The Secret Doctrine Volume 3.pdf

A Mystery Within a Mystery- (Page 165) And now the situation stands thus: as the old
Alchemists have not left a key to their writings, the latter have become a mystery within an
older mystery. The Kabalah is interpreted and checked only by the light which mediaeval
Mystics have thrown upon it, and they, in their forced Christology, had to put a theological
dogmatic mask on every ancient teaching, the result being that each Mystic among our
modern European and American Kabalists interprets the old symbols in his own way, and
each refers his opponents to the Rosicrucian and the Alchemist of three and four hundred
years ago. Mystic Christian dogma is the central maelstrom that engulfs every old Pagan
symbol, and Christianity - Anti-Gnostic Christianity, the modern retort that has replaced the
alembic of the Alchemists - has distilled out of all recognition the Kabalah, i.e., the Hebrew
Zohar and other rabbinical mystic works. And now it has come to this: The student interested
in the Secret Sciences has to believe that the whole cycle of the symbolical “Ancient of
Days,” every hair of the mighty beard of Macroprosopos, refers only to the history of the
earthly career of Jesus of Nazareth! And we are told that the Kabalah “was first taught to a
select company of angels” by Jehovah himself - who, out of modesty, one must think, made
himself only the third Sephiroth in it, and a female one into the bargain. So many Kabalists,
so many explanations. Some believe - perchance with more reason than the rest - that the
substance of the Kabalah is the basis upon which masonry is built, since modern Masonry is
undeniable the dim and hazy reflection of primeval Occult Masonry, of the teaching of those
divine Masons who established the Mysteries of the prehistoric and prediluvian Temples of
Initiation, raised by truly superhuman Builders. Others declare that the tenets expounded in
the Zohar relate merely to mysteries terrestrial and profane, having no more concern with
metaphysical speculations - such as the soul, or the post-mortem life of man - than have the
Mosaic books. Others, again - and these are the real, genuine Kabalists, who had their
instructions from initiated Jewish Rabbis - affirm that if the two most learned Kabalists of the
mediaeval period, John Reuchlin and Paracelsus, differed in their religious professions - the
former being the Father of the Reformation and the latter a Roman Catholic, at least in
appearance - the Zohar cannot contain much of Christian dogma or tenet, one way or the
other. In other words, they maintain that the numerical language of the Kabalistic works
teaches universal truths - and not any one Religion in particular. Those who make this (Page
166) statement are perfectly right in saying that the Mystery-language used in the Zohar and
in other Kabalistic literature was once, in a time of unfathomable antiquity, the universal
language of Humanity. But they become entirely wrong if to this fact they add the untenable
theory that this language was invented by, or was the original property of, the Hebrews, from
whom all the other nations borrowed it.
They are wrong, because, although the Zohar ( .
) , The Book of Splendour
of Rabbi Simeon Ben Iochai, did indeed originate with him - his son, Rabbi Eleazar, helped
by his secretary, Rabbi Abba, compiling the Kabalistic teachings of his deceased father into a
work called the Zohar - those teachings were not Rabbi Simeon’s, as the Gupta Vidya
shows. They are as old as the Jewish nation itself. , and far older. In short, the writings which
pass at present under the title of the Zohar of Rabbi Simeon are about as original as were
the Egyptian synchronistic Tables after being handled by Eusebius, or as St. Paul’s Epistles
after their revision and correction by the “Holy Church.” [ This is proved if we take but a
single recorded instance. J. Picus de Mirandola, finding that there was more Christianity than
Judaism in the Kabalah, and discovering in it the doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, the
Divinity of Jesus, etc., wound up his proofs of this with a challenge to the world at large from
Rome. As Ginsburg shows: “In 1486, when only twenty-four years old, he [Pieus] published
nine hundred [Kabalistic] theses, which were placarded in Rome, and undertook to defend
them in the presence of all European scholars whom he invited to the Eternal City, promising
to defray their travelling expenses.]
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