The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 2 of 4 / The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy

by H. P. Blavatsky

As narrated in King's Gnostics and their Remains concerning Ildabaoth, whom several sects regarded as the God of Moses:

Ildabaoth was far from being a pure spirit; ambition and pride dominated in his composition. He therefore resolved to break off all connection with his mother, Achamoth, and to create a world entirely for himself. Aided by his own Six Spirits, he created Man, intending him for the image of his power; but he failed utterly in his work, his Man proving a vast, soulless monster, crawling upon the earth. The Six Spirits were obliged to bring their work again before their father, to be animated: he did so by communicating the ray of Divine Light which he himself had inherited from Achamoth, who by this loss punished him for his pride and self-sufficiency.

Man, thus favoured by Achamoth at the expense of her own son, followed the impulse of the Divine Light that she had transferred to him, collected a further supply out of the creation with which it was intermingled, and began to present not the image of his creator Ildabaoth, but rather that of the Supreme Being, the “Primal Man.” At this spectacle the Demiurgus was filled with rage and envy at having produced a being so superior to himself. His looks, inspired by his passions, were reflected in the Abyss, as in a mirror, the image became instinct with life, and forth arose “Satan Serpent-formed,” Ophiomorphos, the embodiment of envy and cunning.[561]

This is the exoteric rendering of the Gnostics, and the allegory, though a sectarian version, is suggestive, and seems true to life. It is the natural deduction from the dead-letter text of Chapter iii of Genesis. [pg 255] Hence the allegory of Prometheus, who steals the Divine Fire so as to allow men to proceed consciously on the path of Spiritual Evolution, thus transforming the most perfect of animals on Earth into a potential God, and making him free to “take the kingdom of heaven by violence.” Hence, also, the curse pronounced by Zeus against Prometheus, and by Jehovah-Ilda-baoth against his “rebellious son,” Satan. The cold, pure snows of the Caucasian mountain and the never-dying, singeing fire and flames of an inextinguishable Hell, two poles, yet the same idea, the dual aspect of a refined torture; a “Fire-producer”—the personified emblem of Φωσφόρος (Phósphoros), of the Astral Fire and Light in the Anima Mundi (that Element of which the German materialist philosopher Moleschott said: “ohne Phosphor kein Gedanke,” or “without phosphorus no thought”)—burning in the fierce Flames of his terrestrial Passions; the conflagration fired by his Thought, discerning as it now does good from evil, and yet a slave to the passions of its earthly Adam; feeling the vulture of doubt and full consciousness gnawing at its heart—a Prometheus indeed, because a conscious, and hence a responsible entity.[562] The curse of life is great, yet, with the exception of some Hindû and Sufi mystics, how few are those who would exchange all the tortures of conscious life, all the evils of a responsible existence, for the unconscious perfection of a passive (objectively) incorporeal Being, or even the universal static Inertia personified in Brahmâ during his “Night's” Rest. For, to quote from an able article by one[563] who, confusing the planes of existence and consciousness, fell a victim thereto:

Satan [or Lucifer] represents the Active, or, as [M. Jules] Baissac calls it, the “Centrifugal” Energy of the Universe [in a cosmic sense]. He is Fire, Light, Life, Struggle, Effort, Thought, Consciousness, Progress, Civilization, Liberty, Independence. At the same time he is Pain, which is the Reaction of the Pleasure of Action, and Death—which is the Revolution of Life—Satan, burning in his own Hell, produced by the fury of his own momentum—the expansive disintegration of the Nebula which is to concentrate into New Worlds. And fitly is he again and [pg 256]again baffled by the Eternal Inertia of the Passive Energy of the Kosmos—the inexorable “I am”—the Flint from which the sparks are beaten out. And fitly ... are he and his adherents ... consigned to the “Sea of Fire”—because it is the Sun [in one sense only in the cosmic allegory], the Fount of Life in our system, where they are purified (meaning thereby disintegrated) and churned up to reärrange them for another life (the Resurrection)—that Sun which, as the Origin of the Active Principle of our Earth, is at once the Home and the Source of the Mundane Satan....

Furthermore, as if to demonstrate the accuracy of Baissac's general theory [in Le Diable et Satan] cold is known to have a “Centripetal” effect. Under the influence of Cold everything contracts.... Under it Life hybernates, or dies out, Thought congeals, and Fire is extinguished. Satan is immortal in his own Fire-Sea—it is only in the “Nifl-Heim” [the cold Hell of the Scandinavian Eddas] of the “I am” that he cannot exist. But for all that there is a kind of ImmortalExistence in Nifl-Heim, and that Existence must be Painless and Peaceful, because it is Unconscious and Inactive. In the Kingdom of Jehovah [if this God were all that the Jews and Christians claim for him] there is no misery, no war, no marrying and giving in marriage, no change, no Individual Consciousness.[564] All is absorbed in the spirit of the Most Powerful. It is emphatically a Kingdom of Peace and loyal Submission, as that of the “Arch-Rebel” is one of War and Revolution.... It [the former] is in fact what Theosophy calls Nirvâna. But then Theosophy teaches that Separation from the Primal Source having once occurred, Reünion can only be achieved by Will-Effort—which is distinctly Satanic in the sense of this essay.[565]

It is “Satanic” from the standpoint of orthodox Romanism, for it is owing to the prototype of that which became in time the Christian Devil—to the Radiant Archangels, Dhyân Chohans, who refused to create, because they wanted Man to become his own creator and an immortal God—that men can reach Nirvâna and the Haven of heavenly Divine Peace.

To close this rather lengthy comment, the Secret Doctrine teaches that the Fire-Devas, the Rudras, and the Kumâras, the “Virgin-Angels,” (to whom the Archangels, Michael and Gabriel, both belong,) the Divine “Rebels”—called by the all-materializing and positive Jews, the Nahash or “Deprived”—preferred the curse of incarnation and the long cycles of terrestrial existence and rebirths, to seeing the misery, even if unconscious, of the beings who were evolved as Shadows out of their Brethren, through the semi-passive energy of their too spiritual Creators. If “man's uses of life should be such as neither to animalize [pg 257] nor to spiritualize, but to humanize Self,”[566] to do so, he must be born human not angelic. Hence, tradition shows the celestial Yogîs offering themselves as voluntary victims in order to redeem Humanity, which was created god-like and perfect at first, and endow him with human affections and aspirations. To do this they had to give up their natural status, descend on our Globe, and take up their abode on it for the whole cycle of the Mahâyuga, thus exchanging their impersonal Individualities for individual Personalities—the bliss of sidereal existence for the curse of terrestrial life. This voluntary sacrifice of the Fiery Angels, whose nature was Knowledge and Love, has been construed by the exoteric theologies into a statement that shows “the Rebel Angels hurled down from Heaven into the darkness of Hell”—our Earth. Hindû Philosophy hints at the truth by teaching that the Asuras, hurled down by Shiva, are only in an intermediate state, in which they prepare for higher degrees of purification and redemption from their wretched condition; but Christian Theology—claiming to be based on the rock of the divine love, charity, and justice of him it appeals to as its Saviour—to paradoxically enforce that claim, has invented the dreary dogma of Hell, that Archimedean lever of Roman Catholic philosophy.

Whereas Rabbinical wisdom—than which there is none more positive, materialistic, or grossly terrestrial, as it brings everything down to physiological mysteries—calls these Beings, the “Evil One”; and the Kabalists—Nahash, “Deprived,” as just said, and the Souls that have, after having been alienated in Heaven from the Holy One, thrown themselves into an Abyss at the dawn of their very existence, and have anticipated the time when they are to descend on Earth.[567]

And let me explain at once that our quarrel is not with the Zohar or any other book of the Kabalah in its right interpretation—for the latter is the same as our own—but only with the gross, pseudo-esoteric explanations of the later, and especially of the Christian Kabalists.