Page 258 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

In the subcontinent of India (where the Orion constellation is known as
Kal-Purush, meaning Time-Man ), we find that Sellers’s Osiris numbers
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are transmitted through a wide range of media in ways increasingly
difficult to ascribe to chance. There are, for instance, 10,800 bricks in the
Agnicayana, the Indian fire altar. There are 10,800 stanzas in the
Rigveda, the most ancient of the Vedic texts and a rich repository of
Indian mythology. Each stanza is made up of 40 syllables with the result
that the entire composition consists of 432,000 syllables ... no more, and
no less. And in Rigveda 1:164 (a typical stanza) we read of ‘the 12-
17
spoked wheel in which 720 sons of Agni are established’.
18
In the Hebrew Cabala there are 72 angels through whom the Sephiroth
(divine powers) may be approached, or invoked, by those who know their
names and numbers. Rosicrucian tradition speaks of cycles of 108 years
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(72 plus 36) according to which the secret brotherhood makes its
influence felt. Similarly the number 72 and its permutations and
20
subdivisions are of great significance to the Chinese secret societies
known as Triads. An ancient ritual requires that each candidate for
initiation pay a fee including ‘360 cash for “making clothes”, 108 cash
“for the purse”, 72 cash for instruction, and 36 cash for decapitating the
“traitorous subject”.’ The ‘cash’ (the old universal brass coin of China
21
with a square hole in the centre) is of course no longer in circulation but
the numbers passed down in the ritual since times immemorial have
survived. Thus in modern Singapore, candidates for Triad membership
pay an entrance fee which is calculated according to their financial
circumstances but which must always consist of multiples of $1.80,
$3.60, $7.20, $10.80 (and thus, $18, $36, $72, $108.00, or $360, $720,
$1,080, and so on.
22
Of all the secret societies, the most mysterious and archaic by far is
undoubtedly the Hung League, which scholars believe to be ‘the
depository of the old religion of the Chinese’. In one Hung initiation
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ritual the neophyte is put through a question and answer session that
goes:

Q. What did you see on your walk?

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and Sister Nivedita, Myths of the Hindus and Buddhists,
16
George G. Harrap and Company, London, 1913, p. 384.
17 Hamlet’s Mill, p. 162.
18 Rig Veda, 1:164, cited in The Arctic Home in the Vedas, p. 168.
19 Frances A. Yates, Girodano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, the University of
Chicago Press, 1991, p. 93.
20 Personal communication from AMORC, San Jose, California, November 1994.
21 Leon Comber, The Traditional Mysteries of the Chinese Secret Societies in Malaya,
Eastern Universities Press, Singapore, 1961, p. 52.
Ibid., p. 53.
22
23 Gustav Schlegel, The Hung League, Tynron Press, Scotland, 1991 (first published
1866), Introduction, p. XXXVII.

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