Theosophy - The Lost Light -Part -5- of -5- by Alvin Boyd Kuhn
THE LOST LIGHT by Alvin Boyd Kuhn - Part 5 of 5
Chapter
XX
SUNS
OF INTELLECT
As the human eye
recoils before the overpowering splendor of the solar disk in the sky, so the
human mind strives in vain to realize the marvel of sublime grandeur in the
ancient religious myth of the sun-gods. This was no curious faith of a diminutive
Parsee sect; it was the universal form and dress of religion. The sun-myth was
the heart’s core of all religion and philosophy everywhere before the Dark Ages
obscured the vision of truth. And world religion will not fulfill its original
function of dispelling from the soul of mankind the dark earth-born vapors that
envelop it until the mind once again is irradiated with the light of that transcendent
knowledge. Christianity forsook its high station on the mount illuminated by
solar radiance when it submerged the Christly sun-glory under the limitations
of a fleshly personage and dismissed solar religion as "pagan." In converting
the typical man into a man of history, it forswore its early privilege of basking
in the rays of the great solar doctrine. Light, fire, the sun, spiritual glory
- all went out in eclipse under the clouds of mental fog that arose when the
direct radiance of the solar myth had been blanketed. Christianity passed forthwith
out of the light into the dreadful shadows of the Dark Ages. And that dismal
period will not end until the bright glow of the solar wisdom is released once
more to enlighten benighted modernity. Ajax crying for the light is still the
appropriate heraldic figure on the modern shield, and until the myth of the
sun-gods is restored to its place in knowledge, there will be no response to
the cry but the echo.
Near the end of
November, 1932, the public press reported the announcement of Dr. George W.
Crile, noted scientist of the Cleveland laboratories, that he had discovered
in the heart of every cell of protoplasm tiny centers or foci of energy which
he called "hot points" or "radiogens," with estimated temperatures of from
3,000 to 6,000 degrees (Page 497) of
heat. Protoplasm emitted radiations of various wave lengths, "some as powerful
as those emitted by the sun." "The sun ‘shines’ in the protoplasm of animals
and plants, and therefore animals and plants can confer on atoms chemical
affinities such as are conferred by the sun."
"Who would think
that there are ‘hot points’ in man and animals on the order of the temperature
of the surface of the sun? . . . If one could look into protoplasm with an
eye capable of infinite magnification, one might expect to see the radiogens
spaced like stars as suns in infinite miniature . . . Without exaggeration
the concept may be taken to mean . . . that within the very flesh of man burns
the fierce fire of the sun, and that within man’s body glow infinitely small
counterparts of the stars." [ From an article in the New York Times
of Nov. 25, 1932.]
This report, which
fell more or less unheeded upon millions of minds racked with economic fear,
at last marks the discovery of the direct point of contact between "science
and religion," of which the world has so long stood in such desperate need.
It provides that common ground of a mutual datum on which both can meet with
perfect accord at last. For this discovery of modern science posits, after
sixteen or more centuries of obscuration, the fundamental authenticity of
the solar myth, out of which all religions took their rise. Science has now
restored to religion its basic principle, of which it had been bereft by nearly
two millennia of ignorance. Religion now returns to its place in the sun,
because the sun returns to its place in religion. Sunlight builds all things
that are the subjects of scientific scrutiny; sunlight is also the Christly
excellence in man’s life and body. Science and religion meet at last in the
happy glow of sunlight. The Christ in man is a god of solar energy.
One is permitted
to wonder what would be the amazement of Dr. Crile and his fellow-moderns
if it was shown to them that in an old book on the Rosicrucians published
about 1872 the following brief sentence has stood in the silence of scientific
scorn for nearly seventy years:
"Every man has
a little spark of the sun in his own bosom . . . A spark of the original light
is supposed to remain deep down in the interior of every atom." [ The
Rosicrucians: Their Rites and Mysteries; Hargrave Jennings, p. 211.]
The secret purpose
of the "Fire Philosophers," whom modern savants still like to class with imbeciles
and children, was to release that (Page 498) spark
of solar flame from its trammels of the flesh and unite it once again with
the radix or point of emanation in "heaven." This was the mysterious aim of
the alchemical science, whose "gold" was that Lux or Light of the Ineffable
Source, into which all baser forms of conscious manifestation had to be transmuted.
The sun was typed as gold and the moon as silver, a poetization to which nature
has been a party in the coloring of the two orbs. For the gold was the radiant
energy of the sun embosomed in man’s interior being. It was his spiritual
fire, that true light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world;
while the silvery moon typed the feminine or bodily nature which was to be
raised by the alchemy of spiritual vibration into the golden glow.
A spark of the
sun in the inner heart of every human! That is the center of light about which
all religion and philosophy can again rally their disconcerted forces of interpretation.
That is the point of gravity toward which all meanings can be seen to tend
with perfect constancy. This is the radiant gleam of mental light, by which
mankind may again see to read aright the ancient books of wisdom. And this
is the torch that will in our day illumine the darkened portals of the temple
of religion, so that the menacing hordes of materialistic devastators will
see its beauty in time to stay their impious hands. It is only because a benighted
ecclesiasticism permitted religion to be divorced from its basic principle
which roots it in science, that the partisans of a modern "scientific" interpretation
of life have been able to see no beauty or utility to it. To them religion
has seemed a delusion of fancy, a hallucination thrown over feebler minds.
To them it is not basically or structurally related to nature. On the whole
their repugnance to the system was legitimate, for religion had been distorted
into the unnatural thing it has come to be. But with the restoration of religion
and philosophy to their ancient bases in true science, and the god seen as
the solar fire within man’s bosom, resentment against it can no longer find
apology. For science now finds itself on bended knee before this tiny glint
of solar light at the heart of every atom; and when religion finds that it,
too, worships the counterpart of the same fire in man’s heart, the two estranged
brothers, science and religion, will find themselves kneeling side by side
at the same altar at last.
Not only is there
a spark of solar fire in every particle of matter, but every higher organism
partakes of the empyreal largesse in proportion (Page 499) to
its grade of being. Thus every man harbors a solar god or fiery spirit within
him! Above man, the planets are cosmic beings with resplendent souls of unimaginable
glory. The suns are the glowing hearts of the bodies of gods!
The sun was the
center of religious ideology because it was the center of all life. Religion
was once organically constructed about a nucleus of profound teaching directly
related to the phenomena of life. It was no detached scheme of emotionalism.
It was an alignment of devotion and conduct in relation to knowledge of the
elements and facts of life itself. The central fact was the presence of a
solar fragment, a spark of deity, in the inner soul of every being, unintelligent
below man, intelligent for the first time in Atum, the Man. The immortal soul
was a beam from the eternal Sun, a spark of divine fire, an irradiation of
the essence of God’s own being. This spark of cosmic intelligence was, as
shown, the seventh emanation crowning the elementary six, and summing their
powers all in itself. Man, in whom this spark was for the first time made
local in nature, was the crown and summation of all precedent expression.
All lower kingdoms are in him, the three sub-mineral, the mineral, vegetable,
animal and human thus far evolved. They are comprehended in him in the constituency
of his four lower vehicles, which make him the composite being he is. His
physical form is from the earth, his emotion body from the moon, his mind
from the race evolved on Venus, and his spiritual soul from the sun. The sun-spark
was then the guiding intelligence, the king, within him. By his body and his
senses he was linked with the earth, with nature; by his mind and soul he
was tied to the stars of heaven. Head in heaven, body on the earth, said Egypt.
"I am a child of earth and the starry skies, but my race is of heaven alone,"
seconded the Orphic philosophy. By virtue of the two lower creatures within
him he is a mortal being, doomed to temporal extinction; by the higher two
he is constituted an immortal entity, facing a future of endless glorification.
The lower rose from the earth by the force of the expansion of powers elemental
in the atom of matter, and was a product of "natural" evolution. The higher
was "the Lord from heaven," as Paul names it. And the union of the two in
one organism gave to humanity a local habitation and a name, a form, a character
and a cosmic stage for its activities.
But the ancients
knew that the history of each fragment of solar (Page 500 ) light
impounded in a corral of flesh on earth was a reflected miniature of that
of the great solar orb itself. And the growth and progress of the tiny spark
that had got individualized in each man was studied in the light of its parental
analogue in the heavens. Hence the basis of religion was the course of the
sun through the solar year, which course again reflected the round of the
sun through the 25,868 years of the Great Year of precession, and both were
marked by the orb’s passage through the twelve stages of zodiacal meaning.
He who will interpret the zodiac with full intelligibility will depict the
life of man in all its reaches. The knowledge of this stellar script, this
book with seven, then twelve great seals, was imparted in full or in part
in the sacred Mysteries of old. It is gravely doubtful if anyone now living
knows the import of the entire wheel. We catch fragmentary glimpses of its
meaning, but the deeper connotation of the structure eludes the mind. Its
profundity is next to fathomless. We can but follow the hints given us by
the archaic sages in their writings.
It is clear, in
outline, that the solar year is a marvelously precise reflection in outer
nature of the spiritual life of man the individual and man the race. It is
particularly a vivid typograph of the history of the soul in and out of incarnation.
The two groups of upper signs, three air and three fire (symbolically), represent
the life of the soul when out of body in the empyrean. The six lower signs,
dubbed the six "water"signs, cover the life of the soul in the watery physical
body. The lower six are a reflection or image of the upper six, as water reflects
what is above it in the air and the light! That is to say that the life of
man below is a reflected counterpart of his life in spirit above. And the
soul’s journey round the wheel through the alternate realms of incarnate and
discarnate life comprises its cyclical history in this aeon. As nature sets
the norm in her life-method by her alternations of day and night in the physical
and astronomical domains, these are seen to be typical of the experience undergone
by the soul in its successive sojourns in the realms of spiritual "day" and
material "night." The systole and diastole of the heart’s action, the inhalation
and exhalation of breath, are but the common evidence and confirmation of
the universal modus of living procedure. The conscious immortal spirit in
man swings endlessly through the two phases of the zodiac, upper and lower,
of which circulation the daily and annual phenomenon of the sun’s movements
is an exact miniature copy. (Page 501) Solar religion
was based solidly on the ground fact that the sun was not only the type, but
the essential essence of the divine soul of man, and that its annual course
was graphically pictorial of the soul’s cyclical history. The sun’s annual
round is typical, first, of a single life history; secondly, of the entire
series of single lives making up the complete experience of the human cycle.
Like the stars, the galaxies and the super-galaxies now seen by astronomy,
many individual life cycles constitute a larger cycle, and many of those a
still larger one. It is futile for the little mind of man to quarrel with
the limitless expansiveness of the Universe of Life. Such quarrel has already
cost us the loss of our clearest understanding of cosmic processes, which
by reflection open our minds to the meaning of the lesser processes of our
life here. Life is vast, and its vastness would crush our thinking if philosophy
did not fortify us with the consideration that the little repeats the immense
and is identical with it. Each man is a solar universe, a planetary system,
comprised of infinite cells or minor systems, and the spiritual light glowing
at the center of his being is the central sun of his system. And if he learns
to control this universe, he will be put in charge of larger spheres. "My
mind to me a kingdom is," and if one be found faithful in the governance of
that world of self, one will be made ruler over many things. "The Framer made
the creations six in number and for the seventh he threw into the midst the
fire of the sun," is ancient truth. Likewise the seventh outgush of creative
force threw the sun of intellect into the midst of the six lower natural energies,
to become their head and ruler. This was the work of the divine Father implanting
the seminal seed of his fiery spiritual consciousness into the body of Mother
Nature, and so closing her unfrutiful womb and stopping her wastage to make
her pregnant with Christ child. Hence the antipathy, detected in ancient texts,
between the menstruating woman and the sun or fire. A verse in the Shayast
La-Shayast (Ch. 2:29) runs:
"A fiend so violent
is that fiend of menstruation" that "where another fiend does not smite anything
with a look (akhsh) it smites with a look," so that "the sun and other luminaries
are not to be looked at by her, and conversation with a righteous man is not
to be held by her. She must not look on fire, and a fire must not be kindled
in the same house that she is in." (Page 502)
Wilson
in his Parsee Religion (p. 224) writes:
"The flow was looked
upon as the Azi-damp by which the devil desired to extinguish the fire that
Zarathustra brought from heaven."
This is in the
realm of symbolism, of course, intimating the general significance of the
divine soul, as fire, being extinguished by the water of the body. It may
not be utterly fantastic to suggest that the fire of spirit that dires up
the "red sea" of the menstrual flow in the allegory may be the subtle meaning
behind the Exodus story of the drying up of the Red Sea, alleged to be on
the map. As we have seen, however, modern translation has made it the "Reed
Sea."
Leprosy was spoken
of as the result of an offense against the sun. Amenta, the realm of the six
elementary powers, both in nature and in the human body, was a land of chaos
and darkness until lighted up by the nocturnal sun, or the spirit buried in
the flesh. Hor-Apollo observes that the star which bears the name of Seb signifies,
amongst other things, the soul of the male or virile adult. "This is the star
of soul," they said; "let us keep it pure and bright and shining star-like."
"This is the sun
within us, the seminal source of life; do not dim its lustre or cause it to
suffer eclipse. Save your soul (seminal) and do not sin against the sun of
light."
And it is said
of Osiris in the Ritual:
"Give ye glory
as to the Sun; he is the chief, the only one ever coming from the body, the
head of those who belong to the race of the Sun."
In the Clementine
Gospel the Christ is portrayed in the character of the sun-god. This eastern
Christ says:
"I must work the
works of him that sent me while it is day; the night cometh when no man can
work. When I am in the world I am the light of the world."
The world was represented
as being created from the drops of bloody Gethsemanic sweat, or male seminal
essence which fell from the phallus of Ra, Tem, Atum or Khepera onto the earth.
The male creative fluid became the type of spiritual creative power. It is
the concentrated essence of the blood, which in turn is highly charged with
the electric soul of spiritual energy. It was the seed of the gods’ (Page
503) creative
essence. It was therefore held to be a condensation of solar energy. It is
said that the holy emanation which proceeds from Osiris vivifies gods, men,
cattle and creeping things, and that in his season he flows forth from his
cavern in order to "pour out the seed of his soul which produces offerings
in abundance for his Ka, and vivifies both gods and men." The expulsion of
the seeds of deity into lower realms of matter was a part of the dismemberment
or mutilation. In the case of Bata, the younger brother of Anup, in the tale
of the Two Brothers, the phallus is torn away and thrown into the water and
devoured by a fish. The "masturbating deity" matched on the male side the
virgin mother and the immaculate conception on the female side. He was Khepera,
and his symbol was the male beetle, which produced new life from his own body
without conjunction with the female.
"To denote an Only
Begotten," says Hor-Apollo, "the Egyptians delineate a Scarabaeus, because
the Scarabaeus is a creature self-produced, being unconceived by a female.
The Scarabaeus also symbolizes generation and a father, because it is engendered
by the father solely." Massey adds: "Khepr, the beetle, buried himself, with
his seed, in the earth; there he transformed, and the father issued forth
as the son."
The sun was the
type of the male creative power in the universe, but he was portrayed with
feminine attributes to indicate his subjection under matter when involving
his energies in creation. He was a kind of male-mother. His growing weak in
the autumn was likened to the feminine weakness in menstruation. "When the
sun becomes weak, he lets fall the sweat of his members and this changes to
a liquid; he bleeds much." Then he was called the sun bound in linen, and
wrapped as a woman. He was known as Osiris Tesh-Tesh, in his bloody sweat
in Smen. The male as sole reproducer was spoken of in female terms. He is
god the mother. Num, Egyptian deity, was the Mother of Mothers as well as
the Father of Fathers. "In like manner Jove is designated by Orpheus ‘the
mother of the gods.’ He was Ju-matter, or Jupiter creatress." Proclus in Timaeus
says: "All things are contained in the womb of Jupiter." Brahm is likewise
feminized. "The great Brahm is the womb of all those forms which are conceived
in every natural womb." "The great Brahm," says Krishna, "is my womb and in
it I place my foetus and from it is the procreation of all nature" (Page 504)
(Moor’s
Pantheon: Krishna, p. 211). Baal and Astarte exchange genders in the Assyrian
books. Nu was the original mother-heaven, the feminine celestial firmament.
Yet she is masculinized: "It is the water or Nu who is the father of the gods.
I am the great God creating himself." Creative power was conceived as feminine
during the first creations. But when the sun, Helios, came to govern planetary
revolutions, the gender was conceived as male. Life was androgyne before the
bifurcation. The only quarrel in ancient religions was over the question whether
deity was male or female in its first manifestations. Deity frequently had
to carry the functions of both sexes.
The hidden purport
back of the Egyptian symbolism of the beetle and the self-begetting god was
that which was really the nub of the dispute in the early Christian Church
over the creedal rendering of the Greek term monogenes (Latin: unigenitus),
translated "only-begotten" in the Bible. It led to the great Arius-Athanasius
controversy which rent the early Church into factions, which have not yet
united. Had Egyptian symbolism been envisaged understandingly, that grievous
dispute could have been avoided. The god who poured out and mixed his life
blood with earth, and the beetle that goes underground to come forth renewed,
are two vivid symbols of bright angelic spirit incarnating in human life.
Life buried itself to be born anew. It is quite possible that Onan’s sin was
a reference to the first group of five legions of angels who, as it were,
poured out their spiritual substance in the direction of incarnation, but
who nevertheless failed to plant their seed fully in the soil of mortal flesh.
Their effort proved abortive. The old books recite the story.
It is possible
to see that the monogenetic theory was current in early Christian times and
could have been comprehended by Christian exegetists if they had not already
begun to look with scorn upon all things pagan. Irenaeus alludes to the belief
in an excerpt from his book Against Heresies (I, Ch. 2:1, 4, Ante-Nicene Library):
"It was also taught by the Egyptian Valentinus that the father produced in
his own image without conjunction with the female." Had a little analogical
penetration been displayed by the somber Fathers of the Church, there might
have been intelligence enough extant to save the translators from perpetrating
the damaging rendering of monogenes as "only-begotten." The term meant, of
course, simply born of the father or male principle alone, without birthing
in the womb of matter. Yet it (Page 505) was
at the same time the story of the father or spirit incarnating in matter and
reissuing on the opposite horizon as his transformed son. The fatality of
the incorrect translation can not be seen until it is realized that the term
"only-begotten," misapplied to a single man in history, has operated to dispossess
every mortal in Christendom of the consciousness of his own inborn divinity,
the one inestimable boon that religion was designed to extend to all the race.
The famous Litany
of Ra describes Atum as the supreme sun-god in man. In his descent into Amenta,
which is at sunset, "his form is that of an old man," while later in his resurrection
it is that of a lion. He sets as Ra; he rises again as Horus. Atum in Amenta
is the hidden soul of spiritual life, imaged by the nocturnal sun, buried
in darkness. He suffers dethronement and exile in material darkness in order
that he may "cause the principles to arise." He brings the new generation
of solar power to birth, as in dying he is reborn from himself.
There is involved
herein the secret of one of the most inexplicable and, at first sight, most
irrational customs, the explanation of which has baffled anthropologists without
end. This was the couvade. When the student or casual reader encounters the
historical evidence establishing the fact that many tribes in different parts
of the world in archaic times observed the strange custom of sending the father,
instead of the parturient mother, to the bed of confinement at childbirth,
the impression is that human mental processes had gone sadly awry. But it
is only necessary to keep ever in mind that the sages and formulators of conventional
practice were before all else typologists, to see that the eccentric custom
was only an outward ritual of a very high spiritual commemoration indeed.
The practice was only a symbolic act to dramatize the fact that in the birth
of a son or daughter the father had injected his seminal spirit into the bosom
of matter, had buried his seed in incarnation in the body of the babe, or
had himself gone into confinement or "under cover" of flesh in the new babe!
IT only adumbrated the eternal fact of the incarnation. The sun went into
retirement each evening, to be reborn on the morrow. Couvade means "going
under cover."
The Litany of Ra
contains an apostrophe to the great sun-god:
"Homage to thee,
Ra, the beetle (Khepr), that folds his wings, that rests in the Empyrean,
that is born as his own son!" (Page 506)
Khepr
is designated "the Scarabaeus which enters life as its own son." Ptah, who
was an embodiment of Khepr-Ra, is thus addressed:
"O God, architect
of the world, thou are without a father, begotten by thine own becoming; thou
art withtout a mother, being born through repetition of thyself."
In another text
we read:
"O divine Substance,
created from itself! O God, who hath made the substance which is in him. O
God, who hast made his own father and impregnated his own mother."[ From
a papyrus rendered by M. Chabas.]
Some accompaniments
of the couvade are of great interest. In the custom, as carried out by some
Carib tribes, the father ate neither fish nor fowl for six months. Here we
have a direct reference to the god, or father, as being deprived of water
and air, or any higher element than that of earth, during its incubation period.
Hor-Apollo interestingly
observes again: "They say also that the beetle lives six months underground
and six above." If he does, nature surely has cast him in the role of Proserpina,
not to say that of the human soul, figuratively. The six lower signs typify
incarnate life.
But the beetle has
further instruction for us. He observes that the beetle deposits its ball of
eggs rolled in dung in the earth for the space of twenty-eight days - a lunar
cycle - during which the moon passes through its smaller round of the twelve
zodiacal signs. But on the twenty-ninth day, the day of the resurrection according
to lunar markings, there occurs the baptism of the beetle. The Scarabaeus then
casts his ball into the water. It opens to give birth to the young beetle. This
immersion and baptism leads to renewal and regeneration. So Taht, the lunar
god, was always declared to be self-created, never born.
The egg, as a primitive
type of birth and rebirth, finds intriguing relation to this exegesis. As the
couvade figured the return of the father’s powers in the embryo of his child,
incarnation betokened the return of the soul to its egg state. "Oh! Sun in his
egg!" is an exclamation in the Ritual. The image used represented the return
of "the sun or the dead" (Massey) to the egg-state in the underworld for the
rehatching, or the couvade. And this furnishes the answer to Nicodemus’ question:
the soul must return again and (Page 507) again to the egg-state,
to be rehatched - which is what has again been intimated in the ark symbolism.
Man - the god in man - is as it were a grub worm hatched in the earth, and,
expanding his wings of spirit as he emerges like the chrysalis, flies away with
body glistening in the golden light of morning. The sun-god arising is thus
addressed: "Adoration to thee, who arisest out of the golden and givest light
to the earth!" The sun was emblemed as the winged scarab. And the beetle follows
the sun, keeping in the angle of its direct rays, from morning till evening.
The Christ is the "sun of righteousness."
In Gnostic iconography
the child Horus reappears as the mummy-babe wearing the solar disk. The sun
is again typified by the hawk, with a disk encircled by an uraeus on its head.
Seven apes stand, four in front and three behind, denoting that the sun has
put under or behind him three of the elementary powers, but faces the conquest
of the other four in man.
The "Ur" from which
Abraham, the first emanation from the Father, came forth, means the original
sea of elemental fire. And when the emanation has gone to its death and rebirth
in matter, it has become a new creature and is given a new name. The injection
of the solar principle into material creation lends to mythology or primitive
theology its most striking analogies and types. This is confirmed by Max Müller,
who writes (Selected Essays, Vol. I, 604): "As soon as Suryas or Helios appears
as a masculine form, we are in the very thick of mythology." Suryas or Helios
is the sun. Mythology deals with the presence of this kingly force in life,
its fight for sovereignty and its dominance over the lower powers. It is the
central personage in all earthly myth and drama. The phoenix, dying and being
reborn from its own ashes, depicts the death of the sun power in mortality
and its renaissance from the grave.
The Egypto-Gnostics
affirmed: "Seven powers glorify the Word." These were the seven nature spirits,
which out of gratitude to the Propator, had each contributed of his best gift
to the production of the most perfect being, the Christ aeon. Like the golden
bough and the star atop the Christmas tree, he became the beauteous flower
at the summit of creation, comprehending and synthesizing all lower elements
in himself. He was thus the King of Glory.
After this consummation
the heaven of seven divisions is described as rolling up like a scroll and
passing away. Then the new heaven (Page 508) and
the new earth are inaugurated. When the contents of the seventh bowl are poured
out, the book of life is sealed with the seven seals, and the angel announces:
"Behold I make all things new." A zodiac of twelve signs was then requisite
to portray the life experience of the god in man. In the Book of Exodus we
see the one God Ihuh superseding all the other gods, El-Shadai and the Elohim,
when he assumes the suzerainty and orders that a sanctuary be built in which
he shall be lifted up. This shrine or tabernacle was to be the hitherto unknown
body of solar glory, or body of the resurrection, that temple not to be built
with hands, eternal in the heavens of consciousness. "He subdues the dwellers
in the darkness and there is none who can resist his power in the horizon."
"He shineth like a new king in the East." "The great god who is there is Ra
himself . . . the water of Maati is the road by which Atum-Ra goes to traverse
the fields of divine harvest."
The Book of the
Dead is primarily a sketch of the journey of the solar spark through the underworld
across the Pool of Pant, or Lake of Maati, by night. The soul follows the
track of the all-conquering sun, who is the cleaver of the way or opener of
roads through the tangled thickets of sense life. He builds a dwelling of
light for those who dwell in the darkness. The "Egyptians" are in gloom, but
the "Israelites have light in their dwellings." The home of light for the
glorified is Ammah, the place of no more night. When we realize that the Israelites
were not an earth race, but a host of sun-fragments of intellect in incarnation,
we can catch the sublime imputations in these figurative details of scripture.
The six (later
seven) supplanted powers that come under the sway of the central sun of mind
become the "attendants" or "companions" or "associates" of the sun-god. They
are depicted as seven doves that hover around Jesus in utero, the seven solar
rays that flash about his head, the seven lambs or rams with him in the mount,
the seven as stars with Jesus in their midst, the seven as fishers in his
boat, and finally the seven who as communicants solemnized the Eucharist with
the loaves and fishes in the mortuary meal of the Roman catacombs.
The Pistis Sophia,
furnishing much valuable material deleted from the Gospels, describes Jesus,
after superseding the seven foundation pillars of the world, as passing through
the twelve signs of the zodiac, mentioning each by name, and gathering a portion
of the light from (Page 509) each
to incorporate in his own person. He says that he took the twelve saviors
of the treasure of light and bound them into the bodies of your mothers. This
is to say that he circumscribed the operation of the twelve deific powers
in bodies of mortal flesh. He was thus to judge the twelve "tribes of Israel,"
or twelve segmentations of idvine intelligence; those rays of cosmic mind
which figure as the twelve tribes, sons, stars, brothers, kings, reapers,
rowers, fishermen, sowers, and twelve voices and teachers. All these had begun
as powers of light in the physical domain, and were in the end endowed with
spiritual status with Jesus in the Father’s kingdom. The Christ became the
rose in the center of twelve knights. And, says Paul, the whole creation groaneth
and travaileth to bring forth these twelve Sons of God, or powers of spiritual
light.
The Rig-Veda asks:
"Who has seen the
primordial at the time of his being born? What is that endowed with substance,
which the unsubstantial sustains? From the earth are the breath and blood,
but where is the soul? What is that one alone who has upheld these six spheres
in the shape of the unborn?"
And the answer
is given by Egypt in the person of the solar deity who was at last made the
base and support of the six spheres. When the fire that enlightens supplanted
the powers of Seb and Sut, there was present a new type of power as soul or
Sol. This unborn power was personalized as Ptah, in the form of an embryo
that transformed like the beetle to reproduce itself. It is the sun-god performing
his couvade to raise up both the six spheres and himself. He is the hidden
light, Amen-Ra, the unborn god, the support and rock of the whole creation.
He is the unsubstantial, that nevertheless sustains substance.
Massey well expounds
that "the Savior who came by spirit was the soul of the sun." "This suffering
deity was the god in matter." When plunged into matter and ensouling creation,
he became Osiris. In this phase he was the stricken one, the dead, lying inert
in his mummy-case. He is figured as the "little old child," with finger at
mouth, wizened, impotent, decadent, as the sun-god losing his power. He is
the Jack of nursery legends, the Scottish Assiepet, the Danish Askepot, the
German Aschenpüttel, who pokes in the ashes and blows up the fire, the solar
fire which he has to rekindle from dying embers. He is the male Cinderella,
the ash or ember maiden. (Page 510)
Before
descending below the horizon of incarnation these souls are denominated in Egypt
the Hamemmet Beings. They originated as the germs of souls emanating from the
sun, whence Scipio saw them abstracted in his vision. "Hamemmet" signifies "that
which is unembodied," not yet incorporated in material bodies. This matches
the "virgins" and the "Innocents" of Biblical terminology. They are the embryonic
souls of future beings, children of the sun or Ra. They were the "children of
Israel." If the monster Apap or Herut could slay them "in the egg" he would
avert his later doom of having his head crushed under their heel. At enmity
with the sun, the dragon of darkness seeks to devour the newborn sons of the
light-god who are destined to overthrow his rule in nature. So he lies in wait
at the bight of Amenta until the woman clothed with the sun shall give birth
to them. They are called, in addition to other names already given, "the issue
of Horus." Their slaughter is to be prevented, as is indicated by the title
of Chapter 42 of the Ritual: "Chapter by which one hindreth the slaughter which
is in Suten-Khen," the birthplace. The Manes at this stage is the child-Horus
himself, and he says four times over: "I am the babe." As the child of the incorruptible
sun, no power can harm him, and so "he steppeth onward through eternity," gathering
up all the manifold powers of ineffable Light. "Not to be seen is my nest. Not
to be broken is my egg." "I have made my nest in the confines of heaven" (Rit.,
Ch. 85).
Lower Egypt was
called "the desert in which the flocks of Ra were shepherded and fed." Horus
says to them:
"Protection for
you, flocks of Ra, born of the great one who is in the heavens. Breath to
your nostrils, overthrowal of your coffins" (Book of Hades, 5th Div., Legend
D).
Horus indicates
how he steps onward through eternity in the statement: "I live in Tattu and
I repeat daily my life after death, like the sun."
It need hardly
be repeated that the Christos was represented under a different title and
character during each 2155 years of a cycle of precession. In Leo he was the
lion of the house of Judah (Iu-dah), and his whelp; in Cancer he was the "Good
Scarabaeus," ever renewing himself, the crab emerging from the water onto
the land; in (Page 511) Gemini
he was the twins, the two opposite phases of life contending in the womb of
being for supremacy; in Taurus, the shining bull and golden calf; in ARies,
the ram, the lamb of God and the golden fleece; in Pisces the great whale
and the little fish with the gold in its mouth, the fisher of souls, the food
in the water; in Aquarius the emanator of the water of life in two streams;
in Capricorn the dual god again, half goat or land animal, half fish or sea
animal, duplicating the sign of Cancer opposite, only that the crab is emerging
from the water and the goat is in the water; in Sagittarius again double as
the Centaur, half man and half horse, the archer aiming at the eye of Horus
to put it out on the downward course of the autumnal sun, when deity is going
blind; in Scorpio, double again as the scorpion that stings divine power to
"death" and the eagle that soars aloft again; in Libra as the god of the two
horizons holding the scales of the balance between spirit and matter in exact
equilibrium; in Virgo double as the divine child of the mother and the wheat
for the bread of Christ, as well as the branch of the true vine that was constellated
in Virgo.
The Ritual states
that Horus "is united at sunset with his Father Ra, who goeth round the heavens"
in the zodiacal cycles. Perhaps the Gospels retain a parallel to this in the
life of Jesus in his retirement each night to the mountains to commune with
his Father. Horus says: "I see my father, the lord of the gloaming, and I
breathe." Horus again is called "the Lord of the Staircase, at the top of
which his father sat enthroned." He is lord of the evolutionary ladder, the
planes by which the soul mounts up to godhead. Again he says: "I seek my father
at sunset in silence and I feed on life." Be it noted that he feeds on life
after his descent into embodiment, or in this world. And once more the Ritual
dispenses wisdom of transcendent importance in the statement: "Thou settest
as a living being within the dark portal; . . . thou becomest a divine being
in the earth. Thou wakest as thou settest . . ."
The declarations
of ancient wisdom that we are divinized on earth and that the soul awakes
as it sets, or incarnates, are mighty items of knowledge for benighted mortals.
But it has been set forth that the descent is a swoon and a going into oblivion,
the very sleep of "death." Now it is pictured as an awakening. Here again
is exemplified the doubleness of esoteric methodology in picturing the two
aspects and movements of being. But the paradox in all these reversals of
imagery (Page 512) is
readily resolvable. The soul does fall under a spell of Lethe when enshrouded
in dense body; nevertheless it finds in that very state the beginning of its
true awakening to a higher sense of reality than ever before. This world is
"the place of establishing forever," of bringing purely latent capacity to
dynamic realization. There is involved here the ultimate mystery of life,
which is the necessity of the soul’s "death" in matter to gain a new birth.
The Egyptians, observes
Plutarch, offer incense to the sun three times a day: resin at its rising; myrrh
when it is at midheaven; and kyphi about the time of its setting. Here is the
"gold, frankincense and myrrh" of the later Hebrew myth, brought by the solar
triad of Atma-Buddhi-Manas, the three Magi or knowledge-principles. The trident
of Neptune was a Greek symbol of the three-forked spiritual sun-power. The sun
at midday zenith is Ra; at the evening is Tum (Atum); at rising on the morrow
he is Khepr, renewing himself.
The three most
celebrated emblems used in the Greek Mysteries were the Phallus (I), the Egg
(O) and the Serpent, symboled by the Greek letter Phi, being the O bisected
by the I. These are the male symbol, the female and the two united. The union
of the two yields the great "serpent power" or the driving force of life itself.
It was this serpent power that the Ophite sect of early Christianity elevated
to dominant place in their system, paying homage thus to the creative energy
and power of endless renewal, the serpent in this conception being by no means
the malefic principle "with the vulgar downward literal meaning that we ascribe
to it." Ra tells Seb to "be the guardian of the serpents which are in thee,"
referring to the swirling elementary life principles enwombed in the earth
and matter.
The sun’s might
as Jupiter was triform: Jupiter in the heavens, Neptune in the sea, and Pluto
in the underworld. Sunlight itself has three primary colors, before it breaks
into the seven. The gods are male, but the three regions are made female,
holding the shakti powers that implemented their activity. The great Hindu
Mother Mahadevi divides into three colors, black, red and white, to become
Sarasvati, the shakti of Brahma; Lacksmi, that of Vishnu; and Parvati, the
consort of Siva. There is the Hecate triad in Greece. The three Parcae or
Fates of Greece are matched by the Egyptian Neith, spinner of the web (net),
and her two sisters, Isis and Nephthys, and by the three Norns of the (Page
513) Norse
pantheon. Of the three Fates Atropos conferred the solar power of generation;
Clotho was lodged in the moon, as she who joins, mingles and unites the light
with the dark, spirit with flesh; Lachesis is on the earth supervising the
flow of mortal events, "and with her does fortune very much participate."
The ancients conjoined
the twin male and female triads and from the union produced the interlaced
triangles, or Soloman’s Seal, the six-rayed star which is a perfect numerical
typograph of the linking of the three spiritual with the three physical principles,
the apices pointing in opposite directions. Their inextricable interlinking
bespeaks the incarnation or entanglement of soul with body.
The Clementine
Homilies set forth that the body of man consists of three parts and derives
its origin from the female; the spirit consists of three parts and derives
its origin from the male. The sperm-cell of the male creative fluid is three-ply.
The union of the two triads in man makes him the sextuple being he is. His
life has six facets and manifests in a world where any object has six faces,
as a cube. The seventh principle is that which subsumes the six of the cube
in a higher synthesis, which is achieved, however, on the plane of the dimension
above it. The seventh principle always lifts a creation up to the next plane
above it. It resolves the formation of the six into soul and meaning. Its
day is the Sun-day, crowning the natural or secular operations with their
apotheosis into spiritual being. The mystic AUM is a concealed glyph of the
trinity, we are told. Our word "triumph," seen particularly well in its French
form, triomphe, is composed of the root tri, "three"; om, the shortened AUM,
the triple Logos; and phe, from the Greek, meaning "spoken." Our cry of triumph
will then be our ability to unify again the "thrine-spoken word," or bring
the three primary rays of divine mind back to unity.
The two sexes are
not only marked in man by the division into male and female persons; there
is another segmentation into sex which is one of the great keys in theology.
The division of humanity into male and female is only an outward mark of an
inner sacrament which is the main theme of religion. The most important sex
division is that which inheres in man’s individual life, whereby everyone
is male on the spiritual side, and female on the physical. The diaphragm is
the horizon line in man physiologically, for the individual is male above
it and female below it. The marriage of the Bride and the Lamb is to (Page
514) take
place between these two parties. The dividing wall is to be broken down and
the two united. The great Sphinx of Egypt depicts this duality in man, proclaming
under the zodiacal sign of the Lion that each human is spirit-male and matter-female
in himself, facing the evolutionary duty of wedding the two. The three psychic
centers below the diaphragm are concerned with the reproduction of body; the
three above deal with spiritual destiny, and the crowning one in the head
will unify all seven. Mythology teems with half-man, half-animal creatures,
male in front and female behind. And says the Hebrew Psalmist (Ps. 139:5):
"Thou hast fashioned me Behind and Before." This must be translated to say
that we are humans in our upper half and beast in the lower. This is the incontestable
reading of the symbology. The female is assigned the creation of the animal
body of man. The female’s interests are infinitely more directly centered
in the body than are the male’s. Man is, in the large, the intellectual creator;
woman the physical.
The ancients in
their stellar configuration represented the great Divine Man as facing the
south, his back to the north. Hence the south was male, the north female.
The constellation of the Great Bear the lower, hinder part, the thigh or womb,
of nature. The gods of the four quarters, the bases of the human pyramid,
the four "Sons of Horus," "are they who are behind the thigh in the northern
sky." They are the hind quarter of the heavenly man and are the four lower
elements in man’s constitution. The haunch of the lion that is carried on
the head of Anhur is a sign of natural fecundity. The fore part, the face
and head of the lion, denotes the glory of solar radiance. "The Lord God is
a sun and shield," says the Psalm; and man is made in his image. The rear
material part shields mortal eye from the too great effulgence of solar glory.
But Samson sets fire to the tails of 300 foxes, as a suggestion that the fire
of soul must light up and transform the rear or lower half of our nature.
In the Ritual chapter
"of making the transformation into the god that giveth light in the darkness,"
the Manes says he is the robe of light that dispels the darkness, "which uniteth
the two fighting deities that dwell in my body through the mighty spell of
the words of my mouth." Two fighting deities in our bodies! The robe alluded
to is called elsewhere "the garment without a seam," since the marriage obliterates
the seam or dividing line. The unification of these (Page 515) two warring
elements is each individual’s specific task, the main reason for his incarnate
existence and a pursuit worth all its hardship.
In one of the hymns
to Osiris the god is greeted:
"Hail to thee,
Osiris, Lord of Eternity! When thou art in heaven thou appearest as the sun,
and thou renewest thyself in the moon."
The soul of life,
we have seen, renews itself by eternal rebirth following cyclical death in
matter. The moon is ancient symbol for the physical half of human nature,
since the two lower elements and man’s two lower bodies, the physical and
emotional, were the products of a precedent evolution on the moon. And sun
and moon, in their interaction each lunar month, enact the whole drama of
human evolution with such graphic fidelity that the delineation of it becomes
a perpetual marvel. No graphology of mythicism has excelled nature herself
in vivid portrayal of the dual history of the human being upon the very face
of the moon, where the story, endlessly repeated, has been enacted before
the eyes of successive generations of mortals, but never read since the days
of ancient Egypt. In the various phases and aspects of the registration of
the sun’s light upon its body, the moon stages the entire symbolic drama of
the blended physico-spiritual life of mortal man with a precision so astonishing
that a mind which once follows the analogies can hardly escape the conclusion
that Intelligence presided at the ordering of the movements of the three bodies,
sun, moon and earth, in their interrelation. As seen from the earth, the sun
and moon together depict in the heavens each month the record of man’s typical
life so fully that it becomes a prime enigma to account for the loss of the
wisdom to interpret this sky-book after it had once been known. The rejection
of paganism by Roman Christianity cost the world the forfeiture of its ability
to read this elementary textbook and its story written in characters of light
and darkness.
As spirit was reborn
periodically in matter, so the sun was reborn monthly in the moon, matter’s
planetary symbol. Both Horus and Khunsu, two characters representing the renewed
solar deity, as well as Taht, were depicted in the disk of the full moon.
The planisphere of Denderah shows the two in this position. Khunsu’s father
is Amen, the hidden god, the youthful Khunsu being his visible representative
reborn in the new moon. Horus was the renewed Ra, Osiris or Atum. That divine
self which in solar symbolism was reborn in the vernal (Page 516) equinox
or the eastern rim of morning, was re-dramatized in lunar symbolism as finding
its rebirth in the young crescent moon. Osiris, Atum or Ra, sinking to feebleness
and death in the cycle of waning moon, came to their renaissance between the
two horns of the crescent in the west at nightfall. The moon repeated thirteen
times the death and resurrection story while the sun traced it once. Ages
of intelligence have gazed upon this monthly drama without once descrying
its tacit narrative. Yet the Egyptians discoursed about the meaning of this
phenomenon in chapter after chapter. Must we conclude, therefore, that ancient
eyes penetrated deeper into nature’s secrets than modern? The evidence is
before us. This datum may become again the bulwark of religion, rendering
it impregnable to materialistic or agnostic assault. For while sacred Bibles
may be brushed aside with scorn, the chart of man’s spiritual constitution,
written ineradicably on the open sheet of the nightly sky, can not be gainsaid.
Here is an indelible scripture whose ever-turning pages the atheist must read
alike with the theist. Here is a book which no mind dare flout. Here are the
heavens themselves preaching a sermon and reciting a gospel narrative that
no mortal can contemn.
The story is by
no means easy in the telling. It must be lived with and be given time to mellow
in the mind, ere it will bestir the profoundest psychic intuitions. Only the
groundwork for the structure of beautiful meaning can be given in a series
of facts, relations and phenomena. Each one must in the end be his own poet.
We have seen the
sun-god pictured as passing through the dark underworld at night. His voyage
is made amid spiritual darkness. The body is the soul’s dark prison, grave
and tomb. The god is then the sun in the dark underworld. Therefore it is
a light in the darkness. His mission is to bring light into this dark region.
Come to earth, his light ceased shining in heaven, as the Chinese said, and
shone only in the underworld for the benighted inhabitants thereof. Jesus
is the light of the world by night.
Yet it is by no means
his true full splendor that shines on our darkness. It is a sadly diminished
light that he shows, his full radiance being dimmed by the veil of matter which
is thrown between it and our eyes. It is therefore a light, which, itself hidden
from sight, shines through an intermediary body, or shines by reflection or
indirect transmission. Now in the first chapter of John’s Gospel there (Page
517) is that noteworthy statement that there was a man sent of God to bear witness
to that "light that shineth in the darkness." "He was not that Light, but was
sent to bear witness of that Light." He was himself not the full or true light,
but only the harbinger of it. This was John the Baptizer, or leader of souls
into the waters of generation in the dark lower half of evolution. He was typed
as Anup, and again as Taht-Aan, the dark phase of the moon, or the moon itself
as the sun’s witness when it is not itself shining on us. So the Christ-light
within us is that secondary or transmitted radiance which shines into our prisons
when the full glory of divinity is cut off from us and out of our sight. If
God is the full ineffable Sun of Divinity, then the Christos is, as it were,
the reflected radiance from that Sun coming secondhand to us from the surface
of bodies of matter.
In the interpretation,
this intermediary is the physical human body, with its emotion apparatus.
In the realm of astronomy it is the moon. The lighted moon, then, is the symbol,
representative, vice-regent, of the sun when the orb is buried in darkness.
It holds the proxy of its power. It is the transmitter of solar light when
that itself is out of sight. It is the only witness and evidence of the sun’s
light when that luminary is unable to shine on the world. It is the sun’s
lower or secondary self. The moon is the sun by night. So the Christos is
that reduced and reflected ray of the Father’s infinite glory. When the sun
is in full panoply in the heavens of day, the moon is eclipsed. It is man’s
"noon." But she comes into her glory in the night. The moon stands between
man and total darkness, yet she has no light to give of herself. She but transmits
the brightness of one higher than herself. So the body stands between man
and his god and transmits what can not be received directly.
Here, then, we
have the two great characters in the drama, with man the spectator and interpreter,
and as he finally realizes to his amazement, the ultimate actor. Meaning begins
to rise as soon as we have fixed the two chief dramatis personae and their
roles. The sun and moon play the parts of man’s soul and his body respectively,
and their interaction will be found to depict in detail the connected history
of the two on earth in the world of the body.
These determinations
lead to the second great fact, which opens wide the door into a world of new
meaning. If the sun represents spirit and the soul body, the deduction is that
the sun is male and the moon (Page 518) female. The stage is then set to register
the play of the two great interacting forces of life, the positive and negative
poles. The evolutionary conflict between the two, the battle between Sut and
Horus, the twins, which is reproduced everywhere in nature, is transferred now
to the lunar surface and reenacted there for man’s eternal behoof. As the moon
encircles her lord in monthly course, she traces a stream of significant interrelations.
From dark to full moon, it is the story of man’s deification and glorification,
his en-light-enment, through repeated life in body; the nightly increase of
the area of light is the sealed promise of our ultimate divinization. By analogy,
the increase night by night endorses the postulate of the soul’s reincarnations.
It is the cycle of evolution. From full moon to total obscuration it writes
the record of involution, or the spirit’s descent into matter. The following
tabulation is suggested for the readier tracing of the analogies:
SUN |
MOON |
|
|
Spirit-soul-mind |
Body |
Consciousness |
Flesh |
Intellect |
Sensation |
Male |
Female |
Light-giving |
Light-receiving |
Upper body |
Lower body |
Fire |
Water |
The god
|
The animal |
In its complete
cycle the moon analogizes the conception, birth, growth, perfection, decline,
death and rebirth of the sun-god in his incarnating cycle. The moon records
the progress of the rebegettal or divinization. Hence the principal moon-deity
of Egypt, Taht-Aan, is known as the recorder or scribe for Horus. He keeps
the record of the advance or decline of spiritual light. And the moon’s function
of bearing witness to the sun when the latter was out of sight, constitutes
Taht-Aan and Anup the "two witnesses" for the hidden Christ. In the court
of life the body holds the record and bears witness of the character of the
deity who is buried out of sight within us!
The Greeks regarded
the moon as "the self-revealing emblem of nature." As bringer of the hidden
sun to light the moon was named the goddess Diana, who, says Proclus, "presides
over the whole of generation into natural existence, leads forth into light
all natural reasons, (Page 519) and extends a prolific power from on high
even to the subterranean realms."4 And we are told that "the sexual parts
of this god are denominated by theologists, Diana," for no more subtle reason
apparently than that it is sex which brings all things to outward birth. The
moon is Diana because the orb brings all to light, as the woman who reflects,
regenerates and reproduces the hidden germ of life. Spirit would be inchoate
and lost to view if some matrix did not give it birth as concrete form. That
the moon is in affinity with the natural creation rather than with the spiritual
world is also attested by the Chaldean Oracles, one of which recites that
"the moon rides on every thing generated, and all these terrestrial natures
are manifestly governed by her, as the Oracle says." She is the nature power,
the woman, who becomes clothed with the sun of intelligence, which lights
up her head finally with twelve facets of divine radiance.
The moon, then,
is the register of solar or spiritual history, and the fact of crowning pertinence
for us is that the nightly increase of light area on her dark surface is nature’s
cosmic hieroglyph recording our growth toward full divinization. It marks
to what extent divine light has spread over and through the physical body.
From total darkness the sun-god begins to impregnate the lunar body with his
bright power, until finally her whole body becomes irradiated with his glory.
So the sun-deity of mind meets the physical man, first Adam, at the dawn of
racial history, and finds no spiritual light in him. He then implants his
tiny seed, and life after life he adds to the growth until at the end of the
aeon the whole being of physical man is irradiated with intellectual light.
He lights the darkened prison from within with that shining power that Jesus
said his disciples had in themselves. Each night of incarnation increases
the area of light. And the material body, like the moon, records the measure
of the god’s occupancy of the vehicle. Even in ordinary social judgment, that
countenance is most beautiful through or upon which the most of soul shines
forth.
The nightly spectacle
of the waxing moon should impress every mortal that nature bears incontestable
evidence of the gradual divinization of humanity. "If thine eye be single,
thy whole body shall be full of light," is the Biblical assurance to this
effect. The supreme message of lunar symbology to man is that divine light
is measurably spreading over our whole being. At the fullness of his perfection
the Manes cries: "There is no part of me that is without a god. I am the god
entire." (Page 520)
In phallic
terms it would be said that the moon, female, being impregnated by the active
germ of solar, masculine, light, registers the growth of the babe of the sun
in her womb by the swelling of the gestating foetus night by night, till its
birth at the full moon. Then the child is delivered, and the mother returns
to normal condition.
A most striking
series of analogies extends further this parallelism between the moon and
the mother, body, nature. The bodily world of incarnation, is, as has been
demonstrated by the table of the four elements, typed by the two planes of
earth and water, which two are often generalized under the one, water. The
body is chiefly water, and this is the first unassailable confirmation of
the legitimacy of the symbol. Its life of sensation and emotion is most aptly
pictured by the shifty, ceaseless mobility of water. All bodily processes
are in constant flux. Therefore if the sun is typified by fire, the moon is
just as fitly emblemed by water. Is it by "coincidence" then, or by an amazing
natural endorsement of the meet character of the symbol, that there is found
to be that mysterious affinity between the moon and the water of earth? For
it is the moon that draws the seas of earth toward it in the daily tides!
But even that remarkable
vindication of the analogies involved is dwarfed by the magnitude of another
natural relationship,--that between the moon and the female. It need hardly
be elaborated that it is the physiological function of the female, and not
that of the male, that is rendered periodic by the cycle of the moon! Does
it need any smart juggling of poetic fancies to relate the woman to the moon,
when the very periodicity of her bodily functions is fixed by the twenty-eight
days’ cycle of the orb? And the function energized by the moon has everything
to do with body and procreation, nothing directly with the woman’s mind or
higher nature. The moon affects the woman, not the man; and her body, not
her spirit.
Together moon and
woman repeat each month in identical manner the story of descent, incarnation
and rebirth of the soul. From the night of the full moon the light of the
sun-god visible on its face begins to wane, going down again into darkness.
Its movement is downward across the sphere, as the direction of its increase
is from the under surface to the upper. At the lowest ebb of the cycle the
light is totally hidden for three days! While in this dark underworld which
lies below the horizon, the virgin moon is met by the sun, who has (Page 521)
entered the underworld with it at early evening, or the time of his descent!
Let this fact be noted carefully, since it is of great import. The sun and
moon meet and are conjoined in wedlock while both are buried out of sight
in the west below the horizon, or in the dark of night. Transposing this situation
to the kingdom of man, we find that nature has reproduced the story of incarnation
and its collateral values once more. For here again nature records that it
is in the dark underworld of this nether earth that the only conjunction of
spirit (soul) and matter (body) takes place. This world is that place of darkness
wherein alone the sun of spirit and the moon of matter can meet and copulate
for reproduction. Says Massey: "It is only in the darkness of Amenta that
the two ever meet." Sun and moon meet and embrace just at the end of her dark
period, and while both are in the nether earth. Man’s soul and his body meet
in the same dark period in the lower world of earth. Immediately the mother,
impregnated, begins to swell until she delivers the sun’s child on the fifteenth
day.
The Egyptians said
that Osiris copulated with the dead body of Isis and impregnated it and that
the touch of his sperm revived it - all in the dark, out of sight. Another version
is that Isis drew the seed from Osiris’ dead body and impregnated herself, giving
birth to Horus. The Egyptians were not evil-minded pagans, but beautifully pictured
truth and need not be defended against the charge of a revolting sacrilege.
Nor do we need to ascribe posthumous sexual rapacity to their favorite god and
goddess. Isis, typed by the dark moon, was nature unspiritualized, unfructified,
barren, dead. It required the touch of the sun-god’s vivifying rays, the implantation
of the germinal light of spirit in her inert body, to awaken her to fruitfulness.
The other version reads that Isis was fecundated by the god dead and buried
in matter. He fructifies her when he has gone to his "death" in matter.
With incredible
exactness human biology matches this procedure of sun and moon. Each month
during the "dark" period of the female cycle, when nature runs to waste unchecked
by male fecundation, there descends from the "upper room" of the Fallopian
tubes the ovum, or foetal nucleus, which falls, as does the unfertilized earth
soul, into the belly of darkness in the lower body, the prison, cave, tomb
or womb. What then happens? Hither, also descending into the dark cavern,
but from outside, is projected the seed of the male, (Page 522) the seminal
essence, typical ever of the solar light, threefold like the solar triad;
and once again in nature’s economy "sun" and "moon" copulate in the dark cave
of the underworld to engender a new birth.
The seed is placed
in the ground, its underworld, and lies there inert until the sun penetrates
into that hidden womb and warms it to life.
The tale of the
Sleeping Beauty is but a form of this tropology. The beautiful maiden is the
moon-goddess, waiting in a state of negativity until awakened to reproductive
life by the lover’s kiss--the sun’s rays.
Tracing analogies
further, we find that the new moon is born in the west, and, like the "Innocents"
which it types, it is immediately threatened with extinction by the power
of darkness. Each night it becomes more able to combat and outlive the assaults
of the enemy. The west is the place of entry into lower life, and the soul
was endangered at the beginning of its immersion in the body. But what about
the fully-divinized sun-child at full moon? Where is he born as the finished
mortal made immortal? Surely at a place where danger lurks no more for him.
Majestically he rises in the east! No longer now is he subject to the attack
of darkness, for he rides in full glory across the sky by night. He is not
plunged into the earth, but is the "sky-runner," the ancient term for a god.
Born as man on the west, he is now born anew as god on the east, "where the
gods are born," and reincarnation is over.
Some of the legends
poetize the moon as seducing the sun in the darkness of night to be impregnated
with his light. Some say the sun was in love with the moon. A kiss in mythical
language was a euphemism for copulation. Judas betrayed his Lord with a kiss,
which is the Gospel’s continuation of former Egyptian imagery by which the betrayer,
seducer - matter - the woman, lured the sun or soul into her darkened realm
to give her the seed of light. The allegory was later applied to the resurrection,
in which the slumbering soul was awakened by the kiss of Horus. The Prince awakens
Snow-white with a kiss.
The great Egyptian
symbol, the Eye, stands for the solar light. Sut, who swallows it at evening,
restores it at morning. Nature, earth, the mother, all of whom absorb the
sunlight, are made to reproduce it again in new beauty! Says Massey: (Page
523)
"Thus
the lunar orb was the consort of the sun; his Eye by night as the reproducer
of his light when he was in the underworld; and in reproducing the light she
was the mother bringing forth her child"--his child, he might have said.
[ Lecture on Luniolatry, p. 14.]
The "Cow-Goddess"
Hathor is portrayed with the solar disk between her horns, the imagery denoting
the mother-moon as bearer of the sun, or rebegetter of his light. The eye reproduces
objects by reflection; the moon reproduces the sun. Here indeed is the woman
clothed with the sun, bathed in its splendor, and periodically bringing forth
her man-child, with the great dragon of darkness ready to devour him, reenacting
endlessly the type of that Christ-birth that occurs to man once. For three days
the father’s dwindling light disappeared in the belly of the great fish. Jonah
issues from the great fish, constellated in Pisces, in the form of the Christ,
who stills the storm on the sea of carnality. As the moon retired out of sight
of men in her dark period to copulate with the sun, so woman, the moon’s human
counterpart, was made by early religious usage to retire from the sight of men
during her period. Nor was she to come into the presence of the sun or fire,
a restriction perpetuated in some quarters to this day.
The Egyptians,
it will have been noticed, manifested an uncanny penchant for discerning in
the characteristic traits of animals many striking analogies with spiritual
or creational verities. If their work was restored to religion, it would revitalize
the latter by establishing a knowledge of the fundamental affinity between
man and his environing universe. In no one respect, perhaps, have they revealed
a more astonishing correspondence between animal trait and cosmical philosophy
than in the case of the cynocephalus or dog-headed ape. This animal, be it
recalled, is the zoötype of the moon-god Taht-Aan. To avoid faulty presentation
of this parallel it is desirable to quote the datum from its ancient source
in the writing of Hor-Apollo, as cited by Massey:
"Hor-Apollo says
of the cynocephalus, the personified speaker, singer and later writer, that
the Egyptians symbolized the moon by it on account of a kind of sympathy which
the ape had with it at the time of its conjunction with the god. ‘For at the
exact instant of the conjunction of the moon with the sun, when the moon became
unillumined, then the male cynocephalus neither sees nor eats, but is bowed
down to the earth with grief, as if lamenting the ravishment of the moon.
The female also, in (Page 524) addition to its being unable to see, and being
afflicted in the same manner as the male, ex genitalibus sanguinem emittit;
[ Latin: "Emits blood from the genitals."]hence even to this
day Cynocephali are brought up in the temples, in order that from them may
be ascertained the exact instant of the conjunction of the sun and moon. And
when they would denote the renovation of the moon, they again portray a cenocephalus
in the posture of standing upright, and raising its hands to heaven, with
a diadem on its head.’" [ The Natural Genesis, I, pp. 44.]
Any attempt to
add point to this natural fact seems inadvisable. It speaks volumes of rebuke
for those who blatantly decry the suggestion of astrological influences upon
our earth and its citizenry. Plutarch, it will be remembered, stated that
the "astral" or emotion body of man came from the moon, as the spiritual one
came from the sun. These counterparts in man retain an affinity with their
source, as they are of kindred essence with their progenitors. Hence powerful
currents from the parent bodies must vitally affect their offspring even down
here. Distance imposes little obstacle to such forces as cosmic rays.
The ape sets mankind
another singular example of harmony with nature which we will be amazed to
ponder. There is a widespread ancient tradition that certain species of apes
assemble at the time of sunrise on an elevation or river bank facing the east,
and with cries, prostrations and "clicking" salute the lord of day as he appears
above the horizon. Biologically the ape heralded the coming of the man with
the sun of intellect, and with ability to express the motions of thought by
speech. How astonishing that nature has dramatized this event in the matutinal
hailing by the apes of the physical symbol and embodiment of that intellect!
The advent of divinity gave man speech; the rise of the solar lord sets the
apes to clicking!
The ibis, sacred
to Taht, the moon-god, emblemed the dark and light aspects of the moon in
its two colors of white and black. The dark of the moon types the unspiritualized
state of the first Adam, the Gentile, Sut, Anup, Krishna and the little Bambino
or Italian Christ-child, were depicted as black.
The Biblical narrative
of Samson and his consort Delilah seems quite definitely to be a growth from
lunar typology. With the sun (in Hebrew) for his name, Samson is the sun-god;
Delilah is traced (by Massey) to mean the feeble, waning, drooping aspect
of lunar light, or the dark of the moon, its obscuration, and the menstruation.
Conjunction with the woman during the dark period meant negation, (Page 525)
abortion, waste of virile power, as in Onan’s case. Delilah represented the
wretched sun-god in his reduced and fallen state of incarnation. As with Horus,
Samson’s eyes are put out, his light is lost. Delilah causes his ruin, as
her allurements lead to his being bound and shorn of his hair (a general type
for solar rays). Ishtar is also the ruin of her solar lovers, and is charged
with being an enchantress, a poisoner, a destroyer of male potency. Izdubar,
the sun-god, reproaches her with witchcraft and seductive murderous lust,
and saves himself by refusing to be her lover. The havoc wrought by Aholah
and Aholibah, the two unholy sisters in harlotry portrayed in Ezekiel (23),
upon the mighty sun-men of "Egypt" and "Babylon," is depicted without restraint
of language. They, like Delilah, lure young men to their "destruction," that
is, to union with matter and descent into it.
In old texts the
date on which Osiris is affirmed to descend into the underworld is given as
the seventeenth of the month Athor or Athyr. This was to match the date of
the autumn equinox. Zodiacally it was the time of his entering the six lower
signs for the "three days of navigation." Significantly the ark in which he
was to be borne across the waters was a boat in the shape of the crescent
moon. Then on the nineteenth of the same month, or after two (i.e., three)
days, the priests proclaimed that he was re-found, or that his bark had come
to view after being lost sight of.
The lunar phase
of the meaning back of the term "Bull of his Mother," applied to Horus, is
readily glimpsed. As the growing light of the new sun-child spreads over the
body of the moon, his mother, he is said to impregnate her and fill her body
with his virility. The old light re-begets itself on its own mother. The horn
is a type of male power, as witness the rhinoceros (nose-horn) and the unicorn.
The "horned moon" represented the virile young sun-god exercising his function
of begetting light on his mother. Horus impregnated his mother Isis.
The context makes
it appropriate to introduce here the figure of another animal used by the ancients
in symbolism - the ass. His mythical usage has brought much of his own reputed
quality, asininity, into the interpretations. Much, if not all, of his typical
significance can be seen in relation to lunar imagery. Anup, the god of the
dark moon, was figured by the ass, as well as by the jackal. As the lunar orb
becomes illumined with light, the mythicists framed the allegory of (Page 526)
the sun-god’s riding into full glory on the back of the dark moon, Anup, the
ass, or ass-headed god, as he is depicted on the tomb of Rameses Sixth. Hence
Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the city of heavenly glory, is only a
fabulous construction of the mythicist to portray the final triumph of the sun-god
or soul in man over his lower world. The climactic act in mundane life is the
departure from mortal flesh and the entry into the kingdom of spirit, the Aarru-Salem
or Fields of Peace. And nothing so decisively betrays the befuddlement into
which exoteric literalism has thrown Christian practice than the Church’s placing
the triumphal entry of Jesus chronologically ahead of the crucifixion, death
and burial. The victorious entry into spirit, to join the glorious company of
the gods, ends all earthly crucifixion. By no jugglery of sense can the triumph
precede the crucifixion, in the same cycle.
The god rides into
glory on the back of the lower animal self. The Ritual has told us that Horus
would be set on Sut’s back, to be upborne safely by him. The spiritual world
rests upon the physical, which fact let idealists never forget. Without being
carried patiently by these ascetically despised bodies of ours we could never
reach the gates of the celestial city.
That the ass-riding
legend is purely a mythical drama past all contradiction on the basis of the
Biblical context is evident from the fact that the Gospels state Jesus would
be found "sitting on an ass and a colt, the foal of an ass." Impossibilities
that can pass as myth prove ruinous when myth is turned into history. Picture
Jesus physically astride the two animals at once! And this is a fair sample
of the ludicrousness which the entire theology has taken on in modern presentation
from the sheer despoiling of the mighty allegories of past wisdom. Nothing
but the derided pagan mythology can eradicate the buffoonery of this scene
and restore it to dignity. Theology has gone far to reduce the mind of Western
humanity to imbecility; let mythology be called upon to restore it to sanity.
In this connection
the linking of the symbol of the palm branch with the triumphal entry also
indicates the luni-solar path to meaning. For, says Massey, the palm branch
was an ancient type of time and periodicity. And Hor-Apollo avers that it
was adopted as a symbol of a month or "moonth," because it alone reproduces
an additional branch at each renovation of the moon. One might call a lunar
month the (Page 527) period of a palm branch. In the degree of subtlety and
refinement to which the sages carried the art of natural portrayal of truth,
they seem to have far overshot the capacity of later, even modern, mind to
evaluate their constructions.
We have Balaam
riding the ass, and Samson slaying the Philistines with the jaw-bone of an
ass. The jaw is the lower and moveable part of the head, working up and down
against a stable unmoved counterpart. In this bit of anatomy nature has typed
again our duality and the deep truth that over against a stable and unmoved
eternal nature within, an activity in the lower levels of life moves out and
back, to and fro, to nourish and express life’s inner attributes. Only by
the activity of this lower part can the inner soul slay its adversaries.
Another revelation
of hidden Bible typology comes to light through lunar representation. The jackal
of Anup and the cynocephalus of Taht-Aan, which figured as types of the dark
lunation, were conceived as having stolen the light from the bright moon. As
the dark period before and that after the illumination, they stood on either
side of the Christ light on the moon. They were dubbed "thieves of the light,"
in contrast to the twelve solar characters who were guardians of the treasure
of light. Hermes, cognate with Anup, was in Greek mythology the thief. In the
zodiac of Denderah just where Horus is shown on the cross or at the crossing
of the vernal equinox, these two thieves Anup and Aan are drawn on either side
of the sun-god. Here would appear to be the authentic pre-Christian prototype
of the Gospel crucifixion between two thieves. Incarnation steals away the divine
light - only to add to its brightness.
Orion, the mighty
hunter, type of the sun-god, is represented as pursuing the moon which leaps
ahead one hour’s jump each night, like a hare. In his chase of the hare he
is accompanied by his two dogs, constellated as the stars Cyon (Greek kuon
(cyon), "dog") and Procyon. On emerging from the darkness of Amenta Osiris
says: "I come forth as a Bennu (the Phoenix-type of the Dog-star Sirius) at
dawn. I urge on the dogs of Horus." These again may be Anup and Aan, the dog
and the dog-headed ape, symbols of man in his early evolutionary state as
animal, then as half animal and half man, the ape, before becoming full man.
The god in man urges on in his evolution the animal part of himself.
We are now in position
to understand a detail of Sut’s (Page 528) dismemberment of Osiris passed
over before. The dark power cut the god’s body into fourteen pieces! The meaning
is under our eye in the lunar symbolism. To reduce full moon to dark moon,
the Sut power must cut off the light in fourteen separate pieces, one each
night! The lunar phenomena likewise dramatize the companion idea of the disrobing
of the soul at each step of her descent into matter, as she loses a portion
of her robe of light at each of fourteen steps.
The moon phases
and periods furnish the actual origin of ancient and some modern festivals
in a manner known to few. If not entirely a growth out of lunar periodicities,
our Sabbath on the seventh day and the Jewish one on the sixth day, are traceable
to origins in identical ancient festivals commemorating the sixth and seventh
days of the lunar month. The early civilizations marked off three dates in
the lunar cycle as worthy of celebration, the first, the sixth (or seventh)
and the fifteenth. These were apparently all festivals in honor of Ra (or
Osiris), though in conjunction with Luna. The feasts on the first and fifteenth
were lunar festivals corresponding to the solar Christmas and the solar Easter,
or the sun-god’s birth and resurrection. The new moon might be thought of
as born on the first day. He completed his conquest of darkness in full light
on the fifteenth (fourteenth). But there was a feast day set for the sixth
and seventh days of the lunar month. This was the Feast of the Tenait. The
word denotes a measure of time, a division, week or fortnight. It was primarily
associated with the seventh day of the month. The Ritual recites (Ch. I):
"I am with Horus on the day when the Festivals of Osiris are celebrated, and
when offerings are made on the sixth day of the month, and on the Feast of
the Tenait in Heliopolis" (city of the sun). The significant basic datum here
is that, according to the old texts, "Osiris entered the moon on the sixth
day of the month."
Now a great quantity
of material could be adduced to support the contention that the sixth day
was named as the date of the god’s entrance into the moon, picturing his entry
into earthly body, because the implantation of the seed in the material womb
could not be made until the day after the completion of the five days of menstruation!
A lunar dark period was three days; but the reckoning was made on the basis
of the woman’s actual period of five days. This five-day period of female
non-productivity looms large in primitive number types of meaning. Indeed
some African creation legends set a secular creation (Page 529) of five days
with a Sabbath on the sixth. The five days signifying negation, it is curiously
found that the Egyptian Nun, the abyss of nothingness, is written with five
successive N’s. We have seen how ancient law insisted on woman’s playing the
part of negation, disappearance, retirement, during the five days. In Parsee
law even a woman who became clean in three days was not to be washed until
the fifth day. On this account five became considered the evil or untoward
number, and the five intercalary days injected into the year at the end to
make the difference between the 360 days of twelve solar months (of 30 days)
and the 365 (364) of the thirteen lunar months of 28 days each, were charactered
as the unlucky days of ill and darkness. They came at the winter solstice,
the era of yearly darkness.
Hence it was that
the sixth day, the first succeeding the five days of taboo, was the time of
a new impregnation, connoting new birth and renewal. Hence the first five days
of the moon cycle were made memorial of the preliminary natural cycles of life
in the kingdoms of darkness before the advent of the mind principle, solar intelligence,
in the world. The sixth was considered to have deified the early five as later
the seventh deified the first six. At any rate this was the figure of representation
when the female period was the norm of typing and measurement. Thus Osiris,
the seminal seed of divinity, entered the womb of matter to fecundate life on
the first day after the dark period, which is incidentally the most fertile
period of the month’s cycle. And this is indeed notable, for it is undoubtedly
the origin of the Jewish eve. The commencement of the Sabbath at sunset is attributable
to the symbolism of the setting sun, which figuratively marked the time of the
god’s descent into the underworld for the night - of incarnation. This gave
a Sabbath beginning on the evening of the fifth day, but covering mainly the
sixth day, Saturday. This was the true Sun-day under lunar typism, because it
marked the birth of the new sun in the moon.
But the festival
of the full moon came on the fifteenth, bringing another Sun-day eight days
later,--if on the fourteenth, then seven days later. But if the seventh was
a solar day, the sixth was dedicated to Saturn, and on the night of it the
love-feast or Agapae began at six o’clock to commemorate the conjunction of
the sun and moon, (Page 530) or Horus with Hathor-Isis. This day was a phallic
festival celebrated in symbolic appropriateness by the conjunction of male
and female, the basis of the Saturnalia. Merely typical significance was given
concrete dramatization in the actual union of males and females; for it is
said that "couplings did abound." It was Saturn’s day to conjoin with his
mother. From being held once a month, the two-day soli-lunar celebration was
later repeated every seven days, or weekly.
Annu was the Egyptian
city where festivals were held in honor of Osiris. One of these was kept on
the sixth day of the month. The Speaker in the Ritual says that he is with
Horus on the festival of Osiris on the sixth day of the month. As Annu became
Beth-Annu (Bethany), it is instructive to compare with this the following
from the Gospels (John 12): "Jesus, therefore, six days before the Passover
came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus raised from the dead. So they
made him a supper there," at which were present the two women, Mary and Martha,
as the two Meri’s or Merti (Mertae) were present at Beth-Anu in Egypt. This
was the mortuary meal at Annu, corresponding to the supper at Bethany.
The festival of
the sixth day is clearly the one known as the Hakera (as well as the Tenait),
that was solemnized on the sixth night of the Ten Mysteries. At this great
festival was commemorated the resurrection of Osiris. This one of the Ten
Mysteries was celebrated "before the great circle of the gods in Abydos [city
of death and rebirth] on the night of the Hakera when the glorious ones are
rightly judged; when the evil dead are parted off and ‘joy goeth its rounds
in Thinis’" (Ch. 18, Renouf). This was the festival of "Come thou to me,"
or the resurrection. On this day the solar healer and deliverer of the Manes
in Amenta rides in glory as the "divine one that dwelleth in heaven and who
sitteth on the eastern side of heaven" (Rit., Ch. 25).
The goddess-mother
Ishtar (the Hebrew Esther!) of Akkad was, like Venus and Hathor, designated
"the Goddess Fifteen": being named from the date of the full moon or her productive
heyday. The Egyptian goddess exclaims (Ch. 80): "I have made the eye of Horus
when it was not coming on the festival of the fifteenth day." This is perhaps
a reminder that at an early day the moon revolution was more definitely known
than the solar cycle, and the fourteenth was counted as the date of the full
moon. Ishtar is described as ascending and descending the steps of the moon,
fifteen up and down in consonance (Page 531) with her title of Goddess Fifteen.
In Pseudo-Matthew (Ch. 4) we learn that when the Virgin was an infant, just
weaned, she ran up the fifteen steps of the temple at full speed without once
looking back. In the History of Joseph the Carpenter Jesus says that Mary
gave him birth in the fifteenth year of her age, by a mystery that no creature
can understand except the Trinity. And Mary is the Egyptian Meri, who was
Hathor, the Goddess Fifteen.
The Pistis Sophia
dates the Transfiguration of Jesus on the fifteenth day of the month Tybi,
the day of the full moon. The resurrection, or new birth, was always reckoned
in Egypt on the full moon of this month, and as it came close after the winter
solstice, about December 27 (Massey), it points to the Christmas nativity
as being either ignorantly confused or knowingly identified with both the
Transfiguration and the Resurrection. An address to Isis in the Ritual runs:
"I have come to
see thee and thy beauties within the Utcha in thy name of Heb-enti-ses (i.e.,
the sixth-day festival). Thou hast conquered heaven by the greatness of thy
majesty in thy name of ‘Prince of the festival of the fifteenth day!’ . .
. Gods and men live at sight of thee. Thou risest to us . . ."
In the Ritual the
Mother is she who "gives thee water on every first and every fifteenth day
of the month."
A considerable
amount of mythic construction has grown up around the poetic conception of
the crescent moon as shaped like a tortoise shell, across which seven strings
were drawn to form a lyre or harp. Many gods and goddesses play upon a harp
of seven strings, Orpheus notably. Man must learn to draw consummate music
from his evolutionary instrument of seven keys.
The moon is the source
of much numerology, especially that dealing with the quantity: four times seven
equals twenty-eight. The circuit of twenty-eight days found a natural division
into four weeks of seven days each, the basis of a thirteen-month lunar year,
or 364 days. Here was the meat for a veritable feast of mythological and numerological
revelry. Man is founded, we have seen, on a natural basic structure composed
of the four elements, each of which provide the substrate for one of his four
bodies. His upper three principles rest on these four. Man is a spiritual triangle
resting on a natural quadrilateral - the Pyramid. Each one of the four elemental
strata is itself subdivided (Page 532) into seven sub-planes. Hence man’s foundation
is numerically a fourfold seven, or four times seven, or twenty-eight. In Hindu
literature one finds this distinctly confirmed in a statement which says "the
last of the Buddhas advanced by 28 steps, seven toward each of the four quarters."
Man has thus far established himself on four of the total seven platforms of
the mount, with seven sub-steps to each.
But when the solar
reckoning had supplanted the lunar there was a new basis of division. Thirty
days were taken to the month and these were divided into three decads, or
3 X 10 = 30. This was in conformity with the new constitution of man, presided
over, as he now was, by the solar light as a trinity or triad. The sun of
intellect added its three crowning rays to the seven lower forces, making
the tenfold man, the perfect type. A week on this basis would be composed
of ten days, and three would make the month. Spiritual light is amenable to
the same decomposition as is sunlight in passing through a three-sided medium,
and it goes into seven divisions, which, united with the three primal ones,
make the ten.
The study yields
a sudden and unexpected return on effort expended by revealing to the world
at last the true origin of the superstition of ill luck or sinister influence
attaching to the number thirteen. It was the number of lunar months in the
solar year. This was the year as founded on lunar or feminine determination.
When the father’s part in parenthood came to be known, and the moon’s light
was discovered to come from the hidden father of lights, the great differentiation
between the two sexual hemispheres of humanity became established, with the
ascription of every high and favorable, right and propitious influence to
the spiritual male side, and the ominous, unfavorable, sinister and left-handed
(Latin: sinister means "left-handed") to the material or female. Hence a thirteen-month
year, as the final numerical basis of the new heaven in man’s constitution,
was the accepted sign of everything desirable. Thirteen is sinister, then,
because it was governed by luni-feminine influence, always redolent to the
mythicist of the baser elements of the human frame. "Left" in Latin is "sinister,"
in French it is "gauche," which works into gaucherie, awkwardness.
The moon sent the
hare to tell mankind that as the lunar god died and rose again, so should
mortals also be renewed and rise again. (Page 533) So runs
a tribal tradition of the Khoi-Khoi. They regarded the moon as the deity that
promises man immortality. We would do well to keep a hold on that Khoi-Khoi
suggestion. As with obvious design and precise calculation of times and cycles,
the silvery orb is set in the sky as a perpetual object-lesson to the human
race, a reminder to man that in the darkness of the night of his earthly burial,
the solar light of divinity is still shining gloriously upon him, and shining
more brightly unto the day of perfection. So comprehensive is that allegory
that twenty pages have scarcely sufficed to outline the main facts involved.
When the history written in soli-lunar language on the sky of night is read
once again, a race distracted by loss of fontal wisdom may gain a foothold
for peace and sanity on the ground of the knowledge there revealed.
The light of the
sun on the moon shows spirit transfiguring body. And this nocturnal stage-play
is far from being merely allegorical. The final word of crowning moment in the
whole presentation of solar symbolism has not yet been spoken. At the heart
of every living organism is a nucleus of solar light and energy. That is the
sublime beginning of knowledge. Half of the task of liberating the modern mind
from its hangover of medieval darkness will be achieved by the propagation anew
of that fountain truth. But the still unuttered word that will complete the
enfranchisement of thought from its present shackles has been hidden away amid
the neglected pages of Neo-Platonic literature. From that grave of oblivion
we drag it forth and set it beside the other luminous fact so that the two may
be seen as the twin lights of the modern renaissance of wisdom. The light of
the sun has been proclaimed as the essence of the deity within us. The sunlight
on the moon has been heralded as the symbol of our growing Godhood. How infinitely
more it is than essence and symbol, and how much closer sun-worship has been
to truth than modern superciliousness has ever dreamed, is disclosed in the
short but mighty sentence of Proclus:
"The
light of the sun is the pure energy of intellect."[The Six Books of
Proclus on the Theology of Plato, II, p. 148. ]
Here is the vital
link of knowledge, long missing, that has been needed to join matter with spirit,
nature with God, science with religion, and mind with the universe. For if,
then, there is a nucleus of radiant light at the core of every life, the long
puzzle as to how (Page 534) mind
became introduced into body is indeed solved. That unquenchable spark of intense
light glowing at the center of all life is itself the pure energy of intellect!
The body does not generate intellect; intellect is the force that generates
the body! The Faerie Queen has intimated that soul shapes the body’s form over
its own inner model. Matter and mind are never found disjoined, for mind is
the primal energy and builds a body to be its instrument in this arena of life.
The substance, or body, of any organic unit is only an accretion of matter about
a fiery nucleus, itself nonphysical, which is mind itself. Mind is the energy
of solar light; or solar light is the effect of mental energy. Can we imagine
the stupendous power of that thinking energy of cosmic Mind which engenders
a light like that of the sun! Mind is the core and cornerstone of every creature.
Its light is blinded in lower orders, but shines forth in men and gods. Here
is the beginning of wisdom and the re-beginning of religion. Could Christians
have been persuaded to understand and accept their own Bible, this matter would
have been established long ago. For the Psalms (84) stated this truth to an
uncomprehending world centuries ago: "The Lord God is a sun. . . ." Nor less
has the New Testament given witness to the same truth, for it has proclaimed
that the son of the Father of Lights is the "sun of righteousness, risen with
healing in his wings." The face of Jesus did "shine as the sun" in his transfiguration;
and the ultimate promise given to sincere mortals is that at the end of earthly
struggle, with victory won,--"then shall the righteous shine like the sun in
the kingdom of their Father." (Page 535)
Chapter
XXI
AT
THE EAST OF HEAVEN
The human drama
ends with the sunrise of Easter. The voyage across the underworld sea by night
terminates on the rim of the eastern horizon at break of Easter light. The
somber cross turns into the garlanded maypole of Merry Mount. The ark shrine
of Horus reaches at last that other shore, and its enthralled crew disembarks,
to take at last that other boat, the majestic ship of Ra, beginning its voyage
across the crystal sea. The door of the cabin is flung wide open to let the
King of Glory emerge. He advances amid the joyous acclaim of gods and men
as they hail him who has arisen victorious over the underworld.
To limn the reality
of that experience is beyond the power of language. This fact explains indeed
why the ancients did not attempt to describe it. They strove to present it
under forms of typology that would impress the mind through subtle powers
of suggestion not open to language. All religious ceremonial grew out of typal
operations which wrought their influence through the hidden potencies of sound
and rhythm. And long contemplation of zoötypes and living natural symbols
of truth produced repercussions in psychic awakening and vivid realization
that may well be regarded as magical. The continued consideration of any living
embodiment of truth will achieve a transformation into a new birth of spiritual
vision and a liberation of currents of power not dreamed of before. If we
are to effectuate some measure of this release of latent efficacy, we must
revive the ancient figurative typology. We must align truth once again with
natural processes, so as to view it under the forms of its endorsement by
outward reality. The human psyche, tortured too long under the strain of sheer
unsupported faith, will leap forward in gladness if again it can find the
proffered truths of religion cast in harmony with living veracity. The outer
world is itself living mind come to view in its own (Page 536) formations,
which must then be the veridical images of truth. In conformity with this
axiom the effort must now be made to portray the later phases of the arc of
the human cycle, in which the soul undergoes processes that find vivid analogues
in the realm of lower nature.
The soul or god in
man has been represented as in actuality the foetus of a great divine being
in the womb of earthly nature and individually in the body of each human, awaiting
delivery. The task of evolution in the human round is to bring this embryo to
the consummation of its prenatal period, and to give it birth at last into the
kingdom of the celestials. Birth is delivery from some womb. Matter is the mother
of the gods and the body of physical man is the womb of the god who is struggling
to come to being in it. It groans and travails in pain until the Christ is formed
within it. All nature is in labor to generate the mind principle. Paul says
that "even we ourselves groan within ourselves," waiting for our redemption
through the new birth. The Apostle adds that the body is the temple of the living
God, and emphasizes that "the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are" (I
Cor. 3:17). With all this direct force of literal statement to empower his utterance,
a stupid world has never yet seemed to grasp that Paul was delineating an actual
physiological fact. He fairly shrieks at our dullness with the cry: "Know ye
not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is within you?"
One of the variety
of natural symbols under which the sages pictured the generation of the embryo
god was that of "germination." We have seen how pointedly the seed in the
ground was employed to type this new birth. Germination was a vivid mirror
of an inner experience.
Budge, in his introductory
treatise to the Book of the Dead, writes that the Egyptians conceived the sahu,
or spiritual body, the ka, or double, the ba, or soul, the ab, or heart, the
khu, or shining spirit, the sekhem, or vital force, the ren, or name, and the
khabit, or shade, all as coming forth into existence after death. With no better
conception of what was meant by "death" than the scholastics have had, it would
be assumed on the basis of this interpretation that man has none but his physical
organism while living, and that the various higher bodies come into being after
his demise. But these inner bodies are vital to the very existence of the physical,
and must subsist with it. Man is on earth to bring these subtle bodies into
development, for they can not evolve without the solar essence resident in the
core of the bodily cells (Page 537) to
furnish them their texture of light. They readily interpenetrate the coarser
bodies and subsist on them. What is to be understood as the coming forth of
these bodies after death, as formulated by Budge, is the fact that at the consummation
of the long series of lives- which are themselves the "death" spoken of, these
bodies, having been born, formed and matured within the womb of the outer body,
then step forth through the rent in the veil, the opened tomb door, and float
free of their old mother-womb, or "birdcage of the soul." The ones below the
body of immortal essence, disintegrate in turn, to be nucleated again about
the new physical body of the next generation. The higher ones persist intact
through the "Flood" of dissolution and return to embodiment. But these bodies
are not fully formed and perfected until after many "deaths," and it is their
final liberation at the termination of the climactic life in flesh that the
seers of old are commenting upon. Budge concludes his statement by saying that
"it seems that the various ethereal bodies which we have enumerated together
made up the spiritual body, which ‘germinated’ in the khat, or material body."
The Ritual (Ch.
56) gives this utterance of the Manes: "I keep watch over the egg of Kenken-Ur
(the Great Cackler); I germinate as it germinateth; I live as it liveth, and
my breath is its breath." And in Chapter 64 he says:
"I hide with the
god Ala-aaiu, who will walk behind me, and my members shall germinate and
my khu shall be as an amulet for my body and as one who watcheth to protect
my soul and to defend it and to converse therewith; . . ."
In chapter 129,
the book of making perfect the Khu, it is stated that "the goddess Menqet
shall make plants to germinate upon his body; . . ." And in chapter 165, called
significantly the "chapter of arriving in port," the text to be recited is
designed to "make the body germinate, and to drink water and not disappear."
The prayer to be recited pleads as follows: "Grant thou that all his members
may repose in Neter-khertet (the underworld) . . . let his whole body become
like that of a god." The sequence of the phrases indicates that the sprouting
of the seed of divinity in the body was integrally a part of the process of
becoming like a god.
In the "chapter
of making the transformation into the bennu bird," Nu saith: (Page 538)
"I am
come into being from unformed matter. I come into existence like the god Khepera;
I have germinated like things which germinate (i.e., plants) and I have dressed
myself like the tortoise. I am the germs of every god . . . I have come by
day and I have risen in the footsteps of the gods."
The doctrine of
the "virgin birth" as from "unformed matter" is concisely stated in the first
sentence, and the germination of every god is clearly asserted. The roots
of the profoundest of all Christian doctrines can be discerned in these Egyptian
discourses.
Germination parallels
closely the other symbol of "quickening" touched on earlier. Sent to die in
matter, the latent power of the seed bestirs itself in the tomb, and sends
out its first tendrils to take hold of the soil below, and others to woo the
air above. It begins at once to "cultivate the crops on both sides of the
horizon," the upper and lower worlds, simultaneously. This is indeed a graphic
picture of how life reaches both upwards and downwards, linking two kingdoms.
It must root itself in the lower in order to get a firm hold to aspire upward.
Without its rootage in the soil below it could not evolve the organism by
which it reaches aloft to air and sun. Out of the cruder elements of the underworld
it absorbs the material which the magic power of the sun is able to transmute
into finer body, crowning the whole with the soul of beauty and glory in the
flower at the summit. Germination is the analogue of man’s life in every general
aspect and in many minor particulars. Our souls must germinate in the khat
or physical body, and the transaction is one of the larger regenerations undergone
by the incarnate Ego, as described by the students of the past.
Germination is
a step antecedent and preparatory to emergence from the buried state of any
seed, earthly or celestial. It is introductory to the resurrection, to a more
realistic appreciation of which one can best be led through the gate of the
mighty Kamite wisdom. The sacred books of Egypt deal mainly with the two segments
of the arc of life, embodiment in flesh and resurrection therefrom. The first
chapter of the Book of the Dead deals with the resurrection, and the title
of this great antique script is itself but a term for the resurrection: The
Coming Forth by Day. The title obviously refers to the coming of a living
entity out of some state of darkness and imprisonment into the light of day
and freedom. It is the book of the resurrection of the "dead." (Page 539)
It is
the book for the living "dead" on earth. It has little reference to the experiences
or conditions beyond the grave. It concerns the birth, burial, incubation,
baptism, purgation, circumcision, temptation, crucifixion; the bleeding, the
shame, the nakedness, the suffering; and then the quickening, germination,
rebirth, reconstitution and final transfiguration and resurrection of the
divine-human psyche in this life.
Lewis Spence very
justly, amid his complete misconception of Egyptian mythology, states:
"It is probable
that the name had a significance for the Egyptians which is incapable of being
rendered in any modern language, and this is borne out by another of its (sub)-titles--"The
chapter of making perfect the Khu’ (or spirit). Osiris had now become the
god of the dead par excellence, and his dogma taught that from the preserved
corpse would spring a beautiful astral body, the future home of the spirit
of the deceased."
The only real difficulty
in rendering the name in other languages, however, has been the complete ignorance
of the reversed meaning of the word "death." Naturally enough the translation
and the sense would seem to be complicated with difficulties when nothing
of the cosmic history of the soul, the evolutionary states from and into which
it is to be resurrected, and other basic data, are known. Difficulty vanishes
when these fundamenta are taken into account.
The name--"Coming
forth by day"--demands a moment’s scrutiny. The question arises as to just what
the Egyptians mean by "day." Is it the "day" of our life here in body or the
brighter "day" that follows this life? Is the coming forth to be reckoned as
from the darkness of nonexistence into this life, or as from the darkness of
earth into the bright "day" of celestial being? With all its bright sunshine
and vivid sense of reality, this life is still the dark night of the soul, the
twilight of the gods, the burial in death and hell. The coming forth by day
then must refer to the final transfer of the imprisoned soul from this darkness
to the Elysian meadows of supernal delight. This interpretation is inherent
in every implication of the great mass of typology.
A statement from
Massey is interpolated here because it repeats so faithfully the typical language
of Egyptian texts:
"Resurrection in
the Ritual is the coming forth to day (Peri-em-heru) whether from the life
on earth, or to the life attainable in the heaven of eternity. [Why not both?--we
ask.] The first resurrection is, as it were, (Page 540) an
ascension from the tomb in the nether earth by means of the secret doorway.
But this coming forth is in, not from, Amenta, after the burial in the upper
earth. He issues from the valley of darkness and the shadow of death." [Ancient
Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 210. ]
The reader will
doubtless share our own inability to assign definite location to Massey’s
"nether earth" and "upper earth." They were terms hit upon by him to go on
talking without committing himself to anything definitely meaningful. As locations
they are perfectly pointless and fictional, in his usage. Nether and upper
earth are the two realms of man’s nature, and surely in his resurrection he
rises out of or from the lower and ascends into the upper. If Amenta is this
life and not some semi-ghostly existence after demise, then the resurrection
must be from Amenta into heaven. But if a prisoner is released from a cell
his release at least starts in the cell. So our resurrection is both in and
from Amenta, and to a kingdom above. It must be described as in and from this
life to a higher. Yet in reality it is an apotheosis in consciousness which
plays havoc with the strict sense of in, from and to. Three dimensional directions
become synthesized in a new direction on the plane above this type of consciousness.
Our arising then is from lower to higher state of being.
We call the Ritual
itself to witness the correctness of the exegesis. In the Rubric to chapter
18 directions are given: "Now if this chapter be recited over him, he shall
come forth upon earth and shall escape from every fire." What could be more
explicit? Not less decisive is the chapter 64 title: "The chapter of coming
forth by day in the underworld." The soul is itself hailed as "Lord of the
shrine that standeth in the middle of the earth." And again definiteness is
seen in the title to chapter 188: "Chapter of the coming in of the soul to
build an abode and to come forth by day in human form." This might at first
glance seem to be a denial of the resurrection in a spiritual body; yet it
is not. Massey himself understood this clearly. He writes:
"But the individual
is shown to persist [after demise] in human form. He comes forth by day and
is living after death in the figure, but not as the mummy, that he wore on
earth."
"Also
the ka-image of man the immortal is portrayed in the likeness of man the mortal.
The human form is never lost to view through all the phantasmagoria of transformation."[
Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 210.] (Page 541)
Though
a spirit and no longer a mortal, Jesus came forth from the grave in human
form. As Massey well says, the resurrected Manes appears in the figure of,
but not as, the mummy or earth body. The soul steps forth in a garment that
has the form but not the substance of physical man. Why? Because the outer
physical form was in the first place shaped over the mold of that inner invisible
body. When the latter has divested itself of the former, it appears in its
original and characteristic shape.
The Manes asserts
that he rises as "a god amongst men," which must be on earth. The resurrecting
entity was styled "he who cometh forth from the dusk and whose birth is in
the house of death"--which is the physical body. Chapter 65 bears further
succinct testimony: "Behold me, I am born and I come forth in the form of
a living Khu, and the human beings who are upon the earth ascribe praise unto
me." He must be where human beings can perceive him to render him this praise.
It may fall with
disconcerting effect upon religionists who so sharply differentiate between
Old and New Testaments to be told that the Old Testament exodus is identical
in meaning with the New Testament resurrection! To be sure, it is set forth
under vastly different forms of typology in the two versions. The Hebrew representation
perhaps also depicts the entire scope of the cycle rather than just the concluding
or climactic stage of it. Massey’s words will make this clear:
"Thus the origin
of the exodus, as Egyptian, was in the coming forth of the heavenly bodies
from below the horizon as the mythical representation. This was followed by
the coming forth of the Manes from dark to day, from death to life, from bondage
to liberty, from Lower Egypt to Upper Egypt in the eschatology."[Ancient
Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 639. ]
The exodus, he
says, is the experience of the Manes in making their journey through, and
their exit from, Amenta.
Luke’s "multitude
of the heavenly host praising God" fills also the Book of the Dead with celestial
chorus: "They rejoice at his beautiful coming forth from the womb of Nut,"
or, as it might be rendered, the womb of Meri (Mary), for Meri is another
name for the Mother-heaven. And as the glory appeared to the shepherds in
such effulgence that they were sore afraid, so "the coming forth to day is
attended by (Page 542) a
great flood of light that emanated from the solar glory and enveloped him
entirely." When Horus has revived his dead father, he says: "I am Horus on
this fair day at the beautiful coming forth of thy powers, who lifteth thee
up with himself on this fair day as thine associate god." Chapters 2 and 3
provide that the deceased may come forth in the underworld and "live after
he hath died, even as doth Ra day by day." And chapter 72 says that he may
"come forth by day in all the forms which he pleaseth to take." "He sails
over heaven . . . he arrives at the high place of heaven . . . the storm winds
of heaven bear him along and present him to Ra." The Manes is told: "Thy soul
flieth up on high to meet the soul of the gods . . ." The famous Hymn to Ra
is sung "when he [Ani] riseth in the eastern part of heaven."
It is likely that
the "two men in white apparel" in the Acts (I:10) who say to the disciples,
"Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing into heaven?" are the Gospel counterparts
of the two sons of Atum, Hu and Sa, who attend their father in his resurrection
in the Egyptian scene.
In Job (25:14)
it is asked: "How can man be clean that is born of a woman?" The resurrection
followed the cleansing from earthly dross. The Manes prays that the solar
glory should shine upon him and that "no pollution of my mother be upon me."
He hopes to fare across the miry lake with no stains of base defilement clinging
to him. The Speaker in the Ritual is desirous of making his transformation
into the glorious body of light which is at the opposite pole of manifestation
from that earthy body that was engendered by the blood of the mother. At the
apex of his triumph he must have sloughed off every last vestige of earthly
taint if his radiance is to shine undimmed.
The coming forth
implicates certain theological considerations that must be scanned. It is not
the same as the "coming" which is involved in the Messianic advent. The Egyptian
Amen seems to be derived from Amenu, "to come." He was that aspect of Ra whose
emergence upon earth brought the deific fire to man. This was the coming of
divinity to earth, yet hardly its coming forth upon earth. They are an inceptive
and a concluding phase, however, of the same large movement. The one begins,
the other ends, the cycle of mortal life. The seed comes into the soil and then
comes forth from it. A human comes on the day of his birth, yet he only comes
in his adulthood when a man. And in a larger sense the whole of his life (Page
543) is his coming to whatever
he is to be. So with the theological "coming"; it is not completed until its
final act is consummated. The god has not fully come until his resurrection.
The coming Son is not only the Messiah whose advent is celebrated at Christmas,
but is as well the buried lord rearising at Easter.
For many thousands
of years before Christ, the prototype of all coming saviors was the Egyptian
Iusa. The name is from Iu (Ia, Ie, Io or Ja, Je, Jo, Ju), the original name
of biune divinity, combined with the Egyptian suffix sa (or se, si, su, or saf,
sef, sif, suf), meaning, with the grammatical masculine "f," the male heir,
son, successor, or prince. Iusa then means the son of the divine father Iu (Ju-piter,
"father god"), or the son of Ihuh (Jehovah). He was Iu, coming as the su, or
son. His mother in the Atum cult was Iusaas. He was God the son, the prince,
the heir. He was the original of all Jesus figures, of whom there are some twenty
or more by the name of Jesus (Joshua, Jesse, Joses, Hosea, Isaiah, Isaac, Esau,
Josiah, Joash, Jehoaz, Jehoahaz, Job, Jonah, Joel and others) both in the Old
Testament and outside of it. Samson, Saul and Solomon are prior types of Jesus,
all bearing the solar character in their name. Iusa, Solomon and Jesus were
all temple builders. Iusa was the divine modeler of the spiritual temple, and
an inscription says that the temple of Edfu was "restored as it is in the book
of the model composed by Prince Iusa, eldest son of Ptah." He was Iu-em-hetep
(Imhotep, Imothes) of a later cult. He was that seventh principle that came
to bring peace (Hetep) by fusing and reducing to harmony the lower six powers
which were anarchic until the advent of the Prince of Peace to subjugate them.
The seventh principle is the savior and redeemer of creation. The Manes says:
"I am one of those to whom it is said, Come, come, in peace, by those who look
upon him"--that is, the company of the gods. He says again in Chapter 25, the
"chapter of giving a heart to Osiris in the underworld:" "My soul shall not
be fettered to my body at the gates of the underworld; but I shall enter in
peace and I shall come forth in peace." These and similar phrases of promise
are to be fulfilled on that great day, the name of which is itself significant
- the day of "Come thou to me," or "the day of ‘Come unto us,’" or "Come thou
hither." This was to be the opening day of the resplendent new creation. Revelation
speaks of the same grand inaugural: "The spirit and the bride say (Page 544)
‘Come’!" (Ch.
20:11). Spirit and matter, calling from the horizon, bid us come to the crowning.
The natural man,
first Adam, the race’s ancient half-animal progenitors, prepared the way and
saluted and announced the coming one. The Manes cries: "Let the fathers and
their apes make way for me, that I may enter the Mount of Glory, where the great
ones are" (Ch. 136B). The ape typed the pre-solar morning star that announced
the coming of the human sun, and the morning star is one of the seven rewards
promised to him that overcometh. The morning star (at one time) was Sothis,
the watchdog that barked to announce the coming of the Daystar from on high,
as the ape clicked at the rising sun.
In the beginning
of the cycle, "the god comes to his body"; in the end Horus exclaims: "I have
come to an end for the lord of heaven, I rest at the table of my father Osiris."
This immediately precedes his piercing the veil of the tabernacle and coming
forth as the divine hawk or soul.
A quite instructive
statement stands at the end of the "chapter by which the soul of Osiris is
perfected in the bosom of Ra":
"By this book the
soul of the deceased shall make its exodus with the living and prevail amongst,
or as, the gods. By this book he shall know the secrets of that which happened
in the beginning. No one else has ever known this mystical book or any part
of it. It has not been spoken by men. No eye hath deciphered it. No ear hath
heard of it. It must only be seen by thee and the man who unfolded its secrets
to thee. Do not add to its chapters or make commentaries on it from the imagination
or from memory. Carry it out in the judgment hall. This is a true Mystery
unknown anywhere to those who are uninitiated." (Rubric to Chapter 149, Birch).
It is singular
that Paul (Ephesians 3:3 ff) speaks in quite similar terms of a mystery made
known to him "which in other ages was not made known unto the sons of men;
as it is now revealed unto his holy apostles and prophets by the spirit"--that
the Gentiles should be fellow-heirs and partakers of the promise of Christhood.
It would seem, then, that the great aeonial mystery of this portion of the
universe was the coming of the solar deities to link with the animal races
and lift them up. This is the theme of our book. It is for men the greatest
of all mysteries, since it is the mystery of his own being. We, unspiritualized,
are the Gentiles. (Page 545)
As the
heir of Seb, Horus says that he was suckled at the breast of Isis, the spouse
of Seb, "who gave him his theophanies," or manifestations (Rit., Ch. 82).
"Horus on earth lies down to embrace the old man who keeps the light of earth,
and who is Seb, the earth-father" (Ch. 84). It is notable here that it is
Seb, earth-power, that gives to undeveloped solar intelligence, its "theophanies"
or actualization in concrete worlds.
The Messianic Son
came ever as the manifester and witness for the father, who had sunk his life
in matter to reproduce himself in his next generation. According to Herodotus
(2:43) the Egyptian Jesus with the title of Iu-em-hetep was one of the eight
great gods who were in the papyri twenty thousand years ago! He bore a different
name according to the cult. To the sages of old time the coming was a constantly
recurring and only typical event. The ancient Messiah was a representative
figure coming from age to age, cycle to cycle. He came "each day" in the Ritual;
he came periodically; he came "regularly and continuously." He came once through
the cycle; but his solar and lunar and natural types came cyclically and in
eternal renewal. The Egyptian Messiah was one whose historical coming was
not expected at any date, at any epoch. The type of his coming was manifest
in some phenomenon repeated as often as the day, the year, or the lunation
came around. The constant repetition of type was the assurance of its unfailing
fulfillment. For the ancients, the idea of a fulfillment "once for all" would
have been to accept the possibility of stopping dead the march of the universe.
And for one to be saved in a final sense for all eternity, would have been
to drop out of step with the rhythmic pulse of life. To them salvation meant
to consummate the present step or cycle and keep marching on with nature.
Viciously the corrupt notion has undermined the wholesome spirit of natural
progress, that one may attain final bliss and drop out of the movement of
life into eternal rest. It is a fatuity, and it has partly paralyzed the instinctive
sympathy between man and his world of nature. We have torn our life asunder
from its basic symphonic relation to the seasons and the elements, and lost
thereby our sensitiveness to currents of subtle force that were designed to
carry us onward.
The coming was
taking place in the life of every man at all times. Each man had his evolutionary
solstice, his Christmas; and he would have his Easter. The symbols were annuals;
the actual events they (Page 546) typed
in mankind’s history were perennials. In nature every process is but typical
and repetitive. But it is typical of all other process and of life in its
entirety.
Horus, a form of
Iu-em-hetep, was not an individual historical person. For he says: "I am Horus,
the Prince of Eternity." Jesus was with the Father before the foundation of
the worlds. Horus calls himself "the persistent traveler on the highways of
heaven," and "the everlasting one." "I am Horus who steppeth onward through
eternity." Here is wisdom to nourish the mind and lead it out of its infantile
stage into maturity of view. Horus declares himself forever above the character
of a time-bound personage, an indestructible spirit that advances onward through
one embodiment after another to endless days. He is the Ancient of Days, who
eternally renews himself in cycle after cycle. Let moderns ponder his other
mighty pronouncement: "I am a soul, and my soul is divine. It is the self-originating
force." It can perpetually renew itself, entering the womb of its mother,
wife, sister, Isis, mother-nature, to be born again and again.
His career in any
life cycle was typified by the ancients under the phases of the rolling year.
Being himself the sun-god, his life was analogous to the sun’s movements round
its cycle. He was born or baptized in the water signs below and rebaptized
in the air and fire signs above the horizon. His typical reign was the period
of one year! This was "the acceptable year of the Lord." Tradition has carried
the legend of a one-year ministry. The Gnostics Ptolemaeus and Herakleon,
as well as the two great Christian philosophers Clement and Origen, held the
view of a reign of Jesus that lasted one year.
The ancients used
other cycles than the solar year to represent the comings of the perennial
traveler. One was the Great Year of 25,868 years, during which the sun traversed
the entire twelve signs of the zodiac in the precession of the equinoxes.
A lesser one was a twelfth of this year, or the cycle of one sign, 2155 years.
Another was the "house of a thousand years," which was calculated to mean
fourteen average lifetimes of 71 years each, 994 years. A surprising reference
to the division or cycle of fourteen generations is found in Matthew (I:17),
where those who may dispute the significance of the number fourteen will find
themselves forced to reckon with it again:
"So all the generations
from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; and from David until the carrying
away into Babylon (Page 547) are fourteen generations;
and from the carrying away into Babylon unto Christ are fourteen generations."
Even if this statement
matched no facts of veridical history, it marks a specific cycle of fourteen
generations, and once more the Bible is found to hold to "pagan" usages. The
Magi, the Zoroastrians, Chaldeans, Jews, Gnostics, Essenes and others kept
the reckonings of the great religious cycles that were astronomical from the
first. There were the Phoenix Cycle of 500 years and the great Cycle of Neros
of 600; also the Egyptian Sothiac Cycle of 1461 years. The 1260 "days" of
Revelation became the basis of another measurement.
Horus, Iusa, Iu-em-hetep
and the Jesus of the "Infancy" Gospels all wrought miracles of resurrection
in their childhood. At three years of age Iusa performed the wonder of making
a dead fish (Pisces, the house of the birth of Christs) come to life (Latin
Gospel of Thomas, Bk. 3, Ch. I). At five years of age he takes clay and molds
twelve sparrows, which he commanded to fly, and not in vain. Here is a beautiful
little allegory of bringing the dead divinity to life in twelve aspects of
evolving intelligence. Papias emphatically declares that the Gospels originated
in the Logia, or Sayings of Mu, or Ma. Mythoi were also Ma-ti (-ti being an
Egyptian plural ending). Mati, the goddess of the Hall of the Two Truths or
the equipoise of truth, would be the deity who uttered the true sayings or
Logia. Research discloses that all the salient features of the life and character
of Jesus were anticipated in the person of Horus, including the virgin motherhood,
the divine sonship, the miracles, the self-immolation, the compassion, the
discourses, the resurrection and a host of minor particulars. Egypt was the
cradle of the Jesus figure, and in that cradle lay Iusa and Iu-em-hetep, Khunsu
and Horus, Amsu, Khepr and Aten, all resurrected sons of dead fathers. In
a sense both humorously and ironically unsuspected, the proclamation of the
God of Christendom has been true: "Out of Egypt have I called my son." God
sent his sons into this "Egypt" of the flesh-pots to gain what such an experience
alone could yield; but in the turn of the cycle he called them home to him.
The coming of the
ancient Christs was not historical. They did not come as persons, but as principles.
Being spiritual light, their coming is in the form of an intenser glowing,
as man feeds their flame with truth and love. They are the fire that burns
with unquenchable (Page 548) persistence
and gradually transforms the body itself into more ethereal substance. They
come to transubstantiate the body that is host to them. These processes were
embodied in several theological doctrines, which have become misread, misconceived
and disastrously misapplied, through their ascription to the lone experience
of one man.
There was the basic
doctrine of transubstantiation. In the performance of the Mystery ritual an
actual transformation might take place in more or less ample measure. Always
there was the release of a psychic force through the powerfully suggestive
nature of the rites and symbols. Symbolic ceremony need not stop at the portals
of the mind, but might, through repetition, penetrate to the seat of the deeper
consciousness and effect a liberation of latent power. Sincere performance
of the ceremony might bring surprising repercussions in the organism. Continued
cultivation of the presence and power of the god would gradually transmute
baser elements into spiritual gold, and end by elevating one to the rank and
number of the gods.
The god himself,
fallen into carnal mire, buried and inert, had to be raised and restored to
sound condition. As he awakened his faculties and sloughed off the imprisoning
vesture of decay, it was as if every member of his body was resuscitated and
made over. He is to come forth as a god in the form of a man. It is the mystery
of life that he was to realize his latent divinity in the lower manger of
the mortal body. It is said of him: "The secret dwelling is in darkness in
order that the transformation of this god may take place." The seed must germinate
in the dark earth. Not only the beetle, but the tadpole, the moth, the serpent,
the human foetus, the boy at puberty, all were images of the great transformation
which should at some late day metamorphose the man into the god. This work
is gradual and is accomplished piecemeal. The god finds his glorification
coming day by day, feature by feature; he is reconstituted limb by limb, member
by member, until he says there is no part of him that remains mortal. He is
given the hair of Nu or heaven (solar rays); the eyes of Hathor; the ears
of Apuat; the nose of Khenti-Kas; the lips of Anup; the teeth of Serkh; the
neck of Isis; the hands of the mighty lord of Tattu; the shoulders of Neith;
the back of Sut; the phallus of Osiris; the legs and thighs of Nut; the feet
of Ptah; and the nails and bones of the living Uraei "until there is not a
limb of him that is without a god." "My leg-bones are the leg-bones of the
living gods. (Page 549) There is no member
of my body that is not a member of some god. I am Yesterday, and Seer of Millions
of Years is my name." Here is notice to man that he must traverse every kingdom
in order that he may absorb and embody in himself every aspect of nature’s
power, the efficacy of every god. Mighty truth is this.
In the Gospels
this reconstitution is hinted at in the passage in which the acceptable year
of the Lord is announced, when the Messiah shall preach recovery of sight
to "the blind" and bind up the "brokenhearted." Horus goes "wherever there
lieth a wreck in the field of eternity." This reminder is announced with joy:
"Hail, Osiris!
Horus makes thee to be joined to the gods. . . . He brings to thee the gods
in a body. None among them escapes from his hand. Horus loves thee more than
his own offspring, he unites thee to those of his own body. Horus makes his
Ka to be in thee. . . . He makes a spirit to be in thee."
And the Manes again
is hailed:
"Ho, Ho! thou art
raised up! Thou hast received thy head, thou hast embraced thy bones, thou
hast collected thy flesh, thou hast searched the earth for thy body."
Here is strong
assertion again that man is to summarize in himself the qualities of the whole
scale of being, denominated gods. All their powers and virtue have to be embodied
in man’s organic wholeness to make him, like the resuscitated Osiris, "Neb-er-ter,
the god entire." Every member of the old Atum, deceased and defunct, had to
be fashioned anew in a fresh creation. Like a person recovering from amnesia,
he had to recollect his former knowledge, reassemble the component elements
of his dismembered integrity. He was so long the lifeless mummy he had forgotten
to walk; so long mute he had forgotten how to speak. "Let me," he says, "come
forth to day and walk upon my legs. Let me have the feet of the glorified."
He says again: "I have come myself and delivered the god from great pain and
suffering that were in trunk and shoulder and leg. I have come and healed
the trunk and fastened the shoulder and made firm the leg." He remembers his
name. A new heart is given him. His jaws are parted, his eyes reopened. Power
is given to his arms, the constricting bandages being removed by Horus-Amsu,
the freer of the (Page 550) arm.
He is no longer bound to the khat at the gate of Amenta. Clad in bright new
vesture, his Easter morning finery, he prepares to take passage on board the
boat of the sun. "Behold me," he exclaims; "I have come to you and have carried
off and put together my forms." Perfected in his unified septenary nature,
he is ready to ascend to the Father in his original glory. For he has prayed
that the Father may give unto him that glory which he had with him from the
creation of the world. He has been told that he may behold his Ka. This was
that soul that came forth from the hand of God at the beginning of his individual
career, was in attendance on him all life through as a genius or daemon, and
reabsorbed the lower personality to itself at the dissolution of the various
elements. When honors were paid to a Pharaoh, offerings were made to his Ka,
not to his mortal self, which could not be permanent.
In the Seventh
Book of Hermes, which is entitled "His secret sermon in the Mount of regeneration
and the profession of silence," Hermes instructs Taht in the nature of the
"tabernacle of the zodiacal circle." There is often more enlightenment in
an Egyptian phrase or name than in whole works on theology. Peter wished,
we are told, to build three tabernacles on the Mount, one for Jesus, one for
Moses and one for Elias. These must be taken for the three spiritual aspects
of the solar triad. But Hermes then defines the transfiguration in terms of
a philosophy of superior wisdom. "This is regeneration, O son, that we should
not any longer fix our imagination upon the body, subject to the three dimensions."
To Horus it is
said: "Thou dost renew thy youth"; and his rising to life is declared to make
men and women alive. "I went in as a hawk," he sings; "I came out as a phoenix"--that
is, transformed. Says Job: "I shall die in my nest, and I shall multiply my
days like the phoenix." "My transformations are those of the double god, Horus-Set"
(Ch. 180). He became "the lord of both parts," with the atonement made. Jesus
in matter and the Christ in spirit are identical with the two Horus phases.
In the Gnostic writings the two meet in Tattu and blend in the mystery of
a divine union. They unite in one divine soul "which dwelleth in the place
of establishing a soul that is to live forever" (Ch. 17). The scene of this
transformation, as in the case of the Buddha, is beneath the tree; the tree
of dawn; the tamarisk, persea, olive or sycamore-fig. Horus reborn as the
sun of morning says: (Page 551) "I am the
babe. I am the god within the tamarisk tree" (Ch. 42). Chapter 84 of the Ritual
is that "of making the transformation into a heron":
"I have gotten
dominion over the beasts that are brought for sacrifice. . . . I have set
the gods upon their paths . . . the light is beyond your knowledge and yet
cannot fetter it; the times and seasons are in my body."
To know of a certainty
that with all our stupidity we can not fetter the light, is a truth that should
be republished and pondered by an age intent only upon outward accomplishment
and heedless of the light within.
The soul is rescued
from animal incarnation when it consummates its Easter. We are indeed blind
if we fail to catch the significance of the animal typology of the zodiac. Massey
informs us that it was not more than three or four centuries since in England
the zodiac was called "the Bestiary." The sun was represented as passing through
a series of animal forms. This is of Egyptian origin. Horus in the Pool of Persea
made his transformation into the cat, the lion, the hawk and the phoenix, the
heron and the swallow, each a type of a stage of progression - for deeply recondite
reasons. The soul transforms into the various animals, fishes, birds; and his
emphatic words are to the effect that he becomes these animals. He crawls as
a serpent, burrows as a mole, sees in the dark of death as a cat or owl or hare,
swims the water as a fish, hibernates as a bear, follows the lost spiritual
scent in the night as a dog, fox or jackal (Anup), divides his nature like the
ape, floats on the water of life like a swan, undergoes transformations like
a beetle and breaks his eggshell like a chick. The passage of the sun through
the bestial signs was depicted as a series of transformations denoted by the
signs. The Manes says: "I establish myself forever in my transformations that
I choose." As he was to sum and unify the total powers of the living kingdoms,
he was to gather up in his journey through earth the typical qualities and nature
of every animal, and transform them into their spiritual form. He was thus to
become king over nature, and the angels from their seats would envy him. In
John’s and Ezekiel’s visions he was to rule the gods of the four corners of
life’s temple, the lion, eagle, bull and animal man. He was to convert animality
into divinity.
The misty specter
of an unsolved problem in anthropology arises here to twit us with our ignorance.
Totemism is the most perplexing (Page 552) riddle
of archaeology, and in want of a single decisive datum to elucidate it we have
ascribed it to "primitive superstition," our most convenient limbo into which
to consign a thing we can not solve. By this resort we do but pit modern superstition
against ancient knowledge. So far as can be discerned, there has been hardly
a single word uttered by learned anthropologists or sociologists that betrays
the slightest hint of an approach to solid ground as to the rationale of Totemism.
An institution that was worldwide in prevalence and profound in relation to
social life, is set down as due to nothing more germane to actual life than
caprice of primitive imagination.
But no student
can bring his mind to grips with the implications of Egyptian religion without
confronting the steady insistence of an inference from the old data which,
however incredible it may appear, at least furnishes the first rational or
plausible ground for an understanding of Totemism. Even through the corruption
of originally pure conception can be traced the outline of the profoundest
intimation of evolutionary truth.
Many ancient texts
advance the suggestion that early man and the animals were practically kindred.
Perhaps the central fact of archaic anthropology is the declaration that the
sons of God took incarnation in the bodies of animals. Genesis (6:4) assures
that they had intercourse, in contravention of their demiurgic commission, with
the females of the animal races. Whole groups of the sense-blinded gods may
have taken residence in the bodies of particular species, thus making their
blood cognate with that of the animal in each case. Groups seized upon different
species, and the various animal natures thus became distributed amongst the
incoming humans. The particular animal would be reverenced as the progenitor
of the tribe, the present members of the species would be regarded as brothers,
and except at the sacrificial Eucharist, when the beast’s virtues were to be
incorporated by eating its flesh, its body would be sacrosanct. Oriental ideas
of the inviolability of animal life may spring from such an early conception
of kinship and sanctity. It is certain that the line of division between animal
and human was at the start quite inappreciable. There are legends of interminglings
and cross-breedings without end. As life distributed its manifold qualities
out amid its multiplicity of creatures, and man was to gather them all up and
unify them again under intelligent rule, it is no wild conception to assume
that the sages (Page 553) spread
some knowledge amongst the early races that different tribes were manifesting
the qualities of this or the other animal, which they would transmute to grander
expression when mind wrought its miracle upon them. Whether Totemism commemorated
the incorporation of raw animal quality-germs in man by actual incarnation in
animal forms or by typal representation only, is a matter to be specifically
determined. That the higher aspect of the allegorical rituals may have been
known to but few, or lost entirely for long stretches, does not impugn the validity
of the original meaning. The sharp line of distinction between that which is
purely representative in symbolic act and its esoteric true meaning is easily
transgressed when perception flags and insight grows dull; and idolatry and
superstition are the result when confusion thickens. But man, who exhibits the
results of his incorporation in the animal orders in his tigerish ferocity,
his foxy cunning, his leonine courage, his eel-like slipperiness, his serpent-wise
slyness, his scorpion sting of anger, his sheepish meekness, his dogged pertinacity,
his wolfish rapacity, his catlike stealth, his beaver persistency, his dove-like
dreams of sweet purity, or his phoenix-like aspiration to soar aloft at times
- with his obvious embodiment of the attributes of lower orders within himself
- man may not rationally repudiate the theory of his sometimes kinship with
those grades of life. Man is weaving a pattern composed of the commingled strands
of every species of experience, which must be consciously had to be appropriated.
If there never was at any primordial time a living link with these animal creatures,
then there is a problem of explaining how the obvious parallelism between human
and animal characteristic traits arose. The Ritual of Egypt states that the
"seven Uraeus divinities are my body." This is to say that man’s physical nature
is a compound of the seven natural powers that formulated the material creation.
It must be summed up, then, that man’s composite life is an epitome and codification,
as it were, of all the precedent powers of creation, including the animal traits,
but now sublimated by the mystic and magic operation of the superior solar intelligence
which glows in his brain alone on earth. Totemism would have a very real foundation.
It seems that the
final and climactic episode in the transformation of man into god was considered
in isolation and named the Transfiguration. This majestic initiation is a
harbinger of the resurrection, if not indeed a part of that epochal experience
itself. It is no less splendid. (Page 554)
Much
instruction is gained in reading the account of this great mystery as given
in the Gnostic Pistis Sophia. It is in the first place of tremendous importance
to note that the Transfiguration here follows, not precedes, the resurrection.
For in this and other Apocryphal Gospels it is given that when Jesus had risen
from the dead in his first advent, he passed eleven (or twelve) years speaking
with the disciples and instructing them up to the stage of the first statutes
only (the Lesser Mysteries):
"It came to pass,
therefore, that the disciples were sitting together on the Mount of Olives
speaking of these things, rejoicing with great joy and being exceedingly glad,
and saying one to another, ‘Blessed are we before all men who are on earth,
for the Savior hath revealed this unto us, and we have received all fulness
and all perfection’"--as these had been received likewise upon Mt. Bakhu,
the Egyptian Mount of Olives, in the ascent of Horus from Amenta.
"And while they
were saying these things the one to the other, Jesus sat a little apart from
them. It came to pass, therefore, on the fifteenth day of the month Tybi,
the day of the full moon, on that day when the sun had risen in its going,
that there came forth a great stream of light shining exceedingly. It came
forth from the light of lights. And this stream of light poured over Jesus
and surrounded him. He was seated apart from his disciples and was shining
exceedingly. But the disciples saw not Jesus because of the great light in
which he sat, for their eyes were blinded by the great light." (Mead’s Translation,
p. 4, 5.)
The calendar position
of the Transfiguration on the full moon of Tybi (about December 27 in the
Christian calendar) aligns the event with the Christmas Nativity. This only
indicates that the imagery of an outburst of sun-glory had been intertwined
with the suggestion of "quickening" at the winter solstice. We have seen that
the early Christians celebrated the "birth" on March 25. The full moon can
type nothing but the completion of a process of divinization. This may be
associated with the quickening from inert death at Christmas or with the birth
of full glory at Easter. Let it be established beyond cavil that the varied
imagery of ancient representation comprises many forms of depicting that which
is but one grand event, any critical epoch of which is typal in a measure
of the whole experience. The statement of the disciples that they had "received
the fulness of all perfection" would point to the consummative nature of the
events (Page 555) comprising
the climactic transition from mortal to divine. The fact that the Transfiguration
took place on the Mount of Olives on the east would indicate the culminative
value of it. The eastern mount was the point of departure from earth, all
values won.
The Ritual of Egypt
speaks of the same illuminative power of solar deity: "Horus gives thee the
gods, he makes them come to thee, they illumine thy face." On the Mount of
Transfiguration in the Gospels Jesus’ "face did shine as the sun and his garments
became white as the light." When the deceased mortal climbs out of matter
and approaches the verge of the Paradisical Aarru, or Hetep, "his members
become like those of the gods. He goeth forth pure spirit."
It is to be noted
that this great transaction is described as instantaneous. When in the Ritual
it is stated to Ra that "thy rays are upon all faces," and the transition
into spirit is described, the conclusion is given as follows: "This thou doest
in one little moment of time." Says Evans-Wentz in elucidating the Tibetan
Book of the Dead (p. 168): "In a moment of time a marked differentiation is
created; in a moment of time perfect enlightenment is obtained." When the
mummy comes forth and assumes the likeness of Ra, the statement in the Ritual
is that Osiris "is renewed in an instant." It is the consummation of his second
birth, when "he raises his soul and hides his body." We have Paul’s similar
statement that we are changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. These
statements either are descriptive of the flooding luminosity of the very last
moment of our deification, or the "little moment of time" may be in terms
of fourth-dimensional consciousness.
The misconstruction
of the resurrection by Christian theology has been most lamentably serious
and fatal. The imagery of the rent veil, the discarded swathings, the rolled
stone and the opened tomb were converted into occurrence and attached to a
personal life. As the figure of the Christos was nailed on a wooden cross,
so was his body consigned to a rocky tomb. And what may be asserted to have
been gained in gruesome realism by the maneuver has been more than overbalanced
by the loss of the universality of the experience and of its ineffable beauty
as a spiritual mystery. There was neither reason, justification nor need for
the literalization of the crucifixion and the resurrection. People who were
children in intellect took the grand parables and allegories of arcane science
and fed them to other infantile minds (Page 556) as
veritable history. The Logos was declared to have come as the man Jesus, born
as a babe in Judea, and walking the lanes, lake strands and hills as any peasant.
It is the good fortune of humanity, however, that enough of the material embodying
the ancient intellectual achievement has survived the bigotry of that movement
to enable us to rekindle the lamp that once burned so luminously. While the
blinded worshippers of the carnalized Logos were obliterating in frenzied
zeal all traces of a more spiritual philosophy, there lay securely buried
from their devastating hands the great Egyptian wisdom, safe from their predatory
fury by reason of their own inability to decipher the writings, as well as
by their sorry misjudgment of the value of that "pagan rubbish." Now the discovery
of a slab of stone by one of Napoleon’s soldiers has arisen to confound their
design after centuries. And Christianity can now be seen as a sad travesty
of original knowledge. Only the restoration of its esoteric meaning by the
keys of that despised paganism can save it.
Osiris rose on
the third day under lunar or cosmical typology. The germinal seed of divine
consciousness, buried for three aeons or kingdoms in lower matter, rose in
the middle of the fourth day. Aeons of anthropological history were dramatized
by the three dark days of the lunar month. The seed of seminal light spent
three "days" in the bowels of earth and matter, and rose in the fourth round,
or "watch of the night." As history the resurrection after three literal days
in the tomb falls into absurdity; but as ritual symbolism it stands in such
grandeur as the mind can only vainly struggle to conceive.
Much Biblical reference
to the period of three days has been quoted, but there is a remarkable forecast
of resurrection imagery in Hosea (6:1-3):
"Come let us return
unto the Lord [who is described in the preceding chapter as the double lion!]
for he hath torn and he shall heal us; he hath smitten and he will bind us
up. After two days will he revive us; on the third day he will raise us up;
and we shall live for him. . . . His going forth is sure as the morning; .
. ."
The essential truth
of the resurrection is the central Egyptian conception of the one life force,
the one soul of being, the self-generating, self-sustaining power, ever renewing
itself in phenomena. The grossest error of conventional religionism is the
prevalent idea of a static (Page 557) eternity
for man’s spirit after departure from earth. This is one of those dreary delusions
with which the despoiling of esotericism has afflicted the mass of humanity.
Immortality we have, but it is not static. The placid "at peace" and "at rest"
on gravestones is but a temporary interlude between active lives. Life is
immortal, but its immortality is won by the effort of an endless succession
of cycles of birth and death, manifestation and retirement. Immortality is
through repetition of cycle; and that is why the cycles of nature that are
endlessly repeated before our eyes are set as the symbols of our life. The
imperishable spark of life that goes into and out of matter was typed as the
breath of God, the spirit of the Father, the mind of the Logos, the pillar
of earth, the salt of the earth, the ark of heaven, the elixir of life, the
fount of youth, the backbone of the universe, the water of life, the oil of
anointing, the spark of eternal fire, the bread of life, the river of blessing
and the resurrecting soul. Each rhythmic renewal of itself in matter was called
its own son. It forever bred itself anew as its own child.
That the festival
of the resurrection was an astronomical event used as a type of spiritual
truth is attested by the date set for it. In the Gospel account it was by
one calculation on the fourteenth of the month Nisan, on the eve of the vernal
Passover. This was the date of the full moon in a lunar month of 28 days.
Yet by another reckoning the feast of the Passover preceded the morn of resurrection
and fell on the fifteenth of the month Nisan. The fifteenth brings the full
moon of a solar month. The resurrection being the result of the union of male
and female principles, both a feminine (lunar) and a masculine (solar) dating
had to be combined in fixing it. Therefore it falls on the first Sun-day following
the first full-moon-day after the vernal equinox.
The ancient type
of resurrection and rebirth was the tree. The tamarisk, persea, sycamore-fig,
olive, oak, pine, ash, palm, acacia, cypress, banyan, juniper and others were
made emblems of the eternal renewal. The vernal rebirth of the tree could
hardly be surpassed for beauty in its miracle of annual resurrection of "dead"
life. Massey’s statement as to the purely typical character of the doctrine
is clear:
"There is no possible
question of a corporeal resurrection. The mummy of the god in matter or mortality
rises from the tomb transubstantiated into (Page 558) spirit.
The Egyptians had no doctrine of a physical resurrection of the dead."
Obviously not,
when we see, as Massey did not, that they spoke not at all of the dead as
the defunct mortal. Budge lends corroboration:
"The educated Egyptian
never believed that the material body would rise again and take up a new life,
for he well understood that flesh and blood could not inherit immortality."[
Introduction to the Book of the Dead, Ip. lxxxv.]
The truth is, alleges
Massey again, that the Christian religion is the only one in religious history
that is based on the resuscitated corpse instead of a spiritual transformation.
In no other religion is continuity in spirit made dependent on the resurrection
of the earthly body. The spirit rose from the corpse, not in it. It was the
soul emerging radiant from its grave in matter. All religion must rest for
ultimate values on the resurrection, as Paul says; but the rising again is
not that of the cadaver. Paul himself says that man re-arises in spirit body.
The deceased prays
that he may emerge from the world of the dead and revisit the earth. This
has been taken by many to mean a return of the spirit to earth in the ghostly
sense. It hardly seems to mean this, though it may not be necessarily excluded.
It seems rather to point directly to its return in future embodiments in the
cycles. The living soul on earth and not the wraith in its celestial rest
is the chief and central concern of religion. Misguided pietism has tended
to contemn earth and glorify heaven. Egypt answers this false discrimination
decisively when the Manes says (Ch. 30A, Renouf): "Although he is buried in
the deep, deep grave, and bowed down with the reign of annihilation, he is
glorified [even] there."
After his 40 days
in the desert of Amenta, tried under Satanic power, the Manes prays: "Let
me reach the land of ages, let me gain the land of eternity, for thou, my
Lord, hast destined them for me" (Ch. 13). Osiris passed into Amenta as the
Lord of Transformations, and he was therefore to emerge transformed in the
resurrection. He was the power of renewal, able to overcome death and bring
life and immortality to light. As the Lord of Transformations he carried the
magic wand, symbol of divine power, by which he could effect the chrysalis-like
alterations of his followers’ nature, as he opened one door of initiation
after another. He became the magician of folk-tales.
The term Sekhem,
the name of the place in which (Page 559) magical operations
were performed upon the Manes, denotes the power of erectile force. It was
therefore the region in which all that had been thrown down in incarnation
was re-erected in new birth. In Sekhem the weak mortal nature was quickened
and established firmly. It is not difficult to see the application here of
one of the common phallic emblems, the erection of the male member to become
creative. All phallism was originally purely symbolic. Massey’s statement
is appropriate here:
"The self-erecting
member was the type of the resurrection, as the image of Khem-Horus, the rearising
sun, and of Khepr-Ra, the re-erector of the dead." [ The Natural Genesis,
I, p. 127.]
The power to raise
up fallen divinity and unspiritualized nature was supplied only by the Sekhem
or virile force. Without it the Manes could not have stood upon his feet,
as Paul was told to stand on his feet after being thrown down on the way to
Damascus. Horus was called the Prince of Sekhem. The Ritual contains two chapters,
one concerning the arranging of the funeral couch, the other concerning its
being made to stand up. This ritual is made into a miracle in the Gospels,
when the dead are raised and the paralytic takes up his bed and walks. Chapter
170 says to the Manes: "Horus causes thee to stand up at the risings." "Thou
art raised up, thou art not dead," exults the Papyrus of Teta. "Thy (spiritual)
body to heaven, the empty case of Horus to the earth," indicates the release
of the immortal soul from the now empty shell of the corpse. "Thou shalt not
be imprisoned by those . . . who shut up the shades of the dead. It is heaven
alone that shall hold thee" (Ch. 92). Imprisonment was over; the liberty of
the sons of God was won at last.
Tedium in quotation
is risked for the sake of the majestic nobility of such a verse as this from
the Ritual: "I am the bright one in glory, whom Atum-Ra hath called into being,
and my origin is from the apple of his eye. Verily before Isis was I grew
up and waxed old and was honored before those who were with me in glory" (Rit.,
Ch. 78, Renouf). Again it is the voice of the cosmic Aeon and not that of
a man of flesh. And here is the affirmation that Horus existed before his
mother! "The soul is more ancient than the body," is the parallel dictum of
Greek philosophy. The womb of nature that the soul enters is a new formation;
but the entering soul is a spark of primordial fire that existed from beyond
time itself. (Page 560)
"The soul that
rises with us, our life star,
Hath had
elsewhere its setting,
And cometh
from afar."
The riddle offers
no greater complexity than to understand that an aged man may be much older
than the house he lives in, having lived elsewhere before.
In one of the scenes
in the Ritual Horus is enjoined to perform his eastern task. He is addressed:
"Rise up, Horus, son of Isis, and restore thy father Osiris," the mummy. Then
he bids his father: "Rise up, then, Osiris. I have stricken down thine enemies
for thee; I have delivered thee from them." He opens his father’s two eyes and
raises him to stand among the living. All this is outward allegorism, outlining
the truth that the son brings the inert power of his father to new life in his
youthful splendor. Then it is that the Hebrew Horus, that is, Jesus, concludes
his address to his Father- Horus had given forty addresses to Osiris - with
"Now I come to thee." "Father, the hour is come; glorify thy son that thy son
may glorify thee."
"I glorified thee
on earth, having accomplished the work which thou hast given me to do. And
now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I
had with thee before the world was. I manifested thy name unto the men whom
thou gavest me out of the world. I am no more in the world. But now I come
to thee. I kept them in thy name, which thou hast given me. I guided them
and not one of them perished, but the son of perdition" (John 17:5-12).
Could purblind
Christian theology have rightly divined the cosmogenetic and anthropogenetic
truth so plainly expressed in this passage, it need not have left its following
to grope in darkness for futile centuries. It is a clear statement of the
coming and return of the solar ray of the Logos, who was from all time in
the bosom of the universal Father, Ra, and suffered death in matter to glorify
a race of men whom the Father gave him to uplift in nature. The work accomplished,
this son of Ra asks that he may again be restored to his pristine effulgence,
nay, that he may be raised to a superior station above the angels who had
not descended to courageous adventure in lower worlds. The soul, by incarnation,
becomes mightier than the virgin deities that have never been wedded to matter.
In the texts of Unas there is described the terror of the gods when they see
Teta (the soul) (Page 561) arriving
triumphant. They discover that he is mightier than they. Likewise Pepi, fresh
from his conquest of the Two Lands,
"comes forth to
heaven. He finds Ra; standing up he meets him. He sits upon his shoulders.
Ra permits him not to rest upon the ground, (for) he knows that Pepi is greater
than he. Pepi is more a Spirit than the Spirits, more Perfect than the Perfect
Ones, more stable than the stable ones. Pepi takes possession of the Two Lands
like a king of his gods."
Again the returning
soul is beautifully apostrophized:
"The Comer! The
Comer! This Pepi cometh! The Lady of Tep is agitated and the heart of the
goddess dwelling in Nekheb fluttereth on this day when Pepi cometh in the
place of Ra. Pepi hath carried away for himself thy light under his feet."
The part that old
earth has played in this mighty consummation is shown in these passages:
"Behold, Keb taketh
Pepi by the hand and he guideth him in through the doors of heaven like a
god into his place; beautiful is the god in his place . . . he cometh to the
gods of heaven . . . he goeth to the gods of earth."
"Pepi is raised
up and passes into his spirit."
"This Pepi is the
Eye of Horus, which is stronger than men and mightier than the gods."
"Horus hath taken
his Eye, he hath given it to this Pepi."
"Heaven saluteth
him joyfully; the earth trembleth before him."
This is part of
the word picture of the first-born Horus divinized and upraised in his second
birth, when human suffering has brought its guerdon of glory. And when he
rises up, like Jesus he lifts up all men with him. He says: "I have raised
up the exalted ones who dwell in their shrines," who slumber in their mummy
bodies unawakened. Three or four of our main theses find corroboration in
the following short excerpt:
"Each day right
and truth come into my eyebrows. At night taketh place the festival of those
that are dead; the Aged One who is in ward in the earth."
Chapters 96 and
97 are entitled: "of being nigh unto Thoth and of giving glory unto a man
in the underworld." Says the soul: (Page 562)
"I have
made myself clean in the Lake of Making to be at peace and in the Lake of
weighing in the balance, and I have bathed myself in Netert-utchat, which
is under the holy sycamore tree of heaven. Behold, I am bathed. . . ."
"Now is Christ
risen from the dead and become the first fruits of them that slept." Likewise
Horus, "the Lord of Resurrections" from the house of death, is the first of
them that slept in darkness to wake as a "soul most mighty."
Chapter 92 of the
Ritual is entitled" "of opening the tomb to the soul and to the shade of Osiris
. . . so that he may come forth by day and have dominion over his feet," or
lower self. The vignettes represent the deceased as having opened the tomb
door, with his soul by his side, or as standing before the open door with
hand stretch out to embrace his soul. The chapter reads: "That which was shut
hath been opened, that is to say, he that lay down in death hath been awakened."
The Manes has prayed that his soul "may not be kept captive, but that a way
may be opened for its release."
In the fragment
of an Egypto-Gnostic gospel assigned to Peter, one of many such discovered
in the East, the resurrection scene pictures two men descending and entering
the tomb, and three coming forth. Two powers united and brought forth a third.
"They beheld three
men coming out of the tomb, and two of them were supporting a third, and a
cross was following them; and the heads of the two men reached to heaven,
but the head of him that was being led along by them was higher than heaven."
And they heard
a voice from heaven which said: "Hast thou preached to them that are asleep?"
And the response of "Yea" was heard from the cross. This scene is a version
of the rising of Osiris or Ptah with the Tat cross, coming forth supported
by his two sons, Hu and Sa. The critical question put to the god when leaving
earth was whether he had preached to the souls imprisoned in the underworld
and awakened them. For this was that commission which he had taken an oath
to perform with diligence and despatch.
Hosea (13:14)
sings of the release of the captive soul from mundane thralldom: (Page 563)
"I will
ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death: O
Death, I will be thy plagues; O Grave, I will be thy destruction."
This brings to
mind Paul’s rapturous refrain in his resurrection chapter in Corinthians.
Another triumphant resurrection shout rises from the divine scribe in Revelation
(I:18): "I am he that liveth and was dead; and behold I am alive for evermore."
The Prodigal Son "was dead, and is alive again; he was lost and is found,"
like the Tat cross. "I am the resurrection and the life," announces Jesus;
"he that believeth on me, though he were dead, yet shall he live"; "I will
raise him up at the last day."
An expressive symbol
of the release of the captives was the unwrapping of the burial bandages.
Horus frees the sleeping mummies from their cerements, which he rends asunder.
"Thou hast loosed my sackcloth and girded me with gladness," rejoices the
soul. This speaks of the divestiture of the soul’s various physical sheaths
or "coats of skin" preparatory to his return clothed in imperishable light.
In the Kamite rite the bandages of burial were cast aside so that the mummy
might be invested with a lighter and brighter robe. Horus burst the funeral
bonds and rent asunder the coffin in his awakening. He freed himself from
every bond and strode forth on uncramped legs, the most triumphant figure
in "history." The dead were "the bandaged ones." Jesus, the child, was wrapped
meanly in swaddling bands. The rising Egyptian savior exclaims: "O my father!
my sister! my mother Isis! I am freed from my bandages! I can see! I am one
of those who are freed from their bandages to see Seb" (Ch. 158). Matthew
states that with the rent veil and loosened rocks and quaking earth, the graves
were raised." This is more truly the fact of the resurrection, of which Jesus’
rising is but a symbol; but all is figurative.
When the left arm
of Horus is freed, the fan, typical of the mind (air), or of the Khu spirit,
is held in its grasp. This is "the arm of the Lord" which hath gotten him
the victory. It is the arm of which it is asked, while inert in death: "Is
his arm foreshortened that it cannot save?"
Jesus is born in
Bethlehem, "the house of bread" by name; Horus comes forth in (Beth)-Annu,
"the place of multiplying bread!" (Page 564) The Gnostic
Jesus says he comes now not as when they crucified him. He comes now in spirit;
he has passed from the afflicted one to "the active one of Heliopolis," the
city of the sun!
The two-aspected
Horus, or the infant and the adult Horus, furnish for all symbolic religion
the enigma of the two births. Pagan zodiacal dramatism placed the birth of
the god in matter, the first Adam, at the autumn equinox; Christianity placed
it at the winter solstice, where the inert god was quickened (but not strictly
born) in the womb of death. The three-months’ period of hiding the child parallels
the "sixth to the ninth hour" of darkness over the earth preceding the rending
of the tomb-bars. Six months or three, the meaning was the same. The Jews
rejected the babe born at the winter solstice because their traditions committed
them to the mysteries of Harmachis, Horus of the double horizon.
Egyptian genius
described the resurrection as the "dawn upon the coffin of Osiris," the mummy.
He rose a spirit, spreading the light of divine radiance like dawn over the
scene of his burial. In the Litany of Ra (34) adoration is paid to the sun-deity:
"Homage to thee, Ra! Supreme power, the ray of light in the sarcophagus!"
Just previous to
his asking the Father to glorify him Jesus had said to his disciples: "I know
whence I came and whither I go." "I go unto the Father." So Horus declared:
"It is I, even I. I am Horus in glory. I am the Lord of Light, and I advance
to the goal of heaven" (Ch. 78). "I raise myself, I renew myself. I grow young
again." And this is the most compact statement of the resurrection that could
be made. Again he says: "I am the victorious one . . . There hath been assigned
to me eternity without end. Lo, I am the heir of endless time and my attribute
is eternity . . . I, even I, am he that knoweth the paths of heaven. Its breezes
blow upon me."
The study now brings
us face to face with a denouement in the realm of comparative religion which
must be seen as fraught with the most momentous, perhaps catastrophic, consequences
for the unique claims of the Christian faith and theology. This item concerns
the raising of Lazarus at Bethany, which is pointed to as perhaps the highest
demonstration of Jesus’ possession of divine power, his sublimest and most convincing
miracle. Yet, in a word, the examination of Egyptian material reveals conclusively
that it was not and could not have been, a historical occurrence! It is nothing
but a dramatic etching (Page 565) of the resurrection. The identical transaction,
with locale and actors the same in name, had been depicted or enacted in Egyptian
ceremonial for perhaps ten thousand years before Christ. The story even in the
Gospels stands as but another cinematograph of the resurrection. There is the
same rocky tomb, the same cerements, the same lapse of time--three (four) days
- in the hall of death, the same women watchers, and other similar items of
the old symbology. The correlations have been outlined in the Prologue, but
there are supplementary features that should not be slighted.
Origen in the second
century reports that he was unable to find any trace of a "Bethany beyond
Jordan" in his day.[T. J. Thorburn: The Mythical Interpretation of
the Gospels, p. 131. As Thorburn is antagonistic to the mythical interpretation,
his data are therefore all the more valuable. ] If the Hebrews had
taken the name from inherited Egypto-Gnostic literature or from the spiritual
uranograph and given it to a village alleged to be near Jerusalem, it was
but another instance of their adaptation of purely representative names to
places and features of their local geography. But whether there was a Bethany
beyond Jordan or not, the practical identity of the miraculous event alleged
to have occurred there with an Egyptian dramatization of a purely spiritual
initiation that had been portrayed in Kamite ritual for some millennia prior
to the time of the Christian Jesus, seems to preclude with finality the possibility
of its having been the scene of the episode narrated in the Gospels as history.
The name Bethany points to a distinctly Egyptian origin, as we have seen.
It is proximately identical in significance with Bethlehem, sharing the latter’s
meaning of "house of bread." Both towns were scripturally the place where
the divine bread was given out and "multiplied" in the persons of the Saviors,
Horus and Jesus, "born" there. We cite Massey’s competent scholarship to support
our claims as to the status of Anu:
"The tomb of Osiris
was localized in Annu, the solar birthplace. Osiris, under one of his titles,
is the great one in Annu. Annu is the place of his repose. ‘I go to rest in
Annu, my dwelling,’ says Osiris. . . . Jesus goes to rest in Bethany. It was
in Annu that the soul was united to its spiritual body. Annu is termed ‘where
thousands reunite themselves,’ soul and body. . . . Annu is the abode of ‘those
who have found their faces.’ The house or beth of Osiris, then, was in Annu.
. . . The house of Osiris in Annu was . . . the abode of Horus when he came
to raise Osiris from the tomb." [ Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World,
p. 844.] (Page 566)
Similar
are the two proceedings, the Egyptian ritual and the Gospel "miracle," in
that both Horus and Jesus first declared the mummy to be not dead, but only
sleeping. Similar also are they in the reference to the already corrupt state
of the corpse. Martha reminded Jesus in John’s account that "by this time
he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days." In the Ritual, when Horus comes
to those who are in their cells, he utters the words of Ra to enliven them
and says (Budge): "I am the herald of his (Ra’s) words to him whose throat
stinketh"; meaning, to the soul suffering corruption in the tomb of the body
(Ch. 38B). Paul, the Psalms, Isaiah and other sources contribute replicas
of this feature of the sleeping, not dead, entity.
Similar also are
the two narratives in the manner of the calling forth. All such enactments
of the resurrection episode repeat the basic Egyptian summons to the mummy
to awake, come to life and rise, symbolically. It is the glorious coming forth
to day, the theme of the great Book of the Dead. Jesus cries at the mouth
of the tomb with a loud voice: "Lazarus, come forth! and he that was dead
came forth bound hand and foot with grave bands." Horus, previously, had entered
the dark grave, opened the Tuat door, recited to his father what he had done
to reconstitute his shattered divinity, and bade him come forth to the sunlight
and to victory. "Rise up, thou Teta! Thou art not a dead thing," he exhorts
the mummy. The inert one was called the sleeping divinity, the breathless
one, Urt-Hat, the god of the non-beating heart, the silent Sekari. The sleeping
god is vigorously appealed to awake and rise up. "Arise, O God, and awake
for me" (Ps. 7:6). "Awake; why sleepest thou, O Lord? Rise up for an help"
(Ps. 44:23). "Then the Lord awaked as one out of a sleep and he smote his
adversaries backward" (Ps. 78:65). Jesus said: "This sickness is not unto
death." And Lazarus, as pointed out, is Osiris.
From an obscure
corner it was our hap to unearth a bit of evidence bearing upon these conclusions
which adds a strong sidelight to reinforce the identification. In the scholarly
work of G. R. S. Mead, Did Jesus Live 100 Years B.C.?, there is the following
footnote to page 377:
"It is somewhat
strange to find Tertullian (De Corona, VIII; Oehler I:436) referring to the
"linen cloth’ with which Jesus girt himself, mentioned in John 13:4, 5, as
the ‘proper garment of Osiris.’ Tertullian thus appears to have picked up
a phrase which he did not quite understand and used it inappropriately." (Page
567)
Mead’s
surmise as to Tertullian’s lack of understanding of the phrase is a likely
enough one, but that the Church Father used it inappropriately is not so evident.
In fact this remarkable reference of Tertullian must be taken as a most direct
clue of connection between Christian Bible material and Egyptian sources of
the same. Justin Martyr and other second-century Fathers not only did not
so suddenly conceal the traces of relationship between Christian and earlier
pagan literature, but at times pressed the evidences of derivation and identity.
At all events, that we are able to discover some bit of Christian support
for linking together Jesus and Osiris in the resurrection ritual must be conceded
to strengthen the case materially.
And as to the two
women, the two sisters of Lazarus, Mary and Martha?
When Horus declaims
the forty discourses to his father, in recounting the blessings he has brought
him, he says: "I have given thee thy victory, I have given thee thy two eyes
(Mertae), and I have given thee Isis and Nephthys." Here we have the Egyptian
prototypes of the two Maries of Gospel legend, or the sisters Mary and Martha.
The much-mooted question of the identity of the "two women" of both Old and
New Testament is settled by Egyptian lore at last. They are the traditional
replicas of the two great divine mothers of the sun-god, Isis and Nephthys,
the Apt and Hathor of an earlier cult. They are the two protectors of the
hidden babe, the two eternal watchers of his growth. They are also his two
sisters who weep for him in his suffering state. In Egypt Anu was also "Rem-Rem,
the place of weeping" for the buried lord of life. In the Litany of Ra Horus
says: "I tread the dwelling of the god Rem-Rem," who is elsewhere denominated
"Remi the Weeper." It was at Bethany that Jesus wept! Isis lay watching in
tears over her brother Osiris when he had been cut to pieces and destroyed.
The two goddesses also both watch and weep over the dead body. They call him
in weeping, addressing to him long supplications. Isis bewails:
"Come to thine
abode! Come to thine abode!
God An, come
to thine abode!
Look at me;
I am thy sister that loveth thee.
Do not stay
from me, O beautiful youth;
Come to thine
abode, with haste, with haste.
Mine eyes
seek thee;
I seek
thee to behold thee.
Will it be long ere I see thee?
Beholding thee is happiness.
[
Plato mentions this as one of the hymns of Isis that were ten thousand
years old.]
Isis and Nephthys,
Jesus and Horus, Mary and Martha, all wept over the inert lord, El-Asar-us,
at Bethany!
Then the two goddesses
sing the song of the resurrection as a magical means of raising their beloved
from the dead. A form of this song is to be found in the evocations addressed
to the dead Osiris by the two sisters, who say:
"Thy two sisters
are near thee, protecting thy funeral bed, calling thee in weeping, thou who
art prostrate on thy funeral bed" (Records of the Past, Vol. 2, pp. 121-126).
Horus, the deliverer
of his bound father, it is written, reaches him in the train of Hathor, another
name of whom is Meri. He follows Meri to the place where Asar lies buried
in the sepulcher, as Jesus follows Mary who had come forth to meet him on
the way to Bethany. Jesus reaches the tomb in the train of Mary and Martha.
In the resurrection
scene it is the two women who first see and announce the rising and the empty
tomb. The risen Horus says: "The goddesses and the women proclaim me when
they see me." Everywhere in sacred scripts of old it is the world of nature
that hails deity rising from its bosom. The supporters and nourishers of solar
deity in matter would be the first to witness the apotheosis in their domain.
But all the while the lord of life is inert in their realm they are the ones
solicitous about his rebirth. They lead the way to the cave where he lies
and urge his quick resuscitation. Volumes of instruction are condensed in
the words they address the god slumbering in humanity:
"Thy two sisters
Isis and Nephthys come to thee: they fill thee with life, health, strength
and all the joy that they possess. They gather for thee all kinds of good
things within their reach."
And this proclaims
the function of nature and earth in the life of spirit.
The two Eyes of
Ra (or Horus) called "Mertae," who are the two Maries, or Mary and Martha,
symbolized the cosmic and the individualized divine powers of spirit-soul.
Spiritual intelligence can find no focus to open its inner vision on worlds
of reality save through (Page 569) material
instrumentality. Sight must have its organ, the eye. The organ is a material
construction. The cosmic and the substantial forms of matter become then the
two eyes of the spirit of Ra. As eyes they are watchers, and as the two women
they are likewise watchers. In their service they stand, one at the head,
the other at the feet, of the body on the bier. This is where they would be
assigned to stand in any dramatization of the meaning, the one functioning
in heaven or at the head, the other on earth, or at the foot. They figure
as mourners, also anointers and embalmers. Mary anointed Jesus for his burial.
Luke’s account states that the woman who stood behind at the feet of Jesus,
weeping, began to wet his feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair.
Here again is the contacting of the head of the lower or feminine order with
the feet of the Christ nature. Nephthys bears another mark of identification
with Martha, as she is styled "the mistress of the house"; she carries the
small replica of a house on her head, and is designated also "the benevolent
saving sister." Martha was the home economist, always represented as concerned
with household affairs.
More than two women
act a part as ministrants to Jesus in the Gospels. There are three Maries
and Martha and others who might be enumerated to a possible seven (Massey
does so enumerate them), matching the seven Hathors, or elementary powers,
that, from being at one time equal with Jesus, later become subordinate and
ancillary to his exalted position when he becomes lord of the new sanctuary.
The seven Maries, like the seven Hathors, were superseded in their primal
sovereignty in evolution; and so the Gospels, instead of saying directly that
the seven Maries were cast out, has it that the seven devils were cast out
of the one Mary (Magdalene).
A matter of theological
consequence is that the four "sons of Horus," who also were placed in position
at the bier of Osiris to aid in the resurrection, were constellated in the
four stars of the body of the Great Bear to form the astral bier or coffin
of Osiris, according to Arabian astronomers.[The story of the rich
man and Lazarus, the beggar, repeated in the Gospel of Luke (Ch. 16:19), is
told at length in the second tale of Kamuas, as Egyptian. ] The Arabs
called the three tail or handle stars the "Daughters of the Bier." In the
Papyrus of Teta it is given that "Isis was in front of him, Nephthys behind
him." The four sons of Horus stand facing Osiris and praise him thus:
"Glory to thee,
Osiris Un-Nefer, the great god within Abydos, king of eternity, lord of everlastingness,
who passeth through millions of years in (Page 570) his
existence. Praise be unto thee . . . whose forms are manifold and whose attributes
are majestic."
These four gods
were four of the seven elementaries, whose powers Horus had brought under
control and raised up. They are changed from brothers among the primal seven
to sons of the chief power, when he rose up as their king. An Egyptian vignette
shows four fishermen drawing a net. These were the four cardinal gods, assistants
to him who came under Piscean signature as the Divine Fish to feed mankind,
and to make them "fishers of men."
Many chapter titles
of the Egyptian Bible deal with the resurrection. Chapter 46 is entitled:
"of not perishing and of becoming alive in the underworld." Says the Manes
in it: "Like the Hamemmet beings may I arise, even as Osiris doth arise and
fare forth." Chapter 45 is headed: "A chapter of not suffering corruption
in the underworld."
The one consummate
symbol of the resurrection, nature’s own resplendent heliograph of man’s moment
of apotheosis, is the rise of the sun at dawn or the ascending of the sun
above the line of the vernal equinox. The breaking of the morning light and
the bursting from winter’s captivity of the soul of life in verdant nature
are the kindred operations in the phenomenal world which were given as constant
reminders to man of that unimaginable transformation into a being of light
which awaits him at the summit of the mount of mundane existence. Insensible
any longer to the subtle power of ancient symbolical philosophy, deadened
and unreceptive to the moving efficacy of commonplace natural glories, modern
life neither heeds nor exults at the poetry on the arrival of the singing
birds and bursting buds of springtime. But so potent is nature’s sheer force
of symbolism for the mind that has grasped the reality back of the outer show,
that the daily or the annual solar, or monthly lunar, typology may work such
minor transformations in the soul as the ancient Mysteries were designed to
effectuate. Sunrise expresses the spirit of man’s most climactic experience,
his closest rapport with the ecstatic joyousness of life. The daily or annual
rising, endlessly repeated for the race’s instruction, is the type of that
one consummative event of ecstasy past all transcription, which it will be
the rapturous privilege of every grown son of God to undergo when the soul
bursts like the morning rays from darkness (Page 571) into
ineffable glory. Nature recapitulates without end the physical type of that
transfiguration which man has experienced in ever-recurring cycles, but which
on the grand scale is destined to occur once for each individual at the climax
of his earthly career. At the end of each life there supervenes a momentary
opening of higher vision, giving the soul a vivid if fleeting glimpse of cosmic
reality, and a review of its own progress in its last adventure. This is itself
a typical resurrection as the soul rises out of its seventy-years’ tomb. But
this is only the faint adumbration of the final resurrection, which comes
for the Manes at the summit stage of a long series of earth lives, when the
soul has gathered its powers and stabilized itself in the shining immortal
body. Then in one transporting thrill of expanding life it breaks loose from
the (living) physical body and rises on wings of ecstasy, a phoenix, to its
radiant home among the gods.
The ancient mythic
poets strove right royally to signalize the potency of the rising sun symbol
of the resurrection. They strove to impart some measure of the dynamic significance
of nature’s gorgeous ritualism in poetry, odes to the deities and hymns to
the Sun. These are majestic, and capable of wielding transforming power over
the human psyche. Liberty is taken to insert Thomas Taylor’s effort to convey
something of the grandeur of the coming of the lord of day.
"But you will ask,
what has the rising of the sun through the Ocean from the boundaries of the
earth and night to do with the adventures of Bacchus? I answer, that it is
impossible to devise a symbol more beautifully accommodated to the purpose:
for, in the first place, is not the ocean a proper emblem of our earthly nature,
whirling and stormy, and perpetually rolling without any periods of repose?
And is not the sun emerging from its boisterous deeps a perspicuous symbol
of the higher spiritual nature, apparently rising from the dark and fluctuating
material receptacle, and conferring form and beauty on the sensible universe
through its light? . . . This description, therefore, of the rising sun is
a most beautiful symbol of the new birth of Bacchus, which, as we have already
observed, implies nothing more than the rising of intellectual light, and
its consequent manifestation to subordinate orders of existence." (Page 572)
Chapter
XXII
SKYLARK
AT HEAVEN’S GATE
Paul asks (I Corinthians
15:35) a question which, had it been envisaged in the light of the succinct
answer which he himself immediately gave to it, would have left world religion
in far better case than its present position.
"But some man will
say," he argues, "How are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come?"
Paul’s first word of answer is a rebuke to the stupidity of such a question.
He says: "Foolish man!" And by a quirk of ironic fate the rebuke administered
to such ignorance of basic Greek philosophy (in which Paul was steeped) as the
question implied, now falls upon the very institution which exalts him as its
original propagandist and builder. By one of the most arrant perversions of
clear philosophy ever to be perpetrated in world history, the Church he founded
has put itself in the very place of the "some man" asking the absurd question
- whether the dead rise up in their corpses or in some other form. And this
in spite of the fact that the great Apostle addressed himself, in the remainder
of his chapter, to as lucid an exposition of the spiritual resurrection as is
to be found anywhere in sacred literature. This 15th chapter of I Corinthians
marks the high point of spiritual sublimity reached in the New Testament. Its
oracular grandeur should have lifted the body of Christian theology far above
the mists of controversy that overhang it over the question of the corporeal
resurrection. But the later formulators of orthodox theology looked askance
at Paul and classed him as a heretic. They would have ousted his Epistles from
the canon if they had dared. For he had grown in disfavor among them. His studies
were not in line with the policy of the literalizers of religious drama; he
was the exponent of that Orphic-Platonic wisdom from the Chaldean and Egyptian
springs that they had come to revile. He indited more than one of the grandest
chapters of their Bible; yet they frowned upon him (Page 573) because
his writing was not in accord with their cult-Christianity. His was cosmic Christianity.
It was emblemed in terms of Platonic Gnosticism, the flower of Greek rational
mysticism. Orphic paganism glows throughout that 15th chapter of Corinthians.
The sublimest chapter in the Christian Bible is clearly pagan philosophy.
Let us follow Paul
in his exposition and see how completely he is in accord with pagan teaching.
First he announces the great law of incubation, as the prelude to any understanding
of the resurrection in spirit: "What you sow never comes to life unless it
dies." Then he clarifies a moot point: "And what you sow is not the body that
is to be; it is a mere grain of wheat . . . or of some other seed." But "God
gives it a body . . . gives each kind of seed a body of its own. Flesh is
not all the same; there is human flesh, there is flesh of beasts, flesh of
birds and flesh of fish." Has it ever been noticed that Paul here enumerates
precisely the four kingdoms on which man’s life rests at its corners, matching
the four figures in Egyptology, and in Ezekiel’s and John’s celestial visions?
Man, animal, bird, fish. Amsta, Hapi, Tuamutef and Kabhsenuf, the four sons
of Horus; the man, lion, eagle and fish (crocodile); the four quarters of
the zodiac; the four bases of man’s life. Paul’s vital statement is that God
plants "bare grain" (Authorized Version), that is, souls of pure spirit untried
by matter in incarnation, our Hamemmet Beings, Innocents, younglings, Kumaras,
Asuras, virgin souls; and he later gives to these tender spirits garments
of solar glory.
Then Paul tells
us that "there are heavenly bodies and also earthly bodies," but the splendor
of the one is greater than that of the other.
"There is a splendor
of the sun and a splendor of the moon and a splendor of the stars - for one
star differeth from another in splendor. So with the resurrection of the dead:
what is sown
is mortal,
what rises
is immortal;
sown inglorious,
it rises
in glory;
sown in
weakness,
it rises
in power;
sown an
animate body,
it rises
a spiritual body.
(Page 574) As there
is an animate body, so there is a spiritual body. Thus it is written:
"The first man,
Adam, became an animate being,
the last
Adam a life-giving spirit;’
. . . . .
.
Man the first
is from the earth, material;
Man the second
is from heaven.
Thus as we
have borne the likeness of the material Man,
so we are
to bear the likeness of the heavenly Man.
I tell you this,
my brothers, flesh and blood cannot inherit the Realm of God, nor can the
perishing inherit the imperishable . . . the dead will rise invested with
the imperishable, and this mortal body invested with immortality; . . . then
. . .
Death is swallowed
up in victory."
How in the face
of this lucidity of statement the Church perpetrated its frightful dogmatic
travesty of "the resurrection of the body," it is hard indeed to understand.
And now we can see also that the first and second Adam of Paul were the Egyptian
Horus of the two horizons, the "lions of the double force" of soul and body,
Horus the younger, and Horus the elder.
The seed is sown
in and as the natural material body, but unless that dies, and in dying transmits
its essential strength over to a finer vehicle that will be built out of its
disintegrating elements, it will not live again. The old material seed will
never rise again; and the physical corpus of man will not rise from the grave.
But the germinal essence will come forth from decay shining in new life. That
which is sown in the earth will die; but out of its death will rise the stem
that bears the new generation of beauty aloft to sun and air. Well did Paul
say, "Foolish man!" to ask such a question. And well may the world say "Foolish
Church!" to have missed and confounded the simple clear meaning of the resurrection.
The putting on
of the robe of immortality has not been adequately translated into rational
comprehension. It hovers in the background of the Christian consciousness
as a beautiful haze of indefinite meaning. A clearer grasp of its significance
may accrue from inspection of some of the ancient material touching it.
The deceased says
to Osiris: (Page 575)
"Do
thou embalm these my members; for I would not perish and come to an end, (but
be) like unto my divine father Khepera, who is the divine type of him that
never saw corruption. . . . Let not my body become worms, but deliver me as
thou didst deliver thyself. . . . Homage to thee, Osiris; thou didst not decay,
thou didst not become worms, thou didst not waste away, thou didst not become
corruption, thou didst not putrefy. . . . I am the god Khepera and my members
shall have an everlasting existence. I shall not decay, I shall not rot, I
shall not putrefy . . . and I shall not see corruption beneath the eye of
the god Shu. I shall have my being . . . I shall live . . . I shall germinate
. . . I shall wake up in peace . . . I shall not suffer from any defect; mine
eye shall not decay; the form of my visage shall not disappear; mine ear shall
not become deaf; my head shall not be separated from my neck; my tongue shall
not be carried away; my hair shall not be cut off; . . . and no baleful injury
shall come to me."
In spite of death
the Manes cries: "I am, I am; I live, I live; I grow, I grow; and when I awake
I shall awake, I shall awake in peace, I shall not see corruption . . . I
shall not perish in the earth forever" (Ch. 154, Naville). The immortality
that was previously potential in the first Adam-Horus became established at
last in Tattu and secured by the resurrection of the illumined soul from the
pit of Akar (Rit., Ch. 30A). At the consummation of the Mane’s victory over
earthly forces it is declared to him: "Thy father Tum hath prepared for thee
this beautiful crown of triumph, the living diadem which the gods love, that
thou mayest live forever" (Ch. 19). The Manes says (Ch. 85):
"I am the first-born
god of primeval matter, that is to say, the divine Soul, even the Soul of
the god of everlastingness, and my body is eternity. My form is everlastingness,
and is the lord of years and the prince of eternity."
The soul is assured
in the text: "Thou shalt never perish, thy Ka shall never perish, a Ka established."
The flow of events in time is connected with the temporal and impermanent
vestures in which the seed-spark of divinity has embodied itself to travel
through Amenta. Decay does not touch the core of being itself, the Ka.
But what specifically
is this robe of immortality that the mortal must put on if he is to live forever?
It is Paul’s "spiritual body" as contrasted with the natural or "animate body."
But what is a spiritual (Page 576) body,
the world has been asking for these hundreds of years, and "science" has also
asked contemptuously. The answer is to be found in an early chapter, in the
theses that modern science itself has now reified or hypostasized matter of
various grades of ethereal fineness, sublimated essence, capable of being
organized into material structures in the world invisible to man. The Egyptians
predicated a total of seven such successively finer bodies in man’s constitution,
of which the lower or coarser four have been so far developed to function.
Besides this obvious physical body, man possesses inner bodies of what a scientist
called "immaterial matter."
That sublimated
vesture, then, which seems to be the "spiritual body" in which the dead specifically
rise, is the Sahu, though the next higher one, the Khu, is frequently mentioned
in the experience. The Khu is so high in its structure that of it is said:
"Thou shalt not be imprisoned . . . it is heaven alone that shall hold thee."
Also it is written that the Khus, or glorified ones, "live on the shades of
the motionless, or the souls of the dead." This means that the highest bodies
absorb and transmute into their own subtler essence the substances of the
ones below, as a candle flame absorbs the tallow below it. The Khu was thus
figuratively conceived of as a "ghoul" or "feeder on the shades" of the Manes
in the nether worlds. It is constellated as the "Ghoul," the star Beta in
the Perseus group.
The Ka always accompanies
the soul through its incarnations and returns. "Thou hast come and thy Ka
with thee" is the welcome greeting on the soul’s return. The Manes passes
from the state of a shade to that of a Ka when he is said to have completed
his investiture. Then as a Sahu he is reincorporated in a spiritual body,
and as a Khu he is invested with the robe of light and glory. No healthy child
was believed to be born without this Ka, the soul of animate life; and in
their pictures of it they made it resemble the physical body. They looked
upon it as the "double" of the body. It did not die with the body.
In open contradiction
to other reasons he had assigned elsewhere, Budge gives a motive for mummification:
"It has been urged
by some that the custom of mummifying the dead, which obtained throughout
Egypt for so many thousands of years, was maintained because the Egyptians
believed in the resurrection of the material body, but it is not so. They
mummified their dead simply because they believed that spiritual bodies would
‘germinate’ in them." (Page 577)
This
passage is a remarkable demonstration of how a scholar can state the surface
facts in a particular matter and yet tell nothing true about it. Yes, the
Egyptians believed that spiritual bodies would germinate from or in the physical
Khat, but while it was a living body, not the long-preserved cadaver! Germination
of finer spiritual bodies would come in the living man, and in the mummy only
as the ritual symbol of the body of this death.
Budge gives both
"Ba" and "Sahu" as meaning "something like" "noble" or "sublime," "chief,"
"free." The Ba, he says, was free to travel over all heavens and mix with
souls there and to take any form it pleased; for such statements are found.
Far more free were the higher bodies to do the same. The learned Egyptologist
writes again:
"Concerning the
form in which Osiris rises from the dead the texts are silent, and nothing
is said as to the nature of his body in the underworld; that he dwelt in the
[same] material body which was his upon earth there is no reason whatever
to suppose, for there are indications in the texts which point to a definite
belief in the resurrection of a spiritual body, both in the case of the god
and of man."[Introduction to the Book of the Dead, p. lxxxv. ]
When the reader
has noted with us even the limited and haphazard collection of passages from
these same texts describing the bodies in which Osiris lives and rises, he
will be able to determine for himself whether "the texts are silent, and nothing
is said as to the nature of" the body of Osiris in the underworld; also how
futile seems to have been the reading of these venerable texts by such savants
as Budge and others. In the present matter Spence has read somewhat more intelligently:
"The soul, ba,
and the spirit, Khu, which were usually represented as a hawk and a heron
in the hieroglyphics, partook of heavenly food and became one with the gods,
and in time became united with the glorified body of heavenly frame, so that
the soul, spirit, power, shade, double, and name of the deceased were all
collected in the one heavenly body, known as the Sahu, which may be described
as the spiritual body. It was considered to grow out of the dead body, and
its existence became possible through the magic ceremonies performed and the
words of power spoken by the priests during the burial service."[Myths
and Legends: Egypt, p. 126. ]
Budge endorses
this general view in saying: (Page 578)
"When
the material body had been brought to the tomb for burial . . . it acquired
the power of sending forth from itself a body called the Sahu, which was able
to ascend to heaven and dwell with the gods there. The only suitable rendering
for the word ‘Sahu’ is ‘spiritual body,’ and the meaning fits very well into
the translation of the texts where the word is found."
This is in the
broad sense true, but thrown out of due symmetry to the scholar’s ignorance
of the cardinal meaning of "death" and "the dead" in symbolic usage. The name
unquestionably means "spiritual body" and "free, noble, chief" might be applicable
to it. But the derivation would seem to be closer at hand than Budge presumes.
The two divine sons of the great first god Tem, or Tum (meaning "total"),
were the gods Sa and Hu. These two short names seem either broadly or in some
particular reference to connote "spirit" and "matter," the opposite nodes
of primal energy. Souls were said to be composed of the essence of Sa, drawn
in the beginning from the great "Lake of Sa" in the southern heavens. "Sa"
also meant the son, or spirit born of matter. Hu was the basis of Ihuh, or
Atum-Huhi (Adam-Jehovah), the spark of flame in matter. As the spiritual body
was built up of spirit and matter in combination, the two basic god-names
seem to have been combined to designate it. Massey says that the word "Sahu"
means "to incorporate." It is the incorporated spirit or its product. Chapter
47 of the Ritual reads: "I am a spiritual body (sah), therefore let me rise
among those who follow the great god." As Osiris-Sekari, the god was the coffined
one; as Osiris-Sahu, he rose again in a spiritual body. "I am the spiritual
body of the god," cries the Manes on fleeing the grave (Ch. 99). In chapter
128 Osiris exclaims: "Horus hath made for me a spiritual body through his
own soul, to take possession of that which belongeth to Osiris in the Tuat."
In the text of Unas we read: "Behold, he cometh forth this day in the real
form of a living spirit." The Chaldean Oracles say: "The powers build up the
body of the holy man."
In the Hymn to
Osiris the risen soul is praised: "Thou art a shining Spirit-Body, the Governor
of Spirit-Bodies."
Luke (24:39) represents
Jesus after the resurrection as calling attention to his very members: "See
my hands and my feet, that it is I myself." This is clarified by the knowledge
that, the resurrection once consummated, the soul has power to assume what
form it will and (Page 579) to
materialize for the moment its old physical semblance. Did not Jesus pass
through closed doors and appear to his disciples, so that Thomas put his hands
in the wounds in the flesh to resolve his doubts? Of spiritual essence, he
could yet become palpable to sense.
Budge’s assertion
that the texts are silent with respect to the nature of the vesture in which
the soul arose might have been modified had he seen the following from the
Papyrus of Pepi: "They draw thee unto heaven in thy soul, and thou art endowed
with soul among them. Thou appearest in the sky as Horus from the womb of
the sky in this thy form which came forth from the mouth of Ra, as Horus,
the Chief of the Spirits." And again from the same text: "When Osiris ascended
the ladder, he was covered with the coverings of Horus, he wore the apparel
of Thoth." In chapter 180 the soul says: "I stretch myself at my desire, I
run forward with my strides in my spiritual form of hidden qualities." And
how striking is the following from the text of Teta: "He receives bones of
a marvelous nature and a complete and imperishable body is bestowed upon him
in the womb of his mother Nut!"
The Egyptians regarded
the physical body as being powerless and lifeless save for the more magnetically
powerful inner bodies. Of itself it could never have arisen. It could not
rise as flesh and blood; it could ascend only after being transformed, like
water converted into vapor, by more potent spirit. It was only the presence
in it of the Ba, the Sekhem, the Khu that gave it erectile force. As says
James (2:26): "the body without the spirit is dead." So much more vital was
the spirit than the body, so much "more ancient" and established, that even
the destruction of the latter would not annihilate it. For well the Egyptians
knew, before Paul, that "if our earthly house of this tabernacle is dissolved,
we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens."
When the deity descended to earth he put on the mask of a crocodile, an ibis,
a lion, or other zootype of the primary powers. But when rising into spirit,
he divested himself of these "filthy rags" and stood forth clothed in the
majesty of solar light. He personates in turn each of the gods and appropriates
their strength and qualities.
"Their magical
powers are in his body, the Sahu do not retreat from his hands. He eats the
wisdom of every god, his period of life is eternity, his limit is everlastingness
in this form (sah) of his." (Page 580)
"I am
come," says Horus, "as a sahu in the spiritual body, glorious and well-equipped;
and that is given to me which lives on amidst all overthrow."
Here at last is
that element which all philosophy, all religion, all moral feeling has been
seeking for ages as the indubitable foundation of both faith and knowledge.
All rationalism and mysticism alike are the search for the enduring real,
that which abides amid the flux. Here it is, says Horus. Here is the ages’
Rock of Certitude.
The soul was released
from the khat or physical body when the latter had been itself sublimated
to such tenuity that it quickly vanished away. Horus, coming out of Sekhem,
left his earthly body behind in the sepulcher, and was greeted as pure spirit
by those who had forerun him in the glorification. They rejoiced to see him
walking upright and ready to stride onward through eternity. He who had earned
these salutations was the re-establisher of time "for millions of years."
He came in raiment like the dawn, as the true light of the world newly kindled
in the night of death. He says he comes forth equipped with Ra’s words of
power. In the Book of Teta the risen soul is greeted: "Hail, thou hast received
thy robe of honor, thou hast arrayed thyself in the Hata garment. Thou art
clothed with the Eye of Horus . . . which giveth thee thy apparel before the
gods." "Let love for him," proceeds the text, "be in the body of every god
who shall see him. This is the swathing which Horus made for his father Osiris,"
mentioned by Tertullian. "Thou art provided with thy form, O dweller among
the spirits." "Thy movement is like that of a star. No ruin falls to thee
. . . Thou art complete in thy members of crystal." "Thou hast thy state of
glory . . . thou hast thy faculty of knowledge." "Thou art pure with the purity
of the gods, who journey unceasingly." Chapter 171 is captioned: "Of trying
on the garment of purity." In the Pepi text it is stated that as he rises
he puts on the sheth garment of Horus and the apparel of Thoth. The coming
forth of Jesus as a spirit, or as the Christos, is called his investiture.
He says: "The times are fulfilled for me to put on my vesture. Lo, I have
put on my vesture, and all power hath been given to me by the first mystery"
(Pistis Sophia I:10).
In his first advent
as the Virgin’s son he was the "bare grain," the word made flesh but not yet
made truth. In his second advent he (Page 581) revealed
the glory of the Father through that body which God gave him. He now regains
the glory he had with the Father before he laid it aside to put on the sackcloth
of earth. The Ritual details how the ransomed spirits, redeemed from the mummy
condition and all the ills of the corruptible flesh, put on the pure white
robe of righteousness, called the vesture of truth. This is given them by
the god Taht for their entrance into the boat of the sun. Earth’s apron is
removed, and he receives a bandage of the finest linen "in place of the old
garb of shame." In chapter 64 there is this explicit statement: "I have made
the dress which Ptah has woven out of his clay." Spirit must draw its light
from the very womb of matter. Ptah was the divine Potter, as Jesus was the
Carpenter and Hiram the Mason.
When the deceased
has been resuscitated he says (Ch. 85): "The seven Uraeus divinities are my
body. . . . My image is eternal." The lower elements form his material body;
his spirit body is imperishable. But the soul synthesized the seven and raised
them aloft to share its everlastingness. Ptah tells Rameses II that he has
refashioned his flesh in vermilion. The texts speak of the dead bones being
refleshed with a coating of red earth. These are references to the renewal
through the soul’s bath in the pool of the body’s blood.
The Manes were
of two classes, the clothed and the naked. Those were clothed who had passed
the judgment trial and received their investiture of the robe of righteousness.
"I hasten to the land (of Aarru) and I fasten my stole upon me," says the
Manes, "that I may come forth and take possession of the wealth assigned to
me" (Ch. 110). "I range within the garden of Hetep (Aarru); I fasten my stole
upon me." "I am the glorified one coming forth in triumph." Paul has said
that we "groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which
is from heaven," "clothed upon that mortality might be swallowed up of life."
"I was naked and ye clothed me," says the Gospel Jesus himself. Isaiah (61:10)
sings: "I will greatly rejoice in the Lord . . . for he hath clothed me with
the garment of salvation, he hath covered me with the robe of righteousness."
Hermes says: "I am gone out of myself into an immortal body, and am not what
I was before, but am begotten in mind." How well this describes what the Greek
philosophers call the "ekstasis," or transport of release from the physical
body-tomb! Ekstasis means literally "a standing out" of the soul from the
body, so that one is in truth "beside oneself" with "ecstasy." (Page 582)
In Iamblichus’
great work on the Mysteries of the Egyptians (p. 55) he unfolds the doctrine
thus:
"The Gods, being
benevolent and propitious, impart their light to theurgists in unenvying abundance,
calling upon their souls, procuring them a union with themselves, and accustoming
them, while they are yet in body, to be separated from bodies, to be led around
to their intelligible principle."
Thus they, too,
were "begotten in mind." Hermes tells Ptah he "would that thou also wert gone
out of thyself, like them that dream in their sleep." This is the ecstasy
and transport when the soul passes from the boat of Horus to the ship of the
sun, from mortal flesh to radiant spiritual glory.
In chapter 19 of
the Ritual is the whole detailed struggle of the powers of intellectual light
to gain the victory for Horus over his enemies "on the day of making his triumph
over Set and his fiends." For a purpose of very great importance we quote
some of this chapter at length. The great final conquest is achieved by Horus--
"on the night of
the battle and overthrow of the Seba-fiend in Abtu; on the night of Osiris’
triumph over his enemies; on the day of the festival of Haker (on the fifteenth
of the month); on the night of setting up the Tat in Tattu in the presence
of the great sovereign princes; on the night of the judgment of those who
shall be annihilated in Sekhem; on the night of laying the things on the altars
in Sekhem; on the night of the establishing of the inheritance by Horus of
the things of the father Osiris, at the great festival of plowing and turning
up the earth in Tattu or in Abtu (Abydos); on the night of the weighing of
words or a weighing of looks; on the night when Isis lieth down to watch and
make lamentation for her brother in Re-stau; on the night of making Osiris
to triumph."
The design in making
this strange quotation is to call attention to the multiplicity of symbolic
occurrences that are thrown into the period of the night preceding the Passover
of the vernal equinox, which is just the "dark night of the soul" in incarnation,
ending with the passing of the soul across the boundary at Easter. All processes
of transformation, purifying, perfecting, glorifying, reach their consummation
on the last marge of the "night" period, as it breaks into the dawn of Easter’s
spiritual Sun. In the yearly calendar this would be the night of the Passover
of spring. Hence Egyptian drama placed the crowning (Page 583) of
every process on this eventful "night." Being purely symbolical, there would
be no difficulty in allocating to this date any number of representations
of the various aspects of the soul’s experience as it concluded its earthly
history. The Christ’s trial, his bloody sweat, his battle with the fiends,
his mockery and suffering, his crucifixion in its last stages, his last supper,
his bearing the cross, and every other phase of his "death" and "burial" in
matter could be "staged" on this night. But it would not and could not be
"history." What then would happen if at a later time symbolic events in such
number were turned into alleged history? Here indeed is a point for "higher
criticism," if not for downright common sense.
It seems to be
incontestable that the many events of the last night of Jesus’ life as narrated
in the Gospels are a somewhat attenuated copy of this momentous nineteenth
chapter of Egypt’s Ritual! Perhaps the material was not taken directly from
it, but was drawn from the dramas and Mystery plays that had been based on
it and worked out in consonance with it. Obviously so blind was fanatical
zealotry in hurrying to crush paganism and to change spiritual allegory into
history that it did not pause to reckon with the difficulty of crowding a
long series of varied events into the course of a single night of clock time.
So Jesus was given a busy night to close his sad career! The literalizers
of drama did not scruple to ask zealotry to believe that there could actually
have occurred in the brief space of one night the Last Supper with the disciples,
the walk to the Mount of Olives, the long watch in the garden of Gethsemane,
the incidents of the disciples falling asleep when Jesus upbraided them for
not being able to watch with him one little hour, the arrest, the severed
and healed ear cut off by Peter, then three separate and distinct judicial
trials involving the summoning of judges, juries, attendants, officers, the
populace in the dead of night (a thing impossible if considered in realism),
then the mockery of the soldiers, the parting of Jesus’ garments, the forcing
on him of the crown of thorns, then the march to the hill of Golgotha ("the
place of the skull"), and the harrowing "crucifixion" running into the next
morning. There is an obvious very meager limit to what can occur in the temporal
span of one short night. The Gospels here stand helplessly exposed to the
attack of plain reason in view of the patent conditions of the problem raised.
The Gospels are the old manuscripts of the dramatized ritual of the incarnation
and resurrection of (Page 584) the
sun-god, which was first Egyptian, later Gnostic and Hellenic, then Hebrew
and finally adopted ignorantly by the Christian movement and transferred to
the arena of history. They were not history until in Christian hands the esoteric
meaning had been obscured and the wisdom needed to interpret them non-historically
was wanting.
An important link
is the identification of the Sahu body with the sun. The Kabalah intimates
that the soul in each solar system spends six aeons on planets and the seventh
in the sun of the system. In the seventh or human kingdom, then, life would
be preparing for the soul a body of solar essence. And solar energy is the
expression of deific intellect, according to Proclus. The soul of humanity
is to clothe itself in an indestructible armor of solar light, eternally self-luminous
and self-perpetuating. The Bible’s statement that "the Lord God is a sun"
is echoed in Egypt: "I am the lord of light, and that which is an abomination
unto me is death; let me not go into the chamber of torture which is in the
Tuat." A hundred texts exalt the principle of light, and here its rebellion
against being overwhelmed by the darkness of matter in incarnation is registered.
Here was the whole
gist of theology outlined in terms whose significance for human life could
not have been missed save by minds hopelessly warped by previous obsession
of fantastic conceptions. For "death" is here distinctly defined as residence
in a world where the intellectual light of deity would be sadly darkened.
But we have seen how the failure properly to locate "the underworld" blocked
the sway to all true comprehension of intrinsic wisdom for centuries. The
appearance of the angel who descended from heaven to roll away the stone from
the grave was "as lightning, and his raiment was white as snow" (Matt. 28:2).
"He has come forth like the sun," says the Osirian in his eulogy of the soul.
"He comes in raiment like the dawn," sings the sacred writer. Osiris is said
to give life "to the ministers of the sun," the sun-gods. Says Horus: "I have
come like the sun through the gate . . . and have passed pure" (Rit., Ch.
148, Birch). Jesus insisted that each man had light within himself, and with
its increase by spiritual cultivation, it would even supplant the sun and
moon as light-givers. In man all previous powers of creative light were to
be synthesized in the glory of a new order of radiant being.
We read in the Litany
of Ra (Ch. 2:7): "Thou commandest the Osirified deceased to be like Khuti, the
brilliant triangle which appears (Page 585) in
the shining place." This was the solar trinity of mind, soul, spirit. Horus
is seated in the decans of the Ram, the whip of rule in his left hand and the
starry "Triangula" in his right. Thus the dead god rose on the horizon of the
resurrection like the sun in the vernal equinox when that sun was in Aries,
bearing the triangle as symbol of the triunity of man’s spirit. "He shineth
like a new being in the east," is a tribute to the risen glory of the soul.
In chapter 129 of the Ritual - the book of making perfect the Khu - we have:
"And the majesty of the god Thoth lovingly shall make light to rest upon his
corruptible body." The very gods "withdraw themselves when they see thee arrayed
in the awful majesty of Ra."
In Exodus we read
that the vestments worn by the children of Israel were to be woven of violet,
purple and scarlet yarn. These three vivid colors likely typify the higher
triad in the scale of seven colors, or the coat of many colors. Macrobius,
commenting on the Orphic Hymns, speaks of the sacred dress in which those
initiated into the Dionysiac Mysteries were invested, preparatory to their
enthronement:
"He who desires
in pomp of sacred dress
The sun’s
resplendent body to express,
Should
first a veil assume of purple bright,
Like fair
white beams combined with fiery light."
"I shine
forth from the egg which is in the unseen world" (Ch. 22).
The mummy-swath
was, like the shenti, a linen tunic, made from shena, and this was the garment
woven without a seam. The "young man" who left his garment and fled naked
from the resurrection scene was the figure of the rising soul that had shed
its mummy-cloth and made its transformation into spirit that no longer needed
earthly covering. The seam was obliterated when the two halves of man were
made into one whole and new man.
Spence states that
the spirits of heaven "lived upon the rays of light which fell from the eyes
of Horus; that is, they were nourished upon sunlight, so that in time their
bodies became wholly composed of light."[Myths and Legends: Egypt,
p. 127. ] This is true. They emaned their own light and there was no
need of external light, "for the glory of the Lord did lighten it." The Talmud
says: "There is a light which is never eclipsed or obscured, derived from
the upper light, by which the first man could view the world from one end
to the other" (Avodath Hakodesh). (Page 586) This is presumably
that light of the poets which never was on land or sea; the gleam, of Tennyson’s
conception. "I live by reason of my splendor," chants the emancipated soul.
The souls having
attained the resurrected state in shining raiment were called the Khus or
the glorified. Jesus asked the Father to glorify him with primeval radiance;
Horus pleads in the same way (Ch. 175): "But let the state of the shining
ones be given unto me instead of water and air. . . ." The elect "arriveth
at the Aged One, on the confines of the Mount of Glory, where the crown awaiteth
him" (Ch. 131).
Mt. Olympus of
the Greeks was identical with Mount Hetep of the Egyptians. Hence the Kimmerians
of Homer may possibly be identified with the Egyptian Khemi, or Akhemu, the
dwellers in the northern heaven, as never-setting stars or spirits of the
glorified, the Khus or Khuti.
The whole course
of evolution on earth is designed to perfect the individualized humans, who
are the crown of animal development. This perfection comes through the spiritualization
of the gross animal nature by the impacting upon it of currents of intellectual
and spiritual forces which gradually refine the lower self. When a certain
degree of sublimation has been achieved the lower bodies become capable of
affording free course to the influx of the higher influences, which then so
transform the lower that a practical identity between the two is established.
Greek mythology called it the union of Cupid and Psyche; in Egypt it was the
embrace of Horus and Osiris; in Churchly language it was the marriage of the
Bride and the Lamb. It was that welding at last in blissful harmony of the
mortal and immortal elements. Of this ultimate union of male and female components,
the body-soul with the spirit-soul, all marriage and sexual intercourse is
only the outward sign and symbol. For its attainment the male and female natures
in the individual must be "married"; the centers below and those above the
diaphragm must merge in interchange of activity. The wedding or welding of
these two groups of energies will divinize human nature. For it will return
man to his original androgyne state which obtained before the "fall" into
physical generation, when he assumed the garb of the animal nature and put
on the mask of personality.
Massey concisely
sums up this basic datum of theology: (Page 587)
"The
marriage of Cupid and Psyche is a fable that was founded on this union of
the two souls which we have traced in the Ritual as the soul in matter, or
as the human, and the soul in spirit."[Ancient Egypt, the Light of
the World, p. 223. ]
Evolution’s work
in the moral sphere was to unite a soul inherent in matter with a higher soul
that was divine. This operation takes place in the body and consciousness
of mankind. The divine soul was a unit of sublimated intellectual essence
from beyond the skies, but temporarily united with the lower body to engraft
upon it its own higher potencies. Physical evolution was impotent to pass
a certain point, the boundary between sense and soul, until the germ of conscious
selfhood linked with it from above. Life languished on earth until the heaven
spirit descended like a dove to free it." As soon as thou enterest the Utchau
and unitest thyself thereto, the beings on earth flourish."
A strong and moving
assertion of the influence of the union of lower life with higher is seen
in the following from the Book of the Dead:
"Thou joinest thyself
unto the Eye of Horus and thou hidest thyself within its secret place; it
destroyeth for thee all the convulsions of thy face, it maketh thee strong
with life, and thou livest . . . thou joinest thyself unto the upper heaven,
O luminary."
The soul is addressed
here as the luminous person of the sun, and most challenging is the statement
that the force of the solar intellect released in the personal life will destroy
the convulsions of the face, caused by the painful constraint of the soul
under the bondage of matter. Like lovers’ kiss, the embrace between the spiritual
soul and the psychic entity in the body brought harmony and expanded life.
A complementary and salutary interchange of health and strength flashed between
spirit and matter in the embrace, when the two met in Amenta.
Budge says that
the conjunction of the lower ba, or animal soul, with its Ka, or spiritual
soul, took place in Heliopolis, the city of the sun, Annu. This would correspond
with the revival of Osiris, or Lazarus, at Beth-Any. The ba comes forth upon
earth to do the will of its Ka. This is important, matching Jesus’ declaration
that he comes to do the will of his Father.
The work of the exiled
god on earth being now consummated, his effort having prevailed to overcome
the flesh and transform the soul (Page 588) of the body into the likeness of
the glorious sun-soul, the risen deity stands on the eastern threshold of heaven,
ready to complete the last stages of the twelvemonths’ journey, and with the
waxing sun of spring to climb the steep ascent of heaven from March to June.
This is the final arc of the return to the Father who stands at the apex of
heaven at the gate of Cancer. The summit of the mount of the zodiac was the
place of reunion and reconciliation; the paradise of perennial plenty and everlasting
peace, the land where there was no more sea and no more night, where beings
carried their own light eternally within them. Hither the twelve companions
of Horus bring the sheaves of golden grain which they have reaped in the harvest
fields of Amenta. Horus tells Osiris at the festival of the Harvest Home that
he has cultivated his corn for him and reaped the golden crop in the Aarru Fields
of Peace, or Hetep.
Exodus (3:12)
reports the Eternal as saying to Moses: "When thou hast brought the people
out of Egypt, ye shall serve God upon this mountain." It was there called
Mt. Horeb, and the first syllable, Hor-, can be equated with the Hor-, of
Hor-us, the sun. The injunction to Moses precedes:
"Thou shalt bring
them in and plant them in the mountain of their inheritance, the place, O
Lord, which thou hast made for them to dwell in, the sanctuary, O Lord, which
thy hands have established."
Here "the Lord
shall reign for ever and ever." This was the Mount of Jerusalem, the Aarru-Salem,
or Aarru-Hetep, the mount of eternal peace. In escaping from Egypt or Amenta,
the goal of refuge is the Mount of Peace, as every religion on earth has attested.
As spirits, not human marching columns, the children of Israel, after crossing
the swampy Reed Sea of this life, are led to the celestial land flowing with
water. This heavenly home was located and dramatized as the circumpolar paradise,
the Homeland of exiles and captives. "I am master there," says the beatified
spirit who has attained this mansion in the skies and built his homestead
there. "I am in glory there; I eat there; I plant and I reap there; I plough
there; I take my fill of love." "I net ducks and I eat dainties." "I am united
there to the god Hetep"--the seven powers completely exalted, unified and
at peace.
There the risen
spirit becomes one of the glorious stars that (Page 589) never-more
shall set in ocean’s or in earth’s depths. "A divine domain hath been constructed
for me: I know the name of it; the name of it is the garden of Aarru" (Ch.
109, Renouf).
Instead of being
damned eternally for eating of the fruit of the tree of life and knowledge,
the Manes is part by part divinized as he transmutes the substance of its
food into higher essence. In the Rubric at the end of chapter 99 of the Ritual
we read: "This chapter being known, the deceased appears in the fields of
Aarru. He receives food there, the produce of its fields." The cakes, corn,
bread and wine which he shall partake of there are described. "And he shall
come forth in Sekhet-Aarru in any form whatsoever he pleaseth, and he shall
appear regularly and continually." Chapter 110 tells of the soul’s going in
and out of Sekhet-Hetep, of the coming forth by day, of becoming a glorified
Khu there; of reaping, eating, drinking, making love there and "doing everything
even as a man doeth upon earth." The soul exults: "And I have sailed into
the divine city of Hetep . . . I array myself in apparel and I gird myself
with the sa garment of Ra." To have attained this blessed home the soul must
have undergone the earthly baptism:
"I have gone into
the city of An-Aarret-f (the place where nothing groweth) and I covered my
nakedness with the garments which are there."
In the midst of
Sekhet-Aarru was a door, with a sycamore of turquoise on each side of it,
through which the sun-god Ra appeared every day. The outgoing and return of
the celestial glory was thus depicted for the blessed each day, as it is for
mortals on earth.
The soul’s reward
for leaving its celestial home and spending the long toilsome cycle of necessity
in dreary exile on earth is the evolutionary gain therefrom, which is vast
and permanent, as is attested by the ecstasy that accompanies the return.
The pitiful nostalgia which has oppressed it throughout its long sojourn among
"the wild beasts" is blithesomely appeased by its nearing vision of the Father’s
portals and the sunny meads and shady bowers of the Homeland. Death is indeed
swallowed up in victory and the night of gloom and the Götterdämmerung are
followed by the fresh sweetness of supernal dawn.
Iamblichus presents
beautifully the philosophy of our escape from the iron fetters of fate and
return to the liberty of the sons of God: (Page 590)
"But neither
are all things comprehended in the nature of fate, but there is another principle
of the soul, which is superior to all nature and generation, and through which
we are capable of being united to the Gods, of transcending the mundane order
and of participating eternal life and the energy of the supercelestial gods.
Through this principle, therefore, we are able to liberate ourselves from fate.
For when the more excellent parts of us energize, and the soul is elevated to
natures better than itself, then it is entirely separated from things which
detain it in generation, departs from subordinate natures, exchanges the present
for another life and gives itself to another order of things, entirely abandoning
the former order with which it was connected."[ Mysteries of the Egyptians,
Chaldeans and Assyrians, p. 312.]
Iamblichus says
elsewhere that there is found no other dissolution of the fetters of fate
and necessity than the knowledge of the gods. For to know the godly powers
is felicity. Oblivion of them while in terrestrial body is the greatest source
of evil to a deific nature. Knowledge of the gods preserves the true life
of the soul and leads it back to the Father, the Noetic principle. For fate
ties the soul to natures that are inferior, that are perpetually unstable,
flowing from one impermanency to another, and prevents it at every turn from
obtaining a vision of immutable good. Intellectual union with the gods alone
will anchor the soul to the support of its true felicity.
Proclus is as luminously
clear on the same point:
"The one salvation
of the soul herself, which is extended by the Demiurgus and which liberates
her from the circle of generation, from abundant wanderings and an inefficacious
life, is her return to the intellectual form, and a flight from every thing
which naturally adheres to us from generation."[6. The Timaeus, Lib.
V, p. 33. ]
For the soul, he
continues, having been hurled like seed into the realms of generation, should
cast aside the stubble and bark, as it were, which she accumulates about herself
from contact with the fluctuations in these realms, and preserve her pristine
purity. Purging herself from everything she touches, she should become the
intellectual flower and fruit, delighting in the stable circles of sameness,
rather than in the revolutions of difference. Having fallen from celestial
harmony into the jangling diffusion of divine energies, she had, as Proclus
says, become something belonging to an individual instead of to the universe.
Departing from her connection with the lower irrational nature, and (Page
591) steering
her course by reason, she will be led happily from her wanderings about the
realms of sense, and from the passions which adhere to us from generation,
back to the blissful contemplation of the one universal Life.
In a cosmic upper
chamber the "old ones" and "the ones gone before" gather to welcome the return
of the exiled souls. There are reception hosts who assemble to "welcome the
pilgrims of the night." The text of the Ritual gives some faint picture of
the joy that thrills through the heavenly arches when the solar sons return
triumphant from their long expatriation:
"The divine power
hath risen and shineth in the horizon. . . . The Khus shine in heaven . .
. for there is among them a form which is like unto themselves; and there
are shouts and cries of gladness within the shrine, and the sounds of those
who rejoice go round about through the underworld . . . and his majesty shineth
as he shone in the primeval time, when the Utchat was first upon his head."
The script of Teta
reads:
"Thou standest
at the doors. . . . Khent-Ament-f comes forth to thee; he grasps thy hand
and leads thee to heaven before thy father Keb [Seb], who rejoices to meet
thee and gives thee his two hands. He kisses thee, he fondles thee, he pushes
thee forward at the head of the indestructible spirits . . . thou keepest
the festivals of the first day of the month and the festivals of the fifteenth
day of the month, according to the decree which thy father Keb made for thee."
When Osiris, reborn
as Horus, triumphs, "Joy goeth the rounds in Thinis," the celestial city;
and even earth catches the repercussion of the jubilee in the heavens. The
Book of Enoch relates that the same heavenly host that met to anoint the collective
angelry that was preparing to come to earth to do evolution’s work assembled
again to welcome the returning victors, and that the reaches of farthest space
were filled with angelic halleluiahs, as heaven and nature sang in unison.
Yet the paeans
of heaven are hardly more intriguing than the more restrained pronouncements
of Greek philosophy. Says Proclus:
There is "the race
of men, who through a more excellent power and with piercing eyes, acutely
perceive supernal light, to the vision of which they (Page 592) raise
themselves above the clouds and darkness, as it were, of this lower world;
and there abiding, despise every thing in those regions of sense; being no
otherwise delighted with the place which is truly and properly their own,
than he who, after many wanderings, is at length restored to his lawful country."
[ The Six Books of Proclus on the Theology of Plato, II, p. 272.]
The night of earthly
sorrow breaks into the morn of heavenly rejoicing, for "joy cometh in the
morning."
"The great and
mighty gods cry out: ‘He hath gotten the victory.’"
Earthly
dust from off thee shaken,
Soul immortal
thou shalt waken,
With thy
last dim journey taken,--
All through
the night.
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