The Taro of the sacred Book of Enoch, or Rota, is prefaced, moreover, with this explanation:
The antiquity of this Book is lost in the night of time. It is of Indian origin, and goes back to an epoch long before Moses.... It is written upon detached leaves, which at the first were of fine gold and precious metals.... It is symbolical, and its combinations adapt themselves to all the wonders of the Spirit. Altered by its passage across the Ages, it is nevertheless preserved—thanks to the ignorance of the curious—in its types and its most important primitive figures.
This is the Rota of Enoch, now called Taro of Enoch, to which De Mirville alludes, as we saw, as the means used for “evil Magic,” the [pg 094] “metallic plates [or leaves] escaped from destruction during the Deluge” and which are attributed by him to Cain. They have escaped the Deluge for the simple reason that this Flood was not “Universal.” And it is said to be “of Indian origin,” because its origin is with the Indian Âryans of the first Sub-Race of the Fifth Root-Race, before the final destruction of the last stronghold of Atlantis. But, if it originated with the forefathers of the primitive Hindus, it was not in India that it was first used. Its origin is still more ancient and must be traced beyond and into the Himaleh,[171] the Snowy Range. It was born in that mysterious locality which no one is able to locate, and which is the despair of both Geographers and Christian Theologians—the region in which the Brâhman places his Kailâsa, the Mount Sumeru, and the Pârvatî Pamîr, transformed by the Greeks into Paropamisus.
Round this locality, which still exists, the traditions of the Garden of Eden were built. From these regions the Greeks obtained their Parnassus[172]; and thence proceeded most of the biblical personages, some of them in their day men, some demi-gods and heroes, some—though very few—myths, the astronomical doubles of the former. Abram was one of them—a Chaldæan Brâhman,[173] says the legend, transformed later, after he had repudiated his Gods and left his Ur (pur, “town”?) in Chaldæa, into A-brahm[174] (or A-braham) “no-brâhman” who emigrated. Abram becoming the “father of many nations” is thus explained. The student of Occultism has to bear in mind that every God and hero in ancient Pantheons (that of the Bible included), has three biographies in the narrative, so to say, running parallel with each other and each connected with one of the aspects of the hero—historical, astronomical and perfectly mythical, the last serving to connect the other two together and smooth away the asperities and discordancies in the narrative, and gathering into one or more symbols the verities of the first two. Localities are made to correspond with astronomical [pg 095] and even with psychic events. History was thus made captive by ancient Mystery, to become later on the great Sphynx of the nineteenth century. Only, instead of devouring her too dull querists who will unriddle her whether she acknowledges it or not, she is desecrated and mangled by the modern Œdipus, before he forces her into the sea of speculations in which the Sphynx is drowned and perishes. This has now become self-evident, not only through the Secret Teachings, parsimoniously as they may be given, but by earnest and learned Symbologists and even Geometricians. The Key to the Hebrew Egyptian Mystery, in which a learned Mason of Cincinnati, Mr. Ralston Skinner, unveils the riddle of a God, with such ungodly ways about him as the Biblical Jah-ve, is followed by the establishment of a learned society under the presidentship of a gentleman from Ohio and four vice-presidents, one of whom is Piazzi Smyth, the well-known Astronomer and Egyptologist. The Director of the Royal Observatory in Scotland and author of The Great Pyramid, Pharaonic by name, Humanitarian by fact, its Marvels, Mysteries, and its Teachings, is seeking to prove the same problem as the American author and Mason: namely, that the English system of measurement is the same as that used by the ancient Egyptians in the construction of their Pyramid, or in Mr. Skinner's own words that the Pharaonic “source of measures” originated the “British inch and the ancient cubit.” It “originated” much more than this, as will be fully demonstrated before the end of the next century. Not only is everything in Western religion related to measures, geometrical figures, and time-calculations, the principal period-durations being founded on most of the historical personages,[175] but the latter are also connected with heaven and earth truly, only with the Indo-Âryan heaven and earth, not with those of Palestine.
The prototypes of nearly all the biblical personages are to be sought [pg 096] for in the early Pantheon of India. It is the “Mind-born” Sons of Brahmâ, or rather of the Dhyâni-Pitara (the “Father-Gods”), the “Sons of Light,” who have given birth to the “Sons of Earth”—the Patriarchs. For if the Rig Veda and its three sister Vedas have been “milked out from fire, air and sun,” or Agni, Indra, and Sûrya, as Manu-Smriti tells us, the Old Testament was most undeniably “milked out” of the most ingenious brains of Hebrew Kabalists, partly in Egypt and partly in Babylonia—“the seat of Sanskrit literature and Brâhman learning from her origin,” as Colonel Vans Kennedy truly declared. One of such copies was Abram or Abraham, into whose bosom every orthodox Jew hopes to be gathered after death, that bosom being localised as “heaven in the clouds” or Abhra.[176]
From Abraham to Enoch's Taro there seems to be a considerable distance, yet the two are closely related by more than one link. Gaffarel has shown that the four symbolical animals on the twenty-first key of the Taro, at the third septenary, are the Teraphim of the Jews invented and worshipped by Abram's father Terah, and used in the oracles of the Urim and Thummim. Moreover, astronomically Abraham is the sun-measure and a portion of the sun, while Enoch is the solar year, as much as are Hermes or Thot; and Thot, numerically, “was the equivalent of Moses, or Hermes,” “the lord of the lower realms, also esteemed as a teacher of wisdom,” the same Mason-mathematician tells us; and the Taro being, according to one of the latest bulls of the Pope, “an invention of Hell,” the same “as Masonry and Occultism,” the relation is evident. The Taro contains indeed the mystery of all such transmutations of personages into sidereal bodies and vice versâ. The “wheel of Enoch” is an archaic invention, the most ancient of all, for it is found in China. Éliphas Lévi says there was not a nation but had it, its real meaning being preserved in the greatest secresy. It was a universal heirloom.
As we see, neither the Book of Enoch (his “Wheel”), nor the Zohar, nor any other kabalistic volume, contains merely Jewish wisdom.
The doctrine itself being the result of whole millenniums of thought, is therefore the joint property of Adepts of every nation under the sun. Nevertheless, the Zohar teaches practical Occultism more than any other work on that subject; not as it is translated and commented upon by its various critics though, but with the secret signs on its margins. These signs contain the hidden instructions, apart from the metaphysical interpretations and apparent absurdities so fully credited by Josephus, who was never initiated and gave out the dead letter as he had received it.[177]