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

Whence the idea, and the true meaning of the term “Eden”? Christians will maintain that the Garden of Eden is the holy Paradise, the place desecrated by the sin of Adam and Eve; the Occultist will deny this dead-letter interpretation, and show the reverse. One need not believe in the Bible and see in it divine revelation, to say that this ancient book, if read esoterically, is based upon the same universal traditions as the other ancient scriptures. What Eden was is partially shown in Isis Unveiled, where it is said that:

The Garden of Eden as a locality is no myth at all; it belongs to those landmarks of history which occasionally disclose to the student that theBibleis not all mere allegory.“Eden, or the Hebrew גן עדן, Gan-Eden, meaning the Park or the Garden of Eden, is an archaic name of the country watered by the Euphrates and its many branches, from Asia and Armenia to the Erythraian sea.”458In the ChaldæanBook of Numbers, its location is designated in numerals, and in the cypher Rosicrucian manuscript, left by Count St. Germain, it is fully described. In the AssyrianTabletsit is rendered Gan-duniyas.“Behold,”say the אלהִם, Elohim, ofGenesis,“the man is become as one of us.”The Elohim may be accepted in one sense forgodsor powers, and in another for Aleim, or priests—the hierophants initiated into the good and evil of this world; for there was a college of priests called the Aleim, while the head of their caste, or the chief of the hierophants, was known as Java-Aleim. Instead of becoming a neophyte, and gradually obtaining his esoteric knowledge through a regular initiation, an Adam, or Man, uses his intuitional faculties and, prompted by the serpent—Womanand Matter—tastes of the Tree of Knowledge, the Esoteric or Secret Doctrine, unlawfully. The priests of Hercules, or Mel-karth, the“Lord”of the Eden, all wore“coats of skin.”The text says:“And Java-Aleim made for Adam and his wife, כתנותעור. Chitonuth-our.”The first Hebrew word, Chiton, is the Greek Χιτὼν (Chitôn). It became a Slavonic word by adoption from theBible, and means acoat, an upper garment.

Though containing the same substratum of esoteric truth as does every early Cosmogony, the Hebrew Scripture wears on its face the marks of a double origin. ItsGenesisis purely a reminiscence of the Babylonian captivity. The names of places, men, and even objects, can be traced from the original text to the Chaldæans and the Akkadians, the progenitors and Âryan instructors of the former. It is strongly contested that the Akkad tribes of Chaldæa, Babylonia and Assyria were in any way cognate with the Brâhmans of Hindûstan; but there are more proofs in favour of this opinion than otherwise. The Shemite or Assyrian ought, perchance, to have been called the Turanian, and the Mongolians have been denominated Scyths. But if the Akkadians ever existed, otherwise than in the imagination of some Philologists and Ethnologists, they certainly would never have been a Turanian tribe, as some Assyriologists have striven to make us believe. They were simply[pg 213]emigrants on their way to Asia Minor from India, the cradle of humanity, and their sacerdotal adepts tarried to civilize and initiate a barbarian people. Halévy proved the fallacy of the Turanian mania in regard to Akkadian people, and other scientists have proved that the Babylonian civilization was neither born nor developed in that country. It was imported from India, and the importers were Brâhmanical Hindûs.459

Much of the theology was borrowed by the Semites from the non-Semitic Akkadians or Proto-Chaldæans, whom they supplanted, and whose local cults they had neither the will nor the power to uproot. Indeed, throughout a long course of ages the two races, Semites and Akkadians, lived side by side, their notions and worship of the gods blending insensibly together.

Here, the Akkadians are called “non-Semitic,” as we had insisted they were in Isis Unveiled, which is another corroboration. Nor are we less right in always maintaining that the Jewish biblical history was a compilation of historical facts, arranged from other people's history in Jewish garb—Genesis excluded, which is Esotericism pure and simple. But it is really from the Euxine to Kashmir, and beyond, that Science has to search for the cradle—or rather one of the chief cradles—of mankind and the sons of Ad-ah; especially in after times, when the Garden of Ed-en on the Euphrates became the College of the Astrologers and Magi, the Aleim.

But this College and this Eden belong to the Fifth Race, and are simply a faint reminiscence of the Âdi-Varsha, of the primeval Third Race. What is the etymological meaning of the word Eden? In Greek it is ἡδονὴ, signifying “voluptuousness.” In this aspect it is no better than the Olympus of the Greeks, Indra's Heaven, Svarga, on Mount Meru, and even the Paradise full of Houris, promised by Mahomet to the faithful. The Garden of Eden was never the property of the Jews, for China, which can hardly be suspected of having known anything of the Jews 2,000 b.c., had such a primitive Garden in Central Asia inhabited by the “Dragons of Wisdom,” the Initiates. And according to Klaproth, the hieroglyphical chart copied from a Japanese Cyclopædia in the book of Foĕ-kouĕ-ki460 places its “Garden [pg 214] of Wisdom” on the Plateau of Pamir between the highest peaks of the Himâlayan ranges; and, describing it as the culminating point of Central Asia, shows the four rivers—Oxus, Indus, Ganges, and Silo—flowing from a common source, the “Lake of the Dragons.”

But this is not the Genetic Eden; nor is it the Kabalistical Garden of Eden. For the former—Eden Illa-ah—means in one sense Wisdom, a state like that of Nirvâna, a Paradise of Bliss; while in another sense it refers to Intellectual Man himself, the container of the Eden in which grows the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil; man being the Knower thereof.

Renan and Barthélemy St. Hilaire, basing themselves “on the most solid inductions,” think it impossible to doubt any longer, and both place the cradle of humanity “in the region of the Timaus.” Finally, the Journal Asiatique461 concludes that:

All the traditions of the human race gathering its primitive families at the region of their birth-place, show them to us grouped around the countries where Jewish tradition places the Garden of Eden; where the Âryans [Zoroastrians] established their Airyana Vaêjô or the Meru [?]. They are hemmed in to the North by the countries which join Lake Aral, and to the South by Baltistan, or Little Tibet. Everything concurs in proving that there was the abode of that primitive humanity to which we have to be traced.

That “primitive humanity” was in its Fifth Race, when the “Four-mouthed Dragon,” the lake, of which very few traces are now left, was the abode of the “Sons of Wisdom,” the first Mind-born Sons of the Third Race. Yet it was neither the only nor the primitive cradle of humanity, though it was the copy of the cradle, verily, of the first thinking divine Man. It was the Paradesha, the highland of the first Sanskrit-speaking people, the Hedone, the country of delight of the Greeks, but it was not the “Bower of Voluptuousness” of the Chaldæans, for the latter was but the reminiscence of it; nor again was it there that the “Fall of Man” occurred after the “separation.” The Eden of the Jews was copied from the Chaldæan copy.

That the Fall of Man into generation occurred during the earliest portion of what Science calls the Mesozoic times, or the age of the reptiles, is evidenced by the bible phraseology concerning the serpent, the nature of which is explained in the Zohar. The question is not whether Eve's incident with the tempting reptile is allegorical or textual, for no one can doubt that it is the former, but to show the [pg 215] antiquity of the symbolism on the very face of it, and that it was not a Jewish but a universal idea.

Now we find in the Zohar a very strange assertion, one that is calculated to provoke the reader to merry laughter by its ludicrous absurdity. It tells us that the serpent, which was used by Shamaël, the supposed Satan, to seduce Eve, was a kind of “flying camel”—καμηλόμορφον.462

A “flying camel” is indeed too much for the most liberal-minded F.R.S. Nevertheless, the Zohar, which can hardly be expected to use the language of a Cuvier, was right in its description; for we find it called in the old Zoroastrian MSS. Aschmogh, which in the Avesta is represented as having after the Fall lost its nature and its name, and is described as a huge serpent with a camel's neck.

There are none now; but there is no reason why they should not have existed during the Mesozoic Age; and Cuvier, who has reconstructed their skeletons, is a witness to “flying camels.” Already, after finding simple fossils of certain saurians, the great Naturalist has written, that:

We are unaware if Cuvier has added anything in the way of a further mea culpa, but we may well imagine his confusion for all his slanders against archaic veracity, when he found himself in the presence of a flying saurian, the Pterodactyl, found in Germany, seventy-eight feet long, and carrying vigorous wings attached to its reptilian body. This fossil is described as a reptile, the little fingers of whose hands are so elongated as to bear a long membranous wing. Here, then, the “flying camel” of the Zohar is vindicated. For surely, between the long neck of the Plesiosaurus and the membranous wing of the Pterodactyl, or still better the Mosasaurus, there is enough scientific probability on which to build a “flying camel,” or a long-necked dragon. Prof. Cope, of Philadelphia, has shown that the Mosasaurus [pg 216] fossil in the chalk was a winged serpent of this kind. There are characters in its vertebræ, which indicate union with the Ophidia rather than with the Lacertilia.

And now to the main question. It is well known that Antiquity has never claimed Palæontography and Palæontology among its arts and sciences; and it never had its Cuviers. Yet on Babylonian tiles, and especially in old Chinese and Japanese drawings, in the oldest Pagodas and monuments, and in the Imperial Library at Pekin, many a traveller has seen and recognized perfect representations of Plesiosauri and Pterodactyls in the multiform Chinese dragons.465 Moreover, the prophets speak in the Bible of the flying fiery serpents,466 and Job mentions the Leviathan.467 Now the following questions are put very directly:

I. How could the ancient nations know anything of the extinct monsters of the Carboniferous and Mesozoic times, and even represent and describe them orally and pictorially, unless they had either seen those monsters themselves or possessed descriptions of them in their traditions; which descriptions necessitate living and intelligent eye-witnesses?

II. And if such eye-witnesses are once admitted (unless retrospective clairvoyance is granted), how can humanity and the first palæolithic men be no earlier than about the middle of the Tertiary period? We must bear in mind that most of the men of Science do not allow man to have appeared before the Quaternary period, and thus shut him out completely from the Cainozoic times. Here we have extinct species of animals, which disappeared from the face of the Earth millions of years ago, described by, and known to, nations whose civilization, it is said, could hardly have begun a few thousand years ago. How is this? Evidently either the Mesozoic time has to be made to overlap the [pg 217] Quaternary period, or man must be made the contemporary of the Pterodactyl and the Plesiosaurus.

It does not follow that, because the Occultists believe in and defend Ancient Wisdom and Science, even though winged saurians are called “flying camels” in the translations of the Zohar, we therefore as readily believe in all the stories which the Middle Ages give us of such dragons. Pterodactyls and Plesiosauri ceased to exist with the bulk of the Third Race. When, therefore, we are gravely asked by Roman Catholic writers to credit Christopher Scherer's and Father Kircher's cock-and-bull stories of their having seen with their own eyes living fiery and flying dragons, respectively in 1619 and 1669, we may be allowed to regard their assertions as either dreams or fibs.468 Nor shall we regard otherwise than as a “poetical license” the story told of Petrarch, who, while following one day his Laura in the woods and passing near a cave, is credited with having found a dragon, whom he forthwith stabbed with his dagger and killed, thus preventing the monster from devouring the lady of his heart.469 We would willingly believe the story had Petrarch lived in the days of Atlantis, when such antediluvian monsters may still have existed. We deny their existence in our present era. The sea-serpent is one thing, the dragon quite another. The former is denied by the majority because it lives in the very depths of the ocean, is very scarce, and rises to the surface only when compelled, perhaps, by hunger. Thus keeping invisible, it may [pg 218] exist and still be denied. But if there was such a thing as a dragon of the above description, how could it have ever escaped detection?

The reader may enquire why we speak of dragons at all? We answer: firstly, because the knowledge of such animals is a proof of the enormous antiquity of the human race; and, secondly, to show the difference between the real zoological meaning of the words “Dragon,” “Nâga,” and “Serpent,” and the metaphorical meaning, when used symbolically. The profane reader, who knows nothing of the mystery language, is likely, whenever he finds one of these words mentioned, to accept it literally. Hence, the quidproquos and unjust accusations. A couple of instances will suffice.

“Sed et Serpens?” Aye: but what was the nature of the serpent? Mystics intuitionally see in the serpent of Genesis an animal emblem and a high spiritual essence: a cosmic force, superintelligent, a “great fallen light,” a spirit, sidereal, aërial and tellurian at the same time, “whose influence circumambulates the globe” (qui circumambulat terram), as De Mirville,470 a Christian fanatic of the dead-letter, has it, and which only “manifested itself under the physical emblem which agreed the better with its moral and intellectual coils”—i.e., under the ophidian form.

But what will Christians make of the Brazen Serpent, the “Divine Healer,” if the serpent is to be regarded as the emblem of cunning and evil; the “Evil One” itself? How can the line of demarcation ever be settled, when it is traced arbitrarily in a sectarian theological spirit? For, if the followers of the Roman Church are taught that Mercury and Æsculapius, or Asclepios, who are, in truth, one, are “devils and sons of devils,” and the wand and serpent of the latter, the “Devil's wand”; how about the Brazen Serpent of Moses? Every scholar knows that both the Heathen “wand” and the Jewish “serpent” are one and the same, namely, the Caduceus of Mercury, son of Apollo-Python. It is easy to comprehend why the Jews adopted the ophidian shape for their “seducer.” With them it was purely physiological and phallic; and no amount of casuistical reasoning on the part of the Roman Catholic Church can give it another meaning, once that the mystery language is well studied, and that the Hebrew scrolls are read numerically. The Occultists know that the Serpent, the Nâga, and the Dragon have each [pg 219] a septenary meaning; that the Sun, for instance, was the astronomical and cosmic emblem of the two contrasted Lights and the two Serpents of the Gnostics, the good and the evil. They also know that, when generalized, the conclusions of both Science and Theology present two most ridiculous extremes.

For, when the former tells us that it is sufficient to trace the legends of the serpents to their primal source, the astronomical legend, and to meditate seriously on the Sun, the conqueror of Python, and the celestial Virgin in the Zodiac forcing back the devouring Dragon, if we would have the key of all the subsequent religious dogmas—it is easy to perceive that, instead of generalizing, the author simply has his eye on Christian religion and Revelation. We call this the one extreme. We see the other when Theology, repeating the famous decision of the Council of Trent, seeks to convince the masses that:

To this Occult Philosophy answers: Prove first the existence of the Devil as an entity, and then we may believe in such congenital possession. A very small amount of observation and knowledge of human nature may be sufficient to prove the fallacy of this theological dogma. Had Satan any reality, in the objective or even subjective world (in the ecclesiastical sense), it is the poor Devil who would find himself chronically obsessed and even possessed by the wicked—hence by the bulk of mankind. It is humanity itself, and especially the clergy, headed by the haughty, unscrupulous and intolerant Roman Church, which has begotten, given birth to, and reared in love the Evil One. But this is a digression.

The whole of humanity burnt incense to it or stoned it. TheZendsspeak of it as do theKingsandVedas, as theEdda... and theBible.... Everywhere the sacred serpent [the Nâga] has its shrine and its priest; in Rome it is the Vestal who ... prepares its meal with the same care that she bestows on the sacred fire. In Greece, Æsculapius cannot cure without its assistance, and delegates to it his powers. Every one has heard of the famous Roman embassy sent by the Senate to the god of medicine and its return with the not less famous serpent, which proceeded of its own will and by itself toward its master's temple on one of the islands of the Tiber. Not a Bacchante that did not wind it [the serpent] in her[pg 220]hair, not an Augur but questioned it with care, not a Necromancer whose tombs are free from its presence! The Cainites and the Ophites call it Creator, while recognizing, as Schelling did, that the serpent is“evil in substance and in person.”472

Yes, the author is right, and if one would have a complete idea of the prestige which the serpent enjoys to our own day, he ought to study the matter in India and learn all that is believed about, and still attributed to, the Nâgas (cobras) in that country; one should also visit the Africans of Whydah, the Voodoos of Port-au-Prince and Jamaica, the Nagals of Mexico, and the Pâ, or Men-serpents of China, etc. But why wonder that the serpent is “adored” and at the same time cursed, since we know that from the beginning it was a symbol? In every ancient language the word dragon signified what it now does in Chinese, long or “the being who excels in intelligence,” and in Greek, δράκων, or “he who sees and watches.”473 Is it to the animal of this name that any of these epithets can apply? Is it not evident, wherever superstition and oblivion of the primitive meaning may have led savages now, that the above qualifications were intended to apply to the human originals, who were symbolized by Serpents and Dragons? These originals—called to this day in China the “Dragons of Wisdom”—were the first disciples of the Dhyânîs, who were their Instructors; in short, the Primitive Adepts of the Third Race, and later, of the Fourth and Fifth Races. The name became universal, and no sane man before the Christian era would ever have confounded the man and the symbol.

Is among others that of an enormous serpent standing on human legs; this reptile, the emblem of the Good Genius, is a veritable Agathodæmon. It is often represented bearded.... This sacred animal, identical with the serpent of the Ophites, is found engraved on numerous Gnostic or Basilidean stones.... The serpent has various heads, but is constantly inscribed with the letters ΧΝΟΥΒΙΣ.474

The “invention of magic”! A strange term to use, as though the unveiling of the eternal and actual mysteries of Nature could be invented! As well attribute, millenniums hence, the invention instead of the discovery of radiant matter to Mr. Crookes. Hermes was not the inventor, or even the discoverer, for, as said in the last footnote but one, Thot-Hermes is a generic name, as is Enoch—Enoïchion, the “inner, spiritual eye”—Nebo, the prophet and seer, etc. It is not the proper name of any one living man, but a generic title of many Adepts. Their connection with the serpent in symbolic allegories is due to their enlightenment by the Solar and Planetary Gods during the earliest intellectual Race, the Third. They are all the representative patrons of the Secret Wisdom. Asclepios is the son of the Sun-God Apollo, and he is Mercury; Nebo is the son of Bel-Merodach; Vaivasvata Manu, the great Rishi, is the son of Vivasvat—the Sun or Sûrya, etc. And while, astronomically, the Nâgas along with the Rishis, the Gandharvas, Apsarases, Grâmanîs (or Yakshas, minor Gods), Yâtudhânas and Devas, are the Sun's attendants throughout the twelve solar months; in theogony, and also in anthropological evolution, they are Gods and Men—when incarnated in the Nether World. Let the reader be reminded, in this connection, of the fact that Apollonius met in Kashmir Buddhist Nâgas. These are neither serpents zoologically, nor yet the Nâgas ethnologically, but “wise men.”

The Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is but a series of historical records of the great struggle between White and Black Magic, between the Adepts of the Right Path, the Prophets, and those of the Left, the Levites, the clergy of the brutal masses. Even the students of Occultism, though some of them have more archaic MSS. and direct teaching [pg 222] to rely upon, find it difficult to draw a line of demarcation between the Sodales of the Right Path and those of the Left. The great schism that arose between the sons of the Fourth Race, as soon as the first Temples and Halls of Initiation had been erected under the guidance of the “Sons of God,” is allegorized in the Sons of Jacob. That there were two Schools of Magic, and that the orthodox Levites did not belong to the holy one, is shown in the words pronounced by the dying Jacob. And here it may be well to quote a few sentences from Isis Unveiled.478

The dying Jacob thus describes his sons:“Dan,”he says,“shall be aserpentby the way, anadderin the path, that biteth the horse-heels, so that his rider shall fall backwards [i.e., he will teach candidatesBlackMagic]. I have waited for thy salvation, O Lord!”Of Simeon and Levi the patriarch remarks that they“are brethren; instruments ofcrueltyare in their habitations. O my soul, come not thou into theirsecret; unto theirassembly.”479Now in the original, the words“their secret”read—“their Sod.”480And Sod was the name for the great Mysteries of Baal, Adonis and Bacchus, who were all Sun-Gods and had serpents for symbols. The Kabalists explain the allegory of the fiery serpents by saying that this was the name given to the tribe of Levi, to all the Levites, in short, and that Moses was the chief of the Sodales.481