Sona, the Indian Red River, Keeps Wandering Off Its Bed

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's First Proposition Series · 9 pages

Nine pages, and *the one file in this section built around a geographical fact*. The title-page illustration is the Brahmaputra River by Nikolai Roerich, and an endnote by Boris de Zirkoff closes the argument.

The frame is cosmological before it is geographical. From the Spirit of God brooding in, not over, the chaotic waters, Ocean emerged as the father of gods; with the Greeks the River Gods were the sons of the primeval Ocean; and in the Mosaic books water and earth stand for primordial matter, the creative feminine principle on our plane. The correspondence the file works from is a triple one: the seven rays of the sun run parallel to the seven worlds of every planetary chain and to the seven rivers of heaven and earth. Varuna, chief of the Dhyani-Chohans and prototype of the Greek Ouranos, is said to regulate all natural phenomena, with the seven rivers of the sky — the descending creative gods — and the seven rivers of the earth — the seven primitive mankinds — under his control. The particular claim then follows, and it is checkable in a way most of this series is not: the Sona has changed its course several times since the days of the Mahabharata, and twice since Gautama's time, first turning away and flowing back eastward and later flowing westward as it does now. The file's interest is in what a wandering river was taken to mean rather than in the hydrology, and Boris de Zirkoff's endnote is what a reader should turn to for the scholarly position on it. A page of suggested reading closes the file.

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