2. The Elohim make a woman out of Adam's rib.[363] This process is found in the Magical Texts translated by G. Smith.
The seven Spirits bring forth the woman from the loins of the man,
explains Mr. Sayce in his Hibbert Lectures.[364]
The mystery of the woman who was made from the man is repeated in every national religion, and in Scriptures far antedating the Jewish. You find it in the Avestan fragments, in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and finally in Brahmâ, the male, separating from himself, as a female self, Vâch, in whom he creates Virâj.
3. The two Adams of the first and second chapters in Genesis originated from garbled exoteric accounts coming from the Chaldæans and the Egyptian Gnostics, revised later from the Persian traditions, most of which are old Âryan allegories. As Adam Kadmon is the seventh creation,[365] so the Adam of dust is the eighth; and in the Purânas one finds an eighth, the Anugraha creation, and the Egyptian Gnostics had it. Irenæus, complaining of the heretics, says of the Gnostics:
Sometimes they will have him [man] to have been made on the sixth day, and sometimes on the eighth.[366]
The author of The Hebrew and Other Creations writes:
These two creations of man on the sixth day and on the eighth were those of the Adamic, or fleshly man, and of the spiritual man, who were known to Paul and the Gnostics as the first and second Adam, the man of earth and the man of Heaven. Irenæus also says they insisted that Moses began with the Ogdoad of the Seven Powers and their mother, Sophia (the old Kefa of Egypt, who is the Living Wordat Ombos).[367]
Sophia is also Aditi with her seven sons.
One might go on enumerating and tracing the Jewish “revelations” ad infinitum to their original sources, were it not that the task is superfluous, since so much is already done in that direction by others—and done thoroughly well, as in the case of Gerald Massey, who has sifted the subject to the very bottom. Hundreds of volumes, treatises, and pamphlets are being written yearly in defence of the “divine-inspiration” claim for the Bible; but symbolical and archæological research is coming to the rescue of truth and fact—therefore of the Esoteric Doctrine—upsetting every argument based on faith and breaking it as an idol with feet of clay. A curious and learned book, The Approaching End of the Age, by H. Grattan Guinness, professes to solve the mysteries of the Bible chronology and to prove thereby God's direct revelation to man. Among other things its author thinks that: