Theosophy - Creation in six days - par Alvin Boyd Kuhn
CREATION
IN SIX DAYS ΔΔ
by Alvin Boyd Kuhn
PROLOGUE
originally published in book form in 1947
by the Liberty Publishing Co. Liberty, Mo.
[Page 3] The "common man" knows
in a vague way the massive fact that the modern mind has made more progress
in precise and profound knowledge of life and matter
in the last century than it had been able to make in more than two thousand
years previous to this epoch. He is at times disposed to wonder at this surprising
phenomenon, but it is not likely to occur to him at any time what might be
the historical rationale underlying and explaining the event itself. And
he would have to read a work like Andrew D. White's great two-volume History
of the Warfare Between Science and Theology in Christendom to have had
his eyes opened to the realization of a mighty fact of sixty generations
of Western history, which would be likely to stagger his thinking
beyond measure. He would, by such a work — along with others that would
further strengthen its force — come to understand at last that
a brutal, if sanctimonious, power dominant in the West for over eighteen hundred
years held the mind of the
entire Occident in leash, and with summary vengeance crushed down every movement
of that mind toward the grasp of truth in the realm of scientific fact. And
finally there would crash through into his intellect the explosive realization
that this searching, prying mind of Western man has achieved more knowledge
that can lift human life immeasurably, in the hundred years since it has been
free from ecclesiastical tyranny, and able to think and broadcast its findings,
than it had won in all previous history.
And if the logic of events had its
course with him, he would conclude at last that the age-long despotism of
priestcraft in European history has been the most
blighting calamity that ever afflicted assumedly civilized humanity. Gulled
by the natural influences of pietism and sanctity traditionally flaunted
before the mass mind by religionists, he would never have sensed the diabolical
character of religious tyranny, had not science demonstrated what the free
mind could accomplish, once it had thrown off the trammels and shackles of
churchly [Page
4] prohibition.
Fifty years of freedom — and science has advanced the human
race in vital knowledge farther than it had ever progressed in all previous
time! It took this astounding development of modern achievement to tear the
veil of pious blindness and submissiveness from off the common man's eyes,
and to reveal to his unobstructed vision the ugliness and falsity of two thousand
years of futile religious hallucination for his world of the West. The Dark
Ages indeed! And science, crushed to earth for long generations, is seen rising
at last to lift the pall of superstitious pietism from off the mind of Western
man, to let it prove its immortal divine genius.
If this average man's resentment
flares out against the still lingering power of pious religionism, as the
result of this challenging denouement of contemporary history, it is only
the just balancing of! the scales of cause and effect. Religiosity can lay
claim to no exemption from the force of natural law on any fictitious grounds
of exceptional sanctity of any kind. It is amenable to historical consequence
of its actions as is every other segment of human expression. It can claim
no immunity from the law of reaction. If it has been a frightful enemy of
human happiness and progress for dreary centuries, it must expect to receive
its due and proper flagellation at the hands of indignant revolutionaries
and dissenters. If it is further to serve the race for humanitarian culture,
it must be purged of its unconscionable ineptitudes, falsities and oppressions
of every kind. If it is to serve as tool and instrument of benignant history,
it mUst release thinking mind from its fetters and shackles.
Not only in the outer world of physical
achievement and material progress has dogmatic theology imposed its bondage
on the life of Western man, but it has tyrannously thrown its blighting ignorance
likewise and just as fatally over the pages of Holy Writ. It has laid sacrilegious
hands upon the tomes of ancient esoteric spiritual wisdom and devastated
at one stroke the priceless true meaning of all the sacred lore. Besotted
in ignorance of ancient Pagan philosophy and Scriptural symbolism already
in the third century, ignorant religionists laid the monstrous hand of literal
and historical gross-ness upon the precious volumes of cryptic literature
and befouled all the meaning into senseless caricature.[Page
5]
It mistook allegory for history, dramatism
for actual occurrence, myth for supposed veridical narrative. Ancient Pagan philosophers
like Plutarch and Plotinus, Philo
and Proclus, and even a few early Church Fathers like Clement of Alexandria and
Origen, stood helplessly by and saw the horrendous despoliation and mutilation
of the books of the great Mysteries of the Science of the Soul, as triumphant ignorance
travestied them into weird and unintelligible "history". And in the wake
of this great cultural catastrophe, and hard on the heels of the havoc and wreckage
of the luminous esoteric spiritual systems of the Sages like Pythagoras and Plato,
Orpheus and Hermes, there came crashing the inevitable debacle of spiritual culture,
clinching its victory with, the closing of the Platonic Academies and the burning
of priceless libraries. And over Europe descended the dismal murks of the Dark
Ages. Unintelligent religious fanaticism crushed out not only the springs of possible
science, but fatally submerged for eighteen centuries the potential enlightenment
that lay cryptically concealed under the surface literalism of the Sacred Scriptures,
and that needed only the keys to its esoteric secrets to unlock its treasures of
golden truth.
But at last the night of dark ignorance
has run its course. History is at last to be released from its throttling
grip. The human mind awaits its final liberation from the thongs of mental
bondage fastened on it for so long by a frenzied religionism demoniacally
activated by ignorance. Together the new twins, reborn science and restored
symbolism, are conspiring to undo the aeonial folly of a literal-historical
rendering of the great Scriptures. Science arises with irrefutable data to
shatter the pronouncements of religion as to man's creation and his life
and evolution on the earth. The theological creation of the world in seven
days is shattered forever, and the special creation of a first man and woman
is likewise shot into the limbo of all such preposterous religious chimeras.
The authoritative dictum of Canon Usher hardly two centuries ago that the
world was created at four o'clock of a Thursday afternoon of November, 4004
B. C., and would come to its end at the corresponding day and hour in 4004
A. D., is now thrust aside as the delusion of folly. Late evidence is now
at hand to prove that a civilization long hoary with age was extant in [Page
6] the
Eastern Andes Mountain regions some four thousand years B. C. Further evidence
is out in the light indicating that man was civilized unpredictable ages
ago, even on continents now submerged beneath the ocean waves.
Science and symbolism now march
hand in hand to retrieve the books of a genuine philosophy and an astoundingly
deep esoteric wisdom from this pall of blighting
misinterpretation. The Bibles still harbor the lessons of the purest morality
and the highest spirituality ever held before mankind as the goals of evolutionary
struggle and presented in literary form. But they offer this science and this
wisdom to mankind in subtly veiled forms. One must learn how to tear off
a mask of cryptic disguise from the face of the literal narrative of the
sacred texts before the diamond brilliance of the hidden truth can be caught.
With the aid of science's findings and symbolism's strategic keys, the work
of unveiling the concealed sense of the Christian and other Bibles is here
undertaken. The work is dedicated to
the emancipation of the Western mind from the lingering remnants of Medieval
bondage and to the illumination of Holy Writ with that ancient Light, which,
rekindled in the modern day, may come in time to save a still religiously
blinded humanity in the West. [Page
7]
Alvin Boyd Kuhn
THE
STORY OF CREATION
The Bible begins, as it should, with
the account of creation in the Book of Genesis. Its first words are: "In
the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." This
primacy of creation in the Scriptures is due to the fuel; that the human mind must
think of the universe as having had a beginning in time, as it seems to have undergone
a growth or development now spoken of as an evolution. Under human observation
all created things seem to begin and end at definite points. The world, the solar
systems, the galaxies, the super — and super-super-galaxies now known to
exist — the entire universe, must have had its origin from some potential
creative source. So the Bible begins with Genesis.
But, in common with every other
construction of ancient knowledge embodied in the mighty Scriptures given
by masters of wisdom to early humanity, this creation
story has been sadly misread and misconstrued. After the early centuries of
Christian history the intelligence to read properly the profound meaning
hidden in the archaic writings of the Sages of olden time vanished away and
was finally lost. The very methods employed by these Seers and Prophets of
the ancient day became a mystery and a lost art. For these writers did not
use plain language, but embalmed their gems of wisdom and knowledge in constructions
of fancy such as myths, allegories, drama, fable, parable, number graphs
and astrological pictographs. These representations or "stories" were
not intended to be taken as "true", as having
literally occurred on the plane of history. They were in all external sense
fictitious. But we will grossly and tragically err — as we have done — if
we assume then that they are nothing but fanciful rubbish and valueless.
We have committed a costly blunder by saying that they are only myths.
We have vastly misunderstood, miscalculated the myth. The myth was designed
by transcendent genius to convey to intelligence the deepest meanings the
mind can grasp! The myths are myths of something, and that something is always
the profoundest truth. The myths never happened, but they picture the significance
and meaning of all that does happen in the long run of history. In the end
they are infinitely more vital than history itself! [Page
8]
It is a doleful story, this loss
of the ability to read the deeper meaning hidden under the Bible's artful
constructions. It has left the world for centuries taking a childish instead
of a mature view of the meaning of Scripture. It has darkened general ignorance
instead of enlightening general intelligence. In place of revealing light
we have had the grotesque and fantastic, the gross and preposterous maunderings
of unintelligence as the outcome of centuries of study of the sacred texts.
The tide of ignorance and superstition that flooded in to overwhelm the Gnostic
teachings of early Christianity wrought world calamity. It is an awesome
story, that blight of ignorance that fell in the third century upon the glorious
philosophical systems of the ancient world. It has been told in the author's
major works. It can not be reviewed in a brochure aiming to elucidate one
small segment of the marvellous structure of ancient truth.
But it is desirable to state again that
such a construction of the great archaic wisdom as the creation story in Genesis — and
some fifty other ancient books — embalms
a lucid meaning that has been lost, but which, if regained, would be priceless
for its saving power over man's intelligence. The restoration of the lost meaning
of the cycle of dramatic allegories in the Christian Bible is an event that will
mark the present epoch as the date of the Western world's emergence from the Dark
Ages into which the early loss of the esoteric keys to the Scriptures plunged it.
No less than this restoration is the motive for the publication of this series
of exegetical essays, every one of which will relight one of those burned out wicks
of the ancient lamp of knowledge.
WISDOM HIDDEN IN A MYSTERY
Without the brighter light to clarify
the meaning and with only the surface sense to guide the mind, the interpretation
of Genesis has been badly warped out of true
line. It has been taken to be a more or less intelligent effort to describe
the formation of this planet and the life upon it, culminating in the creation
of the human family. It was for a long time even considered to be an account
of the geological and biological formation of the earth and its genera of
living creatures. This low view engendered the long and dismal controversy
between [Page
9] religion
and science which went rather badly for religion. But there never should have
been any such dispute, as the proper understanding of the story would have
obviated at one glance |the possibility of a conflict between these two in
the account.It was never an attempt of child-minded early humans to describe
the genesis of the world geologically or biologically, though these elements
of course are remotely intimated. They can be seen as belonging to the story
if oriented in their proper place and relation to the larger principia of
the outline. The narrative was, as stated, a glyph or secret code formulation
designed with majestic form and beauty to portray for eternal remembrance the
total meaning of life and its great processes of creation.
What those grand constructions, preserved
in the books of "Holy Writ", really
are has never been measurably understood. They in fact are much what Einstein's
imposing mathematical and physical formulas are. They are not accounts of events,
but formulas which graphically delineate the structure and meaning of all event. They
equate and symmetrize the balance of forces that hold the universe in organic shape
and function. This has not been known or seen as the basis of the interpretation
of these stately old prints of cosmic process. Not for over two thousand years
has their true message been caught in anything like clear vision.
The Genesis story of creation, then, is one of those luminous graphs, and is not
at all the story of the creation of one tiny planet as its sole revelation. It
delineates the design and structure of all creation! It is a formula that depicts
the form of world process and the cosmic evolution of life at any place in the
universe. Wherever life comes to manifestation it does so according to the pattern
spread out to view in Genesis. So it is that pattern that holds the
meaning and the supreme value of it all. To unfold any adequate measure of
it in a treatise of forty pages is a task of great difficulty.
The seven Hebrew words in the first verse of the Genesis narrative
challenge immediate attention. "In the beginning God created the heaven
and the earth."
The adverbial phrase "in the
beginning" demands
brief treatment. It asserts that creation had a point of beginning [Page
10] and
by inference will have an end
in the time process. This might not seem worthy of notice until one remembers
that God exists from endless time to endless time and is without beginning
or end. Why, then, should his creations have temporal existence, to be followed
by annihilation and non-existence? The
answer is found in a knowledge of the great philosophical archai,
or fundamental principles, which, while they can not "describe" the
nature or being of God, do outline the processes of his creative work. One
of these laws by which he works is that of rhythm. God alternately sleeps and
wakes to work, as do his creatures! Again, like us, he divests himself of all
his "clothes" when
he sleeps and similarly relapses into unconsciousness: and when he awakes he
resumes his "clothing" and
regains his consciousness. In this instance the "clothing" he
doffs and dons again at the end and beginning of each period of creative work
are the
formations
of matter which give him body to work with. We, being essentially "spirits",
must have "coats of skin" or physical bodies to enable us to
function in a concrete world. God labors under an analogous necessity and acts
accordingly.
He arises from sleep, puts on his garments of flesh and matter and sets to
work.
The ancient books of wisdom virtually
assert that God "lives" and "dies", or
deploys his forces of being out into manifestation, clothed and instrumentalized
in and by matter, and again withdraws them, retiring as the outer body "decomposes" at
the end of the cycle, precisely as do our bodies, to live in bodies of finer invisible
forms of matter. Matter is indestructible, but can be changed in form and constituency
from visible substance to invisible immaterial essence. And it would be well if
modern thought assimilated the difference between substance and essence in this
view of matter. Matter can go out of existence and yet retain being or remain in
being, And this is precisely what God does in his resuming a body and again dropping
it, or dissolving it, in each creative round. His inner being remains continuous
through it all, just as our identity remains constant while we are in sleep.
So we must know that while God is
without beginning or end in his own interior being, his creations, building
the bodies he is to animate in each cycle, have definite points of beginning
and ending. The law of rhythm is his working principle. [Page
11]
MADE IN GOD'S IMAGE
Here — to anticipate later verses — can
at once be seen the meaning of that profound utterance in Genesis that God made
man in his own image and likeness.
Modern cult religions, in particular Christian Science, assert that this means
only that as God is a spirit, man's likeness to his Author is fulfilled in the
idea that man, too, in spite of his obvious physical constitution, is only a spirit.
The meaning is far more specific and
significant than that. It carries for us the very momentous realization that
in actual truth and fact our being is patterned — in
miniature, of course — over the same model of construction and procedure
as that of God himself. The common mistake is made in the assumption that spirit
has
no form of structure. We should have learned from Plato first, and Berkeley and
Kant later, that indeed it is spirit that is the author of all form. "Form" is
precisely the word Plato used to describe God's spiritual activity. Man, as
the ancients averred, is a microcosm, or little universe, and a strict copy
of the Macrocosm, God's total being. If man will know himself, these wise men
said, he will be cognizant of all the laws and secrets of the entire universe.
This basic item of knowledge must be vitalized again. As the atom is now found
to be a tiny universe in itself so it is true that man's organic life is a
wonderful copy of the solar systems and the entire cosmos, in both form and
operation. Little things are only big things reduced in proportion.
WHY DOES GOD CREATE?
Other great Scriptures, more specifically than does Genesis, detail how God, after
a long sleep, which the Hindus call pralaya, awakes on a new mom, to begin another
cosmic cycle of activity. He, like us, has had enough sleep and awakes with renewed
desire for bodily exertion. Having thrown off his body at the end of the former
cycle, he has to rebuild each time a new body through which to gain consciousness
and do his work. We must never forget Alexander Pope's celebrated portrayal of
the cosmic nature in his oft-quoted couplet:
All things consist of one stupendous whole,
Of which the body Nature is, and
God the soul. [Page
12]
Yes, God periodically wakes from sleep
and dons a new physical body; otherwise how is our life an image of his? His
pleasure — again like ours — is
in creating something that expresses his nature and gives play to his faculties,
his
intelligence, his genius. The philosophical quest often comes to a dead end with
the question: Why does God create at all? The answer is indeed basic for understanding.
The ancients told us in a single word — Lila. It is variously translated
as the pleasure, the delight, the joy, even the sport and play, of God. It is instructive
to note that our word "recreation," in the sense of pleasurable, free,
playful exertion, is re-creation. Evidently God creates because it is
his pleasure and his delight, and, again in his likeness, man is never so truly
happy as when
he is creating something that exercises his highest and deepest powers. Are we
not God's children, and do not children resemble their parents? Our parents are
Father God and Mother; Nature, or Spirit and Matter. The two marry in our very
bodies, They marry everywhere in the universe.
But who is the God who creates in the
first verse? Here the translators have done the Christian world a great disservice.
They have put a plural word into the singular
number. They have written "God" when the Hebrew Bible says "the
Gods". And they have thereby wrought endless confusion and misunderstanding
in the sincere thinking of countless millions. Elohim" are "the
Gods",
for there are seven of them.
WHO IS THE CREATOR?
The startling truth of the matter
is that the creative work is not done by the Supreme or the Absolute, but
by his seven emanated powers, the Elohim or Archangels.
Many passages from the wisdom literature of the nations expressly state that
the Infinite, the Boundless, the Absolute, is not conscious and neither thinks
nor creates. The Greek word applied to him (It) was to apeiron,
which is neuter gender. God is not neuter, but masculine, as Nature (Matter)
is feminine. In Hebrew the
Absolute is Ain-Soph; and a line from an ancient tome in view as this
is written says: "Ain-Soph cannot be the Creator or even the modeller
of the Universe, nor can he be Aur (Light)." For the Absolute
is darkness and the light has not yet been formed. "Darkness was over
all the face of the deep", [Page
13] says Genesis;
and the great deep is what is known to us as the universal sea of "empty
space." And in "empty space," apart
from the presence of a star or sun, darkness reigns. In Hindu Scriptures the
Absolute is Brahm, and
It does not create until It becomes Brahma; and only then does he create through
his seven "mind-born" Sons, who are called the primordial Rishis,
or "the
Builders".
The doctrine of divine emanations is
supposed to have gone out of Christian theology when early Gnosticism was made
a heresy. But the truth of the Bible can not be
glimpsed without restoring them. It surely can not be heresy to say that from the
Absolute Source of all things come the forces, both of mind and of matter (and
we now know what force is in matter!) which form the worlds and their living creatures.
And these forces or emanations are the agencies through which the divine work is
accomplished. In our blunt way of conceiving things, the Absolute is that which
is when, from our point of view, there is — nothing! Indeed the word connotes
just that. It means "released from", having no relation with anything.
But from that Absolute Nothing issue the Forces , which do create.
To have relation to anything — and
to all things — the Absolute must,
so to say, perform an operation upon itself, to bring it from nothingness to
somethingness. Even as nothingness it contains within it the potentiality
of becoming all things. Since in the nothing-state it is "without form
and void", it must generate
within itself the two indispensable elements of somethingness, which are spirit
and matter, mind and body, substance and consciousness. It can not become
something without developing consciousness and matter; consciousness in order
to know what to create and how
to do it; matter, to have something with which to create. Since there is nothing
outside of It, to begin with, It must produce from Itself the two things which
will enable It to become aware of its own existence. And these two "things" are
subjectivity and objectivity. It must evolve Itself into consciousness, to
become aware, and matter, to have something to be aware of. So It must break
Its original oneness
apart into a twoness, to objectify Itself to Itself.[Page
14]
And just this, be it stated, is what our first verse of Genesis announces.
For the first act of creation, the formation of the "heaven" and the "earth",
is precisely the statement that the Absolute split its unitary being apart into
the two nodes of life, spirit and matter. "Heaven" is universally the
term used to typify spirit, and "earth" that used to represent matter.
This meaning has been missed because of the inveterate tendency of the later Christian
leaders to interpret the Scriptures literally, having lost the keys to its more
recondite significance. That first verse, in a more explicit esoteric rendering
of its meaning, should read something like this: Out of the Absolute potentiality
of infinite being the (seven) Elohim generated spirit and mater. Before this bifurcation
of the One into its operative duality it could not have created. It would have
lacked both knowledge and material. It had to produce these out of itself, or in
a sense, turn itself into these two.
Producing both these primary requisites from the depths of its own essence, it
could begin the work, the processes of mind acting upon matter.
And the seven Elohim? They are found
under a variety of as many as thirty or forty names in the different national
religions. For its value as information a partial
list of these designations is given: Elohim; Demiurgoi; Logoi; Rishis; Prajapati;
Kabiri; Archangels; Spirits of the Presence; Angels before the throne; Cosmocratores;
Titans; Uranidae; Kronidae; Saturnidae; Rulers; Archons; Pitris; Amshaspends;
Hohgates; Lumazi; Rebels; Devils; "The Seven"; Children of Inertness;
Serpents; Sons of Ptah; Sons or Ra; Sons of Sydik; Cyclops; Companions of
Horus; Companions of Arthur; Sons of the Mother (not of the Father); and
are generally called the Seven Primary Powers, the Seven Elementary Forces,
the Seven Gods of Nature. In many religions the seven are named individually.
In the Hebrew pantheon they were Ildabaoth, Jehovah, Sabaoth, Adonai, Eloeus,
Oreus and Astanphaios. In the Babylonian they were Bel, Ea (Hea), Rimmon,
Nebo, Marduk (the Mordecai of the Bible!), Nerra (Nergal) and Ninib (Ninev),
from which comes "Nineveh." In the Persian they are Azazel, Amazarak,
Armers, Barkayel, Akabeel, Tamiel and Azaradel. In pre-Christian and Gnostic [Page
15] terminology
they are correlated with the planets of the solar system, as regents of the stars,
namely, Michael (the Sun), Gabriel (the Moon), Samael (Mars), Anael
(Venus), Raphael (Mercury), Zachariel (Jupiter) and Orifiel (Saturn).
In the Christian system they are the
(Seven) Archangels, for arch is the Greek for "first" or "primordial".
Hence they are those first seven rays of power that were emanated from the
being
of God to go forth into the
realms of empty space and effect the creation. They were God himself at work,
but through his seven arms of power, so to say.
THE GREAT MYSTERY OF SEVEN
There is infinite mystery attached to
this number seven. And well there can be, for it is the number that
determines the structure of. the substantial universe. It is a fact and not
mystical fancy, that the worlds are built over the pattern
of the number seven. It is astonishing, indeed unbelievable, that so mighty
a basic fact as this has gone to oblivion in the Christian system. The great
fundamental that the ancients built upon were not childish phantasies, but
primary cosmic data. They knew that all creation was consummated in seven
great - waves or propulsions of energy from the heart of God, and that each
one of these seven radiations subdivided itself into a minor seven, and even
these into lesser sevens. The pulse of the universe beats in sevens. Marvel
at it we must, but deny it we cannot. To ignore it is to perpetuate our ignorance.
Every wave of released energy projected outward from the heart of being (just
as our hearts propel the blood stream outward to do its sustaining work) runs round
a cycle of energization till its force is spent. This cycle is itself broken upon
into seven sub-cycles, and is not completed until the seventh angel has sounded
his seventh trumpet to marshall the hosts of created things into their proper order
and harmony at the end.
Here enters a point of great importance
for understanding. While there are seven propulsions, the seventh and last
is both a new note and at the same time the summarization or synthesis of
the preceding six. It includes the six and unifies their vibrations in one
new and consummative vibration. It is as if six singers of successive notes
in the scale of an octave [Page
16] each
in turn sounded his individual note and then all together united with the seventh
when his note ended the diapason.
Here, then, is the cosmological basis
for the oldest and most universal social ordinance in the world, the institution
of the week of six secular days,
crowned with a Sabbath (meaning itself "seventh") day, in honor of the
sun. As was seen a moment ago, the seven Archangels were correlated with the
planets and the sun, or six with planetary bodies and the seventh with the sun.
This reflects the scientific hypothesis as to the formation of the solar system.
For the seven were originally undifferentiated, being ethereal and gaseous in one
mass, before segregation, and before the final focus of productive energy had become
nucleated in the sun at the center. For this reason the seven were first called
brothers, , but later the six were changed to sons of the sun, which had now become
the central dominating seventh. The Kabbalah, or esoteric book of the Jews, says
that a soul traversing, as souls must, the kingdoms of nature, must spend six "days" on
each one of the six planets of a solar system and the seventh "day" in
the sun of that system.
It is a thing to fill the reflective
mind with wonder and awe that an abstruse segment of most ancient cosmological
symbology has become fixed in the world's
most sacred ordinance, the Sabbath. To our discredit it has little been noted that
our week is composed of six days devoted to profane and secular activity ("six
days shalt thou labor and do all thy work") and the terminal seventh devoted
to the sun, the symbol and embodiment of the supreme divine life of the system.
The amazing feature of our dullness is that we have not realistically noted
that our week repeats a constantly recurring glyph of the order of cosmic creation.
Each week's course should remind us of the eternal frame and mode of the universal
creation. If man lived in constant closer affinity with nature, the week should
indeed be a renewed expression in his life of the macrocosmic cycle of creation.
Each seven days should repeat in miniature the processes of development in
the whole order of being. Man was thus to be reminded of his kinship with nature,
and so be induced to maintain his stride with the beat of the life-pulse of
the progressing universe.
To be sure — it need hardly
be said — the "days" of creation
[Page 17] in Genesis are
not days of earthly rotation, twenty-four hours in duration. To take the
word thus literally is to read preposterous nonsense into the grand writing.
Both "days" and "years," sometimes also "weeks" and "months," in
the old Scriptures arc figurative terms used to designate any and all cycles,
of whatever length. They can refer to any specific cycle or round of life
in its periods of manifestation. "The morning and the evening were the
first day." The
birth, development, life and death of any living creature or stellar system
is its "day" or its "year." Infinite perplexity and controversy
could long ago have been saved if this one little item had been correctly registered.
That the six "days" of Genesis, however, can be taken as six geological
eras of earth formation, as has been advanced to save something for the literal
rendering, has little to stand on in the allegory. The creation story is not specifically
dealing with the formation of this one planet.
The six days of work, with rest on the
climactic seventh, can readily be seen in its most pertinent relevance if we
take the "days" as denoting the
six kingdoms of nature, each of which took an aeon of time to develop, coming to
their consummation in the seventh. This approach at any rate yields the clearest
and most natural sense from the symbolism. We have definitely under observation
in our world four kingdoms or planes of life clearly distinguished from each other.
They are the mineral, vegetable, animal and human. But what is not at all commonly
known, and is one of the vital disclosures to us from the ancient knowledge, is
that there are three kingdoms below the mineral in the stages of the development
of matter out of its initial "pure" state of primal essence. They are
not apparent visibly, for the very good reason that they are constituted of atomic
matter below the range of human sight. Yet they exist, as we now know the atom
exists, although invisible to us.
THE FOUR KINGDOMS
These three kingdoms are in reality
states or stages in the formation of the atom itself. The atom is only completely
formed in the mineral kingdom. To bring it
to perfection three preceding epochs in its life history are necessary. These
three are classed as subatomic, and matter existent in these conditions [Page
18] is
called "elemental
essence".
Strictly in our sense it is not yet matter at all, but the elementary substance
that is to become matter. In the first of these kingdoms matter is as yet
only a latent potentiality. It is sheer be-ness, not yet "being" at
all. It must "become" in order to "be". So the first of
the divine emanations gives it the initial impulse on the road to becoming
something from "nothing," by virtue of which becoming it is to pass
from potentiality to actuality.
Matter in this primordial state is symbolized
by the egg. An egg must be fertilized by creative potency, or the male seed.
The female is matter; the male is spirit.
The first creative impulse can be thought of as the
fecundation of matter by the seeds of spirit or mind. As the male fish places himself
in suspension over the female eggs to fertilize them, so the spirit of God "brooded
over the waters" in the beginning stage. And the waters are the indubitable
symbol
of matter. All things proceed out of the womb of matter; all physical birth originates
out of water. The first kingdom, then, is matter in its first impregnation by spirit-mind.
The ray of spirit "flashes into the germ", as an old
Hindu phrase puts it, and gives nonexistent matter the first agitation of the essence
which is to generate it. This is God brooding over the face of the deep.
In the second elementary kingdom the
process works on to the segregation of primal essence into a duality, represented
in old accounts by the analogy of the
separation of the curds from the whey in the churning of
butter, or indeed the separation of the cream from the protein in the milk, or
again the protein (albumen; white) from the yolk (fat; yellow) in the egg.
And the third-stage resulted in
the granulation of the essence into particles, the atoms. The analogy of
churning the cream to butter holds with astonishing fidelity
right through the cosmic process. Matter has
now been worked over into numberless granules, or atomized, by the endless
combinations of which Creative Mind can now shape substance into any form or
condition desired to meet its purposes. The divine aim of life is to "multiply" its
being infinitely. The only way a One-Thing can multiply itself, or escape its
oneness into multiplicity, is by first dividing itself into infinite pieces,
giving each the potential capacity to grow to parent status [Page
19] in
turn. This is why God commanded creatural life of all kinds to increase and multiply.
Matter, then, went into infinite division of its original homogeneous
essence and began the process of endless differentiation. The one prime essence
was broken up into atoms.
For the work of the fourth kingdom,
the mineral, the forming of actual visible substance was achieved by the wave
of force that energized the various affinities
and repulsions that are found in chemistry. By these laws the physical elements — of
which we now know some ninety-four — were generated, to become the basis
of all natural formation and all growth. Their various "loves and hates", as
Empedocles termed them, determined what materials should constitute the bodies
aggregated for life's purposes, for living entities. Over all presided the Goddess
of Harmony, us the Greeks name this principle of Deity, seeing that those elements
were organically related that would provide the mechanisms for happy life and prevent
the bad relationships of hostile ones.
The fifth wave carried elemental structure
to that degree of organic complexity that would facilitate such a condition as
vegetable life. And the sixth swept the
development on to the still more complex organization of elements and functions
into what became animal life.
THE ADVENT OF MAN
When the animal evolution had proceeded
from tiny moneron or single cell up to the noblest animal creature, a point
was reached at which the brain and nervous
system of the body had become sufficiently sensitized and refined to be capable
of registering the vibration rate at which the first stage of true self-consciousness
could be realized. The animal could be conscious, even of its existence; but
only man could be conscious of being conscious. The animal could not think in
the proper sense of that term. "Man" is derived from the Sanskrit man,
meaning "to
think". Manas is the thinking principle and man the first thinking
animal. And this was the divine manna that fell from heaven to sustain
the children of God. And the primitive tribes used always to say that any fetish
or object embodying
God possessed mana. The American Indians' Deity was Manitou. [Page
20]
So a wholly distinct kingdom came to
being when the bud of matter, so to say, burst out at its summit in the wonderful
flower of human consciousness. This was
the crowning act in the septenary drama. Matter, the universal Mother, had begotten
her divine Sons. This was the aeonial event for which, as Paul says, "the
whole creation groaneth and travaileth until now, waiting for the manifestation
of the Sons of
God". The great mother of all life, away along in her old age, had
borne the Christ-child of divine mind. (Need we pause to bring out the amazing
significance
of this hint for the solution of the eternal conundrum, never solved by a single
theologian or clergyman, of the phenomenon of Sarah, Hannah, Elizabeth and several
others of the mothers of the Christ character in the Scriptures, bringing forth
the divine
child in their old age? It was Mother Nature, Mother Matter, generating
the Christ-consciousness,
not a human woman bearing a babe.)
The work of creation for the cycle
was finished with the seventh impulse. Well could the Man-become-God exclaim: "Consummatum
est!" — "It
is finished!" And wisely did the author of the Book of Proverbs sing: "Wisdom
hath builded her house! she hath hewn out her seven pillars." Yes,
the material house which gives spirit "a local habitation and a name" was
constructed, and as always, reared upon seven "pillars," seven states
of atomic organization, seven notes of the scale of energic being, seven grades
of matter. It needs no
extended dissertation to certify the fact that this physical universe is
actually built on the number seven. There are seven colors in the full
white light, seven tones in an "octave," seven envelopes to the gestating
human foetus, seven steps in the periodic table of the weight of the elements,
and the
gestating period for all creatures up to and including man is seven days or
a multiple of seven. A circle can be surrounded by just six circles of equal
size tangent to it and to each other, giving you the outer six with their center
in the seventh. The Egyptian God of earth was Seb, originally Sevekh,
whose name is etymologically "seven".
On earth all manifestations take a sevenfold or seven-partite formation. This
is indisputable.
But the failure of Christianity to incorporate it in its proper place in its "scheme
of theology" has left exegesis groping for want of this deft
key to many secrets. [Page
21]
If man is to follow out this incontestable
time-plan and developmental rhythm in his own life, it can be seen that a realistic
observance of the seventh day
is a very real necessity. As all lesser cycles run over in miniature the same unfolding
pattern as the larger cosmic aeons, it is clear that man can maintain his rhythm
with the heart-beat of the universe only by dedicating each seventh day to the
interests of the mind, soul and spirit. "The seventh is the Sabbath of the
Lord thy God." For the labor of the six "days" was to prepare the
body for the reception of the divine King of Righteousness in the seventh cycle.
It is a gross mistake, however, and one made all to generally by unintelligent
pietism, that to consecrate the Sabbath one must indulge in heavy, lugubrious
or doleful religionism, or regard it a sin to enjoy the physical life to the full.
It is demanded, however, that the Sabbath be devoted to the interests of the inner
consciousness, rather than to bodily activity. It should be man's day for the profoundest
of his spiritual cultures.
Much obscurantism has been bred in theology
and Bible exegesis because of a cardinal misconception relative to the location of
Paradise and the Garden of Eden in the narrative. In Greek the word paradeisos means "a park". As a park
in an earthly sense is a beautiful place of rest and enjoyment, it was the symbol
chosen by the ancient Sages to denote that other place of beauty and delight in
higher consciousness — the heaven world. This must be so, because, when man
was expelled from this Garden of Delight he landed down on earth. It can therefore
not be considered as located on earth, in the Euphrates Valley, the Shangri-La
of the East, the Shamballah of Tibet or any Holy Land on the map. It is not on
this planet; and what dismal wallowing in the errors of mistaken exposition of "Bible
meaning" could have been avoided if this one simple item had been kept in
knowledge.
Reinforcement is given to this academic
conclusion by the identity of the description conventionally drawn of the
Garden with those assuming to picture the life of heaven. Both are depicted
as places of serene blissful consciousness, perfect happiness and sinlessness.
The pervading atmosphere of both is the innocent purity of childhood. It
is therefore the place [Page
22] where
man was in the childhood of his racial development, and the place to which
he is destined to return when freed again from body at the end of his life
cycle.
All traditional theology has pictured
man in Eden as still subsisting in his original state of purity and innocence,
before his "sin" had brought
his "fall" into the state of mundane life and labor. Therefore it is
conclusive that while still in the Garden he had not yet been driven out of the
celestial Paradise of bliss in worlds of consciousness graded higher in vibration
than his earthly one. From our knowledge of the basic principles of the radio
mechanism we can now understand that any consciousness "lives" on that
plane or in that world, with whose vibration rates and wave lengths its organic
mechanism
can vibrate in unison. Its world is that to which it can attune its receiving apparatus;
worlds manifesting at other rates do not exist for it. That is another clarification
immensely worth our making.
THE FALL OF MAN
The old books, it must be noted, do
not describe the "fall" of man out
of heaven in the manner of the literal realism with which, Milton invests it in
his Paradise Lost. He shows Satan falling straight down in one dire descent for
nine days and nights. (Jesus in the Gospels says "I beheld Satan as lightning
fall from heaven.") But this is not after all meaningless fancy. It is meant
to represent the soul's descent by nine gradual stages, or by nine successive steps,
from highest spirit freedom to embodiment in deepest matter, each step or stage
bringing it to a lower kingdom of matter of denser organization. Usually the number
of successive steps in the "fall" was seven, but in some forms of the
Greek and Egyptian symbology they were counted as nine.
It would take a whole volume to
expound fully the doctrine of the "fall" of
man into "sin and death" through an act of primary
disobedience to the command of God. Hardly anything in all the warped and distorted
misconstrution of Christian doctrinism
has been so wretchedly and tragically misconceived as the common
teaching on this matter of man's "fall" from Paradise. Features of the
Bible narrative which were never more
than fanciful modes of dramatical representation of [Page
23] man's
evolutionary history — even
produced in the great Mystery dramas on the stage in olden times — have
been ignorantly (mis) taken for factual occurrence or interpreted in gross
literal and historical
sense. Their meaning was never intended
to be so construed. The outward representation must be seen as a suggestive
formula, an outline pictograph, to enable the dull human mind to pierce through
the mask and discern the fuller shape of the truth that is always, in old books,
hidden beneath such an enigmagraph.
Christian theology would have done well
had it kept in vogue the original name for this feature of ancient anthropology.
The Greeks called it simply "the
descent of the soul". Resting after previous incarnation in the heaven world
of more sublimated consciousness, the soul finds itself under the necessity of
descending to earth for another whirl round the cycle of mundane experience; for
without experience it could grow no further. Its coming to earth is in no sense
a "fall" in anything like the lamentable connotation of sin and punishment
that morbid religiosity has attached to it over the centuries. It is just its inevitable
and inexorable bending to the "cycle of necessity" which periodically
confronts all souls in the ongoing of evolution. The soul, to grow, must live through
an experience in contact with every grade of matter and organic growth. To be the
later master of life — since it is to become creator in turn of future life
below it — it must have mastered the knowledge of every form and expression
of life, and so must have experienced it on its way up. It must therefore descend
again and again to live in every cycle of life's gamut. It must hear every note
of life's music. So it descends or "falls" down, step by step into earthly
body.
In the seventh chapter of the Epistle
to the Romans, St.
Paul, in utter agreement with this exposition, says that he was at one time
without sin himself
and was
not "in bondage to the law" of "sin* and death". This unquestionably
is no reference to any earlier state of the Apostle's own human life or religious
condition; for how could he who, even after his conversion and glorious spiritual
exaltation in the faith of the Christ, did not claim to be free from grievous
sin, make the bald assertion that he had at any time in his human career [Page
24] been "without
sin"? This puts the statement beyond dispute as being
a reference to the premundane residence of his eternal soul in the celestial
realms before its descent into the present body. What he states is that then,
in that high octave of consciousness, being untainted with in, he descended
to earth and came under the law. For he says: "When the command came home
to me, sin sprang to life and I died."
Here is one of the most enlightening
passages in all Scripture, yet it has lain for centuries with its mine of meaning
wholly unexploited. It throws a whole new
light on the disfigured understanding of this gruesome element in Christian systematism, — sin.
The verse gives us the warrant for affirming that the true and only legitimate
connotation of this sadly misunderstood word "sin" is simply the attitude
and disposition of the soul toward the prospective and actual enjoyment of its
incarnational existence in bodies of flesh. In the strictly logical and theological
ancient esoteric sense, there is nothing evil in the "sin" that is dramatically
represented as luring Adam and Eve to their "fall".
The soul could not grow further without
meeting, overcoming and finally converting the powers of the carnal nature into
subservient forces of its own evolution. Had
this more dialectical meaning of the term been kept alive in general intelligence,
all the untold weight of "sin and remorse," of morbid torturing of conscience
that has so darkly marked Christian pietism, might have been replaced by a happier
righteousness.
The sin that man commits through
his ignorance and consequent violation of natural law is a matter that should
rightly concern him to the point of disturbance of
his equanimity and the torturing of his conscience. But Christian theology
has plagued the peace and natural happiness of its millions of votaries down
the centuries by poisoning their minds with the injection of a doctrine that
thrusts sin upon them vicariously. "In Adam's fall, we sinned all",
chants the Bay
Psalm Book of the Massachusetts Puritans. "The fathers have eaten
sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge", has been an acceptable
slogan of the Christian systematism. To be sure we sinned in Adam's "fall",
because "Adam" is
the generic term connoting mankind, and therefore it was all [Page
25] mankind
that "fell
into sin." Mankind was not constituted as such until
the hosts of celestial inhabitants descended here to incarnate, and their "fall" was
simply their coming here. And their evolutionary bent to enjoy life in the
flesh was dramatized as their "sin".
Indeed there is solid scholarship and
impressive data behind the determination that the Mount Sinai on which
man was to commune with God is but an extension of this same word "sin." For
the earth is often denominated "the
Mount of Sin". An elucidation that will play a great part in the revelation
of lost meanings in the Ark and Deluge treatise discloses the remarkable
fact that in the early figurative language used by the Bible composers, the earth
was commonly referred
to under the symbol of "the Mount".
Had the Christian mind been open to
catch the significance of Paul's remarkable statement that "sin sprang to life" only "when the command came
home in him", all theological history could have had a far brighter coloring.
So far as can be seen in extensive study, no Christian theologian has ever remotely
guesed at what this mysterious "command" actually connoted. The disclosure
of its meaning here for the first time will constitute in itself a revelation of
no inconsiderable moment in the history of interpretation.
The exposition begins with the realization
that it is impossible for the soul to "sin" as
long as it resides in the heaven world. That element of influence which tempts
it to "sin" is not present in that world. Its only possible incentive
to "sin" springs from the carnal nature, and it is only linked with that
when it arrives on earth. Neither above man with the angels, nor below man with
the animals, is "sin" possible. Only, then, in the human stage, where
soul is linked to the bodily nature and subject to its promptings, can it be tempted
to "sin".
This fact then provides the dialectical
background for determining the moaning of the "command" that caused "sin" to
spring to life in the Apostle's case. The exegesis of this word lifts from
off the face of theology a
blanket which obscurantism, partly innocent and partly designed, has flung
over it since the days of early enlightenment. It releases to the light of
day once more a cardinal doctrine of primitive Christianity that later chicanery
was at immense pains to [Page
26] becloud
and finally ostracize. Clement of Alexandria and Origen had incorporated the
doctrine of reincarnation of souls into the Christian system; both it and its
promulgators in the Church were excommunicated and anathematized within three
hundred years after their deaths. Efforts were made to erase all traces of
it from the Scriptures. Yet here it rises tip to mock their ignorant designs.
For unquestionably the "command" Paul refers to can be nothing but
the command that to all souls — to reincarnate.
It is the natural, inescapable and altogether salutary command to arise from cyclical
sleep following a former period of activity in body, to descend to earth and resume
the evolutionary march at the point where it left off at the last cycle's end.
But from the time soul comes to dwell
in mortal body, it comes under the sway of the forces that rule animal life.
Its susceptibility to the seductive power
of these appetencies is all that its "sin" could possibly connote. And
for a time the soul's attachment to and immersion in the sensual life of the body
inevitably overwhelms its diviner spiritual nature with the flood of carnal-mindedness
that gushes up from the earthly side. This is the springing to life of "sin" that
the Apostle alludes to. He adds that when "sin" sprang to life he "died".
What is expressed here is simply that "sin" sprang to life as he "died", that
is, as he descended to the "death" of soul in mortal body.
THE SERPENT TEMPTER
It is therefore the body itself that
tempts the divine part of man to "sin." Here
we face the necessity of making another vital rendering of long-lost ancient meaning,
this time connected with the word "temptation." Its complete elucidation
is reserved for the succeeding number in the series, The
Tree of Knowledge. But
it can be stated briefly here that this word has been, like so many others carrying
pivotal meaning, twisted out of its true reference and bent to a crude falsification
of its significance. It is, in briefest form of statement simply the trial and
testing to which life in body subjects all souls. It is not a trap set by divine
strategy to catch man in sin.
In the fact that the trial of man
comes to his soul from the side of the body we have the explanation of the
allegorical
[Page 27] feature
that depicts the temptation as coming to Adam from the "woman".
Universally, unequivocally, the male figures in old Scriptures typify spirit
and the female ones matter. Man's soul is represented ever as masculine,
his body as feminine. The body (woman) tempts the soul (man). That is the
inescapable and simple meaning back of the temptation of Adam by Eve.
Most significantly in this connection
the real sin of theological scholarship comes to light in a little matter of
English translation. In the twentieth verse
of chapter three of the Genesis account it is said that "Adam called
his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all living". The Greek
Septuagint Old Testament lies open under our eyes as this is written, and in the
plainest
of print it says nothing of the kind: "And Adam called the name of his wife
Zoe, as being the mother of all the living." Now Zoe of course means "life" in
the Greek. So Paul is incontrovertibly correct when he says that "sin sprang
to life" when
the soul obeyed the divine . command to come down to "life." Whole volumes
of controversy and blind groping for true meaning can be resolved now to clear
and simple understanding. Adam, the soul in body, plunged into this entirely necessary
and wholesome life of "sin" or fleshly trial, as it entered the mortal
body, which was "the woman" whom, as he says to God, "thou gavest
me." And the whole beautiful truth of the soul's relation to body is thus
pictured in allegory under the common human representation of "man," the
soul element, being given the "woman", type of fleshly body, as his companion
and helpmeet. And let no theological mind fail to comprehend that the soul can
not partake of life, can learn little from
life, can not generate its own divine capabilities and faculties, its sons, without
the aid of an instrumentalizing body, — the "woman."
AND ADAM KNEW EVE
Then comes that remarkable statement
that has never had anything but the wildest guesses as to its profound sense
from twenty centuries of exegesis. Any competent
reader can judge for himself as to the epochal significance of a single determination
of this kind in the history of theology. It floods an area of darkness with
welcome light. It is the verb in the [Page
28] opening verse of the fourth chapter
of Genesis: "Now
Adam knew Eve (spelled in Greek Eua!) his wife and she conceived
and bore Cain." As,
assumedly and outside of some "miracle" or whimsical action of God,
sexual cohabitation was necessary for Eve's conception and the birth of a son,
the verb "knew" has
perforce been accepted as a squeamishly delicate and polite euphemism for sexual
copulation between the "first pair." But let it be affirmed once
again that natural relationship on the earthly bodily plane, as here suggested,
only stands as dramatic depiction of a far deeper cosmic and evolutionary truth
that is meant to be discerned on a higher plane of esoteric relevance. Always
an outer dramatic fact or phenomenon becomes to the discerning intuition the
type or analogue of a hidden and recondite truth.
What is adumbrated here, then, is the
great cosmic fact that for the generation of life anywhere it is necessary that
the two poles of being, which in the first
verse of Genesis were segregated apart into the duality of spirit and
matter (heaven and earth), must effect a union or conjunction of their two opposite
potencies,
and out of the natural intercourse between them generate the progeny that can proceed
only from such a union. In the case of man the final union of the two will give
birth to the Christ-child of divine consciousness. This glorious birth of deific
mind in man will be the outcome of the At-one-ment of the two natures struggling
over long periods to achieve a final amity in the breast of the human. The Hindus
call this consummation Yoga, or union. The picture of Adam and Zoe in physical
conjunction to generate their children, is the dramatic typing of spirit and matter,
soul and flesh, in incarnational conjunction to give birth to a new creation of
spiritual mind in the creature man. Again the Sages used a natural and physiological
fact to sublimate the thought to a profounder mystical meaning. But eighteen centuries
of dogmatic folly crushed out the possibility of discerning this deeper import.
It has spelled horrendous tragedy for ages.
But, it will be asked, how does
this touch the little verb *'knew" ? This
is an ancient mystery of such cryptic linkage that its subtle clue would never
have been regained if Egypt's treasure house of secret wisdom had not been
unlocked. It is [Page
29] here revealed for the first time.
Perhaps everybody has wondered at one
time or another why a group of words in English have the combinations "kn" and "gn",
with the k and
the g silent, in such words as know, knee, knight, knuckle, knoll,
knack, gnostic, gnarled, knot, knit, gnaw and many more. The wonder should have extended us well
to the reversed combinations, where the n precedes the k or g. This is seen in
such words as anchor, angel, ankle, ink, link, cling, linger, king, messenger,
clang and many more. No dictionary has gone back far enough to locate the
true origin of these formations. But a mountain of evidence that has escaped philologists
exists to substantiate the claim here advanced that these arrangements of letters
derive in the distant past from Egypt's oldest and most majestic symbol, the hieroglyph
for "life" itself. This was the "ankh", or crux
ansata, the
ansated cross. It was carried in the hands of all the Gods, their fingers run through
the circular loop above the tau (T). Its pronunciation equivalent was expressed
by the English spelling ankh (recently changed by the grammarians to enkh).
This symbol entails a whole sermon
in itself, for it means basically three things, the most significant things
in man's world, namely life, love and tie.
To elucidate the relation of these three under one meaning demands considerable
elaboration.
They together comprise a sacred glyph, a hieroglyph or transcendental pictograph
of great truth. Why would one hieroglyph cover the combined meaning of life,
love and tie? Briefly as can be put, it does so for the reason
that there can be no-life until two opposite forces are tied together
in creative relationship by a power sufficient to hold them in conjunction,
which power everywhere
in life is an attraction
denominated by the representative term, love. The two opposite forces
are, of course, spirit and matter, soul and body; and all life is generated
only when they are
conjoined in connubial relation in an organic body such as man's, and held
together by the divine energy of an affinity that is well symbolized by the
word love. The circle above the T cross is universally tho feminine or matter
symbol, matter having no beginning or end, and giving birth to all things;
whilst the straight line or vertical shaft of the T is ever the symbol of male
or spiritual [Page
30] potency. The horizontal line both separates and unites
them, as it stands on the borderline between them. The ankh then represents
the tieing together of soul
and body, and life results from this union, which is sustained by
the mutual love of the two. The outer analogue shadowing this high
truth is, to be sure, the love that draws together male and female in conjugal
union, to beget a new cycle of
life.
With this background we can see why "know" is
spelled with the ancient nk, here reversed to kn. It was employed
in both arrangements and the order makes no difference. Only through this ancient
etymology do we arrive at the basic significance,
illuminating for epistemology, of the function of "knowing." For it is
revealed in this light as the mental act which unites (ties) consciousness, the
knowing power, with an object of consciousness, the thing known, by a power of
mind which links the two. Knowledge is constituted only by the tieing of mind
to an object to be known. Knowledge arises from the love-union of subjective consciousness
with objective reality. The ankh cross typified this cosmic marriage that is the
basis of all life.
Adam's "knowing" his wife,
who was to become the mother of all life, was the dramatic typology to represent
the linking together in the human organism
of the two elements, the man, or knowing, thinking principle, and woman,
the matter or body principle, and the impregnation of the latter by the former,
for the new
production of all life. The result was that matter conceived and bore her son,
spiritual mind. Etymology again sheds much light into dark regions of exegesis.
It is interesting to note that both the English conceive and the Greek
equivalent for it in the Septuagint version, sullambano, mean "to
take together",
to unite or tie together. Conception, physically, is always the union of male
sperm with female ovum. Exoterically it is the "story" of the first
man and the first woman uniting physically to beget their progeny, and as such
it has ever been taken as a recital of the beginning of the progenation of
the race of mankind. But esoterically it reveals its more plausible, more acceptable
and more enlightening purport. And more capable intelligence both needs and
demands the profounder, more abstruse sense. For the deepest mind of man must
be fed, equally with his body
[Page 31] and
his emotions. It would be well if mystical and emotional religionists would
remember this. The rational element in man can not be ignored or starved, for
the soul is a compound of thinking and lofty feeling, and both ingredients
must be present to insure inner harmony. Irrational pietism has been anything
but an unmixed blessing in human, history. It has activated much of the foulest
inhumanity of man to man recorded in human annals.
THE MIST AND THE DUST
Several items in the Bible's second
chapter are worthy of special analysis. An apparent mistranslation in verse 6
of this chapter has led to some confusion. It
is stated that "there went up a mist from the earth and watered the whole
face of the ground." The Greek word rendered "mist" is pege,
and the dictionary meaning of this is given as "spring", "source-spring," headwaters,
fountain-head. Obviously it is a reference to the generation of the moist element,
water, its segregation from the fire or dry element, out of the bosom of primordial
first matter. Fire and water are the symbols universally employed to represent
spirit and matter. Without water the dry land could produce no life. The rising
up of the "mist" out of primeval chaos denotes the original production
of water from out the inchoate mass, in the evolutionary process which segregated
earth, water, air and fire severally into their distinct natures and positions
in the universe.
As, likewise, water is the universal
symbol for matter itself, the rising of the "mist" could
not inaptly symbolize the general formation of matter as atomic substance, gradually
arising and spreading everywhere in the course of visible creation.
Far more significant is the statement
in verse seven of this chapter, which traces the very creation of man from "the
dust of the ground." This "dust
of the ground" must be seen as another apparently wild and free translation
of the Hebrew text. The common version has it phrased that "God formed
man of the dust of the ground." It is amazing that scholars and the clergy
have not pointed out or been struck by the [Page
32] identity of the two words in Hebrew, the
one denoting "man" and the
other rendered "dust of the ground."
The word for "man" is no less
than the word Adam itself, with
the article "the" prefixed: ha-Adam in Hebrew; while, astonishingly,
the word for "dust-of-the-ground" is
the same word, thrown into the feminine gender by the addition of the regular
feminine singular ending — ah. It is ha-Adamah! Now if ha-Adam is "man," it
is more than plausible to read into ha-Adam-ah at least one sense of the
meaning of "woman". Indeed it entirely harmonizes with the esoteric meaning
of the whole story to say that God formed "man" from "woman".
For "man," as
we have seen, is the thinking principle, soul or spirit; and "woman" is
the symbol or glyph for matter; and assuredly it is matter that gives birth to
or forms "man" in this sense. Matter generates cosmic consciousness from
out its interior womb. Either the original translators were ignorant of the symbolism
of "woman" for nature, matter, earth and body, and mistakenly substituted "dust" for
Adamah; or they knew the deeper meaning and deliberately disguised it, which is
what we are told by Plato, Plutarch and other ancient philosophers they did do.
At any rate the only logical connection between the feminine counterpart of ha-Adam,
the thinking man, and "dust of the ground" is the idea that links this
feminine element with material substance, from which, of course, the earth (ground)
and all concrete things are formed. The conception that most truly goes with the Adamah is
just that of "atomic matter". God evolved the thinking
principle out of atomic matter, which must be the rock-bottom meaning of the statement.
By "dust
of the ground," then, we are to understand atoms of matter, poetically translated
as "dust." It can be seen, however, that it would not have been a gross
mistranslation had it been made to read that "God made (the) man out of atomic
dust," if we can poetize atoms as dust.
We will miss the entire sense of
the story if we fail to realize that the words "Adam" and "man" as
here used cannot possibly refer to a single human being. Folly has ridden along
with the idea that Genesis is talking of the formation of the two
first human persons. The man of Genesis is humanity, man
generically. Ha-Adam is
man collectively,
not a man. [Page
33]
THE FOUR-BRANCHED STEAM OF LIFE
Then in verse ten of chapter two there is the division of the "river" that "went
out of Eden to water the garden" into four parts or "heads," with
the four names, Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel and Euphrates. Again theological fatuity,
attempting to make something factually geographical out of this, especially
since the name of one of the four streams is a known river on earth — Euphrates — has
floundered helplessly over one of the simpler features of early esoteric emblemism.
The great river that proceeded out of Eden to make verdant the Garden was not
a river of earthly water. It was the typal representation of the stream of
cosmic energization, of creative power, that under the impulsion of God's will
went forth to organize matter into bodies instrumental for the expression of
life's ordained purposes. The blood stream in our bodies, projected from the
heart to "water
all the garden" of man's organic being, is an apt analogue of it. The
outflowing sap of a tree is another. The dividing and subdividing branches
of this stream carry the "rivers of vivification" to every portion
of the cosmos.
But its division in the creation of physical universes and animal life on
them is always basically a quatrapartite one. The physical base of life's constructions
is by dialectical necessity fourfold. The universe, so to say, must rest on
a four-square base. This is not, of course, to be taken in crude literal sense;
but a four-square object is nevertheless the type of a solid basis for the
world of life in a higher sense. Evolution constructs one of its seven ultimate
forms and expressions with each of its seven propulsions of energy waves outward
from center. The first four build up the base of the pyramid of life and the
last three add the superstructure of a triple consciousness. Mind and soul
must rest on a physical base, which is ever four-square. At last can be seen
what the figure of the altar connotes in the Old Testament.
The shape of the great pyramids of Egypt, Mexico and Yucatan exemplifies this
basic architecture of the microcosm and the macrocosm. Their four-sided base
and upper triangular faces give us the mathematical formula for the edifice
of life. The universe, says Pythagoras, "is built on number". "God
geometrizes." Four plus three
makes the seven-ply [Page
34] pattern of life on its physical side. Four times three
equals twelve, which structuralizes the pattern of the spiritual nature and
evolution of man. For the great number twelve, as of the months, the hours,
the zodiac and the companions or disciples of the Christos in all religions,
is representative always of those twelve divine
powers of consciousness that man is destined to unfold in his on-going to godhood.
And the twelve divine powers will be brought to full function within the course
of the unfoldment of the seven physical properties. The pyramid is thus the
mighty glyph in stone of the nature and k organic evolution of the creature
man, the Son of God. The word itself shows this. For pyr is the ancient
Chaldeo-Egyptian word for "fire," and mid is the altered
form of met,
as in the Latin metior, "to
measure". As life builds her structures it allots to each formation its
due portion of its elementary "fire" of creative energy. And so the
plan of it marks off the seven and the twelve measures of the creative fire that
builds the house of life. Wisdom, as says Proverbs, builds her house
with its seven pillars and she crowns the base with the great circle of the
twelve upright stones, such as Joshua was ordered to set up in the dry bed
of the Jordan River when he led the Israelites into the Promised Land of Canaan,
and as the Druids erected in their sun-temple at Stonehenge, and as all the
nations represented in the twelve-house zodiac, not to mention the twelve
Urim on the breastplate of the Hebrew high priest, and the twelve sons of
Jacob, the foundation of spiritual Israel.
Turning to man to find in his microcosmic sphere the reduplication of this
universal creative structure, we see the basal four present as four lower vehicles
or bodies. There is readily enough apparent first the gross physical body,
and, less visibly but still really existent, an etheric or vital body, an "astral" or
emotion body, and a lower mental body. The erudite esoteric knowledge of the
past assures us of these elements in our make-up. Modern psychology is
making the same differentiations. These constitute the four-fold base of man's
organization.
Resting on these and drawing dynamic energy from their atomic springs of power
are three more finely "atomized" bodies, which are vehicles of higher
modes of consciousness: [Page
35] a
higher or abstract mental body, a buddhic or
intuitional body and an atmic or soul body. Thus we have the lower quaternary
and the upper triad, as the ancients
speak of them.
Life as it emanates from the heart of energic being shortly divides into the
four "heads",
which flow out to build the fourfold base of consciousness. The names given
to the four
would unquestionably be found to yield the meanings of physical, vital, emotional
and mental nature, though their etymological origin seems to be lost in obscurity.
At any rate the name Euphrates cannot apply to
the river in the Mesopotamian Valley in Asia, geographically.
It is significant that the "garden" in which the Lord placed the
man was allegorically located "eastward in Eden." General
theology has not taken heed of the significance of the cardinal points of direction
as used in ancient Scriptural symbolism. East and west are very direct vanes
of meaning in esoteric philosophy. From its being the place of the rising sun,
the east was made to carry always the
imputations going with the soul's resurrection from its "death" in
incarnation, the point at which it returned from earthly exile to enter the
kingdom of spirit in celestial mansions and its home of bliss, released from
its imprisonment in mortal body. Hence its reference is distinctly to the heaven
world. And this brings the allegory into full accord with the statement made
earlier herein, that the garden of Paradise was in ethereal regions, not on
earth. The west, on the contrary, universally speaks of the setting sun, which
in turn symbolized the descent of the soul from spiritual spheres to earthly
body. With the Egyptians the west was the Tuat, the gate to the underworld
into which all souls descended or "fell" in the arcane systemology.
Not even to this day has it dawned upon the scholars and savants that this "underworld" of
mythology is this good earth of ours. The soul descends into the underworld
when it incarnates in the flesh.
MALE AND FEMALE MADE HE THEM
Only with the aid of the arcane symbolism and a particular linguistic link
is it possible to probe into the allegorical hint at evolutionary process deftly
hidden under the outer veil of the story of woman's creation from the "rib" of
the man. [Page 36]
Taken as ostensible factual occurrence the narrative here is preposterous.
As is so often the case, the clue to esoteric mystery is found in a single
word. Here
it is the "rib." The truth would not have been so tortuous a matter
of discovery if the story had been frank enough to tell us that the part of
the Adamic anatomy referred to was the "midrib," and not just one
of the man's ordinary costal ribs.
Discovery of cryptic meaning was aided by the reflection that in old English,
even in Shakespeare, the word "midrib" is spelled "midrif." It
is therefore from the old Anglo-Saxon verb, of which we have only the past
participle left: "riven." "Riven" means split, cleft. The
original verb, to "rive," has dropped out of use. But lying close
to the original stem and preserving its meaning is the noun "rift." And
this form of the word leads the mind directly to the fundamental and only rational
sense of the entire allegory. The "rib" allegory is a very subtle "cover" for
the allusion to the primeval "cleft in the rock", or rift in
the unitary being of God in the initial stage of every new cycle of creation,
when he breaks
his oneness apart into the duality of spirit and matter, positive and negative
life, male and female. And the operation resulted in the distinctive
separate creation of male and female. It is the Biblical occult reference to
what is voluminously described in works expounding the arcane science of old
as "the separation
of the sexes". Life is androgyne, or male-female undifferentiated, before
it bifurcates into distinctive male and female. The archaic books
tell us that in the early stages of the soul's descent from spiritual realms
into body its first embodiments were quite tenuous or ethereal and that in
that state both sexual functions were found in the one organism. Only as the
soul neared ultimate physical embodiment did it manifest in the fully divided
forms. In the great Book of the Dead,
the "Bible" of
Egypt, it is clearly stated that "the soul makes the journey through
Amenta in the two halves of sex". "Amenta" is
this world of life in body — although the scholars have not yet arrived
at that vital determination.
The sum and gist of the "rib" allegory
is simply the recital, in disguised form, of this bifurcation or forking
apart of the unity of creative function into the two embodiments [Page 37] of
male and female entities. It is possible that the original allegorical form
of the story has been altered somewhat by the tampering with, and re-editing
of ancient manuscripts indulged in rather freely — and admittedly — by
copyists and scribes of the early day. It is to be best understood by thinking
of God as
running a (mid) rib through the center of his unity and thus splitting it
into duality, or as dividing that unity by cutting a rift through its middle,
as one would cut an apple in two. If one will watch under a microscope the
bifurcation of a paramoecium or any of the single-cell organisms that split
in two equally living entities, and will realize that what nature does in
the small is a replica and reduplication of what nature does in the cosmically
universal, there will be little difficulty in understanding that the human
race, starting out as androgyne, separated into male and female. It was effected
by means of the opening up of a middle line of cleavage, or a mid-rift (rib)
between the two halves as they moved apart. Any other rendition of the allegory
leaves it floating about in the realm of nonsense.
ORIGIN OF THE SENSE OF SHAME
The pair, it is dramatized, twice found themselves "naked." The
first time it was in the celestial Paradise, in which instance it is said that
they "were
not ashamed." The second time it was on earth, and although the text does
not say specifically that they were this time ashamed, it infers as much by
saying that they sewed together fig leaves and made themselves aprons. Here
is a touch of allegorism designed to bring out another forgotten item of ancient
esoteric knowledge.
The inner meaning is involved in an aspect of the soul's history that brings
in the matter of its clothing and unclothing itself, so to say, each time it
makes the descent from supernal realms down into the flesh. Starting out for
earth from its condition of almost "pure" spirit in the heavens,
it successively enwraps itself in one body after another as it descends from
plane to plane. Being the higher triad, it puts on first a lower mental body,
then an emotional body, then a vital or pranic body and finally the gross physical
vesture. Through the friendly offices of these several bodies it is able to
relate itself in conscious experience with the actualities of each plane in
turn, and finally all together. But the figure or symbol of [Page
38]
nakedness was used
by the ancients to hint at its spiritual condition when divested of all these
garments in the empyrean.
And surely the soul has no cause to feel shame at this "nakedness," for,
although divested of all material clothing, it was nevertheless, poetically
considered, "in
robes of light arrayed," as the Christian hymn has it. It had, as it put off
earthly "rags", replaced them with the glorious apparel of the redeemed,
the divine garments of solar radiance, the "body of the resurrection". The
allegory could permit no sense of shame to be imputed to that investiture of the
soul with the robes of more than royal majesty.
But on the downward way to the flesh, in proportion as the soul put on successively
heavier and coarser garments of matter, it lost its more resplendent and more real
clothing of spirit, and finally stood on earth bereft of all its heavenly raiment.
Then it saw itself "naked" indeed, and its want of the true spiritual
clothing brought keenly home to it the realization of its relatively debased and
degraded condition, a heavenly citizen and son of the divine Father reduced to
the state of incarceration in the body of an animal on earth and forced even to
procreate in the low fashion of the beasts. Briefly as this is put, it sums up
in a sentence the origin of the human sense of shame of the procreative function
and organs.
The tree, as a symbol, stood always for the evolutionary development in matter,
and the fig was perhaps the foremost of all the symbolic trees. To say that
the first pair clothed themselves with fig-leaf garments is to allegorize their
clothing themselves with the several material and physical bodies, which the
soul puts on and throws off, exactly as the tree dons and doffs its clothing
of leaves each season, as it comes to earth. To be divested of earthly clothing
in the Father's house was no shame; but to be divested of spiritual radiance
even while clothed in flesh, was the soul's shame. Or so it was dramatized.
Although the god-soul loses in large part the memory of its diviner home and
kingly origin when it has descended into mortal body, it undoubtedly retains
some degree at all times of subconscious sense of its pristine and innate divinity.
And the impingement upon this consciousness of the low estate it has fallen
into on earth generates the sense [Page 39] of shame. As it arrives here through
the agency of the sex functions, this sense of shame naturally centers upon
those functions. This is innately and instinctively the repercussion upon its
inner cognition of its experience in body, and it requires the later birth
of philosophical understanding of the whole motive and plan of earthly incarnation
in all its beneficence to bring a reflective mind to see that there is no true
cause for shame in it. Indeed it is finally seen that there is no intrinsic
shame in it at any time, because it is understood to be the reflection, at
its level, of that attraction of spirit and matter, soul and sense, which is
the law of life in all the universe.
As the first act of Genesis is the separation of life into its two aspects of
spirit and matter, all later cosmic procedure brings them together in that knowing relation from which all new birth springs. And while the soul blushes a little
at her birth springs. And while the soul blushes a little at her earthly nakedness,
she knows in the depths of her secret heart that her union with material body will
be blessed and fruitful.
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