Cross Is the Time-Honoured Symbol of Pre-Cosmic Divine Mind

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's First Proposition Series · 57 pages

*The longest study in this batch at fifty-seven pages*, opened by a full abstract and train of thoughts. Where a passage admits of rival readings the file prints them side by side and numbers them — two separate interpretations of Moses asking to be shown God's glory, one by Isaac Myer and one by J. Ralston Skinner, are given in that form.

The governing symbol is stated at the outset: the cross as the time-honoured emblem of pre-cosmic divine mind, its four points corresponding to birth, life, death and immortality. What is called the cornerstone of esoteric cosmogony, theogony and anthropogony is a single figure — the hidden Deity represented by the circumference of a circle and the creative power, the androgynous Word, by the diameter drawn across it. The historical argument turns on what different peoples made of that figure. With the old Aryans, the Egyptians and the Chaldeans the diameter across the circle is said to have carried the idea of eternal and immovable divine thought in its absoluteness, entirely separate from the beginning of creation; whereas what was embodied in the Pentateuch, and especially in Genesis, is described as only the secondary stage — the mechanical law of construction rather than of creation — with theogony hardly outlined at all. From this follows the sharpest section, on Jehovah as the tribal property of the Jews, inseparable from the Mosaic law and unfit to play a part in any other, with the astronomical gloss that the Most High is the sun and the Lord one of his seven planets. A general rule of interpretation is given which governs the whole file and much of this series: every religious and philosophical symbol had seven meanings attached to it — metaphysical, astronomical, psychical, physiological and so on — which are hard enough to grasp in themselves, and become tenfold more puzzling when any one of them is taken as the sole explanation of the whole idea instead of being made to flow from the others.

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