Section I. Esoteric Tenets Corroborated in Every Scripture.
In view of the strangeness of the teachings, and of many a doctrine which from the modern scientific standpoint must seem absurd, some necessary and additional explanations have to be made. The theories contained in the Stanzas of Volume II are even more difficult to assimilate than those which are embodied in Volume I, on Cosmogony. Theology, therefore, has to be questioned here, in Part II, as Science will be in Part III, for since our doctrines differ so widely from the current ideas of both Materialism and Theology, the Occultists must be ever prepared to repel the attacks of either or of both.
The reader can never be too often reminded that, as the abundant quotations from various old Scriptures prove, these teachings are as old as the world; and that the present work is simply an attempt to render, in modern language and in a phraseology with which the scientific and educated student is familiar, archaic Genesis and History as taught in certain Asiatic centres of Esoteric Learning. These must be accepted or rejected on their own merits, fully or partially; but not before they have been carefully compared with the corresponding theological dogmas and the modern scientific theories and speculations.
One feels serious doubt whether, with all its intellectual acuteness, our age is destined to discover in each Western nation even one solitary [pg 470] uninitiated Scholar or Philosopher capable of fully comprehending the spirit of Archaic Philosophy. Nor can either be expected to do so, before the real meaning of the Alpha and the Omega of Eastern Esotericism, the terms Sat and Asat—so freely used in the Rig Veda and elsewhere—is thoroughly assimilated. Without this key to Âryan Wisdom, the Cosmogony of the Rishis and the Arhats is in danger of remaining a dead letter to the average Orientalist. Asat is not merely the negation of Sat, nor is it the “not yet existing”; for Sat is in itself neither the “existent,” nor “being.” Sat is the immutable, the ever-present, changeless, and eternal Root, from and through which all proceeds. But it is far more than the potential force in the seed, which propels onward the process of development, or what is now called evolution. It is the ever becoming, though the never manifesting.[1029] Sat is born from Asat, and Asat is begotten by Sat—perpetual motion in a circle, truly; yet a circle that can be squared only at the Supreme Initiation, at the threshold of Parinirvâna.
Barth started a reflection on the Rig Veda which was meant for a stern criticism, an unusual, therefore, as was thought, an original, view of this archaic volume. It so happened, however, that, in his criticism, this scholar revealed a truth, without being himself aware of its full importance. He premises by saying that “neither in the language nor in the thought of the Rig Veda” has he “been able to discover that quality of primitive natural simplicity, which so many are fain to see in it.” Barth had Max Müller in his mind's eye when writing this. For the famous Oxford professor has throughout characterized the hymns of the Rig Veda, as the unsophisticated expression of the religious feeling of a pastoral innocent people. “In the Vedic hymns the ideas and myths appear in their simplest and freshest form”—the Sanskrit scholar thinks. Barth is of a different opinion, however.
So divided and personal are the opinions of Sanskritists as to the importance and intrinsic value of the Rig Veda, that these opinions become entirely biassed whichever way they incline. Thus Prof. Max Müller declares that:
Nowhere is the wide distance which separates the ancient poems of India from the most ancient literature of Greece more clearly felt, than when we compare the growing myths of the Veda with the full grown and decayed myths on which the poetry of Homer is founded. The Veda is the real Theogony of the Aryan races, while that of Hesiod is a distorted caricature of the original image.
This is a sweeping assertion, and perhaps rather unjust in its general application. But why not try to account for it? Orientalists cannot do so, for they reject the chronology of the Secret Doctrine, and can hardly admit the fact that between the Rig Vedic hymns and Hesiod's Theogony tens of thousands of years have elapsed. So they fail to see that the Greek myths are no longer the primitive symbolical language of the Initiates, the Disciples of the Gods-Hierophants, the divine ancient “Sacrificers,” and that disfigured by the distance, and encumbered by the exuberant growth of human profane fancy, they now stand like distorted images of stars in running waves. But if Hesiod's Cosmogony and Theogony are to be viewed as caricatures of the original images, how much more so the myths in the Hebrew Genesis, in the sight of those for whom they are no more divine revelation or the word of God, than is Hesiod's Theogony for Mr. Gladstone.