1nCnVqgFI

458 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
And though it is impossible for any Occultist or student of Eastern
Esotericism to concur in the strange idea t lat, "the religious conceptions
of the most famous nations of antiquity are connected with the
beginnings of civilization amongst the Germanic races,"* he is yet glad
to find such truths expressed as that: "These fairy tales are not senseless
stories written for the amusement of the idle; they embody the
profound religion of our forefathers."!
Precisely so. Not only their Religion, but likewise their History.
For a myth, in Greek fj-vOos, means oral tradition, passed from mouth to
mouth from one generation to the other; and even in the mpdern
etymology the term stands for a fabulous statement conveying some
important truth; a tale of some extraordinary personage whose biography
has become overgrown, owing to the veneration of successive
generations, with rich popular fancy, but which is no wholesale fable.
Like our ancestors, the primitive Aryans, we believe firmly in the
personality and intelligence of more than one phenomenon-producing
Force in Nature.
As time rolled on, the archaic teaching grew dimmer; and the
nations more or less
lost sight of the Highest and One Principle of all
things, and began to transfer the abstract attributes of the
Cause to the caused effects, which became in
Causeless
their turn causative, the
Creative Powers of the Universe; the great nations thus acted from
fear of profaning the Idea ; the smaller, because they either failed to
grasp it, or lacked the power of philosophic conception needed to
preserve it in all its immaculate purity. But one and all, with the
exception of the latest Aryans, now become Europeans and Christians,
show this veneration in their Cosmogonies. As Thomas Taylor, J the
most intuitional of all the translators of the Greek Fragments, shows,
no nation has ever conceived the One Principle as the immediate
creator of the visible Universe, for no sane man would credit a planner
and architect with having built with his own hands the edifice he
admires. On the testimony of Damascius in his work. On First
Principles (Hcpi npwrwi' 'Apx^v), they referred to it as the " Unknovv^n
Darkness." The Babylonians passed over this principle in silence.
"To that God," says Porphyry, in his O71 Abstinence (He/at a.Tro^i/'i;xt»)v), "who is above all things, neither external speech ought to
be addressed, nor yet that which is inward." Hesiod begins his
» Ibid., p. 2. + Ibid., p. 21. X See The Monthly Magazine, for April, 1797.