There is an Eternal Cyclic Law of Re-births, and the series is headed at every new Manvantaric Dawn by those who have enjoyed their rest from reïncarnations in previous Kalpas for incalculable Æons—by the highest and the earliest Nirvânîs. It was the turn of these “Gods” to incarnate in the present Manvantara; hence their presence on Earth, and the ensuing allegories; hence, also, the perversion of the original meaning.[540] The Gods who had “fallen into generation,” whose mission it was to complete Divine Man, are found represented later on as Demons, Evil Spirits, and Fiends, at feud and war with Gods, or the [pg 243] irresponsible agents of the one Eternal Law. But no conception of such creatures as the Devils and the Satan of the Christian, Jewish, and Mahommedan religions was ever intended by these thousand and one Âryan allegories.[541]
The true Esoteric view about “Satan,” the opinion held on this subject by the whole of philosophic antiquity, is admirably brought out in an Appendix, entitled “The Secret of Satan,” to the second edition of Dr. A. Kingsford's Perfect Way.[542] No better and clearer indication of the truth could be offered to the intelligent reader, and it is therefore quoted here at some length:
1. And on the seventh day [seventh creation of the Hindûs],[543] there went forth from the presence of God a mighty Angel, full of wrath and consuming, and God gave him the dominion of the outermost sphere.[544]
2. Eternity brought forth Time; the Boundless gave birth to Limit; Being descended into generation.[545]
4. Among the Gods is none like unto him, into whose hands are committed the kingdoms, the power and the glory of the worlds:
5. Thrones and empires, the dynasties of kings,[546] the fall of nations, the birth of churches, the triumphs of Time.
For, as is said in Hermes:
20. Satan is the door-keeper of the Temple of the King; he standeth in Solomon's porch; he holdeth the Keys of the Sanctuary;
21. That no man may enter therein save the anointed, having the arcanum of Hermes.
These suggestive and majestic verses had reference, with the ancient Egyptians and other civilized peoples of antiquity, to the creative and [pg 244]generative Light of the Logos—Horus, Brahmâ, Ahura Mazda, etc., as primeval manifestations of the Ever-unmanifested Principle, whether called Ain Suph, Parabrahman, or Zeruâna Akerne, or Boundless Time, Kâla—but the meaning is now degraded in the Kabalah. The “Anointed”—who has the secrets and mysteries of Hermes, or Budha, Wisdom, and who alone is entrusted with the “Keys of the Sanctuary,” the Womb of Nature, in order to fructify it and call to active life and being the whole Kosmos—has become, with the Jews, Jehovah, the “God of Generation” on the Lunar Mountain—Sinai, the Mountain of the Moon (Sin). The “Sanctuary” has become the “Holy of Holies,” and the arcanum has been anthropomorphized, and “phallicized,” and dragged down into Matter, indeed. Hence arose the necessity of making of the “Dragon of Wisdom,” the “Serpent” of Genesis; of the conscious God who needed a body to clothe his too subjective divinity, Satan. But the “innumerable incarnations of Spirit,” and “the ceaseless pulse and current of Desire,”[547] refer, the first, to our doctrine of Karmic and Cyclic Rebirths, the second—to Erôs, not the later God of material, physiological love, but to the Divine Desire in the Gods, as well as in all Nature, to create and give life to Beings. This, the Rays of the one “Dark,” because invisible and incomprehensible, “Flame” could achieve only by themselves descending into Matter. Therefore, as continued in the Appendix: