The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 of 4 / The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy

by H. P. Blavatsky

Which ever is transformed, yet still the same,

And warms not, but illumes....

stands in closer relations to Earth than any other sidereal orb. The Sun is the Giver of Life to the whole Planetary System; the Moon is the Giver of Life to our Globe; and the early races understood and knew it, even in their infancy. She is the Queen, and she is the King. She was King Soma before she became transformed into Phœbe and the chaste Diana. She is preëminently the Deity of the Christians, through the Mosaic and Kabalistic Jews, though the civilized world may have remained ignorant of the fact for long ages; in fact, ever since the last initiated Father of the Church died, carrying with him into his grave the secrets of the Pagan Temples. For such Fathers as Origen or Clemens Alexandrinus, the Moon was Jehovah's living symbol; the Giver of Life and the Giver of Death, the Disposer of Being—in our World. For, if Artemis was Luna in Heaven, and, with the Greeks, Diana on Earth, who presided over child-birth and life; [pg 416] with the Egyptians, she was Hekat (Hecate) in Hell, the Goddess of Death, who ruled over magic and enchantments. More than this; as the personified Moon, whose phenomena are triadic, Diana-Hecate-Luna is the three in one. For she is Diva triformis, tergemina, triceps, three heads on one neck,[623] like Brahmâ-Vishnu-Shiva. Hence she is the prototype of our Trinity, which has not always been entirely male. The number seven, so prominent in the Bible, so sacred in the seventh day, or Sabbath, came to the Jews from antiquity, deriving its origin from the four-fold number 7 contained in the 28 days of the lunar month, each septenary portion thereof being typified by one quarter of the Moon.

It is worth the trouble of presenting, in this work, a bird's-eye view of the origin and development of the lunar myth and worship, in historical antiquity, on our side of the globe. Its earlier origin is untraceable by exact Science, which rejects all tradition; while for Theology, which, under the guidance of the crafty Popes, has put a brand on every fragment of literature that does not bear the imprimatur of the Church of Rome, its archaic history is a sealed book. Whether the Egyptian or the Âryan Hindû religious philosophy is the more ancient—the Secret Doctrine says it is the latter—does not much matter, in this instance, as the Lunar and Solar “worship” are the most ancient in the world. Both have survived, and prevail to this day throughout the whole world; with some openly, with others—as, for instance, in Christian symbology—secretly. The cat, a lunar symbol, was sacred to Isis, who was the Moon in one sense, just as Osiris was the Sun, and is often seen on the top of the Sistrum in the hand of the Goddess. This animal was held in great veneration in the city of Bubastis, which went into deep mourning on the death of the sacred cats, because Isis, as the Moon, was particularly worshipped in that city of mysteries. The astronomical symbolism connected with it has already been given in Section I, and no one has better described it than Mr. Gerald Massey, in his Lectures and in The Natural Genesis. The eye of the cat, it is said, seems to follow the lunar phases in their growth and decline, and its orbs shine like two stars in the darkness of night. Hence the mythological allegory which shows Diana hiding in the Moon, under the shape of a cat, when she was seeking, in company with other Deities, to escape the pursuit of Typhon, as related in the [pg 417] Metamorphoses of Ovid. The Moon, in Egypt, was both the “Eye of Horns” and the “Eye of Osiris,” the Sun.

The same with the Cynocephalus. The dog-headed ape was a glyph to symbolize the Sun and Moon, in turn, though the Cynocephalus is really more a Hermetic than a religious symbol. For it is the hieroglyph of Mercury, the planet, and of the Mercury of the Alchemical philosophers, who say that:

Mercury has to be ever near Isis, as her minister, for without Mercury neither Isis nor Osiris can accomplish anything in the Great Work.

The Cynocephalus, whenever represented with the caduceus, the crescent, or the lotus, is a glyph of the “philosophical” Mercury; but when seen with a reed, or a roll of parchment, he stands for Hermes, the secretary and adviser of Isis, as Hanumâna filled the same office with Râma.

Though the regular Sun-Worshippers, the Parsîs, are few, yet not only is the bulk of the Hindû mythology and history based upon, and interblended with, these two worships, but so is even the Christian religion itself. From their origin down to our modern day, it has coloured the theologies of both the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches. Indeed, the difference between the Aryan Hindû and the Âryan European faiths is very small, if only the fundamental ideas of both are taken into consideration. Hindûs are proud of calling themselves Sûryavanshas and Chandravanshas, of the Solar and Lunar Dynasties. The Christians pretend to regard this as idolatry, and yet they adhere to a religion entirely based upon Solar and Lunar worship. It is vain and useless for the Protestants to exclaim against the Roman Catholics for their “Mariolatry,” based on the ancient cult of lunar Goddesses, when they themselves worship Jehovah, preëminently a lunar God; and when both Churches have accepted in their theologies the Sun-Christ and the Lunar Trinity.

What is known of Chaldean Moon-Worship, of the Babylonian God, Sin, called by the Greeks Deus Lunus, is very little; and that little is apt to mislead the profane student, who fails to grasp the esoteric significance of the symbols. As popularly known to the ancient profane philosophers and writers—for those who were initiated were pledged to silence—the Chaldeans were the worshippers of the Moon under her, and his, various names, just as were the Jews, who came after them.

In the unpublished MS. on the Art-Speech, already mentioned, [pg 418] giving a key to the formation of the ancient symbolical language, a logical raison d'être is brought forward for this double worship. It is written by a wonderfully well-informed and acute scholar and Mystic, who gives it in the comprehensive form of a hypothesis. The latter, however, forcibly becomes a proven fact in the history of religious evolution in human thought, to anyone who has ever had a glimpse into the secret of ancient symbology. Thus, he says: