THE GREAT INITIATES - MOSES The Book of the Origins

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« THE GREAT INIITATES », part I

Edouard SCHURE

Kessinger Publishings Rare Reprints

ISBN 0-7661-3146-7

 

MOSES

 

Chapter III

 

 

THE SEPHER BERESHIT

 

 

Moses married Zipporah, Jethro's daughter, and stayed for many years with the

sage of Midian. Thanks to the Ethiopian and Chaldean traditions he found in the

temple, he was able to complete and verify what he had learned in the Egyptian

sanctuaries, to extent a backward glance over the most ancient cycles of

mankind, and by induction reach out into the distant horizons of the future. It

was during his stay with Jethro that he found two books on cosmogony quoted in

Genesis : " The Wars of Jehovah and the Generations of Adam. Into the study of

these he plunged with the utmost ardour.

 

His loins must be well girt for the work he was meditating. Before him, Rama,

Krishana, Hermes, Zoroaster, and Fo-Hi had created religions for people for the

eternal religion. A powerful foundation was needed for so bold, novel, and

colossal project. Moses therefore wrote his Sepher Bereshit? His Book of

Origins, a concentrated synthesis of the past and a framework, of the future

science; key to the mysteries, torch of the initiates, rallying-point for the

whole nation.

 

Let us try to see what Genesis meant in the mind of Moses. Here, indeed, it shed

another light, embracing worlds far vaster than the childish world and the

insignificant earth set forth in the Greek translation of the Bible, the

Septuagint, or in the Latin translation of Saint Jerome, the Vulgate.

 

Present-day Biblical exegesis has popularised the idea that Genesis is not the

work of Moses, that it is quite possible this prophet never existed, and is

simply a legendary character, invented four or five years later by the Jewish

priesthood, to give itself a divine origin. Modern criticism founds this opinion

on the fact that Genesis consists of different fragments (Elohistic and

Jehovistic) pieced together, and that its present form is at least four hundred

years more recent that the time when Israel left the land of Egypt. The facts

established by modern criticism, with reference to the time of publication of

the facts we possess, are exact; the conclusions drawn there-from are arbitrary

and illogical. Because the Elohistic and the Jehovistic writers produced their

works four hundred years after the Exodus, it by no means follows that they were

in the inventors of Genesis, and that they were not working from a previous –

perhaps imperfectly-understood – document. Because the Pentateuch gives us a

legendary account of the life of Moses, it does not follow that it contains no

truth at all. Moses becomes a living force; the whole of his wonderful career is

explained when we begin by placing him back again in his native surroundings –

the solar temple of Memphis. Finally, even the profound meanings of Genesis can

only be unfolded in the light of the torches snatched from the initiation of

Isis and Osiris.

 

No religion is ever constituted without an initiator. The Judges, the Prophets,

the whole history of Israel are proofs of Moses; even Jesus cannot be conceived

of without him. Genesis contains the essence of the Mosaic tradition. Whatever

transformations it may have undergone, the venerable mummy, beneath priestly

wrappings and the dust of centuries, must contain the root idea, the living

thought, the testament of the Prophet of Israel.

 

Israel gravitates round Moses as certainly and fatally as the earth turns round

the sun. This being granted, however, it is quite another thing to discover the

root ideas of Genesis – what it was that Moses wished to bequeath to posterity

in this secret testament of the Sepher Bereshit. The problem can only be solved

from the esoteric point of view, and may be stated as follows: - In his capacity

as Egyptian science, which acknowledges, as does our own, the immutability of

the laws of the universe, the development of the worlds by gradual evolution,

and which had, besides, wide, precise and well-reasoned ideas as to the soul and

invisible Nature. If such was the science of Moses – and how could it be

otherwise with the priest of Osiris? – In what way is to be reconciled with the

childish ideas in Genesis regarding the creation of the world and the origin of

man? Does not, perchance, this story of creation, which, interpreted literally,

brings a smile to the face of a schoolboy in these days, conceal a profound

symbolical meaning? Where is this key to be found?

 

It may be found in Egyptian symbology; in that of all the religions of the

ancient cycle; in the synthesis of the doctrine of the initiates, as resulting

from comparison with esoteric teaching, from Vedic India to the Christian

initiates of the early centuries.

 

The priests of Egypt, so say the Greek authors, had three ways of expressing

their thought. " The first was clear and simple, the second symbolical and

figurative, the third sacred and hieroglyphic. The same word assumed, at their

will, either the literal, the figurative, or the transcendental meaning. Such

was the genius of their language. Heraclitus well expressed this difference when

he designated this language as being speaking? Signifying, and concealing " .

 

 

In the theogonic and cosmogonic sciences the Egyptian priests always employed

the third method of writing. Their hieroglyphs had three corresponding and

distinct meanings. The two latter could not be understood without a key. The

enigmatical, concentrated method of writing itself depended upon a fundamental

dogma of the teaching of Hermes, in accordance with which one same law governs

the natural, the human, and the divine worlds. This language, wonderfully

concise, unintelligible to the masses, could readily be understood by the adept;

for, by means of a single sign it summoned forth origins, causes and effects

which radiate out from divinity into blind nature, human consciousness, and the

world of pure spirit. Thanks to this writing, the adept comprehended all three

worlds at a single glance.

 

No one doubts, granted Moses education that he wrote Genesis in Egyptian

hieroglyphs of three meanings. The keys and the oral explanation he cofided to

his successors. When, in Salomon's time, Genesis was translated into Phoenician

characters; when, after the Babylonian captivity, Esdras wrote in the Aramaean

characters of the Chaldaeans, the Jewish, priesthood could no longer interpret

these keys except very imperfectly. Finally, when we come to the Greek

translators of the Bible, they had only a very faint idea of the esoteric

meaning of the texts. Saint Jerome, notwithstanding his great intellect and the

seriousness of his purpose, when he made his Latin translation from the Hebrew

text, could not fathom the original meaning; and, had he done so, it would have

been his duty not to divulge it. Accordingly, when we read Genesis in our

translations, we obtain only the elementary, the inferior meaning. Whether they

wish it or not, even expounders and theologians, orthodox or free-thinkers,

understand the Hebrew text only through the Vulgate. The comparative and

superlative meaning, the true one, escapes them. None the less does it remain

mysteriously buried in the Hebrew text, whose roots go deep down, right into the

sacred language of the temples – a language remodelled by Moses, in which each

vowel and consonant had a universal signification en rapport with the acoustic

value of the letter and the mental condition of the man who uttered it. For such

as are intuitive this profound meaning sometimes leaps forth, like a spark of

fire, from the text; for such as are seers it shines in the phonetic structure

of the words adopted or invented by Moses – magic syllables in which the

initiate of Osiris framed his thought as bell-metal is shaped in a perfect

mould. By the study of this phonetic science which bears, the impress of the

sacred language of ancient temples, by the keys with which we are supplied in

the Kabbala, some of which date back to the times of Moses, and finally, by

comparative esoterism, we are in a position at the present time to reconstitute

and catch some glimpse of the real Genesis. Then the thought of Moses leaps

forth, flashing like gold from the furnace of the centuries the dross of an

elementary theology and the ashes of negative criticism.

 

Two examples will suffice to throw light on what the sacred language of the

ancient temples was, and how the three meanings correspond with one another in

the symbols of Egypt and in those of Genesis. On innumerable Egyptian monuments

may be seen a woman with a crown on her head, holding the crux ansata, the

symbol of eternal life, in one hand, and in the other a sceptre in the form of a

lotus flower, the symbol of initiation.

 

This is the Goddess ISIS. Now Isis has three different meanings. In the positive

mood it typifies Woman; consequently the whole female sex. Comparatively it

personifies the totality of terrestrial nature with all its powers of

conception. Superlatively it symbolises celestial and invisible Nature, the

element proper to souls and spirits, light spiritual and intelligible in itself,

which alone confers initiation. The symbol corresponding to Isis in the text of

Genesis and in the Jewish-Christian mind is EVE, Heva, the eternal woman. This

Eve is not only the wife of Adam, she is also the spouse of God. She constitutes

three-quarters of his essence, for the name of the Eternal is IEVE, which we

have incorrectly called Jehova and Javeh, is composed of the prefix Jod and the

name of Eve. oNce every year the high priest of Jerusalem uttered the divine

nae, spelling it out, letter by letter, in the following way : Jod, he, vau, he.

The first expressed the divine thought and the theogonic sciences; the three

letters in the name of Eve expressed the three orders of Nature, the three

worlds in which this thought is realised, and consequently the cosmogonic,

psychical, and physical sciences corresponding thereto. The ineffable contains

in the epths of his being the masculine Eternal and the feminine Eternal. The

indissoluble union of the two produces his power and his mystery. Moses, the

sworn enemy of every image of divinity, did not tell this to the people, though

he recorded it figuratively in the construction of the divine name, explaining

it to his adepts. Thus Nature, veiled in the Judaic cult, lies concealed in the

very name of God. Adam's spouse, the guilty and charming, though inquisitive

woman, reveals to us her deep affinities with the terrestrial and divine Isis,

the mother of the Gods.

 

Another example. A character playing a large part in the history of Adam and Eve

is the serpent. In Genesis it is called Nâchâsh. Now, what did the serpent

signify in the ancient temples? The mysteries of India, Egypt, and Greece reply

in one voice: The serpent curled in a circle signifies universal life, whose

magic agent is the astral light. In an even deeper meaning Nâchash signifies the

force which sets this life in motion, the attraction of self for self, in which

Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire saw the reason for universal gravitation. The Greeks

called it Eros, Love or Desire. Now apply these two meanings to the story of

Adam and Eve and the serpent, and you will see that the fall of the first

couple, the famous original sin, suddenly becomes the mighty unrolling of the

divine, universal Nature with its kingdoms, classes and species in the

formidable and inevitable circle of life.

 

The two examples now enable us to cast a glance into the mysteries of the Mosaic

Genesis. We have already obtained some idea as to what cosmogony was to an

initiate of old, and what distinguished it from cosmogony in the modern sense of

the word.

 

In modern science cosmogony is reduced to a cosmography. Therein is found the

description of a portion of the visible universe, with an investigation into the

linking together of physical causes and effects within a given sphere. It is for

instance, Laplace's system of the world, in which the formation of our solar

system is conjectured from its present working, and deduced to be nothing but

matter in movement; hypothesis, pure and simple. Again it is the history of the

earth, of which the superposed layers of soil are irrefutable witnesses. Ancient

science was not ignorant of this development of the visible universe, and though

it may have had regarding it less precise notions than modern science has, it

had, all the same, intuitively formulated the general laws thereof.

 

This, however, to the sages of India and Egypt, was nothing but the outer aspect

of the world, its reflex movement. They sought an explanation in its inner

aspect, its direct, original movement, which they found in another order of laws

revealing itself to our intelligence. To ancient science the boundless universe

was not dead matter governed by mechanical laws, but a living whole, endowed

with intelligence, soul and will. This great sacred animal had innumerable

organs corresponding with its infinite faculties. As in the human body,

movements are the result of the thinking soul, the acting will – so, in the eyes

of the scientists of old, the visible order of the universe was nothing but the

reflection of an invisible order; that is to say, of cosmogonic forces and

spiritual monads, kingdoms, genera, species which, through their perpetual

involution into matter, produce the evolution of life. Instead of modern science

considering only the outside, the shell of the universe, the object of science

in the temples of old was to reveal the interior, to lay bare its concealed

mechanism. Ancient science did not extract intelligence from matter, but rather

matter from intelligence. It did not cause the universe to spring into being

from the blind dance of atoms; it generated atoms by vibrations of the universal

soul. In a world it proceeded in concentric circles from the universal to the

particular, from the Invisible to the Visible, from pure Spirit to organized

Substance, from God to man. This descending order of Forces and Souls, in

inverse ratio to the ascending order of Life and Bodies, was ontology or the

science of intelligible principle, and formed the foundation of cosmogony.

 

All the great initiations of India and Egypt, of Judea and Greece; those of

Krishna and Hermes, of Moses and Orpheus, have been acquainted, under different

forms, with this order of principles and powers, of souls and generations,

coming down from the one first cause, the ineffable Father.

 

The descending order of incarnations is simultaneous with the ascending order of

lives, and alone makes it understood. Involution produces evolution and explains

it.

 

In Greece the male and Doric temples, those of Jupiter and Apollo – hat at

Delphi especially – were the only ones which were thoroughly acquainted with the

descending order. The ionic or feminine temples knew it only in imperfect

fashion. As the entire Greek civilisation was Ionic, Doric science and the Doric

order were more and more veiled by it. None the less is it certain that its

greatest initiators, heroes, and philosophers, from Orpheus to Pythagoras, from

Pythagoras to Plato, and from the latter to the Alexandrians, spring from this

order. They all recognized Hermes as their master.

 

Let us now return to Genesis. In the mind of Moses, that other son of Hermes,

the first ten chapters of Genesis constituted a veritable ontology, according to

the order and filiation of principles. Everything that begins must have an end.

Genesis relates both evolution in time and creation in eternity, the only one

worthy of God.

 

I intend to offer in Pythagoras a living picture of esoteric theogony and

cosmogony in a form less abstract that that of Moses and more in harmony with

modern mentality. Notwithstanding the polytheistic form and the extreme

diversity of the symbols, the meaning of this Pythagorean cosmogony, according

to Orphic initiation and sanctuaries of Apollo, is, at bottom, identical with

that of the prophet of Israel. In Pythagoras it illumined, so to speak, by its

natural complement: The doctrine of the soul and of its evolution. In the Greek

sanctuaries it was taught under the symbols of the myth of Persephone. It was

called the terrestrial and celestial story of Psyche. This story, corresponding

to what Christianity calls Redemption, is altogether absent from the Old

Testament. Not that Moses and the Prophets were ignorant of it, but they

regarded it as being too lofty a doctrine to be taught to the masses, so it was

reserved for the oral tradition of the initiates. The divine Psyche is to remain

so long concealed beneath the Hermetic ethereal and luminous coming of the

Christ.

 

The cosmogony of Moses possesses the stern conciseness of the Semitic and the

mathematical precision of the Egyptian genius. The style of the narrative calls

to mind the figures found inside the tombs of the kings; in their dry, severe

stiffness and rigid bareness they contain an impenetrable mystery. The ensemble

makes one think of a Cyclopean building; though here and there, like a torrent

of lava between the giant rocks, the thought of Moses, as revealed in the

thrilling verses of the translators, pours forth with all the impetuosity of

fiery flame from a volcanic eruption. In the first few chapters, incomparable in

their majesty, one feels the very life-breath of Elohim, as He turns over, one

by one, the ponderous pages of the universe.

 

Before leaving them, let us cast one more glance at some of those powerful

hieroglyphs composed by the prophet of Sinai. Like the door of a subterranean

temple, each of them opens on to a gallery of occult truths, which, like

motionless lamps, light up the series of worlds and times. Using the keys of

initiation, we will endeavour to penetrate into the temple and see these strange

symbols, these magic formulas in their power of evocation, as the initiate of

Osiris saw them when they issued in fiery letters from the furnace of his mind.

 

In a crypt of the temple of Jethro, Moses is seated alone on a sarcophagus,

plunged in meditation. Wals and pilasters are covered with hieroglyphs and

paintings representing the names and figures of the Gods of all the nations on

earth. These symbols sum un the history of vanished cycles and foretell future

ones. A naphta lamp, set on the ground, casts a faint glimmer on to these signs,

each of which speaks to him its own language. No longer does he see anything of

the outer world; within himself he seeks the Word of his book, the reflection of

his work, Speech which is to become Action. The lamp has flickered out; but

before his inner eye, in the darkness of the crypt, flashes forth the name.

 

IEVE

 

The fist letter " I " is the white colour of light; the other three shine like an

changing fire, glowing with all the colours of the rainbow. How strange the life

hidden in these characters! In the first letter Moses perceives the masculine

principle, Osiris, the creative Spirit par excellence; in Eve the faculty of

conception, the celestial Isis who forms part thereof. Thus the divine

faculties, which contain in potentiality all worlds, are unfolded, and

co-ordinated in the heart of God. By their perfect union the ineffable Father

and Mother form the Son, the living Word who creates the universe. This is the

mystery of mysteries, hidden from mortal sense, but speaking by the sign of the

Eternal, as Spirit speaks to Spirit. The sacred tetragram shines with ever

intenser light. Moses sees the three worlds, all the kingdoms of Nature, and the

sublime order of the sciences issue from it in a giant flashes. Then his ardent

gaze is fixed on the masculine sign of the creative Spirit. It he invokes in

order to descend the order of creations and, from the sovereign will, to draw

strength to accomplish his own creation, after contemplating the works of the

Eternal.

 

And now, through the darkness of the crypt, there shines the other divine names:

 

 

ELOHIM

 

This signifies to the initiates: He – The Gods, the God of Gods. This is no

longer Being, retiring with himself and into the Absolute, but the Lord of the

worlds, whose thought expands in millions of stars, movable spheres of floating

universes. " In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth " . The heaven

at first, however, was only the thought of boundless time and space, inhabited

by silence and void. " And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters " .

What is the first thing that will come forth ? A sun ? An earth? A nebula? Any

substance whatever of the visible wold? No. The first thing born therefrom was

Aour, Light. But this light is not physical; it is intelligible light, born of

the thrill of celestial Isis in the bosom of the Infinite; universal soul and

astral light, substance which makes souls, from which they come forth as though

of an ethereal fluid; subtle element by which through is transmitted to endless

distances; divine light, both previous and subsequent to that of all suns .

First, it spreads out into the Infinite; it is the powerful respiration of God;

then it comes back upon itself in an outburst of love, the deep aspiration of

Eternal. In the billows of the divine ether, the astral forms of worlds and

beings quiver as though beneath a translucent veil. The Mage-Seer finds all this

summed up in the words he utters, words which shine through the darkness in

dazzling characters:

 

 

ROUA ELOHIM AOUR

 

3Let there be light, and there was light " . The breath of Elohim is Light!

 

From the bosom of this primitive, immaterial light issue the first six days of

Creation, i.e. the seeds, origins, forms, and living souls of all things. It is

the Universe in potentiality, before the letter and according to the Spirit. And

what is the last word of Creation, the formula which sums up Being in action,

the living Word in which appears the first and last thought of absolute Being?

It is.

 

 

ADAM – EVE

 

The Man-Woman – This symbol by no means represents the first human couple on our

earth, as the Churches teach and expositors believe, but God in action

throughout the universe, and the type of the human race; universal humanity

throughout all the heavens. " God created man in his own image; male and female

created he him " . This divine couple is the universal word by which IEVE

manifests his own nature in the worlds. The sphere he first inhabits and which

the powerful mind of Moses understands is not the garden of Eden, the legendary

terrestrial paradise, the upper earth of Plato, the universal celestial kingdom,

Heden , Hadama, substance of all the earths. What is to be the evolution of

humanity in time and space? This, in concentrated form, Moses considers in the

story of the fall. In Genesis, Psyche, the human Soul, is called Aïsha another

name for Eve. Its home is Shamaïm, heaven. There it lives happy and blessed in

the divine ether, though devoid of acknowledge of itself. It enjoys heaven

without understanding it. To understand, it must first have forgotten and the

remembered; to love, It must first have lost and then won back. Only by pain and

the fall will it know and understand. And what a profound and tragic fall, s

different from the literal one we read of in our childish Bible! Attracted

towards the dark gloomy abyss bys desire for knowledge, Aïsha lets herself

fall…. She ceases to be the pure soul, having only a sideral body and living on

the divine ether. She clothes herself with a material body and enters the circle

of generations. Her incarnations are not one, but a hundred, a thousand, in

bodies of denser and denser matter according to the constellations she inhabits.

She descends from world to world… descends and forgets…. A dark veil covers he

inner eye; obliterated is the divine consciousness, dimmed the memory of heaven

in the sense tissue of matter. Pale as a lost hope, a faint memory of her lost

happiness still shines within! From this ray of light she is to be reborn, to

regenerate herself!

 

Yes, Aïsha still lives in these two nude beings lying defenceless in a wild,

savage land, beneath a hostile, thunder-threatening sky. Paradise lost? There is

the immensity of the veiled heavens, both behind and before her!

 

In such a light does Moses contemplate the generations of Adam in the world.

Then he considers the destinies of man on earth. He sees both the cycles that

have passed and the present one. In the terrestrial Aïsha, the soul of humanity,

the consciousness of God had, in past times, shone with the fire of Agni, in the

land of Cush, on the slopes of the Himalayas.

 

And now we find Aïsha ready to fall away into idolatry, subjected to hellish

passions and Assyrian tyranny, amongst troubled nations and jealous gods. Moses

vows that he will arouse her by establishing the worship of Elohim.

 

Not only the individual man but also collective humanity must be of the image of

IEVE. But where is to be found the nations which will incarnate him, and be the

living Word of humanity?

 

Then Moses, having conceived his book and his work, and sought out the profound

darkness of the human soul, declares war on terrestrial Eve, on corrupt and

feeble nature. To combat and restore it, he invokes the Spirit, the primal,

omnipotent Fire, IEVE to whose source he has just ascended. He feels that its

outbreathings inflame and temper him like steel. Will is its name.

 

And in the darkness and silence of the crypt, Moses hears a voice coming from

out the depths of his consciousness. In light-like vibrations it says: " Go to

the mountain of God, even to Horeb " .