For the Dragon, while sacred and to be worshipped, has within himself something still more of the divine nature of which it is better [for others?] to remain in ignorance.[791]
The “Dragon” symbol has a septenary meaning, and of these seven meanings, the highest and the lowest may be given. The highest is identical with the “Self-born,” the Logos, the Hindû Aja. With the Christian Gnostics called the Naasenians, or Serpent-worshippers, he was the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son. His symbol was the constellation of the Dragon.[792] Its seven “Stars” are the seven stars held in the hand of the “Alpha and Omega” in Revelation. In its most terrestrial meaning, the term “Dragon” was applied to the “Wise” men.
This portion of the religious symbolism of antiquity is very abstruse and mysterious, and may remain incomprehensible to the profane. In our modern day it so jars on the Christian ear that, in spite of our boasted civilization, it can hardly escape being regarded as a direct denunciation of the most cherished of Christian dogmas. Such a subject required, to do it justice, the pen and genius of Milton, whose poetical fiction has now taken root in the Church as a revealed dogma.
Did the allegory of the Dragon and his supposed conqueror in Heaven originate with St. John, in his Revelation? Emphatically we answer—No. St. John's “Dragon” is Neptune, the symbol of Atlantean Magic.
In order that we may demonstrate this negation, the reader is asked to examine the symbolism of the Serpent or the Dragon under its several aspects.
The Sidereal And Cosmic Glyphs.
Every Astronomer—not to speak of Occultists and Astrologers—knows that, figuratively speaking, the Astral Light, the Milky Way, [pg 372] and also the Path of the Sun to the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, as well as the Circles of the Sidereal or Tropical Year, were always called “Serpents” in the allegorical and mystic phraseology of the Adepts.
This, cosmically, as well as metaphorically. Poseidon is a “Dragon”—the Dragon “Chozzar, called by the profane Neptune” according to the Peratæ Gnostics, the “Good and Perfect Serpent,” the Messiah of the Naaseni, whose symbol in Heaven is Draco.
But we ought to discriminate between the various characters of this symbol. Now Zoroastrian Esotericism is identical with that of the Secret Doctrine, and when an Occultist reads in the Vendîdâd complaints uttered against the “Serpent,” whose bites have transformed the beautiful, eternal spring of Airyana Vaêjô, changing it into winter, generating disease and death, and at the same time mental and psychic consumption—he knows that the Serpent alluded to is the North Pole, and also the Pole of the Heavens.[793] These two axes produce the seasons according to their angle of inclination to each other. The two axes were no more parallel; hence the eternal spring of Airyana Vaêjô “by the good river Dâitya” had disappeared, and “the Âryan Magi had to emigrate to Sogdiana”—say the exoteric accounts. But the Esoteric Teaching states that the pole had passed from the equator, and that the “Land of Bliss” of the Fourth Race, its inheritance from the Third, had now become the region of desolation and woe. This alone ought to be an incontrovertible proof of the great antiquity of the Zoroastrian Scriptures. The Neo-Âryans of the post-diluvian age could, of course, hardly recognize the mountains, on the summits of which their forefathers had met before the Flood, and conversed with the pure “Yazatas” or celestial Spirits of the Elements, whose life and food they had once shared. As shown by Eckstein: