Proposition 1: Noah's Ark Is the Argha of the Hindus

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's First Proposition Series · 10 pages

Ten pages whose cover title is Noah's Ark is the sacred Argha of the Hindus, and which begin straight into the argument rather than with a contents page. The running heading names the thesis: Noah is Spirit, vivifying Matter.

The reading offered is that the flood story is not an account of a terrestrial event. The Manus are identified as seven individual sons of God, Pitaras and Pitris, and in this case as sons of Kronos or Saturn — Kala, time — and as Arkites like the Kabeiroi and Titans, their name of lunar ancestors indicating that the moon is the Ark or Argha on the watery abyss of space. The Phoenician Agrueros is identified with Kronos or Saturn and treated as the prototype of the Israelite Jehovah, so that Noah, as connected with the Argha, is mythologically one with Saturn — and the file immediately draws the consequence that this therefore cannot relate to any terrestrial flood. The Chaldean Nuah is then set beside Noah floating in his ark: Noah is spirit falling into matter, and the detail usually read as a moral lapse is turned into the point of the allegory, since as soon as he descends upon the earth he plants a vineyard, drinks the wine and becomes drunk on it — pure spirit becoming intoxicated as soon as it is finally imprisoned in matter. The seventh chapter of Genesis is treated as another version of the first, the spirit of God moving upon the face of the waters in the one and the ark going upon the face of the waters in the other. The Babylonian parallel is given, with Ishtar the moon shut in the ark and sending out a dove. A final section, on the kingly race born in Arghya rather than Argos, uses Anna Swanwick's complaint that Io's wanderings in Prometheus Bound cannot be made consistent with known geography, and suggests the reason is that the journey is not geographical at all. A page of suggested reading closes the file.

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