The Druids understood the meaning of the Sun in Taurus, therefore when all the fires were extinguished on the 1st of November their sacred and inextinguishable fire remained alone to illumine the horizon like those of the Magi and the modern Zoroastrian. And like the early Fifth Race and the later Chaldæans and Greeks, and again like the Christians (who do it to this day without suspecting the real meaning), they greeted the “Morning-Star,” the beautiful Venus-Lucifer.[504] Strabo speaks of an island near Britannia where Ceres and Persephone were worshipped with the same rites as in Samothrace, and this was the sacred Ierna, where a perpetual fire was lit. The Druids believed in the rebirth of man, not, as Lucian explains,
That the same Spirit shall animate a new body, not here, but in a different world,
but in a series of reïncarnations in this same world; for as Diodorus [pg 269] says, they declared that the souls of men after a determinate period would pass into other bodies.[505]
These tenets came to the Fifth Race Âryans from their ancestors of the Fourth Race, the Atlanteans. They piously preserved the teachings, while their parent Root-Race, becoming with every generation more arrogant, owing to the acquisition of superhuman powers, were gradually approaching their end.
Section XXIX. The Trial of the Sun Initiate.
We will begin with the ancient Mysteries—those received from the Atlanteans by the primitive Âryans—whose mental and intellectual state Professor Max Müller has described with such a masterly hand, yet left so incomplete withal.
He says: We have in it [in the Rig Veda] a period of the intellectual life of man to which there is no parallel in any other part of the world. In the hymns of the Vedawe see man left to himself to solve the riddle of this world.... He invokes the gods around him, he praises, he worships them. But still with all these gods ... beneath him, and above him, the early poet seems ill at rest within himself. There, too, in his own breast, he has discovered a power that is never mute when he prays, never absent when he fears and trembles. It seems to inspire his prayers and yet to listen to them; it seems to live in him, and yet to support him and all around him. The only name he can find for this mysterious power is “Brahman;”for brahman meant originally force, will, wish, and the propulsive power of creation. But this impersonal brahman too, as soon as it is named, grows into something strange and divine. It ends by being one of many gods, one of the great triad, worshipped to the present day. And still the thought within him has no real name; that power which is nothing but itself, which supports the gods, the heavens, and every living being, floats before his mind, conceived but not expressed. At last he calls it “Âtman,” for âtman, originally breath or spirit, comes to mean Self and Self alone, Self, whether divine or human; Self, whether creating or suffering; Self, whether One or All; but always Self, independent and free. “Who has seen the first-born?” says the poet, “when he who had no bones (i.e., form) bore him that had bones? Where was the life, the blood, the Self of the world? Who went to ask this from any one who knew it? (Rig Veda, I, 164, 4.) This idea of a divine Self once expressed, everything else must acknowledge its supremacy; Self is the Lord of all things; it is the King of all things; as all the spokes of a wheel are contained in the nave and circumference, all things are contained in this Self; all selves are contained in this Self.” (Brihadâranyaka, IV. v. 15).[506]
This Self, the highest, the one, and the universal, was symbolised on the plane of mortals by the Sun, its life-giving effulgence being in its turn the emblem of the Soul—killing the terrestrial passions which have ever been an impediment to the re-union of the Unit Self (the Spirit) with the All-Self. Hence the allegorical mystery, only the broad features of which may be given here. It was enacted by the “Sons of the Fire-Mist” and of “Light.” The second Sun (the “second hypostasis” of Rabbi Drach) appeared as put on his trial, Vishvakarma, the Hierophant, cutting off seven of his beams, and replacing them with a crown of brambles, when the “Sun” became Vikarttana, shorn of his beams or rays. After that, the Sun—enacted by a neophyte ready to be initiated—was made to descend into Pâtâla, the nether regions, on a trial of Tantalus. Coming out of it triumphant, he emerged from this region of lust and iniquity, to re-become Karmasâkshin, witness of the Karma of men,[507] and arose once more triumphant in all the glory of his regeneration, as the Graha-Râjah, King of the Constellations, and was addressed as Gabhastiman, “re-possessed of his rays.”