Is Christ's nativity account fact or fiction? Many scholars are of the opinion that the Gospel account of Jesus' birth is a mixture of faith and history. "As with so many other elements of faith, the Nativity narratives are the subject of ongoing scholarly debate over their historical accuracy, their theological meaning and whather some of the central images and words of the Christian religion owe as much to the pagan culture of the Roman Empire as they do to apostolic revelation," writes Jon Meacham (Newsweek, December 20, 2004). Thus:

The origins of the Nativity stories are much murkier than the accounts of Jesus' adulthood. Where did the details—of miraculous conception, of birth in Bethlehem, of stars in the sky, shepherds in the night and wise men on a journey—come from?

Neither Jesus nor Mary nor Joseph seems to be its direct source. John P. Meier, a Roman Catholic priest and professor at Notre Dame, writes: "The traditions behind the Infancy Narratives differ essentially from those of the public ministry and the passion," whicfh were the result of firsthand testimony. Could there have been such a star, guiding the wise men in the search of baby Jesus? Halley's comet made an appearance in 12 B.C. and the Book of Numbers mentions: "There shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel." The three wise men (Magi) visiting infant Jesus is considered by some scholars to be fulfilment of Psalm 72: "The kings of Tarshish and of the isles shall bring presents: the kings of Sheba and Seba shall offer gifts." There is no historical evidence of such a visit and so also of the Herodian atrocity.

In Isis Unveiled, H.P.B. traces the origin of the Gospels to Oriental Gnosis and Oriental Kabala and points out that the Fourth Gospel was not written by John (II, 211). She writes:

The Acts and the fourth Gospel teem with Gnostic expressions....Peter's second Epistle and Jude's fragment, preserved in the New Testament, show by their phraseology that they belong to the kabalistic Oriental Gnosis, for they use the same expressions as did the Christian Gnostics who built a part of their system from the Oriental Kabala. (Isis, II, 205)

The legends of three Saviours—Krishna, Buddha and Jesus—when compared, show striking similarity. She suggests that St. Thomas adopted "in his gospel (from which all others were copied) the most important details of the story of the Hindu Avatar," Krishna (Isis, II, 539). The Gospel account of Virgin Mary and the slaughter of the innocents ordered by king Herod, compares thus:

Christna's mother was Devaki...an immaculate virgin (but had given birth to eight sons before Christna). Buddha's mother was Maya or Mayadeva; married to her husband (yet immaculate virgin)....Christna is persecuted by Kansa, Tyrant of Madura, but miraculously escapes. In the hope of destroying the child, the king has thousands of male innocents slaughtered. (Isis, II, 537)

The real meaning of Herod's "infant-massacre" is explained as persecution during the Herodian reign of kabalists and the Wise men as well as the prophets were nicknamed the "Innocents" and the "Babes" on account of their holiness. (Ibid, II, 199)

As for the "three wise men" and the star that guided them, Kepler maintained that at the moment of the "incarnation," all planets were in conjunction in the sign of Pisces, called by the Jews (the Kabalists), the "constellation of Messiah." It is in this constellation that the "the star of the Magi" was placed. Of the names of the three Magi—Kaspar and Melchior, Balthazar—two have Chaldean ring. (S.D., I, 654 and fn.)

H.P.B. points out that the concept of "Immaculate conception" is purely astronomical, mathematical and pre-eminently metaphysical, but carnalized by the Christian Church. Thus:

The Male element in Nature (personified by the male deities and Logoi—Viraj, or Brahma; Horus or Osiris, etc., etc.) is born through, not from, an immaculate source, personified by the "Mother"; because the Male having a Mother cannot have a "Father"—the abstract Deity being sexless, and not even a Being but Be-ness, or Life itself. (S.D., I, 59)

What does Siva's "Third Eye" depict? Is it a fact of human evolution or just allegory? Recently, Dr. O. P. Jangir, a Zoology professor in Bikaner, created frogs with three eyes in the laboratories of Dungar College. He removed the two eyes of a tadpole and treated the pineal gland with Vitamin A, which gradually transformed into an eye having all the properties of a normal eye. He transplanted this eye in another tadpole, giving rise to three-eyed tadpoles. "According to him, evolutionary history suggests that primitive animals, including some vertebrates, had three eyes on the frontal lobe," writes Sandipan Sharma (The Indian Express, January 30). Dr. Jangir observes:

With time, two of these eyes shifted sideways in animals. Due to this development, the middle eye, which remained in its place, lost its utility. But it survived as a vestigial organ, right above the nose, as pineal gland.

H.P.B. mentions that in the beginning, every class and family of living species was hermaphrodite and objectively one-eyed. Prior to acquiring the "coats of skin" or the physical form, when man and animal were both ethereal, the third eye was the only seeing organ; the two physical front eyes developed only later, in both man and animal. This "Cyclopean" eye was, "and still is, in man the organ of spiritual sight; in the animal it was that of the objective vision" (S.D., II, 299). H.P.B. mentions that during the course of evolution there were races of men with three eyes and four arms. Before the human form became perfect and symmetrical in the Fifth Race, there are indications of the early Fourth Race being three-eyed. However, this third eye need not have been in the middle of the brow; in fact, it was at the back of the head (S.D., II, 294). Thus, the "third eye" was once a physiological organ, but later on, owing to the gradual increase of materiality and disappearance of spirituality, this "third eye" got atrophied, and was gradually transformed into a sinple gland (S.D., II, 295-96). "The third eye is dead, and acts no longer; but it has left behind a witness to its existence. This witness is now the PINEAL GLAND." (S.D., II, 295)

It is said that John Elbert Wilkie, a young reporter for The Chicago Tribune, was the inventor of the legendary Indian Rope Trick. It was only a figment of the American scribe's imgination, writes Teller (The Times of India, February 17, 2005). The Chicago Tribune for August 8, 1890, carried an article that narrated the rope trick witnessed by two Yale graduates on their visit to India. A street fakir tossed the ball of gray twine up into the air, holding its loose end in his teeth. The ball unrolled until the other end was out of sight. Then a small boy climbed the twine, but vanished at the height of 30 or 40 feet in the air. The artist made the sketch and the photographer took the snapshots of the event. However, when the photos were developed, they showed no twine, no boy, only the fakir sitting on the ground. The reporter concluded, "My Fakir had simply hypnotized the entire crowd, but couldn't hypnotize the camera." This item was picked up by the newspapers of the U.S. and Britain and was translated into almost every European language. Peter Lamont, in his "Rise of the Indian Rope Trick," comments that Wilkie's article appeared at the right moment to feed the needs and prejudices of modern Western culture. To justify the colonial rule, the British had convinced themselves that Indian benightedness was the fakir, whose childish tricks—as the British imagined—frightened his ignorant countrymen but could never fool a Westerner."

H.P.B. was asked by an American subscriber to Lucifer to comment upon this curious report in the Chicago Tribune, which had the heading "It is only Hypnotism." H.P.B. observes that such phenomena, produced by Indian jugglers, are as old as the hills and are well known to every Occultist. She explains that the man who performed the phenomena was not a fakir but a public juggler and a "producer of illusions." However, she asserts that the two gentlemen [the Yale graduates who witnessed it] would never be able to repeat such juggling phenomena because these "jugglers" are not sleigh of hand conjurers. She writes:

"It is only Hypnotism," you say. Then those who say so, do not know the difference between hynotism, which, at best, is only a purely physiological manifestation even in the hands of the most powerful and learned experimenters, and real mesmerism, let alone mahamaya or even the guptamaya of ancient and modern India. We defy all, and everyone, from Charcot and Richet down to all the second rate hynotizers....to produce that with which...[the two Yale graduates] credit their "juggler."...We say yes; it is glamour, fascination, psychology, call it what you will, but it is not "hypnotism."...[It is] collective and instantaneous fascination produced on hundreds by one passing gaze of the "juggler," even though the gaze did "take in every man" "from sole to crown." (Lucifer, September 1890)

Further, H.P.B. observes that by analogy, "if such phenomenal powers of fascination, as throwing glamour over audiences often numbering several hundreds and even thousands, are once proven to exist in simple professional jugglers, who can deny the same powers, only twenty times as strong, in trained adepts in Occultism?"

Each creature on earth is composed of billions of atoms. There is a kinship between man and other species on earth based on—among other things—exchange of atoms between them. All creatures on Earth are indistinguishably intertwined, "making us soulmates in more ways than one." When any living being dies, decomposition sets in, releasing the constituent atoms into the atmosphere. Some of these atoms may get reconstituted in a shorter or longer period of time, in the same or in another species. Thus, each of us has some of the ingredients of the other, writes Jahanavi Shandilya (The Times of India, February 28). Bill Bryson in A Short History of Everything talks about the pervasive nature of atoms. Bryson writes:

Atoms are fantastically durable. Because they are so long-lived, atoms really get around. Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each atomically so numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that at death a significant number of atoms—up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested—probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name....So we are all reincarnations—though short-lived ones. When we die, our atoms will disassemble and move off to find new uses elsewhere—as part of a leaf or other human being or drop of dew. Atoms themselves, however, go on practically for ever.

"Humanity is a great Brotherhood by virtue of the sameness of the material from which it is formed physically and morally" (The Theosophical Glossary). In The Ocean of Theosophy Mr. Judge points out that a continuous exchange of atoms has been going on all the time. Atoms from our body are being replaced by other atoms and thus our body undergoes a complete alteration and renovation every seven years. At the end of the day, our body is believed to have changed at least seven times. (pp. 39-40)

In answer to a question, Mr. Judge mentions that such recombination and recycling of atoms illustrates the idea of universal brotherhood. He writes:

If we have all, as Egos, used over and over again the atoms physical which all other Egos have used, we lose all individual property in the atoms and each is common owner of all. I believe, but am unable to prove, that we use over again the atoms we once used in a body, but how many times the great wheel of the solar system allows this permutation and recombination to happen is beyond me and my generation. ("Forum" Answers, p. 66)

We continuously impress the atoms that we use, with either lower, psychic or higher, spiritual impressions—depending upon our thoughts. When these atoms are impressed by evil thoughts and actions, they get attracted to lower kingdoms, by magnetic affinity, and go in the formation of lower animals or brutes. This is the real meaning of the doctrine of Metempsychosis (H.P.B. Series No. 25, pp. 33-34). It is in this sense that man is said to be reborn as an animal. Man is responsible for the evolution of the lower kingdoms, as he has to raise "the entire mass of manifested matter up to the stature, nature, and dignity of conscious god-hood." The explanation given to Mr. Judge, by a holy man, runs as follows:

Atoms fly from all of us at every instant. They seek their appropriate centre; that which is similar to the character of him who evolves them. We absorb from our fellows whatever is like unto us. It is thus that man reincarnates in the lower kingdoms. He is the lord of nature, the key, the focus, the highest concentrator of nature's laboratory. And the atoms he condemns to fall thus to beasts will return to him in some future life for his detriment or his sorrow. But he, as immortal man, cannot fall....He is the brother and teacher of all below him. See that you do not hinder and delay all nature by your failure in virtue. (The Heart Doctrine, p. 145)

How clear is the path of one who believes! He lives with honour, with honour he leaves; Walks straight on the highways, nor wanders in the bye ways, And is to Dharma, the duty, bound. When hands, feet and body are soiled, water washes them pure; When clothes are spoiled soap clears them sure; When the mind is polluted by sin and shame, it is cleansed by the love of Your name.

—Guru Nanak