Black Birds Are Symbols of Primeval Wisdom

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

Three pages drawing on Blavatsky Collected Writings volume XIV (Eastern and Western Occultism) and The Secret Doctrine volume I, arranged under two headings: darkness as concealed Deity, and black birds as symbols of higher Divinities and of the enlightened human mind-soul.

The starting point is the epigraph that darkness is concealed Deity, which becomes light to those who can reach it. The text places the universal myths, the personified cosmic powers and the historical figures of all religions among the seven chief Deities of the Rig-Veda with their three hundred and thirty million correlations, all treated as rays of one boundless Unity to which no profane worship can be offered — only abstract meditation. At the dawn of every creation, eternal Light, which is darkness, takes on the aspect of chaos: chaos to the human intellect, the eternal Root to the spiritual sense. The Egyptian formula "Osiris is a black God," said at low breath at initiation, is explained as meaning that Osiris as noumenon is darkness to the mortal. In that chaos the Waters are formed — Isis, Aditi — in which the primordial germs are reawakened by the primordial Light, becoming the golden mundane egg. The second half turns the principle into a rule for reading symbols: every national symbol may be read esoterically and checked by transliterating it into its corresponding numbers and geometrical forms, and the opening image of nearly every cosmogony is a circle, an egg or a head with darkness surrounding it — hence black ravens, black doves, black waters and black flames across the Hindu, Egyptian, Chaldeo-Hebrew and Scandinavian systems alike.

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