Keys to the Mystery Language

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 84 pages

*Eighty-four pages, and unlike anything else in this batch: it is a picture book. Its own title page calls it 180 Keys to the Mystery Language*, and it is a showcase of 180 theosophical symbols, each drawn, named and placed in a numbered group with its page reference. The section folder also holds a font file of theosophical symbols, which belongs with this file.

The table of contents is what makes it usable, because it lists every single symbol rather than only the groups. Group 1, Central Point and Circle, runs through the Monas or central point; the circle or disc alone; the circle with a central point; the circle with a horizontal diameter; the circle with a vertical diameter; the circle with a horizontal diameter and a vertical one beginning to form from below; and the Monas becoming Trias — that is, the same figure developed one stroke at a time, which is exactly the sequence the Proposition 1 diagrams elsewhere on this site depend on. Group 2, Cross is Deity Revealed, works the same way: the mundane cross encircled; the mundane cross falling outside the circle and becoming the terrestrial cross; a variant of the terrestrial cross; the Jewish cross; a typical example of the Christian cross; and swastikas encircled, rotating left. The remaining groups continue in the same manner through the rest of the 180. Because every symbol has its own line and page number, the file works as a look-up table: a reader who meets an unfamiliar figure in one of the study files can find it here and see what it is called and how it relates to its neighbours. It is the most useful single reference on the site for the symbols the rest of the library uses without explanation.

Read the full text (PDF, 4.1 MB, 84 pages)