432. And It was connected with a light-bearer

Now the following extract from the Zohar,[181] under the heading, “The Pre-Adamite Kings,” also deals with the same mystery:

We have learned in the Siphrah D'Tznioothah: That the At-tee' kah D'At-tee' keen, Ancient of Ancients, before He prepared His Form, built kings and engraved kings, and sketched out kings [men, the “kings” of the animals], and they could not exist: till He overthrew them and hid them until after a time, therefore it is written; “And these are the kings which reigned in the land of Edom.”... And they could not exist till Resha'Hiv'rah, the White Head, the At'-tee'-kah D'At-tee'-keen, Ancient of the Ancients, arranged Himself. When he arranged Himself He formed all forms Above and Below.... Before He arranged Himself in His Form, had not been formed all those whom He desired to form, and all worlds have been destroyed.... They did not remain in their places, because the form of the kings had not been formed as it ought to be, and the Holy City had not been prepared.[182]

Now the plain meaning of these two allegorical and metaphysical disquisitions is simply this: Worlds and men were in turn formed and destroyed, under the law of evolution and from preëxisting material, until both the Planets and their men, in our case our Earth and its animal and human races, became what they are now in the present cycle—opposite polar forces, an equilibrized compound of Spirit and Matter, of the positive and the negative, of the male and the female. Before man could become male and female physically, his prototype, the creating Elohim, had to arrange his Form on this sexual plane astrally. That is to say, the Atoms and the organic forces, descending into the plane of the given differentiation, had to be marshalled in the order intended by Nature, so as to be ever carrying out, in an immaculate way, that law which the Kabalah calls the “Balance,” through which everything that exists does so as male and female in its final perfection, in this present stage of materiality. Chokmah, Wisdom, the Male Sephira, had to diffuse itself in, and through, Binah, intelligent Nature, or Understanding. Therefore the First Root-Race of men, sexless and mindless, had to be overthrown and “hidden until after a time”; i.e., the First Race, instead of dying, disappeared in the Second Race, as certain lower lives and plants do in their progeny. It was a [pg 089] wholesale transformation. The First became the Second Root-Race, without either begetting it, procreating it, or dying.

“They passed by together,” as it is written: “And he died” and another “reigned in his stead.”[183]

Why? Because the “Holy City had not been prepared.” And what is the “Holy City”? The Ma-qom—the Secret Place or the Shrine—on Earth; in other words, the human womb, the microcosmic copy and reflection of the Heavenly Matrix, the female Space or primeval Chaos, in which the male Spirit fecundates the germ of the Son, or the visible Universe. So much so, that in the paragraph on “The Emanation of the Male and Female Principles” in the Zohar, it is said that, on this Earth, the Wisdom from the “Holy Ancient” “does not shine except in male and female.”

(Hokhmah Wisdom, is the Father, and Binah Understanding, is the Mother.)... And when they connect one with the other, they bring forth and diffuse and emanate Truth. In the sayings of Rabbi Ye-yeva, Sabbah, i.e., the Old, we learned this; What is Binah Understanding? But when they connect in one another, the י (Yod) in the ה (Heh), they become impregnated and produce a Son. And, therefore, it is called Binah, Understanding. It means BeN YaH, i.e., Son of YaH. This is the completeness of the Whole.[184]

This is also the “completeness” of phallicism by the Rabbis, its perfect apotheosis, the divine being dragged into the animal, the sublime into the grossness of the terrestrial. Nothing so graphically gross exists in Eastern Occultism, nor in the primitive Kabalah—the Chaldæan Book of Numbers. We have said so already in Isis Unveiled:

We find it rather unwise on the part of Catholic writers to pour out their vials of wrath in such sentences as these: “In a multitude of pagodas, the phallic stone, ever and always assuming, like the Grecian batylos, the brutally indecent form of the lingham ... the Mahâ Deva.” Before casting slurs on a symbol whose profound metaphysical meaning is too much for the modern champions of that religion of sensualism par excellence, Roman Catholicism, to grasp, they are in duty bound to destroy their oldest churches, and change the form of the cupolas of their own temples. The Mahadeo of Elephanta, the Round Tower of Bhagulpore, the minarets of Islam—either rounded or pointed—are the originals of the Campanile column of San Marco, at Venice, of Rochester Cathedral, and of the modern Duomo of Milan. All of these steeples, turrets, domes, and Christian temples, are the reproductions of the primitive idea of the lithos, the upright phallus.[185]

Nevertheless, and however it may be, the fact that all these Hebrew Elohim, Sparks, and Cherubs are identical with the Devas, Rishis and the Fires and Flames, the Rudras and the forty-nine Agnis of the ancient Âryas, is sufficiently proven by and in the Kabalah.