In religious rites, the Moon served a dual purpose. Personified as a female Goddess for exoteric purposes, or as a male God in allegory and symbol, in Occult Philosophy our satellite was regarded as a sexless Potency to be well studied, because it was to be dreaded. With the initiated Âryans, Chaldeans, Greeks and Romans, Soma, Sin, Artemis Soteira (the hermaphrodite Apollo, whose attribute is the lyre, and the bearded Diana of the bow and arrow), Deus Lunus, and especially Osiris-Lunus and Thot-Lunus,[639] were the Occult potencies of the Moon. But whether male or female, whether Thot or Minerva, Soma or Astoreth, the Moon is the Occult Mystery of Mysteries, and more a symbol of evil than of good. Her seven phases, in the original Esoteric division, are divided into three astronomical phenomena and four purely psychic phases. That the Moon was not always reverenced is shown in the Mysteries, in which the death of the Moon-God—the three phases of gradual waning and final disappearance—was allegorized by the Moon standing for the Genius of Evil that, for the time, triumphs over the Light and Life-giving God, the Sun; and all the skill and learning of the ancient Hierophants in Magic were required to turn this triumph into a defeat.
It was the most ancient worship of all, that of the Third Race of our Round, the Hermaphrodites, in which the male Moon became sacred, when, after the so-called Fall, the sexes had become separated. Deus Lunus then became an androgyne, male and female in turn; to finally serve, for purposes of sorcery, as a dual power for the Fourth Root Race, the Atlanteans. With the Fifth, our own Race, the Lunar-solar worship divided the nations into two distinct, antagonistic camps. It led to events described æons later in the Mahâbhâratan War, which to the [pg 427] Europeans is the fabulous, to the Hindûs and Occultists the historical, strife between the Sûryavanshas and the Indovanshas. Originating in the dual aspect of the Moon, the worship of the female and the male principles respectively, it ended in distinct Solar and Lunar cults. Among the Semitic races, the Sun was for a very long time feminine and the Moon masculine; the latter notion being adopted by them from the Atlantean traditions. The Moon was called the “Lord of the Sun,” Bel-Shemesh, before the Shemesh worship. The ignorance of the incipient reasons for such a distinction, and of Occult principles, led the nations into anthropomorphic idol-worship. During that period which is absent from the Mosaic books, viz., from the exile from Eden to the allegorical Flood, the Jews, with the rest of the Semites, worshipped Dayanisi, דינאישי, the “Ruler of Men,” the “Judge,” or the Sun. Though the Jewish canon and Christianism have made the Sun to become the “Lord God” and “Jehovah” in the Bible, yet the same Bible is full of indiscreet traces of the androgyne Deity, which was Jehovah, the Sun, and Astoreth, the Moon in its female aspect, and quite free from the present metaphorical element given to it. God is a “consuming fire,” appears in, and “is encompassed by fire.” It was not only in vision that Ezekiel saw the Jews “worshipping the Sun.”[640] The Baal of the Israelites—the Shemesh of the Moabites and the Moloch of the Ammonites—was the identical “Sun-Jehovah,” and he is till now the “King of the Host of Heaven,” the Sun, as much as Astoreth was the “Queen of Heaven,” or the Moon. The “Sun of Righteousness” has only now become a metaphorical expression. But the religion of every ancient nation had been primarily based upon the Occult manifestations of a purely abstract Force or Principle now called “God.” The very establishment of such worship shows, in its details and rites, that the philosophers who evolved such systems of Nature, subjective and objective, possessed profound knowledge, and were acquainted with many facts of a scientific nature. For besides being purely Occult, the rites of Lunar worship were based, as just shown, upon a knowledge of Physiology—quite a modern science with us—Psychology, sacred Mathematics, Geometry and Metrology, in their right applications to symbols and figures, which are but glyphs recording observed natural and scientific facts; in short upon a most minute and profound knowledge of Nature. As we have just said, lunar magnetism generates life, preserves and destroys it; and Soma embodies [pg 428] the triple power of the Trimûrti, though it remains unrecognized by the profane to this day. The allegory that makes Soma, the Moon, produced by the Churning of the Ocean of Life (Space) by the Gods in another Manvantara, that is, in the pre-genetic day of our Planetary System, and the myth, which represents “the Rishis milking the Earth, whose calf was Soma, the Moon,” have a deep cosmographical meaning; for it is neither our Earth which is milked, nor was the Moon which we know the calf.[641] Had our wise men of Science known as much of the mysteries of Nature as the ancient Âryans did, they would surely never have imagined that the Moon was projected from the Earth. Once more, the oldest of permutations in Theogony, the Son becoming his own Father and the Mother generated by the Son, has to be remembered and taken into consideration if the symbolical language of the Ancients is to be understood by us. Otherwise mythology will be ever haunting the Orientalists as simply “the disease which springs up at a peculiar stage of human culture!”—as Renouf gravely observes.
The Ancients taught the auto-generation, so to speak, of the Gods: the One Divine Essence, unmanifested, perpetually begetting a Second-Self, manifested, which Second-Self, androgynous in its nature, gives birth, in an immaculate way, to everything macrocosmical and microcosmical in this Universe. This was shown in the Circle and the Diameter, or the Sacred Ten (10), a few pages back.
But our Orientalists, notwithstanding their extreme desire to discover one homogeneous Element in Nature, will not see it. Cramped in their researches by such ignorance, the Âryanists and Egyptologists are constantly led astray from truth in their speculations. Thus, de Rougé is unable to understand, in the text which he translates, the meaning of Ammon-Ra saying to King Amenophes, who is supposed to be Memnon: “Thou art my Son, I have begotten thee.” And, finding the same idea in many a text and under various forms, this very Christian Orientalist is finally compelled to exclaim:
For this idea to have entered the mind of a hierogrammatist, there must have been in their religion a more or less defined doctrine, indicating as a possible fact that might come to pass, a divine and immaculate incarnation under a human form.
Precisely. But why throw the explanation on to an impossible prophecy, when the whole secret is explained by the later religion copying the earlier?
This doctrine was universal, nor was it the mind of any one hierogrammatist that evolved it; for the Indian Avatâras are a proof to the contrary. After which, having come “to realize more clearly”[642] what the “Divine Father and Son” were with the Egyptians, de Rougé still fails to account for, and to perceive what were the functions attributed to, the feminine Principle in that primordial generation. He does not find it in the Goddess Neïth, of Saïs. Yet he quotes the sentence of the Commander to Cambyses, when introducing that king into the Saïtic temple: “I made known to his Majesty the dignity of Saïs, which is the abode of Neïth, the great [female] producer, genitrix of the Sun, who is the first-born, and who is not begotten, but only brought forth”—and hence is the fruit of an Immaculate Mother.
How much more grandiose, philosophical and poetical—for whoever is able to understand and appreciate it—is the real distinction made between the Immaculate Virgin of the ancient Pagans and the modern Papal conception. With the former, the ever-youthful Mother Nature, the antitype of her prototypes, the Sun and Moon, generates and brings forth her “mind-born” Son, the Universe. The Sun and Moon, as male-female deities, fructify the Earth, the microcosmical Mother, and the latter conceives and brings forth, in her turn. With the Christians, the “First-born” (primogenitus) is indeed generated, i.e., begotten (genitus, non factus), and positively conceived and brought forth: “Virgo pariet,” explains the Latin Church. Thus does that Church drag down the noble spiritual ideal of the Virgin Mary to the earth, and, making her “of the earth earthy,” degrades the ideal she portrays to the lowest of the anthropomorphic Goddesses of the rabble.
Truly, Neïth, Isis, Diana, etc., by whatever name she was called, was “a demiurgical Goddess, at once visible and invisible, having her place in Heaven, and helping on the generation of species”—the Moon, in short. Her occult aspects and powers are numberless, and, in one of them, the Moon becomes with the Egyptians Hathor, another aspect of Isis,[643] and both of these Goddesses are shown suckling Horus. Behold in the Egyptian Hall of the British Museum, Hathor worshipped by Pharaoh [pg 430] Thotmes, who stands between her and the Lord of Heavens. The monolith was taken from Karnac. The same Goddess has the following legend inscribed on her throne: “The Divine Mother and Lady, or Queen of Heaven”; also the “Morning Star,” and the “Light of the Sea”—Stella Matutina and Lux Maris. All the Lunar Goddesses had a dual aspect; one divine, the other infernal. All were the Virgin Mothers of an immaculately born Son—the Sun. Raoul Rochette shows the Moon-Goddess of the Athenians, Pallas, or Cybele, Minerva, or again Diana, holding her child-son on her lap, invoked in her festivals as Μονογενὴς θεοῦ, the “One Mother of God,” sitting on a lion, and surrounded by twelve personages; in whom the Occultist recognizes the twelve great Gods, and the pious Christian Orientalist the Apostles, or rather the Grecian Pagan prophecy thereof.
They are both right, for the Immaculate Goddess of the Latin Church is a faithful copy of the older Pagan Goddesses; the number of the Apostles is that of the twelve Tribes, and the latter are a personification of the twelve great Gods, and of the twelve Signs of the Zodiac. Almost every detail in the Christian dogma is borrowed from the Heathens. Semele, the Wife of Jupiter and Mother of Bacchus, the Sun, is, according to Nonnus, also “carried,” or made to ascend to Heaven after her death, where she presides between Mars and Venus, under the name of the “Queen of the World,” or the Universe, πανβασίλεια; “at the name of which,” as at the names of Hathor, Hecate, and other infernal Goddesses, “all the demons tremble.”[644]