All this is very puzzling to one who is unable to read and understand the Purânas except in their dead-letter sense.[1387] Hence we find [pg 619] the Orientalists refusing to be puzzled, and cutting the Gordian knot of perplexity by declaring the whole scheme “figments ... of Brâhmanical fancy and love of exaggeration.” But to the student of Occultism, the whole is pregnant with deep philosophical meaning. We willingly leave the rind to the Western Sanskritist, but claim the essence of the fruit for ourselves. We do more: we concede that in one sense much in these so-called “fables” refers to astronomical allegories about constellations, asterisms, stars, and planets. Yet, while the Gandharva of the Rig Veda may there be made to personify the fire of the Sun, the Gandharva Devas are entities both of a physical and psychic character, while the Apsarasas (with other Rudras) are both qualities and quantities. In short, if ever unravelled, the Theogony of the Vedic Gods will reveal fathomless mysteries of Creation and Being. Truly says Parâshara:
These classes of thirty-three divinities ... exist age after age, and their appearance and disappearance is in the same manner as the sun sets and rises again.[1388]
There was a time, when the Eastern symbol of the cross and circle, the Svastika, was universally adopted. With the Esoteric, and for the matter of that exoteric, Buddhist, the Chinaman and the Mongolian, it means the “ten thousand truths.” These truths, they say, belong to the mysteries of the Unseen Universe and Primordial Cosmogony and Theogony.
Since Fohat crossed the Circle like two lines of flame [horizontally and vertically], the Hosts of the Blessed Ones have never failed to send their representatives upon the Planets they are made to watch over from the beginning.
This is why the Svastika is always placed—as the ansated cross was in Egypt—on the breast of the defunct Mystics. It is found on the heart of the images and statues of Buddha, in Tibet and Mongolia. It is the seal placed also on the hearts of the living Initiates, burnt into the flesh for ever with some. This, because they have to keep these truths inviolate and intact, in eternal silence and secrecy to the day they are perceived and read by their chosen successors—new Initiates—“worthy of being entrusted with the ten thousand perfections.” So degraded, however, has it now become, that it is often placed on the headgear of the “Gods,” the hideous idols of the sacrilegious Bhons—the Dugpas or Sorcerers, of the Tibetan borderlands—until found out by a Galukpa, and torn off together with the head of the “God,” [pg 620] though it would be better were it that of the worshipper which was severed from his sinful body. Still, it can never lose its mysterious properties. Throw a retrospective glance, and see it used alike by the Initiates and Seers, as by the Priests of Troy, for many specimens of it have been found by Schliemann on the site of that old city. One finds it with the old Peruvians, the Assyrians, Chaldæans, as well as on the walls of the old-world Cyclopean buildings; in the catacombs of the New World, and in those of the Old (?), at Rome, where—because the first Christians are supposed to have concealed themselves and their religion—it is called Crux Dissimulata.
According to De Rossi the Swastika from an early period was a favourite form of the cross employed with an occult signification which shows the secret was not that of the Christian cross. One Swastika cross in the catacombs is the sign of an inscription which reads “ΖΩΤΙΚΩ ΖΟΤΙΚΗ [? ΖΩΤΙΚΗ], Vitalis Vitalia,” or life of life.[1389]
But the best evidence to the antiquity of the cross is that which is brought forward by the author of The Natural Genesis himself:
The value of the cross as a Christian symbol is supposed to date from the time when Jesus Christ was crucified. And yet in the “Christian” iconography of the catacombs no figure of a man appears upon the Cross during the first six or seven centuries. There are all forms of the cross except that—the alleged starting-point of the new religion. That was not the initial but the final form of the Crucifix.[1390]During some six centuries after the Christian era the foundation of the Christian religion in a crucified Redeemer is entirely absent from Christian art! The earliest known form of the human figure on the cross is the crucifix presented by Pope Gregory the Great to Queen Theodolinde of Lombardy, now in the Church of St. John at Monza, whilst no image of the Crucified is found in the catacombs at Rome earlier than that of San Giulio, belonging to the seventh or eighth century.... There is no Christ and no Crucified; the Cross is the Christ even as the Stauros (Cross) was a type and a name of Horus the Gnostic Christ. The Cross, not the Crucified, is the primary symbol of the Christian Church. The Cross, not the Crucified, is the essential object of representation in its art, and of adoration in its religion. The germ of the whole growth and development can be traced to the cross. And that cross is pre-Christian, is pagan and heathen, in half a dozen different shapes. The Cult began with the cross, and Julian was right in saying he waged a “Warfare with the X”; which he obviously considered had been adopted by the A-Gnostics and Mytholators to convey an impossible significance.[1391] [pg 621]During centuries the cross stood for the Christ, and was addressed as if it were a living being. It was divinized at first and humanized at last.[1392]
Few world-symbols are more pregnant with real Occult meaning than the Svastika. It is symbolized by the figure 6. Like that figure, it points, in its concrete imagery, as does the ideograph of the number, to the Zenith and the Nadir, to North, South, West, and East; one finds the unit everywhere, and that unit reflected in all and every unit. It is the emblem of the activity of Fohat, of the continual revolution of the “Wheels,” and of the Four Elements, the “Sacred Four,” in their mystical, and not alone in their cosmical meaning; further, its four arms, bent at right angles, are intimately related, as shown elsewhere, to the Pythagorean and Hermetic scales. One initiated into the mysteries of the meaning of the Svastika, say the Commentaries, “can trace on it, with mathematical precision, the evolution of Kosmos and the whole period of Sandhyâ.” Also “the relation of the Seen to the Unseen,” and “the first procreation of man and species.”
To the Eastern Occultist the Tree of Knowledge, in the Paradise of man's own heart, becomes the Tree of Life Eternal, and has nought to do with man's animal senses. It is an absolute mystery that reveals itself only through the efforts of the imprisoned Manas, the Ego, to liberate itself from the thraldom of sensuous perception, and see in the light of the one eternal present Reality. To the Western Kabalist, and far more now to the superficial Symbologist, nursed in the lethal atmosphere of Materialistic Science, the chief explanation of the mysteries of the cross is—its sexual element. Even the otherwise spiritualistic modern commentator discerns this feature in the cross and Svastika before all others.