Theos-Talk Archives (May 1996 Message tl01426)

ISIS006.TXT (Isis Unveiled, 1st Edition) - BEFORE THE VEIL
   (continued)

EVOLUTION. - The development of higher orders of animals from the
   lower. Modern, or so-called exact science, holds but to a
   one-sided physical evolution, prudently avoiding and ignoring
   the higher or spiritual evolution, which would force our
   contemporaries to confess the superiority of the ancient
   philosophers and psychologists over themselves.  The ancient
   sages, ascending to the UNKNOWABLE, made their starting-point
   from the first manifestation of the unseen, the unavoidable, and
   from a strict logical reasoning, the absolutely necessary
   creative Being, the Demiurgos of the universe. Evolution began
   with them from pure spirit, which descending lower and lower
   down, assumed at last a visible and comprehensible form, and
   became matter. Arrived at this point, they speculated in the
   Darwinian method, but on a far more large and comprehensive
   basis.

In the Rig-Veda-Sanhita, the oldest book of the World [Translated
   by Max Muller, Professor of Comparative Philology at the Oxford
   University, England] (to which even our most prudent
   Indiologists and Sanscrit scholars assign an antiquity of
   between two and three thousand years B.C.), in the first book,
   "Hymns to the Maruts," it is said:

"Not-being and Being are in the highest heaven, in the birthplace
   of Daksha, in the lap of Aditi" (Mandala, i., Sukta 166).

"In the first age of the gods, Being (the comprehensible Deity) was
   born from Not-being (whom no intellect can comprehend); after it
   were born the Regions (the invisible), from them Uttanapada."

"From Uttanapad the Earth was born, the Regions (those that are
   visible) were born from the Earth. Daksha was born of Aditi, and
   Aditi from Daksha" (Ibid.).

Aditi is the Infinite, and Daksha is daksha-pitarah, literally
   meaning the father of gods, but understood by Max Muller and
   Roth to mean the fathers of strength, "preserving, possessing,
   granting faculties." Therefore, it is easy to see that "Daksha,
   born of Aditi and Aditi from Daksha," means what the moderns
   understand by "correlation of forces"; the more so as we find in
   this passage (translated by Prof. Muller):

"I place Agni, the source of all beings, the father of strength"
   (iii., 27, 2), a clear and identical idea which prevailed so
   much in the doctrines of the Zoroastrians, the Magians, and the
   medieval fire-philosophers.  Agni is god of fire, of the
   Spiritual Ether, the very substance of the divine essence of the
   Invisible God present in every atom of His creation and called
   by the Rosicrucians the "Celestial Fire." If we only carefully
   compare the verses from this Mandala, one of which runs thus:
   "The Sky is your father, the Earth your mother, Soma your
   brother, Aditi your sister" (i., 191, 6), ["Dyarih vah pita,
   prithivi mata somah bhrata aditih svasa."] with the inscription
   on the Smaragdine Tablet of Hermes, we will find the same
   substratum of metaphysical philosophy, the identical doctrines!

"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all
   things were produced from this one thing by adaptation: 'Its
   father is the sun; its mother is the moon' . . . etc. Separate
   the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross. . . . What
   I had to say about the operation of the sun is completed"
   (Smaragdine Tablet). [As the perfect identity of the
   philosophical and religious doctrines of antiquity will be fully
   treated upon in subsequent chapters, we limit our explanations
   for the present.]

Professor Max Muller sees in this Mandala "at last, something like
   a theogony, though full of contradictions." ["Rig-Veda-Anhita,"
   p. 234.] The alchemists, kabalists, and students of mystic
   philosophy will find therein a perfectly defined system of
   Evolution in the Cosmogony of a people who lived a score of
   thousands of years before our era. They will find in it,
   moreover, a perfect identity of thought and even doctrine with
   the Hermetic philosophy, and also that of Pythagoras and Plato.

In Evolution, as it is now beginning to be understood, there is
   supposed to be in all matter an impulse to take on a higher form
   - a supposition clearly expressed by Manu and other Hindu
   philosophers of the highest antiquity. The philosopher's tree
   illustrates it in the case of the zinc solution. The controversy
   between the followers of this school and the Emanationists may
   be briefly stated thus: The Evolutionist stops all inquiry at
   the borders of "the Unknowable". the Emanationist believes that
   nothing can be evolved - or, as the word means, unwombed or born
   - except it has first been involved, thus indicating that life
   is from a spiritual potency above the whole.

(Scanned and uploaded by Alan Bain)
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