The “Curse” From A Philosophical Point Of View.

The foregoing teachings of the Secret Doctrine, supplemented by universal traditions, must now have demonstrated that the Brâhmanas and Purânas, the Vendîdâd and other Mazdean scriptures, down to the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman, and finally to the Jewish sacred records, all have the same origin. None are meaningless and baseless stories, invented to entrap the unwary profane; all are allegories intended to convey, under a more or less fantastic veil, the great truths gathered in the same field of pre-historic tradition. Space forbids us, in these volumes, from entering into further and more minute details with respect to the four Races which preceded our own. But before offering to the student the history of the psychic and spiritual evolution of the direct antediluvian fathers of our Fifth (Âryan) Humanity, and before demonstrating its bearing upon all the other side branches grown from the same trunk, we have to elucidate a few more facts. It has been shown, on the evidence of the whole ancient literary world, and the intuitional speculations of more than one Philosopher and Scientist of the later ages, that the tenets of our Esoteric Doctrine are, in almost every case, corroborated by inferential as well as by direct proof, that neither the “legendary” Giants, nor the lost Continents, nor yet the evolution of the preceding Races, are quite baseless tales. In the Addenda which close this volume, Science will find itself more than once unable to reply; these Addenda, will, it is hoped, finally dispose of every sceptical remark with regard to the sacred number in nature, and our figures in general.

Meanwhile, one task is left incomplete—the disposing of that most pernicious of all the theological dogmas, the Curse under which man-kind is alleged to have suffered ever since the supposed disobedience of Adam and Eve in the bower of Eden.

Creative powers in man were the gift of Divine Wisdom, not the result of sin. This is clearly instanced in the paradoxical behaviour of Jehovah, who first curses Adam and Eve (or Humanity) for the supposed crime committed, and then blesses his “chosen people” by saying, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.”967 The Curse was not brought on mankind by the Fourth Race, for the comparatively sinless Third Race, the still more gigantic Antediluvians, had perished in the same way; hence the Deluge was no punishment, but simply a result of a periodical and geological law. Nor was the Curse of Karma called down upon them for seeking natural union, as all the mindless animal-world [pg 429] does in its proper seasons; but, for abusing the creative power, for desecrating the divine gift, and wasting the life-essence for no purpose except bestial personal gratification. When understood, the third chapter of Genesis will be found to refer to the Adam and Eve of the closing Third and the commencing Fourth Races. In the beginning, conception was as easy for woman as it was for all animal creation. Nature had never intended that woman should bring forth her young ones “in sorrow.” Since that period, however, during the evolution of the Fourth Race, there came enmity between its seed and the “Serpent's” seed, the seed or product of Karma and Divine Wisdom. For the seed of woman, or lust, bruised the head of the seed of the fruit of wisdom and knowledge, by turning the holy mystery of procreation into animal gratification; hence the Law of Karma “bruised the heel” of the Atlantean Race, by gradually changing physiologically, morally, physically, and mentally, the whole nature of the Fourth Race of mankind,968 until, from being the healthy king of animal creation in the Third Race, man became in the Fifth, our Race, a helpless, scrofulous being, and has now become the wealthiest heir on the Globe to constitutional and hereditary diseases, the most consciously and intelligently bestial of all animals!969

This is the real Curse from the physiological standpoint, almost the only one touched upon in Kabalistic Esotericism. Viewed from this aspect, the Curse is undeniable, for it is evident. The intellectual evolution, in its progress hand-in-hand with the physical, has certainly been a curse instead of a blessing—a gift quickened by the “Lords of Wisdom,” who have poured on the human Manas the fresh dew of their own Spirit and Essence. The Divine Titan has then suffered in vain; and one feels inclined to regret his benefaction to mankind, and sigh for those days so graphically depicted by Æschylus in his “Prometheus Bound,” when, at the close of the first Titanic Age (the Age that followed that of Ethereal Man, of the pious Kandu and Pramlochâ), nascent, physical mankind, still mindless and (physiologically) senseless, is described as—

Our Saviours, the Agnishvâtta and other divine “Sons of the Flame of Wisdom”—personified by the Greeks in Prometheus970—may well be left unrecognized and unthanked, in the injustice of the human heart. They may, in our ignorance of the truth, be indirectly cursed for Pandora's gift; but to find themselves proclaimed and declared by the mouth of the clergy, as the Evil Ones, is too heavy a Karma for “Him” who, when Zeus “ardently desired” to quench the entire human race, “dared alone” to save that “mortal race” from perdition, or, as the suffering Titan is make to say:

The chorus remarking very pertinently:

Prometheus answers:

Chorus: Have now these short-lived creatures flame-eyed fire?

Prom.: Ay, and by it full many arts will learn....

But, with the arts, the “fire” received has turned into the greatest curse; the animal element, and consciousness of its possession, has changed periodical instinct into chronic animalism and sensuality.971 It is this which hangs over humanity like a heavy funereal pall. Thus arises the responsibility of free-will; the Titanic passions which represent humanity in its darkest aspect;

The restless insatiability of the lower passions and desires, when, with self-asserting insolence, they bid defiance to the restraints of law.972

Prometheus having endowed man, according to Plato's Protagoras, with that “wisdom which ministers to physical well-being,” but the lower aspect of Manas of the animal (Kâma) having remained unchanged, instead of “an untainted mind, heaven's first gift,” there was created the eternal vulture of ever unsatisfied desire, of regret and despair, coupled with “the dreamlike feebleness that fetters the blind race of mortals” (556), unto the day when Prometheus is released by his heaven-appointed deliverer, Herakles.

Now Christians—Roman Catholics especially—have tried to prophetically connect this drama with the coming of Christ. No greater mistake could be made. The true Theosophist, the pursuer of Divine Wisdom and worshipper of Absolute Perfection—the Unknown Deity which is neither Zeus nor Jehovah—will demur to such an idea. Pointing to antiquity he will prove that there never has been an original sin, but only an abuse of physical intelligence—the Psychic being guided by the Animal, and both putting out the light of the Spiritual. He will say: All you who can read between the lines, study Ancient Wisdom in the old dramas, the Indian and the Greek; read carefully the “Prometheus Bound,” enacted in the theatres of Athens 2,400 years ago! The myth belongs to neither Hesiod nor Æschylus; but, as Bunsen says, it “is older than the Hellenes themselves,” for it belongs, in truth, to the dawn of human consciousness. The crucified Titan is the personified symbol of the collective Logos, the “Host,” and of the “Lords of Wisdom” or the Heavenly Man, who incarnated in Humanity. Moreover, as his name (Pro-me-theus, “he who sees before him” or futurity) shows973—in the arts he devised and taught to humanity, psychological [pg 432] insight was not the least. For as he complains to the daughters of Oceanus:

Leaving for a few pages the main subject, let us pause and see what may be the hidden meaning of this, the most ancient as it is the most suggestive of traditional allegories. As it relates directly to the early Races, this will be no real digression.

The subject of Æschylus' trilogy, of which two plays are lost, is known to all cultured readers. The Demi-god robs the Gods (the Elohim) of their secret—the mystery of the Creative Fire. For this sacrilegious attempt he is struck down by Cronus974 and delivered unto Zeus, the Father and Creator of a mankind which he would have wished to have blind intellectually, and animal-like; a Personal Deity, which will not see Man “like one of us.” Hence Prometheus, the “Fire and Light-giver,” is chained on Mount Caucasus and condemned to suffer torture. But the triform Fates (Karma), whose decrees, as the Titan says, even Zeus—

—ordain that those sufferings will last only to that day when a son of Zeus—

—is born. This “Son” will deliver Prometheus (suffering Humanity) from his own fatal gift. His name is, “He who has to come.”

On the authority, then, of these few lines, which, like any other allegorical sentence, may be twisted into almost any meaning—on the authority of the words pronounced by Prometheus and addressed to Io, the daughter of Inachus, persecuted by Zeus—a whole prophecy is constructed by some Catholic writers. Says the crucified Titan:

This was construed by several fanatics—Des Mousseaux and De Mirville amongst others—into a clear prophecy. Io “is the mother of God,” we are told, and “dark Epaphos”—Christ. But, the latter has not dethroned his Father, except metaphorically, if one has to regard Jehovah as that Father; nor has the Christian Saviour hurled his Father down into Hades. Prometheus says (in verse 930) that Zeus will be humbled yet:

“Dark Epaphos” was the Dionysus-Sabasius, the son of Zeus and of Demeter in the Sabasian Mysteries, during which the “Father of the Gods,” assuming the shape of a Serpent, begot on Demeter Dionysus, or the Solar Bacchus. Io is the Moon, and at the same time the Eve of a new race, and so is Demeter—in the present case. The Promethean myth is a prophecy indeed; but it does not relate to any of the cyclic Saviours who have appeared periodically in various countries and among various nations, in their transitionary conditions of evolution. It points to the last of the mysteries of cyclic transformations, in the series of which mankind, having passed from the ethereal to the solid physical state, from spiritual to physiological procreation, is now carried onward on the opposite arc of the cycle, toward that second phase of its primitive state, when woman knew no man, and human progeny was created, not begotten.

That state will return to it and to the world at large, when the latter shall discover and really appreciate the truths which underlie this vast problem of sex. It will be like “the light that never shone on sea or land,” and has to come to men through the Theosophical Society. That light will lead on and up to true spiritual intuition. Then, as expressed once in a letter to a Theosophist,

The world will have a race of Buddhas and Christs, for the world will have discovered that individuals have it in their own powers to procreate Buddha-like children—or Demons.... When that knowledge comes, all dogmatic religions, and with these the Demons, will die out.

If we reflect upon the serial development of the allegory, and the character of the heroes, the mystery may be unriddled. Cronus is of course “Time” in its cyclic course. He swallows his children—the personal Gods of exoteric dogmas included. Instead of Zeus he has swallowed his stone idol; but the symbol has grown, and has only developed in human fancy as mankind has been cycling down toward only its physical and intellectual—not spiritual—perfection. When it is as far advanced in its spiritual evolution Cronus will be no longer deceived. Instead of the stone image he will have swallowed the anthropomorphic fiction itself. Because, the Serpent of Wisdom, represented in the Sabasian Mysteries by the anthropomorphized Logos, the unity of spiritual and physical Powers, will have begotten in Time (Cronus) a progeny—Dionysus-Bacchus, or the “dark Epaphos,” the “mighty one,” the Race that will overthrow him. Where will he be born? Prometheus traces him to his origin and birth-place in his prophecy to Io. Io is the Moon-goddess of generation—for she is Isis and she is Eve, the Great Mother.975 He traces the path of the (racial) wanderings as plainly as words can express it. She has to quit Europe and go to Asia's continent, reaching there the highest of the mountains of Caucasus (v. 737), the Titan telling her:

that she must travel Eastward, after passing the “Kimmerian Bosphorus,” and cross what is evidently the Volga and now Astrakhân on the Caspian Sea. After this she will encounter “fierce northern blasts” and cross thither to the land of the “Arimaspian host” (East of Herodotus' Scythia) to—

This is rightly conjectured by Professor Newman to have meant the Ural, the Arimaspi of Herodotus being “the recognized inhabitants of this golden region.”

And here comes (between verses 825 and 835) a puzzle to all the European interpreters. Says the Titan:

There Io was ordained to found a colony for herself and her sons. Now we must see how the passage is interpreted. Io is told that she has to travel Eastward till she comes to the river Ethiops, which she is to follow till it falls into the Nile—hence the perplexity. “According to the geographical theories of the earliest Greeks,” we are informed by the author of the version of “Prometheus Bound”:

This condition was fulfilled by the river Indus. Arrian (vi. 1) mentions that Alexander the Great, when preparing to sail down the Indus [having seen crocodiles in the river Indus, and in no other river except the Nile...], seemed to himself to have discovered the sources of the Nile; as though the Nile, rising from some place in India, and flowing through much desert land, and thereby losing its name Indus, next... flowed through inhabited land, being now called Nile by the Ethiopians of those parts and afterwards by the Egyptians. Virgil in the IVth Georgic echoes the obsolete error.976

Both Alexander and Virgil may have erred considerably in their geographical notions; but the prophecy of Prometheus has not in the least so sinned—not, at any rate, in its Esoteric spirit. When a certain Race is symbolized, and events pertaining to its history are rendered allegorically, no topographical accuracy ought to be expected in the itinerary traced for its personification. Yet it so happens, that the river Ethiops is certainly the Indus, and it is also the Nîl or Nîlâ. It is the river born on the Kailâsa Heaven mountain, the Mansion of the Gods—22,000 feet above the level of the sea. It was the Ethiops river, and was so called by the Greeks, long before the days of Alexander, because its banks, from Attock down to Sind, were peopled by tribes generally referred to as the Eastern Ethiopians. India and Egypt were two kindred nations, and the Eastern Ethiopians—the mighty builders—have come from India, as is pretty well proved, it is hoped, in Isis Unveiled.977

Then why could not Alexander, and even the learned Virgil, have used the word Nile or Neilos when speaking of the Indus, since it is one of its names? To this day the Indus is called, in the regions around Kalabagh, Nîl, “blue,” and Nîlâ, the “blue river.” The water there is of such a dark blue colour that this name was given to it from time immemorial; a small town on its banks being called by the same name, and existing to this day. Evidently Arrian, who wrote far later than the days of Alexander, and who was ignorant of the old name of the Indus, has unconsciously slandered the Greek conqueror. Nor are our modern historians much wiser, in judging as they do, for they often make the most sweeping declarations on mere appearances, as much as their ancient colleagues ever did in days of old, when no Encyclopædias were yet ready for them.

The race of Io, the “cow-horned maid,” is then simply the first pioneer race of the Æthiopians brought by her from the Indus to the Nile, which received its name in memory of the mother river of the colonists from India.978 Therefore Prometheus says to Io979 that the sacred Neilos—the God, not the river—shall guide her “to the land, three-cornered,” namely, to the Delta, where her sons are foreordained to found “that far-off colony.” (833 et seqq.)

It is there that a new race (the Egyptians) will begin, and a “female race” (873) which, “fifth in descent” from dark Epaphos—

Then one of the fifty virgins will fail through love and shall—

When these heroes shall arise, the Titan does not reveal; for as he remarks:

This, to set forth at large needs lengthy speech.

But “Argos” is Arghyavarsha, the Land of Libations of the old Hierophants, whence the Deliverer of Humanity will appear, a name which became ages later that of its neighbour, India—the Aryâvarta of old.

That the subject formed part of the Sabasian Mysteries is made known by several ancient writers; among others by Cicero980 and by Clemens Alexandrinus.981 The latter writers are the only ones who attribute the fact of Æschylus being charged by the Athenians with sacrilege and condemned to be stoned to death to its true cause. They say that being himself uninitiated, Æschylus had profaned the Mysteries by exposing them in his Trilogies on a public stage.982 But he would have incurred the same condemnation had he been initiated; which must have been the case, as otherwise he must, like Socrates, have had a Daimon to reveal to him the secret and sacred allegorical Drama of Initiation. At all events, it is not the “father of the Greek tragedy” who invented the prophecy of Prometheus; for he only repeated in dramatic form that which was revealed by the priests during the Mysteria of the Sabasia.983 The latter was one of the oldest sacred festivals, whose origin is to this day unknown to history. Mythologists connect it through Mithras, the Sun, called Sabasius on some old monuments, with Jupiter and Bacchus. It was never, however, the property of the Greeks, but dates from days immemorial.

The translator of the drama wonders how Æschylus could become guilty of such

Discrepancy between the character of Zeus as portrayed in the “Prometheus Bound” and that depicted in the remaining dramas.984

This is just because Æschylus, like Shakespeare, was and will ever remain the intellectual “Sphinx” of the ages. Between Zeus, the Abstract Deity of Grecian thought, and the Olympic Zeus, there was an abyss. The latter represented in the Mysteries no higher a principle [pg 438] than the lower aspect of human physical intelligence—Manas wedded to Kâma; whereas Prometheus—the divine aspect of Manas merging into and aspiring to Buddhi—was the divine Soul. Zeus, whenever shown as yielding to his lower passions, is the Human Soul and nothing more—the jealous God, revengeful and cruel in its Egotism or “I-am-ness.” Hence, Zeus is represented as a Serpent—the intellectual tempter of man—which, nevertheless, begets in the course of cyclic evolution the “Man-Saviour,” the Solar Bacchus or Dionysus—more than a man.

Dionysus is one with Osiris, with Krishna, and with Buddha, the heavenly Wise One, and with the coming (tenth) Avatâra, the glorified Spiritual Christos, who will deliver the suffering Chrestos—mankind, or Prometheus, on its trial. This, say Brâhmanical and Buddhistic legends, echoed by the Zoroastrian and now by the Christian teachings (the latter only occasionally), will happen at the end of the Kali Yuga. It is only after the appearance of Kalki Avatâra, or Sosiosh, that man will be born from woman without sin. Then will Brahmâ, the Hindû deity, Ahura Mazda (Ormazd), the Zoroastrian, Zeus, the Greco-Olympian Don Juan, Jehovah, the jealous, repenting, cruel, tribal God of the Israelites, and all their likes in the universal Pantheon of human fancy—vanish and disappear in thin air. And along with these will vanish their shadows, the dark aspects of all these Deities, ever represented as their “twin brothers” and creatures, in exoteric legend—their own reflection on Earth, in Esoteric Philosophy. The Ahrimans and Typhons, the Samaels and Satans, must be all dethroned on that day, when every dark evil passion will be subdued.

There is one Eternal Law in Nature, one that always tends to adjust contraries, and to produce final harmony. It is owing to this Law of spiritual development superseding the physical and purely intellectual, that mankind will become freed from its false Gods, and find itself finally—Self-redeemed.

In its final revelation, the old myth of Prometheus, of whom the proto- and anti-types are found in every ancient Theogony, stands in each of them at the very origin of physical evil, because at the threshold of human physical life. Cronus is “Time,” whose first law is that the order of the successive and harmonious phases, in the process of evolution during cyclic development, should be strictly preserved—under the severe penalty of abnormal growth with all its ensuing results. It was not in the programme of natural development, [pg 439] that man—higher animal though he may be—should become at once, intellectually, spiritually, and psychically, the Demi-god he is on Earth, while his physical frame remains weaker, more helpless and ephemeral, than that of almost any huge mammal. The contrast is too grotesque and violent; the tabernacle much too unworthy of its indwelling God. The gift of Prometheus thus became a Curse—though foreknown and foreseen by the Host personified in that personage, as his name well shows.985 It is in this that rests, at one and the same time, its sin and its redemption. For the Host that incarnated in a portion of humanity, though led to it by Karma or Nemesis, preferred free-will to passive slavery, intellectual self-conscious pain and even torture, “while myriad time shall flow,” to inane, imbecile, instinctual beatitude. Knowing such an incarnation was premature and not in the programme of Nature, the Heavenly Host, “Prometheus,” still sacrificed itself to benefit thereby, at least, one portion of mankind.986 But while saving man from mental darkness, they inflicted upon him the tortures of the self-consciousness of his responsibility—the result of his free will—besides every ill to which mortal man and flesh are heir. This torture Prometheus accepted for himself, since the Host became henceforward blended with the tabernacle prepared for them, which was still un-achieved at that period of formation.

Spiritual evolution being incapable of keeping pace with the physical, once its homogeneity was broken by the admixture, the gift thus became the chief cause, if not the sole origin, of Evil.987 Highly philosophical [pg 440] is the allegory which shows Cronus cursing Zeus for dethroning him, in the primitive Golden Age of Saturn, when all men were Demi-gods, and for creating a physical race of men weak and helpless in comparison; and then as delivering to his (Zeus') revenge the culprit, who despoiled the Gods of their prerogative of creation and who thereby raised man to their level, intellectually and spiritually. In the case of Prometheus, Zeus represents the Host of the Primeval Progenitors, of the Pitaras, the “Fathers” who created man senseless and without mind; while the Divine Titan stands for the Spiritual Creators, the Devas who “fell” into generation. The former are spiritually lower, but physically stronger, than the “Prometheans”; therefore, the latter are shown conquered. “The lower Host, whose work the Titan spoiled and thus defeated the plans of Zeus,” was on this Earth in its own sphere and plane of action; whereas the superior Host was an exile from Heaven, who had got entangled in the meshes of Matter. The inferior Host were masters of all the Cosmic and lower Titanic Forces; the higher Titan possessed only the Intellectual and Spiritual Fire. This drama of the struggle of Prometheus with the Olympic tyrant and despot, sensual Zeus, one sees enacted daily within our actual mankind; the lower passions chain the higher aspirations to the rock of Matter, to generate in many a case the vulture of sorrow, pain, and repentance. In every such case one sees once more—

a God, bereft even of that supreme consolation of Prometheus, who suffered in self-sacrifice—

as the divine Titan is moved by altruism, but the mortal man by selfishness and egoïsm in every instance.

The modern Prometheus has now become Epi-metneus, “he who sees only after the event”; because the universal philanthropy of the former has long ago degenerated into selfishness and self-adoration. Man will become the free Titan of old, but not before cyclic evolution has reestablished the broken harmony between the two natures—the terrestrial and the divine; after which he becomes impermeable to the lower Titanic Forces, invulnerable in his Personality, and immortal in his Individuality—but this cannot happen before every animal element is eliminated from his nature. When man understands that “Deus non [pg 441]fecit mortem,”988 but that man has created it himself, he will re-become the Prometheus before his Fall.

For the full symbolism of Prometheus and the origin of this mythos in Greece, the reader is referred to Part II of this Volume, Section XX, “Prometheus, the Titan,” etc. In the said Part—a kind of supplement to the present portion—every additional information is given upon those tenets that will be the most controverted and questioned. This work is so heterodox, when confronted with the acknowledged standards of Theology and Modern Science, that no proof which tends to show that these standards often usurp an illegal authority should be neglected.