The bird Karshipta dwells in the heavens: were he living on the earth, he would be king of birds. He brought the law into the Var of Yima, and recites the Avesta in the language of birds.[667]
This again is an allegory and a symbol misunderstood by the Orientalists only, who see in this bird “an incarnation of lightning,” and say its song was “often thought to be the utterance of a god and a revelation,” and what not. Karshipta is the human Mind-Soul, and the deity thereof, symbolized in ancient Magianism by a bird, as the Greeks symbolized it by a butterfly. No sooner had Karshipta entered the Vara or Man, than he understood the law of Mazda, or Divine Wisdom. In the “Book of Concealed Mystery” it is said of the Tree, which is the Tree of knowledge of good and evil:
In its branches the birds lodge and build their nests (the souls and the angels have their place).[668]
Therefore, with the Kabalists it was a like symbol. “Bird” was a Chaldæan, and has become a Hebrew, synonym and symbol for Angel, a Soul, a Spirit, or Deva; and the “Bird's Nest” was, with both, Heaven, and is God's Bosom, in the Zohar. The perfect Messiah enters Eden “into that place which is called the Bird's Nest.”[669]
“Like a bird that is flying from its nest,” and that is the Soul from which the She'kheen-ah [divine wisdom or grace] does not move away.[670]
The Nest of the Eternal Bird, the flutter of whose wings produces Life, is boundless Space,
—says the Commentary, meaning Hamsa, the Bird of Wisdom.
It is Adam Kadmon who is the tree of the Sephiroth, and it is he who becomes the “tree of knowledge of good and evil,” Esoterically. And that “tree hath around it seven columns [seven pillars] of the world, or Rectores [the same Progenitors or Sephiroth again], operating through the respective orders of Angels in the spheres of the seven planets,” etc., one of which orders begets Giants (Nephilim) on Earth.
It was the belief of all antiquity, Pagan and Christian, that the [pg 307] earliest mankind was a race of giants. Certain excavations in America in mounds and in caves, have already, in isolated cases, yielded groups of skeletons of nine and twelve feet high.[671] These belong to tribes of the early Fifth Race, now degenerated to an average size of between five and six feet. But we can easily believe that the Titans and Cyclopes of old really belonged to the Fourth (Atlantean) Race, and that all the subsequent legends and allegories found in the Hindû Purânas and the Greek poems of Hesiod and Homer, were based on the hazy reminiscences of real Titans—men of a tremendous super-human physical power, which enabled them to defend themselves, and hold at bay the gigantic monsters of the Mesozoic and early Cenozoic times—and of actual Cyclopes, “three-eyed” mortals.
It has been often remarked by observant writers, that the “origin of nearly every popular myth and legend could be traced invariably to a fact in Nature.”