The Dog Symbolises Our Spiritual Conscience

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's Third Proposition Series · 5 pages

*Five pages, the shortest file in this section, taken from a single footnote in The Secret Doctrine* volume II, pages 114 to 115. The frontispiece is by Patricia G. Ducray with an illustration by Ralph Steadman. Its running heading gives the claim: dog is a mystical title of the planets Mercury and Sirius.

The context is an argument about the elements, and it is worth having because it explains why a note about a dog appears in a book about cosmogenesis. The passage is a footnote to what the file describes as a perverted order of the elements — an order rearranged by Christian Kabbalists and symbologists so that it would dovetail with the order of the Gospels and allow the Angel-Man to be identified with Christ. Blavatsky's reply to anyone who asks what hydrogen has to do with air or oxygenation is characteristically brisk: study first the ABC of occult alchemy. The substantive claim is that in their anxiety to identify Poimandrēs, the mouth of Mystery, prophetically with St John the Baptist, the same writers also mis-identified the seven Kabeiroi and the associated figures — so that a whole set of correspondences was bent out of shape to fit a single scheme. The dog itself is explained as a mystical title of the planet Mercury, the god of secret wisdom, a personification of omniscience presided over by the Manasaputras, the Sons of Mind — which is what places this small file in the Third Proposition section, since the Manasaputras are the beings who gave man his mind. Sirius, the Dog Star, carries the same association. A reader interested in why the dog guards thresholds in so many mythologies will find the theosophical answer here in five pages.

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