Insights to the First Chapter of Genesis

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's Third Proposition Series · 8 pages

Eight pages of insights and key concepts, each with its page number. *It is the short companion to "The first chapter of Genesis"* held elsewhere in this section, and it states its position in the first line rather than working up to it.

That position is that Genesis is a purely symbolic and kabbalistic volume, which can neither be understood nor appreciated if judged on the mistranslations and misinterpretations of its Christian remodellers. The specific charge brought against the received text is unexpectedly concrete: the Elohistic portion is said to be charged with a great zoological blunder, in placing the evolution of the birds before the reptiles. Against it stands the file's own and much stranger claim — that man was the first living being to appear on earth, with the whole animal world coming after him. The explanation offered for how that could be is the key to the whole passage, and it depends on man not being physical at the start: the first wave of humanity was fashioned not from earth but from invisible essence, so that man was born after the image and likeness of his progenitors, resembling but not of the same essence with the gods — a shadow of them, so to speak. A small illustration is attached which is the sort of detail that makes these files memorable: that is why, in India, the gods are said to have no shadows. Two further sections deal with the trained will of the initiate ruling the elemental world by correlating colour, sound, form, number and substance; and with the impermanence of the objective world, whose matter continually returns to a primordial condition invisible to mortal eyes.

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