IX

ON THE MYTH OF THE "FALLEN ANGEL."

It is quite natural that the materialist and the physicist should imagine that everything is due to blind force and chance, and to the survival of the strongest more often than the fittest. But Occultists, who regard physical nature as a bundle of the most varied illusions on the plane of deceptive perceptions, who recognize in all pain and suffering but a necessary series of stages towards perfection, visible in the silent influence of never-erring Karma, or abstract Nature-the Occultists, we say, view the great Mother otherwise.

As the whole philosophy of the problem of evil hangs upon the correct comprehension of the constitution of the inner being of nature and man, of the divine within the animal, we cannot take too careful precautions against theological errors, and more especially the idea embodied in the Christian Devil.

The primitive origin of this personification will be found in the Akkadian conception of the cosmic powers-the Heavens and the Earth-as in eternal feud and struggle with Chaos. Their " God amongst all the gods" was the Son of Hea (or Ea), the great God of Wisdom, called by the Babylonians Nebu (or Nebo). With both peoples-as well as the Hindus-their deities were both beneficent and maleficent. As evil and punishment are the agents of Karma, in an absolutely just retributive sense, so evil was the servant of the good. (Hibbert Lect. 1887, pp. 101-115.) The Chaldeo-Assyrian tiles have demonstrated this beyond the shadow of a doubt. We find the same idea in the Zohar. Satan was a Son, and an Angel of God. With all the Semitic

nations the Spirit of the Earth was as much the creator in his own realm as the Spirit of the Heavens. They were twin brothers, and interchangeable in their functions, when not two in one.

Whence comes the Christian idea that God cursed the Devil? The God of the Jews, whomsoever he was, forbade the cursing of Satan. Philo Judæus and Josephus both state that the Law (the Pentateuch and the Talmud) invariably forbid one to curse the Adversary, as also the Gods of the Gentiles. "Thou shalt not revile the gods," said the God of Moses (Exodus xxii. 28), for it is God who "hath divided them into all nations" (Deut. iv. 19), and those who speak evil of Dignities (gods) are called "filthy dreamers" by Jude (v. 8). Even Michael the Archangel durst not rail against the devil, but said "the Lord rebuke thee" (Ibid. 9). All that we read in the Zohar and other Kabalistic works shows plainly that "Satan" is simply the personification of the abstract evil, which is the weapon of Karmic law and KARMA. It is part of our human nature, as it is said that "Satan is always near and inextricably interwoven with man." It is only a question of that Power being latent or active in us.

It is a well-known fact, to those learned in symbology at all events, that in every great religion of antiquity it is the Logos-Demiurge, or the first emanation from the Universal Mind, who strikes the keynote, so to speak, of what may be called the correlation of individuality and personality in the subsequent scheme of evolution. It is the Logos who is shown in the mystic symbolism of cosmogony, theogony and anthropogony as playing two parts in the drama of Creation and Being, that of the purely human personality and the divine impersonality of the so-called Avatars or divine incarnations, and that of the Universal Spirit, called Christos by the Gnos

tics, and the Ferouer or Favarshi of Ahura Mazda in the Mazdean philosophy.

Now what is a Ferouer or Favarshi? In some Mazdean works it is plainly implied that the Favarshi is the inner, immortal man (or the reincarnating Ego); that it existed before its physical body, and survives all bodies that it may be clothed in. "Not only was man endowed with the Favarshi, but gods, too, and the sky, fire, waters and plants.' (Introd. to the Vendidad by James Darmstetter.) This plainly shows that the ferouer (or favarshi) is the" spiritual counterpart " of god, animal, plant or even element, that is, the refined and the purer part of the grosser creation, the soul of the body, whatever the body may happen to be. Therefore does Ahura Mazda (in the Vendidad) recommend Zarathustra to invoke his Favarshi and not himself (Ahura Mazda); that is to say, the impersonal and true Essence of Deity, one with Zarathustra's own Atman (or Christos), not the false and personal

appearance.

The first lesson taught in Esoteric philosophy is that the incognizable Cause does not put forth evolution whether consciously or unconsciously, but only exhibits periodically different aspects of itself to the perception of finite Minds. Now, the collective Mind-the Universal-composed of various and numberless Hosts of Creative Powers, however infinite they may seem in manifested Time, is still finite when contrasted with the unborn and undecaying Space in its supreme essential aspect. That which is finite cannot be perfect. Therefore, there are inferior Beings among those Hosts, but there never were any devils or "disobedient Angels, for the simple reason that they are all governed by Law.

The seven-headed Dragon of Revelations is simply the symbol of the life-cycle, and of the "Sons

of Cyclic Eternity" who had descended on Earth during a certain epoch of its formative period. The "clouds of smoke" (Rev. ix. 2) are a geological phenomenon. The third part of the stars of heaven" cast down to earth (Ibid. xii. 4) refers to the divine Monads (the Spirits of the Stars in Astrology) that circumambulate our globe; that is, the human Egos destined to go through the whole cycle of incarnations.

The "Asuras, or so-called demons who incarnated, followed, in so doing, a law as implacable as any other. The name of Asura (not-god) was first given by the Brahmans indiscriminately to those who opposed their mummeries and sacrifices, and it is to those ages, probably, that the origin of the idea of the demon as opposer and adversary has to be traced. The Hebrew Elohim, called "God" in the translations of the Bible, and who create "light," are identical with the Aryan Asuras. They are also referred to as the "Sons of Darkness," a philosophical and logical contrast to light immutable and eternal. The earliest Zoroastrians did not believe in Evil or Darkness, as coeternal with Good or Light, and they give the same interpretation. Ahriman (the evil Spirit) is the manifested shadow of Ahura (Asura) Mazda, himself issued from the Unknown Cause. Its primal emanation is eternal Light, previously concealed in Darkness, but when called to manifest itself producing Ormazd the King of Life." He is the "first-born" in BOUNDLESS TIME, but like his own antetype (the preexisting Spiritual Idea) has lived within Darkness from all eternity. The six Amshaspends (with himself as chief of all, seven), the primitive Spiritual Angels and Men, are collectively his Logos. The Zoroastrian Amshaspends create the world in six days or periods, and rest on the seventh; whereas that seventh is the first period, or " day," in eso

teric philosophy (Primary creation in the Aryan cosmogony). It is that intermediate on which is the Prologue to creation, and which stands on the borderland between the uncreated eternal Causation and the produced finite effects; a state of nascent activity and energy as the first aspect of the eternal, immutable Quiescence. In Genesis "Creation" begins with the third stage of manifestation, "God" or the Elohim, being equivalent to all the other Creators, including the “Seven Regents" of Pymander.

But even in Genesis that intermediate period is hinted at in the "darkness" that was upon the face of the deep. The Elohim are shown as building or producing the double heaven (not Heaven and Earth) which means that they separated the manifested angelic or upper heaven, or plane of consciousness, from the lower or terrestrial plane. Such is the meaning of the sentence in Pymander which says that "THOUGHT the divine, which is LIGHT and LIFE, produced through its WORD, or first aspect, the other, operating Thought; which, being the god of Spirit and Fire, constructed seven Regents, enclosing within their circle the world of senses, named fatal destiny.'" The latter refers to Karma; the "seven circles" are the seven planets and planes, as also the seven invisible Spirits in the angelic spheres, whose visible symbols are the seven planets, the seven Spirits of the Great Bear, and other glyphs. The "First-born" Sons of Light were so near to the confines of pure quiescent Spirit as to be merely the "privations" (in the Aristotelian sense) the ferouers of ideal types of those that followed. They could not create material, corporeal things; and, therefore, in process of time, were said to have refused to create, as commanded by God-in other words, to have rebelled. No mention is made in Genesis of these "Sons of