Those who labour under the impression that the Occultists of any nation reject the Bible, in its original text and meaning, are wrong. As well reject the Books of Thoth, the Chaldæan Kabalah or the Book of Dzyan itself. Occultists only reject the one-sided interpretations and the human element in the Bible, which is an Occult, and therefore a sacred, volume as much as the others. And terrible indeed is the punishment of all those who transgress the permitted limits of secret revelations. From Prometheus to Jesus, and from Him to the highest Adept as to the lowest disciple, every revealer of mysteries has had to become a Chrestos, a “man of sorrow” and a martyr. “Beware,” said one of the greatest Masters, “of revealing the Mystery to those without”—to the profane, the Sadducee and the unbeliever. All the great Hierophants in history are shown ending their lives by violent deaths—Buddha,[160] Pythagoras, Zoroaster, most of the great Gnostics, the founders of their respective schools; and in our own more modern epoch a number of Fire-Philosophers, of Rosicrucians and Adepts. All of these are shown—whether plainly or under the veil of allegory—as paying the penalty for the revelations they had made. This may seem to the profane reader only coincidence. [pg 090] To the Occultist, the death of every “Master” is significant, and appears pregnant with meaning. Where do we find in history that “Messenger” grand or humble, an Initiate or a Neophyte, who, when he was made the bearer of some hitherto concealed truth or truths, was not crucified and rent to shreds by the “dogs” of envy, malice and ignorance? Such is the terrible Occult law; and he who does not feel in himself the heart of a lion to scorn the savage barking, and the soul of a dove to forgive the poor ignorant fools, let him give up the Sacred Science. To succeed, the Occultist must be fearless; he has to brave dangers, dishonour and death, to be forgiving, and to be silent on that which cannot be given. Those who have vainly laboured in that direction must wait in these days—as the Book of Enoch teaches—“until the evil-doers be consumed” and the power of the wicked annihilated. It is not lawful for the Occultist to seek or even to thirst for revenge: let him
Wait until sin pass away; for their [the sinners'] names shall be blotted out of the holy books [the astral records], their seed shall be destroyed and their spirits slain.[161]
Esoterically, Enoch is the “Son of man,” the first; and symbolically, the first Sub-Race of the Fifth Root Race.[162] And if his name yields for purposes of numerical and astronomical glyphs the meaning of the solar year, or 365, in conformity to the age assigned to him in Genesis, it is because, being the seventh, he is, for Occult purposes, the personified period of the two preceding Races with their fourteen Sub-Races. Therefore, he is shown in the Book as the great grandfather of Noah who, in his turn, is the personification of the mankind of the Fifth, struggling with that of the Fourth Root-Race—the great period of the revealed and profaned Mysteries, when the “sons of God” coming down on Earth took for wives the daughters of men, and taught them the secrets of the Angels; in other words, when the “mind-born” men of the Third Race mixed themselves with those of the Fourth, and the divine Science was gradually brought down by men to Sorcery.
Section IX. Hermetic and Kabalistic Doctrines.
The cosmogony of Hermes is as veiled as the Mosaic system, only it is upon its face far more in harmony with the doctrines of the Secret Sciences and even of Modern Science. Says the thrice great Trismegistus, “the hand that shaped the world out of formless pre-existent matter is no hand”; to which Genesis is made to reply, “The world was created out of nothing,” although the Kabalah denies such a meaning in its opening sentences. The Kabalists have never, any more than have the Indian Âryans, admitted such an absurdity. With them, Fire, or Heat, and Motion[163] were chiefly instrumental in the formation of the world out of preëxisting Matter. The Parabrahman and Mûlaprakriti of the Vedântins are the prototypes of the En Suph and Shekinah of the Kabalists. Aditi is the original of Sephira, and the Prajâpatis are the elder brothers of the Sephiroth. The nebular theory of Modern Science, with all its mysteries, is solved in the cosmogony of the Archaic Doctrine; and the paradoxical though very scientific enunciation, that “cooling causes contraction and contraction causes heat; therefore cooling causes heat,” is shown as the chief agency in the formation of the worlds, and especially of our sun and solar system.
All this is contained within the small compass of Sepher Jetzirah in its thirty-two wonderful Ways of Wisdom, signed “Jah Jehovah Sabaoth,” for whomsoever has the key to its hidden meaning. As to the dogmatic or theological interpretation of the first verses in Genesis it is pertinently answered in the same book, where speaking of the [pg 092] Three Mothers, Air, Water and Fire, the writer describes them as a balance with
The good in one scale, the evil in the other, and the oscillating tongue of the Balance between them.[164]
One of the secret names of the One Eternal and Ever-Present Deity, was in every country the same, and it has preserved to this day a phonetic likeness in the various languages. The Aum of the Hindus, the sacred syllable, had become the Ἀιών with the Greeks, and the Ævum with the Romans—the Pan or All. The “thirtieth way” is called in the Sepher Jetzirah the “gathering understanding,” because