven original angels] (capul angelorum); the lamb (hamal), the Shepherd of the Zodiac and the antagonist of the snake. But the Sun (the Eye of Ormuzd) has also his rector, Korshid or the Mitraton, who is the Ferouer of the face of Ormuzd, his Ized, or the morning star. The Mazdeans had a triple Sun.... For us this Korshid‐Mitraton is the first of the psychopompian genii, and the guide of the sun, the immolator of the terrestrial Bull [or lamb] whose wounds are licked by the serpent [on the famous Mithraic monument].(600)

St. Paul, in speaking of the rulers of this world, the Cosmocratores, only said what was said by all the primitive Philosophers of the ten centuries before the Christian era, only he was scarcely understood, and was often wilfully misinterpreted. Damascius repeats the teachings of the Pagan writers when he explains that

There are seven series of cosmocratores or cosmic forces, which are double: the higher ones commissioned to support and guide the superior world; the lower ones, the inferior world [our own].

And he is but saying what the ancients taught. Iamblichus gives this dogma of the duality of all the planets and celestial bodies, of gods and daimons (spirits). He also divides the Archontes into two classes—the more and the less spiritual; the latter more connected with and clothed with matter, as having a form, while the former are bodiless (arûpa). But what have Satan and his angels to do with all this? Perhaps only that the identity of the Zoroastrian dogma with the Christian, and of Mithra, Ormuzd, and Ahriman with the Christian Father, Son, and Devil, might be accounted for. And when we say “Zoroastrian dogmas” we mean the exoteric teaching. How explain the same relations between Mithra and Ormuzd as those between the Archangel Mikael and Christ?

Ahura Mazda says to holy Zaratushta: “When I created [emanated] Mithra ... I created him that he should be invoked and adored equally with myself.”

For the sake of necessary reforms, the Zoroastrian Âryans transformed the Devas, the bright Gods of India, into devs or devils. It was their Karma that in their turn the Christians should vindicate on this point the Hindus. Now Ormuzd and Mithra have become the devs of Christ and Mikael, the dark lining and aspect of the Saviour and Angel. The day of the Karma of Christian theology will come in its turn. Already the Protestants have begun the first chapter of the religion that will seek to transform the “Seven Spirits” and the host of the Roman Catholics into demons and idols. Every religion has its Karma, as has every individual. That which is due to human conception and is built on the abasement of our brothers who disagree with us, must have its day. “There is no religion higher than truth.”

The Zoroastrians, Mazdeans, and Persians borrowed their conceptions from India; the Jews borrowed their theory of angels from Persia; the Christians borrowed from the Jews.

Hence the latest interpretation by Christian theology—to the great disgust of the synagogue, forced to share the symbolical candlestick with the hereditary enemy—that the seven‐branched candlestick represents the seven Churches of Asia and the seven planets which are the angels of those Churches. Hence also, the conviction that the Mosaic Jews, the inventors of that symbol for their tabernacle, were a kind of Sabæans, who blended their planets and the spirits thereof into one, and called them—only far later—Jehovah. For this we have the testimony of Clemens Alexandrinus, St. Hieronymus and others.

And Clement, as an Initiate of the Mysteries—at which the secret of the heliocentric system was taught several thousands of years before Galileo and Copernicus—proves it by explaining that

By these various symbols connected with (sidereal) phenomena the totality of all the creatures which bind heaven with earth, are figured.... The chandelier represented the motion of the seven luminaries, describing their astral revolution. To the right and the left of that candelabrum projected the six branches, each of which had its lamp, because the Sun placed as a candelabrum in the middle of other planets distributes light to them.(601) ... As to the cherubs having twelve wings between the two, they represent to us the sensuous world in the twelve zodiacal signs.(602)

And yet, in the face of all this evidence, sun, moon, planets, all are shown as being demoniacal before, and divine only after, the appearance of Christ. All know the Orphic verse: “It is Zeus, it is Adas, it is the Sun, it is Bacchus,” these names having been all synonymous for classic poets and writers. Thus for Democritus “Deity is but a soul in an orbicular fire,” and that fire is the Sun. For Iamblichus the sun was “the image of divine intelligence”; for Plato “an immortal living Being.” Hence the oracle of Claros when asked to say who was the Jehovah of the Jews, answered, “It is the Sun.” We may add the words in Psalm xix. 4

In the sun hath he placed a tabernacle for himself(603) ... his going forth is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it: and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof.

Jehovah then is the sun, and thence also the Christ of the Roman Church. And now the criticism of Dupuis on that verse becomes comprehensible, as also the despair of the Abbé Foucher. “Nothing is more favourable to Sabæism than this text of the Vulgate!” he exclaims. And, however disfigured may be the words and sense in the English authorised bible, the Vulgate and the Septuagint both give the correct text of the original, and translate the latter: “In the sun he established his abode”; while the Vulgate regards the “heat” as coming direct from God and not from the sun alone, since it is God who issues forth from, and dwells in the sun and performs the circuit: in sole posuit ... et ipse exultavit. From these facts it will be seen that the Protestants were right in charging St. Justin with saying that

God has permitted us to worship the sun.

And this, notwithstanding the lame excuses that what was really meant was that

God permitted himself to be worshipped in, or within, the sun,

which is all the same.

It will be seen from the above, that while the Pagans located in the sun and planets only the inferior powers of Nature, the representative Spirits, so to say, of Apollo, Bacchus, Osiris, and other solar gods, the Christians, in their hatred of Philosophy, appropriated the sidereal localities, and now limit them to the use of their anthropomorphic deity and his angels—new transformations of the old, old gods. Something had to be done in order to dispose of the ancient tenants, so they were disgraced into “demons,” wicked devils.

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SECTION XXXVI. PAGAN SIDEREAL WORSHIP, OR ASTROLOGY

The Teraphim of Abram’s father Terah, the “maker of images,” and the Kabiri Gods are directly connected with ancient Sabæan worship or Astrolatry. Kiyun, or the God Kivan, worshipped by the Jews in the wilderness, is Saturn and Shiva, later on called Jehovah. Astrology existed before astronomy, and Astronomus was the title of the highest hierophant in Egypt.(604) One of the names of the Jewish Jehovah, “Sabaoth,” or the “Lord of Hosts” (tsabaoth), belongs to the Chaldæan Sabæans (or Tsabæans), and has for its root the word tsab, meaning a “car,” a “ship,” and “an army”; sabaoth thus meaning literally the army of the ship, the crew, or a naval host, the sky being metaphorically referred to as the “upper ocean” in the doctrine.

In his interesting volumes, The God of Moses, Lacour explains that all such words as

The celestial armies or the hosts of heaven, signify not only the totality of the heavenly constellations, but also the Aleim on whom they are dependent; the aleitzbaout are the forces or souls of the constellations, the potencies that maintain and guide the planets in this order and procession; ... the Jae‐va‐ Tzbaout signifies Him, the supreme chief of those celestial bodies.

In his collectivity, as the chief “Order of Spirits,” not a chief Spirit.

The Sabæans having worshipped in the graven images only the celestial hosts—angels and gods whose habitations were the planets, never in truth worshipped the stars. For on Plato’s authority, we know that among the stars and constellations, the planets alone had a right to the title of theoi (Gods), as that name was derived from the verb θεῖν, to run or to circulate. Seldenus also tells us that they were likewise called

θεοὶ βουλαιοὶ (God‐Councillors) and ῥαβδοφόροι (lictors) as they (the planets) were present at the sun’s consistory, solis consistoris adstantes.

Says the learned Kircher:

The sceptres the seven presiding angels were armed with, explain these names of Rhabdophores and lictors given to them.

Reduced to its simplest expression and popular meaning, this is of course fetish worship. Yet esoteric astrolatry was not at all the worship of idols, since under the names of “Councillors” and “Lictors,” present at the “Sun’s consistory,” it was not the planets in their material bodies that were meant, but their Regents or “Souls” (Spirits). If the prayer “Our Father in heaven,” or “Saint” so‐and‐so in “Heaven” is not an idolatrous invocation, then “Our Father in Mercury,” or “Our Lady in Venus,” “Queen of Heaven,” etc., is no more so; for it is precisely the same thing, the name making no difference in the act. The word used in the Christian prayers, “in heaven” cannot mean anything abstract. A dwelling—whether of Gods, angels or Saints (every one of these being anthropomorphic individualities and beings)—must necessarily mean a locality, some defined spot in that “heaven”; hence it is quite immaterial for purposes of worship whether that spot be considered as “heaven” in general, meaning nowhere in particular, or in the Sun, Moon or Jupiter.

The argument is futile that there were

Two deities, and two distinct hierarchies or tsabas in heaven, in the ancient world as in our modern times ... the one, the living God and his host, and the other, Satan, Lucifer with his councillors and lictors, or the fallen angels.

Our opponents say that it is the latter which Plato with the whole of antiquity worshipped, and which two‐thirds of humanity worship to this day. “The whole question is to know how to discern between the two.”

Protestant Christians fail to find any mention of angels in the Pentateuch, we may therefore leave them aside. The Roman Catholics and the Kabalists find such mention; the former, because they have accepted Jewish angelology, without suspecting that the “tsabæan Hosts” were colonists and settlers on Judæan territory from the lands of the Gentiles; the latter, because they accepted the bulk of the Secret Doctrine, keeping the kernel for themselves and leaving the husks to the unwary.

Cornelius a Lapide points out and proves the meaning of the word tsaba in the first verse of Chapter ii. of Genesis; and he does so correctly, guided, as he probably was, by learned Kabalists. The Protestants are certainly wrong in their contention, for angels are mentioned in the Pentateuch under the word tsaba, which means “hosts” of angels. In the Vulgate the word is translated ornatus, meaning the “sidereal army,” the ornament also of the sky—kabalistically. The biblical scholars of the Protestant Church, and the savants among the materialists, who failed to find “angels” mentioned by Moses, have thus committed a serious error. For the verse reads:

Thus the heaven and the earth were finished and all the host of them,

the “host” meaning “the army of stars and angels”; the last two words being, it seems, convertible terms in Church phraseology. A Lapide is cited as an authority for this; he says that

Tsaba does not mean either one or the other but “the one and the other,” or both, siderum ac angelorum.

If the Roman Catholics are right on this point, so are the Occultists when they claim that the angels worshipped in the Church of Rome are none else than their “Seven Planets,” the Dhyân Chohans of Buddhistic Esoteric Philosophy, or the Kumâras, “the mind‐born sons of Brahmâ,” known under the patronymic of Vaidhâtra. The identity between the Kumâras, the Builders or cosmic Dhyân Chohans, and the Seven Angels of the Stars, will be found without one single flaw if their respective biographies are studied, and especially the characteristics of their chiefs, Sanat‐Kumâra (Sanat Sujâta), and Michael the Archangel. Together with the Kabirim (Planets), the name of the above in Chaldæa, they were all “divine Powers” (Forces). Fuerot says that the name Kabiri was used to denote the seven sons of יצדיק meaning Pater Sadic, Cain, or Jupiter, or again of Jehovah. There are seven Kumâras—four exoteric and three secret—the names of the latter being found in the Sânkhya Bhâshya, by Gaudapâdâchârya.(605) They are all “Virgin Gods,” who remain eternally pure and innocent and decline to create progeny. In their primitive aspect, these Âryan seven “mind‐born sons” of God are not the regents of the planets, but dwell far beyond the planetary region. But the same mysterious transference from one character or dignity to another is found in the Christian Angel‐scheme. The “Seven Spirits of the Presence” attend perpetually on God, and yet we find them under the same names of Mikael, Gabriel, Raphael, etc., as “Star‐regents” or the informing deities of the seven planets. Suffice it to say that the Archangel Michael is called “the invincible virgin combatant” as he “refused to create,”(606) which would connect him with both Sana Sujâta and the Kumâra who is the God of War.

The above has to be demonstrated by a few quotations. Commenting upon St. John’s “Seven Golden Candlesticks,” Cornelius a Lapide says:

These seven lights relate to the seven branches of the candlestick by which were represented the seven [principal] planets in the temples of Moses and Solomon ... or, better still, to the seven principal Spirits, commissioned to watch over the salvation of men and churches.

St. Jerome says:

In truth the candlestick with the seven branches was the type of the world and its planets.

St. Thomas Aquinas, the great Roman Catholic doctor writes:

I do not remember having ever met in the works of saints or philosophers a denial that the planets are guided by spiritual beings.... It seems to me that it may be proved to demonstration that the celestial bodies are guided by some intelligence, either directly by God, or by the mediation of angels. But the latter opinion seems to be far more consonant with the order of things asserted by St. Denys to be without exception, that everything on earth is, as a rule, governed by God through intermediary agencies.(607)

And now let the reader recall what the Pagans say of this. All the classical authors and philosophers who have treated the subject, repeat with Hermes Trismegistus, that the seven Rectors—the planets including the sun—were the associates, or the co‐workers, of the Unknown All represented by the Demiurgos—commissioned to contain the Cosmos—our planetary world—within seven circles. Plutarch shows them representing “the circle of the celestial worlds.” Again, Denys of Thracia and the learned Clemens of Alexandria both describe the Rectors as being shown in the Egyptian temples in the shape of mysterious wheels or spheres always in motion, which made the Initiates affirm that the problem of perpetual motion had been solved by the celestial wheels in the Initiation Adyta.(608) This doctrine of Hermes was that of Pythagoras and of Orpheus before him. It is called by Proclus “the God‐given” doctrine. Iamblichus speaks of it with the greatest reverence. Philostratus tells his readers that the whole sidereal court of the Babylonian heaven was represented in the temples

In globes made of sapphires and supporting the golden images of their respective gods.

The temples of Persia were especially famous for these representations. If Cedrenus can be credited

The Emperor Heraclius on his entry into the city of Bazaeum was struck with admiration and wonder before the immense machine fabricated for King Chosroes, which represented the night‐sky with the planets and all their revolutions, with the angels presiding over them.(609)

It was on such “spheres” that Pythagoras studied Astronomy in the adyta arcana of the temples to which he had access. And it was there on his Initiation, that the eternal rotation of those spheres—“the mysterious wheels” as they are called by Clemens and Denys, and which Plutarch calls “world‐wheels”—demonstrated to him the verity of what had been divulged to him, namely, the heliocentric system, the great secret of the Adyta. All the discoveries of modern astronomy, like all the secrets that can be revealed to it in future ages, were contained in the secret observatories and Initiation Halls of the temples of old India and Egypt. It is in them that the Chaldæan made his calculations, revealing to the world of the profane no more than it was fit to receive.

We may, and shall be told, no doubt, that Uranus was unknown to the ancients, and that they were forced to reckon the sun amongst the planets and as their chief. How does anyone know? Uranus is a modern name; but one thing is certain: the ancients had a planet, “a mystery planet,” that they never named and that the highest Astronomus, the Hierophant, alone could “confabulate with.” But this seventh planet was not the sun, but the hidden Divine Hierophant, who was said to have a crown, and to embrace within its wheel “seventy‐seven smaller wheels.” In the archaic secret system of the Hindus, the sun is the visible Logos “Sûrya”; over him there is another, the divine or heavenly Man—who, after having established the system of the world of matter on the archetype of the Unseen Universe, or Macrocosm, conducted during the Mysteries the heavenly Râsa Mandala; when he was said:

To give with his right foot the impulse to Tyam or Bhûmi [Earth] that makes her rotate in a double revolution.

What says Hermes again? When explaining Egyptian Cosmology he exclaims:

Listen, O my son ... the Power has also formed seven agents, who contain within their circles the material world, and whose action is called destiny.... When all became subject to man, the Seven, willing to favour human intelligence, communicated to him their powers. But as soon as man knew their true essence and his own nature, he desired to penetrate within and beyond the circles and thus break their circumference by usurping the power of him who has dominion over the Fire [Sun] itself; after which, having robbed one of the Wheels of the Sun of the sacred fire, he fell into slavery.(610)

It is not Prometheus who is meant here. Prometheus is a symbol and a personification of the whole of mankind in relation to an event which occurred during its childhood, so to say—the “Baptism by Fire”—which is a mystery within the great Promethean Mystery, one that may be at present mentioned only in its broad general features. By reason of the extraordinary growth of human intellect and the development in our age of the fifth principle (Manas) in man, its rapid progress has paralysed spiritual perceptions. It is at the expense of wisdom that intellect generally lives, and mankind is quite unprepared in its present condition to comprehend the awful drama of human disobedience to the laws of Nature and the subsequent Fall, as a result. It can only be hinted at in its place.

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SECTION XXXVII. THE SOULS OF THE STARS—UNIVERSAL HELIOLATRY

In order to show that the Ancients have never “mistaken stars for Gods,” or Angels and the sun for the highest Gods and God, but have worshipped only the Spirit of all, and have reverenced the minor Gods supposed to reside in the sun and planets—the difference between these two worships has to be pointed out. Saturn, “the Father of Gods” must not be confused with his namesake—the planet of the same name with its eight moons and three rings. The two—though in one sense identical, as are, for instance, physical man and his soul—must be separated in the question of worship. This has to be done the more carefully in the case of the seven planets and their Spirits, as the whole formation of the universe is attributed to them in the Secret Teachings. The same difference has to be shown again between the stars of the Great Bear, the Riksha and the Chitra Shikhandina, “the bright‐crested,” and the Rishis—the mortal Sages who appeared on earth during the Satya Yuga. If all of these have been so far closely united in the visions of the seers of every age—the bible seers included—there must have been a reason for it. Nor need one go back so far as into the periods of “superstition” and “unscientific fancies” to find great men in our epoch sharing in them. It is well known that Kepler, the eminent astronomer, in common with many other great men who believed that the heavenly bodies ruled favourably or adversely the fates of men and nations—fully credited besides this the fact that all heavenly bodies, even our own earth, are endowed with living and thinking souls.

Le Couturier’s opinion is worthy of notice in this relation:

We are too inclined to criticize unsparingly everything concerning astrology and its ideas; nevertheless our criticism, to be one, ought at least to know, lest it should be proved aimless, what those ideas in truth are. And when among the men we thus criticize, we find such names as those of Regiomontanus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, etc., there is reason why we should be careful. Kepler was an astrologer by profession, and became an astronomer in consequence. He was earning his livelihood by genethliac figures, which, indicating the state of the heavens at the moment of the birth of individuals, were a means to which everyone resorted for horoscopes. That great man was a believer in the principles of astrology, without accepting all its foolish results.(611)

But astrology is nevertheless proclaimed as a sinful science, and together with Occultism is tabooed by the Churches. It is very doubtful, however, whether mystic “star worship” can be so easily laughed down as people imagine—at any rate by Christians. The hosts of Angels, Cherubs and Planetary Archangels are identical with the minor Gods of the Pagans. As to their “great Gods,” if Mars has been shown—on the admission of even the enemies of the Pagan astrologers—to have been regarded by the latter simply as the personified strength of the one highest impersonal Deity, Mercury being personified as its omniscience, Jupiter as its omnipotency, and so on, then the “superstition” of the Pagan has indeed become the “religion” of the masses of the civilized nations. For with the latter, Jehovah is the synthesis of the seven Elohim, the eternal centre of all those attributes and forces, the Alei of the Aleim, and the Adonai of the Adonim. And if with them Mars is now called St. Michael, the “strength of God,” Mercury Gabriel, the “omniscience and fortitude of the Lord,” and Raphael “the blessing or healing power of God,” this is simply a change of names, the characters behind the masks remaining the same.

The Dalai‐lama’s mitre has seven ridges in honour of the seven chief Dhyâni Buddhas. In the funeral ritual of the Egyptians the defunct is made to exclaim:

Salutation to you, O Princes, who stand in the presence of Osiris.... Send me the grace to have my sins destroyed, as you have done for the seven spirits who follow their Lord!(612)

Brahmâ’s head is ornamented with seven rays, and he is followed by the seven Rishis, in the seven Svargas. China has her seven Pagodas; the Greeks had their seven Cyclopes, seven Demiurgi, and the Mystery Gods, the seven Kabiri, whose chief was Jupiter‐Saturn, and with the Jews, Jehovah. Now the latter Deity has become chief of all, the highest and the one God, and his old place is taken by Mikael (Michael). He is the “Chief of the Host” (tsaba); the “Archistrategus of the Lord’s army”; the “Conqueror of the Devil”—Victor diaboli—and the “Archisatrap of the Sacred Militia,” he who slew the “Great Dragon.” Unfortunately astrology and symbology, having no inducement to veil old things with new masks, have preserved the real name of Mikael—“that was Jehovah”—Mikael being the Angel of the face of the Lord,(613) “the guardian of the planets,” and the living image of God. He represents the Deity in his visits to earth, for as it is well expressed in Hebrew, he is one מיכאל, who is as God, or who is like unto God. It is he who cast out the serpent.(614)

Mikael, being the regent of the planet Saturn, is—Saturn.(615) His mystery‐name is Sabbathiel, because he presides over the Jewish Sabbath, as also over the astrological Saturday. Once identified, the reputation of the Christian conqueror of the devil is in still greater danger from further identifications. Biblical angels are called Malachim, the messengers between God (or rather the gods) and men. In Hebrew מכאל Malach, is also “a King,” and Malech or Melech was likewise Moloch, or again Saturn, the Seb of Egypt, to whom Dies Saturni, or the Sabbath, was dedicated. The Sabæans separated and distinguished the planet Saturn from its God far more than the Roman Catholics do their angels from their stars; and the Kabalists make of the Archangel Mikael the patron of the seventh work of magic.

In theological symbolism ... Jupiter [the Sun] is the risen and glorious Saviour, and Saturn, God the Father, or the Jehovah of Moses,(616)

says Éliphas Lévi, who ought to know. Jehovah and the Saviour, Saturn and Jupiter, being thus one, and Mikael being called the living image of God, it does seem dangerous for the Church to call Saturn, Satan—le dieu mauvais. However, Rome is strong in casuistry and will get out of this as she got out of every other identification, with glory to herself and to her own full satisfaction. Nevertheless all her dogmas and rituals seem like so many pages torn out from the history of Occultism, and then distorted. The extremely thin partition that separates the Kabalistic and Chaldæan Theogony from the Roman Catholic Angelology and Theodicy is now confessed by at least one Roman Catholic writer. One can hardly believe one’s eyes in finding the following (the passages italicized by us should be carefully noticed):

One of the most characteristic features of our Holy Scriptures is the calculated discretion used in the enunciation of the mysteries less directly useful to salvation.... Thus, beyond those “myriads of myriads” of angelic creatures just noticed(617) and all these prudently elementary divisions, there are certainly many others, whose very names have not yet reached us.(618) “For,” excellently says St. John Chrysostom, “there are doubtless, (sine dubio,) many other Virtues [celestial beings] whose denominations we are yet far from knowing.... The nine orders are not by any means the only populations in heaven, where, on the contrary, are to be found numberless tribes of inhabitants infinitely varied, and of which it would be impossible to give the slightest idea through human tongue.... Paul, who had learned their names, reveals to us their existence.” (De Incomprehensibili Natura Dei, Bk. IV.)....

It would thus amount to a gross mistake to see merely errors in the Angelology of the Kabalists and Gnostics, so severely treated by the Apostle of the Gentiles, for his imposing censure reached only their exaggerations and vicious interpretations, and still more, the application of those noble titles to the miserable personalities of demoniacal usurpers.(619) Often nothing so resemble each other as the language of the judges and that of the convicts [of saints and Occultists]. One has to penetrate deeply into this dual study [of creed and profession] and what is still better, to trust blindly to the authority of the tribunal [the Church of Rome, of course] to enable oneself to seize precisely the point of the error. The Gnosis condemned by St. Paul remains, nevertheless, for him as for Plato the supreme knowledge of all truths, and of the Being par excellence, ὁ ὄντως ὤν (Republ. Bk. VI). The Ideas, types, ἀρχὰι of the Greek philosopher, the Intelligences of Pythagoras, the aeons or emanations, the occasion of so much reproach to the first heretics, the Logos or Word, Chief of these Intelligences, the Demiurgos, the architect of the world under his father’s direction [of the Pagans], the unknown God, the En‐soph, or the It of the Infinite [of the Kabalists], the angelical periods,(620) the seven spirits, the Depths of Ahriman, the World’s Rectors, the Archontes of the air, the God of this world, the pleroma of the intelligences, down to Metatron the angel of the Jews, all this is found word for word, as so many truths, in the works of our greatest doctors, and in St. Paul.(621)

If an Occultist, eager to charge the Church with a numberless series of plagiarisms were to write the above, could he have written more strongly? And have we, or have we not, the right, after such a complete confession, to reverse the tables and to say of Roman Catholics and others what is said of the Gnostics and Occultists. “They used our expressions and rejected our doctrines.” For it is not the “promoters of the false Gnosis”—who had all those expressions from their archaic ancestors—who helped themselves to Christian expressions, but verily the Christian Fathers and Theologians, who helped themselves to our nest, and have tried ever since to soil it.

The words above quoted will explain much to those who are searching for truth and for truth only. They will show the origin of certain rites in the Church inexplicable hitherto to the simple‐minded, and will give the reason why such words as “Our Lord the Sun” were used in prayer by Christians up to the fifth and even sixth century of our era, and embodied in the Liturgy, until altered into “Our Lord, the God.” Let us remember that the early Christians painted Christ on the walls of their subterranean necropolis, as a shepherd in the guise of, and invested with all the attributes of Apollo, driving away the wolf, Fenris, who seeks to devour the Sun and his Satellites.

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SECTION XXXVIII. ASTROLOGY AND ASTROLATRY

The books of Hermes Trismegistus contain the exoteric meaning, still veiled for all but the Occultist, of the Astrology and Astrolatry of the Khaldi. The two subjects are closely connected. Astrolatry, or the adoration of the heavenly host, is the natural result of only half‐ revealed Astrology, whose Adepts carefully concealed from the non‐ initiated masses its Occult principles and the wisdom imparted to them by the Regents of the Planets—the “Angels.” Hence, divine Astrology for the Initiates; superstitious Astrolatry for the profane. St. Justin asserts it:

From the first invention of the hieroglyphics it was not the vulgar, but the distinguished and select men who became initiated in the secrecy of the temples into the science of every kind of Astrology—even into its most abject kind: that Astrology which later on found itself prostituted in the public thoroughfares.

There was a vast difference between the Sacred Science taught by Petosiris and Necepso—the first Astrologers mentioned in the Egyptian manuscripts, believed to have lived during the reign of Ramses II. (Sesostris)(622)—and the miserable charlatanry of the quacks called Chaldæans, who degraded the Divine Knowledge under the last Emperors of Rome. Indeed, one may fairly describe the two as the “high ceremonial Astrology” and “astrological Astrolatry.” The first depended on the knowledge by the Initiates of those (to us) immaterial Forces or Spiritual Entities that affect matter and guide it. Called by the ancient Philosophers the Archontes and the Cosmocratores, they were the types or paradigms on the higher planes of the lower and more material beings on the scale of evolution, whom we call Elementals and Nature‐Spirits, to whom the Sabæans bowed and whom they worshipped, without suspecting the essential difference. Hence the latter kind when not a mere pretence, degenerated but too often into Black Magic. It was the favourite form of popular or exoteric Astrology, entirely ignorant of the apotelesmatic principles of the primitive Science, the doctrines of which were imparted only at Initiation. Thus, while the real Hierophants soared like Demi‐Gods to the very summit of spiritual knowledge, the hoi polloi among the Sabæans crouched, steeped in superstition—ten millenniums back, as they do now—in the cold and lethal shadow of the valleys of matter. Sidereal influence is dual. There is the physical and physiological influence, that of exotericism; and the high spiritual, intellectual, and moral influence, imparted by the knowledge of the planetary Gods. Bailly, speaking with only an imperfect knowledge of the former, called Astrology, so far back as the eighteenth century, “The very foolish mother of a very wise daughter”—Astronomy. On the other hand, Arago, a luminary of the nineteenth century, supports the reality of the sidereal influence of the Sun, Moon and Planets. He asks:

Where do we find lunar influences refuted by arguments that science would dare to avow?

But even Bailly, having, as he thought, put down Astrology as publicly practised, dares not do the same with the real Astrology. He says:

Judiciary Astrology was at its origin the result of a profound system, the work of an enlightened nation that would wander too far into the mysteries of God and Nature.

A Scientist of a more recent date, a member of the Institute of France, and a professor of History, Ph. Lebas, discovers (unconsciously to himself) the very root of Astrology in his able article on the subject in the Dictionnaire Encyclopédique de France. He well understands, he tells his readers, that the adhesion to that Science of such a number of highly intellectual men should be in itself a sufficient motive for believing that all Astrology is not folly:

While proclaiming in politics the sovereignty of the people and of public opinion can we admit, as heretofore, that mankind allowed itself to be radically deceived in this only: that an absolute and gross absurdity reigned in the minds of whole nations for so many centuries without being based on anything save—on one hand human imbecility, and on the other charlatanry? How for fifty centuries and more can most men have been either dupes or knaves? ... Even though we may find it impossible to decide between and separate the realities of Astrology from the elements of invention and empty dreaming in it, ... let us, nevertheless, repeat with Bossuet and all modern philosophers, that “nothing that has been dominant could be absolutely false.” Is it not true, at all events, that there is a physical reaction on one another among the planets? Is it not again true, that the planets have an influence on the atmosphere, and consequently at any rate a mediate action on vegetation and animals? Has not modern science demonstrated now these two points beyond any doubt?... Is it any less true that human liberty of action is not absolute: that all is bound, that all weighs, planets as the rest, on each individual will; that Providence [or Karma] acts on us and directs men through those relations that it has established between them and the visible objects and the whole universe?... Astrolatry, in its essence, is nothing but that; we are bound to recognise that an instinct superior to the age they lived in guided the efforts of the ancient Magi. As to the materialism and annihilation of human moral freedom with which Bailly charges their theory (Astrology), the reprobate has no sense whatever. All the great astrologers admitted, without one single exception, that man could react against the influence of the stars. This principle is established in the Ptolemœian Tetrabiblos, the true astrological Scriptures, in chapters ii. and iii. of book i.(623)

Thomas Aquinas had corroborated Lebas in anticipation; he says:

The celestial bodies are the cause of all that happens in this sublunary world, they act indirectly on human actions; but not all the effects produced by them are unavoidable.(624)

The Occultists and Theosophists are the first to confess that there is white and black Astrology. Nevertheless, Astrology has to be studied in both aspects by those who wish to become proficient in it; and the good or bad results obtained do not depend upon the principles, which are the same in both kinds, but in the Astrologer himself. Thus Pythagoras, who established the whole Copernican system by the Books of Hermes 2,000 years before Galileo’s predecessor was born, found and studied in them the whole Science of divine Theogony, of the communication with, and the evocation of, the world’s Rectors—the Princes of the “Principalities” of St. Paul—the nativity of each Planet and of the Universe itself, the formulæ of incantations and the consecration of each portion of the human body to the respective Zodiacal sign corresponding to it. All this cannot be regarded as childish and absurd—still less “devilish”—save by those who are, and wish to remain, tyros in the Philosophy of the Occult Sciences. No true thinker—no one who recognises the presence of a common bond between man and visible, as well as invisible, Nature—would see in the old relics of Archaic Wisdom—such as the Petemenoph Papyrus, for instance—“childish nonsense and absurdity,” as many Academicians and Scientists have done. But upon finding in such ancient documents the application of the Hermetic rules and laws, such as

The consecration of one’s hair to the celestial Nile; of the left temple to the living Spirit in the sun, and in the right one to the spirit of Ammon,

he will endeavour to study and comprehend better the “laws of correspondences.” Nor will he disbelieve in the antiquity of Astrology on the plea that some Orientalists have thought fit to declare that the Zodiac was not very ancient, being only the invention of the Greeks of the Macedonian period. For this statement, besides having been shown to be entirely erroneous by a number of other reasons, may be entirely disproved by facts relating to the latest discoveries in Egypt, and by the more accurate readings of hieroglyphics and inscriptions of the earliest dynasties. The published polemics on the contents of the so‐called “Magic” Papyri of the Anastasi collection indicate the antiquity of the Zodiac. As the Lettres à Lettrone say: The papyri discourse at length upon the four bases or

Foundations of the world, the identity of which it is impossible, according to Champollion, to mistake, as one is forced to recognise in them the Pillars of the World of St. Paul. It is they who are invoked with the gods of all the celestial zones, quite analogous, once more, to the Spiritualia nequitiæ in cælestibus of the same Apostle.(625)

That invocation was made in the proper terms ... of the formula, reproduced far too faithfully by Jamblichus for it to be possible to refuse him any longer the merit of having transmitted to posterity the ancient and primitive spirit of the Egyptian Astrologers.(626)

As Letronne had tried to prove that all the genuine Egyptian Zodiacs had been manufactured during the Roman period, the Sensaos mummy is brought forward to show that:

All the Zodiacal monuments in Egypt were chiefly astronomical. Royal tombs and funereal rituals are so many tables of constellations and of their influences for all the hours of every month.

Thus the genethliac tables themselves prove that they are far older than the period assigned to their origin; all the Zodiacs of the sarcophagi of later epochs being simple reminiscences of the Zodiacs belonging to the mythological [archaic] period.

Primitive Astrology was as far above modern judiciary Astrology, so‐ called, as the guides (the Planets and Zodiacal signs) are above the lamp‐ posts. Berosus shows the sidereal sovereignty of Bel and Mylitta (Sun and Moon), and only “the twelve lords of the Zodiacal Gods,” the “thirty‐six Gods Counsellors” and the “twenty‐four Stars, judges of this world,” which support and guide the Universe (our solar system), watch over mortals and reveal to mankind its fate and their own decrees. Judiciary Astrology as it is now known, is correctly denominated by the Latin Church the

Materialistic and pantheistic prophesying by the objective planet itself, independently of its Rector [the Mlac of the Jews, the ministers of the Eternal commissioned by him to announce his will to mortals]; the ascension or conjunction of the planet at the moment of the birth of an individual deciding his fortune and the moment and mode of his death.(627)

Every student of Occultism knows that the heavenly bodies are closely related during each Manvantara with the mankind of that special cycle; and there are some who believe that each great character born during that period has—as every other mortal has, only in a far stronger degree—his destiny outlined within his proper constellation or star, traced as a self‐prophecy, an anticipated autobiography, by the indwelling Spirit of that particular star. The human Monad in its first beginning is that Spirit, or the Soul of that star (Planet) itself. As our Sun radiates its light and beams on every body in space within the boundaries of its system, so the Regent of every Planet‐star, the Parent‐monad, shoots out from itself the Monad of every “pilgrim” Soul born under its house within its own group. The Regents are esoterically seven, whether in the Sephiroth, the “Angels of the Presence,” the Rishis, or the Amshaspends. “The One is no number” is said in all the esoteric works.

From the Kasdim and Gazzim (Astrologers) the noble primitive science passed to the Khartumim Asaphim (or Theologians) and the Hakamim (or scientists, the Magicians of the lower class), and from these to the Jews during their captivity. The Books of Moses had been buried in oblivion for centuries, and when re‐discovered by Hilkiah had lost their true sense for the people of Israel. Primitive Occult Astrology was on the decline when Daniel, the last of the Jewish Initiates of the old school, became the chief of the Magi and Astrologers of Chaldæa. In those days even Egypt, who had her wisdom from the same source as Babylon, had degenerated from her former grandeur, and her glory had begun to fade out. Still, the science of old had left her eternal imprint on the world, and the seven great Primitive Gods reigned for ever in the Astrology and in the division of time of every nation upon the face of the earth. The names of the days of our (Christian) week are those of the Gods of the Chaldæans, who translated them from those of the Âryans; the uniformity of these antediluvian names in every nation, from the Goths back to the Indians, would remain inexplicable, as Sir W. Jones thought, had not the riddle been explained to us by the invitation made by the Chaldæan oracles, recorded by Porphyry and quoted by Eusebius:

To carry those names first to the Egyptian and Phœnician colonies, then to the Greeks, with the express recommendation that each God should be invoked only on that day that had been called by his name....

Thus Apollo says in those oracles: “I must be invoked on the day of the sun; Mercury after his directions, then Chronos [Saturn], then Venus, and do not fail to call seven times each of those gods.”(628)

This is slightly erroneous. Greece did not get her astrological instruction from Egypt or from Chaldæa, but direct from Orpheus, as Lucian tells us.(629) It was Orpheus, as he says, who imparted the Indian Sciences to nearly all the great monarchs of antiquity; and it was they, the ancient kings favoured by the Planetary Gods, who recorded the principles of Astrology—as did Ptolemus, for instance. Thus Lucian writes:

The Bœotian Tiresias acquired the greatest reputation in the art of predicting futurity.... In those days divination was not as slightly treated as it is now; and nothing was ever undertaken without previous consultation with diviners, whose oracles were all directed by astrology.... At Delphos the virgin commissioned to announce futurity was the symbol of the Heavenly Virgin, ... and Our Lady.

On the sarcophagus of an Egyptian Pharaoh, Neith, mother of Ra, the heifer that brings forth the Sun, her body spangled with stars, and wearing the solar and lunar discs, is equally referred to as the “Heavenly Virgin” and “Our Lady of the Starry Vault.”

Modern judiciary Astrology in its present form began only during the time of Diodorus, as he apprises the world.(630) But Chaldæan Astrology was believed in by most of the great men in History, such as Cæsar, Pliny, Cicero—whose best friends, Nigidius Figulus and Lucius Tarrutius, were themselves Astrologers, the former being famous as a prophet. Marcus Antonius never travelled without an Astrologer recommended to him by Cleopatra. Augustus, when ascending the throne, had his horoscope drawn by Theagenes. Tiberius discovered pretenders to his throne by means of Astrology and divination. Vitellius dared not exile the Chaldæans, as they had announced the day of their banishment as that of his death. Vespasian consulted them daily; Domitian would not move without being advised by the prophets; Adrian was a learned Astrologer himself; and all of them, ending with Julian (called the Apostate because he would not become one), believed in, and addressed their prayers to, the Planetary “Gods.” The Emperor Adrian, moreover, “predicted from the January calends up to December 31st, every event that happened to him daily.” Under the wisest emperors Rome had a School of Astrology, wherein were secretly taught the occult influences of the Sun, Moon, and Saturn.(631) Judiciary Astrology is used to this day by the Kabalists; and Éliphas Lévi, the modern French Magus, teaches its rudiments in his Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie. But the key to ceremonial or ritualistic Astrology, with the teraphim and the urim and thummim of Magic, is lost to Europe. Hence our century of Materialism shrugs its shoulders and sees in Astrology—a pretender.

Not all scientists scoff at it, however, and one may rejoice in reading in the Musée des Sciences(632) the suggestive and fair remarks made by Le Couturier, a man of science of no mean reputation. He thinks it curious to notice that while the bold speculations of Democritus are found vindicated by Dalton,

The reveries of the alchemists are also on their way to a certain rehabilitation. They receive renewed life from the minute investigations of their successors, the chemists; a very remarkable thing indeed is to see how much modern discoveries have served to vindicate, of late, the theories of the Middle Ages from the charge of absurdity laid at their door. Thus, if, as demonstrated by Col. Sabine, the direction of a piece of steel, hung a few feet above the soil, may be influenced by the position of the moon, whose body is at a distance of 240,000 miles from our planet, who then could accuse of extravagance the belief of the ancient astrologers [or the modern, either] in the influence of the stars on human destiny.(633)

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SECTION XXXIX. CYCLES AND AVATARAS

We have already drawn attention to the facts that the record of the life of a World‐Saviour is emblematical, and must be read by its mystic meaning, and that the figures 432 have a cosmic evolutionary significance. We find these two facts throwing light on the origin of the exoteric Christian religion, and clearing away much of the obscurity surrounding its beginnings. For is it not clear that the names and characters in the Synoptical Gospels and in that of St. John are not historical? Is it not evident that the compilers of the life of Christ, desirous to show that the birth of their Master was a cosmic, astronomical, and divinely‐ preördained event, attempted to coördinate the same with the end of the secret cycle, 4,320? When facts are collated this answers to them as little as does the other cycle of “thirty‐three solar years, seven months, and seven days,” which has also been brought forward as supporting the same claim, the soli‐lunar cycle in which the Sun gains on the Moon one solar year. The combination of the three figures, 4, 3, 2, with cyphers according to the cycle and Manvantara concerned, was, and is, preëminently Hindu. It will remain a secret even though several of its significant features are revealed. It relates, for instance, to the Pralaya of the races in their periodical dissolution, before which events a special Avatâra has always to descend and incarnate on earth. These figures were adopted by all the older nations, such as those of Egypt and Chaldæa, and before them were current among the Atlanteans. Evidently some of the more learned among the early Church Fathers who had dabbled, whilst Pagans, in temple secrets, knew them to relate to the Avatâric or Messianic mystery, and tried to apply this cycle to the birth of their Messiah; they failed because the figures relate to the respective ends of the Root‐Races and not to any individual. In their badly‐directed efforts, moreover, an error of five years occurred. Is it possible, if their claims as to the importance and universality of the event were correct, that such a vital mistake should have been allowed to creep into a chronological computation preördained and traced in the heavens by the finger of God? Again, what were the Pagan and even Jewish Initiates doing, if this claim as to Jesus be correct? Could they, the custodians of the key to the secret cycles and Avatâras, the heirs of all the Âryan, Egyptian, and Chaldæan wisdom, have failed to recognise their great “God‐Incarnate,” one with Jehovah,(634) their Saviour of the latter days, him whom all the nations of Asia still expect as their Kalki Avatâra, Maitreya Buddha, Sosiosh, Messiah, etc.?

The simple secret is this: There are cycles within greater cycles, which are all contained in the one Kalpa of 4,320,000 years. It is at the end of this cycle that the Kalki Avatâra is expected—the Avatâra Whose name and characteristics are secret, Who will come forth from Shamballa, the “City of Gods,” which is in the West for some nations, in the East for others, in the North or South for yet others. And this is the reason why, from the Indian Rishi to Virgil, and from Zoroaster down to the latest Sibyl, all have, since the beginning of the Fifth Race, prophesied, sung, and promised the cyclic return of the Virgin—Virgo, the constellation—and the birth of a divine child who should bring back to our earth the Golden Age.

No one, however fanatical, would have sufficient hardihood to maintain that the Christian era has ever been a return to the Golden Age—Virgo having actually entered into Libra since then. Let us trace as briefly as possible the Christian traditions to their true origin.

First of all, they discover in a few lines from Virgil a direct prophecy of the birth of Christ. Yet it is impossible to detect in this prophecy any feature of the present age. It is in the famous fourth Eclogue in which, half a century before our era, Pollio is made to ask the Muses of Sicily to sing to him about greater events.

The last era of Cumæan song is now arrived and the grand series of ages [that series which recurs again and again in the course of our mundane revolution] begins afresh. Now the Virgin Astræa returns, and the reign of Saturn recommences. Now a new progeny descends from the celestial realms. Do thou, chaste Lucina, smile propitious to the infant Boy who will bring to a close the present Age of Iron,(635) and introduce throughout the whole world the Age of Gold.... He shall share the life of Gods and shall see heroes mingled in society with Gods, himself be seen by them and all the peaceful world.... Then shall the herds no longer dread the huge lion, the serpent also shall die: and the poison’s deceptive plant shall perish. Come then, dear child of the Gods, great descendant of Jupiter!... The time is near. See, the world is shaken with its globe saluting thee: the earth, the regions of the sea, and the heavens sublime.(636)

It is in these few lines, called the “Sibylline prophecy about the coming of Christ,” that his followers now see a direct foretelling of the event. Now who will presume to maintain that either at the birth of Jesus or since the establishment of the so‐called Christian religion, any portion of the above‐quoted sentences can be shown as prophetic? Has the “last age”—the Age of Iron, or Kali Yuga—closed since then? Quite the reverse, since it is shown to be in full sway just now, not only because the Hindus use the name, but by universal personal experience. Where is that “new race that has descended from the celestial realms”? Was it the race that emerged from Paganism into Christianity? Or is it our present race, with nations ever red‐hot for fight, jealous and envious, ready to pounce upon each other, showing mutual hatred that would put to blush cats and dogs, ever lying and deceiving one another? Is it this age of ours that is the promised “Golden Age”—in which neither the venom of the serpent nor of any plant is any longer lethal, and in which we are all secure under the mild sway of God‐chosen sovereigns? The wildest fancy of an opium‐eater could hardly suggest a more inappropriate description, if it is to be applied to our age or to any age since the year one of our era. What of the mutual slaughter of sects, of Christians by Pagans, and of Pagans and Heretics by Christians; the horrors of the Middle Ages and of the Inquisition; Napoleon, and since his day, an “armed peace” at best—at the worst, torrents of blood, shed for supremacy over acres of land, and a handful of heathen: millions of soldiers under arms, ready for battle; a diplomatic body playing at Cains and Judases; and instead of the “mild sway of a divine sovereign” the universal, though unrecognised, sway of Cæsarism, of “might” in lieu of “right,” and the breeding therefrom of anarchists, socialists, pétroleuses, and destroyers of every description?

The Sibylline prophecy and Virgil’s inspirational poetry remain unfulfilled in every point, as we see.

The fields are yellow with soft ears of corn;

but so they were before our era:

The blushing grapes shall hang from the rude brambles, and dewy honey shall [or may] distil from the rugged oak;

but they have not thus done, so far. We must look for another interpretation. What is it? The Sibylline Prophetess spoke, as thousands of other Prophets and Seers have spoken, though even the few such records that have survived are rejected by Christian and infidel, and their interpretations are only allowed and accepted among the Initiated. The Sibyl alluded to cycles in general and to the great cycle especially. Let us remember how the Purânas corroborate the above, among others the Vishnu Purâna:

When the practices taught by the Vedas, and the Institutes of Law shall have nearly ceased, and the close of the Kali Yuga [the “Iron Age” of Virgil] shall be nigh, an aspect of that divine Being who exists of his own spiritual nature in the character of Brahmâ and even is the beginning and the end [Alpha and Omega], ... shall descend upon earth: he will be born in the family of Vishnuyashas, an eminent Brâhman of Shamballah ... endowed with the eight superhuman powers. By his irresistible might he will destroy ... all whose minds are devoted to iniquity. He will then reëstablish righteousness upon earth; and the minds of those who live at the end of the [Kali] Age shall be awakened, and shall be as pellucid as crystal.(637) The men who are thus changed by virtue of that peculiar time shall be as the seeds of human beings [the Shistha, the survivors of the future cataclysm], and shall give birth to a race who shall follow the laws of the Krita [or Satya] Yuga [the age of purity, or the “Golden Age”]. For it is said: “When the sun and moon and Tishya [asterisms] and the planet Jupiter are in one mansion the Krita Age [the Golden] shall return.”(638)

The astronomical cycles of the Hindus—those taught publicly—have been sufficiently well understood, but the esoteric meaning thereof, in its application to transcendental subjects connected with them, has ever remained a dead‐letter. The number of cycles was enormous; it ranged from the Mahâ Yuga cycle of 4,320,000 years down to the small septenary and quinquennial cycles, the latter being composed of the five years called respectively the Samvatsara, Parivatsara, Idvatsara, Anuvatsara, and Vatsara, each having secret attributes or qualities attached to them. Vriddhagarga gives these in a treatise, now the property of a Trans‐ Himâlayan Matham (or temple); and describes the relation between this quinquennial and the Brihaspati cycle, based on the conjunction of the Sun and Moon every sixtieth year: a cycle as mysterious—for national events in general and those of the Âryan Hindu nation especially—as it is important.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

SECTION XL. SECRET CYCLES

The former five‐year cycle comprehends sixty solar‐sidereal months of 1800 days, sixty‐one solar months (or 1830 days); sixty‐two lunar months (or 1860 lunations), and sixty‐seven lunar‐asterismal months (or 1809 such days).

In his Kâla Sankalita, Col. Warren very properly regards these years as cycles; this they are, for each year has its own special importance as having some bearing upon, and connection with, specified events in individual horoscopes. He writes that in the cycle of sixty there

Are contained five cycles of twelve years, each supposed equal to one year of the planet (Brihaspati, or Jupiter) ... I mention this cycle because I found it mentioned in some books, but I know of no nation or tribe that reckons time after that account.(639)

The ignorance is very natural, since Col. Warren could know nothing of the secret cycles and their meanings. He adds:

The names of the five cycles or Yugas are: ... (1) Samvatsara, (2) Parivatsara, (3) Idvatsara, (4) Anuvatsara, (5) Udravatsara.

The learned Colonel might, however, have assured himself that there were “other nations” which had the same secret cycle, if he had but remembered that the Romans also had their lustrum of five years (from the Hindus undeniably) which represented the same period if multiplied by 12.(640) Near Benares there are still the relics of all these cycle‐records, and of astronomical instruments cut out of solid rock, the everlasting records of Archaic Initiation, called by Sir W. Jones (as suggested by the prudent Brâhmans who surrounded him) old “back records” or reckonings. But in Stonehenge they exist to this day. Higgins says that Waltire found the barrows of tumuli surrounding this giant‐temple represented accurately the situation and magnitude of the fixed stars, forming a complete orrery or planisphere. As Colebrooke found out, it is the cycle of the Vedas, recorded in the Jyotisha, one of the Vedângas, a treatise on Astronomy, which is the basis of calculation for all other cycles, larger or smaller;(641) and the Vedas were written in characters, archaic though they be, long after those natural observations, made by the aid of their gigantic mathematical and astronomical instruments, had been recorded by the men of the Third Race, who had received their instruction from the Dhyân Chohans. Maurice speaks truly when he observes that all such

Circular stone monuments were intended as durable symbols of astronomical cycles by a race who, not having, or for political reasons, forbidding the use of letters, had no other permanent method of instructing their disciples or handing down their knowledge to posterity.

He errs only in the last idea. It was to conceal their knowledge from profane posterity, leaving it as an heirloom only to the Initiates, that such monuments, at once rock observatories and astronomical treatises, were cut out.

It is no news that as the Hindus divided the earth into seven zones, so the more western peoples—Chaldæans, Phœnicians, and even the Jews, who got their learning either directly or indirectly from the Brâhmans—made all their secret and sacred numerations by 6 and 12, though using the number 7 whenever this would not lend itself to handling. Thus the numerical base of 6, the exoteric figure given by Ârya Bhatta, was made good use of. From the first secret cycle of 600—the Naros, transformed successively into 60,000 and 60 and 6, and, with other noughts added into other secret cycles—down to the smallest, an Archæologist and Mathematician can easily find it repeated in every country, known to every nation. Hence the globe was divided into 60 degrees, which, multiplied by 60, became 3,600 the “great year.” Hence also the hour with its 60 minutes of 60 seconds each. The Asiatic people count a cycle of 60 years also, after which comes the lucky seventh decad, and the Chinese have their small cycle of 60 days, the Jews of 6 days, the Greeks of 6 centuries—the Naros again. The Babylonians had a great year of 3,600, being the Naros multiplied by 6. The Tartar cycle called Van was 180 years, or three sixties; this multiplied by 12 times 12 = 144, makes 25,920 years, the exact period of revolution of the heavens.

India is the birthplace of arithmetic and mathematics; as “Our Figures,” in Chips from a German Workshop, by Prof. Max Müller, shows beyond a doubt. As well explained by Krishna Shâstri Godbole in The Theosophist:

The Jews ... represented the units (1‐9) by the first nine letters of our alphabet; the tens (10‐90) by the next nine letters; the first four hundreds (100‐400) by the last four letters, and the remaining ones (500‐900) by the second forms of the letters “kâf” (11th), “mîm” (13th), “nûn” (14th), “pe” (17th), and “sâd” (18th); and they represented other numbers by combining these letters according to their value.... The Jews of the present period still adhere to this practice of notation in their Hebrew books. The Greeks had a numerical system similar to that used by the Jews, but they carried it a little farther by using letters of the alphabet with a dash or slant‐line behind, to represent thousands (1000‐9000), tens of thousands (10,000‐90,000) and one hundred of thousands (100,000) the last, for instance, being represented by “rho” with a dash behind, while “rho” singly represented 100. The Romans represented all numerical values by the combination (additive when the second letter is of equal or less value) of six letters of their alphabet: i (= 1), v (= 5), x (= 10), c (for “centum” = 100), d (= 500), and m (= 1000): thus 20 = xx, 15 = xv, and 9 = ix. These are called the Roman numerals, and are adopted by all European nations when using the Roman alphabet. The Arabs at first followed their neighbours, the Jews, in their method of computation, so much so that they called it Abjad from the first four Hebrew letters—“alif,” “beth,” “gimel”—or rather “jimel,” that is, “jim” (Arabic being wanting in “g”), and “daleth,” representing the first four units. But when in the early part of the Christian era they came to India as traders, they found the country already using for computation the decimal scale of notation, which they forthwith borrowed literally; viz., without altering its method of writing from left to right, at variance with their own mode of writing, which is from right to left. They introduced this system into Europe through Spain and other European countries lying along the coast of the Mediterranean and under their sway, during the dark ages of European history. It has thus become evident that the Âryas knew well mathematics or the science of computation at a time when all other nations knew but little, if anything, of it. It has also been admitted that the knowledge of arithmetic and algebra was first introduced from the Hindus by the Arabs, and then taught by them to the Western nations. This fact convincingly proves that the Âryan civilisation is older than that of any other nation in the world; and as the Vedas are avowedly proved the oldest work of that civilisation, a presumption is raised in favour of their great antiquity.(642)

But while the Jewish nation, for instance—regarded so long as the first and oldest in the order of creation—knew nothing of arithmetic and remained utterly ignorant of the decimal scale of notation—the latter existed for ages in India before the actual era.

To become certain of the immense antiquity of the Âryan Asiatic nations and of their astronomical records one has to study more than the Vedas. The secret meaning of the latter will never be understood by the present generation of Orientalists; and the astronomical works which give openly the real dates and prove the antiquity of both the nation and its science, elude the grasp of the collectors of ollas and old manuscripts in India, the reason being too obvious to need explanation. Yet there are Astronomers and Mathematicians to this day in India, humble Shâstris and Pandits, unknown and lost in the midst of that population of phenomenal memories and metaphysical brains, who have undertaken the task and have proved to the satisfaction of many that the Vedas are the oldest works in the world. One of such is the Shâstri just quoted, who published in The Theosophist(643) an able treatise proving astronomically and mathematically that:

If the Post‐Vaidika works alone, the Upanishads, the Brâhmanas, etc., down to the Purânas, when examined critically carry us back to 20,000 B.C., then the time of the composition of the Vedas themselves cannot be less than 30,000 B.C., in round numbers, a date which we may take at present as the age of that Book of books.(644)

And what are his proofs?

Cycles and the evidence yielded by the asterisms. Here are a few extracts from his rather lengthy treatise, selected to give an idea of his demonstrations and bearing directly on the quinquennial cycle spoken of just now. Those who feel interested in the demonstrations and are advanced mathematicians can turn to the article itself, “The Antiquity of the Vedas,”(645) and judge for themselves.

10. Somâkara in his commentary on the Shesha Jyotisha quotes a passage from the Satapatha Brâhmana, which contains an observation on the change of the tropics, and which is also found in the Sâkhâyana Brâhmana, as has been noticed by Prof. Max Müller in his preface to Rigveda Samhitâ (p. xx. foot‐note, vol. iv.). The passage is this: ... “The full‐moon night in Phâlguna is the first night of Samvatsara, the first year of the quinquennial age.” This passage clearly shows that the quinquennial age which, according to the sixth verse of the Jyotisha, begins on the 1st of Mâgha (January‐February), once began on the 15th of Phâlguna (February‐March). Now when the 15th of Phâlguna of the first year called Samvatsara of the quinquennial age begins, the moon, according to the Jyotisha, is in 3/4th of the Uttar Phâlgunî, and the sun in 1/4th of Pûrva Bhâdrapadâ. Hence the position of the four principal points on the ecliptic was then as follows:

The winter solstice in 3°29’ of Purva Bhâdrapadâ.

The vernal equinox in the beginning of Mrigashîrsha.

The summer solstice in 10 of Purva Phâlgunî.

The autumnal equinox in the middle of Jyeshtha.

The vernal equinoctial point, we have seen, coincided with the beginning of Krittikâ in 1421 B.C.; and from the beginning of Krittikâ to that of Mrigashîrsha, was, in consequence, 1421 + 26‐2/3 x 72 = 1421 + 1920 = 3341 B.C., supposing the rate of precession to be 50° a year. When we take the rate to be 3°20" in 247 years, the time comes up to 1516 + 1960·7 = 3476·7 B.C.

When the winter solstice by its retrograde motion coincided after that with the beginning of Pûrva Bhâdrapadâ, then the commencement of the quinquennial age was changed from the 15th to the 1st of Phâlguna (February‐March). This change took place 240 years after the date of the above observation, that is, in 3101 B.C. This date is most important, as from it an era was reckoned in after times. The commencement of the Kali or Kali Yuga (derived from “kal,” “to reckon”), though said by European scholars to be an imaginary date, becomes thus an astronomical fact.

INTERCHANGE OF KRITTIKÂ AND ASHVINÎ.(646)

We thus see that the asterisms, twenty‐seven in number, were counted from the Mrigashîrsha when the vernal equinox was in its beginning, and that the practice of thus counting was adhered to till the vernal equinox retrograded to the beginning of Krittikâ, when it became the first of the asterisms. For then the winter solstice had changed, receding from Phâlguna (February‐March) to Mâgha (January‐February), one complete lunar month. And, in like manner, the place of Krittikâ was occupied by Ashvinî, that is, the latter became the first of the asterisms, heading all others, when its beginning coincided with the vernal equinoctial point, or, in other words, when the winter solstice was in Pansha (December‐February). Now from the beginning of Krittikâ to that of Ashvinî there are two asterisms, or 26‐2/3°, and the time the equinox takes to retrograde this distance at the rate of 1 in 72 years is 1920 years; and hence the date at which the vernal equinox coincided with the commencement of Ashvinî or with the end of Revatî is 1920 ‐ 1421 = 499 A.D.

BENTLEY’S OPINION.

12. The next and equally‐important observation we have to record here is one discussed by Mr. Bentley in his researches into the Indian antiquities. “The first lunar asterism,” he says, “in the division of twenty‐eight was called Mûla, that is to say, the root or origin. In the division of twenty‐seven the first lunar asterism was called Jyeshtha, that is to say, the eldest or first, and consequently of the same import as the former” (vide his Historical View of the Hindu Astronomy, p. 4). From this it becomes manifest that the vernal equinox was once in the beginning of Mûla, and Mûla was reckoned the first of the asterisms when they were twenty‐eight in number, including Adhijit. Now there are fourteen asterisms, or 180°, from the beginning of Mrigashîrsha to that of Mûla, and hence the date at which the vernal equinox coincided with the beginning of Mûla was at least 3341 + 180 × 72 = 16,301 B.C. The position of the four principal points on the ecliptic was then as given below:

The winter solstice in the beginning of Uttara Phâlgunî in the month of Shrâvana.

The vernal equinox in the beginning of Mûla in Kârttika.

The summer solstice in the beginning of Pûrva Bhâdrapadâ in Mâgha.

The autumnal equinox in the beginning of Mrigashîrsha in Vaishâkha.

A PROOF FROM THE BHAGAVAD GÎTÂ.

13. The Bhagavad Gîtâ, as well as the Bhâgavata, makes mention of an observation which points to a still more remote antiquity than the one discovered by Mr. Bentley. The passages are given in order below:

“I am the Mârgashîrsha [viz. the first among the months] and the spring [viz. the first among the seasons].”

This shows that at one time the first month of spring was Mârgashîrsha. A season includes two months, and the mention of a month suggests the season.

“I am the Samvatsara among the years [which are five in number] and the spring among the seasons, and the Mârgashîrsha among the months and the Abhijit among the asterisms [which are twenty‐eight in number].”

This clearly points out that at one time in the first year called Samvatsara, of the quinquennial age, the Madhu, that is, the first month of spring, was Mârgashîrsha, and Abhijit was the first of the asterisms. It then coincided with the vernal equinoctial point, and thence from it the asterisms were counted. To find the date of this observation: There are three asterisms from the beginning of Mûla to the beginning of Abhijit, and hence the date in question is at least 16,301 + 3/7 × 90 × 72 = 19,078 or about 20,000 B.C. The Samvatsara at this time began in Bhâdrapadâ, the winter solstitial month.

So far then 20,000 years are mathematically proven for the antiquity of the Vedas. And this is simply exoteric. Any mathematician, provided he be not blinded by preconception and prejudice, can see this, and an unknown but very clever amateur Astronomer, S. A. Mackey, has proved it some sixty years back.

His theory about the Hindu Yugas and their length is curious—as being so very near the correct doctrine.

It is said in volume ii. p. 131, of Asiatic Researches that: “The great ancestor of Yudhister reigned 27,000 years ... at the end of the brazen age.” In volume ix. p. 364, we read:

“In the beginning of the Cali Yuga, in the reign of Yudhister. And Yudhister ... began his reign immediately after the flood called Pralaya.”

Here we find three different statements concerning Yudhister ... to explain these seeming differences we must have recourse to their books of science, where we find the heavens and the earth divided into five parts of unequal dimensions, by circles parallel to the equator. Attention to these divisions will be found to be of the utmost importance ... as it will be found that from them arose the division of their Maha‐Yuga into its four component parts. Every astronomer knows that there is a point in the heavens called the pole, round which the whole seems to turn in twenty‐four hours; and that at ninety degrees from it they imagine a circle called the equator, which divides the heavens and the earth into two equal parts, the north and the south. Between this circle and the pole there is another imaginary circle called the circle of perpetual apparition: between which and the equator there is a point in the heavens called the zenith, through which let another imaginary circle pass, parallel to the other two; and then there wants but the circle of perpetual occultation to complete the round.... No astronomer of Europe besides myself has ever applied them to the development of the Hindu mysterious numbers. We are told in the Asiatic Researches that Yudhister brought Vicramâditya to reign in Cassimer, which is in the latitude of 36 degrees. And in that latitude the circle of perpetual apparition would extend up to 72 degrees altitude, and from that to the zenith there are but 18 degrees, but from the zenith to the equator in that latitude there are 36 degrees, and from the equator to the circle of perpetual occultation there are 54 degrees. Here we find the semi‐circle of 180 degrees divided into four parts, in the proportion of 1, 2, 3, 4, i.e., 18, 36, 54, 72. Whether the Hindu astronomers were acquainted with the motion of the earth or not is of no consequence, since the appearances are the same; and if it will give those gentlemen of tender consciences any pleasure I am willing to admit that they imagined the heavens rolled round the earth, but they had observed the stars in the path of the sun to move forward through the equinoctial points, at the rate of fifty‐four seconds of a degree in a year, which carried the whole zodiac round in 24,000 years; in which time they also observed that the angle of obliquity varied, so as to extend or contract the width of the tropics 4 degrees on each side, which rate of motion would carry the tropics from the equator to the poles in 540,000 years: in which time the Zodiac would have made twenty‐two and a half revolutions, which are expressed by the parallel circles from the equator to the poles ... or what amounts to the same thing, the north pole of the ecliptic would have moved from the north pole of the earth to the equator.... Thus the poles become inverted in 1,080,000 years, which is their Maha Yuga, and which they had divided into four unequal parts, in the proportions of 1, 2, 3, 4, for the reasons mentioned above; which are 108,000, 216,000, 324,000, and 432,000. Here we have the most positive proofs that the above numbers originated in ancient astronomical observations, and consequently are not deserving of those epithets which have been bestowed upon them by the Essayist, echoing the voice of Bentley, Wilford, Dupuis, etc.

I have now to show that the reign of Yudhister for 27,000 years is neither absurd nor disgusting, but perhaps the Essayist is not aware that there were several Yudhisters or Judhisters. In volume ii. p. 131, Asiatic Researches: “The great ancestor of Yudhister reigned 27,000 years at the end of the brazen or third age.” Here I must again beg your attention to this projection. This is a plane of that machine which the second gentleman thought so very clumsy; it is that of a prolong spheroid, called by the ancients an atroscope. Let the longest axis represent the poles of the earth, making an angle of 28 degrees with the horizon; then will the seven divisions above the horizon to the North Pole, the temple of Buddha, and the seven from the North Pole to the circle of perpetual apparition represent the fourteen Manvantaras, or very long periods of time, each of which, according to the third volume of Asiatic Researches, p. 258 or 259, was the reign of a Menu. But Capt. Wilford, in volume v. p. 243, gives us the following information: “The Egyptians had fourteen dynasties, and the Hindus had fourteen dynasties, the rulers of which are called Menus.” ...

Who can here mistake the fourteen very long periods of time for those which constituted the Cali Yuga of Delhi, or any other place in the latitude of 28 degrees, where the blank space from the foot of Meru to the seventh circle from the equator, constitutes the part passed over by the tropic in the next age; which proportions differ considerably from those in the latitude of 36; and because the numbers in the Hindu books differ, Mr. Bentley asserts that: “This shows what little dependence is to be put in them.” But, on the contrary, it shows with what accuracy the Hindus had observed the motions of the heavens in different latitudes.

Some of the Hindus inform us that “the earth has two spindles which are surrounded by seven tiers of heavens and hells at the distance of one Raju each.” This needs but little explanation when it is understood that the seven divisions from the equator to their zenith are called Rishis or Rashas. But what is most to our present purpose to know is that they had given names to each of those divisions which the tropics passed over during each revolution of the Zodiac. In the latitude of 36 degrees where the Pole or Meru was nine steps high at Cassimere, they were called Shastras; in latitude 28 degrees at Delhi, where the Pole or Meru was seven steps high, they were called Menus; but in 24 degrees, at Cacha, where the Pole or Meru was but six steps high, they were called Sacas. But in the ninth volume (Asiatic Researches) Yudhister, the son of Dherma, or Justice, was the first of the six Sacas; the name implies the end, and as everything has two ends, Yudhister is as applicable to the first as to the last. And as the division on the north of the circle of perpetual apparition is the first of the Cali Yuga, supposing the tropics to be ascending, it was called the division or reign of Yudhister. But the division which immediately precedes the circle of perpetual apparition is the last of the third or brazen age, and was therefore called Yudhister, and as his reign preceded the reign of the other, as the tropic ascended to the Pole or Meru, he was called the father of the other—“the great ancestor of Yudhister, who reigned twenty‐seven thousand years, at the end of the brazen age.” (Vol. ii. Asiatic Researches.)

The ancient Hindus observed that the Zodiac went forward at about the rate of fifty‐four seconds a year, and to avoid greater fractions, stated it at that, which would make a complete round in 24,000 years; and observing the angle of the poles to vary nearly 4 degrees each round, stated the three numbers as such, which would have given forty‐five rounds of the Zodiac to half a revolution of the poles; but finding that forty‐five rounds would not bring the northern tropic to coincide with the circle of perpetual apparition by thirty minutes of a degree, which required the Zodiac to move one sign and a half more, which we all know it could not do in less than 3,000 years, they were, in the case before us, added to the end of the brazen age; which lengthen the reign of that Yudhister to 27,000 years instead of 24,000, but, at another time they did not alter the regular order of 24,000 years to the reign of each of these long‐winded monarchs, but rounded up the time by allowing a regency to continue three or four thousand years. In volume ii. p. 134, Asiatic Researches, we are told that: “Paricshit, the great nephew and successor of Yudhister, is allowed without controversy to have reigned in the interval between the brazen and earthen, or Cali Ages, and to have died at the setting‐in of the Cali Yug.” Here we find an interregnum at the end of the brazen age, and before the setting‐in of the Cali Yug: and as there can be but one brazen or Treta Yug, i.e., the third age, in a Maha Yuga of 1,080,000 years: the reign of this Paricshit must have been in the second Maha Yuga, when the pole had returned to its original position, which must have taken 2,160,000 years: and this is what the Hindus call the Prajanatha Yuga. Analogous to this custom is that of some nations more modern, who, fond of even numbers, have made the common year to consist of twelve months of thirty days each, and the five days and odd measure have been represented as the reign of a little serpent biting his tail, and divided into five parts, etc.

But “Yudhister began his reign immediately after the flood called Pralaya,” i.e., at the end of the Cali Yug (or age of heat), when the tropic had passed from the pole to the other side of the circle of perpetual apparition, which coincides with the northern horizon; here the tropics or summer solstice would be again in the same parallel of north declination, at the commencement of their first age, as he was at the end of their third age, or Treta Yug, called the brazen age....

Enough has been said to prove that the Hindu books of science are not disgusting absurdities, originated in ignorance, vanity, and credulity; but books containing the most profound knowledge of astronomy and geography.

What, therefore, can induce those gentlemen of tender consciences to insist that Yudhister was a real mortal man I have no guess; unless it be that they fear for the fate of Jared and his grandfather, Methuselah?

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SECTION XLI. THE DOCTRINE OF AVATARAS

A strange story—a legend rather—is persistently current among the disciples of some great Himâlayan Gurus, and even among laymen, to the effect that Gautama, the Prince of Kapilavastu, has never left the terrestrial regions, though his body died and was burnt, and its relics are preserved to this day. There is an oral tradition among the Chinese Buddhists, and a written statement among the secret books of the Lamaists of Tibet, as well as a tradition among the Âryans, that Gautama BUDDHA had two doctrines: one for the masses and His lay disciples, the other for His “elect,” the Arhats. His policy and after Him that of His Arhats was, it appears, to refuse no one admission into the ranks of candidates for Arhatship, but never to divulge the final mysteries except to those who had proved themselves, during long years of probation, to be worthy of Initiation. These once accepted were consecrated and initiated without distinction of race, caste or wealth, as in the case of His western successor. It is the Arhats who have set forth and allowed this tradition to take root in the people’s mind, and it is the basis, also, of the later dogma of Lamaic reincarnation or the succession of human Buddhas.

The little that can be said here upon the subject may or may not help to guide the psychic student in the right direction. It being left to the option and responsibility of the writer to tell the facts as she personally understood them, the blame for possible misconceptions created must fall only upon her. She has been taught the doctrine, but it was left to her sole intuition—as it is now left to the sagacity of the reader—to group the mysterious and perplexing facts together. The incomplete statements herein given are fragments of what is contained in certain secret volumes, but it is not lawful to divulge the details.

The esoteric version of the mystery given in the secret volumes may be told very briefly. The Buddhists have always stoutly denied that their Buddha was, as alleged by the Brâhmans, an Avatâra of Vishnu in the same sense as a man is an incarnation of his Karmic ancestor. They deny it partly, perhaps, because the esoteric meaning of the term “Mahâ Vishnu” is not known to them in its full, impersonal, and general meaning. There is a mysterious Principle in Nature called “Mahâ Vishnu,” which is not the God of that name, but a principle which contains Bîja, the seed of Avatârism or, in other words, is the potency and cause of such divine incarnations. All the World‐Saviours, the Bodhisattvas and the Avatâras, are the trees of salvation grown out from the one seed, the Bîja or “Mahâ Vishnu.” Whether it be called Âdi‐Buddha (Primeval Wisdom) or Mahâ Vishnu, it is all the same. Understood esoterically, Vishnu is both Saguna and Nirguna (with and without attributes). In the first aspect, Vishnu is the object of exoteric worship and devotion; in the second, as Nirguna, he is the culmination of the totality of spiritual wisdom in the Universe—Nirvâna,(647) in short—and has as worshippers all philosophical minds. In this esoteric sense the Lord BUDDHA was an incarnation of Mahâ Vishnu.

This is from the philosophical and purely spiritual standpoint. From the plane of illusion, however, as one would say, or from the terrestrial standpoint, those initiated know that He was a direct incarnation of one of the primeval “Seven Sons of Light” who are to be found in every Theogony—the Dhyân Chohans whose mission it is, from one eternity (æon) to the other, to watch over the spiritual welfare of the regions under their care. This has been already enunciated in Esoteric Buddhism.

One of the greatest mysteries of speculative and philosophical Mysticism—and it is one of the mysteries now to be disclosed—is the modus operandi in the degrees of such hypostatic transferences. As a matter of course, divine as well as human incarnations must remain a closed book to the theologian as much as to the physiologist, unless the esoteric teachings be accepted and become the religion of the world. This teaching may never be fully explained to an unprepared public; but one thing is certain and may be said now: that between the dogma of a newly‐created soul for each new birth, and the physiological assumption of a temporary animal soul, there lies the vast region of Occult teaching(648) with its logical and reasonable demonstrations, the links of which may all be traced in logical and philosophical sequence in nature.

This “Mystery” is found, for him who understands its right meaning, in the dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna, in the Bhagavad Gita, chapter iv. Says the Avatâra:

Many births of mine have passed, as also of yours, O Arjuna! All those I know, but you do not know yours, O harasser of your enemies.

Although I am unborn, with exhaustless Âtmâ, and am the Lord of all that is; yet, taking up the domination of my nature I am born by the power of illusion.(649)

Whenever, O son of Bhârata, there is decline of Dharma [the right law] and the rise of Adharma [the opposite of Dharma] there I manifest myself.

For the salvation of the good and the destruction of wickedness, for the establishment of the law, I am born in every yuga.

Whoever comprehends truly my divine birth and action, he, O Arjuna, having abandoned the body does not receive re‐birth; he comes to me.

Thus, all the Avatâras are one and the same: the Sons of their “Father,” in a direct descent and line, the “Father,” or one of the seven Flames becoming, for the time being, the Son, and these two being one—in Eternity. What is the Father? Is it the absolute Cause of all?—the fathomless Eternal? No; most decidedly. It is Kâranâtmâ, the “Causal Soul” which, in its general sense, is called by the Hindus Îshvara, the Lord, and by Christians, “God,” the One and Only. From the standpoint of unity it is so; but then the lowest of the Elementals could equally be viewed in such case as the “One and Only.” Each human being has, moreover, his own divine Spirit or personal God. That divine Entity or Flame from which Buddhi emanates stands in the same relation to man, though on a lower plane, as the Dhyâni‐Buddha to his human Buddha. Hence monotheism and polytheism are not irreconcilable; they exist in Nature.

Truly, “for the salvation of the good and the destruction of wickedness,” the personalities known as Gautama, Shankara, Jesus and a few others were born each in his age, as declared—“I am born in every Yuga”—and they were all born through the same Power.

There is a great mystery in such incarnations and they are outside and beyond the cycle of general re‐births. Rebirths may be divided into three classes: the divine incarnations called Avatâras; those of Adepts who give up Nirvâna for the sake of helping on humanity—the Nirmânakâyas; and the natural succession of rebirths for all—the common law. The Avatâra is an appearance, one which may be termed a special illusion within the natural illusion that reigns on the planes under the sway of that power, Mâyâ; the Adept is re‐born consciously, at his will and pleasure;(650) the units of the common herd unconsciously follow the great law of dual evolution.

What is an Avatâra? for the term before being used ought to be well understood. It is a descent of the manifested Deity—whether under the specific name of Shiva, Vishnu, or Âdi‐Buddha—into an illusive form of individuality, an appearance which to men on this illusive plane is objective, but is not so in sober fact. That illusive form, having neither past nor future, because it had neither previous incarnation nor will have subsequent rebirths, has naught to do with Karma, which has therefore no hold on it.

Gautama BUDDHA was born an Avatâra in one sense. But this, in view of unavoidable objections on dogmatic grounds, necessitates explanation. There is a great difference between an Avatâra and a Jîvanmukta: one, as already stated, is an illusive appearance, Karma‐less, and having never before incarnated; and the other, the Jîvanmukta, is one who obtains Nirvâna by his individual merits. To this expression again an uncompromising, philosophical Vedântin would object. He might say that as the condition of the Avatâra and the Jîvanmukta are one and the same state, no amount of personal merit, in howsoever many incarnations, can lead its possessor to Nirvâna. Nirvâna, he would say, is actionless; how can, then, any action lead to it? It is neither a result nor a cause, but an ever‐present, eternal Is, as Nâgasena defined it. Hence it can have no relation to, or concern with, action, merit, or demerit, since these are subject to Karma. All this is very true, but still to our mind there is an important difference between the two. An Avatâra is; a Jîvanmukta becomes one. If the state of the two is identical, not so are the causes which lead to it. An Avatâra is a descent of a God into an illusive form; a Jîvanmukta, who may have passed through numberless incarnations and may have accumulated merit in them, certainly does not become a Nirvânî because of that merit, but only because of the Karma generated by it, which leads and guides him in the direction of the Guru who will initiate him into the mystery of Nirvâna and who alone can help him to reach this abode.

The Shâstras say that from our works alone we obtain Moksha, and if we take no pains there will be no gain and we shall be neither assisted nor benefited by Deity [the Mahâ‐Guru]. Therefore it is maintained that Gautama, though an Avatâra in one sense, is a true human Jîvanmukta, owing his position to his personal merit, and thus more than an Avatâra. It was his personal merit that enabled him to achieve Nirvâna.

Of the voluntary and conscious incarnations of Adepts there are two types—those of Nirmânakâyas, and those undertaken by the probationary chelâs who are on their trial.

The greatest, as the most puzzling mystery of the first type lies in the fact, that such re‐birth in a human body of the personal Ego of some particular Adept—when it has been dwelling in the Mâyâvi or the Kâma Rûpa, and remaining in the Kâma Loka—may happen even when his “Higher Principles” are in the state of Nirvâna.(651) Let it be understood that the above expressions are used for popular purposes, and therefore that what is written does not deal with this deep and mysterious question from the highest plane, that of absolute spirituality, nor again from the highest philosophical point of view, comprehensible but to the very few. It must not be supposed that anything can go into Nirvâna which is not eternally there; but human intellect in conceiving the Absolute must put It as the highest term in an indefinite series. If this be borne in mind a great deal of misconception will be avoided. The content of this spiritual evolution is the material on various planes with which the Nirvânî was in contact prior to his attainment of Nirvâna. The plane on which this is true, being in the series of illusive planes, is undoubtedly not the highest. Those who search for that must go to the right source of study, the teachings of the Upanishads, and must go in the right spirit. Here we attempt only to indicate the direction in which the search is to be made, and in showing a few of the mysterious Occult possibilities we do not bring our readers actually to the goal. The ultimate truth can be communicated only from Guru to initiated pupil.

Having said so much, the statement still will and must appear incomprehensible, if not absurd, to many. Firstly, to all those who are unfamiliar with the doctrine of the manifold nature and various aspects of the human Monad; and secondly to those who view the septenary division of the human entity from a too materialistic standpoint. Yet the intuitional Occultist, who has studied thoroughly the mysteries of Nirvâna—who knows it to be identical with Parabrahman, and hence unchangeable, eternal and no Thing but the Absolute All—will seize the possibility of the fact. They know that while a Dharmakâya—a Nirvânî “without remains,” as our Orientalists have translated it, being absorbed into that Nothingness, which is the one real, because Absolute, Consciousness—cannot be said to return to incarnation on Earth, the Nirvânî being no longer a he, a she, or even an it, the Nirmânakâya—or he who has obtained Nirvâna “with remains,” i.e., who is clothed in a subtle body, which makes him impervious to all outward impressions and to every mental feeling, and in whom the notion of his Ego has not entirely ceased—can do so. Again, every Eastern Occultist is aware of the fact that there are two kinds of Nirmânakâyas—the natural, and the assumed; that the former is the name or epithet given to the condition of a high ascetic, or Initiate, who has reached a stage of bliss second only to Nirvâna; while the latter means the self‐sacrifice of one who voluntarily gives up the absolute Nirvâna, in order to help humanity and be still doing it good, or, in other words, to save his fellow‐creatures by guiding them. It may be objected that the Dharmakâya, being a Nirvânî or Jîvanmukta, can have no “remains” left behind him after death, for having attained that state from which no further incarnations are possible, there is no need for him of a subtle body, or of the individual Ego that reincarnates from one birth to another, and that therefore the latter disappears of logical necessity; to this it is answered: it is so for all exoteric purposes and as a general law. But the case with which we are dealing is an exceptional one, and its realization lies within the Occult powers of the high Initiate, who, before entering into the state of Nirvâna, can cause his “remains” (sometimes, though not very well, called his Mâyâvi Rûpa), to remain behind,(652) whether he is to become a Nirvânî, or to find himself in a lower state of bliss.

Next, there are cases—rare, yet more frequent than one would be disposed to expect—which are the voluntary and conscious reincarnations of Adepts(653) on their trial. Every man has an Inner, a “Higher Self,” and also an Astral Body. But few are those who, outside the higher degrees of Adeptship, can guide the latter, or any of the principles that animate it, when once death has closed their short terrestrial life. Yet such guidance, or their transference from the dead to a living body, is not only possible, but is of frequent occurrence, according to Occult and Kabalistic teachings. The degrees of such power of course vary greatly. To mention but three: the lowest of these degrees would allow an Adept, who has been greatly trammelled during life in his study and in the use of his powers, to choose after death another body in which he could go on with his interrupted studies, though ordinarily he would lose in it every remembrance of his previous incarnation. The next degree permits him, in addition to this, to transfer the memory of his past life to his new body; while the highest has hardly any limits in the exercise of that wonderful faculty.

As an instance of an Adept who enjoyed the first mentioned power some mediæval Kabalists cite a well‐known personage of the fifteenth century—Cardinal de Cusa; Karma, due to his wonderful devotion to Esoteric study and the Kabalah, led the suffering Adept to seek intellectual recuperation and rest from ecclesiastical tyranny in the body of Copernicus. Se non e vero e ben trovato; and the perusal of the lives of the two men might easily lead a believer in such powers to a ready acceptance of the alleged fact. The reader having at his command the means to do so is asked to turn to the formidable folio in Latin of the fifteenth century, called De Docta Ignorantia, written by the Cardinal de Cusa, in which all the theories and hypotheses—all the ideas—of Copernicus are found as the key‐notes to the discoveries of the great astronomer.(654) Who was this extraordinarily learned Cardinal? The son of a poor boatman, owing all his career, his Cardinal’s hat, and the reverential awe rather than friendship of the Popes Eugenius IV., Nicholas V., and Pius II., to the extraordinary learning which seemed innate in him, since he had studied nowhere till comparatively late in life. De Cusa died in 1473; moreover, his best works were written before he was forced to enter orders—to escape persecution. Nor did the Adept escape it.

In the voluminous work of the Cardinal above‐quoted is found a very suggestive sentence, the authorship of which has been variously attributed to Pascal, to Cusa himself, and to the Zohar, and which belongs by right to the Books of Hermes:

The world is an infinite sphere, whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

This is changed by some into: “The centre being nowhere, and the circumference everywhere,” a rather heretical idea for a Cardinal, though perfectly orthodox from a Kabalistic standpoint.

The theory of rebirth must be set forth by Occultists, and then applied to special cases. The right comprehension of this psychic fact is based upon a correct view of that group of celestial Beings who are universally called the seven Primeval Gods or Angels—our Dhyân Chohans—the “Seven Primeval Rays” or Powers, adopted later on by the Christian Religion as the “Seven Angels of the Presence.” Arûpa, formless, at the upper rung of the ladder of Being, materializing more and more as they descend in the scale of objectivity and form, ending in the grossest and most imperfect of the Hierarchy, man—it is the former purely spiritual group that is pointed out to us, in our Occult teaching, as the nursery and fountain‐ head of human beings. Therein germinates that consciousness which is the earliest manifestation from causal Consciousness—the Alpha and the Omega of divine being and life for ever. And as it proceeds downward through every phase of existence descending through man, through animal and plant, it ends its descent only in the mineral. It is represented by the double triangle—the most mysterious and the most suggestive of all mystic signs, for it is a double glyph, embracing spiritual and physical consciousness and life, the former triangle running upwards, and the lower downwards, both interlaced, and showing the various planes of the twice‐seven modes of consciousness, the fourteen spheres of existence, the Lokas of the Brâhmans.

The reader may now be able to obtain a clearer comprehension of the whole thing. He will also see what is meant by the “Watchers,” there being one placed as the Guardian or Regent over each of the seven divisions or regions of the earth, according to old traditions, as there is one to watch over and guide every one of the fourteen worlds or Lokas.(655) But it is not with any of these that we are at present concerned, but with the “Seven Breaths,” so‐called, that furnish man with his immortal Monad in his cyclic pilgrimage.

The Commentary on the Book of Dzyan says:

_Descending on his region first as Lord of Glory, the Flame (or Breath), having called into conscious being the highest of the Emanations of that special region, ascends from it again to Its primeval seat, whence It watches __ over and guides Its countless Beams (Monads). It chooses as Its Avatâras only those who had the Seven Virtues in them_(656)_ in their previous incarnation. As for the rest, It overshadows each with one of Its countless beams.... Yet even the __“__beam__”__ is a part of the Lord of Lords._(657)

The septenary principle in man—who can be regarded as dual only as concerns psychic manifestation on this gross earthly plane—was known to all antiquity, and may be found in every ancient Scripture. The Egyptians knew and taught it, and their division of principles is in every point a counterpart of the Âryan Secret Teaching. It is thus given in Isis Unveiled:

In the Egyptian notions, as in those of all other faiths founded on philosophy, man was not merely ... a union of soul and body: he was a trinity when Spirit was added to it. Besides, that doctrine made him consist of Kha (body), Khaba (astral form or shadow), Ka (animal soul or life‐principle), Ba (the higher soul), and Akh (terrestrial intelligence). They had also a sixth principle, named Sah (or mummy), but the functions of this one commenced after the death of the body.(658)

The seventh principle being of course the highest, uncreated Spirit was generically called Osiris, therefore every deceased person became Osirified—or an Osiris—after death.

But in addition to reiterating the old ever‐present fact of reincarnation and Karma—not as taught by the Spiritists, but as by the most Ancient Science in the world—Occultists must teach cyclic and evolutionary reincarnation: that kind of re‐birth, mysterious and still incomprehensible to many who are ignorant of the world’s history, which was cautiously mentioned in Isis Unveiled. A general re‐birth for every individual with interlude of Kâma Loka and Devachan, and a cyclic conscious reincarnation with a grand and divine object for the few. Those great characters who tower like giants in the history of mankind like Siddârtha BUDDHA and Jesus in the realm of the spiritual, and Alexander the Macedonian and Napoleon the Great in the realm of physical conquests are but the reflected images of human types which had existed—not ten thousand years before, as cautiously put forward in Isis Unveiled, but for millions of consecutive years from the beginning of the Manvantara. For—with the exception of real Avatâras, as above explained—they are the same unbroken Rays (Monads), each respectively of its own special Parent‐ Flame—called Devas, Dhyân Chohans, or Dhyâni‐Buddhas, or again, Planetary Angels, etc.—shining in æonic eternity as their prototypes. It is in their image that some men are born, and when some specific humanitarian object is in view, the latter are hypostatically animated by their divine prototypes reproduced again and again by the mysterious Powers that control and guide the destinies of our world.

No more could be said at the time when Isis Unveiled was written; hence the statement was limited to the single remark that

There is no prominent character in all the annals of sacred or profane history whose prototype we cannot find in the half fictitious and half real traditions of bygone religions and mythologies. As the star, glimmering at an immeasurable distance above our heads, in the boundless immensity of the sky, reflects itself in the smooth waters of a lake, so does the imagery of men of the antediluvian ages reflect itself in the periods we can embrace in a historical retrospect.

But now that so many publications have been brought out, stating much of the doctrine, and several of them giving many an erroneous view, this vague allusion may be amplified and explained. Not only does this statement apply to prominent characters in history in general, but also to men of genius, to every remarkable man of the age, who soars beyond the common herd with some abnormally developed special capacity in him, leading to the progress and good of mankind. Each is a reincarnation of an individuality that has gone before him with capacities in the same line, bringing thus as a dowry to his new form that strong and easily re‐ awakened capacity or quality which had been fully developed in him in his preceding birth. Very often they are ordinary mortals, the Egos of natural men in the course of their cyclic development.

But it is with “special cases” that we are now concerned. Let us suppose that a person during his cycle of incarnations is thus selected for special purposes—the vessel being sufficiently clean—by his personal God, the Fountain‐head (on the plane of the manifested) of his Monad, who thus becomes his in‐dweller. That God, his own prototype or “Father in Heaven,” is, in one sense, not only the image in which he, the spiritual man, is made, but in the case we are considering, it is that spiritual, individual Ego himself. This is a case of permanent, life‐long Theophania. Let us bear in mind that this is neither Avatârism, as it is understood in Brâhmanical Philosophy, nor is the man thus selected a Jîvanmukta or Nirvânî, but that it is a wholly exceptional case in the realm of Mysticism. The man may or may not have been an Adept in his previous lives; he is so far, and simply, an extremely pure and spiritual individual—or one who was all that in his preceding birth, if the vessel thus selected is that of a newly‐born infant. In this case, after the physical translation of such a saint or Bodhisattva, his astral principles cannot be subjected to a natural dissolution like those of any common mortal. They remain in our sphere and within human attraction and reach; and thus it is that not only a Buddha, a Shankarâchârya, or a Jesus can be said to animate several persons at one and the same time, but even the principles of a high Adept may be animating the outward tabernacles of common mortals.

A certain Ray (principle) from Sanat Kumâra spiritualized (animated) Pradyumna, the son of Krishna during the great Mahâbhârata period, while at the same time, he, Sanat Kumâra, gave spiritual instruction to King Dhritarâshtra. Moreover, it is to be remembered that Sanat‐Kumâra is “an eternal youth of sixteen,” dwelling in Jana Loka, his own sphere or spiritual state.

Even in ordinary mediumistic life, so‐called, it is pretty well ascertained that while the body is acting—even though only mechanically—or resting in one place, its astral double may be appearing and acting independently in another, and very often distant place. This is quite a common occurrence in mystic life and history, and if this be so with ecstatics, Seers and Mystics of every description, why cannot the same thing happen on a higher and more spiritually developed plane of existence? Admit the possibility on the lower psychic plane, then why not on a higher plane? In the cases of higher Adeptship, when the body is entirely at the command of the Inner Man, when the Spiritual Ego is completely reünited with its seventh principle even during the life‐time of the personality, and the Astral Man or personal Ego has become so purified that he has gradually assimilated all the qualities and attributes of the middle nature (Buddhi and Manas in their terrestrial aspect) that personal Ego substitutes itself, so to say, for the spiritual Higher Self, and is thenceforth capable of living an independent life on earth; when corporeal death takes place the following mysterious event often happens. As a Dharmakâya, a Nirvânî “without remains” entirely free from terrestrial admixture, the Spiritual Ego cannot return to reincarnate on earth. But in such cases, it is affirmed, the personal Ego of even a Dharmakâya can remain in our sphere as a whole, and return to incarnation on earth if need be. For now it can no longer be subject, like the astral remains of any ordinary man, to gradual dissolution in the Kâma Loka (the limbus or purgatory of the Roman Catholic, and the “Summer‐land” of the Spiritualist); it cannot die a second death, as such disintegration is called by Proclus.(659) It has become too holy and pure, no longer by reflected but its own natural light and spirituality, either to sleep in the unconscious slumber of a lower Nirvânic state, or to be dissolved like any ordinary astral shell and disappear in its entirety.

But in that condition known as the Nirmânakâya [the Nirvânî “with remains,”] he can still help humanity.

“Let me suffer and bear the sins of all [be reincarnated unto new misery] but let the world be saved!” was said by Gautama BUDDHA: an exclamation the real meaning of which is little understood now by his followers. “If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?”(660) asks the astral Jesus of Peter. “Till I come” means “till I am reincarnated again” in a physical body. Yet the Christ of the old crucified body could truly say: “I am with my Father and one with Him,” which did not prevent the astral from taking a form again nor John from tarrying indeed till his Master had come; nor hinder John from failing to recognize him when he did come, or from then opposing him. But in the Church that remark generated the absurd idea of the millennium or chiliasm, in its physical sense.

Since then the “Man of Sorrows” has returned perchance, more than once, unknown to, and undiscovered by, his blind followers. Since then also, this grand “Son of God” has been incessantly and most cruelly crucified daily and hourly by the Churches founded in his name. But the Apostles, only half‐initiated, failed to tarry for their Master, and not recognizing him, spurned him every time he returned.(661)

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SECTION XLII. THE SEVEN PRINCIPLES

The “Mystery of Buddha” is that of several other Adepts—perhaps of many. The whole trouble is to understand correctly that other mystery: that of the real fact, so abstruse and transcendental at first sight, about the “Seven Principles” in man, the reflections in man of the seven powers in Nature, physically, and of the seven Hierarchies of Being, intellectually and spiritually. Whether a man—material, ethereal, and spiritual—is for the clearer comprehension of his (broadly‐speaking) triple nature, divided into groups according to one or another system, the foundation and the apex of that division will be always the same. There being only three Upâdhis (bases) in man, any number of Koshas (sheaths) and their aspects may be built on these without destroying the harmony of the whole. Thus, while the Esoteric System accepts the septenary division, the Vedântic classification gives five Koshas, and the Târaka Râja Yoga simplifies them into four—the three Upâdhis synthesized by the highest principle, Âtmâ.

That which has just been stated will, of course, suggest the question: “How can a spiritual (or semi‐spiritual) personality lead a triple or even a dual life, shifting respective ‘Higher Selves’ ad libitum, and be still the one eternal Monad in the infinity of a Manvantara?” The answer to this is easy for the true Occultist, while for the uninitiated profane it must appear absurd. The “Seven Principles” are, of course, the manifestation of one indivisible Spirit, but only at the end of the Manvantara, and when they come to be re‐united on the plane of the One Reality does the unity appear; during the “Pilgrim’s” journey the reflections of that indivisible One Flame, the aspects of the one eternal Spirit, have each the power of action on one of the manifested planes of existence—the gradual differentiations from the one unmanifested plane—on that plane namely to which it properly belongs. Our earth affording every Mâyâvic condition, it follows that the purified Egotistical Principle, the astral and personal Self of an Adept, though forming in reality one integral whole with its Highest Self (Âtmâ and Buddhi) may, nevertheless, for purposes of universal mercy and benevolence, so separate itself from its divine Monad as to lead on this plane of illusion and temporary being a distinct independent conscious life of its own under a borrowed illusive shape, thus serving at one and the same time a double purpose: the exhaustion of its own individual Karma, and the saving of millions of human beings less favoured than itself from the effects of mental blindness. If asked: “When the change described as the passage of a Buddha or a Jîvanmukta into Nirvâna takes place, where does the original consciousness which animated the body continue to reside—in the Nirvânî or in the subsequent reincarnations of the latter’s ‘remains’ (the Nirmânakâya)?” the answer is that imprisoned consciousness may be a “certain knowledge from observation and experience,” as Gibbon puts it, but disembodied consciousness is not an effect, but a cause. It is a part of the whole, or rather a Ray on the graduated scale of its manifested activity, of the one all‐pervading, limitless Flame, the reflections of which alone can differentiate; and, as such, consciousness is ubiquitous, and can be neither localized nor centred on or in any particular subject, nor can it be limited. Its effects alone pertain to the region of matter, for thought is an energy that affects matter in various ways, but consciousness per se, as understood and explained by Occult philosophy, is the highest quality of the sentient spiritual principle in us, the Divine Soul (or Buddhi) and our Higher Ego, and does not belong to the plane of materiality. After the death of the physical man, if he be an Initiate, it becomes transformed from a human quality into the independent principle itself; the conscious Ego becoming Consciousness per se without any Ego, in the sense that the latter can no longer be limited or conditioned by the senses, or even by space or time. Therefore it is capable, without separating itself from or abandoning its possessor, Buddhi, of reflecting itself at the same time in its astral man that was, without being under any necessity for localizing itself. This is shown at a far lower stage in our dreams. For if consciousness can display activity during our visions, and while the body and its material brain are fast asleep—and if even during those visions it is all but ubiquitous—how much greater must be its power when entirely free from, and having no more connection with, our physical brain.

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SECTION XLIII. THE MYSTERY OF BUDDHA

Now the mystery of Buddha lies in this: Gautama, an incarnation of pure Wisdom, had yet to learn in His human body and to be initiated into the world’s secrets like any other mortal, until the day when He emerged from His secret recess in the Himâlayas and preached for the first time in the grove of Benares. The same with Jesus: from the age of twelve to thirty years, when He is found preaching the Sermon on the Mount, nothing is positively said or known of Him. Gautama had sworn inviolable secrecy as to the Esoteric Doctrines imparted to Him. In His immense pity for the ignorance—and as its consequence the sufferings—of mankind, desirous though He was to keep inviolate His sacred vows, He failed to keep within the prescribed limits. While constructing His Esoteric Philosophy (the “Eye‐Doctrine”) on the foundations of eternal Truth, He failed to conceal certain dogmas, and trespassing beyond the lawful lines, caused those dogmas to be misunderstood. In His anxiety to make away with the false Gods, He revealed in the “Seven Paths to Nirvâna” some of the mysteries of the Seven Lights of the Arûpa (formless) World. A little of the truth is often worse than no truth at all.

Truth and fiction are like oil and water: they will never mix.

His new doctrine, which represented the outward dead body of the Esoteric Teaching without its vivifying Soul, had disastrous effects: it was never correctly understood, and the doctrine itself was rejected by the Southern Buddhists. Immense philanthropy, a boundless love and charity for all creatures, were at the bottom of His unintentional mistake; but Karma little heeds intentions, whether good or bad, if they remain fruitless. If the “Good Law” as preached resulted in the most sublime code of ethics and the unparalleled philosophy of things external in the visible Kosmos, it biassed and misguided immature minds into believing there was nothing more under the outward mantle of the system, and its dead‐letter only was accepted. Moreover, the new teaching unsettled many great minds which had previously followed the orthodox Brâhmanical lead.

Thus, fifty odd years after his death “the great Teacher”(662) having refused full Dharmakâya and Nirvâna, was pleased, for purposes of Karma and philanthropy, to be reborn. For Him death had been no death, but as expressed in the “Elixir of Life,”(663) He changed

A sudden plunge into darkness to a transition into a brighter light.

The shock of death was broken, and like many other Adepts, He threw off the mortal coil and left it to be burnt, and its ashes to serve as relics, and began interplanetary life, clothed in His subtle body. He was reborn as Shankara, the greatest Vedântic teacher of India, whose philosophy—based as it is entirely on the fundamental axioms of the eternal Revelation, the Shruti, or the primitive Wisdom‐Religion, as Buddha from a different point of view had before based His—finds itself in the middle‐ground between the too exuberantly veiled metaphysics of the orthodox Brâhmans and those of Gautama, which, stripped in their exoteric garb of every soul‐vivifying hope, transcendental aspiration and symbol, appear in their cold wisdom like crystalline icicles, the skeletons of the primeval truths of Esoteric Philosophy.

Was Shankarâchârya Gautama the Buddha, then, under a new personal form? It may perhaps only puzzle the reader the more if he be told that there was the “astral” Gautama inside the outward Shankara, whose higher principle, or Âtman, was, nevertheless, his own divine prototype—the “Son of Light,” indeed—the heavenly, mind‐born son of Aditi.

This fact is again based on that mysterious transference of the divine ex‐ personality merged in the impersonal Individuality—now in its full trinitarian form of the Monad as Âtmâ‐Buddhi‐Manas—to a new body, whether visible or subjective. In the first case it is a Manushya‐Buddha; in the second it is a Nirmânakâya. The Buddha is in Nirvâna, it is said, though this once mortal vehicle—the subtle body—of Gautama is still present among the Initiates; nor will it leave the realm of conscious Being so long as suffering mankind needs its divine help—not to the end of this Root Race, at any rate. From time to time He, the “astral” Gautama, associates Himself, in some most mysterious—to us quite incomprehensible—manner, with Avatâras and great saints, and works through them. And several such are named.

Thus it is averred that Gautama Buddha was reincarnated in Shankarâchârya—that, as is said in Esoteric Buddhism:

Shankarâchârya simply was Buddha in all respects in a new body.(664)

While the expression in its mystic sense is true, the way of putting it may be misleading until explained. Shankara was a Buddha, most assuredly, but he never was a reincarnation of the Buddha, though Gautama’s “Astral” Ego—or rather his Bodhisattva—may have been associated in some mysterious way with Shankarâchârya. Yes, it was perhaps the Ego, Gautama, under a new and better adapted casket—that of a Brâhman of Southern India. But the Âtman, the Higher Self that overshadowed both, was distinct from the Higher Self of the translated Buddha, which was now in Its own sphere in Kosmos.

Shankara was an Avatâra in the full sense of the term. According to Sayanâchârya, the great commentator on the Vedas, he is to be held as an Avatâra, or direct incarnation of Shiva—the Logos, the Seventh Principle in Nature—Himself. In the Secret Doctrine Shri Shankarâchârya is regarded as the abode—for the thirty‐two years of his mortal life—of a Flame, the highest of the manifested Spiritual Beings, one of the Primordial Seven Rays.

And now what is meant by a “Bodhisattva”? Buddhists of the Mahâyâna mystic system teach that each BUDDHA manifests Himself (hypostatically or otherwise) simultaneously in three worlds of Being, namely, in the world of Kâma (concupiscence or desire—the sensuous universe or our earth) in the shape of a man; in the world of Rûpa (form, yet supersensuous) as a Bodhisattva; and in the highest Spiritual World (that of purely incorporeal existences) as a Dhyâni‐Buddha. The latter prevails eternally in space and time, i.e., from one Mahâ‐Kalpa to the other—the synthetic culmination of the three being Âdi‐Buddha,(665) the Wisdom‐Principle, which is Absolute, and therefore out of space and time. Their inter‐ relation is the following: The Dhyâni‐Buddha, when the world needs a human Buddha, “creates” through the power of Dhyâna (meditation, omnipotent devotion), a mind‐born son—a Bodhisattva—whose mission it is after the physical death of his human, or Manushya‐Buddha, to continue his work on earth till the appearance of the subsequent Buddha. The Esoteric meaning of this teaching is clear. In the case of a simple mortal, the principles in him are only the more or less bright reflections of the seven cosmic, and the seven celestial Principles, the Hierarchy of supersensual Beings. In the case of a Buddha, they are almost the principles in esse themselves. The Bodhisattva replaces in him the Kârana Sharira, the Ego principle, and the rest correspondingly; and it is in this way that Esoteric Philosophy explains the meaning of the sentence that “by virtue of Dhyâna [or abstract meditation] the Dhyâni‐Buddha [the Buddha’s Spirit or Monad] creates a Bodhisattva,” or the astrally clothed Ego within the Manushya‐Buddha. Thus, while the Buddha merges back into Nirvâna whence it proceeded, the Bodhisattva remains behind to continue the Buddha’s work upon earth. It is then this Bodhisattva that may have afforded the lower principles in the apparitional body of Shankarâchârya, the Avatâra.

Now to say that Buddha, after having reached Nirvâna, returned thence to reïncarnate in a new body, would be uttering a heresy from the Brâhmanical, as well as from the Buddhistic standpoint. Even in the Mahâyâna exoteric School in the teaching as to the three “Buddhic” bodies,(666) it is said of the Dharmakâya—the ideal formless Being—that once it is taken, the Buddha in it abandons the world of sensuous perceptions for ever, and has not, nor can he have, any more connection with it. To say, as the Esoteric or Mystic School teaches, that though Buddha is in Nirvâna he has left behind him the Nirmânakâya (the Bodhisattva) to work after him, is quite orthodox and in accordance with both the Esoteric Mahâyâna and the Prasanga Mâdhyâmika Schools, the latter an anti‐esoteric and most rationalistic system. For in the Kâla Chakra Commentary it is shown that there is: (1) Âdi‐Buddha, eternal and conditionless; then (2) come Sambhogakâya‐Buddhas, or Dhyâni‐Buddhas, existing from (æonic) eternity and never disappearing—the Causal Buddhas so to say; and (3) the Manushya‐Bodhisattvas. The relation between them is determined by the definition given. Âdi‐Buddha is Vajradhara, and the Dhyâni‐Buddhas are Vajrasattva; yet though these two are different Beings on their respective planes, They are identical in fact, one acting through the other, as a Dhyâni through a human Buddha. One is “Endless Intelligence;” the other only “Supreme Intelligence.” It is said of Phra Bodhisattva—who was subsequently on earth Buddha Gautama:

Having fulfilled all the conditions for the immediate attainment of perfect Buddhaship, the Holy One preferred, from unlimited charity towards living beings, once more to reincarnate for the benefit of man.

The Nirvâna of the Buddhists is only the threshold of Paranirvâna, according to the Esoteric Teaching: while with the Brâhmans, it is the summum bonum, that final state from which there is no more return—not till the next Mahâ‐Kalpa, at all events. And even this last view will be opposed by some too orthodox and dogmatic Philosophers who will not accept the Esoteric Doctrine. With them Nirvâna is absolute nothingness, in which there is nothing and no one: only an unconditioned All. To understand the full characteristics of that Abstract Principle one must sense it intuitionally and comprehend fully the “one permanent condition in the Universe,” which the Hindûs define so truly as

The state of perfect unconsciousness—bare Chidâkâsham (field of consciousness) in fact,

however paradoxical it may seem to the profane reader.(667)

Shankarâchârya was reputed to be an Avatâra, an assertion the writer implicitly believes in, but which other people are, of course, at liberty to reject. And as such he took the body of a southern Indian, newly‐born Brâhman baby; that body, for reasons as important as they are mysterious to us, is said to have been animated by Gautama’s astral personal remains. This divine Non‐Ego chose as its own Upâdhi (physical basis), the ethereal, human Ego of a great Sage in this world of forms, as the fittest vehicle for Spirit to descend into.

Said Shankarâchârya:

Parabrahman is Kartâ [Purusha], as there is no other Adhishtâthâ,(668) and Parabrahman is Prakriti, there being no other substance.(669)

Now what is true of the Macrocosmical is also true of the Microcosmical plane. It is therefore nearer the truth to say—when once we accept such a possibility—that the “astral” Gautama, or the Nirmânakâya, was the Upâdhi of Shankarâchârya’s spirit, rather than that the latter was a reincarnation of the former.

When a Shankarâchârya has to be born, naturally every one of the principles in the manifested mortal man must be the purest and finest that exist on earth. Consequently those principles that were once attached to Gautama, who was the direct great predecessor of Shankara, were naturally attracted to him, the economy of Nature forbidding the re‐evolution of similar principles from the crude state. But it must be remembered that the higher ethereal principles are not, like the lower more material ones, visible sometimes to man (as astral bodies), and they have to be regarded in the light of separate or independent Powers or Gods, rather than as material objects. Hence the right way of representing the truth would be to say that the various principles, the Bodhisattva, of Gautama Buddha, which did not go to Nirvâna, re‐united to form the middle principles of Shankarâchârya, the earthly Entity.(670)

It is absolutely necessary to study the doctrine of the Buddhas esoterically and understand the subtle differences between the various planes of existence to be able to comprehend correctly the above. Put more clearly, Gautama, the human Buddha, who had, exoterically, Amitâbha for his Bodhisattva and Avalokiteshvara for his Dhyâni‐Buddha—the triad emanating directly from Âdi‐Buddha—assimilated these by his “Dhyâna” (meditation) and thus become a Buddha (“enlightened”). In another manner this is the case with all men; everyone of us has his Bodhisattva—the middle principle, if we hold for a moment to the trinitarian division of the septenary group—and his Dhyâni‐Buddha, or Chohan, the “Father of the Son.” Our connecting link with the higher Hierarchy of Celestial Beings lies here in a nutshell, only we are too sinful to assimilate them.

Six centuries after the translation of the human Buddha (Gautama) another Reformer, as noble and as loving, though less favoured by opportunity, arose in another part of the world, among another and a less spiritual race. There is a great similarity between the subsequent opinions of the world about the two Saviours, the Eastern and the Western. While millions became converted to the doctrines of the two Masters, the enemies of both—sectarian opponents, the most dangerous of all—tore both to shreds by insinuating maliciously‐distorted statements based on Occult truths, and therefore doubly dangerous. While of Buddha it is said by the Brâhmans that He was truly an Avatâra of Vishnu, but that He had come to tempt the Brâhmans from their faith, and was therefore the evil aspect of the God; of Jesus the Bardesanian Gnostics and others asserted that He was Nebu, the false Messiah, the destroyer of the old orthodox religion. “He is the founder of a new sect of Nazars,” said other sectarians. In Hebrew the word “Naba” means “to speak by inspiration,” (נבא, and נבו is Nebo, the God of wisdom). But Nebo is also Mercury, who is Buddha in the Hindu monogram of planets. And this is shown by the fact that the Talmudists hold that Jesus was inspired by the Genius (or Regent) of Mercury confounded by Sir William Jones with Gautama Buddha. There are many other strange points of similarity between Gautama and Jesus, which cannot be noticed here.(671)

If both the Initiates, aware of the danger of furnishing the uncultured masses with the powers acquired by ultimate knowledge, left the innermost corner of the sanctuary in profound darkness, who, acquainted with human nature, can blame either of them for this? Yet although Gautama, actuated by prudence, left the Esoteric and most dangerous portions of the Secret Knowledge untold, and lived to the ripe old age of eighty—the Esoteric Doctrine says one hundred—years, dying with the certainty of having taught its essential truths, and of having sown the seeds for the conversion of one‐third of the world, He yet perhaps revealed more than was strictly good for posterity. But Jesus, who had promised His disciples the knowledge which confers upon man the power of producing “miracles” far greater than He had ever produced Himself, died, leaving but a few faithful disciples—men only half‐way to knowledge. They had therefore to struggle with a world to which they could impart only what they but half‐ knew themselves, and—no more. In later ages the exoteric followers of both mangled the truths given out, often out of recognition. With regard to the adherents of the Western Master, the proof of this lies in the very fact that none of them can now produce the promised “miracles.” They have to choose: either it is they who have blundered, or it is their Master who must stand arraigned for an empty promise, an uncalled‐for boast.(672) Why such a difference in the destiny of the two? For the Occultist this enigma of the unequal favour of Karma or Providence is unriddled by the Secret Doctrine.

It is “not lawful” to speak of such things publicly, as St. Paul tells us. One more explanation only may be given in reference to this subject. It was said a few pages back that an Adept who thus sacrifices himself to live, giving up full Nirvâna, though he can never lose the knowledge acquired by him in previous existences, yet can never rise higher in such borrowed bodies. Why? Because he becomes simply the vehicle of a “Son of Light” from a still higher sphere, Who being Arûpa, has no personal astral body of His own fit for this world. Such “Sons of Light,” or Dhyâni‐ Buddhas, are the Dharmakâyas of preceding Manvantaras, who have closed their cycles of incarnations in the ordinary sense and who, being thus Karmaless, have long ago dropped their individual Rûpas, and have become identified with the first Principle. Hence the necessity of a sacrificial Nirmânakâya, ready to suffer for the misdeeds or mistakes of the new body in its earth‐pilgrimage, without any future reward on the plane of progression and rebirth, since there are no rebirths for him in the ordinary sense. The Higher Self, or Divine Monad, is not in such a case attached to the lower Ego; its connection is only temporary, and in most cases it acts through decrees of Karma. This is a real, genuine sacrifice, the explanation of which pertains to the highest Initiation of Gñâna (Occult Knowledge). It is closely linked, by a direct evolution of Spirit and involution of Matter, with the primeval and great Sacrifice at the foundation of the manifested Worlds, the gradual smothering and death of the spiritual in the material. The seed “is not quickened except it die.”(673) Hence in the Purusha Sûkta of the Rig Veda,(674) the mother‐ fount and source of all subsequent religions, it is stated allegorically that “the thousand‐headed Purusha” was slaughtered at the foundation of the World, that from his remains the Universe might arise. This is nothing more nor less than the foundation—the seed, truly—of the later many‐formed symbol in various religions, including Christianity, of the sacrificial lamb. For it is a play upon the words. “Aja” (Purusha), “the unborn,” or eternal Spirit, means also “lamb,” in Sanskrit. Spirit disappears—dies, metaphorically—the more it gets involved in matter, and hence the sacrifice of the “unborn,” or the “lamb.”

Why the BUDDHA chose to make this sacrifice will be plain only to those who, to the minute knowledge of His earthly life, add that of a thorough comprehension of the laws of Karma. Such occurrences, however, belong to the most exceptional cases.

As tradition goes, the Brâhmans had committed a heavy sin by persecuting Gautama BUDDHA and His teachings instead of blending and reconciling them with the tenets of pure Vaidic Brâhmanism, as was done later by Shankarâchârya. Gautama had never gone against the Vedas, only against the exoteric growth of preconceived interpretations. The Shruti—divine oral revelation, the outcome of which was the Veda—is eternal. It reached the ear of Gautama Siddartha as it had those of the Rishis who had written it down. He accepted the revelation, while rejecting the later overgrowth of Brâhmanical thought and fancy, and built His doctrines on one and the same basis of imperishable truth. As in the case of His Western successor, Gautama, the “Merciful,” the “Pure,” and the “Just,” was the first found in the Eastern Hierarchy of historical Adepts, if not in the world‐annals of divine mortals, who was moved by that generous feeling which locks the whole of mankind within one embrace, with no petty differences of race, birth, or caste. It was He who first enunciated that grand and noble principle, and He again who first put it into practice. For the sake of the poor and the reviled, the outcast and the hapless, invited by Him to the king’s festival table, He had excluded those who had hitherto sat alone in haughty seclusion and selfishness, believing that they would be defiled by the very shadow of the disinherited ones of the land—and these non‐spiritual Brâhmans turned against Him for that preference. Since then such as these have never forgiven the prince‐ beggar, the son of a king, who, forgetting His rank and station, had flung widely open the doors of the forbidden sanctuary to the pariah and the man of low estate, thus giving precedence to personal merit over hereditary rank or fortune. The sin was theirs—the cause nevertheless Himself: hence the “Merciful and the Blessed One” could not go out entirely from this world of illusion and created causes without atoning for the sin of all—therefore of these Brâhmans also. If “man afflicted by man” found safe refuge with the Tathâgata, “man afflicting man” had also his share in His self‐sacrificing, all‐embracing and forgiving love. It is stated that He desired to atone for the sin of His enemies. Then only was He willing to become a full Dharmakâya, a Jivanmukta “without remains.”

The close of Shankarâchârya’s life brings us face to face with a fresh mystery. Shankarâchârya retires to a cave in the Himâlayas, permitting none of his disciples to follow him, and disappears therein for ever from the sight of the profane. Is he dead? Tradition and popular belief answer in the negative, and some of the local Gurus, if they do not emphatically corroborate, do not deny the rumour. The truth with its mysterious details as given in the Secret Doctrine is known but to them; it can be given out fully only to the direct followers of the great Dravidian Guru, and it is for them alone to reveal of it as much as they think fit. Still it is maintained that this Adept of Adepts lives to this day in his spiritual entity as a mysterious, unseen, yet overpowering presence among the Brotherhood of Shamballa, beyond, far beyond, the snowy‐capped Himâlayas.

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SECTION XLIV. “REINCARNATIONS” OF BUDDHA

Every section in the chapter on “Dezhin Shegpa”(675) (Tathâgata) in the Commentaries represents one year of that great Philosopher’s life, in its dual aspect of public and private teacher, the two being contrasted and commented upon. It shows the Sage reaching Buddha‐hood through a long course of study, meditation, and Initiations, as any other Adept would have to do, not one rung of the ladder up to the arduous “Path of Perfection” being missed. The Bodhisattva became a Buddha and a Nirvânî through personal effort and merit, after having had to undergo all the hardships of every other neophyte—not by virtue of a divine birth, as thought by some. It was only the reaching of Nirvâna while still living in the body and on this earth that was due to His having been in previous births high on the “Path of Dzyan” (knowledge, wisdom). Mental or intellectual gifts and abstract knowledge follow an Initiate in his new birth, but he has to acquire phenomenal powers anew, passing through all the successive stages. He has to acquire Rinchen‐na‐dun (“the seven precious gifts”)(676) one after the other. During the period of meditation no worldly phenomena on the physical plane must be allowed to enter into his mind or cross his thoughts. Zhine‐Ihagthong (Sanskrit: Vipashya, religious abstract meditation) will develop in him most wonderful faculties independently of himself. The four degrees of contemplation, or Sam‐tan (Sanskrit: Dhyâna), once acquired, everything becomes easy. For, once that man has entirely got rid of the idea of individuality, merging his Self in the Universal Self, becoming, so to say, the bar of steel to which the properties inherent in the loadstone (Âdi Buddha, or Anima Mundi) are imparted, powers hitherto dormant in him are awakened, mysteries in invisible Nature are unveiled, and becoming a Thonglam‐pa (a Seer) he becomes a Dhyâni‐Buddha. Every Zung (Dhâranî, a mystic word or mantra) of the Lokottaradharma (the highest world of causes) will be known to him.

Thus, after His outward death, twenty years later, Tathâgata in His immense love and “pitiful mercy” for erring and ignorant humanity, refused Paranirvâna(677) in order that He might continue to help men.

Says a Commentary:

Having reached the Path of Deliverance [Thar‐lam] from transmigration, one cannot perform Tulpa(678) any longer, for to become a Paranirvânî is to close the circle of the Septenary Ku‐Sum.(679) He has merged his borrowed Dorjesempa [Vajrasattva] into the Universal and become one with it.

Vajradhara, also Vajrasattva (Tibetan: Dorjechang and Dorjedzin, or Dorjosampa), is the regent or President of all the Dhyân Chohans or Dhyâni Buddhas, the highest, the Supreme Buddha; personal, yet never manifested objectively; the “Supreme Conqueror,” the “Lord of all Mysteries,” the “One without Beginning or End”—in short, the Logos of Buddhism. For, as Vajrasattva, He is simply the Tsovo (Chief) of the Dhyâni Buddhas or Dhyân Chohans, and the Supreme Intelligence in the Second World; while as Vajradhara (Dorjechang), He is all that which was enumerated above. “These two are one, and yet two,” and over them is “Chang, the Supreme Unmanifested and Universal Wisdom that has no name.” As two in one He (They) is the Power that subdued and conquered Evil from the beginning, allowing it to reign only over willing subjects on earth, and having no power over those who despise and hate it. Esoterically the allegory is easily understood; exoterically Vajradhara (Vajrasattva) is the God to whom all the evil spirits swore that they would not impede the propagation of the Good Law (Buddhism), and before whom all the demons tremble. Therefore, we say this dual personage has the same rôle assigned to it in canonical and dogmatic Tibetan Buddhism as have Jehovah and the Archangel Mikael, the Metatron of the Jewish Kabalists. This is easily shown. Mikael is “the angel of the face of God,” or he who represents his Master. “My face shall go with thee” (in English, “presence”), before the Israelites, says God to Moses (Exodus, xxxiii. 14). “The angel of my presence” (Hebrew: “of my face”) (Isaiah, lxiii. 9), etc. The Roman Catholics identify Christ with Mikael, who is also his ferouer, or “face,” mystically. This is precisely the position of Vajradhara, or Vajrasattva, in Northern Buddhism. For the latter, in His Higher Self as Vajradhara (Dorjechang), is never manifested, except to the seven Dhyân Chohans, the primeval Builders. Esoterically, it is the Spirit of the “Seven” collectively, their seventh principle, or Âtman. Exoterically, any amount of fables may be found in Kâla Chakra, the most important work in the Gyut [or (D)gyu] division of the Kanjur, the division of mystic knowledge [(D)gyu]. Dorjechang (wisdom) Vajradhara, is said to live in the second Arûpa World, which connects him with Metatron, in the first world of pure Spirits, the Briatic world of the Kabalists, who call this angel El‐ Shaddai, the Omnipotent and Mighty One. Metatron is in Greek ἄγγελος (Messenger), or the Great Teacher. Mikael fights Satan, the Dragon, and conquers him and his Angels. Vajrasattva, who is one with Vajrapâni, the Subduer of the Evil Spirits, conquers Râhu, the Great Dragon who is always trying to devour the sun and moon (eclipses). “War in Heaven” in the Christian legend is based upon the bad angels having discovered the secrets (magical wisdom) of the good ones (Enoch), and the mystery of the “Tree of Life.” Let anyone read simply the exoteric accounts in the Hindu and Buddhist Pantheons—the latter version being taken from the former—and he will find both resting on the same primeval, archaic allegory from the Secret Doctrine. In the exoteric texts (Hindu and Buddhist), the Gods churn the ocean to extract from it the Water of Life—Amrita—or the Elixir of Knowledge. In both the Dragon steals some of this, and is exiled from heaven by Vishnu, or Vajradhara, or the chief God, whatever may be his name. We find the same in the Book of Enoch, and it is poetized in St. John’s Revelation. And now the allegory, with all its fanciful ornamentations, has become a dogma!

As will be found mentioned later, the Tibetan Lamaseris contain many secret and semi‐secret volumes, detailing the lives of great Sages. Many of the statements in them are purposely confused, and in others the reader becomes bewildered, unless a clue be given him, by the use of one name to cover many individuals who follow the same line of teaching. Thus there is a succession of “living Buddhas’” and the name “Buddha” is given to teacher after teacher. Schlagintweit writes:

To each human Buddha belongs a Dhyâni‐Buddha, and a Dhyâni‐ Bodhisattva, and the unlimited number of the former also involves an equally unlimited number of the latter.(680)

[But if this be so—and the exoteric and semi‐exoteric use of the name justify the statement—the reader must depend on his own intuition to distinguish between the Dhyâni Buddhas and the human Buddhas, and must not apply to the great BUDDHA of the Fifth Race all that is ascribed to “the Buddha” in books where, as said, blinds are constantly introduced.

In one of these books some strange and obscure statements are made which the writer gives, as before, entirely on her own responsibility, since a few may sense a meaning hidden under words misleading in their surface meaning.](681) It is stated that at the age of thirty‐three, Shankarâchârya, tired of his mortal body, “put it off” in the cave he had entered, and that the Bodhisattva, that served as his lower personality, was freed

With the burden of a sin upon him which he had not committed.

At the same time it is added:

At whatever age one puts off his outward body by free will, at that age will he be made to die a violent death against his will in his next rebirth.

Now, Karma could have no hold on “Mahâ Shankara” (as Shankara is called in the secret work), as he had, as Avatâra, no Ego of his own, but a Bodhisattva—a willing sacrificial victim. Neither had the latter any responsibility for the deed, whether sinful or otherwise. Therefore we do not see the point, since Karma cannot act unjustly. There is some terrible mystery involved in all this story, one that no uninitiated intellect can ever unravel. Still, there it is, suggesting the natural query, “Who, then, was punished by Karma?” and leaving it to be answered.

A few centuries later Buddha tried one more incarnation, it is said, in * * *, and again, fifty years subsequent to the death of this Adept, in one whose name is given as Tiani‐Tsang.(682) No details, no further information or explanation is given. It is simply stated that the last Buddha had to work out the remains of his Karma, which none of the Gods themselves can escape, forced as he was to bury still deeper certain mysteries half revealed by him—hence misinterpreted. The words used would stand when translated:(683)

Born fifty‐two years too early as Shramana Gautama, the son of King Zastang; then retiring fifty‐seven years too soon as Mahâ Shankara, who got tired of his outward form. This wilful act aroused and attracted King Karma, who killed the new form of * * * at thirty‐three,(684) the age of the body that was put off. [At whatever age one puts off his outward body by free will, at that age will he be made to die in his next incarnation against his will—Commentary.] He died in his next (body) at thirty‐two and a little over, and again in his next at eighty—a Mâyâ, and at one hundred, in reality. The Bodhisattva chose Tiani‐Tsang,(685) then again the Sugata became Tsong‐Kha‐pa, who became thus Dezhin‐ Shegpa [Tathâgata—“one who follows in the way and manner of his predecessors”]. The Blessed One could do good to his generation as * * * but none to posterity, and so as Tiani‐Tsaug he became incarnated only for the “remains” [of his precedent Karma, as we understand it]. The Seven Ways and the Four Truths were once more hidden out of sight. The Merciful One confined since then his attention and fatherly care to the heart of Bodyul, the nursery‐ grounds of the seeds of truth. The blessed “remains” since then have overshadowed and rested in many a holy body of human Bodhisattvas.

No further information is given, least of all are there any details or explanations to be found in the secret volume. All is darkness and mystery in it, for it is evidently written but for those who are already instructed. Several flaming red asterisks are placed instead of names, and the few facts given are abruptly broken off. The key of the riddle is left to the intuition of the disciple, unless the “direct followers” of Gautama the Buddha—“those who are to be denied by His Church for the next cycle”—and of Shankarâchârya, are pleased to add more.

The final section gives a kind of summary of the seventy sections—covering seventy‐three years of Buddha’s life(686)—from which the last paragraph is summarized as follows:

Emerging from ——, the most excellent seat of the three secrets [Sang‐Sum], the Master of incomparable mercy, after having performed on all the anchorites the rite of ——, and each of these having been cut off,(687) perceived through [the power of] Hlun‐ Chub(688) what was his next duty. The Most‐Illustrious meditated and asked himself whether this would help [the future] generations. What they needed was the sight of Mâyâ in a body of illusion. Which?... The great conqueror of pains and sorrows arose and proceeded back to his birthplace. There Sugata was welcomed by the few, for they did not know Shramana Gautama. “Shâkya [the Mighty] is in Nirvâna.... He has given the Science to the Shuddhas [Shûdra],” said they of Damze Yul [the country of Brâhmans: India].... It was for that, born of pity, that the All‐Glorious One had to retire to ——, and then appear [karmically] as Mahâ Shankara; and out of pity as ——, and again as ——, and again as Tsong‐Kha‐pa.... For, he who chooses in humiliation must go down, and he who loves not allows Karma to raise him.(689)

This passage is confessedly obscure and written for the few. It is not lawful to say any more, for the time has not yet come when nations are prepared to hear the whole truth. The old religions are full of mysteries, and to demonstrate some of them would surely lead to an explosion of hatred, followed, perhaps, by bloodshed and worse. It will be sufficient to know that while Gautama Buddha is merged in Nirvâna ever since his death, Gautama Shâkyamuni may have had to reincarnate—this dual inner personality being one of the greatest mysteries of Esoteric psychism.

“The seat of the three secrets” refers to a place inhabited by high Initiates and their disciples. The “secrets” are the three mystic powers known as Gopa, Yasodhara, and Uptala Varna, that Csomo de Köros mistook for Buddha’s three wives, as other Orientalists have mistaken Shakti (Yoga power) personified by a female deity for His wife; or the Draupadî—also a spiritual power—for the wife in common of the five brothers Pândava.

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SECTION XLV. AN UNPUBLISHED DISCOURSE OF BUDDHA

(It is found in the second Book of Commentaries and is addressed to the Arhats.)

Said the All‐Merciful: Blessed are ye, O Bhikshus, happy are ye who have understood the mystery of Being and Non‐Being explained in Bas‐pa [Dharma, Doctrine], and have given preference to the latter, for ye are verily my Arhats.... The elephant, who sees his form mirrored in the lake, looks at it, and then goes away, taking it for the real body of another elephant, is wiser than the man who beholds his face in the stream, and, looking at it, says, “Here am I.... I am I”: for the “I,” his Self, is not in the world of the twelve Nidânas and mutability, but in that of Non‐ Being, the only world beyond the snares of Mâyâ.... That alone, which has neither cause nor author, which is self‐existing, eternal, far beyond the reach of mutability, is the true “I” [Ego], the Self of the Universe. The Universe of Nam‐Kha says: “I am the world of Sien‐Chan”;(690) the four illusions laugh and reply, “Verily so.” But the truly wise man knows that neither man, nor the Universe that he passes through like a flitting shadow, is any more a real Universe than the dewdrop that reflects a spark of the morning sun is that sun.... There are three things, Bhikshus, that are everlastingly the same, upon which no vicissitude, no modification can ever act: these are the Law, Nirvâna, and Space,(691) and those three are One, since the first two are within the last, and that last one a Mâyâ, so long as man keeps within the whirlpool of sensuous existences. One need not have his mortal body die to avoid the clutches of concupiscence and other passions. The Arhat who observes the seven hidden precepts of Bas‐pa may become Dang‐ma and Lha.(692) He may hear the “holy voice” of ... [Kwan‐yin],(693) and find himself within the quiet precincts of his Sangharama(694) transferred into Amitâbha Buddha.(695) Becoming one with Anuttara Samyak Sambodhi,(696) he may pass through all the six worlds of Being (Rûpaloka) and get into the first three worlds of Arûpa.(697)... He who listens to my secret law, preached to my select Arhats, will arrive with its help at the knowledge of Self, and thence at perfection.

It is due to entirely erroneous conceptions of Eastern thought and to ignorance of the existence of an Esoteric key to the outward Buddhist phrases that Burnouf and other great scholars have inferred from such propositions—held also by the Vedântins—as “my body is not body” and “myself is no self of mine,” that Eastern psychology was all based upon non‐permanency. Cousin, for instance, lecturing upon the subject, brings the two following propositions to prove, on Burnouf’s authority, that, unlike Brâhmanism, Buddhism rejects the perpetuity of the thinking principle. These are:

1. Thought or Spirit(698)—for the faculty is not distinguished from the subject—appears only with sensation and does not survive it.

2. The Spirit cannot itself lay hold of itself, and in directing attention to itself it draws from it only the conviction of its powerlessness to see itself otherwise than as successive and transitory.

This all refers to Spirit embodied, not to the freed Spiritual Self on whom Mâyâ has no more hold. Spirit is no body; therefore have the Orientalists made of it “nobody” and nothing. Hence they proclaim Buddhists to be Nihilists, and Vedântins to be the followers of a creed in which the “Impersonal [God] turns out on examination to be a myth”; their goal is described as

The complete extinction of all spiritual, mental, and bodily powers by absorption into the Impersonal.(699)

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