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

Soma was never given in days of old to the non-initiated Brâhman—the simple Grihasta, or priest of the exoteric ritual. Thus Brihaspati, “Guru of the Gods” though he was, still represented the dead-letter form of worship. It is Târâ, his wife, the symbol of one who, though wedded to dogmatic worship, longs for true Wisdom, who is shown as initiated into his mysteries by King Soma, the giver of that Wisdom. Soma is thus made to carry her away in the allegory. The result of this is the birth of Budha, Esoteric Wisdom—Mercury, or Hermes, in Greece and Egypt. He is represented as “so beautiful,” that even the husband, though well aware that Budha is not the progeny of his dead-letter worship—claims the “new-born” as his Son, the fruit of his ritualistic and meaningless forms.1151 Such is, in brief, one of the meanings of the allegory.

The War in Heaven refers to several events of this kind on various and different planes of being. The first is a purely astronomical and cosmical fact pertaining to Cosmogony. Mr. John Bentley thought that with the Hindûs the War in Heaven was only a figure referring to their calculations of time periods.1152

This served as a prototype, he thinks, for the Western nations to build their War of the Titans upon. The author is not quite wrong, but neither is he quite right. If the sidereal prototype refers indeed to a pre-manvantaric period, and rests entirely on the knowledge which the Âryan Initiates claim they have of the whole programme and progress of cosmogony,1153 the War of the Titans is but a legendary and deified copy of the real war that took place in the Himâlayan Kailâsa (Heaven) instead of in the depths of cosmic interplanetary Space. It is the record of the terrible strife between the “Sons of God” and the “Sons of the Shadow” of the Fourth and the Fifth Races. It is on these two events, blended together by legends borrowed from the exoteric account of the War waged by the Asuras against the Gods, that every subsequent national tradition on the subject has been built.

Esoterically, the Asuras, transformed subsequently into evil Spirits and lower Gods, who are eternally at war with the Great Deities—are the Gods of the Secret Wisdom. In the oldest portions of the Rig Veda, they are the Spiritual and the Divine, the term Asura being used for the Supreme Spirit and being the same as the great Ahura of the Zoroastrians.1154 There was a time when the Gods Indra, Agni, and Varuna themselves belonged to the Asuras.

In the Taittirîya Brâhmana, the Breath (Asu) of Brahmâ-Prajâpati became alive, and from that Breath he created the Asuras. Later on, after the War, the Asuras are called the enemies of the Gods, hence—“A-suras,” the initial a being a negative prefix—or “No-Gods”; the “Gods” being referred to as Suras. This then connects the Asuras and their “Hosts,” enumerated further on, with the “Fallen Angels” of the Christian Churches, a Hierarchy of Spiritual Beings to be found in every Pantheon of ancient and even modern nations—from the Zoroastrian down to that of the Chinaman. They are the Sons of the primeval Creative Breath at the beginning of every new Mahâ Kalpa, or Manvantara, in the same rank as the Angels who had remained “faithful.” These were the allies of Soma (the parent of the Esoteric Wisdom) as against Brihaspati (representing ritualistic or ceremonial worship). Evidently they have been degraded in Space and Time into opposing Powers or Demons by the ceremonialists, on account of their rebellion against hypocrisy, sham-worship, and the dead-letter form.

(2) The Daityas and Dânavas are the Titans, the Demons and Giants whom we find in the Bible1156—the progeny of the “Sons of God” and the “Daughters of Men.” Their generic name shows their alleged character, and discloses at the same time the secret animus of the Brâhmans; for they are the Kratu-dvishas—the “enemies of the sacrifices” or exoteric shams. These are the “Hosts” that fought against Brihaspati, the representative of exoteric popular and national religions; and Indra—the God of the visible Heaven, the Firmament, who, in the early Veda, is the highest God of cosmic Heaven, the fit habitation for an extra-cosmic and personal God, higher than whom no exoteric worship can ever soar.

(3) Then come the Nâgas,1157 the Sarpas, Serpents or Seraphs. These, again, show their character by the hidden meaning of their glyph. In [pg 527] mythology they are semi-divine beings with a human face and the tail of a dragon. They are therefore, undeniably, the Jewish Seraphim (compare Serapis, Sarpa, Serpent); the singular being Saraph, “burning, fiery.” Christian and Jewish angelology distinguishes between the Seraphim and the Cherubim or Cherubs, who come second in order: Esoterically, and kabalistically, they are identical; the Cherubim being simply the name for the images or likenesses of any of the divisions of the celestial Hosts. Now, as said before, the Dragons and Nâgas were the names given to the Initiate-hermits, on account of their great Wisdom and Spirituality and their living in caves. Thus, when Ezekiel1158 applies the adjective Cherub to the King of Tyre, and tells him that by his wisdom and his understanding there is no secret that can be hidden from him, he shows the Occultist that it is a “Prophet,” perhaps still a follower of exoteric worship, who fulminates against an Initiate of another school and not against an imaginary Lucifer, a fallen Cherub from the stars, and then from the Garden of Eden. Thus the so-called “War” is, in one of its many meanings, also an allegorical record of the strife between the two classes of Adepts—of the Right and of the Left Path.

There were three classes of Rishis in India, who were the earliest Adepts known; the Royal, or Râjarshis, kings and princes, who adopted the ascetic life; the Divine, or Devarshis, or the sons of Dharma or Yoga; and the Brahmarshis, descendants of those Rishis who were the founders of Gotras of Brâhmans, or caste-races. Now, leaving the mythical and astronomical keys for one moment aside, the secret teachings show many Atlanteans who belonged to these divisions; and there were strifes and wars between them, de facto and de jure. Nârada, one of the greatest Rishis, was a Devarshi; and he is shown in constant and everlasting feud with Brahmâ, Daksha, and other Gods and Sages. Therefore we may safely maintain that whatever the astronomical meaning of this universally accepted legend may be, its human phase is based on real and historical events, disfigured into a theological dogma only to suit ecclesiastical purposes. As above so below. Sidereal phenomena, and the behaviour of the celestial bodies in the Heavens, were taken as a model, and the plan was carried out below, on Earth. Thus, Space, in its abstract sense, was called the “realm of divine knowledge,” and by the Chaldees or Initiates Ab Soo, the habitat (or father, i.e., the source) of knowledge, because it is in Space [pg 528] that dwell the intelligent Powers which invisibly rule the Universe.1159

In the same manner, and on the plan of the Zodiac in the upper Ocean or the Heavens, a certain realm on Earth, an inland sea, was consecrated and called the “Abyss of Learning”; twelve centres on it, in the shape of twelve small islands, representing the Zodiacal Signs—two of which remained for ages the “mystery Signs”1160—were the abodes of twelve Hierophants and Masters of Wisdom. This “Sea of Knowledge” or learning1161 remained for ages there, where now stretches the Shamo or Gobi Desert. It existed until the last great glacial period, when a local cataclysm, which swept the waters South and West and so formed the present great desolate desert, left only a certain oasis, with a lake and one island in the midst of it, as a relic of the Zodiacal Ring on Earth. For ages the Watery Abyss—which, with the nations that preceded the later Babylonians, was the abode of the “Great Mother,” the terrestrial post-type of the “Great Mother Chaos” in Heaven, the parent of Ea (Wisdom), himself the early prototype of Oannes, the Man-Fish of the Babylonians—for ages, then, the “Abyss” or Chaos was the abode of Wisdom and not of Evil. The struggle of Bel and then of Merodach, the Sun-God, with Tiamat, the Sea and its Dragon—a “War” which ended in the defeat of the latter—has a purely cosmic and geological meaning, as well as a historical one. It is a page torn out of the history of the Secret and Sacred Sciences, their evolution, growth and death—for the profane masses.

It relates (a) to the systematic and gradual drying up of immense territories by the fierce Sun at a certain pre-historic period, one of the terrible droughts which ended by a gradual transformation of once fertile lands abundantly watered into the sandy deserts which they are now; and (b) to [pg 529] the as systematic persecution of the Prophets of the Right Path by those of the Left. The latter, having inaugurated the birth and evolution of the sacerdotal castes, have finally led the world into all those exoteric religions, which have been invented to satisfy the depraved taste of the “hoi polloi” and the ignorant for ritualistic pomp and the materialization of the ever-immaterial and Unknowable Principle.

This was a certain improvement on the Atlantean sorcery, the memory of which lingers in the remembrance of all the literary and Sanskrit-reading portion of India, as well as in the popular legends. Still it was a parody on, and the desecration of, the Sacred Mysteries and their Science. The rapid progress of anthropomorphism and idolatry led the early Fifth, as it had already led the Fourth Race, into sorcery once more, though on a smaller scale. Finally, even the four “Adams” (symbolizing, under other names, the four preceding Races) were forgotten, and, passing from one generation into another, each loaded with some additional myths, were at last drowned in that ocean of popular symbolism called the Pantheons. Yet they exist to this day in the oldest Jewish traditions: the first as the Tzelem, the “Shadow-Adam,” the Chhâyâs of our doctrine; the second, the “Model” Adam, the copy of the first, and the “male and female” of the exoteric Genesis; the third, the “Earthly Adam” before the Fall, an androgyne; and the fourth, the Adam after his “fall,” i.e., separated into sexes, or the pure Atlantean. The Adam of the Garden of Eden, or the forefather of our Race—the fifth—is an ingenious compound of the above four. As stated in the Zohar, Adam, the first Man, is not found now on Earth, he “is not found in all Below.” For where does the lower Earth come from? “From the Chain of the Earth, and from the Heaven Above,” i.e., from the superior Globes, those which precede and are above our Earth.

As in the Chaldæan Cosmogony of Berosus and the Stanzas just given, some treatises on the Kabalah speak of creatures with two faces, some with four, and some with one face; for “the highest Adam did not come down in all the countries, or produce progeny and have many wives,” but is a mystery.

And those Christians, who may happen to read this, will also understand by the light of the above sentence who their “Christ” was. For Jesus states repeatedly that he who “shall not receive the Kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein”; and if some of his sayings have been meant to apply to children without any metaphor, most of the references to the “little ones” in the Gospels, relate to the Initiates, of whom Jesus was one. Paul (Saul) is referred to in the Talmud as the “little one.”

The “Mystery of the Serpent” was this: Our Earth, or rather terrestrial life, is often referred to in the Secret Teachings as the Great Sea, the “Sea of Life” having remained to this day a favourite metaphor. The Siphra Dtzenioutha speaks of Primeval Chaos and the Evolution of the Universe after a Destruction (Pralaya), comparing it to an uncoiling serpent:

So the Spirit of God “sleeps,” or is “breathing” over the Chaos of Undifferentiated Matter, before each new “Creation,” says the Siphra Dtzenioutha. Now one Day of Brahmâ is composed, as already explained, of one thousand Mahâ Yugas; and as each Night, or period of rest, is equal in duration to this Day, it is easy to see what this sentence in the Siphra Dtzenioutha refers to—viz., that the Serpent manifests [pg 531] “once in a thousand days.” Nor is it more difficult to see whither the initiated writer of the Siphra is leading us, when he says:

It refers to the trials of the Initiates in this physical life, the “Sea of Sorrow,” if read with one key; it hints at the successive destruction of the seven Spheres of a Chain of Worlds in the Great Sea of Space, when read with another key; for every sidereal globe or sphere, every world, star, or group of stars, is called in symbolism a “Dragon's Head.” But however it may read, the Dragon was never regarded as Evil, nor was the Serpent either—in antiquity. In the metaphors, whether astronomical, cosmical, theogonical or simply physiological (or phallic), the Serpent was always regarded as a divine symbol. When mention is made of “the [Cosmic] Serpent which runs with 370 leaps,”1167 it means the cyclic periods of the great Tropical Year of 25,868 years, divided in the Esoteric calculation into 370 periods or cycles, as one solar year is divided into 365 days. And if Michael was regarded by the Christians as the Conqueror of Satan, the Dragon, it is because in the Talmud this fighting personage is represented as the Prince of Waters, who had seven subordinate Spirits under him—a good reason why the Latin Church made him the patron saint of every promontory in Europe. In the Siphra Dtzenioutha the Creative Force “makes sketches and spiral lines of his creation in the shape of a Serpent.” It “holds its tail in its mouth,” because it is the symbol of endless eternity and of cyclic periods. Its meanings, however, would require a volume, and we must end.

Thus the reader may now see for himself what are the several meanings of the “War in Heaven,” and of the “Great Dragon.” Thus the most solemn and dreaded of Church dogmas, the alpha and omega of the Christian faith, and the pillar of its Fall and Atonement, dwindles down to a Pagan symbol, in the many allegories of these pre-historic struggles.