Thus saith Hermes, the thrice great Initiate,[603] the “Power of the Thought Divine.” St. Paul, another Initiate, called our World, “the enigmatical mirror of pure truth,” and St. Gregory of Nazianzen corroborated Hermes by stating that:
Things visible are but the shadow and delineation of things that we cannot see.
It is an eternal combination, and images are repeated from the higher rung of the Ladder of Being down to the lower. The “Fall of the Angels,” and the “War in Heaven” are repeated on every plane, the lower “mirror” disfiguring the image of the superior “mirror,” and each repeating it in its own way. Thus the Christian dogmas are but the reminiscences of the paradigms of Plato, who spoke of these things cautiously, as every Initiate would. But it is all as expressed in these few sentences of the Desatir:
All that is on earth, saith the Lord [Ormazd], is the shadow of something that is in the superior spheres. This luminious object [light, fire, etc.] is the shadow of that which is still more luminous than itself, and so on till it reaches me, who am the light of lights.
In the Kabalistic books, in the Zohar prëeminently, the idea that every objective thing on Earth or in this Universe is the “Shadow” (Dyooknah) of the eternal Light or Deity, is very strong.
The Third Race was prëeminently the bright “Shadow,” at first, of the Gods, whom tradition exiles on to the Earth after the allegorical War in Heaven. This became still more allegorical on Earth, for it was the War between Spirit and Matter. This War will last till the Inner and Divine Man adjusts his outer terrestrial self to his own spiritual nature. Till then the dark and fierce passions of that self will be at eternal feud with his Master, the Divine Man. But the animal will be tamed one day, because its nature will be changed, and [pg 281] harmony will reign once more between the two as before the “Fall,” when even mortal man was “created” by the Elements and was not born.
The above is made clear in all the great Theogonies, principally in the Grecian, as in that of Hesiod. The mutilation of Uranus by his son Cronus, who thus condemns him to impotency, has never been understood by the modern Mythographers. Yet, it is very plain; and as it was universal[604] it must have contained a great abstract and philosophical idea, now lost to our modern sages. This punishment in the allegory marks, indeed, “a new period, a second phase in the development of creation,” as justly remarked by Decharme,[605] who, however, does not attempt to explain it. Uranus tried to oppose an impediment to that development, or natural evolution, by destroying all his children as soon as born. Uranus, who personifies all the creative powers of, and in, Chaos—Space, or the Unmanifested Deity—is thus made to pay the penalty; for it is these powers which cause the Pitris to evolve primordial “men” from themselves—as, later on, these men, in their turn, evolve their progeny—without any sense or desire for procreation. The work of generation, suspended for a moment, passes into the hands of Cronus (Chronos) Time,[606] who unites himself with Rhea (the Earth—-in Esotericism, Matter in general), and thus produces celestial and terrestrial Titans. The whole of this symbolism relates to the mysteries of evolution.
This allegory is the exoteric version of the Esoteric Doctrine given in this part of our work. For in Cronus we see the same story repeated again. As Uranus destroyed his children by Gæa (one in the world of manifestation with Aditi, or the Great Cosmic Deep), by confining [pg 282] them in the bosom of the Earth, Titæa, so Cronus, at this second stage of creation, destroyed his children by Rhea—by devouring them. This is an allusion to the fruitless efforts of Earth, or Nature, alone to create real human “men.”[607] Time swallows its own fruitless work. Then comes Zeus, Jupiter, who dethrones his father in his turn.[608] Jupiter the Titan, is Prometheus, in one sense,[609] and varies from Zeus, the great “Father of the Gods.” He is the “disrespectful son” in Hesiod. Hermes calls him the “Heavenly Man” in Pymander; and even in the Bible he is found again under the name of Adam, and, later on—by transmutation—under that of Ham. Yet these are all personifications of the “Sons of Wisdom.” The necessary corroboration that Jupiter belongs to the purely human Atlantean Cycle—if Uranus and Cronus who precede him are found insufficient—may be read in Hesiod, who tells us that:
The Immortals made the race of the Golden and Silver Age [First and Second Races]; Jupiter made the generation of Bronze [an admixture of two elements], that of the Heroes, and of the Iron Age.[610]
After this he sends his fatal present, Pandora, to Epimetheus.[611] Hesiod calls this present of the first woman “a fatal gift.” It was a punishment, he explains, sent to man “for the theft of [divine creative] fire.” Her apparition on Earth is the signal for every kind of evil. Before her appearance, the human races lived happy, exempt from sickness and suffering—as the same races are made to live under Yima's rule, in the Mazdean Vendidâd.