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

This comment sets forth the“hidden wisdom”of the original text by hidden wisdom, that is, by the use of words carrying a special set of numbers and a special phraseology, which will set forth the very explanatory system which we find to fit so accurately in the Hebrew Bible.... In setting forth his scheme, to enforce it, and to finish out his detailed exposition in a general postulate,—viz., the one word“Sephrim”(Sephiroth), of the Number Jezirah, the author explains the separation of this word in the three subordinate ones, a play upon a common word,s-ph-r, or number.

The prince Al-Chazari73says to the Rabbi:“I wish now that thou wouldest impart to me some of the chiefest or leading principles ofNatural Philosophy, which, as thou sayest, were in former times worked out by them (the ancient wise ones);”—to which the Rabbi makes answer:“To such principles appertains the Number of Creation of our race-father Abraham”that is Abram and Abraham, or numbers 41224 and 41252. He then says that this book of number treats of teaching the“Alhim-ness andOne-ness through (DBRIM)”viz., the numbers of the word“Words.”That is, it teaches the use of the ratio 31415 to One, through 41224, which last, in the description of the Ark of the Covenant, was divided into two parts by thetwotables of stone, on which these DBRIM, or 41224, were written or engraved—or 20612 × 2. He then comments on these three subordinately used words, and takes care as to one of them to make the comment,“andAlhim(31415 to One) said let there be Light (20612 to 6561).”

and the Rabbi, in commenting upon them, says:“It teaches theAlhim-ness (31415) andOne-ness (the diameter to Alhim), through Words (DBRIM = 41224), by which on the one side there is infinite expression in heterogeneous creations, and on the other a final harmonic tendency toOne-ness”(which, as everyone knows, is the mathematical function ofpiof the schools, which measures, weighs, and numbers the stars of heaven, and yet resolves them back into the final oneness of the Uni-verse)“through Words. Their final accord perfects itself in thatOne-ness that ordains them, and which consists in

that is, the Rabbi, in his first comment, leaves thejod, ori, out of one of the words, whereas afterwards he restores it again. If we take the values of those subordinate[pg 044]words, we find them to be 340, 340 and 346;—together these are 1026, and the division of the general word into these has been to produce these numbers—which by T'mura may be changed in various ways, for various purposes.74

The reader is asked to turn to Stanza IV of Volume I, Shloka 3 and Commentary,75 to find that the 3, 4, (7), and the thrice seven, or 1065, the number of Jehovah, is the number of the 21 Prajâpati mentioned in the Mahâbhârata, or the three Sephrim (words in ciphers or figures). And this comparison between the Creative Powers of Archaic Philosophy and the anthropomorphic Creator of exoteric Judaism (since the Esotericism of the Jews shows its identity with the Secret Doctrine) will lead the student to perceive and discover that, in truth, Jehovah is but a “lunar” and “generation” God. It is a fact well known to every conscientious student of the Kabalah, that the deeper he dives into it, the more he feels convinced that unless the Kabalah—or what is left of it—is read by the light of the Eastern Esoteric Philosophy, its study leads only to the discovery that, on the lines traced by exoteric Judaism and Christianity, the monotheism of both is nothing more exalted than ancient Astrolatry, now vindicated by modern Astronomy. The Kabalists never cease to repeat that Primal Intelligence can never be understood. It cannot be comprehended, nor can it be located, therefore it has to remain nameless and negative. Hence the Ain Suph—the “Unknowable” and “Unnameable”—as It could not be made manifest, was imagined as emanating Manifesting Powers. It is then with its Emanations alone that human intellect has to, and can, deal.

Christian theology, having rejected the doctrine of Emanations and replaced them with direct, conscious Creations of Angels and the rest out of nothing, now finds itself hopelessly stranded between Supernaturalism, or Miracle, and Materialism. An extra-cosmic God is fatal to Philosophy: an intra-cosmic Deity—i.e., Spirit and Matter inseparable from each other—is a philosophical necessity. Separate them and that which is left is a gross superstition under a mask of emotionalism. But why “geometrize,” as Plato has it, why represent these Emanations under the form of an immense arithmetical table? The question is well answered by the author just cited, who says:

Mental perception, to become physical perception, must have the cosmic principle ofLight:—and, by this, our mental circle must become visible through light; or, for its complete manifestation, the circle must be that of physical visibility, or Light itself.

Under s'ph-r is to be understood—calculationandweighingof the created bodies. For thecalculation, by means of which a body must be constructed in harmony or symmetry, by which it must be in construction rightly arranged and made to correspond to the object in design, consists at last innumber,extension,mass,weight;—co-ordinate relation of movements, then harmony of music, must consist altogetherby number, that is s'ph-r.... By Sippor (s'phor) is to be understood the words of Alhim (206—1 of 31415 to one), whereunto joins or adapts itself the design to the frame or form of construction; for example—it was said“Let Light be.”The work became as thewordswere spoken, that is, as the numbers of the work came forth.77

This is materializing the spiritual without scruple. But the Kabalah was not always so well adapted to anthropo-monotheistic conceptions. Compare this with any of the six schools of India. For instance in Kapila's Sânkhya Philosophy, unless, allegorically speaking, Purusha mounts on the shoulders of Prakriti, the latter remains irrational, while the former remains inactive without her. Therefore Nature (in man) must become a compound of Spirit and Matter before he becomes what he is; and the Spirit latent in Matter must be awakened to life and consciousness gradually. The Monad has to pass through its mineral, vegetable and animal forms, before the Light of the Logos is awakened in the animal man. Therefore, till then, the latter cannot be referred to as “man,” but has to be regarded as a Monad imprisoned in ever-changing forms. Evolution, not Creation, by means of Words is recognized in the Philosophies of the East, even in their exoteric records. Ex oriente lux. Even the name of the first man in the Mosaic Bible had its origin in India, Professor Max Müller's negation notwithstanding. The Jews got their Adam from Chaldæa; and Adam-Adami is a compound word and therefore a manifold symbol, and proves the Occult dogmas.

This is no place for philological disquisitions. But the reader may be reminded that the words Ad and Adi mean in Sanskrit the “first”; in Aramæan, “one” (Ad-ad, the “only one”); in Assyrian, “Father,” whence Ak-ad or “father-creator.”78 And once the statement is found [pg 046] correct, it becomes rather difficult to confine Adam to the Mosaic Bible alone, and to see therein simply a Jewish name.

There is frequent confusion in the attributes and genealogies of the Gods in their Theogonies, the Alpha and the Omega of the records of that symbolical science, as given to the world by the half-initiated writers, Brâhmanical and Biblical. Yet there could be no such confusion made by the earliest nations, the descendants and pupils of the Divine Instructors; for both the attributes and the genealogies were inseparably linked with cosmogonical symbols, the “Gods” being the life and animating “soul-principle” of the various regions of the Universe. Nowhere and by no people was speculation allowed to range beyond those manifested Gods. The boundless and infinite Unity remained with every nation a virgin forbidden soil, untrodden by man's thought, untouched by fruitless speculation. The only reference made to it was the brief conception of its diastolic and systolic property, of its periodical expansion, or dilatation, and contraction. In the Universe, with all its incalculable myriads of Systems and Worlds disappearing and reäppearing in eternity, the anthropomorphized Powers, or Gods, their Souls, had to disappear from view with their Bodies. As our Catechism says:

Ideal Nature, the Abstract Space in which everything in the Universe is mysteriously and invisibly generated, is the same female side of the procreative power in Nature in the Vedic as in every other Cosmogony. Aditi is Sephira, and the Sophia of the Gnostics, and Isis, the Virgin Mother of Horus. In every Cosmogony, behind and higher than the “Creative” Deity, there is a Superior Deity, a Planner, an Architect, of whom the Creator is but the executive agent. And still higher, over and around, within and without, there is the Unknowable and the Unknown, the Source and Cause of all these Emanations.

It thus becomes easy to account for the reason why Adam-Adami is found in the Chaldæan scripture, certainly earlier than the Mosaic Books. In Assyrian Ad is the “father,” and in Aramæan Ad is “one,” and Ad-ad the “only one,” while Ak is in Assyrian “creator.” Thus [pg 047] Ad-am-ak-ad-mon became Adam-Kadmon in the Kabalah (Zohar), meaning as it did, the “One (Son) of the divine Father, or the Creator,” for the words am and om meant at one time in nearly every language the divine, or the deity. Thus Adam-Kadmon and Adam-Adami came to mean “The first Emanation of the Father-Mother or Divine Nature,” and literally the “first Divine One.” And it is easy to see that Ad-Argat (or Aster't, the Syrian Goddess, the consort of Ad-on, the Lord God of Syria or the Jewish Adonai), and Venus, Isis, Ister, Mylitta, Eve, etc., are identical with the Aditi and Vâch of the Hindûs. They are all the “Mothers of all living” and “of the Gods.” On the other hand—cosmically and astronomically—all the male Gods became at first “Sun-Gods,” then, theologically, the “Suns of Righteousness,” and the Logoi, all symbolized by the Sun.79 They are all Protogonoi—First-born—and Mikroprosopoi. With the Jews Adam-Kadmon was the same as Athamaz, Tamaz, or the Adonis of the Greeks—“the One with, and of his Father”—the “Father” becoming during the later Races Helios, the Sun, as Apollo Karneios,80 for instance, who was the “Sun-born”;

Osiris, Ormazd, and so on, were all followed by, and found themselves transformed later on into, still more earthly types: such as Prometheus, the crucified of Mount Kajbee, Hercules, and so many others, Sun-Gods and Heroes, until all of them came to have no better significance than phallic symbols.

Therefore in Genesis the Elohim say: “Behold Man is become as one of us.” But in Hindû Cosmogony or “Creation,” Brahmâ-Prajâpati creates Virâj and the Rishis, spiritually; therefore the latter are distinctly [pg 048] called the “Mind-born Sons of Brahmâ”; and this specified mode of engendering precluded every idea of Phallicism, at any rate in the earlier human nations. This instance well illustrates the respective spirituality of the two nations.

3. Said the Lord of the Shining Face:“I shall send thee a Fire when thy work is commenced. Raise thy voice to other Lokas; apply to thy Father, the Lord of the Lotus81(a), for his Sons.... Thy People shall be under the rule of the Fathers.82Thy Men shall be mortals. The Men of the Lord of Wisdom,83not the Sons of Soma,84are immortal. Cease thy complaints (b). Thy Seven Skins are yet on thee.... Thou art not ready. Thy Men are not ready”(c).

(b) Pitri-Pati is the Lord or King of the Pitris, Yama, the God of Death and the Judge of mortals. The men of Budha, Mercury, are metaphorically “immortal” through their Wisdom. Such is the common belief of those who credit every Star or Planet with being inhabited—and there are men of Science, M. Flammarion among others, who believe in this fervently, on logical as well as on astronomical data. The Moon being an inferior body—even to the Earth, to say nothing of other Planets, the terrestrial men produced by her Sons—the Lunar Men or Ancestors—from her shell or body, cannot be immortal. They cannot hope to become real, self-conscious and intelligent men, unless they are “finished,” so to say, by other creators. Thus in the Purânic legend, the son of the Moon (Soma) is Budha (Mercury), the intelligent and the wise, because he is the offspring of Soma, the Regent of the visible Moon, not of Indu, the physical Moon. Thus Mercury is the elder brother of the Earth, metaphorically—his step-brother, so to say, the offspring of Spirit—while she (the Earth) is the progeny of the Body. These allegories have a deeper and more scientific meaning—astronomically and geologically—than our modern [pg 049] Physicists are willing to admit. The whole cycle of the first “War in Heaven,” the Târakâ-maya, is as full of philosophical as of cosmogonical and astronomical truths. One can trace therein the biographies of all the Planets by the history of their Gods and Rulers.

Ushanas (Shukra, or Venus), the bosom-friend of Soma and the foe of Brihaspati (Jupiter), the “Instructor of the Gods,” whose wife Târâ, or Tarakâ, had been carried away by the Moon, Soma—“of whom he begat Budha”—took also an active part in this war against the “Gods” and forthwith was degraded into a Demon (Asura) Deity, and so he remains to this day.85

Here the word “men” refers to the Celestial men, or what are called in India the Pitaras or Pitris, the Fathers, the Progenitors of men. This does not remove the seeming difficulty, in view of modern hypotheses, of the teaching, which shows these Progenitors or Ancestors creating the first human Adams out of their sides, as astral shadows. And though it is an improvement on Adam's rib, still geological and climatic difficulties will be brought forward. Such, however, is the teaching of Occultism.

(c) Man's organism was adapted in every Race to its surroundings. The first Root-Race was as ethereal as ours is material. The progeny of the Seven Creators, who evolved the Seven Primordial Adams,86 surely required no purified gases to breathe and live upon. Therefore, however strongly the impossibility of this teaching may be urged by the devotees of Modern Science, the Occultist maintains that the case was as stated æons of years before even the evolution of the Lemurian, the first physical man, which took place 18,000,000 years ago. [pg 050] Archaic Scripture teaches that at the commencement of every local Kalpa, or Round, the Earth is reborn, and preliminary evolution is described in one of the Books of Dzyan and the Commentaries thereon in this wise:

“As the human Jîva [Monad], when passing into a new womb, gets recovered with a new body, so does the Jîva of the Earth; it gets a more perfect and solid covering with each Round after reëmerging once more from the matrix of space into objectivity.”

“After the changeless [Avikâra] immutable Nature [Essence, Sadaikarûpa] had awakened and changed [differentiated] into [a state of] causality [Avyakta], and from cause [Kârana] had become its own discrete effect [Vyakta], from invisible it became visible. The smallest of the small [the most atomic of atoms, or anîyânsam anîyasâm] became one and the many [Ekânekarûpa]; and producing the Universe produced also the fourth Loka [our Earth] in the garland of the seven lotuses. The Achyuta then became the Chyuta.”88

The Earth is said to cast off “her old three” Skins, because this refers to the three preceding Rounds she has already passed through; the present being the Fourth Round out of the seven. At the beginning of every new Round, after a period of Obscuration, the Earth—as do also the other six “Earths”—casts off, or is supposed to cast off, her old Skins as the Serpent does; therefore she is called in the Aitareya-Brâhmana the Sarpa-Râjnî, the “Queen of the Serpents,” and “the mother of all that moves.” The “Seven Skins,” in the first of which she now stands, refer to the seven geological changes which [pg 051] accompany and correspond to the evolution of the Seven Root-Races of Humanity.

Stanza II, which speaks of this Round, begins with a few words of information concerning the age of our Earth. The chronology will be given in its place. In the Commentary appended to the Stanza, two personages are mentioned, Nârada and Asuramaya, especially the latter. All the calculations are attributed to this archaic celebrity; and what follows will make the reader superficially acquainted with some of these figures.