Page 82 (part 4)

'The prudent son of Iapetus,' says Hesiod, 'deceived Jupiter by stealing and concealing in the cavity of a narthex, the indefatigable fire of the resplendent glow' ( Theog. 565) . . . Thus the gift made by Prometheus to men was a conquest made from heaven. . . " "Now according to Greek ideas," (identical in this with those of the Occultists) "this possession forced from Jupiter, this human trespassing upon the property of the gods, had to be followed by an expiation. . . . Prometheus, moreover, belongs to that race of Titans who had rebelled** against the gods, and whom the master of Olympus had hurled down into Tartarus; like them, he is the genius of Evil, doomed to cruel suffering, etc., etc." That which is revolting in the explanations that follow, is the one-sided view taken of this grandest of all the myths. The most intuitional among modern writers cannot or will not rise in their conceptions above the level of the Earth and Cosmic phenomena. It is not denied that the moral idea in the myth, as presented in the Theogony of Hesiod, plays a certain part in the primitive Greek conception. The Titan is more than a thief of the celestial fire. He is the representation of humanity -- active, industrious, intelligent, but at the same time ambitious, which aims at equalling divine powers. Therefore it is humanity punished in the person of Prometheus, but it is only so with the Greeks. With the latter, Prometheus is not a [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * The monad of the animal is as immortal as that of man, yet the brute knows nothing of this; it lives an animal life of sensation just as the first human would have lived, when attaining physical development in the Third Race, had it not been for the Agnishwatta and the Manasa Pitris. ** The fallen angels, therefore; the Asuras of the Indian Pantheon. [[Vol. 2, Page]] 526 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. criminal, save in the eyes of the gods. In his relation with the Earth, he is, on the contrary, a god himself, a friend of mankind ([[ philanthropos ]]), which he has raised to civilization and initiated into the knowledge of all the arts; a conception which found its most poetical expounder in AEschylus. But with all other nations Prometheus is -- what? The fallen Angel, Satan, as the Church would have it? Not at all. He is simply the image of the pernicious and dreaded effects of lightning. He is the "evil fire" ( mal feu ) and the symbol of the divine reproductive male organ. "Reduced to its simple expression, the myth we are trying to explain is then simply a (Cosmic) genius of fire" (p. 261). It is the former idea (the phallic) which was pre-eminently Aryan, if we believe Ad. Kuhn ( in his Herabkunft des Feuers und des Gottertranks ) and Baudry. For -- "The fire used by man being the result of the action of pramantha in the arani, the Aryas must have ascribed (?) the same origin to celestial fire, and they must* have imagined (?) that a god armed with pramantha, or a divine pramantha, exercised in the bosom of the clouds a violent friction, which gave birth to lightning and thunderbolts. . . . . This idea is supported by the fact that, according to Plutarch's testimony ( Philosoph. Plant., iii . 3), the Stoics thought that thunder was the result of the struggle of storm-clouds and lightning -- a conflagration due to friction; while Aristotle saw in the thunderbolt only the action of clouds which clashed with each other. What was this theory, if not the scientific translation of the production of fire by friction? . . . . . . Everything leads us to think that, from the highest antiquity, and before the dispersion of the Aryans, it was believed that the pramantha lighted fire in the storm cloud as well as in the aranis." ( Revue Germanique, p. 368.) Thus, suppositions and idle hypotheses are made to stand for discovered truths. Defenders of the Bible dead-letter could never help the writers of missionary tracts more effectually, than do materialistic Symbologists in thus taking for granted that the ancient Aryans based their religious conceptions on no higher thought than the physiological. But it is not so, and the very spirit of Vedic philosophy is against such an interpretation. And if, as Decharme himself confesses, "this idea of the creative power of fire is explained at once by the ancient assimilation of the human soul to a celestial spark," as shown by the imagery often made use of in the Vedas when speaking of Arani, it would mean something higher than simply a gross sexual conception. A hymn to Agni in the Veda is cited as example: -- "Here is the pramantha, the generator is ready. Bring the mistress of the race (the female Arani ) . Let us produce Agni by attrition, according [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * The italics are ours; they show how assumptions are raised to laws in our day. [[Vol. 2, Page]] 527 THE SIX BROTHERS OF KRISHNA. to ancient custom" -- which means no worse than an abstract idea expressed in the tongue of mortals. The "female Arani," the mistress of the race, is Aditi, the mother of the gods, or Shekinah, eternal light -- in the world of Spirit, the "Great Deep" and C HAOS; or primordial Substance in its first remove from the U NKNOWN, in the manifested Kosmos. If, ages later, the same epithet is applied to Devaki, the mother of Krishna, or the incarnated L OGOS; and if the symbol, owing to the gradual and irrepressible spread of exoteric religions, may already be regarded as having a sexual significance, this in no way mars the original purity of the image. The subjective had been transformed into the objective; Spirit had fallen into matter. The universal kosmic polarity of Spirit-Substance had become, in human thought, the mystic, but still sexual union of Spirit and Matter, and had thus acquired an anthropomorphic colouring which it had never had in the beginning. Between the Vedas and the Puranas there is an abyss of which both are the poles, like the seventh ( atmic ) and the first or lowest principle (the physical body) in the Septenary constitution of man. The primitive, purely spiritual language of the Vedas, conceived many decades of millenniums earlier, had found its purely human expression for the purpose of describing events taking place 5,000 years ago, the date of Krishna's death (from which day the Kali Yuga, or Black-Age, began for mankind).