Thus Vâch, Shekinah, or the “Music of the Spheres” of Pythagoras, are one, if we take for our example instances in the three most (apparently) dissimilar religious philosophies in the world, the Hindû, the Greek and the Chaldean Hebrew. These personations and allegories may be viewed under four chief and three lesser aspects, or seven in all, as in Esotericism. The Parâ form is the ever subjective and latent Light and Sound, which exist eternally in the bosom of the Incognizable; when transferred into the ideation of the Logos, or its latent Light, it is called Pasyantî, and when it becomes that Light expressed, it is Madhyamâ.
Now the Kabalah gives the definition thus:
There are three kinds of Light, and that [the fourth] which interpenetrates the others; (1) the clear and the penetrating, the objective Light, (2) the reflected Light, and (3) the abstract Light.
The ten Sephiroth, the Three and the Seven, are called in the Kabalah the Ten Words, dbrim (Dabarim), the Numbers and the Emanations of the Heavenly Light, which is both Adam Kadmon and Sephira, Prajâpati-Vâch, or Brahmâ. Light, Sound, Number, are the three factors of creation in the Kabalah. Parabrahman cannot be known except through the luminous Point, the Logos, which knows not Parabrahman but only Mûlaprakriti. Similarly Adam Kadmon knew only Shekinah, though he was the Vehicle of Ain Suph. And, as Adam Kadmon, he is, in the Esoteric interpretation, the total of the Number Ten, the Sephiroth, himself being a Trinity, or the three attributes of the Incognizable Deity in One.[702] “When the Heavenly [pg 467] Man (or Logos) first assumed the form of the Crown[703] [Kether] and identified himself with Sephira, he caused Seven splendid Lights to emanate from it [the Crown],” which made in their totality Ten; so Brahmâ-Prajâpati, once he became separated from, yet identical with Vâch, caused the seven Rishis, the seven Manus or Prajâpatis, to issue from that Crown. In exotericism one will always find 10 and 7, of either Sephira or Prajâpati; in esoteric rendering always 3 and 7, which yield also 10. Only when divided, in the manifested sphere, into 3 and 7, they form [circle with vertical line], the androgyne, and [circle containing an X], or the figure X manifested and differentiated.
This will help the student to understand why Pythagoras esteemed the Deity, the Logos, to be the Centre of Unity and Source of Harmony. We say this Deity was the Logos, not the Monad that dwelleth in Solitude and Silence, because Pythagoras taught that Unity being indivisible is no number. And this is also why it was required of the candidate, who applied for admittance into his school, that he should have already studied as a preliminary step, the sciences of Arithmetic, Astronomy, Geometry and Music, which were held to be the four divisions of Mathematics.[704] Again, this explains why the Pythagoreans asserted that the doctrine of Numbers, the chief of all in Esotericism, had been revealed to man by the Celestial Deities; that the World had been called forth out of Chaos by Sound, or Harmony, and constructed according to the principles of musical proportion; that the seven planets which rule the destiny of mortals have a harmonious motion and, as Censorinus says:
Intervals corresponding to musical diastemes, rendering various sounds, so perfectly consonant, that they produce the sweetest melody, which is inaudible to us, only by reason of the greatness of the sound, which our ears are incapable of receiving.
In the Pythagorean Theogony, the Hierarchies of the Heavenly Host and Gods were numbered, and also expressed numerically. Pythagoras had studied Esoteric Science in India; therefore we find his pupils saying:
The Monad [the manifested One] is the principle of all things. From the Monad and the indeterminate Duad (Chaos), Numbers; from Numbers, Points; from Points, Lines; from Lines, Superficies; from Superficies, Solids; from these, Solid Bodies, [pg 468]whose elements are four, Fire, Water, Air, Earth; of all which transmuted [correlated], and totally changed, the World consists.[705]
And this, if it does not unriddle the mystery altogether, may at any rate lift a corner of the veil off those wondrous allegories that have been thrown over Vâch, the most mysterious of all the Brâhmanical Goddesses; she who is termed “the melodious Cow who milked forth sustenance and Water”—the Earth with all her mystic powers; and again she “who yields us nourishment and sustenance”—the physical Earth. Isis is also mystic Nature and also Earth; and her cow's horns identify her with Vâch, who, after being recognized in her highest form as Parâ, becomes, at the lower or material end of creation, Vaikharî. Hence she is mystic, though physical, Nature, with all her magic ways and properties.
Again, as Goddess of Speech and of Sound, and a permutation of Aditi, she is Chaos, in one sense. At any rate, she is the “Mother of the Gods,” and it is from Brahmâ, Îshvara or the Logos, and Vâch, as from Adam Kadmon and Sephira, that the real manifested Theogony has to start. Beyond, all is Darkness and abstract speculation. With the Dhyân Chohans or the Gods, the Seers, the Prophets and the Adepts in general are on firm ground. Whether as Aditi, or the Divine Sophia of the Greek Gnostics, she is the mother of the Seven Sons, the Angels of the Face, of the Deep, or the Great Green One of the Book of the Dead. Says the Book of Dzyan, or Real Knowledge, obtained through meditation: