Various were the forms it was made to assume, and numerous the natural symbols that were adapted to it, as it crossed into the Space and Time evolved out of human speculation. These forms were cosmic and astronomical, theistic and pantheistic, abstract and concrete. They became in turn the Polar Dragon and the Southern Cross, the Alpha Draconis of the Pyramid, and the Chinese Dragon of Wisdom. They are all seven-headed, the dragons and serpents of antiquity, "one head for each Race, and each head with seven hairs on it," as the allegory has it. This typifies the seven principles throughout nature and man. The author of The Natural Genesis (Gerald Massey) thinks that the septenary of stars seen in the Great Bear and seven-headed Dragon furnished a visible origin for the symbolic seven of time above. He shows that the goddess of the Great Bear and mother of Time was in Egypt from the earliest times the 66 Living Word," and that "Sevekh-Kronus, whose type was the CrocodileDragon, the preplanetary form of Saturn, was called her son and consort; he was her Word-Logos (v. op. cit. II., p. 313, and I., p. 321). shown in the work just quoted, the seven-headed or septenary DRAGON-LOGOs had been in course of time split up, so to speak, into 28 portions. Each lunar week has a distinct occult character in the lunar month; each day of the 28 has its special characteristics, as each of the twelve constellations, whether separately or in combination with other signs, has an occult influence either for good or evil. This represents the sum of knowledge that men can acquire on this earth, yet few are those who acquire it, and still fewer are the wise men who get to the root of knowledge symbolized by the great RootDragon, the spiritual Logos of these visible signs. But those who do, receive the name of "Dragons (or Serpents), and they are "the Arhats of the

As

Four Truths of the 28 Faculties," or attributes, and have always been so called.

The crocodile is the Egyptian dragon. It was the dual symbol of Heaven and Earth, of Sun and Moon, and was made sacred in consequence of its amphibious nature, to both Osiris and Isis. (See Comment on Stanza VII. f. and in Vol. II., § XXIV., The Cross and the Pythagorean Decade, where the connection of the crocodile with the fifth sign of the Zodiac, with the fifth hierarchy, etc., is fully explained, as well as its connection with the number 7. It is also the symbol of the spiritual part of man, the reincarnating principle. (v. loc. cit., Stanza VII. f.)

The Serpent became the type and symbol of evil and of the Devil only during the middle ages. The early Christians—as well as the Ophite Gnosticshad their dual Logos, the Good and the Bad Serpent, the Agathodæmon and the Kakodæmon. It is on each of the seven zones of post mortem ascent, in the Hermetic writings, that the "mortal" leaves one of his "souls" (or principles); until arrived on the plane above all zones, he remains as the great Formless Serpent of absolute wisdom-or the Deity itself. The seven-headed serpent has more than one signification in the arcane teachings. It is the sevenheaded Draco, each of whose heads is a star of the Little Bear; but it is also, and pre-eminently, the Serpent of Darkness (i.e., inconceivable and incomprehensible), whose seven heads were the seven Logoi, the reflections of the one and first manifested Light-the Universal Logos.

Section XI

DEMON EST DEUS INVERSUS

This symbolical sentence is certainly most dangerous and iconoclastic in the face of all the dualistic later religions, or rather theologies, and especially so in the light of Christianity. Yet it is neither just nor correct to say that it is Christianity which has conceived and brought forth Satan. As an "adversary, ," the opposing power required by the equilibrium and harmony of things in Nature, like night to bring into greater relief the day-Satan has ever existed. One cannot claim God as the synthesis of the whole Universe, as Omnipresent, and Omniscient and Infinite, and then divorce Him from evil. As there is far more evil than good in the world, it follows logically that God must either include evil or stand as the direct cause of it, or else surrender His claims to absoluteness. The ancients understood this so well that their philosophers defined evil as the lining of good, or God; Demon est Deus inversus being a very old adage. Indeed evil is reaction, opposition and contrast, evil for some, good for others. There is no malum in se; only the shadow of light, without which light could have no existence, even in our perceptions. If evil disappeared from the earth good would disappear along with it. In the SyroChaldean magic Ophis and Ophiomorphos are joined in the Zodiac, at the sign of Virgo-Scorpio. Everywhere the speculations of the Kabalists treat of evil as a FORCE, which is antagonistic, but at the same time essential to good. There would be no life possible (in our world of illusion) without death, nor regeneration and reconstruction without destruction. Plants would perish in eternal sunlight, and so would man, who would become an automaton with

out the exercise of his free will and his aspirations after that sunlight which would lose its being and its value for him had he nothing but light.

In human nature evil denotes only the polarity of matter and spirit, a struggle for life between the two manifested principles in Space and Time, principles which are one per se, inasmuch as they are rooted in the Absolute. In Kosmos the equilibrium must be preserved. The operations of the two contraries produce harmony, like the centripetal and centrifugal forces, which are necessary to each other-mutually interdependent-" in order that both should live." If one be arrested, the action of the other will immediately become self-destructive.

The

The personification called Satan has been amply analyzed in Chapter X., Vol. 2, of Isis Unveiled, and in several subsequent chapters of this book. present subject is touched upon here for very good reasons. Before we can approach the evolution of physical and divine man we have first to master the idea of cyclic evolution, and to acquaint ourselves with the philosophies and beliefs of the four Races which preceded our own, to learn the ideas of those Titans and giants-giants, verily, mentally as well as physically. The whole of antiquity was imbued with that philosophy which teaches the involution of spirit into matter, the progressive, downward cyclic descent. The Alexandrian Gnostics have sufficiently divulged the secret of initiations, and their records are full of "the sliding down of Eons" in their double quality of Angelic Beings and periods of Time, the one the natural evolution of the other. On the other hand, Oriental tradition is as full of allegories about the downfall of the gods. One and all allegorized and explained the FALL as the desire to learn and acquire Knowledgeto KNOW. This is the natural sequence of mental evolution, the spiritual becoming transmuted into the

material or physical. The same law of descent into materiality and reascent into spirituality asserted itself during the Christian era, the reaction having only just stopped, in our own special sub-race. (Fifth sub-race of the Fifth Root-Race.)

The allegory of the seven Planetary Spirits breaking through the seven circles of fire, an astronomical, anthropological and even chemical fact, allegorized in Pymander perhaps ten millenniums ago, was dwarfed into one material and anthropomorphic interpretation-the rebellion and Fall of the Angels. The love of nature for Divine form and the "Heavenly Man" enraptured with his own beauty mirrored in nature-i.e., Spirit attracted into matterhas now become in theology; "the seven Archangels disobeying Jehovah, self-admiration generating Satanic pride, followed by their FALL, Jehovah permitting no worship save of himself." In short, the beautiful Planet-Angels, the glorious cyclic ons of the ancients, became henceforth synthesized in their most orthodox shape in Samael, the chief of the Demons in the Talmud, "that great serpent with twelve wings that draws down after him in his Fall the solar system, or the Titans." But Schemal, the Sabean type of Samael, meant in his philosophical and esoteric aspect, the year in its astrological evil aspect, its twelve months or wings of unavoidable evils in nature. The Kabalists show the two, Schemal and Samael, to be a symbolical form of Saturn, KRONOS, the 12 wings standing for the 12 months, and the symbol as a whole representing a racial cycle: Jehovah and Saturn are also glyphically identical.

Kronos stands for endless (hence immovable) Duration, without beginning or end, beyond divided Time, and beyond Space. Those " Angels" who were born to act in space and time-i.e., to break through the seven circles of the super-spiritual