Page 48 (part 2)

He traces the invention of it to the palmy days of the golden age of Iran, remarking that one of the said traditions maintains that the genii of the planets are represented under the same shapes and figures they had assumed, when they showed themselves to several holy prophets , and have thus led to the establishment of the rites based on the Zodiac. Pythagoras, and after him Philo Judaeus, held the number 12 as very sacred. "The dodecahedron is a PERFECT number." It is the one among the signs of the Zodiac, Philo adds, that the sun visits in twelve months, and it is to honour that sign that Moses divided his nation into twelve tribes, established the twelve cakes (Levit. xxiv., 5) of the shewbread , and placed twelve precious stones around the ephod of the pontiffs. (See De Profugis. ) According to Seneca, Berosus taught prophecy of every future event and cataclysm by the Zodiac; and the time fixed by him for the conflagration of the world ( pralaya ), and another for a deluge, is found to answer to the time given in an ancient Egyptian papyrus. It comes at every renewal of the cycle of the sidereal year of 25,868 years. The names of the Akkadian months were called by, and derived from, the [[Vol. 1, Page]] 650 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. names of the signs of the Zodiac, and the Akkadians themselves are far earlier than the Chaldaeans. Mr. Proctor shows, in his Myths and Marvels of Astronomy , that the ancient astronomers had acquired a system of the most accurate astronomy 2,400 years B.C. ; the Hindus date their Kali Yug from a great periodical conjunction of the planets thirty-one centuries B.C .; and, withal, it is the Greeks belonging to the expedition of Alexander the Great, who were the instructors of the Aryan Hindus in astronomy! Whether the origin of the Zodiac is Aryan or Egyptian, it is still of an immense antiquity. Simplicius ( VI th cent. A.D .) writes that he had always heard that the Egyptians had kept astronomical observations and records for the last 630,000 years. This statement appears to frighten Mr. G. Massey, who remarks on this in his Natural Genesis (318) that "if we read this number of years by the month which Euxodus said the Egyptians termed a year, that would still yield the length of two cycles of precession (or 51,736 years)." Diogenes Laertius carried back the astronomical calculations of the Egyptians to 48,863 years before Alexander the Great ( Proem , 2) . Martianus Capella corroborates the same by telling posterity that the Egyptians had secretly studied astronomy for over 40,000 years, before they imparted their knowledge to the world ( Astronomy of the Ancients , Lewis, p. 264). Several valuable quotations are made in the Natural Genesis with the view of supporting the author's theories, but they justify the teaching of the Secret Doctrine far more. For instance, Plutarch is quoted from his Life of Sulla , saying: "One day when the sky was serene . . . a sound was heard in it . . . of a trumpet, so loud, shrill and mournful, that it affrighted . . . the world. The Tuscan sages said that it portended a new race of men , and a renovation of the world; for they affirmed that there were eight several kinds of men , all being different in life and manners, and that Heaven had allotted each its time , which was limited by the circuit of the great year " (25,868 years). This reminds one strongly of our seven races of men, and of the eighth -- the "animal man" -- descended from the later Third Race; as also of the successive submersions and destruction of the continents which finally disposed of almost the entire bulk of that race. "The Assyrians," says Iamblichus, "have not only preserved the memorials of seven and twenty myriads of years (270,000 years) as Hipparchus says they have, but likewise of the whole apocatastases and periods of the seven rulers of the world." (Proclus, in Timaeus , b. I.) This is the calculation of the Esoteric Doctrine , as approximately as it can be. For 1,000,000 of years are allowed for our present Root-race (the Fifth), and about 850,000 years since the submersion of the last large island (part of the Continent), the Ruta of the Fourth Race, or the Atlanteans; [[Vol. 1, Page]] 651 THE JEWISH PATRIARCHS ZODIACAL SIGNS. while Daitya, a small island inhabited by a mixed race, was destroyed about 270,000 years ago, during the glacial period or thereabouts ( vide Book II.). But the Seven Rulers, or the seven great Dynasties of the divine kings belong to the traditions of every great people of antiquity. Wherever twelve are mentioned, these are invariably the 12 signs of the zodiac. So patent is the fact, that the Roman Catholic writers -- especially among the French Ultramontanes -- have tacitly agreed to connect the twelve Jewish Patriarchs with the signs of the Zodiac. This is done in a kind of prophetico-mystic way, which would sound to pious and ignorant ears like a portentous sign, a tacit divine recognition of the "chosen people of God," whose finger has purposely traced in heaven, from the beginning of creation, the numbers of these patriarchs. For instance, these writers (De Mirville among others) recognise curiously enough all the characteristics of the 12 signs of the Zodiac, in the words addressed by the dying Jacob to his Sons, and in his definitions of the future of each Tribe. ( Vide Genesis , ch. xlix. ) Moreover, the respective banners of the same tribes are claimed to have exhibited the same symbols and the same names as the signs, repeated in the 12 stones of the Urim and Thummim , and on the 12 wings of the cherub.