The First Chapter of Genesis and the Creation of Man

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Charles Johnston · Secret Doctrine's Third Proposition Series · 14 pages

Fourteen pages with a contents page and abstract, revised in September 2024. *It is written as a dialogue* between Charles Johnston and Blavatsky — Johnston being the Irish Orientalist who married her niece, and whose life is told in a separate file in the Theosophy and Theosophists section — which makes it considerably easier to follow than the same argument set out as an essay.

The thesis is in the title and is stated without hedging: the first chapter of Genesis has nothing to do with the creation of man; it is the Purānic Primal Creation, and only the second chapter is the Secondary Creation, that of our globe. The general principle behind that reading is the one the shorter companion file also gives — that Genesis is a purely symbolic and kabbalistic volume, which can neither be understood nor appreciated if judged by the mistranslations and misinterpretations of its Christian remodellers. What is new here is the specific correspondence proposed, and it is a bold one: the sevenfold primordial evolution of the Purānas appears in the Bible as the Six Days of Creation with a seventh day of rest — the same seven stages, rewritten as a week. The consequence she draws is stated flatly and is the sentence a reader will remember: none of these creations has ever occurred on this earth at all. Because the material is presented as a conversation with a sympathetic but questioning interlocutor rather than as assertion, the file is one of the better places in this library to see a difficult reading argued rather than announced. The shorter treatment is "Insights to the first chapter of Genesis", in the first batch of this section.

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