Allegories and Myths Underlying Puranic Cosmology

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's First Proposition Series · 7 pages

Seven pages of footnotes Blavatsky appended to an essay on philology versus symbology in the Purānas by Professor Manilal Nabhubhai Dvivedi, published in Lucifer in 1891 and republished in Blavatsky Collected Writings volume XIII. A headnote explains why she printed it at all, and the reason is a small scandal: Dvivedi had sent the essay to the Oriental Congress at Stockholm in 1889 together with copies of his books, and was told much later that it had been mislaid — so she reprints it, in her own phrase, in the service of fair play.

The epigraph sets the register: it is the cow that gives the milk of wisdom and produces the jewels of wisdom, her tail being the golden thread of divine knowledge that connects the self with its higher counterpart. The substance of the notes is a retelling of the Trivikrama story, given because the Purānic myths may be unfamiliar. Bali, called a demon, is described as having been an exceedingly good and virtuous Daitya king who defeated Indra, humbled the gods and extended his sovereignty over the three worlds by devotion and penance — a pious and holy ascetic, like many other so-called demons in the Purānas, since the Asuras are explained as divine Egos fallen into matter or incarnated in human form, the Christian myth of the fallen angels carrying the same significance. The gods appeal to Vishnu, who manifests as the Dwarf Avatāra and approaches Bali to ask the boon of three steps of ground. The point of the notes is that the story is not a fable about a defeated demon but an allegory whose terms have to be read in their own vocabulary before anything else can be said about them.

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