The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 2 of 4 The Synthesis of...

Besides, the same author shows and demonstrates numerically and geometrically that (a) Arets, “earth,” Adam, “man,” and H-adam-h, are cognate with each other, and are personified in the Bible under one form, as the Egyptian and Hebrew Mars, God of Generation;1076 and (b) that Jehovah, or Jah, is Noah, for Jehovah is Noah in Hebrew would be ינח or literally in English, Inch.

The above affords, then, a key to the said traditions. Noah, a divine permutation, the supposed Saviour of Humanity, who carries in his Ark or Argha (the Moon), the germs of all living things, worships before the “Body of Adam,” which body is the image of the Creator, and a Creator itself. Hence Adam is called the “Prophet of the Moon,” the Argha or “Holy of Holies” of the Yod (י). This also shows the origin of the Jewish popular belief that the face of Moses is in the Moon—i.e., the spots in the Moon. For Moses and Jehovah are kabalistically once more permutations, as has been shown. Says the author of The Source of Measures:

Add the values of thenew formof the name Jehovah, 21 + 501 + 21 = 543, or, by a reverse reading, 345; thus showing Moses to be a form of Jehovah in this combination. 21 ÷ 2 = 105, or, reversed, 501, so that theasheror thethatinI am-that-I amis simply a guide to a use of 21 or 7 × 3.501^2 = 251 +, a very valuable pyramid number, etc.1077

This relates to the process of descending in Fire on the Mount to make Man, etc., and is explained to be but a check and use of the numbers of the mountains; for on one side we have 10 + 5 + 6 = 21, down the middle 501, and on the other side 6 + 5 + 10 = 21.1078

The “Holy of Holies,” both kabalistic and rabbinical, is thus shown as an international symbol, and common property. Neither had originated with the Hebrews; but owing to the too realistic handling of the half-initiated Levites, the symbol had acquired with them a significance which it scarcely has with any other people to this day, and which it was originally never meant to have by the true Kabalist. The Lingam and Yoni of the modern average Hindû is, on the face of it, of course, no better than the rabbinical “Holy of Holies”—but it is no worse; and this is a point gained on the Christian traducers of the Asiatic religious Philosophies. For, in such religious myths, in the hidden symbolism of a creed and philosophy, the spirit of the tenets propounded ought to decide their relative value. And who will say, that, examined either way, this so-called “Wisdom,” applied solely to the uses and benefit of one little nation, has ever developed in it anything like national ethics. The Prophets are there, to show the walk in life of the chosen but “stiff-necked” people before, during, and after, the days of Moses. That they have had at one time the Wisdom-Religion and the use of its universal language and symbols is proved by the same Esotericism existing to this day in India with regard to the “Holy of Holies.” This, as said above, was and still is the passage through the “Golden” Cow in the same stooping position as was necessitated by the Gallery of the Pyramid, which identified man with Jehovah in Hebrew Esotericism.

The whole difference lies in the spirit of the interpretation. With the Hindûs as with the ancient Egyptians that spirit was and is entirely metaphysical and psychological; with [pg 492] the Hebrews it was realistic and physiological. It pointed to the first sexual separation of the human race—Eve giving birth to Cain-Jehovah, as shown in The Source of Measures; to the consummation of terrestrial physiological union and conception—as in the allegory of Cain shedding Abel's blood, Habel being the feminine principle; and to child-bearing—a process shown to have begun in the Third Race, or with Adam's Third Son, Seth, with whose Son Henoch, men began to call themselves Jehovah or Jah-hovah, the male Jod and Havah or Eve, to wit, male and female beings.1079 Thus the difference lies in the religious and ethical feeling, but the two symbols are identical. There is no doubt that, with the fully initiated Judæan Tanaim, the inner sense of the symbolism was as holy in its abstraction as with the ancient Âryan Dvijas. The worship of the “God in the Ark” dates only from David; and for a thousand years Israel knew of no phallic Jehovah. And now the old Kabalah edited and reëdited, has become tainted with it.

With the ancient Âryans the hidden meaning was grandiose, sublime and poetical, however much the external appearance of their symbol may now militate against the claim. The ceremony of passing through the Holy of Holies—now symbolized by the Cow, but in the beginning through the temple Hiranya-garbha, the Radiant Egg, in itself a symbol of Universal, Abstract Nature—meant spiritual conception and birth, or rather the re-birth of the individual and his regeneration; the stooping man at the entrance of the Sanctum Sanctorum, ready to pass through the Matrix of Mother Nature, or the physical creature ready to re-become the original Spiritual Being, pre-natal Man. With the Semite, that stooping man meant the fall of Spirit into Matter, and that fall and degradation were apotheosized by him with the result of dragging Deity down to the level of man. For the Âryan, the symbol represented the divorce of Spirit from Matter, its merging into and return to its primal Source; for the Semite, the wedlock of Spiritual Man with Material Female Nature, the physiological taking preëminence over the psychological and the purely immaterial. The Âryan views of the symbolism were those of the whole Pagan world; the Semite interpretations emanated from, and were preëminently those of a small tribe, thus marking its national features and the idiosyncratic defects that characterize many of the Jews to this day—gross realism, selfishness, and sensuality.

They had made a bargain, through their father Jacob, [pg 493] with their tribal deity, self-exalted above all others, and a covenant that his “seed shall be as the dust of the earth”; and that deity could have no better image henceforth than that of the symbol of generation, and as representation a number and numbers.

The religion of the Hindû detaches him from this Earth; therefore, even now, the cow-symbol is one of the grandest and most philosophical among all others in its inner meaning. To the “Masters” and “Lords” of European potencies, the Israelites, certain words of Carlyle apply still more admirably; for them

But it was not so with the ancient nations. For them the passage-entrance and the sarcophagus in the King's Chamber meant regeneration—not generation. It was the most solemn symbol, a Holy of Holies, indeed, wherein were created Immortal Hierophants and “Sons of God”—never mortal men and sons of lust and flesh, as now in the hidden sense of the Semite Kabalist. The reason for the difference in the views of the two races is easy to account for. The Âryan Hindû belongs to the oldest races now on Earth; the Semite Hebrew to the latest. The former is nearly one million years old; the latter is a small sub-race some 8,000 years of age and no more.1080

But phallic worship has developed only with the gradual loss of the keys to the inner meaning of religious symbols, and there was a day when the Israelites had beliefs as pure as the Âryans have. But now Judaism, built solely on phallic worship, has become one of the latest [pg 494] creeds in Asia, and theologically a religion of hate and malice toward everyone and everything outside itself. Philo Judæus shows what was the genuine Hebrew faith. The Sacred Writings, he says, prescribe what we ought to do, commanding us to hate the heathen and their laws and institutions. True, they did hate Baal or Bacchus worship publicly, but left its worst features to be followed secretly. It is with the Talmudic Jews that the grand symbols of Nature were the most profaned. With them, as now shown by the discovery of the key to the correct Bible reading, Geometry, the fifth Divine Science—“fifth” in the series of the Seven Keys to the universal Esoteric Language and Symbology—was desecrated, and by them applied to conceal the most terrestrial and grossly sexual mysteries, wherein both Deity and Religion were degraded.

We are told that it is just the same with our Brahmâ-Prajâpati, with Osiris and all other Creative Gods. Quite so, when their rites are judged exoterically and externally; the reverse when their inner meaning is unveiled, as we see. The Hindû Lingam is identical with Jacob's “Pillar”—most undeniably. But the difference, as said, seems to consist in the fact that the Esoteric significance of the Lingam was too truly sacred and metaphysical to be revealed to the profane and the vulgar; hence its superficial appearance was left to the speculations of the mob. Nor would the Âryan Hierophant and Brâhman, in their proud exclusiveness and the satisfaction of their knowledge, go to the trouble of concealing its primeval nakedness under cunningly devised fables; whereas the Rabbi, having interpreted the symbol to suit his own tendencies, had to veil the crude significance; and this served a double purpose—that of keeping his secret to himself and of exalting himself in his supposed monotheism over the Heathen, whom his Law commanded him to hate1081—a commandment now gladly accepted by the Christian too, in spite of another and later commandment, “Love one another.” 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 [pg 495] 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 Judæo-Christian 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.1082 In Hindûism—the “Holy of Holies” is a universal abstraction, whose dramatis personæ are Infinite Spirit and Nature; in Christian Judaism, it is a personal God, outside of that Nature, and the human womb—Eve, Sarah, 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 Suph; or, the Jews have been from the beginning no better than the dead-letter Lingam-worshippers1083 of the India of to-day. We say it was the former; and that, therefore, the secret or esoteric worship of the Jews was the same Pantheism that the Vedântin Philosophers are reproached with to-day; Jehovah was a substitute for purposes of an exoteric national faith, and had no importance or reality in the eyes of the erudite Priests and Philosophers—the Sadducees, the most refined and the most learned of all the Israelite sects, who stand as a living proof of it, 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 Bethels, oil-anointed Phalli, and their “Brazen Serpent,” worship such a gross symbol, and minister unto it, seeing in it their “Covenant”—the [pg 496] Lord Himself! Let the reader turn to Gemara Sanhedrim and judge.

We know from the Jewish recordsthat the Ark contained atable of stone; and if it can be demonstrated that that stone was phallic, and yet identical with the sacred name Jehovah or Yehovah, which, written in unpointed Hebrew with four letters, is J-E-V-E or J-H-V-H (the H being merely an aspirate and the same as E). This process leaves us the two letters I and V (or in another of its forms U); then if we place the Iinthe U we have the“Holy of Holies”; we also have the Linga and Yoni and Argha of the Hindûs, the Iswarra [Îshvara] or“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.1084

The biblical Jews of to-day do not date from Moses but from David—even admitting the identity of the old and genuine with the later and remodelled Mosaic scrolls. Before that time their nationality is lost in the mists of pre-historic darkness, the veil from which is now withdrawn as much as we have space to do. It is only to the days of the Babylonian captivity that the Old Testament may be referred by the most lenient criticism as the approximately correct views that were current about the days of Moses. Even such fanatical Christians and worshippers of Jehovah as the Rev. Mr. Horne, have to admit the numerous changes and alterations made by the later compilers of the “Book of God,” since it was found by Hilkiah,1085 and since

The Elohistic texts were re-written 500 years after the date of Moses; the Jehovistic 800, on the authority of the biblical chronology itself. Hence, it is maintained that the deity, represented as the organ of generation in his pillar-form, and as a symbol of the double-sexed organ in the numeral value of the letters of his name—the Yod, י or “phallus,” and Hé, ה, 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, or Abrasax, of some Gnostic sects identical with the God of the Hebrews, who was the same as the Egyptian Horus. [pg 497] 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 ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞ ΙΑΩ (Abrasax Iao)—an address exactly parallel to the so frequent ΕΙΣ ΖΕΥΣ ΣΑΡΑΠΙ (Eis Zeus Sarapi) on the contemporary Heathen gems, and therefore only to be translated by“Abraxas is the One Jehovah.”1086

Thus, he was 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.”

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: