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CONFLUENCE OF OPPOSITES
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because the devas are only so many attributes of the soul and have no existence apart from it. The enemies of the gods are the forces of darkness (ignorance) and fury (passion). The devas are immortal, though liable to suffer defeat at times; but the asuras are mortal. The explanation is that the divine qualities of the soul are really the attributes of the soul-substance, which may be curtailed, limited, or suspended from time to time but can never be completely destroyed, while ignorance and passions are the products of a soul vitia. ted by the union of matter, and must disappear completely on their separation from one another. Most of the world's mythologies contain stories of such wars bet. ween the devas of Light and the powers of Darkness and Evil. The Celtic, the. Teutonic and the Greek systems. of mythologies seem to have been conceived on a gigantic scale, though nowhere near approaching the gran. deur of the Hindu Epics ; but owing to spoliation on the part of their pious and “enlightened "translators, these “pagan "myths rarely yield their secret through the medium of modern European works. The Greeks, however, openly applied the allegorical method of interpretation to their sacred literature, and a solution of some of the classical legends has also been given by me in the Key of Knowledge. But I must not linger any longer over the Christian and Hindu myths.
To proceed to Islam, there can be no denying the fact that the Holy Qur'an is also a document of the same description as the Bible and the Vedas. As a
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