-------
* “Chamber’s Encyclopedia,” vii. 127.

** According to Herodotus the Mysteries were actually brought from India by Orpheus. -------

Orpheus was—­in Greece—­the son of Apollo or Helios, the sun-god, according to corrected mythology, and from him received the phorminx or lyre of seven strings, i.e.—­according to occult phraseology—­the sevenfold mystery of the Initiation.  Now Indra is the ruler of the bright firmament, the disperser of clouds, “the restorer of the sun to the sky.”  He is identified with Arjuna in the Samhita Satapatha Brahmana (although Prof.  Weber denies the existence of any such person as Arjuna, yet there was indeed one), and Arjuna was the Chief of the Pandavas;* and though Pandu the white passes for his father, he is yet considered the son of Indra.  As throughout India all ancient cyclopean structures are even now attributed to the Pandavas, so all similar structures in the West were anciently ascribed to the Pelasgians.  Moreover, as shown well by Pococke—­laughed at because too intuitional and too fair though, perchance less, philologically learned—­the Pandavas were in Greece, where many traces of them can be shown.

-------
* Another proof of the fact that the Pandavas were, though Aryans, not
Brahmans, and belonged to an Indian tribe that preceded the Brahmans,
and were later on Brahmanized, and then out-casted and called Mlechhas,
Yavanas (i.e., foreign to the Brahmans), is afforded in the following: 
Pandu has two wives; and “it is not Kunti, his lawful wife, but Madri,
his most beloved wife,” who is burnt with the old King when dead, as
well remarked by Prof Max Muller, who seems astonished at it without
comprehending the true reason.   As stated by Herodotus (v. 5), it was a
custom amongst the Thracians to allow the most beloved of a man’s wives
to be sacrificed upon his tomb;  and Herodotus (iv. 17) asserts a
similar fact of the Scythians, and Pausanias (iv. 2) of the Greeks. 
("Hist.  Sans.  Lit.” p. 48).   The Pandavas and the Kauravas are called
esoterically cousins in the Epic poem because they were two distinct yet
Aryan tribes, and represent two peoples, not simply two families.
--------

In the Mahabharata, Arjuna is taught the occult philosophy by Krishna (personification of the universal Divine Principle); and the less mythological view of Orpheus presents him to us as “a divine bard or priest in the service of Zagreus .... founder of the Mysteries .... the inventor of everything, in fact, that was supposed to have contributed to the civilization and initiation into a more humane worship of the deity.”  Are not these striking parallels; and is it not significant that, in the cases of both Arjuna and Orpheus, the sublimer aspects of religion should have been imparted along with the occult methods of attaining it by masters of the mysteries?  Real Devanagari—­non-phonetic characters—­meant formerly the outward symbols, so to say, the signs used in the intercommunication