Page 86 (part 7)

We do more: we concede that in one sense much in these so-called "fables" refers to astronomical allegories about constellations, asterisms, stars, and planets. Yet, while the Gandharva of the Rig-Veda may there be made to personify the fire of the Sun, the Gandharva devas are entities both of a physical and psychic character; while the Apsarasas (with other Rudras) are both qualities and quantities. In short, if ever unravelled, the theogony of the Vedic Gods will reveal fathomless mysteries of Creation and being. Truly says Parasara: "These thirty-three divinities exist age after age, and their appearance and disappearance is in the same manner as the sun sets and rises again." (Book I., xv.) There was a time, when the Eastern symbol of the Cross and Circle, the Swastica, was universally adopted. With the esoteric (and, for the matter of that, exoteric) Buddhist, the Chinaman and the Mongolian, it means "the 10,000 truths." These truths, they say, belong to the [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * Yet this sense, if once mastered, will turn out to be the secure casket which holds the keys to the Secret Wisdom. True, a casket so profusely ornamented that its fancy work hides and conceals entirely any spring for opening it, and thus makes the unintuitional believe it has not, and cannot have, any opening in it. Still the Keys are there, deeply buried, yet ever present to him who searches for them. [[Vol. 2, Page]] 586 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. mysteries of the unseen Universe and primordial Cosmogony and Theogony. "Since Fohat crossed the Circle like two lines of flame (horizontally and vertically), the hosts of the Blessed Ones have never failed to send their representatives upon the planets they are made to watch over from the beginning." This is why the Swastica is always placed -- as the ansated Cross was in Egypt -- on the breasts of the defunct mystics. It is found on the heart of the images and statues of Buddha, in Tibet and Mongolia. It is the seal placed also on the hearts of the living Initiates, burnt into the flesh, for ever, with some. This, because they have to keep those truths inviolate and intact, in eternal silence and secrecy to the day these are perceived and read by their chosen successors -- new Initiates -- "worthy of being entrusted with the ten thousand perfections." So degraded, however, has it now become, that it is often placed on the headgear of the "gods," the hideous idols of the sacrilegious Bhons, the Dugpas (Sorcerers) of the Tibetan borderlands; until found out by a Galukpa and torn off together with the head of the "god;" though it would be better were it that of the worshipper which was severed from the sinful body. Still, it can never lose its mysterious properties. Throw a retrospective glance, and see it used alike by the Initiates and Seers, as by the priests of Troy (found by Schliemann on the site of that old city). One finds it with the old Peruvians, the Assyrians, Chaldeans, as well as on the walls of the old-world cyclopean buildings; in the catacombs of the New world, and in those of the Old (?), at Rome, where, because the first Christians are supposed to have concealed themselves and their religion, it is called Crux Dissimulata. "According to de Rossi, the Swastica from an early period was a favourite form of the cross employed with an occult signification, which shows the secret was not that of the Christian cross. One Swastica cross in the catacombs is the sign of an inscription which reads [[' ZOTIKO ZOTIKE ]],' ' Vitalis Vitalia, ' or 'life of life.' "* But the best evidence to the antiquity of the cross is that which is brought forward by the author of Natural Genesis on page 433. "The value of the cross," says Mr. Massey, "as a Christian symbol, is supposed to date from the time when Jesus Christ was crucified. And yet in the 'Christian' Iconography of the Catacombs no figure of a man appears upon the Cross during the first six or seven centuries. There are all forms of the cross except that -- the alleged starting-point of the new religion. That was not the initial but the final form of the Crucifix.** During some six [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * Quoted in " The Natural Genesis " (p. 427, Vol. I.). ** With the Christians, most undeniably. With the pre-Christian symbologists it was, as said, the Bed or Couch of Torture during the Initiation Mystery, the "Crucifix" being placed horizontally, on the ground, and not erect, as at the time when it became the Roman gallows. [[Vol. 2, Page]] 587 THE CROSS, A CHRISTIAN AFTER-THOUGHT. centuries after the Christian era the foundation of the Christian religion in a crucified Redeemer is entirely absent from Christian art! The earliest known form of the human figure on the cross is the crucifix presented by Pope Gregory the Great to Queen Theodolinde of Lombardy, now in the Church of St. John at Monza, whilst no image of the Crucified is found in the Catacombs at Rome earlier than that of San Giulio, belonging to the seventh or eighth century. . . . There is no Christ and no Crucified; the Cross is the Christ even as the Stauros cross was a type and a name of Horus, the Gnostic Christ. The Cross, not the Crucified, is the essential object of representation in its art, and of adoration in its religion. The germ of the whole growth and development can be traced to the cross. And that cross is pre-Christian, is pagan and heathen, in half a dozen different shapes. The cult began with the cross, and Julian was right in saying he waged a 'Warfare with the X'; which he obviously considered had been adopted by the A-Gnostics and Mytholators to convey an impossible significance.* During centuries the cross stood for the Christ, and was addressed as if it were a living being. It was made divine at first, and humanized at last." Few world-symbols are more pregnant with real occult meaning than the Swastica. It is symbolized by the figure 6; for, like that figure, it points in its concrete imagery, as the ideograph of the number does, to the Zenith and the Nadir, to North, South, West, and East; one finds the unit everywhere, and that unit reflected in all and every unit.