Salutations to thee, O Osiris, elder son of Seb; thou the greatest over the six Gods issued from the Goddess Noo [Primordial Water], thou the great favourite of thy father Ra; Father of Fathers, King of Duration, Master in the Eternity ... who, as soon as these issued from thy Mother's Bosom, gathered all the Crowns and attached the Uræus [serpent or naja][710] on thy head; multiform God, whose name is unknown and who has many names in towns and provinces.
Coming out from the Primordial Water crowned with the Uræus, which is the serpent-emblem of Cosmic Fire, and himself the seventh over the six Primary Gods, issued from Father-Mother, Noo and Noot, the Sky, who can Osiris be, but the chief Prajâpati, the chief Sephira, the chief Amshaspend, Ormazd! That this latter Solar and Cosmic God stood, in the beginning of religious evolution, in the same position as the Archangel, “whose name was secret,” is certain. This Archangel was Michael, the representative on earth of the Hidden Jewish God; in short, it is his “Face” that is said to have gone before the Jews like a “Pillar of Fire.” Burnouf says: “The seven Amshaspends, who are most assuredly our Archangels, designate also the personifications of the Divine Virtues.”[711] And these Archangels, therefore, are as certainly the Saptarshis of the Hindus, though it is next to impossible to class each with its Pagan prototype and parallel, since, as in the case of Osiris, they have all so “many names in towns and provinces.” Some of the most important, however, will be shown in their order.
One thing is thus undeniably proven. The more we study their Hierarchies and find out their identity, the more proofs we acquire that there is not one of the past or present personal Gods, known to us from the earliest days of history, that does not belong to the third stage of cosmic manifestation. In every religion we find the Concealed Deity forming the ground work; then the Ray therefrom, that falls into primordial Cosmic Matter, the first manifestation; then the Androgyne result, the dual Male and Female abstract Force personified, the second stage; this finally separates itself, in the third, into Seven Forces, called the Creative Powers by all the ancient religions, and the Virtues of God by the Christians. The later explanations and abstract metaphysical qualifications have not prevented the Roman and Greek Churches from worshipping these “Virtues” under the personifications and distinct names of the Seven Archangels. In the Book of Druschim,[712] in the Talmud, a distinction between these groups is given which is the correct Kabalistical explanation. It says:
There are three Groups (or Orders) of Sephiroth. 1st. The Sephiroth called the “Divine Attributes” [abstract]. 2nd. The Physical or Sidereal Sephiroth [personal]—one group of seven, the other of ten. 3rd. The metaphysical Sephiroth, or periphrasis of Jehovah, who are the first three Sephiroth [Kether, Chokmah and Binah], the rest of the seven being the (personal) seven Spirits of the Presence [also of the planets].
The same division has to be applied to the primary, secondary and tertiary evolution of Gods in every Theogony, if one wishes to translate the meaning esoterically. We must not confuse the purely metaphysical personifications of the abstract attributes of Deity, with their reflection—the Sidereal Gods. This reflection, however, is in reality the objective expression of the abstraction; living Entities and the models formed on that divine Prototype. Moreover, the three metaphysical Sephiroth, or the “periphrasis of Jehovah,” are not Jehovah. It is the latter himself, with the additional titles of Adonai, Elohim, Sabbaoth, and the numerous names lavished on him, who is the periphrasis of the Shaddai (שדי), the Omnipotent. The name is a circumlocution, indeed, a too abundant figure of Jewish rhetoric, and has always been denounced by the Occultists. To the Jewish Kabalists, and even the Christian Alchemists and Rosicrucians, Jehovah was a convenient screen, unified by the folding of its many panels, and adopted [pg 473] as a substitute; one name of an individual Sephira being as good as another name, for those who had the secret. The Tetragrammaton, the Ineffable, the Sidereal “Sum Total,” was invented for no other purpose than to mislead the profane and to symbolize life and generation.[713] The real secret and unpronounceable Name, the “Word that is no word,” has to be sought in the seven names of the first Seven Emanations, or the “Sons of the Fire,” in the secret Scriptures of all the great nations, and even in the Zohar, the Kabalistic lore of the smallest of all of them, viz., the Jewish. This word, composed of seven letters in every tongue, is found embodied in the architectural remains of every great sacred building in the world; from the Cyclopean remains on Easter Island—part of a Continent buried under the seas nearer 4,000,000 years ago[714] than 20,000—down to the earliest Egyptian pyramids.
We shall have to enter more fully into this subject later on, and to bring practical illustrations to prove the statements made in the text.
For the present it is sufficient to show, by a few instances, the truth of what has been asserted at the beginning of this work, namely, that no Cosmogony, the world over, with the sole exception of the Christian, has ever attributed to the One Highest Cause, the Universal Deific Principle, the immediate creation of our earth, or man, or anything connected with these. This statement holds as well for the Hebrew or Chaldean Kabalah as it does for Genesis, had the latter been ever thoroughly understood and, what is still more important, correctly [pg 474] translated.[715] Everywhere there is either a Logos—a “Light shining in Darkness,” truly—or the Architect of the Worlds is esoterically in the plural number. The Latin Church, paradoxical as ever, while applying the epithet of Creator to Jehovah alone, adopts a whole Kyriel of names for the working Forces of the latter, names which betray the secret. For if the said Forces had nought to do with “Creation” so-called, why call them Elohim (Alhim), a plural word; Divine Workmen and Energies (Ἐνέργειαι), incandescent celestial stones (lapides igniti cœlorum); and especially Supporters of the World (Κοσμοκράτορες), Governors or Rulers of the World (Rectores Mundi), Wheels of the World (Rotæ), Auphanim, Flames and Powers, Sons of God (B'ne Alhim), Vigilant Counsellors, etc.?
It is often asserted, and unjustly, as usual, that China, nearly as old a country as India, had no Cosmogony. It was unknown to Confucius, and the Buddhists extended their Cosmogony without introducing a Personal God,[716] it is complained. The Yi-King, “the very essence of ancient thought and the combined work of the most venerated sages,” fails to show a distinct Cosmogony. Nevertheless, one existed, and a very distinct one. Only as Confucius did not admit of a future life[717] and the Chinese Buddhists reject the idea of One Creator, accepting one Cause and its numberless effects, they are misunderstood by the believers in a Personal God. The “Great Extreme,” as the commencement of “changes” (transmigrations), is the shortest and, perhaps, the most suggestive of all Cosmogonies for those who, like the Confucianists, love virtue for its own sake and try to do good unselfishly without [pg 475] perpetually looking to reward and profit. The “Great Extreme” of Confucius produces “Two Figures.” These Two produce in their turn the “Four Images”; these again the “Eight Symbols.” It is complained that though the Confucianists see in them “heaven, earth and man in miniature,” we can see in them anything we like. No doubt, and so it is with regard to many symbols, especially those of the latest religions. But they who know something of Occult numerals, see in these “Figures” the symbol, however rude, of a harmonious progressive Evolution of Kosmos and its Beings, both Heavenly and Terrestrial. And any one who has studied the numerical evolution in the primeval Cosmogony of Pythagoras—a contemporary of Confucius—can never fail to find in his Triad, Tetraktys and Decad, emerging from the One and solitary Monad, the same idea. Confucius is laughed at by his Christian biographer for “talking of divination,” before and after this passage, and is represented as saying:
The eight symbols determine good and ill fortune, and these lead to great deeds. There are no imitable images greater than heaven and earth. There are no changes greater than the four seasons [meaning North, South, East and West, etc.]. There are no suspended images brighter than the sun and moon. In preparing things for use, there is none greater than the sage. In determining good and ill-luck there is nothing greater than the divining straws and the tortoise.[718]
Therefore, the “divining straws” and the “tortoise,” the “symbolic sets of lines,” and the great sage who looks at them as they become one and two, and two become four, and four become eight, and the other sets “three and six,” are laughed to scorn, only because his wise symbols are misunderstood.