We now add-it is all this and much more.

This "Fire" is spoken of in all the Hindû Sacred Books, as also in the Kabalistic works. The Zohar explains it as the "White Hidden Fire, in the Risha Havurah," the White Head, whose Will causes the fiery fluid to flow in 370 currents in every direction of the Universe. It is identical with the "Serpent that runs with 370 leaps" of the Siphrah Dizenioutha, the Serpent, which, when the "Perfect Man," the Metatron, is raised, that is to say, when the Divine Man indwells in the animal man, becomes three Spirits, or Âtmâ-Buddhi-Manas, in our Theosophical phraseology.

Spirit, then, or Cosmic Ideation, and Cosmic Substance-one of whose "principles" is Ether-are one, and include the Elements, in the sense St. Paul attaches to them. These Elements are the veiled Synthesis standing for Dhyân Chohans, Devas, Sephiroth, Amshaspends, Archangels, etc. The Ether of Science-the Ilus of Berosus, or the Protyle of Chemistry-constitutes, so to speak, the rude material, relatively, out of which the above-named Builders, following the plan traced out for them eternally in the Divine Thought, fashion the Systems in the Kosmos. They are "myths," we are told. No more so than Ether and the Atoms, we answer. The two latter are absolute necessities of Physical Science, and the Builders are as absolute a necessity of Metaphysics. We are twitted with the objection: You never saw them. And we ask the Materialists: Have you ever seen Ether, or your Atoms, or, again, your Force? Moreover, one of the greatest Western Evolutionists of our modern day, co-"discoverer" with Darwin, Mr. A. R. Wallace, when discussing the inadequacy of Natural Selection alone accounting for the physical form of Man, admits the guiding action of "higher intelligences" as a "necessary part of the great laws which govern the material Universe."

"

These "higher intelligences" are the Dhyân Chohans of the Occultists.

Indeed, there are few myths in any religious system worthy of the name, but have a historical as well as a scientific foundation. “Myths," justly observes Pococke, "are now proved to be fables, just in proportion as we misunderstand them; truths, in proportion as they were once understood."

The most distinct and the one prevailing idea, found in all ancient teaching, with reference to Cosmic Evolution and the first "creation"

* Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection.

of our Globe with all its products, organic and inorganic-strange word for an Occultist to use!—is that the whole Kosmos has sprung from the Divine Thought. This Thought impregnates Matter, which is coeternal with the One Reality; and all that lives and breathes evolves from the Emanations of the One Immutable, Parabrahman-Mûlaprakriti, the Eternal- One-Root. The former of these, in its aspect of the Central Point turned inward, so to say, into regions quite inaccessible to human intellect, is Absolute Abstraction; whereas, in its aspect as Mûlaprakriti, the Eternal Root of all, it gives one at least some hazy comprehension of the Mystery of Being.

Therefore, it was taught in the inner temples that this visible Universe of Spirit and Matter is but the concrete Image of the ideal Abstraction; it was built on the Model of the first Divine Idea. Thus our Universe existed from eternity in a latent state. The Soul animating this purely spiritual Universe is the Central Sun, the highest Deity Itself. It was not the One who built the concrete form of the idea, but the First-Begotten; and, as it was constructed on the geometrical figure of the dodecahedron, the First-Begotten "was pleased to employ 12,000 years in its creation." The latter number is expressed in the Tyrrhenian Cosmogony,† which shows man created in the sixth millennium. This agrees with the Egyptian theory of 6,000 “years,”‡ and with the Hebrew computation. But it is the exoteric form of it. The secret computation explains that the "12,000 and the 6,000 years" are Years of Brahmâ, one Day of Brahmâ being equal to 4,320,000,000 years. Sanchuniathon, in his Cosmogony,§ declares that when the Wind (Spirit) became enamoured of its own principles (Chaos), an intimate union took place, which connection was called Pothos (óðos), and from this sprang the seed of all. And the Chaos knew not its own production, for it was senseless; but from its embrace with the Wind was generated Môt, or the Ilus (Mud).|| From this proceeded the spores of creation and the generation of the Universe.¶

Zeus-Zên (Ether), and Chthonia (Chaotic Earth) and Metis (Water), his wives; Osiris-also representing Ether, the first emanation of the Supreme Deity, Amun, the primeval source of Light-and Isis-Latona, the Goddess Earth and Water again; Mithras,** the rock-born God, the symbol of the male Mundane Fire, or the personified Primordial Light, and Mithra, the Fire-Goddess, at once his mother and his wife-the pure element of Fire, the active or male principle, regarded as light and heat, in conjunction with Earth and Water, or matter, the female, or passive, element of cosmical generation-Mithras who is the son of Bordj, the Persian

* Plato, Timæus.

+ Suidas, sub voc. "Tyrrhenia." See Cory's Ancient Fragments, p. 309, 2nd ed.

The reader will understand that by "years" is meant "ages," not mere periods of 13 lunar months each.

? See the Greek translation by Philon Byblius.

Cory, Op. cit., p. 3.

Isis Unveiled, I. 342.

** Mithras was regarded among the Persians as the theos ek petras-the God from the rock.

mundane mountain,* from which he flashed out as a radiant ray of light; Brahmâ, the Fire-God, and his prolific consort; and the Hindû Agni, the refulgent Deity from whose body issue a thousand streams of glory and seven tongues of flame, and in whose honour certain Brâhmans to this day maintain a perpetual fire; Shiva, personated by Meru, the mundane mountain of the Hindûs, the terrific Fire-God, who is said in the legend to have descended from heaven, like the Jewish Jehovah. "in a pillar of fire"; and a dozen other archaic double-sexed Deities-all loudly proclaim their hidden meaning. And what could be the dual meaning of these myths but the psycho-chemical principle of primordial creation; the First Evolution, in its triple manifestation of Spirit, Force and Matter; the divine correlation, at its starting point, allegorized as the marriage of Fire and Water, the products of electrifying Spirit-the union of the male active principle with the female passive element-which become the parents of their tellurian child, Cosmic Matter, the Prima Materia, whose Soul is Æther, and whose Shadow is the Astral Light!+

But the fragments of the cosmogonical systems that have reached us are now rejected as absurd fables. Nevertheless, Occult Science-which has survived even the Great Flood that submerged the Antediluvian Giants and with them their very memory, save the record preserved in the Secret Doctrine, the Bible and other Scriptures-still holds the Key to all the world problems.

Let us, then, apply this Key to the rare fragments of long-forgotten Cosmogonies, and by means of their scattered portions endeavour to reestablish the once Universal Cosmogony of the Secret Doctrine. The Key fits them all. No one can seriously study ancient philosophies without perceiving that the striking similitude of conception in all of them, in their exoteric form very frequently, and in their hidden spirit invariably, is the result of no mere coincidence, but of a concurrent design; and that, during the youth of mankind, there was but one language, one knowledge, one universal religion, when there were no churches, no creeds or sects, but when every man was a priest unto himself. And, if it is shown that already in those early ages which are shut out from our sight by the exuberant growth of tradition, human religious thought developed in uniform sympathy in every portion of the globe; then, it becomes evident that that thought, born under whatever latitude, in the cold North or the burning South, in the East or West, was inspired by the same revelations, and that man was nurtured under the protecting shadow of the same Tree of Knowledge.

Bordj is called a fire-mountain, a volcano: therefore it contains fire, rock, earth and water; the male, or active, and the female, or passive, elements. The myth is suggestive.

+ Op. cit., I. 150.

SECTION IV.

CHAOS: THEOS: THEOS: KOSMOS.

THESE three are the containment of Space; or, as a learned Kabalist has defined it: "Space, the all-containing uncontained, is the primary embodiment of simple Unity . . . . boundless extension.”* But, he asks again: "boundless extension of what?"-and makes the correct reply: "The Unknown Container of All, the Unknown First Cause." This is a most correct definition and answer; most esoteric and true, from every aspect of Occult Teaching.

Space, which, in their ignorance and with their iconoclastic tendency to destroy every philosophic idea of old, the modern wiseacres have proclaimed "an abstract idea" and a "void," is, in reality, the Container and the Body of the Universe in its Seven Principles. It is a Body of limitless extent, whose Principles, in Occult phraseology— each being in its turn a septenary-manifest in our phenomenal World only the grossest fabric of their sub-divisions. "No one has ever seen the Elements in their fulness," the Doctrine teaches. We have to search for our Wisdom in the original expressions and synonyms of the primeval peoples. Even the Jews, the latest of these, show the same idea, in their Kabalistic teachings, when they speak of the sevenheaded Serpent of Space, called the "Great Sea."

In the beginning, the Alhim created the Heavens and the Earth; the Six [Sephiroth]. . . . They created Six, and on these all things are based. And these [Six] depend upon the seven forms of the Cranium up to the Dignity of all Dignities.†

Now Wind, Air and Spirit have ever been synonymous in every nation. Pneuma (Spirit) and Anemos (Wind), with the Greeks, Spi

• Henry Pratt, M.D., New Aspects of Life.

+ Siphrah Dizenioutha, i. 16.

ritus and Ventus, with the Latins, were convertible terms, even if dissociated from the original idea of the Breath of Life. In the "Forces" of Science we see but the material effect of the spiritual effect of one or other of the four primordial Elements, transmitted to us by the Fourth Race just as we shall transmit Æther, or rather its gross sub-division, in its fulness to the Sixth Root-Race.

Chaos was called senseless by the Ancients, because-Chaos and Space being synonymous-it represented and contained in itself all the Elements in their rudimentary, undifferentiated State. They made Æther, the fifth Element, the synthesis of the other four; for the Ether of the Greek philosophers was not its Dregs, although indeed they knew more than Science does now of these Dregs (Ether), which are rightly enough supposed to act as an agent for many Forces that manifest on Earth. Their Æther was the Âkâsha of the Hindus; the Ether accepted in Physics is but one of its sub-divisions, on our plane, the Astral Light of the Kabalists with all its evil as well as its good effects. Seeing that the Essence of Ether, or the Unseen Space, was considered divine, as being the supposed Veil of Deity, it was regarded as the Medium between this life and the next. The Ancients considered that when the directing active Intelligences-the Gods-retired from any portion of Æther in our Space, or the four realms which they superintend, then that particular region was left in the possession of evil, so called by reason of the absence from it of good.

The existence of Spirit in the common Mediator, the Ether, is denied by Materi alism; while Theology makes of it a Personal God. But the Kabalist holds that both are wrong, saying that in Ether, the elements represent only Matter, the blind Cosmic Forces of Nature; while Spirit represents the Intelligence which directs them. The Aryan, Hermetic, Orphic, and Pythagorean cosmogonical doctrines, as well as those of Sanchuniathon and Berosus, are all based upon one irrefutable formula, viz., that Æther and Chaos, or, in the Platonic language, Mind and Matter, were the two primeval and eternal principles of the Universe, utterly independent of anything else. The former was the all-vivifying intellectual principle, while Chaos was a shapeless liquid principle, without "form or sense"; from the union of which two sprang into existence the Universe, or rather the Universal World, the first Androgynous Deity-Chaotic Matter becoming its Body, and Ether its Soul. According to the phraseology of a Fragment of Hermeias: "Chaos, from this union with Spirit, obtaining sense, shone with pleasure, and thus was produced Protogonos the (First-Born) Light.”* This is the universal Trinity, based on the metaphysical conceptions of the Ancients, who, reasoning by analogy, made of man, who

* Damascius, in his Theogony, calls it Dis, "the disposer of all things." Cory, Ancient Fragments,

p. 314.