Mistaken is he who accepts the kabalistic works of to-day, and the interpretations of the Zohar by the Rabbis, for the genuine kabalistic lore of old![1053] For no more to-day than in the day of Frederick von Schelling does the Kabalah accessible to Europe and America contain much more than
Ruins and fragments, much distorted, remnants still of that primitive system which is the key to all religious systems.[1054]
The oldest system and the Chaldæan Kabalah were identical. The latest renderings of the Zohar are those of the Synagogue in the early centuries—i.e., the Thorah (or Law), dogmatic and uncompromising.
The “King's Chamber” in Cheops' Pyramid is thus an Egyptian “Holy of Holies.” On the days of the Mysteries of Initiation, the Candidate, representing the Solar God, had to descend into the Sarcophagus, and represent the energizing ray, entering into the fecund womb of Nature. Emerging from it on the following morning, he typified the resurrection of Life after the change called Death. In the Great Mysteries his figurative “death” lasted two days, when with the Sun he arose on the third morning, after a last night of the most cruel trials. While the Postulant represented the Sun—the all-vivifying orb that “resurrects” every morning but to impart life to all—the Sarcophagus was symbolic of the female principle. This, in Egypt; its form and shape changed with every country, provided it remained a vessel, a symbolic “navis” or boat-shaped vehicle, and a “container,” symbolically, of germs or the germ of life. In India, it is the “Golden” Cow through which the Candidate for Brâhmanism has to pass if he desires to be a Brâhman, and to become Dvi-ja, “born a second time.” The crescent-form Argha of the Greeks was the type of the Queen of Heaven—Diana, or the Moon. She was the Great Mother of all Existences, as the Sun was the Father. The Jews, previous to, as well as after, their metamorphosis of Jehovah into a male God, worshipped Astoreth, which made Isaiah declare: “Your new moons and ... feasts my soul hateth”;[1055] in saying which, he was evidently unjust. Astoreth and the New Moon (the crescent Argha) Festivals, had no worse significance as a form of public worship than had the hidden meaning of the Moon in general, which was kabalistically connected directly with, and sacred to, Jehovah, as is well known; with the sole difference, however, that one was the female and the other the male aspect of the Moon, and of the star Venus.
The Sun (the Father), the Moon (the Mother), and Mercury-Thoth (the Son), were the earliest Trinity of the Egyptians, who personified them in Osiris, Isis, and Thoth (Hermes). In the Gnostic Gospel Pistis Sophia, the seven Great Gods, divided into two Triads and the highest God (the Sun), are the lower Triple Powers (Τριδυνάμεις), whose powers [pg 485] reside respectively in Mars, Mercury and Venus; and the higher Triad—the three “Unseen Gods,” who dwell in the Moon, Jupiter and Saturn.[1056]
This requires no proof. Astoreth was in one sense an impersonal symbol of Nature, the Ship of Life carrying throughout the boundless Sidereal Ocean the germs of all being. And when she was not identified with Venus, like every other “Queen of Heaven” to whom cakes and buns were offered in sacrifice, Astoreth became the reflection of the Chaldæan “Nuah, the Universal Mother” (the female Noah, considered as one with the Ark), and of the female Triad, Ana, Belita and Davkina; called, when blended into one, “Sovereign Goddess, Lady of the Nether Abyss, Mother of Gods, Queen of the Earth, and Queen of Fecundity.” Later, Belita or Tamtu[1057] (the sea), the Mother of the City of Erech (the great Chaldæan Necropolis), became Eve; and now she is Mary the Virgin, in the Latin Church, represented as standing on the Crescent Moon, and, at times on the Globe, to vary the programme. The Navis, or ship-like form of the crescent, which blends in itself all those common symbols of the Ship of Life, such as Noah's Ark, the Yoni of the Hindûs, and the Ark of the Covenant, is the female symbol of the Universal “Mother of the Gods,” and is now found under its Christian symbol in every Church, as the “nave” (from navis).[1058] The Navis, the Sidereal Vessel, is fructified by the Spirit of Life—the male God; or, as the learned Kenealy, in his Apocalypse, very appropriately calls it—the Holy Spirit. In Western religious symbology the crescent was the male, the full Moon the female, aspect of that universal Spirit. The mystic word ALM, which the prophet Mahomet prefixed to many chapters of the Korân, alludes to her as the Alm, the Immaculate Virgin of the Heavens.[1059] And—the sublime ever falling into the ridiculous—it is from this root Alm that we have to derive the word Almeh—the Egyptian dancing-girls. The latter are “virgins” of the same type as the Nautchees in India, and the (female) Kadeshim, the “holy ones” of the Jewish temples—consecrated to Jehovah, who represented both sexes—whose holy functions in the Israelite fanes were identical with those of the Nautchees.
Now Eustathius declares that IO (ΙΩ) means the Moon, in the dialect [pg 486] of the Argians; it was also one of the names of the Moon in Egypt. Says Jablonski:
ΙΩ, Ioh, Ægyptiis Lunam significat neque habent illi, in communi sermonis usu, aliud nomen quo Lunam designent præter IO.
The Pillar and Circle (IO), which with Pythagoras was the perfect number contained in the Tetraktys,[1060] became later a preëminently phallic number—amongst the Jews, foremost of all, with whom it is the male and female Jehovah.
This is how a scholar explains it: