Two deities, and two distinct hierarchies or tsabas in heaven, in the ancient world as in our modern times ... the one, the living God and his host, and the other, Satan, Lucifer with his councillors and lictors, or the fallen angels.
Our opponents say that it is the latter which Plato with the whole of antiquity worshipped, and which two-thirds of humanity worship to this day. “The whole question is to know how to discern between the two.”
Protestant Christians fail to find any mention of angels in the Pentateuch, we may therefore leave them aside. The Roman Catholics and the Kabalists find such mention; the former, because they have accepted Jewish angelology, without suspecting that the “tsabæan Hosts” were colonists and settlers on Judæan territory from the lands of the Gentiles; the latter, because they accepted the bulk of the [pg 327] Secret Doctrine, keeping the kernel for themselves and leaving the husks to the unwary.
Cornelius a Lapide points out and proves the meaning of the word tsaba in the first verse of Chapter ii. of Genesis; and he does so correctly, guided, as he probably was, by learned Kabalists. The Protestants are certainly wrong in their contention, for angels are mentioned in the Pentateuch under the word tsaba, which means “hosts” of angels. In the Vulgate the word is translated ornatus, meaning the “sidereal army,” the ornament also of the sky—kabalistically. The biblical scholars of the Protestant Church, and the savants among the materialists, who failed to find “angels” mentioned by Moses, have thus committed a serious error. For the verse reads:
Thus the heaven and the earth were finished and all the host of them,
the “host” meaning “the army of stars and angels”; the last two words being, it seems, convertible terms in Church phraseology. A Lapide is cited as an authority for this; he says that
Tsaba does not mean either one or the other but “the one and the other,” or both, siderum ac angelorum.
If the Roman Catholics are right on this point, so are the Occultists when they claim that the angels worshipped in the Church of Rome are none else than their “Seven Planets,” the Dhyân Chohans of Buddhistic Esoteric Philosophy, or the Kumâras, “the mind-born sons of Brahmâ,” known under the patronymic of Vaidhâtra. The identity between the Kumâras, the Builders or cosmic Dhyân Chohans, and the Seven Angels of the Stars, will be found without one single flaw if their respective biographies are studied, and especially the characteristics of their chiefs, Sanat-Kumâra (Sanat Sujâta), and Michael the Archangel. Together with the Kabirim (Planets), the name of the above in Chaldæa, they were all “divine Powers” (Forces). Fuerot says that the name Kabiri was used to denote the seven sons of יצדיק meaning Pater Sadic, Cain, or Jupiter, or again of Jehovah. There are seven Kumâras—four exoteric and three secret—the names of the latter being found in the Sânkhya Bhâshya, by Gaudapâdâchârya.[605] They are all “Virgin Gods,” who remain eternally pure and innocent and decline to create progeny. In their primitive aspect, these Âryan seven “mind-born sons” of God are not the regents of [pg 328] the planets, but dwell far beyond the planetary region. But the same mysterious transference from one character or dignity to another is found in the Christian Angel-scheme. The “Seven Spirits of the Presence” attend perpetually on God, and yet we find them under the same names of Mikael, Gabriel, Raphael, etc., as “Star-regents” or the informing deities of the seven planets. Suffice it to say that the Archangel Michael is called “the invincible virgin combatant” as he “refused to create,”[606] which would connect him with both Sana Sujâta and the Kumâra who is the God of War.
The above has to be demonstrated by a few quotations. Commenting upon St. John's “Seven Golden Candlesticks,” Cornelius a Lapide says:
These seven lights relate to the seven branches of the candlestick by which were represented the seven [principal] planets in the temples of Moses and Solomon ... or, better still, to the seven principal Spirits, commissioned to watch over the salvation of men and churches.