Theosophy - The Lost Light- Part -1-of -5- by Alvin Boyd Kuhn
The
Lost Light- AN INTERPRETATION OF ANCIENT SCRIPTURES
Alvin
Boyd Kuhn
To
THE
MEMORY OF DR. ROBERT NORWOOD WHOSE CHARGE TO ME TO WRITE THIS BOOK
WAS AN IMPELLING AND SUSTAINING INSPIRATION TO THE TASK, THIS WORK IS AFFECTIONATELY
DEDICATED
CONTENTS
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PROLOGUE
I.
TRAGEDY DIES IN LAUGHTER
II.
ECCE HOMO - ECCE DEUS
III.
TRUTH CRUSHED TO EARTH
IV.
WISDOM HIDDEN IN A MYSTERY
V.
LOOSING THE SEVEN SEALS
VI.
THE DESCENT TO AVERNUS
VII.
COLONISTS FROM HEAVEN
VIII
- IN DURANCE VILE
IX.
ALIVE IN DEATH
X.
THE MUMMY IN AMENTA
XI.
DISMEMBERMENT AND DISFIGUREMENT
XII.
AMBROSIA AND NECTAR
XIII.
EARTH, WATER, AIR, FIRE
XIV.
FIRE ON HEAVEN’S HEARTH
XV.
NOXIOUS FUMES AND LURID FLAMES
XVI.
BAPTISM AT THE CROSSING
XVII.
THE ARK AND THE DELUGE
XVIII.
THE LAKE OF EQUIPOISE
XIX.
WEIGHED IN THE BALANCE
XX.
SUNS OF INTELLECT
XXI.
AT THE EAST OF HEAVEN
XXII.
SKYLARK AT HEAVEN’S GATE
PROLOGUE
Coming forth in a
day when theology has long been discredited - even in its own ecclesiastical
household - and religion itself is threatened with obliteration by rampant forces
hostile to it, this book aims to rehabilitate theology and to stabilize true
religion. It must be said at the very outset and with blunt insistence that
it is for religion and not in any way against it. It is written to establish
religion again as the cornerstone of human culture, when civilization has largely
turned away from it to seek elsewhere the guiding light. It is designed to redeem
Divine Theology from her outcast condition and place her again beside Philosophy
and Science on the throne in the kingdom of man’s mind.
It needs sharply
to be asseverated that the book is for religion because many will pronounce
it the most forthright attack on ecclesiastical doctrinism yet presented. It
can hardly be denied that it sweeps away almost the entire body of common acceptance
of biblical and theological meaning. But it makes no war on anything in religion
save the idiocies and falsities that have crept into the general conception
of orthodox belief. Finding the chief enemies of true religion were those within
her own gates, the book has had to address itself to the ungenerous task of
repudiating the whole untenable structure of accredited interpretation in order
to erect on the ground the lovely temple of ancient truth. If theology is to
be rescued from its forlorn state of intellectual disrepute into which not its
enemies but its friends have precipitated it through an unconscionable perversion
of its original significance to gross repulsiveness, the errors and distortions
perpetrated upon it by those of its own household must be ruthlessly dismantled.
Hence to many the book will seem like a devastating assault on the very citadel
of common religious preachment. In the face of all this it must be maintained
that the work is written to support and defend religion against all its foes
and that it is constructive and not destructive of true religious values at
every turn. It was no light or (Page 1) frivolous gesture to affront a settled
and rooted growth of beliefs and doctrinal statements that have been cherished
for centuries around the hearthstone of Christian culture and become hallowed
by age-long acceptance and the strong loves and loyalties inbred in sensitive
childhood. But it was seen to be a drastic operation quite necessary to save
the organism of religion itself from further decay and menacing death. Excrescences
of misconception and superstition had to be heroically cut out of the body of
theology and the calcareous incrustations of ignorant interpretation dissolved
and carried away by the acid stream of living truth flowing forth, after centuries
of suppression, from the mighty scriptures of the past.
The Western world
has too long and fatuously labored under the delusion that a pious and devout
disposition fulfills the whole requirement of true religion. Ancient sagacity
knew that piety without intelligence, or religion without philosophy, was insufficient
and dangerous. It knew that general good intent was not safe from aberrancy,
folly and fanaticism unless it was directed by the highest powers and resources
of the mind. And the mind itself had to be fortified with specific knowledge
of the nature of the cosmos and of man and the relation between the two. Following
the dictum of the sage, Hermes Trismegistus, that "the vice of a soul is ignorance,
the virtue of a soul is knowledge," the scriptures of old inculcated the precept
that with all man’s getting he must first get wisdom and understanding. These
were related to his well-being as health to his navel and marrow to his bones,
and would alone give him a crown of eternal life. They were pronounced more
precious than all the things that he could desire. The council of Illuminati
therefore laid down their systems of cosmology and anthropology, which have
become by immemorial tradition the Bibles of humanity, universally reverenced.
In them were given the ordinances of life, the constitution of the cosmos, the
laws governing both nature and mind. They still constitute the Magna Carta of
all human action guided by intelligence. For they were the first Institutes
embodying the Principia and Fundamenta of all moral behavior, the only true
chart and compass to guide human effort in a line of harmony with an overshadowing
divine plan of evolution for the Cosmos.
The corruption and
final loss of the basic meaning of these scriptures has been, in the whole of
time, the greatest tragedy in human (Page 2) history. Like Shakespeare’s tide,
which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune, but, omitted, casts all the
rest of life in shoals and quicksands, the wreckage of the Esoteric Gnosis in
the centuries following Plato’s day, culminating in the debacle of all philosophical
religion about the third century of Christianity’s development and ushering
in sixteen centuries of the Dark Ages, has thrown all religion out of basic
relation to true understanding and caused it to breed an endless train of evils,
fanaticisms, bigotries, idiosyncrasies, superstitions, wars and persecutions
that more than anything else blacken the record of man’s historic struggle toward
the light. The present (1940) most frightful of all historical barbarities owes
its incidence directly to the decay of ancient philosophical knowledge and the
loss of vision and virtue that would have attended its perpetuation.
What, then, must
be the importance of a book which restores to the scriptures of ancient wisdom
the lost light of their true original meaning?
In a very real and
direct way the salvation of culture and a free spirit in the world is contingent
upon this restoration of the ancient intelligence to modernity. For man at this
age has had new and mighty powers of nature suddenly placed in his hands, and
yet lacks the spiritual poise and sagacity to use them without calamity. Most
strangely, the control of the lower physical, natural or brute forces by the
mind or reason was the one central situation primarily and fundamentally dealt
with in the sage tomes of antiquity. To effect that control in a perfect balance
and harmony, and to train the reasoning intellect in the divine art of it, was
the aim and end of the Arcane Philosophy. Ideology in the Western world has
endlessly vacillated back and forth between the cult of the inner spirit and
engrossment in objective materialism. Ancient philosophy taught that the true
path of evolutionary growth was to be trodden by an effort that united the forces
of the spirit with those of the world, the lower disciplined by the higher.
The whole gist of the Esoteric Doctrine was the study and mastery of the powers
engaged in working out the evolutionary advance, so that the aspirant might
be able to align his cultural effort in consonance with the requirements of
the problem and the end to be achieved.
Without this guiding
data and this evolutionary perspective modern man is totally at a loss how to
focus his endeavor and is unable to point (Page 3) his direction in line with
anything more fixed and basic than his next immediate objective of apparent
desirability. He has neither a knowledge of his origin, a chart of his path,
an inventory of his capacities or a vision of his goal. Hence he travels the
long road still a benighted wanderer without compass. He can but recoil from
one mistaken plunge after another, learning sporadic lessons from pain and misfortune.
The ancient torch that was lighted for his guidance he has let burn out. This
lamp was the body of Ancient Philosophy. In this critical epoch in the life
of the world this book proclaims afresh the message of lost truth.
. .
. . . . .
Three ancient and
long-discredited sciences have had a surprising renaissance in popular fancy
and scientific interest: symbolism, alchemy, astrology. The last has particularly
come into a general vogue, but on a basis which still inclines conservative
positivism in science and scholarship to regard it as allied closely with "popular
superstition." In its predictive or "fortune-telling" aspect it is generally
looked at askance. But there is another side on which it has pertinence and
value that has not been recognized in the modern revival and on which perhaps
its most legitimate claim to consideration rests. This is its function as symbolic
theology. Unquestionably cosmic operation, cosmic significance, lie behind the
twelve constellations of the zodiac and the thirty-six or more other stellar
configurations. The planisphere or chart of the heavens was doubtless the first
of all Bibles, pictorially edited. Not quite simply and directly but intrinsically,
all Bibles are amplifications and elaborations of the original volume of ideography
first written on the open face of the sky, charted in the zodiac and heavenly
maps, and later transferred to earth and written in scrolls and parchments.
Man was instructed to fashion his new body of spiritual glory "after the pattern
of things in the heavens," the heavenly or zodiacal man. And a graph of the
structure and history of this celestial Personage was sketched by the enlightened
sages in the configurated star clusters. Zodiac comes from the Greek word zodion,
a small living image, signifying that it is a graph of the microcosmic life
of man, which is cast in the form of the macrocosmic life of the universe, or
of God. Man’s own small body is a replica of this body of God, made in its image
and likeness. The vast frame of Cosmic Man (Page 4) was outlined in the scroll
of the heavens, the solar systems and galaxies being living cell clusters in
his immense organism.
A deal of this adumbrative
symbology elucidating theological doctrinism is set forth in the body of the
present work. But there is a group of its data that strikes so deeply into the
heart of general theology that it is given here at the outset for the sake of
its overwhelming impressiveness. It must prove to be so conclusive an evidence
that Biblical theology rests more solidly than has ever been believed on zodiacal
backgrounds that its presentation will be admittedly a matter of great moment.
It traces the unsuspected significance of two of the twelve signs, Virgo and
Pisces, in the very heart of New Testament narrative. Let the reader picture
before him the ordinary zodiac, with the house of Virgo at the western equinox
point and that of Pisces directly opposite on the eastern side. The simple fact
that they stand six months apart will presently be seen to assume great importance
in Gospel determination.
The exposition must
begin with the puzzling and hitherto unexplained item of ancient religious myth,
that the Christs, the Sun-Gods, the Messiahs, all were depicted as having two
mothers. How, one asks, could there possibly be rational significance in this?
It has been put aside as just some more of the mythical rubbish and nonsense
of early Paganism. The profundity of pagan intelligence, hiding sublime cosmic
truth under glyph and symbol, has not been dreamed of.
The depiction should
not have created incredulity, seeing that the Gospel Jesus himself, dramatic
figure of the divine principle in man, announced it categorically in declaring
to Nicodemus that "ye must be born again." Nicodemus asks if this means that
we must enter a second time into our mother’s body and experience a second birth
in the natural manner. Jesus replies that we "must be born of water and the
spirit." Attention must be directed a moment to the fact that the Latin word
spiritus, translated "spirit" in many passages, means as well "air" or "breath."
One of the great keys to Bible meaning is the series of the four "elements"
of ancient mythicism: earth, water, air and fire. The body of the physical or
natural man was conceived as being composed of the two lower, earth and water,
while air and fire, representing mind and spirit, commingled to make the higher
or spiritual man. Jesus’ statement to Nicodemus, then, could have been rendered,
"born of water and air." And John the Baptist uses three of the (Page 5) four
elements when he states that he, the forerunner of the Christos, and therefore
a type of the lower natural man, indeed baptizes us with water (omitting earth),
but that there cometh after him one higher than himself who shall baptize us
with the holy spiritus (air) and with fire. Jesus thus affirms that we have
two births, necessitating two mothers, and John the Baptist adds that we must
have two baptisms.
Since man’s spirit
is an indestructible fragment of God’s own mighty Spirit, truly a tiny spark
of that cosmic Intelligence and Love which we call the Mind of God, the ancients
typified the divine element in man by fire and in contrast the lower or human
element by water. The fiery soul of man is housed in a tenement of flesh and
matter which is seven-eighths water by actual composition! The crossing of the
rivers and seas and the immersion of solar heroes in water in olden mythologies,
and the rite of baptism in theology, signified nothing beyond the fact of the
soul’s immersion in a physical body of water nature in its successive incarnations.
Now man is distinctly
a creature compounded of two natures, a higher and a lower, a spiritual and
a sensual, a divine and a human, a mortal and an immortal, and finally a fiery
and a watery, conjoined in a mutual relationship in the organic body of flesh.
Says Heraclitus: "Man is a portion of cosmic fire, imprisoned in a body of earth
and water." Speaking of man Plato affirms: "Through body it is an animal; through
intellect it is a god." To create man God incarnated the fiery spiritual principle
of his life in the watery confines of material bodies. That is the truest basic
description of man that anthropology can present. All problems spring from that
foundation and are referable for solution back to it.
Man is, then, a natural
man and a god, in combination. Our natural body gives the soul of man its baptism
by water; our nascent spiritual body is to give us the later baptism by fire!
We are born first as the natural man; then as the spiritual. Or we are born
first by water and then by fire. Of vital significance at this point are two
statements by St. Paul: "That was not first which is spiritual, but that which
is natural"; and, "First that which is natural, then that which is spiritual."
Again he says: "For the natural man comprehendeth not the things of the spirit
of God, neither can he." Of course not; for he is not yet in that higher kingdom
of evolution, and he must be transformed, transfigured, lifted up into a superior
world of consciousness before (Page 6) he can cognize spiritual things. Evolution
will thus transform him, and nothing else will.
Using astrological
bases for portraying cosmic truths, the ancients localized the birth of the
natural man in the zodiacal house of Virgo and that of the spiritual man in
the opposite house of Pisces. These then were the houses of the two mothers
of life. The first was the Virgin Mother (Virgo), the primeval symbol of the
Virgin Mary thousands of years B.C. Virgo gave man his natural birth by water
and became known as the Water-Mother; Pisces (the Fishes by name) gave him his
birth by the Fish and was denominated the Fish-Mother. The virgin mothers are
all identified with water as symbol and their various names, such as Meri, Mary,
Venus (born of the sea-foam), Tiamat, Typhon and Thallath (Greek for "sea")
are designations for water. On the other side there are the Fish Avatars of
Vishnu, such as the Babylonian Ioannes, or Dagon, and the Assyrian goddess Atergatis
was called "the Fish-Mother." Virgo stood as the mother of birth by water, or
the birth of man the first, of the earth, earthy; Pisces stood as the mother
of birth by spirit or fire, or the birth of man the second, described by St.
Paul as "the Lord from heaven." Virgo was the water-mother of the natural man,
Pisces the fish-mother of the spiritual man."
There must now be
brought out an unrevealed significance of the fish symbol in the zodiac and
in mythical religion. It is of astonishing import. Water is the type of natural
birth because all natural birth proceeds in and from water. All first life originated
in the sea water. The fish is a birth in and from the water, and it stands patently
as the generic type of organic life issuing out of inorganic! The fish typifies
life embodied in a physical organic structure. Organic life is born out of the
water, and is the first birth, child of the water-mother. And if organic life
is in turn to become mother, its child will be mind and spiritual consciousness,
son of the fish-mother! In brief, water is the mother of natural physical being,
and organic structure becomes the later mother of divine mind.
Now, strangely enough,
water is the type of another thing which is still more germinal of life, namely,
matter. Matter is the virgin mother of all life in the aboriginal genesis. All
things are generated in the womb of primordial matter, the "old genetrix" of
Egyptian mythology. And it is by a consideration of the nature of matter and
its evolution (Page 7) that we are enabled to arrive at last at the true meaning
of the double motherhood of life. For oddly enough, matter is seen to exist
in two states, in each of which it becomes mother of life, at two different
levels. Primordial matter, the sea of (to us) empty space, is the first mother
of all living forms. This is the primal "abyss of the waters" in Genesis. The
Latin word for "mother" is our very word "matter," with one "t" left out--mater.
And how close to mater is water! And organic structure is the second mother,
parent of spiritual mind.
The ancient books
always grouped the two mothers in pairs. They were called "the two mothers"
or sometimes the "two divine sisters." Or they were the wife and sister of the
God, under the names of Juno, Venus, Isis, Ishtar, Cybele or Mylitta. In old
Egypt they were first Apt and Neith; and later Isis and Nephthys. Massey relates
Neith to "net," i.e., fishnet! Clues to their functions were picked up in the
great Book of the Dead: "Isis conceived him; Nephthys gave him birth." Or: "Isis
bore him; Nephthys suckled him," or reared him. The full sense of these statements
was not discerned until they were scrutinized in the light of another key sentence
which matched them: "Heaven conceived him; the Tuat brought him forth." With
this came the flash of clear insight into the mystery. For that which is to
eventuate in the cycles of evolution as divine mind in an organic creature-man
is aboriginally conceived by divine ideation in the innermost depths of Cosmic
Consciousness, or in the purely noumenal world, or again in the bosom of Infinite
Spirit, where Spirit is identical with pure undifferentiated matter. This is
mirrored in the Egyptian statement that Isis conceived him. Matter in its invisible,
inorganic state was the womb of the first conception. Isis is virgin, i.e.,
pure matter, or matter sublimated to spiritual tenuity. The Tuat, on the other
hand, is really earth, as the type of physical matter, or matter organic, aggregated
into substantial forms, called by us physical matter. It is matter as substance,
constituted and existent in the visible world in structural forms. Isis was
matter subsistent as empty space, and Nephthys was atomic matter, constituent
of visible structural forms. The physical worlds which we must now think of
as floating in the sea of empty space like fish in the water, are the second
form of matter, and their organic bodies of substantial matter give birth to
the Logoi in the solar systems and to the Christos in man. So divine spirit
is conceived in the womb of Isis, the first universal mother, and brought to
birth in the womb of (Page 8) Nephthys, the second mother, the immediate incubator
and gestator of its manifest expression. One might paraphrase this situation
by saying that a human child is first conceived in the love, or mind, of its
parents, and later born from the womb of its physical mother. Thus life has
two births and must of necessity have two mothers. Life is spiritually conceived
and materially born. Or, man may be said to be born as a natural creature from
spirit into matter, and born later as a spiritual god when he emerges from his
baptism in the water of the body and reenters the bosom of his Father. Or, finally,
he is born first as man, by water; and reborn later as god, by fire. And the
first birth was depicted as taking place on the western side of the zodiac,
in the house or womb of the Virgin Mother, Virgo, because in the west the sun,
universal symbol of spiritual fire, descended into organic matter in its setting,
or incarnation. So man is born as natural man on the west, to be regenerated
as spiritual man on the east. Spirit’s descent on the west makes it man; its
resurrection on the east, like the summer sunrise, makes it deity again. This
is the death and resurrection of the god in all religions. It is incarnation
and return to spirit. It is the descent of the Messiah into Egypt and his exodus
back to Canaan.
Further scrutiny
of such data brings to light links of connection with the Bible. The chief one
is found in the symbol of bread in connection with both Virgo and Pisces. Pisces
is the house of the Fishes by name, but it is not commonly known that Virgo
in astrological symbology was the house of Bread. This is indicated by several
items of ancient typology. Many centuries ago in the precession of the equinoxes,
the end of the year was marked by the position of the great Dog-Star Sirius,
mighty celestial symbol of the divinity in man. Precisely at midnight of December
24 it stood on the meridian line from the zenith to Egypt. At the same moment
there arose on the eastern horizon the constellation of the Virgin, bearing
in her left arm the Christ child, symbol of the Christhood coming to function
in man, and in her right hand the great star Spica (Latin, a head, or "spike"
of wheat), symbol of that same divinity coming as celestial food for man. It
must ever be remembered that the Gospel Jesus told us we had virtually to eat
his body as food, and drink his blood, if we would inherit eternal life. So
typism represented him as coming in the form of man, the babe Christ, and as
food for man, the wheat. John speaks of the Christ principle in the words: "This
is that bread which came (Page 9) down from heaven, that if a man eat of it
he shall hunger no more." Jesus broke a loaf into fragments and gave to his
disciples, saying that it was his body, broken for them.
We now have Virgo
established as the house of Bread and Pisces as the house of Fish. But the characterization
of the two houses must be brought along to a more specific evolutionary reference.
What are these "houses," thus delineated? They are, as at first, the two states
of matter, but now to be taken in immediate reference to the life of man on
earth. They are in the final stage of the meaning man’s body itself, which consists
of matter in both its invisible and its visible forms. For man has a natural
body and a spiritual body. Man’s body itself houses the two mothers. The body
is this double house of Bread and of Fish.
And the next link
is seen when it is considered that this physical body is for the soul the house
of death and in its regenerative phase, the house of rebirth. It is the house
into which the spirit descends to its partial obscuration in the darkness of
the grave of matter, into the night of death, or incarnation, out of which it
is to arise in a new birth or resurrection on the opposite side of the cycle.
A significant passage from the Book of the Dead recites: "Who cometh forth from
the dusk, and whose birth is in the house of death"--referring to the incarnating
soul. In a spiritual sense the soul "dies" on entering the body in incarnation,
but has a new birth in it as it later resurrects from it. The body is therefore
the house of his death and rebirth, or the place of his crucifixion and resurrection.
And the Egyptians
had a name for the body as the locus of these transformations, which carry the
central meaning of all theologies. This name now rises out of the dim mists
of ancient Egyptian books to enlighten all modern Bible comprehension. This
city of the body, where the sun of soul sank to its death on the cross of matter,
to rearise in a new birth, was called the city of the sun, or in Greek, Heliopolis,
but in the Egyptian, ANU. The name was given to an actual Egyptian city, where
the rites of the death, burial and resurrection of Osiris or Horus were enacted
each year; but the name bore a theological significance before it was given
to a geographical town.
The name is obviously
made up of NU, the name for the mother heaven, or empty space, or abyss of nothingness,
and Alpha privative, meaning, as in thousands of words, "not." A-NU would then
mean (Page 10) "not-nothingness," or a world of concrete actuality, the world
of physical substantial manifestation. Precisely such a world it is in which
units of virginal consciousness go to their death and rise again. A-NU is then
the physical body of man on earth. The soul descends out of the waters of the
abyss of the NUN, or space in its undifferentiated unity, which is the sign
and name of all things negative. The NUN is indeed our "none." Life in the completeness
of its unity is negative. To become positively manifest it must differentiate
itself into duality, establish positive-negative tension, and later split up
into untold multiplicity. This brings out the significance of the Biblical word
"multiply." Life can not manifest itself in concrete forms until it multiplies
itself endlessly. Unit life of deity must break itself up into infinite fragments
in order to fill empty space with a multitude of worlds and beings of different
natures. The primal Sea or Mother must engender a multitudinous progeny, to
spawn the limitless shoals of organic fish-worlds. This is the meaning of the
promise given to Abraham, that his seed should multiply till it filled the earth
with offspring countless as the sands of the seashore. And if life was symboled
by bread, as the first birth, and by fish, as the second, then we might expect
to find in old religious typology the allegory of a Christ figure multiplying
loaves and fishes! Are we surprised to find that the Gospel Jesus does this
very thing, multiplying the fish loaves and two small fishes to feed a multitude!
This is astonishing
enough in all conscience, but it yields in wonder to the next datum of Comparative
Religion which came to our notice as a further tie between the Bible and antecedent
Egyptian mythology. Who can adequately measure the seriousness of the challenge
which this item of scholarship presents to Gospel historicity? For a discovery
of sensational interest came to light when a passage was found in the Book of
the Dead which gave to Anu the characteristic designation, "the place of multiplying
bread"! Here in the long silent tomes of old Egypt was found the original, the
prototype, of the miracle of the loaves and the fishes in the Gospels of Christianity.
And a meaning never before apprehended had to be read into this New Testament
wonder. At last we were instructed to catch in the miracle the sense that the
physical body, as A-NU, was the place where the corpus of the Christ’s deific
power was broken into an infinite number of fragments and distributed out among
a multitude of creatures, enhungered after (Page 11) a three-days’ fast, or
deprivation of the food of spiritual life in their sojourn in the three kingdoms,
the mineral, vegetable and animal, before reaching the plane of mind. Here are
all the elements of the inner meaning of the Christian Eucharist: the broken
but multiplied fragments of the body of the god, distributed to feed hungry
humanity. And as humanity is composed of twelve groups of divine conscious units,
there were gathered up twelve baskets of fragments! And this episode of the
Christ’s ostensible life is found to be Egyptian in origin and meaning and symbolic
in character!
But new implications
arise and lead us on to more startling disclosures. The Hebrews came along and
appropriated Egyptian material. They picked up the name ANU and fitting it back
into its zodiacal setting as Virgo, they called it the "house of Bread." This
required their adding to ANU their word for "house," which, as anyone knows,
is Beth. This yields us Beth-Anu. Now it is a fact of common philological knowledge
that the ancient Greek and Egyptian "U" is rendered as "Y" when the words are
brought over into English. The "U" became a "Y," and Beth-Anu now stands before
us as the Bethany of the Gospels! Bethany is thus just the sign of Virgo, as
the "house of Bread," the home of the great star Spica, the head of wheat!
But let us say "house
of Bread" in ordinary Hebrew. What further astonishment strikes us here, as
we find it reads Beth-Lehem (Lechem, Lekhem), for lechem, lekhem, is bread in
everyday Hebrew. The Christ was born in Bethany or Bethlehem, the astrological
"house of Bread." (Later it seems that the two signs, Virgo and Pisces, and
their symbols, bread and fish, were almost interchangeably confused or commingled
in the symbolic imagery. This was natural, since the two signs represented the
same body of man in its two aspects of dying and being reborn, and the two processes
are confusedly interblended.)
If Pisces is then
the "house" in which the Christ in man comes to his birth, it is pertinent to
ask if there are evidences in the Bible or Christianity that Jesus was colored
with the fish typology. Here we encounter material enough to provide another
nine-days’ wonder. For we find the Gospel Jesus marked with many items of the
Piscean symbology. He picks his twelve disciples from the ranks of fishermen
(in Egypt they were as well carpenters, reapers, harvesters, sailors, rowers,
builders, masons, potters, etc.); he told Peter to find the gold in the fish’s
mouth; he performed the miraculous draught of fishes; (Page 12) he declared
that he would make them "fishers of men." In the catacombs under Rome the symbol
of the two fishes crossed was displayed on the Christ’s forehead, at his feet,
or on a plate on the altar before him. And the Romans for several centuries
dubbed the early Christians Pisciculi, or "Little Fishes," members of the "fish-cult."
And the Greeks denominated the Gospel Jesus as Ichthys, the Fish. All this fish
symbolism can not be explained away as sheer incident material. It is the product
of ancient custom, which figured the Christs under the symbolism of the reigning
sign of the zodiac, according to the precession of the equinoxes.
And yet another surprising
correlation comes to view. The Christ, as it has here been delineated, is the
offspring or creation of a conception of deific Mind, first in the inner bosom
of spiritual matter, then in organic bodily structure. Primeval space, we have
seen, was called in Egypt the NUN, or the Waters of the Nun. All Bible students
recognize a familiar ring in the phrase "Joshua, Son of Nun." But so far has
ignorance and obscurantism gone with its deadly work in Christian literalism
that hardly anyone knows with definiteness that Joshua is just a variant name
for Jesus. The phrase is actually written in some old documents as "Jesus, Son
of Nun." At any rate Joshua is just Jesus, no less. So here is the Christ, called
Jesus, son of the aboriginal space, or the NUN. But the wonder increases when
we turn to the Hebrew alphabet and find that while "M" is called and spelled
"Mem" and means "water," "N" is called and spelled "Nun" and means - of all
things--"Fish"! Jesus, then, is son of Pisces, the Fish-sign, as he indeed is
in the Gospels themselves.
And Horus, the Egyptian
Christ, who is identical with the Jesus of the Gospels in some one hundred and
eighty particulars, performed at Anu a great miracle. He raised his father Osiris
from the dead, calling unto him in the cave to rise and come forth. Anu, as
we have seen, became Bethany of the Gospels; and it was at Bethany that Jesus
raised Lazarus from death! And who was Lazarus? Here the greatest of all the
marvels in this chain of comparative data unfolds under our eyes. According
to Budge and other eminent Egyptologists the ancient designation of Osiris was
ASAR. But the Egyptians invariably expressed reverence for deity by prefixing
the definite article "the" to the names of their Gods. Just as Christians say,
or should say, the Christ, they said: the Osiris. It will be found that the
article connoted deity in (Page 13) ancient usage. Our definite article, "the"
is the root of the Greek word theos, God; the Spanish article, masculine, "el,"
is the Hebrew word for God; and the Greek masculine article, "ho," is a Chinese
word for deity. To say the Osiris was equivalent to saying Lord Osiris. When
the Hebrews took up the Egyptian phrases and names they converted the name of
"the Osiris" or "Lord Osiris" directly into their own vernacular, and the result
was "El-Asar." Later on the Romans, speaking Latin, took up the same material
that had come down from revered Egyptian sources and to "El-Asar" they added
the common Latin termination of the second declension masculine nouns, in which
most men’s names ended, namely, "-us"; and the result was now "El-Asar-us."
In time the initial "E" wore off, as the scholars phrase it, and the "s" in
Asar changed into its sister letter "z," leaving us holding in our hands the
Lazarus whom Jesus raised at Bethany! To evidence that this derivation is not
a fanciful invention or sheer coincidence the Biblical names of High Priests
may be cited. We find one with the name of El(e)azar and another by name Azar-iah,
"iah" or "jah" being suffixes of great deific connotation, matching "el." And
so we are faced with the irrefutable evidence of Comparative Religion that Jesus’
raising of Lazarus at Bethany is but a rescript of the old Egyptian dramatic
mystery in which Horus, the Christ, raised his "dead" father Osiris, or El-Asar-us
from the grave. And the Egyptian recital was in the papyri perhaps 5000 years
B.C.
Also at the Egyptian
scene were present the two divine sisters, Isis and Nephthys. An old source-name
for Isis was Meri, basic for the Latin mare, the sea. The Egyptian plural of
Meri was Merti. In Latin feminine form this became Mertae. In Hebrew it resolved
into what was rendered in English as Martha. So even in the ancient Egyptian
transaction there were present the two Maries, or Mary and Martha, the sisters
of Lazarus!
All this sets the
stage for the crowning item in the correspondence. In the Gospel drama John
the Baptist bears the character of the firstborn or natural man, coming first
to prepare the ground or make straight the path for the advent of the spiritual
man or Lord Christ. He would therefore stand as the son of the water-mother,
Virgo, and under the astrological symbolism would be born at the autumn equinox,
or in his mother’s house. On the other side of the cycle of descent and resurrection
Jesus, the Christos, would be the son of the (Page 14) fish-mother, and would
be born in his mother’s house, Pisces. These houses are six months apart astrologically.
The whole edifice of Gospel historicity trembles under the impact of the strange
dramatic circumstance, given in Luke, that the annunciation to Mary of her impregnation
by the Holy Ghost came when John the Baptist was six months in Elizabeth’s womb.
The natural man, having covered the "six months" between his birth and the date
of his quickening into spiritual status in the evolutionary cycle, was thus
quickened, or leaped in his mother’s womb, when the time for the birth, or advent,
of the spiritual Christ had arrived. The water baptism was to be consummated
with the fire baptism. And Justin Martyr adds an item left out of the Gospels,
that at the baptism of Jesus by John, a fire was kindled in the waters of the
Jordan!
St. Paul declares
that we come to birth spiritually only as we die carnally, which means that
the quantum of divine character in us grows in proportion as the quantum of
raw nature declines. As the spiritual man, Jesus, son of Nun, the fish, increases,
the natural man, John, son of Virgo, the Water, must decrease. Astrologically,
as a constellation or star sinks below the horizon in the west, its opposite
constellation would be rising in the east. As John, type of the natural first
birth, went down, Jesus, type of the spiritual second birth, rose on the world.
And, says John the Baptist: "I must decrease as he must increase"!
. .
. . . . .
On the analogy, might
one venture to predict that a new day of brotherhood in human society may be
about to dawn, as the "six months’" reign of a degrading literal interpretation
of the Sacred Scriptures goes down to desuetude and the daystar of a transfiguring
spiritual interpretation rises in the east? (Page 15)
Chapter
1
TRAGEDY
DIES IN LAUGHTER
Little could the
ancient mythologists and sages have foreseen that the "fabulous narrations"
which their genius devised to cloak high truth would end by plaguing the mind
of the Western world with sixteen centuries of unconscionable stultification.
They could not possibly imagine that their allegorical constructions to dramatize
spiritual truth would so miscarry from their hidden intent as to cast the mental
life of half the world for ages under the cloud of the most grotesque superstition
known to history. Nor could they have dreamed that the gross blindness and obtuseness
of later epochs would cite these same marvelously ingenious portrayals as the
evidence of childish crudity on the part of their formulators. Who could have
suspected that a body of the most signal instrumentalities for conveying and
preserving deep knowledge ever devised by man would become the means of centuries
of mental enslavement?
Nothing more clearly
evidences the present age’s loss of fixed moorings in philosophical truth than
the inconsistency of its attitudes toward the sacred scriptures of antiquity.
The general mind, indoctrinated by priestcraft, regards them as infallible revelations
and holds them as fetishes, which it were a sacrilege to challenge; while theological
scholarship hedges from pious veneration of them over to outright skepticism
of their divine origin, swinging more recently to a view which takes them to
be the simple conceptions of men just emerging from cave and forest barbarism.
The character of divine dictation and absolute wisdom assigned to them on the
one thesis has yielded to that of ignorant speculation of primitive folk on
the other. That there is a possible truer characterization of them lying midway
between the extravagances of these two extreme views has not seemed to come
through to intelligence at any time. It has not occurred to students of religion
that ancient scripts are the work neither of Supreme Deity on the one (Page
17) side, nor of groping infantile humanity on the other, but that their production
must be sought in a region intermediate between the two. They came neither from
supernal Deity nor from common humanity, but from humanity divinized! They were
the output of normal humans graduating to divine or near-divine status, St.
Paul’s "just men made perfect." Their divinity is therefore not transcendent
and exotic, and their humanity is not crude and doltish. They bear the marks,
therefore, of human sagacity exalted to divine mastership.
When a student graduates
creditably from a college he is presumed to have acquired a mastery over the
field of knowledge covered in his course. Human life is a school, and why should
not its graduates be presumed to have gained mastery over the range of knowledge
which it covers, and to be able to write authoritatively upon it? Humans must
at some time attain the goal, the prize of the high calling of God in Christly
illumination, the crown of glorious intelligence. Life’s school issues no diploma
of graduation without attainment, for the graduation is the attainment. We have
here the ground for the only sane acceptance of the ancient scriptures as books
of accredited wisdom. We are neither asked to believe them inscribed by the
finger of omnipotent Deity, nor forced to attribute them to the undeveloped
brains of primitives. They can be seen as the products of the sage wisdom garnered
by generations of men who had finally risen to clear understanding. They are
the literary heritage bequeathed by men grown to the stature of divinity. Their
veneration by the world for long centuries, even carried to the extreme of outrageous
sycophancy, attests an indestructible tradition of their origination from sources
accredited as divine and infallible. Their successful hold on the popular mind
for many ages bespeaks also the unshakable foundations of their wisdom. They
have withstood consistently the test of generations of human experience. Their
wisdom holds against life; it rings true. And it is all the more precious to
us because of its authorship by men of our own evolution, since thereby it does
not miss immediate pertinence to our life.
Both the conventional
views of Bible authorship have militated against the possible high service of
the scriptures to mankind. The theory of their divine dictation to "holy men
of old" has led to the abject surrender of the rational mind before their impregnable
fortress of direct assertion, its hypnotization by a fetish, and the crippling
of its native energies. The theory of their production by early crudity tends
(Page 18) to the disparagement of the value and validity of their message. The
other view here advanced preserves their venerated authority while it brings
their authorship from alleged Cosmic Divinity back to men of earth. It saves
us from the fatuous claim that "God" took time out to dictate a volume of absolute
verity for the inhabitants of a minor planet amongst millions of trillions of
such worlds. Relieving us of the necessity of asserting that Supreme Deity went
into the book publishing business on this globe and took advantage of his commanding
position to write the planet’s "best seller," it preserves mental integrity
by enabling us to assign scriptural authorship to human agency, where alone
it is acceptable. It is understandable that evolved men, with vision opened
to knowledge of the laws of life, would indite sage tomes for the enlightenment
of those less advanced. In any case the Bibles are here; they must be accounted
for. The phenomenon of their existence among the nations, their hoary age, their
escape from destruction through the centuries, the ineradicable tradition of
their divine origin and authority, their almost universal veneration, must all
find some factual ground of explanation. The theory offered in refutation of
the two conventional ones seems the only one that provides such a rational and
acceptable basis. And since the belief in their sacredness generally persists,
it can not be regarded as less than momentous that the world should know of
a surety that, while these revered relics are not the voice of the personified
Cosmos, neither are they the mere speculative romancing of cavemen or scholastics.
They are the sure word of perfected wisdom.
There was a time,
then, in early human history, when enlightened men possessed true knowledge,
the passport to wisdom. Clear and concise answers to the profoundest problems
of philosophy were known. In so far as the human intellectual faculty is capable
of it, an understanding of the mystery and riddle of life itself and the laws
of its evolutionary unfolding, was achieved by men who, as Hermes says, had
been "reborn in mind." Philosophy was no mere "speculative enterprise," or tilting
at logical windmills; it was a statement of the fundamental archai, or basic
principles, of the science of being. It formed the groundwork for the elevation
of theology to its true place as the King of Sciences, or the Kingly Science.
Together philosophy and theology held the throne in the mental life of mankind;
and justly so, for a reason which modern thought would do well to consider:
they must ever be the ultimate science because they motivate finally the use
we (Page 19) make of all other sciences! They hold final answers to all life’s
problems. They are the determination of all human action in the end. They alone
can direct man finally to the path of good, for by no other means can he learn
to know what constitutes the good. The sore need of the world today is the restoration
of philosophy, to supply the proper motivation and end of action.
Though zealously
guarded from the unworthy by its accredited custodians, knowledge was extant
in the ancient day. Modern zeal for publicity finds it hard to understand why
it was so sedulously kept esoteric. Briefly - for the full reason is a lengthy
matter - a thing so precious, the distillation of ages of experience and the
deposit of many lives of painful earning, could not be given out loosely to
the undisciplined rabble to be violated and despoiled. Yet it was withheld from
no worthy aspirant. No bars of bigotry or persecution interdicted its free culture.
The Societies in which it was secretly pursued were honored by kings and the
populace alike.
That halcyon age
passed, that priceless legacy of knowledge was threatened with extinction, its
pursuit was forbidden, its devotees assailed and exterminated; and for more
than fifteen centuries the Occidental world has muddled through its age-to-age
existence in nearly total ignorance of the fact that antiquity held, in its
philosophy and theology, an adequate answer to the great interrogatory, the
Sphinx riddle of human life.
The gift and then
the loss of primal wisdom are the two most momentous events in human history.
This age will be spectator to the third most significant event - the Renaissance
of Ancient Culture. The plans of demigods and divine men, interrupted for fifteen
centuries of the Dark Ages, will move forward again toward destined goals.
This age faces the
denouement of a drama the like of which has not been unrolled in world history
before and will hardly be repeated in aeons. Tragedy and comedy being copiously
admixed in mortal existence, the astounding spectacle to which the world will
shortly awake will exhibit untold calamity and the ludicrous conjoined in incredible
fashion. We are destined soon to pass from a stunning sense of tragic loss to
a world-echoing burst of laughter. The sting of our realization of our duo-millennial
loss will melt away under the dawning recognition of our previous unbelievable
stupidity. We are in a little time to be made acutely aware of a situation that
will become the butt of hollow (Page 20) mirth for ages to come. Other egregious
follies of history can be accepted or extenuated to the point of being condoned
and forgotten. But this colossal ineptitude, prolonged over sixteen centuries,
can not escape being laughed at for centuries more. A joke owes its character
to the miscarriage of the intended sense into something ludicrously different.
This denouement will stand as the historical joke of the ages. No less than
this quantity of hilarity can balance the weight of the tragedy which loads
the joke at the other end. For the ludicrously different direction in which
the intended sense of the great mythical religions and dramatic rituals of the
past took its perverted course entailed as a consequence the greatest of all
historical tragedies,--the frightful chapter of religious bigotry and persecution.
This worst of all forms of man’s inhumanity to man was bred out of the miscarriage
of the concealed meaning of the ancient spiritual myth. The transaction carried
the form of a joke, but it also carried the substance of the most appalling
terrorism in history. And this most calamitous of all blunders was the mistaking
of religious myth, drama and allegory for veridical history!
The promise of our
coming awakening lies in the progress made and to be made in the study of Comparative
Religion, Comparative Mythology and Comparative Philology. What they will ere
long make clear to us beyond further dispute is the almost unthinkable fact
that for sixteen centuries the best intelligence of the West took the ancient
sages’ Books of Wisdom, which were in all cases the spiritual dramatizations
of the experience of the human soul on earth, for objective historical narratives.
The spectacle that will soon throw a world first into wonder, confusion and
dismay, and then into clownish laughter, is that of a civilization covering
one third of the globe, and boasting itself as the highest in culture in the
historical period, all the while taking its moral and spiritual guidance for
an aeon from a Book or Books, of the true content and meaning of which it never
for a moment has had the slightest inkling.
The superior knowledge
vouchsafed from early graduates in life’s school to disciplined pupils in the
Mysteries of old was transmitted from generation to generation by oral teaching
and preserved only in memory. But later, lest it be lost or corrupted, it was
consigned to writing. Hence came the Sacred Books, Scriptures, Holy Writ, of
antiquity. So highly were they held in the esteem of early men that when in
(Page 21) later days their true origin and character had been forgotten, they
were exalted to the position of veritable fetishes and assigned a quite preternatural
source and rating. Regarded as books of superhuman intelligence, men have in
face of them practically set in abeyance their human reason and bowed to them
as the oracles of absolute Truth. This was natural and to a degree inevitable.
But it spelled catastrophe to the general mental life of man by fixing upon
him the basest hypnotization in all the annals of record, when a literal and
historical, instead of a purely spiritual and typical interpretation of the
books was broadcast to general acceptance. The evidence is mountain high that
the taking of ancient ritual dramas and scriptural myths for objective history
and the figures in them for human persons has been the fountain source of the
most abject corruption of man’s mental forces since the race began.
In mechanical exploit
this is an age of marvel, and credit for this type of achievement should not
be withheld. In study of life and its objective powers it has labored with wondrous
accomplishment. In psychological delving into deeper phases of consciousness
it has begun a pursuit long neglected. But in religion and philosophy it is
one of the blindest of ages. It is not overstating the case to say that in these
areas of human enterprise the mind of this era still slumbers in a state of
ineptitude and gross darkness at least a degree or two below that commonly termed
barbaric. At this moment the common mentality of the day, led and fed by a compactly
institutionalized ecclesiastical power, stands committed to ideas as to the
origin, structure, meaning and destiny of life which have not been surpassed
in crudity and chimerical absurdity by the tribes of the forest and the sea
isles. Conceptions in theology having to do with basic realities of man’s relation
to the universe are still presented in pulpits, Sunday Schools and Theological
Seminaries which the uncorrupted native intelligence of children of eight and
ten years shrinks from or accepts with startled dismay,--to the subsequent confusion
of their whole mental integrity. A "scheme" of explanation of cosmic processes
and world design, of human and angelic relations, of the plan and purport of
life itself, is advanced for popular acceptance, yet is grotesque to common
sense and fantastic to rational thought. Philosophy and religion are still propagated
on the basis of a theology that is received without understanding by the "common
people," entirely repudiated by the intelligentsia and brazenly (Page 22) dissembled
by the very priesthood that lips its cantos and its oracles from Sunday to Sunday.
In sum it can be said without the remotest possibility of successful dispute
that the general grasp of the mind of this age on philosophical verity and the
truth of life, as proffered by orthodox religionism, is still steeped in the
crassest forms of dark superstition. And this has been due to the miscarriage
of ancient symbolism.
History would seem
to present a pattern of retrogressive current if it can be shown that this late
epoch grovels in a mire of semi-barbaric philosophical grossness from which
a former period was free. Degeneracy must have set in at some distant time and
swept onward to this day. And such a phenomenon must have had its due cause.
A great work of a learned author some years ago pointed to the approaching "decline
of the West." What has not been seen, however, is that the West has long been
in decline, is at a low stage of decay, and has not risen out of the murks of
the Dark Ages. This has come in the wake of causes long operative in the world
situation, which have been overlooked or failed of discovery through an egregious
obscuration of the vision of scholars since the early centuries. And if this
failure of insight is not to be attributed to stupidity that is in itself beyond
understanding, then it becomes necessary for the historian of these things to
posit for it another cause, one that casts the dark shadow of sinister motive
over the whole course of that historical enterprise in which sinister motive
is of all places most unpardonable. Corruption in politics or in economic or
social life can be understood in relation to the imperfection of human nature,
and in a measure pardoned. But designed corruption in religion is shattering
to the very foundations of human aspiration. It shocks and paralyzes fundamental
urges to sincerity. It weights the human spirit with the hopelessness of its
effort to conquer imperfection. Dishonesty and insincerity in worldly dealings
may entail disaster of greater or minor degree. In religion they are never less
than fatal. There is one domain in which untruth is insupportable, that field
of the human soul’s endeavor of which Truth is the very substance and being,--religion.
Whether stupidity
or sinister design prove to have been the cause of the loss of true original
meaning must be left to the historical sequel to disclose. And whether the cause
of the perpetuation of rank superstition in the present day of alleged enlightenment
is to be laid at the door of ignorance or knavery or a combination of both,
must likewise (Page 23) be determined as time moves on. It is certain that both
the primal and the present causes of nescience are kindred, if not identical.
It is the purpose
of the present volume to set forth to the modern mind the extent of the wreckage
which splendid ancient wisdom suffered at the hands of later incompetence. And
it is designed to accomplish this by setting up the sharp contrast between the
present disfigurement and the past glory of the structure. This purpose entails
the task of revealing for the first time the hidden meaning of the body of archaic
scriptures by means of a clear and lucid interpretation of their myths and allegories,
fables and dramas, astrological pictographs and numerological outlines. It will
be at once seen to be a labor of no mean proportions to convert the entire mass
of antique mythology and legend, Biblical graph and cryptogram, from presumed
childish nonsense into an organic corpus of transcendent scientific significance.
It involves the reversal of that mental process which in the days of early Christianity
operated to change myth and allegory in the first instance over to factual history.
As third century ignorance converted mythical typology to objective history,
the task is now to convert alleged objective history back to mythology, and
then to interpret it as enlightened theology. The almost insuperable difficulty
of the project will consist in demonstrating to an uncomprehending world, mistaught
for centuries and now fixed in weird forms of fantastic belief, that the sacred
scriptures of the world are a thousand times more precious as myths than as
alleged history. It can only be done by showing that as myths they illumine
and exalt the mind to unparalleled clarity, while as assumed history they are
either nonsensical or inconsequential. But centuries of erroneous indoctrination
have so warped and victimized the modern mind that the effort to restore the
scriptures to their primal mythical status will be met with the objection that
the transaction will wipe the Bible and other sacred literature out of the realm
of value altogether. In the common mind this would be to rob them of worth and
significance utterly. So wretchedly has the ancient usage of the religious myth
been misunderstood that the cry, "the Bible only a myth!", will fall upon the
popular ear with all the catastrophic force and finality of the tolling of a
death knell. And no statement that words can phrase will stand as a more redoubtable
testimony to the correctness of this estimate of the present stupefaction of
modern intelligence concerning religious philosophy than just this reaction.
(Page 24) Ridicule, contempt and flat rejection will be the greeting accorded
the proclamation that Biblical myth is truer and more important than Biblical
history. Our book aims at nothing less than the full proof of this contention.
It flies directly in the face of the awaiting scorn of common opinion on the
point at issue. Yet nothing is easier than to demonstrate that Bible material
taken as history is the veriest nonsense. Anyone with an analytic mind and an
imagination to convert its narratives into realism can make it a laughingstock.
The Voltaires, Paines, Ingersols and the freethinkers have done this successfully
enough. But having disproved it as history, they have not redeemed it as spiritual
mythology. The world awaits this work of interpretation, and only when it is
supplied will the full force of the tragic humor of mistaking drama for history
be grasped.
The loss or corruption
of the philosophical interpretation of ancient scriptures precipitated the West
into the Dark Ages, and a main factor in this disaster was a general obscuration
of intelligence concerning the myth. Catastrophe was made the more readily possible
because the rationale of the use of the myth in ancient hands passed from knowledge.
When the recondite suggestiveness of the myth was lost, the inner essence of
esoteric wisdom was dissipated away. Philosophy died out. And, bereft of its
inner soul, the myth came to stand as the mere ghost of itself. With its hidden
significance gone, it read nonsense and caricature. And so it has stood till
this day. The word connotes in the popular mind of the present something about
equivalent to fairy-tale, a fiction little removed from a "hoax." It is something
that is sheer fanciful invention. To declare a narrative formerly believed to
be true "only a myth" is to toss it out on the rubbish heap as a thing no longer
of value. This attitude of mind toward the myth is itself the sign and seal
of the decadence of this age. For ancient sagacity could hardly have assumed
that any succeeding age would prove so obtuse as to take the outward form of
its spiritual allegories for factual occurrence, or suppose that their formulators
believed them to be true objectively.
To be sure, they
are fanciful creations and entirely fictitious. They are fables of events which,
as events, never happened. The aim was never at any time to deceive anybody.
It was never imagined that anybody would ever "believe" them. Nevertheless the
myth was designed to tell truth of the last importance. Its instrument was fancy,
but its purpose was not falsehood, but sublime truth. Outwardly it was not (Page
25) true, but at the same time it portrayed full truth. It was not true for
its "characters," but was true for all mankind. It was only a myth, but it was
a myth of something. It used a false story to relate a true one. While it never
happened, it is the type of all things that have happened and will happen. It
is not objective history, but it embalms the import and substance, the heart’s
core, of all human history. Such authors as Spengler and Lord Raglan have begun
to see that the ancients regarded it of far less importance to catalogue the
occurrences of objective history than to dramatize its inner "spirit." The outward
actions of humans are in the main trivial, because they constitute in the end
only a partial and ephemeral account of whole verity. Ancient literature aimed
at something infinitely higher and more universal. It strove to depict in the
myths and dramas the eternal norms of life experience, which would stand as
truth for all men at any time in evolution. The myths were cryptographs of the
great design and pattern of human history, limning in the large the truth that
is only in fragmentary fashion brought to living enactment in any given set
of historical circumstances. The myth is always truer than history! Only in
aeons will history have caught up with the myth, when it will have unfolded
the entire design of the original mythograph. Hegel indeed essayed to read the
features of a grand cosmic design in the straggling line of actual events. But
the myth already foreshadows the ultimate meaning of history.
Such being the portentous
function of the myth in the early stages of the life of humanity, it becomes
in some degree apparent what blindness must have fallen upon the mental eye
of practically a whole world to have blotted out in little more than a single
century the knowledge of a thing of such vast utility. No matter how conclusively
the data may prove the fact, it will probably remain forever incomprehensible
to unstudied folk that whole bodies of ancient mythology and spiritual typology,
suddenly became metamorphosed into alleged history. And because it ensued through
sheer gaucherie and clumsy loutish dumbness, it will, as predicted, rise on
our horizon as the supreme folly of the ages. When it is realized that an early
gift of divine wisdom, planned to aid the race fight through the exigencies
of its historical evolution, totally miscarried into tragic nonsense through
the simple mistake of taking spiritual allegory for literal history, (Page 26)
a humiliated world will find difficulty in ridding its memory of this preposterous
blunder.
Deprived thus of
a legacy of transcendent knowledge vouchsafed for its instruction, Western humanity
has wound a tortuous path through dangerous terrain that the lost wisdom would
have enabled it to avoid. It has been a journey made without the guiding light
that had been given to render the road more easily passable. Civilization has
floundered in the shoals and quicksands of ignorance. And its contemporary phase
presents the strangest of spectacles,--that of a modern culture boasting its
superiority over any antecedent one, yet admittedly guided in its ethical life
by a Book of which it is now possible to affirm that not the most rudimentary
sense of its message has ever been apprehended. The declaration can be made
and supported that the Bible is still a sealed book. This study will vindicate
that declaration by setting forth the hidden meaning of ancient scripture for
the first time. Gross misinterpretation cannot be seen as such until its product
has been set down alongside a true rendering. The crudeness and baseness of
a literal and historical translation of the sense will only be brought into
glaring light by being held up against a background of the clarity and dignity
of a true spiritual meaning.
The promised interpretation
is not predicated upon the play of a genius superior to that of the accumulated
scholarship and acumen of centuries of religious students and theologians in
Christendom. It was made possible purely by the discovery of clues and "keys"
to the old scriptures hidden deeply in the tomes of ancient literature, which
had escaped the notice of the long line of exegetical inquirers. If wonder and
skepticism arise over the difficulty of understanding why discovery was made
at this epoch and not in so long a time before, the answer is most probably
to be found in the fact that the thousands who failed approached the study of
ancient treasure-tomes with an attitude of mind that made defeat inevitable,
while success came finally through an attitude that, if it did not of itself
guarantee victory, at least opened the door to it. This is of immense significance
and carries a weighty moral connotation with it. With the scales fallen at last
from the eyes of purblind prejudice, it can be patently enough seen that there
was little chance of discovery of the cryptic burden of ancient books as long
as scholars undertook their study with the ingrained and obstinate assurance
that they were the products of primitive infantilism. Ever thus (Page 27) have
the archaic volumes been approached by Orientalists and Western savants. It
is next to unbelievable to discover in what a rigid posture of predetermined
estimate the scrutiny of antique writings has been undertaken by Western Christian
scholars. Even when the evidence of sage wisdom was present under the eye, the
relentless force of the fixation could never rest content until it had read
the imputation of simpleness and crudity into the text. If early literature
did not manifestly read as folly, it had to be made to do so. The inviolable
presupposition in the case was that by no possibility could it be admitted that
the ancients knew a modicum of what we know today. If it was to be granted that
the seers of yore knew life truly and profoundly, it would be gall to modern
intellectual pride, and the very walls of boasted modern superiority would be
breached. The content of old scripts, mysterious and haunting as it often appeared,
had to be explained on the basis of primitive naïveté of mind. By no right were
the supposed aborigines of remote times entitled to the presumption of high
knowledge or a scientific envisagement of the world. No thesis found in modern
view could account for the prevalence of developed culture in the early stages
of the chart of progressive evolution as at present conceived. The assignment
of puerile nescience to the civilizations of even three and four thousand years
ago had to be vindicated at all costs. The rating of primitives for early men
had to be maintained.
Little wonder, then,
that a literature scanned with such a blighting spirit never yielded its buried
light. Supercilious contempt blinded the eyes of inquiry and closed the mind
to all discovery. Obdurately refusing to admit the possibility of the presence
of knowledge, no amount of search would reveal it. All the surer was inquiry
doomed to failure in this field, when the most exalted genius the world ever
knew had been at pains to disguise the outward appearance of that knowledge.
It was only when at last the arcane writings were inspected with the eager spirit
of genuine seeking and the reverent assurance of their holding precious mines
of instruction, that the open sesame unlocked a hoard of hidden wealth.
If it shatters current
orthodoxy in science or philosophy to establish the fact that archaic man possessed
supernal sapiency, then shattering there must be. The thing cannot be obviated.
It is a fact that out of the night of antiquity looms the giant light of transcendent
intelligence on the part of numerous sages. At a period remote enough to be
(Page 28) contemporary with the times incorrigibly marked as "primitive" by
historians, the ancients possessed books of such exalted spiritual and intellectual
content as to lie yet beyond the comprehension of vaunted modern intelligence!
Modern pride must face the situation: "primitive" people already possessed books
which by no possibility could have been produced by "primitive" mentality. Books
which only sages could have written bespeak the presence of sages on the scene.
And sages there were.
Popular academic theory must perforce revise its postulates in the case. It
has stubbornly refused to admit the operation of a law of life in this situation
which it sees at work everywhere else in the realm of genetic procedure. Universal
observation yields the truth that infant life is everywhere parented. The period
of helpless infancy is safeguarded by parental oversight. The elder generation
is at hand to protect, nurture and instruct the young of every kind. Modern
theory admits the prevalence of this rule everywhere - except strangely in the
biological history of the human race as a unit. Granting the sway of the principle
in the case of the individual, animal or human, it has refused to predicate
its governance over the early life of humanity as an entity. But the presence
of sapient writings, the evidence of great lost arts, and the remains of structures
surpassing present achievement, attest incontrovertibly the uniform working
of the law of parenthood here as elsewhere. The human race was parented. It
was not left to struggle through its helpless infancy without guardianship.
Ancient legend in the mass bears this out. Prehistoric lore teems with the stories
of heroes and men of divine stature, demigods and sons of God who mingled with
humanity, and who left codes of laws and manuals of civilization that manifest
a mastery not possible of acquirement by primitives. Hermes, Orpheus, Cadmus,
Zoroaster, Hammurabi, Manu, Buddha, Laotse, Moses, and even Plato and Pythagoras,
hover in the dim light of remote legendary times as figures transcending normal
human stature, and leaving behind writings that have been held up as the norm
of perfect wisdom and conduct down the centuries. The Laws of Manu have stood
for ages as the prototype of all legal and social codes since formulated. Hermes,
Orpheus taught the nations agriculture, writing, astronomy, language, religion,
philosophy and science, the saga runs.
Hence there is posited
for the first time a natural and competent answer to the great and insistent
question of the authorship of (Page 29) primeval books overpassing even present
capability. The authorship of the sages removes these books at once from the
category of merely human speculation and places them securely in the place of
authority and authenticity. They were the products, not of early man’s groping
tentatives to understand life, but of evolved men’s sagacious knowledge and
matured experience. On no other ground can their perennial durability and universal
power be accounted for. The early races obviously received and treasured these
documents with the same high reverence with which the human child receives the
codes and rules of conduct first handed down to it by its parents, who stand
to it in loco Dei. If the primal world-reverence is found wanting in certain
groups today, it is due not so much to the fact that the books have proven of
unsound merit, but to the failure to know what they actually say. They are uninterpreted
to this moment. They could not be scorned if their intrinsic meaning was known.
The republication of that lost meaning will restore the bibles to universal
veneration, but not as fetishes.
Incidentally all
speculation of scholars as to the date of the personal authorship of the Bible
books or other ancient documents of the kind must be declared to be pure and
simple impertinence. Nobody knows or can know what hand first set these verses
to paper, or at what epoch. The books are of unknown antiquity. They were extant
thousands of years B.C. When they passed from oral impartation to written form
none can say. Hundreds of volumes proclaim Moses to have been the writer of
the Pentateuch. Yet the last of the five books describes Moses’ death and burial,
and adds that not in a long cycle since his day (estimated by scholars at six
hundred years at least) hath there been found one like unto him in wisdom and
piety in all Israel! To ascribe any of the Bible books to any named writer is
to trespass on the ground of folly. Indeed it is possible to assert that, in
the common meaning of the term, they were never "written" at all. No man sat
down and composed them out of his thought or his knowledge. They were the outlines
of a great universal tradition formulated by the accumulated wisdom of those
first "parents" or "guardians" of infant humanity, and, like the thousands of
lines of the great Homeric poems, which had been held purely in the memory of
the Hellenes for five hundred years, were finally committed by scribes to written
form. Thus came those set formulations of systematic knowledge, cosmic data
and moral (Page 30) codes, that have survived the test of time and still stand
as sacred commitments. Their material presents the substantial truth of life,
and not primitive man’s erratic guessings. And sixteen hundred years of the
most consecrated effort to study them has left their meaning still unrevealed.
But the Western mind
has begun to delve into the fathomless spiritual philosophies of the ancient
East. The renaissance of Oriental thought, which was first quickened by Schopenhauer
in Europe and by Emerson in America, is now sweeping Occidental religious consciousness
to a new and lofty height of vision and uplift. The eminent psychologist, C.
G. Jung, declares this movement to be the most significant taking place in the
thought life of today. The philosophy that could give an expansive illumination
to a brain like Emerson’s is proving a fount of light and incentive to millions
more at present.
The mask of literary
disguise is being slowly lifted from the face of ancient scripture, and what
has been gratuitously assumed to be the product of primitive naïveté and ignorance
is now seen to be the many-colored cloak of recondite wisdom. Even so apparently
quixotic a construction as the body of Greek myths, which has gained for its
originators the imputed status of moronism, bewildering and baffling the world
for two millennia, is to be revealed as perhaps the most lucid presentment of
philosophical truth ever given to the world. The light so long buried under
a bushel of myths is beginning to shine through. Not only do they bear the impress
of a genius able to portray mighty truth in fable and fiction, but they register
an equal skill in artful concealment. Their employment of the craft of disguise
has carried them so far beyond us that we have been gulled into taking the mask
for the reality. The devisers of the myths were master dramatists and poets.
With such deft touches did they weave the pattern of cosmic, mundane, spiritual
and physical truth through their myriad narratives of gods and men, mermaids,
harpies, satyrs, centaurs, stags and boars, labyrinths, rivers, trees and stars,
that not the most outlandish detail of their fabrications can be ignored without
the loss of some signal link of meaning. Generations of scholars, chained in
the cave of orthodoxy with their backs to the light, have perennially scoffed
at the idea that the myths might be fanciful portrayals of esoteric truth. And
we have charged the most enlightened races in history, the Greeks, Chaldeans
and Egyptians, with possessing the mentality of immature children. (Page 31)
We accused
them of taking their three-headed dogs, their fire-breathing dragons, their
griffins, naiads, Cyclops, Circes and Medusas for sure-enough actualities. We
were sure we could afford to laugh at the simpleness of a people who ascribed
the summer’s drought to Phaëthon’s losing control of the horses of Apollo’s
sun-chariot. But modern presumption must brace itself for a rude jolt, when
it shortly transpires that not one in a hundred of our population will be able
to grasp the involved and profound signification of the Phaëthon myth even when
it has been clearly set forth. Face to face with what we could not understand
in ancient literature, we assumed that the unintelligibility was due to ancient
unintelligence in the construction. That it might be due to our unintelligence
in the comprehension was unthinkable. We could only hold our ground of supposed
enlightenment by shifting our ignorance to the ancients. If the myths made no
sense to us, it was proof that there was no sense in them. But history is soon
to reverse judgment. The comics in the case will be found to be modern, not
ancient. Not they, but we, will be adjudged the simple-minded children lacking
insight. And we will see ourselves at last, clowns and buffoons, laughing and
grimacing in hideous mockery of a treasure the value of which we cannot grasp.
Perhaps there will
be wanting to us the powers of discernment needed to catch the grandeur of arcane
systems of philosophy under their covering of allegory. Habits of thought and
postures of mind hostile to the presuppositions of the archaic knowledge will
not easily adjust themselves to new views. The attempt at a full revelation
of buried meaning will come with a shock to current theological vanity, to the
pride of present knowledge and to the complacency of the mechanistic cast of
modern thought. But the release of the hidden significance of the world scriptures
at this epoch may be destined to achieve our salvation from threatened social
catastrophe. For the ancient wisdom held the prescription for both individual
sanity and a righteous social order. Folly flourished only by grace of its despoliation.
The release of the
enlightenment potentially held in the old books will challenge many traditional
habitudes of mind and most of the lingering relics of theological inculcation.
It will republish the postulates of ancient knowledge that have been lost or
discredited and establish them once more as the Principia of understanding for
both the (Page 32) phenomena of life and the deep lore of the scriptures. Some
of these, long without the pale of orthodox acceptance, will strangely have
been found corroborated by late scientific discovery. The philosophical method
was that of deduction, since it conceived life as unfolding in the outer order
the pattern of things innately involved in its inner heart. The conclusion reached
by evolutionists in present studies is that "evolution is centrifugal, developing
outward from within the geneplasm, rather than centripetal, developing inward
from without the geneplasm," in the words of Henry Fairfield Osborn. Another
late finding is that "evolution is creational rather than variational. Variation
of the species is the result of an original creative pattern within the geneplasm
which is there from the very beginning." And a third pronouncement demolishes
completely the theories of materialism, affirming that "evolution is prot-empirical
rather than meta-empirical; the organs developing before there is any actual
need for them rather than after the need for them arises." Nature already carries
in her womb the embryo of that which will come to form. Life works ahead to
an end premeditated in the beginning, so that Aristotle’s scheme of "entelechy"
is a sound principle in philosophy. Plato told us twenty-four hundred years
ago that life is weaving on the field of manifestation the design of the archetypal
ideas in the Cosmic Mind. Modern science and the clear interpretation of the
arcane philosophy of the past will together restore Plato to his seat on the
throne of mind.
The debate on teleology
has been long and acrimonious. Negative conclusions have been fostered and apparently
affirmed by the shortness of our perspective. The immensely extended outline
of evolution envisioned by the cosmology of old will enable the mind to see
the working of design. Mr. Clarence Darrow asks skeptically if the Lisbon earthquake
was designed. As well might a colony of ants ask if the destruction of their
burrow as we spade our garden was designed. Neither to the citizens of Lisbon
nor to the ants in the garden would the philosophy of design be comforting.
But we know that the digging was designed, not to destroy the ant-city, but
to prepare the garden. So we may equally well know that the processes of world
building were designed, not to destroy Lisbon, but to adjust the earth’s crust
properly about it. The designed activities progressing in two different worlds
happened to clash, man being no more intelligent about the plans of cosmic beings
than the ant about human intentions. And as (Page 33) man cannot change his
larger designs always for the convenience of ants in certain situations, or
indeed may not even be aware that his designs jeopardize their lives, so neither
presumably can higher beings alter their operations for the temporary advantage
of little man. Neither man nor nature has yet learned how to work on in evolution
without the element of some sacrifice of life. It does not impugn design in
the course and speed of an automobile that a child has been unfortunate enough
to drift into its path.
Centuries of world
life have been lived all awry because the philosophical insight into the structure
of archetypal design has been dulled and obscured. The outlines of the pattern
of evolution formulated in the beginning by Cosmic Mind were known of old, but
lost in the long interim. The world being the crystallized projection of a divine
thought-form and history the slow filling out of the lines of the pattern, what
man can know of the structure of the original ideation, or the Great Plan, becomes
of incontestable importance. This was the base and content of the Ancient Philosophy.
It must be restored to knowledge. Fortunately it has never been lost beyond
recovery, merely lost out of common thought. It was safe even while unknown,
being preserved in the amber of a subtle cryptography. Ignorance came along
and swept out of ken the esoteric purport; but at the same time it perpetuated
the myths and allegories, believing them to be history. Deluded piety made a
hash of the sense of the scriptures, yet all unwittingly saved them for the
advantage of a wiser age.
On the one hand materialism
has ignored the spiritual nature and motivation of the universe; on the other,
ecclesiastical zealotry, blinded by stupid literalism, has rendered religion
ridiculous. The truth must combat untruth on both these fronts, rebuffing a
philosophy that denies the ideal frame of things, and rebuking an eccentric
religionism that distorts early truth into revolting irrationality. To redeem
religion from ignominy it is necessary to stigmatize its historical caricature,
ecclesiasticism. War must be declared on its falsities to vindicate its truth.
Medieval and modern incrustations, excrescences and abnormalities of a hundred
types must be brushed away, if the brilliance of the splendid original creation
of supernal genius is to shine forth again. Plato’s theology and "divine philosophy"
must be vindicated. (Page 34)
Chapter
II
ECCE
HOMO - ECCE DEUS
The modern
zeal to exploit "the practical" is about one part good philosophy and nine parts
sheer fatuity. The whole matter has been involved in the utmost fog and mental
haze. The groundlessness of current notions of what constitutes "the practical"
is readily disclosed by asking the question: What does modern man do with the
gains which his practical effort has brought to him -wealth , comfort, means,
freedom, competence? They bring him certain satisfactions, no doubt, and the
answer in part is there. But often the satisfactions turn to ashes in his hands,
or melt away as he reaches out to grasp them, or prove hollow soon or late.
Their inadequacy and shallowness attest their futility and give "practical"
philosophy the lie.
The entire question
rests on the determination of what constitutes ultimate values in life itself,
and this is only fixed by an adequate philosophy. To be sure, a basic ingredient
in philosophy is experience, and a philosophy is largely a digest of experience.
But philosophy is finally and inexorably the mind’s grasp of a set of formulas
of meanings which array the data of experience into a meaningful pattern, or
structural design, which design must eventually match the outline of the archetypal
noumenal thought form projected by Cosmic Mind for this area of creation. Harmony
with this immanent pattern is the insistent demand, as well as the touchstone
and seal of truth. The lower mind in man, being a fragment of cosmic intellect,
is by nature keen to recognize and register, by an expansive pleasure, the concord
of its ideas with the overshadowing form of truth. Some knowledge of the features
of this living mosaic is essential to the final allocation of values, else there
will be no criterion other than an unauthoritative sensual hedonism to determine
whether an experience or a philosophy is good or detrimental. All actions and
opinions rate a final appraisal on the ground of a deposit they leave in consciousness,
according as (Page 35) they
harmonize or disagree with the cosmic thought structure that is working to manifestation
in the process. They accord, or not, with the elemental pattern of creation.
Deep within is a sense that registers in the outer mind the thrill of that accord
or disagreement. The acuteness of this barometer of values may be viciously
blunted, so that its registering sense is sadly vitiated. Yet in the end it
speaks in the stern language of pain and discord for violation of its principles,
and positive pleasure for virtuous action. And the final definition of "the
practical" is that which relates the life of man ever closer to the form and
substance of the primordial pattern laid down for human evolution.
Early theology presented
the general cast and outline of the great cosmic plan of creation, in the reflected
light of which mortal mind could frame the more or less definite graph of the
structure of this life on earth. The profound philosophy, then, that rested
on this stratum of basic knowledge brought the offices of the enlightened intelligence
to the aid of the outer and less reliable pragmatic criteria in the ego’s effort
to direct the evolution of the organism. Philosophical understanding thus in
large measure could be made to obviate the toilsome methodology of trial and
error, and both conserve available force and save valuable time and much suffering.
One of the deep principles of the Buddha’s system was that "right knowledge"
must come to save the individual from pitiable suffering arising from ignorance.
If, as he averred, it is a fundamental truth that ignorance is the cause of
sorrow, then knowledge is its antidote. And all the great religions of antiquity
make this assertion. Says Hermes: "The vice of a soul is ignorance; the virtue
of a soul is knowledge." The Book of Proverbs in the Bible enjoins at length
the prime necessity of getting wisdom, understanding, knowledge. Its preciousness
is set above "all the things that thou canst desire." It is glorified as an
ornament of grace and a crown of life unto its possessor. In this document it
is not placed second to Love or Christly Charity. By an invincible dialectic
Plato and Socrates work out in dialogue after dialogue the proposition that
one cannot be good until one knows what the good thing is, and even what it
is good for. According to Rhys Davids in his Hibbert Lectures of 1881 on The
Origin and Growth of Religions: Buddhism (p. 208), "it is not by chance that
the foundation of the higher life, the gate to the heaven that is to be reached
on earth, is placed, not in emotion, not in feeling, but in knowledge, in the
victory over delusions. (Page 36) The moral
progress of the individual depends, according to Buddhism, upon his knowledge.
Sin is folly. It is delusion that leads to crime." An editorial in the New York
Times of June 20, 1938, well says that the hearts of such folks as the German
persecutors of Jewry "are bitter only when their minds are dark," and cites
Voltaire’s trenchant utterance that "men will continue to commit atrocities
as long as they continue to believe absurdities." In so far as men act for reasons
- instead of sheer brute impulse - the soundness or the imperfection of their
"philosophy" in the case determines the good or evil quality of their deeds.
Knowledge has long
been apostrophized as a beacon light, a lamp unto the feet. It seems to be an
inexpugnable datum of history that fully enlightened sages of the past gave
to infant humanity mighty formulations of cosmic truth, evolutionary schematism,
wisdom of the last practical utility, and supernal knowledge of the worlds of
men and of angels. They placed this torch in the hands of the early races for
the advantage and behoof of all succeeding humanity. Precautions of the most
extraordinary nature were taken to safeguard the deposit. But, miserabile dictu,
the doltishness of historical groups at various times so far imperiled the gift
that in a long period, roughly from the third century of Christianity until
almost the present day, the open promulgation of the high teaching invited the
bitterest persecution from the entrenched forces of cruder belief. Esoteric
philosophy was forced to hide underground and make its way through the centuries
by subterranean channels and covert devices. Barbarism threatened the utter
extinction of previous light. Supervening ignorance swooped down upon and buried
earlier knowledge. But in one of the resurgent waves of revival, the ancient
light is breaking through the incrustation of ignorance once again. Wisdom is
having its rebirth.
Obscuration enveloped
brighter enlightenment because mankind seems unable to maintain its hold on
the golden mean between extreme views. It is constantly following the swing
of the pendulum from one movement to violent reaction in an opposite direction.
Religious history is in the main a record of oscillation between arrant supernaturalism
and soulless naturalism. The group mind bends far over to mystic or spiritistic
faith on one side, and then sways equally far over to a dead materialism. It
is either believing in angels, ghosts, spirits, saints, virgin births, elementals,
divine interventions, miracles, (Page 37) transfigurations,
salvations, vicarious atonements; or it is rebounding from these to blank mechanism
which rates all such things as delusions. In his revulsion from eccentric mysticism
man has sought always the wrong antidote - a barren naturalism. In his revulsion
from the latter he has again always gone too far into uncritical mysticism.
But there is a middle position that meets the essential truth between both attitudes.
And the soul science of old set forth this median position. It presented mystic
elements without irrationality, and advanced such knowledge of spiritual experience
as to make the negation of such values impossible. Ancient theology was the
science that dealt with the more sublimated essences and forces latent in the
human endowment, exploiting them for the vast enrichment of the conscious life.
It was the science of spiritual growth without mystic extravagance, the science
of dynamically real elements in the psychic constitution of man, the very existence
of which mechanistic science has disregarded. What the ancients called esoteric
science is but the steady direct penetration of human intelligence into the
deeper heart of nature, to manipulate creatively her hidden springs of power.
It was based on a knowledge of the laws ruling the higher octaves in the diapason
of consciousness. It was firmly grounded on premises which authenticated the
existence of the soul as an entity. The soul has ever been the scarecrow in
the garden of positive science. But modern science has itself reestablished
the ground for such a predication in its recent findings with regard to the
more sublimated constitution of matter, making a way for the reification of
bodies of subatomic or ethero-spiritual composition, in which a unit of soul
might find subsistence when disengaged from a fully substantial body. Late physics
has gone far toward hypostasizing St. Paul’s asserted "spiritual body," and
his other statement that he knew a man "who was caught up into the third heaven."
In the rarer forms of matter now hypothecated by our adventuring science will
be found the rarefied physical implementation of whole octaves of "spiritual"
phenomena catalogued by ancient psychic discernment, but looked at skeptically
by positivism in our day. There is a spiritual evolution proceeding pari passu
with the physical, and implemented by it. Our late science has only now come
into view of nature’s sublimated matter of varying gradations of density, enabling
it for the first time to give body to the beings of ancient hierarchies and
to give veritude to the ancient affirmation of "spiritual bodies." In proportion
as the (Page 38) redoubtable
solidity of science’s basic stuff melts down into mere swirls of force, to that
extent can the angels and demons of ancient systems stalk forth in something
like veritable substantiality.
A penetrating view
of the interior sublimation of matter opened to the eye of antiquity a fuller
and more detailed charting of the basic components of man’s constitution. Human
nature was seen as a compound of at least four segments or strata of being,
possessing four bodies of differentiated substance ranging from dense physical
coarseness through etheric and mental gradients to spiritual tenuity. In short
man has a physical, an emotional, a mental and a spiritual body, each finer
one interpenetrating successively its coarser substrate and being held in linkage
to it by vital affinities. Hence the deep lore of old dealt with a keen analysis
and formulation of the laws of interaction between the several "men" in us and
catalogued the extensive schedule of reactions in consciousness in that amplified
psychology to a degree that proves astonishing to students of our time. The
psychology of past days has names for a host of sharply drawn segmentations
of subjective activity that modern probing has never systematically distinguished.
Their "gods" were the living energies of nature and of mind, realities of the
cosmos, and by no means fanciful and fictitious nonentities. They were the personified
rays and energies that our science is now discovering. The broad field of what
is termed mystical experience was mapped, with every section of its area charted
in relation to the economy of the whole. It was no realm of whimsical idiosyncrasy,
of sheer feeling. The revelation that the ancient East had perfected the technique
of an elaborate spirito-psychological science, surpassing anything yet adduced
by modern genius, is a marked denouement of current history. The renaissance
of this buried "science of the soul" is giving birth again to the knowledge
that man may pass from unconscious drifting with the tide of evolution to a
conscious self-directed mastery of his progress. He may step from the status
of a victim of evolution’s forces, such as he is when without cognizance of
its laws, into the ranks of those who work intelligently with its plan. Hence
he can advance more smoothly and swiftly with the tide, as Shakespeare asserted,
instead of being tossed about by cross and counter currents whose play he does
not understand. The vitalizing item of ancient knowledge was the prime datum
that man is himself, in his real being, a spark of divine fire struck off like
the flint flash from the Eternal (Page 39) Rock
of Being, and buried in the flesh of body to support its existence with an unquenchable
radiant energy. On this indestructible fire the organism and its functions were
"suspended," as the Orphic theology phrased it, and all their modes and activities
were the expression of this ultimate divine principle of spiritual intelligence,
energizing in matter. Philosophy so grounded was able to meet the exegetical
demands of the "mind-body problem" by its hypothecation of states of rarefied
matter mediating between immaterial spirit and gross body and linking them commodiously
in one organism. How the gross body holds connection with sheer "anima"--how
it holds on to its "ghost"--was readily understood in the terms of their knowledge
of intermediate structures which bridge by several steps the wide gap between
pure spirit and palpable matter.
At the summit, or
in the interior heart, of man’s nature was the divine and immortal Atma or spirit;
on the lower level there was the body, with its twofold equipment for sensation
and emotion. Bridging the gap between the two was the principle of conscious
mind called Manas. It could span the gap between "quickening spirit" and inert
matter; because it stood between them and possessed affinities with both of
them, which they lacked with each other. It could touch soul above and flesh
beneath and pass the lofty motivations of the one across the gulf to the beneficiary
below. Modern religious conception faces the absurd situation of envisaging
man as obviously physical and animal by virtue of his body, and as obviously
intellectual and spiritual through his soul, but with the ancient hierarchical
grades of intermediacy torn out of the gap between the two. Early Christian
revolt against esotericism threw down the ladder of linkage between man below
and his soul above, and now has no resources to diagram the steps of his possible
communion with his Emanuel. The gap left vacant had perforce to be filled in
by theology with the single figure of the historical Jesus as mediator between
man and his God. A historical personage was called in to implement a function
that was originally assigned to one of the principles of man’s own constitution.
This was one of those consequences which the little blunder of mistaking myth
for history entailed for succeeding ages.
On the strength of
the new data furnished by modern science, present thought must orient its attitude
toward basic problems, since it must view life as the play of causal forces
in consciousness more (Page 40) sublimated
and potent than any of the energies so far discerned in matter. It will then
be in position to take counsel again with the primeval divine revelation. It
will be able to predicate again the human soul and the divine spirit in man.
In the ultimate it has been its failure to posit the independent Atmic entity
in our life that has blocked its every excursion toward a vital religious philosophy.
It has made philosophy the dead speculation it now is and religion both a chimerical
and a fruitless enterprise. When theology wisely guided the effort to relate
the lower man to the god within, it was the central pursuit in the life of the
world and stood at the apex of dignity and importance. But the loss of vital
premises of understanding blinded following ages to the value of spiritual culture,
and theology and philosophy now go abegging for recognition, bereft of their
former kingly renown. And now their continued abeyance threatens civilization
itself. No age calls so piteously for the certain knowledge of the science of
the soul; since to soul alone can be attached the anchor for all shifting human
values. Without the scientific grounding of an inner principle in man which
is itself a portion of Eternal Durability, and which will carry the values built
up in life to endless perpetuity, human philosophy must forever lack stability
and prime utility.
Such a carrier and
preserver of values was the Atmic spark, described by Heraclitus as "a portion
of cosmic Fire, imprisoned in a body of earth and water." It was on earth to
trace its line of progress through the ranges of the elements and the kingdoms,
harvesting its varied experiences at the end of each cycle. It was described
by Greek philosophy as "more ancient than the body," because it had run the
cycle of incarnations in many bodies, donning and doffing them as garments of
contact with lower worlds, so that it might treasure up the powers of all life
garnered in experience in every form of it. The mutual relation of soul to body
in each of its incarnate periods is the nub of the ancient philosophy, and the
core of all Biblical meaning. As the Egyptian Book of the Dead most majestically
phrases it, the soul, projecting itself into one physical embodiment after another,
"steppeth onward through eternity." No more solid foundation for salutary philosophy
can be laid than this rock of knowledge, and civilization will flounder in perilous
misadventure until this datum of intellectual certitude is restored to common
thought.
The practical service
of philosophy is the proper direction of effort. (Page 41) Its
function is to furnish guiding intellectual light. Religion is the consecration
of purpose to attain the goal indicated as blessed. But knowledge is the only
guarantee of right effort. Misunderstanding leads the feet into morasses and
quicksands. An errant philosophy is the poison of human endeavor at its source.
Modern psychology loudly asserts that failure of the mind to know the answers
to life’s riddles breaks down its integrity and racks even the body. Philosophy,
reduced now to tedious and jejune speculation, is that very bread of life for
which we starve. It was once a body of positive truth. To it the mind could
anchor. Only intelligence can save motivation from rank exuberance of eccentricity.
Despoiled of the early truth, later ages have been in the position of a person
trying to think without true premises. It is the function of science and philosophy
to furnish the mind true premises. As Gerald Massey says, thinking is in essence
a process of "thinging," since thoughts must rest on the nature of things. And
things are themselves God’s thoughts in material form.
The one grand premise
for constructive thinking is that man is a god functioning in the body of a
human animal, and that this situation is typical of all other existent life,
and a key to the comprehension of all. Religion is that field of effort in which
man strives to relate a divine element, transcending immeasurably his own natural
powers, to a lower self in which it is tenanted. In this comparative sense,
its true function is and always will be to deal with those three elements which
it has so shockingly abused and misapplied, the supernatural, the miraculous
and the magical. In any absolute sense, to be sure, these terms are misnomers
and can become misleading. But relative to the viewpoint of the merely natural
man, the work of the god in his nature is transcendent and is indeed fittingly
termed supernatural. For it is the province of religion to transfigure the natural
life of man with the irradiance of cosmic romance, magical potency and unearthly
splendor. It is designed to refashion the natural man into the likeness of a
glorious spiritual being, the cosmical man of the heavens. To lower orders of
life the capabilities of beings of a superior kingdom of life are justifiably
designated as supernatural. Our brain power is supernatural to the dog.
Even now Socrates’
"daimon" (daemon), that hovering presence which guided and warned him constantly
throughout his life, is being entified as the "unconscious" mentor of present
psychology. (Page 42) The restoration
to Western thought of the divine monitorial guardianship of the individual will
instigate the mightiest reformation in the history of Occidental religion. It
will enforce a drastic alteration in theological dogma. For it will demand a
discarding of the conventional form of the God idea and a return to that of
learned antiquity.
It flouts current
belief most flagrantly to assert that the Christian movement represented a descent
from high pagan levels of knowledge and spiritual insight. Not a churchman but
harbors the smug assurance that Christianity arose like a stately phoenix out
of the ashes of a decadent paganism, to save a benighted world from sinking
into a morass of degradation horrendous to contemplate. But current notions,
however sanctified by pious belief, must yield before the influx of positive
facts and the light of a proper interpretation of revered scriptures. This only
means, however, that Christianity must cast off a heavy incrustation of exoteric
literalism and reassert its own primal majestic message. No student conversant
with the history of early Christianity will for a moment maintain that medieval
or modern presentations of theology are identical with those held at the start.
One of the most influential and admittedly the most learned of the Church Fathers,
whose scholarship had been powerfully instrumental in formulating the early
creedology, was excommunicated as a heretic within three hundred years after
his death by a Church that had so quickly lost the light of its original inspiration.
"Origen, the pupil
of St. Clement of Alexandria, and the best informed and most learned of the
Church Fathers, who held the doctrine of rebirth and karma to be Christian,
and against whom, 299 years after he was dead, excommunication was decreed by
the exoteric Church on account of his beliefs, has said: ‘But that there should
be certain doctrines not made known to the multitude, which are revealed after
the exoteric ones have been taught, is not a peculiarity of Christianity alone,
but also of philosophical systems in which certain truths are exoteric and others
esoteric.’" [Quoted in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, by W. Y. Evans-Wentz,
in a note to p. 234, from Origen’s Contra Celsum, Book I, Ch. VIII. ]
Both Origen’s statement
and his posthumous discrediting at the hands of the Church Council make it clear
that Christianity had been radically transmogrified within a few hundred years
after its inception. And every individual or sect in the centuries following
the third that endeavored to revive the pristine purity of the original formulations
was acrimoniously hounded and persecuted. Paulinism itself, (Page 43) which
represents
perhaps the clearest stream of high spiritual teaching, was hard put to escape
being torn out of the context of scripture or defeated in ecclesiastical controversy.
The issue must be
faced and determined now if religion is to live and exalt the race. The crux
of the entire problem is the conception of deity in a form perennially available
for man in the heart of his own nature. This conception is the core of all religious
theory, and loss of it has been the cause of doubt, confusion and despair. Light
and truth long lost are once more at hand to illumine minds now groping in darkness.
False notions of deity have nearly cost mankind the loss of its birthright of
knowledge.
The boast of Christianity
and Judaism is that they alone have presented to mankind its purest concept
of deity in the form of the One God--Monotheism. The claim is by no means true
as fact. They may more correctly be said to have been the first to present the
One God without the ancient train of the subordinate gods. They boast of having
abolished the magnified evils of polytheism. But to the ancient sages the task
of handling the Supreme God without his pantheon of lesser divinities was much
the same as trying to deal physiologically with a man without consideration
of his arms, feet, head and several organs. The gods of primeval religion were
the active manifest powers, faculties, organs of God himself. Nature was his
body, elemental forces the agents of his operative economy, universal mind his
thinking faculty and ultimate beneficence his spiritual heart. The ancient systems
of wisdom thought it not blasphemy to delineate the organic structure of deity
to explain to human grasp the cause and nature of the world. Reverence was not
withheld from even the lowest instrumentalization of Godhood. And God organically
apprehended was to be better adored than God as an abstract "nonity."
But some strange
quirk of philosophical revulsion against the function and nature of matter militated
later to cause theologians to deem it a blasphemy to give God a body, parts
and divisions. The mind could only be saved from defiling his purity by keeping
him an empty abstraction. Unknowable and Absolute, he was to be kept ineffable.
He was not to be dragged into the purlieus of mortal description, degraded into
the semblance of a creation of man’s low thought.
But the astute Greeks
kept the one without foregoing the other. They reverenced the One as beyond
the reach of thought, yet portrayed (Page 44) his
emanations in the field of manifestation. And they ranked themselves as his
sons. They deemed it not dishonoring to deity to recognize his being in all
things. They saw him in nature, and not as abstracted from nature. And they
studied nature as the living garment of God’s immanence.
Therefore, though
the monotheistic concept has a place in man’s thought problem, it is nevertheless
to be appraised in its final utility to religion as practically valueless. The
human mind cannot think without the concept of First Cause, and God must stand
in the thought problem to fill this need. It has this dialectic utility. But
it must ever remain a contentless abstraction. As such it turns out that the
chalice of divinity that the Church proffered to benighted nations as the supreme
boon of religion, was well-nigh an empty cup. And engrossing the mass mind with
a philosophical concept that is unassimilable and must forever remain meaningless,
ecclesiasticism perpetrated the far worse crime of condemning to desuetude that
more realistic conception of resident deity which alone is fraught with pregnant
power to apotheosize human life. Holding out a supreme Ineffability to its followers,
it withheld from them at the same time the knowledge of that deity that is lodged
immediately within their own selfhood. Giving them a God who is utterly inaccessible,
it blocked their approach to the god who was "closer than breathing, nearer
than hands and feet."
This is of surpassing
importance. It is revolutionary. It is devastating to prevalent orthodoxies.
It shocks traditional piety to hear that the concept of the One Supreme can
never be of great practical utility to man. But apart from its offices in generating
in us perpetual wonder and awe, our dealing with it ends when we have placed
it in the thought problem where the mind demands the postulate of First Cause.
Beyond that it has little service to render us. Give it form, substance, content,
description, we cannot, without destroying its necessary being. Whatever good
will flow from our knowing that the Unknowable is back of all phenomena is ours.
We can hardly love or worship what we cannot know. The boundary of our reach
is wonder and speculation. Our attempts to worship it are the fluttering of
a moth about the light we dare not look at. Ancient religion was suspected of
having left the monotheistic God out of its picture. It did not leave it out,
but it had the discretion to leave it alone! The sage theologists reverenced
it by a becoming silence! Communion has never been established (Page 45) between
man and an Absolute God in the cosmic heavens. But the pagan world provided
a contact with a god dwelling immediately within the human breast. No reaching
after the moon of the Absolute diverted conscious purpose from actual touch
with the god who stood at one’s elbow. The seers of old held it a sacrilege
for mortals to worship any power outside themselves. And this implied no spirit
of vaunting humanism or affront to deity. It was just the recognition of deity
at the point where it was accessible. The real heresy and apostasy, the gross
heathenism, is to miss deity where it is to be had in the blind effort to seek
it where it is not available.
Deity for man is
at home, not afield in distant skies. The kingdom of heaven and the hope of
glory are within. They lurk within the unfathomed depths of consciousness. Divinity
lies buried under the heavier motions of the sensual nature and the incessant
scurrying of the superficial mind. It is the still small voice, drowned out
mostly by the raucous clamor of fleshly, material and mental interests. It is
a pure, mild Presence, awaiting the day when the outer man will give more heed
to its quiet speech. The Supreme God is not available; but within the quietude
of his own being every man may find a fragment of that same God, made personal
in his own individuality. This is the burden of the lost wisdom of antiquity.
Other than potentially, God in his wholeness is not present with man; but he
has not left man without that measure of his grace that man can utilize. He
has projected into our nature a portion, a ray, of his own life. He has apportioned
amongst all his creatures that measure of his ineffable power which each is
capable of receiving. Yet potentially he has lodged the whole of himself in
every man, for the nucleus of his divinity that he has implanted in every creature
is a seed of the whole of his being. In man the divine seed is the Christos,
the son of the Almighty Father. It is no negative statement, but the glorious
affirmation of all attainment, to assert that this germ of divinity within the
heart is all of God that man can possibly absorb in the present cycle. The cosmic
God is hardly an object of worship by humanity; but that segmented portion of
infinite Being that is tabernacled within the flesh of mortals - that is the
actual divinity assigned to receive the attention and homage of mankind, and
sacrificially to be eaten.
The indwelling god
is himself being brought to birth within the womb of humanity. Each individual
is gestating a divinity within the (Page 46) deeps
of his own nature. Christianity has fervently exhorted us to look into the empyrean
to find the unapproachable God. All the while the infant deity slumbers unheeded
within the heart. Christianity has largely nullified the force of St. Paul’s
almost frantic cry to us: "Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ
is within you?"
The seers of old
distinguished between the Unknowable God of the thought theorem and the actual
Presence in the human constitution by denominating the former "God" and the
latter "the god." Intermediate deities were called variously "the Gods" and
"the gods." The object of most constant attention in philosophy was "the god,"
the personal daemon of the individual. On the plane of all practical living
value, it was useless to look to higher evolutionary forms of deific expression
unless and until that was brought from infancy to maturity of function, since
its qualities had to be assimilated into human nature before anything higher
could be received. It can be stated as a matter beyond controversy that the
vital concern of ancient religion was with the god lodged within the human psyche.
If man missed contact with deity there, he missed it utterly.
Christianity euhemerized
the pagan conception of the germinal deity in us in the historical Jesus. But
this has left the rest of mortals unsanctified. The personalized Christ cuts
the commonalty of mankind off from its divinity. An "only-begotten son of God,"
made to carry all the values and meanings in his human person, robs mankind
at large of its birthright. The mistranslation of the Greek "monogenes" as "only-begotten"
was an error fraught with the most terrific consequences for Christendom. It
properly means "born of the one parent alone" (the Father, Spirit), in contradistinction
to the idea of being born of the union of Father and Mother, or spirit and matter.
It was a reference in ancient theogony to the descent of the Logos (the cosmic
counterpart of the Christos in man) from the spiritual side of God’s nature
alone, as distinct from its progenation from the union of spirit with matter.
The doctrine was primordial in the Egyptian conception of the god Kheper or
Khepera, symboled by the scarab, which, the Egyptians asserted, produced its
young through the male or father alone. If Jesus was the sole epiphany of deity
on earth, then the promises of our universal sonship are made nugatory. We are
assured again and again that we are all sons of God and sons of the Highest.
Christianity not only thrust upon the man Jesus the divinity that was (Page
47) apportioned
amongst us all, but also, in its confusion and ignorance, forced upon his mortal
person the function, power and office of the Cosmic Logos, which in the carefully
graded system of the hierarchies could not conceivably have been embodied in
the constitution of a mere man on earth. How could the mighty power that organized
and ensouled galaxies of solar systems be confined within the tiny limits of
a physical brain and nervous system? The great Christian Fathers, Clement of
Alexandria and Origen (and others) expressly repudiated the possibility of the
Logos taking flesh in one person of merely human stature. Such a limitation
blasphemed Deity.
What has not been
recognized is that the solitary exaltation of the man Jesus has inevitably demeaned
humanity. His lonely apotheosization has disinherited us. And the general revolt
of the intellectualism of this age against the resultant debasement of human
nature to the level of the worm of the dust through Augustinian and Calvinistic
impositions should stoutly attest the falsity of the orthodox characterization.
The mythical as opposed
to the historical interpretation of the Gospels has been presented with some
clarity by such men as Dupuis, Drews, Robertson, Smith, Renan, Strauss, Massey,
Higgins, Mead and others. The historical view of Jesus’ life is stubbornly maintained
in spite of the evidence adduced by Comparative Religion and Mythology, which
points with steady directness to the fact that the events of the Gospel narrative
are matched with surprising fidelity by the antecedent careers of such world
saviors as Dionysus, Osiris, Sabazius, Tammuz, Adonis, Atys, Orpheus, Mithras,
Zoroaster, Krishna, Bala-Rama, Vyasa, Buddha, Hercules, Sargon, Serapis, Horus,
Marduk, Izdubar, Witoba, Apollonius of Tyana, Yehoshua ben Pandira, and even
Plato and Pythagoras. It is also held in the face of the consideration that
the body of the material used in the ceremonial dramas performed by the hierophants
in the early Mystery Religions for 1200 years B.C. constitute by and large the
series of events narrated as the personal biography of the Galilean. It is worth
impressing on all minds that the legend of the historicity of the Gospels is
only to be held by ignoring the solid weight of such - and vastly more - significant
testimony. Instead of permitting its adherents to move in the freedom of a spiritual
interpretation, the ecclesiastical power is holding them rigidly to a doctrinal
meaning that is badly vitiated by literalism. In exalting Jesus in unique magnificence,
it lets the divinity in every man’s heart lie (Page 48) fallow.
The deity that needs exaltation is that which is struggling within the breasts
of the sons of earth. Theological dogmatism fails utterly to see the ultimate
Pyrrhic nature of its victory. Jesus’ enthronement is the disinheritance of
common man. Taught to look outside ourselves for the source of power and grace,
we ignore the real presence within us that pleads for closer recognition. The
historical Jesus blocks the way to the spiritual Christ in the chamber of the
heart.
All Christian history
would have been markedly different had not the historical Jesus been interpolated
into the spiritual drama. By this diversion the aims of a true spiritual culture
were sentimentally turned outward to the worship of an extraneous but romantic
impersonation. The consecrated devotion of hundreds of millions of souls in
Christendom for centuries, instead of being focused upon the effort to nurse
to life a Christly spirit within the collective body of Western humanity, has
been dissipated in almost total fruitlessness upon the figure of an historicized
myth. The present demoralized state of civilization in countries most thoroughly
saturated with Christian doctrinism confirms the sorry truth of this statement.
And the earlier Christian history lends further corroboration in its record
of bickering, heretical persecution, violent warfare and ghastly crucifixions
that sicken the heart. And all this was perpetrated in the name of the personal
Jesus! It could hardly have been done in the name of the spiritual Christos.
If it be advanced
in rebuttal that the example of the historical Jesus has stood as a loadstone
and beacon to inspire and attract the hearts of millions of devotees, and that
the contemplation of his excellency will work a miracle of uplift in the believers’
nature, this but proves the efficacy of psychology and not a fact of history.
Ecclesiastical propaganda has more than once produced psychological hysteria,
as witness the Crusades and the Inquisition. And religious hysteria has ever
produced its marvels - stigmata , speaking in tongues and healings. Every religious
psychologization has run into phenomena and sums its lists of "demonstrations."
It is folly to question the psychological power of an example such as the pictured
Jesus. Humans are almost helpless in their tendency to ape some paragon. It
was precisely because mankind needed to be inspired to idealism that the formulators
of the dramas in the Mystery Rituals introduced the Messiah, the Sun-God, the
Christos as the central character of the piece. But he was there as ensampler
and by no means as substitute or scapegoat. Much as (Page 49) mankind
needs to be confronted by the constant presence of a model of its own destined
perfection, it needs far more the invincible knowledge that divinity is its
own inner possession.
To hold his place
in mass reverence, Jesus had to be made matchless, incomparable, unapproachable.
No man dared stand beside him. But overpowering splendour only twits and chides
mediocrity. It reminds us of our littleness. It leaves us gazing blankly, hopelessly.
The higher the elevation of Jesus, the vaster the gulf fixed between the ideal
and the adorer. It clips the wings of aspiration. The setting up of a figure
of perfection outside is in part psychologically hazardous. To approach him,
to match his purity, is to reduce his stature. He must be kept beyond compare,
the ever-receding ideal.
Ancient psychology
of religion worked on a different principle. The motive to zeal was an ever-present
possibility of attainment. Numbers of the sages were men who had gained the
sunlit summit. They thought it not robbery to be equal with the god, for he
was sent to call them into the mount of fellowship.
To sense poignantly
the degradation to which literal caricature of spiritual knowledge has reduced
theology, one needs but to point to the picture of millions of votaries gazing
into the physical heavens to find God, where Laplace said that no telescope
had ever located him, and searching the map of Judea to localize the Christos,
whose dwelling can be only in the heart and conscience. And the Prince of Peace
still awaits to be crowned the King of Glory. (Page 50)
CHAPTER
III
TRUTH
CRUSHED TO EARTH
The resolution of
the "birth of Christ" into the delivery of a babe in a localized Bethlehem has
kept the race from realizing the true meaning of the Messianic fulfillment.
With the third century conversion of the features of the age-old spiritual drama
into the alleged biography of a man-savior, the outlines of the great truth
that a ray of the solar Logos was incorporated distributively in animal humanity
faded out and were obliterated. All sound sense of the inner signification of
the Christmas nativity tableau was irrevocably lost. The annual celebration
of the advent of deity to earth remains a meaningless travesty to this day.
It becomes necessary,
then, to outline the historical trends that led to the obscuration of this central
feature of religious cultism. This is in no sense a diversion, but the most
direct approach to the correct envisagement of ancient material. It will reveal
items of the utmost strategic importance for a true evaluation of archaic structures.
The restoration of the lost meaning will be given greater credence if the causes
of its decadence are set forth.
The knowledge that
a fragment of the spiritual heart of the sun was implanted in the body of each
son of man to be his soul and his god was the golden secret imparted by the
hierophants in the Mystery Schools to their qualified pupils. It was regarded
as such a priceless treasure that these Secret Brotherhoods were organized specifically
to guard its esoteric inviolability. From age to age it passed down the stream
of oral transmission, now waning in one quarter, but spreading in another, and
was revived periodically by messengers who came as the agents of a hierarchy
of perfected men. From remote antiquity it was present in China, Tibet, India,
Chaldea, Egypt. It was carried by the priests of the Orphic Mysteries over to
the Hellenic world.[For corroboration see such works as The Six Books
of Proclus on the Theology of Plato, Iamblichus’ The Mysteries of the Egyptians,
Chaldeans and Assyrians, and Thomas Taylor’s Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries.
] It was disseminated in the Greek areas in the philosophies of Pythagoras,
Plato, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras;[Vide From Orpheus to Paul,
by Vittorio D. Macchioro, a recognized world authority on Orphism. ] was
embodied in the (Page 51) poetry
of Homer, Hesiod, Pindar; in the dramas of Euripides and Aeschylus. From Egypt
and Chaldea it emerged in the religion of the Hebrews, who wrought its myths,
allegories and symbols obscurely into their Old Testament, but had more authentically
kept the deposit in their ancient Kabalah. It was taken up by pre-Christian
and early Christian Gnostics, being contained with sufficient clarity in the
great Gnostic work, Pistis Sophia, a work conjecturally of Basilides or Valentinus.
Its Orphic-Platonic rescension was widely republished by the Neo-Platonist school
in the second, third and fourth centuries, with ample elucidation, a measure
adopted in all likelihood by the spiritual hierarchy to check the growing trend
of the nascent Christian movement toward the complete exoterization of its esoteric
message. It was reintegrated eclectically around Alexandria by such syncretists
as Maximius of Tyre, Ammonias Saccas and Philo Judaeus, powerfully influencing
the character of primitive Christianity. It was carried most directly into Christian
documentation by St. Paul, whom many scholars claim on evidence to have been
himself an Initiate in the Greek Mysteries (as were Clement and Origen in the
Egyptian), and also by St. John, whose Bible writings are decidedly more Platonic
than distinctively Christian. The visible thread of its transmission runs on
to Plutarch, after whom it became more subterranean, being propagated by Hermeticists,
Therapeutae, Rosicrucians, Platonists, Mystics, Illuminati, Alchemists, Brothers
of various designations and secret fraternities in Europe, out of sight of the
jealous eye of the all-powerful Church. At the period of its lowest ebb in Europe
it was tided over the danger of total extinction by Arabian and Moorish scholars
and Jewish students in Spain. The teaching was preserved and handed on by such
associations in Medieval Europe as the Cathedral Builders, the Platonic Academy
of Florence, the Alchemists, the "Fire Philosophers," the Troubadours and Minnesingers,
by secret printers, among them Aldus Minutius of Venice, who reprinted the classic
Greek literature that ushered in the Italian Renaissance. Sporadically, now
in one region, now in another, it took form in outward movements in groups of
mystic and pietistic tendency of many names. It was the secret spring of motive
and meaning in most medieval literature, in the folklore, the hero legends,
the fairy myths, the Arthurian cycle, the Mabinogian tales, the Peredur stories,
the Niebelungenlied, the castle ballads, the Romance of the Rose and many another
invention of esoteric skill. (Page 52)
Features
of it came to be embodied in a thousand conventional forms of common "superstition."
It was pictorially outlined in the set of Tarot Cards of the Bohemians in the
twelfth century. Philosophers such as Paracelsus, Raymond Lully, Pletho, Cardano,
Philalethes, Robert Fludd (from whose work on Moses Milton is said to have derived
his theses on which Paradise Lost was built) and others presented aspects of
it in more or less surreptitious fashion. Jacob Boehme’s "Theosophical Points"
vitally influenced Newton’s thought in important directions, as he confesses.
Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo acknowledge their debt to the principles of the
ancient science. Later came the English Platonists More and Cudworth, and it
is alleged that Francis Bacon and the mysterious Count de St. Germain formulated
the body of Masonic ritualism upon the old principles.
Coming to the surface
again in recent years it is being revived by Rosicrucians, Theosophists, Kabalists,
Esotericists, Mystics, Spiritual and Psychic Scientists and Parapsychologists
in large numbers, and is perhaps the most vital movement in the thought life
of today.
The door to this
rejuvenescence of an influence so long buried was opened during the last century
by the studies in Comparative Religion and Comparative Mythology assiduously
pursued by many scholars. There was needed nothing but a mind free from bias
to discern the unity, amounting virtually to identity, underlying all the old
systems, which expressed so clearly the characteristic features of what appeared
to have been a universal primal world religion, with the solar myth as its cornerstone.
Every great historical religion is readily seen to have been, at its start,
a pure expression of the basic elements of this outline, and equally readily
seen to have badly vitiated the pristine purity of teaching in later decadence.
A gross transgressor in this respect is seen to be Christianity, which carried
original spiritual meaning further afield than perhaps any other. It is desirable
to trace the causes and progress of this corruption.
The blanket assertion
that ancient spiritual light was darkly obscured under Christian handling is
a challenging statement and must be given the room to vindicate itself. This
work in its entirety will amount to a substantiation of that claim. The point
can be carried only by an ample reproduction of the substance of the archaic
world religion, so that the clear outlines of the great pristine doctrines of
theology as they were apprehended in the arcane schools, may by contrast reveal
the darkness (Page 53) and
vacuity of present readings. Only in the light of the radiant wisdom of the
past will the glaring corruption of current interpretation become discernible.
The stream of degradation
of originally pure teaching flowed in through the channels of literalism. The
simple but still nearly incredible truth of the matter is that elaborate charts
of spiritual ideography, devised with poetic genius and analogical skill, were
mistaken for literal objective fact. The ancient theologists had sought to portray
the essence of deep truth by means of fanciful constructions of many kinds.
The whole of early Egyptian and Greek religious literature was a construction
commonly termed mythology. What now looms as the consummate catastrophic stupidity
of the centuries was the traducing of it into alleged history. This has been
perpetrated in spite of the obvious impossibility of explaining how a people
that produced Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Pericles, Heraclitus, Homer, Pindar
and Demosthenes could gull itself into taking poetic fiction for objective occurrence
on a grand scale. Our explanation of the mythology of the Greeks commits us
to accrediting such sages with the minds of children. The myths were the lenses
through which the gaze might be focused on the realities of recondite truth.
Only to the crudely ignorant were the representations not diaphanous. But, oddly
enough, blind misapprehension carried the day, and the transparency of the myths
was darkened into solid opaqueness.
Christianity started
out as a system closely kindred with the cults environing it, and boasting of
conformity with them. The early Church Father, Justin Martyr in particular,
is at pains to protest that Christianity in no wise differs from pagan usages.
But a strange and curious thing then happened. There came to a head a virulent
rebellion of mediocrity and inferiority against the aristocracy of intellect
and culture. Christianity carried in large measure the impetuosity of this revolt.
It became the embodied expression of a vehement assault on the esotericism of
the Mystery Religions. It was evidently motivated by a popular resentment against
the exclusiveness and aristocracy of the cults. Only a restricted and tested
minority was eligible to admission into the Associations. The hidden teaching
was withheld from the populace, under the strictest of secret bans. A wave of
hostility to the privileged groups swept over the masses and culminated in an
effort to crash through the restrictions of esotericism and bring out the secret
(Page 54) doctrine
for general behoof. Distrust of the possession of any real truth beyond ordinary
grasp and perhaps the degeneracy of the Mysteries themselves to some extent,
lent substance to the popular enmity. A movement to spread abroad a plain man’s
simple enunciation of the truths gained heavy momentum. A definite trend away
from esotericism carried the impulse far over into literalism. The genius of
culture in mankind has constantly had to contend with this effort of dull mediocrity
to tear down its best structures of truth and beauty.[ See such a work
as Lothrop Stoddard’s The Revolt Against Civilization. ] The attempt
to unmask the myths for commonplace rendering was quite like the present-day
demand upon popular publicists for a reduction of their best wisdom to the level
of moronic bluntness. But the effort to simplify the esoteric purport was to
lose it, to wreck the spiritual edifice altogether. Truth can make no terms
with incapacity.
When, later, the
headship of the early Church passed out of the hands of the academicians of
Athens and Alexandria, of Antioch, Tarsus and Ephesus, and fell into those of
the less studied Romans, the trend to literalism had gained such volume that
there swept into the movement a spirit of fell vindictiveness against the dominant
systems. When the conception of the purely spiritual Christos could no longer
successfully be imparted to the turbulent masses, who were clamoring for a political
savior, it was found necessary, or expedient, to substitute the more concrete
idea of a personal Messiah, who would be so obviously factual and realistic
as to preclude the possibility of being misconceived by the most doltish. The
swell of this tide of force carried the Church Fathers to the limit of recasting
the entire Gospel in the terms of a human biography. So that what had been originally
in the Mysteries and the sacred scripts a combined astrological and mythical
dramatization of man’s total experience, was now turned into the story of one
character put forth as a "life." In spite of almost insuperable obstacles and
the outcropping of endless absurdities and inanities of meaning in the transposition,
the undertaking was carried through. The outcome has been that the theology
handed down to us by the early reformation is the crudest, least rational and
intellectually most disconcerting rendition of the ancient revelation anywhere
extant. Philo, Origen, Clement and Josephus had expressly declared that scripture
shielded beneath the literal narrative a secret profundity of meaning, which
was its true message. Philo specified four distinct levels in which the sense
of scripture was to be apprehended, the purely literal, (Page 55) or
physical, the moral or emotional, the allegorical or mental and the anagogical,
or lofty spiritual. The later Church discarded or disregarded the two or three
more abstruse ones and held only to the lowest and the basest.
The drive to convert
the highly concentrated "meat" of spiritual truth into "pap" or "milk" for the
babes in capacity probably gave to Christianity that volcanic fervor that swept
it forward among the lower ranks and shortly enabled it to turn the tide against
its chief rival, Mithraism. The masses will always, as they did in Luther’s
Reformation, seize upon a sweeping current of ideological force and attempt
to utilize it as a means of escape from their lowly economic lot. The hopes
of the rabble interwove the dream of political liberation with the religious
message, adding an extraneous factor to the pressure to translate allegory into
a tale of history. Then as now low culture soon turned from the fervor to achieve
the slow laborious task of mastering an inner kingdom of spiritual character
to eager expectation of a utopian regime in world affairs. In the spiritual
drama were many lines which could be so misconstrued. [See Bouck White’s
The Call of the Carpenter, which builds an entire economic interpretation of
the Gospels on such specious material in the texts. ]
Thus Christianity
lost its Gnosis; and all Christendom has since had to suffer the blighting of
its best spiritual effort. If by the tactic the Church may be said to have gained
the whole world, it lost its own soul in the process.
That Christianity
after its inception was a ferment confined largely to the poor and untutored
classes is indicated both by the Gospel story itself and by much data of history.
Some authentic testimony may be useful in impressing the little-known fact upon
general knowledge. The cultured Celsus, writing about 200 A.D., cannot refrain
from commenting on the social complexion of the Christians of his day. He wrote:
"It is only the simpletons,
the ignoble, the senseless slaves and womenfolk and children - whom they wish
to persuade . . . wool-dressers and cobblers and fullers, the most uneducated
and vulgar persons . . . whosoever is a sinner, or unintelligent, or a fool,
in a word, whoever is godforsaken (@insert Greek equivalent), him the
kingdom of God will receive." [Quoted by Edward Carpenter, Pagan
and Christian Creeds, p. 22. Also in Glover’s Conflict of Religions in the Early
Roman Empire. ]
Edward Carpenter,
an unbiased and kindly student of early Christianity in relation to its contemporary
faith, says: (Page 56) "The
rude and menial masses, who had hitherto been almost beneath the notice of Greek
and Roman culture, flocked in; and though this was doubtless, as time went on,
a source of weakness to the Church, and a cause of dissension and superstition,
yet it was the inevitable line of human evolution, and had a psychological basis."
[Pagan and Christian Creeds, p. 221. ]
Many additional statements
in the same tenor could be quoted, but it is needless to enforce what is known
and indisputable.
But one hears the
protestations of Christians that the ministrations of their faith to the simple
and the downtrodden was its glory and demonstrated a sounder humanitarianism
than the Mystery Schools displayed. Let it have whatever praise goes with this
part of its program. It is to the credit of any system that it gives to the
lowly the food they need. The default of Christianity is that it gave to one
class and withheld from another. Even to that one class it gave the poorest
of bread - truth vitiated, devoid of nourishing sense, corrupted and corrupting
- as witness its own unconscionable history. It attempted to furnish to the
uncultured the easily digested provender they required, but swung with such
zeal into this labor that it denied the need of strong meat to more capable
digestions. Christianity’s culpability was not that it fed the outcast and the
sinner, but that it denied the Gnosis to the intelligent - or to any. Its Roman
revolt against the spiritual esotericism constituted its betrayal of the innermost
heart of all religion. It chose to feed the religious hunger of all grades of
people with food that was not even wholesome for the simple.
And it must answer
for its vicious resentment and unholy violence against the high-minded groups
that again and again in the whole course of its history essayed with sincerity
to restore it to the lost message of the Gnosis. Students of the situation in
the early Church will know the factual ground beneath the Emperor Julian’s caustic
observation that "there is no wild beast like an angry theologian." And the
murder of the learned Hypatia and the burning of the priceless books of the
Alexandrian library are sufficient attestation of the level of savage ferocity
to which the reaction against the lofty wisdom of the past had reduced its uncultured
opponents. Christianity now lives to witness a world of more general intelligence,
after repression by fiend-like persecution for fifteen centuries, once more
and this time with irrepressible purpose, turning with an eagerness born of
long denial to the (Page 57) esotericism
of revived Oriental philosophies for the deeper nourishment of the human spirit.
Christianity can
not shake off its pagan parentage. It must be seen that in spite of the almost
complete dismantling of the esoteric interpretation, the system retained practically
all the outward vestments of the hidden truth. That Christianity presented to
the world a complete new system of high truth unknown before is of course now
understood to be an unfounded legend. That it failed to make any single advance
from ignorance to wisdom is not so obvious to its partisans or to the general
public, but seems nevertheless indisputable on the evidence. It sadly bedimmed
the old splendor of knowledge. For it threw away the golden grain and kept only
the husk. The legitimacy of such a dogmatic assertion can become evident only
in the light of the entire study here undertaken, since such a lengthy scrutiny
is required to demonstrate that in dogma after dogma, rite after rite, and parable
after parable, Christianity substituted a mean and valueless literal sense for
the original inspiring message. If this was the sacrifice it made on behalf
of the lowly masses, it wrote off the payment by a total suppression of light
for those in higher intellectual brackets. It sealed up the anagogical meaning
and hounded to the death the parties that strove for its dissemination.
Devising nothing
new and retaining the outward form and dress of pagan systems, Christianity
has ever been hard put to explain the undeniable similarity between antecedent
religions and its own faith and practice. Intelligent churchmen have seen the
futility of denying the fact and have readily admitted the pagan sources of
Christianity. But in the third century it was a matter of critical importance
to maintain the novel and superior character of the new religion. The device
resorted to by numbers of the Fathers bears indisputable testimony to the desperateness
of their plight. Church membership today will be loath to credit the reliability
of the evidence on this matter, so nearly does it exceed all belief. Confronted
from time to time with amazing evidences of identity between their own and pagan
material, there was no recourse save to that negation of all logic, that last
resort of bigotry and zealotry - the plea of diabolism! Christian pride should
blush at the disingenuousness of its founders in this matter. The evidence bearing
on the point is neither inconsiderable nor vague. In his (Page 58) excellent
work, Pagan and Christian Creeds, Edward Carpenter comments at length on the
subterfuge, as follows:
"The similarity of
these ancient pagan legends and beliefs with Christian traditions was indeed
so great that it excited the attention and the undisguised wrath of the early
Christian Fathers. They felt no doubt about the similarity, but not knowing
how to explain it, fell back upon the innocent theory that the Devil - in order
to confound the Christians - had centuries before, caused the pagans to adopt
certain beliefs and practices! (Very crafty, we may say, of the Devil, but very
innocent of the Fathers to believe it!) Justin Martyr, for instance, describes
the institution of the Lord’s supper as narrated in the Gospels, and then goes
on to say: ‘Which the wicked devils have imitated in the Mysteries of Mithra,
commanding the same thing to be done. For that bread and a cup of water are
placed with certain incantations in the mystic rites of one who is being initiated
you either know or can learn.’ Tertullian also says (De Praescriptione Hereticorum,
C. 30; De Bapt., C. 3; De Corona, C. 15) that ‘the devil by the mysteries of
his idols imitates even the main part of the divine mysteries. . . . He baptizes
his worshippers in water and makes them believe that this purifies them from
their crimes! . . . Mithra sets his mark on the forehead of his soldiers; he
celebrates the oblation of bread; he offers an image of the resurrection and
presents at once the crown and the sword; he limits his chief priests to a single
marriage; he even has his virgins and ascetics.’ Cortez, it will be remembered,
complained that the Devil had positively taught to the Mexicans the same things
which God had taught to Christendom."
To which may be added
the astonishing statement of a modern Catholic priest, quoted by Carpenter (p.
68):
"And the Tartary
Father Grüber thus testifies: ‘This only do I affirm, that the Devil so mimics
the Catholic Church there, that although no European or Christian has ever been
there, still in all essential things they agree so completely with the Roman
Church as even to celebrate the Host with bread and wine; with my own eyes I
have seen it!’"
There are many accusations
against "the devil" in the same strain from Christian apologists. Not only were
the theory and practice of the new cult identical in most respects with those
of previous systems, but its own central thesis - the divinity of the Savior
- had been anticipated by some hundreds of years in other cults. (Page 59) "If
we look close," says Prof. Bousset, [Quoted in Pagan and Christian Creeds,
p. 206. ]"the result emerges with great clearness, that the figure of
the Redeemer, as such, did not wait for Christianity to force its way into the
religion of Gnosis, but was already present there under various forms."
Discussing the doctrine
of a Savior, Carpenter writes: [Pagan and Christian Creeds, p. 130.
])
"Probably the wide
range of this doctrine would have been far better and more generally known,
had not the Christian Church, all through, made the greatest of efforts and
taken the greatest of precautions to extinguish and snuff out all evidence of
the pagan claims on the subject. There is much to show that the early Church
took this line with regard to pre-Christian Saviors." [See Tertullian’s
Apologia, C. 16. ]
Carpenter makes it
clear that the coming of a Savior-God was in no sense a belief distinctive of
Christianity. He explains that the Messianic prophecies of the Jews and the
fifty-third chapter of Isaiah infected Christian teaching to some degree with
Judaic influence. The Hebrew word Messiah, meaning "The Anointed One," occurs
some forty times in the Old Testament; and each time in the Septuagint, written
as early as the third century before our era, it is translated Christos, which
also means "Anointed." It is thus seen, says Carpenter, that the word "the Christ"
was in vogue in Alexandria as far back as 280 B.C. In the Book of Enoch, written
not later than B.C. 170, the Christ is spoken of as already existing in heaven,
about to come to earth, and is called "The Son of Man." The Book of Revelation
is full of passages from Enoch, likewise the Epistles of Paul and the Gospels.
These statements
are but a suggestion of the full truth in this direction. The Christians were
not content to let the matter rest with the explanation that Satan had teased
them with some anticipatory resemblances. They resorted to the most violent
measures to blot out all links between their body of doctrine and former pagan
material. This is a black page in the history of Christianity and a measure
of evil policy not easily condoned. They destroyed as far as possible the entire
body of pagan record to obliterate, as Carpenter says, "the evidence of their
own dishonesty." Porphyry tells of their destruction of elaborate treatises
on Mithraism. And his own work on Christianity fell a prey likewise. Their vandal
work is of record. The whole matter may be tersely summed up in the world of
Sir Gilbert Murray: "The polemic (Page 60) literature
of Christianity is loud and triumphant; the books of the pagans have been destroyed."
It is clear, if comment
be not superfluous, that Christianity has lost, not gained, by its masking the
truth about its origins. Rabid fanaticism and the destruction of literature
are always the resort of a bad cause, revealing a want of a good defense on
open ground. The frenzy of zeal to wipe out all the testimony that pointed to
derivation from pagan forms argues a weak confidence, if not a bad conscience.
It may be said, in
partial extenuation of the Fathers’ conduct in the second, third and fourth
centuries, that their discovery now and again of the startling similarities
between their religion and earlier paganism may have come with genuine astonishment.
It is commonly believed that the Greeks and Romans of the early Christian days
stood far closer to the great Egyptian and Chaldean cultures than we do today.
Such is far from the truth. The Egyptian papyri, monuments and tablets were
a sealed book to the Christian Fathers, and remained so until Champollion worked
out the key to the hieroglyphics from the Rosetta Stone in the early nineteenth
century. The connection between the Christian cult and its antecedents in India,
Chaldea and Egypt was not seen then as it can be today. We can in a measure
understand the indignant surprise of the propagators of the new faith on finding
that their alleged novel truth had been copied ahead of them by the heathen!
The crux of present
interest in the matter is the consideration that the Christianity of our time
is imperiling its own standing and repute by perpetuating a mistake made at
its inception. Continuance in a folly so obvious in the face of modern scholarship
will henceforth be an open confession of disingenuousness. It will be at the
risk of the loss of the last vestige of respect yet accorded to it by studied
intellectuals. Its only salvation from neglect and scorn constantly augmenting
is a frank admission of its outgrowth from pagan antecedents, and a willingness
to reconstruct its interpretation in relation to them. It must manifest a disposition
to lift the stigma of "heathenism" from off the ancient faiths and restore them
to their high place of nobility and worth. For in elevating its sources it will
exalt itself. The outcome has been disastrous. (Page 61)
The Church
might be well advantaged by paying head to Carpenter’s candid conclusions on
the subject. He says:
"I have said that
out of this World-Religion Christianity really sprang. It is evident that the
time has arrived when it must either acknowledge its source and frankly endeavor
to affiliate itself to the same, or failing that, must perish. . . . Christianity,
therefore, as I say, must either now come frankly forward and, acknowledging
its parentage from the great Order of the Past, seek to rehabilitate that, and
carry mankind one step forward in the path of evolution - or else it must perish.
There is no other alternative."[Pagan and Christian Creeds, p. 263.
]
It will
be hard for an ingrained devotionalism to turn back and embrace what it had
been so long taught to despise. But it must be done, or all pretense at regard
for the truth be abandoned. The grand body of ancient teaching should never
have been brought into contempt. Convicted of its error the Church must go the
whole way in making the correction. No course but that of candor and honesty
will now suffice, if indeed it is not too late even now to make amends and save
a bad situation. Further concealment and evasion will only prove the more surely
disastrous. For the sun of the moral zodiac has swung around into the sign of
Libra, where the good and evil of historical action are weighed in the balance,
and piled high on the adverse pan are the knavery and ignorance of early policies,
the violent treatment of earnest esotericists, the destruction of priceless
books and the cruel persecution of sincere sectaries. The way in which ecclesiastical
Christianity meets this issue will determine its fate. If it confronts it with
honest humility it may rise again in power. For there is power in the ancient
spiritual science to transfigure Christian nations with the glow of righteousness.
Readoption of the pagan wisdom will glorify a movement now sunk in nearly hopeless
ineptitude. The Dark Ages are not yet past, and that treasure which slipped
away through the fingers of early Christianity has not yet been restored. (Page
62)
Chapter
IV
WISDOM
HIDDEN IN A MYSTERY
We have remained
stodgily and stupidly impervious to the infiltration of ancient truth because
we have remained blind to the method of its presentation and preservation. We
have lost the power to grasp the premises of true knowledge laid down by sage
ancestors because we have been too dull to see through the subtleties of a methodology
different from our own. These premises for thought will only be regained as
the devices resorted to in their statement are comprehended. The very possibility
of making the interpretation at all is intimately bound up with the use of abstruse
keys to bring to light meanings covered under an adroit strategy of concealment.
Modern mentality almost instinctively resents the presumption that sages of
old put truth under a mask of subtle disguise. Modern canons of utility can
admit no sense or sanity in a procedure of the sort. Truth is for general broadcasting,
if only that its discoverer or author may get his financial reward for his contribution.
But truth in ancient days was not sold to the public. There were, in the first
place, no printing presses to manage its general and quick distribution. Secondly,
it had to be safeguarded from the undisciplined who would misuse it. And thirdly,
it had to be preserved. To this end it had to be embalmed in the amber of such
myths, legends, folk-tales, parables and structures of natural symmetry as would
become unforgettable mnemonics through the power of tradition. And finally it
had to be expressed in a language that would be universally comprehensible -
a language of living symbols. Therefore truth was dramatized and symbolized.
The figures in the drama were the elements of divine and human nature; and the
symbols were an alphabet of truth because they were phrases of truth itself
in the world of flesh and matter. They carried to the mind their message of
invisible truths because they were those invisible truths themselves appearing
in man’s cognizable world clothed in a garment (Page 63) of
concreteness. Words are themselves but symbols. Objects of living nature are
more definite speech to a discerning mind than formal language. It is as if
one could throw the ideas of the mind on a screen. And Universal Mind did throw
its archetypal ideas onto the screen of matter, where mortal man may look at
them in their appearance that is not false, as philosophy has so mistakenly
alleged, but true.
Unable to decipher
the archaic language used, we have made hash of the true meaning of sacred love.
The grandest of structures for truth-telling have been made into the grossest
of fabrications. What the Bible has been declared to mean is inane nonsense;
what it does actually mean is splendid truth. And the gross perversion and loss
of its sense have come solely through our unfamiliarity with the special and
involved techniques employed in writing the sacred books. Our efforts to read
the texts in total ignorance of their art of literary indirection have run into
the territory of the ridiculous.
The ancient scribes
were, first of all, esotericists and wrote esoterically. All spiritual wisdom
was held in secret brotherhoods and rigorously safeguarded from common dissemination.
There existed a spiritual aristocracy quite difficult for us to conceive of,
based on considerations the force of which we have lost the insight to appreciate.
There were intellectual and spiritual castes, and the lower orders of mental
capacity were not regarded as fitted to receive information where the qualifications
for its social use were not fulfilled. Sheer pious faith could not alone gain
one admission into the Mystery Schools. Actual discipline of body and mind,
and certain inner unfoldments of faculty were held as requisite for the grasp
of deeper truth. Initiation was to some real extent a matter of the mastery
of theurgic powers dependent in the main upon purity of life. Esotericism arose
primarily from the necessity of safeguarding the use of dynamic knowledge. Religion
was far from being the jejune shell of social or mystical sentimentalism that
it has so largely come to be at this epoch. It aimed to liberate the powerful
forces hidden in the depths of man’s psyche. It bore an immediate reference
to individual evolution, in the processes of which nature’s dynamic energies
had to be controlled and intelligently directed. What we have derided as "magic"
in the religion of old was just the control of subtle powers which we mostly
permit to slumber in dormancy beneath the surface of our superficial life. Religion
touched man so deeply in olden times that it awakened the (Page 64) potencies
of his godlike endowment, an enterprise which concerns us rather little now.
The imputation of sacredness to the rites of religion flowed directly from recognition
of the vital issues at stake in the soul’s incarnation on earth. And the right
to participate in the higher mysteries, of which St. Paul speaks, belonged to
those who had won it from nature by the payment of the full price - a life schooled
to harmony by intelligent consecration of every personal force.
In spite of the enormous
quantity of evidence pointing to the existence of a great body of esoteric teaching
in the Mystery Brotherhoods, such a scholar as Renouf asks:[From Hibbert
Lectures, p. 217. ]"Was there really, as is frequently asserted, an esoteric
doctrine known to the scribes and priests alone, as distinct from the popular
belief?" And his answer is: "No evidence has yet been provided in favor of this
hypothesis." But how can Renouf support so negative a statement in the face
of the positive testimony offered by Plato, Porphyry, Apuleius, Herodotus, Plotinus,
Proclus, Iamblichus, Euripides and Cicero? He is decisively contradicted also
by many modern writers, among them Angus, Kennedy and Halliday, who have undertaken
profound and searching studies of the Mysteries. Certainly a man like Cicero
can not be scorned when he testifies as follows:
"There is nothing
better than those Mysteries by which, from a rough and fierce life, we are polished
to gentleness and softened. And Initia, as they are called, we have thus known
as the beginnings of life in truth; not only have we received from them the
doctrine of living with happiness, but even of dying with a better hope."[Quoted
in Preface to Lectures on Ancient Philosophy, by Manly P. Hall. ]
And is such a statement
as the following from Plato without weight:
"But it was then
lawful to survey the most splendid beauty, when we obtained, together with that
blessed choir, this happy vision and contemplation. And we indeed enjoyed this
blessed spectacle in conjunction with Jupiter . . . at the same time being initiated
in those Mysteries which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all Mysteries.
. . . Likewise in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators
of entire, simple, immovable and blessed visions in the pure light. . . ."[Phaedrus,
p. 64.]
To Renouf’s ill-founded
assertion it need only be rejoined that, to be sure, there is little or no evidence
of esotericism, for the good reason (Page 65) that
esotericism is the one thing in the world that is bound by its nature to leave
little evidence! Does the scholar expect that the members of the Mysteries would
have published their secrets abroad? On the contrary, they were bound to secrecy
by the severest of all pledges.
Religious books have
been written, if written at all, in cryptic form, with truth heavily veiled
under the garb of cipher and symbol. Figures and glyphs had to be devised that
would convey meaning to the initiated, but conceal it from the uninstructed.
To interpret archaic literature one must learn to discern the intent of truth
under the disguise of designed duplicity in the telling.
And it is further
absurd for a Christian apologist to protest the fact of ancient esotericism,
seeing that Christianity itself perpetuated esoteric distinctions in its own
practices for two centuries. To this effect there is a mountain of evidence.
Even the Christian Creed was kept largely a secret down to the fifth century.
It was to be preserved in memory only. St. Augustine urged that no writing be
done about the Creed because God had said that he would write his laws in our
hearts and minds. According to J. R. Lumby, in his History of the Creeds (pp.
2, 3) there is found no specimen of a Creed until the end of the second century,
and the oldest written Creed dates about the end of the third century.
The demands of an
esoteric methodology account for the ancient use of mythopoeia. Here we encounter
that feature of ancient procedure that has bred the prevalent wide confusion
with respect to past wisdom, and find the solution of our bewilderment and ineptitude
in face of ancient mythology. Our childish misconstruction that has written
the record of our dull incomprehension across the scroll of literature for a
millennium and a half, comes out in glaring silhouette as we fathom the devices
of this cryptic treatment. We have mistaken symbolic language for direct speech.
We have pitying condescension toward early races who explained the discovery
of "fire" by the Promethean legend. We laugh at Hindus for saying that the earth
is upheld by an elephant, which stands on a tortoise. We pridefully ask them
on what the tortoise stood. Their pertinent answer might well be: "On modern
stupidity." Not the ancients, but we, are the puerile party in the case. We,
not they, have "believed" their myths. The apparent childishness of the myths
is far overmatched by our real childishness in supposing they were taken as
factual. One can not read in any (Page 66) modern
academic work on ancient culture in Greece, Egypt, Chaldea or India without
having to witness the birth anguish of the laboring idea that the myths reveal
an inceptive stage of the slow evolution from primitive infantilism to our smug
all-knowing wisdom.
We cast in the face
of this presupposition the statement that the mythos was the designed instrument
of consummate poetic and dramatic art!
The stories were
devised to convey cosmical history, theogony, anthropogenesis, and finally individual
experience of humans in the psycho-physiological development of mortal life.
The whole cycle of the history of unfolding divinity in humanity was dramatized
for stage enactment in the annual round of Mystery festivals. And portions of
this drama have filtered down into the ritualism of practically every religion
in the world. The epic of the human soul in earthly embodiment was the theme
of every ancient poet and dramatist, and each strove to dress out the elements
of the struggle in a new allegorical garb, with a new hero, whether Achilles,
Hercules, Horus, Theseus, Aeneas, Orpheus, Jason, Dionysus, Buddha, Ulysses
or Jesus, enacting the central role of the divine genius conquering the animal
nature. In lieu of love, sex, detective, murder and gangster novels, the writers
of the bygone era could deal but with one theme, that of the pilgrimage of the
soul through the gamut of the elements. Each work was a Pilgrim’s Progress.
And novelty could be introduced only by the device of depicting the soul’s experiences
under a new allegorical situation, symbolizing afresh the old, old story of
the immortal spirit’s immersion in the sea of matter. In all, combats with dragons,
wrestling with serpents, harassments by brute creatures, enchantments by Sirens,
plottings of conspirators, imprisonment in dungeons and struggling through to
an ultimate return to the original home of felicity, find their place. In one
type of adventure after another the many features of the history of the divine
Ego in its progress from earth back to the skies were allegorically portrayed.
Every aspect of the experience had its appropriate myth.
Indeed there is every
presumption in favor of the belief that the mythos was an infinitely more profound
instrument in the hands of its inventors than we yet can fathom. It is hardly
too much to affirm that it was the echo of the Logos itself carrying the form
of the emanational Voice out into the material realm. The mythos brought the
(page 67) unseen
forms of abstract truth out into physical representation for the grasp of thought.
There is warrant for believing that mutheomai, the Greek, meaning "to fable,"
"represent," "invent," is derivable from the Egyptian mutu, "quick utterance."
It would suggest a form of direct speech to the intuitions. The myth made an
outward picture of ideal forms. It dramatized truth. It had the graphic impressiveness
of a cinematograph. This view is upheld by a writer who yet refutes at every
turn the mythological basis of religion:[Emile Baumann, Saint Paul, p.
275. ]"It is the property of the mystic to proceed by way of images to
the summit of a pure idea and the intellectual vision of the substance." That
the myths were thus the vehicles for conveying the realization of abstract truths
which could not be presented so forcefully in words alone seems indisputably
clear. What is equally clear now is that, in the hands of ignorance, an exoteric
rendering has taken the place of the esoteric, depriving the mind of its grasp
on the essential truth intended in the adumbration. The danger of such a confusion
was seen by Philo, the learned Jew, who when speaking of the Mosaic writings
told his countrymen that "the literal statement is a fabulous one, and it is
in the mythical that we shall find the true."[Quoted by Gerald Massey,
Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 543. ] Philo’s statement is
not less apt for the present age.
Reluctant as is the
modern scholar of repute to assent to the ascription of vital hidden meaning
to the ancient legends, the truth in this regard is occasionally seen and admitted.
It is refreshing to read such a passage as the following from one of the accredited
authorities in the field of Egyptology. Speaking of the Mysteries of Osiris
and the dramatic representations enacted each year at Abydos, he says:
"Every act was symbolical
in character and represented some ancient belief or tradition. The paste, the
mixture of wheat and water, the egg, the naked goddess Shenti, i.e., Isis in
her chamber, the placing of the paste on her bed, the kneading of the paste
into moulds, etc., represented the great processes of Nature which are set in
motion when human beings are begotten and conceived, as well as the inscrutable
powers which preside over growth and development. . . . And there was not the
smallest action on the part of any member of the band who acted the ‘miracle
Play’ of Osiris, and not a sentence in the Liturgy which did not possess importance
and vital significance to the followers of Osiris."[E. A. Wallis Budge,
Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, II, p. 30. ]
In the light of such
true words from one of the most eminent of Egyptologists it becomes next to
incomprehensible that (Page 68) modern scholars
have so wretchedly misconceived the inner purport of these old Mystery rituals
and that the same scholar has himself most ridiculously misconstrued their meaning
in many particulars. The broad modern assumption has been that the mythos was
in toto a lot of mummery and that the rituals were a lot of hollow ceremonialism
based on superstition. That they shadowed the greatest of spiritual truths has
not yet entered the mind of any man highly received in the ranks of orthodox
scholarship. No one has yet been able to tell these savants that they have been
handling pearls, and not rubbish.
Yet they have been
told, and by no one more courageously and vehemently than Gerald Massey, a scholar
of surpassing ability whose sterling work has not yet won for him the place
of eminence which he deserves. The wrecking of the mythos by ignorant literalism
stirred Massey to bitter resentment against the perpetrators of the crime. His
own words will speak best for him, while they support our own contentions:
"The aborigines did
not mistake the facts of nature as we have mistaken the primitive method of
representing them. It is we, not they, who are the most deluded victims of false
belief. Christian capacity for believing the impossible is unparalleled in any
time past amongst the race of men. Christian readers denounce the primitive
realities of the mythical representations as puerile indeed, and yet their own
realities alleged to be eternal, from the fall of Adam to the redemption by
means of a crucified Jew, are little or nothing more than the shadows of these
primitive simplicities of an earlier time. It will yet be seen that the culmination
of credulity, the meanest emasculation of mental manhood, the densest obscuration
of the inward light of nature, the completest imbecility of shuteye belief,
the nearest approach to a total and eternal eclipse of common sense, has been
attained beyond all chance of competition by the victims of the Christian creeds.
The genesis of delusive superstition is late, not early. It is not the direct
work of nature herself. Nature was not the mother who began her work of development
by nursing her child in all sorts of illusions concerning things in general.
. . . Primitive man was not a metaphysician, but a man of common sense. . .
. The realities without and around him were too pressing for the senses to allow
him to play the fool with delusive idealities. . . . Modern ignorance of the
mythical mode of representation has led to the ascribing of innumerable false
beliefs not only to primitive men and present-day savages, but also to the most
learned and highly civilized people of antiquity, the Egyptians." [Ancient
Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 33. As Massey is an authority frequently to
be cited in this work, it is well to state that he was an English literary figure
of some prominence in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first
years of the twentieth. He studied the Egyptian hieroglyphics for forty
years and had a force of transcribers employed in his later years of investigation
to assemble the material from the monuments, tombs and papyri. His interpretation
of Egyptian writings has been all too largely ignored by savants, yet he has
the merit of having approached the task with a mind free from scholastic, theological
or conventional biases, which have so utterly blinded the discernment and vitiated
the conclusions of orthodox authorities. It is permissible for us to state that
it was his works that opened our eyes to the hidden meaning under the material,
when the works of more accredited specialists in the field had left us without
a single enlightening hint. Massey is the only scholar in whose hands the recondite
Egytpian material begins to take on rational significance. All the others leave
it resembling unintelligible nonsense. Several important misconceptions in his
interpretation are dealt with in the course of our work. Indeed we have used
one or two of these as the most direct approach to a correction of the profound
misconstructions which have vitiated the work of scholars in this field up to
the present.
] (Page 69) He
asserts again that the Egyptians "knew, more or less, that their own legends
were mythical, whereas the Christians were vouching for their Mythos being historical."
Concerning symbolism and mythical representation he emphasizes that "the insanity
lies in mistaking it for human history or Divine Revelation." Mythology, he
avers, is the repository of man’s most ancient science, and "when truly interpreted
once more, it is destined to be the death of those false theologies to which
it has unwittingly given birth." Holding that all mythologizing originated in
Egypt, he fights the conclusion of Renouf that "neither Hebrews nor Greeks borrowed
any of their ideas from Egypt." The eminent scholar could not have known of
Herodotus’ statement that it was Melampus, the son of Amytheon, who introduced
into Greece the name of Dionysus (Bacchus) and the ceremonial of his worship,
having become acquainted with these and other practices in Egypt. Herodotus
concludes:
"For I can by no
means allow that it is by mere coincidence that the Bacchic ceremonies in Greece
are so nearly the same as the Egyptian." [Lectures on Luniolatry, p.
2, by Gerald Massey. ]
Elsewhere (II, 81)
he repeats:
". . . the rites
called Orphic or Bacchic are in reality Egyptian and Pythagorean."
Massey claims that
modern misinterpretation of ancient typology has made a terrible tyranny in
the mental domain, much of our folklore and most of our popular beliefs being
fossilized symbolism. "Misinterpreted mythology has so profoundly infected religion,
poetry, art and criticism that it has created a cult of the unreal." He asserts
that "a great deal of what has been imposed upon us as God’s direct, true and
sole revelation to man is a mass of inverted myths."
Massey insists that
theology is a diseased state of primitive mythology, contradicting the renowned
Max Müller, who has stated the contrary - that mythology was a disease of theology.
Elsewhere he says that the Marchen are not reflections, but refractions, of
the ancient myths. The mythos passed over into the folk-tale, not the folk-tale
into the mythos. He contends that in truth the myths were the earliest forms
taken by primitive thought in formulating representations of reality. Simple-minded
early man saw life pictured by the living processes under his observation. Our
own opinion diverges considerably from (Page 70) Massey’s
at this point, since there is massive evidence, of the general type adduced
in this work, to show that the myths were not the product of "primitive" simplicity,
but on the contrary were devised by the highest mythopoetic genius. They were
the output of a line of sages who knew the truth of what Paul has told us, that
the inner world of ideality is understood by those things which are made, in
the outer world of physis. They traced a marvelous series of parallels, correspondences,
analogies between things seen and things unseen, the better to illustrate the
latter. They knew that physical nature typed spiritual reality, and used the
outlines of the former to pictorialize the latter. They took the tadpole or
the serpent as the type of resurrected life, because they saw the spiritual
process exemplified in these creatures. They took the hawk as the symbol of
the risen soul because they saw the bird soar into the airy heights. They found
in the mole a fit symbol of the soul immersed in the dark underworld of flesh,
because the analogy was evident and under their eye. Nature supplied the suggestive
identity, and they used it to teach subjective truths. Primitive man may well
known the simple processes of nature from firsthand contact; but he will not
know that they bespeak a spiritual counterpart of themselves in the interior
life of man unless the sages so inform him. Massey’s view was not well considered
in this regard. Whole generations of civilized folks have gazed upon the phenomena
of nature and failed to be instructed spiritually by the spectacle. One must
ask Massey if primitive fancy could construct allegories so profoundly elaborated
that the united intelligence of the world for centuries has been unable to fathom
their hidden significance. Millions of intelligent persons today have looked
upon the sun and moon throughout the whole of their lives and have never yet
discerned in their movements and phases an iota of the astonishing spiritual
drama which the two heavenly bodies enact each month, a drama disclosed to our
own astonished comprehension only by the books of ancient Egypt. Hundreds of
celebrities in the field of Egyptology have mulled over the same material and
have not yet lifted as much as a corner of the veil of Isis. Primitive simplicity
could not have concocted what the age-long study of an intelligent world could
not fathom. Not aboriginal naïveté, but exalted spiritual and intellectual acumen,
formulated the myths. Reflection of the realities of a higher world in the phenomena
of a lower world could not be detected when only the one world, the (Page 71)
lower, was known. You can not see that nature reflects spiritual truth unless
you know the form of spiritual truth. And such knowledge would be an a priori
requirement to making the comparison at all! Did primitive man possess such
profound knowledge of subjective truth?
But whence, it will
be asked, came such exalted intelligence amongst the early undeveloped races?
This question has been answered by the earlier statement that graduates of this
or other cycles of growth had parented and tutored early mankind. A parent or
guardian gives to the immature child a set of high maxims into the practical
wisdom of which he is to grow in the course of his later development. Humanity
was the ward of the demigods in remote times. And none but an intelligence beyond
Shakespeare’s, beyond Plato’s, could have framed so marvelous a quiver of myths,
the interior purport of which cannot even now be grasped save by the help of
most recondite keys, themselves the distillation of a whole course of philosophical
education. We have not read into the myths, as Massey claims, an unwarranted
implication; we are only now, all too belatedly, drawing out of them some portion
of a meaning deep as life itself, which they were from the first designed to
embody. We do not have to superimpose extraneous meaning upon them. We find
them already pregnant with truth. They shine with the flashing light of an inner
connotation which they were intended to reflect. They were themselves the shadow
in objective form of the substance of truth, and Massey must not object to our
working from the shadow, as Plato suggested in the "cave allegory," back to
the substance. It is the only method operable by men in the "cave."
The religious texts
of old are at least one thing that did not arise from "primitive" ignorance.
Says Budge, in speaking of the Egyptian Book of the Dead: "They can’t be the
literary product of savages or Negroes."[ ] He adds elsewhere:
"The descriptions
of the heaven of the Egyptian depicted in the Pyramid Texts represent the conceptions
of countless generations of theologians." [Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection,
I, p. 101. ]
Yet he refers to
these Egyptian people as primitives. He reveals his mental obfuscation again
in speaking of the Egyptian judgment:
"The pictorial form
of the Judgment Scene cannot fail to strike us as belonging to a primitive period,
when the Egyptians believed that hearts were actually weighed in the Balance
before Osiris, while the words of the (Page 72) texts
. . . suggest a development of ethics which we are accustomed to associate with
the most civilized nations of the world." [Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection,
I, p. 334. ]
Apart from the fact
that almost certainly no age of Egyptian history was so stupid as to believe
that a living Osiris ever observed the weighing of physical hearts in an actual
Judgment Scene - it being all a symbolical depiction - the passage discloses
the confusion of the scholastic mind at the contemporaneous presence of elevated
spirituality or ethics with alleged primitive culture. We see the same inadequacy
of the "primitive" theory to meet the facts again in the following quotation
from Budge:
"Mr. Dennett, after
a long study of the religions of many tribes in Western Africa, says that the
Bavili conception of God is so spiritual, or abstract, that he fears the reader
will think him mad to suppose that so evidently degenerate a race can have formed
so logical an idea of God." [Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, I,
p. 370. ]
It seems never to
have occurred to either Budge or Mr. Dennett or others that some saner age might
some time pass upon our scholars the judgment of madness in thinking that the
sublime spiritual conceptions of the Book of the Dead, the Chaldean Oracles,
the Orphic Hymns, could have been the product of primitive peoples.
In discussing the
(figurative) partaking by the ancient votaries of the bodies of their gods in
the Eucharistic festival, which he mistakes for a literal eating (!), Budge
traces the practice to a savage custom of cutting out and eating the vital organs
of the bodies of captives in order to imbibe their courage, and says that "it
is hard to understand the retention of such a notion in a text filled with sublime
thoughts and ideas." Could not this distinguished scholar see that the sole
difficulty in the matter was caused by the foolish attempt to read poetry and
allegory as objective occurrence?
It is perhaps permissible
to interject here an instance of the incapacity of modern academicians to interpret
the ancient use of symbols. Says Budge again:
"The Egyptian Christian
also associated the frog with new birth and on a Christian lamp described by
Lauzone, is a figure of a frog surrounded by the legend ‘Ego eimi Anastasis,’
‘I am the Resurrection.’ It is not easy at first sight to understand why the
frog should have been a symbol of new life to the Egyptian any more than the
beetle. . . ."[Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, I, p. 280. ]
(Page 73) He
finally arrives at the solution: "The frog appears with the coming of the rain,
just as the beetle appears with the rising of the Nile, and so the ideas of
new life and fertility became associated with them." That so eminent a scholar
as Budge should admit the difficulty of understanding why the frog - which transforms
from the tadpole - and the beetle - which goes into the ground only to reissue
after an incubation of twenty-eight days as a new generation of himself - should
have been taken as apt symbols of the resurrection is a sufficiently striking
demonstration of the blindness with which modern presumption has approached
the study of the lore of antiquity. The frog, the beetle, the snake, the worm
becoming the chrysalis, were the obvious visible types of transfiguration and
regeneration, the outward mark of the spiritual idea. Massey states that the
Christian Fathers, with the exception perhaps of Clement of Alexandria, "had
scarcely enough knowledge of the ancient symbolism to put any perceptible boundary
to their ignorance." [Massey: The Natural Genesis, I, p. 431. ]
They did not know that their Gospels were old Egyptian myths ignorantly literalized.
Massey notes that Celsus "asked concerning the Christian legends, made false
to fact by the ignorant literalization of the Gnosis,--‘What nurse would not
be ashamed to tell such fables to a child?’" One might paraphrase Celsus’ question
today by asking: "What age would not be ashamed to confess that it could not
tell the difference between myths and actual history?"
Every religion apparently
has begun at a high level and become corrupted until it stood in need of reformation
and purification. Religions decay through atrophy of spiritual vision. Their
course is marked by a blurring of the original light. Their fiery motivating
spirit ever tends to become static. Early passion for radical regeneration of
the life dwindles into a conservative tendency. The early dynamic symbols and
slogans after a time lose their pristine significance. Hence the traditions,
legends and rites found to be cherished by many semi-civilized tribes of our
day are doubtless the decadent remnants or mere husks of former grand representations
of spiritual truth. They do not represent the beginnings of crude religious
apprehension; they are the crumbling ruins of once noble structures of wisdom
and genius. Modern insight has entirely failed to sense this status of the religious
material in anthropological study, in consequence of which the handling of religion
as a sociological investigation has been (Page 74) marked
by the grossest misconception, bewilderment and confusion. Academic opinion
is that the myths and folk-tales are the groping efforts of undeveloped mind
to interpret nature. But, on the contrary, they are the floating debris of splendid
old formulations that once brimmed with the golden wine of high meaning. They
are the wrack of mythology. "Whoever begins with the myths as a product of the
‘savage’ mind as savages are known today is fatally in error." [Ancient
Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 29. ]Years of study convinced Massey
that all the Marchen were the flotsam of old Egyptian wisdom-structures. He
avers:
"We must go back
to the Proto-Aryan beginnings which are Egyptian and Kamite. In Africa we find
those things next to Nature where we can go no further back in search of origins.
Egypt alone goes back far enough to touch Nature in these beginnings, and .
. . Egypt alone has faithfully and intelligently kept the record." [Ancient
Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 30. ]
In Budge’s Osiris
and the Egyptian Resurrection (Vol. I, p. 365) the author writes of the people
of West Africa in relation to the assertion that they were primitive savages:
"This is a great
mistake, for they possess the remnants of a noble and sublime religion, the
precepts of which they have forgotten and the ceremonies of which they have
debased."
Here for once the
scholar glimpsed the truth of the anthropological situation as regards religious
origins and subsequent decadence, and had he followed the light which here shone
in his mind for the moment, he would have been spared the floundering in bogs
and swamps of misconception which makes his treatises so nearly worthless in
the end. In treating of that supposedly most debased of African religious customs,
fetishism, he writes:
"Wherever we find
fetishism it seems to be a corruption or modification of some former system
of worship rather than the result of a primitive faith."
"All this is only
theory as far as the Egyptians are concerned, but authorities on modern African
religions tell us that this is exactly what has taken place among the peoples
of West Africa. Thus Col. Ellis says that there is more fetishism among the
Negroes of the West Indies, who have been Christianized for more than half a
century, than amongst those of West Africa; for side by side with the new religion
have lingered the old superstitions, whose true import has been forgotten or
corrupted."[Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, II, p. 201. ]
(Page 75)
It served partisan
ecclesiastical purposes in early times to weave some history into the texture
of the allegory or to use certain bold historical events as the frame for the
allegorical depiction. And this mixture has made the determination difficult
in places. It is not an overstatement of truth to aver that the systems of mythology
have served little better purpose in the Christian era than to detail the entire
train of meaning. They have proved to be insoluble puzzles and enigmas. Our
inability to make sense of them has totally distorted our estimate of Greek,
Egyptian, Hindu and Chinese mentality, causing us to belittle their product
most egregiously. Evidences of our erroneous estimates of their work are abundant.
Lewis Spence quotes Budge (Egyptian Magic) as asserting that the Egyptians believed
the gods could assume at will the forms of animals, and that this belief was
the origin of the most sacred position accorded to animals in Kamite religion.
"This was the fundamental
idea of so-called ‘Egyptian animal-worship’ which provoked the merriment of
the cultured Greeks and drew down upon the Egyptians the ridicule and abuse
of the early Christian writers."[Myths and Legends: Egypt, p. 271.
]
Budge is of record
in a statement that
"it is doubtful if
the Egyptian, at that time, had developed any spiritual conceptions, in our
sense of the word; for although his ideas were very definite as to the reality
of a future existence, I think that he had formulated few details about it,
and that he had no idea as to where or how it was to be enjoyed."
Such a quotation
provokes the comment that it might be heartily agreed that the Egyptians had
no "spiritual conceptions in our sense of the word," for their understanding
of eschatology far transcended ours in definiteness and lucidity, being both
scientific and consistent, while ours is hazy and conjectural. And again, one
could ask Budge just where in modern life the details as to the future state
have been so expressly "formulated" on an accepted basis, and where one can
gain explicit information nowadays as to "where and how it is to be enjoyed."
For the Spiritualists are the only ones who have tried to set forth these matters
with definiteness, and are we to understand that Budge regards their theories
as the accepted knowledge of our brilliant era? Have not both science and the
academic world scoffed at (Page 76) Spiritualistic
offerings? Budge goes on to say that the student who views Egyptian religion
"from the lofty standpoint of Christianity only," will regard it as gross polytheism
or pantheism, expressed through rites that were cruel, bloodthirsty and savage,
embellished with legends of the gods that are childish, the outcome of debased
minds and imaginations, featuring a story of the resurrection of Osiris that
is a farrago of nonsense in which absurd magical ceremonies play an impossible
part, and a conception of heaven that bespeaks the imagination of a half-savage
people. Yet he has more than once expressed his surprise at the sublimity and
lofty purity of their presentments!
In his sorry effort
at interpretation of the Egyptian Myths and Legends Lewis Spence adds clinching
evidence of the utter incapacity of academic brains to discern in the least
degree what the sages of old were laboring to do, when he permits himself to
place the following shameful appraisal upon archaic intelligence:
"Again, to the Egyptian
mind, incapable of abstract thought, an immaterial and intangible deity was
an impossible conception. A god, and more so by reason of his godhead, must
manifest and function in an actual body. . . . As the Egyptian everywhere craved
the manifestation of and communion with his gods, it thus came about that incarnations
of deity and its many attributes were multiplied."[Myths and Legends:
Egypt, p. 283. ]
The consummate obtuseness
that could prompt the ascription to the ancient Egyptian seers of the flat incapacity
for abstract thought may not be comprehended in its bald grossness until the
reader has finished the perusal of the present volume. We have not hitherto
had the presentation of the lucid meaning of Egypt’s religion to enable us to
gauge the amazing injustice, as well as the crass stupidity, of so rank a judgment
pronounced by ignorance against wisdom. In spiritual science we are still the
barbarians.
Further comment would
call attention to the sagacity of the Egyptians in refraining from doing the
very thing of which Spence accused them,--of actualizing their deities as persons.
Not the Egyptians but the Christians did this, in the person of Jesus. Personal
gods were precisely the kind they did not have. What they had was representations
of the gods, which is a whole kingdom’s length away from the other conception.
Their "gods" were in reality the actual energies of nature, of matter and of
mind in the universe, graded in (Page 77) a wonderful hierarchy.
These are intangible powers, and what can puny man do other than represent them
by one or another type of image? The Egyptians had quite unaccountable knowledge
of these sublimer forces, with some of which, as the ethers and the rays, modern
science is now slowly becoming acquainted, and they poetically imaged them under
deific names, as Thoth, Anup, Kheper, Khnum, Osiris, Horus, Ptah, Set, Isis,
Nephthys and Ra. But gods in human flesh (except by personation) they expressly
did not have. Budge wastes pages over the discussion as to whether Osiris was
a living character; and decided that his tomb, with his actual bodily remains,
was at Abydos. The time has come to cry out against such incompetent muddling
and to bend ourselves with what capacity we have to unravel the golden threads
of supernal wisdom running their magnificent design through the old books of
Egypt.
Budge was a few times
astute and fair enough to admit that injustice had been done to pagans by Christian
aspersions as to their addiction to idol-worship and fetishism. He well recalls
that the Portuguese Christian explorers adjudged the African tribes to be practitioners
of witchcraft and sorcery simply because they were themselves familiar with
it and gratuitously translated observed African ceremonies as such. He is good
enough to say that "neither the Egyptian nor the modern African ever believed
in the divinity of their amulets or fetishes, and they never considered them
to represent deities." He quotes Dr. Nassau as a final authority in stating
that "the thing itself, the material itself, is not worshipped. . . . Low as
is fetishism, it nevertheless has its philosophy, a philosophy that is the same
in kind as that of the higher forms of worship." The apex of fairness is reached
in Budge’s statement in the Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, Vol. I, p.
198:
"From first to last
there is no evidence whatever that the Egyptians worshipped a figure or symbol,
whether made of metal or wood, stone, porcelain or any other substance, unless
they believed it to be the abode of a spirit of some kind. So far from fetishism
being peculiarly characteristic of Egyptian religion, it seems to me that this
religion, at all events in its oldest forms, was remarkably free from it." (Page
78)
Chapter
V
LOOSING
THE SEVEN SEALS
If the mythologies
of the early nations have been a source of perplexity and bafflement to students,
no less so has been the Christian Bible itself. Not even the most rabid Christian
partisan could claim that the book has throughout a clear message, clearly to
be apprehended. Outside of much simple homiletic truth which has yielded comfort
to troubled hearts, the Bible is as yet practically a sealed book. Its meaning
is not known at the present day. Nothing but the thinnest shadow of the truth
that the book portrays has yet fallen across the threshold of modern understanding.
No suspicion of the grand completeness of its message has yet dawned upon us.
Nineteen hundred years of theological digging has not unearthed the treasure
buried under its allegorical profundities. And this failure has been due to
our stubborn refusal to reject the Bible as history, and to accept it as cryptic
typology. From beginning to end the Bible is nothing but a series of spiritual
allegories traduced to history or interwoven with some history.
A further startling
discovery along this line is that the series of myths deals not with a wide
variety of spiritual or cosmical situations, but only with the same one situation
in endless repetition! There is but one story to religion and its Bibles, only
one basic event from which spring all the motivations of loyalty and morality
that stir the human heart. The myth-makers had but one narrative to relate,
one fundamental mystery of life to dilate upon. All phases of spiritual life
arise out of the elements of the one cosmic and racial situation in which the
human group is involved; and all scriptural allegory has reference to this basic
datum, and meaning only in relation to it. The myths are all designed to keep
mankind apprised of this central predicament. It is the key to the Bible. And
it is the loss of this key situation that has caused the Book to be sealed against
the age-long assaults of our curious prying and delving. The restoration of
this key to our hands will (Page 79) be
seen at once to open the doors to a vision of clear meaning, where now stalks
dark incomprehensibility. Cosmology has been almost wholly discarded from religion
since Milton’s day, yet a cosmical situation provides the ground for all adequate
interpretation of Bible representation. The one central theme is the incarnation.
Beside esotericism
and allegorism the Bible composers had recourse to another method which is less
readily demonstrable and which has caused the confusion incident to mistaking
myth for history to be far worse confounded. It was the method of uranography.
The uranograph was the chart of the heavens with the constellated pictography.
From remote times the ancients dealt with a celestial chart or map, on which
their earliest teachers had essayed to depict the features of the soul’s experience
in the scenes which their enlightened imaginations had traced about the star
clusters. The stellar zodiacs left at Denderah, Pylae and elsewhere are impressive
reminders of the influence of this heavenly scenograph. The discovery in quite
recent years of the Somerset zodiac in England, a giant zodiac wrought, it is
calculated, 2700 B.C. in the natural features of the countryside covering one
hundred square miles, with the figure of Leo, the Lion, four miles from nose
to tail-tip, is another most authentic attestation to the basic significance
which symbolical astrology has held in ancient religious formulations. Present
students have as yet little conception of how generally this graph was employed
in spiritual ideography and how pervasively it colored the composition of the
scriptural writings. It is next to impossible to grasp subtle references in
the Bible and other archaic literature without a knowledge of the features of
this planisphere. Bibles are in fact, in a broad general sense, just the literary
extension and amplification of the symbology of the zodiac! The sages had first
written the history of the human soul upon the starry skies.
If we hold them guilty
of having thus perpetrated what seems to us pure whimsicality, we are convicted
of ignorance on another count. They were depicting history in that sphere where
it had first occurred, before it began with man on earth. Spiritual history
had been enacted on a cosmic scale in the heavens, in higher ranges of cosmic
life, before it was repeated and copied in the human drama on this globe. The
heavenly man, in whose image and likeness earthly man is made, and in whose
body the suns and planets are but cells and organs, was the prototype of man
himself. And so it comes that humanity was in (Page 80) primordial
times instructed to build its life "after the pattern of things in the heavens."
The planisphere was the historical and anatomical graph of the Divine Cosmical
Man, and it became at once a secret glyph for the behoof of mundane humanity.
In the spirit of
this understanding the religious teachers of yore ever sought to write into
human, racial, national and individual history the reflection or pattern of
the uranograph. This effort was the secret motif back of all national epics!
The epic was an attempt to fashion national history in the similitude of the
structural unity of the divine plan for macrocosmic, and by reflection, microcosmic,
man. This is in general the theme of such an esoteric work as the Jewish Kabalah.
The distinctive features
of the cosmograph are in evidence in every case. In every religious epic there
is first and centrally a Holy City, a "Jerusalem," residence of the king and
the eventual home of all the elect. There is next an Upper and Lower Land, typifying
the dual segmentation of heaven and earth, or spirit and body, in man’s nature,
which was in all systems held to be the union of a divine with an animal principle.
The two sections were always connected by a river, rising in the higher mountainous
sources in the Upper Kingdom and flowing thence, carrying its blessings of fertility,
down into the Lower Kingdom, which is thus nourished by the living water from
above. Then there was always a bordering sea, symbolical in every case of the
stormy ephermeral scene of the mortal life. No less was there a smaller water,
a lake, Sea of Galilee, Dead Sea, Black Sea, Red Sea, Jordan River, Styx River,
or the marshes or fens, which were to be crossed by the voyaging soul to reach
the more blessed isles, or farther shore of spiritual bliss. Strangely enough
there, was a further division of the land into seven tribal provinces, a heptarchy
or heptanomis, as in Egypt, Judea, England and elsewhere. This division was
representative of the seven kingdoms of nature, the seven stages of unfoldment
through which life must pass in the completion of every cycle. At other times
the division was a decad, after the pattern of the Sephirothal Tree of the Kabbalah,
but eventually redistributed in twelve sections, as in the case of the Hebrews,
Athens, Afghanistan and some others, reflecting the twelvefold segmentation
of the zodiac, which in turn typified the twelve levels of man’s evolutionary
attainment, or "twelve manner of fruits" on the branches of the Tree of Life,
the twelve divine elements of man’s perfected being. Likewise there was (Page
81) always
a definite locality designated as the birthplace of the god, which was in many
instances also his place of death and burial and following resurrection. Other
centers marked the scene of his initiations, temptations, baptisms, trials,
crucifixion and transfiguration, every stage of his evolutionary experience,
in fact. Then there were cities dedicated to the special cult of the sun, the
moon, and even such stars as Orion, the stellar symbol of the Christos; or of
Sirius, the great Dog-Star, symbol of the advent. The four cardinal points were
featured, as emblematic of the four pillars of man’s constitution, his physical,
emotional, mental and spiritual bodies and natures. A warfare between the Upper
and Lower Lands and their kings was generally a part of the "history," ending
in the conquest of the Lower by the Higher and the union of the two under the
crown of dual sovereignty. This drama was enacted so often in the "history"
of so many kings of Egypt that even a scholar of the eminence of the late William
H. Breasted, in his History of Egypt, expresses his puzzlement over the fact
that nearly every Pharaoh of the dynasties had to conquer Lower Egypt afresh
and unite the two halves of the country under a common hegemony! In all likelihood
the physiography and organic structure of the heavenly man was to some extent
copied in the distribution and construction of pyramids, tombs, temples and
other sanctuaries, and the pyramids themselves were quite obviously astronomical
graphs with ceremonial design and conformations. There was a mountain or holy
hill of the Lord, and there were points of entrance and exit from and to the
lower world of Amenta.
The celestial typology
having been engrafted on the topography of the country itself, the next measure
was to weave the dramatic features into the national history. Egypt and the
Hebrew tribes are perhaps the most outstanding examples of the operation of
this methodology on an extensive scale, how extensive the general student of
the present age is unprepared to believe. Thus the names associated for ages
with cosmic and spiritual typism were spread out over the maps of the different
lands; and the national kings, heroes, warriors, sages became titular characters
in the immemorial heavenly drama. In the light of this custom we are in a position
to reach a conclusion of the very greatest importance for research, affecting
the entire view of scripture as history. For we are confronted with the inexpugnable
fact that the names and events in religious scripts were for the greater part
not (Page 82) the
products of objective history in the first place, but on the contrary the names
and events in assumed history were a deposit from the religious books! The names
of kings, heroes, cities, lakes, rivers and mountains were on the uranograph
long before they appeared on national maps! They were transferred from the uranograph
to the maps! The occurrences of Bible "history" had been enacted annually or
nightly among the stars of the sky long before they became incorporated in the
epics of religion. And they had been in the epics before they became assigned
to actual localities and personages. Heavenly regions and spiritual transactions
were finally brought to earth and given a local habitation on land and in history.
In short, the naming of geographical features was done by the sacerdotal castes
in each country, in which task they simply sought to pattern their country and
its history after the scheme of the uranograph! Their map and their history
were cast as far as could be done in the mold of the cosmic chart. Each nation
designed to make its configuration and history reflect and fulfill the heavenly
model!
A partial exemplification
of the same tendency can be seen even in our own American history, where the
priestly class gave religious names to the earliest settlements and geographical
features. The practice is attested by such names as Salem, Providence, New Haven,
Newark, New Canaan, Bethlehem, Nazareth (Pennsylvania), Sante Fe, Sacramento,
Corpus Christi, Los Angeles, Vera Cruz, San Salvador, San Domingo and a list
of saints’ names and holy appellations. The Puritans from England and Holland
emigrated to New England actuated powerfully by the assurance that they were
going to fulfill in the new continent the ancient Covenant between Jehovah and
the Israelites. The Mayflower was part of the religious epic. The Anglo-Israel
movement of the present day manifests largely the same tendencies.
The theory here advanced
is not without support from other authorities. The following brings the weight
of a very venerable document to the endorsement of the idea:
"It has already been
suggested that the mapping out of localities was celestial before the chart
was geographically applied and that all common naming on earth came from one
common naming of the heavens, commencing with the Great Bear and the Dog. The
mapping out of Egyptian localities according to the celestial Nomes and scenery
is described in the (Page 83) inscription
of Khnum-hept, who is said to have ‘established the landmark of the south, and
sculptured the northern - like the heaven. He stretched the Great Bear on its
back. He made the district in its two parts, setting up their landmarks, like
the heaven.’" (Records of the Past, XII, 68.)
An evident additional
corroboration of the theory is contained in the injunction given to Moses in
the Bible:
"See that thou make
all things after the pattern shown thee in the Mount . . . the pattern of the
heavens."
"Jerusalem, the Mount
of Peace, the Nabhi-Yoni of the Earth, was one of these sacred cities that were
mapped out according to the Kamite model in the heavens." [Massey: The
Natural Genesis, I, p. 168. ]
"The pattern of things
in the Mount," "the pattern of the heavens," has not hitherto been seen to be
the Biblical analogue and symbol of Plato’s ideal forms. The Mount, the heavens,
are of course the heights of divine ideation, whereon God projected his new
world in thought forms before he impressed them upon matter. The heavens are
the uplands of consciousness, or spheres of being, not physical localities.
God formed his mental models on the Mount of Vision and Imagination before he
cast them into concretion.
So far from grasping
the uranographic art as the key to the historical problem in all scriptures,
late writers vent their skepticism on this point in passages such as this:
"What proof is there
- we ask once more - that the people, the mystics even, of two thousand or more
years ago, read all this into the heavens; that they regarded the various divisions
and towns, and the river and name of Galilee, as mystical and earthly reflexes
of these celestial phenomena!"[The Mythical Interpretation of the Gospels,
T. J. Thorburn, p. 108. ]
There is proof enough
in the very fact that the ancient seers were poets and allegorists, and not
historians. Practically conclusive evidence that Bible names are not objective
or historical (in the first place) is to be found in the fact that there are
in the Bible some scores of allusions to such local names as Egypt, Jerusalem,
Nineveh, Babylon, Tyre, Sidon, Gilead, Assyria, Galilee, Ethiopia and others
which, if taken in the earthly geographical sense, yield no intelligible meaning
whatever. Further evidence is to be found in the notable fact that the divisions
and localities on mundane maps do in the main largely match the celestial features.
Charts of the "Holy Land of Canaan" have been (Page 84) found
extant in early Egypt as much as three hundred years before the alleged Israelite
exodus, whence it is to be presumed that this promised land of peace and plenty
was allegorical before it was historical. Massey states that an entablature
on the wall of an Egyptian temple bore a list of some hundred and twenty place
names afterwards localized in Palestine, at a date at least one hundred and
fifty years before there could possibly have been an exodus of Israelites from
Egypt. It requires little "proof" to ascertain that "Egypt" as used throughout
the Bible has the meaning of the lower self or animal-human personality, indeed
the physical body of man itself. Jerusalem means the "holy city" or the heavenly
realms, which are in consciousness, not on the map.
"The picture of this
paradise in the Hebrew writings, the Psalms, the Books of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Zechariah
and Revelation, were pre-extant long ages earlier as Egyptian. What the so-called
‘prophets’ of the Jews did was to make sublunary the vision of the good time
in another life. There were always two Jerusalems from the time when Judea and
Palestine were appendages of Egypt. Two Jerusalems were recognized by Paul,
one terrestrial, one celestial. The name of Jerusalem we read as the Aarru-salem
or fields of peace in the heaven of the never-setting stars. The burden of Jewish
prophecy, which turned out so terribly misleading for those who were ignorant
of the secret wisdom, is that the vision of this glorious future should be attained
on earth; whereas it never had that meaning. . . . Thus Jerusalem on earth was
to take the place of Jerusalem above and the Aarru-hetep became Jerusalem simply
as a mundane locality."[Massey: Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World,
p. 539. ]
From numberless texts
in the Bible itself which point to the correctness of the uranographic interpretation
of names we take one alone, which by itself is enough to substantiate the claim
made in this connection. In Revelation (II: 8), speaking of the two witnesses
whom it is said the dragon will rise up and slay, the apocalyptic writers says:
"And their dead bodies
shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom
and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified."
There is enough in
this verse to confound the entire schematism of Christian theology as historically
based. It implies a clear refutation of the whole Passion Week and Good Friday
ritual, as commemorative of "history." Jesus, so it says, was not crucified
in an earthly Jerusalem, (Page 85) but
only in a spiritual one, the name of which is indifferently Sodom or Egypt,
the latter not even the name of an earthly city, but of a country! Jesus crucified
in Egypt! And what becomes of the Gospel "history"? It is left to take its only
true place, which is among the sacred myths! The crucifixion was, on the authority
of the Bible itself, a spiritual and not a historical transaction.
T. J. Thorburn, author
of a work aiming to invalidate the mythical nature of the Gospels, reveals the
perplexity as well as the ineptitude of orthodox scholars in the face of the
ancient trick of uranography and allegory:
"And if their statements
are not to be taken in their natural and historical sense, then we must hold
that in ancient literature it is more than doubtful whether writers ever mean
precisely what they say."[ The Mythical Interpretation of the Gospels,
p. 109.]
They surely never
dreamed that an age would come, so far lost to the mythical intent of their
writings as to suppose they ever meant literally what they said. They could
not know that the wisest savants of a distant epoch would be so blinded by the
forces of obscurantism as not to realize that the old books spoke only in the
terms of those earthly forms that adumbrate spiritual realities. The old masters
of religious science were not in the habit of speaking "precisely"; they spoke
under the forms of figure always. They could not suspect that their indirect
poetical method would so outrageously befuddle modern "intelligence."
Ancient philosophy
was intensely responsive to the conception that all things mundane were a lower
copy of things empyrean. On the theory that all forms of life were typical of
the one basic nature of all life everywhere, the sages read into earthly things
the reflection of things celestial. Jesus said he could not tell the disciples
of heavenly things unless they had first believed in earthly things. The sea
of earth life reflected heavenly life in its bosom. The seers who knew that
nature was a dramatization of cosmic archai, sought for the evidence of the
archetypal design in every phenomenon on earth. With what remarkable nicety
they traced higher truth in the mirror of nature we shall see clearly as the
story unfolds. So, in the end, in their religious life they labored to represent
their history as conforming to the primordial type. To this end they resorted
to a measure which has caught and deceived purblind scholarship since that time.
(Page 86)
From the
general thesis that their national history reflected God’s plan for the world,
it was an easy step to the more explicit assumption that their national life
embodied the divine plan. They threw about themselves the aureole of divinely
constituted agency to fulfill the cosmic plan. They therefore arrogated to themselves
the title of "God’s chosen people," and took the names allotted only to the
spiritualized humans, the men evolved to divinity! This tack will not appear
either unlikely or outlandish when we ponder the disposition of nations in our
own day to put forth blatant claims to be the chosen agents of Providence for
the cultural rulership of the world.
Even if there seems
to be veridical history in the Bible, it can be viewed properly as a setting
for the spiritual dramatization, or as the clothing in which the drama was garbled.
At times, perhaps, the writers appear to have utilized the data of actual history
to stage the symbolic figurations. To this task the religious poets dedicated
their ingenuity.
It becomes evident
on this thesis that the historical element of the scriptures is of far less
significance than has been supposed. It is the philosophy of history and not
the data of history that is of foremost concern. As exhibiting providential
design in world life it becomes of epic moment. The Hebrew race has exploited
this phase of the old methodology to its highest possibility, only, however,
as Egypt had done before it; and has been so successful that it has left the
impression of a unique and exalted hierarchical status for the Jewish race.
The outcome of our correction of vision will be that we shall for the first
time properly regard the Old Testament books as, in the main, the universal
drama of the spiritual life masquerading in the disguise of Hebrew history subtly
woven into the great cosmic epic! The Biblical title Israelites is a spiritual
designation purely, and is wrongly taken in the sense of the name of an ethnic
group. "My people of Israel" or "the children of Israel" of the Hebrew deity
are just the divinized humans, mortals who have put on the immortal spiritual
nature, men graduated into Christhood, a spiritual group in the early Mysteries.
Gentiles were those who were not yet spiritually reborn. The word comes from
the Latin and Greek roots, "gen," "gent," meaning simply "to be born." They
were those born as the first or natural man, but not yet reborn as the spiritual
Christ. It can be given no ethnic reference. The name "Israelite" is obviously
compounded of "Is," abbreviation of Isis, or Eve’s original name, Issa (See
Josephus); "Ra," the great Egyptian (Page 87) solar
god, male and spiritual; and the Hebrew "El," God. It would then read, Father-Mother-God,
making his "children" the sons of God, i.e., Christs. Likewise the name "Hebrews"
means "those beyond" (the merely human state), and therefore is practically
identical with "Israelites." Finally the term "Jews" (from the plural of the
Egyptian IU--Latin JU) refers to the "male-female divinities," a title given
in the Mysteries to men made gods and thus restored to androgyne, or male-female,
condition. The national Jews thus adopted for their historical name all three
of the exalted spiritual designations conferred in the Mysteries on the Epoptae
or completely divinized candidates.
It was hardly expected
that any positive documentary evidence could be found in support of the evident
fact that these names had simply been appropriated by the race using them as
illustrious titles abstracted from the uranograph. But a direct statement to
that precise effect was found in the Hebrew Grammar of Gesenius, a learned German
scholar, (on p. 6):
"Of the names Hebrews
. . . and Israelites . . . the latter was more a national name of honor and
was applied by the people to themselves with a patriotic reference to their
descent from illustrious ancestors; . . ."
This is of vast significance
as affecting the historical view of the Bible, with possible extremely severe
repercussions on world history of the present.
The fourth consideration
found essential to a grasp of archaic meaning is the knowledge that religion
was an outgrowth from a specific situation involving the human race at its beginning.
Religion is commonly assigned to a category under the head of psychology. It
is a matter of mind and emotion.
But the roots of
religion are found to go deeper than any mere inclination of the psyche. Eventually
religion took psychological forms of expression, but it was originally not mere
psychology. It was an outgrowth of anthropology. It took its rise out of the
racial or evolutionary beginnings and bore an immediate relation thereto. Every
feature of it was engendered out of the interrelation of the several elements
entering into the compound of man’s constitution.
Human nature was
composed of more than one element. There were the physical, the emotional, the
mental and the spiritual. (Page 88) More compactly
viewed, there are the human-animal and the divine. Religion is just the play
of the factors of the interrelationship subsisting between these several natures
in man. Or it is the relation between man and his god, the latter being universally
existent primarily within him, secondarily without. It details the history of
the soul or divine spark of spirit in its cyclical incorporation in human bodies.
Its central fact is the incarnation, the relation of soul to body, God to man,
man to God.
According to Plato’s
Timaeus and other archaic documents a group of twelve legions of "junior gods,"
who were sparks of the eternal Flame of cosmic mind, were ordered, as their
assignment in the cooperative work of creation with Deity, to descend to earth
and elevate the races of the highest animal development by linking their own
mental capacity with the organisms thus far developed by the evolution of form.
They were to lift the animals across the gulf between the summit of instinct
and the beginnings of reason. These angels were devas, "bright" or "shining"
emanations of divine intelligence, but were not exempt from the "cycle of necessity,"
or periodical immersion in forms of physical embodiment on a planet for purposes
of their own further self-evolution. It subserved both the interests of their
own progress and that of the animals they were to uplift, that the two races,
the one germinally conscious and immortal, the other dumbly brutish and mortal,
should be periodically joined together, the higher to be the king and ruler
of the lower. The procedure thus adopted by life gave to the animal the possibility
of evolving a mind through association with a mental nature, and to the intelligent
spirits the physical bodies that were their particular requirement for contacting
the type of experience they were destined to undergo. If this seems bizarre,
it must be remembered that all living entities are the result of the linkage
of a spiritual nucleus with a material organism. No creature lives but what
is compounded of "soul" and body.
In conformity with
evolutionary law these legions of devas or angels, we are told, descended to
earth, took lodgment in the bodies of higher animals and began their career
of redeeming the lower creatures to mental status. In the Timaeus these "junior
gods" are addressed by the Demiurgus (the creative Logos, Jupiter) and are told
to descend and "convert yourselves according to your natures to the fabrication
of animals," the gist of their mission being summed up in the command (Page
89) to "weave
together mortal and immortal natures." This is one of the most important utterances
of ancient scripture, because it announces the character of our constitution
and sets forth plainly our evolutionary commission. It tells us that we are
both animal-human and divine at once, animal as to our bodies, divine as to
our intellects. For Plato says: "According to body it is an animal, but according
to intellect a god." Our earthly task, according to St. Paul, is to link together
the two natures in "one new man," bringing to an end in a final "reconciliation"
"the battle of Armageddon," the aeonial warfare between the "carnal mind" of
the animal and the spiritual mind of the god. This warfare is also Plato’s strife
between noësis, the spiritual intelligence, and doxa, the motions of the sense
nature. The soul is here in body to discipline the latter by the inculcation
of habits of rectitude until the animal learns to use the powers of mind. Tutoring
the animal, the soul at the same time achieved its own higher schooling in deific
unfoldment. This interlocking of the two grades of life in one organism must
be constantly kept in view if the proper study of religion is to be made. No
organic evolution can proceed from one kingdom to another without the deploying
of the mental resources of a superior kingdom in aid of the level below it.
And each kingdom profits by the act of brotherhood. The god achieves his own
further apotheosis by reaching down to raise the animal to human estate.
It must be noted
that when the intelligence of the god is joined to the life of the animal, it
communicates but a fragment of its power to the organism, remaining for the
larger part of its conscious being hidden on its own spiritual plane. It thus
becomes an invisible guardian, or what the ancients called the "daimon." Lurking
in the background of consciousness, it is what modern psychology has lately
discovered and named the "collective unconscious." From behind the curtain,
as it were, it directs the animal with only a tentacle of its power. It can
not incorporate in the animal a greater measure of its capacity than the latter
can suitably accommodate and carry. It will push down into expression more and
more of itself as the refinement of the coarse body goes on apace. Like a radio,
the mechanism must be tuned up higher to register finer vibrations. In the Greek
theosophy it is stated that "the gods distribute divinity" to the grades of
beings below them, which "participate according to their capacity."
In briefest summary
(to be amplified to greater elaboration in the (Page 90) sequel)
this is the basic cosmological and racial datum of every old religion. Together
with its implications it is the basis of every religious interpretation ever
made or to be made. Every problem of ethics, devotion, discipline and intellect
receives its full complement of value and meaning only in reference to this
fundamentum. Religion is far more than a posture of mystic feeling; it was in
origin a series of codes, principles and practices given by the demigods to
early mankind to awaken the torpid genius of our actual divinity. In a true
sense it was designed to wield a semi-magical influence to transform animal
man into the divinized human! Its rites were formulated with a view to bestirring
man’s memory of his essential deific character. It was in no sense merely worship.
It was the most intensely practical and utilitarian culture the world has ever
known. It was designed to prevent the utter loss of purpose and failure of effort
in the cosmical task to which man, as a celestial intelligent spirit, had pledged
himself under the Old Testament covenant and "the broad oaths fast sealed" of
Greek theology. In coming to earth to help turn the tide of evolution past one
of its most critical passages, he bound himself to do the work and return without
sinking into the mire of animal sensuality. We must henceforth approach religion
with the realization that it is the psychic instrumentality designed for the
use of humanity in charting its way through the shoals of the particular racial
and evolutionary crisis in which it was involved. All the stupendous knowledge
relating to the entire cosmic chapter was once available, given by the gods
to the sages. We have nearly lost it beyond recovery because the ignorance of
an early age closed the Academies and crushed every attempt to revive the teaching.
The prodigious folly of the modern essay to vitalize religion through piety
alone will be more fully seen as the ancient picture takes form in the delineation.
Our present business is to struggle to regain that lost paradise of intelligence.
We must work again to the recognition of our high cosmic mission, and revivify
the decadent forms of a once potent religious practique, based on knowledge.
For spiritual cultism was once vitally related to our evolutionary security,
which stands jeopardized by present religious desuetude.
The nature of the
material to be presented in volume will enforce by the sheer illuminative power
of the interpretation itself the necessity for this extended introduction. It
was quite impossible to undertake the exegesis of recondite scriptures long
misinterpreted or never (Page 91) interpreted
at all, without providing a rationale of ancient literary methodology and setting
up a background of philosophical light. The erection of this background was
made all the more necessary by the inveterate recalcitrancy of modern scholarship
to recognize the applicability of the methods and principles outlined. Their
validation by the substance and meaning of the larger presentment now to be
made involves nothing less than the complete revision of all our interpretative
norms in religious study. (Page 92)
Chapter
VI
THE
DESCENT TO AVERNUS
The rectification
of misguided rendering of holy writ in its entirety is a work of great magnitude
and will tax severely the capacity of a single book. Particularly in regard
to the traditional dogmas of theology, where misconception has become embedded
in set habitudes of mind, the reinterpretation can be established only by the
presentation of material in overwhelming quantity. The bare statement of the
main theses of the venerable philosophy would be met with contempt or arrogant
rejection. The claims must therefore be buttressed by a mass of irrefutable
data. This material has not been marshaled for this use before in anything like
organic array.
The story most properly
begins with what is called in theology "the descent of the gods." Traditional
lore is replete with legends of the "expulsion of the angels," "the fall of
Lucifer and his hosts," "the fall from heaven," and the more philosophical "descent
of the soul." These phrase-titles relate to the first step in the series of
pre-historical and even pre-mundane episodes which culminated in the establishment
of humanity on earth and the fabrication of human nature combining both a natural
and a supernatural element. The substrate datum in religion is that man is an
animal and a god in union. There were animals on earth and angels in heaven;
and the counsels of cosmic intelligence decreed that the angels should join
forces with the animals and be their gods. The conjunctive experience would
educate both parties. The effort to overcome matter’s inertia and the sense
urge of the flesh would develop more dynamic spiritual initiative for the gods.
They would be forced to deploy more of their potential and as yet static divine
power to gain mastery over the elementary forces of the physical world.
Hints are not wanting
in the old scripts to show that their obligation to leave their home of blissful
rest in dreamy sub-consciousness in (Page 93) the
ethereal spheres and suffer the hardships of earth life in gross animal bodies
was in some part at least a measure of karmic retribution for past dereliction
elsewhere. Pride and insolence are ascribed to them by Greek theology. Violated
oaths and "Moira’s bounds transgressed" are alluded to by the philosophic poets.
As evolution links penalty with readjustment and forward progress, it is not
difficult to admit the play of both retributive and normal procedure in the
enforced descent of minor deities to our globe. It is the expulsion of Satan
and his hosts from heaven in Paradise Lost and Revelation. So presented, it
has been taken either as a mythical unreality or an inscrutable chapter of celestial
history, and discarded from serious consideration in religious systematism.
It is, however, the central situation and must be restored to its pivotal place
of consequence in the picture. The doctrine of the "descent" is crucial for
the interpretation. True or false, it is what the scriptures are building their
narratives upon.
Of the original twelve
legions of deities, ten have plunged into the stream of incarnation and are
now passing through the experiences incident thereto. At the conclusion of the
venture, after many incarnations for each individual member, they will return
to their celestial abodes, transfigured and further divinized. The allegory
of the Prodigal Son is a short glyph or graph of this evolutionary descent and
return. There is hardly a religious book of any ancient nation that does not
deal more or less directly with that event.
To see the "descent"
as an integral function of cosmic process and not as a calamitous "fall," it
is quite necessary to expound a portion of Orphic-Platonic cosmogony.
The beginning must
be made where creation itself begins. It starts from Unity. All things proceed
from what was aboriginally and ever ultimately is, the One Life. The pagan name
for the Supreme Power was commonly The One. All things ultimately resolve into
the primordial One, since they emanate from that One in the beginning. Before
manifestation takes place, Being is homogeneous, undifferentiated. It is uniform
similitude and excludes dissimilitude. It is all One Essence, alike in every
part, if parts there are.
But in such state
it is unmanifest, and from our point of view unconscious, asleep, inert. The
Hindu term is Pralaya. And out of Pralaya it must awake, for it sleeps only
in alternate turn with waking (Page 94 ) activity,
as do all its creatures made in its likeness. It passes, like them from death
to life and back again, in eternal routine.
To awake and come
into being it must by force of logic perform an operation upon its own nature
which is the first ground of manifestation. It can not create a universe in
which to live and suffer experience without breaking its Unity apart into duality.
For it must become Consciousness on the one side, in order to know what and
how to create, and Matter on the other, if it is to have material with which
to create! So it must split its primal Oneness into a dualism which however
is still subsumed under the unity. It becomes two in one or the One in two.
The One has not become Two, but a twoness.
It virtually can
not create without throwing itself into the condition of being at a tension
between two aspects of itself, on the strength of which tension it can exert
its inchoate energies. It must therefore manifest itself as the two ends of
a polarity, positive and negative. It must become polarized in relation to itself;
and so it takes on the double-aspected characterization of spirit and matter,
male and female, consciousness and vehicle, function and instrument, attraction
and repulsion, visible and invisible, real and actual. Positively, like the
proton of the atom, it must stand stably in the center, governing, holding,
regulating the cyclical whirl of negative force about its eternal rock of durability.
Negatively, like the electrons, it must revolve in the periodic swing of active
life. It must provide the dual grounds for living existence, a conscious nucleus
presiding at the heart of moving, changing embodiments. It must become, out
of itself, subject, knowing, and object, to be known. Its entire purpose is
obviously to arise out of unconscious slumber and become ever more awake and
more concretely conscious. Since there is nothing of which it can be conscious
save itself, the aim of Life is thus ever to become more Self-conscious! Therefore
it must, so to speak, set itself as object over against itself as subject, and
down the ages and the cycles ever thus contemplate itself. It is the seeing
eye and the thing seen, as all profound esoteric philosophy asserts.
As Genesis puts it,
God effected his creation, gazed upon it with gratification and pronounced it
good. To see his creation he had to objectify, hypostasize, reify his thoughts,
the radiations of his subjective aspect. For he creates by thoughts. He must
see his ideas form in (Page 95) concretion
before him, take on material body and come to visible manifestation for himself
and his creatures.
So his expression
proceeds from unity to duality, and from duality it runs further onward to infinite
multiplicity. Multiple manifestation is achieved by the operation of a principle
which is easily comprehended. As life has split into spirit and matter, the
one mobile, the other inert, the unity of the mobile is broken up into multitude
as it moves against the immobile. The lighter essence, spirit, is broken and
divided as it moves outward against the resistance of matter. A suggestive illustration
is the infinite division of a body of water dropped as one unit from a height
as it falls against the resistance of the air. Its sheer motion and speed throws
it apart. The circulation of the blood from the central heart, dividing endlessly
till it reaches the periphery in numberless streamlets, is a similar reflection
of the universal law. Outward bound, it divides; on the return it reunites!
Life descends, "falls," from the summit of its primal unity down into the arms
of matter, dividing as it goes. Division is a logical necessity if it is to
multiply itself, for unity can not multiply out of itself without first dividing
itself. And it can not divide itself unless it falls or descends against resistance.
The importance of this determination for clear grasp of basic theology can not
be overstressed. Angels "fall" by divine ordinance, and not by literal folly
of rebellion against deity. Evolutionary gravity brings them down from heaven
to earth.
The wind does not
commonly blow a steady gale, but comes in rhythmic puffs. Creative impulse acts
similarly. Every cycle of energization of the universe finishes its work in
seven waves or impulses, and the sub-cycles have also seven waves. Life projects
its formative energies outward, or matterward, in surge after surge. Each one
carries the impulse as far as it will go under its original force, or until
the wave is brought to a dead standstill by the inertia of matter, the carrying
and resisting medium. Each propulsion of power comes to a stop, locked in the
embrace of matter. In this embrace the capacities of the two nodes of being
interplay, fecundate each other, generate a growth of new life, and build up
what is termed a plane or level or kingdom of nature, with creatures embodying
the type of life there engendered. Thus there are terrestrial and celestial
worlds (as Paul says), noumenal and phenomenal realms, physical and ethereal
planes, material and spiritual bodies, heavens, fairylands, underworlds, hells,
limbos, Isles (Page 96) of the Blessed, Elysian Fields, the meadows of Aarru-Hetep
and homes on high. And the beings on the ranges from high divinity down to man
are the gods of ancient mythology.
The capacities of
life on each level are expressed and given play by the organic beings built
up thereon. Thus each kingdom has its own specific nature and determinations.
But life is not static; it is generative, reproductive, forward-moving. It creates
anew, in its turn, at its level, and passes the stream of creative force on
down the line. Thus the succession of waves of projection runs down the scale,
each one carrying the formative force one surge farther out. On and on it goes,
establishing the kingdoms of nature and the living citizens on them. The contiguous
planes form a link of connection from top to bottom of the series, and this
is the golden chain of life. And each level bears a definite relation to its
neighbor on either side.
The explication of
this relationship involves a law that is basic for all evolution. Its statement
will render understandable the constitution of man. It tells why he is a soul
and a body linked together. It may be called the great Law of Incubation.
Under its terms each
plane is mother to the life on the plane above it and father to that of the
plane below it. It receives from above the seed germs of higher life and harbors
them in the womb of its soil, or matter, gestates them and eventually gives
them their new birth. This is the function of motherhood. And matter (Latin
mater, mother) is the universal mother. But, having received from above, it
also gives the impulse to the order below; and as giver it is active, aggressive,
generative - the father function. Feminine to life above, masculine to life
beneath, it is the link and bridge between two worlds.
But at each step
of transmission the primal impulse suffers a diminution of its impetus, a weakening
of its force, and in consequence a further and further fragmentation. The matter
of each plane on the downward or involutionary track being more dense in atomic
structure than that of its superior, the living bodies it provides can not bear
as heavy a life charge as the beings above can support, and the voltage of power
must be stepped down if it is to be incorporated fittingly in the less capacious
bodies of a lower kingdom. To effect this reduction in dynamism the bodies carrying
the life of each plane act as electric transformers, changing a high current
into numerous lesser currents to be accommodated to the lower carrying capabilities
of bodies on the (Page 97) plane
beneath. Hence the unit charge received from the plane above by each life structure
on any place must, in falling one step further downward, be again broken up
into a large number of fragments, each of which will become the energizing soul
of a lower body. The Greek philosophers say in this connection that "the gods
distribute divinity," scattering its higher units abroad from plane to plane,
the units multiplying in number, but diminishing in power, as the stream flows
on. This is what ancient theology connotes by "the river of life." The Orphic
system speaks of "rivers of vivification," which, they say, "proceed from on
high as far as to the last of things," or to the lowest stratum of the mineral
kingdom. And as the gods distribute divinity, the secondary ranks in each case
are said to "participate according to their capacity." The gods pour out their
life for the vivifying of all lower beings, and the latter partake of this bounty
or "grace" to the measure of their receptivity. Nothing other than this is meant
by the "shed blood" of the gods, given for the life of the worlds. All old theologies
aver that the blood of the gods, or of God, mixed with the clay of earth, makes
the "red earth" which is given as the etymological signification of Adam in
Hebrew, i.e., man. Man is compounded of the red lifeblood of deity and the dust
of the ground, which in Hebrew is Adamah, purely the feminine or material aspect
of Adam, spirit, itself. Deity mixed together spirit and matter to make man.
One more step in
the analysis yields the final phase of the Law of Incubation. If life is to
be propagated in eternal renewal, in multiplied individualization, it becomes
necessary for any living creature on each plane to produce a multiple progeny
of the seeds of its own life and "plant" or bury them in the soil of the kingdom
immediately below it. There they go first to their "death," after which they
are reborn or resurrected in the sprouting of the seeds and their growth back
to maturity. Each generation lives anew in its regeneration, but multiplied
by as many times itself as the number of seeds it produced and successfully
germinated in the plane below.
The vegetable buries
its seeds in the soil of the kingdom beneath it, the mineral. The animal’s life
is embodied in a corpus built up of vegetable material taken in each day as
food. The human is rooted in an animal body. And now comes the pivotal fact
in theology. The lowest ranks of gods, in their position just above humanity,
must, by the Law of Incubation, send down their seeds, plant (incarnate) them
(Page 98) in
the bodies of humans, and win their next cyclical generation of divine life
in that ground! Centuries of theological maundering have not told the millions
of hungry sheep this plain truth as to why man nurtures a winged spirit of intelligence
- a soul - in his physical body. The soul of man is in his body as a seed of
divinity planted, buried, gone to its "death" in the soil of the human kingdom,
and bears the same relation to that soil as does any seed to its bed. The greatest
truth that can be told to mortals is that their bodies are each the gestating
womb of a god. As said St. Paul, the Christ is being "formed within" each mortal
body. Man has a soul because his physical human self is the nursery or breeding
ground of the seeds of divinity. And man’s divinity is, or begins as, a seed.
His duty is to cultivate the growth of that deific embryo. It is gestating in
the womb of his physical body, and he must, as said Socrates, become a philosophic
"midwife" and aid in its birth. Plato reports the Demiurgus in the notable speech
to the legions of devas in the Timaeus as saying that "whatever is immortal
and divine" in the human makeup, "of that I will furnish the seed and the beginning.
It is your business to do the rest; to weave together mortal and immortal natures."
The upper plane furnishes the seeds of Godhood, the lower furnishes the soil
or garden. Divinity is planted in "the garden of the world." It is the seminal
soul of divine mind, destined to germinate and eventually blossom in the ground
of humanity.
If, in sum, God is
to multiply himself, his tree of life must reproduce on its branches a numerous
progeny, each child bearing the potentiality of renewing the parent life in
its fullness, and of carrying its eternal unfoldment one step ahead. As no living
thing can subsist save as a result of a linking together of spirit and matter,
a germinal unit of spirit must be incubated as the god in a body of material
structure. This divine economy gives every creature its soul, which is its god.
In the long chain of linked lives, from God down to mineral crystal, no being
is deprived of its possibility of immediate communion with deity, up to the
border of its capacity. But the "arm of the Lord" that is potent to bless and
to save is within, not without. It is Emanuel, God with us, the hope of our
glory. God is everywhere, within and without; but his son, the Christos, is
only within. If he is not sought there, he will not be found. His inner presence
is the provision of life that no entity should be bereft of instant contact
with its parent god, who dwells on the plane just over its head, though rooted
in its very (Page 99) body.
Man’s deity is not a personage in a distant land and time, but, as an Eastern
saga puts it, "closer is he than breathing, nearer than hands and feet." No
man can fail of touching his divinity, but failure of his knowledge that his
deity is in himself may palsy his effort to arouse its latent faculties.
A legend of India
tells of a council of the gods at which it was purposed to invest man with deity.
A debate arose as to how it might be entrusted to him without his misusing it.
One suggested that it be buried in the depths of the sea, so that he would not
easily find and abuse it. Another advised placing it on the most inaccessible
mountain top. Finally the supreme head of the assembly declared he had thought
of a place where no man would ever think of looking for it,--in the deepmost
chambers of man’s own heart!
The basal truth that
every living thing is a union of spirit and matter, soul and body, was put in
a graph by the Egyptians. It is perhaps the oldest and most meaningful of signs.
The great symbol carried in the hands of the gods was the Ankh, or crux ansata
(ansated cross), a "T" topped with the circle. The circle is the female symbol,
the boundless infinite matter, the mother of all things in endless round. The
vertical line is the male symbol, a ray of intelligence that goes out from the
heart of the universe to impregnate the worlds. The horizontal line is the line
of division between the two, at the point where they are joined. It is the cross-line
between them. The word Ankh means three most significant things: love, life
and tie. It is a formula of all life, signifying that life is the resultant
of a tying together of two things, spirit and matter, by the force of an attraction,
which is love.
The great doctrine
of the "descent" or "fall" can now be clearly envisaged. Deity, in the form
of its seed potency, must descend from its own plane into the soil of the plane
below it and be incubated there. It must leave its own home, its father’s house,
and go out into another country, where it will be an exile and a stranger. And
like the youth going out from home into a rough world to make a fight of it
under temptation and gross influences, he must undergo a long toilsome trial
and testing and crucifixion to become an eventual victor and return with laurels.
Said Jesus: "I came forth from the Father and am come into the world."
Additional elucidation
of basic meaning flows from the consideration of the great doctrine of the Trinity
in theology. One is not too bold (Page 100) in asserting that this formula of
ancient truth is not comprehended in its clear and profound significance by
the Church which still blindly offers it. Once a year the pew occupants listen
to a sermon on the Trinity, but go away unenlightened. Yet it is the heart of
the mystery of life, the base of theology, and - easily comprehensible.
Plotinus, the Neo-Platonist
of the third century, who gave the doctrine to Christianity through Augustine,
has given us an analogy with a natural phenomenon by which it is possible, with
the additional link of a finding of modern science, to see the simple meaning
of a doctrine that has baffled comprehension for sixteen centuries. He said
that we can understand how one deity can have three aspects if we think of the
sun, its light and its active energy. The sun in heaven is comparable to the
Father of the Trinity. It is a glowing globe of fire. The fire of the sun does
not go forth into the ends of space, but abides at home. Like a match which
you strike in a dark room, the fire stays on the match; it does not leave it.
The fire stays’ but it generates and sends forth its son,--the light. This is
the second aspect or "person." It is of the same essence with the Father, yet
not he. And the Psalmist sings: "Send out thy light"!
Now a flood of clear
light is released on the problem by following the implications as to the identity
of the third "person," the Holy Spirit. But here it is necessary to adduce some
pertinent data which is given to us by modern physical science to round out
our analogy. We are told that a ray of the sun’s light out in the void of space
(not near a planet) is inert. It is both cold and dark. If one could reduce
one’s body to the size of a pinpoint, one would be in total darkness and the
intensest cold, though the sun be glaring overhead. The ray is impotent, inactive,
uncreative and can generate no life until - and here is the nub of all philosophy
- it falls upon a surface of a material body, a globe or planet! Only by incidence
upon its opposite pole, matter, can the light of spirit come to its creative
function. There is required the interplay of its rays with a resistant surface
to bring out its own powers from latency to potency. Matter is, as already shown,
the "mother" of life, while spirit (God) is its father. And, as everywhere,
father spirit can not become creative until it unites with and fecundates mother
matter! His ray of power, his son, is in a sense the phallic emanation of his
seed, and the seed must become coefficient with the unfructified egg of life
in matter’s bosom to bring a new birth to (Page 101) pass.
Almost it might be said,--here is all truth in a nutshell. The light of God
would remain uncreative unless it entered the body or womb of mother life and
aroused the slumbering potentialities therein. And here is the solution of a
riddle of mythology which has baffled and horrified Christian moralists no end.
The fables of the gods represent the son of deity as turning about and creating
upon his own mother. Horus is called "the Bull of his Mother"--Isis. The sons
of God marry their own mothers! Horrible! Detestable! shout the offended Church
Fathers. Yet the son of present life marries and impregnates his own mother
every time an acorn or grain of wheat falls into the ground and germinates!
It is discernible at last why the letter H comes a second time into the form
of the sacred tetragrammaton, or four-letter name of Jehovah, the Ineffable
Name of ancient Kabalism--JHVH. "J" is the Father God, the line that comes down
from on high, goes deep into the heart of matter and then turns upward to return
to deity. The H represents by its two vertical lines life divided into its two
aspects, spirit and matter, joined by the cross line, and so brings its activity
into the realm of the mother, matter. The V is their son, who goes down in his
turn into matter and returns. Now, why does the mother H come into the formula
of creation a second time? The J H V would be a formula covering one - the first
generation of life. It would take it through one cycle. But that would not be
a glyph that would represent life as perpetuating itself through endless cycles
of renewal. It would end there. The graph must carry it on. As, then, the son
must take up the line and become father in his turn, he must unite his productive
fecundation with his old mother, matter. And so the H, or mother, must be brought
into the picture once more. And the holy name becomes thus a descriptive form
for all creation. For spirit is creatively helpless, like the sunlight, without
the cooperation of its opposite, matter, which is dramatized as its wife and
sister. Hence every mythological deity was linked with his shakti or spouse,
his creative potency, without whom he would remain forever ungenerative. The
implications of this determination are tremendous, for if spirit can not give
birth to its archetypal conceptions without the implementation of matter in
actual creation, neither can it function apart from matter in philosophy! And
a thousand fantastic "spiritual" cult systems that have deluded uncritical minds
in every age by a denial of the utility of matter, are at one stroke given the
coup de grâce as illogical fallacies. (Page 102)
Reverting
to the Trinity, it is desirable to go further with the Greek elaborators of
the Orphic wisdom in delineating the aspects of divine activity.
Of the Father they
assert that he "abides." A Hindu script has the passage in which Lord Krishna
says: "Having impregnated the universe with a portion of myself, I yet remain."
He remains on his own plane. He is the unmoved Mover and the uncaused Cause.
He is without experience himself, delegating the function of acquiring it to
his Son. He is unaffected, undivided, unchanging and undiminished.
Of the Son they say
that he "proceeds." He bears the Father’s potentialities out into all the universe.
He is the radiating arm of his Father’s power. He goes out to do the will of
his parent and become his vicegerent in the worlds. He becomes God’s spoken
Word. He conveys the Logoic ideas out upon the bosom of his Father’s emanations
to stamp them upon plastic matter. And proceeding from the bosom of the Father,
he goes forth into every condition which is precisely the opposite of that of
the Father. He will become subject to experience and suffer all things, while
the Father abides unmoved. He will be affected, divided, changed and be sadly
diminished, suffering the loss of all that he enjoyed with the Father. He will
endure all experience in every kingdom, will be fragmented into "partial natures,"
will enter a moving stream of endless change, and will be reduced to a minimum
of his glory on the cross of suffering.
Of the Holy Spirit
they say that it "converts" matter to its own likeness; "is converted" by matter
to its next higher estate; and finally "returns."
What, then, is the
Holy Spirit, the Third Person? It is the first Ray of divine life, undergoing
its final conversion into active creative agency. It is latent power of God’s
mind, transformed into working efficacy. It is static divinity become kinetic.
It is God’s Logos, or Word, carrying the command of his creative Voice, now
converted into an energy that moves matter and builds worlds. It is, finally,
God’s spirit at work; no longer static, or merely potential, but released upon
matter in moving force - kinesis
It may be helpful
to present a diagrammatic sketch of this formulation, as it is a brief but complete
graph of the entire rationale of all incarnation, or involution of life in matter,
and its evolution back to (Page 103) spirit.
It is thus a concise formula comprehending all that ancient scriptures have
been designed to elucidate.
SUN |
FATHER |
|
ABIDES |
LIGHT |
SON |
|
PROCEEDS |
EARTH |
HOLY SPIRIT { |
{ |
CONVERTS (Matter) |
IS CONVERTED (by Matter) |
|
RETURNS |
All "history" takes
place at the point where the light, or latent radiation of divine force, comes
in contact with matter, earth, the mother. For there involution is brought to
a halt and, spirit being implanted within the heart of matter and awakening
its slumbering potencies, there is begun at that point a new growth of life,
actuated by the union of intelligence with sheer energy. And this new growth
begins the evolutionary stage, or the return unto the father, or parent, status.
When Trinities are
given as Father, Mother and Son, the aspect here characterized as the Holy Spirit
is the "Son," the product of the union of Father and Mother. When given as Father,
Son and Holy Spirit, the Mother is implicit, being the material element necessary
at all times.
The Son’s, or the
ray’s, impregnation of Mother matter begins a new process of growth from seed
to adulthood, which through a cycle of "conversion" and "being converted" lifts
up the new form of Sonship of deity to the stage which the Father had reached
in its last previous cycle. The cycle is completed with the "return"; but after
aeonial rest life gets ready to make its next rhythmic movement outward to unite
again with the Mother.
Having set forth
in the most compact form the outline of the structure of ancient evolutionary
knowledge, it is incumbent on us now to trace the origin and fix the place of
every single doctrine of theology in the draft. It is requisite also that sufficient
space be granted to present as much as is permissible of the vast body of data
supporting each phase of the exegesis. The "descent" is the first feature of
the chart that relates heavenly creation to earthly life, and is logically the
first aspect of divine activity to be taken up. Its groundwork and presuppositions
having been laid down, its presence in ancient religion must be demonstrated
with sufficient fullness. (Page 104)
Chapter
VII
COLONISTS
FROM HEAVEN
To begin with there
is that vast mass of Medieval legend that became focused in Milton’s grand epic.
The tradition of man’s having lost a Paradise, having been cast out of heaven
and thrown into a prison, a dungeon, a pit, a lake of pitch, a dark cavernous
underground where suffering was intensified by fire, was almost universal in
the background of theological belief over a long period. This wide possession
might have remained highly instructive had not Milton, in common with all save
isolated groups of Hermeticists in Europe, lost in signal knowledge that the
fallen angels, the rebel hosts, the armies of Satan-Lucifer were, collectively,
man himself, and that the fiery lake into which they were hurled was just our
good earth! This tradition was the far-trailing descendant of the ancient Mysteries,
in which the entire drama of man’s evolution was enacted at the great annual
festivals. Says Thomas Taylor, perhaps the most understanding of all Plato’s
interpreters:
"I now proceed to
prove that the dramatic spectacles of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by
the ancient theologists, their founders, to signify occultly the condition of
the unpurified soul invested with the earthly body, and enveloped in a material
and physical nature: . . ."[Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, p. 4.
]
Cocker in his Greek
Philosophy says that Plato in the Phaedrus, under the allegory of the chariot
and the winged steeds, represents the lower or inferior part of man’s nature
as dragging the soul down to earth and subjecting it to a slavery under corporeal
conditions. Taylor says [Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, p. 120.
] that
"the descent of the
superior intellect [The superior intellect of man is indeed the "god"
spoken of. "Man’s genius is a deity," said Heraclitus. ] into the realms
of generated existence becomes, indeed, the greatest benefit and ornament which
a material nature is capable of receiving; for without this participation of
intellect in the lowest department of corporeal life, nothing but the irrational
soul and a brutal life would subsist in the dark and fluctuating abode of the
body." (Page 105)
The whole
design of the Mysteries, according to the great Plato himself, was "to lead
us back to the perfection from which, as our beginning, we first made our descent."
One of the mysterious significations of the Thyrsus or reed used in the Mysteries
was connected with the descent of the soul, for, "as it was a reed full of knots,"
it became "an apt symbol of the diffusion of the higher nature into the sensible
world." Bacchus (the divine self) carried a reed instead of a scepter, and it
betokened the god’s "descent into our partial nature." "Indeed the Titans are
Thyrsus-bearers; and Prometheus concealed fire in a Thyrsus or reed; after which
he is considered as bringing celestial light into generation, or leading the
soul into the body."
The Greeks allegorized
the descent of the soul again in the fable of Ceres and Proserpine. Ceres is
the higher intellect, Proserpina being her daughter, the soul. Edward Carpenter
says
"that there were
ritual dramas or passion plays [in the Mysteries], of which an important one
dealt with the descent of Kore or Proserpine into the underworld, as in the
Eleusinian representations, and her redemption and restoration to the upper
world in spring." [Pagan and Christian Creeds, p. 239. ]
No less applicable
to the same fundamental situation is the Greek fable of Eros and Psyche. Love,
the divine Eros, descends into the mortal sphere to redeem the human soul, or
Psyche, from suffering in its animal habitat by marrying her. In the Mystery
celebrations lasting nine days, Taylor tells us that on the eighth day the "fall
of the soul into the lunar orb" was commemorated,
"because the soul
in this situation is about to bid adieu to everything of a celestial nature;
to sink into a perfect oblivion of her divine origin and pristine felicity;
and to rush profoundly into the region of dissimilitude, ignorance and error.
And lastly, on the ninth day, when the soul falls into the sublunary world and
becomes united with a terrestrial body, a libation was performed such as is
usual in the sacred rites."[See later explication of all lunar typology
in the present work. ]Proclus,
the great Neo-Platonist of the fourth century, expounding Plato’s theology,
says that it is the peculiar function of "heroic souls" (an order above daemons)
to express "magnitude of operation, elevation and magnificence," but that this
order "descends indeed for the benefit of the life of man, as partaking of a
destiny inclining downwards." [ The Six Books of Proclus on the Theology
of Plato, II, 275.] (Page 106) Iamblicus corroborates Plato as to these
grades of the hierarchy:
"Angles above dissolve
the bonds of generation. Daemons draw souls down into nature; but heroes lead
them to a providential attention to sensible works." [The Mysteries of
the Egyptians, Chaldeans and Assyrians, p. 93. ]
Iamblichus makes
an unequivocal statement of the descent when he says:
"But from the first,
divinity sent souls hither in order that they might again return to him."
[The Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans and Assyrians, p. 312. ]
He reiterates the
idea (p. 68) when speaking of the gods:
"These, therefore,
descend with invariable sameness for the salvation of the universe, and connectedly
contain the whole of generation after the same manner."
He utters a strange
sentiment when he affirms (p. 89) that the
"magnitude of the
epiphanies [or manifestations] in the Gods, indeed, is so great as sometimes
to conceal all heaven, the sun and the moon; and the earth itself, as the Gods
descend, is no longer able to stand still."
Greek philosophy,
as we have seen, embodies the traditions of the descent in several molds.
In the cycle of the twelve mystic operations of Hercules, the hero is ordered
to go down into Hades (our world) and bring up the three-headed Cerberus.
His journey is a symbolic tracing of the experiences undergone by the soul
on earth, not in some mysterious underworld below it. Orpheus descends to
the underworld to recover his lost Eurydice, the soul. In Virgil’s epic Aeneas
finds the gate to Avernus and descends for the inspection of the Tartarian
regions. It is instructive to note the etymology of this word "Avernus." It
is the Greek ornos, a bird, and alpha (a )privative, meaning "un-" or "not"
or "-less." The "v" is thrown in for euphony between the two vowels, and the
"o" is shortened to "e." It would therefore read "not birds" or "no birds,"
with the implication of "not a good place for birds." When it is known that
in all arcane systems the bird was the universal symbol for the soul, the
meaning comes clear that this earth was regarded as the place where souls
were poisoned by the noxious fumes arising from the carnal life, since the
birds were lethalized by the vapor rising from the mouth of the pit of Avernus,
became (Page 107) stupefied
and fell into the underworld. The allegory tells the story of our descent
with a force that no philosophical descanting could match. So deftly has ancient
philological skill woven a theosophical meaning into the structure of language.
Dante’s tour of Purgatory
and the deeper Inferno is a treatment of the old myth, with political and other
connotations. Ulysses’ visit to the cave of Polyphemus is again a form of the
representation, and Theseus and his labyrinthine adventure underground is another
rendering of it. From Herodotus we have an account (II, 122) of the descent
into Hades of King Rhampsinitus, in whose honor the priests of Egypt instituted
a rebirth festival. The Rig Veda parallels this story with an account of the
boy Nachiketas, who descended into the realm of Yama, the deity of the earthly
underworld, in Yama-Loka, the kingdom of the dead, and then returned to the
world of life. Needless to say, neither Egyptians nor Hindus took their theological
myths for history.
A number of utterances
in the Chaldean Oracles point to a quite complete harmony with Orphic Platonism
and Neo-Platonism. Indeed opinion veers strongly to the conclusion that Pythagorean,
Platonic and Greek philosophy generally was formulated out of the principles
of theology promulgated through the powerful agency of the Orphic Mysteries,
and that those principles were brought by the Orphics into Greece from Chaldean
sources. The Oracles agree with Greek doctrine that higher deific energies emanated
outward from a spiritual focus into the material worlds. One of them runs: "For
all things thence begin to extend their admirable rays downwards." The life
of the gods rays outward into corporeal beings and becomes the animating principle
or soul of living things.
A passage from the
Tibetan Book of the Dead (p. 130) warns devotees to "be not attracted towards
the dull blue light of the brute world," under penalty of falling into that
kingdom of nature. It asserts (p. 125) that the predilection of our immortal
nature toward animal grossness will cause it to "stray downwards." The text
represents the human soul as beseeching the "Knowledge-Holding Deities" not
to let it drift further down, but to lead it to the holy paradise. The soul
exults that "These Knowledge-Holding Deities, the Heroes and the Dakinis have
come from the holy paradise realms to receive me." The text traces the descent
of these divinities who, false to their oaths, fall (Page 108) from
lower to still lower stages of the Bardo, or world of dark embodiment.
A cuneiform tablet
in the British Museum holds a legend of the rebellious angels who broke into
the Lord’s song with impious shouts, destroying the harmony, and who, for punishment,
were cast down out of heaven. They are referred to in the Book of Jude (Ch.
6) in the line: "They kept not their own habitations." These in the Book of
Enoch are the seven stars which "transgressed the commandment of God and came
not in their proper season" (Enoch 18, 21, 22). It is said in the cuneiform
text, "May the God of divine speech expel from his five thousand those who in
the midst of his heavenly song shouted evil blasphemies."
Of tremendous significance
to the thesis that early Christian doctrine was intimately allied with and influenced
by the prevalent esoteric wisdom of environing cults, is a fragment called the
Naasene Hymn, preserved by Hippolytus (Haer. V. 5). After describing the woes
and sufferings of the human soul during its wanderings on earth, the hymn continues:
But Jesus said:
Father, Behold
A war of
evils has arisen upon earth;
It comes
from thy breath and ever works;
Man strives
to shun this bitter chaos,
But knows
not how he may pass (safely) through it;
Therefore,
do thou, O Father, send me;
Bearing thy
seals I will descend (to earth);
Throughout
the ages I will pass;
All mysteries
I will unfold,
All forms
of Godhead I will unveil,
All secrets
of thy holy path
Styled Gnosis
(knowledge) I will impart (to man).
The Jesus character
alluded to here is, it seems certain, the Gnostic Jesus, or Ieou, whom we shall
see is traceable to Egyptian origins many centuries B.C. Scholars will haggle
over the question of the date of the hymn, whether A.D. or B.C. The possibility
that it dates B.C. has already been repudiated with great speciousness.[T.
J. Thorburn: The Mythical Interpretation of the Gospels, p. 80 ff. ]
The name Naasene, of apparently Ophite connection, seems to have etymological
relation to both the names of Essene and Nazarene. If an Essene production it
could (Page 109) readily
be given a B.C. placing without violent improbability. There is evidence that
cults of Nazarenes (Nararaioi) teaching Egypto-Gnostic Christolatry antedated
the coming of the Gospel Jesus. The Ophites (serpent-symbolizers, not serpent-worshipers)
were a Gnostic sect of early Christianity, later persecuted as heretics, who
believed in a spiritual Christ-Aeon that descended into the material chaos to
assist Sophia (Wisdom) in her efforts to emancipate the soul from the bondage
of the flesh.
Turning to the material
of Egypt we find the descent traced unmistakably in a thousand references. The
conception is so pervading that all three persons of the Egyptian Trinity, Isis,
Osiris and Horus, are represented as descending to the nether earth. Osiris,
the Father God, descends, is cut to pieces by Sut (Satan) and the fragments
of his body scattered over the earth. Isis, the Mother, descends to earth to
search for the fragments. Horus, the Son, comes down in the identical character
as the Christian Jesus in the advent at Christmas as the bringer of peace. As
Jesus descends into hell (Apostles’ Creed), so Horus came from heaven into the
realm of darkness as the light of the world. It is said that he descends into
the funeral land, the abode of darkness and of death. The Speaker in the Egyptian
Ritual (representing always the human soul) says: "I have come upon this earth,
and I take possession of it with my two feet." It is said that Osiris goes down
into Tattu (another name for Amenta) and finds there the soul of the sun, and
is united thereto. The Manes (again the human soul) says: "I am he that cometh
forth by day . . . I descend upon earth and mine eye maketh me to walk thereon."
It is said of him: "Thou enterest in to the place where thy Father is, where
Keb [Seb, the god of earth] is." Again: "Thou descendest under protection. Ra
ferries thee to Amenta." In the Ritual (The Book of the Dead) it is said: "This
is he who in his resurrection says, ‘I am the Lord on high and I descend to
the earth of Seb that I may put a stop to evil.’"
Such references to
the advent of divinity in the scripts of Egypt could be multiplied to great
length. Likewise the religious lore of scores of aboriginal tribes in all continents
hold multitudinous corroboration of the fact and confirm its status as the basic
datum of all religious construction. A hundred folk-tales begin with the coming
of some hero from heaven to earth, or with the flinging down of some (Page 110)
object emblematic
of divinity. The variety of symbols used is wide, and to one lacking the keys
of interpretation, bewildering. It is enough to say that in all such legends
the idea of the descent is central.
Looking now at the
Christian Bible we shall find in plenty the features of the same myth. Bible
students are not generally aware of the directness with which the descent of
the gods to earth is there told. There is first the well-known declaration of
God himself (distorted into a reference to the historical Jesus) that he sent
his only-begotten son into the world that all believers might have everlasting
life. Then there is the remarkable pronouncement in the Gospel of John (3):
"No man ascendeth into heaven but he that cometh down from heaven." From Luke
(19:10) we have: "The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which is lost."
Then there is Jesus’ direct statement to his disciples: "Ye are from beneath;
I am from above." The Lord’s affirmation that he laid down his life for his
sheep surely means not that he was immolated on a wooden cross, but that he
resigned his celestial life to endure the burden of the cross (of flesh and
matter). The Apocalyptist’s vision of the New Jerusalem coming down from God
out of heaven is a reference to the descent of divinity in its fragmented form.
The line that follows--"Behold the tabernacle of God is with men, and he shall
dwell with them . . . and God himself shall be with them and he shall be their
God" (Rev. 21:1), is to the same effect. Jesus declares that he came from the
Father into the earth.
Lifting from the
term Christos the Christian limitation of its personification in the body of
the historical Jesus, and reading for this distorted meaning the idea of the
gods incarnated distributively in all men, it is possible to discern allusions
to the descent all through the Bible. Though not so immediately obvious, the
Lukan account which states that Jesus came down from the mount and "stood on
a level place" (Ch. 6:17) before he delivered the Sermon, is another indirect
allusion to the same fact. For the Pistis Sophia, the Gnostic Gospel, states
that Jesus preached his discourse to his disciples "in the midst of Amenta"!
Later comparison of many texts discloses the surprising fact that both the mount
and the level plain, whereon the Sermon was delivered in the Gospels, are diverse
forms of the same symbolism! Both refer to our earth, under the terms of equinoctial
symbolism. The "mount" in the mythos was never in any sense an earthly elevation.
Paul in one passage propounds the logical problem, which should have (Page 111)
been given
consideration, analogically, by our scientists,--how we can envisage the resurrection
without the postulation of a previous descent from heaven. He asks (Ephesians
4:9): "Now he that ascended, what is it but that he also descended first into
the lower parts of the earth? He that descended is the same also that ascended
far above all heavens. . . ." The pertinence of this material for science is
that science has studied life as in evolution without having postulated a necessary
involution antecedently! Science must meet Paul’s significant query. Likewise
must theology restore to its high place the doctrine of the descent.
Symbolizing the divine
nature as bread for man, John gives Jesus’ announcement of his descent (6:47,
48) : "I am the bread of life . . . such is the bread that came down from heaven,
that a man shall eat of it and shall not die." The general allegorism of scattering
or sowing seed is employed to depict the Platonic "distribution of divinity"
among men. In the parable of the sower we have a portraiture of the partitive
incarnation of divine natures in mortal bodies. The falling of the seed into
various types of soil is a natural version of the diversified embodiments the
descending souls might have apportioned to them. This interpretation raises
the parable to infinite heights of dignity and meaning above the feeble and
ineffective rendering of uncomprehending thought, which is able to see in the
figured situation nothing higher than the sowing of the "word," that is, the
Sabbath droning from pulpits, impinging upon different grades of mental acumen
or moral character! The "Word" is in no case the written Bible, even, but the
Logos, or form of divine ideation, powerfully stamped upon the physical universe
by the deific utterance. No student is in position to grasp the significance
of the Logos doctrine until he has mastered the principles of Platonic theology,
as outlined by Proclus [See Proclus: The Six Books of Proclus on the
Theology of Plato, 2 Vols., wherein the two hundred and eleven principles of
Greek theology are listed and expounded. ] or Plotinus. Christian interpretation
has merely shuffled along in the darkness without a light. "Like the streams
in the circle of heaven I besprinkle the seeds of men," runs a text in the Records
of the Past (Vol. III, 129).
The angels in Revelation
pour out the contents of their censers over the earth, granting a nucleus of
solar "fire" to each mortal to divinize him. As the Timaeus of Plato reports,
the deity was to furnish the collective seed of what was to be immortal in humanity.
In Old Testament
allegorism the doctrine is found most unexpectedly to be the core of meaning
in the Abraham story. Like the Prodigal (Page 112) Son
of the New Testament he was sent out from his home, country and kinsfolk (in
the heavenly Eden) to go to a strange land (incidentally to the West, where
was the Tuat, or gate of entry to the earth!). There his seed was to multiply
until it filled the earth with his children, the heirs of supernal grace.
But the hidden sense
of the name Abraham or Abram has escaped notice, and it is of great moment,
as are all Bible names. Scholars may protest, but it seems obvious that the
word is simply A-Brahm, (Hindu), meaning "non-Brahm." Abraham, the Patriarch
or oldest of the aeons or emanations, was not Brahm, the Absolute, but the first
emanation from Brahm; the first ray, the first God, perhaps equivalent to Ishwara
of the Hindus. He was the first life that was not Absolute, yet from the Absolute.
He was to go forth into the realms of matter, divide and multiply, and fill
the world with his fragmented units. To return to Abraham’s bosom would be just
to complete the cycle of outgoing and return, to rest in the bosom of the highest
divinity close to the Absolute. Also he came out of Ur, of the Chaldees (or
Kasadim), which is another key word, since Ur is the Chaldean word for "fire,"
the celestial empyrean, out of which all souls, as fiery sparks, are emanated.
Kasadim, or Kasdim, was a term given to the highest celestial spirits, who fathered
the production of the divine sparks of soul. It is practically equivalent to
"Archangels."
Then Abraham went
straight to Egypt from the land of Canaan, and his descendants were to suffer
bondage in that lower country. It is a crushing blow to the historical rendering
of Bible narrative to declare, on evidence that is incontrovertible, that the
"Egypt" of the scriptures is not the country on the map. It is the term used
in the allegories to designate the plane, state or "land" of embodied life,
life on earth. "Egypt" is just this earth, or the state or locale of bodily
life on it. It even at times connotes the physical body itself, as in "the flesh
pots of Egypt." Hence the descent of Abraham, and later of the twelve sons of
Jacob, into "Egypt" are again the fable of the soul’s adventure here. If the
term Egypt is taken as the geographical unit, many passages in which it occurs
will be found to read as sheer nonsense. Had theology known that "the strange
land" and "the far country" were glyphs for this earth of ours, greater sanity
would have marked the counsels of ecclesiasticism down the centuries. If the
"bondage in (Page 113) Egypt,
that slave pen," as the Eternal repeatedly calls it (in the Moffatt translation),
has been in some way interlocked with an historical servitude (as may have been
the case), it still does not prove that the allegory intended to recount the
bondage of a nation. It was a bondage of spirit under sense that was thus portrayed.
Many passages from the Old Testament books refer to the Israelites as captives,
outcasts, expatriates and exiles, matching Greek, Egyptian and Gnostic terminology,
and alluding of course to the expulsion of the angelic hosts from a celestial
Paradise to a bleak earthly exile. The sons of God had to go to Egypt also in
order that fulfillment might be given to the hoary scriptural line from the
Mystery drama: "Out of Egypt have I called my Son." For resurgent deity in the
wandering exiles would eventually lead them back to their home on high.
In Luke (10:18) Jesus
says that he "beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven." As Satan is identical
with Lucifer, the bringer of deific light, or the god (collectively), and the
hosts of angelic souls (distributively), Jesus’ utterance is readily seen as
another affirmation of the descent of the spiritual principle, eternally symboled
by "fire" from heaven. Again, in the resurrection scene "an angel of the Lord
descended from heaven." Once more this is not a fragment of veridical history,
but another brief figuration of the descent. In an Egypto-Gnostic fragment the
same ideograph is repeated under the double representation, [See later
exposition of the Law of the Two Truths, passim. ] when "the heavens
opened and two men descended thence with great radiance," and both the young
men entered the tomb. The seer in Revelation descries an angel in flight toward
the earth and also sees the holy city of Zion, radiant with the glory of God,
descending from the skies.
One of the Old Testament
allegories has to do with the Lord’s reminding Israel that he had "opened the
doors of heaven" and "rained down manna upon them to eat." As bread is the Johannine
symbol of divine nature on which the mortal race was to feed, so manna in the
Mosaic narrative stands in the same usage. There is reason also to suppose that
manna is cognate by derivation with the Sanskrit "manas," the principle of intelligence,
which was the gift of deity to "man." Its distribution over the ground in a
thin layer like frost and glistening white is a symbolism of the spirit, which
comes to us in the form of a distillation over the ground of our concrete experience
out of the (Page 114) brooding
atmosphere of divine super-intelligence. And all deity is described as shining
with radiance.
A frequent figure
for the descending spirits of light is the falling star. In the Egyptian Records
of the Past (Vol. II, p. 16) the Speaker says: "The place is empty into which
the starry ones fall down headlong upon their faces and find nothing by which
they can raise themselves up." In the same thought the Chinese have a venerable
proverb which runs: "The stars ceased shining in heaven and fell upon earth,
where they became men." That the star as an emblem of the divine soul is not
altogether a sheer poetic fancy, is shown by the fact that, as Massey points
out,
"The Elementaries
or brute forces of nature may be said to have obtained their souls in the stars.
Hence, as Plutarch says, the Dog-Star is the soul of Isis, Orion is the soul
of Horus, and the Bear is the soul of Typhon,--Soul and Star being synonymous
in the Egyptian word Seb." [The Natural Genesis, I, p. 332. ]
In one of the addresses
to King Pepi it is said to him: "Thy soul is a living star at the head of his
brethren." [ It should be understood that the Egyptians often used the
names of kings for the character of the Christos, or the sun-god.]In
the texts of Egypt the evil crocodile, typifying Paul’s "carnal nature," is
said to swallow the sinking stars," the souls that fall into the darkness of
incarnation. Among the ancients the stars that dipped beneath the horizon were
emblematic of souls in physical incarnation, in contradistinction to those that
never set, which typed the non-incarnating gods. Souls in incarnation were dubbed
by the Greeks "moist souls," since they were immersed in the body, which is
seven-eighths water by composition. The redeemed souls rejoiced in the Egyptian
Ritual (Ch. 44) at being lifted up "among the stars that never set." Those condemned
to descend were represented as falling stars in danger of being devoured by
the open jaws of the dragon (of mortal life). This reptile lurked in the "bight
of Amenta" or the bend of the river "where the starry procession dipped down
below the horizon." The Swabian "Lindwurm" was another form of the dragon that
"swallowed the setting stars." Indeed the entire myth of the casting down of
Saturn and his hosts was figured under the symbolism of falling stars. The dragon
that "made war with the woman drew down into his kingdom many of the stars of
heaven." One of the phenomena of the Crucifixion mentioned in Revelation along
with the darkness over the earth, (Page 115) the veiled
sun, the bloodstained moon, is that "the stars from the heavens fell." In the
same place we read that "when the message of the third angel was sounded forth,
a great star went down from heaven and it fell upon the earth." Another star
fell at the sounding of the trumpet of the firth angel. The various legends,
then, of falling stars become invested with unexpected significance as being
disguised allusions to the descent of the angelic myriads to our shores,--to
become our souls.
But nowhere is the
statement of the descent of soul made more explicitly than in the very Creed
of the Christian Church, wherein the second person of the Trinity is described
as he "who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven . . . and
was made man." Our material will show that the idea was common to many early
nations, in whose literature it is stated with more definiteness than in the
Christian.
If the descent was
in partial degree a karmic punishment for sin, an enforced expiation of evolutionary
dereliction in past cycles, as is hinted in Greek philosophy, it was also pictured
as a seeking of refuge or a hiding for safety. Some contingency or crisis in
celestial affairs, not fully divulged, made it both obligatory and advantageous
for the angel hosts to flee heaven and find on earth, or in "Egypt," an escape
from danger involved in some evolutionary impasse. It is not customary to think
of hell as a haven, but certain implications in the old theology require us
to do just that. At all events the legend of the hiding away of the young divine
heroes is too general to be without deep significance. Adam hid himself when
the Eternal walked in the garden. Moses as an infant was hidden in the papyrus
swamps of "Egypt"; later he was hidden by the Eternal in a cleft of the rock
as the majesty of the Lord swept by. Jonah ran and hid from the Eternal when
first commanded to execute a mission to the Ninevites. The child Jesus had to
be hidden away from danger in "Egypt"! The Old Testament Joseph went down to
"Egypt" to be saved from danger. Jotham preserved his life from his murderous
brother Abimelech by hiding. Saul was found in hiding among the baggage when
he was chosen to be king in Israel. In Egypt, Buto, the nurse, concealed Horus,
the analogue of Jesus, in Sekhem, "the hidden shrine and shut place,"--our earth.
Horus’ birth was in a secret place. A similar legend is related of the mythical
Sargon in the cuneiform tablets. He says: "My mother, the Princess, conceived
me; in a secret place she brought me forth." (Page 116) The supreme
Egyptian Sun-God, the mighty spiritual divinity Ra, says to the earth: "I have
hidden you." [Book of Hades, First Division. ]He says that in
the "Egypt" of this lower world he had prepared a secret and mysterious dwelling
for his children. This divine dwelling created by Ra as the place of protection
for the elect, is called "the Retreat." Amen, an aspect of Ra, was termed "The
Master of the Hidden Spheres"; and Amen itself means "the hidden god." In the
Ritual (Ch. 22) Osiris cries: "I rise out of the egg in the hidden land." Under
another name, Qem-Ur, he addresses the earth (Aukert, the underworld) as the
land "which hidest thy companion who is in thee." The god again speaks of "hiding
himself to cast light upon his hidden place." This is the typical Lucifer character
of the descending god, the Light-Bringer. He hides himself in order, it is said,
to perform there the "mysteries of the underworld." "These things shall be done
secretly in the underworld." (Rubric to Ch. 137A of the Ritual.) Under the title
of Unas he "gathers together his members which are in the hidden place." He
says that he has "made Horus enter into the Hidden Shrine to vivify the heart
of the god."
It is desirable to
search a little more closely for the rationale of this hiding in the secret
place of earth, as the bases of the whole theological situation are involved
in this dark background. Two causes can be assigned for the descent, a normal
evolutionary one, and another rising out of the motives for karmic punishment
for error, stubbornness, pride or wrong. As to the first, the Greeks postulated
the Cycle of Necessity, which required that all souls or fragments of divine
being must pass through the round of all the elements, in order to embody in
their finished perfection the qualities of every modification of life. The second
cause is less philosophically rationalized and - hints are given us - grew out
of a special situation involving the recalcitrant behavior of twelve legions
of angels, who, in retribution for evolutionary irregularities on their part,
were forced into an earthly incarnation distasteful to them. In the character
of King Teta, Osiris is made to say: "This Teta hath detestation of the earth,
and he will not enter into Seb" (god of earth). There are also references to
the anger of the higher gods, enkindled against them. Plato (Phaedrus) speaks
of those souls who were "subject through the ancient indignation of the Gods
in consequence of former guilt" to severe penalties on earth. In the Cratylus
he concurs with the doctrine of the Orphics that the soul is punished through
its union with body. Iamblicus (Mysteries of the (Page 117) Egyptians,
Chaldeans and Assyrians, p. 133) states that a partial motive in the celebration
of the Mysteries of Sabazius was the appeasing of "the ancient divine anger."
Clement of Alexandria (Stromata, III) preserves a passage from a celebrated
Pythagorean, Philolaus, which runs: "The ancient theologists and priests also
testify that the soul is united with body as if for the sake of punishment."
The Book of Enoch points to a motive for this punishment in that the deities
"came not in their proper season." It is given that they were ordered to incarnate
at an earlier period, when the bodies of the animal race were of a requisite
preparedness to receive the principle of intelligence, but that they refused
and in consequence were forced to descend much later, when the animal vehicles
were far gone in a state of degeneracy. Proclus in his Hymn to Minerva prays
to the goddess:
"Nor let these
horrid punishments be mine,
Which guilty
souls in Tartarus confine,
With fetters
fastened to its broken floors,
And locked
by hell’s tremendous iron doors."
Dante in
the Inferno alludes to the souls in bondage:
"Hither for
failure of their vows exiled."
There is ground for
connecting all this allusion to the penal character of our adventure on earth
with the oft-cited "rebellion of the angels." Theological students should be
more familiar with Plato’s version of the Demiurgic speech to the hosts about
to incarnate, the "junior gods," in the Timaeus. The Creator covenants with
them to insure their immortality, to support them with his power; and then charge
them to come to earth and "weave together mortal and immortal natures." It is
said they rebelled, procrastinated and, when finally forced to descend by virtue
of karma, missed the crest of a wave of evolution that would have carried them
more smoothly forward past a crucial point. As it eventuated, their delay brought
them to the earth when the lower race they were to uplift had sunk back into
brutal degradation, and their penal infliction became the greater by the enhanced
grossness of the bodies they were to inhabit. Their proper season had passed,
as say Jude and Enoch.
Strangely we find
in an old Egyptian inscription called " (Page 118) The Destruction
of Mankind" a parallel to this somewhat anomalous situation in Platonic systematism.
There is a rebellion against Ra, the Sun-God, followed by a great destruction
and a deluge. Atum-Ra had been established as the king of gods and men, the
God alone. There is a revolt against his supremacy. He calls the elder gods
around him for consultation and says to them:
"You ancient gods,
behold the beings who are born of myself; they utter words against me. Tell
me, what would you do in these circumstances? Behold, I have waited and I have
not destroyed them until I should hear what you have to say." [Detailed
by Massey: Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 556. ]
The elder gods advise
that he permit them to go and smite the enemies who plot evil against Ra, and
let none remain alive. The rebels are then destroyed by being cast down for
three days. Here is the distinct clue to true meaning, for the three days are
a glyph for the time spent by evolutionary consciousness in the three lower
kingdoms beneath man, the mineral, vegetable and animal. And "destruction" in
this usage can not be taken as equivalent to actual annihilation or extirpation.
This latter point is an extremely important one, as it saves many a Biblical
allegory from utter perversion of meaning. After the exaction of the penalty,
the "majesty of Ra" declares that he will now protect men on this account. "I
raise my hand (in token) that I shall not again destroy men." The similarity
of this description to more than a score of such narratives of the almighty
anger against "a stiff-necked and rebellious people," their being cast out from
celestial court and favor, and the eventual divine relenting and restoration
of them to his providential care, must strike any fair-minded student who has
read the Old Testament.
It is charged that
Job, when cause is sought for his trial, had added "rebellion unto his sin."
[See: The Book of Job as a Greek Tragedy, Horace M. Kallen. ] It
does not seem to be well known that the Old Testament contains an account of
the "rebellion of the angels" in the guise of alleged Hebrew history. It is
the rebellion of the "Sons of Korah," given in the Mosaic books, and recalled
to the attention of the Israelites several times by the Eternal. It is told
that at the rebellion the Lord caused the earth to open and swallow them up.
It should be noticed that they were engulfed by the earth. It is known that
two different groups of Psalms, thirteen to forty-nine, and eighty-four to eighty-eight,
are specialized as "Psalms of the Sons of Korah." It is to (Page 119) be
remarked as significant also that while swallowed up by earth, they were not
destroyed! The rebel hosts, cast out of heaven, were not annihilated! What can
this mean but that the term "destruction" is purely a glyph for the enforced
descent to earth? Here they could expiate their contumely by sojourning in the
untoward conditions of animal embodiment. Milton in the Paradise Lost, expresses
Adam’s surprise to find that his sentence of "death" for disobedience is a long,
living death, not extinction. The account of the Korahitic rebellion expressly
states that they were swallowed alive.
Happily Chaldean
as well as Hindu records reaffirm the correctness of our interpretation, for
Massey says:
"The Chaldean and
Hindu legends know nothing of a human sin as a cause of the deluge. The sin
against the gods, however, is described as the cause of the deluge in the so-called
‘destruction of men.’ . . . But these beings in the case were elemental, not
mortal, and the sin was not human." [Ancient Egypt, the Light of the
World, p. 559. ]
This is quite important.
The beings were pre-human and angelic, not elemental in the theological sense.
Their rebellion, in short, occurred in heaven, not on earth, though indeed it
has been prolonged into the earthly life. They carried their rebellious attitude
down with them and exhibit phases of it to the present!
An Egyptian text
says of the god Anhur that he had seen the malice of these gods who "deserted
their allegiance to raise a rebellion," and "he refused to go forth with them."
Other texts contain references to "the children of impotent revolt," and tell
of their "inroad into the Eastern part of heaven, whereupon there arose a battle
in heaven and in all the earth." And another passage alludes to the "carrying
out of the sentence upon those who are to die," and says it is "the withholding
of that which is so needful to the souls of the children of impotent revolt."
The meaning here is obviously their expatriation and consequent cutting off
from participation in the life of their celestial estate.
In general
summary of this point, it may be said that the implications and the moral of
these traditions of rebellious and outcast angels are these: our divine souls
(for we are those rebellious deities) fled under karmic pressure from heaven
to earth, and we have carried the same refractoriness down in our racial history.
We refused at first to incarnate in the animal forms, and we still are rebellious
in our refusal (Page 120) to take full charge and assume complete mastery over
the "animal" segment of our composite nature. Hence the frequent injunctions
in old scriptures to "kill out" the lower elements in us, and such a statement
as that in the Egyptian text of Unas to "slay the rebel" in consummating our
work of redemption. [This spiritual edict has often been sadly misconstrued
by mystical devotees. It does not, to be sure, imply the stern negation of all
carnal impulses, far less their total annihilation. The animal nature is not
to be ruthlessly slain, but transformed into the likeness of the spiritual man.
] Angels indeed were despatched to this realm, and their presence in the
human constitution accounts for the divine element apostrophized in all religion.
In the Epistle to the Hebrews (1:14) it is asked: "Are they not all ministering
spirits sent forth to minister for them who should be heirs of salvation?"
The next step in
the unfoldment of the theme is to establish beyond dispute that it was to our
earth that the descent was made. This is tremendously vital to true interpretation.
In Egyptian scriptures
we encounter the promise that "if Pepi falleth on to the earth, Keb [Seb] will
lift him up." Pepi here stands for the divinity in man, the god come to earth.
To him in another place it is said: "Thou plowest the earth . . . Thou journeyest
on the road whereon the gods journeyed." Here is identification of the earth
as the place to which the gods were sent to travel the road of evolution.
One of the most conclusive
statements of this fact in Christian scriptures is that memorable passage in
Revelation (12:7-9), where we have a succinct rehearsal of the "war in heaven"
and the casting down of the angel hosts in the character of Satan, as the dragon
or serpent.
"There was war in
heaven. Michael and his angels went forth to war with the dragon; and the dragon
warred and his angels; and they prevailed not, neither was their place found
any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast down, the old serpent, he
that is called the Devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world; he was
cast down into the earth and his angels were cast out with him."
It is of prime interest
to note that the war in heaven was continued on earth, as has been intimated
before. For after the dragon had been cast down to earth, he "waxed wroth with
the woman and went away to make war with the rest of her seed."
This can be seen
as the confirmation of the narrative in Genesis, wherein the Lord swore to place
enmity between the serpent, or dragon, and the seed of the woman.
In the Egyptian Ritual,
in the "chapter by which one cometh forth by day," the spirit of the descending
god pleads: (Page 121)
"Let me have possession
of all things soever which were offered ritualistically for me in the nether
world. Let me have possession of the table of offerings which was heaped up
for me on earth." He asks "that he may feed upon the bread of Seb [the earth
god] or the food of earth." Proceeding he urges: "Let the Tuat be opened for
me. Here am I."
This is an announcement
of his advent upon earth, for the Tuat is the gate of entrance to Amenta. He
is coming to this world to feed upon that type of concrete experience which
the conditions here alone afford, under the name of "the bread of Seb." Later,
following his resurrection, he says: "The tunnels of earth have given me birth."
"I rise as a god among men," he exclaims. If there are men elsewhere than on
earth, they are not those referred to in the old scriptures. He is described
again as "Thou who givest light to the earth" (Rit., Ch. 15). Again he says:
"I come that I may overthrow my adversaries upon earth." It is on earth that
his opposition is to be met and hither he must come to conquer it, for his undeveloped
divinity must grow by overcoming opposition. He is spoken of again as "he who
has caused the authority of his father to be recognized in the great dwelling
of Seb,"--earth. Another passage (Ch. 64) describes the lower self in man as
saying: "I draw near to the god whose words were heard by me in the lower earth."
As the god-soul descends he says: "My body shall be established and it shall
neither fall into decay nor be destroyed upon this earth." His mission to earth
is proclaimed as being to "vivify every human being that walketh upon the regions
which are upon the earth." In another place we have a combined reference to
the earth both as the "hidden place" and as the globe where the young gods came
to progress. It is said of Isis that "she suckled the child in solitariness,
and none knew where his place was, and he grew in strength and his arm increased
in strength in the house of Keb," or the earth. Egypt will offer us in later
connections a superabundance of testimony to the thesis under discussion, the
relevance of which can not be so well appreciated until other phases of the
mundane journey of the god can be presented. The localization of the place where
the gods fell when ejected from heaven in the mythos as being our earth is one
of the three or four major postulates of the ancient theology which this work
is undertaken to establish, and its implications must alter all religious construction
drastically. (Page 122)
The point
was once known, but was obscured by ignorant handling of the Gnosis and was
lost. It is almost unthinkable that it could have met such a fate when the Church
had constantly before its eyes the legend of Christmas, with its clear imputation
of the incarnation of the children of spiritual skies on earth. But the distributive
nature of the Christhood had been submerged, and the tradition of the fall of
the angels had been wrenched out of all relation to the Nativity at the winter
solstice.
The passage in Revelation
(22:16) that has left theological thought in such deep obscurity, may find acceptable
rendition of its meaning in the light of the thesis of the descent: "I, Jesus,
have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches." To apprehend
the statement clearly we are required to read the name "Jesus" in the light
of its Gnostic meaning as an Aeon, or emanation of divine spirit, an interpretation
that is not at odds with its usage in the Book of Revelation. Students have
been impressed with the evident resemblance of the Apocalypse to Gnostic literature,
and one writer has ventured the opinion that it could have been written only
by a Platonist versed in Mystery and Magian symbology. It bears quite pointed
resemblances to such a Hermetic book as the Enoch. The Jesus referred to in
it obviously has no identic relation to the Jesus personalized in the Gospels.
His figure here is of cosmic proportions and equates the stature of the Logos.
His dispatching of his angels to testify unto the churches can mean only that
the Demiurgus, or Cosmic Intelligence embodied in an exalted being of the hierarchy,
ordered the incarnation of the legionary hosts in the interests of the human
evolution on earth. The "churches" can by no possible sophistry be distorted
into a reference to the early Christian congregations. This would be to bring
the dignity of cosmic operations down almost to the level of the monthly meeting
of the Ladies’ Auxiliary! The "churches" were groupings or gradations of spiritual
beings at or near the completed state of human development, if not the "ecclesia"
or "assembly" of the divinized mortals.
Theology has never
adequately traced the course of the evolutionary processes by which the simple
fact of the descent of the angels for incarnation took on the character of a
"fall," with the implication of disaster. Says Cocker: "The present life is
a fall and a punishment." [ Greek Philosophy. ]Many passage from
the Bible could be adduced to show that the (Page 123) incarnation
was held to have resulted in a fall or debasement of pristine angelic virtue.
The Revelation apostrophe to the fallen Babylon, the mighty, whose ancient glory
had departed, giving place to the glory of the Beast, whose courts had become
the habitation of devils, and whose fornicatory wines had made the nations drunk,
is doubtless an allusion to the situation here envisaged. To what else could
St. Paul conceivably be referring when, speaking of the Gentiles, he says:
"And they changed
the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of a corruptible
man, and of birds, and of four-footed beasts, and of creeping things."
An earlier paragraph
has corrected the miscomprehension of the meaning of the term "Gentiles," which
has beset the theological mind for centuries. It would be illogical to ascribe
so dire an evolutionary degeneration to the mere accident of non-membership
in a religious caste, or nation of allegedly "chosen" people. The Gentiles were
the as yet undivinized "sons of men," as distinct from the "Sons of God," or
Israelites, and it was their unpurified natures that dragged down the gods who
incarnated in their bodies and dimmed their glory. The Gentile is the man "from
beneath"; the Israelite is "from above," as Jesus affirmed. "The first man is
of the earth, earthy; the second is the Lord from heaven," says St. Paul. The
immersion of the latter in the bodies of the former reduced their originally
vivid intelligence to such a point of stultification that they sank by degrees
under the dominance of the sensual disposition. And here is found the conversion
of the evolutionary "descent" into the theological "fall." The two terms Gentiles
and Israelites can not be attached to any historical nationals. Their employment
by several nations was at first only an allegorical flourish. The Greek use
of the term "barbarians" and our own recent literary use of the word "Philistines"
somewhat parallel this treatment of the word "Gentiles." The Gentiles were the
party of the first part in evolution, who drew down the gods and changed their
glory into the semblance of grinning hyenas, chattering apes, braying asses
and rapacious wolves, in spite of "broad oaths fast sealed" and a covenant with
deity.
The advent of the
Prometheans to earth was the oblation, the divine sacrifice, the sacrifice "for
sin." Yet it is only a perverted connotation of the word "sacrifice" that has
caused this act of cosmic policy to be (Page 124) taken
in the light of a self-privation on the part of the Luciferian hosts. Few words
of noble meaning have not been touched by the disfiguring hand of low human
understanding. Sacrifice (Latin: sacra and facio) means "to make sacred," and
has no immediate correlation with the denial to oneself of benefits. If privation
came in the process of incarnation, it was incidental, not inherent. The angel
legions descended to make a lower order of life holy--"to adorn what was below
them," as Plotinus puts it. Their labor was to the end of "sacrifying" a merely
natural kingdom of life. It was to sanctify with the gift of divinity the mortal
race, and make it immortal and divine.
This is not to assert
that the enterprise did not entail hardship. The labor of evolution especially
when self-consciousness had been awakened and the Ego became aware of his failures,
and knew that he bore responsibility for his conduct, is more likely to be a
Via Dolorosa than a path of roses. The reason for the accentuation of the denial
aspect of the sacrifice is to be found in the fact that the upliftment of the
lower grade entailed a long relinquishment of paradisiacal blessedness for the
spirits of light, and a quenching of their deific fire in the moist humors,
or "water," of the body. The adventure brought privation, torture, woe. It was
an exile from a home of beatific happiness. To be plunged from a state of dreamy
blissfulness into a state of dull realism and concrete objectivity, where the
golden glow of idealism faded from every sight, was for them a dimming of the
bright lamp of life. It was indeed a plunge from lively consciousness into partial
unconsciousness. It was an ostracism from heaven into a long, hard and unattractive
migration. They were to become colonists of a strange, distant land, if not
castaways on its unfriendly shores. Cocker, already quoted, comments, in reference
to Plato’s Cave Allegory: "Their sojourn on earth is . . . a dreary exile from
their proper home." Earth life is only a shadow of reality. In Egyptian scriptures
the holy city of Aarru-Hetep (Salem) was to be built up by "the outcasts or
the colonists from Egypt." St. Paul states that "we are a colony of heaven"
(Moffatt translation). This is a clear Biblical intimation that we are expatriates
from a higher world. Greek philosophy and mythology are replete with allusions
to souls wandering on earth, exhiles from a diviner sphere. Most of the semi-divine
heroes had long journeys and crusades assigned to them. And the Prodigal Son
is of course the unquestioned representative of the exile’s role in Bible lore.
From the (Page 125) Greek
philosopher Empedocles comes the echo of the sentiment that the soul has migrated
to a foreign country:
"For this I weep,
for this indulge my woe,
That e’er
my soul such novel realms should know."
Moses’ son was Gershom,
which the Moffatt translation gives as meaning "Stranger," with the parenthetical
explanation: "For I have been a stranger in a foreign land."
In this connection
there is the possibility of a rational solution of the meaning of a text in
the Bible which, in its conventional reading, has proven a perplexity and a
"hard saying." It appears to be a stroke at the fundamental integrity of human
kinship, family affection. In Luke (14:26) Jesus tells the multitude that no
one can be his disciple unless one hate father, mother, brother, sister and
all kin. In the great Gnostic-Christian work, the Pistis Sophia (Bk. 2, p. 341)
a text runs to nearly the same effect:
"For this cause have
I said unto you aforetime, ‘he who shall not leave father and mother to follow
after me is not worthy of me.’ What I said then was, ye shall leave your parents,
the rulers, that ye may all be children of the first, everlasting mystery."
In the light of the
additional explanatory material given in the Pistis Sophia and omitted from
the Gospel account, it is possible to see that this necessity of the disciple’s
leaving father, mother and kin and breaking all home ties in an apparently ruthless
disruption of the most commendable of earthly loves, bore no original reference
to human parents and kindred, but was another of the many illusions to the expatriation
of the angelic orders. This breaking of home ties occurred in the celestial
paradise, which in all portrayal is called "the Homeland." To be a follower
of Jesus in his mission to a submerged humanity was to accompany him in his
descent to earth from heavenly Father and empyrean home. If religion had kept
its original knowledge of our cosmic errand, we could have been saved the perennial
perplexity of wondering why the Lord’s disciples are commanded to flout the
tenderest of human ties.
Many of the allusions
to the children of Israel as exiles, captives in a foreign land, hostages and
outcasts, are made during periods when the historical Hebrews were not in either
the Egyptian or (Page 126) the Babylonian
or Assyrian captivities, and were not in any mundane sense exiles. Empedocles
describes mortals as "Heaven’s exiles straying from the orb of light." In line
with our thought are the words of the Christian Advent hymn:
O come, O come,
Emmanuel,
And ransom
captive Israel,
That mourns
in lonely exile here,
Until the
Son of God appear.
Nor less
grandly true are the lines of the "Gospel" hymn:
I’m but a
stranger here;
Heaven is
my home.
The various exiles,
captivities and wanderings of the children of Israel were not historical. They
were symbolic accounts of the descent of the twelve "tribes" of angelic spirits,
"chosen" by the higher Lords in heaven to come to earth and divinize incipient
humanity.(Page 127)
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