The antiquity and universality of the Zodiac can be traced back to the earliest Theogonies. It was not the Greeks who invented the Zodiac, for the simple reason that they did not yet exist as a nation thirty-seven centuries B.C. The dodecahedron is a perfect number and one among many signs of the Zodiac that the Sun visits in twelve months. It was in honour of that sign that Moses divided his nation into twelve symbolical tribes. Berosus predicted future events by the Zodiac; and the time fixed by him for the conflagration of the world, and another for a deluge, comes at every renewal of the cycle of the sidereal year of 25,868 years. The Hindus date their Kali-Yuga from the great periodical conjunction of the planets at 3,100 before the birth of Christ. Diogenes Laërtius carried back the astronomical calculations of the Egyptians to 48,683 years before Alexander the Great. The cycle of Initiation was a reproduction in miniature of that great series of Cosmic changes to which astronomers have given the name of tropical or sidereal year. Just as, at the close of the cycle of the sidereal year (25,868 mortal years), the heavenly bodies return to the same relative positions as they occupied at its outset, so at the close of the cycle of Initiation the inner man may regain the pristine state of divine purity and knowledge, from which he set out on his cycle of terrestrial incarnations. The connection of the twelve Jewish patriarchs with the Zodiac is a tacit “divine” recognition of the “chosen people of God,” whose finger has purposely traced in heaven, from the beginning of creation, the numbers of these patriarchs. Even the banners of these tribes are claimed to have exhibited the same symbols as those of the zodiacal signs. In the universe of differentiated matter everything is mathematically co-ordinated and mutually related in its units. Replace God with of Karma, and he will become an Eastern axiom. Why see in the Pisces a direct reference to Jesus, one of several world-reformers, when that constellation shines as a symbol of all past, present, and future Spiritual Saviours who dispense light and dispel mental darkness? The Jews had evidently and undeniably borrowed their chronology from the Chaldeans, along with their gods. Of the 432,000 years of the Chaldean divine Dynasties they made 4,320 lunar years from the world’s creation to the Christian era; as to the Babylonian and Egyptian Gods, they transformed them as quietly and modestly into Patriarchs. The Zodiac existed hundreds of million of years before the Christian era. Each planetary conjunction is a climacteric year of humanity. All Sun-gods had been mystically connected with the constellation of Taurus, which was called “the great city of God and mother of revelations” and “the interpreter of the divine voice.” The ansated Egyptian cross or Tau, the Jaina cross or Svastika, and the Christian cross have all the same meaning. No peoples or nations, except the Christians, gave the significance to the Dragon that is given to it now. The Serpent was the symbol of Wisdom; and the Taurus, sacred in every Cosmogony, the symbol of physical or terrestrial generation. It was from the Hindu systems of astronomy that the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, and even the Jews derived their knowledge. It is the antiquity of the nations of the East which has erected their scientific fame. For patience accumulated knowledge; and prolonged experience produced wisdom. Time itself was their teacher; they knew the motions of the heavenly bodies during these intervals because they had seen them; and the duration of the Hindu people on earth is the cause of the fidelity of its records and the accuracy of its calculations. The descent and re-ascent of the human soul cannot be disconnected from the Zodiacal signs, and it feels more natural to believe in the mysterious sympathy between the metaphysical soul and the bright constellations, and in the influence of the latter on the former, than in the absurd notion that the creators of Heaven and Earth have placed in Heaven the types of twelve vicious Jews. In esoteric philosophy Patriarchs are the progenitors of the human race, the “Mind-born Sons” of Brahmā. They are the nursery and fountainhead of human beings. This is the occult meaning of the Biblical Patriarchs, of their genealogy, and of their descendants dividing among themselves the earth. First 7 are mentioned, then 10, 21, and so on. The Jewish Patriarchs were pastors, not priests.
Cross is the time-honoured symbol of pre-Cosmic Divine Mind. The four points correspond to birth, life, death, and immortality. The Hidden Deity represented by the circumference of a Circle, and the Creative Power (Androgynous Word) by the diameter across it, is the cornerstone of Esoteric Cosmogony, Theogony, and Anthropogony. With the old Aryans, the Egyptians, and the Chaldeans, the diameter across the Circle embraced the idea of eternal and immovable Divine Thought in its Absoluteness, separated entirely from the incipient stage of the so-called creation. With the Hebrews, however, that which has been embodied in the Pentateuch and especially in Genesis, is simply the secondary stage of Cosmogenesis, i.e., the mechanical law of creation, or rather of construction; while Theogony is hardly, if at all, outlined. Jehovah was the tribal property of the Jews and no higher, inseparable from, and unfit to play a part in, any other but the Mosaic Law. Astronomically, the “Most High” is the Sun, and the “Lord” is one of his seven planets.. The meaning of Moses beseeching the Lord to show him “his glory” interpreted by two Kabbalists. Moses and Jehovah are in numerical harmony because the number of Moses is that of “I am, That I am,” i.e., 345. The number of Jehovah is 543, the reverse of 345. When the “back parts” of Moses and his “face” are added up we have 888, which is the Gnostic-Kabbalistic name of Jesus. The Sphinx has been devouring the brightest and the noblest intellects of Christendom but, at last, she is now conquered. It is not the Sphinx, however, who, burning with the shame of defeat had to bury herself into the sea, but the variegated symbol of Jehovah, whom Christians have accepted as their God. The Cross is one of the most ancient symbols, perhaps the most ancient. IAO is certainly a title of the Supreme Being, and belongs partially to the Ineffable Name; but it neither originated with, nor was it ever the sole property of, the Jews. IAO is an old mystic name of the Supreme deity of the Semites. In the old religion of the Chaldeans the highest divinity, enthroned above the seven heavens representing the spiritual light principle, was also called IAO who, like the Hebrew Yaho, was mysterious and unmentionable, and whose name was communicated only to the initiated. The ansated Cross represented Vishvakarman, the carpenter and artificer of the Gods crucifying the “Sun-Initiate” on the cruciform lathe, imparted the grand idea of man’s spiritual birth, not his physical regeneration. The candidate for initiation, being attached to the astronomical Cross, is a much grander and nobler idea than that of the origin of terrestrial life. On the other hand, the Semites had no other or higher purpose in life than that of procreating their species. Geometrically demonstrated, the Jewish Deity is merely an even number — the illusionary duad — never the One Absolute All; symbolically, a euhemerized Priapus. And all this can hardly satisfy those thirsting after real spiritual truths, not such a blasphemous and gross caricature of the Ever Unknowable. Even the most learned of modern Kabbalists can see in the Cross and Circle nothing but a symbol of the manifested creative and androgyne deity in this phenomenal world. But the Eastern Occultist declines to worship any anthropomorphic God. A Being, “having a mind like that of man, only infinitely more powerful,” is no God that has any room beyond the cycle of physical creation. That Being is, at best, one of the creative subordinate powers, the totality of which is called the Sephiroth, the Heavenly Man, and Adam Kadmon — the Second Logos of the Platonists. The initiated Hindus know how to “square the Circle” far better than any European. Western Mystics commence their speculation only at that stage when the universe “falls into matter,” as the Occultists say. From the first to the last chapter of the Pentateuch every scene, character, and event are connected with the origin of birth in its crudest and most brutal form. God is a Circle, the centre of which is everywhere and the circumference nowhere. Circle and Cross are inseparable. It is not in the Bible that we have to search for the origin of the Cross and Circle, but beyond the Flood. Deity is eternal perpetual motion, the Ever-Becoming, as well as the Ever-Universally-present, and the Ever-Existing. The Circle is its outward veil. The Crux Ansata unites the Circle and the four corners of the Cross. The Cross below the Circle stands for human procreation, and therefore oblivion of the divine origin of the Cross within the Circle and the divine pedigree of Man. The cruciform noose is a Cross in a Circle, a Crux Ansata truly; but it is a Cross on which all the human passions have to be crucified before the Yogin passes through the “strait gate,” the narrow Circle that widens into an infinite one, as soon as the inner man has passed the threshold. The Pleiades are the central group of the Milky Way, and the Central Point around which our Universe of fixed stars revolve in their respective orbits. It is this Circle and the starry Cross on its face that play the most prominent part. The Universe is periodically manifested by accelerated Motion, propelled by the Breath of Unknowable Power. The Spirit of Life, Infinite Wisdom, and Immortality are symbolised by the Circle and the Astronomical Cross within, the ouroboric Serpent or Dragon, and the Winged Globe which evolved as the Egyptian Scarabæus — suggesting the peregrinations of the Soul, each lower form unfolding a higher one. Self-moving numbers preceded mathematical numbers. The Planetary Spirits, or Creative Powers, were represented as Invisible Circles, the prototypic causes and builders of the heavenly orbs, which are Their visible bodies or coverings. Our visible Sun orbits ever closer around the Invisible Central Sun, which is the Spirit of Kosmos — abstract and formless because homogeneous and impartite — the Centre of Intelligence-Wisdom in every organised Universe, and Solar systems to be. Theos is neither the Spirit of Truth nor Spiritual Intelligence, but their Father. Far greater and more exacting deity than the “god” of this world, supposed to be “good,” is the Law of Karma. And this Universal Deity demonstrates that the lesser one, our personal god, has no power to arrest her mighty hand, for causes initiated by our thoughts and actions generate smaller causes, and call forth the unerring Law of Retribution that predestines nothing and no one. The Honoured One dwells in the Centre as in the Circumference, but it is only the reflection of the hidden Deity. The plane of the surface of the Circle is the World Soul. Those who, by unifying and individualizing the Universal Presence, have synthesized it into one symbol — the Central Point in the Crucifix — they have never seized the true Spirit of the teaching of Christ, and by their spurious interpretations they have degraded it in more than one way. They have forgotten the Spirit of that universal symbol and have selfishly monopolized it — as though the Boundless and the Infinite can ever be limited and conditioned in one man, or even in a nation! Alone, among the Apostles of the Western religion, Paul seems to have fathomed out the archaic mystery of the Cross. The four points of the Cross represent in succession birth, life, death, and immortality. To crucify before the sun is a phrase used of initiation. It comes from Egypt via from India. The initiated adept, who had successfully passed through all the trials, was simply tied on a couch (not nailed) in the form of a Tau or a Svastika, without the four prolongations, and then plunged in a deep sleep, the Sleep of Siloam. Vishvakarman, the all-seeing god, the great architect of the world and creative power, sacrifices himself to himself. The Spiritual Egos of every mortal are of His own essence, and one with Him. The symbol of Crucifixion is the origin of measures, shadowing forth creative law and design. Man was the primordial Word, the very first word possessed by the Hebrews, whoever they were, to carry the idea by the sound of a man. The numerical value of that word is 113, and carried with it the elements of the cosmical system displayed. The figure of Vithoba, even to the nail-marks on the feet, is that of Jesus crucified, in all its details, save the Cross. That man was meant, is proved by the fact of the Initiate being reborn after his crucifixion on the Tree of Life. That tree, through its use by the Romans as an instrument of torture, and by the ignorance of Christian schemers, has now become the tree of death! Thus one of the seven esoteric meanings, implied in the mystery of Crucifixion by the inventors of the system, is now revealed by the geometrical symbols containing the history of the evolution of man. The queer injunction in the Old Testament to crucify men before the Lord, the Sun, is no prophecy at all but has a direct phallic significance. The Cross is not a human invention, it is a time-honoured symbol of cosmic ideation and of the divine soul in man: eternal in its potentiality, periodical in its potency. Later, it expanded in that of the mortal who, by crucifying his flesh and passions on the Procrustean bed of torture, is reborn Immortal — leaving behind the animal-man tied on the Cross of Initiation. Like an empty chrysalis, the Spiritual Soul is now free as a butterfly. Much later, owing to the gradual loss of spirituality, the Cross was degraded to a phallic symbol. Eventually, the Cross was adopted and manipulated by Christianity, yet it was phallic from the very beginning. But the Cross does not belong exclusively to the Churches: its metaphysical meaning is too much for the champions of the religion of sensualism to grasp. The Cross is pre-eminently is Kabbalistic, representing the opposition and quaternary equilibrium of the elements.
Unknown and Unknowable is the Supreme Mystery-God. It is the Voice of the Ineffable Name and the Wisdom of the Initiates (Epopteia). It is the Holy of Holies, the Unity of Unities, more ineffable than all Silence, more occult than all Essence. It is Plato’s Unspeakable All, He whom no person has seen, except the Son. It is Pythagoras’ Ineffable God’s Name, and key to the mysteries of the Kabbalah. It is the Holy Word of God that “no man knew but He himself.” The Name is Ineffable because non-existent. It permeates the Moon and Stars, yet It is different from the Moon and Stars. It never differentiates but only emanates. There is no need travelling to distant places to find It. The Name is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart. It may rush into infinite worlds in sleepless whirling, yet It remains latent in the deepest recesses of thy heart. The Ineffable Name is Deity Itself, but not God. Nameless, unpronounceable, yet universally diffused Essence, the Ineffable is Kama-Eros-Phanes or noumenon of Fohat, i.e., Divine Will or Eternal Desire of manifesting Itself through visible creation. The Name lies hidden within the Pythagorean Tetrad or Tetractys. It is expressed by the Tau Cross, signet of the Living God. The double motion of the philosophical cross is the great arcanum of life and being. Deity is Nameless, Numberless, No-thing, Absolute Darkness. God is quaternary: Ineffable–Silence–Father–Truth. All powers and great symphonies of physical and spiritual nature lie inscribed within the Perfect Square. That is why the Ineffable Name was replaced by the Sacred Tetrad or Tetractys, the most binding and solemn oath with the ancient mystics. There are three Tetrads: the Unfathomable Father (First Logos), Its creative emanation or Heavenly Man (Second Logos), and the embodied reflection of the latter in humanity at large (Third Logos), or the Tetragrammaton of the Jews. Only the first is the real, Pythagorean Tetractys; the other two are counterfeit. The Ineffable Word is identical with the “Ineffable Name” of the Masons and the Kabbalists. The Word itself is only a substitute for the Masonic “Lost Word,” and a comparatively modern invention. The “Lost Word” is no word at all, as in the case of the “Ineffable Name.” It ought to stand as “lost words” and lost secrets, in general. Nor the “Name” is a name, but Sound or rather Motion. The “Name” is not “ineffable,” it is “unpronounceable” or rather not to be pronounced.
There are two Times, Universal and Finite. The one is the abstraction or noumenon of Infinite Time (Kala); the other, its phenomenon appearing periodically as the effect of Mahat. What is called temporal can exist only in time, which is a portion of the revolution of the highest sphere. Time is asleep in the bosom of the Orphic trinity. Secondary Logoi, like Zeus-Jupiter are born in and out of Chronos-Saturn, or Infinite Time. The last vibration of the Seventh Eternity, when Time was not, is First Logos. Time dawns in Second Logos, and is fully expressed in the Third. All Logoi are all the Sons of the Mother before they become those of the Father. Time is the panoramic succession of our states of consciousness. Present, “past,” and “future” are compound phenomenal time.
In its highest aspect, Akasha is Divine mind reflected in the waters of Space or Chaos. It is undifferentiated Noumenal and Abstract Space, which will be occupied by Primordial Consciousness. Akasha has several fields: The first is the field of latent consciousness which is coeval with the duration of the First and Second Logos. Another Akashic field is coeval with the emergence of the Third Logos. From the latent potentiality there radiates a lower field of differentiated consciousness, which is Mahat, or the entire collectivity of those Dhyani-Chohans of sentient life of which Fohat is the representative on the objective plane and the Manasaputras on the subjective. 1. Akasha is eternal; Astral Light; periodic and ephemeral. The ideals of Divine Mind become reflected and reversed in the Astral Light, which also reflects the life of our Earth. 2. Akasha is eternal divine consciousness, undifferentiated, and unconditioned. Astral Light is a periodic projection of the One Celestial Unconsciousness to myriads of terrestrial, individualised consciousnesses. 3. Akasha is the germ within the acorn; Astral Light is the acorn. 4. Akasha is the Divine Soul of Thought and Compassion, a perpetually reasoning Divinity. Compassion, being the Spirit of Truth, is the Law of laws. 5. Akasha is the Soul of the World on the spiritual plane; Astral Light, the Body of the World on the psychic plane. 6. Astral Light is the dregs of Akasha polluted by man’s selfish and perverted thoughts and deeds, storehouse of all human and especially psychic iniquities. Astral Light is bi-sexual. The male part is purely spiritual; the female part, tainted with matter. 7. Astral Light is not even the thought substance of the Universe, but a mere recorder of every thought. Astral Light retains the thoughts and deeds of the animal man; Akasha, those of the Spiritual Man.
Desire slumbers alone in the bosom of Eternal Truth. Out of Wind enamoured with Chaos, Pothos is born. Brahma soliloquizes in consternation: Who am I? Whence came I? The pregenetic or precosmic Triad is a pure metaphysical abstraction. As fragrance affects the mind from its proximity merely, and not from any immediate operation upon mind itself, so the Supreme influences the elements of creation. Will is the Desire to be, and to become. Then Desire awakens and polarises Spirit and Matter, the two opposing forces which are inseparable, interdependent, and readily convertible into each other. Polarisation is the outcome of a conscious apostasis of Spirit from a state of Unconscious Subjectivity, marking a period of self-reflection through the “objectivity” of Matter (illegitimate marriage) with the promise and hope of the two becoming one again (true marriage) and re-ascend (be resurrected) to their heavenly abode. In the World of Being, in between each and every pair of opposites there is a Point of Impartiality or Not-Being. This is Third Logos, the Heavenly Man, Conscious Universal Mind.
The Good is the Centre; the Intellectual-Principle, an unmoving circle; Soul, a circle in motion. All good souls dwell in the far-spread heavens, infusing life into the stars, consciously moving around the One Centre, seeking nothing beyond. Eternity is stable in Unity. All is bound to The Good, but The Good to none: It is the object of all aspiration. In Unity there can be no knowing. The One can only know Itself through Plurality. But in the great illusion of form, The One stands distinct and apart: it is present without being inherent.
At first the cosmogonical idea was one, everywhere. But as nations began fragmenting along tribal grooves, the original idea became gradually veiled with the overgrowth of human fancy. While in some countries the intelligent Powers of Nature received divine honours they were hardly entitled to, in others, the very thought of any such Power being endowed with intelligence seems absurd, and is proclaimed unscientific. Homer is silent with respect to the First Principle which, according to Proclus, is the Unity of Unities, more ineffable than all silence, more occult than all Essence. The Jews ascended no higher than the immediate artificer of the universe; for they degraded their metaphorical deity, as have the Christians, by accepting Jehovah as their one living yet personal God. The Jews invented the Tetragrammaton to celebrate life, to deify multiplication, and to mislead the profane. The Theosophist’s Deity is not the two-faced Tetragrammaton but the Crown, which has nought to do with the material world. The First Cause (Monad) is symbolised by a Point within the Circle of Heaven, or an Equilateral Triangle, from whence the First Cause has radiated is passed over in silence. That Point is the First Logos, not as yet the Architect of the world to be, but the unknown and unknowable cause of the Architect himself. Parabrahman cannot be seen as it is. It can only be seen by Logos but with a veil thrown over it: that veil is Mulaprakriti, the mighty expanse of cosmic matter. Mulaprakriti is the noumenon of matter, and is material to Logos, as any physical object is material to us. The Hidden Deity is represented by the circumference of a circle, the centre of which is everywhere and the circumference nowhere. Ain-Soph, the Kabbalistic Parabrahman, is inscrutable, unknowable, and unnameable — a Circle bound by the utmost stretch of our perception to the vault of a sphere. Deity is eternal perpetual motion, ever-becoming, universally-present, ever-existing. The Boundless Circle is its outward veil. Logos, represented by the central mathematical point, is only an organ in cosmic creation, through which radiate the energy and wisdom of Parabrahman. Logos is as unknown to us as Parabrahman is unknown in reality to Logos itself. In all those personations of Nature’s Female Powers, there are two distinct aspects: the noumenal and the phenomenal. The one is purely metaphysical, the other terrestrial and physical, and at the same time divine from the standpoint of human conception. The Powers of Nature all the symbols and personifications of Chaos, or the Primordial Waters of Space, the impenetrable veil between Absoluteness and the Logos of Creation. The feminine Logoi are all correlations, in their noumenal aspect, of Light, Sound, and Æther. There are four personations of Vach-Voice, vehicles of divine thought, corresponding with the higher Cosmic Principles. Vach is the female Logos, the loving mother of all that lives, milking forth sustenance and water. The most precious archaic records are utterly unknown to the Orientalists, and the dead-letter sense translations of popular Sanskrit works are merely blinds to the uninitiated. Hence the Orientalists refusing to be puzzled, they cut the Gordian knot of their perplexity by declaring the whole cosmogonical scheme figments of Brahmanical fancy and love of exaggeration. Prominent in every Cosmogony are the pre-cosmic Lords of Being, the Prajapatis or “Seven Builders,” symbolised by concentric circles. Osiris is the unknown “black God” because the realm of his noumenon is darkness to the mortal. He is the Egyptian Zagreus. Osiris is Avalokiteshvara, the Universal saviour and All-merciful Master, who moves the Waters of Space, fructifies and infuses the Breath of life into that germ that becomes the Golden Mundane Egg, and in which the male Brahmā is created. And thus, the first Prajapati, Lord of Beings, emerges and becomes the progenitor of mankind. Like Brahmā, Zeus and all other lower deities, Jehovah is an androgyne god. But he is neither the God worshipped by Moses, nor the Father of Jesus, nor yet the Ineffable Name of the Kabbalists. He is merely a composite name for membrum virile and Eve, a hermaphrodite. He is, in one sense, Noah (Hebrew Yah) or, literally translated, inch — the British inch! For those who love Truth for her own sake, and try to do good unselfishly without perpetually looking to reward and profit, the Cosmogony of Confucius is the most succinct and perhaps the most suggestive of all Cosmogonies. For those who are familiar with Occult Numerals, the Confucian figures indicate the progressive yet harmonious evolution of Kosmos and its beings, and the culmination of every perfection in heaven and on earth. The archaic map of Cosmogony is full of lines in the Confucian style, of concentric circles and dots. All these represent the most abstract and highest cosmogenic visions. Confucius, a contemporary of Pythagoras, was the Easter sage of the ancient world. He taught the sphericity of the Earth and the Heliocentric system; while, at about thrice years later, the infallible Popes threatened and even burnt “heretics” for asserting the same. The great Architect of the Universe gives the first impulse to the rotatory motion of our planetary system by stepping seriatim over each planet, causing each to turn around itself, and all around the Sun. Then after the Solar and Lunar Pitris take charge of their respective planets and earth to the end of the Kalpa. The Rishis are the mind-born sons of Brahmā, not priests. At the end of the first stage of evolution they are transformed into the seven stellar Rishis, the Saptarshis, while their human doubles appear as heroes, kings, and sages on this earth. There are many Rishis in the Vedas. It must however be understood that in every Creation the Vedas are revealed to the same men only. The opening sentence in every Cosmogony is either a Circle, an Egg, or a Head, often surrounded by Darkness — hence, black doves, black ravens, black tongues, black waters. They all relate to the birth of Universe and Man out of the latent germ in the Eternal Egg dwelling in Darkness. The Raven, yielding the same numerical value as the Head, is the symbol of the purely spiritual, sexless and androgyne man of the first three Root-Races, who vanished from earth forever. Eastern Esotericism asserts that only physical man was created in the image of deity; but that deity is but a minor god. The real God is the Imperishable Higher Ego or Nous, man’s true Individuality that cloths itself in a new personality at every new birth. Yet the Jews degraded the only ennobling religion of humanity to the most unspiritual and gross phallic religion.
