The secret doctrine

Thus the heaven and the earth were finished and all the host of them,

These seven lights relate to the seven branches of the candlestick by which were represented the seven [ principal ] planets in the temples of Moses and Solomon . . . or, better still, to the seven principal Spirits, commissioned to watch over the salvation of men and churches.

St. Jerome says:

In truth the candlestick with the seven branches was the type of the world and its planets.

I do not remember having ever met in the works of saints or philosophers a denial that the planets are guided by spiritual beings . . . . It seems to me that it may be proved to demonstration that the celestial bodies are guided by some intelligence, either directly by God, or by the mediation of angels. But the latter opinion seems to be far more consonant with the order of things asserted by St. Denys to be without exception, that everything on earth is, as a rule, governed by God through intermediary agencies. [ We give the original: “Coelestia corpora moveri a spiritual creatura, a nemine Sanctorum vel philosophorum, negatum, legisse me memini. (Opuse. X. art. iiil) ... Mihi autam videtur quod Demonstrative probari posset, quod ab aliquo intellectu corpora coelestia moveantur vel a Deo immediate, vel a mediantibus angelis. Sed quod mediantibus angelis ca moveat, congruit rerum ordine, quem Dionysius infallibilem asserit ut inferiora a Deo per Media secundum cursum communem administrentur” (Opusc. II. art . ii.) and if so, and God never meddles with the once for ever established laws of Nature, leaving it to his administrators, why should their being called Gods by the “heathen” to be deemed idolatrous?]

And now let the reader recall what the Pagans say of this. All the classical authors and philosophers who have treated the subject, repeat with Hermes Trismegistus, that the seven Rectors—the planets including the sun—were the associates, or the co-workers, of the Unknown All represented by the Demiurgos—commissioned to contain the Cosmos—our Planetary world—within seven circles.
Celestial Wheels - (Page 329) Plutarch shows them representing “the circle of the celestial worlds.” Again, Denys of Thracia and the learned Clemens of Alexandria both describe the Rectors as being shown in the Egyptian temples in the shape of mysterious wheels or spheres always in motion, which made the Initiates affirm that the problem of perpetual motion had been solved by the celestial wheels in the Initiation Adyta. [ In one of Des Mousseaux's volumes on Demonology (Œuvres des Demons) if we do not mistake.) the statement of the Abbé Huc is found, and the author testifies to having heard the following story repeatedly from the Abbé himself. In a lamasery of Tibet, the missionary found the following:

It is a simple canvas without the slightest mechanical apparatus attached, as the visitor may prove by examining it at his leisure. It represents a moonlit landscape, but the moon is not at all motionless or dead: quite the reverse, for, according to the Abbé, one would say that our moon herself, or at least her living double, lighted the picture. Each phase, each aspect, each movement of our satellite, is repeated in her facsimile, in the movement and progress of the moon in the sacred picture. “You see this planet in the painting ride as a crescent, or full, shine brightly, pass behind the clouds, peep out or set, in a manner corresponding in the most extraordinary way with the real luminary. It is, in a word, a most perfect and resplendent reproduction of the pale queen of the night, which received the adoration of so many people in the days of old.” We know from the most reliable sources and numerous eye-witnesses, that such “machines”—not canvas paintings—do exist in certain temples of Tibet: as also the “sidereal wheels” representing the planets, and kept for the same purposes—astrological and magical. Huc’s statement was translated in Isis Unveiled from Des Mousseaux’s volume.] This doctrine of Hermes was that of Pythagoras and of Orpheus before him. It is called by Proclus “the God-given” doctrine. Iamblichus speaks of it with greatest reverence. Philostratus tell his readers that the whole sidereal court of the Babylonian heaven was represented in the temples.

In globes made of sapphires and supporting the golden images of their respective gods.

The temples of Persia were especially famous for these representations. If Cedrenus can be credited

The Emperor Heraclius on his entry into the city of Bazaeum was struck with admiration and wonder before the immense machine fabricated for King Chosroes, which represented the night-sky with the planets and all their revolutions, with the angels presiding over them. [ Cedrenus, p.338. Whether produced by clockwork or magic power, such machines—whole celestial spheres with planets rotating—were found in the Sanctuaries, and some exist to this day in Japan, in a secret subterranean temple of the old Mikados, as well as in two other places.]

It was on such “spheres” that Pythagoras studied Astronomy in the adyta arcana of the temples to which he had access. And it was there on his Initiation, that the eternal rotation of those spheres—“the mysterious wheels” as they are called by Clemens and Denys, and which Plutarch calls “world-wheels”—demonstrated to him the verity (Page 330) of what had been divulged to him, namely, the heliocentric system, the great secret of the Adyta. All the discoveries of modern astronomy, like all the secrets that can be revealed to it in future ages, were contained in the secret observatories and Initiation Halls of the temples of old India and Egypt. It is in them that the Chaldæan made his calculations revealing to the world of the profane no more than it was fit to receive.

To give with his right foot the impulse to Tyam or Bhûmi [ Earth ] that makes her rotate in a double revolution.

What says Hermes again? When explaining Egyptian Cosmology he explains:

Listen, O my son . . . the Power has also formed seven agents, who contain within their circles the material world, and whose action is called destiny . . . . When all became subject to man, the Seven, willing to favour human intelligence, communicated to him their powers. But as soon as man knew their true essence and his own nature, he desired to penetrate within and beyond the circles and thus break their circumference by usurping the power of him who has dominion over the Fire [ Sun ] itself; after which, having robbed one of the Wheels of the Sun of the sacred fire, he fell into slavery. [ Champollion’s Egypte Moderne. p.42.]

But astrology is nevertheless proclaimed as a sinful science, and together with Occultism is tabooed by the Churches. It is very doubtful, however, whether mystic “star-worship” can be so easily laughed down as people imagine—at any rate by Christians. The hosts of Angels, Cherubs and Planetary Archangels are identical with the minor Gods of the Pagans. As to their “great Gods,” if Mars has been shown—on the admission of even the enemies of the Pagan astrologers—to have been regarded by the latter simply as the personified strength of the one highest impersonal Deity, Mercury being personified as its omniscience, Jupiter as its omnipotency, and so on, then the “superstition” of the Pagan has indeed become the “religion” of the masses of the civilized nations. For with the latter, Jehovah is the synthesis of the seven Elohim, the eternal centre of all those attributes and forces, the Alei of the Aleim, and the Adonai of the Adonim. And if with them Mars is now called St. Michael, the “strength of God,” Mercury Gabriel, the “omniscience and fortitude of the Lord,” and Raphael “the blessing or healing power of God,” this is simply a change of names, the characters behind the masks remaining the same.

Salutation to you, O Princes, who stand in the presence of Osiris . . . . Send me the grace to have my sins destroyed, as you have done for the seven spirits who follow the Lord! [ Translated by the Vicomte de Rougemont. See Les Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne, 7^th year. 1861 ]

One of the most characteristic features of our Holy Scriptures is the calculated discretion used in the enunciation of the mysteries less directly useful to salvation. . . . . Thus, beyond those “myriads of myriads” of angelic creatures just noticed [ If enumerated, they will be found to be the Hindu “divisions” and choirs of Devas, and the Dhyân Chohans of Esoteric Buddhism.] and all these prudently elementary divisions, there are certainly many others, whose very names have not yet reached us. [ But this fact has not prevented the Roman Church from adopting them all the same, accepting them from ignorant, though perchance sincere Church Fathers, who had borrowed them from Kabalists—Jews and Pagans. ] “For,” excellently says St. John Chrysostom, “there are doubtless, (sine dubio,) many other Virtues [ celestial beings ] whose denominations we are yet far from knowing . . . . The nine orders are not by any means the only populations in heaven, where, on the contrary, are to be found numberless tribes of inhabitants infinitely varied, and of which it would be impossible to give the slightest idea through human tongue . . .. Paul, who had learned their names, reveals to us their existence.” ( De Incomprehensibili Natura Dei, Bk. IV.) . . .

It would thus amount to a gross mistake to see merely errors in the Angelology of the Kabalists and Gnostics, so severely treated by the Apostle of the Gentiles, for his imposing censure reached only their exaggerations and vicious interpretations, and still more, the application of those noble titles to the miserable personalities of demoniacal usurpers. [To call “usurpers” those who preceded the Christian Beings for whose benefit these same titles were borrowed, is carrying paradoxical anachronism a little too far! ] Often nothing so resemble each other as the language of the judges and that of the convicts [ of saints and Occultists ]. One has to penetrate deeply into this dual study [ of creed and profession ] and what is still better, to trust blindly to the authority of the tribunal [ the Church of Rome, of course ] to enable oneself to seize precisely the point of the error. The Gnosis condemned by St. Paul remains, nevertheless, for him as for Plato the supreme knowledge of the truths, and of the Being par excellence, σ σντως (Republ. Bk. VI). The Ideas, types,αρχαι of the Greek philosopher, the Intelligences of Pythagoras, the aeons or emanations, the occasion of so much reproach to the first heretics, the Logos or Word, Chief of these Intelligences, the Demiurgos, the architect of the world under his father’s direction [ of the Pagans ], the unknown God, the En-soph, or the It of the Infinite [ of the Kabalists], the angelical periods, [ Or the divine ages, the “days and years of Brahmâ.”] the seven spirits, the Depths of Ahriman, the World’s Rectors, the Archontes of the air, the God of this world, the pleroma of the (Page 336) intelligences, down to Metatron the angel of the Jews, all this is found word for word, as so many truths, in the works of our greatest doctors, and in St. Paul.[ De Mirville. ii. 325, 326. So we say too. And this shows that it is to the Kabalists and Magicians that the Church is indebted for her dogmas and names. Paul never condemned real Gnosis, but the false one, now accepted by the Church.]

If an Occultist, eager to charge the Church with a numberless series of plagiarisms were to write the above, could he have written more strongly? And have we, or have we not, the right, after such a complete confession, to reverse the tables and to say of Roman Catholics and others what is said of the Gnostics and Occultists. “They used our expressions and rejected our doctrines.” For it is not the “promoters of the false Gnosis”—who had all those expressions from their archaic ancestors—who helped themselves to Christian expressions, but verily the Christian Fathers and Theologians, who helped themselves to our nest, and have tried ever since to soil it.