Subba Row on the Sevenfold Principle in Man

Tallapragada Subba Row · Constitution of Man Series · 23 pages

T. Subba Row's article as it first appeared in The Theosophist of January 1882 and was reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings III. The editorial note explains why it is issued separately as well as within the symposium: the entire text is published here because Blavatsky's own extended reply, held in this section as Classification of the Principles in Man, cannot be followed without it. Read together they form the fullest disagreement about the constitution of man in the literature.

The frontispiece and its footnote carry more than decoration. The temple depicted is named for Saptaparna, the sevenfold Man-Plant — after the famous cave and vihara at Rajagriha where the Buddha meditated and taught his Arhats and where the first Synod was held, a cave with seven chambers, whence the name. A second symbol of septenary man is given as a triad over a tetrad, the double glyph of Gaia-Earth expressed geometrically: the three and the four, the triangle and the cube, the male-female universal glyph, called the first aspect of the evolving deity — a figure the note says was disguised in the Greek Tau, and which connects this file to the Drawing in Buddhas and Initiates and to the symbol gallery in Theosophy and Theosophists.

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