Madame Blavatsky On The Origin And Source Of The Secret Doctrine

Madame Blavatsky's Victorian-era masterpiece is now scaled down to its essentials, providing the most readable, accessible experience ever of one of history's seminal occult works. The Secret Doctrine, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky's masterwork on the origin and evolution of the universe and humanity itself, is arguably the most famous, and perhaps the most influential, occult book ever written. Published since 1888 only in expensive, two-volume editions of some 1,400 pages, it has long eluded the grasp of modern readers- until now. This single-volume edition, abridged and annotated by historian and Theosophical scholar Michael Gomes, places the ideas of The Secret Doctrine within reach of all who are curious. In particular, Gomes provides a critical sounding of the book's famous stanzas on the genesis of life and the cosmos- mysterious passages that Blavatsky said originated from a primeval source and which form the heart of The Secret Doctrine. Gomes scrupulously scales down the book's key writings on symbolism to their essentials, and offers notes and a glossary to illuminate arcane references. His historical and literary introduction casts new light on some of the book's sources and on the career of its brilliant and elusive author, one of the most intriguing personages of the nineteenth century. At once compact and representative of the work as a whole, this new edition of The Secret Doctrine brings unprecedented accessibility to the key esoteric classic of the modern era.

The Book of Dzyan is the first volume of Commentaries upon the seven secret folios of Kiu-te, and a Glossary of the public works of the same name. The thirty-five volumes of Kiu-te ought to be termed “the popularised version of the Secret Doctrine.” They are full of myths, blinds, and errors. On the other hand, the fourteen volumes of Commentaries — with their translations, annotations, and glossaries of Occult terms, worked out from one small archaic folio, the “Book of the Secret Wisdom of the World” — contain a digest of all the Occult Sciences. It is from the texts of all these works that the Secret Doctrine has been given in 1888.

Madame Blavatsky's Victorian-era masterpiece is now scaled down to its essentials, providing the most readable, accessible experience ever of one of history's seminal occult works. The Secret Doctrine, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky's masterwork on the origin and evolution of the universe and humanity itself, is arguably the most famous, and perhaps the most influential, occult book ever written. Published since 1888 only in expensive, two-volume editions of some 1,400 pages, it has long eluded the grasp of modern readers- until now. This single-volume edition, abridged and annotated by historian and Theosophical scholar Michael Gomes, places the ideas of The Secret Doctrine within reach of all who are curious. In particular, Gomes provides a critical sounding of the book's famous stanzas on the genesis of life and the cosmos- mysterious passages that Blavatsky said originated from a primeval source and which form the heart of The Secret Doctrine. Gomes scrupulously scales down the book's key writings on symbolism to their essentials, and offers notes and a glossary to illuminate arcane references. His historical and literary introduction casts new light on some of the book's sources and on the career of its brilliant and elusive author, one of the most intriguing personages of the nineteenth century. At once compact and representative of the work as a whole, this new edition of The Secret Doctrine brings unprecedented accessibility to the key esoteric classic of the modern era.

The European Occultists see in the Jewish Kabbalah alone the universal well of wisdom and find in it the secret lore of nearly all the mysteries of Nature. For them the Zohar is an Esoteric Thesaurus of all the mysteries of the Christian Gospel. The Esoteric language used by the Alchemists was their own, given out as a blind necessitated by the dangers of the epoch they lived in, and not as the Mystery-language, as used by the Pagan Initiates, which the Alchemists had re-translated and re-veiled once more. Some believe that the substance of the Kabbalah 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. Others maintain that the numerical language of the Kabbalistic 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 Kabbalistic literature was once 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 allegedly borrowed it. The writings which pass today under the title of the Zohar of Rabbi Shimon are not authentic. Moreover, the lore found in Kabbalistic literature was never recorded in writing before the first century of the modern era. There was at all times a Kabbalistic literature among the Jews, 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, a series of symbolical records which the Jews had copied from the Egyptian and the Chaldæan Sanctuaries, only adapting them to their own national history. Jews and Christians rely on a phonograph of a dead and almost unknown language. There are scholars who do not carry the now-known Hebrew square letters beyond the late period of the fourth century. The real Hebrew of Moses was lost after the seventy years’ captivity and ceased from that time to be a spoken language. The Lost Tribes of Israel is a pure invention of the Rabbis. Not only are there no proofs of the twelve tribes of Israel having ever existed, but Herodotus, the most accurate of historians, who was in Assyria when Ezra flourished, never mentions the Israelites at all; and Herodotus was born in B.C. It is now becoming apparent that the Kabbalah of the Jews is but the distorted echo of the Secret Doctrine of the Chaldæans, and that the real Kabbalah is found only in the Chaldæan Book of Numbers, now in the possession of certain Persian Sufis. Hebrew cannot be called an old language, merely because Adam is supposed to have used it in the Garden of Eden. Linguistic analysis shows that the old Egyptian tongue was only old Hebrew and that the two nations lived together for centuries. Before adopting the Chaldæan for their phonetic tongue, the Jews had already adopted the old Coptic or Egyptian. The Hebrew Scriptures had been tampered with and remodelled, had been lost and rewritten, a dozen times before the days of Ezra. In its hidden meaning, from Genesis to the last word of Deuteronomy, the Pentateuch is the symbolical narrative of the sexes, and an apotheosis of Phallicism under astronomical and physiological personations. The wise King of Israel who succeeded his father, King David, was noticed neither by Herodotus, nor by Plato, nor by Diodorus Siculus, nor by any writer of standing. The Bible as it is now (i.e., the Hebrew texts), depends for its accuracy on the authenticity of the Septuagint, written miraculously by the “Seventy” in Greek, and the original copy having been lost since, our texts have been re-translated backward into Hebrew. So little, indeed, was Hebrew known that both the Septuagint and the New Testament had to be written in Greek, a heathen language, and no better reasons for it given than that “the Holy Ghost chose to write the New Testament in Greek.” The new system of the Masoretic points has made the Hebrew characters a sphinx-like riddle for all. Punctuation is now to be found everywhere, in all later manuscripts, and by means of it anything can be made of a text; a Hebrew scholar can put on the texts any interpretation he likes. The Tower of Babel myth relates to enforced secrecy. Men falling into sin were regarded as no longer trustworthy for the reception of such esoteric knowledge and, from being universal, it became limited to the few. One of the chief Lords or Hierophants of the Mysteries of Yava-Aleim had confounded the languages of the earth, so that the sinners could understand one another’s speech no longer. There are two distinct styles, two antagonistic schools, plainly traceable in the Hebrew Scriptures — the Elohistic and the Jehovistic. The one taught strictly esoteric doctrines, the other theological doctrines. The Elohists identified their Deity, as in the Secret Doctrine, with Nature. The Jehovists made of Jehovah a personal God and used the term simply as a phallic symbol. The original Mosaic text have been tampered with and replaced by that of the later Levites, who practiced degenerate mysteries and veiled Pantheism under Monotheism. The Ain-Soph of the Chaldæans, and later of the Jews, is a copy of the Vedic Deity; while the “Heavenly Adam,” the Macrocosm which unites in itself the totality of beings and is the Spirit of the visible universe, finds his original in the Puranic Brahmā. The Zohar places Ain-Soph, or Absolute Unity, outside human thought and appreciation; and in the Sepher Yetzirah the Spirit of God (Logos, not the Deity itself) is called The One. The true meaning of the compound name of Jehovah (of which, unvowelled, you can make almost anything) is men and women, or humanity composed of two sexes. A Kabbalist traces Jehovah from the Adam of earth to Seth, the third “son,” or rather race, of Adam. Thus Seth is Jehovah male; and Enos, being a permutation of Cain and Abel, is Jehovah male and female, or mankind. Eve stands as the evolution and the never-ceasing “becoming” of Nature. If we call Jehovah by his divine name, then he becomes at best and forthwith “a female passive” potency in Chaos. And if we view him as a male God, he is no more than one of many angels. There are four Adams, one for each of the preceding Root-Races. Thus the Kabbalah, as we have it now, is of the greatest importance in explaining the allegories and “dark sayings” of the Bible. As an Esoteric work upon the mysteries of creation, however, it is almost worthless as it is now disfigured — unless cross-checked by the Chaldæan Book of Numbers or by the tenets of the Eastern Secret Science. We have shown that the “Hebrew Bible” exists no more and hat uninitiated have to content with the garbled accounts and falsified copies of the real Mosaic Bible of the Initiates. The Temple of King Solomon exists to this day as a stupendous living monument of Esoteric records, while the famous temple has never existed outside of the far later Hebrew scrolls. The letters in the Hebrew sacred scrolls are musical notes. In the Sanskrit language letters are continually arranged in the sacred ollas so that they may become musical notes. Thus the Devanagari are the speech of the Gods, and Sanskrit, is the divine language. Sanskrit is the perfect form of the most perfect language on earth; Hebrew, the roughest and the poorest. The six days of the week and the seventh, the Sabbath, are based primarily on the seven creations of the Hindu Brahmā, the seventh being that of man; and, secondarily, on the number of generation. The Sabbath is pre-eminently and most conspicuously phallic. The mystery of the woman, who was made from the man, is repeated in every national religion, and in Scriptures far antedating the Jewish. Genesis does not begin at the beginning. Neither the septiform chronology nor the septiform theogony and evolution of all things is of divine origin in the Bible. The Jews never had more than three keys out of the seven in mind, while composing their national allegories — the astronomical, the numerical, and above all the purely anthropological, or rather physiological key. This resulted in the most phallic religion of all, and has now passed, part and parcel, into Christian theology.

The "Würzburg manuscript" is a partial copy of H.P. Blavatsky's early manuscript of "The Secret Doctrine," written in 1885 and 1886 while staying in Würzburg, Germany and Ostende, Belgium.