BOOK II. PART IV

THE ARCHAIC SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-RELIGIONS

"The narratives of the Doctrine are its cloak. The simple look only at the garment—that is, upon the narrative of the Doctrine; more they know not. The instructed, however, see not merely the cloak, but what the cloak covers." (The Zohar, III., 152, Franck, 119.)

§VII. ADAM-ADAMI

One feels a serious doubt whether our age, with all its intellectual acuteness, is destined to discover in each Western nation even one uninitiated scholar or philosopher capable of fully comprehending the spirit of archaic philosophy. Nor can one be expected to do so before the real meaning of the terms Sat and Asat, so freely used in the Rig Veda and elsewhere, is thoroughly assimilated. Asat is not merely the negation of Sat, nor is it" the not-yet existing"; for Sat is in itself neither "the existent," nor "being. "SAT is the immutable, the ever present, changeless and eternal Root, from and through which all proceeds. But it is far more than the potential force in the seed which propels onward the process of development, or what is now called evolution. It is the ever becoming, though the never manifesting. Sat is born from Asat, and Asat is begotten by Sat; perpetual motion in a circle truly; yet a circle that can be squared only at the supreme Initiation, at the threshold of Absolute Consciousness. (Paranirvana.)

The whole of the present work is an endeavor to prove that the ancient Scriptures, Indian and others, were compiled by Initiates. The mysteries of Life and Death were fathomed by the great master-minds of antiquity, and if they have preserved them in silence and secrecy it is because these problems formed part of the sacred Mysteries, and also because they must have been as incomprehensible to the vast majority of mankind then as they are now. A curious work was translated about 1860 by the Orientalist Chwolsohn, under the innocent title of Nabathean Agriculture. In the opinion of the translator that archaic volume is "a complete initiation into the mysteries of the pre-Adamite nations, on the authority of undeniably authentic documents." It is an invaluable compendium, the full epitome of the doctrines, and of the arts and sciences, not only of the Chaldeans, but also of the Assyrians and Canaanites of the prehistoric ages." The Nabatheans, some critics thought, were identical with the Sabeans, or Chaldean star-worshippers. The work is a retranslation from the Arabic, into which it was first translated from the Chaldean.* Chwolsohn maintains that this Chaldean original was written out from the oral teachings of a wealthy Babylonian land-owner, named Qû-tâmy, who had used in these teachings still more ancient materials. The first Arabic translation is assigned by Chwolsohn to the 13th century B. C. On the first page the author or amanuensis Qu-tâmy declares that the doctrines propounded therein were originally told by Saturn to the Moon, who communicated them to her idol, which idol revealed them to her devotee, the writer -the adept Scribe of the work—Qû-tâmy.

The details given therein for the benefit and instruction of mortals show periods of incalculable

*The Encyclopædia Britannica calls the MS. "a forgery of the 10th century," but does not mention Chwolsohn.-Editor.

duration and a series of numberless kingdoms and Dynasties that preceded the appearance on earth of Adami (the "red-earth "). The mode of divination by "the idol of the moon "is the same that was practised by David, Saul and the High Priests of the Jewish Tabernacle, by means of the Teraphim. (v. S. D., III., p. 234.) This curious This curious "Bible" of the Chaldean adept is noticed because it has an important bearing upon a great portion of the present work. The Nabathean Agriculture is a compilation, but it is no apocrypha. It is a repetition of the tenets of the Secret Doctrine under the exoteric Chaldean form of national symbols, for the purpose of "cloaking" those tenets, just as the books of Hermes and the Purânas are Egyptian and Hindu attempts at the same. The work was as well known in antiquity as in the Middle Ages. Maimonides speaks of it more than once, calling the Nabatheans by their co-religionary name "star-worshippers," or Sabeans, but failing to see in the disfigured word" Nabatheans," the mystic name of the caste devoted to Nebo (God of secret wisdom), which shows on its face that the Nabatheans were an occult Brotherhood. Nebo is the deity of the planet Mercury, and Mercury is Hermes, or the god of Wisdom, and Budha, whom the Greeks called Nabo, hence Nabatheans. The Nabatheans of Mt. Lebanon believed in the Seven Archangels as their forefathers had believed in the Seven Great Stars, the abodes and bodies of these Archangels. As Mercury the planet, Nebo was the "overseer " among the seven gods of the planets; and as the personification of the Secret Wisdom, he was Nabin, a seer and a prophet. The fact that Moses is made to die and disappear on the mount sacred to Nebo, shows him to have been an Initiate and a priest of that god under another name; for this God of Wisdom was the great creative deity, and was worshipped as

such by the Moabites, the Canaanites, the Assyrians, and throughout the whole of Palestine; then why not by the Israelites?

Nebo is a creator, like Budha, of the Fourth and Fifth Races. For the former starts a new race of Adepts, and the latter, the Solar-Lunar Dynasty, or the men of these Races and this Round. Both are the Adams of their respective creatures. AdamAdami is a personation of the dual Adam; of the paradigmic Adam-Kadmon, the creator, and of the lower Adam, the terrestrial, who, as the Syrian Kabalists have it, had only "the breath of life,” but no living soul till after his Fall. For the Kabalists teach the existence of four distinct Adams, or the transformation of four consecutive Adams, the emanations from the "divine phantom" of the Heavenly Man, an ethereal combination of the highest Soul and Spirit; this Adam having, of course, neither a gross human body nor a body of desire. This is the prototype of the second Adam. That they represent our Five Races is certain, as every one can see from their description in the Kabala: the first being "the perfect, Holy Adam

a shadow that disappeared," (the Kings of Edom), produced from the divine Image. (This Adam, "a shadow that disappeared," does not count in Mr. Isaac Myer's Qabbalah. v. p. 418 et seq.) The second is called the protoplasmic androgyne Adam of the future terrestrial and separated Adam. The third Adam is the man made of "dust" (the first, innocent Adam); and the fourth Adam was clothed with skin, flesh, nerves, etc. This answers to the breath of life and the physical body. He had the animal power of reproduction and continuance of species, and this is the human or Fourth Root-Race, the forefather of our own, the Fifth.

Here the modern Kabalists, led into error by the long generations of Christian mystics, diverge from