Category: Isis Unveiled, Volume II: H. P. Blavatsky (1877)

"Knorr von Rosenroth, busying himself with the interpretation of the Kabala, argues that, "In this first state, (of secret wisdom), the infinite God Himself can be understood as 'Father', (of the new covenant). But the Light being let down by the Infinite through a canal into the ' primal Adam', or Messiah, and joined with [...]

"And now we will compare this system with that of the Jewish Gnostics - the Nazarenes, as well as with other philosophies. The ISH AMON, the pleroma, or the boundless circle within which lie "all forms", is the THOUGHT of the power divine; it works in SILENCE, and suddenly is begotten by darkness; it is [...]

"The Gnostics, as well as the Nazarenes, allegorizing on the personification, said that the First and Second man loved the beauty of Sophia, (Sephira), the first woman, and thus the Father and the Son fecundated the heavenly "Woman", and from primal darkness procreated the visible light, (Sephira is the Invisible, or Spiritual Light), "whom they [...]

“” Whoso wishes to have insight into the sacred unity, let him consider a flame rising from a burning coal or a burning lamp. He will see first a two-fold light - a bright white, and a black or blue light; the white light is above, and ascends in a direct light, while the blue, or [...]

“The real doctrines of the Basilideans, Valentinians, and the Marcionites cannot be correctly ascertained in the prejudiced and calumnious writings of the Fathers of the Church; but rather in what remains of the works of the Bardesanesians, known as the Nazarenes. It is next to impossible, now that all their manuscripts and books are destroyed, [...]

“In the later Zoroastrian books, after that Darius had restored both the worship of Ormazd and added to it the purer Magianism of the primitive Secret Wisdom - hwtsn-twmbx, of which, as the inscription tells us, he was himself a hierophant, we see again reappearing the Zeru-ana, or boundless time, represented by the Brahmans in [...]

“These endless emanations of the one First Cause, all of which were gradually transformed by the popular fancy into distinct gods, spirits, angels, and demons, were so little considered immortal, that all were assigned a limited existence. And this belief, common to all the peoples of antiquity, to the Chaldean Magi as well as to [...]

"When Solomon is made to say that I was "from the beginning...while, as yet, he, (the Supreme Deity), had not made the earth nor the highest part of the dust of the world...I was there", and "when he appointed the foundations of the earth...then I was by him, as one brought up with him", what [...]

"Alexander Polyhistor says that Abraham was born at Kamarina or Uria, a city of soothsayers, and invented astronomy. Josephus claims the same for Terah, Abraham's father. The tower of babel was built as much by the direct descendants of Shem as by those of the "accursed" Ham and Canaan, for the people in those days [...]

"Strictly speaking, it is difficult to view the Jewish Book of Genesis otherwise than as a chip from the trunk of the mundane tree of universal Cosmogony, rendered in Oriental allegories. As cycle succeeded cycle, and one nation after another came upon the world's stage to play its brief part in the majestic drama of [...]