Category: Isis Unveiled: H. P. Blavatsky (1877)

"There is both religion and science in these Scandinavian songs of heathendom. As an example of the latter, take the conception of Thor, the son of Odin. Whenever this Hercules of the North would grasp the handle of his terrible weapon, the thunderbolt or electric hammer, he is obliged to put on his iron gantlets. [...]

"The trinity is an idea which all the ancient nations held in common. The three Dejotas - the Hindu Trimurti; the Three Heads of the Jewish Kabala. "Three heads are hewn into one another and over one another." The trinity of the Egyptians and that of the mythological Greeks were alike representations of the first [...]

"The existence of such an invisible universe being once admitted - as seems likely to be the fact if the speculations of the authors of the Unseen Universe are ever accepted by their colleagues - many of the phenomena, hitherto mysterious and inexplicable, become plain. It acts on the organism of the magnetized mediums, it [...]

"And now that we have learned so much of the mental labors of the holy fathers and their achievements in astral anthropology, need we be surprised at all, if, in the zeal of their spiritual explorations, they have so far neglected their own planet as at times to deny not only its rights to motion [...]

"The author of the Homoiomerian system of philosophy, Anaxagoras of Clazomene, firmly believed that the spiritual prototypes of all things, as well as their elements, were to be found in the boundless ether, where they were generated, whence they evolved, and whither they returned from earth. In common with the Hindus who had personified their [...]

"Such is the origin of the serpent, metamorphosed in Christian ages into Satan. It is the Od, the Ob, and the Aour of Moses and the Kabalists. When in its passive state, when it acts on those who are unwittingly drawn within its current, the astral light is the Ob, or Python. Moses was determined [...]

"From the poetry of abstract conception, these mundane myths gradually passed into the concrete images of cosmic symbols, as archeology now finds them. The snake, which plays such a prominent part in the imagery of the ancients, was degraded by the absurd interpretation of the serpent of the Book of genesis into a synonym of [...]

"Thus all the world-mountains and mundane eggs, the mundane trees, and the mundane snakes and pillars, may be shown to embody scientifically demonstrated truths of natural philosophy. All of these mountains contain, with very trifling variations, the allegorically-expressed description of primal cosmogony; the mundane trees, that of subsequent evolution of spirit and matter; the mundane [...]

"But there are myths which speak for themselves. In this class we may include the double-sexed first creators, of every cosmogony. The Greek Zeus-Zen (aether), and Chthonia (the chaotic earth) and Metis (the water), his wives; Osiris and Isis-Latona - the former god representing also ether - the first emanation of the Supreme Deity, Amun, [...]

"It is more than fortunate that, while the works of some men of science - who have justly won their great reputations - will flatly contradict our hypotheses, the researches and labors of others not less eminent seem to fully confirm our views. In the recent work of Mr. Alfred R. Wallace, The Geographical Distribution [...]