Even Numbers Are Devilish and Unlucky

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

Two pages setting two sources side by side: a passage from The Secret Doctrine, volume II pages 574-75, and a longer one from Mahatma Letter 59 in the third combined edition, each under its own heading.

The first passage explains the old rule that odd numbers are divine while even numbers are terrestrial, devilish and unlucky. The Pythagoreans are said to have hated the binary because it was the origin of differentiation and therefore of contrasts, discord and matter — the beginning of evil — with Bythos and Sigē, Depth and Silence, named as the primordial binary of the Valentinian theogony. Among the early Pythagoreans the duad was the imperfect state into which the first manifested being fell on becoming detached from the Monad, the point at which the roads of Good and Evil bifurcated; anything double-faced or false was called binary. One alone was Good and Harmony, since no disharmony can proceed from one alone — from which the Latin Solus, used of the one and only God, is derived, and which very soon became Sol, the Sun. The second passage gives a reason rather than a prejudice. The One, when it manifests, can become only three; a simple duality remains passive and concealed. The dual monad must first become a triad, then, on the bosom of the Great Deep, draw the One Circle into itself and form from it the perfect Square — squaring the circle, called the greatest of all the mysteries — and inscribe the Ineffable Name within it. Otherwise the duality could not persist and would have to be reabsorbed into the One. The Deep is identified with Space, both male and female, and the passage breaks off deliberately, saying it must stop lest nothing be left for the reader's own intuitions.

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