Book Title: Development of Hinduism
Author(s): M M Ninan
Publisher: M M Ninan

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Page 577
________________ PURUSHA SUKTHAM Heaven, the Sun, and Heat (fire)--the correlation of cosmic forces--fecundates Matter or Nature, the daughter of Spirit. And Para-Brahma himself has to submit to and bear the penance of the curses of the other gods (Elohim) for such an incest. According to the immutable, and, therefore, fatal law, both Nara and Nari are mutually Father and Mother, as well as Father and Daughter. Matter, through infinite transformation, is the gradual product of Spirit. The unification of one Eternal Supreme Cause required such a correlation, and if nature be the product or effect of that Cause, in its turn it has to be fecundated by the same divine Ray which produced nature itself. The most absurd cosmogonical allegories, if analyzed without prejudice, will be found built on strict and logical necessarianism. "Being was born from not-being," says a verse in the Rig Veda. The first being had to become androgyne and finite, by the very fact of its creation as a being. And thus even the sacred Trimurti, containing Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva will have an end when the "night" of Para-Brahma succeeds the present "day," or period of universal activity. The second, or rather the first, triad--as the highest one is a pure abstraction--is the intellectual world. The Vach which surrounds it is a more definite transformation of Aditi. Besides its occult significance in the secret Mantram, Vach is personified as the active power of Brahma proceeding from him. In the Vedas she is made to speak of herself as the supreme and universal soul. "I bore the Father on the head of the universal mind, and my origin is in the midst of the ocean; and therefore do I pervade all beings. . . . Originating all beings, I pass like the breeze (Holy Ghost). I am above this heaven, beyond this earth; and what is the Great One that am I." Literally, Vach is speech, the power of awakening, through the metrical arrangement contained in the number and syllables of the Mantras, corresponding powers in the invisible world. In the sacrificial Mysteries Vach stirs up the Brahma (Brahma jinvati), or the power lying latent at the bottom of every magical operation. It existed from eternity as the Yajna (its latent form), lying dormant in Brahma from "no-beginning," and proceeded forth from him as Vach (the active power). It is the key to the "Trai vidya," the thrice sacred science which teaches the Yajus (the sacrificial Mysteries). Having done with the unrevealed triad, and the first triad of the Sephiroth, called the "intellectual world," little remains to be said. In the great geometrical figure which has the double triangle in it, the central circle represents the world within the universe. The double triangle belongs to one of the most important, if it is not in itself the most important, of the mystic figures in India. It is the emblem of the Trimurti three in one. The triangle with its apex upward indicates the male principle, downward the female; the two typifying, at the same time, spirit and matter. This world within the infinite universe is the microcosm within the macrocosm, as in the Jewish Kabala. It is the symbol of the womb of the universe, the terrestrial egg, whose archetype is the golden mundane egg. It is from within this spiritual bosom of mother nature that proceed all the great saviours of the universe--the avatars of the invisible Deity. "Of him who is and yet is not, from the not-being, Eternal Cause, is born the being Pouroucha," says Manu, the legislator. Pouroucha is the "divine male," the second god, and the avatar, or the Logos of Para-Brahma and his divine son, who in his turn produced Viradj, the son, or the ideal type of the universe. "Viradj begins the work of creation by producing the ten Pradjapati, 'the lords of all beings.' According to the doctrine of Manu, the universe is subjected to a periodical and never-ending succession of creations and dissolutions, which periods of creation are named Manvantara. "It is the germ (which the Divine Spirit produced from its own substance) which never perishes in the being, for it becomes the soul of Being, and at the period of pralaya (dissolution) it returns to absorb itself again into the Divine Spirit, which itself rests from all eternity within Swayambhuva, the 'SelfExistent'" (Institute of Manu, book i.). 573

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