If we now give our attention to the Egyptian cross, or the Tau, we may discover this letter, which was so exalted by Egyptians, Greeks, and Jews, to be mysteriously connected with the Decad. The Tau is the Alpha and the Omega of Secret Divine Wisdom, which is symbolized by the initial and the final letters of Thot (Hermes). Thot was the inventor of the Egyptian alphabet, and the letter Tau closed the alphabets of the Jews and the Samaritans, who called this character the “end” or “perfection,” “culmination” and “security.” Hence, Ragon tells us, the words Terminus, “end,” and Tectum, “roof,” are symbols of shelter and security—which is rather a prosaic definition. But such is the usual destiny of ideas and things in this world of spiritual decadence, though at the same time of physical progress. Pan was at one time Absolute Nature, the One and Great All; but when history catches a first glimpse of him, Pan has already tumbled down into a godling of the fields, a rural God; history will not recognize him, while theology makes of him the Devil! Yet his seven-piped [pg 615] flute, the emblem of the seven forces of Nature, of the seven planets, the seven musical notes, of all the septenary harmony in short, shows well his primordial character. So with the cross. Far earlier than the Jews had devised their golden candlestick of the Temple with three sockets on one side and four on the other, and made of number seven a feminine number of generation[1382]—thus introducing the phallic element into religion—the more spiritually-minded nations had made of the cross (as 3 + 4 = 7) their most sacred divine symbol. In fact, circle, cross, and seven—the latter being made a base of circular measurement—are the first primordial symbols. Pythagoras, who brought his wisdom from India, left to posterity a glimpse into this truth. His School regarded number 7 as a compound of numbers 3 and 4, which they explained in a dual manner. On the plane of the noumenal world, the Triangle was, as the first conception of the manifested Deity, its image, “Father-Mother-Son”; and the Quaternary, the perfect number, was the noumenal, ideal root of all numbers and things on the physical plane. Some students, in view of the sacredness of the Tetraktys and the Tetragrammaton, mistake the mystic meaning of the Quaternary. The latter was with the Ancients only a secondary “perfection,” so to speak, because it related only to the manifested planes. Whereas it is the Triangle, the Greek Delta (Δ), which was the “vehicle of the unknown Deity.” A good proof of it lies in the name of the Deity beginning with Delta. Zeus was written Δεύς (Deus) by the Bœotians, thence the Deus of the Latins. This, in relation to the metaphysical conception, with regard to the meaning of the septenary in the phenomenal world; but for purposes of profane or exoteric interpretation, the symbolism changed. Three became the ideograph of the three material Elements—Air, Water, Earth; and four became the principle of all that which is neither corporeal nor perceptible. But this has never been accepted by the real Pythagoreans. Viewed as a compound of 6 and 1, the Senary and the Unity, number 7 was the invisible centre, the Spirit of everything, as there exists no [pg 616] hexagonal body without a seventh property being found as the central point in it, as, for instance, crystals and snow-flakes in so-called “inanimate” nature. Moreover, number seven, they said, has all the perfection of the unit—the number of numbers. For as absolute unity is uncreated, and impartite, hence number-less, and no number can produce it, so is the seven; no digit contained within the Decad can beget or produce it. And it is four which affords an arithmetical division between unity and seven, for it surpasses the former by the same number (three), as it is itself surpassed by the seven, since four is by as many numbers above one, as seven is above four.[1383]
“With the Egyptians number 7 was the symbol of life eternal,” says Ragon, and adds that this is why the Greek letter Z, which is but a double 7, is the initial letter of Zaô, “I live,” and of Zeus, the “father of all living.”
Moreover, figure 6 was the symbol of the Earth during the autumn and winter “sleeping” months, and figure 7 during spring and summer, as the Spirit of Life animated her at that time—the seventh or central informing Force. We find the same in the Egyptian mythos and symbol of Osiris and Isis, personifying Fire and Water metaphysically, and the Sun and the Nile physically. The number of the solar year, 365 in days, is the numerical value of the word Neilos (Nile). This, together with the Bull, with the crescent and the ansated cross between its horns, and the Earth under its astronomical symbol (♁), are the most phallic symbols of later antiquity.
The Nile was the river of time with the number of a year, or year and a day (364 + 1 = 365). It represented the parturient water of Isis, or Mother Earth, the moon, the woman, and the cow, also the workshop of Osiris, representing the T'sod Olaum of the Hebrews. The ancient name of this river was Eridanus, or the Hebrew Iardan, with the Coptic or old Greek suffix. This was the door of the Hebrew word Jared, or source, or descent ... of the river Jordan, which had the same mythical use with the Hebrews that the Nile had with the Egyptians,[1384] it was the source of descent, and held the waters of life.[1385]
It was, to put it plainly, the symbol of the personified Earth, or Isis regarded as the womb of that Earth. This is shown clearly enough; and Jordan—the river so sacred now to Christians—held no more sublime or poetical meaning in it than the parturient waters of the Moon—Isis, or Jehovah in his female aspect. Now, as shown by the [pg 617] same scholar, Osiris was the Sun, and the river Nile, and the year of 365 days; while Isis was the Moon, the bed of that river, or Mother Earth “for the parturient energies of which water was a necessity,” as also the lunar year of 354 days, “the time-maker of the periods of gestation.” All this then is sexual and phallic, our modern scholars seeming to find in these symbols nothing beyond a physiological or phallic meaning. Nevertheless, the three figures 365, or the number of days in a solar year, have but to be read with the Pythagorean key to find in them a highly philosophical and moral meaning. One instance will be sufficient. It can read:
The Earth (3)—animated by (6)—the Spirit of Life (5).
Simply because 3 is equivalent to the Greek Gamma (Γ) which is the symbol of Gaia, the Earth, while the figure 6 is the symbol of the animating or informing principle, and the 5 is the universal quintessence which spreads in every direction and forms all matter.[1386]
The few instances and examples brought forward reveal only one small portion of the methods used to read the symbolical ideographs and numerals of antiquity. The system being of an extreme and complex difficulty, very few, even among the Initiates, could master all the seven keys. Is it to be wondered, then, that the metaphysical gradually dwindled down into the physical Nature; that the Sun, once upon a time the symbol of Deity, became, as æons glided by, that of its creative ardour only; and that thence it fell into a glyph of phallic significance? But surely, it is not those whose method, like Plato's, was to proceed from universals down to particulars, who could ever have begun by symbolizing their religions by sexual emblems! It is quite true, though uttered by that incarnated paradox Éliphas Lévi, that “man is God on Earth, and God is man in Heaven.” But this could not, and never did apply to the One Deity, only to the Hosts of Its incarnated beams, called by us Dhyân Chohans, by the Ancients Gods, and now transformed by the Church into Devils on the left, and into the Saviour on the right side!
But all such dogmas grew out of the one root, the root of Wisdom, which grows and thrives on the Indian soil. There is not an Archangel that could not be traced back to its prototype in the sacred land of Âryâvarta. These prototypes are all connected with the Kumâras who appear on the scene of action by “refusing”—as Sanatkumâra and Sananda—to “create progeny.” Yet they are called the “creators” [pg 618] of (thinking) man. More than once they are brought into connection with Nârada—another bundle of apparent incongruities, yet a wealth of philosophical tenets. Nârada is the leader of the Gandharvas, the celestial singers and musicians; Esoterically, the reason for this is explained by the fact that the Gandharvas are “the instructors of men in the Secret Sciences.” It is they, who “loving the women of the Earth” disclosed to them the mysteries of creation; or, as in the Veda, the “heavenly” Gandharva is a deity who knew and revealed the secrets of heaven and divine truths, in general. If we remember what is said of this class of Angels in Enoch and in the Bible, then the allegory is plain; their leader, Nârada, while refusing to procreate, leads men to become Gods. Moreover, all of these, as stated in the Vedas, are Chhandajas, “will-born,” or incarnated, in different Manvantaras, of their own will. They are shown in exoteric literature as existing age after age; some being “cursed to be reborn,” others incarnating as a duty. Finally, as the Sanakadikas, the seven Kumâras who went to visit Vishnu on the “White Island” (Shveta-dvîpa), the Island inhabited by the Mahâ Yogins—they are connected with Shâka-dvîpa and the Lemurians and Atlanteans of the Third and Fourth Races.
In the Esoteric Philosophy, the Rudras (Kumâras, Âdityas, Gandharvas, Asuras, etc.) are the highest Dhyân Chohans or Devas as regards intellectuality. They are those who, owing to their having acquired by self-development the five-fold nature—hence the sacredness of number five—became independent of the pure Arûpa Devas. This is a mystery very difficult to realize and understand correctly. For we see that those who were “obedient to law” are, equally with the “rebels,” doomed to be reborn in every age. Nârada, the Rishi, is cursed by Brahmâ to incessant peripateticism on Earth, i.e., to be constantly reborn. He is a rebel against Brahmâ, and yet has no worse fate than the Jayas—the twelve great Creative Gods produced by Brahmâ as his assistants in the functions of creation. For the latter, lost in meditation, only forgot to create; and for this, they were equally cursed by Brahmâ to be born in every Manvantara. And still they are termed—together with the rebels—Chhandajas, or those born of their own will in human form.