The Chinese Y-King attributes the discovery of agriculture to “the instruction given to men by celestial genii.”
Woe, woe to the men who know nought, observe nought, nor will they see. They are all blind,[852] since they remain ignorant how full the world is of various and invisible creatures which crowd even in the most sacred places.[853]
The “Sons of God” have existed and do exist. From the Hindû Brahmaputras and Mânasaputras, Sons of Brahmâ and Mind-born Sons, down to the Bne Aleim of the Jewish Bible, the faith of the centuries and universal tradition force reason to yield to such evidence. Of what value is “independent criticism” so-called, or “internal evidence”—based usually on the respective hobbies of the critics—in the face of the universal testimony, which has never varied throughout the historical cycles? For instance, read Esoterically the sixth chapter of Genesis, which repeats the statements of the Secret Doctrine, though slightly changing its form, and drawing a different conclusion which clashes even with the Zohar.
There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God Bne Aleim came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown [or giants].[854]
What does this sentence, “and also after that,” signify unless it means: There were Giants in the Earth before, i.e., before the Sinless Sons of the Third Race; and also after that when other Sons of God, lower in nature, inaugurated sexual connection on Earth—as Daksha did, when he saw that his Mânasaputras would not people the Earth? And then comes a long break in the chapter between verses 4 and 5. For surely, it was not in or through the wickedness of the “mighty men ... men of renown,” among whom is placed Nimrod the [pg 392] “mighty hunter before the Lord,” that “God saw that the wickedness of man was great,” nor in the builders of Babel, for this was after the Deluge; but in the progeny of the Giants who produced monstra quædam de genere giganteo, monsters from whence sprang the lower races of men, now represented on Earth by a few miserable dying-out tribes and the huge anthropoid apes.
And if we are taken to task by Theologians, whether Protestant or Roman Catholic, we have only to refer them to their own literal texts. The above quoted verse has ever been a dilemma, not alone for the men of Science and biblical scholars, but also for priests. For, as the Rev. Father Péronne puts it:
Either they (the Bne Aleim) were good Angels, and in such case how could they fall? Or they were bad (Angels), and in that case could not be called Bne Aleim, or sons of God.[855]
This biblical riddle—“the real sense of which no author has ever understood,” as is candidly confessed by Fourmont[856]—can only be explained by the Occult doctrine, through the Zohar to the Western, and the Book of Dzyan to the Eastern. What the latter says we have seen; what the Zohar tells us is that Bne Aleim was a name common to the Malachim, the good Messengers, and to the Ischins, the lower Angels.[857]
We may add for the benefit of the Demonologists that their Satan, the “Adversary,” is included in Job among the “sons” of God or Bne Aleim who visit their father.[858] But of this later on.
Now the Zohar says that the Ischins, the beautiful Bne Aleim, were not guilty, but mixed themselves with mortal men because they were sent on earth to do so.[859] Elsewhere the same volume shows these Bne Aleim belonging to the tenth sub-division of the “Thrones.”[860] It also explains that the Ischins—“Men-spirits,” viri spirituales[861]—now that men can see them no longer, help Magicians to produce, by their Science, Homunculi which are not “small men” but “men smaller (in the sense of inferiority) than men.” Both show themselves under the form that the Ischins had then, i.e., gaseous and ethereal. Their chief is Azazel.