Thus the miracles of the canonical Gospels repeat the mysteries of the Ritual, and the scene of these was in the earth of the manes, not in the earth of mortals. It was there the deliverer wrought his “miracles” in the eschatological representation, whether as Horus, the son of Osiris, or as Iusa, the son of Atum-Ra. The Egyptian religion had no need of miracles. It did not postulate the supernatural. The superhuman and ideally divine were a part of and not apart from nature. The nether-earth was the other half of this and the Gospel history has been based upon that other earth of the manes being mistaken for the earth of mortals. In the Ritual, and in the gnostic writings, we find the mystery, the events, the characters, the Christ, the Virgin-Mother, the miracles, replaced upon their own proper footing and on the only ground of their existence which is eschatological and was a means of working out the drama in Amenta by means of the mythology that was previously extant. The so-called miracles of Jesus were not only impossible on human grounds; they are historically impossible because they were pre-extant as mythical representations which were made on grounds that were entirely non-human in the drama of the mysteries that was as non-historical as the Christmas pantomime. The miracles ascribed to Jesus on earth had been previously assigned to Iusa the divine healer who was non-historical in the pre-Christian religion. Horus, whose other name is Jesus, is the performer of “miracles” which are repeated in the Gospels, and which were first performed as mysteries in the divine nether-world. But if Horus or Iusa be made human on earth, as a Jew in Judea, we are suddenly hemmed in by the miraculous, at the centre of a maze with nothing antecedent for a clue; no path that leads to the heart of the mystery, and no visible means of exit therefrom. With the introduction of the human personage on mundane ground, the mythical inevitably becomes the miraculous; you cannot have the history without it; thus the history was founded on the miracles which are perversions of the mythology that was provably pre-extant.

Not only is it represented in the Gospels that Jesus raised the dead but that he also conferred power on the disciples to do likewise. They are to preach and proclaim that the kingdom of heaven is at [Page 807] hand, to “heal the sick and raise the dead” (Matt. X. 5-8). So the followers, called the “Children of Horus”, had the power given them previously by their Lord to raise the dead. In the Pyramid texts of Teta (line 270) it is said, “Horus hath given his children power that they may raise thee up” ; that is, from the funeral couch. But this resurrection was in Amenta, the earth of eternity, not in the earth of time, and those who were raised up for the second life are the manes, not mortal beings in the human world. It was not pretended that they were Egyptians in the time of Teta, the first king of the sixth dynasty. The Christians babble about the mysteries of revealed religion, which mysteries never were revealed except to those who had been duly initiated. These were mysteries to the Christians simply because they had not been revealed to them. They are the mysteries of ancient knowledge reproduced as miracles of modern ignorance. Such mysteries of the Christian faith, as the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Virgin Birth, the Transfiguration on the Mount, the Passion, Death, Burial, Resurrection and Ascension, Transubstantiation and Baptismal Regeneration, were all extant in the mysteries of Amenta with Horus or Iu-em-hetep as the central figure of the pre-Christian Jesus.

This mode of making miracles from the mysteries can be traced in the canonical Gospels. For instance, according to John, when Jesus reappears to the seven fishers on board the boat to cause the miraculous draught of fishes it is after his resurrection from the dead. Consequently, the transaction is in a region beyond the tomb, therefore in spirit-world, not in the life on earth. Whereas in Luke’s version, his reappearance was in the earth-life and is not a reappearance after death. Yet the miraculous draught of fishes is the same in both books; and either the transaction is historical in Luke and has been relegated to the after-life in another world by John, or else the mythical version was first and has been converted into an historical event by Luke. But here, as in other cases, there is no corroboration of the history to be adduced, whereas the priority of John’s version is attested by the Ritual where the fisher, the seven fishers, the fishing and the fish belong not to this earth but to that other world beyond the tomb and to the mysteries of Amenta.

When Sebek in the Ritual (ch. 113) catches the fish in his marvellous net this is proclaimed by Ra to be “a mystery”. But when Simon Peter in the Gospel catches the great draught of fishes the mystery becomes a miracle.

Mythology knows nothing of miracle, nor the need of it. Miracle has no place in the Egyptian Ritual. But the Ritual shows us how the necessity for it arose as a modus operandi when the gnosis had to be accounted for by ignorance and the mythos was converted into human history. For example, the sun or the sun-god Atum is described in the Ritual as going over the surface of the lake of Mati, in Abydos, the place of rebirth, or of sunrise. That which is done mythically by the god is performed by the manes on the eschatological plane, and as he is in the human likeness, it follows that he must walk the water in the sun-god’s track. He says, “the great God who is there is Ra himself. I walk on his road; I know the surface of the lake of Mati. The water of Mati is the road by which Atum-Ra [Page 808] goes to traverse the field of divine harvest” (Rit., 17). In the first phase the sun (or solar god) traverses the celestial water at dawn. In the eschatological continuation the human soul in Amenta does the same because assimilated to the character of the god. It is but a mode of representing phenomena in the two worlds of the double earth, the imagery of upper earth being repeated in spirit-world. But if we substitute a human being for the solar god or the manes in Amenta, and make him walk the water in our world on the surface of the sea or lake of Galilee, instead of the lake of Mati in Amenta, the water-walking can only be done by miracle. Such is the genesis of the Biblical miracles in both the Old Testament and the New. This we are now able to prove twice over by means of the original matter and mode of the mythos in the Egyptian eschatology that was humanized or literalized in legends and at last converted into Christian history.

You cannot rationalize the Bible miracles by reducing them to what may be thought reasonable dimensions. As Matthew Arnold said, “this is as if we were startled by the extravagance of supposing Cinderella’s fairy godmother to have actually changed the pumpkin into a coach-and-six, but should suggest that she did really change it into a one-horse-cab”. It is not a matter of degree or proportion, but of a radical difference in the fundamental nature of things. It is not the kind of transformation that was applied to the primary facts, nor is this transformation the result of imagination. It was not a result of the faculty of imagining that a man should be supposed to walk the water and not sink. Such an imagining was controverted by all the past of human experience. When the Egyptians portrayed a human impossibility — a miracle — they depicted a pair of feet walking on the water. This was a mode of superhuman force first made manifest by the elemental powers such as light and darkness, the wind, or the spirit of the storm. The water-walker was an old type of deity. The Christian miracles are false modes of explaining that which was ignorantly misappropriated. The gnostic interpretation of the Kamite mysteries had no need of miracles, no reversal or violation of natural law. The process by which miracles, or total violations of natural law, arose, was through perversion of ancient knowledge by later ignorance — not in the false or exaggerated reports of eye-witnesses. Nor could anything be settled by a conflict of opinions in the domain of ideas. We must have some foothold and ground of fact to go upon even to fight the battle. As it is in physical science, we have to ascertain the knowable. It avails nothing to take refuge in the unknown or to enshroud ourselves in mystery. The legends of mythology were not ideal, nor based upon abstract ideas. They were not first evolved from the inner consciousness, but from facts in outward nature that are for ever verifiable. The mysteries that “historic Christianity” took over without understanding, and preserved as food for faith, or as problems for metaphysical speculation, are fathomable and even simple when truly interpreted, but they have and can have no solution on the supposed historic ground. And with its bogus miracles surreptitiously derived from the ancient mysteries by falsification of the myths, it has destroyed or tended to destroy all standing-ground [Page 809] of common sense in natural reality. With its “historical” virgin mother of a God who was her “historical” child, it has made a double mockery of nature, human and divine. With its risen corpse for an anointed Christ the only Son of God, it has deified an image of death itself and made a mortuary of the human mind.

When it is conclusively proved that the Christian miracles are nothing more than a pagan mode of symbolical representation literalized, there is no longer any question of contravening, or breaking, or even challenging any well-known laws of nature. The discussion as to the probability or possibility of miracle on the old grounds of belief and doubt is closed for ever. A glance at the Egyptian pictures will show that the Horus or Christ is the young sun-god who walks the waters in Amenta not on the upper earth, and that the evil spirits who enter the swine and are driven down into the lake are the souls of those who were condemned in the great judgment as typhonian, the black pig being a type of Sut the evil being. A study of these miracles as they were originally rendered will lead to an understanding of their true significance, and here as everywhere else the truth of the matter once attained must ultimately put an end to the false belief:

Falsehood hath nothing in the world to do,
But lie to live and die to prove the true!

The story of child-Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas who, when five years old, took clay and formed the images of twelve sparrows, which turned the word into a deed when Jesus bade them fly, is a miracle manufactured from a mystery of Amenta. When the manes were transformed from mummy to spirit they became bird-headed in the likeness of Horus whose head was that of a sparrow-hawk. This in the folk-tale becomes a sparrow, and twelve sparrows created by Jesus in the miracle are the representatives of the twelve great spirits of [Page 810] Horus which have the head of the sparrow-hawk in the mystery of Amenta.

When evil spirits enter swine and are driven down the mountainside to be drowned in the lake of darkness the representation is mythical, not miraculous. The mount is rooted in Amenta. The scene is in the earth of eternity. The mount was called the mount of birth in heaven. This was ascended by the manes who had passed through the judgment-hall and come forth as the good spirits, whereas the condemned were driven back and literally sent to the devil by entering the pig of Sut, which had become a type of all impurity. The miracle begins when the avenging Har-Tema is made historical, the pig actual, and the transaction takes place on this our upper earth. We must go to the Egyptian drawings in the drama of the mysteries for the verifiable fact; and once we are in presence of the real truth we learn that the argument of Professor Huxley against the miracle is just as unprofitable as the Christian belief in the miracle. Here, as everywhere, the miracle results from a misinterpretation of the mythos out of which the gospels were ultimately evolved, piecemeal, and put together in a spurious history, with a spurious version of Horus the mortal, and a spurious spectre of Horus in the spirit.

In performing his miracles with a word, in being the word incarnated or made truth in person, in wielding a magical power over the elements, in casting out devils, in causing the spirits of evil to enter the swine, in healing the woman with the issue of blood, in giving sight to the blind, in transforming and transfiguring himself, in suddenly concealing himself, in walking upon the sea, in his personal conflict and battles with Satan, in raising the dead to life out of the earth, in resuscitating himself on the third day; in all these and other things Jesus is accredited with doing exactly what was attributed to Horus in the Ritual and in the Egyptian mysteries. But these miraculous things were never done by mortal or immortal on the surface of our earth. They are other-world occurrences in the true rendering, and they can only be re-related to reality as a mythical mode of representing the scenes in the drama of Amenta. The superhuman attributes are possessed, the transformation and transfiguration effected, the waters walked, the evil spirits cast out to enter the typhonian swine; sight is restored to the blind, the dumb are given a mouth, the dead are raised up out of the earth by Horus in this divine nether-world termed the earth of eternity and not on the earth of Seb in the world of time.

The historical character of the four Gospel narratives must stand or fall by the historical facts of the miracles. From the birth derived from a virgin to the corporeal resurrection of the Christ, the sole standing-ground is upon miracle. No amount of Jesuitical dialectic or logical argument based upon false premises, can ever make right, as a trustworthy matter of faith, that which is verifiably wrong as matter-of-fact. Yet the faith was founded on the uttermost falsification of natural fact as the ground of the history. On the one hand we find a belief that these miraculous transactions, these teachings of the Christ and the Christ himself were historical. On the other, we have the proof that they were unhistorical, a proof upon evidence that has [Page 811] never been tampered with, and that is directly derived from witnesses that do not, cannot lie. The miracles of the virgin birth and physical resurrection of Jesus; the miracles of giving sight to the blind and of raising the dead, the descent into Hades, and the resurrection in three days or on the third day, are all Egyptian, all in the Ritual. They were previously performed by the Christ who was not historical, the Christ of the Egypto-gnostics who is Horus or Jesus, identical with the Osirian Christ who was Horus the lord by name, and who, as the records show, was also extant as a divine type or spiritual impersonation as Iusa or Iu-em-hetep many thousand years ago.

A crucial example of the mode in which the gospel history was manufactured from the matter of the mythos and the eschatology is furnished by the miracle of miracles of the loaves and fishes. In one account the multitude of men, women and children are fed on five loaves and two fishes, and the remains of the meal were sufficient to fill twelve baskets (Matt. XVI. 17-21). In the other miracle, or second version of the same, the multitude are fed on seven loaves and a few small fishes, and there were seven baskets full of broken pieces. But for the Ritual we might never have known the correct number of loaves that did suffice to feed the vast multitude. They are seven in one place and five in another, and both the seven and five are found in one and the same book. This difference, however, serves for Matthew to make out a second miracle (XV. 36). The speaker in the Ritual says, “There are seven loaves on earth with Seb; there are seven loaves with Osiris (in Amenta); there are seven loaves at Annu with Ra in heaven” (ch. 53). “Henceforth let me live upon corn in your presence, ye gods, and let there come one who bringeth to me that I may feed from those seven loaves which he hath brought for Horus” (Renouf, Rit., ch. 52). “It is the god of the sektet boat and of the maatit boat who hath brought them (the loaves) to me at Annu” (ch. 53). These seven loaves constitute the celestial diet on which the multitude of souls are fed in Annu, called “the place of multiplying bread”. But those who are fed upon the seven loaves in the celestial locality of Annu are not human beings on earth; they are manes in Amenta where Horus is the bread of life as giver of food to the quickened spirits of the dead; and as the transaction occurred in the next life there was no need of a miracle in this life by asserting that about five thousand hungry men, besides women and children, were fed upon five or seven loaves of bread and two fishes.

The synoptics do not mention the incident, but according to John (VI. 9) who retains much more of the Egyptian wisdom in his Gospel, there was a lad present in the scene who had with him “five barley loaves and two fishes”. “Jesus therefore took the loaves from him and distributed them to the people”. We have identified the feeding of the multitude of manes on the seven loaves that were brought to Horus as distributor of the bread of life, and the lad who brings the bread to Jesus in the Gospel with the one who brings the seven loaves to Horus, or, it may be, the five loaves to Taht, in the Ritual, and who is described as “someone” who comes with the bread of Horus and Taht which is ritualistically represented by the seven loaves. A primitive concept of the infinite had been expressed in terms of [Page 812] boundless food and drink. Providence was the provider; and the power that provided the fruits of the earth or water was Providence. When bread was made the providing power or godhead itself was figured by the Egyptians as an illimitable loaf, the food of spirits or celestial diet for the life to come. The one great loaf was equivalent to the one supreme source of soul. Seven loaves were numerically equivalent to the seven souls of Ra. The human soul was fed from the bread of life as typical of divine source. With bread of that kind one loaf might have sufficed without the pretence of a miracle, as it was cut and come again without diminution. It was the kind of bread which keeps on rising and expanding for ever as in the German tale of Jesus and the miserly woman with her dough.

Annu is the place of bread in which the multitudes of manes are fed as men, women and children also, if the younglings of Shu are included. It is called the place of multiplying bread. There are seven loaves of bread with Ra in Annu (Rit., ch. 53 B) on which the manes are fed by Horus. They feed upon the seven loaves of celestial bread which were brought for Horus to feed the manes with by a divine messenger. Seven loaves were brought for Horus and there were also loaves for Taht (ch. 52), the two which correspond to the seven loaves and the five in the “historical” miracles. The manes prays that he may feed on the seven loaves that are brought for Horus, and the loaves that were brought for Taht, which shows at least that there was more than one set of loaves, when the multitude were fed on the divine diet in the place of multiplying bread. In the Gospel the multitude recline upon the grass. In the Ritual they rest upon the grassy sward beneath the sycamore of Hathor (ch. 52, 4). But when the multitudes were fed in Annu they were the souls of the departed, and the symbolical seven loaves on which they fed was Ka-bread that was neither made nor eaten on earth, nor did it need a miracle to make the good go far enough. Annu was a mythical locality which did not supply the conditions for a miracle. A miracle had to be performed only when the eschatological representation was shifted from the mount of Annu in Amenta to a mountain in Judea. One hieroglyphic sign of the mount hetep is a pile of food. The mount was the place of feasting for the followers of Horus, the beatified spirits of the departed. “Every feast on earth and on the mountain” signifies the feasts of the living and the dead; the living upon earth, the dead or the departed on the mountain. In the feasting on the mount “Jesus went up into the mountain and sat there. And there came unto him great multitudes, having with them the lame, blind, dumb, maimed, and many others, and they cast them down at his feet; and he healed them; insomuch that the multitude wondered when they saw the dumb speaking, the maimed whole, the lame walking, and the blind seeing; and they glorified the God of Israel. And Jesus called his disciples and said, I have compassion on the multitude, because they continue with me three days and have nothing to eat”. (Matt. XV. 29-32.) The miracles of healing, including the casting out of evil spirits and the raising of the dead, as portrayed in the Ritual and corroborated by the “Pistis Sophia”, occurred in the resurrection on the mount; and this shows that those who had been with Jesus having nothing to eat for three days had been awaiting their [Page 813] resurrection on the third day, and that they were the manes and not mortals.

The only reason why the blind and deaf and dumb, the palsied and the lame, including the dead, assembled in their multitudes upon the mount is because this was the mount of resurrection and regeneration, thence of healing, for the manes who had waited in Amenta for the coming of the Lord. The resurrection of Osiris was solemnized at the great Haker festival. This is one of the ten mysteries described in the “Book of the Dead” (ch. 18) said to have been celebrated “before the great circle of gods in Abydos (the place of Osiris’s rebirth and resurrections) on the night of “Haker” (or Ha-k-er-a) when the glorious ones are rightly judged: when the evil dead are parted off, and joy goeth its round in Thinis” (ch. 18, Renouf). The name for this festival is rendered “Come thou hither or Come thou to me” : as the call of Ra upon the mount addressed to Osiris in the valley on the day of resurrection, when the soul of Horus the mortal was blended with Horus the immortal in the mystery of Tattu (ch. 17). The Haker celebration included both fasting and feasting. The word haker signifies fasting, to be famished, as well as denoting the festival of “Come thou to me” or the rite of resurrection. Now, as the comparative process shows an “historical” version of the Haker festival is given in the Gospels where we find an exoteric account of the funeral fast and resurrection feast, in the miracles of healing performed upon the mount and feeding the famished multitude upon the seven loaves of bread. It should be premised that the raising of Osiris, the god in matter was individual, but, at the same time, the resurrection of the dead in Osiris who were the “All Souls” for the year or cycle was general. The supreme miracle of “raising the dead” suffices of itself to show that it belonged to the mysteries of Amenta, as asserted in the “Pistis Sophia”, where the dead were raised; evil spirits were cast out, the blind were made to see, the deaf to hear, the lame to walk, the bed-ridden to get up and go, not by miracle but as a dramatic mode of illustrating the mysteries of the resurrection in the Peri em hru or coming forth to day. It is noticeable that the miracles of healing on the mount described in Matthew (XV. 29-31), are immediately followed by the miracle of multiplying the loaves and fishes. There is no change of scene, the multitude upon the mount remain the same. “And Jesus called unto Him His disciples, and said “I have compassion on the multitude, because they continue with Me now three days and have nothing to eat; and I would not send them away fasting”. Thus three days are allotted to the work of healing in the mount, during which time the multitude were fasting in the company of Jesus and his disciples. In the Ritual these are not only the fasting, they are also deprived of breath. They are without a mouth. They are the blind, the dumb, the motionless, in short, they are the deceased awaiting in their coffins and their cells for him who is the resurrection and the life, as the divine healer and deliverer of the manes from Amenta; he is the “divine one who dwelleth in heaven, and who sitteth on the eastern side of heaven” (Rit., ch. 25) that is on Mount Bakhu, the mount of the olive-tree, the only mount on which the dead were ever raised (P. S., B. 2, 279). This healing then was a mystery of the resurrection, the same in the canonical as [Page 814] in the Egypto-gnostic Gospel; the same in both as in the Book of the Dead, or Ritual of the resurrection. Three days was the length of time allowed for the burial in Amenta. This would constitute a three days’ fasting of the dead. We must discriminate. In the lunar reckoning the resurrection of Osiris in the moon was on the third day, which corresponded to the actual appearance of the light in nature. This death, described by Plutarch, occurred on the seventeenth of the month. In the solar reckoning three whole days and nights were allowed for the burial of the sun or sun-god in the earth. Both are employed in the Gospels but not scientifically. Neither could the complex of soli-lunar reckoning be explicated on the single line of a personal human history. Both solar and lunar reckonings remain, but hugely gaping apart with a gulf for ever fixed between the two. The Son of Man was to remain three nights as well as days in the “heart of the earth”. That is in keeping with the solar reckoning, whereas the resurrection is on the third day, the same as that of Osiris in the moon. We repeat, there was a two-fold computation of time, lunar and solar, both of which are given in the gospels, but without the gnosis that explained the astronomical mythology. Three days is the full period, and this is the length of time over which the miracles of healing were extended and during which the multitude with Jesus had “nothing to eat”, because they were with him in the Valley of Amenta; the same that were healed by him on the Mount of Resurrection. It was in the resurrection that the dead were raised to life and became spirits. These were the good spirits which were parted from the evil spirits that were then “cast out”. Sight was given to the blind, a mouth to the dumb, hearing was restored to the deaf. The lame were enabled to rise and walk. Then the three days’ fast was ended by the feeding of the multitude on what the Ritual terms celestial diet, i.e., the “seven loaves” of heaven that were supplied as sustenance for the risen dead in Annu, the place of multiplying bread. In the Egyptian mysteries, all who enter the nether world as manes to rise again as spirits are blind and deaf and dumb and maimed and impotent because they are the dead. Their condition is typified by that of mortal Horus who is portrayed as blind and maimed, deaf and dumb in An-arar-ef the abode of occultation, the house of obscurity, the “city of dreadful night” where all the denizens were deaf and dumb and maimed and blind awaiting the cure that only came with the divine healer who is Horus of the resurrection in the Ritual, or Khunsu, the caster out of demons, or Iu-em-hetep the healer, or Jesus in the Gospels, gnostic or agnostic. Thus the restoring of sight to the blind man, or the two blind men, was one of the mysteries of Amenta that is reproduced amongst the miracles in the canonical gospels.

The speaker in the Ritual often makes the merest allusion to some act of the drama that was visibly performed and fully unfolded in the mysteries. For example, Horus the avenger is described as blending his being with that of the Sightless One, who had been Horus in the flesh (Rit., 17). In a previous allusion (same chapter) the coming of the soul of Ra to embrace and blend with the body-soul of Osiris, to give light and life to the Mummy-God is also described as the act of Horus-Tema who is blended with the Sightless God. In either [Page 815] representation there is a restoration of sight to the blind; and this when written out and narrated as “History” becomes the miracle of Jesus curing the man and giving sight to him who was blind; or to the two men as Osiris and the Osiris, N., or to any number of those who were sightless in the city of the blind. When Horus the deliverer descends into Amenta he is hailed as the prince in the city or the region of the blind. That is, of the dead who are sleeping in their prison cells, and who therefore are the prototypal spirits in prison. He comes to shine into their sepulchres and to restore their sight to the blind. “Hail to Thee, Lord of Light, who art prince of the house which is encircled by darkness and obscurity”, in the city of the blind (Rit., ch. 21). This picture is repeated in the Gospel of Matthew (IV. 16). “The people which sat in darkness saw a great light: and to them which sat in the region and shadow of death, to them did the light spring up”. This, as written in the “Book of the Dead” was in Amenta.

The typical blind man of Amenta, then, is Horus in the gloom of his sightless condition, as the human soul obscured in matter or groping in the darkness of the grave. This is Horus An-arar-ef in the city of the blind. And the Horus who comes to restore the lost sight, is he who had been divinized in the likeness of Ra, the holy spirit. It is said of this dual Horus in the Ritual (ch. 17), “The pair of gods are Horus the reconstituter of his father and Horus the prince in the city of blindness”. The second Horus is the spirit perfected. He descends from heaven to the darkness of Amenta as The Light of the World. He is called the one whose head is clothed with a white radiance. His presence shines into the sepulchres and cells of the manes. He comes to the blind in the city of the blind, the place in which blind Horus was enveloped in obscurity. He shows as a great light in the darkness of the land of the dead, and is described as restoring sight to those who are blind, that is to the manes who have not yet attained the beatific or spiritual vision. This is represented as giving sight to the blind. Amenta was looked upon as the earth of the blind. The manes were there as blind folk awaiting sight. The human Horus Har-Khent-An-arar-ef in Sekhem was the prince of the blind, being chief amongst the manes who were sightless or without the means of seeing in the dark. For this reason the mole or shrewmouse was his zootype. The typical blind man in Amenta is the blind Horus who was deprived of sight by Sut, the Power of Darkness. But every manes that entered Amenta was also blind in the darkness of death. Thus there are two blind men, or one as the God and one as the manes; one in the soli-lunar mythos, and one in the eschatology; Horus in his darkness of night or the eclipse; the mortal in the dark of death. Miracle for mystery, this may explain the two different versions of healing the blind in the Gospels. Three of the evangelists know of a single blind man only, who was cured by Jesus, where Matthew reports the healing of two blind men in which he obviously gives two separate versions of one and the same miracle. In the Ritual, then, we can identify the one blind man with Horus in the dark, or without sight (Rit., ch. 18, as Har-Khent-an-maati); the two blind men with Horus and the manes (otherwise [Page 816] with Osiris and the Osiris); and the multitudes of blind people above ground with the manes or the dead in Amenta. There is no need of limiting the miracle of curing the blind to one or two men. Horus the light of the world in the earth of Amenta comes to cure the blind in general who are dwelling in the darkness of the city of the blind, in which the devil (Sut) was dominant previous to the second advent of Horus. The dead in Osiris were as blind mummies awaiting the spiritual light which gave the beatific vision; and Horus comes to unseal the eyes of the manes waking in their coffins.

The poor blind Horus was given eyes at the time when he became the anointed son, and the child of twelve years made his transformation into the adult of thirty years with the head and sight of the hawk, or the beatific vision of Horus in the spirit. He was anointed with oil at the lustration in Abydos, the place of re-birth. Hence one mode of making the anointed or the Christ whom Horus became in this transformation was by anointing with saliva. The lustration of children by spittle was an old Papal rite, and in the Gospel the spittle used to open the eyes of the blind is equivalent to anointing the sightless Horus in Sekhem. In acting the mystery of Amenta the “Eye of Horus”, the anointed son, the light of the world, was brought to blind Horus lying in his darkness. This mystery is reproduced as miracle in the healing of the blind man. “When I am in the world”, says Jesus, “I am the Light of the World”. This is equivalent to bringing the eye of Horus to the benighted manes in Amenta. “When he had spoken, he spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and anointed his eyes with the clay”. And in this unsightly way the man is said to have attained his sight in thus becoming the anointed. Such is the puerility of the miracle-mongers who misrepresent the mystery-teachers in the Gospels. To preach the “recovery of sight to the blind” was to teach a doctrine of the resurrection and the opening of the eyes in death, such as was set forth dramatically in the mysteries of the Ritual (chs. 20-30). It was the same also in giving a mouth to the dumb; in making the dead to rise and the lame to walk; likewise in casting out evil spirits, and the powers of darkness, the associates of Sut, the Sami or the Sebau, which originated in physical phenomena, and were afterwards mis-rendered as obsessing spirits that were primarily human. When the divine healer and caster-out of demons, Khunsu-Horus, went to Bakhten to exorcise an evil spirit from the possessed Princess, the god was carried there in effigy, as the “driver away of evil spirits that take possession “ of the human body, not as a divinized medicine-man portrayed in human form. The effigy is an image of the wonderful healer who originated as a power of renewal in external nature, and not as a mortal on this earth. The caster-out of demons is also portrayed as Khunsu offering up the abominable pig in the lunar disk as a sacrifice to the Lord of Light (Planisphere of Denderah), the pig being a zootype of Sut the evil one. Thus we reach a root-origin in the war of light and darkness, or Horus and Sut, that is waged for ever in the Moon. The black boar, Sut, makes his attack upon the eye, which is healed by Horus or Khunsu, Taht or Ra. The power of light was then the healer of the wound in nature that was wrought by the representative of darkness as the pig, the Apap-dragon, or the adversary Sut. Hence the eye of Horus in [Page 817] the moon is a symbol of healing, and of safety or salvation; an amulet, therefore, or fetish, good against the powers of darkness. There was no miracle in the natural phenomena. There was no miracle involved or taught in the original mode of representation. But when a “human mortal” with the name of Jesus is put in place of Horus, Taht or Khunsu, he becomes the supposed to be, but for ever impossible, miracle-monger; Jesus, the Jewish Saviour, who is described as coming into a world of blind people; some of whom are blind figuratively, others actually. The Scribes and Pharisees are denounced as blind, “blind guides”, “fools and blind”, “blind leaders of the blind”, Jesus restores the sight of those who are physically blind, “to many blind he gave sight”. That is in fitting the canonical Jesus to the rôle of Horus. A form of blind Horus described by Isaiah leaves no room for doubt that the Hebrew Messiah was the Egyptian Horus. This is he who is blind; “my servant, who is blind as he that is made perfect, and blind as the Lord’s servant” (chs. XLII, XLIII). This servant of the Lord is the suffering Horus who was portrayed as the servant of Osiris the Lord, blind, dumb, and therefore deaf, but as being perfected in serving the Lord, who “confirmed the word of His servant”. Being perfected marks the change from the servant, as Horus who was born blind in matter to Horus in spirit, the restorer of sight to the blind, that is, to the dead. Also the word of the servant was confirmed by the coming of Horus as the word-made-truth in Har-Ma-Kheru. But it was in the earth of Amenta that Horus came to restore the sight to the blind, and in the canonical Gospels Judea, full of blind folk being cured by miracle, is just Amenta wrong-side uppermost, with the drama of the double-earth in a state of topsy-turvydom through the conversion of the ancient mysteries into Gospel-miracles.

In arranging for the resurrection of the dead, as performed in the mysteries of Osiris, the funeral bed, called the Khenkhat, is prepared as the couch of the mummy. It is said to the deceased, “I have fastened thy bones together for thee. I have given thy flesh to thee”. “I have collected thy members for theeâ€�. This is in arranging the deceased upon the funeral couch, for his rising from, or as, the dead (ch. 170). “Hail N”, it is said to the deceased upon the funeral couch, “Arise on thy bed and come forth” (Rit., chs. 169-170). Here is an instructive instance of the way in which the mysteries of the Ritual have been converted into the miracles of the Gospels. There are two chapters concerning the funeral bed. The first is “on making the Khenkhat to stand up”; the other is on “arranging the Khenkhat”. We repeat, the Khenkhat is the funeral bed on which the dead were laid out in Amenta, waiting for the coming of Horus, lord of the resurrection, to wake the sleepers who are in their coffins or lying breathless on their couches in the likeness of inert Osiris. It is the couch of the dead that is set up on end like the mummy-case with the body inside which is thus erected on its feet as a mode of rendering the mystery of the resurrection or re-erection of the deceased (Rit., ch. 169). This becomes a miracle in the Gospel, when the dead are raised, and those who were paralytic take up their bed and walk. In the next chapter (170) on the arrangement of the funeral bed it is said to the risen one, “Thou settest forth on thy [Page 818] way. Horus causeth thee to stand up at the risings”. Then the deceased, as the risen mummy, is seen to be walking off. That is in the resurrection. Here, as elsewhere, the mystery of Amenta becomes a miracle when represented on this earth. That change would of itself account for a huge falsification, to say nothing of the intent and tendency of the writers, which follow and overshadow the truth of the ancient wisdom all through as darkly as the night the day; for if ancient Egypt was the light of the world, Christian theology has assuredly been its impenetrable shadow.

As already shown, a reduced form of the mysteries that were acted in the Osirian drama may here and there be recognized in the form of parables and portable sayings. Take the mystery of Tattu in the 17th chapter of the Ritual, by means of which the Sayings of the Lord, quoted from “the Gospel of the Egyptians” by the two Clements, can be explicated. The Lord himself being asked by someone when his kingdom would come, replied: “When two shall be one. When that which is without is as that which is within, and the male with the female (shall be) neither male nor female” (Clem., Rom.). When Salome asked, when those things about which she questioned should be made known, the Lord said: “When you tread under foot the covering of shame, and when out of two is made one, and the male with the female is neither male nor female” (Clem. Alex., Stromata). This is that blending of the two souls or two sexes in one which was figured and effected in the mystery of Tattu. This blending of two halves in one whole, which is a likeness of neither, but a new image of both, is exemplified thrice over in the Ritual, when a soul was established that should live for ever. Ra is blended with Osiris; Shu with Tefnut; child-Horus with Horus the adult. Ra represents the divine soul, and Osiris the body-soul in matter. Shu represents the male, and Tefnut the female nature. Child-Horus is the mortal and Horus in spirit the immortal. Thus the divine soul was blended with the soul of matter; female with male, and mortal with immortal in the mystery of Tattu. The mystery was of course performed, and in the present instance, the drama consists of three acts with six different characters which are Ra and Osiris, Shu and Tefnut, Horus the sightless, with Horus the bringer of the beatific vision. In the saying quoted from “the Gospel according to the Egyptians” the mystery has been reduced to the male and female becoming neither male nor female in the mystical marriage, the other factors being omitted. This shows the process by which the mysteries of the Ritual were reduced and made portable in the miracles, the parables and sayings, or Logoi, whether as separate sayings or as miscellaneous collections. A distant echo of the doctrine is to be heard in the Gospel according to Matthew (XXII. 30): “For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as angels in heaven”. So remote is this from the mystical marriage in Tattu that the mystery in Amenta is limited to sexual conjunction. Now we learn from the Ritual that one mode of making the change from matter to spirit and of being unified in the type beyond sex was by discarding the garb of the female in the preparation of the manes for the funeral bed at the time of the second birth (Rit., ch. 170). The garment is again referred to in “the [Page 819] fragments of a lost Gospel” when the speaker says “he himself will give you your garment”. “His disciples say unto him, when wilt thou be manifest to us, and when shall we see thee? He saith, when ye shall be stripped and not be ashamed’ (Grenfell and Hunt, New Sayings of Jesus, p. 40), which is the same thing as being freed from the garb of shame upon the funeral bed. This is no mystical reference to Genesis III. 7, but to the mystery of Amenta and a ceremony that was performed in the nether-world, of which it is said, “Thou puttest on the pure garment and thou divestest thyself of thy apron when thou stretchest thyself on the funeral bed’ (Rit., ch. 172). “Thou receivest a bandage of the finest linen”, in place of the old garb of shame, or the apron which was now a symbol of the flesh. Lastly, amongst the mysteries of Amenta which were converted into Gospel miracles one of the most arresting is that of the Widow and her only son whom Jesus raised up from the funeral bier at Nain (Luke VII. 14), because Isis is the widow by name in the Ritual who was represented by the disconsolate swallow as the widow who has lost her mate, and Horus was her only son. The connection of the child with the widow in Egypt is already seen in the Gospel of Thomas or Tum, which goes far towards identifying the child-Jesus with the child of Isis. Moreover, the mystery shows us how the mother as Isis became a widow. When Osiris had been put to death, the birth of the child-Horus followed the decease of his father, and his mother was consequently the widow who had an only son in Horus, the only child of his mother. In the mystery of Tattu, child-Horus was raised up from the dead when Horus in the spirit came to the funeral couch and the immortal was blended with the mortal in the mystery of the resurrection. This is repeated in the Gospel as one of the most telling of the mysteries that were Christianized in the miracles.

 Horus was the prototypal fish, the same type of sacrifice that is still eaten in the penitential meal to-day as it was in On when Sebek-Horus was the Saviour as the fish that brought the food and water of [Page 861] the inundation. Horus as the fish preceded Horus as the fisher when Sebek, the crocodile-headed god, was the typical great fisher. It is said of the first two fishers, “These are the two hands of Horus which had become fishes”, that is as types of Horus the fisher according to the mystery of Nekhen (Rit., ch. 113). The followers of Horus as fishers (ch. 153A) are called “the fishermen who are fishing”. Thus the total group who were the twelve as reapers in the harvest-field of Amenta are also the twelve as the fishers. Hence the twelve fishermen of the later legend. The two first fishes caught for Horus are then eaten at the sacramental meal. As it is said (Rit., ch. 153A), the fishes are laid on the table of Horus. They had been brought to him when the festival was founded by Ra; “they were brought to Horus and displayed before his face at the feast of the 15th day of the month, when the fishes were produced” (Rit., ch. 113).

In the Ritual (ch. 97) there is a scene of the Seven Fishers at the boat with Horus, which can be paralleled in the Gospel of John. The scene in John’s Gospel is post-resurrectional, therefore not in the earth of time. As it is said, “This is now the third time that Jesus was manifested to the disciples after that he was risen from the dead” (John XXI. 14). And that which follows the resurrection is in spirit-world. Therefore Jesus and the seven disciples in this scene are spirits like the seven with Horus, which were the seven great spirits of Annu, four of whom became the first fishers for Horus (Rit., chs. 97 and 153A). This view is corroborated by the appearance of Peter, “for he was naked”, and a naked man in Sign-language means a spirit. Thus the seven with Jesus at the boat are a form of the seven great spirits with Horus at the bark in Annu, four of whom — the foremost four — become the founders of the fold for the Good Shepherd, in the same chapter of the Ritual but in another character. In this character Horus had shepherded the flocks of Ra, his heavenly father, in the deserts of Amenta (Book of Hades). In this character of the shepherd Horus of the resurrection rose up from the sepulchre with a crook instead of the later lamb or kid upon his shoulder. And it is in this character Horus chooses the first four of the seven great spirits of Annu to become the founders of his fold as well as his first four fishers. In the Gospel Jesus likewise assumes the character of the so-called good shepherd. Hence the injunctions to Peter, and the sayings, “Feed my lambs”, “Tend my sheep”, “Feed my sheep” (John XXI. 16-18).

According to Matthew, the four brethren first chosen by Jesus are Simon, Andrew, James and John. It is noteworthy, however, that in the Johannine account the first four followers of Jesus are Andrew and Peter, Phillip and Nathaniel. Moreover, Nathaniel was one of those who were under the fig-tree aforetime with Jesus. There is no Zebedee, father of the fishers, and there is no fishing in the opening chapter of John; that is, as supposed in the life on earth. The fishers only appear in this Gospel after the resurrection of Jesus, which takes us, as does the baptism, into the spirit-world of the mythos, where the seven fishers answer to the other group of the seven in the boat with Horus.

The mysteries of Amenta show us Anup calling the world to judgment in the character of the judge. He is the precursor of [Page 862] Horus in the wilderness, and the announcer of the kingdom that follows at the second coming. Under the title of Ap-Uat he is the opener or guide of roads who “makes ready the way of the Lord”, and levels the path in the equinox. In the Gospels the proclamation that the kingdom of heaven is at hand was first made by John the baptizer and precursor of Jesus. The cry of the coming kingdom immediately at hand is then taken up by Jesus after the baptism in which he has become the adult of thirty years, and the co-type of Horus the anointed son of God the second born who was Horus in the spirit. Also in the Gospel of Nicodemus, John the Baptist is the teacher in the earth of eternity. The baptism and transformation of Jesus into the spirit symbolled by the dove was in the earth of eternity. The descent of the holy spirit, as God the father, in authentication of the anointed son was enacted in the earth of eternity, not in the world of time. According to the genuine mythos or gnosis which is Egyptian, and we have no other criterion, the double advent of Horus depended on his birth and rebirth, in the two earths; the birth of a human soul in matter and the rebirth of an immortal in Amenta. The second coming of Horus is the mystery of that second birth in which the human soul is divinized from its two halves as an enduring spirit or eternal entity. This transformation follows death and burial, and therefore can only take place in spirit-world. When it does take place the second advent is accomplished as represented both in the Ritual and the Egypto-gnostic writings. But it is otherwise in the canonical Gospels, because in making out a history solely human the concocters were limited to the human life in the earth of time. For example, in the Gospel according to John, when Jesus is about to leave the disciples and is telling them of the second advent, he says, “I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now” (ch. XVI. 12). These things that are to come, in some indefinite future (which has not come yet), relate to the nature of God the father. They constitute the mysteries which are to be unfolded in the future at the second coming of the son in the person of the judge, the avenger, the harvester, the spirit-of-truth, the comforter, the fulfiller who fulfils both in the Ritual and in the gnostic Gospel. Jesus had hitherto taught in parables. Now he says the hour cometh when he will tell them “plainly of the father” and speak to them no more in parables (XVI. 25). This is at the second coming which had been already fulfilled in the Gospel of “Pistis Sophia” and in the Ritual of the Resurrection. The Egypto-gnostic Jesus who, as the “little Iao” of “Pistis Sophia”, only spoke in parables, and was not empowered to expound the profounder mysteries of the fatherhood, is a form of the child-Horus whom Plutarch called the “inarticulate discourse”. At his second coming he unfolded the spiritual mysteries. The chief of these was the mystery of mysteries, namely, the mystery of “the father in the likeness of a dove” (B. 1, 1). Nevertheless, the second advent, and the mysteries pertaining thereto (according to the genuine gnosis), do leak out in the canonical Gospels, however carefully disguised or surreptitiously inserted. The gnostic manifestation of the first mystery, namely, that of the father as a dove, is made to the Gospel-Jesus at the time of his baptism, in the life on earth. The second [Page 863] coming is also illustrated in the scene of transfiguration on the mount. Likewise in the resurrection when the risen Christ has transformed into a spirit, Luke notwithstanding, with power to impart the holy spirit and share it with his followers (John XX. 22). Each of these manifestations, with others belonging to the second advent of Horus in Amenta, are assigned to Jesus in the human life in fulfilment of the history. In the Ritual the father, as the holy spirit, calls from heaven to Horus (or Osiris) the anointed son, “Come thou to me”. This is Ra the bird-headed, whose likeness is then assumed by Horus the beloved son. In the Gospel, the Father, as the holy spirit, descended on Jesus in the form of a dove, and in that guise “abode upon him”. The exigency of a human history with only a single advent did not permit of the death and resurrection of Jesus occurring at the time when the youth of twelve years made his change into the adult of thirty years. Yet the baptism and ascension of Jesus from the water into the opening heavens are identical with the Egypto-gnostic resurrection. The Horus or Jesus of twelve years is the mortal on this side of death. The Horus or Jesus of thirty years is a spirit on the other side, in spirit-world. The baptism of Jesus represents the resurrection of Horus from the water. Hence Jesus in his baptism becomes a spirit. He is led up from the water “of the spirit”, “in the spirit”, or as a spirit into which he had made his transformation. When Sut put out the eye of Horus, the darkness represented death. But, in the Gospel, death, or the transformation, is only represented at this point by the baptism. If it had been actualized the history must have ended there and then, which was not in accordance with the Gospel schema. Still, the “history” notwithstanding, Jesus does become a spirit in this scene of transformation which belongs to the mysteries of Amenta. Bird-headed beings are spirits, not historical Jews. Only as a spirit could the foster-child of Seb, or Joseph, transform into the son of Ra the holy spirit; and only in the earth of eternity could the change occur in which the Virgin’s child became the father’s son by being born again of Nut the heavenly mother, one of whose names was Meri. According to the gnosis, the following are a few of the events that occur after the resurrection: the transformation of Jesus, the Virgin’s child, into the beloved son of the father with the spirit of God descending on him as a dove; the contests with Satan in the spirit; the adoption of the four disciples in the mount; Jesus with the seven on board the bark; the founding of the fold; the miracles of healing; giving sight to the blind; raising the dead; casting out the devils; causing evil spirits to enter the swine; walking upon the water; founding the kingdom of heaven on the four fishers, or disciples, and conferring the holy spirit, after death, upon the twelve.

The Gospel doctrine of the Holy Spirit is true enough, according to the Egyptian wisdom, when properly applied, but only as Egyptian is it to be understood. Certain manifestations of the holy spirit in the Gospels are strictly in keeping with the mysteries of the Ritual or Book of the Dead. In the words of John “the holy spirit was not given” at the time when Jesus “was not yet glorified” (ch. VII. 39). The glorifying was by descent of the holy spirit; the spirit that was given to Horus and by him to the disciples in the mystery [Page 864] of Tattu upon the resurrection-day when the God in heaven called to the mummy-Osiris in Amenta “Come thou to me”, when the two halves of the soul were blended in the eternal oneness, and human Horus, the soul in matter, was transformed to rise again as Horus divinized. This was in the resurrection after death, in baptismal regeneration, or in the Christifying of the Osiris-mummy.

The Ritual shows us how the apostles were established on the same foundation, beginning with the two brothers, who were followed by the four brethren, the cycle being completed by the twelve in the fields of divine harvest. The four as brothers of Horus had been figures in the astronomy. The four as his children are figures in the eschatology; the four who are “foremost among the spirits of Annu” with the aid of whom “the fold” was constructed for him, as for one victorious against all “adversaries” (Rit., ch. 97). The two fours are thus equated in the Gospels. The four brothers of Horus=the four brothers of Jesus. Amsta, Hapi, Tuamutef, Kabhsenuf=James, Joseph, Simon, Judas. The same four in the character of his children with Horus=the four brethren, Simon, Andrews, James and John, whom Jesus addresses as his children (John XXXI. 5). At a later stage the followers in the train of Horus are the twelve who are his harvesters in the cornfields of Amenta. “Pistis Sophia” in agreement with the “Book of Hades” shows us how the twelve as followers of Horus were constituted a company that consisted at first of seven to which the five were added in forming the group of twelve. The disciples of Jesus likewise become the twelve who reap the harvest. “Then saith he unto his disciples, the harvest truly is plenteous but the labourers are few. Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest that he send forth labourers into his harvest. And he called unto him his twelve disciples” — who were previously but four (Matt. IV. 18, 21) — “and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal all manner of disease and all manner of sickness”. At this point the names of the twelve are for the first time given (Matt. X. 1-5). The same words are uttered in Luke concerning the harvest and its reapers, but now the number of disciples appointed and sent forth for the ingathering of harvest-home is seventy or seventy-and-two — one for each subdivision of the decans in the twelve signs, both the seventy and seventy-two being identifiable astronomical numbers.

The twelve with Horus in Amenta are they who labour at the harvest and collect the corn (otherwise the souls) for Horus. When the harvest is ready “the bearers of sickles reap the grain in their fields. Ra says to them, on earth as bearers of sickles in the fields of Amenta”, “Take your sickles, reap your grain” “Book of Hades”, Records, vol. 10, 119). Here the labourers who reap the harvest in Amenta are the object of propitiatory offerings and of adoration on the earth, as the twelve disciples of Horus, son of Ra, the heavenly father. And this was ages before the story was told of the twelve fictitious harvesters in Galilee. Moreover, the Harvest is identical with the Last Judgment. Atum-Ra says at the same time, “Guard the enemies, punish the wicked. Let them not escape from your hands. Watch over the executions, according to the orders you have received from the Founder, who has marked you out to strike” — as executioners. So is it in the Gospels, where the harvest is one [Page 865] with the judgment at the end of the world, or consummation of the age.

As before said, when the narratives in the canonical scriptures had taken the place of the primitive drama, certain mysteries of Amenta were made portable in parables, and thenceforth the Gospels repeat the same things in parables and logoi that were represented dramatically in the mysteries. The harvest-home and judgment-day, described in the Gospels, which are to occur at some indefinite time in the future on this earth, belong to the Osirian mysteries of Amenta. The great judgment at the last day supplies an illustration of the mystery extant in parable. A first and second death occur, likewise a first and second resurrection in the mysteries of Amenta. The first is the death which takes place on earth, and the apparition of the manes in the nether-world constitutes the first resurrection from the dead. Then follows the great judgment of the righteous and the wicked. Those found guilty are doomed to suffer the second death. There is for them no other resurrection. Those who escape from the dread tribunal uncondemned pass on to the second resurrection as the spirits of the just made perfect, called the glorified. These are the inheritors of eternal life. Jesus says, “This is the will of my Father, that every one that beholdeth the Son, and believeth on him, should have eternal life, that I should raise him up at the last day”, “and I will raise him up at the last day” (John VI. 40, 44). The pitiful pretence of an historical Jew being the raiser up of the dead at the last day is a miserable mockery of the actual transaction in the mysteries of Amenta with Horus as the resurrection and the life. In these, the deceased is shown as Ani in the hall of judgment. He has emerged from the earth-life and risen in Amenta, but not yet from it. He must be judged in the Maat or great hall before he rises from the dead as one of the just made perfect for the life to come. If he passes, sound of heart and pure in spirit, he will enter the presence of the great god. Ani succeeds and passes pure. His resurrection from the dead and from Amenta, the world of the dead, is assured. Horus the Son of God, the Intercessor, the paraclete, now takes him by the hand as the raiser of the dead to life and introducer of the risen Ani to his father. In one scene the hair of Ani is black. The next shows him kneeling in presence of Osiris with his hair turned white. He has passed in purity. He has been raised by Horus at the “last day” or at the end of the cycle when the dead were judged, once every year or other period at the great gathering of “all souls”. This took place “in presence of the gods”, as one of the ten great mysteries described in the Ritual (ch. 18) when “the glorious ones were rightly judged, and joy went its round in Thinis”; when judgment was passed upon those who were to be annihilated “on the highway of the damned” ; when “the evil dead were cast out”, and the goats divided from the sheep. As it is said —”when the associates of Sut arrive, and take the form of goats, they are slain in presence of the gods so long as their blood runneth down, and this is done according to the judgment of those gods who are in Tattu”, the place of establishing the soul for ever, from its two halves, as the double Horus, the divine avenger of the suffering Osiris, who at his second coming was the revealer of [Page 866] eternal justice. This culminating event, which was the subject of so much Old Testament prophecy that is reproduced in the New, is here fulfilled, according to the knowledge of the wise men “which knew the times” and who also “knew the law and the judgment” (Esther I. 13). The advent might be on the millennial scale of Horus in the house of a thousand years according to the cycle, but there was a Coming once a year and an ending of the cycle, the age, or the world as it was called by the Christians every year. And it is on this one-year period derived from the solar mythos that the second advent and the immediate ending of the world were ignorantly based. The end of the world or the cycle of the annual sun came once a year in the Egyptian mythos. The second advent of Horus, like the first, was also annual. He came in the terror of his glory as avenger of his father; as the great judge, as lord of the harvest with the glorious ones for reapers who were the typical twelve in number, and as the fulfiller of the heavenly kingdom in which he reigned according to the mythos for one year, whether as Horus the shoot, the fish, the fisherman, or the harvester. The gnostic Christ was likewise known to be the ruler for one year.

At the festival of Ha-ka-er-a, or “Come thou to me”, the blessed ones were welcomed by Horus to the kingdom which had been prepared from the foundation of the world, or the earlier cycle of time, in the Kamite astro-mythology, if anywhere on earth, but which preparation and founding were repeated every year as a mode of the mysteries in Amenta. These mysteries were extant, and periodically performed some thousands of years ago. So ancient is some of the imagery in the Maat, that when Ani passes pure, the crown of glory placed upon his head to be worn in heaven is a form of the top-knot, which is still assumed at puberty by the Kaffirs and other African black races. But this great judgment, in common with the other events that were fulfilled at the second advent, still remains the subject of prophecy in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. In the Gospel according to Matthew the last judgment is to take place at the veritable ending of the world (Matt. XXV. 31-46). “When the Son of Man shall come in his glory, and all the angels with him, then shall he sit on the throne of his glory, and before him shall be gathered all the nations, and he shall separate them, as the shepherd parteth the sheep from the goats; and he shall set the sheep on the right hand, but the goats on the left. Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: for I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger and ye took me in: naked and ye clothed me, sick and ye visited me. Then shall he say unto them on the left hand, Depart from me ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels”. In the original, the devil and his angels are Sut and his Sami, and the goats on the left hand are also the representatives of Sut. Nevertheless, the two judgments of the Ritual and in the gospel are fundamentally the same; there was but one origin and one meaning for both. The great judgment in the hall of righteousness which remained the subject of Hebrew prophecy gone dateless was an annual occurrence in the [Page 867] Kamite mysteries. In this the Osiris pleads: “I have done that which man prescribeth and that which pleaseth the gods. I have propitiated the god with that which he loveth. I have given bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, clothes to the naked, a boat to the shipwrecked. I have made oblations to the gods and funeral offerings to the departed: deliver me therefore; protect me therefore: and report not against me in presence of the great God. I am one whose mouth is pure, and whose hands are pure, to whom it is said by those who look upon him, Come, come in peace” (Ritual, ch. 125, Renouf).

The great judgment was periodic in Amenta at the end of a cycle, which might be a year, a generation, or, as it was also exoterically figured, at the end of the world. The uninitiated, who had but an outside view, mistook it for the actual and immediate ending of the world. “The harvest is the end of the world” (Matt. XIII. 39). “The end of all things is at hand” (1 Peter IV. 7). “It is the last hour” (1 John II. 18). “The kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matt. III. 2; IV. 17; X. 7). This was according to the literalization of the Illiterate. Paul is the only writer or speaker in the New Testament who knew better. He warns his followers amongst the Thessalonians against believing this teaching of the uninitiated. He says: “We beseech you, brethren, touching the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and our gathering together unto him; to the end that ye be not quickly shaken from your mind, nor yet be troubled, either by spirit or by word, or by Epistle as from us (i.e., by a forged “Epistle of Paul”;), as that the day of the Lord is (now) present: let no man beguile you in any wise” (2 Thess. II. 1, 3). He was the only one who knew the esoteric nature of this end of the aeon, and the coming of Christ or Horus, the anointed, the Messiah in Israel, or the Jesus who was Iu the Su of Atum, whom he calls the second Adam=Atum, and who had been to him the pre-Christian Christ, the spiritual rock, from which the people drank the water of life whilst in the wilderness. When Tertullian denounced Paul as “The Apostle of the Heretics” he meant the Egypto-gnostics. Paul was epopt and perfect amongst those who knew that the historic version was a lying delusion. This we hold to have been aimed at in his Second Epistle to the Thessalonians”, when he says of his opponents, the fleshifiers of the Christ, “for this cause God sendeth them a working of error, that they should believe a lie”.

The mould of the mythos being solar, once every year the heir of Ra assumed his sovereignty as Horus of the kingly countenance, whose rule was for one year. Every year Osiris, the great green one in vegetation, died to rise again in the fruits of the earth. Every year in the solar drama he was buried in Amenta to make the road that united the two earths in one, for establishing the coming kingdom on earth as it was in heaven. Every year the prophecy was fulfilled in natural phenomena, and every year the coming kingdom came. Every year was celebrated this foundation of the world that was laid and relaid by the buried body of the god; this union of the double earth in Tanen, at the equinox, this resurrection of the soul that supplied the bread of life, this completion of the cycle by the sun that rose and travelled on the eternal round as representative of the author of eternity. A glimpse of this annual coming is permitted when the Christ is made to say, “Ye shall not have gone through the cities of [Page 868] Israel till the son of man be come” (Matt. X. 23). “There be some of them that stand here which shall in no wise taste of death till they see the son of man coming in his kingdom” (Matt. XVI. 28). Such prophecy is in accordance with the true mythos, but for ever fatal to the falsely-founded history.

THE LAST SUPPER: THE CRUCIFIXION AND THE RESURRECTION

As the legend is related by Plutarch, the death of Osiris was preceded by his betrayal, and the betrayal, which was the work of his twin brother, Sut, took place in the banqueting-room. Sut, having framed a curious ark just the size of Osiris’s body, brought it to a certain banquet. As this was on the last night of Osiris’s life or reign, and on the last night of the year, the meal may fairly be called the Last Supper (Of Isis and Osiris, 13). Now this mystery of the Last Supper can be traced in the Ritual as the first of a series acted in Amenta. Sut and his associates had renewed the assault upon Osiris on the night of laying the evening provisions upon the altar, called the night of the battle in which the powers of drought and darkness were defeated and extinguished. The coffin of Osiris is the earth of Amenta. Dawn upon the coffin was the resurrection; and this provender is imaged as “the dawn upon the coffin of Osiris”, which shows that the evening meal, or eucharist, was eaten in celebration of the resurrection and the transubstantiation of the body into spirit. The night of laying provisions on the altar is mentioned twice: once when Osiris is in the coffin, provided by Sut and his associates, the Sebau, who entrapped him in the ark. The second mention follows the erection of the Tat-sign which denoted the resurrection; hence the “dawn upon the coffin of Osiris”, which is equivalent to the resurrection morn. The resurrection on the third day originated in lunar phenomena. Twenty-eight days was the length of a moon, and this is no doubt the source of the statement that Osiris was in his eight-and-twentieth year at the time of his betrayal. The moon is invisible during two nights, which completed the luni-solar month of thirty days.

The assault upon Osiris the Good Being made by Sut was periodically renewed. This has just occurred when the first of the ten mysteries is enacted (Rit., ch. 18). The scene is in the house of Annu (Heliopolis), where Osiris lay buried and Horus was reborn. The triumph of Osiris over his adversaries is in the resurrection following the dramatized death of the inviolate god. This is called the night of the battle, when there befell the defeat of the Sebau and the extinction of the adversaries of Osiris. It is also described as “the night of provisioning the altar”, otherwise stated “the night of the Last Supper”, when “the calf of the sacrificial herd” was eaten at “the mortuary meal”, which represented the body and blood of Osiris, “the bull of eternity” (Rit., ch. 1).

The second mystery of the ten is solemnized upon the night when the Tat-pillar was set up in Tattu, or when Osiris in his resurrection [Page 869] was raised up again as a type of the eternal. The third mystery is on the night of the things that were laid upon the altar in Sekhem which imaged the altar and the offering in one. This was the circle of Horus in the dark, the sufferer made blind by Sut, the victim in the Tat who was the prototype of Jesus on the cross, and representative of the god in matter.

As we have seen, a great Memphian festival, answering to the Christmas-tide of later times, was periodically solemnized at the temple of Medinet Habu in the last decade of the month Choiak (from December 20th to 30th), which lasted for ten days. One day, the 26th of the month=December 24th, was kept as the feast of Sekari, the god who rose again from the mummy, and this was the principal feast-day of the ten. In all likelihood the whole ten mysteries were performed during the ten days of the festival that was celebrated at Memphis (Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt, Eng. translation, pp. 277-9). Prominent among these was the feast of the erection or re-erection of the Tat-pillar of stability, which was an image of Ptah-Sekari, the coffined one who rose again, and who in the later religion becomes Osiris-Sekari, “Lord of resurrections, whose birth is from the house of death”. The resurrection of Osiris, which, like other doctrines, was based on the realities of nature, would be appropriately celebrated in the winter solstice. At that time the powers of darkness, drought, decay and death, now personalized in Sut, were dominant, as was shown in the lessening water and the waning light of the enfeebled sun. The tat-type of stability was temporarily overthrown, by the adversary of Osiris and his co-conspirators, the Sebau. Here begins the great drama of the Osirian mysteries, in ten acts, which is outlined in the Ritual. The putting of Osiris to death — so far as a god could suffer — was followed by the funeral, and the burial by the resurrection. The opening chapters of the Ritual, called the Coming forth to day, are said to contain “the words which bring about the resurrection and the glory”, also the words to be recited on the day of burial that confer the power of coming forth from the death on earth, and of entering into the new life of the manes in Amenta. Horus is described as covering Tesh-Tesh (a title of the mutilated Osiris); as opening the life-fountains of the god whose heart is motionless, and as closing the entrance to the hidden things in Rusta (ch. 1, 18-20). The two divine sisters are present as mourners over their brother in the tomb. They are called the mourners who weep for Osiris in Rekhet (line 15, 16). The mysteries thus commence with the burial of Osiris in Amenta — as a mummy. The mummy-making that was first applied to preserving the bones and body of the human being had been afterwards applied to the god or sun of life in matter, imaged as the typical mummy of Osiris that was buried to await the resurrection in and afterwards from Amenta. In both phases it is Osiris, as the god in matter, who is represented in the nether-earth. And the re-arising of the human soul and its blending with the eternal spirit were dramatically rendered in the mysteries as the resurrection of the Osiris or the soul of mortal Horus re-arisen in Amenta as the son of Ra.

In the Gospels, Judas the brother of Jesus in one character, elsewhere called the familiar friend, is the betrayer on the night of the last [Page 870] supper, and Judas “the son of perdition” answers to Sut the twin-brother of Osiris (in the later Egyptian mythos), who was his betrayer at the last supper called the messiu or evening meal that was eaten on the last night of the Old Year, or the reign of Osiris. The twelve disciples only are present at the last supper in the Gospels. In the betrayal of Osiris by Sut the number present in the banqueting-hall is seventy-two. These were officers who had been appointed by Osiris. The number shows they represent the seventy-two duo-decans as rulers in the planisphere, but the twelve have been chosen to sit at supper with the doomed victim in the Gospels instead of the seventy-two who were also appointed by the Lord, and are dimly apparent in their astronomical guise, as the seventy-two (or seventy) who are present in the scene where Jesus triumphs over Satan as he falls like lightning from his place in heaven (Luke X. 17).

One of the most striking of the various episodes in the Gospel narrative is that scene at the Last Supper in which Jesus washes the feet of the disciples, compared with “the washing” that is performed by the Great One in the Ritual. In the Gospel Judas is waiting to betray his master. Jesus says to the betrayer, “That thou doest, do quickly”. Now it should be borne in mind that the Ritual, as it comes to us, consists to a large extent of allusions to the matter that was made out more fully in performing the drama of the mysteries. Washing the feet was one of the mysteries pertaining to the funeral of Osiris, when the feet of the disciples or followers of Horus were washed. It was one of the funeral ceremonies. As it is said in the Ritual (ch. 172), “Thou washest thy feet in silver basins made by the skilful artificer Ptah-Sekari”. This was preparatory to the funeral feast, as is shown by the context (ch. 172). In the Gospel (John XIII.) the funeral feast becomes the “Last Supper” when Jesus “riseth from supper and layeth aside his garments; and he took a towel and girded himself. Then he poureth water into a basin and began to wash the disciples feet”. And here is a passage of three lines, called the chapter by which the person is not devoured by the serpent in Amenta. “O Shu, here is Tattu, and conversely, under the hair of Hathor. They scent Osiris. Here is the one who is to devour me. They wait apart. The serpent Seksek passeth over me. Here are wormwood bruised and reeds. Osiris is he who prayeth that he may be buried. The eyes of the great one are bent down, and he doeth for thee the work of washing, marking out what is conformable to law and balancing the issues” (Rit., ch. 35, Renouf). This brief excerpt contains the situation and character of the great one, who with eyes bent down in his humility does “the work of washing”, and explains why this ceremony has to be performed by him in person. The “washer” is he who is in presence of the one who waits to betray him, devour him, or compass his destruction, and he beseeches a speedy burial. Osiris in this scene is a form of the typical “lowly one” who had been in type as such for ages previously. But the most arresting fact of all is hidden in the words “O Shu, here is Tattu (the place of re-establishing) under the wig (or hair) of Hatho”, the goddess of dawn, one of whose names is Meri. And it is here, beneath the hair of Hathor-Meri, they perfume and anoint Osiris for his burial. This when written out as “history” [Page 871] contains the anointing and perfuming of the feet of Jesus by Mary, who wiped them with her hair (Luke VII. 38). The two bathings of the feet are separate items in the Gospels, whereas both occur in this one short chapter of the Ritual in which Osiris is anointed for his burial, and at the same time he does for others the work of washing and purifying, “marking out what is conformable to law and balancing the issues”.

Osiris also is “he who prayeth that he may be buried”, and Jesus, “knowing that his hour has come”, says to Judas the betrayer, “That thou doest, do quickly”. And later, “Friend, do that for which thou art come” (Matt. XXVI. 50), which is the equivalent of Osiris praying that he may be buried. The wormwood bruised, or crushed, and the reeds are utilized in the crucifixion for furnishing the bitter drink, which was offered to the victim with a sponge placed upon a reed. A reed was also put in his right hand. These things were portrayed in the drama of Amenta. They were acted in the mysteries and explained by the mystery-teachers. The Osiris passes through the same scenes and makes continual allusion to the sufferings of Osiris (or Horus) his great forerunner, and finally the drama was staged on earth and reproduced as history in the Gospels. That is the one final and sufficient explanation of episode after episode belonging to the mysteries of Amenta reproduced according to the canon as veritable Gospel history.

The scene in Gethsemane may be compared with the scene in Pa, where Horus suffered his agony and bloody sweat when wounded by the black boar Sut. Pa was an ancient name of Sesennu, a locality in the lunar mythos, which was also called Khemen, later Smen, a word signifying number eight, applied to the enclosure of the eight; and the suffering of the wounded Horus in Am-Smen is, as now suggested, the Osirian original of Jesus bleeding in Gethsemane. Pa is not called “a garden”, but it is described as a “place of repose” for Horus that was given to him by his father for his place of rest. Ra says, “I have given Pa to Horus as the place of his repose. Let him prosper”. The story is told in “the chapter of knowing the powers of Pa” (Rit., ch. 112). The question is asked, “Know ye why Pa hath been given to Horus?” The answer is, It was Ra who gave it to him in amends of the blindness in his eye, in consequence of what Ra said to Horus: “Let me look at what is happening in thine eye to-day”, and he looked at it. Ra said to Horus, “Pray, look at that black swine”. He looked, and a grievous mishap befell his eye. Horus said to Ra, “Lo, mine eye is as though Sut had made a wound in it”. And wrath devoured his heart. Then Ra said to the gods, “Let him be laid upon his bed that he may recover”. “It was Sut who had taken the form of a black swine, and he wrought the wound which was made in the eye of Horus. And Ra said to the gods, “The swine is an abomination to Horus; may he get well” And the swine became an abomination to Horus. (Rit., ch. 112, Renouf.) It was in Pa that Horus was keeping his watch for Ra by night when the grievous mishap befell his eye. He was watching by command of Ra, who had said to Horus, “Keep your eye on the black pig”. The eye was lunar, with which Horus kept the watch for Ra; and Sut in the form of the black boar of darkness pierced [Page 872] the eye of Horus with his tusk, the moon being the eye of Horus as the watcher by night for Ra. Sut on whom he kept the watch transformed himself into a black boar, and wounded Horus in the eye whilst he was watching on behalf of Ra as his nocturnal eye in the darkness. Jesus in the Gospels keeps the watch by night in Gethsemane, as is shown by the disciples failing to keep it. The watch by Horus was necessitated on account of Sut, who is the typical betrayer in the Kamite mythos, as Judas is in the Christian version. Sut knew the place in the original rendering and sought out Horus there when he caused the agony and bloody sweat by mutilating him. “Now Judas also which betrayed him knew the place” (to which Jesus “often restored’‘ with his disciples) and there the betrayer seeks him out to betray him, not in the form of a black boar that put out the eye which was the light of the world, but as a dark-hearted person befitting the supposed historical nature of the narrative. The scene of the drowsy watchers in Gethsemane is apparently derived from a scene in the mysteries. There is a reference in the Ritual (ch. 89) to “those undrowsy watchers who keep watch in Annu”. In the Gospels Jesus asks his followers to watch with him in the garden, and on both occasions he found them sleeping. The moral is pointed by the “undrowsy watchers in Annu” being turned into the drowsy watchers who slept in Gethsemane, and who failed to keep the watch. “I know the powers in Pa”, says the speaker; “they are Horus, Amsta and Hapi”. That is, Horus and the “two brothers”, who correspond to the two brethren James and John, the sons of Zebedee, in the Gospels, and who are here the two with Jesus in the garden. The conversation betwixt Horus the son and Ra the father, the watching by night, and the bloody sweat are followed by the glorification of Horus. Ra gives back the eye, the sight of which was restored in the new moon. In the Gospel (John XVII.) this glorification of Horus as the son of the father — Horus, who had previously been the son of the mother, Har-si-Hesi only — is anticipated and described as about to occur when the torment and the trial are over. “These things spake Jesus; and lifting up his eyes to heaven, he said, Father, the hour is come; glorify thy son, that thy son may glorify thee; even as thou gavest him authority over all flesh” — that was in the character of Horus the mortal — “Now, O Father, glorify me with thine own self” — in the character of Horus divinized or glorified. The temporary triumph of the treacherous Sut (the power of darkness) is acknowledged by Jesus when Judas betrays him with a kiss and he succumbs. “This”, he says to his captors, “this is your hour, and the power of darkness (Sut). And they seized him” (Luke XXII. 53, 54). But when the associates of Sut saw the double-crown of Horus on his forehead they fell to the ground upon their faces (Rit., ch. 134, 11). And when the associates of Judas=Sut the betrayer, came to take “Jesus of Nazareth”, and he said “I am!” (not I am he!) “They went backward and fell to the ground”. Scene for scene, they are the same. One of the titles of Horus is “Lord of the Crown” (ch. 141, 9), which possibly led to Jesus being crowned “King of the Jews”. In this scene the title of “Jesus of Nazareth” has the same effect on the associates of Judas that the [Page 873] assuming of his crown by Horus had upon the associates of Sut when it caused them to fall on their faces before him. The crowning of Jesus on the cross is as Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. The crown of triumph is assigned to Horus by his father Atum, and all the adversaries of the Good Being fall on their faces at the sight of it (Rit., ch. 19).

The scene in the garden of Gethsemane, and the cry to the father from the sufferer on the cross are very pitiful — the essence of the tragedy working most subtly on account of the supplication that was all in vain, which makes all the more profound appeal to human sympathy. In the Egyptian representation there is no such cruel desertion by the father of his suffering son in his agony of great darkness. It is far otherwise in the Ritual. When Horus suffers his agony in the darkness, after being pierced and made blind by Sut, Ra, the father-God, is with him to comfort and sustain him. He tenderly examines the bleeding wound and soothes him in his great affliction. Ra charges his angels concerning Horus, or bids the gods to look to his safety and see to his welfare. Ra said to the gods, “Let him be laid upon his couch that he may recover”. He also gives the eye of Horus fire to protect him, and consume the black boar of darkness. There is no sightless sufferer groping helplessly with empty hands outstretched and left unclasped in the dark void of death; no vain and unavailing cry of the forsaken son that stuns the brain and scars the human conscience, and is of itself sufficient to empty the Christian heaven of all fatherhood, and ought to be sufficient to empty earth of all faith in such a father.

According to the synoptists, Jesus did not carry his own cross to the place of execution; it was borne thither by one Simon of Cyrene. This is denied in the Gospel attributed to John, who declares that Jesus went out from the Judgment Hall “bearing the cross for himself”. John is generally truest to the Egyptian original, and here the figure of Jesus bearing his own cross is equivalent to the figure of Ptah-Sekari or Osiris-Tat. The Tat of a fourfold foundation was the prototype of the cross, and the victim extended or standing with arms akimbo is equivalent to the victim stretched upon the cross of suffering. Sekari was the sufferer in, or on, or as the Tat, and Osiris was raised in, or as the Tat where Jesus carries the cross. The scourging of Jesus previous to his being crucified has never been explained. According to the record he was not condemned to both modes of punishment. It is probably a detail derived from the mysteries of Osiris-Sekari, Jesus scourged at the pillar being an image of Osiris or Ptah as the suffering Sekari in or on the Tat, the pillar with arms, that was superseded by the cross in the Christian iconography. In the Egyptian drama of the passion Horus was blinded by Sut and his accomplices, in suffering his change from being the human Horus to becoming Horus in spirit. The incident that is almost omitted from the Gospel account was preserved in the mysteries. It is a common subject in the passion-play and in religious pictures for the Christ to be blindfolded and brutally buffeted by the soldiers before he is crucified. This occurs in the Townley mysteries and in the Coventry mysteries, and is referred to in the “Legends of the holy rood” (pp. 178, 179, E. E. Text Society). [Page 874] Christ blindfolded to be made a mockery of suggests a likeness of Horus without sight in An-arar-ef, the region of the blind. In one representation Horus has a bandage over his eyes, and the grotesque image of the humorous Bes appears to introduce a comic element into the tragedy of the blind sufferer. The blinding, buffeting and scourging, practiced in the mysteries, as in passing through fire and water, was evidently continued and extended in the sports and pastimes. Still, the blindfolding of the victim for the buffeting is implied in the Gospel according to Matthew. “Then did they spit in his face and buffet him; and some smote him with the palms of their hands, saying, Prophesy unto us, thou Christ: who is he that struck thee?” (Matt. XXVI. 68).

It was a common popular tradition that the Christ was of a red complexion, like the child or calf which represented the little red sun of winter and also the Virgin’s infant in its more mystical character. Moreover, there is a tradition of a crucified child-Christ who was coloured red like “the calf in the paintings”. Among “the portraits of God the son” Didron cites one in a manuscript of the fourteenth century which answers to the red Christ as a co-type of the red calf. The manuscript “contains a miniature of the priest Eleazar sacrificing a red cow”, and “opposite to this miniature is one of Christ on the cross”. “Jesus is entirely naked, and the colour of his skin is red; he is human, poor and ugly”. The red Christ, equivalent to the red Horus, is here identified with the red cow and therefore with the red calf of the Ritual, which was a symbol of the little red sufferer, the “afflicted one” in the winter solstice. In some of the mystery-plays the Christ wore a close-fitting, flesh-coloured garment, through which the nails were driven into the wood of the cross. The resurrection robe was always red. Satan wants to know who this man in the “red coat” may be. And when Horus rises again, in the character of the avenger, it is as the “red god”. The manes thus addresses him, “O fearsome one, who art over the two earths; Red God, who orderest the block of execution!” (Rit., ch. 17, Renouf). Jesus likewise appears to have been represented as the red God, or the god in red. For “they stripped him and put on him a scarlet robe” (Matt. XXVII. 28). A papyrus reed was the throne and sceptre of Horus, the sign of his sovereignty. In the pictures he is supported by the reed, and one of his titles is “Horus on his papyrus” (Rit., ch. 112, Renouf). The reed also has been turned to historic account in making a mockery-king of Jesus. “And they plaited a crown of thorns and put it upon his head, and a reed in his right hand; and they kneeled down before him, and mocked him, saying, Hail, king of the Jews! and they spat upon him, and took the reed and smote him on the head” (Matt. XXVII. 27, 29, 30). Jesus is posed in another form of the Osirian sacrificial victim. One meaning of the word “sekari” is the silent. This is the typical victim that opened not his mouth, as the inarticulate Horus. So, having been assigned the character of the silent one before Pilate, “Jesus no more answered anything”.

It is possible that the crown of thorns placed upon the head of the crucified was derived from the thorn-bush of Unbu, the solar god, especially if we take it in connection with the papyrus reed, another [Page 875] type of Horus, And they plaited a crown of thorns and put it upon his head, and a reed in his right hand” (Matt. XXVII. 29). The god and the branch, which is a bush of flowering thorn, are identified, the one with the other, under the name of Unbu, and the god in the Unbu-thorn is equivalent to the crucified in the crown of thorn. Moreover, Unbu, the branch, was a title of the Egyptian Jesus. “I am Unbu of An-arar-ef, the flower in the abode of occultation” or eclipse (Rit., ch. 71). And if Horus was not figured on a cross with the Unbu-thorn upon his head, as the crown was afterwards made out, he is the sacrificial victim in the place of utter darkness or sightlessness. Horus in An-arar-ef is Horus, Lord of Sekhem — Horus in the dark. He is also “Unbu”, that is, Horus in the thorn-bush. Thus the Unbu-thorn was typical of the god, who was personified as Unbu by name, and who is Unbu as Horus the sufferer in the dark, equivalent to and the prototype of the victim on the cross as wearer of the crown of thorn. It is also possible that Pilate’s question, “What is truth?” may now be answered for the first time. Jesus says, “I come into the world that I should bear witness unto the truth. Everyone that is of the truth heareth my voice” (John XVIII. 37, 38). And, in his second character, Horus the king, Horus the anointed and beloved son, not only came into the world as testifier to the truth, he was also given the title of Har-Makheru, the name of the Word that was made truth by the doing of it in his death and resurrection, and the demonstration of a life hereafter at his second coming.

The typical darkness at the time of the crucifixion might be nocturnal, or annual, according to the mythos. When Atum, god of the evening sun, is setting from the land of life, at the point of equinox, with his hands drooping, which is equivalent to the victim who was extended on the cross, a great darkness overspread the earth, and Nut, the mother, is said to be obscured as she receives the dying deity in her supporting arms. The figure is the same, whether the scene be on the cross or at the crossing (Rit., ch. 15). Still more express is the darkness spoken of in the Egyptian faith, or gospel (ch. 17), which contains the kernel of the credo. Here we learn that “the darkness is of Sekari”. Sekari is a title of Osiris as the mutilated and dismembered god. It is explained that this darkness of Sekari, the god who is pierced, wounded, cut in pieces, is caused by Sut “the slayer”, who has “terrified by prostrating”. Sekari is Osiris in the sekru, or coffin; and to be in the coffin, or in the cruciform figure of the mummy, has the same meaning (with a change of type) as if the divine victim might be embodied in the Tat, or extended on the cross. The darkness of sekari was in the coffin; the darkness of Jesus is on the cross.

It is observable that the sixth division of the Tuat in Amenta, corresponding to the sixth hour of the night, has no representation of Ra the solar god, and in his absence naturally there was darkness. But the three hours’ darkness that was over all the earth at the time of the crucifixion has no witness in the world to its being an historic event. In the mythical representation it was natural enough. As the night began at six o’clock, the sixth hour according to that reckoning was midnight, and from twelve to three there was dense darkness. This was then applied to the dying sufferer in the eschatology, and [Page 876] there was darkness for three hours in the mysteries. The great darkness is described in the Ritual as the shutting up of Seb and Nut, or heaven and earth, and the Resurrection as the rending asunder. The manes saith, “I am Osiris, who shut up his father and his mother when (or whilst) the great slaughter took place. I am Horus, the eldest of Ra, as he riseth. I am Anup on the day of rending asunder” (Rit., ch. 69, Renouf).

In the coming forth from the cavern the risen one exclaims, “Let the two doors of earth be opened to me: let the bolts of Seb open to me: and let the first mansion be opened to me, that he may behold me who hath kept guard over me, and let him enclose me who hath wound his arms about me, and hath fastened his arms around me in the earth” (ch. 68). The one who had held him fast with his arms about him in the earth, and who was the keeper of the dead on earth, is Seb; hence it is he who kept guard over the body that was buried in the earth. The part of Seb is also assigned to Joseph of Arimathea, who took the body when it was embalmed with a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes, and made a mummy of, and laid it in his own tomb. The tomb of Seb, the earth (John XIX. 38-41), becomes the garden of Joseph; the “bolts of Seb” are replaced by the great stone that Joseph rolls against the door of the sepulchre (Matt. XXVII. 60), and he who kept guard over the mummy-Osiris in the sepulchre is represented by the guard who watches over the tomb in the history. “Pilate said unto them, Ye have a guard, go your way, make it sure as ye can. So they went and made the sepulchre sure, sealing the stone, the guard being with them” (Matt. XXVII. 66). The guard that is set to keep watch and ward at the sepulchre may be compared with the “wardens of the passages”, who are “attendant upon Osiris” in the tomb. These are the powers that safeguard the body or mummy of Osiris and keep off the forces of his adversaries. The Passages are those which lead to the outlet of Rusta in the resurrection (Rit., ch. 17). In the chapter by which one arriveth at Rusta, the deceased has risen again. He says, “I am he who is born in Rusta. Glory is given to me by those who are in their mummied forms in Pa, at the sanctuary of Osiris, whom the guards receive at Rusta when they conduct (the) Osiris through the demesnes of Osiris”. In this scene of the resurrection the deceased comes forth triumphant as Osiris risen (ch. 117). The dead are there in mummied forms, and these are received by the guards as they rise and reach the place of egress in Rusta. In the Gospel according to Matthew a watch was set upon the sepulchre; the guard is spoken of as “the centurion, and they that were with him watching Jesus” (Matt. XXVII. 54). These were watching when the graves were opened and the dead “in their mummied forms” were raised to come forth from the tomb. As nothing occurs in the Gospel except by miracle, the graves are opened by an earthquake for the passages to be made, which passages were very ancient in the geography and pictures of the Egyptian nether-world. The guards, or soldiers, in attendance on Jesus are four in number. At least it is said that they took the garments of the dead body and “made four parts, to every soldier a part” (John XIX. 23). These guards correspond to the four guardians of the coffin Hapi, Tuamutef, Kabhsenuf and Amsu, who watch by the sarcophagus [Page 877] of the dead Osiris, one at each of its four corners. In a German passion-play the four are invincible knights named Dietrich, Hildebrant, Isengrim, and Laurein.

At the time of the death upon the cross there is a resurrection which is not the resurrection. This is a general rising of the Manes, not the resurrection of the Christ. “And behold the veil of the sanctuary was rent in twain from the top to the bottom: and the rocks were rent and the tombs were opened: and many bodies of the saints that had fallen asleep were raised”.In short, a general rising must have preceded the personal resurrection of Jesus on the third day after the crucifixion. It is added, however, that the manes who had already risen came forth “out of the tombs after his resurrection and” appeared unto many”. Therefore they stayed in the open tombs a day or two longer in order that he might have the precedence. When Horus rises as a spirit, the Lord of Mehurit, the risen one, is represented by a hawk, and he says, “I am the hawk in the tabernacle, and I pierce through the veil”, or, in another lection, through that which is upon the veil. To pierce through the veil of the sanctuary is equivalent to rending the veil of the temple. The hawk is a type of the sun-god in the solar mythos and of the spirit in the eschatology. Thus the veil was pierced or rent asunder when Horus rose in the shape of a divine hawk to become the Lord of heaven. In the Gospel (Matt. XXVII. 51), at the moment when Jesus “yielded up his spirit”, it is said, “and behold the veil of the sanctuary was rent in twain from top to bottom: and the earth did quake: and the rocks were rent: and the tombs were opened”, and, in brief, this was what the Ritual terms “the day of rending asunder”. when the rocks of the Tser hill were opened, which is the day of resurrection in the mysteries of Amenta. The death of Osiris was followed by the saturnalia of Sut, in a reign of misrule and lawlessness which lasted during the five black days or dies non of the Egyptian calendar when everything was turned topsy-turvy — a saturnalia, which to all appearance, is yet celebrated in Upper Egypt (Frazer, Golden Bough, I, p. 231). The mutilation of Osiris in his coffin, the stripping of his corpse and tearing it asunder by Sut, who scattered it piecemeal, is represented by the stripping of the dead body of Jesus whilst it still hung upon the cross, and parting the garments amongst the spoilers. In John’s account the crucifixion takes place at the time of the Passover, and the victim of sacrifice in human form is substituted for, and identified with, the Paschal lamb. But, as this version further shows, the death assigned is in keeping with that of the non-human victim. Not a bone of the sufferer was to be broken. This is supposed to be in fulfilment of prophecy. It is said by the Psalmist (XXXIV. 20), “He keepeth all his bones; not one of them is broken”. But this was in strict accordance with the law of totemic tabu. No matter what the type, from bear to lamb, no bone of the sacrificial victim was ever permitted to be broken; and the only change was in the substitution of the human type for the animal, which had been made already when human Horus became the type of sacrifice instead of the calf or lamb. When the Australian natives sacrificed their little bear, not a bone of it was ever broken; when the Iroquois sacrificed the white dog, not a bone was broken. This was a common [Page 878] custom, on account of the resurrection, as conceived by the primitive races, and the same is applied to Osiris. Every bone of the skeleton was to remain intact as a basis for the future building. After the murder and mutilation of Osiris in Sekhem, the judgment is executed on the conspirators in the mystery of ploughing the earth on the night of fertilizing the soil with the blood of the betrayer Sut and his associates. This is done before the great divine chiefs in Tattu! In the Gospels (Matt. XXVII. 6) the chief priests take the place of the divine chiefs in the mystery of ploughing the earth and fertilizing or manuring it with the blood of the wicked: they buy the potter’s field, and this was called Aceldama, the field of blood. The field of blood here bought with the price paid for the betrayal takes the place of the field that is fertilized with blood in the Ritual. In the Acts it is Judas himself, not the “chief priests”, who “purchased a field with the reward of his iniquity”. According to this version, Judas fertilizes or manures the field with his own blood, as does the betrayer Sut, on the night of fertilizing the field in Tattu. When, in his resurrection, Jesus reappeared to the disciples, they thought it an apparition. This it should have been if the life had been human, the death actual, the story true. In the Egyptian, however, the day of reappearance is termed the “day of apparition” ; but reappearing=apparition is not necessarily manifesting as the human ghost. The Christ as Horus was not a human ghost reappearing on the earth; and Horus the pure spirit, the typical divine son of god, the reappearing one, might have denied being a phantom or a ghost, for he would not be manifesting to men, but to other characters in the religious drama. This being denied on behalf of the divinity, the carnalizers then had recourse to their human physics to illustrate the denial by making the risen Christ corporeal. In John’s account, which is always the nearest to the Egyptian original, there is no denial of the ghost theory, no declaration that the risen one is not a spirit but a veritable human body of flesh and bone. He merely “showed unto them his hands and side”, as Horus might have shown his wounds, and no doubt did show them, in the mysteries — the wounds that were inflicted by Sut. In fact, when Sut has wounded Horus in the eye, he shows the wound to Ra, his father (Rit., ch. 112).

When Horus, or the Egypto-gnostic Jesus, rises in the sepulchre on coming forth to day it is in the semi-corporeal form of the Karest-mummy that is not yet become pure spirit and therefore has not yet ascended to his father in the hawk-headed likeness of Ra. This figure can be studied in the tomb as that of Amsu. The scene of the resurrection is in Amenta, the earth of eternity, the earth of the manes, not on the earth of mortals. It is here the risen Horus breathes the breath of his new life into the sleeping dead to raise them from their coffins, sepulchres and cells. When the Egyptian Christ, or Karest, rose up from the tomb as Amsu-Horus it was in a likeness of the buried mummy, as regards the shape, with one arm loosened from the swathes or bandages. But this resurrection was not corporeal on earth. Osiris had been transformed into Horus, and although the mummy-shape was still retained, the texture had been transubstantiated; the corpus was transfigured into the glorious body of the Sahu or divine mummy. The mystery of transubstantiation [Page 879] was not understood by the writers of the Gospels, who did not know whether Jesus reappeared in the body or in spirit, as a man or as a god. They carried off all they could, but were not in possession of the secret wisdom which survived amongst the Egypto-gnostics. They wrote as carnalizers of the Christ. It follows that the risen Jesus of the canonical Gospels is not a reality in either world; neither in the sphere of time, nor as divine Horus transfigured into spirit. “Tis but a misappropriated type; the spurious spectre of an impossible Christ; a picture of nobody. The Christian history fails in rendering Horus as an apparition of Osiris. When Horus came from Sekhem he had left the earthly body behind him in the sepulchre, and was greeted as pure spirit by the glorified ones who rejoiced to see how he continued walking as the risen Horus, he who “steppeth onward through eternity” (Rit., ch. 42). Jesus in this character comes forth from the tomb in the same body that was buried and still is human, flesh and bones and all. Thus, as a phantom, he is a counterfeit; a carnalized ghost, upon the resurrection of which no real future for the human spirit ever could or ever will be permanently based. A corpse that has not made the transformation from the human Horus into Horus the pure spirit offers no foundation for belief in any known natural fact. Horus in his resurrection is described as being once more set in motion. At this point he says, “I am not known, but I am one who knoweth thee. I am not to be grasped, but I am one who graspeth thee. I am Horus, prince of eternity, a fire before your faces, which inflameth your hearts towards me. I am master of my throne, and I pass onwards”. “The path I have opened is the present time, and I have set myself free from all evil” (ch. 42, Renouf). But when he is transubstantialized, it is said of the deceased in his resurrection: “The gods shall come in touch with him, for he shall have become as one of them”. Now let us see how this was converted into history. Jesus is the prince of eternity in opposition to Satan, Sut, or Judas, the prince of this world. In his resurrection he is supposed to have opened the pathway from the tomb historically and for the first time some 1800 or 1900 years ago. When he rises from the dead he is unknown to the watchers, but he knows them. Mary knew not that the risen form was Jesus. He is not to be grasped, saying, “Touch me not”, or do not grasp me, “for I am not yet ascended unto my Father” (John XX. 14, 17). On the way to Emmaus Jesus appears and inflames the hearts of the disciples towards him, after calling them “slow of heart”, and “they said one to another, Was not our heart burning within us?” (Luke XXIV. 13, 32). Horus had opened a path from the tomb as the sun-god in the mythos, the divine son of God in the eschatology, and he ascended to his father and took his seat upon the throne of which he had become the lord and master. So Jesus goes on his way “unto the mountain”, where he had appointed to meet his followers (Matt. XXVIII. 16). The mountain in the Ritual is the mount of rebirth in heaven, whether of the sun-god or of the enduring spirit.

The change from bodily death to future life in spirit was acted as a transformation-scene in the mysteries of the resurrection. The mummy-Osiris was an effigy of death. The Sahu-mummy [Page 880] Amsu-Horus is an image of the glorious body into which Osiris transubstantiated to go forth from Sekhem as pure spirit. It is the mummy in this second stage that is of primary import. First of all the dead body was smeared over with unguents and thus glorified. During the process of anointing it was said, “O Asar (the deceased) the thick oil which is poured upon thee furnishes thy mouth with life” (Budge, “The Mummy”, p. 163). It is also said that the anointing is done to give sight to the eyes, hearing to the ears, sense of smell to the nostrils and utterance to the mouth. To embalm the body thus was to karas it and the embalmment was a mode of making the typical Christ as the Anointed. Thus the mortal Horus was invested with the glory of the only God-begotten Son. Now this making of the Krst, or mummy-Christ, after the Egyptian fashion is apparent in the Gospels. When the woman brings the alabaster cruse of precious ointment to the house of Simon and pours it on the head of Jesus he says, “In that she poured this ointment upon my body, she did it to prepare me for my burial” (Matt. XXVI. 12). She was making the Christ as the anointed-mummy previous to interment. After the description of the crucifixion it is said that Nicodemus came and brought a “mixture of myrrh and aloes, about a hundred pound” and “they took the body of Jesus and bound it in linen cloths with the spices as the custom of the Jews is to bury” (John XIX. 39, 40). This again denotes the making of the Karest-mummy=the Christ. Moreover, it is the dead mummy in one version and it is the living body in the other which is anointed, just as Horus was anointed with the exceedingly precious Antu ointment, or oil, that was poured upon his head and face to represent his glory.

The two Mertae-sisters are the watchers over the dead Osiris. They are also the mourners who weep over him when he is anointed and prepared for his burial. It is said of Osiris that he was triumphant over his adversaries on the night when Isis lay watching in tears over her brother Osiris (ch. 18). But the Mertae-sisters both watch and both weep over the dead body. In the vignettes to the Ritual one of the two stands at the head and one at the feet of the body on the bier. These two mourners, weepers, anointers, or embalmers, appear in the Gospels as two different women. According to John it was Mary the sister of Martha who anointed Jesus for his burial. And as these are the two divine sisters in historic guise we ought to find one at the head of the victim and one at the feet, as, in fact, we do so find them. In the account furnished by Luke it is said that the woman who stood behind at the feet of Jesus weeping “began to wet his feet with her tears, and wiped them with the hair of her head” (Luke VII. 38). No name is given for the woman who was “a sinner”, which seems to denote the other Mary called Magdalene. Matthew also omits the name of the woman with an alabaster cruse or flask. In keeping with the mythos this other one of the two Mertae-sisters should be Martha, but the point is that the woman with the cruse does not anoint the feet of Jesus. She poured the ointment “upon his head as he sat at meat” (Matt. XXVI. 7). Thus we see there are two different women who anoint Jesus, one at the head, one at the feet, even as the two divine sisters of Osiris called the Mertae, or watchers, stand at the head and feet of Osiris, when preparing him for his burial, or watching in [Page 881] tears, like Isis, the prototype of the woman who never ceased to kiss the feet of Jesus since the time when he had come into the house (Luke VII. 45-6). We have identified the other sister Nephthys, the mistress of the house, with the housekeeper Martha, and as Nephthys also carries the bowl or vase upon her head, this may account for the vessel of alabaster that was carried by the “woman” who poured the ointment on the head of Jesus, whereas Mary the sister of Martha poured it on his feet. Martha is one of the two Mertae by name. In the Egyptian mythos the two Mertae are Isis, the dear lover of Horus the Lord, bowed at his feet, and Nephthys mourning at his head (Naville, Todtenbuch, v. 1, kap. 17, A. g. and B. b.).

The Karast-mummy was the body of the dead in Osiris who were prepared by human hands to meet their Lord in spirit when wrapt in the seamless vesture of a thousand folds, which was typically the robe of immortality, when they were baptized and purified and anointed with the unction of Horus taken from the tree of life. The process of preparing, embalming and Christifying the mummy obviously survives in the Chrisome or krisum of the Roman Catholic Church. The chrisome itself is properly a white cloth which the “minister of baptism places on the head of the newly-anointed child”.The chrisom as ointment is made of oil and balm. In the instructions for private baptism it is charged that the minister shall put the white vesture, commonly called a chrisome, upon the child. The chrism-cloth is still the vesture of immortality, for if the infant dies within a month after birth, the chrisome is its shroud and the chrisom-child becomes an image in survival of the Karast-mummy in Amenta.

Let it be assumed that to all appearance the resurrection in Amenta is corporeal. The human Horus, or the Osiris, who had passed through death, and been laid out as the mummy in the Tuat, still retains the form of the mummy that was made on earth. The difference is in Horus having risen to his feet and freed his right arm from the burial bandages. Indeed, the dead were reincorporated in Amenta as the Sahu-mummy. The Egyptian word Sahu signifies to incorporate, and in this physical-looking form they were reincorporated for the resurrection in the earth of eternity. Amsu had made a change in rising to his feet, but was not yet the Horus glorified with the soul of Ra; therefore he has not yet ascended to the father. To the sense of sight he is corporeal still, and has not transubstantiated into spirit. When he does, the hawk or Menat will alight to abide upon him and he will assume the likeness of his father Ra, the bird-headed holy spirit. It is the body-soul that rises in Amenta which has to suffer purgatorial rebirth before it can become “pure spirit” as the Ritual of the resurrection has it, to attain eternal life. So far as reincorporation of the soul in Sahu-shape could go, the resurrection is corporeal. Yet this was only a dramatic mode of representation in the mystery of transubstantiation, which included several acts. It is in this character of Amsu-Horus reincorporated as the Sahu-mummy issuing from the tomb that Jesus is described by Luke: “See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself” (ch. XXIV. 39). In the absence of the gnosis the reincorporation in Amenta led to the doctrine of a physical resurrection at the last day on this earth. The power of resurrection was imparted by [Page 882] Ra, the father in spirit, to the anointed and beloved son. And Horus is said to be the “bringer of the breaths” to his “followers” (Rit., chapters on breathing 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59). Horus as he issues forth to day, in his resurrection, comes to give the breath of life to the manes in Amenta, saying, “I give the breezes to the faithful dead amid those who eat bread”. This chapter of the Ritual follows the decease of Horus, which is equivalent to the crucifixion of Jesus. In this the speaker says, “I have come to an end on behalf of the Lord of heaven. I am written down sound of heart, and I rest at the table of my father Osiris” (ch. 70). It is also said in the Rubric, “if this scripture is known upon earth he (the Osiris) will come forth to day; he will have power to walk on the earth amid the living”. Jesus in the Gospel has “come to an end for the Lord of heaven”. He likewise manifests on earth “amid the living”. He gives “the breezes to the faithful dead” when he breathes on them, saying, “Receive ye of the holy spirit”.

It is “the women” in the Gospels who announce the resurrection and proclaim that Jesus has left the tomb. According to Matthew “the woman” are “Mary Magdalene and the other Mary”, who “ran to bring the disciples word” (XXVIII. 1, 8). According to Mark (XVI. 1) the women were Mary Magdalene and Mary (the mother) of James, and Salome, who discovered that Jesus had arisen but were afraid to make it known. Here it is Mary Magdalene, who proclaims the resurrection. It is Mary Magdalene in John (XX. 1, 2) who first announces that the Lord has arisen. Luke XXIV. 10 has it that “Mary Magdalene and Joanna, and Mary (mother) of James and other women” first found the sepulchre empty and “told these things unto the apostles”. These conflicting accounts agree in the one essential point, that it was the woman or the women who proclaimed the resurrection, and this is as it should be according to the data in the Ritual. When the deceased comes forth from the tomb and reaches the horizon of the resurrection he exclaims, “I rise as a god amongst men. The goddesses and the women proclaim me when they see me!” It is the goddesses and the women who see the risen Horus first and proclaim him to the others. Usually the women and the female deities are identical as the two divine sisters who are represented in the Gospels by the two Marys, but in some of the scenes there are other women in attendance as well as the two sisters-Mertae. Now, as the two Marys are originally goddesses we have the same group of goddesses and “the women” (in Luke XXIV. 10) as in the Ritual (79, 11) and both agree in proclaiming the resurrection and hailing the risen Lord with jubilation. This chapter contains all the data necessary to construct the story of the “historicâ€� resurrection in which the Christ arises as a god amongst men, and is proclaimed by the women. The allusions in the Ritual are very brief. The style of the writing is economical as that of the lapidary. The Egyptians neither used nor tolerated many words; verbosity was prohibited by one of their commandments. But these allusions refer to a drama that was represented in the mysteries, the characters and scenes of which were all as well known as are those in the Christian Gospels when the play is performed at Ammergau. And this statement, made at the moment of his resurrection —“ I rise as a god [Page 883] amongst men. The goddesses and the women proclaim me when they see me” — contained a germ that was pregnant with a whole chapter of the future Gospel “history”.

In the Gospel according to John there is but one woman weeping at the tomb. This was Mary Magdalene, who corresponds to the first great mother Apt, she who bore the seven sons that preceded the solar Horus of the pre-Osirian cult. She, like Anup, lived on in the burial-place with those that waited for the resurrection. She is called Apt, the “mistress of divine protections”. Apt is portrayed as kindler of the light for the deceased in the dark of death (ch. 137, Vig. Papyrus of Nebseni). Thus the old bringer to rebirth is the kindler of a light in the sepulchre. Mary Magdalene who takes her place comes to the tomb, “early, while it was yet dark”, and finds the stone moved away and light enough to see by kindled in the tomb. Isis also was a form of the great mother alone. She is mentioned singly as watching in tears over her brother Osiris by night in Rekhet (Rit., ch. 18). So Mary Magdalene is described as “standing without at the tomb weeping” alone as the one woman. But, according to Matthew, there were two women at the tomb. “Mary Magdalene was there and the other Mary, sitting over against the sepulchre (ch. XXVII. 61). And in the Osirian representation Isis and Nephthys are the two women called the “two mourners who weep and wail over Osiris in Rekhet” (ch. 1). Isis and Nephthys, the two divine sisters, are the two women at the sepulchre of Osiris. They are portrayed, one at the head the other at the feet of the mummy. They sing the song of the resurrection as a magical means of raising their dear one from the dead. A form of this is to be found in the evocations addressed to the dead Osiris by the two sisters, who say: “Thy two sisters are near thee, protecting thy funeral bed, calling thee in weeping, thou who art prostrate on thy funeral bed” (Records of the Past, vol. 2, pp. 121-126). Horus rises in his Ithyphallic form with the sign of virility erect; the member that was restored by Isis when the body had been torn in pieces by Sut. This may account for the Phallus found in the Roman Catacombs as a figure of the resurrection, which, if the Gospel story had been true, would denote the phallus of an historic Jew, instead of the typical member of Horus whose word was thus manifested with pubescent power in the person of the risen Amsu.

In the Osirian legend there are three women, or goddesses, who especially attend upon Osiris to prepare him for his burial. These are the great mother, Neith, and the two divine sisters, Isis and Nephthys. It was related in the ancient version that Neith arrayed the mummy in his grave-clothes for the funerary chamber called “the good house”, the house in which the dead were embalmed and swathed in pure white linen. This is described in the Book of the Dead (ch. 172) when it is said to the Osiris N, “Thou receivest a bandage of the finest linen from the hands of the attendant of Ra”. The raiment put on Osiris by Neith was said to be woven by the two watchers in the tomb. In the preparation of Osiris for his burial, the ointment or unguents were compounded and applied by Neith. It was these that were to preserve the mummy from decay and [Page 884] dissolution. These three may be compared with the three Marys in the Gospels, thus: Neith, the great mother=Mary Magdalene, the great mother; Isis=Mary; Nephthys=Martha. There was also a group of seven ministrants in attendance at the birth of Horus or rebirth of Osiris. These, in the astronomical mythology, were constellated in the female hippopotamus — our Great Bear — as those who ministered “of their substance” to the young “bull of the seven cows” (Rit., ch. 141-3), which were seven forms of the great mother, seven Fates or Hathors in the birthplace, from the time when this was in the year of the Great Bear, with the seven in attendance on the child. In the legend related by Luke, the whole of the seven women who ministered of their substance to Jesus (or the sacrificial victim), appear to have been grouped together with the dead body in the sepulchre. “Now they were Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary the mother of James and the other women with them” (Luke XXIV. 10). These are called “the women which had come with them out of Galilee”. They are also termed “certain women of our company” (ch. XXIV. 22). The number is not specified; this being one of those sundries that were safest if left vague. Thus we find the foremost Great Mother at the tomb; the two divine sisters; the three women with Neith included, and as we suggest, the company of ministrants, who were the seven mothers, seven Hathors, seven Meri, or seven women in three different versions of the historic resurrection.

In the version given by Matthew there is but one divine visitant at the tomb, in addition to the two women here called the two Marys. As the Sabbath day began to dawn “came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre. And behold there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled away the stone and sat upon it. His appearance was as lightning, and his raiment was as white as snow” (Matt. XXVIII. 2, 3). The angel that rolls the stone away from the tomb in the Gospel for the buried Christ to rise corresponds to the god Shu in the Ritual, who is described as uplifting the heaven when the god Atum or Horus comes forth from the sarcophagus and passes through the gate of the rock to approach the land of spirits. It is said the gate of Tser is where Shu stands when he lifts up the heaven (Rit., 17, 56-7). The Tser was the rock of the horizon in which the dead body of Osiris was laid for its repose when it was buried in Annu. Shu is not only the uplifter of heaven or raiser of the gravestone, he is also the opener of the sepulchre as the bringer of breath to the newly awakened soul.

The Egyptian knew well enough that his body would remain where it was left when buried. For that it had been mummified. His difficulty was concerning his soul, and how to get this freed from its surroundings in the speediest fashion and the most enduring form. The Ritual speaks of the “shade”, the “soul” and “spirit” as being in the tomb with the mummy-Osiris who rises from stage to stage according to the evolution of his spirit from the bonds of matter. Chief of these are the body-soul and spirit-Ka. The deceased, when in the tomb, is thus addressed, “Let the way be opened to thy Ka and to thy Soul, O glorified one; thou shalt not be imprisoned by [Page 885] those who have the custody of souls and spirits and who shut up the shades of the dead” (Rit., ch. 92). Thus the body-soul and Ka made their appearance in the tomb previously to being blended in the manifesting soul, called the double of the dead which constituted the risen Horus, and which was the only one of the seven souls that bore the human lineaments (Rit., ch. 178. The god who rises again is described in the Egyptian litany of Ra (58) as “he who raises his soul and conceals his body”. His name is that of Herba, he who raises the soul. The body being hidden as Osiris, the soul was raised as Horus. Hence, as it is said, the mummy of Osiris was not found in the sepulchre. In one sense the body vanished by transubstantiation into spirit. The night of the evening meal on which the body was eaten sacramentally is called “the night of hiding him who is supreme of attributes” (Rit., ch. 18). The body was eaten typically as a mode of converting matter into spirit; this was the motive of the eucharist from the beginning when the mother was the victim eaten. In one of the texts cited by Birch concerning the burial of the god Osiris at Abydos, it is said the sepulchral chamber was searched but the body was not found. The “Shade, it was found” (Proceedings Bib. Archy., Dec. 2, 1884, p. 45). The shade was a primitive type of the soul; it is the shadow of an earthly body projected as it were into Amenta, and was portrayed in some of the vignettes lying black upon the ground of that earth, like the shadow of the human body on this earth. In Marcion’s account of the resurrection there is no body to be found in the tomb; only the phantom, or the shade, was visible there. So in the Johannine version (ch. XX. 17) the buried body of Jesus is missing; the Shade is present in the tomb; but this is of a texture that must not be touched. Like Amsu it neither represents the dead corpus nor the spirit perfected. It is quite possible that we get a glimpse of the “Ka” as that personage in the sepulchre described by Mark, who relates that when the women entered the tomb they “saw a young man sitting on the right side, arrayed in a white robe and they were amazed” (ch. XVI. 5). According to the gnosis, the Ka had here taken the place of the missing mummy which had risen, or as the Egyptians said, Osiris had made his transformation into Amsu-Horus. According to Luke, when the women came to the tomb with their spices and ointments they “found not the body of the Lord Jesus”. But, “behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel”, who said to them “why seek ye the Living (One) among the dead?” (Luke XXIV. 5). These, in the Johannine Gospel, are “two angels in white, sitting one at the head and one at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain” (John XX. 12). Now, if the “young man” represented the Ka-image in the human form we may suppose the “two men” to have been the soul and spirit called the Ka and the soul of the glorified, that were portrayed in the Egyptian sepulchre and which are to be read of in the Ritual. One of the numerous Egypto-gnostic scriptures which at one time were extant has lately been discovered in the fragment of a gospel assigned to Peter. This from the orthodox point of view is considered to be “docetic” — which is another name for non-historical. From this we learn that in the [Page 886] resurrection “the heavens opened and two men descended thence with great radiance” “and both the young men entered” the tomb. Two men entered and three figures issued forth. “They behold three men coming out of the tomb, and two of them were supporting a third, and a cross was following them; and the heads of the two men reached to the heaven, but the head of him who was being led along by them was higher than the heavens”. And they heard a voice from heaven which said, “Hast thou preached to them that are asleep?” And a response of “Yea” was heard from the cross. This has no parallel in the canonical Gospels, but, as Egyptian, it is the scene of Atum (Ptah or Osiris) rising again in or with the two sons Hu and Sau. Also, in the pre-Osirian mythos, Hu and Sau, the two sons of Atum-Ra, support their father when he issues from the tomb and makes his exit from Amenta. These are two young men who are in the retinue of Ra, and who accompany their father in his resurrection daily (Rit., ch. 17).

To a spiritualist the doctrines of the fleshly faith are ghastly in their grossness. The foundation of the creed was laid in a physical resurrection of the body; and the flesh and blood of that body were to be eaten in the eucharistic rite as a physical mode of incorporating the divine. It is true the doctrine of transubstantiation was added to gild the dead body for eating. But the historical rendering of the matter necessitated the substitution of the physical for the spiritual interpretation. The founders only carried off the carnalized Horus, the Karast-mummy, for their Christ. They raised him from the grave corporeally; whereas the Egyptians left that type of Osiris in matter, that image of Horus on earth in the tomb. Horus did rise again, but not in matter. He spiritualized to become the superhuman or divine Horus. The Egyptians did not exhume the fleshly body, living nor dead, to eat it with the expectation of assimilating Horus to themselves or becoming Horus by assimilating the blood and body of his physical substance. This was what was done by the Christian Sarkolatrae. Hooker asks: “Doth any man doubt that even from the flesh of Christ (eaten sacramentally) our very bodies do receive that life which shall make them glorious at the latter day?” This was an inevitable result of making the Christ historical, and of continuing the carnalized Horus in a region beyond the tomb by means of a physical resurrection of the dead. The Christians having carried off the Corpus Christi, which the Egyptians transubstantiated in the sepulchre, have never since known what to do with it. But as the Christ rose again in the material body and ascended with it into heaven, leaving no mummy in the tomb, they can but nurse the delusive hope that a physical saviour may redeem the physical corpse, so that those who believe may be raised by him at the last day and follow him bodily into paradise. In this way the foundations of the faith were corporeally laid. Also in this way the pre-extant “types” of the Christ are supposed to have been realized: the fore-shadows substantialized, and Horus the Lord who had been the anointed Christ, the immortal Son of God in the Egyptian religion for at least ten thousand years, was at last converted into a Judean peasant as [Page 887] the unique personage of the Gospels, and the veritable saviour of the world.

It is not alleged in the Gospel history that the victim was torn piecemeal as well as crucified. And yet the bread which represents his body in the eucharistic meal is religiously torn to pieces in commemoration of the event that does not occur in the Gospels; a performance that is suggestive of those poor Norway rats which lose their lives in trying to cross the waters where there was a passage once by land. Jesus is not torn in pieces, but Osiris was. When Sut did battle with Un-Nefer, the Good Being, he tore the body into fragments, and that is the sacrifice still commemorated in the Christian eucharist. Under one of his many titles in the Ritual Osiris is “the Lord of resurrections”. But this does not merely denote the periodicity of the resurrection. There were several resurrections of the god in matter and in spirit. Osiris rose again to life in the returning waters of the Nile. He rose again in the renewal of vegetation represented by Horus the branch of endless years; and as the papyrus shoot. He rose again upon the third day, in the moon; or as the sun, the supreme soul of life in physical nature. These were followed in the eschatology by the god who rose again from Amenta as Horus in spirit; as the Bennu-Osiris, or as Ra the holy spirit. Jesus is likewise portrayed as the Lord of resurrections. He is said to have risen on the third day; also on the fourth day, after being three nights in the earth; also after forty days, when he ascended into heaven from the mount; and when he rose up from the dead with power to pass where doors were shut, and to impart the Holy Spirit (John XX. 19) to his followers, the same as Horus in the Ritual (ch. 1). The first act of Horus in his resurrection is to free his right arm from the bandage of the mummy. The next is to cast aside the seamless swathe in which the body had been wrapped for burial. Now, after so much of the mythos has been established in place of the “history”, it will not be so very incredible if we suggest a mythical and recognizably Kamite origin for an episode in the Gospel according to Mark which has no record elsewhere. When Jesus is arrested in the garden or enclosure of Gethsemane preparatory to his death and resurrection it is said that: “A certain young man followed him having a linen cloth cast about him over his naked body; and they laid hold on him; but he left the linen cloth and fled naked” (Mark XIV. 51). Such a statement standing alone, purposeless and unexplained, is perfectly maniacal as history; clearly it is a fragment of something that is otherwise out of sight. The Greek word sindon represents the Egyptian shenti, a linen garment which is derived from shena, a name for the flax from which the fine linen of the mummy was made. The shenti is a linen tunic. The mummy-swathe was also made from shena, and this was the garment woven without a seam. Therefore we infer that the “young man” was a form of the manes risen with the bandages about him, and that when he “left the linen-cloth and fled naked” he had made his transformation into spirit like any other of the mummies.

So soon as the risen Lord had ascended into heaven from the summit of Mount Olivet, after the space of forty days, the disciples [Page 888] are described as meeting in the “upper chamber” with Mary, the mother of Jesus, and his brethren who were gathered together for the purpose of prayer (Acts I. 13, 14). Now, “the upper chamber” was the cubiculum attached to the sepulchre, both in Rome and Egypt, for the meeting of the bereaved relatives and the solemnizing of the mourning for the dead. One of the inscriptions in the catacombs calls it “the upper chamber to celebrate the memory of the dead” (“Cubiculum superius ad confrequentandum memoriam quiescentium”. De Rossi, Roma Sotteranea, 3, 474.) There were two funerary chambers in the Egyptian sepulchre; one was for the mummy and one for the Ka. Also the Ka-chamber was without a door, it being held that the risen spirit could pass through matter without a doorway. This is repeated in the Gospel according to John. When Jesus came into the room, “the doors being shut”, and stood in the midst of the disciples, it was in the character of the Ka or double of the dead endowed with power to rise again, to pass through matter, and reappear to the living. The same dual figure is to be found in the pre-Christian catacombs with the subterranean sepulchre for the mummy or corpse beneath, and the chamber above which was known as the cubiculum or cubiculum memoriae. It was the pre-Christian custom for the relatives and friends of the deceased to meet together in this upper chamber at the funeral feast, or eucharistic meal, for the purpose of celebrating the resurrection from the dead, and of making their offerings and oblations to the ancestral spirits in the mortuary sacrament.

The last scene in the personal “history” coincides with the ascent of Atum-Horus from Amenta, and the soul ascending into paradise, called the Aarru-fields. Jesus, in his final disappearance from the earth, ascends the typical mount, called Olivet, at the end of forty days. “And when he had said these things as they were looking, he was taken up; and a cloud received him out of their sight. And while they were looking steadfastly into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white apparel which also said, Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye looking into heaven?” (Acts I. 9-11). The ascent of Jesus from the mount into the clouds of heaven can be traced twice over, in the two different categories, mythical and eschatological. It was made “from the mount called Olivet”. This, we repeat, was Mount Bakhu, the mount of the olive-tree of dawn. The ascent at the tree was made each day, and also yearly in the annual round, by the god in his resurrection from Amenta. Thus the sun-god in the mythos makes his ascent by the Mount of Olives, or the olive-tree of dawn, when “approaching to the land of spirits in heaven” (Rit., ch. 17). In this character Nefer-Tum the young sun-god is the Egyptian Jesus risen from the northern door of the tomb, or the northern gate of the Tuat. In the phase of eschatology it is the risen soul upon its upward journey to the circumpolar paradise “north of the olive-tree” where the eternal city was eventually attained. The olive (Bakhu) also figures in the eschatology as well as in the astronomical mythology. “He who dwelleth in the olive-tree” is a name of Horus in the burial-place; and in his resurrection the Osiris says, when coming forth from the [Page 889] judgment-hall, “I pass on to a place that is north of the olive-tree”. Or it might be the fig-tree at the meeting-place of Jesus with Nathanael. It was no earthly mount on which the typical teacher gave instruction to the four called fishermen or to the twelve as reapers of the harvest. It was the mountain of Amenta and the double earth that we have traced all through the Ritual called the mount of resurrection and of glory. This, in the mythos, was the mount of the green olive-tree of the Egyptian dawn and a figure of the ascent to heaven in the eschatology. Up this mount the risen manes attained the circle of the divine powers attached to Osiris (Rit., ch. 1 in the older MSS.). And up this mount the solar god, as Atum-Horus, makes his ascent to heaven, termed the land of spirits; that is, from the Mount of Olives, the track which is here followed by the canonical Jesus (Rit., ch. 17). Moreover, in his coming forth to day and making the ascent to heaven, Atum was attended by his two sons, Hu and Sau, who are said to accompany their father daily. The copy, in this instance, is so close to the original that it may be possible to identify the “two men in white apparel” who say to the disciples, “Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing into heaven?” (Acts I. 10, 11). Those two men in white apparel correspond to Hu and Sau in the Ritual (ch. 17, 60-64) who accompany the sun-god in his resurrection from the place of burial in Amenta. In the vague phase, Jesus disappears into a cloud and passes out of sight. In the Ritual of the resurrection the departed spirit is received with greetings by the lords of eternity, who open their arms to embrace and bid him welcome to the table of his father at the festival that is to be eternal in the heavens.

THE RESURRECTION FROM AMENTA, OR COMING FORTH TODAY.

 The dark Amenta quakes
As with diviner dawn Osiris wakes

 And with his key[The Ankh-key of life.] hath risen
To free the arm of Amsu from its prison.

 Out of our mortal night
He suddenly flashed and fleshed his lance of light.

 Jaw-broken lies the black
Grim Boar, mouth open, with its fangs turned back.

Egypt the living Word
Of the eternal truth once more is heard;

 Nor shall her reign be o’er
While language lasts till time shall be no more.

THE SAYINGS OF JESUS

The Book of the Dead, or Ritual of the resurrection, chiefly represents the mysteries of Amenta in the Osirian phase of the religious drama. But there is an older stratum than that of the Osirian eschatology. The Sayer of the Kamite Logia Kuriaka is identifiable in at least three different Egyptian religions; in one as the Osirian Horus who predominates by name in the Ritual; in another as Iu, the Sa or son of Iusãas and Atum-Ra; and a third as Iu-em-hetep, the son of Ptah. Two of these titles of the typical Egyptian “sayer” are cited in the “Festal dirge” when it is said, “I have heard the words of Iu-em-hetep and Hartatef. It is said in their sayings”, some of which sayings are then quoted. These two answer to the Horus and Jesus of the Egypto-gnostics, which are two names of the same original character that was Egyptian from the root. The so-called “Christian eschatology” may be said to have had its origin in the mysteries of Ptah at Memphis. So far as known, it was there the doctrine of immortality was first taught; there that the Son of God was figured in the act of issuing from the mortal mummy as a living spirit. It was likewise there the teacher of the religious mysteries was first impersonated as the sayer, Iu-em-hetep, who, as Iu the coming Su, was the son of Ptah.

Iu as a form of Tum, proclaims himself to be the Sayer in the Ritual (ch. 82). He says: “I have come forth with the tongue of Ptah and the throat of Hathor that I may record the words of my father, Tum, with my mouth which draweth to itself the spouse of Seb”. That is the mother on earth who was Isis in the Osirian mythos, and Hathor-Iusãas in the cult of Tum or Atum-Ra. The speaker here is Horus as Iu the coming Su, or son, who in Egyptian is Iu-su, or Iusa, the child of Iusãas, the consort of Atum-Ra. This sayer as Iu, the Su or son in one character, is Tum himself as father in the other. As Ra the father he is the author of the sayings; as Iu the son (Iusu) he is the utterer of the sayings “with his mouth” or in person on the earth as the heir of Seb. To the Egyptians “the words of Tum” were the teachings of an everlasting gospel of truth, law, justice and right, “not to be altered is that which Tum hath uttered” (Rit., ch. 78) by the mouth of the sayer, Iu-em-hetep, or by the pen of the writer, Taht-Aan. Thus we can identify Tum or Atum-Ra as the author of the sayings which are to be spoken on earth by God the Son. Tum was the earlier name of Atum-Ra, when the character was that of child-Horus, or the infant Tum, and the sayings together with the sayer were pre-Osirian. In other words the “sayer” is Iu-em-hetep, the prince of peace in the [Page 891] cult of Annu, whom we trace back to the time of Ptah as the Egyptian Jesus. Hence this 82nd chapter is the one by which the manes is said to “assume the form of Ptah” in the course of becoming a pure and perfect spirit.

Upon this line of descent, distinguished from the Osirian, Ptah represented the grandfather of the gods; Atum the father, and Iu the Su, the ever-coming son of Atum at Annu. It was Ptah, the opener of the nether-earth, who made the resurrection of the manes possible that was acted in the mysteries of Amenta. And Iu the Su came to say what he had seen and had to tell as witness for the father (Rit., ch. 86), that is, as the “sayer” to whom the sayings were attributed. Hence the speaker tells us that he comes with “the tongue of Ptah” “and the throat of Hathor” to record the words of his father Tum with his own mouth, or as the sayer who was reborn at Annu as Iusu, or Iusa of Hathor-Iusãas, she who was great with Iusa, the son of Atum-Ra, and grandson of Ptah.

The “sayings” may be divided and differentiated in two categories corresponding to the two characters of the double-Horus, the child of twelve years, and Horus the adult of thirty years; Horus the afflicted one who suffered and died and was buried, and Horus who rose again as the demonstrator of eternal life in his resurrection from the dead. At first child-Horus was the word-made-flesh as Logos of the mother. This was Hathor-Iusãas in relation to Atum-Ra (Rit., ch. 82). Next he was the word-made-truth as sayer for the father and teacher of the greater mysteries. Thus there are two classes of the sayings — those of the childhood and those of the adultship; those that pertain to the earth of Seb and those that are uttered in Amenta the earth of eternity. It is said in the Ritual that the words of Taht are “written in the two earths”, the earth of Seb or time, and the earth of eternity or Amenta (Renouf and Naville, ch. 183). So the sayings were uttered by Horus, Tum, Iu, or Jesus, in the double earth of time, and of eternity. It is also said of certain sayings in “Pistis Sophia” (or Books of the Saviour, 390, Mead), “Jesus spake these words unto his disciples in the midst of Amenta”, whence they went forth three by three to the four points of heaven to preach the gospel of the kingdom. This likewise was in the earth of eternity, versus the earth of time. But, whether the god be represented as the heavenly father by Ptah at Memphis, by Atum-Ra at Annu, or by Osiris at Abydos, the infant was Horus or Heru the lord by name, who was the only lord as a little child. Iu, Iusu, Iusa, Tum, Aten, Sekari, Iu-em-hetep, are but titles of Horus the lord of the Logia Kuriaka who became the “Sayer” as the Egypto-gnostic Jesus, Iu-Su, the ever-coming Messianic son.

Now, amongst the gods of Egypt that were canonized as Christian saints the deity Tum has been converted into the Apostle Thomas. The Gospel according to Thomas is also known to have existed in several forms, some of which are yet extant in the Gospels of the Infancy, assumed to be the childhood of an historic Christ. Hippolytus cites one of these as a Gospel of the Nasseni. He says they hand down an explicit passage occurring in the Gospel inscribed “according to Thomas”, expressing themselves thus: “He who seeks [Page 892] me (the higher soul) will find me in children from seven years old; for there concealed I shall, in the fourteenth year (or aeon), be made manifest” (Refut. V. 7). This passage contains the doctrine of the double-Horus, the Horus of the incarnation and Horus of the resurrection, or the child-Horus and Horus the adult. The duality of Horus as the word made flesh and the word made truth is also exemplified in the Gospel of Thomas by the boy whose every word at once became a deed (ch. 4).

In the introductory word to the “New Sayings of Jesus”, found on the site of Oxyrhynchus by Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt, it is said: “These are the (wonderful) words which Jesus the living (Lord) spake to . . . and Thomas, and he said unto (them) everyone that hearkens to these words shall never taste of death” (p. 11). The wonderful words, the words of power in the Ritual, are the words of Atum-Ra the holy spirit. The speaker is Horus or Iu the living, he who rises from the grave and does not die a second time, or who is the resurrection and the life, that was represented as the first fruit or type of them that slept. He is one of those to whom Nut, the mother heaven, has given birth or rebirth (Rit., ch. 1), and this power he afterwards confers on his four brethren or children that they likewise may raise up the dead (Pyramid Texts, Teta, 270). It is in this character he says, “I am the living soul” (Rit., ch. 5). That is, as Horus the lord of the resurrection from the land of death. “I am he that cometh forth”. “I open all the paths in heaven and on earth” (ch. 9). “That has been given to me which endureth amidst all overthrow” (ch. 10). Thus Horus is the demonstrator of a resurrection for the human soul in a mystery of Amenta. He says, “I am he who establishes you for eternity”. “I am he who dieth not a second time” (ch. 42). “I am he whose orbits are of old; my soul is divine, it is the eternal Force” (ch. 85). “It is I who proceed from Tum” — the father of a soul that is immortal.

An original Egyptian source for the Gospels of the Infancy is recognizable in the Ritual. In his incarnation Horus, or Iu the Su, indicates that he “disrobes himself” to “reveal himself” when he “presents himself to the earth” (ch. 71). In his birth he says, “I am the babe” born as the connecting link betwixt earth and heaven, and as the one who does not die the second death (ch. 42). He issues from the disc or from the egg. He is pursued by the Herrut-reptile, but, as he says, his egg remains unpierced by the destroyer. He escapes from the slaughter of the innocents or the Hamemmat in Suten-Khen. On entering the earth-life Horus knows it to be in accordance with his lot that he should suffer death or come to an end and be no more (Rit., ch. 8). He also knows that he is a living soul. As such he has that within which surviveth all overthrow; even though he may be buried in the deep, dark grave, he will not be annihilated there. He will rise again (ch. 10 and ch. 30A). But before quoting further what Horus says, we cite a few more of the Logoi which tell us what Horus is. And what Horus is in the Osirian religion the same was the Egyptian Jesus in the cult of Atum-Ra, and Iu-em-hetep still earlier in the mysteries of Memphis and the cult of Ptah.

Apart from the Osirian dynasty of deities, the two chief divine [Page 893] personages in the Ritual are Atum-Ra and Atum-Horus, as Huhi the eternal father, and Iu the ever-coming Messianic son, who as the Su is Iusu, the Egyptian Jesus. Now Tum, or Atum-Ra the inspiring spirit, was the author of the sayings in the Ritual which he gave to Horus the Iu-su or coming son, as Sayer, for him to utter to men and manes in the two characters of the infant Horus and Horus the adult. Tum as Egyptian, is the earlier form of Atum’s name; and in the Greek inscriptions Tum (or Atum) is called Tomos. We also find that the twin-totality of Tum is registered in the name of “Thomas called Didymus”; Thomas the twin being equivalent in name to the character of the twofold Tum. From this we infer that the apocryphal Gospel of the Infancy assigned to Thomas is, or was, based upon the Egyptian Gospel of Tum. This duality may also explain the relationship of Jesus to Thomas in the “sayings” or Logoi, recently recovered from the mounds of Oxyrhynchus, which are called “the sayings of Jesus”, who is described as the Lord, and the living one.

Now Tum, in the Ritual, is pre-eminently “the lord”. In one chapter (79) he is addressed as “the lord of heaven”, “the lord of life”, “the lord of all creatures”, “the lord of all”. Thus the Ritual contains “the sayings of the lord”. The Hebrew formula “thus saith the lord” had been anticipated in the Ritual by the “so saith Tum” whose word is “not to be altered” (Ritual, ch. 78). As Egyptian, Tum is the one god called “the living”. And the sayings are the words which Jesus “the living” is said to have spoken to Thomas, the son Iu here being given the foremost position of the two. The sayings of the lord, in the Ritual, then, are the sayings spoken by Tum the father to Iusa the son, who utters them to men on earth and to the manes in Amenta. It is as Atum-Horus that the son says, “I am the bright one in glory whom Tum himself brought into being, who hath made and glorified and honoured those who are to be with him”, as his followers or his children (Rit., ch. 78). It is the same speaker who says, “I have come upon this earth and I take possession of it with my two feet. I am Tum, and I come from my own place”. That is as Iusa the manifesting son. Thus the sayings of Horus Iu-em-hetep can be traced to Tum as Ra the inspiring spirit and to Horus as the sayer in the Ritual.

“Tum” in Egyptian was also a name for the mythical child as the inarticulate one, the little Tum, who survives in various countries. For the child Tum passed out of Egypt into Europe to become the Tom Thumb and little Thumbkin of our nursery tales. We also consider that this was the Tum who passed into India as the “historic” Thomas and who is claimed by Christians to have been the Apostle of that name. The god Tum is there identifiable in half-a-dozen features assigned to the Apostle or Saint Thomas. For one thing he is the patron of builders and architects, and his symbol is the mason’s square. He is reputed to have built a superb palace in heaven for the poor of earth. Tum survives by name as the Thoma of the Indian Christians on a peninsula of the Indus this side of the gulf: also in Cochin and beyond. The so-called Christians of India who are frequently supposed to have been the followers of an historic Thomas have their own tradition which is [Page 894] both congruous and explicable. They say that “a certain holy man called Mar-Thome, a Syrian, first came to them with a number of beasts from Syria and Egypt” (Calmet, Thomas). That is with the hieroglyphic signs. Thome we take to be the Egyptian god, Tum. The Mar or Mer, as the surname of the holy man, is an Egyptian title for a superintendent. The “Mer-Tetu” was the superintendent of books, and also the royal mage in one person. Thus read “Mar-Thome” was one of the Egyptian Magi or Rekhi as the superintendent of a college or body of priests who went to India from Syria as missionaries and who promulgated the worship of Tum as God the Father, and Iusa as the son in the religion of Annu.

This dual character of Tum as the father and Iu the Su or son, equal to Jesus, will enable us to identify the child-Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas and that Gospel itself as a form of the Egyptian Gospel. This is one of the most ancient of the Gospels of the Infancy called Apocryphal, the origin and true significance of which are hitherto unknown. These have been denounced as idle tales, foolish traditions: pious frauds, disguised heresy, anti-evangelical representations and fables forged to supply an account of “Our Lord’s History”, in that infancy which the evangelists have perforce omitted. The representations, however, are anti-evangelical; hence they are supposed to favour Docetism: in other words, they are non-historical. As already demonstrated, the great god Tum was the father in one character, and Iu or Horus in the other; he is the divine son who is Iu-em-hetep the Egyptian Jesus. Tum is Tomas or Thomas in Greek, and the Gospel of Tomas in Greek is the Gospel of Tum as Egyptian. Also Tum the father and Iu the son will show why the history of the infancy should be related of a mythical Jesus in the Gospel of Tum or Thomas, and in relation to Thomas. Thus we can identify Tum as the author of the sayings which are to be spoken by Iu-em-hetep, in the person of God the Son. Tum was the earlier name of Atum-Ra, when the character was that of child-Horus, or the infant Tum, and the sayings together with the sayer were pre-Osirian. In other words, the “sayer” is Iu-em-hetep, the prince of peace in the cult of On, whom we trace back to the time of Ptah as the Egyptian Jesus. Hence this chapter is the one by which the manes is said to “assume the form of Ptah” in the course of being spiritualized. In one of the sayings ascribed to Jesus he says, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt. XI. 28). This had then become “one of the sayings”. But the sayer himself had been personalized or typified in earlier ages as Iu-em-hetep at Memphis, and again at On, and later still at Alexandria. And Iu-em-hetep the bringer of peace by name was the giver of rest by nature as the Egyptian Jesus; he who settled the matter of immortality in his resurrection from the tomb. As we have already seen, a tap-root of the Jesus legend in the eschatological phase can be traced in the Egyptian Ritual to the time and to the cult of Ptah at Memphis (Rit., ch. 82). Ptah was the earliest form of an eternal father manifesting in the person of an ever-coming son, who, as the coming one, was Iu, or Iu-em-hetep, he who comes with peace. Hence we derive the name or title of the Egypto-gnostic Jesus from Iu-Su, or Iusa, the coming son. Indeed, the question asked by the messengers of John in the Gospel, [Page 895] art thou he that should come, or must we look for another? is equivalent to asking “art thou Iu-em-hetep, he who comes with peace as manifestor for the father?”

It is also said of Jesus that he had compassion on the people “because they were as sheep without a shepherd”. And this has been looked upon as one of the foundational pillars of the history, and proof positive that he was the original Good Shepherd. But Horus had long been extant as the good shepherd in the mythos, the eschatology, and the iconography of Egypt. Again, it is said of Jesus (Matt. VII. 29), that he taught the multitude as one having authority, and not as their scribes. So was it with Horus, who claims that authority to teach had been divinely delegated to him as the beloved son of God the Father. Hence the sayings, “I have come forth with the tongue of Ptah and the throat of Hathor that I may record the words of my father Tum with my mouth” (Rit., ch. 82). “I am arrayed and equipped with thy words of power, O Ra” (ch. 32). “I utter his words to the men of the present generation, and I repeat his words to him who is deprived of breath” as the manes in Amenta (ch. 38).

It was the work of Horus to exalt the father at all times and in every place. He is exalted as Un-Nefer, the good being who is the one alone that is good, perfect and unique. The same mission is assigned to the Gospel-Jesus. Hence the saying, “Why callest thou me good? None is good save one, even God alone . . . the Father alone” (Mark X. 18), who represents the same Good Being Un-Nefer as did Osiris. This duality of the Deity as father and son is also manifest in the saying, “Whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of Man it shall be forgiven him, but whosoever shall speak against the Holy Spirit it shall not be forgiven him” (Matt. XII. 32). That is said in exaltation of the father in heaven who was the holy spirit represented by the son on earth or in Amenta. The Ritual likewise proves that Seb, the god of earth and foster-father of Horus, when he was the child of the virgin mother only, is the prototype or original of Joseph. Horus says that as the heir of Seb, from whom he issued, he was suckled at the breast of Isis, the spouse of Seb, who gave him his theophanies (Rit., ch. 82). Horus on earth lies down to embrace the old man who keeps the light of earth, and who is Seb the earth-father (Rit., ch. 84). Horus is lord of the staircase or mount of rebirth in heaven. In his first advent as the heir of Seb Horus says, “I am come as a mummied one” (that is, in his embodiment when made flesh, the Hamemmat being the unmummied ones) (Rit., ch. 9). “I come before you and make my appearance as that god in the form of a man who liveth as a god” — otherwise stated, as Iusu the son of Atum-Ra (ch. 79). “I repeat the acclamations at my success on being declared the heir of Seb” (Seb was the father on earth (ch. 82), Osiris in Amenta, Ra in heaven). “I descend to the earth of Seb and put a stop to evil” as the bringer of peace, plenty, and good will on earth. “I shine forth from the egg which is in the unseen world” (ch. 22). “Lo, I bring this my word of power” from out the silence in which the gods originated. “I am arrayed and equipped with thy words of power, O Ra” (ch. 24, 32). “I utter his words to the living and to those who are deprived of breath. I am Horus, prince of eternity” (ch. 42). “I am yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow” [Page 896] (ch. 64). “I am” (or, am I not) “the bull of the sacrificial herd. Are not the mortuary gifts upon me, and the supernal powers?” (ch. 105). “Witness of Eternity is my name, the persistent traveller on the highways of heaven. I am the everlasting one, I am Horus, who steppeth onwards through eternity”. But Horus in the Ritual is chiefly the son of God the Father in heaven, and the subject-matter is mainly post-resurrectional.

After the life with Seb on earth, Horus is reborn in the earth of eternity for the heaven of eternity (78, 25). He is divinized with the flesh or substance of god (ch. 78). By means of Horus, his manifestor, Osiris is said to re-live. Horus is Osiris in his rebirth. Horus rises as a god and is visible to the gods (or divine spirits) (79) in his resurrection. Horus rises as the living soul of Ra in heaven (127). Horus strikes the wakers in their cells or coffins for the resurrection of the manes in Amenta (ch. 84). “I raise myself up, I renew myself, I grow young again” (ch. 43). “Not men or gods; or the glorified ones, or the damned, can inflict any injury on me” (ch. 42). “I do not die a second time in the nether-world” (ch. 44). “I am the victorious one” (ch. 47). “I am seized (in possession) of the two earths” (ch. 50). “There hath been assigned to me eternity without end. Lo, I am the heir of endless time and my attribute is eternity” (ch. 62). “I, even I, am he who knoweth the paths of heaven. Its breezes blow upon me. I advance whithersoever there lieth a wreck in the field of eternity, and I pilot myself towards the darkness and the sufferings of the deceased ones of Osiris” (ch. 78), as the deliverer or saviour of souls whose supreme concern and object is to be saved from the second death in Amenta by earning and attaining the life of the soul that is eternal. “It is I, even I, who am Horus in glory. I am the lord of light and I advance to the goal of heaven”. Jesus says, “I go unto him that sent me” (John VII. 33). “I know whence I came and whither I go” (John VIII. 14). “I go to prepare a place for you”. ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one cometh to the Father but through me” (John XIV. 6). “I go unto the Father” (XIV. 12). But there is nothing so striking in the Gospel as this image of Horus the saviour in the boat of souls who steers his own bark that tosses in distressful agitation over the water, whilst he carries rescue wheresoever there has been a wreck amongst the suffering and deceased ones of his father Osiris.

Horus was the sole one of the seven great spirits born of the mother who was chosen to become the only-begotten son of God the Father when he rose up from the dead. This is he who says in the Ritual, “I am the bright one in glory, whom Atum-Ra hath called into being, and my origin is from the apple of his eye. Verily before Isis was, I grew up and waxed old, and was honoured beyond those who were with me in glory” (Rit., ch. 78, Renouf). Those who were with him in glory were the seven great spirits, the Khuti or glorious ones. Amongst these, Horus became the divine heir of all things, the son of God who claims to have existed before Isis his mother, when speaking as manifestor for the holy spirit. This is the son and heir of God who is described in the Epistle to the Hebrews as the “appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the worlds”. [Page 897] He was thus exalted above the angels or great spirits through “having become by so much better than the angels” and by inheriting a more excellent name than they. “For unto which of the angels said he at any time, thou art my son?” Horus exalts his father in every place; “associating himself with the two divine sisters, Isis and Nephthys”, as his two mothers. It is Taht-Ani who speaks by him the favourable incantations which issue from his heart through his mouth. Horus overthrows the serpent Apap daily for Ra. Horus unites both Osiris and Ra in one triune personality, or trinity in unity.

The sayer personalized as son of God and utterer of the logia in the Ritual says: “I am the one proceeding from the one, the son from a father, the father from the son” (Sarcophagus of Seti I). Jesus is credited with having the magical power of being known or unknown, seen or unseen at will. When the Jews took up stones to cast at him he was suddenly invisible, even in their midst (John VIII. 59). Again, whilst uttering the sayings to the multitude, he was hidden from them (John XII. 36). When risen bodily, he is the unknown one to Mary at the sepulchre. He is also the unknown one to the disciples on the way to Emmaus (Luke XXIV). This character, like all the rest, is according to copy supplied by the Ritual. “I am he”, says Horus, “who cometh forth and proceedeth, and whose name is unknown to men” (ch. 42). The Osiris has a word of power by means of which he can conceal or manifest himself. He says: “I am in possession of that word of power which is the most potent one in my body here; and by means of it I make myself either known or unknown” (Renouf, ch. 110), which is equivalent to becoming visible or invisible at will.

“Before the feast of the Passover, Jesus, knowing that his hour was come that he should depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end” (John XIII. 1). The end is here indicated by the feast of the Passover and the last supper. In the parallel scene Horus says: “I have come to an end for the lord of heaven, I rest at the table of my father Osiris” (Rit., ch. 70). This immediately precedes his piercing the veil of the tabernacle and coming forth as the divine hawk of soul (Rit., 70-71, Renouf). Horus when addressing Ra the father on behalf of the four brethren, his followers, says, “Be they with thee so that they may be with me” (Rit., ch. 113). Jesus says of his followers, “Holy Father, keep them in thy name which thou hast given me that they may be one even as we are”. “I will that where I am they also may be with me” (John XVII. 11, 12, 24). In the same passage of the Ritual Sut is referred to as invoking the powers of Nekhen. In the same passage of the Gospel it is “the son of perdition”.

In this way the canonical Gospels can be shown to be a collection of sayings from the Egyptian mythos and eschatology. The original likeness is somewhat defeatured at times in the process, but sufficient remains in the Ritual for the purpose of comparison and reclamation. When Horus returns to his father with his work accomplished on earth and in Amenta he greets Osiris in a “discourse to his father”. In forty addresses he enumerates what he has done for the support and assistance of Osiris in the earth of Seb. Each line commences with [Page 898] the formula, “Hail, Osiris, I am thy son Horus. I have come!” Amongst other of the assistances he says, “I have supported thee. I have struck thine enemies dead. I have brought the companions of Sut to thee in chains. I have cultivated thy fields. I have watered thy grounds. I have strengthened thine existence upon the earth. I have given thee thy soul, thy strength, thy power. I have given thee thy victory. I have anointed thee with the offerings of holy oil”. This last in sign-language is, I have given thee the glory (Renouf and Naville, Rit., ch. 173). This we parallel with the sixteenth chapter of John, in which the position and character of Jesus are the same with those of Horus, and in which Jesus addresses the father at the end of his career. “I have come to thee”, says Horus to Osiris. “Now I come to thee”, says Jesus to the Father. “Father, the hour is come; glorify thy son that the son may glorify thee”. “I glorified thee on earth, having accomplished the work which thou hast given me to do. And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was. I manifested thy name unto the men whom thou gavest me out of the world. I am no more in the world. But now I come to thee. I kept them in thy name, which thou hast given me. I guarded them, and not one of them perished, but the son of perdition” (XVII. 5-12). The glory of God the father was reflected by the sacred oil upon the face of Horus the anointed son, which was a sign of his divinity. This was “the glory as of the only-begotten from the father” who was Horus in spirit, Horus the adult, the anointed one with the father, and thus the representative type of a soul of life that is eternal and attainable by all as in the only-beloved son.

It is an utterance of the truth that is eternal to say that Horus as the son of God had previously been all the Gospel Jesus is made to say he is, or is to become. Horus and the father were one. Jesus says, “I and my Father are one”. “He that seeth me, seeth him that sent me” (John XII. 45). Horus is the father seen in the son (Rit., 115). Jesus claims to be the son in whom the father is revealed. Horus was the light of the world, the light that is represented by the symbolical eye, the sign of salvation. Jesus is made to declare that he is the light of the world. Horus was the way, the truth, the life, by name and in person. Jesus is made to assert that he is the way, the truth, and the life. Horus was the plant, the shoot, the natzer. Jesus is made to say, “I am the true vine”. The deceased says, “I spring up as a plant” (Rit., 83, 1). The deceased, in the character of Horus, or one with him by assimilation, also makes these claims for himself. Hence the sayings — the sayings which are repeated in the Gospels, more especially in the Gospel according to John=Aan. To parallel a few of the sayings in the Gospels with those of the Ritual: In the Gospel according to John, Jesus says of himself, “I am the bread of life” (VI. 35), “I am the light of the world” (VIII. 12), “I am the door of the sheep” (X. 7), “I am the good shepherd” (X. 11), “I am the resurrection and the life” (XI. 25), “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (XIV. 6), “I am the true vine” (XV. 1). And Horus was the original in all seven characters. Horus was the bread of life, also the divine corn from which the bread of life was made (Rit., ch. 83). Horus was the good shepherd who carries the crook upon his shoulder. [Page 899] Horus was the door of entrance into Amenta, which none but he could open. Horus was the resurrection and the life. He carries the two symbols of resurrection and of life eternal, the hare-headed sceptre, and the Ankh-key in his hands. Horus was the way. His name is written with the sign of the road (Heru). Horus was the true vine, as the branch of Osiris, who is himself the vine in person. Now the original of all these identifiable characters could occur but once, and that prototype was Horus, or Jesus in the cult of Atum-Ra. Horus says, “It is I who traverse the heaven. I go round the Sekhet-Aarru (the Elysian fields). Eternity has been assigned to me without end. Lo! I am the heir of endless time, and my attribute is eternity” (Ritual, ch. 62). Jesus says, “I am come down from heaven. For this is the will of the Father that every one who beholdeth the son and believeth in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day”. He, too, claims to be the lord of eternity. When Horus is “lifted up” to become glorified and is “Horus in his glory” (ch. 78), “master of his diadem”, he says, “I raise myself up”. Then he adds, “I stoop upon the Atit-bark that I may reach and raise to me those who are in their circles, and who bow down before me” as his worshippers (ch. 77). “And I”, says Jesus, “if I be lifted up out of the earth (as Horus was lifted up from out the nether-world), will draw all men after me” (John XII. 32, 33). Horus says, “I open the Tuat that may drive away the darkness”. Jesus says, “I am come a light into the world”. Horus says, “I am equipped with thy words of power, O Ra” (the father in heaven) (ch. 32), “and repeat them to those who are deprived of breath” (ch. 38). These were the words of the father in heaven. Jesus says, “The Father which sent me, he hath given me a commandment, what I should say and what I should speak. The things therefore which I speak, even as the Father hath said unto me, so I speak” (John XII. 49, 50). “The word which ye hear is not mine, but the Father’s who sent me “(John XIV. 24). Horus repeated to his followers that which his father Osiris had said to him in the early time (Rit., 78). Jesus says, “As the Father taught me, I speak these things” (John VIII. 28). “All things that I heard from my Father I have made known unto you” (John XV. 15). Horus comes on earth to report what he has known and heard and seen and handled with the father. “I have touched with my two hands the heart of Osiris”. “That which I went to ascertain I have come to tell”. “I know the mysterious paths and the gates of Aarru (or Paradise) from whence I come. Here am I, and I come that I may overthrow mine adversaries on earth, though my dead body be buried” (Renouf, ch. 86).

Horus eats the bread of Seb on earth, but he teaches the manes in Amenta to pray for the bread of heaven. Let him ask for food from the Lord, who is over all (ch. 78). In this we have the germ of the Lord’s Prayer addressed to “our Father in heaven” for “our daily bread”: Ra being the heavenly father of Horus and the supplier of food to souls; the daily giver of eternal life, that was represented by the typical seven loaves of plenty. There is a prayer in the Ritual (ch. 71) which opens with an address to the Lord of Heaven who “reveals himself, who derobes himself, and presents himself to the earth” in the person of Horus his son, the divine hawk or soul that [Page 900] pierces through the veil of the tabernacle. It is here referred to for the refrain which occurs seven times over “May his will toward me be done by the Lord of the one face”, that is, by the one and only God who is the father in heaven, he who “revealed himself, who disrobed himself, and presented himself to the earth” (Renouf, ch. 71) in the person of his beloved son.

Horus who comes from heaven says, “I am the food which perisheth not, in my name of the self-originating force” (Rit., ch. 85). Jesus says, “I am the bread of life. This is the bread which cometh down out of heaven that a man may eat thereof and not die. I am the living bread which came down out of heaven” (John VI. 48-51). Horus was not only the bread of life derived from heaven and the producer of bread in the character of Amsu the husbandman; he also gave his flesh for food and his blood for drink. This, however, was not in the cannibal form of human flesh and blood, but as the typical calf or the lamb. Jesus says, “The bread which I will give is my flesh”. “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood ye have not life in yourselves”, that is, in the human form, which is proclaimed to be the bread which came down out of heaven (John VI. 53, 58). Horus says, “I am the possessor of bread in Annu. I have bread in heaven with Ra” (ch. 53A). “There are seven loaves in heaven at Annu with Ra” (ch. 53B). Ra is the father in heaven. He is the provider of the bread of life that is given by the son, and by Jesus in the Gospel. Jesus says, “My Father giveth you the true bread out of heaven. For the bread of God is that which cometh down out of heaven, and giveth life unto the world”, that is, in the person of Jesus or of Horus. “Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life” (John VI. 32-35). Jesus, like Horus, is the giver of the water of life which likewise cometh from the Father (John IV. 10 and VII. 37). “Now on the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water” (John VII. 37, 38). In passing, we may notice that the great feast corresponds to the Uaka festival by which the return of the water of life in the inundation was celebrated; and that Osiris was the lord of the water as well as of the wine. Moreover, the miracle of converting water into wine is very simply illustrated by the picture of Osiris as the vine and also as the water of renewal in which the vine springs out of the water of life that issues from beneath his throne. On the ground of natural fact, Osiris was the water of life to the land of Egypt in the inundation of the Nile. He was adored in the temple of Isis at Philae as “Osiris of the mysteries, who springs from the returning waters”. He was the water of life to the souls in Amenta; and in the eschatology Osiris is the water of life in Hetep, the paradise of peace, to spirits perfected. In the Ritual, Horus is the son of God through whom is given the water that cometh from the father, which is called the Ru of Osiris, the divine liquid that flows from him as the ichor of life. Horus speaks of quenching his thirst with the drops (the Ru) of his father Osiris. So Jesus draws and drinks and gives drink from the well of living water which is the father’s; not the well of Jacob (John IV. 10, 15), but a well of water springing up unto eternal life. [Page 901]

Again and again, the status and character of Jesus as the Sayer in the Gospels are only to be determined by the mythical or mystical relationship. “Before Abraham was, I am”, is one of the sayings ascribed to the supposed historical Christ. Abraham is of course referred to as the typical progenitor of the Jews. So in the Gospel of Thomas, or Tum, the child-Jesus says to his earth-father Joseph, “It is enough for thee to see me, not to touch me. For thou knowest not who I am. If thou knewest thou wouldst not grieve me. And although I am now with thee I was made before thee” (ch. 5). The son who existed before the father claims an immense antiquity, as a character entirely mythical, but if the statement were made a hundred times over in the märchen the meaning would be the same. It is a saying of the Divine Child who came into being earlier than God the Father as the offspring of the Virgin Mother who is Jesus the fatherless Child of Mary in the Gospels, and of Neith or Iusãas in the Ritual. Joseph also plays the part of Seb, the father, to Horus on earth. “Seb giveth me his theophanies”, says Horus, but “more powerful am I than the lord of time (Seb), I am the author and the master of endless years” (Rit., ch. 82) as an image of the Eternal.

In the inscription of Hatshepsu, the child-Horus is called “the elder of his mother’s husband”. That is, he was older than Osiris, who became the father according to the later sociology (Obelisk of Karnak, l. 4). Such is the sole ground of origin upon which the father can be later than the son whether his name is Atum, Osiris or Abraham.

 The sayings involve a sayer who became the typical teacher in person as Horus in the Osirian cult and Iu-em-hetep in the religion of Atum-Ra, or Iao of the Egypto-gnostics in the Pistis Sophia. These are mentioned in the texts as the divine enunciators of the “sayings”. Each of them is a form of the sayer, word, logos, announcer, or revealer in person, precisely the same as the Jesus of the gospels, whether Apocryphal, Egypto-gnostic or Canonical. The elder Horus was the virgin’s child; he imaged the soul in matter, or, the body-soul in the life on earth. He was the teacher of the lesser mysteries in the mythology. He was solar; hence the leader of that glorious company of the twelve now stationed in the zodiac as rowers of the bark for millions of years. The primary twelve were the great gods of Egypt twenty thousand years ago as the twelve powers that rowed the solar bark for Ra around the circle of the zodiacal signs. They became the Aeons of the gnostics, twelve in number. As preservers of the light, they were twelve teachers in mythology, twelve followers of Horus who are the twelve apostles or disciples of the Egypto-gnostic Christ; the seven and five being grouped together to constitute the twelve.

At his second coming when Horus of the resurrection rose again as a spirit in the image of the holy ghost — he became the teacher of the greater mysteries to the twelve who likewise had attained the status of spirits in the eschatology, and who were now the twelve to whom twelve thrones were promised in the heaven of eternity.

Horus the word in person was the sayer to whom the sayings were assigned. Hence the “sayings”, attributed to Iu-em-hetep and Hartatef in Egypt: the one as child of the mother; the other as son [Page 902] of the father who wore the Atef-crown of Atum-Ra. Now this mystical “word” of the mother, and the word-made-truth in Har-Mat-Kheru are both apparent in the opening chapter of the Gospel according to John. “In the beginning was the word”, he says; as it had been in Iu-em-hetep, or child-Horus. “And the word became flesh”, which it did in the virgin-blood of the immaculate Isis or of Hathor-Iusãas. The doctrine of the second Horus follows, but is inserted parenthetically. “And we beheld his glory; glory as of the only begotten from the father”. But the Jesus of the genuine legend was not yet begotten by or from the father. He was begotten or christified in his baptism. Matthew has it that when Jesus was baptized he went up straightway from the water; and lo the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God. Descending as a dove and coming upon him; and lo a voice out of the heavens, saying, This is my beloved son (ch. III. 16, 17). In the original transformation scene this occurred when the child of the mother made his change into the beloved son of God the father at the time of the baptism in the Osirian mystery of Tattu (Rit., ch. 17). It was in his resurrection from the dead, here represented by the rising from the water, and becoming bird-headed as a spirit, that Horus became the beloved son of the father (Rit., ch. 9). John then proceeds to describe the transformation of Jesus in his baptism when “the spirit descended as a dove out of heaven, and it abode upon him”, which change had already taken place before the glory of the father could have been visible in the person of the son. Now, this word that was in the beginning had already manifested as the “sayer” of the sayings in the Ritual. This is he who says, “I have come forth with the tongue of Ptah and the throat of Hathor (Iusãas) that I may record the words of my father Atum with my mouth”. That is, as the utterer of the “sayings” which were ascribed to the Egyptian Jesus as Iu-em-hetep, the son of Hathor-Iusãas and Atum-Ra. We have no need to go further back for the beginning of the Word, as utterer of the sayings. The canonical Gospels are based upon the “sayings” of Jesus; the Jesus that we claim to have been the son of Atum at On; genealogically, the grandson of Ptah at Memphis, and the author of the books of wisdom attributed to him as the Jesus of the Apocrypha, and Gospels of the Infancy.

Enough has been cited to show that the revelation ascribed to Jesus, the Christ of the canonical Gospels, had been previously published in the Ritual of the resurrection and uttered by Iu the Su of Atum-Ra (Iusa=Jesus or Tum=Thomas), who was and is and ever will be the Egyptian Jesus independently of any personal historical character.

The Egyptian Ritual contains the “sayings” or the words of wisdom that were attributed to Ra the inspiring holy spirit. As god the father this was Tum (or Thomas). The utterer of the “sayings” “with his mouth” was god the son, Iu (or Iu-em-hetep) the Su (son) who was Iu-Su, the ever-coming son in the religion of Annu, and Iusu when rendered through the Greek is Ιησους or Jesus.

A large part of the Egyptian Book of the Dead consists of “sayings”. The forty-second chapter contains at least fifty sayings uttered by Horus in person respecting himself, his father and his work [Page 903] of salvation. These are the sayings of Horus, or of the Osiris by whom they are repeated in character. And as Horus the divine word in person is the Lord whose name of Heru signifies the Lord, these sayings of Horus are the Logia Kuriaka; assuredly the oldest in the world, which we have now traced to Iu-em-hetep, the Egypto-gnostic Jesus as the sayer for Atum-Ra. These might be called the sayings of Ra or Horus, of Tum or Thomas, of Iu or Iu-em-hetep, of Aan, Taht or Hermes. But above all other names or titles they were known as the words of Mati.

Also, the Gospel of the Egyptians, represented by the Ritual, was the Gospel according to Mati (or Matiu, with the U, inherent). And as Mati was inculcated by means of the sayings, the sayings in the Ritual are the sayings of Mati as the words of truth, justice, law, and rightfulness, and the revelation of the resurrection. In Dr. Birch’s translation of “the funeral Ritual” he has given the word “Mati” as a title of Taht-Aan the divine scribe; and from this title the present writer deduced the names of Matthias and Matthew, as the true reckoner, the just reckoner, and keeper of the tablets for Maati in the hall of Maat. Taht-Aan might be designated Mati. But, whether we take the word Mati as a proper name or title of the scribe Taht (whether called Hermes, Aan or Mati), he was the recorder of the sayings or Logia Kuriaka in the Ritual. But even if we do not take the name of Mati to be a title of Tehuti, whence the names of Matthias and Matthew, the character remains. Taht was the scribe in the Maat or judgment-hall, also the recorder of the sayings that were given by the Father in Heaven to be uttered by Horus, and written down by the fingers of Taht. Now, according to the often-quoted testimony of Papias, recorded in his last “commentary” on the “sayings of the Lord”, the basis of the canonical Gospels was laid in a collection of sayings that were attributed to “The Lord”. He tells us that Matthew wrote the sayings in the Hebrew dialect, and every one interpreted them as best he was able. This was the current hearsay on the subject as reported by Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis. And here we might repeat, in passing, that the sayings of Horus the lord in the Ritual were collected and written down by Taht-Mati the scribe, and that Matthew, or Matthias, corresponds to Mati both in character and by name. We have no further use for the statement beyond noting that the extant Gospel of Matthew was evidently founded on a collection of those “wise sayings, dark sentences and parables” that constituted the wisdom of the Egypto-gnostic Jesus, one late version of which has been preserved in the Book of Ecclesiasticus, entitled “the wisdom of Jesus”. The present writer has previously suggested that the “sayings” collected by Matthew, which Papias had heard of as the source of the Christian Gospels, were a form of the sayings of Mati collected from the papyri of the Ritual. The Catholic Christians were sorely troubled about the Egypto-gnostic Gospels in possession of the “heretics” when they came to hear of them. These are especially associated with the name of Valentinus, an Egyptian gnostic, who came with these Egypto-gnostic Gospels from Alexandria, and to whom Pistis Sophia and the “Gospel of Truth” have been attributed. The “Gospel of Truth”, known to the Valentinian gnostics as Egyptian, is [Page 904] the Gospel of Mati, or a collection of the sayings of Mati=Matthew. The Logia of Matthias was the authentic gospel of the Carpocratean gnostics. Clement of Alexandria quotes from the “Traditions of Matthias” two sayings which are not to be found in the canonical Matthew. This proves the existence of other sayings, oracles and divine words than the canonical in the time of Clement, which were assigned to Matthias=Mati. These sayings and traditions were acknowledged as genuine by the gnostic followers of Carpocrates, Valentinus and Basilides, who never did acknowledge any historical founder, and whose Christ was the Egypto-gnostic Jesus — he who was the utterer of the sayings and traditions first written down by the divine scribe Taht-Aan=John; or Taht-Mati=Matthew.

In writing his Gospel, Basilides appealed to a secret tradition which he had received from Matthias; and Hippolytus reports that this secret tradition was derived by Matthias during his private intercourse with the Saviour. But the gnostics never did acknowledge any historic saviour. Their Christ was Horus, or the non-historical Jesus, and therefore the private intercourse of Matthias with the Saviour was that of Mati with Horus the Christ of the Ritual which contains the history of that intercourse.

We are told that it was after his Resurrection that Christ revealed the true gnosis to Peter, John and James. (Clem. Alex. Eusebius, H. E. 2, 1). But it was only the spiritual Horus or Christ that could reveal the true gnosis, which is here admitted versus the historic personage. This revelation is post-resurrectional, the same as with the gnostic Jesus in the Pistis Sophia who expounds the mysteries to his twelve apostles on Mount Olivet after he has risen from the dead. The “Manifestation of Truth” is the title of the great work of Marcus the gnostic in the third century. The lost work of Celsus was the Word of Truth or Logos Alethea. In these instances the gospel is that of truth, the word of truth; the true gospel. And the gospel of Mati, we repeat, is equivalent to the gospel or the sayings according to Matthew which had been heard of by Papias as the nuclei of the canonical Gospels. Epiphanius, in speaking of the “Sabelian Heretics”, says, “The whole of their errors and the main strength of their heterodoxy they derive from some apocryphal books, but principally from that which is called the Gospel of the Egyptians (which is a name some have given to it) for in that many things are proposed in a hidden, mysterious manner as by our Saviour” (Ad. Haeres, 26, 2), just as they are in the sayings of the Ritual, the sayings of Hartatef, Iu-em-hetep or the sayings of Jesus. In his tirade against gnosticism Augustine echoes the name of Mati (for truth) and shows its twofold nature in a peculiar way as “The Truth and Truth”. He says of the gnostics: “They used to repeat ‘Truth and Truth,’ for thus did they repeat her name to me, but she was nowhere amongst them; for they spoke false things, not only concerning thee who art the Truth in Truth, but even concerning the elements of this world of ours, thy creation; concerning which even the philosophers, who declared what is true, I ought to have slighted for love of thee, O my father, the supreme God, the beauty of all things beautiful. O truth! truth! how inwardly did the marrow of my soul sigh after thee even then, whilst they were perpetually dinning thy name into my ears, and [Page 905] after various fashions with the mere voice, and with many and huge books of theirs”. (The Gnostics and their Remains, King, p. 157.)

The Book of the Dead or Ritual of the resurrection virtually contains the Gospel of the Egyptians which was assumed to have been lost. This is the Gospel according to Mati or Matiu, the original, as we maintain, of that which Papias attributes to one “Matthew”, and which was a collection of the sayings assigned to the Jesus whom the non-gnostic Christians always assumed to be historical. The Ritual preserves the sayings of the Egyptian Jesus who was Iu the Su, or Sa of Atum-Ra and Iusãas at On, and who was otherwise known as the Lord in different Egyptian religions. This was the sayer to whom the sayings are attributed in the “Festal Dirge” (Records, vol. IV, p. 115), and also in the Ritual and other Hermetic Scriptures. And now we have a form of the genuine Gospel of the Egyptians in the Ritual itself. This is the original Evangelium Veritas: The Gospel according to Mati=Matthew; to Aan=John; or Tum=Thomas. From this we learn, by means of the comparative process, that the literalizers of the legend and the carnalizers of the Egypto-gnostic Christ have but gathered up the empty husks of Pagan tradition, minus the kernel of the Gnosis; so that when we have taken away all which pertains to Horus, the Egypto-gnostic Jesus, all that remains to base a Judean history upon is nothing more than an accretion of blindly ignorant belief; and that of all the Gospels and collections of “Sayings” derived from the Ritual of the resurrection in the name of Mati or Matthew, Aan or John, Thomas or Tum, Hermes, Iu-em-hetep or Jesus, those that were canonized at last as Christian are the most exoteric, and therefore the farthest away from the underlying, hidden, buried, but imperishable truth.