H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, Volume 3

A True Priesthood - (Page 263) But in order to achieve this reform the masses have to pass through a dual transformation: (a) to become divorced from every element of exoteric superstition and priestcraft, and (b) to become educated men, free from every danger of being enslaved whether by a man or an idea.
This, in view of the preceding may seem paradoxical. The Initiates were “priests,” we may be told—at any rate, all the Hindu, Egyptian, Chaldaean, Greek, Phoenician, and other Hierophants and Adepts were priests in the temples, and it was they who invented their respective exoteric creeds. To this the answer is possible: “The cowl does not make the friar.” If one may believe tradition and the unanimous opinion of ancient writers, added to the examples we have in the “priests” of India, the most conservative nation in the world, it becomes quite certain that the Egyptian priests were no more priests in the sense we give to the word than are the temple Brâhmans. They could never be regarded as such if we take as our standard the European clergy. Laurens observes very correctly that:
The priests of Egypt were not, strictly speaking, ministers of religion. The word “priest,” which translation has been badly interpreted, had an acceptation very different from the one that is applied to it among us. In the language of antiquity, and especially in the sense of the initiation of the priests of ancient Egypt, the word “priest” is synonymous with that of “philosopher.” . . . . The institution of the Egyptian priests seems to have been really a confederation of sages gathered to study the art of ruling men, to centre the domain of truth, modulate its propagation, and arrest its too dangerous dispersion.[ Essais Historiques sur la Franc-Maçonnerie, pp. 142. 143.]
The Egyptian Priests, like the Brâhmans of old, held the reins of the governing powers, a system that descended to them by direct inheritance from the Initiates of the great Atlantis. The pure cult of Nature in the earliest patriarchal days—the word “patriarch” applying in its first original sense to the Progenitors of the human race, [The word “patriarch” is composed of the Greek word “Patria” (“family.” “tribe,” or “nation”) and “Archos” (a “chief”, the paternal principle. The Jewish Patriarchs who were pastors, passed their name to the Christian Patriarchs, yet they were no priests, but were simply the heads of their tribes, like the Indian Rishis.] the Fathers, Chiefs, and Instructors of primitive men—became the heirloom of those (Page 264) alone who could discern the noumenon beneath the phenomenon. Later, the Initiates transmitted their knowledge to the human kings, as their divine Masters had passed it to their forefathers. It was their prerogative and duty to reveal the secrets of Nature that were useful to mankind—the hidden virtues of plants, the art of healing the sick, and of bringing about brotherly love and mutual help among mankind. No Initiate was one if he could not heal—aye, recall to life from apparent death (coma) those who, too long neglected, would have indeed died during their lethargy. [There is no need to observe here that the resurrection of a really dead body is an impossibility in Nature. ] Those who showed such powers were forthwith set above the crowds, and were regarded as Kings and Initiates . Gautama Buddha was a King-Initiate, a healer, and recalled to life those who were in the hands of death. Jesus and Apollonius were healers, and were both addressed as Kings by their followers. Had they failed to raise those who were to all intents and purposes the dead, none of their names would have passed down to posterity; for this was the first and crucial test, the certain sign that the Adept had upon Him the invisible hand of a primordial divine Master, or was an incarnation of one of the “Gods.”
The later royal privilege descended to our Fifth Race kings through the kings of Egypt. The latter were all initiated into the mysteries of medicine, and they healed the sick, even when, owing to the terrible trials and labours of final Initiation, they were unable to become full Hierophants. They were healers by privilege and by tradition, and were assisted in the healing art by the Hierophants of the temples, when they themselves were ignorant of Occult curative Science. So also in far later historical times we find Pyrrhus curing the sick by simply touching them with his foot; Vespasian and Hadrian needed only to pronounce a few words taught to them by their Hierophants, in order to restore sight to the blind and health to the cripple. From that time onward history has recorded cases of the same privilege conferred on the emperors and kings of almost every nation. [The kings of Hungary claimed that they could cure the jaundice; the Dukes of Burgandy were credited with preserving people from the plague; the kings of Spain delivered those possessed by the devil. The prerogative of curing the king’s evil was given to the kings of France, in reward for the virtues of good King Robert. Francis the First, during a short stay at Marseilles for his son’s wedding, touched and cured of that disease upwards of 500 persons. The kings of England had the same privilege.]
The Egyptian Priests - (Page 265) That which is known of the Priests of Egypt and of the ancient Brâmans, corroborated as it is by all the ancient classics and historical writers, gives us the right to believe in that which is only traditional in the opinion of sceptics. Whence the wonderful knowledge of the Egyptian Priests in every department of Science, unless they had it from a still more ancient source? The famous “Four,” the seats of learning in old Egypt, are more historically certain than the beginnings of modern England. It was in the great Theban sanctuary that Pythagoras upon his arrival from India studied the Science of Occult numbers. It was in Memphis that Orpheus popularized his too-abstruse Indian metaphysics for the use of Magna Grecia; and thence Thales, and ages later Democritus, obtained all they knew. It is to Saïs that all the honour must be given of the wonderful legislation and the art of ruling people, imparted by its Priests to Lycurgus and Solon, who will both remain objects of admiration for generations to come. And had Plato and Eudoxus never gone to worship at the shrine of Heliopolis, most probably the one would have never astonished future generations with his ethics, nor the other with his wonderful knowledge of mathematics.[ See Laurens’ Essais Historiques for further information as to the world-wide, universal knowledge of the Egyptian Priests.]
The great modern writer on the Mysteries of Egyptian Initiation—one, however, who knew nothing of those in India—the late Ragon, has not exaggerated in maintaining that:

All the notions possessed by Hindustan, Persia, Syria, Arabia, Chaldaea, Sydonia, and the priests of Babylonia, [on the secrets of Nature], was known to the Egyptian priests. It is thus Indian philosophy, without mysteries, which, having penetrated into Chaldaea and ancient Persia, gave rise to the doctrine of Egyptian Mysteries.[Des Initiations. p.24.]

The Mysteries preceded the hieroglyphics. [The word comes from the Greek ‘hieros’ (“sacred”) and “glupho” (“I grave”). The Egyptian characters were sacred to the Gods, as the Indian Devanâgarî is the language of the Gods.] They gave birth to the latter, as permanent records were needed to preserve and commemorate their secrets. It is primitive Philosophy [The same author had (as Occultists have) a very reasonable objection to the modern etymology of the word “philosophy,” which is interpreted “love of wisdom,” and is nothing of the kind. The philosophers were scientists, and philosophy was a real science—not simply verbiage, as it is in our day. The term is composed of two Greek words whose meaning is intended to convey its secret sense, and ought to be interpreted as “wisdom of love.” Now it is in the last word, “love,” that lies hidden the esoteric significance: for “love” does not stand here as a noun, nor does it mean “affection” or “fondness.” but is the term used for Eros, that primordial principle in divine creation, synonymous with χσφοζ, the abstract desire in Nature for procreation, resulting in an everlasting series of phenomena. It means “divine love,” that universal element of divine omnipresence spread throughout Nature and which is at once the chief cause and effect. The “wisdom of love” (or “philosophia,’) meant attraction to and love of everything hidden beneath objective phenomena and the knowledge thereof. Philosophy meant the highest Adeptship—love of and assimilation with Deity. In his modesty Pythagoras even refused to be called a Philosopher (or one who knows every hidden thing in things visible: cause and effect, or absolute truth), and called himself simply a Sage, an aspirant to philosophy, or to Wisdom of Love—love in its exoteric meaning being as degraded by men then as it is now by its purely terrestrial application.] that has served as the (Page 266) foundation-stone for modern philosophy; only the progeny, while perpetuating the features of the external body, has lost on its way the Soul and Spirit of its parent.
Initiation, though it contained neither rules and principles, nor any special teaching of Science—as now understood—was nevertheless Science, and the Science of sciences. And though devoid of dogma, of physical discipline, and of exclusive ritual, it was yet the one true Religion—that of eternal truth. Outwardly it was a school, a college, wherein were taught sciences, arts, ethics, legislation, philanthropy, the cult of the true and real nature of cosmic phenomena; secretly, during the mysteries, practical proofs of the latter were given. Those who could learn on all things—i.e., those who could look the great Isis in her unveiled face and bear the awful majesty of the Goddess—became Initiates. But the children of the Fifth Race had fallen too deeply into matter always to do so with impunity. Those who failed disappeared from the world, without leaving a trace behind. Which of the highest kings would have dared to claim any individual, however high his social standing, from the stern priests, once that the victim had crossed the threshold of their sacred Adytum?
The noble precepts taught by the Initiates of the early races passed to India, Egypt, and Greece, to China and Chaldaea, and thus spread all over the world. All that is good, noble, and grand in human nature, every divine faculty and aspiration, were cultured by the Priest-Philosophers who sought to develop them in their Initiates. Their code of ethics, based on altruism, has become universal. It is found in Confucius, the “atheist,” who taught that “he who loves not his brother has no virtue in him,” and in the Old Testament precept, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” [Lev., xix. 18.] The greater Initiates became like unto Gods, and Socrates, in Plato’s Phaedo, is represented as saying:

The Initiates are sure to come into the company of the Gods.

Revealing and Reveiling - (Page 267) In the same work the great Athenian Sage is made to say:

It is quite apparent that those who have established the Mysteries, or the secret assemblies of the Initiates, were no mean persons, but powerful genii, who from the first ages had endeavoured to make us understand under those enigmas that he who will reach the invisible regions unpurified will be hurled into the abyss [the Eighth Sphere of the Occult Doctrine; that is, he will lose his personality for ever], while he who will attain them purged of the maculations of this world, and accomplished in virtues, will be received in the abode of the Gods.

Said Clemens Alexandrinus, referring to the Mysteries:

Here ends all teaching. One sees Nature and all things.

A Christian Father of the Church speaks then as did the Pagan Pretextatus, the pro-consul of Achaia (fourth century A.D.), “a man of eminent virtues,” who remarked that to deprive the Greeks of “the sacred Mysteries which bind in one the whole of mankind,” was to render their very lives worthless to them. Would the Mysteries have ever obtained the highest praise from the noblest men of antiquity had they not been of more than human origin? Read all that is said of this unparalleled institution, as much by those who had never been initiated, as by the Initiates themselves. Consult Plato, Euripides, Socrates, Aristophanes, Pindar, Plutarch, Isocrates, Diodorus, Cicero, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, not to name dozens of other famous Sages and writers. That which the Gods and Angels had revealed exoteric religions, beginning with that moses, reveiled and hid for ages from the sight of the world. Joseph, the son of Jacob, was an Initiate, otherwise he would not have married Aseneth, the daughter of Petephre (“Potiphar”—“he who belongs to Phre,” the Sun-God), priest of Heliopolis and governor of On. [“On,” the “Sun,” the Egyptian name of Heliopolis (the “City of the Sun”)]. Every truth revealed by Jesus, and which even the Jews and early Christians understood, was reviled by the Church that pretends to serve Him. Read what Seneca says, as quoted by Dr. Kenealy:

“"The world being melted and having reëntered the bosom of Jupiter [or Parabrahman], this God continues for some time totally concentred in himself and remains concealed, as it were, wholly immersed in the contemplation of his own ideas. Afterwards we see a new world spring from him . . . .An innocent race of men is formed.” And again, speaking of mundane dissolution as involving the destruction or death of all, he [Seneca] teaches us that when the laws of Nature shall be buried in ruin and the last day of the world shall come, the Southern Pole shall crush, as it falls, all the regions of Africa; and the North Pole shall overwhelm all the countries beneath its axis. The affrighted sun shall be deprived of its light: (Page 268) the palace of heaven, falling to decay, shall produce at once both life and death, and some kind of dissolution shall equally seize upon all the deities, who thus shall return to their original chaos. [Book of God, p. 160.]

One might fancy oneself reading the Purânic account by Paràshara of the great Pralaya. It is nearly the same thing, idea for idea. Has Christianity nothing of the kind? Let the reader open any English Bible and read chapter iii of the Second Epistle of Peter, and he will find there the same ideas.

There shall come in the last days scoffers, . . . . saying, Where is the promise of his coming? For since the fathers fell asleep all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. For this they willingly are ignorant of that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished. But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are . . . .reserved unto fire, . . . .in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat. . . Nevertheless we . . . .look for new heavens and a new earth.

If the interpreters chose to see in this a reference to a creation, a deluge, and a promised coming of Christ, when they will live in a New Jerusalem in heaven, that is no fault of Peter. What he meant was the destruction of the Fifth Race and the appearance of a new continent for the Sixth Race.
The Druids understood the meaning of the Sun in Taurus, therefore when all the fires were extinguished on the 1^st of November their sacred and inextinguishable fire remained alone to illumine the horizon like those of the Magi and the modern Zoroastrian. And like the early Fifth Race and the later Chaldaeans and Greeks, and again like the Christians (who do it to this day without suspecting the real meaning), they greeted the “Morning-Star,” the beautiful Venus-Lucifer. [Mr Kenealy quotes, in his Book of God, Vallancey, who says: “I had not been a week landed in Ireland from Gibraltar, where I had studied Hebrew and Chaldaic under Jews of various countries, when I heard a peasant girl say to a boor standing by her ‘Feach an Maddin Nag’(Behold the morning star) pointing to the planet Venus, the Maddena Nag of the Chaldeans.”] Strabo speaks of an island near Britannia where Ceres and Persephone were worshipped with the same rites as in Samothrace, and this was the sacred Ierna, where a perpetual fire was lit. The Druids believed in the rebirth of man, not, as Lucian explains,

That the same Spirit shall animate a new body, not here, but in a different world,

but in a series of reïncarnations in this same world; for as Diodorus says, they declared that the souls of men after a determinate period would pass into other bodies. [There was a time when the whole world, the totality of mankind, had one religion, as they were of “one lip.” “All the religions of the earth were at first one, and emanated from one centre.” says Faber.]
Atlanteans Degenerating - (Page 269) These tenets came to the Fifth Race Aryans from their ancestors of the Fourth Race, the Atlanteans. They piously preserved the teachings, while their parent Root-Race, becoming with every generation more arrogant, owing to the acquisition of superhuman powers, were gradually approaching their end.
 

SECTION XXIX
The Trial of the Sun Initiate
(Page 270) WE will begin with the ancient Mysteries—those received from the Atlanteans by the primitive Äryans—whose mental and intellectual state Professor Max Müller has described with such a masterly hand, yet left so incomplete withal.
He says: We have in it [ in the Rig Veda] a period of the intellectual life of man to which there is no parallel in any other part of the world. In the hymns of the Veda we see man left to himself to solve the riddle of this world. . . .He invokes the gods around him, he praises, he worships them. But still with all these gods . . . .beneath him, and above him, the early poet seems ill at rest within himself. There, too, in his own breast, he has discovered a power that is never mute when he prays, never absent when he fears and trembles. It seems to inspire his prayers and yet to listen to them; it seems to live in him, and yet to support him and all around him. The only name he can find for this mysterious power is “Brahman;” for brahman meant originally force, will, wish, and the propulsive power of creation. But this impersonal brahman too, as soon as it is named, grows into something strange and divine. It ends by being one of many gods, one of the great triad, worshipped to the present day. And still the thought within him has no real name; that power which is nothing but itself, which supports the gods, the heavens, and every living being, floats before his mind, conceived but not expressed. At last he calls it Ãtman,” for âtman, originally breath or spirit, comes to mean Self and Self alone, whether divine or human; Self, whether creating of suffering; Self, whether One or All; but always Self, independent and free. “Who has seen the first-born?” says the poet, “when he who has no bones (i.e., form) bore him that had bones? Where was the life, the blood, the Self of the world? Who went to ask this from any one who knew it?” (Rig Veda, I, 164,4.) This idea of a divine Self once expressed, everything else must acknowledge its supremacy; Self is the Lord of all things; it is the King of all things; as all the spokes of a wheel are contained in the nave and circumference, all things are contained in this Self; all selves are contained in this Self.” (Brihadâranyaka, IV. v. 15). [Chips from a German Workshop, i. 69. 70. ]
Vishvakarma and Vikarttana - (Page 271) This Self, the highest, the one, and the universal, was symbolised on the plane of mortals by the Sun, its life-giving effulgence being in its turn the emblem of the Soul—killing the terrestrial passions which have ever been an impediment to the re-union of the Unit Self (the Spirit) with the All-Self. Hence the allegorical mystery, only the broad features of which may be given here. It was enacted by the “Sons of the Fire-Mist” and of “Light.” The second Sun (the “second hypostasis” of Rabbi Drach) appeared as put on his trial, Vishvakarma, the Hierophant, cutting off seven of his beams, and replacing them with a crown of brambles, when the “Sun” became Vikarttana, shorn of his beams or rays. After that, the Sun,—enacted by a neophyte ready to be initiated—was made to descend into Pâtâla, the nether regions, on a trial of Tantalus. Coming out of it triumphant, he emerged from this region of lust and iniquity, to re-become Karmasâkshin, witness of the Karma of men, [Sûrya, the Sun, is one of the nine divinities that witness all human actions.] and arose once more triumphant in all the glory of his regeneration, as the Graha-Râjah, King of the Constellations, and was addressed as Gabhastiman, “re-possessed of his rays.”
The “fable” in the popular Pantheon of India, founded upon, and born out of the poetical mysticism of the Rig-Veda—the sayings of which were mostly all dramatised during the religious Mysteries—grew in the course of its exoteric evolution into the following allegory. It may be found now in several of the Purânas and in other Scriptures. In the Rig-Veda and its Hymns, Vishvakarma, a Mystery-God, is the Logos, the Demiurgos, one of the greatest Gods, and spoken of in two of the hymns as the highest. He is the Omnificent (Vishvakarma) called the “Great Architect of the Universe,” the

All seeing God, . . . .the father, the generator, the disposer, who gives the gods their names, and is beyond the comprehension of mortals,

as is every Mystery-God. Esoterically, He is the personification of the creative manifested Power; and mystically He is the seventh principle in man, in its collectivity. For He is the son of Bhuvana, the self-created, luminous Essence, and of the virtuous, chaste and lovely Yoga-Siddhâ, the virgin Goddess, whose name speaks for itself, since it personified Yoga-power, the “chaste mother” that creates the Adepts. In the Rig-Vaidic Hymns, Vishvakarma performs the “great sacrifice” i.e., sacrifices himself for the world; or, as the Nirukta is made to say, translated by the Orientalists:

(Page 272) Vishvakarma first of all offers up all the world in a sacrifice, and then ends by sacrificing himself

In the mystical representations of his character, Vishvakarma is often called Vittoba, and is pictured as the “Victim,” the “Man-God,” or the Avatàra crucified in space.

[Of the true Mysteries, the real Initiations, nothing of course can be said in public: they can be known only to those who are able to experience them. But a few hints can be given of the great ceremonial Mysteries of Antiquity, which stood to the public as the real Mysteries, and into which candidates were initiated with much ceremony and display of Occult Arts. Behind these, in silence and darkness, were the true Mysteries, as they have always existed and continue to exist. In Egypt, as in Chaldaea and later in Greece, the Mysteries were celebrated at stated times, and the first day was a public holiday, on which, with much pomp, the candidates were escorted to the Great Pyramid and passed thereinto out of sight. The second day was devoted to ceremonies of purification, at the close of which the candidate was presented with a white robe; on the third day] [There is a gap in H.P.B’s MS., and the paragraph in brackets supplies what was missing.—A.B.] he was tried and examined as to his proficiency in Occult learning. On the fourth day, after another ceremony symbolical of purification, he was sent alone to pass through various trials, finally becoming entranced in a subterranean crypt, in utter darkness, for two days and two nights. In Egypt, the entranced neophyte was placed in an empty sarcophagus in the Pyramid, where the initiatory rites took place. In India and Central Asia, he was bound on a lathe, and when his body had become like that of one dead (entranced), he was carried into the crypt. Then the Hierophant kept watch over him “guiding the apparitional soul (astral body) from this world of Samsàra (or delusion) to the nether kingdoms, from which, if successful, he had the right of releasing seven suffering souls” (Elementaries). Clothed with his Anandamayakosha, the body of bliss—the Srotâpanna remained there where we have no right to follow him, and upon returning—received the Word, with or without the “heart’s blood” of the Hierophant. [ In Isis Unveiled, Vol.II., pp. 41, 42, a portion of this rite is referred to. Speaking of the dogma of Atonement, it is traced to ancient “heathendom” again. We say: “This cornerstone of a church which had believed herself built on a firm rock for long centuries, is now excavated by science and proved to come from the Gnostics. Professor Draper shows it as hardly known in the days of Tertullian, and as having originated among the Gnostic heretics’ (see Conflict Between Religion and Science, p.224) . . . .But there are sufficient proofs to show that it originated among them no more than did their anointed Christos and Sophia. The former they modelled on the original of the King Messiah, the male principle of wisdom, and the latter on the third Sephiroth, from the Chaldaean Kabalah, and even from the Hindu Brahmâ and Sarasvati, and the Pagan Dionysius and Demeter. And here we are on firm ground, if it were only because it is now proved that the New Testament never appeared in its complete form, such as we find it now, till 300 years after the period of the apostles, and the Zohar and other Kabalistic books are found to belong to the first century before our era, if not to be far older still.

“The Gnostics entertained many of the Essenean ideas; and the Essenes had their greater and minor Mysteries at least two centuries before our era. They were the Isarim or Initiates, the descendants of the Egyptian Hierophants, in whose country they had been settled for several centuries before they were converted to Buddhistic monasticism by the missionaries of King Asoka, and amalgamated later with the earliest Christians; and they existed, probably, before the old Egyptian temples were desecrated and ruined in the incessant invasions of Persians, Greeks and other conquering hordes. The hierophants had their atonement enacted in the Mystery of Initiation ages before the Gnostics, or even the Essenes, had appeared. It was known among hierophants as the Baptism of Blood, and was considered not as an atonement for the ‘fall of man’ in Eden, but simply as an expiation for the past, present, and future sins of ignorant, but nevertheless polluted mankind. The hierophant had the option of either offering his pure and sinless life as a sacrifice for his race to the gods whom he hoped to rejoin, or an animal victim. The former depended entirely on their own will. At the last moment of the solemn ‘new birth,’ the Initiator passed ‘the word’ to the initiated, and immediately after the latter had a weapon placed in his right hand, and was ordered to strike. This is the true origin of the Christian dogma of atonement.”

As Ballanche says, quoted by Ragon: “Destruction is the great God of the World, justifying therefore the philosophical conception of the Hindu Shiva. According to this immutable and sacred law, the Initiate was compelled to kill the Initiator: otherwise initiation remained incomplete . . . . It is death that generates life.” Orthodoxie maçonnique, p. 104. All that, however, was emblematic and exoteric. Weapon and killing must be understood in their allegorical sense.]