The Teraphim of Abram’s father _Terah_, the “maker of images,” and the
Kabiri Gods are directly connected with ancient Sabæan worship or
Astrolatry. Kiyun, or the God Kivan, worshipped by the Jews in the
wilderness, is Saturn and Shiva, later on called Jehovah. Astrology
existed before astronomy, and _Astronomus_ was the title of the highest
hierophant in Egypt.(604) One of the names of the Jewish Jehovah,
“Sabaoth,” or the “Lord of Hosts” (_tsabaoth_), belongs to the Chaldæan
Sabæans (or _Tsabæans_), and has for its root the word _tsab_, meaning a
“car,” a “ship,” and “an army”; sabaoth thus meaning literally the _army
of the ship_, the _crew_, or a _naval host_, the sky being metaphorically
referred to as the “upper ocean” in the doctrine.
In his interesting volumes, _The God of Moses_, Lacour explains that all
such words as
The celestial armies or the hosts of heaven, signify not only the
totality of the heavenly constellations, but also the Aleim on
whom they are dependent; the _aleitzbaout_ are the forces or
_souls_ of the constellations, the potencies that maintain and
guide the planets in this order and procession; ... the Jae‐va‐
Tzbaout signifies Him, the supreme chief of those celestial
bodies.
In his collectivity, as the chief “Order of Spirits,” not a chief Spirit.
The Sabæans having worshipped in the _graven_ images only the celestial
hosts—angels and gods whose habitations were the planets, never in truth
worshipped the stars. For on Plato’s authority, we know that among the
stars and constellations, the planets alone had a right to the title of
_theoi_ (Gods), as that name was derived from the verb θεῖν, to run or to
circulate. Seldenus also tells us that they were likewise called
θεοὶ βουλαιοὶ (God‐Councillors) and ῥαβδοφόροι (_lictors_) as they
(the planets) were present at the sun’s consistory, _solis
consistoris adstantes_.
Says the learned Kircher:
The sceptres the seven presiding angels were armed with, explain
these names of Rhabdophores and lictors given to them.
Reduced to its simplest expression and popular meaning, this is of course
fetish worship. Yet esoteric astrolatry was not at all the worship of
idols, since under the names of “Councillors” and “Lictors,” present at
the “Sun’s consistory,” it was not the planets in their material bodies
that were meant, but their Regents or “Souls” (Spirits). If the prayer
“Our Father in heaven,” or “Saint” so‐and‐so in “Heaven” is not an
idolatrous invocation, then “Our Father in Mercury,” or “Our Lady in
Venus,” “Queen of Heaven,” etc., is no more so; for it is precisely the
same thing, the name making no difference in the act. The word used in the
Christian prayers, “in heaven” cannot mean anything abstract. A
dwelling—whether of Gods, angels or Saints (every one of these being
anthropomorphic individualities and beings)—must necessarily mean a
locality, some defined spot in that “heaven”; hence it is quite immaterial
for purposes of worship whether that spot be considered as “heaven” in
general, meaning nowhere in particular, or in the Sun, Moon or Jupiter.
The argument is futile that there were
Two deities, and two distinct hierarchies or _tsabas_ in heaven,
in the ancient world as in our modern times ... the one, the
living God and his host, and the other, _Satan_, Lucifer with his
councillors and lictors, or the _fallen_ angels.
Our opponents say that it is the latter which Plato with the whole of
antiquity worshipped, and which two‐thirds of humanity worship to this
day. “The whole question is to know how to discern between the two.”
Protestant Christians fail to find any mention of angels in the
Pentateuch, we may therefore leave them aside. The Roman Catholics and the
Kabalists find such mention; the former, because they have accepted Jewish
angelology, without suspecting that the “tsabæan Hosts” were colonists and
settlers on Judæan territory from the lands of the Gentiles; the latter,
because they accepted the bulk of the Secret Doctrine, keeping the kernel
for themselves and leaving the husks to the unwary.
Cornelius a Lapide points out and proves the meaning of the word _tsaba_
in the first verse of Chapter ii. of _Genesis_; and he does so correctly,
guided, as he probably was, by learned Kabalists. The Protestants are
certainly wrong in their contention, for angels _are_ mentioned in the
Pentateuch under the word _tsaba_, which means “hosts” of angels. In the
Vulgate the word is translated _ornatus_, meaning the “sidereal army,” the
_ornament_ also of the sky—kabalistically. The biblical scholars of the
Protestant Church, and the _savants_ among the materialists, who failed to
find “angels” mentioned by Moses, have thus committed a serious error. For
the verse reads:
Thus the heaven and the earth were finished and all the host of
them,
the “host” meaning “the army of stars and angels”; the last two words
being, it seems, convertible terms in Church phraseology. A Lapide is
cited as an authority for this; he says that
_Tsaba_ does not mean _either one_ or the other but “_the one and
the other_,” or both, _siderum ac angelorum_.
If the Roman Catholics are right on this point, so are the Occultists when
they claim that the angels worshipped in the Church of Rome are none else
than their “Seven Planets,” the Dhyân Chohans of Buddhistic Esoteric
Philosophy, or the Kumâras, “the mind‐born sons of Brahmâ,” known under
the patronymic of Vaidhâtra. The identity between the Kumâras, the
Builders or cosmic Dhyân Chohans, and the Seven Angels of the Stars, will
be found without one single flaw if their respective biographies are
studied, and especially the characteristics of their chiefs, Sanat‐Kumâra
(Sanat Sujâta), and Michael the Archangel. Together with the Kabirim
(Planets), the name of the above in Chaldæa, they were all “_divine_
Powers” (Forces). Fuerot says that the name Kabiri was used to denote the
_seven_ sons of יצדיק meaning Pater Sadic, Cain, or Jupiter, or again of
Jehovah. There are seven Kumâras—four exoteric and three secret—the names
of the latter being found in the _Sânkhya Bhâshya_, by
Gaudapâdâchârya.(605) They are all “Virgin Gods,” who remain eternally
pure and innocent and decline to create progeny. In their primitive
aspect, these Âryan seven “mind‐born sons” of God are not the regents of
the planets, but dwell far beyond the planetary region. But the same
mysterious transference from one character or dignity to another is found
in the Christian Angel‐scheme. The “Seven Spirits of the Presence” attend
perpetually on God, and yet we find them under the same names of Mikael,
Gabriel, Raphael, etc., as “Star‐regents” or the informing deities of the
seven planets. Suffice it to say that the Archangel Michael is called “the
invincible virgin combatant” as he “refused to create,”(606) which would
connect him with both Sana Sujâta and the Kumâra who is the God of War.
The above has to be demonstrated by a few quotations. Commenting upon St.
John’s “Seven Golden Candlesticks,” Cornelius a Lapide says:
These seven lights relate to the seven branches of the candlestick
by which were represented the seven [principal] planets in the
temples of Moses and Solomon ... or, better still, to the seven
principal Spirits, commissioned to watch over the salvation of men
and churches.
St. Jerome says:
In truth the candlestick with the seven branches was the type of
the world and its planets.
St. Thomas Aquinas, the great Roman Catholic doctor writes:
I do not remember having ever met in the works of saints or
philosophers a denial that the planets are guided by spiritual
beings.... It seems to me that it may be proved to demonstration
that the celestial bodies are guided by some intelligence, either
directly by God, or by the mediation of angels. But the latter
opinion seems to be far more consonant with the order of things
asserted by St. Denys to be without exception, that everything on
earth is, as a rule, governed by God through intermediary
agencies.(607)
And now let the reader recall what the Pagans say of this. All the
classical authors and philosophers who have treated the subject, repeat
with Hermes Trismegistus, that the seven Rectors—the planets including the
sun—were the associates, or the co‐workers, of the Unknown All represented
by the Demiurgos—commissioned to contain the Cosmos—our planetary
world—within seven circles. Plutarch shows them representing “the circle
of the celestial worlds.” Again, Denys of Thracia and the learned Clemens
of Alexandria both describe the Rectors as being shown in the Egyptian
temples in the shape of mysterious wheels or spheres always in motion,
which made the Initiates affirm that the problem of perpetual motion had
been solved by the celestial wheels in the Initiation Adyta.(608) This
doctrine of Hermes was that of Pythagoras and of Orpheus before him. It is
called by Proclus “the God‐given” doctrine. Iamblichus speaks of it with
the greatest reverence. Philostratus tells his readers that the whole
sidereal court of the Babylonian heaven was represented in the temples
In globes made of sapphires and supporting the golden images of
their respective gods.
The temples of Persia were especially famous for these representations. If
Cedrenus can be credited
The Emperor Heraclius on his entry into the city of Bazaeum was
struck with admiration and wonder before the immense machine
fabricated for King Chosroes, which represented the night‐sky with
the planets and all their revolutions, with the angels presiding
over them.(609)
It was on such “spheres” that Pythagoras studied Astronomy in the _adyta
arcana_ of the temples to which he had access. And it was there on his
Initiation, that the eternal rotation of those spheres—“the mysterious
wheels” as they are called by Clemens and Denys, and which Plutarch calls
“world‐wheels”—demonstrated to him the verity of what had been divulged to
him, namely, the heliocentric system, the great secret of the Adyta. All
the discoveries of modern astronomy, like all the secrets that can be
revealed to it in future ages, were contained in the secret observatories
and Initiation Halls of the temples of old India and Egypt. It is in them
that the Chaldæan made his calculations, revealing to the world of the
profane no more than it was fit to receive.
We may, and shall be told, no doubt, that Uranus was unknown to the
ancients, and that they were forced to reckon the sun amongst the planets
and as their chief. How does anyone know? Uranus is a modern name; but one
thing is certain: the ancients had a planet, “a mystery planet,” that they
never named and that the highest Astronomus, the Hierophant, alone could
“confabulate with.” But this seventh planet was not the sun, but the
hidden Divine Hierophant, who was said to have a crown, and to embrace
within its wheel “seventy‐seven smaller wheels.” In the archaic secret
system of the Hindus, the sun is the visible Logos “Sûrya”; over him there
is another, the divine or heavenly Man—who, after having established the
system of the world of matter on the archetype of the Unseen Universe, or
Macrocosm, conducted during the Mysteries the heavenly Râsa Mandala; when
he was said:
To give with his right foot the impulse to _Tyam_ or Bhûmi [Earth]
that makes her rotate in a double revolution.
What says Hermes again? When explaining Egyptian Cosmology he exclaims:
Listen, O my son ... the Power has also formed seven agents, who
contain within their circles the material world, and whose action
is called destiny.... When all became subject to man, the Seven,
willing to favour human intelligence, communicated to him their
powers. But as soon as man knew their true essence and his own
nature, he desired to penetrate within and beyond the circles and
thus break their circumference by usurping the power of him who
has dominion over the Fire [Sun] itself; after which, having
robbed one of the Wheels of the Sun of the sacred fire, he fell
into slavery.(610)
It is _not_ Prometheus who is meant here. Prometheus is a symbol and a
personification of the whole of mankind in relation to an event which
occurred during its childhood, so to say—the “Baptism by Fire”—which is a
mystery within the great Promethean Mystery, one that may be at present
mentioned only in its broad general features. By reason of the
extraordinary growth of human intellect and the development in our age of
the fifth principle (Manas) in man, its rapid progress has paralysed
spiritual perceptions. It is at the expense of wisdom that intellect
generally lives, and mankind is quite unprepared in its present condition
to comprehend the awful drama of human disobedience to the laws of Nature
and the subsequent Fall, as a result. It can only be hinted at in its
place.