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

Satan [or Lucifer] represents theActive, or, as [M. Jules] Baissac calls it, the“Centrifugal”Energy of the Universe [in a cosmic sense]. He is Fire, Light, Life, Struggle, Effort, Thought, Consciousness, Progress, Civilization, Liberty, Independence. At the same time he isPain, which is the Reaction of thePleasureof Action, andDeath—which is the Revolution ofLife—Satan, burning in his own Hell, produced by the fury of his own momentum—the expansive disintegration of the Nebula which is to concentrate into New Worlds. And fitly is he again and[pg 256]again baffled by the Eternal Inertia of thePassiveEnergy of the Kosmos—the inexorable“I am”—the Flint from which the sparks are beaten out. And fitly ... are he and his adherents ... consigned to the“Sea of Fire”—becauseit isthe Sun [in one sense only in the cosmic allegory], the Fount of Life inoursystem, where they are purified (meaning thereby disintegrated) and churned up to reärrange them for another life (the Resurrection)—thatSunwhich, as the Origin of the Active Principle of our Earth, is at once theHomeand theSourceof the Mundane Satan....

Furthermore, as if to demonstrate the accuracy of Baissac's general theory [inLe Diable et Satan] cold is known to have a“Centripetal”effect. Under the influence of Cold everything contracts.... Under it Lifehybernates, or dies out, Thought congeals, and Fire is extinguished. Satan is immortal in his own Fire-Sea—it is only in the“Nifl-Heim”[the cold Hell of the ScandinavianEddas] of the“I am”that he cannot exist. But for all that there is a kind ofImmortalExistence in Nifl-Heim, and that Existence must bePainlessandPeaceful, because it isUnconsciousandInactive. In the Kingdom ofJehovah[if this God were all that the Jews and Christians claim for him] there is no misery, no war, no marrying and giving in marriage, no change, noIndividual Consciousness.564All is absorbed in the spirit of the Most Powerful.It is emphatically a Kingdom of Peace and loyal Submission, as that of the“Arch-Rebel”is one of War and Revolution....It [the former] is in fact what Theosophy calls Nirvâna. But then Theosophy teaches that Separation from the Primal Sourcehaving once occurred, Reünion can only be achieved byWill-Effort—which is distinctly Satanic in the sense of this essay.565

It is “Satanic” from the standpoint of orthodox Romanism, for it is owing to the prototype of that which became in time the Christian Devil—to the Radiant Archangels, Dhyân Chohans, who refused to create, because they wanted Man to become his own creator and an immortal God—that men can reach Nirvâna and the Haven of heavenly Divine Peace.

To close this rather lengthy comment, the Secret Doctrine teaches that the Fire-Devas, the Rudras, and the Kumâras, the “Virgin-Angels,” (to whom the Archangels, Michael and Gabriel, both belong,) the Divine “Rebels”—called by the all-materializing and positive Jews, the Nahash or “Deprived”—preferred the curse of incarnation and the long cycles of terrestrial existence and rebirths, to seeing the misery, even if unconscious, of the beings who were evolved as Shadows out of their Brethren, through the semi-passive energy of their too spiritual Creators. If “man's uses of life should be such as neither to animalize [pg 257] nor to spiritualize, but to humanize Self,”566 to do so, he must be born human not angelic. Hence, tradition shows the celestial Yogîs offering themselves as voluntary victims in order to redeem Humanity, which was created god-like and perfect at first, and endow him with human affections and aspirations. To do this they had to give up their natural status, descend on our Globe, and take up their abode on it for the whole cycle of the Mahâyuga, thus exchanging their impersonal Individualities for individual Personalities—the bliss of sidereal existence for the curse of terrestrial life. This voluntary sacrifice of the Fiery Angels, whose nature was Knowledge and Love, has been construed by the exoteric theologies into a statement that shows “the Rebel Angels hurled down from Heaven into the darkness of Hell”—our Earth.

Hindû Philosophy hints at the truth by teaching that the Asuras, hurled down by Shiva, are only in an intermediate state, in which they prepare for higher degrees of purification and redemption from their wretched condition; but Christian Theology—claiming to be based on the rock of the divine love, charity, and justice of him it appeals to as its Saviour—to paradoxically enforce that claim, has invented the dreary dogma of Hell, that Archimedean lever of Roman Catholic philosophy.

Whereas Rabbinical wisdom—than which there is none more positive, materialistic, or grossly terrestrial, as it brings everything down to physiological mysteries—calls these Beings, the “Evil One”; and the Kabalists—Nahash, “Deprived,” as just said, and the Souls that have, after having been alienated in Heaven from the Holy One, thrown themselves into an Abyss at the dawn of their very existence, and have anticipated the time when they are to descend on Earth.567

And let me explain at once that our quarrel is not with the Zohar or any other book of the Kabalah in its right interpretation—for the latter is the same as our own—but only with the gross, pseudo-esoteric explanations of the later, and especially of the Christian Kabalists.

The names of these three answer, in Sanskrit, to the “Electric Fire,” the “Solar Fire,” and the “Fire produced by Friction.” Explained on the cosmic and human planes, these three Fires are Spirit, Soul, and Body, the three great Root Groups, with their four additional divisions. These vary with the Schools, and—according to their applications—become the Upâdhis and the Vehicles, or the Noumena of these. In the exoteric accounts, they are personified by the “three sons of surpassing brilliancy and splendour” of Agni Abhimânin, the eldest son of Brahmâ, the Cosmic Logos, by Svâhâ, one of Daksha's568 daughters. In the metaphysical sense, the “Fire by Friction” means the union between Buddhi, the sixth, and Manas, the fifth “principle,” which thus are united or cemented together, the fifth merging partially into and becoming part of the Monad; in the physical, it relates to the “creative spark,” or germ, which fructifies and generates the human being. The three Fires, whose names are Pâvaka, Pavamâna and Shuchi, were condemned, it is said, by a curse of Vasishtha, the great Sage, “to be born over and over again.”569 This is clear enough.

Therefore, the Flames, whose functions are confused in the exoteric books, and who are called indifferently Prajâpatis, Pitris, Manus, Asuras, Rishis, Kumâras,570 etc., are said to incarnate personally in the Third Root-Race and thus find themselves “reborn over and over again.” In the Esoteric Doctrine they are generally named Asuras, or the Asura Devatâ or Pitar Devatâ (Gods), for, as said, they were first Gods—and the highest—before they became “No-Gods,” and had from Spirits of Heaven fallen into Spirits of Earth571—exoterically, note well, in orthodox dogma.

No Theologian or Orientalist can ever understand the genealogies of the Prajâpatis, the Manus, and the Rishis, or the direct connection of these—their correlation rather—with the Gods, unless he has the key to the old primitive Cosmogony and Theogony, which all nations originally had in common. All these Gods and Demi-gods are found reborn on Earth, in various Kalpas and in as various characters; each, moreover, having his Karma distinctly traced, and every effect assigned to its cause.

Before other Stanzas could be explained, it was, as may be seen, absolutely necessary to show that the Sons of “Dark Wisdom,” though identical with the Archangels which Theology has chosen to call the “Fallen,” are as divine and as pure, if not more pure, than all the Michaels and Gabriels so glorified in the Churches. The “Old Book” also goes into various details of Astral Life, which at this juncture would be quite incomprehensible to the reader. It must, therefore, be left for later explanation, and the First and Second Races will now receive only bare notice. Not so the Third Race—the Root-Race which separated into sexes, and which was the first to be endowed with reason; men evolving pari passu with the Globe, and the latter having “incrustated” more than a hundred millions of years before the first human sub-race had yet begun to materialize or solidify, so to say. But, as the Stanza has it:

(b) Shloka 39 relates exclusively to the racial divisions. Strictly speaking, Esoteric Philosophy teaches a modified polygenesis. For, while it assigns to humanity a oneness of origin, in so far that its Forefathers or “Creators” were all Divine Beings—though of different classes or degrees of perfection in their Hierarchy—it teaches that men were nevertheless born at seven different centres of the Continent of that period. Though all were of one common origin, yet, for reasons given, their potentialities and mental capabilities, outward or physical forms, and future characteristics, were very different.572 As to their [pg 260] complexions, there is a suggestive allegory told in Linga Purâna. The Kumâras—the Rudra Gods, so called—are described as incarnations of Shiva, the Destroyer (of outward forms), called also Vâmadeva. The latter, as a Kumâra, the “Eternal Celibate,” the chaste Virgin Youth, springs from Brahmâ in each great Manvantara, and “again becomes four”; a reference to the four great divisions of the human Races, as regards complexion and type—and the three chief variations of these.

Thus in the twenty-ninth Kalpa—in this case a reference to the transformation and evolution of the human form, which Shiva ever destroys and remodels periodically down to the great Manvantaric turning point, about the middle of the Fourth (Atlantean) Race—in the twenty-ninth Kalpa, Shiva, as Shvetalohita, the Root-Kumâra, from moon-coloured becomes white; in his next transformation, he is red (and in this the exoteric version differs from the Esoteric Teaching); in the third, yellow; in the fourth, black.

Esotericism now classes these seven variations, with their four great divisions, into only three distinct primeval Races—as it does not take into consideration the First Race, which had neither type nor colour, and a hardly objective, though colossal, form. The evolution of these Races, their formation and development, proceeded on parallel lines with the evolution, formation, and development of three geological strata, from which the human complexion was as much derived as it was determined by the climates of these zones. The Esoteric Teaching names three great divisions, namely, the red-yellow, the black, and the brown-white.573 The Âryan races, for instance, now varying from dark brown, almost black, red-brown-yellow, down to the whitest creamy colour, are nevertheless all of one and the same stock, the Fifth Root-Race, and spring from one single Progenitor, called in Hindû exotericism by the generic name of Vaivasvata Manu; the latter, remember, being that Generic Personage, the Sage, who is said to have lived over 18,000,000 years ago, and also 850,000 years ago—at the time of the sinking of the last remnants of the Great Continent of Atlantis,574 and [pg 261] who is said to live even now in his mankind.575 The light yellow is the colour of the first solid human race, which appeared after the middle of the Third Root-Race—after its fall into generation, as just explained—bringing on the final changes. For, it is only at that period that the last transformation took place, which brought forth man as he is now, only on a magnified scale.

This Race gave birth to the Fourth Race; “Shiva” gradually transforming that portion of Humanity which became “black with sin” into red-yellow, of which the red Indians and the Mongolians are the descendants, and finally into brown-white races—which now, together with the yellow races, form the great bulk of Humanity. The allegory in Linga Purâna is curious, as showing the great ethnological knowledge of the ancients.

When reading of the “last transformation,” which is said to have taken place 18,000,000 years ago, let the reader at this juncture, consider how many millions more it must have required to reach that final stage. And if Man, in his gradual consolidation, developed pari passu with the Earth, how many millions of years must have elapsed during the First, Second, and the first half of the Third Race. For the Earth was in a comparatively ethereal condition before it reached its last consolidated state. The Archaic Teachings, moreover, tell us that, during the middle period of the Lemuro-Atlantean Race, three and a half Races after the Genesis of Man, the Earth, Man, and everything on the Globe, were of a still grosser and more material nature, while such things as corals and some shells were still in a semi-gelatinous, astral state. The cycles that have intervened since then, have already carried us onward, on the opposite ascending arc, some steps toward our “dematerialization,” as the Spiritualists would say. The Earth, ourselves, and all things have softened since then—aye, even our brains. But it has been objected by some Theosophists that an ethereal Earth even some 15 or 20,000,000 years ago, “does not square with Geology,” which teaches us that winds blew, rains fell, waves broke on the shore, sands shifted and accumulated, etc.; that, in short, all natural causes now in operation were then in force, “in the very earliest ages of geological time, aye, that of the oldest palæozoic rocks.” To this the following answers are given.

Firstly, what is the date assigned by Geology to these “oldest palæozoic rocks”? And secondly, why could not the winds blow, rain fall, and waves—of “carbonic acid” [pg 262] apparently, as Science seems to imply—break on the shore, on an Earth semi-astral, i.e., viscid? The word “astral” does not necessarily, in Occult phraseology, mean as thin as smoke, but rather “starry,” shining or pellucid, in various and numerous degrees, from a quite filmy to a viscid state, as just observed. But it is further objected: “How could an astral Earth have affected the other Planets in this System? Would not the whole process get out of gear now if the attraction of one Planet were suddenly removed?” The objection is evidently invalid, since our System is composed of older and younger Planets, some dead—like the Moon—others in process of formation, for all that Astronomy knows to the contrary. Nor has the latter ever affirmed, so far as we know, that all the bodies of our System have sprung into existence and developed simultaneously. The Cis-Himâlayan Secret Teachings differ from those of India in this respect. Hindû Occultism teaches that the Vaivasvata Manu Humanity is 18,000,000 and odd years old. We say, yes; but only so far as physical or approximately physical, Man is concerned, who dates from the close of the Third Root-Race. Beyond that period Man, or his filmy image, may have existed for 300,000,000 years, for all we know; since we are not taught figures which are and will remain secret with the Masters of Occult Science, as justly stated in Esoteric Buddhism.