Western European stream·Isis Unveiled·V. The Ether

Source context

Theme

occult constitution of matter, the astral light, and elemental beings as substrate of physical phenomena

Steiner

not engaged in the GA corpus

Cross-tradition

• Neoplatonism (Iamblichus, Proclus)The Neoplatonic doctrine of the world-soul as an intermediate plastic medium between intellect and matter presents a structural cross-tradition congruence with Blavatsky's astral light as the all-pervading occult substance mediating spiritual and physical causation.
• Paracelsian elemental philosophyParacelsus's taxonomy of elemental beings (gnomes, undines, sylphs, salamanders) as animate inhabitants of the four elemental realms provides a direct structural antecedent to the elemental classifications developed in this chapter.
• Kabbalistic Qliphoth and Astral Plane doctrineThe Kabbalistic conception of the Qliphoth as shells or residues inhabiting the astral realm offers a cross-tradition congruence with Blavatsky's account of lower elemental entities as by-products of the material plane.

Chapter V

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CHAPTER V.

"Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint."

(I am the spirit which still denies.)--(Mephisto in FAUST.) "The Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it seeth Him not; neither knoweth Him."--Gospel according to John, xiv., 17. "Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth

Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep."--MILTON. "Mere intellectual enlightenment cannot recognize the spiritual. As the sun puts out a fire, so spirit puts out the eyes of mere intellect.--W. HOWITT. **

T**HERE has been an infinite confusion of names to express one and the same thing.

The chaos of the ancients; the Zoroastrian sacred fire, or the Antusbyrum of the Parsees; the Hermes-fire; the Elmes-fire of the ancient Germans; the lightning of Cybele; the burning torch of Apollo; the flame on the altar of Pan; the inextinguishable fire in the temple on the Acropolis, and in that of Vesta; the fire-flame of Pluto's helm; the brilliant sparks on the hats of the Dioscuri, on the Gorgon head, the helm of Pallas, and the staff of Mercury; the πυρ ασβεστον the Egyptian Phtha, or Ra; the Grecian Zeus Cataibates (the descending); * the pentecostal fire-tongues; the burning bush of Moses; the pillar of fire of the Exodus, and the "burning lamp" of Abram; the eternal fire of the "bottomless pit"; the Delphic oracular vapors; the Sidereal light of the Rosicrucians; the AKASA of the Hindu adepts; the Astral light of Eliphas Levi; the nerve-aura and the fluid of the magnetists; the od of Reichenbach; the fire-globe, or meteor-cat of Babinet; the Psychod and ectenic force of Thury; the psychic force of Sergeant Cox and Mr. Crookes; the atmospheric magnetism of some naturalists; galvanism; and finally, electricity, are but various names for many different manifestations, or effects of the same mysterious, all-pervading cause--the Greek Archeus, or Αρχαιοσ.

Sir E. Bulwer-Lytton, in his Coming Race, describes it as the VRIL, ** used by the subterranean populations, and allowed his readers to take it

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for a fiction. "These people," he says, "consider that in the vril they had arrived at the unity in natural energic agencies"; and proceeds to show that Faraday intimated them "under the more cautious term of correlation," thus:

"I have long held an opinion, almost amounting to a conviction, in common, I believe, with many other lovers of natural knowledge, that the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest, HAVE ONE COMMON ORIGIN; or, in other words, are so directly related and naturally dependent, that they are convertible, as it were, into one another, and possess equivalents of power in their action."

Absurd and unscientific as may appear our comparison of a fictitious vril invented by the great novelist, and the primal force of the equally great experimentalist, with the kabalistic astral light, it is nevertheless the true definition of this force. Discoveries are constantly being made to corroborate the statement thus boldly put forth. Since we began to write this part of our book, an announcement has been made in a number of papers of the supposed discovery of a new force by Mr. Edison, the electrician, of Newark, New Jersey, which force seems to have little in common with electricity, or galvanism, except the principle of conductivity. If demonstrated, it may remain for a long time under some pseudonymous scientific name; but, nevertheless, it will be but one of the numerous family of children brought forth from the commencement of time by our kabalistic mother, the Astral Virgin. In fact, the discoverer says that, "it is as distinct, and has as regular laws as heat, magnetism, or electricity." The journal which contains the first account of the discovery adds that, "Mr. Edison thinks that it exists in connection with heat, and that it can also be generated by independent and as yet undiscovered means."

Another of the most startling of recent discoveries, is the possibility of annihilating distance between human voices--by means of the telephone (distance-sounder), an instrument invented by Professor A. Graham Bell. This possibility, first suggested by the little "lovers' telegraph," consisting of small tin cups with vellum and drug-twine apparatus, by which a conversation can be carried on at a distance of two hundred feet, has developed into the telephone, which will become the wonder of this age. A long conversation has taken place between Boston and Cambridgeport by telegraph; "every word being distinctly heard and perfectly understood, and the modulations of voices being quite distinguishable," according to the official report. The voice is seized upon, so to say, and held in form by a magnet, and the sound-wave transmitted by electricity acting in unison and co-operating with the magnet. The whole success depends upon a perfect control of the electric currents and the

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power of the magnets used, with which the former must co-operate. "The invention," reports the paper, "may be rudely described as a sort of trumpet, over the bell-mouth of which is drawn a delicate membrane, which, when the voice is thrown into the tube, swells outward in proportion to the force of the sound-wave. To the outer side of the membrane is attached a piece of metal, which, as the membrane swells outward, connects with a magnet, and this, with the electric circuit, is controlled by the operator. By some principle, not yet fully understood, the electric current transmits the sound-wave just as delivered by the voice in the trumpet, and the listener at the other end of the line, with a twin or facsimile trumpet at his ear, hears every word distinctly, and readily detects the modulations of the speaker's voice."

Thus, in the presence of such wonderful discoveries of our age, and the further magical possibilities lying latent and yet undiscovered in the boundless realm of nature, and further, in view of the great probability that Edison's Force and Professor Graham Bell's Telephone may unsettle, if not utterly upset all our ideas of the imponderable fluids, would it not be well for such persons as may be tempted to traverse our statements, to wait and see whether they will be corroborated or refuted by further discoveries.

Only in connection with these discoveries, we may, perhaps, well remind our readers of the many hints to be found in the ancient histories as to a certain secret in the possession of the Egyptian priesthood, who could instantly communicate, during the celebration of the Mysteries, from one temple to another, even though the former were at Thebes and the latter at the other end of the country; the legends attributing it, as a matter of course, to the "invisible tribes" of the air, which carry messages for mortals. The author of Pre-Adamite Man quotes an instance, which being given merely on his own authority, and he seeming uncertain whether the story comes from Macrinus or some other writer, may be taken for what it is worth. He found good evidence, he says, during his stay in Egypt, that "one of the Cleopatras (?) sent news by a wire to all the cities, from Heliopolis to Elephantine, on the Upper Nile." *

It is not so long since Professor Tyndall ushered us into a new world, peopled with airy shapes of the most ravishing beauty.

"The discovery consists," he says, "in subjecting the vapors of volatile liquids to the action of concentrated sun-light, or to the concentrated beam of the electric light." The vapors of certain nitrites, iodides, and acids are subjected to the action of the light in an experimental tube, lying horizontally, and so arranged that the axis of the tube and that of

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the parallel beams issuing from the lamp are coincident. The vapors form clouds of gorgeous tints, and arrange themselves into the shapes of vases, of bottles and cones, in nests of six or more; of shells, of tulips, roses, sunflowers, leaves, and of involved scrolls. "In one case," he tells us, "the cloud-bud grew rapidly into a serpent's head; a mouth was formed, and from the cloud, a cord of cloud resembling a tongue was discharged." Finally, to cap the climax of marvels, "once it positively assumed the form of a fish, with eyes, gills, and feelers. The twoness of the animal form was displayed throughout, and no disk, coil, or speck existed on one side that did not exist on the other."

These phenomena may possibly be explained in part by the mechanical action of a beam of light, which Mr. Crookes has recently demonstrated. For instance, it is a supposable case, that the beams of light may have constituted a horizontal axis, about which the disturbed molecules of the vapors gathered into the forms of globes and spindles. But how account for the fish, the serpent's head, the vases, the flowers of different varieties, the shells? This seems to offer a dilemma to science as baffling as the meteor-cat of Babinet. We do not learn that Tyndall ventured as absurd an explanation of his extraordinary phenomena as that of the Frenchman about his.

Those who have not given attention to the subject may be surprised to find how much was known in former days of that all-pervading, subtile principle which has recently been baptized THE UNIVERSAL ETHER.

Before proceeding, we desire once more to enunciate in two categorical propositions, what was hinted at before. These propositions were demonstrated laws with the ancient theurgists.

I. The so-called miracles, to begin with Moses and end with Cagliostro, when genuine, were as de Gasparin very justly insinuates in his work on the phenomena, "perfectly in accordance with natural law"; hence--no miracles. Electricity and magnetism were unquestionably used in the production of some of the prodigies; but now, the same as then, they are put in requisition by every sensitive, who is made to use unconsciously these powers by the peculiar nature of his or her organization, which serves as a conductor for some of these imponderable fluids, as yet so imperfectly known to science. This force is the prolific parent of numberless attributes and properties, many, or rather, most of which, are as yet unknown to modern physics.

II. The phenomena of natural magic to be witnessed in Siam, India, Egypt, and other Oriental countries, bear no relationship whatever to sleight of hand; the one being an absolute physical effect, due to the action of occult natural forces, the other, a mere deceptive result

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obtained by dexterous manipulations supplemented with confederacy. *

The thaumaturgists of all periods, schools, and countries, produced their wonders, because they were perfectly familiar with the imponderable--in their effects--but otherwise perfectly tangible waves of the astral light. They controlled the currents by guiding them with their will-power. The wonders were both of physical and psychological character; the former embracing effects produced upon material objects, the latter the mental phenomena of Mesmer and his successors. This class has been represented in our time by two illustrious men, Du Potet and Regazzoni, whose wonderful powers were well attested in France and other countries. Mesmerism is the most important branch of magic; and its phenomena are the effects of the universal agent which underlies all magic and has produced at all ages the so-called miracles.

The ancients called it Chaos; Plato and the Pythagoreans named it the Soul of the World. According to the Hindus, the Deity in the shape of Æther pervades all things. It is the invisible, but, as we have said before, too tangible Fluid. Among other names this universal Proteus--or "the nebulous Almighty," as de Mirville calls it in derision--was termed by the theurgists "the living fire," ** the "Spirit of Light," and Magnes. This last appellation indicates its magnetic properties and shows its magical nature. For, as truly expressed by one of its enemies--μαγος and μαγνες are two branches growing from the same trunk, and shooting forth the same resultants.

Magnetism is a word for the derivation of which we have to look to an incredibly early epoch. The stone called magnet is believed by many to owe its name to Magnesia, a city or district in Thessaly, where these stones were found in quantity. We believe, however, the opinion of the Hermetists to be the correct one. The word Magh, magus, is derived from the Sanskrit Mahaji, the great or wise (the anointed by the divine wisdom). "Eumolpus is the mythic founder of the Eumolpidae (priests);

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the priests traced their own wisdom to the Divine Intelligence." * The various cosmogonies show that the Archaeal Universal Soul was held by every nation as the "mind" of the Demiurgic Creator, the Sophia of the Gnostics, or the Holy Ghost as a female principle. As the Magi derived their name from it, so the Magnesian stone or Magnet was called in their honor, for they were the first to discover its wonderful properties. Their temples dotted the country in all directions, and among these were some temples of Hercules, --hence the stone, when it once became known that the priests used it for their curative and magical purposes, received the name of the Magnesian or Heraclean stone. Socrates, speaking of it, remarks: "Euripides calls it the Magnesian stone, but the common people, the Heraclean." *** It was the country and stone which were called after the Magi, not the Magi after one or the other. Pliny informs us that the wedding-ring among the Romans was magnetized by the priests before the ceremony. The old Pagan historians are careful to keep silent on certain Mysteries of the "wise" (Magi) and Pausanias was warned in a dream, he says, not to unveil the holy rites of the temple of Demeter and Persephoneia at Athens. **

Modern science, after having ineffectually denied animal magnetism, has found herself forced to accept it as a fact. It is now a recognized property of human and animal organization; as to its psychological, occult influence, the Academies battle with it, in our century, more ferociously than ever. It is the more to be regretted and even wondered at, as the representatives of "exact science" are unable to either explain or even offer us anything like a reasonable hypothesis for the undeniable mysterious potency contained in a simple magnet. We begin to have daily proofs that these potencies underlie the theurgic mysteries, and therefore might perhaps explain the occult faculties possessed by ancient and modern thaumaturgists as well as a good many of their most astounding achievements. Such were the gifts transmitted by Jesus to some of

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his disciples. At the moment of his miraculous cures, the Nazarene felt a power issuing from him. Socrates, in his dialogue with Theages, * telling him of his familiar god (demon), and his power of either imparting his (Socrates') wisdom to his disciples or preventing it from benefiting those he associates with, brings the following instance in corroboration of his words: "I will tell you, Socrates," says Aristides, "a thing incredible, indeed, by the gods, but true. I made a proficiency when I associated with you, even if I was only in the same house, though not in the same room; but more so, when I was in the same room . . . and much more when I looked at you. . . . But I made by far the greatest proficiency when I sat near you and touched you."

This is the modern magnetism and mesmerism of Du Potet and other masters, who, when they have subjected a person to their fluidic influence, can impart to them all their thoughts even at a distance, and with an irresistible power force their subject to obey their mental orders. But how far better was this psychic force known to the ancient philosophers! We can glean some information on that subject from the earliest sources. Pythagoras taught his disciples that God is the universal mind diffused through all things, and that this mind by the sole virtue of its universal sameness could be communicated from one object to another and be made to create all things by the sole will-power of man. With the ancient Greeks, Kurios was the god-Mind (Nous). "Now Koros (Kurios) signifies the pure and unmixed nature of intellect--wisdom," says Plato. ** Kurios is Mercury, the Divine Wisdom, and "Mercury is the Sol" (Sun), *** from whom Thaut--Hermes--received this divine wisdom, which, in his turn, he imparted to the world in his books. Hercules is also the Sun--the celestial storehouse of the universal magnetism; **** or rather Hercules is the magnetic light which, when having made its way through the "opened eye of heaven," enters into the regions of our planet and thus becomes the Creator. Hercules passes through the twelve labors, the valiant Titan! He is called "Father of All" and

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"self-born" "(autophues)." * Hercules, the Sun, is killed by the Devil, Typhon, ** and so is Osiris, who is the father and brother of Horus, and at the same time is identical with him; and we must not forget that the magnet was called the "bone of Horus," and iron the "bone of Typhon." He is called "Hercules Invictus," only when he descends to Hades (the subterranean garden), and plucking the "golden apples" from the "tree of life," slays the dragon. *** The rough Titanic power, the "lining" of every sun-god, opposes its force of blind matter to the divine magnetic spirit, which tries to harmonize everything in nature.

All the sun-gods, with their symbol, the visible sun, are the creators of physical nature only. The spiritual is the work of the Highest God--the Concealed, the Central, Spiritual SUN, and of his Demiurge--the Divine Mind of Plato, and the Divine Wisdom of Hermes Trismegistus ****--the wisdom effused from Oulom or Kronos.

"After the distribution of pure Fire, in the Samothracian Mysteries, a new life began." * This was the "new birth," that is alluded to by Jesus, in his nocturnal conversation with Nicodemus. "Initiated into the most blessed of all Mysteries, being ourselves pure . . . we become just and holy with wisdom." * "He breathed* on them and saith unto them, 'Take the Holy Pneuma.' " * And this simple act of will-power was sufficient to impart vaticination in its nobler and most perfect form if both the initiator and the initiated were worthy of it. To deride this gift, even in its present aspect, "as the corrupt offspring and lingering remains of an ignorant age of superstition, and hastily to condemn it as unworthy of sober investigation, would be as unphilosophical as it is wrong," remarks the Rev. J. B. Gross. "To remove the veil which hides our vision from the future, has been attempted--in all ages of the world; and therefore the propensity to pry into the lap of time, contemplated as one of the faculties of human mind, comes recommended to us under the sanction of God. . . . Zuinglius, the Swiss reformer, attested the comprehensiveness of his faith in the providence of the Supreme Being, in the cosmopolitan doctrine that the Holy Ghost was not excluded from the more worthy portion of the heathen world. Admitting its truth, we cannot

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easily conceive a valid reason why a heathen, thus favored, should not be capable of true prophecy." *

Now, what is this mystic, primordial substance? In the book of Genesis, at the beginning of the first chapter, it is termed the "face of the waters," said to have been incubated by the "Spirit of God." Job mentions, in chap. xxvi., 5, that "dead things are formed from under the waters, and inhabitants thereof." In the original text, instead of "dead things," it is written dead Rephaim (giants, or mighty primitive men), from whom "Evolution" may one day trace our present race. In the Egyptian mythology, Kneph the Eternal unrevealed God is represented by a snake-emblem of eternity encircling a water-urn, with his head hovering over the waters, which it incubates with his breath. In this case the serpent is the Agathodaimon, the good spirit; in its opposite aspect it is the Kakodaimon--the bad one. In the Scandinavian Eddas, the honey-dew--the food of the gods and of the creative, busy Yggdrasill--bees--falls during the hours of night, when the atmosphere is impregnated with humidity; and in the Northern mythologies, as the passive principle of creation, it typifies the creation of the universe out of water; this dew is the astral light in one of its combinations and possesses creative as well as destructive properties. In the Chaldean legend of Berosus, Oannes or Dagon, the man-fish, instructing the people, shows the infant world created out of water and all beings originating from this prima materia. Moses teaches that only earth and water can bring a living soul; and we read in the Scriptures that herbs could not grow until the Eternal caused it to rain upon earth. In the Mexican Popol-Vuh man is created out of mud or clay (terre glaise), taken from under the water. Brahma creates Lomus, the great Muni (or first man), seated on his lotus, only after having called into being, spirits, who thus enjoyed among mortals a priority of existence, and he creates him out of water, air, and earth. Alchemists claim that primordial or pre-Adamic earth when reduced to its first substance is in its second stage of transformation like clear-water, the first being the alkahest ** proper. This primordial substance is said to contain within itself the essence of all that goes to make up man; it has not only all the elements of his physical being, but even the "breath of life" itself in a latent state, ready to be awakened. This it derives from the "incubation" of the Spirit of God upon the face of the waters--chaos; in fact, this substance is chaos itself. From this it was that Paracelsus claimed to be able to make his "homunculi"; and

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this is why Thales, the great natural philosopher, maintained that water was the principle of all things in nature.

What is the primordial Chaos but Æther? The modern Ether; not such as is recognized by our scientists, but such as it was known to the ancient philosophers, long before the time of Moses; Ether, with all its mysterious and occult properties, containing in itself the germs of universal creation; Ether, the celestial virgin, the spiritual mother of every existing form and being, from whose bosom as soon as "incubated" by the Divine Spirit, are called into existence Matter and Life, Force and Action. Electricity, magnetism, heat, light, and chemical action are so little understood even now that fresh facts are constantly widening the range of our knowledge. Who knows where ends the power of this protean giant--Ether; or whence its mysterious origin?--Who, we mean, that denies the spirit that works in it and evolves out of it all visible forms?

It is an easy task to show that the cosmogonical legends all over the world are based on a knowledge by the ancients of those sciences which have allied themselves in our days to support the doctrine of evolution; and that further research may demonstrate that they were far better acquainted with the fact of evolution itself, embracing both its physical and spiritual aspects, than we are now. With the old philosophers, evolution was a universal theorem, a doctrine embracing the whole, and an established principle; while our modern evolutionists are enabled to present us merely with speculative theoretics; with particular, if not wholly negative theorems. It is idle for the representatives of our modern wisdom to close the debate and pretend that the question is settled, merely because the obscure phraseology of the Mosaic account clashes with the definite exegesis of "exact science."

One fact at least is proved: there is not a cosmogonical fragment, to whatever nation it may belong, but proves by this universal allegory of water and the spirit brooding over it, that no more than our modern physicists did any of them hold the universe to have sprung into existence out of nothing; for all their legends begin with that period when nascent vapors and Cimmerian darkness lay brooding over a fluid mass ready to start on its journey of activity at the first flutter of the breath of Him, who is the Unrevealed One. Him they felt, if they saw Him not. Their spiritual intuitions were not so darkened by the subtile sophistry of the forecoming ages as ours are now. If they talked less of the Silurian age slowly developing into the Mammalian, and if the Cenozoic time was only recorded by various allegories of the primitive man--the Adam of our race--it is but a negative proof after all that their "wise men" and leaders did not know of these successive periods as well as we do now.

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In the days of Democritus and Aristotle, the cycle had already begun to enter on its downward path of progress. And if these two philosophers could discuss so well the atomic theory and trace the atom to its material or physical point, their ancestors may have gone further still and followed its genesis far beyond that limit where Mr. Tyndall and others seem rooted to the spot, not daring to cross the line of the "Incomprehensible." The lost arts are a sufficient proof that if even their achievements in physiography are now doubted, because of the unsatisfactory writings of their physicists and naturalists,--on the other hand their practical knowledge in phytochemistry and mineralogy far exceeded our own. Furthermore, they might have been perfectly acquainted with the physical history of our globe without publishing their knowledge to the ignorant masses in those ages of religious Mysteries.

Therefore, it is not only from the Mosaic books that we mean to adduce proof for our further arguments. The ancient Jews got all their knowledge--religious as well as profane--from the nations with which we see them mixed up from the earliest periods. Even the oldest of all sciences, their kabalistic "secret doctrine," may be traced in each detail to its primeval source, Upper India, or Turkestan, far before the time of a distinct separation between the Aryan and Semitic nations. The King Solomon so celebrated by posterity, as Josephus the historian says, * for his magical skill, got his secret learning from India through Hiram, the king of Ophir, and perhaps Sheba. His ring, commonly known as "Solomon's seal," so celebrated for the potency of its sway over the various kinds of genii and demons, in all the popular legends, is equally of Hindu origin. Writing on the pretentious and abominable skill of the "devil-worshippers" of Travancore, the Rev. Samuel Mateer, of the London Missionary Society, claims at the same time to be in possession of a very old manuscript volume of magical incantations and spells in the Malayalim language, giving directions for effecting a great variety of purposes. Of course he adds, that "many of these are fearful in their malignity and obscenity," and gives in his work the fac-simile of some amulets bearing the magical figures and designs on them. We find among them one with the following legend: "To remove trembling

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arising from demoniacal possession--write this figure on a plant that has milky juice, and drive a nail through it; the trembling will cease." * The figure is the identical Solomon's seal, or double triangle of the Kabalists. Did the Hindu get it from the Jewish kabalist, or the latter from India, by inheritance from their great king-kabalist, the wise Solomon? ** But we will leave this trifling dispute to continue the more interesting question of the astral light, and its unknown properties.

Admitting, then, that this mythical agent is Ether, we will proceed to see what and how much of it is known to science.

With respect to the various effects of the different solar rays, Robert Hunt, F. R. S., remarks, in his Researches on Light in its Chemical Relations, that:

"Those rays which give the most light--the yellow and the orange rays--will not produce change of color in the chloride of silver"; while "those rays which have the least illuminating power--the blue and violet--produce the greatest change, and in exceedingly short time. . . . The

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yellow glasses obstruct scarcely any light; the blue glasses may be so dark as to admit of the permeation of a very small quantity."

And still we see that under the blue ray both vegetable and animal life manifest an inordinate development, while under the yellow ray it is proportionately arrested. How is it possible to account for this satisfactorily upon any other hypothesis than that both animal and vegetable life are differently modified electrico-magnetic phenomena, as yet unknown in their fundamental principles?

Mr. Hunt finds that the undulatory theory does not account for the results of his experiments. Sir David Brewster, in his Treatise on Optics, showing that "the colors of vegetable life arise . . . from a specific attraction which the particles of these bodies exercise over the differently-colored rays of light," and that "it is by the light of the sun that the colored juices of plants are elaborated, that the colors of bodies are changed, etc. . . ." remarks that it is not easy to allow "that such effects can be produced by the mere vibration of an ethereal medium." And he is forced, he says, "by this class of facts, to reason as if light was material (?)." Professor Josiah P. Cooke, of Harvard University, says that he "cannot agree . . . with those who regard the wave-theory of light as an established principle of science." * Herschel's doctrine, that the intensity of light, in effect of each undulation, "is inversely as the square of the distance from the luminous body," if correct, damages a good deal if it does not kill the undulatory theory. That he is right, was proved repeatedly by experiments with photometers; and, though it begins to be much doubted, the undulatory theory is still alive.

As General Pleasonton, of Philadelphia, has undertaken to combat this anti-Pythagorean hypothesis, and has devoted to it a whole volume, we cannot do any better than refer the reader to his recent work on the Blue Ray, etc. We leave the theory of Thomas Young, who, according to Tyndall, "placed on an immovable basis the undulatory theory of light," to hold its own if it can, with the Philadelphia experimenter.

Eliphas Levi, the modern magician, describes the astral light in the following sentence: "We have said that to acquire magical power, two things are necessary: to disengage the will from all servitude, and to exercise it in control."

"The sovereign will is represented in our symbols by the woman who crushes the serpent's head, and by the resplendent angel who represses the dragon, and holds him under his foot and spear; the great magical agent, the dual current of light, the living and astral fire of the earth, has been represented in the ancient theogonies by the serpent with the head

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of a bull, a ram, or a dog. It is the double serpent of the caduceus, it is the Old Serpent of the Genesis, but it is also the brazen serpent of Moses entwined around the tau, that is to say, the generative lingha. It is also the goat of the witch-sabbath, and the Baphomet of the Templars; it is the Hyle of the Gnostics; it is the double-tail of serpent which forms the legs of the solar cock of the Abraxas; finally, it is the Devil of M. Eudes de Mirville. But in very fact it is the blind force which souls have to conquer to liberate themselves from the bonds of the earth; for if their will does not free "them from this fatal attraction, they will be absorbed in the current by the force which has produced them, and will return to the central and eternal fire."

This last kabalistic figure of speech, notwithstanding its strange phraseology, is precisely the one used by Jesus; and in his mind it could have had no other significance than the one attributed to it by the Gnostics and the Kabalists. Later the Christian theologians interpreted it differently, and with them it became the doctrine of Hell. Literally, though, it simply means what it says--the astral light, or the generator and destroyer of all forms.

"All the magical operations," continues Levi, "consist in freeing one's self from the coils of the Ancient Serpent; then to place the foot on its head, and lead it according to the operator's will. 'I will give unto thee,' says the Serpent, in the Gospel myth, 'all the kingdoms of the earth, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.' The initiate should reply to him, 'I will not fall down, but thou shalt crouch at my feet; thou wilt give me nothing, but I will make use of thee and take whatever I wish. For I am thy Lord and Master!' This is the real meaning of the ambiguous response made by Jesus to the tempter. . . . Thus, the Devil is not an Entity. It is an errant force, as the name signifies. An odic or magnetic current formed by a chain (a circle) of pernicious wills must create this evil spirit which the Gospel calls legion, and which forces into the sea a herd of swine--another evangelical allegory showing how base natures can be driven headlong by the blind forces set in motion by error and sin." *

In his extensive work on the mystical manifestations of human nature, the German naturalist and philosopher, Maximilian Perty, has devoted a whole chapter to the Modern Forms of Magic. "The manifestations of magical life," he says in his Preface, "partially repose on quite another order of things than the nature in which we are acquainted with time, space, and causality; these manifestations can be experimented with but little; they cannot be called out at our bidding, but may be observed

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and carefully followed whenever they occur in our presence; we can only group them by analogy under certain divisions, and deduce from them general principles and laws." Thus, for Professor Perty, who evidently belongs to the school of Schopenhauer, the possibility and naturalness of the phenomena which took place in the presence of Kavindasami, the fakir, and are described by Louis Jacolliot, the Orientalist, are fully demonstrated on that principle. The fakir was a man who, through the entire subjugation of the matter of his corporeal system has attained to that state of purification at which the spirit becomes nearly freed from its prison, * and can produce wonders. His will, nay, a simple desire of his has become creative force, and he can command the elements and powers of nature. His body is no more an impediment to him; hence he can converse "spirit to spirit, breath to breath." Under his extended palms, a seed, unknown to him (for Jacolliot has chosen it at random among a variety of seeds, from a bag, and planted it himself, after marking it, in a flower pot), will germinate instantly, and push its way through the soil. Developing in less than two hours' time to a size and height which, perhaps, under ordinary circumstances, would require several days or weeks, it grows miraculously under the very eyes of the perplexed experimenter, and mockingly upsets every accepted formula in Botany. Is this a miracle? By no means; it may be one, perhaps, if we take Webster's definition, that a miracle is "every event contrary to the established constitution and course of things--a deviation from the known laws of nature." But are our naturalists prepared to support the claim that what they have once established on observation is infallible? Or that every law of nature is known to them? In this instance, the "miracle" is but a little more prominent than the now well-known experiments of General Pleasonton, of Philadelphia. While the vegetation and fruitage of his vines were stimulated to an incredible activity by the artificial violet light, the magnetic fluid emanating from the hands of the fakir effected still more intense and rapid changes in the vital function of the Indian plants. It attracted and concentrated the akasa, or life-principle, on the germ. ** His magnetism, obeying his will,

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drew up the akasa in a concentrated current through the plant towards his hands, and by keeping up an unintermitted flow for the requisite space of time, the life-principle of the plant built up cell after cell, layer after layer, with preternatural activity, until the work was done. The life-principle is but a blind force obeying a controlling influence. In the ordinary course of nature the plant-protoplasm would have concentrated and directed it at a certain established rate. This rate would have been controlled by the prevalent atmospheric conditions; its growth being rapid or slow, and, in stalk or head, in proportion to the amount of light, heat, and moisture of the season. But the fakir, coming to the help of nature with his powerful will and spirit purified from the contact with matter, * condenses, so to speak, the essence of plant-life into its germ, and forces it to maturity ahead of its time. This blind force being totally submissive to his will, obeys it with servility. If he chose to imagine the plant as a monster, it would as surely become such, as ordinarily it would grow in its natural shape; for the concrete image--slave to the subjective model outlined in the imagination of the fakir--is forced to follow the original in its least detail, as the hand and brush of the painter follow the image which they copy from his mind. The will of the fakir-conjurer forms an invisible but yet, to it, perfectly objective matrix, in which the vegetable matter is caused to deposit itself and assume the fixed shape. The will creates; for the will in motion is force, and force produces matter.

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If some persons object to the explanation on the ground that the fakir could by no means create the model in his imagination, since he was kept ignorant by Jacolliot of the kind of seed he had selected for the experiment; to these we will answer that the spirit of man is like that of his Creator--omniscient in its essence. While in his natural state the fakir did not, and could not know whether it was a melon-seed, or seed of any other plant; once entranced, i.e., bodily dead to all outward appearance--the spirit, for which there exist neither distance, material obstacle, nor space of time, experienced no difficulty in perceiving the melon-seed, whether as it lay deeply buried in the mud of the flower-pot, or reflected in the faithful picture-gallery of Jacolliot's brain. Our visions, portents, and other psychological phenomena, all of which exist in nature, are corroborative of the above fact.

And now, perhaps, we might as well meet at once another impending objection. Indian jugglers, they will tell us, do the same, and as well as the fakir, if we can believe newspapers and travellers' narratives. Undoubtedly so; and moreover these strolling jugglers are neither pure in their modes of living nor considered holy by any one; neither by foreigners nor their own people. They are generally FEARED and despised by the natives, for they are sorcerers; men practising the black art. While such a holy man as Kavindasami requires but the help of his own divine soul, closely united with the astral spirit, and the help of a few familiar pitris--pure, ethereal beings, who rally around their elect brother in flesh--the sorcerer can summon to his help but that class of spirits which we know as the elementals. Like attracts like; and greed for money, impure purposes, and selfish views, cannot attract any other spirits than those that the Hebrew kabalists know as the klippoth, dwellers of Asiah, the fourth world, and the Eastern magicians as the afrits, or elementary spirits of error, or the *devs.

*

This is how an English paper describes the astounding trick of plant-growth, as performed by Indian *jugglers:

*

"An empty flower-pot was now placed upon the floor by the juggler, who requested that his comrades might be allowed to bring up some garden mould from the little plot of ground below. Permission being accorded, the man went, and in two minutes returned with a small quantity of fresh earth tied up in a corner of his chudder, which was deposited in the flower-pot and lightly pressed down. Taking from his basket a dry mango-stone, and handing it round to the company that they might examine it, and satisfy themselves that it was really what it seemed to be, the juggler scooped out a little earth from the centre of the flower-pot and placed the stone in the cavity. He then turned the earth lightly over it, and, having poured a little water over the surface, shut the flower-pot out

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of view by means of a sheet thrown over a small triangle. And now, amid a full chorus of voices and rat-tat-tat accompaniment of the tabor, the stone germinated; presently a section of the cloth was drawn aside, and gave to view the tender shoot, characterized by two long leaves of a blackish-brown color. The cloth was readjusted, and the incantation resumed. Not long was it, however, before the cloth was a second time drawn aside, and it was then seen that the two first leaves had given place to several green ones, and that the plant now stood nine or ten inches high. A third time, and the foliage was much thicker, the sapling being about thirteen to fourteen inches in height. A fourth time, and the little miniature tree, now about eighteen inches in height, had ten or twelve mangoes about the size of walnuts hanging about its branches. Finally, after the lapse of three or four minutes, the cloth was altogether removed, and the fruit, having the perfection of size, though not of maturity, was plucked and handed to the spectators, and, on being tasted, was found to be approaching ripeness, being sweetly acid."

We may add to this, that we have witnessed the same experiment in India and Thibet, and that more than once we provided the flower-pot ourselves, by emptying an old tin box of some Liebig extracts. We filled it with earth with our own hands, and planted in it a small root handed to us by the conjurer, and until the experiment was ended never once removed our eyes from the pot, which was placed in our own room. The result was invariably the same as above described. Does the reader imagine that any prestidigitator could produce the same manifestation under the same conditions?

The learned Orioli, Corresponding Member of the Institute of France, gives a number of instances which show the marvellous effects produced by the will-power acting upon the invisible Proteus of the mesmerists. "I have seen," says he, "certain persons, who simply by pronouncing certain words, arrest wild bulls and horses at headlong speed, and suspend in its flight the arrow which cleaves the air." Thomas Bartholini affirms the same.

Says Du Potet: "When I trace upon the floor with chalk or charcoal this figure . . . a fire, a light fixes itself on it. Soon it attracts to itself the person who approaches it: it detains and fascinates him . . . and it is useless for him to try to cross the line. A magic power compels him to stand still. At the end of a few moments he yields, uttering sobs. . . . The cause is not in me, it is in this entirely kabalistic sign; in vain would you employ violence." *

In a series of remarkable experiments made by Regazzoni in the

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presence of certain well-known French physicians, at Paris, on the 18th of May, 1856, they assembled on one night together, and Regazzoni, with his finger, traced an imaginary kabalistic line upon the floor, over which he made a few rapid passes. It was agreed that the mesmeric subjects, selected by the investigators and the committee for the experiments, and all strangers to him, should be brought blindfold into the room, and caused to walk toward the line, without a word being spoken to indicate what was expected of them. The subjects moved along unsuspiciously till they came to the invisible barrier, when, as it is described, "their feet, as if they had been suddenly seized and riveted, adhere to the ground, while their bodies, carried forward by the rapid impulse of the motion, fall and strike the floor. The sudden rigidity of their limbs was like that of a frozen corpse, and their heels were rooted with mathematical precision upon the fatal line!" *

In another experiment it was agreed that upon one of the physicians giving a certain signal by a glance of the eye, the blindfolded girl should be made to fall on the ground, as if struck by lightning, by the magnetic fluid emitted by Regazzoni's will. She was placed at a distance from the magnetizer; the signal was given, and instantly the subject was felled to the earth, without a word being spoken or a gesture made. Involuntarily one of the spectators stretched out his hand as if to catch her; but Regazzoni, in a voice of thunder, exclaimed, "Do not touch her! Let her fall; a magnetized subject is never hurt by falling." Des Mousseaux, who tells the story, says that "marble is not more rigid than was her body; her head did not touch the ground; one of her arms remained stretched in the air; one of her legs was raised and the other horizontal. She remained in this unnatural posture an indefinite time. Less rigid is a statue of bronze." **

All the effects witnessed in the experiments of public lecturers upon mesmerism, were produced by Regazzoni in perfection, and without one spoken word to indicate what the subject was to do. He even by his silent will produced the most surprising effects upon the physical systems of persons totally unknown to him. Directions whispered by the committee in Regazzoni's ear were immediately obeyed by the subjects, whose ears were stuffed with cotton, and whose eyes were bandaged. Nay, in some cases it was not even necessary for them to express to the magnetizer what they desired, for their own mental requests were complied with with perfect fidelity.

Experiments of a similar character were made by Regazzoni in England, at a distance of three hundred paces from the subject brought to

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him. The jettatura, or evil eye, is nothing but the direction of this invisible fluid, charged with malicious will and hatred, from one person to another, and sent out with the intention of harming him. It may equally be employed for a good or evil purpose. *In the former case it is magic; in the latter, sorcery.

*

What is the WILL? Can "exact science" tell? What is the nature of that intelligent, intangible, and powerful something which reigns supreme over all inert matter? The great Universal Idea willed, and the cosmos sprang into existence. I will, and my limbs obey. I will, and, my thought traversing space, which does not exist for it, envelops the body of another individual who is not a part of myself, penetrates through his pores, and, superseding his own faculties, if they are weaker, forces him to a predetermined action. It acts like the fluid of a galvanic battery on the limbs of a corpse. The mysterious effects of attraction and repulsion are the unconscious agents of that will; fascination, such as we see exercised by some animals, by serpents over birds, for instance, is a conscious action of it, and the result of thought. Sealing-wax, glass, and amber, when rubbed, i.e., when the latent heat which exists in every substance is awakened, attract light bodies; they exercise unconsciously, will; for inorganic as well as organic matter possesses a particle of the divine essence in itself, however infinitesimally small it may be. And how could it be otherwise? Notwithstanding that in the progress of its evolution it may from beginning to end have passed through millions of various forms, it must ever retain its germ-point of that preexistent matter, which is the first manifestation and emanation of the Deity itself. What is then this inexplicable power of attraction but an atomical portion of that essence that scientists and kabalists equally recognize as the "principle of life"--the akasa? Granted that the attraction exercised by such bodies may be blind; but as we ascend higher the scale of the organic beings in nature, we find this principle of life developing attributes and faculties which become more determined and marked with every rung of the endless ladder. Man, the most perfect of organized beings on earth, in whom matter and spirit--i.e., will--are the most developed and powerful, is alone allowed to give a conscious impulse to that principle which emanates from him; and only he can impart to the magnetic fluid opposite and various impulses without limit as to the direction. "He wills," says Du Potet, "and organized matter obeys. It has no poles."

Dr. Brierre de Boismont, in his volume on Hallucinations, reviews a wonderful variety of visions, apparitions, and ecstasies, generally termed hallucinations. "We cannot deny," he says, "that in certain diseases we see developed a great surexcitation of sensibility, which lends to the

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senses a prodigious acuteness of perception. Thus, some individuals will perceive at considerable distances, others will announce the approach of persons who are really on their way, although those present can neither hear nor see them coming." *

A lucid patient, lying in his bed, announces the arrival of persons to see whom he must possess transmural vision, and this faculty is termed by Brierre de Boismont--hallucination. In our ignorance, we have hitherto innocently supposed that in order to be rightly termed a hallucination, a vision must be subjective. It must have an existence only in the delirious brain of the patient. But if the latter announces the visit of a person, miles away, and this person arrives at the very moment predicted by the seer, then his vision was no more subjective, but on the contrary perfectly objective, for he saw that person in the act of coming. And how could the patient see, through solid bodies and space, an object shut out from the reach of our mortal sight, if he had not exercised his spiritual eyes on that occasion? Coincidence?

Cabanis speaks of certain nervous disorders in which the patients easily distinguished with the naked eye infusoria and other microscopical beings which others could only perceive through powerful lenses. "I have met subjects," he says, "who saw in Cimmerian darkness as well as in a lighted room; . . ." others "who followed persons, tracing them out like dogs, and recognizing by the smell objects belonging to such persons or even such as had been only touched by them, with a sagacity which was hitherto observed only in animals." **

Exactly; because reason, which, as Cabanis says, develops only at the expense and loss of natural instinct, is a Chinese wall slowly rising on the soil of sophistry, and which finally shuts out man's spiritual perceptions of which the instinct is one of the most important examples. Arrived at certain stages of physical prostration, when mind and the reasoning faculties seem paralyzed through weakness and bodily exhaustion, instinct--the spiritual unity of the five senses--sees, hears, feels, tastes, and smells, unimpaired by either time or space. What do we know of the exact limits of mental action? How can a physician take upon himself to distinguish the imaginary from the real senses in a man who may be living a spiritual life, in a body so exhausted of its usual vitality that it actually is unable to prevent the soul from oozing out from its prison?

The divine light through which, unimpeded by matter, the soul perceives

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things past, present, and to come, as though their rays were focused in a mirror; the death-dealing bolt projected in an instant of fierce anger or at the climax of long-festering hate; the blessing wafted from a grateful or benevolent heart; and the curse hurled at an object--offender or victim--all have to pass through that universal agent, which under one impulse is the breath of God, and under another--the venom of the devil. It was discovered (?) by Baron Reichenbach and called OD, whether intentionally or otherwise we cannot say, but it is singular that a name should have been chosen which is mentioned in the most ancient books of the Kabala.

Our readers will certainly inquire what then is this invisible all? How is it that our scientific methods, however perfected, have never discovered any of the magical properties contained in it? To this we can answer, that it is no reason because modern scientists are ignorant of them that it should not possess all the properties with which the ancient philosophers endowed it. Science rejects many a thing to-day which she may find herself forced to accept to-morrow. A little less than a century ago the Academy denied Franklin's electricity, and, at the present day, we can hardly find a house without a conductor on its roof. Shooting at the barn-door, the Academy missed the barn itself. Modern scientists, by their wilful skepticism and learned ignorance, do this very frequently.

Emepht, the supreme, first principle, produced an egg; by brooding over which, and permeating the substance of it with its own vivifying essence, the germ contained within was developed; and Phtha, the active creative principle proceeded from it, and began his work. From the boundless expanse of cosmic matter, which had formed itself under his breath, or will, this cosmic matter--astral light, aether, fire-mist, principle of life--it matters not how we may call it, this creative principle, or, as our modern philosophy terms it, law of evolution, by setting in motion the potencies latent in it, formed suns and stars, and satellites; controlled their emplacement by the immutable law of harmony, and peopled them "with every form and quality of life." In the ancient Eastern mythologies, the cosmogonic myth states that there was but water (the father) and the prolific slime (the mother, Ilus or Hyle), from which crept forth the mundane snake-matter. It was the god Phanes, the revealed one, the Word, or logos. How willingly this myth was accepted, even by the Christians who compiled the New Testament, may be easily inferred from the following fact: Phanes, the revealed god, is represented in this snake-symbol as a protogonos, a being furnished with the heads of a man, a hawk or an eagle, a bull--taurus, and a lion, with wings on both sides. The heads relate to the zodiac, and typify the four seasons of the year, for the mundane serpent is the mundane year, while the ser-

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pent itself is the symbol of Kneph, the hidden, or unrevealed deity--God the Father. Time is winged, therefore the serpent is represented with wings. If we remember that each of the four evangelists is represented as having near him one of the described animals--grouped together in Solomon's triangle in the pentacle of Ezekiel, and to be found in the four cherubs or sphinxes of the sacred arch--we will perhaps understand the secret meaning, as well as the reason why the early Christians adopted this symbol; and how it is that the present Roman Catholics and the Greeks of the Oriental Church still represent these animals in the pictures of their evangelists which sometimes accompany the four Gospels. We will also understand why Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, had so insisted upon the necessity of the fourth gospel; giving as a reason that there could not be less than four of them, as there were four zones in the world, and four principal winds coming from the four cardinal points, etc. *

According to one of the Egyptian myths, the phantom-form of the isle of Chemmis (Chemi, ancient Egypt), which floats on the ethereal waves of the empyrean sphere, was called into being by Horus-Apollo, the sun-god, who caused it to evolve out of the mundane egg.

In the cosmogonical poem of Voluspa (the song of the prophetess), which contains the Scandinavian legends of the very dawn of ages, the phantom-germ of the universe is represented as lying in the Ginnungagap--or the cup of illusion, a boundless and void abyss. In this world's matrix, formerly a region of night and desolation, Nebelheim (the Mist-place) dropped a ray of cold light (aether), which overflowed this cup and froze in it. Then the Invisible blew a scorching wind which dissolved the frozen waters and cleared the mist. These waters, called the streams of Elivagar, distilled in vivifying drops which, falling down, created the earth and the giant Ymir, who only had "the semblance of man" (male principle). With him was created the cow, Audhumla ** (female principle), from whose udder flowed four streams of milk, *** which diffused themselves throughout space (the astral light in its purest emanation). The cow Audhumla produces a superior being, called Bur, handsome and powerful, by licking the stones that were covered with *mineral salt.

*

Now, if we take into consideration that this mineral was universally

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regarded by ancient philosophers as one of the chief formative principles in organic creation; by the alchemists as the universal menstruum, which, they said, was to be wrought from water; and by every one else, even as it is regarded now by science as well as in the popular ideas, to be an indispensable ingredient for man and beast; we may readily comprehend the hidden wisdom of this allegory of the creation of man. Paracelsus calls salt "the centre of water, wherein metals ought to die," etc., and Van Helmont terms the Alkahest, "summum et felicissimum omnium salium," the most successful of all salts.

In the Gospel according to Matthew, Jesus says: "Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savor, wherewith shall it be salted?" and following the parable he adds: "Ye are the light of the world" (v. 14). This is more than an allegory; these words point to a direct and unequivocal meaning in relation to the spiritual and physical organisms of man in his dual nature, and show, moreover, a knowledge of the "secret doctrine," the direct traces of which we find equally in the oldest ancient and current popular traditions, in both the Old and New Testaments, and in the writings of the ancient and mediaeval mystics and philosophers.

But to return to our Edda-legend. Ymir, the giant, falls asleep, and sweats profusely. This perspiration causes the pit of his left arm to generate out of that place a man and a woman, while his foot produces a son for them. Thus, while the mythic "cow" gives being to a race of superior spiritual men, the giant Ymir begets a race of evil and depraved men, the Hrimthursen, or frost-giants. Comparing notes with the Hindu Vedas, we find it then, with slight modifications, the same cosmogonic legend in substance and details. Brahma, as soon as Bhagaveda, the Supreme God, endows him with creative powers, produces animated beings, wholly spiritual at first. The Dejotas, inhabitants of the Surg's (the celestial) region, are unfit to live on earth, therefore Brahma creates the Daints (giants, who become the dwellers of the Patals, the lower regions of space), who are also unfit to inhabit Mirtlok (the earth). To palliate the evil, the creative power evolves from his mouth the first Brahman, who thus becomes the progenitor of our race; from his right arm Brahma creates Raettris, the warrior, and from his left Shaterany, the wife of Raettris. Then their son Bais springs from the right foot of the creator, and his wife Basany from the left. While in the Scandinavian legend Bur (the son of the cow Audhumla), a superior being, marries Besla, a daughter of the depraved race of giants, in the Hindu tradition the first Brahman marries Daintary, also a daughter of the race of the giants; and in Genesis we see the sons of God taking for wives the daughters of men, and likewise producing mighty men of old; the

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whole establishing an unquestionable identity of origin between the Christian inspired Book, and the heathen "fables" of Scandinavia and Hindustan. The traditions of nearly every other nation, if examined, will yield a like result.

What modern cosmogonist could compress within so simple a symbol as the Egyptian serpent in a circle such a world of meaning? Here we have, in this creature, the whole philosophy of the universe: matter vivified by spirit, and the two conjointly evolving out of chaos (Force) everything that was to be. To signify that the elements are fast bound in this cosmic matter, which the serpent symbolizes, the Egyptians tied its tail *into a knot.

*

There is one more important emblem connected with the sloughing of the serpent's skin, which, so far as we are aware, has never been heretofore noticed by our symbolists. As the reptile upon casting his coat becomes freed from a casing of gross matter, which cramped a body grown too large for it, and resumes its existence with renewed activity, so man, by casting off the gross material body, enters upon the next stage of his existence with enlarged powers and quickened vitality. Inversely, the Chaldean Kabalists tell us that primeval man, who, contrary to the Darwinian theory was purer, wiser, and far more spiritual, as shown by the myths of the Scandinavian Bur, the Hindu Dejotas, and the Mosaic "sons of God,"--in short, of a far higher nature than the man of the present Adamic race, became despiritualized or tainted with matter, and then, for the first time, was given the fleshly body, which is typified in Genesis in that profoundly-significant verse: "Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skin, and clothed them." * Unless the commentators would make of the First Cause a celestial tailor, what else can the apparently absurd words mean, but that the spiritual man had reached, through the progress of involution, to that point where matter, predominating over and conquering spirit, had transformed him into the physical man, or the second Adam, of the second chapter of *Genesis?

*

This kabalistical doctrine is much more elaborated in the Book of Jasher. ** In chapter vii., these garments of skin are taken by Noah into the ark, he having obtained them by inheritance from Methuselah and Enoch, who had them from Adam and his wife. Ham steals them from

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his father Noah; gives them "in secret" to Cush, who conceals them from his sons and brothers, and passes them to Nimrod.

While some Kabalists, and even archeologists say that "Adam, Enoch, and Noah might, in outward appearance, be different men, but they were really the selfsame divine person." * Others explain that between Adam and Noah there intervened several cycles. That is to say, that every one of the antediluvian patriarchs stood as the representative of a race which had its place in a succession of cycles; and each of which races was less spiritual than its predecessor. Thus Noah, though a good man, could not have borne comparison with his ancestor, Enoch, who "walked with God and did not die." Hence the allegorical interpretation which makes Noah have this coat of skin by inheritance from the second Adam and Enoch, but not wear it himself, for if otherwise, Ham could not have stolen it. But Noah and his children bridged the flood; and while the former belonged to the old and still spiritual antediluvian generation, insomuch as he was selected from all mankind for his purity, his children were post-diluvian. The coat of skin worn by Cush "in secret,"--i.e., when his spiritual nature began to be tainted by the material--is placed on Nimrod, the most powerful and strongest of physical men on this side of the flood--the last remnant of the antediluvian giants. **

In the Scandinavian legend, Ymir, the giant, is slain by the sons of Bur, and the streams of blood flowing from his wounds were so copious that the flood drowned the whole race of ice and frost giants, and Bergelmir alone of that race was saved, with his wife, by taking refuge in a bark; which fact permitted him to transmit a new branch of giants from the old stock. But all the sons of Bur remained untouched by the flood. ***

When the symbolism of this diluvian legend is unravelled, one perceives at once the real meaning of the allegory. The giant Ymir typifies the primitive rude organic matter, the blind cosmical forces, in their chaotic state, before they received the intelligent impulse of the Divine Spirit which set them into a regular motion dependent on immovable laws. The progeny of Bur are the "sons of God," or the minor gods mentioned by Plato in the Timaeus, and who were intrusted, as he expresses it, with the creation of men; for we see them taking the mangled remains of Ymir to the Ginnunga-gap, the chaotic abyss, and employing them for the creation of our world. His blood goes to form oceans and rivers; his bones, the mountains; his teeth, the rocks and cliffs;

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his hair, the trees, etc.; while his skull forms the heavenly vault, supported by four pillars representing the four cardinal points. From the eye-brows of Ymir was created the future abode of man--Midgard. This abode (the earth), says the Edda, in order to be correctly described in all its minute particulars, must be conceived as round as a ring, or as a disk, floating in the midst of the Celestial Ocean (Ether). It is encircled by Yormungand, the gigantic Midgard or Earth Serpent, holding its tail in its mouth. This is the mundane snake, matter and spirit, combined product and emanation of Ymir, the gross rudimental matter, and of the spirit of the "sons of God," who fashioned and created all forms. This emanation is the astral light of the Kabalists, and the as yet problematical, and hardly known, aether, or the "hypothetical agent of great elasticity" of our physicists.

How sure the ancients were of this doctrine of man's trinitarian nature may be inferred from the same Scandinavian legend of the creation of mankind. According to the Voluspa, Odin, Honir, and Lodur, who are the progenitors of our race, found in one of their walks on the ocean-beach, two sticks floating on the waves, "powerless and without destiny." Odin breathed in them the breath of life; Honir endowed them with soul and motion; and Lodur with beauty, speech, sight, and hearing. The man they called Askr--the ash, * and the woman Embla--the alder. These first men are placed in Midgard (mid-garden, or Eden) and thus inherit, from their creators, matter or inorganic life; mind, or soul; and pure spirit; the first corresponding to that part of their organism which sprung from the remains of Ymir, the giant-matter, the second from the &Ælig;sir, or gods, the descendants of Bur, and the third from the Vanr, or the representative of pure spirit.

Another version of the Edda makes our visible universe spring from beneath the luxuriant branches of the mundane tree--the Yggdrasill, the tree with the three roots. Under the first root runs the fountain of life, Urdar; under the second is the famous well of Mimer, in which lie deeply buried Wit and Wisdom. Odin, the Alfadir, asks for a draught of this water; he gets it, but finds himself obliged to pledge one of his eyes for it; the eye being in this case the symbol of the Deity revealing itself in the wisdom of its own creation; for Odin leaves it at the bottom of the deep well. The care of the mundane tree is intrusted to three maidens (the Norns or Parcae), Urdhr, Verdandi, and Skuld--or the Present, the Past, and the Future. Every morning, while fixing the term

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of human life, they draw water from the Urdar-fountain, and sprinkle with it the roots of the mundane tree, that it may live. The exhalations of the ash, Yggdrasill, condense, and falling down upon our earth call into existence and change of form every portion of the inanimate matter. This tree is the symbol of the universal Life, organic as well as inorganic; its emanations represent the spirit which vivifies every form of creation; and of its three roots, one extends to heaven, the second to the dwelling of the magicians--giants, inhabitants of the lofty mountains--and at the third, under which is the spring Hvergelmir, gnaws the monster Nidhogg, who constantly leads mankind into evil. The Thibetans have also their mundane tree, and the legend is of an untold antiquity. With them it is called Zampun. The first of its three roots also extends to heaven, to the top of the highest mountains; the second passes down to the lower region; the third remains midway, and reaches the east. The mundane tree of the Hindus is the Aswatha. * Its branches are the components of the visible world; and its leaves the Mantras of the Vedas, symbols of the universe in its intellectual or moral character.

Who can study carefully the ancient religious and cosmogonic myths without perceiving that this striking similitude of conceptions, in their exoteric form and esoteric spirit, is the result of no mere coincidence, but manifests a concurrent design? It shows that already in those ages which are shut out from our sight by the impenetrable mist of tradition, human religious thought developed in uniform sympathy in every portion of the globe. Christians call this adoration of nature in her most concealed verities--Pantheism. But if the latter, which worships and reveals to us God in space in His only possible objective form--that of visible nature--perpetually reminds humanity of Him who created it, and a religion of theological dogmatism only serves to conceal Him the more from our sight, which is the better adapted to the needs of mankind?

Modern science insists upon the doctrine of evolution; so do human reason and the "secret doctrine," and the idea is corroborated by the ancient legends and myths, and even by the Bible itself when it is read between the lines. We see a flower slowly developing from a bud, and the bud from its seed. But whence the latter, with all its predetermined programme of physical transformation, and its invisible, therefore spiritual forces which gradually develop its form, color, and odor? The word evolution speaks for itself. The germ of the present human race must have preexisted in the parent of this race, as the seed, in which lies hidden

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the flower of next summer, was developed in the capsule of its parent-flower; the parent may be but slightly different, but it still differs from its future progeny. The antediluvian ancestors of the present elephant and lizard were, perhaps, the mammoth and the plesiosaurus; why should not the progenitors of our human race have been the "giants" of the Vedas, the Voluspa, and the Book of Genesis? While it is positively absurd to believe the "transformation of species" to have taken place according to some of the more materialistic views of the evolutionists, it is but natural to think that each genus, beginning with the mollusks and ending with monkey-man, has modified from its own primordial and distinctive form. Supposing that we concede that "animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors"; * and that even a la rigueur "all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form"; ** still no one but a stone-blind materialist, one utterly devoid of intuitiveness, can seriously expect to see "in the distant future . . . psychology based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation." ***

Physical man, as a product of evolution, may be left in the hands of the man of exact science. None but he can throw light upon the physical origin of the race. But, we must positively deny the materialist the same privilege as to the question of man's psychical and spiritual evolution, for he and his highest faculties cannot be proved on any conclusive evidence to be "as much products of evolution as the humblest plant or the lowest worm." ****

Having said so much, we will now proceed to show the evolution-hypothesis of the old Brahmans, as embodied by them in the allegory of the mundane tree. The Hindus represent their mythical tree, which they call Aswatha, in a way which differs from that of the Scandinavians. It is described by them as growing in a reversed position, the branches extending downward and the roots upward; the former typifying the external world of sense, i.e., the visible cosmical universe, and the latter the invisible world of spirit, because the roots have their genesis in the heavenly regions where, from the world's creation, humanity has placed its invisible deity. The creative energy having originated in the primordial point, the religious symbols of every people are so many illustrations of this metaphysical hypothesis expounded by Pythagoras, Plato, and other

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philosophers. "These Chaldeans," says Philo, * "were of opinion that the Kosmos, among the things that exist, is a single point, either being itself God (Theos) or that in it is God, comprehending the soul of all the things."

The Egyptian Pyramid also symbolically represents this idea of the mundane tree. Its apex is the mystic link between heaven and earth, and stands for the root, while the base represents the spreading branches, extending to the four cardinal points of the universe of matter. It conveys the idea that all things had their origin in spirit--evolution having originally begun from above and proceeded downward, instead of the reverse, as taught in the Darwinian theory. In other words, there has been a gradual materialization of forms until a fixed ultimate of debasement is reached. This point is that at which the doctrine of modern evolution enters into the arena of speculative hypothesis. Arrived at this period we will find it easier to understand Haeckel's Anthropogeny, which traces the pedigree of man "from its protoplasmic root, sodden in the mud of seas which existed before the oldest of the fossiliferous rocks were deposited," according to Professor Huxley's exposition. We may believe man evolved "by gradual modification of a mammal of ape-like organization" still easier when we remember that (though in a more condensed and less elegant, but still as comprehensible, phraseology) the same theory was said by Berosus to have been taught many thousands of years before his time by the man-fish Oannes or Dagon, the semi-demon of Babylonia. ** We may add, as a fact of interest, that this ancient theory of evolution is not only embalmed in allegory and legend, but also depicted upon the walls of certain temples in India, and, in a fragmentary form, has been found in those of Egypt and on the slabs of Nimroud and Nineveh, excavated by Layard.

But what lies back of the Darwinian line of descent? So far as he is concerned nothing but "unverifiable hypotheses." For, as he puts it, he views all beings "as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited." *** He does not attempt to show us who these "few beings" were. But it answers our purpose quite as well, for in the admission of their existence at all, resort to the ancients for corroboration and elaboration of the idea receives the stamp of scientific approbation. With all the changes that our globe has passed through as regards temperature, climate, soil, and--if we may be pardoned, in view of recent developments--its electromagnetic condition, he would be bold indeed who dare say that anything

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in present science contradicts the ancient hypothesis of ante-Silurian man. The flint-axes first found by Boucher de Perthes, in the valley of the Somme, prove that men must have existed at a period so remote as to be beyond calculation. If we believe Buchner, man must have lived even during and before the glacial epoch, a subdivision of the quaternary or diluvial period probably extending very far back in it. But who can tell what the next discovery has in store for us?

Now, if we have indisputable proof that man has existed so long as this, there must have been wonderful modifications of his physical system, corresponding with the changes of climate and atmosphere. Does not this seem to show by analogy that, tracing backward, there may have been other modifications, which fitted the most remote progenitors of the "frost-giants" to live even contemporaneously with the Devonian fishes or the Silurian mollusks? True, they left no flint-hatchets behind them, nor any bones or cave-deposits; but, if the ancients are correct, the races at that time were composed not only of giants, or "mighty men of renown," but also of "sons of God." If those who believe in the evolution of spirit as firmly as the materialists believe in that of matter are charged with teaching "unverifiable hypotheses," how readily can they retort upon their accusers by saying that, by their own confession, their physical evolution is still "an unverified, if not actually an unverifiable hypothesis." * The former have at least the inferential proof of legendary myth, the vast antiquity of which is admitted by both philologists and archaeologists; while their antagonists have nothing of a similar nature, *unless they help themselves to a portion of the ancient picture-writings, and suppress the rest.

*

It is more than fortunate that, while the works of some men of science--who have justly won their great reputations--will flatly contradict our hypotheses, the researches and labors of others not less eminent seem to fully confirm our views. In the recent work of Mr. Alfred R. Wallace, The Geographical Distribution of Animals, we find the author seriously favoring the idea of "some slow process of development" of the present species from others which have preceded them, his idea extending back over an innumerable series of cycles. And if animals, why not animal man, preceded still farther back by a thoroughly "spiritual" one--a "son of God"?

And now, we may once more return to the symbolology of the olden times, and their physico-religious myths. Before we close this work, we hope to demonstrate more or less successfully how closely the conceptions of the latter were allied with many of the achievements of modern science

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in physics and natural philosophy. Under the emblematical devices and peculiar phraseology of the priesthood of old lie latent hints of sciences as yet undiscovered during the present cycle. Well acquainted as may be a scholar with the hieratic writing and hieroglyphical system of the Egyptians, he must first of all learn to sift their records. He has to assure himself, compasses and rule in hand, that the picture-writing he is examining fits, to a line, certain fixed geometrical figures which are the hidden keys to such records, before he ventures on an interpretation.

But there are myths which speak for themselves. In this class we may include the double-sexed first creators, of every cosmogony. The Greek Zeus-Zen (aether), and Chthonia (the chaotic earth) and Metis (the water), his wives; Osiris and Isis-Latona--the former god representing also ether--the first emanation of the Supreme Deity, Amun, the primeval source of light; the goddess earth and water again; Mithras, * the rock-born god, the symbol of the male mundane-fire, or the personified primordial light, and Mithra, the fire-goddess, at once his mother and his wife; the pure element of fire (the active, or male principle) regarded as light and heat, in conjunction with earth and water, or matter (female or passive elements of cosmical generation). Mithras is the son of Bordj, the Persian mundane mountain ** from which he flashes out as a radiant ray of light. Brahma, the fire-god, and his prolific consort; and the Hindu Unghi, the refulgent deity, from whose body issue a thousand streams of glory and seven tongues of flame, and in whose honor the Sagniku Brahmans preserve to this day a perpetual fire; Siva, personated by the mundane mountain of the Hindus--the Meru (Himalaya). This terrific fire-god, who is said in the legend to have descended from heaven, like the Jewish Jehovah, in a pillar of fire, and a dozen of other archaic, double-sexed deities, all loudly proclaim their hidden meaning. And what can these dual myths mean but the physico-chemical principle of primordial creation? The first revelation of the Supreme Cause in its triple manifestation of spirit, force, and matter; the divine correlation, at its startingpoint of evolution, allegorized as the marriage of fire and water, products of electrifying spirit, union of the male active principle with the female passive element, which become the parents of their tellurian child, cosmic matter, the prima materia, whose spirit is ether, the ASTRAL LIGHT!

Thus all the world-mountains and mundane eggs, the mundane trees, and the mundane snakes and pillars, may be shown to embody scientifically

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demonstrated truths of natural philosophy. All of these mountains contain, with very trifling variations, the allegorically-expressed description of primal cosmogony; the mundane trees, that of subsequent evolution of spirit and matter; the mundane snakes and pillars, symbolical memorials of the various attributes of this double evolution in its endless correlation of cosmic forces. Within the mysterious recesses of the mountain--the matrix of the universe--the gods (powers) prepare the atomic germs of organic life, and at the same time the life-drink, which, when tasted, awakens in man-matter the man-spirit. The soma, the sacrificial drink of the Hindus, is that sacred beverage. For, at the creation of the prima materia, while the grossest portions of it were used for the physical embryo-world, the more divine essence of it pervaded the universe, invisibly permeating and enclosing within its ethereal waves the newly-born infant, developing and stimulating it to activity as it slowly evolved out of the eternal chaos.

From the poetry of abstract conception, these mundane myths gradually passed into the concrete images of cosmic symbols, as archaeology now finds them. The snake, which plays such a prominent part in the imagery of the ancients, was degraded by the absurd interpretation of the serpent of the Book of Genesis into a synonym of Satan, the Prince of Darkness, whereas it is the most ingenious of all the myths in its various symbolisms. For one, as agathodaimon, it is the emblem of the healing art and of the immortality of man. It encircles the images of most of the sanitary or hygienic gods. The cup of health, in the Egyptian Mysteries, was entwined by serpents. As evil can only arise from an extreme in good, the serpent, under some other aspects, became typical of matter; which, the more it recedes from its primal spiritual source, the more it becomes subject of evil. In the oldest Egyptian imagery, as in the cosmogonic allegories of Kneph, the mundane snake, when typifying matter, is usually represented as contained within a circle; he lies straight across its equator, thus indicating that the universe of astral light, out of which the physical world evolved, while bounding the latter, is itself bound by Emepht, or the Supreme First Cause. Phtha producing Ra, and the myriad forms to which he gives life, are shown as creeping out of the mundane egg, because it is the most familiar form of that in which is deposited and developed the germ of every living being. When the serpent represents eternity and immortality, it encircles the world, biting its tail, and thus offering no solution of continuity. It then becomes the astral light. The disciples of the school of Pherecydes taught that ether (Zeus or Zen) is the highest empyrean heaven, which encloses the supernal world, and its light (the astral) is the concentrated primordial element.

Such is the origin of the serpent, metamorphosed in Christian ages

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into Satan. It is the Od, the Ob, and the Aour of Moses and the Kabalists. When in its passive state, when it acts on those who are unwittingly drawn within its current, the astral light is the Ob, or Python. Moses was determined to exterminate all those who, sensitive to its influence, allowed themselves to fall under the easy control of the vicious beings which move in the astral waves like fish in the water; beings who surround us, and whom Bulwer-Lytton calls in Zanoni "the dwellers of the threshold." It becomes the Od, as soon as it is vivified by the conscious efflux of an immortal soul; for then the astral currents are acting under the guidance of either an adept, a pure spirit, or an able mesmerizer, who is pure himself and knows how to direct the blind forces. In such cases even a high Planetary Spirit, one of the class of beings that have never been embodied (though there are many among these hierarchies who have lived on our earth), descends occasionally to our sphere, and purifying the surrounding atmosphere enables the subject to see, and opens in him the springs of true divine prophecy. As to the term Aour, the word is used to designate certain occult properties of the universal agent. It pertains more directly to the domain of the alchemist, and is of no interest to the general public.

The author of the Homoiomerian system of philosophy, Anaxagoras of Clazomene, firmly believed that the spiritual prototypes of all things, as well as their elements, were to be found in the boundless ether, where they were generated, whence they evolved, and whither they returned from earth. In common with the Hindus who had personified their Akas'a (sky or ether) and made of it a deific entity, the Greeks and Latins had deified Æther. Virgil calls Zeus, pater omnipotens aether; * Magnus, the great god, Ether.

These beings above alluded to are the elemental spirits of the Kabalists, ** whom the Christian clergy denounce as "devils," the enemies of mankind.

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"Already Tertullian," gravely remarks Des Mousseaux, in his chapter on the devils, "has formally discovered the secret of their cunning."

A priceless discovery, that. And now that we have learned so much of the mental labors of the holy fathers and their achievements in astral anthropology, need we be surprised at all, if, in the zeal of their spiritual explorations, they have so far neglected their own planet as at times to deny not only its right to motion but even its sphericity?

And this is what we find in Langhorne, the translator of Plutarch: Dionysius of Halicarnassus [L. ii.] is of opinion that Numa built the temple of Vesta in a round form, to represent the figure of the earth, for by Vesta they meant the earth." Moreover Philolaus, in common with all other Pythagoreans, held that the element of fire was placed in the centre of the universe; and Plutarch, speaking on the subject, remarks of the Pythagoreans that "the earth they suppose not to be without motion, nor situated in the centre of the world, but to make its revolution round the sphere of fire, being neither one of the most valuable, nor principal parts of the great machine." Plato, too, is reported to have been of the same opinion. It appears, therefore, that the Pythagoreans anticipated Galileo's *discovery.

*

The existence of such an invisible universe being once admitted--as seems likely to be the fact if the speculations of the authors of the Unseen Universe are ever accepted by their colleagues--many of the phenomena, hitherto mysterious and inexplicable, become plain. It acts on the organism of the magnetized mediums, it penetrates and saturates them through and through, either directed by the powerful will of a mesmerizer, or by unseen beings who achieve the same result. Once that the silent operation is performed, the astral or sidereal phantom of the mesmerized subject quits its paralyzed, earthly casket, and, after having roamed in the boundless space, alights at the threshold of the mysterious "bourne." For it, the gates of the portal which marks the entrance to the "silent land," are now but partially ajar; they will fly wide open before the soul of the entranced somnambulist only on that day when, united with its higher immortal essence, it will have quitted forever its mortal frame. Until then, the seer or seeress can look but through a chink; it depends on the acuteness of the clairvoyant's spiritual sight to see more or less through it.

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The trinity in unity is an idea which all the ancient nations held in common. The three Dejotas--the Hindu Trimurti; the Three Heads of the Jewish Kabala. * "Three heads are hewn in one another and over one another." The trinity of the Egyptians and that of the mythological Greeks were alike representations of the first triple emanation containing two male and one female principles. It is the union of the male Logos, or wisdom, the revealed Deity, with the female Aura or Anima Mundi--"the holy Pneuma," which is the Sephira of the Kabalists and the Sophia of the refined Gnostics--that produced all things visible and invisible. While the true metaphysical interpretation of this universal dogma remained within the sanctuaries, the Greeks, with their poetical instincts, impersonated it in many charming myths. In the Dionysiacs of Nonnus, the god Bacchus, among other allegories, is represented as in love with the soft, genial breeze (the Holy Pneuma), under the name of Aura Placida. ** And now we will leave Godfrey Higgins to speak: "When the ignorant Fathers were constructing their calendar, they made out of this gentle zephyr two Roman Catholic saints!! " SS. Aura and Placida;--nay, they even went so far as to transfer the jolly god into St. Bacchus, and actually show his coffin and relics at Rome. The festival of the two "blessed saints," Aura and Placida, occurs on the 5th of October, close to the festival of St. Bacchus. ***

How far more poetical, and how much greater the religious spirit to be found in the "heathen" Norse legends of creation! In the boundless abyss of the mundane pit, the Ginnunga-gap, where rage in blind fury and conflict cosmic matter and the primordial forces, suddenly blows the thaw-wind. It is the "unrevealed God," who sends his beneficent breath from Muspellheim, the sphere of empyreal fire, within whose glowing rays dwells this great Being, far beyond the limits of the world of matter; and the animus of the Unseen, the Spirit brooding over the dark, abysmal waters, calls order out of chaos, and once having given the impulse to all creation the FIRST CAUSE retires, and remains for evermore in statu abscondito! ****

There is both religion and science in these Scandinavian songs of heathendom. As an example of the latter, take the conception of Thor, the son of Odin. Whenever this Hercules of the North would grasp the handle of his terrible weapon, the thunderbolt or electric hammer, he is obliged to put on his iron gantlets. He also wears a magical belt

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known as the "girdle of strength," which, whenever girded about his person, greatly augments his celestial power. He rides upon a car drawn by two rams with silver bridles, and his awful brow is encircled by a wreath of stars. His chariot has a pointed iron pole, and the spark-scattering wheels continually roll over rumbling thunder-clouds. He hurls his hammer with resistless force against the rebellious frost-giants, whom he dissolves and annihilates. When he repairs to the Urdar fountain, where the gods meet in conclave to decide the destinies of humanity, he alone goes on foot, the rest of the deities being mounted. He walks, for fear that in crossing Bifrost (the rainbow), the many-hued Æsirbridge, he might set it on fire with his thunder-car, at the same time causing the Urdar waters to boil.

Rendered into plain English, how can this myth be interpreted but as showing that the Norse legend-makers were thoroughly acquainted with electricity? Thor, the euhemerization of electricity, handles his peculiar element only when protected by gloves of iron, which is its natural conductor. His belt of strength is a closed circuit, around which the isolated current is compelled to run instead of diffusing itself through space. When he rushes with his car through the clouds, he is electricity in its active condition, as the sparks scattering from his wheels and the rumbling thunder of the clouds testify. The pointed iron pole of the chariot is suggestive of the lightning-rod; the two rams which serve as his coursers are the familiar ancient symbols of the male or generative power; their silver bridles typify the female principle, for silver is the metal of Luna, Astarte, Diana. Therefore in the ram and his bridle we see combined the active and passive principles of nature in opposition, one rushing forward, and the other restraining, while both are in subordination to the world-permeating, electrical principle, which gives them their impulse. With the electricity supplying the impulse, and the male and female principle combining and recombining in endless correlation, the result is--evolution of visible nature, the crown-glory of which is the planetary system, which in the mythic Thor is allegorized by the circlet of glittering orbs which bedeck his brow. When in his active condition, his awful thunderbolts destroy everything, even the lesser other Titanic forces. But he goes afoot over the rainbow bridge, Bifrost, because to mingle with other less powerful gods than himself, he is obliged to be in a latent state, which he could not be in his car; otherwise he would set on fire and annihilate all. The meaning of the Urdar-fountain, that Thor is afraid to make boil, and the cause of his reluctance, will only be comprehended by our physicists when the reciprocal electro-magnetic relations of the innumerable members of the planetary system, now just suspected, shall be thoroughly determined. Glimpses of the truth are given in the

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recent scientific essays of Professors Mayer and Sterry Hunt. The ancient philosophers believed that not only volcanos, but boiling springs were caused by concentrations of underground electric currents, and that this same cause produced mineral deposits of various natures, which form curative springs. If it be objected that this fact is not distinctly stated by the ancient authors, who, in the opinion of our century were hardly acquainted with electricity, we may simply answer that not all the works embodying ancient wisdom are now extant among our scientists. The clear and cool waters of Urdar were required for the daily irrigation of the mystical mundane tree; and if they had been disturbed by Thor, or active electricity, they would have been converted into mineral springs unsuited for the purpose. Such examples as the above will support the ancient claim of the philosophers that there is a logos in every mythos, or a ground-work of truth in every fiction.

Footnotes

125:* Pausanias: "Eliae," lib. i., cap. xiv.

125: We apprehend that the noble author coined his curious names by contracting words in classical languages. Gy would come from gune; vril from virile.

127:* P. B. Randolph: "Pre-Adamite Man," p. 48.

129:* On this point at least we are on firm ground. Mr. Crookes's testimony corroborates our assertions. On page 84 of his pamphlet on "Phenomenal Spiritualism" he says: "The many hundreds of facts I am prepared to attest--facts which to imitate by known mechanics or physical means would baffle the skill of a Houdin, a Bosco, or an Anderson, backed with all the resources of elaborate machinery and the practice of years--have all taken place in my own house; at times appointed by myself and under circumstances which absolutely precluded the employment of the very simplest instrumental aids."

129:** In this appellation, we may discover the meaning of the puzzling sentence to be found in the Zend-Avesta that "fire gives knowledge of the future, science, and amiable speech," as it develops an extraordinary eloquence in some sensitives.

130:* Dunlap: "Musah, His Mysteries," p. iii.

130:** "Hercules was known as the king of the Musians," says Schwab, ii., 44; and Musien was the feast of "Spirit and Matter," Adonis and Venus, Bacchus and Ceres. (See Dunlap: "Mystery of Adonis," p. 95.) Dunlap shows, on the authority of Julian and Anthon (67), Æsculapius, "the Savior of all," identical with Phtha (the creative Intellect, the Divine Wisdom), and with Apollo, Baal, Adonis, and Hercules (ibid., p. 93), and Phtha is the "Anima mundi," the Universal Soul, of Plato, the Holy Ghost of the Egyptians, and the Astral Light of the Kabalists. M. Michelet, however, regards the Grecian Herakles as a different character, the adversary of the Bacchic revellings and their attendant human sacrifices.

130:*** Plato: "Ion" (Burgess), vol. iv., p. 294.

130:**** "Attica," i., xiv.

131:* Plato: "Theages." Cicero renders this word δαιμονιον, quiddam divinum, a divine something, not anything personal.

131:** "Cratylus," p. 79.

131:*** "Arnobius," vi., xii.

131: As we will show in subsequent chapters, the sun was not considered by the ancients as the direct cause of the light and heat, but only as an agent of the former, through which the light passes on its way to our sphere. Thus it was always called by the Egyptians "the eye of Osiris," who was himself the Logos, the First-begotten, or light made manifest to the world, "which is the mind and divine intellect of the Concealed." It is only that light of which we are cognizant that is the Demiurge, the creator of our planet and everything pertaining to it; with the invisible and unknown universes disseminated through space, none of the sun-gods had anything to do. The idea is expressed very clearly in the "Books of Hermes."

132:* "Orphic Hymn," xii.; Hermann; Dunlap: "Musah, His Mysteries," p. 91.

132:** Movers, 525. Dunlap: "Mysteries of Adonis," 94.

132:*** Preller: ii., 153. This is evidently the origin of the Christian dogma of Christ descending into hell and overcoming Satan.

132:** This important fact accounts admirably for the gross polytheism of the masses, and the refined, highly-philosophical conception of one God, which was taught only in sanctuaries of the "pagan" temples.

132:* Anthon: "Cabeiria."

132:** Plato: "Phaedrus," Cary's translation.

132:* John xx., 22.

133:* "Heathen Religion," 104.

133:** Alkahest, a word first used by Paracelsus, to denote the menstruum or universal solvent, that is capable of reducing all things.

135: Josephus: "Antiquities," vol. viii., c. 2, *5.

136:* "The Land of Charity," p. 210.

136: The claims of certain "adepts," which do not agree with those of the students of the purely Jewish Kabala, and show that the "secret doctrine" has originated in India, from whence it was brought to Chaldea, passing subsequently into the hands of the Hebrew "Tanaim," are singularly corroborated by the researches of the Christian missionaries. These pious and learned travellers have inadvertently come to our help. Dr. Caldwell, in his "Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Languages," p. 66, and Dr. Mateer, in the "Land of Charity," p. 83, fully support our assertions that the "wise" King Solomon got all his kabalistic lore from India, as the above-given magical figure well shows. The former missionary is desirous to prove that very old and huge specimens of the baobab-tree, which is not, as it appears, indigenous to India, but belongs to the African soil, and "found only at several ancient sites of foreign commerce (at Travancore), may, for aught we know," he adds, "have been introduced into India, and planted by the servants of King Solomon." The other proof is still more conclusive. Says Dr. Mateer, in his chapter on the Natural History of Travancore: "There is a curious fact connected with the name of this bird (the peacock) which throws some light upon Scripture history. King Solomon sent his navy to Tarshish (I Kings, x. 22), which returned once in three years, bringing 'gold and silver, ivory and apes, and peacocks.' Now the word used in the Hebrew Bible for peacock is 'tukki,' and as the Jews had, of course, no word for these fine birds till they were first imported into Judea by King Solomon, there is no doubt that 'tukki' is simply the old Tamil word 'toki,' the name of the peacock. The ape or monkey also is, in Hebrew, called 'koph,' the Indian word for which is 'kaphi.' Ivory, we have seen, is abundant in South India, and gold is widely distributed in the rivers of the western coast. Hence the 'Tarshish' referred to was doubtless the western coast of India, and Solomon's ships were ancient 'East Indiamen.' " And hence also we may add, besides "the gold and silver, and apes and peacocks," King Solomon and his friend Hiram, of masonic renown, got their "magic" and "wisdom" from India.

137:* Cooke: "New Chemistry," p. 22.

138:* Eliphas Levi: "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie."

139: Plato hints at a ceremony used in the Mysteries during the performance of which the neophyte was taught that men are in this life in a kind of prison, and taught how to escape from it temporarily. As usual, the too-learned translators disfigured this passage, partially because they could not understand it, and partially because they would not. See Phaedo § *16, and commentaries on it by Henry More, the well-known Mystic philosopher and Platonist.

139: The akasa is a Sanscrit word which means sky, but it also designates the imponderable and intangible life-principle--the astral and celestial lights combined together, and which two form the anima mundi, and constitute the soul and spirit of man; the celestial light forming his νουσ,πνευμα, or divine spirit, and the other his p. 140 ψυχε, soul or astral spirit. The grosser particles of the latter enter into the fabrication of his outward form--the body. Akasa is the mysterious fluid termed by scholastic science, "the all-pervading ether"; it enters into all the magical operations of nature, and produces mesmeric, magnetic, and spiritual phenomena. As, in Syria, Palestine, and India, meant the sky, life, and the sun at the same time; the sun being considered by the ancient sages as the great magnetic well of our universe. The softened pronunciation of this word was Ah--says Dunlap, for "the s continually softens to h from Greece to Calcutta." Ah is Iah, Ao, and Iao. God tells Moses that his name is "I am" (Ahiah), a reduplication of Ah or Iah. The word "As" Ah, or Iah means life, existence, and is evidently the root of the word akasa, which in Hindustan is pronounced ahasa, the life-principle, or Divine life-giving fluid or medium. It is the Hebrew ruah, and means the "wind," the breath, the air in motion, or "moving spirit," according to Parkhurst's Lexicon; and is identical with the spirit of God moving on the face of the waters.

140: Bear in mind that Kavindasami made Jacolliot swear that he would neither approach nor touch him during the time he was entranced. The least contact with matter would have paralyzed the action of the freed spirit, which, if we are permitted to use such an unpoetical comparison, would re-enter its dwelling like a frightened snail, drawing in its horns at the approach of any foreign substance. In some cases such a brusque interruption and oozing back of the spirit (sometimes it may suddenly and altogether break the delicate thread connecting it with the body) kills the entranced subject. *See the several works of Baron du Potet and Puysegur on this question.

142:* "La Magie Devoilee," p. 147.

143: "Magie au XIX*me Siecle," p. 268.

143:** Ibid.

145:* Brierre de Boismont: "Des Hallucinations, ou Histoire raisonnee des apparitions, des songes, des visions, de l'extase du Magnetisme," 1845, p. 301 (French edition). See also Fairfield: "Ten Years Among the Mediums."

145:** Cabanis, seventh memoir: "De l'Influence des Maladies sur la Formation des Idees," etc. A respected N. Y. legislator has this faculty.

147:* Irenaeus: Book iii., chap. ii., sec. 8.

147:** The cow is the symbol of prolific generation and of intellectual nature. She was sacred to Isis in Egypt; to Christna, in India, and to an infinity of other gods and goddesses personifying the various productive powers of nature. The cow was held, in short, as the impersonation of the Great Mother of all beings, both of the mortals and of the gods, of physical and spiritual generation of things.

147:* In Genesis the river of Eden was parted, "and became into four heads" (Gen. ii., 5).

149:* Genesis iii. 21.

149:** This is claimed to be one of the missing books of the sacred Canon of the Jews, and is referred to in Joshua and II. Samuel. It was discovered by Sidras, an officer of Titus, during the sack of Jerusalem, and published in Venice in the seventeenth century, as alleged in its preface by the Consistory of Rabbins, but the American edition, as well as the English, is reputed by the modern Rabbis, to be a forgery of the twelfth century.

150:* See Godfrey Higgins: "Anacalypsis," quoting Faber.

150: See Cory's "Ancient Fragments." B**EROSUS.

150:*** We refer the reader for further particulars to the "Prose Edda" in Mallett's "Northern Antiquities."

151:* It is worthy of attention that in the Mexican "Popol-Vuh" the human race is created out of a reed, and in Hesiod out of the ash-tree, as in the Scandinavian narrative.

152:* See Kanne's "Pantheum der &Ælig;ltesten Philosophie."

153:* "Origin of Species," p. 484.

153: Ibid. Which latter word we cannot accept unless that "primordial form" is conceded to be the primal concrete form that spirit assumed as the revealed Deity.

153:*** Ibid., p. 488.

153:* Lecture by T. H. Huxley, *F.R.S.: "Darwin and Haeckel."

154:* "Migration of Abraham," § 32.

154:** Cory: "Ancient Fragments."

154:*** "Origin of Species," pp. 448, 489, first edition.

155:* Huxley: "Darwin and Haeckel."

156: Mithras was regarded among the Persians as the Theos ek petros--god *of the rock.

156:** Bordj is called a fire-mountain--a volcano; therefore it contains fire, rock, earth, and water--the male and active, and the female or passive elements. The myth is suggestive.

158:* Virgil: "Georgica," book ii.

158: Porphyry and other philosophers explain the nature of the dwellers. They are mischievous and deceitful, though some of them are perfectly gentle and harmless, but so weak as to have the greatest difficulty in communicating with mortals whose company they seek incessantly. The former are not wicked through intelligent malice. The law of spiritual evolution not having yet developed their instinct into intelligence, whose highest light belongs but to immortal spirits, their powers of reasoning are in a latent state and, therefore, they themselves, irresponsible.

But the Latin Church contradicts the Kabalists. St. Augustine has even a discussion on that account with Porphyry, the Neo-platonist. "These spirits," he says, "are deceitful, not by their nature, as Porphyry, the theurgist, will have it, but through malice. They pass themselves off for gods and for the souls of the defunct" ("Civit. Dei," book x., ch. 2). So far Porphyry agrees with him; "but they do not claim to be p. 159 demons [read devils], for they are such in reality!" adds the Bishop of Hippo. But then, under what class should we place the men without heads, whom Augustine wishes us to believe he saw himself? or the satyrs of St. Jerome, which he asserts were exhibited for a considerable length of time at Alexandria? They were, he tells us, "men with the legs and tails of goats"; and, if we may believe him, one of these Satyrs was actually pickled and sent in a cask to the Emperor Constantine!

160:* "Tria capita exsculpta sunt, una intra alterum, et alterum supra alterum"--(Sohar; "Idra Suta," sectio vii.)

160:** Gentle gale (lit.)

160:*** Higgins: "Anacalypsis"; also "Dupuis."

160:**** Mallett: "Northern Antiquities," pp. 401-406, and "The Songs of a Voluspa" in the Edda.

Chapter V

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CHAPTER V.

"Learn to know all, but keep thyself unknown."--GNOSTIC MAXIM. "There is one God supreme over all gods, diviner than mortals,

Whose form is not like unto man's, and as unlike his nature;

But vain mortals imagine that gods *like themselves are begotten

With human sensations, and voice, and corporeal members."--XENOPHANES: Clem. Al. Strom., v. 14, § 110. "T*YCHIADES.--Can you tell me the reason, Philocles, why most men desire to lye, and delight not only to speak fictions themselves, but give busie attention to others who do?

"PHILOCLES.--There be many reasons, Tychiades, which compell some to speak lyes, because they see 'tis profitable."--A Dialogue of Lucian. * "S*PARTAN.--Is it to thee, or to God, that I must confess?

"PRIEST.--To God.

"SPARTAN.--Then, MAN, stand back!"--PLUTARCH: *Remarkable Lacedemonian Sayings.

---

WE will now give attention to some of the most important Mysteries of the Kabala, and trace their relations to the philosophical myths of various nations.

In the oldest Oriental Kabala, the Deity is represented as three circles in one, shrouded in a certain smoke or chaotic exhalation. In the preface to the Sohar, which transforms the three primordial circles into THREE HEADS, over these is described an exhalation or smoke, neither black nor white, but colorless, and circumscribed within a circle. This is the unknown Essence. * The origin of the Jewish image may, perhaps, be traced to Hermes' Pimander, the Egyptian Logos, who appears within a cloud of a humid nature, with a smoke escaping from it. ** In the Sohar the highest God is, as we have shown in the preceding chapter, and as in the case of the Hindu and Buddhist philosophies, a pure abstraction, whose objective existence is denied by the latter. It is Hakama, the "SUPREME WISDOM, that cannot be understood by reflection," and that lies within and without the CRANIUM of LONG FACE *** (Sephira), the uppermost of the three "Heads." It is the "boundless and the infinite En-Soph," the No-Thing.

The "three Heads," superposed above each other, are evidently taken from the three mystic triangles of the Hindus, which also superpose each other. The highest "head" contains the Trinity in Chaos, out of which springs the manifested trinity. En-Soph, the unrevealed forever, who is

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boundless and unconditioned, cannot create, and therefore it seems to us a great error to attribute to him a "creative thought," as is commonly done by the interpreters. In every cosmogony this supreme Essence is passive; if boundless, infinite, and unconditioned, it can have no thought nor idea. It acts not as the result of volition, but in obedience to its own nature, and according to the fatality of the law of which it is itself the embodiment. Thus, with the Hebrew kabalists, En-Soph is non-existent , for it is incomprehensible to our finite intellects, and therefore cannot exist to our minds. Its first emanation was Sephira, the crown . When the time for an active period had come, then was produced a natural expansion of this Divine essence from within outwardly, obedient to eternal and immutable law; and from this eternal and infinite light (which to us is darkness) was emitted a spiritual substance. * This was the First Sephiroth, containing in herself the other nine Sephiroth, or intelligences. In their totality and unity they represent the archetypal man, Adam Kadmon, the προτογονος, who in his individuality or unity is yet dual, or bisexual, the Greek Didumos, for he is the prototype of all humanity. Thus we obtain three trinities, each contained in a "head." In the first head, or face (the three-faced Hindu Trimurti), we find Sephira, the first androgyne, at the apex of the upper triangle, emitting Hackama, or Wisdom, a masculine and active potency--also called Jah, -- and Binah, , or Intelligence, a female and passive potency, also represented by the name Jehovah . These three form the first trinity or "face" of the Sephiroth. This triad emanated Hesed, , or Mercy, a masculine active potency, also called El, from which emanated Geburah } , or Justice, also called Eloha, a feminine passive potency; from the union of these two was produced Tiphereth , Beauty, Clemency, the Spiritual Sun, known by the divine name Elohim; and the second triad, "face," or "head," was formed. These emanating, in their turn, the masculine potency Netzah, , Firmness, or Jehovah Sabaoth, who issued the feminine passive potency Hod, , Splendor, or Elohim Sabaoth; the two produced Jesod, , Foundation, who is the mighty living one El-Chai, thus yielding the third trinity or "head." The tenth Sephiroth is rather a duad, and is represented on the diagrams as the lowest circle. It is Malchuth or Kingdom, , and Shekinah , also called Adonai, and Cherubim among the angelic hosts. The first "Head" is called the Intellectual world; the second "Head" is the Sensuous, or the world of Perception, and the third is the Material or Physical world.

"Before he gave any shape to the universe," says the Kabala, "before

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he produced any form, he was alone without any form and resemblance to anything else. Who, then, can comprehend him, how he was before the creation, since he was formless? Hence, it is forbidden to represent him by any form, similitude, or even by his sacred name, by a single letter, or a single point. . . . The Aged of the Aged, the Unknown of the Unknown, has a form, and yet no form. He has a form whereby the universe is preserved, and yet has no form, because he cannot be comprehended. When he first assumed a form (in Sephira, his first emanation), he caused nine splendid lights to emanate from it." *

And now we will turn to the Hindu esoteric Cosmogony and definition of "Him who is, and yet is not."

"From him who is, ** from this immortal Principle which exists in our minds but cannot be perceived by the senses, is born Purusha, the Divine male and female, who became Narayana, or the Divine Spirit moving on the water."

Swayambhuva, the unknown essence of the Brahmans, is identical with En-Soph, the unknown essence of the kabalists. As with the latter, the ineffable name could not be pronounced by the Hindus, under the penalty of death. In the ancient primitive trinity of India, that which may be certainly considered as pre-Vedic, the germ which fecundates the mother-principle, the mundane egg, or the universal womb, is called Nara, the Spirit, or the Holy Ghost, which emanates from the primordial essence. It is like Sephira, the oldest emanation, called the primordial point, and the White Head, for it is the point of divine light appearing from within the fathomless and boundless darkness. In Manu it is "NARA, or the Spirit of God, which moves on Ayana (Chaos, or place of motion), and is called NARAYANA, or moving on the waters." *** In Hermes, the Egyptian, we read: "In the beginning of the time there was naught in the chaos." But when the "verbum," issuing from the void like a "colorless smoke," makes its appearance, then "this verbum moved on the humid principle." * And in Genesis we find: "And darkness was upon the face of the deep (chaos). And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." In the Kabala, *the emanation of the primordial passive principle (Sephira), by dividing itself into two parts, active and passive, emits Chochma-Wisdom and Binah-Jehovah, and in conjunction with these two acolytes, which complete the trinity, becomes the Creator of the abstract Universe; the physical world being the production of later and still more material powers. *** In the Hindu Cosmogony, Swayambhuva emits

Nara and Nari, its bisexual emanation, and dividing its parts into two halves, male and female, these fecundate the mundane egg, within which develops Brahma, or rather Viradj, the Creator. "The starting-point of the Egyptian mythology," says Champollion, "is a triad . . . namely, Kneph, Neith, and Phtah; and Ammon, the male, the father; Muth, the female and mother; and Khons, the son."

The ten Sephiroth are copies taken from the ten Pradjapatis created by Viradj, called the "Lords of all beings," and answering to the biblical Patriarchs.

Justin Martyr explains some of the "heresies" of the day, but in a very unsatisfactory manner. He shows, however, the identity of all the world-religions at their starting-points. The first beginning opens invariably with the unknown and passive deity, producing from himself a

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certain active power or virtue, "Rational," which is sometimes called WISDOM, sometimes the SON, very often God, Angel, Lord, and LOGOS. * The latter is sometimes applied to the very first emanation, but in several systems it proceeds from the first androgyne or double ray produced at the beginning by the unseen. Philo depicts this wisdom as male and female. But though its first manifestation had a beginning, for it proceeded from Oulom ** (Aion, time), the highest of the Æons, when emitted from the Fathers, it had remained with him before all creations, for it is part of him. *** Therefore, Philo Judaeus calls Adam Kadmon "mind" (the Ennoia of Bythos in the Gnostic system). "The mind, let it be named Adam." ****

Strictly speaking, it is difficult to view the Jewish Book of Genesis otherwise than as a chip from the trunk of the mundane tree of universal Cosmogony, rendered in Oriental allegories. As cycle succeeded cycle, and one nation after another came upon the world's stage to play its brief part in the majestic drama of human life, each new people evolved from ancestral traditions its own religion, giving it a local color, and stamping it with its individual characteristics. While each of these religions had its distinguishing traits, by which, were there no other archaic vestiges, the physical and psychological status of its creators could be estimated, all preserved a common likeness to one prototype. This parent cult was none other than the primitive "wisdom-religion." The Israelitish Scriptures are no exception. Their national history--if they can claim any autonomy before the return from Babylon, and were anything more than migratory septs of Hindu pariahs, cannot be carried back a day beyond Moses; and if this ex-Egyptian priest must, from theological necessity, be transformed into a Hebrew patriarch, we must insist that the Jewish nation was lifted with that smiling infant out of the bulrushes of Lake Moeris. Abraham, their alleged father, belongs to the universal mythology. Most likely he is but one of the numerous aliases of Zeruan (Saturn), the king of the golden age, who is also called the old man (emblem of time). * It is now demonstrated by Assyriologists that in the old Chaldean books Abraham is called Zeru-an, or Zerb-an--meaning one very rich in gold and silver, and a mighty prince. * He is also called Zarouan and Zarman--a decrepit old man. ****

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The ancient Babylonian legend is that Xisuthrus (Hasisadra of the Tablets, or Xisuthrus) sailed with his ark to Armenia, and his son Sim became supreme king. Pliny says that Sim was called Zeruan; and Sim is Shem. In Hebrew, his name writes img iu2-217}, Shem--a sign. Assyria is held by the ethnologists to be the land of Shem, and Egypt called that of Ham, Shem, in the tenth chapter of Genesis is made the father of all the children of Eber, of Elam (Oulam or Eilam), and Ashur (Assur or Assyria). The "nephelim," or fallen men, Gebers, mighty men spoken of in Genesis (vi. 4), come from Oulam, "men of Shem." Even Ophir, which is evidently to be sought for in the India of the days of Hiram, is made a descendant of Shem. The records are purposely mixed up to make them fit into the frame of the Mosaic Bible. But Genesis, from its first verse down to the last, has naught to do with the "chosen people"; it belongs to the world's history. Its appropriation by the Jewish authors in the days of the so-called restoration of the destroyed books of the Israelites, by Ezra, proves nothing, and, until now, has been self-propped on an alleged divine revelation. It is simply a compilation of the universal legends of the universal humanity. Bunsen says that in the "Chaldean tribe immediately connected with Abraham, we find reminiscences of dates disfigured and misunderstood, as genealogies of single men, or indications of epochs. The Abrahamic recollections go back at least three millennia beyond the grandfather of Jacob." *

Alexander Polyhistor says that Abraham was born at Kamarina or Uria, a city of soothsayers, and invented astronomy. Josephus claims the same for Terah, Abraham's father. The tower of Babel was built as much by the direct descendants of Shem as by those of the "accursed" Ham and Canaan, for the people in those days were "one," and the "whole earth was of one language"; and Babel was simply an astrological tower, and its builders were astrologers and adepts of the primitive Wisdom-Religion, or, again, what we term Secret Doctrine.

The Berosian Sibyl says: Before the Tower, Zeru-an, Titan, and Yapetosthe governed the earth, Zeru-an wished to be supreme, but his two brothers resisted, when their sister, Astlik, intervened and appeased them. It was agreed that Zeru-an should rule, but his male children should be put to death; and strong Titans were appointed to carry this into effect.

Sar (circle, saros) is the Babylonian god of the sky. He is also Assaros or Asshur (the son of Shem), and Zero--Zero-ana, the chakkra, or wheel, boundless time. Hence, as the first step taken by Zoroaster, while founding his new religion, was to change the most sacred deities

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of the Sanscrit Veda into names of evil spirits, in his Zend Scriptures, and even to reject a number of them, we find no traces in the Avesta of Chakkra--the symbolic circle of the sky.

Elam, another of the sons of Shem, is Oulam and refers to an order or cycle of events. In Ecclesiastes iii. 11, it is termed "world." In Ezekiel xxvi. 20, "of old time." In Genesis iii. 22, the word stands as "forever"; and in chapter ix. 16, "eternal." Finally, the term is completely defined in Genesis vi. 4, in the following words: "There were nephelim (giants, fallen men, or Titans) on the earth." The word is synonymous with Æon, αιον. In Proverbs viii. 23, it reads: "I was effused from Oulam, from Ras" (wisdom). By this sentence, the wise king-kabalist refers to one of the mysteries of the human spirit--the immortal crown of the man-trinity. While it ought to read as above, and be interpreted kabalistically to mean that the I (or my eternal, immortal Ego), the spiritual entity, was effused from the boundless and nameless eternity, through the creative wisdom of the unknown God, it reads in the canonical translation: "The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old"! which is unintelligible nonsense, without the kabalistic interpretation. When Solomon is made to say that I was "from the beginning . . . while, as yet, he (the Supreme Deity) had not made the earth nor the highest part of the dust of the world . . . I was there," and "when he appointed the foundations of the earth . . . then I was by him, as one brought up with him," what can the kabalist mean by the "I," but his own divine spirit, a drop effused from that eternal fountain of light and wisdom--the universal spirit of the Deity?

The thread of glory emitted by En-Soph from the highest of the three kabalistic heads, through which "all things shine with light," the thread which makes its exit through Adam Primus, is the individual spirit of every man. "I was daily his (En-Soph's) delight, rejoicing always before him . . . and my delights were with the sons of men," adds Solomon, in the same chapter of the Proverbs. The immortal spirit delights in the sons of men, who, without this spirit, are but dualities (physical body and astral soul, or that life-principle which animates even the lowest of the animal kingdom). But, we have seen that the doctrine teaches that this spirit cannot unite itself with that man in whom matter and the grossest propensities of his animal soul will be ever crowding it out. Therefore, Solomon, who is made to speak under the inspiration of his own spirit, that possesses him for the time being, utters the following words of wisdom: "Hearken unto me, my son" (the dual man), "blessed are they who keep my ways. . . . Blessed is the man that heareth me, watching daily at my gates. . . . For whoso findeth me, findeth life, and shall obtain favor of the Lord. . . . But he that

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sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul . . . and loves death" (Proverbs vii. 1-36).

This chapter, as interpreted, is made by some theologians, like everything else, to apply to Christ, the "Son of God," who states repeatedly, that he who follows him obtains eternal life, and conquers death. But even in its distorted translation it can be demonstrated that it referred to anything but to the alleged Saviour. Were we to accept it in this sense, then, the Christian theology would have to return, nolens volens, to Averroism and Buddhism; to the doctrine of emanation, in short; for Solomon says: "I was effused" from Oulam and Rasit, both of which are a part of the Deity; and thus Christ would not be as their doctrine claims, God himself, but only an emanation of Him, like the Christos of the Gnostics. Hence, the meaning of the personified Gnostic Æon, the word signifying cycles or determined periods in the eternity and at the same time, representing a hierarchy of celestial beings--spirits. Thus Christ is sometimes termed the "Eternal Æon." But the word "eternal" is erroneous in relation to the Æons. Eternal is that which has neither beginning nor end; but the "Emanations" or Æons, although having lived as absorbed in the divine essence from the eternity, when once individually emanated, must be said to have a beginning. They may be therefore endless in this spiritual life, never eternal.

These endless emanations of the one First Cause, all of which were gradually transformed by the popular fancy into distinct gods, spirits, angels, and demons, were so little considered immortal, that all were assigned a limited existence. And this belief, common to all the peoples of antiquity, to the Chaldean Magi as well as to the Egyptians and even in our day held by the Brahmanists and Buddhists, most triumphantly evidences the monotheism of the ancient religious systems. This doctrine calls the life-period of all the inferior divinities, "one day of Parabrahma." After a cycle of fourteen milliards, three hundred and twenty-millions of human years--the tradition says--the trinity itself, with all the lesser divinities, will be annihilated, together with the universe, and cease to exist. Then another universe will gradually emerge from the pralaya (dissolution), and men on earth will be enabled to comprehend SWAYAMBHUVA as he is. Alone, this primal cause will exist forever, in all his glory, filling the infinite space. What better proof could be adduced of the deep reverential feeling with which the "heathen" regard the one Supreme eternal cause of all things visible and invisible.

This is again the source from which the ancient kabalists derived identical doctrines. If the Christians understood Genesis in their own way, and, if accepting the texts literally, they enforced upon the uneducated masses the belief in a creation of our world out of nothing; and

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moreover assigned to it a beginning, it is surely not the Tanaim, the sole expounders of the hidden meaning contained in the Bible, who are to be blamed. No more than any other philosophers had they ever believed either in spontaneous, limited, or ex nihilo creations. The Kabala has survived to show that their philosophy was precisely that of the modern Nepal Buddhists, the Svabhavikas. They believed in the eternity and the indestructibility of matter, and hence in many prior creations and destructions of worlds, before our own. "There were old worlds which perished." * "From this we see that the Holy One, blessed be His name, had successively created and destroyed sundry worlds, before he created the present world; and when he created this world he said: 'This pleases me; the previous ones did not please me.' " ** Moreover, they believed, again like the Svabhavikas, now termed Atheists, that every thing proceeds (is created) from its own nature and that once that the first impulse is given by that Creative Force inherent in the "Self-created substance," or Sephira, everything evolves out of itself, following its pattern, the more spiritual prototype which precedes it in the scale of infinite creation. "The indivisible point which has no limit, and cannot be comprehended (for it is absolute), expanded from within, and formed a brightness which served as a garment (a veil) to the indivisible points. . . . It, too, expanded from within. . . . Thus, everything originated through a constant upheaving agitation, and thus finally the world originated." ***

In the later Zoroastrian books, after that Darius had restored both the worship of Ormazd and added to it the purer Magianism of the primitive Secret Wisdom-- , of which, as the inscription tells us, he was himself a hierophant, we see again reappearing the Zeru-ana, or boundless time, represented by the Brahmans in the chakkra, or a circle; that we see figuring on the uplifted finger of the principal deities. Further on, we will show the relation in which it stands to the Pythagorean, mystical numbers--the first and the last--which is a zero (0), and to the greatest of the Mystery-Gods IAO. The identity of this symbol alone, in all the old religions, is sufficient to show their common descent from one primitive Faith. **** This term of "boundless time," which can be applied but to the ONE who has neither beginning nor end, is

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called by the Zoroastrians Zeruana-Akarene, because he has always existed. "His glory," they say, is too exalted, his light too resplendent for either human intellect or mortal eyes to grasp and see. His primal emanation is eternal light which, from having been previously concealed in darkness, was called out to manifest itself, and thus was formed Ormazd, "the King of Life." He is the first-born of boundless time, but like his own antitype, or preexisting spiritual idea, has lived within primitive darkness from all eternity. His Logos created the pure intellectual world. After the lapse of three grand cycles * he created the material world in six periods. The six Amshaspands, or primitive spiritual men, whom Ormazd created in his own image, are the mediators between this world and himself. Mithras is an emanation of the Logos and the chief of the twenty-eight izeds, who are the tutelary angels over the spiritual portion of mankind--the souls of men. The Ferouers are infinite in number. They are the ideas or rather the ideal conceptions of things which formed themselves in the mind of Ormazd or Ahuramazda before he willed them to assume a concrete form. They are what Aristotle terms "privations" of forms and substances. The religion of Zarathustra, as he is always called in the Avesta, is one from which the ancient Jews have the most borrowed. In one of the Yashts, Ahuramazda, the Supreme, gives to the seer as one of his sacred names, Ahmi, "I am"; and in another place, ahmi yat ahmi, "I am that I am," as Jehovah is alleged to have given it to Moses.

This Cosmogony, adopted with a change of names in the Rabbinical Kabala, found its way, later, with some additional speculations of Manes, the half-Magus, half-Platonist, into the great body of Gnosticism. The real doctrines of the Basilideans, Valentinians, and the Marcionites cannot be correctly ascertained in the prejudiced and calumnious writings of the Fathers of the Church; but rather in what remains of the works of the Bardesanesians, known as the Nazarenes. It is next to impossible, now that all their manuscripts and books are destroyed, to assign to any of these sects its due part in dissenting views. But there are a few men still living who have preserved books and direct traditions about the Ophites, although they care little to impart them to the world. Among the unknown sects of Mount Lebanon and Palestine the truth has been concealed for more than a thousand years. And their diagram of the Ophite scheme differs with the description of it given by Origen and hence with the diagram of Matter. **

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The kabalistic trinity is one of the models of the Christian one. "The ANCIENT whose name be sanctified, is with three heads, but which make only one." * Tria capita exsculpa sunt, unum intra alterum, et alterum supra alterum. "Three heads are inserted in one another, and one over the other. The first head is the Concealed Wisdom (Sapientia Abscondita). Under this head is the ANCIENT (Pythagorean Monad), the most hidden of mysteries; a head which is no head (caput quod non est caput); no one can know what that is in this head. No intellect is able to comprehend this wisdom. ** This Senior Sanctissimus is surrounded by the three heads. He is the eternal LIGHT of the wisdom; and the wisdom is the source from which all the manifestations have begun. These three heads, included in ONE HEAD (which is no head); and these three are bent down (overshadow) SHORT-FACE (the son) and through them all things shine with light." *** "En-Soph emits a thread from El or Al (the highest God of the Trinity), and the light follows the thread and enters, and passing through makes its exit through Adam Primus (Kadmon), who is concealed until the plan for arranging (statum dispositionis) is ready; it threads through him from his head to his feet; and in him (in the concealed Adam) is the figure of A MAN." ****

"Whoso wishes to have an insight into the sacred unity, let him consider a flame rising from a burning coal or a burning lamp. He will see first a two-fold light--a bright white, and a black or blue light; the white light is above, and ascends in a direct light, while the blue, or dark light, is below, and seems as the chair of the former, yet both are so intimately connected together that they constitute only one flame. The seat, however, formed by the blue or dark light, is again connected with the burning matter which is under it again. The white light never changes its color, it always remains white; but various shades are observed in the lower light, whilst the lowest light, moreover, takes two directions; above, it is connected with the white light, and below with the burning matter. Now, this is constantly consuming itself, and perpetually ascends to the upper light, and thus everything merges into a single unity." *

Such were the ancient ideas of the trinity in the unity, as an abstraction. Man, who is the microcosmos of the macrocosmos, or of the

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archetypal heavenly man, Adam Kadmon, is likewise a trinity; for he is body, soul, and* spirit.

*

"All that is created by the 'Ancient of the Ancients' can live and exist only by a male and a female," says the Sohar. * He alone, to whom no one can say, "Thou," for he is the spirit of the WHITE-HEAD in whom the "THREE HEADS" are united, is uncreated. Out of the subtile fire, on one side of the White Head, and of the "subtile air," on the other, emanates Shekinah, his veil (the femininized Holy Ghost). "This air," says Idra Rabba, "is the most occult (occultissimus) attribute of the Ancient of the Days. ** The Ancienter of the Ancienter is the Concealed of the Concealed. *** All things are Himself, and Himself is concealed on every way. * The cranium *of the WHITE-HEAD has no beginning, but its end has a shining reflection and a roundness which is our universe."

"They regard," says Klenker, "the first-born as man and wife, in so far as his light includes in itself all other lights, and in so far as his spirit of life or breath of life includes all other life spirits in itself." * The kabalistic Shekinah answers to the Ophite Sophia. Properly speaking, Adam Kadmon is the Bythos, but in this emanation-system, where everything is calculated to perplex and place an obstacle to inquiry, he is the Source of Light, the first "primitive man," and at the same time Ennoia, the Thought of Bythos, the Depth, for he is Pimander.

The Gnostics, as well as the Nazarenes, allegorizing on the personification, said that the First and Second man loved the beauty of Sophia, (Sephira) the first woman, and thus the Father and the Son fecundated the heavenly "Woman" and, from primal darkness procreated the visible light (Sephira is the Invisible, or Spiritual Light), "whom they called the ANOINTED CHRISTUM, or King Messiah." * This Christus is the Adam of Dust before his fall, with the spirit of the Adonai, his Father, and Shekinah Adonai, his mother, upon him; for Adam Primus is Adon, Adonai, or Adonis. The primal existence manifests itself by its wisdom, and produces the Intelligible LOGOS (all visible creation). This wisdom was venerated by the Ophites under the form of a serpent. So far we see that the first and second life are the two Adams, or the first and the second man. In the former lies Eva, or the yet unborn spiritual Eve, and she is within Adam Primus, *for she is a part of himself, who is androgyne. The Eva of dust, she who will be called in

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*

Genesis "the mother of all that live," is within Adam the Second. And now, from the moment of its first manifestation, the LORD MANO, the Unintelligible Wisdom, disappears from the scene of action. It will manifest itself only as Shekinah, the GRACE; for the C*ORONA is "the innermost Light of all Lights," and hence it is darkness's own substance. *

In the Kabala, Shekinah is the ninth emanation of Sephira, which contains the whole of the ten Sephiroth within herself. She belongs to the third triad and is produced together with Malchuth or "Kingdom," of which she is the female counterpart. Otherwise she is held to be higher than any of these; for she is the "Divine Glory," the "veil," or "garment," of En-Soph. The Jews, whenever she is mentioned in the Targum, say that she is the glory of Jehovah, which dwelt in the tabernacle, manifesting herself like a visible cloud; the "Glory" rested over the Mercy-Seat in the *Sanctum Sanctorum.

*

In the Nazarene or Bardesanian System, which may be termed the Kabala within the Kabala, the Ancient of Days--Antiquus Altus, who is the Father of the Demiurgus of the universe, is called the Third Life, or Abatur; and he is the Father of Fetahil, who is the architect of the visible universe, which he calls into existence by the powers of his genii, at the order of the "Greatest"; the Abatur answering to the "Father" of Jesus in the later Christian theology. These two superior Lives then, are the crown within which dwells the greatest Ferho. "Before any creature came into existence the Lord Ferho existed." ** This one is the First Life, formless and invisible; in whom the living Spirit of LIFE exists, the Highest GRACE. The two are ONE from eternity, for they are the Light and the CAUSE of the Light. Therefore, they answer to the kabalistic concealed wisdom, and to the concealed Shekinah--the Holy Ghost. "This light, which is manifested, is the garment of the Heavenly Concealed," says Idra Suta. And the "heavenly man" is the superior Adam. "No one knows his paths except Macroprosopus" (Long-face)--the Superior active god. *** "Not as I am written will I be read; in this world my name will be written Jehovah and read Adonai," * say the Rabbins, very correctly. Adonai is the Adam Kadmon; he is *FATHER and MOTHER both. By this double mediatorship the Spirit of the "Ancient of the Ancient" descends upon the Microprosopus (Short-face) or the Adam of Eden. And the "Lord God breathes into his nostrils the breath of life."

When the woman separates herself from her androgyne, and becomes

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a distinct individuality, the first story is repeated over again. Both the Father and Son, the two Adams, love her beauty; and then follows the allegory of the temptation and fall. It is in the Kabala, as in the Ophite system, in which both the Ophis and the Ophiomorphos are emanations emblematized as serpents, the former representing Eternity, Wisdom, and Spirit (as in the Chaldean Magism of Aspic-worship and Wisdom-Doctrine in the olden times), and the latter Cunning, Envy, and Matter. Both spirit and matter are serpents; and Adam Kadmon becomes the Ophis who tempts himself--man and woman--to taste of the "Tree of Good and Evil," in order to teach them the mysteries of spiritual wisdom. Light tempts Darkness, and Darkness attracts Light, for Darkness is matter, and "the Highest Light shines not in its Tenebrae." With knowledge comes the temptation of the Ophiomorphos, and he prevails. The dualism of every existing religion is shown forth by the fall. "I have gotten a man from the Lord," exclaims Eve, when the Dualism, Cain and Abel--evil and good--is born. "And the Adam knew Hua, his woman (astu), and she became pregnant and bore Kin, and she said: : Kiniti ais Yava.--I have gained or obtained a husband, even Yava--Is, Ais--man." "Cum arbore peccati Deus creavit seculum."

And now we will compare this system with that of the Jewish Gnostics--the Nazarenes, as well as with other philosophies.

The ISH AMON, the pleroma, or the boundless circle within which lie "all forms," is the THOUGHT of the power divine; it works in SILENCE, and suddenly light is begotten by darkness; it is called the SECOND life; and this one produces, or generates the THIRD. This third light is "the FATHER of all things that live," as EUA is the "mother of all that live." He is the Creator who calls inert matter into life, through his vivifying spirit, and, therefore, is called the ancient of the world. Abatur is the Father who creates the first Adam, who creates in his turn the second. Abatur opens a gate and walks to the dark water (chaos), and looking down into it, the darkness reflects the image of Himself . . . and lo! a SON is formed--the Logos or Demiurge; Fetahil, who is the builder of the material world, is called into existence. According to the Gnostic dogma, this was the Metatron, the Archangel Gabriel, or messenger of life; or, as the biblical allegory has it, the androgynous Adam-Kadmon again, the SON, who, with his Father's spirit, produces the ANOINTED, or Adam before his fall.

When Swayambhuva, the "Lord who exists through himself," feels impelled to manifest himself, he is thus described in the Hindu sacred books.

Having been impelled to produce various beings from his own divine

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substance, he first manifested the waters which developed within themselves a productive seed.

The seed became a germ bright as gold, blazing like the luminary with a thousand beams; and in that egg he was born himself, in the form of BRAHMA, the great principle of all the beings (Manu, book i., slokas 8, 9).

The Egyptian Kneph, or Chnuphis, Divine Wisdom, represented by a serpent, produces an egg from his mouth, from which issues Phtha. In this case Phtha represents the universal germ, as well as Brahma, who is of the neuter gender, when the final a has a diaresis on it; * otherwise it becomes simply one of the names of the Deity. The former was the model of the THREE LIVES of the Nazarenes, as that of the kabalistic "Faces," PHARAZUPHA, which, in its turn, furnished the model for the Christian Trinity of Irenaeus and his followers. The egg was the primitive matter which served as a material for the building of the visible universe; it contained, as well as the Gnostic Pleroma, the kabalistic Shekinah, the man and wife, the spirit and life, "whose light includes all other lights" or life-spirits. This first manifestation was symbolized by a serpent, which is at first divine wisdom, but, falling into generation, becomes polluted. Phtha is the heavenly man, the Egyptian Adam-Kadmon, or Christ, who, in conjunction with the female Holy Ghost, the ZŒ, produces the five elements, air, water, fire, earth, and ether; the latter being a servile copy from the Buddhist A'd, and his five Dhyana Buddhas, as we have shown in the preceding chapter. The Hindu Swayambhuva-Nara, develops from himself the mother-principle, enclosed within his own divine essence--Nari, the immortal Virgin, who, when impregnated by his spirit, becomes Tanmatra, the mother of the five elements--air, water, fire, earth, and ether. Thus may be shown how from the Hindu cosmogony all others proceed.

Knorr von Rosenroth, busying himself with the interpretation of the Kabala, argues that, "In this first state (of secret wisdom), the infinite God Himself can be understood as 'Father' (of the new covenant). But the Light being let down by the Infinite through a canal into the 'primal Adam,' or Messiah, and joined with him, can be applied to the name SON. And the influx emitted down from him (the Son) to the lower parts (of the universe), can be applied to the character of the Holy Ghost." ** Sophia-Achamoth, the half-spiritual, half-material LIFE, which vivifies the inert matter in the depths of chaos, is the Holy Ghost of the Gnostics, and the Spiritus (female) of the Nazarenes. She is--be it re-

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membered--the sister of Christos, the perfect emanation, and both are children or emanations of Sophia, the purely spiritual and intellectual daughter of Bythos, the Depth. For the elder Sophia is Shekinah, the Face of God, "God's Shekinah, which is his image." *

"The Son Zeus-Belus, or Sol-Mithra is an image of the Father, an emanation from the Supreme Light," says Movers. "He passed for Creator." **

"Philosophers say the first air is anima mundi. But the garment (Shekinah) is higher than the first air, since it is joined closer to the En-Soph, the Boundless." *** Thus Sophia is Shekinah, and Sophia-Achamoth the anima mundi, the astral light of the kabalists, which contains the spiritual and material germs of all that is. For the Sophia-Achamoth, like Eve, of whom she is the prototype, is "the mother of all that live."

There are three trinities in the Nazarene system as well as in the Hindu philosophy of the ante and early Vedic period. While we see the few translators of the Kabala, the Nazarene Codex, and other abstruse works, hopelessly floundering amid the interminable pantheon of names, unable to agree as to a system in which to classify them, for the one hypothesis contradicts and overturns the other, we can but wonder at all this trouble, which could be so easily overcome. But even now, when the translation, and even the perusal of the ancient Sanscrit has become so easy as a point of comparison, they would never think it possible that every philosophy--whether Semitic, Hamitic, or Turanian, as they call it, has its key in the Hindu sacred works. Still facts are there, and facts are not easily destroyed. Thus, while we find the Hindu trimurti triply manifested as

Nara (or Para-Pouroucha), Agni, Brahma, the Father,

Nari (Mariama), Vaya, Vishnu, the Mother,

Viradj (Brahma), Surya, Siva, the Son,

and the Egyptian trinity as follows:

Kneph (or Amon), Osiris, Ra (Horus), the Father,

Maut (or Mut), Isis, Isis, the Mother,

Khons, Horus, Malouli, the Son; ****

the Nazarene System runs,

Ferho (Ish-Amon), Mano, Abatur, the Father,

Chaos (dark water), Spiritus (female), Netubto, the Mother,

Fetahil, Ledhaio, Lord Jordan, the Son.

The first is the concealed or non-manifested trinity--a pure abstraction. The other the active or the one revealed in the results of creation,

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proceeding out of the former--its spiritual prototype. The third is the mutilated image of both the others, crystallized in the form of human dogmas, which vary according to the exuberance of the national materialistic fancy.

The Supreme Lord of splendor and of light, luminous and refulgent, before which no other existed, is called Corona (the crown); Lord Ferho, the unrevealed life which existed in the former from eternity; and Lord Jordan--the spirit, the living water of grace. * He is the one through whom alone we can be saved; and thus he answers to the Shekinah, the spiritual garment of En-Soph, or the Holy Ghost. These three constitute the trinity abscondito. The second trinity is composed of the three lives. The first is the similitude of Lord Ferho, through whom he has proceeded forth; and the second Ferho is the King of Light--MANO (Rex Lucis). He is the heavenly life and light, and older than the Architect of heaven and earth. ** The second life is Ish Amon (Pleroma), the vase of election, containing the visible thought of the Iordanus Maximus--the type (or its intelligible reflection), the prototype of the living water, who is the "spiritual Jordan." *** Third life, which is produced by the other two, is ABATUR (Ab, the Parent or Father). This is the mysterious and decrepit "Aged of the Aged," the "Ancient Senem sui obtegentem et grandaevum mundi." This latter third Life is the Father of the Demiurge Fetahil, the Creator of the world, whom the Ophites call Ilda-Baoth, * though Fetahil is the only-begotten one, *the reflection of the Father, Abatur, who begets him by looking into the "dark water";   but the Lord Mano, "the Lord of loftiness, the Lord of all genii," is higher than the Father, in this kabalistic Codex--one is purely spiritual, the other material. So, for instance, while Abatur's "only begotten" one is the genius Fetahil, the Creator of the physical world, Lord Mano, the "Lord of Celsitude," who is the son of Him, who is "the Father of all who preach the Gospel," produces also an "only-begotten" one, the Lord Lehdaio, "a just Lord." He is the Christos, the anointed, who pours out the "grace" of the Invisible Jordan, the Spirit of the Highest Crown.

*

In the Arcanum, "in the assembly of splendor, lighted by MANO, to whom the scintillas of splendor owe their origin," the genii who live in light "rose, they went to the visible Jordan, and flowing water . . . they assembled for a counsel . . . and called forth the Only-Begotten Son

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of an imperishable image, and who cannot be conceived by reflection, Lebdaio, the just Lord, and sprung from Lebdaio, the just lord, whom the life had produced by his word." *

Mano is the chief of the seven Æons, who are Mano (Rex Lucis), Aiar Zivo, Ignis Vivus, Lux, Vita, Aqua Viva (the living water of baptism, the genius of the Jordan), and Ipsa Vita, the chief of the six genii, which form with him the mystic seven. The Nazarene Mano is simply the copy of the Hindu first Manu--the emanation of Manu Swayambhuva--from whom evolve in succession the six other Manus, types of the subsequent races of men. We find them all represented by the apostle-kabalist John in the "seven lamps of fire" burning before the throne, which are the seven spirits of God," ** and in the seven angels bearing the seven vials. Again in Fetahil we recognize the original of the Christian doctrine.

In the Revelation of Joannes Theologos it is said: "I turned and saw in the midst of the seven candlesticks one like unto the Son of man . . . his head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire . . . and his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace" (i. 13, 14, 15). John here repeats, as is well known, the words of Daniel and Ezekiel. "The Ancient of Days . . . whose hair was white as pure wool . . . etc." And "the appearance of a man . . . above the throne . . . and the appearance of fire, and it had brightness round about." *** The fire being "the glory of the Lord." Fetahil is son of the man, the Third Life, and his upper part is represented as white as snow, while standing near the throne of the living fire he has the appearance of a flame.

All these "apocalyptic" visions are based on the description of the "white head" of the Sohar, in whom the kabalistic trinity is united. The white head, "which conceals in its cranium the spirit," and which is environed by subtile fire. The "appearance of a man" is that of Adam Kadmon, through which passes the thread of light represented by the fire. Fetahil is the Vir Novissimus (the newest man), the son of Abatur, * the latter being the "man," or the third *life,  now the third personage of the trinity. John sees "one like unto the son of man," holding in his right hand seven stars, and standing between "seven golden candlesticks" (Revelation *i.). Fetahil takes his "stand on high," according to the will of his father, "the highest Æon who has seven sceptres," and

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seven genii, who astronomically represent the seven planets or stars. He stands "shining in the garment of the Lord's, resplendent by the agency of the genii." * He is the Son of his Father, Life, and his mother, Spirit, or Light. ** The Logos is represented in the Gospel according to John as one in whom was "Life, and the life was the light of men" (i. 4). Fetahil is the Demiurge, and his father created the visible universe of matter through him. *** In the Epistle of Paul to the Ephesians (iii. 9), God is said to have "created all things by Jesus." In the Codex the Parent-LIFE says: "Arise, go, our son first-begotten, ordained for all creatures." * "As the living father hath sent me," says Christ, "God sent his only-begotten son that we might live."  Finally, having performed his work on earth, Fetahil reascends to his father Abatur. "Et qui, relicto quem procreavit mundo, ad Abatur suum patrem contendit," ** "My father sent me . . . I go to the Father," repeats Jesus.

Laying aside the theological disputes of Christianity which try to blend together the Jewish Creator of the first chapter of Genesis with the "Father" of the New Testament, Jesus states repeatedly of his Father that "He is in secret." Surely he would not have so termed the ever-present "Lord God" of the Mosaic books, who showed Himself to Moses and the Patriarchs, and finally allowed all the elders of Israel to look on Himself. * When Jesus is made to speak of the temple at Jerusalem as of his "Father's house," he does not mean the physical building, which he maintains he can destroy and then again rebuild in three days, but of the temple of Solomon; the wise kabalist, who indicates in his Proverbs that every man is the temple of God, or of his own divine spirit. This term of the "Father who is in secret," we find used as much in the Kabala as in the Codex Nazaraeus, and elsewhere. No one has ever seen the wisdom concealed in the "Cranium," and no one has beheld the "Depth" (Bythos). Simon, the Magician, preached "one Father unknown to all." **

We can trace this appellation of a "secret" God still farther back. In the Kabala the "Son" of the concealed Father who dwells in light and glory, is the "Anointed," the Seir-Anpin, who unites in himself all the Sephiroth, he is Christos, or the Heavenly man. It is through Christ that the Pneuma, or the Holy Ghost, creates "all things"

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(Ephesians iii. 9), and produces the four elements, air, water, fire, and earth. This assertion is unquestionable, for we find Irenaeus basing on this fact his best argument for the necessity of there being four gospels. There can be neither more nor fewer than four--he argues. "For as there are four quarters of the world, and four general winds (Καθολικα Πνευματα) . . . it is right that she (the Church) should have four pillars. From which it is manifest that the Word, the maker of all, he who sitteth upon the Cherubim . . . as David says, supplicating his advent, 'Thou that sittest between the Cherubim, shine forth!' For the Cherubim also are four-faced and their faces are symbols of the working of the Son of God." *

We will not stop to discuss at length the special holiness of the four-faced Cherubim, although we might, perhaps, show their origin in all the ancient pagodas of India, in the vehans (or vehicles) of their chief gods; as likewise we might easily attribute the respect paid to them to the kabalistic wisdom, which, nevertheless, the Church rejects with great horror. But, we cannot resist the temptation to remind the reader that he may easily ascertain the several significances attributed to these Cherubs by reading the Kabala. "When the souls are to leave their abode," says the Sohar, holding to the doctrine of the pre-existence of souls in the world of emanations, "each soul separately appears before the Holy King, dressed in a sublime form, with the features in which it is to appear in this world. It is from this sublime form that the image proceeds" (Sohar, iii., p. 104 ab). Then it goes on to say that the types or forms of these faces "are four in number--those of the angel or man, of the lion, the bull, and the eagle." Furthermore, we may well express our wonder that Irenaeus should not have re-enforced his argument for the four gospels--by citing the whole Pantheon of the four-armed Hindu gods!

Ezekiel in representing his four animals, now called Cherubim, as types of the four symbolical beings, which, in his visions support the throne of Jehovah, had not far to go for his models. The Chaldeo-Babylonian protecting genii were familiar to him; the Sed, Alap or Kirub (Cherubim), the bull, with the human face; the Nirgal, human-headed lion; Oustour the Sphinx-man; and the Nathga, with its eagle's head. The religion of the masters--the idolatrous Babylonians and Assyrians--was transferred almost bodily into the revealed Scripture of the Captives, and from thence came into Christianity.

Already, we find Ezekiel addressed by the likeness of the glory of the Lord, "as Son of man." This peculiar title is used repeatedly

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throughout the whole book of this prophet, which is as kabalistic as the "roll of a book" which the "Glory" causes him to eat. It is written within and without; and its real meaning is identical with that of the Apocalypse. It appears strange that so much stress should be laid on this peculiar appellation, said to have been applied by Jesus to himself, when, in the symbolical or kabalistic language, a prophet is so addressed. It is as extraordinary to see Irenaeus indulging in such graphic descriptions of Jesus as to show him, "the maker of all, sitting upon a Cherubim," unless he identifies him with Shekinah, whose usual place was among the Charoubs of the Mercy Seat. We also know that the Cherubim and Seraphim are titles of the "Old Serpent" (the orthodox Devil) the Seraphs being the burning or fiery serpents, in kabalistic symbolism. The ten emanations of Adam Kadmon, called the Sephiroth, have all emblems and titles corresponding to each. So, for instance, the last two are Victory, or Jehovah-Sabaoth, whose symbol is the right column of Solomon, the Pillar Jachin; while GLORY is the left Pillar, or Boaz, and its name is "the Old Serpent," and also "Seraphim and Cherubim." *

The "Son of man" is an appellation which could not be assumed by any one but a kabalist. Except, as shown above, in the Old Testament, it is used but by one prophet--Ezekiel, the kabalist. In their mysterious and mutual relations, the Æons or Sephiroth are represented in the Kabala by a great number of circles, and sometimes by the figure of a MAN, which is symbolically formed out of such circles. This man is Seir-Anpin, and the 243 numbers of which his figure consists relate to the different orders of the celestial hierarchy. The original idea of this figure, or rather the model, may have been taken from the Hindu Brahma, and the various castes typified by the several parts of his body, as King suggests in his Gnostics. In one of the grandest and most beautiful cave-temples at Ellora, Nasak, dedicated to Vishvakarma, son of Brahma, is a representation of this God and his attributes. To one acquainted with Ezekiel's description of the "likeness of four living creatures," every one of which had four faces and the hands of a man under its wings, etc., ** this figure at Ellora must certainly appear absolutely biblical. Brahma is called the father of "man," as well as Jupiter and other highest gods.

It is in the Buddhistic representations of Mount Meru, called by the Burmese Mye-nmo, and by the Siamese Sineru, that we find one of the originals of the Adam Kadmon, Seir-Anpin, the "heavenly man," and of all the Æons, Sephiroth, Powers, Dominions, Thrones, Virtues, and

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Dignities of the Kabala. Between two pillars, which are connected by an arch, the key-stone of the latter is represented by a crescent. This is the domain in which dwells the Supreme Wisdom of A'di Buddha, the Supreme and invisible Deity. Beneath this highest central point comes the circle of the direct emanation of the Unknown--the circle of Brahma with some Hindus, of the first avatar of Buddha, according to others. This answers to Adam Kadmon and the ten Sephiroth. Nine of the emanations are encircled by the tenth, and occasionally represented by pagodas, each of which bears a name which expresses one of the chief attributes of the manifested Deity. Then below come the seven stages, or heavenly spheres, each sphere being encircled by a sea. These are the celestial mansions of the devatas, or gods, each losing somewhat in holiness and purity as it approaches the earth. Then comes Meru itself, formed of numberless circles within three large ones, typifying the trinity of man; and for one acquainted with the numerical value of the letters in biblical names, like that of the "Great Beast," or that of Mithra Μιθρας αβραχας, and others, it is an easy matter to establish the identity of the Meru-gods with the emanations or Sephiroth of the kabalists. Also the genii of the Nazarenes, with their special missions, are all found on this most ancient mythos, a most perfect representation of the symbolism of the "secret doctrine," as taught in archaic ages.

King gives a few hints--though doubtless too insufficient to teach anything important, for they are based upon the calculations of Bishop Newton --as to this mode of finding out mysteries in the value of letters. However, we find this great archaeologist, who has devoted so much time and labor to the study of Gnostic gems, corroborating our assertion. He shows that the entire theory is Hindu, and points out that the durga, or female counterpart of each Asiatic god, is what the kabalists term active Virtue* ** in the celestial hierarchy, a term which the Christian Fathers adopted and repeated, without fully appreciating, and the meaning of which the later theology has utterly disfigured. But to return to Meru.

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The whole is surrounded by the Maha Samut, or the great sea--the astral light and ether of the kabalists and scientists; and within the central circles appears "the likeness of a man." He is the Achadoth of the Nazarenes, the twofold unity, or the androgyne man; the heavenly incarnation, and a perfect representation of Seir-Anpin (short-face), the son, of Arich Anpin (long-face). * This likeness is now represented in many lamaseries by Gautama-Buddha, the last of the incarnated avatars. Still lower, under the Meru, is the dwelling of the great Naga, who is called Rajah Naga, the king-serpent--the serpent of Genesis, the Gnostic Ophis--and the goddess of the earth, Bhumay Nari, or Yama, who waits upon the great dragon, for she is Eve, "the mother of all that live." Still lower is the eighth sphere, the infernal regions. The uppermost regions of Brahma are surrounded by the sun, moon, and planets, the seven stellars of the Nazarenes, and just as they are described in the *Codex.

*

"The seven impostor-Daemons who deceive the sons of Adam. The name of one is Sol; of another Spiritus Venereus, Astro; of the third Nebu, Mercurius a false Messiah; . . . the name of a fourth is Sin Luna; the fifth is Kiun, Saturnus; the sixth, Bel-Zeus; the seventh, Nerig-Mars." ** Then there are "Seven Lives procreated," seven good Stellars, "which are from Cabar Zio, and are those bright ones who shine in their own form and splendor that pours from on high. . . . At the gate of the HOUSE OF LIFE the throne is fitly placed for the Lord of Splendor, and there are THREE habitations." *** The habitations of the Trimurti, the Hindu trinity, are placed beneath the key-stone--the golden crescent, in the representation of Meru. "And there was under his feet (of the God of Israel) as it were a paved work of a sapphire-stone" (Exodus xxiv. 10). Under the crescent is the heaven of Brahma, all paved with sapphires. The paradise of Indra is resplendent with a thousand suns; that of Siva (Saturn), is in the northeast; his throne is formed of lapis-lazuli and the floor of heaven is of fervid gold. "When he sits on the throne he blazes with fire up to the loins." At Hurdwar, during the fair, in which he is more than ever Mahadeva, the highest god, the attributes and emblems sacred to the Jewish "Lord God," may be recognized one by one in those of Siva. The Binlang stone, **** sacred to this Hindu deity, is an unhewn stone like the Beth-el, consecrated by the Patriarch Jacob, and set up by him "for a pillar," and like the latter

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Binlang is anointed. We need hardly remind the student that the linga, the emblem sacred to Siva and whose temples are modelled after this form, is identical in shape, meaning, and purpose with the "pillars" set up by the several patriarchs to mark their adoration of the Lord God. In fact, one of these patriarchal lithoi might even now be carried in the Sivaitic processions of Calcutta, without its Hebrew derivation being suspected. The four arms of Siva are often represented with appendages like wings; he has three eyes and a fourth in the crescent, obtained by him at the churning of the ocean, as Pancha Mukhti Siva has four heads.

In this god we recognize the description given by Ezekiel, in the first chapter of his book, of his vision, in which he beholds the "likeness of a man" in the four living creatures, who had "four faces, four wings," who had one pair of "straight feet . . . which sparkled like the color of burnished brass . . . and their rings were full of eyes round about them four." It is the throne and heaven of Siva that the prophet describes in saying " . . . and there was the likeness of a throne as the appearance of a sapphire stone . . . and I saw as the color of amber (gold) as the appearance of fire around about . . . from his loins even upward, and from the appearance of his loins even downward, I saw as it were the appearance of fire" (Ezekiel i. 27). "And his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace" (Revelation i. 15). "As for their faces . . . one had the face of a cherub, and the face of a lion . . . they also had the face of an ox and the face of an eagle" (Ezekiel i. 10, x. 14). This fourfold appearance which we find in the two cherubims of gold on the two ends of the ark; these symbolic four faces being adopted, moreover, later, one by each evangelist, as may be easily ascertained from the pictures of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, * prefixed to their respective gospels in the Roman Vulgate and Greek *Bibles.

*

"Taaut, the great god of the Phoenicians," says Sanchoniathon, "to express the character of Saturn or Kronos, made his image having four eyes . . . two before, two behind, open and closed, and four wings, two expanded, two folded. The eyes denote that the god sees in sleep, and sleeps in waking; the position of the wings that he flies in rest, and rests in flying."

The identity of Saturn with Siva is corroborated still more when we consider the emblem of the latter, the damara, which is an hour-glass, to show the progress of time, represented by this god in his capacity of a destroyer. The bull Nardi, the vehan of Siva and the most sacred em-

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blem of this god, is reproduced in the Egyptian Apis; and in the bull created by Ormazd and killed by Ahriman. The religion of Zoroaster, all based upon the "secret doctrine," is found held by the people of Eritene; it was the religion of the Persians when they conquered the Assyrians. From thence it is easy to trace the introduction of this emblem of LIFE represented by the Bull, in every religious system. The college of the Magians had accepted it with the change of dynasty; * Daniel is described as a Rabbi, the chief of the Babylonian astrologers and Magi; ** therefore we see the Assyrian little bulls and the attributes of Siva reappearing under a hardly modified form in the cherubs of the Talmudistic Jews, as we have traced the bull Apis in the sphinxes or cherubs of the Mosaic Ark; and as we find it several thousand years later in the company of one of the Christian evangelists, Luke.

Whoever has lived in India long enough to acquaint himself even superficially with the native deities, must detect the similarity between Jehovah and other gods besides Siva. As Saturn, the latter was always held in great respect by the Talmudists. He was held in reverence by the Alexandrian kabalists as the direct inspirer of the law and the prophets; one of the names of Saturn was Israel, and we will show, in time, his identity in a certain way with Abram, which Movers and others hinted at long since. Thus it cannot be wondered at if Valentinus, Basilides, and the Ophite Gnostics placed the dwelling of their Ilda-Baoth, also a destroyer as well as a creator, in the planet Saturn; for it was he who gave the law in the wilderness and spoke through the prophets. If more proof should be required we will show it in the testimony of the canonical Bible itself. In Amos the "Lord" pours vials of wrath upon the people of Israel. He rejects their burnt-offerings and will not listen to their prayers, but inquires of Amos, "have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel?" "But ye have borne the tabernacles of your Moloch and Chiun your images, the star of your god" (v. 25, 26). Who are Moloch and Chiun but Baal--Saturn--Siva, and Chiun, Kivan, the same Saturn whose star the Israelites had made to themselves? There seems no escape in this case; all these deities are identical.

The same in the case of the numerous Logoi. While the Zoroastrian Sosiosh is framed on that of the tenth Brahmanical Avatar, and the fifth Buddha of the followers of Gautama; and we find the former, after having passed part and parcel into the kabalistic system of king Messiah, reflected in the Apostle Gabriel of the Nazarenes, and Æbel-Zivo, the Legatus, sent on earth by the Lord of Celsitude and Light; all of these --

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Hindu and Persian, Buddhist and Jewish, the Christos of the Gnostics and the Philonean Logos--are found combined in "the Word made flesh" of the fourth Gospel. Christianity includes all these systems, patched and arranged to meet the occasion. Do we take up the Avesta--we find there the dual system so prevalent in the Christian scheme. The struggle between Ahriman, * Darkness, and Ormazd, Light, has been going on in the world continually since the beginning of time. When the worst arrives and Ahriman will seem to have conquered the world and corrupted all mankind, then will appear the Saviour of mankind, Sosiosh. He will come seated upon a white horse and followed by an army of good genii equally mounted on milk-white steeds. ** And this we find faithfully copied in the Revelation: "I saw heaven opened, and beheld a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called faithful and true. . . . And the armies which were in heaven followed him upon white horses" (Revelation xix. 11, 14). Sosiosh himself is but a later Persian permutation of the Hindu Vishnu. The figure of this god may be found unto this day representing him as the Saviour, the "Preserver" (the preserving spirit of God), in the temple of Rama. The picture shows him in his tenth incarnation--the Kalki avatar, which is yet to come--as an armed warrior mounted upon a white horse. Waving over his head the sword destruction, he holds in his other hand a discus, made up of rings encircled in one another, an emblem of the revolving cycles or great ages, *** for Vishnu will thus appear but at the end of the Kaliyug, answering to the end of the world expected by our Adventists. "And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword . . . on his head were many crowns" (Revelation xix. 12). Vishnu is often represented with several crowns superposed on his head. "And I saw an angel standing on the Sun" (17). The white horse is the horse of the Sun. * Sosiosh, the Persian Saviour, is also born of a virgin,  and at the end of days he will come as a Redeemer to regenerate the world, but he will be preceded by two prophets, who will come to announce him. **** Hence the Jews who had Moses and Elias, are now waiting for the Messiah. "Then comes the

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general resurrection, when the good will immediately enter into this happy abode--the regenerated earth; and Ahriman and his angels (the devils), * and the wicked, be purified by immersion in a lake of molten metal. . . . Henceforward, all will enjoy unchangeable happiness, and, headed by Sosiosh, ever sing the praises of the Eternal One." ** The above is a perfect repetition of Vishnu in his tenth avatar, for he will then throw the wicked into the infernal abodes in which, after purifying themselves, they will be pardoned--even those devils which rebelled against Brahma, and were hurled into the bottomless pit by Siva, *** as also the "blessed ones" will go to dwell with the gods, over the Mount Meru.

Having thus traced the similarity of views respecting the Logos, Metatron, and Mediator, as found in the Kabala and the Codex of the Christian Nazarenes and Gnostics, the reader is prepared to appreciate the audacity of the Patristic scheme to reduce a purely metaphysical figure into concrete form, and make it appear as if the finger of prophecy had from time immemorial been pointing down the vista of ages to Jesus as the coming Messiah. A theomythos intended to symbolize the coming day, near the close of the great cycle, when the "glad tidings" from heaven should proclaim the universal brotherhood and common faith of humanity, the day of regeneration--was violently distorted into an accomplished fact.

"Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is God," says Jesus. Is this the language of a God? of the second person in the Trinity, who is identical with the First? And if this Messiah, or Holy Ghost of the Gnostic and Pagan Trinities, had come in his person, what did he mean by distinguishing between himself the "Son of man," and the Holy Ghost? "And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but unto him that blasphemeth against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven," he says. **** And how account for the marvellous identity of this very language, with the precepts enunciated, centuries before, by the Kabalists and the "Pagan" initiates? The following are a few instances out of many.

"No one of the gods, no man or Lord, can be good, but only God alone," says Hermes. *

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"To be a good man is impossible, God alone possesses this privilege," repeats Plato, with a slight variation. *

Six centuries before Christ, the Chinese philosopher Confucius said that his doctrine was simple and easy to comprehend (Lun-yu, chap. 5, § 15). To which one of his disciples added: "The doctrine of our Master consists in having an invariable correctness of heart, and in doing toward others as we would that they should do to us." **

"Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles," *** exclaims Peter, long after the scene of Calvary. "There was a man sent from God, whose name was John," * says the fourth Gospel, thus placing the Baptist on an equality with Jesus. John the Baptist, in one of the most solemn acts of his life, that of baptizing Christ, thinks not that he is going to baptize a God, but uses the word man. "This is he of whom I said, after me cometh a man."  Speaking of himself, Jesus says, "You seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth, which *I have heard of God. * Even the blind man of Jerusalem, healed by the great thaumaturgist, full of gratitude and admiration for his benefactor, in narrating the miracle does not call Jesus God, but simply says, ". . . a man that is called Jesus, made clay." *

We do not close the list for lack of other instances and proofs, but simply because what we now say has been repeated and demonstrated by others, many times before us. But there is no more incurable evil than blind and unreasoning fanaticism. Few are the men who, like Dr. Priestley, have the courage to write, "We find nothing like divinity ascribed to Christ before Justin Martyr (A. D. 141), who, from being a philosopher, became a Christian." **

Mahomet appeared nearly six hundred years * after the presumed deicide. The Graeco-Roman world was still convulsed with religious dissensions, withstanding all the past imperial edicts and forcible Christianization. While the Council of Trent was disputing about the Vulgate, the unity of God quietly superseded the trinity, and soon the Mahometans outnumbered the Christians. Why? Because their prophet never sought to identify himself with Allah. Otherwise, it is safe to say, he would not have lived to see his religion flourish. Till the present day Mahometanism has made and is now making more proselytes than Christianity. Buddha Siddhartha came as a simple mortal, centuries before Christ. The religious ethics of this faith are now found to far exceed

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in moral beauty anything ever dreamed of by the Tertullians and Augustines.

The true spirit of Christianity can alone be fully found in Buddhism; partially, it shows itself in other "heathen" religions. Buddha never made of himself a god, nor was he deified by his followers. The Buddhists are now known to far outnumber Christians; they are enumerated at nearly 500,000,000. While cases of conversion among Buddhists, Brahmanists, Mahometans, and Jews become so rare as to show how sterile are the attempts of our missionaries, atheism and materialism spread their gangrenous ulcers and gnaw every day deeper at the very heart of Christianity. There are no atheists among heathen populations, and those few among the Buddhists and Brahmans who have become infected with materialism may always be found to belong to large cities densely thronged with Europeans, and only among educated classes. Truly says Bishop Kidder: "Were a wise man to choose his religion from those who profess it, perhaps Christianity would be the last religion he would choose!"

In an able little pamphlet from the pen of the popular lecturer, J. M. Peebles, M.D., the author quotes, from the London Athenaeum, an article in which are described the welfare and civilization of the inhabitants of Yarkand and Kashgar, "who seem virtuous and happy." "Gracious Heavens!" fervently exclaims the honest author, who himself was once a Universalist clergyman, "Grant to keep Christian missionaries away from 'happy' and heathen Tartary!" *

From the earliest days of Christianity, when Paul upbraided the Church of Corinth for a crime "as is not so much as named among the Gentiles--that one should have his father's wife"; and for their making a pretext of the "Lord's Supper" for debauch and drunkenness (1 Corinthians, v. 1), the profession of the name of Christ has ever been more a pretext than the evidence of holy feeling. However, a correct form of this verse is: "Everywhere the lewd practice among you is heard about, such a lewd practice as is nowhere among the heathen nations--even the having or marrying of the father's wife." The Persian influence would seem to be indicated in this language. The practice existed "nowhere among the nations," except in Persia, where it was esteemed especially meritorious. Hence, too, the Jewish stories of Abraham marrying his sister, Nahor, his niece, Amram his father's sister, and Judah his son's widow, whose children appear to have been legitimate. The Aryan tribes esteemed endogamic marriages, while the Tartars and all barbarous nations required all alliances to be exogamous.

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There was but one apostle of Jesus worthy of that name, and that was Paul. However disfigured were his Epistles by dogmatic hands before being admitted into the Canon, his conception of the great and divine figure of the philosopher who died for his idea can still be traced in his addresses to the various Gentile nations. Only, he who would understand him better yet must study the Philonean Logos reflecting now and then the Hindu Sabda (logos) of the Mimansa school.

As to the other apostles, those whose names are prefixed to the Gospels--we cannot well believe in their veracity when we find them attributing to their Master miracles surrounded by circumstances, recorded, if not in the oldest books of India, at least in such as antedated Christianity, and in the very phraseology of the traditions. Who, in his days of simple and blind credulity, but marvelled at the touching narrative given in the Gospels according to Mark and Luke of the resurrection of the daughter of Jairus? Who has ever doubted its originality? And yet the story is copied entirely from the Hari-Purana, and is recorded among the miracles attributed to Christna. We translate it from the French version:

"The King Angashuna caused the betrothal of his daughter, the beautiful Kalavatti, with the young son of Vamadeva, the powerful King of Antarvedi, named Govinda, to be celebrated with great pomp.

"But as Kalavatti was amusing herself in the groves with her companions, she was stung by a serpent and died. Angashuna tore his clothes, covered himself with ashes, and cursed the day when he was born.

"Suddenly, a great rumor spread through the palace, and the following cries were heard, a thousand times repeated: 'Pacya pitaram; pacya gurum!' 'The Father, the Master!' Then Christna approached, smiling, leaning on the arm of Ardjuna. . . . 'Master!' cried Angashuna, casting himself at his feet, and sprinkling them with his tears, 'See my poor daughter!' and he showed him the body of Kalavatti, stretched upon a mat. . . .

" 'Why do you weep?' replied Christna, in a gentle voice. 'Do you not see that she is sleeping? Listen to the sound of her breathing, like the sigh of the night wind which rustles the leaves of the trees. See, her cheeks resuming their color, her eyes, whose lids tremble as if they were about to open; her lips quiver as if about to speak; she is sleeping, I tell you; and hold! see, she moves, Kalavatti! Rise and walk!'

"Hardly had Christna spoken, when the breathing, warmth, movement, and life returned little by little, into the corpse, and the young girl, obeying the injunction of the demi-god, rose from her couch and

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rejoined her companions. But the crowd marvelled and cried out: 'This is a god, since death is no more for him than sleep!' " *

All such parables are enforced upon Christians, with the addition of dogmas which, in their extraordinary character, leave far behind them the wildest conceptions of heathenism. The Christians, in order to believe in a Deity, have found it necessary to kill their God, that they themselves should live!

And now, the Supreme, unknown one, the Father of grace and mercy, and his celestial hierarchy are managed by the Church as though they were so many theatrical stars and supernumeraries under salary! Six centuries before the Christian era, Xenophanes had disposed of such anthropomorphism by an immortal satire, recorded and preserved by Clement of Alexandria.

"There is one God Supreme. . . . . . . . .

Whose form is not like unto man's, and as unlike his nature;

But vain mortals imagine that gods like themselves are begotten

With human sensations, and voice, and corporeal members;

So if oxen or lions had hands and could work in man's fashion

And trace out with chisel or brush their conception of Godhead

Then would horses depict gods like horses, and oxen like oxen,

Each kind the Divine with its own form and nature endowing." **

And hear Vyasa--the poet-pantheist of India, who, for all the scientists can prove, may have lived, as Jacolliot has it, some fifteen thousand years ago--discoursing on Maya, the illusion of the senses:

"All religious dogmas only serve to obscure the intelligence of man. . . . Worship of divinities, under the allegories of which, is hidden respect for natural laws, drives away truth to the profit of the basest superstitions" (Vyasa Maya)*.

*

It was given to Christianity to paint us God Almighty after the model of the kabalistic abstraction of the "Ancient of Days." From old frescos on cathedral ceilings; Catholic missals, and other icons and images, we now find him depicted by the poetic brush of Gustave Dore. The awful, unknown majesty of Him, whom no "heathen" dared to reproduce in concrete form, is figuring in our own century in Dore's Illustrated Bible. Treading upon clouds that float in mid-air, darkness and chaos behind him and the world beneath his feet, a majestic old man stands, his left hand gathering his flowing robes about him, and his right raised in the gesture of command. He has spoken the Word, and

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from his towering person streams an effulgence of Light--the Shekinah. As a poetic conception, the composition does honor to the artist, but does it honor God? Better, the chaos behind Him, than the figure itself; for there, at least, we have a solemn mystery. For our part, we prefer the silence of the ancient heathens. With such a gross, anthropomorphic, and, as we conceive, blasphemous representation of the First Cause, who can feel surprised at any iconographic extravagance in the representation of the Christian Christ, the apostles, and the putative Saints? With the Catholics St. Peter becomes quite naturally the janitor of Heaven, and sits at the door of the celestial kingdom--a ticket-taker to the Trinity!

In a religious disturbance which recently occurred in one of the Spanish-American provinces, there were found upon the bodies of some of the killed, passports signed by the Bishop of the Diocese and addressed to St. Peter; bidding him "admit the bearer as a true son of the Church." It was subsequently ascertained that these unique documents were issued by the Catholic prelate just before his deluded parishioners went into the fight at the instigation of their priests.

In their immoderate desire to find evidence for the authenticity of the New Testament, the best men, the most erudite scholars even among Protestant divines, but too often fall into deplorable traps. We cannot believe that such a learned commentator as Canon Westcott could have left himself in ignorance as to Talmudistic and purely kabalistic writings. How then is it that we find him quoting, with such serene assurance as presenting "striking analogies to the Gospel of St. John," passages from the work of The Pastor of Hermas, which are complete sentences from the kabalistic literature? "The view which Hermas gives of Christ's nature and work is no less harmonious with apostolic doctrine, and it offers striking analogies to the Gospel of St. John. . . . He (Jesus) is a rock higher than the mountains, able to hold the whole world, ancient, and yet having a new gate! . . . He is older than creation, so that he took counsel with the Father about the creation which he made. . . . No one shall enter in unto him otherwise than by his Son." *

Now while--as the author of Supernatural Religion well proves --

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there is nothing in this which looks like a corroboration of the doctrine taught in the fourth gospel, he omits to state that nearly everything expressed by the pseudo-Hermas in relation to his parabolic conversation with the "Lord" is a plain quotation, with repeated variations, from the Sohar and other kabalistic books. We may as well compare, so as to leave the reader in no difficulty to judge for himself.

"God," says Hermas, "planted the vineyard, that is, He created the people and gave them to His Son; and the Son . . . himself cleansed their sins, etc."; i.e., the Son washed them in his blood, in commemoration of which Christians drink wine at the communion. In the Kabala it is shown that the Aged of the Aged, or "Long-Face," plants a vineyard, the latter typifying mankind; and a vine, meaning Life. The Spirit of "King Messiah" is, therefore, shown as washing his garments in the wine from above, from the creation of the world. * Adam, or A-Dam is "blood." The life of the flesh is in the blood (nephesh--soul), Leviticus xvii. And Adam-Kadmon is the Only-Begotten. Noah also plants a vineyard--the allegorical hot-bed of future humanity. As a consequence of the adoption of the same allegory, we find it reproduced in the Nazarene Codex. Seven vines are procreated, which spring from Iukabar Ziva, and Ferho (or Parcha) Raba waters them. ** When the blessed will ascend among the creatures of Light, they shall see Iavar-Zivo, Lord of LIFE, and the First VINE! *** These kabalistic metaphors are thus naturally repeated in the Gospel according to John (xv. 1): "I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman." In Genesis (xlix.), the dying Jacob is made to say, "The sceptre shall not depart from Judah (the lion's whelp), nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh (Siloh) comes. . . . Binding his colt unto the vine, and his ass's colt unto the choice vine, he washed his garments in wine, and his clothes in the blood of grapes." Shiloh is "King Messiah," as well as the Shiloh in Ephraim, which was to be made the capital and the place of the sanctuary. In The Targum of Onkelos, the Babylonian, the words of Jacob read: "Until the King Messiah shall come." The prophecy has failed in the Christian as well as in the kabalistico-Jewish sense. The sceptre has departed from Judah, whether the Messiah has already or will come, unless we believe, with the kabalists, that Moses was the first Messiah, who transferred his soul to Joshua--Jesus. ****

Says Hermas: "And, in the middle of the plain, he showed me a great white rock, which had risen out of the plain, and the rock was

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higher than the mountains, rectangular, so as to be able to hold the whole world; but that rock was old, having a gate hewn out of it, and the hewing out of the gate seemed to me to be recent." In the Sohar, we find: "To 40,000 superior worlds the white of the skull of His Head (of the most Sacred Ancient in absconditus) is extended. * . . . When Seir (the first reflection and image of his Father, the Ancient of the Ancient) will, through the mystery of the seventy names of Metatron, descend into Iezirah (the third world), he will open a new gate. . . . The Spiritus Decisorius will cut and divide the garment (Shekinah) into two parts. ** . . . At the coming of King Messiah, from the sacred cubical stone of the Temple a white light will be arising during forty days. This will expand, until it encloses the whole world. . . . At that time King Messiah will allow himself to be revealed, and will be seen coming out of the gate of the garden of Odan (Eden). 'He will be revealed in the land Galil.' *** . . . When 'he has made satisfaction for the sins of Israel, he will lead them on through a new gate to the seat of judgment.' * At the Gate of the House of Life, *the throne is prepared for the Lord of Splendor." ***

Further on, the commentator introduces the following quotation: "This rock and this gate are the Son of God. 'How, Lord,' I said, 'is the rock old and the gate new?' 'Listen,' He said, 'and understand, thou ignorant man. The Son of God is older than all of his creation, so that he was a Councillor with the Father in His works of creation; and for this is he old.' " **

Now, these two assertions are not only purely kabalistic, without even so much as a change of expression, but Brahmanical and Pagan likewise. "Vidi virum excellentem coeli terraeque conditore natu majorem. . . . I have seen the most excellent (superior) MAN, who is older by birth than the maker of heaven and earth," says the kabalistic Codex. * The Eleusinian Dionysus, whose particular name was Iacchos (Iaccho, Iahoh) *--the God from whom the liberation of souls was expected--was considered older than the Demiurge. At the mysteries of the Anthesteria at the lakes (the Limnae), after the usual baptism by purification of water, the Mystae *were made to pass through to another door (gate), and one

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particularly for that purpose, which was called "the gate of Dionysus," and that of "the purified."

In the Sohar, the kabalists are told that the work-master, the Demiurge, said to the Lord: "Let us make man after our image." * In the original texts of the first chapter of Genesis, it stands: "And the Elohim (translated as the Supreme God), who are the highest gods or powers, said: Let us make man in our (?) image, after our likeness." In the Vedas, Brahma holds counsel with Parabrahma, as to the best mode to proceed to create the world.

Canon Westcott, quoting Hermas, shows him asking: "And why is the gate new, Lord? I said. 'Because,' he replied, 'he was manifested at the last of the days of the dispensation; for this cause the gate was made new, in order that they who shall be saved might enter by it into the Kingdom of God.' " ** There are two peculiarities worthy of note in this passage. To begin with, it attributes to "the Lord" a false statement of the same character as that so emphasized by the Apostle John, and which brought, at a later period, the whole of the orthodox Christians, who accepted the apostolic allegories as literal, to such inconvenient straits. Jesus, as Messiah, was not manifested at the last of the days; for the latter are yet to come, notwithstanding a number of divinely-inspired prophecies, followed by disappointed hopes, as a result, to testify to his immediate coming. The belief that the "last times" had come, was natural, when once the coming of King Messiah had been acknowledged. The second peculiarity is found in the fact that the prophecy could have been accepted at all, when even its approximate determination is a direct contradiction of Mark, who makes Jesus distinctly state that neither the angels, nor the Son himself, know of that day or that hour. *** We might add that, as the belief undeniably originated with the Apocalypse, it ought to be a self-evident proof that it belonged to the calculations peculiar to the kabalists and the Pagan sanctuaries. It was the secret computation of a cycle, which, according to their reckoning, was ending toward the latter part of the first century. It may also be held as a corroborative proof, that the Gospel according to Mark, as well as that ascribed to John, and the Apocalypse, were written by men, of whom neither was sufficiently acquainted with the other. The Logos was first definitely called petra (rock) by Philo; the word, moreover, as we have shown elsewhere, means, in Chaldaic and Phoenician, "interpreter." Justin Martyr calls him, throughout his works, "angel," and makes a clear distinction between the Logos and God the Creator.

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"The Word of God is His Son . . . and he is also called Angel and Apostle, for he declares whatever we ought to know (interprets), and is sent to declare whatever is disclosed." *

"Adan Inferior is distributed into its own paths, into thirty-two sides of paths, yet it is not known to any one but Seir. But no one knows the SUPERIOR ADAN nor His paths, except that Long Face"--the Supreme God. ** Seir is the Nazarene "genius," who is called Æbel Zivo; and Gabriel Legatus--also "Apostle Gabriel." *** The Nazarenes held with the kabalists that even the Messiah who was to come did not know the "Superior Adan," the concealed Deity; no one except the Supreme God; thus showing that above the Supreme Intelligible Deity, there is one still more secret and unrevealed. Seir-Anpin is the third God, while "Logos," according to Philo Judaeus, is the second one. * This is distinctly shown in the Codex. "The false Messiah shall say: "I am Deus, son of Deus; my Father sent me here. . . . I am the first Legate, *I am Æbel Zivo, I am come from on high! But distrust him; for he will not be Æbel Zivo. Æbel Zivo will not permit himself to be seen in this age."  Hence the belief of some Gnostics that it was not Æbel Zivo (Archangel Gabriel) who "overshadowed" Mary, but Ilda-Baoth, who formed the material body of Jesus; Christos *uniting himself with him only at the moment of baptism in the Jordan.

Can we doubt Nork's assertion that "the Bereshith Rabba, the oldest part of the Midrash Rabboth, was known to the Church Fathers in a Greek translation"? **

But if, on the one hand, they were sufficiently acquainted with the different religious systems of their neighbors to have enabled them to build a new religion alleged to be distinct from all others, their ignorance of the Old Testament itself, let alone the more complicated questions of Grecian metaphysics, is now found to have been deplorable. "So, for instance, in Matthew xxvii. 9 f., the passage from Zechariah xi. 12, 13, is attributed to Jeremiah," says the author of Supernatural Religion. "In Mark i. 2, a quotation from Malachi iii. 1, is as-

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cribed to Isaiah. In 1 Corinthians, ii. 9, a passage is quoted as Holy Scripture, which is not found in the Old Testament at all, but which is taken, as Origen and Jerome state, from an apocryphal work, The Revelation of Elias (Origen: Tract. xxxv.), and the passage is similarly quoted by the so-called Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians (xxxiv.). How reliable are the pious Fathers in their explanations of divers heresies may be illustrated in the case of Epiphanius, who mistook the Pythagorean sacred Tetrad, called in the Valentinian Gnosis, Kol-Arbas, for a heretic leader. * What with the involuntary blunders, and deliberate falsifications of the teachings of those who differed in views with them; the canonization of the mythological Aura Placida (gentle breeze), into a pair of Christian martyrs--St. Aura and St. Placida; ** the deification of a spear and a cloak, under the names of SS. Longimus and Amphibolus; *** and the Patristic quotations from prophets, of what was never in those prophets at all; one may well ask in blank amazement whether the so-called religion of Christ has ever been other than an incoherent dream, since the death of the Great Master.

So malicious do we find the holy Fathers in their unrelenting persecution of pretended "haeresies," * that we see them telling, without hesitation the most preposterous untruths, and inventing entire narratives, the better to impress their own otherwise unsupported arguments upon ignorance. If the mistake in relation to the tetrad had at first originated as a simple consequence of an unpremeditated blunder of Hippolytus, the explanations of Epiphanius and others who fell into the same absurd error ** have a less innocent look. When Hippolytus gravely denounces the great heresy of the Tetrad, Kol-Arbas, and states that the imaginary Gnostic leader is, "Kolarbasus, who endeavors to explain

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religion by measures and numbers," * we may simply smile. But when Epiphanius, with abundant indignation, elaborates upon the theme, "which is Heresy XV.," and pretending to be thoroughly acquainted with the subject, adds: "A certain Heracleon follows after Colarbasus, which is Heresy XVI.," ** then he lays himself open to the charge of deliberate falsification.

If this zealous Christian can boast so unblushingly of having caused "by his information seventy women, even of rank, to be sent into exile, through the seductions of some in whose number he had himself been drawn into joining their sect," he has left us a fair standard by which to judge him. C. W. King remarks, very aptly, on this point, that "it may reasonably be suspected that this worthy renegade had in this case saved himself from the fate of his fellow-religionists by turning evidence against them, on the opening of the persecution." ***

And thus, one by one, perished the Gnostics, the only heirs to whose share had fallen a few stray crumbs of the unadulterated truth of primitive Christianity. All was confusion and turmoil during these first centuries, till the moment when all these contradictory dogmas were finally forced upon the Christian world, and examination was forbidden. For long ages it was made a sacrilege, punishable with severe penalties, often death, to seek to comprehend that which the Church had so conveniently elevated to the rank of divine mystery. But since biblical critics have taken upon themselves to "set the house in order," the cases have become reversed. Pagan creditors now come from every part of the globe to claim their own, and Christian theology begins to be suspected of complete bankruptcy. Such is the sad result of the fanaticism of the "orthodox" sects, who, to borrow an expression of the author of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," never were, like the Gnostics, "the most polite, the most learned, and most wealthy of the Christian name." And, if not all of them "smelt garlic," as Renan will have it, on the other hand, none of these Christian saints have ever shrunk from spilling their neighbor's blood, if the views of the latter did not agree with their own.

And so all our philosophers were swept away by the ignorant and superstitious masses. The Philaletheians, the lovers of truth, and their eclectic school, perished; and there, where the young Hypatia had taught the highest philosophical doctrines; and where Ammonius Saccas had explained that "the whole which Christ had in view was to reinstate and restore to its primitive integrity the wisdom of the ancients--to reduce

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within bounds the universally prevailing dominion of superstition . . . and to exterminate the various errors that had found their way into the different popular religions" *--there, we say, freely raved the ὁι πολλοι of Christianity. No more precepts from the mouth of the "God-taught philosopher," but others expounded by the incarnation of a most cruel, fiendish superstition.

"If thy father," wrote St. Jerome, "lies down across thy threshold, if thy mother uncovers to thine eyes the bosom which suckled thee, trample on thy father's lifeless body, trample on thy mother's bosom, and, with eyes unmoistened and dry, fly to the Lord who calleth thee"! !

This sentence is equalled, if not outrivalled, by this other, pronounced in a like spirit. It emanates from another father of the early Church, the eloquent Tertullian, who hopes to see all the "philosophers" in the gehenna fire of Hell. "What shall be the magnitude of that scene! . . . How shall I laugh! How shall I rejoice! How shall I triumph when I see so many illustrious kings who were said to have mounted into heaven, groaning with Jupiter, their god, in the lowest darkness of hell! Then shall the soldiers who have persecuted the name of Christ burn in more cruel fire than any they had kindled for the saints!" **

These murderous expressions illustrate the spirit of Christianity till this day. But do they illustrate the teachings of Christ? By no means. As Eliphas Levi says, "The God in the name of whom we would trample on our mother's bosom we must see in the hereafter, a hell gaping widely at his feet, and an exterminating sword in his hand. . . . Moloch burned children but a few seconds; it was reserved to the disciples of a god who is alleged to have died to redeem humanity on the cross, to create a new Moloch whose burning stake is eternal!" ***

That this spirit of true Christian love has safely crossed nineteen centuries and rages now in America, is fully instanced in the case of the rabid Moody, the revivalist, who exclaims: "I have a son, and no one but God knows how I love him; but I would see those beautiful eyes dug out of his head to-night, rather than see him grow up to manhood and go down to the grave without Christ and without hope!!"

To this an American paper, of Chicago, very justly responds: "This is the spirit of the inquisition, which we are told is dead. If Moody in his zeal would 'dig out' the eyes of his darling son, to what lengths may he not go with the sons of others, whom he may love less? It is the spirit of Loyola, gibbering in the nineteenth century, and prevented from lighting the fagot flame and heating red-hot the instruments of torture only by the arm of law."

Footnotes

212:* "Kabbala Denudata"; preface to the "Sohar," ii., p. 242.

212:** See Champollion's "Egypte."

212:*** "Idra Rabba," vi., p. 58.

213:* Idra Suta: "Sohar," ii.

214:* Idra Suta: "Sohar," iii., p. 288 a.

214: Ego sum qui sum (see "Bible").

214:*** See "Institutes of Manu," translated by Sir William Jones.

214:**** Champollion.

214:* We are fully aware that some Christian kabalists term En-Soph the "Crown," p. 215 identify him with Sephira; call En-Soph "an emanation from God," and make the ten Sephiroth comprise "En-Soph" as a unity. They also very erroneously reverse the first two emanations of Sephira--Chochma and Binah. The greatest kabalists have always held Chochma (Wisdom) as a male and active intelligence, Jah , and placed it under the No. 2 on the right side of the triangle, whose apex is the crown, while Binah (Intelligence) or , is under No. 3 on the left hand. But the latter, being represented by its divine name as Jehovah , very naturally showed the God of Israel as only a third emanation, as well as a feminine, passive principle. Hence when the time came for the Talmudists to transform their multifarious deities into one living God, they resorted to their Masoretic points and combined to transform Jehovah into Adonai, "the Lord." This, under the persecution of the Mediaeval kabalists by the Church, also forced some of the former to change their female Sephiroth into male, and vice versa, so as to avoid being accused of disrespect and blasphemy to Jehovah; whose name, moreover, by mutual and secret agreement they accepted as a substitute for Jah, or the mystery name IAO. Alone the initiated knew of it, but later it gave rise to a great confusion among the uninitiated. It would be worth while--were it not for lack of space--to quote a few of the many passages in the oldest Jewish authorities, such as Rabbi Akiba, and the "Sohar," which corroborate our assertion. Chochma-Wisdom is a male principle everywhere, and Binah-Jehovah, a female potency. The writings of Irenaeus, Theodoret, and Epiphanius, teeming with accusations against the Gnostics and "Haeresies," repeatedly show Simon Magus and Cerinthus making of Binah the feminine divine Spirit which inspired Simon. Binah is Sophia, and the Sophia of the Gnostics is surely not a male potency, but simply the feminine Wisdom, or Intelligence. (See any ancient "Arbor Kabbalistica," or Tree of the Sephiroth.) Eliphas Levi, in the "Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. i., pp. 223 and 231, places Chochma as No. 2 and as a male Sephiroth on the right hand of the Tree. In the "Kabala" the three male Sephiroth--Chochma, Chesed, Netsah--are known as the Pillar of Mercy; and the three feminine on the left, namely, Binah, Geburah, Hod, are named the Pillar of Judgment; while the four Sephiroth of the centre--Kether, Tiphereth, Jesod, and Malchuth--are called the Middle Pillar. And, as Mackenzie, in the "Royal Masonic Cyclopaedia," shows, "there is an analogy in these three pillars to the three Pillars of Wisdom, Strength, and Beauty in a Craft Lodge of Masonry, while the En-Soph forms the mysterious blazing star, or mystic light of the East" (p. 407).

216:* Justin: "Cum. Trypho," p. 284.

216:** A division indicative of time.

216: Sanchoniathon calls time the oldest Æon, Protogonos, the "first-born.*"

216:**** Philo Judaeus: "Cain and his Birth," p. xvii.

216:* Azrael, angel of death, is also Israel. Ab-ram means father of elevation, high-placed father, for Saturn is the highest or outmost planet.

216:** See Genesis xiii. 2.

216:* Saturn is generally represented as a very old man, with a sickle in his hand.

217:* Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 85.

220:* Idra Suta: "Sohar," iii., p. 292 b.

220:** Bereshith Rabba: "Parsha," ix.

220:*** "Sohar," i., p. 20 a.

220: "The Sanscrit s," says Max Muller, "is represented by the z and h. Thus the geographical name 'hapta hendu,' which occurs in the 'Avesta,' becomes intelligible, if we retranslate the z and h into the Sanscrit s. For 'Sapta Sindhu,' or the seven rivers, is the old Vaidic name for India itself" ("Chips," vol. i., p. 81). The "Avesta" is the spirit of the "Vedas"--the esoteric meaning made partially known.

221: What is generally understood in the "Avesta" system as a thousand *years, means, in the esoteric doctrine, a cycle of a duration known but to the initiates and which has an allegorical sense.

221:** Matter: "Histoire Critique du Gnosticisme," pl. x.

222:* Idra Suta: "Sohar," iii., p. 288.

222:** Ibid., sect. ii.

222:*** Ibid., vii.

222: Jam vero quoniam hoc in loco recondita est illa plane non utuntur, et tantum de parte lucis ejus particepant quae demittitur et ingreditur intra filum Ain Soph protensum e Persona (Al-God) deorum: intratque et perrumpit et transit per Adam primum occultum usque in statum dispositionis transitque per eum a capite usque ad pedes ejus: et in eo est figura hominis ("Kabbala Denudata," ii., p. 246).

222:* "Sohar," i., p. 51 a.

223:* Book iii., p. 290.

223:** "Idra Rabba," §§ 541, 542.

223:*** Ibid., iii., p. 36.

223:**** Ibid., p. 171.

223:* "Nat. und Urspr. d. Emanationslehre b. d. Kabbalisten," p. ii.

223:** "Irenaeus," p. 637.

224:* "Idra Suta," ix.; "Kabbala Denudata"; see Pythagoras: "Monad."

224:** "Codex Nazaraeus," i., p. 145.

224:*** "Idra Rabba," viii., pp. 107-109.

224:**** "Auszuge aus dem Sohar," p. 11.

226: He is the universal and spiritual germ of all* things.

226:** "Ad. Kabb. Chr.," p. 6.

227:* "Sohar," p. 93.

227:** "Movers," p. 265.

227:*** "Kabbala Denudata," vol. ii., p. 236.

227:**** Champollion, Junior: "Lettres."

228:* "Codex Nazaraeus," vol. ii., pp. 47-57.

228:** Ibid., vol. i., p. 145.

228:*** Ibid., vol. ii., p. 211.

228:**** Ibid., vol. i., p. 308.

228:* Sophia-Achamoth also begets her son Ilda-Baoth, the Demiurge, by looking into chaos or matter, and by coming in contact with it.

229:* "Codex Nazaraeus," vol. ii., p. 109. See "Sod, the Son of the Man," for translation.

229:** Revelation iv. 5.

229:*** Ezekiel.

229:**** "Codex Nazaraeus," vol. ii., p. 127.

229:* The first androgyne duad being considered a unit in all the secret computations, is, therefore, the Holy Ghost.

230:* "Codex Nazaraeus," vol. iii., p. 59.

230:** Ibid., vol. i., p. 285.

230:*** Ibid., vol. i., p. 309.

230:**** Ibid., vol. i., p. 287. See "Sod, the Son of the Man," p. 101.

230:* John iv. 9.

230:** "Codex Nazaraeus," vol. ii., p. 123.

230:* "Then went up Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel. And they saw the God of Israel," Exodus xxiv. 9, 10.

230:** Irenaeus: "Clementine Homilies," I., xxii., p. 118.

231:* "Adv. Haes.," III., ii., 18.

232:* See King's "Gnostics."

232:** Ezekiel i.-ii.

233:* "Gnostics and their Remains."

233: "Although this science is commonly supposed to be peculiar to the Jewish Talmudists, there is no doubt that they borrowed the idea from a foreign source, and that from the Chaldeans, the founders of magic art," says King, in the "Gnostics." The titles Iao and Abraxas, etc., instead of being recent Gnostic figments, were indeed holy names, borrowed from the most ancient formulae of the East. Pliny must allude to them when he mentions the virtues ascribed by the Magi to amethysts engraved with the names of the sun and moon, names not expressed in either the Greek or Latin tongues. In the "Eternal Sun," the "Abraxas," the "Adonai," of these gems, we recognize the very amulets ridiculed by the philosophic Pliny ("Gnostics," pp. 79, 80); Virtutes (miracles) as employed by Irenaeus.

234: So called to distinguish the short-face, who is exterior, *"from the venerable sacred ancient" (the "Idra Rabba," iii., 36; v 54). Seir-Anpin is the "image of the Father." "He that hath seen me hath seen my Father" (John xiv. 9).

234:** "Codex Nazaraeus," vol. iii., p. 57.

234:*** Ibid., vol. iii., p. 61.

234:**** This stone, of a sponge-like surface, is found in Narmada and seldom to be seen in other places.

235:* John has an eagle near him; Luke, a bull; Mark, a lion; and Matthew, an angel--the kabalistic quaternary of the Egyptian Tarot.

236:* See Matter, upon the subject.

236:** Consult Book of Daniel, iv., v.

237: Ahriman, the production of Zoroaster, is so called in hatred of the Arias or Aryas, the Brahmans against whose dominion the Zoroastrians had revolted. Although an Arya (a noble, a sage) himself, Zoroaster, as in the case of the Devas whom he disgraced from gods to the position of devils, *hesitated not to designate this type of the spirit of evil under the name of his enemies, the Brahman-Aryas. The whole struggle of Ahura-mazd and Ahriman is but the allegory of the great religious and political war between Brahmanism and Zoroastrianism.

237:** "Nork," ii., 146.

237:*** Rev. Mr. Maurice takes it also to mean the cycles.

237:**** "Duncker," ii., 363; Spiegel's "Avesta," i., 32, 34.

237:* See the "Book of Dehesh," 47.

237:** See King's translation of the "Zend Avesta," in his "Gnostics," p. 9.

238:* The daevas or devils of the Iranians contrast with the devas or deities of India.

238:** "Nork," ii., 146.

238:* The Bishop of Ephesus, 218 A.D.; Eusebius: "H. E." iii., 31. Origen stoutly maintained the doctrine of eternal punishment to be erroneous. He held that at the second advent of Christ even the devils among the damned would be forgiven. The eternal damnation is a later Christian thought.

238:**** Luke xii. 10.

238:* "Hermes Trismegistus," vi. 55.

239:* Plato Protogoras; "Cory," p. 274.

239:** Panthier: "La Chine," ii., 375; "Sod, the Son of the Man," p. 97.

239:*** Acts ii. 22.

239:**** John i. 6.

239:* Ibid., 30.

239:** John viii. 40.

239:* Ibid., ix. 11.

239:** Priestley: "History of Early Christianity," p. 2, sect. 2.

239:*** Mahomet was born in 571 A. D.

240:* J. M. Peebles: "Jesus--Man, Myth, or God?"

242:* Translated from the "Hari-Purana," by Jacolliot: "Christna, et le Christ."

242:** Clement: "Al. Strom.," v. 14, § 110; translation given in "Supernatural Religion," vol. i, p. 77.

243: This work, "The Pastor of Hermas," is no longer extant, but appears only in the "Stichometry" of Nicephorus; it is now considered an apocrypha. But, in the days of Irenaeus, it was quoted as Holy Scripture (see "Sup. Religion," vol. i., p. 257) by the Fathers, held to be divinely inspired, and publicly read in the churches (Iraenus: "Adv. Haer.," iv., 20). When Tertullian became a Montanist he rejected it, after having asserted *its divinity (Tertullian: "De Orat.," p. 12).

244:* "Sohar," xl., p. 10.

244:** "Codex Nazaraeus," vol. iii., pp. 60, 61.

244:*** Ibid., vol. ii., p. 281; vol. iii., p. 59.

244: We must remind the reader, in this connection, that Joshua and Jesus are one and the same name. In the Slavonian Bibles Joshua reads--Iessus (or Jesus), Navin.

245:* "Idra Rabba," vol. iii., § 41; the "Sohar."

245:** "Kabbala Denudata," vol. ii., p. 230; the "Book of the Babylonian Companions," p. 35.

245:*** "Sohar Ex.," p. 11.

245:**** "Midrash Hashirim"; "Rabbi Akaba"; "Midrash Koheleth," vol. ii., p. 45.

245:* "Codex Nazaraeus," vol. iii., p. 60.

245:** "On the Canon," p. 178 ff.

245:* Vol. ii., p. 57; Norberg's "Onomasticon"; "Sod, the Son of the Man," p. 103.

245:** "Preller," vol. i., p. 484; K. O. Muller: "History of Greek Literature," p. 238; "Movers," p. 553.

246:* "Sohar," vol. i., fol. 25.

246:** "Simil.," vol. ix., p. 12; "Supernatural Religion," vol. i., p. 257.

246:*** Mark xiii. 32.

247:* "Apolog.," vol. i., p. 63.

247:** "Idra Rabba," x., p. 177.

247:*** "Codex Nazaraeus," vol. i., p. 23.

247: Philo says that the Logos is the interpreter of the highest God, and argues, "that he must be the God of us imperfect beings" ("Leg. Alleg.," iii., § 73). According to his opinion man was not made in the likeness of the most High God, the Father of all, but in that of the second God who is his word--Logos" (Philo: "Fragments," 1; ex. Euseb. "Praepar. Evang.," vii., 13).

247:* "Codex Nazaraeus," p. 57; "Sod, the Son of the Man," p. 59.

247:** "Hundert und ein Frage," p. xvii.; Dunlap: "Sod, the Son of the Man," p. 87; the author, who quotes Nork, says that parts of the "Midrashim" and the "Targum" of Onkelos, antedate the "New Testament."

248: Writing upon Ptolemaeus and Heracleon, the author of "Supernatural Religion" (vol. ii., p. 217) says that "the inaccuracy of the Fathers keeps pace with their want of critical judgment," and then proceeds to illustrate this particularly ridiculous blunder committed by Epiphanius, in common with Hippolytus, Tertullian, and Philostrius. "Mistaking a passage of Irenaeus, 'Adv. Haer.,' i., p. 14, regarding the Sacred Tetrad (Kol-Arbas), Hippolytus supposes Irenaeus to refer to another heretic leader." He at once treats the Tetrad as such a leader named "Colarbasus," and after dealing (vi., 4) with the doctrines of Secundus, and Ptolemaeus, and Heracleon, he proposes, §5, to show, "what are the opinions held by Marcus and Colarbasus," these *two being, according to him, the successors of the school of Valentinus (cf. Bunsen: "Hippolytus, U. S. Zeit.," p. 54 f.; "Ref. Omn. Haer.," iv., § 13).

248:** See Godf. Higgins: "Anacalypsis."

248:*** Inman: "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 84.

248:** Meaning--holding up of different views.

248:* "This absurd mistake," remarks the author of "Supernatural Religion," vol. ii., p. 218, "shows how little these writers knew of the Gnostics of whom they wrote, and how the one ignorantly follows the other."

249:* "Ref. Omn. Haer.," iv., §13.

249:** Epiph.: "Haer.," xxxvi., § 1, p. 262 (quoted in "Supernatural Religion"). See Volkmar's "Die Colarbasus-gnosis" in Niedner's "Zeitschr. Hist. Theol."

249:*** "Gnostics and their Remains," p. 182 f., note 3.

250:* Mosheim.

250:** Tertullian: "Despectae," ch. xxx.

250:*** Mosheim: "Eccles. Hist.," c. v., § 5.

**

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