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, His thought made visible; and before the Christian era, from the Trimurti of the Hindus down to the three kabalistic heads of the scriptures as explained by the Jews, the triune godhead of each nation was fully defined and substantiated in its allegories. Such is the cosmic and ideal significance of this great symbol with the Eastern peoples. But, applied to practical and exoteric worship -- which had also its esoteric symbology -- the lotus became in time the carrier and container of a more terrestrial idea. No dogmatic religion has ever escaped the sexual element in it; and to this day it soils the moral beauty of the root idea. The following is quoted from the same Kabalistic MSS . already mentioned: -- "Pointing to like signification was the lotus growing in the waters of the Nile. Its mode of growth peculiarly fitted it as a symbol of the generative activities. The flower of the lotus, which is the bearer of the seed for reproduction, as the result of its maturing, is connected by its placenta-like attachment with mother-earth, or the womb of Isis, through the water of the womb, that is, the river Nile, by means of the long cord-like stalk, the umbilicus. Nothing can be plainer than the symbol, and to make it perfect in its intended signification, a child is sometimes represented as seated in or issuing from the flower.* Thus Osiris and Isis, the children of Chronos, or time without end, in the development of their nature-forces, in this picture become the parents of man under the name Horus. . ." (See § X., "Deus Lunus.") "We cannot lay too great stress upon the use of this generative function as a basis for a symbolical language and a scientific art-speech. Thought upon the idea leads at once to reflection upon the subject of creative cause. In its workings Nature is observed to have fashioned a wonderful piece of living mechanism governed by an added living soul; the life development and history of which soul, as to its whence, its present, and its whither, surpasses all efforts of the human intellect.** The new born is an ever-recurring miracle, an evidence that [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * In Indian Puranas it is Vishnu, the first, and Brahma, the second logos, or the ideal and practical creators, who are respectively represented, one as manifesting the lotus, the other as issuing from it. ** Not the "efforts" of the trained psychic faculties of an Initiate into Eastern metaphysics, and the mysteries of creative Nature. It is the profane of the past ages who have degraded the pure ideal of cosmic creation into an emblem of mere human reproduction and sexual functions: it is the esoteric teachings, and the initiates of the Future, whose mission it is, and will be, to redeem and ennoble once more the primitive conception so sadly profaned by its crude and gross application to exoteric dogmas and personations by theological and ecclesiastical religionists. The silent worship of abstract or noumenal Nature, the only divine manifestation, is the one ennobling religion of Humanity. [[Vol. 1, Page]] 382 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. within the workshop of the womb an intelligent creative power has intervened to fasten a living soul to a physical machine. The amazing wonderfulness of the fact attaches a holy sacredness to all connected with the organs of reproduction, as the dwelling and place of evident constructive intervention of deity." This is a correct rendering of the underlying ideas of old, of the purely pantheistic conceptions, impersonal and reverential, of the archaic philosophers of the prehistoric ages. Not so, however, when applied to sinful humanity, to the gross ideas attached to personality. Therefore, no pantheistic philosopher would fail to find the remarks that follow the above and which represent the anthropomorphism of Judean symbology, other than dangerous for the sacredness of true religion, and fitting only our materialistic age, which is the direct outcome and result of that anthropomorphic character. For this is the key-note to the entire spirit and essence of the Old Testament. "Therefore," goes on the MSS., treating of the symbolism of art-speech of the Bible: -- "The locality of the womb is to be taken as the MOST HOLY PLACE, the SANCTUM SANCTORUM, and the veritable T EMPLE OF THE L IVING G OD.* With man the possession of the woman has always been considered as an essential part of himself, to make one out of two, and jealously guarded as sacred. Even the part of the ordinary house or home consecrated to the dwelling of the wife was called the penetralia , the secret or sacred, and hence the metaphor of the Holy of Holies of sacred constructions taken from the idea of the sacredness of the organs of generation. Carried to the extreme of description** by metaphor, this part of the house is described in the Sacred Books as the "between the thighs of the house," and sometimes the idea is carried out constructively in the great door-opening of Churches placed inward between flanking buttresses." No such thought "carried to the extreme" ever existed among the old primitive Aryans. This is proven by the fact that in the Vedic period their women were not placed apart from men in penetralia , or "Zenanas." Their seclusion began when the Mahomedans -- the next heirs to Hebrew symbolism after Christian ecclesiasticism -- had conquered the land and gradually enforced their ways and customs upon the Hindus. The pre- and post- Vedic woman was as free as man; and no impure terrestrial thought was ever mixed with the religious symbo- [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * Surely the words of the old Initiate into the primitive mysteries of Christianity, " Know ye not ye are the Temple of God " (I Corinth. iii . 16) could not be applied in this sense to men? The meaning may have been, and was so, undeniably, in the minds of the Hebrew compilers of the Old Testament. And here is the abyss that lies between the symbolism of the New Testament and the Jewish canon. This gulf would have remained and ever widened, had not Christianity -- especially and most glaringly the Latin Church -- thrown a bridge over it? Modern Popery has now spanned it entirely, by its dogma of the two immaculate conceptions, and the anthropomorphic and at the same time idolatrous character it has conferred upon the Mother of its God. ** It was so carried only in the Hebrew Bible, and its servile copyist, Christian theology. [[Vol. 1, Page]] 383 THE PURITY OF EARLY PHALLICISM. logy of the early Aryans. The idea and application are purely Semitic.