Chaos was called senseless by the Ancients, because—Chaos and Space being synonymous—it represented and contained in itself all the Elements in their rudimentary, undifferentiated State. They made Æther, the fifth Element, the synthesis of the other four; for the Æther of the Greek philosophers was not its Dregs, although indeed they knew more than Science does now of these Dregs (Ether), which are rightly enough supposed to act as an agent for many Forces that manifest on Earth. Their Æther was the Âkâsha of the Hindûs; the Ether accepted in Physics is but one of its sub-divisions, on our plane, the Astral Light of the Kabalists with all its evil as well as its good effects.
Seeing that the Essence of Æther, or the Unseen Space, was considered divine, as being the supposed Veil of Deity, it was regarded as the Medium between this life and the next. The Ancients considered that when the directing active Intelligences—the Gods—retired from any portion of Æther in our Space, or the four realms which they superintend, then that particular region was left in the possession of evil, so called by reason of the absence from it of good.
The existence of Spirit in the common Mediator, the Ether, is denied by Materialism; while Theology makes of it a Personal God. But the Kabalist holds that both are wrong, saying that in Ether, the elements represent only Matter, the blind Cosmic Forces of Nature; while Spirit represents the Intelligence which directs them. The Âryan, Hermetic, Orphic, and Pythagorean cosmogonical doctrines, as well as those of Sanchuniathon and Berosus, are all based upon one irrefutable formula, viz., that Æther and Chaos, or, in the Platonic language, Mind and Matter, were the two primeval and eternal principles of the Universe, utterly independent of anything else. The former was the all-vivifying intellectual principle, while Chaos was a shapeless liquid principle, without “form or sense”; from the union of which two sprang into existence the Universe, or rather the Universal World, the first Androgynous Deity—Chaotic Matter becoming its Body, and Ether its Soul. According to the phraseology of a Fragment of Hermeias: “Chaos, from this union with Spirit, obtaining sense, shone with pleasure, and thus was produced Protogonos the (First-Born) Light.”[510] This is the universal Trinity, based on the metaphysical conceptions of the Ancients, who, reasoning by analogy, made of man, who [pg 367]is a compound of Intellect and Matter, the Microcosm of the Macrocosm, or Great Universe.[511]
“Nature abhors Vacuum” said the Peripatetics, who though Materialists in their way, comprehended perhaps why Democritus, with his instructor Leucippus, taught that the first principles of all things contained in the Universe were Atoms and a Vacuum. The latter means simply latent Force or Deity, which, before its first manifestation—when it became Will, communicating the first impulse to these Atoms—was the great Nothingness, Ain Suph, or No-Thing; and, therefore, to every sense, a Void, or Chaos.
This Chaos, however, became the “Soul of the World,” according to Plato and the Pythagoreans. According to Hindû teaching, Deity, in the shape of Æther or Âkâsha, pervades all things. It was called, therefore, by the Theurgists the “Living Fire,” the “Spirit of Light,” and sometimes “Magnes.” According to Plato, the highest Deity itself built the Universe in the geometrical form of the dodecahedron, and its “First-Begotten” was born of Chaos and Primordial Light—the Central Sun. This First-Born, however, was only the aggregate of the Host of the Builders, the first Constructive Forces, who are called in ancient Cosmogonies, the Ancients, born of the Deep or Chaos, and the First Point. He is the Tetragrammaton, so-called, at the head of the Seven lower Sephiroth. This was also the belief of the Chaldeans. Philo, the Jew, speaking very flippantly of the first instructors of his ancestors, writes as follows:
These Chaldeans were of opinion that the Kosmos, among the things that exist [?], is a single Point, either being itself God [Theos] or that in it is God, comprehending the Soul of all things.[512]
Chaos, Theos, Kosmos are but the three symbols of their synthesis—Space. One can never hope to solve the mystery of this Tetraktys, by holding to the dead-letter even of the old philosophies as now extant. But even in these, Chaos, Theos, Kosmos and Space are identified in all Eternity, as the One Unknown Space, the last word on which will never, perhaps, be known, before our Seventh Round. Nevertheless, the allegories and metaphysical symbols about the primeval and perfect Cube, are remarkable, even in the exoteric Purânas.
There, also, Brahmâ is Theos, evolving out of Chaos, or the Great Deep, the Waters, over which Spirit or Space—the Spirit moving over the face of the future boundless Kosmos—is silently hovering, in the [pg 368] first hour of reäwakening. It is also Vishnu, sleeping on Ananta-Shesha, the great Serpent of Eternity, of which Western Theology, ignorant of the Kabalah, the only key that opens the secrets of the Bible, has made—the Devil. It is the first Triangle or the Pythagorean Triad, the “God of the three Aspects,” before it is transformed, through the perfect quadrature of the Infinite Circle, into the “four-faced” Brahmâ. “Of him who is and yet is not, from Non-Being, the Eternal Cause, is born the Being, Purusha,” says Manu, the legislator.
In the Egyptian mythology, Kneph, the Eternal Unrevealed God, is represented by a snake-emblem of Eternity encircling a water urn, with its head hovering over the waters, which it incubates with its breath. In this case, the Serpent is the Agathodaimôn, the Good Spirit; in its opposite aspect, it is the Kakodaimôn, the Evil Spirit. In the Scandinavian Eddas, the honey-dew, the fruit of the Gods, and of the creative busy Yggdrasil bees, falls during the hours of night, when the atmosphere is impregnated with humidity; and in the Northern mythologies, as the passive principle of creation, it typifies the creation of the Universe out of Water. This dew is the Astral Light in one of its combinations, and possesses creative as well as destructive properties. In the Chaldean legend of Berosus, Oannes or Dagon, the man-fish, instructing the people, shows the infant World created out of Water, and all beings originating from this Prima Materia. Moses teaches that only Earth and Water can bring into existence a Living Soul: and we read in the Scriptures that herbs could not grow until the Eternal caused it to rainupon Earth. In the Mexican Popol Vuh, man is created out of mud or clay (terre glaise), taken from under the Water. Brahmâ creates the great Muni, or first man, seated on his Lotus, only after having called spirits into being, who thus enjoyed over mortals a priority of existence; and he creates him out of Water, Air and Earth. Alchemists claim that the primordial or pre-adamic Earth, when reduced to its first substance, is in its second stage of transformation like clear Water, the first being the Alkahest proper. This primordial substance is said to contain within itself the essence of all that goes to make up man; it contains not only all the elements of his physical being, but even the “breath of life” in a latent state, ready to be awakened. This it derives from the “incubation” of the “Spirit of God”upon the face of the Waters—Chaos. In fact, this substance is Chaos itself. From this it was that Paracelsus claimed to be able to make his Homunculi; and this is why Thales, the great natural philosopher, maintained that Water was the principle of all things in nature.[513]... Job says that dead things are formed from under the Waters, and the inhabitants thereof.[514] In the original text, instead of “dead things,” it is written dead Rephaim, Giants or mighty Primitive Men, from whom Evolution may one day trace our present race.[515]
“In the primordial state of the creation,” says Polier's Mythologie des Indous, “the rudimental Universe, submerged in Water, reposed in the bosom of Vishnu. Sprung from this Chaos and Darkness, Brahmâ, the Architect of the World, poised on a lotus-leaf, floated [moved] upon the waters, unable to discern anything but water and darkness.” Perceiving such a dismal state of things, Brahmâ soliloquizes in consternation: “Who am I? Whence came I?” Then he hears a voice:[516] “Direct your thoughts to Bhagavat.” Brahmâ, rising from his natatory position, seats himself upon the lotus, in an attitude of contemplation, and reflects upon the Eternal, who, pleased with this evidence of piety, disperses the primeval darkness and opens his understanding. “After this Brahmâ issues from the Universal Egg [Infinite Chaos] as Light, for his understanding is now opened, and he sets himself to work. He moves on the eternal Waters, with the Spirit of God within himself; and in his capacity of Mover of the Waters he is Vishnu, or Nârâyana.”