Subba Row's Twelve Signs of the Zodiac

Tallapragada Subba Row, William Quan Judge · Secret Doctrine's First Proposition Series · 15 pages

Fifteen pages carrying *a complete article by Tallapragada Subba Row, whose own title is The Zodiac is a veil thrown over Cosmogenesis. It was first published in The Theosophist volume III number 2, November 1881, pages 41 to 44, and republished in Five Years of Theosophy and in the Adyar pamphlet of Subba Row's esoteric writings. The presentation solves a problem neatly: Blavatsky, as editor of The Theosophist, appended notes to certain of Subba Row's statements, and those notes — reprinted from her Collected Writings volume III — are printed in azure blue* so a reader can tell at a glance which remarks are hers and which are his. The frontispiece is a collaborative painting by Aboriginal Yamaji artists of Western Australia, with an illustration on page 10 by Kim Alexander.

Subba Row begins with the antiquity of the division. It dates from immemorial times, has acquired world-wide celebrity, and appears in the astrological systems of several nations, with different antiquarians assigning the invention to different peoples. He reports the tradition that there were at first only ten signs, that one was later split into two and a new sign added — done, on this account, to make the esoteric significance of the division more profound and at the same time to conceal it more perfectly from the uninitiated. His own object, he says plainly, is not to decide which nation deserves the credit but to indicate the real philosophical meaning involved and the way to discover what remains undisclosed, though he draws the inference along the way that the conception probably originated in ancient India. The question the essay turns on is put directly: do the signs merely represent the shape or configuration of the constellations included in each division, or are they masks designed to veil a hidden meaning? He rejects the first possibility outright and gives two reasons for doing so, and the remainder of the essay is the case for reading the twelve signs as a concealed account of cosmogenesis.

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