—Dr. Henry More: Immortality of the Soule. 1659.
“Knowledge is Power; Ignorance is Imbecility.”—Author of “Art-Magic” Ghost-Land.
The “secret doctrine” has for many centuries been like the symbolical “man of sorrows” of the prophet Isaiah. “Who hath believed our report?” its martyrs have repeated from one generation to another. The doctrine has grown up before its persecutors “as a tender plant and as a root out of a dry ground; it hath no form, nor comeliness ... it is despised and rejected of men; and they hid their faces from it.... They esteemed him not.”
There need be no controversy as to whether this doctrine agrees or not with the iconoclastic tendency of the skeptics of our times. It agrees with truth and that is enough. It would be idle to expect that it would be believed by its detractors and slanderers. But the tenacious vitality it exhibits all over the globe, wherever there are a group of men to quarrel over it, is the best proof that the seed planted by our fathers on “the other side of the flood” was that of a mighty oak, not the spore of a mushroom theology. No lightning of human ridicule can fell to the ground, and no thunderbolts ever forged by the Vulcans of science are powerful enough to blast the trunk, or even scar the branches of this world-tree of Knowledge.
We have but to leave unnoticed their letter that killeth, and catch the subtile spirit of their hidden wisdom, to find concealed in the Books of Hermes—be they the model or the copy of all others—the evidences of a truth and philosophy which we feel must be based on the eternal laws. We instinctively comprehend that, however finite the powers of man, while he is yet embodied, they must be in close kinship with the attributes of an infinite Deity; and we become capable of better appreciating the hidden sense of the gift lavished by the Elohim on H’Adam: “Behold, I have given you everything which is upon the face of all the earth ... subdue it,” and “have dominion” over ALL.
Had the allegories contained in the first chapters of Genesis been better understood, even in their geographical and historical sense, which involve nothing at all esoteric, the claims of its true interpreters, the kabalists, could hardly have been rejected for so long a time. Every student of the Bible must be aware that the first and second chapters of Genesis could not have proceeded from the same pen. They are evidently allegories and parables;[855] for the two narratives of the creation and peopling of our earth diametrically contradict each other in nearly every particular of order, time, place, and methods employed in the so-called creation. In accepting the narratives literally, and as a whole, we lower the dignity of the unknown Deity. We drag him down to the level of humanity, and endow him with the peculiar personality of man, who needs the “cool of the day” to refresh him; who rests from his labors; and is capable of anger, revenge, and even of using precautions against man, “lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life.” (A tacit admission, by the way, on the part of the Deity, that man could do it, if not prevented by sheer force.) But, in recognizing the allegorical coloring of the description of what may be termed historical facts, we find our feet instantly on firm ground.
To begin with—the garden of Eden as a locality is no myth at all; it belongs to those landmarks of history which occasionally disclose to the student that the Bible is not all mere allegory. “Eden, or the Hebrew גן־עדן GAN-EDEN, meaning the park or the garden of Eden, is an archaic name of the country watered by the Euphrates and its many branches, from Asia and Armenia to the Erythraian Sea.”[856] In the Chaldean Book of Numbers, its location is designated in numerals, and in the cipher Rosicrucian manuscript, left by Count St. Germain, it is fully described. In the Assyrian Tablets, it is rendered gan-dunyas. “Behold,” say the אלהים Eloim of Genesis, “the man is become as one of us.” The Eloim may be accepted in one sense for gods or powers, and taken in another one for the Aleim, or priests; the hierophants initiated into the good and the evil of this world; for there was a college of priests called the Aleim, while the head of their caste, or the chief of the hierophants, was known as Java Aleim. Instead of becoming a neophyte, and gradually obtaining his esoteric knowledge through a regular initiation, an Adam, or man, uses his intuitional faculties, and, prompted by the Serpent—Woman and matter—tastes of the Tree of Knowledge—the esoteric or secret doctrine—unlawfully. The priests of Hercules, or Mel-Karth, the “Lord” of the Eden, all wore “coats of skin.” The text says: “And Java Aleim, made for Adam and his wife כתנות עור, CHITONUTH OUR.” The first Hebrew word, chitun, is the Greek χιτων, chiton. It became a Slavonic word by adoption from the Bible, and means a coat, an upper garment.
Though containing the same substratum of esoteric truth as every early cosmogony, the Hebrew Scripture wears on its face the marks of its double origin. Its Genesis is purely a reminiscence of the Babylonian captivity. The names of places, men, and even objects, can be traced from the original text to the Chaldeans and the Akkadians, the progenitors and Aryan instructors of the former. It is strongly contested that the Akkad tribes of Chaldea, Babylonia, and Assyria were in any way cognate with the Brahmans, of Hindustan; but there are more proofs in favor of this opinion than otherwise. The Shemite, or Assyrian, ought, perchance, to have been called the Turanian, and the Mongolians have been denominated Scyths. But if the Akkadians ever existed otherwise than in the imagination of some philologists and ethnologists, they certainly would never have been a Turanian tribe, as some Assyriologists have striven to make us believe. They were simply emigrants on their way to Asia Minor from India, the cradle of humanity, and their sacerdotal adepts tarried to civilize and initiate a barbarian people. Halevy proved the fallacy of the Turanian mania in regard to the Akkadian people, whose very name has been changed a dozen times already; and other scientists have proved that the Babylonian civilization was neither born nor developed in that country. It was imported from India, and the importers were Brahmanical Hindus.
It is the opinion of Professor A. Wilder, that if the Assyrians had been called Turanians and the Mongolians Scyths, then, in such a case the wars of Iran and Turan, Zohak and Jemshid, or Yima, would have been fairly comprehended as the struggle of the old Persians against the endeavors of the Assyrian satraps to conquer them, which ended in the overthrow of Nineveh; “the spider weaving her web in the palace of Afrasiab.”[857]
“The Turanian of Prof. Müller and his school,” adds our correspondent, “was evidently the savage and nomadic Caucasian, out of whom the Hamite or Æthiopian builders come; then the Shemites—perhaps a hybrid of Hamite and Aryan; and lastly the Aryan—Median, Persian, Hindu; and later, the Gothic and Slavic peoples of Europe. He supposes the Celt to have been a hybrid, analogous to the Assyrians—between the Aryan invaders of Europe and the Iberic (probably Æthiopic) population of Europe.” In such a case he must admit the possibility of our assertion that the Akkadians were a tribe of the earliest Hindus. Now, whether they were Brahmans, from the Brahmanic planisphere proper (40° north latitude), or from India (Hindustan), or, again, from the India of Central Asia, we will leave to philologists of future ages to decide.