WHO ARE THE GODS?

Esotericism, pure and simple, speaks of no personal God; therefore are we considered as Atheists. But, in reality, Occult Philosophy, as a whole, is based absolutely on the ubiquitous presence of God, the Absolute Deity; and if It itself is not speculated upon, as being too sacred and yet incomprehensible as a Unit to the finite intellect, yet the entire philosophy is based upon Its divine Powers as being the source of all that breathes and lives and has its existence. In every ancient religion the One was demonstrated by the many. In Egypt and India, in Chaldea and Phoenicia, and finally in Greece, the ideas about Deity were expressed by multiples of three, five, and seven; and also of eight, nine and twelve great Gods which symbolized the powers and properties of the One and Only Deity. This was related to that infinite subdivision by irregular and odd numbers to which the metaphysics of these nations subjected their ONE DIVINITY. Thus constituted, the cycle of the Gods had all the qualities and attributes of the ONE SUPREME AND UNKNOWABLE; for in this collection of divine personalities, or rather of symbols personified, dwells the ONE GOD, the GOD ONE, that God which, in India, is said to have no Second: "Oh God Ani (the Spiritual Sun), thou residest in the agglomeration of thy divine personages."

These words show the belief of the ancients that all manifestation proceeds from one and the same source, all emanating from the one identical principle which can never be completely developed except in and through the collective and entire aggregate of its emanations. — H.P.B.'s E.S. Instructions, II

It is probable that no theme is so enwrapped in hazy obscurities as that of the gods of the various nations. In fact, even scholars — while acquainted with the religious, philosophical and mystical literatures of antiquity, as well as with the scriptures of those Oriental peoples who are still polytheistic in their belief — would be hard driven to give a clear-cut statement as to just what these gods were and are. The reason is that Occidentals for some two thousand years have abandoned all polytheistic thought for a somewhat illogical monotheistic conception of nature, and so are wholly out of sympathetic understanding with what these ancient and modern peoples consider their gods or goddesses to be.
Now it would be quite misleading to suppose that either the devas of Hindu mythology, or the gods and goddesses of the ancient Mediterranean peoples and their neighbors, are all fully self-conscious divinities inspiring and more or less controlling nature. They would be far better understood if we called them the powers of nature, including under this definition the divine, the semidivine, and all the ethereal, astral, and astral-physical entities which not only infill, but actually compose, our universe.
The esoteric philosophy, however, when speaking of gods, conceives of beings who, from their origin and by their characteristics and functions, are typically inhabitants of the highest cosmic planes. These gods are divisible into two classes or groups which are, so to speak, the extremes of the divine powers of nature, these extremes being the septenary classes of the divinities considered (a) at their origin, and (b) as full-blown self-conscious beings active on the light side of nature and on the divine-spiritual planes.
When a universe is beginning to unfold itself, there arise into activity, automatically as it were, beings on the highest cosmic plane (the only one then in existence) which are born from the very stuff or essence of that divine cosmic plane itself. These, class (a), are what we could call cosmic divine elementals; born of the substance or essence of the mulaprakriti of the cosmic unit, they are divine and divine-spiritual in type or character, gods after a fashion, although elemental divinities just beginning their evolution in this universe, and not yet full-blown gods or highly evolved jivamuktas.
Class (b), on the other hand, more truly corresponds to what the Western mind conceives divinities to be. They are those relatively fully evolved gods who had reached divinity on the divine and divine-spiritual planes at the end of the preceding mahamanvantara; and because they have so far advanced on the evolutionary ladder of life that they are native to those realms, they come forth contemporaneously with the group of cosmic elementals described under (a). Now those of group (b), while being full-blown divinities, are, nevertheless, 'failures' in the sense that they had not evolved sufficiently far at the end of the preceding mahamanvantara to leave the present universe and enter into a higher one, and consequently they have karmic links obliging them to take part in the new mahamanvantara of the universe now in process of opening its cosmic drama of life.
Thus the cosmic elementals are borne forwards into activity and begin the work of building the new universe under the spiritual and intellectual guidance of the true divinities or divine powers, the latter coalescing with the former and guiding their activities. As all these entities of both groups are, or at least become, sevenfold, such coalescence takes place in the points of mutual joining or similarity of swabhavic substance. In The Mahatma Letters (p. 87), K.H. speaks of this event and the coalescence of the self-conscious divinities with the newly aroused elementals as bringing about the first formation of a cosmic unit.
The gods are no mere abstractions; they are entities, incomparably more 'entified' than we are. They are examples of pure, individualized consciousnesses, while we are examples of entities whose consciousness is scarcely realized by ourselves. The gods live in their own spiritual realms, in bodies of spiritual texture, or in what to us would be bodies of light; just as to entities lower than we our bodies would seem to be built of light — and so in fact they are. To us it is flesh, because our senses are of the same substance.
What form have the gods? They have such forms as karma and evolution have given to them. What form have human beings? Such forms as karma and evolution have given to us. The great difference between a man and a god is that the gods are quasi-universal in their vital and consciousness-spheres, while men are extremely restricted in the spheres of their vitality and consciousness. On the other hand, the main similarity between them is that both god and man hold within their vital sphere other entities of a lower degree. The gods are countless. New gods are continuously being added to the host, while others are advancing into a still higher class of divinities. But every god contains within the realm of his auric egg — which includes his vitality and his consciousness, his intellect and his buddhic energy and his atman — a whole vast range of less evolved beings.
Consider the body of man with its multitudes of life-atoms and physical atoms, and remember at the same time that a large number of such physical atoms within their own atomic system have inhabitants, many of which are sentient, conscious, self-conscious, thinking entities. Yet man comprehends them all within the sphere of his vital influence. His is the dominant vitality which permeates and holds them all together as an entity. Similarly, we are human life-atoms living in the auric egg, in the vital sphere, of a divinity.
Stars, comets, planets, and nebulae — all are entities, vital phenomena, gathered together in and encompassed by the vitality of some super-divinity. And thus it is throughout Space endlessly.
Mere size has naught to do with consciousness. Some of the electrons of certain atoms are inhabited, and some of these inhabitants are fully as intelligent and self-conscious as we are. They think, they feel, they aspire. They are the 'humans' of those infinitesimal worlds. In the other direction, think of the wondrous spaces that we call our universe; the billions of suns which compose the Milky Way, most of them probably having planets around them, many of which are inhabited.
We on this little electron of our own solar system atom are in the same position in relation to the cosmic divinity in which we have our being, as the infinitesimal entities are to us. It is our vitality, our intelligence, our individuality, it is the energies and powers and forces welling forth from the heart of us, which give life and evolutionary direction to these infinitesimal beings living within us. They are our children. There is nothing separate in boundless Infinitude. Everything is interwoven with everything else. And this fact is the basis of the greatest teaching of occultism — the fundamental essential oneness of all that is.
Now as every universe, of whatever grade or magnitude in Space, is overseen and inspired by an originating atmic divinity — or cosmic hierarch (— we may look upon all these divinities as rays or logoi from this cosmic hierarch, very much as the life-atoms on any plane of a man's auric egg can be looked upon as rays or individuals flowing forth from one or another of the different monads of his constitution.