Collated from the writings of H. P. Blavatsky
Theosophy - Vol. 52, No. 2, December, 1963 / Pages 43-50

from WisdomWorld Website

 

FROM the very day when the first mystic found the means of communication between this world and the worlds of the invisible host, between the sphere of matter and that of pure spirit, he concluded that to abandon this mysterious science to the profanation of the rabble was to lose it.

The Kabiri or the Kabirim [the name is Phoenician] were Deities and very mysterious gods with the ancient nations, including the Israelites, and were held in the highest veneration at Thebes, in Lemnos, Phrygia, Macedonia, and especially at Samothrace. They were mystery gods, no profane having the right to name or speak of them. Herodotus makes of them Fire-gods and points to Vulcan as their father. The Kabiri presided over the Mysteries, and their real number has never been revealed, their occult meaning being very sacred.

The Kabiri were also Assyrian gods. In Hebrew the name means "the mighty ones," Gibborim. In Samothrace, an island famous and renowned for its Mysteries all over the world -- perhaps the oldest ever established in our present race -- they were the Samothraces. The latter are considered identical with the Kabiri, Dioscuri and Corybantes. The names of the Samothraces were mystical, denoting Pluto, Ceres or Proserpine, Bacchus and Æsculapius, or Hermes. At one time all the deities connected with fire, whether they were divine, infernal or volcanic, were called Kabirian. With the Christians, however, they are now devils, although the modern Archangels are the direct transformation of these same Kabiri.

Those who know anything of the Samothracian mysteries will remember that the generic name of the Kabiri was the "Holy Fires," which created on seven localities of the island of Electria (or Samothrace) the "Kabir born of the Holy Lemnos" (the island sacred to Vulcan). According to Pindar, this Kabir, whose name was Adamas, was, in the traditions of Lemnos, the type of the primitive man born from the bosom of the Earth. He was the archetype of the first males in the order of generation, and was one of the seven autochthonous ancestors or progenitors of mankind.

A Mystery, imparted to but very few initiates, was enacted once every seven years during the Mysteries, and the records of it are found self-imprinted on the leaves of the Thibetan sacred tree, the mysterious Kounboum, in the Lamasery of the holy adepts. In the shoreless ocean of space radiates the central, spiritual, and invisible sun. The universe is his body, spirit, and soul; and after this ideal model are framed all "things." These three emanations are the three lives, the three degrees of the gnostic Pleroma, the three "Kabalistic Faces," for the ANCIENT of the ancient, the holy of the aged, the great En-Soph, "has a form and then he has no form." The invisible "assumed a form when he called the universe into existence," says the Sohar, the Book of Splendor. The first light is His Soul, the Infinite, Boundless, and Immortal breath; under the efflux of which the universe heaves its mighty bosom, infusing intelligent life throughout creation. The second emanation condenses cometary matter and produces form within the cosmic circle; sets the countless worlds floating in the electric space, and infuses the unintelligent, blind life-principle into every form. The third produces the whole universe of physical matter; and as it keeps gradually receding from the Central Divine Light its brightness wanes and it becomes DARKNESS and the BAD -- pure matter, the "gross purgations of the celestial fire" of the Hermetists.

When the Central Invisible, the "highest and greatest Creative POWER," saw the efforts of the divine Scintilla [Over-Soul], unwilling to be dragged lower down into the degradation of matter, to liberate itself, he permitted it to shoot out from itself a monad, over which, attached to it as by the finest thread, the Divine Scintilla had to watch during its ceaseless peregrinations from one form to another. Thus the monad was shot down into the first form of matter and became encased in a stone; then, in course of time, through the combined efforts of living fire and living water, both of which shone their reflection upon the stone, the monad crept out of its prison to sunlight as a lichen. From change to change it went higher and higher; the monad, with every new transformation borrowing more of the radiance of its parent, Scintilla (Soul), which approached it nearer at every transmigration. For "the First Cause had willed it to proceed in this order"; and destined it to creep on higher until the physical form became once more the Adam of dust, shaped in the image of the Adam Kadmon (Pitris).

Before undergoing its last earthly transformation, the external covering of the monad, from the moment of its conception as an embryo, passes in turn, once more, through the phases of the several kingdoms. In its fluidic prison it assumes a vague resemblance at various periods of the gestation to plant, reptile, bird, and animal, until it becomes a human embryo. At the birth of the future man, the monad, radiating with all the glory of its immortal parent [Dhyani-Buddha] which watches it from the seventh sphere, becomes senseless. It loses all recollection of the past, and returns to consciousness but gradually, when the instinct of childhood gives way to reason and intelligence. After the separation between the life-principle (astral spirit) and the body takes place, the liberated soul -- Monad, exultingly rejoins the mother and father spirit [i.e., the Fire-Kabiri], the radiant Augoeides, and the two, merged into one, forever form, with a glory proportioned to the spiritual purity of the past earth-life, the Adam who has completed the circle of necessity, and is freed from the last vestige of his physical encasement. Henceforth, growing more and more radiant at each step of his upward progress, he mounts the shining path that ends at the point from which he started around the Grand Cycle.

If one studies comparative Theogony, it is easy to find that the secret of these "Fires" was taught in the Mysteries of every ancient people, pre-eminently in Samothrace. There is not the smallest doubt that the Kabiri, the most arcane of all the ancient deities, gods and men, great deities and Titans, are identical with the Kumaras and Rudras headed by Kartikeya [Mars, personifying the powers of the LOGOS] -- a Kumara also. This is quite evident even exoterically; and these Hindu deities were, like the Kabiri, the personified sacred Fires of the most occult powers of Nature. The several branches of the Aryan Race, the Asiatic and the European, the Hindu and the Greek, did their best to conceal their true nature, if not their importance. As in the case of the Kumaras, the number of the Kabiri is uncertain. Some say that they were three or four only; others say seven. Thus, while in Samothrace and the oldest Egyptian temples they were the great Cosmic Gods (the seven and the forty-nine Sacred Fires), in the Grecian fanes their rites became mostly phallic, therefore to the profane, obscene. In the latter case they were three and four, or seven -- the male and female principles -- (the crux ansata), this division showing why some classical writers held that they were only 3, while others named 4. And these were, the Kabiri Axieros (in his female aspect, Demeter); Axio-Kersa (Persephone); Axiokersos (Pluto or Hades); and Kadmos or Kadmilos (Hermes -- not the ithyphallic Hermes mentioned by Herodotus ... but "he of the sacred legend," explained only during the Samothracian mysteries). They may very well stand for the alter-egos of the four Kumaras, Sanat-Kumara, Sananda, Sanaka, and Sanatana. The former deities, whose reputed father was Vulcan, were often confounded with the Dioscuri, Corybantes, Anaces, etc., just as the Kumara, whose reputed father is Brahmâ (or rather, the "Flame of his Wrath") ... were confounded with the Asuras, the Rudras, and the Pitris, for the simple reason that they are all one -- i.e., correlative Forces and Fires.

The Kabirim, the "mighty ones," are identical with our primeval Dhyan-Chohans, with the incorporeal and corporeal Pitris, and with all the rulers and instructors of the primeval races, which are referred to as the Gods and Kings of the divine Dynasties. It matters little whether it is Isis, or Ceres -- the "Kabiria" -- or again the Kabiri. Every nation has either the seven and ten Rishi-Manus and Prajapatis; the seven and ten Ki-y; or ten and seven Amshaspends (six exoterically, if Ormazd, their chief and Logos, is excluded); ten and seven Chaldean Anedots, ten and seven Sephiroth, etc., etc. One and all have been derived from the primitive Dhyan-Chohans of the Esoteric doctrine, or the "Builders" of the Stanzas. From Manu, Thot-Hermes, Oannes Dagon, and Edris-Enoch, down to Plato and Panadores, all tell us of seven divine Dynasties, of seven Lemurian and seven Atlantean divisions of the earth; of the seven primitive and dual gods who descend from their celestial abode and reign on Earth, teaching mankind Astronomy, Architecture, and all the other sciences that have come down to us.

These Beings appear first as "gods" and Creators; then they merge in nascent man, to finally emerge as "divine-Kings and Rulers." But this fact has been gradually forgotten. As Bosuage shows, the Egyptians themselves confessed that science flourished in their country only since Isis-Osiris, whom they continue to adore as gods, "though they had become Princes in human form." And he adds of Osiris-Isis (the divine androgyne):

"It is said that this Prince (Isis-Osiris) built cities in Egypt, stopped the overflowing of the Nile; invented agriculture, the use of the vine, music, astronomy, and geometry."

It is the Kabiri who are credited with having revealed, by producing corn or wheat, the great boon of agriculture. What Isis-Osiris, the once living Kabiria, has done in Egypt, that Ceres is said to have done in Sicily; they all belong to one class. To them, the Kabiri or Titans, is ascribed the invention of letters (the Devanagari, or the alphabet and language of the gods), of laws and legislature, of architecture, as of the various modes of magic, so-called; and of the medical use of plants. Hermes, Orpheus, Cadmus, Asclepius, all those demi-gods and heroes, to whom is ascribed the revelation of sciences to men, and in whom Bryant, Faber, Bishop Cumberland, and so many other Christian writers, too zealous for the plain truth, would force posterity to see only pagan copies of one and sole prototype, named Noah -- are all generic names.

As to the Jewish Noah, no Occultist would ever think of dispossessing him of his prerogatives, if he is claimed to be an Atlantean; for this would simply show that the Israelites repeated the story of Vaivasvata-Manu, Xisuthrus, and so many others, and that they only changed the name, to do which they had the same right as any other nation or tribe. What we object to is the literal acceptation of Biblical chronology, as it is absurd, and in accord with neither geological data nor reason. Moreover, if Noah was an Atlantean, then he was a Titan, a giant, as Faber shows; and if a giant, then why is he not shown as such in Genesis? The Titans and Kabirs have been invariably made out by the theologians and some pious symbologists as indissolubly connected with the grotesque personage called devil, and every proof to the contrary has been hitherto as invariably rejected and ignored; therefore, the Occultist must neglect nothing which may tend to defeat this conspiracy of slander.

Neither the Chaldean nor the Biblical deluge (the stories of the Babylonian Xisuthrus and Noah) is based on the universal or even on the Atlantean deluges, recorded in the Indian allegory of Vaivasvata-Manu. They are all the exoteric allegories based on the esoteric mysteries of Samothrace. If the older Chaldees knew the esoteric truth of Samothrace in the Puranic legends, the other nations were aware only of the Samothracian mystery, and allegorized it. They adapted it to their astronomical and anthropological, or rather phallic, notions. Samothrace is known historically to have been famous in antiquity for a deluge, which submerged the country and reached the top of the highest mountains; an event which happened before the age of the Argonauts. It was overflowed very suddenly by the waters of the Euxine, regarded up to that time as a lake. If, while coupling with this the fact that Samothrace was colonized by the Phoenicians, and before them by the mysterious Pelasgians who came from the East, one remembers also the identity of the mystery gods of the Phoenicians, Chaldeans, and Israelites, it will be easy to discover whence came also the confused account of the Noachian deluge.

Thus it is very important to prevent fanatics from monopolizing all the facts in history and legend, and from fathering their distortions of truth, history, and legend upon one man. Noah, is either a myth along with the others or one whose legend was built upon the Kabirian or Titanic tradition, as taught in Samothrace. He has, therefore, no claim to be monopolised by either Jew or Christian. If, as Faber tried to demonstrate at such cost of learning and research, Noah is an Atlantean, and a Titan, and his family are Kabiri or pious Titans, etc., then biblical chronology falls by its own weight, and along with it all the patriarchs -- the antediluvian and pre-Atlantean Titans. As now discovered and proven, Cain is Mars, the god of power and generation. Tubal-Cain is a Kabir, "an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron"; or, if this will please better, he is one with Hephaestos or Vulcan -- Vul-cain, the greatest god also with the later Egyptians, and the greatest Kabir. The god of time was Chium in Egypt, or Saturn, or Seth, and Chium is the same as Cain. Jabal is taken from the Kabiri -- instructors in agriculture, "such as have cattle," and Jubal is "the father of those who handle the harp," he, or they who fabricated the harp for Kronos and the trident for Poseidon.

The history or "fables" about the mysterious Telchines, fables echoing each and all the archaic events of our esoteric teachings, furnish us with a key to the origin of Cain’s genealogy; they give the reason why the Roman Catholic Church identifies "the accursed blood" of Cain and Ham with Sorcery, and makes it responsible for the Deluge. Were not the Telchines, it is argued, the mysterious iron-workers of Rhodes; they who were the first to raise statues to the gods, furnish them with weapons, and men with magic arts? And is it not they who were destroyed by a deluge at the command of Zeus, as the Cainites were by that of Jehovah? The Telchines are simply the Kabiri and the Titans, in another form. They are the Atlanteans also.

"Like Lemnos and Samothrace," says Decharme, "Rhodes, the birthplace of the Telchines, is an island of volcanic formation."

The island of Rhodes emerged suddenly out of the seas, after having been previously engulfed by the Ocean, say the traditions. Like Samothrace it is connected in the memory of men with the Flood legends.

The Kabiri are in truth "the great, beneficent and powerful Gods," as Cassius Hermone calls them. At Thebes, the Kabirim Kore and Demeter had a sanctuary, and at Memphis, the Kabiri had a temple so sacred that none, excepting the priests, were suffered to enter their holy precincts. During the Samothracian Mysteries, "after the distribution of pure Fire a new life began." This was the "new birth" that is alluded to by Jesus in his nocturnal conversation with Nicodemus. "Initiated into the most blessed of all the Mysteries, being ourselves pure ... we become just and holy with wisdom." "He breathed on them and saith unto them, ’Take of Holy Pneuma’." And this simple act of will-power was sufficient to impart vaticination in its nobler and more perfect form if both the initiator and the initiated were worthy of it. To deride this gift, even in its present aspect, "as the corrupt offspring and lingering remains of an ignorant age of superstition, would be as unphilosophical as it is wrong," as remarked by a 19^th century minister.

"To remove the veil which hides our vision from the future, has been attempted in all ages of the world."

The fact that, astronomically, the Titans-Kabirim were also the generators and regulators of the seasons, and cosmically the great Volcanic Energies, the gods presiding over all the metals and terrestrial works, does not prevent them from being, in their original divine characters, the beneficent Entities who, symbolized in Prometheus, brought light to the world, and endowed humanity with intellect and reason. They are pre-eminently in every theogony, especially in the Hindu, the sacred Divine FIRES, 3, 7, or 49, according as the allegory demands it. They were universally worshipped, and their origin is lost in the night of time. Yet whether propitiated in Phrygia, Phoenicia, the Troad, Thrace, Egypt, Lemnos or Sicily, their cult was always connected with fire; their temples ever built in the most volcanic localities, and in exoteric worship they belonged to Chthonian Divinities. Therefore Christianity has made of them infernal gods. Nor must it be lost sight of that the Kabiri were of both sexes, as also terrestrial, celestial and kosmic. While in their later capacity of the Rulers of sidereal and terrestrial powers, a purely geological phenomenon was symbolized in the persons of those rulers, they were also, in the beginning of times, the rulers of mankind. When incarnated as Kings of the "divine Dynasties," they gave the first impulse to civilizations, and directed the mind with which they had endued men to the invention and perfection of all the arts and sciences. Thus the Kabiri are said to have appeared as the benefactors of men, and as such they lived for ages in the memory of nations.

They had other names in the "sacred language," known but to the hierophants and priests; and "it was not lawful to mention them." We find them pronounced, albeit slightly disfigured, as known in that same sacred language -- by the populations of Siam, Thibet, and India. And on the walls of the Cambodian Nagkon-Wat are to be found at this day several repetitions of the Kabirian gods of Samothrace. This may have escaped the notice of archaeologists, but upon stricter inspection they will be found there, as well as the reputed father of the Kabiri -- Vulcan, with his bolts and implements, having near him a king with a sceptre in his hand, which is the counterpart of that of Cheronaea, or the "scepter of Agamemnon," so-called, said to have been presented to him by the lame god of Lemnos. In another place we find Vulcan, recognizable by his hammer and pincers, but under the shape of a monkey, as usually represented by the Egyptians. It is easy to see that the excavators of Ellora, the builders of the old Pagodas, the architects of Copan and of the ruins of Central America, those of Nagkon-Wat, and those of the Egyptian remains were, if not of the same race, at least of the same religion -- the one taught in the oldest Mysteries. And if, as sometimes thought, Nagkon-Wat is essentially a Buddhist temple, how comes it to have on its walls basso relievos of completely an Assyrian character and Kabirian gods which, though universally worshipped as the most ancient of the Asiatic mystery-gods, had already been abandoned 200 years B.C., and the Samothracian mysteries themselves completely altered?
 

Pindar

held pantheons to be immoral II 764
----- Hymn to Jupiter
Kabir Adamas first man II 3
----- Hymn to Minerva
Minerva on Jupiter’s right hand I 401
----- Nemean Odes
Castor & Pollux II 122, 123
Gods & men of common origin II 270
----- Olympian Odes
Pherecydes [Pherenicus?] on Hyperboreans II 775
----- Pythian Odes
Aetna a celestial pillar II 763

"Happy," says Pindar, who passed through the august mysteries of Eleusis, "is he who has beheld them, and descends beneath the hollow earth. He knows the end, he knows the divine origin of life." As, in Pantanjali’s system of Yoga, the pupil goes gradually onward and upward, from the state of animal man, through the stages of self-mastery and psychic development, until he flowers into the true Yogi and unites his consciousness with the infinite, so in all the mystical schools of Greece, Rome, Egypt, and other trans-Himalayan countries, he had to pass through a like education.
 

From The Secret Doctrine

[Vol. 2, Page 118]
 

"The early Second (Root) Race were the Fathers of the ’Sweat-born’;

the later Second (Root) Race were ’Sweat-born’ themselves."

This passage from the Commentary refers to the work of evolution from the beginning of a Race to its close. The "Sons of Yoga," or the primitive astral race, had seven stages of evolution racially, or collectively; as every individual Being in it had, and has now. It is not Shakespeare only who divided the ages of man into a series of seven, but Nature herself. Thus the first sub-races of the Second Race were born at first by the process described on the law of analogy; while the last began gradually, pari passu with the evolution of the human body, to be formed otherwise. The process of reproduction had seven stages also in each Race, each covering aeons of time. What physiologist or biologist could tell whether the present mode of generation, with all its phases of gestation, is older than half a million, or at most one million of years, since their cycle of observation began hardly half a century ago.

Primeval human hermaphrodites are a fact in Nature well known to the ancients, and form one of Darwin’s greatest perplexities. Yet there is certainly no impossibility, but, on the contrary, a great probability that hermaphroditism existed in the evolution of the early races; while on the grounds of analogy, and on that of the existence of one universal law in physical evolution, acting indifferently in the construction of plant, animal, and man, it must be so. The mistaken theories of mono-genesis, and the descent of man from the mammals instead of the reverse, are fatal to the completeness of evolution as taught in modern schools on Darwinian lines, and they will have to be abandoned in view of the insuperable difficulties which they encounter. Occult tradition -- if the terms Science and Knowledge are denied in this particular to antiquity -- can alone reconcile the inconsistencies and fill the gap.

"If thou wilt know the invisible, open thine eye wide on the visible," says a Talmudic axiom.

In the "Descent of Man"* occurs the following passage; which shows how near Darwin came to the acceptance of this ancient teaching.

"It has been known that in the vertebrate kingdom one sex bears rudiments of various accessory parts appertaining to the reproductive system, which properly belong to the opposite sex... Some remote progenitor of the whole vertebrate kingdom appears to have been hermaphrodite or androgynous** ... But here we encounter a singular difficulty. In the mammalian class the males possess rudiments of a uterus with the adjacent passages in the Vesiculae prostaticae; they bear also rudiments of mammae, and some male marsupials have traces of a marsupial sac. Other analogous facts could be added. Are we then to suppose that some extremely ancient mammal continued androgynous after it had acquired the chief distinctions of its class, and therefore after it had diverged from the lower classes of the vertebrate kingdom? This seems very improbable,*** for we have to look to fishes, the lowest of all the classes, to find any still existent androgynous forms."

** And why not all the progenitive first Races, human as well as animal; and why one "remote progenitor"?
*** Obviously so, on the lines of Evolutionism, which traces the mammalia to some amphibian ancestor.

Mr. Darwin is evidently strongly disinclined to adopt the hypothesis which the facts so forcibly suggest, viz., that of a primeval androgynous stem from which the mammalia sprang. His explanation runs:

"The fact that various accessory organs proper to each sex, are found in a rudimentary condition in the opposite sex may be explained by such organs having been gradually acquired by the one sex and then transmitted in a more or less imperfect condition to the other."

He instances the case of "spurs, plumes, and brilliant colours, acquired for battle or for ornament by male birds" and only partially inherited by their female descendants. In the problem to be dealt with, however, the need of a more satisfactory explanation is evident, the facts being of so much more prominent and important a character than the mere superficial details with which they are compared by Darwin. Why not candidly admit the argument in favour of the hermaphroditism which characterizes the old fauna? Occultism proposes a solution which embraces the facts in a most comprehensive and simple manner. These relics of a prior androgyne stock must be placed in the same category as the pineal gland, and other organs as mysterious, which afford us silent testimony as to the reality of functions which have long since become atrophied in the course of animal and human progress, but which once played a signal part in the general economy of primeval life.

The occult doctrine, anyhow, can be advantageously compared with that of the most liberal men of science, who have theorized upon the origin of the first man.

Long before Darwin, Naudin, who gave the name of Blastema to that which the Darwinists call protoplasm, put forward a theory half occult and half scientifico-materialistic. He made Adam, the a-sexual, spring suddenly from the clay, as it is called in the Bible, the Blastema of Science.

"It is from this larval form of mankind that the evolutive force effected the completion of species. For the accomplishment of this great phenomenon, Adam had to pass through a phase of immobility and unconsciousness, very analogous to the nymphal state of animals undergoing metamorphosis," explains Naudin.

For the eminent botanist, Adam was not one man, however, but mankind, "which remained concealed within a temporary organism... distinct from all others and never contracting alliance with any of these." He shows the differentiation of sexes accomplished by "a process of germination similar to that of Medusae and Ascidians." Mankind, thus constituted physiologically, "would retain a sufficient evolutive force for the rapid production of the various great human races."

De Quatrefages criticizes this position in the "Human Species." It is unscientific, he says, or, properly speaking, Naudin’s ideas "do not form a scientific theory," inasmuch as primordial Blastema is connected in his theory with the First Cause, which is credited with having made potentially in the Blastema all past, present, and future beings, and thus of having in reality created these beings en masse; moreover, Naudin does not even consider the secondary Causes, or their action in this evolution of the organic world. Science, which is only occupied with Secondary Causes, has thus "nothing to say to the theory of Naudin" (p. 125).

Nor will it have any more to say to the occult teachings, which are to some extent approached by Naudin. For if we but see in his "primordial Blastema" the Dhyan-Chohanic essence, the Chhaya or double of the Pitris, which contains within itself the potentiality of all forms, we are quite in accord. But there are two real and vital differences between our teachings. M. Naudin declares that evolution has progressed by sudden leaps and bounds, instead of extending slowly over millions of years; and his primordial Blastema is endowed only with blind instincts -- a kind of unconscious First Cause in the manifested Kosmos -- which is an absurdity. Whereas it is our Dhyan Chohanic essence -- the causality of the primal cause which creates physical man -- which is the living, active and potential matter, pregnant per se with that animal consciousness of a superior kind, such as is found in the ant and the beaver, which produces the long series of physiological differentiations. Apart from this his "ancient and general process of creation" from proto-organisms is as occult as any theory of Paracelsus or Khunrath could be.

Moreover, the Kabalistic works are full of the proof of this. The Zohar, for instance, says that every type in the visible has its prototype in the invisible Universe.

"All that which is in the lower (our) world is found in the upper. The Lower and the Upper act and react upon each other."

(Zohar, fol. 186.) Vide infra, Part II., "Esoteric Tenets corroborated in every Scripture."

20. THEIR FATHERS WERE THE SELF-BORN. THE SELF-BORN, THE CHHAYA FROM THE BRILLIANT BODIES OF THE LORDS, THE FATHERS, THE SONS OF TWILIGHT (a).

(a) The "shadows," or Chhayas, are called the sons of the "self-born," as the latter name is applied to all the gods and Beings born through the WILL, whether of Deity or Adept. The Homunculi of Paracelsus would, perhaps, be also given this name, though the latter process is on a far more material plane. The name "Sons of Twilight" shows that the "Self-born" progenitors of our doctrine are identical with the Pitris of the Brahmanical system, as the title is a reference to their mode of birth, these Pitris being stated to have issued from Brahma’s "body of twilight."

(See the Puranas.)

21. WHEN THE RACE BECAME OLD, THE OLD WATERS MIXED WITH THE FRESHER WATERS (a); WHEN THE DROPS BECAME TURBID, THEY VANISHED AND DISAPPEARED, IN THE NEW STREAM, IN THE HOT STREAM OF LIFE. THE OUTER OF THE FIRST BECAME THE INNER OF THE SECOND. (b). THE OLD WING BECAME THE SHADOW, AND THE SHADOW OF THE WING (c).

(a) The old (primitive) Race merged in the second race, and became one with it.

(b) This is the mysterious process of transformation and evolution of mankind. The material of the first forms -- shadowy, ethereal, and negative -- was drawn or absorbed into, and thus became the complement of the forms of the Second Race. The Commentary explains this by saying that, as the First Race was simply composed of the astral shadows of the creative progenitors, having of course neither astral nor physical bodies of their own -- this Race never died. Its "men" melted gradually away, becoming absorbed in the bodies of their own "sweat-born" progeny, more solid than their own. The old form vanished and was absorbed by, disappeared in, the new form, more human and physical. There was no death in those days of a period more blissful than the Golden Age; but the first, or parent material was used for the formation of the new being, to form the body and even the inner or lower principles or bodies of the progeny.

(c) When the shadow retires, i.e. when the astral body becomes covered with more solid flesh, man develops a physical body. The "wing," or the ethereal form that produced its shadow and image, became the shadow of the astral body and its own progeny. The expression is queer but original.

As there may be no occasion to refer to this mystery later, it is as well to point out at once the dual meaning contained in the Greek myth bearing upon this particular phase of evolution. It is found in the several variants of the allegory of Leda and her two sons Castor and Pollux, which variants have each a special meaning. Thus in Book XI. of the Odyssey, Leda is spoken of as the spouse of Tyndarus, who gave birth by her husband "to two sons of valiant heart" -- Castor and Pollux. Jupiter endows them with a marvelous gift and privilege. They are semi-immortal; they live and die, each in turn, and every alternate day; [[eteremeroi*]]. As the Tyndaridae, the twin brothers are an astronomical symbol, and stand for Day and Night; their two wives, Phoebe and Hilasira, the daughters of Apollo or the Sun, personifying the Dawn and the Twilight.** Again, in the allegory where Zeus is shown as the father of the two heroes -- born from the egg to which Leda gives birth -- the myth is entirely theogonical.

It relates to that group of cosmic allegories in which the world is described as born from an egg. For Leda assumes in it the shape of a white swan when uniting herself to the Divine Swan.*** Leda is the mythical bird, then, to which, in the traditions of various peoples of the Aryan race, are attributed various ornithological forms of birds which all lay golden eggs.**** In the Kalevala (the Epic Poem of Finland), the beauteous daughter of the Ether, "the Water Mother," creates the world in conjunction with a "Duck" (another form of the Swan or Goose, Kalahansa), who lays six golden eggs, and the seventh, "an egg of iron," in her lap. But the variant of the Leda allegory which has a direct reference to mystic man is found in Pindar***** only, with a slighter reference to it in the Homeric hymns.****** Castor and Pollux are in it no longer the Dioscuri (of Apollodorus III. 10, 7); but become the highly significant symbol of the dual man, the Mortal and the Immortal. Not only this, but as will now be seen, they are also the symbol of the Third Race, and its transformation from the animal man into a god-man with only an animal body.

Pindar shows Leda uniting herself in the same night to her husband and also to the father of the gods -- Zeus. Thus Castor is the son of the Mortal, Pollux the progeny of the Immortal. In the allegory made up for the occasion, it is said that in a riot of vengeance against the Apherides******* Pollux kills Lynceus -- "of all mortals he whose sight is the most penetrating" -- but Castor is wounded by Idas, "he who sees and knows." Zeus puts an end to the fight by hurling his thunderbolt and killing the last two combatants. Pollux finds his brother dying.******** In his despair he calls upon Zeus to slay him also. "Thou canst not die altogether," answers the master of the Gods; "thou art of a divine race." But he gives him the choice: Pollux will either remain immortal, living eternally in Olympus; or, if he would share his brother’s fate in all things, he must pass half his existence underground, and the other half in the golden heavenly abodes. This semi-immortality, which is also to be shared by Castor, is accepted by Pollux.* And thus the twin brothers live alternately, one during the day, and the other during the night.**

Is this a poetical fiction only? An allegory, one of those "solar myth" interpretations, higher than which no modern Orientalist seems able to soar? Indeed, it is much more. Here we have an allusion to the "Egg-born," Third Race; the first half of which is mortal, i.e., unconscious in its personality, and having nothing within itself to survive***; and the latter half of which becomes immortal in its individuality, by reason of its fifth principle being called to life by the informing gods, and thus connecting the Monad with this Earth. This is Pollux; while Castor represents the personal, mortal man, an animal of not even a superior kind, when unlinked from the divine individuality. "Twins" truly; yet divorced by death forever, unless Pollux, moved by the voice of twinship, bestows on his less favoured mortal brother a share of his own divine nature, thus associating him with his own immortality.

Such is the occult meaning of the metaphysical aspect of the allegory. The widely spread modern interpretation of it -- so celebrated in antiquity, Plutarch tells us,**** as symbolical of brotherly devotion -- namely, that it was an image borrowed from the spectacle of Nature -- is weak and inadequate to explain the secret meaning. Besides the fact that the Moon, with the Greeks, was feminine in exoteric mythology, and could therefore hardly be regarded as Castor -- and at the same time be identified with Diana -- ancient symbologists who held the Sun, the King of all sidereal orbs, as the visible image of the highest deity, would not have personified it by Pollux, a demi-god only.

**** Castor’s tomb was shown in Sparta, in days of old, says Pausanias (III., 13, 1); and Plutarch says that he was called at Argos the demi-mortal or demi-hero [[mizarchagetas]]. (See Plutarch, Quaestiones Graecae, 23.)

**** The Monad is impersonal and a god per se, albeit unconscious on this plane. For, divorced from its third (often called fifth) principle, Manas, which is the horizontal line of the first manifested triangle or trinity, it can have no consciousness or perception of things on this earthly plane. "The highest sees through the eye of the lowest" in the manifested world; Purusha (Spirit) remains blind without the help of Prakrit (matter) in the material spheres; and so does Atma-Buddhi without Manas.

If from Greek mythology we pass to the Mosaic allegories and symbolism, we shall find a still more striking corroboration of the same tenet under another form. Unable to trace in Genesis the "Egg-born," we shall still find there unmistakably the androgynes, and the first three races of the Secret Doctrine hidden under most ingenious symbology in the first four chapters of Genesis.

THE DIVINE HERMAPHRODITE

An impenetrable veil of secrecy was thrown over the occult and religious mysteries taught, after the submersion of the last remnant of the Atlantean race, some 12,000 years ago, lest they should be shared by the unworthy, and so desecrated. Of these sciences several have now become exoteric -- such as Astronomy, for instance, in its purely mathematical and physical aspect. Hence their dogmas and tenets, being all symbolized and left to the sole guardianship of parable and allegory, have been forgotten, and their meaning has become perverted. Nevertheless, one finds the hermaphrodite in the scriptures and traditions of almost every nation; and why such unanimous agreement if the statement is only a fiction?

It is this secrecy which led the Fifth Race to the establishment, or rather the re-establishment of the religious mysteries, in which ancient truths might be taught to the coming generations under the veil of allegory and symbolism. Behold the imperishable witness to the evolution of the human races from the divine, and especially from the androgynous Race -- the Egyptian Sphinx, that riddle of the Ages! Divine wisdom incarnating on earth, and forced to taste of the bitter fruit of personal experience of pain and suffering, generated under the shade of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil -- a secret first known only to the Elohim, the SELF-INITIATED, "higher gods" -- on earth only.*

In the Book of Enoch we have Adam,** the first divine androgyne, Moon, conceived as twins . . . The Sun, the immortal and powerful being that disappears every evening from the horizon and descends under the Earth, as though he would make room for the fraternal orb which comes to life with night, is Pollux, who sacrifices himself for Castor; Castor, who, inferior to his brother, owes to him his immortality: for the Moon, says Theophrastus, is only another, but feebler Sun." (De Ventis 17. See Decharme, p. 655.)

Adam (Kadmon) is, like Brahma and Mars, the symbol of the generative and creative power typifying Water and Earth -- an alchemical secret. "It takes Earth and Water to create a human soul," said Moses. Mars is the Hindu Mangala, the planet Mars, identical with Kartikeya, the "War-God," born of Gharma-ja (Siva’s sweat) and of the Earth. He is Lokita, the red, like Brahma also and Adam. The Hindu Mars is, like Adam, born from no woman and mother. With the Egyptians, Mars was the primeval generative Principle, and so are Brahma, in exoteric teaching, and Adam, in the Kabala.