supposed monotheism over the heathen, whom his Law commanded. him to hate.990 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. Virâj and Horus are both male symbols, emanating from androgyne Nature, one from Brahmâ and his female counterpart Vâch, the other, from Osiris and Isis never from the One infinite God. In the JudaeoChristian systems it is different. Whereas the lotus, containing Brahmâ, 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.991 In Hindûism—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 Deity, the Kabalistic Ain-Soph; or, the Jews have been from the beginning, no better than the dead-letter Lingam-2worshipers of the India of today. We say it was the former; and that, therefore, the secret or esoteric worship of the Jews was the same Pantheism that the Vedântin philosophers are reproached with today; 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 Sad 990. Whenever such analogies between the Gentiles and the Jews, and later the Christians, were pointed out, it was the invariable custom of the latter to say that it was the work of the Devil who forced the Pagans to imitate the Jews for the purpose of throwing a slur on the religion of the one, true living God. To this Faber says very justly: Some have imagined that the Gentiles were servile copyists of the Israelites, and that each point of similitude was borrowed from the Mosaical Institutes. But this theory will by no means solve the problem: both because we find the very 992. Their consecrated pillars (unhewn stones) erected by Abraham and Jacob were LINGAMS. THE ELOHISTIC AND JEHOVISTIC TEXTS 473 ducees, 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 Sanhedrim and judge. As various writers have shown, and as brutally stated in Hargrave Jennings' Phallicism,992 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 Linga and Yoni and Argha of the Hindûs, the Îśvara 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 today do not date from Moses but from David - even admitting the identity of the old genuine with the later and remodeled 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 worshipers 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; 993 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 992a. Page 67. 993, See Introduction to the Old Testament, and also Bishop Colenso's Elohistic and Jehovistic Writers. 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 Lingam and Yoni found on every roadside 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 ABPACAE IAQ (Abrasax Iao) an address exactly parallel to the so frequent EIC ZEYC CAPAII (Eis Zeus Sarapi) on the contemporary Heathen gems; and therefore only to be translated by "Abraxas is the One Jehovah." 994 But who was Abraxas? As the same author shows the numerical or Kabalistic value of the name Abraxas directly refers to the Persian title of the god Mithra,' Ruler of the year, worshiped 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." 66 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 Brâhmans, and even from the Korân, in their strong and frequent recommendation of TRUTH [ !! ]. . . .” 994. King's Gnostics, p. 327. NATURE, A STONE-COLD MOTHER § XVIII ON THE MYTH OF THE "FALLEN ANGEL," IN ITS VARIOUS ASPECTS A THE EVIL SPIRIT: WHO, AND WHAT? 475 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. And though for the Pantheists and Occultists, as much as for the Pessimists, Nature is no better than "a comely mother, but stone cold"- 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 a 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. learned 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 medieval 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 personae 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 called the Devil "the monkey of God," this could be attributed 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 to the 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 in the Zend Avesta and the Vendîdâd, and of his Amshâspends, 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 to discover in its verses, by mangling the texts and meaning, 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 Kabala.995 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 transforma 995. Such a pseudo-Kabalist was the Marquis de Mirville in France, who, having studied the Zohar and other old remnants of Jewish Wisdom under the "Chevalier" Drach, an ancient Rabbi Kabalist converted to the Romish Church-wrote with his help half a dozen volumes full of slander and calumnies against every prominent Spir. itualist and Kabalist. From 1848 up to 1860 he persecuted unrelentingly the old Count d'Ourches, one of the earliest Eastern Occultists in France, a man the scope of whose occult knowledge will never be appreciated correctly by his survivors, because he screened his real beliefs and knowledge under the mask of Spiritism, |