Blavatsky on the Veiled Phraseology of the Puranas

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 10 pages

Ten pages with a contents page and abstract, revised in November 2024, with a frontispiece by Tassy. Its cover title makes a dating claim in passing — that the veiled phraseology of the Purānas is well over twenty thousand years old.

Three readings are offered, each of a figure a Western reader is likely to misconstrue. The Purānic Asuras, usually rendered as demons, are identified as fallen Egos incarnated in human forms — the ever-present spark of divinity in man, recast as fallen angels, the file says, in the exuberance of Christian fancy. The serpent is defended as the most ancient of symbols on a ground that is almost zoological: the reptile preceded the bird and the bird the mammal. It was honoured by the Gnostic Ophites because he taught primeval men the mysteries of Kosmos and man; Serpent and Dragon were among the names given to the Wise Ones, the initiated Adepts of olden times; and only on the lowest plane of materiality was the serpent adopted as a type of feminine pubescence, on account of its sloughing and self-renewal — the point throughout being that one symbol carries several meanings at different levels and that the lowest is not the original. The third figure is the cow, called the daughter of the first desires, whom the sages named Vach-Virāj and who was milked by the Rishi Brihaspati, Jupiter: her milk is the milk of wisdom and her tail the thread of wisdom that unites us to our Higher Self — the same image that opens the file on Purānic cosmology in the First Proposition series. A page of suggested reading from this series closes it.

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