"The Four Elements": Selections from Theosophy’s Sacred Teachings "The Secret Doctrine," Part 2 of 2

“In Cory’s Ancient Fragments, one of the ‘Chaldean Oracles’ expresses ideas about the elements and Ether (Astral Light) in language singularly like that of The Unseen Universe, written by two eminent Scientists of our day. It states that from Ether (Astral Light) have come all things, and to it all will return; that the images of all things are indelibly impressed upon it; and that it is the store- house of the germs, or of the remains of all visible forms, and even ideas. It appears as if this case strangely corroborates our assertion that whatever discoveries may be made in our days will be found to have been anticipated by many thousand years by our ‘simple-minded ancestors.’”

“Whence came the Four Elements and the Malachim (angels) of the Hebrews? They have been made to merge, by a theological sleight of hand on the part of the Rabbins and the later Fathers of the Church, into Jehovah, but their origin is identical with that of the Cosmic Gods of all other nations. Their symbols, whether born on the shores of the Oxus, on the burning sands of Upper Egypt, or in the wild forests, weird and glacial, which cover the slopes and peaks of the sacred snowy mountains of Thessaly, or again, in the pampas of America—their symbols, we repeat, when traced to their source, are ever one and the same. Whether Egyptian or Pelasgian, Aryan or Semitic, the Genius Loci, the Local God, embraced in its unity all Nature; but not especially the four elements any more than one of their creations, such as trees, rivers, mounts or stars. The Genius Loci, a very late afterthought of the last sub-races of the Fifth Root-Race, when the primitive and grandiose meaning had become nearly lost, was ever the representative, in his accumulated titles, of all his colleagues.”

“These were the Cosmic Gods, ever synthesizing all in one, as found in every cosmogony or mythology. Thus, the Greeks had their Dodonean Jupiter, who included in himself the four Elements and the four cardinal points, and who was recognized, therefore, in old Rome under the pantheistic title of Jupiter Mundus; and who now, in modern Rome, has become the Deus Mundus , the one mundane God, who is made to swallow all others, in the latest theology, by the arbitrary decision of his special ministers.”