Theos-Talk Archives (March 2002 Message tt00018)

Each country referred to seems to have its own role in Esoteric 
historiography. Egypt is the land of initiation, of great mysteries;
India is the source of concepts such as reincarnation, karma and the 
subtle bodies; Tibet plays the role of the homeland of sages and the
repository of ancient scriptures. 
However the distinction between an Egyptian tradition and one based 
on a generalized india, is a scholarly construction.

Thus the main impulse behind the study of the kabbala during the 
Renaissance and up to the 17th century combined with hermetism, was 
the belief that it heralded christianity. Because the historiography
of the bible, the only one known that time, started with the jewish as the 
oldest culture. The pre-eminent form of Classical Kabbalah, began in 
Provence, France, in the thirteenth century. It contains elements of 
both Gnosticism and Neo-platonism, and in the late fifteenth and 
sixteenth centuries, this was augmented with aspects of Christian 
Theology and alchemy. Renaissance representatives of the "christian 
Kabbalah" are Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Reuchlin, Cornelius 
Agrippa or Guillaume Postel, and Giordano Bruno who argued this case 
with the inquisition.

We often form hypotheses that help us find order even in random data 
and ensure that the existence of the patterns we have projected onto 
the data will be corroborated. 
Especially the number seven seems to serve as a focus of pattern 
recognition. Blavatsky devotes an entire article to presenting such 
similarities, claiming that they are due to a common spiritual 
heritage. ("The Number Seven" BCW II, 408 ff.) One is reminded of 
similar attempts by Jung to show that there are universal archetypes 
and that especially the number four plays a central role in the 
spiritual heritage of mankind. Monier-Williams' Sanskrit-English 
Dictionary in 1872, made, apart from reports by swedish travelers in 
the previous century to India, first mention in the west of the 
chakras as a coherent system.

On the cover of Leadbeater's book "The Chakras" one finds 
one of J.G. Gichtel's illustrations, originally published in 1696, in 
which circles and astrological signs have been placed on a male 
figure. Gichtel's main source of inspiration, Jacob Boehme tried to 
construct a traditional, hermetic system of correspondences between 
man, the microcosms, and the planetary system, and did so from a 
heliocentric point of view.

H.P.B. placed the Corpus Hermetic in early Pharaoh times instead of 
during the Hellenistic period. She placed the Kabbala of the middle
ages in Rabbinistic time periods and assumed that the Greek mysteries 
had similar contents as the cabbalist- neoplatonic ideas. Blavatsky 
therefore was not so much interested in Gnosticism as she was in 
Hermetism, because for her, Gnosis derived from Hermetism, whereby 
today we know it is the other way around.

Bri.