On The Identity And Differences Of The Incarnating Powers.
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Blavatsky, H. P. (Helena Petrovna)
The Progenitors of Man, called in India Fathers, Pitaras, or Pitris, are the “Creators” of our bodies and lower principles. They are ourselves, as the first personalities, and we are they. Primeval man would be “the bone of their bone and the flesh of their flesh,” if they had bones and flesh. As stated, they were “Lunar Beings.”
The endowers of man with his conscious, immortal Ego, are the “Solar Angels”—whether so regarded metaphorically or literally. The mysteries of the Conscious Ego or Human Soul are great. The Esoteric name of these Solar Angels is, literally, the “Lords” (Nâth) of “persevering ceaseless devotion” (Pranidhâna). Therefore they of the Fifth Principle (Manas) seem to be connected with, or to have originated the system of the Yogîs who make of Pranidhâna their fifth observance.189 It has already been explained why the Trans-Himâlayan Occultists regard them as evidently identical with those who in India are termed Kumâras, Agnishvâttas, and the Barhishads.
How precise and true is Plato's expression, how profound and philosophical [pg 093] his remark on the (Human) Soul or Ego, when he defined it as “a compound of the same and the other.” And yet how little this hint has been understood, since the world took it to mean that the Soul was the Breath of God, of Jehovah. It is “the same and the other,” as the great Initiate-Philosopher said; for the Ego—the “Higher Self” when merged with and in the Divine Monad—is Man, and yet the same as the “other”; the Angel in him incarnated is the same with the Universal Mahat. The great classical writers and philosophers felt this truth, when saying that:
There must be something within us which produces our thoughts. Something very subtle; it is a breath; it is fire; it is ether; it is quintessence; it is a slender likeness; it is an intellection; it is a number; it is harmony.190
All these are the Mânasas and Râjasas; the Kumâras, Asuras, and other Rulers and Pitris, who incarnated in the Third Race, and in this and various other ways endowed mankind with Mind.
There are Seven Classes of Pitris, as shown below, three Incorporeal and four Corporeal; and two kinds, the Agnishvâtta and the Barhishad. And we may add that, as there are two kinds of Pitris, so there is a double and a triple set of Barhishad and Agnishvâtta. The former, having given birth to their Astral Doubles, are reborn as Sons of Atri, and are the “Pitris of the Demons,” or Corporeal Beings, on the authority of Manu;191 while the Agnishvâtta are reborn as Sons of Marîchi, a Son of Brahmâ, and are the “Pitris of the Gods.”192
TheVâyu Purânadeclares the Seven Orders of Pitris to have been originally thefirst Gods, the Vairâjas, whom Brahmâ, with the eye of Yoga, beheld in the eternal spheres, and who are thegods of the gods.... TheMatsya... adds, that the Gods worshipped them.193
The Harivamsha distinguishes the Vairâjas as one class of the Pitris only,194 a statement corroborated in the Secret Teachings, which, however, identify the Vairâjas with the elder Agnishvâttas195 and the Râjasas, or Âbhûtarajasas, who are Incorporeal without even an Astral Phantom. [pg 094] Vishnu is said, in most of the MSS., to have incarnated in and through them.
In the Raivata Manvantara, again, Hari, best of gods, was born of Sambhûti, as the divine Mânasa—originating with the deities called Râjasas.196
Sambhûti was a daughter of Daksha, and wife of Marîchi, the father of the Agnishvâtta, who, along with the Râjasas, are ever associated with Mânasas. As remarked by a far more able Sanskritist than Wilson, Mr. Fitzedward Hall:
Mânasa is no inappropriate name for a deity associated with the Râjasas. We appear to have in itmânasam—the same asmanas—with the change of termination required to express male personification.197
All the Sons of Virâja are Mânasa, says Nîlakantha. And Virâja is Brahmâ, and, therefore, the Incorporeal Pitris are called Vairâjas from being the Sons of Virâja, says Vayu Purâna.
We could multiply our proofs ad infinitum, but it is useless. The wise will understand our meaning, the unwise are not required to. There are thirty-three crores, or three hundred and thirty millions, of Gods in India. But, as remarked by the learned lecturer on the Bhagavad Gîtâ:
They may be all devas, but are by no means all“gods,”in the high spiritual sense one attributes to the term.
This is an unfortunate blunder generally committed by Europeans. Deva is a kind of spiritual being, and because the same word is used in ordinary parlance to mean god, it by no means follows that we have and worship thirty-three crores of gods. These beings, as may be naturally inferred, have acertain affinitywith one of the three component Upâdhis [basic principles] into which we have divided man.198
The names of the deities of a certain mystic class change with every Manvantara. Thus the twelve Great Gods, Jayas, created by Brahmâ to assist him in the work of creation in the very beginning of the Kalpa, and who, lost in Samâdhi, neglected to create—whereupon they were cursed to be repeatedly born in each Manvantara till the seventh—are respectively called Ajitas, Tushitas, Satyas, Haris, Vaikunthas, Sâdhyas, and Adityas:199 they are Tushitas, in the second Kalpa, and Âdityas in this Vaivasvata Period,200 besides other names for each age. But they are identical with the Mânasas or Râjasas, and these with our incarnating Dhyân Chohans.
Yes; besides those Beings, who, like the Yakshas, Gandharvas, [pg 095] Kinnaras, etc., taken in their individualities, inhabit the Astral Plane, there are real Devas, and to these classes belong the Adityas, the Vairâjas, the Kumâras, the Asuras, and all those high celestial Beings whom Occult teaching calls Manasvin, the Wise, foremost of all, and who would have made all men the self-conscious spiritually intellectual Beings they will be, had they not been “cursed” to fall into generation, and to be reborn themselves as mortals for their neglect of duty.