Judge on the Gita and the Zodiac

William Quan Judge · Secret Doctrine's First Proposition Series · 6 pages

Six pages from The Path of August 1890, republished in Dara Eklund's Echoes of the Orient, with a frontispiece by Debra Hurd.

Judge's starting point is a complaint about the state of scholarship: orientalists have never admitted that any key to the Bhagavad-Gita exists beyond a knowledge of Sanskrit, so European translators have given only its philosophical aspect. Against that he sets the belief — held by many students of theosophy and by Blavatsky in particular — that there are several keys to the poem and that they have been lost to the world. His qualification of the word lost is the most striking part of the piece, and he makes it precise: nothing has been lost absolutely, since the keys are preserved intact in rolls and books made of polished stones, hidden and guarded in underground temples in the East whose location those who know will not divulge. No search has been made for them by the profane because there is no belief in their existence — and for the sincere student who can project his mental sight in the right direction there is no need to discover the outward form in which they are kept. He then makes the same case for the Zodiac, dismissing modern astronomers who have offered commonplace explanations of its origin and referred vaguely to a supposed author they cannot name, with the dry observation that it is much to be doubted whether they could have constructed any zodiac at all had this immemorial arrangement of signs not been ready to hand.

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