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The Secret Doctrine Volume 3.pdf

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. . .gives a light to every age,<br />

It gives, but borrows none.<br />

for it does borrow, and that very considerably; especially in the opinion of those who,<br />

ignorant of its symbolical meaning and of the university of the truths underlying and<br />

concealed in it, are able to judge only from its dead letter appearance. It is a grand<br />

volume, a master-piece composed of clever, ingenious fables containing great<br />

verities; but it reveals the latter only to those who, like the Initiates, have a key to its<br />

inner meaning; a tale sublime in its morality and didactics truly - still a tale and an<br />

allegory; a repertory of invented personages in its older Jewish portions, and of dark<br />

sayings and parables in its later additions, and thus quite misleading to anyone<br />

ignorant of its Esotericism. Moreover it is Astrolatry and Sabaean worship, pure and<br />

simple, that is to be found in the Pentateuch when it is read exoterically, and Archaic<br />

Science and Astronomy to a most wonderful degree, when interpreted - Esoterically.<br />

SECTION VIII<br />

<strong>The</strong> Book of Enoch <strong>The</strong> Origin and the Foundation of Christianity<br />

(Page 82) WHILE making a good deal of the Mercavah, the Jews, or rather their<br />

synagogues, rejected the Book of Enoch, either because it was not included from the<br />

first in the Hebrew Canon, or else, as Tertullian thought, it was disavowed<br />

by the Jews like all other Scripture which speaks of Christ [Book of<br />

Enoch, Archbishop Laurence’s translation. Introduction, p.v.]<br />

But neither of these reasons was the real one. <strong>The</strong> Synedrion would have nothing to<br />

do with it, simply because it was more of a magic than a purely kabalistic work. <strong>The</strong><br />

present day <strong>The</strong>ologians of both Latin and Protestant Churches class it among<br />

apocryphal productions. Nevertheless the New Testament, especially in the Acts and<br />

Epistles, teems with ideas and doctrines, now accepted and established as dogmas<br />

by the infallible Roman and other Churches, and even with the whole sentences<br />

taken bodily from Enoch, or the “pseudo-Enoch,” who wrote under that name in<br />

Aramaic or Syro-Chaldaic, as asserted by Bishop Laurence, the translator of the<br />

Ethiopian text.<br />

<strong>The</strong> plagiarisms are so glaring that the author of <strong>The</strong> Evolution of<br />

Christianity, who edited Bishop Laurence’s translation, was compelled<br />

to make some suggestive remarks in his Introduction. On internal<br />

evidence [ <strong>The</strong> Book of Enoch was unknown to Europe for a thousand<br />

years, when Bruce found in Abyssinia some copies of it in Ethiopic; it<br />

was translated by Archbishop Laurence in 1821, from the text in the<br />

Bodleian Library, Oxford.] this book is found to have been written<br />

before the Christian period (whether two or twenty centuries does not<br />

matter). As correctly argued by the Editor, it is<br />

either the inspired forecast of a great Hebrew prophet, predicting with<br />

miraculous accuracy the future teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, or the<br />

Semitic romance from which the latter borrowed His conceptions of the<br />

triumphant return of the Son of man, to occupy a judicial throne in the<br />

midst of rejoicing saints and trembling sinners, expectant of everlasting<br />

happiness or eternal fire; and whether these celestial visions be<br />

accepted as human or Divine, they have exercised so vast an influence<br />

on the destinies of mankind for nearly two thousand years that candid<br />

70

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