duty, high as these two infinitudes (heaven and hell), dwarfing all else, annihilating all else—it was a reality, and it is one: the garment only of it is dead; the essence of it lives through all times and all eternity!

It lives undeniably, and has settled in all its ineradicable strength and power in the Asiatic Aryan heart, from the Third Race direct, through its first Mind-born Sons, the fruits of Kriyâshakti. As time rolled on, the holy caste of Initiates produced, but rarely, from age to age, such perfect creatures; beings apart, inwardly, though the same as those who produced them, outwardly.

In the infancy of the Third primitive Race:
A creature of a more exalted kind

Was wanting yet, and therefore was designed;
Conscious of thought, of more capacious breast,
For empire formed and fit to rule the rest.

It was called into being, a ready and perfect vehicle for the incarnating denizens of higher spheres, who took forthwith their abodes in these forms, born of Spiritual Will and the natural divine power in man. It was a child of pure spirit, mentally unalloyed with any tincture of earthly element. Its physical frame alone was of time and of life, for it drew its intelligence direct from above. It was the Living Tree of Divine Wisdom; and may therefore be likened to the Mundane Tree of the Norse Legends, which cannot wither and die until the last battle of life shall be fought, while its roots are all the time gnawed by the dragon Nidhogg. For even so, the first and holy Son of Kriyâshakti had his body gnawed by the tooth of time, but the roots of his inner being remained for ever undecaying and strong, because they grew and expanded in heaven, and not on earth. He was the first of the First, and he was the Seed of all the others. There were other Sons of Kriyâshakti produced by a second spiritual effort, but the first one has remained to this day the Seed of Divine Knowledge, the One and the Supreme among the terrestrial "Sons of Wisdom." Of this subject we can say no more, except to add that in every age—aye, even in our own -there have been great intellects who have understood the problem correctly.

But how comes our physical body to the state of perfection it is now found in? Through millions of years of evolution, of course, yet never through, or from, animals, as taught by Materialism. For, as Carlyle says:

The essence of our being, the mystery in us that calls itself "I,"-ah, what words have we for such things?-is a breath of Heaven; the Highest Being

reveals himself in man.

THE CREATIVE POWERS.

233

This body, these faculties, this life of ours, is it not all as

a vesture for that Unnamed? The "breath of Heaven," or rather the breath of Life, called in the Bible Nephesh, is in every animal, in every animate speck and in every mineral atom. But none of these has, like man, the consciousness of the nature of that "Highest Being,"* as none has that divine harmony in its form, which man possesses. It is, as Novalis said, and no one since has said it better, as repeated by Carlyle:

There is but one temple in the Universe, and that is the Body of Man. Nothing is holier than that high form. . . . We touch Heaven when we lay our hand on a human body! This sounds like a mere flourish of rhetoric; but it is not so. If well meditated, it will turn out to be a scientific fact; the expression . . . of the actual truth of the thing. We are the miracle of miracles-the great inscrutable Mystery....†

STANZA VII.

1. BEHOLD THE BEGINNING OF SENTIENT FORMLESS LIFE (a). FIRST, THE DIVINE ‡ (6), THE ONE FROM THE MOTHER-SPIRIT ;§ THEN, THE SPIRITUAL|| (c); ¶THE THREE FROM THE ONE (d), the FOUR FROM THE One (e), and THE FIVE (ƒ), FROM WHICH THE Three, THE FIVE AND THE SEVEN (g). THESE ARE THE THREE-FOLD AND The Four-folD DOWNWARD; THE MIND-BORN SONS OF THE FIRST LORD,** THE SHINING SEVEN.tt IT IS THEY WHO ARE THOU, I, HE, O LANOO; THEY WHO WATCH OVER THEE AND THY MOTHER, BHUMI.‡‡

(a) The Hierarchy of Creative Powers is divided esoterically into Seven (four and three), within the Twelve great Orders, recorded in the twelve signs of the Zodiac; the Seven of the manifesting scale being connected, moreover, with the Seven Planets. All these are subdivided into numberless Groups of divine spiritual, semi-spiritual, and ethereal Beings.

⚫ There is no nation in the world in which the feeling of devotion, or of religious mysticism, is more developed and prominent than in the Hindû people. See what Max Müller says of this idiosyncrasy and national feature in his works. This is a direct inheritance from the primitive conscious men of the Third Race.

+ Lectures on Heroes.

: Vehicle.

Atman.

| Atmá-Buddhi, Spirit-Soul. This relates to the cosmic principles.

Again.

* Avalokiteshvara.

++Builders. The seven creative Rishis, now connected with the constellation of the Great Bear. #Earth.

The chief Hierarchies among these are hinted at in the great Quaternary, or the "four bodies and the three faculties," exoterically, of Brahmâ and the Panchâsya, the five Brahmâs, or the five DhyâniBuddhas in the Buddhist system.

The highest Group is composed of the Divine Flames, so called, also spoken of as the "Fiery Lions" and the "Lions of Life," whose esotericism is securely hidden in the zodiacal sign of Leo. It is the nucleole of the superior Divine World. They are the Formless Fiery Breaths, identical in one aspect with the upper Sephirothal Triad, which is placed by the Kabalists in the Archetypal World.

The same Hierarchy, with the same numbers, is found in the Japanese system, in the "Beginnings," as taught by both the Shinto and the Buddhist sects. In this system, Anthropogenesis precedes Cosmogenesis, as the divine merges into the human, and creates-midway in its descent into matter-the visible Universe; the legendary personages, remarks reverentially Omoie, "having to be understood as the stereotyped embodiment of the higher [secret] doctrine, and its sublime truths." To state this old system at full length would occupy too much of our space; a few words on it, however, cannot be out of place. The following is a short synopsis of this Anthropo-Cosmogenesis, and shows how closely the most separated nations echoed one and the same archaic teaching.

When all was as yet Chaos (Kon-ton), three spiritual Beings appeared on the stage of future creation: (1) Ame no ani naka nushi no Kami, "Divine Monarch of the Central Heaven"; (2) Taka mi onosubi no Kami, "Exalted, Imperial Divine Offspring of Heaven and Earth"; and (3) Kamu mi musubi no Kami, "Offspring of the Gods," simply. These were without form or substance-our Arûpa Triad—as neither the celestial nor the terrestrial substance had yet differentiated, “nor had the essence of things been formed."

(b) In the Zohar-which, as now arranged and reëdited by Moses de Leon, with the help of Syrian and Chaldean Christian Gnostics, in the XIIIth century, and corrected and revised still later by many Christian hands, is only a little less exoteric than the Bible itself this "Divine [Vehicle]" no longer appears as it does in the Chaldean Book of Numbers. True enough, Ain Suph, the Absolute Endless No-thing, uses also the form of the One, the manifested "Heavenly Man" (the First Cause), as its Chariot (Mercabah, in Hebrew; Vâhana, in Sanskrit) or Vehicle, to descend into, and manifest itself in, the phenomenal

world.

ONE PARENT FLAME, COUNTLESS FLAMES.

235

But the Kabalists neither make it plain how the Absolute can use anything, or exercise any attribute whatever, since, as the Absolute, it is devoid of attributes; nor do they explain that in reality it is the First Cause (Plato's Logos), the original and eternal Idea, that manifests through Adam Kadmon, the Second Logos, so to speak. In the Book of Numbers, it is explained that Ain (En, or Aiôr) is the only self-existent, whereas its "Depth," the Bythos of the Gnostics, called Propatôr, is only periodical. The latter is Brahmâ, as differentiated from Brahman or Parabrahman. It is the Depth, the Source of Light, or Propatôr, which is the Unmanifested Logos, or the abstract Idea, and not Ain Suph, whose Ray uses Adam Kadmon-"male and female"or the Manifested Logos, the objective Universe, as a Chariot, through which to manifest. But in the Zohar we read the following incongruity: "Senior occultatus est, et absconditus; Microprosopus manifestus est, et non manifestus."* This is a fallacy, since Microprosopus, or the Microcosm, can only exist during its manifestations, and is destroyed during the Mahâpralayas. Rosenroth's Kabbala is no guide, but very often a puzzle.

The First Order are the Divine. As in the Japanese system, in the Egyptian, and every old cosmogony-at this divine Flame, the "One," are lit the Three descending Groups. Having their potential being in the higher Group, they now become distinct and separate Entities. These are called the Virgins of Life, the Great Illusion, etc., etc., and collectively the six-pointed star. The latter, in almost every religion, is the symbol of the Logos as the first emanation. It is the sign of Vishnu in India, the Chakra, or Wheel; and the glyph of the Tetragrammaton, "He of the Four Letters," in the Kabalah, or metaphorically the "Limbs of Microprosopus," which are ten and six respectively.

The later Kabalists, however, especially the Christian Mystics, have played sad havoc with this magnificent symbol. Indeed, the Microprosopus-who is, philosophically speaking, quite distinct from the unmanifested eternal Logos, "one with the Father"-has finally been brought, by centuries of incessant efforts of sophistry and of paradoxes, to be considered as one with Jehovah, or the one living God (!), whereas Jehovah is no better than Binah, a female Sephira. This fact cannot be too frequently impressed upon the reader. For the "Ten Limbs” of the Heavenly Man are the ten Sephiroth; but the first Heavenly Man.

Rosenroth, Liber Mysterii, IV. 1.

is the unmanifested Spirit of the Universe, and ought never to be degraded into Microprosopus, the Lesser Face or Countenance, the prototype of man on the terrestrial plane. The Microprosopus is, as just said, the Logos manifested, and of such there are many. Of this, however, later on. The six-pointed star refers to the six Forces or Powers of Nature, the six planes, principles, etc., etc., all synthesized by the seventh, or the central point in the star. All these, the upper and lower Hierarchies included, emanate from the Heavenly or Celestial Virgin, the Great Mother in all religions, the Androgyne, the Sephira Adam Kadmon. Sephira is the Crown, Kether, in the abstract principle only, as a mathematical x, the unknown quantity. On the plane of differentiated nature, she is the female counterpart of Adam Kadmon, the first Androgyne. The Kabalah teaches that the words "Fiat Lux" referred to the formation and evolution of the Sephiroth, and not to light as opposed to darkness. Rabbi Simeon says:

O companions, companions, man as an emanation was both man and woman, Adam Kadmon verily, and this is the sense of the words, "Let there be Light, and there was Light." And this is the two-fold man.†

In its Unity, Primordial Light is the seventh, or highest, principle, Daiviprakriti, the Light of the Unmanifested Logos. But in its differentiation, it becomes Fohat, or the "Seven Sons." The former is symbolized by the central point in the Double Triangle; the latter by the Hexagon itself, or the "Six Limbs" of Microprosopus, the Seventh being Malkuth, the "Bride" of the Christian Kabalists, or our Earth. Hence the expressions:

The first after the One is Divine Fire; the second, Fire and Ether; the third is composed of Fire, Ether and Water; the fourth of Fire, Ether, Water, and Air. The One is not concerned with Man-bearing Globes, but with the inner, invisible Spheres. The First-Born are the LIFE, the Heart and Pulse of the Universe; the Second are its MIND or Consciousness.

These Elements of Fire, Air, etc., are not our compound elements; and this "Consciousness" has no relation to our consciousness. The Consciousness of the "One Manifested," if not absolute, is still unconditioned. Mahat, the Universal Mind, is the first production of the Brahmâ-Creator, but also of Pradhana, Undifferentiated Matter.

(c) The Second Order of Celestial Beings, those of Fire and Ether, corresponding to Spirit and Soul, or Âtmâ-Buddhi, whose names are legion, are still formless, but more definitely "substantial." They are