Isis Unveiled

These facts all go to show the identical parentage of this idea in the three religious systems, Hindu, Egyptian and Judaico-Christian. Wherever the mystic water-lily (lotus) is employed, it signifies the emanation of the objective from the concealed, or subjective—the eternal thought of the ever-invisible Deity passing from the abstract into the concrete or visible form. For as soon as darkness was dispersed and “there was light,” Brahma’s understanding was opened, and he saw in the ideal world (which had hitherto lain eternally concealed in the Divine thought) the archetypal forms of all the infinite future things that would be called into existence, and hence become visible.

The sprig of lilies placed in the hand of the archangel, who offers them to the Virgin Mary, in the pictures of the “Annunciation,” have in their esoteric symbolism precisely the same meaning.

Our Heaven—he says—was produced according to the eternal pattern of the “Ideal World,” contained, as everything else, in the dodecahedron, the geometrical model used by the Deity.