Section 4

" Praise to Thy Face, Beaming Light in the Firmament, to Thee, to the Shining Lord of the Heaven's Bark, to the Creator and Ruler
THE WORLD-SOUL. 43
Who renders justice to all men, who delight to see Thee walking in the Web of Thy Splendour." (From Uhlemann's Book of the Dead, as quoted in Uunlap's Sud : The Mysteries ofAdoni, p. 187.)
Let us now turn to another Book of Wisdom, and hear what Hermes, the thrice greatest,^ has to tell us of the mystery. In the treatise called Pceuiandres, the World-Mind, Pcemandres, the " Mind of the Absolute" (6 t^s av6€VTia mirrored in the Higher Ego of the Initiate, thus speaks to his lower consciousness :
" Say well, O Thou ! speaking such things. I myself, the Mind, am present with the holy and good, and pure and merciful, with those living piously ; and my presence becomes a help ; and forthwith they are cognizant of all things, and lovingly propitiate the Father, and give thanks, praising and singing hymns to Him in ranks [in their orders, rather] , from affection ; and before delivering over the body to its own death, they detest the senses, know- ing their operations ; or rather I, The Mind, will not suffer the operations of the body which
' On the Rosetta stone he is called simply " Great, Great, Great" — /i-e'ya?, /i.£yas, fj.eya
44 THE WORLD-MYSTERY.
happen, to be accomplished ; for being door- keeper, I will shut out the incomings of the evil and base operations, cutting off desires."^
Although it is impossible in the short space at my disposal to attempt an analysis of the various passages cited, still I would briefly suggest to students a few hints as to interpre- tation. The Father is here, as in cognate schools of philosophical mysticism, the Atma- Buddhi in Kosmos and Man, and the hymns the " music of the spheres " of man's septenary nature, which sing in harmony only when man becomes one with the great Soul of Nature. The idea is well expressed by Dryden, who writes :
''From harmony, from heavenly harmony, This universal frame began ; From harmony to harmony, Through all the compass of the notes it ran, The diapason closing full in man."'
The teaching, however, as to the loathing^ of
f 1 From Chambers' translation (p. 12), which is as accurate and painstaking 'as may be, considering the translator's strong sectarian bias. The Pcemandycs, however, has yet to be translated by a true theosophical student.
2 Mvo-ttTTecr^at is a very strong word, meaning to abomi- nate, detest, loathe ; used of filth and foulness.
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the senses is different to the wiser instruction of the Upanishads, where we learn that both longing and detestation are equally bonds of attachment, and that pure freedom can never be won by such means.
Mark well also the curious expression that the Mind is the "door-keeper," both the great Mind and the mind of man ; the one keeping the doors or gates of the great planes of the septenary universe, the other guarding the portals of the seven "principles." And here we may do well to call to mind H. P. Blavatsky's words : " In that mansion called the human body the brain is the front door, and the only one which opens out into Space." {Lucifer, vii. 182.)
Let us — as the preceding sentences naturally lead up to it — pause here a moment to learn the path of the Soul up to the " Father," w'hen death overtakes the body, and when the seven corruptible are put off for the incorruptible, according to the Hermetic Gnosis.
" ' You have well taught me,' I said, ' all things as I desired, O Mind ! But tell me further about the ascent that is to be.'
" To these things Poemandres said: 'First,
46 THE WORLD-MYSTERY.
indeed, in the dissolution of the body material, it deHvers up the body itself unto alteration, the form which thou hast becomes invisible, and delivers the character deprived of energy to the demon (daimon), and the senses of the body return back to their respective sources, becoming portions, and again united together with the energies. And passion and desire depart to the irrational nature.
"'And thus the residue hastens upwards through the Harmony, and gives up to the first zone the energy of increase and that of decrease ; and to the second the machination of the evils and the fraud deenergized ; and to the third the concupiscent deception deener- gized ; and to the fourth the pride of domineer- ing without means of satisfaction ; and to the fifth the unholy boldness and the rashness of the audacity ; and to the sixth the evil covet- ings after wealth, deenergized ; and to the seventh zone insidious falsehood.
"'And, then, denuded from the operations [energizings] of the Harmony, it becomes energizing at the eighth nature, having its proper power, and along with the entities [essences] hymning The Father. Those
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being present at this his coming there, rejoice together, and being made Hke to those who are with Him, he hears also the Powers who are above the eighth nature in a certain sweet voice hymning The God. And then in order they mount upward to The Father, and they deHver themselves up to the Powers, and becoming Powers they become in God. This is the good end of those attaining knowledge, to be made Divine. For the rest, why delayest thou ? Is it not that having accepted all things, thou mayest become guide to those who are worthy ; so that the race of mankind through thee may be saved by God ? ' " (Chambers, pp. 13, 14.)
One might almost think that the treatise was written by the same hand that inscribed for us that wonderful relic of Egyptian Gnosticism called the Pistis Sophia. Who can tell whence was the original source of this hoary tradition of wisdom ?
The passage loses much in translation for the general reader, and it is difficult to recognise that nearly every word is a precise technical term, just as are the terms in the opening chapters of the Gospel according to John.
It is easy to see that the first paragraph
48 THE WORLD-MYSTERY.
refers to the dissolution of the lower four prin- ciples, whereas the second paragraph refers to the seven aspects of the lower mind, and the last to the mysteries of the Higher Ego, of the Primordial Emanations in the Pleroma, of the Hierarchies of the Sons of the Mind, and of the su- preme realisation of the N irvana of Atma-Buddhi.
What the idea of the Egyptian Initiate was concerning this attainment, and how difficult it is to treat of such lofty themes without the grossest self-contradictions, we may learn from the following passage :
" Holy The God, The Father of the Uni- versals, Whose counsel is perfected by His own powers. Holy The God Who willeth to know and is known by His own. Holy Thou art W^ho by Word hast constituted the Entities. Thou art Holy, of Whom all nature was born as the image. Thou art Holy Whom the nature formed not. Thou art Holy Who art stronger than all power. Thou art Holy Who art greater than all excellence. Thou art Holy Who art superior to praises. Accept rational sacrifices pure from soul and heart, intent upon Thee, O unspeakable, ineffable, invoked by silence !" (Ibid., pp. 15, ib.)
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The inability of human words to express that which must ever escape expression — for even the Universe itself is incapable of expressing It, seeing that there is an infinite number of Universes — and the failure of the human mind to express the Divine Mind arc well shown in the following passage also :
" This the God is superior to a name ; This the unmanifest ; This the most manifest, to be contemplated by the mind ; This visible to the eyes ; This incorporeal, multicorporeal — yea, rather of every body ; for there is nothing which This is not. For This is above all things. And because of this He has all names, that He is One Father, and because of this he has not a name that He is Father of all. Who, then, is able to bless, to sing praises of {evXoyrja-aL) Thee, Concerning Thee, or to Thee ? Looking whither shall I bless Thee, above, below, within, without ? for there is no con- dition, no place about Thee, nor anything else of the Entities ; for all things are in Thee, all things from Thee, having given all things and receiving nothing ; for Thou hast all things, and nothing that Thou hast not.
"When, O Father ! shall I hymn Thee ? for
D
50 THE WORLD-MYSTERY.
neither Thine hour nor time is it possible to ascertain : concerning what also shall I hymn ? concerning what things Thou hast made, or concerning those Thou hast not made ? con- cerning those Thou hast made manifest, or concerning those Thou hast concealed ? Where- fore, also, shall I hymn Thee ? As if being of myself, as if having something mine own ? as being another ? For Thou art what I may be, Thou art what I may do, Thou art what I may speak, for Thou art all things, and there is nothing else that Thou art not." (Ibid., pp. 41, 42.)
In all the various exoteric presentations of the Wisdom-Religion, the World-Soul was Intelligence, and was symbolized indifferently in personifications which were male and female, androgjme or sexless ; in Egypt and Phoenicia, in Babylon and China, in India and Greece. The Universal Mind of Pythagoras was an attribute of deity universally recognized in antiquity, Athena was Wisdom, and Bacchus the Divine Mind, for the philosopher and initiate. Thus we shall have no difficulty in understanding why Poemandres is the Mind, and also, by the light of the interpretation of
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the Esoteric Philosophy outHned by H. P. Blavatsky, why there are seven spheres in the Harmony, We must all be musicians and learn to sing sweetly on Apollo's heptachord before we " can hear the powers which are above the eighth nature in a certain sweet voice." We must learn to play on the seven-stringed lute of the radiant Sun-God, and modulate the harmonies of our own septenary nature, for : "Seven sounding letters sing the praise of me,
The immortal God, the Almighty Deity ;
Father of all, that cannot wearied be.
I am the eternal viol of all things,
Whereby the melody so sweetly rings
Of heavenly music." (Oliver, The Pythagorean Triangle, p. 175.)
Passing next to the cognate schools of so- called Gnosticism, of those who "tried to know," let us take a thought or two that comes from the minds of the great masters of the Gnosis.
Epiphanius professes to describe the cere- mony whereby the Heracleonitaj prepared a dying brother for the next world. The words of power wherewith the soul might break the
52 THE WORLD-MYSTERY.
seals and burst open the gates of the Nether World in its passage to rest, are given as follows :
"I, the Son from the Father, the Father Preexisting, but the Son in the present time, am come to behold all things both of others and of my own, and things not altogether of others, but belonging unto Achamoth [one of the aspects of Akasha, the World-SouF , who is feminine, and hath created them for herself. But I derive my own origin from the Preexisting One, and I am going back unto my own from which I have come." {Adv. Hcev., xxxvi. 3. Cf. also Irenaeus, Adv. Hcer., I. xxi. 5.)
There were many of such mystic formulae containing occult truths which students of theosophy will instantly recognize, such as, for instance, the garnering of the harvest of life- experiences by the Higher Ego, quoted by Epiphanius from the lost Gospel of Philip, which tells us :
" I have known myself, I have collected my- self from all parts, neither have I begotten sons unto the Ruler of this World, but I have plucked up the roots, and gathered together the scattered members. I know thee who thou
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art, for I am one from above." [King's Gnostics and their Remains, p. 333.)
But let us take a passing glance at the chief of these great "heresies."
In the system of Simon, the Soul of the World was called Fire (Pur), as we learn from his Great Revelation. {Philosophumena, vi. i.)
Menander, his disciple, called it the (Divine) Thought, Ennoia (Irenaeus, Adv. Hcbv., I. xxiii.) and Satornilus, the disciple of Menander, named it the Unknown Father (Pater Agnostos). {Pliilos., vii. 2.)
As we pass down the corridors of history we find the disciple of the latter, Basilides, one of the most famous masters of the Gnosis, re- naming this Un-nameable of many names, and calling it by the mysterious appellation Abraxas, in the transliteration of the mystery-tongue. This was the Unborn Father, Pater Innatus, " He who is not." (Irenaeus, Adv. Hcbv., I. xxiv. ; the iv to dyeVvj/Tov, according to Epiphanius, Adv. Hcbv., XXIV. i.)
This he did for the comprehension of the "many," for the "few" he had a further teaching :
"It was when naught was; nor was that
54 THE WORLD-MYSTERY.
naught aught of that which is, but (to speak) nakedly, and so as to avoid suspicion, and with- out any contrivance, It was in fine not even One." (Philos., vii. i.)
It was, in one of its aspects, the One (i), which is Naught (o), the Perfect Number lo in the divine manifestation of the " Primary Creation " of the Gods. But even such a metaphysical definition as the above was a materialization to the subtle intellect and spiritual intuition of Basilides, for he says {ibid.) :
" That is not absolutely unspeakable which is so called ; inasmuch as we call it * Unspeak- able,' but That is not even 'The Unspeakable.' So that That which is not even ' The Unspeak- able cannot be named ' The Unspeakable,' for It is beyond all name that can be named." Carpocrates, who follows next in date, like Satornilus, speaks of the Unknown Father, the Ungenerable, Pater Ingenitus, according to the text of Irenseus. {Philos., viii. 4.)
Finally, the God of the Valentinian Gnosis was called Bythos, the Depth, from which came all the iEons. This was not called the Father until the primal Syzygy or Double,
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Sige (Silence), emanated in the All-Unity. This was the Noon of the Egyptians. " Thou art the First-born of the Gods ; Thou, from Whom I came forth." "Thou art the One creating Himself," we read in the Book of the Dead.
Among prayers to the Supreme Principle are to be remarked the mystic invocations in the Coptic MSS., brought back from Abyssinia, and preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and in the British Museum. These are treatises on the Egyptian Gnosis. In the concluding section, the Saviour, the First Mystery, thus addresses the hidden " Father " in the mystic celebration of the initiatory rite of which a fragment remains in the " Sacrament " of the churches. The "prayer" is in the mystery language, untranslatable by the "profane," and runs as follows :
" Hear me, Father, Father of all Fatherhood, Boundless Light ! aeeiouu, iao, aoi, oia, psinother, thernops, nopsither, zagoure, pagoure nethmomauth, nepsiomauth, marachachtha, thubarrhabau, tharna- chachan, zorokothora, leou, Sabaoth.^' {aerjiovoy, law,
awL, wia, if/LVioOep, OeproxJ/, vo)i//i^ep, t,ayovpr], Trayovprj, ViOju^fxawd, viil/ioixauiO, /xapa^a^^a, Oio^appaPav, Oap-
56 THE WORLD-MYSTERY.
va)^a^av, l^opOKoOopa, Itov, '^a/3aw6.) (Schwartze S
Pistis-Sophia, pag. 125.)
The theosophical student will at once perceive the method of permutation of the first m3'Stery names, and will remember the seven, five, and three-vowelled names used in the Secret Doctrine. Though the full interpretation, however, will probably remain unknown for many a long year to come, from the work itself we learn :
"This is the name of the Immortal AAA Qilil -^ and this is the Name of the Voice which is the Cause of the Motion of the Perfect Man m."
And again immediately following the invoca- tion we read :
"This is the interpretation thereof: iota, the Universe has come forth; alpha, they shall return within ; 66, there shall be an End of
Ends." {Ibid.,pagg. 3S7y35^-)
No kabalistic method I have yet applied for obtaining a numerical solution has produced any satisfactory result, except that the sum of the digits of the seven-vowelled name is seven, and the sum of the whole invocation is likewise
1 " The Father of the Pleroma.'' C/. Notice siir le Papyrus Gnostiqiie Bruce. M. E. Amelineau, p. 113.
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seven. The work has all to be done, and though no theosophist has yet publicly solved the method of this deeply-concealed mysticism, we should bear in mind that no scholar has even attempted a solution other than the wildest speculation bred of a diseased philology.
Let us next take the purely Gnostic teaching of Paul in his first Letter to the Colossians. (i. i2-ig.)
" Giving thanks to the Father who fits us for a share in the Inheritance of the Holy in the Light ; who preserved us from the Power of the Darkness, and translated us into the King- dom of the Son of his Love, in Whom we have our Redemption,^ the Remission of Sins, Who is the Image of God, the Invisible, the First- born of every Foundation. For in Him are founded all things, in the Heavens and on Earth, visible and invisible, whether Thrones or Dominions, Rulerships^ or Powers. All things were founded through Him and for Him. And He is before all, and in Him all things