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the ground, which didst weaken the nations!

“For thou saidst in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north.”
     
But we also find an unmistakable reference to strife in heaven in the New Testament. Revelation 12:7-8 reads:
     
“And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon: and the dragon fought and his angels,

“And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven.”
     
    Many of the ancient documents of mankind mention wars and battles in heaven. The Book of Dzyan, a secret doctrine, was preserved for millennia in Tibetan crypts. The original text, of which nothing is known, not even whether it still exists, was copied from generation to generation and added to by initiates. Parts of the Book of Dzyan that have been preserved circulate around the world in thousands of Sanskrit translations, and experts claim that this book contains the evolution of mankind over millions of years. The Sixth Stanza of the Book of Dzyan runs as follows:
“At the fourth (round), the sons are told to create their images, one third refuses. Two obey. The curse is pronounced . . . The older wheels rotated downward and upward. The mother’s spawn filled the whole.
There were battles fought between the creators and the destroyers, and battles fought for space
; the seed appearing and reappearing continuously. Make thy calculations, o disciple, if thou wouldst learn the correct age of thy small wheel.”
     
    In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, that collection of texts which contained instructions for behavior in the hereafter and was placed beside mummies in the tomb, Ra, the mighty Sun God,
fights with the rebellious children in the universe
, for Ra never left the world-egg during the battle. The Latin poet Ovid (43 B.C. to A.D. 17) is naturally better known to posterity for his
Ars amandi
than for his collection of myths, the
Metamorphoses
. In the latter, Ovid tells the story of Phaeton (= the shining one), who was once given permission by his father Helios, the Sun God, to drive the chariot of the sun. Phaeton could not control the chariot, fell through the sky and set the earth on fire. In Greek mythology the twelve children of Uranus (the personification of heaven) and Gaia (the personification of earth) play an important part. These twelve Titans were terrible children who used their tremendous strength to rebel against the established order, i.e. against Zeus, the king of the gods, and attacked Olympus, the abode of the gods. Hesiod (
circa
700 B.C.), an earlier, Greek colleague of Ovid’s, who recounts the ancestry of the gods and the origin of the world in his
Theogony
, tells us that the Titan Prometheus brought fire down to men from heaven after violent conflicts with Zeus. Zeus himself was forced to share world dominion with his brothers Poseidon and Hades after a bloodthirsty struggle. Referring to Zeus by his name of God of Light, Homer (
circa
800 B.C.) describes him as cloud-banger, thunder-powerful and combative, who had no scruples about using lightning when fighting his enemies and so deciding the struggle in his favor. Lightning as a weapon also occurs in the Maori legends of the South Seas. They tell of a rebellion that broke out in heaven after Tane had arranged the stars. The legend names the rebels who were no longer willing to follow Tane, but Tane smote them with lightning, conquered the insurgents and threw them
down to earth
. Since then man has fought man, tribe fought tribe, animal fought animal and fish fought fish on this earth. The god Hinuno fares no better in the saga of the North American Payute Indians. After he had begun a battle with the gods, he was
thrown out of heaven
.
    The International Academy for Sanskrit Research at Mysore, India, had the courage to take a Sanskrit text by Maharishi Bharadvaya and replace the traditional