Theosophical Society,
THE
SECRET DOCTRINE
H P Blavatsky
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The Moon, Deus Lunus, Phoebe
THIS
archaic symbol is the most poetical of all symbols, as also the most
philosophical. The ancient Greeks brought it into prominence, and the modern
poets have worn it threadbare. The Queen of Night, riding in the majesty of her
peerless light in heaven, throwing all, even Hesperos, into darkness, and
spreading her silver mantle over the whole sidereal world, has ever been a
favourite theme with all the poets of Christendom, from Milton and Shakespeare
down to the latest versifier. But the refulgent lamp of night, with her suite
of stars unnumbered, spoke only to the imagination of the profane. Until lately,
Religion and Science had nought to do with the beautiful mythos. Yet, the cold
chaste moon, she, in the words of Shelley --
.
. . . "Who makes all beautiful on which she smiles
That
wandering shrine of soft, yet icy flame,
Which
ever is transformed, yet still the same,
And
warms, but not illumines." . . . .
stands
in closer relations to Earth than any other sidereal orb. The Sun is the giver
of life to the whole planetary system; the Moon is the giver of life to our
globe; and the early races understood and knew it, even in their infancy. She
is the Queen and she is the King, and was King Soma before she became
transformed into Phoebe and the chaste Diana. She is pre-eminently the deity of
the Christians, through the Mosaic and Kabalistic Jews, though the civilized
world may have remained ignorant of the fact for long ages; in fact, ever since
the
*
With the Egyptians it was the resurrection in rebirth after 3,000 years of
purification, either in Devachan or "the fields of bliss."
**
Such "frog-goddesses" may be seen at Bulaq, in the
It
is worth the trouble of presenting in this work a bird's-eye view of the origin
and development of the lunar myth and worship in historical antiquity, on our
side of the globe. Its earlier origin is untraceable by exact science,
rejecting as it does tradition; while for Theology, which, under the guidance
of the crafty Popes, has put a brand on every fragment of literature that does
not bear the imprimatur of the Church of Rome, its archaic history is a sealed
book. Whether the Egyptian or the Aryan Hindu religious philosophy is the more
ancient -- and the Secret Doctrine says it is the latter -- does not much
matter in this instance, as the lunar and solar "worship" are the
most ancient in the world. Both have survived, and prevail to this day
throughout the whole world, with some openly, with others -- e.g., in Christian
symbolics -- secretly. The cat, a lunar symbol, was sacred to Isis, herself the
Moon in one sense, as Osiris was the Sun. The cat is often seen on the top of
the Sistrum in the hand of the goddess. This animal was held in great
veneration in the city of
NOTE
* The goddess
[[Trimorphos]] in the statuary of Alcamenes.
escape
the pursuit of Typhon (Vide the Metamorphoses of Ovid). The moon in
The
same with the Cynocephalus. The dog-headed ape was a glyph to symbolise the sun
and moon, in turn, though the Cynocephalus is more a Hermetic than a religious
symbol. For it is the hieroglyph of Mercury, the planet, as of the Mercury of
the Alchemical philosophers, "as," say the Alchemists, "Mercury
has to be ever near
Though
the regular Sun-Worshippers, the Parsis, are few, yet not only is the bulk of
the Hindu mythology and history based upon and interblended with these two
worships, but so is also the Christian religion itself. From their origin down
to our modern day it has coloured the theologies of both the Roman Catholic and
What
is known of Chaldaean Moon-Worship, of the Babylonian god, Sin, called by the
Greeks "Deus Lunus," is very little, and that little is apt to
mislead the profane student who fails to grasp the esoteric significance of the
symbols. As popularly known to the ancient profane philosophers and writers
(for those who were initiated were pledged to silence) the Chaldaea were the
worshippers of the moon under her (and his) various names, just as were the
Jews, who came after them.
In
the unpublished MSS. on the Art Speech, already mentioned, giving a key to the
formation of the ancient (symbolical) languages a logical raison d'etre is
brought forward for this double worship. It is written by a wonderfully
well-informed and acute scholar and Mystic, who gives it in the comprehensive
form of a hypothesis. The latter, however, becomes forcibly a proven fact in
the history of religious evolution in human thought, to anyone who has ever had
a glimpse into the secret of ancient Symbology. Thus, he says:--
"One
of the first occupations among men, connected with those of actual necessity,
would be the perception of time periods,* marked on the vaulted arch of the
heavens sprung and rising over the level floor of the horizon, or the plain of
still water. These would come to be marked as those of day and night, of the
phases of the moon, of its stellar or synodic revolutions, and of the period of
the solar year with recurrence of the seasons, and with the application to such
periods of the natural measure of day or night, or of the day divided into the
light and the dark. It would also be discovered that there was a longest and
shortest solar day, and two solar days of equal day and night, within the
period of the solar year; and the points in the year of these could be marked with
the greatest precision in the starry groups of the heavens or the
constellations, subject to that retrograde movement thereof, which in time
would require a correction by intercalation, as was the case in the description
of the Flood, where correction of 150 days was made for a period of 600 years,
during which confusion of landmarks had increased. . . . This would naturally
come to pass . . . . with all races in all time; and such knowledge must be
taken to have been inherent in the human race, prior to what we call the
historic period. . . . ."
On
this basis, the author seeks for some natural physical function possessed in
common by the human race, and connected with the periodical manifestations,
such that "the connection between the two kinds of phenomena . . . became
fixed in popular usage." He finds it "(a) in the feminine
physiological phenomena every lunar month of 28 days, or" 4 weeks of 7
days each, so that 13 occurrences of the period should happen in 364 days,
which is the solar week year of 52 weeks of 7 days each. (b) The quickening of
the foetus is marked by a period of 126 days, or 18 weeks of 7 days each. (c)
That period which is called "the period of viability" is one of 210
days, or 30 weeks of 7 days each. (d) The period of parturition is accomplished
in 280 days, or a period of 40 weeks of 7 days each, or 10 lunar months of 28
days each, or of 9 calendar months of 31 days each, counting on the royal arch
of heavens for the measure of the period of traverse from the darkness of the
womb to the light and glory of conscious existence, that continuing inscrutable
mystery and miracle . . . Thus the observed periods of time marking the
workings of the birth function would naturally become a basis of astronomical
calculation . . . We may almost affirm . . . that this was the mode of
reckoning among all nations, either independently, or intermediately and
indirectly by tuition. It was the mode with the Hebrews, for even to-day they
calculate the calendar by means of the 354 and 355 of the lunar year, and we
possess a special evidence that it was the mode with the ancient Egyptians, as
to which this is the proof:--
NOTE
* Ancient Mythology
includes ancient Astronomy as well as Astrology. The planets were the hands
pointing out, on the dial of our solar system, the hours of certain periodical
events. Thus, Mercury was the messenger appointed to keep time during the daily
solar and lunar phenomena, and was otherwise connected with the God and Goddess
of Light.
"The
basic idea underlying the religious philosophy of the Hebrews was that God
contained all things within himself*; and that man was his image, man including
woman . . . The place of the man and woman with the Hebrews was among the
Egyptians occupied by the bull and the cow, sacred to Osiris and Isis,** who
were represented, respectively, by a man having a bull's head, and a woman
having the head of a cow, which symbols were worshipped. Notoriously Osiris was
the Sun and the river Nile, the tropical year of 365 days, which number is the
value of the word Neilos, and the bull, as he was also the principle of fire
and of life-giving force, while Isis was the Moon, the bed of the river Nile,
or the Mother Earth, for the parturient energies of which water was a
necessity, the lunar year of 354-364 days, the time-maker of the periods of
gestation, and the cow marked by, or with, the crescent new moon." . . . .
"But
the use of the cow of the Egyptians for the women of the Hebrews was not
intended as of any radical difference of signification, but a concurrence in
the teaching intended, and merely as a substitution of a symbol of common
import, which was this, viz., the period of parturition with the cow and the
woman was held to be the same, or 280 days, or ten lunar months of four weeks
each. And in this period consisted the essential value of this animal symbol,
whose mark was that of the crescent moon.*** . . . These parturient and natural
periods are found to have been subjects of symbolism all over the world. They
were thus used by the Hindus, and are found to be most plainly set forth by the
ancient Americans, in the Richardson and Gest tablets, in the Palenque Cross;
and manifestly lay at the base of the formation of the calendar forms of the
Mayas of Yucatan, the Hindus, the Assyrians, and the ancient Babylonians, as
well as the Egyptians and old Hebrews. The natural symbols . . . would be
either the phallus or the phallus and yoni, . . . or male and female. Indeed,
the words translated by the generalizing terms male and female, in the 27th
verse of the 1st chapter of Genesis are . . . sacr and n'cabrah, or literally,
phallus and yoni,**** while the representation of the phallic emblems would
barely indicate the genital members of the human body, when their functions and
the development of the seed-vesicles emanating from them was considered; then
would come into indication a mode of measures of lunar time, and, through
lunar, of solar time." . . .
This
is the physiological or anthropological key to the Moon symbol. The key that
opens the mystery of theogony, or the evolution of the Manvantaric gods, is
more complicated, and has nothing phallic in it. All is mystical and divine
there. But the Jews, beyond connecting Jehovah directly with the Moon as a
generative god, preferred to ignore the higher hierarchies, and have made of
some of them (zodiacal constellations and planetary gods) their Patriarchs,
thus euhemerizing the
NOTE
* A caricatured and
dwarfed Vedantin notion of Parabrahmam containing within itself the whole
Universe as being that boundless Universe itself, and there existing nothing
outside of itself.
** Just as they are to
this day in
*** Hence the worship of
the moon by the Hebrews.
**** "Male and
female, created he them."
purely
theosophical idea and dragging it down to the level of sinful humanity. (See
section "Holy of Holies" in the "Symbolism" of Book II.)
The MSS. from which the above is extracted explains very clearly to what
hierarchy of gods Jehovah belonged, and who this Jewish GOD was; for it shows
in clear language that which the writer has always insisted upon -- namely,
that the God with which the Christians have burdened themselves was no better
than the lunar symbol of the reproductive or generative faculty in nature. They
have ever ignored even the Hebrew secret god of the Kabalists, Ain-Soph, as
grand as Parabrahmam in the earliest Kabalistic and mystical conceptions. But
it is not the Kabala of Rosenroth that can ever give the true original
teachings of Simeon-Ben-Iochai, as metaphysical and philosophical as any. And
how many are there among the students of the Kabala who knew anything of them
except in their distorted Latin translations. Let us glance at the idea which
led the ancient Jews to adopt a substitute for the ever UNKNOWABLE, and which
has misled the Christians into mistaking the substitute for the reality.
"If
to these organs (phallus and yoni) as symbols of creative cosmic agencies the
idea of . . . . time periods can be attached, then, indeed, in the construction
of Temples as Dwellings of Deity, or of Jehovah, that post designated as the
Holy of Holies, or the most High Place, should borrow its title from the
recognized 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.* With the Hebrews, the indirect conception of such was couched in a term
of negation of comprehension -- viz., Ain-Soph, or the Without Bounds. But the
symbol of its first comprehensible manifestation, was the conception of a
circle with its diameter line. . . . . (See the Proem of Book I., Part I.) to
carry at once a geometric, phallic, and astronomic idea . . . . for the one
takes its birth from the nought or the Circle, without which it could not be,
and from one, or primal one, spring the nine digits, and, geometrically, all
plane shapes. So in the Kabala this Circle, with its diameter line, is the
picture of the ten Sephiroth or Emanations, composing the Adam Kadmon, the
Archetypal Man, the creative origin of all things. . . . . This idea of connecting
the circle and its diameter line, that is, number ten, with the signification
of the reproductive organs, and the Most Holy Place, was carried out
constructively in the King's Chamber, or Holy of Holies, of the great Pyramid,
in the Tabernacle of Moses, and in the Holy of Holies of the Temple of Solomon.
. . . . It is the picture of a double-womb, for in Hebrew the letter he
[[diagram]] is at the same time the number 5 and symbol of the womb, and twice
5 is 10, or the phallic number."
This
"double womb" also shows the duality of the idea carried from
NOTE
* Because it was too
sacred. It is referred to as THAT in the Vedas: it is the "Eternal
Cause," and cannot, therefore, be spoken of as a "First Cause,"
a term implying the absence of any cause, at one time.
the
highest, spiritual, down to the lowest or terrestrial plane; and by the Jews
limited to the latter. With them, therefore the number 7 has acquired the most
prominent place in their exoteric religion, a cult of external forms and empty
rituals; as their Sabbath, for instance, the seventh day sacred to their deity,
the moon, symbolical of the generative Jehovah. While with other nations the
number seven was typical of theogonic evolution, of cycles, cosmic planes, and
the Seven Forces and Occult Powers in Kosmos, as a boundless whole, whose first
upper triangle was unreachable to the finite intellect of man -- while other
nations, therefore, busied themselves, in their forcible limitation of Kosmos
in Space and Time, only with its septenary manifested plane, the Jews centred
this member solely in the moon, and based all their sacred calculations
thereupon. Hence we find the thoughtful author of the MSS. just quoted,
remarking, in reference to the metrology of the Jews that: "If 20,612 be
multiplied by 4/3 the product will afford a base for the ascertainment of the
mean revolution of the moon, and if this product be again multiplied by 4/3,
this continued product will afford a base for finding the exact period of the
mean solar year, . . . this form . . . becoming, for the finding of
astronomical periods of time, of very great service." This double number
(male and female) is symbolized also in some well-known idols: e.g.,
"Ardanari-Iswara, the Isis of the Hindus, Eridanus, or Ardan, or the
Hebrew Jordan, or source of descent. She is standing on a lotus-leaf flowing on
the water. But the signification is, that it is androgyne or hermaphrodite,
that is phallus and yoni combined, the number 10, the Hebrew letter Jod
[[diagram]], the containment of Jehovah. She, or rather she-he, gives the
minutes of the same circle of 360 degrees."
"Jehovah,"
in its best aspect is Binah, "the Upper mediating Mother, the Great Sea or
Holy Spirit;" therefore rather a synonym of Mary, the Mother of Jesus,
than of his Father; that "Mother, being the Latin Mare" the Sea is here
also, Venus, the Stella del Mare, or "Star of the Sea."
The
ancestors of the mysterious Akkadians -- the Chandra or Indovansas, the Lunar
Kings whom tradition shows reigning at Prayag (Allahabad) ages before our era
-- had come from India, and brought with them the worship of their forefathers,
of Soma, and his son Budha, which afterwards became that of the Chaldeans. Yet
such adoration, apart from popular Astrolatry and Heliolatry, was in no sense
idolatry. No more, at any rate, than the modern Roman Catholic symbolism which
connects their Virgin Mary -- the Magna Mater of the Syrians and Greeks -- with
the Moon.
Of
this worship, the most pious Roman Catholics feel quite proud, and loudly
confess to it. In a Memoire to the French Academy, the Marquis De Mirville
says:--
"It
is only natural that, as an unconscious prophecy, Ammon-Ra should be his
mother's husband, since the Magna Mater of the Christians is precisely the
spouse of that son she conceives. . . . We (Christians) can understand now why
Neithis throws radiance on the sun, while remaining the Moon, since the VIRGIN,
who is the QUEEN OF HEAVEN, as Neith was, clothes herself in her radiance, and
clothes in his turn the CHRIST-SUN. "Tu vestis solem et te sol
vestit.". . . is sung by the Roman Catholics during their service, and he
adds:--
"We
(Christians) understand also how it is that the famous inscription at Sais
should have stated that 'none has ever lifted my peplum (veil),' considering
that this sentence, literally translated, is the summary of what is sung in the
Church on the day of the immaculate conception." (ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE
VIRGIN MOTHER," p. 117.)
Surely
nothing could be more sincere than this! It justifies entirely what Mr. Gerald
Massey has said in his Lecture on "Luniolatry, Ancient and Modern":--
"The
man in the moon (Osiris-Sut, Jehovah-Satan, Christ-Judas, and other Lunar
twins) is often charged with bad conduct. . . . In the lunar phenomena the moon
was one as the moon, which was two-fold in sex, and three-fold in character --
as mother, child, and adult male. Thus the child of the moon became the consort
of his own mother! It could not be helped if there was to be any reproduction.
He was compelled to be his own father! These relationships were repudiated by
later sociology, and the primitive man in the moon got tabooed. Yet, in its
latest, most inexplicable phase, this has become the central doctrine of the grossest
superstition the world has seen, for these lunar phenomena and their humanly
represented relationships, the incestuous included, are the very foundations of
the Christian Trinity in Unity. Through ignorance of the symbolism, the simple
representation of early time has become the most profound religious mystery in
modern Luniolatry. The Roman Church, without being in any wise ashamed of the
proof, portrays the Virgin Mary arrayed with the sun, and the horned moon at
her feet, holding the lunar infant in her arms -- as child and consort of the
mother moon. The mother, child, and adult male, are fundamental."
"In
this way it can be proved that our Christology is mummified mythology, and
legendary lore, which have been palmed off upon us in the Old Testament and the
New, as divine revelation uttered by the very voice of God."
A
charming allegory is found in the Zohar, one which unveils better than anything
ever did the true character of Jehovah or YHVH in the primitive conception of
the Hebrew Kabalists. It is now found in the philosophy of I'bn Gebirol's
Kabbalah, translated by Isaac Myer. "In the introduction written by
R'Hez'quee-yah, which is very old," says our author, "and forms part
of our Brody edition of the Zohar (I, 5b. sq.) is an account of a journey taken
by R. El'azar, son of R. Shim-on b. Io'hai, and Rabbi Abbah." They met a
man with a heavy burden and asked his name; but he refused to give it and
proceeded to explain to them Thorah (Law). "They asked: 'Who caused thee
thus to walk and carry such a heavy load?' He answered: 'The letter
[[diagram]], (Yod, which = 10, and is the symbolical letter of Kether and the
essence and germ of the Holy name [[diagram]] YHVH) . . . . They said to him:
'If thou wilt tell us the name of thy father, we will kiss the dust of thy
feet.' He replied: 'As to my father, he had his dwelling in the Great Sea, and
was a fish therein' (like Vishnu and Dagon or Oannes), 'which (first) destroyed
the great sea' . . . . . and he was great and mighty and 'Ancient of Days,'
until he swallowed all the other fishes in the (Great) Sea . . . R. El'azar
listened and said to him: 'Thou art the Son of the Holy Flame, thou art the Son
of Rab Ham -- 'nun-ah Sabah [the old: the fish in Aramaic or Chaldee is nun
(noon)] thou art the Son of the Light of the Thorah," (Dharma) etc. Then
the author explains that the feminine Sephiroth, Binah, is termed by the
Kabalist the great sea: therefore Binah, whose divine names are Jehovah, Yah,
and Elohim, is simply the Chaldean Tiamat, the female power, the Thalatth of
Berosus, who presides over the Chaos, and was made out later by Christian
theology to be the serpent and the Devil. She-He (Yah-hovah) is the supernal
(Heh, and Eve). This Yah-hovah then or Jehovah, is identical with our Chaos --
Father, Mother, Son, -- on the material plane and in the purely physical World.
Demon and Deus at one and the same time; the sun and moon, good and evil, God
and Demon.
Lunar
magnetism generates life, preserves and destroys it, psychically as well as
physically. And if, astronomically, she is one of the seven planets of the
ancient world, in theogony she is one of the regents thereof; with Christians
now as much as with Pagans, the former referring to her under the name of one
of their archangels, and the latter under that of one of their gods.
Therefore
the meaning of the "fairy tale" translated by Chwolson from an old
Chaldean MSS. translated into Arabic, about Qu-tamy being instructed by the
idol of the moon, is easily understood (vide Book III.) Seldenus tells us the
secret as well as Maimonides (More Nevochim, Book III., ch. xxx). The
worshippers of the Teraphim (the Jewish Oracles) "carved images and
claimed that the light of the principal stars (planets) permeating these
through and through, the angelic VIRTUES (or the regents of the stars and
planets) conversed with them, teaching them many most useful things and
arts." And Seldenus explains that the Teraphim were built and composed
after the position of certain planets, those which the Greeks called
[[stoicheia]], and according to figures that were located in the sky and called
[[alexeteroi]], or the tutelary gods. Those who traced out the [[stoicheia]]
were called [[stoicheiomatichoi]], or the diviners by the [[stoicheia]]. (De
Diis Syriis, Teraph, II. Synt. p. 31) vide infra, the Teraphim.
It
is such sentences, however, in the "Nabathean agriculture," that have
frightened the men of science and made them proclaim the work "either an
apocrypha or a fairy tale, unworthy of the notice of an Academician." At
the same time, as shown, zealous Roman Catholics and Protestants tore it
metaphorically to pieces; the former because "it described the worship of
demons," the latter because it is "ungodly." They are all wrong,
once more. It is not a fairy tale; and as far as regards pious Churchmen, the
same worship may be shown in the Scriptures, however disfigured by translation.
Solar and Lunar worship, as well as that of the Stars and Elements, are traced,
and figure in the Christian theology; defended by Papists, they are stoutly
denied by the Protestants only at their own risk and peril. Two instances may
be given.
Ammianus
Marcellinus teaches that ancient divinations were always accomplished with the
help of the Spirits of the Elements, "Spiritus elementorum, and in Greek
[[pneumata ton stoicheion]]" (1. I., 21).
But
it is found now that the planets, the Elements, and the Zodiac, were figured
not only in Heliopolis by the twelve stones called "mysteries of the
elements," elementorum arcana, but also in Solomon's temple, and, as
pointed out by various writers, in several old Italian churches and even at
Notre Dame de Paris where they can be seen to this day.
No
symbol -- the sun included -- was more complex in its manifold meanings than
the lunar symbol. The sex was, of course, dual. With some it was male, e.g.,
the Hindu "King Soma," and the Chaldean Sin; with other nations it
was female, the beauteous goddesses Diana-Luna, I'lythia, Lucina. In Tauris,
human victims were sacrificed to Artemis, a form of the lunar goddess; the
Cretans called her Dictynna, and the Medes and Persians Anaitis, as shown by an
inscription of Koloe: '[[Artemidi 'Anaeiti]]. But, we are now concerned chiefly
with the most chaste and pure of the virgin goddesses, Luna-Artemis, to whom
Pamphos was the first to give the surname of [[Kalliste]], and of whom
Hippolitus wrote: [[Kallista polu parthenon]]. (See Pausanias viii., 35, 8.)
This Artemis-Lochia, the goddess that presided at conception and child-birth
(Iliad, Pausanias, etc., etc.), is, in her functions and as the triple Hecate,
the Orphic deity, the predecessor of the God of the Rabbins and pre-Christian
Kabalists, and his lunar type. The goddess [[Trimorphos]] was the personified
symbol of the various and successive aspects represented by the moon in each of
her three phases; and this interpretation was already that of the Stoics
(Cornut. De Nat, D. 34, 1), while the Orpheans explained the epithet
([[Trimorphos]]) by the three kingdoms of nature over which she reigned.
jealous, blood-thirsty, revengeful and exacting, Hecate-Luna is a worthy
counterpart of the "Jealous God" of the Hebrew prophets.
The
whole riddle of the solar and lunar worship, as now traced in the churches,
hangs indeed on this world-old mystery of lunar phenomena. The correlative
forces in the "Queen of Night," that lie latent for modern science,
but are fully active to the knowledge of Eastern adepts, explain well the
thousand and one images under which the moon was represented by the ancients.
It also shows how much more profoundly learned in the Selenic mysteries were
the ancients than are now our modern astronomers. The whole Pantheon of the
lunar gods and goddesses, Nephtys or Neith, Proserpina, Melytta, Cybele, Isis,
Astarte, Venus, and Hecate, on the one hand, and Apollo, Dionysius, Adonis,
Bacchus, Osiris, Atys, Thammuz, etc., etc., on the other, all show on the face
of their names and titles -- those of "Sons" and "Husbands"
of their mothers -- their identity with the Christian Trinity. In every
religious system the gods were made to merge their functions as Father, Son,
and Husband, into one, and the goddesses were identified as "Wife, Mother,
and Sister" of the male God; the former synthesizing the human attributes
as the "Sun, the giver of Life," the latter merging all the other
titles in the grand synthesis known as Maia, Maya, Maria, etc., a generic name.
Maia, in its forced derivation, has come to mean with the Greeks,
"mother," from the root ma (nurse), and even gave its name to the
month of May, which was sacred to all those goddesses before it became
consecrated to Mary.* Its primitive meaning, however, was Maya, Durga, translated
by the Orientalists as "inaccessible," but meaning in truth the
"unreachable," in the sense of illusion and unreality; as being the
source and cause of spells, the personification of ILLUSION.
In
religious rites the moon served a dual purpose. Personified as a female goddess
for exoteric purposes, or as a male god in allegory and symbol, in occult
philosophy our satellite was regarded as a sexless Potency to be well studied,
because it was to be dreaded. With the initiated Aryans, Khaldii, Greeks and
Romans, Soma, Sin, Artemis Soteira (the hermaphrodite Apollo, whose attribute
is the lyre, and the bearded Diana of the bow and arrow), Deus Lunus, and
especially Osiris-lunus and Thot-lunus,** were the occult potencies of the
moon. But whether male or female, whether Thot or Minerva, Soma or Astoreth,
the Moon is the Occult mystery of mysteries, and more a symbol of evil than of
good. Her seven phases (original, esoteric division) are divided into three
astronomical phenomena and four
NOTE
* The Roman Catholics
are indebted for the idea of consecrating the month of May to the Virgin, to
the pagan Plutarch, who shows that "May is sacred to Maia ([[Maia]]) or
Vesta" (Aulus-Gellius, word Maia) -- our mother-earth, our nurse and
nourisher personified.
** Thot-Lunus is
"Budha-Soma" of
purely
psychic phases. That the moon was not always reverenced is shown in the
Mysteries, in which the death of the moon-god (the three phases of gradual
waning and final disappearance) was allegorized by the moon standing for the
genius of evil that triumphs for the time over the light and life-giving god
(the sun), and all the skill and learning of the ancient Hierophants in Magic
was required to turn this triumph into a defeat.
It
was the most ancient worship of all, that of the third Race of our Round, the
Hermaphrodites, to whom the male-moon became sacred, when after the
"Fall" so-called, the sexes had become separated. "Deus
Lunus" then became an androgyne, male and female in turn; to serve
finally, for purposes of sorcery, as a dual power, to the Fourth Root-race, the
Atlanteans. With the Fifth (our own) the lunar-solar worship divided the
nations into two distinct, antagonistic camps. It led to events described aeons
later in the Mahabharatan War, which to the Europeans is the fabulous, to the
Hindus and Occultists the historical, strife between the Suryavansas and the
Indovansas. Originating in the dual aspect of the moon, the worship of the
female and the male principles respectively, it ended in distinct solar and
lunar cults. Among the Semitic races, the sun was for a very long time feminine
and the moon masculine -- the latter notion being adopted by them from the
Atlantean traditions. The moon was called "the Lord of the sun,"
Bel-Skemesh,* before the Shemesh worship. The ignorance of the incipient
reasons for such a distinction, and of occult principles, led the nations into
anthropomorphic idol-worship. But the religion of every ancient nation had been
primarily based upon the Occult manifestations of a purely abstract Force or
Principle now called "God." The very establishment of such worship
shows, in its details and rites, that the philosophers who evolved those
systems of nature, subjective and objective, possessed profound knowledge, and
were acquainted with many facts
NOTE
* During that period
which is absent from the Mosaic books -- from the exile of Eden to the
allegorical Flood -- the Jews worshipped with the rest of the Semites Dayanisi
[[hebrew]] "the Ruler of Men," the "Judge," or the SUN.
Though the Jewish canon and Christianism have made the sun become the
"Lord God" and Jehovah in the Bible, yet the latter is full of
indiscreet traces of the androgyne Deity, which was Jehovah the sun, and
Astoreth the moon in its female aspect, and quite free from the present
metaphorical element given to it. God is a "consuming fire," appears
in, and is encompassed by fire." It was not only in vision that Ezekiel
(viii., 16) saw the Jews "worshipping the sun." The Baal of the
Israelites (the Shemesh of the Moabites and the Moloch of the Ammonites) was
the identical "Sun-Jehovah," and he is till now "the King of the
Host of Heaven," the Sun, as much as Astoreth was the "Queen of
Heaven" -- or the moon. The "Sun of Righteousness" has become a
metaphorical expression only now.
of
a scientific nature. For besides being purely Occult, the rites of lunar
worship were based, as just shown, upon a knowledge of physiology (quite a
modern science with us), psychology, sacred mathematics, geometry and
metrology, in their right applications to symbols and figures, which are but
glyphs, recording observed natural and scientific facts; in short, upon a most
minute and profound knowledge of nature. Lunar magnetism generates life,
preserves and kills it. Soma embodies the triple power of the Trimurti, though
it passes unrecognized by the profane to this day. The allegory that makes
Soma, the moon, produced by the churning of the Ocean of Life (Space) by the
gods in another Manvantara (i.e., in the pregenetic day of our planetary
system), and that other allegory, which shows "the Rishis milking the
earth, whose calf was Soma, the moon," has a deep cosmographical meaning;
for it is neither our earth which is milked, nor was the moon, which we know,
the calf.* Had our wise men of science known as much of the mysteries of nature
as the ancient Aryans did, they would surely never have imagined that the moon
was projected from the Earth. Once more, the oldest of permutations in
theogony, the Son becoming his own father and the mother generated by the Son,
has to be remembered and taken into consideration if the symbolical language of
the ancients is to be understood by us. Otherwise mythology will be ever
haunting the Orientalists as simply "the disease which springs up at a
peculiar stage of human culture!" -- as Renouf gravely observes in a
Hibbert lecture.
The
ancients taught the, so to speak, auto-generation of the Gods: the one divine
essence, unmanifested, perpetually begetting a second-self, manifested, which
second-self, androgynous in its nature, gives birth in an immaculate way to
everything macro- and micro-cosmical in this universe. This was shown in the
Circle and the Diameter, or the Sacred 10, a few pages back.
But
our Orientalists, their extreme desire to discover one homogeneous element in
nature notwithstanding, will not see it; cramped in their researches by such ignorance,
they -- the Aryanists and Egyptologists -- are constantly led astray from truth
in their speculations. Thus, de Rouge is unable to understand, in the text
which he translates, the meaning of Ammon-Ra saying to King Amenophes (supposed
to be Memnon), "Thou art my Son, I have begotten thee"; and as he
NOTE
* The earth flees for
her life in the allegory, before Prithu, who pursues her. She assumes the shape
of a cow, and, trembling with terror, runs away and hides even in the regions
of Brahma. Therefore, it is not our Earth. Again, in every Purana, the calf
changes name. In one it is Manu Swayambhuva, in another Indra, in a third the
Himavat (
finds
the same idea in many a text and under various forms, this very Christian
Orientalist is finally compelled to exclaim that "for this idea to have
entered the mind of a hierogrammatist, there must have been in their religion a
more or less defined doctrine, indicating as a possible fact that might come to
pass, a divine and immaculate incarnation under a human form." Precisely.
But why throw the explanation on an impossible prophecy, when the whole secret
is explained by the later religion copying the earlier?
That
doctrine was universal, and it was not the mind of any one hierogrammatist that
evolved it; for the Indian avatars are a proof to the contrary. After which,
having come "to realize clearer"* what "the Divine Father and
Son" were with the Egyptians, de Rouge still fails to account for, and
perceive what were the functions attributed to the feminine principle in that
primordial generation. He does not find it in the goddess Neith, of
How
much more grandiose, philosophical and poetical is the real distinction -- for
whoever is able to understand and appreciate it -- made between the immaculate
virgin of the ancient Pagans and the modern Papal conception. With the former,
the ever-youthful mother nature, the antitype of her prototypes, the sun and
moon, generates and brings forth her "mind-born" son, the Universe.
The Sun and Moon, as male-female deities, fructify the earth, the microcosmical
mother, and the latter conceives and brings forth, in her turn. With the
Christians, "the first-born" (primogenitus) is indeed generated,
i.e., begotten, "genitum, non factum," and positively conceived and
brought forth -- "Virgo pariet," explains the Latin Church. Thus, she
drags down the noble spiritual ideal of the Virgin Mary to the earth, and, making
her "of the earth earthy," degrades that ideal to the lowest of the
anthropomorphic goddesses of the rabble.
Truly,
Neith, Isis, Diana, etc., etc., were each of them "a demiurgical goddess,
at once visible and invisible, having her place in Heaven, and helping to the
generation of species" -- the moon, in short. Her occult aspects and
powers are numberless, and, in one of them, the moon becomes with
NOTE
* His clear realization
of it is, that the Egyptians prophesied Jehovah (!) and his incarnated Redeemer
(the good serpent), etc., etc.; even to identifying Typhon with the wicked
dragon of the garden of Eden, and this passes as serious and sober science.
the
Egyptians Hathor, another aspect of
They
are both right, for the immaculate goddess of the Latin Church is a faithful
copy of the older pagan goddesses; the number (twelve) of the apostles is that
of the twelve tribes, and the latter are a personification of the twelve great
gods, and of the twelve signs of the Zodiac. Every detail almost in the
Christian dogma is borrowed from the heathens. Semele, the wife of Jupiter and
mother of Bacchus, the Sun, is, according to Nonnus, also "carried,"
or made to ascend to heaven after her death, where she presides between Mars
and Venus, under the name of the Queen of the World, or the universe,
[[panbasileia]]; "at the names of which, as at the names of Hathor,
Hecate, and other infernal goddesses," "tremble all the
demons."**
"[[Semelen
premousi daimones]]." This Greek inscription on a small temple, reproduced
on a stone that was found by somebody, and copied by Montfaucon, as De Mirville
tells us (113, Archaeologie de la Vierge mere) informs us of the stupendous
fact, that the Magna Mater of the old world was an impudent plagiarism,
perpetrated by the Demon, of the Immaculate Virgin Mother of his Church.
Whether so, or vice versa, is of no importance. That which is interesting to
note is the perfect identity between the ARCHAIC COPY and the MODERN ORIGINAL.
Did
space permit we might show the inconceivable coolness and unconcern exhibited
by certain followers of the Roman Catholic Church, when made to face the
revelations of the Past. To Maury's remark that "the Virgin took
possession of all the Sanctuaries of Ceres and
NOTE
* Hathor is the infernal
Isis, the goddess pre-eminently of the West or the nether world.
** This is De Mirville,
who proudly confesses the similarity, and he ought to know.
Venus,
and that the pagan rites, proclaimed and practised in honour of those
goddesses, were in a good measure transferred to the mother of Christ,"
the advocate of
"That
such is the fact, and that it is just as it should be and quite natural. As the
dogma, the liturgy, and the rites professed by the Roman Apostolical Church in
1862 are found engraved on monuments, inscribed on papyri, and cylinders hardly
posterior to the Deluge, it does seem impossible to deny the existence of a
FIRST ANTE-HISTORICAL (Roman) CATHOLICISM OF WHICH OUR OWN IS BUT THE FAITHFUL
CONTINUATION. . . . But while the former was the culmination, the summum of the
impudence of demons and Goetic necromancy . . . . the latter is divine. If in
our (Christian) Revelation (l'Apocalypse), Mary, clothed with the Sun and
having the moon under her feet, has nothing more in common with the humble
servant of Nazareth (sic.), it is because she has now become the greatest of
theological and cosmological powers in our universe." -- (Archaeol. de la
Vierge, pp. 116 and 119, and by the Marquis de Mirville).
Verily
so, since Pindar's Hymns to Minerva (p. 19) . . . "who sits at the right
hand of her Father Jupiter, and who is more powerful than all the other (angels
or) gods," are likewise applied to the Virgin. It is St. Bernard, who,
quoted by Cornelius a Lapide, is made to address the Virgin Mary in this
wise:--
"The
Sun-Christ lives in thee and thou livest in him." (Sermon on the Holy
Virgin.) . . . .
Again
the Virgin is admitted to be the MOON by the same unsophisticated holy man.
Being the Lucina of the Church, that is in childbirth, the verse of Virgil --
"Casta fove Lucina, tuus jam regnat Apollo" -- is applied to her.
Like the moon, the Virgin is the Queen of Heaven," adds the innocent
saint; (Apocal., ch. xii., Comm. by Cornelius a Lapide).
This
settles the question. The more similarity, according to such writers as De
Mirville, there exists between the pagan conceptions and the Christian dogmas,
the more divine appears the Christian religion, and the more is it seen to be
the only truly inspired one, especially in its Roman Catholic form. The
unbelieving scientists and the academicians who think they see in the Latin
Church quite the opposite of divine inspiration, and who will not believe in
the satanic tricks of plagiarism by anticipation, are severely taken to task.
But then "they believe in nothing and reject even the 'Nabathean
Agriculture' as a romance and a pack of superstitious nonsense," complains
the memorialist. "In their perverted opinion Qu-ta-my's 'idol of the moon'
and the statue of the Madonna are one!" A noble Marquis wrote twenty years
ago six huge volumes, or, as he calls them "Memoires to the French
Academy," with the sole object of showing Roman Catholicism an inspired
and revealed faith. As a proof thereof, he furnishes numberless facts, all
tending to show that the entire ancient world, ever since
the
deluge, had been, with the help of the devil, systematically plagiarizing the
rites, ceremonies, and dogmas of the future
But
perhaps it is just this that M. Renouf intended to say namely -- that it is the
Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Aryans, who borrowed theirs from the Latin
Church? And if so, why, in the name of logic, do the Papists reject the
additional information which the Occultists may give them on Moon-worship,
since it all tends to show their (the Roman Catholic) worship as old as the
world -- OF SABAEANISM AND ASTROLATRY?
The
reason of early Christian and later Roman Catholic astrolatry, or the
symbolical worship of Sun and Moon -- identical with that of the Gnostics,
though less philosophical and pure than the "Sun worship" of the
Zoroastrians -- is a natural consequence of its birth and origin. The adoption
by the Latin Church of such symbols as the water, fire, sun, moon and stars,
and a good many other things, is simply a continuation by the early Christians
of the old worship of Pagan nations. Thus Odin got his wisdom, power, and
knowledge, by sitting at the feet of Mimir, the thrice-wise Jotun, who passed
his life by the fountain of primeval Wisdom, the crystalline waters of which
increased his knowledge daily. Mimir "drew the highest knowledge from the
fountain, because the world was born of water; hence primeval wisdom was to be
found in that mysterious element" ("Asgard and the Gods," 86).
The eye which Odin had to pledge to acquire that knowledge may be "the
Sun, which enlightens and penetrates all things; his other eye being the moon,
whose reflection gazes out of the deep, and which at last, when setting, sinks
into the Ocean." (Ibid.) But it is something more, besides this. Loki, the
fire-god, is said to have hidden in the water, as well as in the moon, the
light-giver, whose reflection he found therein; and this belief that the fire
finds refuge in the water was not limited to the old Scandinavians. It was
shared by all nations and was finally taken up by the early Christians, who
symbolized the Holy Ghost under the shape of Fire, "cloven tongues like as
fire" -- the breath of the Father-SUN. This "Fire" descends also
into the Water or the Sea: Mar, Mary. The dove was the symbol of the Soul with
several nations, it was sacred to Venus, the goddess born from the
NOTE
* Quoted in Mr. G.
Massey's Lecture.
sea-foam,
and it became later the symbol of the Christian Anima Mundi, or the Holy
Spirit.
One
of the most occult chapters in the "Book of the Dead" is ch. lxxx.,
entitled: "To make the transformation into the god giving light to the
path of Darkness," wherein "Woman-light of the Shadow" serves
Thot in his retreat in the moon. Thot-Hermes is said to hide therein, because
he is the representative of the Secret Wisdom. He is the manifested logos of
its light side, the concealed deity or "Dark Wisdom" when he is
supposed to retire to the opposite hemisphere. Speaking of her power, the moon
calls herself repeatedly: "The Light which shineth in Darkness," the
"Woman-Light." Hence it became the accepted symbol of all the
Virgin-Mother goddesses. As the wicked "evil" spirits warred against
the moon in days of yore, so they are supposed to war now, without being able
to prevail, however, against the actual Queen of Heaven, Mary, the moon. Hence
also the moon was intimately connected in all the Pagan theogonies with the
Dragon, her eternal enemy; the Virgin, or Madonna, standing on the mythical
Satan under that form, crushed and made powerless, under her feet. This,
because the head and tail of the Dragon, which represent in Eastern astronomy
to this day the ascending and descending nodes of the moon, were also
symbolized in ancient Greece by the two serpents. Hercules kills them on the
day of his birth, and so does the babe in his virgin mother's arms. As Mr.
Gerald Massey aptly observes in this connection: "All such symbols figured
their own facts from the first, and did not pre-figure others of a totally
different order. The Iconography (and dogmas, too) had survived in Rome from a
period remotely pre-Christian. There was neither forgery nor interpolation of
types; nothing but a continuity of imagery with a perversion of its
meaning."
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