Again, in the ancient Quiché Manuscript, the Popol Vuh—published by the late Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg—the first men are described as a race “whose sight was unlimited, and who knew all things at once”; thus showing the divine knowledge of Gods, not mortals. The Secret Doctrine, correcting the unavoidable exaggerations of popular fancy, gives the facts as they are recorded in the archaic symbols.
(b) These “Shadows” were born “each of his own colour and kind,” each also “inferior to his Father,” or Creator, because the latter was a complete Being of his kind. The Commentaries refer the first sentence to the colour or complexion of each human race thus evolved. In Pymander, the Seven Primitive Men, created by Nature from the “Heavenly Man,” all partake of the qualities of the Seven “Governors,” or Rulers, who loved Man—their own reflection and synthesis.
In the Norse Legends, one recognizes in Asgard, the habitat of the Gods, as also in the Ases themselves, the same mystical Loci and personifications woven into the popular “myths,” as in our Secret [pg 102] Doctrine; and we find them in the Vedas, the Purânas, the Mazdean Scriptures and the Kabalah. The Ases of Scandinavia, the Rulers of the World which preceded ours, whose name means literally the “Pillars of the World,” its “Supports,” are thus identical with the Greek Cosmocratores, the seven “Workmen” or Rectors of Pymander, the seven Rishis and Pitris of India, the seven Chaldæan Gods and seven Evil Spirits, the seven Kabalistic Sephiroth, synthesized by the upper Triad, and even the seven Planetary Spirits of the Christian Mystics. The Ases create the earth, the seas, the sky and the clouds, the whole visible world, from the remains of the slain giant Ymir; but they do not create Man, but only his form from the Ask or Ash tree. It is Odin who endows him with life and soul, after Lodur had given him blood and bones, and finally it is Hönir who furnishes him with his intellect (Manas) and with his conscious senses.[220] The Norse Ask, the Hesiodic Ash-tree, whence issued the men of the generation of bronze, the Third Root-Race, and the Tzité tree of the Popol Vuh, out of which the Mexican third race of men was created, are all one. This may be plainly seen by any reader. But the Occult reason why the Norse Yggdrasil, the Hindû Ashvattha, the Gogard, the Hellenic tree of life, and the Tibetan Zampun, are one with the Kabalistic Sephirothic Tree, and even with the Holy Tree made by Ahura Mazda, and the Tree of Eden—who among the Western scholars can tell?[221] Nevertheless, the fruits of all those “Trees,” whether Pippala, or Haoma, or even the more prosaic Apple, are the “plants of life,” in fact and verity. The prototypes of our races were all enclosed in the Microcosmic Tree, which grew and developed within and under the great mundane Macrocosmic Tree;[222] and the mystery is half revealed in the Dîrghotamas, where it is said:
Pippala, the sweet fruit of that tree upon which come spirits who love the science, and where the gods produce all marvels.
As in the Gogard, among the luxuriant branches of all these Mundane Trees, the “Serpent” dwells. But while the Macrocosmic Tree is the Serpent of Eternity and of absolute Wisdom itself, those who dwell in the Microcosmic Tree are the Serpents of the Manifested Wisdom. One is the One and All; the others are its reflected parts. The “Tree” is man himself, of course, and the Serpent dwelling in each, the conscious [pg 103] Manas, the connecting link between Spirit and Matter, Heaven and Earth.
Everywhere, it is the same. The “Creating” Powers produce Man, but fail in their final object. All these Logoi strive to endow man with conscious immortal Spirit, reflected in the Mind (Manas) alone; they fail, and they are all represented as being punished for the failure, if not for the attempt. What is the nature of the punishment? A sentence of imprisonment in the lower or nether region, which is our Earth, the lowest in its Chain; an “Eternity”—meaning the duration of the Life-cycle—in the darkness of Matter, or within animal Man. It pleased the half ignorant and half designing Church Fathers to disfigure the graphic symbol. They took advantage of the metaphor and allegory in every old religion to turn them to the benefit of the new one. Thus man was transformed into the darkness of a material Hell; his divine consciousness, obtained from his indwelling Principle, the Mânasa, or the incarnated Deva, became the glaring flames of the Infernal Region, and our Globe that Hell itself. Pippala, Haoma, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, were denounced as the forbidden fruit, and the “Serpent of Wisdom,” the voice of reason and consciousness, remained identified for ages with the Fallen Angel, which is the old Dragon, the Devil!
The same for the other high symbols. The Svastika, the most sacred and mystic symbol in India, the “Jaina Cross” as it is now called by the Masons, notwithstanding its direct connection, and even identity, with the Christian Cross, has become dishonoured in the same manner. It is the “devil's sign,” we are told by the Indian missionaries. Does it not shine on the head of the great Serpent of Vishnu, on the thousand-headed Shesha-Ananta, in the depths of Pâtâla, the Hindû Naraka or Hell? It does: but what is Ananta? As Shesha, it is the almost endless Manvantaric Cycle of Time, and becomes Infinite Time itself, when called Ananta, the great Seven-headed Serpent, on which rests Vishnu, the Eternal Deity, during Pralayic inactivity. What has Satan to do with this highly metaphysical symbol? The Svastika is the most philosophically scientific of all symbols, as also the most comprehensible. It is the summary in a few lines of the whole work of “creation,” or evolution as one should rather say, from Cosmotheogony down to Anthropogony, from the indivisible unknown Parabrahman to the humble Moneron of materialistic Science, whose genesis is as unknown to that Science as is that of the All-Deity Itself. The [pg 104] Svastika is found heading the religious symbols of every old nation. It is the “Worker's Hammer” in the Chaldæan Book of Numbers, the “Hammer,” above referred to, in the Book of Concealed Mystery, “which striketh sparks from the flint” (Space), those sparks becoming Worlds. It is Thor's Hammer, the magic weapon forged by the Dwarfs against the Giants, or the Pre-cosmic Titanic Forces of Nature, which rebel and, while alive in the region of Matter, will not be subdued by the Gods—the agents of Universal Harmony—but have first to be destroyed. This is why the World is formed out of the relics of the murdered Ymir. The Svastika is the Miölnir, the “Storm-hammer”; and therefore it is said that when the Ases, the holy Gods, after having been purified by fire—the fire of the passions and suffering in their life-incarnations—become fit to dwell in Ida in eternal peace, then Miölnir will become useless. This will be when the bonds of Hel—the Goddess-queen of the region of the Dead—will bind them no longer, for the kingdom of evil will have passed away.
Surtur's flames had not destroyed them, nor yet had the raging waters [of the several deluges].... There were ... the sons of Thor. They brought Miölnir with them, not as a weapon of war, but as the hammer with which to consecrate the new heavens and the new earth.[223]
Verily many are its meanings! In the macrocosmic work, the “Hammer of Creation,” with its four arms bent at right angles, refers to the continual motion and revolution of the invisible Kosmos of Forces. In that of the manifested Cosmos and our Earth, it points to the rotation in the Cycles of Time of the world's axes and their equatorial belts; the two lines forming the Svastika 卐, meaning Spirit and Matter, the four hooks suggesting the motion in the revolving cycles. Applied to the microcosm, Man, it shows him to be a link between Heaven and Earth; the right hand being raised at the end of a horizontal arm, the left pointing to the Earth. In the Smaragdine Tablet of Hermes, the uplifted right hand is inscribed with the word “Solve,” the left with the word “Coagula.” It is at one and the same time an Alchemical, Cosmogonical, Anthropological, and Magical sign, with seven keys to its inner meaning. It is not too much to say that the compound symbolism of this universal and most suggestive of signs contains the key to the seven great mysteries of Kosmos. Born in the mystical conceptions of the early Âryans, and by them placed [pg 105] at the very threshold of eternity, on the head of the serpent Ananta, it found its spiritual death in the scholastic interpretations of mediæval Anthropomorphists. It is the Alpha and the Omega of universal Creative Force, evolving from pure Spirit and ending in gross Matter. It is also the key to the Cycle of Science, divine and human; and he who comprehends its full meaning is for ever liberated from the toils of Mahâ-Mâyâ, the great Illusion and Deceiver. The Light that shines from under the Divine Hammer, now degraded into the mallet or gavel of the Grand Masters of Masonic Lodges, is sufficient to dissipate the darkness of any human schemes or fictions.
How prophetic are the songs of the three Norse Goddesses, to whom the ravens of Odin whisper of the past and the future, as they flutter round in their abode of crystal beneath the flowing river. The songs are all written down in the “Scrolls of Wisdom,” of which many are lost but some still remain; and they repeat in poetical allegory the teachings of the Archaic Ages. To summarize from Dr. Wagner's Asgard and the Gods, concerning the “Renewal of the World,” which is a prophecy about the Seventh Race of our Round told in the past tense.