Mental perception, to become physical perception, must have the cosmic principle of Light:—and, by this, our mental circle must become visible through light; or, for its complete manifestation, the circle must be that of physical visibility, or Light itself.
Such conceptions, thus formulated, became the ground-work of the philosophy of the Divine manifesting in the universe.[76]
This is Philosophy. It is otherwise when we find the Rabbi in Al-Chazari saying that:
Under s'ph-r is to be understood—calculation and weighing of the created bodies. For the calculation, by means of which a body must be constructed in harmony or symmetry, by which it must be in construction rightly arranged and made to correspond to the object in design, consists at last in number, extension, mass, weight;—co-ordinate relation of movements, then harmony of music, must consist altogether by number, that is s'ph-r.... By Sippor (s'phor) is to be understood the words of Alhim (206—1 of 31415 to one), whereunto joins or adapts itself the design to the frame or form of construction; for example—it was said “Let Light be.” The work became as the words were spoken, that is, as the numbers of the work came forth.[77]
This is materializing the spiritual without scruple. But the Kabalah was not always so well adapted to anthropo-monotheistic conceptions. Compare this with any of the six schools of India. For instance in Kapila's Sânkhya Philosophy, unless, allegorically speaking, Purusha mounts on the shoulders of Prakriti, the latter remains irrational, while the former remains inactive without her. Therefore Nature (in man) must become a compound of Spirit and Matter before he becomes what he is; and the Spirit latent in Matter must be awakened to life and consciousness gradually. The Monad has to pass through its mineral, vegetable and animal forms, before the Light of the Logos is awakened in the animal man. Therefore, till then, the latter cannot be referred to as “man,” but has to be regarded as a Monad imprisoned in ever-changing forms. Evolution, not Creation, by means of Words is recognized in the Philosophies of the East, even in their exoteric records. Ex oriente lux. Even the name of the first man in the Mosaic Bible had its origin in India, Professor Max Müller's negation notwithstanding. The Jews got their Adam from Chaldæa; and Adam-Adami is a compound word and therefore a manifold symbol, and proves the Occult dogmas.
This is no place for philological disquisitions. But the reader may be reminded that the words Ad and Adi mean in Sanskrit the “first”; in Aramæan, “one” (Ad-ad, the “only one”); in Assyrian, “Father,” whence Ak-ad or “father-creator.”[78] And once the statement is found [pg 046] correct, it becomes rather difficult to confine Adam to the Mosaic Bible alone, and to see therein simply a Jewish name.
There is frequent confusion in the attributes and genealogies of the Gods in their Theogonies, the Alpha and the Omega of the records of that symbolical science, as given to the world by the half-initiated writers, Brâhmanical and Biblical. Yet there could be no such confusion made by the earliest nations, the descendants and pupils of the Divine Instructors; for both the attributes and the genealogies were inseparably linked with cosmogonical symbols, the “Gods” being the life and animating “soul-principle” of the various regions of the Universe. Nowhere and by no people was speculation allowed to range beyond those manifested Gods. The boundless and infinite Unity remained with every nation a virgin forbidden soil, untrodden by man's thought, untouched by fruitless speculation. The only reference made to it was the brief conception of its diastolic and systolic property, of its periodical expansion, or dilatation, and contraction. In the Universe, with all its incalculable myriads of Systems and Worlds disappearing and reäppearing in eternity, the anthropomorphized Powers, or Gods, their Souls, had to disappear from view with their Bodies. As our Catechism says:
“The Breath returning to the Eternal Bosom which exhales and inhales them.”
Ideal Nature, the Abstract Space in which everything in the Universe is mysteriously and invisibly generated, is the same female side of the procreative power in Nature in the Vedic as in every other Cosmogony. Aditi is Sephira, and the Sophia of the Gnostics, and Isis, the Virgin Mother of Horus. In every Cosmogony, behind and higher than the “Creative” Deity, there is a Superior Deity, a Planner, an Architect, of whom the Creator is but the executive agent. And still higher, over and around, within and without, there is the Unknowable and the Unknown, the Source and Cause of all these Emanations.
It thus becomes easy to account for the reason why Adam-Adami is found in the Chaldæan scripture, certainly earlier than the Mosaic Books. In Assyrian Ad is the “father,” and in Aramæan Ad is “one,” and Ad-ad the “only one,” while Ak is in Assyrian “creator.” Thus [pg 047] Ad-am-ak-ad-mon became Adam-Kadmon in the Kabalah (Zohar), meaning as it did, the “One (Son) of the divine Father, or the Creator,” for the words am and om meant at one time in nearly every language the divine, or the deity. Thus Adam-Kadmon and Adam-Adami came to mean “The first Emanation of the Father-Mother or Divine Nature,” and literally the “first Divine One.” And it is easy to see that Ad-Argat (or Aster't, the Syrian Goddess, the consort of Ad-on, the Lord God of Syria or the Jewish Adonai), and Venus, Isis, Ister, Mylitta, Eve, etc., are identical with the Aditi and Vâch of the Hindûs. They are all the “Mothers of all living” and “of the Gods.” On the other hand—cosmically and astronomically—all the male Gods became at first “Sun-Gods,” then, theologically, the “Suns of Righteousness,” and the Logoi, all symbolized by the Sun.[79] They are all Protogonoi—First-born—and Mikroprosopoi. With the Jews Adam-Kadmon was the same as Athamaz, Tamaz, or the Adonis of the Greeks—“the One with, and of his Father”—the “Father” becoming during the later Races Helios, the Sun, as Apollo Karneios,[80] for instance, who was the “Sun-born”; Osiris, Ormazd, and so on, were all followed by, and found themselves transformed later on into, still more earthly types: such as Prometheus, the crucified of Mount Kajbee, Hercules, and so many others, Sun-Gods and Heroes, until all of them came to have no better significance than phallic symbols.