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

by H. P. Blavatsky

I open to the chief of An (Heliopolis). I am Toom. I cross the water spilt by Thot-Hapi, the lord of the horizon, and am the divider of the earth [Fohat divides Space and, with his Sons, the Earth into seven zones]....

I cross the heavens; I am the two Lions. I am Ra, I am Aam, I eat my heir.[1155].... I glide on the soil of the field of Aanroo,[1156] given me by the master of limitless eternity. I am a germ of eternity. I am Toom, to whom eternity is accorded.

The very words used by Fohat in the XIth Book, and the very titles given him. In the Egyptian Papyri the whole Cosmogony of the Secret Doctrine is found scattered about in isolated sentences, even in the Book of the Dead. Number seven is quite as much insisted upon and emphasized therein as in the Book of Dzyan. “The Great Water [the Deep or Chaos] is said to be seven cubits deep”—“cubits” standing here of course for divisions, zones, and principles. Therein, “in the great Mother, all the Gods, and the Seven Great Ones are born.” Both Fohat and Toom are addressed as the “Great Ones of the Seven Magic Forces,” who, “conquer the Serpent Apap” or Matter.[1157]

No student of Occultism, however, ought to be betrayed, by the usual phraseology used in the translations of Hermetic Works, into believing that the ancient Egyptians or Greeks spoke of, and referred, monk-like, at every moment in conversation, to a Supreme Being, God, [pg 738] the “One Father and Creator of all,” etc., in the way found on every page of such translations. No such thing indeed; and those texts are not the original Egyptian texts. They are Greek compilations, the earliest of which does not go beyond the early period of Neo-Platonism. No Hermetic work written by Egyptians—as we may see by the Book of the Dead—would speak of the one universal God of the Monotheistic systems; the one Absolute Cause of all, was as unnameable and unpronounceable in the mind of the ancient Philosopher of Egypt, as it is for ever Unknowable in the conception of Mr. Herbert Spencer. As for the Egyptian in general, as M. Maspero well remarks, whenever he

Arrived at the notion of divine Unity, the God One was never “God” simply. M. Lepage-Renouf very justly observed that the word Nouter, Nouti, “God” had never ceased to be a generic name to become a personal one.

Every God was the “one living and unique God” with them. Their

Monotheism was purely geographical. If the Egyptian of Memphis proclaimed the Unity of Phtah to the exclusion of Ammon, the Thebeian Egyptian proclaimed the unity of Ammon to the exclusion of Phtah [as we now see done in India in the case of the Shaivas and the Vaishnavas]. Ra, the “One God” at Heliopolis is not the same as Osiris, the “One God” at Abydos, and can be worshipped side by side with him, without being absorbed by him. The one God is but the God of the nome or the city, Nouter Nouti, and does not exclude the existence of the one God of the neighbouring town or nome. In short, whenever we are speaking of Egyptian Monotheism, we ought to speak of the Gods One of Egypt, and not of the One God.[1158]

It is by this feature, preëminently Egyptian, that the authenticity of the various so-called Hermetic Books, ought to be tested; and it is totally absent from the Greek fragments known under this name. This proves that a Greek Neo-Platonic, or perhaps a Christian hand, had no small share in the editing of such works. Of course the fundamental Philosophy is there, and in many a place—intact. But the style has been altered and smoothed in a monotheistic direction, as much, if not more than that of the Hebrew Genesis in its Greek and Latin translations. They may be Hermetic works, but not works written by either of the two Hermes—or rather, by Thot Hermes, the directing Intelligence of the Universe[1159] or by Thot his terrestrial incarnation called Trismegistus, of the Rosetta stone.

But all is doubt, negation, iconoclasm and brutal indifference, in our [pg 739] age of a hundred “isms” and no religion. Every idol is broken save the Golden Calf.

Unfortunately, no nation or nations can escape their Karmic fate, any more than can units and individuals. History itself is dealt with by the so-called historians as unscrupulously as legendary lore. For this, Augustin Thierry has made the amende honorable, if one may believe his biographers. He deplored the erroneous principle that made all the would-be historiographers lose their way, and each presume to correct tradition, “that vox populi which nine times out of ten is vox Dei”; and he finally admitted that in legend alone rests real history; for he adds: