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

That the subject formed part of the Sabasian Mysteries is made known by several ancient writers; among others by Cicero980 and by Clemens Alexandrinus.981 The latter writers are the only ones who attribute the fact of Æschylus being charged by the Athenians with sacrilege and condemned to be stoned to death to its true cause. They say that being himself uninitiated, Æschylus had profaned the Mysteries by exposing them in his Trilogies on a public stage.982 But he would have incurred the same condemnation had he been initiated; which must have been the case, as otherwise he must, like Socrates, have had a Daimon to reveal to him the secret and sacred allegorical Drama of Initiation. At all events, it is not the “father of the Greek tragedy” who invented the prophecy of Prometheus; for he only repeated in dramatic form that which was revealed by the priests during the Mysteria of the Sabasia.983 The latter was one of the oldest sacred festivals, whose origin is to this day unknown to history. Mythologists connect it through Mithras, the Sun, called Sabasius on some old monuments, with Jupiter and Bacchus. It was never, however, the property of the Greeks, but dates from days immemorial.

This is just because Æschylus, like Shakespeare, was and will ever remain the intellectual “Sphinx” of the ages. Between Zeus, the Abstract Deity of Grecian thought, and the Olympic Zeus, there was an abyss. The latter represented in the Mysteries no higher a principle [pg 438] than the lower aspect of human physical intelligence—Manas wedded to Kâma; whereas Prometheus—the divine aspect of Manas merging into and aspiring to Buddhi—was the divine Soul. Zeus, whenever shown as yielding to his lower passions, is the Human Soul and nothing more—the jealous God, revengeful and cruel in its Egotism or “I-am-ness.” Hence, Zeus is represented as a Serpent—the intellectual tempter of man—which, nevertheless, begets in the course of cyclic evolution the “Man-Saviour,” the Solar Bacchus or Dionysus—more than a man.

Dionysus is one with Osiris, with Krishna, and with Buddha, the heavenly Wise One, and with the coming (tenth) Avatâra, the glorified Spiritual Christos, who will deliver the suffering Chrestos—mankind, or Prometheus, on its trial. This, say Brâhmanical and Buddhistic legends, echoed by the Zoroastrian and now by the Christian teachings (the latter only occasionally), will happen at the end of the Kali Yuga. It is only after the appearance of Kalki Avatâra, or Sosiosh, that man will be born from woman without sin. Then will Brahmâ, the Hindû deity, Ahura Mazda (Ormazd), the Zoroastrian, Zeus, the Greco-Olympian Don Juan, Jehovah, the jealous, repenting, cruel, tribal God of the Israelites, and all their likes in the universal Pantheon of human fancy—vanish and disappear in thin air. And along with these will vanish their shadows, the dark aspects of all these Deities, ever represented as their “twin brothers” and creatures, in exoteric legend—their own reflection on Earth, in Esoteric Philosophy. The Ahrimans and Typhons, the Samaels and Satans, must be all dethroned on that day, when every dark evil passion will be subdued.

There is one Eternal Law in Nature, one that always tends to adjust contraries, and to produce final harmony. It is owing to this Law of spiritual development superseding the physical and purely intellectual, that mankind will become freed from its false Gods, and find itself finally—Self-redeemed.

In its final revelation, the old myth of Prometheus, of whom the proto- and anti-types are found in every ancient Theogony, stands in each of them at the very origin of physical evil, because at the threshold of human physical life. Cronus is “Time,” whose first law is that the order of the successive and harmonious phases, in the process of evolution during cyclic development, should be strictly preserved—under the severe penalty of abnormal growth with all its ensuing results. It was not in the programme of natural development, [pg 439] that man—higher animal though he may be—should become at once, intellectually, spiritually, and psychically, the Demi-god he is on Earth, while his physical frame remains weaker, more helpless and ephemeral, than that of almost any huge mammal. The contrast is too grotesque and violent; the tabernacle much too unworthy of its indwelling God. The gift of Prometheus thus became a Curse—though foreknown and foreseen by the Host personified in that personage, as his name well shows.985 It is in this that rests, at one and the same time, its sin and its redemption. For the Host that incarnated in a portion of humanity, though led to it by Karma or Nemesis, preferred free-will to passive slavery, intellectual self-conscious pain and even torture, “while myriad time shall flow,” to inane, imbecile, instinctual beatitude.

Knowing such an incarnation was premature and not in the programme of Nature, the Heavenly Host, “Prometheus,” still sacrificed itself to benefit thereby, at least, one portion of mankind.986 But while saving man from mental darkness, they inflicted upon him the tortures of the self-consciousness of his responsibility—the result of his free will—besides every ill to which mortal man and flesh are heir. This torture Prometheus accepted for himself, since the Host became henceforward blended with the tabernacle prepared for them, which was still un-achieved at that period of formation.

Spiritual evolution being incapable of keeping pace with the physical, once its homogeneity was broken by the admixture, the gift thus became the chief cause, if not the sole origin, of Evil.987 Highly philosophical [pg 440] is the allegory which shows Cronus cursing Zeus for dethroning him, in the primitive Golden Age of Saturn, when all men were Demi-gods, and for creating a physical race of men weak and helpless in comparison; and then as delivering to his (Zeus') revenge the culprit, who despoiled the Gods of their prerogative of creation and who thereby raised man to their level, intellectually and spiritually. In the case of Prometheus, Zeus represents the Host of the Primeval Progenitors, of the Pitaras, the “Fathers” who created man senseless and without mind; while the Divine Titan stands for the Spiritual Creators, the Devas who “fell” into generation. The former are spiritually lower, but physically stronger, than the “Prometheans”; therefore, the latter are shown conquered. “The lower Host, whose work the Titan spoiled and thus defeated the plans of Zeus,” was on this Earth in its own sphere and plane of action; whereas the superior Host was an exile from Heaven, who had got entangled in the meshes of Matter. The inferior Host were masters of all the Cosmic and lower Titanic Forces; the higher Titan possessed only the Intellectual and Spiritual Fire.

This drama of the struggle of Prometheus with the Olympic tyrant and despot, sensual Zeus, one sees enacted daily within our actual mankind; the lower passions chain the higher aspirations to the rock of Matter, to generate in many a case the vulture of sorrow, pain, and repentance. In every such case one sees once more—

The modern Prometheus has now become Epi-metneus, “he who sees only after the event”; because the universal philanthropy of the former has long ago degenerated into selfishness and self-adoration. Man will become the free Titan of old, but not before cyclic evolution has reestablished the broken harmony between the two natures—the terrestrial and the divine; after which he becomes impermeable to the lower Titanic Forces, invulnerable in his Personality, and immortal in his Individuality—but this cannot happen before every animal element is eliminated from his nature. When man understands that “Deus non[pg 441]fecit mortem,”988 but that man has created it himself, he will re-become the Prometheus before his Fall.

For the full symbolism of Prometheus and the origin of this mythos in Greece, the reader is referred to Part II of this Volume, Section XX, “Prometheus, the Titan,” etc. In the said Part—a kind of supplement to the present portion—every additional information is given upon those tenets that will be the most controverted and questioned. This work is so heterodox, when confronted with the acknowledged standards of Theology and Modern Science, that no proof which tends to show that these standards often usurp an illegal authority should be neglected.