Cortege of the Solar God

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 2 pages

Two pages holding a single passage from The Secret Doctrine, volume I page 363, on the four winged creatures of Christian iconography.

The argument is that Christian sacred animals are continuous with pagan ones rather than distinct from them. The dove is named as the symbol of the Holy Ghost, and the four evangelical creatures — the Bull, the Eagle, the Lion and the Angel, the last identified as the Cherub or Sārāph, the fiery-winged serpent — are called as much pagan as anything Egyptian or Chaldean. Three readings are then laid over one another. The four are symbols of the four elements; they are symbols of the four lower principles in man; and they correspond physically to the four constellations which form the suite or cortège of the Solar God and occupy the four cardinal points of the zodiacal circle at the winter solstice. The passage ends by pointing to where the same four may be seen in ordinary use — in Roman Catholic New Testaments, beside the portraits of the evangelists — and by identifying them with the animals of Ezekiel's Merkābāh.

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