Nothing Greater Than the Divining Straws and Tortoise

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's Third Proposition Series · 12 pages

Twelve pages with an abstract and train of thoughts. *It is the only file in this section built on a Chinese source*, and it takes as its text a saying from the Confucian classics: in determining good and bad luck there is nothing greater than the divining straws and the tortoise.

The reading offered is not about fortune-telling. Lines, concentric circles and dots, the file argues, represent the most abstract and philosophical conceptions of primeval cosmogony — so the marks on a tortoise shell and the patterns made by yarrow straws are being treated as the same pictorial mystery-language described in "The Cross and the Pythagorean Decad" in this same batch. The most effective sentence in the file is a piece of plain comparative fairness, and it is aimed squarely at a Western reader's instinct to find one tradition's symbols dignified and another's absurd: no unprejudiced person, it says, can see any difference between a tortoise and a lamb as candidates for sacredness — both are mere symbols, and no more. Having levelled the ground, the file then supplies the Indian parallel that explains why a tortoise in particular: Vishnu is represented in the Kurma-avatāra as a tortoise sustaining a circular pillar, on which the semblance of himself, maya, sits with all his attributes. The tortoise is thus the support of the manifested world in one tradition and the instrument of reading it in another — which is the kind of correspondence this whole library exists to point out.

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