Theosophy - The Great Myth of the Sun-Gods by Alvin Boyd Kuhn
THE
GREAT MYTH of the SUN-GODS
by ALVIN
BOYD KUHN
It
may be that many of you have come to this lecture with the expectation of
hearing about the superstitious beliefs of some ancient fire-worshippers
or sun-worshippers. You may wonder why we should presume to waste an evening
dilating upon the childish fancies of early peoples who could conceive of
no more exalted form of deity in the universe than the physical body of our
sun. Can there possibly be anything important in the study of such forms
of crude fetishism?
Let
me disabuse your minds of any such prepossession at once. We have not invited
you to hear of infantile nonsense of early child-humanity. On the contrary,
it is our opinion that there is not a theme within the entire range of religious
interest of such sublimity and authentic grandeur as this subject of the Sun-gods.
We have come to the persuasion that this is the most important lecture that
we have given or shall ever give. In it there is to be found the central thesis
of all religion. We have asked you to hear an exposition of the cardinal principle
of all true religion. Instead of dealing with an erratic notion of primitive
barbarism, we have to present to you this evening the long-lost supreme datum
of all high religion. And it is our design to show that religion in the world
has drifted so far away from its original base that it no longer recognizes
the very first and fundamental conception about which it was in the beginning
constructed. The myth of the Sun-gods is the very heart's core of religion at
its best.
It
is commonly supposed that religious honors were paid to the sun as a deity by
a few isolated peoples or sects, such as the Parsees and the ancient Ghebers
of Persia, and some African tribes. In correction of this view we are prepared
to support the declaration that the worship of the Sun-god was quite universal
in the ancient world. It ranged from China and India to Yucatan and Peru. The
Emperor and the Mikado, as well as the Incas, and the Pharaohs were Sun-god
figures. And is the belief only an empty myth? So far from being such, it is
at once the highest embodiment of religious conception in the spiritual history
of the race.
Since
the word "myth" occurs in the title, it is necessary to define it
so that we may the better glimpse the nature of the subject. To the modern mind
the word carries with it a derogatory implication. To reduce any construction
to the status of a myth is to put it out of court and render it valueless. We
regard a myth as a fiction and a falsity. To show that a theory or a belief
is only a myth, is to relegate it to the world of non-reality, and dismiss it
from further consideration as a thing of value.
Not
so with the ancients. With them a myth was a valuable instrumentality of knowledge.
It was an intellectual, even a spiritual, tool, by the aid of which truth and
wisdom could at one and the same time both be concealed from the unworthy and
expressed for the worthy. The ancients rightly regarded spiritual truth and
experience as being incapable of expression or impartation by means of words
simply. A myth or an allegory could be made the better means of conveying subtly
and with a certain added force, the truth veiled under a set form of dramatic
presentation. The myth would enhance spiritual truth as a drama reinforces moral
situations. It was all the more powerful in its message precisely because it
was known not to be outwardly a true story. No one was caught by the literal
falsity of the construction. Attention could therefore be given wholly to the
hidden import, which was not obscured by the outward occurrence. The myth was
known to be a fiction; therefore it deceived nobody -- until the third century.
But at the same time it was most ingeniously designed to instruct in the deepest
of spiritual truths. It was a literary device to embalm lofty wisdom in the
amber of a tradition that could be easily remembered, in the guise of a human
story. It was truth incarnated in a dramatic occurrence, which was known to
be untrue. Outwardly fictitious, but inwardly the substance of a mighty truth,
was the myth. And as such it was the universal dress in which ancient knowledge
was clothed.
To
indicate the universality of the Sun-god myth it is only necessary to enumerate
some thirty of the chief figures known as Sun-gods amongst the nations about
the Eastern Mediterranean, before the advent of Jesus. There were in Egypt,
Osiris, Horus, Serapis, Hermes or Taht (Thoth), Khunsu, Atum (Aten, Adon, the
Adonis or Phrygia), Iusa, Iu-sa, Iu-em-hetep; in Syria, Atis, Sabazius, Zagreus,
Kybele (feminine); in Assyria Tammuz; in Babylonia, Marduk and Sargon; in Persia,
Mithra, Ahura-Mazda and the Zoroasters; in Greece, Orpheus, Bacchus (Dionysus),
Achilles, Hercules, Theseus, Perseus, Jason, Prometheus; in India, Vyasa, Krishna,
Buddha; in Tibet the Boddhisattvas; besides many others elsewhere.
Likewise
in the ancient Mystery dramas the central character was ever the Sun-god the
role being enacted by the candidate for initiation in person. He went through
the several initiations as himself the type and representative of the solar
divinity in the field of human experience.
Moreover,
the Patriarchs, Prophets, Priests and Kings of Biblical lore are no less Sun-god
figures. For in their several characteristics they are seen to be typical of
the Christos.
From
the study of a mass of the ancient material the sincere and disingenuous student
becomes ere long convinced of the fact that the Jesus figure of the Gospels,
whether he lived historically or not (and there is much question of it even
among theologians), is just another in the long list of the solar gods. They
were figured by ancient poetic genius as embodiments of divine solar glory living
among men, if they were not purely the mythical constructions of the allegorists.
These
Sun-god characters, of none of whom can it be said positively that they were
living personages, were, it must be clearly noted, purely typical figures in
the national epics of the several nations. They were symbols, one might say.
But of what were they symbolical? That is the point of central importance. They
were representative characters, summing and epitomizing in themselves the spiritual
history of the human individual in his march across the field of evolving life
on earth. They were the types and models of the divine potentiality pictured
as coming to realization in their careers. They were the mirror held up to men,
in which could be seen the possibilities locked up in man's own nature. They
were type-figures, delineating the divine life that was an ever-possible realization
for any devoted man. They were the symbols of an ever-coming deity, a deity
that came not once historically in Judea, but that came to ever-fuller expression
and liberation in the inner heart of every son of man. The solar deities were
the gods that ever came, that were described as coming not once upon a time,
but continuously and regularly. Their radiant divinity might be consummated
by any earnest person at any time or achieved piecemeal.
They
were typed as ever-coming or coming regularly because they were symboled by
the sun in its annual course around the zodiac of twelve signs, and the regular
periodicity of this natural symbol typified the ever-continuing character of
their spiritual sunlight. The ancients, in a way and to a degree almost incomprehensible
to the unstudied modern, had made of the sun's annual course round the heavens
a faithful reproduction of the spiritual history of the divine spirit in man.
The god in us was emblemed by the sun in its course, and the sun's varied experiences,
as fabulously construed, were a reflection of our own incarnational history.
The sun in its movements through the signs was made the mirror of our life in
spirit. To follow the yearly round of the zodiac was to epitomize graphically
the whole history of human experience. Thus the inner meaning of our mortal
life was endlessly repeated in the daily, weekly, monthly and yearly cycle of
the sun's passage, the seven or twelve divisions of which marked the seven-
or twelvefold segmentation of our spiritual history or our initiations. (They
were figured at first as seven, later as twelve, when the solar gods came upon
the cosmic scene.)
The
careers of these solar gods, then, were a type of what is occurring to every
man who is dowered with the spark of divine soul within his breast. Each one
of us has had or will have his festival of conception in June, his birth into
the world of fleshly life in the autumn, his spiritual awakening at Christmas,
and his glorious resurrection from the dead body of this life at Easter.
The
Christians say the Christos came once in a single character in history, Jesus
of Judea, saying nothing about his coming to Everyman at all times. They present
to the world the Only-Begotten Son of the Father, confusing in one historical
figure two distinct characters of ancient philosophy, the Logos and the Christos,
and making both historical in a human being born of woman. Suffice it to say
that neither character was historical in the ancient systems. The Logos and
the Christos were cosmic forces, and the erring Christians confounded these
"personages" of ancient philosophy with the mundane career of the
man Jesus, who was not other than one of the mythical Sun-god heroes, or national
type-figures. What a travesty of truth the Christian representation has become!
What a caricature the Gospels have made of the divine spiritual principle in
man's life!
The
ancients had no "only-begotten" son because the term used in their
systems, miserably mistranslated "only-begotten," was something with
quite a different connotation. It was in Greek "monogenes," and in
Latin "unigenitus," and was far from meaning "only-begotten."
It meant that which was begotten of one parent, the father, alone, not the offspring
of the union of father and mother. By the term the ancients meant to designate
him who was the projection into matter of the spirit forces of life, not the
final product of the union of spirit and matter, or the male and female elements.
Had the early Christian Fathers known of the inner meaning of the symbolism
of the Egyptian Ptah, as Khepr-Ra, who was typed by the male beetle that incubated
in the ground and without union with the female transformed and regenerated
himself after twenty-eight days (exactly a moon cycle) in the form of the young
scarab, symbol of the new-born sun in the moon, they would have been intelligent
enough to have avoided the great schisms that divided the Church into Roman
and Greek Catholic bodies over the abstrusities of this very origin of the persons
of the Trinity. But Egypt was farther away from Rome of the third century than
it is from us, who can now read the inscriptions that were sealed from them.
All
this ancient scriptural data accentuates the fact that not the historical Jesus,
but the spiritual Christ, or the god within the individual heart (as expounded
in the lecture on Platonic Philosophy in the Bible) is the subject of the sacred
writings of old, and the kernel of the whole religious ideology. Angelus Silesius
has expressed this in a stanza which should be a perpetual reminder of the futility
of clinging to the historical interpretation of Gospel literature.
Though
Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born,
But
not within thyself, thy soul will be forlorn;
The
cross on Golgotha thou lookest to in vain
Unless
within thyself it be set up again.
And
the Christian hymn, "O Jesus, thou art standing, outside the fast-closed
door," gives expression to the kindred idea that while we look across the
map to localize the Christos in Judea, we keep the spiritual mentor of our own
lives standing without, seeking an entrance into our lives in vain.
By
the aid of archaic sacred books we have been enabled to trace authentically
the origin of the name Jesus. And it is of great importance to present this
material, because it throws a flood of clear light upon the ancient conceptions
of the Messiah and the coming Son, or Sun-god. In this light the name will be
seen to be a type-designation and not the personal name of an historical being.
It
is derived from the two letters (or numbers) which in the beginning of typology
symbolized the two first elements, spirit and matter, into which the primal
One Life bifurcated. They are the I (or 1) symboling the male or spirit, and
the O (letter) or 0 (cipher) symboling the female or material universe. Together
they represented the biune male-female deity. We have, then, the letters IO,
or the number 10. As the vowels were freely interchanged, in ancient languages,
the name was written either IO, IA, IE, or IU, and all these forms are found.
Next the I transformed into consonantal value and became a J (as it is yet in
Latin), so that we find the names JO, JA, JE and JU, from each of which many
names have arisen. When the creation had combined the male and female and the
two had given birth to the Son, or Logoic universe, the name was given the form
of three letters, and we then find such forms as IAO, JAH, IEO, JEU, ZUE. When
the universe became founded on the four cardinal points or the square of four
dimensions, the name was spelled variously as IEOU, JOVE, ZEUS, JEVE, DIOS,
T/HEOS, HUHI, IHUH and others. In its character as a sevenfold or seven-lettered
name, it took the form of JEHOVAH, SABAOTH, DEBORAH, DELILAH, SEP/HIROT/H, MICHAEL,
SOLOMON, and others of seven letters. The I permuted with l (el) or 1 (one),
so that IE became LE or, inverted EL, the great Hebrew character of deity. The
EL and the IAH (JAH), became the most frequent determinatives of divinity, as
a host of names will testify. There are Bethel, Emanuel, Michael, Israel, Gabriel,
Samuel, Abdiel, Uriel, Muriel Azazel, and many others, in which the EL is prefixed.
The JAH is seen in such names as EliJAH, AbiJAH, while the IAH comes in a host
of such names as Nehemiah, Jeremiah, Obediah, Hezekiah, Isaiah, Messiah, Alleluiah
and more.
But
whence comes the "s" in Jesus's name? This is of great importance.
It is derived from an Egyptian suffix written either SA, SE, SI, SU, or SAF,
SEF, SIF or SUF (SAPH, SEPH, SIPH or SUPH) and meaning "the son,"
"heir," "prince" or successor to the father. (The F is an
Egyptian ending for the masculine singular.) When the original symbol of divinity,
IO or IE, JO or JE, was combined with the Egyptian suffix for the succeeding
heir, SU or SA, the resultant was the name IUSA, IUSE, IUSU, or IOSE; or IESU,
JESU, IUSEF, IOSEF, JOSEF. One of the many forms was JESU and another was JOSEF.
The final F became sibilant at times and gave us the eventual form of JESUS.
The name then meant the "divine son," and combined in the Egyptian
IU the idea of the coming one. Hence JESUS was the Messiah, the coming son of
the divine life. There was in Egypt for ten thousand years B.C. The character
of this functionary under the name of IUSA. Later he was the Iu-em-hetep, which
means "the divine son who comes with peace (hetep). But most interestingly,
this last word also means seven. Hence Jesus is he who comes as the seventh
principle to complete the six elementary powers of natural evolution with the
gift of divine intelligence, which supplants the elementary chaos with the rulership
of love and intelligence and thus brings peace into a warring situation. Hence
finally, Jesus is the seventh cosmic principle, announced in all religious lore
as he who comes to bring peace and good will to men. And as such he was announced
in the Christian Gospels. But there was more than one Jesus or IUSA or IU before
the coming of the alleged historical Jesus.
Startling
as are the implications of this bit of etymology, a far more amazing denouement
of Bible study is the revelation that not only were there over thirty Sun-god
figures in the cults of the various nations of old, but there are immediately
in the Bible itself, in the Old Testament, some twenty more Sun-god characters
under the very name of Jesus! Are we speaking arrant nonsense or sober truth
when we make a claim which seems at first sight so unsupportable? Twenty Jesus
characters in the Old Testament! Let us see. We have noted the many variant
forms of the Jesus name. There are still others in the Old Testament, never
suspected as being related to the name of the Christian Redeemer. There are
Isaac, Esau, Jesse, Jacob, Jeshu, Joachim, Joshua, Jonah and others. All these
are variant forms of the one name, which has still other forms among the Hebrews
in secular life, Yusuf, Yehoshua, Yeshu, etc. Joshua, Hosea and Jesse are from
this name indisputably. A few might be the subject of controversy.
Furthermore,
beside these that bear the original divine name, there are other Sun-god figures
in the Old Testament under a wide variety of names. They are Samson (whose name
means "solar"), David, Solomon, Saul (equals soul, or sol, the sun
-- Latin.), Abraham, Moses, Gideon, Jephtha and the like. Their actions identify
them as solar representatives.
Now
let us see what the conception of our divinity as a Sun-god in reality meant
to the sages of old, and what it should mean to us. It meant that the divinity
within us, our divine soul or Self, was itself the Sun-god, or solar deity.
And what does this signify in concrete terms for us? Just this; that the god
within us is constituted of the imperishable essence of solar light and energy!
In short, we ourselves, in our higher nature, are solar gods in potentiality!
Our highest nature is an incorruptible body composed of the glorious essence
of the sun's energy! The gods in the Bible were always symboled by the light
or fire of the sun. We are now enlightened to see it as a description of our
nature as veritable truth and fact. We are Sun-gods. Our immortal spirits within
us are composed of the radiant substance of solar energy.
At
the very time we were first assembling the material for this lecture, there
came an announcement in the daily press of a discovery by a modern physicist,
Dr. George W. Crile, of the Cleveland Laboratories, which practically fixed
the seal of truth upon every word we have uttered or shall utter in this lecture.
It was most startlingly corroborative of our exegesis. He announced that he
had discovered at the heart of every living organism a tiny nucleus of energy,
all aglow, with temperatures ranging from 3000 to 6000 degrees of heat, which
he called "radiogens" or "hot points." These, he said, were
precisely akin to the radiant energy of solar matter. He affirmed, in short,
that a tiny particle of the sun's power and radiance was lodged within the heart
of every organic unit! The light and energy that has life. What would be Crile's
surprise, however, if he were to be shown a sentence taken from Hargrave Jennings'
old book on the Rosicrucians, written over sixty years ago: "Every man
has a little spark (sun) in his own bosom?" For this was one item in the
teaching of the Medieval Fire-Philosophers, and the reason they were styled
such. They knew what Crile has discovered, as likewise did the ancient Bible-writers.
They based their Sun-god religions upon it. Our souls are composed of the imperishable
essence of solar light! We are immortal because we are Sun-gods.
But
many will impatiently rise to expostulate with us, and ask why, if this was
the universal fundamentum of the old religions, the Bible itself does not categorically
carry this message and state this central fact. Wait a moment! Who that knows
this primary datum has searched the Bible to see if it has nothing to say on
the point? We, too, believed the Bible was remiss in expressing this conception,
until we searched with a more watchful eye. And now let us hear what the Bible
says as to our solar constitution, and determine for ourselves whether it is
silent on the groundwork of religion or not. Let us hear first the Psalms. "Our
God is a living fire," say they; and "Our God is a consuming fire."
"The Lord God is a sun," avers the same book. "I am come to send
fire on earth," says Jesus, meaning he came to scatter the separated sparks
of solar essence amongst mankind, a spark to each soul. In Revelation the angels
scatter the fire and the incense of their seven censers over the earth, among
the inhabitants. Then says John the Baptist: "I indeed baptize you with
water, but he that cometh after me will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and
with fire!" Jesus says: "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven."
(Satan was the descending Lucifer, or Light-bringer, before he was lifted up
and divinized.) The fire that falls on Jeremiah's altar and many another in
the Bible narrative types the deity coming to dwell with mortals. Says Jesus:
"When I am in the world I am the light of the world." Again he said:
"Ye are the light of the world," and "Let your light so shine
that others may . . . glory your father which is in heaven." The Lord,
say the Psalms, "made his angels messengers and his ministers a flame of
fire." The New Testament Jesus, following the well-known Egyptian diagram
of the Ankh, the solar disk with the spread wings, is described as "the
sun of righteousness, risen with healing in his wings." John has Jesus
saying that the condemnation of the world lay in that it rejected the light
when it was sent into the world. Says Job: "Yea, the light of the wicked
shall be put out, and the spark of his fire shall not shine. The light shall
be dark in his tabernacle and his candle shall be put out with him." Isaiah
writes: "Behold all ye that kindle a fire, that compass yourselves about
with sparks; walk in the light of your fire and in the sparks that ye have kindled."
We are adjured to "Rise, shine, for thy light is come." "The
Lord is my light," reiterates the Psalms. And again: "In thy light
shall we see light." "Light is sown for the righteous." "We
wait for light," cry the souls in the darkness of incarnation, far from
their original fount of light. John declares that the Christos "was the
true light" which was to come Messianically for the redemption of our lower
nature. And again he declares that with the Christos "light is come into
the world." No cry echoes with more resounding intensity down to this age
than Paul's exhortation to our souls buried in lethal darkness: "Awake,
thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine upon thee!"
And in Revelation there are those mighty pronouncements: in the spiritual resurrection
"there shall be no more need of the sun to shine by day nor the moon by
night, for the glory of the Lord did lighten it." And there is no more
heartening assurance anywhere in the Bible than Jesus's statement: "Ye
have light in yourselves."
And
these are only a gleaning from the great score of similar passages with which
the Bible teems. And still folks will say they find no warrant for the Sun-god
idea in the Bible!
In
Rome the sacred fire in the temple of Vesta was guarded by seven Vestal Virgins,
chosen for purity and for psychic vision. If they permitted the fire to die
out (symbolic of the light of deity dying out in the heart) the penalty upon
them was death. If they violated their sexual purity, they were buried alive
in the city. And from the great old Egyptian Book of the Dead we take just one
passage among scores: "Lo, I come from the Lake of Flame, from the Lake
of Fire, and from the field of flame, and I live." And again, from an old
Book of Adam and Eve we quote a great passage in which the Lord says: "I
made thee of the light, and I wished to bring out children of the light from
thee." If only we had been taught by our religious teachers that our spiritual
natures are woven and fabricated of solar light, we should have had a clearer
apprehension of our potentialities for divine education.
Supplementing
all this material from the Bible and ancient scriptures, there is at hand for
our supreme enlightenment one grand pronouncement from Greek Platonic philosophy
which we conceive to be that lost ultimate link between science and religion.
It is the truth before whose altar both science and religion can kneel at last
and find themselves paying tribute to the same god,--the god of solar radiance.
It is a sentence from the learned Proclus, last of the Great Platonists: "The
light of the sun is the pure energy of intellect." Are we big enough to
catch the mighty significance of that statement? Is it not the essence of what
the modern physicist means when he talks of "mind-stuff?" The fiery
radiance of the sun is already the motivating genius of intellect! Matter is
itself intelligent and intelligence! Here is the basic link between all naturalism
and all spirituality. Matter enshrouds and contains the soul of mind and spirit.
The light of the sun is the deific flash of intellect! And the very core of
our conscious being is a spark of that infinite indestructible energy of solar
light. There is the "seminal soul of light" or the seed of fiery divinity
(Prometheus's "fire" stolen from the gods) in each of us. It makes
us a god.
Armed
with this unquenchable fire which is intellect, we are sent on earth to inhabit
a body which is described as a watery and miry swamp. The body is nearly eighty
per cent water! It is the duty of the fiery spark to enlighten the whole dark
realm of mortal life, to transmute by its alchemical power the baser dross of
animal propensity into the finer motivation of love and brotherhood. This life
is a purgation -- Purgatory -- because it is a process of burning and tempering
crude animal elements into the pure gold of spiritual light. In Egyptian scriptures
the twelve sons of Ra (the twelve sons of Jacob, and the twelve tribes of Israel)
were called the "twelve saviors of the treasure of light." An Egyptian
text reads: "This is the sun within us, the seminal source of light. Do
not dim its luster or cause it to suffer eclipse." And another runs: "Give
ye glory as to the sun; he is the chief, the only one coming from the body,
the head of those who belong to the race of the sun."
With
this force of fire we must uplift the lower man and transmute his nature into
the spiritual glow of love and intelligence. With it we must turn the water
of the lower nature into the wine of spiritual force. Around it we must aggregate
the refined material which we shall build into that temple of the soul, that
body of the resurrection, the great garment of solar light, in which we shall
rise out of the tomb of the physical corpus and ascend with the angels. This
is the radiant Augoeides of the Greeks, the Sahu of the Egyptians, in which
the soul wings its flight aloft like the phoenix, after rending the veil of
the temple of the body. It is our garment of immortality, the seamless robe
of glory, in prospect of which we groan and travail, says St. Paul, as we earnestly
desire to be clothed upon with the garment of incorruption. As flesh and blood
can not inherit the kingdom of heaven, we must fashion for our tenancy there
this body of solar glory, in whose self-generated light we may live eternally,
having overcome the realms of darkness, or spiritualized the body. Jesus prays
the Father to grant unto him that glory that he had with him before the world
was, and his prayer is fulfilled in the formation of the spirit body out of
the elements of the sun.
Who
is this King of Glory?--says the Psalmist. And we are exhorted to lift up the
aeonial gates, the age-lasting doors, to let the King of Glory enter into our
realm. The King of Glory is the Sun-soul within us, raised in his final perfection
in the fulness of Christly stature to the state of magnificent effulgence. The
King of Glory is the immortal Sun-god, the deity in our hearts; and when at
last he blazes forth in the heyday of his glory, and comes in majesty into our
lives, then we behold his glory, as of the alone-begotten of the Father, full
of grace and truth. And when he appears to those still sitting in the shadow
of darkness, they report that "they have seen a great light, and to those
that sat in the valley of darkness did the light shine." And this light,
seen ever and anon by some illuminated son of man, as he gropes in the murks
of incarnation, is truly "that light that lighteth every man that cometh
into the world."
And
when that light shineth clearer and brighter unto the perfect day, then, indeed,
we know of a surety that we ourselves are nucleated of that same glorious essence
of combined intellect and spirit. Then we know that we ourselves are the Sun-gods,
and that the ancient allegory is not a "myth," but the very essence
of our own Selfhood.
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