The Absolute Consciousness behind phenomena, they tell us, which is only termed unconsciousness in the absence of any element of personality, transcends human conception. Man, unable to form a single concept except in terms of empirical phenomena, is powerless from the very constitution of his being to raise the veil that shrouds the majesty of the Absolute. Only the liberated Spirit is able to faintly realize the nature of the source whence it sprung and whither it must eventually return. As the highest Dhyân Chohan, however, can but bow in ignorance before the awful mystery of Absolute Being; and since, even in that culmination of conscious existence—the merging of the individual in the universal consciousness, to use a phrase of Fichte's—the Finite cannot conceive the Infinite, nor can it apply to it its own standard of mental experiences, how can it be said that the Unconscious and the Absolute can have even an instinctive impulse or hope of attaining clear Self-Consciousness?See Schwegler's Handbook of the History of Philosophy, in Sterling's translation, p. 28. A Vedântin, moreover, would never admit this Hegelian idea; and the Occultist would say that it applies perfectly to the awakened Mahat, the Universal Mind already projected into the phenomenal world as the first aspect of the changeless Absolute, but never to the latter. Spirit and Matter, or Purusha and Prakriti, are but the two primeval aspects of the One and Secondless, we are taught.

The matter-moving Nous, the animating Soul, immanent in every atom, manifested in man, latent in the stone, has different degrees of power; and this Pantheistic idea of a general Spirit-Soul pervading all Nature is the oldest of all the philosophical notions. Nor was the Archæus a discovery either of Paracelsus or of his pupil Van Helmont; for this same Archæus is Father-Æther, the manifested basis and source of the innumerable phenomena of life—localized. The whole series of the numberless speculations of this kind are but variations on the same theme, the key-note of which was struck in this primeval revelation.

(b) The term Anupâdaka, parentless, or without progenitors, is a mystical designation having several meanings in our philosophy. By this name Celestial Beings, the Dhyân Chohans or Dhyâni-Buddhas, are generally meant. These correspond mystically to the human Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, known as the Mânushi (Human) Buddhas, which latter are also designated Anupâdaka, once that their whole personality is merged in their compound Sixth and Seventh Principles, or Âtmâ-Buddhi, and they have become the Diamond-Souled (VajrasattvasVajrapâni or Vajradhara means the diamond-holder; in Tibetan Dorjesempa, sempa meaning the soul; its adamantine quality referring to its indestructibility in the hereafter. The explanation with regard to the Anupâdaka given in the Kâla Chakra, the first in the Gyut division of the Kanjur, is half esoteric. It has misled the Orientalists into erroneous speculations with respect to the Dhyâni-Buddhas and their earthly correspondencies, the Mânushi-Buddhas. The real tenet is hinted at in a subsequent volume, and will be more fully explained in its proper place.), or full Mahâtmâs. The Concealed Lord (Sangbai Dag-po), the one merged with the Absolute, can have no parents since he is Self-Existent, and one with the Universal Spirit (Svayambhû),To quote Hegel again, who with Schelling practically accepted the Pantheistic conception of periodical Avatâras (special incarnations of the World-Spirit in Man, as seen in the case of all the great religious reformers): The essence of man is spirit ... only by stripping himself of his finiteness and surrendering himself to pure self-consciousness does he attain the truth. Christ-man, as man in whom the Unity of God-man [identity of the individual with the universal Consciousness as taught by the Vedântins and some Advaitees] appeared, has, in his death and history generally, himself presented the eternal history of Spirit—a history which every man has to accomplish in himself, in order to exist as Spirit.—Philosophy of History, Sibree's English Translation, p. 340. the Svabhâvat in its highest aspect. The mystery of the Hierarchy of the Anupâdaka is great, its apex being the universal Spirit-Soul, and the lower rung the Mânushi-Buddha: and even every soul-endowed man also is an Anupâdaka in a latent state. Hence—when speaking of the Universe in its formless, eternal, or absolute condition, before it was fashioned by the Builders—the expression, the great Wheel [Universe] was Anupâdaka.

The idea of Absolute Unity would be broken entirely in our conception, had we not something concrete before our eyes to contain that Unity. And the Deity being absolute, must be omnipresent; hence not an atom but contains It within itself. The roots, the trunk, and its many branches, are three distinct objects, yet they are one tree. Say the Kabalists: The Deity is one, because It is infinite. It is triple, because It is ever manifesting. This manifestation is triple in its aspects, for it requires, as Aristotle has it, three principles for every natural body to become objective: privation, form, and matter.A Vedântin of the Visishthadvaita Philosophy would say that, though the only independent Reality, Parabrahman is inseparable from His Trinity. That He is three, Parabrahman, Chit, and Achit, the last two being dependent Realities unable to exist separately; or, to make it clearer, Parabrahman is the Substance—changeless, eternal, and incognizable—and Chit (Âtmâ) and Achit (Anâtmâ) and its qualities, as form and colour are the qualities of any object. The two are the garment, or body, or rather aspect (sharîra) of Parabrahman. But an Occultist would find much to say against this claim, and so would the Advaiti Vedântin. Privation meant in the mind of the great philosopher that which the Occultists call the prototypes impressed in the Astral Light—the lowest plane and world of Anima Mundi. The union of these three principles depends upon a fourth—the Life which radiates from the summits of the Unreachable, to become a universally diffused Essence on the manifested planes of Existence. And this Quaternary (Father, Mother, Son, as a Unity, and a Quaternary—as a living manifestation) has been the means of leading to the very archaic idea of Immaculate Conception, now finally crystallized into a dogma of the Christian Church, which has carnalized this metaphysical idea beyond any common sense. For one has but to read the Kabalah and study its numerical methods of interpretation to find the origin of the dogma. It is purely astronomical, mathematical, and preëminently metaphysical: the Male Element in Nature (personified by the male deities and Logoi—Virâj, or Brahmâ, Horus, or Osiris, etc., etc.) is born through, not from, an immaculate source, personified by the Mother, for—the Abstract Deity being sexless, and not even a Being but Be-ness, or Life itself—that Male having a Mother cannot have a Father. Let us render this in the mathematical language of the author of The Source of Measures. Speaking of the Measure of a Man and his numerical (Kabalistic) value, he writes that in Genesis, iv. 1—

Thus is repeated on earth the mystery enacted, according to the Seers, on the divine plane. The Son of the Immaculate Celestial Virgin (or the Undifferentiated Cosmic Protyle, Matter in its infinitude) is born again on earth as the Son of the terrestrial Eve, our mother Earth, and becomes Humanity as a total—past, present, and future—for Jehovah, or Jod-Hé-Vau-Hé, is androgyne, or both male and female. Above, the Son is the whole Kosmos; below, he is Mankind. The Triad or Triangle becomes Tetraktys, the sacred Pythagorean number, the perfect Square, and a six-faced Cube on earth. The Macroprosopus (the Great Face) is now Microprosopus (the Lesser Face); or, as the Kabbalists have it, the Ancient of Days, descending on Adam Kadmon whom he uses as his vehicle to manifest through, gets transformed into Tetragrammaton. It is now in the Lap of Mâyâ, the Great Illusion, and between itself and the Reality has the Astral Light, the Great Deceiver of man's limited senses, unless Knowledge through Paramârthasatya comes to the rescue.

5. The SevenSc., Sons. were not yet born from the Web of Light, Darkness alone was Father-Mother, Svabhâvat; and Svabhâvat was in Darkness.

The Secret Doctrine, in the Stanzas here given, occupies itself chiefly, if not entirely, with our Solar System, and especially with our Planetary Chain. The Seven Sons, therefore, are the creators of the latter. This teaching will be explained more fully hereafter.

Svabhâvat, the Plastic Essence that fills the Universe, is the root of all things. Svabhâvat is, so to say, the Buddhistic concrete aspect of the abstraction called in Hindû philosophy Mûlaprakriti. It is the body of the Soul, and that which Ether would be to Âkâsha, the latter being the informing principle of the former. Chinese mystics have made of it the synonym of Being. In the Chinese translation of the Ekashloka-Shâstra of Nâgârjuna (the Lung-shu of China), called the Yih-shu-lu-kia-lun, it is said that the term Being, or Subhâva, (Yeu in Chinese) means the Substance giving substance to itself; it is also explained by him as meaning without action and with action, the nature which has no nature of its own. Subhâva, from which Svabhâvat, is composed of two words: su fair, handsome, good; sva, self, and bhâva, being or states of being.

6. These Two are the Germ, and the Germ is One. The Universe was still concealed in the Divine Thought and the Divine Bosom.

The Divine Thought does not imply the idea of a Divine Thinker. The Universe, not only past, present and future—a human and finite idea expressed by finite thought—but in its totality, the Sat (an untranslateable term), Absolute Being, with the Past and Future crystallized in an eternal Present, is that Thought itself reflected in a secondary or manifested cause. Brahman (neuter), as the Mysterium Magnum of Paracelsus, is an absolute mystery to the human mind. Brahmâ, the male-female, the aspect and anthropomorphic reflection of Brahman, is conceivable to the perceptions of blind faith, though rejected by human intellect when it attains its majority.

Hence the statement that during the prologue, so to say, of the drama of creation, or the beginning of cosmic evolution, the Universe, or the Son, lies still concealed in the Divine Thought, which had not yet penetrated into the Divine Bosom. This idea, note well, is at the root, and forms the origin, of all the allegories about the Sons of God born of immaculate virgins.

Is One refers to the Non-Separateness of all that lives and has its being, whether in an active or passive state. In one sense, Oeaohoo is the Rootless Root of All; hence, one with Parabrahman: in another sense it is a name for the manifested One Life, the eternal living Unity. The Root means, as already explained, Pure Knowledge (Sattva),The original for Understanding is Sattva, which Shankara renders Antaskarana. Refined, he says, by sacrifices and other sanctifying operations. In the Katha, at p. 148, Sattva is rendered by Shankara to mean Buddhi—a common use of the word. (Bhagavadgîtâ, etc., translated by Kâshinâth Trimbak Telang, M.A.; edited by Max Müller, p. 193.) Whatever meaning various schools may give the term, Sattva is the name given among Occult students of the Âryâsanga School to the dual Monad, or Âtmâ-Buddhi, and Âtmâ-Buddhi on this plane corresponds to Parabrahman and Mûlaprakriti on the higher plane. eternal (nitya) unconditioned Reality, or Sat (Satya), whether we call it Parabrahman or Mûlaprakriti, for these are but the two symbols of the One. The Light is the same Omnipresent Spiritual Ray, which has entered and now fecundated the Divine Egg, and calls cosmic matter to begin its long series of differentiations. The Curds are the first differentiation, and probably also refer to that cosmic matter which is supposed to be the origin of the Milky Way—the matter we know. This matter, which, according to the revelation received from the primeval Dhyâni-Buddhas, is, during the periodical Sleep of the Universe, of the ultimate tenuity conceivable to the eye of the perfect Bodhisattva—this matter, radiant and cool, becomes, at the first reawakening of cosmic motion, scattered through Space; appearing, when seen from the Earth, in clusters and lumps, like curds in thin milk. These are the seeds of the future worlds, the star-stuff.

6. The Root of Life was in every Drop of the Ocean of Immortality,Amrita. and the Ocean was Radiant Light, which was Fire, and Heat, and Motion. Darkness vanished and was no more; it disappeared in its own Essence, the Body of Fire and Water, of Father and Mother.

The Essence of Darkness being Absolute Light, Darkness is taken as the appropriate allegorical representation of the condition of the Universe during Pralaya, or the term of Absolute Rest, or Non-Being, as it appears to our finite minds. The Fire, and Heat, and Motion, here spoken of, are, of course, not the fire, heat, and motion of Physical Science, but the underlying abstractions, the noumena, or the soul, of the essence of these material manifestations—the things in themselves, which, as Modern Science confesses, entirely elude the instruments of the laboratory, and which even the mind cannot grasp, although it can equally as little avoid the conclusion that these underlying essences of things must exist. Fire and Water, or Father and Mother, may be taken here to mean the divine Ray and Chaos. Chaos, from this union with Spirit obtaining sense, shone with pleasure, and thus was produced the Protogonos [the first-born Light], says a fragment of Hermas. Damascius calls it Dis, the disposer of all things.Cory's Ancient Fragments, p. 314.

According to the Rosicrucian tenets, as handled and explained by the profane for once correctly, if only partially, Light and Darkness are identical in themselves, being only divisible in the human mind; and according to Robert Fludd, Darkness adopted illumination in order to make itself visible.On Rosenkranz. According to the tenets of Eastern Occultism, Darkness is the one true actuality, the basis and the root of Light, without which the latter could never manifest itself, nor even exist. Light is Matter, and Darkness pure Spirit. Darkness, in its radical, metaphysical basis, is subjective and absolute Light; while the latter in all its seeming effulgence and glory, is merely a mass of shadows, as it can never be eternal, and is simply an Illusion, or Mâyâ.

Even in the mind-baffling and science-harassing Genesis,i. 2. light is created out of darkness—and darkness was upon the face of the deep—and not vice versâ. In him [in darkness] was life; and the life was the light of men.John, i. 4. A day may come when the eyes of men will be opened; and then they may comprehend better than they do now the verse in the Gospel of John that says, And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehendeth it not. They will see then that the word darkness does not apply to man's spiritual eyesight, but indeed to Darkness, the Absolute, that comprehendeth not (cannot cognize) transient Light, however transcendent to human eyes. Demon est Deus inversus. The Devil is now called darkness by the Church, whereas in the Bible, in the Book of Job, he is called the Son of God, the bright star of the early morning, Lucifer. There is a whole philosophy of dogmatic craft in the reason why the first Archangel, who sprang from the depths of Chaos, was called Lux (Lucifer), the luminous Son of the Morning, or Manvantaric Dawn. He has been transformed by the Church into Lucifer or Satan, because he is higher and older than Jehovah, and had to be sacrificed to the new dogma.

7. Behold, O Lanoo,Lanoo is a student, a Chelâ who studies practical Esotericism. the Radiant Child of the Two, the unparalleled refulgent Glory—Bright Space, Son of Dark Space, who emerges from the Depths of the great Dark Waters. It is Oeaohoo, the Younger, the —— Whom thou knowest now as Kwan-Shai-Yin.—Comment. (a). He shines forth as the Sun, he is the Blazing Divine Dragon of Wisdom; the EkaEka is One; Chatur, Four; Tri, Three; and Sapta, Seven. is Chatur, and Chatur takes to itself Tri, and the Union produces the Sapta, in whom are the Seven, which become the Tridasha,Tridasha, or Thirty, three times ten, alludes to the Vedic deities in round numbers, or more accurately 33—a sacred number. They are the 12 Âdityas, the 8 Vasus, the 11 Rudras, and the 2 Ashvins—the twin sons of the Sun and Sky. This is the root-number of the Hindû Pantheon, which enumerates 33 crores, or three hundred and thirty millions of gods and goddesses. the Hosts and the Multitudes (b). Behold him lifting the Veil, and unfurling it from East To West. He shuts out the Above, and leaves the Below to be seen as the Great Illusion. He marks the places for the Shining Ones,Stars. and turns the UpperThe Upper Space. into a shoreless Sea of Fire (c), and the One ManifestedElement. into the Great Waters.

(a) Bright Space, Son of Dark Space, corresponds to the Ray dropped at the first thrill of the new Dawn into the great Cosmic Depths, from which it reëmerges differentiated as Oeaohoo, the Younger (the New Life), to be to the end of the Life-Cycle the Germ of all things. He is the Incorporeal Man who contains in himself the Divine Idea, the generator of Light and Life, to use an expression of Philo Judæus. He is called the Blazing Dragon of Wisdom, because, firstly, he is that which the Greek philosophers called the Logos, the Verbum of the Thought Divine; and secondly, because in Esoteric Philosophy this first manifestation, being the synthesis or the aggregate of Universal Wisdom, Oeaohoo, the Son of the Sun, contains in himself the Seven Creative Hosts (Sephiroth), and is thus the essence of manifested Wisdom. He who bathes in the Light of Oeaohoo will never be deceived by the Veil of Mâyâ.

Kwan-Shai-Yin is identical with, and an equivalent of the Sanskrit Avalokiteshvara, and as such is an androgynous deity, like the Tetragrammaton and all the Logoi of antiquity. It is only by some sects in China that he is anthropomorphized, and represented with female attributes; under his female aspect becoming Kwan-Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, called the Divine Voice.The Gnostic Sophia, Wisdom, who is the Mother of the Ogdoad (Aditi, in a certain sense, with her eight sons), is the Holy Ghost and the Creator of all, as in the ancient systems. The Father is a far later invention. The earliest manifested Logos was female everywhere—the mother of the seven planetary powers. The latter is the patron deity of Tibet and of the island of Puto in China, where both deities have a number of monasteries.See Chinese Buddhism, by the Rev. Joseph Edkins, who always gives correct facts, although his conclusions are very frequently erroneous.

The higher gods of antiquity are all Sons of the Mother before they become Sons of the Father. The Logoi, like Jupiter or Zeus, son of Cronus-Saturn, Infinite Time (Kâla), in their origin were represented as male-female. Zeus is said to be the beautiful virgin, and Venus is made bearded. Apollo was originally bisexual, so is Brahmâ-Vâch in Manu and the Purânas. Osiris is interchangeable with Isis, and Horus is of both sexes. Finally in St. John's vision in Revelation, the Logos, who is now connected with Jesus, is hermaphrodite, for he is described as having female breasts. So also is Tetragrammaton, or Jehovah. But there are two Avalokiteshvaras in Esotericism; the First and the Second Logos.

No religious symbol can escape profanation and even derision in our days of politics and science. In Southern India the writer has seen a converted native making pûjâ with offerings before a statue of Jesus clad in woman's clothes and with a ring in its nose. On asking the meaning of this masquerade, we were answered that it was Jesu-Maria blended in one, and that it was done by the permission of the Padre, as the zealous convert had no money to purchase two statues, or idols as they, very properly, were called by a witness, another but a non-converted Hindû. Blasphemous this will appear to a dogmatic Christian, but the Theosophist and the Occultist must award the palm of logic to the converted Hindû. The esoteric Christos in the Gnôsis is, of course, sexless, but in exoteric Theology he is male and female.

Now these terms fire, flame, day, the bright fortnight, etc., smoke, night, and so on, leading only to the end of the Lunar Path, are incomprehensible without a knowledge of Esotericism. These are all names of various deities which preside over the cosmo-psychic Powers. We often speak of the Hierarchy of Flames, of the Sons of Fire, etc. Shankarâchârya, the greatest of the Esoteric Masters of India, says that Fire means a deity which presides over Time (Kâla). The able translator of the Bhagavadgîtâ, Kâshinâth Trimbak Telang, M.A., of Bombay, confesses he has no clear notion of the meaning of these verses. It seems quite clear, on the contrary, to him who knows the Occult doctrine. With these verses the mystic sense of the solar and lunar symbols are connected. The Pitris are Lunar Deities and our Ancestors, because they created the physical man. The Agnishvatta, the Kumâras (the Seven Mystic Sages), are Solar Deities, though they are Pitris also; and these are the Fashioners of the Inner Man. They are The Sons of Fire, because they are the first Beings, called Minds, in the Secret Doctrine, evolved from Primordial Fire. The Lord ... is a consuming fire.Deuteronomy, iv 24. The Lord shall be revealed ... with his mighty angels in flaming fire.Thess., i. 7, 8. The Holy Ghost descended on the Apostles as cloven tongues like as of fire;Acts, ii. 3. Vishnu will return on Kalkî, the White Horse, as the last Avatâra, amid fire and flames; and Sosiosh will also descend on a White Horse in a tornado of fire. And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him ... and his name is called the Word of God,Rev., xix. 13. amid flaming Fire. Fire is Æther in its purest form, and hence is not regarded as matter, but is the unity of Æther—the second, manifested deity—in its universality. But there are two Fires, and a distinction is made between them in the Occult teachings. The first, or the purely formless and invisible Fire, concealed in the Central Spiritual Sun, is spoken of as Triple (metaphysically); while the Fire of the Manifested Cosmos is Septenary, throughout both the Universe and our Solar System. The fire of knowledge burns up all action on the plane of illusion, says the Commentary. Therefore, those who have acquired it and are emancipated, are called Fires. Speaking of the seven senses, symbolized as Hotris, or Priests, Nârada says in Anugitâ: Thus these seven [senses, smell and taste, and colour, and sound, etc.,] are the causes of emancipation; and the translator adds: It is from these seven from which the Self is to be emancipated. I [in the sentence, I am ... devoid of qualities] must mean the Self, not the Brâhmana who speaks.Telang's Translation, Sacred Books of the East, viii. 278.

(b) The expression, all is One Number, issued from No-Number, relates again to that universal and philosophical tenet just explained in the commentary on Shloka 4 of Stanza III. That which is absolute, is of course No-Number; but in its later significance it has an application both in Space and in Time. It means that not only every increment of time is part of a larger increment, up to the most indefinitely prolonged duration conceivable by the human intellect, but also that no manifested thing can be thought of except as part of a whole: the total aggregate being the One Manifested Universe that issues from the Unmanifested or Absolute—called Non-Being, or No-Number, to distinguish it from Being, or the One Number.

2. Learn what we, who descend from the Primordial Seven, we, who are born from the Primordial Flame, have learnt from our Fathers....

This is explained in Book II, and the term, Primordial Flame, corroborates what is said in the first paragraph of the preceding commentary on Stanza IV.

The distinction between the Primordial and the subsequent Seven Builders is that the former are the Ray and direct emanation of the first Sacred Four, the Tetraktys, that is, the eternally Self-Existent One—eternal in essence note well, not in manifestation, and distinct from the Universal One. Latent, during Pralaya, and active, during Manvantara, the Primordial proceed from Father-Mother (Spirit-Hyle, or Ilus); whereas the other Manifested Quaternary and the Seven proceed from the Mother alone. It is the latter who is the immaculate Virgin-Mother, who is overshadowed, not impregnated, by the Universal Mystery—when she emerges from her state of Laya, or undifferentiated condition. In reality, they are, of course, all one; but their aspects on the various planes of Being are different.

The first Primordial are the highest Beings on the Scale of Existence. They are the Archangels of Christianity, those who refuse to create or rather to multiply—as did Michael in the latter system, and as did the eldest Mind-born Sons of Brahmâ (Vedhâs).

3. From the Effulgency of Light—the Ray of the Ever-Darkness—sprang in Space the reäwakened Energies;Dhyân Chohans. the One from the Egg, the Six, and the Five (a). Then the Three, the One, the Four, the One, the Five—the Twice Seven, the Sum Total (b). And these are the Essences, the Flames, the Elements, the Builders, the Numbers (c), the Arûpa,Formless. the Rûpa,With Bodies. and the Force, or Divine Man—the Sum Total. And from the Divine Man emanated the Forms, the Sparks, the Sacred Animals (d), and the Messengers of the Sacred FathersPitris. within the Holy Four.The Four, represented in the Occult numerals by the Tetraktys, the Sacred or Perfect Square, is a Sacred Number with the Mystics of every nation and race. It has one and the same significance in Brâhmanism, Buddhism, in Kabalism and in the Egyptian, Chaldean and other numerical systems.

(a) This relates to the Sacred Science of the Numerals; so sacred, indeed, and so important in the study of Occultism that the subject can hardly be skimmed, even in such a large work as the present. It is on the Hierarchies and the correct numbers of these Beings—invisible (to us) except upon very rare occasions—that the mystery of the whole Universe is built. The Kumâras, for instance, are called the Four—though in reality seven in number—because Sanaka, Sananda, Sanâtana and Sanatkumâra are the chief Vaidhâtra (their patronymic name), who sprang from the four-fold mystery. To make the whole clearer, we have to turn for our illustrations to tenets more familiar to some of our readers, namely the Brâhmanical.

According to Manu, Hiranyagarbha is Brahmâ, the first male, formed by the undiscernible Causeless Cause, in a Golden Egg resplendent as the Sun, as states the Hindû Classical Dictionary; Hiranyagarbha meaning the Golden, or rather the Effulgent, Womb or Egg. The meaning tallies awkwardly with the epithet male. Surely the esoteric meaning of the sentence is clear enough! In the Rig Veda it is said—That, the one Lord of all beings ... the one animating principle of gods and men, arose, in the beginning, in the Golden Womb, Hiranyagarbha—which is the Mundane Egg, or Sphere of our Universe. That Being is surely androgynous, and the allegory of Brahmâ separating into two, and creating in one of his halves (the female Vâch) himself as Virâj, is a proof of it.

The One from the Egg, the Six and the Five, give the number 1065, the value of the First-born (later on the male and female Brahmâ-Prajâpati), who answers to the numbers 7, and 14, and 21 respectively. The Prajâpati, like the Sephiroth are only seven, including the synthetic Sephira of the Triad from which they spring. Thus from Hiranyagarbha, or Prajâpati, the Triune (the primeval Vedic Trimûrti, Agni, Vâyu, and Sûrya), emanate the other seven, or again ten, if we separate the first three which exist in one, and one in three; all, moreover, being comprehended within that one Supreme, Parama, called Guhya or Secret, and Sarvâtman, the Super-Soul. The seven Lords of Being lie concealed in Sarvâtman like thoughts in one brain. So with the Sephiroth. They are either seven when counting from the upper Triad, headed by Kether, or ten—exoterically. In the Mahâbhârata, the Prajâpati are 21 in number, or ten, six, and five (1065), thrice seven.In the Kabalah, the same numbers, viz., 1065 are a value of Jehovah, since the numerical values of the three letters which compose his name—Jod, Vau and twice Hé—are respectively 10 (י), 6 (ו) and 5 (ה); or again thrice seven, 21. Ten is the Mother of the Soul, for Life and Light are therein united, says Hermes. For number one is born of the Spirit and the number ten from Matter [Chaos, feminine]; the unity has made the ten, the ten the unity. (Book of the Keys.) By means of Temura, the anagrammatical method of the Kabalah, and the knowledge of 1065 (21), a universal science may be obtained regarding Cosmos and its mysteries (Rabbi Yogel). The Rabbis regard the numbers 10, 6, and 5 as the most sacred of all.

(b) The Three, the One, the Four, the One, the Five, in their total—Twice Seven, represent 31415—the numerical Hierarchy of the Dhyân Chohans of various orders, and of the inner or circumscribed world.The reader may be told that an American Kabalist has now discovered the same number for the Elohim. It came to the Jews from Chaldæa. See Hebrew Metrology, in The Masonic Review, July, 1885, McMillan Lodge, No. 141. Placed on the boundary of the great Circle, Pass Not—called also the Dhyânipâsha, the Rope of the Angels, the Rope that hedges off the phenomenal from the noumenal Cosmos, which does not fall within the range of our present objective consciousness—this number, when not enlarged by permutation and expansion, is ever 31415, anagrammatically and Kabalistically, being both the number of the Circle and the mystic Svastika, the Twice Seven once more; for whatever way the two sets of figures are counted, when added separately, one figure after another, whether crossways from right, or from left, they will always yield fourteen. Mathematically they represent the well-known mathematical formula, that the ratio of the diameter of a circle to the circumference is as 1 to 3.1415, or the value of π (pi), as it is called. This set of figures must have the same meaning, since the 1:314,159 and again 1:3.1415927 are worked out in the secret calculations to express the various cycles and ages of the First-born, or 311,040,000,000,000 with fractions, and yield the same 1.3415 by a process we are not concerned with at present. And it may be shown that Mr. Ralston Skinner, the author of The Source of Measures, reads the Hebrew word Alhim in the same number values—by omitting, as said, the ciphers, and by permutation—13514: since א (a) is 1; ל (l) is 3 (30); ה (h) is 5; י (i) is 1 (10); and מ (m) is 4 (40); and anagrammatically—31415, as explained by him.

Thus, while in the metaphysical world, the Circle with the one central Point in it has no number, and is called Anupâdaka—parentless and numberless, for it can fall under no calculation; in the manifested world, the Mundane Egg or Circle is circumscribed within the groups called the Line, the Triangle, the Pentagram, the second Line and the Square (or 13514); and when the Point has generated a Line, and thus becomes a diameter which stands for the androgynous Logos, then the figures become 31415, or a triangle, a line, a square, a second line, and a pentagram. When the Son separates from the Mother he becomes the Father, the diameter standing for Nature, or the feminine principle. Therefore it is said: In the World of Being, the One Point fructifies the Line, the Virgin Matrix of Kosmos [the egg-shaped zero], and the immaculate Mother gives birth to the Form that combines all forms. Prajâpati is called the first procreating male, and his mother's husband.We find the same expression in Egypt. Mout signifies, for one thing, Mother, and shows the character assigned to her in the triad of that country. She was no less the mother than the wife of Ammon, one of the principal titles of the god being the husband of his mother. The goddess Mout, or Mût, is addressed as Our Lady, the Queen of Heaven and of the Earth, thus sharing these titles with the other mother goddesses, Isis, Hathor, etc. (Maspero). This gives the key-note to all the later Divine Sons from Immaculate Mothers. It is strongly corroborated by the significant fact that Anna, the name of the Mother of the Virgin Mary, now represented by the Roman Catholic Church as having given birth to her daughter in an immaculate way (Mary conceived without sin), is derived from the Chaldean Ana, Heaven, or Astral Light, Anima Mundi; whence Anaitia, Devî-Durgâ, the wife of Shiva, is also called Annapurna, and Kanyâ, the Virgin; Umâ-Kanyâ being her esoteric name, and meaning the Virgin of Light, Astral Light in one of its multitudinous aspects.

(c) The Devas, Pitris, Rishis; the Suras and the Asuras; the Daityas and Âdityas; the Dânavas and Gandharvas, etc., etc., have all their synonyms in our Secret Doctrine, as well as in the Kabalah and Hebrew Angelology; but it is useless to give their ancient names, as it would only create confusion. Many of these may be now also found even in the Christian Hierarchy of divine and celestial Powers. All those Thrones and Dominions, Virtues and Principalities, Cherubs, Seraphs and Demons, the various denizens of the Sidereal World, are the modern copies of archaic prototypes. The very symbolism in their names, when transliterated and arranged, in Greek and Latin, are sufficient to show it, as will be proved in several cases further on.

(d) The Sacred Animals are found in the Bible as well as in the Kabalah, and they have their meaning—a very profound one, too—on the page of the origins of Life. In the Sepher Jetzirah it is stated that: God engraved in the Holy Four the Throne of his Glory, the Auphanim [the Wheels or World-Spheres], the Seraphim, and the Sacred Animals, as Ministering Angels, and from these [Air, Water, and Fire or Ether] he formed his habitation.

The following is the literal translation from the IXth and Xth Sections:

The words founded his dwelling show clearly that in the Kabalah, as in India, the Deity was considered as the Universe, and was not, in his origin, the extra-cosmic God he now is.

Thus was the world made through Three Seraphim—Sepher, Saphar, and Sipur, or through Number, Numbers, and Numbered. With the astronomical key, these Sacred Animals become the signs of the Zodiac.

4. This was the Army of the Voice, the Divine Mother of the Seven. The Sparks of the Seven are subject to, and the servants of, the First, the Second, the Third, the Fourth, the Fifth, the Sixth, and the Seventh of the Seven (a). TheseThe Sparks. are called Spheres, Triangles, Cubes, Lines and Modellers; for thus stands the Eternal Nidâna—the Oi-Ha-Hou (b).The permutation of Oeaohoo. The literal signification of the word is, among the Eastern Occultists of the North, a circular wind, whirlwind; but in this instance, it is a term to denote the ceaseless and eternal Cosmic Motion, or rather the Force that moves it, which Force is tacitly accepted as the Deity, but never named. It is the eternal Kârana, the ever-acting Cause.

(a) This Shloka gives again a brief analysis of the Hierarchies of the Dhyân Chohans, called Devas (Gods) in India, or the Conscious Intelligent Powers in Nature. To this Hierarchy correspond the actual types into which Humanity may be divided; for Humanity, as a whole, is in reality a materialized, though as yet imperfect, expression thereof. The Army of the Voice is a term closely connected with the mystery of Sound and Speech, as an effect and corollary of the Cause—Divine Thought. As beautifully expressed by P. Christian, the learned author of Histoire de la Magie and L'Homme Rouge des Tuileries, the words spoken by, as well as the name of, every individual largely determine his future fate. Why? Because:

This is strictly true as an esoteric teaching accepted by all the Eastern Schools of Occultism. In the Sanskrit, as also in the Hebrew and all other alphabets, every letter has its occult meaning and its rationale: it is a cause and an effect of a preceding cause, and a combination of these very often produces the most magical effect. The vowels, especially, contain the most occult and formidable potencies. The Mantras (magical rather than religious invocations, esoterically) are chanted by the Brâhmans, and so are the rest of the Vedas and other Scriptures.

The Army of the Voice is the prototype of the Host of the Logos, or the Word, of the Sepher Jetzirah, called in the Secret Doctrine the One Number issued from No-Number—the One Eternal Principle. The Esoteric Theogony begins with the One Manifested (therefore not eternal in its presence and being, if eternal in its essence), the Number of the Numbers and Numbered—the latter proceeding from the Voice, the feminine Vâch, of the hundred forms, Shatarûpâ, or Nature. It is from this Number, 10, or Creative Nature, the Mother (the Occult cypher, or 0, ever procreating and multiplying in union with the unit 1, or the Spirit of Life), that the whole Universe proceeds.

In the Anugîtâ,vi. 15. The Anugîtâ forms part of the Ashvamedha Parvan of the Mahâbhârata. The translator of the Bhagavadgîtâ, edited by Max Müller, regards it as a continuation of the Bhagavadgîtâ. Its original is one of the oldest Upanishads. a conversation is given between a Brâhmana and his wife on the origin of Speech and its Occult properties. The wife asks how Speech came into existence, and which was prior to the other, Speech or Mind. The Brâhmana tells her that the Apâna (inspirational breath) becoming lord, changes that intelligence, which does not understand Speech or Words, into the state of Apâna, and thus opens the Mind. Thereupon he tells her a story, a dialogue between Speech and Mind. Both went to the Self of Being (i.e., to the individual Higher Self, as Nîlakantha thinks; to Prajâpati, according to the commentator Arjuna Mishra), and asked him to destroy their doubts, and decide which of them preceded and was superior to the other. To this the Lord said: Mind (is superior). But Speech answered the Self of Being, by saying: I verily yield (you) your desires, meaning that by Speech he acquired what he desired. Thereupon again, the Self told her that there are two Minds, the movable and the immovable. The immovable is with me, he said, the movable is in your dominion (i.e. of Speech), on the plane of matter. To that you are superior.

The above allegory is at the root of the Occult law, which prescribes silence upon the knowledge of certain secret and invisible things, perceptible only to the spiritual mind (the sixth sense), and which cannot be expressed by noisy or uttered speech. This chapter of Anugîtâ explains, says Arjuna Mishra, Prânâyâma, or regulation of the breath in Yoga practices. This mode, however, without the previous acquisition of, or at least full understanding of, the two higher senses (of which there are seven, as will be shown), pertains rather to the lower Yoga. The Hatha so called was and still is discountenanced by the Arhats. It is injurious to the health, and alone can never develop into Râja Yoga. This story is quoted to show how inseparably connected in the metaphysics of old, are intelligent beings, or rather intelligences, with every sense or function, whether physical or mental. The Occult claim that there are seven senses in man, and in nature, as there are seven states of consciousness, is corroborated in the same work, Chapter vii, on Pratyâhâra (the restraint and regulation of the senses, Prânâyâma being that of the vital winds or breath). The Brâhmana, speaking of the institution of the seven sacrificial Priests (Hotris), says: The nose and the eye, and the tongue, and the skin and the ear as the fifth [or smell, sight, taste, touch, and hearing], mind and understanding are the seven sacrificial priests separately stationed, which dwelling in a minute space (still) do not perceive each other, on this sensuous plane, none of them except mind. For mind says: The nose smells not without me, the eye does not take in colour, etc., etc. I am the eternal chief among all elements [i.e., senses]. Without me, the senses never shine, like an empty dwelling, or like fires the flames of which are extinct. Without me, all beings, like fuel half dried and half moist, fail to apprehend qualities or objects even with the senses exerting themselves.This shows the modern metaphysicians, added to all past and present Hegels, Berkeleys, Schopenhauers, Hartmanns, Herbert Spencers, and even the modern Hylo-Idealists to boot, no better than the pale copyists of hoary antiquity.

This, of course, only with regard to mind on the sensuous plane. Spiritual Mind, the upper portion or aspect of the impersonal Manas, takes no cognizance of the senses in physical man. How well the ancients were acquainted with the correlation of forces, and all the recently discovered phenomena of mental and physical faculties and functions, and with many more mysteries also—may be found in reading Chapters vii and viii of this priceless work in philosophy and mystic learning. See the quarrel of the senses about their respective superiority and their taking the Brahman, the Lord of all creatures, for their arbiter. You are all greatest and not greatest [or superior to objects, as Arjuna Mishra says, none being independent of the other]. You are all possessed of one another's qualities. All are greatest in their own spheres and all support one another. There is one unmoving [life-wind or breath, the yoga-inhalation, so called, which is the breath of the One or Higher Self]. That one is my own Self, accumulated in numerous (forms).

This Breath, Voice, Self or Wind (Pneuma?), is the Synthesis of the Seven Senses, noumenally all minor deities, and esoterically—the Septenary and the Army of the Voice.

(b) Next we see Cosmic Matter scattering and forming itself into Elements; grouped into the mystic Four within the fifth Element—Ether, the lining of Âkâsha, the Anima Mundi, or Mother of Cosmos. Dots, Lines, Triangles, Cubes, Circles and finally Spheres—why or how? Because, says the Commentary, such is the first law of Nature, and because Nature geometrizes universally in all her manifestations. There is an inherent law—not only in the primordial, but also in the manifested matter of our phenomenal plane—by which Nature correlates her geometrical forms, and later, also, her compound elements, and in which also there is no place for accident or chance. It is a fundamental law in Occultism, that there is no rest or cessation of motion in Nature.It is the knowledge of this law that permits and helps the Arhat to perform his Siddhis, or various phenomena, such as the disintegration of matter, the transport of objects from one place to another, etc. That which seems rest is only the change of one form into another, the change of substance going hand in hand with that of form—so at least we are taught in Occult physics, which thus seem to have anticipated the discovery of the conservation of matter by a considerable time. Says the ancient CommentaryThese are ancient Commentaries attached with modern Glossaries to the Stanzas, for the Commentaries in their symbolical language are usually as difficult to understand as the Stanzas themselves. to Stanza IV:

The Mother is the fiery Fish of Life. She scatters her Spawn and the Breath [Motion] heats and quickens it. The Grains [of Spawn] are soon attracted to each other and form the Curds in the Ocean [of Space]. The larger lumps coalesce and receive new Spawn—in fiery Dots, Triangles and Cubes, which ripen, and at the appointed time some of the lumps detach themselves and assume spheroidal form, a process which they effect only when not interfered with by the others. After which, Law No. —— comes into operation. Motion [the Breath] becomes the Whirlwind and sets them into rotation.In a polemical scientific work, The Modern Genesis (p. 48), the Rev. W. B. Slaughter, criticizing the position assumed by the astronomers, says: It is to be regretted that the advocates of this [nebular] theory have not entered more largely into the discussion of it [the beginning of rotation] No one condescends to give us the rationale of it. How does the process of cooling and contracting the mass impart to it a rotatory motion? (Quoted by Winchell, World-Life, p. 94.) It is not materialistic Science that can ever solve it. Motion is eternal in the unmanifested, and periodical in the manifest, says an Occult teaching. It is when heat caused by the descent of Flame into primordial matter causes its particles to move, which motion becomes the Whirlwind. A drop of liquid assumes a spheroidal form owing to its atoms moving around themselves in their ultimate, unresolvable, and noumenal essence; unresolvable for Physical Science, at any rate. The question is amply treated later on.

The Doctrine teaches that, in order to become a divine, fully conscious God—aye, even the highest—the Spiritual Primeval Intelligences must pass through the human stage. And when we say human, this does not apply merely to our terrestrial humanity, but to the mortals that inhabit any world, i.e., to those Intelligences that have reached the appropriate equilibrium between matter and spirit, as we have now, ever since the middle point of the Fourth Root Race of the Fourth Round was passed. Each Entity must have won for itself the right of becoming divine, through self-experience. Hegel, the great German thinker, must have known or sensed intuitionally this truth, when he said, that the Unconscious evolved the Universe only in the hope of attaining clear self-consciousness, in other words, of becoming Man; for this is also the secret meaning of the oft recurring Purânic phrase, of Brahmâ being constantly moved by the desire to create. This explains also the hidden Kabalistic meaning of the saying: The Breath becomes a stone; the stone, a plant; the plant, an animal; the animal, a man; the man, a spirit; and the spirit, a god. The Mind-born Sons, the Rishis, the Builders, etc., were all Men—of whatever forms and shapes—in other worlds and in preceding Manvantaras.

This subject being so very mystical, it is most difficult to explain it in all its details and bearings; for the whole mystery of evolutionary creation is contained therein. A sentence or two in the Shloka vividly recalls to mind similar sentences in the Kabalah and the phraseology of the King Psalmist.Psalms, civ. 4. Both, when speaking of God, show him making the wind his messenger and his ministers a flaming fire. But in the Esoteric Doctrine it is used figuratively. The Fiery Whirl-wind is the incandescent cosmic dust which only follows magnetically, as the iron filings follow the magnet, the directing thought of the Creative Forces. Yet, this cosmic dust is something more; for every atom in the Universe has the potentiality of self-consciousness in it, and is, like the Monads of Leibnitz, a Universe in itself, and for itself. It is an atom and an angel.

In this connection it should be noted that one of the luminaries of the modern Evolutionist School, Mr. A. R. Wallace, when discussing the inadequacy of natural selection as the sole factor in the development of physical man, practically concedes the whole point here discussed. He holds that the evolution of man was directed and furthered by superior Intelligences, whose agency is a necessary factor in the scheme of Nature. But once the operation of these Intelligences is admitted in one place, it is only a logical deduction to extend it still further. No hard and fast line can be drawn.

2. They make of him the Messenger of their Will (a). The Dzyu becomes Fohat: the swift Son of the Divine Sons, whose Sons are the Lipika,The difference between the Builders, the Planetary Spirits, and the Lipika must not be lost sight of. (See Shlokas 5 and 6 of this Commentary.) runs circular errands. Fohat is the Steed, and the Thought is the Rider.That is, he is under the influence of their guiding thought. He passes like lightning through the fiery cloudsCosmic mists. (b); takes Three, and Five, and Seven Strides through the Seven Regions above, and the Seven below.The World to be. He lifts his Voice, and calls the innumerable Sparks,Atoms. and joins them together (c).

(a) This shows the Primordial Seven using for their Vehicle, (Vâhana, or the manifested subject which becomes the symbol of the Power directing it) Fohat, called in consequence, the Messenger of their Will—the Fiery Whirlwind.

(b) Dzyu becomes Fohat—the expression itself shows it. Dzyu is the one Real (Magical) Knowledge, or Occult Wisdom; which, dealing with eternal truths and primal causes, becomes almost omnipotence when applied in the right direction. Its antithesis is Dzyu-mi, that which deals with illusions and false appearances only, as in our exoteric modern sciences. In this case, Dzyu is the expression of the collective Wisdom of the Dhyâni-Buddhas.

As the reader is supposed not to be acquainted with the Dhyâni-Buddhas, it is as well to say at once that, according to the Orientalists, there are five Dhyânis who are the Celestial Buddhas, of whom the Human Buddhas are the manifestations in the world of form and matter. Esoterically, however, the Dhyâni-Buddhas are seven, of whom five only have hitherto manifested,See A. P. Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism, 5th annotated edition, pp. 171-173. and two are to come in the Sixth and Seventh Root-Races. They are, so to speak, the eternal prototypes of the Buddhas who appear on this earth, each of whom has his particular divine prototype. So, for instance, Amitâbha is the Dhyâni-Buddha of Gautama Shâkyamuni, manifesting through him whenever this great Soul incarnates on earth as He did in Tzonkha-pa.The first and greatest Tibetan Reformer who founded the Yellow-Caps, Gelukpas. He was born in the year 1355 a.d., in the district of Amdo, and was the Avatâra of Amitâbha, the celestial name of Gautama Buddha. As the synthesis of the seven Dhyâni-Buddhas, Avalokiteshvara was the first Buddha (the Logos), and Amitâbha is the inner God of Gautama, who, in China, is called Amida (Buddha). They are, as Prof. Rhys Davids correctly states, the glorious counterparts in the mystic world, free from the debasing conditions of this material life, of every earthly mortal Buddha—the liberated Mânushi-Buddhas appointed to govern the Earth in this Round. They are the Buddhas of Contemplation, and are all Anupâdaka (parentless), i.e., self-born of the divine essence. The exoteric teaching—which says that every Dhyâni-Buddha has the faculty of creating from himself an equally celestial son, a Dhyâni-Bodhisattva, who, after the decease of the Mânushi-Buddha, has to carry out the work of the latter—rests on the fact that, owing to the highest Initiation performed by one overshadowed by the Spirit of Buddha—who is credited by the Orientalists with having created the five Dhyâni-Buddhas!—a candidate becomes virtually a Bodhisattva, created such by the High Initiator.

(c) Fohat, being one of the most, if not the most important character in Esoteric cosmogony, should be minutely described. As in the oldest Grecian cosmogony, which differed widely from the later mythology, Eros is the third person in the primeval trinity, Chaos, Gæa, Eros—answering to the Kabalistic Trinity, Ain Suph, the Boundless All (for Chaos is Space, from χαίνω, to open wide, to be void), Shekinah and the Ancient of Days, or the Holy Ghost—so Fohat is one thing in the yet Unmanifested Universe, and another in the phenomenal and Cosmic World. In the latter, he is that occult, electric, vital power, which, under the Will of the Creative Logos, unites and brings together all forms, giving them the first impulse, which in time becomes law. But in the Unmanifested Universe, Fohat is no more this, than Eros is the later brilliant winged Cupid, or Love. Fohat has naught to do with Cosmos yet, since Cosmos is not born, and the Gods still sleep in the bosom of Father-Mother. He is an abstract philosophical idea. He produces nothing yet by himself; he is simply that potential creative Power, in virtue of whose action the Noumenon of all future phenomena divides, so to speak, but to reunite in a mystic supersensuous act, and emit the creative Ray. When the Divine Son breaks forth, then Fohat becomes the propelling force, the active Power which causes the One to become Two and Three—on the cosmic plane of manifestation. The triple One differentiates into the Many, and then Fohat is transformed into that force which brings together the elemental atoms, and makes them aggregate and combine. We find an echo of this primeval teaching in early Greek mythology. Erebus and Nux are born out of Chaos, and, under the action of Eros, give birth in their turn to Æther and Hemera, the light of the superior and the light of the inferior, or terrestrial, regions. Darkness generates light. Compare in the Purânas Brahmâ's Will or Desire to create; and in the Phœnician cosmogony of Sanchuniathon the doctrine that Desire, πόθος, is the principle of creation.

Fohat is closely related to the One Life. From the Unknown One, the Infinite Totality, the Manifested One, or the periodical, Manvantaric Deity, emanates; and this is the Universal Mind, which, separated from its Fountain-Source, is the Demiurge or the Creative Logos of the Western Kabalists, and the Four-faced Brahmâ of the Hindû religion. In its totality, viewed, in the Esoteric doctrine, from the standpoint of manifested Divine Thought, it represents the Hosts of the higher Creative Dhyân Chohans. Simultaneously with the evolution of the Universal Mind, the Concealed Wisdom of Adi-Buddha—the One Supreme and Eternal—manifests itself as Avalokiteshvara (or Manifested Îshvara), which is the Osiris of the Egyptians, the Ahura-Mazda of the Zoroastrians, the Heavenly Man of the Hermetic philosophers, the Logos of the Platonists, and the Âtman of the Vedântins.T. Subba Row seems to identify him with, and to call him, the Logos. (See his Lectures on the Bhagavadgîtâ, in the Theosophist, vol. ix.) By the action of the Manifested Wisdom, or Mahat—represented by these innumerable centres of spiritual energy in the Kosmos—the Reflection of the Universal Mind, which is Cosmic Ideation and the Intellectual Force accompanying such Ideation, becomes objectively the Fohat of the Buddhist esoteric philosopher. Fohat, running along the seven principles of Âkâsha, acts upon manifested Substance, or the One Element, as declared above, and, by differentiating it into various centres of energy, sets in motion the law of Cosmic Evolution, which, in obedience to the Ideation of the Universal Mind, brings into existence all the various states of being in the manifested Solar System.

(b) The Seed appearing and reäppearing continuously. Here Seed stands for the World-Germ, viewed by Science as material particles in a highly attenuated condition, but in Occult Physics as spiritual particles, i.e., supersensuous matter existing in a state of primeval differentiation. To see and appreciate the difference—the immense gulf that separates terrestrial matter from the finer grades of supersensuous matter—every Astronomer, every Chemist and Physicist ought to be a Psychometer, to say the least; he ought to be able to sense for himself that difference in which he now refuses to believe. Mrs. Elizabeth Denton, one of the most learned, and also one of the most materialistic and sceptical women of her age—the wife of Professor Denton, the well-known American Geologist, and the author of The Soul of Things—was, in spite of her scepticism, one of the most wonderful psychometers. This is what she describes in one of her experiments. A particle of a meteorite was placed on her forehead, in an envelope, and the lady, not being aware of what it contained, said:

In Theogony, every Seed is an ethereal organism, from which evolves later on a celestial Being, a God.

In the Beginning, that which is called in mystic phraseology Cosmic Desire evolves into Absolute Light. Now light without any shadow would be absolute light; in other words, absolute darkness, as Physical Science tries to prove. This shadow appears under the form of primordial matter, allegorized—if you will—in the shape of the Spirit of Creative Fire or Heat. If, rejecting the poetical form and allegory, Science chooses to see in this the primordial fire-mist, it is welcome to do so. Whether one way or the other, whether Fohat or the famous Force of Science, nameless and as difficult of definition as our Fohat himself, that Something caused the Universe to move with circular motion, as Plato has it; or, as the Occult teaching expresses it:

The Central Sun causes Fohat to collect primordial dust in the form of balls, to impel them to move in converging lines and finally to approach each other and aggregate.... Being scattered in Space, without order or system, the World-Germs come into frequent collision until their final aggregation, after which they become Wanderers [Comets]. Then the battles and struggles begin. The older [bodies] attract the younger, while others repel them. Many perish, devoured by their stronger companions. Those that escape become worlds.Book of Dzyan.

When carefully analyzed and reflected upon, this will be found as scientific as Science can make it, even at our late period.

We have been assured, that there exist several modern works of speculative fancy upon such struggles for life in sidereal heaven, especially in the German language. We rejoice to hear it, for ours is an Occult teaching lost in the darkness of archaic ages. We have treated of it fully in Isis Unveiled,See Index, at the words Evolution, Darwin, Kapila, Battle of Life, etc. and the idea of Darwinian-like evolution, of struggle for life and supremacy, and of the survival of the fittest, among the Hosts above as of the Hosts below, runs throughout both the volumes of our earlier work, written in 1876. But the idea is not ours, it is that of antiquity. Even the Purânic writers have ingeniously interwoven allegory with cosmic facts and human events. Any symbologist may discern their astro-cosmical allusions, even though he be unable to grasp the whole meaning. The great wars in heaven, in the Purânas; the wars of the Titans, in Hesiod and other classical writers; the struggles also between Osiris and Typhon, in the Egyptian myth; and even those in the Scandinavian legends; all refer to the same subject. Northern Mythology refers to it as the battle of the Flames, the sons of Muspel who fought on the field of Wigred. All these relate to Heaven and Earth, and have a double, and often even a triple, meaning and esoteric application to things above as to things below. They severally relate to astronomical, theogonical and human struggles; to the adjustment of orbs, and the supremacy among nations and tribes. The struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest reigned supreme from the moment that Kosmos manifested into being, and could hardly escape the observant eye of the ancient Sages. Hence the incessant fights of Indra, the God of the Firmament, with the Asuras—degraded from high Gods into cosmic Demons—and with Vritra or Ahi; the battles fought between stars and constellations, between moons and planets—later on incarnated as kings and mortals. Hence also the War in Heaven of Michael and his Host against the Dragon—Jupiter and Lucifer Venus—when a third of the stars of the rebellious Host was hurled down into Space, and its place was found no more in Heaven. As we wrote long ago:

There were old worlds that perished, conquered by the new, etc., etc. The assertion that all the worlds (stars, planets, etc.)—as soon as a nucleus of primordial substance, in the laya (undifferentiated) state, is informed by the freed principles of a just deceased sidereal body—become first comets, and then suns, to cool down to inhabitable worlds, is a teaching as old as the Rishis.

Thus the Secret Books, as we see, distinctly teach an astronomy that would not be rejected even by modern speculation, could the latter thoroughly understand its teachings.

For archaic astronomy and the ancient physical and mathematical sciences expressed views identical with those of Modern Science, and many of far more momentous import. A struggle for life and a survival of the fittest, in the worlds above and on our planet here below, are distinctly taught. This teaching, however, although it would not be entirely rejected by Science, is sure to be repudiated as an integral whole. For it avers that there are only seven self-born primordial Gods, emanated from the trinitarian One. In other words, it means that all the worlds, or sidereal bodies—always on strict analogy—are formed one from the other, after the primordial manifestation at the beginning of the Great Age is accomplished.

The birth of the celestial bodies in space is compared to a multitude of pilgrims at the Festival of the Fires. Seven ascetics appear on the threshold of the temple with seven lighted sticks of incense. At the light of these the first row of pilgrims light their incense sticks. After which, every ascetic begins whirling his stick around his head in space, and furnishes the rest with fire. Thus with the heavenly bodies. A laya-centre is lighted and awakened into life by the fires of another pilgrim, after which, the new centre rushes into space and becomes a comet. It is only after losing its velocity, and hence its fiery tail, that the Fiery Dragon settles down into quiet and steady life, as a regular respectable citizen of the sidereal family. Therefore it is said:

The chief Hierarchies among these are hinted at in the great Quaternary, or the four bodies and the three faculties, exoterically, of Brahmâ and the Panchâsya, the five Brahmâs, or the five Dhyâni-Buddhas in the Buddhist system.

The highest Group is composed of the Divine Flames, so called, also spoken of as the Fiery Lions and the Lions of Life, whose esotericism is securely hidden in the zodiacal sign of Leo. It is the nucleole of the superior Divine World. They are the Formless Fiery Breaths, identical in one aspect with the upper Sephirothal Triad, which is placed by the Kabalists in the Archetypal World.

The same Hierarchy, with the same numbers, is found in the Japanese system, in the Beginnings, as taught by both the Shinto and the Buddhist sects. In this system, Anthropogenesis precedes Cosmogenesis, as the divine merges into the human, and creates—midway in its descent into matter—the visible Universe; the legendary personages, remarks reverentially Omoie, having to be understood as the stereotyped embodiment of the higher [secret] doctrine, and its sublime truths. To state this old system at full length would occupy too much of our space; a few words on it, however, cannot be out of place. The following is a short synopsis of this Anthropo-Cosmogenesis, and shows how closely the most separated nations echoed one and the same archaic teaching.

When all was as yet Chaos (Kon-ton), three spiritual Beings appeared on the stage of future creation: (1) Ame no ani naka nushi no Kami, Divine Monarch of the Central Heaven; (2) Taka mi onosubi no Kami, Exalted, Imperial Divine Offspring of Heaven and Earth; and (3) Kamu mi musubi no Kami, Offspring of the Gods, simply.

These were without form or substance—our Arûpa Triad—as neither the celestial nor the terrestrial substance had yet differentiated, nor had the essence of things been formed.

(b) In the Zohar—which, as now arranged and reëdited by Moses de Leon, with the help of Syrian and Chaldean Christian Gnostics, in the XIIIth century, and corrected and revised still later by many Christian hands, is only a little less exoteric than the Bible itself—this Divine [Vehicle] no longer appears as it does in the Chaldean Book of Numbers. True enough, Ain Suph, the Absolute Endless No-thing, uses also the form of the One, the manifested Heavenly Man (the First Cause), as its Chariot (Mercabah, in Hebrew; Vâhana, in Sanskrit) or Vehicle, to descend into, and manifest itself in, the phenomenal world. But the Kabalists neither make it plain how the Absolute can use anything, or exercise any attribute whatever, since, as the Absolute, it is devoid of attributes; nor do they explain that in reality it is the First Cause (Plato's Logos), the original and eternal Idea, that manifests through Adam Kadmon, the Second Logos, so to speak. In the Book of Numbers, it is explained that Ain (En, or Aiôr) is the only self-existent, whereas its Depth, the Bythos of the Gnostics, called Propatôr, is only periodical. The latter is Brahmâ, as differentiated from Brahman or Parabrahman. It is the Depth, the Source of Light, or Propatôr, which is the Unmanifested Logos, or the abstract Idea, and not Ain Suph, whose Ray uses Adam Kadmon—male and female—or the Manifested Logos, the objective Universe, as a Chariot, through which to manifest. But in the Zohar we read the following incongruity: Senior occultatus est, et absconditus; Microprosopus manifestus est, et non manifestus.Rosenroth, Liber Mysterii IV. 1. This is a fallacy, since Microprosopus, or the Microcosm, can only exist during its manifestations, and is destroyed during the Mahâpralayas. Rosenroth's Kabbala is no guide, but very often a puzzle.

The First Order are the Divine. As in the Japanese system, in the Egyptian, and every old cosmogony—at this divine Flame, the One, are lit the Three descending Groups. Having their potential being in the higher Group, they now become distinct and separate Entities. These are called the Virgins of Life, the Great Illusion, etc., etc., and collectively the six-pointed star. The latter, in almost every religion, is the symbol of the Logos as the first emanation. It is the sign of Vishnu in India, the Chakra, or Wheel; and the glyph of the Tetragrammaton, He of the Four Letters, in the Kabalah, or metaphorically the Limbs of Microprosopus, which are ten and six respectively.

The later Kabalists, however, especially the Christian Mystics, have played sad havoc with this magnificent symbol. Indeed, the Microprosopus—who is, philosophically speaking, quite distinct from the unmanifested eternal Logos, one with the Father—has finally been brought, by centuries of incessant efforts of sophistry and of paradoxes, to be considered as one with Jehovah, or the one living God (!), whereas Jehovah is no better than Binah, a female Sephira. This fact cannot be too frequently impressed upon the reader. For the Ten Limbs of the Heavenly Man are the ten Sephiroth; but the first Heavenly Man is the unmanifested Spirit of the Universe, and ought never to be degraded into Microprosopus, the Lesser Face or Countenance, the prototype of man on the terrestrial plane. The Microprosopus is, as just said, the Logos manifested, and of such there are many. Of this, however, later on. The six-pointed star refers to the six Forces or Powers of Nature, the six planes, principles, etc., etc., all synthesized by the seventh, or the central point in the star. All these, the upper and lower Hierarchies included, emanate from the Heavenly or Celestial Virgin, the Great Mother in all religions, the Androgyne, the Sephira Adam Kadmon. Sephira is the Crown, Kether, in the abstract principle only, as a mathematical x, the unknown quantity. On the plane of differentiated nature, she is the female counterpart of Adam Kadmon, the first Androgyne. The Kabalah teaches that the words Fiat LuxGenesis i. referred to the formation and evolution of the Sephiroth, and not to light as opposed to darkness. Rabbi Simeon says:

In its Unity, Primordial Light is the seventh, or highest, principle, Daiviprakriti, the Light of the Unmanifested Logos. But in its differentiation, it becomes Fohat, or the Seven Sons. The former is symbolized by the central point in the Double Triangle; the latter by the Hexagon itself, or the Six Limbs of Microprosopus, the Seventh being Malkuth, the Bride of the Christian Kabalists, or our Earth. Hence the expressions:

The first after the One is Divine Fire; the second, Fire and Ether; the third is composed of Fire, Ether and Water; the fourth of Fire, Ether, Water, and Air. The One is not concerned with Man-bearing Globes, but with the inner, invisible Spheres. The First-Born are the Life, the Heart and Pulse of the Universe; the Second are its Mind or Consciousness.

These Elements of Fire, Air, etc., are not our compound elements; and this Consciousness has no relation to our consciousness. The Consciousness of the One Manifested, if not absolute, is still unconditioned. Mahat, the Universal Mind, is the first production of the Brahmâ-Creator, but also of Pradhâna, Undifferentiated Matter.

(c) The Second Order of Celestial Beings, those of Fire and Ether, corresponding to Spirit and Soul, or Âtmâ-Buddhi, whose names are legion, are still formless, but more definitely substantial. They are the first differentiation in the Secondary Evolution or Creation—a misleading word. As the name shows, they are the Prototypes of the incarnating Jîvas or Monads, and are composed of the Fiery Spirit of Life. It is through these that passes, like a pure solar beam, the Ray which is furnished by them with its future Vehicle, the Divine Soul, Buddhi. These are directly concerned with the Hosts of the higher World of our System. From these Two-fold Units emanate the Three-fold.

In the cosmogony of Japan, when, out of the chaotic mass, an egg-like nucleus appears, having within itself the germ and potency of all universal as well as of all terrestrial life, it is the Three-fold just named, which differentiate. The male ethereal principle (Yo) ascends, and the female grosser or more material principle (In) is precipitated into the universe of substance, when a separation occurs between the celestial and the terrestrial. From this, the female, the Mother, the first rudimentary objective being is born. It is ethereal, without form or sex, and yet it is from it and the Mother that the Seven Divine Spirits are born, from whom will emanate the seven creations; just as in the Codex Nazaræus from Karabtanos and the Mother Spiritus the seven evilly disposed (material) spirits are born. It would be too long to give here the Japanese names, but in translation they stand in this order:

(1.) The Invisible Celibate, which is the Creative Logos of the non-creating Father, or the creative potentiality of the latter made manifest.

(2.) The Spirit [or God] of the rayless Depths [Chaos], which becomes differentiated matter, or the world-stuff; also the mineral realm.

(3.) The Spirit of the Vegetable Kingdom, of the Abundant Vegetation.

(4.) The Spirit of the Earth and the Spirit of the Sands; a Being of dual nature, the former containing the potentiality of the male element, the latter that of the female element. These two were one, as yet unconscious of being two.

In this duality were contained (a) Isu no gai no Kami, the male, dark and muscular Being; and (b) Eku gai no Kami, the female, fair and weaker or more delicate Being. Then:

(5 and 6.) The Spirits who were androgynous or dual-sexed.

(7.) The Seventh Spirit, the last emanated from the Mother, appears as the first divine human form distinctly male and female. It was the seventh creation, as in the Purânas, wherein man is the seventh creation of Brahmâ.

These, Tsanagi-Tsanami, descended into the Universe by the Celestial Bridge, the Milky Way, and Tsanagi, perceiving far below a chaotic mass of cloud and water, thrust his jewelled spear into the depths, and dry land appeared. Then the two separated to explore Onokoro, the newly-created island-world. (Omoie.)

Such are the Japanese exoteric fables, the rind that conceals the kernel of the same one truth of the Secret Doctrine.

(d) The Third Order correspond to Âtmâ-Buddhi-Manas, Spirit, Soul and Intellect; and are called the Triads.

(e) The Fourth Order are substantial Entities. This is the highest Group among the Rûpas (Atomic Forms). It is the nursery of the human, conscious, spiritual Souls. They are called the Imperishable Jîvas, and constitute, through the Order below their own, the first Group of the first Septenary Host—the great mystery of human, conscious and intellectual Being. For the latter is the field wherein lies concealed, in its privation, the Germ that will fall into generation. That Germ will become the spiritual potency in the physical cell, that guides the development of the embryo, and that is the cause of the hereditary transmission of faculties, and all the inherent qualities in man. The Darwinian theory, however, of the transmission of acquired faculties is neither taught nor accepted in Occultism. Evolution, in the latter, proceeds on quite other lines; the physical, according to Esoteric teaching, evolving gradually from the spiritual, mental, and psychic. This inner soul of the physical cell—the spiritual plasm that dominates the germinal plasm—is the key that must open one day the gates of the terra incognita of the Biologist, now called the dark mystery of Embryology. It is worthy of notice that Modern Chemistry, while rejecting, as a superstition of Occultism and Religion as well, the theory of substantial and invisible Beings, called Angels, Elementals, etc.—without, of course, having ever looked into the philosophy of these incorporeal Entities, or thought over them—should, owing to observation and discovery, have been unconsciously forced to recognize and adopt the same ratio of progression and order, in the evolution of chemical atoms, as Occultism does for both its Dhyânis and Atoms—analogy being its first law. As seen above, the very first Group of the Rûpa Angels is quaternary, an element being added to each in descending order. So also are the atoms, in the phraseology of Chemistry, monatomic, diatomic, triatomic, tetratomic, etc., progressing downwards.

Let it be remembered that the Fire, Water, and Air of Occultism, or the Elements of Primary Creation so-called, are not the compound elements they are on earth, but noumenal homogeneous Elements—the Spirits of the former. Then follow the Septenary Groups or Hosts. Placed on parallel lines with the atoms in a diagram, the natures of these Beings would be seen to correspond, in their downward scale of progression, to composite elements in a mathematically identical manner as to analogy. This refers, of course, only to diagrams made by Occultists; for were the scale of Angelic Beings to be placed on parallel lines with the scale of the chemical atoms of Science—from the hypothetical Helium down to Uranium—they would of course be found to differ. For the latter have, as correspondents on the Astral Plane, only the four lowest orders—the three higher principles in the atom, or rather molecule, or chemical element, being perceptible to the initiated Dangma's eye alone. But then, if Chemistry desired to find itself on the right path, it would have to correct its tabular arrangement by that of the Occultists—which it might refuse to do. In Esoteric Philosophy, every physical particle corresponds to, and depends on, its higher noumenon—the Being to whose essence it belongs; and, above as below, the Spiritual evolves from the Divine, the Psycho-mental from the Spiritual—tainted from its lower plane by the Astral—the whole animate and (seemingly) inanimate Nature evolving on parallel lines, and drawing its attributes from above as well as below.

The number seven, as applied to the term Septenary Host, above mentioned, does not imply only seven Entities, but seven Groups or Hosts, as explained before. The highest Group, the Asuras born in Brahmâ's first body, which turned into Night, are septenary, i.e., divided like the Pitris into seven Classes, three of which are bodiless (arûpa) and four with bodies.See Vishnu Purâna, Book I. They are in fact more truly our Pitris (Ancestors) than the Pitris who projected the first physical man.

(f) The Fifth Order is a very mysterious one, as it is connected with the microcosmic pentagon, the five-pointed star, representing man. In India and Egypt, these Dhyânis were connected with the Crocodile, and their abode is in Capricornus. But these are convertible terms in Indian Astrology, for the tenth sign of the Zodiac, which is called Makara, is loosely translated Crocodile. The word itself is occultly interpreted in various ways, as will be shown further on. In Egypt, the Defunct—whose symbol is the pentagram, or the five-pointed star, the points of which represent the limbs of a man—was shown emblematically transformed into a crocodile. Sebekh, or Sevekh (or Seventh), as Mr. Gerald Massey says, showing it to be the type of intelligence, is a dragon in reality, not a crocodile. He is the Dragon of Wisdom, or Manas, the Human Soul, Mind, the Intelligent Principle, called in our Esoteric Philosophy the Fifth Principle.

Says the defunct Osirified, in the Book of the Dead, or Ritual, under the glyph of a mummiform God with a crocodile's head:

An allusion to the destruction of divine spiritual purity when man acquires the knowledge of good and evil; also to the fallen Gods, or Angels of every theogony.

This last sentence gives the corroboration, and repeats the doctrine of esoteric Buddhism, for it alludes directly to the Fifth Principle (Manas), or the most spiritual part of its essence rather, which merges into, is absorbed by, and made one with Âtmâ-Buddhi, after the death of man. For Sekhem is the residence, or Loka, of the God Khem (Horus-Osiris, or Father and Son); hence the Devachan of Âtmâ-Buddhi. In the Book of the Dead, the Defunct is shown entering into Sekhem, with Horus-Thot, and emerging from it as pure spirit. Thus the Defunct says:

And addressing in magic formula that which is called, in Egyptian Esotericism, the ancestral heart, or the reïncarnating principle, the permanent Ego, the Defunct says:

It is in Sekhem that lies concealed the Mysterious Face, or the real Man concealed under the false personality, the triple-crocodile of Egypt, the symbol of the higher Trinity, or human Triad, Âtmâ, Buddhi and Manas.

One of the explanations of the real though hidden meaning of this Egyptian religious glyph is easy. The crocodile is the first to await and meet the devouring fires of the morning sun, and very soon came to personify the solar heat. When the sun arose, it was like the arrival on earth, and among men, of the divine soul which informs the Gods. Hence the strange symbolism. The mummy donned the head of a crocodile to show that it was a Soul arriving from the earth.

In all the ancient papyri, the crocodile is called Sebekh (Seventh); water also symbolizes the fifth principle esoterically; and, as already stated, Mr. Gerald Massey shows that the crocodile was the seventh Soul, the supreme one of seven—the Seer unseen. Even exoterically Sekhem is the residence of the God Khem, and Khem is Horus avenging the death of his father Osiris, hence punishing the sins of man, when he becomes a disembodied Soul. Thus the defunct Osirified became the God Khem, who gleans the field of Aanroo; that is, he gleans either his reward or punishment, for that field is the celestial locality (Devachan), where the Defunct is given wheat, the food of divine justice. The Fifth Group of Celestial Beings is supposed to contain in itself the dual attributes of both the spiritual and physical aspects of the Universe; the two poles, so to say, of Mahat, the Universal Intelligence, and the dual nature of man, the spiritual and the physical. Hence its number Five, doubled and made into Ten, connecting it with Makara, the tenth sign of the Zodiac.

(g) The Sixth and Seventh Orders partake of the lower qualities of the Quaternary. They are conscious ethereal Entities, as invisible as Ether, which are shot out, like the boughs of a tree, from the first central Group of the Four, and shoot out in their turn numberless side Groups, the lower of which are the Nature-Spirits, or Elementals, of countless kinds and varieties; from the formless and unsubstantial—the ideal Thoughts of their creators—down to atomic, though, to human perception, invisible organisms. The latter are considered as the spirits of atoms, for they are the first remove (backwards) from the physical atom—sentient, if not intelligent creatures. They are all subject to Karma, and have to work it out through every cycle. For, as the Doctrine teaches, there are no such privileged Beings in the Universe, whether in our own or in other Systems, in the outer or the inner Worlds,A World, when called a higher World, is not higher by reason of its location, but because it is superior in quality or essence. Yet such a World is generally understood by the profane as Heaven, and located above our heads. as the Angels of the Western Religion and the Judean. A Dhyân Chohan has to become one; he cannot be born or appear suddenly on the plane of life as a full-blown Angel. The Celestial Hierarchy of the present Manvantara will find itself transferred, in the next Circle of Life, into higher superior Worlds, and will make room for a new Hierarchy, composed of the elect ones of our mankind. Being is an endless cycle within the One Absolute Eternity, wherein move numberless inner cycles finite and conditioned. Gods, created as such, would evince no personal merit in being Gods. Such a class of Beings—perfect only by virtue of the special immaculate nature inherent in them—in the face of suffering and struggling humanity, and even of the lower creation, would be the symbol of an eternal injustice quite Satanic in character, an ever present crime. It is an anomaly and an impossibility in Nature. Therefore the Four and the Three have to incarnate as all other beings have. This Sixth Group, moreover, remains almost inseparable from man, who draws from it all but his highest and lowest principles, or his spirit and body; the five middle human principles being the very essence of those Dhyânis. Paracelsus calls them the Flagæ; the Christians, the Guardian Angels; the Occultists, the Ancestors, the Pitris. They are the Six-fold Dhyân Chohans, having the six spiritual Elements in the composition of their bodies—in fact, men, minus the physical body.

Alone, the Divine Ray, the Âtman, proceeds directly from the One. When asked how this can be? How is it possible to conceive that these Gods, or Angels, can be at the same time their own emanations and their personal selves? Is it in the same sense as in the material world, where the son is, in one way, his father, being his blood, the bone of his bone and the flesh of his flesh? To this the Teachers answer: Verily it is so. But one has to go deep into the mystery of Being, before one can fully comprehend this truth.

2. The One Ray multiplies the smaller Rays. Life precedes Form, and Life survives the last Atom.Of Form, the Sthûla Sharîra, External Body. Through the countless Rays the Life-Ray, the One, Like a Thread through many Beads.Pearls.

This shloka expresses the conception—a purely Vedântic one, as already explained elsewhere—of a Life-Thread, Sûtrâtmâ, running through successive generations. How, then, can this be explained? By resorting to a simile, to a familiar illustration, though necessarily imperfect, as all our available analogies must be. Before resorting to it, however, I would ask, whether it seems unnatural, least of all supernatural, to any one of us, when we consider the process of the growth and development of a fœtus into a healthy baby weighing several pounds? Evolving from what? From the segmentation of an infinitesimally small ovum and a spermatozoön! And afterwards we see the baby develop into a six-foot man! This refers to the atomic and physical expansion, from the microscopically small into something exceedingly large; from the unseen, to the naked eye, into the visible and objective. Science has provided for all this; and, I dare say, her theories, embryological, biological and physiological, are correct enough, so far as exact observation of the material goes. Nevertheless, the two chief difficulties of the science of Embryology—namely, what are the forces at work in the formation of the fœtus, and the cause of hereditary transmission of likeness, physical, moral or mental—have never been properly answered; nor will they ever be solved, till the day when Scientists condescend to accept the Occult theories. But if this physical phenomenon astonishes no one, except in so far as it puzzles the Embryologists, why should our intellectual and inner growth, the evolution of the Human-Spiritual to the Divine-Spiritual, be regarded as, or seem, more impossible than the other?

The Materialists and the Evolutionists of the Darwinian school would be ill-advised to accept the newly worked-out theories of Professor Weissmann, the author of Beiträge zur Descendenzlehre, with regard to one of the two mysteries of Embryology, as above specified, which he seems to think he has solved; for, when it is fully solved, Science will have stepped into the domain of the truly Occult, and passed for ever out of the realm of transformation, as taught by Darwin. The two theories are irreconcilable, from the standpoint of Materialism. Regarded from that of the Occultists, however, the new theory solves all these mysteries. Those who are not acquainted with the discovery of Professor Weissmann—at one time a fervent Darwinist—ought to hasten to repair the deficiency. The German embryologist-philosopher—stepping over the heads of the Greek Hippocrates and Aristotle, right back into the teachings of the old Âryans—shows one infinitesimal cell, out of millions of others at work in the formation of an organism, alone and unaided determining, by means of constant segmentation and multiplication, the correct image of the future man, or animal, in its physical, mental and psychic characteristics. It is this cell which impresses on the face and form of the new individual the features of the parents, or of some distant ancestor; it is this cell, again, which transmits to him the intellectual and mental idiosyncracies of his sires, and so on. This Plasm is the immortal portion of our bodies, developing by means of a process of successive assimilations. Darwin's theory, viewing the embryological cell as the essence or extract from all other cells, is set aside; it is incapable of accounting for hereditary transmission. There are but two ways of explaining the mystery of heredity: either the substance of the germinal cell is endowed with the faculty of crossing the whole cycle of transformations that lead to the construction of a separate organism, and then to the reproduction of identical germinal cells; or, these germinal cells do not have their genesis at all in the body of the individual, but proceed directly from the ancestral germinal cell passed from father to son through long generations. It is the latter hypothesis that Weissmann has adopted and worked upon, and it is to this cell that he traces the immortal portion of man. So far, so good; and when this almost correct theory is accepted, how will Biologists explain the first appearance of this everlasting cell? Unless man grew like the immortal Topsy, and was not born at all, but fell from the clouds, how was that embryological cell generated in him?

Complete the Physical Plasm, mentioned above, the Germinal Cell of man with all its material potentialities, with the Spiritual Plasm, so to say, or the fluid that contains the five lower principles of the Six-principled Dhyâni—and you have the secret, if you are spiritual enough to understand it.

Now to the promised simile.

When the seed of the animal man is cast into the soil of the animal woman, that seed cannot germinate unless it has been fructified by the five virtues [the fluid of, or the emanation from, the principles] of the Six-fold Heavenly Man. Wherefore the Microcosm is represented as a Pentagon, within the Hexagon Star, the Macrocosm.Ἄνθρωπος, a work on Occult Embryology, Book I.

The functions of Jiva on this Earth are of a five-fold character. In the mineral atom, it is connected with the lowest principles of the Spirits of the Earth (the Six-fold Dhyânis); in the vegetable particle, with their second—the Prâna (Life); in the animal, with all these plus the third and the fourth; in man, the germ must receive the fruitage of all the five. Otherwise he will be born no higher than an animal.Namely, a congenital idiot.

Thus in man alone the Jîva is complete. As to his seventh principle, it is but one of the Beams of the Universal Sun, for each rational creature receives the temporary loan only of that which has to return to its source. As to his physical body, it is shaped by the lowest terrestrial Lives, through physical, chemical and physiological evolution; the Blessed Ones have nought to do with the purgations of matter, says the Kabalah in the Chaldean Book of Numbers.

It comes to this: Mankind, in its first prototypal, shadowy form, is the offspring of the Elohim of Life, or Pitris; in its qualitative and physical aspect, it is the direct progeny of the Ancestors, the lowest Dhyânis, or Spirits of the Earth; for its moral, psychic and spiritual nature, it is indebted to a Group of divine Beings, the name and characteristics of which will be given in Volume II. Collectively, men are the handiwork of Hosts of various Spirits; distributively, the tabernacles of those Hosts; and occasionally and individually, the vehicles of some of them. In our present all-material Fifth Race, the earthly Spirit of the Fourth is still strong in us; but we are approaching the time when the pendulum of evolution will direct its swing decidedly upwards, bringing Humanity back on a parallel line with the primitive Third Root-Race in spirituality. During its childhood, mankind was wholly composed of that Angelic Host, who were the indwelling Spirits that animated the monstrous and gigantic tabernacles of clay of the Fourth Race, built by and composed of countless myriads of Lives, as our bodies are also now. This sentence will be explained later on in the present Commentary. Science, dimly perceiving the truth, may find bacteria and other infinitesimals in the human body, and see in them only occasional and abnormal visitors, to which diseases are attributed. Occultism—which discerns a Life in every atom and molecule, whether in a mineral or human body, in air, fire or water—affirms that our whole body is built of such Lives; the smallest bacterium under the microscope being to them in comparative size like an elephant to the tiniest infusoria.

The tabernacles mentioned above have improved in texture and symmetry of form, growing and developing with the Globe that bears them; but the physical improvement has taken place at the expense of the spiritual Inner Man and of Nature. The three middle principles, in earth and man, became with every Race more material; the Soul stepping back to make room for the Physical Intellect; the essence of the Elements becoming the material and composite elements now known.

Man is not, nor could he ever be, the complete product of the Lord God; but he is the child of the Elohim, so arbitrarily changed into the singular number and masculine gender. The first Dhyânis, commissioned to create man in their image, could only throw off their Shadows, as a delicate model for the Nature Spirits of matter to work upon. Man is, beyond any doubt, formed physically out of the dust of the Earth, but his creators and fashioners were many. Nor can it be said that the Lord God breathed into his nostrils the Breath of Life, unless that God is identified with the One Life, omnipresent though invisible, and unless the same operation is attributed to God on behalf of every Living Soul, which is the Vital Soul (Nephesh), and not the Divine Spirit (Ruach) which ensures to man alone a divine degree of immortality, that no animal, as such, could ever attain in this cycle of incarnation. It is owing to the inadequate distinctions made by the Jews, and now by our Western metaphysicians, who are unable to understand, and hence to accept, more than a triune man—Spirit, Soul, Body—that the Breath of Life has been confused with the immortal Spirit. This applies also directly to the Protestant theologians, who in translating a certain verse in the Fourth GospelJohn iii, 8. have entirely perverted its meaning. This mistranslation runs, the wind bloweth where it listeth, instead of the spirit goeth where it willeth, as in the original, and also in the translation of the Greek Eastern Church.

The learned and very philosophical author of New Aspects of Life would impress upon his reader that the Nephesh Chiah (Living Soul), according to the Hebrews:

The human body, he thinks, ought to be viewed as a matrix in which, and from which, the Soul, which he seems to place higher than the Spirit, is developed. Considered functionally and from the standpoint of activity, the Soul stands undeniably higher, in this finite and conditioned world of Mâyâ. The Soul, he says, is ultimately produced from the animated body of man. Thus the author identifies Spirit (Âtmâ) with the Breath of Life simply. The Eastern Occultists will demur to this statement, for it is based on the erroneous conception that Prâna and Âtmâ, or Jîvâtmâ, are one and the same thing. The author supports the argument, by showing that with the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and even Latins, Ruach, Pneuma and Spiritus meant Wind—with the Jews undeniably, and with the Greeks and Romans very probably; the Greek word Anemos (Wind) and the Latin Animus (Soul) having a suspicious relation.

This is very far fetched. But a legitimate battle-field for deciding this question is hardly to be found, since Dr. Pratt seems to be a practical, matter-of-fact metaphysician, a kind of Kabalist-Positivist, whereas the Eastern metaphysicians, especially the Vedântins, are all Idealists. The Occultists also are of the extreme Esoteric Vedântin school, and though they call the One Life (Parabrahman) the Great Breath and the Whirlwind, they disconnect the seventh principle entirely from matter, and deny that it has any relation to, or connection with it.

Thus the philosophy of man's psychic, spiritual and mental relations with his physical functions is in almost inextricable confusion. Neither the old Âryan nor the Egyptian psychology is now properly understood; nor can they be assimilated, without accepting the Esoteric septenary, or, at any rate, the Vedântic quinquepartite division of the human inner principles. Failing which, it will be for ever impossible to understand the metaphysical and purely psychic, and even physiological, relations between the Dhyân Chohans, or Angels, on the one plane, and Humanity on the other. No Eastern (Âryan) Esoteric works are so far published, but we possess the Egyptian papyri, which speak clearly of the seven principles, or the Seven Souls of Man. The Book of the Dead gives a complete list of the transformations that every Defunct undergoes, while divesting himself, one by one, of all these principles—materialized for the sake of clearness into ethereal entities or bodies. We must, moreover, remind those who try to show that the Ancient Egyptians did not teach Reïncarnation, that the Soul (the Ego or Self) of the Defunct is said to be living in Eternity: it is immortal, coëval with, and disappearing with, the Solar Boat, that is, for the Cycle of Necessity. This Soul emerges from the Tiaou, the Realm of the Cause of Life, and joins the living on Earth by day, to return to Tiaou every night. This expresses the periodical existences of the Ego.Ch. cxlviii.

The Shadow, the Astral Form, is annihilated, devoured by the Uræus,Ibid., cxlix. 51. the Manes will be annihilated; the two Twins (the Fourth and Fifth Principles) will be scattered; but the Soul-Bird, the Divine Swallow, and the Uræus of Flame (Manas and Âtmâ-Buddhi) will live in the eternity, for they are their mother's husbands.

Another suggestive analogy between the Âryan, or Brâhmanical, and the Egyptian Esotericism. The former call the Pitris the Lunar Ancestors of men, and the Egyptians make of the Moon-God, Taht-Esmun, the first human ancestor.

As well known to every Hindû, this same constellation represents in India the Seven Rishis, and is called Riksha, and Chitrashikandinas.

Like alone produces like. The Earth gives Man his body, the Gods (Dhyânis) give him his five inner principles, the psychic Shadow, of which these Gods are often the animating principle. Spirit (Âtman) is one, and indiscrete. It is not in the Tiaou.

For what is the Tiaou? The frequent allusion to it in the Book of the Dead contains a mystery. Tiaou is the path of the Night-Sun, the inferior hemisphere, or the infernal region of the Egyptians, placed by them on the concealed side of the Moon. The human being, in their Esotericism, came out from the Moon—a triple mystery, astronomical, physiological and psychical, at once; he crossed the whole cycle of existence, and then returned to his birth-place, before issuing from it again. Thus the Defunct is shown arriving in the West, receiving his judgment before Osiris, resurrecting as the God Horus, and circling round the sidereal heavens, which is an allegorical assimilation to Ra, the Sun; then having crossed the Noot, the Celestial Abyss, returning once more to Tiaou; an assimilation to Osiris, who, as the God of life and reproduction, inhabits the Moon. PlutarchDe Iside et Osiride, xliii. shows the Egyptians celebrating a festival called The Ingress of Osiris into the Moon. In the Ritual,Ch. xli. life is promised after death; and the renovation of life is placed under the patronage of Osiris-Lunus, because the Moon was the symbol of life-renewals or reïncarnations, owing to its growth, waning, dying, and reäppearance every month. In the Dankmoe,iv. 5. it is said: O Osiris-Lunus, that renews to thee thy renewal. And Sabekh says to Seti I:Mariette's Abydos, plate 51. Thou renewest thyself as the God Lunus, when a babe. It is still better explained in a Louvre papyrus:P. Pierret, Études Égyptologiques. Couplings and conceptions abound when he [Osiris-Lunus] is seen in heaven on that day. Says Osiris: O sole radiant beam of the Moon! I issue from the circulating multitudes [of stars].... Open me the Tiaou, for Osiris N. I will issue by day to do what I have to do amongst the livingRitual, ch. ii.—i.e., to produce conceptions.

Osiris was God manifest in generation, because the ancients knew, far better than the moderns, the real occult influences of the lunar body upon the mysteries of conception. In the oldest systems we find the Moon always male. Thus Soma, with the Hindûs, is a kind of sidereal Don Juan, a King, and the father, albeit illegitimate, of Budha—Wisdom. This relates to Occult Knowledge, a wisdom gathered through a thorough acquaintance with lunar mysteries, including those of sexual generation. And later, when the Moon became connected with the female Goddesses, with Diana, Isis, Artemis, Juno, etc., this connection was also due to a thorough knowledge of physiology and female nature, physical as much as psychic.

If, instead of being taught in Sunday Schools useless lessons from the Bible, the armies of the ragged and poor were taught Astrology—so far, at any rate, as the occult properties of the Moon and its hidden influences on generation are concerned—then, there would be little need to fear increase of the population, or to resort to the questionable literature of the Malthusians for its arrest. For it is the Moon and her conjunctions that regulate conceptions, and every Astrologer in India knows it. During the previous Races, and at least at the beginning of the present one, those who indulged in marital relations during certain lunar phases that made those relations sterile, were regarded as sorcerers and sinners. But now even these sins of old, which arose from the abuse of Occult knowledge, would appear preferable to the crimes of to-day, which are perpetrated because of the complete ignorance of such Occult influences.

But, primarily, the Sun and Moon were the only visible and, by their effects, so to say, tangible, psychic and physiological deities—the Father and the Son—while Space or Air in general, or that expanse of heaven called Noot by the Egyptians, was the concealed Spirit or Breath of the two. The Father and Son were interchangeable in their functions, and worked together harmoniously in their effects upon terrestrial nature and humanity; hence they were regarded as one, though two as personified Entities. They were both males, and both had their distinct though collaborative work in the causative generation of humanity. So much from the astronomical and cosmic standpoints, viewed and expressed in symbolical language, which became in our last races theological and dogmatic. But behind this veil of cosmic and astrological symbols, there were the occult mysteries of anthropography and the primeval genesis of man. And in this, no knowledge of symbols, or even the key to the post-diluvian symbolical language of the Jews, will or can help, save only with reference to that which has been laid down in national scriptures for exoteric uses; the sum of which, however cleverly veiled, was but the smallest portion of the real primitive history of each people, and often, moreover, as in the Hebrew Scriptures, related merely to the terrestrial human, and not to the divine life of that nation. That psychic and spiritual element belonged to the Mysteries and Initiation. There were things never recorded in scrolls, but which, as in Central Asia, were engraved on rocks and in subterranean crypts.

Nevertheless, there was a time when the whole world was of one lip and of one knowledge, and man knew more of his origin than he does now; and thus knew that the Sun and Moon, however large a part they may play in the constitution, growth and development of the human body, were not the direct causative agents of his appearance on Earth; for these agents, in truth, are the living and intelligent Powers which the Occultists call Dhyân Chohans.

As to this, a very learned admirer of the Jewish Esotericism tells us that:

To this the Eastern Occultist replies: Quite so; they are an abstraction to our physical senses. To our spiritual perceptions, however, and to our inner spiritual eye, the Elohim, or Dhyânis, are no more an abstraction than our soul and spirit are to us. Reject the one and you reject the other, since that which is the surviving Entity in us, is partly the direct emanation from, and partly those celestial Entities themselves. One thing is certain; the Jews were perfectly acquainted with sorcery and various maleficent forces: but, with the exception of some of their great prophets and seers like Daniel and Ezekiel—Enoch belonging to a far distant race, as a generic character, and not to any nation but to all—they knew little of, nor would they deal with, the real divine Occultism; their national character being averse to anything which had no direct bearing upon their own ethnical, tribal and individual benefits—witness their own prophets, and the curses thundered by them against the stiff-necked race. But even the Kabalah plainly shows the direct relation between the Sephiroth, or Elohim, and men.

Therefore, when it is proved to us that the Kabalistic identification of Jehovah with Binah, a female Sephira, has still another, a sub-occult, meaning in it, then and then only will Occultists be ready to pass the palm of perfection to the Kabalist. Until then, it is asserted that, as Jehovah, in the abstract sense of a one living God, is a single number, a metaphysical figment, and a reality only when put in his proper place as an emanation and a Sephira—we have a right to maintain that the Zohar, as witnessed by the Book of Numbers, at any rate, gave out originally, before the Christian Kabalists had disfigured it, and still gives out, the same doctrine that we do; that is, it makes Man emanate, not from one Celestial Man, but from a Septenary Group of Celestial Men, or Angels, just as in Pymander, the Thought Divine.

3. When the One becomes Two, the Three-fold appears (a). The Three areLinked into. One; and it is our Thread, O Lanoo, the Heart of the Man-Plant, called Saptaparna (b).

(a) When the One becomes Two, the Three-fold appears: to wit, when the One Eternal drops its reflection into the region of Manifestation, that reflection, the Ray, differentiates the Water of Space; or, in the words of the Book of the Dead: Chaos ceases, through the effulgence of the Ray of Primordial Light dissipating total darkness, by the help of the great magic power of the Word of the [Central] Sun. Chaos becomes male-female, and Water, incubated by Light, and the Three-fold Being issues as its First-born. Ra [or Osiris-Ptah] creates his own Limbs [like Brahmâ], by creating the Gods destined to personify his phases, during the Cycle.Op. cit., xvii. 4. The Egyptian Ra, issuing from the Deep, is the Divine Universal Soul in its manifested aspect, and so is Nârâyana, the Purusha, concealed in Âkâsha, and present in Ether.

This is the metaphysical explanation, and refers to the very beginning of Evolution, or, as we would rather say, of Theogony. The meaning of the Stanza, when explained from another standpoint in its reference to the mystery of man and his origin, is still more difficult to comprehend. In order to form a clear conception of what is meant by the One becoming Two, and then being transformed into the Three-fold, the student has to make himself thoroughly acquainted with what we call Rounds. If he refers to Esoteric Buddhism—the first attempt to sketch out an approximate outline of archaic cosmogony—he will find that by a Round is meant the serial evolution of nascent material Nature, of the seven Globes of our Chain,Several inimical critics are anxious to prove that no Seven Principles of Man, or Septenary Constitution of our Chain, were taught in our earlier volumes, Isis Unveiled. Though in that work the doctrine could only be hinted at, there are many passages, nevertheless, in which the Septenary Constitution of both Man and the Chain is openly mentioned. Speaking of the Elohim (II. 420), it is said: They remain over the seventh heaven (or spiritual world), for it is they who, according to the Kabalists, formed in succession the six material worlds, or rather, attempts at worlds, that preceded our own, which, they say, is the seventh. Our Globe, in the diagram representing the Chain, is, of course, the seventh and lowest; though, as the evolution on these Globes is cyclic, it is the fourth, on the descending arc of matter. And again (II. 367) it is written: In the Egyptian notions, as in those of all other faiths founded on philosophy, man was not merely ... a union of soul and body; he was a trinity, when spirit was added to it. Besides, that doctrine made him consist of ... body, ... astral form, or shadow, ... animal soul, ... the higher soul, and ... terrestrial intelligence ... [and] a sixth principle, etc., etc.—the seventh—Spirit. So clearly are these principles mentioned, that even in the Index (II. 683), one finds Six Principles of Man, the seventh being, in strict truth, the synthesis of the six, and not a principle but a ray of the Absolute All. with their mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms; man being included in the latter and standing at the head of it, during the whole period of a Life-Cycle, which latter would be called by the Brâhmans a Day of Brahmâ. It is, in short, one revolution of the Wheel (our Planetary Chain), which is composed of seven Globes, or seven separate Wheels, in another sense this time. When evolution has run downward into matter from Globe A to Globe G, it is one Round. In the middle of the fourth revolution, which is our present Round, Evolution has reached its acme of physical development, crowned its work with the perfect physical man, and, from this point, begins its work spirit-ward. All this needs little repetition, as it is well explained in Esoteric Buddhism. That which was hardly touched upon, however, and of which the little that was said has misled many, is the origin of man, and it is upon this that a little more light may now be thrown, just enough to make the Stanza more comprehensible, as the process will be fully explained only in its legitimate place, in Volume II.

Now every Round, on the descending scale, is but a repetition in a more concrete form of the Round which preceded it, just as every Globe, down to our Fourth Sphere the actual Earth, is a grosser and more material copy of the more shadowy Sphere which precedes it, each in order, on the three higher planes.See Diagram III, p. 221. On its way upwards, on the ascending arc, Evolution spiritualizes and etherealizes, so to speak, the general nature of all, bringing it on to a level with the plane on which the twin Globe on the opposite arc is placed; the result being, that when the seventh Globe is reached, in whatever Round, the nature of everything that is evolving returns to the condition it was in at its starting point—plus, every time, a new and superior degree in the states of consciousness. Thus it becomes clear that the origin of man, so-called, in this our present Round, or Life-Cycle, on this Planet, must occupy the same place in the same order—save details based on local conditions and time—as in the preceding Round. Again, it must be explained and remembered that, as the work of each Round is said to be apportioned to a different Group of so-called Creators, or Architects, so is that of every Globe; that is, it is under the supervision and guidance of special Builders and Watchers—the various Dhyân Chohans.

Creators is an incorrect word to use, as no other religion, not even the sect of the Visishthadvaitîs in India, one which anthropomorphizes even Parabrahman, believes in creation ex nihilo, as Christians and Jews do, but only in evolution out of preëxisting materials.

The Group of the Hierarchy which is commissioned to create men is a special Group, then; yet it evolved shadowy man in this Cycle, just as a higher and still more spiritual Group evolved him in the Third Round. But as it is the Sixth, on the downward scale of Spirituality—the last and Seventh being the Terrestrial Spirits (Elementals), which gradually form, build and condense his physical body—this Sixth Group evolves no more than the future man's shadowy form, a filmy, hardly visible, transparent copy of themselves. It becomes the task of the Fifth Hierarchy—the mysterious Beings that preside over the constellation Capricornus, Makara, or Crocodile, in India and in Egypt—to inform the empty and ethereal animal form, and make of it the Rational Man. This is one of those subjects upon which very little may be said to the general public. It is a Mystery truly, but only to him who is prepared to reject the existence of intellectual and conscious Spiritual Beings in the Universe, and to limit full Consciousness to man alone, and that only as a function of the brain. Many are those among the Spiritual Entities, who have incarnated bodily in man, since his first appearance, and who, for all that, still exist as independently as they did before, in the infinitudes of Space.

To put it more clearly, such an invisible Entity may be bodily present on earth without, however, abandoning its status and functions in the supersensuous regions. If this needs explanation, we can do no better than remind the reader of like cases in so-called Spiritualism; though such cases are very rare, at least as regards the nature of the Entity incarnating, or taking temporary possession of a medium. For the so-called spirits that may occasionally possess themselves of the bodies of mediums are not the Monads, or Higher Principles, of disembodied Personalities. Such spirits can only be either Elementaries, or—Nirmânakâyas. Just as certain persons, whether by virtue of a peculiar organization, or through the power of acquired mystic knowledge, can be seen in their double in one place, while their body is many miles away; so the same thing can occur in the case of superior Beings.

Man, philosophically considered, is, in his outward form, simply an animal, hardly more perfect than his pithecoid-like ancestor of the Third Round. He is a living Body, not a living Being, since the realization of existence, the Ego Sum, necessitates self-consciousness, and an animal can only have direct consciousness, or instinct. This was so well understood by the ancients, that even the Kabalists made of soul and body two Lives, independent of each other. In the New Aspects of Life, the author states the Kabalistic teaching:

This relates exclusively to our Elemental Spirits, and has naught to do with either the Planetary, Sidereal, Cosmic or Inter-Etheric Intelligent Forces, or Angels as they are termed by the Roman Church. The Jewish Kabalists, especially the practical Occultists who dealt with Ceremonial Magic, busied themselves solely with the Spirits of the Planets and the Elementals so-called. Therefore the above covers only a portion of the Esoteric teaching.

The Soul, whose body-vehicle is the astral, ethereo-substantial envelope, could die and man be still living on earth. That is to say, the Soul could free itself from and quit the tabernacle for various reasons, such as insanity, spiritual and physical depravity, etc. The possibility of the Soul—that is, the eternal Spiritual Ego—dwelling in the unseen worlds, while its body goes on living on Earth, is a preeminently Occult doctrine, especially in Chinese and Buddhist philosophy. Many are the soulless men among us, for the occurrence is found to take place in wicked materialists as well as in persons who advance in holiness and never turn back.

Therefore, that which living men (Initiates) can do, the Dhyânis, who have no physical body to hamper them, can do still better. This was the belief of the antediluvians, and it is fast becoming that of modern intellectual society in Spiritualism, as well as in the Greek and Roman Churches, which teach the ubiquity of their Angels. The Zoroastrians regarded their Amshaspends as dual entities (Ferouers), applying this duality—in Esoteric philosophy, at any rate—to all the spiritual and invisible denizens of the numberless worlds in space, which are visible to our eye. In a note of Damascius (sixth century) on the Chaldean Oracles, we have ample evidence of the universality of this doctrine, for he says: In these Oracles, the seven Cosmocratores of the World [the World-Pillars], mentioned likewise by St. Paul, are double; one set being commissioned to rule the superior worlds, the spiritual and the sidereal, and the other to guide and watch over the worlds of matter. Such is also the opinion of Jamblichus, who makes an evident distinction between the Archangels and the Archontes.De Mysteriis, ii. 3.

The above may be applied, of course, to the distinction made between the degrees or orders of Spiritual Beings, and it is in this sense that the Roman Catholic Church tries to interpret and teach the difference; for while the Archangels are in her teaching divine and holy, she denounces their Doubles as Devils. But the word Ferouer is not to be understood in this sense, for it means simply the reverse or the opposite side of some attribute or quality. Thus when the Occultist says that the Demon is the inverse of God—evil, the reverse of the medal—he does not mean two separate actualities, but two aspects or facets of the same Unity. But the best man living, side by side with an Archangel—as described in Theology—would appear a fiend. Hence a certain reason in depreciating a lower Double, immersed far deeper in matter than its original. But still there is as little cause to regard them as Devils, and this is precisely what the Roman Catholics maintain against all reason and logic.

This identity between the Spirit and its material Double—in man it is the reverse—explains still better the confusion, already alluded to in this work, in the names and individualities, as well as in the numbers, of the Rishis and Prajâpatis; especially of those of the Satya Yuga and the Mahâbhâratan Period. It also throws additional light on what the Secret Doctrine teaches with regard to the Root- and the Seed-Manus. Not only these Progenitors of our mankind, but every human being, we are taught, has his prototype in the Spiritual Spheres, which prototype is the highest essence of his Seventh Principle. Thus the seven Manus become fourteen, the Root-Manu being the Prime Cause, and the Seed-Manu its Effect; and from the Satya Yuga (the first stage) to the Heroic Period, these Manus or Rishis become twenty-one in number.

(b) The concluding sentence of this shloka shows how archaic is the belief and the doctrine that man is seven-fold in his constitution. The Thread of Being, which animates man, and passes through all his Personalities, or Rebirths on this Earth—an allusion to Sûtrâtmâ—the Thread on which moreover all his Spirits are strung, is spun from the essence of the Three-fold, the Four-fold and the Five-fold which contain all the preceding. Panchâshikha, agreeably to Padma Purâna,Asiatic Researches, xi. 99, 100. is one of the seven Kumâras who go to Shveta Dvîpa to worship Vishnu. We shall see, further on, what connection there is between the celibate and chaste Sons of Brahmâ, who refuse to multiply, and terrestrial mortals. Meanwhile, it is evident that the Man-Plant, Saptaparna, thus refers to the seven principles, and that man is compared to this seven-leaved plant, which is so sacred among Buddhists. The Egyptian allegory, in the Book of the Dead, that relates to the reward of the Soul, is as suggestive of our septenary doctrine as it is poetical. The Deceased is allotted a piece of land in the field of Aanroo, wherein the Manes, the deified shades of the dead, glean, as the harvest they have sown by their actions in life, the corn seven cubits high, which grows in a territory divided into seven and fourteen portions. This corn is the food on which they will live and prosper, or that will kill them, in Amenti, the realm of which the Aanroo-field is a domain. For, as said in the hymn,Ch. xxxii. 9. the Deceased is either destroyed therein, or becomes pure spirit for the Eternity, in consequence of the seven times seventy-seven lives passed, or to be passed, on Earth. The idea of the corn reaped as the fruit of our actions is very graphic.

4. It is the Root that never dies, the Three-tongued Flame of the Four Wicks (a)... The Wicks are the Sparks, that draw from the Three-tongued Flame,Their Upper Triad. shot out by the Seven, their Flame; the Beams and Sparks of One Moon, reflected in the Running Waves of all the Rivers of the EarthBhûmi or Prithivî. (b).

(a) The Three-tongued Flame that never dies is the immortal spiritual Triad, the Âtmâ, Buddhi and Manas, or rather the fruitage of the last, assimilated by the first two after every terrestrial life. The Four Wicks, that go out and are extinguished, are the Quaternary, the four lower principles, including the body.

I am the Three-wicked Flame and my Wicks are immortal, says the Defunct. I enter into the domain of Sekhem [the God whose hand sows the seed of action produced by the disembodied soul], and I enter the region of the Flames who have destroyed their adversaries [i.e., got rid of the sin-creating Four Wicks].Book of the Dead, i. 7. Compare also Mysteries of Rostan.

The Three-tongued Flame of the Four Wicks corresponds to the four Unities and the three Binaries of the Sephirothal tree.

(b) Just as milliards of bright sparks dance on the waters of an ocean, above which one and the same moon is shining, so our evanescent Personalities—the illusive envelopes of the immortal Monad-Ego—twinkle and dance on the waves of Mâyâ. They appear and, as the thousands of sparks produced by the moon-beams, last only so long as the Queen of the Night radiates her lustre on the Running Waves of Life, the period of a Manvantara; and then they disappear, the Beams—symbols of our eternal Spiritual Egos—alone surviving, remerged in, and being, as they were before, one with the Mother-Source.

5. The Spark hangs from the Flame by the finest Thread of Fohat. It journeys through the Seven Worlds of Mâyâ (a). It stops in the first,Kingdom. and is a Metal and a Stone; it passes into the Second,Kingdom. and behold—a Plant; the Plant whirls through Seven Forms and becomes a Sacred AnimalThe first Shadow of the Physical Man. (b).

From the combined attributes of these, Manu,Man. the Thinker, is formed.

Who forms him? The Seven Lives, and the One Life (c). Who completes him? The Five-fold Lha. And who perfects the last Body? Fish, Sin and SomaThe Moon. (d).

(a) The phrase, through the Seven Worlds of Mâyâ, refers here to the seven Globes of the Planetary Chain and the seven Rounds, or the forty-nine stations of active existence that are before the Spark, or Monad, at the beginning of every Great Life-Cycle, or Manvantara. The Thread of Fohat is the Thread of Life before referred to.

This relates to the greatest problem of philosophy—the physical and substantial nature of Life, the independent nature of which is denied by Modern Science, because that Science is unable to comprehend it. The reïncarnationists and believers in Karma alone dimly perceive, that the whole secret of Life is in the unbroken series of its manifestations, whether in, or apart from, the physical body. Because even if:

yet it is itself part and parcel of that Eternity; for Life alone can understand Life.

What is that Spark which hangs from the Flame? It is Jîva, the Monad in conjunction with Manas, or rather its aroma—that which remains from each Personality, when worthy, and hangs from Âtmâ-Buddhi, the Flame, by the Thread of Life. In whatever way it is interpreted, and into whatever number of principles the human being is divided, it may be easily shown that this doctrine is supported by all the ancient religions, from the Vedic to the Egyptian, from the Zoroastrian to the Jewish. In the case of the last-mentioned, the Kabalistic works offer abundant proof of this statement. The entire system of the Kabalistic numerals is based on the divine Septenary hanging from the Triad, thus forming the Decad, and its permutations 7, 5, 4, and 3, which, finally, all merge into the One itself; an endless and boundless Circle.

As says the Zohar:

The Ten Sephiroth correspond to the Limbs of Man.

But neither the Head nor the Shoulders of Adam Kadmon can be seen; therefore we read in the Siphra Dtzenioutha, the Book of the Concealed Mystery:

The seventh being Malkuth, which is our EarthSee Mantuan Codex. on its plane, and the lowest on all the other planes of conscious existence. The Chaldean Book of Numbers contains a detailed explanation of all this.

The Sephiroth of this upper Triad are: 1. Kether (the Crown), represented by the brow of Macroprosopus; 2. Chokmah (Wisdom, a male Principle), by his right shoulder; and 3. Binah (Intelligence, a female Principle), by the left shoulder. Then come the seven Limbs, or Sephiroth, on the planes of manifestation; the totality of these four planes being represented by Microprosopus, the Lesser Face, or Tetragrammaton, the four-lettered Mystery. The seven manifested and the three concealed Limbs are the Body of the Deity.

Thus our Earth, Malkuth, is both the seventh and the fourth World; the former when counting from the first Globe above, the latter if reckoned by the planes. It is generated by the sixth Globe or Sephira, called Yezud, Foundation, or, as said in the Book of Numbers, by Yezud, He [Adam Kadmon] fecundates the primitive Heva [Eve or our Earth]. Rendered in mystic language, this is the explanation why Malkuth, called the Inferior Mother, Matrona, Queen, and the Kingdom of the Foundation, is shown as the Bride of Tetragrammaton, or Microprosopus (the Second Logos), the Heavenly Man. When free from all impurity, she will become united with the Spiritual Logos, i.e., in the Seventh Race of the Seventh Round—after the regeneration, on the day of Sabbath. For the Seventh Day again has an occult significance undreamed of by our theologians.

Become one body means, that all is reäbsorbed once more into the One Element, the spirits of men becoming Nirvânîs, and the elements of everything else becoming again what they were before—Protyle or Undifferentiated Substance. Sabbath means Rest, or Nirvâna. It is not the seventh day after six days, but a period the duration of which equals that of the seven days, or any period made up of seven parts. Thus a Pralaya is equal in duration to a Manvantara, or a Night of Brahmâ is equal to his Day. If the Christians will follow Jewish customs, they ought to adopt the spirit and not the dead letter thereof. They should work one week of seven days and rest seven days. That the word Sabbath had a mystic significance, is disclosed in the contempt shown by Jesus for the Sabbath day, and by what is said in Luke.xviii. 12. Sabbath is there taken for the whole week. See the Greek text where the week is called Sabbath. Literally, I fast twice in the Sabbath. Paul, an Initiate, knew it well when referring to the eternal rest and felicity in Heaven, as Sabbath:Hebrews, iv. and their happiness will be eternal, for they will ever be [one] with the Lord, and will enjoy an eternal Sabbath.Cruden, sub voce.

The difference between the Kabalah and the archaic Esoteric Vidyâ—taking the Kabalah as contained in the Chaldean Book of Numbers, not as misrepresented by its now disfigured copy, the Kabalah of the Christian Mystics—is very small indeed, being confined to unimportant divergences of form and expression. Thus Eastern Occultism refers to our Earth as the Fourth World, the lowest of the Chain, above which run upward on both curves the six Globes, three on each side. The Zohar, on the other hand, calls the Earth the lower, or the seventh, adding that upon the six depend all things which are in it (Microprosopus). The Smaller Face [smaller because manifested and finite] is formed of six Sephiroth, says the same work. Seven Kings come and die in the thrice-destroyed World [Malkuth, our Earth, destroyed after each of the Three Rounds which it has gone through]. And their reign [that of the Seven Kings] will be broken up.Book of Numbers, 1. viii. 3. This relates to the Seven Races, five of which have already appeared, and two more have still to appear in this Round.

The Shinto allegorical accounts of cosmogony and the origin of man, in Japan, hint at the same belief.

Captain C. Pfoundes, who studied the religion underlying the various sects of the land, for nearly nine years in the monasteries of Japan, says:

These Gods are simply our Five Races, Isanagi and Isanami being the two kinds of Ancestors, the two preceding Races which give birth to animal and to rational man.