"And now again He (Brahmâ) re-enters into the golden egg of His Thought, the germ of all that exists. During His peaceful rest the animated beings endowed with the principles of action cease their functions, and all intelligence becomes dormant. When they are all absorbed in the SUPREME SOUL, this Soul of all beings sleeps in complete repose till the day when it resumes its form and awakes again from its primitive darkness." (Jacolliot, L'Inde des Brahmes, p. 230.)

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As the Golden Age is always the first in the series of four Ages, so the Black Age ever comes last. The Black Age now reigns supreme in India, and seems to coincide with that of the West. "In the Black Age," says the Vishnu Purâna, decay will constantly proceed, until the human race approaches its dissolution. When the close of the Black Age shall be nigh, a portion of that Divine Being which exists of its own spiritual nature shall descend on earth dowed with the eight superhuman faculties. (Kalki, or White Horse Avatar, v. Rev. xix. 11.) He will re-establish righteousness on earth, and the minds of those who live at the close of the Dark Age shall be awakened and become as pellucid as crystal. The men who are thus changed shall be the seeds of human beings, and shall give birth to a race who shall follow the laws of the Golden Age, the age of purity."

Section VIII

THE LOTUS AS A UNIVERSAL SYMBOL

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All ancient symbols have a deep and philosophical meaning, their importance and significance increasing with their antiquity, and this is especially the case with the Lotus. It is the flower sacred to Na

ture and her gods, and represents the abstract and the concrete universes, standing as the emblem of the productive powers of both physical and spiritual nature. It was held sacred from the remotest antiquity by the Aryan Hindus, the Egyptians and the Buddhists after them; revered in China and Japan, and adopted as a Christian emblem by the Greek and Latin Churches, who replace it with the white lily. In every picture of the Annunciation the angel Gabriel appears to the Virgin Mary with a spray of white lilies in his hand. This spray, typifying fire and water, or the idea of creation and regeneration, has precisely the same significance as the lotus in the hand of the Bodhisat, who announces to Gautama's mother the birth of the Buddha. With the Hindus the lotus is the emblem of the productive power of nature through the agency of fire and water (spirit and matter). Sir Wm. Jones shows that the seeds of the lotus contain, even before they germinate, the miniature shapes of the perfected leaves. (Its seed-vessel is ripened on the surface of the water, and contains seven seed-receptacles. The flower is first female and then male.) The lotus is, therefore, the twofold type of the divine and human hermaphrodite, as combining the two sexes.

The spirit of Fire, or heat, which animates, fructifies and develops into concrete form-from its ideal prototype-everything which is born of WATter, or primordial Earth, evolved Brahmâ, the Creative God of the Hindus. The lotus, represented as growing out of Vishnu's navel, the god resting on the Serpent of Infinity upon the waters of Space, is the most graphic of allegories; the Universe evolving from the central Sun, the POINT, the ever-concealed germ. Lakshmi, the Hindu Venus, the female aspect of Vishnu, is shown as floating at "Creation" on a lotus-flower, springing from the foam of the sea. The underlying idea in this symbol is very beauti

ful, and the same in all religious systems. It signifies the same philosophical idea as lotus or lily, the emanation of the objective from the subjective, divine Ideation passing from the abstract into the concrete or visible form. At this stage of action the Demiurge is not yet the Architect. Born in the twilight of action, he has yet to perceive the plan, to realize the ideal forms which lie buried in the bosom of Eternal Ideation, as the future lotus leaves are concealed within the seed.

In Esoteric philosophy the Demiurge or Logos, regarded as the CREATOR, is simply an abstract term, like" army." As the latter term comprises a body of active working units, soldiers, so "Demiurge " is the name of a multitude of Creators or Builders. In all the primitive religions the "Son of the Father" is the creative God-i.e., His thought made visible, and before the Christian era the triune godhead of each nation was fully defined and substantiated in its allegories.

Such is the cosmic and ideal significance of this great symbol with the Eastern peoples. But applied to practical and exoteric worship—although that also had its esoteric symbology-the lotus became in time the carrier and container of a more terrestrial idea. No dogmatic religion has been altogether free from the sexual element; and to this day that element soils the moral beauty of the root idea.

Whether the early Fathers of the Church knew the esoteric meaning of the Hebrew Old Testament, or whether only a few of them were aware of it, is for posterity to decide. One thing is certain, at any rate. The esotericism of the New Testament agrees perfectly with that of the Mosaic books, and the New Testament writers have adopted several symbols that typify purely Egyptian conceptions and beliefs -in their outward and inward meaning-which are not to be found in the Jewish Canon. One of such

symbols is the lily in the hands of the angel of the Annunciation, and these symbols are preserved to this day in the iconography of the Greek and Roman Churches. Thus water, fire, the cross, as well as the dove, the Lamb, and other sacred animals, yield esoterically an identical meaning, and must have been accepted as an improvement upon Judaism pure and simple.

For the Lotus and Water are among the oldest symbols, and in their origin are purely Aryan, though they became common property at the branching off of the Fifth Race. Let us give an example. Letters, as well as numbers, were all mystic, whether taken in combination or separately. The most sacred of all is the letter M. It is both feminine and masculine, or androgyne, and symbolizes Water, the Great Deep, in its origin. It is mystic in all the languages, both Eastern and Western, and stands as a glyph for the waves, thus: So the tenth sign of the Zodiac (Capricorn) in the East is Makara, a crocodile, or rather an aquatic monster, always associated with water. The letter MA in Sanskrit is equivalent to and corresponds with number 5-composed of a binary, the symbol of the two sexes separated, and of the ternary, symbol of the third life, their progeny. MAITREYA is the secret name of the fifth Buddha, the last MESSIAH, who will come at the culmination of the Great Cycle. M is also the initial letter of the Greek Metis, or Divine Wisdom; of Mary, the mother of Christ, and Maya, the mother of Buddha. Even Moses, found in the waters of the Nile, has the symbolical initial in his name. A reminder of the three Marys at the Crucifixion, and their connection with Mar, the sea, may close this example. This is why in Judaism and Christianity the Messiah is always connected with water, baptism, the Fish (the tenth sign of the Zodiac called Mee

nam in Sanskrit), and even with the Matsya Avatar, and the lily or lotus.

In the relics of ancient Egypt, the greater the antiquity of the votive symbols and emblems exhumed, the oftener are the lotus and the water found in connection with the Solar gods. The god Khnoom, the moist power-sits on a throne enshrined in a lotus. (Saitic epoch, Sarapeum.) The god Bes stands on a lotus; Thoth, the god of mystery, sits on a fullblown lotus, and finally the goddess Hiquet, in the shape of a frog, rests on the lotus. The frog or toad goddess was one of the chief Cosmic deities connected with creation, both on account of her amphibious nature and because of her apparent resurrection after being shut up for ages in stones, etc. She not only took part with Khnoom in the organization of the world, but was also connected with the Egyptian dogma of resurrection, after 3,000 years of purification in "the fields of bliss." The early Egyptian Christian adopted the emblem, and a frog enshrined in a lotus flower, or sometimes without it, was the form chosen for the Church lamps, on which were engraved the words, "I am the resurrection." These frog goddesses are also found on all the mummies.

Section IX

THE MOON IN SYMBOLISM

This archaic symbol is the most poetical of all symbols, as also the most philosophical. The Sun is the giver of life to the whole planetary system; the Moon is the giver of life to our globe, and the early races understood this from their very beginning. She is the Queen, and she is the King, for she was King Soma before she became Phoebe and the chaste