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

The Self-Sacrificing Victim - (Page 295) Mankind—having reached the last limit, and that turning point where its spiritual nature had to make room for mere physical organization—had to “fall into matter” and generation. But man’s evolution and involution are cyclic. He will end as he began. Of course to our grossly material minds even the sublime symbolism of Kosmos conceived in the matrix of Space after the divine Unit had entered into and fructified it with Its holy fiat, will no doubt suggest materiality. Not so with primitive mankind. The initiatory rite in the Mysteries of the self-sacrificing Victim that dies a spiritual death to save the world from destruction—really from depopulation—was established during the Fourth Race, to commemorate an event, which, physiologically, has now become the Mystery of Mysteries among the world-problems. In the Jewish script it is Cain and the female Abel who are the sacrificed and sacrificing couple—both immolating themselves (as permutations of Adam and Eve, or the dual Jehovah) and shedding their blood “of separation and union,” for the sake of and to save mankind by inaugurating a new physiological race. Later still, when the neophyte, as already mentioned, in order to be re-born once more into his lost spiritual state, had to pass through the entrails (the womb) of a virgin heifer [The Aryans replaced the living cow by one made of gold, silver or any other metal, and the rite is preserved to this day, when one desires to become a Brâhman, a twice-born, in India.] killed at the moment of the rite, it involved again a mystery and one as great, for it referred to the process of birth, or rather the first entrance of man on to this earth, through Vâch—“the melodious cow who milks forth sustenance and water”—and who is the female Logos. It had also reference to the same self-sacrifice of the “divine Hermaphrodite”—of the third Root-Race—the transformation of Humanity into truly physical men, after the loss of spiritual potency. When, the fruit of evil having been tested along with the fruit of good, there was as a result the gradual atrophy of spirituality and a strengthening of the materiality in man, then he was doomed to be born thenceforth through the present process. This is the Mystery of the Hermaphrodite, which the Ancients kept so secret and veiled. It was neither the absence of moral feeling, nor the presence of gross sensuality in them that made them imagine their Deities under a dual aspect; but rather their knowledge of the mysteries and processes of primitive Nature. The Science of Physiology was better known to them than it is to us now. It is in this (Page 296) that lies buried the key to the Symbolism of old, the true focus of national thought, and the strange dual-sexed images of nearly every God and Goddess in both pagan and monotheistic Pantheons.
Says Sir William Drummond in Œdipus Judaïcus:

The truths of science were the arcana of the priests because these truths were the foundations of religion.

But why should the missionaries so cruelly twit the Vaishnavas and Krishna worshippers for the supposed grossly indecent meaning of their symbols, since it is made clear beyond the slightest doubt, and by the most unprejudiced writers, that Chrestos in the pit—whether the pit to be taken as meaning the grave or hell—had likewise a sexual element in it, from the very origin of the symbol.
This fact is no longer denied today. The “Brothers of the Rosy Cross of the Middle Ages were as good Christians as any to be found in Europe, nevertheless, all their rites were based on symbols whose meaning was pre-eminently phallic and sexual. Their biographer, Hargrave Jennings, the best modern authority on Rosicrucianism, speaking of this mystic Brotherhood, describes how

The tortures and the sacrifice of Calvary, the Passion of the Cross, were, in their [the Rose-Croix’s] glorious blessed magic and triumph, the protest and appeal.

Protest—by whom? The answer is, the protest of the crucified Rose, the greatest and the most unveiled of all sexual symbols—the Yoni and Lingam, the “victim” and the “murderer,” the female and male principles in Nature. Open the last work of that author, Phallicism, and see in what glowing terms he describes the sexual symbolism in that which is most sacred to the Christian:

The flowing blood streamed from the crown, or the piercing circlet of the thorns of Hell. The Rose is feminine. Its lustrous carmine petals are guarded with thorns. The Rose is the most beautiful of flowers. The Rose is the Queen of God’s Garden (Mary, the Virgin). It is not the Rose alone which is the magical idea, or truth. But it is the “crucified rose,” or the “martyred rose” (by the grand mystic apocalyptic figure) which is the talisman, the standard, the object of adoration of all the “Sons of Wisdom” or the true Rosicrucians. [Op. cit.,p. 141.]

Not of all the “Sons of Wisdom,” by any means, not even of the true Rosicrucian. For the latter would never put in such sickening relievo, in such a purely sensual and terrestrial, not to say animal light, the grandest, the noblest of Nature’s symbols.
Orpheus - (Page 297) To the Rosicrucian, the “Rose” was the symbol of Nature, of the ever prolific and virgin Earth, or Isis, the mother and nourisher of man, considered as feminine and represented as a virgin woman by the Egyptian Initiates. Like every other personification of Nature and the Earth she is the sister and wife of Osiris, as the two characters answer to the personified symbol of the Earth, both she and the Sun being the progeny of the same mysterious Father, because the Earth is fecundated by the Sun—according to the earliest Mysticism—by divine insufflation. It was the pure ideal of mystic Nature that was personified in the “World Virgins,” the “Celestial Maidens,” and later on by the human Virgin, Mary, the Mother of the Saviour, the Salvator Mundi now chosen by the Christian World. And it was the character of the Jewish maiden that was adopted by Theology to archaic Symbolism, [ In Ragon’s Orthodoxie Maconnique p.105, note, we find the following statement—borrowed from Albumazar the Arabian, probably: “The Virgin of the Magi and Chaldæans. The Chaldæan sphere [globe] showed in its heavens a newly-born babe, called Christ and Jesus; it was placed in the arms of the Celestial Virgin. It was to this Virgin that Eratosthenes, the Alexandrian Librarian, born 276 years before our era, gave the name of Isis, mother of Horus.” This is only what Kircher gives (in Ædipus Ægypticus, iii. 5), quoting Albumazar: “In the first decan of the Virgin rises a maid, called Aderenosa, that is pure, immaculate virgin . . .sitting upon an embroidered throne nursing a boy . . . a boy, named Jesus . . . which signifies Issa, whom they also call Christ in Greek.” (See Isis Unveiled, ii. 491)] and not the Pagan symbol that was modelled for the new occasion.
We know through Herodotus that the Mysteries were brought from India by Orpheus—a hero far anterior to both Homer and Hesiod. Very little is really known of him, and till very lately Orphic literature, and even the Argonauts, were attributed to Onamacritus, a contemporary of Pisistratus, Solon and Pythagoras—who was credited with their compilation in the present form toward the close of the sixth century B.C., or 800 years after the time of Orpheus. But we are told that in the days of Pausanias there was a sacerdotal family, who, like the Brâhmans with the Vedas, had committed to memory all the Orphic Hymns, and that they were usually thus transmitted from one generation to another. By placing Orpheus so far back as 1200 B.C., official Science—so careful in her chronology to choose in each case as late a period as possible—admits that the Mysteries, or in other words Occultism dramatised, belong to a still earlier epoch than the Chaldæans and Egyptians.
The downfall of the Mysteries in Europe may now be mentioned.

 

SECTION XXXIII

The Last of the Mysteries in Europe
(Page 298) AS was predicted by the great Hermes in his dialogue with Æsculapius, the time had indeed come when impious foreigners accused Egypt of adoring monsters, and naught but the letters engraved in stone upon her monuments survived—enigmas unintelligible to posterity. Her sacred Scribes and Hierophants became wanderers upon the face of the earth. Those who remained in Egypt found themselves obliged for fear of a profanation of the sacred Mysteries to seek refuge in deserts and mountains, to form and establish secret societies and brotherhoods—such as the Essenes; those who had crossed the oceans to India and even to the (now-called) New World, bound themselves by solemn oaths to keep silent, and to preserve secret their Sacred Knowledge and Science; thus these were buried deeper than ever out of human sight. In Central Asia and on the northern borderlands of India, the triumphant sword of Aristotle’s pupil swept away from his path of conquest every vestige of a once pure Religion: and its Adepts receded further and further from that path into the most hidden spots of the globe. The cycle of* * * *being at its close, the first hour for the disappearance of the Mysteries struck on the clock of the Races, with the Macedonian conqueror. The first strokes of its last hour sounded in the year 47 B.C.. Alesia [Now called St. Reine (Cote d’Or) on the two streams, the Ose and the Oserain. Its fall is a historical fact in Keltic Gaulish History.] the famous city in Gaul, the Thebes of the Kelts, so renowned for its ancient rites of Initiation and Mysteries, was, as J. M. Ragon well describes it:

The ancient metropolis and the tomb of Initiation, of the religion of the Druids and of the freedom of Gaul. [Orthodoxie Maconnique, p. 22.]

Alesia and Bibractis - (Page 299) It was during the first century before our era, that the last and supreme hour of the great Mysteries had struck. History shows the populations of Central Gaul revolting against the Roman yoke. The country was subject to Cæsar, and the revolt was crushed; the result was the slaughter of the garrison at Alesia (or Alisa), and of all its inhabitants, including the Druids, the college-priests and the neophytes; after this the whole city was plundered and razed to the ground.
Bibractis, a city as large and as famous, not far from Alesia, perished a few years later. J. M. Ragon describes her end as follows:

Bibractis, the mother of sciences, the soul of the early nations [in Europe], a town equally famous for its sacred college of Druids, its civilisation, its schools, in which 40,000 students were taught philosophy, literature, grammar, jurisprudence, medicine, astrology, occult sciences, architecture, etc. Rival of Thebes, of Memphis, of Athens and of Rome, it possessed an amphitheatre, surrounded with colossal statues, and accommodating 100,000 spectators, gladiators, a capital, temples of Janus, Pluto, Prosperpine, Jupiter, Apollo, Minerva, Cybele, Venus and Anubis; and in the midst of these sumptuous edifices the Naumachy, with its vast basin, an incredible construction, a gigantic work wherein floated boats and galleys devoted to naval games; then a Champ de Mars, an aqueduct, fountains, public baths; finally fortifications and walls, the construction of which dated from the heroic ages.[Op. cit., p.22.]

Such was the last city in Gaul wherein died for Europe the secrets of the Initiations of the Great Mysteries, the Mysteries of Nature, and of her forgotten Occult truths. The rolls and manuscripts of the famous Alexandrian Library were burned and destroyed by the same Cæsar, [ The Christian mob in 389 of our era completed the work of destruction upon what remained: most of the priceless works were saved for students of Occultism, but lost to the world.] but while History deprecates the action of the Arab general, Amrus, who gave the final touch to this act of vandalism perpetrated by the great conqueror, it has not a word to say to the latter for his destruction of nearly the same amount of precious rolls in Alesia , nor to the destroyer of Bibractis. While Sacrovir—chief of the Gauls, who revolted against Roman despotism under Tiberius, and was defeated by Silius in the year 21 of our era—was burning himself alive with his fellow conspirators on a funeral pyre before the gates of the city, as Ragon tells us, the latter was sacked and plundered, and all her treasures of literature on the Occult Sciences perished by fire. The once majestic city, Bibractis, has now become Autun, Ragon explains.

(Page 300 ) A few monuments of glorious antiquity are still there, such as the temples of Janus and Cybele.

Ragon goes on:

Arles, founded two thousand years before Christ, was sacked in 270. This metropolis of Gaul, restored 40 years later by Constantine, has preserved to this day a few remains of its ancient splendour; amphitheatre, capitol, an obelisk, a block of granite 17 metres high, a triumphal arch, catacombs, etc. Thus ended Kelto Gaulic civilisation. Cæsar, as a barbarian worthy of Rome, had already accomplished the destruction of the ancient Mysteries by the sack of the temples and their initiatory colleges, and by the massacre of the Initiates and the Druids. Remained Rome; but she never had but the lesser Mysteries, shadows of the Secret Sciences. The Great Initiation was extinct. [Op. cit., p.23. J.M. Ragon, a Belgian by birth, and a Mason, knew more about Occultism than any other non-initiated writer. For fifty years he studied the ancient mysteries wherever he could find accounts of them. In 1805, he founded at Paris the Brotherhood of Les Trinosophes, in which Lodge he delivered for years lectures on Ancient and Modern Initiations (in 1818 and again in 1841), which were published, and now are lost. Then he became the writer in chief of Hermes, a masonic paper. His best works were La Maconnerie Occulte and the Fastes Initiatiques. After his death, in 1866, a number of his MSS, remained in the possession of the Grand Orient of France. A high Mason told the writer that Ragon had corresponded for years with two Orientalists in Syria and Egypt, one of whom is a Kopt gentleman.]

A few further extracts may be given from his Occult Masonry, as they bear directly upon our subject. However learned and erudite, some of the chronological mistakes of that author are very great. He says:

After deified man (Hermes) came the King-Priest [the Hierophant] Menes was the first legislator and the founder of Thebes of the hundred palaces. He filled that city with magnificent splendour; it is from his day that the sacerdotal epoch of Egypt dates. The priests reigned, for it is they who made the laws. It is said that there have been three hundred and twenty-nine [Hierophants] since his time—all of whom have remained unknown.

After that, genuine Adepts having become scarce, the author shows the Priests choosing false ones from the midst of slaves, whom they exhibited, having crowned and deified them, for the adoration of the ignorant masses.

Tired of reigning in such a servile way, the kings rebelled and freed themselves. Then came Sesostris, the founder of Memphis (1613, they say before our era). To the sacerdotal election to the throne succeeded that of the warriors. . . . Cheops who reigned from 1178 to 1122 built the great Pyramid which bears his name. He is accused of having persecuted theocracy and closed the temples.

This is utterly incorrect, though Ragon repeats “History.” The Pyramid called by the name of Cheops is the Great Pyramid, the building of which even Baron Bunsen assigned to 5,000 B.C. He says in Egypt’s Place in Universal History:

The Learning of Egypt -

(Page 301) The Origins of Egypt go back to the ninth millennium before Christ.[Op. cit., iv. 462.]

And as the Mysteries were performed and the Initiations took place in that Pyramid—for indeed it was built for that purpose—it looks strange and an utter contradiction with known facts in the history of the Mysteries to suppose that Cheops, if the builder of that Pyramid ever turned against the initiated Priests and their temples. Moreover, as far as the Secret Doctrine teaches, it was not Cheops who built the Pyramid of that name, whatever else he might have done.

Yet, it is quite true that

Owing to an Ethiopian invasion and the federated government of twelve chiefs, royalty fell into the hands of Amasis, a man of low birth.

This was in 570 B.C., and it was Amasis who destroyed priestly power. And

Thus perished that ancient theocracy which showed its crowned priests for so many centuries to Egypt and the whole world.

Egypt had gathered the students of all countries around her Priests and Hierophants before Alexandria was founded. Ennemoser asks:

How comes it that so little has become known of the Mysteries and of their particular contents, through so many ages, and amongst so many different times and people? The answer is that it is again owing to the universally strict silence of the initiated. Another cause may be found in the destruction and total loss of all the written memorials of the secret knowledge of the remotest antiquity.

Numa's books, described by Livy, consisting of natural philosophy, were found in his tomb; but they were not allowed to be made known, lest they should reveal the most secret mysteries of the state religion. . . .The senate and the tribunes of the people determined . . . that the books themselves should be burned, which was done. [History of Magic, ii, II.]

Cassain mentions a treatise, well-known in the fourth and fifth centuries, which was accredited to Ham, the son of Noah, who in his turn was reputed to have received it from Jared, the fourth generation from Seth, the son of Adam.

Alchemy also was first taught in Egypt by her learned Priests, though the first appearance of this system is as old as man. Many writers have declared that Adam was the first Adept; but that was a blind and a pun upon the name, which is “red earth” in one of its meanings. The correct information—under its allegorical veil—is found in the sixth chapter of Genesis, which speaks of the “Sons of God” who took wives of the daughters of men, after which they communicated to (Page 302) these wives many a mystery and secret of the phenomenal world. The cradle of Alchemy, says Olaus Borrichius, is to be sought in the most distant times. Democritus of Abdera was an Alchemist, and a Hermetic Philosopher. Clement of Alexandria wrote considerably upon the Science, and Moses and Solomon are called proficients in it. We are told by W. Godwin;
The first authentic record on this subject is an edict of Diocletian about 300 years A.D. ordering a diligent search to be made in Egypt for all the ancient books which treated of the art of making gold and silver, that they might, without distinction, be consigned to the flames.

The Alchemy of the Chaldæans and the old Chinamen is not even the parent of that Alchemy which revived among the Arabians many centuries later. There is a spiritual Alchemy and a physical transmutation. The knowledge of both was imparted at the Initiations.

SECTION XXXIV
The Post-Christian Successors to the Mysteries
(Page 303) THE Eleusinian Mysteries were no more. Yet it was these which gave their principle features to the Neo-platonic school of Ammonius Saccas, for the Eclectic System was chiefly characterised by its Theurgy and ecstasis. It was Iamblichus who added to it the Egyptian doctrine of Theurgy with its practices, and Porphyry, the Jew, who opposed this new element. The school, however, with but few exceptions, practised asceticism and contemplation, its mystics passing through a discipline as rigorous as that of the Hindu devotee. Their efforts never tended so much to develop the successful practice of thaumaturgy, necromancy or sorcery—such as they are now accused of—as to evolve the higher faculties of the inner man, the Spiritual Ego. The school held that a number of spiritual beings, denizens of spheres quite independent of the earth and of the human cycle, were mediators between the “Gods” and men, and even between man and the Supreme Soul. To put it in plainer language, the soul of man became, owing to the help of the Planetary Spirits, “recipient of the soul of the world” as Emerson puts it. Apollonius of Tyana asserted his possession of such a power in these words (quoted by Professor Wilder in his Neo-Platonism):

I can see the present and the future in a clear mirror. The sage [Adept] need not wait for the vapours of the earth and the corruption of the air to foresee plagues and fevers; he must know them later than God, but earlier than the people. The theoi or gods see the future; common men, the present; sages that which is about to take place. My peculiar abstemious mode of living produces such an acuteness of the senses, or creates some other faculty, so that the greatest and most remarkable things may be performed. [ Neo-Platonism and Alchemy. p.15 ]

(Page 304) Professor A. Wilder’s comment thereupon is remarkable:

This is what may be termed Spiritual photography. The soul is the camera in which facts and events, future, past, and present, are alike fixed; and the mind becomes conscious of them. Beyond our everyday world of limits, all is as one day or state—the past and future comprised in the present. Probably this is the “great day,” the “last day,” the “day of the Lord.” of the Bible writers—the day into which everyone passes by death or ecstasis. Then the soul is freed from the constraint of the body, and its nobler part is united to higher nature and becomes partaker in the wisdom and foreknowledge of the higher beings. [ Loc. cit.]

How far the system practised by the Neo-Platonists was identical with that of the old and the modern Vedântins may be inferred from what Dr. A. Wilder says of the Alexandrian Theosophists.

The anterior idea of the New Platonists was that of a single Supreme Essence. . . All the old philosophies contained the doctrine that φεοι, theoi, gods or disposers, angels, demons, and other spiritual agencies, emanated from the Supreme Being. Ammonius accepted the doctrine of the Books of Hermes, that from the divine All proceeded the Divine Wisdom or Amun; that from Wisdom proceeded the Demiurge or Creator; and from the Creator, the subordinate spiritual beings; the world and its people being the last. The first is contained in the second, the first and second in the third, and so on through the entire series. [ Op. cit., pp. 9. 10 ]

This is a perfect echo of the belief of the Vedântins, and it proceeds directly from the secret teachings of the East. The same author says:

Akin to this is the doctrine of the Jewish Kabala which was taught by the Pharsi or Pharisees, who probably borrowed it, as their sectarian designation would seem to indicate, from the Magians of Persia. It is substantially embodied in the following synopsis.

The Divine Being is the All, the source of all existence, the Infinite; and He cannot be known. The Universe reveals Him, and subsists by Him. At the beginning His effulgence went forth everywhere. [This Divine Effulgence and Essence is the light of the Logos: only the Vedântin would not use the pronoun “He,” but would say “It.”] Eventually He retired within Himself and so formed around Him a vacant space. Into this He transmitted His first Emanation, a Ray, containing in it the generative and conceptive power, and hence the name IE, or Jah. This in turn produced the tikkun, the pattern or idea or form; and in this emanation, which also contained the male and female, or generative and conceptive potencies, were the three primitive forces of Light, Spirit and Life. This Tikkun is united to the Ray, or first emanation, and pervaded by it; and by that union is also in perpetual communication with the infinite source. It is the pattern, the primitive man, the Adam Kadmon, the macrocosm of Pythagoras and other philosophers.