An opinion which with us amounts to certitude, demonstrated by an inductive method of our own, which we are afraid will be but little appreciated by the orthodox methods of modern science, is based on what will appear to the latter merely circumstantial evidence. For years we have repeatedly noticed that the same esoteric truths were expressed in identical symbols and allegories in countries between which there had never been traced any historical affiliation. We have found the Jewish Kabala and the Bible repeating the Babylonian “myths,”[858] and the Oriental and Chaldean allegories, given in form and substance in the oldest manuscripts of the Siamese Talapoin (monks), and in the popular but oldest traditions of Ceylon.
In the latter place we have an old and valued acquaintance whom we have also met in other parts of the globe, a Pali scholar, and a native Cingalese, who has in his possession a curious palm leaf, to which, by chemical processes, a timeproof durability has been given, and an enormous conch, or rather one-half of a conch—for it has been split in two. On the leaf we saw the representation of a giant of Ceylonian antiquity and fame, blind, and pulling down—with his outstretched arms, which are embracing the four central pillars of a pagoda—the whole temple on a crowd of armed enemies. His hair is long and reaches nearly to the ground. We were informed by the possessor of this curious relic, that the blind giant was “Somona, the Little;” so called in contradistinction with Somona-Kadom, the Siamese saviour. Moreover, the Pali legend, in its important particulars, corresponds with that of the biblical Samson.
The shell bore upon its pearly surface a pictorial engraving, divided in two compartments, and the workmanship was far more artistic, as to conception and execution, than the crucifixes and other religious trinkets carved out of the same material in our days, at Jaffa and Jerusalem. In the first panel is represented Siva, with all his Hindu attributes, sacrificing his son—whether the “only-begotten,” or one of many, we never stopped to inquire. The victim is laid on a funeral pile, and the father is hovering in the air over him, with an uplifted weapon ready to strike; but the god’s face is turned toward a jungle in which a rhinoceros has deeply buried its horn in a huge tree and is unable to extricate it. The adjoining panel, or division, represents the same rhinoceros on the pile with the weapon plunged in its side, and the intended victim—Siva’s son—free, and helping the god to kindle the fire upon the sacrificial altar.
Now, we have but to remember that Siva and the Palentinian Baal, or Moloch, and Saturn are identical; that Abraham is held until the present day by the Mahometan Arabs as Saturn in the Kaaba;[859] that Abraham and Israel were names of Saturn;[860] and that Sanchoniathon tells us that Saturn offered his only-begotten son as a sacrifice to his father Ouranos, and even circumcised himself and forced all his household and allies to do the same,[861] to trace unerringly the biblical myth to its source. But this source is neither Phœnician, nor Chaldean; it is purely Indian, and the original of it may be found in the Maha-Bharata. But, whether Brahmanical or Buddhistical, it must certainly be much older than the Jewish Pentateuch, as compiled by Ezra after the Babylonian captivity, and revised by the Rabbis of the Great Synagogue.
Therefore, we are bold enough to maintain our assertion against the opinion of many men of learning, whom, nevertheless, we consider far more learned than ourselves. Scientific induction is one thing, and knowledge of facts, however unscientific they may seem at first, is another. But science has discovered enough to inform us that Sanscrit originals, of Nepaul, were translated by Buddhistic missionaries into nearly every Asiatic language. Likewise Pali manuscripts were translated into Siamese, and carried to Burmah and Siam; it is easy, therefore, to account for the same religious legends and myths circulating in all these countries. But Manetho tells us also of Pali shepherds who emigrated westward; and when we find some of the oldest Ceylonic traditions in the Chaldean Kabala and Jewish Bible, we must think that either Chaldeans or Babylonians had been in Ceylon or India, or the ancient Pali had the same traditions as the Akkadians, whose origin is so uncertain. Suppose even Rawlinson to be right, and that the Akkadians did come from Armenia, he did not trace them farther back. As the field is now opened for any kind of hypothesis, we submit that this tribe might as well have come to Armenia from beyond the Indus, following their way in the direction of the Caspian Sea—a part which was also India, once upon a time—and from thence to the Euxine. Or they might have come originally from Ceylon by the same way. It has been found impossible to follow, with any degree of certitude, the wanderings of these nomadic Aryan tribes; hence we are left to judge from inference, and by comparing their esoteric myths. Abraham himself, for all our scientists can know, might have been one of these Pali shepherds who emigrated West. He is shown to have gone with his father, Terah, from “Ur of the Chaldees;” and Sir H. Rawlinson found the Phœnician city of Martu or Marathos mentioned in an inscription at Ur, and shows it to signify the West.
If their language seems in one sense to oppose their identity with the Brahmans of Hindustan, yet there are other reasons which make good our claims that the biblical allegories of Genesis are entirely due to these nomadic tribes. Their name Ak-ad, is of the same class as Ad-Am, Ha-va,[862] or Ed-En—“perhaps,” says Dr. Wilder, “meaning son of Ad, like the sons of Ad in ancient Arabia. In Assyrian, Ak is creator and Ad-ad is Ad, the father.” In Aramean Ad also means one, and Ad-ad the only-one; and in the Kabala Ad-am is the only-begotten, the first emanation of the unseen Creator. Adon was the “Lord” god of Syria and the consort of Adar-gat, or Aster-‘t,’ the Syrian goddess, who was Venus, Isis, Istar, or Mylitta, etc.; and each of these was “mother of all living” the Magna Mater.
Thus, while the first, second, and third chapters of Genesis are but disfigured imitations of other cosmogonies, the fourth chapter, beginning at the sixteenth verse, and the fifth chapter to the end—give purely historical facts; though the latter were never correctly interpreted. They are taken, word for word, from the secret Book of Numbers, of the Great Oriental Kabala. From the birth of Enoch, the appropriated first parent of modern Freemasonry, begins the genealogy of the so-called Turanian, Aryan, and Semitic families, if such they be correctly. Every woman is an euhemerized land or city; every man and patriarch a race, a branch, or a subdivision of a race. The wives of Lamech give the key to the riddle which some good scholar might easily master, even without studying the esoteric sciences. “And Ad-ah bare Jabal: he was the father of such as dwell in tents, and of such as have cattle,” nomadic Aryan race; “ ... and his brother was Jubal; he was the father of all such as handle the harp and organ; ... and Zillah bare Tubal-Cain, an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron,” etc. Every word has a significance; but it is no revelation. It is simply a compilation of the most historical facts, although history is too perplexed upon this point to know how to claim them. It is from the Euxine to Kashmere, and beyond that we must search for the cradle of mankind and the sons of Ad-ah; and leave the particular garden of Ed-en on the Euphrates to the college of the weird astrologers and magi, the Aleim.[863] No wonder that the Northern seer, Swedenborg, advises people to search for the LOST WORD among the hierophants of Tartary, China, and Thibet; for it is there, and only there now, although we find it inscribed on the monuments of the oldest Egyptian dynasties.
The grandiose poetry of the four Vedas; the Books of Hermes; the Chaldean Book of Numbers; the Nazarene Codex; the Kabala of the Tanaïm; the Sepher Jezira; the Book of Wisdom, of Schlomah (Solomon); the secret treatise on Muhta and Badha,[864] attributed by the Buddhist kabalists to Kapila, the founder of the Sankhya system; the Brahmanas;[865] the Stan-gyour,[866] of the Thibetans; all these volumes have the same groundwork. Varying but in allegories they teach the same secret doctrine which, when once thoroughly eliminated, will prove to be the Ultima Thulè of true philosophy, and disclose what is this LOST WORD.
It is useless to expect scientists to find in these works anything of interest except that which is in direct relation to either philology or comparative mythology. Even Max Müller, as soon as he refers to the mysticism and metaphysical philosophy scattered through the old Sanscrit literature, sees in it naught but “theological absurdities” and “fantastic nonsense.”
Speaking of the Brahmanas, all full of mysterious, therefore, as a matter of course, absurd, meanings, we find him saying: “The greater portion of them is simply twaddle, and what is worse, theological twaddle. No person who is not acquainted beforehand with “the place which the Brahmanas fill in the history of the Indian mind, could read more than ten pages without being disgusted.”[867]