One is the Spirit of the living God, blessed be his Name, who liveth for ever! Voice, Spirit, and Word, this is the Holy Spirit.[730]
And this is the Kabalistic abstract Trinity, so unceremoniously anthropomorphized by the Fathers. From this triple One emanated the whole Kosmos. First from One emanated number Two, or Air, the creative element; and then number Three, Water, proceeded from the Air; Ether or Fire completes the mystic Four, the Arba-il. In the Eastern doctrine, Fire is the first Element—Ether, synthesizing the whole, since it contains all of them.
In the Vishnu Purâna, the whole seven periods are given; and the progressive Evolution of the “Spirit-Soul,” and of the seven Forms of Matter, or Principles, is shown. It is impossible to enumerate them in this work. The reader is asked to peruse one of the Purânas.
R. Yehudah began, it is written: “Elohim said: Let there be a firmament, in the midst of waters.” Come, see! At the time that the Holy ... created the world, He [they] created 7 heavens Above. He created 7 earths Below, 7 seas, 7 days, 7 rivers, 7 weeks, 7 years, 7 times, and 7,000 years that the world has been, ... the seventh of all (the millennium).... So here are 7 earths Below, they are all inhabited except those which are above, and those which are below. And ... between each earth, a heaven (firmament) is spread out between each other.... And there are in them [these earths] creatures who look different one from the other; ... but if you object and say that all the children of the world came out from Adam, it is not so.... And the lower earths, where do they come from? They are from the chain of the earth, and from the Heaven above.[731]
Irenæus also is our witness—and a very unwilling one—that the Gnostics taught the same system, veiling very carefully the true esoteric meaning. This “veiling,” however, is identical with that of the Vishnu Purâna and others. Thus Irenæus writes of the Marcosians:
They maintain that first of all the four elements, fire, water, earth and air, were produced after the image of the primary Tetrad above, and that then if we add their operations, namely, heat, cold, moisture and dryness, an exact likeness of the Ogdoad is presented.[732]
Only this “likeness” and the Ogdoad itself is a blind, just as in the seven creations of the Vishnu Purâna, to which two more are added, of which the eighth, termed Anugraha, “possesses both the qualities of goodness and darkness,” a Sânkhyan more than a Purânic idea. For Irenæus says again, that:
They [the Gnostics] had a like eighth creation which was good and bad, divine and human. They affirm that man was formed on the eighth day. Sometimes they affirm that he was made on the sixth day, and at others on the eighth; unless, perchance, they mean that his earthly part was formed on the sixth day and his fleshly part [?] on the eighth day; these two being distinguished by them.[733]
They were so “distinguished,” but not as Irenæus gives it. The Gnostics had a superior, and an inferior Hebdomad in Heaven; and a third terrestrial Hebdomad, on the plane of matter. Iaô, the Mystery God and the Regent of the Moon, as given in Origen's Chart, was the chief of these superior “Seven Heavens,”[734] hence identical with the chief of the Lunar Pitris, that name being given by them to the Lunar Dhyân Chohans. “They affirm that these seven heavens are intelligent, and speak of them as being angels,” writes the same Irenæus; and adds that on this account they termed Iaô Hebdomas, while his mother was called Ogdoas, because, as he explains, “she preserved the number of the first begotten and primary Ogdoad of the Plerôma.”[735]
This “first begotten Ogdoad” was in Theogony the Second Logos, the Manifested, because it was born of the Seven-fold First Logos, hence it is the eighth on this manifested plane; and in Astrolatry, it was the Sun, Mârttânda, the eighth Son of Aditi, whom she rejects while preserving her Seven Sons, the planets. For the Ancients have never regarded the Sun as a planet, but as a central and fixed Star. This, then, is the second Hebdomad born of the Seven-rayed One, Agni, the Sun and what not, only not the seven planets, which are Sûrya's Brothers, not his Sons. With the Gnostics, these Astral Gods were the Sons of Ialdabaoth[736] (from ilda, child, and baoth egg), the Son of Sophia Achamôth, the daughter of Sophia or Wisdom, whose region [pg 484] is the Plerôma. Ialdabaoth produces from himself these six stellar Spirits: Iaô (Jehovah), Sabaôth, Adoneus, Eloæus, Oreus, Astaphæus,[737] and it is they who are the second, or inferior Hebdomad. As to the third, it is composed of the seven primeval men, the shadows of the Lunar Gods, projected by the first Hebdomad. In this the Gnostics did not, as seen, differ much from the Esoteric Doctrine, except that they veiled it. As to the charge made by Irenæus, who was evidently ignorant of the true tenets of the “Heretics,” with regard to man being created on the sixth day, and man being created on the eighth, this relates to the mysteries of the inner man. It will become comprehensible to the reader only after he has read Volume II, and understood well the Anthropogenesis of the Esoteric Doctrine.