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The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2 [[Vol. 2, Page]] 202 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. E DENS, S ERPENTS, AND D RAGONS. Whence the idea, and the true meaning of the term "Eden"? Christians will maintain that the Garden of Eden is the holy Paradise, the place desecrated by the sin of Adam and Eve; the Occultist will deny this dead-letter interpretation, and show the reverse. One need not believe and see in the Bible divine revelation in order to say that this ancient book, if read esoterically, is based upon the same universal traditions. What Eden was is partially shown in Isis Unveiled. * It was said that: "The Garden of Eden as a locality is no myth at all; it belongs to those landmarks of history which occasionally disclose to the student that the Bible is not all mere allegory. Eden, or the Hebrew Gan-Eden, meaning the park or the garden of Eden, is an archaic name of the country watered by the Euphrates and its many branches, from Asia and Armenia to the Erythraean sea." (A. Wilder says that Gan-duniyas is a name of Babylonia.) In the Chaldean " Book of Numbers, " the location is designated in numerals, and in the cypher Rosicrucian manuscript, left by Count St. Germain, it is fully described. In the Assyrian Tablets it is rendered Ganduniyas. "Behold," says the ( Elohim ) of Genesis, "the man is become as one of us." The Elohim may be accepted in one sense for gods or powers, and in another for Aleim, or priests -- the hierophants initiated into the good and evil of this world; for there was a college of priests called the Aleim, while the head of their caste, or the chief of the hierophants was known as Java-Aleim. Instead of becoming a neophyte, and gradually obtaining his esoteric knowledge through a regular initiation, an Adam, or Man, uses his intuitional faculties and, prompted by the serpent ( Woman and matter), tastes of the Tree of Knowledge -- the esoteric or Secret Doctrine -- unlawfully. The priests of Hercules, or Mel-karth, the "Lord of the Eden," all wore "coats of skin." The text says: "And Java-Aleim made for Adam and his wife 'Chitonuth our.' " The first Hebrew word, " chiton, " is the Greek [[ Chiton ]], Chiton. It became a Slavonic word by adoption from the Bible, and means a coat, an upper garment. "Though containing the same substratum of esoteric truth as does every early Cosmogony, the Hebrew Scripture wears on its face the marks of a double origin. Its Genesis is purely a reminiscence of the Babylonian captivity. The names of places, men and even objects, can be traced from the original text to the Chaldeans and the Akkadians, the progenitors and Aryan instructors of the former. It is strongly contested that the Akkad tribes of Chaldea, Babylonia and Assyria were in [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * Vol. I., pp. 575, et seq. [[Vol. 2, Page]] 203 THE GARDEN OF EDEN, A COLLEGE. any way cognate with the Brahmans of Hindostan; but there are more proofs in favour of this opinion than otherwise. The Shemite or Assyrian ought, perchance, to have been called the Turanian, and the Mongolians have been denominated Scyths. But if the Akkadians ever existed, otherwise than in the imagination of some ethnologists and philologists, they certainly would never have been a Turanian tribe, as some Assyriologists have striven to make us believe. They were simply emigrants on their way to Asia Minor from India, the cradle of humanity, and their sacerdotal adepts tarried to civilize and initiate a barbarian people. Halevy proved the fallacy of the Turanian mania in regard to Akkadian people, and other scientists have proved that the Babylonian civilization was neither born nor developed in that country. It was imported from India, and the importers were Brahminical Hindus." And now, ten years after this was written, we find ourselves corroborated by Professor Sayce, who says in his first Hibbert lecture that the culture of the Babylonian city Eridu was of foreign importation. It came from India. "Much of the theology was borrowed by the Semites from the non-Semitic Akkadians or proto-Chaldeans, whom they supplanted, and whose local cults they had neither the will nor the power to uproot. Indeed, throughout a long course of ages the two races, Semites and Akkadians, lived side by side, their notions and worship of the gods blending insensibly together." Here, the Akkadians are called "non-Semitic," as we had insisted they were in " Isis, " which is another corroboration. And we are no less right in always maintaining that the Jewish Biblical history was a compilation of historical facts, arranged from other people's history in Jewish garb -- Genesis excluded, which is esotericism pure and simple. But it is really from the Euxine to Kashmir and beyond, that science has to search for the cradle -- or rather one of the chief cradles -- of mankind and the sons of Ad-ah; and especially in after times, when the Garden of Ed-en on the Euphrates became the college of the astrologers and magi, the Aleim. But this "college" and this Eden belong to the Fifth Race, and are simply a faint reminiscence of the Adi-varsha, of the primeval Third Race. What is the etymological meaning of the word Eden? In Greek it is [ hedone ], signifying voluptuousness. In this aspect it is no better than the Olympus of the Greeks, Indra's heaven (Swarga) on Mount Meru, and even the paradise full of Houris, promised by Mahomet to the faithful. The Garden of Eden was never the property of the Jews; for China, which can hardly be suspected of having known anything of the Jews 2,000 B.C ., has such a primitive garden in Central Asia inhabited by the "Dragons of Wisdom," the Initiates. And according to Klaproth, [[Vol. 2, Page]] 204 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. the hieroglyphical chart copied from a Japanese Cyclopaedia in the book of Fo-kone-ky, places its "Garden of Wisdom" on the plateau of Pamir between the highest peaks of the Himalayan ranges; and describing it as the culminating point of Central Asia, shows the four rivers -- Oxus, Indus, Ganges, and Silo -- flowing from a common source, the " Lake of the Dragons.