Blavatsky on Nebo, the Son of Merodach and Zarpanitu

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 11 pages

A manuscript in Blavatsky's own handwriting, once owned by her friend the publisher John Watkins, marked XV(a) and running to a little over twelve numbered pages. Boris de Zirkoff, who transcribed it from microfilm, suggests it may have been intended for the Secret Doctrine and later set aside; a few words and sentences in it remain illegible.

Its subject is the serpent, and the argument is about what was lost rather than what was believed. The dragon or serpent, she writes, has always allegorised eternity, divine intelligence and hidden wisdom; the old sidereal serpent is the fallen Jupiter, prototype of the fallen archangel, and the Prince of the Air became on mediaeval canvases a kind of fantastic draco-volans. When the Christian nations destroyed the seats of learning and the pagan temples they lost the key to the symbol, and their clergy chose thereafter to see the devil's horn and hoof in the foundation of every old non-Christian temple. She cites Aelianus on why the Athenians kept large serpents in their temples — to have prophets always on hand — and notes the same practice continuing in her own day in Cairo and elsewhere, with the same explanation offered.

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