Chapter 1522

[←1512]

It is very surprising to see theologians and Oriental scholars expressing indignation at the “depraved taste” of the Hindû mystics, who, not content with having “invented” the Mind-born Sons of Brahmâ, make the Rishis, Manus, and Prajâpatis of every kind spring from various parts of the body of their primal Progenitor, Brahmâ. (See Wilson’s footnote in his Vishnu Purâna, i. 102.) Because the average public is unacquainted with the Kabalah, the key to, and glossary of, the much veiled Mosaic Books, therefore, the clergy imagines the truth will never out. Let any one turn to the English, Hebrew, or Latin texts of the Kabalah, now so ably translated by several scholars, and he will find that the Tetragrammaton, which is the Hebrew IHVH, is also both the “Sephirothal Tree”—i.e., it contains all the Sephiroth except Kether, the crown—and the united Body of the Heavenly Man (Adam Kadmon) from whose Limbs emanate the Universe and everything in it. Furthermore, he will find that the idea in the Kabalistic Books, the chief of which in the Zohar are the “Book of Concealed Mystery,” and of the “Greater” and the “Lesser Holy Assembly,” is entirely phallic and far more crudely expressed than is the four-fold Brahmâ in any of the Purânas. (See The Kabbalah Unveiled, by S. L. MacGregor Mathers, chapter xxii. of “The Lesser Holy Assembly,” concerning the remaining members of Microprosopus.) For, this “Tree of Life” is also the “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil,” whose chief mystery is that of human procreation. It is a mistake to regard the Kabalah as explaining the mysteries of Kosmos or Nature; it explains and unveils only a few allegories in the Bible, and is more esoteric than is the latter.