THE RIDDLES OF THE SPHINXES. 573 elephant-headed god of wisdom (or magic learning), Ganesha, may be found among the stucco figures of the Mexican ruins. What explanation can the archeologists, philologists-in short, the chosen host of Academicians—give us? None whatever. At best they have but hypotheses, every one of which is likely to be pulled down by its successor a pseudo-truth, perhaps, like the first. The keys to the biblical miracles of old, and to the phenomena of modern days; the problems of psychology, physiology, and the many "missing links" which have so perplexed scientists of late, are all in the hands of secret fraternities. This mystery must be unveiled some day. But till then dark skepticism will constantly interpose its threatening, ugly shadow between God's truths and the spiritual vision of mankind; and many are those who, infected by the mortal epidemic of our century-hopeless materialism-will remain in doubt and mortal agony as to whether, when man dies, he will live again, although the question has been solved by long bygone generations of sages. The answers are there. They may be found on the time-worn granite pages of cave temples, on sphinxes, propylons, and obelisks. They have stood there for untold ages, and neither the rude assault of time, nor the still ruder assault of Christian hands, have succeeded in obliterating their records. All covered with the problems which were solved-who can tell? perhaps by the archaic forefathers of their builders-the solution follows each question; and this the Christian could not appropriate, for, except the initiates, no one has understood the mystic writing. The key was in the keeping of those who knew how to commune with the invisible Presence, and who had received, from the lips of mother Nature herself, her grand truths. And so stand these monuments like mute forgotten sentinels on the threshold of that unseen world, whose gates are thrown open but to a few elect. Defying the hand of Time, the vain inquiry of profane science, the insults of the revealed religions, they will disclose their riddles to none but the legatees of those by whom they were entrusted with the MYSTERY. The cold, stony lips of the once vocal Memnon, and of these hardy sphinxes, keep their secrets well. Who will unseal them? Who of our modern, materialistic dwarfs and unbelieving Sadducees will dare to lift the VEIL OF ISIS? CHAPTER XV. * STR.—Have we devils here? Do you put tricks upon us with savages, and men of Inde?" The Tempest, Act ii., Sc. a "We have now, so far forth as it is requisite for our design, considered the Nature and Functions of the Soule; and have plainly demonstrated that she is a substance distinct from the body." -DR. HENRY MORE: Immortality of the Soule. 1659. "KNOWLEDGE Is Power; Ignorance is IMBECILITY."—AUTHOR OF "Art-Magic :" Ghost-Land. THE HE "secret doctrine" has for many centuries been like the symbol. ical "man of sorrows" of the prophet Isaiah. "Who hath be lieved our report ?" its martyrs have repeated from one generation to another. The doctrine has grown up before its persecutors "as a tender plant and as a root out of a dry ground; it hath no form, nor comeliness . . it is despised and rejected of men; and they hid their faces from it. . . . They esteemed him not." There need be no controversy as to whether this doctrine agrees or not with the iconoclastic tendency of the skeptics of our times. It agrees with truth and that is enough. It would be idle to expect that it would be believed by its detractors and slanderers. But the tenacious vitality it exhibits all over the globe, wherever there are a group of men to quarrel over it, is the best proof that the seed planted by our fathers on "the other side of the flood" was that of a mighty oak, not the spore of a mushroom theology. No lightning of human ridicule can fell to the ground, and no thunderbolts ever forged by the Vulcans of science are powerful enough to blast the trunk, or even scar the branches of this world-tree of KNOWLEDGE. We have but to leave unnoticed their letter that killeth, and catch the subtile spirit of their hidden wisdom, to find concealed in the Books of Hermes-be they the model or the copy of all others—the evidences of a truth and philosophy which we feel must be based on the eternal laws. We instinctively comprehend that, however finite the powers of man, while he is yet embodied, they must be in close kinship with the attributes of an infinite Deity; and we become capable of better appreciating the hidden serse of the gift lavished by the Elohim on H'Adam: “Behold, I have given you everything which is upon the face of all the earth . . . subdue it," and "have dominion" over ALL. Had the allegories contained in the first chapters of Genesis been THE FDEN OF THE BIBLE AND OF FACT. 571 better understood, even in their geographical and historical sense, which involve nothing at all esoteric, the claims of its true interpreters, the kabalists, could hardly have been rejected for so long a time. Every student of the Bible must be aware that the first and second chapters of Genesis could not have proceeded from the same pen. They are evidently allegories and parables; * for the two narratives of the creation and peopling of our earth diametrically contradict each other in nearly every particular of o: der, time, place, and methods employed in the socalled creation. In accepting the narratives literally, and as a whole, we lower the dignity of the unknown Deity. We drag him down to the level of humanity, and endow him with the peculiar personality of man, who needs the "cool of the day" to refresh him; who rests from his labors; and is capable of anger, revenge, and even of using precautions against man, "lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life." (A tacit admission, by the way, on the part of the Deity, that man could do it, if not prevented by sheer force.) But, in recognizing the allegorical coloring of the description of what may be termed historical. facts, we find our feet instantly on firm ground. To begin with the garden of Eden as a locality is no myth at all; it belongs to those landmarks of history which occasionally disclose to the student that the Bible is not all mere allegory. "Eden, or the Hebrew 17973 GAN-EDEN, meaning the park or the garden of Eden, is an archaic name of the country watered by the Euphrates and its many branches, from Asia and Armenia to the Erythraian Sea." In the Chaldean Book of Numbers, its location is designated in numerals, and in the cipher Rosicrucian manuscript, left by Count St. Germain, it is fully described. In the Assyrian Tablets, it is rendered gan-dunyas. "Behold," say the Eloim of Genesis, "the man is become as one of us." The Eloim may be accepted in one sense for gods or powers, and taken in another one for the Aleim, or priests; the hierophants initiated into the good and the evil of this world; for there was a college of priests called the Aleim, while the head of their caste, or the chief of the hierophants, was known as Java Aleim. Instead of becoming a neophyte, and gradually obtain ing his esoteric knowledge through a regular initiation, an Adam, or man, uses his intuitional faculties, and, prompted by the Serpent-Woman and matter-tastes of the Tree of Knowledge-the esoteric or secret doctrine -unlawfully. The priests of Hercules, or Mel-Karth, the "Lord" of the Eden, all wore "coats of skin." The text says: "And Java Aleim, 66 CHITONUTH OUR." The first ,כתנות צור made for Adam and his wife *See Paul to the Galatians, iv. 24, and Gospel according to Matthew, xiii 10-15. A. Wilder says that "Gan-duniyas," is a name of Babylonia. Hebrew word, chitun, is the Greek xirov, chiton. It became a Slavonie word by adoption from the Bible, and means a coat, an upper garment. Though containing the same substratum of esoteric truth as every early cosmogony, the Hebrew Scripture wears on its face the marks of its double origin. Its Genesis is purely a reminiscence of the Babylonian captivity. The names of places, men, and even objects, can be traced from the original text to the Chaldeans and the Akkadians, the progenitors and Aryan instructors of the former. It is strongly contested that the Akkad tribes of Chaldea, Babylonia, and Assyria were in any way cognate with the Brahmans, of Hindustan; but there are more proofs in favor of this opinion than otherwise. The Shemite, or Assyrian, ought, per. chance, to have been called the Turanian, and the Mongolians have been denominated Scyths. But if the Akkadians ever existed otherwise than in the imagination of some philologists and ethnologists, they certainly would never have been a Turanian tribe, as some Assyriologists have striven to make us believe. They were simply emigrants on their way to Asia Minor from India, the cradle of humanity, and their sacerdotal adepts tarried to civilize and initiate a barbarian people. Halevy proved the fallacy of the Turanian mania in regard to the Akkadian people, whose very name has been changed a dozen times already; and other scientists have proved that the Babylonian civilization was neither born nor developed in that country. It was imported from India, and the importers were Brahmanical Hindus. It is the opinion of Professor A. Wilder, that if the Assyrians had been called Turanians and the Mongolians Scyths, then, in such a case the wars of Iran and Turan, Zohak and Jemshid, or Yima, would have been fairly comprehended as the struggle of the old Persians against the endeavors of the Assyrian satraps to conquer them, which ended in the overthrow of Nineveh; "the spider weaving her web in the palace of Afrasiab." "The Turanian of Prof. Müller and his school," adds our correspondent, "was evidently the savage and nomadic Caucasian, out of whom the Hamite or Æthiopian builders come; then the Shemites-perhaps a hy brid of Hamite and Aryan; and lastly the Aryan-Median, Persian, Hindu; and later, the Gothic and Slavic peoples of Europe. He supposes the Celt to have been a hybrid, analogous to the Assyrians-between the Aryan invaders of Europe and the Iberic (probably Æthiopic) population of Europe." In such a case he must admit the possibility of our assertion that the Akkadians were a tribe of the earliest Hindus. Now, *The appropriate definition of the name "Turanian" is, any ethnic family that ethnologists know nothing about. TWO REMARKABLE CINGALESE RELICS. 577 whether they were Brahmans, from the Brahmanic planisphere proper (40° north latitude), or from India (Hindustan), or, again, from the India of Central Asia, we will leave to philologists of future ages to decide. An opinion which with us amounts to certitude, demonstrated by an inductive method of our own, which we are afraid will be but little appreciated by the orthodox methods of modern science, is based on wha will appear to the latter merely circumstantial evidence. For years we have repeatedly noticed that the same esoteric truths were expressed in identical symbols and allegories in countries between which there had never been traced any historical affiliation. We have found the Jewish Kabala and the Bible repeating the Babylonian "myths," and the Oriental and Chaldean allegories, given in form and substance in the oldest manuscripts of the Siamese Talapoin (monks), and in the popular but oldest traditions of Ceylon. In the latter place we have an old and valued acquaintance whom we have also met in other parts of the globe, a Pali scholar, and a native Cingalese, who has in his possession a curious palm leaf, to which, by chemical processes, a timeproof durability has been given, and an enormous conch, or rather one-half of a conch-for it has been split in two. On the leaf we saw the representation of a giant of Ceylonian antiquity and fame, blind, and pulling down—with his outstretched arms, which are embracing the four central pillars of a pagoda-the whole temple on a crowd of armed enemies. His hair is long and reaches nearly to the ground. We were informed by the possessor of this curious relic, that the blind giant was "Somona, the Little; so called in contradistinction with Somona-Kadom, the Siamese saviour. Moreover, the Pali legend, in its important particulars, corresponds with that of the biblical Sam son. The shell bore upon its pearly surface a pictorial engraving, divided in two compartments, and the workmanship was far more artistic, as to conception and execution, than the crucifixes and other religious trinkets carved out of the same material in our days, at Jaffa and Jerusalem. In the first panel is represented Siva, with all his Hindu attributes, sacrificing his son-whether the "only-begotten," or one of many, we never stopped to inquire. The victim is laid on a funeral pile, and the father is hovering in the air over him, with an uplifted weapon ready to strike but the god's face is turned toward a jungle in which a rhinoceros has deeply buried its horn in a huge tree and is unable to extricate it. The adjoining panel, or division, represet.ts the same rhinoceros on the pile • See Berosus and Sanchoniathon; Cory's "Ancient Fragments; " Movers, and others. |