Prueba de hipótesis

Moses married Zipporah, daughter of Jethro, and sojourned many years with the wise man of Madian. Thanks to the Ethiopian and Chaldean traditions which he found in this temple, Moses was able to complete and master what he had learned in the Egyptian sanctuaries, to study the most ancient cycles of humanity and by the process of induction to plunge into the distant horizons of the future. It was at the home of Jethro that he found two books on cosmogony mentioned in Genesis:

The Wars of Jehovah and The Generations of Adam. He studied them with great care.

It was necessary to gird his loins well for the work he was considering. Before him Rama, Krishna, Hermes, Zoroaster and Fo-Hi had created religions of the people; Moses wished to create a people for the everlasting religion. A strong foundation was necessary for such a courageous, new, gigantic undertaking. For this reason Moses wrote his Sepher Bereshith, his Book of Beginnings, a concentrated synthesis of the science of the past and a framework for the science of the future, a key to the Mysteries, a torch of the initiates, a rallying-point for the entire nation.

Let us try to see what Genesis was, according to Moses' way of thinking. Certainly in his thought Genesis radiated a different light, it embraced worlds which were much more vast than the naive conception of the tiny earth which appears in the Greek translation of the Septuagint, or in St.

Jerome's Latin translation!

The Biblical exegesis of the nineteenth century made fashionable the idea that Genesis is not the work of Moses, that this prophet may not even have existed, and that he may have been merely an entirely legendary character invented four or five centuries later by the Jewish priesthood in order to give itself a divine origin. Modern criticism bases this opinion on the fact that Genesis is composed of various fragments (Elohistic and Jehovistic) pieced together, and that its present editing is posterior by at least four hundred years to the time when Israel left Egypt. The facts established by modern criticism as regards the time of editing the texts that we possess today are accurate; the conclusions it draws from them are arbitrary and illogical. It does not follow from the fact that the Elohist and Jehovist wrote four hundred years after the Exodus, that they were the inventors of Genesis and that they did riot work on an earlier document, perhaps poorly understood. From the fact that the Pentateuch gives us a traditional account of the life of Moses, it does not follow that it contains nothing true. The mission of the prophet is explained when he is seen in his native environment, the solar temple of Memphis. Finally, the depths of Genesis are revealed only in the light of torches snatched from the initiation of Isis and Osiris.

A religion is not formed without an initiator. The judges, the prophets, all the history of Israel, give proof of Moses; Jesus himself cannot be conceived of without him. Moreover, Genesis contains the essence of the Mosaic tradition. Whatever changes it has undergone, beneath the dust of centuries and priestly wrappings the venerable mummy must contain the basic idea, the living thought, the testament of the prophet of Israel.

Israel gravitates around Moses as surely, as inevitably as the earth turns around the sun. But once this is established, it is something else to know what the basic ideas of Genesis were, what Moses wanted to will to posterity in this secret testament of the Sepher Bereshith. The problem can be resolved only from an esoteric point of view, and is as follows: In his role as an Egyptian initiate, the intellectuality of Moses had to be on a par with Egyptian science which, like ours, accepted the permanence of the laws of the universe, the development of worlds by gradual evolution, and in addition had extensive, exact and rational ideas about the soul and invisible nature. If such was Moses' science -- and how could a priest of Osiris not have had it? -- how can one reconcile this with the naive ideas of Genesis concerning the creation of the world and the origin of man? Might not this story of creation which, when taken literally, makes a modern schoolboy laugh, conceal a profound symbolic meaning? Is there a way to unlock the latter? What is this deep meaning? Where can one find the key to it?

That key is to be found: 1. in Egyptian symbolism, 2. in the symbolism of all the religions of the ancient cycle, 3. in the synthesis of esoteric teaching from Vedic India to the Christian initiates of the early centuries.

The Greek authors relate that the priests of Egypt had three ways of expressing their thoughts. "The first was clear and simple; the second, symbolic and figurative; the third, sacred and hieroglyphic. At their wish, the same work assumed a literal, a figurative or a transcendent meaning. This was the genius of their language. Heraclitus expressed the differences perfectly in designating them as speaking, signifying and concealing."

In the theogonic and cosmogonic sciences the Egyptian priests always used the third mode of writing. Their hieroglyphs had three distinct meanings. The last two could not be understood without a key. This enigmatic, concentrated style of writing was related to a fundamental tenet of Hermes' doctrine, according to which one and the same law rules the natural world, the human world and the

divine world. This language of extraordinary conciseness, unintelligible to the common man, had a singular eloquence for the adept, for, by means of a single sign it evoked the principles, causes and effects radiating from divinity into blind nature, into the human consciousness and into the world of pure spirits. Thanks to this writing, the initiate embraced the three worlds in a single glance.

Considering Moses' education, there is no doubt that he wrote Genesis in Egyptian hieroglyphs with three meanings. He entrusted the keys and oral explanation to his successors. When, in Solomon's time, Genesis was transliterated into Phoenician characters, when, after the Babylonian Captivity, Esdras edited it in Chaldaic-Aramaic characters, the Jewish priesthood could make but very imperfect use of these keys. At last, when the Greek translators of the Bible appeared, they had no more than a vague idea of the esoteric meaning of the texts. Despite his serious intentions and his great mind, when St. Jerome prepared his Latin translation from the Hebrew text, he could not fathom the basic meaning, and could he have done so, it was right that he remained silent. Therefore, when we read Genesis in our translations, we have only the elementary, inferior meaning. Whether they will or no, the exegetes and theologians themselves, orthodox or free thinkers, see the Hebrew text only through the Vulgate. The comparative and superlative meaning, which is the profound and true sense of Genesis, escapes them. It remains no less mysteriously hidden in the Hebrew text, which by its roots dips down into the sacred language of the temples, remolded by Moses.

This sacred language is one in which each vowel and each consonant has a universal meaning in harmony with the acoustic value of the letter and the state of consciousness of the man who produced it. For the intuitive this profound meaning sometimes bursts forth like a spark from the text; for the seer it shines in the phonetic structure of the words adopted or created by Moses: magic syllables, where the initiate of Osiris let his thought flow like sonorous metal into a perfect mold.

Through the study of this phonetic alphabet which bears the impress of the holy language of the ancient temples, by means of the keys which the Kabbala provides, some of which date back to Moses, finally through comparative esoterism, today we are allowed to penetrate into and rediscover the real Genesis. Thus the thought of Moses emerges, shining like gold from the furnace of the centuries, from the scoria of a primitive theology and the ashes of negative criticism.³⁵

Two examples will shed broad light upon what the sacred language of the ancient temples was, and how the three meanings in the symbols of Egypt and those of Genesis correspond to one another. On a great many Egyptian monuments one sees a woman wearing a crown, holding in one hand the crux ansata, the symbol of everlasting life; in the other hand she holds a scepter in the form of a lotus flower, the symbol of initiation. This is the goddess ISIS. Now Isis has three different meanings.

Literally, she personifies Woman, and from this the universal feminine gender. Comparatively, she personifies the fullness of terrestrial nature, with all its reproductive powers. In the superlative, she symbolizes celestial and invisible nature, itself the element of souls and spirits, spiritual light, intelligible in itself, which initiation alone confers.

The symbol which corresponds to Isis in the Genesis text and in the Judeo-Christian mind is EVE, Heva, the Eternal Feminine. This Eve is not only Adam's wife, she is also the wife of God. She constitutes three-quarters of His being. For the name of the Eternal IEVE of which we have incorrectly made Jehovah and Javeh, is composed of the prefix I and the name Eve. The high priest of Jerusalem pronounced the divine name once a year, enunciating it letter by letter in the following manner: Yod, he, vau, he. The first expressed the divine thought³⁶ and the theogonic sciences; the three letters of Eve's name expressed the three orders of nature, the three worlds in which this thought is realized, and then the cosmogonic, psychic and physical sciences which correspond to them.³⁷ The Ineffable encloses deep within Itself the Eternal Masculine and the Eternal Feminine.

Their indissoluble union make for His power and mystery. This is what Moses, sworn enemy of all images of divinity, did not tell the people, but recorded figuratively in the structure of the Divine Name when he explained it to his adepts. Thus in the Judaic cult an esoteric nature is hidden in the very Name of God. The wife of Adam, strange, guilty, charming woman, reveals to us her profound

affinities with the terrestrial, divine Isis, the mother of the gods, who manifests through her deep womb the turbulence of souls and stars.

Another example: A character which plays a great role in the story of Adam and Eve is the Serpent.

Genesis calls it Nâhdâsh. Now what did the serpent mean in the ancient temples? The mysteries of India, Egypt and Greece reply with a single voice: The serpent arranged in a circle means universal life, whose magic agent is starlight. In a still deeper sense, Nâhdâsh means the power which puts life in motion, the attraction of self for self. In the latter meaning Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire saw the basis for universal gravity. The Greeks called it Eros, Love, or Desire. -- Now apply these two meanings to the story of Adam, Eve and the Serpent, and you will see that the Fall of the first couple, the celebrated original sin, suddenly becomes the vast revealing of divine and universal nature with its kingdoms, its classes and its species, in the tremendous, ineluctable cycle of life.

These two examples have enabled us to glance for the first time into the depths of the Mosaic Genesis. We already see in part what cosmogony was for an ancient initiate, and what distinguished it from cosmogony in the modern sense.

For modern science, cosmogony is reduced to a cosmography. One will find in it the description of a portion of the visible universe included in a study dealing with the chain of physical causes and effects in a given area. For example, it will be Laplace's 'system of the world where the formation of our solar system is hypothesized only on the basis of its present functioning and from matter in movement. It will also be the history of the earth, whose irrefutable evidences are the various strata of the soil. Ancient science was not unaware of this development of the visible universe, and if it had less accurate ideas on it than has modern science, nevertheless intuitively it had formulated the general laws.

But for the sages of India and Egypt this was merely the outer aspect of the world, its reflex movement. They sought the explanation of the world in its inner aspect, in its direct and original movement. They found in it another order of laws which reveals itself to our intelligence. For ancient science, the limitless universe was not dead matter governed by mechanical laws, but was a living whole, endowed with intelligence, soul and will. This great divine being had innumerable organs, corresponding to its infinite faculties. As in the human body movements result from the thinking mind and the acting will, so in the eyes of ancient science the visible order of the universe was but the reflection of an invisible order, that is, of cosmogonic forces and spiritual monads, kingdoms, classes and species, which through their perpetual involution into matter produced the evolution of life. Whereas modern science considers only the external, the surface of the universe, the science of the ancient temples had the task to reveal the internal, to discover hidden movements.

It did not conclude that intelligence derives from matter, but matter from intelligence. It did not describe the universe as born of the blind dance of atoms, but it generated atoms through the vibrations of the universal soul. In short, it moved 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 powers and spirits in inverse proportion to the ascending order of life and bodies, was the ontology of science, of intelligible principles, and formed the basis of cosmogony.

All the great initiations in India, Egypt, Judea and Greece, those of Krishna, Hermes, Moses and Orpheus knew in varied forms this order of elements, powers, souls and generations which descend from the First Cause, from the Ineffable Father.

The descending order of incarnations is simultaneous with the ascending order of lives, and this alone makes it understandable. Involution produces evolution and explains it.

In Greece the male, or Doric temples, those of Jupiter and Apollo (especially that at Delphi), were the only ones which possessed the essential knowledge of the descending order. The Ionic, or feminine temples had but imperfect knowledge of it. The entire Greek civilization being Ionic, science and the Doric order became more and more veiled. Nevertheless, it is incontestable that its great initiators, its heros and philosophers, from Orpheus to Pythagoras to Plato and from the latter to the Alexandrians, depend upon that order. All recognized Hermes as their master.

Let us return to Genesis. According to Moses, that other son of Hermes, the first ten chapters of Genesis constituted a real ontology, based upon the order and relationship of beginnings. All that begins must end. Genesis simultaneously described evolution in time and creation in Eternity; the only creating worthy of God.

In the section on Pythagoras I shall give a picture of theogony and esoteric cosmogony in a less abstract setting than that of Moses, and closer to the modern mind. In spite of the polytheistic form, in spite of the extreme diversity of symbols, the meaning of this Pythagorean cosmogony, on the basis of Orphic initiation and the sanctuaries of Apollo, will be basically identical with that of the prophet of Israel. In Pythagoras the latter will be as though lighted by its natural complement, the doctrine of the soul and its evolution. The latter was taught in the Greek sanctuaries by means of the symbols of the myth of Persephone. It was also called The Earthly and Heavenly Story of Psyche.

This narrative, corresponding to what Christianity calls redemption, is entirely absent from the Old Testament. This is not because Moses and the prophets did not know about it, but because they considered it too difficult for popular teaching, reserving it for the oral tradition of the initiates. The divine Psyche was hidden for a long time beneath the hermetic symbols of Israel, only that it might be personified in the ethereal, luminous appearance of Christ.

As for the cosmogony of Moses, it unites the incisive brevity of Semitic aptitude with the mathematical precision of Egyptian genius. The style of the narrative reminds one of the forms which decorate the interior of the kings' tombs; erect, cold, severe, they conceal an impenetrable mystery in their sharp bareness. The general effect makes one think of a Cyclopean building, but here and there, like lava flowing between the giant blocks, the thought of Moses bursts forth with the impetuosity of an initiate fire between the trembling verses of the translators. In the first chapters of incomparable grandeur, one feels the breath of Elohim pass by, turning the heavy pages of the universe one by one.

Before leaving them, let us look again at some of the mighty hieroglyphs composed by the prophet of Sinai. Like the door of an underground temple each of them opens upon a gallery of esoteric truths which, with their unflickering lamps, light the succession of worlds and ages. Let us attempt to enter it with the keys of initiation. Let us try to see these strange symbols, these magic formulas in their evocative power as the initiate of Osiris saw them, as they emerged in letters of fire from the furnace of his thought.

In the crypt of Jethro's temple Moses is meditating alone, sitting upon a sarcophagus. About him the walls and pilasters are covered with hieroglyphs and paintings, representing the names and forms of the gods as conceived by all peoples of the earth. These symbols summarize the history of vanished cycles and foretell future ones. A lamp placed upon the ground dimly lights these signs, each of which speaks its language to him. But already he no longer sees anything of the external world; he is seeking within himself the word of his book, the form of his work, the Word which will be Action.

The lamp has gone out, but before his inner eye in the night of the crypt flames the name:

The lamp has gone out, but before his inner eye in the night of the crypt flames the name: