Section IV. On the Myth of the “Fallen Angels” in its Various Aspects

A. The Evil Spirit: Who, And What?

Our present quarrel is exclusively with Theology. The Church enforces belief in a Personal God and a Personal Devil, while Occultism shows the fallacy of such a belief. For the Pantheists and Occultists, as much as for the Pessimists, “Nature” is no better than “a comely mother, but stone cold”; but this is true only so far as regards external Physical Nature. They both agree that, to the superficial observer, she is no better than an immense slaughter-house wherein butchers become victims, and victims executioners in their turn. It is quite natural that the pessimistically inclined profane, once convinced of Nature’s numerous shortcomings and failures, and especially of her autophagous propensities, should imagine this to be the best evidence that there is no Deity in abscondito within Nature, nor anything divine in her. Nor is it less natural that the Materialist and the Physicist should imagine that everything is due to blind force and chance, and to the survival of the strongest, even more often than of the fittest. But the Occultists, who regard Physical Nature as a bundle of most varied illusions on the plane of deceptive perceptions; who recognize in every pain and suffering but the necessary pangs of incessant procreation; a series of stages toward an ever-growing perfectibility, which is visible in the silent influence of never-erring Karma, or Abstract Nature—the Occultists, we say, view the Great Mother otherwise. Woe to those who live without suffering. Stagnation and death is the future of all that vegetates without change. And how can there be any change for the better without proportionate suffering during the preceding stage? Is it not those only who have learnt the deceptive value of earthly hopes and the illusive allurements of external nature who are destined to solve the great problems of life, pain, and death?

If our modern Philosophers—preceded by the mediæval scholars—have helped themselves to more than one fundamental idea of antiquity, Theologians have built their God and his Archangels, their Satan and his Angels, along with the Logos and his staff, entirely out of the dramatis personæ of the old heathen Pantheons. They would have been welcome to these, had they not cunningly distorted the original characters, perverted the philosophical meaning, and, taking advantage of the ignorance of Christendom—the result of long ages of mental sleep, during which humanity was permitted to think only by proxy—tossed every symbol into the most inextricable confusion. One of their most sinful achievements in this direction, was the transformation of the divine Alter Ego into the grotesque Satan of their Theology.

As the whole philosophy of the problem of evil hangs upon the correct comprehension of the constitution of the Inner Being of Nature and Man, of the divine within the animal, and hence also the correctness of the whole system as given in these pages, with regard to the crown piece of evolution—Man—we cannot take sufficient precautions against theological subterfuges. When the good St. Augustine and the fiery Tertullian call the Devil the “monkey of God,” we can attribute it to the ignorance of the age they lived in. It is more difficult to excuse our modern writers on the same ground. The translation of Mazdean literature has afforded Roman Catholic writers the pretext for proving their point in the same direction once more. They have taken advantage of the dual nature of Ahura Mazda and of his Amshaspands in the Zend Avesta and the Vendîdâd, to emphasize still further their wild theories. Satan is the plagiarist and the copyist by anticipation of the religion which came ages later. This was one of the master strokes of the Latin Church, its best trump-card after the appearance of Spiritualism in Europe. Though only a succès d’estime, in general, even among those who are not interested in either Theosophy or Spiritualism, yet the weapon is often used by the Christian (Roman Catholic) Kabalists against the Eastern Occultists.

Now even the Materialists are quite harmless, and may be regarded as the friends of Theosophy, when compared to some fanatical “Christian”—as they call themselves, “Sectarian” as we call them—Kabalists, on the Continent. These read the Zohar, not to find in it ancient Wisdom, but, by mangling the texts and meaning, to discover in its verses Christian dogmas, where none could ever have been meant; and, having fished them out with the collective help of Jesuitical casuistry and learning, the supposed “Kabalists” proceed to write books and to mislead less far-sighted students of the Kabalah.1088

May we not then be permitted to drag the deep rivers of the Past, and thus bring to the surface the root idea that led to the transformation of the Wisdom-God, who had first been regarded as the Creator of everything that exists, into an Angel of Evil—a ridiculous horned biped, half goat and half monkey, with hoofs and a tail? We need not go out of the way to compare the Pagan Demons of either Egypt, India, or Chaldæa with the Devil of Christianity, for no such comparison is possible. But we may stop to glance at the biography of the Christian Devil, a piratical reprint from the Chaldæo-Judæan mythology.

The primitive origin of this personification rests upon the Akkadian conception of the Cosmic Powers—the Heavens and the Earth—in eternal feud and struggle with Chaos. Their Silik-Muludag (? Murudug), “the God amongst all the Gods,” the “merciful guardian of men on Earth,” was the son of Hea (or Ea) the great God of Wisdom, called by the Babylonians Nebo. With both peoples, as also in the case of the Hindû Gods, their deities were both beneficent and maleficent. As evil and punishment are the agents of Karma, in an absolutely just retributive sense, so Evil was the servant of the Good.1089 The reading of the Chaldæo-Assyrian tiles has now demonstrated this beyond a shadow of doubt. We find the same idea in the Zohar. Satan was a Son and an Angel of God. With all the Semitic nations, the Spirit of the Earth was as much the Creator in his own realm as the Spirit of the Heavens. They were twin brothers and interchangeable in their functions, when not two in one. Nothing of that which we find in Genesis is absent from the Chaldæo-Assyrian religious beliefs, even in the little that has hitherto been deciphered. The great “Face of the Deep” of Genesis is traced in the Tohu Bohu (“Deep” or “Primeval Space”), or Chaos, of the Babylonians. Wisdom, the Great Unseen God—called in Genesis the “Spirit of God”—lived, for the older Babylonians as for the Akkadians, in the Sea of Space. Toward the days described by Berosus, this Sea became the Visible Waters on the face of the Earth—the crystalline abode of the Great Mother, the Mother of Ea and all the Gods, which became, still later, the great Dragon Tiamat, the Sea Serpent. Its last stage of development was the great struggle of Bel with the Dragon—the Devil!

Whence the Christian idea that God cursed the Devil? The God of the Jews, whosoever he was, forbids cursing Satan. Philo Judæus and Josephus both state that the Law (the Pentateuch and the Talmud) undeviatingly forbid one to curse the Adversary, and also the Gods of the Gentiles. “Thou shalt not revile the Gods,” quoth the God of Moses,1090 for it is God who “hath divided [them] unto all nations”;1091 and those who speak evil of “Dignities” (Gods) are called “filthy dreamers” by Jude.

For even Michael the Archangel ... durst not bring against him [the Devil] a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee.1092

Finally the same is repeated in the Talmud:1093

Satan appeared one day to a man who used to curse him daily, and said to him: “Why dost thou this?” Consider that God himself would not curse me, but merely said: “The Lord rebuke thee, Satan.”1094

This piece of Talmudic information shows plainly (a) that St. Michael is called “God” in the Talmud, and somebody else the “Lord,” and (b) that Satan is a God, of whom even the “Lord” is in fear. All we read in the Zohar and other kabalistic works on Satan shows plainly that this “personage” is simply the personification of the abstract Evil, which is the weapon of Karmic Law and Karma. It is our human nature and man himself, as it is said that “Satan is always near and inextricably interwoven with man.” It is only a question of that Power being latent or active in us.

It is a well-known fact—to learned Symbologists at all events—that in every great religion of antiquity, it is the Logos Demiurge—the Second Logos, or the first emanation from the Mind, Mahat—who is made to strike, so to say, the keynote of that which may be called the correlation of Individuality and Personality in the subsequent scheme of evolution. It is the Logos who is shown, in the mystic symbolism of Cosmogony, Theogony, and Anthropogony, playing two parts in the drama of Creation and Being—that of the purely human Personality and the divine Impersonality of the so-called Avatâras, or divine Incarnations, and of the Universal Spirit, called Christos by the Gnostics, and the Fravarshi (or Ferouer) of Ahura Mazda in the Mazdean Philosophy. On the lower rungs of Theogony the Celestial Beings of lower Hierarchies had each a Fravarshi, or a Celestial “Double.” It is the same, only still more mystic, reässertion of the kabalistic axiom, “Deus est Demon inversus”; the word “Demon,” however, as in the case of Socrates, and in the spirit of the meaning given to it by the whole of antiquity, standing for the Guardian Spirit, an “Angel,” not a Devil of Satanic descent as Theology would have it. The Roman Catholic Church shows its usual logic and consistency by accepting St. Michael as the Ferouer of Christ. This Ferouer was his “Angel Guardian,” as proved by St. Thomas,1095 who, however, calls the prototypes and synonyms of Michael, such as Mercury for example, Devils!

The Church positively accepts the tenet that Christ has his Ferouer as any other God or mortal has. Writes De Mirville:

Here we have the two heroes of the Old Testament, the Verbum [?] (or secondJehovah), and his Face [“Presence,” as the Protestants translate], both making but one, and yet being two, a mystery which seemed to us unsolvable before we had studied the doctrine of the Mazdean Ferouers, and learnt that the Ferouer was the spiritual potency, at once image, face, and guardian of the Soul which finally assimilates the Ferouer.1096

This is almost correct.

Among other absurdities, the Kabalists maintain that the word Metatron, being divided into meta-thronon (μετὰ, θρόνον), means “near the throne.”1097 It means quite the reverse, as meta means “beyond” and not “near.” This is of great importance in our argument. St. Michael, then, the “quis ut Deus,” is the translator, so to speak, of the invisible world into the visible and the objective.

They maintain, furthermore, along with the Roman Catholic Church, that in the Biblical and Christian Theology there does not exist a “higher celestial personality, after the Trinity, than that of the Archangel, or the Seraphim, Michael.” According to them, the conqueror of the Dragon is the Archisatrap of the Sacred Militia, the Guardian of the Planets, the King of the Stars, the Slayer of Satan and the Powerful Rector. In the mystic Astronomy of these gentlemen, he is the Conqueror of Ahriman, who having upset the Sidereal Throne of the usurper, bathes in his stead in the Solar Fires; and, Defender of the Christ-Sun, he approaches so near his Master, “that he seems to become one with him.”1098 Owing to this fusion with the Word (Verbum) the Protestants, and among them Calvin, ended by losing sight entirely of the duality, and saw no Michael “but only his Master,” writes the Abbé Caron. The Roman Catholics, and especially their Kabalists, know better; and it is they who explain to the world this duality, which affords them the means of glorifying the chosen ones of the Church, and of rejecting and anathematizing all those Gods who may be in the way of their dogmas.

Thus the same titles and the same names are given in turn to God and the Archangel. Both are called Metatron, “both have the name of Jehovah applied to them when they speak one in the other” (sic), for, according to the Zohar, the term signifies equally the Master and the Ambassador. Both are the Angel of the Face, because, as we are informed, if on the one hand the “Word” is called “the Face [or the Presence] and the Image of the Substance of God,” on the other, “when speaking of the Saviour to the Israelites, Isaiah [?] tells them” that “the Angel of his Presence saved them in their affliction”—”so he was their Saviour.”1099 Elsewhere Michael is called very plainly the “Prince of the Faces of the Lord,” the “Glory of the Lord.” Both Jehovah and Michael are the “Guides of Israel1100 ... Chiefs of the Armies of the Lord, Supreme Judges of the Souls and even Seraphs.”1101

The whole of the above is given on the authority of various works by Roman Catholics, and must, therefore, be orthodox. Some expressions are translated to show what subtle Theologians and Casuists mean by the term Ferouer,1102 a word borrowed by some French writers from the Zend Avesta, as said, and utilized in Roman Catholicism for a purpose Zoroaster was very far from anticipating. In Fargard xix (verse 14), of the Vendîdâd it is said:

Invoke, O Zarathushtra! my Fravarshi, who am Ahura Mazda, the greatest, the best, the fairest of all beings, the most solid, the most intelligent, ... and whose soul is the holy Word (Mâthra Spenta).1103

The French Orientalists translate Fravarshi by Ferouer.

Now what is a Ferouer, or Fravarshi? In some Mazdean works it is plainly implied that Fravarshi is the inner, immortal Man, or the Ego which reïncarnates; that it existed before the physical body and survives all such bodies it happens to be clothed in.

Not only man was endowed with a Fravarshi, but gods too, and the sky, fire, waters, and plants.1104

This shows as plainly as can be shown that the Ferouer is the “spiritual counterpart” of either God, animal, plant, or even element, i.e., the refined and the purer part of the grosser creation, the soul of the body, whatever the body may happen to be. Therefore does Ahura Mazda recommend Zarathushtra to invoke his Fravarshi and not himself (Ahura Mazda); that is to say, the impersonal and true Essence of Deity, one with Zoroaster’s own Âtmâ (or Christos), not the false and personal appearance. This is quite clear.

Now it is on this divine and ethereal prototype that the Roman Catholics have seized so as to build up the supposed difference between their God and Angels and the Deity and its aspects, or the Gods of the old religions. Thus, while calling Mercury, Venus, Jupiter (whether as Gods or Planets) Devils, they at the same time make of the same Mercury the Ferouer of their Christ. This fact is undeniable. Vossius1105 proves that Michael is the Mercury of the Pagans, and Maury and other French writers corroborate him, and add that according to great Theologians Mercury and the Sun are one, (?) and no wonder, they think, since Mercury being so near the Wisdom and the Verbum (the Sun), must be absorbed by and confounded with him.1106

This “Pagan” view was accepted from the first century of our era, as shown in the original Acts of the Apostles (the English translation being worthless). So much is Michael the Mercury of the Greeks and other nations, that when the inhabitants of Lystra mistook Paul and Barnabas for Mercury and Jupiter, saying, “The Gods have come down to us in the likeness of men”—the text adds: “And they called Barnabas Zeus, and Paul, Hermes, because he was the leader of the Word (Logos),” and not “the chief speaker,” as erroneously translated in the Authorized, and repeated even in the Revised, English Bible. Michael is the Angel of the vision in Daniel, the Son of God, “who was like unto a Son of Man.” It is the Hermes-Christos of the Gnostics, the Anubis-Syrius of the Egyptians, the Counsellor of Osiris in Amenti, the Leontoid Michael-Ophiomorphos (ὀφιομόρφος) of the Ophites, who wears on certain Gnostic jewels a lion’s head, like his father Ildabaoth.1107

Now to all this the Roman Catholic Church tacitly consents, many of her writers even avowing it publicly. Unable to deny the flagrant “borrowing” of their Church, who “spoiled” her seniors of their symbols, as the Jews had “spoiled” the Egyptians of their jewels of silver and gold, they explain the fact quite coolly and seriously. Thus the writers who have hitherto been timid enough to see, in this repetition by Christian dogmas of old Pagan ideas, “a legendary plagiarism perpetrated by man,” are gravely assured that, far from such a simple solution of the almost perfect resemblance, it has to be attributed to quite another cause—”to a pre-historical plagiarism, of a superhuman origin.”

If the reader would know how, he must again kindly turn to the same volume of De Mirville’s work.1108 Please note that this author was the official and recognized defender of the Roman Church, and was helped by the learning of all the Jesuits. There we read:

We have pointed out several demi-gods, and also “very historical” heroes of the Pagans, who were predestined from the moment of their birth, to ape, while at the same time they dishonoured, the nativity of the hero, who was quite God, before whom the whole earth had to bow; we have traced them being born as he was, from an immaculate mother; we have seen them strangling serpents in their cradles, fighting against demons, performing miracles, dying as martyrs, descending to the nether world and rising again from the dead. And we have bitterly deplored that timid and shy Christians should feel compelled to explain all such identities on the ground of coincidence of myth and symbol. They forget apparently these words of the Saviour, all that came before me are thieves and robbers—a word which explains all without any absurd negation and which I have commented on in these words, “The Evangel is a sublime drama, parodied and played before its appointed time by ruffians.”

The “ruffians” (les drôles), are of course Demons whose manager is Satan. Now this is the easiest and the most sublime and simple way of getting out of the difficulty! The Rev. Dr. Lundy, a Protestant De Mirville, followed the happy suggestion in his Monumental Christianity, and so did Dr. Sepp of Munich in his works written to prove the divinity of Jesus and the Satanic origin of all other Saviours. So much greater the pity that a systematic and collective plagiarism which went on for several centuries on the most gigantic scale, should be explained by another plagiarism, this time in the fourth Gospel. For the sentence quoted from it, “All that ever came before me,” etc., is a verbatim repetition of words written in the Book of Enoch. In the Introduction to Archbishop Laurence’s translation from an Ethiopic MS. in the Bodleian Library, the editor, author of the Evolution of Christianity, remarks:

In revising the proof-sheets of the Book of Enoch, we have been still further impressed by relationship with New Testament Scripture. Thus, the parable of the sheep, rescued by the good Shepherd from hireling guardians and ferocious wolves, is obviously borrowed by the fourth Evangelist from Enoch lxxxix, in which the author depicts the shepherds as killing and destroying the sheep before the advent of their Lord, and thus discloses the true meaning of that hitherto mysterious passage in the Johannine parable—”All that ever came before me are thieves and robbers”—language in which we now detect an obvious reference to the allegorical shepherds of Enoch.1109

It is too late in the day to claim that it is Enoch who borrowed from the New Testament, instead of vice versâ. Jude (14, 15) quotes verbatim from Enoch a long passage about the coming of the Lord with his ten thousand saints, and naming the prophet specifically acknowledges the source.

In ... perfecting the parallelism between prophet and apostle, [we] have placed beyond controversy that, in the eyes of the author of an Epistle accepted as Divine revelation, the Book of Enoch was the inspired production of an antediluvian patriarch....

The cumulative coincidence of language and ideas in Enoch and the authors of New Testament Scripture, ... clearly indicates that the work of the Semitic Milton was the inexhaustible source from which Evangelists and Apostles, or the men who wrote in their names, borrowed their conceptions of the resurrection, judgment, immortality, perdition, and of the universal reign of righteousness under the eternal dominion of the Son of Man. This evangelical plagiarism culminates in the Revelation of John, which adapts the visions of Enoch to Christianity, with modifications in which we miss the sublime simplicity of the great master of apocalyptic prediction, who prophesied in the name of the antediluvian Patriarch.1110

“Antediluvian,” truly; but if the phraseology of the text dates hardly a few centuries or even millenniums before the historical era, then it is no longer the original prediction of the events to come, but is, in its turn, a copy of some scripture of a pre-historic religion.

In the Krita age, Vishnu, in the form of Kapila and other (inspired teachers) ... imparts ... true wisdom [as Enoch did]. In the Tretâ age he restrains the wicked, in the form of a universal monarch [Chakravartin, the “Everlasting King” of Enoch1111] and protects the three worlds [or Races]. In the Dvâpara age, in the person of Veda-vyâsa, he divides the one Veda into four, and distributes it into hundreds (Shata) of branches.1112

Truly so; the Veda of the earliest Âryans, before it was written, went forth into every nation of the Atlanto-Lemurians, and sowed the first seeds of all the now existing old religions. The off-shoots of the never dying Tree of Wisdom have scattered their dead leaves even on Judæo-Christianity. And at the end of the Kali, our present Age, Vishnu, or the “Everlasting King,” will appear as Kalki, and reëstablish righteousness upon earth. The minds of those who live at that time shall be awakened, and become as pellucid as crystal.

The men who are thus changed by virtue of that peculiar time [the Sixth Race] shall be as the seeds of other human beings, and shall give birth to a race who shall follow the laws of the Krita age of purity;

i.e., it shall be the Seventh Race, the Race of “Buddhas,” the “Sons of God,” born of immaculate parents.

B. The Gods Of Light Proceed From The Gods Of Darkness.

Thus it is pretty well established that Christ, the Logos, or the God in Space and the Saviour on Earth, is but one of the echoes of this same antediluvian and sorely misunderstood Wisdom. Its history begins by the descent on Earth of the “Gods” who incarnate in mankind, and this is the “Fall.” Whether Brahmâ hurled down on Earth by Bhagavân in the allegory, or Jupiter by Cronus, all are the symbols of the human races. Once having touched this Planet of dense Matter, the snow-white wings of even the highest Angel can no longer remain immaculate, or the Avatâra (or incarnation) be perfect, as every such Avatâra is the fall of a God into generation. Nowhere is the metaphysical truth more clear, when explained Esoterically, or more hidden from the average comprehension of those who instead of appreciating the sublimity of the idea can only degrade it—than in the Upanishads, the Esoteric glossaries of the Vedas. The Rig Veda, as Guignault characterized it, “is the most sublime conception of the great highways of humanity.” The Vedas are, and will remain for ever, in the Esotericism of the Vedânta and the Upanishads, “the mirror of the Eternal Wisdom.”

For upwards of sixteen centuries the new masks, forced over the faces of the old Gods, have screened them from public curiosity, but they have finally proved a misfit. Yet the metaphorical Fall, and the as metaphorical Atonement and Crucifixion, have led Western Humanity through roads knee-deep in blood. Worse than all, they have led it to believe in the dogma of the Evil Spirit distinct from the Spirit of all Good, whereas the former lives in all Matter and preëminently in man. Finally it has created the God-slandering dogma of Hell and eternal perdition; it has spread a thick film between the higher intuitions of man and divine verities; and, most pernicious result of all, it has made people remain ignorant of the fact that there were no fiends, no dark demons in the Universe before man’s own appearance on this, and probably on other Earths. Hence the people have been led to accept, as the problematical consolation for this world’s sorrows, the thought of original sin.

The philosophy of that Law in Nature, which implants in man as well as in every beast a passionate, inherent, and instinctive desire for freedom and self-guidance, pertains to Psychology and cannot be touched on now, for to demonstrate this feeling in higher Intelligences, to analyze and give a natural reason for it, would necessitate an endless philosophical explanation for which there here is no room. Perhaps the best synthesis of this feeling is found in three lines of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Says the “Fallen One”:

Here we may reign secure; and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition, though in hell!Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven!

Better be man, the crown of terrestrial production and king over its opus operatum, than be lost among the will-less Spiritual Hosts in Heaven.

We have said elsewhere that the dogma of the first Fall rested on a few verses in Revelation, which are now shown to be a plagiarism from Enoch by some scholars. These have given rise to endless theories and speculations, which have gradually acquired the importance of dogma and inspired tradition. Every one sought to explain the verse about the seven-headed dragon with his ten horns and seven crowns, whose tail “drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth,” and whose place, with that of his Angels, “was found no more in heaven.” What the seven heads of the Dragon (or Cycle) mean, and its five wicked kings also, may be learned in the Addenda which close Part III of this Volume.

From Newton to Bossuet speculations were incessantly evolved in Christian brains with regard to these obscure verses. Says Bossuet:

The star that falls is the heresiarch Theodosius.... The clouds of smoke are the heresies of the Montanists.... The third part of the stars are the martyrs, and especially the doctors of divinity.

Bossuet ought to have known, however, that the events described in Revelation were not original, and may, as shown, be found in other and Pagan traditions. There were no scholastics nor Montanists during Vedic times, nor yet far earlier in China. But Christian Theology had to be protected and saved.

This is only natural. But why should truth be sacrificed in order to protect from destruction the lucubrations of Christian Theologians?

The “princeps aeris hujus,” the “Prince of the Air,” of St. Paul, is not the Devil, but the effects of the Astral Light, as Éliphas Lévi correctly explains. The Devil is not the “God of this period,” as he says, for it is the Deity of every age and period since Man appeared on Earth, and Matter in its countless forms and states had to fight for its evanescent existence against other disintegrating Forces.

The “Dragon” is simply the symbol of the Cycle and of the “Sons of Manvantaric Eternity,” who had descended on Earth during a certain epoch of its formative period. The “clouds of smoke” are geological phenomena. The “third part of the stars of heaven,” cast down to the Earth, refers to the Divine Monads—the Spirits of the Stars in Astrology—that circumambulate our Globe; i.e., the human Egos destined to perform the whole Cycle of Incarnations. The sentence, “qui circumambulat terram,” however, is again referred to the Devil in Theology, the mythical Father of Evil being said to “fall like lightning.” Unfortunately for this interpretation, the “Son of Man,” or Christ, is expected, on the personal testimony of Jesus, to descend on Earth likewise, “as the lightning cometh out of the East,”1113 just in the same shape and under the same symbol as Satan, who is seen to fall “as lightning ... from heaven.”1114 All these metaphors and figures of speech, preëminently Oriental in their character, must have their origin searched for in the East. In all the ancient Cosmogonies Light comes from Darkness. In Egypt, as elsewhere, Darkness was “the principle of all things.” Hence Pymander, the “Thought Divine,” issues as Light from Darkness. Behemoth1115 is the principle of Darkness, or Satan, in Roman Catholic Theology, and yet Job says of him that Behemoth is “the chief [principle] of the ways of God”—”Principium viarum Domini Behemoth!”1116

Consistency does not seem to be a favourite virtue in any portion of Divine Revelation, so-called—not as interpreted by Theologians, at any rate.

The Egyptians and the Chaldæans referred the birth of their Divine Dynasties to that period when creative Earth was in her last final throes in giving birth to her pre-historic mountain ranges, which have since disappeared, her seas and her continents. Her face was covered with “deep Darkness and in that [Secondary] Chaos was the principle of all things” that developed on the Globe later on. Our Geologists have now ascertained that there was such a terrestrial conflagration in the early geological periods, several hundred millions of years ago.1117 As to the tradition itself, every country and nation had it, each under its respective national form.

It is not alone Egypt, Greece, Scandinavia or Mexico, that had its Typhon, Python, Loki, and its “falling” Demon, but China also. The Celestials have a whole literature upon the subject. It is said that in consequence of the rebellion against Ti of a proud Spirit, who said he was Ti himself, seven Choirs of Celestial Spirits were exiled upon Earth, which “brought a change in all Nature, Heaven itself bending down and uniting with Earth.”

In the Y-King, one reads:

The flying Dragon, superb and rebellious, suffers now, and his pride is punished; he thought he would reign in Heaven, he reigns only on the Earth.

Again, the Tchoon-Tsieoo says allegorically:

One night the stars ceased shining in darkness, and deserted it, falling down like rain upon the Earth, where they are now hidden.

These stars are the Monads.

Chinese Cosmogonies have their “Lord of the Flame” and their “Celestial Virgin,” with little “Spirits to help and minister to her; and big Spirits to fight those who are the enemies of other Gods.” But all this does not prove that the said allegories are presentments or prophetic writings which all refer to Christian Theology.

The best proof one can offer to Christian Theologians that the Esoteric statements in the Bible—in both Testaments—are the assertion of the same idea as in our Archaic Teachings, to wit, that the “Fall of the Angels” referred simply to the Incarnation of Angels “who had broken through the Seven Circles”—is found in the Zohar. Now the Kabalah of Simeon Ben Iochaï is the soul and essence of the allegorical narrative, as the later Christian Kabalah is the “dark cloaked” Mosaic Pentateuch. And it says (in the Agrippa MSS.):

The Wisdom of the Kabalah rests in the Science of the Equilibrium and Harmony.

Forces that manifest without having been first equilibrized perish in Space [“equilibrized” meaning differentiated].

Thus perished the first Kings [the Divine Dynasties] of the Ancient World, the self-produced Princes of Giants. They fell like rootless trees, and were seen no more; for they were the Shadow of the Shadow [to wit, the Chhâyâ of the Shadowy Pitris].1118

But those that came after them, who shooting down like falling stars were enshrined in the Shadows—prevailed to this day [Dhyânîs, who by incarnating in those “empty Shadows,” inaugurated the era of mankind].

Every sentence in the ancient Cosmogonies unfolds to him who can read between the lines the identity of the ideas, though under different garbs.

The first lesson taught in Esoteric Philosophy is, that the Incognizable Cause does not put forth evolution, whether consciously or unconsciously, but only exhibits periodically different aspects of Itself to the perception of finite minds. Now the Collective Mind—the Universal—composed of various and numberless Hosts of Creative Powers, however infinite in Manifested Time, is still finite when contrasted with the Unborn and Undecaying Space in its supreme essential aspect. That which is finite cannot be perfect. Therefore there are inferior Beings among those Hosts, but there never have been any Devils or “disobedient Angels,” for the simple reason that they are all governed by Law. The Asuras (call them by any other name you will) who incarnated, followed in this a law as implacable as any other. They had manifested prior to the Pitris, and as Time (in Space) proceeds in Cycles, their turn had come—hence the numerous allegories. The name “Asura” was first given by the Brâhmans indiscriminately to those who opposed their mummeries and sacrifices, as did the great Asura called Asurendra. It is to those ages, probably, that the origin of the idea of the Demon, as opposer and adversary, has to be traced.

The Hebrew Elohim, called “God” in the translations, who create “Light,” are identical with the Âryan Asuras. They are also referred to as the “Sons of Darkness,” as a philosophical and logical contrast to Light Immutable and Eternal. The earliest Zoroastrians did not believe in Evil or Darkness being coëternal with Good or Light, and they give the same interpretation. Ahriman is the manifested Shadow of Ahura Mazda (Asura Mazda), himself issued from Zeruâna Âkerne, the “Boundless [Circle of] Time,” or the Unknown Cause. They say of the latter:

Its glory is too exalted, its light too resplendent for either human intellect or mortal eye to grasp and see.

Its primal emanation is Eternal Light, which, from having been previously concealed in Darkness, was called to manifest itself and thus was formed Ormazd, the “King of Life.” He is the “First-born” in Boundless Time, but, like his own antetype (preëxisting spiritual idea), has lived within Darkness from all Eternity. The six Amshaspands—seven with himself, the Chief of all—the primitive Spiritual Angels and Men, are collectively his Logos. The Zoroastrian Amshaspands create the World in six Days or periods also, and rest on the seventh; but in the Esoteric Philosophy, that seventh is the first period or “Day,” the so-called Primary Creation in Âryan Cosmogony. It is that intermediate Æon which is the Prologue to Creation, and which stands on the borderland between the Uncreated Eternal Causation and the produced finite effects; a state of nascent activity and energy as the first aspect of the Eternal Immutable Quiescence. In Genesis, on which no metaphysical energy has been spent, but only an extraordinary acuteness and ingenuity to veil the Esoteric Truth, Creation begins at the third stage of manifestation. “God” or the Elohim are the “Seven Regents” of Pymander. They are identical with all the other Creators. But even in Genesis that period is hinted at by the abruptness of the picture, and the “Darkness” that was on the face of the Deep. The Elohim are shown to “create”—that is to say, to build or to produce the two Heavens or “double” Heaven (not Heaven and Earth); which means, in so many words, that they separated the upper manifested (Angelic) Heaven, or plane of consciousness, from the lower or terrestrial plane; the (to us) Eternal and Immutable Æons from those Periods that are in space, time and duration; Heaven from Earth, the Unknown from the Known—to the profane. Such is the meaning of the sentence in Pymander, which says that:

Thought, the divine, which is Light and Life [Zeruâna Âkerne] produced through its Word, or first aspect, the other, operating Thought, which being the God of Spirit and Fire, constructed Seven Regents enclosing within their Circle the World of Senses named “Fatal Destiny.”

The latter refers to Karma; the “Seven Circles” are the seven planets and planes, as also the seven Invisible Spirits, in the Angelic Spheres, whose visible symbols are the seven planets,1119 the seven Rishis of the Great Bear and other glyphs. As said of the Âdityas by Roth:

They are neither sun, nor moon, nor stars, nor dawn, but the eternal sustainers of this luminous life which exists as it were behind all these phenomena.

It is they—the “Seven Hosts”—who, having “considered in their Father [Divine Thought] the plan of the operator,” as says Pymander, desired to operate (or build the world with its creatures) likewise; for, having been born “within the Sphere of Operation”—the manifesting Universe—such is the Manvantaric Law. And now comes the second portion of the passage, or rather of two passages merged into one to conceal the full meaning. Those who were born within the Sphere of Operation were “the brothers who loved him well.” The latter—the “him”—were the Primordial Angels; the Asuras, the Ahriman, the Elohim, or “Sons of God,” of whom Satan was one—all those Spiritual Beings who were called the “Angels of Darkness,” because that Darkness is absolute Light, a fact now neglected if not entirely forgotten in Theology. Nevertheless, the spirituality of those much abused “Sons of Light” which is Darkness, must be evidently as great, in comparison with that of the Angels next in order, as the ethereality of the latter would be when contrasted with the density of the human body. The former are the “First-born,” and therefore so near to the confines of Pure Quiescent Spirit as to be merely the “privations”—in the Aristotelian sense—the Ferouers or the ideal types of those who followed. They could not create material, corporeal things; and, therefore, were said in process of time to have “refused” to create, as “commanded” by “God”—otherwise, to have “rebelled.”

Perchance, this is justified on the principle of the scientific theory which teaches us as to the effect of two sound waves of equal length meeting:

If the two sounds be of the same intensity, their coincidence produces a sound four times the intensity of either, while their interference produces absolute silence.

While explaining some of the “heresies” of his day, Justin Martyr shows the identity of all the world religions at their starting points. The first Beginning opens invariably with the Unknown and Passive Deity, from which emanates a certain Active Power or Virtue, the Mystery that is sometimes called Wisdom, sometimes the Son, very often God, Angel, Lord, and Logos.1120 The latter is sometimes applied to the very first Emanation, but in several systems it proceeds from the first Androgyne or Double Ray produced at the beginning by the Unseen. Philo depicts this Wisdom as male and female. But though its first manifestation had a beginning—for it proceeded from Oulom1121 (Aiôn, Time), the highest of the Æons when emitted from the Father—it had remained with the Father before all creations, for it is part of him.1122 Therefore Philo Judæus calls Adam Kadmon by the name “Mind”—the Ennoia of Bythos in the Gnostic System. “The Mind, let it be named Adam.”1123

As the old Magian books explain it, the whole event becomes clear. A thing can only exist through its opposite—Hegel teaches us; and only a little philosophy and spirituality are needed to comprehend the origin of the later dogma, which is so truly satanic and infernal in its cold and cruel wickedness. The Magians accounted for the Origin of Evil in their exoteric teachings in this way. “Light can produce nothing but Light, and can never be the origin of Evil”; how then was Evil produced, since there was nothing coëqual or like the Light in its production? Light, say they, produced several Beings, all of them spiritual, luminous, and powerful. But a Great One (the “Great Asura,” Ahriman, Lucifer, etc.) had an evil thought, contrary to the Light. He doubted, and by that doubt he became dark.

This is a little nearer to the truth, but still wide of the mark. There was no “evil thought” that originated the opposing Power, but simply Thought per se; something which, being cogitative, and containing design and purpose, is therefore finite, and must thus find itself naturally in opposition to pure Quiescence, the as natural state of absolute Spirituality and Perfection. It was simply the Law of Evolution that asserted itself; the progress of Mental Unfolding, differentiated from Spirit, involved and entangled already with Matter, into which it is irresistibly drawn. Ideas, in their very nature and essence, as conceptions bearing relation to objects, whether true or imaginary, are opposed to Absolute Thought, that Unknowable All of whose mysterious operations Mr. Spencer predicates that nothing can be said, but that “it has no kinship of nature with Evolution”1124—which it certainly has not.1125

The Zohar gives it very suggestively. When the “Holy One” (the Logos) desired to create man, he called the highest Host of Angels and spake unto them what he wanted, but they doubted the wisdom of this desire and answered: “Man will not continue one night in his glory”—for which they were burnt (annihilated?), by the “Holy” Lord. Then he called another, lower Host, and said the same. And they contradicted the “Holy One”: “What is the good of Man?”—they argued. Still Elohim created Man, and when Man sinned there came the Hosts of Uzza and Azael, and twitted God: “Here is the Son of Man that thou hast made”—they said. “Behold, he sinned!” Then the Holy One replied: “If you had been among them [Men] you would have been worse than they.” And he threw them from their exalted position in Heaven even down on to the Earth; and “they were changed [into Men] and sinned after the women of the earth.”1126 This is quite plain. No mention is made in Genesis (vi) of these “Sons of God” receiving punishment. The only reference to it in the Bible is in Jude:

And the angels which kept not their first estate but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day.1127

And this means simply that the “Angels,” doomed to incarnation, are in the chains of flesh and matter, under the darkness of ignorance, till the “Great Day,” which will come as always after the Seventh Round, after the expiration of the “Week,” on the Seventh Sabbath, or in the Post-Manvantaric Nirvâna.

How truly Esoteric and consonant with the Secret Doctrine is Pymander, the Thought Divine, of Hermes, may be inferred from its original and primitive translations in Latin and Greek only. On the other hand how disfigured it has been later on by Christians in Europe, is seen from the remarks and unconscious confessions made by De St. Marc, in his Preface and Letter to the Bishop of Ayre, in 1578. Therein, the whole cycle of transformations from a Pantheistic and Egyptian into a Mystic Roman Catholic treatise is given, and we see how Pymander has become what it is now. Still, even in St. Marc’s translation, traces are found of the real Pymander—the “Universal Thought” or “Mind.” This is the translation from the old French translation, the original being given in the foot-note1128 in its quaint old French:

Seven men [principles] were generated in Man.... The nature of the harmony of the Seven of the Father and of the Spirit. Nature ... produced seven men in accordance with the natures of the Seven Spirits ... having in them, potentially, the two sexes.

Metaphysically, the Father and the Son are the “Universal Mind” and the “Periodical Universe”; the “Angel” and the “Man.” It is the Son and the Father at one and the same time; in Pymander, the active Idea and the passive Thought that generates it; the radical keynote in Nature which gives birth to the seven notes—the septenary scale of the Creative Forces, and to the seven prismatic aspects of colour, all born from the one White Ray, or Light—itself generated in Darkness.

C. The Many Meanings Of The “War In Heaven.”

The Secret Doctrine points out, as a self-evident fact, that Mankind, collectively and individually, is with all manifested Nature the vehicle (a) of the Breath of One Universal Principle, in its primal differentiation; and (b) of the countless “breaths” proceeding from that One Breath in its secondary and further differentiations, as Nature with its many “mankinds” proceeds downwards toward the planes that are ever increasing in materiality. The Primary Breath informs the higher Hierarchies; the secondary—the lower, on the constantly descending planes.

Now there are many passages in the Bible which prove on their face, exoterically, that this belief was at one time universal; and the two most convincing are Ezekiel, xxviii and Isaiah, xiv. Christian Theologians are welcome to interpret both as referring to the great War before Creation, the Epos of Satan’s Rebellion, etc., if they so choose, but the absurdity of the idea is too apparent. Ezekiel addresses his lamentations and reproofs to the King of Tyre; Isaiah—to King Ahaz, who indulged in the worship of idols, as did the rest of the nation with the exception of a few Initiates (the Prophets, so-called), who tried to arrest it on its way to exotericism—or idolatry, which is the same thing. Let the student judge.

In Ezekiel, it is said:

Son of Man, say unto the prince of Tyrus, Thus saith the Lord God [as we understand it, the “God” Karma]; Because thine heart is lifted up, and thou hast said I am a God, ... yet thou art a man.... Behold, therefore, I will bring strangers upon thee: ... and they shall draw their swords against the beauty of thy wisdom, ... and they shall bring thee down to the pit [or Earth-life].1129

The origin of the “prince of Tyrus” is to be traced to the “Divine Dynasties” of the iniquitous Atlanteans, the Great Sorcerers. There is no metaphor in the words of Ezekiel, but actual history this time. For the voice in the prophet, the voice of the “Lord,” his own Spirit, which spake unto him, says:

Because ... thou hast said, I am a God, I sit in the seat of God(s) [Divine Dynasties], in the midst of the seas; yet thou art a man.... Behold, thou art wiser than Daniel; there is no secret that they can hide from thee: with thy wisdom ... thou hast increased thy riches, and thine heart is lifted up because of thy riches. Behold, therefore ... strangers ... shall draw their swords against the beauty of thy wisdom ... They shall bring thee down ... and thou shalt die the deaths of them that are slain in the midst of the seas.1130

All such imprecations are not prophecy, but simply reminders of the fate of the Atlanteans, the “Giants on Earth.”

What can be the meaning of this last sentence if it is not a narrative of the fate of the Atlanteans? Again, “Thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty,”1131 may refer to the “Heavenly Man” in Pymander, or to the Fallen Angels, who are accused of having fallen through pride on account of the great beauty and wisdom which became their lot. There is no metaphor here, except in the preconceived ideas of our Theologians, perhaps. These verses relate to the Past and belong more to the Knowledge acquired at the Mysteries of Initiation than to retrospective clairvoyance! Says the voice, again:

Thou hast been in Eden, the garden of God [in the Satya Yuga]; every precious stone was thy covering: ... the workmanship of thy tabrets and thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day thou wast created. Thou art the anointed cherub; ... thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire.... Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee. Therefore I will cast thee ... out of the mountain of God, and ... destroy thee.1132

The “Mountain of God” means the “Mountain of the Gods” or Meru, whose representative in the Fourth Race was Mount Atlas, the last form of one of the divine Titans, so high in those days that the ancients believed that the Heavens rested on its top. Did not Atlas assist the Giants in their War against the Gods (Hyginus)? Another version shows the fable as arising from the fondness of Atlas, son of Iapetus and Clymene, for Astronomy, and from his dwelling for that reason on the highest mountain peaks. The truth is that Atlas, the “Mountain of the Gods,” and also the hero of that name, are the Esoteric symbols of the Fourth Race, and his seven daughters, the Atlantides, are the symbols of its seven sub-races. Mount Atlas, according to all the legends, was three times as high as it is now; for it has sunk at two different times. It is of a volcanic origin, and therefore the voice within Ezekiel says:

Therefore will I bring forth a fire from the midst of thee, it shall devour thee.1133

Surely it does not mean, as seems to be the case from the translated texts, that this fire was to be brought from the midst of the Prince of Tyrus, or his people, but from Mount Atlas, symbolizing the proud Race, learned in Magic and high in arts and civilization, whose last remnant was destroyed almost at the foot of the range of those once gigantic mountains.

Truly, “thou shalt be a terror, and never shalt thou be any more”;1134 as the very name of the Race and its fate is now annihilated from man’s memory. Bear in mind that almost every ancient king and priest was an Initiate; that from toward the close of the Fourth Race there had been a feud between the Initiates of the Right and those of the Left Path; finally, that the Garden of Eden is referred to by other personages than the Jews of the Adamic Race, since even Pharaoh is compared to the fairest tree of Eden by this same Ezekiel, who shows:

All the trees of Eden, the choice and best of Lebanon, ... comforted in the nether parts of the earth. [For] they also went down into hell with him [Pharaoh]1135

—unto the nether parts, which are in fact the bottom of the ocean, whose floor gaped wide to devour the lands of the Atlanteans and themselves. If one bears all this in mind and compares the various accounts, then one will find out that chapters xxviii and xxxi of Ezekiel do not relate to Babylon, Assyria, nor yet to Egypt, since none of these have been so destroyed, having simply fallen into ruins on the surface, not beneath the earth—but indeed to Atlantis and most of its nations. And he will see that the “Garden of Eden” of the Initiates was no myth, but a locality now submerged. Light will dawn upon him, and he will appreciate such sentences as these at their true Esoteric value: “Thou hast been in Eden; ... thou wast upon the holy mountain of God”1136—for every nation had and many still have holy mountains; some Himâlayan Peaks, others Parnassus and Sinai. They were all places of Initiation and the abodes of the Chiefs of the communities of ancient and even modern Adepts. And again:

Behold, the Assyrian [why not Atlantean, Initiate?] was a cedar in Lebanon; ... his height was exalted above all the trees.... The cedars in the garden of God could not hide him: ... so that all the trees of Eden ... envied him.1137

Throughout all Asia Minor, the Initiates were called the “Trees of Righteousness,” and the Cedars of Lebanon, as also were some kings of Israel. So were the great Adepts in India, but only the Adepts of the Left Hand. When Vishnu Purâna narrates that “the world was over-run with trees,” while the Prachetasas, who “passed 10,000 years of austerity in the vast ocean,” were absorbed in their devotions, the allegory relates to the Atlanteans and the Adepts of the early Fifth Race—the Âryans. Other “trees [Adept Sorcerers] spread, and over-shadowed the unprotected earth; and the people perished ... unable to labour for ten thousand years.” Then the Sages, the Rishis of the Âryan Race, called Prachetasas, are shown “coming forth from the deep,”1138 and destroying by the wind and flame issuing from their mouths the iniquitous “Trees” and the whole vegetable kingdom; until Soma (the Moon), the sovereign of the vegetable world, pacifies them by making alliance with the Adepts of the Right Path, to whom he offers as bride Mârishâ, the “offspring of the trees.”1139 This hints at the great struggle between the “Sons of God” and the Sons of the Dark Wisdom—our forefathers; or the Atlantean and the Âryan Adepts.

The whole history of that period is allegorized in the Râmâyana, which is the mystic narrative in epic form of the struggle between Râma—the first king of the Divine Dynasty of the early Âryans—and Râvana, the symbolical personation of the Atlantean (Lankâ) Race. The former were the incarnations of the Solar Gods; the latter, of the Lunar Devas. This was the great battle between Good and Evil, between White and Black Magic, for the supremacy of the divine forces over the lower terrestrial, or cosmic powers.

If the student would understand better the last statement, let him turn to the Anugîtâ episode of the Mahâbhârata, where the Brâhmana tells his wife:

I have perceived by means of the Self the seat abiding in the Self—(the seat) where dwells the Brahman free from the pairs of opposites, and the moon, together with the fire [or the sun], upholding (all) beings (as) the mover of the intellectual principle.1140

The Moon is the deity of the mind (Manas) but only on the lower plane. Says a Commentary:

Manas is dual—Lunar in the lower, Solar in its upper portion.

That is to say, it is attracted in its higher aspect towards Buddhi, and in its lower descends into, and listens to the voice of, its animal Soul full of selfish and sensual desires; and herein is contained the mystery of an Adept’s and of a profane man’s life, as also that of the post mortem separation of the divine from the animal Man. The Mahâbhârata—every line of which has to be read Esoterically—discloses in magnificent symbolism and allegory the tribulations of both Man and Soul. Says the Brâhmana in the Anugîtâ:

In the interior (within the body), in the midst of all these (life-winds) [? principles], which move about in the body and swallow up one another,1141 blazes the Vaishvânara fire1142 sevenfold.1143

But the chief “Soul” is Manas or mind; hence, Soma, the Moon, is shown as making an alliance with the solar portion in it, personified as the Prachetasas. But of the seven keys that open the seven aspects of the Râmâyana, as of every other Scripture, this is only one—the metaphysical.

The symbol of the “Tree” standing for various Initiates was almost universal. Jesus is called the “Tree of Life,” as are also all the Adepts of the Good Law, while those of the Left Path are referred to as the “withering trees.” John the Baptist speaks of the “axe” which “is laid to the root of the trees”;1144 and the king of Assyria’s armies are called “trees.”1145

The true meaning of the Garden of Eden has been sufficiently given in Isis Unveiled. Now the writer has more than once heard surprise expressed that Isis Unveiled should contain so few of the doctrines now taught. This is quite erroneous. For the allusions to such teachings are plentiful, even if the teachings themselves were withheld. The time had not arrived then, as the hour has not struck even now, to say all. “No Atlanteans, or the Fourth Race which preceded our Fifth Race, are mentioned in Isis Unveiled,” wrote a critic on Esoteric Buddhism one day. I, who wrote Isis Unveiled, maintain that the Atlanteans are mentioned as our predecessors. For what can be plainer than the following statement, when speaking of the Book of Job:

In the original text, instead of “dead things,” it is written dead Rephaim (giants, or mighty primitive men), from whom “Evolution” may one day trace our present race.1146

It is invited to do so now, now that this hint is explained quite openly; but Evolutionists are as sure to decline nowadays as they did ten years ago. Science and Theology are against us: therefore we question both, and have to do so in self-defence. On the strength of hazy metaphors scattered throughout the prophets, and in St. John’s Revelation, a grand but reëdited version of the Book of Enoch, on these insecure grounds Christian Theology has built its dogmatic Epos of the War in Heaven. It has done more: it has used the symbolical visions, intelligible only to the Initiates, as pillars upon which to support the whole bulky edifice of its religion; and now the pillars have been found very weak reeds, and the cunning structure is foundering. The entire Christian scheme rests upon this Jakin and Boaz—the two contrary forces of Good and Evil, Christ and Satan, αἱ ἀγαθαὶ καὶ αἱ κακαὶ δυνάμεις. Take away from Christianity its main prop of the Fallen Angels, and the Eden Bower vanishes, with its Adam and Eve, into thin air; and Christ, in the exclusive character of the One God and Saviour, and the Victim of Atonement for the sin of animal-man, becomes forthwith a useless, meaningless myth.

In an old number of the Revue Archéologique, a French writer, M. Maury, remarks:

This universal strife between good and bad spirits seems to be only the reproduction of another more ancient and more terrible strife, which, according to an ancient myth, took place before the creation of the universe, between the faithful and the rebellious legions.1147

Once more, it is a simple question of priority. Had John’s Revelation been written during the Vedic period, and were not one sure now of its being simply another version of the Book of Enoch and the Dragon legends of Pagan antiquity—the grandeur and the beauty of the imagery might have biassed the critics’ opinion in favour of the Christian interpretation of that first War, whose battle-field was starry Heaven, and the first slaughterers—the Angels. As the matter now stands, however, one has to trace Revelation, event by event, to other and far older visions. For the better comprehension of the apocalyptic allegories and of the Esoteric epos we ask the reader to turn to Revelation, and to read chapter xii, from verse 1 to verse 7.

This has several meanings, and much has been found out with regard to the astronomical and numerical keys of this universal myth. That which may be now given, is a fragment, a few hints as to its secret meaning, as embodying the record of a real war, the struggle between the Initiates of the two Schools. Many and various are the still existing allegories built on this same foundation stone. The true narrative—that which gives the full Esoteric meaning—is in the Secret Books, but the writer has had no access to these.

In the exoteric works, however, the episode of the Târaka War, and some Esoteric Commentaries, may offer a clue perhaps. In every Purâna the event is described with more or less variations which show its allegorical character.

In the Mythology of the earliest Vaidic Âryans as in the later Paurânic narratives, mention is made of Budha, the “Wise,” one “learned in the Secret Wisdom,” who is the planet Mercury in his euhemerization. The Hindû Classical Dictionary credits Budha with being the author of a hymn in the Rig Veda. Therefore, he can by no means be “a later fiction of the Brâhmans,” but is a very old personation indeed.

It is by enquiring into his genealogy, or theogony rather, that the following facts are disclosed. As a myth, he is the son of Târâ, the wife of Brihaspati, the “gold coloured,” and of Soma, the (male) Moon who, Paris-like, carries this new Helen of the Hindû Sidereal Kingdom away from her husband. This causes a great strife and war in Svarga (Heaven). The episode brings on a battle between the Gods and the Asuras. King Soma finds allies in Ushanas (Venus), the leader of the Dânavas; and the Gods are led by Indra and Rudra, who side with Brihaspati. The latter is helped by Shankara (Shiva), who, having had for his Guru Brihaspati’s father, Angiras, befriends his son. Indra is here the Indian prototype of Michael, the Archistrategus and the slayer of the “Dragon’s” Angels—since one of his names is Jishnu, “leader of the celestial host.” Both fight, as some Titans did against other Titans in defence of revengeful Gods, the one party in defence of Jupiter Tonans (in India, Brihaspati is the planet Jupiter, which is a curious coincidence); the other in support of the ever-thundering Rudra. During this war, Indra is deserted by his body-guard, the Storm-Gods (Maruts). The story is very suggestive in some of its details.

Let us examine some of them, and seek to discover their meaning.

The presiding Genius, or “Regent” of the planet Jupiter is Brihaspati, the wronged husband. He is the Instructor or Spiritual Guru of the Gods, who are the representatives of the Procreative Powers. In the Rig Veda, he is called Brahmanaspati, the name “of a deity in whom the action of the worshipped upon the gods is personified.” Hence Brahmanaspati represents the materialization of the “Divine Grace,” so to say, by means of ritual and ceremonies, or the exoteric worship.

Târâ,1148 his wife, is, on the other hand, the personification of the powers of one initiated into Gupta Vidyâ (Secret Knowledge), as will be shown.

Soma is the Moon astronomically; but in mystical phraseology it is also the name of the sacred beverage drunk by the Brâhmans and the Initiates during their mysteries and sacrificial rites. The Soma plant is the asclepias acida, which yields a juice from which that mystic beverage, the Soma drink, is made. Alone the descendants of the Rishis, the Agnihotris, or Fire-priests, of the great Mysteries knew all its powers. But the real property of the true Soma was (and is) to make a “new man” of the Initiate, after he is “reborn,” namely once that he begins to live in his Astral Body;1149 for, his spiritual nature overcoming the physical, he would soon snap it off and part even from that etherealized form.1150

Soma was never given in days of old to the non-initiated Brâhman—the simple Grihasta, or priest of the exoteric ritual. Thus Brihaspati, “Guru of the Gods” though he was, still represented the dead-letter form of worship. It is Târâ, his wife, the symbol of one who, though wedded to dogmatic worship, longs for true Wisdom, who is shown as initiated into his mysteries by King Soma, the giver of that Wisdom. Soma is thus made to carry her away in the allegory. The result of this is the birth of Budha, Esoteric Wisdom—Mercury, or Hermes, in Greece and Egypt. He is represented as “so beautiful,” that even the husband, though well aware that Budha is not the progeny of his dead-letter worship—claims the “new-born” as his Son, the fruit of his ritualistic and meaningless forms.1151 Such is, in brief, one of the meanings of the allegory.

The War in Heaven refers to several events of this kind on various and different planes of being. The first is a purely astronomical and cosmical fact pertaining to Cosmogony. Mr. John Bentley thought that with the Hindûs the War in Heaven was only a figure referring to their calculations of time periods.1152

This served as a prototype, he thinks, for the Western nations to build their War of the Titans upon. The author is not quite wrong, but neither is he quite right. If the sidereal prototype refers indeed to a pre-manvantaric period, and rests entirely on the knowledge which the Âryan Initiates claim they have of the whole programme and progress of cosmogony,1153 the War of the Titans is but a legendary and deified copy of the real war that took place in the Himâlayan Kailâsa (Heaven) instead of in the depths of cosmic interplanetary Space. It is the record of the terrible strife between the “Sons of God” and the “Sons of the Shadow” of the Fourth and the Fifth Races. It is on these two events, blended together by legends borrowed from the exoteric account of the War waged by the Asuras against the Gods, that every subsequent national tradition on the subject has been built.

Esoterically, the Asuras, transformed subsequently into evil Spirits and lower Gods, who are eternally at war with the Great Deities—are the Gods of the Secret Wisdom. In the oldest portions of the Rig Veda, they are the Spiritual and the Divine, the term Asura being used for the Supreme Spirit and being the same as the great Ahura of the Zoroastrians.1154 There was a time when the Gods Indra, Agni, and Varuna themselves belonged to the Asuras.

In the Taittirîya Brâhmana, the Breath (Asu) of Brahmâ-Prajâpati became alive, and from that Breath he created the Asuras. Later on, after the War, the Asuras are called the enemies of the Gods, hence—”A-suras,” the initial a being a negative prefix—or “No-Gods”; the “Gods” being referred to as Suras. This then connects the Asuras and their “Hosts,” enumerated further on, with the “Fallen Angels” of the Christian Churches, a Hierarchy of Spiritual Beings to be found in every Pantheon of ancient and even modern nations—from the Zoroastrian down to that of the Chinaman. They are the Sons of the primeval Creative Breath at the beginning of every new Mahâ Kalpa, or Manvantara, in the same rank as the Angels who had remained “faithful.” These were the allies of Soma (the parent of the Esoteric Wisdom) as against Brihaspati (representing ritualistic or ceremonial worship). Evidently they have been degraded in Space and Time into opposing Powers or Demons by the ceremonialists, on account of their rebellion against hypocrisy, sham-worship, and the dead-letter form.

Now what is the real character of all those who fought along with them? They are:

(1) Ushanas, or the “Host” of the Planet Venus, become now in Roman Catholicism Lucifer, the Genius of the “day star,”1155 the Tsaba, or Army of “Satan.”

(2) The Daityas and Dânavas are the Titans, the Demons and Giants whom we find in the Bible1156—the progeny of the “Sons of God” and the “Daughters of Men.” Their generic name shows their alleged character, and discloses at the same time the secret animus of the Brâhmans; for they are the Kratu-dvishas—the “enemies of the sacrifices” or exoteric shams. These are the “Hosts” that fought against Brihaspati, the representative of exoteric popular and national religions; and Indra—the God of the visible Heaven, the Firmament, who, in the early Veda, is the highest God of cosmic Heaven, the fit habitation for an extra-cosmic and personal God, higher than whom no exoteric worship can ever soar.

(3) Then come the Nâgas,1157 the Sarpas, Serpents or Seraphs. These, again, show their character by the hidden meaning of their glyph. In mythology they are semi-divine beings with a human face and the tail of a dragon. They are therefore, undeniably, the Jewish Seraphim (compare Serapis, Sarpa, Serpent); the singular being Saraph, “burning, fiery.” Christian and Jewish angelology distinguishes between the Seraphim and the Cherubim or Cherubs, who come second in order: Esoterically, and kabalistically, they are identical; the Cherubim being simply the name for the images or likenesses of any of the divisions of the celestial Hosts. Now, as said before, the Dragons and Nâgas were the names given to the Initiate-hermits, on account of their great Wisdom and Spirituality and their living in caves. Thus, when Ezekiel1158 applies the adjective Cherub to the King of Tyre, and tells him that by his wisdom and his understanding there is no secret that can be hidden from him, he shows the Occultist that it is a “Prophet,” perhaps still a follower of exoteric worship, who fulminates against an Initiate of another school and not against an imaginary Lucifer, a fallen Cherub from the stars, and then from the Garden of Eden. Thus the so-called “War” is, in one of its many meanings, also an allegorical record of the strife between the two classes of Adepts—of the Right and of the Left Path. There were three classes of Rishis in India, who were the earliest Adepts known; the Royal, or Râjarshis, kings and princes, who adopted the ascetic life; the Divine, or Devarshis, or the sons of Dharma or Yoga; and the Brahmarshis, descendants of those Rishis who were the founders of Gotras of Brâhmans, or caste-races. Now, leaving the mythical and astronomical keys for one moment aside, the secret teachings show many Atlanteans who belonged to these divisions; and there were strifes and wars between them, de facto and de jure. Nârada, one of the greatest Rishis, was a Devarshi; and he is shown in constant and everlasting feud with Brahmâ, Daksha, and other Gods and Sages. Therefore we may safely maintain that whatever the astronomical meaning of this universally accepted legend may be, its human phase is based on real and historical events, disfigured into a theological dogma only to suit ecclesiastical purposes. As above so below. Sidereal phenomena, and the behaviour of the celestial bodies in the Heavens, were taken as a model, and the plan was carried out below, on Earth. Thus, Space, in its abstract sense, was called the “realm of divine knowledge,” and by the Chaldees or Initiates Ab Soo, the habitat (or father, i.e., the source) of knowledge, because it is in Space that dwell the intelligent Powers which invisibly rule the Universe.1159

In the same manner, and on the plan of the Zodiac in the upper Ocean or the Heavens, a certain realm on Earth, an inland sea, was consecrated and called the “Abyss of Learning”; twelve centres on it, in the shape of twelve small islands, representing the Zodiacal Signs—two of which remained for ages the “mystery Signs”1160—were the abodes of twelve Hierophants and Masters of Wisdom. This “Sea of Knowledge” or learning1161 remained for ages there, where now stretches the Shamo or Gobi Desert. It existed until the last great glacial period, when a local cataclysm, which swept the waters South and West and so formed the present great desolate desert, left only a certain oasis, with a lake and one island in the midst of it, as a relic of the Zodiacal Ring on Earth. For ages the Watery Abyss—which, with the nations that preceded the later Babylonians, was the abode of the “Great Mother,” the terrestrial post-type of the “Great Mother Chaos” in Heaven, the parent of Ea (Wisdom), himself the early prototype of Oannes, the Man-Fish of the Babylonians—for ages, then, the “Abyss” or Chaos was the abode of Wisdom and not of Evil. The struggle of Bel and then of Merodach, the Sun-God, with Tiamat, the Sea and its Dragon—a “War” which ended in the defeat of the latter—has a purely cosmic and geological meaning, as well as a historical one. It is a page torn out of the history of the Secret and Sacred Sciences, their evolution, growth and death—for the profane masses. It relates (a) to the systematic and gradual drying up of immense territories by the fierce Sun at a certain pre-historic period, one of the terrible droughts which ended by a gradual transformation of once fertile lands abundantly watered into the sandy deserts which they are now; and (b) to the as systematic persecution of the Prophets of the Right Path by those of the Left. The latter, having inaugurated the birth and evolution of the sacerdotal castes, have finally led the world into all those exoteric religions, which have been invented to satisfy the depraved taste of the “hoi polloi” and the ignorant for ritualistic pomp and the materialization of the ever-immaterial and Unknowable Principle.

This was a certain improvement on the Atlantean sorcery, the memory of which lingers in the remembrance of all the literary and Sanskrit-reading portion of India, as well as in the popular legends. Still it was a parody on, and the desecration of, the Sacred Mysteries and their Science. The rapid progress of anthropomorphism and idolatry led the early Fifth, as it had already led the Fourth Race, into sorcery once more, though on a smaller scale. Finally, even the four “Adams” (symbolizing, under other names, the four preceding Races) were forgotten, and, passing from one generation into another, each loaded with some additional myths, were at last drowned in that ocean of popular symbolism called the Pantheons. Yet they exist to this day in the oldest Jewish traditions: the first as the Tzelem, the “Shadow-Adam,” the Chhâyâs of our doctrine; the second, the “Model” Adam, the copy of the first, and the “male and female” of the exoteric Genesis; the third, the “Earthly Adam” before the Fall, an androgyne; and the fourth, the Adam after his “fall,” i.e., separated into sexes, or the pure Atlantean. The Adam of the Garden of Eden, or the forefather of our Race—the fifth—is an ingenious compound of the above four. As stated in the Zohar, Adam, the first Man, is not found now on Earth, he “is not found in all Below.” For where does the lower Earth come from? “From the Chain of the Earth, and from the Heaven Above,” i.e., from the superior Globes, those which precede and are above our Earth.

And there came out from it [the Chain] creatures differing one from the other. Some of them in garments [solid] (skins), some in shells (Q’lippoth), ... some in red shells, some in black, some in white, and some from all the colours.1162

As in the Chaldæan Cosmogony of Berosus and the Stanzas just given, some treatises on the Kabalah speak of creatures with two faces, some with four, and some with one face; for “the highest Adam did not come down in all the countries, or produce progeny and have many wives,” but is a mystery.

So is the Dragon a mystery. Truly says Rabbi Simeon Ben Iochaï, that to understand the meaning of the Dragon is not given to the “companions” (students, or Chelâs), but only to the “little ones,” i.e., the perfect Initiates.1163

The work of the beginning the companions understand; but it is only the little ones who understand the parable on the work in the Principium by the Mystery of the Serpent of the Great Sea.1164

And those Christians, who may happen to read this, will also understand by the light of the above sentence who their “Christ” was. For Jesus states repeatedly that he who “shall not receive the Kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein”; and if some of his sayings have been meant to apply to children without any metaphor, most of the references to the “little ones” in the Gospels, relate to the Initiates, of whom Jesus was one. Paul (Saul) is referred to in the Talmud as the “little one.”

The “Mystery of the Serpent” was this: Our Earth, or rather terrestrial life, is often referred to in the Secret Teachings as the Great Sea, the “Sea of Life” having remained to this day a favourite metaphor. The Siphra Dtzenioutha speaks of Primeval Chaos and the Evolution of the Universe after a Destruction (Pralaya), comparing it to an uncoiling serpent:

Extending hither and thither, its tail in its mouth, the head twisting on its neck, it is enraged and angry.... It watches and conceals itself. Every thousand Days it is manifested.1165

A commentary on the Purânas says:

Ananta-Shesha is a form of Vishnu, the Holy Spirit of Preservation, and a symbol of the Universe, on which it is supposed to sleep during the intervals of the Daysof Brahmâ. The seven heads of Shesha support the Universe.

So the Spirit of God “sleeps,” or is “breathing” over the Chaos of Undifferentiated Matter, before each new “Creation,” says the Siphra Dtzenioutha. Now one Day of Brahmâ is composed, as already explained, of one thousand Mahâ Yugas; and as each Night, or period of rest, is equal in duration to this Day, it is easy to see what this sentence in the Siphra Dtzenioutha refers to—viz., that the Serpent manifests “once in a thousand days.” Nor is it more difficult to see whither the initiated writer of the Siphra is leading us, when he says:

Its head is broken in the waters of the Great Sea, as it is written: Thou dividest the sea by thy strength, thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters.1166

It refers to the trials of the Initiates in this physical life, the “Sea of Sorrow,” if read with one key; it hints at the successive destruction of the seven Spheres of a Chain of Worlds in the Great Sea of Space, when read with another key; for every sidereal globe or sphere, every world, star, or group of stars, is called in symbolism a “Dragon’s Head.” But however it may read, the Dragon was never regarded as Evil, nor was the Serpent either—in antiquity. In the metaphors, whether astronomical, cosmical, theogonical or simply physiological (or phallic), the Serpent was always regarded as a divine symbol. When mention is made of “the [Cosmic] Serpent which runs with 370 leaps,”1167 it means the cyclic periods of the great Tropical Year of 25,868 years, divided in the Esoteric calculation into 370 periods or cycles, as one solar year is divided into 365 days. And if Michael was regarded by the Christians as the Conqueror of Satan, the Dragon, it is because in the Talmud this fighting personage is represented as the Prince of Waters, who had seven subordinate Spirits under him—a good reason why the Latin Church made him the patron saint of every promontory in Europe. In the Siphra Dtzenioutha the Creative Force “makes sketches and spiral lines of his creation in the shape of a Serpent.” It “holds its tail in its mouth,” because it is the symbol of endless eternity and of cyclic periods. Its meanings, however, would require a volume, and we must end.

Thus the reader may now see for himself what are the several meanings of the “War in Heaven,” and of the “Great Dragon.” Thus the most solemn and dreaded of Church dogmas, the alpha and omega of the Christian faith, and the pillar of its Fall and Atonement, dwindles down to a Pagan symbol, in the many allegories of these pre-historic struggles.