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368 THE SECRKT DOCTRINE.
first hour of reawakening. It is also Vishnu, sleeping on Ananta-
Shesha, the great Serpent of Eternity, of which Western Theology,
ignorant of the Kabalah, the only key that opens the secrets of the
Bible, has made—the Devil. It is the first Triangle or the Pythagorean
Triad, the "God of the //^r^< Aspects," before it is transformed, through
the perfect quadrature of the Infinite Circle, into the "four-faced"
Brahma. "Of him who is and yet is not, from Non-Being, the Kternal
Cause, is born the Being, Purusha," says Manu, the legislator.
In the Egyptian mythology, Kneph, the Eternal Unrevealed God, is represented
by a snake-emblem of Eternity encircling a water urn, with its head hovering over
the waters, which it incubates with its breath. In this case, the Serpent is the
Agathodaimon, the Good Spirit; in its opposite aspect, it is the Kakodaimon, the
Evil Spirit.
In the Scandinavian Eddas, the honey-dew, the fruit of the Gods, and
of the creative busy Yggdrasil bees, falls during the hours of night, when the
atmosphere is impregnated vidth humidity; and in the Northern mythologies, as
the passive principle of creation, it typifies the creation of the Universe out of
Water. This dew is the Astral Light in one of its combinations, and possesses
creative as well as destructive properties. In the Chaldean legend of Berosus,
Cannes or Dagon, the man-fish, instructing the people, shows the infant World
created out of Water, and all beings originating from this Prima Materia. Moses
teaches that only Earth and Water can bring into existence a Living Soul : and we
read in the Scriptures that herbs could not grow until the Eternal caused it to i'ain
upon Earth. In the Mexican Popol Vuh, man is created out of mud or clay {terre
glaise), taken from under the Water. Brahma creates the great Muni, or first man,
seated on his Lotus, only after having called spirits into being, who thus enjoyed
•over mortals a priority of existence; and he creates him out of Water, Air and
Earth.
Alchemists claim that the primordial or pre-adamic Earth, when reduced
to its first substance, is in its second stage of transformation like clear Water, the
first being the Alkahest proper.
This primordial substance is said to contain within
itself the essence of all that goes to make up man; it contains not only all the elements
of his physical being, but even the "breath of life" in a latent state, ready
to be awakened. This it derives from the "incubation" of the "Spirit of God"
upon the face of the Waters—Chaos. In fact, this substance is Chaos itself. From
this it was that Paracelsus claimed to be able to make his Homunculi ; and
this is
why Thales, the great natural philosopher, maintained that Water was the principle
of all things in nature.*. . . Job says that dead things are formed from under
the Waters, and the inhabitants thereof.t In the original text, instead of "dead
things,'^ it is written dead Rephaim, Giants or mighty Primitive Men, from whom
Evolution may one day trace our present race. J
• with the Greeks, the River-Gods, all of them the Sons of the Primeval Ocean^Chaos, in its masculine
aspect—were the respective ancestors of the Hellenic races. For them the Ocean was the Father
of the Gods; and thus in this connection they had anticipated the theories of Thales, as rightly
observed by Aristotle. (Metaph. I. 3-5.)
t xxvi. 5.
t /sis Unveiled, I. 133-4.