The Sons of Mahat are the quickeners of the human Plant. They are the Waters falling upon the arid soil of latent life, and the Spark that vivifies the human Animal. They are the Lords of Spiritual Life Eternal.... In the beginning [in the Second Race] some [of the Lords] only breathed of their essence into Manushya [men], and some took in man their abode.
This shows that not all men became incarnations of the “Divine Rebels,” but only a few among them. The remainder had their fifth Principle simply quickened by the spark thrown into it, which accounts for the great difference between the intellectual capacities of men and races. Had not the “Sons of Mahat,” speaking allegorically, skipped the Intermediate Worlds, in their impulse toward intellectual freedom, the animal man would never have been able to reach upward from this Earth, and attain through self-exertion his ultimate goal. The Cyclic Pilgrimage would have had to be performed through all the planes of existence half unconsciously, if not entirely so, as in the case of the animals. It is owing to this rebellion of intellectual life against the morbid inactivity of pure spirit, that we are what we are—self-conscious, thinking men, with the capabilities and attributes of Gods in us, for good as much as for evil. Hence the Rebels are our Saviours. Let the Philosopher ponder well over this, and more than one mystery will become clear to him. It is only by the attractive force of the contrasts that the two opposites—Spirit and Matter—can be cemented together on Earth, and, smelted in the fire of self-conscious experience and suffering, find themselves wedded in Eternity. This will reveal the meaning of many hitherto incomprehensible allegories, foolishly called “fables.”
It explains, to begin with, the statement made in Pymander, that the “Heavenly Man,” the “Son of the Father,” who partook of the nature [pg 109] and essence of the Seven Governors, or Creators and Rulers of the Material World,
Peeped through the Harmony, and breaking through the strength of the [Seven] Circles [of Fire], so showed and made manifest the downward-borne nature.[233]
It explains every verse in the Hermetic narrative, as also the Greek allegory of Prometheus. Most important of all, it explains the many allegorical accounts about the “Wars in Heaven,” including that of Revelation with respect to the Christian dogma of the “Fallen Angels.” It explains the “Rebellion” of the oldest and highest Angels, and the meaning of their being cast down from Heaven into the depths of Hell, i.e., Matter. It even solves the recent perplexity of the Assyriologists, who express their wonder through the late George Smith, as follows:
My first idea of this part [of the rebellion] was that the war with the powers of evil preceded the Creation; I now think it followed the account of the Fall.[234]
In the same work,[235] Mr. George Smith gives an engraving, from an early Babylonian Cylinder, of the Sacred Tree, the Serpent, man and woman. The Tree has seven branches; three on the man's side, four on that of the female. These branches are typical of the seven Root-Races, in the third of which, at its very close, occurred the separation of the sexes and the so-called Fall into generation. The three earliest Races were sexless, then hermaphrodite; the other four, male and female, as distinct from each other. As the writer tells us:
The dragon, which, in the Chaldean account of the Creation, leads man to sin, is the creature of Tiamat, the living principle of the sea and of chaos ... which was opposed to the deities at the creation of the world.[236]
This is an error. The Dragon is the male principle, or Phallus, personified, or rather animalized; and Tiamat, “the embodiment of the spirit of chaos,” of the Deep, or Abyss, is the female principle, the Womb. The “spirit of chaos and disorder” refers to the mental perturbation which it led to. It is the sensual, attractive, magnetic principle which fascinates and seduces, the ever-living active element which throws the whole world into disorder, chaos and sin. The Serpent seduces the woman, but it is the latter who seduces man, and both are included in the Karmic curse, though only as a natural result of a cause produced. Says George Smith:
It is clear that the dragon is included in the curse for the Fall, and that the gods [the Elohim, jealous at seeing the man of clay becoming a Creator in his turn, like all the animals] invoke on the head of the human Race all the evils which afflict humanity. Wisdom and knowledge shall injure him, he shall have family quarrels, shall submit to tyranny, he will anger the gods ... he shall be disappointed in his desires, he shall pour out useless prayer, ... he shall commit future sin. No doubt subsequent lines continue these topics, but again our narrative is broken, and it only reopens where the gods are preparing for war with the powers of evil, which are led by Tiamat (the woman).[237]