[Der Ursprung der “Geheimlehre” und ihre Verbreitung unter den Juden]
Translation from the German by Robert Hutwohl[1]
The wisdom of which I speak is not the wisdom of this world, nor of the great of this world, which perishes; but theosophy, the hidden wisdom of God.[2]
St. Paul, I. Corinthians II. 7.
The Secret Doctrine is that science which forms the basis of all major religious systems and is therefore the same in all religions. Its origin is that wisdom which does not belong to mortal man but to God; i.e., it springs from the knowledge of the eternal truth revealed in enlightened man. Therefore, when we find it among the most diverse peoples, it does not follow that it was transmitted from one people to another by oral or written tradition, but the explanation lies in the fact that among all peoples there have been enlightened ones who have the same light revealed and who saw and recognized the same truth which underlies all natural laws. Without this self-knowledge of the true, all knowledge is only theory. In God alone is true wisdom; in it all opinions cease; in it all enlightened people find themselves together.
This is what all the sages of the world teach. In ancient times, Gautama Buddha said to his disciples: “These teachings which I am giving you are not the result of comparisons and investigations; I received them not by tradition, nor by any external means; but within myself, the truth revealed itself; in myself the eye opened; within myself the light appeared.” The Indian sage Śankarāchārya, in his Tattwa Bodha or “Realization of Existence,” gives the conditions under which inner enlightenment can take place; the Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus says to his disciple: “Arise and grasp me with all your mind, and I will show you marvelous things”; the apostle Paul says: “What no human eye has seen, or ear heard, and what has not come into the heart of man, God has prepared for those who love him.” . . . “The mind searches all things, even the depths of divinity; but the natural (earthly) man hears nothing of the Spirit of God; it is folly to him.” Likewise, Saint Bernard says: “If you wish to know, ask grace and not doctrine; the desire and not the mind; the groaning of prayer and not diligent reading; the bridegroom, not the Master; God, not humans; the darkness, not the clarity; not the light, but the fire, which blazes all over and leads into God with ardent desires, which fire is God Himself.” This fire is the state of Samādhi of the Indians, ecstasy; the absorption of personality in divine love; called the fervor of ecstasy (hitlabahut) by the Jews “the burning.”
It is not given for everyone to grasp the glory of God in the universe. Spiritual truths are like the stars in the sky; they do not come to us on earth and will not be dragged down; whoever wants to grasp them must grow up to them and grow spiritually, and not everyone is ready for that yet. What is above all conceptions of the earthly common sense will always remain secret for it and cannot be described in any other way than in pictures, allegories and fables. If from well-known things, like, for example, if horses or dogs are spoken of, everyone knows what is involved when one speaks of them, but how could one prove to the unbeliever supernatural or celestial things of which material man has no experience, or show him other than through parables? How could one make the formless imaginable other than through a form, a symbol? Therefore myth is a necessity for any religious system; just as necessary as sunshine, without which we would know nothing of the existence of the sun, but which is not the sun. But whoever takes the form for the essence, the myth for the event, the shell for the core, will not find the truth. Therefore the Bible is a sealed book to those who do not understand its deep meaning, and folly to the foolish.
“Bereshit bara Elohim ath ashanaïm onath Aares” are the first words of the books of Moses in the Old Testament. “In the beginning God created heaven and earth”; or more correctly translated: “The head (Bereshit) sent out (bara) the spiritual powers (Elohim) or intelligences, from which the upper and lower worlds arose.” What a deep meaning lies hidden in these few words! Endless comments could be written about it, and yet they would be of little use to those who do not have the head (the spirit) and do not know the spiritual hierarchies, the “creators” of the worlds. — And yet the understanding is very simple for every spiritually gifted person who knows how to search within himself; because every human being is the creator of his own world, which he draws from within and brings to his imagination through his indwelling spiritual powers of will and thought and awakens what has been created to life. Many complain of a lack of clarity in theosophical writings; but the Scriptures are clear enough, darkness and mist are in the one who reads them and does not understand.
Religion is the same in all religious systems, although the forms in which it is represented vary among different peoples, and correspond to their national peculiarities and idioms. When the Brahmin teaches that the goddess Māyā (the symbol of love {also: illusion}) enticed Brahma to create the world, he is saying the same thing which Jacob Böhme teaches; namely, that God created the world out of love. One cannot come to an Eskimo with the symbol of the apple in paradise, because there are no apples in Greenland and therefore the Eskimo does not know them. There, a piece of whale blubber must take the place of Eve’s apple. The fact that the human soul was enticed by the serpent of lust for individual existence and knowledge to descend from its paradisiacal state into the material in order to attain the fruit (experience) from the tree of knowledge remains the same in both cases; only the form of presentation is different. The same truth is represented in the sacrifice of Abraham, who sacrifices his son Isaac to God, as we see in Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross and in his resurrection. Both symbols signify the divinization of the human will, which is the result of its sacrifice to the divine will. Mystical death is the entrance to eternal life. It is the “exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt” and their entry into the “promised land.”
Martin Buber in his excellent work: “The Legend of the Baal-Shem” introduces us to the secrets of the Hasidim, an Eastern Jewish sect.[3] Here too we find that the Secret Doctrine was not attained by the Master (Baal-Shem) through speculation, brooding or tradition, but through beholding in ecstasy. The author says: “In ecstasy (samādhi) everything past and everything future converges into the present. Time shrinks, the line between eternities disappears; only the moment lives and the moment is eternity. In its unfragmented light everything that was and will be appears simple and collected. It is there as a heartbeat is there and manifests as it does. . . The Hasidic legend has a lot to tell about the miraculous ones who remembered their previous forms of existence (reincarnations), became aware of the future like their own breaths, looked from one end of the earth to the other and all the changes that took place in the worlds, like feeling something that was happening in their own bodies.”
All this has nothing to do with raving, dreams and fantasies; true seeing consists in grasping reality. Spiritualization is not evaporation or merging into nothingness, but the growth of the soul, the consolidation of spiritual “uniqueness” (individuality). The individual appearance of the material body is a temporary illusion, a composite thing, and subject to constant change. It is only in the character of man is what makes him independent and distinguishes him from others of his nature.
“Unique and unparalleled is the being,” says the author. It emerges new and never before from the flood of recurrences, occurring and plunges back into them unrepeatable. Each appears a different time; but each transformed. . . . Thus uniqueness is man’s essential good, which he is given to develop. And this is precisely the meaning of the recurrence, that the uniqueness in it purifies itself more and more and becomes perfect, and that in every new life the one who returns stands in a more unspoiled and undisturbed incomparability. Because pure uniqueness and pure perfection are one, and who has become so completely unique that no other entity has power over him and position over him, he has completed the journey and is redeemed and returns to God.”
But this is precisely the Indian doctrine of reincarnation and entering the bliss of Nirvāṇa. After death the immortal soul of every human being absorbs into itself that part of the personality which has become immortal in it, and that is the purpose of life, that man here on earth attains the consciousness of his immortal soul. It is easy to explain that the Jewish secret doctrine (just like the Christian one) knows nothing about salvation by means of substitution; on the other hand, it agrees with the Christian, Buddhist, and Brahminic teachings, which say that the power of salvation is to be found within man himself.[4] It teaches that in every man there is a dormant spark of God-consciousness, by the awakening of which man becomes enlightened and comes to the knowledge of his true immortal existence, and the inner immortal man is born in the outer man.[5] This light, this power, which elevates and enlightens man, is called “Kawwana [Kavanah].” The author says:
“Kawwana” [Kavanah] is a ray of divine glory which dwells in every human being and means salvation. But this is the salvation that the Shekinah will return from exile. “May all rays of the glory of God fade away and it purifies itself and become one with its owner in perfect union.” The Messiah appears as a sign and sets all beings free. . . . And this is the meaning and purpose of kawwana, that it is given to man to lift up the fallen and free the captives. Not just waiting, not just looking, man can work towards the salvation of the world. This is Kawwana, the mystery of the soul directed to redeeming the world. . . . With every deed man can work on the shape of God’s glory, so that it emerges from the hidden. Not the matter of the action, only its consecration decides.”
It is not mortal man in his self-conceit which redeems himself by means of his self-will, but the divine redeeming power working in him, and we cannot therefore close this sketch without mentioning what the author says about humility:
“The only One sees God and embraces him. The only One (the man who found himself) redeems the fallen worlds. And yet the unique is not a whole, but a part. And the purer and more perfect he is, the more intimately he knows that he is a part, and the more awake the community of beings stirs in him. This is the mystery of humility. — That is not humility when someone humbles himself too much and forgets that through his word and his gestures man is able to bring down the overflowing blessing over all worlds. The greatest evil is when you forget that you are a king’s son. Arrogance means: facing each other. Not he who knows himself, only he who compares himself with others is the proud one. No man can exalt himself when he rests on himself; all heavens are open to him and all worlds surrender. He exalts himself, who feels towards others, sees himself higher than the very lowest of things, who switches with yardstick and weights and speaks judgment.
The true sage, whether Jew or Christian, sees the omnipresence of God in all things, in all outward forms, as well as in himself. All are to him only appearances in which the One lives. “When man rests as in nothingness, he is not limited by anything else and is limitless, and God pours his glory upon him.”
We must also meet the lowly with love, because in them the high is hidden and awaits redemption. “All men are abodes of wandering souls. They dwell in many beings and strive from form to form towards perfection. . . . In the soul itself appear those in need of solution. Most are the sparks which kicked the netherlands through that soul’s fault in one of their previous lives. They are the strange, disturbing thoughts that often beset the worshiper. . . . He redeems it when he returns every dull thought to its pure source, pours every impulse which thinks about something special into the divine all-impulse, allows everything foreign to be lost in its own uniqueness.”
Thus we also find in the Jewish secret teaching the sublime teachings of divine wisdom (Theosophy), which only those who strive to live according to them grasp in their full magnitude, and we conclude with the words of the author:
“Whoever serves in perfection in this way has conquered the primordial duality and has inscribed Hitlahabat [Hitlahavut] in the heart of the Aboda. He dwells in all realms of life and yet all walls have fallen, all boundary stones have been torn down, all divisions have been annihilated. He is the brother of all creatures and feels their gaze as if it were his own, their step as if his own feet were walking, their blood as if it were flowing in his body. He is the son of God. . . . He makes his body the throne of life, and life the throne of the spirit, and the spirit the throne of the soul, and the soul the throne of divine glory, and the light streams about him, and he sits amidst the light, and trembles, and rejoices.”
Notes
[1] The Source of the “Secret Doctrine” and its dissemination among the Jews [Der Ursprung der “Geheimlehre” und ihre Verbreitung unter den Juden. Franz Hartmann, M.D. Neue Lotusblüten 2, no. 7-8 (July-August 1909), 193-205] {This was reformatted from the original, but with the content unchanged other than fixing minor typos. Translation from the German by Robert Hütwohl, ©2025}
[2] {R.H.—The Greek verse: ἀλλὰ λαλοῦμεν θεοῦ σοφίαν ἐν μυστηρίῳ, τὴν ἀποκεκρυμμένην, ἣν προώρισεν ὁ θεὸς πρὸ τῶν αἰώνων εἰς δόξαν ἡμῶν = allá laloúmen theoú sofían en mystirío, tín apokekrymménin, ín proórisen o theós pró tón aiónon eis dóxan imón = R.H.—but we speak the wisdom of God in mystery, the hidden wisdom, which God has foreordained before the ages for our glory. From the New American Standard Bible: “we speak God’s wisdom in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God predestined before the ages to our glory; and Douay-Rheims Bible: “But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, a wisdom which is hidden, which God ordained before the world, unto our glory:}
[3] Literarische Anstalt Rütten-Loening, Frankfurt a. Μ. {Literary Institute Rütten-Loening, Frankfurt a. M.}
[4] Colossians I. 27.
[5] Colossians. Chap. II.