Masonic, Occult and Esoteric Online Library
The Secret Doctrine
By Helena P. Blavatsky
Book II-Part II- The Holy Of Holies Its Degradation
THE Sanctum Sanctorum of the Ancients, i.e., that recess on the Western side of the Temple which was enclosed on three sides by blank walls and had its only aperture or door hung over with a curtain -- also called the Adytum -- was common to all ancient nations.
Nevertheless, a great difference is found between the secret meanings of this symbolical place, in the esotericism of the Pagans and that of later Jews; though the symbology of it was originally identical throughout the ancient Races and Nations. The Gentiles, by placing in the Adytum a sarcophagus, or a tomb (taphos), and the solar-god to whom the temple was consecrated, held it, as Pantheists, in the greatest veneration. They regarded it -- in its esoteric meaning -- as the symbol of resurrection, cosmic, solar (or diurnal), and human. It embraced the wide range of periodical and (in time) punctual, Manvantaras, or the re-awakenings of Kosmos, Earth, and Man to new existences; the sun being the most poetical and also the most grandiose symbol of the same in heaven, and man -- in his re-incarnations -- on Earth. The Jews -- whose realism, if judged by the dead letter, was as practical and gross in the days of Moses as it is now* -- in the course of their estrangement from the gods of their pagan neighbours, consummated a national and levitical polity, by the device of setting forth their Holy of Holies as the most solemn sign of their Monotheism -- exoterically; while seeing in it but a universal phallic symbol -- esoterically. While the Kabalists knew but Ain-Soph and the "gods" of the Mysteries, the Levites had no tomb, no god in their adytum but the "Sacred" Ark of the Covenant -- their "Holy of Holies."
When the esoteric meaning of this recess is made clear, however, the profane will be better able to understand why David danced "uncovered" before the ark of the Covenant, and was so anxious to appear vile for the sake of his "Lord," and base in his own sight. (See 2 Samuel vi. 16-22.)
The ark is the navi-form Argha of the Mysteries. Parkhurst, who has a long dissertation upon it in his Greek dictionary, and who never breathes a word about it in the Hebrew lexicon, explains it thus: -- "[[Arche]] in this application answers to the Hebrew rasit or wisdom . . . . a word which had the meaning of the emblem of the female generative power, the Arg or Arca, in which the germ of all nature was supposed to float or brood on the great abyss during the interval which took place after every mundane cycle." Quite so; and the Jewish ark of the Covenant had precisely the same significance; with the supplementary addition that, instead of a beautiful and chaste sarcophagus (the symbol of the matrix of Nature and resurrection) as in the Sanctum sanctorum of the pagans, they had the ark made still more realistic in its construction by the two cherubs set up on the coffer or ark of the covenant, facing each other, with their wings spread in such a manner as to form a perfect yoni (as now seen in India). Besides which, this generative symbol had its significance enforced by the four mystic letters of Jehovah's name, namely, ; or meaning Jod (membrum Virile, see Kabala); (the womb); (Vau, a crook or a hook, a nail), and again, meaning also "an opening"; the whole forming the perfect bisexual emblem or symbol or Y (e) H (o) V (a) H, the male and female symbol.
Perhaps also, when people realise the true meaning of the office and title of the Kadesh Kadeshim, "the holy ones," or "the consecrated to the temple of the Lord," -- the "Holy of Holies" of the latter may assume an aspect far from edifying.
Iacchus again is Iao or Jehovah; and Baal or Adon, like Bacchus, was a phallic god. "Who shall ascend into the hill (the high place) of the Lord?" asks the holy king David, "who shall stand in the place of his Kadushu ?" (Psalms xxiv. 3). Kadesh may mean in one sense to devote, hallow, sanctify, and even to initiate or to set apart; but it also means the ministry of lascivious rites (the Venus-worship) and the true interpretation of the word Kadesh is bluntly rendered in Deuteronomy xxiii. 17; Hosea iv. 14; and Genesis xxxvii. from verses 15 to 22. The "holy" Kadeshuth of the Bible were identical, as to the duties of their office, with the Nautch-girls of the later Hindu pagodas. The Hebrew Kadeshim, or galli, lived "by the house of the Lord, where the women wove hangings for the grove," or the bust of Venus-Astarte, says verse the seventh in the twenty-third chapter of 2 Kings.
The dance performed by David round the ark was the "circle-dance." said to have been prescribed by the Amazons for the Mysteries. Such was the dance of the daughters of Shiloh (Judges xxi. 21, 23 et passim), and the leaping of the prophets of Baal (I Kings xviii. 26). It was simply a characteristic of the Sabean worship, for it denoted the motion of the planets round the sun. That the dance was a Bacchic frenzy is apparent. Sistra were used on the occasion, and the taunt of Michal and the King's reply are very expressive. Isis Unveiled, Vol. II., p. 49.
"The Ark, in which are preserved the germs of all living things necessary to repeople the earth, represents the survival of life, and the supremacy of spirit over matter, through the conflict of the opposing powers of nature. In the Astro-Theosophic chart of the Western Rite, the Ark corresponds with the navel, and is placed at the sinister side, the side of the woman (the moon), one of whose symbols is the left pillar of Solomon's temple -- BOAZ. The umbilicus is connected through the placenta with the receptacle in which are fructified the embryos of the race. . . The Ark is the sacred Argha of the Hindus, and thus the relation in which it stands to Noah's ark may be easily inferred when we learn that the Argha was an oblong vessel, used by the high priests as a sacrificial chalice in the worship of Isis, Astarte, and Venus-Aphrodite, all of whom were goddesses of the generative powers of nature, or of matter -- hence representing symbolically the Ark containing the germs of all living things." ("Isis Unveiled," Vol. II., p. 444.) Mistaken is he who accepts the Kabalistic works of to-day, and the interpretations of the Zohar by the Rabbis, for the genuine Kabalistic lore of old!* For no more to-day than in the day of Frederick von Schelling does the Kabala accessible to Europe and America, contain much more than "ruins and fragments, much distorted remnants still of that primitive system which is the key to all religious systems" (See Kabbala, by Prof. Franck, Preface). The oldest system and the Chaldean Kabala were identical. The latest renderings of the Zohar are those of the Synagogue in the early centuries -- i.e., the Thorah, dogmatic and uncompromising.
The "King's Chamber" in Cheops' Pyramid is thus an Egyptian "Holy of Holies." On the days of the Mysteries of Initiation, the candidate, representing the solar god, had to descend into the Sarcophagus, and represent the energizing ray, entering into the fecund womb of Nature. Emerging from it on the following morning, he typified the resurrection of life after the change called Death. In the great MYSTERIES his figurative death lasted two days, when with the Sun he arose on third morning, after a last night of the most cruel trials. While the postulant represented the Sun -- the all-vivifying Orb that "resurrects" every morning but to impart life to all -- the Sarcophagus was symbolic of the female principle. This, in Egypt; its form and shape changed with every country, provided it remained a vessel, a symbolic navis or boat-shaped vehicle, and a container, symbolically, of germs or the germ of life. In India, it is the "golden" Cow through which the candidate for Brahminism has to pass if he desires to be a Brahmin, and to become DWIJA ("reborn a second time"). The crescent-form Argha of the Greeks was the type of the Queen of Heaven -- Diana, or the Moon. She was the great Mother of all Existences, as the Sun was the Father. The Jews, previous to, as well as after their metamorphosis of Jehovah into a male god, worshipped Astoreth, which made Isaiah declare: "Your new moons and feasts my soul hateth," (i. 14); saying which, he was evidently unjust. Astoreth and the New-moon (the crescent argha) festivals, had no worse significance as a form of public worship than had the hidden meaning of the moon in general, which was Kabalistically connected directly with, and sacred to, Jehovah, as is well known; with the sole difference that one was the female and the other the male aspect of the moon, and of the star Venus.
The Sun (the Father), the Moon (the Mother), and Mercury-Thoth (the Son), were the earliest Trinity of the Egyptians, who personified them in Osiris, Isis, and Thoth (Hermes). In [[PISTIS SOPHIA]], the seven great gods, divided into two triads and the highest God (the Sun) are: the lower [[Tridunameis]], whose powers reside respectively in Mars, Mercury and Venus; and the higher Triad ("the three unseen gods") who dwell in the Moon, Jupiter and Saturn; (vide §§ 359 and 361 et seq).
This requires no proof. Astoreth was in one sense an impersonal symbol of nature, the ship of Life carrying throughout the boundless Sidereal Ocean the germs of all being. And when she was not identified with Venus, like every other "Queen of Heaven" to whom cakes and buns were offered in sacrifice, Astoreth became the reflection of the Chaldean "Nuah, the Universal Mother" (female Noah, considered as one with the ark), and of the female triad, Ana, Belita and Davikina; called, when blended into one, "Sovereign goddess, lady of the Nether Abyss, Mother of gods, Queen of the Earth, and Queen of fecundity." Later, Belita or Damti (the sea), the Mother of the City of Erech (the great Chaldean Necropolis) became Eve; and now she is Mary the Virgin, in the Latin Church, represented as standing on the crescent-moon, and, at times on the Globe, to vary the programme. The navi, or ship-like form of the crescent, which blends in itself all those common symbols of the ship of life, such as Noah's ark, the Yoni of the Hindus, and the ark of the Covenant, is the female symbol of the Universal "Mothers of the gods," and is now found under its Christian symbol in every Church, as the nave (from navis, the ship).* The navis -- the Sidereal vessel -- is fructified by the Spirit of Life -- the male God; or, as the learned Kenealy (in his Apocalypsis) calls it very appropriately -- the Holy Spirit. In Western religious symbology the Crescent was the male, the full moon, the female aspect of that universal Spirit. "The mystic word Alm, which the prophet Mahomet prefixed to many chapters of the Koran, alludes to her as the Alm, the immaculate Virgin of the heavens. And -- the sublime ever falling into the ridiculous -- it is from this root Alm that we have to derive the word Almeh -- the Egyptian dancing-girls. The latter are "Virgins" of the same type as the Nautchnis in India, and the (female) Kadeshim, the Holy Ones of the Jewish temples (those consecrated to Jehovah, who represented both sexes), whose holy functions in the Israelite fanes were identical with those of the Nautchnis.
Now Eustathius declares that ([IO]) IO means the moon, in the dialect of the Argians; and it was one of the names of the same in Egypt. Says Jablonski, "[[IO]], Ioh, AEgyptiis LUNAM significat neque habent illi in communi sermonis usu, aliud nomen quo Lunam, designent praeter IO." The pillar and Circle (IO), now constituting the first decimal number, and which with Pythagoras was the perfect number contained in the Tetractis,** became later a pre-eminently phallic Number -- amongst the Jews, foremost of all, with whom it is the male and female Jehovah.
This is how a scholar explains it: -- "I find, on the Rosetta stone of Uhlemann, the word mouth, also in Seiffarth, viz., the name of the Moon used as a cycle of Time, hence the lunar month from the hieroglyph with and as determinatives given, as the Coptic I O H, or I O H. The Hebrew may also be used as I O H, for the letter yau, or , was used for o and for u, and for v or w. This, before the Massora, of which the . was used as = o, = u, and = v or w. Now I had worked it out by original search that the great distinctive function of the god-name Jehovah was designative of the influence of the moon as the causative of generation, and as of its exact value as a lunar year in the natural measure of days, as you will fully see, . . . . And here comes this linguistic same word from a source far more ancient; viz., the Coptic, or rather from the old Egyptian in time of the Coptic.". . . . (From a MS.)
This is the more remarkable when Egyptology compares this with the little which it knows about the Theban triad -- composed of Ammon, Mouth, (or Mout) and their son Khonsoo. This triad was, when united, contained in the moon as their common symbol; and when separated, it was Khonsoo who was the god, LUNUS, being thus confounded with Thot and Phtah. His mother Mout(h) -- the name signifying Mother, by the bye, not the moon, which was only her Symbol -- is called the "Queen of Heaven"; the "Virgin," etc., etc., as she is an aspect of Isis, Hathor, and other mother goddesses. She was less the wife than the mother of Ammon, whose distinct title is "the husband of his Mother." In a statuette at Boulaq, Cairo, this triad is represented (Number 1981 Serapeum, Greek Period) as a mummy-god holding in his hand three different sceptres, and bearing the lunar disc on his head, the characteristic tress of hair showing the design of representing it as that of an infant god, or "the Sun," in the triad. He was the god of Destinies in Thebes, and appears under two aspects (1) as "Khonsoo, the Lunar god, and Lord of Thebes, Nofir-hotpoo -- 'he who is in absolute repose'; and (2) as Khonsoo Iri-sokhroo, or 'Khonsoo, who executes Destiny': the former preparing the events and conceiving them for those born under his generative influence; the latter putting them into action." (See Maspero's Definitions). Under theogonic permutations Ammon becomes Horus, HOR-AMMON, and Mout(h)-Isis is seen suckling him in a statuette of the Saitic period. (Abydos.) In his turn, in this transformed triad, Khonsoo becomes Thot-Lunus, "he who operates salvation." His brow is crowned with the head of an ibis decorated with the lunar disc and the diadem called IO-tef.
Now all these symbols are certainly found reflected in (some believe them identical with) the Yave, or Jehovah of the Bible. This will be made plain to any one who reads "The Source of Measures," or "Hebrew Egyptian Mystery," and understands the undeniable, clear, and mathematical proofs that the esoteric foundations, or the system used in the building of the Great Pyramid, and the architectural measurements in the Temple of Solomon (whether the latter be mythical or real), Noah's ark, and the ark of the Covenant, are the same. If anything in the world can settle the dispute that the old, as much as the later, Jews (post-Babylonian), and especially the former, built their theogony and religion on the very same foundation as all Pagans did, it is the work in question.
And now it may be as well to remind the reader of that which was said of I A O, in our work, "Isis Unveiled."
"No other deity affords such a variety of etymologies as Jaho, nor is there any name which can be so variously pronounced. It is only by associating it with the Masoretic points that the later Rabbins succeeded in making Jehovah read 'Adonai' -- or Lord, as Philo Byblus spells it in Greek letters [[IEUO]] -- IEVO. Theodoret says that the Samaritans pronounced it Jahe (yahra), and the Jews Yaho; which would make it as we have shown, I -- Ah -- O. Diodorus states that 'among the Jews they relate that Moses called the god Iao.' It is on the authority of the Bible itself, therefore, that we maintain that before his initiation by Jethro, his father-in-law, Moses had never known the word Jaho."*
The above receives corroboration in a private letter from a very learned Kabalist. In STANZA IV. and elsewhere it is stated that exoterically Brahma (neuter), so flippantly and so often confused by the Orientalists with Brahma -- the male, is sometimes called Kala-hansa (Swan in the eternity), and the esoteric meaning of A-ham-sa, is given. (I -- am -- he, so ham being equal to sah "he," and aham "I" -- a mystic anagram and permutation). It is also the "four-faced" Brahma, the Chatur mukha (the perfect cube) forming itself within, and from the infinite circle; and again the use of the 1, 3, 5, and = 14, as the esoteric hierarchy of the Dhyan Chohans is explained. On this, the said correspondent comments in this way: --
"Of the 1, 3, 5, and twice 7, intending and very especially 13,514, which on a circle may be read as 31415 (or [[pi]] value), I think there cannot be a possibility of doubting; and especially when considered with symbol marks on sacr,** 'Chakra,' or Circle of Vishnu.
"But let me carry your description a step further: -- You say 'The One from the Egg, the six, and the five (See Stanza IV., Book I.) give the numbers 1065, the value of the first born'. . . . . . If it be so, then in 1065 we have the famous Jehovah's name, the Jve or Jave, or Jupiter, and by change of to or h to n, then or the Latin Jun or Juno, the base of the Chinese riddle, the key measuring numbers of Sni (Sinai) and Jehovah coming down on that mount, which numbers (1,065) are but the use of our ratio of 113 to 355 because 1,065 = 355 x 3 which is circumference to a diameter of 113 x 3 = 339. Thus the first born of Brahma Prajapati (or any Demiurgos) indicates a measuring use of a circular relation taken from the Chakra (or Vishnu) and, as stated above, the Divine manifestation takes the form of life and the first born."
"It is a most singular thing: At the entrance passage to the King's chamber the measurement from the surface of the Great Step* and the Grand Gallery to the top of the said gallery, is by the very careful measures of Piazzi Smyth 339 inches.
Take A as a centre and with this radius describe a circle; the diameter of that circle will be 339 x 2 = 678, and these numbers are those of the expression and the raven, in the 'Dove and raven' scenes or pictures of the Flood of Noah; (the radius is taken to show division into two parts, which are 1,065 each) for 113 (man) x 6 = 678; and the diameter to a circumference of 1,065 x 2 -- so we have here an indication of cosmic man on this high grade or step, at the entrance of the King's Chamber (the Holy of Holies) -- which is the womb. Now this passage is of such a height that a man to enter it must stoop. But a man upright is 113, and broken, or stooping, he becomes 133 / 2 = 5. 65 or Jehovah. That is, he personifies** him as entering the Holy of Holies. But by Hebrew Esotericism the chief function of Jehovah was child giving, etc., and that because, by the numbers of his name, he was the measure of the lunar year, which cycle of time, because by its factor of 7 (seven) it ran so co-ordinately with the periods of the quickening, viability, and gestation, was taken as the causative of the generative action and therefore was worshipped and besought."
This discovery connects Jehovah still more with all the other creative and generative gods, solar and lunar, and especially with "King" Soma, the Hindu Deus Lunus, the moon, because of the esoteric influence attributed to this planet in Occultism. There are other corroborations of it, however, in Hebrew tradition itself. Adam is spoken of in Maimonides (More Nevochim, "The Guide of the Perplexed" -- truly!) in two aspects; as a man, like all others born of a man and a woman, and -- as the prophet of the Moon; the reason of which is now made apparent, and has to be explained.
Adam, as the supposed great "Progenitor of the human race," is, as Adam Kadmon, made in the image of God -- a priapic image, therefore. The Hebrew words sacr and n'cabvah are, literally translated, lingham (phallus) and yoni, notwithstanding their translation in the Bible (Genesis i. v. 27.) "male and female." As said there "God creates 'Man in his own image'. . . . . in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them," the androgyne Adam-Kadmon. Now this Kabalistic name is not that of a living man, nor even of a human or divine Being, but of the two sexes or organs of procreation, called in Hebrew with that usual sincerity of language pre-eminently Biblical, sacr and n'cabvah*; these two being, therefore, the image under which the "Lord God" appeared usually to his chosen people. That this is so, is now undeniably proven by almost all the symbologists and Hebrew scholars as well as by the Kabala. Therefore Adam is in one sense Jehovah. This makes plain another general tradition in the East mentioned in Gregorie's "Notes and Observations upon several passages in Scripture" (1684. Vol. 1 pp. 120-21) and quoted by Hargrave Jennings in his Phallicism: "That Adam was commanded by God that his dead body should be kept above ground till committed to the middle of the earth by a priest of the most High God." Therefore, "Noah daily prayed in the ark before the BODY OF ADAM," or before the Phallus in the ark, or Holy of Holies, again. He who is a Kabalist and accustomed to the incessant permutation of Biblical names, once they are interpreted numerically and symbolically, will understand what is meant. Jehovah, from the two words of which his name is composed, "makes up the original idea of male-female as birth-originator, for the was the membrum virile and Houak was Eve." So . . . "the perfect one, as originator of measures, takes also the form of birth origin, as hermaphrodite one; hence the phallic use of form." ("Source of Measures," 159). Besides the same author shows and demonstrates numerically and geometrically that (a) Arets, earth, Adam, man, and H'Adam are cognate with each other, and are personified in the Bible under one form, as the Egyptian and Hebrew Mars, god of the generation; and (b) that Jehovah, or Jah, is Noah, or Jehovah is Noah in Hebrew would be , or literally in English, Inch."
The above affords, then, a key to the said traditions. Noah, a divine permutation, the supposed saviour of Humanity, who carries in his ark or argha (the moon), the germs of all living things, worships before the "body of Adam," which body is the image of, and a Creator itself. Hence Adam is called the "Prophet of the Moon," the Argha or "Holy of Holies" of the (Yodh). This also shows the origin of the Jewish popular belief that the face of Moses is in the moon -- i.e., the spots in the Moon. For Moses and Jehovah are once more permutations, as has been shown Kabalistically. Says the author of the "Source of Measures" (p. 271): "There is one fact in regard to Moses and his works too important to be omitted. When he is instructed by the Lord as to his mission, the power name assumed by the Deity is, I am that I am, the Hebrew words being: --
a variety reading of . Now, Moses is , and equals 345. Add the values of the new form of the name Jehovah, 21 + 501 + 21 = 543, or, by a reverse reading, 345; thus showing Moses to be a form of Jehovah in this combination. 21 ÷ 2 = 10.5, or, reversed, 501, so that the asher or the that in I am that I am is simply a guide to a use of 21 or 7 x 3; 501 [[squared]] = 251 +, a very valuable pyramid number, etc., etc.
For a clearer explanation for the benefit of non-Kabalists we put it thus: "I am that I am" is in Hebrew: --
Add the numbers of these separate words and you have: --
(which relates to the process of descending in fire on the mount to make man, etc., etc.), and which is explained to be but a check and use of the numbers of the mountains; for: -- on one side we have 10 + 5 + 6 = 21, down the middle 501, and on the other side 6 + 5 + 10 = 21." (From the same author.) (Vide § XXII., "The Symbolism of the Mystery Name IAO.")
The "Holy of Holies," both Kabalistic and Rabbinical, are thus shown as an international symbol, and common property. Neither has originated with the Hebrews; but owing to the too realistic handling of the half-initiated Levites, the symbol has with them acquired a significance which it hardly has with any other people to this day, and which it was originally never meant to have by the true Kabalist. The Lingham and Yoni of the modern average Hindu is, on the face of it, of course, no better than the Rabbinical "Holy of Holies," -- but it is no worse; and this is a point gained on the Christian traducers of the Asiatic religious philosophies. For, in such religious myths, in the hidden symbolism of a creed and philosophy, the spirit of the tenets propounded ought to decide their relative value. And who will say, that, examined either way, this so-called "Wisdom," applied solely to the uses and benefit of one little nation, has ever developed in it anything like national ethics. The Prophets are there, to show the walk in life, before, during, and after the days of Moses, of the chosen but "stiff-necked" people. That they have had at one time the Wisdom-Religion and use of the universal language and its symbols at their disposal and in their possession, is proved by the same esotericism existing to this day in India with regard to the "Holy of Holies." This, as said, was and still is the passage through the "golden" cow in the same stooping position as the one shown in the gallery of the pyramid, which identified man with Jehovah in Hebrew esotericism. The whole difference lies in the Spirit of Interpretation. With the Hindus as with the ancient Egyptians that spirit was and is entirely metaphysical and psychological; with the Hebrews it was realistic and physiological. It pointed to the first sexual separation of the human race (Eve giving birth to Cain-Jehovah, as shown in the "Source of Measures"); to the consummation of terrestrial physiological union and conception (as in the allegory of Cain shedding Abel's blood -- Habel, the feminine principle) and -- child-bearing; a process shown to have begun in the Third Race, or with Adam's THIRD son, Seth, with whose son Henoch, men began to call themselves Jehovah or Jah-hovah, the male Jod and Havah or Eve -- to wit, male and female beings.* Thus the difference lies in the religious and ethical feeling, but the two symbols are identical. There is no doubt that, with the fully initiated Judaean Tanaim, the inner sense of the symbolism was as holy in its abstraction as with the ancient Aryan Dwijas. The worship of the "god in the ark" dates only from David; and for a thousand years Israel knew of no phallic Jehovah. And now the old Kabala, edited and re-edited, has become tainted with it.
With the ancient Aryans the hidden meaning was grandiose, sublime, and poetical, however much the external appearance of their symbol may now militate against the claim. The ceremony of passing through the Holy of Holies (now symbolized by the cow), in the beginning through the temple Hiranya gharba (the radiant Egg) -- in itself a symbol of Universal, abstract nature -- meant spiritual conception and birth, or rather the re-birth of the individual and his regeneration: the stooping man at the entrance of the Sanctum Sanctorum, ready to pass through the matrix of mother nature, or the physical creature ready to re-become the original spiritual Being, pre-natal MAN. With the Semite, that stooping man meant the fall of Spirit into matter, and that fall and degradation were apotheosized by him with the result of dragging Deity down to the level of man. For the Aryan, the symbol represented the divorce of Spirit from matter, its merging into and return to its primal Source; for the Semite, the wedlock of spiritual man with material female nature, the physiological being taking pre-eminence over the psychological and the purely immaterial. The Aryan views of the symbolism were those of the whole Pagan world; the Semite interpretations emanated from, and were pre-eminently those of a small tribe, thus marking its national features and the idiosyncratic defects that characterize many of the Jews to this day -- gross realism, selfishness, and sensuality. They had made a bargain, through their father Jacob, with their tribal deity, self-exalted above all others, and a covenant that his "seed shall be as the dust of the earth"; and that deity could have no better image henceforth than that of the symbol of generation, and, as representation, a number and numbers.
Carlyle has wise words for both these nations. With the Hindu Aryan -- the most metaphysical and spiritual people on earth -- religion has ever been, in his words, "an everlasting lode-star, that beams the brighter in the heavens the darker here on earth grows the night around him." The religion of the Hindu detaches him from this earth; therefore, even now, the cow-symbol is one of the grandest and most philosophical among all others in its inner meaning. To the "MASTERS" and "Lords" of European potencies -- the Israelites -- certain words of Carlyle apply still more admirably; for them "religion is a wise prudential feeling grounded on mere calculation" -- and it was so from its beginnings. Having burdened themselves with it, Christian nations feel bound to defend and poetise it, at the expense of all other religions.
But it was not so with the ancient nations. For them the passage entrance and the sarcophagus in the King's chamber meant regeneration -- not generation. It was the most solemn symbol, a Holy of Holies, indeed, wherein were created immortal Hierophants and "Sons of God" -- never mortal men and Sons of lust and flesh -- as now in the hidden sense of the Semite Kabalist. The reason for the difference in the views of the two races is easy to account for. The Aryan Hindu belongs to the oldest races now on earth; the Semite Hebrew to the latest. One is nearly one million years old; the other is a small sub-race some 8,000 years old and no more.*
But Phallic worship has developed only with the gradual loss of the keys to the inner meaning of religious symbols; and there was a day when the Israelites had beliefs as pure as the Aryans have. But now Judaism, built solely on Phallic worship, has become one of the latest creeds in Asia, and theologically a religion of hate and malice toward everyone and everything outside themselves. Philo Judaeus shows what was the genuine Hebrew faith. The sacred Writings, he says, prescribe what we ought to do . . . commanding us to hate the heathen and their laws and institutions. They did hate Baal or Bacchus worship publicly, but left its worst features to be followed secretly; and it is with the Talmudic Jews that the grand symbols of nature were the most profaned. With them, as now shown by the discovery of the key to the correct Bible reading -- Geometry, the fifth divine Science ("fifth" -- because it is the fifth key in the series of the Seven Keys to the Universal esoteric language and symbology) was desecrated, and by them applied to conceal the most terrestrial and grossly sexual mysteries, wherein both Deity and religion were degraded.
We are told that it is just the same with our Brahma-prajapati, with Osiris and all other creative gods. Quite so, when their rites are judged exoterically and externally; the reverse when their inner meaning is unveiled, as we see. The Hindu Lingham is identical with "Jacob's Pillar" -- most undeniably. But the difference, as said, seems to consist in that the esoteric significance of the Lingham was too truly sacred and metaphysical to be revealed to the profane and the vulgar; hence its superficial appearance was left to the speculations of the mob. Nor would the Aryan Hierophant and Brahmin, in their proud exclusiveness and the satisfaction of their knowledge, go to the trouble of concealing its primeval nakedness under cunningly devised fables; whereas the Rabbi, having interpreted the symbol to suit his own tendencies, had to veil the crude significance; and this served a double purpose -- that of keeping his secret to himself and of exalting himself in his supposed monotheism over the heathen, whom his Law commanded him to hate.* A commandment now gladly accepted by the Christian too, in spite of another and later commandment -- "love each other." Both India and Egypt had and have their sacred lotuses, symbolic of the same "Holy of Holies" -- the Lotus growing in the water, a double feminine symbol -- the bearer of its own seed and root of all. Viraj and Horus are both male symbols, emanating from androgyne Nature, one from Brahma and his female counterpart Vach, the other, from Osiris and Isis -- never from the One infinite God. In the Judaeo-Christian systems it is different. Whereas the lotus, containing Brahma, the Universe, is shown growing out of Vishnu's navel, the Central point in the Waters of Infinite Space, and whereas Horus springs from the lotus of the Celestial Nile -- all these abstract pantheistic ideas are dwarfed and made terrestrially concrete in the Bible: one is almost inclined to say that in the esoteric they are grosser and still more anthropomorphic, than in their exoteric rendering. Take as an example the same symbol, even in its Christian application; the lilies in the hand of the Archangel Gabriel (Luke i. 28). In Hinduism -- the "Holy of Holies" is a universal abstraction, whose dramatis personae are Infinite Spirit and Nature; in Christian Judaism, it is a personal God, outside of that Nature, and the human Womb -- Eve, Sarah, etc., etc.; hence, an anthropomorphic phallic god, and his image -- man.
Thus it is maintained, that with regard to the contents of the Bible, one of two hypotheses has to be admitted. Either behind the symbolic substitute -- Jehovah -- there was the unknown, incognizable Diety, the Kabalistic Ain-Soph; or, the Jews have been from the beginning, no better than the dead-letter Lingham-** worshippers of the India of to-day. We say it was the former; and that, therefore, the secret or esoteric worship of the Jews was the same Pantheism that the Vedantin philosophers are reproached with to-day; Jehovah was a substitute for purposes of an exoteric national faith, and had no importance or reality in the eyes of the erudite priests and philosophers -- the Sadducees, the most refined as the most learned of all the Israelite sects, who stand as a living proof with their contemptuous rejection of every belief, save the LAW. For how could those who invented the stupendous scheme now known as the Bible, or their successors who knew, as all Kabalists do, that it was so invented for a popular blind -- how could they, we ask, feel reverence for such a phallic symbol and a NUMBER, as Jehovah is shown most undeniably to be in the Kabalistic works? How could anyone worthy of the name of a philosopher, and knowing the real secret meaning of their "pillar of Jacob," their Bethel, oil-anointed phalli, and their "Brazen Serpent," worship such a gross symbol, and minister unto it, seeing in it their "Covenant" -- the Lord Himself! Let the reader turn to Gemara Sanhedrin and judge. As various writers have shown, and as brutally stated in Hargrave Jennings' Phallicism (p. 67) "We know from the Jewish records that the Ark contained a table of stone. . . . that stone was phallic, and yet identical with the sacred name Jehovah . . . which written in unpointed Hebrew with four letters, is J-E-V-E or JHVH (the H being merely an aspirate and the same as E). This process leaves us the two letters I and V (in another form U); then if we place the I in the U we have the 'Holy of Holies'; we also have the Lingha and Yoni and Argha of the Hindus, the Isvara and 'supreme Lord'; and here we have the whole secret of its mystic and arc-celestial import, confirmed in itself by being identical with the Linyoni (?) of the Ark of the Covenant."
The Biblical Jews of to-day do not date from Moses but from David -- even admitting the identity of the old genuine with the later and remodelled Mosaic scrolls. Before that time their nationality is lost in the mists of prehistoric darkness, the veil from which is now withdrawn as much as we have space to do so. It is only to the days of the Babylonian captivity that the Old Testament may be referred by the most lenient criticism, as the approximately correct views that were current about the days of Moses. Even such fanatical Christians and worshippers of Jehovah as the Rev. Mr. Horne, have to admit the numerous changes and alterations made by the later compilers of the "Book of God," since it was found by Hilkiah (See "Introduction to the Old Testament," and also Bishop Colenso's "Elohistic and Jehovistic writers"); and that "the Pentateuch arose out of the primitive or older documents, by means of a SUPPLEMENTARY One." The Elohistic texts were re-written 500 years after the date of Moses; the Jehovistic 800, on the authority of the Bible chronology itself. Hence, it is maintained that the deity, represented as the organ of generation in his pillar form, and as a symbol of the double-sexed organ in the numeral value of the letters of his name, or the Yodh (phallus), and He (the opening, or the Womb) according to Kabalistic authority -- is of a far later date than the Elohim symbols and is borrowed from the Pagan exoteric rites; and Jehovah is thus on a par with the Lingham and Yoni found on every road-side in India.
Just as the IAO of the mysteries was distinct from Jehovah, so was the later Iao and Abraxas of some Gnostic sects identical with the god of the Hebrews, who was the same with the Egyptian Horus. This is undeniably proven on "heathen" as on the Gnostic "Christian" gems. In Matter's collection of such gems there is a "Horus" seated on the lotus, inscribed [[ABRASAXIAO]] (Abraxas Iao) -- an address exactly parallel to the so frequent [[EIS ZETS SARAPI]] (Eis zets sarapi) on the contemporary Heathen gems; and therefore only to be translated by "Abraxas is the One Jehovah" (King's Gnostics, p. 327). But who was Abraxas? As the same author shows -- "the numerical or Kabalistic value of the name Abraxas directly refer to the Persian title of the god 'Mithra,' Ruler of the year, worshipped from the earliest times under the appellation of Iao." Thus, the Sun, in one aspect, the moon or the Lunar genius, in another, that generative deity whom the Gnostics saluted as "Thou that presidest over the Mysteries of the Father and the Son, who shinest in the night-time, holding the second rank, the first Lord of Death."
It is only in his capacity of the genius of the moon, the latter being credited in the old cosmogony with being the parent of our Earth, that Jehovah could ever be regarded as the creator of our globe and its Heaven, namely, the Firmament.
The knowledge of all this will be no proof, however, to the average bigot. Missionaries will go on with the most virulent attacks on the religions of India, and Christians read with the same benighted smile of satisfaction as ever these preposterously unjust words of Coleridge, "It is highly worthy of observation that the inspired writings received by Christians are distinguishable from all other books PRETENDING TO INSPIRATION, from the Scriptures of the Brahmins, and even from the Koran, in their strong and frequent recommendation of TRUTH (! !). . . ."
