Blavatsky's Pythagorean Triangle / Tetraktys figure becomes the master diagram of Volume II's metaphysics. The Tetraktys — the triangle of ten units in four rows (1+2+3+4=10) — was the most sacred figure of the Pythagorean school, the object of their oath: 'by him who gave to our soul the tetraktys, source and root of ever-flowing nature' (preserved in Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians VII.94). Iamblichus's Theologoumena Arithmeticae and Theon of Smyrna's Mathematics Useful for Reading Plato treat it at length. Blavatsky uses it as the geometric shorthand for how the unmanifest Logos articulates into manifested cosmos: one becomes two, two becomes three, three becomes four, the four together constitute ten. The Christian Trinitarian theologian Bonaventure used a similar diagrammatic mode in his Itinerarium Mentis in Deum. The Kabbalistic Sefirot run a related but ten-pointed structure. What looks like number-mysticism is doing real conceptual work — it is mapping how unity can give rise to multiplicity without ceasing to be one.Editor
This is the densest single paragraph on the seven principles of the human in all of Volume II. To complete the septenary man, Blavatsky says, two connecting Principles are needed beyond what the lower vehicles can supply: Manas and Kâma. The vocabulary comes directly from classical Indian Sāṅkhya-Vedānta psychology — manas as the discursive mind, kāma as the desire-nature — but the seven-fold arrangement (sthūla-śarīra, prāṇa, liṅga-śarīra, kāma-rūpa, manas, buddhi, ātman) is her own systematization rather than a found Indian doctrine. Pauline Christianity layers three (pneuma, psyche, soma — 1 Thessalonians 5:23); Origen runs the same triad with more articulation; Sufi anthropology distinguishes the laṭā'if, the subtle centers (heart-qalb, spirit-rūḥ, mystery-sirr, hidden-khafī, most-hidden-akhfā). What Blavatsky's seven-principle scheme will pass into is the standard taxonomy of every twentieth-century Theosophical descendant: Steiner's Anthroposophical bodies, Alice Bailey's seven planes, Annie Besant and Leadbeater's clairvoyant anatomy in Man Visible and Invisible (1902). The system she synthesizes here is the one that becomes the New Age default vocabulary for the subtle body.Editor
The Prometheus / Pramantha alignment Blavatsky reaches for here is one of her most ambitious cross-tradition moves and one of the more philologically debated. The Sanskrit pramantha names the upper fire-drill stick of Vedic ritual, the one that rotates against the lower wood-piece (araṇī) to kindle the sacrificial flame; Vishvakarman or Tvashtri is the divine artist-carpenter behind the ritual. The Greek Prometheus, in Hesiod's Theogony 510-616 and Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, steals fire from the gods for humanity and pays the eternal cost. The philological link was argued seriously by Adalbert Kuhn in Die Herabkunft des Feuers und des Göttertranks (1859) and was respectable Indo-European comparative linguistics in 1888; modern Indo-European linguistics (Calvert Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon, 1995) has been more cautious about whether the etymological identity holds, while accepting that fire-from-friction myths cluster recognizably across the language family. What Blavatsky uses the alignment for is to argue that Prometheus is the Greek memory of the Manasaputra descent — fire here meaning mind. The poetic reading is rich whatever one makes of the etymology.Editor