Book 0/ ike Dead those principles are called the "Sons of Rebellion." J

In that night, the oppressor, the miu'derer of Osiris, otherwise called the deceiv- ing SerperU .... calls the Sons of Rebellion in Air^ and when they arrive to the East of the Heavens, then there is War in Heaven and in the entire World.^
In the Scandinavian Eddas the "War" of the Ases with the Hrim- thurses or Frost giants, and of Asathor with the Jotuns, the Serpents and Dragons and the "Wolf" who comes out of "Darkness" — is the repetition of the same myth. The "Evil Spirits." || who began by being simply the emblems of Chaos, have become euhemerized by the super- stition of the rabble, until they have finally won the right of citizenship in what are claimed to be the most civilized and learned races of this globe since Us creation^ and have become a dogma with Christians. As George Smith has it:
The evil principles [Spirits], emblems of Chaos [in Chaldsea and Assyria as in
Egypt, we see] resist this change and make war on the Moon, the
eldest son of Bel, drawing over to their aide the Sun, Venus and the atmospheric god Vul.t
* Book of thf Dead, xvii. 63 ; Anubli is Horus who melts " In him who {■ eyeless."
♦ See Ijenoir'9 Dm Dragim de Mtts. J See also Egyptian Pantfutm. pp. m, 23. \ Book of th* Dead. xvii. m and «- |] These "Kvil SpiriU" can by no means be identified with Satan or the Great Dra^n. They are
the Eletneotals t^enenited or begotten by igpaorsnce— coamlc and human passions— or Chaos. ' Ai^grrian Di$coveri€i, p. 403.
4«H
THK SECRET DOCTRIN'E,
This is only another version of the Hindu "War in Heaven,'* between Soma, the Moon, and the Gods; Indra being the atmospheric Vul — which shows it plainly to be both a cosmogonical and an astronomical allegory, woven into and drawn from the earliest Theogony as taught in the Mysteries.
It is in the religious doctrines of the Gnostics that we can best see the real meaning of the Dragon, the Serpent, the Goat, and all those svmbols of Powers now called Evil; for it is they who. in their teach- ings, divulged the Esoteric nature of the Jewish substitute for Ain Suph, the true meaning of which the Rabbins concealed, while the Christians, with a few exceptions, knew nothing of it. Surely Jesus of Nazareth would have hardly advised his apostles to show themselves as wise as the serpent, had the latter been a symbol of the Evil One; nor would the Ophites, the learned Egyptian Gnostics of the •• Brotherhood of the Serpent.*' have reverenced a living snake in their ceremonies as the emblem of IVisdotn, the divine Sophia, and a type of the All-good, not the All-bad. were that reptile so closely con- nected with Satan. The fact is, that e\'en as a common ophidian it has ever been a dual symbol, and as a dragon it has never been anything else than a symbol of the Manifested Deity in its great Wisdom. The drato voians, the "flying dragon" of the early painters, may be an exaggerated picture of the real extinct antediluvian animal, and those who have faith in the Occult Teachings believe that in the days of old there were such creatures as flying dragons, a kind of Pterodactyl, and that it is those gigantic winged lizards that served as prototypes for the Seraph of Moses and his great Brazen Serpent.* The Jews formerly worshipped the latter id^i themselves, but, after the religious reforms brought about by Hezekiah, they turned round, and called that symbol of the Great or Higher God of every other nation a Devil, and their own usurper — the "One God."f
The appellation Saltan, in Hebrew SStfin, an "Adversary" (from the
• Sec Numbers, xxi. 8, <>. God orders Moees to builtl n bracen .Serpent (SAraph). to look upon which beala Lhasc bitten by the Fiery Serpcntm. The latter were the Seraphim, each one of which, as Uaiah BhowB tvL t), "had six wingm"; they arc the Jismibabi of Jehovoli, nnd or all the other IVmiurgi wha produce oat of themselves six boob or likeneewft- seven with their Crealof . Thus, the Braaen Serpent « Jehovah, the chief of the " Fiery Serpents." And yet. in // ATiw^ri (xviii. 4) it is shown that klnx Hcsckiah, who, like as Uavid his fother. "did tliat which was right in the siglit of the Lord"— " brake In pieces the bnsetx serpent that Moses had made .... and called it Nebtuhtan," or piece of brasA.
f "And Satan stood op agaimrt Israel and provoked Uavid to uuniber Israel " 1/ C^ramiclrj. xzi. 1), "The antrer of the Lxird [Jehovah] was kindled aeainfet Israel, and he moved David . . . to say. Go, number Israel " {// Samuel, ajdv. 1). The two arr then identical.
WHO FIRST CREATED WOMAN.
405
verb sfiaiana^ "to be adverse," "to persecute") belongs by right to the first and cruellest "Adversary" 0/ all the other Gods — ^Jehovah; not to the Serpent, which spoke only words of sympathy and wisdom, and is at the worst, even in the dogma, the "Adversary" of max. This dogma. based as it is on the third chapter of Genesis^ is as illogical and unjust as it is paradoxical. For who was the first to create that original and henceforward universal tempter of man — the woman? Not the Ser- pent surely, but the "Lord God" himself, who, saying, "It is not good that the man should be alone/' made woman, and "brought her unto the man."* If the unpleasant little incident that followed 7oas and is still to be regarded as the "original sin," then it exhibits the Creator's divine foresight in a poor light indeed. It would have been far better for the first Adam of the first chapter to have been left either "male and female," or "alone." It is the Lord God, evidently, who was the real cause of all the mischief, the '*agati provocaleur" and the Serpent — only a prototype of Azazel, "the scapegoat for the sin of [the God of] Israel," the poor Tragos having to pay the penalty for his Master's and Creator's blunder. This, of course, is addressed only to those who accept the opening events of the drama of humanity in Genesis in their dead-letter sense. Those who read them Esoterically, are not reduced to fanciful speculations and hypo- theses; \hey kfww how to read the symbolism therein contained, and cannot err.
There is at present no need to touch upon the mystic and manifold meaning of the name Jehovah in its abstract sense, one independent of the Deity falsely called by that name. It was a "blind" purposely created by the Rabbins, a secret preserved by them \vith ten-fold care after the Christians had despoiled them of this God-name which was their own property. t The following statement, however, is now made. The personage who is named in the first four chapters of Genesis variously as "God," the "Lord God," and "Lord" simply, is not one and the same person; certainly it is not Jehovah. There are three distinct classes or groups of the Eloliim called Sephiroth in the Kabalah. Jehovah appears only in chapter iv of Genesis^ in the first verse of which he is named Cain, and in the last transformed into mankind —
• ii. 18, aa.
T Dosens of Uie most cnidiie writcre bave siAed thoroughly the various meaningrs of the name JHioyah (with, and withotit the Masorrtic paints), and :ihowD their multifarious bearing. The be^tof such works is the Soura of Mfasmres : tkt Hebrew Egypttan MyiUry, by J. Kalston Skinner, so ofbm already referred to.
406
THE SEC RET DOCTRINK.
male and female, Jah-veh.* The Serpent, moreover, is not Satan, but the bright Angel, one of the Elohim clothed in radiance and glory, who — promising the woman, if they ate of the forbidden fruit, " ye shall not surely die** — kept his promise, and made man immortal in his incornip- able nature. He is the lao of the Mysteries, the chief of the Androgyne Creators of men. Chapter iii contains (Esoterically) the wnthdrawal of the veil of ignorance that closed the perceptions of the Angelic Man. made in the image of the "boneless" Gods, and the opening of his con- sciousness to his real nature; thus showing the Bright Angel (Lucifer) in the light of a giver of Immortality, and as the '* Eulightener " ; while the real Fall into generation and matter is to be sought in chapter iv. There, Jehovah-Cain, the male part of Adam the dual man, having sepa- rated himself from Eve, creates in her Abel, the first Tiatural wo7nan,\ and sheds the virgin blood. Now Cain, being shown identical with Jehovah, on the authority of the correct reading of the first verse of