The Taro is a series of leaves or an unbound book coming down to us across the ages from a primitive epoch. The name is merely a disguising transportation of the Latin word, Rota, or Wheel. We shall presently see in what respects the name of Wheel is applicable to it.
By ordinary men, whose reasoning powers are ruled,—rather should we say, are thrown into disuse, warped, or even obliterated by the mists of prejudice, the extreme antiquity of this book would be sufficient to cause them to consider it merely as a venerable toy played with in the infancy of the world, and not to be seriously considered in this highly enlightened nineteenth century. The true occultist, divesting himself of'every prejudice, as of a garment which would impede him in the race he has to run, investigates all things; old or new, purporting to appertain to the Occult Sciences, however absurd, uninviting or difficult they may at first sight appear. We only care to invite the attention of such as these to the subject of the Taro.
To get a precise idea of its import, we must first know something of the remote period in which it was invented. In this short paper we cannot pretend to give sufficient proofs of what we advance. Were we to do so, we should require to displace Plato altogether from this journal. We can only indicate the path, and leave the student to trace out for himself whether or not it leads him to the goal he would reach.
This so-called primitive epoch was in reality a time of the greatest intellectual activity in a race of men who had for many generations been in the ascending scale of civilization, scientific culture, and attainment of knowledge. This race had gradually discovered that to gain knowledge by the external senses only, as even the lower animals do, was a very slow process, and that the life of man was too short to enable him, however great his natural genius might be, to achieve more than a very limited and uncertain result having only some remote relationship to the great truths of the universe. What led them to avail themselves of the joint use of the male attribute of reason and the female attribute of intuition is beyond our limits to enter upon. This process was then called inspiration, and those who practised it were called munis or inspired men. By way of illustration of our meaning we may mention what is known to mathematicians as a matter of history. About 300 B. C., there lived in India one Arya Bhatta, who has the credit of being the inventor of algebra. He was one of the first of the uninspired philosophers, when the race had entered on the descending scale. Before him was a whole series of munis or inspired men. They had invented mathematics and algebra. Arya Bhatta, only, in all probability, collected, and put in some kind of form, a small portion of the discoveries of generations of munis, as their knowledge was fast dying out, and so got the credit of having invented algebra. This Arya Bhatta also knew the diameter of the earth, or squaring of the circle, to within a few decimal places, and we know no more now. The munis had, at their culminating point, penetrated all the mysteries of creation and mathematics followed as a natural consequence. The orbits of the sun, moon, and planets, were to them familiar knowledge. The mysteries of polar motion and its dependent “procession of the equinoxes,” with the vast changes it had made in the course of ages in the earth’s cycles and seasons were all fathomed and esoterically symbolized by them, which symbols remain to this day. Not only had they arrived at an intuition of the mechanism of the macrocosm of great world, but also that of the microcosm or smaller world of man, and the intimate analogy, mutual relationship and interdependence of the two.