Another suggestive analogy between the Âryan, or Brâhmanical, and the Egyptian Esotericism. The former call the Pitris the “Lunar Ancestors” of men, and the Egyptians make of the Moon-God, Taht-Esmun, the first human ancestor.
This Moon-God “expressed the Seven nature-powers that were prior to himself, and were summed up in him as his seven souls, of which he was the manifestor as the Eighth One. [Hence the eighth sphere.]... The seven rays of the Chaldean ... Heptakis or Iao, on the Gnostic stones, indicate the same septenary of souls.... The first form of the mystical Seven was seen to be figured in heaven, by the seven large stars of the Great Bear, the constellation assigned by the Egyptians to the Mother of Time, and of the seven Elemental Powers.”[359]
As well known to every Hindû, this same constellation represents in India the Seven Rishis, and is called Riksha, and Chitrashikandinas.
Like alone produces like. The Earth gives Man his body, the Gods (Dhyânis) give him his five inner principles, the psychic Shadow, of which these Gods are often the animating principle. Spirit (Âtman) is one, and indiscrete. It is not in the Tiaou.
For what is the Tiaou? The frequent allusion to it in the Book of the Dead contains a mystery. Tiaou is the path of the Night-Sun, the inferior hemisphere, or the infernal region of the Egyptians, placed by them on the concealed side of the Moon. The human being, in their Esotericism, came out from the Moon—a triple mystery, astronomical, physiological and psychical, at once; he crossed the whole cycle of existence, and then returned to his birth-place, before issuing from it again. Thus the Defunct is shown arriving in the West, receiving his judgment before Osiris, resurrecting as the God Horus, and circling round the sidereal heavens, which is an allegorical assimilation to Ra, the Sun; then having crossed the Noot, the Celestial Abyss, returning once more to Tiaou; an assimilation to Osiris, who, as the God of life [pg 249] and reproduction, inhabits the Moon. Plutarch[360] shows the Egyptians celebrating a festival called “The Ingress of Osiris into the Moon.” In the Ritual,[361] life is promised after death; and the renovation of life is placed under the patronage of Osiris-Lunus, because the Moon was the symbol of life-renewals or reïncarnations, owing to its growth, waning, dying, and reäppearance every month. In the Dankmoe,[362] it is said: “O Osiris-Lunus, that renews to thee thy renewal.” And Sabekh says to Seti I:[363] “Thou renewest thyself as the God Lunus, when a babe.” It is still better explained in a Louvre papyrus:[364] “Couplings and conceptions abound when he [Osiris-Lunus] is seen in heaven on that day.” Says Osiris: “O sole radiant beam of the Moon! I issue from the circulating multitudes [of stars].... Open me the Tiaou, for Osiris N. I will issue by day to do what I have to do amongst the living”[365]—i.e., to produce conceptions.
Osiris was “God manifest in generation,” because the ancients knew, far better than the moderns, the real occult influences of the lunar body upon the mysteries of conception. In the oldest systems we find the Moon always male. Thus Soma, with the Hindûs, is a kind of sidereal Don Juan, a “King,” and the father, albeit illegitimate, of Budha—Wisdom. This relates to Occult Knowledge, a wisdom gathered through a thorough acquaintance with lunar mysteries, including those of sexual generation. And later, when the Moon became connected with the female Goddesses, with Diana, Isis, Artemis, Juno, etc., this connection was also due to a thorough knowledge of physiology and female nature, physical as much as psychic.
If, instead of being taught in Sunday Schools useless lessons from the Bible, the armies of the ragged and poor were taught Astrology—so far, at any rate, as the occult properties of the Moon and its hidden influences on generation are concerned—then, there would be little need to fear increase of the population, or to resort to the questionable literature of the Malthusians for its arrest. For it is the Moon and her conjunctions that regulate conceptions, and every Astrologer in India knows it. During the previous Races, and at least at the beginning of the present one, those who indulged in marital relations during certain lunar phases that made those relations sterile, were regarded as sorcerers [pg 250] and sinners. But now even these sins of old, which arose from the abuse of Occult knowledge, would appear preferable to the crimes of to-day, which are perpetrated because of the complete ignorance of such Occult influences.
But, primarily, the Sun and Moon were the only visible and, by their effects, so to say, tangible, psychic and physiological deities—the Father and the Son—while Space or Air in general, or that expanse of heaven called Noot by the Egyptians, was the concealed Spirit or Breath of the two. The Father and Son were interchangeable in their functions, and worked together harmoniously in their effects upon terrestrial nature and humanity; hence they were regarded as one, though two as personified Entities. They were both males, and both had their distinct though collaborative work in the causative generation of humanity. So much from the astronomical and cosmic standpoints, viewed and expressed in symbolical language, which became in our last races theological and dogmatic. But behind this veil of cosmic and astrological symbols, there were the occult mysteries of anthropography and the primeval genesis of man. And in this, no knowledge of symbols, or even the key to the post-diluvian symbolical language of the Jews, will or can help, save only with reference to that which has been laid down in national scriptures for exoteric uses; the sum of which, however cleverly veiled, was but the smallest portion of the real primitive history of each people, and often, moreover, as in the Hebrew Scriptures, related merely to the terrestrial human, and not to the divine life of that nation. That psychic and spiritual element belonged to the Mysteries and Initiation. There were things never recorded in scrolls, but which, as in Central Asia, were engraved on rocks and in subterranean crypts.
Nevertheless, there was a time when the whole world was “of one lip and of one knowledge,” and man knew more of his origin than he does now; and thus knew that the Sun and Moon, however large a part they may play in the constitution, growth and development of the human body, were not the direct causative agents of his appearance on Earth; for these agents, in truth, are the living and intelligent Powers which the Occultists call Dhyân Chohans.
As to this, a very learned admirer of the Jewish Esotericism tells us that: