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326 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Powers, union with which produces good or bad results, as the case
may be. No student was ever allowed to recite historical, religious, or
real events of any kind, in so many unmistakable words, lest the
Powers connected with the event should be once more attracted. Such
events were narrated only during Initiation, and every student had to
record them in corresponding symbols, drawn out of his own mind and
examined later by his Master, before they were finally accepted. Thus
by degrees was the Chinese Alphabet created, as just before it the
hieratic symbols were fixed upon in old Egypt. In the Chinese language,
the characters of which may be read in any language, and
which, as just said, is only a little less ancient than the Egyptian
alphabet of Thoth, every word has its corresponding symbol in
a pictorial
form.
This language possesses many thousands of such symbolletters,
or logograms, each conveying the meaning of a whole vv^ord ;
letters proper, or an alphabet as we understand it, do not exist in the
Chinese language, any more than they did in the Eg3"ptian, till a far
later period.
Thus a Japanese who does not understand one word of Chinese,
meeting with a Chinaman who has never heard the language of the
former, will communicate in writing with him, and they will understand
each other perfectly—because their writing is symbolical.
The explanation of the chief symbols and emblems is now attempted,
as Book II, which treats of Anthropogenesis, would be most difficult to
understand without a
for
preparatory^ acquaintance with at least the metaphysical
symbols.
Nor would it be just to enter upon an esoteric reading of sjanbolism,
without giving due honour to one who has rendered it the greatest
service in this century, by discovering the chief key to ancient Hebrew
symbology, strongly interwoven with metrology, one of the keys to
the once universal Mystery lyanguage.
Mr. Ralston Skinner, of Cincinnati,
the author of The Key to the Hebrew-Egyptian Mystery in the
Source of Measures, has our thanks. A Mystic and a Kabalist by nature,
he has laboured for many years in this direction, and his efforts have
certainly been crowned with great success. In his own words
The writer is quite certain that there was an ancient language which modemly
and up to this time appears to have been lost, the vestiges of which, however,
abundantly exist. . . . The author discovered that this geometrical ratio [the
integral ratio of the diameter to the circumference of a circle] was the very ancient,
and probably the divine origin of ... .
linear measures. ... It appears
sJmost proven that the same system of geometry, numbers, ratio, and measures