The Real Meaning of the First Line of Genesis

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 26 pages

Twenty-six pages on a single sentence. The study distinguishes two ways of rendering the first line of Genesis: the exoteric reading of the Christian interpreters, and the Kabbalistic, itself divided into a Rabbinical and a purely occult method. Ralston Skinner's numerical analysis of that sentence supplies the technical spine of the argument — the sentence on which, as she puts it, the whole Christian religion hung in blind faith.

The conclusion drawn from Skinner is that Genesis read by the dead letter cannot yield anything higher than phallic elements, which are its root and cornerstone, and that anthropomorphism and revelation together dig an impassable chasm between the material world and any ultimate spiritual truth. The second half turns to the Elohim, with MacGregor Mathers called in to elucidate them, and the reading offered is the one that matters doctrinally: that the creation of Genesis is not the primary creation at all, and that the Elohim are not God, nor even the higher planetary spirits, but the architects of this physical planet and of man's material body — lower angels, corresponding to the Prajapatis of the Hindus. This, she notes, was the teaching of the Gnostics, whom she calls the most philosophical of all the early Christian churches.

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