The likelihood
of a favourable acceptance of the astounding revelation
to be made in this essay will be considerably heightened
if the epochal disclosure is preceded by sufficient prefatory
exegesis to present it in its proper
"frame of reference". So incredible is the true esoteric
elucidation of the lost meaning of the Scriptures of Christianity
that the immediate reaction will generate the demand to know
what historical circumstances or developments could have led
in the first place to so fateful a loss of vital knowledge
once possessed. It will therefore be judicious to begin the
exposition by presenting certain items of the historical background
as necessary and highly enlightening introductory matter.
This explanatory
material must begin with the broad blunt statement that
what is commonly believed about the Bible as a book, its date,
authorship and
"inspiration", is all quite erroneous. Let
us be explicit in this: the solid bulk of common belief about
this book is totally untrue! There is scarcely a single item
of the common man's presuppositions about the Christian Scriptures,
— who wrote its books, when it was written, how the composition
was "dictated" or "inspired", what
its message really means, in what language it was written,
what is its assumed historical reference, how and why these
particular books were selected out of hundreds to become "the
Bible", and other subsidiary questions
by the score — that comes within the proverbial mile
of the actual truth concerning this mysterious document that
for centuries has held the minds of millions under the prodigious
obsession of its inviolable sanctity. The [Page
4] grim
and sober truth must now be stated, that all general ideas
about this volume, disseminated among the masses by the priests
of the religions and never corrected by them, are totally,
grossly, tragically false to fact.
If this drastic
assertion seems to upset the whole apple-cart of conventional
ideas on the subject of Bible authorship, the reader will
need to brace himself to absorb the next shocking declaration,
which undoubtedly will shatter all preconceived notions
of the general mind. This jarring blow comes in the blunt
statement that, in the common and accepted meaning of the
words, the Bible books were never "written" at
all! This, it will be said, is self-evident nonsense and
folly! A book can't be a book unless it has been written.
The retort still is that the statement is sober truth!
In the sense in which the word "written" is used
today, in reference to a book's authorship, these Bible
books never were written. How can this be so? Simply enough,
when it is known, as now it is, that
this collection of documents was in existence for ages and
held in the minds of priests and initiates in the ancient Mystery
brotherhoods for thousands of years without ever having been
committed to writing. They were preserved in memory only. They
constituted the body of what is known as the great "oral
tradition",
a set of ritual formulas, ceremonial rites, allegorical depictions
of truth, number graphs and pictorial representations of the
realities and phenomena of man's spiritual history,
that had been transmitted from generation to generation of
the hierophants of the ancient religions in unwritten form.
Finally here and there, for one reason or another, chiefly
lest they be lost or forgotten or too badly corrupted by change,
they were set down on paper, and so at last came to the later
ages as books, presumably "written" by
somebody. And once written, they became subject to the human [Page
5] proclivities
of tampering, altering and religious skulduggery of many sorts.
That they met with this treatment is not only admitted by the
historians of Christianity in its early stages, but is
even boasted of by the scribes and some of the Church Fathers,
who thus initiated the moral justification of a resort
to unholy means for the achievement of "holy" ends.
Summing up volumes of history in a sentence, it can be
said that the extent to which the flagrant practice of
literary forgery was carried in the days of apostolic fervour
is well past the belief of those who have not read the
massed evidence.
So the books of
the Bible were never "written" at all, in the
modern understanding of literary authorship. They were not
the original lucubrated creation of individual minds producing
a written document that had not been in existence before
such authorship. They were in large part the final deposit
on paper of the sets of ritualistic formulas, dramatic
scenarios, allegorical depictions, all representing the
aspects of cosmic reality and spiritual truth; and they
were often just the transcripts of the lines to be recited
by the actors in the great Mystery plays of the ancient
religion. Prominent among the material were the choral
odes and runes to be chanted in accompaniment to the symbolic
religious dances that imitated the rhythms of the universe.
Such has become
the "set" of orthodox Christian thinking on such
matters that when the statement is made that Scriptural material
is not history in the modern sense, but is spiritual allegory
and drama of cosmic verities, the reaction is inevitably
one of mental let-down in evaluation of the importance
of the Holy Word. This is a wrong attitude and must be
corrected before another word is put down. Whether the
reader is prepared to give credit to the truth of the statement
or not, it must be said categorically that not only does
the acceptance [Page 6] of
the Bible contents as allegory instead of history not diminish
their value, but it is the only device that will open the
door to any appreciation of their true value. In short it
is to be said that the Bible becomes infinitely more significant
when taken as allegory than when read as ostensible history.
(Unquestionably some history was interpolated at a later
time, so that it is hard in places to determine where allegory
stops and history begins)
The high value
of the allegory inheres in the fact that it faithfully
portrays to discerning minds the inner core of the meaning of
all history, for it depicts the one thing that is of central
importance to all humans, — the spiritual or evolutionary
history of the Sons of God, who are our own souls incarnated
in mortal bodies here on earth. The Bible is a collection of
archaic dramas and allegories pictorializing the experience
and meaning of this mundane life of ours. Compared with these
divinely produced representations of the structure, plan and
import of man's earthly life, what has all along passed for
the "history" of
a minor tribe of herdsmen in one particular land less than
twenty-five hundred years ago falls into comparative triviality
and inconsequence. What was known of old, has been forgotten
for centuries and must now be learned again, is that the religious
myths of ancient times, formulated by near-divine genius, are
infinitely truer than history.
All this will
sound to the general orthodox reader like veritable heresy
against concreted and consecrated tradition and opinion. But
it is a poetic truism that
"truth crushed to earth shall rise again". And in
this matter the suppressed truth is rapidly rising to dissolve
incrusted error. [Page
7]
LOST KEYS RECOVERED
If the Bible is a collection of dramas and allegories of the soul's life in
body, the point of next importance concerns their interpretation. Everything of
value ultimately hinges on this. And because it was ever of pivotal importance,
it was right here that ineptitude, unintelligence and chicanery crept in to
ruin the operation of the entire scheme of instruction divinely instituted for
human benefit. The loss of the symbolic codes and the consequent failure to
grasp the proper interpretation sent the entire structure of ancient sagacity
crashing down in tragic wreckage.
The trap that
caught ignorance in its snares and led to the fatal decline
of intelligence necessary for a true interpretation of
Scriptural lore is not hard to locate. It was the strange
device that ancient genius employed to release truth to
the intelligent and the initiated, while hiding it from
the base and vulgar mind. For the Bibles were written in
a language the very existence of which has hardly been
known since the days of its ancient usage — the
language of symbolism.
The glyphs and
characters of this ancient language have been undeciphered
for twenty centuries or more. Only recently have the first
steps been taken toward its recovery and restoration. But
already it is seen that through its light the interior
true meaning of the Bible and theology leaps into glorious
significance and luminous intelligibility, so that the whole
volume of divine revelation embodied in the Holy Scriptures
is at once redeemed from arrant nonsense to sublime import
and value. If this is true in any measurable degree, the
announcement becomes the epochal event in two thousand
years of Christian history. That it is wholly true there
is no longer any sound reason to doubt. [Page 8]
THREE FATEFUL WORDS
The rehabilitation of the lost meaning of the sacred books of old properly
begins with the revelation of the cryptic connotation of three words in the
Bible whose true interpretation will in a flash work a miracle of
re-enlightenment in all minds and will in one vivid moment of new realization
transform the entire structure of religion and theology. The whole rationale of
religious conception, so far as it is based on the authority of Bible
literature, will undergo a complete and astonishing reorientation when the
great light released by the proper esoteric sense of these three words is
turned upon the mystifying problem of sane exegesis. The discovery of this
meaning, hidden for twenty centuries, will inaugurate a new era in all world
religion.
And what are these
three words that carry such vital significance? They are
"the dead", "death", and "to die",
In essence they are the one word — "death".
It will fall with
a stroke of amazement and incredulity upon minds of limited
intelligence to be told that these words can possibly have,
or could for twenty-five centuries have had, any other
meaning in the Scriptures than the one commonly attached
to them. What, it will be asked, can
"death" possibly mean other than the demise of the
physical person which ensues when the impalpable life energy,
or soul, detaches itself from the vehicle of flesh? Who else
can be the "dead" but those who have lived
in body and are now gone across the great divide? What can "to
die"
mean if not to undergo the separation of the body and the spirit?
Surely there can be concealed no mystery here, no hidden sense
that could conceivably elude general intelligence. [Page
9]
Yet it is our obligation to announce, in the
face of this universal supposition, that these simple words have all the time
borne a connotation different from the one commonly supposed to be their standard
and established acceptation. And it becomes our privilege, on the strength of
tested scholarship, to proclaim that they bear a meaning not only different
from the one generally conceived, but one precisely opposite to
that universally attributed to them. Incredible as it may seem,
when used in their theological reference, these words bear
a meaning that at one stroke turns the picture of all exegetical
significance almost completely upside down! For
"to die" means, for the soul, to live here
on earth;
"death" means the soul's life here in the
flesh; and "the
dead" is a term denoting those alive here in the mortal body! Could
any assertion appear to be more preposterous? Evidence for these assertions,
and plenty of it, the reader will be demanding. As to that, the quantity of
evidence available to demonstrate the correctness of the pronouncement is
almost limitless.
RIGHTLY DIVIDING THE WORD
It is only necessary
to take a few brief texts from the Bible and consider dialectically
for a moment the words "die" and "death" as
there used, to be made aware in a flash that the common meaning
of the words does not and cannot apply, and to realize
thence that they must carry some hitherto unsuspected connotation.
Let reflection dwell for a moment on this passage: "The
soul that sinneth, it shall die". This
has been read millions of times and almost certainly never
without the belief that it stands as a warning pronounced against
sinners, holding the threat of a catastrophic end of life [Page
10] in some
dismal way as the consequence of evil-doing. Yet so little
is the logical genius of the human mind brought into use in
connection with Biblical utterances, being lured astray
by pious doctrinal persuasions or lulled to desuetude by
indoctrinated hypnotizations, that apparently no one has
ever paused a second to reflect on the obvious meaninglessness
and emptiness of the passage if the word "die" is
here taken in its usual acceptance. No one in all the Christian
centuries, it would appear, has stopped long enough to
register the immediately obvious reflection that the soul
that does not sin
will die too, since all, both the righteous and the ungodly,
alike go down to physical death. It is therefore inane
and pointless, in fact quite an outright delusion, to warn
the sinners that they shall die, when they well know they
shall meet the same fate even if they turn to righteousness.
What good is a warning to sinners if it can offer no advantage
to sinless life? The sentence of sinners to death is utterly
nonsensical if "die" is given its
common meaning, and no one has known any other meaning to ascribe
to it. As a deterrent against sin it carries no moral force
whatever, since an instant's thought sabotages the assumed
direful punitive character of the judgment. Sinlessness
saves no man from death.
Another Biblical
citation runs to the same effect: "The wages of sin
is death". Similar reasoning process here yields the
same nugatory result. The wages of righteousness and virtue
is death also. Godliness gains no advantage over sin. The
meaning assumed to lie in these verses turns around on
itself, so to say, and destroys whatever logical cogency
they are taken to possess. Unless "die" and "death" have
some other undiscovered reference, these passages are so much
pious froth.
But, if the esoteric
claim that the Bible conveys [Page
11] beneath
the literal sense of its language a profound recondite
meaning is to be sustained, — and only on such grounds
can it be saved from ridiculous irrelevance in hundreds
of items — then it must be concluded that these statements
employ the two words "die" and "death" in
some other meaning than the decease of life from mortal
body. The release of this meaning from the thraldom of
ignorance must rank as a cultural event of the sublimest
import.
The great revelation
throws in our faces the blunt fact that these significant
words carried a cryptic meaning having nothing to do with
the demise of fleshly body at the end of a life. They bore
a secret meaning which becomes veritably the true "key
to the Scriptures". When
once that profounder sense is recaptured and read back into
hundreds of passages in the Bible, the lost light of sound
theological understanding will glow again in the human mind
after centuries of obscuration.
The basic ground
for discovery and comprehension of the crucial meaning
of these words is found in the Greek Platonic, Pythagorean,
Orphic and Neo-Platonic philosophies, and behind these
the more ancient wisdom-knowledge of the Egyptians, who
bore the bright torch of religious light in times remote
beyond common supposition. Long study and profound reflection
upon these primeval systems, framed obviously by the great
demigod Seers and Sages of antiquity, are an indispensable
requisite to the recapture in full of the mighty strategic
import of these key words. It is not asserted here that
the true cryptic sense of the words has not at any time
in centuries been known, or that the pronouncement here
made as to their theological meaning is the first revelation
of that meaning. Such as assertion would flout the truth in
flagrant fashion. Many students have delved into these
early systems of philosophy and have [Page 12] been made familiar enough with the recondite sense in which they are used in
the systems mentioned.
What, then, constitutes the momentous revelation proclaimed herein? It is
the discovery that this cryptic sense of the words holds and must be applied in
a vast field of world thought in which no one ever dreamed that it carried its
significance and wielded its crucial import. And this vast field of cultural
effort is the religion and theology of Christianity. Apparently not one of the
many scholars who since early days have been conversant with the ancient
philosophical connotation of these words ever gained a flash of intelligence
that would have shown him the absolute necessity of carrying their Egyptian and
Greek meanings over into the Jewish and the Christian Scriptures! That the
esoteric sense of the words does apply there as the veritable keystone of the
arch structure of Christian theological systematism constitutes the epochal
modern discovery, perhaps the most momentous made in religion in ages.
True
and basic meaning was lost from the three words when Christian
theology failed to maintain the sharp distinction made
by Greek thought between the two elements of the duality
in man's nature, the physical body, or the natural man,
on the lower side, and the divine soul, or the Christ-in-us,
on the higher level. Had this vital and pivotal distinction
been keenly held in its system, Christian exegesis would
never have made the capital blunder of associating the
words "death", "to
die" and "the dead" with
the body
of man, but would have kept them, as did the Greeks,
in constant reference to the divine soul that comes
down out of "heaven" to dwell
for seventy years in the flesh of mortal body. On this basis
it would have been seen all along that "death" was
in their conception that comparative and relative "death" which
the soul underwent when it made its [Page
13] descent
from higher realms of consciousness and took residence
in earthly forms. In brief, they would have known that
the
"death" spoken of was of the soul and not
of the body!
The soul, coming here from its own glorious home "above", gave
its life that the body might have it. It endured the cross
of flesh and matter and suffered "death" that the
body might live.
THE BODY IS THE TOMB
If the body was
the home of the soul in its condition of "death",
then it was the grave, the tomb, the sarcophagus, the sepulcher,
the mummy-case of the soul. And so one finds the Sages referring
to the physical corpus of man as the prison, the underground
dungeon, the pit, the cave and finally the tomb of the soul.
This life, they said, was the soul's "death," as,
conversely, the soul's free life in the higher worlds was the
body's death.
But the modern
mind knows no meaning applicable to the word
"death" that does not connote actual extinction of life or being. So
it is puzzled to understand how the sagacious prophets of old could attribute
life to the bodily part of man, that actually does die, while representing as
"dead" the spiritual part that never can die. It
was this paradoxical dilemma which prevented Christian theology
from catching the true import of the Scriptures it took over
from antecedent Pagan sources and caused it to pervert their
underlying significance into unconscionable literal nonsense.
But life itself
is the greatest of all mysteries, even to the creatures
enjoying it, and the method that ancient sagacity and understanding
took to represent to human thought this aspect of the mystery
seemed to reverse the [Page
14] principia
of common knowledge. Nearly always does profounder plumbing
into the depths of thought upset the structures of common
presupposition. So the general mind of Christendom, adjusted
by centuries of teaching to the bodily reference of the
word "death", will
be inclined to think that if such is the position of Greek
philosophy, it must be a very illogical philosophy indeed.
Counter to this natural reaction we would assert that,
so far from being illogical and untrue, it is the only
rational view that meets the factuality of the situation
involving soul and body in living relationship and that
yields correct understanding to the mind. It therefore
becomes the primary key to the Scriptures.
What, then, is
the nature of this "death" that underlies what
we call the very opposite thing — life? The answer
is found buried deeply under the abstruse signification
of another great item of theology, that of the Christ giving
his life for the salvation of man. If a living entity gives
up its life so that other being may have it, naturally
it loses that which it gives away. It cannot both give
it and retain it at the same time. And to lose life is
to suffer "death". The
Son was sent into the world that the men of the world might
through his oblation have life more abundantly. He is pictured
as the sacrificial lamb, offering his life to creatures
of a lower rank who were linked with the realm of mortality.
The Son's giving his life as "a ransom
for many" entailed his losing it for himself. Hence came
his
"death". And this "death" was on the cross,
not of wood, but of flesh. For the Logos, of which the Christos
was a ray, became flesh and dwelt among us. And at last the
true meaning of "death on the cross"
comes to light. The incarnation of soul in mortal body is all
that this phrase means or ever could mean.
The
transaction "on
Calvary brow" some
nineteen [Page 15] centuries
ago is a dramatic representation of purely theological
meaning. The Christ-soul is on the cross — of flesh
and matter —whenever it is linked to body in incarnation.
The ghastly conception of the human race's salvation through
the shedding of, shall it be said, two pints of blood from "the
wounded side" of
a physical man two millennia ago, is resolvable into plain
intelligible common sense only when it is understood that
the Sons of God, taken collectively as the Son of God,
transmitted the dynamic energies of their living essence,
symbolized as blood (since the blood in all creatures holds
the life principle) to the entities of animal-human stature,
that they, thus partaking of more exalted being, might
have more abundant life.
THE SOUL IS DIVINE SEED
A clearer view may perhaps be gained if the exposition is conducted through
the avenue of the analogy of the planted seed. The seed is in fact one of the
most fruitful bases of theological apprehension at every turn. It is so because
it is the means which life evolves to carry the potentialities of renewing
itself in a new cycle across the gulf of non-existence following the
dissolution of its living embodiment. The Son is therefore the divine seed of
the Father's life, which, like any seed, must fall into the ground, go to decay
and lose its life for the very purpose of regaining it. The seed loses its life
in the ground in order that it may have a resurrection in the young sprout.
It is precisely
true to say that in the descent of his Sons (or his Son)
into earthly existence, God plants the seed of his own life
in the personal lives of his human children. This, be it
stated, is all that is implied in [Page
16] theology
by God's condemning his Sons (Son) to "death" on
the cross for the sins of the world.
John has put the
solid basis of this theological conception in succinct
allegorical form when, using the seed as analogy, he says: "Unless
a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it
abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit".
Paul, too, asserts that the seeds of divine life sown for
the world must first die. He says that the seed we sow
is
"bare grain . . . but God giveth it a body". This "bare
grain" is divinity potential, which has to be planted
in the garden of the world, die and be born again to give God
himself — since we are cells in his body — a
new cycle of conscious existence in this portion of his being.
But, contemplating
evolution from the standpoint of the soul's divine origin
rather than from that of its earthly situation, Greek philosophy
regarded the soul's life here in body as in a very real,
though always in a relative sense,
a veritable "death". In coming to earth the divine
spirit exchanged a very high and blessed potential life
for a very poor actual one.
It suffered the loss of a whole superior dimension of consciousness.
In the realms of disembodiment, consciousness, free of the
trammels of the flesh, functions at a level one full degree
higher than that which it can experience through the comparatively
sluggish instrumentality of the brain. Developed consciousness
at that higher level operates with instantaneous rapidity and
lucid clarity and vividness.
From
this enchanted state it is torn away, "divulsed",
as the Greeks put it, from "real being" and sent
out into that "far
country" of the Prodigal Son allegory. And no minister
or theologian has ever told us with authority that that "far
country" was
this earth of ours. The soul down here is far from its true
home in the [Page 17] sense
that it is separated from it by a great gap in the scale of
vibration rates of consciousness! If gods, angels, men and
beasts live in different worlds, even though locally contiguous
on the same plane, it is because the grades of consciousness
which they severally express are separated from each other
as one radio station is separated from another, by differences
in frequencies and wave-lengths. This, we now know, is the
basis of differentiation between the many gradations of conscious
life and being. Life ever manifests as or through vibration,
and the differences in vibrational character mark the essential
diversifications of the numberless forms in life's gradient.
BREAKING THE BREAD OF LIFE
Nowhere do we
get the systematic rationale of the situation involving
the soul's exchange of heavenly for earthly life so well
delineated as in the Greek Orphic and Platonic systems
of philosophy. There it is clearly pictured how the soul,
when thus "direpted" from her more blissful celestial
estate, is carried away into every sort of enfeeblement
and diminution of her pristine powers and faculties, the
sharp discernment of which can be expressed by English
words beginning with "dis-", a prefix that
always carries the idea of a scattering of a thing from central
unity out into multiplicity, or the dissolution of a
thing into its component elements. The soul, which by virtue
of its possession of higher fourth dimensional consciousness
sees things in the spiritual world as units, becomes on its
descent to earth blinded to that more complete and perfect
vision, a veil being drawn over its
"eyes", and, to use the Greek terms, it suffers
the dismemberment
or dismantling of its unitary sight, [Page
18] or its power to see things as wholes. It suffers
violent distraction
of its focus of consciousness through the distribution
or dissemination
of its elements, the dispersion of its energies in many
directions, the distortion
or disturbance of the clarity of its images, the disunion
and disjunction
and finally the discord and disharmony of its
whole being attendant upon the loss of its Paradise of loftier
consciousness, which then through sorrow, toil and mingled
pain and pleasure it must proceed to regain.
This profoundly
true and rational basis of Greek philosophy must be restored
to its vital place in the edifice of modern theology. The great
doctrine of the
dismemberment and disfigurement of the unitary
being of deific powers on the upper planes when the Sons
of God move outward from center to carry the emanations
of divine force forth to material creation, must be reintroduced
into the exegetical system, for without these primary principles
of knowledge all sound interpretation is impossible. The doctrine
has been lost because it appertains to the involutionary
arc of the cycle of manifestation, which has been wholly
dropped out of consideration through the purblindness that
laid all stress upon the evolutionary
arc. As St. Paul asks, how can it be that souls have ascended
unless they had first descended into the bowels of the earth?
If there is to be a resurrection from the
"dead", the entity to be resurrected must first
have gone down into a grave or tomb of "death".
A philosophy that
seeks to rationalize the problems and phenomena of life
will hobble along lamely on one foot if it attempts to find
solutions by studying evolution while leaving entirely
out of view the antecedent process of involution. This
observation well enough delineates the prime deficiency
of modern scientific rationale in philosophy. Modernity
has never once [Page 19] thought
to ask — and apply to theology — the simple
question: how can you expect a flower stalk in your garden
to grow up unless you have first planted its seed there?
The whole body of Scriptural truth will continue to grope
blindly toward the light of true meaning as long as the
antecedent movement of involution is not restored to its
place in the dialectical structure of understanding.
All this is extremely
pertinent to the present essay because this word
"death" is the key word of focal import that carries the whole
Biblical reference to the involutionary side of the theological construct. This
"death" is precisely what the divine soul suffers
upon and through its descent into the human body. It is the
comprehensive word used to cover the whole range of the soul's
loss of its divine nature or being as it plunges downward on
the Jacob's ladder between heaven and earth. It is the Bible
testimony and confirmation of the lost doctrine of involution
as both a dialectically and a factually necessary precedent
of evolution.
If any of the
hundreds of students of Greek, Chaldean and Oriental religions
who have been conversant with the characterization of the soul's
life in body as its "death", has ever caught
the idea that possibly the conception could or should be
applied to the elucidation of Christian Biblical material,
the inkling has never got beyond the recesses of private
thought. If at any time the idea generated a hint in this
direction, the movement of suggestion that might have gone
on to momentous discovery has been discouraged, deterred
and thwarted by the instinctive perception of the absolutely
shattering and subversive implications which the doctrine
held for traditional Christian theology. For the full reach
of these involvements embraces the necessary transferal
of the "death" of
the Son of God from a physical and [Page 20] historical
basis and reference to a majestic symbolic depiction of
a purely spiritual or anthropological transaction, and
that not in the case of one man, but of all men. Christianity
is brought face to face with the challenge of an invincible
logical thesis, that if the Greek philosophical meaning
of "to
die" and "the dead" is the true intended
meaning of these words in the Christian Bible, then the "death" of
Christ on the cross can by no legitimate means be circumscribed
within the limits of one man's corporeal experience on a wooden
cross, but must have its meaning in the experience of the soul
on its cross of matter and limitation in every human life.
It
would need no elaborated dissertation to limn in all intelligent
minds the picture of the inevitable muddle of erroneous
meanings that has been produced by the mistaking of the
word "death" as
referring to the demise of physical bodies instead of the
deadened condition of the soul while incarnated in such
bodies. So arrant a blunder would not only miss the high
meaning intended, but would precipitate the sense over into
every kind of anomalous and ludicrous predicament. Precisely
this is what it has done in many instances, and it has
at all times drawn the minds of millions off the path of
true instruction and knowledge and out into a thicket of weird
and egregious theological beliefs that have come nigh to
unsettling the reason of Occidental nations. The default
of knowledge of this one item alone has caused the miscarriage
of all religious effort from the sheer fact that because
of the mislocation of the realm of "death" the
world has been deprived of the good that would have flowed
from the realization that all the manifold experiences
it has been taught to expect to encounter in the spirit
world after bodily decease are its experiences now being
undergone on earth. Readily it can be seen that, while
looking in the wrong world for the Biblical [Page
21] characterizations
of "death", and waiting
for this life to terminate before the land of "death" will
be entered, Western man has totally missed the vital reference
and the gist of all Scriptural meaning that was intended to
bear directly upon the crucial significance of the experience
he was living through in this land of the
soul's "death". The confusion consequent upon the
theological displacement of the soul's "death" by
the body's demise has perpetuated untold and endless befuddlement
in all the labors of Christian theology for sixteen centuries.
THROUGH DEATH TO LIFE
Heraclitus, the
first philosopher generally mentioned in histories of philosophy,
gives expression to a conception which is quite basic for
the intelligent approach to this ancient view of the soul's
life in body. He speaks of the several elements formed
by the gradations of atomic composition of matter at different
levels and says that a lower one "lives the
death" of a higher one, as a higher one dies under the life of
a lower one. "Water lives the death of air", he says,
as "air
lives the death of fire". This is to say that the seed
of a higher life must give its vital essence over to a sort
of static "death" when it
projects its energies outward and downward and incorporates
them in organisms existing on the plane below its own status,
thus to become the inspiriting, ensouling life-giving principle
in those organisms. To give its energic life to a kingdom or
entity below it in rank, it must die away or die out to the
full conscious expression of being on its own plane. It must
in this fashion lose its own life in order to give life to
a being below it, which otherwise could not be lifted up to
higher kingdom. So it must "die" to
redeem the life of the [Page 22] creature below it! Here is the first truly scientific statement of the
theological structure underlying Christianity. And it is this purely
dialectical principle of understanding that has been grossly travestied into
the asserted historical sacrifice of a man on a wooden cross!
If a spark of
the divine fire is to enter upon the career of another
living expression in renewed cycles, it must, like the
vegetable oak, suffer its seed to be planted in the soil
of the kingdom immediately below it in the scale. Its descent
in seed form to lie buried deep in the soil of the lower
stratum of organic growth, is for it obviously to suffer "death", — "until
the time appointed" for the recovery of its growth, or
its
"resurrection". Thus it becomes incontrovertibly
clear that the incarnation of life in seed form in the body
of a lower kingdom carried with it in ancient philosophical
reflection the connotation of a "death". It
is equally firmly established, also, that while the soul's
condition in this state fully warranted the designation of "death",
nevertheless it was to be understood in a relative sense, not
as in any way an extinction or annihilation or total end of
being for the entity so buried in matter.
Hence it was a "living death" that soul endured in body, or a
"death" from which, at the turn round the nadir point of the cycle,
there would be inevitably a resurrection. Also it was a "death"
which, instead of actual loss, brought immeasurable gain. It was itself the
inescapable pathway to higher life. The life that would increase itself in
potency and glory must first lose itself. In the light of this enunciation can
now be understood the perfectly natural and beneficent meaning of this
"hard saying" that has heretofore cast its darksome
shadow of apprehension and dread across the pathway to Christian
glory.
So we find St.
Paul exulting in the sage philosophical [Page
23] asseveration
that "for me to die is gain". The Son of God
willingly approached the cross of "death" in material
embodiment to win heightened glory in the celestial realms,
since the generation of brighter glory there is the fruit of
the soul's strivings in the life on earth. For
"it must needs be that Christ should suffer and enter
into his glory". Through the gateway of sin and "death" came
also the resurrection from the "dead", as Paul says.
The
exposition of this epochal disclosure will be the more
solidly grounded if it is introduced with the presentation
of a modest selection of excerpts from ancient, particularly
Greek, philosophy, to put beyond cavil the use of these
cardinal words in the sense, not surely of the body's demise,
but of the soul's incarnation. To have mistaken the
"death" of the soul in body for the decease of the physical
life of the body itself, will thus be seen to have been the fatal blunder that
wrecked Christian theology.
THE VOICE OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY
The conception
in its fulness is most frankly expressed in The Gorgias of
Plato, when Socrates says to Cebes: "For indeed, as you
also say, life is a grievous thing. For I should not wonder
if Euripides spoke the truth when he says: 'Who knows whether
to live is not to die, and to die is not to live?' And perhaps
we are in reality dead. For I have heard from one of the wise
that we are now dead; and that the body is our sepulcher; but
that the part of the soul in which the desires are contained
is of such a nature that it can be persuaded and hurled upward
and downward".
The intimation
here clearly is that Socrates was [Page
24] expounding
the position of the conscious entity, the soul or psyche
in man, which, standing midway between physical body below
and divine spirit above, is capable of being drawn either
downward into "death" under the
dominance of sensual appetites or upward into heavenly life
by the attractions of the beauty of virtue. For Paul tells
us that "the interests
of the flesh meant death, the interests of the soul meant life
and peace".
In the Enneads (I,
lviii) of the great Plotinus, third century Neo-Platonist,
there is found a straight presentment of the conception:
"When the soul has descended into generation (from this
first divine condition) she partakes of evil and is carried
a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and
integrity, to be entirely merged in it . . . and death to her
is, while baptized or immersed in the present body, to descend
into matter and be wholly subjected to it. This is what is
meant by the falling
asleep in Hades of those who have come there".
Attention should
be called in passing to Plotinus' use of the word
"baptized" to describe or refer to incarnation. To
incarnate was to be plunged into the water of the physical
body! This is the true meaning of the baptism in ancient theology.
Paul accentuates this idea also most directly when, speaking
of Christ, he says that "we suffer death with him
in his baptism", thus identifying death and baptism
as the same one experience, and both meaning the incarnation.
To this may be
added an excerpt from Pythagoras, who is claimed by many
to have been the Greek progenitor of the whole Platonic
system: "Whatever we
see when awake is death; and when asleep a dream". It
is a strange thought that, as Socrates expresses it to Cebes,
the life we are presumably living
here may, from the standpoint of more extended consciousness
and the [Page 25] reduced
dimensionality and reality of the experience, be a form of
veritable
"death", as compared with the vividness of a life
we could live in a world where we would be disencumbered of
body and free of its circumscriptions. That we are blindly
groping about down here in a wonderland of vague dreams in
a state of semi-sleep, missing the grander reality of life
and more glorious and blissful vision of true being in supernal
states, is not only not a new and bizarre conception limited
to the Greek philosophers, but is indeed widely current in
reflective poetry and in fact is the presumptive claim of nearly
all religions. That heaven is the true home of the soul, and
that the latter is astray here in a mournful exile far from
its Father's celestial house, is a commonplace idea finding
expression in the Prodigal Son allegory and in Christian literature
everywhere. It was one of the higher conceptions drawn by early
Christianity from the fountains of Greek philosophy.
Perhaps the most
discerning and competent of all expositors of Greek philosophy
is Thomas Taylor, whose splendid translations and commentaries
have been passed over by the academic world in a preference
for the far less revealing translations of Jowett. In a
dissertation on the Mysteries, Taylor writes that the Greeks "believed
that human souls were confined in the body as in a prison,
a condition which was denominated genesis or generation;
from which Dionysus would liberate them. This generation,
which linked the soul to body, was supposed to be a kind
of death to the higher form of life. Evil is inherent to
this condition, the soul dwelling in the body as in a prison or
a grave .
. . The earthly life is a dream rather than a reality .
. . The soul is purified and separated from the evils of
this condition by knowledge".
This is so typical
a presentation of the ground bases [Page
26] of Greek philosophy that it deserves comment. Evil as a cosmic principle has
been genetically derived in Greek thought from spirit's association with
matter. To spirit dissociated from matter all highest good is attributed. On
its own high plane it is altogether pure. It is only through its contact with,
imprisonment in and subjection to matter that it is cast down into evil
conditions. The segment of Christianity that derived from Gnosticism and Greek
sources through Paul carried this strain of thought into all its later
theology. It became the root source of the egregious ascetic movement and practices
of later centuries of Christian Europe. In the shadow of this view it was
accounted as degradation for the soul to be tied to mortal body, and any
inclination to let the appetencies and passions of the flesh dominate the
immortal spirit was looked upon as horrendous. To subdue and mortify the flesh
and seat spirit on the throne of the individual life was the motive of the
asceticism that swept early Medieval Christianity like a plague.
For
soul to be driven out of heaven and sent down to earth
to be "cribbed,
cabined and confined" in a vesture of mortal decay was
for it a cosmic abasement grievous enough to be theologized
as its descent into hell. All Hindu philosophy centered on
the soul's struggling to divest itself at the earliest possible
moment of its incubus of the body. The soul's life down here
was held to be a veritable imprisonment, her wings clipped
by the sad diminution of her powers and the limitations imposed
on her freedom by the inhibiting sluggishness and inertia of
her physical instruments of cognition. To incarnate in fleshly
body was for her to suffer the agonies of virtual "death".
Only the knowledge of profoundest philosophy, embracing the
true science of the soul, would provide men with understanding
adequate to orient the mind to endure the carnal nature with [Page
27] equanimity
and imperturbability (the ataraxia of
the Stoics) and to liberate the consciousness from the painful
distractions of the sensuous life to the placid contemplation
of the more real verities of the spirit.
SPIRITS IN PRISON
Plato himself
said that "men are placed in the body as in a
prison". He even considered the body as the sepulcher
of the soul, an idea that carried one step farther the ancient
Egyptian representation of the body, personalized in the Goddess
Hathor, as the "bird-cage of the soul".
That this imprisonment was equated with the idea of "death" to
the soul is clearly expressed by Taylor who, in commenting
on the writings of Macrobius, writes: "The soul in the
present life may be said to die, as far as it is possible for
a soul to die; occultly intimating that the death of the soul
was nothing more than a profound union with the ruinous bonds
of the body". To impart to the body its life by
linking to it the soul's more dynamic voltage, nature extracted
from the higher principle the plenary quantum of its life to
be offered as an oblation for the benefit of the lower order.
So the body lived the "death" of soul, and soul died
unto the life of the body, as Heraclitus would have put it.
All this is explicitly
set forth in apt phraseology by Taylor who, in his Select
Works of Porphyry says: "What is here said by Plato
is beautifully unfolded by Olympiodorus in his MS Commentary
on the Gorgias, as
follows: “Euripides (in Phryxo) says that to live
is to die, and to die is to live. For the soul, coming hither,
as she imparts life to the body, so she partakes through this
of a certain privation of life; but this is an evil. When separated,
therefore, from the body, she lives in reality; for she dies [Page
28] here, through
participating in privation of life, because the body becomes
the source of evils. And hence it is necessary to subdue
the body".
The logic of all
this is at least on the face of it unquestionable, unarguable.
If the soul is called upon in incarnation to give away
its life to the lower organism it certainly cannot retain
possession of it for itself. Here we have the ground foundation
of the great central arch in the temple of religion known
as the sacrificial oblation of the Son of God, who gave
his life for the world of men. He threw his energic
powers into the bodies of mortals so that they might have
this connection with a battery of higher dynamism, by drawing
upon which they might rise to a higher and more abundant
life than as natural creatures they could ever gain without
such condescension of the gods. The Sons of God had to
give their life and die on the cross of matter, that lower
orders might have a visible link with divinity.
So general was
this conception among the intelligent in the Greek sphere
of culture that the soul's entry into body at the latter's
birth was called its burial.
The Egyptians called it its mummification. In this connection
it is likely that the reference of Jesus to his disciples'
anointing him for his
"burial" can find its true and more meaningful explication
in taking his "burial" in its Greek sense as his
incarnation in the flesh. We have noted Plotinus's statement
that death, to the soul, was to descend under the power of
matter and to be subjected to its torpid influences. No less
a figure than the great Roman poet Virgil adds his assent to
this view: "For
souls are deadened by earthly forms and members subject to
death".
One needs but
recur to the Epistles of St. Paul to find evidence of the
great Apostle's accord with this element of Greek philosophy.
He speaks of the
"law of [Page 29] death" "which
is in my members". Flesh
and body are at war with soul and spirit. The clamor of
the sensuous desires long overwhelms the still small voice
of the spirit. A hasty and too simple deduction from all
this seemed to dictate the drastic subjugation of the fleshly
appetencies and the crucifixion of the body. A doleful
chapter of Christian and indeed all other religious history
transpired in the wake of this uncritical conclusion.
Again Plato likened the soul's bondage in corporeal existence to the
condition of an oyster bound in its shell.
One must note,
too, Milton's expression of Adam's surprise, in Paradise
Lost, when, on being expelled from the Garden of Supernal
Paradise for
"disobedience" to God's command, with the penalty
of
"death" pronounced against him for his transgression,
he stands, as it were, awaiting the fall of the axe that would
terminate his life. But no axe falls; he does not die as he
expected. He lives on. If this is the
"death" God had threatened for his sin, it turned
out to be a living
"death". So a new significance flashes into the commonplace
Scriptural citation: "In the midst of life we are in death".
It
will be indeed a strange and awesome reflection that must
accrue from long acquaintance with the lost Greek philosophy
that in truth and in fact we are now in the deepest "death" we
shall ever experience henceforth in our evolution. We have
been in deeper wells and hells of material embodiment in
past cycles, no doubt. But as from the present, the bodily
life we now lead holds us as deeply in the underworld of
physical coarseness as the necessities of our education
require, and the future will reward past and present rectitude
with better conditions in each ensuing life on earth. This
happy assurance is one of those liberating influences by
which intelligence frees the soul from the "evils" of
residence in body. [Page 30]
As the study of the illuminating Greek
philosophy proceeded there was no failure to apprehend the significant role
which this singular feature of Hellenic esotericism played in ancient religious
systematism. Hundreds of scholars had grasped and familiarly handled the idea
in many a work. But always it was treated as a somewhat unique and distinctly
characteristic Greek conception. That it might be found to extend its influence
beyond the Greek area of speculation and indeed stand in pivotal strategic
relation to Western Christian theology and its source-spring, the Christian
Bible, was apparently never caught even on the farthest horizons of Occidental
reflection. The staggering discovery that the Greek sense of the words did
indeed apply to the Bible and theology and that this revelation would transform
the house of world religion, illuminating it with a new resplendence, was to
come at a later stage of the study.
THE BOOK OF THE DEAD
The hints that
prodded speculation on toward the momentous discovery were
caught in a field laying outside the area of Greek thought,
— the Egyptian. Books of the eminent academic Egyptologists
were scanned first, and an introduction was gained into
the mysteries of the prodigious lore of the land of Khem.
But the orthodox scholastic treatment of the Egyptian books
left the mind still shrouded in fog, doing little to dispel
the mist from the mystery. Out of much desultory reading
in this alcove there came only one sharp suggestion in
the direction of the denouement that was to come. This
was in connection with the Egyptian name of the so-called
Egyptian "Bible",
the great Book of the Dead.[Page
31] Here
was "death" again, and in the very title of the selected
compilation of the greatest of the documents found in the Nile
valley. The question arose: Did the Egyptians write a Bible
to be used only by the spirits of the dead in the after life;
a book to be disregarded by living mortals on earth and only
to be consulted for guidance in the heaven world following
bodily demise? Of what use to mortals could be a book which
was written, as Budge had affirmed, "for the use of the
dead in all periods of Egyptian history"? To simple reason
it seemed illogical that a Bible of a great nation should be
written, not for the living, but for the dead (in the ordinary
physical sense). It appeared more than chimerical to assume
that the overlords and semi-divine guardians of early humanity
would indite books of proven wisdom and put them in the hands
of the living inhabitants of earth, if the instruction therein
was not to be profited by and applied to the present life in
which the books were read, but was to be held in abeyance,
so to say, until death took the individuals over into another
realm of being, where the precepts were to be put into practice.
Surely mortals have use for Bibles here, rather than in spirit
life. Could a deceased person take his Book of the Dead with
him and use it as manual for his conduct in the land of spirits!
Indubitably a Bible must be meant to appertain to the life
of that world in which it was produced and in which it could
be read, and to edify the life lived therein.
The Egyptian name
of the compilation of fragments called (first by Lepsius) The
Book of the Dead was pert em heru, the translation
of which was given as "the Day of Manifestation," or "the
Coming Forth by Day". Here was food for thought. This
sounded more suggestive of the resurrection than of death.
And, sure enough, the very first chapter of the collection
dealt with the [Page 32] resurrection.
The puzzle deepened. But it was not to find its amazing resolution
until some time later.
Good fortune led
to the reading of Egyptian lore through the works of the
one scholar who, scorned by the scholastics as Thomas Taylor
has been, came measurably close to solving the Sphinx riddle
of the mighty Egyptian wisdom, — Gerald Massey. His
six ponderous tomes were devoured with avidity, as new
light shone forth from every page. He missed by very little
what all the other investigators had missed in toto. He
is the only Egyptologist who has come close to descrying
what the sage Egyptians were actually talking about under
their astute hieroglyphic forms of representation. The
others have missed it utterly and tragically.
In the first volume
of his Ancient
Egypt, the Light of the World, at
about page 180, Massey, dissertating upon the Platonic doctrine
of the soul's regaining its memory lost in its descent
into earthly body, or the Doctrine of Reminiscence, asserted
that Plato, drawing the teaching from ancient Egypt,
"had misapplied it to the past lives and pre-existence
of human being dwelling on the earth", when according
to Massey, it should properly apply to the soul's memory in
heaven of its past earth life following the demise of the body.
The soul in heaven, he claimed, would regain the full memory
of its (one) life on earth.
To a mind then
fresh from the impact of the magnificent conceptions of
the Greek systemology and soul science, it was obvious
that in this assertion, not Plato, but Massey, had "misapplied" the
doctrine. One knew that the great Plato had not blundered
in his basic formulations. As the elements of this clash
of interpretative ideas were sharply arrayed in the mind,
as by some magical light of intuition, there flashed into
recognition with blinding splendor a discernment that not
only resolved [Page 33] the Massey-Plato conflict in clear outlines, but opened up in one stupendous
revelation the whole vision of lost meaning of all ancient religion. The great
light spread out to illumine every single doctrine of primal Christianity in
its true bearing, for it proved to be the long-lost key to all the Scriptures
of the archaic world. It was the open sesame to all constructions, to all
exegesis, to all meaning in the Scriptures of antiquity.
It also held the
explication of why the Egyptian Bible was called The
Book of the Dead. For those whom they dubbed "the
dead" are
ourselves, the living humans. The antique tome of supernal
wisdom and transcendent knowledge was after all not, as Budge
and all the other beguiled scholastics thought, "written
for the benefit of the dead (in their sense) in all periods
of Egyptian history", but written, as common logic had
insisted they should be, for the benefit of living mortals,
whom, however, they regarded philosophically as "the dead". It
was seen that there was no clash between Massey and Plato save
that Plato was using the word
"death" in its esoteric philosophical sense, and
Massey was using it in its common reference to bodily decease.
And what was that
flash of illumination that came at that one moment of clear
insight to unlock the meaning of thousands of volumes hitherto
read in befuddlement and confusion of ideas? It was the
astounding realization that indeed and in truth, beyond
all cavil and controversy, the three pivotal words,
"death", "the dead", and "to die" bore
the same cryptic meaning and reference in the Christian and
Hebrew Scriptures, creeds and theologies as they did in Greek
and Egyptian books of old! The lost light of ancient Egypt
had been rekindled.
The rush of clarifications
of scores of texts, the flood of new and more luminous
meaning in every dialectical situation in the theological
purview, was an experience [Page 34] never to be forgotten. The light of new
comprehension was almost blinding. In its permeating radiance the entire
structure of all ancient sagacity stood revealed in all the grandeur of its
divine harmony and beauty. Items and features that in the gloom of imperfect
understanding had stood athwart the vision mystifying and unrelated to the
whole, now were seen in their almost incredible relevance and symmetry. The
entire structure, bathed for the first time in a clear light that revealed its
full form and majesty, was awesome in its wonder and glory. Hidden in the
darkness of the Middle Ages for sixteen hundred years, the temple of ancient
wisdom now stood forth flooded with the aura of knowledge that restored its
supernal loveliness once more.
CHRIST CRUCIFIED IN EGYPT
First and with
almost terrifying force came the certain realization that
the central key doctrine of Christianity — the death
and resurrection of the Son of God to redeem humanity — could
not possibly connote the death of the body, the
physical demise, of any man-savior, but could bear true meaning
only in reference to the soul-death of the Sons of God collectively
in their incarnation in all men. At one stroke of sound understanding
the historical foundations of apostolic Christianity and its
Gospels were swept from under the entire structure. The "death" of
the crucified One was seen to be his incarceration in mortal
body, not his bloody torture and decease on a cross of wood.
That which "died" to rise again was the Christ-soul;
and catastrophe had ensued in Christian counsels and Christian
history because this
"death" of imperishable soul was misconceived to
be the physical death of a one-man embodiment of the Christ-spirit. [Page
35]
Along with that
came the astounding assurance that the Christ's resurrection
could have nothing to do with the rising of a corpse and its
bursting the bars of a rock tomb on a Judean hillside on
any Easter morn. This was now seen to be allegorism depicting
the soul's eventual bursting the gates of this hell of
imprisonment in the flesh and winging its way in the glory
of celestial light back to its empyrean home, the "sting of death" and the "victory
of the grave" having been overcome at the last trump.
Hard on the heels
of these overpowering realizations came a startling corroboration
of the restored interpretation, one that has strangely
survived Christian manhandling of the Scriptural texts,
in the eleventh chapter of Revelation.
If, as five or six Church Councils have decreed in
utmost solemnity, every word of the Bible is God's infallible
truth, then at least one verse of the Holy Book negates
the whole story of the four Gospels, taken historically.
The apocalyptic writer (who, say many discerning scholars,
could not have
been the disciple John!) is speaking of the "two witnesses",
previously called "the two olive trees", but taken
by theology to be two hierarchical powers; and in the preceding
verse he says that the
"dragon" shall rise up and slay them. Then in verse
eight he makes the statement that puts all historical Christianity
on the stand for searching cross examination: "And their
dead bodies shall lie in the street of the city which is spiritually
called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified".
Only the flash
of light dimmed for eighteen centuries and reillumined
as Massey's "Egypt" was being perused,
provided a dialectical basis for the salvation of Christianity
in its proper essence and message from the devastating
implications of that remarkable eighth verse. What! The
Lord Christ not crucified in [Page
36] Jerusalem,
but in a city spiritually named Sodom and Egypt!
And Egypt not even the name of a geographical earthly city,
but of a land and nation! (And even that meaning disqualified
by our present knowledge that the name "Egypt" in
both Old and New Testaments is an allegorical
designation for earth itself, the "underworld" into
which souls descend for incarnate life!) Also there is the
damaging consideration that geographically and historically
Sodom and Egypt were not one and the same place, a fact which
makes it necessary to assign one crucifixion to two different
places, and neither of them the place claimed for the event
in the Gospel stories. If the statement in this eighth verse
is in any sense true, then it refutes the whole of the Gospel
accounts of a physical crucifixion of the man Jesus in Jerusalem.
And with characteristic subterfuge the ecclesiastical system
of Christianity has evaded the issue presented by the conflict
between this verse and the Gospels.
From this precarious
dilemma Christian theology can be saved only by the resources
provided by the very philosophies which the Church, both
early and late, has pronounced heretical. The now readily
discernible clue is hidden in the word "spiritually", the
adverb used to describe the manner of the naming of the
city of the crucifixion. If this locality was
"spiritually", (another translation says "mystically")
called by several names, it could not have been a geographical
town, but must have been a "spiritual" city! One
of St. Augustine's two major books, which is indeed one of
the foundation pillars of the Christian faith, is entitled The
City of God; and this, it is to be noted, is no
geographical municipality, but clearly a kingdom of spiritual
consciousness. So, then, there can be no dispute over the figurative
meaning of verse eight, which clearly states that the principle
of Christly spirituality is crucified in this lower [Page
37] world, or city of mortal consciousness, and thus
only spiritually, not physically, crucified. It was the crucifixion
of soul in a physical body, but not the crucifixion of a
physical body. And that difference represents the vast abyss
between sane understanding of Biblical meaning and ghastly
misunderstanding in centuries of Christian theology. The death
and crucifixion was that of divine soul on the cross of the
flesh, and in no sense that of fleshly body on a cross of wood.
The latter, however, was used symbolically and dramatically
to typify the former, and ignorance mistook it for the actuality
in a historical sense. It was soul, not body, that met crucifixion
and
"death." The mortal body, named variously Sodom and
Egypt, is itself
the cross, on whose four arms the Christ-soul is crucified.
In
the view here brought to light with clarifying force it
can be seen at one sweep how through the blunder of mistaking
the Christ-death for the demise of a bodily personality,
instead of the "death" of
divine soul when incarnated in all bodies, and entifying
the cross as a piece of wood instead of the bodily life
and limitations, Christianity has lost the purport of its
entire original message for intelligence, has indeed exactly
reversed the axis pole of all its organic wholeness and
so has almost come to teach the very opposite of what its
literature meant to convey. By taking "death" to
refer to the decease of physical body (and that of one man
alone), and therefore being forced to take the phrase "after
death" as
pointing to the post-mortem spiritual existence in heaven
worlds, the meaning-message of Christianity has been shunted
clear out of the world in and for which its theology was to
have cogent and helpful application, and has landed over in
a world of disembodied existence, where its intent was not
directly to have reference at any time! By this error in cryptological
interpretation [Page 38] Christianity has missed the world for the
behoof and uplift of which it was intended, and shot its meaning and reference
over into a supernal world where it had no direct or immediate application.
IN THE UNDERWORLD
Then came the
further glow of illumination from the new-found meaning
of the name of that mysterious world into which all mythological
heroes find their way, a world so baffling to savants and
scholars through all the many centuries. This elusive region
of the myths is the so-called
"underworld", or "nether earth". The ancient
Egyptian books named it Amenta; in the Hebrew Scriptures
it is Sheol; in the
Greek system it is Hades; and in Christian theology
it is the Hell of
the creeds. Scholars have been at sea for ages in their effort
to localize this lower region of the soul's existence, which
it entered at or after
"death". Their addiction to the common meaning of
the word
"death" as the demise of the body kept them searching
everlastingly for the locale of this dark realm of the "dead" in
every possible area in which the spirits, or "shades" of
the dead might be thought to take residence. The more general
conclusion among many wild surmises was that it was one of
the "lower hells" of the spirit world, some
gloomier level of the "astral plane" of the Theosophists.
Some were content to let its location rest with the six feet
of grave space beneath the sod. Budge, the great Egyptologist,
was finally forced to confess that it was neither in heaven
nor on earth, but suspended somewhere between the two in an
indeterminate region! By some again it was put down in actual
subterranean caverns. All the while the scholars, wedded to
the idea that it must be a place [Page
39] inhabited
by souls after (physical) death, and assuming it could not
be rational to think that we were denizens of it at this very
time, refused to look for it in the one place where it lay
before their eyes at every moment of life, — on earth
itself. They could not ever catch the conception that
"under" was used in reference to the primal point
of life's departure in creation, the heaven world; and so they
kept on seeking for it under this
world. With their failure properly to locate Amenta, together
with their equal blindness in failing to sense the cryptic
meaning of
"death" in the Scriptures, they have missed every
true connotation of ancient sacred revelation of wisdom and
knowledge, and contorted the message of Holy Writ into a ribald
hodge-podge of error and idiocy.
In the lucid moment
of that flash of understanding it was seen that every meaning
in every theological or Scriptural presentment immediately
falls into its proper niche in the one grand edifice of
religious truth. So clear was this realization that it
was obvious that the architectural lineaments of that grand
temple never could be beheld in all their harmony and beauty
without the clarifying beams of these two lost principia
of rationalization. But when, in their light, the structure
was viewed in all its integrity, the organic unity of the
whole and the interrelation of every part, were equally
vivid discernments of transcendent intellectual magnificence.
The "lost meaning
of death" and the proper location of the "underworld" of
mythology were the two crucial keys needed to unlock the ancient
casket of
"divine theology", and their recovery was certain
to transform religion henceforth from its character of a dementia-breeding
superstition into its original force for racial salvation.
These two emendations would inaugurate a new culture in a new
world. [Page 40]
In the ancient
day — if Plato's time may be called ancient — the
great body of esoteric teaching, conveying to initiated
minds these cryptic connotations of basic terms and concepts,
was confined to the narrow cycle of the few who could read
and attend lectures in the schools of the Mystery Brotherhoods.
There was no possibility, hence no thought, of attempting
its popularization among the masses. It was necessarily
esoteric, the possession of the few literati. Little wonder,
therefore, that when the rabid promulgators of Christianity
determined to spread their new gospel among the multitude,
they ignored and later despised the secret knowledge of
the esoteric cultists. This observation is in itself an
item that religious scholarship has overlooked. Christianity
shortly took the road of appeal to the sympathies, the
predilections, the emotions and the ignorance of the downtrodden
masses, and thereby closed every door of connection between
its popular advertisement of personal salvation and true
intellectual understanding and knowledge. Paul, from every
indication, endeavored to reestablish the connection and
to reintroduce the Gnosis and the Greek esoteric wisdom;
whereupon immediately the wing of Petrine, apostolic and
"primitive" Christianity vociferously denounced and
opposed his efforts. It is a "miracle" of some magnitude
indeed that his fifteen Epistles were kept in the ecclesiastical
canon at all. As every honest writer has observed, his exposition
of "the wisdom hidden in a mystery" has
practically nothing whatever to do with the faith and movement
assumedly set in motion by Jesus and the Judean disciples and
apostles in Palestine.
But now we have
reached an age in the development of mankind when it may
be possible to disseminate the occult truths to the general
populace. Every attempt hitherto has resulted in the direct
distortion and [Page 41] falsification
of the cryptic presentation, with mostly calamitous historical
repercussion. Now, however, the general level of intelligence
is perhaps high enough for the release of buried truth
with fair hope of no catastrophic consequences.
And it is clear
that St. Paul uses the term "death" in the
connotation which this brochure assigns to it, as its true
meaning in the Scriptures of antiquity. Excerpts from his
Epistles will confirm that statement.
It
was overwhelmingly thrilling to reflect that the lost secrets
of the world's antique literature had found solution again
in this modern age, and with involvements and consequences
for history henceforth that staggered the mind to anticipate.
It is difficult to describe the satisfaction that sprang
from the knowledge that the "underworld" of mythology
is just this good earth, and that the "dead" of
the Scriptures are our own souls flitting about here amid
the murky shadows of the images of truth and reality. Broken
was the haunting dread of those bogies which a fearful
theology had reified in the imagination of sensitive childhood;
gone was the fear of a future ordeal of punishment for
earthly misdeeds in a fiery hell of torment. For this
life is the Hades, Sheol
and Amenta, and whatever it held of pain and horror was being
met now and found not by any means horrific. And there was
the positive knowledge, mighty in its comfort and cheer, that
if this is the "death" of the soul, it is one that
looks ever toward the dawn of a wondrous day of awakening and
a final resurrection to a life of ineffable glory. A thousand
phantoms of traditional orthodox religious
"teaching" were instantaneously dissolved in the
sunshine of the intelligence that the Scriptural tomb of death
is nothing more fearsome than the physical bodies we wear on
earth, and that our bursting the bars of that tomb is nothing
more [Page 42] insuperable
than the mastery of a truly spiritual science. It was a prodigious
gain of peace and serenity when all the unintelligible and
irrational collation of theological asseverations that held
the mind in a world of doubt and confusion was lucidly resolved
into the actualities of conscious evolution in the present
life. It was nothing less than a joyous release from morbid
unhappiness to know at last that all the spectral experiences
promised by current theology for a darkly unknown future were
being lived through, and not too unhappily, in the life now
running. In a word, the new light removed at one flash of its
beams the sting of death.
THE TOMB OF THE BODY
At about the same
time there came one of the numberless correlations of meaning
that continued to be revealed through the study of comparative
philology, one indeed that supplied overwhelming corroboration
to the discernment made through the reading of Massey's
exegetics. Two English words of four letters each and differing
in only one of them were seen to be alike because they
esoterically connote the same thing. These two revealing
words were "tomb" and "womb". If soul
went to its
"death" when it entered the body of a child, then
that body must be actually its tomb, grave, sarcophagus, sepulcher
and mummy case. But since also in that very tomb of "death" it
was destined in the course of its cycle to have its rebirth
or resurrection from "death", then also
this body became in time its "womb" of new life.
That vehicle which became its tomb of death, was also the conceiving
mother-womb of its new birth!
And this startling
correlation from two English [Page 43] words was more than corroborated by a similar, but even stronger kinship of
structure that united two Greek words, namely soma, body, and sema, tomb.
There is no escaping the deduction that the Greek Sages saw the body as the
tomb, as well as the womb of the soul.
Along with the
sweeping current of endless new enlightenments that came
with every fresh sally of thought from the gate of the
new premises there flashed the discernment of the esoteric
meaning of the descent into and exodus from
"Egypt". Here was another reorientation and clarification
of a whole segment of both Old and New Testament cryptography.
The geographical Egypt, lying south and west of Judea, fitted
the allegorical direction in which souls from above traveled
on their way down to earth and body. They went "west", then "south.
. If one will examine the charted direction of Abraham's journeying
from the empyrean of heavenly fire, Ur, to "Egypt," it
will be found that he went first west, then south.
The Egyptians
called the "dead" the "Westerners",
those who had "gone west" to "death".
A few scholars have been astute enough to see that "Egypt" in
the Scriptures cannot be taken as the geographical country
of the Nile Valley. To do so turns many texts referring
to it into asinine irrelevance. The "Egypt" of
the Bible is the allegorical designation for this same "underworld",
Hades, Sheol, Amenta, lying "south" (that is below
in the sense of inferior gradations of life's power) of the
heavenly kingdoms. We
are now in
"Egypt", "the land of bondage", — "that
slave pen", as the Moffatt translation of the Bible phrases
it. Our diviner spirits are in humble servitude under the power
of the elements of the flesh and of the world. They came here
to do a work which could not be done in heaven. For this world
alone provides the fulcrum of matter against which [Page
44] spirit can base and brace itself to exert its potential
might. We are, as souls, being crucified in this world. And
so it is no miscarriage of truth when the Revelation verse
says that Christ was crucified in
"Egypt."
Furthermore, in Old
Testament allegorism, "Egypt" could
only be escaped by crossing the "Red Sea". As elaborated
elsewhere, the liquid nature of the human body — composed
of seven-eighths water — and that red in color, really
solves the mystery of the "Red Sea". The soul
must pass through its ordeals of living experience in the red
fluid of the body to make its final exodus from the "flesh
pots of Egypt". At any rate
corrected modern translations of the Scriptures have taken
the Red Sea out of the text! In Moffatt's translation it has
become, and correctly, the "Reed
Sea." Literalists must stand dumbfounded at this disappearance
of their geographical body of water from the story. Yet, oddly
enough, that very phrase, when taken in another and its obviously
true sense, brings it back to them as the (physical) body composed
mainly as water. Literally enough they must know that they
are making their evolutionary way from "Egypt" to
"Canaan" through a red body of water — the
human blood!
In Greek mythology
the god of the underworld was Pluto. He seized Proserpina,
the divine soul, daughter of Ceres, cosmic intellect, and
dragged her down from the light of day in the upper realms
into his darksome kingdom and forced her to marry him.
The myth becomes alight with meaning when it is known that
the "underworld" is this earth. For the soul
is impelled by divine necessity to descend here below and
marry the kingly powers that rule it.
In the meaning-glyphs
of ancient Egypt Osiris was the Pluto, king of the
"dead". Says Massey: "The buried Osiris represented
the god in matter”. But King [Page
45] Spirit
goes into a torpor when first he plunges into this underworld.
Matter stupefies his powers and faculties. So Osiris was overcome
with stupor and had to be awakened and regenerated by his
own son, represented as the Father's own nature, a while "dead", but
revived again. So the souls that had entered this nether
earth were termed "sleepers in their coffins", "prisoners
in their cells", or "spirits in prison". Even
the Christian Gospels retain a fringe of this symbolism in
their brief statement that during the three days Jesus lay
in the tomb of death between his crucifixion and his resurrection
he descended into hell and there preached to the "spirits
in prison". In the 142nd Psalm the soul prays that
God will bring it up "out of prison". Isaiah (42)
says that the people are
"snared in holes and they are hid in prison houses".
And the same chapter states that the Lord will come into this "underworld"
"to open blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the
prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house".
Matching this
in the old Egyptian books we find the soul beseeching its
deity: "Imprison not my soul; keep not in custody my shade; let the path
be open to my soul; let it not be made captive by those who imprison the shades
of the dead." And again it pleads: "Let not Osiris
enter into the dungeon of the captives."
Massey clearly
sets forth the nature of this "underground" Amenta
in his description, so closely matching Christian phrases: "The
wilderness of the nether earth, being a land of graves, where
the dead awaited the coming of Horus . . . to wake them in
their coffins and lead them from this land of darkness to the
land of day". (Let it be remembered here
that the real title of the Egyptian Book of the Dead is "The
Coming Forth Into the Day.") How closely this harmonizes
with the proclamation of the Christ himself, when he says in
the [Page
46] Gospels: "Verily,
verily I say unto you, the hour is coming and now is, when the
dead shall
hear the voice of the Son of God; and they that hear shall
live. Marvel not at this, for the hour is coming in which
all that are in their graves shall hear his voice". And
does it need an ornate word picture to paint the mental
muddle and its gruesome influences that have been generated
by the inveterate error of mistaking these graves of our
physical bodies for cemetery holes and marble mausoleums?
And countless
millions have read these words with only a vague and uncertain
wonder as to what sort of a phenomenon was to occur at some
incalculable day of a purely mystical spirit-future; or
with the fanatically precipitated conviction that this
call to all past dead souls would come within their life-time
and on some given date. The deluded Millerites of 1837
set the date for April 17, 1843, and thousands disposed
of their property to be disencumbered of worldly goods
for the apocalyptic denouement. Some modern groups still
come forth from time to time with a proclamation of the
date when the elements will consume the planet and bring
Scriptural "prophecy"
to a head. Yet the globe goes serenely swinging in its circles and doubtless
will prove recalcitrant to Bible "prophecy" for some
millions of years at least.
It is an instructive
exercise to attempt to imagine the difference this one
Bible passage alone would have made, or can still make,
in the life of the world if the true instead of a false
and wholly impossible meaning was read into the words "the
dead" and the "grave". Instead
of being left pondering in perplexity over a promised planetary
and racial debacle and holocaust that is unbelievable on
any familiar natural basis and psychologically damaging
through its incitement to doubt and fear, the reader would
be instantly [Page 47] galvanized
into dynamic appreciation of their reference to his own life,
not in some ill-defined and speculative state of unnatural
existence "in the
grave" tied somehow to the last few bones and teeth of
his earthly cadaver, but in the living present, when, alive
as he assumes he is, he begins to realize that his soul is
in an actual torpor of veritable "death"
to all the more ecstatic possibilities of expanded consciousness
which are potential in his divine part, and that he needs to
be here and now awakened out of "the body of this death", as
St. Paul names it. Then would come to his mind the realizing
sense of Paul's cry to us from the Greek wisdom of two thousand
years ago: "Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from
the dead, and Christ will give thee light". "For
ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God". "Ye
are dead in your trespasses and sins", for "to be
carnally minded is death". The Christ himself
adds: "You must not let sin have your members for the
service of vice; you must dedicate yourselves to God as men
who have been brought from death to life”.
Back in the Old
Testament Isaiah had
said in the plainest of words:
"We live in darkness like the dead". And Job declares:
"I laid me down in death and slept; I awaked; for the
Lord sustaineth me". If the word "death" is
taken here in its ordinary sense of bodily demise, it would
say that Job had already once died and been brought back to
life. As this is not supposable, then the word bears some other
connotation than its common one, and it is that of a soul-death.
This is a splendid sample of how in hundreds of passages the
substitution of the philosophic sense for the exoteric literal
one redeems the text from baffling nonsense to rational meaning.
In the forty-ninth Psalm it
is said that "like sheep they are
laid in the grave". Does this mean rows of [Page
48] cemetery graves? Not if one remembers that the figure
of a lamb led to the slaughter and to his grave was applied
to the Christ himself. In the Psalms (49
and 89) and in Hosea (13) the spirit of God says that
he will redeem
"my soul" and "their souls" from the power
of the grave and of death. Can this bear logical reference
to anything save the freeing of the divine spirit locked up
in man's corporeal constitution from its bondage under such
limitations?
What nobler consolation and inspiration would have come from the innumerable
recitals of the beautiful twenty-third Psalm if the
proper philosophical sense of "the valley of the shadow of death" had been inculcated in
all minds! Even down here in the murks and shadows of "death" which
the soul must undergo the God presence attends us, and its
rod and staff will guide and support us. It will anoint our
heads with the oil of gladness, till our cup of blessing runneth
over in sheer plentitude of divine love.
Jonah, plunged
down to the very "roots of the mountains" in
the depths of the "bowels of the earth", cries
up to God: "Out
of the belly of hell do I cry unto thee, O God!"
It is pertinent
to ask here what point that peculiar sentence in the Gospels
could have which says that "the Gospel will be preached to them that are
dead" if it does not refer to mortals who, here in living
bodies, are yet asleep in soul. (I Peter 4; 6.)
But an astonishingly
direct and unequivocal allusion to "death" in
the Greek sense is found in the first verses of the third chapter
of Revelation. Could any statement be more explicit?
The Moffatt translation has brought out with striking force
the straight meaning of the words, which it seems almost
evident the Authorized Version has attempted to cover over: "Ye
have the name of being [Page
49] alive,
but ye are dead;
wake up, rally what is still left to you, though it is
on the very point of death". This ringing call, like
Paul's cry to the dead to awake, and arise, is shouted
at living people on the earth, yet they are declared to
be and are named "the dead". Living people
are told to awake from death! And no one in two thousand years
caught the inescapable inference that the word "dead" applied
to the mortals alive in body, but "dead" in soul.
And many a Sabbath School teacher, in answer to some child's
query as to how a minister can preach to the dead, has
blushingly asserted that this is a reference to the way
the deceased Jesus spent his three days in the grave "preaching
to the spirits in prison". Inexorably the meaning
had to be kept within the aura of the graveyard tombstones.
Anticipating a chorus of rejoinders that the words have been taken in a
spiritual sense, alluding to a moral death, and not the sheer physical sense of
decease of body, so that the critique here is overdrawn, let it be said that
this opens no door of escape from the critical strictures of orthodox position
here advanced. Of course there has been intelligence enough to read into the
words the sense of a moral-spiritual deadness. But this still fails to catch
and carry the implications of the Greek philosophical use of the terms and
their full theological import, because moral and spiritual deadness was not
connected dialectically with the incarnation. It was left simply to earthly
dereliction and depravity. It connotes these, of course, for they come with the
earth life. But orthodox conception has never demonstrated any dialectical link
between these worldly failings and the soul's plunge into water body.
And
how are we to interpret Paul's utterance of almost tragic
despair (Romans
7:24) other than as an allusion to the soul's stupefaction
under its immersion [Page 50] in
this fluid body, when in that memorable passage he cries
out that he perceives in his members a law which wars against
the law of his mind, and ends with the wail of almost moral
desperation:
"Wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the
body of this
death?" And how shall we take his meaning? It is a
dubious phrase at best. Does "body" refer to the
physical corpus? Or is it a metaphorical figurism for the density
and solidity of the soul's
"dead" state of consciousness? Any way, how can "death"
have a body? Is it a possibility that conniving scribes — as
it is confessed they often have done — took a phrase
which clearly said "this
death (of the soul) in the body," and transposed
it over into the meaningless
"body of this death"? But if it is an uncorrupted
text and correctly translated, it is one of the surest and
most open namings of this life as
"death" in the Bible. It is therefore a notable and
memorable passage.
UNDER THE LAW OF SIN AND DEATH
But it is reserved
for the seventh chapter of Romans (as
seen especially in the Moffatt translation) to yield our
study the most pointed and amazing corroborations of the
interpretative thesis here presented. Paul there (verse
five) starts with the assertion that "the sinful cravings
excited by the Law were active in our members, and made us fruitful
to death. But
now we are delivered from the Law, being dead to that wherein
we were held, that we should serve in newness of spirit, and
not under the old code of the letter". Hundreds of exegetical
books have utterly missed the inner purport of this vital statement
because they have missed the meaning of that term "the
Law" by the proverbial thousand [Page
51] miles.
They have taken it to be the old Hebraic Mosaic or Levitical
moral and spiritual code-laws regulating the physical observance
of an endless list of ethical and ceremonial rites, when
all the time it is the "law" of
the fleshly members, the law of the lower animal nature inclining
unto
"sin", the law of the sensual life of the physical
body, in contradistinction to the higher law of spiritual goodness.
The one binds the soul to the body and hence to "death"; the
other frees it to the life of spiritual "liberty of the
Sons of God".
But what Paul
clearly means is that, as he says in Galatians (4),
"while we were yet children (in the evolutionary sense),
not knowing God, we were in bondage to them that by nature
are no gods", — meaning the
elemental powers dominating the physical body and the world.
When at last we grew into the recognition of a higher and diviner
law ruling evolution, the law of righteousness, we then "died" unto
the influences of the natural law, and we stood out free from
its dominance and were reborn in newness of spirit. Just so
said the old Greek philosophy.
But the Apostle
goes on. Under the natural law we developed "sin",
because the tendencies excited by the animal nature, which
at first and for a long time is not yet subdued and disciplined
by the God-soul, drive us into sensual expression; and for
the god in man to behave according to the nature and instincts
of the animal in whose body he was for the time a tenant and
over whose inclinations he had covenanted to act as king and
lord, was to commit
"sin". And as "sin" could be overcome
and "died
unto" only by additional experience of incarnational "death" for
the soul thus recreant to its covenanted vows, the Apostle
rightly tells us that "by sin came death". Surely
this consequence followed the indulgence in animality, since
that bound the soul still [Page
52] longer
to animal body, imprisonment in which is a living "death".
But then Paul
extends the chain of theological dialectic by unfolding
its next link. If "by sin came death", then
by death "came also the
resurrection from the dead". For the pain suffered by
the soul in consequence of its "sinful" life of transgression
would eventually bring an end to the sinning and a final escape
— so much insisted upon in Hindu philosophy — from
the round of birth and death in the body.
Then Paul gives
expression to perhaps the most positive affirmation that
his allusion to "death" is to be taken in its
full Greek philosophical sweep and sense, when he makes
the extraordinary statements which follow:
"I lived at one time without Law myself; but when the
command came home to me, sin sprang to life and I died; the
command that meant life proved death
to me. The command gave an impulse to sin, sin beguiled
me and used the command to kill me. So the Law at any
rate is holy, the command is holy, just and for our good".
It is doubtful if there is any more pregnant passage in the Scriptures than
this for both overt and covert mental illumination of the fundamental
principles of Christian theology. It needs comment and analysis.
What does Paul
mean by saying that he lived at one time without Law himself?
It cannot mean that he had lived a life of pure spiritual
goodness in the present incarnation, for he elsewhere expressly
bemoans his failure and error. So it must refer to his
spiritual existence in the upper heavens before his soul's
descent to earth. In the upper world his soul had enjoyed
the liberty of
the Sons of God. Surely in heaven there is no sin, and no law
of the members to goad to sin — since there are no "members".
The animal below man and the angels [Page
53] above
him are both without sin; only man is "born in sin".
Paul himself certifies this conclusion when in the very first
verse of that same chapter he writes: "Know ye not, brethren
(for I speak to them that know the law,) how that the law hath
dominion over a man as long as he liveth?"
Would we not be warranted in asserting that he meant to say "only
as long as a man liveth?" This would be simply to say
that he meant us to understand that the law applies to souls
in earth, not to spirits in heaven. Every religion in the world
has virtually based its message of consolation to mortals enduring
the hardships of this life on the assurance that return to
heaven at life's end would release the soul from all earthly
bondage. The point in Paul's mind is just a reminder of the
obvious truth that in incarnation the soul comes under the
law that governs earthly bodies, from which it is free in the
supernal worlds. That theologians have mistaken this "law" for
Jewish religious rigor instead of simply the law of the flesh
exercising dominion over the soul when soul has entered its
domain, is surely one of the most arrant instances of mental
aberration in all the history of religious thought.
But then comes
a word which has never received a single true interpretation
to give the wonderful philosophy of the passage a chance to
be caught by minds starving for truth. It is the "command".
The soul in the empyrean is without Law and without sin.
But there comes to it a "command". And
this "command" is going to break in upon and end
its celestial serenity and blessedness, and plunge it into
sin. What can so direful a thing as this be? What is this "command"?
Be it noted, then,
for the first time in ages, it is the command which comes
to all embryonic souls in the cosmic heavens to end their dreamy
placidity of supernal consciousness and come down to earth
or some other [Page 54] star. It is the command to incarnate!
Failure to catch
the crucially significant meaning of this one word has
been due to the fact that in the authorized version of
the New Testament, whether designedly or through ignorance,
the word has been mistranslated
"commandment" instead of "command". From
the context no one could possibly determine what this "commandment" referred
to; there is not a clue given; the apostle has not mentioned
any "commandment",
actually none is in sight anywhere in the situation under discussion.
The use of the word leaves the passage in blank incomprehension
and meaninglessness. It is well known that the exegesis of
Paul's theological elucidations in this Epistle
to the Romans has perplexed and baffled orthodox scholarship
beyond any other portion of the New Testament. It is obviously
all due to the failure to grasp the reference of these two
words, the "law" and the
"command", along with, of course, that lost Greek
connotation of the word "death".
And when this
command comes home to the soul above and draws it into
its downward plunge, as all archaic writings agree, "sin
springs to life", and the soul marches on down the
Jacob's ladder to enter the cycle of its "death", "burial" and "resurrection" in
the earthly body! For the soul in its descent, or involution,
abandons its life of spiritual blissfulness in purely subjective
states and comes by successive stages closer, closer to
the flesh, which, through its sinful cravings excited by
the Law of the carnal consciousness, will blot out its
memory of diviner motions of the spirit and overwhelm it
with the coarser motivations of sense life. The nearer
it comes to full submergence in the body the deeper is
its coma of "death" to all its higher sensibilities,
and the greater its bent to "sin". Its approach
to the flesh gives "sin" its
chance to "spring to life" in a [Page
55] mode
or height of consciousness not hitherto subject to such a spur.
The full plunge into the "moist nature" of the body
completes the soul's
"death" on the cross of matter.
So the divine
command, which meant a new chance at life, and life more
abundant than ever achievable by the soul before, through the
opportunity of a new experience of growth in the mastery
of the elements of all worlds, — the command that "meant
(more) life" proved "death" unto
the soul, as Paul says. Here is new light sufficient to
regenerate the decadent life of Christianity. This is the
ancient saving truth of life regained after long centuries
of hallucinated blindness.
And it is notable
that the Apostle ends his dissertation with the final conclusion
that all this sin and death of soul in body is NOT the
evil thing that ages of wretched miscalculation have pictured
it in all the generations of Christian history. Was this
descent of soul into earthly body its sinful
"fall", its disobedience to God's command? At last
the common miscarriage of the allegory in Genesis is
refuted by Paul's clear exegesis. Man's descent to earth was
NOT in disobedience to God's command, but in full compliance
with it. God's command brought the soul to earth.
"Man's first disobedience", as Milton puts it, was
NOT a wrecking of God's command or of his plan for his human
children. Aiming a rejoinder at what were doubtless current
misunderstandings and misrepresentations of the allegories
in his own day, Paul asks: "Did what was meant for my
good prove fatal to me?" And it is as if he concentrates
a thousand
"No's" and "God forbids'" in his smashing
answer to all this theological stupidity. "Never!" shouts
the Apostle; and that
"Never!" should go echoing about the earth and swirl
within the inner precincts of all philosophical and theological
brains from now on. For [Page
56] it
is the crushing refutation of all the theologies of Adam's
sin, involving all humanity in one man's dereliction, the erroneous
ideas of man's
"fall", and the whole fallacious scheme of the gruesome
and morbid theology of "sin".
Never, shouts
Saint Paul, was the descent of the soul into body a fall
into sin in any sense of a miscarriage of divine beneficence
and divine design. It was God's own planting of the seeds
of his own life in their proper soil for a new growth into
higher levels of eternal life. Paul ends by saying that
the springing to life of sin and the resultant "death" proved
beneficent
"by making use of this good thing".
The whole incarnational process, that takes the soul through
the valley of the shadow of sin and death, is "this good thing",
for which the Apostle says the whole cycle of existence is
ordained.
Only in esoteric
circles of the present has it been recognized that the
Prodigal Son story in the New Testament is a beautiful
allegory of the soul's descent into animal body, its long forgetfulness
of its diviner home above, its awakening to that memory and
its valiant resolve to return thither up the ladder of evolution.
It was one of the parables or Logia of the Lord, uttered by
the character taking the role of the Christos in the Mystery
dramatizations of old. Only in the purview of the meaning elucidated
here can the Father's rebuke of the elder brother's churlish
reluctance to welcome back the returned wastrel, and his statement
of the ground of his rejoicing, be dialectically rationalized.
For the Father says: "This my Son was dead,
and is alive again". And since he was alive in the
human sense the while he was wasting his substance in riotous
living and feeding on the husks that the swine did eat, the
Father's assertion that he was "dead" can
have no other meaning than that he was alive on earth, but
with his soul [Page 57] groveling
in its "death" under
the gross motivations inspired by the fleshly lusts.
In Luke (20:38)
it is stated that the Supreme Deity "is not the God
of the dead, but of the living, for all men live unto him". Several
approaches to the likely meaning are open; but it seems
plain that the most obvious one is to take it that the
God presence in man, through his Son, or Sons, is not an
active and vital power for those in whose nature the immanent
principle of Christliness is not yet aroused to function,
but that it is an active saving leaven for those who have
come alive and awake to its working power, who have become
the "living" from the
"dead", through having implemented the hidden potency
of divine mind.
TO HIM THAT OVERCOMETH
A strange phraseology
is found in Egyptian and other literature that is closely
related to this theme of the soul's "death" in
body and which touches the fringe of Christian theology,
in which, however, it has never received noticeable emphasis.
It has to do with what is called "the second
death". After noting its occurrence prominently in Egyptian
scripts, one was surprised to find it directly in the Christian
canon also. In the Book
of Revelation one of the seven promises made to "him
that overcometh" is that "he shall not suffer the
second death". This
cannot well be apprehended in its true bearing unless the
significance of the first "death" is also correctly
envisaged. The naive intellect has had to wonder what a second death
can mean to a mortal, to whom his own (Christian) Scriptures
aver that "it is given unto man once to
die". If a man dies as a mortal, how can he die again?
As a spirit? But all religion [Page 58] distinctly
affirms that it is precisely as a spirit that death cannot reach
him. A second death in any sense of demise or even of moral
decay is not understandable for mankind. The only light
of rational diegesis is through the door of the Greek exoteric
sense of the soul's "death" as here
projected into theology. What, then, can be its meaning?
As Revelation has
already declared that, while we have the name of being
alive, we are in reality "dead", and follows
this with the urgent call to us to "Wake up; rally
what is still left to us, though it is on the very point
of death", it is clear that, already deep in one
"death", we are close to the possibility and threat
of still another and deeper one. If a Biblical passage warns
people already "dead"
that they are on the very point of "death", there
must be a first
"death" and also a second. As there are two births,
there are also two "deaths."
We have the grounds
of explication before us in our theme. In the philosophy
of the age in which the Scriptures were "written" the
soul had entered the realm of "death" when it was
brought down from heaven and linked to carnal body. This was
its first "death". There it lay in
"death" until the turn of the cycle brought its awakening
and its eventual resurrection from the "dead" condition.
Now, however,
if it sank so deeply into the enmired consciousness of
the bodily life and the animal nature as to lose the power
to awake and arise out of that lethal stupor, and continued
to sink further down to a point where its recall "out
of Egypt" was impossible (a conceived eventuality
in ancient Christological science), it lost its link of
attachment to the upper world and its chance to return
thither. In that sad case it would suffer the
"second death". And, is it strange, [Page
59] then,
that this was the only one of the two that was wholesomely
dreaded by the Manes (or shades of the "dead" in
the underworld) of the Egyptian books? When this danger had
been definitely passed at the turn of the cycle, the soul gives
vivid expression to its joy at its presumptive salvation from
the worst of its ordeals. "I have not suffered the second
death", it
jubilates. "I have passed the gates of the Tuat",
or underworld.
"I have successfully passed the most dangerous crisis",
it might have cried in modern terms. But the Christian Scriptures
closely match the Egyptian meanings. In Isaiah it is
again the divine soul buried in the first
"death" that piteously pleads with the Father that "thou
wilt not suffer thine holy one to see corruption; thou wilt
show me the path of life" back to the upper levels of
Paradise regained. How close this is to the soul's similar
cry in Egyptian scrolls: "I shall not putrefy, I shall
not rot, I shall not become worms; I shall germinate, I shall
live again",
each phrase thrice repeated to accentuate the ineffable joyousness.
Proclus, the last
of the great Neo-Platonists, warns that the soul must avail
itself of the evolutionary opportunities provided by its
linkage to flesh
"without merging itself too deeply in the darkness of
body".
In I Samuel (2:6)
it is written that "the Eternal kills; the
Eternal life bestows; he lowers to death and he lifts up".
If comment is not by now superfluous, what sobering reflections
should be generated in the minds of intelligent readers by
the caught sense of the difference it would have made to all
theology if such a passage had been read with the cryptic sense
of the Eternal's "killing" us and then "lifting" us
up again firmly fixed in all minds, instead of taking it as
somehow meaning his actually killing us in the earthly sense.
It is not a general item even of theological knowledge that
the Eternal is [Page
60] represented
as having tried to "kill" every one of the Biblical
heroes who, at his command, journeyed down into "Egypt".
It is notable in the case of Moses. Even the Jesus of the Gospels
had to be assured of his safety in his "flight into Egypt." Paul
says the command "killed"
him and that he "died". (Yet he was a living
man, writing of his own "death!") What peculiar brand
of death is it that a living man can describe as his own past
experience? Let Christian theology answer; let it face the
issue it has, through ignorance or chicanery, dodged for two
millennia. For its positive answer is central and vital to
the intellectual sanity of the millions of its adherents today,
and through these, to the possible salvation of the race.
Says Job: "I
shall die in my nest, and I shall multiply my days like
the eagle", or phoenix, the fabled bird of death and
resurrection. How can death in its physical sense multiply
one's days, obviously on earth? Death ends one's days,
it does not multiply them. But in its sense of incarnation
each additional "death" and burial in
(living) body surely does multiply for the soul not only days,
but years and ages of ever more thrilling life.
Let us place alongside
of Job's rhapsodical utterance one from the Book
of the Dead. There the soul, in a ritualistic pronouncement
that, when philosophically apprehended in all the length and
breadth of its cosmic significance, generates almost a transport
of exalted feeling, says, as if in a veritable struggle to
suppress bursting rapture: "I die, and I am born again,
and I renew myself and I grow young each day". And he
enlarges on this by exclaiming in climactic ecstasy: "Eternity
and everlastingness is my name." Notable it is that the
soul's cry of blissful salvation begins with
"I shall die". That its prospective "death" is
not foreseen as the cause of gloom or sorrow, but the first
step in his [Page 61] journey
to ineffable expansion of life, proves that the "death" in
contemplation is not the thing of evil hap and the end of existence.
One of the most
striking evidences of the presence of the lost sense of
the word "death" in the Bible, and apparently
a tell-tale evidence of the effort of early scribes to
suppress the esoteric intent of much of the Scriptures'
original text (mishandling of which has been freely admitted),
is to be found in verse nine of the famous fifty-third
chapter of Isaiah, called
by theologians "the Chapter of the Suffering Servant".
There we find the verse running in the ordinary Bible as follows: "And
he hath made his grave with the wicked and with the rich in
his death". A marginal
note is frank enough to tell us something that opens the door
to a most engaging surmise, in view of the issue involved.
It states that this final word
"death" was in the original Hebrew manuscripts in
the plural number! It read: ". . . in his deaths".
Would it ever occur to ordinary readers what insidious motive
might have inspired ancient translators to change this key
word from plural to singular? Hardly. Yet it stares one in
the face with glaring suggestion of theological duplicity.
Surely it is not difficult to envision the natural difficulty
a semi-instructed scribe — much more a totally ignorant
one — would
have in seeing how the word
"death" can have any rational meaning whatever in
the plural number, seeing that we die but once, — on
orthodox doctrinal presuppositions. It could be that some such
copyist or theologian, meeting the plural form of the word
and finding it hard to reconcile with sensible meaning, ended
by figuring it was a mistake, and summarily "corrected" it
by substituting the singular form. This is at least a charitable
view of the possibilities to account for the change. [Page
62]
But another is
possible. Astuter theological discernment, seeing with
dismay (after the third century) that the plural number
of the word "death"
would naturally betray its esoteric and only rational meaning
of multiple
incarnations, deemed it a holy subterfuge to remove all possibility of this
calamity by making it singular.
For in Christian
theology physical death can have no plural. It must be
some other "death" that can be pluralized. And this was doubtless known to
the few remaining esotericists in the Christian movement after the debacle of
ignorance in the third century, who saw that the verse would give away the then
discarded doctrine of reincarnation. Church polity had already decreed the
ousting of this too Pagan conception from formulated dogmas. The tell-tale
verse had to be made innocuous. "Death" had to be
kept singular.
But all too clearly
the lucid import of the plural form shines out.
"Deaths" could mean only repeated incarnations! In
one life the soul made its "grave" (of body) with
or among or in low and wicked people; in another it was cast
with the rich and the high of the earth. Hindu philosophy gives
expression to this very conception. In Sir Edwin Arnold's The
Light of Asia it is intimated that the entity that comes
in one life as a beggar "will come again a king".
Here in Christian Scriptures, pronounced to be true in every
word and syllable, was the too obvious reference to incarnation
as reincarnation. It dared not be permitted to stand. It had
to be concealed. The change to the singular did it.
Then there is
that perplexing statement in the Scriptures that "the
last enemy to be overcome is death". This, taken of course
in its assumed meaning of bodily decease, has led uncritical
and credulous minds to the weird expectation of an immortality
for the human being in the flesh. But this is not in the order
or plan of [Page
63] nature. The physical is to have no organic immortality.
Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of heaven.
What, then, it
is challenged, is the meaning? Simply that there will be
an end to the series of "deaths", meaning incarnations,
when the long course of experience in fleshly embodiments
on earth is finished and the soul becomes a pillar in the
mansions of divinity "to go no more out" into
mundane life in this cycle of cosmic evolution. This is surely
the overcoming of the last "enemy" of the soul's
advance. "Death" will
be swallowed up in the soul's crowning and consummative victory
in the last incarnation of the series.
The soul's residence
in the "darkness" of body being symbolized as
its "night-time", and the body's watery composition
earning it the allegorical designation as the "sea", luminous
clarification of vivid meaning flashes into the mind when one
contemplates the Revelation assertion
that at the day of evolutionary consummation, when the soul
has won the victory over the lower elements and returned to
spiritual heavens, "there shall be
no more night and no more sea".
It is instructive
to compare two passages, one from Egyptian literature and
the other from the third chapter of Revelation. In both
what is to be noticed is a sequence of three states, namely
life, to begin with, then death, and after that life again.
This is most revealing, as showing the eternal swing of the
pendulum between life and "death." First the Egyptian
verse. Says the soul in the script of the Ritual: "He
hath given me the beautiful Amenta (the underworld — this
earth) through which the living pass
from death to life". And in Revelation the
Logos proclaims: "I am he that liveth and was dead; and
behold I am alive for evermore", Life, "death" and
life again forever alternate in the cycles of the soul's eternal
journeying. [Page 64]
Empedocles speaks
of the cycles of generation. They he says, cause "the
living to pass into the dead".
And so it comes to that climactic utterance of the divine soul of man,
perhaps the most exultant outburst of holy rapture expressed in the Scriptures.
It is from Paul's immortal chapter on the Resurrection, the fifteenth of First
Corinthians. As the essay concludes with its unforgettable
rhapsody, the reader should take it deep into his own inner
consciousness as being the glad cry that will go ringing out
from his and our own lips as, finally triumphant over our last "enemies" of
sense and body, we shall go winging our way verily on pinions
of ecstasy back to the celestial home.
"So
when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption,
and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then
shall be brought to pass the saying that is written:
Death is swallowed up of victory. O grave, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?