For although to reveal itself to us, the concealed of all the concealed sent forth the Ten Emanations [Sephiroth] called the Form of God, Form of the Heavenly Man, yet since even this luminous form was too dazzling for our vision, it had to assume another form, or had to put on another garment, _which is the Universe_. The Universe, therefore, or the visible world, is a farther expansion of the Divine Substance, and is called in the Kabalah “The Garment of God.”(342) This is the doctrine of all the Hindu Purânas, especially that of the _Vishnu Purâna_. Vishnu pervades the Universe and is that Universe; Brahmâ enters the Mundane Egg, and issues from it as the Universe; Brahmâ even dies with it and there remains only Brahman, the impersonal, the eternal, the unborn, and the unqualifiable. The Ain‐Suph of the Chaldæans and later of the Jews is assuredly a copy of the Vaidic Deity; while the “Heavenly Adam,” the Macrocosm which unites in itself the totality of beings and is the _Esse_ of the visible Universe, finds his original in the Purânic Brahmâ. In _Sôd_, “the Secret of the Law,” one recognizes the expressions used in the oldest fragments of the Gupta Vidyâ, the Secret Knowledge. And it is not venturing too much to say that even a Rabbi quite familiar with his own special Rabbinical _Hebrew_ would only comprehend its secrets thoroughly if he added to his learning a serious knowledge of the Hindu philosophies. Let us turn to Stanza I. of the _Book of Dzyan_ for an example. The _Zohar_ premises, as does the Secret Doctrine, a universal, eternal Essence, passive—because absolute—in all that men call attributes. The pregenetic or pre‐cosmical Triad is a pure metaphysical abstraction. The notion of a triple hypostasis in one Unknown Divine Essence is as old as speech and thought. Hiranyagarbha, Hari, and Shankara—the Creator, the Preserver, and the Destroyer—are the three manifested attributes of it, appearing and disappearing with Kosmos; the visible Triangle, so to speak, on the plane of the ever‐invisible Circle. This is the primeval root‐ thought of thinking Humanity; the Pythagorean Triangle emanating from the ever‐concealed Monad, or the Central Point. Plato speaks of it and Plotinus calls it an ancient doctrine, on which Cudworth remarks that: Since Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Plato, who all of them asserted a Trinity of divine hypostases, unquestionably derived their doctrine from the Egyptians, it may be reasonably suspected that the Egyptians did the like before them.(343) The Egyptians certainly derived their Trinity from the Indians. Wilson justly observes: As, however, the Grecian accounts and those of the Egyptians are much more perplexed and unsatisfactory than those of the Hindus, it is most probable that we find amongst them the doctrine in its most original, as well as most methodical and significant form.(344) This, then, is the meaning: