Armageddon: Wisdom Revealing Herself to the Elect

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 3 pages

Three pages excerpted from Blavatsky Collected Writings volume III, the Lamas and Druses material first published in The Theosophist for June 1881. A headnote points readers to the full text under the title "Lamas and Druses, descendants of the Elect Race" in the site's Atlantean Realities Series.

The argument starts from the Druse belief in a resurrection day at Armageddon, and denies that the idea was borrowed from St John's Revelation. The Druse teaching described has the bodies of the wise and faithful absorbed into the absolute essence and transformed from the many into the ONE, which the text identifies with the Buddhist Nirvana and the Vedāntin absorption into Parabrahm. The main claim concerns the word itself. Armageddon, it says, is commonly mistaken for a geographical locality — the tableland of Esdraelon, the mountain of Megiddo where Gideon defeated the Midianites — whereas the name in Revelation refers to a mythical place in much older Eastern tradition, a kind of purgatorial Elysium where departed spirits are gathered to await final judgment. The Druses, who pronounce it "Ramdagon," are taken as preserving the older form, and the name is read as an anagram of Rama-Dagon: Rama the Sun-God, and Dagon the Chaldean holy wisdom incarnate in the Man-Fish Ōannēs. On that reading Armageddon names not a battlefield but the descent of divine wisdom upon the Sons of God or Initiates, which is the sense the title of the file carries.

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