Theosophy - Spiritual Symbolism of the Sun and Moon by Alvin Boyd Kuhn
SPIRITUAL
SYMBOLISM of
the SUN
AND MOON
by ALVIN
BOYD KUHN
I have
found a most fitting introduction to the theme and sentiment of our address
this evening in the beautiful little verse of Wordsworth which he calls Heartleap
Well:
My heart
leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky;
So
was it when I was a child;
So
is it now I am a man;
So
shall it be when I grow old,--
Or
let me die!
The
child is father of the man,
And
I could wish my days to be
Bound
each to each in natural piety.
There
are two things in this little gem of sentiment that are worthy of our attention
at the outset of this lecture. The one is the poet's uplift that his life be
continually sweetened and deepened by the emotions of a "natural piety."
The development of religion under Christian auspices has severed it quite drastically
from its original kinship with nature, and it is the purpose and keynote of
this lecture to revive some of the primordial links of relationship between
the religious emotions in man's heart and the phenomena of the external world.
For religion once owned to a close affinity with natural events and the course
of the solar year. The Church and the various religions still hold the thin
cords of that bond of kinship between the subjective and the objective worlds
in their calendar of yearly festivals. But to a distressing extent either the
very datings of these festivals have been misplaced, or the inner purport of
the celebrations has effervesced out of ecclesiastical knowledge, and the great
round of pagan festivals in the year is reduced to a merely nominal place in
the religious life. This is because the great fundamental teaching of the Ancient
Wisdom, that both astronomical and natural phenomena are a reflection and epitome
of man's spiritual history, has been lost out of current knowledge.
If
I may make a personal reference for a moment, I desire to state that my own
discovery, as a result of research into Egyptology, of the amazing reproduction
of man's spiritual life in the movements of our two great heavenly neighbors,
the sun and the moon, has been perhaps the climactic realization in a whole
long series of astounding revelations which were disclosed to my mind in recent
study of religious origins. Words indeed fail me in the effort to convey to
another mind the veritable transfiguration of my own philosophic mind, my conception
of life and religion, as the truth embodied in solar and lunar movements little
by little took form in my comprehension. It was, to say the least, an illumination
so flashing as to stun and benumb my thinking, as if I had been brought face
to face with the entire glory of truth in one sudden flare. If cold words will
enable me to impart to your minds a fraction of what has been my own intellectual
experience in dealing with this material, I may express the hope that whenever
hereafter you behold the moon in the nightly sky, you, like Wordsworth at sight
of the rainbow, may be moved by feelings and intimations of the utmost profundity
and gripping power. God set these lights in the heavens, not merely as lamps
unto our physical feet by night and by day, but in a far deeper sense to keep
us mortals enlightened by their astonishing revelation of our cosmic and spiritual
history. For the sun and moon together trace in the open book of the skies each
month and each year the entire narrative of our inner experience.
The
(apparent) annual revolution of the sun about the earth, or more properly the
course of the sun through the four seasons or four quarters (twelve signs) of
the zodiac, was the entire symbolical basis of ancient religious systematism.
The divinity in man was typed by the sun, and the sun's yearly experience in
its journeying was made the outward typograph of the experience of the spirit
in mortal man. As the sun descended into the dark realm of winter, died and
was buried out of sight, to be revived and raised up again to glory in the vernal
equinox, so the god descended into the depths of night and winter in matter,
lost his divine nature and died on the cross of incarnation, to rise again,
as did Osiris in Egypt, "on the third day in the moon." The new moon
was born on the third day of the dark period. And this, be it known on authority,
was the origin of the three days during which all Saviors in ancient scriptures
reposed in the tomb of death.
The
zodiacal chart is divided into four quarters to match the four seasons, the
four cardinal points, and the fourfold segmentation of man's nature. At the
junction points of each two of these divisions, or at the two solstices and
equinoxes, the ancients celebrated the four great religious festivals of the
year. In June came the great Fire-festival, symbolic of the highest expression
of the fiery nature of deity; in September came the festival that commemorated
the incarnation, under whatever name; in December was celebrated the end of
the dark night of death, and the birth or quickening of the Sun-god to new life;
and at the vernal equinox in March followed the joyous festival of the bursting
of the bars of death in matter, or the resurrection. Each of these was of cardinal
importance and significance; yet it might be said that of the four the autumn
and spring occasions were the ones of primary rating. They severally symbolize
the descent of the god into incarnation and his re-arising after "death."
They thus typify death and rebirth in the spiritual life of man.
The
Fire-festival of ancient days in June has passed quite out of modern ken. Our
Fourth of July celebration, with its pyrotechnics and old-time bonfires, has
chanced to come in, for America, with a certain appropriateness not dreamed
of by the general mind. Of the great autumnal festival commemorating the death
of the god as he sank below the horizon, the main survival is, all unsuspected,
our Hallowe'en mummery. It was designated Michaelmas, as Michael is from the
Egyptian Makhu, the god of the horizon or the balance. The proper celebration
of Hallowe'en or All Souls' Night has preserved features of the ancient religious
symbology which are of extreme significance. The public's total ignorance of
the hidden meaning of these mummeries speaks volubly as to the decay of ancient
wisdom and a knowledge of the forms under which it was depicted. The wearing
of masks, which were originally those of animal faces, signified the incorporation
of the god or soul that came from spiritual realms in the body of an animal.
The mummery depicted the souls as hiding themselves behind the outward mask
of an animal's body! We, the gods, came to earth and made the bodies of animals
our habitation. These were the "coats of skin" that Genesis describes
the Eternal as making for Adam and Eve in the Edenic days. As the god took residence
in the bodies of the lower race which he came to uplift, it was a most natural
form of typology to picture him as looking out upon the world through the grimacing
features of some animal. The ludicrousness of the masks was designed to betoken
the distortion and sad disfigurement of the beauty of the god as his intrinsically
divine nature came to expression darkened and corrupted by the animal medium
through which it passed into concrete expression. Here is the long-lost meaning
of the masks of Hallowe'en.
Take
next the divided and bi-colored suits worn by the Hallowe'en celebrants. What
is the emblemism back of these? It is not less interesting than that of the
masks. It was designed to represent the fact that the god, a unit nature on
his own plane, split or bifurcated into duality when he incarnated. A great
Egyptian verse reads: "The soul makes the journey through Amenta (incarnate
life) in the two halves of sex." There is a great truth back of this statement.
Indeed it is the great mystery of human life. Before incarnation, we, as spirits,
were androgyne, or biune in sex. Sex pertains to the physical body, and the
soul, which is sexless, receives a sexual differentiation by virtue of its coming
to incarnation in a body. But the bifurcation rises to even higher significance
when it is seen to connote also man's duality as a creature of combined physical
and spiritual natures. Humanity is divided into male and female, in outer form;
it is also divided in each individual between the two worlds of spirit and matter.
Man is the result of the union of a soul or immaterial principle of intelligence
with a gross body. This duality, along with the sexual duality of the race,
is typed by the divided suit of the Hallowe'en symbolism.
Then
we have the great festival of Easter typing the resurrection of dead life on
all planes. And how do we give expression to the meaning? Chiefly in the outward
form of bright new spring clothing! This is not merely a social custom. It arose
out of the archaic symbology, when man thought it fitting to imitate nature,
who was then clothing herself anew in the bright glories of springtide. Ponder
a moment over the idea, and you will be able to see an infinite depth of new
meaning in this custom of casting off old garments and coming out in new ones.
One of the several reasons why the snake was a symbol of the resurrection was
his sloughing and self-renewal in the springtime. The entire process of evolution
in the human cycle is to be consummated at our Easter by our casting off the
old garment of mortality, the body of flesh, and standing forth transfigured
in the radiant body of solar glory, our spiritual house not made with hands.
Easter
is rightly the consummate festival of human joy, because it signalizes the god's
release from his imprisonment in a body of what was to him virtually death.
"Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"--cries Paul, referring
to his incarnation. "Out of the belly of death have I cried unto thee,
O God," echoes Jonah from the depths of this watery grave of the body--(The
body of man is close to 80% water!). The opposite side of the year, then, must
have been the season of grief and sorrow over the god's descent from spiritual
freedom into the bondage of "Egypt," or the human body. (Our mortal
bodies are the "flesh-pots of Egypt!") And so we find it in the ancient
days. In old systems and cults there were celebrated various festivals appropriate
to this motive. Significantly there was a three-days festival of mourning for
the death of the god around the date of the autumn equinox; likewise a seven-days
festival of the same purport; and a forty-days festival equivalent to Lent.
The seven-days festival was called in Christian times the Fetes de Tenebres,
a French name for Festival of Darkness. It commemorated the soul's sad entry
upon its dark night of bodily incarnation.
Now
all three of these ancient autumnal festivals which bewailed the soul's descent
into the realms always described in the sacred books as "death," have
been continued by the Christian Church, but by a strange miscarriage of their
primal intent, they have been transferred over into the opposite side of the
year, where they have no appropriateness and where they are glaringly out of
place. This has been due to the loss of the original meaning of the celebrations
with the decay of all ancient theology dating from the third century on. Christianity
has so far missed the interpretation of old symbols and so far drifted away
from solar religion that it has postponed the season set aside for lamenting
the death and burial of our spiritual Lord until that season in which all nature
is in the midst of her renewal and resurrection. It surely is no time to bewail
the buried king of life when he is already emerging from his tomb! The fit time
for that is in "the melancholy days" of autumn.
But
the Christians were probably moved by the consideration that "All's well
that ends well," for they arranged each of the three periods at such a
time that the concluding day of each one falls upon Easter. This is the only
possible justification for placing the festivals of mourning in the spring,
namely, that their night of mourning can be gloriously terminated in the rejoicing
on Easter morn. And this is the only consideration that saves the Christian
Church from the commission of a frightful anachronism in its calendar of festivals.
We
have seen one of the origins of the three-days period in the tomb (another and
more abstruse one has been elaborated in other lectures). It is desirable now
to trace the origin of the Passion Week of seven days, the ancient Fetes de
Tenebres, and also the origin of the forty days of Lent.
To
explain fully the significance of the number seven and its application to the
sufferings of the Christ would take no less than a volume in itself. Suffice
it to say with the utmost brevity that the divine life in and back of evolution
struggled up through six kingdoms of nature, three sub-mineral, the mineral,
the vegetable and the animal, before attaining to the expression of its latent
deific force in the seventh or human stage, wherein the god makes his debut
upon the scene of incarnate existence. Hence in all fables and myths the gods
appear in a seventh epoch, period or cycle, as in the Genesis account of the
finishing of creation on the sixth day. A series of old allegories placed the
rising of the Savior out of death on the seventh morn, and this construction
the Christians followed in the institution of Passion Week.
The
Lenten period of forty days has two mythological origins. First it was derived
from the Egyptian agriculture, where the seed was in the ground forty days
before germinating. As the seed in the soil was a natural figure for the
soul in incarnation, the period of incubation was transferred to the spiritual
allegory. Thus the Christians themselves announce three different periods
of the god's burial or death in matter -- three, seven and forty days --
a definite proof that the event can not be historical.
A second
origin derives it from another natural phenomenon of incubation, the forty weeks
spent by the human foetus in the womb. As forty weeks was too large a portion
of the year to devote to a commemoration of one phase of the spiritual drama,
the typical forty days were substituted, the number alone being significant.
And after all, what more natural a typology of the incarnation could be found
than the foetal cycle?
This
number forty -- which occurs scores of times in Old and New Testament allegorism,
-- has been retained at several other points in the Christian year. Hallowe'en
has been placed just forty days past the autumn equinox, and the festival
of Candlemas, or the Purification of the virgin, following the birth of
the Christos, falls on February 2, just forty days after Christmas. Also
Whitsuntide falls forty days after the ascension. But from these celebrations
more or less of the ancient significance of the number has disappeared.
From
Gerald Massey's Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World (p. 745) we take the following
significant passage:
"But
there was a diversity of opinion amongst the Christian Fathers as to whether
Jesus the Christ was born in the winter solstice or in the vernal equinox. It
was held by some that the 25 of March was the natal day. Others maintained that
this was the day of the incarnation. According to Clement of Alexandria the
birth of Jesus took place upon the 25 of March. But in Rome the festival of
Lady Day was celebrated on the 25 of March in commemoration of the miraculous
conception in the womb of the virgin, which virgin gives birth to the child
at Christmas, nine months afterward. According to the gospel of James (Ch. 18)
it was in the equinox, and consequently not at Christmas, that the virgin birth
took place."
This
passage is valuable from many points of view, and should put an end forever
to the notion that the Christian Christmas festival has anything to do with
commemorating the birth of a personal being from a human mother. It was purely
an astronomical celebration. Indeed when it was officially set by decree of
Pope Julius in the year 345 A.D., It was placed on December 25 expressly to
match the astronomical date of the birth of Mithra and Dionysus in the Mystery
cults! It was the pagans who set the date for Christmas!
Taking
our rough diagram of the zodiac and its four quarters, we may see several large
spiritual facts which are fruitful for our instruction.
The
four quarters type the fourfold nature of man, or his four bodies, the physical
(earth), the astral or emotional (water), the mental (air), and the spiritual
(fire). The divine spirit in man lives in these four sheaths, which interpenetrate
each other in the field of the physical body. It lives in the four because it
has built them up in its journey through the round of the elements, building
a form in and of the matter of each. To contact those four elemental worlds
it had to evolve an organism of the material of each. The sun, traversing the
four quarters of the zodiac, is a glyph of this evolutionary journey of the
human soul through the four worlds or elements. To symbolize this great fact,
the year, the month (lunar) and the day were each divided into a fourfold section,
and the year and the day additionally given a twelvefold partition, i.e., the
twelve months and the twelve hours, of day and night. The lunar months give
us seven days in each quarter, and twenty-eight is the number of the gestation
period, in days, of many animals.
All
this numerology and periodicity is part of the great significant fact that the
ancients saw in the movements of the sun and moon a counterpart or analogue
of the spiritual history of all men. With nature's aid they wrote the drama
of human life on the open tablet of the sky. Or rather, it might be said, they
deciphered the handwriting of mother nature herself in the skies, her stencils
being the sun and moon.
Then
we have also the cycle of the Great Year, a period of 25,868 years, measured
by the total precession of the equinoxes through the entire twelve signs, giving
us the different astronomical "Ages." Each of these twelve divisions
lasted 2155 years; and the ancient sages represented the Messiah as coming at
the beginning of each new Age under the form of the sign. In Libra he came as
the Lord of the Balance, or the King of Righteousness; in Scorpio he came as
the divine Scorpion, to sting the god into incarnational Lethe from which he
was to awake on Christmas in his quickening to life; in Sagittarius he came
as the half-animal Archer aiming at the distant goal of unification of his two
elements; in Capricorn he came as the mountain goat scaling the heights of the
spirit; in Aquarius he was the Water-Pourer, or universal server; in Pisces
he came as the Ichthys, the divine Fish, as the food of man; in Aries the ram
or Lamb of God, sacrificed for the world; in Taurus, as the Golden Bull or Calf,
the male Cow of life and plenty of ancient Egypt; in Gemini as the two divine
twins, the god in his biune form, the one of which, like John the Baptist decreases
as the other increases; in Cancer as the Good Scarab or Beetle, type of the
self-renewing divine life; in Leo as the lion of the house of Judah; in Virgo
as the shoot of the vine, constellated in this sign in old zodiacs. Jesus of
Galilee came at or near the beginning of the Piscean era; his followers were
called the Pisciculi (little fishes) and his disciples were figured as rude
fisherman. As we have now entered the Aquarian Age, the Messiah should be re-charactered
to conform to ancient usage. He should be the Waterman, or dispenser of the
water of life and universal love.
But
only now, on top of all this preliminary solar symbolism, do we plunge into
the heart of those amazing analogies that make the sun and moon the celestial
writers of our history. We must delineate sharply, first, the characters played
by the two orbs, as each stands, both in fact and in symbology, for certain
definite traits, elements and natures in our constitution. Let us look at these
severally. The sun types our divinity, the moon our animality; the sun the soul,
the moon the body. As all spirit is masculine, the sun is of that gender, the
moon female, the woman. The solar god embodies the positive energies of life,
the moon the negative. The sun's essence is fiery, the moon is symboled by water.
We might tabulate this as follows for readier classification:
THE SUN.
|
THE MOON.
|
The
god |
The
animal |
Spirit |
Physical
matter |
Soul |
Body |
Positive |
Negative |
Masculine;
man |
Feminine;
woman |
Fire |
Water |
Aggressive,
light-giving. |
Receptive,
light-receiving |
Heavenly
life |
Earthly
life |
Spirit
body |
Astral
body |
The sun is our
light by day, the moon by night, and in the large cosmic sense day symbols
our life in the celestial worlds or the empyrean when not incarnated. Night
is the definite symbol of our bodily incarnation. Our day is symbolical (only)
of our life as pure spirit; night betokens the subjection of our spirits to
the gloom and darkness of incarnation. This will be seen in important connections
in a few minutes. In the daytime we receive the rays of our spiritual life
directly; by night we get them only secondarily and by reflection. And here
is the beginning of the great symbolism of the moon. It is a reflector of
the sun's light, and this reflection is made at night, when the sun is out
of sight of man! The moon is our sun-by-night, and it is well to delve more
deeply into the implications of this datum. The moon conveys to us the sun's
light in our darkness. What does this mean on a wider scale of values? It
means this: as the night typifies our time of incarnation, the diminished
solar light reflected on the lunar surface is an index of the fact that by
no means the full power and radiance of the sun (our divine light or spirit)
can fall upon us or shine for us while in the life in body. As the moon stands
for the body, the reflected light of the sun upon it and from it to us, betokens
that we can have access only to as much of the spiritual glory as our bodies
can give passage to, or give expression to, or become susceptible to. In incarnation
we are in spiritual darkness, or have access only to that spiritual force
and radiance that can get down to us through the intervening medium of the
physical mechanism. The body which individualizes us must needs be the transmitter
of godly life and nature to us. As it is our outer garment, the light from
within must come through it to reach us in the outer world. As at night solar
light comes to us reflected and refracted, dimmed and obscured by its passage
through another orb, so in our night of incarnation on earth, our divine character
shines for us only in that diminished and broken form in which the mechanism
of nerves and blood transmit it to our intelligence. The moon is all that
we can have of the sun at night. So the bodily registration and transmission
of godly nature in our physical life is all that we can have of deity. Hence
the ancient widespread desire to escape the bonds of the body by rigid mortification
and crucifixion of its heavier tendencies. When in incarnation, we are deprived
of the full glow of our inner light. Our god is then as the hidden sun, and
we must get its rays through a reflecting medium, the body. This is why Taht,
the moon-god in Egyptian mythology-religion, is called the witness for Ra,
the great Sun-god. He, through his orb, is the witness to the human race of
the presence of the invisible sun. He is identical with the Gospel character
of John the Baptist, who is described in the Gospels as being not that true
light, but as coming to bear witness to that light. So the moon is not a true
light, but stands in the sky of our night to bear witness that the solar light,
our god, is still shining. It thus also symbolizes the human body, which is
surely not the light of spirit, yet in its structure and in its outward countenance,
it reflects and bears witness to the divine spirit that animates it, the god
hidden within. A man's spirit shines out on his face as the sun shines on
the moon!
This
is a profound thing to realize about the moon,--that it types our lower nature,
which reflects the higher. But the most sublime element in the spiritual symbolism
we are trying to depict comes next in the development of our theme. This is
the eternal meaning connected with the sun's light on the moon that we are desirous
of impressing in unforgettable vividness upon the imagination. This is the great
fact which we would have you call to mind whenever you gaze upon the silvery
orb from night to night. As the young crescent fills with light and rounds out
its luminous circle, it is writing our spiritual history! It is preaching to
us uncomprehending mortals the gospel truth about our own divinization. The
growing expanse of light on the moon, we repeat, is the sign, symbol and seal
of our own transfiguration into godhood! The spark of divinity implanted in
our organisms must, to use one Biblical figure, gradually leaven the whole lump;
to use another, must illuminate the whole bodily house. Grandly do the texts
of the Egyptian Book of the Dead express the features of this process. Horus
in his resurrection is made to say, after enumerating the bodily members one
by one: "There is no member of my body that is without a god." He
means in effect that there is no portion of his nature that has not been divinized,
i.e., purified, raised, transfigured with spiritual radiance. And this states
the whole purpose of human life. The god came to dwell within us in order to
transform our lower natures and lift them up to a harmony of vibration with
his own ethereal personality. As we gaze upon the lunar crescent and see it
go on toward the full, the vision should fortify us with the profoundest and
sublimest truth about this mortal existence of ours, viz.: that we are in process
of filling our very bodies with the mantling glow of an interior hidden light,
which will steadily transform our whole nature with the beauty of its gleaming.
The sight of the crescent (from Latin crescere, to grow) should thrill us with
the realization that little by little, life by life, divinity is creeping over
us, spreading through us! The growing light on the moon is nature's sure pledge
of our deification! Here is inspired writing of revelation by the hand of Nature
herself. Here is a Bible whose word no sceptic will deny.
The
Sun-gods in ancient systems were represented as being dismembered, or cut to
pieces, when they came to incarnation. Osiris's body was fabled to have been
cut by Sut, the devil of darkness, into fourteen pieces, which were scattered
and buried over the land of Egypt, to be reassembled later by Isis or Horus,
aided by the god Taht, and the body restored whole in its resurrection. Here
is indisputable proof that the religious myths were based on astronomical symbolism,
for the fourteen pieces can have no other basis than the fact that the power
of darkness cuts off fourteen slices of light from the body of the full moon,
or cuts the full-orbed light of the sun on the moon, the god in matter, into
fourteen pieces. These are reassembled or reconstituted in the next birth of
the crescent; and once more the heavenly symbolism of the gradual spiritualization
of the lower man takes form in the growing light. So that we can understand
the hidden ecstasy of the god Horus, when at the completion of the process and
the divinization of his whole nature, he cries, triumphantly, "I am the
god entire."
In
this same great Egyptian Ritual (The Book of the Dead) there is the statement
that "Osiris enters the moon on the sixth day." This has not heretofore
been seen as of any pointed significance, because the symbolism has not been
understood. As the moon types the woman, lunar typology was made to match feminine
functions, and the three dark days of the moon were extended to, or represented
as, five, to equate the five days of the feminine period. As the ovum, the seed
of life from above, descends into the womb for fecundation at the end of the
period, it was used to type the descent of the god into incarnation after a
period of pralaya or non-existence in a world of form, and the typism was transferred
from the woman to the moon, her astronomical counterpart. Or the moon-goddess
was simply figured as menstruating.
This
entry of Osiris or the god into the moon on the sixth day of the new cycle is
the prime origin of the Sabbath, and makes clear particularly why the Jewish
Sabbath begins Friday evening and extends to Saturday evening. The descent of
the god was timed on solar symbolism, and therefore was made at sunset. Counting
from Sunday, Friday is the sixth day, and evening the time of the descent. Jesus
and Horus both enter the boat to cross the sea at eventide.
As
the underlying idea of the Sabbath is the crowning of the six rounds or waves
of elemental life, non-intelligent, with the coming of the seventh or spiritual
intelligence, and the bringing of peace (the same Egyptian word, hetep, which
means seven also means peace and is the name of the Egyptian Messiah, Iu-em-hetep,
he who comes as the seventh, and he who as the seventh brings peace to the seven
elementary forces of blind nature)--(See lecture on the Myth of the Sun-gods
for fuller elucidation.)-- there was thus a Sabbath on the seventh day of each
month, called the Feast of the Tenait. Then as the full moon was typical of
the complete divinization of the lower man, and came on the 15th, there was
another Sabbath held eight days later. Each month thus had at first only two
Sabbaths, on the seventh (evening of the sixth) and the fifteenth. Later the
general idea of a seventh or spiritual day completing the six secular days,
was applied to each recurring group of seven days, without reference to the
lunar phases or periods, and was made continuous,--the origin of our week. Several
of the goddesses, as Semiramis and Ishtar, as also Venus, were actually named
"the goddess Fifteen," typifying their giving birth to the Sun-god
at the height of their enciente condition, on the fifteenth.
As
intimated, the three dark days of the moon were the actual origin of all the
burial periods of three days for the Sun-gods or their mythical three days in
the tomb. In lunar symbolism they matched the five days of the feminine period,
and as this is the period during which the light of the sun is not in contact
at all with the moon, tribal and national custom, founded basically on these
outward phenomena and their hidden spiritual signification, carried the implication
over into the life of womankind by prohibiting contact with the male during
the dark cycle, and still further by requiring women to avoid all contact with
sunlight or even with a fire, the outward symbols of the male or spirit! The
customs of the Jews and other nations of early time forbade a woman to be in
a house where there was a fire. Her condition was supposed to dishonor the fire
or the sun, and this is the meaning back of the legends of the Greek Diana visiting
condign punishment upon the hero who came into her presence while she was bathing.
David also looked from his housetop upon a beautiful woman who was bathing,
and was severely punished for it.
We
have said that the moon and woman are mutually representative in the typology.
Now, to indicate that these parallelisms are not mere poetic fancies, but that
they are grounded on actual affinities in nature, let us see if there is any
actual bond of relationship between them. At once we are confronted with an
amazing confirmation of the connection. The very basic functions of woman as
female are controlled and timed by the 28-day cycle of the moon. There is nothing
that can be added to this bare statement, but there is an infinite amount of
thinking that can be done about it, to great profit. The great mystery of life
is the mystery of sex, and here is one of the most startling phenomena connected
with it all.
Another
most important link in the series of symbolism is this: the ancient books tell
us that man's emotional (or astral) body, comes to him from the moon. Our desire
bodies are the chayas of the lunar pitris, or our lunar progenitors. Now the
symbol of the astral or emotional plane, in all ancient scripts without exception,
is water, as fire is just as invariably the sign of spirit. Which, then, of
the two sexes would we expect to find predominantly on the emotional ray? Need
I state that woman is universally adjudged to be the more emotional of the two?
Again we find our table of symbols to be vindicated. Woman, who represents the
moon and is typed by water, is under the moon influence both physiologically
(as above) and psychologically. And how does the typism hold as between moon
and water? Again we meet an astonishing verification of the correctness of our
parallels, for the moon it is, not the sun, that controls the watery tides of
our earthly oceans! Think how nature has been trying to instruct us, and we
all these centuries too dull to interpret her daily, weekly, monthly and yearly
lessons! The moon, water, the body (composed mainly of water), woman, emotion,
all linked in one great bond of affinity! Nor have we seen the last of the parallels.
Still another is to be found in the word "lunatic," moon-struck. The
influence of the moon on human psychic states is seen beyond question in the
behavior of asylum inmates. At full moon many cases, particularly of women,
show violent symptoms which are not manifest between the lunations.
Now
we are ready to examine a series of even more wonderful phenomena and their
symbologies in connection with the interaction of the two bodies, sun and moon.
As male and female together engender all life, let us see if in the interaction
of sun and moon there is any adumbration of this fact. Of a truth, one of the
most thrilling situations in astronomical theology, almost indeed the cornerstone
of religion and philosophy, is clearly outlined in the monthly interplay of
solar and lunar movements.
First
it must be prefaced that this realm of bodily life on earth was called in all
old scriptures the Hades, of the Greeks, the Sheol of the Hebrews, and the Amenta
of the Egyptians; the dark cave, the grave or tomb, and lastly and always, the
dark Underworld. It was the gloomy abysmal pit, the infernal realm of Stygian
darkness. It was the region of death and darkest night, the dark night of the
soul. Darkness was its invariable symbol.
Now,
as it was only when incarnated on this earth that the human spirit came into
contact with body, split into the two nodes of sex ("the soul makes the
journey through Amenta in the two halves of sex"--Egyptian Ritual), and
became the bisexual parentage of new life, the copulation of cosmic sex to reproduce
new life may be said to take place only in the dark underworld, or, most significantly,
in the soul's night time! The two halves of sex, soul and body, unite in the
underworld to effect a new creation. Human fecundation commonly takes place
in the night and out of the world's sight. Can it be possible that the sun and
moon match this cosmic, this theological and finally this human parallelism
in their relations? Indeed they do so, and with unbelievable fidelity. The new
infant light of the sun on the crescent moon is conceived and born in the dark
underworld, that is, below the horizon, in the western sky, out of sight of
the world, where the sun and moon have met (they are both at a point below the
western horizon at the same time) and may be said to have copulated. Sun and
moon together once a month descend into the dark underworld, there unite, and
in two or three days the moon gives birth to their child, the new young moon!
Here is the theological outline or glyph of all creation, planetary, racial,
human, individual. Men and women only meet in the underworld (there is no sex
in spiritual heavens) and only in the cave of incarnation do spirit (male) and
body (female) ever meet in the cosmos. What a sermon the two orbs preach to
us in that monthly tryst below the rim of the world in the western sky! For
it is only in the kingdom of man that soul and body are met in creative union.
The angels and gods are spiritual only; the animals are without spirit--Man
alone is a union of spirit and matter in equilibrium.
Reverting
a moment to the physiological or phallic aspect of the data, we see an exact
replica of this entire phenomenon once more. As soul descends into the underworld
to meet body, as sun descends below the horizon light to meet moon, so in the
physical plane of creation sperm (the male element) descends into the dark cavern
of the womb to meet there the ovum (female element) that has likewise come down
from above, and the two meet in creative union in that dark underworld. An Egyptian
text says that the soul of Osiris descends into the underworld of Amenta (our
earth), it meets there the soul of Isis; the two are there united.
To
climax this series of almost incredible correspondences between outward astronomical
and inner spiritual processes in two altogether different realms of life, there
is another natural phenomenon that may well serve to fill us with wonder at
nature's recording of her universal affinities. In order to present it with
the utmost impressiveness we shall give it in the words of the ancient writer,
Hor-Apollo, an Egyptian quoted by Plutarch, and a man whose extant writings
contain some of the clearest hints at the hidden significance of the ancient
symbols. The following is one of them:
"Hor-Apollo
says of the Cynocephalus. . . . 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 becomes 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 addition to its being unable
to see, and being afflicted in the same manner as the male, ex genitalibus sanguinem
emittit (Lat.--"emits blood from the genitary organ";) hence even
to this day Synocephali 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
Cynocephalus in the posture of standing upright, and raising its hands to heaven,
with a diadem on its head'." (Taken from Gerald Massey's, The Natural Genesis,
Vol. I, p. 44.)
Can
we gather the significance of this phenomenon? So far is the union of sun and
moon below the horizon in the underworld from being a matter of sheer poetic
fancy, that natural actually marks the event by its influence upon the physical
functions of a susceptible species of near-human animal. It is the heavenly
recording of that physiological function in the female half of humankind which
presages and prepares the birth of a new life.
And
finally how truly does the moon exemplify again in another phenomenon the truth
of zodiacal religion! As just seen, the new moon is conceived in the west, the
region of all beginning or entry upon incarnate life, the place of descent into
the underworld. It has its birth and begins its career of growth in the west,
moving night by night further toward
the east. Man, the soul, enters his journey toward divinity in the west, and
life by life moves further toward the east, the place of fulfilment and glorious
resurrection. What more fitting, then, that the rising of the moon in its full
glory, when it typifies the completed and perfected human-divine, the man become
god, should take place in the east, the gate of the resurrection! The young
new moon appears and mounts in the west; the full moon in the east! The one
is the infant god struggling for light and growth against a dark power; the
other is the full evolved god-man, victorious over the darkness, arising to
shine over all the world.
And
in conclusion may we not paraphrase the little gem of Wordsworth to remind us
of the truths typed by the silvery orb of night?
My
heart leaps up when I behold
A crescent
in the sky;
Its
shadowed globe is night by night
In
fourteen segments, each more bright,
At
last in utmost splendor dight;--
My
deity!
The
hidden Lord it manifests;
The
sun-bright god rides on its crests;
In
that grand light man ever, ever rests.
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