Page 65 (part 3)

by a Jewish Kabalist, and called the "Genesis of Enoch." But even its disfigured remnants show how closely its text agrees with the Archaic Doctrine, as is shown in the creation of the Seven Creators and seven primitive men . As to Enoch, Thoth or Hermes, Orpheus and Kadmus, these are all generic names, branches and offshoots of the seven primordial sages (incarnated Dhyan Chohans or Devas, in illusive, not mortal bodies) who taught Humanity all it knew, and whose earliest disciples assumed their master's names. This custom passed from the Fourth to the Fifth Race. Hence the sameness of the traditions about Hermes (of whom Egyptologists count five) Enoch, etc., they are all inventors of letters; none of them dies but still lives, and they are the first Initiators into, and Founders of the Mysteries. The Genesis of Enoch disappeared only very lately among the Kabalists. Guillaume [[Footnote continued on next page]] [[Vol. 2, Page]] 268 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. Thought Divine." St. Paul, another Initiate, called our world "the enigmatical mirror of pure truth," and St. Gregory, of Nazianzen, corroborated Hermes by stating that "things visible are but the shadow and delineation of things that we cannot see." It is an eternal combination, and images are repeated from the higher rung of the ladder of being down to the lower. The "Fall of the Angels," and the "War in Heaven" are repeated on every plane, the lower "mirror" disfiguring the image of the superior mirror, and each repeating it in its own way. Thus the Christian dogmas are but the reminiscences of the paradigms of Plato, who spoke of these things cautiously, as every Initiate would. But it is all as expressed in these few sentences of the Desatir: - - "All that is on Earth, saith the Lord (Ormazd), is the shadow of something that is in the superior spheres. This luminous object (light, fire, etc.) is the shadow of that which is still more luminous than itself, and so on till it reaches ME, who am the light of lights." In the Kabalistic books, and in the Zohar pre-eminently, the idea that everything objective on earth or in this Universe is the Shadow -- Dyooknah -- of the eternal Light or Deity, is very strong. The Third Race was pre-eminently the bright shadow, at first, of the gods, whom tradition exiles on Earth after the allegorical war in Heaven; which became still more allegorical on Earth, for it was the war between spirit and matter. This war will last till the inner and divine man adjusts his outer terrestrial self to his own spiritual nature. Till then the dark and fierce passions of the former will be at eternal feud with his master, the Divine Man. But the animal will be tamed one day, because its nature will be changed, and harmony will reign once more between the two as before the "Fall," when even mortal man was created by the Elements and was not born. The above is made clear in all the great theogonies, principally in the Grecian ( see Hesiod and Theogony ) . The mutilation of Uranos by his son Kronos, who thus condemns him to impotency, has never been understood by the modern Mythographers. Yet, it is very plain; and having been universal* ( vide foot note infra ) , it must have contained a great abstract [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- [[Footnote continued from previous page]] Postel saw it. It was most certainly in a great measure a transcript from the books of Hermes, and far anterior to the Books of Moses, as Eliphas Levi tells his readers. * Uranos is a modified Varuna, "the Universal encompasser," the all-embracer, and one of the oldest of the Vedic deities -- S PACE, the maker of Heaven and Earth, since both are manifested out of his (or its) seed. It is only later that Varuna became the chief of the Adityas and a kind of Neptune riding on the Leviathan -- Makara, now the most sacred and mysterious of the signs of the Zodiac. Varuna, "without whom no creature can even wink," was degraded like Uranos, and, like him, he fell into generation, his functions, "the grandest cosmical functions," as Muir calls them, having been lowered down from heaven to earth by exoteric anthropomorphism. As the same [[Footnote continued on next page]] [[Vol. 2, Page]] 269 THE SYMBOLISM OF KRONOS. and philosophical idea, now lost to our modern sages. This punishment in the allegory marks, indeed "a new period, a second phase in the development of creation," as justly remarked by Decharme ( Mythologie de la Grece Antique, p. 7), who, however, renounces the attempt to explain it. Uranos has tried to oppose an impediment to that development, or natural evolution, by destroying all his children as soon as born. Uranos, who personifies all the creative powers of, and in, Chaos (Space, or the unmanifested Deity) is thus made to pay the penalty; for it is those powers which cause the Pitris to evolve primordial men from themselves -- as, later on, these men evolve their progeny -- without any sense or desire for procreation. The work of generation, suspended during a moment, passes into the hands of Kronos,* time, who unites himself with Rhea (the earth in esotericism -- matter in general), and thus produces, after celestial -- terrestrial Titans. The whole of this symbolism relates to the mysteries of Evolution. This allegory is the exoteric version of the esoteric doctrine given in this part of our work. For in Kronos we see the same story repeated again. As Uranos destroyed his children from Gaia (one, in the world of manifestation, with Aditi or the Great Cosmic Deep) by confining them in the bosom of the Earth, Tythea, so Kronos at this second stage of creation destroyed his children from Rhea -- by devouring them. This is an allusion to the fruitless efforts of Earth or Nature alone to create real human men. ( See our Stanzas III. -- X., et seq., and also Berosus ' account of primeval creation. ) Time swallows its own fruitless work.