Page 18 (part 5)

Divested of their modern repulsive crudeness, such views of nature and man, on the authority of the celestial bodies and their mysteries, [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- [[Footnote continued from previous page]] final stage of the SACRED MYSTERIES. " Had Mr. Staniland Wake been a Theosophist, he might have added that the narrow upward passage leading to the King's chamber had a "narrow gate" indeed; the same "strait gate" which "leadeth unto life," or the new spiritual re-birth alluded to by Jesus in Matthew vii. 13 et seq; and that it is this gate in the Initiation temple, that the writer who recorded the words alleged to have been spoken by an Initiate, was thinking of. * All we have said in Isis is now found corroborated in the "Egyptian Mystery; or The Source of Measures," by those readings of the Bible with the numerical and geometrical keys thereto. [[Vol. 1, Page]] 319 MOSES COPIED FROM SARGON. will unveil the evolutions of the human mind and show how natural was such a course of thought. The so-called phallic symbols have become offensive only because of the element of materiality and animality in them. As they originated with the archaic races, which, issuing to their personal knowledge from an androgyne ancestry, were the first phenomenal manifestations in their own sight of the separation of sexes and the ensuing mystery of creating in their turn -- such symbols were but natural. If later races have degraded them, especially the "chosen people," this does not affect the origin of those symbols. The little Semitic tribe -- one of the smallest branchlets from the commingling of the 4th and 5th sub-races (the Mongolo-Turanian and the Indo-European, so-called, after the sinking of the great Continent) -- could only accept its symbology in the spirit which was given to it by the nations from which it was derived. Perchance, in the Mosaic beginnings, that symbology was not as crude as it became later under the handling of Ezra, who remodelled the whole Pentateuch. For the glyph of Pharaoh's daughter (the woman), the Nile (the Great Deep and Water), and the baby-boy found floating therein in the ark of rushes, has not been primarily composed for, or by, Moses. It has been found anticipated in the Babylonian fragments on the tiles, in the story of King Sargon,* who lived far earlier than Moses. Now, what is the logical inference? Most assuredly that which gives us the right to say that the story told of Moses by Ezra had been learned by him while at Babylon, [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * On page 224 of Assyrian Antiquities Mr. George Smith says: "In the palace of Sennacherib at Kouyunjik I found another fragment of the curious history of Sargon. . . . published in my translation in the Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology , vol. I. part I. p . 46." The capital of Sargon, the Babylonian Moses, "was the great city of Agadi, called by the Semitics Akkad -- mentioned in Genesis as the capital of Nimrod." ( Gen. x. 10) . . . "Akkad lay near the City of Sippara on the Euphrates and North of Babylon." ( See Isis , vol. II . p. 442-3,) Another strange coincidence is found in the fact that the name of the neighbouring above-mentioned City of Sippara is the same as the name of the wife of Moses -- Zipporah (Exodus ii.). Of course the story is a clever addition by Ezra, who could not be ignorant of it. This curious story is found on fragments of tablets from Kouyunjik, and reads as follows: -- 1. Sargona, the powerful king, the king of Akkad am I. 2. My mother was a princess, my father I did not know; a brother of my father ruled over the country. 3. In the city of Azupiran, which is by the side of the River Euphrates. 4. My mother, the princess, conceived me; in difficulty she brought me forth. 5. She placed me in an ark of rushes, with bitumen my exit she sealed up. 6. She launched me in the river, which did not drown me. 7. The river carried me, to Akki the water-carrier it brought me. 8. Akki, the water-carrier, in tenderness of bowels, lifted me, etc., etc. And now Exodus (ii): "And when she (Moses' mother) could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein, and she laid it in the flags by the river's brink." [[Vol. 1, Page]] 320 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. and that he applied the allegory told of Sargon to the Jewish lawgiver. In short, that Exodus was never written by Moses, but re-fabricated from old materials by Ezra. And if so, then why should not other symbols and glyphs far more crude in their phallic element have been added by this adept in the later Chaldean and Sabaean phallic worship? We are taught that the primeval faith of the Israelites was quite different from that which was developed centuries later by the Talmudists, and before them by David and Hezekiah. All this, notwithstanding the exoteric element, as now found in the two Testaments, is quite sufficient to class the Bible among esoteric works, and to connect its secret system with Indian, Chaldean, and Egyptian symbolism. The whole cycle of biblical glyphs and numbers as suggested by astronomical observations -- astronomy and theology being closely connected -- is found in Indian exoteric, as well as esoteric, systems. These figures and their symbols, the signs of the Zodiac, the planets, their aspects and nodes -- the last term having now passed even into our modern botany to distinguish male and female plants (the unisexual, polygamous, monoecious, dioecious, etc., etc.) -- are known in astronomy as sextiles , quartiles and so on, and have been used for ages and aeons by the archaic nations, and in one sense have the same meaning as the Hebrew numerals. The earliest forms of elementary geometry must have certainly been suggested by the observation of the heavenly bodies and their groupings. Hence the most archaic symbols in Eastern Esotericism are a circle, a point, a triangle, a plane, a cube, a pentacle, and a hexagon, and plane figures with various sides and angles. This shows the knowledge and use of geometrical symbology to be as old as the world.