The Cross and the Pythagorean Decad

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's Third Proposition Series · 34 pages

Thirty-four pages with an abstract and train of thoughts, *arranged number by number* — a headed section for each of the numbers of the Decad, so a reader can look up one of them without reading the rest.

The premise is a claim about language, and it explains why the file exists at all: the mystery-language, that of the prehistoric races, is not a phonetic but a purely pictorial and symbolical tongue — so numbers and figures are not illustrations of ideas but the ideas themselves, written down. The Pythagorean Decad, representing the universe and its evolution from the unfathomable depths of the Spiritual Soul, is said to have been applied first to the Macrocosm and only afterwards to the Microcosm, man — which is the direction of travel assumed throughout this library, and the reason its diagrams look the way they do. The individual entries then begin. Number 1 is treated with a distinction that catches the whole method: on the plane above, number is no number at all but a nought, a circle; on the plane below it becomes 1, which is an odd number. Number 2 carries the rule that runs through the Pythagorean material in every section of this site — even numbers are terrestrial, devilish and unlucky, odd numbers divine — which is the reasoning behind the recurring remark that Pythagoras had a reason for never using the useless figure two. The remaining numbers follow in order to ten. Read beside "Keys to the Mystery Language" in the Theosophy and Theosophists section, which shows 180 symbols, this file supplies the numerical half of the same alphabet.

Read the full text (PDF, 1.8 MB, 34 pages)