The Hindu Pantheon Dressed in Biblical Garb

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's First Proposition Series · 45 pages

Forty-five pages with a full abstract and train of thoughts. *It is the widest-ranging comparative file in the section*, and the one that states most clearly the assumption on which the whole series rests.

That assumption is given in the first line of the abstract: at first the cosmogonical idea was one, everywhere, and only as nations began fragmenting along tribal grooves did the original idea become gradually veiled with the overgrowth of human fancy. The consequence traced is an uneven one — in some countries the intelligent Powers of Nature received divine honours they were hardly entitled to, while in others the very thought of such a Power being endowed with intelligence came to seem absurd and was proclaimed unscientific. The sentence the file turns on is a fine formulation of its whole method: myths are proved to be fables just in proportion as we misunderstand them, and truths in proportion as they were once understood. The argument proper begins from a common-sense observation — no nation has ever conceived the Universal Deific Principle as the direct creator of the visible universe, since no sane man would credit a planner and architect with having built the edifice with his own hands. Homer's silence about the First Principle is noted, with Proclus's description of it as the Unity of Unities, more ineffable than all silence and more occult than all essence. The sharpest section holds that the Jews ascended no higher than the immediate artificer of the universe, degrading their metaphorical deity — as, it says, the Christians have — by accepting Jehovah as one living yet personal God. The Pythagorean arithmetic is then set out: the First Cause or Monad symbolised by a point within the circle of heaven, the Monad returning into darkness as soon as it has evolved the higher three, from which emanate the lower seven of the Decad, so that unity has made the ten and the ten the unity — God in Nature and Nature in God. Scandinavian legend is brought in for the same pattern, its creation beginning in time and space while the All-Father remains outside both, as Zeus is born in and out of Chronos and Brahmā is the emanation of Kala. The section closes on Mulaprakriti as the veil thrown over Parabrahman, the only condition on which the Logos can see it at all.

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