1nCnVqgFI

:
—
THE NUMBER 777.
I9I
cast to an enem)'-, unable to understand its value, who has turned round
and rent us.
''Let 7is
imagine''—wrote the same Master to his two " lay chelSs,"
as he called the author of Esoteric Buddhism and another gentleman,
his co-student for some time ''let us imagiiie that our earth is one of
a group of seven planets or man-bearing worlds
planets' are the sacred planets of aitiquity, and are all septenary.^
\_The ' seven
Now
the life-imptilse reaches A, or rather that which is destiied to become A, and
which sofar is but cosmic dust \_a laya-centre^ . .
." etc.
In these early letters, in which terms had to be invented and words
coined, the " Rings" very often became " Rounds," and the " Rounds,"
" Life-Cj'^cles," and vice versa. To a correspondent who called a "Round"
a " World-Ring," the Teacher wrote "
: I believe this will lead to a further
confusio7i. A Round we are agreed to call the passage of a. Mo7iadfrom
Globe A to Globe G or Z. . . The ' World-Ri7ig' is correct. . . Advise
Mr. . . . strongly, to agree upon a iiomenclature before goiig any
further.'''
Notwithstanding this agreement, man}^ mistakes, owing to this confusion,
crept into the earliest teachings. The "Races" even were
occasionally mixed up with the "Rounds" and "Rings," and led to
similar mistakes in Man: Fragments of Forgotten Tricth. From the
first the Master had written
"Not being permitted to give yoti the whole trtith, or divulge the number
of isolatedfractions, . . . I am unable to satisfy you."
This in answer to the questions: "If we are right, then the total
existence prior to the man-period is 637," etc., etc. To all the queries
relating to figures, the reply was: " Try to solve the problein of "jyj incarnatioyis.
. . . Though I arn obliged to withhold ififo'mation, . . . yet if
yo2i should work out the problen by yourself it will be my duty to tellyou so."
But it never was so worked out, and the results were—never-ceasing
perplexity and mistakes.
Even the teaching about the septenary'
constitution of the sidereal
bodies and of the macrocosm—from which the septenary division of
the microcosm, or man—has until now been among the most esoteric.
In olden times it used to be divulged only at Initiation together with the
most sacred figures of the cycles. Now, as stated in one of the Theosophical
journals,* the i-evelation of the whole system of cosmogony
had not been contemplated, nor even thought for one moment possible,
• Lucifer, May, 1888.