Theosophy - The Lost Light- Part 3 of 5- by Alvin Boyd Kuhn
THE LOST LIGHT by Alvin Boyd Kuhn - Part 3 of 5
Chapter
XII
AMBROSIA
AND NECTAR
Theological confusion
over the ancient use of bread and wine and various foods as types of spiritual
nourishment makes necessary a chapter to clarify these matters. All such figures
- heavenly manna, bread, wheat, ambrosia, nectar, meat, corn, wine, honey, barley
- are forms of typology suggestive of the deific life ordered to mortals for
their immortal nutriment. The body of spiritual intellect, Ceres, which was
the true "cereal" food for man, was crushed into bits and then welded into cake
so that it might be "eaten" by mortals. The body of Christ was the intellectual
bread broken to be made edible and assimilable by our lower range of digestive
capacity. We could not eat the god in his wholeness, or his rawness. The golden
grain of life-giving wheat had to be crushed, ground, lacerated, before it could
be rendered fit food for our consumption, in the Eucharistic cake and the sacrificial
meal on the altar. Jesus says that we must "eat" his body, and the Epistle of
Ignatius to the Romans (Apocryphal) says that the wheat of God must be ground
between the teeth of wild animals, our animal bodies, to be made the pure bread
of Christ.
The breaking of
the bread and the libation of the wine are now clearly seen to be emblematic
of the partition of the unified energy of the god’s life for distribution
to the races of men. The banquets of the gods, the Passover feasts, the funerary
meals, the last suppers and the Totemic repasts were all forms of a primary
Eucharist. Man was given the transcendent privilege of feeding upon the life
of the gods! And it can be freely admitted that nowhere is the necessity of
transferring a literal physical meaning over to a spiritual one more definitely
apparent than here.
The final definitive
meaning of the great Eucharistic rite is bound up in the reconstitution of lost
significance in this doctrine. The entire debate as to the matter of transubstantiation,
transfusion, the partaking (Page 232) of
the material body and blood or their inner essence, finds its resolution in
the premises of this interpretation. Strangely enough it is now seen to be possible
to give up the physical meaning of the sacrament and yet take it as a thing
of literal reality. Man is literally to eat his Lord’s body; only it is not
a physical body. The eating is literal and real enough, but neither it nor the
body eaten is physical. Stout human good sense has revolted at a rite of swallowing
a physical body, but theology has failed to picture how we can partake of a
spiritual essence or body of divinity. The absorption and transmutation of currents
of deific life in our own nature is as possible as our digestion of food. The
physical rite was only a symbol and, its higher meaning once apprehended, its
efficacy is secured. The eating of bread and drinking of wine outwardly dramatize
the inner reality, a transubstantiation which can be literally, though not physically,
true.
Says St. Paul:
shun idolatry,
then, my beloved [doubtless the material sense of he
symbols.]
I am speaking
to sensible people: weigh my words for yourselves.
The cup of
blessing which we bless, is that not participating in the blood of Christ?
The bread
we break,is
that not participating in the body of Christ?
(for many
as we are, we are one Bread, one Body, since we all partake
of the one Bread)."
[ I Corinthians
10:14 ff.]
But the nauseous
ecclesiastical wrangling over whether the bread and wine were the body and
blood of a historical Jesus, or merely symbols of them, points to the frightful
desecration of the wholly spiritual and figurative nature of the drama. The
inner sense of this mighty typology passed out of ken with the submergence
of Greek wisdom under canonical literalism. The body of Christ, emblemed by
bread, wheat, ambrosia, meat, flesh or other forms of solid food, can mean
nothing but the substantial essence of divine nature; the blood, wine, nectar,
ichor, honey and liquid forms of nourishment can mean only that same divinity
when liquefied to be poured out in streams of nourishment for man. The cutting
of meat is to render it macerable; the grinding of grain is to render it edible;
the crushing of the grape for wine is to liquefy it for drinking. In every
case there is the (Page 233) destruction of the bodily integrity of the food,
and a fragmentation for better assimilation. The ritualism of Christianity
thus still dramatizes the principles of Greek spiritual philosophy, which
it persists in denying as part of a true religious system. If we were to eat
the body of Christos and drink his blood, the first had to be macerated and
the second liquefied.
Briefly, solid food
typified divine essence on its own high plane, the more ethereal states being
the more substantial! Liquid forms emblemed the same divine nature poured out
in streams, "rivers of vivification," for the feeding of "secondary natures."
Also in its descent Godhood became admixed with the "watery" elements of the
life down here and were further liquefied thereby. Solid food was the emblem
of stability; liquid food the sign of that mobile essence which was to run out
in blessing.
The several symbols
must be looked at more minutely, for they cover deep suggestions of vital
meaning. We take first that of bread. There is in all literature no more direct
and compelling statement of the spiritual significance of bread than the verses
of John’s Gospel (6:47 ff). Says Jesus:
"I am the bread
of life. Your fathers did eat Manna in the wilderness and have died; such
is the bread that comes down from heaven, that a man shall eat of it and shall
not die.
"And in truth the
bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.
"Verily, verily
I say unto you, Unless you eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of
Man, you have not life in you. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood
hath eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.
"For my flesh is
food indeed and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh
my blood abideth in me and I in him."
[ It is
impossible to pass these verses by without a remark upon what is commented upon
them by Sweitzer, one of the most popular European writers of the day on religious
themes, in a recent work. He follows his quotation of John’s verses with the
statement that it is not the purpose of John’s discourse to be understood; that
its aim is solely to direct attention to the miracle which is to happen in connection
with the bread in the future; and that it does not matter, therefore, that it
should offend the multitude.
One is indeed
permitted to ask: What is the poverty of modern spiritual discernment when it
is frankly stated by a leading religious publicist that John’s immortal verses
are not meant to be understood? But, after all, is it to be wondered at that
there should be complete befogging of vision when all but a few Docetic wings
of Christian thought have been bent on taking the eating of the flesh and the
drinking of the blood of the Son of Man in a physical sense? There has not seemed
to be present the matured capacity to assimilate the entirely spiritual purport
of the transaction.]
The bread is, then,
the radiant divine principle of light and life. The blood is the pledge of
the same life poured out for man’s behoof. But Jesus was not the only divine
personage who offered his body and blood for the nourishment of mortals. Says
Massey:
"Horus was not only
the bread of life derived from heaven and the producer of bread in the character
of Amsu, the husbandman; he also gave his flesh for food and his blood for drink."
[ Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 900.] (Page 234)
Horus
says (Rit., Ch. 53A): "I am the possessor of bread in Annu. I have bread in
heaven with Ra." Again the deceased says: "I am the lord of cakes in Annu; and
my bread is in heaven with Ra, and my cakes are on the earth with the god Seb."
The distinction here between bread in heaven and cakes on earth is perhaps of
vast significance, matching, as it does, many assertions that the soul is in
heaven and the body on earth. The cake form of the divine pastry must have been
regarded as a state of soul more highly advanced or refined by organic evolution.
Many texts carry out the two types. The soul continues: "I eat of what they
[the gods] eat there; and I eat of the cakes which are in the hall of the lord
of sepulchral offerings"--or bread with the gods in heaven and cakes with the
"dead" on earth. And in the Rubric to the 71st chapter of the Ritual this meaning
is confirmed: "Sepulchral bread shall be given to him and he shall come forth
into the presence of Ra day by day, and every day, regularly and continually."
Sepulchral bread, like the funerary meals, undoubtedly refers to the "bread
of Seb," or food of earth, earth and body being the sepulcher of the soul.
Wheat is much employed
as a symbol. The law of divine incubation in matter is expressly intimated
in Budge’s account of the Resurrection in Egypt:
"The grain which
is put into the ground is the dead Osiris, and the grain which has germinated
is the Osiris who has once again renewed his life." [ Osiris and the
Egyptian Resurrection, II, p. 32.]
The resurrection
of Osiris is closely interwoven with the germination of wheat. Jesus announces:
"My father giveth you the true bread out of heaven and giveth life unto the
world." And as Jesus was the divine bread out of heaven, the consubstantial
essence with the Father, so Horus: "He is Horus, he is the flesh and blood of
his father Osiris." Horus in his Christological character says: "I am a soul
and my soul is divine. I am he who produceth food. I am the food that perisheth
not - in my name of self-originating force, together with Nu"--the Mother Heaven.
(Rit., Ch. 85).
The body of Christ
could not be mystically eaten in its wholeness and unreduced power. It had to
be crushed and bruised, broken and mutilated, so that from its deep gashes would
flow out the living streams. If taken literally and materially, the wounded
side is not only (Page 235) gruesome,
but carries only a feeble suggestion of its grand meaning. And herein lies the
spiritual meaning of all blood sacrifice and "shed blood." There is no truth
found in it until for "blood" (of the gods) we read "divine intellect." Had
early theology made it clear, in a word, that the "shed blood" of God connoted
spiritual force, which we must embody in our lives, there would have been a
vastly less amount of actual "bloodshed" in European history! The god shed his
life essence for us out of his earth-bruised body of deific mind.
On this divine
wheat, it is said, Osiris and his followers lived. It was a form of Osiris
himself, as the god who brought it from heaven, and those who are it and lived
upon it nourished themselves upon their god. As he came to feed them, he is
declared to have "provided them with food and drink as he passed through the
Tuat." How the partaking of the divine body would affect man is set forth
by Budge:
"Eating and drinking
with the spirits raised man’s nature and ‘made his spirit divine,’ and destroyed
the feeling of separation which came with the appearance of death . . . And
it must always be remembered that the altar was the place to possess the power
of transmuting the offerings which were laid upon it and of turning them into
spiritual entities of such a nature that they became suitable food for the god
Osiris and his spirits." [ Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, I, p.
264.]
But we are those
spirits, the living men or Manes in this underworld. The recovered Logia,
or "sayings of the Lord," give a most direct allusion to the dismemberment
doctrine of the Eucharist in the line: "the flesh of the Son of God, broken
for all souls."
By a slight shifting
of the symbol, the ceremony performed in the rites of many lands, of eating
the serpent and drinking the dragon’s blood, was a replica of the Eucharistic
festival. For the serpent was universally a type of supernal wisdom--"wise
as serpents"--or the intellectual nature of the gods.
Horus, we find, was
the Kamite prototype of Bacchus, Lord of Wine. Like Bacchus and Jesus, Horus
is the vine, whose season was celebrated at the Uaka festival, with prodigious
rejoicing and a deluge of drink. The divine mania, declared by Plato to be better
than laborious reason, was the heady transport resulting from the imbibing of
the spiritual liquor of life. The Bacchic feast of intoxication was, however
sensual in later performance, a token of the legitimate and blessed ecstasy
of the soul upon partaking of the heavenly wine. (Page 236) The vine
and the mixing bowl were constellated as celestial symbols, the latter as the
cluster called the Crater (Latin: bowl) or the Goblet, the sacramental cup or
grail. The juice of the grape was the blood of Horus or Osiris, in the Egyptian
Eucharist.
The Manes in one
of the chapters in the Ritual prays that he may have possession of all things
whatsoever that were offered ritualistically for him in the nether world,
the "table of offerings which was heaped" for him on earth, "the solicitations
that were uttered" for him, "that he may feed upon the bread of Seb," or food
of earth experience. "Let me have possession of my funeral meals." A fact
that should loom large in any valuation of Eucharistic meaning is that the
flat surface of the coffin lid of the mummified Osiris constituted the table
of the Egyptian Last Supper. It was the board whereon were served the mortuary
meals. This unmistakable connection of the Eucharist with the burial, which
is only the passing of the god into the mummy or incarnate form, speaks volubly
as to the hidden relation of the two symbolic operations. For the god, about
to be buried in body, was to be eaten by the mortal nature.
Ancient tribes indulged
in the rite of a symbolic feeding upon the body of their god. At times when
spiritual symbology had passed into the literalism of ignorance and barbarity,
a living victim was cut to pieces and actually eaten by the celebrants. In very
early periods of the matriarchate, when the mother was the only known giver
and fount of life, a living mother was dedicated to the office of hostia or
victim, and her body cut up and eaten as a token of the distribution of her
fecund life. "The primordial Eucharist was eating the Mother’s flesh and drinking
her blood! [ Massey: Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 64.]
A converted phase of this custom exhibits the idea of the "disrobing" combined
with the Eucharistic rite:
"A young girl called
(significantly) the Meriah, was stripped stark naked and bound with cords to
a maypole crowned with flowers, and ultimately put to death . . . torn to pieces
and partly eaten." [ Reclus: Primitive Folk, pp. 311-315. ]
Human sacrifices
were later commuted to animal offerings. And when crude natural instincts were
softened by humane ideals, bread and wine were substituted. Thus one can see
how an original spiritual conception, passing from hand to hand in the lapse
of time and changing mores, reverts at one time to a brutal literalism amongst
untamed (Page 237) peoples
and again rises to symbolism in more cultured races. Through all stages, however,
can be seen the lineaments of the germinal high spiritual idea back of each
rite.
One of the Egyptian
texts reads: "Shesmu cuts them in pieces and cooks them in his fiery cauldrons."
Another line runs: "O, Osiris-Pepi, the Sma-Bull is brought to thee cut in
pieces."
Expressing a phallic
significance to the ritual, it is of interest to note that in very remote tribal
celebrations of the Eucharist the female participants invited the fecundating
offices of the males. The two sisters, or wife and sister, of Horus plead with
the still recumbent god to arise and come and embrace them. There are two women
in the Biblical resurrection scene. And when Isis and Nephthys invite the young
lord to come to them, Isis says: "Thou comest to us from thy retreat to . .
. distribute the bread of thy being, that the gods may live and men also." This
is of transcendent importance as pointing to the verification of the basic thesis
of our study, that the dip into incarnation is an avenue of evolutionary advance
for both the god and the animal-human in their linked lives. It is striking
that in this context both Jesus and Horus are themselves raised up from death,
and both raise up in turn those below. Two far separate streams of evolution
are confluent in man, and both are going onward as the result of their cooperative
life in one body. The Manes pleads:
"May I go in and
come out without repulse at the pylons of the lords of the underworld; may there
be given unto me loaves of bread in the house of coolness, and offerings of
food in Annu (Heliopolis) and a homestead forever in Sekhet-Aarru (paradise),
with wheat and barley therefor." [ Budge: Introduction to the Book of
the Dead, p. xcix.]
And the Rubric
to this chapter recites that if the chapter be known by the Manes he shall
come forth in Sekhet-Aarru, "and he shall eat of that wheat and barley and
his limbs shall be nourished therewith, and his body shall be like unto the
bodies of the gods." Here is perfect matching of Egyptian script with Paul’s
statement that Christ shall "change our vile body into the likeness of his
glorious body."
Holy Thursday was
especially consecrated by the Roman Church to a commemoration of the Last Supper,
and the institution of the Eucharistic meal was fixed, at which the corpus of
the Christ, already dead, was laid out to be eaten sacramentally. In the Gospels
the Last (Page 238) Supper,
with Jesus present, is eaten before the crucifixion has occurred. There is obviously
confusion of ancient ritualistic practice here, yet strangely enough no grave
violence is done to the inner significance either way, since the Christ was
"dead" in the one sense, and alive in the other. The whole of incarnation is
the "crucifixion, death and burial" of the Lord.
After the raising
of Osiris Taht says: "I have celebrated the festival of Eve’s provender,"
or the meal which came to be called the Last Supper. The raising of Lazarus
is likewise commemorated by a supper. "So they made him a supper there" (John
12:2).
In the Greek Mystery
play the candidate for initiation underwent the taurobolium or bull’s - blood
bath. He stood under a grating and received upon his naked body the dripping
blood of the sacrificial bull, in token that his nature was being suffused with
the shed blood of the god emblemed by the astrological sign of Taurus, as in
Christian practice it was the blood of the ram or lamb, the zodiacal Aries.
The sign of the sun in the spring equinox determined the zodiacal type under
which the Christos was figured. Elsewhere animal blood was actually drunk as
a more literal partaking of the emblem of divine life.
In the Ritual the
evening meal depicted the absorption of the higher nature into and by the lower,
and the occasion was called the "Night of Laying Provision on the Altar." Not
in a given moment of time, but in the total course of the cycle, each physical
body was to be transubstantiated into spirit. The whole round of human incarnations
was provided to this end. As the physical was converted into sublimated essence,
we have an explanation of the strange disappearance of the physical body in
all resurrection scenes. In one of the texts cited by Birch concerning the burial
of Osiris at Abydos, it is said that the sepulchral chamber was searched, but
the body was not found. "The ‘Shade’ it was found." [ Proceedings: Biblical
Archaeology, Dec. 2, 1884, p. 45.] In Marcion’s account of the resurrection
no body is found in the tomb; only the phantom or shade was visible there. So
in the Johannine version (Ch. 20:17) the body of Jesus is missing; the "Shade"
is present in the tomb. But this was of a texture which forbade it being touched.
The night of the
evening meal was called also "the night of hiding him who is supreme of attributes"
(Rit., Ch. 18). We have seen that (Page 239) the
descent into the tomb of body was considered a hiding, and the period of incarnation
was called the night of the soul.
The Eucharistic
emblems are many and varied. The deceased in the Ritual prays: "Grant unto
me ale, and let me cleanse myself by means of the haunch and by the offerings
of cakes." In Chapter 65 cakes of white grain and ale of red grain are mentioned.
The juxtaposition of the statements in the following citation is noteworthy,
as identifying the emblems with their non-material references: "Thou descendest
under protection; are given unto thee breed, wine and cakes . . . thou art
endowed with a soul, with power and with will." "he hungers not, for he eats
bread-cakes made of fine flour . . . He lives on the daily bread which comes
in this season"--of incarnation. "He shall have offered wine and cakes and
roasted fowl for the journey . . ." The bird was a universal symbol of the
soul, and its descent into the lower fires of earth and hell provided the
basis of the allegory of "roasting." In Chapter 106 the Manes says: "Give
me bread and beer. Let me be made pure by the sacrificial joint, together
with white bread." Horus is both the bread of life and the divine corn (Rit.
Ch. 83). In I Corinthians (37:38) Paul has a remarkable imagery of divine
food:
"And that which
thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may
chance of wheat, or of some other grain. But God giveth it a body as it hath
pleased him, and to every seed his own body."
The remarkable passage
from the Apocryphal Epistle of Ignatius to the Romans, already quoted should
be recalled at this point, as it definitely states that the soul comes to be
food to the wild beasts, by whom it will attain its new Godhood. The figure
of the soul as wheat, ground between the teeth of the wild animals to be made
the pure bread of Christ, is a most pungent typograph,--of the incarnation.
And this passage prepares the ground for understanding the relevance of the
manger symbolism in the Nativity scene. The Christ, at birth, was laid in a
manger, the place where animals eat! He came to be eaten by the lower, animal
nature.
In the Ritual the
soul entreats: "Give thou bread to this Pepi, give thou beer to him, of the
bread of eternity, and of the beer of everlastingness." "This bread which can
not go mouldy is brought to Pepi, (Page 240) and
this wine which can not go sour." What sublime imagery for states of spiritual
immortality, and natures that change not!
A special feature
in connection with the Eucharistic bread is seen in several passages from
the Ritual, which are of great weight in stabilizing the general position
of the purely figurative nature of the symbols. It is found in the chapter
"of not eating filth in the underworld.":
"Let food come
unto me from the place whither thou wilt bring food, and let me live upon
the seven loaves of bread, which shall be brought as food before Horus, and
upon bread which is brought before Thoth . . . Let me not eat filth and let
me not trip up and fall in the underworld."
Again in the "chapter
of not letting a man perform a journey being hungry" we read:
"Let me live upon
the seven cakes which shall be brought unto me, four cakes before Horus, and
three cakes before Thoth."
Four is the number
of the lower physical world of the body, three the number of the soul as the
triad of mind, soul, spirit. Horus was the soul in matter, Thoth the cosmic
spirit.
Massey writes that
a three-days fast was ended by the feeding of the multitude on what the Ritual
terms "celestial diet," i.e., the "seven loaves" of heavenly bread that were
supplied as sustenance for the risen dead in Annu, "the place of multiplying
bread." In this phrase descriptive of Annu (Anu), one of the cities named
as both the place of death and resurrection of the sun-god, we find the open
sesame to the New Testament "miracle" of Jesus feeding the multitude. But
in the Gospel "miracle," instead of the seven loaves we have the five loaves
and the two small fishes, the latter being introduced evidently to bring in
the Piscean house along with Virgo, the house of bread.
Hebrew symbology
closely matches Egyptian. In Exodus (29) one reads that
"With the former
lamb you must offer about seven pints of fine flour mixed with nearly three
pints of beaten oil, and nearly three pints of wine as a libation . . . This
is to be a regular burnt-offering made, age after age, at the entrance of
the Trysting-Tent before the Eternal, where I meet you and speak to you."
If it was known that
this Trysting-Tent is the human body, where alone God can meet man and speak
to him, and that the three pints of (Page 241) oil
and wine stand for the three elements of divine consciousness that are to be
mixed with the seven elementary powers of nature or physis, the brotherhood
of man might not so fearfully have miscarried. The human body is the place where
the two lovers, spirit and matter, or body and soul, make their tryst, and that
they are to make their libation to the Eternal before the entrance to the tent
indicates that the higher and lower partners to the coming marriage compound
their elements as they enter into incarnation. One stroke of symbolism tells
us more than volumes of theology.
Divine food is
called sometimes simply "meat." "Thou hast in great abundance in the Fields
of the Gods the meat and drink which the gods live upon therein."
Even butter comes
in as a type of representation, and coming from a female source, indicates
the material foundation of life. The seven cows of Hathor produce the divine
butter. As the formation of primal matter out of the primeval undifferentiated
essence was pictured as a kind of curdling, the butter symbolism has a profound
cosmical significance.
The Manes’ life
is fed upon divine food throughout its sojourn in Amenta; Horus and Jesus,
Jonah and Ioannes of Babylonia, all came as the zodiacal Pisces, or the Fish,
offering themselves as food for man while he is immersed in the sea of generation!
The Egyptians saw in the tortoise, which lived half in water and half on land,
the sign of Libra, the Balance, and took it as another type of divine nourishment,
when the two natures, divine and human, are in equilibration in the body.
When the Manes have
sufficiently cultivated the fields of Aarru, Ra says to them: "Your own possessions,
gods, and your own domains, elect, are yours. Now eat. Ra . . . appoints you
your food." They have labored at cultivation and at last they collect their
harvest of corn. Their seeds are warmed into germination by the sunlight of
Ra at his appearance. The radiance of the god in human life causes the divine
seed buried in us to sprout and grow as the sun fructifies plants in any earthly
garden. The elect, enveloped in light, are fed mysteriously with food from heaven.
Milk is one of the types used and is called "the white liquor which the glorified
ones love," and it was supplied by the seven cows, of course, providers of plenty
in the meadows of Aarru. The seven cows, of course, emblem the seven modifications
of cosmic (Page 242) energy
which create and sustain the worlds of life, the appropriate counterparts of
which irradiate man’s being and formulate his basic constitution. The uplifted
Manes says: "I eat of the food of Sekhet-Hetep and I go onward to the domain
of the starry gods." The zodiacal twelve supply food to the gods and the elect
in two groups, seven reapers and five collectors of corn (Book of Hades). The
spiritualized Manes live on the food of Ra, "and the meats belong to the inhabitants
of Amenta," a possible reference to the animal bodies on earth. The divine food
is apparently repeated in the quails and manna that were sent from heaven in
the Biblical account. The Osiris-Nu asserts: "I am the divine soul of Ra proceeding
from the god Nu; that divine soul which is God. I am the creator of the divine
food . . . which is not corrupted in my name of Soul." This soul "comes to him
and brings him abundance of celestial food, and what the god lives on he also
lives on, and he partakes of the food and drink and offerings of the god." At
another place we are told that the Manes "maketh his purificatory substances
with figs and wine from the vineyard of the god."
As the living rivers
flow forth out of the heart of eternal matter, the womb of all life, the godly
nutriment is again proffered to man streaming from the breast of the Mother
Isis or Hathor. "She giveth him her breast and he suckleth thereat." Paul (I
Corinthians 10:1, 2) writes that all those in Christ have eaten "the same supernatural
food and all drank the same supernatural drink (drinking from the supernatural
Rock which accompanied them - and that Rock was Christ)." Revelation (2:17)
enlightens us with the following: "To him that overcometh, to him will I give
of the hidden manna." When the deceased is making his way through Amenta, Hathor,
the Egyptian Venus, goddess of Love, emerges from the trees and offers him a
drink of fruit juice, which she prepared to woo him with. By accepting this
gift he is bound to remain the guest of the goddess and return no more to the
world of the living, unless by her permission. This fruit is not that which
is sent down gratuitously from heaven, but the fruit of the soul’s living experience
on earth, yet it is the same thing in the end. For it is sent down as seed,
and bears its fruit on the ends of the branches of the Tree of Life and Knowledge,
of the taste of good and evil here on earth. And this is the same tree which
in the last chapter in the Bible is declared to bear twelve fruits upon its
branches. (Page 243) These twelve
fruits are the completed unfoldment of the twelve original types of Kumeric
infant deity that will be brought to their maturity by cultivation on this planet.
The bread of Seb becomes metamorphosed eventually into the divine food. Eve
and Hathor are identical figures. They offer to virgin spiritual units and to
animal man the opportunity to live, grow and create, out of which cycle they
will emerge as gods, through knowledge of good and evil. And the temptation
is baited with the promise, "yet shall not surely die." The fruit of earthly
life is divinization. Says Massey:
"Hathor was the
goddess draped in golden vesture, who drew men with the cords of a love that
was irresistible."
"Instead of being
damned eternally through eating the fruit of the tree, the Manes in Amenta are
divinized piecemeal as the result of eating it." (Rit., Ch. 82). [ Ancient
Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 465.]
Again pause must
be made to reflect that had these two items of theology been known in clear
light, as here presented, whole centuries of human bigotry and hate might
have been painted in brighter colors.
Red as the color
of blood, and white, the color of milk, emblem the two natures of man, his bodily
birth through the mother’s blood, and his later nourishment through her milk.
Red is connected closely with the first Adam, whose name means in one interpretation,
Red Earth, that is, physical matter mixed with red blood. In this character
he would be the answer to the Bible’s query, "Who is this that comes from Edom,
with his garments crimson in Bozrah?" Edom was this man Adam, red earth, mortal
clay mixed with the life essence of divinity typed by the blood, in which the
Old Testament affirms several times the life of the soul is to be found. And
he who comes out of Edom may be taken as the Christ, the Son of Man. For the
first Adam is to give birth to the second Adam. Blood here types the divine
part of man, as contrasted with earth or with water. Jesus emblems the two births
as those of "water and the blood." But when the blood is used to typify the
lower natural man then it is contrasted with the white essence, the mother’s
milk, a higher nutriment than her blood, or with the father’s seminal essence.
White universally types that which is spiritually highest, up to the shining
white raiment of the redeemed. Perfection being the synthesis of all lower or
divided natures in original unity, white represents that perfection, as it is
the synthesis of the (Page 244) colors.
Ra says to the god: "Light the earth up bright! My benefits are for you who
are in the light." The food he promised them is itself of the nature of intellectual
light. "The immortal liquor is the Solar Light." [Ancient Egypt, the
Light of the World, p. 3. ] No utterance surpasses this for sublime import.
A Chaldean Oracle asserts that "the Intelligible is food to that which understands."
And the solar light is intelligence, shining abroad.
Looking now at
wine, many phases of meaning not commonly considered are brought to view.
The grape and the vine share in the symbolism. There is first the significant
detail, brought out by Massey, that the Egyptian Garden of Aarru, or Allu
(the Islamic Garden of Allah!) has in the Ritual the same essence as the substance
of that celestial life itself in the Paradise above. The wine offered by the
gods for man’s uplift is their celestial nature.
Horus came as the
lord of wine and is said to be "full of wine" at the Uaka festival. The old
"festival of intoxication" is the prototype of all later communal rites that
celebrate the outpouring of lofty deity. The form of this festival has become
universally popular, but as usual its interior meaning has been lost. The Christian
Agape and Eucharist are moderate demonstrations of the same old effort to commemorate
the perpetual gift of divine afflatus to mankind. Horus achieved the subtitle
of "the Jocund" when he rose up "full of wine," and was astrologically typed
as Orion, with the constellation of the Crater or bowl for his cup. The fable
said that this cup held seven thousand gallons of intoxicating drink and that
Horus brought the grapes to make the wine. "Thou didst put grapes in the water
that cometh forth from Edfu." The seven thousand had no explicit numerical significance
beyond the number seven itself, the thousands only adding the idea of multiple
division and diffusion. Horus came to distribute to the thousands of mortals
the divine essence in its sevenfold expression in the full gamut of its nature.
Who shall prove that the Jesus of the canonical Gospels, who gained notoriety
as a wine-bibber and came eating and drinking, is not a frayed copy of this
Kamite original? For Greece in her Bacchus repeated the same type. Christ came
to intoxicate man with the divine wine.
In the Assyrian account
of the Deluge those who came out of the ark poured out a libation of seven jugs
of wine. And they built an (Page 245) altar
on the peak of the mountain, or set up contact between man and god at the summit
of man’s spiritual being. Likewise after the Deluge Noah planted the vine and
became intoxicated. This vine may be seen in the decans of Virgo, where the
star Vindemeatrix denotes the time of the vintage in Egypt, a symbol of the
infusion of the higher nature into the lower.
The Christ treading
the grapes in the winepress is all very like the portrait of Har-Tema (Horus),
the mighty avenger of his despoiled father, and he came at the end and the
re-beginning of the cycle of incarnation, which is called the year of redemption.
Careful research discloses that Edom is another name for Esau, the Red; he
had asked to be fed with pottage, translated in one text "red." Edom, not
identical with Eden, seems to refer to earth as the "red land." In all its
Biblical usages Edom refers to the lower kingdom of human nature, not the
celestial sphere in any case. Edom was heavily punished by the Eternal, David
put garrisons in it and reduced its people to servants, and they later revolted.
It refused passage to the Israelites, as the lower nature refused entry to
the godly part. In Obadiah (I:6) we read: "But what a ransacking of Edom!
What a rifling of her treasures!" Edmonites were Esau’s descendants. The avenging
god’s anger (dramatization merely, of course) is apparently vented upon the
lower propensities of human nature, which are the foes of his incarnating
enterprise, the obstructors of his path and mutilators of his father Osiris.
The figure of treading the winevat is a noble one and definitely points to
the earth as the great winepress wherein the essence of the mortal nature
is crushed and trampled by deity into a liquor to reinforce the god’s dying
life. That the god trod the winepress alone is evidence of the loneliness
of his mission. Jesus’ loneliness is accentuated in the Gospel drama. That
the god comes from the underworld stained with the blood of his foes is an
allegorical way of saying that he had not kept himself entirely "unspotted
from the world" in his wrestling with the flesh. Greek philosophy asserts
that his garments were badly stained by terrene contacts.
Plutarch tells us
that the Egyptian priests conceived vines to have sprung from the blood of those
fallen deities mixed with the earth. A Babylonian legend sets forth that the
blood of the god Belus was mixed with the earth in the same way. Man is compounded
of the mud (Page 246) of
earth for his body, and the blood of the gods for his animating soul. He is
Adam, red earth.
Hathor, the great
mother of the living in Egyptian mythology, pours out the heavenly drink made
from the fruit of the sycamore-fig tree, a most prominent ancient form of the
tree of life. Hathor was the Shekhem, or shrine of the child, figured as the
bearing tree, the genetrix, the womb, birdcage and significantly the tomb, not
that of final death, but of buried life about to germinate. The word Shekhem,
hidden shrine, is from sekh, "liquid," "drink." Teka means "to supply with drink."
The fig, like the pomegranate, is an emblem of the womb. The Persea fruit is
the fruit of the sycamore-fig tree. Sycamore is from sykos (sukos), the Greek
for the fig-tree, from the fruit of which a powerful beverage was made. The
root means latent power unfolded, as by fermentation; to fill with aeriform
spirit force, as by the bubbles of air in fermentation. It becomes possible
now to sense the meaning of Jesus’ pronouncement (Luke 17:6):
"If ye have faith
as a grain of mustard seed ye would say unto this sycamore tree [Moffatt:
‘mulberry’], Be thou rooted up and be thou planted in the sea; and it would
have obeyed you."
As Revelation and
the Book of the Dead both describe the entry of divine fire into the "sea,"
causing a fermentation in it to spiritualize or divinize it, the sycamore’s
removal into the sea to lodge inspiriting power in it at last comes to clear
significance. To have faith as a grain of mustard seed, so tiny, is for the
soul, buried in the deep soil of the mortal self, to have an instinctive assurance
that, like the life in any seed, it will rise out of death to live again.
Who can fail to trace
the Genesis story in the following legend preserved among the Hottentots? The
deity, Heitsi Eibib, tells his son Urisip, the whitish one, not to eat of the
raisin trees in the valley. Heitsi Eibib in his travels came to a valley (the
earth) in which the raisin trees were ripe. There he was attacked by a severe
illness. Then his young second wife (Eve is often called Adam’s second wife,
Lilith being the first) said: "This brave one is taken ill on account of these
raisins; death is here at the place." The old man told his son: "I shall not
live, I feel it." And he spoke further: "This is the thing which I order you
not to do: Of the raisin trees of this valley ye shall not eat, for if ye eat
of them I shall infect you; and ye shall surely die in a (Page 247) similar
way." So he died. When they moved to another place, they heard always from the
side whence they had come a noise as of people eating raisins and singing. The
song ran:
"I, father of Urisip,
Father of
this unclean one;
I, who had
to eat these raisins and died,
And, dying,
live."
The raisin tree
gave dysentery, and this natural detail was used to prefigure the sickness,
swooning, distress and intoxication that came over the gods upon their plunge
into this life, or their eating of the fruit of the tree whose juice made
them drunk with a mixture of spiritous and sensuous ingredients. This is,
in short, to type the effect of incarnation upon the god as a bewildering,
befuddling, stupefying drunkenness, as from a semi-poison injected into his
blood; and such indeed the Platonists have ever described it.
"Heaven is pregnant
with wine" is an Egyptian fragment.
In the Book of
Judges (Ch. 6) Gideon, the son of Joash, is found beating out some wheat inside
the winepress to save it from Midian, when the angel of the Lord comes down
to entrust him with the commission to redeem Israel. What appears here like
a mixed metaphor is perhaps only a close mingling of several customary symbols.
Beating out the chaff was a kindred figure with that of stamping out the wine.
Greek philosophy,
rising sphinxlike out of the Orphic Mysteries, proclaims a hidden meaning of
the grapes in the winepress. Thomas Taylor says that the pressing of grapes
is as evident a symbol of the dispersion of divine energy into humanity as could
well be devised. [ Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, p. 142.]The
grape was for this reason consecrated to Bacchus, who personalized empyreal
intelligence flowing out in divided streams. Previous to its pressing it aptly
represented that which is collected into one; when pressed into juice it aptly
represented the diffusion of the same. Hence wine-pressing symbols the crushing
and division of unity to flow into multiplicity and spiritize divided creatural
life. What is most singular is that Taylor likens this process to another oft-used
typology, that of fleece, stating that the Greek word for "wool," lenos, is
practically identical with that for a "winepress," lenôs. The tearing and carding
of wool matches the liquidation of the grape for purposes of typism. Should
it be deemed (Page 248) strange,
then, that Gideon, found threshing wheat in the winepress, should immediately
ask the Eternal to authenticate his commission to him by the test of the dew
on the fleece? It need hardly be pointed out what strength these symbols of
wine and fleece, along with flour, bring to the theory of dismemberment. And
there is also the obvious suggestion of the fruitful rendering of the symbolism
of the mythological Golden Fleece (Aries of the zodiac), as typing the Christ
avatar who came under that sign. Fleece, says Taylor, is the symbol of laceration
or distribution of intellect, or Dionysus, into matter; and he adds that Isidorus
traces lana (Latin: "wool") from laniando, "tearing," as vellus (Latin: "fleece")
from vellendo, also "tearing." "Delano," "to tear asunder," he uses "in relation
to Bacchic discerption." So succinctly and integrally is the history of ideas
preserved in the amber of words.
Massey explains:
"The typical tree
of life in an Egyptian-Greek planisphere is the grapevine. This is the tree
still represented by the female vine-dresser and the male grape-gatherer in
the decans of Virgo [W. H. Higgins, Arabic Names of the Stars]. Orion rose up
when the grapes were ripe to represent the deliverer who was coming ‘full of
wine.’" [Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 729. ]
The birthplace
of the grapes was figured in or near the sign of Virgo, the mother of the
child who was to rise up out of death to bring salvation to lower man under
the symbol of the vine. He was also typed as the rising Nile, bringing a new
birth to the parched land of Egypt. And the grape ripened with the rising
inundation! In ways that astonish us with the fidelity of the parallelism,
both natural and astronomical phenomena reflect man’s inner history.
The vine and sycamore
tree were two types of producing life in the Kamite Paradise. In the Papyrus
of Nu the Manes prays that he may sit under his own vine and also beneath the
refreshing foliage of the sycamore-fig tree of Hathor. The Garden of Aarru is
the garden of the grape, and the god Osiris is sometimes seated in a Naos, under
the vine, from which branches of grapes are hanging. Moreover Osiris was charactered
as the vine and his son Horus the unbu or Branch. Need we pause to point out
the identity of this with the Biblical sentence (I Kings 4:25): "And Judah and
Israel dwelt safely, every man under his vine and under his fig-tree"? (Page
249)
Jesus
was the true vine of the Logos and we are his branches, destined to bear the
fruit. Horus bore the same representative character in Egypt. The American Indians
have traditions of tribes climbing to safety across the Mississippi, or up out
of the interior of mother earth to the land of light, by means of trees with
overhanging branches and grapevines. (Schoolcraft: VI, 14). Jack climbing the
bean stalk to overcome the ogre is a variant of the aboriginal type-legend.
The Eucharist easily
lends itself to characterization as a festival of intoxication if it is viewed
in the light of the following lines from the Ritual: "Are not all hearts drunk
through love of thee, O Un-Nefer (Osiris), triumphant?" The entire body of
mystic testimony from St. Augustine to St. Francis of Assizi and on through
to the modern revivalist, is to the effect of the spiritual intoxication of
the supreme love frenzy or mania, as Plato terms it. It needs no descanting
to enhance it further. There is every warrant for the ancient imagery. Only
it must be seen as working at both ends of the gamut. The meaning covered
by intoxication, a swooning and giddy stupefaction after his entry into mortal
body; while mortal man undergoes a more positive intoxication, an exaltation
and marvelous giddy expansion of his faculties when he becomes filled with
the power of divine intellect and begins to feel its influence expanding the
whole range and vividness of his consciousness. The one is to be thought of
as a scattering of wits, the other as an overpowering afflatus. Yet incarnation
is the open door to both god and animal for the advance into higher life,
and their opposite elements finally so merge in the new expansion that the
intoxication is the same for both in the end. The god, drunk with animal sensual
enjoyment, and the animal mind, intoxicated with undreamed-of delirium, reel
onward together in the dance of life, and who shall sharply distinguish where
intoxication ends and ecstasy begins? All this is germane to the understanding
of the symbolism and the irrefragible factuality behind it.
The Delaware Indians
put into effect an outward demonstration of the intoxicating imagery when in
one of their festivals an old man threw handfuls of tobacco on heated stones
in a tent, and the sitters, narcotized by the fumes, were carried in a swoon.
The ceremony typed the inhalation of spirit, producing a delirious rapture.
Vapor has ever been a mode of representing spirit, and the smoke (Page 250)
of the Indian’s pipe
was suggestive of allaying the fierce nature of rude forest children to mildness
and peace.
The Egyptian typology
placed a Lake of Sa in the northern heavens. Sa was the name of a sort of
ichor that circulated in the veins of the gods and perfected mortals. This
they could communicate to men on earth and give them health, vigor and new
life. This datum will be of significance when we come to study the Egyptian
spirit body, the Sahu.
Honey, as symbol,
shared place with the Greek nectar served at the tables of the Olympian gods.
Its plain suggestion is of the sweetness of the divine life as sustenance
for starving mortals, and as bestowing immortality. Some of its relevance
of course can be traced to its origin from the bee. There is a tradition that
bees alone of all animals descended from Paradise. Virgil (Georgics IV) celebrates
the never-dying bee that ascends alive into heaven. The faithful diligent
insect is thus an image of the immortal soul, or the god. Egyptian typology
makes the Abait, or bird-fly, the guide of the souls of the dead on their
way to the fields of Aarru, the land of celestial honey. The "beeline" directness
of travel betokens the unerring sense of the soul, lost afar in Amenta’s fields,
to go straight home. This Aarru is, of course, "Jerusalem the Golden, with
milk and honey blest" of the Christian hymn. The "ba" name of the astral or
ethereal body of man in Egypt may be related to "bee." For ba is also a word
for "honey." Honey was used in embalming. It is suggestively entwined with
the imagery of the "meads of amaranth." The soul is as the bee gathering sweet
honey of immortality from the flowers of life experience on earth. Also the
bee reproduces the new life in plants by acting as the intermediator between
male and female flower elements; and the divine soul likewise links male spirit
and female body and marries them in man.
The myth represents
the sun, eternal type of divine generative source, as "letting water fall
from his eyes; it is changed into working bees; they work in the flowers of
each kind, and honey and wax are produced instead of water." Shu and Tefnut
give honey to the living members. Divine emanations, falling as tear drops,
diffuse their power of blessing over the earth, like Shakespeare’s "gentle
rain from heaven."
The Samson story
in Judges bears on the meaning of honey. (Page 251) "Out of
the strong came forth honey." The honey was found by the solar god (Samson means
"solar") in the decaying carcass of the lion upon his return. The return types
evolution, as the outward journey, involution. The god, as the lion, is "slain"
on the outward arc or descent, overcome by matter. But in evolution, the bees
(the soul) have built their nest of sweet honey in the very midst of the old
decay, in the very body of corruption. In the Persian myth we see the lion depicted
with a bee in his mouth.
There are, however,
intimations of involved astrological reference in the linking together of
the bee and the lion. Massey thinks that the bee typifies the sweet refreshing
waters of the inundation in Egypt, which came to its fullest outpouring in
the month of July, the sign of the lion. His elaboration of the point is lengthy
and the reader is referred to his Lecture on Luniolatry. The lion, or lioness,
he claims, types the fiery solar heat (Cf. the lioness in heat) and the bee
the cooling influence of the waters. For the hero, Samson, fairly immersed
in symbols of the number thirty, obviously is a soli-lunar character, and
the full moon in the lion sign rose in conjunction with the sign of Aquarius,
the Waterman. The moon brought the cool waters that conquered the solar heat.
The application of the typism may hint at the god’s bringing the force of
cool intellectual judgment to allay the fierce heat of sensual passion of
the lower self. The types of divinity in the summer season are the reverse
of those appropriate to the winter. Salvation comes to man in the heat of
summer in the form of shade, coolness and water. Earth and water type the
lower self and the evil side under winter’s symbolism. But they spell salvation
under reversed conditions. The duality and reversibility of the symbols must
be constantly borne in mind.
The most meaningful
aspect of the wine symbolism is perhaps that of fermentation. This arises from
the development in the liquid of a potent energy at first latent. Hidden and
buried, silent and inert, the dynamic fiery spirit rises to activity and exerts
an influence that yields to mortals a semblance of divine inspiration and glorious
liberty. As a symbol it is far-reaching and vivid. The "spirit" in wine and
the spirit in man are not inaptly related even as a pun. The Greeks indulged
in such puns, as in the Cratylus of Plato, and yet have covered the most majestic
significations under these light touches. The "spirit" in wine is a graphic
figure of the other spirit. Wine is water that has (Page 252) in
it the fire of spirit, and in American pioneer days it was often called "firewater."
Fire universally typed spirit. Grape juice is just water of earth that has had
injected in it a power engendered by the sun, again the type of spirit, as it
passed through the length of the vine to be deposited in the berry at the end.
The sun, like the Christ it symboled in his "miracle" at Cana, turns water into
wine in any vineyard!
The Egyptian goddess
who represented the "spirit" of alcoholic fermentation was Sekhet, and her
pictures show her carrying the sun-disk on the head of a lioness. Her name
is also, says Massey, the name for the Bee. As a goddess Sekhet is the fiery
energy of Mother Nature, which engenders the ferment out of which comes the
soul, the bee. For she is also the goddess of sweetness or pleasure, literally
"goddess of the honeymoon." She is designated the "force or energy of the
gods, astonisher of mankind." (Birch, Gallery, p. 17.) She was the inspirer
of the male, his Sakti, or creative force. The Egyptian sakh means "to inflame,"
"to inspire," and Sekhet is the double force personified as female. This sakh
brings us close again to the syc- of the sycamore fig, whose juice bred spirit
intoxication, and the Greek psyche hovers close in the background of this
etymology. The soul is, or causes, the divine ferment in the body of life,
developed there, as in the vine, by the sun of man’s spiritual self. Drink
and divinity are thus found under one name, as were fleece and grape, seven
and peace, star and soul.
Isis, whose original
variant names were Hes, Hesit, Sesit, Sesh, etc., also carries this element
of Sekhet’s function. Sesh means primarily "breath," which is the inspirer
(Latin: spiro, I breathe) in the sense of imparting the gift of higher life
of spirit to a creature "dead" in matter. Man was not finished until God had
breathed into him divine breath. Ses, Sesh is "breath," "flame," "combustion";
also "the spirit of wine." From it Massey traces the "svas" from which we
have the Swastika, the sign of vivifying fire,--"tika" meaning "cross."
Another root yields
meaning along the same line. Kep means "to light," "kindle," "heat," "cause
a ferment." And from it Massey derives the Greek fire-forger of the gods, Vulcan
or Hephaestus, who is Kep and the Greek root of the Latin aestas, summer heat.
He forges for the gods whatever needs to be shaped by fire. Vapor produced from
water by heat was the primitive illustration for breath which gave a creature
its soul. It was a natural marvel, this emergence of a principle of fiery (Page
253) energy
in vapor form, so likely a type of soul engendered in man out of the mixture
of his lower earth and water elements.
Horus and Jesus,
both turning water into wine, represented this transforming power of the god,
maturing the inert elements of sense and feeling into spiritual character.
Horus put grapes into the water, and "the water of Teta is as wine even as
that of Ra." The Jewish Feast of the Tent or Tabernacle was a ceremony embodying
the turning of water into wine.
There are many
instances of rivers and seas being turned into blood, Revelation reports that
at the sound of the angel’s trumpet a mountain, around which lightning played
(symbol of the divine emanations, Jove’s thunderbolts), went down into the
sea and changed its waters into blood. As the first forms of life were generated
in sea water, their initial body plasms were just that water. In eras of evolution
this primitive life fluid was gradually transmuted, by the operation upon
it of even higher voltages of life force, into that which eventually in man
became human blood! Sea water has been turned into blood in man’s constitution!
Blood is the fluid containing the living dynamic, and the Bible states that
the soul dwells in the blood. Now, astonishingly, chemical analysis reveals
that sea water and human blood are identical in elementary composition. It
has remained for science and ancient symbolism to combine in this latter day
to tell us the hidden meaning of one of the greatest spiritual allegories
that theology failed to interpret for eighteen centuries.
Blood is the last
of the Eucharistic signs to be dealt with. Few Christians can tell capably why
it was that the human race had to be redeemed by the blood of an innocent victim
poured out for its guilt. There is so glaring an inference of vicariousness
here that common sense has halted long before giving credence to this dogma.
It seems to contravene all natural justice and leaves an unstudied laity incredulous
and unconvinced. There could be found no ground of fitness in the necessity
that made a being of a higher rank, a god, come down and suffer gratuitously
for sins of ours. With its linkage to evolution and anthropology cut totally
away from it, there was no way to connect the doctrine with elucidative reference.
Even Massey revolts in horror from the Biblical verse, in the words of the Son:
"My father! This day shalt thou refresh thyself in blood." The picture of a
blood-lustful deity terrifies us. But such revulsion is gratuitous. (Page 254)
The primal implications
hold nothing to cause us horror. The Son is only reminding the Father that the
descent of his germinal essence into the blood of this human body would give
him his next cycle of rebirth and renewal. "Day" is one of the glyphs for cycle,
aeon, round of incarnation, as in Genesis with its seven "days" of creation.
The god finds fresh experience and new conquest in each life; he renews himself
like the phoenix or the eagle, when bathed in new blood-bodies in incarnation.
In our cycle he does this in the blood of man. But what might well cause Massey
and the whole world abhorrence is that blood as symbol should have been taken
for blood as substance, and that a whole millennium and a half of alleged civilized
history has been deluded with the picture of a human personage buying unearned
redemption for a race by the gruesome act of pouring out the blood of his physical
body on a wooden cross! Rational reaction from religion is largely, if not overwhelmingly,
justified. To a degree distressing to contemplate religion has befogged the
mind of the world by converting the forms of ancient tropism into a sense repugnant
even to the intelligence of children.
The entire theological
theme of blood sacrifice, so literalized in the Old Testament rites, reduces
itself to the one simple meaning of divine life poured out to circulate vitally
through the mental and spiritual veins of man on earth. Mortal man underwent
a transfusion of deific "blood." Divine energies of consciousness course and
thrill through our life. This higher infusion regenerates us, makes us new.
The lamb slain on the altar was but the ceremonial token of this meaning. The
bull-bath of Mithraic rites was the washing away of sin in the blood of the
Tauric emanation of deity. On the other side, however, the consuming of the
animal on the altar by fire that flashed down from heaven was the token of the
transfiguration of the animal nature in man into immortal purity by the aeonial
"burning" of the godly fire in life after life. Man was nourished in the substance
of animal life, as the candle flame feeds upon the animal tallow below it, converting
it from gross substance into divine flame. That a race of people could for centuries
believe that God demanded the killing and burning of actual animals on actual
altars for his sensuous delight of sniffing the odors of roasting flesh - a
sweat savor unto his nostrils - well nigh destroys faith in human intelligence.
The imputation of gory sensualism to (Page 255)
supreme deity, the unconscionable assumption that he would delight in the slaughter
of billions of his own creatures, and that he would discharge man’s sins by
accepting the suffering of a lower order of his creatures as yet incapable of
sin, form a list of theological aberrations that have gone far to throw the
general mind into nearly barbarian besottedness.
The cleansing power
of the blood was in part at least borrowed from the fact of the menstrual
process. The ancient allegorists did not hesitate to employ the generative
functions in the way of cosmic analogues. It is outwardly easy to fasten the
charge of phallicism on the symbolic religion of the past. But man’s creative
processes are typical of all creative process, and the sages did not scruple
to use the known functionism to depict the unknown cosmic procedures. There
is no taint of ill in this until sordid sensuality invades the realm of pure
depiction. Each incarnation in earthly bodies subjected the soul to a sort
of menstrual purification, working, so to say, a lot of bad blood out of the
system of god-man. It linked him with a body of flesh which came "under the
law" of periodicity and purgation. Books on primeval religious customs tell
of men dressing as women and laboring to manifest the menstrualia, in token
of the entry of the god into his feminine phase, becoming a child of Mother
Nature. In Egypt Tefnut (the Greek Daphne) was a name formed from the root
tefn, tebn, "to shed, drip, drop." The same root means also to "rise up, spread,
illumine," as the dawn. The dawn of womanhood came with the cleansing by blood.
However theology
might like to disown the connection, this background looms as essential for
our interpretation of the Gospel "bloody sweat" of the savior in the Garden
of Gethsemane. The menstrual purification of the god in Egypt was in Smen! Legends
of Tem, Atum and Ra portray them as shedding drops of their blood, under male
symbolism, to fall on the earth and create mankind, or man and woman, Shu and
Tefnut, Hu and Sa. The relation of Smen to the essence of the male blood is
obvious. The gods poured out their vital life to fecundate matter, their mother
and sister, to give creation a new birth. This general typism is all that could
ever have been hinted at under the figure of the bloody sweat. The emission
of life-fluid is accompanied by sweating. The male and female aspects of the
meaning enter side by side. Smen, says Massey, was the place appointed for the
(Page 256) purging,
purifying and cleansing of souls. It is the place of pain and torment, the birthplace
of the new moon, symbol of the infant birth of solar light in humanity. Hesmen
is the Egyptian name for the rhythmic purgation. It is the voice of matter,
the woman, saying in the Ritual: "I am the woman, the orb in the darkness; I
have brought my orb to darkness where it is changed to light." The bloody sweat
of the god in Smen is described as "the flux emanating from Osiris," when Osiris
is the god in his feminine or material expression. It is the divine "shedding
of blood," without which humanity would have no cosmic opportunity to escape
the eternal weight of karmic "sin."
Where the outpouring
of deific power was not as yet linked with Mother Nature’s body, was not yet
implemented by its proper Shakti, or force in matter, the god was figured
as "masturbating." Kheper-Ra was the Egyptian deity fulfilling this function.
His type was the beetle or scarabaeus, which, according to Egyptian belief,
created its young by itself alone, without the female. There was hidden in
this symbolism the truth that would have settled the famous "filioque" dispute
that split the early Church into Greek and Roman Catholicism.
Chapter 17 of the
Ritual runs:
"O ye gods who
are in the presence of Osiris, grant me your arms, for I am the god who shall
come into being among you. Who then are these? They are the drops of blood
which came forth from the phallus of Ra when he went forth to perform mutilation
upon himself. They sprang into being as the gods Hu and Sa." [In another legend
Shu and Tefnut.]
The Ritual states
that "the sun mutilates himself, and from the streams of blood all things
come into existence." Here is so-called phallicism, yet with sublimity.
Matching the Assyrian
and Egyptian jugs of wine and pitchers of mixed drink, the Hebrews (Leviticus
4) were ordered to sprinkle some blood seven times before the Eternal in front
of the curtain of the inner sanctuary. This was for a sweet savor and soothing
fragrance to deity. In their sacrifices they were instructed never to consume
the blood of any animal: "The soul of any creature lies in its blood . . .
blood expiates by reason of the soul in it."
Esau was called "red"
because he sucked his mother’s blood before his birth. He is said to have sold
his birthright for a mess of "red." Tradition shows him to have been a divinity
imaged by the solar (Page 257) hawk,
which symbolized blood "because they say that this bird does not drink water
but blood, by which the soul is nourished" (Hor-Apollo, Bk. I, 6). The soul
lives on natural forces, its Mother’s blood, before it is born into Christhood
in man.
One of the marvels
in Exodus that were to persuade the reluctant Egyptians to let the Israelites
go was the turning into blood some water that Moses poured on the ground.
The pouring it on the ground would point to the necessity of making the transformation
on earth. A Mexican legend sets forth the vivification of the dead remains
of former races by the blood of the gods.
As the sun of spirit
descending into the darkness of matter, in the evening or autumn, the god
was suggestively depicted as the woman, suffering, becoming ill, wasting her
substance unproductively. The god linked with Mother Nature was as a woman
not yet impregnated by spirit. It required the passage of "virtue" from the
Christ to stop her wastage.
A further aspect
of the red-and-white symbolism comes to view here. If the red types the mother’s
blood giving generation, the white types the seminal life of spirit. The union
of the white of divinity with the red of nature produces the new birth. Nor
did the sages overlook the meaningful fact that it is the white creative essence
of the father’s blood that releases the stream of the mother’s white nourishment
for the new child. So the first or natural man, born of the blood, the first
Adam or "red earth," is raised to his status of spiritual new birth by "the
white liquor which the glorified ones love." And both the mother’s and the father’s
condensation of white creative and sustaining essence is distilled out of the
natural red blood. Our divinization turns us from red to white. Under Christmas
tropism, the red stands for the divine; the green - universal color of nature
- for the physical.
The red color of
the evening sun, sinking into his feminine phase, and the red color of the
morning sun, when for a brief space of his infancy he is still close to his
Mother Earth, like the human child tied through the first years to his mother,
again beautifully adumbrate the feminine connotation of red; while the white
blaze of the sun throughout the day suggests the male or spiritual power.
In the Ritual (Ch.
37A) the Speaker is told he shall make four troughs of clay and shall "fill
them with milk of a white cow." The four containers of the divine ichor are
the physical, etheric, emotional (Page 258) and
concrete mental natures in man’s lower self. An instructive picturing of the
human creation is given in this Kamite description: the basis of the oblation
in the Egyptian sacrifice is "the blood of beings that have been destroyed."
"Said by the majesty
of the god, Let them begin with Elephantine and bring to me the fruits in
quantity. And when the fruits had been brought they were given . . . (Lacuna).
"The Sekti (miller)
of Annu was grinding the fruits, while the priestesses poured the juices into
vases; and those fruits were put into vessels with the blood of the beings,
and there were seven thousand pitchers of drink.
"And there came
the majesty of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, with the gods, to see the
drink after he had ordered the goddess to destroy the beings in three days
of navigation."
The Assyrian seven
jugs and the Egyptian seven thousand pitchers of drink are brewed from the
blood of the massacred beings (the dismembered incarnating gods) mingled with
the juice of the fruits of earth. This is vastly significant. Massey comments
instructively:
"Blood and the fruit
of earth were the two primitive forms of the offering, and these are blended
together in a deluge of intoxicating drink." [ Ancient Egypt, the Light
of the World, p. 561.]
The plain inference
here is that the mingling in one drink of the juices of the fruits of earth
and the blood of the "beings," is a type of the blending in one composite
nature of the life of the gods and that of animal-man--the base of all religion.
An exactly similar
depiction is found in the Berosan account of the Babylonian creation. The
deity Belus cut off his own head; whereupon the other gods mixed the blood
as it gushed out with the earth, and from the mixture men were formed. "On
this account it is that men are rational and partake of divine knowledge."
The Beast in Revelation
is to be overcome by the blood of the Lamb. The lower sense creature in us
is to be raised up by the infusion of godlike quality from above.
We are now in possession
of much of the multifarious data which will enable proper judgment to be exercised
in interpreting the central significance of the Eucharistic meal. We commemorate
our partaking of the Lord’s body and blood to remind our sluggish sense that
there dwells in us a god, whose nature is compounded with that of a beast. (Page
259)
In the
drama the Lord assigned immediately a pointed reason for his institution of
the rite. And in this reason we come upon one of the pivotal elements of the
Platonic philosophy, the loss of which out of Christian theology has contributed
to our generally palsied grasp of fundamental truth. Little is it dreamed that
the Lord himself announced the great Platonic doctrine of "reminiscence" in
the midst of his ordination of the Eucharist. The world’s astutest students
have been puzzled and perplexed over the great Academician’s principle of regained
memory for the soul, and they have labeled it a philosophical fantasy, a finely
spun poetization. That it bears direct relation to our earthly history has not
been discerned by scholars.
When the Christos
concluded his injunction to eat the broken fragments of his body and to drink
the flowing stream of his lifeblood with the command: "Do this in memory of
me," he set Plato’s great doctrine at the very heart of Christianity. But Christianity
could not catch the relevance of the statement because it did not have the correlative
tenets of the dismemberment and disfigurement. The restoration of memory can
have understanding only in relation to a previous loss of it. Paradise regained
must follow Paradise lost. So "rememberment" is the repairing of the dismemberment.
Reminiscence is the recuperation of shattered memory. Death must have its resurrection.
Divine intellect, dispersed into all forms of divulsion and enfeeblement, torn
into fragments, with the links of connection lost, condemned to wander blindly
in murks and shadows, must be reintegrated in the end. "My reason returned unto
me," says the reconstituted Nebuchadnezzar. The Prodigal Son remembered his
forgotten Father’s house on high. Away off in that "far country," the Vale of
Lethe and Land of Oblivion, the exiled soul begins to recover from its amnesia,
and the divine nostalgia sets in to lead it back home.
A Chaldean Oracle
states that the "paternal principle" of higher intellect "will not receive
the will of the soul till she has departed from oblivion; and has spoken the
word, assuming the memory of her paternal sacred impression." Immersed in
scattered and partial images of reality, the soul can not regain her former
unity of vision until she has restored some semblance of her former integrity
of intellection. She must weave the tangled strands of mental fleece again
into a garment with pattern matching archetypal ideals.
The figures of both
Jesus and Jonah, fast asleep in the holds of their (Page 260) respective
ships in the storm are variant types of this oblivion of the god in his mundane
journey. In a similar episode in the career of Horus, "there was deep slumber
within the ship."
Iamblichus paints
a beautiful picture of the gods gathering up the loose shreds of memory and
weaving them again into the design of original loveliness, to escape their
dire condition of forgetfulness:
"Neither is it proper
to say that the soul primarily consists of harmony and rhythm. For thus enthusiasm
would be adapted to the soul alone. It is better . . . to assert that the soul,
before she gave herself to body, was the auditor of divine harmony; and that
hence, when she proceeded into body and heard melodies of such a kind as especially
preserve the divine vestiges of memory, she embraced these, from them recollected
divine harmony, and tends and is allied to it, and as much as possible participates
of it." [ Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans and Assyrians, p. 133.]
Amid her distraction
the soul catches faint and feeble glimpses of former felicity and these stir
her latent recollection of harmonies known before. Through them she strives
to integrate her former bliss and grandeur. And this states the whole office
of ritual religion!
Plato’s esoteric
principle, grounded in segments of recondite anthropology lost out of modern
consideration, is one vital to all theory and practique of education. Subtle
principles of cultural technique are involved in the incarnational situation
which make learning not at all the acquiring of something new and alien to
the soul, but the remembering or recollecting of scattered fragments of things
inherently kin to consciousness itself. Culture is reintegration, not the
acquiring of a collection.
Of the nine Muses
of classical mythology Mnemosyne is the goddess of memory, and memory is thus
indicated as one of the nine paths by which we return to our divinity. Mercury
also shared the function of rehabilitating the memory. A note by Thomas Taylor
reads:
"Hermes disperses
the sleep and oblivion with which the different herds of souls are oppressed.
He is likewise the supplier of recollection, the end of which is a genuine intellectual
apprehension of divine natures." [ In Iamblichus’ Mysteries of the Egyptians,
Chaldeans and Assyrians, p. 7.]
As man is a rational
soul thrust into an irrational life, the province of Mercury is to impress upon
the mind, distracted by the shifting flux of this world’s dream images, the
beauty of the stable principles (Page 261) of
Universal Mind that were visioned by the soul in her own world. Chapter 90 of
the Ritual gives a prayer in these words:
"O thou who restorest
memory in the mouth of the dead through the words of power which they possess,
let my mouth be opened through the words of power which I possess."
The title of Chapter
25 is itself convincing: "The chapter of making a man possess memory in the
underworld." This again is the whole office of religion. Of what, be it asked,
could a man on earth be expected to have memory, if not of a former life which
he had forgotten?
If religion is
to be animated and inspired by its most forceful significance, it must be
practiced with a view to awakening in earthbound souls lost divine memories.
This is the import of all its song, its ritual, its rhythms and prayers. A
powerful reinforcement of spiritual unction and dynamic life would well up
out of its decadent forms if this motif were revived. Salvation, the aim of
religion, is by way of rekindled memory of slumbering divinity.
In an address to
Pepi it is written that the god "setteth his remembrance upon men and his
love before the gods." Indeed the Ritual records the fact that the deceased
in Amenta was shown his Ka (higher soul body) and assured that it accompanied
him through the lower earth in order that he might not utterly forget his
divine moorings, or as he says, "that he might not suffer loss of identity
by forgetting his name." Man is on earth like one stricken with amnesia. Showing
him his Ka bestirs the Manes to recall his divine name and nature. Also the
passage of Osiris through the underworld is effected only by means of his
preserving all the mystical names in memory. Ra has 75 names, Osiris 153.
As the "name" stood for one of the higher spiritual principles, to call upon
the name of the Lord, or to know the deity’s name, was to have come en rapport
with his higher nature. This presupposed the restoration of all the soul’s
higher metaphysical faculties. This is given elsewhere as knowing the names
of all the gates and their god keepers, past whom the voyaging soul had to
go.
In the Orphic Mysteries
of Greece the phrase occurs more than once: "I am a child of earth and the starry
sky, but my race is of heaven alone." The "dead" man is instructed to address
these words to the guardian of the Lake of Memory, while he asks for a drink
of water from the lake. In our highest flights toward divine consciousness we
(Page 262) drink from that Lake of Memory and regale ourselves anew with aboriginal
harmonies. If it holds true to its prime purpose the persistent vogue of religion
in human society is abundantly warranted.
Max Müller gives
an important link of philology when he derives the Sanskrit word Smara, "love,"
from Smar, "to recollect"! [Lectures, Vol. I, p. 383. Ed. 1862. ]
He states that the German Schmerz, "pain," and the English "smart," come from
this root. Love, then, like learning, is only the memory of former transports
and ecstasies of the glory the soul once had with the Father before the worlds.
When, therefore,
Jesus breaks the bread and sips the wine in token of his death till he come
- his discerption and dismantling - he is dramatizing the necessity of their
"remembering" his scattered selfhood in their lives. The Ritual of Egypt assigns
a name to the ship of Horus as it passes across the sea of this lower life,
which name shows the archaic origin of the sage philosophy of Greece: "Collector
of souls is the name of my barque"! Recollection is the soul’s office on earth.
We are to gather up in the boat of our life the twelve baskets of scattered
fragments and restore the broken body of our Lord "whole and entire."
Out of the dissertation
on divine food here elaborated there should accrue to the modern mind a new
and grander sense of the Christ’s ordinance: "Do this in memory of me." And
an elevated consciousness arising from the double sense of the word "remember"
should lift humanity once more to an awareness of its mission, which is to bind
up the broken and dismembered body of the Lord of Hosts, by welding together
the nations in the spirit of a lofty fraternity. In the light of restored sublimity
to the doctrine, every individual will know that the appeal to remember his
deity comes not from an isolated figure in ancient Judea, but from the living
god within, begging all to drink the cup of communion with him and thus hasten
to forge that recollection of him which alone will effect his release from the
dreary grave of the body. (Page 263)
Chapter
XIII
EARTH,
WATER, AIR, FIRE
The possibility
of making an effective interpretation of arcane scriptures will be seen to
be closely interwoven with the part played in symbolic structure by the four
elements, earth, water, air and fire. Grasp of the ideas hidden under the
use of these four emblems comes close to putting one in possession of the
key to most of the mystery. The revelation of the full force of their application
will prove astonishing.
Much absurdity has
found expression in common belief as to their significance. It has everywhere
been asserted that the ancients conceived all substances to be composed of these
four primary and irreducible constituents, instead of the ninety-two mineral
elements of modern chemistry. This is folly. What they were dealing with is
a vastly different formula. They were not asserting man’s physical body, with
all other things, was compounded of only four elements. They held man’s total
constitution to be compounded of four distinct grades or modifications of original
essence, each of which gave him a body, by virtue of which his life effected
its conscious expression in four different worlds at the same time. Each of
the bodies was charactered and symboled by one of the four elements, and the
more sublimated ones interpenetrated the coarser, localizing the functionism
of all four in the lower one, man’s physical body, symboled by the earth; an
emotional body, of which water was the suggestive emblem; a mental body, with
air as its sign; and a spiritual body, typed by fire or the sun. A fifth, not
yet evolved to function in humanity and beyond the ken of mortal knowledge,
was predicated as the development of a distant future. It was called a body
of aether, the fifth element, called by Aristotle a term equivalent to "quintessence."
It yet lies latent and undifferentiated in the inner core of the element of
fire. (Pae 264)
The Bibles
of antiquity can not be understood unless this basic predication be made, that
man lives not alone on one plane of nature, but on four, and that he makes contact
with the realities of each of them by means of a body composed of the matter
indigenous to that realm. His focus of consciousness may pass from one to the
other of the four bodies under pressure of the swing of his interests. When
we grandiloquently speak of living within the whole range of our being, we are
unwittingly repeating a conception of ancient theory, the literal truth of which
we have lost the data to comprehend.
Of an eventual
septenary constitution man has as yet progressed only so far as to have deployed
into function the lower quaternary of powers. Plato in the Timaeus says that
"three genera of mortals yet await to be created." Each emanation of energic
force brings to manifestation one of the bodies of our composite mechanism,
as it does one of the planes of nature. We are now in the fourth of such rounds
or cycles, and have therefore developed four of the ultimate seven bodies
of our equipment for contacting the reality of all worlds. And these four
bodies are typed by earth, water, air and fire, symbolically.
The matter of the
contemporary existence of these four (or five) bodies within the single space
of the physical may occasion some incredulity as to the ancient theory. But
modern science has itself opened the door of explanation here. It is a matter
of the fineness of molecular particles and interstitial spaces. Certain rays
can be passed through "solid" substances, because their electrons swing in minute
orbits amid vaster ones. It is declared esoterically that the atomic matter
of which each of man’s four bodies is composed is in structural essence a sevenfold
attenuation or sublimation of the one which it interpenetrates. Each one interpenetrates
its coarser neighbor, and at the same time is interpenetrated by its next finer
associate. So the four dwell together, occupying the same three-dimensional
area, yet with a "great gulf" fixed between each pair, the abyss of difference
of electronic vibration, wave length, frequency and radial orbit. This is the
great gulf that divides each world from all others. It is not a chasm of spacial
distance, but a hiatus between vibrational frequencies, wave length and other
forms of potency. To bridge the abyss and step from one world to another, it
is requisite that man should be able to tune up, or down, the mathematical "pitch"
of his consciousness, as exemplified by the "tuning in" process of the radio.
Two discordant tones of consciousness (Page 265) are
not on the same plane, or in the same world. Their failure to harmonize puts
them into different areas of the field of life.
The five planes
were represented by the five geometric figures, the cube for earth, the sphere
for water, the triangle for fire, the crescent for air, and the candle-flame
tip for aether. Certain significations of the figure-symbols will be presented
in the sequel, but it is doubtful if anyone at present knows authoritatively
the full range of meaning attached to them. In some drawings of the series,
air, the third, and fire, the fourth, are reversed in position. Their relative
place in the order is doubtless of vital importance, but for the ends of religious
symbolism, it seems not to be a question of critical value. After examination
of many applications of the typing it has been found advantageous to make
a more condensed grouping of the four under the two heads of fire and water,
as these two appear to do double duty in carrying the burden of the symbolism.
This reduces the
fourfold nature of man to the broad generality of the dualism, or the compound
of two elements, the divine and the earthly, in one body.
This will be found
to serve the readiest purposes of interpreting the many myths, for there appears
to be a vast preponderance of the dual representation in the scriptures and
folklore of the world, under the wide imagery of fire and water.
The two most distinctive
symbols, then, are fire and water, and their proper interpretation almost
alone gives a key to the religious texts. Let fire be taken to refer undeviatingly
to our higher or divine segment, and water to our lower or animal-human portion;
or fire to connote the god from heaven, and water the earthly man, the first
Adam. In an even more condensed form, fire may type the soul and water the
body. Classifications so general are not to be taken as scientifically precise;
but they will be seen to be systematically applicable, without loss of explicit
meaning. The fifth element, aether, may profitably be ignored, as it stands
for the innermost essence of all manifest life, and humanity is not in conscious
relation to its high mode of activity.
Oddly enough, by
one of those inversions to which the imagery is susceptible, the serpent has
become a symbol of both the fire and the water elements, and hence types both
our divine and our sensual natures. "When above it was the serpent of air and
fire, and when below the serpent of water and earth." [Massey: The Natural
Genesis, I, p. 344. ] There was the fiery serpent (Pae 266) that
Moses lifted up, and the water dragon of Revelation, of the Aeneid and other
classical works. There is the Good Serpent, Agathodaemon, and the Evil Serpent,
Kakodaemon, symbol of Satan. Water, too, became a dual sign, with a higher and
lower translation. As the first it was an emblem of the outpourings of divinity,
the water of life that Jesus promised to the woman at the well; as the second,
it typed the fluctuating, restless, sensual nature in which the divine fire
was so nearly drowned out. Even fire shares the dual meaning, for it symbols
the celestial life, the fire of Prometheus, Jove’s thunderbolt, as well as the
fires of the torture and hell of earthly existence. The Ritual speaks of our
baptism on earth "in the Pool of the Double Fire." This is easily comprehensible
because of the shifting of the divine beings from the empyrean to the mundane
sphere of activity. In heaven it was a pure and clear flame; on earth it was
fed with damp, coarse fuel, and became lurid in hue and charged with noxious,
sulphurous gases, and turned to steam and smoke. A large part of the whole significance
of the incarnation can be seen reflected in the imagery of fire introduced into
a semi-watery condition. Our work will be wasted effort if it does not succeed
in imprinting on every imagination the indelible suggestion that our earthly
history is adumbrated by the picture of an imperishable and unquenchable spark
of divine fire struggling to live and expand its power in a moist environment.
Our inmost essence is as a central nucleus of fire striving valiantly to light
a mass of damp green wood - the animal nature. The resultant smoke and smudge
is the perfect type of our life here, intellectually and spiritually. These
were the very symbols of our terrene existence employed in Greek philosophy.
This peculiar duality
of the symbols, discerned throughout, is itself a reflection of the twofold
movement, or double status, of the soul in incarnation. For that which began
as heavenly passed into earthly embodiment, and the pertinence of the symbols
had to change with the change of milieu. All the heavenly symbols became inwrought
with earthly reference and imperfection, and thus picked up the implication
of evil. On earth, then, we may expect to find the celestial symbols with meanings
almost completely reversed, or with their purity besmirched, so to say. It is
not surprising that the wise Egyptians should have given us a picture of this
very reversal in one of their typical vignettes. (Page 267) For, says Massey:
"The god
advancing in a reversed position is the sun [the god, soul] in the underworld.
The image accords exactly with an Egyptian scene of the sun passing through
the Hades, where we see the twelve gods of the earth, or the lower domain of
night, marching towards a mountain turned upside down, and two typical personages
are also turned upside down. This is an illustration of the passage of the sun
through the underworld. The reversed (people) on the same monument are the dead.
Thus the Osirified deceased who had attained the second life, in the Ritual
says exultingly, ‘I do not walk on my head.’ The dead, as the Akhu, are the
spirits, and the Atua is a spirit who comes walking upside down." (Book of Hades.)
[The Natural Genesis, I, p. 529. ]
One of the rites
of the resurrection was the "erecting of the Tat," or setting the Tat cross
or the mummy upright on its feet. In addition to the imagery of death in all
its forms to type our spiritually defunct condition here, there was employed
also the idea of an entire reversal of position to portray the true state
of the soul in its untoward predicament. We are heavenly spirits turned upside
down on earth! Earth reverses heavenly lines of motion. It reflects the pattern
of things in the mount, but inverted. The highest symbols of heaven therefore
fall at the very bottom of earthly tracing. And the very spirit of the god
who came to earth, renouncing his bliss on high to bring immortal gifts to
man, was himself later inverted into the personification of evil! We have,
then, the angels of light turned into demons, the bright flame of divinity
metamorphosed into the lurid fire of hell, the waters of life becoming the
raging seas that engulfed the boats of Jonah and Jesus, the serpent of wisdom
becoming the dragon of evil.
With the four basic
elements now established, it is interesting to note the curious typical results
obtained when any two are brought together, as the fact of incarnation does
bring all four together in man. Some remarkable and surprising combinations
are produced, both in symbol and in actuality.
Man’s lower nature,
as seen in any diagram, is composed of the elements of earth and water, his
higher nature of fire and air. Any time either of the two upper is crossed with
either of the two lower, there is a rough symbol of incarnation, or combination
of the divine with the human. But the two that together comprise either our
lower or higher nature may also be found in correlation. This is admirably seen
in the two lower, where the mixture of earth and water produces, as any child
can tell, mud or mire. At once we have a key to translate (Page 268) the
significance of the papyrus swamps of Egyptian legends, the "miry clay" of Plato
and the Bible, and the celebrated Reed (not Red) Sea of Exodus (see Moffatt
Translation). The marshes of Lower Egypt in which Horus and Jesus and Sargon
were all secreted can be taken now as the glyphs of the human physical body,
compounded of earth and water. The body is itself about seven-eighths water
and the remainder earth. The lotus, papyrus or reed has a number of meanings,
but in the main they typify the new life springing up out of the mud and water,
to flower out in the air and the fire of the sun. The risen Horus is figured
seated on a lotus pad above the water.
Mud, as the type
of matter (and matter, mud, and mother all come from the same linguistic root),
is dialectically analyzed in the Greek philosophy:
"Matter," says
Simplicius in his commentary on the first book of Aristotle’s Physics, "is
nothing else then mutation of sensibles, with respect to intelligibles, deviating
from thence and carried down to non-being. These things, indeed, which are
the properties of sensibles are irrational, corporeal, distributed into parts,
and passing into bulk and divulsion through an ultimate progression into generation,
viz., into matter; for matter is always truly the last sediment. Hence also
the Egyptians call the dregs of the first (or highest) life, which they symbolically
denominate water, matter, being, as it were, a certain mire."
What Simplicius
is quaintly telling us in terms of reasoned analysis of the elements of being
which are quite "Greek" to us moderns, is that matter is to be thought of
as a kind of sediment deposited on the lowest levels of inert life by the
crystallization of ethereal forces, precisely as snow is the sedimentary deposit
of vaporous states of water, subjected to a reduction of temperature. Nature
furnishes a perfect analogy for every truth.
A common ancient
symbolic term for our life here is the "sea of generation." Iamblichus joins
Heraclitus in likening generation to a water symbol, that of a river, as being
always in flux. It is the river of Lethe, flowing through the dark meadows of
Ate, as Empedocles says. It represents in its swirling currents the voracity
of matter and the light-hating world, as the gods say, and the winding streams
under which many are drawn down, as the Chaldean Oracles assert. The fitness
of the meadow to stand for this life is seen in its lying always (Page 269)
in a low marshy
place contiguous to a stream. It tells of land and water in juxtaposition and
therefore matches mire in its suggestiveness.
Plotinus in a passage
already quoted has called our descent a fall into dark mire. The Hebrew Psalmist,
in the words of the incarnated deity, cries:
"Save me, O God!
for the waters are come in unto my soul. I sink in deep mire, where there
is no standing. I am come in unto deep waters where the floods overwhelm me."
Without the skill
of the Greeks in dealing with abstruse facts of cosmology under symbolic typism
we are hardly prepared to catch the aptness of the figure of water for the
creeping inroads of sensual impulse upon the divine purity. But the god cries
that the waters of animal passion have come in to inundate his soul. Again
he prays:
"Deliver me out
of the mire, and let me not sink. Let me be delivered from them that hate
me. Let not the water-floods overwhelm me, neither let the deep swallow me
up."
His gratitude for
eventual deliverance takes the form (Ps. 40):
"He brought me
up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon
a rock, and established my goings."
Yet--"he hath founded
the earth upon the waters and established it upon the floods" (Ps. 24), because
out of the water and the mud of mortal life was to come the new generation,
the son, Jesus or Horus, as the young shoot of the papyrus reed of divine
life.
The mire and filth
of the Augean stables cleansed by Hercules is another form of this imagery,
for the solar hero turns into them the waters of two rivers. The two streams
represent those of spirit and matter, generally, and only out of the interworking
of the two does eventual purgation come.
A vivid light can
now be thrown on such a fiction as this: Horus was mutilated and his members
cast into the water. To find them Isis invoked the aid of Sebek, or Sevekh,
the crocodile-god, an ancient solar deity, who, having examined the banks of
the swamps with his claws, took his net and fished out the pieces. Sebek then
reconstituted the god whole and entire. The significance of Sebek’s participation
is in his name, which means "seven," intimating that a septenary development
(Pae 270) was
entailed in the perfective process. Man is perfected always in a cycle of seven
stages.
Water and earth
yield another deposit than that of mud or mire, a very curious one. Water,
depositing particles of mineral earth, petrifies a piece of wood, a combination
of water, earth and air. Not even such a symbol is irrelevant, since it speaks
in loudest tones of the hardening influence of the lower nature upon the higher,
and images the Gorgon shield, turning all softer natures to stone.
Air and water in
conjunction provide much matter for symbology. In the first place there is air
in water, and it needs only the application of the still more energic element
fire to beget life and engender most of the other forms of living symbolism.
In ice or cold water the energies of life remain inert; let fire be applied
and the resultant energization gives us a faint suggestion of the whole meaning
of the entry of the gods into the province of less active substances. Fire plunged
into water most pointedly dramatizes the basic import of the whole incarnation
procedure. The soul, a fiery nucleus of noetic intelligence, is plunged into
the watery habitat of the fleshly body. The moral fight is a combat between
the fire of spirit and the water of emotion and desire; and fire must win the
victory by eventually drying up and converting into steam the heavy humid nature
of animal-man. Fire must dry out a path across the sea of generation, so that
it may cross this Reed (Red) Sea out of Egypt, as also the Jordan River, into
the Holy Land, without wetting its feet! Fire enters the watery realm of body,
already permeated by air in hidden form. Heat raises the water into vapor, which,
being an airy form of water, suggests the birth of mind out of emotion. We read
in the Ritual (Ch. 164): "Oh, the Being dormant within his body, making his
burning in flame, glowing within the sea by his vapor. Come, give the fire,
transport [perhaps better, "transform"] the vapor of the Being." The vapor was
a type of the breath of life, air containing moisture, symbol of the soul that
was linked with emotion. It was a plea for the god to come and sublimate the
emotional element of the lower self, water, by unifying it with air, mind. Each
higher element is able to raise the potential of the one below it and refine
it. So earth (sense) is raised and purified by water (emotion); water (emotion)
by air (mind); and air (mind) by fire (spirit). This gives us the key table
of values. By their simple (Page 271) application
in various combinations a hundred intimate meanings of ancient scriptures may
be resolved into comprehensible reading.
A common form of
air and water mixed is foam or bubbles. Froth arises when air becomes violently
active in water. Fire, spirit, quickens and intensifies the process. We have
here the ground for the solution of that riddle of Greek mythology which makes
Venus to be born from the sea-foam, produced by the energy of the great God
Jupiter striding through the sea. It is a beautiful allegory, hinting that
the goddess of Love is born in the evolutionary process when air, mind, is
injected into the field of the animal impulses and passions. This came when
the god, descending, brought air and fire to energize the elements in the
sea water (of the body). Froth would intimate the elevation of emotion to
the plane of thought, or the thorough mixing of thought with emotion,--perhaps
also the emotionalizing of thought. Bubbles rising to the surface suggest
the evolution of thought out of the very depths of the physical and emotional
departments of man. The Egyptian image of the water-cow indicated life emanating
from the primordial waters. And the rising of Aphrodite into breathing life
and beauty out of the foam marks this idea as Egyptian in origin. Nu-ti, "froth,"
is the same word as Neith, who was one of the early Kamite personifications
of the first life rising from the waters. Neith is Hathor, the Egyptian Venus,
the mother of life, twofold in character as liquid and aeriform. Her celestial
representative was Ursa Major, the Great Bear (or Bearer, suggests Massey),
the great dipper in which the water of life was held, and from which, as it
turned around the pole, it was periodically poured out and again dipped up!
In early times its orbit dipped down into the sub-horizonal sea. So this great
sidereal directory of the heavens became the greatest of astronomical symbols
to the ancients, dramatizing the seven great elementary mother powers of nature
that periodically arose out of the waters of life. Operated by its handle
of three stars, typing the solar triad of mind, soul and spirit, it caught
up the living waters in its four-starred cup, the fourfold physical basis
of all things.
The Egyptian male-female
pair of Shu and Tefnut personify the dual subsistence of breath and moisture.
"These in one form may be the breath of life and its dew, as Tef is to drip
or drop."[Massey: The Natural Genesis, I, p. 147. ] Air and moisture
are combined in the breath of mortals. The creative breath of mortal life is
emaned and drips its moisture upon the earth in rain, (Page 272) fog
or dew. The spirit of God outbreathed as air or breath, from which was precipitated
the water of life on earth. Rain is distilled out of the bosom of the air. In
the form of vapor, visible or invisible, the upper heaven holds the celestial
water, the type of divine life embosomed in air - emotions germinally latent
in thoughts. And when this water has fallen to earth, it takes the action of
fiery spirit to convert it back again to heavenly state, and this can only be
done by the superior energy transmuting its nature from liquid to vapor or "spirit"
form.
The deceased, awaiting
his resurrection, cries to Nu: "Give me water and the breath of life!" The
reply comes: "I bring thee the vase containing the abundant water for rejoicing
the heart by its effusion, that thou mayest breathe the breath of life resulting
from it." Water, though not in its liquid form, is the first aspect of matter
in all the oldest mythologies and cosmologies. It is indeed the primal substance
of the universal mother. In the Berosan account of creation the primal mother
is called Thallath, which is the Greek thallassa, "the sea." Tiamat and Typhon
are equivalent to Tefnut (Greek Daphne), the Great Depth, or Tepht (also Tophet).
Basically, mother, matter and water are one. Plato speaks of water as "the
liquid of the whole vivification." Again he alludes to it mystically as "a
certain fountain."
The interpenetration
of the gross bodies by the subtler ones in man may perhaps be realistically
depicted by the relations subsisting between the four elements in the outer
world. Living physical bodies of earthly constituency hold water, the water
embosoms air, and in the air is the hidden potency of fire. The elements consistently
interpenetrate each other, the finer in the coarse. We have already traced
the vivid symbolism of fermentation, or the generation of air in water, type
of the enkindling of spirit. At the baptism of Jesus by John, according to
Justin Martyr, "a fire was kindled in the waters of the Jordan." This matches
the Egyptian "a burning within the sea." Spirit sets its ferment and its blaze
a-going amid the watery elements of the body.
Seeking in the heights
and depths of the natural creation for symbols of truth, the mythographers could
not miss so patent a type as that of the fish leaping out of the water. It was
a vivid suggestion of the soul in matter leaping in aspiration for short breaths
of air in the kingdom above it. Whether it be seeking a moment’s breath of a
diviner air in the kingdom above, or only a fly as food, it projects itself
from the (Page 273) lower to a higher plane, prefiguring the sallies of the
human soul - often otherwise represented by ichthys, the fish - from its mortal
habitat into the purer realms of spirit. The soul, like the fish, must occasionally
clutch at a morsel of more heavenly food. The fish stood for the immortal soul
as breather in the water of mundane existence.
A Norse myth tells
of the division of a single primal world into two halves, or the separation
of the two waters of the firmament, as in Genesis. The one was a world of
water, the other of air, and the beings in the lower water ascend by night
to breathe the pure air of the upper half; and it is said the sun consumes
them like vapor. This would restate the Assumption of the Virgin, the festival
of the old astronomical phenomenon of August and early September, when the
sun absorbs the constellation of the Virgin, emblematic of the dissolution
of all physical worlds in the bosom of the Absolute. It might be said that
after every day and every incarnation man ascends to inhale refreshing draughts
of spiritual air on an upper plane. Without this frequent release and relief
he could not support prolonged existence in the denser world below.
The "secret of
Horus in An" is the mystery of how his mother caught him in the water. Neith,
given by Massey as equivalent to "net," fished him out. Cosmically he typified
the first life emanating from the water; humanly the god coming to birth in
the water of the body. Many of the symbols can be worked on two or even more
planes of explanation. Every cosmic process has its reflection in the natural
world, again in the spiritual life of man, and lastly in the very physiology
of the body. Nature is meaningless nowhere.
The perch on the
head of Neith or Hathor is a badge of the birth from water. Neith also carries
the shuttle or knitter for her net, wherewith she becomes a catcher of men
out of the waters, and draws them up into the world of air and spirit.
The East has always
portrayed true being as an escape from the waters of life. Hence the widespread
use of the fisherman’s net as an emblem of salvation. Jesus did not startle
his disciples with a new metaphor when he called them to be "fishers of men."
Two Ritual chapters furnish suggestion here. Chapter 153A is entitled "of coming
forth from the net," and 153B "of coming forth from the Catcher of Fish." Water
so obviously presented a menace to life by drowning that it becomes the focus
of ideas emphasizing an escape from evil. (Page 274) As such
it is not the water of life, but the water of death. It signified the lower
life of generation, or life in "death." Water stops our breathing and perils
the air-sustained life of deity. An oyster that could keep shut up and safe
under water was one of the figures of spiritual security.
Nun in the Chaldean
is the Great Fish; Nuna in Syriac is the constellation Cetus, the Whale. Nun
of the Hebrew alphabet is the fish, as Mem is water. The picture of a great
fish "breathing out" water caused it to be personified as the mother heaven
that poured forth water and the breath of life. The Egyptians also made the
lotus, ascending from the water, a symbol of breath, and the Egyptian Seshin
for "lotus" is from ses, "breath."
The close philosophical
relation of water and air is shown in a number of languages by the identical
derivation of the words "to swim" and "to be born." Birth and swimming in or
on water are practically synonymous. It is best seen in the Latin. The same
root, na, means both "to be born" and "to swim." Being born of water, avers
Massey, is but to be borne upon it. As man was not able to live under water,
life was pictured as a coming out of it or a floating upon it. To be born into
life, therefore, was to escape from the water, and come up where breath was
obtainable. The very first act of the babe newborn out of the water of the womb
is to catch its first breath! Immersed in the waters of generation, of sense
and desire, man can not come to his real life, or second birth, until he can
rise out of the "water" to breathe the more vivifying air of the heaven of mind
and spirit. The power of the sun (god) to stimulate life and growth could not
reach him effectively in the kingdom of water (nature); he had first to lift
his head out of the water into the kingdom of air (mind) before the rays of
the god could breed spiritually within him.
From the na stem
we trace both "naval" and "navel," relating birth and sailing. Nef, says Massey,
means in Egyptian both "sailor" and "to breathe." The navel was one of the earliest
doorways between the two worlds (of water and air), and as such it maintained
its symbolic value. The navel was an image of breath in the waters of the womb.
It was the channel by which the breath of life passed into the soul in the water.
The god, through whom we partake of the breath of life from a higher plane,
is spiritually our navel, located at the very center of our being. (Page 275)
In the
ideography the female came to be regarded as the furnisher of water, and the
male as the supplier of breath, the combination yielding life. These were Tefnut
and Shu. He became the inspirer of soul, she the former of flesh. It was the
god, masculine, who breathed the breath of life into the nostrils. In the Ritual
the Speaker, coming to his new life, says he has been "snatched from the waters
of his Mother" and "emaned from the nostrils of his Father Osiris." The Chinese
matched this with their Ying and Yin, the male and female, or breath and water
sources.
The water and the
lotus were both female emblems at first. The papyrus-scepter of Uat is the
express sign of the feminine nature of Uati, who represented the features
of both wet and heat, water and breath, or body and soul, heat being necessary
to turn water into vapor or breath.
A simple yet strong
ideograph of the unified action of water and air is a ship driven by the wind.
The wind (intellect) imparts motion to that which navigates the waters. The
body is driven by the mind! Mind and wind, both unseen, energize the visible.
Very suggestive
is the request in the Ritual (Ch. 55): "May air be given unto these young
divine beings," a reference to the Kumaras or Innocents when first plunged
into their material baptism. And even more directly pertinent is the chapter
title (56): "Of sniffing air in the waters of the underworld." And another
title (Ch. 54) is: "Of giving air to the overseer of the palace . . . Nu,
triumphant, in the underworld." And again Chapter 57 is that "of breathing
the air and having dominion over the waters of the underworld." When Horus
rises he is exultingly welcomed as escaping from the dark lower region, "without
water and without air," as the condition of soul in matter.
In Africa and Central
America the god Houragan (Hurricane) was the personification of the mingled
power of water and air. Hurakan in Quiché means a stream of water that pours
straight down. In the hieroglyphics Hura is heaven (Greek: oura-nos), "over,"
"above." Khan is a watery tempest. Typhon, the abyss of primordial heaven,
is identical with typhoon. Mixcohuatl, the "cloud serpent," the chief of the
Mexican gods, bears the name of the tropical whirlwind.
The flying fish came
in for its share of appropriate suggestiveness, and another bird, the hissing
widgeon, which issued from the waters (Page 276) to
fly along the surface, became a symbol of the soaring free soul, which was nearly
always pictured as winged or feathered.
Naturally all species
of aero-aquatic birds came under the scope of this typology. The bird that
could rise off the water and soar away was inescapably a type of the rising
soul. But the ancients joined the two kinds of life in one creature which
became one of the most universal of all symbols, the winged serpent or feathered
snake. Recent researches in Central America have brought to light the wide
prevalence of this emblem in the Mayan and other civilizations on the American
continent. And since it was general in Asia and Africa in remote times, the
question of intercommunication or separate origin is once more pertinently
raised. The snake that could fly is the incontrovertible evidence of ancient
knowledge of the union of divinity and earthiness in man’s organic life. Man
that is born of water and the spirit (air) should once again become wise as
to his dual origin. And modern man should cease to belittle the mythopoetic
genius of his ancestors who endeavored, with almost incredible sagacity, to
embody important knowledge of cosmic facts in imperishable glyphs. In the
terms of evolutionary biology the swan is the feathered snake, and Hansa,
the bird of primordial life and intelligence that floats above the waters
of the abyss, is the eternal emblem of that spiritual life that has stepped
into our fluctuating sea of natural impulse to bring order, harmony and beauty
into the realm of nescience and chaos.
The Akhekh gryphon
is a dragon with wings. Wings and feathers supply the type of air and fire
in the later Bird of the Sun. The bird symbolized the swift-darting and lofty-soaring
motion of divine intelligence. The French Swan-Dragon unites the bird’s head
with the serpent’s tail. An ancient Greek work makes the first godly nature
a serpent which later transmuted into a hawk. One form of the gryphon was
the body of a beast, the tail of a serpent and the head of a peacock. This
is the mythical cockatrice. It was so named because of its origin from the
egg of a cock hatched by a serpent. The divine is hatched and nurtured in
the body of nature.
Earth with water
yielded mire, or sensuousness; water with air suggested mingled emotion and
dawning thought; spiritous wine hinted at a fiery element in water, or "firewater."
Beside Isis, whose name derives from stems meaning to breathe and ferment, there
is the goddess Uati, a name congenital perhaps with our "wet" and "heat," if
not the (Page 277) basis
of "water" itself. She was the genetrix, and signified wet and heat in conjunction;
and her function suggests the conversion of water into breathing life by the
mother in heat, or gestating! Unleavened bread would represent the natural man
unspiritualized by the ferment of divine efficacies. It would show the first
Adam, the man unregenerate, born of water, the natural body, but not of the
spirit. Leavened bread was "spiritualized" bread. And oddly enough the little
leaven that leaveneth the whole lump does indeed generate by its ferment a sort
of breathing in the dough, for the latter becomes permeated with air bubbles
which work to the surface. Bring the god of fire into matter and the latter
begins to manifest the breath of life. Fire rises, and is the ultimate type
of evolution, in which life sparks ascend to the empyrean. Water falls, and
is the type of involution, or life descending to incubate in matter. But water
below, acted upon by fire, is transformed into a sublimated state in which it
can effect its return to the empyrean. The gist of the story of religion is
here. Fire had to be brought down from heaven to convert fallen water into spiritous
vapor, to enable it to rise again.
Physical nature presents
a notable exemplification of the fourfold elemental typology in the phenomenon
of a thunderstorm. Our universal mother has set the advertising sign of her
modes and configurations all about us, but only the ancients heeded her message
or read her language. The upper air, or heaven, surcharged with electricity,
discharges its pent energies above the earth in flashes of fire. The mighty
potency performs a sort of electrolysis upon the constituent elements of the
air, dismembering, so to say, the unit mass of embosomed moisture held in suspension
in the atmosphere and sending it in fragments to the earth to nourish the life
of man and beast. Not an item or detail of the theological typism is lacking
in the phenomenon. As the fire emanation from heaven operated to precipitate
its latent forces in the broken globules of water to the earth to fructify its
life, so the fiery nature of deity came potentially to earth in fragments to
liberate its powers in new growth. The celestial energy of pure spirit runs
down the gamut of fire, air, water and earth. In man likewise a flash of the
fire of spirit darts out of the surcharged bosom of the upper aether of consciousness,
agitates the elements of the plane of mind next below it, these in turn release
emotions on the plane below, and they deposit a final influence upon the very
material of the earthy (Page 278) body.
Each plane in succession receives the effects of the outrush of life from above.
A breeze ruffling the surface of a pond is a vivid symbol of a thought stirring
the emotions, the type of which is water. And the waves washing the shores portray
in a measure the emotional wear and tear on the body. "Let nature be your teacher,"
says Wordsworth.
But a still more
eloquent symbol comes to view to edify the mind of man at the end of the shower:
the rainbow! In its sevenfold coloration we read again the septenary design
of all natural constitution, including the life of man. The one divine essence
of white light, shining out through the descending waters, is broken into
its seven constituent rays. All manifest form must therefore be septenary
in structure. Every cycle runs its course and comes to its perfection in seven
sub-cycles. Hence the Eternal placed the rainbow in the heavens, at the end
of the rain, in token that "never again will he destroy mankind." For man,
at the end of his sojourn in the watery habitat of body, will have completed
his perfection in seven stages and will not need further immersion in the
sea of generation. As the rainbow disappears with the last rain, the sun reigns
alone again in its one white light.
A unitary ray of
light, passed through a three-faced glass prism and breaking into its seven
colors, is a memorable certification of cosmic creational method. Man actually
presents a three-faced transparent medium for the first light in the upper
levels of his nature to provide the requisite condition for this phenomenon
in his life. The immortal unit of spirit itself has segmented already into
a triad which hovers in the upper sphere of consciousness. It is the great
solar triad of Mind-Soul-Spirit, the reflection in human make-up of the cosmic
Trinity of Will-Wisdom-Activity. It is man’s triangle of conscious faculty
and it is of bright essence. Through it shines the one unbroken ray of Intelligence
from the primal fount of light to be reflected on the physical screen of human
life on earth, in a final sevenfold differentiation.
Still another phase
of portrayal meets us in nature when we consider the change from a watery beginning
to a fiery heyday in the progress of each day’s summer sun. The dewy freshness
of dawn (water) and the burning heat of midday (fire) are personalized in Egypt
by the goddesses Tefnut and Sekhet respectively. Tef(n) connotes the meaning
of "dew" and "moisture" from its primary signification of "to drip, or drop."
Then the watery phase of the goddess is superseded by (Page 279) the
fiery one, and Tefnut becomes Sekhet, the heat principle which engenders ferment
and new life. This is the transformation of Daphne (Tefnut) dawn, into the laurel
or wood of fire, in the Greek poetization.
Another Ritual
title (Ch. 163) is deeply suggestive: "Of not allowing the body of a man to
molder away in the underworld." (The spiritual body is meant here, as the
physical body does molder away.) The Manes is addressed:
"Hail, thou who
art lying prostrate within thy body, whose flame cometh into being from out
of the fire that blazeth within the sea (or water) in such wise that the sea
(or water) is raised up on high out of the fire thereof."
If there are still
any who dispute the mythical nature of ancient constructions, let them demonstrate
how a fire blazing in the midst of a sea could be spoken of otherwise than
allegorically. But when one knows that a universal code of symbol language
made fire represent spiritual mind, and water flesh and carnality, then it
can be seen how the poets speak rationally of a fire blazing in the sea and
trying to raise it up again in vapor or spirit.
Another strong
confirmation of the analysis is found in the Ritual (Ch. 176). In comment
on it Budge writes: "As fire and boiling water existed in the underworld,
he hastened to protect himself from burns and scalds by the use of chapters
63A and 63B." For the titles of these two chapters are: "Of drinking water
and not being burnt by fire in the underworld," and "Of not being scalded
with water." How squarely this is matched in the Bible (Is. 43):
"When thou passest
through the waters I shall be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall
not overflow thee; when thou walkest through the fire thou shalt not be burned;
neither shall the flame kindle on thee."
The underworld,
then, is the place where fire and water are joined in affective relation;
and where could this conjunction take place other than in the physical body?
And what pithy moral
corollaries are discerned in the analogies if they are carried into particulars!
The god (fire) stood in danger, as the Greeks clearly intimate, of suffering
from the exhalations arising from its contact with the humors of the carnal
body. It must be seen (Page 280) that
the god’s entry into the body of an inferior being would result in the injection
of an increased voltage, as it were, in the activities of all its forces. Animality
would be more keenly energized as the transforming ferment began its work. The
god stood in danger of being "burned," "scalded" by the "steam" engendered by
the heightening of all lower psycho-chemical powers. The enhanced potential
of the sense and emotion functionism provided by his own alliance with them,
might overpower him.
One of the phallic
renderings of the rainbow symbolism is curiously interesting. It is made to
allegorize the prohibition of the male from union with the female during menstruation.
Erymanthus, the son of Apollo, was said to have been struck blind because he
looked on Venus when she was bathing. Acteon, seeing Diana at her bath, was
turned into a stag. David was punished for his relations with Bathsheba, whom
he saw bathing. What is the significance of the punishment of all these solar
heroes for contacting the woman during her period? It is but one of the forms
of cryptic typology under which ancient sagacity limned in outline the "fall"
of the god when he linked his life with the feminine or material powers in a
cycle of manifestation. He is dramatized as contaminating himself by his union
with the wasting expenditure of natural force. He looks upon mother nature when
she is shedding her lifeblood fruitlessly. The glance of his eye, the sun, through
her shower fixes the sevenfold division of physical nature in the sky. But the
rainbow comes at the end of the rainstorm, and union of spirit with matter at
the end of its outpouring is the time propitious for fecundation and the new
birth. At any rate the punishment allotted to deity for intercourse with the
flowing stream of the natural physical order, typed as feminine, is his being
reduced to imprisonment in the animal body of man! Like the rainbow, this is
sevenfold in organization. The sun, peeking out and beholding nature dripping,
projects the sign of his intercourse with matter upon the opposite side of heaven
in his septenary dismemberment. The sevenfold fission of his primal unity shows
the disruption of his integrity in the sight of all the earth!
This is not empty
imagery. It has had historical actualization in a strange way. It is related
in Genesis (6) and in other racial epics that the sons of God had untimely intercourse
with the females of the more advanced animal species, breeding the races of
half-human, half-animal (Page 281) types.
Early connection with the female animals instituted the miscegenation that so
nearly thwarted the cosmic plan. As a result of the unleashing of powerful procreative
forces in the animal world there ensued an unnatural production of hybrid monsters
and prodigies of lust, which, the books hint, had to be expunged from evolution
by the sinking of continents. One of the backgrounds of the "deluge" is thus
erected. Procreation in the Golden Age or Edenic state was by kriyashakti, exercised
by the will and the mind. This was possible because incarnation had not yet
been fully achieved, and the forms of flesh were of ethereal tenuity. But miscegenation
began prematurely and bred misshapen monsters. The enhancing of the keen powers
of sense by the entry of the gods intensified the carnal mind, and a more or
less promiscuous generation ran riot. This is the meaning of the harlotry or
whoredom against which the Eternal vents his displeasure so vehemently throughout
the prophetic books of the Old Testament. It is also allegorized by the various
tempests on the sea into which the solar heroes must be cast, after being awakened,
to still the raging waters of animal lust. This is the meaning of Jonah’s being
cast into the waters after the casting of lots showing him responsible for the
tempest. As the belly is the seat of the sexual and animal nature, the solar
god is appropriately placed in the fish’s belly. And that neither Jonah’s venture
nor Jesus’ burial is historical is indicated by the fact that both were held
captive in this cavern of death for three days!
In the Eternal’s
promise to Noah that the rainbow after every storm would remind him of his
compact not to bring further destruction on the earth, he concludes with:
"and the waters shall never again become a deluge to destroy every creature."
The structure of this sentence is enlightening; for it is to be noted that
the Eternal does not say that there shall be no waters to cover the earth,
but that the waters of living force released for evolutionary purposes shall
not again get out of hand and "become a deluge."
Of great value
in this connection is the latter part of an Egyptian inscription called the
Destruction of Mankind, dealing with the rebellion and fall of the angels.
It ends similarly to that of Noah:
"When the deluge
of blood is over, it is stated by the majesty of Ra: ‘I shall now protect men
on this account. I raise my hand (in token) that I shall not again destroy men.’"
(Page 282)
Here it
is distinctly called a deluge of blood, not of water, signifying that the fiery
nature of deity was drowned in the blood of incarnation. This points clearly
to the racial biological nature of the deluge and away from any historical imputation
whatever. Cosmology, biology, racial origin and individual spiritual history
are all woven together in the skein of both the rainbow and the deluge symbolism.
The thread that is missing is objective history!
The four elemental
symbols are found to suggest these interesting correlations when two or more
are seen in interplay. But there is almost no end of allusions to each of
them separately in the tomes of the old wisdom. Much of this material is too
valuable to be passed by. We begin with earth at the bottom.
This element need
not be dealt with at great length. It is readily seen for what it truly is,
the nethermost stratum of matter to which intelligence descends to manifest.
The mineral kingdom of earth, the physical base of man’s body, marks the nadir
of the downward sweep and the turning point or pivot. On its descending arc
life undergoes a subjection of its finer forces to sluggish inert matter,
on the analogy of a fire being reduced in burning potency. The earth is thus
the opposite pole to heaven, as matter is the opposite node to spirit. And
forever between these two extremes of positive and negative being plies the
tireless shuttle of life. From spirit to matter and back again is the schedule
of life’s endless journey. The ultimate significance of this is the profound
mystery of all being. But Life is; and one of its activities is the cyclical
periodicity of its creative function, its circulation around the wheel of
birth, growth and death. It rhythmically institutes a progressive order, runs
its course, perfects its products and then annihilates these products (to
outward sense), leaving their seeds of new life, however, to flower in the
next cycle.
Archaic wisdom expounds
more intricate cosmic and evolutionary data than modern science has yet picked
up. It asserts that the stars and planets are living beings, like humans. If
a mortal-immortal man has four distinct bodies appertaining to his entire being,
so does a planet. The ancient science says that each globe physically discernible
is but one of a chain of seven bodies existing, like man’s vestures, in four
types of matter symboled, again like man’s bodies, by earth, water, air and
fire. A life wave emanating from the Father darts outward and courses around
this chain of seven globes, organizing them in fact, (Page 283) and
creating a kingdom of kindred matter on each plane. The direction is downward
or matterward for the first four globes, after which it turns again spiritward
and sweeps upward through the last three. That is, the life wave builds a planetary
spirit body on the plane of spirit (fire), a more material body on the plane
of mind (air), a still more dense one on the plane of emotion (water), and finally
an entirely material globe on the plane of mineral earth. Then it turns upward
in its swing, rebuilding new globe bodies on the subtler planes through which
it descended till it rests at last in the glorious new spirit body on the plane
of the empyreal fire. On the fourth or lowest plane it builds up, lives and
then retires from, the dense physical globe which is the earth.
The earth is thus
the place of critical interest in the whole cycle. The life wave is sent forth
to return with a harvest of more abundant life. Now it is only as spirit contacts
and overcomes the inertia of matter that it brings its own potentialities to
birth. Abiding eternally on its own plane, as Platonic philosophy says, it remains
nonproductive. It must go forth, seek adventure, meet with opposition, wrestle
with the powers that would choke it, and achieve its new cyclical victory in
a world of adversity. As Plotinus writes, "It is not enough for the soul merely
to exist; she must show what she is capable of begetting." Here is the model
and the genius of all romance, all drama. And the earth is the scene of this
conflict between the embryonic immortal and the titanic mortal forces. And where
the earth stands in the chain of planetary bodies, the physical body of man
stands in the chain of vehicles or vestures which compose each individual. The
human body is the seat and arena of the great conflict of personal destiny.
Without dwelling in and mastering the body of flesh, the individual soul, as
says Plotinus, would never know her powers. She would be spiritual, as she was
from the start; but she would dream her existence away without ever becoming
consciously aware of her latent creative capabilities, if she did not incarnate.
Incarnation is evolution’s method of setting the seal of reality upon conscious
life. This is the office of earth-life in the cycle and of incarnation for the
individual soul. And it is the crucial point in all philosophy, as it is the
critical point in individual destiny. As for the soul her pathway to heaven
runs through the earth, and on it she goes to her "death" to be born anew. (Page
284)
In the
Ritual (Ch. 19) the chapter of the Crown of Triumph shows the meaning of placing
a floral wreath or crown upon the mummy in the sheta or coffin. It was to depict
that the "garland of earth in the nether world becomes the crown of triumph
for eternal wear." The crown of life was given to those who had suffered on
earth. Earth and the body were the double arena in which the soul wrought out
its perfection. Untried, untested in the fires of bodily experience, its faculties
could not have been forged into strength, power and beauty. The soul comes into
the underworld of darkness to win the immortal crown of light and glory, for
only by victory over the powers of darkness can the light be brought to shining.
The Ritual makes
it clear that the underworld of the earth is the realm to which the father
Osiris, or Amen-Ra, or other deity pictured as aged, comes to regain his youth.
"The old man (Amen-Ra) shineth in the form of one that is young"; "the old
man that maketh himself young again"; "the unknown one who hideth himself
from that which cometh forth from him"; and finally the one who is "deified
in the underworld." In the Book of Breathings the Manes is told:
"Then doth thy
soul breathe forever and ever, and thy form is made anew with thy life upon
earth; thou art made divine along with the souls of the gods, thy heart is
the heart of Ra, and thy members are the members of the great god."
Again:
"And the god Ap-uat
(i.e., the Opener of the Ways) hath opened up for thee a prosperous path."
The Manes cries
to Ra, his divinity:
"Make thou thy
roads glad for me; and make broad for me thy paths when I shall set out from
earth for the life in the celestial regions."
Saying that the divine
speech of Ra is in his ears in the Tuat (underworld) the Manes prays that "no
defects of my mother be imputed to me." This is to say: let no stains from my
contacts with mother earth adhere to me. Yet to the unit of undivinized spirit
it is told: "Through Keb (Seb) thou dost become a spirit." Apotheosis is on
earth. The swamps of earth are the miry path to the Aarru-Hetep at the summit
of the mount. (Page 285)
We meet
in the Ritual the statement that "Earth opens to Ra! Earth closes to Apap!"
It is the story of the Reed (Red) Sea over again. The physical domain opens
as the soul learns the keys of magic power that part the waters. These keys
are virtue, discipline, wisdom. But earth closes to block the way to Apap, or
evil and ignorance. Earth provides the conditions that induce every quality
of spirit to burgeon in beauty; but it brings to nought the counsels of the
ungodly through karmic law. To live in the lower, sensual, grasping nature is
to plunge into the waters and be overwhelmed; to aspire after fervent righteousness
is to find that dry land between the parted waters.
The next element
is water, and this is a more pertinent symbol of the lower self in man even
than earth. It stands in two senses, first, for the primordial essence of
all substance, the water of the abyss, the mother principle of all things;
secondly for the higher water of life. The first is called in Egypt the water
of the Nun, or of Nu (Nnu, equated with Noah by Massey). The Greek Nux (Nyx),
Latin Nox, perhaps matches this goddess of the infinite void, in whom there
is nothing but the sheer potentiality of life. As this is the primal darkness
and the void, Nu, Nun, Nyx, is apparently the linguistic original of all things
negative in speech, as "no," "none," "not," "nought," "never," "negative,"
German "nichts." But out of it flashed the first ray of light. It was the
water of source, and life is born out of water.
But the primal
abyss splits into two firmaments, and there is the water above to match the
water below. So secondly there is the water of life, the higher firmament.
This is practically equivalent to spirit and is another but less used form
of the fire symbol itself. The rain that falls from the skies, and not the
flowing water below, would be its type.
Closer to man, however,
there is a third application of the water symbol. The element is made to stand
for the second of his constituent principles, the emotional nature, which is
so closely inwrought with his physical body as generally to include the latter
in its reference. This is the most suggestive and fruitful use of water as symbol.
It is the water of earth, of sense, of generation, that holds the threat of
drowning the god. It is the water in which he has to learn to walk without sinking!
It is the water that he has to transmute into wine as spirit. Water is the aptest
symbol of the lower life because of its fluid nature and its constant motion
and fluctuation, picturing sense and emotion. (Page 286)
Life cast
amid the senses and the feelings is in unceasing flux, as Heraclitus said. Like
the restless throb of ocean, it is never still. No figure could better portray
the dual sense-emotion life of mortals than the heaving bosom of the sea, or
the moving current of a river or brook.
Nature indeed holds
before us a marvelous textual illustration of the whole cyclical life process
in her water-circulation system. We have the ocean as the source of all rising
water emanations. The sun elevates great masses of moisture into the skies
by its power; and a reduction of temperature causes this water vapor to condense
and fall upon the land. From remote highlands it trickles into the brooks,
streams, rivers and bays, and finally rejoins its primal sea of source. The
circuit bristles with analogies to the life cycle at every turn. The sun’s
function in lifting masses of vapor invisibly to heaven types the spirit’s
power to refine the unseen elements of consciousness and elevate the substance
of life. The reduction in temperature symbolizes a procedure in evolution
which leads souls back to earth. The condensation of the vapor mass into individual
drops symbols the dismemberment of deity. The fall to earth matches the descent
of the gods. The beneficent agency of the rain in uplifting natural growth
is evident as a parallel with the work of the god in uplifting the human.
Without water from heaven humanity would be equally sterile, spiritually,
as are the animals. The return to primal unity in the sea is manifest in the
conversion of individual selfishness back to social and spiritual solidarity.
Then comes a step in the cycle that yields the utmost of instruction for thought.
Every phase of the round is visible except that in which the water is lifted
from the sea again into heaven. The entire cycle is perceptible except the
one arc in which matter is returned to spirit (vapor) form. In every visible
round of life process there is always the one stage that is invisible!
This observation
holds a pointed moral for science and truth-seeking generally. It has been the
unwillingness to recognize the reality of the process of life in its invisible
stages that has kept science from discerning full truth. For human life runs
a similar cycle, issuing from the subjective or spirit world into the objective
palpable life of body, and retiring again. But, like the vapor rising from the
ocean, its return to heaven and its positive existence there is unseen. Science
stands on its firm denial of the soul’s subsistence after death on the sheer
ground of (Page 287) its
disappearance. Nature’s typology intimates that, like the vapor that has risen
to the skies, it will return again to earth, and that it must therefore be subsistent
in the interim. As the water cycle is complete in spite of one invisible segment,
so the natural cycle of life is complete, with no arc missing. The apparently
missing link is found in the unseen world. But is not science itself finding
that the most vital and dynamic realities are in the unseen world?
The sally of the
gods into nature’s realm is imaged as a welling forth of water from a living
rock or secret source. Ihuh (Jehovah), the Lord, is described in Egypt as
"the fountain of living waters" (Psalms, 29:10). Revelation speaks similarly
(Ch. 22:1): "And he showed me a river of water of life brought as crystal,
proceeding out of the throne of God." And in Isaiah when it is said that the
dumb shall break forth into singing, it is added: "Waters are to well forth
in the wilderness, streams in the desert." Jesus cried:
"If any man thirst,
let him come unto me and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture
hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water." (John 7:37).
In the
Ritual the god says: "I flood the land with water." There were various pools
and lakes which the Manes was to cross on his journey through the underworld.
Pepi, the soul, is called "the efflux of the celestial water, and he appeared
when Nu came into being." For the Manes the promise is made: "He shall quaff
water at the fountain head." In an Irish myth seven streams flowed forth from
"Counla’s Well" into the River Shannon. All cosmic effluence is in seven rays
or streams. The Egyptian text says of the Manes: "He gulpeth down seven cubits
of the great waters." The Rig-Veda (10:8, 3) gives us a similar hint, though
it has several loftier interpretations: "When the sun flew up, the (seven) Arushis
refreshed their bodies in the water." The disappearance by day of the seven
stars of the Great Bear, which always typed these seven creative emanations,
is probably the natural basis of this poetization. The water issuing from the
base of a rock is typical of godly life emanating from the eternal rock of being.
In the Ritual we meet with the hero who, like Moses, causes water to gush from
the rock. He says: "I make the water to issue forth." Of this water the children
of light "drink abundantly." The water of dawn, the dew, symbolizing the first
outpouring, is called "the water of (Page 288) Tefnut,"
twin sister of Shu, god of life by air. And it is notable that in the Hebrew
version the first to make the water come forth by miracle for the people to
drink is Miriam, whose relation to Moses is identical with that of Tefnut to
Shu. This Shu, as the son of Nun, the firmamental water, is the life in breath;
and almost unquestionably furnishes the prototypal character of Joshua, the
son of Nun in the Hebrew book. And Joshua is identical by name with Jesus. The
text pictures the goddess Nut standing beneath her sycamore tree, from which
she pours out the water of life, as Hathor offers her fruit juice from the tree.
The Hawaiian mythoi
have a rock that yields water on being struck with a rod.
Heaven as the source
of celestial water is indicated in the derivation of the Greek Ouranos, "heaven,"
from the Egyptian Urnas, which is the celestial water (probably giving the
root of our "urn"). It is the blood of Ouranos that gives birth to Aphrodite.
Neptune is traced
to the Egyptian nef, "sailor," and this god was the sun over the waters, the
god who completed the circuit round or over the waters.
Water was the first
creation, and up out of its depths came the emanating gods to get the breath
of life. Could one find a more astonishing replica of this cosmic situation
than that furnished by the modus of human birth? Every child who in this life
is to travel from nature to God issues into life out of a sack of water, and
the first thing done by the attendant is to stimulate the latent breathing
power. "Tefnut bears him, Shu gives him life."
The gods who brought
the water of life down to mortals had thereafter to endure the drenching by
this same element in its earthly form. Says Daniel: "He shall be drenched with
the dews of heaven." As the original cosmic water was the Nun, or the negation
of all positive life, so the earthly shadow of water, that is, matter, is similarly
a type of the negation of life. It is inert. The Egyptian ideograph of privation,
negation, is a wave of water! And many Indian languages have a similar term
for "he dies" and "water." This indicates the idea of death by drowning, the
paraphrase of incarnation. The gods descend to drink of the waters of carnal
life at the peril of their immortal souls. The dead beneath the waters, says
Massey, are the Manes in Amenta, where the waters are an image of the lower
Nun, (Page 289) the water
not above, but below, the horizon. Isis sought her drowned son Horus in the
waters of the underworld, from which he was fished out by Sevekh. Bacchus, lord
of the humid nature, in being raised again, ascends from the water, enters the
air and comes then as the Fanman or Winnower, the purifier by air (mind). (Plutarch:
De Iside et Osiride) This marks once more the evolution of natural man over
into the kingdom of spirit, the transition from water to air, or from emotion
to mind, from Tefnut to Sekhet, or from Tefnut to Shu. Jonah, the personification
of the god in matter, cried from "the belly of death":
"For thou didst
cast me into the depth, in the heart of the seas, and the flood was round
about me; all thy waves and thy billows passed over me . . . The waters compassed
me about, even to the soul. The deep was round about me; the weeds were wrapped
about my head."
Job (26) cries
that "the dead tremble beneath the waves . . . He stilleth the sea by his
power," as did Jonah and Jesus, Horus and Tammuz and others. "He turneth back
the waterflood which is over the thigh of the goddess Nut . . ." The Manes
in dread of the deluge prays to "have power over the water and not be drowned"
(Rit., Ch. 57). Glimpsing his coming earthly victory, he cries: "I am the
being who is never overwhelmed in the waters."
Herod in attempting
to kill Jesus by a slaughter of the innocents is paralleled by the Pharaoh.
He attempted to blot out the menace of the Israelites by ordering the Hebrew
midwives to kill all the male children at the time of birth by drowning (Exod.
I:22). This is a depiction of the general danger menacing the god during his
incarnation in the watery realm of the body. The Psalms express it indirectly
(74): "Thou breakest the heads of the dragons in the waters." The gods had
to break the power of the elementary lives engendered in the lower or water
kingdoms. Sargon says that his mother gave him to the river, "which drowned
me not."
"He drew me out
of great waters," sings the Psalmist. Moses is water-born. Josephus explains
the name as signifying "one who was taken out of the water." Moffatt translates
it as "removed" (from the water). Pharaoh’s daughter called the name of the
child Mosheh, and said "because I drew him out of the water." (Exod. II:10).
Maui, of New Zealand legend, like Moses and Sargon, was drawn out of the (Page
290) water
at birth. And the floating ark was the coffin. The Speaker says: "I am coffined
in an ark like Horus, to whom his cradle is brought." This cradle is often
represented as a nest of papyrus reeds, equated thus with the ark of bulrushes.
Thor in the Norse mythos had to wade through the waters, there being no bridge
for him, as he fares to the Doomstead under the Ygdrasil. The root of this
great Norse tree of life was beneath the water, its stem and branches above,
like the lotus. The Ygdrasil ash stands in the well of the Urdar fountain.
The Egyptian Pool of Persea nourished the roots of "the two divine sycamore
trees of earth and heaven." In Revelation the tree of life is planted on both
sides of the river of waters.
It was in the storm
on the sea that the distressed sailors in the gray light of dawn saw Jesus walking
upon the troubled waters, drawing nigh to them. In quieting the storm he played
the part of Horus in the Ritual, of whom it is written: "He hath destroyed the
waterflood of his mother"--nature. In another form this stands: "He hath dispersed
the power of the raging rainstorm." And again: "He hath dispersed for thee the
rainstorm, he hath driven away for thee the waterflood, he hath broken for thee
the tempests." All this prefigures the stilling of the strong restless power
of the natural elements in man’s lower life, the mother-material nature, symboled
by water. The god descending into the sphere of "water" was imaged by the duck,
goose or swan; who all dive for food under the water. In a beautiful myth of
the island of Celebes, seven celestial nymphs descend from the sky to bathe.
They are seen by Kasimbaha, who stole the robes of one of them named Utahagi.
These robes gave her the power of flying, and without them she was caught. She
became his wife and bore him a son. Here we find ignorant primitives, according
to scholastic rating, preserving a definite legend of the highest spiritual
truth. For the robe stolen by the man on earth was her divine vesture, the immortal
spiritual body.
The Ritual speaks
eloquently again in one of its chapter titles: "Of drinking water in the underworld."
And in this chapter the Manes prays: "May there be granted to me mastery over
the water courses as over the members of Set (Sut)."
One of the Chinese
Trinity of gods "showed the people how to cultivate the ground which had been
reclaimed from the waters" (Shu-King). (Page 291)
We have in this
imagery the meaning of "casting bread upon the waters." It is the going out
into incarnation of that "bread" which cometh down out of heaven for the life
of the world. As the life in generation is distressful for the god, one of
the promises pertaining to final release from the ordeal emphasizes that "there
shall be no more night, no more sea" in the blessed homeland of the father.
But the bread cast out is multiplied and returns a sevenfold increase.
The zodiacal sign
of Aquarius is the Waterman pouring from an urn the water of life in a double
stream. The sacred literature is filled with references to the two waters, or
the water of the double source. In many myths there are two streams, two springs,
two wells, two lakes. Cosmically the two indicate the original fission of God’s
being into the two poles of positive and negative life, or spirit and matter.
This was the divine life that emanated in two streams to fructify creation.
In the lower world it is reflected in the division between the water of the
air above and on the earth below, vapor and liquid, cloud on high and stream
on the ground. Sometimes the goddesses representing primal fecundity are cut
in two, as Tiamat, Isis, Neith, Hathor, Apt, Rerit. Thus Nut was the goddess
of celestial water and Apt of the terrestrial; Isis of the heavenly, Nephthys
of the earthly. These were pictured as the two cows or two groups of seven cows
(as in Pharaoh’s dream) or a cow of two colors, fore and hind. The cow, as productive
source of life-food, was paired into the water-cow of earth and the milch-cow
of heaven. The water-cow symboled Mother Nature alone, before the advent of
divine spirit, the masculine bull, into creation - matter unfructified by intelligence.
The seven cows betoken the seven creative Elohim, the living energies of matter.
The two living streams of water were put in the uranograph in the form of a
watercourse with two branches, one of which was the Iarutana (Egy.), Eridanus
(Greek), Jordan (Hebrew); and the other the milk stream, the Milky Way, Via
Lactea. The Eridanus, or earth water, was the stream that had to be passed over
in incarnation; the Milky Way was the water course by which the soul ascended
again into the heavens of spirit. The cow of earth was constellated in the seven
stars of the Great Bear, the Milch-cow of heaven in Cassiopeia.
The Hindu Aditi,
as the Great Mother of the Gods, becomes twain. She yields milk for the gods,
and is identical with the heaven cow in Egypt. Aditi was the primal form of
Dyaus (Zeus), the sky divinity. (Page 292)
She alternates
with Diti as mother of the embryo that was divided into seven parts, the seven
Elohim. As Aditi she was the undivided Absolute; as Diti she was the divided
one, mother of the two streams of outpoured life.
Of Ra it is written:
"Thou bringest the milk of Isis to him and the waterflood of Nephthys." Or again:
"Thou hast brought the milk of Isis to Teta, and the water of the celestial
stream of Nephthys."
The Egyptians figured
the two waters in the Nile, with its two arms, the Blue Nile and the White
Nile. In the planispheres the south was Upper Egypt (by elevation); so the
heavenly chart depicts the celestial Nile or Eridanus (Jordan) as pouring
forth its divine stream from the southern sky, rising from the star Achernar
in Eridanus constellation, and traveling northward to Orion’s foot, or where
Orion rises up as Horus, the lord of the fertilizing inundation. Horus’ representative
in the planisphere is Orion. In the celestial chart Orion is found standing,
club in hand, the mighty hunter, with one foot on the water of the River Eridanus.
By this it is depicted that the young solar god, our divinity, rises up where
the stream of natural evolution ends and stands over it invested with the
majesty and power of the lord of the lower waters of sense and emotion. Also
in the case of the Nile there were two sources of its water, one earthly,
the Lake Nyanza, the other celestial, or the rain and snow from heaven in
the highlands of source.
The Persian Bundahish
details the two waters of origin as female and male seed. "All milk arises
from the seed of the males and the blood is that of the females." The two
waters, or blood and milk, were both typed as feminine at first, to represent
nature as productive without spiritual fecundation. To symbol the latter,
the one was afterwards made masculine. The first pair was the mother’s blood
and milk; the second, blood and seminally-engendered milk, or milk treated
as of male generation.
As in the cosmos,
matter, the virgin mother of life, was evolving her forms without the visible
presence of animating divine intelligence, that is, before a creature embodying
intelligence had been evolved, so in human racial history the body of man was
built up by nature without the ensouling presence of mind. Matter and its inherent
force, the feminine aspect of life, alone occupied the field. Marvelously this
phase is paralleled not only in some aspects of biology but in early racial
(Page 293) history
itself. Following upon Totemic social organization there was the Matriarchate,
when the woman was head and ruler, because she was the only known producer of
life. The function of fatherhood was obscurely known. The mother and later the
daughter, or the mother and her sister, were the only known bonds of blood relation
for the children. As in the cosmos, so in human society, the male element, while
operative, was hidden out of sight and knowledge. A child was related only through
two women, mother and daughter, or mother and aunt. Massey asserts in a hundred
pages that these two are the archetypal forms of the two wives, or two women
who are dramatis personae in nearly every religious myth of origin. Adam, Abraham,
Jacob, Laban, David, Moses, Samson had two wives, and the Old Testament is replete
with stories of two women, who are sisters, as Aholah and Aholibah, in Ezekiel.
Two Meris figure in the story of Osiris, and the two Maries in that of Jesus.
Two pools were
pictured in the Ritual, the Pool of Natron and the Pool of Salt. Also the
Pool of the North and the Pool of the South.
The male or seminal
element, then, marked the introduction of spiritual vivification into the natural
order. A new birth ensued for nature, new powers were released for her creatures,
and they sprang forward to attain a new status in conscious being. The element
injected into nature to produce this generation was typified, both by the Gnostics
and by Jesus, as "the salt of the earth" and the "light of the world." The sowing
of the spiritual seed, or the potentiality of the god, was the earnest of man’s
redemption from animal status. The effort to fix the character of our "salvation"
without knowing specifically the nature of our "fall"--without definite knowledge
of what we were to be saved from - has held the human mind for centuries captive
to a vague dread, a bogie apprehension, that has been a vast discredit to theology.
Salt is the figure of preservation. As in the case of the mummy unguents, salt
was to preserve the lower nature of man from decay.
Curiously the two
Pools are elsewhere called the Pool of the Moon and the Pool of the Sun. In
the Pool of Natron, or Hesmen, or Smen, the bloody sweat of menstruation, we
have the feminine, that is, material aspect of life, for which the moon ever
stands, in opposition to the sun, which is masculine, life-generative and vivifying.
The moon in its phase unlighted by the sun represented the woman, nature, in
(Page 294) her
unproductive stage. She was in her virgin state, unwedded to male spirit, unfecundated
by mind. Impregnation by Intelligence would make her productive and take her
out from under her subjection "to the law" of periodicity and matter.
And this alone is
the meaning of the "miracle" in which Jesus heals the woman with an issue of
blood from her youth, who touched the hem of his robe and received the perceptible
discharge of his power. The incident is just one of the old mythic depictions,
using the sexual procreative functionism as a weathervane of spiritual meaning.
When matter, the virgin mother, received the impregnation of spirit, the periodic
course of nature was interrupted and a miraculous new birth of life was inaugurated.
The stoppage of her issue of blood was but the sign of the entrance of deity
into humanity. For the ceasing of the natural flow is the sure index of the
ensuing advent of a higher birth. Nature, running to waste without fruitage,
was healed by divine impregnation or vivification. Christianity has been content
to take from this incident the meager wealth of a physical "cure"; ancient poetic
genius deposited in it a mine of inexhaustible cosmic suggestiveness, a source
of great moral enrichment for all.
That antique document,
the Book of Enoch, comments directly upon the point under discussion (80:7-10):
"The water which
is above shall be the agent (male) and the water which is under the earth
shall be the recipient, and all shall be destroyed."
Jesus said that
he was from above and natural man from beneath. It is found in the Ritual
that in the Pool of Natron and the Pool of Salt the sun was reborn each day
and the moon each night. The circuit of experience each day, or each life,
for both the divine man (sun) and the animal man (moon) amounted to a rebaptism
and renewal of life. "I grow young each day," exults the soul in the Ritual.
The constellation
of the Great Bear was called "The Well of the Seven Stars." The Hebrew Beer-Sheba
(Sheba meaning obviously "seven") was an early form of the primordial water.
Beer-Sheba in the Septuagint is given as "Phrear Horkou" (Greek), meaning: "The
well of the oath." What can this strange name connote, save that it is a subtle
designation for this life in watery body, to which the soul descended under
the karmic "command" or covenant, or oath, which binds it to return to this
living well of life? (Page 295)
The twin
pools were located in Anu, the white water being southward, the red northward.
In the Ritual one name for it is the "Well of Sem-Sem." Sem-Sem denotes regenesis.
The Ritual says: "Inexplicable is the Sem-Sem, which is the greatest of all
secrets." It was the place where sun and moon were renewed. In consequence it
was a place where the deceased seeks the waters of regeneration, or fount of
youth. He says (Ch. 97): "I wash in the Pool of Peace. I draw water from the
Divine Pool under the two Sycamores of heaven and earth. All justification is
redoubled on my behalf." "Osiris is pure by the Well of the South and the North."
In plain language
all this metaphorization means simply that man, a biune being, strides forward
in his evolution by dipping in the experiences of both the carnal embodiment,
the Pool of Natron, the "Nature" Pool, and in the god’s divine essence, the
Pool of Salt, the "Spirit" Pool.
The water of life
is sometimes said to be concealed between two lofty mountains which stand
close together. But for two or three minutes each day they move apart, and
the seeker of the healing and vivifying water must be ready on the instant
to dart through, fill his two flasks and instantly rush back. Zechariah (14:4)
hints at this:
"And the Mount
of Olives shall cleave in the midst thereof towards the East and towards the
West, and half of the mountain shall remove toward the North and half toward
the South."
"Day" is a glyph
for a cycle of any length, here an incarnation. The period of openness between
the two mountains is just the time between birth and death in this life, during
which brief moment, the soul must fall speedily to work to wrest all it can
from this opportunity for contact between the two natures, animal and divine.
It must strive quickly to fill its cup of experience from the flowing waters.
The night cometh when no man can work. For this is the only time in its evolution
when it can drink from the double spring, the two pools. The two or three
minutes coincide with the two (or three) days in the tomb.
And by the shifting
of the earth’s axis the east-west relation was supplanted by the north-south
one, as referred to by Zechariah.
The Egyptian god
Hapi, being of both sexes, denotes the eunuch in whom the two were united. He
is the epicene personification, androgyne. From the mouth of Hapi issues the
one stream which enters (Page 296) two
other figures from whose two mouths it is emaned in a double stream. This is
the one water dividing into two in the mythology. In the astrograph this is
Aquarius.
In Egyptian and
Hebrew traditions the deity is represented as shedding two creative tears,
a poetic version of the two waters.
In the Hindu picture
of Mahadeva and Parvati the waters of Soma are seen issuing from the head
of the male deity and from the mouth of the cow, the feminine emblem. Siva
is the mouth of the male source and Parvati, the Great Mother, is that of
the feminine source. "He who knows the golden reed standing in the midst of
the waters is the mysterious Prajapati, the generator."
Milk from the body
signified the female water, while Soma juice figured the male element, the
wine that went to the head!
The ancient mother
source was portrayed as twofold, a breathing land-animal in front, a water-animal
behind, typing the elements of water and air. This is seen in the zodiacal
Capricorn, the sea-goat, land-goat in front, sea animal in the rear. The Hindu
goddess Maya hovers over the waters, and presses her two breasts with both
hands, ejecting the twofold stream of living nutriment. The Hermaean Zodiac
shows the Great Bear with streaming breasts, and the zodiacal Virgin is represented
by the Bear as unproductive in Virgo, but the "bearer" in the sign of Pisces,
where she is half fish and half human. Ishtar, another personification of
the genetrix, was dual. One of her names was Semiramis, the daughter of Atergatis.
The latter has the tail of a fish, but the daughter was wholly human. The
fish denoted water, and the dove on Ishtar’s head signified air, again throwing
sense and soul into relation.
Since the Eridanus
is the Jordan, the word merits closer attention. It came from the Egyptian
Iarutana. Eri, later Uri, was an Egyptian name for the inundation, meaning
"great, mighty," whilst tun or tana signified "that which rises up and bursts
and bonds." In Eritanu, or Iarutana, we then have the mighty river rising
to overflow its banks. Astrologically it was placed in the heavenly chart
as issuing from the mouth of the constellation of the Southern Fish, type
of life source, and flowing north to the foot of Orion.
It is of note that
in Joshua (22) it is said the Eternal made the Jordan the boundary between the
main body of the Israelites and the Reubenites and Gadites, who had not been
permitted to cross into (Page 297) the
Promised Land because, as it is put, "you have no share in the Eternal." Naturally
this stream of life force sweeping mankind onward marks the boundary between
the animal and the spiritual kingdoms. Animal man can not cross it until he
has been bathed in its waters and been purified and transformed. We are crossing
this boundary line between our lower and higher natures.
There is plentiful
use of the water symbol under the special form of the sea. "The angel descended
until he reached the sea of the earth, and he stood with his right foot upon
it." This matches Horus-Orion in the starry chart standing with his foot upon
the end of the Jordan River. The Dragon poured forth the water flood to overwhelm
the Woman cast out of heaven. This points to the release of the surging forces
of the carnal nature upon the soul after incarnation. But the earth opened
to swallow up the released waters and helped the Woman, at which the Beast
waxed more wroth; "and he waged war against them upon the borders of the sea
which encompassed the earth." This is Paul’s war of the carnal mind against
the spirit on the rim or boundary between earth and sea, our two natures!
The watery field
of life is pictured as a "crystal sea wherein the fire was reflected, and
upon it there stood those who had overcome the influence of the Beast, who
had not worshipped his image nor borne upon them the mark of his number."
Ra brings to Teta
"the power to journey over the Great Green Sea." The Manes (Teta) "goes round
about the Lake and on the flood of the Great Green Sea." Again: "Thou sailest
over the Lake of Kha, in the north of heaven, like a star passing over the
Great Green Sea . . . as far as the place where is the star Seh (Orion)."
This matches the location of the Eridanus. Hawaiian tradition says that the
voyaging souls "waded safely through the sea."
One of the most specific
corroborations of the meaning of the water symbol is found in Revelation in
the expression that when the books of life were opened, "the sea gave up its
dead, for Death and Hades found no more any place, because they were judged
and cast down." Orthodox typology present two varying symbols of what takes
place "when the dead are raised." One says the graves were opened; the other
that the sea gave up its dead. Here is a land and water conflict, only resolvable
by symbolism, which may use many figures to picture one truth. But literal history
falls meaningless between two varying (Page 298) statements
of fact. The grave and the sea both refer to mortal life, which under any figure
yields up its living "dead" at the end of the accomplished cycle. Then the seer
"beheld the fashioning of the earth anew; for the sea out of which the Beast
had risen was now no more." "There shall be . . . no more sea."
It is necessary
to give some space to the symbolism of the fish, for it carries part of the
imputation of the water element. For practical purposes it is possible to
equate the four terms, fish, sea, matter and mother, in significance. The
fish denotes, first, life in submergence, or the god in matter, who yet does
not die, who can still breathe under the elements. But more specifically it
intimates the source of life flowing outward toward matter. It is the outrance,
not the entrance, of life. The whale spouting out its water stream is suggestive.
The Eridanus poured forth from the mouth of the Southern Fish. The os tincae,
or tench’s mouth, was one of the religious symbols of frequent occurrence.
Watching a fish, one notes an apparent expulsion of water from the mouth with
the semblance of chewing. It is the door of life’s emanation, and it is the
denizen of the waters out of which life streams. The zodiacal Pisces is the
sign of the birth of saviors. Jesus, Horus, Ioannes and others came as Ichthys
(Ichthus), "fish" in Greek. And we have the fish-avatar of Vishnu. The door
of life is figured in the shape of a fish-mouth at the western or feminine
end of a church. The Pope’s miter is the mouth of a fish. The soul of life
comes by way of the water.
The Vesica Piscis
or fish’s bladder denoted the presence of air in the water, and the bubbles
rising from the fish’s mouth double this hint as to the presence of mind in
matter. The fish was a lower symbol than the swan or duck, for it must swim
in the water; the other can float on the surface. In this sense it types the
god caught, trapped in water; also likely to be caught in a net. It is said
that cynocephali, who lay in wait to seize fish, "were allowed to catch them
because of their ignorance." It is the soul’s lack of full knowledge that
causes it to be caught again and again in the meshes of carnality.
The fish zodiacally
stands for the feet of the man. The mermaid with tail of fish represented the
body as partaking in its nether half of the lower forces of life. Man’s feet
are in the water of life. Ishtar-Semiramis was given the tail of a fish. The
tail also portrays the, as yet, non-dual character of life, creative power not
yet bifrond. (Page 299) It shows the
non-division of the legs. The mummied Christ figure in the Catacombs, with legs
bound helplessly together, depicts the god strapped in the bonds of the natural
elements, not yet having manifested the duality. He can not use his two legs
and walk, like a god. He is only the first, natural man, not man and god conjoined.
Semiramis’ brother
was Ichthys in the statue at Ascalon. Ichthys was a title of Bacchus. In the
Hermaean Zodiac Pisces is named Ichthon, and the fish is the female goddess
who brought forth the young sun-god as her Piscean offspring, whether called
Horus in Egypt, Jesus in Palestine and Rome, or Marduk, the fish of Hea, in
Assyria. Christ was Ichthys the Fish from 255 B.C. unto about 1900 A.D., or
for the period of the Piscean era in the precession. Previous to that he was
Aries, the Lamb of God. Who will figure him now as the Waterman?
An old Egyptian
story, the tale of Setnau, written by Taht himself, and alleged to be so potent
that two pages of it, when recited, would open the secrets of nature and unlock
all mysteries, says: "The divine power will raise fishes to the surface of
the water." Metaphorically this refers to the power of the god to lift the
natural man, immersed in the sea of material life, to mastery over his lower
self, and bring him to the top or surface of his fleshly nature from out of
the depths of it.
The Ritual reports
the god as declaring: "I am the great and mighty Fish which is in the city
of Qem-Ur." This is the god in matter. But it is promised that Ra "shall be
separated from the Egg and from the Abtu Fish." Abtu is a form of Abydos,
the place of burial of the god. Ra shall be freed from the fish or submerged
state. Two chapter titles tell of "coming forth from the net" and from "the
catcher of the fish." The swampy region from which Sevekh, solar deity, recovered
the mutilated limbs of Horus, was called Ta-Remu, "the land of the Fish,"
a name given it by Ra.
Gathering up some
scattered fragments of the water emblem, we note Homer describing the river
Titaresius flowing from the Styx as pure and unmixed with the taint of death
and gliding like oil over the surface of the water by which the gods made their
covenant. Oil on troubled waters may be seen to be a profounder symbolism than
was conceived before. For the god, oil is no chance symbol, as it was regularly
employed in the anointing to type celestial radiance, the sheen of the divine
glory. To pour oil on the waters is indeed to quiet (Page 300) the
storms of raging animality by the calm of reason and the gentleness of love.
In the Hebrew the
water of life flows from the rock Tser till the time of Miriam’s passing away.
This represents the female source. The change to the masculine phase occurs
when the water gushes forth for the first time from the rock Seba (Beer-Sheba)
by the command of Moses. This was the water of Meribah, and in the Egyptian
Meri is water, and Bah is the male.
In Judges (30)
God split the rock as sign of the dual nature, and water flowed forth to quench
Samson’s thirst, as in the case of Moses.
The throne on which
Osiris is seated is sometimes placed, in the vignettes to the Ritual, on water,
still or running. This is to say that the god is seated above the unstable
foundation of the changing earth life. But life is to be established through
its experience here, and so "he hath established it upon the floods."
When the god had
been transformed he is said to "have gained power over fresh water." As salt
typed the saving grace of divinity, the fresh water would point to the new
and as yet unsaved natural creature. "Moisture," says the Chaldean Oracles,
"is a symbol of life, and hence both Plato and, prior to Plato, the gods call
the soul at one time a drop from the whole of vivification; and at another
time a certain fountain of it."
The chapter can
be brought to a close with a few intimations of the air symbolism. It is much
less general than those of water and fire. The Sanskrit "Asu," meaning "vital
breath" is of great importance because it is the base of Asura (Persian: Ahura,
surname of Ahura-Mazda), one of the specific names of the hosts of incarnating
gods.
Both Horus and Jesus
came forth with a fan in their hands, as the Winnower. This emblem is a clear
glyph for the principle of mind. Intellect is to sweep out the chaff of sensuality
and free the golden grain. Those initiated into the Greater Mysteries were washed
with water and then breathed upon, fanned and winnowed by the purifying spirit.
This was the dual baptism of water and the spirit, or fire. One of the two great
symbols held in the hands of the Gods in Egypt was a fan called the Khi, the
sign of air, breath and spirit. The other was the Hek, or Aut-crook, which denoted
laying hold, in the downward direction, of matter by spirit; in the reversed
direction, of spirit by the lower personality.(Page 301)
Lack of
air, or smothering, was a twin type with drowning for the limitations of incarnation.
A phrase of the Ritual indicates this: "whose throat stinketh for lack of air."
In descending to seek her lost brother and husband Osiris, Isis is claimed to
have "made light appear from her feathers; she made air to come into being by
means of her two wings,"--another personation of the fanner or winnower. The
god fans the mortal to keep him from being suffocated for lack of air, mind.
The god brings us intellect, which indeed keeps us from being smothered by the
intolerable life of sense. The cogency of leaven as a symbol lies in its generating
air within the material mass. The raising of dough is synonymous with the resurrection
of mortality. In the Ritual there is a "chapter of giving air to the soul in
the underworld." Mind came as our savior.(Page 302)
Chapter
XIV
FIRE
ON HEAVEN’S HEARTH
The way is now
cleared for the majestic sweep of the fire symbolism. It rises above the other
elements in grandeur and impressiveness. The full implication of its meaning
lifts the mind into reaches of luminous suggestiveness as to the splendor
of the experience awaiting us in nobility, and even as a mere figure it has
a certain power to stir dim intimations of the magnificence of that reality
which it hints at. There is in nature hardly a phenomenon more wonderful than
the eating away of a stick of wood by a flame. The mystery of all life is
back of that energic display. And the mystery becomes awesome when we realize
that our own life is more than analogous to fire; it is of kindred nature
with it. The soul within us is a spark of divine flame.
The origin of the
word is of interest. It goes back to the Greek pur(pyr). Massey traces the
word "pyramid" from the stem, plus the Egyptian met, meaning "ten" or "a measure,"
giving us pyramet. He asserts that it stands thus for the ten original measures
or arcs traced by the god of fire, the sun, through the zodiacal circuit.
As the great pyramid at Gizeh, and others, seem to have been intimately related
to sidereal measurements, this theory of origin is plausible. The word would
then mean "a ten-form measure of fire," a figure for manifest life.
But the Greek pur
itself traces back to the Chaldean ur, primitive word for "fire." To this
the Egyptians added their article "the" as prefix, in the form of p-, making
the word p-ur or pur. The first emanation, Abraham, came out from ur, the
primal fire of creation.
The Sanskrit Agni,
god of fire, is traced by Massey to the general root, ag, meaning "to move quickly,"
as in the Latin ago, "to go," agile (Lat.), "active," our "agitate" and others.
As this derivation links it closely to the Greek theos, "god," who by etymology
is the "swift runner," "the swift goer," Agni, god of fire, may well be connected
(Page 303) with
the theos, the god whose symbol everywhere is the swift-darting shaft of fire,
whether in the heavens or in the uplands of reason and intelligence. The "flash
of intelligence" is the exact sign and token of the swift activity of the god
within us.
That the soul is
a spark from the celestial fire is attested by the words of the Speaker in
the Ritual (Ch. 97): "Lo I come from the lake of flame, from the lake of fire,
and from the field of flame, and I live."
In the Vision of
Scipio Cicero has preserved some of the ancient doctrine concerning the derivation
of souls from the empyrean. The spirit of Africanus tells his son that souls
were supplied to men from the eternal fires, which are constellations and
stars. Virgil says that in souls there is a potency like fire. In the Hymn
to Minerva of Proclus, souls originate
"From the great father’s
fount, supremely bright,
Like fire resounding,
leaping into light."
One of the Chaldean
Oracles runs as follows:
"The soul being
a splendid fire, through the power of the Father remains immortal, is the
mistress of life . . . the soul extends vital illumination to body."
And again most
succinctly:
"All things are
the progeny of one fire."
The first Oracle
of Zoroaster tells of a ladder which reached from Tartarus to the first or
highest fire. This was the gamut of stages between the lowest levels of material
life and the highest spiritual. The principle of soul, says the Oracle, is
the operator and giver of life-bearing fire. It fills the vivific bosom of
Hecate (the lower nature) and pours on the linked natures of matter and spirit
the fertile strength of a fire endured with mighty power. Concerning divine
Love the Oracle speaks:
"Who first leaped
forth from intellect, clothing fire bound together with fire, that he might
govern the fiery cratera (bowls), restraining the flower of his own fire."
When Ceres delivered
up the government to Proserpina, her daughter (intellect to soul), she instructed
her to have conjugal relation (Page 304) with
Apollo, the sun-god, as thus the god would beget "famed offspring, with faces
glowing with refulgent fire."
The upper fire,
the Oracles affirm, did not shut up its power in matter, nor in works, but
in intellect. "For the artificer of the fiery world is an intellect of intellect."
Saturn, who in the Oracles is the first fountain, the strong spirit which
is beyond the fiery poles, endues all the lower principles with his essence.
These, through his pervading might, "become refulgent with the furrows of
inflexible and implacable fire." They "are the intellectual conceptions from
the paternal fountain, plucking abundantly the flower of the fire of ceaseless
time." And that our progress upward is a return to a fiery nature is shown
by these excerpts:
"A fire-heated
conception has the first order. For the mortal who approaches to fire will
receive a light from divinity; . . ."
"A singular fire
extends itself by leaps through the waves of air; or an infigured fire, whence
a voice runs before; or a light beheld near, every way splendid, resounding
and convolved. But also behold a horse full of refulgent light; or a boy carried
on a swift horse - a boy fiery or clothed with gold."
"Rivers being mingled,
perfect the works of incorruptible fire."
It was the statement
of Greek philosophy that "from the exhalations arising from the burning bodies
of the Titans, mankind were produced." [ Thomas Taylor: Eleusinian and
Bacchic Mysteries, p. 126.]
An echo of this abstrusity
of esoteric lore is heard in the accounts of the Wiradthuri tribe of Western
Australia. One of their initiations is apparently the analogue of the whole
basic structure of religion, represented in a fire drama. In the puberty initiations
the lads were frightened by a large fire lighted near them, being told that
the Dhur-Moolan was about to burn them. This god was supposed to take them into
the bush and instruct them in all the traditional customs. So he went through
a pretended killing of the boys, cutting them up and burning the pieces to ashes,
after which he molded the ashes into human shape and restored them to life as
new beings.[See. R. H. Matthews: The Wiradthuri Tribes, Journal of Anthropology
Inst., Vol. XXV, 1896. ] Primitive ignorance may be the nursery of superstition,
but much alleged primitive ignorance is old wisdom surviving in ruinous grandeur
by the implacable power of tradition.
In the Clementine
Homilies (8:18) the offspring of the unnatural (Page 305) and
untimely union between the sons of God and the daughters of men described in
Genesis are declared to be "bastards, begotten of the fire of angels and the
blood of women." The gods are rebuked for polluting themselves with women, "as
the sons of men do," and for creating a hybrid and unworthy progeny whose destruction
they would in the future lament. (Enoch 12)
Many tribes held
the firefly, which thrives in moist grasses, to be a typical emblem of our divinity.
Its periodical flashing in the dark is suggestive.
The Logia and Revelation
both yield data on the theme of fire. At the first angel’s trumpet message
there ascended on the earth a hail of fire which was scattered from the Altar
of Fire before the throne. "And the hail of fire was mingled with the blood
of the Lamb; these were cast upon earth to consume away its evil." Horus had
said that he came to put an end to evil. At the second angel’s blast lightning
flashed forth and went down into the sea, which it changed into blood. We
have seen that a hail of stars or sparks over the earth was the typical figuration
of the descent of the bright deities. The Egyptian ceremony of flinging a
blazing cross into the Nile conveys the same connotation. The deities in incarnation
were styled by the Greeks water-nymphs. A cross on fire thrust into water
carried the purport of the sacrificial act of incarnation. A fiery serpent
on the cross is a kindred emblem. The Targum commands: "Make thee a burning."
In India the swastika cross was a special emblem of fire, the god Agni. In
the early Church the cross of fire was adorned on a Friday, when a lighted
cross was suspended from the dome of St. Peter’s, the cross being covered
with lamps in a fire-traced figure. Dante describes the souls in Paradise
as praying inside a cross of fire, which is their world. The hawk is a symbol
of solar fire, and Horus arose hawk-headed or divinized with fire.
When Lucifer fell
upon the earth and with his key unlocked the pit of the abyss, there issued
from it clouds of smoke like that which proceeds from a great furnace, and it
obscured the light of the sun! That is to say, the mingled steam and exhalation
from electrolyzed "water" and ‘burning flesh," or the carnal nature vivified
by currents of deific potency, rose all around the god and well nigh obscured
his inner glow. And out of the smoke came forth locusts and scorpions, having
power to sting and poison. And these went forth to torment all the (Page 306)
dwellers on
earth; only they could not harm those who had not the mark of the Beast on them.
The army of horsemen that came forth to battle these forms of evil coming out
of the smoke appeared as if "emitting fire." This fire scorched those who love
to do wickedness, and drove them back into the pit. This denotes the burning
out of those strong animal propensities in the fiery furnace of human experience.
Proclus in his Timaeus (Lib. V) observes concerning the telestic art that "it
obliterates through divine fire all the stains produced by generation." This
is the true and only meaning of purgatory.
Another angel descended
with a rainbow on his head, his face was as the sun for brightness and his
feet were resting upon pillars of fire. This lower fire searched the lives
of all on earth and filled with pain those who bore the mark of the Beast.
In the Book of Overthrowing
Apap this archfiend and his associates, the Sami and the Sebau (minions of Seb),
are burnt up by the flames of the sun-god. In the Book of Am-Tuat the bodies,
souls, shadows and heads of the enemies of Ra are burnt and consumed daily in
pits of fire. In the eighth section of the Book of Gates a picture is drawn
of a monster speckled serpent called "Kheti," with seven folds, in each one
of which stands a god. The open mouth of the serpent belches a stream of fire
into the faces of the enemies of Ra, whose arms are tied behind their backs
in agonized helplessness. Horus stands by, urging the reptile to consume the
enemies of his father. In the Book of Am-Tuat there is also a group of twelve
serpents, whose work was to pour fire from their bodies "which was to light
the dead sun-god on his way." The soul of the god, typed often as "the Eye of
Ra," is described as "the flame which followeth after Osiris to burn up the
souls of his enemies." "Uatchet, the Lady of Flames, is the Eye of Ra." Ra is
addressed as "Thou who givest blasts of fire from thy mouth, (who makest the
two lands bright with thy radiance)." The Manes who come out of Amenta pure
"shall have burnt incense before Ra."
The inner idea of
burning animal flesh on a physical altar was the consuming by divine fire of
the dross that emanated from the carnal segment in man. The god came into the
natural man to transfigure him. To achieve this aeonial labor his fire had to
burn out slowly the grosser elements, earthy and moist, by spiritual alchemy
and replace them by subtle and pure essence akin to its own diviner substance.
A Buddhist phrase, "the gross purgations of the celestial fire," attests the
(Page 307) nature
of the chemistry that must take place. The burning up of dross to refine pure
metal is a glib poetic shibboleth in philosophy, but few know that it is a description
of an actual biochemical process taking place in human life. All our lower emotionalism
and heavier sensualism is as fuel for the burning. The lurid flare of such a
combustion is only turned to pure clear flame by pain and defeat. Animal sacrifice
on an altar was only to dramatize the conversion of lower man to higher under
the action of fiery spiritual energies. And it is significant that the ancients
swore, not by the altar, but by the fire which was on the altar. One would not
swear by the impermanent part of his nature, but by the stable and abiding.
This was the fire of soul and conscience. The inner fire, imprisoned in body,
strives to burn its way into flame. But its fuel is moist and damp--green wood
- and it must first slowly dry out the resistant mass. The grossly misunderstood
phrase, "the wrath of God," is just this steady consuming of obstructing material.
Says the Eternal,
then, in Deuteronomy (32), when he notes that his sons have sacrificed to "demons,
to no-gods, to gods who are utter strangers, to newcomers of gods""
"For a self-willed
race are they,
Children devoid
of loyalty.
My wrath has
flared up,
flaming to
the nether world itself,
burning up
earth and all it bears,
setting the
roots of the hills ablaze.
From Sinai
came the Eternal,
from Seir he
dawned on us;
from Paran’s
range he rayed out,
blazing in
fire from the south.
It is given in
the Ritual (Ch. 108) that "the Osiris, triumphant, knoweth the name of this
serpent. . . . ‘Dweller in his fire’ is his name."
The Manes "opens
the doors of heaven by the flames which are about the abode of the gods; he
advances through the fire which is about the home of the gods, who make a
way for him, to make him pass onwards, for he is Horus."
According to another
text, "Horus led the deceased through the abode of the gods situated among the
flames of fire." (Page 308)
Sut and
Horus are the representatives of the dual life of man, and are the divine twins,
the first of whom, Sut, brings the water of the inundation to submerge the fire
of deity in the sea of generation; and the second, Horus, brings the rebirth
of the fire within the very borders of the sea of life. Both were astrologically
united in the star Sut-Canopus. In an Australian myth the hawk brought the fire
to the aborigines.
A typical mythical
account of the war in heaven and descent of the fire-devas to earth is found
in another Australian legend of the bandicoot who had a firebrand, but refused
to share it. This was the rebellion. The hawk and the pigeon were deputed
to get it. The pigeon made a lunge for it, whereupon the bandicoot desperately
hurled it toward the water to put it out. But the hawk deflected it into the
grass over the sea, which caught fire. The hawk and pigeon (dove) are birds
of soul-fire, the bandicoot the bird of darkness, a type of the water that
put out the solar fire.
All through the
world’s Märchen one finds that fire is often dual, the first being the natural
fire, as of lightning, flint-fire and other forms; the second is a fire that
is human in origin, requiring mind to achieve it.
Sut and Horus, as
the human duality, are typed in the two phases, light and dark, of the moon.
Sut is the black vulture (which lives on blood) and Horus the golden hawk. The
lunar ibis, bird of Ptah, is black and white, and portrays the two natures in
one creature. There is a legend of a black raven that once was white. In a Thlinker
tradition the white bird is represented as becoming black in passing up the
flue of Kanukh’s fireplace. This is a form of the phoenix which transforms from
black to white (or into the golden hawk) and from white to black in its passage
to and from the underworld, which is called Kanukh’s flue.
A prayer in the Ritual
(Ch. 163) begs the god to "grant that the flame may leave the fire, wherever
it may be, to raise up the hands of Osiris," which were bandaged to the sides
of his inert body in the mummy case. Osiris is himself appealed to, as the Governor
of Amenta, to "grant light and fire to the happy soul which is in Sutenkhenen
(Heracleopolis)," the underworld. Samson’s bound arms were freed by the burning
away of his flaxen bonds. The soul (in Ch. 63B) says that Ra has "lifted up
the moist emanations of Osiris from the (Page 309) Lake
of Fire and he was not burned." "A fire was kindled for thee in the hands of
the goddess Rerit [the hippopotamus goddess of the Nile, i.e., the virgin mother];
she performeth acts of protection for thee every day." The Manes is exhorted
to "kindle the fire in order that the flame may rise up; and throw incense upon
it in order that the smell of incense may rise up." A chapter (137A) deals with
the four blazing flames which are made for the Khu or spirit. The flame riseth,
it is said, in Abru (Abydos) and it cometh to the Eye of Horus. It is set in
order on the brow of Osiris and on his breast, and is fixed within his shrine.
The Rubric specifies that this chapter shall be recited over the four fires
made of anointed atma[ If this term is the same as the Sanskrit Atma,
it means the high spiritual essence, the soul of the soul of man.] cloth,
and the fires shall be placed in the hands of four men who shall have the names
of the four pillars of Horus written on their shoulders. It is promised that
the soul that undertakes to perform the offices of this chapter of the Four
Blazing Fires each day shall find release from every hall in the underworld
and from the seven halls of Osiris. The four men are the four guardians of the
cardinal points, upholding man at the four corners of his being, or in his four
bodies.
The Manes says
again: "I am the Great One, son of the Great One; I am Fire, son of Fire,
to whom was given his head after it was cut off." The descent was symbolized
as a cutting off of the head, since intellect was lost.
The genetrix of
the seven stars is called the keeper of fire, the spark-holder.
Sut signifies "Fire-stone,"
according to Massey. Oddly enough, lightning was anciently regarded as the dart
of a fiery stone, and it has the name of the fire-stone widely attached to it
among many peoples. So we have Jesus saying, "I beheld Satan as lightning fall
from heaven." But the name likely has also a reference to the flint-stone fire,
as potential fire locked up in stone. Indeed flint was a frequent symbol of
the buried deific potency. One of the Mexican legends reports the Mother-Creatrix
as having given birth to a flint knife, which fell on earth and became the origin
of men. The flint is a graphic symbol of the presence of hidden fire in the
physical world. In the same fashion a god (fire) is buried invisibly within
the body of physical humanity. Flint nurses the potentiality of the birth of
fire within it! "When the Serpent-lightning darted out of the cloud it buried
itself in the earth, (Page 310) leaving
its stone-head in the aerolith of smelted sand." It was called the Thunder-hatchet.
(Records of the Past.)
The element of
fire was regarded as latent in both wood and stone, needing effort, force,
a blow or heat to bring it forth. Fire, with its eternal intimation of spirit,
was regarded as the divine inner essence of these materials, a conception
now endorsed by late science.
When the Mystery
candidate came forth from the examination he was asked what the judges have
awarded him and he replies: "A flame of fire and a pillar of crystal." (Ch.
125.)
The Quiché name
for lightning is Cak-ul-ha, that is, "fire coming from water"; and the serpent
of fire and the serpent of water are one, ultimately. The winged serpent signified
winged lightning.
The Old Testament
(Exod. 24:12) declares that the glory of the Lord was in appearance like a
devouring fire on top of the mount. The Psalms (18) say that he "thundered
in the heavens. He made darkness his secret place; a smoke issued from his
nostrils and devouring fire out of his mouth . . . and he hurtled stones and
coals of fire." He is called the "Lightning-sender." In Exodus (20) the Eternal
descended in fire upon a cloud. Here is the mingling of fire and water again.
"Smoke rose like steam from a kiln, till the people all trembled terribly."
The lightning only flashed on the third day, a significant fact explained
later.
In most of these
illustrations the fire alluded to is that of upper intelligence flashing forth
to enlighten the natural order. But this fire, in its contact with the watery
and earthly elements of the carnal self, stirs up steam, sulphurous exhalations,
fumes, noxious gases and dust, and in this transformation it becomes truly
a fire of Tophet and Hades! Nevertheless it is still the purifying fire. As
washing by water was an emblem of purgation, so fumigation was a companion
type. Says Massey:
"Amenta was the land
of precious metals and the furnace of solar fire. Hence Ptah, the miner, became
the blacksmith of the gods, the Kamite Vulcan." [ Ancient Egypt, the
Light of the World, p. 359.]
If, then, the earth
is the furnace of fire, there can be no quibbling about the meaning of the vivid
narrative of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, the three who were cast into the
fiery furnace, in Daniel. It is only another allegory of the solar triadic god,
(Page 311) in his three principles
of mind-soul-spirit, embodied in the sphere of flesh, typed now as a fiery furnace.
The Manes, who is spirit in this furnace, is shown his Ka, his pure higher soul,
as a means of aiding him to remember his name in the great house, "in the crucible
of the great house of flame." One of the chapters is designed to be read so
that its magical potency may enable the Manes to "escape from every fire." In
another the soul prays (Ch. 17) to be "delivered from the god who liveth upon
the damned, whose face is that of a hound, but whose skin is that of a man,"
"at the angle of the pool of fire." Here is the man and animal combined, another
of the oft-recurring glyphs of our duality. And where the man and the animal
are united, where they meet, is the pool of fire!
In the Psalms it
is said, "They go through fire and through water" and are "brought out into
a place of abundance." "So," says Edward Carpenter, "was the Greek Hercules,
who overcame death though his body was consumed in the burning garment of mortality
out of which he rose to heaven." [ Pagan and Christian Creeds, p. 129.]
The Book of Judges
[ Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, II, p. 175.] recounts
how at the sacrifices for the Eternal, the meat and the unleavened bread which
the angel had commanded Gideon to "put on the rock yonder," were touched by
the tip of the wand in the angel’s hand, at which "fire spurted out of the rock
and burned up the meat and the cakes. So Gideon realized it was an angel of
the Eternal."
In Exodus (12)
the directions from the Eternal to the Israelites were that the meat of the
sacrificial offering was "not to be eaten raw or boiled in water, but roasted
in fire, head and legs and all." The true food for man to consume is not that
immersed in his lower watery nature, but that transformed into suitable spiritual
nourishment by the fire of spirit alone. It is to be recalled that the Titans
first boiled the members of Bacchus in water and afterwards roasted them in
fire. The fiery force of deity had caused the lower elements to seethe and
boil; when the moisture (carnality) was all dried out, the remainder of the
process was a "roasting."
The immolation of
Jephthah’s daughter as a burnt sacrifice appears to be another figuration of
the divinization of the mortal (feminine) nature after two and a fraction aeons.
For she asked permission to bewail her unfruitfulness for two months in the
hills. Hill or hills is a frequent glyph for earth. To burn her up was not to
destroy her, so we (Page 312) can
save our tears. It was to set her on fire with a brighter purer flame.
Gideon’s routing
of the Midianites "in the valley below" by the smashing of the clay pitchers
in which were lighted torches, is of extremely apt relevance in the terms
of the symbology of fire and water. A pitcher is a water container, but these
were empty. The water had been dried up, and the fire burned unquenched. The
water of sense burned out, the only remaining task for the spirit, to consummate
its full release from its prison, was to rend asunder the veil of flesh, the
body. This was achieved in the shattering of the clay pitchers. The Midianites
are the multitude of lower impulses, ever the adversaries, the enemies. They
flee and vanish the moment they see the divine fire glow forth in its full
release of hidden power!
The story of Samson,
a typical solar hero, provides splendid exemplification of the fire symbology.
When he was delivered over to the Philistines (the lower propensities again)
he was bound with two new ropes. But when the Philistines were about to punish
him, "the spirit of the Eternal inspired him mightily, the ropes around his
arms became like flax that has caught fire, the bonds melted off his hands."
The god within burned away his bonds. A whole chapter of exposition could
not add force to the sublime meaning here pictured.
It is appropriate
to consider the beautiful emblemism of the "pillar of cloud by day and of fire
by night," whereby the Eternal manifested his guiding presence with his children
on their mundane journey. In the full glare of the blinding light of divinity,
some watery veil is necessary to intervene between us and the overpowering glory.
The Eternal put his hand over Moses’ eyes while his glory passed by. Man’s face
must be veiled in the presence of deity. God interposes the veil of matter between
us and his hidden spirit. This is the cloud by day. But in the evolutionary
night time, when the soul is deeply submerged in material darkness, there is
needed the shining of the pillar of fire. It is the moon by night. In the Elysian
or paradisical realms the angels are represented as refreshing themselves in
bowers of shade or cloud. Shade is grateful in the summer. But on earth the
buried god needs light. The gross physical sense of the moving pillars is impossible.
A marching column of some two million people, and some twenty miles long, would
need to rest at night, whereas the literal translation would presuppose their
needing a light to guide their nocturnal march. (Page 313)
Then there is that
other great religious usage, the significance of which no mind can fail to sense
in all its dynamic admonition for humanity. Many nations felt it incumbent,
under the strength of the most powerful obligations, to maintain a fire perpetually
burning on the central hearth of the nation. In Rome a class of virgins, chosen
for physical and spiritual purity, were put in charge of the Vestal Fire, and
death was the penalty for letting it die out. Likewise, as is not so generally
known, death by burial alive was the penalty for sexual intercourse, inflicted
remorselessly upon these maidens. This, too, was regarded as a letting of the
spiritual fire on the hearth of life go out. The ancients knew that if once
the spark of empyreal fire kindled in the moist nature of the earthy man was
permitted to die out, it was the second and irretrievable death of the soul.
That portion or fragment of deity that was sent into the flesh could be divulsed
entirely from its linkage to heaven - the silver cord could be cut - and the
soul lost, for the rest of the aeonial cycle. The 64th chapter of the Ritual
is to be recited in order that the person may not die a second time, "but may
come forth and escape from the fire." To escape the second death the Manes had
to keep the sacred fire aglow.
In the elaborate
ceremony conducted over the mummy, there was one act which stands out in the
sharp forcefulness of its meaning. The Rubric to the 137th chapter says that
the figure of the mummy was to be smeared with bitumen (the same substance
was used to caulk the wicker boat in which Moses and Sargon floated among
the reeds) and set fire to. This was to figure the lower nature being lighted
up by the fire of the higher. The life of the god, says Budge naively, "sometimes
takes the form of a flame of fire." Budge adds: "These ceremonies are said
to be ‘an exceedingly great mystery of Amenta and a type of the hidden things
of the other world.’"6 Again we see the scholar’s mind stultified by want
of that one key to ancient books: that this world is Amenta. For the mystery
pertains to the hidden things of no other world than this one we know. But
it is, of course, a type of the mysteries of all other cosmic worlds.
Then there is the
"burning bush" of Moses. "When he looked there was the thorn-bush ablaze with
fire, yet not consumed" (Ex. 2). "The angel of the Eternal appeared to him in
a flame of fire rising out of the thorn-bush." To be sure, the fire rises out
of the natural order, (Page 314) symboled
by a bush. The figure of the burning bush seems to offer no more significance
than the "golden bough" of classical lore, or the branch of the sycamore-fig
that burns with fire but is not consumed. Horus indeed was typed as the "golden
unbu" (branch) from his mother’s tree. No fact in nature lends itself with more
felicity to the idea of new life from old than that of the bright new shoot
(as of the pine) at the end of last season’s more darkly colored growth. Its
lighter color is significant of new glory. As Jesus was the shoot of the vine
(also Horus), his Egyptian mythical designation would have been the "golden
unbu." In the texts the unbu is the symbol of the son reborn from the dead father.
There is a figure of the disk of light raying all ablaze from the summit of
the sycamore-fig, which thus appears to burn with fire, but is not burned. The
Manes approaches the holy emblem without shoes, salutes the tree and addresses
the god in the solar fire: "Shine on me, O unknown soul. I draw near to the
god whose words were heard by me in the lower earth" (Ch. 64). One is now prepared
to sense the meaning of the bright-spangled star that tops our Christmas pine
tree. And by the same token one can know the cryptic meaning of the Star of
Bethlehem. Need it be added that the burning bush is just the symbol of nature’s
"green" product, the first Adam, being divinized to golden splendor by the touch
of the god’s spiritual fire? Any green tree or stalk or stem, tipped at its
summit by the bright-hued flower, furnishes the same moral. Human life is to
flower out at its summit in radiant colors. And we set fire to the Yule log.
An old English
legend identifies the golden bough of Horus with the bush that flowered at
Christmas, the Glastonbury thorn. The flowering at Christmas depicts the birth
of the solar god at the solstice, the application of which to individual spiritual
history will be examined later. Says Horus (Ch. 42): "I am Unbu, who proceedeth
from Nu, and my mother is Nut." Again: "I am Unbu of An-ar-ef, the flower
in the abode of occultation," or in the fleshly world of hiding. Possession
of the golden bough in classical mythology was the passport of release from
the underworld.
There is, also, the
flaming two-edged sword of the angel set to guard the tree of life in the garden.
Origen says that the Gnostic diagram of this symbol was as follows: "The flaming
sword was depicted as the diameter of a flaming circle, and as if mounting guard
over (Page 315) the tree of knowledge and of life." There is doubtless much
mystical, astrological and other occult symbolism in the sign; but in relation
to the human situation its meaning seems to be simpler. Man’s life here is cast
between the two fires of heaven and earth, the bright fire of celestial splendor
and the lurid one of earth. They are of course two aspects or modifications
of the same one fire. Hence his life is cut by the fire that catches him on
both sides, upper and lower. The fire of life consumes in both directions. It
lights and it also burns. It glows in beauteous glory; it painfully consumes
the lower self. Heaven is fiery; so is hell. As the waters were sundered, so
was the divine fire. The flaming sword is the eternal reminder of the two-edgedness
of our nature. The doubleness of the fire that has come to deify us is announced
in the line in the Ritual: "Pepi is the country (or the god) Setit, the conqueror
of the Two Lands, whose flame receives its two portions." We are bathed in "the
Pool of the Double Fire." The Two Lands are the two areas or fields of our dual
selfhood. Man is to conquer the twoness of his being, merging the two portions
into one new creation. The Ritual says that "he cultivates the Two Lands, he
pacifies the Two Lands, he unites the Two Lands." It says also that "he cultivates
the crops on both sides of the horizon."
John Baptist’s
statement in the New Testament is a mighty affirmation of the truth of what
is here presented. He represented the lower man, antecedent and preparatory
to the spiritual self. He bears the symbolism of water (if not of earth),
as Jesus does that of fire and air. For his statement yet rings down the centuries
of Christian theology: "I indeed baptize you with water, but he that cometh
after me shall baptize you with the Holy Spirit [Latin: spiritus, "air"!]
and with fire." The man born of the natural or maternal order (man born of
woman) alone, preceded him that was born of the Father’s divine spirit. Again
our thesis is dramatically vindicated by "scripture."
Iamblichus tells
us that the three golden apples of Hesperides are: (1), Illumination; (2), A
communion of operation; and, (3), A perfect plenitude of Divine Fire. [ Mysteries
of the Egyptians, Chaldeans and Assyrians, p. 272.]
A mass of testimony
could be drawn from the Bible to stress the prominence of the fire typology.
Isaiah strongly enjoins us (50, 11): "Behold all ye that kindle a fire, that
compass yourselves about with sparks: walk in the light of your fire, and in
the sparks that ye have kindled." Job admonishes evildoers (18:5): "Yea, the
light of the (Page 316) wicked
shall be put out and the spark of his fire shall not shine. The light shall
be dark in his tabernacle, and his candle shall be put out with him." Paul says
that if we awake "from the dead," "Christ will shine upon" us. Isaiah says that
we wait for the light, and exhorts us to "arise, shine, for thy light is come."
John says that "light is come into the world" and "that was the true light"
when the Christos arrived. He declares that the only condemnation was the world’s
rejection of the light when it came. The Psalmist says that the Lord is his
light and his salvation and that "light is sown for the righteous." "In thy
light shall we see light." Jesus said: "When I am in the world I am the light
of the world." He assured the righteous that they were the light of the world,
that indeed they needed no other light to lighten their path, as they had light
in themselves. The Lord made his ministers a flame of fire. "The Lord God is
a sun and a shield"--the pillar and the cloud, the meaning of which, clear at
last, is simply spirit and matter. When there was darkness over the land of
Egypt, "the Israelites had light in their dwellings." And this is not speaking
of rush lights in Egyptian huts, but spiritual light in physical bodies. Jesus
was "the sun of righteousness" and at the end of human evolution "the righteous
shall shine like the sun." And if there is needed a pointblank utterance from
the Bible to cover our claim, it might be found in the line from the Psalms:
"Our God is a living fire." For a long series of generations Christendom has
set fire to the Yule log and lighted candles on the Christmas tree. Yet there
is hardly a child in the West that could give a reason for these rites that
would convey a modicum of the truth. For the venerable teaching that nature
put forth on its topmost bough a bright effulgence of deity, a bright flower
at the top of the green stem, a shining god at the summit of elemental creation,
has long been lost. Yet the Christ has come, bringing and distributing "that
light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world."
The fire emblem
has become involved in a host of combinations with other types, and its play
in all mythology is extensive. Many of these references to it carry valuable
implications.
The ancient Apt,
mother of the world, is called "the kindler of sparks," the "kindler of light
for the deceased in the dark of death" (Rit., Ch. 137: Vign: Papyrus of Nebseni).
Thus the old first bringer of rebirth is the kindler of light in the sepulcher
- of earth. (Page 317) Mary Magdalene
who is her counterpart in the Gospel version, comes to the tomb "early, while
it is yet dark," and finds the stone moved away and light kindled at the tomb
sufficient to see by. Chapter 137B is entitled: "Of kindling a flame by Nebseni,
the scribe in the temple of Ptah."
The great classical
fable of Prometheus bears relations to the fire sign. The myth is not entirely
unique. There is, for instance, the Hindu tale of the monster (Titan) Rahu,
who smuggled himself into the presence of the Gods of light and drank the
Amrit-juice of immortality. He was cut in two, but could not be destroyed,
by Indra, and the two halves were set as signs in the heavens at the places
of the lunar eclipses.
That the Promethean
myth is not entirely to be dissociated from the story of the Galilean savior
is shown by the fact that, according to Carpenter, "Prometheus, the greatest
and earliest benefactor of the human race, was nailed by hands and feet, and
with arms extended, to the rocks of Mt. Caucasus." [Pagan and Christian
Creeds, p. 139.]When one knows that this figure fastened to a cross or
rock is but the outward dramatization of the truth of the god’s impalement on
the stake of matter, all historical realism connected with it becomes revolting.
The Titans were styled
in the Mysteries "Thyrsus-bearers, and Prometheus concealed fire in a thyrsus
or reed; after which he was considered as bringing celestial light into generation
or leading soul into body, or calling forth the divine illumination."[Taylor:
Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, p. 139. ] The natural order harbors
in it the seeds of spiritual growth.
Massey quite plausibly
allocates to the word "Teitan" the "number of the Beast" given in Revelation
as 666. He argues that the triple "S" on the Gnostic stones, represents this
number, "S" equaling 6. SSS then equals 666. It was a sign of the six elementary
creations that prepare the way for the seventh. He traces the value of the
letters as follows:
T |
300 |
E |
5 |
I |
10 |
T |
300 |
A |
50 |
N |
1 |
|
|
TOTAL |
666 |
The statement that
the Beast lost one of its heads, which was afterwards restored and healed
(Cf. a similar case in the Egyptian mythos) is interpreted by him to mean
that the descent of the Titanic hosts was the figurative equivalent of the
loss of the head or intellect to be regained in the evolutionary sequel. The
sevenfold corpus of deity, (Page 318) minus
one of its heads, was thus numerically reduced from seven to six. Man, then,
is to be regarded as a sevenfold being suffering the temporary loss of his
(divine) intellect, or head, which he is striving to restore or heal. We must
round out the Beast in us by giving him a head of intelligence. There is still
more to this typology of seven minus one. The fabled Mt. Meru "is also described
as being intersected by six parallel ranges running east and west. Six is
typed by the hexagon or space in six directions"--a symbol of our life in
this three-dimensional world, where the cube of six sides is the typical shape
of any existential object. The six parallel ranges are the six planes beneath
the topmost level, where the "heart of Bacchus" was preserved when the mental
body was dismembered. Says Proclus in the Timaeus: "The Framer made the heavens
six in number, and for the seventh he cast into the midst the fire of the
sun." This was the crowning of nature’s six elementary kingdoms with the element
of mind, or the first injection of intellect into the evolutionary creation
in and through the person of man, Atum-Ra, the first god-born race. Nature
struggles upward through six degrees of material coarseness, till her product,
animal-man, is sufficiently sensitized to be made the vehicle of Manas, or
Mind.
Job (5:19) relates
six and seven mysteriously in a remarkable statement: "He shall deliver thee
in six troubles: yea, in seven, there shall no evil touch thee." Trouble is
associated with six and deliverance from it with seven. Life is captive and
harassed during its long peregrinations upward through the three subatomic"elemental
kingdoms" in the invisible world, the preliminary stages in the formation of
matter out of empty space, and the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms in
the visible atomic world; and intelligence comes in the seventh kingdom to release
it from its subconscious captivity. Life is in "Egyptian" bondage to nature
through six aeons. The seventh - and seven times seven - brings the glorious
"year of jubilee," when all captives and prisoners are set free. In Numbers
a Hebrew slave was to serve six years and go free in the seventh without paying
a ransom. The fields were to be cultivated for six years and to lie fallow the
seventh. But when the Messiah came - and his Egyptian name Iu-em-hetep means
"he who comes seventh"--he was allegorized as coming under the dominance of
the six lower forces; and so the number seven later took on in the texts the
evil implications of the number six and is the (Page 319) numerical
type of servitude. Jacob is made to serve seven years for Leah and an added
seven for Rachel. In some old texts the ten plagues of Egypt were originally
seven.
The profounder
significance of the first "miracle" of Jesus in turning water into wine at
the marriage feast of Cana hinges upon the fact, hardly ever commented on,
that the servants set out for the transformation six pots of water in earthen
vessels! Jesus, embodying the seventh or transmuting power, came to convert
that nature that had been constituted by the first six outpourings of primal
life into higher spiritual status. The Christ has the task of transfiguring
six lower elemental powers into divinity. And in the Gospel story he went
up into the mount for the transfiguration "after six days"! Spiritual "wine"
was to be made out of the six types of elemental "water" in man’s constitution.
And man, physically, comes close to being six-sevenths water in composition!
The "year of the
Lord" was divided into six (double) signs of the zodiac. The sun passes annually
through these six signs, and man’s soul, his sun, also passes through six
levels of being in attaining self-conscious freedom. It makes the round of
the elements of earth, water, air and fire in twelve subdivisions. These elements
being embodied in his own constitution, the sun-soul in man passes through
them to achieve its mastery of all life. His victory in the seventh kingdom
regains for him all that was lost in the beginning. The Christ adds the seventh
head to the decapitated natural order. The seventh and "lost" Pleiad will
be recaptured by Orion, the mighty hunter, Egypt’s astrological figure for
Horus. The Christ will restore the lost light.
The Titans, of
whom Prometheus was one, appear in a dual and somewhat confusing character
in the mythology. They are both man’s good angel and his devil. The solution
of this enigma of theology will be fully expounded in the next chapter. But,
briefly, it can be said that the Titans of mythology match the Lucifer character
of theology.
"Hesiod says the
Father called the Revolters by an opprobrious name, Teitans, when he cursed
them. And they were cast down into Tartarus and bound in chains and darkness
in the abyss." (Theogony I, 207; II, 717).
The god, the Titan,
Prometheus, Lucifer, who brought us our divine fire from the empyrean, was in
part converted into the Beast when his (Page 320) Titanic
intellect was linked with the six elementary forces. He mingled his lifeblood
with theirs, and the contagion of elementary impulse went to his head! Certain
of the myths tend to align the Titans with the six elementary powers; and this
is a natural confusion since the higher mentality did commingle with the lower
instincts. The god who was angelic, because untested, in heaven, became demoniacal
on earth, and the coloring of every attribute is altered as he indeed "suffers
a sea change" in plunging into the lower waters.
The myth of the
Greek Saturn, who was overthrown and despoiled by the Titans in that heavenly
warfare, is read as planetary cosmology by Massey and others. The meaning
is that each lower grade of life organized in the progressive outpourings
"steals" away the higher creative force to use on its own plane. The functions
and the glory of Saturn were alleged to have been transferred to the sun,
who became the new lord of the six. Saturn is identical with the Egyptian
Sebek (Sevekh) whose name is "seven," and in the early mythos he was the deity
who crowned the six elementary forces with completion, as their ruler and
governor. Says Massey:
"The sun and Saturn
both became the lord of the seventh day, the Sabbath, the day of rest and peace,
which is Hept, [Hetep] the name of No. 7. But in the cult of Sebek . . . the
original of the solar Sabazius, son of . . . Kubele, the sun and Saturn were
combined as Sabat, Sabaoth, or Sapt, which, read as Sebti, shows the dual form
of Seb, for the sun and Saturn . . . Sabazius was reported to have been torn
into seven parts by the Titans, corresponding to the seven days of the week
and the seven planets to which they were dedicated." [The Natural Genesis,
II, p. 78. ]
That is to say, our
number "seven" (Latin: septem) is derived from Saturn and the sun combined in
their two names of Seb and Hept, compounded into sept. Seb, as we have seen,
covers the dual meaning of "star" and "soul," both suggesting fire. As the coming
of the god of intellect and reason, the seventh element, crowned the long elemental
warfare of cosmic creation with the peace and rest of intellectual control,
order and harmony, so the deific principle gives its name to the day of peace
that follows the hurly-burly of the six secular days. In general we devote six
days to bodily interests; the seventh should go to the interests of the soul.
Ancient discernment of primary (Page 321) creational
verities gave us our week of seven days, to stand as an eternal reminder of
the sevenfold cosmic order, of which our own basic constitution is itself a
reflection and a miniature. And old Egypt gives us the philosophical demonstration
of all this in the dual meaning of the word Hept, which is both "seven" and
"peace." The seventh element is that noetic intellect which stills the storm
on the passional waters and brings peace to chaotic nature, based on its six
lower mindless energies. Iu-em-hetep (Imhotep of the Greeks) is he who comes
to bring peace as number seven.
In Exodus (23)
it is written:
"The radiance of
the Eternal rested on the mountain of Sinai; for six days the cloud covered
it, and on the seventh day he called from the cloud to Moses (the Eternal’s
radiance looked to the Israelites like blazing fire on the top of the mountain.)"
It is in a verse
from this same chapter that a very noteworthy statement is made:
"For six years
you may sow your land and gather in your crops, but every seventh year you
must let the land alone, so the poor people may pick up something; anything
they leave the wild animals can eat, for if you worship their gods it will
endanger you."
There is ample
warrant for a moment’s digression from the main theme of the chapter to follow
out several implications of this astonishing passage. The injunction not to
cultivate the fields every seventh year, so that the "poor" might have some
"pickings," is on the face of it impossible physically. For if the land was
left alone, there would be no planting and hence no picking. How could the
earthly poor profit from unplanted fields?
The command has nothing
to do with agriculture or charity, except that which is cosmic and spiritual.
It is one of those ingenious "parables" by which ancient sagacity embodied great
evolutionary truth in pictorial representation. It concerns in this case a most
recondite fact of esoteric knowledge. Bizarre as it may sound to modern ears,
it was the teaching of the abstruse biological science of old that at the dissolution
of the several component principles of the multiple human constitution at the
completion of the cycle (the seventh day), one of these bodies of etheric material
(of types now predicated by science), (Page 322) the
"astral," called the "chhaya" in India, floated free as an independent entity,
possessing both sufficient vitality to preserve it from disintegration, and
a semblance of mental automatism. In this condition it was utilized by nature
for a particular purpose. It was made the matrix or mold about which was aggregated
coarser matter, as a magnetic field organizes iron filings, which matter gave
it a body and localized it on earth as a living creature. Both the Bible and
other esoteric writings have mysterious sayings about the lower orders of life
feeding upon the lees or dregs of the orders above them, even in some cases
excrementitious matter. The meaning is approached along the line of a peculiar
emblemism. Man’s discarded "astral" shells, so the doctrine teaches, serve as
the models and the animating principles of lower forms of life. Our "astral"
leavings, cast-off clothing, are made to serve as the feeling souls of inferior
creatures. The animal picks up our emotion body and builds his physical body
over it as a model. Man’s part in creative evolution is far more direct than
he imagines. Every phase or grade of life is creative, to its degree. If this
item seems strange, it assuredly is no more so than many of the almost unbelievable
phenomena of physical biology in general in animal and insect life. Nature has
a bigger bag of tricks than we realize. She employs a vast range of unsuspected
and startling methods in the endless repertoire of her ingenuity. At any rate
the fact was so taught in the arcane schools of occultism, and here in Exodus
is a passage directly pointing to it, since the text can mean nothing intelligible
in its literal sense. The seventh round in all cycles of life in nature is always
the epoch at which soul consummates its work in an organism and retires to its
proper level above, leaving the physical bases of life to stand without further
cultivation until the beginning of the next series of seven rounds. During the
retirement the lower animal self, the "poor," reaps the harvest of its previous
attachment to the higher entity. The ethereal vestures survive, for they are
enduring in proportion to their atomic fineness. We have already equated "the
poor" and also "the people" with the Gentiles, who were the "sons of men" in
contrast to the "Sons of God"; the humans in whom the Christ principle has not
yet been made consciously the ruler.
And the second startling
item of this excerpt asserts that what those "poor" semi-humans leave may be
picked up, in a third order of gradation, by the wild animals. This is informative
indeed. (Page 323) The process of
divination begins with the highest God and is relayed, in ever diminishing power,
from rank to rank, down to the animal. Only by living on the lees of the superior
order can each kingdom link itself to its appropriate measure of divine vivification.
By such occult
analysis is it possible to see the meaning of the final hint of danger expressed
by the line: "for if you worship their gods it will endanger you." This work
has already set forth the peril involved for the heavenly visitant in taking
residence in animal forms, if it permitted itself to "worship their gods"
of sensuality and beastliness. A number of passages of scripture admonish
the children of light to "make no compact" with the "natives" of that realm
to which they were sent, nor to marry their "women"!
The sum of this
material which shows the world to be figuratively "at sixes and sevens" is
that conscious life was in servitude and bondage to blind unintelligent elemental
forces for six aeons, three in the invisible and three in the visible worlds,
and was only lifted up to the liberty of sons of God when the spiritual fire
of the spiritual sun, the second Adam or the Christ, was set in the heavens
of man’s conscious being as the ruler of the six sub-mental powers. In Galatians
(4) Paul clearly states that when we were children in evolution "we were in
bondage to them that by nature are no gods." We were in slavery to the elementals
of the earth and of the air, as he distinctly says! He warns his brethren
not to come under the power of these elementals, as it would endanger their
spiritual integrity.
Stars are closely
intermingled with the fire symbolism. They are themselves fiery in constitution,
blazing suns or their planets. Stars were considered the children of Ra, the
great lord of the spiritual sun, who emaned them like tears from his eyes. Souls
were his offspring, centrally nucleated by his solar fire. He was the parent
of the Kumaras. Stars were held to be a race of higher beings, having souls
of the essence of light coming from the sun. "I have shed my seed (of light)
abroad for you," he says to his sons.[ Book of Hades, Fifth Division,
D. ] In the Book of Adam and Eve, translated from the Ethiopic by Malan,
God says: "I made thee of the light, and I wished to bring out children of the
light from three." The sun’s children were called Ruti, or men of excellence.
Under the name of Khabsu the stars are synonymous with souls, as also in the
name of Seb. Souls in Amenta were represented by stars. As the souls arose in
their resurrection they appeared above the horizon on the eastern (Page 324)
side of heaven.
This is why the rising star of the solar deity born in mankind was seen "in
the east" in the Gospel story. It dies in the west, like the sun, and has its
new birth in the house of bread (Bethlehem) in the east. The god Shu-Anhur was
called the "lifter up of the sky," together with its inhabitants, the stars.
Ra addresses Shu: "Be the guardian of the multitudes that live in the nocturnal
sky," or sky of the Lower Egypt of Amenta. "Put them on thy head and be their
fosterer," or sustainer. Spiritually this betokens the elevation of our elemental
nature by the shifting of the center of intellectual and spiritual gravity above
the horizon in the heaven of consciousness. The stars were in fact the bodies
of gods, and the lucent fragment of deity in man is his star.
The Great Bear of
seven stars drew the first circle or cycle of time in the abyss of chaos, and
gave definite law, order and periodicity to the primary creation. From primal
elemental disorder, nature settled down to rhythmic regularity as the beginning
of stable order in her worlds. From blind erratic struggle the elements fell
into order in a septenary mechanism. This was imaged first in the Great Bear,
the mother of the first cycle of regular time and fixed revolutions. This primary
cluster in the sky should never cease to speak to our imagination of the heptarchy
of forces in nature, which are the bases of our lives as well. This mighty fact
of creation was in the mind of the sage who wrote that at the dawn of creation
all the sons of the Elohim shouted for joy and "the Morning Stars sang together"
(Job 38). The music of the spheres began with the first swing into symmetrical
order and balanced harmony between centripetal and centrifugal energies that
had been jangling in confusion and dissonance before the seventh element, the
sun or spirit, gave the six a king. But Plato strangely tells us that "with
the sixth creation ended the order of song." (Philebus, 66.) Coincident with
this we are also told that the sixth pole star in succession passed from the
constellation of Lyra, the Harp, to that of Hercules, the man-god. All these
veiled hints have tremendous meaning, for this would seem to indicate that the
soul comes into the order of nature bringing a power of independent will, which
may contravene the mechanical automatism of nature, break into the rhythm and
mar the music - until it learns of itself anew to fix the measure to a higher
harmony. Man’s free agency does inject either a reasoned or an unreasoned self-initiative
into that which was automatically rhythmic (Page 325) before.
In a former reference we have heard the great Lord himself complain of the spirits
who had broken in upon his celestial music and marred the harmony, for which
he threw them down into incarnation.
The Rubric to chapter
129 of the Ritual says of the Manes: "And he shall be established as a star
face to face with Septet [Sirius, Sothis, the Dog-Star] and his corruptible
body shall be as a god . . . forever." To deify the human is to make a star
of him. The Manes himself prays (Ch. 102): "Let me be among the stars that
never rest." It is promised (Ch. 164) that "he shall become a star of heaven."
Has orthodoxy held out to its votaries any such thrilling cosmic view of their
future? The Osiris-Nu pleads (Ch. 188): "May I enter into the house of his
body, which, behold, hath become one of the starry gods!" This would be the
higher spiritual body, not the corporeal. It is said to the soul: "Thou art
purified with the libation of the stars. The stars that never set bear thee
up; thou enterest in the place where thy father is, where Keb [Seb] is . .
. thou becomest a soul therein." The soul (Pepi) pleads: "Make thou this Pepi
to be an imperishable star before thee." The acme of directness is attained
in the next statement: "Pepi is a star." To Teta, the soul, it is said: "Thou
seizest the hands of the imperishable stars . . . for behold thou art one
of the gods." "The imperishable stars follow and minister unto thee." Pepi
is addressed: "Thou art the Great Star; Orion beareth thee on his shoulder.
Thou traversest heaven with Orion, thou sailest through the Tuat with Osiris."
Again: "Pepi takes his seat among you, O ye star gods of the Tuat." And finally
in grand simplicity stands the categorical pronouncement : "Thy soul is a
living star at the head of his brethren." For the six elementary powers were
his natural brothers, of whom he, like Joseph and like Jesus, was made the
chief or head. From brethren they were reduced to children when the god principle
took charge and synthesized their functions. The fiery soul of intellect became
king of the lower six elementary powers in man’s make-up. The Christos came
as the Prince of Peace to rise to kingship over nature’s six divisions of
force. "Unto you a king is given . . . and his name shall be called . . .
the Prince of Peace."
But the soul is specifically
typed by that great and brilliant emblem of our divinity, the Morning Star.
The Titan who came hurtling to earth still clinging to his stolen possession,
the spiritual fire, was Lucifer, "the bright and morning star." (Page 326)
The significance
of this emblem is in its heralding the approach of day. "The day star is rising."
It is the harbinger of the coming of the great Lord of Day. As the announcer
it becomes identical in function with Anup, the fiery ape in Egypt, Mercury
in Greek mythology, and John Baptist in Christianity. Anup is the way-opener
for the advent of Horus, who, though coming after him, was before him in stature
and authority (Rit., Ch. 44). Anup abode in the dark and empty reaches of the
desert of Amenta until the day of his manifestation in the heliacal rising of
the star Sothis (Sirius), the morning star of the year in Egypt, which heralded
the birth of Horus, as the opening of the year. John dwelt in the wilderness
until the time of his theophany or "showing forth in Israel" (Luke I:80). The
soul was held out in the wilderness of the six elemental energies until the
arrival of the Christ. Anup was only a star god, but as such he was the precursor
of the greater solar light. As the sun in its splendor far outshines the total
galaxy of the stars, so the deity whose association with man was presaged by
the star-god, was far to surpass in glory any product of the natural series.
And this is made clear by the Gospel statement that the least in the kingdom
of the god is greater than the highest of those born of woman, that is, nature.
The stars typed one
of the elementary creations, of which there seem to have been three, the first
being cosmic and universal, offering a sevenfold differentiation in primal substance;
the second stellar and planetary; the third racial and individual in mankind.
Much of the endless confusion in the interpretation of creation legends has
arisen because of failure to distinguish which of these creations was being
dealt with. What is fundamental, however, to all understanding is that all of
nature’s cyclic processes are typical of each other. So that cosmogenesis adumbrates
the planetary formation, which in turn is an enlarged picture of the anthropogenesis.
As man was formed in the image and likeness of the Elohim, the seven-rayed creative
Logoi, the septenary constitution pictured in the first and second creations
appertains to him by reflection. All ancient philosophy referable to man was
built upon the human constitution as a septenate of powers. We see the first
creation in the hebdomadal formation of all physical creation; the second in
the septenary solar systems; the third in the human formed of seven principles
or natures. Of the first the Mother alone, the Virgin, Achamoth, Typhon, Apt,
Nut, Neith, Isis, Hathor, Rerit, (Page 327) Ishtar,
Tiamat, Semiramis, Cybele and other primary feminine deities become the bearer
and producer. Of the second Sevekh (Sebek, Seb), Saturn, and the Sun, as the
leader of the seven Rishis, Archangels, Elohim, Kabiri, were the progenitors.
Of the third the twelve legions of Asuras, Kumaras, Titans, Deva-Angels, Rudras,
Adityas, who came collectively as Prometheus and Lucifer, individually as sons
of the solar radiance, sons of Ra, or sparks of the divine fire, were the chief
agents. They still supervise their continuing creation from their citadel deep
within the shrine of man’s life. In one form or another, solar light, essence,
power is centered in every manifestation. In the innermost sanctuary of life
dwells the spark, the ray, the flame of solar glory. The sun is the central
type and embodiment of the highest divinity. The Christs were all sun-gods.
In the Kabalah
the vital statement is found that in each solar system the soul in its aeonial
round dwells successively on six planes and spends its seventh aeon on the
sun of that system. This is after the analogy of the soul in the human body,
for there it successively energizes, from lowest to highest, the six elemental
physical ranges of power, and six sub-spiritual psychic centers, before it
ascends into the supreme flowering of the solar fire in the head.
Sirius, otherwise
Sothis and Septet, being the morning star in the mythos, etymologically supplies
another significant link in the story. Septet is another form of the word "seven."
The six natural forces were completed and synthesized by the coming of the seventh.
The morning star heralded the perfection of the sevenfold creation as it announced
the coming of the crowning glory. This Sirius, the Dog-Star, was the type of
Anup, the dog or jackal god, as the guide of souls in the dark of night, or
incarnation. "The star Sept (Sothis) with long strides leads on the celestial
path of Ra each day, and the blessed one rises as a star." The star precedes
Ra, the sun in man. Of Pepi it is written: "His sister is Sept (Sothis), he
is born as the Morning Star (Venus)." And again: "His sister, the star Sept
(Sothis), his guide, the Morning Star, takes him by the hand to Sekhet-Hetep."
Usually women, in the mythology, are the guides, protectors and watchers of
the sun-god in the mythology, as they are the natural bearers, rearers and watchers
of the human infant, until his own divinity arises. As the feminine always types
the natural as distinct from the spiritual, the religious myth depicts the youthful
solar god as being born of woman, (Page 328) cradled,
watched and nourished by women, type of the elementary forces. The god comes
to be born, nursed and nurtured in the lap of Mother Nature. But he must leave
her at twelve!
In one place the
text of the Ritual says, as to Pepi: "The Morning Star giveth birth to him."
In another it says: "Pepi giveth birth to the Morning Star." The apparent
contradiction is a matter of viewpoint, or a matter like the priority of hen
or egg. Did John the Baptist bring Jesus, or Jesus John? John himself solves
the riddle by saying: "He who cometh after me is preferred before me." The
star brings the dawn, but the dawn also brings the star. Of the coming god,
as of the Christ, the Ritual says: "His light appeareth in the sky like that
of a great star, the Morning Star." And again: "Thou revolvest about Ra, near
the Morning Star." The Manes is instructed: "Command thou that he is to sit
by thee, on the shoulders of the Morning Star on the horizon." Following the
statement that heaven is pregnant with wine, it is said that "Nut maketh herself
to give birth to her daughter, the Morning Star." And immediately follows
the exhortation to the soul: "Rise up thou, then, O Pepi, thou third Septet
(Sothis), whose seats are purified." Calling Pepi the "third Septet" bears
out fully what has just been expounded as to the three creations, each sevenfold
in organization, the last being that of septenary man. That the god in his
coming was to enter the waters of incarnation and the mires of earth is betokened
by the following: "He places thee like the Morning Star in the fields of Reeds
(Sekhet-Aarru)."
Numbers (24:17)
predicts that "there shall come a star out of Jacob." As the Gnostic Jesus
of Revelation (22:16) himself declares: "I am the root and offspring of David,
and the bright and Morning Star." And the angel promises in Revelation (2:28),
to him that overcometh "I will give the Morning Star." This comes as the seventh
of a series of promises "to him that overcometh."
The frequent use
of the censer in Revelation is to be noticed. Seven angels had given to them
seven censers, containing the fire from the altar of God within the innermost
place, which the seven were to cast upon the earth! Here is the basic allegory
again in small compass. In the Logia these details are preceded by the announcement:
"And I beheld yet another sign in the heavens, which was marvelous in its (Page
329) meaning
and great in its issues!" Surely; for it was the story of the deification of
the human race. The burning of incense, a very general custom in religious observance
in the world, runs parallel in meaning to keeping alive the Vestal Fire. In
the Old Testament all cereal was to be mixed with oil and sprinkled with incense
- a double seal of divinity. The Manes is addressed in the Ritual: "Thou art
pure with the incense of Horus." Again we read" "Incense is presented unto thee,
thou becomest God." One becomes a god only by the gift of that higher fire that
purges the lower nature and refines it to true gold. And this gold is the immortal
solar light. The words for gold, light and deity all derive from the same original
root, "ar," "aur," "or."
Lightning, a great
sacred symbol of the outflashing of the power of God on earth, was often pictured
as seven-barbed. This usage establishes it definitely as a figure for the
seven-forked emanation that engendered the creation. It is the type of a fiery
power resident in latent form in the air and water elements. So the god is
latent in the water of physical nature. The swift power of the fiery dart
was typical of the "swift-running" power of deity, for the Greek word for
god, theos, means the "swift-darter." In Assyria Tiamat, mother of "seven
sons of the abyss," wielded a seven-speared thunderbolt, typifying her children,
as powers. The highest of the seven is lightning by name. In Africa some tribes
have a word for divinity which translates "lightning." Many peoples had thunder-gods,
and the Bible is full of allusions to thunder. The fiery dart of Intelligence
into the bosom of the worlds produces or carries the Voice of the Logos out
into nature, in seven primary tones. The Hebrew male god of thunder, Kak,
or Iach, probably equates with the Hindu Vach, the Word. As the forerunner
and prophet of rain, the thunder held the office of Mercury and Anup, the
announcers of divine advent.
Even embers and sparks
are not slighted in the typism. We have the ancient Egyptian tale of Cinderella,
the "sitter in the ashes," embers or cinders. Sitting in her lonely hutch on
earth by the dead embers of the fire, she is the soul come to desolation on
earth, stripped of her fire. But she surpasses her sisters and fits herself
to be dight with radiance again. The flame that ramifies out in seven tongues
is the original figure of the seven-branched candlestick. Deity comes to earth
to manifest himself in seven flaming aspects of his being. And still stand the
great ancient pyramids, the word by etymology (Page 330) reading "a measure
of (creative) fire," with square base and triangular upper faces, the four and
the three united to constitute the sevenfold physical structure of the worlds
and man, and multiplied to constitute the twelve deific powers to be unfolded
by spiritual humanity. (Page 331)
Chapter
XV
NOXIOUS
FUMES AND LURID FLARES
It has been necessary
to anticipate the substance of this chapter in one or two places in the preceding
one, because many important statements so closely link the two fires, the supernal
and the infernal, that it was impossible to present the one in entire disseverance
from the other. The background for the clarification of this aspect of the interpretation
has therefore already been set up. Yet the whole doctrine of "hellfire" has
fallen so infinitely remote from even the outskirts of true understanding that
it must be grappled with in good earnest. The deplorable state of modern exegesis
in this segment of theology impels one to a vehement expression of that disgust
at the harrowing grotesquerie of rendering which a comparison of ancient esoteric
meaning with current superstition so readily excites. But this situation must
be evident by now as a general matter, and should need but little reinforcement
beyond the continued revelation of gaping chasms of difference between the old
and the present readings. Yet this theology of a hell of fiery torment has suffered
such an unconscionable distortion from its primary bearing, and has afflicted
the mind of mankind with so outrageous a delusion, that every consideration
points to the necessity of a vigorous handling in the interests of sanity and
social benefit. The perversion of original teaching regarding the lower fire
has cast over the collective mind of the Western world the foulest hypnotic
obsession which it has ever suffered. The strangling tentacles of this theological
devilfish have spread over the whole of Christendom and have compressed the
spiritual genius of that segment of mankind into the coldest and most inhuman
bigotry known to history. For ages the doctrine in its misconceived form has
deprived the Christianized world of its reason, and opened doors to the entry
of every superstition. It has snuffed out the native spark of human brotherhood
and brought between man and man the lurid glare of its own devilish mischief.
(Page 332)
For the
fiercest fires of persecution and fiendish cruelty ever lighted upon earth flared
out under the impulsion of the fantastic theological teaching that the acts
of one’s brother may be the impious machination of "the devil." It is too gruesome
and ghoulish a chapter of horrors to linger upon; yet the same philosophical
benightedness out of which this atrocious monster of diabolism and demonism
has emerged has never to this day been dispelled by the light of wisdom. A more
sensitive humanity of the present, sickened by the ghastly spectacle of past
tortures and holocausts inspired by fiendish zeal, has tried to drop the subject
as far as possible out of sight, and has imposed a taboo upon its exploitation
in religious quarters. But the darkness has not been dissipated, and the monster
is still capable, on provocation, of glaring fiercely out of the murks. The
light that would have enabled the Christian world to descry the Beast in his
true outlines and character has never been rekindled since it was extinguished
about the third century. Had that light been available it would have revealed
that the fiery dragon of the pit was none other than the god himself, his face
begrimed with smoke, his features distorted by the grimaces of the Beast through
whose eyes he looked out upon this strange world, and his countenance luridly
alight with the smudgy flare of the earthly furnace. Milton’s lakes of seething
fire in Paradise Lost are a travesty of truth, unless taken purely as the symbology
they are. For Satan is the god himself - on earth! This broad assertion is incontestable.
It is proven by the very name. The descending god was the Light-bringer, Lucifer,
the bright and morning star, which is precisely the character assumed by the
Jesus of the Biblical Revelation! The Christian devil, the hated serpent of
evil, Satan, is Lucifer, the god of light on earth, Prometheus, the "benefactor
of mankind,"--"the god" himself.
Indoctrinated orthodoxy
may rise to protest the identification. Some ghastly mistake will be alleged
in the philology. It will be in vain. Erudite theology has at times perhaps
known the truth, but has kept an advised silence. The general mind has lost
the key to the mystery. By dropping the name Lucifer and clinging to that of
Satan alone, the mischief has been bred and perpetuated. That Satan and Jesus
are identical is as true as that Sut and Horus in Egypt are twins! The god and
devil are kindred. They are full brothers. Their mother is one. They are the
two aspects or manifestations of the same force. It may be said that the evil
character is the good (Page 333) seen in reversed reflection
on earth. For an ancient esoteric adage in Latin ran: DEMON EST DEUS INVERSUS,
"the devil is the god turned upside down." Satan is the god in incarnation;
or he is the god as he appears after his nature has been diffracted in its passage
through the blurred medium of earth life. The devil is the god transformed into
a being of reduced power, blunted moral sense, befogged intellect and forgotten
glory. He is the god bemired with the slime of carnal generation, beset with
the strong sensuous and sexual urge of the brute. In short, he is the divine
soul entangled in the bestial nature and himself lending more fiery intensity
to the impulses of the body by his vitalizing presence!
The genesis of
what is called "evil" may perhaps be dialectically derivable from the fundamental
premises of thought. But the origin of evil in reference to man’s specific
cosmic situation is a particular problem, only to be determined by full knowledge
of this situation. As the world does not possess such knowledge in full measure,
the great problem is enveloped in some obscurity.
But the sages of
the early dawn vouchsafed a portion of this knowledge deemed sufficient to yield
to reflection an intelligent comprehension of the issues involved and a philosophic
attitude toward them. The rank of the gods sent to earth, their endowments and
capabilities, their attitude toward their mission, their obligation in relation
to past dereliction, and the implications of their tenanting the animal bodies
assigned to them, were broadly revealed to the initiates and theodidaktoi of
an early period. With all these interests and relations the connotations of
the term "evil" are intimately concatenated. This knowledge, elaborated to much
detail, was the treasure of the Mystery Societies and Brotherhoods, and formed
the esoteric motivation of their regimes of discipline, instruction and consecration.
The modern revival of interest in this mine of truth has not yet recovered all
that has slipped away. The uncertainty about some of the major premises is supplemented
by the additional difficulty of determining which of the two phases of the representative
figures, Satan, Lucifer, Apap, Sut, Typhon, the serpent, the dragon, the beast,
is being emphasized in the numberless myths and legends. And there is the ever-present
doubleness of the meaning of the symbols, making it difficult to know whether
the higher or the lower aspect is meant. But enough hints are provided usually
to enable scholarship to work with intelligence upon the material. (Page 334)
The origin
of evil is indeed the mystery of our life. It is inwrought with the key situation
of humanity. The arising of evil in a system of total and absolute good is indeed
a riddle that taxes the best effort of brain and heart. The difficulty, however,
has been made by the mistaken common assumption that Good is absolute, that
is, good as conceived in human ideation, good in its specific human relevance.
The Supreme God has been called the Good, and this has been misleading. Good
can only be absolute if evil is also absolute, and this can not be, since there
can not be two different and opposing absolutes. The absolute is beyond good
and evil alike. There is an abstract and detached conception of good which the
mind can predicate of the entire scheme of things, to posit which, however,
would require our saying that that which is beyond both good and evil is the
good. Yet such a declaration is dialectically impossible, because that which
we would characterize as good is beyond all character. Descriptive statements
about it are empty sound. It is not within the scope of any predication whatever.
The ultimate is neutral to us always.
It only becomes
either good or bad to us when it ceases to be absolute and relates itself
to itself as spirit and matter, positive and negative, male and female, light
and dark. And, be it proclaimed in clarion tones, the whole matter of the
theological bogie of the devil, or incarnate evil, arose solely from the miscarriage
of the dramatic necessity of ascribing an adverse, opposing and relatively
evil character to the negative or material pole of life force! The bifurcation
of the Unmanifest into the two nodes of being to become manifest threw both
poles in contrariety and opposition to each other. The spiritual, or active
and conscious end came to be represented as the "good" and the inert and negative
material end carried the dramatic imputation of the "evil." The two can never
step out of their poised interrelation with each other, since they have existence
only in the terms of such relation. They are only and always relative to each
other. Good and evil have no human meaning outside the terms of a counterpoise
with each other. Each gets its characterization by virtue of its being not
what the other is, being its diametric opposite. Each gains what it possesses
of substantiality and character from being the reflex of the other. Good is
Not-evil and evil is the Not-good.
Manifestation of
life comes only through the tension between the (Page 335) two
modalities, because it requires just such a stress to awaken latent consciousness
to open awareness. Actuality comes to birth only at the central point of contact
between the subjective and the objective worlds. If life does not establish
the countervalence between its two opposite aspects, it remains unconscious.
The friction between spirit and matter is the ground of life’s ultimate or at
least increased self-consciousness. So the soul comes to this earth to partake
of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Evil is therefore
one of its two essential conditions for normal growth and expansion. A sagacious
view of philosophical archai, therefore, perceives "evil" in its true light,
and once and forever lifts from off its imputed entifications in religion all
stigma and bad odor. At the same time it apprehends its role in the drama, in
which it plays the part of the "adversary," "the opposer," of the active building
power of life. This is the role that has all to easily become misunderstood
for one of absolute evil, when it should have been judiciously envisaged as
but relative, and as conducive to the awakening of the positive energies of
life itself. For without the necessity of exerting itself and deploying its
as yet unawakened powers to overcome the opponent’s resistance and inertia,
the divine seed would continue to slumber on in unconscious ignorance of its
own capabilities. It awakes its dormant giant potentialities by "overcoming
the adversary."
This is the heavy
role of the villain in every play. He is the foil. He acts as the steppingstone
over which the hero strides to victory. His dark designs make the hero’s virtue
shine out the brighter by contrast. He furnishes the dark background against
which the conqueror’s exploits stand out in relief.
Hence that which
in human and worldly affairs wears all the outward appearance of evil - defeat
, disaster, loss, crime, treachery - is to be seen only as good under a disguise.
It subserves a karmic purpose,--the challenging of some hidden power to come
awake and rouse itself to function. Later on, its hidden beneficence is seen,
and we say: Now I know why that happened; without it I would never have gained
what I now possess. So "evil" is good under a mask. The villain is our other
self in masquerade. If we could at the moment tear off his false face, we would
see him as the lovely fairy, ready to transform us into something nobler.
It is the antithesis
of good and evil, our experience with both wings (Page 336) of
the bird of life, and the resultant deposit of wisdom in our own interior vehicle
of consciousness, that gives us ultimately our cognition of values. And in the
finale this valuation overleaps mere characterization as either good or bad.
We are balanced between the two in order to transcend them both. The child unites
characteristics of both its parents and carries life forward one step higher.
The gist of the matter
is that value - which should not be thought of as good in contradistinction
to evil, but as evolutionary gain - can not be brought to birth unless good
is opposed by evil; and evil is just this opposition. It is in every sense except
that of immediate human estimate of it entirely necessary, salutary and beneficent.
But no one can calculate the untold volume of wretchedness that has been heaped
up in world history by the frightful miscarriage of this basic understanding.
For the mass mind was overridden by the assignment to "evil" of a positive character,
reifying it into a living bogie, and was in the last stage of gross literalization
devastated by its personification in an actual "devil." The transmogrification
of this dramatic personage into the realistic bogieman to harass millions of
earth’s simple-minded children by Christendom is perhaps the crowning disservice
which a distorted theology has rendered its unenlightened devotees.
Our sense of evil
only arises because of our imperfect vision. As Paul said, we now see life
in part and through a glass darkly. If we could see it whole, we would see
all things in their proper place in the large picture, and hence in their
beneficence. More piercing vision would penetrate the mask of evil and reveal
it as good. But our sense of evil, and our reactions to it, are part of the
cost of our growth. They are the terms and conditions under which we advance
to larger appreciations. The apparent evil is part of the path we must tread
to reach values beyond. Evil may be said to be episodical, an incident along
the way, as life marches on. Seen out of proportion and relation it assumes
its grim aspect.
And what is sin?
Again has a baleful theology terrorized the minds of millions with an apparition
that is as unsubstantial as the bugaboo of evil. Again it is a normal and natural
phase of the evolutionary situation which has been wrested from its balanced
meaning in the dramatic typology and turned into a thing of psychological terrorism.
Sin is in brief nothing but the "lust for life" itself, and the appetency and
zest of the higher soul for the life of flesh and sense, (Page 337) through
which alone
it can become creative in new generations. Sin is the entangling of the entified
spirits in the laws and nature and motivations of the flesh, not to add the
world and "the devil," and its free indulgence in the play of its creative powers
through and upon these elementary forces. Sin is the spirit’s subjection of
itself to the dominance of these proclivities to an inordinate or disproportionate
degree. The Cycle of Necessity draws it down into their domain and makes it
for a time and in a measure subject to their sway. Whether duly or unduly influenced
by them, its submergence under their power is what the ancient drama pictured
as sin.
At least one philosopher
has kept his vision of this portrayal true and steady. Plotinus declares that
if the soul keeps her eye fixed steadily on the star of her higher self, "she
need not regret having become acquainted with evil or knowing the nature of
vice," and having had the opportunity of manifesting her creative faculties
through her conjunction with the body. This is grandly refreshing amid the
welter of corrupted philosophies berating and belaboring the life of sense
with the stigma of evil and the curse. The latter have grown up in the wake
of a morbid religionism turned ascetic when the lighter play of drama was
burdened with the lugubrious weight of misconceived ideas of sin and the devil.
A portion or degree
of cosmic divine spirit was to become creative in man, and was sent here to
try its intellectual powers upon a formative work. It had thence to show its
lordship over the elements and the matter with which creative intelligence had
to work. It had to be thrown in strategic relation to the world of matter at
its appropriate place and station. Like both Jesus and Jonah, it had to be thrown
into the "sea," to subdue its ungoverned raging. It had then to take charge
of the seven lower furies and range them under its higher command. The unregulated
play of these subordinate and irrational forces of sense in the field of life,
once the god had plunged into their milieu, is sin. It is powerful at first
and for a long time, until the soul gradually rises to assert its kingship over
the seven heads of the Beast. It is only admissibly evil - and then still in
a relative sense - when it usurps the prerogatives of the lord, unhinges the
balance between the two forces, and becomes grossly immoderate and libertine.
Only when the soul, still not wide awake and vigilantly in control, permits
the (Page 338) lower
animality to rule inordinately, is it sin in the mawkish theological sense of
shame and remorsefulness.
To help a world
lift itself out from under the darksome shadow of gloomy moroseness, induced
by twisted theologies, into the brighter day of clearer comprehension, it
may be said that the general mind must grasp once again the basic deific motif
in creation, to begin with. As set forth just now, "sin" has its rise in the
desire of life to become parent of each new cycle of recurrent creation. Spirit
and matter must woo, win and wed each other; and their copulation, envisaged
through the medium of a diseased human view of sexual relation, became tinged
with the stains of moral baseness. This is the psychological genesis of the
interpretation so long foisted upon the "fall" of Adam and Eve "into carnal
sin." Physical parenthood has long borne the stigma of some remote spiritual
transgression, and still the shadow of social and universal shame clings to
it. A great modern cult, and some of its offshoots, have expressly stressed
the possibility of regaining the Edenic spiritual creation of human beings
without resort to the physical mode of procreation. And of course the Immaculate
Conception and Virgin Birth doctrines have been haloed about with intimations
of the same sort. This is all, however, the result of incomprehension turning
charming and luminously suggestive typology into crass realism.
Why does God create?
Why is he not content to enjoy his exalted position in endless contemplation
of his own perfection? As far as human cognition can rise to conceive of it,
God’s motive in creation announced in the old books, is Lila, translated "the
sport of the gods," "the delight of God." The highest joy and sweetest preoccupation
of work. As man reflects deity, it may be known from this datum that God’s highest
pleasure comes from his creative labors. He creates for the sport and the joy
of it. He first thinks out (in Plato’s "archetypal ideas") what sort of universe
he will build, and then proceeds to reap the delight of seeing it grow under
his hands. "The sea is his for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land."
His reveling in creation does not stop at his ideal conception of prospective
worlds; like the true artisan, he must realize the satisfaction of seeing them
take form in the concrete. Plastic matter, susceptible to every breath of creative
impulse, is his potter’s clay. God comes out of his noumenal world (Page 339)
to enjoy a
period of activity in the realm of sense. Having thought long enough of his
projected creation, he now wills to emerge onto the field of physical activity
and bring it into substantial reality. He longs to feel the play of elemental
energies through his vast physical frame. Any man yearning to rise from sedentary
occupation and brain work to experience the "feel" of muscular activity outdoors,
is a sufficient analogue. The opposition, tension and zest for the game are
provided by the playing forces on the two teams of matter and spirit. The game
or battle will yield him adequate thrills, since in it he will find coming to
function still unevolved latencies of his own measureless being. Each act will
enhance his sense of power and glory. That he may live again and enjoy a new
joust with matter he must plunge his nucleated units of consciousness into a
state of "death" and burial in material inertia. Paul asks if this is evil;
and his own answer, overlooked and never understood, must become the keynote
of a new world attitude to life: "Never! The law was holy, just and altogether
righteous."
There is evidence
that the word "sin" has derivations and connections of the most momentous
import. Some of these are astonishing. In the first place "Sin" was a name
for "the mount of the moon." Arcane books speak of the incarnating souls as
having fallen into the moon, and earth is still called the "sublunary sphere."
This has immediate links with pertinent meaning, since the lower aspects of
man’s nature, his two lower bodies, the "astral" and physical, have been built
up over the "astral" molds left by the retreating race of men on the moon
chain of evolution. Since the spirit plunges into the lower man, the belly
of death, it may aptly be said to fall into the mount of the moon. The soul
fell into "Sin" or landed on "Mt. Sin."
But another etymology
falls in here with unexpected force. The lower physical and emotional half of
man’s constitution is, in its relation to physical nature, typed in ancient
tomes by "the woman." The lower nature, that holds the soul in material bondage,
is specifically dramatized by the character of Hagar, the concubine of Abraham,
significantly dubbed "the bond-woman." To "her" we are in bondage. There is
very definite connection between this name Hagar and the Agar, or Akar, or Aker,
which was the name for the tunnel of the underworld through which incarnating
souls had to pass from the rear (material) end of the Sphinx forward to the
front (spiritual) end or (Page 340) head.
The materials are now ready for St. Paul to use in making for us a startling
weaving of the several etymological strands into a thread of great strength.
For in Galatians (4:24 ff) he makes a positive identification of Mt. Sinai with
Hagar (Agar): "Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants;
the one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Agar. For
this Agar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is,
and is in bondage with her children." To call a woman a mountain, and that localized
in a specific country on the map, for once clearly shatters all possible literalism
or historicism in the verse. But beyond that it throws into relation, likely
that of identity, the two mountains Sin and Sin-ai. Sinai is derived (by Massey)
from the Egyptian senai, sheni, meaning "point of turning and returning," and
almost surely refers to that point where life strikes a balance between the
forces of involution and evolution in the cosmic "solstice." In its descent
spirit reaches the nadir point in the depths of matter, is held in a state of
exact equilibrium with it - the "pool of equipoise" of the Egyptians - experiences
its new birth of life from this relation, and then turns to return to the Father
above. The name Sinai, then, is most revelatory. All communication with deity,
all revelation of deity to man, must occur on this Mount Sinai, when the feet
of the woman clothed with the sun rest upon the moon, or lower part of man’s
organic structure. So Moses (man) ascends into the mount to receive the commandments
of the law and the dicta of the Lord. And Jesus ascends into the same Mount
to deliver his sermon unto mortal men. This whole situation is of strategic
importance for the entire theme and must be unfolded at length in later connections.
Evil and sin must
be cleared of their theological accretions of gruesomeness and morbid sentimentalism.
They were involvements of the evolutionary predicament which, under the ruses
and resources of dramatic representation, became tinged with darksome psychological
hues and inspired a volume of unnatural effort to mortify the human part of
our nature. Whole generations of children, taught by literal-minded parents
and tutors, imbibed the idea that in the universe there was a deity, dividing
power equally with God, who was wholly bent on defeating the good, and who must
be resisted, if life is to be "saved." Back of this miscarriage, as back of
all absurd popular religious notions, lurks the great truth, that Life has divided
its powers between (Page 341) spirit
and matter, and that all growth is the outcome of the "war" between these two
energies. Clearly apprehended in a philosophical view, this is knowledge of
high verity, knowledge that stabilizes the mind with a grasp on the ultimate
beneficence of the scheme. On the other hand the popular distortion of it is
a horrendous fallacy, devastating to faith in the salutary operation of cosmic
law. Between the two there is the whole vast gulf of the difference between
sanity and composure and the practical certainty of a monstrous dementia.
The devil is just
the god on earth; and how the radiant son of the morning, bright angelic Lucifer,
became transmogrified into the dour person of Satan is a matter of deepest
concern for religion and for humanity. This problem could have been solved
readily enough if the Western mind had not lost the data for thinking. Logic
can not proceed when the due premises are wanting. These lie buried in forgotten
books dealing with cosmology and anthropology. To supply them again to modern
reflection is a major purpose of this work.
The basic item is
the duality of man as the result of the incarnation. Evil arises from the union
in one organism of brute and god. When the god stepped in, the potentiality
of evil was engendered. Evil could not arise from animal alone; paradoxically,
it awaited the coming of the god. The animal is unmoral, incapable of either
morality or immorality. He has no sense of good and evil. He has not eaten of
the fruit of the tree of good and evil. The "god" in man is the first being
in evolution who steps out from under the law of natural automatism and periodical
regularity, and assumes his training in the art of balancing consciously discerned
forces of evil and good. He came into the flesh for the very purpose of opening
his eyes (Cf.: "and their eyes were opened" in Genesis) and seeing consciously
how to weigh his action in the balance between the two poles of life. He came
to eat of the fruit of the tree. While the beast was unmoral, the god was morally
capable, but innocent. He had to learn grace by contacting guilt. He had to
win his right to the enjoyment of good by overcoming evil. "To him that overcometh
shall all things be given," but not to divine souls that would rather dream
away their existence in mystical bliss in the empyrean. Without warfare with
evil the soul would never come into cognition of its own capacities. As Plotinus
affirms, "she would not know what she possesses," and her faculties would never
receive their development. Nature could not become productive until it had (Page
342) thrown
its opposing forces into the duality of spirit and matter, positive and negative,
and provided thus the basis for experience. Consciousness can not come to self-consciousness
unless the subjective aspect is confronted with the objective. Spirit and matter
are helpless, or rather, as Plotinus adds, are really nonexistent, until they
interact in "opposition." It is this "opposition" that stabilizes them in relation
to each other. Monism is a true philosophy applicable only before and after
the worlds are! It takes both Nux and Lux to make life conscious. And virtue
can not be won except as the laurel wreath for victory over vice.
The opening of the
eyes in the creation allegory is the dramatic typing of man’s awakening to his
first glimpse of self-consciousness. It marks the distinguishing insignium of
man’s superior position above the beast. It marks the line of his evolutionary
passover. At this point man stepped over the greatest boundary line in all the
universe of life. He passed out of the sway of the unconscious mindless energies
of nature, the "subconscious mind" of cosmic deity, and became, albeit at the
lowest level, a sharer with God in his conscious creative intelligence. He stepped
across the line from the kingdom of bondage to the natural mindless forces into
potential rulership of them. He ceased being the son of Hagar, the bond-woman,
and became the son of Sarah, the free-woman. He became, collectively, children
of the promise and of the adoption, sons and heirs of the Father. He stepped
from bondage under the law to the possible "liberty of the sons of God." Liberty!
The animal can not sin; man can. He has this freedom! He may choose - good or
evil. But he must face the consequences. These are the terms of his evolutionary
education. The good or evil consequences would instruct him. Choose he well
or badly, karmic compensation would advise. But his new freedom was his highest
prerogative, his badge of incipient divinity. That he was prone, of necessity,
to make many bad choices until his karmic education had sobered and enlightened
him is indicated from a most significant passage from Plotinus:
"They began to revel
in free will; they indulged in their own movement; they took the wrong path.
Then it was that they lost the knowledge that they sprang from that divine order.
They no longer had a true vision of the Supreme or of themselves. Smitten with
longing for the lower, (Page 343) rapt in love
of it, they grew to depend upon it; so they broke away as far as they were able."
This tells the
whole story of whatever there is intrinsic in the perverted idea of the "fall."
It was just the fall of the child learning to walk! It was nothing but the
floundering of ignorant innocence before it has grown wise through trial and
error. It was inherent in the very conditions of the evolutionary situation.
It was more or less inevitable. And its "evil" consequences were to be absorbed
in the vicissitudes of later experience, as the follies of youth are ironed
out in subsequent larger vision and more steady conduct.
The god brought the
possibility of "evil" with him on his arrival. He came to suffer many things,
because his coming threw a stable and orderly evolution temporarily into an
unstable one. The animal was bound to a fixed order in nature, whose unvarying
laws left him no choice, no freedom to deviate. The god came to get practice
in the use of freedom to break through this order and win independent creative
facility for himself. And he was incidentally to impart to the animal in whose
body he lived that part of his new found knowledge that he managed to make habitual,
or transferred by the force of repetition over to the subconscious, which is
the animal’s highest conscious self. For he was, along with his own education,
to help the animal bridge the gulf between its kingdom and the human.
But he threw a
disturbance into a condition that had previously been equilibrated and stable.
He introduced free choice and variant procedure into the hitherto inerrant
course of the animal’s behavior. He could break natural routine, initiate
new tentative and note the result. A god who could not do evil is a marionette,
not a god. There is no merit in compulsory good. Reward must come with victory.
Trial and error was to result in knowledge, which therefore could not be its
antecedent or concomitant at the start.
Wisdom is a resultant,
a deposit, a crystallization of fluid elements. Freedom began with ignorance
in order to end in wisdom. Freedom and blunder were means to an end. The smooth
harmony of natural law was bound to be thrown, for a time, into discord. This
is the meaning behind the rebel angels’ breaking in upon the harmony of the
great God’s festival song with raucous shouts, which may be seen (Page 344)
possibly as
their riotous exultation at the prospect of a new freedom never enjoyed before,
like schoolboys let out for a holiday, as Plotinus paints it.
While the god was
thus to be buried in the very belly of the great Abtu fish, his immunity from
complete drowning and loss of his deific life was provided for. It is hinted
at in various typographs. He was to be protected, as Plato says, like an oyster
in its shell. He was as the fish in the water, that would be able to breathe
even under the water. Again he was shown as learning to walk on the water
without sinking into its depths. The Ritual of Egypt speaks of his being immersed
in the water of the underworld, but hovering over, the water; or in it as
to his body, but aloof from it as to his soul. The latter is especially prominent
in the Ritual for the "dead." More than one passage repeats that while "my
dead body lies in the grave, my soul is in heaven." "Thy material body liveth
in Tattu and in Nif-urtet, and thy soul liveth in heaven each day." "Heaven
holdeth thy soul, O Osiris Auf-ankh, and earth holdeth thy form" (Ch. 163).
"Thy soul is in heaven, and thy body is under ground" (Ch. 169). "Ra grasps
his hands, a spirit in heaven, a body on earth." "Thy water is in heaven;
thy solid parts are on the earth." "The Sun-god," writes Massey, "whether
as Atum-Iu or Osiris-Ra, is a mummy in Amenta and a soul in heaven."
These passages
are of great value. Particularly should the one be noted which says that "thy
material body liveth in Tattu" while the soul lives in heaven. This forestalls,
the likely argument that these passages refer to the ordinarily deceased person,
whose body is in the ground (if not cremated) while his soul has gone to heaven.
The deeper meaning here is that man actually inhabits two worlds at once.
He is in heaven by virtue of his divine consciousness; he is on earth through
his physical body.
All this situation
was part of a larger divine plan. The god was to touch the tip of the head or
inchoate mental faculty of the animal with the flame of his intellect, but not
further embrace the animal’s life. He was to light the wick of intelligence
for the lower being. He was to kindle a fire in the body, but not be burned
thereby. But it is said that the waywardness of the gods pretty badly marred
the progress of the work. As a group they had bound themselves under a covenant
to do the work promptly and return. But earth currents overwhelmed (Page 345)
them, swept
them into forgetfulness, and they truly lost their divine heads and were carried
down into sensuous life and sexual procreation. The passage from Plotinus tells
why the first essay of Phaëthon to drive the chariot of the Sun resulted in
a wild orgy of uncontrolled movement. The seven charges drawing the chariot
proved unmanageable for the untested powers of the young god. He gave himself
to the delight of a wild revel in the sensual enjoyment of life, and the thrill
of adventure tingled through his blood as he indulged his fancy in free creational
direction of energies. His drive was outward, and he threw himself into the
interests of the lower vehicle. And here lurks the rationale of his changed
character from Lucifer to Satan. In drama he was pictured as in part the author
of evil when he lent his own superior forces and faculties to the virile energies
of the beast. He threw the added power of his own dynamism into the life of
animal man. This is the evil aspect of his kindling a fire on earth, or in the
sea around the earth. He in fact kindled a fiercer fire under the caldron containing
the water of life and the animal ingredients of the lower human constitution,
and raised the potentials of all the elemental appetencies. Into the hellish
brew went the qualities of the creatures of earth, of the water and of night
- the bat, the owl, the toad, the lizard, the newt, the snake; of herbs gathered
under the light of waning moon; of every noxious and venomous thing; and under
it all burned the fire of the god! Around flitted the three witches, the masquerading
earthly forms, feminine and material, of the three divine principles of mind-soul-spirit,
the solar triad, poking the fire. And as they revel around the eerie scene,
the fire burns and the caldron bubbles, brewing the double toil and trouble
for god and man; but all the while the broth is being transformed into its spiritual
sublimation, so that it returns to heaven as vapor, in the midst of which the
geni can be seen taking form. So the animal ingredients are transformed and
lifted up in the burning lake.
In mutual interplay
god and animal accentuate each other’s potential energies. In a sense the
god makes a worse hell of this nether pit of Tophet, for he plays a part in
the degradation of the beast. An excerpt from the Codex Nazareus seems to
confirm this delineation:
"He himself will
captivate the sons of men by the allurements of cunning delusions and will imbue
them with blood and monthly pollution." (Page 346)
Yet both
parties find an enhancement of their range and powers of consciousness through
the struggle. But traditional figures of the Satanic personage have taken form
and clung to popular fancy out of the allegorical depictions of the cosmic scene.
The god, plunged into the hell of body, was painted as plying his fierce labor
in mingling his higher fire with the lower elementary fury, stoking the furnace
with the fuel of his pride, rebellion and lust for sense, and enjoying with
the animal the mutual exchange of their polarized forces. Fantasy sets up the
portrait - his body reeking with sweat (Cf. the bloody sweat of Gethsemane),
his countenance grimy and lurid in the glare of the fire made murky with the
commingled smoke, steam, ashes and soot (Sut) arising from his effort to "burn"
the damp green material. This is the ancient picture drawn by high poetic fancy
to convey the recondite philosophical principles actually involved; and the
failure of heavy ignorant zealotry to catch its fanciful import has cost a crass
civilization centuries of woe. The Logia speak in no uncertain terms of this
tradition:
"There was one
who reigned over them all, even the Star of the Morning, which had fallen
upon the earth, Lucifer, but they named him Abaddon, for he was the Destroyer."
Here was in fact
proud Lucifer, rebel against the too long protracted passivity of life in the
higher worlds, come to earth, baptized in the waters of the Jordan River on
the boundary between the two kingdoms, kindling a fire in the water itself,
throwing his reed or rod into the Nile of earth and turning it into blood, injecting
his own fiery energies into the sluggish life of the beast, himself torn and
distracted, abased and crucified, disfigured out of all semblance of his divinity.
Let us recall here Isaiah’s account: "How was his visage marred, more than any
man!" The figure of intoxication used by the mythicists to betoken this phase
of the god’s condition is by no means inapt. This was indeed the "riotous living"
in which the Prodigal Son spent his substance. And St. Paul helps us understand
the depth of degradation into which the innocent souls fell by his statement
that the sweep of lower motivation caused them to change "the glory of the incorruptible
God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds and fourfooted
beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness
through the lusts of their own (Page 347) hearts,
to dishonor their own bodies between themselves: Who changed the truth of God
into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator . .
." This is also the story of Ichabod, from whom "the glory" had departed.
With its roots
winding deeply into the heart of this theological depiction, there has sprung
up the growth of a gigantic excrescence on the psychological life of mankind
that has found no explanation, and can find none, outside the purview of the
background just presented. Here lies the key to one of the most inexplicable
and redoubtable phenomena in the domain of sociology, for which sociological
science can provide no material for a formula of understanding,--the sense
of shame appertaining to the sexual organs and functions. From instantaneous
creation in the noumenal world by projection of thought energies, the god
found himself thrust into lowly physical bodies and reduced to the sensuous
procedure of sexual progenation. Swooning into the "deep sleep" that attended
his descent from the higher planes, he awoke on the plane of earth to find
himself forced to procreate physically like the animals. From deep within
his most real self sprang that sense of revulsion at the change, the shadow
of which has clung to his consciousness in spite of all rationalization or
sophistication. The soul sensed its degradation. Ancient scriptures reflected
this feeling in their naming the physical body, as the agent of this debasement,
"the garment of shame." In the Pistis Sophia Jesus tells Salome, in answer
to her question, that his kingdom shall come "when you shall have trampled
underfoot the garment of shame" and returned from the divided life of sex
to androgyneity.
If the sense of shame
was not inherent in the anthropological situation at the beginning, it was developed
and strengthened by the wild license or "Harlotry" in which the first groups
of the Sons of God indulged with the females of the higher animal species after
reaching earth. There seems to have been a long period of sexual miscegenation,
the experience of which would have imprinted the reaction of shame lastingly
upon the subconscious psyche of early humanity. This is perhaps the "evil concupiscence"
against which Paul crusades in his Epistles. And it is significant that in a
later passage in the first chapter of Romans, in which Paul states that God
gave them up to a reprobate mind to do the things "which are not convenient,"
he adds as their final description that they were "covenant-breakers." (Page
348) We protest that this
takes his preachment out of the rank of mere pious homiletics and makes it referable
to the racial predicament we are dealing with. Greek philosophy speaks of the
violation of "broad oaths fast sealed."
Reverting for a
moment to the philosophic analysis of evil, it is highly desirable that the
view of Platonic systematism should be gleaned from a few pointed excerpts.
Near the end of his two great volumes on the theology of Plato Proclus dilates
at length upon the nature of evil in grand fashion. There is not such a thing,
he says, as
"unmixed evil or
evil itself, or an eternal idea, form and essence of evil; but moral evil
is mixed with good, and so far as it is good, it subsists from divinity; but
so far as it is evil, it is derived from another cause which is impotent.
For evil is nothing else than a greater or less declination, departure, defect
and privation from the good itself . . . in the same manner as darkness from
(want of) the sun. It is debility and absence of power. And that which is
evil to partial natures, is not evil to the universe."
Christian aberrancy
from high philosophy can be seen in the erection of evil into a positive,
active force and personifying it in a semi-deity.
Evil is only a byproduct
of the good on its march to full development. Proclus has further enlightenment
for us, which should not be missed:
"Evil in souls
is a debility of not always and uniformly adhering to better natures and to
the good. Hence arises their descent to things subordinate, their oblivion,
their malefic inclination to things conversant with body, and their dischord
with reason. According to some, matter is that which is primarily evil, and
is evil itself, and the debility of souls arises from their lapse into matter."
But we owe to Thomas
Taylor a reminder that it is error to impute evil gratuitously to matter:
"This Proclus denies
and says that both body and matter originate from deity and that both are
the progeny of divinity. He adds . . . that souls sinned before they were
thrust into matter; that there are not two principles (matter and deity);
and that matter is neither good nor evil, but a thing necessary, and distant
in the last degree from the good itself."
Here is balance and
sanity, so sorely needed in an age overrun with cults of the "spiritual" raving
against the "evil" nature of matter, (Page 349) making
it a theological "devil." This declaration should be advanced to prominence
in the philosophic treatment of the place and function of matter in evolution
and systematic thought. Modern spiritual cultism needs to be enlightened with
the assurance that matter is in itself neither good nor evil, but neutral. It
has no moral quality in itself, but receives such from the good or evil use
made of it, as any mechanical invention. It is to become the implementation
of the good, and is therefore vitally necessary, as Proclus declares. Cult diatribes
against matter as evil are at last seen to be beyond the mark, and the orthodox
hypostasization and personification of evil is discovered to be equally inane.
Whatever seems
evil exists indeed for the sake of the good:
"To divinity, therefore,
nothing is evil, not even of the things which are called evil. For he uses
these also to a good purpose . . . For he [the demiurgus] concealed evil in
the use of good." Evil "consists in the privation of symmetry between form
and matter."
The last statement
is a detail which is doubtless most relevant. The god and the animal being
conjoined in one organism, evil arose from the want of harmony between them.
This is at the base of those Platonic discussions on harmony and symmetrical
allotment of function in the Greek thought. Two widely diverse and in a sense
antagonistic elements were thrust into a marriage in one body. A conflict
was inevitable. Paul’s war of the flesh against the soul was on. The animal
could no longer drift in his course of unintelligent natural instinct; and
on his part the god was erratic in his incipient lordship over lower forces.
What measure of human wretchedness, instability and recklessness does not
flow from these factors operative in the situation?
Hence Lucifer became
transformed into Satan. Without his intrusion the animal would have known no
evil, no aberrancy, no contravention of cyclic order, with consequent pain and
distress. But he would have purchased the continuance of his halcyon blissfulness
at the cost of -remaining an animal! He could not step across the gap between
beast and sentient man without awakening the knowledge of good and evil. The
god stepped into the beast’s own province and brought that disturbing influence
that began the harrowing process, for both, of learning through suffering. By
the god’s stripes we are healed, and both he and his pupil suffer many an anguish
before the (Page 350) healing
is effected. Fittingly the Logia are found saying: "The Beast that was, that
is, and that is soon to be cast down into the bottomless pit, is the mystery
of iniquity by whose power the world hath been made full of sorrow."
The Beast that
was chained in prison or cast down into the lake of fire that burned with
brimstone is to be found, along with the lake, in the Ritual (Ch. 17). He
is called Baba, the eternal devourer, whose dwelling is in the lake of fire,
the red lake, the pool of the damned, in the fiery pit of the recess or "bight"
of Amenta. It is to be pointed out that this Baba, called "the lord of gore,"
extracts the hearts and viscera from the corpses doomed to be consumed at
his banquet and "eats the livers of the princes." This personation is identical
with that of the Beast in Revelation (10) who makes war on the "Logos of God,"
but is defeated and cast into the lake that blazes with brimstone. The angel
invites all the "birds that fly in mid-heaven to gather for the great banquet
of God," at which "the flesh of kings" was devoured. In the Promethean myth
the bird, vulture or eagle, comes daily to consume the liver of the king of
heaven, bound helpless to the rock, or the cross. The bird typifying generally
the soul, coming to devour the liver of the god, unquestionably has some reference
to the purificatory offices of the spiritual nature in the evolutionary process,
though a more subtle knowledge of the function of the liver in vital economy
would probably enable us to read further astonishing significance in the symbology.
The myth may perhaps simply signify the soul’s periodical visitation to earth
to pluck the fruits of the purgative and purificatory experience, by which
through bodily suffering evil is transmuted into good, as the liver cleanses
impurities of the body.
Paul in Ephesians
(2) and elsewhere sets forth the forces in conflict in the arena of the human
breast:
"You were dead
in the trespasses and sins in which you moved as you followed the course of
this world . . . when we obeyed the passions of our flesh, carrying the dictates
of the flesh and its impulses, when we were objects of God’s anger like the
rest of men."
Again this use of
the word "anger," often elsewhere "ire" or "wrath," must be carefully delimited
in meaning, since it refers to nothing like human vindictiveness, but just the
"fire" of deity working its natural (Page 351) efficacy
in and upon the elements of the body. "Ire" is "fire" with the Greek diagamma
dropped off, and "wrath" is the original fire of creative force.
Paul’s admonition
was to "abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul." He speaks
of the deadly enmity between the two natures, as does Plato, and pleads with
the disciples to strive for the victory of the spiritual man over the carnal.
He puts sexual vice at the head of a list of corrupt practices, and sexual
continence at the head of a list of virtues.
Through the diversion
of dramatic meaning into false channels, the god, then, became regarded as
the instigator of all evil in the moral situation. It is noteworthy that in
the Jonah legend, the god, asleep in the hold of the storm-tossed vessel,
is found, by casting lots, to be responsible for the storm. Two features here
deserve elucidation. He was asleep. The god, who should have been awake and
alert to control the sweeping urges of sensual thought (water agitated by
air, mind, symbolically) was asleep. While he lay inert the storm of air and
water raged. He was thus responsible, for he was sent to be the master of
these very elements. He waked in time and his destiny demanded that he be
thrown into the midst of the waters, to take charge and still them. The storm
then quieted.
Next, he lay in
the hold. This was called Akar (Agar, Hagar), a region of Amenta. It types
the lower self, the lower part of the organism, the natural, carnal man. He
had been captivated and his divine genius and memory were narcotized by the
oblivion-producing influences of incarnation. He lay in a torpor in the hold
of the ship, the belly of the mortal man.
So the god, rendered
at first sluggish, beastly, brutalized, became the evil one. And the alteration
of character from benefactor to demon, has wrought ghastly mischief in religious
machination. Spurred on by the imaginary hypostatization of an Evil Spirit in
the world, men have by the very force and contagion of a fixed obsession wrought
themselves into the likeness of this malignant demon and dramatized in actual
history their conception of his diabolical role. Swept on by the inculcated
theory of his presence in personal form in the world, bigots everywhere found
in the assumption a ready subterfuge for persecution and cruelty. Since embodiment
had to be found (Page 352) for the Evil Spirit,
every unacceptable act or idea of one’s brother or one’s enemy could be charged
to demoniac possession. Thus there was provided an easy channel for a terrible
outpouring of man’s inhumanity to man, and there was let loose an orgy of vicious
despotism in religion that has stained the record of Christianity almost past
repair. Nothing but philosophical understanding of the real issues involved
will clarify the error in religious attitude on this matter. Nothing but the
realization that Satan was and is himself the angel of light, our heavenly benefactor,
will restore sober sanity to a race rendered next to demonical by an infernal
theology.
There is documentary
evidence to indicate that this figure was not at first regarded as the evil
genius of man at all, but was rated as the Agathodaemon, or Guardian Spirit.
On Massey’s authority it may be stated that "the Serpent in Egypt, Chaldea,
India, America and Europe is the Good Serpent generally, the Agathodaemon."
The Ritual (Ch. 83) affirms that "The Great One shining with his body as a
God is Sut." Sut was strictly not the evil one. He was the seven-headed serpent
or dragon. And the seven Uraei, or serpent-headed gods, are typical not of
death, but of life. Another voice concurs in this estimate.
"Like Satan himself,
even as the Rev. Dunbar Heath has shown (The Fallen Angels), the serpent had
not, indeed, a wholly evil character among the early Hebrews." [Westrop
and Wake: Phallism in Ancient Religions, p. 47. ]
The same authority
(p. 57) goes further:
"Whatever may be
the explanation of the fact, it is understood that, notwithstanding the hatred
with which he was afterwards regarded, this god Seth, or Set, was at one time
highly venerated in Egypt. Bunsen says that up to the thirteenth century before
Christ, Set ‘was a great god universally adored throughout Egypt, who confers
on the sovereigns of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties the symbols of
life and power.’ He adds: ‘But subsequently, in the course of the twentieth
dynasty he is suddenly treated as an evil demon, inasmuch as his effigies and
name are obliterated on all the monuments and inscriptions that could be reached.’
Moreover, according to Bunsen, Seth ‘appears gradually among the Semites as
the background of their religious consciousness’; and not merely was he ‘the
primitive god of Northern Egypt and Palestine,’ but his genealogy as ‘the Seth
of Genesis, the father of Enoch (the man), must be considered as originally
running parallel with that derived from the Elohim, Adam’s father.’" (Page 353)
This is
effective corroboration of the claim advanced herein that the father of intelligent
man was the Titanic host, typified by the fiery serpent. Once revered by infant
humanity as the bestower of light and life, this collective being later suffered
a transformation of imputed character and became thought of as the father of
all ill. Some of the dramatic implications worked over into popular belief,
and the dramatic character of the Adversary overbore the true understanding
of the hidden beneficence of the son of the morning.
The doctrine of hellfire
has drifted from the original connotation far away from intelligible meaning.
It must be reduced again to rational sense.
Chemically all life
processes are a burning. Oxidation is a slower burning, as in rust. All decomposition
is a burning. Disintegration of a composite by operation of a superior potency
is a burning. Hence all energic activity among the elements of life is thought
of as the work of fire. Man’s whole life, then, is cast in the midst of a veritable
welter of fiery forces, and so Egypt described the world as the lake of fire,
or again "the crucible of the great house of flame" and "the Pool of the Double
Fire." "Higher" fires and "lower" fires, or the rays of cosmic thought and the
purely chemical energies embosomed in matter, called by the Egyptians "the seven
Uraeus divinities," unite on earth in a combat and interfusion which constitutes
indeed "the fiery furnace" of theological myth. The god came here, to transmute
both himself and his animal protégé into higher natures. He was to burn out
the dross and refine the material of the coarser sheaths, those of "earth" and
"water," to make possible the unfoldment to function of the principle of mind.
This type of spiritual combustion is all that was originally meant by the purging
by fire and the winnowing by air. To purify is to make clean by fire. Burning
out, or blowing out, the chaff of the animal compound in us by the divine fire
of soul, or the divine afflatus of spirit, was the universal mythical symbol
of our divinization. Coming with his fan in his hand "he will thoroughly purge
his floor." The floor is the physical base of life. The higher potency will
cleanse the lowest. More than once the Egyptian Ritual harps on the soul’s "acquiring
dominion over his feet." The rite of feet-washing can be immediately divined
as a type of cleansing the lowest nature. Texts in the Ritual state that he
who has won control over his feet has done all he needs to do to insure salvation.
(Page 354)
Says Isaiah
(I:25): "And I will turn my hand upon thee and purely purge away thy dross and
take away thy tin." After purging his floor, "he will gather his wheat into
the garner; but the chaff he will burn with fire unquenchable" (Matt., Luke).
We are in hell because the lower segment of us needed the burning, and the upper
segment the winnowing, or both segments needed both operations, according to
the application of the figure.
To be consumed
in the lake, or the furnace, of fire, then, is not, as theology has mistaught
a harrowed world, to writhe in flames of torment piled by a vengeful god to
satiate a thwarted wrath. There are seven-league-boot strides of distance
and difference between this insufferable product of a fiendish theology and
the august philosophical conception of primal wisdom. The latter is instinct
with dignity and truth; the other a frenzy of inhuman weakness goaded by ignorant
fear. Some semblance at least of the hidden truth should have been conceived
from the fact that even in the distorted rendering, the souls in hell burn,
but do not burn up. Their torment, says orthodoxy, is eternal; and the true
and sane original meaning of this whole doctrine went awry because "eternal"
was substituted in the translation for "aeonial." The stress of anguish of
the fiery experience was to last through the aeon or cycle of incarnation.
This rendering yields instruction and intelligence; the other mocks the reason.
The souls burn,
but are not extirpated. They die, but live on, eventually transfigured. "I
died yesterday, but I am alive today," cries the Manes. "In one of the hells
the shades (Manes) are seen burning, but they were able to resist the fire,
and consequently it is said: ‘The shades live; they have raised their powers.’"
The lower fires
burn with smudge and murk; they must be transmuted to pure flame. Fire there
will be; its quality is the vital concern. Says Isaiah (9:17):
"For wickedness
burneth as a fire. It shall devour the briars and thorns, and shall kindle
in the thickets of the forests."
The briars, thorns
and thickets are the dense undergrowth of coarse sensualism, which will burn
themselves out, by conversion into gentler flames.
In Egypt the goddess
Sekhet is made to play the part of the avenger of the wicked with hell fire.
She is the fiery energies latent in matter, (Page 355) generating
the various forms of burning and purification to which the Kumaras will be subjected.
The release of her powers upon the god will search and purge his nature. She
is typed by the lioness, material consort and counterpart of Shu, the lion-god,
astrologically the hot July sun of the lion sign. Nature’s typology is most
striking in this relation. In the incarnation cycle, symboled as well by winter
as by night, the fire of soul immersed in earthy and watery body, absorbs, as
it were, an excess of the two lower elements. In the inter-life periods, when
the soul is out of body, and figuratively in its summer time, the heat of July
drives out the water and its earthy admixture in sweat! But life in the empyrean
then runs to an excess of fire and heated air, and the soul has to escape from
this menace by a retreat again to earth and water - incarnation. Even this intimation
has its appropriate and very suggestive summer emblemism; for, as in winter
fire and heated air stand as the types of salvation for man from menace of earth
and water, in the summer water and earth, and even darkness (shade), offer salvation
from the menace of air and fire. The seasonal swing, with all its concomitant
conditions, can be taken as an exact duplication of the evolutionary pendulum,
which swings the soul from an excess of mind and spirit over to the opposite
excess of sense and feeling, and back again. In embodiment the water struggles
to quench the fire; in heaven the fire expunges the water. It is an axiom of
occult and esoteric study that the world shall be alternately destroyed by fire
and water. This has been accepted in a literal way, so that the legend is that
the continent of Lemuria some millions of years ago was destroyed by fiery convulsions
and the later continent of Atlantis submerged by water. If continents sink both
fire and water must of necessity play a part in the development. It is true
that living factual history, of men and of universes and planets, does in general
carry out the outline of symbolism. Yet it may be suggested that perhaps in
this instance it is possible that sheer typology became once more too directly
historicized. As Horus and Sut alternately vanquish each other in endless repetition,
so fire and water eternally dominate in turn.
As Sekhet is linked
with the Lion sign, so Serkh, or Heh, is instructively seen as related to Scorpio.
We can see this better through Massey’s studies: (Page 356)
"The serpent-goddess
Heh especially represents the element of Fire that was first symbolized by the
lightning of the serpent’s sting. But the serpent itself was recognized before
the goddess of fire or heat was personified. She is called the ‘Maker of Invisible
Existence Apparent.’ But it was the serpent that first revealed and made manifest
in pain and death the fiery power that existed invisibly. The fury of the solar
fire suggested the fang-sting. The name of the Sirocco, the very breath of fire,
identifies itself with Serkh, the (Egyptian) name of the Scorpio, which further
shows the hard form of Serf, the blast of burning breath." [The Natural
Genesis, I, p. 324. ]
Before dilating
upon the Scorpion typology, a moment’s attention must be paid to the remarkable
name given to the serpent-goddess of fire: The Maker of Invisible Existence
Apparent. The whole program of incarnation is designed to enable incipient
divinity to bring out into manifestation all its latent powers. All manifestation
is to effect an Epiphany. There is nothing hidden that shall not be revealed,
as evolution throws out upon the screen of concrete existence the deeper things
of God. And the sculpturing tool that molds in matter the forms of archetypal
conception is the burning flame of material energy in the veins of substance,
guided by intelligence. To impale a cosmic thought in a fixed structure of
matter, to imprison it in inert substance, required the deadly sting of the
Scorpion-goddess Serkh, which threw the invisible existence into motionless
stability in the arms of matter.
The allegorical function
of the sign of Scorpio is most impressive. The god in his autumn descent into
body to make his hidden existence visible is stung into lethal sleep by the
Scorpion-goddess. This is a most striking natural emblem of the swooning noted
in connection with the downward march toward body. God caused a deep sleep to
fall upon Adam when he was to be bifurcated into duality in earthly life. The
entire progression into flesh involved the soul’s "death," as from a sting of
poison. The baser fires of sense, permeating his more ethereal bodies, injected
noxious elements into it, rendering it lethal and sluggish. The foreign substances
of the lower man poisoned the god. He was stung to death as he descended. This
is in keeping with the position of Scorpio in the zodiac, which falls in the
October-November date, when the sun likewise is going to death in winter. He
comes with power to tread on serpents and scorpions and put all things under
his feet; but his victory is not won at the start; it will (Page 357) come
at the end. Like Jesus, Job and Samson, he must first come under the power of
the adversary. He first becomes the helpless infant attacked by the serpent,
the Herut menace; he becomes Sekari, the silent sufferer. The Scorpion sign
in the autumn of the year is the intimation of the fatal sting of spirit by
the serpent of the lower nature, the asp or Uraeus of Egypt, "a serpent of fire."
The sense is more
directly to be apprehended in connection with several myths that represent
Isis (nature) as scheming to extract from Ra his mighty secret of wisdom.
She arranges to have Ra pass a certain place at which he would be bitten by
a snake or scorpion. In the ensuing coma the secret could be wrested from
him. This is a mighty glyph of incarnational truth. It is only when the god
is bound in oblivion in the lap of matter that he imparts to matter (Isis)
the qualities of his mind. She must reduce him and his intellectual fire to
inertness so that she may abstract from him his living intellectual essence
and impregnate her body with the seed of his mind after his death, which is
exactly the substance and gist of another of the great Egyptian myths of the
gods. This one has given ignorant Christian scholars and priests paroxysms
of affected revulsion against the imputed sacrilege and obscenity of pagan
"beliefs." So Serkh, a form of Isis characterized as the Scorpion-goddess,
causes the descending god of pure intellect to be struck and paralyzed by
the sting of bodily sense.
It is hardly less
than astonishing that one can turn to the field of natural phenomena and find
there a living duplication of the death of the Christos on the cross of matter.
A number of species of insects resort to a stinging of the male by the female,
as the result of which the former is thrown into a state of coma, and the
mother takes advantage of his helplessness to deposit her eggs in the fleshly
portion of his body, so that when they shortly come into larva form they may
have his body to feed upon until able to find food elsewhere. Jesus commanded
us to eat his body. He was laid in the manger, where the animals eat. The
god goes to his death, and from his dying body and shed blood the young generation
draws the nutriment that sustains life. Job and Isaiah refer to the sting
that poisons the god.
Budge seems to have
become so entangled in the dual relevance of the serpent symbol that he gave
up the effort to grapple with it in despair: (Page 358)
"In short,
the serpent was either a power for good or the incarnation of diabolical cunning
and wickedness."[Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, II, p. 236.
]
He did not know
it was both. But the matter is complicated and his distress is easily comprehended.
There is the dragon of wisdom guarding the tree of knowledge, and there is
the Apap monster, the crocodile of the waters. The latter is the "villain"
of the play. But there is light in many statements that the serpent of evil
is to be transformed into the serpent of good. There is the "lifting up of
the serpent," which, however, again may have a twofold interpretation, denoting
either the lifting up of the elementary powers (the lower serpent) to a higher
condition through transformation; or the lifting up of the fiery serpent of
the god-nature, after it has fallen into degradation. When Moses lifted up
the brazen serpent on the cross in the wilderness, it can mean either that
the Israelites should lift up the fallen god to his fiery purity, or that
they should raise up the baser nature to a higher place through linkage with
their exalted status. Both meanings at any rate eventually merge into one.
For as the higher self had intertwined his nature with that of the lower self,
the lifting up of the one must involve the redemption of the other. In the
famed caduceus of Mercury the two serpents intertwined around the staff or
wand are united at the bottom, because spirit and matter are joined in man’s
physical life.
Moses’ raising the
serpent is paralleled in Egyptian lore by the saying of the Speaker: "I am raised
up to (or as) the serpent of the sun." The influence of the Christly deity lifts
up the lower self. Moses stands for man, and Jehovah ordered Moses to build
a tabernacle in which he (Jehovah) should be raised up. It may fall with surprise
and incredulity upon most readers to be told that the Jehovah character of the
creation legend is by no means the Supreme Lord, but merely one of the seven
Elohim, or builders of the physical universe. He is one of the seven Uraeus
"deities"; another one of the seven bears the name of Oreus, which is a form
of Uraeus. So man is to raise up the natural order to the spiritual, and he
is to do it in the "tabernacle" which he is engaged in building. This is that
body of spiritual radiance which every man is steadily formulating out of the
fiery essence of the very matter of his body, as lower fires are transmuted
to higher. This transformation is made by man here on the cross of material
life. (Page 359) The seven Uraeus
deities, of whom Jehovah was one, were the powers that lay embosomed in matter,
the forces that built the physical universe, all below the level of mind. They
were the Apap or Hydra monster swimming in the water of the lower Nun; and man
had to transmute them into solar fire. Uraeus, the name, evidently derives from
Ur, the original creative fire, and aei, meaning in Greek "ever, always." They
were the "eternal fires" that forged the various creations. They create life
below the level of mind, but must be lifted up to be changed into spiritual
intelligences. They begin around the feet of the gods and goddesses, and end
on their foreheads. In man physiologically they are brought up from the base
of the spine and crown the human development by opening up the latent faculties
of divine intelligence locked up in the pineal gland and pituitary body in the
head. A line from the Ritual dispels all doubt as to their higher or lower rating
and nature. It reads: "The seven Uraeus divinities are my body." They are the
fiery formative energies of matter, not of mind. They are the energy in the
atom, seven blind forces, which, however, draw the chariot of creation and must
therefore be directed by intelligence.
One form of the
serpent of the water is the great Hydra monster of the uranograph, Apap or
Herut. He swims alongside the ship of Horus crossing the Lake of Putrata,
or water of the bodily life, ready to devour any careless sailor who may fall
overboard. In the planispheres his elongated body stretches across seven signs
of the zodiac, and his head, with open mouth, comes directly under the feet
of the Virgin. Her feet are over his head, fulfilling the Biblical promise
that her heel should bruise his head. He is the serpent or dragon of many
myths.
The manner in which
this monster is to be overcome or beaten off is of great interest. The Speaker
(Ch. 108) exclaims triumphantly: "I understand the mystical representation of
things and by that means I repulse Apap." By "mystical representations of things"
is meant something that modern insight does not discern and with which it is
not conversant. It indicates the ancient use of spiritual typology, carried
to a high degree of subtlety and artistry that engendered dynamic forms of psychological
reaction. The cathartic virtue of Greek drama has been fairly well envisaged
by students. But the practice of handling symbolic formulae of profound truth
was in olden time a high art, used as a means of exalting and purifying the
entire life. (Page 360) We note this often
in the directions appended to the Ritual chapters as Rubrics. To put it tersely
for modern skepticism, symbols can be used aright to exert a positive and salutary
magic. Certain potencies in nature are released to play in the individual by
the habitual contemplation of truth on the analogy of natural and other images.
Much ancient ceremonial in religion was repetition of magical formulae of the
sort. In the mind’s grasp of subtle correspondence between physical phenomena
and hidden truth there was liberated a psychic dynamism which was cathartic
of the whole nature. To repulse Apap, to transform bestial desire into love
and brotherhood, demands the skillful handling of subtle forces. Thought, will
and feeling must be harmonized in a delicate balance. Theurgic magic and spiritual
therapy were closely bound up with "the mystical representations of things."
To prevent the
serpent from stinging, to meet this massive brute force of primal instinct
and tame it to reason, required that the god-soul should learn to "charm the
serpent." The significance of this "charming’ is profound. "These are the
gods who charm for Har-Khuti (Horus) in Amenta. They, the masters of their
nets, charm those who are in the nets." In the scene portrayed in this chapter
of the Ritual men walk before Ra to charm Apap for him. They chant: "O impious
Apap, thou art charmed by us through the means of what is in our hands!" The
first star in Ophiuchus is called "the head of the Serpent-Charmer."
"Who is Manitou?"
an Algonquin chant asks. "He that goeth with the Serpent"--the god who lives
with and tames the lower self. The widespread use of such terms as Manitou,
Mana and Manna to indicate a spirit power in man and things is indicative of
much. The words connote "magical power" as believed to be possessed by every
tribal medicine-man. The probability is that the term is of kindred root with
the word "man" itself, and Manas (Sanskrit), "mind." For mind constitutes man
what he is, and it is the mind principle in man that was sent precisely for
the purpose of charming the animal propensities into culture. A "mantram" is
a Vedic word for a magical incantation. The god’s action upon the brute self
was likened to a charming, and the word "charm" is itself from the stem that
gives us "Christ" and "Eucharist" and "charity." For the god to "charm" the
beast was to lull the animal nature to docility, the while it lent ear to the
sweet strains of a higher melody which transformed it magically. (Page 361)
The great
potent serpent-charmer is mind, thought. Man is the thinking magician, rendering
impotent the baleful sting of the serpent. The Christos tramples underfoot the
serpents and scorpions, whose lethal sting endangers him.
Singular verification
of these interpretations is found in the mythical episodes of Orpheus, the
Greek hero-god. He is shown seated amidst eight animals (the elementary seven
powers, counted as eight with their Lord) playing upon his lyre of seven strings.
Massey traces the name Orpheus to the Egyptian Uarp, "the harper." The word
is from the root signifying "to delight, charm or be charmed." He enchants
the wild beasts and overcomes with the charms of his music all the powers
of Hades. Circe’s charming was at once followed by a transformation, but in
this case from men into beasts, marking the god in his descent charmed by
matter, and it had to be followed by a countertransformation back to men.
In most legends of classical mythology in which the solar hero faces the task
of rescuing a maiden (the soul) from the cave in which she is guarded by a
dragon, he is represented as first lulling the dragon to sleep or charming
him by some potent talisman.
Immediately after
Jesus said to his disciples that he beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven
he subjoined: "Behold I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions
and over all the power of the enemy." And when the seventy returned with joy
from their mission, they exclaimed: "Lord, even the devils are subject unto
us in thy name." The power to tread on serpents and scorpions was the power
to rule - not necessarily to crush - the elementary nature. They were in Egypt
the Sami and the Sebau and the minions of Sut. The latter was assigned the scorpion
as the type of evil.
The power to charm
a dangerous serpent by silent concentration was so evidently a demonstration
of the efficacy of some invisible magic that mind, thought and magic were
named after the serpent. It, too, was seen to possess this strange power.
And the (higher) serpent became the type of occult control, wisdom, sagacity,
for this reason. It even was one of the chief symbols of deity itself. The
Greek drakon, "dragon," denotes the keen-eyed seer, as does the Sanskrit Naga,
"serpent."
The dual aspect of
the serpent symbol is graphed in the heavens in an ancient Egyptian planisphere.
The great crocodile (Page 362) (dragon, serpent)
appears at the place of the autumn equinox, close to the Scorpion, yet stretches
across six signs to the spring equinox. It is the power that reaches from sense
to soul. Likewise there is found in the northern sky the (former) pole star
Alpha Draconis, and in the southern heavens the star Eta Hydri. On this dual
pivot of the dragons the starry skies revolved. As in the uranograph between
the two Dragons was run the line of the axis of stability for the planet, so
the axis of stability in man’s life is the line of force running between the
upper serpent of spiritual wisdom and the lower one of animality. All cosmic
stability is fixed upon a line of force playing between the two poles of vital
affinity, positive and negative, the two serpent fires. Man exists only because
spirit and body were united in one organism and the reciprocal play of currents
of force between them sustains his life. The seers of old wrote the signs of
this relationship in the skies. There was the serpent of heaven and the snake
of earth. And man is the compound of their two energies.
Apap, the water
monster, grasps at souls to devour them. The souls on board Horus’ ship exult
at having escaped his jaws. Appropriately he is also called the "eater of
the heads" of the dead in Amenta. He subverts the intellect of man. But even
his nature is finally changed and exalted, and he, along with the seven Uraei,
is lifted up. They all become the servants of the god of light in the sun-cults.
They at first war in fierce opposition to man as the Seven Adversaries; later
they fight for Ra against every manifestation of evil. The Scorpion eventually
stings "on behalf of gods and men." Serkh, Scorpion-goddess, becomes the guardian
of the sun and keeper of the chained Apap. "I have come," says the Manes,
"like the sun through the gates of the Sun-goer, otherwise called the Scorpion."
(Rit., Ch. 147.) This puts Scorpio at the place of the autumn equinox, where
it was in remote times,--the eagle, one of the four cardinal guardians.
When the seven Uraei
were raised to be worn on the foreheads of the gods, that which had been most
deadly was transformed into that which was divine. It is said of each serpent
emitting jets of fire in Hades, "Its flame is for Ra." The death-darting dragons
became the watchers of the gates of heaven and guardians of the tree of knowledge,
the three golden apples (mind-soul-spirit) and every treasure of light. The
seven elementary powers first described as Wicked Spirits are promoted from
that character to become the "Seven Great Spirits (Page 363) in
the service of their Lord," and the seven attendants of the solar Ra in Egypt.
This transformation is matched in Persia and India. In the planisphere they
stand behind the constellation of the Thigh or Meskhen, Ursa Major, in the north.
They are called "the Followers of Osiris," who "burn the wicked souls of his
enemies," and "the givers of blows for sins." Four of these are Amsta, Hapi,
Tuamutef and Kabhsenuf, prominent in Egyptian lore as the "Four Chieftains of
the Four Corners," and Sons of Horus. They were emblemed by the four Canopic
jars at the corners of the mummy-case.
The gist of all
this is that the first seven-ply creation was elementary and chaotic, and
that the advent of mind in creation in the person of man put these wild forces
for the first time under rational control in an organic being. From the status
of enemies and opponents, the first principles were tamed to man’s service.
As a reward of service they will be lifted up to partake of man’s higher nature.
The text (Ch. 85) has the Osirified dead saying: "I pass through substance.
I pierce the darkness. Hidden reptile is my name. The soul of my body is a
serpent of life." Chapter 87 of the Ritual carries the expressive title "of
making the transformation into the serpent Sata." Allusion to the danger encountered
by the god in the underworld is found in the "chapter by which a person is
not devoured or bitten by the eater of the head, which is a snake."
The frequent early
figure of a serpent coiled seven times round the summit of a hill or a cone
(seen in the serpent mounds of America) types the fiery energy of life circling
the round of the seven cycles in all creations. There was a sevenfold movement
in each of the creations, the stellar, the solar or planetary, and the human,
both racial and individual. The Beast had seven heads. The Ritual gives: "O
the very high hill in Hades! the heavens rest upon it. There is a snake on
it, Sati is his name. He is about twenty cubits in his coil." He is also called
"the Serpent of Millions of Years," which indicates that he is a type of the
cyclic revolutions of life force about the globes. The crocodile-god Sevekh
(seven) is said to be on the hill of the Lord of Bata.
The serpent laying
its eggs and coiling about them for incubation was the true type of natural
gestation, which brought forth fixed cycles of revolving life arising out of
the primal chaos. By shape the egg itself is a symbol of revolution. Each seven
coils or revolutions of the mother life engender a new creation. The seven non-intelligent
powers (Page 364) ...--monsters, giants, blind adversaries - are the breeding
force of a new life that is intelligent. The powers that swirled and swarmed
in the abyss of darkness become the nursery of the sun of intellect in the kingdom
of man, who is so far the crown of earthly life. The great old giant dragon
was simply a type of primordial darkness and chaos. It gave birth to seven powers
which fought blindly until they were subdued and synthesized under the last
and highest of them, the Christ mind. This great dragon was pictured with its
tail in its mouth. The figure betokened the cycle returning into itself or back
to source, or the parent life reabsorbing its own products. Kronos, Father Time,
in the great myths devoured his own children. The Oriental expects his individual
consciousness to be drawn back into the universal Nirvana. The dragon of the
original abyss later came to be the dragon of mother earth herself, who swallowed
up her children one by one as the grave closed over them. Also she swallowed
the sun each evening and the stars as they set.
Sut, as a later representative
of evil, became the opponent of the god both in the physical and the moral order.
He waged war with the sun-god and was defeated, but never slain. Horus attacked
him and fought with him for three days, and though wounded, he escaped with
his life. He suffered rout periodically and perpetually, but was not destroyed,
or only figuratively so. He lived to fight again. The sun-god cast a spell on
him every day and rendered him powerless for evil. He was chained down for the
aeon. All this was the natural expression of the moral conflict in man’s soul,
as it is of all other conflict, for life subsists in manifestation only by virtue
of the pull, tension or struggle between the two nodal forces. Now one, now
the other, is conqueror. The original mother of life, represented variously
as the crocodile dragon, the hippopotamus, cow, sow, lioness, water-horse and
finally woman, "the great harlot," who all meet in Kep, or Kefa (Heva, Chavvak,
Eve), "the mother of the living," was the gestator of Sut and Horus, who are
born twins! They typify the two aspects of life’s expression, activity and passivity,
positive and negative force, light and darkness. The story of life is a story
of unending conflict between the two "hostile" powers. The legends paint but
a single cycle of growth, but the cycles repeat themselves endlessly. Any cycle
is emblematic of every other one, and hence of all movement or all truth. If
man knows (Page 365) his
own life in its cycle, he knows all. The arcane wisdom exhorted man to know
himself.
In Egypt the conflict
was first waged between the sun-god Ra and Apap. It was symboled variously
by the death and rebirth of sunshine daily and seasonally, by the waxing and
waning moon, and by the setting and rising stars. In the realm of spiritual
activity it was carried on by Sut and Horus. Astrologically the Dragon in
the northern sky was the good serpent of Ra, or Horus, while the elongated
Hydra was the evil serpent of Sut or Satan. Lastly the two were depicted as
twin brothers fighting over their birthright! Their conflict took place, be
it noted, in Amenta, where they fought upon the mount and were constellated
as the Twins contending in Gemini. We shall see them as Cain and Abel, Jacob
and Esau and other pairs.
The Bible offers
first the warfare between Cain and Abel, the first two sons of Adam (Atum).
Research brings to light the little-known fact that Abel is feminine in gender!
This would seem to put Cain in the role of the conqueror of material nature
and darkness. Massey states that Abel represents the waning light of evening
or autumn, the god descending into incarnation or entering upon his "feminine
phase." Cain then would be the one who puts an end to this cycle, and rises
to victory in a new birth. Cain may be a type of Khunsu, Egyptian god, son
of Atum-Ra, but Khunsu obtains his victory under the typology of the moon’s
phases, rather than those of the sun. He is the lunar light, victorious over
the dark phase.
In the struggle between
Horus and Sut over the succession the two were parted by the intervention of
Taht, the moon-god, who assigns each to his domain, the one north, the other
south. This marks the bifurcation into spirit and matter, or male and female
potency, by the instrumentality of matter, represented by the moon. It is allegorized
in the fairy princess stories by the awarding of one half of the father’s kingdom
to the hero-rescuer of the king’s daughter who had been captured by the dragon.
In the kingdom of man it meant the placing of the god’s intelligence in the
upper portion of the body and the animal soul or Sut below the diaphragm, in
Jonah’s "belly of death." The significance of Taht’s mediatorship is that the
moon is the agency of effecting an intermediate relation between the hidden
solar light and the dark power of night, by its reflection of the sun-god’s
rays in the darkness. The moon is thus the perfect type of the mediatorial function
(Page 366) of
that principle in Plato’s philosophy which stands midway between the higher
Nous, or spiritual intelligence, and the doxa, or sense mind of the animal self.
The bee gets some of its character as type of soul because it is the active
agent of marrying the male and female elements of the flower. In Roman religion
this principle was the Pontifex or Bridge-builder between the two natures, since
it spans the gap between them and makes communication possible. And in human
history it grandly types the situation in which, when the soul in body is quite
cut off, like the earth at night, from the direct rays of heavenly light, and
gropes in darkness, there comes to its aid the principle of Manas, the hidden
intellect, to intervene, like the moon that relays light from an unseen source,
between man and the god who seems to have deserted him. The moonlight is the
symbol of that spiritual light that shines not directly in full power, but refracted
through intervening media, into our prison of darkness. Cut off from our full
solar light in the darkness of incarnation, we still have the divine light by
reflection upon our physical lives. The moonlight is not that true light, but
it bears witness to that light.
Beside the pairs
of contending brothers, mythology presents the many pairs of the two women,
whose representative functions are somewhat more difficult to discern. The
solar heroes have ever two mothers, a heavenly and an earthly one. The one
conceives the son, the other bears him. "The Two Daughters of the king of
the north gave birth to thee, the great ladies of his head." It is added,
significantly: "Heaven beareth thee up on thy right side, earth on thy left
side." The intent here is to tell us that we are upheld by the opposite action
of the positive and negative strands of primal force, the powers of "heaven"
and "earth," or, for the individual, mind and body. The two women are elsewhere
described as the "Two Goddesses who conceive and do not breed"--until fructified
by the germ of mind.
But it is said that
Sut opens and Horus closes up the two mothers. There is abstruse meaning hidden
under this typing. It seems to use the imagery of opening and closing the womb
in impregnation and childbirth. The opening was ascribed to Sut because it signals
the coming forth of conscious life into and under his domain, matter. As St.
Paul has told us, sin and evil sprang to life when the soul came into incarnation.
Sut opened the womb of being and began the phase of manifestation in all the
lower realms. Horus, spirit force, (Page 367) led the life of
nature back from matter to the noumenal worlds, and thus closed the womb of
the universal mother. As the "Bull of his Mother," he impregnated her again
and again, closing her womb until the birth. The sons of intelligence must reproduce
through union with natural and material forms in each generation. Matter, the
mother of life, is the Great Harlot, ever fecund, yielding her bosom to spirit
to embody its forms. Horus closes the womb with fertile seed; Sut opens it again
to let the new birth escape into darkness and death. If this is not the sense
of the typology, it hides something else profound indeed.
The two brothers
were typed by white and black birds, respectively. The golden hawk pictured
Horus, the black vulture Sut. Eagle and crow, dove and raven, hawk and blackbird,
pigeon and bandicoot are often paired. The stars Sothis (Sirius) and Canopus
likewise carry the characters in the sky. In India Krishna and Bala-Rama do
the impersonation. Krishna asks the other: "Do you know that you and I are
alike the origin of the world?" Krishna came from the black hair of Vishnu
and Bala-Rama from the white. Krishna comes (Massey) from a word meaning "waning
moon"; Bala means virile male force. There are the two brothers in the Babylonian
books, the one ousting the other each night. It is the younger of the twins
that always slays the dragon with seven heads, rescuing the soul. Ultimately
he marries the princess, which is to say that the two natures merge into one;
and he inherits half the paternal kingdom.
On one occasion
when Horus and Sut were battling, Sut cast filth in the face of Horus and
blinded him; Horus retaliated by tearing away Sut’s genitals. If incarnation
entails the god’s being blinded by having the "mire" of earth cast in his
face, he at least wins the use of the procreative powers of matter for the
time. His release finally from the dominance of carnal instincts and his graduation
from sexual generation back to spiritual creation would be the general significance
of his circumcision.
In the resurrection
of the dismembered Osiris, "Horus, who loves him, brings him his Eye; Set, who
loves him, brings him his testicles, and Thoth, who loves him, brings him his
arm and shoulder." Set (Sut) is here painted in friendly colors. So in another
text: "Nut gives thee to be a god unto Set in thy name of God. . . . Horus seizes
Set, he places him under thee; Set bears thee up, he is beneath thee as earth
is beneath thee. Rule thou him, therefore, in thy name of Ta-tcheser. (Page
368)
Horus
makes thee to grasp Set by his middle; he shall not get out of thy hand." Here
is evidence that the elementary powers were to be taken in hand by the god and
utilized in support of his life. The subordination of the beast under divine
faculty is surely indicated in this material. The eye definitely identifies
Horus as the deity of spiritual vision, the testicles relate Sut to the realm
of generation, or flesh.
Sut is definitely
made the upholder and servant of Horus in some passages. "Hail, Osiris (deceased),
wake up! Horus hath made Thoth to bring thine enemy to thee. He places thee
on his back; he cannot throw thee off. Thou makest thy seat upon him. Come
forth, sit upon him, he escapes not from thy hand. Hail, be thou master of
him."
"He sets thee on
thy throne; Horus makes thine enemy to bow beneath thee. When he would have
union with thee, thou escapest his member."
Here is further
and unquestioned confirmation of the claim that the seven lower powers are
later drawn into the service of the soul. The god was to "put all things under
his feet," to have dominion over the beast, bird and fish of the worlds lying
below his plane. The allusion to escaping Sut’s member bent on intercourse
would dramatize the idea of the soul’s escape from being drawn into defilement
and pollution by full immersion in the animal nature on its low plane.
Roman classicism
presents the fable of Romulus and Remus, and again one kills the other. A
common early tradition in the world is the founding of a city by a fratricide.
A Greek version
of the twins is seen in Eros, Love, and Ant-Eros, the latter being the opposing
phase. He avenged unrequited love and contended with Cupid (Eros).
The natural man
and the spiritual son were charactered most peculiarly by another set of symbols.
The former became the uncouth "lad from the country," au naturel, and the
latter the "gilded youth from the town." Grotesque as this may seem, it attests
the invincible studiousness of the ancients for suggestive symbols borrowed
from nature and life. A companion pair was the King in the city and the Chief
in the bush.
Astrally the twins
are given places in opposite quarters of the sky, as gods of the north and south.
Then they are distinguished as the setting and rising sun, waning and waxing
moon. Sometimes the character of Sut is assigned to a double of Horus, who is
the ugly old man, (Page 369) fading
in his dotage, or the crippled deity, or the immature and impubescent child.
He is being worsted and supplanted by the young solar Horus, born anew and come
to pubescence (type of the rebirth of his lost power) at the age of twelve,
when his wisdom confounds the old men and he leaves his mother. This second
and virile character is also taken by Jesus, as the Christ of the catacombs,
the "blooming boy" Bacchus of the Greek Mysteries, the youthful Mithras of the
Persians, and the fair Apollo of Greece. Also there was an elder and a younger
Horus, the one born to suffer and die ignominiously, the other to rise crowned
with light. So the Hindu Prajapati was one-half mortal, the other half immortal,
and in his mortal life he feared death. There was a double Horus, a biune Bacchus,
a two-faced Janus and the two-sided Jesus, the little mummied child and suffering
servant, as well as the risen and glorified Lord.
A very important
facet of the myth of the Two Brothers is to be envisaged through the story
of another pair of twins, Jacob and Esau. They struggle for supremacy in the
mother’s womb. In the womb of the abyss of matter the two forces struggle
before they come to manifestation. We have seen that hair, as in Samson’s
case, stands as the type of solar radiance or power. Esau is the "red, hairy
one." Jacob (Egyptian Hak, Hakh, or Hakekh) is the dark twin. When Rebecca
found that "twins were struggling in her womb," she was terrified and consulted
the Eternal. She was told:
"In your limbs
lie nations twain,
rival races
from their birth;
one the mastery
shall gain,
the younger
o’er the elder reign."
Esau emerged first
and Jacob came out grasping the other’s heel. Much the same story comes to
light in the delivery of the twins of Tamar, who had been impregnated by Judah,
her father-in-law. During labor a hand appeared, and the midwife tied a red
thread around it. But the hand drew back and the other babe was born first.
The first-born was Perez (Breach: his untimely birth a breach of order). The
brother’s name was Zerah (Scarlet).
It is, however, in
a well-preserved tradition of the Rabbins that we find the pointed significance
of the Jacob and Esau birth. The grasping of Esau’s heel by Jacob can not be
seen in its full import (Page 370) without completing
the story by means of the tradition. It says that on Esau’s heel there was the
likeness of a serpent! Again we have the heel of the god treading the head of
the serpent and being marked with its imprint. If the two natures, one higher,
one below it, are conjoined in man, obviously the foot, or heel, of the upper
man will be just over the head of the lower, and vice versa. And at the point
where the two contact there would be localized the whole friction and alternate
bruising between them. The god would trample on and eventually crush out the
nature, the head, of the brute elementary forces; but he would not come off
unscathed. He would bear the mark of the beast on his heel. Esau is thus identified
as the higher or spiritual twin.
The vulnerability
of the gods in one point, the heel, was not confined to Hebrew literature.
Osiris was wounded in the feet and had to recover the use of them. The classical
example of Achilles, whose mother Metis held him by the heel while she dipped
him in the waters of the Styx, leaving him vulnerable in the heel which was
untouched by the water, occurs to every mind. The mother, nature, holds the
god in her realm with her grasp only on his lowest part, the heel. If he is
stung, it must be there. We are dipped in the river Styx of this life to render
us invulnerable to further attack.
The serpent fulfilled
his prophesied mission of enmity against the woman’s seed, the Christ nature
in man. He pursued the woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet,
and with twelve stars in her diadem, down to earth and went away to make war
with her offspring on the border of the sea that encompassed the earth. The
divine sun pours its rays upon the soul and "clothes it with light as with a
garment." The moon is the generator of the forces that constitute the nature
below, and so the moon is under her feet. And the topmost output of the whole
cycle will be the twelve shining powers of intellectual light that man is to
evolve. Every impact of the carnal nature of man against the rule of pure intellect
in his mundane life is a skirmish in the serpent’s warfare against the soul.
The war in heaven was transferred to earth and is still going on. It is the
Battle of Armageddon. The two wings of a great eagle that were given the woman
to transport her to a place prepared by God, where she should be nourished for
three and a half cycles, until the time of her delivery of the Christ child,
very probably refers to the sign of Scorpio, coming in the late autumn, the
time of the soul’s descent. (Page 371) For the Scorpion was
in its higher of two aspects the eagle, and it is still taken in that character
by astrologers. The waterflood poured out by the Dragon to overwhelm her evidently
types the release of the strong sweep of karmic and evolutionary forces which
drives about one-third of the "stars of heaven" into incarnation. But earth
helped the woman and swallowed up this flood. This is our assurance that mundane
life is beneficent. The hard experience on earth tamed and subdued the wild
energies of elementary nature and became indeed a place of refuge and safety.
And here in the crypt of earth, the "bight of Amenta," mother nature brings
up her Man-child.
But finally at
the judgment, which is held on the highest mount of resurrection glory, the
great old Mother and her seven earth-born spirits are judged, rejected and
cast down out of heaven. Apt, as the primordial mother of life, is succeeded
by Hathor, and the Sevekh dragon by Horus. What this sheaf of events seems
to imply is that the powers that had at first functioned cosmically, came
in the course of aeons to operate in the building of physical man, a miniature
replica of the cosmos, and when finally converted to a higher level, received
a new name and nature. The harshness of the details of being judged and cast
out is purely a dramatic blind to cover the fine meaning astutely. Deity works
out of its system in the fires of earth life the debilitating and paralyzing
effect of its initial poisoning by the seven influences of Seb. The text of
Revelation says that "fire descended from heaven and consumed them"; but consumption
must be read as conversion into natures of finer purity. The Christ then moves
out of the control of his mother nature and seeks the things of his father,
spirit, at the perfection of his twelve facets of intelligence.
It is of the utmost
significance that the new heaven and new earth, in which the tree of life was
to bear twelve fruits upon its branches, was to be formed according to "the
measure of a man." Man means "thinker," fundamentally; and so thought, intelligent
mind, was to rule the new dispensation. It would establish life finally in its
spiritual kingdom of twelve divisions, superseding the natural order which was
founded on a basis of seven divisions. The mother’s number, seven, was to be
supplanted by the father’s number, twelve. Man was to go on to evolve his twelve
divine faculties. The twelve signs of the zodiac depict the twelve segments
of the nature of man when all have been perfected. No ancient religion can be
understood without (Page 372) reference to them.
The coming of the twelvefold spiritual hierarchy ended the reign of the seven
elementary powers, from bondage to which Paul says we must be freed. The Dragon
of seven heads is overthrown, and on the head of the Woman, saved by earth experience,
is placed the diadem of divinized humanity, studded with twelve stars, or spiritual
fires.
The statement in
Revelation is that the fifth angel poured out his bowl upon the throne of
the Beast in his kingdom of darkness, overthrowing the reign of that power
which had filled many with sore disease and made them cry out against the
Most High. Occult books reveal that we are now in the fifth race of the fourth
round of life energy on this globe, and are developing the fifth principle,
Manas, the intellect. The reasoning mind, then, is destined to put an end
to the reign of bestiality.
When the seven
angels had poured out upon the earth the fires of "the seven bowls of the
judgment of him that lives for ever," it is said that the temple (St. Paul
assures us that the temple is the body) became filled with the smoke from
the seven bowls, so that the power and the glory of God could no more be seen,
nor could anyone enter the temple again until the seven angels had poured
out the fires of judgment upon the earth. This is clearly an occult reference
to what we have described as the smudge, smoke, vapors, soot and murk arising
when the powers of god and beast first mingled in the body. It may also cover
the unnatural intermixture and miscegenation of god-men and animals that seems
to have been a fact of history. The "temple" had of course to be purified
before the true Ego of the individual could enter and rule. Hence the whole
earthly experience is the purgation, beyond question.
Matching the splendid
imagery of Revelation, the Ritual of Egypt presents "the woman clothed with
the sun," who says: "I am the Woman, an orb of light in the darkness; I have
brought my orb to the darkness; it is changed into light. I overthrow the extinguishers
of flame. I have stood. The fiends have hidden their faces." The seven elements
were the powers of material darkness; the Christ power was that of light. The
unevolved soul goes into darkness to become irradiated with light. The lower
passions would extinguish the flames of deity and must be overthrown. They are
the fiends, the minions of Sut and (Page 373) Satan,
who turn and flee as the light of virtue shines forth, like the host of Midianites
when Gideon’s three hundred broke their clay pitchers and revealed the lights
hidden within.
In the Arabic Gospel
of the Infancy, when the boy had been bitten by the serpent, the Lord Jesus
says to his playmates, "Boys, let us go and kill the serpent." He proves his
power over the reptile by making it suck the venom from the wound. Earthly
and Satanic influences poison the descending soul; yet experience in overcoming
their power in the milling grind of life extracts the poison in the end. "God
sends down to death; he also lifts up," says the New Testament. In the same
Gospel it is related that a damsel was afflicted by Satan, the cursed one,
in the form of a huge dragon which from time to time appeared to her and prepared
to swallow her up. He also sucked out all her blood, so that she remained
like a corpse. She is cured by a strip of clothing from a garment worn by
the child Jesus (Ch. 33). This is obviously another form of the story of the
woman with an issue of blood who touches the fringe of Jesus’s garment. In
the Gnostic version it is Sophia who suffers from an issue of blood, and is
sustained by Horus when her life is flowing away. The Christ principle fecundates
Nature and closes her unfruitful womb to make her give birth to the glory
of an intellectual delivery.
As Joseph takes charge
of the virgin mother and the infant fleeing to Egypt for safety, so in the Egyptian
mythos the earth-god Seb becomes the protector of Isis and the foster-father
of the child Horus when they are forced to hide in the marshes till the threat
of Herut is passed. And as "the earth helped the Woman" in the Revelation version,
so Seb, the earth deity, helped the woman and child in Egypt. The dragons issue
from a cave on the roadside, but Jesus appears, according to the Gnostic story,
and they adore him. So the demons cringe before him in the New Testament. In
the Ritual Horus saves his father from the four crocodiles. "I am the Son,"
he says, "who saves the great one from the four crocodiles." He orders them
to go back one by one and they obey him. For Ra has given him sovereignty over
Lower Egypt, with power to tread down serpents, scorpions and dragons. But there
is much hidden value in the legend that the serpent stings the child on its
way into "Egypt," and that the earth-god heals the wound. It is a mighty item
of philosophy, this assurance that mundane experience for the god-soul is the
only antidote for certain imperfections (Page 374) inhering
even in celestial beings. It is evolution’s cure for lack of development, the
prime cause of all that is named evil. The god needed further tempering and
purification in "the crucible of the great house of flame" of flesh and sense.
He was carried far down toward dissolution in the fiery test, but was re-welded
into finer temper by the ordeals of earth, water, air and fire, and rebuilt
to more perfect wholeness. The goose portrayed on the head of Seb in an Egyptian
planisphere (according to Kircher) types the earth as "the goose that laid the
golden egg daily." If this be but a poetograph for the newborn daily sun of
golden light, that sun in turn is the everlasting symbol of the rise of a golden
egg of new divinity from out the confines of earth or the "sea." The god is
the divine egg laid in humanity, for he is the heavenly foetus in the womb of
the body. As he is destined to burgeon out, like the flower, into a burst of
golden glory, it is by no means mere poetic fiction to call him the golden egg.
And earth lays this golden nugget. The earth being our common mother, we have
before us the Egyptian source of "Mother Goose," and the mysterious sagacity
concealed in her catchy jingles.
The Goliath story
is but an embellishing of the original glyph of a dragon in its conflict with
the young deity in man. A dragon is always exchangeable with a giant. The fabled
giants and those mentioned in the sixth chapter of Genesis, the Nephilim (the
"fallen ones," by etymology) were early beings produced by the intermixture
of the Titans with the largest animals in the miscegenation, and are therefore
the most literal or historical embodiments of the dragon-monster idea, and they
were the prototypes of the ogres of children’s books. Egypt shows us fables,
more than one, in which the giant-ogre was killed by the blow of a small egg
(of the pigeon, dove or other bird) in the middle of the forehead. The significance
of slaying the beast or dragon of mental darkness by sinking the symbol of incipient
mind and light into its forehead should need little elaboration. The elemental
giant or ogre in us is killed when the egg or pebble of intellect (the white
stone of Revelation) is implanted in the citadel of reason. The egg or pebble
can undoubtedly be taken to stand for the pineal gland in the middle of the
skull, the opening of which to function brings the full light of deific consciousness
into manifestation, and slays the giant or ogre. The germ of mind, reason, intellect
will charm and "kill" the Goliath in us. David is proven to be another figure
of the solar god. (Page 375)
Horus
too, pierces the Apap-dragon in the eye with his lance and pins him to earth.
The lance was a figure for the sun-ray tipped with red flame for effective piercing
power. The tree we have seen used as the paramount symbol of living force, and
the Christmas tree tipped with the blazing star, or the main stem of the pine
made red hot at the top, was an instrument in the hands of the sun-heroes. There
is outside of Egyptian sources a most famous instance of the occurrence of this
emblem. Ulysses bores out the single eye of the massive Cyclopean giant Polyphemus
with a great pine stake fired at the tip. And this operation takes place in
a cave, which had become the prison of death for the hero and his men - the
underworld. The solar hero wounds the giant of darkness by the injection of
fire into his head! And fire signifies intellect. Horus at one time fights Sut
with the branch of a palm. This weapon matches the golden bough and is a particularly
pertinent solar symbol, being a product of torrid lands, and also, according
to Massey, putting forth a new branch on its trunk every thirty days, thirty
being the number of days in a solar, twenty-eight in a lunar, month.
These seven mighty
engines of creative force, presumably the seven great spirits before the throne
of God, were indeed the seven creative Logoi, Elohim, Kabiri, Ali, Baalim, Rishis,
Cosmocratores, Sephiroth, Aeons. Enoch gives their names: Azazzel, Amazarak,
Armers, Barkayel, Akabeel, Tamiel and Asaradel. In the ancient Hebrew version
they are: Ildabaoth, Jehovah, Sabaoth, Adonai, Eloeus, Oreus and Astanphaios.
Again in Chaldean they are: Bel, Ea, Rimmon, Nebo, Marduk, Nerra and Ninib.
They were typified by the seven stars of the Great Bear. By some they are taken
to be the powers that ruled the seven successive pole stars, which fixed the
earth’s axial position from age to age. For in one rendering of the mythos the
seven giants bore the world of the heptanomis, or cosmos of seven divisions,
upon their backs, each standing at his station as one of the seven great guardians
of stability. It is said that when the Demiurgus asked their help in the work
of creation, they meditated and forgot. They slumbered and fell from their posts
one by one. The seven sleepers of the myth, and those specifically in the cave
at Ephesus, with their dog, answer to the seven sleepers with Anup and his jackal
at the pole in the Egyptian portrayal. (Page 376)
In its
human application the myth is reflected in the seven elementaries, which, being
the original founders of man’s constitution, fell from their status as rulers
of his life when the crowning principle of conscious intelligence placed mind
on the throne and superseded the reign of the seven. The seven giants that have
been "slain" by the young solar power, Jack the Giant Killer, were subdued,
like wild horses, until they bore the spiritual ruler on their backs. All domestication
of wild animals to serve man is a type of the conversion of natural energies
in man’s constitution to the service of his thought. They are the "seven devils"
that had to be cast out of Mary Magdalene (type of the mother or nature again),
the seven plagues of Egypt, the seven lean kine that ate the fat kine, the seven
lean years, the seven ages of servitude. They were previously our pole stars,
but are to be displaced now and cast down by intellect, which should be our
pole star or rod of stability henceforth. In their human phase they are the
earth elementals under whose dominion Paul asserts that we fall when we woo
the carnal mind. They govern the life of every child until the age of seven,
when mind begins to dispossess them and move toward the throne. And again they
are the seven diabolical propensities, the seven deadly sins, which, only too
thinly covered over by a veneer of social restraint, gush up now and again in
the individual, in the nation, in the world, when vital forces sweep upon them
and fan them into expression. Apap is being bound, but he is yet far from being
securely tied by the thongs of reason and disciplined mind.
In the Kabalah the
seven, or first hebdomad, headed by Ildabaoth, say: "Come, let us make man after
our image"; and the mother having furnished them with the idea of a man, they
formed a giant of immense size. But he could only crawl along the ground until
the Father had breathed into him the breath of life, emblem of mentality. From
Ildabaoth’s sentence in the Kabalah it can be seen who it is in the Genesis
story that propose to make man after their image - not at all Supreme Deity,
but the seven lower archangels, one of whom was Jehovah. But Jehovah is used
in the Bible myth to represent the entire seven, as are also Sabaoth and Adonai
at times.
And in the Divine
Pymander of Hermes one reads: "This is the mystery that to this day is hidden
and kept secret; for nature being mingled with man brought forth a wonder most
wonderful." There are accounts of previous creations of worlds or systems that
fell because (Page 377) they
were imperfect. Perfection awaited the generation of man, the advent of the
Christos. The septenary creation was the formation, principle by principle,
of the natural man in the image of the seven Kabiri, Elohim, who could endow
their creature with the six (often called seven) elementary constituents, culminating
in sensation and emotion, but could not give him the baptism of air and fire,
or mind and soul. The twelve-part division came when the pole star passed from
Lyra into Hercules, the sign of the Man, whose twelve labors are the achievement
of twelve distinct stages of evolutionary development. The music of the spheres
ceased - for the time - with the conquest of the seven; and the introduction
of free will, coupled at first with primal ignorance, brought the beginning
of the world’s woe, man’s slow attainment of mastery by the sweat of his brow,
in a milieu of disorder, misery and struggle, typed by the twelve labors of
the solar figure. The struggle of man, the thinker, with the seven maternal
forces which he has to surmount is the great Battle of Armageddon, which Paul
and Plato make the supreme moral issue of mundane life.
The Druid and other
ancient temples were formed of twelve stones set in a circle or oval. A most
striking repetition of this duodecal symbol is found when Joshua (Jesus) in
crossing the Jordan into the kingdom of peace and plenty is commanded to set
up twelve stones in the bed of the river, the waters being dried up. Also it
is seen in the Gilgal circle which became the lodging place of the Israelites.
The "chosen people" were to be given a Promised Land abounding in milk and honey;
but it was already occupied by the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites,
Hivites, Jebusites and Girgashites, the primal seven powers! The Lord kept promising
Israel that he would dispossess these seven tribes of the land on behalf of
his nation of twelve tribes. Old Testament narrative leaves little question
as to the mythical nature of this whole story. For it is told later on with
what inhuman ruthlessness the Eternal, in campaign after campaign under Joshua,
Gideon, Jephthah and other leaders, slew "multitudes in number as the sands
of the seashore" on single days. The only salvation of sense and sanity for
the narrative is to transfer its meaning from outer history to inner relevance,
where it properly belongs. Then one can absolve the Eternal from unthinkable
cruelty, in understanding that the solar ray within us, after crossing the boundary
between the two kingdoms of our nature, before it can institute its twelve-act
regime, (Page 378) must dispossess (by conversion of nature) the countless myriads
of natural instincts, animal impulses, carnal desires that previously operated
there - the progeny of the seven mother powers.
Seven blasts upon
the ram’s horn on the seventh day brought the fall of Jericho (seven letters
in the name); and seven blasts upon the seven angel’s trumpets in Revelation
announced the new heaven and new earth, founded upon the twelve bases in man’s
constitution.
Sut, the head of
the seven first powers, is said to be bound in chains each morning. "Chains
are flung upon thee by the scorpion-goddess and slaughter is dealt out to
thee by Maati [Judgment]. Apap is fallen and is in bonds" (Ch. 39). This daily
drama was enacted yearly as well. Sut is put in chains, cast into prison,
or made to flee with a chain of steel upon him (Ch. 20). Or he is pierced
with hooks. Horus is described as "putting an end to the opposition of Sut,
the power of darkness" (Ch. 137B). Sut and his minions, the Sebau, are declared
to have thrown down the pillars of Osiris on the ground. Horus, the young
solar god, came to set them upright. Sut was the master of the legions of
devils that Jesus (Horus) had to cast out of the man whom they had obsessed
on the Gadarene lake shore in the Gospels. Could anything be more significant
than that the dispossessed demons should be made to come out of the man beside
a body of water and enter animals? And there is the further detail that the
herd ran down the "steep into the lake and were choked" (Luke 8:33). The demoniacal
powers could not be permitted to rule man; their activity appertained only
to the animal kingdom, to which the Christ relegates them in the watery milieu
of the body. Was this incident original in Gospel literature? In the Egyptian
judgment scene, when the person whose life record marked him as evil was condemned
and rejected, he was delivered over immediately to the Typhonian beast, crocodile-hippopotamus-pig
all in one. And he was, as thus indicated, sent down again into incarnation
in the body of the beast! In short, he was not released, but thrust back into
animal body for more experience.
Matching the temptation
scene in the Gospels, Sut is said to have seized Horus in the desert of Amenta
and carried him to the top of the Mount called Hetep, the place of peace,
where the two contending powers were reconciled by Shu or Taht, according
to the treaty made by Seb.
In the Gospel of
the Infancy there are two boys, the bad one and the (Page 379) good
one. In some of the Apocryphal Gospels the bad boy, who in Pseudo-Matthew (29)
is called the Son of Satan, runs at Jesus and thrusts him in a way to injure
his shoulder and paralyze his arm. The Gospel of Thomas recites the incident.
In the Egyptian material Sut has weakened Horus by pinning down his arm, and
in this condition Horus is subject to his assailant’s might. But at the resurrection
Horus frees his arm and strikes down Sut or stabs him to the heart. Sut was
designated "the eater of the arm."
Sut thus has a
manifold function to fulfill in the typology. He is a versatile adversary.
He puts out Horus’ eye; he seizes and imprisons him; he ties his arm; he sows
the tares amid the grain; he lets loose the locusts and other plagues; he
entraps Horus and his company in the ark; he swallows the falling stars and
devours the damned (those condemned to earth life). He represents opposition
to Horus, the good light, at every point and in every form. So Horus comes
to put an end to this opposition. In victory he says to his father Osiris:
"I have brought thee the associates of Sut in chains."
When Jesus was
seized in the Garden of Gethsemane he acknowledges the (temporary) triumph
of the enemy: "This is your hour," he says to his captors, "and the power
of darkness" (Luke 22:53). In the seizure of Horus by the associates of Sut,
they see the double crown on the forehead of Horus and fall to the ground
upon their faces (Rit., Ch. 134). The magical efficacy of the double crown
of Horus lay in the fact that it signified the god’s control over both Lower
and Upper "Egypt." When Judas and his associates came to take Jesus he said:
"I am" (not "I am he"--Massey). Then "they went backward and fell to the ground."
Scene for scene the two are the same.
The seven stars of
the Lesser Bear were figured as the followers or reflections of the greater
creation, the second creation in the likeness of the first, or the small creation
in the image of the cosmic one. The microcosm was formed over the grand lines
of the macrocosm. In the center of the great Denderah zodiac there is the hippopotamus
(identical with the Bear) and her dog, fox or jackal. The two are Typhon-Sut,
or the mother and her child at the center of all. This is nature’s ancient stellar
picture of the Madonna and her child before it was reduced to the human phase.
The dog, fox and jackal, with their instinctive faculty of following a trail
in the dark, were limned as the guide of souls in the darkness of incarnation;
and the little bear, dog or fox, (Page 380) whose
pivotal star was the pole itself, thus became the "cynosure" ("dog’s tail")
for night-bound mariners in a literal sense, the spiritual meaning being evident
to all who are not obtuse. The guide or watchdog was double-headed, a watcher
by day and by night, or guardian of the two segments of our life, the heavenly
and the earthly. The great stellar universe served as the model for the formation
of the smaller, though higher, universe in man’s life, for the great first gods
of nature said they would create man "in their own image." The Great and Little
Bears type these two creations. And the Little Bear, symbolizing man’s divine
part, is the only one anchored fast to the very pole of heaven, the pledge of
eternal stability. Truly "the heavens are telling."
Strangely and with
amazing fidelity, in spite of intervening centuries of ignorance, social custom
preserves the original form, if not the meaning, of symbolic festivals. Horus
or Iusa (Jesus) in the "house of a thousand years" was the bringer of the millennium.
Sut or Satan was released for a little period, seven days at most ("days" meaning
cycles), and the commemoration of this cyclic event was fixed in the worldwide
carnival which indicates by its name its derivation from Satan - the Saturnalia.
Saturn, the chief of the primary seven powers, was identical with Sevekh, Seb,
Set, Sut or Satan. He was, as in Job, Genesis and elsewhere, released for the
seven periods of a cycle, during which Horus had to do combat with him. Then
he was bound for a thousand years, the millennium of peace. It is instructive
to see in the Saturnalia, with its license, the far-flung prolongation of the
ancient idea of the release from bondage of the elementary powers, both in and
out of human nature. The elemental forces, or Saturn or Satan, are unbound when
the god comes into incarnation, and, as Paul shows, they bring sin to birth.
In astrology Saturn is the power that limits or constricts the native. Horus
and Sut alternately bind each other and as often escape the bondage. The lower
instincts are given rein to test the god and develop his fiber when he comes
to fight them. They do not succumb without a battle. And here at last is the
end of the mystification for orthodox Bible students of the disconcerting riddle,
as to why God gave Satan free hand to tease and harry a godly man like (Page
381) Job. Thousands
in ancient Roman streets, gay throngs in Paris, Naples and New Orleans once
a year commemorate the freedom of the elemental nature to play upon the spiritual,
by the temporary relaxation of conventional bonds and the venting of sexual
suggestiveness.
Horus wounded Apap
so severely that he sank in the depths of the sea, and his defeat took place,
according to Maspero, Birch and Chabas, at the very moment of the beginning
of the new year. In the solar mythos this point of time betokened the end
of the dark powers’ reign and the beginning of the new dispensation. The constellation
Corvus, the Crow, reveals the bird (the soul), perched on the body of the
dead monster, pecking at its folds, sign of victory.
But while Apap
lives, he subsists on "the slaughter of the glorious ones, the gods and the
damned in the nether world." He feeds upon those gods who became enamored
and infatuated with his clammy seductions, and thus supply him with food and
fuel to keep alive his natural hunger. He feeds upon the livers of the princes.
The degenerate gods become the damned, on whom the monster lives. The Manes,
personating Horus, addresses Apap:
"I see the way
toward thee. I gather myself together. I am the man who put a veil upon thy
head without being injured. I am the great magician. Thine eyes have been
given me and through them I am glorified . . . I am he who takes possession
of thy strength. I go round the sky; thou are in the valley, as was ordered
to thee before."
Here speaks the
conqueror, the solar fire, reciting that he has grappled with the elementary
serpent, subdued him without being injured in turn, and yet, be it noted,
converted his opponent’s elemental strength to his own high purposes. "I have
repulsed Apap and healed the wounds he made."
As hinted, the far-famed
but generally misconceived Battle of Armageddon, supposed ignorantly to refer
to some catastrophic world conflict, is this spiritual warfare between the two
opposing parties in the great drama of life. With reference to man’s life, it
is the warfare waged between the spiritual and the material energies on the
stage of human consciousness. We are fighting the Battle of Armageddon now.
The conscious life of every soul is the battle ground, and individual moral
character is the issue. The terrain of this conflict is man’s own psycho-physical
organism. Misguided Christian interpretation (Page 382) has removed
the meaning of every representation as far from the life of the individual as
it was possible to take it. The Battle of Armageddon is the Battle of Incarnation.
We are deciding its issue by every act of present living. A likely derivation
of the world traces it from the Egyptian title of Horus as Lord of the Two Horizons,
Har-Makhu; to which the Hebrews or Greeks added the Hebrew word for "Lord,"
Adon; making it Har-Makhu-Adon, or "Lord God of the Two Horizons." And the Ritual
gives a significant detail in connection with the battle between Horus (Har-Makhu)
and the hosts of Sut. It is fought at midnight (incarnation) and on the horizon!
This assuredly clinches its purely symbolical character.
The Sebau or Sami
were just "the imps of Satan"--really the word Seb pluralized. They are Paul’s
"elementals of the earth" and those "that by nature are no gods" (Galatians:
4). In the legend they were finally defeated on the night of the judgment,
when the last adversaries were overthrown. Horus, Un-Nefer, is to triumph
over Apap in the presence of Osiris, Lord of Amenta, and of the great sovereign
chiefs who are in Annu, on the night of the battle with and overthrow of the
Seba-fiend (Seba equals seven).
Horus, the newborn
divine child, is immune to serious injury from the evil Apap. "Not men or gods,
the glorious ones or the damned, not generations past, present or to come, can
inflict an injury on him who cometh forth and proceedeth as the eternal child,
the everlasting one" (Rit., Ch. 42). He tells the serpent, here called Abur,
that he is the divine babe, the mighty one. One of the representations shows
Horus as a cat, cutting off the serpent’s head with a knife. The god is a cat
because he can see in the dark and his eyes shine in the dark - of incarnation.
Apophis, like Sut,
was not originally evil. He was formerly the divine messenger, the earliest
Mercury, the character afterwards assigned to the moon-god Taht. He was termed
"The Good One, the Star of the Two Worlds."
One of the water
forms of the Dragon was Leviathan. In the Psalms (74) the soul is addressed:
"Thou breakest the heads of Leviathan in pieces; thou gavest him to be meat
to the people inhabiting the wilderness." This appears to be a reference to
the Good Dragon, the gods descending to be food for "the people" in this "wilderness."
The breaking in pieces seems a clear allusion to the dismemberment. (Page 383)
This treatment
of the entire theme of the Titans, Prometheus, Lucifer, Satan, Sut, Apap, Seb,
the Sebau, the two serpents, fiery and watery, the dragon and the crocodile,
under all their mythical representations, has made along and perhaps prolix
recital. But it is justified if it will demonstrate the original good character
of the Saturnian personage, clarify the reasons that led to his transmogrification
into a "personal devil" to frighten humanity, and replace harrowing misconception
in the Western mind with sane comprehension, with reference to this lamentable
miscarriage of wisdom. The discussion has opened up the cryptic meaning of a
score or more of pivotal constructions in the Bible. With keys derived from
the mythoi we can once more read intelligible meaning into material that by
perversion has thrown the human spirit under subjection to motivations the most
fiendish and diabolical. Surely the world desperately needs the scholarly perspicacity
that will cast this "devil" out of human thought. (Page 384)
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