The first is from the Book of the Concealed Mystery: -- (429.) From a Light-Bearer (one of the seven sacred planets) of insupportable brightness proceeded a radiating Flame, dashing off, like a vast and mighty hammer, those sparks which were the prior worlds.
(430.) And with most subtle ether were these intermingled and bound mutually together, but only when they were conjoined together, even the great Father and great Mother.
(431.) From Hoa , himself, is AB, the Father; and from Hoa, himself, is RUACH, the Spirit; who are hidden in the Ancient of Days, and therein is that Ether concealed.
(432.) And it was connected with a Light-Bearer (a planet and its angel or regent), which went forth from that Light-Bearer of insupportable brightness, which is hidden in the bosom of Aima, the Great Mother.* Now the following extract from the Zohar** also deals with the same mystery: -- "The Pre-Adamite Kings.
'We have learned in the Siphrah D'Tzniootha: That the At-tee'kah DAt-tee'keen, Ancient of Ancients, before He prepared his Form, built Kings, and engraved [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * See Mr.
Mather's "Kabbalah Unveiled." ** Translated in I.
Myer's Qabbalah.
[[Vol.
2, Page]] 84 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Kings, and sketched out Kings (men, the Kings of the animals), and they could not exist: till he overthrew them and hid them until after a time, therefore it is written: 'And these are the Kings which reigned in the land of Edom' .
.
.
.
And they could not exist till Resha'Hiv'rah, the White Head, the At'-tee-'kah D'At-tee'keen, Ancient of Ancients, arranged Himself .
.
.
.
and formed all forms above and below.
.
.
.
Before He arranged himself in his Form had not been formed all those whom he desired to form, and all worlds have been destroyed .
.
.
.
they did not remain in their places, because the form of the Kings had not been formed as it ought to be, and the Holy City had not been prepared." ( Zohar iii., 135 a; 292a Idra Zootah.
Brody, etc.) Now the plain meaning of these two allegorical and metaphysical disquisitions is simply this: Worlds and men were in turn formed and destroyed, under the law of evolution and from pre-existing material, until both the planets and their men, in our case our Earth and its animal and human races, became what they are now in the present cycle: opposite polar forces, an equilibrized compound of Spirit and Matter, of the positive and the negative, of the male and the female.
Before man could become male and female physically, his prototype, the creating Elohim, had to arrange his Form on this sexual plane astrally.
That is to say, the atoms and the organic forces, descending into the plane of the given differentiation, had to be marshalled in the order intended by Nature, so as to be ever carrying out, in an immaculate way, that law which the Kabala calls the Balance, through which everything that exists does so as male and female in its final perfection, in this present stage of materiality.
Chochmah, Wisdom, the Male Sephiroth, had to diffuse itself in , and through, Binah, intelligent Nature, or Understanding.
Therefore the First Root-race of men, sexless and mindless, had to be overthrown and "hidden until after a time"; i.e.
, the first race, instead of dying, disappeared in the second race, as certain lower lives and plants do in their progeny.
It was a wholesale transformation.
The First became the Second Root-race, without either begetting it, procreating it, or dying.
"They passed by together," as it is written: "And he died and another reigned in his stead" ( Genesis xxvi.
31 et seq.
Zohar iii., 292 a ).
Why?
Because "the Holy City had not been prepared." And what is the "Holy City"?
The Maquom (the Secret Place or the Shrine) on Earth: in other words, the human womb, the microcosmic copy and reflection of the Heavenly Matrix, the female space or primeval Chaos, in which the male Spirit fecundates the germ of the Son, or the visible Universe.* So much so, that in the paragraph on "the Emanation of the Male and Female Principles" in the Zohar [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * Vide "The Holy of Holies: its esoteric meaning," in Part IO of this Volume.
[[Vol.
2, Page]] 85 THE SON OF YAH.
( ibid.
) , it is said that, on this earth, the W ISDOM from the "Holy Ancient" "does not shine except in male and female." " Hohmah, Wisdom, is the Father, and B INAH, understanding, is the Mother .
.
.
.
and when they connect one with the other they bring forth and diffuse and emanate truth.
In the sayings of Rabbi Je-yeva Sabah, i.e.
, the Old, we learned this: What is Binah Understanding?
But when they connect in one another, the [[diagram]] (Yod) in the [[diagram]] (Heh), they become impregnated and produce a Son.
And, therefore, it is called Binah, Understanding.
It means BeN YaH, i.e.
, Son of YaH.
This is the completeness of the whole."* This is also the "completeness" of phallicism by the Rabbis, its perfect apotheosis, the divine being dragged into the animal, the sublime into the grossness of the terrestrial.
Nothing so graphically gross exists in Eastern Occultism, nor in the primitive Kabala -- the "Chaldean Book of Numbers." We have said so in "Isis Unveiled": -- "We find it rather unwise on the part of Catholic writers to pour out their vials of wrath in such sentences as these: 'In a multitude of pagodas, the phallic stone, ever and always assuming, like the Grecian batylos, the brutally indecent form of the lingham .
.
.
the Maha Deva.' Before casting slurs on a symbol whose profound metaphysical meaning is too much for the modern champions of that religion of sensualism par excellence, Roman Catholicism, to grasp, they are in duty bound to destroy their oldest churches, and change the form of the cupolas of their own temples.
The Mahody of Elephanta, the Round Tower of Bhangulpore, the minarets of Islam -- either rounded or pointed -- are the originals of the Campanile column of San Marco, at Venice, of the Rochester Cathedral, and of the modern Duomo of Milan.
Narratives or doctrines of cosmic origin — how heaven, earth, and the primordial deities first came into being. The Kojiki's deities born alone on the Plain of High Heaven, Voluspo's Ginnungagap, Genesis's tohu wa-bohu, the Timaeus's Demiurge fashioning the Receptacle, the Hesiodic Theogony, the Kalevala's egg-cosmogony, Egyptian Nun-and-Atum. Distinct from emanation_hierarchy (structural-ontological cascade), letters_of_creation (mechanism of creation), and apocatastasis/frashokereti (end-state restoration); cosmogony is temporally-narrative beginning.
The passage is fundamentally a narrative of cosmic origin: sparks from a Light-Bearer forming prior worlds, ether binding them, the formation and destruction of Pre-Adamite Kings, and the transformation of the First Root-race into the Second.
The reunification of complementary divine principles (male-female, spirit-matter) as a symbol of wholeness and salvation.
The union of Chochmah (Wisdom/Father) and Binah (Understanding/Mother) who 'connect one with the other they bring forth and diffuse and emanate truth' is a clear divine marriage producing a Son.
The Hermetic doctrine that a masculine-feminine generative principle operates on every plane of being, not only the biological — present at all times as a structural feature of creation itself. Distinct from divine_marriage (a specific reunification event or symbol) and aeons (paired divine beings arranged in syzygies, not a universal structural claim).
The passage's central thesis is that 'everything that exists does so as male and female in its final perfection,' with Chochmah as Father and Binah as Mother, making gender a universal structural principle across all planes.
The twenty-two Hebrew letters as the building blocks through which God creates and sustains all existence.
The Hebrew letters Yod and Heh are referenced in the explanation of Binah as 'BeN YaH' (Son of YaH), using letter-composition to reveal the divine name.
The balance of two contrary forces as the structural law of cosmos and operation — Lévi's equilibrium, expressed in Kabbalah by the senary: the will of God in its first cause, liberty in man, mathematical equilibrium in matter; the twofold vibration required to direct the Astral Light safely.
The 'law which the Kabala calls the Balance' through which 'everything that exists does so as male and female in its final perfection' is a clear expression of equilibrium as structural law.
The human being as a small-scale image of the entire cosmos; the body, soul, and intellect mirroring the structure of the heavens and the divine — distinct from correspondence in that it makes the human the privileged mirror.
The passage explicitly identifies the human womb as 'the microcosmic copy and reflection of the Heavenly Matrix, the female space or primeval Chaos, in which the male Spirit fecundates the germ of the Son, or the visible Universe.'
The Hermetic doctrine that apparent opposites are identical in nature but differ in degree — two extremes of the same scale (hot/cold, love/hate) — such that one pole can be shifted toward its opposite by a change of degree ('mental transmutation'). Distinct from opposites_transcended (a completion-state marking the path's end, not this doctrine's active technique) and magical_equilibrium (balance held BETWEEN two forces, not identity-by-degree of what looks like two forces).
The passage repeatedly emphasizes 'opposite polar forces, an equilibrized compound of Spirit and Matter, of the positive and the negative, of the male and the female' as the fundamental structural principle of existence.