Isis Unveiled by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
[[Vol. 2, Page 405]]
CHAPTER IX.
"All things are governed in the bosom of this triad."
-- LYDUS: De Mensibus, 20.
"Thrice let the heaven be turned on its perpetual axis."
-- OVID: Fasti iv.
"And Balaam said unto Balak, Build me here seven
altars, and prepare me here seven oxen and seven
rams." -- Numbers xxiii. 1, 2.
"In seven days all creatures who have offended me
shall be destroyed by a deluge, but thou shalt be secured in a
vessel miraculously formed; take, therefore . . . and with seven
holy men, your respective wives, and pairs of all animals,
enter the ark without fear; then shalt thou know God face to face,
and all thy questions shall be answered." -- Bagavedgitta.
"And the Lord said, I will destroy man . . . from the face
of the earth. . . . But with thee will I establish my covenant.
. . . Come thou and all thy house into the ark. . . . For yet
seven days and I will cause it to rain upon the earth."
-- Genesis vi., vii.
"The Tetraktys was not only principally honored because all
symphonies are found to exist within it, but also because it appears
to contain the nature of all things." -- THEOS.
OF SMYRNA: Mathem., p. 147.
OUR task will have been ill-performed if the
preceding chapters have not demonstrated that Judaism, earlier
and later Gnosticism, Christianity, and even Christian Masonry,
have all been erected upon identical cosmical myths, symbols,
and allegories, whose full comprehension is possible only to those
who have inherited the key from their inventors.
In the following pages we will endeavor to show how much these
have been misinterpreted by the widely-different, yet intimately-related
systems enumerated above, in fitting them to their individual
needs. Thus not only will a benefit be conferred upon the student,
but a long-deferred, and now much-needed act of justice will be
done to those earlier generations whose genius has laid the whole
human race under obligation. Let us begin by once more comparing
the myths of the Bible with those of the sacred books
of other nations, to see which is the original, which copies.
There are but two methods which, correctly explained, can help
us to this result. They are -- the Vedas, Brahmanical
literature and the Jewish Kabala. The former has, in
a most philosophical spirit, conceived these grandiose myths;
the latter borrowing them from the Chaldeans and Persians, shaped
them into a history of the Jewish nation, in which their spirit
of philosophy was buried beyond the recognition of all but
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 406 ISIS UNVEILED.
the elect, and under a far more absurd form than the Aryan had
given them. The Bible of the Christian Church is the
latest receptacle of this scheme of disfigured allegories which
have been erected into an edifice of superstition, such as never
entered into the conceptions of those from whom the Church obtained
her knowledge. The abstract fictions of antiquity, which for ages
had filled the popular fancy with but flickering shadows and uncertain
images, have in Christianity assumed the shapes of real personages,
and become accomplished facts. Allegory, metamorphosed, becomes
sacred history, and Pagan myth is taught to the people as a revealed
narrative of God's intercourse with His chosen people.
"The myths," says Horace in his Ars Poetica, "have
been invented by wise men to strengthen the laws and teach moral
truths." While Horace endeavored to make clear the very spirit
and essence of the ancient myths, Euhemerus pretended, on the
contrary, that "myths were the legendary history of kings
and heroes, transformed into gods by the admiration of the nations."
It is the latter method which was inferentially followed by Christians
when they agreed upon the acceptation of euhemerized patriarchs,
and mistook them for men who had really lived.
But, in opposition to this pernicious theory, which has brought
forth such bitter fruit, we have a long series of the greatest
philosophers the world has produced: Plato, Epicharmus, Socrates,
Empedocles, Plotinus, and Porphyry, Proclus, Damascenus, Origen,
and even Aristotle. The latter plainly stated this verity, by
saying that a tradition of the highest antiquity, transmitted
to posterity under the form of various myths, teaches us that
the first principles of nature may be considered as "gods,"
for the divine permeates all nature. All the rest, details
and personages, were added later for the clearer comprehension
of the vulgar, and but too often with the object of supporting
laws invented in the common interest.
Fairy tales do not exclusively belong to nurseries; all mankind
-- except those few who in all ages have comprehended their hidden
meaning and tried to open the eyes of the superstitious -- have
listened to such tales in one shape or the other and, after transforming
them into sacred symbols, called the product RELIGION!
We will try to systematize our subject as much as the ever-recurring
necessity to draw parallels between the conflicting opinions that
have been based on the same myths will permit. We will begin by
the book of Genesis, and seek for its hidden meaning
in the Brahmanical traditions and the Chaldeo-Judaic Kabala.
The first Scripture lesson taught us in our infancy is that God
created the world in six days, and rested on the seventh.
Hence, a peculiar sol-
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 407 THE MYSTERY OF THE NUMBER SEVEN.
emnity is supposed to attach to the seventh day, and the Christians,
adopting the rigid observances of the Jewish sabbath, have enforced
it upon us with the substitution of the first, instead of the
seventh day of the week.
All systems of religious mysticism are based on numerals. With
Pythagoras, the Monas or unity, emanating the duad, and thus forming
the trinity, and the quaternary or Arba-il (the mystic four),
compose the number seven. The sacredness of numbers begins
with the great First -- the ONE, and ends only with the nought
or zero -- symbol of the infinite and boundless circle which represents
the universe. All the intervening figures, in whatever combination,
or however multiplied, represent philosophical ideas, from vague
outlines down to a definitely-established scientific axiom, relating
either to a moral or a physical fact in nature. They are a key
to the ancient views on cosmogony, in its broad sense, including
man and beings, and the evolution of the human race, spiritually
as well as physically.
The number seven is the most sacred of all, and is, undoubtedly,
of Hindu origin. Everything of importance was calculated by and
fitted into this number by the Aryan philosophers -- ideas as
well as localities. Thus they have the
Sapta-Rishi, or seven sages, typifying the seven diluvian
primitive races (post-diluvian as some say).
Sapta-Loka, the seven inferior and superior worlds, whence
each of these Rishis proceeded, and whither he returned in glory
before reaching the final bliss of Moksha.*
Sapta-Kula, or seven castes -- the Brahmans assuming
to represent the direct descendants of the highest of them.**
Then, again, the Sapta-Pura (seven holy cities); Sapta-Duipa (seven
holy islands); Sapta-Samudra (the seven holy seas); Sapta-Parvata
(the seven holy mountains); Sapta-Arania (the seven deserts);
Sapta-Vruksha (the seven sacred trees); and so on.
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* The Rishi are identical with Manu. The ten
Pragapati, sons of Viradj, called Maritchi, Atri, Angira, Polastya,
Poulaha, Kratu, Pratcheta, Vasishta, Brighu, and Narada, are euhemerized
Powers, the Hindu Sephiroth. These emanate the seven
Rishi, or Manus, the chief of whom issued himself from the "uncreated."
He is the Adam of earth, and signifies man. His "sons,"
the following six Manus, represent each a new race of men, and
in the total they are humanity passing gradually through
the primitive seven stages of evolution.
** In days of old, when the Brahmans studied more than they do
now the hidden sense of their philosophy, they explained that
each of these six distinct races which preceded ours had disappeared.
But now they pretend that a specimen was preserved which was not
destroyed with the rest, but reached the present seventh stage.
Thus they, the Brahmans are the specimens of the heavenly Manu,
and issued from the mouth of Brahma; while the Sudra was created
from his foot.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 408 ISIS UNVEILED.
In the Chaldeo-Babylonian incantation, this number reappears again
as prominently as among the Hindus. The number is dual in
its attributes, i.e., holy in one of its aspects it becomes
nefast under other conditions. Thus the following incantation
we find traced on the Assyrian tablets, now so correctly interpreted.
"The evening of evil omen, the region of the sky, which produces
misfortune. . . .
"Message of pest.
"Deprecators of Nin-Ki-gal.
"The seven gods of the vast sky.
"The seven gods of the vast earth.
"The seven gods of blazing spheres.
"The seven gods of celestial legion.
"The seven gods maleficent.
"The seven phantoms -- bad.
"The seven phantoms of maleficent flames. . . .
"Bad demon, bad alal, bad gigim, bad
telal . . . bad god, bad maskim.
"Spirit of seven heavens remember . . . Spirit of seven
earths remember . . . etc."
This number reappears likewise on almost every page of Genesis,
and throughout the Mosaic books, and we find it
conspicuous (see following chapter) in the Book of Job and
the Oriental Kabala. If the Hebrew Semitics adopted it
so readily, we must infer that it was not blindly, but with a
thorough knowledge of its secret meaning; hence, that they must
have adopted the doctrines of their "heathen" neighbors
as well. It is but natural, therefore, that we should seek in
heathen philosophy for the interpretation of this number,
which again reappeared in Christianity with its seven sacraments,
seven churches in Asia Minor, seven capital
sins, seven virtues (four cardinal and three theological),
etc.
Have the seven prismatic colors of the rainbow seen by
Noah no other meaning than that of a covenant between God and
man to refresh the memory of the former? To the kabalist, at least,
they have a significance inseparable from the seven labors of
magic, the seven upper spheres, the seven notes of the musical
scale, the seven numerals of Pythagoras, the seven wonders of
the world, the seven ages, and even the seven steps of the Masons,
which lead to the Holy of Holies, after passing the flights of
three and five.
Whence the identity then of these enigmatical, ever-recurring
numerals that are found in every page of the Jewish Scriptures,
as in every ola and sloka of Buddhistic and Brahmanical books?
Whence these numerals that are the soul of the Pythagorean and
Platonic thought, and that no unilluminated Orientalist nor biblical
student has ever been able to fathom?
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 409 THE BRAHMANAS INTERPRET THE RIG-VEDA.
And yet they have a key ready in their hand, did they but know
how to use it. Nowhere is the mystical value of human language
and its effects on human action so perfectly understood as in
India, nor any better explained than by the authors of the oldest
Brahmanas. Ancient as their epoch is now found to be,
they only try to express, in a more concrete form, the abstract
metaphysical speculations of their own ancestors.
Such is the respect of the Brahmans for the sacrificial mysteries,
that they hold that the world itself sprang into creation as a
consequence of a "sacrificial word" pronounced by the
First Cause. This word is the "Ineffable name" of the
kabalists, fully discussed in the last chapter.
The secret of the Vedas, "Sacred Knowledge"
though they may be, is impenetrable without the help of the Brahmanas.
Properly speaking, the Vedas (which are written
in verse and comprised in four books) constitute that portion
called the Mantra, or magical prayer, and the Brahmanas
(which are in prose) contain their key. While the Mantra
part is alone holy, the Brahmana portion contains all the theological
exegesis, and the speculations and explanations of the sacerdotal.
Our Orientalists, we repeat, will make no substantial progress
toward a comprehension of Vedic literature until they place a
proper valuation upon works now despised by them; as, for instance,
the Aitareya and Kaushitaki Brahmanas, which
belong to the Rig-Veda.
Zoroaster was called a Manthran, or speaker of Mantras,
and, according to Haug, one of the earliest names for the Sacred
Scriptures of the Parsis was Manthra-spenta. The power
and significance of the Brahman who acts as the Hotri-priest at
the Soma-Sacrifice, consists in his possession and full knowledge
of the uses of the sacred word or speech -- Vach. The
latter is personified in Sara-isvati, the wife of Brahma, who
is the goddess of the sacred or "Secret Knowledge."
She is usually depicted as riding upon a peacock with its tail
all spread. The eyes upon the feathers of the bird's tail, symbolize
the sleepless eyes that see all things. To one who has the ambition
of becoming an adept of the "Secret doctrines," they
are a reminder that he must have the hundred eyes of Argus to
see and comprehend all things.
And this is why we say that it is not possible to solve fully
the deep problems underlying the Brahmanical and Buddhistic sacred
books without having a perfect comprehension of the esoteric meaning
of the Pythagorean numerals. The greatest power of this Vach,
or Sacred Speech, is developed according to the form which is
given to the Mantra by the officiating Hotri, and this form consists
wholly in the numbers and syllables of the sacred metre. If pronounced
slowly and in a certain rhythm, one effect is produced; if quickly
and with another rhythm, there is a different result. "Each
metre," says Haug, "is the invisible master of
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 410 ISIS UNVEILED.
something visible in this world; it is, as it were, its exponent
and ideal. This great significance of the metrical speech is derived
from the number of syllables of which it consists, for each thing
has (just as in the Pythagorean system) a certain numerical proportion.
All these things, metres (chhandas), stomas, and prishthas, are
liable to be as eternal and divine as the words themselves they
contain. The earliest Hindu divines did not only believe in a
primitive revelation of the words of the sacred texts, but even
in that of the various forms. These forms, along with their contents,
the everlasting Veda-words, are symbols expressive of
things of the invisible world, and in several respects comparable
to the Platonic ideas."
This testimony from an unwilling witness shows again the identity
between the ancient religions as to their secret doctrine. The
Gayatri metre, for example, consists of thrice eight syllables,
and is considered the most sacred of metres. It is the metre of
Agni, the fire-god, and becomes at times the emblem of Brahma
himself, the chief creator, and "fashioner of man" in
his own image. Now Pythagoras says that "The number eight,
or the Octad, is the first cube, that is to say, squared in all
senses, as a die, proceeding from its base two, or even number;
so is man four-square or perfect." Of course
few, except the Pythagoreans and kabalists, can fully comprehend
this idea; but the illustration will assist in pointing out the
close kinship of the numerals with the Vedic Mantras. The
chief problems of every theology lie concealed beneath this imagery
of fire and the varying rhythm of its flames. The burning bush
of the Bible, the Zoroastrian and other sacred fires,
Plato's universal soul, and the Rosicrucian doctrines of both
soul and body of man being evolved out of fire, the reasoning
and immortal element which permeates all things, and which, according
to Herakleitus, Hippocrates, and Parmenides, is God, have all
the same meaning.
Each metre in the Brahmanas corresponds to a number,
and as shown by Haug, as it stands in the sacred volumes, is a
prototype of some visible form on earth, and its effects are either
good or evil. The "sacred speech" can save, but it can
kill as well; its many meanings and faculties are well known but
to the Dikshita (the adept), who has been initiated into
many mysteries, and whose "spiritual birth" is completely
achieved; the Vach of the mantra is a spoken power, which
awakes another corresponding and still more occult power, each
allegorically personified by some god in the world of spirits,
and, according as it is used, responded to either by the gods
or the Rakshasas (bad spirits). In the Brahmanical and
Buddhist ideas, a curse, a blessing, a vow, a desire, an idle
thought, can each assume a visible shape and so manifest itself
objectively to the eyes of its author, or to him that it
concerns.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 411 RELATIVE ANTIQUITY OF THE VEDAS
AND BIBLE.
Every sin becomes incarnated, so to say, and like an avenging
fiend persecutes its perpetrator.
There are words which have a destructive quality in their very
syllables, as though objective things; for every sound awakens
a corresponding one in the invisible world of spirit, and the
repercussion produces either a good or bad effect. Harmonious
rhythm, a melody vibrating softly in the atmosphere, creates a
beneficent and sweet influence around, and acts most powerfully
on the psychological as well as physical natures of every living
thing on earth; it reacts even on inanimate objects, for matter
is still spirit in its essence, invisible as it may seem to our
grosser senses.
So with the numerals. Turn wherever we will, from the Prophets
to the Apocalypse, and we will see the biblical writers constantly
using the numbers three, four, seven, and twelve.
And yet we have known some partisans of the Bible who
maintained that the Vedas were copied from the Mosaic
books!* The Vedas, which are written in Sanscrit, a language
whose grammatical rules and forms, as Max Muller and other scholars
confess, were completely established long before the
days when the great wave of emigration bore it from Asia all over
the Occident, are there to proclaim their parentage of every philosophy,
and every religious institution developed later among Semitic
peoples. And which of the numerals most frequently occur in the
Sanscrit chants, those sublime hymns to creation, to the unity
of God, and the countless manifestations of His power? ONE,
THREE, and SEVEN. Read the hymn by Dirghatamas.
"TO HIM WHO REPRESENTS ALL THE GODS."
"The God here present, our blessed patron, our sacrificer,
has a brother who spreads himself in mid-air. There exists a third
Brother whom we sprinkle with our libations. . . . It is
he whom I have seen master of men and armed with seven rays."**
And again:
"Seven Bridles aid in guiding a car which has but
ONE wheel, and which is drawn by a single horse that shines with
seven rays. The wheel has three limbs, an immortal
wheel, never-wearying, whence hang all the worlds."
"Sometimes seven horses drag a car of seven
wheels, and seven personages mount it, accompanied
by seven fecund nymphs of the water."
And the following again, in honor of the fire-god -- Agni,
who is so clearly shown but a spirit subordinate to the ONE
God.
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* To avoid discussion we adopt the palaeographical conclusions
arrived at by Martin Haug and some other cautious scholars. Personally
we credit the statements of the Brahmans and those of Halled,
the translator of the "Sastras."
** The god Heptaktis.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 412 ISIS UNVEILED.
"Ever ONE, although having three forms of double
nature (androgynous) -- he rises! and the priests offer to God,
in the act of sacrifice, their prayers which reach the heavens,
borne aloft by Agni."
Is this a coincidence, or, rather, as reason tells us, the result
of the derivation of many national cults from one primitive, universal
religion? A mystery for the uninitiated, the unveiling
of the most sublime (because correct and true) psychological
and physiological problems for the initiate. Revelations of the
personal spirit of man which is divine because that spirit is
not only the emanation of the ONE Supreme God, but is the only
God man is able, in his weakness and helplessness, to comprehend
-- to feel within himself. This truth the Vedic poet
clearly confesses, when saying:
"The Lord, Master of the universe and full of wisdom, has
entered with me (into me) -- weak and ignorant -- and has formed
me of himself in that place* where the spirits obtain,
by the help of Science, the peaceful enjoyment
of the fruit, as sweet as ambrosia."
Whether we call this fruit "an apple" from the Tree
of Knowledge, or the pippala of the Hindu poet, it matters
not. It is the fruit of esoteric wisdom. Our object is to show
the existence of a religious system in India for many thousands
of years before the exoteric fables of the Garden of Eden and
the Deluge had been invented. Hence the identity of doctrines.
Instructed in them, each of the initiates of other countries became,
in his turn, the founder of some great school of philosophy in
the West.
Who of our Sanscrit scholars has ever felt interested in discovering
the real sense of the following hymns, palpable as it is: "Pippala,
the sweet fruit of that tree upon which come spirits
who love the science (?) and where the
gods produce all marvels. This is a mystery for him who
knows not the Father of the world."
Or this one again:
"These stanzas bear at their head a title which announces
that they are consecrated to the Viswadevas (that is
to say, to all the gods). He who knows not the Being whom I sing
in all his manifestations, will comprehend nothing
of my verses; those who do know HIM are not strangers
to this reunion."
This refers to the reunion and parting of the immortal and mortal
parts of man. "The immortal Being," says the preceding
stanza, "is in the cradle of the mortal Being. The two eternal
spirits go and come everywhere; only some men know the one without
knowing the other" (Dirghatamas).
Who can give a correct idea of Him of whom the Rig-Veda says:
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* The sanctuary of the initiation.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 413 MASKS WITHOUT AN ACTOR, BEINGS
WITHOUT NAMES.
"That which is One the wise call it in divers manners."
That One is sung by the Vedic poets in all its manifestations
in nature; and the books considered "childish and foolish"
teach how at will to call the beings of wisdom for our instruction.
They teach, as Porphyry says: "a liberation from all terrene
concerns . . . a flight of the alone to the ALONE."
Professor Max Muller, whose every word is accepted by his school
as philological gospel, is undoubtedly right in one sense when
in determining the nature of the Hindu gods, he calls them "masks
without an actor . . . names without being, not beings without
names."* For he but proves thereby the monotheism of the
ancient Vedic religion. But it seems to us more than dubious whether
he or any scientist of his school needed hope to fathom the old
Aryan** thought, without an accurate study of those very "masks."
To the materialist, as to the scientist, who for various reasons
endeavors to work out the difficult problem of compelling facts
to agree with either their own hobbies or those of the Bible,
they may seem but the empty shells of phantoms. Yet such
authorities will ever be, as in the past, the unsafest of guides,
except in matters of exact science. The Bible patriarchs
are as much "masks without actors," as the pragapatis,
and yet, if the living personage behind these masks is but an
abstract shadow there is an idea embodied in every one of them
which belongs to the philosophical and scientific theories of
ancient wisdom.*** And who can render better service in this work
than the native Brahmans themselves, or the kabalists?
To deny, point-blank, any sound philosophy in the later Brahmanical
speculations upon the Rig-Veda, is equivalent to refusing
to ever correctly understand the mother-religion itself, which
gave rise to them, and which is the expression of the inner thought
of the direct ancestors of these later authors of the Brahmanas.
If learned Europeans can so
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "Comparative Mythology."
** While having no intention to enter at present upon a discussion
as to the nomadic races of the "Rhematic period," we
reserve the right to question the full propriety of terming that
portion of the primitive people from whose traditions the "Vedas"
sprang into existence, Aryans. Some scientists find the existence
of these Aryans not only unproved by science, but the traditions
of Hindustan protesting against such an assumption.
*** Without the esoteric explanation, the "Old Testament"
becomes an absurd jumble of meaningless tales -- nay, worse than
that, it must rank high with immoral books. It is curious
that Professor Max Muller, such a profound scholar in Comparative
Mythology, should be found saying of the pragapatis and Hindu
gods that they are masks without actors; and of Abraham
and other mythical patriarchs that they were real living men;
of Abraham especially, we are told (see "Semitic Monotheism")
that he "stands before us as a figure second only to one
in the whole history of the world."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 414 ISIS UNVEILED.
readily show that all the Vedic gods are but empty masks, they
must also be ready to demonstrate that the Brahmanical authors
were as incapable as themselves to discover these "actors"
anywhere. This done, not only the three other sacred books which
Max Muller says "do not deserve the name of Vedas,"
but the Rig-Veda itself becomes a meaningless jumble
of words; for what the world-renowned and subtile intellect of
the ancient Hindu sages failed to understand, no modern scientist,
however learned, can hope to fathom. Poor Thomas Taylor was right
in saying that "philology is not philosophy."
It is, to say the least, illogical to admit that there is a hidden
thought in the literary work of a race perhaps ethnologically
different from our own; and then, because it is utterly unintelligible
to us whose spiritual development during the several thousand
intervening years has bifurcated into quite a contrary direction
-- deny that it has any sense in it at all. But this is precisely
what, with all due respect for erudition, Professor Max Muller
and his school do in this instance, at least. First of all, we
are told that, albeit cautiously and with some effort, yet we
may still walk in the footsteps of these authors of the Vedas.
"We shall feel that we are brought face to face and
mind to mind with men yet intelligible to us after we have
freed ourselves from our modern conceits. We shall not succeed
always; words, verses, nay whole hymns in the Rig-Veda, will
and must remain to us a dead letter. . . . For, with a few exceptions
. . . the whole world of the Vedic ideas is so entirely beyond
our own intellectual horizon, that instead of translating, we
can as yet only guess and combine."*
And yet, to leave us in no possible doubt as to the true value
of his words, the learned scholar, in another passage, expresses
his opinion on these same Vedas (with one exception) thus: "The
only important, the only real Veda, is the Rig-Veda -- the
other so-called Vedas deserve the name of Veda no
more than the Talmud deserves the name of Bible."
Professor Muller rejects them as unworthy of the attention
of any one, and, as we understand it, on the ground that they
contain chiefly "sacrificial formulas, charms, and incantations."**
And now, a very natural question: Are any of our scholars prepared
to demonstrate that, so far, they are intimately acquainted with
the hidden sense of these perfectly absurd "sacrificial formulas,
charms, and incantations" and magic nonsense of Atharva-Veda?
We believe not, and our doubt is based on the confession
of Professor Muller himself, just quoted. If "the whole world
of the Vedic ideas [the Rig-Veda cannot
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* The italics are our own. "The Vedas," lecture by Max
Muller, p. 75.
** "Chips," vol. i., p. 8.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 415 GREAT VALUE OF THE "ATHARVA
VEDA."
be included alone in this world, we suppose] is so entirely
beyond our own [the scientists'] intellectual horizon that, instead
of translating, we can as yet only guess and combine"; and
the Yagur-Veda, Sama-Veda, and Atharva-Veda are
"childish and foolish";* and the Brahmanas, the
Sutras Yaska, and Sayana, "though nearest
in time to the hymns of the Rig-Veda, indulge in
the most frivolous and ill-judged interpretations," how can
either himself or any other scholar form any adequate opinion
of either of them? If, again, the authors of the Brahmanas,
the nearest in time to the Vedic hymns, were already incompetent
to offer anything better than "ill-judged interpretations,"
then at what period of history, where, and by whom, were written
these grandiose poems, whose mystical sense has died with their
generations? Are we, then, so wrong in affirming that if sacred
texts are found in Egypt to have become -- even to the priestly
scribes of 4,000 years ago -- wholly unintelligible,** and the
Brahmanas offer but "childish and foolish"
interpretations of the Rig-Veda, at least as
far back as that, then, 1st, both the Egyptian and Hindu religious
philosophies are of an untold antiquity, far antedating ages cautiously
assigned them by our students of comparative mythology; and, 2d,
the claims of ancient priests of Egypt and modern Brahmans, as
to their age, are, after all, correct.
We can never admit that the three other Vedas are less
worthy of their name than the Rig-hymns, or that the Talmud
and the Kabala are so inferior to the Bible.
The very name of the Vedas (the literal meaning
of which is knowledge or wisdom) shows
them to belong to the literature of those men who, in every country,
language, and age, have been spoken of as "those who know."
In Sanscrit the third person singular is veda (he knows),
and the plural is vida (they know). This word is synonymous
with the Greek [[Theosebeia]], which Plato uses when
speaking of the wise -- the magicians; and with the Hebrew
Hakamin, 
(wise men). Reject
the Talmud and its old predecessor the Kabala, and
it will be simply impossible ever to render correctly one word
of that Bible so much extolled at their expense. But
then it is, perhaps, just what its partisans are working for.
To banish the Brahmanas is to fling away the key that
unlocks the door of the Rig-Veda. The literal
interpretation of the Bible has already borne its fruits;
with the Vedas and the Sanscrit sacred books in general
it will be just the same, with this difference, that the absurd
interpretation of the Bible has received a time-honored
right of eminent domain in the department of the ridiculous; and
will find its
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* We believe that we have elsewhere given the contrary opinion,
on the subject of "Atharva-Veda," of Prof. Whitney,
of Yale College.
** See Baron Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 416 ISIS UNVEILED.
supporters, against light and against proof. As to the "heathen"
literature, after a few more years of unsuccessful attempts at
interpretation, its religious meaning will be relegated to the
limbo of exploded superstitions, and people will hear no more
of it.
We beg to be clearly understood before we are blamed and criticised
for the above remarks. The vast learning of the celebrated Oxford
professor can hardly be questioned by his very enemies, yet we
have a right to regret his precipitancy to condemn that which
he himself confesses "entirely beyond our own intellectual
horizon." Even in what he considers a ridiculous blunder
on the part of the author of the Brahmanas, other more
spiritually-disposed persons may see quite the reverse. "Who
is the greatest of the gods? Who shall first be praised by
our songs?" says an ancient Rishi of the Rig-Veda; mistaking
(as Prof. M. imagines) the interrogative pronoun "Who"
for some divine name. Says the Professor: "A place is allotted
in the sacrificial invocations to a god 'Who,' and hymns addressed
to him are called 'Whoish hymns.' " And is a god "Who"
less natural as a term than a god "I am"? or "Whoish"
hymns less reverential than "I-amish" psalms? And who
can prove that this is really a blunder, and not a premeditated
expression? Is it so impossible to believe that the strange term
was precisely due to a reverential awe which made the poet hesitate
before giving a name, as form to that which is justly considered
as the highest abstraction of metaphysical ideals -- God? Or that
the same feeling made the commentator who came after him to pause
and so leave the work of anthropomorphizing the "Unknown,"
the "WHO," to future human conception?
"These early poets thought more for themselves -- than for
others," remarks Max Muller himself. "They sought rather,
in their language, to be true to their own thought than to please
the imagination of their hearers."* Unfortunately it is this
very thought which awakes no responsive echo in the minds of our
philologists.
Farther, we read the sound advice to students of the Rig-Veda
hymns, to collect, collate, sift, and reject. "Let him
study the commentaries, the Sutras, the Brahmanas,
and even later works, in order to exhaust all the sources
from which information can be derived. He [the scholar] must
not despise the traditions of the Brahmans, even where their
misconceptions . . . are palpable. . . . Not a corner in the Brahmanas,
the Sutras, Yaska, and Sayana, should be
left unexplored before we propose a rendering of our own.
. . . When the scholar has done his work, the poet and philosopher
must take it up and finish it."**
Poor chance for a "philosopher" to step into the shoes
of a learned
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "Chips," vol. i.; "The Vedas."
** Max Muller: Lecture on "The Vedas."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 417 DISDAIN OF EUROPEAN FOR HINDU
SAVANTS.
philologist and presume to correct his errors! We would
like to see what sort of a reception the most learned Hindu scholar
in India would have from the educated public of Europe and America,
if he should undertake to correct a savant, after he had sifted,
accepted, rejected, explained, and declared what was good, and
what "absurd and childish" in the sacred books of his
forefathers. That which would finally be declared "Brahmanic
misconceptions," by the conclave of European and especially
German savants, would be as little likely to be reconsidered at
the appeal of the most erudite pundit of Benares or Ceylon, as
the interpretation of Jewish Scripture by Maimonides and Philo-Judaeus,
by Christians after the Councils of the Church had accepted the
mistranslations and explanations of Irenaeus and Eusebius. What
pundit, or native philosopher of India should know his ancestral
language, religion, or philosophy as well as an Englishman or
a German? Or why should a Hindu be more suffered to expound Brahmanism,
than a Rabbinical scholar to interpret Judaism or the Isaian prophecies?
Safer, and far more trustworthy translators can be had nearer
home. Nevertheless, let us still hope that we may find at last,
even though it be in the dim future, a European philosopher to
sift the sacred books of the wisdom-religion, and not be contradicted
by every other of his class.
Meanwhile, unmindful of any alleged authorities, let us try to
sift for ourselves a few of these myths of old. We will search
for an explanation within the popular interpretation, and feel
our way with the help of the magic lamp of Trismegistus -- the
mysterious number seven. There must have been some reason
why this figure was universally accepted as a mystic calculation.
With every ancient people, the Creator, or Demiurge, was placed
over the seventh heaven. "And were I to touch upon the initiation
into our sacred Mysteries," says Emperor Julian, the kabalist,
"which the Chaldean bacchised respecting the seven-rayed
God, lifting up the souls through Him, I should say things
unknown, and very unknown to the rabble, but well known
to the blessed Theurgists."* In Lydus
it is said that "The Chaldeans call the God IAO,
and SABAOTH he is often called, as He who
is over the seven orbits (heavens, or spheres), that is the Demiurge."**
One must consult the Pythagoreans and Kabalists to learn the potentiality
of this number. Exoterically the seven rays of the solar spectrum
are represented concretely in the seven-rayed god Heptaktis. These
seven rays epitomized into THREE primary rays, namely, the red,
blue, and yellow, form the solar trinity, and typify respectively
spirit-
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Julian: "In Matrem," p. 173; Julian: "Oratio,"
v., 172.
** Lyd.: "De Mensibus," iv., 38-74; "Movers,"
p. 550; Dunlap: "Saba," p. 3.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 418 ISIS UNVEILED.
matter and spirit-essence. Science has also reduced of late the
seven rays to three primary ones, thus corroborating the scientific
conception of the ancients of at least one of the visible manifestations
of the invisible deity, and the seven divided into a quaternary
and a trinity.
The Pythagoreans called the number seven the vehicle of life,
as it contained body and soul. They explained it by saying, that
the human body consisted of four principal elements, and that
the soul is triple, comprising reason, passion, and desire. The
ineffable WORD was considered the Seventh
and highest of all, for there are six minor substitutes,
each belonging to a degree of initiation. The Jews borrowed their
Sabbath from the ancients, who called it Saturn's day
and deemed it unlucky, and not the latter from the Israelites
when Christianized. The people of India, Arabia, Syria, and Egypt
observed weeks of seven days; and the Romans learned the hebdomadal
method from these foreign countries when they became subject to
the Empire. Still it was not until the fourth century that the
Roman kalends, nones, and ides were abandoned, and weeks substituted
in their place; and the astronomical names of the days, such as
dies Solis (day of the Sun), dies Lunae (day
of the Moon), dies Martis (day of Mars); dies Mercurii
(day of Mercury), dies Jovis (day of Jupiter),
dies Veneris (day of Venus), and dies Saturni (day
of Saturn), prove that it was not from the Jews that the week
of seven days was adopted. Before we examine this number kabalistically,
we propose to analyse it from the standpoint of the Judaico-Christian
Sabbath.
When Moses instituted the yom shaba, or Shebang (Shabbath),
the allegory of the Lord God resting from his work of creation
on the seventh day was but a cloak, or, as the Sohar
expresses it, a screen, to hide the true meaning.
The Jews reckoned then, as they do now, their days by number,
as, day the first; day the second; and so on; yom
ahad; yom sheni; yom shelisho; yom rebis; yom shamishi; yom shishehi;
Yom SHABA.
"The Hebrew seven 
,
consisting of three letters, S. B. O., has more than one
meaning. First of all, it means age or cycle, Shab-ang;
Sabbath 
can be translated
old age, as well as rest, and in the old Coptic,
Sabe means wisdom, learning. Modern archaeologists
have found that as in Hebrew Sab 
also means gray-headed, and that therefore
the Saba-day was the day on which the "gray-headed
men, or 'aged fathers' of a tribe, were in the habit of assembling
for councils or sacrifices."*
"Thus, the week of six days and the seventh, the Saba
or Sapta-day period, is of the highest
antiquity. The observance of the lunar festivals in India, shows
that that nation held hebdomadal meetings as well. With
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "Westminster Review": Septenary Institutions; "Stone
Him to Death."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 419 MODERN ORIGIN OF THE CHRISTIAN
SABBATH.
every new quarter the moon brings changes in the atmosphere, hence
certain changes are also produced throughout the whole of our
universe, of which the meteorological ones are the most insignificant.
On this day of the seventh and most powerful of the prismatic
days, the adepts of the "Secret Science" meet as they
met thousands of years ago, to become the agents of the occult
powers of nature (emanations of the working God), and commune
with the invisible worlds. It is in this observance of the seventh
day by the old sages -- not as the resting day of the Deity, but
because they had penetrated into its occult power, that lies the
profound veneration of all the heathen philosophers for the number
seven which they term the "venerable," the
sacred number. The Pythagorean Tetraktis, revered by
the Platonists, was the square placed below the triangle;
the latter, or the Trinity embodying the invisible Monad
-- the unity, and deemed too sacred to be pronounced except
within the walls of a Sanctuary.
The ascetic observance of the Christian Sabbath by Protestants
is pure religious tyranny, and does more harm, we fear, than good.
It really dates only from the enactment (in 1678) of the 29th
of Charles II., which prohibited any "tradesman,
artificer, workman, laborer, or other person," to "do
or exercise any worldly labor, etc., etc., upon the Lord's day."
The Puritans carried this thing to extremes, apparently to mark
their hatred of Catholicism, both Roman and Episcopal. That it
was no part of the plan of Jesus that such a day should be set
apart, is evident not only from his words but acts. It was not
observed by the early Christians.
When Trypho, the Jew, reproached the Christians for
not having a Sabbath, what does the martyr answer
him? "The new law will have you keep a perpetual Sabbath.
You, when you have passed a day in idleness, think
you are religious. The Lord is not pleased with such things
as these. If any be guilty of perjury or fraud, let him
reform; if he be an adulterer, let him repent;
and he will then have kept the kind of Sabbath truly pleasing
to God. . . . The elements are never idle, and keep no Sabbath.
There was no need of the observance of Sabbaths before Moses,
neither now is there any need of them after Jesus Christ."
The Heptaktis is not the Supreme Cause, but simply an
emanation from Him -- the first visible manifestation
of the Unrevealed Power. "His Divine Breath, which,
violently breaking forth, condensed itself, shining with radiance
until it evolved into Light, and so became cognizant to external
sense," says John Reuchlin.* This is the emanation of the
Highest, the Demiurge, a multiplicity in a unity, the
Elohim, whom we
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "Di Verbo Mirifico."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 420 ISIS UNVEILED.
see creating our world, or rather fashioning it, in six
days, and resting on the seventh. And who are these Elohim
but the euhemerized powers of nature, the faithful manifested
servants, the laws of Him who is immutable law and harmony Himself?
They remain over the seventh heaven (or spiritual world), for
it is they who, according to the kabalists, formed in succession
the six material worlds, or rather, attempts at worlds, that preceded
our own, which, they say, is the seventh. If, in laying
aside the metaphysico-spiritual conception, we give our attention
but to the religio-scientific problem of creation in "six
days," over which our best biblical scholars have vainly
pondered so long, we might, perchance, be on the way to the true
idea underlying the allegory. The ancients were philosophers,
consistent in all things. Hence, they taught that each of these
departed worlds, having performed its physical evolution, and
reached -- through birth, growth, maturity, old age, and death
-- the end of its cycle, had returned to its primitive subjective
form of a spiritual earth. Thereafter it had to serve
through all eternity as the dwelling of those who had lived on
it as men, and even animals, but were now spirits. This idea,
were it even as incapable of exact demonstration as that of our
theologians relating to Paradise, is, at least, a trifle more
philosophical.
As well as man, and every other living thing upon it, our planet
has had its spiritual and physical evolution. From an impalpable
ideal thought under the creative Will of Him of whom
we know nothing, and but dimly conceive in imagination, this globe
became fluidic and semi-spiritual, then condensed itself
more and more, until its physical development -- matter, the tempting
demon -- compelled it to try its own creative faculty. Matter
defied SPIRIT, and the earth, too, had its
"Fall." The allegorical curse under which it labors,
is that it only procreates, it does not create. Our
physical planet is but the handmaiden, or rather the maid-of-all-work,
of the spirit, its master. "Cursed be the ground . . . thorns
and thistles shall it bring," the Elohim are made to say.
"In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children." The Elohim
say this both to the ground and the woman. And this curse will
last until the minutest particle of matter on earth shall have
outlived its days, until every grain of dust has, by gradual transformation
through evolution, become a constituent part of a "living
soul," and, until the latter shall reascend the cyclic arc,
and finally stand -- its own Metatron, or Redeeming Spirit
-- at the foot of the upper step of the spiritual worlds, as at
the first hour of its emanation. Beyond that lies the great "Deep"
-- A MYSTERY!
It must be remembered that every cosmogony has a trinity of
workers at its head -- Father, spirit; Mother, nature, or matter;
and the mani-
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 421 THE "DAYS" OF GENESIS,
"DAYS" OF BRAHMA.
fested universe, the Son or result of the two. The universe, also,
as well as each planet which it comprehends, passes through four
ages, like man himself. All have their infancy, youth, maturity,
and old age, and these four added to the other three make the
sacred seven again.
The introductory chapters of Genesis were never meant
to present even a remote allegory of the creation of our earth.
They embrace (chapter i.) a metaphysical conception of some indefinite
period in the eternity, when successive attempts were being made
by the law of evolution at the formation of universes. This idea
is plainly stated in the Sohar: "There were old
worlds, which perished as soon as they came into existence, were
formless, and were called sparks. Thus, the smith, when
hammering the iron, lets the sparks fly in all directions. The
sparks are the primordial worlds which could not continue, because
the Sacred Aged (Sephira) had not as yet assumed its
form (of androgyne or opposite sexes) of king and queen (Sephira
and Kadmon) and the Master was not yet at his work."*
The six periods or "days" of Genesis refer
to the same metaphysical belief. Five such ineffectual attempts
were made by the Elohim, but the sixth resulted in worlds
like our own (i.e., all the planets and most of the stars
are worlds, and inhabited, though not like our earth). Having
formed this world at last in the sixth period, the Elohim rested
in the seventh. Thus the "Holy One," when he
created the present world, said: "This pleases me; the previous
ones did not please me."** And the Elohim "saw everything
that he had made, and behold it was very good. And the
evening and the morning were the sixth day." --
Genesis i.
The reader will remember that in Chapter IV.
an explanation was given of the "day" and "night"
of Brahma. The former represents a certain period of cosmical
activity, the latter an equal one of cosmical repose. In the one,
worlds are being evolved, and passing through their allotted four
ages of existence; in the latter the "inbreathing" of
Brahma reverses the tendency of the natural forces; everything
visible becomes gradually dispersed; chaos comes; and a long night
of repose reinvigorates the cosmos for its next term of evolution.
In the morning of one
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Idra Suta: "Sohar," book iii., p. 292 b. The Supreme
consulting with the Architect of the world -- his Logos -- about
creation.
** Idra Suta: "Sohar," iii., 135 b. If the chapters
of Genesis and the other Mosaic books, as well as the subjects,
are muddled up, the fault is the compiler's -- not that of oral
tradition. Hilkiah and Josiah had to commune with Huldah, the
prophetess, hence resort to magic to understand the word
of the "Lord God of Israel," most conveniently found
by Hilkiah (2 Kings, xxiii.); and that it has passed still later
through more than one revision and remodelling is but too well
proved by its frequent incongruities, repetitions, and contradictions.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 422 ISIS UNVEILED.
of these "days" the formative processes are gradually
reaching their climax of activity; in the evening imperceptibly
diminishing the same until the pralaya arrives, and with
it "night." One such morning and evening
do, in fact, constitute a cosmic day; and it was a "day of
Brahma" that the kabalistic author of Genesis had
in mind each time when he said: "And the evening and the
morning were the first (or fifth or sixth, or any other) day."
Six days of gradual evolution, one of repose, and then --
evening! Since the first appearance of man on our earth
there has been an eternal Sabbath or rest for the Demiurge.
The cosmogonical speculations of the first six chapters of Genesis
are shown in the races of "sons of God," "giants,"
etc., of chapter vi. Properly speaking, the story of the formation
of our earth, or "creation," as it is very improperly
called, begins with the rescue of Noah from the deluge. The Chaldeo-Babylonian
tablets recently translated by George Smith leave no doubt of
that in the minds of those who read the inscriptions esoterically.
Ishtar, the great goddess, speaks in column iii. of the destruction
of the sixth world and the appearance of the seventh,
thus:
"Six days and nights the
wind, deluge, and storm overwhelmed.
"On the seventh day, in its course was calmed the
storm, and all the deluge,
"which had destroyed like an earthquake,*
"quieted. The sea he caused to dry, and the wind and deluge
ended. . . .
"I perceived the shore at the boundary of the sea. . . .
"to the country of Nizir went the ship (argha, or the moon).
"the mountain of Nizir stopped the ship. . . .
"the first day, and the second day, the
mountain of Nizir the same.
"the fifth and the sixth, the mountain
of Nizir the same.
"on the seventh day, in the course of it
"I sent forth a dove, and it left. The dove went and turned,
and . . . the raven went . . . and did not return.
"I built an altar on the peak of the mountain.
"by seven herbs I cut, at the bottom of them I placed
reeds, pines, and simgar. . . .
"the gods like flies over the sacrifice gathered.
"from of old also the great God in his course.
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* This assimilation of the deluge to an earthquake on the Assyrian
tablets would go to prove that the antediluvian nations were well
acquainted with other geological cataclysms besides the deluge,
which is represented in the Bible as the first calamity
which befel humanity, and a punishment.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 423 CURIOUS INTERPRETATION OF NOAH.
"the great brightness (the sun) of Anu had created.* When
the glory of those gods the charm round my neck would not repel,"
etc.
All this has a purely astronomical, magical, and esoteric relation.
One who reads these tablets will recognize at a glance the biblical
account; and judge, at the same time, how disfigured is the great
Babylonian poem by euhemeric personages -- degraded from their
exalted positions of gods into simple patriarchs. Space prevents
our entering fully into this biblical travesty of the Chaldean
allegories. We shall therefore but remind the reader that by the
confession of the most unwilling witnesses -- such as Lenormant,
first the inventor and then champion of the Akkadians -- the Chaldeo-Babylonian
triad placed under Ilon, the unrevealed deity, is composed
of Anu, Nuah, and Bel. Anu is the primordial chaos, the god time
and world at once, [[chromos]] and [[Kosmos]],
the uncreated matter issued from the one and fundamental principle
of all things. As to Nuah, he is, according to the same
Orientalist:
". . . the intelligence, we will willingly say the verbum,
which animates and fecundates matter, which penetrates the universe,
directs and makes it live; and at the same time Nuah is the king
of the humid principle; the Spirit moving on the waters."
Is not this evident? Nuah is Noah, floating on the waters,
in his ark; the latter being the emblem of the argha, or
moon, the feminine principle; Noah is the "spirit" falling
into matter. We find him as soon as he descends upon the earth,
planting a vineyard, drinking of the wine, and getting drunk on
it; i.e., the pure spirit becoming intoxicated as soon
as it is finally imprisoned in matter. The seventh chapter of
Genesis is but another version of the first. Thus, while
the latter reads: " . . . and darkness was upon the face
of the deep. And the spirit (of God) moved upon the face of the
waters," in chapter seventh, it is said: " . . . and
the waters prevailed . . . and the ark went (with Noah -- the
spirit) upon the face of the waters." Thus Noah, if the Chaldean
Nuah, is the spirit vivifying matter, chaos represented
by the
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* George Smith notes in the tablets, first the creation of the
moon, and then of the sun: "Its beauty and perfection are
extolled, and the regularity of its orbit, which led to its being
considered the type of a judge and the regulator of the world."
Did this story of the deluge relate simply to a cosmogonical cataclysm
-- even were it universal -- why should the goddess Ishtara or
Astoreth (the moon) speak of the creation of the sun after
the deluge? The waters might have reached as high as the mountain
of Nizir (Chaldean version), or Jebel-Djudi (the deluge-mountains
of the Arabian legends), or yet Ararat (of the biblical narrative),
and even Himalaya of the Hindu tradition, and yet not reach the
sun -- even the Bible itself stopped short of such a miracle.
It is evident that the deluge of the people who first recorded
it had another meaning, less problematical and far more philosophical
than that of a universal deluge, of which there are no
geological traces whatever.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 424 ISIS UNVEILED.
deep or waters of the flood. In the Babylonian legend it is Istar
(Astoreth, the moon) which is shut up in the ark, and sends out
a dove (emblem of Venus and other lunar goddesses) in search of
dry land. And whereas in the Semitic tablets it is Xisuthrus or
Hasisadra who is "translated to the company of the gods for
his piety," in the Bible it is Enoch who walks with,
and being taken up by God, "was no more."
The successive existence of an incalculable number of worlds before
the subsequent evolution of our own, was believed and taught by
all the ancient peoples. The punishment of the Christians for
despoiling the Jews of their records and refusing the true key
to them began from the earliest centuries. And thus is it that
we find the holy Fathers of the Church laboring through an impossible
chronology and the absurdities of literal interpretation, while
the learned rabbis were perfectly aware of the real significance
of their allegories. So not only in the Sohar, but also
in other kabalistic works accepted by Talmudists, such as Midrash
Berasheth, or the universal Genesis, which, with
the Merkaba (the chariot of Ezekiel), composes
the Kabala, may be found the doctrine of a whole series
of worlds evolving out of the chaos, and being destroyed in succession.
The Hindu doctrines teach of two Pralayas or dissolutions;
one universal, the Maha-Pralaya, the other partial, or the minor
Pralaya. This does not relate to the universal dissolution which
occurs at the end of every "Day of Brahma," but to the
geological cataclysms at the end of every minor cycle of our globe.
This historical and purely local deluge of Central Asia, the traditions
of which can be traced in every country, and which, according
to Bunsen, happened about the year 10,000 B.C., had naught to
do with the mythical Noah, or Nuah. A partial cataclysm occurs
at the close of every "age" of the world, they say,
which does not destroy the latter, but only changes its general
appearance. New races of men and animals and a new flora evolve
from the dissolution of the precedent ones.
The allegories of the "fall of man" and the "deluge,"
are the two most important features of the Pentateuch. They
are, so to say, the Alpha and Omega, the highest and the lowest
keys of the scale of harmony on which resounds the majestic hymns
of the creation of mankind; for they discover to him who questions
the Zura (figurative Gematria), the
process of man's evolution from the highest spiritual entity unto
the lowest physical -- the post-diluvian man, as in the Egyptian
hieroglyphics, every sign of the picture writing which cannot
be made to fit within a certain circumscribed geometrical figure
may be rejected as only intended by the sacred hierogrammatist
for a premeditated blind -- so many of the details in the Bible
must be treated on the same principle, that por-
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 425 HINDU ACCOUNTS OF THE DELUGE.
tion only being accepted which answers to the numerical methods
taught in the Kabala.
The deluge appears in the Hindu books only as a tradition. It
claims no sacred character, and we find it but in the Mahabharata,
the Puranas, and still earlier in the Satapatha,
one of the latest Brahmanas. It is more than probable
that Moses, or whoever wrote for him, used these accounts as the
basis of his own purposely disfigured allegory, adding to it moreover
the Chaldean Berosian narrative. In Mahabharata, we recognize
Nimrod under the name of King Daytha. The origin of the
Grecian fable of the Titans scaling Olympus, and the other of
the builders of the Tower of Babel who seek to reach heaven, is
shown in the impious Daytha, who sends imprecations against
heaven's thunder, and threatens to conquer heaven itself with
his mighty warriors, thereby bringing upon humanity the wrath
of Brahma. "The Lord then resolved," says the text,
"to chastise his creatures with a terrible punishment which
should serve as a warning to survivors, and to their descendants."
Vaivasvata (who in the Bible becomes Noah) saves
a little fish, which turns out to be an avatar of Vishnu.
The fish warns that just man that the globe is about to be submerged,
that all that inhabit it must perish, and orders him to construct
a vessel in which he shall embark, with all his family. When the
ship is ready, and Vaivasvata has shut up in it with
his family the seeds of plants and pairs of all animals, and
the rain begins to fall, a gigantic fish, armed with a horn, places
itself at the head of the ark. The holy man, following its orders,
attaches a cable to this horn, and the fish guides the ship safely
through the raging elements. In the Hindu tradition the number
of days during which the deluge lasted agrees exactly with
that of the Mosaic account. When the elements were calmed,
the fish landed the ark on the summit of the Himalayas.
This fable is considered by many orthodox commentators to have
been borrowed from the Mosaic Scriptures.* But
surely if such a universal cataclysm had ever taken place
within man's memory, some of the monuments of the Egyptians, of
which many are of such a tremendous antiquity, would have recorded
that occurrence, coupled with that of the
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
*The "dead letter that killeth," is magnificently illustrated
in the case of the Jesuit de Carriere, quoted in the "Bible
dans l'Inde." The following dissertation represents the spirit
of the whole Catholic world: "So that the creation of the
world," writes this faithful son of Loyola, explaining the
biblical chronology of Moses, "and all that is recorded in
Genesis, might have become known to Moses through recitals
personally made to him by his fathers. Perhaps, even, the
memories yet existed among the Israelites, and from those recollections
he may have recorded the dates of births and deaths of the patriarchs,
the numbering of their children, and the names of the different
countries in which each became established under the guidance
of the holy spirit, which we must always regard as the chief
author of the sacred books"!!!
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 426 ISIS UNVEILED.
disgrace of Ham, Canaan, and Mizraim, their alleged ancestors.
But, till now, there has not been found the remotest allusion
to such a calamity, although Mizraim certainly belongs to the
first generation after the deluge, if not actually an antediluvian
himself. On the other hand the Chaldeans preserved the tradition,
as we find Berosus testifying to it, and the ancient Hindus possess
the legend as given above. Now, there is but one explanation of
the extraordinary fact that of two contemporary and civilized
nations like Egypt and Chaldea, one has preserved no tradition
of it whatever, although it was the most directly interested in
the occurrence -- if we credit the Bible -- and the other
has. The deluge noticed in the Bible, in one of the Brahmanas,
and in the Berosus Fragment, relates to the partial
flood which, about 10,000 years B.C., according to Bunsen, and
according to the Brahmanical computations of the Zodiac also changed
the whole face of Central Asia.* Thus the Babylonians and the
Chaldeans might have learned of it from their mysterious guests,
christened by some Assyriologists Akkadians, or what is still
more probable they, themselves, perhaps, were the descendants
of those who had dwelt in the submerged localities. The Jews had
the tale from the latter as they had everything else; the Brahmans
may have recorded the traditions of the lands which they first
invaded, and had perhaps inhabited before they possessed themselves
of the Punjab. But the Egyptians, whose first settlers had evidently
come from Southern India, had less reason to record the cataclysm,
since it had perhaps never affected them except indirectly, as
the flood was limited to Central Asia.
Burnouf, noticing the fact that the story of the deluge is found
only in one of the most modern Brahmanas, also thinks
that it might have been borrowed by the Hindus from the Semitic
nations. Against such an assumption are ranged all the traditions
and customs of the Hindus. The Aryans, and especially the Brahmans,
never borrowed anything at all from the Semitists, and here we
are corroborated by one of those "unwilling witnesses,"
as Higgins calls the partisans of Jehovah and Bible. "I
have never seen anything in the history of the Egyptians and Jews,"
writes Abbe Dubois, forty years a resident of India, "that
would induce me to believe that either of these nations, or any
other on the face of the earth, have been established earlier
than the Hindus, and particularly the Brahmans; so I cannot be
induced to believe that the latter have drawn their rites from
foreign nations. On the contrary, I infer that they have drawn
them from an original source of their own. Whoever knows anything
of the spirit and character of the Brahmans, their stateliness,
their pride, and extreme vanity, their distance, and sovereign
contempt for
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* See chapter xv. and last of Part I.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 427 THE SILENCE OF THE VEDAS HIGHLY
SIGNIFICANT.
everything that is foreign, and of which they cannot boast to
have been the inventors, will agree with me that such a people
cannot have consented to draw their customs and rules of conduct
from an alien country."*
This fable which mentions the earliest avatar -- the Matsya --
relates to another yuga than our own, that of the first appearance
of animal life; perchance, who knows, to the Devonian age of our
geologists? It certainly answers better to the latter than the
year 2348 B.C.! Apart from this, the very absence of all mention
of the deluge from the oldest books of the Hindus suggests a powerful
argument when we are left utterly to inferences as in this case.
"The Vedas and Manu," says
Jacolliot, "those monuments of the old Asiatic thought, existed
far earlier than the diluvian period; this is an incontrovertible
fact, having all the value of an historical truth, for, besides
the tradition which shows Vishnu himself as saving the Vedas
from the deluge -- a tradition which, notwithstanding its
legendary form, must certainly rest upon a real fact -- it has
been remarked that neither of these sacred books mention the cataclysm,
while the Puranas and the Mahabharata, and a
great number of other more recent works, describe it with the
minutest detail, which is a proof of the priority of the former.
The Vedas certainly would never have failed to contain
a few hymns on the terrible disaster which, of all other natural
manifestations, must have struck the imagination of the people
who witnessed it."
"Neither would Manu, who gives us a complete narrative of
the creation, with a chronology from the divine and heroical ages,
down to the appearance of man on earth -- have passed in silence
an event of such importance." Manu (book i., sloka
35), gives the names of ten eminent saints whom he calls pradjapatis
(more correctly pragapatis), in whom the Brahman
theologians see prophets, ancestors of the human race, and the
Pundits simply consider as ten powerful kings who lived in the
Krita-yug, or the age of good (the golden age of the Greeks).
The last of these pragapatis is Brighou.
"Enumerating the succession of these eminent beings who,
according to Manu, have governed the world, the old Brahmanical
legislator names as descending from Brighou: Swarotchica, Ottami,
Tamasa, Raivata, the glorious Tchakchoucha, and the son of Vivasvat,
every one of the six having made himself worthy of the title of
Manu (divine legislator), a title which had equally belonged to
the Pradjapatis, and every great personage of primitive India.
The genealogy stops at this name.
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "Description, etc., of the People of India," by the
Abbe J. A. Dubois, missionary in Mysore, vol. i., p. 186.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 428 ISIS UNVEILED.
"Now, according to the Puranas and the Mahabharata
it was under a descendant of this son of Vivaswata, named
Vaivaswata that occurred the great cataclysm, the remembrance
of which, as will be seen, has passed into a tradition, and been
carried by emigration into all the countries of the East and West
which India has colonized since then. . . .
"The genealogy given by Manu stopping, as we have seen, at
Vivaswata, it follows that this work (of Manu) knew nothing either
of Vaivaswata or the deluge."*
The argument is unanswerable; and we commend it to those official
scientists, who, to please the clergy, dispute every fact proving
the tremendous antiquity of the Vedas and Manu. Colonel
Vans Kennedy has long since declared that Babylonia was, from
her origin, the seat of Sanscrit literature and Brahman
learning. And how or why should the Brahmans have penetrated there,
unless it was as the result of intestine wars and emigration from
India? The fullest account of the deluge is found in the Mahabharata
of Vedavyasa, a poem in honor of the astrological allegories
on the wars between the Solar and the Lunar races. One of the
versions states that Vivaswata became the father of all the nations
of the earth through his own progeny, and this is the form adopted
for the Noachian story; the other states that -- like Deukalion
and Pyrrha -- he had but to throw pebbles into the ilus left by
the retiring waves of the flood, to produce men at will. These
two versions -- one Hebrew, the other Greek -- allow us no choice.
We must either believe that the Hindus borrowed from pagan Greeks
as well as from monotheistic Jews, or -- what is far more probable
-- that the versions of both of these nations are derived from
the Vedic literature through the Babylonians.
History tells us of the stream of immigration across the Indus,
and later of its overflowing the Occident; and of populations
of Hindu origin passing from Asia Minor to colonize Greece. But
history says not a single word of the "chosen people,"
or of Greek colonies having penetrated India earlier than the
5th and 4th centuries B.C., when we first find vague traditions
that make some of the problematical lost tribes of Israel,
take from Babylon the route to India. But even were the story
of the ten tribes to find credence, and the tribes themselves
be proved to have existed in profane as well as in sacred history,
this does not help the solution at all. Colebrooke, Wilson, and
other eminent Indianists show the Mahabharata, if not
the Satapatha-brahmana, in which the story is also given,
as by far antedating the age of Cyrus, hence, the possible time
of the appearance of any of the tribes of Israel in India.**
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "Fetichisme, Polytheisme, Monotheisme," pp. 170, 171.
** Against the latter assumption derived solely from the accounts
of the Bible we [[Footnote continues on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 429 ANTIQUITY OF THE MAHABHARATA.
Orientalists accord the Mahabharata an antiquity of between
twelve and fifteen hundred years B.C.; as to the Greek version
it bears as little evidence as the other, and the attempts of
the Hellenists in this direction have as signally failed. The
story of the conquering army of Alexander penetrating into Northern
India, itself becomes more doubted every day. No Hindu national
record, not the slightest historical memento, throughout the length
and breadth of India offers the slightest trace of such an invasion.
If even such historical facts are now found to have been
all the while fictions, what are we to think of narratives which
bear on their very face the stamp of invention? We cannot help
sympathizing at heart with Professor Muller when he remarks that
it seems "blasphemy to consider these fables of the heathen
world as corrupted and misinterpreted fragments of divine
Revelation once granted to the whole race of mankind." Only,
can this scholar be held perfectly impartial and fair to both
parties, unless he includes in the number of these fables those
of the Bible? And is the language of the Old Testament
more pure or moral than the books of the
Brahmans? Or any fables of the heathen world more blasphemous
and ridiculous than Jehovah's interview with Moses (Exodus
xxxiii. 23)? Are any of the Pagan gods made to appear more
fiendish than the same Jehovah in a score of passages? If the
feelings of a pious Christian are shocked at the absurdities of
Father Kronos eating his children and maiming Uranos; or of Jupiter
throwing Vulcan down from heaven and breaking his leg; on the
other hand he cannot feel hurt if a non-Christian laughs
at the idea of Jacob boxing with the Creator, who "when he
saw that he prevailed not against him," dislocated
Jacob's thigh, the patriarch still holding fast to God and not
allowing Him to go His way, notwithstanding His pleading.
Why should the story of Deukalion and Pyrrha, throwing stones
behind them, and thus creating the human race, be deemed more
ridiculous than that of Lot's wife being changed into a pillar
of salt, or of the Almighty creating men of clay and
then breathing the breath of life into them? The choice between
the latter mode of creation and that of the Egyptian ram-horned
god fabricating man on a potter's wheel is hardly perceptible.
The story of Minerva, goddess of wisdom, ushered into existence
after a certain period of gestation in her father's brain, is
at least suggestive and poetical, as an allegory. No ancient Greek
was ever burned for not accepting it literally; and, at all events,
"heathen" fables
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] have every historical
fact. 1st. There are no proofs of these twelve tribes having ever
existed; that of Levi was a priestly caste and all the others
imaginary. 2d. Herodotus, the most accurate of historians, who
was in Assyria when Ezra flourished, never mentions the Israelites
at all! Herodotus was born in 484 B. C.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 430 ISIS UNVEILED.
in general are far less preposterous and blasphemous than those
imposed upon Christians, ever since the Church accepted the Old
Testament, and the Roman Catholic Church opened
its register of thaumaturgical saints.
"Many of the natives of India," continues Professor
Muller, "confess that their feelings revolt against the impurities
attributed to the gods by what they call their sacred writings;
yet there are honest Brahmans who will maintain that these
stories have a deeper meaning; that immorality being incompatible
with a divine being, a mystery must be supposed to be
concealed in these time-hallowed fables, a mystery which an inquiring
and reverent mind may hope to fathom."
This is precisely what the Christian clergy maintain in attempting
to explain the indecencies and incongruities of the Old Testament.
Only, instead of allowing the interpretation to
those who have the key to these seeming incongruities, they have
assumed to themselves the office and right, by divine proxy,
to interpret these in their own way. They have not only done that
but have gradually deprived the Hebrew clergy of the means to
interpret their Scriptures as their fathers did; so that to find
among the Rabbis in the present century a well-versed kabalist,
is quite rare. The Jews have themselves forgotten the key! How
could they help it? Where are the original manuscripts? The oldest
Hebrew manuscript in existence is said to be the Bodleian
Codex, which is not older than between eight and nine hundred
years.* The break between Ezra and this Codex is thus
fifteen centuries. In 1490 the Inquisition caused all the
Hebrew Bibles to be burned; and Torquemada alone destroyed
6,000 volumes at Salamanca. Except a few manuscripts of the Tora
Ketubim and Nebiim, used in the synagogues, and
which are of quite a recent date, we do not think there is one
old manuscript in existence which is not punctuated, hence --
completely misinterpreted and altered by the Masorets. Were it
not for this timely invention of the Masorah, no copy
of the Old Testament could possibly be tolerated in our
century. It is well known that the Masorets while transcribing
the oldest manuscripts put themselves to task to take out, except
in a few places which they have probably overlooked, all the immodest
words and put
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Dr. Kennicot himself, and Bruns, under his direction, about
1780, collated 692 manuscripts of the Hebrew "Bible."
Of all these, only two were credited to the tenth century,
and three to a period as early as the eleventh and twelfth. The
others ranged between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries.
In his "Introduzione alla Sacra Scrittura," pp. 34-47,
De Rossi, of Parma, mentions 1,418 MSS. collated,
and 374 editions. The oldest manuscript "Codex," he
asserts -- that of Vienna -- dates A.D. 1019; the next, Reuchlin's,
of Carlsruhe, 1038. "There is," he declares, "nothing
in the manuscripts of the Hebrew 'Old Testament' extant of an
earlier date than the eleventh century after Christ."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 431 THE MOSAIC LAWS COPIED FROM MANU.
in places sentences of their own, often changing completely the
sense of the verse. "It is clear," says Donaldson, "that
the Masoretic school at Tiberias were engaged in settling or unsettling
the Hebrew text until the final publication of the Masorah
itself." Therefore, had we but the original texts --
judging by the present copies of the Bible in our possession
-- it would be really edifying to compare the Old Testament
with the Vedas and even with the Brahmanical books.
We verily believe that no faith, however blind, could stand before
such an avalanche of crude impurities and fables. If the latter
are not only accepted but enforced upon millions of civilized
persons who find it respectable and edifying to believe in them
as divine revelation, why should we wonder that Brahmans
believe their books to be equally a Sruti, a revelation?
Let us thank the Masorets by all means, but let us study at the
same time both sides of the medal.
Legends, myths, allegories, symbols, if they but belong to the
Hindu, Chaldean, or Egyptian tradition, are thrown into the same
heap of fiction. Hardly are they honored with a superficial search
into their possible relations to astronomy or sexual emblems.
The same myths -- when and because mutilated -- are accepted as
Sacred Scriptures, more -- the Word of God! Is this impartial
history? Is this justice to either the past, the present, or the
future? "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon," said the Reformer,
nineteen centuries ago. "Ye cannot serve truth and public
prejudice," would be more applicable to our own age. Yet
our authorities pretend they serve the former.
There are few myths in any religious system but have an historical
as well as a scientific foundation. Myths, as Pococke ably expresses
it, "are now proved to be fables, just in proportion as we
misunderstand them; truths, in proportion as they were
once understood. Our ignorance it is which has made a
myth of history; and our ignorance is an Hellenic inheritance,
much of it the result of Hellenic vanity."*
Bunsen and Champollion have already shown that the Egyptian sacred
books are by far older than the oldest parts of the Book of
Genesis. And now a more careful research seems to warrant
the suspicion -- which with us amounts to a certainty, that the
laws of Moses are copies from the code of the Brahmanic Manu.
Thus, according to every probability, Egypt owes her civilization,
her civil institutions, and her arts, to India. But against the
latter assumption we have a whole army of "authorities"
arrayed, and what matters if the latter do deny the fact at present?
Sooner or later they will have to accept it, whether they belong
to the German or French school. Among, but not of those
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "India in Greece," Preface, ix.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 432 ISIS UNVEILED.
who so readily compromise between interest and conscience, there
are some fearless scholars, who may bring out to light incontrovertible
facts. Some twenty years since, Max Muller, in a letter to the
Editor of the London Times, April, 1857, maintained most
vehemently that Nirvana meant annihilation, in the fullest
sense of the word. (See Chips, etc., vol. i.,
p. 287, on the meaning of Nirvana.) But in 1869, in a lecture
before the general meeting of the Association of German Philologists
at Kiel, "he distinctly declares his belief that the nihilism
attributed to Buddha's teaching forms no part of his doctrine,
and that it is wholly wrong to suppose that Nirvana means annihilation."
(Trubner's American and Oriental Literary Record, Oct.
16, 1869; also Inman's Ancient Faiths and Modern, p.
128.) Yet if we mistake not, Professor Muller was as much of an
authority in 1857 as in 1869.
"It will be difficult to settle," says (now) this great
scholar, "whether the Vedas is the oldest of books,
and whether some of the portions of the Old Testament may
not be traced back to the same or even an earlier date than the
oldest hymns of the Veda."* But his retraction
about the Nirvana allows us a hope that he may yet change his
opinion on the question of Genesis likewise, so that
the public may have simultaneously the benefit of truth, and the
sanction of one of Europe's greatest authorities.
It is well known how little the Orientalists have come to anything
like an agreement about the age of Zoroaster, and until this question
is settled, it would be safer perhaps to trust implicitly in the
Brahmanical calculations by the Zodiac, than to the opinions of
scientists. Leaving the profane horde of unrecognized scholars,
those we mean who yet wait their turn to be chosen for public
worship as idols symbolical of scientific leadership, where can
we find, among the sanctioned authorities of the day, two that
agree as to this age? There's Bunsen, who places Zoroaster at
Baktra, and the emigration of Baktrians to the Indus at 3784 B.C.,**
and the birth of Moses at 1392.*** Now it is rather difficult
to place Zoroaster anterior to the Vedas, considering
that the whole of his doctrine is that of the earlier Vedas.
True, he remained in Afghanistan for a period more or less
problematical before crossing into the Punjab; but the Vedas
were begun in the latter country. They indicate the progress
of the Hindus, as the Avesta that of the Iranians. And
there is Haug who assigns to the Aitareya Brahmanam -- a
Brahmanical speculation and commentary upon the Rig-Veda of
a far
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "Chips," vol. i.
** "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p.
77.
*** Ibid., p. 78.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 433 THOUGHTS UPON THE ARYANS.
later date than the Veda itself -- between 1400 and 1200
B.C., while the Vedas are placed by him between 2,000
and 2,400 years B.C. Max Muller cautiously suggests certain difficulties
in this chronological computation, but still does not altogether
deny it.* Let it, however, be as it may, and supposing that the
Pentateuch was written by Moses himself -- notwithstanding
that he would thereby be made to twice record his own death --
still, if Moses was born, as Bunsen finds, in 1392 B.C., the
Pentateuch could not have been written before the Vedas.
Especially if Zoroaster was born 3784 B.C. If, as Dr. Haug**
tells us, some of the hymns of the Rig-Veda were written
before Zoroaster accomplished his schism, something like thirty-seven
centuries B.C., and Max Muller says himself that "the Zoroastrians
and their ancestors started from India during the Vaidic period,"
how can some of the portions of the Old Testament be
traced back to the same or even "an earlier date than the
oldest hymns of the Veda"?
It has generally been agreed among Orientalists that the Aryans,
3,000 years B.C., were still in the steppes east of the Caspian,
and united. Rawlinson conjectures that they "flowed
east" from Armenia as a common centre; while two kindred
streams began to flow, one northward over the Caucasus, and the
other westward over Asia Minor and Europe. He finds the Aryans,
at a period anterior to the fifteenth century before our era,
"settled in the territory watered by the Upper Indus."
Thence Vedic Aryans migrated to the Punjab, and Zendic Aryans
westward, establishing the historical countries. But this, like
the rest, is a hypothesis, and only given as such.
Again, Rawlinson, evidently following Max Muller, says: "The
early history of the Aryans is for many ages an absolute blank."
But many learned Brahmans, however, have declared that they found
trace of the existence of the Vedas as early as 2100
B.C.; and Sir William Jones, taking for his guide the astronomical
data, places the Yagur-Veda 1580 B.C. This would be still
"before Moses."
It is upon the supposition that the Aryans did not leave Afghanistan
for the Punjab prior to 1500 B.C. that Max Muller and other Oxford
savants have supposed that portions of the Old Testament may
be traced back to the same or even an earlier date than the oldest
hymns of the Veda. Therefore, until the Orientalists
can show us the correct date at which Zoroaster flourished, no
authority can be regarded as better for the ages of the Vedas
than the Brahmans themselves.
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "Chips"; "Aitareya Brahmanam."
** Dr. M. Haug, Superintendent of the Sanscrit studies in the
Poona College, Bombay.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 434 ISIS UNVEILED.
As it is a recognized fact that the Jews borrowed most of their
laws from the Egyptians, let us examine who were the Egyptians.
In our opinion -- which is but a poor authority, of course --
they were the ancient Indians, and in our first volume we have
quoted passages from the historian Collouca-Batta that support
such a theory. What we mean by ancient India is the following:
No region on the map -- except it be the ancient Scythia -- is
more uncertainly defined than that which bore the designation
of India. AEthiopia is perhaps the only parallel. It was the home
of the Cushite or Hamitic races, and lay to the east of Babylonia.
It was once the name of Hindustan, when the dark races, worshippers
of Bala-Mahadeva and Bhavani-Mahidevi, were supreme in that country.
The India of the early sages appears to have been the region at
the sources of the Oxus and Jaxartes. Apollonius of Tyana crossed
the Caucasus, or Hindu Kush, where he met with a king who directed
him to the abode of the sages -- perhaps the descendants of those
whom Ammianus terms the "Brahmans of Upper India," and
whom Hystaspes, the father of Darius (or more probably Darius
Hystaspes himself) visited; and, having been instructed by them,
infused their rites and ideas into the Magian observances. This
narrative about Apollonius seems to indicate Kashmere as the country
which he visited, and the Nagas -- after their conversion
to Buddhism -- as his teachers. At this time Aryan India did not
extend beyond the Punjab.
To our notion, the most baffling impediment in the way of ethnological
progress has always been the triple progeny of Noah. In the attempt
to reconcile postdiluvian races with a genealogical descent from
Shem, Ham, and Japhet, the Christianesque Orientalists have set
themselves a task impossible of accomplishment. The biblical Noachian
ark has been a Procrustean bed to which they had to make everything
fit. Attention has therefore been diverted from veritable sources
of information as to the origin of man, and a purely local allegory
mistaken for a historical record emanating from an inspired source.
Strange and unfortunate choice! Out of all the sacred writings
of all the branch nations, sprung from the primitive stock of
mankind, Christianity must choose for its guidance the national
records and scriptures of a people perhaps the least spiritual
of the human family -- the Semitic. A branch that has never been
able to develop out of its numerous tongues a language capable
of embodying ideas of a moral and intellectual world; whose form
of expression and drift of thought could never soar higher than
the purely sensual and terrestrial figures of speech; whose literature
has left nothing original, nothing that was not borrowed from
the Aryan thought; and whose science and philosophy are utterly
wanting in those noble features which
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 435 KHAMISM AND THE EASTERN AETHIOPIANS.
characterize the highly spiritual and metaphysical systems of
the Indo-European (Japetic) races.
Bunsen shows Khamism (the language of Egypt) as a very ancient
deposit from Western Asia, containing the germs of the
Semitic, and thus bearing "witness to the primitive cognate
unity of the Semitic and Aryan races." We must remember,
in this connection, that the peoples of Southwestern and Western
Asia, including the Medes, were all Aryans. It is yet far from
being proved who were the original and primitive masters of India.
That this period is now beyond the reach of documentary history,
does not preclude the probability of our theory that it was the
mighty race of builders, whether we call them Eastern AEthiopians,
or dark-skinned Aryans (the word meaning simply "noble warrior,"
a "brave"). They ruled supreme at one time over the
whole of ancient India, enumerated later by Manu as the possession
of those whom our scientists term the Sanscrit-speaking people.
These Hindus are supposed to have entered the country
from the northwest; they are conjectured by some to have
brought with them the Brahmanical religion, and the language of
the conquerors was probably the Sanscrit. On these three
meagre data our philologists have worked ever since the Hindustani
and its immense Sanscrit literature was forcibly brought into
notice by Sir William Jones -- all the time with the three sons
of Noah clinging around their necks. This is exact science,
free from religious prejudices! Verily, ethnology would have been
the gainer if this Noachian trio had been washed overboard and
drowned before the ark reached land!
The AEthiopians are generally classed in the Semitic group; but
we have to see how far they have a claim to such a classification.
We will also consider how much they might have had to do with
the Egyptian civilization, which, as a writer expresses it, seems
referable in the same perfection to the earliest dates, and not
to have had a rise and progress, as was the case with that of
other peoples. For reasons that we will now adduce, we are prepared
to maintain that Egypt owes her civilization, commonwealth and
arts -- especially the art of building, to pre-Vedic India, and
that it was a colony of the dark-skinned Aryans, or those whom
Homer and Herodotus term the eastern AEthiopians, i.e.,
the inhabitants of Southern India, who brought to it their ready-made
civilization in the ante-chronological ages, of what Bunsen calls
the pre-Menite, but nevertheless epochal history.
In Pococke's India in Greece, we find the following suggestive
paragraph: "The plain account of the wars carried on between
the solar chiefs, Oosras (Osiris) the prince of the Guclas, and
'TU-PHOO' is the simple historical fact of the
wars of the Apians, or Sun-tribes of Oude,
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 436 ISIS UNVEILED.
with the people of 'TU-PHOO' or THIBET,
who were, in fact, the lunar race, mostly Buddhists* and opposed
by Rama and the 'AITYO-PIAS'
or people of Oude, subsequently the AITH-IO-PIANS
of Africa."**
We would remind the reader in this connection, that Ravan, the
giant, who, in the Ramayana, wages such a war with Rama
Chandra, is shown as King of Lanka, which was the ancient name
for Ceylon; and that Ceylon, in those days, perhaps formed part
of the main-land of Southern India, and was peopled by the "Eastern
AEthiopians." Conquered by Rama, the son of Dasarata, the
Solar King of ancient Oude, a colony of these emigrated to Northern
Africa. If, as many suspect, Homer's Iliad and much of
his account of the Trojan war is plagiarized from the Ramayana,
then the traditions which served as a basis for the latter
must date from a tremendous antiquity. Ample margin is thus left
in pre-chronological history for a period, during which the "Eastern
AEthiopians" might have established the hypothetical Mizraic
colony, with their high Indian civilization and arts.
Science is still in the dark about cuneiform inscriptions. Until
these are completely deciphered, especially those cut in rocks
found in such abundance within the boundaries of the old Iran,
who can tell the secrets they may yet reveal? There are no Sanscrit
monumental inscriptions older than Chandragupta (315 B.C.), and
the Persepolitan inscriptions are found 220 years older. There
are even now some manuscripts in characters utterly unknown to
philologists and palaeographists, and one of them is, or was,
some time since in the library of Cambridge, England. Linguistic
writers class the Semitic with the Indo-European language, generally
including the AEthiopian and the ancient Egyptian in the classification.
But if some of the dialects of the modern Northern Africa, and
even the modern Gheez or AEthiopian, are now so degenerated and
corrupted as to admit of false conclusions as to the genetical
relationship between them and the other Semitic tongues, we are
not at all sure that the latter have any claim to such a classification,
except in the case of the old Coptic and the ancient Gheez.
That there is more consanguinity between the AEthiopians and the
Aryan, dark-skinned races, and between the latter and the Egyptians,
is something which yet may be proved. It has been lately found
that the ancient Egyptians were of the Caucasian type of mankind,
and the
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Pococke belongs to that class of Orientalists who believe that
Buddhism preceded Brahmanism, and was the religion of the earliest
Vedas, Gautama having been but the restorer of it in its purest
form, which after him degenerated again into dogmatism.
** "India in Greece," p. 200.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 437 LEGENDS OF TWO INDIAN DYNASTIES.
shape of their skulls is purely Asiatic.* If they were less copper-colored
than the AEthiopians of our modern day, the AEthiopians themselves
might have had a lighter complexion in days of old. The fact that,
with the AEthiopian kings, the order of succession gave the crown
to the nephew of the king, the son of his sister, and
not to his own son, is extremely suggestive. It is an old custom
which prevails until now in Southern India. The Rajah is not succeeded
by his own sons, but by his sister's sons.**
Of all the dialects and tongues alleged to be Semitic, the AEthiopian
alone is written from left to right like the Sanscrit and the
Indo-Aryan people.***
Thus, against the origin of the Egyptians being attributed to
an ancient Indian colony, there is no graver impediment than Noah's
disrespectful son -- Ham -- himself a myth. But the earliest form
of Egyptian religious worship and government, theocratic and sacerdotal,
and her habits and customs all bespeak an Indian origin.
The earliest legends of the history of India mention two dynasties
now lost in the night of time; the first was the dynasty of kings,
of "the race of the sun," who reigned in Ayodhia (now
Oude); the second that of the
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "The Asiatic origin of the first dwellers in the Nilotic
Valley is clearly demonstrated by concurrent and independent testimony.
Cuvier and Blumenbach affirm that all the skulls of mummies which
they had the opportunity of examining, presented the Caucasian
type. A recent American physiologist (Dr. Morton) has also argued
for the same conclusion ("Crania AEgyptiaca." Philadelphia,
1844).
** The late Rajah of Travancore was succeeded by the elder son
of his sister now reigning, the Maharajah Rama Vurmah. The
next heirs are the sons of his deceased sister. In case the female
line is interrupted by death, the royal family is obliged to adopt
the daughter of some other Rajah, and unless daughters are born
to this Rana another girl is adopted, and so on.
*** There are some Orientalists who believe that this custom was
introduced only after the early Christian settlements in -AEthiopia;
but as under the Romans the population of this country was nearly
all changed, the element becoming wholly Arabic, we may, without
doubting the statement, believe that it was the predominating
Arab influence which had altered the earliest mode of writing.
Their present method is even more analogous to the Devanagari,
and other more ancient Indian Alphabets, which read from left
to right; and their letters show no resemblance to the Phoenician
characters. Moreover, all the ancient authorities corroborate
our assertion still more. Philostratus makes the Brahmin Iarchus
say (V.A., iii., 6) that the AEthiopians were originally an
Indian race, compelled to emigrate from the mother-land for
sacrilege and regicide (see Pococke's "India," etc.,
ii., p. 206). An Egyptian is made to remark, that he had heard
from his father, that the Indians were the wisest of men, and
that the AEthiopians, a colony of the Indians, preserved the wisdom
and usages of their fathers, and acknowledged their ancient origin.
Julius Africanus (in Eusebius and Syncellus), makes the same statement.
And Eusebius writes: "The AEthiopians, emigrating from the
river Indus, settled in the vicinity of Egypt" (Lemp., Barker's
edition, "Meroe").
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 438 ISIS UNVEILED.
"race of the moon," who reigned in Pruyag (Allahabad).
Let him who desires information on the religious worship of these
early kings read the Book of the Dead, of the Egyptians,
and all the peculiarities attending this sun-worship and the sun-gods.
Neither Osiris nor Horus are ever mentioned without being connected
with the sun. They are the "Sons of the Sun";
"the Lord and Adorer of the Sun" is his name. "The
sun is the creator of the body, the engenderer of the gods who
are the successors of the Son." Pococke, in his
most ingenious work, strongly advocates the same idea, and endeavors
to establish still more firmly the identity of the Egyptian, Greek,
and Indian mythology. He shows the head of the Rajpoot Solar race
-- in fact the great Cuclo-pos (Cyclop or builder) -- called "The
great sun," in the earliest Hindu tradition. This Gok-la
Prince, the patriarch of the vast bands of Inachienses, he says,
"this Great Sun was deified at his death, and according
to the Indian doctrine of the metempsychosis, his Soul was supposed
to have transmigrated into the bull 'Apis,' the Sera-pis of the
Greeks, and the SOORAPAS, or 'Sun-Chief' of the
Egyptians. . . . Osiris, properly Oosras, signifies both
'a bull,' and 'a ray of light.' Soora-pas (Serapis) the
sun chief," for the Sun in Sanscrit is Surya. Champollion's
Manifestation to the Light, reminds in every chapter
of the two Dynasties of the Kings of the Sun and the Moon. Later,
these kings became all deified and transformed after death into
solar and lunar deities. Their worship was the earliest corruption
of the great primitive faith which justly considered the sun and
its fiery life-giving rays as the most appropriate symbol to remind
us of the universal invisible presence of Him who is master of
Life and Death. And now it can be traced all around the globe.
It was the religion of the earliest Vedic Brahmans, who call,
in the oldest hymns of the Rig-Veda, Surya (the sun)
and Agni (fire) "the ruler of the universe," "the
lord of men," and the "wise king." It was the worship
of the Magians, the Zoroastrians, the Egyptians and Greeks, whether
they called him Mithra, or Ahura-Mazda, or Osiris, or Zeus, keeping
in honor of his next of kin, Vesta, the pure celestial fire. And
this religion is found again in the Peruvian solar-worship; in
the Sabianism and heliolatry of the Chaldees, in the Mosaic "burning
bush," the hanging of the heads or chiefs of the people toward
the Lord, the "Sun," and even in the Abrahamic building
of fire-altars and the sacrifices of the monotheistic Jews, to
Astarte the Queen of Heaven.
To the present moment, with all the controversies and researches,
History and Science remain as much as ever in the dark as to the
origin of the Jews. They may as well be the exiled Tchandalas,
or Pariahs, of old India, the "bricklayers" mentioned
by Vina-Svati, Veda-Vyasa and Manu, as the Phoenicians of Herodotus,
or the Hyk-sos of Josephus, or
Chapter 9, part 2
Homepage