The number seven stands prominently conspicuous in even a cursory comparison of the 11th Tablet of the Izdhubar Legends of the Chaldean account of the Deluge and the so-called Mosaic books.  In both the number seven plays a most prominent part.  The clean beasts are taken by sevens, the fowls by sevens also; in seven days, it is promised Noah, to rain upon the earth; thus he stays “yet other seven days,” and again seven days; while in the Chaldean. account of the Deluge, on the seventh day the rain abated.  On the seventh day the dove is sent out; by sevens, Xisusthrus takes “jugs of wine” for the altar, &c.  Why such coincidence?  And yet we are told by, and bound to believe in, the European Orientalists, when passing judgment alike upon the Babylonian and Aryan chronology they call them “extravagant and fanciful!” Nevertheless, while they give us no explanation of, nor have they ever noticed, as far as we know, the strange identity in the totals of the Semitic, Chaldean, and Aryan Hindu chronology, the students of Occult Philosophy find the following fact extremely suggestive.  While the period of the reign of the 10 Babylonian antediluvian kings is given as 432,000 years,* the duration of the postdiluvian Kali-yug is also given as 432,000, while the four ages or the divine Maha-yug, yield in their totality 4,320,000 years.  Why should they, if fanciful and “extravagant,” give the identical figures, when neither the Aryans nor the Babylonians have surely borrowed anything from each other!  We invite the attention of our occultists to the three figures given—­4 standing for the perfect square, 3 for the triad (the seven universal and the seven individual principles), and 2 the symbol of our illusionary world, a figure ignored and rejected by Pythagoras.

--------
* See “Babylonia,” by George Smith, p. 36.   Here again, as with the
Manus and 10 Prajapatis and the 10 Sephiroths in the Book of Numbers—­
they dwindle down to seven!
--------

It is in the Upanishads and the Vedanta though, that we have to look for the best corroborations of the occult teachings.  In the mystical doctrine the Rahasya, or the Upanishads—­“the only Veda of all thoughtful Hindus in the present day,” as Monier Williams is made to confess, every word, as its very name implies,* has a secret meaning underlying it.  This meaning can be fully realized only by him who has a full knowledge of Prana, the one life, “the nave to which are attached the seven spokes of the Universal Wheel.” (Hymn to Prana, Atharva-Veda, XI. 4.)

Even European Orientalists agree that all the systems in India assign to the human body:  (a) an exterior or gross body (sthula-sarira); (b) an inner or shadowy body (sukshma), or linga-sarira (the vehicle), the two cemented with—­(c), life (jiv or Karana sarira, “causal body").** These the occult system or esotericism divides into seven, farther adding to these—­kama, manas, buddhi and atman.