The Secret Doctrine: Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy Vol. 2

can be found just as plainly as they are in the Pymander original: "Pymander"; an ancient Greek text attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, discussing the nature of the divine and the creation of the universe and in the Book of the Concealed Mystery of the Kabbalah. In the latter, Adam Kadmon Adam Kadmon: in Jewish mysticism, the first primordial man, representing the divine blueprint of the universe is the Sephirothic Tree, as well as the "Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil." Verse 32 states that this Tree "has around it seven columns," or palaces, belonging to the seven creative Angels who operate in the spheres of the seven planets on our globe. Just as Adam Kadmon is a collective name, so is the name of the man Adam. George Smith says in his Chaldean Account of Genesis:

The word Adam used in these legends for the first human being is clearly not a proper name, but is used only as a term for mankind. Adam appears as a proper name in the biblical book of Genesis, but in some passages, it is certainly used in the same sense as the Assyrian word.*

Furthermore, neither the Chaldean nor the Biblical flood stories—with their accounts of Xisuthrus Xisuthrus: the hero of the Babylonian flood myth, equivalent to Noah and Noah—are based on the universal or even the Atlantean floods recorded in the Indian allegory of Vaivasvata Manu Vaivasvata Manu: in Hindu mythology, the progenitor of humanity who survived the great flood. They are exoteric exoteric: intended for or likely to be understood by the general public; the opposite of "esoteric" allegories based on the Esoteric Mysteries of Samothrace. If the ancient Chaldeans knew the secret truth hidden in the Puranic legends, other nations were only aware of the Samothracian Mystery and turned it into an allegory. They adapted it to their own astronomical and anthropological—or rather, phallic—ideas. Historically, Samothrace is known to have been famous in ancient times for a flood that submerged the country and reached the tops of the highest mountains; this event happened before the age of the Argonauts Argonauts: a band of heroes in Greek mythology who accompanied Jason in his quest for the Golden Fleece. It was flooded very suddenly by waters from the Euxine original: "Euxine"; the ancient name for the Black Sea, which until then had been considered a lake. See Pliny, book 4, chapter 12; Strabo, book 10; Herodotus, book 7, chapter 109; Pausanias, book 7, chapter 4, etc.

However, the Israelites also had another legend on which to base their allegory: the legend of a flood that turned the current Gobi Desert into a sea for the last time, about 10,000 or 12,000 years ago. This event drove many "Noahs" and their families to the surrounding mountains. Since the Babylonian accounts are only now being restored from hundreds of thousands of broken fragments—with the mound of Kouyunjik alone yielding over twenty thousand inscribed fragments from Austen Henry Layard's excavations—the proofs cited here are relatively few. However, as they stand, they support almost every one of our teachings, at least three of them quite certainly. These are:

(1) That the race which was the first to fall into generation original: "fall into generation"; here meaning the transition from spiritual or ethereal forms into physical, sexual reproduction was a

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