CHAPTER IX.
“All things are governed in the bosom of this triad.”—Lydus: De Mensibus, 20.
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Blavatsky, H. P. (Helena Petrovna)
Hezekiah was not the lineal, but the titular son of Ahaz. Isaiah, the prophet, belonged to the royal family, and Hezekiah was reputed his son-in-law. Ahaz refused to ally himself with the prophet and his party, saying: “I will not tempt (depend on) the Lord” (Isaiah vii. 12). The prophet had declared: “If you will not believe, surely you shall not be established”—foreshadowing the deposition of his direct language. “Ye weary my God,” replied the prophet, and predicted the birth of a child by an alma, or temple-woman, and that before it should attain full age (Hebrews v. 14; Isaiah vii. 16; viii. 4), the king of Assyria should overcome Syria and Israel. This is the prophecy which Irenæus took such pains to connect with Mary and Jesus, and made the reason why the mother of the Nazarene prophet is represented as belonging to the temple, and consecrated to God from her infancy.
In a second song, Isaiah celebrated the new chief, to sit on the throne of David (ix. 6, 7; xi. 1), who should restore to their homes the Jews whom the confederacy had led captive (Isaiah viii. 2-12; Joel iii. 1-7; Obadiah 7, 11, 14). Micah—his contemporary—also announced the same event (iv. 7-13; v. 1-7). The Redeemer was to come out of Bethlehem; in other words, was of the house of David; and was to resist Assyria to whom Ahaz had sworn allegiance, and also to reform religion (2 Kings, xviii. 4-8). This Hezekiah did. He was grandson of Zechariah the seer (2 Chronicles, xxix. 1; xxvi. 5), the counsellor of Uzziah; and as soon as he ascended the throne he restored the religion of David, and destroyed the last vestiges of that of Moses, i.e., the esoteric doctrine, declaring “our fathers have trespassed” (2 Chron., xxix. 6-9). He next attempted a reunion with the northern monarchy, there being an interregnum in Israel (2 Chron., xxx. 1, 2, 6; xxxi. 1, 6, 7). It was successful, but resulted in an invasion by the king of Assyria. But it was a new régime; and all this shows the course of two parallel streams in the religious worship of the Israelites; one belonging to the state religion and adopted to fit political exigencies; the other pure idolatry, resulting from ignorance of the true esoteric doctrine preached by Moses. For the first time since Solomon built them “the high places were taken away.”
It was Hezekiah who was the expected Messiah of the exoteric state-religion. He was the scion from the stem of Jesse, who should recall the Jews from a deplorable captivity, about which the Hebrew historians seem to be very silent, carefully avoiding all mention of this particular fact, but which the irascible prophets imprudently disclose. If Hezekiah crushed the exoteric Baal-worship, he also tore violently away the people of Israel from the religion of their fathers, and the secret rites instituted by Moses.
It was Darius Hystaspes who was the first to establish a Persian colony in Judea, Zoro-Babel was perhaps the leader. “The name Zoro-babel means ‘the seed or son of Babylon’—as Zoro-aster צרו־אשתר is the seed, son, or prince of Ishtar.”[850] The new colonists were doubtless Judæi. This is a designation from the East. Even Siam is called Judia, and there was an Ayodia in India. The temples of Solom or Peace were numerous. Throughout Persia and Afghanistan the names of Saul and David are very common. The “Law” is ascribed in turn to Hezekiah, Ezra, Simon the Just, and the Asmonean period. Nothing definite; everywhere contradictions. When the Asmonean period began, the chief supporters of the Law were called Asideans or Khasdim (Chaldeans), and afterward Pharisees or Pharsi (Parsis). This indicates that Persian colonies were established in Judea and ruled the country; while all the people that are mentioned in the books of Genesis and Joshua lived there as a commonalty (see Ezra ix. 1).
There is no real history in the Old Testament, and the little historical information one can glean is only found in the indiscreet revelations of the prophets. The book, as a whole, must have been written at various times, or rather invented as an authorization of some subsequent worship, the origin of which may be very easily traced partially to the Orphic Mysteries, and partially to the ancient Egyptian rites in familiarity with which Moses was brought up from his infancy.
Since the last century the Church has been gradually forced into concessions of usurped biblical territory to those to whom it of right belonged. Inch by inch has been yielded, and one personage after another been proved mythical and Pagan. But now, after the recent discovery of George Smith, the much-regretted Assyriologist, one of the securest props of the Bible has been pulled down. Sargon and his tablets are about demonstrated to be older than Moses. Like the account of Exodus, the birth and story of the lawgiver seem to have been “borrowed” from the Assyrians, as the “jewels of gold and jewels of silver” were said to be from the Egyptians.
On page 224 of Assyrian Discoveries, Mr. George Smith says: “In the palace of Sennacherib at Kouyunjik, I found another fragment of the curious history of Sargon, a translation of which I published in the Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archæology, vol. i., part i., page 46. This text relates that Sargon, an early Babylonian monarch, was born of royal parents, but concealed by his mother, who placed him on the Euphrates in an ark of rushes, coated with bitumen, like that in which the mother of Moses hid her child (see Exodus ii.). Sargon was discovered by a man named Akki, a water-carrier, who adopted him as his son; and he afterward became King of Babylonia. The capital of Sargon was the great city of Agadi—called by the Semites Akkad—mentioned in Genesis as a capital of Nimrod (Genesis x. 10), and here he reigned for forty five years.[851] Akkad lay near the city of Sippara,[852] on the Euphrates and north of Babylon. “The date of Sargon, who may be termed the Babylonian Moses, was in the sixteenth century and perhaps earlier.”
G. Smith adds in his Chaldean Account that Sargon I. was a Babylonian monarch who reigned in the city of Akkad about 1600 B.C. The name of Sargon signifies the right, true, or legitimate king. This curious story is found on fragments of tablets from Kouyunjik, and reads as follows:
1. Sargona, the powerful king, the king of Akkad am I.
2. My mother was a princess, my father I did not know, a brother of my father ruled over the country.
3. In the city of Azupirana, which is by the side of the river Euphrates,
4. My mother, the princess, conceived me; in difficulty she brought me forth.
5. She placed me in an ark of rushes, with bitumen my exit she sealed up.
6. She launched me in the river which did not drown me.
7. The river carried me to Akki, the water-carrier it brought me.
8. Akki, the water-carrier, in tenderness of bowels, lifted me, etc., etc.
And now Exodus (ii.): “And when she (Moses’ mother) could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein, and she laid it in the flags by the river’s brink.”
The story, says Mr. G. Smith, “is supposed to have happened about 1600 B.C., rather earlier than the supposed age of Moses[853] as we know that the fame of Sargon reached Egypt, it is quite likely that this account had a connection with the event related in Exodus ii., for every action, when once performed, has a tendency to be repeated.”
The “ages” of the Hindus differ but little from those of the Greeks, Romans, and even the Jews. We include the Mosaic computation advisedly, and with intent to prove our position. The chronology which separates Moses from the creation of the world by only four generations seems ridiculous, merely because the Christian clergy would enforce it upon the world literally.[854] The kabalists know that these generations stand for ages of the world. The allegories which, in the Hindu calculations, embrace the whole stupendous sweep of the four ages, are cunningly made in the Mosaic books, through the obliging help of the Masorah, to cram into the small period of two millenniums and a half (2513)!
The exoteric plan of the Bible was made to answer also to four ages. Thus, they reckon the Golden Age from Adam to Abraham; the silver, from Abraham to David; copper, from David to the Captivity; thenceforward, the iron. But the secret computation is quite different, and does not vary at all from the zodiacal calculations of the Brahmans. We are in the Iron Age, or Kali-Yug, but it began with Noah, the mythical ancestor of our race.
Noah, or Nuah, like all the euhemerized manifestations of the Unrevealed One—Swayambhuva (or Swayambhu), was androgyne. Thus, in some instances, he belonged to the purely feminine triad of the Chaldeans, known as “Nuah, the universal Mother.” We have shown, in another chapter, that every male triad had its feminine counterpart, one in three, like the former. It was the passive complement of the active principle, its reflection. In India, the male trimurty is reproduced in the Sakti-trimurti, the feminine; and in Chaldea, Ana, Belita and Davkina answered to Anu, Bel, Nuah. The former three resumed in one—Belita, were called:
“Sovereign goddess, lady of the nether abyss, mother of gods, queen of the earth, queen of fecundity.”
As the primordial humidity, whence proceeded all, Belita is Tamti, or the sea, the mother of the city of Erech (the great Chaldean necropolis), therefore, an infernal goddess. In the world of stars and planets she is known as Istar or Astoreth. Hence, she is identical with Venus, and every other queen of heaven, to whom cakes and buns were offered in sacrifice,[855] and, as all the archæologists know, with Eve, the mother of all that live, and with Mary.
The Ark, in which are preserved the germs of all living things necessary to repeople the earth, represents the survival of life, and the supremacy of spirit over matter, through the conflict of the opposing powers of nature. In the Astro-Theosophic chart of the Western Rite, the Ark corresponds with the navel, and is placed at the sinister side, the side of the woman (the moon), one of whose symbols is the left pillar of Solomon’s temple—Boaz. The umbilicus is connected with the receptacle in which are fructified the germs of the race.[856] The Ark is the sacred Argha of the Hindus, and thus, the relation in which it stands to Noah’s ark may be easily inferred, when we learn that the Argha was an oblong vessel, used by the high priests as a sacrificial chalice in the worship of Isis, Astartè, and Venus-Aphroditè, all of whom were goddesses of the generative powers of nature, or of matter—hence, representing symbolically the Ark containing the germs of all living things.
We admit that Pagans had and now have—as in India—strange symbols, which, to the eyes of the hypocrite and Puritan, seem scandalously immoral. But did not the ancient Jews copy most of these symbols? We have described elsewhere the identity of the lingham with Jacob’s pillar, and we could give a number of instances from the present Christian rites, bearing the same origin, did but space permit, and were not all these noticed fully by Inman and others (See Inman’s Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names).
Describing the worship of the Egyptians, Mrs. Lydia Maria Child says: “This reverence for the production of life, introduced into the worship of Osiris, the sexual emblems so common in Hindustan. A colossal image of this kind was presented to his temple in Alexandria, by King Ptolemy Philadelphus.... Reverence for the mystery of organized life led to the recognition of a masculine and feminine principle in all things, spiritual or material.... The sexual emblems, everywhere conspicuous in the sculptures of their temples, would seem impure in description, but no clean and thoughtful mind could so regard them while witnessing the obvious simplicity and solemnity with which the subject is treated.”[857]
Thus speaks this respected lady and admirable writer, and no truly pure man or woman would ever think of blaming her for it. But such a perversion of the ancient thought is but natural in an age of cant and prudery like our own.
The water of the flood when standing in the allegory for the symbolic “sea,” Tamti, typifies the turbulent chaos, or matter, called “the great dragon.” According to the Gnostic and Rosicrucian mediæval doctrine, the creation of woman was not originally intended. She is the offspring of man’s own impure fancy, and, as the Hermetists say, “an obtrusion.” Created by an unclean thought she sprang into existence at the evil “seventh hour,” when the “supernatural” real worlds had passed away and the “natural” or delusive worlds began evolving along the “descending Microcosmos,” or the arc of the great cycle, in plainer phraseology. First “Virgo,” the Celestial Virgin of the Zodiac, she became “Virgo-Scorpio.” But in evolving his second companion, man had unwittingly endowed her with his own share of Spirituality; and the new being whom his “imagination” had called into life became his “Saviour” from the snares of Eve-Lilith, the first Eve, who had a greater share of matter in her composition than the primitive “spiritual” man.[858]
Thus woman stands in the cosmogony in relation to “matter” or the great deep, as the “Virgin of the Sea,” who crushes the “Dragon” under her foot. The “Flood” is also very often shown, in symbolical phraseology, as the “great Dragon.” For one acquainted with these tenets it becomes more than suggestive to learn that with the Catholics the Virgin Mary is not only the accepted patroness of Christian sailors, but also the “Virgin of the Sea.” So was Dido the patroness of the Phœnician mariners;[859] and together with Venus and other lunar goddesses—the moon having such a strong influence over the tides—was the “Virgin of the Sea.” Mar, the Sea, is the root of the name Mary. The blue color, which was with the ancients symbolical of the “Great Deep” or the material world, hence—of evil, is made sacred to our “Blessed Lady.” It is the color of “Notre Dame de Paris.” On account of its relation to the symbolical serpent this color is held in the deepest aversion by the ex-Nazarenes, disciples of John the Baptist, now the Mendæans of Basra.
Among the beautiful plates of Maurice, there is one representing Christna crushing the head of the Serpent. A three-peaked mitre is on his head (typifying the trinity), and the body and tail of the conquered serpent encircles the figure of the Hindu god. This plate shows whence proceeded the inspiration for the “make up” of a later story extracted from an alleged prophecy. “I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.”
The Egyptian Orante is also shown with his arms extended as on a crucifix, and treading upon the “Serpent;” and Horus (the Logos) is represented piercing the head of the dragon, Typhon or Aphophis. All this gives us a clew to the biblical allegory of Cain and Abel. Cain was held as the ancestor of the Hivites, the Serpents, and the twins of Adam are an evident copy from the fable of Osiris and Typhon. Apart from the external form of the allegory, however, it embodied the philosophical conception of the eternal struggle of good and evil.
But how strangely elastic, how adaptable to any and every thing this mystical philosophy proved after the Christian era! When were ever facts, irrefutable, irrefragable, and beyond denial, less potential for the reëstablishment of truth than in our century of casuistry and Christian cunning? Is Christna proved to have been known as the “Good Shepherd” ages before the year A.D. 1, to have crushed the Serpent Kalinaga, and to have been crucified—all this was but a prophetic foreshadowing of the future! Are the Scandinavian Thor, who bruised the head of the Serpent with his cruciform mace, and Apollo, who killed Python, likewise shown to present the most striking similarities with the heroes of the Christian fables; they become but original conceptions of “heathen” minds, “working upon the old Patriarchal prophecies respecting the Christ, as they were contained in the one universal and primeval Revelation!”[860]
The flood, then, is the “Old Serpent” or the great deep of matter, Isaiah’s “dragon in the sea” (xxvii.1), over which the ark safely crosses on its way to the mount of Salvation. But, if we have heard of the ark and Noah, and the Bible at all, it is because the mythology of the Egyptians was ready at hand for Moses (if Moses ever wrote any of the Bible), and that he was acquainted with the story of Horus, standing on his boat of a serpentine form, and killing the Serpent with his spear; and with the hidden meaning of these fables, and their real origin. This is also why we find in Leviticus, and other parts of his books, whole pages of laws identical with those of Manu.
The animals shut up in the ark are the human passions. They typify certain ordeals of initiation, and the mysteries which were instituted among many nations in commemoration of this allegory. Noah’s ark rested on the seventeenth of the seventh month. Here we have again the number; as also in the “clean beasts” that he took by sevens into the ark. Speaking of the water-mysteries of Byblos, Lucian says: “On the top of one of the two pillars which Bacchus set up, a man remains seven days.”[861] He supposes this was done to honor Deukalion. Elijah, when praying on the top of Mount Carmel, sends his servant to look for a cloud toward the sea, and repeats, “go again seven times. And it came to pass at the seventh time, behold there arose a little cloud out of the sea like a man’s hand.”[862]
“Noah is a revolutio of Adam, as Moses is a revolutio of Abel and Seth,” says the Kabala; that is to say, a repetition or another version of the same story. The greatest proof of it is the distribution of the characters in the Bible. For instance, beginning with Cain, the first murderer, every fifth man in his line of descent is a murderer. Thus there come Enoch, Irad, Mehujael, Methuselah, and the fifth is Lamech, the second murderer, and he is Noah’s father. By drawing the five-pointed star of Lucifer (which has its crown-point downward) and writing the name of Cain beneath the lowest point, and those of his descendants successively at each of the other points, it will be found that each fifth name—which would be written beneath that of Cain—is that of a murderer. In the Talmud this genealogy is given complete, and thirteen murderers range themselves in line below the name of Cain. This is no coincidence. Siva is the Destroyer, but he is also the Regenerator. Cain is a murderer, but he is also the creator of nations, and an inventor. This star of Lucifer is the same one that John sees falling down to earth in his Apocalypse.
In Thebes, or Theba, which means ark—TH-ABA being synonymous with Kartha or Tyre, Astu or Athens and Urbs or Rome, and meaning also the city—are found the same foliations as described on the pillars of the temple of Solomon. The bi-colored leaf of the olive, the three-lobed fig-leaf, and the lanceolate-shaped laurel-leaf, had all esoteric as well as popular or vulgar meanings with the ancients.
The researches of Egyptologists present another corroboration of the identity of the Bible-allegories with those of the lands of the Pharaohs and Chaldeans. The dynastic chronology of the Egyptians, recorded by Herodotus, Manetho, Eratosthenes, Diodorus Siculus, and accepted by our antiquarians, divided the period of Egyptian history under four general heads: the dominion of gods, demi-gods, heroes, and mortal men. By combining the demi-gods and heroes into one class, Bunsen reduces the periods to three: the ruling gods, the demi-gods or heroes—sons of gods, but born of mortal mothers—and the Manes, who were the ancestors of individual tribes. These subdivisions, as any one may perceive, correspond perfectly with the biblical Elohim, sons of God, giants, and mortal Noachian men.
Diodorus of Sicily and Berosus give us the names of the twelve great gods who presided over the twelve months of the year and the twelve signs of the zodiac. These names, which include Nuah,[863] are too well known to require repetition. The double-faced Janus was also at the head of twelve gods, and in his representations of him he is made to hold the keys to the celestial domains. All these having served as models for the biblical patriarchs, have done still further service—especially Janus—by furnishing copy to St. Peter and his twelve apostles, the former also double-faced in his denial, and also represented as holding the keys of Paradise.
This statement that the story of Noah is but another version in its hidden meaning of the story of Adam and his three sons, gathers proof on every page of the book of Genesis. Adam is the prototype of Noah. Adam falls because he eats of the forbidden fruit of celestial knowledge; Noah, because he tastes of the terrestrial fruit: the juice of the grape representing the abuse of knowledge in an unbalanced mind. Adam gets stripped of his spiritual envelope; Noah of his terrestrial clothing; and the nakedness of both makes them feel ashamed. The wickedness of Cain is repeated in Ham. But the descendants of both are shown as the wisest of races on earth; and they are called on this account “snakes,” and the “sons of snakes,” meaning the sons of wisdom, and not of Satan, as some divines would be pleased to have the world understand the term. Enmity has been placed between the “snake” and the “woman” only in this mortal phenomenal “world of man” as “born of woman.” Before the carnal fall, the “snake” was Ophis, the divine wisdom, which needed no matter to procreate men, humanity being utterly spiritual. Hence the war between the snake and the woman, or between spirit and matter. If, in its material aspect, the “old serpent” is matter, and represents Ophiomorphos, in its spiritual meaning it becomes Ophis-Christos. In the magic of the old Syro-Chaldeans both are conjoint in the zodiacal sign of the androgyne of Virgo-Scorpio, and may be divided or separated whenever needed.
Thus as the origin of “good and evil,” the meaning of the S.S. and Z.Z. has always been interchangeable; and if upon some occasions the S.S. on sigils and talismans are suggestive of serpentine evil influence and denote a design of black magic upon others, the double S.S. are found on the sacramental cups of the Church and mean the presence of the Holy Ghost, or pure wisdom.