Masonic, Occult and Esoteric Online Library
The Secret Doctrine
By Helena P. Blavatsky
Book I. -- Part II.The Mystery Language And Its Keys
RECENT discoveries made by great mathematicians and Kabalists thus prove, beyond a shadow of doubt, that every theology, from the earliest and oldest down to the latest, has sprung not only from a common source of abstract beliefs, but from one universal esoteric, or "Mystery" language. These scholars hold the key to the universal language of old, and have turned it successfully, though only once, in the hermetically closed door leading to the Hall of Mysteries. The great archaic system known from prehistoric ages as the sacred Wisdom Science, one that is contained and can be traced in every old as well as in every new religion, had, and still has, its universal language -- suspected by the Mason Ragon -- the language of the Hierophants, which has seven "dialects," so to speak, each referring, and being specially appropriated, to one of the seven mysteries of Nature. Each had its own symbolism. Nature could thus be either read in its fulness, or viewed from one of its special aspects.
The proof of this lies, to this day, in the extreme difficulty which the Orientalists in general, the Indianists and Egyptologists especially, experience in interpreting the allegorical writings of the Aryans and the hieratic records of old Egypt. This is because they will never remember that all the ancient records were written in a language which was universal and known to all nations alike in days of old, but which is now intelligible only to the few. Like the Arabic figures which are plain to a man of whatever nation, or like the English word and, which becomes et for the Frenchman, und for the German, and so on, yet which may be expressed for all civilized nations in the simple sign & -- so all the words of that mystery language signified the same thing to each man of whatever nationality. There have been several men of note who have tried to re-establish such a universal and philosophical tongue: Delgarme, Wilkins, Leibnitz; but Demaimieux, in his Pasigraphie, is the only one who has proven its possibility. The scheme of Valentinius, called the "Greek Kabala," based on the combination of Greek letters, might serve as a model.
The many-sided facets of the mystery language have led to the adoption of widely varied dogmas and rites in the exotericism of the Church rituals. It is they, again, which are at the origin of most of the dogmas of the Christian Church, e.g., the seven Sacraments, the Trinity, the Resurrection; the seven capital Sins and the seven Virtues. The seven keys to the mystery tongue, however, having always been in the keeping of the highest among the initiated Hierophants of antiquity, it is only the partial use of a few out of the seven which passed, through the treason of some early Church Fathers -- ex-initiates of the Temples -- into the hands of the new sect of the Nazarenes. Some of the early Popes were Initiates, but the last fragments of their knowledge have now fallen into the power of the Jesuits, who have turned them into a system of sorcery.
It is maintained that INDIA (not in its present limits, but including its ancient boundaries) is the only country in the world which still has among her sons adepts, who have the knowledge of all the seven sub-systems and the key to the entire system. Since the fall of Memphis, Egypt began to lose those keys one by one, and Chaldea had preserved only three in the days of Berosus. As for the Hebrews, in all their writings they show no more than a thorough knowledge of the astronomical, geometrical and numerical systems of symbolizing all the human, and especially the physiological functions. They never had the higher keys.
"Every time I hear people talking of the religion of Egypt," writes M. Gaston Maspero, the great French Egyptologist and the successor of Mariette Bey, "I am tempted to ask which of the Egyptian religions they are talking about? Is it of the Egyptian religion of the 4th Dynasty, or of the Egyptian religion of the Ptolemaic period? Is it of the religion of the rabble, or of that of the learned men? Of that which was taught in the schools of Heliopolis, or of that other which was in the minds and conceptions of the Theban sacerdotal class? For, between the first tomb of Memphis, which bears the cartouche of a king of the third dynasty, and the last stones at Esneh under Caesar-Philippus, the Arabian, there is an interval of at least five thousand years. Leaving aside the invasion of the Shepherds, the Ethiopian and Assyrian dominions, the Persian conquest, Greek colonization, and the thousand revolutions of its political life, Egypt has passed during those five thousand years through many vicissitudes of life, moral and intellectual. Chapter XVII. of the Book of the Dead which seems to contain the exposition of the system of the world as it was understood at Heliopolis during the time of the first dynasties, is known to us only by a few copies of the eleventh and twelfth dynasties. Each of the verses composing it was already at the time interpreted in three or four different ways; so different, indeed, that according to this or another school, the Demiurge became the solar fire -- Ra-shoo, or the primordial water. Fifteen centuries later, the number of readings had increased considerably. Time had, in its course, modified the ideas about the universe and the forces that ruled it. During the hardly 18 centuries that Christianity exists, it has worked, developed and transformed most of its dogmas; how many times, then, might not the Egyptian clergy have altered its dogmas during those fifty centuries that separate Theodosius from the King Builders of the Pyramids?"
Here we believe the eminent Egyptologist is going too far. The exoteric dogmas may often have been altered, the esoteric never. He does not take into account the sacred immutability of the primitive truths, revealed only during the mysteries of initiation. The Egyptian priests have forgotten much, they altered nothing. The loss of a good deal of the primitive teaching was due to the sudden deaths of the great Hierophants, who passed away before they had time to reveal all to their successors; mostly, to the absence of worthy heirs to the knowledge. Yet they have preserved in their rituals and dogmas the principal teachings of the secret doctrine. Thus, in the seventeenth chapter mentioned by Maspero, one finds (1) Osiris saying he is Toum (the creative force in nature, giving form to all Beings, spirits and men), self-generated and self-existent, issued from Noun, the celestial river, called Father-mother of the gods, the primordial deity, which is chaos or the Deep, impregnated by the unseen spirit. (2) He has found Shoo (solar force) on the staircase in the City of the Eight (the two cubes of good and Evil), and he has annihilated the evil principles in Noun (chaos) the children of Rebellion. (3) He is the Fire and Water, i.e., Noun the primordial parent, and he created the gods out of his limbs -- 14 gods (twice seven) seven dark and seven light gods (the seven Spirits of the Presence of the Christians and the Seven dark Evil Spirits). (4) He is the Law of existence and Being (v. 10), the Bennoo (or phoenix, the bird of resurrection in Eternity), in whom night follows the day, and day the night -- an allusion to the periodical cycles of cosmic resurrection and human re-incarnation; for what can this mean? "The wayfarer who crosses millions of years, in the name of One, and the great green (primordial water or Chaos) the name of the other" (v. 17), one begetting millions of years in succession, the other engulfing them, to restore them back. (5) He speaks of the Seven Luminous ones who follow their Lord, who confers justice (Osiris in Amenti).
All this is now shown to have been the source and origin of Christian dogmas. That which the Jews had from Egypt, through Moses and other initiates, was confused and distorted enough in later days; and that which the Church got from both, is still more misinterpreted.
Yet their system is now proven identical in this special department of symbology -- the key, namely, to the mysteries of astronomy as connected with those of generation and conception -- with those ideas of ancient religions, the theology of which has developed the phallic element. The Jewish system of sacred measures applied to religious symbols is the same, so far as geometrical and numerical combinations go, as those of Chaldea, Greece, and Egypt, having been adopted by the Jews during the centuries of their slavery and captivity with those nations.* What was that system? It is the intimate conviction of the author of "The Source of Measures" that "the Mosaic Books were intended, by a mode of art speech, to set forth a geometrical and numerical system of exact science, which should serve as an origin of measures." Piazzi Smyth believes likewise. This system and these measures are found by some scholars to be identical with those used in the construction of the great pyramid -- but this is only partially so. "The foundation of these measures was the Parker ratio," says Mr. R. Skinner, in "The Source of Measures."
The author of this very extraordinary work has found it out, he says, in the use of the integral ratio in numbers of diameter to circumference of a circle, discovered by John Parker, of New York. This ratio is 6,561 for diameter, and 20,612 for circumference. Furthermore, that this geometrical ratio was the very ancient (and probably) the divine origin of what have now become through exoteric handling and practical application the British linear measures, "the underlying unit of which, viz., the inch, was likewise the base of one of the royal Egyptian cubits and of the Roman foot. He also found out that there was a modified form of the ratio, viz., 113-355 (explained in his work); and that while this last ratio pointed through its origin to the exact integral pi, or to 6,561 to 20,612, it also served as a base for astronomical calculations. The author discovered that a system of exact science, geometrical, numerical, and astronomical, founded on these ratios and to be found in use in the construction of the Great Egyptian Pyramid, was in part the burden of this language as contained in, and concealed under, the verbiage of the Hebrew text of the Bible. The inch and the two-foot rule of 24 inches interpreted for use through the elements of the circle (see first pages of Book I.) and the ratios mentioned, were found to be at the basis or foundation of this natural and Egyptian and Hebrew system of science, while, moreover, it seems evident enough that the system itself was looked upon as of divine origin and of divine revela-
* As we said in Isis (Vol. II. p. 438-9), "To the present moment, in spite of all controversies and researches, History and Science remain as much as ever in the dark as to the origin of the Jews. They may be as well the exiled Tchandalas of old India, the 'bricklayers' mentioned by Vina-Svata, Veda-Vyasa and Manu, as the Phoenicians of Herodotus, or the Hyk-Sos of Josephus, or descendants of Pali shepherds, or a mixture of all these. The Bible names the Tyrians as a kindred people, and claims dominion over them. . . . Yet whatever they may have been, they became a hybrid people, not long after Moses, as the Bible shows them freely intermarrying not alone with the Canaanites, but with every other nation or race they came in contact with." tion. . . ." But let us see what is said by the opponents of Prof. Piazzi Smyth's measurements of the Pyramid.
Mr. Petrie seems to deny them, and to have made short work altogether of Piazzi Smyth's calculations in their Biblical connection. So does Mr. Proctor, the champion "Coincidentalist" for many years past in every question of ancient arts and sciences. Speaking of "the multitude of relations independent of the Pyramid, which have turned up while the Pyramidalists have been endeavouring to connect the pyramid with the solar system . . . . these coincidences," he says, "are altogether more curious than any coincidence between the Pyramid and astronomical numbers: the former are as close and remarkable as they are real" (i.e., those "coincidences" that would remain if even the pyramid had no existence); "the latter which are only imaginary (?) have only been established by the process which schoolboys call 'fudging,' and now new measures have left the work to be done all over again" (Petrie's letter to the Academy, Dec. 17, 1881.) To this Mr. Staniland Wake justly observes in his work on "The Origin and Significance of the Great Pyramid" (London, 1882): "They must, however, have been more than mere coincidences, if the builders of the Pyramid had the astronomical knowledge displayed in its perfect orientation and in its other admitted astronomical features."
They had it; and it is on this "knowledge" that the programme of the MYSTERIES and of the series of Initiations was based: thence, the construction of the Pyramids, the everlasting record and the indestructible symbol of these Mysteries and Initiations on Earth, as the courses of the stars are in Heaven. The cycle of Initiation was a reproduction in miniature of that great series of Cosmic changes to which astronomers have given the name of tropical or sidereal year. Just as, at the close of the cycle of the sidereal year [25,868 years], the heavenly bodies return to the same relative positions as they occupied at its outset, so at the close of the cycle of Initiation the inner man has regained the pristine state of divine purity and knowledge from which he set out on his cycle of terrestrial incarnation.
Moses, an Initiate into the Egyptian Mystagogy, based the religious mysteries of the new nation which he created, upon the same abstract formula derived from this sidereal cycle, which he symbolised under the form and measurements of the tabernacle, that he is supposed to have constructed in the wilderness. On these data, the later Jewish High Priests constructed the allegory of Solomon's Temple -- a building which never had a real existence, any more than had King Solomon himself, who is simply, and as much a solar myth as is the still later Hiram Abif, of the Masons, as Ragon has well demonstrated. Thus, if the measurements of this allegorical temple, the symbol of the cycle of Initiation, coincide with those of the Great Pyramid, it is due to the fact that the former were derived from the latter through the Tabernacle of Moses.
That our author has undeniably discovered one and even two of the keys is fully demonstrated in the work just quoted. One has but to read it to feel a growing conviction that the hidden meaning of the allegories and parables of both Testaments is now unveiled. But that he owes this discovery far more to his own genius than to Parker and Piazzi Smyth, is as certain, if not more so. For, as just shown, whether the measures of the great Pyramid taken and adopted as the correct ones by the Biblical "Pyramidalists" are beyond suspicion, is not so sure. A proof of this is the work called "The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh," by Mr. F. Petrie, besides other works written quite recently to oppose the said calculations, which were called biassed. We gather that nearly every one of Piazzi Smyth's measurements differs from the later and more carefully made measurements of Mr. Petrie, who concludes the Introduction to his work with this sentence:
"As to the results of the whole investigation, perhaps many theories will agree with an American who was a warm believer in Pyramid theories when he came to Gizeh. I had the pleasure of his company there for a couple of days, and at our last meal together he said to me in a saddened tone -- 'Well, Sir! I feel as if I had been to a funeral. By all means let the old theories have a decent burial, though we should take care that in our haste none of the wounded ones are buried alive.'"
As regards the late J. Parker's calculation in general, and his third proposition especially, we have consulted some eminent mathematicians, and this is the substance of what they say:
Parker's reasoning rests on sentimental, rather than mathematical, considerations, and is logically inconclusive.
"The circle is the natural basis or beginning of all area, and the square being made so in mathematical science, is artificial and arbitrary --"
-- is an illustration of an arbitrary proposition, and cannot safely be relied upon in mathematical reasoning. The same observation applies, even more strongly, to Proposition VII., which states that:
"Because the circle is the primary shape in nature, and hence the basis of area; and because the circle is measured by, and is equal to the square only in ratio of half its circumference by the radius, therefore, circumference and radius, and not the square of diameter, are the only natural and legitimate elements of area, by which all regular shapes are made equal to the square, and equal to the circle."
Proposition IX. is a remarkable example of faulty reasoning, and it is the one on which Mr. Parker's Quadrature mainly rests. Here it is: --
"The circle and the equilateral triangle are opposite to one another in all the elements of their construction, and hence the fractional diameter of one circle, which is equal to the diameter of one square, is in the opposite duplicate ratio to the diameter of an equilateral triangle whose area is one," etc., etc.
Granting, for the sake of argument, that a triangle can be said to have a radius in the sense in which we speak of the radius of a circle, -- for what Parker calls the radius of the triangle is the radius of a circle inscribed in the triangle and therefore not the radius of the triangle at all, -- and granting for the moment the other fanciful and mathematical propositions united in his premises, why must we conclude that if the triangle and circle are opposite in all the elements of their construction, the diameter of any defined circle is in the opposite duplicate ratio of the diameter of any given equivalent triangle? What necessary connection is there between the premises and the conclusion? The reasoning is of a kind not known in geometry, and would not be accepted by strict mathematicians.
Whether the Archaic esoteric system originated the British inch or not, is of little consequence, however, to the strict and true metaphysician. Nor does Mr. Ralston Skinner's esoteric reading of the Bible become incorrect, merely because the measurements of the Pyramid will not be found to agree with those of Solomon's temple, the ark of Noah, etc.; or because Mr. Parker's Quadrature of the Circle is rejected by mathematicians. For Mr. Skinner's reading depends first of all on the Kabalistic methods and the Rabbinical value of the Hebrew letters. But it is extremely important to ascertain whether the measures used in the evolution and building of the Aryan symbolic religion, in the construction of their temples, the figures given in the Puranas, and especially in their chronology, their astronomical symbols, the duration of the cycles, and other computations, were, or were not, the same as those used in the Biblical measurements and glyphs. For this will prove that the Jews, unless they took their sacred cubit and measurements from the Egyptians (Moses being an initiate of the Priests) must have got those notions from India. At any rate they passed them to the early Christians. Hence, it is the Occultists and Kabalists who are the "true" heirs to the KNOWLEDGE, or the secret wisdom which is still found in the Bible; for they alone now understand its real meaning, whereas profane Jews and Christians cling to the husks and dead letter thereof. That it is the system of measures which led to the invention of the God-names Elohim and Jehovah, and their adaptation to phallicism, and that Jehovah is a not very flattered copy of Osiris, is now demonstrated by the author of the "Source of Measures." But the latter and Mr. Piazzi Smyth both seem to labour under the impression that (a) the priority of the system belongs to the Israelites, the Hebrew language being the divine language, and that (b) this universal language belongs to direct revelation!
The latter hypothesis is correct only in the sense shown in the last paragraph of the preceding §; but we have yet to agree as to the nature and character of the divine "Revealer." With regard to priority, this, to the profane, will of course depend on (a) the internal and external evidence of the revelation, and (b) on each scholar's individual preconception. This, however, cannot prevent either the theistic Kabalist, or the Pantheistic Occultist, from believing each in his way; neither of the two convincing the other. The data furnished by history are too meagre and unsatisfactory for either of them to prove to the sceptic which of them is right.
On the other hand, the proofs afforded by tradition are too constantly rejected for us to hope to settle the question in our present age. Meanwhile, materialistic science will be laughing impartially at both Kabalists and Occultists. But the said vexed question of priority once laid aside, Science, in its departments of philology and comparative religion, will find itself finally taken to task, and be compelled to admit the common claim.* Its greatest scholars, instead of pooh-poohing that supposed
* One by one the claims become admitted, as one Scientist after another is compelled to recognize the facts given out from the Secret Doctrine -- though he rarely, if ever, recognizes that he has been anticipated in his statements. Thus, in the palmy days of Mr. Piazzi Smyth's authority on the Pyramid of Gizeh, his theory was, that the porphyry sarcophagus of the King's Chamber "is the unit of measure for the two most enlightened nations of the earth, England and America," and was no better than a "corn bin." This was vehemently denied by us in Isis Unveiled just published at that time. Then the New York press arose in arms (the "Sun" and the "World" chiefly) against our presuming to correct or find fault with such a star of learning. On p. 519, vol. I., we had said, that Herodotus when treating of that Pyramid "might have added that, externally it symbolized the creative principle of Nature, and illustrated also the principles of geometry, mathematics, astrology, and astronomy. Internally, it was a majestic fane, in whose sombre recesses were performed the mysteries, and whose walls had often witnessed the initiation-scenes of members of the royal family. The porphyry sarcophagus, which Professor Piazzi Smyth, Astronomer Royal of Scotland, degrades into a corn-bin, was the baptismal font, upon emerging from which the neophyte was "born again" and became an adept."
Our statement was laughed at in those days. We were accused of having got our ideas from the "craze" of Shaw, an English writer who had maintained that the Sarcophagus had been used for the celebration of the Mysteries of Osiris; (we had never heard of that writer!). And now, six or seven years later, this is what Mr. Staniland Wake writes on p. 93 of his paper, on "The Origin and Significance of the Great Pyramid."
"The so-called King's Chamber, of which an enthusiastic pyramidist says, 'The polished walls, fine materials, grand proportions, and exalted place, eloquently tell of glories yet to come -- if not, the chamber of perfections of Cheops' tomb, was probably the place to which the initiant was admitted after he had passed through the narrow upward passage and the grand gallery, with its lowly termination, which gradually prepared him for the "farrago of absurd fiction and superstitions," as the Brahminical literature is generally termed, will endeavour to learn the symbolical universal language with its numerical and geometrical keys. But here again they will hardly be successful if they share the belief that the Jewish Kabalistic system contains the key to the whole mystery: for, it does not. Nor does any other Scripture at present possess it in its entirety, for even the Vedas are not complete. Every old religion is but a chapter or two of the entire volume of archaic primeval mysteries -- Eastern Occultism alone being able to boast that it is in possession of the full secret, with its seven keys. Comparisons will be instituted, and as much as possible will be explained in this work -- the rest is left to the student's personal intuition. For in saying that Eastern Occultism has the secret, it is not as if a "complete" or even an approximate knowledge was claimed by the writer, which would be absurd. What I know, I give out; that which I cannot explain, the student must find out for himself.
But while supposing that the whole cycle of the universal mystery language will not be mastered for whole centuries to come, even that which has been hitherto discovered in the Bible by some scholars is quite sufficient to demonstrate the claim -- mathematically. Judaism having availed itself of two keys out of the seven, and these two keys having been now rediscovered, it becomes no longer a matter of individual speculation and hypothesis, least of all of "coincidence," but one of a correct reading of the Bible texts, as anyone acquainted with arithmetic reads and verifies an addition or total.* A few years longer and this system will kill the dead letter of the Bible, as it will that of all the other exoteric faiths, by showing the dogmas in their real, naked meaning.
And then this undeniable meaning, however incomplete, will unveil the mystery of Being, besides changing entirely the modern scientific systems of Anthropology, Ethnology and especially that of Chronology. The element of Phallicism, found in every God-name and narrative in the Old (and to some degree in the New) Testament, may also in time considerably change modern materialistic views in Biology and Physiology.
Divested of their modern repulsive crudeness, such views of nature and man, on the authority of the celestial bodies and their mysteries, final stage of the SACRED MYSTERIES." Had Mr. Staniland Wake been a Theosophist, he might have added that the narrow upward passage leading to the King's chamber had a "narrow gate" indeed; the same "strait gate" which "leadeth unto life," or the new spiritual re-birth alluded to by Jesus in Matthew vii. 13 et seq; and that it is this gate in the Initiation temple, that the writer who recorded the words alleged to have been spoken by an Initiate, was thinking of.
* All we have said in Isis is now found corroborated in the "Egyptian Mystery; or The Source of Measures," by those readings of the Bible with the numerical and geometrical keys thereto. will unveil the evolutions of the human mind and show how natural was such a course of thought. The so-called phallic symbols have become offensive only because of the element of materiality and animality in them. As they originated with the archaic races, which, issuing to their personal knowledge from an androgyne ancestry, were the first phenomenal manifestations in their own sight of the separation of sexes and the ensuing mystery of creating in their turn -- such symbols were but natural. If later races have degraded them, especially the "chosen people," this does not affect the origin of those symbols. The little Semitic tribe -- one of the smallest branchlets from the commingling of the 4th and 5th sub-races (the Mongolo-Turanian and the Indo-European, so-called, after the sinking of the great Continent) -- could only accept its symbology in the spirit which was given to it by the nations from which it was derived. Perchance, in the Mosaic beginnings, that symbology was not as crude as it became later under the handling of Ezra, who remodelled the whole Pentateuch. For the glyph of Pharaoh's daughter (the woman), the Nile (the Great Deep and Water), and the baby-boy found floating therein in the ark of rushes, has not been primarily composed for, or by, Moses. It has been found anticipated in the Babylonian fragments on the tiles, in the story of King Sargon,* who lived far earlier than Moses. Now, what is the logical inference? Most assuredly that which gives us the right to say that the story told of Moses by Ezra had been learned by him while at Babylon, * On page 224 of Assyrian Antiquities Mr. George Smith says: "In the palace of Sennacherib at Kouyunjik I found another fragment of the curious history of Sargon. . . . published in my translation in the Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, vol. I. part I. p. 46." The capital of Sargon, the Babylonian Moses, "was the great city of Agadi, called by the Semitics Akkad -- mentioned in Genesis as the capital of Nimrod." (Gen. x. 10) . . . "Akkad lay near the City of Sippara on the Euphrates and North of Babylon." (See Isis, vol. II. p. 442-3,) Another strange coincidence is found in the fact that the name of the neighbouring above-mentioned City of Sippara is the same as the name of the wife of Moses -- Zipporah (Exodus ii.). Of course the story is a clever addition by Ezra, who could not be ignorant of it. This curious story is found on fragments of tablets from Kouyunjik, and reads as follows: --
1. Sargona, the powerful king, the king of Akkad am I.
2. My mother was a princess, my father I did not know; a brother of my father ruled over the country.
3. In the city of Azupiran, which is by the side of the River Euphrates.
4. My mother, the princess, conceived me; in difficulty she brought me forth.
5. She placed me in an ark of rushes, with bitumen my exit she sealed up.
6. She launched me in the river, which did not drown me.
7. The river carried me, to Akki the water-carrier it brought me.
8. Akki, the water-carrier, in tenderness of bowels, lifted me, etc., etc.
And now Exodus (ii): "And when she (Moses' mother) could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein, and she laid it in the flags by the river's brink." and that he applied the allegory told of Sargon to the Jewish lawgiver. In short, that Exodus was never written by Moses, but re-fabricated from old materials by Ezra.
And if so, then why should not other symbols and glyphs far more crude in their phallic element have been added by this adept in the later Chaldean and Sabaean phallic worship? We are taught that the primeval faith of the Israelites was quite different from that which was developed centuries later by the Talmudists, and before them by David and Hezekiah.
All this, notwithstanding the exoteric element, as now found in the two Testaments, is quite sufficient to class the Bible among esoteric works, and to connect its secret system with Indian, Chaldean, and Egyptian symbolism. The whole cycle of biblical glyphs and numbers as suggested by astronomical observations -- astronomy and theology being closely connected -- is found in Indian exoteric, as well as esoteric, systems. These figures and their symbols, the signs of the Zodiac, the planets, their aspects and nodes -- the last term having now passed even into our modern botany to distinguish male and female plants (the unisexual, polygamous, monoecious, dioecious, etc., etc.) -- are known in astronomy as sextiles, quartiles and so on, and have been used for ages and aeons by the archaic nations, and in one sense have the same meaning as the Hebrew numerals. The earliest forms of elementary geometry must have certainly been suggested by the observation of the heavenly bodies and their groupings. Hence the most archaic symbols in Eastern Esotericism are a circle, a point, a triangle, a plane, a cube, a pentacle, and a hexagon, and plane figures with various sides and angles. This shows the knowledge and use of geometrical symbology to be as old as the world.
Starting from this, it becomes easy to understand how nature herself could have taught primeval mankind, even without the help of its divine instructors, the first principles of a numerical and geometrical symbol language.* Hence one finds numbers and figures used as an "The story," says Mr. G. Smith, "is supposed to have happened about 1600 B.C. rather earlier than the supposed age of Moses. As we know that the fame of Sargon reached Egypt, it is quite likely that this account had a connection with the event related in Exodus ii., for every action, when once performed, has a tendency to be repeated." But now, when Professor Sayce has had the courage to push back the dates of the Chaldean and Assyrian Kings by two thousand years more, Sargon must have preceded Moses by 2,000 years at the least. (See Professor Sayce's Lectures on the subject.) The confession is suggestive, but the figures lack a cypher or two.
* As a reminder how the Esoteric religion of Moses was crushed several times, and the worship of Jehovah, as re-established by David, put in its place, by Hezekiah for one, read pp. 436-42, vol. II., in Isis Unveiled. Surely there must have been some very expression and a record of thought in every archaic symbolical Scripture. They are ever the same, with only certain variations growing out of the first figures. Thus the evolution and correlation of the mysteries of Kosmos, of its growth and development -- spiritual and physical, abstract and concrete -- were first recorded in geometrical changes of shape. Every Cosmogony began with a circle, a point, a triangle, and a cube, up to number 9, when it was synthesized by the first line and a circle -- the Pythagorean mystic Decade, the sum of all, involving and expressing the mysteries of the entire Kosmos; recorded a hundred times more fully in the Hindu system, for him who can understand its mystic language. The numbers 3 and 4, in their blending of 7, as those of 5, 6, 9, and 10, are the very corner-stone of Occult Cosmogonies. This decade and its thousand combinations are found in every portion of the globe. One recognizes them in the caves and rock-cut temples of Hindostan and Central Asia, as in the pyramids and lithoi of Egypt and America; in the Catacombs of Ozimandyas, in the mounds of the Caucasian snowcapped fastnesses, in the ruins of Palenque, in Easter Island, everywhere whither the foot of ancient man has ever journeyed. The 3 and the 4, the triangle and the cube, or the male and female universal glyph, showing the first aspect of the evolving deity, is stamped for ever in the Southern Cross in the Heavens, as in the Egyptian Crux-Ansata. As well expressed, "The Cube unfolded is in display a cross of the tau, or Egyptian form, or of the Christian cross form. . . . A circle attached to the first, gives the ansated cross. . . numbers 3 and 4 counted on the cross, showing a form of the (Hebrew) golden candlestick (in the Holy of Holies), and of the 3 + 4 = 7, and 6 + 1 = 7, days in the circle of the week, as 7 lights of the sun. So also as the week of 7 lights gave origin to the month and year, so it is the time marker of birth. . . . The cross form being shown, then, by the connected use of the form 113 : 355, the symbol is completed by the attachment of a man to the cross.* This kind of measure was made to co-ordinate with the idea of the origin of human life, and hence the phallic form.**"
The Stanzas show the cross and these numbers playing a prominent part in archaic cosmogony. Meanwhile we may profit by the evidence collected by the same author to show the identity of symbols and their esoteric meaning all over the globe, which he calls rightly the "primordial vestiges of these symbols." good reasons why the Sadducees, who furnished almost all the high Priests of Judea, held to the Laws of Moses and spurned the alleged "Books of Moses," the Pentateuch of the Synagogue and the Talmud.
* Once more, remember the Hindu Wittoba crucified in space; the significance of the "sacred sign," the Swastica; Plato's Decussated man in Space, etc., etc.
** "Source of Measures."
"Under the general view taken of the nature of the number forms. . . . it becomes a matter of research of the utmost interest as to when and where their existence and their use first became known. Has it been a matter of revelation in what we know as the historic age -- a cycle exceedingly modern when the age of the human race is contemplated? It seems, in fact, as to the date of its possession by man, to have been farther removed in the past from the old Egyptians than are the old Egyptians from us.
"The Easter Isles in 'mid Pacific' present the feature of the remaining peaks of the mountains of a submerged continent, for the reason that these peaks are thickly studded with Cyclopean statues, remnants of the civilization of a dense and cultivated people, who must have of necessity occupied a widely extended area. On the back of these images is to be found the 'ansated cross' and the same modified to the outlines of the human form. A full description, with plate showing the land, with the thickly planted statues, also with copies of the images, is to be found in the January number 1870 of the London Builder.
"In the 'Naturalist,' published at Salem, Massachusetts, in one of the early numbers, is to be found a description of some very ancient and curious carving on the crest walls of the mountains of South America, older by far, it is averred, than the races now living. The strangeness of these tracings is in that they exhibit the outlines of a man stretched out on a cross,* by a series of drawings, by which from the form of a man that of a cross springs, but so done that the cross may be taken as the man, or the man as the cross; thus exhibiting a symbolic display of the interdependency of the forms set forth.
"It is known that tradition among the Aztecs has handed down a very perfect account of the deluge. . . . Baron Humboldt says that we are to look for the country of Aztalan, the original country of the Aztecs, as high up at least as the 42nd parallel north; whence, journeying, they at last arrived in the vale of Mexico. In that vale the earthen mounds of the far north become the elegant stone pyramidal and other structures whose remains are now found. The correspondences between the Aztec remains and those of the Egyptians are well known. . . . Attwater, from examination of hundreds of them, is convinced that they had a knowledge of astronomy. As to one of the most perfect of the pyramidal structures among the Aztecs, Humboldt gives a description to the following effect:
"The form of this pyramid (of Papantla) which has seven stories, is more tapering than any other monument of this kind yet discovered, but its height is not remarkable, being but 57 feet, its base but 25 feet on each side. However, it is remarkable on one account: it is built entirely of hewn stones, of an extraordinary size, and very beautifully shaped. Three staircases lead to the top, the steps of which are decorated with hieroglyphical sculptures and small niches arranged with great symmetry. The number of these niches seems to allude to the 318 simple and compound signs of the days of their civil calendar."
"318 is the Gnostic value of Christ," remarks the author, "and the famous number of the trained or circumcised servants of Abraham. When it is consi-
* See farther on the description given of the early Aryan initiation: of Visvakarma crucifying the Sun, "Vikkartana," shorn of his beams -- on a cruciform lath.
dered that 318 is an abstract value, and universal, as expressive of a diameter value to a circumference of unity, its use in the composition of the civil calendar becomes manifest."
Identical glyphs, numbers and esoteric symbols are found in Egypt, Peru, Mexico, Easter Island, India, Chaldea, and Central Asia. Crucified men, and symbols of the evolution of races from gods; and yet behold Science repudiating the idea of a human race other than one made in our image; theology clinging to its 6,000 years of Creation; anthropology teaching our descent from the ape; and the Clergy tracing it from Adam 4,004 years B.C.!!
Shall one, for fear of incurring the penalty of being called a superstitious fool, and even a liar, abstain from furnishing proofs -- as good as any -- only because that day, when all the SEVEN KEYS shall be delivered unto Science, or rather the men of learning and research in the symbological department, has not yet dawned? In the face of the crushing discoveries of Geology and Anthropology with regard to the antiquity of man, shall we -- in order to avoid the usual penalty that awaits every one who strays outside the beaten paths of either Theology or Materialism -- hold to the 6,000 years and "special creation," or accept in submissive admiration our genealogy and descent from the ape? Not so, as long as it is known that the secret records hold the said SEVEN keys to the mystery of the genesis of man. Faulty, materialistic, and biassed as the scientific theories may be, they are a thousand times nearer the truth than the vagaries of theology. The latter are in their death agony for every one but the most uncompromising bigot and fanatic.* Hence we have no choice but either to blindly accept the deductions of Science, or to cut adrift from it, and withstand it fearlessly to its face, stating what the Secret Doctrine teaches us, being fully prepared to bear the consequences.
But let us see whether Science in its materialistic speculations, and even theology in its death-rattle and supreme struggle to reconcile the 6,000 years since Adam with Sir Charles Lyell's "Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man," do not themselves give us unconsciously a helping hand. Ethnology, on the confession of some of its very learned votaries, finds it already impossible to account for the varieties in the human race, unless the hypothesis of the creation of several Adams be accepted. They speak of "a white Adam and a black Adam, a red
* Some of its defenders must have lost their reason, one would rather say. For what can one think when, in the face of the dead-letter absurdities of the Bible, these are still supported, publicly and as fiercely as ever, and one finds its theologians maintaining that though "the Scriptures carefully refrain (?) from making any direct contribution to scientific knowledge, they have never stumbled upon any statement which will not abide the light of ADVANCING SCIENCE"!!! -- ("Primeval Man," p. 14).
Adam and a yellow Adam."* Were they Hindus enumerating the rebirths of Vamadeva from the Linga Purana, they could say little more. For, enumerating the repeated births of Siva, the latter show him in one Kalpa of a white complexion, in another of a black colour, in still another of a red colour, after which the Kumara becomes "four youths of a yellow colour." This strange coincidence, as Mr. Proctor would say, speak only in favour of scientific intuition, as Siva-Kumara represents only allegorically the human races during the genesis of man. But it led to another intuitional phenomenon -- in the theological ranks this time. The unknown author of "Primeval Man" in a desperate effort to screen the divine Revelation from the merciless and eloquent discoveries of geology and anthropology, remarking that "it would be unfortunate if the defenders of the Bible should be driven into the position of either surrendering the inspiration of Scripture, or denying the conclusions of geologists" -- finds a compromise. Nay, he devotes a thick volume to proving this fact: "Adam was not the first man** created upon this earth." . . . The exhumed relics of pre-Adamic man, "instead of shaking our confidence in Scripture, supply additional proof of its veracity" (p. 194). How so? In the simplest way imaginable; for the author argues that, henceforth "we" (the clergy) "are enabled to leave scientific men to pursue their studies without attempting to coerce them by the fear of heresy" . . . (this must be a relief indeed to Messrs. Huxley, Tyndall, and Sir C. Lyell). . . . "The Bible narrative does not commence with creation, as is commonly supposed, but with the formation of Adam and Eve, millions of years after our planet had been created. Its previous history, so far as Scripture is concerned, is yet unwritten." . . . . . "There may have been not one, but twenty different races upon the earth before the time of Adam, just as there may be twenty different races of men on other worlds" (p. 55). . . . Who, then, or what were those races, since the author still maintains that Adam is the first man of our race? It was THE SATANIC RACE AND RACES! "Satan (was) never in heaven, Angels and men (being) one species." It was the pre-Adamic race of "Angels that sinned." Satan was "the first Prince of this world," we read. Having died in consequence of his rebellion, he remained on earth as a disembodied Spirit, and tempted Adam and Eve. "The earlier ages of the Satanic race, and more especially during the life-time of Satan (!!!) may have been a period * "Primeval Man Unveiled, or the Anthropology of the Bible"; author (unknown) of the "Stars and the Angels" 1870, p. 195.
** Especially in the face of the evidence furnished by the authorized Bible itself in ch. iv. of Genesis, v. 16 and 17, which shows Cain going to the land of Nod and there marrying a wife.
[[Vol. 1, Page]] 325 THE IMPARTIALITY OF SCIENTIFIC DENIALS.
of patriarchal civilization and comparative repose -- a time of Tubal-Cains and Jubals, when both Sciences and arts attempted to strike their roots into the accursed ground. . . . . What a subject for an epic. . . . (when) there are inevitable incidents which must have occurred. We see before us . . . . the gay primeval lover wooing his blushing bride at dewy eve under the Danish oaks, that then grew where now no oaks will grow . . . . the grey primeval patriarch . . . . the primeval offspring innocently gambolling by his side. . . . . A thousand such pictures rise before us"! . . . . (pp. 206-207).
The retrospective glance at this Satanic "blushing bride" in the days of Satan's innocence, does not lose in poetry as it gains in originality. Quite the reverse. The modern Christian bride -- who does not often blush nowadays before her gay modern lovers -- might even derive a moral lesson from this daughter of Satan, in the exuberant fancy of her first human biographer. These pictures -- and to appreciate them at their true value they must be examined in the volume that describes them -- are all suggested with a view to reconcile the infallibility of revealed Scripture with Sir C. Lyell's "Antiquity of Man" and other damaging scientific works. But this does not prevent truth and fact appearing at the foundation of these vagaries, which the author has never dared to sign with his own, or even a borrowed name. For, his pre-Adamic races -- not Satanic but simply Atlantic, and the Hermaphrodites before the latter -- are mentioned in the Bible when read esoterically, as they are in the Secret Doctrine. The SEVEN KEYS open the mysteries, past and future, of the seven great Root Races, as of the seven Kalpas. Though the genesis of man, and even the esoteric geology, will surely be rejected by Science just as much as the Satanic and pre-Adamic races, yet if having no other way out of their difficulties the Scientists have to choose between the two, we feel certain that, Scripture notwithstanding, once the mystery language is approximately mastered, it is the archaic teaching that will be accepted.
