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THE
SECRET DOCTRINE
H P Blavatsky
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THE LOTUS
AS A UNIVERSAL SYMBOL
THERE
are no ancient symbols, without a deep and philosophical meaning attached to
them; their importance and significance increasing with their antiquity. Such is the LOTUS. It is the flower sacred to
nature and her Gods, and represents the abstract and the Concrete Universes,
standing as the emblem of the productive powers of both spiritual and physical
nature. It was held sacred from the remotest antiquity by the Aryan Hindus, the
Egyptians, and the Buddhists after them; revered in China and Japan, and
adopted as a Christian emblem by the Greek and Latin Churches, who made of it a
messenger as the Christians do now, who replace it with the water lily.* It
had, and still has, its mystic meaning which is identical with every nation on
the earth. We refer the reader to Sir William Jones.**
With the Hindus, the lotus is the emblem of the productive power of nature,
through the agency of fire and water (spirit and matter). "Eternal!"
says a verse in the Bhagavad Gita, "I see Brahm
the creator enthroned in thee above the lotus!"; and Sir W. Jones shows,
as noted in the Stanzas, that the seeds of the lotus contain, even before they
germinate, perfectly-formed leaves, the miniature shapes of what one day, as
perfected plants, they will become. The lotus, in
The
spirit of Fire (or Heat), which stirs up, fructifies, and develops into concrete
form everything (from its ideal prototype), which is born of WATER or
primordial Earth, evolved Brahma -- with the Hindus. The lotus flower,
represented as growing out of Vishnu's navel -- that God resting on the waters
of space and his Serpent of Infinity -- is the most graphic allegory ever made:
the Universe evolving from the central Sun, the POINT, the ever-concealed germ.
Lakshmi, who is the
NOTE
* In the Christian
religion Gabriel, the
** See Sir William
Jones' "Dissertations Relating to
female
aspect of Vishnu,* and who is also called Padma, the
lotus, is likewise shown floating at "Creation," on a lotus flower,
and during the "churning of the ocean" of space, springing from the
"sea of milk," like Venus from the froth.
".
. . Then seated on a lotusBeauty's bright goddess,
peerless Sri, arose
Out
of the waves . . . "sings an English Orientalist
and poet (Sir Monier Williams).
The
underlying idea in this symbol is very beautiful, and it shows, furthermore,
its identical parentage in all the religious systems. Whether in the lotus or
water-lily shape it signifies one and the same philosophical idea -- namely,
the emanation of the objective from the subjective, divine Ideation passing
from the abstract into the concrete or visible form. For, as soon as DARKNESS
-- or rather that which is "darkness" for ignorance -- has
disappeared in its own realm of eternal Light, leaving behind itself only its
divine manifested Ideation, the creative Logoi have their understanding opened,
and they see in the ideal world (hitherto concealed in the divine thought) the
archetypal forms of all, and proceed to copy and build or fashion upon these
models forms evanescent and transcendent.
At
this stage of action, the Demiurge** is not yet the Architect. Born in the
twilight of action, he has yet to first perceive the plan, to realise the ideal forms which lie buried in the bosom of
Eternal Ideation, as the future lotus-leaves, the immaculate petals, are
concealed within the seed of that plant. . . . .
In chapter lxxxi. of
the Ritual (Book of the Dead), called "Transformation into the
Lotus," a head emerging from this flower, the god exclaims: "I am the
pure lotus, emerging from the Luminous one. . . . . I carry the messages of Horus. I am the pure lotus which comes from the Solar
Fields. . . . ."
The
lotus-idea may be traced even in the Elohistic
chapter, the 1st of Genesis, as stated in
NOTE
* Lakshmi
is Venus -- Aphrodite, and, like the latter, she sprang from the froth of the
ocean with a lotus in her hand. In the Ramayana she is called Padma.
** In Esoteric
philosophy the Demiurge or Logos, regarded as the CREATOR, is simply an
abstract term, an idea, like "army." As the latter is the all-embracing
term for a body of active forces or working units -- soldiers -- so is the
Demiurge the qualitative compound of a multitude of Creators or Builders. Burnouf, the
great Orientalist, has seized the idea perfectly when
saying that Brahma does not create the earth, any more than the rest of the
universe. "Having evolved himself from the soul of the world, once
separated from the first cause, he evaporates with, and emanates all nature out
of himself. He does not stand above it, but is mixed up with it; Brahma and the
universe form one Being, each particle of which is in its essence Brahma
himself, who proceeded out of himself."
It
is in this idea that we must look for the origin and explanation of the verse
in the Jewish cosmogony, which reads: "And God said, Let the earth bring
forth . . . . the fruit-tree yielding fruit after his
kind, whose seed is in itself." In all the primitive religions, the
"Son of the Father" is the creative God -- i.e., His thought made
visible; and before the Christian era, from the Trimurti
of the Hindus down to the three kabalistic heads of the scriptures as explained
by the Jews, the triune godhead of each nation was fully defined and
substantiated in its allegories.
Such
is the cosmic and ideal significance of this great symbol with the Eastern
peoples. But, applied to practical and exoteric worship -- which had also its
esoteric symbology -- the lotus became in time the carrier and container of a
more terrestrial idea. No dogmatic religion has ever escaped the sexual element
in it; and to this day it soils the moral beauty of the root idea. The
following is quoted from the same Kabalistic MSS. already mentioned:--
"Pointing
to like signification was the lotus growing in the waters of the
"We
cannot lay too great stress upon the use of this generative function as a basis
for a symbolical language and a scientific art-speech. Thought upon the idea
leads at once to reflection upon the subject of creative cause. In its workings
Nature is observed to have fashioned a wonderful piece of living mechanism
governed by an added living soul; the life development and history of which
soul, as to its whence, its present, and its whither, surpasses all efforts of
the human intellect.** The new born is an ever-recurring miracle, an evidence
that
NOTE
* In Indian Puranas it is Vishnu, the first, and Brahma, the second
logos, or the ideal and practical creators, who are respectively represented,
one as manifesting the lotus, the other as issuing from it.
** Not the
"efforts" of the trained psychic faculties of an Initiate into
Eastern metaphysics, and the mysteries of creative Nature. It is the profane of
the past ages who have degraded the pure ideal of cosmic creation into an
emblem of mere human reproduction and sexual functions: it is the esoteric
teachings, and the initiates of the Future, whose mission it is, and will be,
to redeem and ennoble once more the primitive conception so sadly profaned by
its crude and gross application to exoteric dogmas and personations
by theological and ecclesiastical religionists. The silent worship of abstract
or noumenal Nature, the only divine manifestation, is
the one ennobling religion of Humanity.
within the workshop of the womb an intelligent
creative power has intervened to fasten a living soul to a physical machine.
The amazing wonderfulness of the fact attaches a holy sacredness to all
connected with the organs of reproduction, as the dwelling and place of evident
constructive intervention of deity."
This
is a correct rendering of the underlying ideas of old, of the purely
pantheistic conceptions, impersonal and reverential, of the archaic
philosophers of the prehistoric ages. Not so, however, when applied to sinful
humanity, to the gross ideas attached to personality. Therefore, no pantheistic
philosopher would fail to find the remarks that follow the above and which
represent the anthropomorphism of Judean symbology, other than dangerous for
the sacredness of true religion, and fitting only our materialistic age, which
is the direct outcome and result of that anthropomorphic character. For this is
the key-note to the entire spirit and essence of the Old Testament.
"Therefore," goes on the MSS., treating of the symbolism of art-speech
of the Bible:--
"The
locality of the womb is to be taken as the MOST HOLY PLACE, the SANCTUM
SANCTORUM, and the veritable TEMPLE OF THE LIVING GOD.* With man the possession
of the woman has always been considered as an essential part of himself, to
make one out of two, and jealously guarded as sacred. Even the part of the
ordinary house or home consecrated to the dwelling of the wife was called the penetralia, the secret or sacred, and hence the metaphor of
the Holy of Holies of sacred constructions taken from the idea of the
sacredness of the organs of generation. Carried to the extreme of description**
by metaphor, this part of the house is described in the Sacred Books as the
"between the thighs of the house," and sometimes the idea is carried out
constructively in the great door-opening of Churches placed inward between
flanking buttresses."
No
such thought "carried to the extreme" ever existed among the old
primitive Aryans. This is proven by the fact that in the Vedic period their
women were not placed apart from men in penetralia,
or "Zenanas." Their seclusion began when
the Mahomedans -- the next heirs to Hebrew symbolism
after Christian ecclesiasticism -- had conquered the land and gradually
enforced their ways and customs upon the Hindus. The pre- and post-Vedic woman
was as free as man; and no impure terrestrial thought was ever mixed with the
religious symbo-
NOTE
* Surely the words of
the old Initiate into the primitive mysteries of Christianity, "Know ye
not ye are the
** It was so carried
only in the Hebrew Bible, and its servile copyist, Christian theology.
logy of the early Aryans. The idea and application
are purely Semitic. This is corroborated by the writer of the said intensely learned
and Kabalistic revelation himself, when he closes the above-quoted passages by
adding:--
"If
to these organs as symbols of creative cosmic agencies the idea of the origin
of measures as well as of time-periods can be attached, then indeed, in the constructions
of the Temples as Dwellings of Deity, or of Jehovah, that part designated as
the Holy of Holies, or the Most Holy place, should borrow its title from the recognised sacredness of the generative organs, considered
as symbols of measures as well as of creative cause. With the ancient WISE,
there was no name and no idea, and no symbol of A FIRST CAUSE." . . . .
Most decidedly not. Rather never give a
thought to it and leave it for ever nameless, as the early Pantheists did, than
degrade the sacredness of that Ideal of Ideals, by dragging down its symbols
into such anthropomorphic forms! Here again one perceives the immense chasm
between Aryan and Semitic religious thought: two opposite poles -- Sincerity
and Concealment. With the Brahmins, who have never invested with an
"original Sin" element the natural procreative functions of mankind,
it is a religious duty to have a son. A Brahmin, in days of old, having
accomplished his mission of human creator, retired to the jungle and passed the
rest of his days in religious meditations. He had accomplished his duty to
nature as mortal man and its co-worker, and henceforth gave all his thoughts to
the spiritual immortal portion in himself, regarding the terrestrial as a mere
illusion, an evanescent dream -- which it is. With the Semite, it was
different. He invented a temptation of flesh in a garden of Eden; showed his
God (esoterically, the Tempter and the Ruler of Nature) CURSING for ever an
act, which was in the logical programme of that nature.* All this exoterically,
as in the cloak and dead letter of Genesis and the rest; and at the same time
esoterically he regarded the supposed sin and FALL as an act so sacred, as to
choose the organ, the perpetrator of the original sin, as the fittest and most
sacred symbol to represent that God, who is shown as branding its entering into
function as disobedience and everlasting SIN!
Who
can ever fathom the paradoxical depths of the Semitic mind? And this
paradoxical element, minus its innermost significance, has now passed entirely
into Christian theology and dogma!
Whether
the early Fathers of the Church knew the esoteric meaning of the Hebrew (Old)
Testament, or whether only a few of them were aware of it, while the others
remained ignorant of the secret, is for
NOTE
* The same idea is
carried out exoterically in the incidents of
posterity to decide. One thing is certain, at any
rate. As the esotericism of the New Testament agrees perfectly with that of the
Hebrew Mosaic Books; and since, at the same time, a number of purely Egyptian
symbols and pagan dogmas in general -- the Trinity for example -- have been
copied by, and incorporated into, the Synoptics and
St. John, it becomes evident that the identity of those symbols was known to
the writers of the New Testament, whoever they were. They must have been aware
also of the priority of the Egyptian esotericism, since they have adopted
several such symbols that typify purely Egyptian conceptions and beliefs -- in
their outward and inward meaning -- and which are not to be found in the Jewish
Canon. One of such is the water-lily in the hands of the
For
the Lotus and Water are among the oldest symbols, and in their origin are purely Aryan, though they became common property during
the branching-off of the fifth race. Let us give an example. Letters, as much
as numbers, were all mystic, whether in combination or each taken separately.
The most sacred of all is the letter M. It is both feminine and masculine, or androgyne, and is made to symbolize WATER, the great deep,
in its origin. It is mystic in all the languages, Eastern and Western, and
stands as a glyph for the waves, thus: [[diagram]]. In the Aryan Esotericism,
as in the Semitic, this letter has always stood for the waters; e.g., in
Sanskrit MAKARA -- the tenth sign of the Zodiac -- means a crocodile, or rather
an aquatic monster associated always with water. The letter MA is equivalent to
and corresponds with number 5 -- composed of a binary, the symbol of the two
sexes separated, and of the ternary, symbol of the third life, the progeny of
the binary. This, again, is often symbolised by a
Pentagon, the latter being a sacred sign, a divine Monogram. MAITREYA is the
secret name of the Fifth Buddha, and the Kalki Avatar
of the Brahmins -- the last MESSIAH who will come at the culmination of the
Great Cycle. It is also the initial letter of the Greek Metis
or Divine Wisdom; of Mimra, the "word" or
Logos; and of Mithras (the Mihr),
the Monad, Mystery. All these are born in, and from, the great Deep, and are
the Sons of Maya -- the Mother; in Egypt, Mouth, in Greece Minerva (divine
wisdom), Mary, or Miriam, Myrrha, etc.; of the Mother
of the Christian Logos, and of Maya, the mother of Buddha. Madhava
and Madhavi are the titles of the most important gods
and goddesses of the Hindu Pantheon. Finally, Mandala
is in Sanskrit "a circle," or an orb (the ten divisions of the Rig
Veda). The most sacred names in India begin with this letter generally -- from Mahat, the first manifested intellect, and Mandara, the great mountain used by the gods to churn the
Ocean, down to Mandakin, the heavenly Ganga (Ganges), Manu, etc., etc.
Shall
this be called a coincidence? A strange one it is then, indeed, when we find
even Moses -- found in the water of the
In
the relics of ancient
NOTE
* Even to the seven
daughters of the Midian priest, who, coming to draw
the water, had Moses water their flock, for which service the Midian gives to Moses Zipporah (sippara = the shining wave) as wife (Exod.
ii.) All this has the same secret meaning.dogma of
resurrection.
* There must have been
some very profound and sacred meaning attached to this symbol, since,
notwithstanding the risk of being charged with a disgusting form of zoolatry,
the early Egyptian Christians adopted it in their Churches. A frog or toad
enshrined in a lotus flower, or simply without the latter emblem, was the form
chosen for the Church lamps, on which were engraved the words "I am the resurrection"
"[[ego eimi anastasis]]."**
These frog goddesses are also found on all the mummies.
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