164 fl The Secret Lij2 of Nature
Theosophists maintain that Zarathustra, able to control his astral
body, passed it on to Hermes, founder of the Egyptian cultural epoch,
a real person, according to Steiner, who appeared about 4200 B.C.E.
as the sun moved into Taurus, walked again as Orpheus among the
Greeks, and finally took birth in the north of India as Gautama
Buddha. In Leadbeater's time it was his belief and that of his theosoph-
ical friends that when the Lord Gautama laid down the office of bod-
hisattva to become a buddha, his mantle passed to the Lord Maitreya, a
teacher several times reincarnated, most recently as a mahatma adept of
the Great White Brotherhood, destined to become a future buddha, so
they say, some two thousand years from now.
According to Steiner, Hermes bore within him the astral body of
Zarathustra so that his master's knowledge might be manifest again.
Moses, by acquiring Zarathustra's etheric body, was able to describe the
happenings in Genesis. Meanwhile, Zarathustra's ego went on to in-
carnate in other personalities, including that of Nazarathos, teacher of
the Chaldean mystery schools, and teacher of Pythagoras, though this
was neither his last nor his most impressive incarnation.
Thus the primeval wisdom of humanity passed from Persia to
Chaldea to Egypt, and so on down. By his Egyptian master, Polidorus
Isurenus, Hodson was told that the throne of the pharaohs was one of
the stages on the way to adeptship, passed through by many adepts, a
notion made clearer by the Egyptian records, which indicate that the
early pharaohs were guided by inspiration, an inspiration explained by
Steiner as being due to overshadowing, as in Atlantean times, by higher
beings. "For thousands of years adepts and initiates were incarnated in
an Egypt where the whole work of training, initiating, passing, and
raising and perfecting went on without interruption." As explained by
Annie Besant, who, along with Leadbeater, by their own reckoning,
had passed their fifth initiation and had become adepts: "Those who
were purest and noblest participated as a means of destroying all fear of
death, giving them the certainty of immortality, and gaining for them
wisdom that others did not possess."
Yet the outer religion of ancient Egypt-the official religion in
which everyone took part, from king to slave--was nevertheless de-