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

by H. P. Blavatsky

One of the first occupations among men, connected with those of actual necessity, would be the perception of time periods,[624] marked on the vaulted arch of the heavens, sprung and rising over the level floor of the horizon, or the plain of still water. These would come to be marked as those of day and night, of the phases of the moon, of its stellar or synodic revolutions, and of the period of the solar year with recurrence of the seasons, and with the application to such periods of the natural measure of day or night, or of the day divided into the light and the dark. It would also be discovered that there was a longest and shortest solar day, and two solar days of equal day and night, within the period of the solar year; and the points in the year of these could be marked with the greatest precision in the starry groups of the heavens or the constellations, subject to that retrograde movement thereof, which in time would require a correction by intercalation, as was the case in the description of the Flood, where correction of 150 days was made for a period of 600 years, during which confusion of landmarks had increased.... This would naturally come to pass with all races in all time; and such knowledge must be taken to have been inherent in the human race, prior to what we call the historic period as during the same.

On this basis, the author seeks for some natural physical function, possessed in common by the human race, and connected with the periodical manifestations, such that “the connection between the two kinds of phenomena ... became fixed in common or popular usage.” He finds it in:

(a) The feminine physiological phenomena every lunar month of 28 days, or 4 weeks of 7 days each, so that 13 occurrences of the period should happen in 364 days, which is the solar week-year of 52 weeks of 7 days each. (b) The quickening of the fœtus is marked by a period of 126 days, or 18 weeks of 7 days each. (c) That period which is called “the period of viability” is one of 210 days, or 30 weeks of 7 days each. (d) The period of parturition is accomplished in 280 days, or a period of 40 weeks of 7 days each, or 10 lunar months of 28 days each, or of 9 calendar months of 31 days each, counting on the royal arch of heavens for the measure of the period of traverse from the darkness of the womb to the light and glory of conscious existence, that continuing inscrutable mystery and miracle.... Thus [pg 419]the observed periods of time marking the workings of the birth function would naturally become a basis of astronomical calculation.... We may almost affirm ... that this was the mode of reckoning among all nations, either independently, or intermediately and indirectly by tuition. It was the mode with the Hebrews, for even to-day they calculate the calendar by means of the 354 and 355 of the lunar year, and we possess a special evidence that it was the mode with the ancient Egyptians, as to which this is the proof:

The basic idea underlying the religious philosophy of the Hebrews was that God contained all things within himself,[625] and that man was his image, man including woman.... The place of the man and woman with the Hebrews was among the Egyptians occupied by the bull and the cow, sacred to Osiris and Isis,[626] who were represented, respectively, by a man having a bull's head, and a woman having the head of a cow; which symbols were worshipped. Notoriously Osiris was the Sun and the river Nile, the tropical year of 365 days, which number is the value of the word Neilos, and the bull, as he was also the principle of fire and of life-giving force; while Isis was the moon, the bed of the river Nile, or the Mother Earth, for the parturient energies of which water was a necessity, the lunar year of 354-364 days, the time-maker of the periods of gestation, and the cow marked by, or with, the crescent new moon....

But the use of the cow of the Egyptians for the woman of the Hebrews was not intended as of any radical difference of signification, but a concurrence in the teaching, intended, and merely as the substitution of a symbol of common import, which was this, viz., the period of parturition with the cow and the woman was held to be the same, or 280 days, or ten lunar months of 4 weeks each. And in this period consisted the essential value of this animal symbol, whose mark was that of the crescent moon.[627]... These parturient and natural periods are found to have been subjects of symbolism all over the world. They were thus used by the Hindûs, and are found to be most plainly set forth by the ancient Americans, in the Richardson and Gest tablets, in the Palenque Cross and elsewhere, and manifestly lay at the base of the formation of the calendar forms of the Mayas of Yucatan, the Hindûs, the Assyrians, and the ancient Babylonians, as well as the Egyptians and old Hebrews. The natural symbols ... would be either the phallus or the phallus and yoni, ... male and female. Indeed, the words translated by the generalizing terms male and female, in the 27th verse of the 1st chapter of Genesis are ... sacr and n'cabvah or, literally, phallus and yoni.[628] While the representation of the phallic emblems would barely indicate the genital members of the human body, when their functions and the development of the seed-vesicles emanating from them were considered, there would come into indication a mode of measures of lunar time, and through lunar, of solar time.

This is the physiological or anthropological key to the Moon symbol. [pg 420] The key that opens the mystery of Theogony, or the evolution of the manvantaric Gods, is more complicated, and has nothing phallic in it. There, all is mystical and divine. But the Jews, beyond connecting Jehovah directly with the Moon as a generative God, preferred to ignore the higher Hierarchies, and have made their Patriarchs of some of these zodiacal constellations and planetary Gods, thus euhemerizing the purely theosophical idea and dragging it down to the level of sinful humanity. The MS., from which the above is extracted, explains very clearly to what Hierarchy of Gods Jehovah belonged, and who this Jewish God was; for it shows, in clear language, that which the writer has always insisted upon, namely, that the God with which the Christians have burdened themselves, was no better than the lunar symbol of the reproductive or generative faculty in Nature. They have ever ignored even the Hebrew secret God of the Kabalists, Ain Suph, a conception as grand as Parabrahman in the earliest Kabalistic and mystical ideas. But it is not the Kabalah of Rosenroth that can ever give the true original teachings of Shimeon Ben Yochaï, which were as metaphysical and philosophical as any could be. And how many are there among the students of the Kabalah who know anything of them except in their distorted Latin translations? Let us glance at the idea which led the ancient Jews to adopt a substitute for the Ever-Unknowable, and which has misled the Christians into mistaking the substitute for the reality.

If to these organs [phallus and yoni] as symbols of creative cosmic agencies the idea of ... time periods can be attached, then, indeed, in the construction of Temples as Dwellings of Deity, or of Jehovah, that part designated as the Holy of Holies, or The Most Holy Place, should borrow its title from the recognized sacredness of the generative organs, considered as symbols of measures as well as of creative cause.

With the ancient Wise, there was no name, and no idea, and no symbol, of a First Cause.[629] With the Hebrews, the indirect conception of such was couched in a term of negation of comprehension, viz., Ain Suph, or the Without Bounds. But the symbol of its first comprehensible manifestation was the conception of a circle with its diameter line, to at once carry a geometric, phallic, and astronomic idea; ... for the one takes its birth from the 0, or the circle, without which it could not be, and from the 1, or primal one, spring the 9 digits, and, geometrically, all plane shapes. So in Kabalah this circle, with its diameter line, is the picture of the 10 Sephiroth, or Emanations, composing the Adam Kadmon, or the Archetypal Man, [pg 421]the creative origin of all things.... This idea of connecting the picture of the circle and its diameter line, that is, the number 10, with the signification of the reproductive organs, and the Most Holy Place ... was carried out constructively in the King's Chamber, or Holy of Holies, of the great Pyramid, in the Tabernacle of Moses, and in the Holy of Holies of the Temple of Solomon.... It is the picture of a double womb, for in Hebrew the letter Hé (ה) is at the same time the number 5, and the symbol of the womb, and twice 5 is 10, or the phallic number.

This “double womb” also shows the duality of the idea carried from the highest or spiritual down to the lowest or terrestrial plane; and limited by the Jews to the latter. With them, therefore, the number seven has acquired the most prominent place in their exoteric religion, a cult of external forms and empty rituals; take, for instance, their Sabbath, the seventh day sacred to their Deity, the Moon, symbolical of the generative Jehovah. But, with other nations, the number seven was typical of theogonic evolution, of Cycles, Cosmic Planes, and the Seven Forces and Occult Powers in Kosmos, as a Boundless Whole, whose first upper Triangle was unreachable to the finite intellect of man. While other nations, therefore, busied themselves, in their forcible limitation of Kosmos in Space and Time, only with its septenary manifested plane, the Jews centred this number solely in the Moon, and based all their sacred calculations thereupon. Hence we find the thoughtful author of the MS. just quoted, remarking, in reference to the metrology of the Jews, that:

If 20,612 be multiplied by 4/3, the product will afford a base for the ascertainment of the mean revolution of the moon; and if this product be again multiplied by 4/3, this continued product will afford a base for finding the exact period of the mean solar year, ... this form ... becoming, for the finding of astronomical periods of time, of very great service.