Category: The Cross and Circle

"To the Eastern Occultist the TREE of Knowledge in the Paradise of man's own heart, becomes the Tree of Life eternal, and has nought to do with man's animal senses.   It is an absolute mystery that reveals itself only through the efforts of the imprisoned Manas and the Ego to liberate themselves from the [...]

"Few world-symbols are more pregnant with real occult meaning than the Swastika.   It is symbolized by the figure 6;  for, like that figure, it points in its concrete imagery, as the ideograph of the number does, to the Zenith and the Nadir, to North, South, West, and East; one finds the unit everywhere, and [...]

"There was a time when the Eastern symbol of the Cross and Circle, the Swastika, was universally adopted.   With the esoteric (and, for that matter, exoteric) Buddhist, the Chinese and the Mongolian, it means "the 10,000 truths". These truths, they say, belong to the mysteries of the unseen universe and primordial Cosmogony and Theogony. [...]

"Long before the cross or its sign were adopted as symbols of Christianity, the sign of the cross was used as a sign of recognition among adepts and neophytes, the latter being called Chrests (from Chrestos, man of tribulation and sorrow).   Says Eliphas Levi:   "The sign of the cross adopted by the Christians [...]

"Now, the primordial system, the double glyph that underlies the idea of the Cross, is not "of human invention", for Cosmic ideation and the Spiritual representation of the divine Ego-man are at its basis.   Later, it expanded in the beautiful idea adopted by and represented in the Mysteries, that of regenerated man, the mortal, [...]

"Let the reader who doubts the statement turn to some most suggestive Egyptian bas-reliefs. One especially from the temple of Philae represents a scene of initiation.   Two God-Hierophants, one with the head of a hawk (the Sun), the other ibis-headed (Mercury, Thoth, the god of Wisdom and secret learning, the assessor of Osiris-Sun), are [...]

"An Ozarim, an Initiate, is said to have found at Hebron, on the dead body of Hermes, the well-known Smaragdine Tablet, which, it is said, contained the essence of Hermetic wisdom.   "Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross....Ascend from the earth to heaven and then descend again to earth" was [...]

"The Brahmanical "Golden Egg", from within which emerges Brahma, the creative deity, is the "circle with the Central Point" of Pythagoras, and its fitting symbol.   In the Secret Doctrine the concealed UNITY - whether representing PARABRAHMAN, or the "GREAT EXTREME" of Confucius, or the Deity concealed by [the Egyptian] PTAH, the Eternal Light, or [...]

"The Secret Doctrine teaches us that everything in the universe, as well as the universe itself, is formed (created) during its periodical manifestations - by accelerated MOTION set into activity by the BREATH of the ever-to-be-unknown power (unknown to present mankind, at any rate) within the phenomenal world.   The Spirit of Life and Immortality [...]

"Something of the divine and the mysterious has ever been ascribed, in the minds of the ancient philosophers, to the shape of the circle.   The old world, consistent in its symbolism with the pantheistic intuitions, uniting the visible and the invisible Infinitudes into one, represented Deity and its outward Veil alike - by a [...]