Theosophy - Mary Magdalene and Her Seven Devils by Alvin Boyd Kuhn
MARY
MAGDALENE and Her Seven Devils
Alvin
Boyd Kuhn
The publication of this document
is inspired by the earnest desire to exorcise from one of the most popular characters
of world literature the stigma of moral obliquity which she has borne for eighteen
centuries through the total miscarriage of ancient literary symbolism. Unquestionably
there will be those who will regard it a doubtful victory to remove the stain
of gross immorality from the name of an individual by the drastic and summary
procedure of removing the individual from the realm of historic existence altogether.
It will be likened to the physician's consolation in the death of his patient,
in that at any rate he had removed the disease. But the modern scholastic mind
is shortly to achieve the realization that Mary Magdalene as a mythical figure
will live more vitally in world thought than she ever did as an alleged historical
woman. It may fall with a certain severity of shock upon orthodox ears to be
told bluntly that the woman whom the Christ was believed to have loved was never
a living personage of flesh and blood, and challenging beauty. Yet to state
that the Gospels of the New Testament are but spiritual allegories, the enacted
drama of the human soul in its incarnate experience, is only to assert that
which is the common and assured knowledge of every erudite student of ancient
Comparative Religion and Mythology. The truth of this statement is now safely
past the point of ridicule or controversy. Many scholars and more mystics have
loudly proclaimed the mythical nature of the Gospels; but by some strange quirk
of psychology or some unaccountable want of courage, few if any have ever dared
to take their stand by the obvious implications of this declaration and announce
the positive non-historicity of the dramatic characters involved. It is insinuated
generally that by some miracle of coincidence or parallelism veritable persons
did live whose lives ran off an exact copy of the incidents recorded in the
Gospels. Without considering that the chance of such a total matching of a mass
of personal occurrences in the careers of living people with the events of an
actually existing drama would run to one in millions, the assumption fails utterly
to take into account that decisive fact that the material entering into this
Gospel narrative, featuring those same incidents and figures, had been extant
prior to the year one A.D. for at least some thousands of years! Are we asked
to believe that suddenly around the time of the first Christian century there
appeared a fairly large group of individuals whose life history fell into the
pattern and relived the history of a set of dramatic personae that had already
been recorded for centuries? The claimants for the historicity of the Gospel
characters have never fairly met this predicament. It would seem that the prior
existence of the Gospels as spiritual dramas should write a decisive finis
to a debate that should never have been begun. But religion is the most
conservative of influences, traditional inculcations die hard, and it can be
predicted that even the plain proof of the purely allegorical and dramatic character
of the Gospels will be met with the same disdain by religious parties as has
been the case heretofore.
Yet the hesitancy to go the full
length with the data, and the scepticism regarding the entirely mythical status
of the great Bibles of antiquity is to be understood, if not condoned, in the
light of the other significant fact that even those who have openly declared
all such writings to be myths have never made the interpretation of their material
in any but the most fragmentary and unconvincing fashion. They have never torn
off the actors' masks and revealed the identity of the characters or the deep
purport of what was being dramatized. They have made it mean little more as
spiritual mystery play than it means as "history." In short, the Bible
is yet a sealed book. The cloak of esoteric concealment thrown over the writing
by ancient sagacity has proven too hard a nut for both medieval and modern acumen
to crack in eighteen centuries of mulling over the sage literary relics.
The present elucidation of the allegorism
connected with Mary Magdalene, with "Veronica," and other women figures
in the scriptures should add almost conclusive evidence to that presented in
earlier lectures in this series, that the Bible of Christianity has never yet
received its most rudimentary interpretation. The spectacle of an age of vaunted
enlightenment being guided morally and spiritually by a Book the most elementary
import of which has never been grasped, will be once more glaringly depicted
by this additional revelation of hidden meaning in the scriptures. Blindness
is only vividly comprehended when it is relieved by the coming of the light.
Not until the incidents alleged to have occurred in connection with persons
in the remote past are seen as the graphs and glyphs of resplendent cosmic truth
can the measure of the depth of modern benightedness be gauged. Not otherwise
can the gross stultification of the mass mind of today by the literalization
of spiritual portrayals be seen in all its repellant crudity. None but a mind
emancipated from the almost hypnotic spell of such warped teaching can gain
the requisite ground of vantage from which to catch a clear view of the unbelievable
distortion of our general philosophical Anschauung through the wrecking
of the myths of old. And nothing short of the final dissipation of the cloud
of literal obfuscation that darkens the modern mass mind by a return to the
wisdom of the myths can give the world the first true birth of sanity which
it is still awaiting. The dawn of this bright era awaits only a more thorough
study of Comparative Religion and Mythology. For the solvent of our dark superstitions
will be the overwhelming proof at last that for sixteen centuries we have taken
spiritual myth, drama and allegory for history! The international laugh at our
age-long asininity may go far to bring us to international goodwill.
The character of Mary Magdalene,
the incidents touching it and particularly the casting out of seven devils from
her spiritual life by the Christ, are but one phase of a manifold group of allegorical
depictions of an element of cosmic meaning which is the key, so to say, to practically
one half of the interpretation of all sacred scriptures. The pivotal importance
of this portrayal of arcane meaning can hardly be too vigorously asserted. Mistaken
for history, it failed to be read as cosmic graphology because of the crassness
of scholarship in linking in meaning a variety of symbols referring to the Motherhood
of all life. Why impurity and sin should be associated with a woman and the
number seven was a mystery that found no solution after the early Church crushed
out the esoteric academies. Bible exegetists have not seen the connection or
discerned the significance of this family of symbols. Yet we shall see that
these are keys that unlock the hidden truth in a quite simple and elementary
way. It will then appear next to inconceivable that centuries of supposedly
astute study of the Bible could have failed to yield to a single scholar the
fact of such ridiculous obviousness as that woman characters in the Bible represent
matter! The certification of this basic bit of ancient typology is the motive
and task of this lecture. There is the greater need for the vindication of this
item of Biblical symbolism because its presentment has been rather generally
met with dismay and resentment on the part of women. The only religious controversy
in ancient times was over the point of the sex of divinity. The feminists did
at times personalize the soul as female. But except in this usage, the women
figures typify matter. And in this characterization they were truer to natural
type, as we shall see. It has, on the whole, availed but little to remind feminine
remonstrators against the immediate invidiousness of the typism that the very
word "mother" is in Latin our word "matter," with but one
"t" left out: Mater. (Greek "meter," French
"mere," Spanish "madre," German "mutter.")
Nor was rebellion in the least placated by the further assurance that all these
words for mother come from the same root which gives us our word "mud."
It did not at all comport with the general feminine view of things that sacred
lore should allot to the kings and the male characters the role of spirit and
to the women the part of lowly matter. The implications were frankly unacceptable.
Was ancient symbolism tramping woman in the mire or besmirching her fair name
with "mud?" Had archaic wisdom miscarried in making the divine part
of man male and the earthly and bodily part female? Is it not a common belief
that women are more spiritual than men?
It is enough to state for the moment
that the issue involved here is by no means one of inconsequence, but that it
reaches to deeper momentousness than at first appears. Since it has subtly involved
serious consequences for women in history, it is in part the motive of this
lecture to resolve it in clear light. Our concern, however, is not with controversy,
but only with the symbolism, and we must hold true to the principles of that
hoary science. There is therefore no recourse but to make the positive declaration
that the goddesses of mythology and the women in the Bible stand as the types
of matter, as "opposed" to spirit. It should be at once remarked,
however, that the statement carries no implications beyond what it succinctly
says, namely, that the female characters typify matter.
When looked at in the bright glare
of ancient light there is no escape -- and no need of escape - -from the full
relevance of the feminine typograph. It will be immediately seen as both futile
and foolish to rebel against the imputations of the woman symbol, as the emblem
of matter, if for a single moment we accept the fitness of assigning to woman
the function of motherhood. It only needs that we accept the other principle
of the profound philosophy of the past, that matter performs the same motherhood
function with regard to spirit, to reconcile our opposition to the symbolism.
Matter is the Universal Mother. It is the womb of all organic life. Not as the
inert lifeless substance of eighteenth century science, but as embodied living
energy, it is the matrix in which are formed all the created worlds. The "kings"
of holy writ are the literary types of the god, the divine unit of consciousness
in man; but they are all born of the same mother, Meri (Egypt), Maya (India),
Mary, Maria. Ever memorable should be the inscription at the base of the statue
of the Egyptian Isis at Sais: "I am the goddess Isis, the Mother of all
the living. No man hath lifted my veil, and the fruit I bore was Helios."
Helios is the sun, the mighty symbol of the divine spirit in humanity. The sun
of righteousness, that rises on mankind with healing in its wings, is born of
Mother Matter. Matter is the great World Mother, since it is the one vehicle
of all manifested life.
To be sure, matter exits in a variety
of forms, as solid, liquid, gaseous and ethereal. Searching through the world
of phenomena for types of universal truth, the ancient sages saw the motherhood
function borne more particularly by the two lower elements, earth and water.
Earth was obviously the mother and sustainer of all the organic life habitant
upon it. Water was equally a party, and an essential one, to this generation.
Modern biology asserts that all first life originated in the water, in the sea.
Even earth remains unproductive without it. The letter "M" is the
archaic hieroglyph for water, and it reads "water" in the Hebrew alphabet;
and its numerical value is 40, the duration of the great deluge of rain. It
is shaped to represent the line of a wave, and it begins all words for "mother."
In outline it is itself a "u" between two "n's," if the
lines are taken in overlap; and N U N spells the ancient Egyptian name for the
aboriginal abyss of the firmamental waters, whence was born the whole creation.
So that Biblical Joshua (Jesus) son of Nun, is in simple statement the spiritual
mind born of matter.
Most aptly, then, the maternal function
of earth has been recognized in the common poetic designation "Mother Earth."
We have no similar phrase ascribing motherhood to water, but the ancients did
give to the primal mother of life the very name for "sea" in several
countries. In Berosus' account of the Chaldean Creation, Tiamat, the first Mother,
is named Thallath, which is the Greek thallasa, the sea. The feminine
Sephiroth, Binah, is termed by the Kabalists "the Great Sea." And
Mary is allied in derivation with maria, the plural of the Latin mare,
the sea.
As the material portion of man's
constitution had its origin on and from the moon, the mothers were almost always
likewise linked with the moon, and called lunar goddesses. So we find The
Secret Doctrine (Vol. 1, p. 400) saying: "All the lunar goddesses had
a dual aspect,--the one divine, the other infernal. All were the virgin mothers
of an immaculately born Son -- the Sun."
Now the moon, in the Hebrew Kabala,
is the Argha, or ark, or womb, in which is hatched the egg or seed of
all material life. And when we find the ancient wisdom expressly telling us
that the "- hovah" portion of Jehovah is identical with Binah,
Eve and the other lunar goddesses, we are assured that the creative powers are
spirit and matter linked together in wedlock. The Secret Doctrine states
that Jehovah and the Assyrian Anu are "both viewed from a dual aspect;
male or spiritual, female or material, or spirit and matter, the two antagonistic
principles." And if there is any question as to water sharing the symbolism
of matter, The Secret Doctrine settles it categorically: "The Flames
or 'Fires' represent spirit or the male element, and
'Water,' matter, or the opposing element." And again: "Water is the
symbol of the female element everywhere; matter, from which the letter
M is derived . . . a water hieroglyph. It is the universal matrix or 'the Great
Deep.' Venus, the great Mother-Virgin, issues forth from the sea-wave, and Cupid
or Eros is her Son." All life is born in and from water. In the Orphic
cosmogony of Greece the maiden Kore gave birth to an aeon.
Hardly a step away from matter and
water as symbols of creative source stands another term, which will carry us
even more intimately into the heart of a true theological understanding. No
phrase in common parlance carries more of the burden of ancient meaning than
does the homely "Mother Nature." This lecture will demonstrate the
place of great importance that the word "nature" occupies in ancient
religion. When the Christian Bible states that the whole natural creation groaneth
and travaileth in pain, waiting to bring forth the Sons of God, it is setting
forth the basic construction of all sacred script. For all Holy Writ deals essentially
and primarily with the one great cosmic story of the motherhood of matter and
nature in giving birth to mind and spirit. The Sons of God are often called
the Sons of Mind. Life starts from its birth in nature and passes over from
nature to the realm of spirit.
This phase can best be introduced
by quoting St. Paul's sententious statement, a mighty pronouncement never accorded
its full significance, in I Corinthians, 15:46: "Howbeit that was
not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that
which is spiritual." And he immediately follows this verse by the corollary
fact that "The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the
Lord from the heaven." Here is the basic text of all religion and philosophy.
Everywhere in the cosmos the natural comes first, to become the mother of the
spiritual. The order of nature was to evolve a creature -- man -- in whom godlike
intellect would come to function. Father God could produce his Son, the new
generation of himself, only through the body of Mother Nature. At last can be
seen the status and meaning of the goddesses of ancient mythology: Isis, Hathor,
Neith, Apt, Typhon, Cybele, Ishtar (Esther), Mylitta, Parvati, Venus, Diana,
Freya, and many another.
The antithesis of Mind over against
Nature makes necessary a strict definition of this word "Nature."
The term has been given a broad universality of meaning that is not sanctioned
in the old scriptures. It will sharply delineate the boundary between Nature
and Mind to say that Nature connotes and embraces those cosmic energies that
operate below the level of self-conscious Mind. St. Paul expressly sets the
natural man and his carnality over against the law of the mind
in its spiritual expression. These energies manifest in the physical (Greek
physis means Nature) world outside of man and in man's body, below mind.
The material world is in the realm of Nature; and man is natural through his
body, but divine through his intellect, as Plato says. The word Nature comes
from the Latin root "na," meaning "to be born"; and,
surprisingly, also, "to swim." Such words as "native" and
"naval" show at once the double meaning of the root. All life is born
swimming in water! The natural world is, then, just that creation that is born,
but which must be "born again," or re-born, to become spiritual.
The major theme of ancient religious
lore, as we have seen, is Man, but Man in process of transition from his natural
state over into the kingdom of spirit. He is passing across the border line
from Nature to God, and so stands poised midway between the two worlds of matter,
or body, and spirit, or mind. He is passing over from the care of his physical
Mother to live forever in the house of his divine Father. And as the entire
journey is completed in the opening up to full function of twelve latent divine
capacities or faculties, represented by the twelve signs of the zodiac and the
twelve fruits on the Tree of Life, or at any rate accomplished in twelve stages
of growth, the Bible allegory represents the Christos (Jesus) as leaving his
mother at the age of twelve and seeking "the things of my Father."
"Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?"--can now
be seen in the clear light of its grand cosmic reference, instead of being taken
in the mean sense of almost rude incivility of the boy Jesus to his anxious
human mother. Man has to graduate at length from the school of his natural mother
training into the university of higher consciousness. And St. Paul assigns the
reason, which is definite enough: "For the natural man receiveth not the
things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can
he know them, because they are spiritually discerned." The Lord Christ
in the Gnostic Gospel, the great Pistis Sophia, tells Salome that he
"came to end the works of the female." This would indeed prove a "hard
saying" to womankind if we could not interpret "female" here
as reading "the material, natural order," the lower stages of evolution.
Equally absurd would be the following sentence from an ancient book, if we did
not know that the soul, or man, in incarnation is "married" to the
natural world through residence in his body: "The man who is obedient to
his passion is under the subjection of his wife." The poet Pope long ago
stated the terms of the evolutionary situation in his memorable couplet:
"All are but parts of one stupendous
whole,
Whose body Nature is,
and God the soul."
The Talmud has a passage which says
that in the early days "the rule of all Israel was in the hand of a woman,
who was called Helene." And it is a notable fact that in most countries
where religious organization was framed over the model of the spiritual "pattern
in the heavens," the nation was first divided into a heptanomis or heptarchy,
of seven nomes or tribes, before it was divided into the kingdom of twelve sections.
And seven, as shall be seen, denotes the feminine or natural, and twelve the
spiritual, characterization. And likewise in the earliest sociological systems,
there was the Matriarchate, or rule of the mother, long before the fatherhood
was exalted to headship.
Is it not, then, a thing of great
wonder to find our eminent modern psychologist, C. G. Jung, dividing human life
into two halves, with the age of thirty-five the dividing line, and stating
that in the "morning" period people live a "natural" life,
before they pass across the line into the more philosophical interests of the
afternoon? The aims striven for in the first half -- money, social status, family
and posterity -- he says "are plain nature, -- not culture."
"Culture lies beyond the purpose of nature. Culture is the work of the
intellect," not of natural impulse or instinct. So the single span
of one human life abridges the whole cycle of evolution, putting first that
which is natural, then that which is spiritual. And the whole moral import of
scripture is paralleled by Jung in his statement that 'whoever carries over
into the afternoon the law of the morning -- that is, the aims of nature --
must pay for so doing with damage to his soul." We must be weaned from
Mother Nature and seek the Father's house.
In the typism which the human physiology
so faithfully manifests -- and as showing how closely the world of physis
parallels the spiritual history of man -- the puberty development at the
age of twelve is an astonishing natural image of the transformation from lower
to higher worlds in the larger cosmograph and in man's higher life. Boy and
girl then become consciously creative and mind arrives to govern sense and emotion.
It would take a volume to set forth the full sweep of this analogue and its
incorporation in ancient tribal ceremonials the world over. (The works of Gerald
Massey depict it most competently.)
All ancient lore, the Mystery dramas,
the annual round of religious festivals, the massed legends of mythology, the
innumerable host of folk-tales, the arcane works of the philosophers, the epics
of the nations, the ethical and cultural systems of the world have for central
theme this transmutation of the natural man over into the spiritual man. If
not read in the light of this evolutionary episode, they will not release their
interior meaning -- and they have not yet been so interpreted.
The comparative evolutionary importance
of the spiritually advanced status over the natural is clearly indicated in
the Drama of Initiation when Jesus tells us that, though John the Baptist is
greatest among "those born of woman," yet the least in the kingdom
of the spirit is greater than he. Surely a Freshman in college is a stage above
the Senior in the High School. John must be taken as the type of the natural
man, the forerunner of the spiritual and the preparer of the way! And so, typologically,
he should be given a female rating, the same as Abel, the material, maternal
lower self, slain finally by the developing higher self; and Abel is charactered
as feminine in old scriptures! As in involution spirit decreases as matter increases
in dominance, so in evolution the process is reversed. Hence John says: "He
(Jesus) must increase, but I must decrease."
Man is therefore first born of the
Mother, then begotten of the Father. He is first generated, then regenerated.
He is born of the water, then of the spirit, as Jesus expressly affirms. Verily
he must be born again. For he is sown a natural body, and he must be raised
a spiritual body. He is sown a mortal, he must be raised an immortal. In the
first stage he is "the first man Adam," purely "a living soul,"
an animate creature merely; in the second birth he becomes that "second
Adam," whom Paul describes as "a quickening spirit." The "first
man," of the earth, earthy, yields place to the second man who is "the
Lord from heaven," the Luciferian spirit of fiery divinity. The human being
is now moving up from beast to god through the Midgard (Norse mythology) or
mid-ground of man's estate. His awareness is in the conscious mind, which is
a blend formed midway between the subconscious mind of his animal self and the
superconscious mind of the god, his divine part.
Strangely this duality and its interrelation
is figured in the Bible under a typism so abstruse that it has escaped detection
until now. One now sees that our common phrase, when affairs are at odds: "Everything
is at sixes and sevens"--has a remote but arresting origin in numerical
typology. For the two numbers, six and seven, are employed in the Bible to stand
for the two elements in our composition. Six types the unregenerated child of
the Mother; seven the finished product of nature and spirit in conjunction,
or man the Christ.
Is this arbitrary and without true
basis? By no means. Six emblems the natural man for the excellent reason that
he is the product of the first six energies of life working through the first
six "days" or aeons of creation. (See the Genesis lecture,
No. 7 in this series.) Arcane science of old informs us that the first three
creative waves of energy proceeding forth from the First God brought matter
from its inchoate formless
condition into a subatomic state available for crystallization into actual substance.
The fourth wave then precipitated it into visible "matter" as we know
it, physical substance, embracing the ninety-three elements of our mineral kingdom.
The fifth wave raised it to the vegetable kingdom, and the sixth lifted it to
the complex development of animal forms. Man, as animal, on the side of body,
is thus the highest product of six evolutionary impulses or outgoings of force.
Six is therefore the numerical index of man the first, the natural man, child
of Mother Nature.
But the ancient books say: "With
the sixth creation closed the order of song." This odd statement seems
more than mystifying. Its meaning must be sought in connection with another
recondite text: "The Framer made the Creations six in number, and for the
seventh he threw into the midst the fire of the Sun." The natural order,
the creation of the first six elementary powers, is under forces that move in
stately rhythm, the poetic "music of the spheres" and "the morning
stars singing together." This is the harmony of Nature, so eulogized. There
is no element of mind to step in and inject independent, self-willed movement
into the melodious chant of Nature. But with the seventh comes Man, the independent
thinker (Sanskrit man means "to think") and venturesome actor,
and he can throw the movement into discord, or inject discordant notes into
it, if he acts "out of tune with the Infinite." Hence his coming with
the seventh principle, mind, the germ of self-acting divinity, to mingle with
Nature's harmonious procession, breaks the order of song -- until man learns
through aeons to fall once more into rhythm with Nature at a higher level and
restore the harmony he jangled into dissonance for a time. And the "fire
of the Sun" thrown into the work of the first six creations to subject
them to a higher lordship is none other than the ray of conscious spiritual
intelligence, the divine Ego in man. The Promethean fire myth and the theological
Fall of Lucifer (the name meaning Light-Bringer) amplifies this section of the
allegory and needs no further elucidation. Astrology, however, has preserved
the record of the transition from natural man to spiritual, from the era of
"song" to the era of mind, in the fall out of place of the sixth pole
star, one in the constellation of Lyra, the harp, and the passage of the pole
into the constellation of Hercules, the Man. The axis of life shifted from cosmic
harmony to the mind of Man.
The animal man, summit of Mother
matter's creative edifice, was to be completed and redeemed (from mere animality)
by the coming of the seventh principle. He was given dominion over all beneath
him, the beasts of the field, the fish of the sea and the fowls of the air.
He was to put all things under his feet "by that power whereby he
is able to subdue all things unto himself." He was to conquer the serpent,
the scorpion and the tiger in his own animal subconscious, not out in the jungle,
be it noted -- else the whole matter is worth only a buffoon's jest.
This seventh element that was to
crown the order of natural evolution with spiritual potency was the salt of
the earth, the little leaven in the lump, the grain of mustard seed, the treasure
in the napkin or invested to gain increment, the gold in the fish's mouth (saviors
born in the sign of Pisces). This was the child begotten of the Father.
A prodigious glow of mental light
at once floods upon many Bible allegories as soon as this numerological typism
is applied to the interpretation. Six would stand for the feminine or the Mother,
Nature, water, animal man; seven for the god in man. And many scriptural constructions
carry out this allotment of meaning. It is seen for instance in such an enigmatical
passage as is found in Job 5:19: "He shall deliver thee in six troubles;
yea in seven there shall no evil touch thee." Here we find six associated
with "trouble," which can mean evolutionary darkness, undevelopment,
animal sensuality, bondage to the flesh; and seven standing as symbol of release
from such troubles. A hundred other texts tell us that the spirit giveth life,
light, comfort, safety, deliverance from trouble and the joy of the Lord.
And what could be more in line with
the rendering here postulated than that other text of similar purport, Exodus
21:2: "If thou buy an Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve: and in
the seventh he shall go out free without paying any ransom." Or again:
"For six years you may sow your land and gather in your crops, but every
seventh year you must let the land alone so the poor people may pick up something;
anything they leave the wild beasts can eat, for if you worship their gods it
will endanger you." (We withhold exegesis on the last portion of this remarkable
passage, which has most amazing significance in other connections.) Here is,
however, a restatement of the sabbatical rest on a seventh round of a cycle,
matching God's rest on the seventh "day" of Genesis. It need
only be reminded the reader that all cycles of life have seven periods and "rest"
on their seventh "day." And, true to the analogue and the Biblical
myth, it is in the seventh round of each cycle that the energies of any kingdom
in process of creation link their potencies with the lowest range of the powers
of life on the plane above. The sixth development reached up just high enough
to effect a connection with spiritual vibration and draw it down into conjunction
with its physical organism, there to mother it through its own period of new
birth and further evolution.
The number forty-two, which has other
allegorical significance, evidently is in one respect a kindred glyph with the
number six. It is six times seven, and as such was obviously used by
the shrewd mythographers to disguise the number six. Forty-nine is a frequent
number typing sevenfold perfection, of which forty-two represented six of
the completed stages. So, typically, it reduces back to six. This would seem
to be the involved meaning in the verse of Numbers 35:6: "And among
the cities for refuge, which ye shall give unto the Levites there shall be six
cities for refuge, which ye shall appoint for the manslayer, that he may
flee thither; and to them ye shall add forty and two cities."
The esoteric meaning of the Biblical cities of refuge has not been delineated.
Briefly it may be stated here that in the strange duality of the ancient symbols,
under what was called the Law of the Two Truths of Life, body was as equally
a refuge for spirits fleeing, or expelled, from heaven to earth, as heaven is
lauded as the refuge for weary souls fleeing earth life. The incarnating soul,
in one very real philosophical sense, does flee to the body, with its sixfold
material constitution, as his city of refuge. (This absolutely untrodden section
of theological symbology will be the theme of a later lecture in the series.)
In Egyptian religion there were the
forty-two assessors or jurymen in the Judgment Trial of the soul before Osiris
in the great Hall of Seb, the god of earth. In Judges forty-two thousand
of the Ephraimites were slain because they were unable to pronounce the threefold
sacred name, Shibboleth. And in New Testament allegory the three and a half
"years" or "days" given (in Revelation, 11 and 12)
as the period of the soul's imprisonment in the flesh, being the lower half
of the cycle of seven stages, are found to equate just forty-two months. The
soul is thus represented as being in the body of Mother Nature for six out of
seven cycles, or in the lower half of a seven-period cycle energized by Nature's
powers. And the purely typal nature of alleged Old Testament "history"
is clearly enough seen in the following citation from Josephus (p. 206): "About
this time David was become the father of six sons, born of as many mothers."
But now, by a strange shifting of
the elements of the situation, from the moment the seventh or spiritual injection
began its regenerating cycle in the body prepared by the first six energies
of elementary Nature, it is altogether vital to the sense of a host of other
Bible allegories that we understand what otherwise becomes totally inexplicable
in the use of the number seven in sacred literature. Seven, it has just been
seen, denotes the Christ or higher consciousness coming as the Messianic Prince
of Peace as number seven in a seven series. For thousands of years the Egyptian
name of the Messiah was Iu-em-hetep
(condensed by the Greeks into Imhotep), which name reads: "The divinity
that comes as number seven, bringing peace." (hetep reading both
"peace" and "seven"). But once the seventh principle had
incarnated and began intermingling its forces with the six lower energies, it
could not be kept, even in typology, utterly clear and exempt from the imputations
of evil that attached to the lower six; and so we find the seventh ray becoming
colored with the characterization of the earlier six, or tainted, as it were,
through too close and "friendly" association with them. Finally, then,
the number seven gathered up into itself the significance of Mother, Nature,
water, earth, the god Seb, or Sebekh (equals seven), or all that the six had
solely connoted at first. And in this usage and with these darker colorations,
it is embodied in many Bible figurations.
Again and again we find seven signalizing
the Woman, the elemental Nature, the Beast (with seven heads) and the physical
creation. In short, seven must be given in these structures the signification
assigned first to the number six. The god, number seven, did confuse his high
nature inextricably with the nature of the beast, number six, and so the symbolism
of the two blended until seven came to carry what six originally and solely
stood for. Though the Beast of Revelation has seven heads, his number
is there given as 666, which is probably just six taken three times for emphasis,
though the Greek word Teitan, which was one of his names, yields the total of
666 in Hebrew numerology.
It is possible now to make application
of the numerology of seven to certain of the Bible myths with hardly less than
astonishing results. In these allegories it is seen that the "magic"
number seven does by no means represent perfection. It has gained the name of
"the perfect number"; but it is only so in the sense that every cycle
is perfected in a series of seven smaller cycles. Imperfection prevails until
it is overcome at the very end of the seventh impulse. In these instances it
will be found employed as the direct sign and token of "evil." It
has seemingly taken over the symbolic impress formerly borne by six. It now
stands for the powers in our constitution that are to be crushed down and thrust
out, subdued and "killed." It denotes the seven great primordial energies
of crude Nature, the seven dwarfs, ogres, giants, dragons, beasts, serpents;
the ungainly brood of the Mother. The old First Mother, Typhon or Apt, in Egypt,
with her progeny of seven sons, was variously represented. She was Hathor of
the seven cows, or the cow with seven heads; she was the old woman with seven
dogs; she was the goddess Rerit (whom Massey equates with Lilith, Adam's "first
wife") typed as the sow
with seven pigs. Astrologically she was configurated in the constellation of
the Great Bear (or Bearer!) with its seven stars; or again as the Great Bear
trailed by the Little Bear with its seven stars.
The ability to derive splendid meaning
from this aspect of the symbolism depends upon our understanding that the connotation
of evil ascribed to any part or feature of life's mechanism must be taken
in a decidedly relative sense only. The taking it in a positively real
sense has confused the racial mind and entailed grave consequences in history.
Why, it has always been asked, were powers engendered in man which needed to
be crushed and ruthlessly eradicated? The answer is, in part, that these powers,
like a scaffold, serve an early purpose, but later have to be torn away. The
stricter truth is that they are, in all ancient systems, converted into useful
servants of their spiritual Lord, as his vibrations gradually transmute their
cruder forces into higher type. They are to be "killed out" only in
the sense of being lifted up, transformed and transfigured to serve as fit vehicles
for the currents of a higher life. The importance of this clarification can
not be overstated, since failure to apprehend it aright has hardened the hearts
of otherwise kindly people and led to untold foul malpractice in religion. Moses
(man) lifting up the serpent on the cross in the wilderness is one of the Biblical
allegories depicting this transformation of the seven lower powers by the higher
self in man, the thinker. For the number of the serpent symbol is always seven,
and the serpent in half its symbolism stands for the lower or "evil"
nature. The serpent is just the seven mindless energies that built the form,
but that became theologically stigmatized as the "children of hell,"
the "minions of Satan," and in Egypt the Sami and the Sebau;
or, as Horus calls them, "the enemies," "the adversaries
of my father Osiris." Horus again and again declares that he comes "to
slay the adversaries" who had "killed" his father. They have
to be killed by a change into something more exalted.
There are first the seven bad years
and the seven lean kine in Pharaoh's dreams interpreted by Joseph, and the seven
years of famine. They swallow up the seven good aspects. Is it possible to understand
how eighteen centuries of brooding over these glyphs have failed to clarify
the simple implications which they fairly shout at our dullness? Failure could
only have been due to the fact that theology had long ago lost the knowledge
that religious documents of the ancient world dealt with the prime fact of the
incarnation. With this in mind, it would have been seen that to all outward
intents and purposes the seven "years" or stages of any incarnate
cycle swallow up the products of the soul's former exertions, which it treasured
up and assimilated in its last period of rest. Its divine intellectual
capacities were submerged under the sway of the seven mindless energies when
buried in body.
This exposition leads directly to
comprehension of the next forms of the same typology. How otherwise explain
those various periods of bondage and servitude of seven "years" duration?
Divine law commanded that the Hebrew slave was to be released in the seventh
year. Other instances speak simply of seven years of servitude. There is first
the case of Jacob, made to serve seven years to marry a woman! One must presume
that the necessity of repeated incarnation is indicated by his having to serve
another seven years for Rachel. Then there is the broad symbolism of the Lord's
promise to his children of Israel that he would clear the land of Canaan, the
territory to be occupied by the twelve perfected faculties of the spiritual
soul, of the seven nations that already occupied it. This representation, taken
as history, makes of the Lord a frightful monster of lower than human cruelty
and wanton vindictiveness, despicable beyond redemption in human eyes. For the
text states that the arm of the Lord prevailed mightily with the armies of Joshua,
Gideon, Jephtha and other kings in Israel, that it slew multitudes countless
as the sands on the seashore in a single day! But that which is repellant and
horrible as "history" is redeemed to magnificent sense when taken
as spiritual and cosmic allegorism. To be sure, the incoming Lord of Life, the
seventh divine principle, must dispossess, by a conversion of nature, the six
(or seven) mindless potencies of the physical man, or he will never be the ruler
in that "land." This "land" is none other than the human
body itself, built up by the seven natural sons of the Mother.
The children of Israel had to march
seven times around the city of Jericho on the seventh day, blowing seven blasts
on the ram's (Aries) horn, after marching around it once a day for six days,
before the walls fell under the bombardment of sevens!
There are numberless sevens in the
sacrificial ordinances, seven lambs, bullocks, heifers, ewes, bulls and goats
to be slain, in a tangle of symbolic usage.
The very institution of our week
of seven days, six devoted to the interests of the body, the mother of life,
and a seventh set aside for the cultivation of the spirit, is replete with cogent
meaning, when once the analogical groundwork is prepared.
And now it is presumed that the material
presented has sufficiently illuminated the mental horizon that the mystery of
Christ's casting out seven devils from our heroine, Mary Magdalene, needs no
further explication. She is one with the other women and the goddesses mentioned
above, and one also with the Mary mother of the Christ.
For this Mary, too, had to undergo
"the days of her purification," as the result of her giving birth
to the seventh principle. (Massey in fact enumerates seven distinct Maries in
the Gospel narrative, matching the seven Hathors of Egypt; and it is more than
coincidence that the early Egyptian name for Hathor was Meri! Its plural was
Merti or Mertae, which worked over into the Hebrew Martha!) She was Mother Nature
Mary out of whose body the seven original demoniac forces had to be displaced.
And the character of harlotry ascribed to her is due to another phase of the
typal depiction, which assayed to present vividly to ancient minds the prolific
productivity of Mother Nature out of wedlock, which is to say, before she had
been impregnated with the higher Luciferian germ of divine Intelligence. Her
brood of natural instincts were born -- but not begotten of the Father, Mind.
She was yet a Virgin, not married to Spirit. And in this light another great
figure of Bible dramatism, made to stand in repulsive obloquy by literal rendering,
is redeemed to acceptable understanding: The Great Harlot of Revelation.
The Great Whore and the Scarlet Woman seated on seven hills (later grossly
taken to be a reference to Rome on its seven hills!) are just typal figures
for our great common physical Mother Nature, resting on her seven powers. And
her whoredom with the princes of the earth, the higher mind, can be seen as
in fact her divine impregnation and conception.
But it was necessary that she, with
her "evil" progeny, should be cast out; and the Bible abounds with
the heartless expulsion of "bad" women, from Eve to the Scarlet Lady
of Revelation, whose "place should know them no more." Hagar,
cast into the wilderness with her spurious son of the bondage, Ishmael; Tamar,
who seduced Judah; Uriah's wife, seduced by David; Rahab the harlot; Jezebel;
Mary Magdalene; and Aholah and her sister Aholibah of Ezekiel (23), the
second being described as more wanton in her whoring with the princes of Babylon
and Egypt than the first, are examples of this typing. They either were cast
out or had "evil" elements cast out of them.
The wide diversity of typology can
be beautifully seen if the story of another "woman" in the New Testament
is analyzed. Here is another pictograph of lucid cosmic meaning that has been
traduced into a mere incident of miraculous healing and bereft of its power
to enlighten, by the literalizing process. It is the story of "Veronica"
(meaning "True Image"), the woman healed of an issue of blood of twelve
years continuance, by touching the mere hem of Christ's garment in the press
of the multitude. The grand meaning here has been lost because tender Christian
sensibilities shrank from facing a bit of sexual or creative symbolism. The
incident of course refers to the menstrual stoppage which is the index of impregnation
and announces the prospective birth of a child. Here again the woman is Mother
Nature, who for twelve ages (years) has run to waste with her very lifeblood
and had not yet produced the Christ child! The touch or impregnation of the
Christ mind stopped her wasteful and unproductive flow and turned her from the
Virgin to the sanctified mother of spirit.
Then there is that set of stories
about "barren women" bringing forth in their old age the Child who
becomes the man of God, the king or ruler. And these myths have perplexed the
priests and the people without end. Happily light is at hand.
The old age feature of this divine
motherhood was baffling until a hint was picked up from two lines of one of
the verses of the stirring Christmas hymn: Hark, The Herald Angels Sing.
They ran:
Late in time behold him come,
Offspring of the Virgin's womb.
There was the clue: "Late in
time!" Not till near the end of six long aeons of slow evolution in the
womb of Mother Nature does the Christ consciousness come to birth! Nature had
first to bring matter up through the mineral, vegetable and animal stages before
the body of man was of requisite complexity and capacity to accommodate the
Christ vibration. Nature is old by this time. Not only is there the story of
Abraham's Sarah who is made to conceive when long past her age of motherhood,
but an even more beautiful narrative of the same sort is that of Hannah, the
mother of Samuel. Elkinah had two wives, Penninah and Hannah. Penninah had borne
him many children, but Hannah was childless. She prayed in Eli's temple that
god would bless her. "And at the turn of the year she bore a son"--Samuel,
the prophet of God. (Prophet in the Greek, by the way, means simply "utterer
of truth," not necessarily or primarily a foreteller.) And as Hannah is
equivalent to Anna, the New Testament maternal grandmother of the Christ, the
identity of the two stories is evidenced. Only in the ripe old age of the natural
order is man, the crown of evolution, brought to birth.
Jesus' cursing the barren fig
tree, which is one of the chief symbols of the motherhood, is just another glyph
of the Christ consciousness rebuking the natural order for not having, late
in time, consummated his divine birth.
But a construction of the deepest
significance in the New Testament awaits our scrutiny. It stands ready to yield
us a vision of truth fairly blazing with light. It is none other than the very
first "miracle" assigned to the Christ in the Gospel drama. There
are two numbers inserted in the narrative of Jesus' turning water into wine
at the marriage feast at Cana
of Galilee which carry the entire significance of the construct, and which it
is questionable if any minister of the Gospel has ever taken seriously into
consideration at all.
This wonder is involved in the symbolism
of water, wine and the spiritual marriage, all of which must be translated into
pertinent sense before the whole transaction can be seen in all its grand sweep
of meaning. We have seen that water symbolizes the natural life, as its birthplace
or source. Wine is water into which a spiritual (spiritous!) element has been
injected in the form of a fruit juice, capable of engendering a fermenting activity
within the water that will render it "inspiriting" to man's
mind. The yeast symbol is familiar, but that of wine, as water with spiritual
"fire" injected into it, making it divinely "intoxicating"
to man, is not so well understood. The sun, the fiery element, and symbol of
man's divine part, actually does take the water of the earth around the roots
of the vine and transform it into wine in the grape under our eyes. Could ancient
symbolic science overlook the parallelism of this process with spiritual exhilaration
in man? By no means. It is the aptest symbol in nature of the transformation
of the lower elements in the human make-up into the higher. IT types the spiritual
alchemy so much harped upon. An Egyptian text reads: "Thou didst put grapes
in the water that cometh forth from Edfu."
But why at a marriage feast? Because
it could be done nowhere else. The process itself climaxes in the union of the
two natures in the spiritual marriage so frequently found in the New Testament.
The two natures, long at odds in their aeonial battle of Armageddon, finally
become reconciled to each other and make the atonement, merging into one higher
being, the "one new man" of St. Paul. The alchemicalization of water
into wine of spirit or "firewater" ends in the divine marriage of
the "woman" and the "man" in our constitution. And out of
their union comes the Christ child.
What, then, are the two numbers in
the allegory? The first is three. "Now after three days Jesus went up into
Cana of Galilee" and performed the sacramental rite on the lower element.
In evolution it is always in the fourth cycle of any larger aeon that matter
and spirit meet and marry to birth the Christ, Mind. The "days" are
the three periods spent by life in the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms
before in the fourth or human, the middle point through the seven, the two mingle
and produce. So Jesus came out on the sea to help his distressed and sinking
disciples "at the fourth watch of the night," the time just before
sunrise.
And the other number is that of the
pots of water set out by the servants to be turned into wine. And how may were
there?
The symbolism here reverts to the
original number of the natural elements to be raised by the seventh power; and
so it is six! The soul in us must spiritualize six lower forces. The Christ
in us, the hope of our glory, must interfuse his fiery intelligence into the
six primary elements of our being. The first "miracle" of Jesus builds
on the transfiguration, and not the extinction, of the primal seven.
In perfect accord with the same hidden
signification of the seventh element crowning and consummating the preparatory
work of the preceding six, falls the number found in the Gospels as timing the
occurrence of the great deification of man - -the Transfiguration on the Mount.
In its fitness with the other features of the cosmograph here outlined, in its
perfect setting in the picture of evolution and anthropology, it can be cited
as practically final and incontrovertible corroboration of our thesis and interpretation.
The climactic irradiation of the lower personality with the full glory of divinity
could not come before the six rounds of elementary life had finished their course.
So it is impossible to underrate the significance of the Gospel's statement
that Jesus with His three disciples went up to be transfigured "after six
days!"
And His triumphal entry into the
holy spiritual city, another allegory of similar import, occurred on the Sabbath,
or seventh day.
If there is any doubt as to the correctness
of this translation of myth and symbol, it can quickly be dispelled by allusion
to a brief but pointed line from that treasury of ancient knowledge, the Egyptian
Book of the Dead. Says the Manes, or human soul in the body: "The
seven Uraeus divinities are my body." The Uraeus was the short asp-like
snake depicted everywhere on the inscriptions. It symboled "the fiery serpent"
or the dynamic energies in matter and nature,--those potencies which modern
science is now finding locked up in the atom.
But in the end all this typology
leaves us face to face with a problem of transcendent interest and importance,
which must have framed itself in the mind of the astute reader by this time.
Mention has been made of the spirited revolt of women against the seeming implications
of the symbolism. If woman is the type of matter, and matter carries all the
theological connotations of the lower evil nature that must be cast out and
changed, is not woman herself then stigmatized as evil?
Before one laughs at the presumed
ridiculousness of this query, let it be said with all possible force that ignorant
uncomprehending handling of this symbology has indeed gone far to victimize
woman in western history. The pall of its warped shadow has fallen pretty heavily
on woman actually. If woman has not enjoyed full equality with
man, it is, in a measure not discerned by historians and students of sociology,
due directly to the miscarriage of symbolic meanings. The shadow of evil that
crude mishandling of the symbols flung over matter and the body with its seven
fires of physical creation, has beclouded the actual life of womankind. Whatever
debasement woman has suffered in a "man-made world" is in fact traceable
to this source.
The menace is perpetuated today by
a group of religious cults which have revitalized the philosophical doctrine
of matter as the parent and embodiment of evil, and made it their central theme.
There do virtually thereby stigmatize woman as evil. For woman is inescapably
the type of matter, not only in the sacred myths, but in reality. To declare
matter evil philosophically is by implication to declare woman evil. There is
no escape, no evading this issue. If then we must regard woman as an error in
cosmic creation, an embodiment of evil. She has not entirely escaped this degradation
in actuality. Matter has been made to play the role of the enemy of the soul,
the drag on the wheels of spiritual progress, the foil of the god, the villain
of the theological piece. And woman is its symbol!
It is the final purpose of this dissertation
to separate the wheat of this situation from its chaff of folly, and to free
women in person from the last hue of stigma from that source. Women stand as
the types of matter; but the assumption that matter itself is evil in any
absolute sense is one of the grossest misconceptions in the philosophical field
that has ever darkened the intellectual vision of mankind. The "evil"
character assigned to matter, flesh, the body, and women as their type, in ancient
literature must be understood as for the purposes of dramatic depiction only.
It is to be read in the purely relative sense. Matter and spirit are as equally
meritorious and as mutually indispensable as are man and woman in actual life.
They are the two polar opposites, the two nodes of being into which God divided
his original unit nature "in the beginning" of creation. Neither can
exist without the other or out of tensional relation with it. Abolish matter,
and spirit would disappear off the scene. Talk of spirit being all in all, and
good, and matter nothing, and evil, is sentimental mystic nonsense. Matter is
as essential in all living process as is the negative pole of magnetism or electricity.
Imagine an electrician engaged to install some heating or lighting device in
your house proclaiming that his creed limited him to the use of positive electricity
only, and forbade his using the negative charge. Or picture the atom trying
to support the universe without its negatively charged electrons whirling about
the positive proton. Or, the same thing, conceive of the
planets being pulled centripetally without the counterbalancing pull centrifugally.
Would they stay in their orbits? The very stability of the universe rests on
the exact countervalence of spirit and matter. Where the two are in equal tension
and equilibrium, the worlds come into stable existence. When the tension is
relaxed the two sink back into their primal undifferentiated union and homogeneity,
and the worlds vanish into the thin air of empty space. To give validity or
reality or even existence to the one, in total denial of them to the other,
whether in actuality or in philosophy, is the veriest imbecility of thought.
The kingdom of a mind in which matter is denied must in the end prove as chaotic
as would be the kingdom of life in which there was operative spirit, but no
matter. So we can fall back upon Dr. Johnson's quip over the debate: "No
matter; never mind!"--in the sense that if there was no matter there would
not be any mind to debate its existence. Mind really does need a brain to function
through -- here. Where did life ever function without an appropriate instrument?
And organic existence is ever the product of consciousness and matter in conjunction.
Unbalanced idealism is as fantastic as unbalanced materialism.
Hence in archaic symbolic wisdom
every god was allotted his Shakti, or goddess, his consort, his spouse.
Why? Because without her he could not bring his ideographs or archetypal thought
creations to manifestation in the concrete worlds. He was totally helpless until
he could call upon matter to implement his conceptions. By cosmic decree he
was under the necessity of linking his energies of mind with her energies of
matter, if he would actualize any of his creations. He would have been punished
for failure to "marry" his appropriate type of matter energy, or cosmic
femininity, by remaining in the eternal bachelorhood of non-existence. And the
ancient books record just such eventualities in early cosmic operations, when
the great Lord ordered certain groups of Rishis to "create," and they
refused and fell into Samadhi or dreamy Nirvanic consciousness. As penalty
they were forced to descend into the lowest material worlds for many ages. The
cosmic Utopian state insists that its Kumaras, or "celibate young men"
marry, that the birth rate among gods and men, planets, suns and galaxies be
kept sufficiently high.
In the light of the symbolism, then,
all rebellion of women against the superficial intimations as to their comparative
base status in life is without valid reason or warrant. So far from depriving
them of high rank and equal dignity with man, it is precisely the function of
this typology to establish and support that rank and equality. But this can
be seen only when contemporary notions and absurd philosophies which belittle
matter and exalt "spirit" to solitary
apotheosis, are dissipated by the light of common sense. An arrant "spiritualism"
is as baneful as is "rank materialism." And current folly under the
name of spirituality is sufficiently heinous to warrant a vigorous campaign
for a return to philosophical sanity. How long will it be until mankind learns
that such sanity can never rest on a view which posits spirit alone, or matter
alone, as ultimate reality? The life of man stands posed between the two worlds,
and sanity can only be achieved by maintaining the equipose steadily until the
forces of the two merge into a new creation.
It seems not unlikely that the terms
of this symbolism may afford just that light which the modern mind needs to
guide it to a better solution of the great problem of woman's position and status.
There is apparently just warrant for a "woman's movement" and a full
and free granting of "woman's rights," if such are still denied. But
if the symbolism indicates one thing clearly, it is that, while matter is equal
in value and function to spirit, operating in reciprocity with spirit, it surely
stands at the extreme opposite pole of difference from it. If women are to be
equal with men, it would seem to be established beyond debate that they should
not try to be like men. The art of emphasizing the difference while preserving
the delicate equilibration that is the life of the attraction between the two
must be left to the individual and collective genius of the race.
The Bible is -- in spite of the blatant
ridicule of the atheists and freethinkers -- a grand volume of a truly divine
wisdom. But its quickening message is couched in the lost language of symbolism
and natural analogue. Translated into meaning it spells out supreme guidance
for human life. But mistranslated into the nonsense of a literal and historical
rendering it has afflicted the western mind with disastrous befuddlement and
played havoc with western society. From this miscarriage of symbolism came not
alone the debasement of woman, but the ugly monster of religious persecution,
which in the estimate of historians has cost the sacrifice of fifty millions
of lives. The intrinsic values in human life, as Ruskin insisted, are fine,
not coarse. And who, therefore, can calculate the dire injury inflicted on a
world by the gross mistranslation of an allegory picturing cosmic Intellect
purging and healing cosmic Matter into the objective story of a man -- no matter
how godlike -- practicing sorcery on one woman and stopping the menstrual wastage
of another? At this low level has Christianity transmitted to its devotees the
sublime Ancient Wisdom. Need any further reason be advanced to explain why its
own shepherds confess in every sermon its ineffective ministry in the modern
world?
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