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Footnote 1:
The modern name is preferably employed.
Footnote 2:
Modern name preferably employed.
Footnote 3:
J. M. Hutchings in “The High Sierras.”
Footnote 4:
Indian name for Mirror Lake.
Footnote 5:
Modern names are preferably employed.
Footnote 6:
This head is in the Museum in the City of Mexico. It was found in 1830
in the streets of Santa Teresa by some workmen while excavating for
the foundation of a new house.
Footnote 7:
The giant Gulliver bound in a net-work of threads by the Lilliputians
is a familiar mythical form of the same belief—Gulliver representing
the whole human family with its net-work of desires and illusions.
Footnote 8:
Modern names preferably used.
Footnote 9:
Indian Legend.
Footnote 10:
From the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Footnote 11:
Later, in all the distorted legends of Adam Kadmon, the cosmic
man,—Woman was accused of causing his fall through lustful desire; and
what was originally an allegory of initiation, or of being able to
distinguish between the true and the false in the battle-ground of our
own hearts, has been perverted into a literal interpretation of dread
consequence.
This false idea has degraded millions of men and women.
Footnote 12:
Aleutian Island chain.
Footnote 13:
In the year 1866, a miner found Akaza’s skull, while sinking a shaft
in a strata of gravel one hundred and thirty-seven feet below the
surface. It was in a beautiful flat, about fifteen miles north of
Table Mountain, a mass of basaltic lava, six hundred feet thick, which
was not erupted until after Akaza’s death.
The skull no longer surmounted that last nudity of man which instinct
bids us conceal in the Earth. It was coated with a deposit of gravel
and sand, that told of its lying in a river bed while mountains were
worn to plains, and the decomposed quartz and loose gravel were plowed
up by glacial erosion, and scattered over the hillsides. The skull was
broken in its strongest part, an evidence of the force with which some
torrent had dashed it against bowlders in the lapsing centuries.
Some time during its wanderings in the river beds, or while resting on
the banks, a snail had crawled under the malar bone and died. Its
shell was found there, and no such species of snail has been known
since the volcanoes ceased pouring lava over California.
The skull[33] and the snail-shell have been the cause of great
discussion among the scientists of our epoch: Its age is too great to
agree with the preconceived idea of man’s existence.
Footnote 14:
Initiates were always considered hermaphrodites, but not in a sex
sense. The name itself implies this, being a compound of Hermes
(wisdom) and Aphrodite (love). When sex takes precedence over humanity
it is hard to explain a divine mystery, because organs are mistaken
attributes, and the whole world is sex mad. Nevertheless, activity and
repose, positive and negative, equilibrium and discord, cause and
effect, involution and evolution, differentiation and polarization of
atoms, and the laws governing them are united in the one word—SEX.
Footnote 15:
Lares and penates—household gods.
Footnote 16:
H. P. Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine.
Footnote 17:
It is a mistake to suppose that the personality originates thought.
The sphere called mind reflects thought, as the earth reflects the
light of the sun. It is quite as mis-leading to assert that the spirit
leaves the body at death as it would be to assume that the sun is
actually in the earth, because this planet lives by its rays. The
spirit never is in the body—therefore it has neither birth nor death.
It contacts and vivifies the body in the same manner as does the sun
and the earth. The photosphere of the earth, and the aura of man are
universal exemplifications of the mysterious Bridge of Kinevat.
Footnote 18:
Sixteen hundred (Egyptian) feet long by five hundred feet wide.
Footnote 19:
Profane and blasphemous words were unknown to the native races in the
Americas. These people believed that speech was given man to enable
him to praise his Maker.
To this day the Indian is chary of words—and in all the relations of
life his language is circumspect, and dignified. He only speaks when
it is necessary, and rightly has profound contempt for the human who
talks too much.
Footnote 20:
The Breath of Life.
Footnote 21:
Co-ownership of property necessitated the institution of civil
marriage, in order to define inheritance.
Footnote 22:
Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Footnote 23:
A planet runs through its grand period of life from a formless nebula
to a globe, which solidifies into a planet with or without satellites.
It is involution as long as the planet is in process of formation; but
when matter begins to manifest, the first step in evolution is taken,
which goes on from protoplasm to man. Then comes the blooming-time,
when this flower of space will scatter its seeds, as did the huge
planet once revolving between Jupiter and Mars.
Where once was unity, light and power, we have now a confused mass of
asteroids moving in eccentric orbits. This was not merely the
experience of a planet, but was a tragedy of the solar system; and in
it the extremity of individualism finds exemplification. The mind of
humanity is broken and divided in a corresponding manner. Both
represent the fluid side of nature, and are correlated to the soul on
the downward spiral.
No one claims that the ego contacts through the animal kingdom, but
the soul of desire may.
When the latter does so, it is lost—until brought back on the upward
spiral by aspiration and harmony, where it becomes one with Divinity.
Footnote 24:
City of Mexico.
Footnote 25:
Cholula was to the primitive Americas, what Jerusalem is to the
Christian; Mecca, to the Mohammedan; Benares, to the Brahman.
Footnote 26:
Gautamozin—meaning son of Guatama—was the nephew of Montezuma, and the
spiritual leader of the Aztecs at the time of the conquest. He was the
last hierophant of the Brotherhood of Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec Messiah.
He defended Mexico City and was tortured and slain by Cortez. The
statue erected in his honor in the Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City,
is one of the finest monuments on the North American continent.
Footnote 27:
All the heroes and ideal men of primitive times were sun-gods. Buddha
was the shining one. Zoroaster (zoe, light; aster, star); was called
the glittering one. The Son of Man came clothed in the glory of the
sun. When the padres attempted to teach the natives of America the
story of Jesus, they exclaimed: “El Dorado!” Such at least is the
Spanish translation of what they called their own spiritual leader.
Footnote 28:
History of the Conquest of Mexico.
Footnote 29:
Esoteric students everywhere understand that California is one of the
occult eyes of the world, because it still retains the magnetism of
pre-historic times, never having been visited by the ice ages nor the
flood, and only in recent geologic reckoning being partially purified
by fire. Its Sanscrit name is Kali (time) and purna (fulfillment).
Footnote 30:
Yermo and Yermina are diminutives and corruptions of Guillermo, the
Spanish for William, and are in common use among the natives of Mexico
and the neighboring states.
Footnote 31:
Chas. Piazzi Smyth, at Teneriffe.
Footnote 32:
Von Humboldt at Teneriffe.
Footnote 33:
Calaveras skull, Smithsonian Institution.
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