| Hail, holy
light,
offspring
of Heaven first-born.
Or of the Eternal co-eternal beam.
. . . Since
God is light
Bright effluence of bright essence increate.
. . . Satan
Puts on swift wings,
and towards the gates of hell
Explores his solitary flight.
--MILTON |
NO more philosophically
profound, nor grander or more graphic and suggestive
type exists among the allegories of
the World-religions than that of the two Brother-Powers
of the Mazdean religion, called Ahura Mazda and
Angra Mainyu, better known in their modernized
form of Ormuzd and Ahriman. Of these two
emanations, "Sons of Boundless Time"--Zeruana
Akarana--itself issued from the Supreme and
Unknowable Principle,l
the one is the embodiment of "Good Thought"
( Vohu Manô), the other of
"Evil Thought" (Akô Manô).
The "King of Light" or Ahura Mazda,
emanates from Primordial Light2
and forms or creates by means of the "Word,"
Honover (Ahuna Vairya), a pure and
holy world. But Angra Mainyu, though born as pure
as his elder brother, becomes jealous of him,
and mars everything in the Universe, as on the
earth, creating Sin and Evil wherever he goes.
The two Powers are inseparable on our present
plane and at this stage of evolution, and would
be meaningless, one without the other. They are,
therefore, the two opposite poles of the One
Manifested Creative Power, whether the latter
is viewed as Universal Cosmic Force which builds
worlds, or under its anthropomorphic aspect, when
its vehicle is thinking man. For Ormuzd and Ahriman
are the respective representatives of Good and
Evil, of Light and Darkness, of the spiritual
and the material elements in man. and also in
the Universe and everything contained in it. Hence
the world and man are called the Macrocosm and the Microcosm,
the great and the small universe, the latter being
the reflection of the former. Even exoterically,
the God of Light and the God of Darkness are,
both spiritually and physically, the two ever-contending
Forces, whether in Heaven
or on Earth.3 The
Parsis may have lost most of the keys that unlock
the true interpretations of their sacred and poetical
allegories, but the symbolism of Ormuzd and Ahriman
is so self-evident, that even the Orientalists
have ended by interpreting it, in its broad features,
almost correctly. As the translator4 of the Vendidad writes, "Long before the Parsis
had heard of Europe and Christianity, commentators,
explaining the myth of Tahmurath, who rode for
thirty years on Ahriman as a horse, interpreted
the feat of the old legendary king as the curbing
of evil passions and restraining Ahriman in the
heart of man." The same writer broadly sums
up Magism in this wise:--
The world, such as it is now, is twofold, being
the work of two hostile beings, Ahura Mazda,
the good principle, and Angra Mainyu the evil
principle; all that is good in the world comes
from the former, all that is bad in it comes
from the latter. The history of the world is
the history of their conflict, how Angra Mainyu
invaded the world of Ahura Mazda and marred
it, and how he shall be expelled from it at
last. Man is active in the conflict, his duty
in it being laid before him in the law revealed
by Ahura Mazda to Zarathustra. When the appointed
time is come a son of the lawgiver. still unborn,
named Saoshyant (Sosiosh) will appear,
Angra Mainyu and hell will be destroyed,
men will rise from the dead, and
everlasting happiness will reign over all the
world.
Attention is drawn to the sentences italicised
by the writer, as they are esoteric. For the Sacred
Books of the Mazdeans, as all the other sacred
Scriptures of the East (the Bible included), have
to be read esoterically. The Mazdeans had practically
two religions, as almost all the other ancient
nations--one for the people and the other for
the initiated priests. Esoterically, then, the
underlined sentences have a special significance,
the whole meaning of which can be obtained only
by the study of occult philosophy. Thus,
Angra Mainyu, being confessedly, in one of its
aspects, the embodiment of man's lowest nature,
with its fierce passions and unholy desires, "his
hell" must be sought for and located on
earth. In occult philosophy there is
no other hell--nor can any state be comparable
to that of a specially unhappy
human wretch. No "asbestos" soul, inextinguishable
fires, or "worm that never dies," can
be worse than a life of hopeless misery upon this
earth. But it must, as it has once had a beginning,
have also an end. Ahura Mazda alone,5 being the divine, and therefore the immortal and eternal symbol
of "Boundless Time," is the secure refuge,
the spiritual haven of man. And as Time is twofold,
there being a measured and finite time within
the Boundless, Angra Mainyu is only a periodical
and temporary Evil. He is Heterogeneity as developed
from Homogeneity. Descending along the scale of
differentiating nature on the cosmic planes, both
Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu become, at the appointed
time, the representatives and the dual type of
man, the inner or divine INDIVIDUALITY,
and the outer personality, a compound
of visible and invisible elements and principles.
As in heaven, so on earth; as above, so below.
If the divine light in man, the Higher
Spirit-Soul, forms, including itself, the seven
Ameshâspends (of which Ormuzd is the seventh,
or the synthesis), Ahriman, the thinking
personality, the animal soul, has
in its turn its seven Archidevs opposed to the
seven Ameshâspends.
During our life cycle,
the good Yazatas, the 99,999 Fravashi (or Ferouers)
and even the "Holy Seven," the Ameshâspends
themselves,6 are
almost powerless against the Host of wicked Devs--the
symbols of cosmic opposing powers and of human
passions and sins.7
Fiends of evil, their presence radiates and fills
the world with moral and physical ills: with disease,
poverty, envy and pride, with despair, drunkenness,
treachery, injustice, and cruelty, with anger
and bloody-handed murder. Under the advice of
Ahriman, man from the first made his fellow-man
to weep and suffer. This state of things will
cease only on the day when Ahura Mazda, the sevenfold
deity, assumes his seventh name8
or aspect. Then, will he send his "Holy Word"
Mathra Spenta (or the "Soul of Ahura")
to incarnate in Saoshyant
(Sosiosh), and the latter will conquer Angra Mainyu.
Sosiosh is the prototype of "the faithful
and the true" of the Revelation,
and the same as Vishnu in the Kalki-avatar.
Both are expected to appear as the Saviour
of the World, seated on a white horse and
followed by a host of spirits or genii, mounted
likewise on milk-white steeds.9
And then, men will arise from the dead and
immortality come.l0
Now the latter is of course purely allegorical.
It stands in the occult sense, that materialism
and sin being called death, the materialist, or
the unbeliever, is "a dead man"--spiritually.
Occultism has never regarded the physical personality
as the man; nor has Paul, if his Epistle
to the Romans (vi-vii), is correctly understood.
Thus mankind, arrived "at the appointed time"
(the end of our present Round), at
the end of the cycle of gross material flesh,
will, with certain bodily changes, have come to
a clearer spiritual perception of the truth. Redemption
from flesh means a proportionate redemption from
sin. Many are those who seeing will believe,
and, in consequence, rise "from
the dead." By the middle of the Seventh Race,
says an occult prophecy, the struggle of the two
conflicting Powers (Buddhi and Kama
Manas) will have almost died out. Everything
that is irredeemably sinful and wicked, cruel
and destructive, will have been eliminated, and
that which is found to survive will be swept away
from being, owing, so to speak, to a Karmic tidal-wave
in the shape of scavenger-plagues, geological
convulsions and other means of destruction. The
Fifth Round will bring forth a higher kind
of Humanity; and, as intelligent Nature
always proceeds Gradually, the last Race of this
Round must necessarily develop the needed materials
thereof. Meanwhile, we are still in the Fifth
Race of the Fourth Round only, and in the Kaliyuga,
into the bargain. The deadly strife between spirit
and matter, between Light and Goodness and Darkness
and Evil, began on our globe with the first appearance
of contrasts and opposites in vegetable and animal
nature, and continued more fiercely than ever
after man had become the selfish and personal
being he now is. Nor is there any chance
of its coming to an end before falsehood is replaced
by truth, selfishness by altruism, and supreme
justice reigns in the heart of man. Till then,
the noisy battle will rage unabated. It is selfishness,
especially; the love of Self above all
things in heaven and earth, helped by human vanity,
which is the begetter of the seven mortal sins.
No; Ashmogh, the cruel "biped serpent,"
is not so easily reduced. Before the poor creature
now in the clutches of Darkness is liberated through
Light, it has to know itself. Man, following the
Delphic injunction, has to become acquainted with,
and gain the mastery over, every nook and corner
of his heterogeneous nature, before he can learn
to discriminate between HIMSELF
and his personality. To accomplish
this difficult task, two conditions are absolutely
requisite: one must have thoroughly realised in
practice the noble Zoroastrian precept: "Good
thoughts, good words, good deeds," and must
have impressed them indelibly on his soul and
heart, not merely as a lip-utterance and form-observance.
Above all, one has to crush personal vanity
beyond resurrection.
Here is a suggestive fable and a charming allegory
from the old Zoroastrian works. From the first
incipient stage of Angra Mainyu's power, he and
his wicked army of fiends opposed the army of
Light in everything it did. The demons of lust
and pride, of corruption and impiety, systematically
destroyed the work of the Holy Ones. It is they
who made beautiful blossoms poisonous; graceful
snakes, deadly; bright fires, the symbol of deity,
full of stench and smoke; and who introduced death
into the world. To light, purity, truth, goodness
and knowledge, they opposed darkness, filth, falsehood,
cruelty and ignorance. As a contrast to the useful
and clean animals created by Ahura Mazda, Angra
Mainyu created wild beasts and bloodthirsty fowls
of the air. He also added insult to injury and
deprecated and laughed at the peaceful and inoffensive
creations of his elder brother. "It is thine
envy," said the holy Yazatas one day to the
unholy fiend, the evil-hearted, "Thou art
incapable of producing a beautiful and harmless
being, O cruel Angra Mainyu" . . .
The arch-fiend laughed and said that he could.
Forthwith he created the loveliest bird the world
had ever seen. It was a majestic peacock, the
emblem of vanity and selfishness, which is self-adulation
in deeds.
"Let it be the King of Birds," quoth
the Dark One, "and let man worship him
and act after his fashion."
From that day "Melek
Taus" (the Angel Peacock) became the special
creation of Angra Mainyu, and the messenger through
which the arch-fiend is invoked by somel1
and propitiated by all men.
How often does one see strong-hearted men and
determined women moved by a strong aspiration
towards an ideal they know to be the true one,
battling successfully, to all appearance, with
Ahriman and conquering him. Their external Selves
have been the battle-ground of a most terrible,
deadly strife between the two opposing Principles;
but they have stood firmly--and won. The dark
enemy seems conquered; it is crushed in fact,
so far as the animal instincts are concerned.
Personal selfishness, that greed for self, and
self only, the begetter of most of the evils--has
vanished; and every lower instinct, melting like
soiled icicles under the beneficient ray of Ahura
Mazda, the radiant EGO-SUN,
has disappeared, making room for better and holier
aspirations. Yet, there lurks in them their old
and but partially destroyed vanity, that spark
of personal pride which is the last to die in
man. Dormant it is, latent and invisible to all,
including their own consciousness; but there it
is still. Let it awake but for an instant, and
the seemingly crushed-out personality comes back
to life at the sound of its voice, arising from
its grave like an unclean ghoul at the command
of the midnight incantator. Five hours--nay, five
minutes even--of life under its fatal sway, may
destroy the work of years of self-control and
training, and of laborious work in the service
of Ahura Mazda, to open wide the door anew to
Angra Mainyu. Such is the result of the silent
and unspoken but ever-present worship of
the only beautiful creation of the Spirit of Selfishness
and Darkness.
Look around you and judge of the deadly havoc
made by this last and most cunning of Ahriman's
productions, notwithstanding its external beauty
and harmlessness. Century after century, year
after year, all is changing; everything is progressing
in this world; one thing only changeth not--human
nature. Man accumulates knowledge,
invents religions and philosophies, but himself
remains still the same. In his ceaseless chase
after wealth and honours and the will o' the wisps
of novelty, enjoyment and ambition, he is ever
moved by one chief motor--vain selfishness. In
these days of so-called progress and civilization,
when the light of knowledge claims to have
replaced almost everywhere the darkness of
ignorance, how many more volunteers do we see
added to the army of Ahura Mazda, the Principle
of Good and Divine Light? Alas, the recruits of
Angra Mainyu, the Mazdean Satan, outnumber these,
daily more and more. They have overrun the world,
these worshippers of Melek Taus, and the more
they are enlightened the easier they succumb.
This is only natural. Like Time, both
the boundless and the finite, Light is
also twofold; the divine and the eternal, and
the artificial light, which paradoxically
but correctly defined, is the darkness of Ahriman.
Behold on what objects the best energies of
knowledge, the strongest human activity, and the
inventive powers of man are wasted at the present
hour: on the creation) amelioration and perfection
of war-engines of destruction, on guns and smokeless
powders, and weapons for the mutual murder and
decimation of men. Great Christian nations seek
to outvie each other in the discovery of better
means for destroying human life, and for the subjecting
by the strongest and the craftiest of the weakest
and the simplest, for no better reason than to
feed their peacock-vanity and self-adulation;
and Christian men eagerly follow the good example.
Whereon is spent the enormous wealth accumulated
through private enterprize by the more enlightened
through the ruin of the less intelligent? Is it
to relieve human suffering in every form, that
riches are so greedily pursued? Not at all. For
now, just as 1.900 years ago, while the beggar
Lazarus is glad to feed on the crumbs that fall
from the rich man's table, no means are neglected
by Dives to hedge himself off from the poor. The
minority that gives and takes care that its left
hand remains ignorant of what its right hand bestows,
is quite insignificant when compared with the
enormous majority who are lavish in their charity--only
because they are eager to see their names heralded
by the press to the world.
Great is the power of Ahriman! Time rolls on,
leaving with every day the ages of ignorance and
superstition further behind, but bringing us in
their stead only centuries of ever-increasing
selfishness and pride. Mankind grows and multiplies,
waxes in strength and (book-)wisdom; it claims
to have penetrated into the deepest mysteries
of physical nature; it builds railroads and honeycombs
the globe with tunnels; it erects gigantic towers
and bridges, minimizes distances, unites the oceans
and divides whole continents. Cables and telephones,
canals and railways more and more with every hour
unite mankind into one "happy" family,
but only to furnish the selfish and the wily with
every means of stealing a better march on the
less selfish and improvident. Truly, the "upper
ten" of science and wealth have subjected
to their sweet will and pleasure, the Air and
the Earth, the Ocean and the Fire. This, our age,
is one of progress, indeed, an era of the most
triumphant display of human genius. But what good
has all this great civilization and progress done
to the millions in the European slums, to the
armies of the "great unwashed"? Have
any of these displays of genius added one comfort
more to the lives of the poor and the needy? Is
it not true to say that distress and starvation
are a hundred times greater now than they were
in the days of the Druids or of Zoroaster? And
is it to help the hungry multitudes that all this
is invented, or again, only to sweep off the couch
of the rich the last-forgotten rose-leaves that
may uncomfortably tickle their well-fed bodies?
Do electric wonders give one additional crust
of bread to the starving? Do the towers and the
bridges, and the forests of factories and manufactures,
bring any mortal good to the sons of men, save
giving an additional opportunity to the wealthy
to vampirize or "sweat" their poorer
brother? When, I ask again, at what time of the
history of mankind, during its darkest days of
ignorance, when was there known such ghastly starvation
as we see now? When has the poor man wept and
suffered, as he weeps and suffers in the present
day--say, in London, where for every club-visitor
who dines and wines himself daily, at a price
that would feed twenty-five families for a whole
day, one may count hundreds and thousands of starving
wretches. Under the very windows of the fashionable
City restaurants, radiant with warmth and electric
lights, old trembling women and little children
may be seen daily, shivering and fastening their
hungry eyes on the food they smell each time the
entrance door is opened. Then they "move
on"--by order, to disappear in the dark gloom,
to starve and shiver and finally to die in the
frozen mud of some gutter. . . .
The "pagan" Parsis know not, nor would
their community tolerate, any beggars in its midst,
least of all--STARVATION!!
Selfishness is the chief prompter of our age;
Chacun pour soi, Dieu pour tout le monde,
its watchword. Where then is the truth, and
what practical good has done that light brought
to mankind by the "Light of the World,"
as claimed by every Christian? Of the "Lights
of Asia" Europe speaks with scorn, nor would
it recognise in Ahura Mazda a divine light.
And yet even a minor light (if such) when
practically applied for the good of suffering
mankind, is a thousand times more beneficent than
even infinite Light, when confined to the realm
of abstract theories. In our days the latter Light
has only succeeded in raising the pride of Christian
nations to its acme, in developing their self-adulation,
and fostering hard-heartedness under the name
of all-binding law. The "personality"
of both nation and individual has thrown deep
roots into the soil of selfish motives; and of
all the flowers of modern culture those that blossom
the most luxuriously are the flowers of polite
Falsehood, Vanity, and Self-exaltation.
Few are those who would confess or even deign
to see, that beneath the brilliant surface of
our civilization and culture lurks, refusing to
be dislodged, all the inner filth of the evils
created by Ahriman; and indeed, the truest symbol,
the very picture of that civilization is the last
creation of the Arch-fiend--the beautiful Peacock.
Truly saith Theosophy unto you--it is the Devil's
Own.
Lucifer, March, 1891
1 Though this deity
is the "First-born," yet metaphysically
and logically Ormuzd comes in order as a fourth
emanation (compare with Parabrahm-Mulaprakriti
and the three Logoi, in the Secret
Doctrine). He is the Deity of the manifested
plane. In the esoteric interpretation of the Avestian
sacred allegories, AHURA or
ASURA is a generic name for
the sevenfold Deity, the Ruler of the Seven
Worlds; and Hvaniratha (our earth) is the
fourth, in plane and number. We have to distinguish
between such names as Ahura Mazdâo,
Varana, the "Supreme" deity
and the synthesis of the Ameshâspends,
etc. The real order would be: the Supreme or
the One Light, called the Eternal; then Zeruana
Akarana (compare Vishnu in his abstract sense
as the Boundless pervading All and Kâla,
Time), the Fravashi or the Ferouer
of Ormuzd (that eternal Double or Image which
precedes and survives every god, man and animal),
and finally Ahura Mazda Himself.
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to text
2 Zeruana Akarana
means, at the same time, Infinite Light, Boundless
Time, Infinite Space and Fate (Karma).
See Vendidad, Farg. xix. 9.
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3 The Parsis, the
last relic of the ancient Magi, or Fire-worshippers
of the noble Zoroastrian system, do not degrade
their Deity by making him the creator of the evil
spirits as well as of the pure angels. They do
not believe in Satan or the Devil, and therefore,
their religious system cannot in truth be termed
dualistic. A good proof of this
was afforded about half a century ago, at Bombay,
when the Rev. Dr. Wilson, the Orientalist, debated
the subject with the Parsi high-priests, the Dasturs.
The latter very philosophically denied his
imputation, and demonstrated to him that far from
accepting the texts of their Sacred Books literally,
they regarded them as allegorical as far as Ahriman
was concerned. For them he is a symbolical representation
of the disturbing elements in Kosmos and of the
evil passions and animal instincts in man (Vendidad).
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4 Vendidad,
trans. by J. Darmsteter, "Introductlon"
p. lvi.
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5 Ahura Mazda stands
here no longer as the supreme One God of eternal
Good and Light but as its own Ray,
the divine EGO which informs
man--under whatever name.
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6 The gods of light,
the "immortal seven," of whom Ahura
Mazda is the seventh. They are deified abstractions.
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7 Or devils.
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8 In verse 16th
of Yast XIX, we read: "I invoke the
glory of the Ameshâspends, who all seven.
have one and the same thinking, one and the same
speaking, one and the same doing, one and the
same lord, Ahura Mazda." As an occult teaching
says: During each of the seven periods (Races)
the chief ruling Light is given
a new name; i.e., one of the seven hidden
names, the initials of which compose the mystery
name of the Septenary Host, viewed as one.
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9 Nork ii.
176. Compare Rev. xix,, 11-14, "I
saw heaven opened, and behold, a white
horse, and he that sat upon him . .
. and the armies followed him upon white horses."
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10 Yast XIX.
89 et seq.
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11
The Yezidis, or "Devil Worshippers,"
some of whom inhabit the plains of ancient Babylonia,
to this day worship Melek Taus, the peacock, as
the messenger of Satan and the mediator between
the Arch-fiend and men.
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