Theosophy - The Lost Light- Part -2-of -5- by Alvin Boyd Kuhn
THE LOST LIGHT- by Alvin Boyd Kuhn - Part 2 of 5
Chapter
VIII
IN
DURANCE VILE
Having
established the place of the soul’s fall or descent as our earth, the next task
is to present the teaching of ancient philosophy as to the character of the
soul’s actual experience in the dismal habitat of the animal bodies. Christian
theology makes much of the doctrine of the Incarnation, but a vast amount of
primary knowledge that would enlighten the mind with reference to this cardinal
item has been lost by the Church’s flouting of the early Gnosis. The doctrine
has been to ecclesiasticism such a baffling conundrum that it was shelved to
a place of happy security in the person of the historical Jesus. Indeed the
evidence grows stronger, as study proceeds, that the theory of a carnalized
or personalized Savior, comprehending in himself every divine attribute, became
established in early polity from the sheer fact of its serviceableness, it being
found an easy solution of many a knotty problem of exegesis to ascribe every
aspect of Godhood to the man Jesus. All divinity once safely localized in his
person, a hundred confusing questions arising from the entanglement of deity
with mortal flesh in all humanity could be summarily disposed of. Pagan philosophy
required the presence of divinity in every son of earth. But a decadent religionism
found the rationale of the situation too difficult to purvey to its ignorant
following, and the euhemerized Jesus proved an easy evasion. Was not Jesus the
only-begotten son of God? Insecure as this left the hierarchical status of every
other Christian, it was sufficient for pious zealotry. The Incarnation was condensed
in Jesus, touchingly born in the climate of tropical Egypt, and heralded by
a star which in any astronomical view whatever becomes a natural monstrosity.
All things considered it was a device of consummate utility to consign the whole
matter of the Incarnation to the distant and sacrosanct person of the Nazarene.
Beside bearing in his body the sins of the world, he has borne also in (Page
128) his frail
person the unsolved problems of a blind and errant theology! The Jesus of Christianity
was as much an intellectual necessity to a befuddled ecclesiasticism as Voltaire’s
God has been to a humanity trying to rationalize the universe. To a theology
plunged into dialectical difficulties by its rejection of esotericism, a Jesus
who "paid it all" has indeed been "a very present help in trouble." By cramming
all the essence of divinity that came to earth into the sainted confines of
Jesus’ body and life, all qualms concerning the neglected "Christ in you" could
be overborne by a wave of the hand toward the picture of the man of Galilee
on the cross.
But pagan thought
faced the implications and the data of the incarnation problem squarely. A fragment
of deity was brought and lodged within the breast of every animal form evolved
to the verge of the human kingdom. The animal race awaited the implantation
of the divine spark, as their hope of a link with the order of responsible free
agency and self-conscious intelligence. They stood at the point at which physical
evolution could take them no farther toward mentality without the endowment
of a nucleus or seed of potential mind from the plane above. They awaited the
incubation of divine intelligence in their physical forms. The agents of such
a blessing were at hand in the legions of Asuras, who had evolved the desired
element of mind in former cycles elsewhere, but yet required some rounds of
incarnate experience to complete the perfection of their divinity. After rebellion
and delay they came to fulfill their cosmic destiny. We are those "unwilling
Nirvanees," those "junior gods," those angelic hosts! By our coming and sharing
our nature with the lesser creatures, they, too, become the heirs of immortality;
for the essence of which our higher nature was nucleated is imperishable. If
the animal could append it to his being, he would be immortalized also. The
Demiurgus in charging us with the commission, assured us that we "should never
be dissolved" (Timaeus). The gist of Plato’s, as of Paul’s, writings is that
man is a being compounded of a lower perishable and a higher indestructible
vesture, the two linked by an intermediate principle which may be inclined to
a union with either, and which therefore stands at the place of the balance
in human destiny. The fleshly form was contributed by physical evolution on
earth, but it was molded upon the matrix of an emotional body of finer etheric
substance supplied by the men of the previous Moon race, (Page 129) or the Lunar
Pitris, at the end of their life period on our satellite. [Hindu, Tibetan,
Platonic and other ancient systems are at one as to the accuracy of this item,
difficult as it appears to us in our ignorance of cosmology and occult science.
]A higher race, concluding a course of incarnations upon another planet
of our system, Venus or Mercury, contributed the mental or manasic principle,
which was to control emotion and sensation. And the highest spiritual node of
being was the gift of entities embodying the soul of the sun. We can see now
why in ancient legends of the formulation of mankind, the various gods are said
to contribute each a bit of his own nature to compile the final product, as
in the Pandora myth. Manas or mind was the intermediary between emotion and
spirit. Spirit was to control mind as mind controlled emotion. With the descending
Asuras [ Known also as Gandharvas, Suryas, Kumaras, Rudras, Adityas,
Manasaputras, Agniswatha Pitris, and by some dozen or more other names. ]came
potential mind and the germ of undying spirit.
To present briefly
the archaic legend of the advent, the accounts relate that of the twelve legions
chosen to undertake the adventure in the far country, two were lost and had
to find their place again in evolution later. Of the remaining ten, one group
of five responded willingly to the order. They were therefore known as the Suras,
or "willing Nirvanees." They are the obedient elder brother of the Prodigal
Son allegory! But in their effort they did not descend to full incarnation in
animal bodies, but remained suspended, so to say, over the earthly scene in
what might be called spiritual bodies. They never reached the flesh, never became
the souls of fleshly creatures. They were obedient, but never fully executed
their commission. The remaining group of five legions, profiting by their example,
at first refused to run the risk of the same abortive effort, and were known
as the Asuras, or "unwilling ones." (Syrians and Assyrians became their earthly
counterparts in the handling of the uranograph, the ancient "u" changing always
to a "y" when Anglicized.) However, they could not avert their destiny, and
reluctantly obeying, they succeeded in linking their divine principle of intelligence
to the mortal forms of the animal-men awaiting them. "The underworld awaits
your coming" is a statement made to them in one of the prophetic books of the
Old Testament. They were the younger and wayward son in the Prodigal Son allegory!
But they did go out from home, as the elder brother did not. Therefore they
were worthy of the fatted calf and the shining robe on their return, victorious.
The elder brother, though obedient, had not earned the reward. This is the solution
of the difficult situation in the allegory, in which the sulkiness and apparent
neglect of the obedient son who had remained faithfully at home, have so (Page
130) universally
defeated the exegetical efforts of the theologians. The parable of the five
wise and five foolish virgins is likewise a glyph of this same cosmic predicament.
For one of the names of the Asuras was Kumaras, meaning "celibate young men,"
or "spiritual virgins." They are the "Innocents" of the Gospel story and the
Hamemmet Beings of the Book of the Dead. Their virginity is by virtue of the
fact that they were entities of pure spiritual nature, radiations of basic Spirit,
who had not yet had full incarnation, which was ever symbolized as a "marriage"
of spirit with flesh! They were cosmically unmarried, hence "virgin" young men.
We have here a new
intimation of profound meaning back of the feature of the "virgin birth" and
the "immaculate conception." The virginity pertained to both sides, the spiritual
as well as the material. If the matter that was to give birth to spiritual mind
was hitherto unwedded to spirit, never impregnated by spirit, so likewise were
the spiritual units who were sent to be the "Bridegroom" of New Testament dramatism
to wed these immaculate virgins of the material nature. They were yet "innocent"
of copulation with matter. They were the ones chosen to descend to earth and
wed material forms, inoculating virgin matter with the principle of immortal
mind. They were "young men" and "celibate." Beside Hamemmet Beings the Egyptians
termed them "younglings in the egg" and the "younglings of Shu," the god. And
they dramatized them as birds’ (souls’) eggs in the nest in the tree of life
in danger of being devoured by the serpent - of the lower nature! One Egyptian
name given, in addition to Apap or Apep, or Apepi, to the great Hydra serpent
that lay in wait to devour the Manes in the "bight of Amenta" was Herut or Herrut.
Evidence that is not lightly to be brushed aside in derision can be adduced
in support of the suggestion that the name Herod, foisted on this serpent character
in the myth when drama was historicized, is just a cover for the Herut reptile
that threatens the Innocents! The historical Herod, tetrarch of Galilee, was
dead at the year 4 B.C. Christian chronology has had to shift the "date" of
Christ’s "birth" to the year 4 B.C. in order to be able to include Herod in
the story. But Cyrenius (Quirinus), the "Governor in Syria" at the time of Jesus’
birth according to the Gospel account, reigned from 13 to 11 B.C. Will another
shift of seven to nine years be made to include him?
The Kumaras in the
Egyptian books exult in their escape from the (Page 131) serpent
threat with the cry: "Apap hath not found my nest. My egg has not been cracked!"
The infant Hercules in his cradle strangled the two great snakes that crept
up to devour him, and both Horus and his cat symbol stand with feet upon the
giant serpent’s neck, the cat severing its head with a knife.
Thomas Taylor, the
discerning Platonist, states that we mortal men are composed of the "fragments"
of the Titans. In Platonism generally the Titans were styled Thyrsus-bearers,
as having "led the soul into the body," or "brought ungenerated into generated
existence." Their part in implanting the seed of intelligence in man is poetically
set forth in Proclus’ Hymn to Minerva:
"Invigorated hence
by thee we find
A demiurgic
impulse in the mind."
Massey tells us that
"in the Latita-Vistara
eight heavenly beings are enumerated as the Gods or Devas. They are the Nagas,
Yakshas, Gandharvas, Asuras, Garudas, Kumaras and Mahorgas." [The Natural
Genesis, I, p. 315. ]
They are the gods
who (collectively) in Leviticus (26) say to the Israelites:
"I will ratify my
compact with you; I will pitch my tent among you and never abhor you. I will
live among you and be your God, and you shall be my people."
In this great enterprise
of leading whole and impartible natures into the realm of division and darkness
they were said to have established "the garden of the Asuras" about the South
Pole of the heavens, the Paradise of Yama, Lord of the region of death, whilst
the Suras, or unfragmented deities, are said to have dwelt in the locality of
the North Polar region, the fabled Mt. Meru, or Paradise of Indra. This opposition
of the two races of divinities, termed the War in Heaven, was the celestial
counterpart and prototypal aspect of the later struggle inaugurated between
the heavenly and the earthly elements in human nature when the Asuras descended
to assume physical vestures. It was the pattern in the heavens of the war between
the first Adam, or natural man, and the second Adam, or the man regenerated
by the infusion of a spiritual consciousness. (Page 132)
The point now to
be demonstrated beyond cavil is that the incarnation was localized in the bodies
of a race that at the beginning was animal and in the end was to be human. The
"tabernacling with men" which the deities undertook consisted in effecting the
incorporation of their subtler faculties and capacities in bodies originally
animal. The ancient apothegm of the sages--"Nature unaided fails"--must be given
due consideration in the scheme of things and accepted as one of the canons
of understanding. It seems to introduce into the system of evolution a bizarre
and unaccountable factor. It appears to thrust the causative principle of mind,
intelligence, into the order of natural unfoldment in a purely arbitrary way,
such as science can not countenance. It appears to make evolution jump over
the gap between beast and human, and suddenly presents man endowed with self-determinative
intelligence with no provision made for his having earned it in orderly development.
But the ancient wisdom does supply the link that to science is missing. It reveals
the irrationality of science’s attempt to account for the presence and growth
of a plant without permitting the assumption that its seed was first planted
in the soil. Science has been straining to explain the presence of mind in man
without knowledge of the ancient theorem that each kingdom serves as the seedbed
for the generation of life of the kingdom above it. It has been searching for
formulae of explanation in total want of the understanding that
"one long immortal
chain, whose sequence is never-ending, reaches by impact with that immediately
above and by contact with that immediately below, from the very lowest to the
very highest." [ Hargrave Jennings: The Rosicrucians.]
It is possible to
discern a replica of this same linkage of principles in the functioning of our
bodily organism, reaching from spirit at the top to flesh and bone at the bottom.
Spirit touches and influences mind, mind touches emotion, emotion modifies nerve
impulse, which affects the composition of the blood, and blood builds cell structure,
eventuating in actual flesh and bone. The spirit in the human body is like a
power current in a dynamo, motivating a dynamic impulse which reaches to the
utmost bounds of the organism. But man, like nature, is composed of a series
of structures of different tenuity, and each member of the series is a link
in the chain, bound above and below to the contiguous links. The interrelation
of the links is governed by the Law of Incubation, by which the seed germ of
life on the level (Page 133) above
is deposited in the soil of the level below, there to be hatched to new generation.
In the Egyptian Ritual (Ch. 85) the incarnating Ego says: "I am the soul, the
Creator of the god Nu, who maketh his habitation in the underworld; my place
of incubation is unseen and my egg is not cracked." And in the resurrection
scene in the Ritual the revivified Ego, figured as a dove, exclaims: "I am the
Dove; I am the Dove,"! as he rises from the realm of darkness wherein the "egg
of his future being was hatched by the divine incubator" (Ch. 86).
In the Pistis Sophia
of the Gnostics the doctrine of the incubation finds clear expression when Jesus
says:
"I found Mary, who
is called my mother, after the material body; I implanted in her the first power
which I had received from the hands of Barbelo, and I planted in her the power
which I had received from the hands of the great, the good Sabaoth" (Mead’s
Trans., Bk. I, 13).
It is of transcendent
importance to note that the Greek (Gnostic) work directly identifies Mary, the
mother of divinity, with the physical body! Let Christian theology be advised
of the long-lost truth of this matter. The mother in all ancient allegories
typifies nothing more than the physical body which in man becomes the womb or
matrix in which the radiant Christ-body of spirit is brought to birth. Is Christianity
to fall below heathenism in its inability to rise above the level of the symbols
to the discernment of the abstract truth behind them?
Proclus speaks of
the soul having fallen like seed into the realms of generation. [Quoted
by Iamblichus: The Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans and Assyrians, p. 364.
]Paul’s characterization of the nature of man as sown in corruption is a
resort again to the imagery of incubation. The "junior gods," potentially if
not yet actually divine, were sown, planted in a soil prepared by evolution
to nourish their latent fires to expansion and full function, and this was the
incarnation. The "fleshly" connotation of the word leaves no doubt as to the
full reality of the process; the ground prepared was the physical body of animal-men.
The entry of these divine seeds of life and mind into each animal form made
possible for those creatures their transition across the gap of the "missing
link" to the plane of humanhood. The link between brute beast and thinking man
is missing on earth; for it was forged by evolutionary process in another realm,
on another planet, and transferred to earth at a given critical epoch in mundane
history. As Plutarch tells us, only one fourth of man, his physical body, is
derived directly from (page 134) the
earth; the other three parts are brought here and linked to his material frame
by appropriate affinities. That this may not remain an insoluble enigma to modern
skepticism about such things, it may be said that each of these principles intermixed
in man’s constitution was the product of an evolution on its particular globe,
and that, since these globes themselves are but cells or organs in a larger
composite living stellar being, the possibility of their sustaining vital relations
or cooperative linkage in a common creative work is far from an unnatural presupposition.
Science must go several steps deeper than it has yet gone into the secret workshop
of nature before it can admit the legitimacy of such predications. Yet ancient
psycho-physics faced the problems of life with the knowledge that all living
organisms are concocted of a perishable material element and an imperishable
subjective element bound together in temporary union. When the corruptible sheath
fades away the imperishable nucleus floats free, persists and may later be embodied
in another form. Science is to be reminded that substances are the more enduring
in proportion to their tenuity, that "soul," as the Greeks affirmed, is far
more lasting than body. Hence impressions made upon it are a more ineradicable
book of life than any cemetery epitaph. Our emotional body, our mental vehicle
and our immortal spiritual vesture each brings the record of its past indelibly
imprinted upon the underlying etheric substance of its composition.
From Greek Platonism
we draw some of the most direct and dialectically essential support for the
thesis of the bodily incarnation. From Olympiodorus’ Commentary on the Phaedo
of Plato we take the following:
"It is necessary,
first of all, for the soul to place a likeness of herself in the body. This
is to ensoul the body. Secondly, it is necessary for her to sympathize with
the image, as being of like idea. For every eternal form or substance is wrought
into an identity with its interior substance, through an integrated tendency
thereto."
We are here enlightened
about the interior affinities which the two partners to the union manifest toward
each other, the bonds that draw and hold and eventually weld them together.
Another pointed assertion
comes from the Chaldean Oracles: (Page 135)
"For the Father of
Gods and men placed our intellect in soul, but soul he deposited in sluggish
body."
Perhaps we shall
find nowhere else so detailed and analytic a statement of the principles on
which life and nature regulate the metamorphoses which divine consciousness
undergoes as it descends the Jacob’s ladder from spirit heights to mortal sense
on coming into incarnation, as in a paragraph from Proclus in the quaint style
of Thomas Taylor’s rendering:
"In order likewise
that this may become manifest and also the arrangement, let us survey from on
high the descent, as Plato says, and defluxion of the wings of the soul. From
the beginning, therefore, and at first the soul, departing from this divine
union, descended into intellect, and no longer possessed real being unitedly
and in one, but apprehended and surveyed them by simple projections and, as
it were, contacts of its intellect. In the next place, departing from intellect,
and descending into reason and dianoia, it no longer apprehended real being
by simple intuitions, but syllogistically and transitively, proceeding from
one thing to another, from propositions to conclusions. Afterwards, abandoning
true reasoning and the dissolving peculiarity [analysis], it descended into
generation, and became filled with much irrationality and perturbation. It is
necessary, therefore, that it should recur to its proper principles and again
return to the place from whence it came." [The Six Books of Proclus
on the Theology of Plato, II, p. 355. ]
Nothing would so
quickly aid modern psychology to work for fruitful results in understanding
as to adopt this table of the successive "defluxions of the wings of the soul"
in Plato’s magnificent analysis. Surely the present status and modus of the
psyche’s operation are to be better envisaged if they are known to be the lowest
and most darkened activity of a spiritual intelligence that on the heights above
functioned by flashing intuition. Clearly outlined are the several steps which
the soul takes from piercing light into murky darkness as it descends into body:
first from identity with reality and direct inclusion of consciousness in it;
then the plunge downward into that form of intellect which apprehends by immediate
intuition; again the dip into the more sluggish processes of logical reasoning,
in which, the inner relations of things being lost, the mind must establish
them slowly by syllogistic process; and finally the dropping altogether from
(Page 136) rational
procedure into following the lead of sheer sense and impulse of the lower nature.
With mighty realizations we are now able to see what St. Paul meant in saying,
"Now we see through a glass darkly."
From a dissertation
on Theurgy translated by the Renaissance Platonist, Ficinus, we take the following
clear statement of the gradations in the chain of the descent:
"So that all things
are full of divine natures; terrestrial natures receiving the plenitude of such
as are celestial, but celestial of supercelestial essences; while every order
of things proceeds gradually, in a beautiful descent, from the highest to the
lowest. For whatever particulars are collected into one above the order of things,
are afterwards dilated in descending, various souls being distributed under
their various ruling divinities." [Quoted by the editor in Iamblichus’
The Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans and Assyrians, p. 345. ]
From the grand master
of divine knowledge himself, Plato (Timaeus, xliv), comes the remarkable declaration:
"The Deity (Demiurgus)
himself formed the divine; and then delivered over to his celestial offspring
(the subordinate or generated gods), the task of creating the mortal. These
subordinate deities, copying the example of their parent, and receiving from
his hands the immortal principles of the human soul, fashioned after this the
mortal body, which was consigned to the soul as a vehicle, and in which they
placed also another kind of soul, which is mortal and is the seat of violent
and fatal passions."
For sheer enlightenment
these passages are worth whole libraries of modern speculation. The lower soul
spoken of is the one which emanated from the moon race, and is, strictly speaking,
the soul of the animal, not the god-soul of the man. It is this lower soul,
called often the "elemental," the seat of the animal instincts, that the god
has come to educate, and in the same body with which it has come to dwell. When
Plato describes it as "the seat of violent and fatal passions," he is definitely
identifying our mortal tenement with the body of an animal. This conclusion
is strengthened by one of the Zoroastrian Oracles, which declares: "The wild
beasts of the earth shall inhabit thy vessel." [Article by Thomas Taylor
in Classical Journal, Vol. 16, p. 338. ]
Edward Carpenter,
in reviewing the multifarious forms of the "sacrifice" doctrine in religions,
says that "Brahma, . . . Indra, Soma, Hari and other gods, became incarnate
in animals." [Pagan and Christian Creeds, p. 132. ]And it is
not without extreme significance that we have such a statement as the following
from a scholarly authority: (Page 137)
"The sense
of an absolute psychical distinction between man and beast, so prevalent in
the civilized world, is hardly to be found among lower races." [Tylor:
Primitive Culture, I, p. 469. (Edn. 1903.) ]
Naturally so, because
the gap between man and animal there is less wide than it now is in cultured
races. The animal did not at one jump land into full manhood. He was given the
as yet ungerminated seed of divinity to nurse within the depths of his own nature.
Only a tiny segment of the god’s life was in conscious manifestation in and
through the lower mentality of the beast at the start. The god could put little
of his full power and capacity into expression through the imperfect brain of
the animal. For a long time, or until the angel’s presence in the brute body
could refine the latter’s impulses and proclivities and increase brain expansion,
the deity could only lurk in the background of consciousness, becoming what
we now so ignorantly term "the subconscious mind." There was obviously little
difference between the first humans and the nearest animals. The difference
did not assume marked proportions until ages had rolled by and the slow march
of development had enabled the god to project more and more of his innate endowment
into the sluggish nature of the beast he was tutoring. We have here, systematically
propounded for the first time, the basic criterion for evaluating the progress
of human culture. Culture is essentially nothing but the gradual modification
of crude animal impulses into the gentler motions of the higher self. Modernity
has never concisely known the cosmic or evolutionary foundations of this transaction.
These lay hidden under the rejected esotericism of Platonic and other arcane
teachings.
The Bible sets forth
the implications of the incarnation in sensationally direct form in the Book
of Daniel. Addressing the king (always a figure for the god) Daniel tells him
that he will be taken away from human beings to dwell with the wild animals;
and he condenses volumes of Platonic philosophy dealing with the obscuration
of deific intellect in the descent, into the pithy statement, repeated three
times in the first five chapters, that "you shall be given the mind of an animal"!
An animal’s mind was given unto him and his dwelling was with the wild beasts."
Also: "He ate grass like cattle, and his nails grew like the claws of a bird."
(Incidentally, here is positive proof of the non-historicity of Bible narrative,
since these things did not happen (Page 138) to
the historical King, Nebuchadnezzar!) But the Paradise lost in the incarnation
was regained in the end, for finally, "When the time was over, I, Nebuchadnezzar,
lifted up my eyes unto heaven; my reason returned unto me, and I blessed the
Lord, praising him and honoring him forever." The period of the duress in animal
habitat is given as "seven years," each cycle of incarnate life being completed
in seven ages! And all the mighty meaning of this grand allegory was missed
because Nebuchadnezzar was taken for an historical personage, instead of a figure
for the god in man.
Egypt furnishes us
with one of the most direct and indubitable bits of testimony to the animal
incarnation of the soul in one of the numberless prayers addressed to Osiris:
"Hail, Osiris Khenti-Amentiu
(Lord of Amenta)! Thou art the Lord of millions of years, the lifter-up of wild
animals, the Lord of cattle; . . ."
As Amenta is the
region in which the Osiris-soul contacts the body, the verse is of surpassing
meaning in this connection.
Massey writes in
The Natural Genesis (Vol. I, p. 71):
"A very comprehensive
designation for the divinities of all kinds, says Gill (Myths and Songs, p.
34), is the Mangaian ‘te anau tuarangi,’ the heavenly family. This ‘celestial
race includes rats, lizards, beetles, sharks and several kinds of birds. The
supposition was that the heavenly family had taken up their abode in these birds
and fishes.’"
"Plutarch refers
to the idea ‘that the Gods, being afraid of Typhon; did, as it were, hide themselves
in the bodies of ibises, dogs and hawks,’ and repudiated it as ‘foolery beyond
belief.’ This, however, is a matter of interpretation. We know that such representations
were part of the drama of the Mysteries. Many descriptions might be quoted to
show that in their religious ceremonies, the actors performed their masquerade
in the guise of animals."
We have here a sterling
clue to the lost meaning of most of the weird ritualism still carried out in
our celebration of Hallowe’en. The importance and gripping significance of this
remnant of ancient symbolic dramatism is not dreamed of today. The masks worn
were originally those of animal faces or hides. The festival, coming at the
time of the September equinox (with a forty-days’ interval), when the sun, eternal
symbol of the divine soul, was descending across the line which (Page 139) marked
the boundary between disembodied spirit and soul embodied, dramatized the entry
of the god into the animal body. "Mask" is in Latin "persona." The god was then
putting on the mask of his personality; and all the weird capers, grimaces,
horseplay and general buffoonery of the Hallowe’en revelry most piquantly prefigure
the deity’s ungainly animalish behavior when cavorting behind the outward mask
of the animal’s nature! The moon being the parent of the mortal body, lunar
symbolism was prominently introduced into the portrayal. And all this is another
strong proof that it was the primal religious ritual drama that gave rise to
social tradition and celebratory custom, and not folk-practice that gave rise
to the myth, as scholars have always so erroneously contended. [An approach
to this viewpoint is notable in a recent study of great importance by the English
scholar, Lord Raglan, in his book, The Hero (Oxford University Press). The work
presents evidence that the masks worn in olden celebrations were those of animals.
]
A patent hint of
strong esoteric significance is found in the following:
"Diodorus has it
that the gods were at one time hard pressed by the giants, and compelled to
conceal themselves for a while under the form of animals, which in consequence
became sacred." [Massey: The Natural Genesis, I, p. 74. ]
Here is straight
anthropology hidden under semi-fable. It is the true explanation of a vast amount
of tribal custom that has perplexed the learned world no end. Whole chapters
of Frazers’s Golden Bough and similar works, of which the authors have offered
no rational interpretation and believed none possible, become intelligible at
one stroke, and such a cultured people as the ancient Egyptians are exculpated
from the charge of crude animism and fetishism in "worshipping animals."
The incarnation was
incontestably the most fateful event that had ever taken place in the evolutionary
career of animal-man, giving him a status far above that of his former condition.
It was the faraway beginning of his apotheosis. It was his passport of entry
into the kingdom of mind. The folklore and Märchen of the nations carry the
story of this mighty crisis in evolution in an apparent mélange of childish
fancy, flippant caprice of invention and forms of the grossest imagery. These
seeming qualities have been the means of derailing the train of our understanding
of the hidden purport of the relics. We have but to use our imagination constructively
to see how mythography passed first into the realism of dramatic representation,
then (Page 140
) into legend
lacking the original spiritual meaning, and finally into a sadly distorted and
barren folk-tale.
"Herodotus was told
that the Neurian wizards among the Scythians, settled about the Black Sea, became
each of them a wolf for a few days once a year. The Texan tribe of the Tonkaways
did the same, when, clothed in wolf-skins, they celebrated the resurrection
of the wolf from the Hades. The head of a wolf was worn in the Mysteries of
Isis; because the wolf (Anup) was her warder and guardian during the search
for Osiris in the underworld. . . . The candidate as the Loveteau of French
Masonry still enters as a young wolf." [ Massey: The Natural Genesis,
I, p. 74.]
A Chinese remnant
relates that a maid conceived by air (the Holy Spirit!) and brought forth a
child, which the father then threw into the pig-yard! "It was the rightful heir,
who lived to become the monarch." If this seems tawdry and profane, let the
reader note the obvious resemblance to the Prodigal Son allegory and the conception
story of Mary.
The Shilluks have
a tradition that "Nyakang then created men and women out of the animals he found
in the country." The promise to mankind in the Genesis account, that the human
should be lord of the animal creation, ruler of the beasts of the field, has
obvious reference to the headship of the mental man over the body itself, which
would be assumed by the soul or god upon his entry therein, under the terms
of his covenant with Deity. His task in the incarnational assignment was to
tame, subdue, discipline and finally exalt the lower personality, which was
the depository of all animal experience in its soul,--our subconscious mind.
Passages in the Book of Enoch state that man shall dwell with the wild beasts
and shall subdue and overcome them. A verse in Ezekiel declares to the soul:
"I shall fill the wild beasts of the earth with thee." But one of the most straightforward
figurations of the incarnation in all religious literature is found in the Epistle
of Ignatius to the Romans, an apocryphal New Testament Gospel, when the soul,
speaking as one of the characters in the drama, most beautifully poetizes his
nature and mission in this remarkable utterance: "Suffer me to be food to the
wild beasts, by whom I shall attain unto God. For I am the wheat of God, and
I shall be ground between the teeth of the wild animals that I may be found
the pure bread of Christ." The crushing of wheat into flour for bread was a
(Page 141) widely
used symbol of the fragmentation of unitary deity consequent upon his descent
into bodies. The statement here that the crushing was done by the teeth of the
wild beasts is beyond cavil a positive reference to the animal embodiment. And
the added information that by such lowly incarnation the soul shall attain unto
God should restore to theology the lost conception of the importance of the
bodily life.
The Bible’s declaration
that we "shall be as sheep among wolves" is a slanting hint at the picture of
the gentle Christ spirit tenanting the bodies of the wild beasts of earth! And
the scene of Daniel, the man of God, in the lion’s den, is another suggestion
that the soul may safely reside in the animal’s body or "den," if it holds true
to its divine ideal.
An Egyptian text
addresses Thoth as "he who sendeth forth his heart to dwell in his body." Another
presents us with a definite corroboration of the incarnation thesis. It speaks
of Annu (in this case our earth) as "the land wherein souls are joined unto
their bodies even in thousands."
An Arunta legend
describes the animistic powers attributed to beings as the "ancestors who reproduce
themselves by incorporation in the life on earth in the course of becoming men
or animal."
It was the fundamental
Egyptian conception that the god, on descending to earth, became "fleshed."
The word Karas, which was used to designate the mummy, is traced to the Greek
kreas, flesh. The taking on of a carnal form was in its true connotation the
mummification of the Osiris or spirit. [A fuller elucidation of this
theme will be given at a later place when the profounder significance of mummification
is dealt with. ] An Egyptian text asserts most positively the union of
soul and body. Chapter 163 of the Ritual says: "Let his soul have its being
within his body, and let his body have its being within his soul." And another
chapter (89) is entitled "the chapter by which the soul is united to the body."
This can not mean the dead body, since obviously the soul is separated from,
not united with, the cadaver. It can mean nothing but the conjunction of the
incoming soul with the body at birth or a little later.
The amassing of so
much data in support of the Incarnation, a doctrine of theology that is still
included in ecclesiastical acceptance, may appear a labor of supererogation.
Far from it. The data presented have been assembled with the purpose of restoring
the dogma to its pivotal place of importance in the theological temple. It has
been so viciously emasculated that a mass of testimony as to its original cardinal
utility had to be adduced, if it is to be reestablished in its rugged pristine
(Page 142) meaning. Mankind works blindly at the main problem confronting it
so long as this doctrine is obscured. It was never intended to mean that the
whole of the power of the Logos was crowded into the admittedly limited area
of a single personality. It was not accepted in this light by the intelligent
Fathers of the early Church, such as Clement and Origen; for they are on record
as expressly repudiating such an eventuality. They regarded a personalized embodiment
of deity as infinitely degrading to the Logos, verily a blasphemy.
Furthermore how can
we understand Paul’s preachment of the warfare between carnal and spiritual
natures unless we are assured that soul and flesh were conjoined in intimate
and affective relationship? If theology is to rise again to benignant influence,
it must be mounted again upon its ancient bases of anthropology. If the advent,
the incarnation, the birth, the temptation, the baptism, transfiguration, crucifixion
and resurrection can not be shown to be the type of our own actual experience
in present living, the temple of theology can not be expected to be rebuilt
on a foundation of mystical sentiment alone. If the cosmological and anthropological
aspects of the original esotericism had not been disdained, theology would not
now stand in such forlorn case before a world styling itself intelligent. Thrown
down from her pedestal of ancient dignity, she lies prostrate in the courtyard
of the Church, and the busy populace hurrying by on worldly bent mocks her or
heeds her not. She has no place in the hall of science, no true home in the
human heart. Hardly even in the somber pulpit does she stand in honor. Her only
place is in the dim and darksome alcoves of the ecclesiastic’s library; and
priestly zeal essays in vain to win back for her the departed power.
On this score it
is desirable to give assent to one or two of Massey’s discerning judgments before
passing on to the corollaries of the doctrine:
"The doctrine of
the incarnation had been evolved and established in the Osirian religion at
least four thousand years, and possibly ten thousand years, before it was purloined
and perverted in Christianity." [Massey: Ancient Egypt, the Light of
the World, p. 231. ]
"The legend of the
voluntary victim who in a passion of divinest pity became incarnate and was
clothed in human form and feature for the salvation of the world, did not originate
in a belief that God had manifested once for all as an historic personage. It
has its roots in the remotest past. The same legend was repeated in many lands
with a change of name, and (Page 143) at
times of sex, for the sufferer, but none of the initiated in the esoteric wisdom
ever looked upon the Kamite [Egyptian] Iusa, or Gnostic Horus, Jesus, Tammuz,
Krishna, Buddha, Witoba, or any other of the many saviors as historic in personality,
for the simple reason that they had been more truly taught." [Massey:
Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 211. ]
The incarnation,
however, only begins the impartation of deity to the human race. It inaugurated
on the planet a chain of events, the circumstances and trend of which must now
be outlined. All of these involvements are profoundly relevant to the system
of theology.
Greek philosophy
viewed the descent and incarnation of the gods as entailing upon these exalted
beings an almost total loss of their pristine glory and felicity, and a devastating
reduction of their coefficient of consciousness. The soul became "cribbed, cabined
and confined" in the sorry limitations of the carnal body, as it lost a dimension
of consciousness at each step on the downward path. It becomes bound to the
sensual and the palpable, after having been able to range at will throughout
the limitless spaces of universal thought. It is impossible to surpass in lucidity
the language of Greek philosophy in delineating these matters. Proclus, as reported
by Iamblichus, avers that [Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans and
Assyrians, p. 355. ]
"The soul by descending
into the realms of generation, resembles a thing broken and relaxed. . . . Hence
the soul energizes partially and not according to the whole of itself . . .
the intellectual part of it is fettered . . . but the doxastic [That
part swayed by mere sense intimation and superficial impression. ]sustains
many fractures and turnings."
Proclus elucidates
Plato’s findings to the effect that
"it is impossible
while here, to lead a theoretic life in perfection, as is evident from the causes
which are enumerated in the Phaedo, viz., the occupations and molestations of
the body, which do not suffer us to energize theoretically without impediment
and disturbance." [The Six Books of Proclus on the Theology of Plato,
II, p. 475. ]
And his fellow-Platonist,
the learned Iamblichus, adds a forceful assertion of the same idea:
"For the human soul
is contained by one form and is on all sides darkened by body, which he who
denominates the River of Negligence or the Water of Oblivion, or ignorance and
delirium, or a bond through passions, will not by such appellations sufficiently
express its turpitude. How therefore is it possible that the soul which is detained
by so many evils can ever become sufficient to an energy of this kind?"
[ Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans and Assyrians, p. 179. ](Page
144) Empedocles,
evidently drawing his philosophical ideas from Orphic Mystery cultism, has a
poem, a fragment of which speaks of the "joyless region" in which the souls
on earth
"Through Ate’s meads
and dreadful darkness stray."
The soul descends
from the realms of light to the region of gloom:
"She flies from deity
and heavenly light
To serve mad Discord
in the realms of night."
A dialectical echo
of Plato’s Cave Myth is heard seven centuries after the Republic was written,
in the language of the great Plotinus, mystic Neo-Platonist of the third century.
Dealing with the fable of Narcissus and elucidating its hidden purport, he says:
"Hence, as Narcissus,
by catching at the shadow, plunged in the stream and disappeared, so he who
is captivated by beautiful bodies, and does not depart from their embrace, is
precipitated, not with the body, but with his soul, into a darkness profound
and repugnant to intellect, through which, remaining blind both here and in
Hades, he associates with shadows." [The Enneads, I, Bk. VI. ]
In the Phaedrus Plato,
in the beautiful allegory of the Chariot and the Winged Steeds, portrays the
soul as being dragged down by the lower elements in man’s nature and subjected
to a slavery incident to corporeal embodiment. Out of these conditions he traces
the rise of numerous evils that disorder the mind and becloud the reason. Indeed
he shows with convincing dialectic that evil is just this breaking up of the
vision of whole natures into distracted particulars where the interconnection
of part with part is lost sight of. Evil is seen to be due to the condition
of partiality and multiformity inseparable from the incarnate state, "into which
we have fallen by our own fault." The rational element, formerly in full function,
now falls asleep. Life is thereupon more generally swayed by the inclinations
of the sensual part. Man becomes the slave of sense, the sport of phantoms and
illusions. This is the realm in which Plato’s noesis, or godlike intellect,
ceases to operate for our guidance and we are dominated by doxa, or "opinion."
[Rather the impulse of sense uncensored by critical thought. ]
This state of mental dimness is the true "subterranean cave" of the Platonic
myth, in which we see only shadows, mistaking them for reality.
Thomas Taylor’s clear
language enforces these ideas for our benefit: (Page 145)
"Such
indeed is the wretched situation of the soul when profoundly merged in a corporeal
nature. She not only becomes captive and fettered, but loses all her original
splendor; she is defiled with the impurity of matter; and the sharpness of her
rational sight is blunted and dimmed through the thick darkness of a material
night." [ Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, p. 103. ]
Proclus, an expounder
of Plato rated nearly equal with his great inspirer, writes:
"when it [the soul]
energizes according to nature, it is superior to the influence of Fate, but
when it falls into sense and becomes irrational and corporeal, it follows the
natures that are beneath it, and living with them as with intoxicated neighbors,
is held in subjection by a cause that has dominion over things that are different
from the rational essence." [The Six Books of Proclus on the Theology
of Plato, II, p. 476. ]
Indeed we have here
the Greek philosophical root of one of the pivotal phases of Pauline doctrine.
It was the descent and mooring of the soul "to the ruinous bonds of the body"
that brought the spirit of man under the dominion of what Paul calls "the law"--of
Fate, Karma and Necessity. This, too, was "the bondage in Egypt" of the Old
Testament. On her own high plane the soul was in a state of liberty, "the glorious
liberty of the sons of God." Only by her incarceration in a vessel whose constitutional
functions were under the laws of physics and chemistry was she subjected to
the rule of matter. The Greek philosophers declared that her release from this
bondage was to be won only through the discipline of "philosophy." It taught
the earnest man to abjure the motions of the flesh and to rise to the delight
and freedom of the noetic consciousness. Paul couched the process in the language
of religion, and called it spirituality or "grace."
"The dark night of
the soul," no less than the Götterdämmerung, was, in the ancient mind, just
the condition of the soul’s embodiment in physical forms. Taylor reasons that
Minerva (the rational faculty, as Goddess of Wisdom) was by her attachment to
body given wholly "to the dangerous employment and abandons the proper characteristics
of her nature for the destructive revels of desire." All this is the dialectic
statement of the main theme of ancient theology - the incarnation of the godlike
intellect and divine soul in the darksome conditions of animal bodies.
The modern student
must adjust his mind to the olden conception-- (Page 146) renewed again by Spinoza
- of all life as subsisting in one or another modification of one primordial
essence, called by the Hindus Mulaprakriti. This basic substance was held to
make a transit from its most rarefied form to the grossest state of material
objectivity and back again, in ceaseless round. Darkness was the only fit symbol
to give to the mind any suggestive realization of the conditions of living intellectual
energy when reduced in potential under the inertia of matter.
So severely curtailed
were the soul’s powers in bodily life that it was denominated her incarceration.
The soul was a captive, caught in a prison, the doors of which were clamped
fast upon it. Its jailer was the body with its sensuous nature. And like Paul
in prison at Philippi, the soul would have to convert her jailer and transform
his nature to the likeness of her own, to gain her release.
The implications
of this cardinal item for ethics, pietism and spirituality are of the highest
moment. For all such philosophies as Buddhism, Christian Science and Spiritualism
(of certain forms), which seek escape from the rigors of incarnation by a sheer
fiat of philosophical thought, and look to a disembodied state for immediate
bliss, this principle is very directly an antidote and corrective. It points
clearly to the false premises of all philosophies of "escape." We can not escape
our obligation to the animal who is lending us his body for our own advancement.
We came hither to transfigure these brute bodies, and such a miracle demands
the exercise of the highest philosophical virtues and the fixed habits of theoretic
contemplation of the beautiful and the good. Job asks if the days of man on
earth "are not the days of an hireling," and declares that he has "found a ransom."
The Greeks believed
"that human souls were confined in the body as in a prison, a condition which
they denominated generation; from which Dionysus would liberate them." Their
sufferings, their progress through the ascending stages of being, their catharsis
or purification, and their enlightenment constituted the theme of the Orphic
writers and the groundwork of the mystical rites.
We have Proclus declaring
that Plato in the Phaedo
"venerates with a
becoming silence the assertion delivered in the arcane discourses, that men
are placed in the body as in a prison, secured by a guard, and testifies, according
to the mystic ceremonies, the different allotments of purified and unpurified
souls in Hades." [In Alexander Wilder’s Introduction to the Eleusinian
and Bacchic Mysteries, of Thomas Taylor, p. vxiii. ](Page 147) Here
is evidence that the Mystery Plays were dramatic representations of our earthly
imprisonment, with all that was corollary to it.
Of our condition
of bondage Plato speaks in the following manner: ". . . liberated from this
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound
like an oyster in its shell." It is Plato who states that the function of philosophy
is to "disenthrall the soul from the bondage of sense." We are "captives chained
to sense."
It seems never to
have occurred to modern classical students that the many descriptions scattered
through the Aeneid of Virgil, of shadowy groves, vales and caves, are allegoric
of the gloomy conditions the soul encounters in her residence in bodies. The
woods whose bristling shades terrify the hero (the soul) are the dismal murks
of physical incarceration. Physical imagery must be translated over into spiritual
or psychic realities. For of such matters only were the early sages discoursing.
Speaking of the removal of the junior deities from heaven to earth, the poet
writes in the Aeneid: "Nor do they, thus enclosed in darkness and the gloomy
prison, behold the heavenly air."
One of the Egyptian
texts says that it is impossible for the shade (soul) to leave the body on earth
until the latter is raised up. After the telestic or perfecting work is finished,
it is shown (Rit., Ch. 91) that the soul "does not [any longer] suffer imprisonment
at any door in Amenta," this lower earth, "either in coming in or going out."
David echoes the
Egyptian idea when in the cave (Ps. 142) he cries to the Lord: "Bring my soul
out of prison." In the great Kamite religion Horus, exactly as the Christian
Jesus, comes to "the spirits in prison" to set them free from bondage and darkness
and lead them to the land of light. The Manes, or soul in the body, cries to
the keepers: "Imprison not my soul, keep not in custody my shade. Let the path
be open to my soul. Let it not be made captive by those who imprison the shades
of the dead. O keep not captive my soul, O keep not ward over my shadow" (Rit.,
Ch. 92). Says Massey:
"Horus is the Kamite
prototype of the chosen one, called the servant by Isaiah, who came ‘for a light
to the Gentiles, [Be it noted, the use of the term "Gentiles" here bears
out the interpretation (as the not fully humanized animal souls) given in a
former place. ] to open blind eyes, to bring out prisoners from the dungeons,
and them that sit in darkness out of the prison-house.’" (Isaiah 42:7.) [Ancient
Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 479. ]
An allied appellation
of the "spirits in prison" is "those who are in their cells." Horus comes to
wake "those who sleep in their cells." (Page 148)
Again
the Manes in the prison of Osiris cries" "Let not the Osiris enter into the
dungeon of the captives." "Let not Osiris advance into the valley of darkness."
Osiris says to the warders of the prisons" "May I not sit within your dungeons,
may I not fall into your pits." (Ch. 17.) Osiris elsewhere asks to be delivered
from "this land of bondage." Sut, the personified evil one as opponent of the
deliverer Horus, is called "the keeper of the prison-house for death," to which
Horus comes as the lord of life and freedom. Horus, as deliverer, is said to
come "to those who are in their prison cells," held captive by Sut. An interesting
sidelight is thrown on one aspect of the function of the Goddess Hathor, who
was the "habitation of the hawk, or the birdcage of the soul"! Hathor was the
goddess of material creation, to which the body belonged, and the hawk represented
the soul. The soul is caged in the body. The latter is even called "the chamber
of torture" in the title to Ch. 85 of the Ritual. In Ch. 164 it is promised
that the soul "shall not be shut in along with the souls that are fettered,"
and the prayer is uttered: "Let him escape from the evil chamber and let him
not be imprisoned therein." The title of Ch. 91 of the Ritual is: "The chapter
of not letting the soul of Nu . . . be captive in the underworld." In Ch. 130
there is a prayer: "Let not the Osiris-Nu fall headlong among those who would
lead him captive."
In the Egyptian fable
of the lion and the mouse, the mouse, a symbol of the quick energic life that
descends into the underground and lives in subterranean darkness, comes like
Jesus and Horus to gnaw the bonds of the great lion, here seemingly standing
for the animal soul in the toils of flesh and matter.
In the Egypto-Gnostic
text, the Pistis Sophia, there were twelve dungeons of infernal torment, in
which the twelve legions of angels were imprisoned. The souls could only escape
by pronouncing the name of the god who guarded each dungeon door. To pronounce
a god’s name was to become equal to him in nature.
In the Bible Exodus
recounts that the children of Israel, who are figured as these twelve legions
of devas "chosen" for the specific work of incarnation, "were groaning under
their bondage, and the wail of their cries for help came up to God." The land
to which they had been sent to work their redemptive errand in bondage to the
flesh was "Egypt, that slave pen." In Leviticus (16) he admonishes them: "Remember,
you were once a slave in Egypt." (Page 149)
A passage
from the Logia, or recovered "sayings of the Lord," declares that "whosoever
followeth the Beast, into captivity he goeth; for the Beast maketh captive all
who so will to follow him."
Beside Plato’s immortal
allegory, there are many uses of the cave as emblem of the dark chambers of
the body. David’s pleading in the cave to be delivered from his prison is paralleled
by Osiris’ crying for deliverance in the cavern of Sut in Amenta.
Thomas Taylor expressly
says that the cavern was used to "signify union with the terrestrial body."
In the fables of
the Hercules cycle the hero (the soul, as always) tracks the Nemean lion into
a cave where its capture is effected. As it was in the body that the divine
nature in man was to "capture" or embrace the animal soul to lift it up, the
cave symbolism for the body is again indicated.
In the Egyptian Ritual
(Ch. 28) the soul affirms: "This whole heart of mine is laid upon the tablets
of Tum, who guideth me to the caverns of Sut," or through the dark passages
of Amenta. The tablets of Tum are records of the law, or Maat. They are kept
by Taht, the divine scribe, in the Hall of Judgment. Thus to come under the
law (St. Paul) brings the deity to the caverns of Sut, the physical body. Of
Horus it is written again that he comes to awaken the "prisoners in their cells,
the sleepers in their caves."
As ancient burial
places were frequently caves in the hillside, we shall have little difficulty
in tracing the symbolic meaning of the cave in both the birth and the resurrection
scenes, not less than in the raising of Lazarus at Bethany, in Palestine, and
of El-Asar(us) at Beth-Anu in Egypt.
Another direct employment
of the cave emblem in Egyptian scripture is in Ch. 182 of the Ritual: "Taht
says: ‘I gave Ra to enter the mysterious cave in order that he may revive the
heart of him whose heart is motionless.’" As Ra is always the divinest spirit,
there is again a clear allusion to the god descending into the cave of the body.
In the Egyptian Bethany scene the "dead" soul is called aloud nine times to
come forth from "the mysterious cave." Massey traces the word "cave" to the
Egyptian Kep, which he says means a secret dwelling. It is obvious that, whether
this etymology stand the scrutiny of linguistic scholarship or not, the mythologists
of old did at any rate conceive the body to be that mysterious hidden dwelling,
that shadowy cavern into (Page 150) which
the legionaries of heaven were obliged to plunge for added physical experience.
With this point established beyond cavil, one of the great stones in the arch
of ancient interpretation will have been put in place and one of the supports
of the structure of a correct theology will have been set up.
From the idea of
a cave it was but a short step to that of a pit. In Job a remarkable verse adduces
the theory that in sleep, when the lower mind is in abeyance, the inner soul,
the god, speaks to Job and admonishes him as to the fluctuating issue of his
battle with the flesh: "He keepeth back his soul from the pit." "The Lord is
gracious unto him and saith, deliver him from going down into the pit." [Given
in verse in The Book of Job as a Greek Tragedy, Horace M. Kallen, p. 165 ff.
]
In the Biblical account
of the rebellion of the sons of Korah, already noticed, it is said that they
went down into the pit in death, but lived on, as did the Manes in the Egyptian
Amenta. As the earth opened to swallow these rebels (ourselves), the pit is
equated with our mundane home. In the Hebrew writings the pit is identical with
the region known as Sheol, equivalent to the Greek Hades and the Egyptian Amenta.
Horus is cast into the mire of the pit.
Jonah, upon being
saved from the sea-monster, exclaims: "Yet Thou hast brought up my life from
the pit, O Lord, my God." Ezekiel contributes a reference both to the pit and
to Egypt in a passage which appears to be beyond question a replica of the myth
of Joseph in Egypt. The prophet says (19:1-5):
As "a lioness she
couched among the lions and she brought up one of her whelps; he became a young
lion"--Jesus as lion of the house of Judah - "nations also heard of him; he
was taken in their pit, and they brought him with hooks into the land of Egypt."
On this portion of
Bible text Massey comments as follows:
"The descent of the
sun-god into the lower Egypt of Amenta is portrayed in the Marchen as the casting
of Joseph into the pit, and the ascent therefrom in his glory by the coat of
many colors," adding: "in an exodus from Egypt which can no longer be considered
historical." [ Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 508.]
In the Book of Hades
(10th division) there is a scene "of making fast the dragon in the pit," which
is preparatory to the rising of Ra, or the birth of the divine in and from the
human.
In Revelation (20:2,
3) the seer visioned an angel coming down out (Page 151) of
heaven, having the keys of the abyss, or pit, and a great chain in his hand,
with which he bound the dragon, the devil or Satan, for a thousand years, and
sealed him fast in the pit. Horus makes war on the powers of evil for what they
have done to his father Osiris, and calls to the gods to strike them and "punish
them in your pits." To them he says: "Your particular duties in Amenta are to
keep the pits of fire in accordance with Ra’s command, which I made known to
you."
Let the reader estimate
how far theology has departed from understanding that these "evil spirits" that
were cast down and bound for a thousand years, or a long series of incarnations,
were the angels of light, denominated Satan because of their rebellious and
recalcitrant behavior under the hard decrees of incorporation in beastly bodies,
and that these fiery pits are none other than our very physical bodies. Is not
Satan equated with Lucifer, and is he not the Promethean Light-Bringer?
In Budge’s account
of the functions of the ba-soul in Egyptian spiritism, he states that in the
Papyrus of Nebqet the ba is seen, depicted as a human-headed hawk, flying down
the funeral pit, bearing air and food to the mutilated body lying in the mummy-chamber.
Here is additional confirmation that the pit designates the human body. Another
Egyptian text, the Book of Am-Tuat (Division 20) describes the mutilation of
the gods and their being cast down into pits of fire. Revelation tells of the
horsemen, ten thousand times ten thousand, going forth to battle with those
forms which had come up out of the smoke that ascended from the pit of the abyss,
emitting fire. These may be taken as the forms of evil generated in the struggle
between the gods and the animals whose natures are long in combat with each
other.
Massey links the
Egyptian Tepht, the abyss, with our "depth." He equates it also with Tevthe,
and that with the Babylonian Tiamat, as well as the old Egyptian underworld
monster, Typhon, the Dragon of the Deep. As such it figured the original birthplace
of creation, and in a more human application it meant the human body as the
seat or birthplace of the spiritual life. For the body is composed of matter,
the infinite abysmal mother of all things. Typhon, who brought forth her brood
of chaos in the abyss, later brings forth the young Sun-god, the divine immortal
soul. The figure in this connection is common, we are (Page 152) told,
in Akkad, China, Egypt and inner Africa. It is but a step in etymology from
Tepht to the Hebrew Tophet, the dark pit.
There were said to
be "seven sons of the Abyss," [Incarnation Records, Vol. II. p. 131.
] or the seven powers generated in nature, to be matched later by seven
phases of growth in the human constitution - the ubiquitous seven in archaic
literature.
The universal religious
myth of the descent of the solar hero, ever typical of deity, into some dark
abysmal region, emerging from it after ordeals of suffering, can have but one
explanation: the incarnation of the hosts of light in the dense physical body.
Another earthly figure
much used to type the dreary existence in the flesh was that of the "wilderness."
A variation of it was the "desert." The people in the Typhonian darkness of
Amenta were furnished a guide "through this wilderness." The Quiché Popul Vuh
portrays the ancestors of the race as wanderers in a wilderness upon their way
to their final homestead. A Hawaiian legend has it that the progenitors "wandered
in a desert wilderness until at last they reached the promised land of Kane"--Canaan!
Numbers (14:33,
34) reads: "Your children shall be wanderers in this wilderness even forty days,
for every day a year." The same book supplies another highly elucidative text
(14:31, 32) which says: "Your little ones will I bring in, but as for you, your
carcasses shall fall in this wilderness." The spiritual meaning here adumbrated
is that the earthly or carnal nature in which the gods took residence would
be conquered and disintegrated, or die, as the substance of the old seed dies
in the ground in generating its offspring, while only the newborn god, the "little
ones," the resurrected sons of dying fatherhood, would achieve the spiritual
homeland of Canaan.
Elsewhere the term
"desert in the Amenta of Egypt" is used to name the locality of bodily life.
The people there are said to "dwell in darkness and black night."
The wanderings of
the Biblical Israelites are a symbolic graph of this spiritual and racial experience,
and have no other meaning, historical or literal, whatever. Hagar’s fleeing
into the wilderness under the compulsion of her situation, is but another similar
picture of the same truth.
The hiding of the
various Sons of God in a mysterious cave or secret earth of Amenta is but the
mundane segment of a drama, the full (Page 153) action
of which is involved in the grand play of forces and sweep of relations in higher
spheres, as to the complete outline and significance of which we have not been
fully informed by the archaic writers. Earth, it is clear, is but an appanage
of heaven, and our history here is without full meaning when detached from its
celestial base. The old books of Greece, Egypt, Chaldea, Persia, India are priceless
for what they give us of this material.
It has been impossible
in these excerpts entirely to avoid anticipation of the next symbol of earthly
life, darkness. The body was pictured as the abode of night and gloomy shadows.
We have noticed Plotinus’
statement that in her descent the "soul was precipitated into a darkness profound
and repugnant to the intellect," which was obscured by it. The body is "night’s
dark region" and the soul’s "sojourn on earth is thus a dark imprisonment in
the body."
One of the riddles
of Greek mythology - why so intelligent a people as the Greeks symbolized deity
as Bacchus, the god of intoxication - is solved by the keys here presented.
Intoxication was used to image the befuddlement and mental darkness, the scattering
of the god’s high intellectual powers in mundane life. Says Thomas Taylor:
"For Bacchus is the
evident symbol of the imperfect energies of intellect, and its scattering into
the obscure and lamentable dominions of sense." [ Eleusinian and Bacchic
Mysteries, p. 104. ]
And Revelation declares
that even the Saints (the gods) have been made drunken with the power of the
lower contacts. Soul had been intoxicated with the wine of sense.
The body is thought
of as actually seizing souls. The Speaker in the Ritual cries to Ra:
"O deliver me from
the god who seizes souls. The darkness in which Sekari dwells is terrifying
to the weak." [Sekari, the god suffering diminution as he passed through
incarnation. ]
In this darkness
Osiris suffers, supplicating Ra for light. Ajax cries for light. Horus in his
resurrection rises "from the house of darkness." Sut (Satan), the twin of Horus,
is portrayed imprisoning his brother the soul of light, in the realm of darkness.
He is called "the power of darkness." A dozen sections of the Pyramid Texts
and the Records of the Past describe the journey of the soul through a "valley
of darkness." The place to which the soul in the Egyptian scripts was (Page
154) conducted
was termed "An-ar-ef, the house of obscurity, the city of dreadful night." The
mole or shrewmouse was the animal symbol used by them to depict the god groping
his earthly way in an underworld region of darkness. Horus, coming as deliverer,
says: "I have sung praises unto those that dwell in darkness." The chapter in
which this occurs is entitled "the chapter of making the transformation into
the god who giveth light in the darkness." He comes to set prisoners free, and
also, it is said, "to dissipate darkness." Incarnation being necessary for the
higher birth of the soul, an Egyptian text reads: "The soul is brought forth
through the embrace of the Lord of Darkness. He is Babi, the Lord of Darkness."
In Ch. 175 "saith Osiris, the scribe Ani: Hail, Tmu! What manner (of land) is
this into which I have come? . . . it is black as blackest night, and men wander
helplessly therein. In it a man may not live in quietness of heart, nor may
the longings of love be satisfied therein."
The very name of
the great Egyptian script, the Book of the Dead, hints at the realm of darkness
from which the soul emerges in its resurrection; for the title, translated,
means "The Coming Forth by Day,"--or into the daylight, ostensibly from some
region of darkness.
Our Hebrew and Christian
scriptures provide a multitude of fitting texts which might be used to enlarge
vastly this résumé of the old material that points to the earthly body of man
as the theological world of darkness. Notably there is that in Matthew (4:16)
which recites:
"The people which
sat in darkness saw a great light; and to them that sat in the shadow . . .
did the light spring up."
And is it not the
universal prayer of Christendom each Sabbath that the deific power should "enlighten
our darkness"? (Page 155)
Chapter
IX
ALIVE
IN DEATH
Such then was the
archaic view of the origin of the soul from on high, its fall into the darkness
and distractions of the body and its consequent submergence in carnal sense.
And, drastic as is seen to be the necessary rehabilitation of all scripture
on the basis of this revised understanding, it will be far overshadowed in theological
importance by a still more radical reconstruction arising from the ancient use
of the figure under which life in the body was mythically represented. For everywhere
throughout antiquity earthly life was depicted as our death! It is of little
avail that the portraiture be uproariously protested as not befitting such a
condition of vivid life as is ours in the body. We may indignantly cast back
upon ancient heads the obloquy of such an inappropriate metaphor. But our repudiation
of their choice of figure falls entirely wide of the mark as affecting the meaning
of ancient texts. The fact stands that they did call our life here death, and
that when they spoke of "the dead" in sacred books, it is indubitable that they
meant the living humans. The words "death" and "the dead" are used in the old
scriptures to refer to living humanity in earthly embodiment. We scurrying mortals
are "the dead" of the Bible and other sacred books, and the "death" spoken of
there is our living existence here. We may reject the aptness of their symbolism,
but it is past our prerogative to read a meaning into their books other than
the one they intended; or to read out of them a meaning they consistently deposited
therein. The astonishing point, of revolutionary significance for all religion,
will receive textual treatment in the present chapter, and a later one will
further vindicate the correctness of the thesis. It is perhaps the cardinal
item of the whole theological corpus, the real "lost key" to a correct reading
of subterranean meaning in esoteric literature. In ancient theology "death"
means our life on earth.
Be the figure apt
or be it considered unthinkable - as it will be at (Page 156) first by many
- the texts of scripture will yield their cryptic meaning on no other terms.
And the Bible is a sealed book mostly because these two words, "death" and "the
dead," have not been read as covers of a far profounder sense than the superficial
one.
To be sure, it is
death in a sense to be understood as dramatic and relative only. And it pertains
to the soul in man, not to the body. Life and death are ever as the two end
seats on a "seesaw." As the one end goes to death the other rises to life. The
death of the body releases the soul to a higher life; conversely, the "death"
of the soul as it sinks in body opens the day of life to that body. The theological
death of the soul in incarnation is a death that does not kill it in any final
sense. It is a death from which it rises again at the cycle’s end into a grander
rebirth. It is a death that ends in resurrection. And sixteen centuries of inane
misconception of the resplendent glory of the greatest of all doctrines, the
resurrection from the dead, will be resolved at long last into the bursting
light of its true meaning when the dust of ignorance is brushed away.
For animal man the
advent of the gods was propitious; indeed it was the very antithesis of death.
The plunge into carnality that brought "death and all our woe" to the soul,
brought life to the lower man. That was part of its purpose. The gods came to
"die" that we mortals might "live." They came that both they and we might have
life more abundantly, but at what cost to themselves- a long "walk through the
valley of the shadow of death." Theirs was the death on the cross of flesh and
matter.
The use of the term
"death" must be in any case a comparative one, for there strictly is no death,
in the form of total extinction of being, for any part of real being. All death,
so called, is but a transition from state to state, a change of form, of that
which is and can not cease to be. Life and death are eternally locked in each
other’s arms, for as Thales says, "Air lives the death of water; fire lives
the death of air," and so on. So body lives the death of the soul, and soul
lives the death of the body. It thrives by virtue of that death. The germ and
young shoot of any seed live the death of the body of the seed. The law of incubation
brings high deities into their Hades, into Pluto’s dark kingdom. For the gods
the cycle of incarnations was the descent into hell - their crucifixion, death
and burial, in all archaic literature!
The material demonstrating
this proposition must be of sufficient (Page 157) volume
to obviate all doubt as to its validity. Upon its successful vindication hinges
the final determination of meaning for hundreds of passages, and the ultimate
interpretation of the main theses of all theologies. As will be shown later,
it carries with it the purport of the resurrection doctrine, the cornerstone
of religions. When we come to that climactic doctrine, it will be possible to
locate with exactness what and where that tomb was whose gates and bars were
rent asunder by the resurgent Lord. Modern theology little dreams, to this day,
the truth back of its own mishandled, but still grandiose, symbols.
The incarnation,
for the soul, was its death and burial. But it was a living death and a burial
alive. It was an entombment that carried life on, but under conditions that
could be poetically dramatized as "death." Our inability to comprehend any but
a physical sense of the word "burial" has left us easy victims of ancient poetic
fancy, and led to the foisting upon ourselves perhaps the most degraded interpretation
of the crucifixion, death and resurrection of deity in mortal life ever to be
held by any religious group. Not even woodland tribes have so wretchedly missed
the true sense of the great doctrines. Literalism in this instance has debased
the human mind more atrociously than fetishism or totemism.
The textual testimony
supporting the thesis is so voluminous that practical considerations forbid
its full amassing. Nothing less, however, than the serried marshaling of much
material will avail to carry conviction to minds unalterably set to opposing
views.
Proclus advises us
that the incarnating Egos were forewarned that their venture into flesh would
be successful on condition that they achieved it "without merging themselves
with the darkness of body." They were to make a magnetic connection with the
animal body by means of a linkage of their currents of higher life with the
forces playing through the nervous system of the animal. They were thus to be
in position to pour down streams of vital power into the body, but were not
to sink their total quantum of divine intellection into the sense life of the
beast. They were to hover over the physical life of the body, touch it with
divine flame, but not be drawn down into it. To fall into this dereliction would
be to sin, to lose a measure of their vivific life and eventually to die. For
there were always two deaths spoken of in the books of the past. It was death,
in the first place, for them to come under the heavy depression of fleshly existence.
This was the first (Page 158) death.
But to sink farther down and be lost in the murks of animal sensualism to a
degree that made a return to their heavenly state next to impossible, was to
suffer the "second death," of which the soul ever stood in fear and terror in
the old texts. The first death was the incarnation; the second was failure to
rise and "return unto the Father."
As Apuleius says,
the soul, then, approached the "confines of death." And on her approach, and
at the moment of her divulsion from her seat on high, there ensued an intermediate
or preparatory stage, a partial loss of consciousness termed by the writers
a "swoon." Corroboration of this experience is found in a very old document
known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead (44):
"In the Bardo Thödol
the deceased [Mistaken for the defunct human, but really the descending
god. ] is represented as retrograding step by step into the lower and
lower states of consciousness. Each step downward is preceded by a swooning
into unconsciousness; and possibly that which constitutes his mentality on the
lower levels of the Bardo is some mental element or compound of mental elements
. . . separated during the swooning from higher and more spiritually enlightened
elements. . . ."
This swooning on
the downward path to earthly death is likened to a falling asleep. Jesus’ assertion
that Lazarus was not dead but only sleeping, and needed only to be awakened,
is a picturing of the same condition. Incidentally the same thing is said of
the earthbound Osiris in Egypt. "That is Osiris, who is not dead but sleeping
in Annu, the place of his repose, awaiting the call that bids him come forth
to day." Massey comments:
"Osiris in Annu,
like Lazarus in Bethany, was not dead but sleeping. In the text of Har-Hetep
(Rit., Ch. 99), the Speaker, who personates Horus, is he who comes to awaken
Asar (Osiris) out of his sleep. Also in one of the earlier funeral texts it
is said of the sleeping Asar: ‘The Great One waketh, the Great One riseth .
. .’ The Manes in Amenta were not looked upon as dead, but sleeping, breathless
of body, motionless of heart. Hence Horus comes to awaken the sleepers in their
coffins." [Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 846. ]
Horus says (Rit.,
Ch. 64): "I go to give movement to the Manes; I go to comfort him who is in
a swoon,"--showing the perfect matching of Egyptian and Tibetan "necrological
science.
The swoon attending
each further step matterward deepens by degrees until it amounts to the full
"sleep" or "dream" of (Page 159) mortal existence,
introduced by the incubus of body upon spirits of light. It is the Oriental
Maya. The vivid awareness of existence which we feel so indubitably is to the
ancient sages only a dull slumber and stupor in comparison with that life of
ecstatic realism from which we were divulsed by the decree of our Fate.
Thomas Taylor expounds
Greek Platonism as holding that the soul "in the present life might be said
to die, as far as it is possible for a soul to die." He asserts directly that
the soul, until purified by "philosophy," "suffers death through this union
with the body."
We have the whole
idea most tersely expressed in the Gorgias of Plato:
"But indeed, as you
say also, life is a grievous thing. For I should not wonder if Euripides spoke
the truth when he says: ‘Who knows whether to live is not to die, and to die
is not to live?’ And we perhaps are in reality dead. For I have heard from one
of the wise that we are now dead; and that the body is our sepulchre; but that
the part of the soul in which the desires are contained is of such a nature
that it can be persuaded and hurled upward and downwards."
If incarnate life
is the burden of this death, then release from it must presuppose a liberation
from the thralling "dead weight." Our work aims to correct the misconceptions
that have vitiated previous studies in eschatology. Reputed savants in the field
give no evidence of having the remotest apprehension of textual meanings pertaining
to this phase of theology. Even Massey and Taylor have fallen just short of
that final step in comprehension which would have taken them into the temple
of truth, the threshold of which they never quite crossed. They knew that the
ancients styled this life "death," but they were unable, apparently, to apply
the connotations to the Bible and theology. The obsessions of current thought
were too strong for them, and overrode the logic of their own premises.
The great Plotinus
(Enneads I, lviii) gives us a clear presentment of the Greek conception:
"When the soul had
descended into generation (from this first divine condition) she partakes of
evil and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity
and integrity, to be entirely merged in it . . . and death to her is, while
baptized or immersed in the present body, (Page 160) to descend
into matter and be wholly subjected to it. . . . This is what is meant by the
falling asleep in Hades, of those who have come there."
It is worth noting
that he uses the word "baptized" to describe incarnation. To incarnate was to
be plunged into the watery condition of the body! This is the whole of the meaning
of the baptism in ancient theology!
To the above may
be added a supplement from Pythagoras, according to Clement, "that whatever
we see when awake is death; and when asleep a dream."
It is sometimes true
that archaic usage of the word "death" makes it cover the period following the
occurrence of death in its common meaning, the demise of the body. Incarnation
was regarded as a continuing experience, the periodical rhythm of release from
the body no more breaking the sequence of lives than does our nightly sleep
break the continuity of the experience of the days. But as our waking days are
the important parts of our earthly activity, the nights being but interludes
of repose and renewals of strength, so the positive incarnate periods of our
larger lives are the primarily significant phases of our mundane history. The
ancient seers both knew more about the subjective experiences of the soul when
out of the body and were less concerned with them than modern Spiritualists.
They regarded the phenomena of discarnate manifestation as but the more or less
automatic reaction of the soul to the sum of its impressions in its last incarnation,
a kind of reflex, threshing over the events of the life just closed. They would
have regarded it as preposterous to use the vaporings of the spirits for the
tenets of a religion. They were but the products of a mental automatism set
up by the engrossments of the last life. The post mortem existence of the soul
was only the hidden side of the life on earth, and regarded as comparatively
inconsequential to the larger processes of conscious living. Theologically,
"death" was the bodily life on earth, but comprising its two aspects of sleeping
and waking, living and dying, in its comprehensive unity. Activity in the body
during the waking phase of the "death" was alone determinative of destiny. By
unfortunate diversion of the original cryptic sense, the unimportant portion
of the experience, the interlude between lives, became the locale to which practically
all religious values were shunted when esoteric knowledge was lost. The meaning
of all religion has in consequence (Page 161) fled
from earth, where it properly belongs and where alone its true value is realized,
to heaven, where present focusing of meaning has little utility for man.
Taylor quotes the
priests as testifying "that the soul is buried in body as in a sepulchre."
[Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, p. 7. ]Alexander Wilder, in
a note to Taylor’s Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries (p. 31), comments:
"Hades . . . supposed
by classical students to be the region or estate of departed souls, . . . is
regarded by Mr. Taylor and other Platonists as the human body, which they consider
to be the grave and place of punishment for the soul."
Virgil adds significant
testimony. In the Aeneid, writing of that "interior spirit" which sustains the
heavens and earth, men and beasts, "the vital souls of birds and the brutes,"
he continues:
"In whom all is a
potency . . . and a celestial origin as the rudimentary principles, so far as
they are not clogged by noxious bodies. They are deadened by earthly forms and
members subject to death; hence they fear and desire, grieve and rejoice."
Plato’s able expounder
Proclus, writing that the soul brings life to the body, says that
"she becomes herself
situated in darkness; and by giving life to the body, destroys both herself
and her own intellect (in as great a degree as these are capable of receiving
destruction). For thus the mortal nature participates of intellect, but the
intellectual part, of death, and the whole, as Plato observes in the Laws, becomes
a prodigy composed of the mortal and the immortal, of the intellectual and that
which is deprived of intellect. For this physical law which binds the soul to
the body is the death of the immortal life, but vivifies the mortal body."
Wilder in his Introduction
to Taylor’s Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries comments again:
"The soul was believed
(by the Greeks) to be a composite nature, linked on the one side to the eternal
world, emanating from God, and so partaking of Divinity. On the other hand,
it was also allied to the phenomenal and external world, and so liable to be
subjected to passion, lust and the bondage of evils. This condition is denominated
generation; and is supposed to be a kind of death to the higher form of life.
Evil is inherent in this condition; and the soul dwells in the body as in a
prison or a grave." (Page 162)
It has
been claimed in some quarters that the death here mentioned is simply Greek
tropology for a state of spiritual decay into which mortal man sinks. But a
proper view sees such degeneracy as the result of the incarnation, which was
the occasion of it. The concrete and the moral situations do image each other;
but it is a matter of vast importance which one is primary and casts the reflection.
There was a descent in historical fact. From it flowed the moral delinquency.
Having seen the lucid
presentation of the "death" philosophy in Greek systems, we turn to Egypt. Does
the wisdom of this venerable nation support that of Greece? With such fullness
and positiveness does it agree with Greek conception that dispute as to the
legitimacy of the interpretation must henceforth be silenced forever. It is
from these unfathomable wells of Kamite knowledge that we draw the water which
nourishes our intellectual life. Again the volume of material is prodigious.
It must be prefaced
that the Egyptian writings use more than one character to personate the incarnating
god. We may find Osiris, or Ra himself, or Tum, Atum or Horus taking the role.
Then there are the two characters which we meet most often, the "Speaker" and
the Manes in the Ritual. These appear to be distinctly the human soul. Sometimes
again it is represented as the "deceased," again as the "Osirified deceased."
Besides, the names of four or more kings are used to stand for deity: Unas,
Ani, Pepi and Teta, frequently with "the" prefixed.
It is definitely
corroborative of the thesis here defended that the central god figure in Egyptian
religion, Osiris, the Father, in distinction from Horus, the Son, is consistently
assigned the functions, prerogatives and sovereignty of the "king of the dead."
He is hailed in a hundred passages as the Ruler of the Underworld, or as Lord
of Amenta (Amenti, Amentiu), the Egyptian Hades, the correct locating of which
region in theology is one of the major aims of this work. He is assimilable
to the Greek Pluto, ruler of Hades, the dark underworld. That this dismal limbo
of theology is actually our earth is a fact which has never once dawned upon
the intellectual horizon of any modern savant, however high his name. Osiris,
the "Speaker," the "Manes," the incarnating deity, is indeed the king in the
realm of the dead. For we are those dead, and the god within us came to rule
this (Page 163) kingdom,
according to the arcane meaning of every religion. For the Egyptians called
the coffin "the chest of the living." [Ancient Egypt, the Light of the
World, p. 152. ]
A passage from Budge
is of importance here:
"About the middle
of the Ptolemaic period the attributes of Osiris were changed, and after his
identification with Serapis, i.e., Pluto, the god of death, his power and influence
declined rapidly, for he was no longer the god of life. In the final state of
the cult of Osiris and Isis, the former was the symbol of death and the latter
the symbol of life." [Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, II, p. 306.
]
This change does
not betoken what Budge supposes, but quite the contrary. It hints at the fact
that the Egyptian conception of the character of Osiris as Lord of the Underworld
of death began to weaken in the later days, as foreign influences crept in,
and the profound esoteric meaning of "death" became obscured. The god’s influence
as Lord of Death declined rapidly at this epoch, not because of the ascription
to him of a new and untrue character, but because of the decay of the true comprehension
of his place and function in the pantheon. His influence in his perennial office
decayed because knowledge of him in that role had decayed. With many such misapprehensions
must the battle for a sane grasp of the ancient wisdom contend. The actual issue
has been beclouded at almost every turn.
In confirmation of
our claim that death in the ancient usage did not imply extinction, the Manes
in the Ritual (Ch. 30 A) says: "After being buried on earth, I am not dead in
Amenta." Horus knows that though he enters the realm of the dead, he does not
suffer annihilation. He knows that he is that which survives all overthrow.
Even though, as he adds, he is "buried in the deep, deep grave," he will not
be destroyed there. He will rise out of the grave of the (living) body in his
final resurrection.
Such a passage as
the following carries in its natural sense the allocation of the term "dead"
to living inhabitants on earth, not to the spirits of the deceased: "The peoples
that have long been dead (?) come forth with cries of joy to see thy beauties
every day." [Question mark is Budge’s - showing how much the scholar
has been confused by his failure to apprehend the technical theological use
of the term by the Egyptians. Passage from the Book of the Dead cited by Budge.
]It pertains to the resurrection. Another text says: Tanenet is the burial-place
of Osiris." Tanenet, along with Aukert, Shekhem, Abydos, Tattu, Amenta and half
a dozen others, is a designation for the earth as the place of burial for the
soul living in death.
Cognate with the
idea of death is the presumption of burial in a (Page 164) tomb,
grave, coffin or sepulcher. Evidence of the prominence of these terms in relation
to the descent into earth life is not wanting in the old texts. The matter is
not left in any state of doubt or confusion. A sentence from Cocker’s Greek
Philosophy speaks in terms of unmistakable directness: "The soul is now dwelling
in ‘the grave which we call the body.’" [Quoted by Thomas Taylor, Eleusinian
and Bacchic Mysteries, p. 91 ff. ] Here is indeed the undebatable clarification
of that poetic imagery, the confusion of which with the natural fact of bodily
decease has cost Christianity its heritage of wisdom.
In the Egyptian records
we have Osiris as the god who "descended into Hades, was dead and buried" in
Amenta. Massey’s succinct statement covering the point is: "The buried Osiris
represented the god in matter,"--not in a hillside grave. The hillside grave,
however, was the typograph used to designate the non-historical burial in the
body. What could be more pointed and conclusive than Massey’s other declaration:
"In the astronomical mythology the earth was the coffin of Osiris, the coffin
of Amenta, which Sut, the power of darkness, closed upon his brother when he
betrayed him to his death"? [Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World,
p. 706. ]"The coffin of Osiris is the earth of Amenta," he says again.
[Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 868. ]It is worthy
of note that the shrine in the Egyptian temples, representing the vessel of
salvation, was in the form of a funeral chest, the front side of which was removed
so that the god might be seen. Chapter 39 of the Ritual contains a plea for
the welfare of the incarnated soul: "Let not the Osiris-Ani, triumphant, lie
down in death among those who lie down in Annu, the land wherein souls are joined
unto their bodies." So that it is quite apparent that the land in which souls
lie down in "death" is this old earth of ours. For nowhere else are souls joined
unto their bodies! This is the only sphere in the range of cosmic activity where
this transaction is possible, and this fact is sufficient warrant for focusing
upon it all that mass of vague meaning for which theologians have been forced
to seek a locale in various subterranean worlds whose place is found at last
only in their own imaginations.
Horus says in one
text: "I directed the ways of the god to his tomb in Peqar . . . and I caused
gladness to be in the dwellers in Amentet when they saw the Beauty as it landed
at Abydos." [Quoted by Budge: Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, II,
p. 8. ] Abydos was claimed to be the place of entry to the lower world
where the "dead" lived, but in this use it was another of those transfers of
uranographic locality to a town on the map in some way appropriately symbolizing
the spiritual idea involved. There was no actual entrance to an actual (Page
165) underworld
at Abydos (or anywhere else), but to complete the astral typology a temple,
tomb and deep well (of great symbolic value) had been constructed there to the
god Osiris. It was mythically and poetically the door of entry to the lower
world, or realm of death, Amenta. Budge does not realize that he is writing
only of the historical adaptation of a spiritual allegory when he says:
"But about Osiris’
burial-place there is no doubt, for all tradition, both Egyptian and Greek,
states that his grave was at Abydos (Abtu) in upper Egypt." [ Osiris
and the Egyptian Resurrection, II, p. 67. ]
He argues that Osiris
must have been a living king, who was later deified. This is not likely, as
there is little to indicate that the Egyptian gods were other than abstract
personifications of the powers of nature and intelligence. The legend that his
body was cut into fourteen pieces, scattered over the land and then reassembled
for the resurrection could have no rational application to the life of an actual
king. Myth has been taken for history on a vast scale.
Another text carries
straightforward information of decided value: "In the text of Teta the dead
king is thus addressed: ‘Hail! hail! thou Teta! Rise up, thou Teta! . . . thou
art not a dead thing." [Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, II, p.
69. ]What can be the resolution of so evident a contradiction of terms
- telling a dead king he is not dead - unless the new interpretation of "death"
as herein advanced and supported be applicable? [Cf. the raising of
Lazarus. ]The souls as deities entered the realm of death, our world,
but were not dead; philosophy dramatized them as such, however.
In a different symbolism
the Eye of Horus, an emblem typifying his life and said to contain his soul,
was stolen and carried off by Sut, the evil twin. Of this Budge says that "during
the period when Horus’ Eye was in the hands of Sut, he was a dead god." His
regaining possession of his Eye symbolized the recovery of his buried divinity
and his restoration to his original Godhood. Horus elsewhere (Rit., Ch. 85)
says: "I come that I may overthrow my adversaries upon earth, though my dead
body be buried." If such a declaration is not to be taken for a species of after-death
spiritism, it can have logical meaning only in reference to the contention that
the buried god is the soul in the fleshly body.
It is imperative
to look next at the conceptions of the sphere of death that were expressed through
the use of the term "underworld." (Page 166) This region
of partial death in which the outcast angels were imprisoned was styled the
dark "underworld." A variant name was "the nether earth." It is often actually
pictured as a subterranean cavern. It may be asked if it has ever occurred to
any scholar of our time that "the underworld" was but another figurative appellation
for the condition of life in the human body. Again a mass of data is available.
All nations of antiquity
show in their literature traces of a legend in which the soul makes a journey
through a dark underworld. The vagueness of its location, however, has failed
to give any scholar an illuminating suggestion as to its totally figurative
and unreal character. Nobody has ever seriously presumed to locate this dreary
region, in spite of the fact that it was childishly regarded as an actual place.
It was hazily associated with the grave or assumed to lie in some dim region
into which the soul passed after death, somehow, somewhere "under," but under
what, it was not apparently ever determined. The cause of bafflement was the
ineradicable assumption that its "underness" was to be oriented in relation
to the earth! No one has caught the idea that its location was under the heavens,
and hence that it was our own earth itself! The surface of the earth, man’s
world, was assumed to be obviously not an "underworld." But the problem of locating
another limbo beneath it baffled theological speculation through the ages. The
outcome is that the locale of Pluto’s shadowy kingdom has been hung indeterminately
between the surface of the ground and the dubious dim region of after-death
spheres. All the while a thousand texts point to its location in the physical
body!
Lewis Spence cautiously
admits that the court of the Mayan underworld seems to have been conducted on
the principles of a secret society with a definite form of initiation, and that
the Mysteries of Eleusis and others in Greece were concerned with the life of
an underworld, especially dramatized in the story of Demeter and Kore. [
Myths and Legends: Egypt, p. 121. ] He admits that the Greek deities
were gods of the dead. But he mars his tentative approach to the truth by advancing
the conjecture that the Book of the Dead may have been the work of prehistoric
Neolithic savages! We refrain from caustic comment, save to aver that if the
Egyptian Book of the Dead was the product of Neolithic savages, the status of
modern mentality which is as yet totally incapable of understanding its high
message, must by inference lie a stratum or two below that level.
The Mystery Rituals
did dramatize the life of an underworld, (Page 167) but the
gods, as kings of this nether realm, were not subterranean deities. The gnomes
and other nature sprites were the only "deities" that were believed to subsist
beneath the surface of the physical earth. The gods of the underworld were always
the gods of the dead. And as the souls of deceased mortals were in all religions
asserted to ascent to heaven and never to remain in the burial ground with the
corpse, it was again impossible to place the underworld down with the gnomes.
But it seems next to incredible that academic diligence should have missed the
plain correlation which would have made the descent of spirits from heaven equate
the descent of all the divine heroes and sun-gods into the dark underworld -
of earth.
From the great Egyptian
Ritual, which so cryptically allegorizes this earthly death, we learn that the
mystery of the Sphinx originated with the conception of the earth as the place
of passage, of burial and rebirth, for the humanized deities. An ancient Egyptian
name for the Sphinx was Akar. [Later equated by Massey with Achor, the
valley of Sheol, the Hebrew Hades. ] This was also the name for the tunnel
through the underworld. And it is said that the very bones of the deities quake
as the stars go on their triumphant courses through the tunnels of Akar (Pyramid
Texts: Teta, 319). As the stars were the descending deities, the metaphor of
stars passing through the underworld tunnels is entirely clear in its implication.
The riddle of the Sphinx is but the riddle of mankind on this earth. The terms
of the riddle at least become clearly defined if we know that the mystery pertains
to this our mortal life, above ground, and not to our existence in some unlocalized
underworld of theological fiction.
The entrance to Amenta,
with its twelve dungeons, consisted of a blind doorway which neither Manes nor
mortal knew the secret of and none but the god could open. Hence the need of
a deity who should come to unlock the portals and unbar the gates of hell, and
be "the door" and "the way." The god came not only to unlock the door of divinity
to human nature, but to be himself that door. The giving of the keys to bolt
and unbolt the doors of the underworld was but the allegory of this evolutionary
reinforcement of the human by the divine nature.
Descriptions of this
dark realm of our present state are given in the texts. "It is a land without
an exit, through which no passage has been made; from whose visitants, the dead,
the light was shut out." "The light they beheld not; in darkness they dwell."
Massey ventures the (Page 168) assertion
that "the inferno, the purgatory and the paradise of Dante Alighieri are extant
recognizably in the Book of the Dead as the domains of Amenta." [Ancient
Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 415. ]
The first chapter
of the Book of the Dead was repeated in the Mystery festivals on the day when
Osiris was buried. His entrance into the underworld as a Manes corresponds to
that of Osiris the corpse in Amenta, who represents the god rendered lifeless
by his suffocation in the body of matter. The dead Osiris is said to enter the
place of his burial called the Kasu. In this low domain of the dead there was
nought but darkness; the upper light had been shut out. But Horus, Ptah, Anup,
Ra and others of the savior gods would come in due time to awaken the sleepers
"in their sepulchres," open the gates and guide the souls out into the light
of the upper regions once more. One of the sayings of the soul contemplating
its plight in the underworld is: "I do not rot. I do not putrefy. I do not turn
to worms. My flesh is firm; it shall not be destroyed; it shall not perish in
the earth forever" (Ch. 154). Inasmuch as the flesh of the physical body most
certainly will perish, rot, putrefy, and turn to food for worms in the only
grave that Christian theology has been able to tell us of, the term "flesh"
in the excerpt can not be taken as that of the human body. And that it is not
to be so taken is obvious from other passages. It refers to the substance of
another body which does not rot away.
The same sense may
distinctly be caught in the term "body" as used in the prayer uttered by the
soul in the body when it says: "May my body neither perish nor suffer corruption
forever." Such a prayer directed to the physical body would be obviously irrelevant,
expecting the impossible. Horus, on his way to earth to ransom the captives,
says: "I pilot myself towards the darkness and the sufferings of the deceased
ones of Osiris" (Ch. 78). Massey sums the discussion:
"The wilderness of
the nether earth, being a land of graves, where the dead awaited the coming
of Horus, Shu, Apuat (Anup), the guide, and Taht . . . as servants of Ra, the
supreme one god, to wake them in their coffins and lead them forth from the
land of darkness to the land of day." [Ancient Egypt, the Light of the
World, p. 643-4. ]
Analysis of other
types of representation will disclose the fact that the Egyptians, in their
lavish use of animals as symbols, filled the underworld with a menagerie of
mythical monsters. Without trespassing on the ground of later discussion, it
may be briefly said that a (Page 169) number of animals - dragons , serpents,
crocodiles, dogs, lions, bears, etc. - lay in wait in the underworld to devour
the luckless Manes. What is the significance of this? Patently it figures the
menace to the soul of its subjection to the constant beat upon it of the animal
propensities, since it had taken residence in the very bodies of the lower creatures.
In a measure detached, it was yet not immune to being drawn down into ever deeper
alliance with the carnal nature. Ever to be remembered is Daniel’s statement
that "his mind was made like the mind of an animal."
Etymology supplies
a sensational suggestion of the soundness of the present thesis in the similarity
of the two words "tomb" and "womb," which Massey avers rise from the same root.
At all events it is rigorously in accord with the Greek theory that the body,
as the tomb of the soul, is at the same time the womb of its new birth. In the
Egyptian Ritual the soul is addressed as he "who cometh forth from the dusk,
and whose birth is in the house of death." This was Anu, Abydos, On (Heliopolis),
or other uranographic center localized on the map, or the zodiacal signs of
Virgo and Pisces. The Greek language bears striking testimony to the same kinship
of the two words, as Plato points out in the Cratylus, in the practical identity
of soma, body, and sema, tomb.
In the Christian
Bible the textual evidence is multitudinous. A few excerpts only can be culled.
First is St. Paul’s clarion cry to us ringing down through nineteen centuries:
"Awake thou that sleepest and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine upon
thee." Job, combining his death with its correlative resurrection, exclaims:
"I laid me down in death and slept; I awaked, for the Lord sustaineth me." Paul
cries in the anguish of the fleshly duress, "Who shall deliver me from the body
of this death?" And it is an open question whether the final phrase might not
as well have been rendered "this death in the body." And Jonah, correlative
name with Jesus, cries from the allegorical whale’s belly: "Out of the belly
of death have I cried unto thee, O God." Paul again pronounces us "dead" in
our trespasses and sins, adding that "the wages of sin is death" and "to be
carnally minded is death." It is sin that brings us back again and again into
this "death" until we learn better. And the Apostle affirms that we are dead
and that our life is hid with Christ in God. Our true life is as yet undeveloped,
buried down in the depths of the latent capacities of being. The Psalms say
(Page 170) that
we "like sheep are laid in the grave," though "God will redeem my soul from
the power of the grave." The death spoken of is at one place defined as "even
the death of the cross," when spirit is bound to the cross of matter and the
flesh. Isaiah declares that "we live in darkness like the dead." And Jesus broadcasts
the promise that whosoever believeth on him, "though he were dead, yet shall
he live." Assurance is given (Peter 4:6) that the Gospel is preached "to them
that are dead." Would not such addresses to the dead, as noted in several of
these passages, be absurd if not referable to the living on earth?
Then there is the
ringing declaration of the Father God in the Prodigal Son allegory, rebuking
the churlish jealousy of the obedient elder brother at the rejoicing over the
wastrel’s return: "This my son was dead and is alive again." The thing described
here as death was just the sojourn in that "far country"--earth.
A most direct and
unequivocal declaration, however, is found in the first verse of chapter three
of Revelation: "Ye have the name of being alive, but ye are dead." And this
is at once followed by the adjuration to "Wake up; rally what is still left
to you, though it is on the very point of death." This is again a strong hint
of the danger that the soul might be so far submerged under sense as to fail
to rise again, and sink down into the dreaded "second death."
But the most astonishing
material corroborative of the thesis here propounded is found in St. Paul’s
discussion of the problem of sin and death in the seventh chapter of Romans.
The statements made can be rendered intelligible and enlightening only by reading
the term "death" in the sense here analyzed. He says first that "the interests
of the flesh meant death; the interests of the spirit meant life and peace."
And then he says: "For when we were in the flesh, the motions of sins, which
were by the law, did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death."
In this chapter Paul
concatenates the steps of a dialectical process which has not been understood
in its deep meaning for theology. It is concerned with the relation of the three
things: the law, sin and death. He asks: "Is the Law equivalent to sin?" And
he replies that sin developed in us "under the Law." What is this mysterious
Law that the Apostle harps on with such frequency? Theology has not possessed
the resources for a capable answer, beyond the mere statement that it (Page
171) is the
power of the carnal nature in man. It is that, in part; but the profounder meaning
could not be gained without the esoteric wisdom - which had been discarded.
This Law - St. Paul’s bête noir - is that cosmic impulsion which draws all spiritual
entities down from the heights into the coils of matter in incarnation. It is
the ever-revolving Wheel of Birth and Death, the Cyclic Law, the Cycle of Necessity.
As every cycle of embodiment runs through seven sub-cycles or stages, it is
the seven-coiled serpent of Genesis that encircles man in its folds.
Now, says the Mystery
initiate, by the Law came sin, and by sin came death. Here is the iron chain
that binds man on the cross. The Law brings the soul to the place where it sins
and sin condemns it to death. Death here must mean something other than the
natural demise of the body, for that comes to all men be they pure or be they
sinful. Reserving a more recondite elaboration of the doctrine of sin for a
later place, it may be asserted here that the great theological bugaboo, sin,
will be found to take its place close along the side of "death" as the natural
involvement of the incarnation itself. Sin is just the soul’s condition of immersion
or entanglement in the nature of the flesh. And happily much of its gruesome
and morbid taint by the theological mind can be dismissed as a mistaken and
needless gesture of ignorant pietism.
Neither as animal
below our status nor as angel above it can man sin. For the animal is not spiritually
conscious and hence not morally culpable. And the angel is under no temptation
or motivation from the sensual nature, which alone urges to "sin." Only when
the Law links the soul to animal flesh does sin become possible. Romans (7:7)
expressly declares: "Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law . . . For without
the law sin was dead." Paul even says that at one time he lived without the
law himself; this was before "the command" came to him. And what was this command?
Again theology has missed rational sense because it has lost ancient cosmologies
and anthropologies. The "command" was the Demiurgus’ order to incarnate. It
is found in the Timaeus of Plato and Proclus’ work on Plato’s theology. Then
the Apostle states the entire case with such clarity that only purblind benightedness
of mind could miss it: "When the command came home to me, sin sprang to life,
and I died; . . ." He means to say that sin sprang to life as he died, i.e.,
incarnated. And then he adds the crowning utterance on this matter to be found
in all sacred literature: (Page 172) "the
command that meant life proved death to me." He explains further: "The command
gave an impulse to sin, sin beguiled me and used the command to kill me." And
he proceeds to defend the entire procedure of nature and life against the unwarranted
imputations of its being all an evil miscarriage of beneficence: "So the Law
at any rate is holy, the command is holy, just and for our good. Then did what
was meant for my good prove fatal to me? Never. It was sin; sin resulted in
death for me to make use of this good thing." [ Here would seem to be
authentic rebuttal of the major premises of so much
Oriental philosophy which builds on the general thesis that the whole of life
on earth is evil, "a calamity to be avoided at all costs." (Radhakrishnan: Indian
Philosophy, Vol. I.)]
The clarifying and
sanifying corollaries of this explication and St. Paul’s material are so expansive
that pause should be made to consider them. In this light it may be seen that
the whole of the negative and lugubrious posture of theology as to "sin," and
"death" as its penalty, might be metamorphosed into an understanding of the
natural and beneficent character of all such things in the drama. Ancient meaning
has miscarried, with crushing weight upon the happy spirit of humanity; and
rectification of such misconstruction is urgently needed.
In I Samuel (2:6)
it is written: "The Eternal kills, the Eternal life bestows; he lowers to death
and he lifts up." Job says: "I shall die in my nest, and I shall renew my youth
like the eagle."
And a most significant
verse from Isaiah (53) can be rescued from mutilation and sheer nonsense only
by the application of the new meaning of "death." Speaking of the divinity,
it says that "He hath made his grave with the wicked and the rich in his death."
A marginal note is honest enough to tell us that the word "death" here used
was in the plural number--"deaths"--in the original manuscripts. Here is invincible
evidence that the word carries the connotation of "incarnations," for in no
other possible sense can "death" be rationally considered in the plural number.
In one incarnation the Christ soul is cast among the wicked; in another among
the rich. This is a common affirmation of most Oriental religious texts. And
his body is his grave.
St. Paul says some
man will ask how the dead are raised and in what body do they come. And Christian
theology has stultified the sanity of its millions of devotees by giving the
answer in the words of the Creed: "The resurrection of the body"--leaving untutored
minds to understand the physical body, or the corpse. The only comment provoked
is to say that the picture of the cemetery graves being opened at the last trump,
and the "dead" (cadavers) arising to array (Page 173) themselves
in line before the tribunal of the judgment, has turned millions in disgust
and revulsion away from the fold of orthodoxy. Paul states in the verses immediately
following that the dead will rise in a spiritual body.
And then we face
that climactic assurance that "the last enemy to be overcome is death." In lack
of the covert intent of the word, Christian thought has ever believed that in
some way this promise meant we should overcome the incidence of bodily decease,
and live on in the physical vessel indefinitely. This would paralyze evolution.
It would wreck the Cyclical Law. The Trinity is the Creator, the Preserver and
the Destroyer. Without the periodic destruction of form there could be no renewal
of life in higher and better forms. Life would be imprisoned forever in matter,
and choked to its real death. Its charter of liberty is its periodical release
from forms that while they enable, they also limit. What, then, means the passage?
If death is the incarnation, the significance is found in the assurance that
at the conclusion of the cycle, when the spirit has mastered all its mundane
instruction, it will be made a "pillar in the house of God and shall go no more
out." Its descents into the tombs of bodies will be at an end at last. "Death"
will then be finally overcome.
In the Egyptian Ritual
the soul rejoices in life, shouting, "He hath given me the beautiful Amenta,
through which the living pass from death to life." Amenta is this world, and
the soul is pictured as running through cycles of descent from life to "death"
and back again. The same sequence is set forth in the first chapter of Revelation:
"I am he that liveth and was dead, and behold I am alive for evermore!" The
Law precipitates us from the life above to the "death" down here, but lifts
us up again.
There is no sublimer
chapter in the entire Bible than the fifteenth of I Corinthians. And perhaps
this treatment could not possibly be more fittingly concluded than with some
of St. Paul’s magnificent utterances therein. It may give us at last the thrilling
realization of their grandeur when grasped in the majestic sense of their restored
original meaning. Need we be reminded that these words of the Apostle will ring
from our own throats in ecstatic jubilee, when, victorious at last over "death"
and the "grave," we arise out of our final imprisonment in body and wing our
flight like the skylark back to celestial mansions? (Page 174)
"So when this corruptible
shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality,
then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: Death is swallowed
up in victory."
"O death, where is
thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?"
. .
. . . . .
We have drawn enough
material from the ancient fund now to have bountifully supplied the demand for
"evidence" that in archaic philosophy the field of our life here is depicted
as the dark cavern, the pit, the abyss, the bleak desert, the wilderness, the
grave, the tomb, the underworld and hell of a life that migrated here from the
skies. "We are a colony of heaven." Our deific souls are at the very bottom
of the arc of death, and can never be as dead again as they are now, and have
been.
But stranger revelations
await us still. (Page 175)
Chapter
X
THE
MUMMY IN AMENTA
We now approach a
phase of the general theme, the correction of popular misconception about which
will be attended with the most momentous consequences for the whole of world
religion. Only one or two other items of our revision of current belief will
prove to be of more sensational interest. The matter that promises so largely
is the Egyptian mummy and the practice of mummification. When the true signification
of this marvelous custom of a sage race begins to dawn in clear light, it will
assuredly seem as if modern appreciation of a great deposit of ancient knowledge
could hardly have suffered so utter a rout, so total a wreckage.
General opinion,
expressed and shared by the most learned of the Egyptologists, holds that the
Egyptians mummified their dead for the reason that, believing in reincarnation
or forms of transmigration, they desired the physical body to be preserved intact
for the reoccupancy of the Ego or soul upon its return to earth. Common belief
asserts that they hoped by this provision to make reincarnation easier for the
returning soul, inasmuch as he would find his former body ready for him, and
would not have to build a new one or enter the body of some animal. The quantity
of "explanation" of this sort that one reads in the works of reputed scholars
is indeed enough to drive any astute reasoner ad nauseam. Nothing betrays the
shallow insufficiency of our knowledge so flagrantly as does this matter.
It would seem as
if it should be unnecessary to issue a denial of the correctness of the popular
theories just indicated. The truth of the matter should be evident to anyone
who can frame a syllogism. One fact alone should have been sufficient to forestall
the arrant blunder in misconceiving the mummification motive. An act performed
for the alleged purpose of preservation began with a gross mutilation! The viscera,
the whole of the organs of the chest and abdominal cavity (Page 176) were
first removed, and the entrails placed in the Canopic jars at the four corners
of the coffin. One does not mutilate that which one wishes to preserve. If this
be not conclusive, let us add that at times both the head and the feet were
cut off! Could the returning soul profitably use this old shriveled, leathery
and mutilated shell as its next living tenement? Our idea has been a tacit insult
to Egyptian intelligence. Surely we might have credited them from the start
with being no such fools. Because we believed, under the lashing of medieval
theologians, that Christ rose in his flesh and that we should do likewise at
the last trump, we assumed that the Egyptians indulged their credulity in the
same weird fashion. We are yet as children essaying to frame an explanation
of the most profoundly symbolic act of the most illumined race of history.
It is the declaration
drawn from our studies and supported by the evidence to be submitted, that the
practice of embalmment was nothing more than a mighty rite of symbolism! One
immediate item of confirmation is the fact that it was performed for only a
relatively few of Egypt’s deceased, notably kings and functionaries. It was
costly, required a hundred days, and so was indulged in only in the case of
those who could afford such an elaborate funeral ritual. If the motive for mummification
had been one arising out of universal philosophy or accepted religious theory,
it would have been practiced generally, with rich and poor alike. Not all Catholic
Christians can afford elaborate masses. No enlightened nation would countenance
for centuries a practice based on a theory which made the difference in worldly
wealth critical for the whole future destiny of the great mass of its inhabitants.
If the hope of future evolutionary welfare depended on this performance with
the cadaver, then Egypt was guilty of a felonious neglect of her general population
in favor of her overlords. And we know that early nations were, as we like to
say, superstitious in the extreme about the punctilious observance of funeral
rites. Virgil tells of the dread of the heroes of having their dead bodies lie
unburied on the sand (inhumatus arena). Egypt could not have given the benefit
of a vital ceremony to only a limited class.
The effort is here
made for the first time in our day to set forth the inner spiritual significance
of this great rite. Our development of the obsolete meaning of "death" in primal
theology has led us right up (Page 177) to
the threshold of the denouement. One further step will take us into the heart
of the age-old mystery.
In the esoteric doctrine
which regarded the present life as death, and the living body as the soul’s
tomb, we have the necessary background for adequate elucidation of the matter.
The body was mummified to serve as a powerful moving symbol of the death of
the soul in matter, and the various features of the meaning of this mundane
life! Nothing more. But this far transcended in graphic impressiveness and cathartic
virtue any theoretic dramatization of the philosophy of life made by any people
since the days of Egypt’s glory. The mummy was designed to point the whole moral
of human life in a form of overwhelming psychological power. To a deeply philosophical
people the lifeless body became at once the most impressive symbol of the entire
import of life itself. The preserved corpse became the mute but grandiloquent
reminder of life and death, mortality and immortality, in one mighty emblem.
The custom was an
attempt to utilize the cadaver as the central object in a ritual designed to
incorporate the essential features of their entire philosophy of life. The import
of a ceremony based on the ostensible preservation of a thing which obviously
could not be preserved for living purposes, was the enforcement upon all minds
of the truth that the mortal part of man could be immortalized! Concomitant
with this, the ritual bore the message that the divine part of man, the immortal
soul, though in this body it has gone to its "death," is immortal still. It
will defy death and corruption, as will the mummy.
The mummy was the
cardinal object in a grandiose ritual precisely because it was a dead thing!
It prefigured the nature of this life, which was, philosophically, death. The
dead thing thus became the emblem of immortal life itself. The "dead" shall
live forever. The mummy symboled life as death, and death as the gate to immortal
life. And the preservation or immortalizing of the dead mortal by the infusion
of spiritous oils, balsams, ichors, was to emblem the raising of this mortal
to immortality through the adoption by the lower man of the spirit of eternal
life from the injected Christ nature. By the infusion of the mind of Christ
into the dead Adamic nature, born to sin, it could be raised to eternal life
out of the realm of decay. To associate ritualistically the idea of undying
existence with the defunct relic was to impress the lesson of the burial in
matter of that divine fragment whose (Page 178) attribute
is "life and everlastingness." Under the garb and swathings of death, its mission
was to bring life and immortality to light.
The embalming was
not the enactment of a vague spiritual ideal. Every detail of the process, as
Budge testified, was a typical performance with specific relevance. The injection
of preservatives was designed to do for the corpse symbolically what the putting
on of the Christ spirit would do for "the body of this death."
An elaborate ritual
was built up about the mummy. There were the mutilations and exsections, symbolizing
the dismemberment or fragmentation of the divine intellect when cast into the
distracting turmoil of sense life. The facial mask carried the implication of
the "false" nature of the physical man, the personality, which was the mask
(Latin: persona, a mask) the soul donned over its true self. The bound legs
and arms symboled the limitation and motionlessness which matter ever imposes
upon active spirit. The four Canopic jars at the corners of the coffin stood
for the physical world, which is ever four-square as the base that upholds all
higher life. The mummy case itself signified the body or earth, the physical
house and habitat of the soul. The coffin lid served as the table for the mortuary
meal, or the partaking of the "bread of Seb" or food of earth. The bandages
were emblematic of the material vestures or bodies which enwrapped the soul,
for one coming to earth it was "all meanly wrapped in swaddling clothes," the
"coats of skin" that God gave to Adam and Eve in Genesis. Then there was the
light, signifying of course the presence of the glowing power of deity within
the fleshly house. When darkness was over the land of Egypt, "the Israelites
had light in their dwellings." More meaningful still was the image of the hawk,
or the hawk-headed Horus, which hovered over the mummy; for this was the figure
of the resurrection, the soul as a bird leaving the body to return to the upper
air of heaven. The Ankh-cross, symbol of life when spirit and matter are tied
together, the ankham-flower of immortality, the Tat cross, symbol of eternal
stability, the level of Amentu, symbol of the balance of nature’s forces, the
scarab, symbol of the resurrection, the vulture, the greenstone tablet of resin,
all shadowed in one way or another the immortality of the spiritual principle
lodged within the mortal vehicle. The spices and balsams were preservatives,
sweet of savor. And the fluids that did so marvelously work their miracle of
preservation upon the substance of decay, were as "the Amrit juice of immortality."
(Page 179) In many
countries a liquor called Soma (the Greek word, incidentally, for the "spiritual"
body) was considered to bestow immortality. A tribal chant runs, in one verse:
"We’ve quaffed
the soma bright
And are immortal
grown
We’ve entered
into light
And all the
gods have known."
The lower man’s immediate
relation to his soul permits him to drink of that immortalizing nectar, and
as it was always Eve, or Hathor, or Ishtar, a goddess, a woman, who offers to
man the tempting cup, the inference is that mundane experience with matter,
the mother of life, is the brimming chalice for our deification.
The mummy thus stood
for the soul buried in body, or sometimes perhaps for the body itself. By its
descent the soul had become, as it were, the mummy. It became the Manes, or
shade of a dead person, in the depiction.
Massey comes very
close in one place to sensing that the mummy must be given a spiritual significance:
"Hence the chapter
of ‘introducing the mummy into the Tuat [underworld] on the day of burial’ deals
not with the earthly mummy, but the mummy of the dramatic mysteries as a figure
of the living personality." [Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p.
416. ]
This is the truth;
but having seen the mummy in its true light for a moment, Massey still adheres
to his precarious endeavor to read "the mummy in Amenta" into the life after
(bodily) death, instead of allocating it to its relationship to earth, where
only the living personality was in function. His phrase--"the mummy of the dramatic
mysteries"--to all intents and purposes concedes the legitimacy of our thesis
as to the mummy’s true function.
But this scholar’s
study is so splendid in the main that we will be enlightened by looking at portions
of his material:
"Amenta as the place
of graves is frequently indicated in the Hebrew scriptures, as in the description
of the great typical burial-place in the valley of Hamon-Gog. This was in the
Egypt described in the Book of Revelation as the city of dead carcasses, where
also their Lord was crucified as Ptah-Sekari or Osiris-Tat. Amenta had been
converted into a cemetery by the death and burial of the solar god, who was
represented as the mummy in (Page 180) the
lower Egypt of the nether earth. The Manes were likewise imaged as mummies in
their coffins. They also rose again in the mummy-likeness of their Lord, and
went up out of Egypt in the constellation of the Mummy (Sahu-Orion), or in the
coffin of Osiris that was imaged in the Great Bear." [Massey: Ancient
Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 644. ]
Can we miss the plain
evidence here presented? The Manes were imaged as mummies in their coffins!
Amenta (this earth) converted into a cemetery by the advent of the gods, our
souls! We, the living on earth, figured unmistakably as mummies in our sarcophagi!
Hence the grave and tomb of all ancient theology is the living physical body
of man!
There will be profit
in considering another Massey statement, since it reveals how he stumbled and
fell at the very door of the truth:
"There is no possibility
of the Manes coming back to earth for a new body or for a reentry into the old
mummy. As the Manes says, ‘his soul is not bound to his old body at the gates
of Amenta’" (Chs. 26, 6). [Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p.
198. ]
That the soul would
not reenter the old mummy is a vital point of truth, and Massey deserves all
credit for discerning it. But that it would not return to enter a new body flies
in the face of all ancient and universal belief in reincarnation. This is just
the point of issue to be clarified. The soul returns from life to life to be
re-clothed in new garments, since it assuredly does not take up life again in
the mutilated and decomposed old hulk. The Manes positively states that he is
not bound to the old body; but a score of times he says he will construct, or
reappear in, a glorious new vesture. This of course is the spiritual body of
the resurrection. But it is not built up in one brief life on earth. It is the
product of many successive lives, each in a new physical body. There is no room
for confusion or dispute on this matter.
Ptah, Atum and finally
Osiris are described at different stages as the solar god in mummified form
in Amenta.
"He was the buried
life on earth, and hence the god in matter, imaged in the likeness of the mummy.
. . . Such was the physical basis of the mythos of the mystery that is spiritual
in the eschatology." Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 198. [Massey:
Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 211. ]
And we find desirable
explicitness in the following passages:
"In the Osirian mythos,
when the sun-god enters the underworld, it is as a mummy or ‘coffined one’ upon
his way to the great resting place." (Page 181)
"The mummy-Osiris
in Amenta is the figure of the sleeping deity. He is the god inert in matter,
the sleeping or resting divinity."[Massey: Ancient Egypt, the Light of
the World, p. 416. ]
Another most pertinent
corroboration of our thesis that the mummy was but a ritualistic figure for
the human soul "dead" in the body, is found in the following from Massey:
[Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 648. ]
"And just as Ra,
the holy spirit, descends in Tattu on the mummy Osiris, and as Horus places
his hands behind Osiris in the resurrection, so Iu [ Iu, a name of the
Egyptian Messiah, equivalent to Jesus or Horus. ]comes to his body, the
mummy in Amenta. Those who tow Ra along say, ‘The god comes to his body; the
god is towed along toward his mummy.’ (Records, Vol. X, p. 132.) The sun-god,
whether as Atum-Iu (Aiu or Aai) or Osiris-Ra, is a mummy in Amenta and a soul
in heaven. Atum or Osiris, as the sun in Amenta, is the mummy buried down in
Khebt, [As we saw, equals the "cave" of the body. ]or lower Egypt."
[Upper Egypt, by the uranographic transfer, denotes the spiritual man
and his spiritual body, while Lower Egypt denotes the carnal man and his body
of flesh. ]
These passages conclusively
indicate that the mummy was the type of the god in the body.
Conquest of the carnal
nature and escape from it is in another place called the "overthrowal of your
coffins." (Book of Hades, Fifth Division, Legend D.) Again, the earth is denominated
"the coffin of Osiris, the coffin of Amenta."
In his descent to
open the tombs for the release of the sleeping captives Horus says: "I am come
as the mummified one," that is, in fleshly embodiment. It should be noted that
this explicit statement of the god himself that he comes in the character of
the mummy, taken with his other assurances that he comes to "those in their
coffins," must be admitted to certify the truth of our contention throughout
- that it is the god who comes to be buried in the matter of a lower kingdom,
from which burial both he and the lower entity will be raised again to higher
estate. When the sun-god entered "the ark of earth, which is called his coffin
or sarcophagus," he was buried in obscurity and shorn of his power. In a sculptured
sarcophagus of the fourth century the three Magi are offering gifts to the divine
infant, a mummied child! Here the mummy is a figure of the divine nature circumscribed
tightly by the garment of flesh. Need we remind the student that numberless
images of the mummied Child-Jesus were found in Christian catacombs, tombs and
chapels in the early centuries? At first view the linkage of the idea of death
as suggested by the mummy, with the infant figure, rather than with the more
appropriate stage of senility, (Page 182) seems
an ineptitude. In early Christian and pre-Christian iconography Jesus was indeed
often figured as an aged one, about to enter the grave. It only requires that
we move the symbolic hint one short step forward to see the pertinence of the
mummified child, called by the Egyptians the Khart. For the buried god was to
have his rebirth in matter and to begin life anew as an infant. The deceased
father god was to metamorphose into the new form of himself as his own child,
as God the Son. While yet a baby-god, beginning his new career, he was cramped
by the limitations of matter and the undeveloped stage of his own powers. He
was the new god, who had not yet broken his bonds or risen from the limitations
of his new incarnate situation.
It is evident that
Hebraic development of archaic typology did not carry the figure of the mummy
into Biblical literature. Yet a cognate symbolism is expressed through the word
"flesh" mainly. Where the Kamite Ritual says: "My dead body shall not rot in
the grave," the Hebrew Psalmist writes: "My flesh shall dwell in safety. For
thou wilt not leave my soul to Sheol; [Sheol may be taken as identical
with the Egyptian Amenta. ]neither wilt thou suffer thine holy one to
see corruption."
But occasionally
an original Egyptian term has been retained in Hebrew transcription. Such a
term is Sekhem, one of the names of the burial-place of the Osiris-mummy in
the Ritual. The deceased is buried as a mummy in Sekhem. Also the well of Jacob
near Sechem answers to the well of Osiris at Abydos, and the oak or terebinth
in Sechem to the tree of life in the Pool of Persea. The fields of Sechem correspond
to the Sekhet-Hetep or fields of peace and plenty in the Kamite original.
Also the incident
of Joseph carrying Jacob’s coffin matches Horus’ carrying the Osiris-mummy.
The word mummy is
perhaps derived from the Egyptian mum, to "initiate into the mysteries." This
origin would suggest that the elaborate procedure of mummification was inaugurated
to typify the whole broad meaning of the incarnation, as a submerging of high
spirit in the dense state of mortal matter. For such a downward sweep through
the world of material inertia was, as we shall see, the only, if fateful, path
leading to the "initiation" of the spirits into the higher mysteries that lurk
in the depths of life. The Sphinx riddle of life can be solved only by a living
experience in all worlds from the lowest to the highest. Life’s own justification
of its processes is the raison d’être (Page 183) of our mummification
in gross earthly bodies, and the great Nilitic rite was designed to express
nothing more.
Attention must now
be given to the Egyptian word which was used to designate the mummy. It was
usually marked upon the coffin lid. It may offer a connection of great potential
fruitfulness for knowledge. It consisted of the consonants K R S with a suffix
T, giving K R S T. The voweling is indeterminate, as it always was in ancient
writing. Scholars have introduced an A before the R and another after it, making
the word K A R A S T as generally written. There is probably no authoritative
warrant for this spelling, but there has ever been a stout resistance to all
suggestions that the alternative vowels, E, I, O or U be used in the form. Yet
scholarship would be hard put to substantiate any objection to the spellings
Karist, Karest, Kerast, Kerist or Krist. Indeed, as the root is very likely
a cognate form with the Greek kreas, flesh, there would be more warrant for
writing it Krast, Krest or Krist than the usual Karast. If we know how easily
a "Kr" consonant metamorphoses into the Greek Chr, we can not dismiss the suggested
closeness of the word to the Greek Chrestos or Christos as an absurd improbability.
This may indeed be the Kamite origin of our name Christ, whatever be the outcry
against such a conclusion.
There are presented
some other extremely interesting possibilities in this etymological situation,
for by the use of another vowel we stand very close to the Latin crux, cross,
the Middle English cros (cross) and our own word crust. For indeed the ground
meaning of the entire incarnation story might well be expressed in the grouping
of these very terms: The Christ on the cross is the encrusting of the divinity
with flesh (Greek kreas). Not far away also is our word crystal, which contains
the root meaning of any process of incrustation, or the precipitation of spirit
energies into forms of solidification around an actuating nucleus of force.
The large idea behind all these forms that stand so closely related in spelling
is just that of spirit crystallizing and forming a crust about a spiritual node
of life. And then the Greek word chruseos, golden, points to the end of the
process to be consummated by the spirit in matter, when, metaphorically speaking,
all baser forms of the encrusted covering or mummy will be transmuted by the
divinity’s glowing fire into the purest spiritual "gold." The "crystal sea"
that is to receive all back into its depths links the two ends of the chemicalization,
first downward, then upward, together in one (page 184) coherence.
Our kreas or mummy case, that becomes but the crust of our life here on the
cross of flesh, kreas, will be translated into crystals of pure gold, chrysos,
by undergoing the chrysalis transformation into full deification. Still within
the circle of these meanings we have chrism, cruse (of ointment), chrisom, charism,
an anointing oil (our cream - French cresme, with the "s" dropped out, being
a derivative of this stem), and finally within the glow of its influence comes
the bright outline of the meaning of the great sacrament of the Eucharist. If
all this etymological flourish appears to be highly fanciful, let the reader
be assured that not a single term of the interwoven ideas in this chain is missing
from the ancient symbolism. If it is a delightful play of fancy, its poetic
originators were the sages of old.
When, then, Osiris
is called the Karast-mummy, the meaning is doubtless that of spirit "fleshed"
or incarnate. The flesh was the crust crystallized about the soul and as such
became not only the cross, but the cruet or cruse containing the golden liquor
of life. The partaking of it was our Eucharist, and our final transfiguration
will be the putting on of the golden hues of immortality, symboled by the insect
chrysalis operation. [So named because of the golden hues of the chrysalis.
]"O thou who risest out of the golden" is an address to the soul in the
Ritual.
Finally, then, we
have Massey breaking through the philological defenses thrown up by the alarmed
orthodox scholars and openly connecting the Egyptian Karast with the Greek Christos
or Christ. He announces the derivation dogmatically:
"Say what you will
or believe what you may, there is no other origin for Christ the Anointed than
for Horus the karast or anointed son of God the Father. . . . Finally, then,
the mystery of the mummy is the mystery of Christ. As Christian it is allowed
to be forever inexplicable. As Osirian the mystery can be explained. It is one
of the mysteries of Amenta, with a more primitive origin in the rites of Totemism."
[Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 219. ]
He adds that Osiris
as the Karast-mummy was the prototypal Corpus Christi. As Osiris-Sekari he was
the coffined one. Aseris, or the Osiris, represented the god in the anguish
of his burial in the cerements of the mortal body, whose cries and ejaculations
are to be heard ascending from Amenta in many a page of the Ritual, or from
Sheol in the Hebrew scriptures. Massey states what has not been readily acceptable
to Christian apologists hitherto when he writes: (Page 185)
"Indeed
the total paraphernalia of the Christian mysteries had been made use of in Egyptian
temples . . . Osiris in the monstrance should of itself suffice to show that
the Egyptian Karast is the original Christ, and that the Egyptian mysteries
were continued by the Gnostics and Christianized in Rome." [Ancient
Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 213. ]
Immediately connected
with the Christos is the term Messiah, since both terms, the one Greek, the
other Egypto-Hebraic, mean "the anointed." The word Messiah is traced to the
Egyptian mes or mas, to steep, to anoint, as also to be born. Messu was the
Egyptian word for "the anointed" initiate in the Mystery rites. The "-iah" was
a quite significant suffix added by the Hebrews, meaning, like the ubiquitous
suffix "el," deity or God. As "-iah" or "-jah," it occurs in many Hebrew sacred
names, sometimes as a prefix, as in Jahweh, but mostly as a suffix, as in Elijah,
Halleluiah, Messiah, Zechariah, Abijah, Nehemiah, Obediah, Isaiah, Hezekiah
and a long list more. The name Messiah then denotes the "divinely anointed"
one or the "born (reborn) deity." When the first or natural man was anointed
with the chrism of Christly grace, he was reborn as the Christos.
An item of great
importance in this ritual was its performance always previous to the burial.
It was a rite preparatory to the interment. Said Jesus himself of Mary: "In
that she poured this ointment upon my body, she did it to prepare me for my
burial" (Matt. 26:12). She was symbolically enacting the Mystery rite of the
chrism, and her performance quite definitely matched the previous practices
of the Egyptians, from whom it was doubtless derived. But what does such an
act denote in the larger interpretation here formulated? If the burial was the
descent of the gods into bodily forms, then the anointing must have been enacted
immediately antecedent to it or in direct conjunction with it. The etymology
of the word sheds much light upon this whole confused matter. The "oint" portion
of it is of course the French softening of the Latin "unct" stem; and this,
whether philologists have yet discovered the connection or not, is derived from
that mighty symbol of mingled divinity and humanity of ancient Egypt - the A
N K H cross. The word Ankh, meaning love, life and tie, or life as the result
of tying together by attraction or love the two nodes of life’s polarity, spirit
and matter, suggests always and fundamentally the incarnation. For this is the
"ankh-ing" of the two poles of being everywhere basic to life. The "unction"
of the sacrament is really just the "junction" of (Page 186) the
two life energies, with the "j" left off the word. Therefore the "anointing"
is the pouring of the "oil of gladness," the spiritual nature, upon the mortal
nature of living man. The "unguents" of the mummification were the types of
the shining higher infusion, and they prepared the soul for, or were integrally
a part of, its burial in the grave of mortality. And the Messiah was then crucified
in the flesh. On this point Massey speaks clearly:
"In preparation of
Osiris for his burial, the ointment or unguents were compounded and applied
by Neith. It was these that were to preserve the mummy from decay and dissolution."
[Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 883. ]
Neith applies the
preservatives in Egypt; Mary in the Gospels. And as the feminine figures emblem
matter, we must take the ritual as dramatizing the anointing of divinity with
materiality, rather than just the anointing of the physical man with divinity.
The same situation is found in the baptism allegory, where the lower man, John
the Baptist, anoints with his element, water, the very deity, Christ, himself.
In that close conjunction and interrelation of the two natures which the great
Ankh symbol connotes, each nature "anoints" the other, and it matters little
for final outcomes of meaning which is considered. All ancient symbols denoting
the two elements in life are not only dual in themselves, but may generally
be interchanged without damage to the ground signification. This strange - and
practically unknown - aspect of the science of typology merits a full chapter
in itself; but perhaps it will be enough to point out its application in specific
situations where it will clarify the exegesis. Since the soul’s burial in body
is the cause and occasion of the release of its own higher potencies, its being
anointed or baptized by matter (or "water") is thus both its active and its
passive anointing. Let it be remembered, it both converts matter and is converted
by matter. This is ever the basic formula. The anointing thus becomes kindred
with the embalming. The chrismatic ceremony was the "ankh-ing" or tying together
of soul and flesh for fuller outflow, giving in the outcome the Karast or Christ.
In man the angel and the animal-human anoint each other.
As the climactic
step in a series of benefits which Horus, the deliverer and reconstituter of
his father Osiris, enumerates in an address to the latter, he likens the anointing
to the gift of grace and spiritual unction: (Page 187)
"I have strengthened
thine existence upon earth. I have given thee thy soul, thy strength, thy power.
I have given thee thy victory. I have anointed thee with offerings of holy oil."
[Ritual, Ch. 173 (Renouf and Naville). ]
The whole procedure
of incarnation from its inception to the Prodigal’s return, is to be seen as
an anointing, first of spirit with flesh, then of flesh with spirit. Massey
says that anointing was the mode of showing the glory of the Father in the person
of his Son, and that Horus was anointed when he transformed from Horus the mortal
to Horus the divine man.
The usual material
for anointing was oil, but at least one other comes in as symbol. We are familiar
with Jesus’ mixing his spittle with a little earth to anoint the eyes of the
blind man in the Gospels. A Hawaiian legend also has it that the first man was
created from red earth (the meaning of "Adam") mixed with the spittle of the
gods, and the triadic god then blew into his nose and bade him rise a living
human being. Egyptian ideography pictures that the primeval god Tum conceived
within himself, then spat, the spittle becoming the gods Shu and Tefnut, whose
union as male and female produced the world. Another Kamite construction holds
that the Eye of Ra (symbol of divine intelligence), being injured by the violent
assault of Sut, was restored when anointed with spittle by Thoth.
In many more legends
the gods are said to have mixed mortal clay with their blood, emblematic of
their living power. The early myth-makers were adept at variation of the symbols.
Horus, representing the god in man, says:
"He anointed my forehead
as Lord of men, creating me as chief of mortals. He placed me in a palace as
a youth, not yet come forth from my mother’s womb."
This is a reference
to the god’s burial in matter, where life was a process of gestation for a new
birth in spirit. The mortal man has not yet resurrected, not yet come forth
from mother nature’s womb! The spirit entombed is like Joseph in "Egypt" and
Daniel in "Babylon" before they rose from out their "prisons" to become the
rulers of the kingdom. We are still to have our birth out of matter into spirit.
Our incarnation is our birth into body; our resurrection is to be our second
birth, this time out of body.
Isaiah (61: 1,2)
emphasizes the anointing in a famous verse: (Page 188)
"The spirit
of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings
unto the poor. He hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, [The specific
significance of this term will appear in the chapter on Dismemberment. ]to
proclaim liberty to the captives. . . ."
The "poor," it is
to be recalled, are equivalent to the Gentiles, the unregenerate natural man.
They were the ones for whom the message of the Messiah was intended. The announcement
from heaven to earth that a race of deities was about to descend to lift animal
life into the kingdom of reason and articulate speech was verily "the good tidings
of great joy which shall be to all people," the best news ever wafted to the
denizens of the planet up to that period. "Thou hast anointed my head with oil,
my cup runneth over," echoes the immortal Psalm (23). "Having had my flesh embalmed,"
says the Osirified deceased in the Ritual (Ch. 64), "my body does not decay."
Hence flesh, inoculated with spirit, or the mummy embalmed, becomes immortal.
And the Word was made flesh! And flesh will be immortalized!
But the Egyptians
had a correlative phrase with "the Word made flesh." It was "the Word made Truth."
The Logos or spirit made flesh produced the first birth, the natural man, the
first Adam. This was not the true Word, for it was falsified by the admixture
of the earthly, natural element, by which it voiced the animal note. As the
boy’s voice at the age of manhood changes from a feminine to a masculine timbre,
so the speech of the mortal had to swing away from the tones of its mother nature
and issue as the voice of the spiritual Self. Figuratively at the human race’s
age of twelve, always the number marking our spiritual perfecting, the Christ
within us has to abandon the concerns of the maternal physical life and "be
about his Father’s business,"--the spiritual life. The race must turn from Mother
Nature to Father God at its spiritual puberty.
It is quite noteworthy
in this connection that one of the most eminent of modern psychologists, C.
G. Jung, has divided human life into two periods, which he calls the forenoon
and afternoon of life, the boundary line being placed at the age of thirty-five.
He says that in the forenoon mankind lives the life of "nature," but turns in
the "afternoon" to a life of "culture." So that we find even the span of mortal
life epitomizing the larger scheme, in that we begin the "day" of life by living
under nature, and turn in the afternoon to the concerns of the spirit and the
mind. "First that which is natural, then that which is spiritual," St. Paul
has reminded us. (Page 189)
The world
took form upon the model of divine ideas, Plato affirms. In us men a god is
striving to stamp his lines of beauty and grace upon the features of an animal!
The God-word was fleshed so that it could preserve and finally transfigure the
mummy with its splendor. But - and let ultra-idealists be advised!--spirit had
to have plastic matter upon which to imprint its form and comeliness, else it
would have remained forever unknown. The visible manifestation of latent wisdom,
power and love could be achieved only by the spirit’s encasement in a body.
Matter, so derided by extreme "spiritual" theory, is the womb in which alone
divine conceptions can be brought to birth. So that the fleshing of soul works
the miracle of its own anointing. Flesh is the way and the means by which man,
the divine thought, is christened with an ever fuller measure of the oil of
beatification.
Carried some distance
afield by certain involvements of the mummy discussion, we return to that aspect
of it suggested by the mythical underworld. It has been already hinted that
this nether world is our earth itself. But readers may not be fully aware that
this assertion is here made directly in the face of all previous and present
scholarship, and that it flouts all scholastic opinion. So open a challenge
to world scholarship must summon additional proof to its support. The substantiation
of the point is pivotal to the entire interpretation here advanced. The case
wins or loses on the determination of this issue. Likewise the correct understanding
of all theology hinges upon the outcome. As the many transactions involving
the experience of the human soul in the body were enacted in Amenta, the underworld,
the final meaning of the whole structure of theology is bound up with the correct
location of this realm of gloomy shade. It is believed that the correction of
the error under which the academic world has labored for centuries with regard
to this region will necessitate the most sweeping alterations in religious and
philosophical ideology, nothing short, in fact, of a total recasting of all
meanings and values.
Amenta, the Egyptian
term for this underworld, is given as a compound of the Egyptian "Amen," meaning
"secret," "hidden"; and "ta," "earth" or "land." In this formation it becomes
"the hidden earth" or "secret, hidden land." It is the land where the divine
sons were hidden away in "Egypt" till the "wrath" of the Karmic Lords should
be appeased. "Amen" was the "hidden deity," "the god in hiding." His hieroglyph
pictures him as kneeling under a canopy. The "wrath" of (Page 190) God,
be it proclaimed at last, is no divine "anger," in any human sense of the word,
but the universally burning, consuming, transforming, building and destroying
energy of Life itself, always anciently characterized as a "fire." And the word
seems derivative from "Ur-ath," the original fiery force in matter, as "Ur"
is "fire" and "-ath" is the feminine, that is, material classification. It therefore
connotes the cosmical transforming energies locked up in the bosom of matter!
This is of consummate importance. And all this complex ancient indirection of
description is just to carry the idea that the soul must be tied down in its
linkage with the deeply hidden energies of matter and body until the fiery potencies
burning at that level refine and purify its grosser elements. A Biblical text
speaks of its being "thrice refined in the fire," and Egyptian scripts abound
with statements of its purification "in the crucible of the great house of flame."
Maintaining the revolutionary thesis that Amenta is this earth, and not some
realm elsewhere into which men relapse after earthly demise, the exposition
will establish the fact that all the typology referring to it pertains to our
own world. In every ancient system of cosmology this globe is the lowest of
all planetary spheres. There can be no other hell, Tartarus, Avernus or Orcus,
Sheol or Tophet below it. It is that darksome limbo where the Styx, the Phlegethon,
the river of Lethe and other murky streams run their sluggish courses through
the life of mortals.
Very apt, then, is
the story of Isis and Osiris. Their infant, Horus, was suckled by Isis in solitude.
She reared him in secret, and his limbs grew strong in the hidden land. None
knew the hiding place, but it was somewhere in the marshes of Amenta, the lower
Egypt of the mythos. This is matched in toto by the story of the birth of the
mythical Sargon of Assyria. Likewise it is the background of the "flight into
Egypt" of Jesus in the Gospels. The divine child had to be taken down into "Egypt"
until the Herut menace was passed and in order that the son of God might be
brought up out of it. As the angel of the Lord says to Joseph, "Arise and take
the young child and his mother and flee into Egypt," so at the birth of Horus
the god Taht says to the mother, "Come, thou goddess Isis, hide thyself with
thy child." She is bidden to take him down into the marshes of Lower Egypt,
called Kheb or Khebt. But the Egyptian version gives us more ground for understanding
the maneuver as a cosmographic symbol, because Taht tells Osiris that there
"these things shall befall: his limbs will grow, he will wax (Page 191) entirely
strong, he will attain the dignity of Prince . . . and sit upon the throne of
his father." This is highly important, since it makes the hiding away a part
of the cosmic process and not a mere incredible incident in Gospel "narrative."
In the mutilated Gospel account the sojourn in Egypt is left as if it were a
matter of brief duration, followed by the child’s return. In the fuller Egyptian
record it is seen that the dip into Lower Egypt is that necessary incubation
in matter that must continue until it has brought the infant potentialities
to actualization and function. As the seed in the soil, so the god in the earthly
body and the "child" in "Lower Egypt"--all are hidden away for the growth that
only thus could be attained. The secreting of the child is no more than the
planting on earth of the divine seed in its appropriate soil - humanity
In the Ritual the
Manes, or Osiris-Nu, says: "I am he whose stream is secret." Of Ptah it is also
said: "Thy secret dwelling is in the depths (or the deep) of the secret waters
and unknown" (Renouf: Hibbert Lectures, p. 321).
The presentation
of the evidence supporting the mundane location of Amenta takes on from this
point largely the semblance of a debate with Massey. If our study seems overburdened
with his material, apology may be found in the explanation that, in the first
place, he has fairly earned this amount of recognition, and secondly that his
presentations focus the issues at stake with more definiteness than those of
any other scholar. Though he missed the golden truth of this matter in the end,
he still comes so close to it that he at times almost states it in spite of
himself. The truth can hardly be better expounded than as the correction of
his error, which proved so fatal at last to his work. No one has ever put more
succinctly and clearly the nature of the experience of the soul or divine child
in Amenta than he has done in the following excerpt:
"In the eschatology
Horus, the child, is typical of the human soul which was incarnated in the blood
of Isis, this immaculate virgin, to be made flesh, and to be born in mortal
guise on earth as the son of Seb (god of earth) and to suffer all the afflictions
of mortality. He descended to Amenta as the soul sinking in the dark of death.
. . ."[Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 190. ]
Everything in this
passage points to the identity of Amenta with earth. Clearly as Massey saw through
the thousand disguises of ancient (Page 192) method,
he was tricked at last by the arcane ruse of presenting earth experience under
the mask of a ritual for the dead. He could hardly bring himself to believe,
sharp as was his break with orthodoxy, that the miscarriage of esoteric sense
had gone so utterly awry as to misplace all religious values finally in a wrong
world. The enormity of cleric aberrancy was already so shocking to him that
he can be pardoned for failing to perceive that it was indeed still seven leagues
worse.
He fought his way
through by what seemed the only devise which would enable him to keep the judgment,
hell, purgatory and the underworld in the after-death realm. He was forced to
split the term "earth," so frequently used with Amenta, into two parts, distinguishing
an "earth of time" from an "earth of eternity." He took Amenta to be this fancied
"earth of eternity" beyond the grave or death. He located it vaguely in the
post mortem state, and segregated it from the earth of time, or the earth we
know. But a little reflection on his part would have told him that the term
"earth" has no possible appropriateness to a nonphysical existence in spiritual
areas. The designations "land," "country," so often applied to the heavenly
state of being, are used only by grace of euphemism or figure. Massey must have
felt this, but it permitted him to use the word "earth" in reference to a purely
celestial locale. This could not have been other than a bit disingenuous; and
it cost him his place in renown and kept us an additional forty or fifty years
in bondage to religious superstition.
He rightly insists
that "not until we have mastered the wisdom of Egypt as recorded in Amenta shall
we be enabled to read it on the surface of the earth." This is precisely what
should be said, but where do we have access to "wisdom recorded in Amenta" (considered
as his spirit world) if not on this earth, either in books or in experience?
Can we go to (his) heaven and read records left there? He speaks of a first
paradise as being celestial and a second one as "sub-terrestrial," and says
that the latter is "the earthly paradise of legendary lore." But, as has been
shown, a "sub-terrestrial" residence for man is meaningless verbiage, imagery
without possible counterpart in actuality. The "sub-" was to be taken as subsolary
and perhaps sublunary, at any rate sub-celestial, but never--really--sub-terrestrial.
If it was used for poetic figure, there need be no quarrel. The ancients did
use subterranean (Page 193) caverns
as types of our life in Amenta, but only as types. Of a surety we shall not
read old Egypt’s mighty wisdom aright until we read it on the surface of this
earth, for the inexpugnable reason that the "wisdom recorded in Amenta" is the
wisdom pertaining to this earth! Amenta and this earth are one and the same
place. Religion must bring back to this earth the core of all those meanings
which took their flight from this sphere on the wings of scholarship’s egregious
mislocation of the mythical region of Amenta.
His mistake, as that
of all other scholars, was occasioned by loss of the archaic signification of
"death." Books of the dead, forsooth, must inescapably apply to deceased humans,
and hence their rituals must be designed for the spirits of the departed on
"that other shore." It was thus not possible for anyone under this persuasion
to discern that the Biblical phrase "after death" could mean its precise antithesis,
as commonly viewed; that is, after entry into this life. It could not be seen
that the phrase "deceased in their graves" had already been appropriated by
the sages of Egypt to type the living denizens here on the globe.
Nevertheless the
identification of Amenta with a post mortem state should have been seen at one
glance as inadmissible in the light of a single consideration. Amenta, Hades,
Sheol are always portrayed as the land of gloom, darkness and misery. These
terms are often translated "hell" in the Bible and elsewhere. They are the dismal
underworld. In it souls are imprisoned, captive, cut to pieces, mutilated, buried.
Exactly opposite in description in every religion is the state of life after
decease! It matches the Amenta characterization in no particular, but is its
exact opposite. In it the soul finds release from the dark, heavy, dreary, wretched
conditions that are descriptive of Amenta. It is the land of light, bliss, surcease
from distress, rest and peace! The two portraitures will not mix! The Amenta
of misery and gloom can not be at the same time the Happy Isles, the Aarru-Hetep
and the asphodel meads! If to enter the body is to undergo captivity, then to
leave it is to regain freedom, not to enter Amenta. Surely in this confusion
of two worlds of diametrically opposite classification our savants are convicted
of the most amazing want of acumen in reaching conclusions preposterously out
of line with the data of scholarship. Massey should have been enlightened by
what he wrote in this passage: (Page 194)
"Except
when lighted up by the sun of night, Amenta was the land of darkness and the
valley of the shadow of death. It remained thus, as it was at first, to those
who could not escape the custody of Seb, the god of earth, ‘the great annihilator
who resideth in the valley.’"
If Amenta was the
place where the god of earth detained souls in darkness, its localization on
earth would seem to be incontrovertibly indicated. Or was not the god of earth
on earth? We might expect a god to inhabit his own kingdom, the one over which
he ruled.
Osiris, king of the
land of the dead, is denominated "lord of the shrine which standeth at the center
of the earth." (Rit., Ch. 64.) Massey speaks of "the human Horus"--and Horus
was in Amenta. Humans exist only on the earth. The earth must be Amenta, then.
He writes again that the drama "from which scenes are given in the Hebrew writings,
as if these things occurred or would occur upon the earth, belongs to the mysteries
of the Egyptian Amenta, and only as Egyptian could its characters ever be understood."
The scenes in Hebrew scriptures are drawn largely from the early Egyptian Mysteries,
which typified cosmic and racial history under the forms of dramatic ritual.
But they were not events of either Egyptian or Hebrew objective history. They
did not "occur" anywhere on earth, but they portrayed the interior meaning of
all that did occur on earth. The events were not here, but their meaning was.
They were not occurrence factually, but the key to all occurrence. Massey thought
the myths must be veridically true in (his) Amenta, since they were not objectively
true on earth. He caught half the truth only. The myths were only symbolic language
telling human dullness of mind what life meant. The moment the myths are alleged
to have taken place in heaven or anywhere else, that moment superstition begins
to stalk into the counsels of religion. Nothing could occur in Amenta as a place
distinct from this earth, since it was a mythopoetic name for earth itself.
But the sad part
of Massey’s story and the reason it is important for us to scrutinize his mistake
is that it is the story of a whole race’s deception for sixteen centuries! The
localization of Amenta in heaven instead of on earth has defeated the whole
purpose of religion for ages. And no pen or tongue will ever record the monstrous
fatuity involved in the spectacle of a race looking into the wrong world and
waiting with sanctified stupidity for the fulfillment of values that have slipped
(Page 195) by
them ungrasped all the while! When religion gave up its effort to realize values
in the life here and fixed despairing eyes on heaven, it betokened the decay
of primal human virtue and a sinking back into mystical fetishism. Came the
Greek "loss of nerve" and the turning from earth to heaven for the realization
of hopes ground to dust on earth. And this shift of philosophical view left
the ground of culture lie fallow, and bred the rank growth that covered the
whole terrain of the Dark Ages. There is needed no other warrant for the extension
of the material of this chapter to some length. As things have turned out, it
may well be that true location of the Egyptian Amenta, instead of being a mere
point in academic scholarship, is the critical item in the life of culture today.
The collapse of true religion is ever marked by its turning for its real experience
from earth to mystical heavens.
Scholars have not
sufficiently or capably reflected on the significant fact that ancient sacred
books or Bibles have been largely Books of the Dead. The obvious glaring peculiarity
of this fact has never seemed to occur to students. It should from the first
have provoked wonder and curiosity that the sages of antiquity would have indited
their great tomes of wisdom in such a form as to serve as manuals in the life
to come, and not as guides for the life lived in the sphere in which the books
were available! Only the heavy tradition that religion was a preparation for
a life to come, instead of a way of life here, could have stifled this natural
reaction to a situation that is odd enough in all conscience. It is no slight
or inconsequential thing that Budge writes in one sentence of ". . . religious
texts written for the benefit of the dead in all periods . . ." (of Egyptian
history), without the least suspicion that he was penning an astonishing thing.
It had been ponderously assumed by scholarship that the ancient sages were more
concerned with the hereafter and the next world than with life down here. How
the march of history would have swung into different highways had the world
known that we living men were those "dead" for whom the sagas were inscribed
by the masters of knowledge! And what must be the sobering realization for present
reflection of the fact that the primeval revelation given to early races for
the guidance and instruction of all humanity has missed entirely the world for
which it was intended!
The scene of critical
spiritual transactions is not "over there" in spirit land, but here in this
inner arena of man’s consciousness. (Page 196) Life’s accounts
do not remain suspended during our active experience on earth, to be closed
and settled when the exertion is over. We are weaving the fabric and pattern
of our creation of ourselves when we are awake on earth, not when we are at
repose in ethereal heavens. The droning cry of lugubrious religionism for centuries
has been to live life on earth merely as the preparation for heaven. But there
is no logic in the idea of making preparation for rest! It is the other way
around: rest is a preparation for more work. The positive expression of life
is the exertion of effort to achieve progress. Rest is just the cessation of
the effort, and needs no preparation. The character of our effort may, to be
sure, determine the nature of our rest, yet one should say, rather, its completeness.
Rest is in some degree correlative with the effort. Still the logic is indefeasible,
that we work to achieve our purposes, and not to gain rest. The presumption
that this life is of minor consequence and has value only as the steppingstone
to another where true being is alone achieved, is one facet of that enormous
fatuity of which we are holding orthodox indoctrination guilty. It is the last
mark of the miscarriage of primal truth in the scriptures that its meaning and
application have been diverted from that world it was intended to instruct,
and projected over into another where its code can have no utility whatever.
The offices of religion have fled to heaven, and must be brought back to earth.
This return can be effected only by the right interpretation of the term "the
dead" and the true location of Amenta, the scene of the judgment, hell, purgatory
and the resurrection, and the seat of all evolutionary experience.
Massey asserts that
"the nether earth was the other half of this" and that the "Gospel history has
been based upon that other earth of the Manes being mistaken for the earth of
mortals." But he errs on both counts. For the "other half of this" life is lived
in a sphere which all faiths have located above this one, and not nether to
it. The spirit world can in no way be localized as under our world. His second
statement misses truth through the fact that the events in the life of the Manes
are not, as he supposes, actual transactions in the afterdeath life of the spirit,
but are only allegorical depictions of the soul’s history in this life.
But he makes a point
of great moment, worthy of transcription, when he states that the miracles of
Jesus were not possible as objective events: (Page 197)
"They
are historically impossible because they were pre-extant as mythical representations
. . . in the drama of the Mysteries, that was as non-historical as the Christmas
pantomime. The miracles ascribed to Jesus on earth had been previously assigned
to Iusa, the divine healer, who was non-historical in the pre-Christian religion.
Horus, whose other name is Jesus, is the performer of the ‘miracles’ which are
repeated in the Gospels; and which were first performed as the mysteries in
the divine nether-world. But if Horus or Iusa be made human on earth, as a Jew
in Judea, we are suddenly hemmed in by the miraculous, at the center of a maze
with nothing antecedent for a clue; no path that leads to the heart of the mystery,
and no visible means of exit therefrom. With the introduction of the human personage
on mundane ground, the mythical inevitably becomes the miraculous; thus the
history was founded on the miracles, which are perversions of the mythology
that was provably pre-extant."
It was in these discernments
that Massey rose to heights of clear vision and made a contribution to the cause
of religious sanity that can not be rated too highly. This passage is a clear
and courageous declaration of the long-lost truth of the matter. He performed
a great service in discrediting the myths as history; but by thrusting them
over into a purely suppositious world as alleged realities in the "eschatology,"
he committed his costly blunder.
It was into Amenta
that both Horus and Jesus descended to preach to the souls in prison. Horus’
object in making the descent was to utter the words of his father to the lifeless
ones. So in the Pistis Sophia Jesus passed into Amenta as the teacher of the
great mysteries. It is said in this Gnostic work: "Jesus spake these words unto
his disciples in the midst of Amenta." [ Mead’s Translation, p. 394.
]Moreover a special title is assigned to Jesus in Amenta. He is called Aber-Amentho;
"Jesus, that is to say, Aber-Amentho," is a formula several times repeated.
Aber means lord or ruler; so that again Jesus and Horus are exactly matched
in title.
If Jesus delivered
his discourses to his disciples "in Amenta," all question of where this hidden
land is located should be settled forever. For unless all Gospels are accounts
of the doings of wraiths in a spectral underworld, as even Massey suggests,
we are bound to suppose that their transactions, historical or mythical, transpired
on earth.
The hazy character
of current Egyptological scholarship is notably manifest in a passage from Budge
dealing with the location of the Tuat. It is clearly given in the Ritual as
the gate of entry to (Page 198) the underworld.
But Budge gives it as "the name of a district or region, neither in heaven nor
upon earth, where the dead dwelt and through which the sun passed during the
night." Where else the Tuat might be, if neither in heaven nor on earth, deponent
saith not. In another place (Egyptian Literature, Vol. I) he defines the Tuat
once more. "Tuat is a very ancient name for the Other World, which was situated
either parallel to Egypt, or across the celestial ocean which surrounded either
world." This goes far to prove that the science of Egyptology has been but a
blind groping amid ideas utterly uncomprehended by the "learned" men in the
field. Indeed Budge himself has penned what may be called his own "confession"
on this score. For its downright candor and its general importance, it is quite
worthy of insertion:
"Is it true that
the more the subject of Egyptian religion and mythology is studied the less
is known about them? The question is, however, thoroughly justified and every
honest worker will admit that there are at the present time scores of passages
even in such a comparatively well-known compilation as the Book of the Dead
which are inexplicable, and scores of allusions to a fundamentally important
mythological character of which the meanings are still unknown." (Gods of the
Egyptians, Vol. I.)
The sun passing through
the Tuat depicted the divine soul as passing through its incarnation, which
being in the darkness of the body was charactered as the "dark night of the
soul." As it entered the gate of Amenta, called the Tuat, it crossed the horizon
line dividing the region of spirit or heaven from earth or embodiment, and there
it stood in the twilight. Budge says that "the Tuat was a duplicate of Egypt,"
laid out in nomes, with a river valley and other similar features. This should
further identify it with our earth.
In Amenta the soul
was said to receive a new heart shaped "by certain gods in the nether world
according to the deeds done in the body whilst the person was living on earth."
Here again is confusion and a missing of the intent. The award of a new heart
is not made like that of a prize on graduation day. The larger meaning is that
the whole long experience of many lives creates a new heart, which is the resultant
of the transformation of nature that is gradually accomplished by the whole
process. It is quite impossible to draw intelligible meaning from the scriptures
if we limit our survey to a single span of earth life as a prelude to an infinite
"eternity" in its wake. Reason forbids (Page 199) our
conceding to the actions of a single life on earth sufficient moment to fix
the destiny of a soul forever. Ancient theology rested on no such irrational
presumption.
Many statements aver
that the soul passes into Amenta at death. Massey felt sure that this clinched
his location of Amenta in the ghost world. He did not dream that the "death"
the ancients spoke of brought the soul here instead of taking it away. The soul’s
statement that it came "to overthrow mine adversaries upon the earth" should
have enlightened him. The soul descends here to battle the lower nature, the
only adversary contemplated in the whole range of holy writ.
The attendants of
the soul in its incarnational descent say to it (Ch. 128): "We put an end to
thy ills through thy being smitten to earth"--"in death," Massey himself adds.
But not even this brought discovery to his mind. The following is highly indicative
also:
"From beginning to
end of the Ritual we see that it is a being once human, man or woman, who is
the traveler through the underworld. . . ." [Ancient Egypt, the Light
of the World, p. 210. ]
Even though the Ritual
assigned to this underworld pilgrim all human characteristics, scholars still
have missed the hint that he was the human. Later texts give to the Manes in
Amenta all the traits and features of the earth mortal.
The solar god in
Amenta is addressed as "thou who givest light to the earth." This again is definite
localization on earth. It was the sun-god who "tunneled the mount of earth and
hollowed out Amenta,"--mistaken for two operations when they are of course one
and the same. The sun-god’s "boring through the earth" was one of the tropes.
Instruction is derived
from noting how Massey’s erroneous idea entangled him in the following passage:
"The lower paradise
of two is in the mount of earth, also called the funeral mount of Amenta. [Identification
again.] The departed are not born immortals in that land; immortality is conditional.
They have to fight and strive and wrestle with the powers of evil to compass
it." [Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 374. ]
His own exegesis
convicts him of shallow thinking here. For he has stated repeatedly that the
soul enters his spectral Amenta with character already formed by "the deeds
done in the body." His Amenta could not be the arena of moral conflict or fight
to win immortality. (Page 200)
He has
indeed called it "the earth of eternity." It is too late to writhe and wrestle
for moral victory when that "Amenta" is entered. The earth is the one and only
theater of spiritual struggle. So he errs in reiterating:
"The world-to-be
in the upper paradise was what they made it by hard labor and by purification
in Amenta." [Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 415. ]
Massey’s mistake,
in common with that of much general religious opinion on these matters, lies
in his affirming that after the termination of life in the body the soul first
descends into Amenta, then later rises into Paradise. This flies in the face
of all basic postulation of theology itself. The soul descends in coming to
earth, and there is no lower region left into which it can further descend on
quitting the body. Its incarnation in flesh drags it down, its release at decease
lets it free to return upward. The false downward direction assigned to the
soul on leaving earth is a perversion of true original conception due to the
loss of the meaning of the term "death" in world religion. Profound philosophical
insight corroborates the instinctive unconditioned idea which rises in connection
with physical death, that the soul when released begins its ascent to celestial
habitat. Only perverted theology inculcated the thought of further descent when
the war between flesh and mind is over. The dissipation of that idea is ample
justification for this chapter. Another sentence pictures his entanglement in
the net:
"The sub-terrestrial
paradise was mapped out for the Manes to work in, and work out their salvation
from the ills of the flesh and the blemishes of the life on earth."
But how can he call
this dark, murky, dismal underworld of sub-terrestrial life a "paradise"? In
no religion is paradise pictured as a gloomy and forbidding place. This obsession
of his, that the soul must first go down into a region of agony and bloody sweat
and fiery torture after separation from the body and be purged of its earthly
sins before it can rise into paradise, warrants all this dissertation upon it
because it is the delusion of millions.
It is conceivable
and admissible that the soul upon release from body may need a period of time
to throw off some heavier portions of its clinging earthly mires, before it
can return to the highest place of purity. But in all reason it must be contended
that the locale of such (Page 201) a
stage must be above, not below, the earth life. If the soul lingers a while
on a level of purgation after life here, it is at least on a plane one step
higher than this.
The general commitments
of this whole discussion are of sufficient importance to excuse a general critique
of the pious theory that life equalizes the balance of her forces by having
us commit error in one world and do penance or make atonement in another. Almost
universal as is the idea, there is little foundation for it in the great systems
of early racial instruction. It is an excrescence on the body of saner teaching.
We must reap as we
sow. "He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption." Half
the world has been hypnotized with the belief that mankind can atone in an ethereal
world for "deeds done in the body." Perfect justice would obviously require
that we return to the same world in which acts were committed to square the
Karmic accounts engendered by them. To work out our salvation from the ills
of the flesh, the soul must at least be where flesh is! If we are to erase the
blemishes of earth life, we must return to those conditions which constituted
the nature of the problem in the first instance. In spirit world the problem
is no longer present; it has been dissolved with matter. If we break the dishes
in the kitchen we can hardly atone by singing in the parlor. How it is presumed
by an eccentric theology that we can work out concrete problems in a world where
concreteness has been dissolved, is not at all easy to see. Those who plan to
win the unfought battles of spiritual life from a bower in Paradise had better
take counsel with the ancient wisdom. There is no heavenly "peace without victory,"
or a victory without St. Paul’s long fight. The arcane science tells modern
ignorance why we are on earth. If there was some sufficient primal necessity
for our coming to wrestle with flesh and sense in the first instance, then it
must be essential that we continue to come until these forces and natures are
overcome and raised. The wisdom of civilizations already hoary in Egypt’s time
is back of that pronouncement, and it is back of no other. The static angelic
immortality of the Christians, the "eternal spiritual progress in heaven" of
the Christian Scientists, Spiritualists and other cultists, find their rebuke
and their correction in the venerable knowledge of the ancient sages.
The divine word or
the Logos "is to be made truth in the life lived (Page 202) on
earth, so that the spirit when it entered the hall of judgment, was, as it were,
its own book of life, written for the all-seeing eye." This is magnificent truth
that Massey states; but how infinitely more meaningful it becomes when it is
known that the hall of judgment entered by the spirit to reap the fruits of
former action and amend its ways, is not a spirit plane after death, but this
present "underworld," to which it will return, after a rest, to face the further
issues involved in its evolution. Returning here again and again, the soul brings
its own record book of life with it, written in its own character. Character
can be built nowhere else than on earth. No religion has ever said that we would
be judged for deeds done in the spirit world! We are asleep then and inactive,
and making no Karma, as the East phrases it. As St. Paul says, sin is lying
dormant until incarnation again brings the moral agent, the soul, into subjection
to the body of sense, when "sin springs to life."
The title of one
of the chapters of the Ritual is: "Of introducing the mummy into the Tuat on
the day of burial." This becomes absurd if the mummy is the corpse and the Tuat
a spectral realm of wraiths. No more than that a man can take his gold watch
with him to heaven could a mummy be introduced into Massey’s and Budge’s Tuat!
The burial is the advent of the "mummified" soul or Karast into its coffin-case
of the physical body.
Elsewhere Massey
equates "the pillar of earth" with "the Tat of Amenta" and still fails to see
identification. In another connection he writes:
"Thus we can identify
Eve or Chavvak, as Kefa or Kep, the Great Mother, with Adam or Atum in the Garden
of Amenta." [Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 455. ]
Were not Adam and
Eve on earth?
A striking pronouncement
in the Papyrus of Ani should have awakened true intelligence in his mind: "The
soul, or Manes, makes the journey through Amenta in the two halves of sex."
Where are there male and female sex distinctions save on earth? And one wonders
how the scholar could have written the following and failed to see the basis
of identity suggested:
"The mortal on earth
was made up of seven constituent parts. The Osiris in Amenta had seven souls,
which were collated, put together and unified to become the ever-living one."
(Page 203)
But all
students of ancient literature are aware that earth was the place where the
collecting and unifying of the seven constituent souls of man were accomplished.
Again a most direct hint of the truth was ignored by the savants. Also Greek
metaphysical science asserts that the soul came down through nine stages "and
became connected with the sublunary world and a terrene body, as the ninth and
most abject gradation of her descent." [Taylor: Ancient Egypt, the Light
of the World, p. 105. ] Here is philosophical testimony that negates
the existence of any hell or underworld below life in the body. Any observer
of human life knows that it is possible for the soul to fall to the most abject
baseness while in the body. We are in the lowest of the hells - Amenta
Again and again the
texts say that Amenta is the dwelling of Seb, the god of earth.
Massey states that
in the resurrection "man ascended from the earth below, or from below the earth."
The first point of departure is correctly placed; but the alternative, meant
to be an appositive, is ruled out of court. Man was never below the earth.
In the Jewish scriptures
twelve sons of Jacob go down into Egypt for corn; in the Book of Amenta twelve
sons of Ra make a journey toward the entrance to Amenta, represented as a gorge
between two mountains, heaven and earth, and they go down into the lower Egypt
of the twelve sons of Ra make a journey toward the entrance to Amenta, represented
as a gorge between two mountains, heaven and earth, and they go down into the
lower Egypt of the mythos. All this is figurative for the descent of the twelve
legions of angels of light (sons of Ra, the Light-God) upon this planet. These
are the true prototypes of the twelve tribes of Israel, to whom the Eternal
as recorded in one of the prophetic books of the Old Testament, before their
descent, calls: "The underworld awaits you with eager joy. It watches with open
jaws to receive you." (Moffatt Trans.) In the Egyptian this is matched by the
statement that "the reptile, or dragon, ‘eternal devourer’ is his name (Ch.
17), lurks and watches in the ‘bight of Amenta’ for its prey." The "bight of
Amenta" accurately matches the "recess of earth" in the Greek terminology. In
another form of typology the twelve are called "the twelve reapers of the harvest
on earth, which was reaped in Amenta by Horus and the twelve." [Ancient
Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 709. ]If the spiritual harvest was
reaped "on earth" and "in Amenta," earth and Amenta must be the same place.
Massey places the
habitat of those "people that sat in darkness" and who saw a great light, in
Amenta. When Horus descends to them to bring the divine light, he is declared
to "descend from heaven to the (Page 204) darkness
of Amenta as the Light of the World." How could he be the light of the world
if he did not come to the world? It is our earth, surely, and this is once more
equated with Amenta.
When Satan takes
Jesus into a high mountain for his trial (against the powers of matter) it was
a place whence "all the kingdoms of the earth could be seen."
Horus in his coming
is said to kindle a light in the dark of death for the soul "or spiritual image
in Amenta." But he came to earth to bring light. When he arrived at the outer
door of Amenta in his rising Horus says: "I arrive at the confines of earth."
Says Massey himself: "He was to be the light of the world in the mortal sphere."
And when Horus comes to give the breath of life to the inert Manes in Amenta
and delivers his message, it is declared in the Rubric (to Ch. 70): "If this
scripture is known upon earth, he (the Osiris) will have power to come forth
to day and walk upon the earth among the living."
An important link
in the chain of evidence is the statement that the seven principles or vehicles
that were integrated in one organism to form perfect man "were all believed
to come into existence after death." [Budge: Introduction to the Book
of the Dead, p. xc. ]But as the khat or physical body was one of them,
and it was incontestably dropped from association with the others after death,
the phrase "after death" must here be taken in the peculiar theological sense
delineated in this analysis. For only after the death and burial in body could
the god begin the work of wedding the seven principles into an aggregate harmony.
We are now put in position to grasp the works that take place "after death."
For in the light of the new-old meaning of "death" all the experiences dramatized
as occurring after bodily demise can be seen as falling within, not outside
of, the limits of earthly life. Physical birth here is the beginning of that
"death" and the events of life thus come "after (the beginning of) death." Even
that redoubtable verse in the Bible, "It is given unto man once to die, and
after that the judgment," does not overrule the exegesis here advanced. The
integration of the seven constituent principles in man can not be carried on
without the khat in a spirit-Amenta.
In describing the
judgment of Ani (the Manes-soul) in Amenta, Budge writes: "Ani is here depicted
in human form and wearing garments and ornaments similar to those which he wore
on earth." (Page 205) To explain
this, to him, odd phenomenon, Budge weaves an intricate conjecture that
"the body which he
has in this hall of judgment can not be the body with which he had been endowed
on earth, and we can probably understand that it is his spiritual body, wearing
the white robes of the beatified dead in the world beyond the grave, that we
see."
But what more natural
than that the hierophants should portray the personage in the drama representing
the human in the likeness of the human? The scrolls of old Egypt depicted Ani
in human form and dress because it was to him as a human being that the meaning
of the drama applied. Budge (and all others) first allocates the trial of the
deceased to the nondescript astral world and then wonders why the human character
is represented as human! If the pundits will have it that the Amenta in which
the judgment trial takes place is the realm of flitting specters, they will
have to contrive as best they can to solve the perplexities of Egyptian procedure
created by their own preconceptions. But if they will follow the indicated guidance
of the symbology employed, they will find their difficulties obviated as if
by a touch of magic. For if Amenta is our earth, then Ani may be expected to
appear as the typical human, with flesh, complexion and ornaments to match,
and a little clothing if needed!
The text says of
Teta: "This Teta hath broken forever his sleep in his dwelling which is upon
earth." This assures us that the Amenta sleep takes place upon our earth.
Using "day" in the
sense of incarnation, another text reads: "Thou appearest upon the earth each
day," under the figure of the rising sun, of course.
Another chapter title
(132) in the Book of the Dead gives a clue that is inerrant: "The chapter of
causing a man to come back to see his house upon earth." And in the Saitic Recension
the "house" is said to be in the underworld. The two are then equated.
Another chapter (152)
gives a quite illuminative title: "Of building a house upon the earth." As this
"house" is the temple which Jesus said he would re-erect "in three days," and
is the central structure of all Masonry, it is important to note that its erection
takes place on earth.
"I died yesterday,
but I come today," exclaims the Manes (Ch. 179). (Page 206) "He
sitteth as a living being in Amenta," affirms another verse. These do not sound
like the expressions of the real defunct.
Budge tells us that
the duty of supplying meat, drink and apparel to the "dead" was deputed to Anup,
Keb and Osiris. Anup was the guide of souls in the underworld; Keb (Seb) was
the god of earth; Osiris was the ruler of the kingdom of the dead. All three
distinctly locate the region of death on this globe.
The following from
Budge is noteworthy: [Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, II, p. 144.
]
"For the goddess
(Taht-I-em-hetep) adds, Amenti is a place of stupor and darkness, and death
calleth every one to him, gods and men, and great and little are all one to
him; he seizeth the babe as well as the old man. Yet [Budge adds] the Egyptians
did not [Italics are Budge’s. ]live wantonly, as if this life
were a preparation for a gloomy death. They lived in expectation of passing
into a region of light and glory."
Here is powerful
confirmation of the contention that the Egyptians could not have regarded the
gloomy and darksome Amenta as the region of life after death, and that the soul
ascended to realms of glory and brightness on leaving the body instead of descending
into the scholars’ purgatory--Amenta. The Egyptians were taught in the Mysteries
that this life was the Amenti of stupor and darkness, and out of it they would
pass to rest and brighter scenes in the empyrean. Budge supposes the call of
"death" to be from the earth to heaven, when it is from heaven to earth, on
the thesis here established. The call of death was the summons to bright angelic
spirits to enter the life in body. It was St. Paul’s "command." No wonder the
noted Egyptologist has to register some incomprehension over the fact that the
Egyptians were cheery in the face of passing at death into what he supposed
was the fearsome Amenta. Pluto’s rape of Proserpine should have enlightened
him. The Grim Reaper calls all souls, when ready for the human trial, into the
kingdom of "death." The other Egyptian designation for death is notable: "‘Devourer
of Millions of Years’ is his name." This would indicate the total cycle of incarnations
to be of great duration, which indeed all esoteric teaching asserts it to be.
And still more significant is another title given him: "His name is either Suti
(Sut) or Smam-ur, the Earth-soul." There is no escaping the invincible evidence:
to die is to live on earth.
There are not wanting
forthright statements from the Egyptians (Page 207) themselves
which should prove conclusive as to the point under discussion. Massey himself
gives one of them:
"In the inscriptions
on the sarcophagus of Seti the earth is used as equivalent to Amenti and opposed
to heaven." [The Natural Genesis, I, p. 525.]
Yet he did not see
that this inscription was destructive of his own interpretation. He says further:
"Also the sun descending
into the underworld is thus addressed: ‘Open the Earth! traverse the Hades and
the Sky! Ra, come to us!"
If now mundane life
be found to be the seat of all human experience and human meaning, what must
be made of the Biblical adjuration not to lay up treasures on earth? If this
life is the scene and theater of destiny, why should it be ignored and scorned?
A part of the answer
is that, to be sure, values are not held here in permanency. Obviously they
could not be, if the bodies through which they are implemented disappear. But
neither are they enjoyed forever in the spiritual existence which the soul has
in the interim between lives. But the great and momentous question then arises:
if they abide in perpetuity neither on earth nor in heaven, where are they preserved?
The answer is: in the inner spiritual entity of the man wherever he goes; it
is his permanent possession and he takes it with him always. It is his, whether
in or out of the body, as St. Paul says. But - and this is the item of final
import for man - though the gains of evolving life are not held on earth in
perpetuity, it is on earth that they are won! And this knowledge is the sum
and substance of philosophy. The soul comes to earth to win its pearl of great
price in the depths of what is called the great sea of mortal life.
The scholar’s thesis
that religious texts were written for the benefit of the dead is the dire result
of the complete reversal of the meaning of ancient typology. All the offices
of poetry vindicate the claim that imagery uses the less real to depict the
more real; a natural process to depict a spiritual one; a fairy tale to portray
the deepest living realities. But a perverted theology used the real to depict
the unreal. As to the mummy, current misconception holds that its preservation
was to suggest an absolutely unreal future for the defunct body that could have
no future and for the soul that as certainly could not return to it. On (Page
208) the contrary,
the symbolism centering about the mummy, an entirely insignificant and unreal
thing, was an elaborate device to impress on living humanity the far more real
experience of the immortal self interred in the coffin of the fleshly body,
but immortalized there.
The Books of the
Dead should be pondered by the Western world with a new intensity. For with
the new canon of interpretation laid down in the present work to guide our thinking,
the title will yield a stunning realization of the catastrophic blunder of sixteen
centuries of theological blindness. And flashing through awakened intelligence
will dawn that benign understanding that religious scripts were meant for human
guidance through this benighted land of the dead, the only Amenta, Sheol, Hades,
Tophet or underworld ever contemplated by the original framers of the grand
mythos. And not the less impressive will be that philosophical recognition,
at last as at first, that man is himself the mummy, "dead" on earth, but preserved
to immortality by the injection of the Amrit or Soma juice of the Christ nature.
(Page 209)
Chapter
XI
DISMEMBERMENT
AND DISFIGUREMENT
The answer to the
riddle of the generally feeble pulse of religion in the modern age has been
compounded out of the material adduced in the preceding chapters. But there
are many distinct doctrinal items the corruption of the significance of which
is a strong ancillary cause of the reduced power of ancient faith, and one of
these can now be enunciated. In the light of extended exposition we shall be
able to see why it was that the gods’ descent into our realm, heralded by angel
hosts as the event of supreme omen thus far in the history of the globe, has
failed to bring to every mortal the climactic joy it was designed to release.
It will be seen why the celestial tidings proclaimed of old to bring an era
of peace and goodwill to all men have stirred us so faintly. A false theology
has stepped in between the supernal messengers and the minds of the sons of
earth to dull the thrill of the "good news." On the day of the Advent heaven’s
arches rang with the proclamation of peace and amity among men on the basis
of the fact that a fragment of divinity had been lodged in the holy of holies
of the temple of each human body. Emanuel had come to dwell with man. But the
exuberant joyousness of all mortal hearts over the event has been clogged. No
longer the substance but only the shadow of the truth remains to kindle Yuletide
ecstasy. The allegory of the birth in the stable or cave was devised to keep
mankind in exultant memory of its divinity. Alas! It speaks no more of our divinity.
It extols the godly nature of but one. The paeans of sacred hilarity that are
raised for the birth of our Savior are appropriate and efficacious only as that
Savior stands as symbol of the glorious birth within ourselves. Long ago Angelus
Silesius, a Christian mystic, admonished Christendom: (Page 210)
"Though Christ
a thousand times in Bethlehem be born,
But not within
thyself, thy soul will be forlorn;
The cross
on Golgotha thou lookest to in vain
Unless within
thyself it be set up again."
If the birth of the
god in each individual heart is not the interior meaning of the Nativity, then
we celebrate the event to no purpose. No amount of adoration accorded to a newborn
king in Judea will avail to redeem a single wayward heart if the Christ Child
is not eventually domiciled in the breast of the individual. The King of Righteousness
must be cradled in the manger of each human self ere the myth can work its magic
in the world.
This miscarriage
of the vital significance of the event has come about entirely through the desuetude
of the doctrine that may be denominated by the Greeks’ philosophical term, the
god’s dismemberment. The reconstruction of pristine wisdom can not be encompassed
without the rehabilitation of this great doctrine. Sunk entirely out of sight,
its restoration to its integral office in the body of theology will enable that
science to function again with the semblance of its former power.
For the god came
to earth not in his entirety, not in his single deific unity, but torn into
hosts of fragments, grouped in twelve principal divisions. How could he hope
to enter every mortal life, to tabernacle in every breast, if he came as one
unit? This is just the mistake that Christian doctrinism made, fatal to humanity
at large. It is a matter of simple logic. To be the divine guest in every human
life he had to suffer fragmentation into as many portions as there were to be
mortal children for him to father, in order that each might possess a share
of his nature. This procedure was necessitated by the conditions extant. The
terms under which the law of incubation operates require that the forces of
life on any plane must take rootage in the soil of the kingdom below, as the
sheer seeds of their own capabilities, and fragment their unity by division
to accommodate their higher potencies to the lesser capacities of the lower
organisms. These could not carry the heavier voltage of life in its unitary
volume on the plane above. Man on earth could never implement and incorporate
the full power of heaven. The embodiment of superior force in less capacious
vehicles is accomplished by the partition of that upper unity into fragments,
after the analogy of the oak tree in its annual production of a thousand embryonic
units of its potential nature, each of which, when incubated in the mothering
womb of the soil below it, is capable of regenerating its dying (Page 211) parent.
And so every divine son of God raises his Father from the dead, as did Jesus
and Horus. The god in man can not move across the dividing line between the
kingdoms, stepping from the divine level down into the human, without suffering
a dismantling of his integrity and a partitioning of his "body" into a multitude.
He must experience a diminution of his intellectual genius analogous to what
a human mind would suffer if it was to be incorporated in the brain of a dog.
And Daniel does say this very thing! "An animal’s mind shall be given unto him."
Only a portion of the god’s intellectual light, and that reduced in strength
and luminosity, could function in the brain mechanism of animal man. In short,
the gods could not transplant their full and mature selfhood into man, but only
the seeds of its next cycle of growth. Indeed all projection of deity outward
into matter is in embryonic form. Divine thought is sent out to take root in
matter, there to have its cycle of new growth. The analogy of the oak and its
acorns leaves nothing wanting for understanding of the evolutionary method.
And it clarifies for us the incarnation, as being the planting, germinating,
budding and flowering in mortal life, of the seed-germ of divinity. Jesus is
the embryonic deity, born in the crib or crypt of man’s mortal nature.
Clement of Alexandria,
describing the sacra of the Mysteries, speaks of those who ignorantly worship
"a boy torn to pieces by the Titans." This was Bacchus, in a part of whose Mystery
ritual the body of the god was represented as torn into pieces by the Titans
and scattered over the earth! It is significant that in the drama the god is
cut into pieces while enticed into contemplating his image in a mirror. Greek
philosophy spoke of the soul’s projecting a similitude of herself into matter.
She was to reproduce a likeness of herself in flesh, for the lower must be formed
in the image of the higher. Man is to reproduce, as the acorn the oak, the image
of his maker. This detail is an intimation that it was the god’s inclination
toward a life of sense, depicted by his bending down (Cf. the fable of Narcissus)
to gaze delightedly at his reflection in the water of generation, that preceded
his fall and divulsion into fragments. Jupiter, hurling his thunderbolts at
the Titans, the forces of elementary nature, committed the members of Bacchus
to Apollo, the Sun-god, that he might properly inter them. The god’s heart,
which had been snatched away by Pallas (the higher mind) during the laceration,
and preserved for a new generation, emerges, (Page 212) and
about it as a nucleus the scattered members are reassembled, and he is restored
to his pristine integrity!
Turning to Egypt
there is found an exactly parallel mythos, which has the god Osiris in place
of the Greek Dionysus. Says Budge:
"Throughout the Egyptian
texts it is assumed that the god suffered death and mutilation at the hands
of his enemies; that various members of his body were scattered about the land
of Egypt; that his sister-wife Isis ‘sought him sorrowing’ and at length found
him; that she fanned him with her wings and gave him air; that she raised up
his body and was reunited with him; that she conceived and brought forth a child
(Horus); and that he (Osiris) became the god and king of the underworld. In
the legend of Osiris as given by Plutarch (De Iside et Osiride) it is said that
he was murdered at the instigation of Typhon or Set, who tore the body into
fourteen pieces, which he scattered throughout the land; Isis collected these
pieces. . . ." [Introduction to the Book of the Dead, p. lxxx. ]
It is hard to think
that this legend or glyph of our evolutionary history has stood in the books
for five thousand years and failed eventually to illuminate the race’s understanding
of its own cosmic situation.
Osiris was not the
only sun-deity whose body suffered dismemberment in the Egyptian pantheon, for
Ptah, an earlier god, shared the same mythic fate. Under his name of Ptah-Sekari
he underwent fragmentation as did Osiris. For "Sekari is the title of the suffering
Ptah, and sekar means to cut; cut in pieces; sacrifice; or, as we have the word
in English, to score or scarify." [Massey: The Natural Genesis, I, p.
108 ff. ]Ptah was said to be the earliest form of God the Father, who
became a voluntary sacrifice in "Egypt," and who, in the name of Sekari, was
the silent sufferer, the coffined one, the deity that opened the nether world
for the Manes. As a solar god he went down into Amenta. There he died and rose
again. Atum, son of Ptah, also became the voluntary sacrifice as the source
of life to mortals. As the "silent Sekari" Ptah was an earlier type of the figure
of Jesus, who was as a lamb dumb before his shearers, and opened not his mouth
against his accusers. The title of Sekari is in fact added to Osiris, as well
as to Ptah, and as Osiris-Sekari he is the dismembered and mutilated mummy in
his coffin. The Speaker in the Ritual cries: "The darkness in which Sekari dwells
is terrifying to the weak." The Egyptian festival of the resurrection, celebrated
every year in the (Page 213) month
Choiak (Nov. 27 to Dec. 26, Alexandrian year) was devoted to the god Osiris-Ptah-Sekari,
"who had been dead and was alive again; cut to pieces and reconstituted with
his vertebrae sound and not a bone of his body found to be broken or missing."
(Cf. the Gospels: "And they brake all his bones." This was the form of the dismemberment,
to be followed by the reconstitution.)
That which applied
to the Osiris-god also applied to "the dead in Osiris." (Cf. the Gospels: "Dead
in Christ.") "They were figuratively cut in pieces as the tangible image of
abstract death." [ Massey: Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p.
154. ]"When the mortal entered Amenta it was in the likeness of Osiris,
who had been bodily dismembered in his death, and who had to be reconstituted
to rise again as the spirit that never died." [Massey: Ancient Egypt,
the Light of the World, p. 479. ]It is certain that the Manes was considered
to have suffered dismemberment like his ensampler Osiris, because it is written
that before the mortal Manes could attain the ultimate state of spirit in the
image of Horus the immortal, he must be put together part by part like Osiris,
the dismembered god. From a divided being he had to be made whole again as Neb-er-ter,
"the god entire." In one phase of the drama the deceased is put together bone
by bone after the model of the backbone of Osiris. The backbone was an emblem
of sustaining power, matching indeed the Tat cross of stability. In the Ritual
(Ch. 102) Horus says: "I have come myself and delivered the god in his dismembered
condition. I have healed the trunk and fastened the shoulder and made firm the
leg." Horus, entering the lower world to seek and to save that which is lost
in the obscurity of matter, says (Ch. 78): "I advance whithersoever there lieth
a wreck in the field of eternity." On their drop into matter, the first episode
in the gods’ mutilation was the loss of their intellectual unity, typified by
the figurative cutting off of their heads. "And the god Horus shall cut off
their heads in heaven where they are) in the form of feathered fowl, and their
hind parts shall be on the earth in the form of animals. . . ." It is even directly
stated that "Ra mutilates his own person" for the benefit of mortals. Thoth
later came and healed the mutilations. As Thoth was the god of knowledge, it
can be seen on what plane of comprehension the mutilation and healing are to
be given meaning. The dismemberment was only the division of unified intellect
into partial vision. The reconstitution of the torn divinity is referred to
in the address to Teta, the "dead" king on earth: "Hail, hail! Rise up, thou
Teta! Thou hast received thy head, (Page 214) thou
hast embraced thy bones, thou hast gathered together thy flesh."
In far India the
Lord of Creation, Prajapati, was represented as having undergone dismemberment.
Likewise Sarasvati. There is no question as to the wide prevalence of the symbol.
Nothing is more shattering
to our modern sense of superiority and condescension with regard to early nations
believed to have been "primitive" and ignorant, than to find in their literary
relics the outlines of some of the grandest conceptions of Platonic or other
high philosophic theory. In a Mexican legend we come upon the idea of the god’s
dismemberment in a striking form. A story portrayed the union of physical man
with a higher spirit under the imagery of mixing a bone with blood. The tale
runs to the effect that the Great Mother of the gods instructs them, in the
creation of man, to go down to Mistlanteuctli, the Lord of Hades, and beg him
to give them a bone or some ashes of the dead, who are with him. These would
represent the lower natural body. Having received this, they were told to sacrifice
over it, sprinkling the blood from their own bodies upon it. This would typify
the impartation of their own divine natures to the mortals. After consultation
they dispatched one of their number, Xolotl, down to Hades. He succeeded in
procuring a bone six feet long (a certain identification with the human body)
from Mistlanteuctli and started off with it at full speed. Wroth at this, the
infernal chief gave chase, causing Xolotl a hasty fall, in which the bone was
broken in pieces. The messenger gathered up in all haste what he could, and
despite the stumble made his escape. Reaching the earth he put the fragments
of bone into a basin and all the gods drew blood from their bodies and sprinkled
it into the vessel. On the fourth day there was a movement among the wetted
bones and a boy lay there before all, and in four days more of bloodletting
and sprinkling, a girl came to life. If the Bible student is inclined to disdain
this myth as profitless, let him turn to Ezekiel (37) and reflect on what he
finds there. For the Biblical fable of the valley of dry bones contains five
or six distinct points of identity with this legend: the operation of the gods
upon the lifeless bones, a noise, a stirring and movement among the bones, a
coming together and eventual constitution of them into living bodies, with flesh
and sinew, and their creation as humans, male and female, as in Genesis.
The early Egyptians
laconically dramatized the doctrine (Page 215) of dismemberment,
but the intellectual Greeks wrote elaborate disquisitions upon its import. It
is set forth by the Platonists with dialectical precision. The doctrine grows
out of the very laws of thought. It is no whimsical speculative fancy. It rests
on a logical necessity. For if life is to proceed from primal unity to manifest
multiplicity and diversity, there is no way for the One to multiply itself save
by an initial division of itself. Life proceeds from oneness and identity of
nature into number and differentiation, and the structure of thought requires
that multiformity arise from unity by partition of that unity. The One must
break himself into pieces, tear himself apart, and this is the meaning of the
mutilations and exsections of the gods. The One must give himself to division.
And with division comes addition of forms, multiplication of units and combinations,
but subtraction of deific power in the divided parts.
Each wave of creative
impulse quivered outward from the central heart of being and, like falling water,
body-blood and tree-sap, was fragmented by the resistance of matter. From plane
to plane the dispersion continued. Wholes were broken into parts, which as wholes
on their own plane went into further partition to plant the field of the next
lower level. With his own inseparable being torn into multiple division, and
each part an integral unit of the total, his life is seminally distributed in
each. He lives in the parts and the parts live in him. The fragments are the
cells of his body. "We are the members of one body, and Christ is the head."
So Greek philosophy states that "each superior divinity becomes the leader of
a multitude, generated from himself." And at last there is the basis for comprehensible
sense in the phrase "the Lord of Hosts." Each deity is the lord of a host, who
are the fragmented children of his own body.
Each unit of division,
when incubated in the lower realm, begins to renew its father’s life. It must
arise and return unto the father’s estate. The son must restore the parent who
has died in him to his former greatness, with something added. He must raise
that which has fallen and redeem that which has been lost. No one shall see
the father save him to whom the son revealeth him. This was the typical function
of Horus in relation to Osiris in Egypt, as it was that of Jesus to God his
Father in the Gospels.
Buried within the
heart of each fragment, then, is the hidden lord of divine life, and from no
one is he absent. He dwells there to be the (Page 216) guide,
the guardian, the comforter and informing intelligence of the organism. He is
the holy spirit, the flame, the ray, the lamp unto our feet. Says St. Paul (I
Cor. 4:7): "For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath
shined in our hearts . . . but we have this treasure in earthen vessels." The
ancients oft termed this presence the daemon or guardian angel, as in the famous
case of Socrates. He is that attendant monitor who stands behind the scenes
of the outer life, instant to bless, ready to save, a never-failing help in
trouble. His counsel is never lacking, if one seeks it or has not previously
stilled its small voice. It reasons with us until many times seven. It abides
within our inner shrine, patiently awaiting the hour of our discovery and recognition
of its presence.
We must take time
to hear the voice of Greek wisdom anent the dismemberment:
"In the first place,
then, we are made up from fragments (says Olympiodorus), because, through falling
into generation, our life has proceeded into the most distant and extreme division;
and from Titanic fragments, because the Titans are the ultimate artificers of
things, and stand immediately next to whatever is constituted from them. But
furthermore, our irrational life is Titanic, by which the rational and higher
life is torn to pieces. Hence when we disperse the Dionysus, or intuitive intellect
contained in the secret recesses of our nature, breaking in pieces the kindred
and divine form of our essence, and which communicates, as it were, both with
things subordinate and supreme, then we become the Titans (or apostates); but
when we establish ourselves in union with this Dionysiacal or kindred form,
then we become Bacchuses, or perfect guardians and keepers of our irrational
life; for Dionysus, whom in this respect we resemble, is himself an ephorus
or guardian deity; dissolving at his pleasure the bonds by which the soul is
united to the body, since he is the cause of a parted life. But it is necessary
that the passive or feminine nature of our irrational part, through which we
are bound to body, and which is nothing more than the resounding echo, as it
were, of soul, should suffer the punishment incurred by descent; for when the
soul casts aside the (divine) peculiarity of her nature, she requires her own,
but at the same time, a multiform body, that she may again become in need of
a common form, which she has lost through Titanic dispersion in matter."
[Taylor: Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, p. 134. ]
"Now we know in part
and we prophesy in part, but when that which is perfect is come, then that which
is in part shall be done (Page 217) away."
Had we held our culture closer to the heart of Greek philosophy we should have
seen the whole of things more clearly. We are the Titans who tore the divine
philosophical fire away from the central altar in the empyrean and scattered
it like sparks amongst the race of mortals. And these Titans, or Satanic hosts,
were those apostates who compounded the felony of stealing divine fire by further
carrying its dispersion into remote depths of matter. Yet they were the agents
of deity to bring salvation, or the purifying, cleansing fire, to man on earth.
They distributed the divine life in fragments among mortals, administering the
cosmic Eucharist of the broken body and shed blood of the gods for a benison
to all humanity. The divine intellectual power, the mind of the god, was divided
amongst us, not, however, with the loss of the total unity of the godhead on
his own plane. Only his lower fragments in body felt their reduction to poverty.
Says Taylor:
And thus much for
the mysteries of Bacchus, which, as well as those of Ceres, relate in one part
to the descent of a partial intellect into matter, and its condition while united
with the dark tenement of body; but there appears to be this difference between
the two, that in the fable of Ceres and Proserpina, the descent of the whole
rational soul is considered; and in that of Bacchus the scattering and going
forth of that supreme part alone of our nature which we properly characterize
by the appellation of intellect." [Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries,
p. 152. ]
In Proclus’ Hymn
to Minerva we have a spirited statement of the unified god-mind, Bacchus, fragmented:
"The Titans fell
against his life conspired;
And with
relentless rage and thirst for gore,
Their hands
his members into fragments tore."
Olympiodorus unfolds
the dialectical thesis in three propositions: (1). It is necessary that soul
place a likeness of herself in body. (2). It is essential that she should sympathize
with this image of herself, as it tends to seek integration with its parent.
(3). "Being situated in a divided nature, it is necessary that she should be
torn to pieces and fall into a last separation," after which she shall free
herself from the simulacrum and rise again to unity. The gods impart their divided
essence to mortals and then the fragments seek to rejoin their parents and be
united again with them in nature. Bacchus pursued his image, (Page 218) formed
in the mirror of matter, and thus was carried downward and scattered into fragments.
But Apollo collected the fragments and restored them to union in the heavens.
If the Bible student
judges all this to be foreign to his interpretation of his Book of Wisdom, let
him consult the nineteenth chapter of Judges, and read the story of the rape
and destruction of the concubine of a man whose name is not given, but described
as "a Levite . . . in the remote highlands of Ephraim," which would seem to
identify him with some higher spiritual principle. The concubine, who left for
her father’s house in a fit of rage, would perhaps correspond to Proserpina,
the detached incarnating soul. The man sought her, and after long dallying with
her reluctant father, started home with her, "from Bethlehem to the remote highlands
of Ephraim." At Gibeah, among the Banjaminites, they lodged over night, and
there the unruly citizens, "certain sons of Belial" (our lower propensities)
attacked the house, forcing the man finally to send out his host’s virgin daughter
and his own concubine to be ravished by the crowd. In the morning he lifted
the concubine’s body on his ass and took her home. Here "he took a knife and
cut up the concubine’s body, limb by limb, into twelve pieces, which he sent
all over the country of Israel, telling his messengers to ask all the inhabitants,
‘Was ever such a crime committed since the Israelites left Egypt?’" Twelve baskets
of fragments in the New Testament miracle; twelve legions of angels ready to
come to Jesus’ assistance in the garden of Gethsemane; twelve stones set in
the midst of the Jordan when Joshua led the Israelites from Amenta into the
Promised Land; twelve fragments of the soul’s dismembered life in the story
in Judges! If the literalist insists that Judges is talking about a concubine
in the flesh, and not a principle of divided intellect in Greek philosophy,
the all-sufficient answer is that he thus keeps the incidents of his Book on
a level where they mean nothing and hold no instruction or appeal for the mind
of man. And the proof of this is that on the level on which he keeps them nobody
pays any attention to them. Only through Greek philosophy can we lift such neglected
allegories to a height of impressive significance.
In the "miracle"
of the Lord’s feeding the five thousand with the loaves and fishes in the Gospel
narrative we have a repetition of the dramatization of the Eucharistic rite
minus only the accompanying statement from the Christ himself that the loaves
were his own body, (Page 219) broken
for the multitude of humans. We have set the stage certainly however, for the
first full and clear comprehension of the meaning of the disciples’ "gathering
up" (the Egyptian reconstitution) twelve baskets of fragments. In multiplying
the bread, he dramatized the doctrine of the dismemberment, which was in twelve
main sections or groups.
But Christian intelligence
is not aware that in the very heart of its own chief rite of formalism this
great doctrine lives in unsuspected completeness. St. Paul makes a specific
announcement of it in I Corinthians (11:23):
"I pass on to you
what I received from the Lord himself, namely, that on the night he was betrayed
the Lord Jesus took a loaf, and after thanking God he broke it, saying, ‘This
means my body broken for you; do this in memory of me."
Here is the fragmentation
of the god announced at the heart of the Christian Eucharist! The body of the
Messiah broken for us! The main symbol in all Christian ritual is the breaking
of a piece of bread into fragments and distributing them out among the communicants!
And all theological acumen has missed the relation of this to Greek Platonism
just because the recital was not explicit enough to state that the Lord’s body
was broken into pieces.
Scholars have long
quarreled over the word translated "broken," and will do so again, doubtless
more violently than before, when the attempt is made to relate its meaning to
the Greek doctrine of dismemberment here suggested. But the quarrel is gratuitous.
There may be dispute about the word, but there can be no dispute about the act
of breaking the bread, which dramatizes the meaning. For Jesus dismembered the
bread as the indisputable outward symbol of the cosmic truth of his fragmented
body of spirit; and to avoid the use of the participle "broken" in the verse
would be a faithless betrayal of the obvious meaning of the text. Here then
is Greek esoteric philosophy functioning on the innermost altar of the Christian
faith!
The entire temple
of Christian theology would be beautified and strengthened if this cardinal
doctrine could once more be adequately envisaged and included in living presentation.
But, the true meaning lost, and the spiritual signification deeply buried under
the outer debris of the myths, the Church has nothing more sublime to offer
(Page 220) its devotees
than the picture of a physical body suffering alleged laceration on a wooden
cross! Such a body could not rise and be reconstituted. But the unit body of
deific virtue, distributed out into myriad earthly vessels of human life, broken
thus and buried piecemeal in the soil of mortal flesh, could be reassembled
and reunited in the increasing brotherhood of humanity. There is no truth in
ancient scripture outside of a spiritual rendering of the material. As soon
as the Church returns to the true original meaning of the "broken body of our
Lord," it may take up again its prime function as nourisher of the souls of
men.
Incarnation brought
dismemberment; but this was not the only form of diminished power and beauty
incurred in the process. The god also suffered many kinds of disfigurement.
Dead and buried in matter, he was typed under a variety of figures representing
his suffering and deformity. The depictions included those of a decrepit old
man, a wizened babe (the mummy-Christ), a maimed, crippled, wounded, dumb, deformed,
disfigured, demoniac, deaf, naked and ugly little child! He was bereft in every
particular. Several of the early Church Fathers, misled by the change from drama
to alleged history, actually described the person of Jesus as not comely and
radiant, but ugly and deformed! This is but one of the many absurdities that
came to light when allegorism was converted over into realism. Some of the disfigurement
material from the Scriptures must be presented here briefly:
"In the Egyptian
mysteries, all who enter the nether world as Manes to rise again as spirits,
are blind and deaf and dumb and maimed and impotent because they are the dead.
Their condition is typified by that of the mortal Horus who is portrayed as
blind and maimed, deaf and dumb, in An-ar-ef, the abode of occultation, the
house of obscurity . . . where all the citizens were deaf and dumb, maimed and
blind, awaiting the cure that only came with the divine healer, who is Horus
of the resurrection in the Ritual, or Khnum, the caster out of demons, or Iu-em-hetep,
the healer, or Jesus in the Gospels, gnostic or agnostic. This restoring of
sight to the blind man, or the two blind men, was one of the mysteries of Amenta
that is reproduced amongst the miracles in the canonical Gospels." [Massey:
Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 814. ]
When Horus, the deliverer,
descends into Amenta he is hailed as the Prince in the City of the Blind; that
is, of the dead who are sleeping (Page 221) in
their prison cells. He comes to shine into their sepulchers and to restore spiritual
sight to the blind on earth. Horus is designated "he who dissipates the darkness
and gives eyes to the gods in obscurity." [ Massey: Ancient Egypt, the
Light of the World, p. 815. ]
"The typical blind
man in Amenta is Horus in the gloom of his sightless condition, as the human
soul obscured in matter, or groping in the darkness of the grave. Sut has deprived
him of his faculties. This is Horus An-ar-ef in the city of the blind."
What becomes of the
Gospel healings and miraculous cures in the light of this antecedent material
in the Egyptian scripts? It is a question momentous for the future of orthodoxy.
There seems to be but one answer open to sincerity: the New Testament "miracles"
are the reproductions of ancient Egyptian religious dramatizations in the Mysteries,
and not actual occurrences.
Horus, prince in
the city of blindness, as his father was king in the realm of the dead, comes
to reconstitute his father whole and entire, and to give lost sight to all those
dead as and in Osiris. The Manes were all blind, and the god had to work a magical
operation on them to restore their sight. We have the Gospels dramatizing the
god’s opening up of intellectual faculty when at the typical age of twelve years
he makes his transformation into the adult. The Egyptian emblem of the hawk’s
head given him at that epoch betokens his restored sight. His eye, stolen from
him by Sut, is then restored. Under the astrological sign of Orion Horus was
typed as the god of the night or dark, the blind god who received sight at dawn.
He describes himself as the mortal born blind and dumb in An-ar-ef, the abode
of occultation, but who in regaining his own sight will likewise open the eyes
of the prisoners in their cells. The circle of the gods rejoices at seeing Horus
take his father’s throne and scepter and rule over the earth, replacing blindness
with spiritual sight.
A most suggestive
portrayal of this condition was hinted at in a calendar published in 1878 at
Alexandria, in which there is recited a tradition that on December 19 "serpents
become blind," and that on March 24 they "open their eyes." (A. Nourse, p. 24).
As the serpent typed here the divine soul, the imagery is readily grasped. One
must connect the story with the yearly astrology to see its full appropriateness.
We read that three months of the year were assigned to the blind serpent or
dragon in the abyss. The three months, as elsewhere three (Page 222) days
and the three kingdoms below the human, figured the period of the god’s burial
in the material worlds. "As Jonas was three days in the whale’s belly, so must
the Son of Man be three days in the bowels of the earth."
Jesus after his baptism
announces his messianic commission to preach "recovery of sight to the blind,"
and healing to them that are bruised. And St. Paul writes that we wait for the
coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, "who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation."
Of Jesus it is written that "to many blind he gave sight," not physical but
spiritual.
The story of Samson,
the luni-solar hero, does not omit the feature of loss of sight, when, as the
god in incarnation, he is shorn of his power and bound helpless. He is eyeless
in Gaza, pitiful and forlorn, like "the blind Orion hungering for the morn"--the
return of the lost light. The Hebrews have a Talmudic tradition that Samson
was lame in both his feet, which was also the status of the child-Horus, who
was pictured as maimed and halt in his lower members, the crippled deity, as
he is called by Plutarch.
Isaiah’s chapter
(61) in which the Manes announces that the Lord has sent him to bind up the
brokenhearted and to open blind eyes, has been noted. But Isaiah has a far more
touching portraiture of the suffering servant in reference to his disfigurement
in chapter 53:
"His visage was
so marred, more than any man,
and his form more than the
sons of men.
Disfigured
till he seemed a man no more,
Deformed
out of the semblance of a man."
Horus bewails the
loss of his eye to Sut who has pierced it, or stolen it. He cries: "I am Horus.
I come to search for mine eyes." In the spring Sut restores the god’s sight.
The mouse, the mole
and the shrewmouse were all employed as symbols of the soul shut up in darkness,
in the crypt of the body. Yet only by such burrowing in the dark underworld
could the soul be transformed into a new and higher stage of life.
Harpocrates, the
Greek-Egyptian god of healing, is traceable to the Egyptian Har-p-khart, who
as a crippled deity was said to be begotten in the dark. The term "khart" signifies
a deformed child, and includes also the idea of speechless. It should not be
overlooked that our own (Page 223) word
"infant," from the Latin, means "speechless!" Har(Horus) -p(the) -khart(speechless
child) was the character depicting the god just born into matter, and not yet
able to manifest or utter "the Word made Truth." One of the supreme features
of Horus’ mission was to open dumb mouths, or to give mouths to the dumb. This
was to cause their lives to express the words of power and truth. Isaiah sings
that "the dumb are to break forth into singing and the lame to leap for joy."
Jesus was silent when accused. This is all to typify the infant god in the flesh,
who has not yet learned to articulate the living reality of spiritual truth.
As the human infant is speechless for an initial period of some two years, so
the god is silent in the expression of his divine nature for a corresponding
period at the beginning of his incarnate nature for a corresponding period at
the beginning of his incarnate sojourn. At the judgment trial vindication for
the Manes was assured if he could assert that he had given bread to the hungry,
speech to the speechless, drink to the thirsty, clothes to the naked and a boat
to him that had suffered shipwreck on the Nile - of life.
A further anthropological
reference of great importance is suggested by the typology of the dawn of speech,
in that it carries an allusion to the opening up of the faculty of speech by
the race with the coming of the gods. Psychology reveals that speech was necessary
for the development of thought. But it is just as rational to say that the power
to think made speech possible.
Deprivation of breath
was another form of typology for "the dead." And with breathing stopped, there
was also the motionless heart. The Osiris says:
"I am motionless
in the fields of those who are dumb in death. But I shall wake, and my soul
shall speak in the dwelling of Tum, the Lord of Annu."
For it was in Beth-Annu
(Bethany) in Egypt, the place of weeping, that Osiris lay in his coffin inert
and motionless. Hence Osiris is portrayed in the likeness of the mummy called
"the breathless one"; also "the god with the non-beating heart." Mummification
set the seal of indestructability on the soul. The god in his advent announces:
"I utter Ra’s words
to the men of the present generation, and I repeat his words to him who is deprived
of breath"--the Manes in Amenta. (Rit., Ch. 36). (Page 224) Multitudes
of crippled people followed Jesus into the mountains and cast themselves at
his feet to be healed. "And he healed them; inasmuch that the multitude wondered
when they saw the dumb speaking, the maimed whole, the lame walking and the
blind seeing." (Matt. 15:29 ff.).
A festival known
as the Hakera was celebrated in Egypt. The name means "fasting" and the festival
terminated the fasting with a feast. It was for the benefit of those who had
been deprived of breath, who were dumb and blind, motionless and inert - in
short, the deceased lying helpless like "wrecks" in the fields of Amenta.
Upon the Gnostic
monuments in the Roman catacombs Jesus is portrayed in one of his two characters,
matching Horus, as the little, old and ugly Jesus; in the other he corresponds
to Horus of the beautiful face. The first is the suffering infant Messiah, the
man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, the despised and afflicted one. As
Jesus in this character was never more than twelve years of age, "Old Child
was his name." In the Pistis Sophia Jesus is again pictured in his two characters,
the first being that of the puny child, the mortal Horus, born of the virgin
mother (nature) as her blind and deaf, her dumb and impubescent child. It was
the human Horus again who was pierced and tortured by Sut in death until the
day of his triumph, when he rose to become king and conqueror in his turn. We
are by this exposition permitted to see the mythical character of Job, the assailed
one, subjected to the assaults of Sut (Satan). Practically all the central figures
of the Old Testament enact the role of the Manes, the soul of buried deity.
In the Orphic Tablets
the dead person is thus addressed: "Hail, thou who hast endured the suffering,
such as thou hadst never suffered before; thou hast become god from man!" One
portion of the Mystery ritual recited the sufferings of Psyche in the underworld
of Pluto and her rescue by Eros, as described by Apuleius (The Golden Ass),
in the cult of Isis. "Almost always," says Dr. Cheetham, speaking of the Mysteries,
"the suffering of a god--suffering followed by triumph--seems to have been the
subject of the sacred drama." [Quoted by Edward Carpenter: Pagan and
Christian Creeds, p. 239. ]The minds of the neophytes were prepared for
the glorious breaking of the light by the preliminary ordeal of darkness, fatigue
and terrors, typical of this earth life. Carpenter [ Pagan and Christian
Creeds, p. 28 (note). ]compares with the wounding of the side of Jesus
an Aztec ceremonial of lighting a holy fire and communicating (Page 225) it
to the multitude from the wounded breast of a human victim, celebrated every
fifty-two years, when the constellation of the Pleiades is at the zenith. (Prescott,
Conquest of Mexico, Bk. I, Ch. 4).
In the Ritual the
Manes cries: "Decree this, O Atum, that if I see thy face, I shall not be pained
by the signs of thy sufferings." In Luke (24:26) it is asked: "Ought not Christ
to have suffered these things and enter into his glory?" And John declares that
in the world we shall have tribulation.
Budge describes a
form of the suffering Messiah:
"Thus the great god
Ra, when bitten by the adder which Isis made, suffered violent pains in his
body, and the sweat of agony rolled down his face, and he would have died if
Isis had not treated him after he revealed to her his hidden name." [Osiris
and the Egyptian Resurrection, I, p. 352. ]
The serpent formed
by the goddess is the lower nature which is made to sting the life of the god
into a coma upon his incarnation. A prayer in the Ritual pleads that the divine
beings do away with the sorrow of the Osiris-Nu, his sufferings and his pains,
and that his ills be removed. Massey draws a composite picture of the god beset
with material limitation:
"This was the Horus
of the incarnation, the god made flesh in the imperfect human form, the type
of voluntary sacrifice, the image of suffering; being an innocent little child,
maimed in his lower members, marred in his visage, lame and blind and dumb and
altogether imperfect." [Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 525.
]
But the most appealing
portrayal of this phase of the Christ experience, save that of the crucifixion
of Jesus, is the picture of the "suffering servant" in Isaiah (Ch. 53). It is
so striking that we must make space for it, in the beautiful language of the
Moffatt translation: (Page 226)
"He was despised
and shunned by men, A man of pain who knew what sickness was;
like one from whom men turn with shuddering, he was despised, we took no heed
of him.
And yet ours was the pain he bore, the sorrow he endured!
We thought him suffering from a stroke at God’s own hand;
yet he was wounded because we had sinned; ‘twas our misdeeds that crushed him;
‘twas for our welfare that he was chastised; the blows that fell to him have
brought us healing.
And the Eternal
laid on him the
guilt of all of us.
He was ill-treated,
yet he bore it humbly, he
never would complain;
Dumb as a
sheep led to the slaughter, dumb
as a ewe before the shearers.
They did
away with him unjustly; and
who heeded how he fell,
torn from
the land of the living, struck
down for sins of ours?
They laid him in
a felon’s grave, and
buried him with criminals,
though he
was guilty of no violence nor
had he uttered a false word.
he shall succeed
triumphantly, since
he has shed his lifeblood,
and let himself
be numbered among rebels,
bearing the
great world’s sins and
interposing for rebellious men."
This is a graphic
depiction of the nature and office of the Christos, and written long before
the appearance of any historical Jesus! The Gospel "life" of Jesus, Isaiah’s
account of the suffering servant, the chronicle of Job’s afflictions, the pre-Christian
Gnostic story of the suffering Christ-Aeon and the description of the pierced,
wounded, crucified Horus of antique Egyptian records, match each other with
unmistakable fidelity.
The diminished glory
of descending Godhood is also portrayed under the figure of disrobing. As the
soul descends from one plane to another she is represented as being divested
of one of her robes of glory at each step. The student of esotericism will see
at once the meaning of this. Each plane clothes the soul with a body of its
proper matter, pneumatikon, psychikon, physikon, or spiritual, psychic, physical.
(Page 227) As the soul steps down the grades of being she takes on a coarser
body, which is equivalent to her losing a more ethereal one, at each landing.
And the incubus of each heavier one yields her a less and less vivid contact
with reality. At last she descends virtually disrobed into the prison and tomb
of the gross body.
In the Ritual (Ch.
71) we are told that in his incarnation Horus, or Iu, the Su, (Iusu, Jesu, or
Jesus) "disrobes himself" to "reveal himself" when he "presents himself to the
earth." The Babylonian goddess Ishtar is said to have made her descent through
seven gates, at each of which she was stripped of one of her robes of glory.
[ Talbot: The Legends of Ishtar; Records of the Past (Vol. I).]Massey
gives us an important point in Comparative Religion in the following:
"The mutilation of
Osiris in his coffin, the stripping of his corpse and tearing it asunder by
Sut, who scattered it piecemeal, is represented by the stripping of the dead
body of Jesus whilst it still hung on the cross, and parting his garments among
the spoilers. ‘For they stripped him and put on him a scarlet robe.’" [Ancient
Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 877. ]
The god sinking into
earthly embodiment is stripped of his finer robes and covered with the scarlet,
red-blooded body of flesh!
In the Ritual (Ch.
172) the text runs:
"Thou puttest on
the pure garment and thou divistest thyself of the apron when thou stretchest
thyself upon the funeral bed. Thou receivest a bandage of the finest linen."
Which is to say,
that on the return, the coarse bodies are thrown off and the robes of radiant
light resumed. And what more apt symbol of the fleshly body than an apron? It
is a garment put on to fend off the grime of earth, to hang between the purity
of spirit and the smudginess of matter!
It is of the utmost
significance that in the Genesis account it is twice said that Adam and Eve
knew they were naked, and that they felt no shame the first time, but were overcome
with shame after their fall into nakedness. The sense is that their first nakedness
came while they were still in the "garden," the celestial paradise, and probably
intimates their freedom from coarse garments of the lower natures. Their later
nakedness came when they had been spiritually stripped, though clothed with
coats of skin, or fleshly vestures. The "shame" arose from the god’s recognition
of his having fallen into a state of comparative (Page 228) degradation
in which he would have to resort to sexual methods of procreation, when hitherto
his life had been renewed by the sheer force of divine will, called kriyashakti
in the East. Paul speaks of this body of our shame, as do Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists
generally. It is the main basis of the widespread ascetic inclination in history.
And the Jesus of the Pistis Sophia tells Salome that his kingdom shall come
when "thou hast trampled under foot the garment of shame" and restored the soul,
split into male and female segments here on earth, to its pristine whole, or
androgyne condition.
In the Ritual the
judgment is designated as that of the clothed and naked. If the Manes appeared
naked before the judges, it meant that he had not overcome the grossness of
his physical nature and robed himself in more radiant spiritual garb. To appear
clothed was to have resumed the shining vestments of light. There is comment
on this in Revelation (16:15): "Blessed is he that watcheth and keepeth his
garments lest he walk naked and see his shame." The seductions of earth and
flesh were strong enough to cause many of the Manes to lose the luster of their
inner vestures. Thus disrobed of their finer garments, they presented the evidence
of their poor condition to pass the ordeals of the judgment. What further light
do we need to interpret Jesus’ parable of the man ejected from the marriage
feast because he came in without a wedding garment? Massey comments:
"The Manes in the
Ritual consist of the clothed and the naked. Those who pass the judgment hall
become the clothed. The beatified spirits are invested with the robe of the
righteous, the stole of Ra, in the garden." [Ancient Egypt, the Light
of the World, p. 466. ]
In the resurrection
ceremony of Osiris, the god is divested of his funerary garment and receives
a bandage of the finest linen from the attendants of Ra (Rit., Ch. 172).
It is notable in
this light that in Revelation the angel discerned in flight toward the earth
came with outstretched wings "and veiled face." And what Exodus says of Moses
has meaning in this connection (Ch. 34):
"Whenever he went
into the presence of the Eternal to speak to him, he took the veil off, till
he came out again; and when he came out and gave the Israelites the orders he
had received, the Israelites would notice that the face of Moses was in a glow;
whereupon Moses drew the veil over his face again till he went into the presence
of the Eternal." (Page 229)
In this
symbolic fashion the wise seers of old represented the incarnational going in
and out before the Lord, the adventuring of the immortal soul out into body
where it put on the veils of matter and flesh, and its retiring again into the
holiest shrine of spirit where it dropped its heavier outer bodies and again
became "clothed in light as with a garment."
In the Hindu, Egyptian
and Greek Mystery rites the ceremony of indicating the soul’s pilgrimage round
the Cycle of Necessity was performed over what was called the "Snake’s Hole,"
and the "Inevitable Circle." It was imaged by a coiled snake. A part of the
rite was to strip the snake in token of its sloughing, a symbol of the divestiture
of the soul to be clothed anew in bright raiment. Proclus states that in the
most holy Mysteries the mystae were divested of their garments to receive a
new divine nature, or vestment of salvation.
Horus covers the
naked body of Osiris with a white robe when he comes to raise the inert one.
This act is paralleled in the Hebrew scriptures when Shem and Japheth go in
backward to cover the nakedness of their father Noah. The drunkenness of Noah
here betokens the swooning which accompanies the descent, as already set forth.
A number of verses
in the Bible yield new and impressive evidence if read in the sense here indicated.
The "coats of skin" made for Adam and Eve by God would be taken as the outer
physical vehicles. The Psalms entreat that "thy priests be clothed with righteousness."
Proverbs states that "drowsiness shall clothe a man with rags." Isaiah speaks
of the joyful ones being clothed with the garments of salvation and the robe
of righteousness. Jesus’ declaration that he was naked and "ye clothed me" would
be inconsequential if taken as a historical fact. But in II Corinthians (Ch.
5) Paul gives strong confirmation of the higher sense:
"(For in this we
groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven.
If so be that being clothed we shall not be found naked. For we that are in
this tabernacle do groan, being burdened; not for that we should be unclothed,
but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life)."
"It makes me sigh,
indeed, this yearning to be under the cover of my heavenly habitation, since
I am sure that once so covered I shall not be ‘naked’ at the hour of death.
I do sigh within this tent of mine with heavy anxiety - not that I want to be
stripped, no, but to be under cover of the (Page 230) other,
to have my mortal element absorbed by life . . . Come what may, then, I am confident;
I know that while I reside in the body I am away from the Lord (for I have to
lead my life in faith without seeing him); and in this confidence I would fain
get away from the body and reside with the Lord."
This is direct and
eloquent confirmation of Greek and Egyptian philosophy in the Christian Book.
Here is the soul conscious of its alienation from heaven, miserably exiled in
the flesh, made poor in spirit, yet striving resolutely to carry the mortal
burden up the hill to its summit. Revelation (3:17) has a passage hardly less
germane:
"Thou knowest not
that thou art wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked; I counsel
thee to buy from me gold refined in the fire, that thou may be rich, white raiment
to clothe you and prevent the shame of your nakedness from being seen, and salve
to rub on your eyes that you may see."
Revelation (19:8)
gives a definition of our spiritual clothing, when referring to the soul, the
bride: "And to her was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen, dazzling
white; (the white linen is the righteousness of saints)." For those who rebel
stubbornly against the mythical interpretation of the Bible, let it be noted
that here the writer of holy gospel positively states that a physical thing,
linen, is a spiritual quality.
And he that rode
on the white horse is described as "clothed with a vesture dipped in blood;
(his name is called THE LOGOS of God)." And here a Bible personage is merely
a figure of an item of Greek philosophy! Will we not be instructed by such things?
It needs but to make
the transfer in meaning from material to ethereal or spiritual clothing to discern
the depth of practical significance in these allusions. The revelation will
be lost only for those who persist in the assumption that Oriental imagery was
so much fanciful froth, and not an endeavor to delineate by poetic figure a
veridical basis of fact and phenomena. Instead of vaunting ourselves in superiority
over presumed primitive crudity, we may have to demonstrate even our own good
rating as pupils of sage wisdom when that is presented. The ancients had more
to conceal than we yet seem capable of grasping. (Page 231)
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