And this very trinitarian idea, as well as the so bitterly denounced doctrine of emanations, whence their remotest origin? The answer is easy, and every proof is now at hand. In the sublime and profoundest of all philosophies, that of the universal “Wisdom-Religion,” the first traces of which, historical research now finds in the old pre-Vedic religion of India. As the much-abused Jacolliot well remarks, “It is not in the religious works of antiquity, such as the _Vedas_, the _Zend Avesta_, the _Bible_, that we have to search for the exact expression of the ennobling and sublime beliefs of those epochs.”[55] “The holy primitive syllable, composed of the three letters A--U--M., in which is contained the Vedic Trimurti (Trinity), must be kept secret, like another triple Veda,” says Manu, in book xi., sloka 265. Swayambhouva is the unrevealed Deity; it is the Being existent through and of itself; he is the central and immortal germ of all that exists in the universe. Three trinities emanate and are confounded in him, forming a Supreme _unity_. These trinities, or the triple _Trimurti_, are: the Nara, Nari, and Viradyi--the _initial_ triad; the Agni, Vaya, and Sourya--the _manifested_ triad; Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, the _creative_ triad. Each of these triads becomes less metaphysical and more adapted to the vulgar intelligence as it descends. Thus the last becomes but the symbol in its concrete expression; the necessarianism of a purely metaphysical conception. Together with Swayambhouva, they are the ten _Sephiroth_ of the Hebrew kabalists, the ten Hindu Pragâpatis--the En-Soph of the former, answering to the great _Unknown_, expressed by the mystic A U M of the latter. Says Franck, the translator of the _Kabala_: “The ten Sephiroth are divided into _three classes_, each of them presenting to us the divinity _under a different aspect_, the whole still remaining an _indivisible Trinity_. “The first three Sephiroth are purely intellectual in metaphysics, they express the absolute identity of existence and thought, and form what the modern kabalists called the intelligible world--which is the first manifestation of God. “The three that follow, make us conceive God in one of their aspects, as the identity of goodness and wisdom; in the other they show to us, in the Supreme good, the origin of beauty and magnificence (in the creation). Therefore, they are named the _virtues_, or the _sensible world_. “Finally, we learn, by the last three Sephiroth, that the Universal Providence, that the Supreme artist is also _absolute Force_, the all-powerful cause, and that, at the same time, this cause _is the generative element of all that is_. It is these last Sephiroth that constitute the _natural world_, or nature in its essence and in its _active_ principle, _Natura naturans._”[56]