Theos-Talk Archives (April 2008 Message tt00105)

To all readers


My views are:


The following might help some of the students understand, various issues, which some students are not ordinarily accostumed to due the culture they live in.



THE EASTERN GUPTA VIDYÂ AND THE KABALAH 



Vol 14 Page 167 

THE EASTERN GUPTA VIDYÂ AND THE KABALAH 

We now return to the consideration of the essential identity between the Eastern Gupta-Vidyâ and the Kabalah as a system, while we must also show the dissimilarity in their philosophical interpretations since the Middle Ages.
It must be confessed that the views of the Kabalists--meaning by the word those students of Occultism who study the Jewish Kabalah and who know little, if anything, of any other Esoteric literature or of its teachings--are as varied in their synthetic conclusions upon the nature of the mysteries taught even in the Zohar alone, and are as wide of the true mark, as are the dicta upon it of exact Science itself. Like the mediaeval Rosicrucian and the Alchemist--like the Abbot Trithemius, John Reuchlin, Agrippa, Paracelsus, Robert Fludd, Philalethes, etc.--by whom they swear, the continental Occultists see in the Jewish Kabalah alone the universal well of wisdom; they find in it the secret lore of nearly all the mysteries of Nature--metaphysical and divine--some of them including herein, as did Reuchlin, those of the Christian Bible. For them the Zohar is an Esoteric Thesaurus of all the mysteries of the Christian Gospel; and the Sepher Yetzîrah is the light that shines in every darkness, and the container of the keys to open every secret in Nature. Whether many of our modern followers of the mediaeval Kabalists have an idea of the real meaning of the symbology of their chosen Masters is another question. Most of them have probably never given even a passing thought to



Page 168


the fact that the Esoteric language used by the Alchemists was their own, and that it was given out as a blind, necessitated by the dangers of the epoch they lived in, and not as the Mystery-language, used by the Pagan Initiates, which the Alchemists had re-translated and re-veiled once more.
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 Macroprosopus, 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 Sephîrôth 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 undeniably 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 



Page 169


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 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 (  , ZHR), The Book of Splendour of Rabbi Shimon ben-Yohai, did indeed originate with him--his son, Rabbi Eleazâr, helped by his secretary, Rabbi Abbâ, compiling the Kabalistic teachings of his deceased father into a work called the Zohar--those teachings were not Rabbi Shimon's, as the Gupta-Vidyâ 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 Shimon 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."*
Let us throw a rapid retrospective glance at the history and

----------
* This is proved if we take but a single recorded instance. G. Pico della 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 Christian D. Ginsburg shows ["as the result of his Kabbalistic studies Mirandola published, in 1486, when only twenty-four years of age, nine hundred thesis, which were placarded in Rome, and which he undertook to defend in the presence of all European scholars whom he invited to the Eternal City, promising to defray their travelling expenses." (Page 206 of the 1974 reprint of Ginsburg's essays, The Essenes and The Kabbalah . . . See bibliography in the appendix of this volume.) --Compiler. ]
----------



Page 170


the tribulations of that very same Zohar, as we know of them from trustworthy tradition and documents. We need not stop to discuss whether it was written in the first century B.C. or in the first century A.D. Suffice it for us to know that there was at all times a Kabalistic literature among the Jews; that though historically it can be traced only from the time of the Captivity, yet from the Pentateuch down to the Talmud the documents of that literature were ever written in a kind of Mystery-language, were, in fact, a series of symbolical records which the Jews had copied from the Egyptian and the Chaldaean Sanctuaries, only adapting them to their own national history--if history it can be called. Now that which we claim--and it is not denied even by the most prejudiced Kabalist, is that although Kabalistic lore had passed orally through long ages down to the latest pre-Christian Tannaim, and although David and Solomon may have been great Adepts in it, as is claimed, yet no one dared to write it down till the days of Shimon ben-Yohai. In short, the lore found in Kabalistic literature was never recorded in writing before the first century of the modern era.
This brings the critic to the following reflection: While in India we find the Vedas and the Brâhmanical literature written down and edited ages before the Christian era--the Orientalists themselves being obliged to concede a couple of millenniums of antiquity to the older manuscripts; while the most important allegories in Genesis are found recorded on Babylonian tiles centuries B.C.; while the Egyptian sarcophagi yearly yield proofs of the origin of the doctrines borrowed and copied by the Jews; yet the Monotheism of the Jews is exalted and thrown into the teeth of all the Pagan nations, and the so-called Christian Revelation is placed above all others, like the sun above a row of street gas lamps. Yet it is perfectly well known, having been ascertained beyond doubt or cavil, that no manuscript, whether Kabalistic, Talmudistic, or Christian, which has reached our present generation, is of earlier date than the first centuries of our era, whereas this can certainly never be said of the Egyptian papyri or the Chaldaean tiles, or even of some Eastern writings.



- - - - - - - -




The People of the Secret and The Eight Sephirot of the Kabalah

"The accepted modern authority on Jewry, The Jewish Encyclopaedia, declares
that it
came from Basra, as one of the treaties composing the
Encyclopaedia of the Faithful Brethren published in 980 !

The statement seems unequivocal. "...The Faithful
Brothers of Basra originated the eight elements which form
God..." Then perhaps comes the clue to all the square pegs and
round holes that have followed: "...changed by a Jewish
philosopher in the middle of the 11th century into ten".
"The People of the Secret" by Ernest Scott; page 76



- - - - - - - -

M. Sufilight

H. P. Blavatsky said: 
"The Society founded to remedy the glaring evils of Christianity, to shun bigotry and intolerance, cant and superstition and to cultivate real universal love extending even to the dumb brute". 
(The Collected Writings of H. P. Blavatsky, vol. 7, p.246) 

Master KH wrote in a Mahatma Letter: 
For the opposition represents enormous vested interests, and they have enthusiastic help from the Dugpas -- in Bhootan and the Vatican! 
(Here is all of Mahtama Letter, No. 55. Dugpas are the same as selfish Magicians.) 





[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]