This article is about the Gemini twins, Castor and Pollux, who are also called the Polydukes, the Dioscuri or the Kabiri. I will mostly be referring to them as the Kabiri.I was inspired to explore the myth of the Gemini twins from the angle of their divine and human parentage and also because of the two colossal statues of the horse tamers, the twins and two horse statues next to them, on the Qurinale Hill in Rome, Italy.

The Kabiri are really the Archangels of Christianity, but Christianity sees the Kabiri as devils. The Kabiri were worshipped in Samothrace, Lacedaemonia, and Asia Minor, especially in

Phrygia, and in

Macedonia and in other parts of northern, as well as southern

Greece. The name means perhaps a derivation from Abin which is great, Ebir, an astrologer, and Kabir, an associate, and they were worshipped at a place

Hebron, which is the city of the Anakes, or giants, which fits in with the size of the statues of the Twins Castor and Pollux on the Qurinale Hill in

Rome. The Kabiri are said to have been worshipped by Phoenician sailors, as they were protectors of all mariners, especially when at sea, and they appeared in the form of St. Elmo’s fire, which was fireballs on the mastheads of the ships. The Kabiri were later identified with the constellation of Gemini, and in Rome came to be known as the Castores, and as the “Horse-Tamers”. Also known as the Dioscuri they are in later mythology usually depicted as twin brothers.  

In the Iliad they sail with Jason as Polydukes is a skilled boxer and Castor a trainer of horses. They are mentioned in The Odyssey Book 11, the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, amid a series of brothers born of mortal mothers and divine fathers. Later historians have tried to discover whether these brothers were mortal heroes of ancient time promoted to godhood in the popular imagination, or whether they were gods degenerated through over-use, as it were, back to human-hood. 

Actually this is part of the theme of the tale, of an inseparable connection between pure spirit and pure materiality, of the Omega and Alpha and of man being never quite the one or the other, on his long climb upwards. The story has many variations of one theme, the twins are born of Leda, a mortal woman, and of Zeus, highest of the gods, who came in the form of a swan, and the offspring were hatched from two eggs. Their twin sisters, Helen of Troy, most beautiful of women, and Clytemnestra, wife of Agamemnon who she later murdered, were born at the same time.  

Leda was said to be the daughter of Thestius, King of Aetolia, and wife of Tyndarus, King of Sparta. It is said that Castor was King Tyndarus’s true son, while Pollux was that of Zeus. Other variations include that Helen and her brothers were born from one egg or the brothers in one and the sisters in the other, or Helen being Zeus’s daughter and Clytemnestra that of Tyndarus, or else one egg hatched Apollo and Letona. Another variant gives a translation of one of the names of one of the brothers as Hermes. 

HP Blavatsky says that as the Tyndaridae, or sons of Tyndarus, they would symbolise night and day, as they were later wedded to the goddesses of dawn and twilight, daughters of Apollo. She says however that this does not mean that the brothers were the Sun and Moon, as the Greek pantheon had a god and a goddess for these functions already and the twins were only godlings. One day after a dispute over some stolen cattle, Pollux killed Lynceus, who could see through the whole world and whose name means that he had penetrating sight. Lynceus’s friend Idas “he who sees and knows”, wounded Castor. Pollux and another combatant had been the last to battle on and were killed by a thunderbolt thrown by Zeus to bring the battle to a halt. On finding his dying brother, Castor asked Zeus if he could die too, as he would follow his brother in everything. Zeus said they could not die altogether, as they are a divine race. Either Pollux remained immortal in Olympus or became semi-mortal along with Castor, living half of the time underground and half in the heavens; thus both lived, one by day and one by night. HP Blavatsky writes that they constantly die and return to life together, while it is absolutely necessary that one should die that the other live. One force is being converted into another force.  

Blair Moffett in the October ’79 Sunrise magazine, said that the hero twins represent the bipolar character of the Mayan saviour deity who incarnates as a man to bring divine thought to mankind. His apotheosis or rising back to heaven brings about the fourth age when fully civilised humanity becomes conscious of its divine progenitors. 

From the Secret Doctrine (SD) volume two, page 121-4, HP Blavatsky said that the myth describes an episode in the vast antiquity of the human race. Specifically, the myth refers to the melding of the second root race into the third, as mere astral forms began to attract more life-atoms to them, thus forming bodies. This on a grand scale produced a whole new race. The auric egg is the source of the human aura and of all the human faculties of the sevenfold human constitution. Going from the SD, she says: “When the race became old, and the old waters mixed with the fresher waters, when the drops became turbid they vanished and disappeared in the new stream, in the hot stream of life, the outer of the first became the inner of the second, the old wing became the shadow and the shadow of the wing. The old primitive race merged into the second race and became one with it. This is the mysterious process of transformation and evolution of mankind. The material of the first forms, shadowy, ethereal and negative, was drawn or absorbed into, and thus became the complementary of, the forms of the second race. The first race never died as it was made of the astral shadows of the creative progenitors and had no astral or physical body. The old became absorbed into the new, physical progeny. The wing or ethereal form that produced the shadow and image became the shadow of the astral body, and its own progeny. Man became dual, transformed from animal-man to god-man, in an animal body only, yet immortal in its possession of a fifth principle and called to life by those who had informed him of this, connecting the monad to the earth, which is Pollux, as Castor when separated from the enlivened half is only an animal again. Twinship can only continue if Pollux chooses to give a share of his own immortality”.  

HP Blavatsky also interprets the portion of the myth where Zeus is the father of the twins, as a cosmic myth of the world born from an egg. Leda herself becomes a white swan, that is her upper triad of her inner constitution unites with the divine swan. Six eggs of gold are laid, and a seventh of iron, which are the planets. The mundane egg symbolises the origin and secret of being. The first calls were seen as an ever invisible, mysterious bird that dropped an egg into Chaos, which egg became the universe. So Brahm was called “the swan of eternity”, the Kalahansa, the swan in space and time. It lays a golden egg at the beginning of each Manvantara. The circle thus came to symbolise this earth, and the universe as a whole.  

In the Katha Upanishad, quoted by Blavatsky, it tells of Purusha, the divine spirit, “standing before original matter from which came the soul of the world, Maha Atma Brahm, the spirit of life, the universal soul, the astral light. In the Secret Doctrine, I, 360, it tells that Vishnu Purana, or intellect mahat, the unmanifested gross elements inclusive, formed an egg and the lord of the universe himself abided in it, in the character of Brahma. In that egg, oh Brahma, were the continents, the seas, the mountains, the planets, and divisions of the universes, the gods, the demons, and mankind”.  

The January 1980 Sunrise article by Manual Oderberg says that the one becomes the many through a triadic process, from one down to 10. This could fit in with the seven builders of the universe which have their counterparts on earth, as the seven or 10 Kabirim or teachers of mankind. There are seven divine dynasties, seven Lemurian and seven Atlantean divisions of the earth, and seven primitive and dual gods who came down to teach all the sciences, including agriculture. They are referred to in correlation with the race of Titans, said to be born of the gods and early womankind, a race of giants which had to be destroyed. There is a connection here in that the Kabirim gods were all gods connected with fire and volcanism and the half man, half serpent Titans killed in the battle with the gods were buried under Greek islands, many of which were volcanic.  

The Kabirim came as gods, then merged with men and finally became divine kings and rulers. This is the same as the ‘Lunar Pitris’ or ‘fathers’ from the last ‘global’ round. They are also referred to as the “sons of the twilight” or “self-born”, who became, who issued from Brahma’s body of twilight. The Dhyan Chohans were not born as we are as they came from the third race, of sweat-born beings. They will wait to be reborn in the flesh in the seventh round. When he dies, Narada, first of these Pitris, will come into a new ready-made body. Others of his race were cursed to be formed as we are for interfering in our karma, not giving spirit to man along with knowledge. These are the Christian fallen angels, according to the Book of Enoch. 

The Kabirim gods were probably introduced to the Greeks from Phoenician Assyrian sources to the Chaldees and Jews from Hindu origins and from Hindu origins also to ancient America. They are also known as the Teraphim or serpent images given in the dowry of Dardenas, which he brought to Samothrace and

Troy. They were Jewish idol oracles. There is a connection here with a practice of artificially hatching a winged serpent from a ball of incense for the initiates, to symbolise spirit-wisdom being distilled from its fleshy habitation.   The Teraphim were celestial beings of human form, with three pairs of wings, and their name meant “bring serpents”, and they were Cabalistic angels related to severity. This would relate to their representation as horse-breakers, the Aswins, who were horsemen or charioteers with a golden chariot drawn by various types of animals. In Vedic literature it says they are born of the sun and the sky. They herald the dawn after the night and are young, handsome, bright, agile, and swift as falcons. They are ocean-born and crowned with lotuses, and represent the transition from darkness to light. Other sources say that the Aswins represent ancient horsemen who were refused admission to a sacrifice because they had been on too familiar terms with mankind. A horse sacrifice was practiced by the Brahmans of ancient India, who thought that the cosmos was symbolised by a horse. They are therefore of dual nature, due to their alliance of light and dark, and because pure monads incarnate during this materialistic manvantara. They also represent Kumara egos, originally the seven sons of Brahma, born from his limbs, in the ninth creation. They were called virgin gods because they do not populate as a race in this sphere. That is they are the same as the Lunar Pitris mentioned before.  

The Kabirim are also connected with the six Elohim which came forth from the One. The SD, Volume I, 374-5 says that it was 6,000 years before the earth became ready to be renewed in itself. The six Sefiroth of construction are the six Dhyan Chohans or Manus, or Prajapati, synthesised by the seventh, the first emanation or logos, and who are called therefore builders or the lower, or physical universe, all belonging below. The essence of these six is the seventh, the upati or the base or the fundamental stone on which the objective universe is built, that the pheneumanoi of all things. Hence they are at the same time the forces of nature, the seven angels of the presence, the sixth and seventh principals in Man, the spirito-psycho, physical spheres of the septenary chain, the route races. all depending on the seven forms of the cranium up to the highest.  

I’ll just conclude now that there are seven original gods, from whom branched all the rest of life. Every god contains within the realm of his auric egg, which includes his vitality and consciousness, intellect, buddhic energy and atman, the whole range of less evolved beings. We are all life-atoms in the cosmic auric egg. All the life atoms are given direction and individuality by the overseeing deities, vitality, individuality and intellect, which wells from the heart of us through him, making us the life-atoms of the cosmos. Now when Man became enfleshed he was also subject to hope via rebirth. The egg would symbolise life eternal.  

The above is the text of a lecture presented to the Theosophical Society Pasadena in Melbourne, Australia. The views expressed are those of the author, and not necessarily those of the Theosophical Society Pasadena.

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