Here we find the unmistakable echo of the archaic Secret Doctrine, as now expounded. Only the latter does not place at the head of the Evolution of Life the “Father,” who comes third and is the “Son of the Mother,” but the “Eternal and Ceaseless Breath of the ALL.” Mahat (Understanding, Universal Mind, Thought, etc.), before it manifests itself as Brahmâ or Shiva, appears as Vishnu, says the _Sânkhya Sâra_.(120) Hence it has several aspects, just as the Logos has. Mahat is called the Lord, in the _Primary_ Creation, and is, in this sense, Universal Cognition or Thought Divine; but, “that Mahat which was first produced is (afterwards) called _Ego‐ ism_, when it is born as (the feeling itself) ‘I,’ that is said to be the _Secondary_ Creation.”(121) And the translator (an able and learned Brâhman, not a European Orientalist) explains in a foot‐note, “_i.e._, when Mahat develops into the feeling of Self‐Consciousness—I—then it assumes the name of Egoism,” which, translated into our Esoteric phraseology, means—when Mahat is transformed into the human Manas (or even that of the finite gods), and becomes _Aham_‐ship. Why it is called the Mahat of the _Secondary_ Creation (or the _Ninth_, the Kaumâra in _Vishnu Purâna_), will be explained hereafter.
(c) The “Sea of Fire” is, then, the Super‐Astral (_i.e._, Noumenal) Light, the first radiation from the Root Mûlaprakriti, Undifferentiated Cosmic Substance, which becomes Astral Matter. It is also called the “Fiery Serpent,” as above described. If the student bears in mind that there is but One Universal Element, which is infinite, unborn, and undying and that all the rest—as in the world of phenomena—are but so many various differentiated aspects and transformations (correlations, they are now called) of that One, from macrocosmical down to microcosmical effects, from super‐human down to human and sub‐human beings, the totality, in short, of objective existence—then the first and chief difficulty will disappear and Occult Cosmology may be mastered. Thus in the Egyptian also as in the Indian Theogony there was a _Concealed_ Deity, the ONE, and a creative, androgynous god; Shoo being the god of creation, and Osiris in his original primary form, the god “whose name is unknown.”(122)