Footnotes
[1.] See Genesis ii. 19. Adam is formed in verse 7, and in verse 19 it is said: “Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them.” Thus man was created before the animals; for the animals mentioned in chapter i are the signs of the Zodiac, while the man, “male and female,” is not man, but the Host of the Sephiroth, Forces, or Angels, “made in his [God's] image and after his likeness.” The Adam, man, is not made in that likeness, nor is it so asserted in the Bible. Moreover, the Second Adam is Esoterically a septenary which represents seven men, or rather groups of men. For the first Adam, the Kadmon, is the synthesis of the ten Sephiroth. Of these, the upper Triad remains in the Archetypal World as the future “Trinity,” while the seven lower Sephiroth create the manifested material world; and this septennate is the Second Adam. Genesis, and the mysteries upon which it was fabricated, came from Egypt. The “God” of the 1st chapter of Genesis is the Logos, and the “Lord God” of the 2nd chapter the Creative Elohim, the lower Powers. [2.] Thus saith Pymander: “This is the mystery that to this day was hidden. Nature being mingled with the Heavenly Man [Elohim, or Dhyânis], brought forth a wonder ... seven Men, all males and females [Hermaphrodite] ... according to the nature of the seven Governors” (ii. 29), or the seven Hosts of the Pitris or Elohim, who projected or created him. This is very clear, but yet, see the interpretations of even our modern theologians, men supposed to be intellectual and learned. In the Theological and Philosophical Works of Hermes Trismegistus, Christian [?] Neoplatonist, a work compiled by John David Chambers, of Oriel College, Oxford, the translator wonders “for whom these seven Men are intended?” He solves the difficulty by concluding that, as “the original pattern Man [Adam Kadmon of Genesis i] was masculine-feminine, ... the seven may signify the succeeding patriarchs named in Genesis” (p. 9). A truly theological way of cutting the Gordian knot! [3.] George Smith's Chaldean Account of Genesis, p. 103. [4.] Compare Zohar, Siphra Dtzenioutha, Idra Suta, 2928, Franck, La Kabbale, p. 205. [5.] Siphra Dtzenioutha. [6.] As it is now asserted that the Chaldæan tablets, which give the allegorical description of Creation, the Fall, and the Flood, even to the legend of the Tower of Babel, were written “before the time of Moses” (Smith's Chaldean Account of Genesis), how can the Pentateuch be called a “revelation”? It is simply another version of the same story. [7.] Philosophumena, v. 7; Miller's edition, p. 98. [8.] Ibid., p. 108. [9.] P. 86. [10.] See Pliny, iv, c. 12; Strabo, 10; Herodotus, vii, c. 109; Pausanias, vii, c. 4, etc. [11.] Chaldean Account of Genesis, p. 82. [12.] See Bund., 79, 12. [13.] By “original” we mean the Amshaspend, called “Zarathushtra, the lord and ruler of the Vara made by Yima in that land.” There were several Zarathushtras or Zertusts, the Dabistan alone enumerating thirteen; but these were all reincarnations of the first one. The last Zoroaster was the founder of the Fire-temple of Azareksh, and the writer of the works on the primeval sacred Magian religion destroyed by Alexander. [14.] In India called a “Day of Brahmâ.” [15.] x. 86. [16.] See Volcker, Mythological Geography, pp. 145 to 170. [17.] Mythical Monsters, p. 47. [18.] It is to be remarked, however, that Mr. Wallace does not accept Mr. Sclater's idea, and even opposes it. Mr. Sclater supposes a land or continent formerly uniting Africa, Madagascar, and India but not Australia and India; and Mr. A. R. Wallace shows, in his Geographical Distribution of Animals and Island Life, that the hypothesis of such a land is quite uncalled for on the alleged zoological grounds. But he admits that a much closer proximity of India and Australia did certainly exist, and at a time so very remote that it was “certainly pre-tertiary,” adding in a private letter that “no name has been given to this supposed land.” Yet the land did exist, and was of course “pre-tertiary,” for Lemuria, if we accept this name for the third Continent, had perished before Atlantis fully developed, and Atlantis had sunk and its chief portions disappeared before the end of the Miocene period. [19.] See Esoteric Buddhism. [20.]
One more “coincidence”:
“Now it is proved that in geologically recent times, this region of North Africa was in fact a peninsula of Spain, and that its union with Africa (proper) was effected on the North by the rupture of Gibraltar, and on the South by an upheaval to which the Sahara owes its existence. The shores of this former sea of Sahara are still marked by the shells of the same Gastropoda that live on the shores of the Mediterranean.” (Prof. Oscar Schmidt, Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism, p. 244.)
The Mandragora is the Mandrake of the Bible, of Rachel and Leah. The roots of the plant are fleshy, hairy, and forked, representing roughly the limbs, the body, and even head of a man. Its magical and mysterious properties have been proclaimed in fable and play from the most archaic ages. From Rachel and Leah, who indulged in witchcraft with them, down to Shakespeare, who speaks of “shrieking”—
“Like mandrakes torn out of the earth
That living mortals, hearing them, run mad”
—the mandragora was the magic plant par excellence.
These roots are without any apparent stalk, large leaves growing out of the head of the root, like a gigantic crop of hair. They present little similitude to man when found in Spain, Italy, Asia Minor, or Syria, but on the Isle of Candia, and in Karamania near the city of Adan, they have a wonderfully human form, and are very highly prized as amulets. They are also worn by women as a charm against sterility, and for other purposes. They are especially effective in “Black Magic.”
Copernicus wrote his theories on the “Revolution of the Heavenly Bodies” in the sixteenth century, and the Zohar, even if compiled by Moses de Leon in the thirteenth century, states that:
“In the Book of Hammannunah, the Old (or, the Ancient), we learn ... that the earth turns upon itself in the form of a circle; that some are on top, the others below; that ... there are some countries of the earth which are lightened, whilst others are in darkness; these have the day, when for the former it is night; and there are countries in which it is constantly day, or in which at least the night continues only some instants.” (Zohar, iii, fol. 10a, quoted in Myer's Qabbalah, p. 139.)
Athenæus shows that the first letter of Satan's name was represented in days of old by an arc and crescent; and some Roman Catholics, kind, good men, would persuade the public that it is in honour of Lucifer's crescent-like horns that Mussulmans have chosen the crescent for their national arms. Venus, ever since the establishment of Roman Catholic dogmatism, has been identified with Satan and Lucifer, or the Great Dragon, contrary to all reason and logic. As shown by symbologists and Astronomers:
“The association between the serpent and the idea of darkness had an astronomical foundation. The position which the constellation Draco at one time occupied showed that the Great Serpent was the ruler of the night. This constellation was formerly at the very centre of the heavens, and is so extensive that it was called the Great Dragon. Its body spreads over seven signs of the Zodiac; and Dupuis, who sees in the Dragon of the Apocalypse a reference to the celestial serpent, says, ‘It is not astonishing that a constellation so extended should be represented by the author of that book as a great dragon with seven heads, who drew the third part of the stars from heaven and cast them to the earth.’ ” (Staniland Wake, The Great Pyramid, p. 79; Dupuis, iii. 255.)
Only Dupuis never knew why Draco, once the pole-star—the symbol of Guide, Guru and Director—had been thus degraded by posterity. “The Gods of our fathers are our devils,” says an Asiatic proverb. When Draco ceased to be the “lode-star,” the guiding sidereal divinity, it shared the fate of all the fallen Gods. Seth and Typhon was at one time, Bunsen tells us, “a great God universally adored throughout Egypt, who conferred on the sovereigns of the 18th and 19th Dynasties the symbols of life and power. But subsequently, in the course of the 20th Dynasty, he is suddenly treated as an evil Demon, insomuch that his effigies and name are obliterated on all the monuments and inscriptions that could be reached.” The real Occult reason will be given in these pages.
“Huxley, supported by the most evident discoveries in Comparative Anatomy, could utter the momentous sentence that the anatomical differences between man and the highest apes are less than those between the latter and the lowest apes. In relation to our genealogical tree of man, the necessary conclusion follows that the human race has evolved gradually from the true apes.” (The Pedigree of Man, by Ernst Hæckel, translated by Ed. B. Aveling, p. 49.)
What may be the scientific and logical objections to the opposite conclusion—we would ask? The anatomical resemblances between Man and the Anthropoids—grossly exaggerated as they are by Darwinists, as M. de Quatrefages shows—are simply enough accounted for when the origin of the latter is taken into consideration.
“Nowhere, in the older deposits, is an ape to be found that approximates more closely to man, or a man that approximates more closely to an ape.”
“The same gulf which is found to-day between man and ape, goes back with undiminished breadth and depth to the Tertiary period. This fact alone is enough to make its untenability clear.” (Dr. F. Pfaff, Prof. of Natural Science in the University of Erlangen.)
“The father of the sacred fire,” writes Prof. Jolly, “bore the name of Tvashtri ... His mother was Mâyâ. He himself was styled Akta (anointed χριστὸς) after the priest had poured upon his head the spirituous (?) Soma, and on his body butter purified by sacrifice.” (Man before Metals, p. 190.) The source of his information is not given by the French Darwinist. But the lines are quoted to show that light begins to dawn even upon the Materialists. Adalbert Kühn, in his Die Herabkunft des Feuers, identifies the two signs [Symbol: swastika] and [Symbol: swastika with dots around the center] with Arani, and designates them under this name. He adds: “This process of kindling fire naturally led men to the idea of sexual reproduction,” etc. Why could not a more dignified idea, and one more Occult, have led man to invent this symbol, in so far as it is connected, in one of its aspects, with human reproduction? But its chief symbolism refers to Cosmogony.
“Agni, in the condition of Akta, or anointed, is suggestive of Christ,” remarks Prof. Jolly. “Mâyâ, Mary, His mother; Tvashtri, St. Joseph, the carpenter of the Bible.” In the Rig Veda, Vishvakarman is the highest and oldest of the Gods and their “Father.” He is the “carpenter or builder,” because God is called even by the Monotheists, the “Architect of the Universe.” Still, the original idea is purely metaphysical, and had no connection with the later Phallicism.
A hypothesis evolved in 1881 by Mr. W. Mattieu Williams seems to have impressed Astronomers but little. Says the author of “The Fuel of the Sun,” in Knowledge, Dec. 23, 1881:
“Applying now the researches of Dr. Andrews to the conditions of solar existence ... I conclude that the sun has no nucleus, either solid, liquid, or gaseous, but is composed of dissociated matter in the critical state, surrounded, first, by a flaming envelope, due to the recombination of the dissociated matter, and outside of this, by another envelope of vapours due to this combination.”
This is a novel theory to be added to other hypotheses, all scientific and orthodox. The meaning of the “critical state” is explained by Mr. W. Mattieu Williams in the same journal (Dec. 9, 1881), in an article on “Solids, liquids, and Gases.” Speaking of an experiment by Dr. Andrews on carbonic acid, the Scientist says that:
“When 88° is reached, the boundary between liquid and gas vanishes; liquid and gas have blended into one mysterious intermediate fluid; an indefinite fluctuating something is there filling the whole of the tube—an etherealized liquid or a visible gas. Hold a red-hot poker between your eye and the light; you will see an upflowing wave of movement of what appears like liquid air. The appearance of the hybrid fluid in the tube resembles this, but is sensibly denser, and evidently stands between the liquid and gaseous states of matter, as pitch or treacle stands between solid and liquid.”
The temperature at which this occurs has been named by Dr. Andrews the “critical temperature”; here the gaseous and the liquid states are “continuous,” and it is probable that all other substances capable of existing in both states have their own particular critical temperatures.
Speculating further upon this “critical” state, Mr. W. Mattieu Williams emits some quite Occult theories about Jupiter and other Planets. He says:
“Our notions of solids, liquids, and gases are derived from our experiences of the state of matter here upon this Earth. Could we be removed to another planet, they would be curiously changed. On Mercury water would rank as one of the condensible gases; on Mars, as a fusible solid; but what on Jupiter?
“Recent observations justify us in regarding this as a miniature sun, with an external envelope of cloudy matter, apparently of partially-condensed water, but red-hot, or probably still hotter within. His vaporous atmosphere is evidently of enormous depth, and the force of gravitation being on his visible outer surface two-and-a-half times greater than that on our earth's surface, the atmospheric pressure, in descending below this visible surface, must soon reach that at which the vapour of water would be brought to its critical condition. Therefore we may infer that the oceans of Jupiter are neither of frozen, liquid, nor gaseous water, but are oceans, or atmospheres of critical water. If any fish or birds swim or fly therein, they must be very critically organized.”
As the whole mass of Jupiter is 300 times greater than that of the Earth, and its compressing energy towards the centre proportional to this, its materials, if similar to those of the Earth, and no hotter, would be considerably more dense, and the whole planet would have a higher specific gravity; but we know by the movement of its satellites that, instead of this, its specific gravity is less than a fourth of that of the Earth. This justifies the conclusion that it is intensely hot; for even hydrogen, if cold, would become denser than Jupiter under such pressure.
“As all elementary substances may exist as solids, liquids, or gases, or, critically, according to the conditions of temperature and pressure, I am justified in hypothetically concluding that Jupiter is neither a solid, a liquid, nor a gaseous planet, but a critical planet, or an orb composed internally of associated elements in the critical state, and surrounded by a dense atmosphere of their vapours and those of some of their compounds such as water. The same reasoning applies to Saturn and other large and rarefied planets.”
It is gratifying to see how “scientific imagination” approaches every year more closely to the borderland of our Occult Teachings.
This is corroborated by a learned Brahman. In his most excellent Lectures on the Bhagavad Gîtâ (Theosophist, April, 1887, p. 444) the lecturer says:
“There is a peculiarity to which I must call your attention. He [Krishna] speaks here of four Manus. Why does he speak of four? We are now in the seventh Manvantara—that of Vaivasvata. If he is speaking of the past Manus, he ought to speak of six, but he only mentions four. In some commentaries an attempt has been made to interpret this in a peculiar manner.
“The word ‘Chatvârah’ is separated from the word ‘Manavah,’ and is made to refer to Sanaka, Sanandana, Sanatkumâra, and Sanatsujâta, who were also included among the mind-born sons of Prajâpati.
“But this interpretation will lead to a most absurd conclusion, and make the sentence contradict itself. The persons alluded to in the text have a qualifying clause in the sentence. It is well known that Sanaka and the other three refused to create, though the other sons had consented to do so: therefore, in speaking of those persons from whom humanity has sprung into existence, it would be absurd to include these four also in the list. The passage must be interpreted without splitting the compound into two nouns. The number of Manus will then be four, and the statement would then contradict the Paurânic account, though it would be in harmony with the Occult theory. You will recollect that it is stated [in Occultism] that we are now in the Fifth Root-Race. Each Root-Race is considered as the Santati of a particular Manu. Now, the Fourth Race has passed, or, in other words, there have been four past Manus.”
One has to remember that, in the Hindû Philosophy, every differentiated unit is such only through the Cycles of Mâyâ, being one in its essence with the Supreme or One Spirit. Hence arises the seeming confusion and contradiction in the various Purânas, and at times in the same Purâna, about the same individual. Vishnu—as the many-formed Brahmâ, and as Brahma (neuter)—is one, and yet he is said to be all the twenty-eight Vyâsas.
“In every Dvâpara (or third) age, Vishnu, in the person of Vyâsa, divides the Veda, which is (properly, but) one, into many portions.... Twenty-eight times have the Vedas been arranged by the great Rishis in the Vaivasvata Manvantara, in the Dvâpara age; and, consequently, eight and twenty Vyâsas have passed away.” (Vishnu Purâna, iii. 3; Wilson's Trans., iii. 33, 34.) “[They who were all] in the form of Veda-Vyâsa; who were the Vyâsas of their respective eras.” (Ibid., loc. cit., p. 33.) “This world is Brahmâ, in Brahmâ, from Brahmâ ... nothing further to be known.” Then, again, in the Harivamsha: “There were (in the first Manvantara) seven celebrated sons of Vasishtha, who (in the third Manvantara) were sons of Brahmâ (i.e., Rishis), the illustrious progeny of Ûrjâ.” (Ibid., iii. 6, note.) This is plain: the Humanity of the First Manvantara is that of the seventh and of all the intermediate ones. The Mankind of the First Root-Race is the mankind of the Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, etc. To the last it forms a cyclic and constant reïncarnation of the Monads belonging to the Dhyân Chohans of our Planetary Chain.
To speak of life as having arisen, and of the human race as having originated, in this absurdly unscientific way, in the face of the modern Pedigrees of Man, is to court instantaneous annihilation. The Esoteric Doctrine risks the danger, nevertheless, and even goes so far as to ask the impartial reader to compare the above hypothesis (if it is one) with Hæckel's theory—now fast becoming an axiom with Science—which we quote verbatim as follows:
“How did life, the living world of organisms, arise? And, secondly, the special question: How did the human race originate? The first of these two enquiries, that as to the first appearance of living beings, can only be decided empirically [!!] by proof of the so-called Archebiosis, or equivocal generation, or the spontaneous production of organisms of the simplest conceivable kind. Such are the Monera (Protogenes, Protamœba, Protomyxa, Vampyrella), exceedingly simple microscopic masses of protoplasm without structure or organization, which take in nutriment and reproduce themselves by division. Such a Moneron as that primordial organism discovered by the renowned English zoologist Huxley and named Bathybius Hæckelii, appears as a continuous thick protoplasmic covering at the greatest depths of the ocean, between 3,000 and 30,000 feet. It is true that the first appearance of such Monera has not up to the present moment been actually observed; but there is nothing intrinsically improbable in such an Evolution.” (The Pedigree of Man, Aveling's translation, p. 33.)
The Bathybius protoplasm having recently turned out to be no organic substance at all, there remains little to be said. Nor, after reading this, does one need to consume further time in refuting the further assertion that: “In that case man also has, beyond a doubt [to the minds of Hæckel and his like], arisen from the lower Mammalia, apes, the earlier simian creatures, the still earlier Marsupialia, Amphibia, Pisces, by progressive transformations” (p. 36)—all produced by “a series of natural forces working blindly, ... without aim, without design.”
The above-quoted passage bears its criticism on its own face. Science is made to teach that, which, up to the present time, “has never been actually observed.” She is made to deny the phenomenon of an intelligent nature and a vital force independent of form and matter, and to find it more scientific to teach the miraculous performance of “natural forces working blindly without aim or design.” If so, then we are led to think that the physico-mechanical forces of the brains of certain eminent Scientists are leading them on as blindly to sacrifice logic and common sense on the altar of mutual admiration. Why should the protoplasmic Moneron producing the first living creature through self-division be held as a very scientific hypothesis, and an ethereal pre-human race generating the primeval men in the same fashion be tabooed as unscientific superstition? Or has Materialism obtained a sole monopoly in Science?
“A very strong argument in favour of variability is supplied by the science of embryology. Is not a man in the uterus ... a simple cell, a vegetable with three or four leaflets, a tadpole with branchiæ, a mammal with a tail, lastly a primate [?] and a biped? It is scarcely possible not to recognize in the embryonic evolution a rapid sketch, a faithful summary, of the entire organic series.” (Lefèvre, Philosophy, p. 484.)
The summary alluded to is, however, only that of the store of types hoarded up in man, the microcosm. This simple explanation meets all such objections, as the presence of the rudimentary tail in the fœtus—a fact triumphantly paraded by Hæckel and Darwin as conclusively in favour of the Ape-Ancestor Theory. It may also be pointed out that the presence of a vegetable with leaflets in the embryonic stages is not explained on ordinary evolutionist principles. Darwinists have not traced man through the vegetable, but Occultists have. Why then this feature in the embryo, and how do the former explain it?
This, regardless of modern materialistic evolution, which speculates in this wise: “The primitive human form, whence as we think all human species sprang, has perished this long time. [This we deny: it has only decreased in size and changed in texture.] But many facts point to the conclusion that it was hairy and dolichocephalic. [African races are even now dolichocephalic in a great measure, but the palæolithic Neanderthal skull, the oldest we know of, is of a large size, and no nearer to the capacity of the gorilla's cranium than that of any other now-living man.] Let us, for the time being, call this hypothetical species homo primigenius.... This first species, or the ape-man, the ancestor of all the others, probably arose in the tropical regions of the old world from anthropoid apes.” Asked for proofs, the Evolutionist, not the least daunted, replies: “Of these no fossil remains are as yet known to us, but they were probably akin to the Gorilla and Orang of the present day.” And then the Papuan negro is mentioned as the probable descendant in the first line. (Pedigree of Man, p. 80.)
Hæckel holds fast to Lemuria, which, with East Africa and South Asia also, he mentions as the possible cradle of the primitive ape-men. So also do many Geologists. Mr. A. R. Wallace admits its reality, though in a rather modified sense, in his Geographical Distribution of Animals. But let not Evolutionists speak so lightly of the comparative size of the brains of man and the ape, for this is very unscientific, especially when they pretend to see no difference between the two, or very little at any rate. For Vogt himself showed that, while the highest of the apes, the Gorilla, has a brain of only 30 to 51 cubic inches, the brain of the lowest of the Australian aborigines amounts to 99·35 cubic inches. The former is thus “not half of the size of the brain of a new-born babe,” says Pfaff.
Of such semi-animal creatures, the sole remnants known to Ethnology were the Tasmanians, a portion of the Australians and a mountain tribe in China, the men and women of which are entirely covered with hair. They were the last descendants in a direct line of the semi-animal latter-day Lemurians referred to. There are, however, considerable numbers of the mixed Lemuro-Atlantean peoples produced by various crossings with such semi-human stocks—e.g., the wild men of Borneo, the Veddhas of Ceylon, classed by Prof. Flower among Âryans (!), most of the remaining Australians, Bushmen, Negritos, Andaman Islanders, etc.
The Australians of the Gulf of St. Vincent and the neighbourhood of Adelaide are very hairy, and the brown down on the skin of boys of five or six years of age assumes a furry appearance. They are, however, degraded men; not the closest approximation to the “pithecoid man,” as Hæckel so sweepingly affirms. Only a portion of these men are a Lemurian relic. (Cf. Esoteric Buddhism, pp. 64 et seqq.)
In general, the so-called orthodox Christian conceptions about the “fallen” Angels or Satan, are as remarkable as they are absurd. About a dozen could be cited, of the most varied character as to details, and all from the pens of educated lay authors, “university graduates” of the present quarter of our century. Thus, the author of Earth's Earliest Ages, G. H. Pember, M.A., devotes a thick volume to proving Theosophists, Spiritualists, Agnostics, Mystics, metaphysicians, poets, and every contemporary author on Oriental speculations, to be the devoted servants of the “Prince of the Air,” and irretrievably damned. He describes Satan and his Antichrist in this wise:
“Satan is the ‘Anointed Cherub’ of old.... God created Satan, the fairest and wisest of all His creatures in this part of His Universe, and made him Prince of the World, and of the Power of the Air.... He was placed in an Eden, which was both far anterior to the Eden of Genesis ... and of an altogether different and more substantial character, resembling the New Jerusalem. Thus, Satan being perfect in wisdom, and beauty, his vast empire is our earth, if not the whole solar system.... Certainly no other angelic power of greater or even equal dignity has been revealed to us. The Archangel Michael himself is quoted by Jude as preserving towards the Prince of Darkness the respect due to a superior, however wicked he may be, until God has formally commanded his deposition.” Then we are informed that “Satan was from the moment of his creation surrounded by the insignia of royalty” (! !): that he “awoke to consciousness to find the air filled with the rejoicing music of those whom God had appointed.” Then the Devil “passes from the royalty to his priestly dignity” (! ! !). “Satan was also a priest of the Most High,” etc., etc. And now—“Antichrist will be Satan incarnate.” (Chap. III and pp. 56-59.) The pioneers of the coming Apollyon have already appeared—they are the Theosophists, the Occultists, the authors of the Perfect Way, of Isis Unveiled, of the Mystery of the Ages, and even of the Light of Asia ! ! The author notes the “avowed origin” of Theosophy from the “descending angels,” from the “Nephilim,” or the Angels of Genesis (vi), and the Giants. He ought to note his own descent from them also, as our Secret Doctrine endeavours to show—unless he refuses to belong to the present humanity.
“For the Mind, a deity abounding in both sexes, being Light and Life, brought forth by its Word another Mind or Workman; which, being God of the Fire and the Spirit, fashioned and formed seven other Governors, which in their Circles contain the Phenomenal World, and whose disposition is called Fate or Destiny.” (Sect. ix. c. 1, ed. of 1579.)
Here it is evident that Mind, the Primeval Universal Divine Thought, is neither the Unknown Unmanifested One, since it abounds in both sexes—is male and female—nor yet the Christian “Father,” as the latter is a male and not an androgyne. The fact is that the “Father,” “Son,” and “Man” are hopelessly mixed up in the translations of Pymander.
Why, for instance, should Éliphas Lévi, the very fearless and outspoken Kabalist, have hesitated to divulge the mystery of the Fallen Angels so-called? That he knew the fact and the real meaning of the allegory, both in its religious and mystical, as well as in its physiological sense, is proved by his voluminous writings and frequent allusions and hints. Yet Éliphas, after having alluded to it a hundred times in his previous works, says in his later Histoire de la Magie (pp. 220, 221): “We protest with all our might against the sovereignty and the ubiquity of Satan. We pretend neither to deny nor affirm here the tradition on the Fall of the Angels.... But if so ... then the prince of the Angelic Rebels can be at best the last and the most powerless among the condemned—now that he is separated from deity—which is the principle of every power.” This is hazy and evasive enough; but see what Hargrave Jennings writes in his weird, staccato-like style:
“Both Saint Michael and Saint George are types. They are sainted personages, or dignified heroes, or powers apotheosized. They are each represented with their appropriate faculties and attributes. These are reproduced and stand multiplied—distinguished by different names in all the mythologies [including the Christian]. But the idea regarding each is a general one. This idea and representative notion is that of the all-powerful champion—child-like in his ‘virgin innocence’—so powerful that this God-filled innocence (the Seraphim ‘know most,’ the Cherubim ‘love most’) can shatter the world (articulated—so to use the word—in the magic of Lucifer, but condemned), in opposition to the artful constructions, won out of the permission of the Supreme—artful constructions (‘this side life’)—of the magnificent apostate, the mighty rebel, but yet, at the same time, the ‘Light-bringer,’ the Lucifer—the ‘Morning Star,’ the ‘Son of the Morning’—the very highest title ‘out of heaven,’ for in heaven it cannot be, but out of heaven it is everything. In an apparently incredible side of his character—for let the reader carefully remark that qualities are of no sex—this Archangel Saint Michael is the invincible, sexless, celestial ‘Energy’—to dignify him by his grand characteristics—the invincible ‘Virgin-Combatant,’ clothed ... and at the same time armed, in the denying mail of the Gnostic ‘refusal to create.’ This is another myth, a ‘myth within myths,’ ... a stupendous ‘mystery of mysteries,’ because it is so impossible and contradictory. Unexplainable as the Apocalypse. Unrevealable as the ‘Revelation.’ ” (Phallicism, pp. 212, 213.)
Nevertheless, this unexplainable and unrevealable mystery will now be explained and revealed by the doctrines of the East. Though, of course, as the very erudite, but still more puzzling author of Phallicism gives it, no uninitiated mortal would ever understand his real drift.
The traditions of every country and nation point to this fact. Donnelly quotes from Father Duran's Historia Antigua de la Nueva España of 1885, in which a native of Cholula, a centenarian, accounts for the building of the great pyramid of Cholula, as follows: “In the beginning, before the light of the sun had been created, this land [Cholula] was in obscurity and darkness ... but immediately after the light of the sun arose in the East, there appeared gigantic men ... who built the said pyramid, its builders being scattered after that to all parts of the earth.”
“A great deal of the Central American history is taken up with the doings of an ancient race of Giants called Quinanes,” says the author of Atlantis (p. 204).
Genesis, v. Treating of the Chinese Dragon and the literature of China, Mr. Charles Gould, in his Mythical Monsters (p. 212), writes: “Its mythologies, histories, religions, popular stories, and proverbs, all teem with references to a mysterious being who has a physical nature and spiritual attributes. Gifted with an accepted form, which he has the supernatural power of casting off for the assumption of others, he has the power of influencing the weather, producing droughts or fertilizing rains at pleasure, of raising tempests and allaying them. Volumes could be compiled from the scattered legends which everywhere abound relating to this subject.”
This “mysterious being” is the mythical Dragon, i.e., the symbol of the historical and actual Adept, the Master and Professor of Occult Sciences of old. It has already been stated elsewhere, that the great “Magicians” of the Fourth and Fifth Races were generally called “Serpents” and “Dragons” after their Progenitors. All these belonged to the Hierarchy of the so-called “Fiery Dragons of Wisdom,” the Dhyân Chohans, answering to the Agnishvâtta Pitris, the Maruts and Rudras generally, as the issue of Rudra their father, who is identified with the God of Fire. More is said in the text. Now Clement, an initiated Neo-Platonist, knew, of course, the origin of the word “Dragon,” and why the initiated Adepts were so called, as he knew the secret of the Agathodæmon, the Christ, the seven-vowelled Serpent of the Gnostics. He knew that the dogma of his new faith required the transformation of all the rivals of Jehovah—the Angels supposed to have rebelled against that “Elohim,” as the Titan Prometheus rebelled against Zeus, the usurper of his father's kingdom—and that “Dragon” was the mystic appellation of the “Sons of Wisdom”; from this knowledge came his definition, as cruel as it was arbitrary, “serpents and giants signify demons,” i.e., not “Spirits,” but Devils, in Church parlance.
Our best modern novelists, although they are neither Theosophists nor Spiritualists, nevertheless begin to have very psychological and suggestively Occult dreams; witness Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson and his Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, than which no grander psychological essay on Occult lines exists. Has the rising novelist Mr. Rider Haggard also had a prophetic, or rather a retrospective, clairvoyant dream before he wrote She? His imperial Kor, the great city of the dead, whose surviving inhabitants sailed northwards after the plague had killed almost a whole nation, seems, in its general outlines, to step out from the imperishable pages of the old archaic records. Ayesha suggests “that those men who sailed north may have been the fathers of the first Egyptians”; and then seems to attempt a synopsis of certain letters of a Master quoted in Esoteric Buddhism, for, she says: “Time after time have nations, ay, and rich and strong nations, learned in the arts, been, and passed away, and been forgotten, so that no memory of them remains. This [the nation of Kor] is but one of several; for time eats up the work of man unless, indeed, he digs in caves like the people of Kor, and then mayhap the sea swallows them, or the earthquake shakes them in.... Yet were not these people utterly destroyed, as I think. Some few remained in the other cities, for their cities were many. But the barbarians ... came down upon them, and took their women to wife, and the race of the Amahagger that is now is a bastard brood of the mighty sons of Kor, and behold it dwelleth in the tombs with its fathers' bones” (pp. 180, 181).
Here the clever novelist seems to repeat the history of all the now degraded and down-fallen races of humanity. Geologists and Anthropologists would place at the head of humanity—as descendants of Homo Primigenius—the ape-man, of which “no fossil remains are as yet known to us,” though they “were probably akin to the Gorilla and Orang of the present day” (Hæckel). In answer to whose “probably,” Occultists point to another and a greater probability—viz., the one given in our text.
It is said by the incarnate Logos, Krishna, in the Bhagavad Gîtâ, “The seven great Rishis, the four preceding Manus, partaking of my nature, were born from my mind: from them sprang [emanated or were born] the human race and the world” (x. 6).
Here, by the seven Great Rishis, the seven great Rûpa Hierarchies or Classes of Dhyân Chohans, are meant. Let us bear in mind that the seven Rishis, Saptarshi, are the Regents of the seven stars of the Great Bear, and therefore, of the same nature as the Angels of the Planets, or the seven Great Planetary Spirits. They were all reborn as men on Earth in various Kalpas and Races. Moreover, “the four preceding Manus” are the four Classes of the originally Arûpa Gods—the Kumâras, the Rudras, the Asuras, etc.; who are also said to have incarnated. They are not Prajâpatis, as are the first, but their informing “principles”—some of which have incarnated in men, while others have made other men simply the vehicles of their “reflections.” As Krishna truly says—the same words being repeated later by another vehicle of the Logos—“I am the the same to all beings ... those who worship me [the sixth principle or the divine Intellectual Soul, Buddhi, made conscious by its union with the higher faculties of Manas] are in me, and I am in them.” (Ibid., x. 29.) The Logos, being no “personality” but the Universal Principle, is represented by all the divine Powers, born of its Mind—the pure Flames, or, as they are called in Occultism, the “Intellectual Breaths”—those Angels who are said to have made themselves independent, i.e., passed from the passive and quiescent, into the active state of Self-Consciousness. When this is recognized, the true meaning of Krishna becomes comprehensible. But see Mr. Subba Row's excellent Lecture on the Bhagavad Gîtâ (Theosophist, April, 1887, p. 444).
For the Stanzas call this locality by a term translated in the Commentary as a place of no latitude (Niraksha), the Abode of the Gods. As a scholiast says in the Sûrya Siddhânta (xii. 42-44):
“Above them goes the sun when situated at the equinoxes; they have neither equinoctial shadow nor elevation of the pole (akshonnati).
“In both directions from Meru are two pole-stars (dhruvatârâ), fixed in the midst of the sky, to those who are situated in places of no latitude (niraksha), both these have their place in the horizon.
“Hence there is, in those cities [in that land], no elevation of the poles, the two pole-stars being situated in their horizon; but their degrees of co-latitude (lambaka) are ninety: at Meru the degrees of latitude (aksha) are of the same number.” (See Vishnu Purâna, Wilson's Trans., ii. 208.)
See the foot-note (p. 431) concerning the etymology of προ-μῆτις or forethought. Prometheus confesses it in the drama when saying:
O holy ether, swiftly-wingèd gales....
Behold what I, a god, from gods endure.
And yet what say I? Clearly I foreknow
All that must happen....
... The Destined it behoves,
As best I may, to bear, for well I wot
How incontestable the strength of Fate.... (105)
“Fate” stands here for Karma, or Nemesis.
Mercure Trismegiste, Pimandre, chap. i, sec. 16: “Oh, ma pensée, que s'ensuit-il? car je désire grandement ce propos. Pimandre diet, ceci est un mystère celé, jusques à ce jour d'hui. Car nature, soit mestant avec l'hôme, a produit le miracle très merveilleux, aîant celluy qui ie t'av diet, la nature de l'harmonie des sept du père, et de l'esprit. Nature ne s'arresta pas là, mais incontinent a produict sept hômes, selon les natures des sept gouverneurs en puissance des deux sexes et esleuez.... La génération de ces sept s'est donnée en ceste manière....”
And a gap is made in the translation, which can be filled partially by resorting to the Latin text of Apuleius. The commentator, the Bishop, says: “Nature produced in him [man] seven men” (seven principles).
Historical View of the Hindû Astronomy. Quoting from the work in reference to “Argabhatta” [? Âryabhatta] who is said to give a near approach to the true relation among the various values for the computations of the value of π, the author of The Source of Measures reproduces a curious statement. “Mr. Bentley,” it is said, “was greatly familiar with the Hindû astronomical and mathematical knowledge.... This statement of his may then be taken as authentic. The same remarkable trait, among so many Eastern and ancient nations, of sedulously concealing the arcana of this kind of knowledge, is a marked one among the Hindûs. That which was given out to be popularly taught, and to be exposed to public inspection, was but the approximate of a more exact but hidden knowledge. And this very formulation of Mr. Bentley will strangely exemplify the assertion; and, explained, will show that it [the Hindû exoteric astronomy and sciences] was derived from a system exact beyond the European one, in which Mr. Bentley himself, of course, trusted, as far in advance of the Hindû knowledge, at any time, in any generation” (pp. 86, 87).
This is Mr. Bentley's misfortune, and does not take away from the glory of the ancient Hindû Astronomers, who were all Initiates.
Having given a number of illustrations from natural history, the doctor adds: “The facts I have briefly glanced at are general facts, and cannot happen day after day in so many millions of animals of every kind. from the larva or ovum of a minute insect up to man, at definite periods, from a mere chance or coincidence.... Upon the whole it is, I think, impossible to come to any less general conclusion than this, that, in animals, changes occur every three and a half, seven, fourteen, twenty-one, or twenty-eight days, or at some definite number of weeks”—or septenary cycles. Again, the same Dr. Laycock states that: “Whatever type the fever may exhibit, there will be a paroxysm on the seventh day.... fourteenth will be remarkable as a day of amendment ... [either cure or death taking place]. If the fourth [paroxysm] be severe, and the fifth less so, the disease will end at the seventh paroxysm, and ... the change for the better ... will be seen on the fourteenth day ... namely, about three or four o'clock a.m., when the system is most languid.” (Approaching End of the Age, by Grattan Guinness, pp. 258 to 269, wherein this is quoted).
This is pure “soothsaying” by cyclic calculations, and it is connected with Chaldæan Astrolatry and Astrology. Thus Materialistic Science—in its medicine, the most materialistic of all—applies our Occult laws to diseases, studies natural history with its help, recognizes its presence as a fact in Nature, and yet must needs pooh-pooh the same archaic knowledge when claimed by the Occultists. For if the mysterious Septenary Cycle is a law in Nature, and it is one, as proven; if it is found controlling both evolution and involution (or death) in the realms of entomology, ichthyology and ornithology, as in the kingdom of the animal mammalia and man—why cannot it be present and acting in Kosmos, in general, in its natural (though occult) divisions of time, races, and mental development? And why, furthermore, should not the most ancient Adepts have studied and thoroughly mastered these cyclic laws under all their aspects? Indeed, Dr. Stratton states as a physiological and pathological fact, that “in health the human pulse is more frequent in the morning than in the evening for six days out of seven; and that on the seventh day it is slower.” (Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, Jan. 1843; ibid., loc. cit.) Why, then, should not an Occultist show the same in cosmic and terrestrial life in the pulse of the Planet and Races? Dr. Laycock divides life by three great septenary periods; the first and last, each stretching over 21 years, and the central period or prime of life lasting 28 years, or four times seven. He subdivides the first into seven distinct stages, and the other two into three minor periods, and says that: “The fundamental unit of the greater periods is one week of seven days, each day being twelve hours, and that single and compound multiples of this unit, determine the length of these periods by the same ratio, as multiples of the unit of twelve hours determine the lesser periods. This law binds all periodic vital phenomena together, and links the periods observed in the lowest annulose animals, with those of man himself, the highest of the vertebrata.” (Ibid., p. 267.) If Science does this, why should she scorn the Occult information, that—to use Dr. Laycock's language—one Week of the Manvantaric (Lunar) Fortnight, of fourteen Days (or seven Manus), that Fortnight of twelve Hours in a Day representing seven Periods or seven Races—is now passed? This language of Science fits our Doctrine admirably. Mankind has lived over “a week of seven days, each day being twelve hours,” since three and a half Races are now gone for ever, the Fourth is submerged, and we are now in the Fifth Race.
The mental barrier between man and ape, characterized by Huxley as an “enormous gap, a distance practically immeasurable” (! !) is, indeed, in itself conclusive. Certainly it constitutes a standing puzzle to the Materialist, who relies on the frail reed of “natural selection.” The physiological differences between Man and the Apes are in reality—despite a curious community of certain features—equally striking. Says Dr. Schweinfurth, one of the most cautious and experienced of Naturalists:
“In modern times there are no animals in creation that have attracted a larger amount of attention from the scientific student of nature than these great quadrumana [the anthropoids], which are stamped with such a singular resemblance to the human form as to have justified the epithet of anthropomorphic.... But all investigation at present only leads human intelligence to a confession of its insufficiency; and nowhere is caution more to be advocated, nowhere is premature judgment more to be deprecated than in the attempt to bridge over the mysterious chasm which separates man and beast.” (Heart of Africa, i., 520. Ed., 1873.)
“At this period,” writes Darwin, “the arteries run in arch-like branches, as if to carry the blood to branchiæ which are not present in the higher vertebrata, though the slits on the side of the neck still remain, marking their former [?] position.”
It is noteworthy that, though gill-clefts are absolutely useless to all but amphibia and fishes, etc., their appearance is regularly noted in the fœtal development of vertebrates. Even children are occasionally born with an opening in the neck corresponding to one of the clefts.
We confess to not being able to see any good reasons for Mr. E. Clodd's positive statement in Knowledge. Speaking of the men of Neolithic times, “concerning whom Mr. Grant Allen has given ... a vivid and accurate sketch,” and who are “the direct ancestors of peoples of whom remnants yet lurk in out-of-the-way corners of Europe, where they have been squeezed or stranded,” he adds, “but the men of Palæolithic times can be identified with no existing races; they were savages of a more degraded type than any extant; tall, yet barely erect, with short legs and twisted knees, with prognathous, that is, projecting ape-like jaws, and small brains. Whence they come we cannot tell, and their ‘grave knoweth no man to this day.’ ”
Besides the possibility that there may be men who know whence they came and how they perished—it is not true to say that the Palæolithic men, or their fossils, are all found with “small brains.” The oldest skull of all those hitherto found, the “Neanderthal skull,” is of average capacity, and Mr. Huxley was compelled to confess that it was no real approximation whatever to that of the “missing link.” There are aboriginal tribes in India whose brains are far smaller and nearer to that of the ape than any hitherto found among the skulls of Palæolithic man.
Since no single atom in the entire Kosmos is without life and consciousness, how much more then must its mighty globes be filled with both—though they remain sealed books to us men who can hardly enter even into the consciousness of the forms of life nearest us?
We do not know ourselves, then how can we, if we have never been trained and initiated, fancy that we can penetrate the consciousness of the smallest of the animals around us?
Those who feel inclined to sneer at that doctrine of Esoteric Ethnology, which pre-supposes the existence of Men in the Secondary age, will do well to note the fact that one of the most distinguished Anthropologists of the day, M. de Quatrefages, seriously argues in that direction. He writes: “There is then nothing impossible in the idea that he [man] ... should have appeared upon the globe with the first representatives of the type to which he belongs by his organization.” (The Human Species, p. 153.) This statement approximates most closely to our fundamental assertion that man preceded the other mammalia.
Professor Lefèvre admits that the “labours of Boucher de Perthes, Lartet, Christy, Bourgeois, Desnoyers, Broca, De Mortillet, Hamy, Gaudry, Capellini, and a hundred others, have overcome all doubts, and clearly established the progressive development of the human organism and industries from the miocene epoch of the tertiary age.” (Philosophy Historical and Critical, Pt. II, p. 499, Chapter II, On Organic Evolution. “Library of Contemporary Science.”) Why does he reject the possibility of a Secondary-age man? Simply because he is involved in the meshes of the Darwinian Anthropology. “The origin of man is bound up with that of the higher mammals”; he appeared “only with the last types of his class”! This is not argument, but dogmatism. Theory can never excommunicate fact. Must everything give place to the mere working hypotheses of Western Evolutionists? Surely not!
Plato's veracity has been so unwarrantably impeached by even such friendly critics as Professor Jowett, when the story of Atlantis has been discussed, that it seems well to cite the testimony of a specialist on the subject. It is sufficient to place mere literary cavillers in a very ridiculous position:
“If our knowledge of Atlantis was more thorough, it would no doubt appear that in every instance wherein the people of Europe accord with the people of America, they were both in accord with the people of Atlantis.... It will be seen that in every case where Plato gives us any information in this respect as to Atlantis, we find this agreement to exist. It existed in architecture, sculpture, navigation, engraving, writing, an established priesthood, the mode of worship, agriculture, and the construction of roads and canals; and it is reasonable to suppose that the same correspondence extended down to all the minor details.” (Donnelly, Atlantis, p. 164. Twenty-fourth Ed.)