The Serpent, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the Tree of Life, are all symbols transplanted from the soil of India. The Arasa‐maram [?], the banyan tree, so sacred with the Hindûs—since Vishnu during one of his incarnations, reposed under its mighty shade and there taught human philosophy and sciences—is called the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. Under the protecting foliage of this king of the forests, the Gurus teach their pupils their first lessons on immortality and initiate them into the mysteries of life and death. The Java‐Aleim of the Sacerdotal College are said, in the Chaldæan tradition, to have taught the sons of men to become like one of them. To the present day Foh‐ tchou(491) who lives in his Foh‐Maëyu, or the temple of Buddha, on the top of the Kouin‐Long‐Sang,(492) the great mountain, produces his greatest religious miracles under a tree called in Chinese Sung‐Ming‐Shŭ, or the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life, for ignorance is death, and knowledge alone gives immortality. This marvellous display takes place every three years, when an immense concourse of Chinese Buddhists assembles in pilgrimage at the holy place.(493) Now it may become comprehensible why the earliest Initiates and Adepts, or the “Wise Men,” who are claimed to have been initiated into the Mysteries of Nature by the Universal Mind, represented by the highest Angels, were named the “Serpents of Wisdom” and “Dragons”; and also how the first physiologically complete couples—after being initiated into the Mystery of Human Creation through Ophis, the Manifested Logos and the Androgyne, by eating of the fruit of knowledge—gradually began to be accused by the material spirit of posterity of having _committed sin_, of having disobeyed the “Lord God,” and of having been tempted by the Serpent. So little have the first Christians—who despoiled the Jews of their _Bible_—understood the first four chapters of _Genesis_ in their esoteric meaning, that they have never perceived that not only was no sin intended in this disobedience, but that the “Serpent” was actually the “Lord God” himself, who, as the Ophis, the Logos, or the bearer of divine creative wisdom, taught mankind to become creators in their turn.(494) They never realized that the Cross was an evolution from the Tree and the Serpent, and thus became the _salvation of mankind_. By this it would become the very first fundamental symbol of Creative Cause, applying to geometry, to numbers, to astronomy, to measure and to animal reproduction. According to the _Kabalah_, _the curse on man came with the formation of woman_.(495) The circle was separated from its diameter line.