GraceWatcher Ministries Presents
The
Lost Light
AN
INTERPRETATION OF ANCIENT SCRIPTURES
Alvin
Boyd Kuhn
Electronically typed and edited by
Anyeot GraceWatcher/Paul Jones for educational research purposes. Please do not remove this
notice. I can be contacted at
anyeot@gracewatcher.org . I will be greatly indebted to
the individual who can put me in touch with the associates of the Estate of Dr.
Alvin Boyd Kuhn and/or any of the following works:
The Mighty Symbol of the Horizon,
Nature as Symbol, The Tree of Knowledge, The Rebellion of the Angels, The Ark
and the Deluge, The True Meaning of Genesis, The Law of the Two Truths, At
Sixes and Sevens, Adam Old and New, The Real and the Actual, Immortality: Yes -
But How?, The Mummy Speaks at Last, Symbolism of the Four Elements, Through Science
to Religion, Creation in Six Days?, Rudolph Steiner's "Mystery of
Golgotha", Krishnamurti and Theosophy, A. B. Kuhn's graduation address at
Chambersburg Academy "The Lyre of Orpheus", A. B. Kuhn's unpublished
autobiography, Great Pan Returns.
To
THE
MEMORY OF
DR.
ROBERT NORWOOD
WHOSE
CHARGE TO ME TO WRITE THIS
BOOK
WAS AN IMPELLING AND SUS-
TAINING
INSPIRATION TO THE
TASK,
THIS WORK IS
AFFECTIONATELY
DEDICATED
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
I. TRAGEDY DIES IN LAUGHTER
II. ECCE HOMO-EOCE DEUS
III. TRUTH CRUSHED TO EARTH
IV. WISDOM HIDDEN IN A MYSTERY
V. LOOSING THE SEVEN SEALS
VI. THE DESCENT TO AVERNUS
VII. COLONISTS FROM HEAVEN
IX. ALIVE IN DEATH
X. THE MUMMY IN AMENTA
XI. DISMEMBERMENT AND DISFIGUREMENT
XII. AMBROSIA AND NECTAR
XIII. EARTH, WATER, AIR, FIRE
XIV. FIRE ON HEAVEN’S HEARTH
XV. NOXIOUS FUMES AND LURID FLAMES
XVI. BAPTISM AT THE CROSSING
XVII. THE
XVIII. THE
XIX. WEIGHED IN THE BALANCE
XX. SUNS OF INTELLECT
XXI. AT THE EAST OF HEAVEN
XXII. SKYLARK AT HEAVEN’S GATE
NOTES
INDEX
PROLOGUE
Coming forth in a day when theology
has long been discredited--even in its own ecclesiastical household--and
religion itself is threatened with obliteration by rampant forces hostile to
it, this book aims to rehabilitate theology and to stabilize true religion. It
must be said at the very outset and with blunt insistence that it is for religion
and not in any way against it. It is written to establish religion again as the
cornerstone of human culture, when civilization has largely turned away from it
to seek elsewhere the guiding light. It is designed to redeem Divine Theology
from her outcast condition and place her again beside Philosophy and Science on
the throne in the kingdom of man’s mind.
It needs sharply to be asseverated
that the book is for religion because many will pronounce it the most
forthright attack on ecclesiastical doctrinism yet presented. It can hardly be
denied that it sweeps away almost the entire body of common acceptance of
biblical and theological meaning. But it makes no war on anything in religion
save the idiocies and falsities that have crept into the general conception of
orthodox belief. Finding the chief enemies of true religion were those within
her own gates, the book has had to address itself to the ungenerous task of
repudiating the whole untenable structure of accredited interpretation in order
to erect on the ground the lovely temple of ancient truth. If theology is to be
rescued from its forlorn state of intellectual disrepute into which not its
enemies but its friends have precipitated it through an unconscionable
perversion of its original significance to gross repulsiveness, the errors and
distortions perpetrated upon it by those of its own household must be
ruthlessly dismantled. Hence to many the book will seem like a devastating
assault on the very citadel of common religious preachment. In the face of all
this it must be maintained that the work is written to support and defend
religion against all its foes and that it is constructive and not destructive
of true religious values at every turn. It was no light or frivol-
1
ous gesture to affront a settled and
rooted growth of beliefs and doctrinal statements that have been cherished for
centuries around the hearthstone of Christian culture and become hallowed by
age-long acceptance and the strong loves and loyalties inbred in sensitive
childhood. But it was seen to be a drastic operation quite necessary to save
the organism of religion itself from further decay and menacing death.
Excrescences of misconception and superstition had to be heroically cut out of
the body of theology and the calcareous incrustations of ignorant
interpretation dissolved and carried away by the acid stream of living truth
flowing forth, after centuries of suppression, from the mighty scriptures of
the past.
The Western world has too long and
fatuously labored under the delusion that a pious and devout disposition
fulfills the whole requirement of true religion. Ancient sagacity knew that
piety without intelligence, or religion without philosophy, was insufficient
and dangerous. It knew that general good intent was not safe from aberrancy,
folly and fanaticism unless it was directed by the highest powers and resources
of the mind. And the mind itself had to be fortified with specific knowledge of
the nature of the cosmos and of man and the relation between the two. Following
the dictum of the sage, Hermes Trismegistus, that "the vice of a soul is
ignorance, the virtue of a soul is knowledge," the scriptures of old
inculcated the precept that with all man’s getting he must first get wisdom and
understanding. These were related to his well-being as health to his navel and
marrow to his bones, and would alone give him a crown of eternal life. They
were pronounced more precious than all the things that he could desire. The
council of Illuminati therefore laid down their systems of cosmology and
anthropology, which have become by immemorial tradition the Bibles of humanity,
universally reverenced. In them were given the ordinances of life, the
constitution of the cosmos, the laws governing both nature and mind. They still
constitute the Magna Carta of all human action guided by intelligence. For they
were the first Institutes embodying the Principia and Fundamenta of all moral
behavior, the only true chart and compass to guide human effort in a line of
harmony with an overshadowing divine plan of evolution for the Cosmos.
The corruption and final loss of the
basic meaning of these scriptures has been, in the whole of time, the greatest
tragedy in human
2
history. Like Shakespeare’s tide,
which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune, but, omitted, casts all the
rest of life in shoals and quicksands, the wreckage of the Esoteric Gnosis in
the centuries following Plato’s day, culminating in the debacle of all
philosophical religion about the third century of Christianity’s development
and ushering in sixteen centuries of the Dark Ages, has thrown all religion out
of basic relation to true understanding and caused it to breed an endless train
of evils, fanaticisms, bigotries, idiosyncrasies, superstitions, wars and
persecutions that more than anything else blacken the record of man’s historic
struggle toward the light. The present (1940) most frightful of all historical
barbarities owes its incidence directly to the decay of ancient philosophical
knowledge and the loss of vision and virtue that would have attended its
perpetuation.
What, then, must be the importance
of a book which restores to the scriptures of ancient wisdom the lost light of
their true original meaning?
In a very real and direct way the
salvation of culture and a free spirit in the world is contingent upon this
restoration of the ancient intelligence to modernity. For man at this age has
had new and mighty powers of nature suddenly placed in his hands, and yet lacks
the spiritual poise and sagacity to use them without calamity. Most strangely,
the control of the lower physical, natural or brute forces by the mind or
reason was the one central situation primarily and fundamentally dealt with in
the sage tomes of antiquity. To effect that control in a perfect balance and
harmony, and to train the reasoning intellect in the divine art of it, was the
aim and end of the Arcane Philosophy. Ideology in the Western world has
endlessly vacillated back and forth between the cult of the inner spirit and
engrossment in objective materialism. Ancient philosophy taught that the true
path of evolutionary growth was to be trodden by an effort that united the
forces of the spirit with those of the world, the lower disciplined by the
higher. The whole gist of the Esoteric Doctrine was the study and mastery of
the powers engaged in working out the evolutionary advance, so that the
aspirant might be able to align his cultural effort in consonance with the
requirements of the problem and the end to be achieved.
Without this guiding data and this
evolutionary perspective modern man is totally at a loss how to focus his
endeavor and is unable to point
3
his direction in line with anything
more fixed and basic than his next immediate objective of apparent
desirability. He has neither a knowledge of his origin, a chart of his path, an
inventory of his capacities or a vision of his goal. Hence he travels the long
road still a benighted wanderer without compass. He can but recoil from one
mistaken plunge after another, learning sporadic lessons from pain and
misfortune. The ancient torch that was lighted for his guidance he has let burn
out. This lamp was the body of Ancient Philosophy. In this critical epoch in
the life of the world this book proclaims afresh the message of lost truth.
.
. . . . . .
Three ancient and long-discredited
sciences have had a surprising renaissance in popular fancy and scientific
interest: symbolism, alchemy, astrology. The last has particularly come into a
general vogue, but on a basis which still inclines conservative positivism in
science and scholarship to regard it as allied closely with "popular
superstition." In its predictive or "fortune-telling" aspect it
is generally looked at askance. But there is another side on which it has
pertinence and value that has not been recognized in the modern revival and on
which perhaps its most legitimate claim to consideration rests. This is its
function as symbolic theology. Unquestionably cosmic operation, cosmic
significance, lie behind the twelve constellations of the zodiac and the
thirty-six or more other stellar configurations. The planisphere or chart of
the heavens was doubtless the first of all Bibles, pictorially edited. Not
quite simply and directly but intrinsically, all Bibles are amplifications and
elaborations of the original volume of ideography first written on the open
face of the sky, charted in the zodiac and heavenly maps, and later transferred
to earth and written in scrolls and parchments. Man was instructed to fashion
his new body of spiritual glory "after the pattern of things in the
heavens," the heavenly or zodiacal man. And a graph of the structure and
history of this celestial Personage was sketched by the enlightened sages in
the configurated star clusters. Zodiac comes from the Greek word zodion, a
small living image, signifying that it is a graph of the microcosmic life of
man, which is cast in the form of the macrocosmic life of the universe, or of
God. Man’s own small body is a replica of this body of God, made in its image
and likeness. The vast frame of Cosmic Man
4
was outlined in the scroll of the
heavens, the solar systems and galaxies being living cell clusters in his
immense organism.
A deal of this adumbrative symbology
elucidating theological doctrinism is set forth in the body of the present
work. But there is a group of its data that strikes so deeply into the heart of
general theology that it is given here at the outset for the sake of its
overwhelming impressiveness. It must prove to be so conclusive an evidence that
Biblical theology rests more solidly than has ever been believed on zodiacal
backgrounds that its presentation will be admittedly a matter of great moment.
It traces the unsuspected significance of two of the twelve signs, Virgo and
Pisces, in the very heart of New Testament narrative. Let the reader picture
before him the ordinary zodiac, with the house of Virgo at the western equinox
point and that of Pisces directly opposite on the eastern side. The simple fact
that they stand six months apart will presently be seen to assume great
importance in Gospel determination.
The exposition must begin with the
puzzling and hitherto unexplained item of ancient religious myth, that the
Christs, the Sun-Gods, the Messiahs, all were depicted as having two mothers.
How, one asks, could there possibly be rational significance in this? It has
been put aside as just some more of the mythical rubbish and nonsense of early
Paganism. The profundity of pagan intelligence, hiding sublime cosmic truth
under glyph and symbol, has not been dreamed of.
The depiction should not have
created incredulity, seeing that the Gospel Jesus himself, dramatic figure of
the divine principle in man, announced it categorically in declaring to
Nicodemus that "ye must be born again." Nicodemus asks if this means
that we must enter a second time into our mother’s body and experience a second
birth in the natural manner. Jesus replies that we "must be born of water
and the spirit." Attention must be directed a moment to the fact that the
Latin word spiritus, translated "spirit" in many passages,
means as well "air" or "breath." One of the great keys to
Bible meaning is the series of the four "elements" of ancient
mythicism: earth, water, air and fire. The body of the physical or natural man
was conceived as being composed of the two lower, earth and water, while air
and fire, representing mind and spirit, commingled to make the higher or
spiritual man. Jesus’ statement to Nicodemus, then, could have been rendered,
"born of water and air." And John the Baptist uses three of the four
ele-
5
ments when he states that he, the
forerunner of the Christos, and therefore a type of the lower natural
man, indeed baptizes us with water (omitting earth), but that there cometh
after him one higher than himself who shall baptize us with the holy spiritus
(air) and with fire. Jesus thus affirms that we have two births,
necessitating two mothers, and John the Baptist adds that we must have two
baptisms.
Since man’s spirit is an
indestructible fragment of God’s own mighty Spirit, truly a tiny spark of that
cosmic Intelligence and Love which we call the Mind of God, the ancients
typified the divine element in man by fire and in contrast the lower or human
element by water. The fiery soul of man is housed in a tenement of flesh
and matter which is seven-eighths water by actual composition! The crossing of
the rivers and seas and the immersion of solar heroes in water in olden
mythologies, and the rite of baptism in theology, signified nothing beyond the
fact of the soul’s immersion in a physical body of water nature in its
successive incarnations.
Now man is distinctly a creature
compounded of two natures, a higher and a lower, a spiritual and a sensual, a
divine and a human, a mortal and an immortal, and finally a fiery and a watery,
conjoined in a mutual relationship in the organic body of flesh. Says
Heraclitus: "Man is a portion of cosmic fire, imprisoned in a body of
earth and water." Speaking of man Plato affirms: "Through body it is
an animal; through intellect it is a god." To create man God incarnated
the fiery spiritual principle of his life in the watery confines of material
bodies. That is the truest basic description of man that anthropology can
present. All problems spring from that foundation and are referable for
solution back to it.
Man is, then, a natural man and a
god, in combination. Our natural body gives the soul of man its baptism by
water; our nascent spiritual body is to give us the later baptism by fire! We
are born first as the natural man; then as the spiritual. Or we are born first
by water and then by fire. Of vital significance at this point are two
statements by
6
he can cognize spiritual things.
Evolution will thus transform him, and nothing else will.
Using astrological bases for
portraying cosmic truths, the ancients localized the birth of the natural man
in the zodiacal house of Virgo and that of the spiritual man in the opposite
house of Pisces. These then were the houses of the two mothers of life. The
first was the Virgin Mother (Virgo), the primeval symbol of the Virgin Mary
thousands of years B.C. Virgo gave man his natural birth by water and became
known as the Water-Mother; Pisces (the Fishes by name) gave him his
birth by the Fish and was denominated the Fish-Mother. The virgin mothers are
all identified with water as symbol and their various names, such as Meri,
Mary, Venus (born of the sea-foam), Tiamat, Typhon and Thallath (Greek for
"sea") are designations for water. On the other side there are the
Fish Avatars of Vishnu, such as the Babylonian Ioannes, or Dagon, and the
Assyrian goddess Atergatis was called "the Fish-Mother." Virgo stood
as the mother of birth by water, or the birth of man the first, of the earth,
earthy; Pisces stood as the mother of birth by spirit or fire, or the birth of
man the second, described by
There must now be brought out an
unrevealed significance of the fish symbol in the zodiac and in mythical
religion. It is of astonishing import. Water is the type of natural birth
because all natural birth proceeds in and from water. All first life originated
in the sea water. The fish is a birth in and from the water, and it stands
patently as the generic type of organic life issuing out of inorganic! The fish
typifies life embodied in a physical organic structure. Organic life is born
out of the water, and is the first birth, child of the water-mother. And if
organic life is in turn to become mother, its child will be mind and spiritual
consciousness, son of the fish-mother! In brief, water is the mother of natural
physical being, and organic structure becomes the later mother of divine mind.
Now, strangely enough, water is the
type of another thing which is still more germinal of life, namely, matter.
Matter is the virgin mother of all life in the aboriginal genesis. All things
are generated in the womb of primordial matter, the "old genetrix" of
Egyptian mythology. And it is by a consideration of the nature of matter and
its evolution
7
that we are enabled to arrive at
last at the true meaning of the double motherhood of life. For oddly enough,
matter is seen to exist in two states, in each of which it becomes mother of
life, at two different levels. Primordial matter, the sea of (to us) empty
space, is the first mother of all living forms. This is the primal "abyss
of the waters" in Genesis. The Latin word for "mother" is
our very word "matter," with one "t" left out--mater. And
how close to mater is water! And organic structure is the second
mother, parent of spiritual mind.
The ancient books always grouped the
two mothers in pairs. They were called "the two mothers" or sometimes
the "two divine sisters." Or they were the wife and sister of the
God, under the names of Juno, Venus, Isis, Ishtar, Cybele or Mylitta. In old
8
Nephthys, the second mother, the
immediate incubator and gestator of its manifest expression. One might
paraphrase this situation by saying that a human child is first conceived in
the love, or mind, of its parents, and later born from the womb of its physical
mother. Thus life has two births and must of necessity have two mothers. Life
is spiritually conceived and materially born. Or, man may be said to be born as
a natural creature from spirit into matter, and born later as a spiritual god
when he emerges from his baptism in the water of the body and re-enters the
bosom of his Father. Or, finally, he is born first as man, by water; and reborn
later as god, by fire. And the first birth was depicted as taking place on the
western side of the zodiac, in the house or womb of the Virgin Mother, Virgo,
because in the west the sun, universal symbol of spiritual fire, descended into
organic matter in its setting, or incarnation. So man is born as natural man on
the west, to be regenerated as spiritual man on the east. Spirit’s descent on
the west makes it man; its resurrection on the east, like the summer sunrise,
makes it deity again. This is the death and resurrection of the god in all
religions. It is incarnation and return to spirit. It is the descent of the
Messiah into
Further scrutiny of such data brings
to light links of connection with the Bible. The chief one is found in the
symbol of bread in connection with both Virgo and Pisces. Pisces is the house
of the Fishes by name, but it is not commonly known that Virgo in astrological
symbology was the house of Bread. This is indicated by several items of ancient
typology. Many centuries ago in the precession of the equinoxes, the end of the
year was marked by the position of the great Dog-Star Sirius, mighty celestial
symbol of the divinity in man. Precisely at
9
down from heaven, that if a man eat
of it he shall hunger no more." Jesus broke a loaf into fragments and gave
to his disciples, saying that it was his body, broken for them.
We now have Virgo established as the
house of Bread and Pisces as the house of Fish. But the characterization of the
two houses must be brought along to a more specific evolutionary reference.
What are these "houses," thus delineated? They are, as at first, the
two states of matter, but now to be taken in immediate reference to the life of
man on earth. They are in the final stage of the meaning man’s body itself,
which consists of matter in both its invisible and its visible forms. For man
has a natural body and a spiritual body. Man’s body itself houses the two
mothers. The body is this double house of Bread and of Fish.
And the next link is seen when it is
considered that this physical body is for the soul the house of death and in
its regenerative phase, the house of rebirth. It is the house into which the
spirit descends to its partial obscuration in the darkness of the grave of
matter, into the night of death, or incarnation, out of which it is to arise in
a new birth or resurrection on the opposite side of the cycle. A significant
passage from the Book of the Dead recites: "Who cometh forth from
the dusk, and whose birth is in the house of death"--referring to the
incarnating soul. In a spiritual sense the soul "dies" on entering
the body in incarnation, but has a new birth in it as it later resurrects from
it. The body is therefore the house of his death and rebirth, or the place of
his crucifixion and resurrection.
And the Egyptians had a name for the
body as the locus of these transformations, which carry the central meaning of
all theologies. This name now rises out of the dim mists of ancient Egyptian
books to enlighten all modern Bible comprehension. This city of the body, where
the sun of soul sank to its death on the cross of matter, to rearise in a new
birth, was called the city of the sun, or in Greek,
The name is obviously made up of NU,
the name for the mother heaven, or empty space, or abyss of nothingness, and
Alpha privative, meaning, as in thousands of words, "not." A-NU would
then mean
10
"not-nothingness," or a
world of concrete actuality, the world of physical substantial manifestation.
Precisely such a world it is in which units of virginal consciousness go to
their death and rise again. A-NU is then the physical body of man on earth. The
soul descends out of the waters of the abyss of the NUN, or space in its
undifferentiated unity, which is the sign and name of all things negative. The
NUN is indeed our "none." Life in the completeness of its unity is
negative. To become positively manifest it must differentiate itself into
duality, establish positive-negative tension, and later split up into untold
multiplicity. This brings out the significance of the Biblical word
"multiply." Life can not manifest itself in concrete forms until it
multiplies itself endlessly. Unit life of deity must break itself up into
infinite fragments in order to fill empty space with a multitude of worlds and
beings of different natures. The primal Sea or Mother must engender a
multitudinous progeny, to spawn the limitless shoals of organic fish-worlds.
This is the meaning of the promise given to Abraham, that his seed should multiply
till it filled the earth with offspring countless as the sands of the
seashore. And if life was symboled by bread, as the first birth, and by fish,
as the second, then we might expect to find in old religious typology the
allegory of a Christ figure multiplying loaves and fishes! Are we
surprised to find that the Gospel Jesus does this very thing, multiplying the
fish loaves and two small fishes to feed a multitude!
This is astonishing enough in all
conscience, but it yields in wonder to the next datum of Comparative Religion
which came to our notice as a further tie between the Bible and antecedent
Egyptian mythology. Who can adequately measure the seriousness of the challenge
which this item of scholarship presents to Gospel historicity? For a discovery
of sensational interest came to light when a passage was found in the Book
of the Dead which gave to Anu the characteristic designation, "the
place of multiplying bread"! Here in the long silent tomes of old
Egypt was found the original, the prototype, of the miracle of the loaves and
the fishes in the Gospels of Christianity. And a meaning never before
apprehended had to be read into this New Testament wonder. At last we were
instructed to catch in the miracle the sense that the physical body, as A-NU,
was the place where the corpus of the Christ’s deific power was broken into an
infinite number of fragments and distributed out among a multitude of
creatures, enhungered after
11
a three-days’ fast, or deprivation
of the food of spiritual life in their sojourn in the three kingdoms, the
mineral, vegetable and animal, before reaching the plane of mind. Here are all
the elements of the inner meaning of the Christian Eucharist: the broken but
multiplied fragments of the body of the god, distributed to feed hungry
humanity. And as humanity is composed of twelve groups of divine conscious
units, there were gathered up twelve baskets of fragments! And this episode of
the Christ’s ostensible life is found to be Egyptian in origin and meaning and
symbolic in character!
But new implications arise and lead
us on to more startling disclosures. The Hebrews came along and appropriated
Egyptian material. They picked up the name ANU and fitting it back into its
zodiacal setting as Virgo, they called it the "house of Bread." This
required their adding to ANU their word for "house," which, as anyone
knows, is Beth. This yields us Beth-Anu. Now it is a fact of common
philological knowledge that the ancient Greek and Egyptian "U" is
rendered as "Y" when the words are brought over into English. The
"U" became a "Y," and Beth-Anu now stands before us as the
Bethany of the Gospels! Bethany is thus just the sign of Virgo, as the
"house of Bread," the home of the great star Spica, the head of
wheat!
But let us say "house of
Bread" in ordinary Hebrew. What further astonishment strikes us here, as
we find it reads Beth-Lehem (Lechem, Lekhem), for lechem, lekhem, is
bread in everyday Hebrew. The Christ was born in Bethany or Bethlehem, the
astrological "house of Bread." (Later it seems that the two signs,
Virgo and Pisces, and their symbols, bread and fish, were almost
interchangeably confused or commingled in the symbolic imagery. This was
natural, since the two signs represented the same body of man in its two
aspects of dying and being reborn, and the two processes are confusedly
interblended.)
If Pisces is then the
"house" in which the Christ in man comes to his birth, it is
pertinent to ask if there are evidences in the Bible or Christianity that Jesus
was colored with the fish typology. Here we encounter material enough to
provide another nine-days’ wonder. For we find the Gospel Jesus marked with
many items of the Piscean symbology. He picks his twelve disciples from the
ranks of fishermen (in Egypt they were as well carpenters, reapers, harvesters,
sailors, rowers, builders, masons, potters, etc.); he told Peter to find the
gold in the fish’s mouth; he performed the miraculous draught of fishes; he de-
12
clared that he would make them
"fishers of men." In the catacombs under Rome the symbol of the two
fishes crossed was displayed on the Christ’s forehead, at his feet, or on a
plate on the altar before him. And the Romans for several centuries dubbed the
early Christians Pisciculi, or "Little Fishes," members of the
"fish-cult." And the Greeks denominated the Gospel Jesus as Ichthys,
the Fish. All this fish symbolism can not be explained away as sheer incident
material. It is the product of ancient custom, which figured the Christs under
the symbolism of the reigning sign of the zodiac, according to the precession
of the equinoxes.
And yet another surprising
correlation comes to view. The Christ, as it has here been delineated, is the
offspring or creation of a conception of deific Mind, first in the inner bosom
of spiritual matter, then in organic bodily structure. Primeval space, we have
seen, was called in Egypt the NUN, or the Waters of the Nun. All Bible students
recognize a familiar ring in the phrase "Joshua, Son of Nun." But so
far has ignorance and obscurantism gone with its deadly work in Christian
literalism that hardly anyone knows with definiteness that Joshua is just a
variant name for Jesus. The phrase is actually written in some old documents as
"Jesus, Son of Nun." At any rate Joshua is just Jesus, no less. So
here is the Christ, called Jesus, son of the aboriginal space, or the NUN. But
the wonder increases when we turn to the Hebrew alphabet and find that while
"M" is called and spelled "Mem" and means
"water," "N" is called and spelled "Nun" and
means--of all things--"Fish"! Jesus, then, is son of Pisces, the
Fish-sign, as he indeed is in the Gospels themselves.
And Horus, the Egyptian Christ, who
is identical with the Jesus of the Gospels in some one hundred and eighty
particulars, performed at Anu a great miracle. He raised his father Osiris from
the dead, calling unto him in the cave to rise and come forth. Anu, as we have
seen, became Bethany of the Gospels; and it was at Bethany that Jesus raised
Lazarus from death! And who was Lazarus? Here the greatest of all the marvels
in this chain of comparative data unfolds under our eyes. According to Budge
and other eminent Egyptologists the ancient designation of Osiris was ASAR. But
the Egyptians invariably expressed reverence for deity by prefixing the
definite article "the" to the names of their Gods. Just as Christians
say, or should say, the Christ, they said: the Osiris. It will be
found that the article connoted deity in an-
13
cient usage. Our definite article,
"the" is the root of the Greek word theos, God; the Spanish
article, masculine, "el," is the Hebrew word for God; and the
Greek masculine article, "ho," is a Chinese word for deity. To
say the Osiris was equivalent to saying Lord Osiris. When the Hebrews
took up the Egyptian phrases and names they converted the name of "the
Osiris" or "Lord Osiris" directly into their own vernacular, and
the result was "El-Asar." Later on the Romans, speaking Latin, took
up the same material that had come down from revered Egyptian sources and to
"El-Asar" they added the common Latin termination of the second
declension masculine nouns, in which most men’s names ended, namely, "-us";
and the result was now "El-Asar-us." In time the initial
"E" wore off, as the scholars phrase it, and the "s" in
Asar changed into its sister letter "z," leaving us holding in our
hands the Lazarus whom Jesus raised at Bethany! To evidence that this
derivation is not a fanciful invention or sheer coincidence the Biblical names
of High Priests may be cited. We find one with the name of El(e)azar and
another by name Azar-iah, "iah" or "jah" being suffixes of
great deific connotation, matching "el." And so we are faced with the
irrefutable evidence of Comparative Religion that Jesus’ raising of Lazarus at
Bethany is but a rescript of the old Egyptian dramatic mystery in which Horus,
the Christ, raised his "dead" father Osiris, or El-Asar-us from the
grave. And the Egyptian recital was in the papyri perhaps 5000 years B.C.
Also at the Egyptian scene were
present the two divine sisters, Isis and Nephthys. An old source-name for Isis
was Meri, basic for the Latin mare, the sea. The Egyptian plural
of Meri was Merti. In Latin feminine form this became Mertae. In
Hebrew it resolved into what was rendered in English as Martha. So even in the
ancient Egyptian transaction there were present the two Maries, or Mary and
Martha, the sisters of Lazarus!
All this sets the stage for the
crowning item in the correspondence. In the Gospel drama John the Baptist bears
the character of the firstborn or natural man, coming first to prepare the
ground or make straight the path for the advent of the spiritual man or Lord
Christ. He would therefore stand as the son of the water-mother, Virgo, and
under the astrological symbolism would be born at the autumn equinox, or in his
mother’s house. On the other side of the cycle of descent and resurrection
Jesus, the Christos, would be the son of the
14
fish-mother, and would be born in
his mother’s house, Pisces. These houses are six months apart astrologically.
The whole edifice of Gospel historicity trembles under the impact of the
strange dramatic circumstance, given in Luke, that the annunciation to
Mary of her impregnation by the Holy Ghost came when John the Baptist was six
months in Elizabeth’s womb. The natural man, having covered the "six
months" between his birth and the date of his quickening into spiritual
status in the evolutionary cycle, was thus quickened, or leaped in his mother’s
womb, when the time for the birth, or advent, of the spiritual Christ had
arrived. The water baptism was to be consummated with the fire at the baptism
of Jesus by John, a fire was kindled in the waters of the Jordan!
St. Paul declares that we come to
birth spiritually only as we die carnally, which means that the quantum of
divine character in us grows in proportion as the quantum of raw nature
declines. As the spiritual man, Jesus, son of Nun, the fish, increases, the
natural man, John, son of Virgo, the Water, must decrease. Astrologically, as a
constellation or star sinks below the horizon in the west, its opposite
constellation would be rising in the east. As John, type of the natural first
birth, went down, Jesus, type of the spiritual second birth, rose on the world.
And, says John the Baptist: "I must decrease as he must increase"!
.
. . . . . .
On the analogy, might one venture to
predict that a new day of brotherhood in human society may be about to dawn, as
the "six months’" reign of a degrading literal interpretation of the
Sacred Scriptures goes down to desuetude and the day-star of a transfiguring
spiritual interpretation rises in the east?
15
Chapter 1
TRAGEDY
DIES IN LAUGHTER
Little could the ancient
mythologists and sages have foreseen that the "fabulous narrations"
which their genius devised to cloak high truth would end by plaguing the mind
of the Western world with sixteen centuries of unconscionable stultification.
They could not possibly imagine that their allegorical constructions to
dramatize spiritual truth would so miscarry from their hidden intent as to cast
the mental life of half the world for ages under the cloud of the most
grotesque superstition known to history. Nor could they have dreamed that the
gross blindness and obtuseness of later epochs would cite these same
marvelously ingenious portrayals as the evidence of childish crudity on the
part of their formulators. Who could have suspected that a body of the most
signal instrumentalities for conveying and preserving deep knowledge ever
devised by man would become the means of centuries of mental enslavement?
Nothing more clearly evidences the
present age’s loss of fixed moorings in philosophical truth than the
inconsistency of its attitudes toward the sacred scriptures of antiquity. The
general mind, indoctrinated by priestcraft, regards them as infallible
revelations and holds them as fetishes, which it were a sacrilege to challenge;
while theological scholarship hedges from pious veneration of them over to
outright skepticism of their divine origin, swinging more recently to a view
which takes them to be the simple conceptions of men just emerging from cave
and forest barbarism. The character of divine dictation and absolute wisdom assigned
to them on the one thesis has yielded to that of ignorant speculation of
primitive folk on the other. That there is a possible truer characterization of
them lying midway between the extravagances of these two extreme views has not
seemed to come through to intelligence at any time. It has not occurred to
students of religion that ancient scripts are the work neither of Supreme Deity
on the one
17
side, nor of groping infantile
humanity on the other, but that their production must be sought in a region
intermediate between the two. They came neither from supernal Deity nor from common
humanity, but from humanity divinized! They were the output of normal
humans graduating to divine or near-divine status, St. Paul’s "just men
made perfect." Their divinity is therefore not transcendent and exotic,
and their humanity is not crude and doltish. They bear the marks, therefore, of
human sagacity exalted to divine mastership.
When a student graduates creditably
from a college he is presumed to have acquired a mastery over the field of
knowledge covered in his course. Human life is a school, and why should not its
graduates be presumed to have gained mastery over the range of knowledge which
it covers, and to be able to write authoritatively upon it? Humans must at some
time attain the goal, the prize of the high calling of God in Christly
illumination, the crown of glorious intelligence. Life’s school issues no
diploma of graduation without attainment, for the graduation is the
attainment. We have here the ground for the only sane acceptance of the ancient
scriptures as books of accredited wisdom. We are neither asked to believe them
inscribed by the finger of omnipotent Deity, nor forced to attribute them to
the undeveloped brains of primitives. They can be seen as the products of the
sage wisdom garnered by generations of men who had finally risen to clear
understanding. They are the literary heritage bequeathed by men grown to the
stature of divinity. Their veneration by the world for long centuries, even
carried to the extreme of outrageous sycophancy, attests an indestructible
tradition of their origination from sources accredited as divine and
infallible. Their successful hold on the popular mind for many ages bespeaks
also the unshakeable foundations of their wisdom. They have withstood
consistently the test of generations of human experience. Their wisdom holds
against life; it rings true. And it is all the more precious to us because of
its authorship by men of our own evolution, since thereby it does not miss
immediate pertinence to our life.
Both the conventional views of Bible
authorship have militated against the possible high service of the scriptures
to mankind. The theory of their divine dictation to "holy men of old"
has led to the abject surrender of the rational mind before their impregnable
fortress of direct assertion, its hypnotization by a fetish, and the crippling
of its native energies. The theory of their production by early crudity tends
18
to the disparagement of the value
and validity of their message. The other view here advanced preserves their
venerated authority while it brings their authorship from alleged Cosmic
Divinity back to men of earth. It saves us from the fatuous claim that
"God" took time out to dictate a volume of absolute verity for the
inhabitants of a minor planet amongst millions of trillions of such worlds.
Relieving us of the necessity of asserting that Supreme Deity went into the
book publishing business on this globe and took advantage of his commanding
position to write the planet’s "best seller," it preserves mental
integrity by enabling us to assign scriptural authorship to human agency, where
alone it is acceptable. It is understandable that evolved men, with vision
opened to knowledge of the laws of life, would indite sage tomes for the
enlightenment of those less advanced. In any case the Bibles are here; they
must be accounted for. The phenomenon of their existence among the nations,
their hoary age, their escape from destruction through the centuries, the ineradicable
tradition of their divine origin and authority, their almost universal
veneration, must all find some factual ground of explanation. The theory
offered in refutation of the two conventional ones seems the only one that
provides such a rational and acceptable basis. And since the belief in their
sacredness generally persists, it can not be regarded as less than momentous
that the world should know of a surety that, while these revered relics are not
the voice of the personified Cosmos, neither are they the mere speculative
romancing of cavemen or scholastics. They are the sure word of perfected
wisdom.
There was a time, then, in early
human history, when enlightened men possessed true knowledge, the passport to
wisdom. Clear and concise answers to the profoundest problems of philosophy
were known. In so far as the human intellectual faculty is capable of it, an
understanding of the mystery and riddle of life itself and the laws of its
evolutionary unfolding, was achieved by men who, as Hermes says, had been
"reborn in mind." Philosophy was no mere "speculative
enterprise," or tilting at logical windmills; it was a statement of the
fundamental archai, or basic principles, of the science of being. It
formed the groundwork for the elevation of theology to its true place as the
King of Sciences, or the Kingly Science. Together philosophy and theology held
the throne in the mental life of mankind; and justly so, for a reason which
modern thought would do well to consider: they must ever be the ultimate science
because they motivate finally the use we
19
make of all other sciences! They
hold final answers to all life’s problems. They are the determination of all
human action in the end. They alone can direct man finally to the path of good,
for by no other means can he learn to know what constitutes the good. The sore
need of the world today is the restoration of philosophy, to supply the proper
motivation and end of action.
Though zealously guarded from the
unworthy by its accredited custodians, knowledge was extant in the ancient day.
Modern zeal for publicity finds it hard to understand why it was so sedulously
kept esoteric. Briefly--for the full reason is a lengthy matter--a thing so
precious, the distillation of ages of experience and the deposit of many lives
of painful earning, could not be given out loosely to the undisciplined rabble
to be violated and despoiled. Yet it was withheld from no worthy aspirant. No
bars of bigotry or persecution interdicted its free culture. The Societies in
which it was secretly pursued were honored by kings and the populace alike.
That halcyon age passed, that
priceless legacy of knowledge was threatened with extinction, its pursuit was
forbidden, its devotees assailed and exterminated; and for more than fifteen
centuries the Occidental world has muddled through its age-to-age existence in
nearly total ignorance of the fact that antiquity held, in its philosophy and
theology, an adequate answer to the great interrogatory, the Sphinx riddle of
human life.
The gift and then the loss of primal
wisdom are the two most momentous events in human history. This age will be
spectator to the third most significant event--the Renaissance of Ancient
Culture. The plans of demi-gods and divine men, interrupted for fifteen
centuries of the Dark Ages, will move forward again toward destined goals.
This age faces the denouement of a
drama the like of which has not been unrolled in world history before and will
hardly be repeated in aeons. Tragedy and comedy being copiously admixed in
mortal existence, the astounding spectacle to which the world will shortly
awake will exhibit untold calamity and the ludicrous conjoined in incredible
fashion. We are destined soon to pass from a stunning sense of tragic loss to a
world-echoing burst of laughter. The sting of our realization of our
duo-millennial loss will melt away under the dawning recognition of our
previous unbelievable stupidity. We are in a little time to be made acutely
aware of a situation that will become the butt of hollow
20
mirth for ages to come. Other
egregious follies of history can be accepted or extenuated to the point of
being condoned and forgotten. But this colossal ineptitude, prolonged over
sixteen centuries, can not escape being laughed at for centuries more. A joke
owes its character to the miscarriage of the intended sense into something
ludicrously different. This denouement will stand as the historical joke of the
ages. No less than this quantity of hilarity can balance the weight of the
tragedy which loads the joke at the other end. For the ludicrously different
direction in which the intended sense of the great mythical religions and
dramatic rituals of the past took its perverted course entailed as a
consequence the greatest of all historical tragedies,--the frightful chapter of
religious bigotry and persecution. This worst of all forms of man’s inhumanity
to man was bred out of the miscarriage of the concealed meaning of the ancient
spiritual myth. The transaction carried the form of a joke, but it also carried
the substance of the most appalling terrorism in history. And this most
calamitous of all blunders was the mistaking of religious myth, drama and
allegory for veridical history!
The promise of our coming awakening
lies in the progress made and to be made in the study of Comparative Religion,
Comparative Mythology and Comparative Philology. What they will ere long make
clear to us beyond further dispute is the almost unthinkable fact that for
sixteen centuries the best intelligence of the West took the ancient sages’
Books of Wisdom, which were in all cases the spiritual dramatizations of the
experience of the human soul on earth, for objective historical narratives. The
spectacle that will soon throw a world first into wonder, confusion and dismay,
and then into clownish laughter, is that of a civilization covering one third
of the globe, and boasting itself as the highest in culture in the historical
period, all the while taking its moral and spiritual guidance for an aeon from
a Book or Books, of the true content and meaning of which it never for a moment
has had the slightest inkling.
The superior knowledge vouchsafed
from early graduates in life’s school to disciplined pupils in the Mysteries of
old was transmitted from generation to generation by oral teaching and
preserved only in memory. But later, lest it be lost or corrupted, it was
consigned to writing. Hence came the Sacred Books, Scriptures, Holy Writ, of
antiquity. So highly were they held in the esteem of early men that when in
21
later days their true origin and
character had been forgotten, they were exalted to the position of veritable
fetishes and assigned a quite preternatural source and rating. Regarded as
books of superhuman intelligence, men have in face of them practically set in
abeyance their human reason and bowed to them as the oracles of absolute Truth.
This was natural and to a degree inevitable. But it spelled catastrophe to the
general mental life of man by fixing upon him the basest hypnotization in all
the annals of record, when a literal and historical, instead of a purely
spiritual and typical interpretation of the books was broadcast to general
acceptance. The evidence is mountain high that the taking of ancient ritual
dramas and scriptural myths for objective history and the figures in them for
human persons has been the fountain source of the most abject corruption of
man’s mental forces since the race began.
In mechanical exploit this is an age
of marvel, and credit for this type of achievement should not be withheld. In
study of life and its objective powers it has labored with wondrous
accomplishment. In psychological delving into deeper phases of consciousness it
has begun a pursuit long neglected. But in religion and philosophy it is one of
the blindest of ages. It is not overstating the case to say that in these areas
of human enterprise the mind of this era still slumbers in a state of
ineptitude and gross darkness at least a degree or two below that commonly
termed barbaric. At this moment the common mentality of the day, led and fed by
a compactly institutionalized ecclesiastical power, stands committed to ideas
as to the origin, structure, meaning and destiny of life which have not been
surpassed in crudity and chimerical absurdity by the tribes of the forest and
the sea isles. Conceptions in theology having to do with basic realities of
man’s relation to the universe are still presented in pulpits, Sunday Schools
and Theological Seminaries which the uncorrupted native intelligence of
children of eight and ten years shrinks from or accepts with startled
dismay,--to the subsequent confusion of their whole mental integrity. A
"scheme" of explanation of cosmic processes and world design, of
human and angelic relations, of the plan and purport of life itself, is advanced
for popular acceptance, yet is grotesque to common sense and fantastic to
rational thought. Philosophy and religion are still propagated on the basis of
a theology that is received without understanding by the "common
people," entirely repudiated by the intelligentsia and brazenly
22
dissembled by the very priesthood
that lips its cantos and its oracles from Sunday to Sunday. In sum it can be
said without the remotest possibility of successful dispute that the general
grasp of the mind of this age on philosophical verity and the truth of life, as
proffered by orthodox religionism, is still steeped in the crassest forms of
dark superstition. And this has been due to the miscarriage of ancient
symbolism.
History would seem to present a
pattern of retrogressive current if it can be shown that this late epoch
grovels in a mire of semi-barbaric philosophical grossness from which a former
period was free. Degeneracy must have set in at some distant time and swept
onward to this day. And such a phenomenon must have had its due cause. A great
work of a learned author some years ago pointed to the approaching
"decline of the West." What has not been seen, however, is that the
West has long been in decline, is at a low stage of decay, and has not risen
out of the murks of the Dark Ages. This has come in the wake of causes long
operative in the world situation, which have been overlooked or failed of
discovery through an egregious obscuration of the vision of scholars since the
early centuries. And if this failure of insight is not to be attributed to
stupidity that is in itself beyond understanding, then it becomes necessary for
the historian of these things to posit for it another cause, one that casts the
dark shadow of sinister motive over the whole course of that historical
enterprise in which sinister motive is of all places most unpardonable.
Corruption in politics or in economic or social life can be understood in
relation to the imperfection of human nature, and in a measure pardoned. But
designed corruption in religion is shattering to the very foundations of human
aspiration. It shocks and paralyzes fundamental urges to sincerity. It weights
the human spirit with the hopelessness of its effort to conquer imperfection.
Dishonesty and insincerity in worldly dealings may entail disaster of greater
or minor degree. In religion they are never less than fatal. There is one
domain in which untruth is insupportable, that field of the human soul’s
endeavor of which Truth is the very substance and being,--religion.
Whether stupidity or sinister design
prove to have been the cause of the loss of true original meaning must be left
to the historical sequel to disclose. And whether the cause of the perpetuation
of rank superstition in the present day of alleged enlightenment is to be laid
at the door of ignorance or knavery or a combination of both, must likewise
23
be determined as time moves on. It
is certain that both the primal and the present causes of nescience are
kindred, if not identical.
It is the purpose of the present volume
to set forth to the modern mind the extent of the wreckage which splendid
ancient wisdom suffered at the hands of later incompetence. And it is designed
to accomplish this by setting up the sharp contrast between the present
disfigurement and the past glory of the structure. This purpose entails the
task of revealing for the first time the hidden meaning of the body of archaic
scriptures by means of a clear and lucid interpretation of their myths and
allegories, fables and dramas, astrological pictographs and numerological
outlines. It will be at once seen to be a labor of no mean proportions to
convert the entire mass of antique mythology and legend, Biblical graph and
cryptogram, from presumed childish nonsense into an organic corpus of
transcendent scientific significance. It involves the reversal of that mental
process which in the days of early Christianity operated to change myth and
allegory in the first instance over to factual history. As third century
ignorance converted mythical typology to objective history, the task is now to
convert alleged objective history back to mythology, and then to interpret it
as enlightened theology. The almost insuperable difficulty of the project will
consist in demonstrating to an uncomprehending world, mistaught for centuries
and now fixed in weird forms of fantastic belief, that the sacred scriptures of
the world are a thousand times more precious as myths than as alleged
history. It can only be done by showing that as myths they illumine and
exalt the mind to unparalleled clarity, while as assumed history they are
either nonsensical or inconsequential. But centuries of erroneous
indoctrination have so warped and victimized the modern mind that the effort to
restore the scriptures to their primal mythical status will be met with the
objection that the transaction will wipe the Bible and other sacred literature
out of the realm of value altogether. In the common mind this would be to rob
them of worth and significance utterly. So wretchedly has the ancient usage of the
religious myth been misunderstood that the cry, "the Bible only a
myth!", will fall upon the popular ear with all the catastrophic force and
finality of the tolling of a death knell. And no statement that words can
phrase will stand as a more redoubtable testimony to the correctness of this
estimate of the present stupefaction of modern intelligence concerning
religious philosophy than just this reaction. Ridi-
24
cule, contempt and flat rejection
will be the greeting accorded the proclamation that Biblical myth is truer and
more important than Biblical history. Our book aims at nothing less than the
full proof of this contention. It flies directly in the face of the awaiting
scorn of common opinion on the point at issue. Yet nothing is easier than to demonstrate
that Bible material taken as history is the veriest nonsense. Anyone with an
analytic mind and an imagination to convert its narratives into realism can
make it a laughing-stock. The Voltaires, Paines, Ingersols and the freethinkers
have done this successfully enough. But having disproved it as history, they
have not redeemed it as spiritual mythology. The world awaits this work of
interpretation, and only when it is supplied will the full force of the tragic
humor of mistaking drama for history be grasped.
The loss or corruption of the
philosophical interpretation of ancient scriptures precipitated the West into
the Dark Ages, and a main factor in this disaster was a general obscuration of
intelligence concerning the myth. Catastrophe was made the more readily
possible because the rationale of the use of the myth in ancient hands passed
from knowledge. When the recondite suggestiveness of the myth was lost, the
inner essence of esoteric wisdom was dissipated away. Philosophy died out. And,
bereft of its inner soul, the myth came to stand as the mere ghost of itself.
With its hidden significance gone, it read nonsense and caricature. And so it
has stood till this day. The word connotes in the popular mind of the present
something about equivalent to fairy-tale, a fiction little removed from a
"hoax." It is something that is sheer fanciful invention. To declare
a narrative formerly believed to be true "only a myth" is to toss it
out on the rubbish heap as a thing no longer of value. This attitude of mind
toward the myth is itself the sign and seal of the decadence of this age. For
ancient sagacity could hardly have assumed that any succeeding age would prove
so obtuse as to take the outward form of its spiritual allegories for factual
occurrence, or suppose that their formulators believed them to be true
objectively.
To be sure, they are fanciful
creations and entirely fictitious. They are fables of events which, as events,
never happened. The aim was never at any time to deceive anybody. It was never
imagined that anybody would ever "believe" them. Nevertheless the
myth was designed to tell truth of the last importance. Its instrument was
fancy, but its purpose was not falsehood, but sublime truth. Outwardly it was
not
25
true, but at the same time it portrayed
full truth. It was not true for its "characters," but was true for
all mankind. It was only a myth, but it was a myth of something. It used
a false story to relate a true one. While it never happened, it is the type of
all things that have happened and will happen. It is not objective history, but
it embalms the import and substance, the heart’s core, of all human history.
Such authors as Spengler and Lord Raglan have begun to see that the ancients
regarded it of far less importance to catalogue the occurrences of objective
history than to dramatize its inner "spirit." The outward actions of
humans are in the main trivial, because they constitute in the end only a
partial and ephemeral account of whole verity. Ancient literature aimed at something
infinitely higher and more universal. It strove to depict in the myths and
dramas the eternal norms of life experience, which would stand as truth for all
men at any time in evolution. The myths were cryptographs of the great design
and pattern of human history, limning in the large the truth that is only in
fragmentary fashion brought to living enactment in any given set of historical
circumstances. The myth is always truer than history! Only in aeons will
history have caught up with the myth, when it will have unfolded the entire
design of the original mythograph. Hegel indeed essayed to read the features of
a grand cosmic design in the straggling line of actual events. But the myth
already foreshadows the ultimate meaning of history.
Such being the portentous function
of the myth in the early stages of the life of humanity, it becomes in some
degree apparent what blindness must have fallen upon the mental eye of
practically a whole world to have blotted out in little more than a single
century the knowledge of a thing of such vast utility. No matter how
conclusively the data may prove the fact, it will probably remain forever
incomprehensible to unstudied folk that whole bodies of ancient mythology and
spiritual typology, suddenly became metamorphosed into alleged history. And
because it ensued through sheer gaucherie and clumsy loutish dumbness, it will,
as predicted, rise on our horizon as the supreme folly of the ages. When it is
realized that an early gift of divine wisdom, planned to aid the race fight through
the exigencies of its historical evolution, totally miscarried into tragic
nonsense through the simple mistake of taking spiritual allegory for literal
history, a
26
humiliated world will find
difficulty in ridding its memory of this preposterous blunder.
Deprived thus of a legacy of
transcendent knowledge vouchsafed for its instruction, Western humanity has
wound a tortuous path through dangerous terrain that the lost wisdom would have
enabled it to avoid. It has been a journey made without the guiding light that
had been given to render the road more easily passable. Civilization has
floundered in the shoals and quicksands of ignorance. And its contemporary
phase presents the strangest of spectacles,--that of a modern culture boasting
its superiority over any antecedent one, yet admittedly guided in its ethical
life by a Book of which it is now possible to affirm that not the most
rudimentary sense of its message has ever been apprehended. The declaration can
be made and supported that the Bible is still a sealed book. This study will
vindicate that declaration by setting forth the hidden meaning of ancient
scripture for the first time. Gross misinterpretation cannot be seen as such
until its product has been set down alongside a true rendering. The crudeness
and baseness of a literal and historical translation of the sense will only be
brought into glaring light by being held up against a background of the clarity
and dignity of a true spiritual meaning.
The promised interpretation is not
predicated upon the play of a genius superior to that of the accumulated
scholarship and acumen of centuries of religious students and theologians in
Christendom. It was made possible purely by the discovery of clues and
"keys" to the old scriptures hidden deeply in the tomes of ancient
literature, which had escaped the notice of the long line of exegetical
inquirers. If wonder and skepticism arise over the difficulty of understanding
why discovery was made at this epoch and not in so long a time before, the
answer is most probably to be found in the fact that the thousands who failed
approached the study of ancient treasure-tomes with an attitude of mind that
made defeat inevitable, while success came finally through an attitude that, if
it did not of itself guarantee victory, at least opened the door to it. This is
of immense significance and carries a weighty moral connotation with it. With
the scales fallen at last from the eyes of purblind prejudice, it can be
patently enough seen that there was little chance of discovery of the cryptic
burden of ancient books as long as scholars undertook their study with the
ingrained and obstinate assurance that they were the products of primitive
infantilism. Ever thus
27
have the archaic volumes been
approached by Orientalists and Western savants. It is next to unbelievable to
discover in what a rigid posture of predetermined estimate the scrutiny of
antique writings has been undertaken by Western Christian scholars. Even when
the evidence of sage wisdom was present under the eye, the relentless force of
the fixation could never rest content until it had read the imputation of
simpleness and crudity into the text. If early literature did not manifestly
read as folly, it had to be made to do so. The inviolable presupposition in the
case was that by no possibility could it be admitted that the ancients knew a
modicum of what we know today. If it was to be granted that the seers of yore
knew life truly and profoundly, it would be gall to modern intellectual pride,
and the very walls of boasted modern superiority would be breached. The content
of old scripts, mysterious and haunting as it often appeared, had to be
explained on the basis of primitive naïveté of mind. By no right were the
supposed aborigines of remote times entitled to the presumption of high
knowledge or a scientific envisagement of the world. No thesis found in modern
view could account for the prevalence of developed culture in the early stages
of the chart of progressive evolution as at present conceived. The assignment
of puerile nescience to the civilizations of even three and four thousand years
ago had to be vindicated at all costs. The rating of primitives for early men
had to be maintained.
Little wonder, then, that a
literature scanned with such a blighting spirit never yielded its buried light.
Supercilious contempt blinded the eyes of inquiry and closed the mind to all
discovery. Obdurately refusing to admit the possibility of the presence of
knowledge, no amount of search would reveal it. All the surer was inquiry
doomed to failure in this field, when the most exalted genius the world ever
knew had been at pains to disguise the outward appearance of that knowledge. It
was only when at last the arcane writings were inspected with the eager spirit
of genuine seeking and the reverent assurance of their holding precious mines
of instruction, that the open sesame unlocked a hoard of hidden wealth.
If it shatters current orthodoxy in
science or philosophy to establish the fact that archaic man possessed supernal
sapiency, then shattering there must be. The thing cannot be obviated. It is a
fact that out of the night of antiquity looms the giant light of transcendent
intelligence on the part of numerous sages. At a period remote enough to be
con-
28
temporary with the times
incorrigibly marked as "primitive" by historians, the ancients
possessed books of such exalted spiritual and intellectual content as to lie
yet beyond the comprehension of vaunted modern intelligence! Modern pride must face
the situation: "primitive" people already possessed books which by no
possibility could have been produced by "primitive" mentality. Books
which only sages could have written bespeak the presence of sages on the scene.
And sages there were. Popular
academic theory must perforce revise its postulates in the case. It has
stubbornly refused to admit the operation of a law of life in this situation
which it sees at work everywhere else in the realm of genetic procedure.
Universal observation yields the truth that infant life is everywhere parented.
The period of helpless infancy is safeguarded by parental oversight. The elder
generation is at hand to protect, nurture and instruct the young of every kind.
Modern theory admits the prevalence of this rule everywhere--except strangely
in the biological history of the human race as a unit. Granting the sway of the
principle in the case of the individual, animal or human, it has refused to
predicate its governance over the early life of humanity as an entity. But the
presence of sapient writings, the evidence of great lost arts, and the remains
of structures surpassing present achievement, attest incontrovertibly the
uniform working of the law of parenthood here as elsewhere. The human race was
parented. It was not left to struggle through its helpless infancy without
guardianship. Ancient legend in the mass bears this out. Prehistoric lore teems
with the stories of heroes and men of divine stature, demi-gods and sons of God
who mingled with humanity, and who left codes of laws and manuals of
civilization that manifest a mastery not possible of acquirement by primitives.
Hermes, Orpheus, Cadmus, Zoroaster, Hammurabi, Manu, Buddha, Laotse, Moses, and
even Plato and Pythagoras, hover in the dim light of remote legendary times as
figures transcending normal human stature, and leaving behind writings that
have been held up as the norm of perfect wisdom and conduct down the centuries.
The Laws of Manu have stood for ages as the prototype of all legal and social
codes since formulated. Hermes, Orpheus taught the nations agriculture,
writing, astronomy, language, religion, philosophy and science, the saga runs.
Hence there is posited for the first
time a natural and competent answer to the great and insistent question of the
authorship of
29
primeval books overpassing even
present capability. The authorship of the sages removes these books at once
from the category of merely human speculation and places them securely in the
place of authority and authenticity. They were the products, not of early man’s
groping tentatives to understand life, but of evolved men’s sagacious knowledge
and matured experience. On no other ground can their perennial durability and
universal power be accounted for. The early races obviously received and
treasured these documents with the same high reverence with which the human
child receives the codes and rules of conduct first handed down to it by its
parents, who stand to it in loco Dei. If the primal world-reverence is
found wanting in certain groups today, it is due not so much to the fact that
the books have proven of unsound merit, but to the failure to know what they
actually say. They are uninterpreted to this moment. They could not be scorned
if their intrinsic meaning was known. The republication of that lost meaning
will restore the bibles to universal veneration, but not as fetishes.
Incidentally all speculation of
scholars as to the date of the personal authorship of the Bible books or other
ancient documents of the kind must be declared to be pure and simple
impertinence. Nobody knows or can know what hand first set these verses to
paper, or at what epoch. The books are of unknown antiquity. They were extant
thousands of years B.C. When they passed from oral impartation to written form
none can say. Hundreds of volumes proclaim Moses to have been the writer of the
Pentateuch. Yet the last of the five books describes Moses’ death and
burial, and adds that not in a long cycle since his day (estimated by scholars
at six hundred years at least) hath there been found one like unto him in
wisdom and piety in all Israel! To ascribe any of the Bible books to any named
writer is to trespass on the ground of folly. Indeed it is possible to assert
that, in the common meaning of the term, they were never "written" at
all. No man sat down and composed them out of his thought or his knowledge.
They were the outlines of a great universal tradition formulated by the
accumulated wisdom of those first "parents" or "guardians"
of infant humanity, and, like the thousands of lines of the great Homeric
poems, which had been held purely in the memory of the Hellenes for five
hundred years, were finally committed by scribes to written form. Thus came
those set formulations of systematic knowledge, cosmic data and moral
30
codes, that have survived the test
of time and still stand as sacred commitments. Their material presents the
substantial truth of life, and not primitive man’s erratic guessings. And
sixteen hundred years of the most consecrated effort to study them has left their
meaning still unrevealed.
But the Western mind has begun to
delve into the fathomless spiritual philosophies of the ancient East. The
renaissance of Oriental thought, which was first quickened by Schopenhauer in
Europe and by Emerson in America, is now sweeping Occidental religious
consciousness to a new and lofty height of vision and uplift. The eminent
psychologist, C. G. Jung, declares this movement to be the most significant
taking place in the thought life of today. The philosophy that could give an expansive
illumination to a brain like Emerson’s is proving a fount of light and
incentive to millions more at present.
The mask of literary disguise is
being slowly lifted from the face of ancient scripture, and what has been
gratuitously assumed to be the product of primitive naïveté and ignorance is
now seen to be the many-colored cloak of recondite wisdom. Even so apparently
quixotic a construction as the body of Greek myths, which has gained for its
originators the imputed status of moronism, bewildering and baffling the world
for two millennia, is to be revealed as perhaps the most lucid presentment of
philosophical truth ever given to the world. The light so long buried under a
bushel of myths is beginning to shine through. Not only do they bear the impress
of a genius able to portray mighty truth in fable and fiction, but they
register an equal skill in artful concealment. Their employment of the craft of
disguise has carried them so far beyond us that we have been gulled into taking
the mask for the reality. The devisers of the myths were master dramatists and
poets. With such deft touches did they weave the pattern of cosmic, mundane,
spiritual and physical truth through their myriad narratives of gods and men,
mermaids, harpies, satyrs, centaurs, stags and boars, labyrinths, rivers, trees
and stars, that not the most outlandish detail of their fabrications can be
ignored without the loss of some signal link of meaning. Generations of
scholars, chained in the cave of orthodoxy with their backs to the light, have
perennially scoffed at the idea that the myths might be fanciful portrayals of
esoteric truth. And we have charged the most enlightened races in history, the
Greeks, Chaldeans and Egyptians, with possessing the mentality of immature
children.
31
We accused them of taking their
three-headed dogs, their fire-breathing dragons, their griffins, naiads,
Cyclops, Circes and Medusas for sure-enough actualities. We were sure we could
afford to laugh at the simpleness of a people who ascribed the summer’s drought
to Phaëthon’s losing control of the horses of Apollo’s sun-chariot. But modern
presumption must brace itself for a rude jolt, when it shortly transpires that
not one in a hundred of our population will be able to grasp the involved and
profound signification of the Phaëthon myth even when it has been clearly set
forth. Face to face with what we could not understand in ancient literature, we
assumed that the unintelligibility was due to ancient unintelligence in the
construction. That it might be due to our unintelligence in the
comprehension was unthinkable. We could only hold our ground of supposed
enlightenment by shifting our ignorance to the ancients. If the myths made no
sense to us, it was proof that there was no sense in them. But history is soon
to reverse judgment. The comics in the case will be found to be modern, not
ancient. Not they, but we, will be adjudged the simple-minded children lacking
insight. And we will see ourselves at last, clowns and buffoons, laughing and
grimacing in hideous mockery of a treasure the value of which we cannot grasp.
Perhaps there will be wanting to us
the powers of discernment needed to catch the grandeur of arcane systems of
philosophy under their covering of allegory. Habits of thought and postures of
mind hostile to the presuppositions of the archaic knowledge will not easily
adjust themselves to new views. The attempt at a full revelation of buried
meaning will come with a shock to current theological vanity, to the pride of
present knowledge and to the complacency of the mechanistic cast of modern
thought. But the release of the hidden significance of the world scriptures at
this epoch may be destined to achieve our salvation from threatened social
catastrophe. For the ancient wisdom held the prescription for both individual
sanity and a righteous social order. Folly flourished only by grace of its
despoliation.
The release of the enlightenment
potentially held in the old books will challenge many traditional habitudes of
mind and most of the lingering relics of theological inculcation. It will
republish the postulates of ancient knowledge that have been lost or
discredited and establish them once more as the principia of understanding for
both the
32
phenomena of life and the deep lore
of the scriptures. Some of these, long without the pale of orthodox acceptance,
will strangely have been found corroborated by late scientific discovery. The
philosophical method was that of deduction, since it conceived life as
unfolding in the outer order the pattern of things innately involved in its
inner heart. The conclusion reached by evolutionists in present studies is that
"evolution is centrifugal, developing outward from within the geneplasm,
rather than centripetal, developing inward from without the geneplasm," in
the words of Henry Fairfield Osborn. Another late finding is that
"evolution is creational rather than variational. Variation of the species
is the result of an original creative pattern within the geneplasm which is
there from the very beginning." And a third pronouncement demolishes
completely the theories of materialism, affirming that "evolution is
prot-empirical rather than meta-empirical; the organs developing before there
is any actual need for them rather than after the need for them arises."
Nature already carries in her womb the embryo of that which will come to form.
Life works ahead to an end premeditated in the beginning, so that Aristotle’s
scheme of "entelechy" is a sound principle in philosophy. Plato told
us twenty-four hundred years ago that life is weaving on the field of
manifestation the design of the archetypal ideas in the Cosmic Mind. Modern
science and the clear interpretation of the arcane philosophy of the past will
together restore Plato to his seat on the throne of mind.
The debate on teleology has been
long and acrimonious. Negative conclusions have been fostered and apparently
affirmed by the shortness of our perspective. The immensely extended outline of
evolution envisioned by the cosmology of old will enable the mind to see the
working of design. Mr. Clarence Darrow asks skeptically if the Lisbon
earthquake was designed. As well might a colony of ants ask if the destruction
of their burrow as we spade our garden was designed. Neither to the citizens of
Lisbon nor to the ants in the garden would the philosophy of design be
comforting. But we know that the digging was designed, not to destroy the
ant-city, but to prepare the garden. So we may equally well know that the
processes of world building were designed, not to destroy Lisbon, but to adjust
the earth’s crust properly about it. The designed activities progressing in two
different worlds happened to clash, man being no more intelligent about the
plans of cosmic beings than the ant about human intentions. And as
33
man cannot change his larger designs
always for the convenience of ants in certain situations, or indeed may not
even be aware that his designs jeopardize their lives, so neither presumably
can higher beings alter their operations for the temporary advantage of little
man. Neither man nor nature has yet learned how to work on in evolution without
the element of some sacrifice of life. It does not impugn design in the course
and speed of an automobile that a child has been unfortunate enough to drift
into its path.
Centuries of world life have been
lived all awry because the philosophical insight into the structure of
archetypal design has been dulled and obscured. The outlines of the pattern of
evolution formulated in the beginning by Cosmic Mind were known of old, but
lost in the long interim. The world being the crystallized projection of a
divine thought-form and history the slow filling out of the lines of the
pattern, what man can know of the structure of the original ideation, or the
Great Plan, becomes of incontestable importance. This was the base and content
of the Ancient Philosophy. It must be restored to knowledge. Fortunately it has
never been lost beyond recovery, merely lost out of common thought. It was safe
even while unknown, being preserved in the amber of a subtle cryptography.
Ignorance came along and swept out of ken the esoteric purport; but at the same
time it perpetuated the myths and allegories, believing them to be history.
Deluded piety made a hash of the sense of the scriptures, yet all unwittingly
saved them for the advantage of a wiser age.
On the one hand materialism has
ignored the spiritual nature and motivation of the universe; on the other,
ecclesiastical zealotry, blinded by stupid literalism, has rendered religion
ridiculous. The truth must combat untruth on both these fronts, rebuffing a
philosophy that denies the ideal frame of things, and rebuking an eccentric
religionism that distorts early truth into revolting irrationality. To redeem
religion from ignominy it is necessary to stigmatize its historical caricature,
ecclesiasticism. War must be declared on its falsities to vindicate its truth.
Medieval and modern incrustations, excrescences and abnormalities of a hundred
types must be brushed away, if the brilliance of the splendid original creation
of supernal genius is to shine forth again. Plato’s theology and "divine
philosophy" must be vindicated.
34
Chapter II
ECCE
HOMO--ECCE DEUS
The modern zeal to exploit "the
practical" is about one part good philosophy and nine parts sheer fatuity.
The whole matter has been involved in the utmost fog and mental haze. The
groundlessness of current notions of what constitutes "the practical"
is readily disclosed by asking the question: What does modern man do with the
gains which his practical effort has brought to him--wealth, comfort, means,
freedom, competence? They bring him certain satisfactions, no doubt, and the
answer in part is there. But often the satisfactions turn to ashes in his
hands, or melt away as he reaches out to grasp them, or prove hollow soon or
late. Their inadequacy and shallowness attest their futility and give
"practical" philosophy the lie.
The entire question rests on the
determination of what constitutes ultimate values in life itself, and this is
only fixed by an adequate philosophy. To be sure, a basic ingredient in
philosophy is experience, and a philosophy is largely a digest of experience.
But philosophy is finally and inexorably the mind’s grasp of a set of formulas
of meanings which array the data of experience into a meaningful pattern, or
structural design, which design must eventually match the outline of the
archetypal noumenal thought form projected by Cosmic Mind for this area of
creation. Harmony with this immanent pattern is the insistent demand, as
well as the touchstone and seal of truth. The lower mind in man, being a
fragment of cosmic intellect, is by nature keen to recognize and register, by
an expansive pleasure, the concord of its ideas with the overshadowing form of
truth. Some knowledge of the features of this living mosaic is essential to the
final allocation of values, else there will be no criterion other than an
unauthoritative sensual hedonism to determine whether an experience or a
philosophy is good or detrimental. All actions and opinions rate a final
appraisal on the ground of a deposit they leave in consciousness, according as
35
they harmonize or disagree with the
cosmic thought structure that is working to manifestation in the process. They
accord, or not, with the elemental pattern of creation. Deep within is a sense
that registers in the outer mind the thrill of that accord or disagreement. The
acuteness of this barometer of values may be viciously blunted, so that its
registering sense is sadly vitiated. Yet in the end it speaks in the stern
language of pain and discord for violation of its principles, and positive
pleasure for virtuous action. And the final definition of "the
practical" is that which relates the life of man ever closer to the form
and substance of the primordial pattern laid down for human evolution.
Early theology presented the general
cast and outline of the great cosmic plan of creation, in the reflected light
of which mortal mind could frame the more or less definite graph of the
structure of this life on earth. The profound philosophy, then, that rested on
this stratum of basic knowledge brought the offices of the enlightened
intelligence to the aid of the outer and less reliable pragmatic criteria in
the ego’s effort to direct the evolution of the organism. Philosophical
understanding thus in large measure could be made to obviate the toilsome
methodology of trial and error, and both conserve available force and save
valuable time and much suffering. One of the deep principles of the Buddha’s
system was that "right knowledge" must come to save the individual
from pitiable suffering arising from ignorance. If, as he averred, it is a
fundamental truth that ignorance is the cause of sorrow, then knowledge is its
antidote. And all the great religions of antiquity make this assertion. Says
Hermes: "The vice of a soul is ignorance; the virtue of a soul is
knowledge." The Book of Proverbs in the Bible enjoins at length the
prime necessity of getting wisdom, understanding, knowledge. Its preciousness
is set above "all the things that thou canst desire." It is glorified
as an ornament of grace and a crown of life unto its possessor. In this
document it is not placed second to Love or Christly Charity. By an invincible
dialectic Plato and Socrates work out in dialogue after dialogue the
proposition that one cannot be good until one knows what the good thing
is, and even what it is good for. According to Rhys Davids in his Hibbert
Lectures of 1881 on The Origin and Growth of Religions: Buddhism (p.
208), "it is not by chance that the foundation of the higher life, the
gate to the heaven that is to be reached on earth, is placed, not in emotion,
not in feeling, but in knowledge, in the victory over delusions. The
36
moral progress of the individual
depends, according to Buddhism, upon his knowledge. Sin is folly. It is
delusion that leads to crime." An editorial in the New York Times of
June 20, 1938, well says that the hearts of such folks as the German
persecutors of Jewry "are bitter only when their minds are dark," and
cites Voltaire’s trenchant utterance that "men will continue to commit
atrocities as long as they continue to believe absurdities." In so far as
men act for reasons--instead of sheer brute impulse--the soundness or the
imperfection of their "philosophy" in the case determines the good or
evil quality of their deeds.
Knowledge has long been
apostrophized as a beacon light, a lamp unto the feet. It seems to be an
inexpugnable datum of history that fully enlightened sages of the past gave to
infant humanity mighty formulations of cosmic truth, evolutionary schematism,
wisdom of the last practical utility, and supernal knowledge of the worlds of
men and of angels. They placed this torch in the hands of the early races for
the advantage and behoof of all succeeding humanity. Precautions of the most
extraordinary nature were taken to safeguard the deposit. But, miserabile
dictu, the doltishness of historical groups at various times so far
imperiled the gift that in a long period, roughly from the third century of
Christianity until almost the present day, the open promulgation of the high
teaching invited the bitterest persecution from the entrenched forces of cruder
belief. Esoteric philosophy was forced to hide underground and make its way
through the centuries by subterranean channels and covert devices. Barbarism
threatened the utter extinction of previous light. Supervening ignorance
swooped down upon and buried earlier knowledge. But in one of the resurgent
waves of revival, the ancient light is breaking through the incrustation of
ignorance once again. Wisdom is having its rebirth.
Obscuration enveloped brighter
enlightenment because mankind seems unable to maintain its hold on the golden
mean between extreme views. It is constantly following the swing of the pendulum
from one movement to violent reaction in an opposite direction. Religious
history is in the main a record of oscillation between arrant supernaturalism
and soulless naturalism. The group mind bends far over to mystic or spiritistic
faith on one side, and then sways equally far over to a dead materialism. It is
either believing in angels, ghosts, spirits, saints, virgin births, elementals,
divine interventions, miracles, transfigura-
37
tions, salvations, vicarious
atonements; or it is rebounding from these to blank mechanism which rates all
such things as delusions. In his revulsion from eccentric mysticism man has
sought always the wrong antidote--a barren naturalism. In his revulsion from
the latter he has again always gone too far into uncritical mysticism. But
there is a middle position that meets the essential truth between both
attitudes. And the soul science of old set forth this median position. It
presented mystic elements without irrationality, and advanced such knowledge of
spiritual experience as to make the negation of such values impossible. Ancient
theology was the science that dealt with the more sublimated essences and
forces latent in the human endowment, exploiting them for the vast enrichment
of the conscious life. It was the science of spiritual growth without mystic
extravagance, the science of dynamically real elements in the psychic
constitution of man, the very existence of which mechanistic science has
disregarded. What the ancients called esoteric science is but the steady direct
penetration of human intelligence into the deeper heart of nature, to
manipulate creatively her hidden springs of power. It was based on a knowledge
of the laws ruling the higher octaves in the diapason of consciousness. It was
firmly grounded on premises which authenticated the existence of the soul as an
entity. The soul has ever been the scarecrow in the garden of positive science.
But modern science has itself re-established the ground for such a predication
in its recent findings with regard to the more sublimated constitution of
matter, making a way for the reification of bodies of sub-atomic or
ethero-spiritual composition, in which a unit of soul might find subsistence
when disengaged from a fully substantial body. Late physics has gone far toward
hypostasizing St. Paul’s asserted "spiritual body," and his other
statement that he knew a man "who was caught up into the third
heaven." In the rarer forms of matter now hypothecated by our adventuring
science will be found the rarefied physical implementation of whole octaves of
"spiritual" phenomena catalogued by ancient psychic discernment, but
looked at skeptically by positivism in our day. There is a spiritual evolution
proceeding pari passu with the physical, and implemented by it. Our late
science has only now come into view of nature’s sublimated matter of varying
gradations of density, enabling it for the first time to give body to the
beings of ancient hierarchies and to give veritude to the ancient affirmation
of "spiritual bodies." In proportion as the
38
redoubtable solidity of science’s
basic stuff melts down into mere swirls of force, to that extent can the angels
and demons of ancient systems stalk forth in something like veritable
substantiality.
A penetrating view of the interior
sublimation of matter opened to the eye of antiquity a fuller and more detailed
charting of the basic components of man’s constitution. Human nature was seen
as a compound of at least four segments or strata of being, possessing four
bodies of differentiated substance ranging from dense physical coarseness
through etheric and mental gradients to spiritual tenuity. In short man has a
physical, an emotional, a mental and a spiritual body, each finer one
interpenetrating successively its coarser substrate and being held in linkage
to it by vital affinities. Hence the deep lore of old dealt with a keen
analysis and formulation of the laws of interaction between the several
"men" in us and catalogued the extensive schedule of reactions in
consciousness in that amplified psychology to a degree that proves astonishing
to students of our time. The psychology of past days has names for a host of
sharply drawn segmentations of subjective activity that modern probing has
never systematically distinguished. Their "gods" were the living
energies of nature and of mind, realities of the cosmos, and by no means
fanciful and fictitious nonentities. They were the personified rays and
energies that our science is now discovering. The broad field of what is termed
mystical experience was mapped, with every section of its area charted in
relation to the economy of the whole. It was no realm of whimsical
idiosyncrasy, of sheer feeling. The revelation that the ancient East had
perfected the technique of an elaborate spirito-psychological science, surpassing
anything yet adduced by modern genius, is a marked denouement of current
history. The renaissance of this buried "science of the soul" is
giving birth again to the knowledge that man may pass from unconscious drifting
with the tide of evolution to a conscious self-directed mastery of his
progress. He may step from the status of a victim of evolution’s forces, such
as he is when without cognizance of its laws, into the ranks of those who work
intelligently with its plan. Hence he can advance more smoothly and swiftly
with the tide, as Shakespeare asserted, instead of being tossed about by cross
and counter currents whose play he does not understand. The vitalizing item of
ancient knowledge was the prime datum that man is himself, in his real being, a
spark of divine fire struck off like the flint flash from the Eternal
39
Rock of Being, and buried in the
flesh of body to support its existence with an unquenchable radiant energy. On
this indestructible fire the organism and its functions were "suspended,"
as the Orphic theology phrased it, and all their modes and activities were the
expression of this ultimate divine principle of spiritual intelligence,
energizing in matter. Philosophy so grounded was able to meet the exegetical
demands of the "mind-body problem" by its hypothecation of states of
rarefied matter mediating between immaterial spirit and gross body and linking
them commodiously in one organism. How the gross body holds connection with
sheer "anima"--how it holds on to its "ghost"--was readily
understood in the terms of their knowledge of intermediate structures which
bridge by several steps the wide gap between pure spirit and palpable matter.
At the summit, or in the interior
heart, of man’s nature was the divine and immortal Atma or spirit; on
the lower level there was the body, with its twofold equipment for sensation
and emotion. Bridging the gap between the two was the principle of conscious
mind called Manas. It could span the gap between "quickening
spirit" and inert matter; because it stood between them and possessed
affinities with both of them, which they lacked with each other. It could touch
soul above and flesh beneath and pass the lofty motivations of the one across
the gulf to the beneficiary below. Modern religious conception faces the absurd
situation of envisaging man as obviously physical and animal by virtue of his
body, and as obviously intellectual and spiritual through his soul, but with
the ancient hierarchical grades of intermediacy torn out of the gap between the
two. Early Christian revolt against esotericism threw down the ladder of
linkage between man below and his soul above, and now has no resources to
diagram the steps of his possible communion with his Emanuel. The gap left
vacant had perforce to be filled in by theology with the single figure of the
historical Jesus as mediator between man and his God. A historical personage
was called in to implement a function that was originally assigned to one of
the principles of man’s own constitution. This was one of those
consequences which the little blunder of mistaking myth for history entailed
for succeeding ages.
On the strength of the new data
furnished by modern science, present thought must orient its attitude toward
basic problems, since it must view life as the play of causal forces in
consciousness more sub-
40
limated and potent than any of the
energies so far discerned in matter. It will then be in position to take
counsel again with the primeval divine revelation. It will be able to predicate
again the human soul and the divine spirit in man. In the ultimate it has been
its failure to posit the independent Atmic entity in our life that has blocked
its every excursion toward a vital religious philosophy. It has made philosophy
the dead speculation it now is and religion both a chimerical and a fruitless
enterprise. When theology wisely guided the effort to relate the lower man to
the god within, it was the central pursuit in the life of the world and stood
at the apex of dignity and importance. But the loss of vital premises of
understanding blinded following ages to the value of spiritual culture, and
theology and philosophy now go abegging for recognition, bereft of their former
kingly renown. And now their continued abeyance threatens civilization itself.
No age calls so piteously for the certain knowledge of the science of the soul;
since to soul alone can be attached the anchor for all shifting human values. Without
the scientific grounding of an inner principle in man which is itself a portion
of Eternal Durability, and which will carry the values built up in life to
endless perpetuity, human philosophy must forever lack stability and prime
utility.
Such a carrier and preserver of
values was the Atmic spark, described by Heraclitus as "a portion of
cosmic Fire, imprisoned in a body of earth and water." It was on earth to
trace its line of progress through the ranges of the elements and the kingdoms,
harvesting its varied experiences at the end of each cycle. It was described by
Greek philosophy as "more ancient than the body," because it had run
the cycle of incarnations in many bodies, donning and doffing them as garments
of contact with lower worlds, so that it might treasure up the powers of all
life garnered in experience in every form of it. The mutual relation of soul to
body in each of its incarnate periods is the nub of the ancient philosophy, and
the core of all Biblical meaning. As the Egyptian Book of the Dead most
majestically phrases it, the soul, projecting itself into one physical
embodiment after another, "steppeth onward through eternity." No more
solid foundation for salutary philosophy can be laid than this rock of
knowledge, and civilization will flounder in perilous misadventure until this
datum of intellectual certitude is restored to common thought.
The practical service of philosophy
is the proper direction of effort.
41
Its function is to furnish guiding
intellectual light. Religion is the consecration of purpose to attain the goal
indicated as blessed. But knowledge is the only guarantee of right effort.
Misunderstanding
leads the feet into morasses and quicksands. An errant philosophy is the
poison of human endeavor at its source. Modern psychology loudly asserts
that failure of the mind to know the answers to life’s riddles breaks down its
integrity and racks even the body. Philosophy, reduced now to tedious and
jejune speculation, is that very bread of life for which we starve. It was once
a body of positive truth. To it the mind could anchor. Only intelligence can
save motivation from rank exuberance of eccentricity. Despoiled of the early
truth, later ages have been in the position of a person trying to think without
true premises. It is the function of science and philosophy to furnish the mind
true premises. As Gerald Massey says, thinking is in essence a process of
"thinging," since thoughts must rest on the nature of things. And
things are themselves God’s thoughts in material form.
The one grand premise for
constructive thinking is that man is a god functioning in the body of a human
animal, and that this situation is typical of all other existent life, and a
key to the comprehension of all. Religion is that field of effort in which man
strives to relate a divine element, transcending immeasurably his own natural
powers, to a lower self in which it is tenanted. In this comparative sense, its
true function is and always will be to deal with those three elements which it
has so shockingly abused and misapplied, the supernatural, the miraculous and
the magical. In any absolute sense, to be sure, these terms are misnomers and
can become misleading. But relative to the viewpoint of the merely natural man,
the work of the god in his nature is transcendent and is indeed fittingly
termed supernatural. For it is the province of religion to transfigure the
natural life of man with the irradiance of cosmic romance, magical potency and
unearthly splendor. It is designed to refashion the natural man into the
likeness of a glorious spiritual being, the cosmical man of the heavens. To
lower orders of life the capabilities of beings of a superior kingdom of life
are justifiably designated as supernatural. Our brain power is supernatural to
the dog.
Even now Socrates’
"daimon" (daemon), that hovering presence which guided and warned him
constantly throughout his life, is being entified as the
"unconscious" mentor of present psychology. The res-
42
toration to Western thought of the
divine monitorial guardianship of the individual will instigate the mightiest
reformation in the history of Occidental religion. It will enforce a drastic
alteration in theological dogma. For it will demand a discarding of the
conventional form of the God idea and a return to that of learned antiquity.
It flouts current belief most
flagrantly to assert that the Christian movement represented a descent from
high pagan levels of knowledge and spiritual insight. Not a churchman but
harbors the smug assurance that Christianity arose like a stately phoenix out
of the ashes of a decadent paganism, to save a benighted world from sinking
into a morass of degradation horrendous to contemplate. But current notions,
however sanctified by pious belief, must yield before the influx of positive
facts and the light of a proper interpretation of revered scriptures. This only
means, however, that Christianity must cast off a heavy incrustation of
exoteric literalism and reassert its own primal majestic message. No student
conversant with the history of early Christianity will for a moment maintain
that medieval or modern presentations of theology are identical with those held
at the start. One of the most influential and admittedly the most learned of
the Church Fathers, whose scholarship had been powerfully instrumental in
formulating the early creedology, was excommunicated as a heretic within three
hundred years after his death by a Church that had so quickly lost the light of
its original inspiration.
"Origen, the pupil of St.
Clement of Alexandria, and the best informed and most learned of the Church
Fathers, who held the doctrine of rebirth and karma to be Christian, and
against whom, 299 years after he was dead, excommunication was decreed by the
exoteric Church on account of his beliefs, has said: ‘But that there should be
certain doctrines not made known to the multitude, which are revealed after the
exoteric ones have been taught, is not a peculiarity of Christianity alone, but
also of philosophical systems in which certain truths are exoteric and others
esoteric.’"1
Both Origen’s statement and his
posthumous discrediting at the hands of the Church Council make it clear that
Christianity had been radically transmogrified within a few hundred years after
its inception. And every individual or sect in the centuries following the
third that endeavored to revive the pristine purity of the original
formulations was acrimoniously hounded and persecuted. Paulinism itself, which
43
represents perhaps the clearest
stream of high spiritual teaching, was hard put to escape being torn out of the
context of scripture or defeated in ecclesiastical controversy.
The issue must be faced and
determined now if religion is to live and exalt the race. The crux of the
entire problem is the conception of deity in a form perennially available for
man in the heart of his own nature. This conception is the core of all
religious theory, and loss of it has been the cause of doubt, confusion and
despair. Light and truth long lost are once more at hand to illumine minds now
groping in darkness. False notions of deity have nearly cost mankind the loss of
its birthright of knowledge.
The boast of Christianity and
Judaism is that they alone have presented to mankind its purest concept of
deity in the form of the One God--Monotheism. The claim is by no means true as
fact. They may more correctly be said to have been the first to present the One
God without the ancient train of the subordinate gods. They boast of having
abolished the magnified evils of polytheism. But to the ancient sages the task
of handling the Supreme God without his pantheon of lesser divinities was much
the same as trying to deal physiologically with a man without consideration of
his arms, feet, head and several organs. The gods of primeval religion were the
active manifest powers, faculties, organs of God himself. Nature was his body, elemental
forces the agents of his operative economy, universal mind his thinking faculty
and ultimate beneficence his spiritual heart. The ancient systems of wisdom
thought it not blasphemy to delineate the organic structure of deity to explain
to human grasp the cause and nature of the world. Reverence was not withheld
from even the lowest instrumentalization of Godhood. And God organically
apprehended was to be better adored than God as an abstract "nonity."
But some strange quirk of
philosophical revulsion against the function and nature of matter militated
later to cause theologians to deem it a blasphemy to give God a body, parts and
divisions. The mind could only be saved from defiling his purity by keeping him
an empty abstraction. Unknowable and Absolute, he was to be kept ineffable. He
was not to be dragged into the purlieus of mortal description, degraded into
the semblance of a creation of man’s low thought.
But the astute Greeks kept the one
without foregoing the other. They reverenced the One as beyond the reach of
thought, yet portrayed
44
his emanations in the field of
manifestation. And they ranked themselves as his sons. They deemed it not
dishonoring to deity to recognize his being in all things. They saw him in
nature, and not as abstracted from nature. And they studied nature as the
living garment of God’s immanence.
Therefore, though the monotheistic
concept has a place in man’s thought problem, it is nevertheless to be
appraised in its final utility to religion as practically valueless. The human
mind cannot think without the concept of First Cause, and God must stand in the
thought problem to fill this need. It has this dialectic utility. But it must
ever remain a contentless abstraction. As such it turns out that the chalice of
divinity that the Church proffered to benighted nations as the supreme boon of
religion, was well-nigh an empty cup. And engrossing the mass mind with a
philosophical concept that is unassimilable and must forever remain
meaningless, ecclesiasticism perpetrated the far worse crime of condemning to
desuetude that more realistic conception of resident deity which alone is
fraught with pregnant power to apotheosize human life. Holding out a supreme
Ineffability to its followers, it withheld from them at the same time the
knowledge of that deity that is lodged immediately within their own selfhood.
Giving them a God who is utterly inaccessible, it blocked their approach to the
god who was "closer than breathing, nearer than hands and feet."
This is of surpassing importance. It
is revolutionary. It is devastating to prevalent orthodoxies. It shocks
traditional piety to hear that the concept of the One Supreme can never be of
great practical utility to man. But apart from its offices in generating in us
perpetual wonder and awe, our dealing with it ends when we have placed it in
the thought problem where the mind demands the postulate of First Cause. Beyond
that it has little service to render us. Give it form, substance, content,
description, we cannot, without destroying its necessary being. Whatever good
will flow from our knowing that the Unknowable is back of all phenomena is
ours. We can hardly love or worship what we cannot know. The boundary of our
reach is wonder and speculation. Our attempts to worship it are the fluttering
of a moth about the light we dare not look at. Ancient religion was suspected
of having left the monotheistic God out of its picture. It did not leave it
out, but it had the discretion to leave it alone! The sage theologists
reverenced it by a becoming silence! Communion has never been established be-
45
tween man and an Absolute God in the
cosmic heavens. But the pagan world provided a contact with a god dwelling
immediately within the human breast. No reaching after the moon of the Absolute
diverted conscious purpose from actual touch with the god who stood at one’s
elbow. The seers of old held it a sacrilege for mortals to worship any power
outside themselves. And this implied no spirit of vaunting humanism or affront
to deity. It was just the recognition of deity at the point where it was
accessible. The real heresy and apostasy, the gross heathenism, is to miss
deity where it is to be had in the blind effort to seek it where it is not
available.
Deity for man is at home, not afield
in distant skies. The kingdom of heaven and the hope of glory are within. They
lurk within the unfathomed depths of consciousness. Divinity lies buried under
the heavier motions of the sensual nature and the incessant scurrying of the
superficial mind. It is the still small voice, drowned out mostly by the
raucous clamor of fleshly, material and mental interests. It is a pure, mild
Presence, awaiting the day when the outer man will give more heed to its quiet
speech. The Supreme God is not available; but within the quietude of his own
being every man may find a fragment of that same God, made personal in his own
individuality. This is the burden of the lost wisdom of antiquity. Other than
potentially, God in his wholeness is not present with man; but he has not left
man without that measure of his grace that man can utilize. He has projected
into our nature a portion, a ray, of his own life. He has apportioned amongst
all his creatures that measure of his ineffable power which each is capable of
receiving. Yet potentially he has lodged the whole of himself in every man, for
the nucleus of his divinity that he has implanted in every creature is a seed
of the whole of his being. In man the divine seed is the Christos, the
son of the Almighty Father. It is no negative statement, but the glorious
affirmation of all attainment, to assert that this germ of divinity within the
heart is all of God that man can possibly absorb in the present cycle. The
cosmic God is hardly an object of worship by humanity; but that segmented portion
of infinite Being that is tabernacled within the flesh of mortals--that is the
actual divinity assigned to receive the attention and homage of mankind, and
sacrificially to be eaten.
The indwelling god is himself being
brought to birth within the womb of humanity. Each individual is gestating a
divinity within the
46
deeps of his own nature.
Christianity has fervently exhorted us to look into the empyrean to find the
unapproachable God. All the while the infant deity slumbers unheeded within the
heart. Christianity has largely nullified the force of St. Paul’s almost
frantic cry to us: "Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is
within you?"
The seers of old distinguished
between the Unknowable God of the thought theorem and the actual Presence in
the human constitution by denominating the former "God" and the
latter "the god." Intermediate deities were called variously
"the Gods" and "the gods." The object of most constant
attention in philosophy was "the god," the personal daemon of the
individual. On the plane of all practical living value, it was useless to look
to higher evolutionary forms of deific expression unless and until that was
brought from infancy to maturity of function, since its qualities had to be
assimilated into human nature before anything higher could be received. It can
be stated as a matter beyond controversy that the vital concern of ancient
religion was with the god lodged within the human psyche. If man missed contact
with deity there, he missed it utterly.
Christianity euhemerized the pagan
conception of the germinal deity in us in the historical Jesus. But this has
left the rest of mortals unsanctified. The personalized Christ cuts the
commonalty of mankind off from its divinity. An "only-begotten son of
God," made to carry all the values and meanings in his human person, robs
mankind at large of its birthright. The mistranslation of the Greek "monogenes"
as "only-begotten" was an error fraught with the most terrific
consequences for Christendom. It properly means "born of the one parent
alone" (the Father, Spirit), in contradistinction to the idea of being
born of the union of Father and Mother, or spirit and matter. It was a
reference in ancient theogony to the descent of the Logos (the cosmic
counterpart of the Christos in man) from the spiritual side of God’s
nature alone, as distinct from its progenation from the union of spirit with
matter. The doctrine was primordial in the Egyptian conception of the god
Kheper or Khepera, symboled by the scarab, which, the Egyptians asserted,
produced its young through the male or father alone. If Jesus was the sole
epiphany of deity on earth, then the promises of our universal sonship are made
nugatory. We are assured again and again that we are all sons of God and sons
of the Highest. Christianity not only thrust upon the man Jesus the divinity
that was appor-
47
tioned amongst us all, but also, in
its confusion and ignorance, forced upon his mortal person the function, power
and office of the Cosmic Logos, which in the carefully graded system of the
hierarchies could not conceivably have been embodied in the constitution of a
mere man on earth. How could the mighty power that organized and ensouled
galaxies of solar systems be confined within the tiny limits of a physical
brain and nervous system? The great Christian Fathers, Clement of Alexandria
and Origen (and others) expressly repudiated the possibility of the Logos
taking flesh in one person of merely human stature. Such a limitation
blasphemed Deity.
What has not been recognized is that
the solitary exaltation of the man Jesus has inevitably demeaned humanity. His
lonely apotheosization has disinherited us. And the general revolt of the
intellectualism of this age against the resultant debasement of human nature to
the level of the worm of the dust through Augustinian and Calvinistic
impositions should stoutly attest the falsity of the orthodox characterization.
The mythical as opposed to the
historical interpretation of the Gospels has been presented with some clarity
by such men as Dupuis, Drews, Robertson, Smith, Renan, Strauss, Massey,
Higgins, Mead and others. The historical view of Jesus’ life is stubbornly
maintained in spite of the evidence adduced by Comparative Religion and
Mythology, which points with steady directness to the fact that the events of
the Gospel narrative are matched with surprising fidelity by the antecedent
careers
of such world saviors as Dionysus, Osiris, Sabazius, Tammuz, Adonis, Atys,
Orpheus, Mithras, Zoroaster, Krishna, Bala-Rama, Vyasa, Buddha, Hercules,
Sargon, Serapis, Horus, Marduk, Izdubar, Witoba, Apollonius of Tyana, Yehoshua
ben Pandira, and even Plato and Pythagoras. It is also held in the face of the
consideration that the body of the material used in the ceremonial dramas
performed by the hierophants in the early Mystery Religions for 1200 years B.C.
constitute by and large the series of events narrated as the personal biography
of the Galilean. It is worth impressing on all minds that the legend of the
historicity of the Gospels is only to be held by ignoring the solid weight of
such--and vastly more--significant testimony. Instead of permitting its
adherents to move in the freedom of a spiritual interpretation, the
ecclesiastical power is holding them rigidly to a doctrinal meaning that is
badly vitiated by literalism. In exalting Jesus in unique magnificence, it lets
the divinity in every man’s heart lie
48
fallow. The deity that needs
exaltation is that which is struggling within the breasts of the sons of earth.
Theological dogmatism fails utterly to see the ultimate Pyrrhic nature of its
victory. Jesus’ enthronement is the disinheritance of common man. Taught to
look outside ourselves for the source of power and grace, we ignore the real
presence within us that pleads for closer recognition. The historical Jesus
blocks the way to the spiritual Christ in the chamber of the heart.
All Christian history would have
been markedly different had not the historical Jesus been interpolated into the
spiritual drama. By this diversion the aims of a true spiritual culture were
sentimentally turned outward to the worship of an extraneous but romantic
impersonation. The consecrated devotion of hundreds of millions of souls in
Christendom for centuries, instead of being focused upon the effort to nurse to
life a Christly spirit within the collective body of Western humanity, has been
dissipated in almost total fruitlessness upon the figure of an historicized
myth. The present demoralized state of civilization in countries most
thoroughly saturated with Christian doctrinism confirms the sorry truth of this
statement. And the earlier Christian history lends further corroboration in its
record of bickering, heretical persecution, violent warfare and ghastly
crucifixions that sicken the heart. And all this was perpetrated in the name of
the personal Jesus! It could hardly have been done in the name of the spiritual
Christos.
If it be advanced in rebuttal that
the example of the historical Jesus has stood as a loadstone and beacon to
inspire and attract the hearts of millions of devotees, and that the
contemplation of his excellency will work a miracle of uplift in the believers’
nature, this but proves the efficacy of psychology and not a fact of history.
Ecclesiastical propaganda has more than once produced psychological hysteria,
as witness the Crusades and the Inquisition. And religious hysteria has ever
produced its marvels--stigmata, speaking in tongues and healings. Every
religious psychologization has run into phenomena and sums its lists of
"demonstrations." It is folly to question the psychological power of
an example such as the pictured Jesus. Humans are almost helpless in their
tendency to ape some paragon. It was precisely because mankind needed to be
inspired to idealism that the formulators of the dramas in the Mystery Rituals
introduced the Messiah, the Sun-God, the Christos as the central
character of the piece. But he was there as ensampler and by no means as
substitute or scape-goat. Much as man-
49
kind needs to be confronted by the
constant presence of a model of its own destined perfection, it needs far more
the invincible knowledge that divinity is its own inner possession.
To hold his place in mass reverence,
Jesus had to be made matchless, incomparable, unapproachable. No man dared
stand beside him. But overpowering splendour only twits and chides mediocrity.
It reminds us of our littleness. It leaves us gazing blankly, hopelessly. The
higher the elevation of Jesus, the vaster the gulf fixed between the ideal and
the adorer. It clips the wings of aspiration. The setting up of a figure of
perfection outside is in part psychologically hazardous. To approach him, to
match his purity, is to reduce his stature. He must be kept beyond compare, the
ever-receding ideal.
Ancient psychology of religion
worked on a different principle. The motive to zeal was an ever-present
possibility of attainment. Numbers of the sages were men who had gained the
sunlit summit. They thought it not robbery to be equal with the god, for he was
sent to call them into the mount of fellowship.
To sense poignantly the degradation
to which literal caricature of spiritual knowledge has reduced theology, one needs
but to point to the picture of millions of votaries gazing into the physical
heavens to find God, where Laplace said that no telescope had ever located him,
and searching the map of Judea to localize the Christos, whose dwelling
can be only in the heart and conscience. And the Prince of Peace still awaits
to be crowned the King of Glory.
50
CHAPTER III
TRUTH
CRUSHED TO EARTH
The resolution of the "birth of
Christ" into the delivery of a babe in a localized Bethlehem has kept the
race from realizing the true meaning of the Messianic fulfillment. With the
third century conversion of the features of the age-old spiritual drama into
the alleged biography of a man-savior, the outlines of the great truth that a
ray of the solar Logos was incorporated distributively in animal humanity faded
out and were obliterated. All sound sense of the inner signification of the
Christmas nativity tableau was irrevocably lost. The annual celebration of the
advent of deity to earth remains a meaningless travesty to this day.
It becomes necessary, then, to
outline the historical trends that led to the obscuration of this central
feature of religious cultism. This is in no sense a diversion, but the most
direct approach to the correct envisagement of ancient material. It will reveal
items of the utmost strategic importance for a true evaluation of archaic
structures. The restoration of the lost meaning will be given greater credence
if the causes of its decadence are set forth.
The knowledge that a fragment of the
spiritual heart of the sun was implanted in the body of each son of man to be
his soul and his god was the golden secret imparted by the hierophants in the
Mystery Schools to their qualified pupils. It was regarded as such a priceless
treasure that these Secret Brotherhoods were organized specifically to guard
its esoteric inviolability. From age to age it passed down the stream of oral
transmission, now waning in one quarter, but spreading in another, and was
revived periodically by messengers who came as the agents of a hierarchy of
perfected men. From remote antiquity it was present in China, Tibet, India,
Chaldea, Egypt. It was carried by the priests of the Orphic Mysteries over to
the Hellenic world.1 It was disseminated in the Greek areas in the philosophies
of Pythagoras, Plato, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras;2 was embodied in the
51
poetry of Homer, Hesiod, Pindar; in
the dramas of Euripides and Aeschylus. From Egypt and Chaldea it emerged in the
religion of the Hebrews, who wrought its myths, allegories and symbols
obscurely into their Old Testament, but had more authentically kept the deposit
in their ancient Kabalah. It was taken up by pre-Christian and early Christian
Gnostics, being contained with sufficient clarity in the great Gnostic work, Pistis
Sophia, a work conjecturally of Basilides or Valentinus. Its
Orphic-Platonic rescension was widely republished by the Neo-Platonist school
in the second, third and fourth centuries, with ample elucidation, a measure
adopted in all likelihood by the spiritual hierarchy to check the growing trend
of the nascent Christian movement toward the complete exoterization of its
esoteric message. It was reintegrated eclectically around Alexandria by such
syncretists as Maximius of Tyre, Ammonias Saccas and Philo Judaeus, powerfully
influencing the character of primitive Christianity. It was carried most
directly into Christian documentation by St. Paul, whom many scholars claim on
evidence to have been himself an Initiate in the Greek Mysteries (as were
Clement and Origen in the Egyptian), and also by St. John, whose Bible writings
are decidedly more Platonic than distinctively Christian. The visible thread of
its transmission runs on to Plutarch, after whom it became more subterranean,
being propagated by Hermeticists, Therapeutae, Rosicrucians, Platonists,
Mystics, Illuminati, Alchemists, Brothers of various designations and secret
fraternities in Europe, out of sight of the jealous eye of the all-powerful
Church. At the period of its lowest ebb in Europe it was tided over the danger
of total extinction by Arabian and Moorish scholars and Jewish students in
Spain. The teaching was preserved and handed on by such associations in
Medieval Europe as the Cathedral Builders, the Platonic Academy of Florence,
the Alchemists, the "Fire Philosophers," the Troubadours and
Minnesingers, by secret printers, among them Aldus Minutius of Venice, who
reprinted the classic Greek literature that ushered in the Italian Renaissance.
Sporadically, now in one region, now in another, it took form in outward
movements in groups of mystic and pietistic tendency of many names. It was the
secret spring of motive and meaning in most medieval literature, in the
folk-lore, the hero legends, the fairy myths, the Arthurian cycle, the
Mabinogian tales, the Peredur stories, the Niebelungenlied, the castle ballads,
the Romance of the Rose and many another invention of esoteric skill.
52
Features of it came to be embodied
in a thousand conventional forms of common "superstition." It was
pictorially outlined in the set of Tarot Cards of the Bohemians in the twelfth
century. Philosophers such as Paracelsus, Raymond Lully, Pletho, Cardano,
Philalethes, Robert Fludd (from whose work on Moses Milton is said to have
derived his theses on which Paradise Lost was built) and others presented
aspects of it in more or less surreptitious fashion. Jacob Boehme’s
"Theosophical Points" vitally influenced Newton’s thought in
important directions, as he confesses. Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo
acknowledge their debt to the principles of the ancient science. Later came the
English Platonists More and Cudworth, and it is alleged that Francis Bacon and
the mysterious Count de St. Germain formulated the body of Masonic ritualism
upon the old principles.
Coming to the surface again in recent
years it is being revived by Rosicrucians, Theosophists, Kabalists,
Esotericists, Mystics, Spiritual and Psychic Scientists and Parapsychologists
in large numbers, and is perhaps the most vital movement in the thought life of
today.
The door to this rejuvenescence of
an influence so long buried was opened during the last century by the studies
in Comparative Religion and Comparative Mythology assiduously pursued by many
scholars. There was needed nothing but a mind free from bias to discern the
unity, amounting virtually to identity, underlying all the old systems, which
expressed so clearly the characteristic features of what appeared to have been
a universal primal world religion, with the solar myth as its corner-stone.
Every great historical religion is readily seen to have been, at its start, a
pure expression of the basic elements of this outline, and equally readily seen
to have badly vitiated the pristine purity of teaching in later decadence. A
gross transgressor in this respect is seen to be Christianity, which carried
original spiritual meaning further afield than perhaps any other. It is
desirable to trace the causes and progress of this corruption.
The blanket assertion that ancient
spiritual light was darkly obscured under Christian handling is a challenging
statement and must be given the room to vindicate itself. This work in its
entirety will amount to a substantiation of that claim. The point can be
carried only by an ample reproduction of the substance of the archaic world
religion, so that the clear outlines of the great pristine doctrines of
theology as they were apprehended in the arcane schools, may by contrast reveal
the darkness
53
and vacuity of present readings.
Only in the light of the radiant wisdom of the past will the glaring corruption
of current interpretation become discernible.
The stream of degradation of
originally pure teaching flowed in through the channels of literalism. The
simple but still nearly incredible truth of the matter is that elaborate charts
of spiritual ideography, devised with poetic genius and analogical skill, were
mistaken for literal objective fact. The ancient theologists had sought to
portray the essence of deep truth by means of fanciful constructions of many
kinds. The whole of early Egyptian and Greek religious literature was a
construction commonly termed mythology. What now looms as the consummate
catastrophic stupidity of the centuries was the traducing of it into alleged
history. This has been perpetrated in spite of the obvious impossibility of
explaining how a people that produced Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Pericles,
Heraclitus, Homer, Pindar and Demosthenes could gull itself into taking poetic
fiction for objective occurrence on a grand scale. Our explanation of the
mythology of the Greeks commits us to accrediting such sages with the minds of
children. The myths were the lenses through which the gaze might be focused on
the realities of recondite truth. Only to the crudely ignorant were the
representations not diaphanous. But, oddly enough, blind misapprehension
carried the day, and the transparency of the myths was darkened into solid
opaqueness.
Christianity started out as a system
closely kindred with the cults environing it, and boasting of conformity with
them. The early Church Father, Justin Martyr in particular, is at pains to
protest that Christianity in no wise differs from pagan usages. But a strange
and curious thing then happened. There came to a head a virulent rebellion of
mediocrity and inferiority against the aristocracy of intellect and culture.
Christianity carried in large measure the impetuosity of this revolt. It became
the embodied expression of a vehement assault on the esotericism of the Mystery
Religions. It was evidently motivated by a popular resentment against the exclusiveness
and aristocracy of the cults. Only a restricted and tested minority was
eligible to admission into the Associations. The hidden teaching was withheld
from the populace, under the strictest of secret bans. A wave of hostility to
the privileged groups swept over the masses and culminated in an effort to
crash through the restrictions of esotericism and bring out the secret
54
doctrine for general behoof.
Distrust of the possession of any real truth beyond ordinary grasp and perhaps
the degeneracy of the Mysteries themselves to some extent, lent substance to
the popular enmity. A movement to spread abroad a plain man’s simple
enunciation of the truths gained heavy momentum. A definite trend away from
esotericism carried the impulse far over into literalism. The genius of culture
in mankind has constantly had to contend with this effort of dull mediocrity to
tear down its best structures of truth and beauty.3 The attempt to unmask the
myths for commonplace rendering was quite like the present-day demand upon
popular publicists for a reduction of their best wisdom to the level of moronic
bluntness. But the effort to simplify the esoteric purport was to lose it, to
wreck the spiritual edifice altogether. Truth can make no terms with
incapacity.
When, later, the headship of the
early Church passed out of the hands of the academicians of Athens and
Alexandria, of Antioch, Tarsus and Ephesus, and fell into those of the less
studied Romans, the trend to literalism had gained such volume that there swept
into the movement a spirit of fell vindictiveness against the dominant systems.
When the conception of the purely spiritual Christos could no longer
successfully be imparted to the turbulent masses, who were clamoring for a
political savior, it was found necessary, or expedient, to substitute the more
concrete idea of a personal Messiah, who would be so obviously factual and
realistic as to preclude the possibility of being misconceived by the most
doltish. The swell of this tide of force carried the Church Fathers to the
limit of recasting the entire Gospel in the terms of a human biography. So that
what had been originally in the Mysteries and the sacred scripts a combined
astrological and mythical dramatization of man’s total experience, was now
turned into the story of one character put forth as a "life." In
spite of almost insuperable obstacles and the outcropping of endless
absurdities and inanities of meaning in the transposition, the undertaking was
carried through. The outcome has been that the theology handed down to us by
the early reformation is the crudest, least rational and intellectually most
disconcerting rendition of the ancient revelation anywhere extant. Philo,
Origen, Clement and Josephus had expressly declared that scripture shielded
beneath the literal narrative a secret profundity of meaning, which was its
true message. Philo specified four distinct levels in which the sense of
scripture was to be apprehended, the purely literal,
55
or physical, the moral or emotional,
the allegorical or mental and the anagogical, or lofty spiritual. The later
Church discarded or disregarded the two or three more abstruse ones and held
only to the lowest and the basest.
The drive to convert the highly
concentrated "meat" of spiritual truth into "pap" or
"milk" for the babes in capacity probably gave to Christianity that
volcanic fervor that swept it forward among the lower ranks and shortly enabled
it to turn the tide against its chief rival, Mithraism. The masses will always,
as they did in Luther’s Reformation, seize upon a sweeping current of
ideological force and attempt to utilize it as a means of escape from their
lowly economic lot. The hopes of the rabble interwove the dream of political
liberation with the religious message, adding an extraneous factor to the
pressure to translate allegory into a tale of history. Then as now low culture
soon turned from the fervor to achieve the slow laborious task of mastering an
inner kingdom of spiritual character to eager expectation of a utopian regime
in world affairs. In the spiritual drama were many lines which could be so
misconstrued.4
Thus Christianity lost its Gnosis;
and all Christendom has since had to suffer the blighting of its best
spiritual effort. If by the tactic the Church may be said to have gained the
whole world, it lost its own soul in the process.
That Christianity after its
inception was a ferment confined largely to the poor and untutored classes is
indicated both by the Gospel story itself and by much data of history. Some
authentic testimony may be useful in impressing the little-known fact upon
general knowledge. The cultured Celsus, writing about 200 A.D., cannot refrain
from commenting on the social complexion of the Christians of his day. He
wrote:
"It is only the simpletons, the
ignoble, the senseless--slaves and womenfolk and children--whom they wish to
persuade . . . wool-dressers and cobblers and fullers, the most uneducated and
vulgar persons . . . whosoever is a sinner, or unintelligent, or a fool, in a
word, whoever is god-forsaken (kakodaimon), him the kingdom of God will
receive."5
Edward Carpenter, an unbiased and
kindly student of early Christianity in relation to its contemporary faith,
says:
56
"The rude and menial masses,
who had hitherto been almost beneath the notice of Greek and Roman culture,
flocked in; and though this was doubtless, as time went on, a source of
weakness to the Church, and a cause of dissension and superstition, yet it was
the inevitable line of human evolution, and had a psychological basis."6
Many additional statements in the
same tenor could be quoted, but it is needless to enforce what is known and
indisputable.
But one hears the protestations of
Christians that the ministrations of their faith to the simple and the
downtrodden was its glory and demonstrated a sounder humanitarianism than the
Mystery Schools displayed. Let it have whatever praise goes with this part of
its program. It is to the credit of any system that it gives to the lowly the
food they need. The default of Christianity is that it gave to one class and
withheld from another. Even to that one class it gave the poorest of
bread--truth vitiated, devoid of nourishing sense, corrupted and corrupting--as
witness its own unconscionable history. It attempted to furnish to the
uncultured the easily digested provender they required, but swung with such
zeal into this labor that it denied the need of strong meat to more capable
digestions. Christianity’s culpability was not that it fed the outcast and the
sinner, but that it denied the Gnosis to the intelligent--or to any. Its
Roman revolt against the spiritual esotericism constituted its betrayal of the
innermost heart of all religion. It chose to feed the religious hunger of all
grades of people with food that was not even wholesome for the simple.
And it must answer for its vicious
resentment and unholy violence against the high-minded groups that again and
again in the whole course of its history essayed with sincerity to restore it
to the lost message of the Gnosis. Students of the situation in the
early Church will know the factual ground beneath the Emperor Julian’s caustic
observation that "there is no wild beast like an angry theologian."
And the murder of the learned Hypatia and the burning of the priceless books of
the Alexandrian library are sufficient attestation of the level of savage
ferocity to which the reaction against the lofty wisdom of the past had reduced
its uncultured opponents. Christianity now lives to witness a world of more
general intelligence, after repression by fiend-like persecution for fifteen
centuries, once more and this time with irrepressible purpose, turning with an
eagerness born of long denial to the
57
esotericism of revived Oriental
philosophies for the deeper nourishment of the human spirit.
Christianity can not shake off its
pagan parentage. It must be seen that in spite of the almost complete
dismantling of the esoteric interpretation, the system retained practically all
the outward vestments of the hidden truth. That Christianity presented to the
world a complete new system of high truth unknown before is of course now
understood to be an unfounded legend. That it failed to make any single advance
from ignorance to wisdom is not so obvious to its partisans or to the general
public, but seems nevertheless indisputable on the evidence. It sadly bedimmed
the old splendor of knowledge. For it threw away the golden grain and kept only
the husk. The legitimacy of such a dogmatic assertion can become evident only
in the light of the entire study here undertaken, since such a lengthy scrutiny
is required to demonstrate that in dogma after dogma, rite after rite, and
parable after parable, Christianity substituted a mean and valueless literal
sense for the original inspiring message. If this was the sacrifice it made on
behalf of the lowly masses, it wrote off the payment by a total suppression of
light for those in higher intellectual brackets. It sealed up the anagogical
meaning and hounded to the death the parties that strove for its dissemination.
Devising nothing new and retaining
the outward form and dress of pagan systems, Christianity has ever been hard
put to explain the undeniable similarity between antecedent religions and its
own faith and practice. Intelligent churchmen have seen the futility of denying
the fact and have readily admitted the pagan sources of Christianity. But in
the third century it was a matter of critical importance to maintain the novel
and superior character of the new religion. The device resorted to by numbers
of the Fathers bears indisputable testimony to the desperateness of their
plight. Church membership today will be loath to credit the reliability of the
evidence on this matter, so nearly does it exceed all belief. Confronted from
time to time with amazing evidences of identity between their own and pagan
material, there was no recourse save to that negation of all logic, that last
resort of bigotry and zealotry--the plea of diabolism! Christian pride should
blush at the disingenuousness of its founders in this matter. The evidence
bearing on the point is neither inconsiderable nor vague. In his
58
excellent work, Pagan and
Christian Creeds, Edward Carpenter comments at length on the subterfuge, as
follows:
"The similarity of these
ancient pagan legends and beliefs with Christian traditions was indeed so great
that it excited the attention and the undisguised wrath of the early Christian
Fathers. They felt no doubt about the similarity, but not knowing how to
explain it, fell back upon the innocent theory that the Devil--in order to
confound the Christians--had centuries before, caused the pagans to
adopt certain beliefs and practices! (Very crafty, we may say, of the Devil,
but very innocent of the Fathers to believe it!) Justin Martyr, for instance,
describes the institution of the Lord’s supper as narrated in the Gospels, and
then goes on to say: ‘Which the wicked devils have imitated in the
Mysteries of Mithra, commanding the same thing to be done. For that bread and a
cup of water are placed with certain incantations in the mystic rites of one
who is being initiated you either know or can learn.’ Tertullian also says (De
Praescriptione Hereticorum, C. 30; De Bapt., C. 3; De Corona, C.
15) that ‘the devil by the mysteries of his idols imitates even the main part
of the divine mysteries. . . . He baptizes his worshippers in water and makes
them believe that this purifies them from their crimes! . . . Mithra sets his
mark on the forehead of his soldiers; he celebrates the oblation of bread; he
offers an image of the resurrection and presents at once the crown and the
sword; he limits his chief priests to a single marriage; he even has his
virgins and ascetics.’ Cortez, it will be remembered, complained that the Devil
had positively taught to the Mexicans the same things which God had taught to
Christendom."
To which may be added the
astonishing statement of a modern Catholic priest, quoted by Carpenter (p. 68):
"And the Tartary Father Grüber
thus testifies: ‘This only do I affirm, that the Devil so mimics the Catholic
Church there, that although no European or Christian has ever been there, still
in all essential things they agree so completely with the Roman Church as even
to celebrate the Host with bread and wine; with my own eyes I have seen
it!’"
There are many accusations against
"the devil" in the same strain from Christian apologists. Not only
were the theory and practice of the new cult identical in most respects with
those of previous systems, but its own central thesis--the divinity of the Savior--had
been anticipated by some hundreds of years in other cults.
59
"If we look close," says
Prof. Bousset,7 "the result emerges with great clearness, that the figure
of the Redeemer, as such, did not wait for Christianity to force its way into
the religion of Gnosis, but was already present there under various
forms."
Discussing the doctrine of a Savior,
Carpenter writes:8
"Probably the wide range of
this doctrine would have been far better and more generally known, had not the
Christian Church, all through, made the greatest of efforts and taken the
greatest of precautions to extinguish and snuff out all evidence of the pagan
claims on the subject. There is much to show that the early Church took this
line with regard to pre-Christian Saviors."9
Carpenter makes it clear that the
coming of a Savior-God was in no sense a belief distinctive of Christianity. He
explains that the Messianic prophecies of the Jews and the fifty-third chapter
of Isaiah infected Christian teaching to some degree with Judaic influence.
The Hebrew word Messiah, meaning "The Anointed One," occurs some
forty times in the Old Testament; and each time in the Septuagint, written
as early as the third century before our era, it is translated Christos,
which also means "Anointed." It is thus seen, says Carpenter,
that the word "the Christ" was in vogue in Alexandria as far back as
280 B.C. In the Book of Enoch, written not later than B.C. 170, the
Christ is spoken of as already existing in heaven, about to come to earth, and
is called "The Son of Man." The Book of Revelation is full of
passages from Enoch, likewise the Epistles of Paul and the Gospels.
These statements are but a
suggestion of the full truth in this direction. The Christians were not content
to let the matter rest with the explanation that Satan had teased them with
some anticipatory resemblances. They resorted to the most violent measures to
blot out all links between their body of doctrine and former pagan material.
This is a black page in the history of Christianity and a measure of evil
policy not easily condoned. They destroyed as far as possible the entire body
of pagan record to obliterate, as Carpenter says, "the evidence of their
own dishonesty." Porphyry tells of their destruction of elaborate
treatises on Mithraism. And his own work on Christianity fell a prey likewise.
Their vandal work is of record. The whole matter may be tersely summed up in
the world of Sir Gilbert Murray: "The polemic
60
literature of Christianity is loud
and triumphant; the books of the pagans have been destroyed."
It is clear, if comment be not
superfluous, that Christianity has lost, not gained, by its masking the truth
about its origins. Rabid fanaticism and the destruction of literature are
always the resort of a bad cause, revealing a want of a good defense on open
ground. The frenzy of zeal to wipe out all the testimony that pointed to
derivation from pagan forms argues a weak confidence, if not a bad conscience.
It may be said, in partial
extenuation of the Fathers’ conduct in the second, third and fourth centuries,
that their discovery now and again of the startling similarities between their
religion and earlier paganism may have come with genuine astonishment. It is
commonly believed that the Greeks and Romans of the early Christian days stood
far closer to the great Egyptian and Chaldean cultures than we do today. Such
is far from the truth. The Egyptian papyri, monuments and tablets were a sealed
book to the Christian Fathers, and remained so until Champollion worked out the
key to the hieroglyphics from the Rosetta Stone in the early nineteenth
century. The connection between the Christian cult and its antecedents in
India, Chaldea and Egypt was not seen then as it can be today. We can in a
measure understand the indignant surprise of the propagators of the new faith
on finding that their alleged novel truth had been copied ahead of them by the
heathen!
The crux of present interest in the
matter is the consideration that the Christianity of our time is imperiling its
own standing and repute by perpetuating a mistake made at its inception.
Continuance in a folly so obvious in the face of modern scholarship will
henceforth be an open confession of disingenuousness. It will be at the risk of
the loss of the last vestige of respect yet accorded to it by studied
intellectuals. Its only salvation from neglect and scorn constantly augmenting
is a frank admission of its outgrowth from pagan antecedents, and a willingness
to reconstruct its interpretation in relation to them. It must manifest a disposition
to lift the stigma of "heathenism" from off the ancient faiths and
restore them to their high place of nobility and worth. For in elevating its
sources it will exalt itself. The outcome has been disastrous.
61
The Church might be well advantaged
by paying head to Carpenter’s candid conclusions on the subject. He says:
"I have said that out of this
World-Religion Christianity really sprang. It is evident that the time has
arrived when it must either acknowledge its source and frankly endeavor to
affiliate itself to the same, or failing that, must perish. . . . Christianity,
therefore, as I say, must either now come frankly forward and, acknowledging
its parentage from the great Order of the Past, seek to rehabilitate that,
and
carry mankind one step forward in the path of evolution--or else it must
perish. There is no other alternative."10
It will be hard for an ingrained
devotionalism to turn back and embrace what it had been so long taught to
despise. But it must be done, or all pretense at regard for the truth be
abandoned. The grand body of ancient teaching should never have been brought
into contempt. Convicted of its error the Church must go the whole way in
making the correction. No course but that of candor and honesty will now
suffice, if indeed it is not too late even now to make amends and save a bad
situation. Further concealment and evasion will only prove the more surely
disastrous. For the sun of the moral zodiac has swung around into the sign of
Libra, where the good and evil of historical action are weighed in the balance,
and piled high on the adverse pan are the knavery and ignorance of early
policies, the violent treatment of earnest esotericists, the destruction of
priceless books and the cruel persecution of sincere sectaries. The way in
which ecclesiastical Christianity meets this issue will determine its fate. If
it confronts it with honest humility it may rise again in power. For there is
power in the ancient spiritual science to transfigure Christian nations
with the glow of righteousness. Readoption of the pagan wisdom will glorify a
movement now sunk in nearly hopeless ineptitude. The Dark Ages are not yet
past, and that treasure which slipped away through the fingers of early
Christianity has not yet been restored.
62
Chapter IV
WISDOM
HIDDEN IN A MYSTERY
We have remained stodgily and
stupidly impervious to the infiltration of ancient truth because we have
remained blind to the method of its presentation and preservation. We have
lost the power to grasp the premises of true knowledge laid down by sage
ancestors because we have been too dull to see through the subtleties of a
methodology different from our own. These premises for thought will only be
regained as the devices resorted to in their statement are comprehended. The
very possibility of making the interpretation at all is intimately bound up
with the use of abstruse keys to bring to light meanings covered under an
adroit strategy of concealment. Modern mentality almost instinctively resents
the presumption that sages of old put truth under a mask of subtle disguise.
Modern canons of utility can admit no sense or sanity in a procedure of the
sort. Truth is for general broadcasting, if only that its discoverer or author
may get his financial reward for his contribution. But truth in ancient days
was not sold to the public. There were, in the first place, no printing presses
to manage its general and quick distribution. Secondly, it had to be
safeguarded from the undisciplined who would misuse it. And thirdly, it had to
be preserved. To this end it had to be embalmed in the amber of such myths,
legends, folk-tales, parables and structures of natural symmetry as would
become unforgettable mnemonics through the power of tradition. And finally it
had to be expressed in a language that would be universally comprehensible--a
language of living symbols. Therefore truth was dramatized and symbolized. The
figures in the drama were the elements of divine and human nature; and the
symbols were an alphabet of truth because they were phrases of truth itself in
the world of flesh and matter. They carried to the mind their message of
invisible truths because they were those invisible truths themselves appearing
in man’s cognizable world clothed in a garment
63
of concreteness. Words are
themselves but symbols. Objects of living nature are more definite speech to a
discerning mind than formal language. It is as if one could throw the ideas of
the mind on a screen. And Universal Mind did throw its archetypal ideas
onto the screen of matter, where mortal man may look at them in their
appearance that is not false, as philosophy has so mistakenly alleged, but
true.
Unable to decipher the archaic
language used, we have made hash of the true meaning of sacred love. The
grandest of structures for truth-telling have been made into the grossest of
fabrications. What the Bible has been declared to mean is inane nonsense; what
it does actually mean is splendid truth. And the gross perversion and loss of
its sense have come solely through our unfamiliarity with the special and
involved techniques employed in writing the sacred books. Our efforts to read
the texts in total ignorance of their art of literary indirection have run into
the territory of the ridiculous.
The ancient scribes were, first of
all, esotericists and wrote esoterically. All spiritual wisdom was held in
secret brotherhoods and rigorously safeguarded from common dissemination. There
existed a spiritual aristocracy quite difficult for us to conceive of, based on
considerations the force of which we have lost the insight to appreciate. There
were intellectual and spiritual castes, and the lower orders of mental capacity
were not regarded as fitted to receive information where the qualifications for
its social use were not fulfilled. Sheer pious faith could not alone gain one
admission into the Mystery Schools. Actual discipline of body and mind, and
certain inner unfoldments of faculty were held as requisite for the grasp of
deeper truth. Initiation was to some real extent a matter of the mastery of
theurgic powers dependent in the main upon purity of life. Esotericism arose
primarily from the necessity of safeguarding the use of dynamic knowledge.
Religion was far from being the jejune shell of social or mystical
sentimentalism that it has so largely come to be at this epoch. It aimed to
liberate the powerful forces hidden in the depths of man’s psyche. It bore an
immediate reference to individual evolution, in the processes of which nature’s
dynamic energies had to be controlled and intelligently directed. What we have
derided as "magic" in the religion of old was just the control of
subtle powers which we mostly permit to slumber in dormancy beneath the surface
of our superficial life. Religion touched man so deeply in olden times that it
awakened the
64
potencies of his godlike endowment,
an enterprise which concerns us rather little now. The imputation of sacredness
to the rites of religion flowed directly from recognition of the vital issues
at stake in the soul’s incarnation on earth. And the right to participate in
the higher mysteries, of which St. Paul speaks, belonged to those who had won
it from nature by the payment of the full price--a life schooled to harmony by
intelligent consecration of every personal force.
In spite of the enormous quantity of
evidence pointing to the existence of a great body of esoteric teaching in the
Mystery Brotherhoods, such a scholar as Renouf asks:1 "Was there really,
as is frequently asserted, an esoteric doctrine known to the scribes and
priests alone, as distinct from the popular belief?" And his answer is:
"No evidence has yet been provided in favor of this hypothesis." But
how can Renouf support so negative a statement in the face of the positive
testimony offered by Plato, Porphyry, Apuleius, Herodotus, Plotinus, Proclus,
Iamblichus, Euripides and Cicero? He is decisively contradicted also by many
modern writers, among them Angus, Kennedy and Halliday, who have undertaken
profound and searching studies of the Mysteries. Certainly a man like Cicero
can not be scorned when he testifies as follows:
"There is nothing better than
those Mysteries by which, from a rough and fierce life, we are polished to
gentleness and softened. And Initia, as they are called, we have thus
known as the beginnings of life in truth; not only have we received from
them the doctrine of living with happiness, but even of dying with a better
hope."2
And is such a statement as the
following from Plato without weight:
"But it was then lawful to
survey the most splendid beauty, when we obtained, together with that blessed
choir, this happy vision and contemplation. And we indeed enjoyed this blessed
spectacle in conjunction with Jupiter . . . at the same time being initiated in
those Mysteries which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all Mysteries. .
. . Likewise in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of
entire, simple, immovable and blessed visions in the pure light. . . ."3
To Renouf’s ill-founded assertion it
need only be rejoined that, to be sure, there is little or no evidence of
esotericism, for the good reason
65
that esotericism is the one thing in
the world that is bound by its nature to leave little evidence! Does the
scholar expect that the members of the Mysteries would have published their
secrets abroad? On the contrary, they were bound to secrecy by the severest of
all pledges.
Religious books have been written,
if written at all, in cryptic form, with truth heavily veiled under the garb of
cipher and symbol. Figures and glyphs had to be devised that would convey
meaning to the initiated, but conceal it from the uninstructed. To interpret
archaic literature one must learn to discern the intent of truth under the
disguise of designed duplicity in the telling.
And it is further absurd for a
Christian apologist to protest the fact of ancient esotericism, seeing that
Christianity itself perpetuated esoteric distinctions in its own practices for
two centuries. To this effect there is a mountain of evidence. Even the Christian
Creed was kept largely a secret down to the fifth century. It was to be
preserved in memory only. St. Augustine urged that no writing be done about the
Creed because God had said that he would write his laws in our hearts and
minds. According to J. R. Lumby, in his History of the Creeds (pp. 2, 3)
there is found no specimen of a Creed until the end of the second century, and
the oldest written Creed dates about the end of the third century.
The demands of an esoteric
methodology account for the ancient use of mythopoeia. Here we encounter
that feature of ancient procedure that has bred the prevalent wide confusion
with respect to past wisdom, and find the solution of our bewilderment and
ineptitude in face of ancient mythology. Our childish misconstruction that has
written the record of our dull incomprehension across the scroll of literature
for a millennium and a half, comes out in glaring silhouette as we fathom the
devices of this cryptic treatment. We have mistaken symbolic language for
direct speech. We have pitying condescension toward early races who
explained the discovery of "fire" by the Promethean legend. We laugh
at Hindus for saying that the earth is upheld by an elephant, which stands on a
tortoise. We pridefully ask them on what the tortoise stood. Their pertinent
answer might well be: "On modern stupidity." Not the ancients, but
we, are the puerile party in the case. We, not they, have "believed"
their myths. The apparent childishness of the myths is far overmatched by our
real childishness in supposing they were taken as factual. One can not read in
any mod-
66
ern academic work on ancient culture
in Greece, Egypt, Chaldea or India without having to witness the birth anguish
of the laboring idea that the myths reveal an inceptive stage of the slow
evolution from primitive infantilism to our smug all-knowing wisdom.
We cast in the face of this
presupposition the statement that the mythos was the designed instrument
of consummate poetic and dramatic art!
The stories were devised to convey
cosmical history, theogony, anthropogenesis, and finally individual experience
of humans in the psycho-physiological development of mortal life. The whole
cycle of the history of unfolding divinity in humanity was dramatized for stage
enactment in the annual round of Mystery festivals. And portions of this drama
have filtered down into the ritualism of practically every religion in the
world. The epic of the human soul in earthly embodiment was the theme of every
ancient poet and dramatist, and each strove to dress out the elements of the
struggle in a new allegorical garb, with a new hero, whether Achilles,
Hercules, Horus, Theseus, Aeneas, Orpheus, Jason, Dionysus, Buddha, Ulysses or
Jesus, enacting the central role of the divine genius conquering the animal
nature. In lieu of love, sex, detective, murder and gangster novels, the
writers of the bygone era could deal but with one theme, that of the pilgrimage
of the soul through the gamut of the elements. Each work was a Pilgrim’s
Progress. And novelty could be introduced only by the device of depicting the
soul’s experiences under a new allegorical situation, symbolizing afresh the
old, old story of the immortal spirit’s immersion in the sea of matter. In all,
combats with dragons, wrestling with serpents, harassments by brute creatures,
enchantments by Sirens, plottings of conspirators, imprisonment in dungeons and
struggling through to an ultimate return to the original home of felicity, find
their place. In one type of adventure after another the many features of the
history of the divine Ego in its progress from earth back to the skies were
allegorically portrayed. Every aspect of the experience had its appropriate
myth.
Indeed there is every presumption in
favor of the belief that the mythos was an infinitely more profound
instrument in the hands of its inventors than we yet can fathom. It is hardly
too much to affirm that it was the echo of the Logos itself carrying the form
of the emanational Voice out into the material realm. The mythos brought
the
67
unseen forms of abstract truth out
into physical representation for the grasp of thought. There is warrant for
believing that mutheomai, the Greek, meaning "to fable,"
"represent," "invent," is derivable from the Egyptian mutu,
"quick utterance." It would suggest a form of direct speech to
the intuitions. The myth made an outward picture of ideal forms. It dramatized
truth. It had the graphic impressiveness of a cinematograph. This view is
upheld by a writer who yet refutes at every turn the mythological basis of
religion:4 "It is the property of the mystic to proceed by way of images
to the summit of a pure idea and the intellectual vision of the
substance." That the myths were thus the vehicles for conveying the
realization of abstract truths which could not be presented so forcefully in
words alone seems indisputably clear. What is equally clear now is that, in the
hands of ignorance, an exoteric rendering has taken the place of the esoteric,
depriving the mind of its grasp on the essential truth intended in the
adumbration. The danger of such a confusion was seen by Philo, the learned Jew,
who when speaking of the Mosaic writings told his countrymen that "the
literal statement is a fabulous one, and it is in the mythical that we shall find
the true."5 Philo’s statement is not less apt for the present age.
Reluctant as is the modern scholar
of repute to assent to the ascription of vital hidden meaning to the ancient
legends, the truth in this regard is occasionally seen and admitted. It is
refreshing to read such a passage as the following from one of the accredited
authorities in the field of Egyptology. Speaking of the Mysteries of Osiris and
the dramatic representations enacted each year at Abydos, he says:
"Every act was symbolical in
character and represented some ancient belief or tradition. The paste, the
mixture of wheat and water, the egg, the naked goddess Shenti, i.e., Isis in
her chamber, the placing of the paste on her bed, the kneading of the paste
into moulds, etc., represented the great processes of Nature which are set in
motion when human beings are begotten and conceived, as well as the inscrutable
powers which preside over growth and development. . . . And there was not the
smallest action on the part of any member of the band who acted the ‘miracle
Play’ of Osiris, and not a sentence in the Liturgy which did not possess
importance and vital significance to the followers of Osiris."6
In the light of such true words from
one of the most eminent of Egyptologists it becomes next to incomprehensible
that modern schol-
68
ars have so wretchedly misconceived
the inner purport of these old Mystery rituals and that the same scholar has
himself most ridiculously misconstrued their meaning in many particulars. The
broad modern assumption has been that the mythos was in toto a
lot of mummery and that the rituals were a lot of hollow ceremonialism based on
superstition. That they shadowed the greatest of spiritual truths has not yet
entered the mind of any man highly received in the ranks of orthodox
scholarship. No one has yet been able to tell these savants that they have been
handling pearls, and not rubbish.
Yet they have been told, and by no
one more courageously and vehemently than Gerald Massey, a scholar of
surpassing ability whose sterling work has not yet won for him the place of
eminence which he deserves. The wrecking of the mythos by ignorant
literalism stirred Massey to bitter resentment against the perpetrators of the
crime. His own words will speak best for him, while they support our own
contentions:
"The aborigines did not mistake
the facts of nature as we have mistaken the primitive method of representing
them. It is we, not they, who are the most deluded victims of false belief.
Christian capacity for believing the impossible is unparalleled in any time
past amongst the race of men. Christian readers denounce the primitive
realities of the mythical representations as puerile indeed, and yet their own
realities alleged to be eternal, from the fall of Adam to the redemption by means
of a crucified Jew, are little or nothing more than the shadows of these
primitive simplicities of an earlier time. It will yet be seen that the
culmination of credulity, the meanest emasculation of mental manhood, the
densest obscuration of the inward light of nature, the completest imbecility of
shut-eye belief, the nearest approach to a total and eternal eclipse of common
sense, has been attained beyond all chance of competition by the victims of the
Christian creeds. The genesis of delusive superstition is late, not early. It
is not the direct work of nature herself. Nature was not the mother who began
her work of development by nursing her child in all sorts of illusions
concerning things in general. . . . Primitive man was not a metaphysician, but
a man of common sense. . . . The realities without and around him were too
pressing for the senses to allow him to play the fool with delusive idealities.
. . . Modern ignorance of the mythical mode of representation has led to
the ascribing of innumerable false beliefs not only to primitive men and
present-day savages, but also to the most learned and highly civilized people
of antiquity, the Egyptians."7
69
He asserts again that the Egyptians
"knew, more or less, that their own legends were mythical, whereas the
Christians were vouching for their Mythos being historical."
Concerning symbolism and mythical representation he emphasizes that "the
insanity lies in mistaking it for human history or Divine Revelation."
Mythology, he avers, is the repository of man’s most ancient science, and "when
truly interpreted once more, it is destined to be the death of those false
theologies to which it has unwittingly given birth." Holding that all
mythologizing originated in Egypt, he fights the conclusion of Renouf that "neither
Hebrews nor Greeks borrowed any of their ideas from Egypt." The eminent
scholar could not have known of Herodotus’ statement that it was Melampus, the
son of Amytheon, who introduced into Greece the name of Dionysus (Bacchus) and
the ceremonial of his worship, having become acquainted with these and other
practices in Egypt. Herodotus concludes:
"For I can by no means allow
that it is by mere coincidence that the Bacchic ceremonies in Greece are so
nearly the same as the Egyptian."8
Elsewhere (II, 81) he repeats:
". . . the rites called Orphic
or Bacchic are in reality Egyptian and Pythagorean."
Massey claims that modern
misinterpretation of ancient typology has made a terrible tyranny in the mental
domain, much of our folklore and most of our popular beliefs being fossilized
symbolism. "Misinterpreted mythology has so profoundly infected religion,
poetry, art and criticism that it has created a cult of the unreal." He
asserts that "a great deal of what has been imposed upon us as God’s
direct, true and sole revelation to man is a mass of inverted myths."
Massey insists that theology is a
diseased state of primitive mythology, contradicting the renowned Max Müller,
who has stated the contrary--that mythology was a disease of theology.
Elsewhere he says that the Marchen are not reflections, but refractions,
of the ancient myths. The mythos passed over into the folk-tale, not the
folk-tale into the mythos. He contends that in truth the myths were the
earliest forms taken by primitive thought in formulating representations of
reality. Simple-minded early man saw life pictured by the living processes
under his observation. Our own opinion diverges considerably from
70
Massey’s at this point, since there
is massive evidence, of the general type adduced in this work, to show that the
myths were not the product of "primitive" simplicity, but on the
contrary were devised by the highest mythopoetic genius. They were the output
of a line of sages who knew the truth of what Paul has told us, that the
inner world of ideality is understood by those things which are made, in the
outer world of physis. They traced a marvelous series of parallels,
correspondences, analogies between things seen and things unseen, the better to
illustrate the latter. They knew that physical nature typed spiritual reality,
and used the outlines of the former to pictorialize the latter. They took the
tadpole or the serpent as the type of resurrected life, because they saw the
spiritual process exemplified in these creatures. They took the hawk as the
symbol of the risen soul because they saw the bird soar into the airy heights.
They found in the mole a fit symbol of the soul immersed in the dark underworld
of flesh, because the analogy was evident and under their eye. Nature supplied
the suggestive identity, and they used it to teach subjective truths. Primitive
man may well known the simple processes of nature from first-hand contact; but
he will not know that they bespeak a spiritual counterpart of themselves in the
interior life of man unless the sages so inform him. Massey’s view was not well
considered in this regard. Whole generations of civilized folks have gazed upon
the phenomena of nature and failed to be instructed spiritually by the
spectacle. One must ask Massey if primitive fancy could construct allegories so
profoundly elaborated that the united intelligence of the world for centuries
has been unable to fathom their hidden significance. Millions of intelligent
persons today have looked upon the sun and moon throughout the whole of their
lives and have never yet discerned in their movements and phases an iota of the
astonishing spiritual drama which the two heavenly bodies enact each month, a
drama disclosed to our own astonished comprehension only by the books of
ancient Egypt. Hundreds of celebrities in the field of Egyptology have mulled
over the same material and have not yet lifted as much as a corner of the veil
of Isis. Primitive simplicity could not have concocted what the age-long study
of an intelligent world could not fathom. Not aboriginal naïveté, but exalted
spiritual and intellectual acumen, formulated the myths. Reflection of the
realities of a higher world in the phenomena of a lower world could not be
detected when only the one world, the
71
lower, was known. You can not see
that nature reflects spiritual truth unless you know the form of spiritual
truth. And such knowledge would be an a priori requirement to making the
comparison at all! Did primitive man possess such profound knowledge of
subjective truth?
But whence, it will be asked, came
such exalted intelligence amongst the early undeveloped races? This question
has been answered by the earlier statement that graduates of this or other
cycles of growth had parented and tutored early mankind. A parent or guardian
gives to the immature child a set of high maxims into the practical wisdom of
which he is to grow in the course of his later development. Humanity was the
ward of the demi-gods in remote times. And none but an intelligence beyond
Shakespeare’s, beyond Plato’s, could have framed so marvelous a quiver of
myths, the interior purport of which cannot even now be grasped save by the
help of most recondite keys, themselves the distillation of a whole course of
philosophical education. We have not read into the myths, as Massey claims, an
unwarranted implication; we are only now, all too belatedly, drawing out of
them some portion of a meaning deep as life itself, which they were from the
first designed to embody. We do not have to superimpose extraneous meaning upon
them. We find them already pregnant with truth. They shine with the flashing
light of an inner connotation which they were intended to reflect. They were
themselves the shadow in objective form of the substance of truth, and Massey
must not object to our working from the shadow, as Plato suggested in the
"cave allegory," back to the substance. It is the only method
operable by men in the "cave."
The religious texts of old are at
least one thing that did not arise from "primitive" ignorance.
Says Budge, in speaking of the Egyptian Book of the Dead: "They
can’t be the literary product of savages or negroes."9 He adds elsewhere:
"The descriptions of the heaven
of the Egyptian depicted in the Pyramid Texts represent the conceptions
of countless generations of theologians."10
Yet he refers to these Egyptian
people as primitives. He reveals his mental obfuscation again in speaking of
the Egyptian judgment:
"The pictorial form of the
Judgment Scene cannot fail to strike us as belonging to a primitive period,
when the Egyptians believed that hearts were actually weighed in the Balance
before Osiris, while the words of the
72
texts . . . suggest a development of
ethics which we are accustomed to associate with the most civilized nations of
the world."11
Apart from the fact that almost
certainly no age of Egyptian history was so stupid as to believe that a living
Osiris ever observed the weighing of physical hearts in an actual Judgment
Scene--it being all a symbolical depiction--the passage discloses the confusion
of the scholastic mind at the contemporaneous presence of elevated spirituality
or ethics with alleged primitive culture. We see the same inadequacy of the
"primitive" theory to meet the facts again in the following quotation
from Budge:
"Mr. Dennett, after a long
study of the religions of many tribes in Western Africa, says that the Bavili
conception of God is so spiritual, or abstract, that he fears the reader will
think him mad to suppose that so evidently degenerate a race can have formed so
logical an idea of God."12
It seems never to have occurred to
either Budge or Mr. Dennett or others that some saner age might some time pass
upon our scholars the judgment of madness in thinking that the sublime
spiritual conceptions of the Book of the Dead, the Chaldean Oracles,
the
Orphic Hymns, could have been the product of primitive peoples.
In discussing the (figurative)
partaking by the ancient votaries of the bodies of their gods in the
Eucharistic festival, which he mistakes for a literal eating (!), Budge traces
the practice to a savage custom of cutting out and eating the vital organs of
the bodies of captives in order to imbibe their courage, and says that "it
is hard to understand the retention of such a notion in a text filled with
sublime thoughts and ideas." Could not this distinguished scholar see that
the sole difficulty in the matter was caused by the foolish attempt to read
poetry and allegory as objective occurrence?
It is perhaps permissible to
interject here an instance of the incapacity of modern academicians to
interpret the ancient use of symbols. Says Budge again:
"The Egyptian Christian also
associated the frog with new birth and on a Christian lamp described by
Lauzone, is a figure of a frog surrounded by the legend ‘Ego eimi
Anastasis,’ ‘I am the Resurrection.’ It is not easy at first sight to
understand why the frog should have been a symbol of new life to the Egyptian
any more than the beetle. . . ."13
73
He finally arrives at the solution:
"The frog appears with the coming of the rain, just as the beetle appears
with the rising of the Nile, and so the ideas of new life and fertility became
associated with them." That so eminent a scholar as Budge should admit the
difficulty of understanding why the frog--which transforms from the
tadpole--and the beetle--which goes into the ground only to reissue after an
incubation of twenty-eight days as a new generation of himself--should have
been taken as apt symbols of the resurrection is a sufficiently striking demonstration
of the blindness with which modern presumption has approached the study of the
lore of antiquity. The frog, the beetle, the snake, the worm becoming the
chrysalis, were the obvious visible types of transfiguration and regeneration,
the outward mark of the spiritual idea. Massey states that the Christian
Fathers, with the exception perhaps of Clement of Alexandria, "had
scarcely enough knowledge of the ancient symbolism to put any perceptible
boundary to their ignorance."14 They did not know that their Gospels were
old Egyptian myths ignorantly literalized. Massey notes that Celsus "asked
concerning the Christian legends, made false to fact by the ignorant
literalization of the Gnosis,--‘What nurse would not be ashamed to tell such
fables to a child?’" One might paraphrase Celsus’ question today by
asking: "What age would not be ashamed to confess that it could not tell
the difference between myths and actual history?"
Every religion apparently has begun
at a high level and become corrupted until it stood in need of reformation and
purification. Religions decay through atrophy of spiritual vision. Their course
is marked by a blurring of the original light. Their fiery motivating spirit
ever tends to become static. Early passion for radical regeneration of the life
dwindles into a conservative tendency. The early dynamic symbols and slogans
after a time lose their pristine significance. Hence the traditions, legends
and rites found to be cherished by many semi-civilized tribes of our day are
doubtless the decadent remnants or mere husks of former grand representations
of spiritual truth. They do not represent the beginnings of crude
religious apprehension; they are the crumbling ruins of once noble structures
of wisdom and genius. Modern insight has entirely failed to sense this status
of the religious material in anthropological study, in consequence of which the
handling of religion as a sociological investigation has been
74
marked by the grossest
misconception, bewilderment and confusion. Academic opinion is that the myths
and folk-tales are the groping efforts of undeveloped mind to interpret nature.
But, on the contrary, they are the floating debris of splendid old formulations
that once brimmed with the golden wine of high meaning. They are the wrack of
mythology. "Whoever begins with the myths as a product of the ‘savage’
mind as savages are known today is fatally in error."15 Years of study
convinced Massey that all the Marchen were the flotsam of old Egyptian
wisdom-structures. He avers:
"We must go back to the
Proto-Aryan beginnings which are Egyptian and Kamite. In Africa we find those
things next to Nature where we can go no further back in search of origins.
Egypt alone goes back far enough to touch Nature in these beginnings, and . . .
Egypt alone has faithfully and intelligently kept the record."16
In Budge’s Osiris and the
Egyptian Resurrection (Vol. I, p. 365) the author writes of the people of
West Africa in relation to the assertion that they were primitive savages:
"This is a great mistake, for
they possess the remnants of a noble and sublime religion, the precepts
of which they have forgotten and the ceremonies of which they have
debased."
Here for once the scholar glimpsed
the truth of the anthropological situation as regards religious origins and
subsequent decadence, and had he followed the light which here shone in his
mind for the moment, he would have been spared the floundering in bogs and
swamps of misconception which makes his treatises so nearly worthless in the
end. In treating of that supposedly most debased of African religious customs,
fetishism, he writes:
"Wherever we find fetishism it
seems to be a corruption or modification of some former system of
worship rather than the result of a primitive faith."
"All this is only theory as far
as the Egyptians are concerned, but authorities on modern African religions
tell us that this is exactly what has taken place among the peoples of West
Africa. Thus Col. Ellis says that there is more fetishism among the negroes of
the West Indies, who have been Christianized for more than half a century, than
amongst those of West Africa; for side by side with the new religion have
lingered the old superstitions, whose true import has been forgotten or
corrupted."17
75
It served partisan ecclesiastical
purposes in early times to weave some history into the texture of the allegory
or to use certain bold historical events as the frame for the allegorical
depiction. And this mixture has made the determination difficult in places. It
is not an overstatement of truth to aver that the systems of mythology have
served little better purpose in the Christian era than to detail the entire
train of meaning. They have proved to be insoluble puzzles and enigmas. Our
inability to make sense of them has totally distorted our estimate of Greek,
Egyptian, Hindu and Chinese mentality, causing us to belittle their product
most egregiously. Evidences of our erroneous estimates of their work are
abundant. Lewis Spence quotes Budge (Egyptian Magic) as asserting that
the Egyptians believed the gods could assume at will the forms of animals, and
that this belief was the origin of the most sacred position accorded to animals
in Kamite religion.
"This was the fundamental idea
of so-called ‘Egyptian animal-worship’ which provoked the merriment of the
cultured Greeks and drew down upon the Egyptians the ridicule and abuse of the
early Christian writers."18
Budge is of record in a statement
that
"it is doubtful if the
Egyptian, at that time, had developed any spiritual conceptions, in our sense
of the word; for although his ideas were very definite as to the reality of a
future existence, I think that he had formulated few details about it, and that
he had no idea as to where or how it was to be enjoyed."
Such a quotation provokes the
comment that it might be heartily agreed that the Egyptians had no
"spiritual conceptions in our sense of the word," for their
understanding of eschatology far transcended ours in definiteness and lucidity,
being both scientific and consistent, while ours is hazy and conjectural. And
again, one could ask Budge just where in modern life the details as to the
future state have been so expressly "formulated" on an accepted
basis, and where one can gain explicit information nowadays as to "where
and how it is to be enjoyed." For the Spiritualists are the only ones who
have tried to set forth these matters with definiteness, and are we to
understand that Budge regards their theories as the accepted knowledge of our
brilliant era? Have not both science and the academic world scoffed at Spirit-
76
ualistic offerings? Budge goes on to
say that the student who views Egyptian religion "from the lofty
standpoint of Christianity only," will regard it as gross polytheism or
pantheism, expressed through rites that were cruel, bloodthirsty and savage,
embellished with legends of the gods that are childish, the outcome of debased
minds and imaginations, featuring a story of the resurrection of Osiris that is
a farrago of nonsense in which absurd magical ceremonies play an impossible
part, and a conception of heaven that bespeaks the imagination of a half-savage
people. Yet he has more than once expressed his surprise at the sublimity and
lofty purity of their presentments!
In his sorry effort at
interpretation of the Egyptian Myths and Legends Lewis Spence adds
clinching evidence of the utter incapacity of academic brains to discern in the
least degree what the sages of old were laboring to do, when he permits himself
to place the following shameful appraisal upon archaic intelligence:
"Again, to the Egyptian mind, incapable
of abstract thought, an immaterial and intangible deity was an impossible
conception. A god, and more so by reason of his godhead, must manifest and
function in an actual body. . . . As the Egyptian everywhere craved the
manifestation of and communion with his gods, it thus came about that
incarnations of deity and its many attributes were multiplied."19
The consummate obtuseness that could
prompt the ascription to the ancient Egyptian seers of the flat incapacity for
abstract thought may not be comprehended in its bald grossness until the reader
has finished the perusal of the present volume. We have not hitherto had the
presentation of the lucid meaning of Egypt’s religion to enable us to gauge the
amazing injustice, as well as the crass stupidity, of so rank a judgment
pronounced by ignorance against wisdom. In spiritual science we are
still the barbarians.
Further comment would call attention
to the sagacity of the Egyptians in refraining from doing the very thing of
which Spence accused them,--of actualizing their deities as persons. Not the
Egyptians but the Christians did this, in the person of Jesus. Personal gods
were precisely the kind they did not have. What they had was representations
of the gods, which is a whole kingdom’s length away from the other
conception. Their "gods" were in reality the actual energies of
nature, of matter and of mind in the universe, graded in a wonderful hier-
77
archy. These are intangible powers,
and what can puny man do other than represent them by one or another
type of image? The Egyptians had quite unaccountable knowledge of these
sublimer forces, with some of which, as the ethers and the rays, modern science
is now slowly becoming acquainted, and they poetically imaged them under deific
names, as Thoth, Anup, Kheper, Khnum, Osiris, Horus, Ptah, Set, Isis, Nephthys
and Ra. But gods in human flesh (except by personation) they expressly did not
have. Budge wastes pages over the discussion as to whether Osiris was a living
character; and decided that his tomb, with his actual bodily remains, was at
Abydos. The time has come to cry out against such incompetent muddling and to
bend ourselves with what capacity we have to unravel the golden threads of
supernal wisdom running their magnificent design through the old books of
Egypt.
Budge was a few times astute and
fair enough to admit that injustice had been done to pagans by Christian
aspersions as to their addiction to idol-worship and fetishism. He well recalls
that the Portuguese Christian explorers adjudged the African tribes to be
practitioners of witchcraft and sorcery simply because they were themselves
familiar with it and gratuitously translated observed African ceremonies as
such. He is good enough to say that "neither the Egyptian nor the modern
African ever believed in the divinity of their amulets or fetishes, and they
never considered them to represent deities." He quotes Dr. Nassau as a
final authority in stating that "the thing itself, the material itself, is
not worshipped. . . . Low as is fetishism, it nevertheless has its philosophy,
a philosophy that is the same in kind as that of the higher forms of
worship." The apex of fairness is reached in Budge’s statement in the Osiris
and the Egyptian Resurrection, Vol. I, p. 198:
"From first to last there is no
evidence whatever that the Egyptians worshipped a figure or symbol, whether
made of metal or wood, stone, porcelain or any other substance, unless they
believed it to be the abode of a spirit of some kind. So far from fetishism
being peculiarly characteristic of Egyptian religion, it seems to me that this
religion, at all events in its oldest forms, was remarkably free from
it."
78
Chapter V
LOOSING
THE SEVEN SEALS
If the mythologies of the early
nations have been a source of perplexity and bafflement to students, no less so
has been the Christian Bible itself. Not even the most rabid Christian partisan
could claim that the book has throughout a clear message, clearly to be
apprehended. Outside of much simple homiletic truth which has yielded comfort
to troubled hearts, the Bible is as yet practically a sealed book. Its meaning
is not known at the present day. Nothing but the thinnest shadow of the truth
that the book portrays has yet fallen across the threshold of modern
understanding. No suspicion of the grand completeness of its message has yet
dawned upon us. Nineteen hundred years of theological digging has not unearthed
the treasure buried under its allegorical profundities. And this failure has
been due to our stubborn refusal to reject the Bible as history, and to accept
it as cryptic typology. From beginning to end the Bible is nothing but a series
of spiritual allegories traduced to history or interwoven with some history.
A further startling discovery along
this line is that the series of myths deals not with a wide variety of
spiritual or cosmical situations, but only with the same one situation in
endless repetition! There is but one story to religion and its Bibles, only one
basic event from which spring all the motivations of loyalty and morality that
stir the human heart. The myth-makers had but one narrative to relate, one
fundamental mystery of life to dilate upon. All phases of spiritual life arise
out of the elements of the one cosmic and racial situation in which the human
group is involved; and all scriptural allegory has reference to this basic
datum, and meaning only in relation to it. The myths are all designed to keep
mankind apprised of this central predicament. It is the key to the Bible. And
it is the loss of this key situation that has caused the Book to be sealed
against the age-long assaults of our curious prying and delving. The
restoration of this key to our hands will
79
be seen at once to open the doors to
a vision of clear meaning, where now stalks dark incomprehensibility. Cosmology
has been almost wholly discarded from religion since Milton’s day, yet a
cosmical situation provides the ground for all adequate interpretation of Bible
representation. The one central theme is the incarnation.
Beside esotericism and allegorism
the Bible composers had recourse to another method which is less readily
demonstrable and which has caused the confusion incident to mistaking myth for
history to be far worse confounded. It was the method of uranography. The
uranograph was the chart of the heavens with the constellated pictography. From
remote times the ancients dealt with a celestial chart or map, on which their
earliest teachers had essayed to depict the features of the soul’s experience
in the scenes which their enlightened imaginations had traced about the star
clusters. The stellar zodiacs left at Denderah, Pylae and elsewhere are
impressive reminders of the influence of this heavenly scenograph. The
discovery in quite recent years of the Somerset zodiac in England, a giant
zodiac wrought, it is calculated, 2700 B.C. in the natural features of the
countryside covering one hundred square miles, with the figure of Leo, the
Lion, four miles from nose to tail-tip, is another most authentic attestation
to the basic significance which symbolical astrology has held in ancient
religious formulations. Present students have as yet little conception of how
generally this graph was employed in spiritual ideography and how pervasively
it colored the composition of the scriptural writings. It is next to impossible
to grasp subtle references in the Bible and other archaic literature without a
knowledge of the features of this planisphere. Bibles are in fact, in a broad
general sense, just the literary extension and amplification of the symbology
of the zodiac! The sages had first written the history of the human soul upon
the starry skies.
If we hold them guilty of having
thus perpetrated what seems to us pure whimsicality, we are convicted of
ignorance on another count. They were depicting history in that sphere where it
had first occurred, before it began with man on earth. Spiritual history had
been enacted on a cosmic scale in the heavens, in higher ranges of cosmic life,
before it was repeated and copied in the human drama on this globe. The
heavenly man, in whose image and likeness earthly man is made, and in whose
body the suns and planets are but cells and organs, was the prototype of man
himself. And so it comes that humanity was in pri-
80
mordial times instructed to build
its life "after the pattern of things in the heavens." The
planisphere was the historical and anatomical graph of the Divine Cosmical Man,
and it became at once a secret glyph for the behoof of mundane humanity.
In the spirit of this understanding
the religious teachers of yore ever sought to write into human, racial,
national and individual history the reflection or pattern of the uranograph. This
effort was the secret motif back of all national epics! The epic was an
attempt to fashion national history in the similitude of the structural unity
of the divine plan for macrocosmic, and by reflection, microcosmic, man. This
is in general the theme of such an esoteric work as the Jewish Kabalah.
The distinctive features of the
cosmograph are in evidence in every case. In every religious epic there is
first and centrally a Holy City, a "Jerusalem," residence of the king
and the eventual home of all the elect. There is next an Upper and Lower Land,
typifying the dual segmentation of heaven and earth, or spirit and body, in
man’s nature, which was in all systems held to be the union of a divine with an
animal principle. The two sections were always connected by a river, rising in
the higher mountainous sources in the Upper Kingdom and flowing thence,
carrying its blessings of fertility, down into the Lower Kingdom, which is thus
nourished by the living water from above. Then there was always a bordering
sea, symbolical in every case of the stormy ephermeral scene of the mortal
life. No less was there a smaller water, a lake, Sea of Galilee, Dead Sea,
Black Sea, Red Sea, Jordan River, Styx River, or the marshes or fens, which
were to be crossed by the voyaging soul to reach the more blessed isles, or
farther shore of spiritual bliss. Strangely enough there, was a further
division of the land into seven tribal provinces, a heptarchy or heptanomis, as
in Egypt, Judea, England and elsewhere. This division was representative of the
seven kingdoms of nature, the seven stages of unfoldment through which life
must pass in the completion of every cycle. At other times the division was a
decad, after the pattern of the Sephirothal Tree of the Kabbalah, but
eventually redistributed in twelve sections, as in the case of the Hebrews,
Athens, Afghanistan and some others, reflecting the twelvefold segmentation of
the zodiac, which in turn typified the twelve levels of man’s evolutionary
attainment, or "twelve manner of fruits" on the branches of the Tree
of Life, the twelve divine elements of man’s perfected being. Likewise there
was
81
always a definite locality
designated as the birthplace of the god, which was in many instances also his
place of death and burial and following resurrection. Other centers marked the
scene of his initiations, temptations, baptisms, trials, crucifixion and
transfiguration, every stage of his evolutionary experience, in fact. Then
there were cities dedicated to the special cult of the sun, the moon, and even
such stars as Orion, the stellar symbol of the Christos; or of Sirius,
the great Dog-Star, symbol of the advent. The four cardinal points were
featured, as emblematic of the four pillars of man’s constitution, his
physical, emotional, mental and spiritual bodies and natures. A warfare between
the Upper and Lower Lands and their kings was generally a part of the
"history," ending in the conquest of the Lower by the Higher and the
union of the two under the crown of dual sovereignty. This drama was enacted so
often in the "history" of so many kings of Egypt that even a scholar
of the eminence of the late William H. Breasted, in his History of Egypt, expresses
his puzzlement over the fact that nearly every Pharaoh of the dynasties had to
conquer Lower Egypt afresh and unite the two halves of the country under a common
hegemony! In all likelihood the physiography and organic structure of the
heavenly man was to some extent copied in the distribution and construction of
pyramids, tombs, temples and other sanctuaries, and the pyramids themselves
were quite obviously astronomical graphs with ceremonial design and
conformations. There was a mountain or holy hill of the Lord, and there were
points of entrance and exit from and to the lower world of Amenta.
The celestial typology having been
engrafted on the topography of the country itself, the next measure was to
weave the dramatic features into the national history. Egypt and the Hebrew
tribes are perhaps the most outstanding examples of the operation of this
methodology on an extensive scale, how extensive the general student of the
present age is unprepared to believe. Thus the names associated for ages with
cosmic and spiritual typism were spread out over the maps of the different
lands; and the national kings, heroes, warriors, sages became titular
characters in the immemorial heavenly drama. In the light of this custom we are
in a position to reach a conclusion of the very greatest importance for
research, affecting the entire view of scripture as history. For we are
confronted with the inexpugnable fact that the names and events in religious
scripts were for the greater part not
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the products of objective history in
the first place, but on the contrary the names and events in assumed history
were a deposit from the religious books! The names of kings, heroes, cities,
lakes, rivers and mountains were on the uranograph long before they appeared on
national maps! They were transferred from the uranograph to the maps! The
occurrences of Bible "history" had been enacted annually or nightly
among the stars of the sky long before they became incorporated in the epics of
religion. And they had been in the epics before they became assigned to actual
localities and personages. Heavenly regions and spiritual transactions were
finally brought to earth and given a local habitation on land and in history.
In short, the naming of geographical features was done by the sacerdotal castes
in each country, in which task they simply sought to pattern their country and
its history after the scheme of the uranograph! Their map and their history
were cast as far as could be done in the mold of the cosmic chart. Each nation
designed to make its configuration and history reflect and fulfill the
heavenly model!
A partial exemplification of the
same tendency can be seen even in our own American history, where the priestly
class gave religious names to the earliest settlements and geographical
features. The practice is attested by such names as Salem, Providence, New
Haven, Newark, New Canaan, Bethlehem, Nazareth (Pennsylvania), Sante Fe,
Sacramento, Corpus Christi, Los Angeles, Vera Cruz, San Salvador, San Domingo
and a list of saints’ names and holy appellations. The Puritans from England
and Holland emigrated to New England actuated powerfully by the assurance that
they were going to fulfill in the new continent the ancient Covenant between
Jehovah and the Israelites. The Mayflower was part of the religious
epic. The Anglo-Israel movement of the present day manifests largely the same
tendencies.
The theory here advanced is not
without support from other authorities. The following brings the weight of a
very venerable document to the endorsement of the idea:
"It has already been suggested
that the mapping out of localities was celestial before the chart was
geographically applied and that all common naming on earth came from one common
naming of the heavens, commencing with the Great Bear and the Dog. The mapping
out of Egyptian localities according to the celestial Nomes and scenery is
described in the
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inscription of Khnum-hept, who is
said to have ‘established the landmark of the south, and sculptured the
northern--like the heaven. He stretched the Great Bear on its back. He
made the district in its two parts, setting up their landmarks, like
the heaven.’" (Records of the Past, XII, 68.)
An evident additional corroboration
of the theory is contained in the injunction given to Moses in the Bible:
"See that thou make all things
after the pattern shown thee in the Mount . . . the pattern of the
heavens."
"Jerusalem, the Mount of Peace,
the Nabhi-Yoni of the Earth, was one of these sacred cities that were mapped
out according to the Kamite model in the heavens."1
"The pattern of things in the
Mount," "the pattern of the heavens," has not hitherto been seen
to be the Biblical analogue and symbol of Plato’s ideal forms. The Mount, the
heavens, are of course the heights of divine ideation, whereon God projected
his new world in thought forms before he impressed them upon matter. The
heavens are the uplands of consciousness, or spheres of being, not physical
localities. God formed his mental models on the Mount of Vision and Imagination
before he cast them into concretion.
So far from grasping the
uranographic art as the key to the historical problem in all scriptures, late
writers vent their skepticism on this point in passages such as this:
"What proof is there--we ask
once more--that the people, the mystics even, of two thousand or more years
ago, read all this into the heavens; that they regarded the various divisions
and towns, and the river and name of Galilee, as mystical and earthly reflexes
of these celestial phenomena!"2
There is proof enough in the very
fact that the ancient seers were poets and allegorists, and not historians.
Practically conclusive evidence that Bible names are not objective or
historical (in the first place) is to be found in the fact that there are in
the Bible some scores of allusions to such local names as Egypt, Jerusalem,
Nineveh, Babylon, Tyre, Sidon, Gilead, Assyria, Galilee, Ethiopia and others
which, if taken in the earthly geographical sense, yield no intelligible
meaning whatever. Further evidence is to be found in the notable fact that the
divisions and localities on mundane maps do in the main largely match the
celestial features. Charts of the "Holy Land of Canaan" have been
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found extant in early Egypt as much
as three hundred years before the alleged Israelite exodus, whence it is to be
presumed that this promised land of peace and plenty was allegorical before
it was historical. Massey states that an entablature on the wall of an
Egyptian temple bore a list of some hundred and twenty place names afterwards
localized in Palestine, at a date at least one hundred and fifty years before
there could possibly have been an exodus of Israelites from Egypt. It requires
little "proof" to ascertain that "Egypt" as used throughout
the Bible has the meaning of the lower self or animal-human personality, indeed
the physical body of man itself. Jerusalem means the "holy city" or
the heavenly realms, which are in consciousness, not on the map.
"The picture of this paradise
in the Hebrew writings, the Psalms, the Books of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Zechariah
and
Revelation, were pre-extant long ages earlier as Egyptian. What the
so-called ‘prophets’ of the Jews did was to make sublunary the vision of the
good time in another life. There were always two Jerusalems from the time when
Judea and Palestine were appendages of Egypt. Two Jerusalems were recognized by
Paul, one terrestrial, one celestial. The name of Jerusalem we read as the Aarru-salem
or fields of peace in the heaven of the never-setting stars. The burden of
Jewish prophecy, which turned out so terribly misleading for those who were
ignorant of the secret wisdom, is that the vision of this glorious future
should be attained on earth; whereas it never had that meaning. . . . Thus
Jerusalem on earth was to take the place of Jerusalem above and the Aarru-hetep
became Jerusalem simply as a mundane locality."3
From numberless texts in the Bible
itself which point to the correctness of the uranographic interpretation of
names we take one alone, which by itself is enough to substantiate the claim
made in this connection. In Revelation (II: 8), speaking of the two
witnesses whom it is said the dragon will rise up and slay, the apocalyptic
writers says:
"And their dead bodies shall
lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom
and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified."
There is enough in this verse to
confound the entire schematism of Christian theology as historically based. It
implies a clear refutation of the whole Passion Week and Good Friday ritual, as
commemorative of "history." Jesus, so it says, was not crucified in
an earthly Jerusalem,
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but only in a spiritual one, the
name of which is indifferently Sodom or Egypt, the latter not even the name of
an earthly city, but of a country! Jesus crucified in Egypt! And what becomes
of the Gospel "history"? It is left to take its only true place,
which is among the sacred myths! The crucifixion was, on the authority of the
Bible itself, a spiritual and not a historical transaction.
T. J. Thorburn, author of a work
aiming to invalidate the mythical nature of the Gospels, reveals the perplexity
as well as the ineptitude of orthodox scholars in the face of the ancient trick
of uranography and allegory:
"And if their statements are
not to be taken in their natural and historical sense, then we must hold that
in ancient literature it is more than doubtful whether writers ever mean
precisely what they say."4
They surely never dreamed that an
age would come, so far lost to the mythical intent of their writings as to
suppose they ever meant literally what they said. They could not know
that the wisest savants of a distant epoch would be so blinded by the forces of
obscurantism as not to realize that the old books spoke only in the terms of
those earthly forms that adumbrate spiritual realities. The old masters of
religious science were not in the habit of speaking "precisely"; they
spoke under the forms of figure always. They could not suspect that their
indirect poetical method would so outrageously befuddle modern
"intelligence."
Ancient philosophy was intensely
responsive to the conception that all things mundane were a lower copy of
things empyrean. On the theory that all forms of life were typical of the one
basic nature of all life everywhere, the sages read into earthly things the
reflection of things celestial. Jesus said he could not tell the disciples of
heavenly things unless they had first believed in earthly things. The sea of
earth life reflected heavenly life in its bosom. The seers who knew that nature
was a dramatization of cosmic archai, sought for the evidence of the
archetypal design in every phenomenon on earth. With what remarkable nicety
they traced higher truth in the mirror of nature we shall see clearly as the
story unfolds. So, in the end, in their religious life they labored to
represent their history as conforming to the primordial type. To this end they
resorted to a measure which has caught and deceived purblind scholarship since
that time.
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From the general thesis that their
national history reflected God’s plan for the world, it was an easy step to the
more explicit assumption that their national life embodied the divine
plan. They threw about themselves the aureole of divinely constituted agency to
fulfill the cosmic plan. They therefore arrogated to themselves the title of
"God’s chosen people," and took the names allotted only to the
spiritualized humans, the men evolved to divinity! This tack will not appear
either unlikely or outlandish when we ponder the disposition of nations in our
own day to put forth blatant claims to be the chosen agents of Providence for
the cultural rulership of the world.
Even if there seems to be veridical
history in the Bible, it can be viewed properly as a setting for the spiritual
dramatization, or as the clothing in which the drama was garbled. At times,
perhaps, the writers appear to have utilized the data of actual history to stage
the symbolic figurations. To this task the religious poets dedicated their
ingenuity.
It becomes evident on this thesis
that the historical element of the scriptures is of far less significance than
has been supposed. It is the philosophy of history and not the data of history
that is of foremost concern. As exhibiting providential design in world life it
becomes of epic moment. The Hebrew race has exploited this phase of the old
methodology to its highest possibility, only, however, as Egypt had done before
it; and has been so successful that it has left the impression of a unique and
exalted hierarchical status for the Jewish race. The outcome of our correction
of vision will be that we shall for the first time properly regard the Old
Testament books as, in the main, the universal drama of the spiritual life
masquerading in the disguise of Hebrew history subtly woven into the great
cosmic epic! The Biblical title Israelites is a spiritual designation
purely, and is wrongly taken in the sense of the name of an ethnic group.
"My people of Israel" or "the children of Israel" of the
Hebrew deity are just the divinized humans, mortals who have put on the
immortal spiritual nature, men graduated into Christhood, a spiritual group in
the early Mysteries. Gentiles were those who were not yet spiritually reborn.
The word comes from the Latin and Greek roots, "gen,"
"gent," meaning simply "to be born." They were those
born as the first or natural man, but not yet reborn as the spiritual Christ.
It can be given no ethnic reference. The name "Israelite" is
obviously compounded of "Is," abbreviation of Isis, or Eve’s original
name, Issa (See Josephus); "Ra," the great Egyptian
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solar god, male and spiritual; and
the Hebrew "El," God. It would then read, Father-Mother-God, making
his "children" the sons of God, i.e., Christs. Likewise the name
"Hebrews" means "those beyond" (the merely human state),
and therefore is practically identical with "Israelites." Finally the
term "Jews" (from the plural of the Egyptian IU--Latin JU)
refers to the "male-female divinities," a title given in the
Mysteries to men made gods and thus restored to androgyne, or male-female,
condition. The national Jews thus adopted for their historical name all three
of the exalted spiritual designations conferred in the Mysteries on the Epoptae
or completely divinized candidates.
It was hardly expected that any
positive documentary evidence could be found in support of the evident fact
that these names had simply been appropriated by the race using them as
illustrious titles abstracted from the uranograph. But a direct statement to
that precise effect was found in the Hebrew Grammar of Gesenius, a learned
German scholar, (on p. 6):
"Of the names Hebrews . . . and
Israelites . . . the latter was more a national name of honor and was
applied by the people to themselves with a patriotic reference to their
descent from illustrious ancestors; . . ."
This is of vast significance as
affecting the historical view of the Bible, with possible extremely severe
repercussions on world history of the present.
The fourth consideration found
essential to a grasp of archaic meaning is the knowledge that religion was an
outgrowth from a specific situation involving the human race at its beginning.
Religion is commonly assigned to a category under the head of psychology. It is
a matter of mind and emotion.
But the roots of religion are found
to go deeper than any mere inclination of the psyche. Eventually religion took
psychological forms of expression, but it was originally not mere psychology. It
was an outgrowth of anthropology. It took its rise out of the racial or
evolutionary beginnings and bore an immediate relation thereto. Every feature
of it was engendered out of the interrelation of the several elements entering
into the compound of man’s constitution.
Human nature was composed of more
than one element. There were the physical, the emotional, the mental and the
spiritual. More
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compactly viewed, there are the human-animal
and the divine. Religion is just the play of the factors of the
interrelationship subsisting between these several natures in man. Or it is the
relation between man and his god, the latter being universally existent
primarily within him, secondarily without. It details the history of the soul
or divine spark of spirit in its cyclical incorporation in human bodies. Its
central fact is the incarnation, the relation of soul to body, God to man, man
to God.
According to Plato’s Timaeus and
other archaic documents a group of twelve legions of "junior gods,"
who were sparks of the eternal Flame of cosmic mind, were ordered, as their
assignment in the cooperative work of creation with Deity, to descend to earth
and elevate the races of the highest animal development by linking their own
mental capacity with the organisms thus far developed by the evolution of form.
They were to lift the animals across the gulf between the summit of instinct
and the beginnings of reason. These angels were devas, "bright" or
"shining" emanations of divine intelligence, but were not exempt from
the "cycle of necessity," or periodical immersion in forms of
physical embodiment on a planet for purposes of their own further
self-evolution. It subserved both the interests of their own progress and that
of the animals they were to uplift, that the two races, the one germinally
conscious and immortal, the other dumbly brutish and mortal, should be
periodically joined together, the higher to be the king and ruler of the lower.
The procedure thus adopted by life gave to the animal the possibility of
evolving a mind through association with a mental nature, and to the
intelligent spirits the physical bodies that were their particular requirement
for contacting the type of experience they were destined to undergo. If this
seems bizarre, it must be remembered that all living entities are the result of
the linkage of a spiritual nucleus with a material organism. No creature lives
but what is compounded of "soul" and body.
In conformity with evolutionary law
these legions of devas or angels, we are told, descended to earth, took
lodgment in the bodies of higher animals and began their career of redeeming
the lower creatures to mental status. In the Timaeus these "junior
gods" are addressed by the Demiurgus (the creative Logos, Jupiter) and are
told to descend and "convert yourselves according to your natures to the
fabrication of animals," the gist of their mission being summed up in the
command
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to "weave together mortal and
immortal natures." This is one of the most important utterances of ancient
scripture, because it announces the character of our constitution and sets
forth plainly our evolutionary commission. It tells us that we are both
animal-human and divine at once, animal as to our bodies, divine as to our
intellects. For Plato says: "According to body it is an animal, but
according to intellect a god." Our earthly task, according to St. Paul, is
to link together the two natures in "one new man," bringing to an end
in a final "reconciliation" "the battle of Armageddon," the
aeonial warfare between the "carnal mind" of the animal and the
spiritual mind of the god. This warfare is also Plato’s strife between noësis,
the spiritual intelligence, and doxa, the motions of the sense
nature. The soul is here in body to discipline the latter by the inculcation of
habits of rectitude until the animal learns to use the powers of mind. Tutoring
the animal, the soul at the same time achieved its own higher schooling in
deific unfoldment. This interlocking of the two grades of life in one organism
must be constantly kept in view if the proper study of religion is to be made.
No organic evolution can proceed from one kingdom to another without the
deploying of the mental resources of a superior kingdom in aid of the level
below it. And each kingdom profits by the act of brotherhood. The god achieves
his own further apotheosis by reaching down to raise the animal to human
estate.
It must be noted that when the
intelligence of the god is joined to the life of the animal, it communicates
but a fragment of its power to the organism, remaining for the larger part of
its conscious being hidden on its own spiritual plane. It thus becomes an
invisible guardian, or what the ancients called the "daimon." Lurking
in the background of consciousness, it is what modern psychology has lately
discovered and named the "collective unconscious." From behind the
curtain, as it were, it directs the animal with only a tentacle of its power.
It can not incorporate in the animal a greater measure of its capacity than the
latter can suitably accommodate and carry. It will push down into expression
more and more of itself as the refinement of the coarse body goes on apace.
Like a radio, the mechanism must be tuned up higher to register finer
vibrations. In the Greek theosophy it is stated that "the gods distribute
divinity" to the grades of beings below them, which "participate
according to their capacity."
In briefest summary (to be amplified
to greater elaboration in the
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sequel) this is the basic
cosmological and racial datum of every old religion. Together with its
implications it is the basis of every religious interpretation ever made or to
be made. Every problem of ethics, devotion, discipline and intellect receives
its full complement of value and meaning only in reference to this fundamentum.
Religion is far more than a posture of mystic feeling; it was in origin a
series of codes, principles and practices given by the demi-gods to early
mankind to awaken the torpid genius of our actual divinity. In a true sense it
was designed to wield a semi-magical influence to transform animal man into the
divinized human! Its rites were formulated with a view to bestirring man’s
memory of his essential deific character. It was in no sense merely worship. It
was the most intensely practical and utilitarian culture the world has ever
known. It was designed to prevent the utter loss of purpose and failure of
effort in the cosmical task to which man, as a celestial intelligent spirit, had
pledged himself under the Old Testament covenant and "the broad
oaths fast sealed" of Greek theology. In coming to earth to help turn the
tide of evolution past one of its most critical passages, he bound himself to
do the work and return without sinking into the mire of animal sensuality. We
must henceforth approach religion with the realization that it is the psychic
instrumentality designed for the use of humanity in charting its way through
the shoals of the particular racial and evolutionary crisis in which it was
involved. All the stupendous knowledge relating to the entire cosmic chapter
was once available, given by the gods to the sages. We have nearly lost it
beyond recovery because the ignorance of an early age closed the Academies and
crushed every attempt to revive the teaching. The prodigious folly of the
modern essay to vitalize religion through piety alone will be more fully seen
as the ancient picture takes form in the delineation. Our present business is
to struggle to regain that lost paradise of intelligence. We must work again to
the recognition of our high cosmic mission, and revivify the decadent forms of
a once potent religious practique, based on knowledge. For spiritual cultism
was once vitally related to our evolutionary security, which stands jeopardized
by present religious desuetude.
The nature of the material to be
presented in volume will enforce by the sheer illuminative power of the
interpretation itself the necessity for this extended introduction. It was
quite impossible to undertake the exegesis of recondite scriptures long
misinterpreted or never
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interpreted at all, without
providing a rationale of ancient literary methodology and setting up a
background of philosophical light. The erection of this background was made all
the more necessary by the inveterate recalcitrancy of modern scholarship to
recognize the applicability of the methods and principles outlined. Their
validation by the substance and meaning of the larger presentment now to be
made involves nothing less than the complete revision of all our interpretative
norms in religious study.
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Chapter VI
THE
DESCENT TO AVERNUS
The rectification of misguided
rendering of holy writ in its entirety is a work of great magnitude and will
tax severely the capacity of a single book. Particularly in regard to the
traditional dogmas of theology, where misconception has become embedded in set
habitudes of mind, the reinterpretation can be established only by the
presentation of material in overwhelming quantity. The bare statement of the
main theses of the venerable philosophy would be met with contempt or arrogant
rejection. The claims must therefore be buttressed by a mass of irrefutable
data. This material has not been marshaled for this use before in anything like
organic array.
The story most properly begins with
what is called in theology "the descent of the gods." Traditional
lore is replete with legends of the "expulsion of the angels,"
"the fall of Lucifer and his hosts," "the fall from heaven,"
and the more philosophical "descent of the soul." These phrase-titles
relate to the first step in the series of pre-historical and even pre-mundane
episodes which culminated in the establishment of humanity on earth and the
fabrication of human nature combining both a natural and a supernatural
element. The substrate datum in religion is that man is an animal and a god in
union. There were animals on earth and angels in heaven; and the counsels of
cosmic intelligence decreed that the angels should join forces with the animals
and be their gods. The conjunctive experience would educate both parties. The
effort to overcome matter’s inertia and the sense urge of the flesh would
develop more dynamic spiritual initiative for the gods. They would be forced to
deploy more of their potential and as yet static divine power to gain mastery
over the elementary forces of the physical world.
Hints are not wanting in the old
scripts to show that their obligation to leave their home of blissful rest in
dreamy sub-consciousness in
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the ethereal spheres and suffer the
hardships of earth life in gross animal bodies was in some part at least a
measure of karmic retribution for past dereliction elsewhere. Pride and
insolence are ascribed to them by Greek theology. Violated oaths and
"Moira’s bounds transgressed" are alluded to by the philosophic
poets. As evolution links penalty with readjustment and forward progress, it is
not difficult to admit the play of both retributive and normal procedure in the
enforced descent of minor deities to our globe. It is the expulsion of Satan
and his hosts from heaven in Paradise Lost and Revelation. So
presented, it has been taken either as a mythical unreality or an inscrutable
chapter of celestial history, and discarded from serious consideration in
religious systematism. It is, however, the central situation and must be
restored to its pivotal place of consequence in the picture. The doctrine of
the "descent" is crucial for the interpretation. True or false, it is
what the scriptures are building their narratives upon.
Of the original twelve legions of
deities, ten have plunged into the stream of incarnation and are now passing
through the experiences incident thereto. At the conclusion of the venture,
after many incarnations for each individual member, they will return to their
celestial abodes, transfigured and further divinized. The allegory of the
Prodigal Son is a short glyph or graph of this evolutionary descent and return.
There is hardly a religious book of any ancient nation that does not deal more
or less directly with that event.
To see the "descent" as an
integral function of cosmic process and not as a calamitous "fall,"
it is quite necessary to expound a portion of Orphic-Platonic cosmogony.
The beginning must be made where
creation itself begins. It starts from Unity. All things proceed from what was
aboriginally and ever ultimately is, the One Life. The pagan name for the
Supreme Power was commonly The One. All things ultimately resolve into the
primordial One, since they emanate from that One in the beginning. Before
manifestation takes place, Being is homogeneous, undifferentiated. It is
uniform similitude and excludes dissimilitude. It is all One Essence, alike in
every part, if parts there are.
But in such state it is unmanifest,
and from our point of view unconscious, asleep, inert. The Hindu term is Pralaya.
And out of Pralaya it must awake, for it sleeps only in alternate
turn with waking
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activity, as do all its creatures
made in its likeness. It passes, like them from death to life and back again,
in eternal routine.
To awake and come into being it must
by force of logic perform an operation upon its own nature which is the first
ground of manifestation. It can not create a universe in which to live and
suffer experience without breaking its Unity apart into duality. For it must
become Consciousness on the one side, in order to know what and how to
create, and Matter on the other, if it is to have material with which to
create! So it must split its primal Oneness into a dualism which however is
still subsumed under the unity. It becomes two in one or the One in two. The
One has not become Two, but a twoness.
It virtually can not create without
throwing itself into the condition of being at a tension between two aspects of
itself, on the strength of which tension it can exert its inchoate energies. It
must therefore manifest itself as the two ends of a polarity, positive and
negative. It must become polarized in relation to itself; and so it takes on
the double-aspected characterization of spirit and matter, male and female,
consciousness and vehicle, function and instrument, attraction and repulsion,
visible and invisible, real and actual. Positively, like the proton of the
atom, it must stand stably in the center, governing, holding, regulating the
cyclical whirl of negative force about its eternal rock of durability.
Negatively, like the electrons, it must revolve in the periodic swing of active
life. It must provide the dual grounds for living existence, a conscious nucleus
presiding at the heart of moving, changing embodiments. It must become, out of
itself, subject, knowing, and object, to be known. Its entire purpose is
obviously to arise out of unconscious slumber and become ever more awake and
more concretely conscious. Since there is nothing of which it can be conscious
save itself, the aim of Life is thus ever to become more Self-conscious!
Therefore it must, so to speak, set itself as object over against itself as
subject, and down the ages and the cycles ever thus contemplate itself. It is
the seeing eye and the thing seen, as all profound esoteric philosophy asserts.
As Genesis puts it, God
effected his creation, gazed upon it with gratification and pronounced it good.
To see his creation he had to objectify, hypostasize, reify his thoughts, the
radiations of his subjective aspect. For he creates by thoughts. He must see
his ideas form in
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concretion before him, take on
material body and come to visible manifestation for himself and his creatures.
So his expression proceeds from
unity to duality, and from duality it runs further onward to infinite
multiplicity. Multiple manifestation is achieved by the operation of a
principle which is easily comprehended. As life has split into spirit and
matter, the one mobile, the other inert, the unity of the mobile is broken up
into multitude as it moves against the immobile. The lighter essence, spirit,
is broken and divided as it moves outward against the resistance of matter. A
suggestive illustration is the infinite division of a body of water dropped as
one unit from a height as it falls against the resistance of the air. Its sheer
motion and speed throws it apart. The circulation of the blood from the central
heart, dividing endlessly till it reaches the periphery in numberless
streamlets, is a similar reflection of the universal law. Outward bound, it
divides; on the return it reunites! Life descends, "falls," from the
summit of its primal unity down into the arms of matter, dividing as it goes.
Division is a logical necessity if it is to multiply itself, for unity can not
multiply out of itself without first dividing itself. And it can not divide
itself unless it falls or descends against resistance. The importance of this
determination for clear grasp of basic theology can not be overstressed. Angels
"fall" by divine ordinance, and not by literal folly of rebellion
against deity. Evolutionary gravity brings them down from heaven to earth.
The wind does not commonly blow a
steady gale, but comes in rhythmic puffs. Creative impulse acts similarly.
Every cycle of energization of the universe finishes its work in seven waves or
impulses, and the sub-cycles have also seven waves. Life projects its formative
energies outward, or matterward, in surge after surge. Each one carries the
impulse as far as it will go under its original force, or until the wave is
brought to a dead standstill by the inertia of matter, the carrying and
resisting medium. Each propulsion of power comes to a stop, locked in the
embrace of matter. In this embrace the capacities of the two nodes of being
interplay, fecundate each other, generate a growth of new life, and build up
what is termed a plane or level or kingdom of nature, with creatures embodying
the type of life there engendered. Thus there are terrestrial and celestial
worlds (as Paul says), noumenal and phenomenal realms, physical and ethereal
planes, material and spiritual bodies, heavens, fairy-lands, underworlds,
hells, limbos, Isles
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of the Blessed, Elysian Fields, the
meadows of Aarru-Hetep and homes on high. And the beings on the ranges from
high divinity down to man are the gods of ancient mythology.
The capacities of life on each level
are expressed and given play by the organic beings built up thereon. Thus each
kingdom has its own specific nature and determinations. But life is not static;
it is generative, reproductive, forward-moving. It creates anew, in its turn,
at its level, and passes the stream of creative force on down the line. Thus
the succession of waves of projection runs down the scale, each one carrying
the formative force one surge farther out. On and on it goes, establishing the
kingdoms of nature and the living citizens on them. The contiguous planes form
a link of connection from top to bottom of the series, and this is the golden
chain of life. And each level bears a definite relation to its neighbor on
either side.
The explication of this relationship
involves a law that is basic for all evolution. Its statement will render
understandable the constitution of man. It tells why he is a soul and a body
linked together. It may be called the great Law of Incubation.
Under its terms each plane is mother
to the life on the plane above it and father to that of the plane below it. It
receives
from above the seed germs of higher life and harbors them in the womb of
its soil, or matter, gestates them and eventually gives them their new birth.
This is the function of motherhood. And matter (Latin mater, mother) is
the universal mother. But, having received from above, it also gives the
impulse to the order below; and as giver it is active, aggressive,
generative--the father function. Feminine to life above, masculine to life
beneath, it is the link and bridge between two worlds.
But at each step of transmission the
primal impulse suffers a diminution of its impetus, a weakening of its force,
and in consequence a further and further fragmentation. The matter of each
plane on the downward or involutionary track being more dense in atomic
structure than that of its superior, the living bodies it provides can not bear
as heavy a life charge as the beings above can support, and the voltage of
power must be stepped down if it is to be incorporated fittingly in the less
capacious bodies of a lower kingdom. To effect this reduction in dynamism the
bodies carrying the life of each plane act as electric transformers, changing a
high current into numerous lesser currents to be accommodated to the lower
carrying capabilities of bodies on the
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plane beneath. Hence the unit charge
received from the plane above by each life structure on any place must, in
falling one step further downward, be again broken up into a large number of
fragments, each of which will become the energizing soul of a lower body. The
Greek philosophers say in this connection that "the gods distribute
divinity," scattering its higher units abroad from plane to plane, the
units multiplying in number, but diminishing in power, as the stream flows on.
This is what ancient theology connotes by "the river of life." The
Orphic system speaks of "rivers of vivification," which, they say,
"proceed from on high as far as to the last of things," or to the
lowest stratum of the mineral kingdom. And as the gods distribute divinity, the
secondary ranks in each case are said to "participate according to their
capacity." The gods pour out their life for the vivifying of all lower
beings, and the latter partake of this bounty or "grace" to the
measure of their receptivity. Nothing other than this is meant by the
"shed blood" of the gods, given for the life of the worlds. All old
theologies aver that the blood of the gods, or of God, mixed with the clay of
earth, makes the "red earth" which is given as the etymological
signification of Adam in Hebrew, i.e., man. Man is compounded of the red life-blood
of deity and the dust of the ground, which in Hebrew is Adamah, purely
the feminine or material aspect of Adam, spirit, itself. Deity mixed
together spirit and matter to make man.
One more step in the analysis yields
the final phase of the Law of Incubation. If life is to be propagated in
eternal renewal, in multiplied individualization, it becomes necessary for any
living creature on each plane to produce a multiple progeny of the seeds of its
own life and "plant" or bury them in the soil of the kingdom
immediately below it. There they go first to their "death," after
which they are reborn or resurrected in the sprouting of the seeds and their
growth back to maturity. Each generation lives anew in its regeneration, but
multiplied by as many times itself as the number of seeds it produced and
successfully germinated in the plane below.
The vegetable buries its seeds in
the soil of the kingdom beneath it, the mineral. The animal’s life is embodied
in a corpus built up of vegetable material taken in each day as food. The human
is rooted in an animal body. And now comes the pivotal fact in theology. The
lowest ranks of gods, in their position just above humanity, must, by the Law
of Incubation, send down their seeds, plant (incarnate) them
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in the bodies of humans, and win
their next cyclical generation of divine life in that ground! Centuries of
theological maundering have not told the millions of hungry sheep this plain
truth as to why man nurtures a winged spirit of intelligence--a soul--in his
physical body. The soul of man is in his body as a seed of divinity planted,
buried, gone to its "death" in the soil of the human kingdom, and
bears the same relation to that soil as does any seed to its bed. The greatest
truth that can be told to mortals is that their bodies are each the gestating
womb of a god. As said St. Paul, the Christ is being "formed within"
each mortal body. Man has a soul because his physical human self is the nursery
or breeding ground of the seeds of divinity. And man’s divinity is, or begins
as, a seed. His duty is to cultivate the growth of that deific embryo. It is
gestating in the womb of his physical body, and he must, as said Socrates,
become a philosophic "midwife" and aid in its birth. Plato reports
the Demiurgus in the notable speech to the legions of devas in the Timaeus
as
saying that "whatever is immortal and divine" in the human makeup,
"of that I will furnish the seed and the beginning. It is your
business to do the rest; to weave together mortal and immortal natures."
The upper plane furnishes the seeds of godhood, the lower furnishes the soil or
garden. Divinity is planted in "the garden of the world." It is the
seminal soul of divine mind, destined to germinate and eventually blossom in
the ground of humanity.
If, in sum, God is to multiply
himself, his tree of life must reproduce on its branches a numerous progeny,
each child bearing the potentiality of renewing the parent life in its
fullness, and of carrying its eternal unfoldment one step ahead. As no
living thing can subsist save as a result of a linking together of spirit and
matter, a germinal unit of spirit must be incubated as the god in a body of
material structure. This divine economy gives every creature its soul, which is
its god. In the long chain of linked lives, from God down to mineral crystal,
no being is deprived of its possibility of immediate communion with deity, up
to the border of its capacity. But the "arm of the Lord" that is
potent to bless and to save is within, not without. It is Emanuel, God with us,
the hope of our glory. God is everywhere, within and without; but his son, the
Christos,
is only within. If he is not sought there, he will not be found. His inner
presence is the provision of life that no entity should be bereft of instant
contact with its parent god, who dwells on the plane just over its head, though
rooted in its very
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body. Man’s deity is not a personage
in a distant land and time, but, as an Eastern saga puts it, "closer is he
than breathing, nearer than hands and feet." No man can fail of touching
his divinity, but failure of his knowledge that his deity is in himself
may palsy his effort to arouse its latent faculties.
A legend of India tells of a council
of the gods at which it was purposed to invest man with deity. A debate arose
as to how it might be entrusted to him without his misusing it. One suggested
that it be buried in the depths of the sea, so that he would not easily find
and abuse it. Another advised placing it on the most inaccessible mountain top.
Finally the supreme head of the assembly declared he had thought of a place
where no man would ever think of looking for it,--in the deepmost chambers of
man’s own heart!
The basal truth that every living
thing is a union of spirit and matter, soul and body, was put in a graph by the
Egyptians. It is perhaps the oldest and most meaningful of signs. The great
symbol carried in the hands of the gods was the Ankh, or crux ansata (ansated
cross), a "T" topped with the circle. The circle is the female
symbol, the boundless infinite matter, the mother of all things in endless
round. The vertical line is the male symbol, a ray of intelligence that goes
out from the heart of the universe to impregnate the worlds. The horizontal
line is the line of division between the two, at the point where they are
joined. It is the cross-line between them. The word Ankh means three most
significant things: love, life and tie. It is a formula of all
life, signifying that life is the resultant of a tying together
of two things, spirit and matter, by the force of an attraction, which is love.
The great doctrine of the
"descent" or "fall" can now be clearly envisaged. Deity, in
the form of its seed potency, must descend from its own plane into the soil of
the plane below it and be incubated there. It must leave its own home, its
father’s house, and go out into another country, where it will be an exile and
a stranger. And like the youth going out from home into a rough world to make a
fight of it under temptation and gross influences, he must undergo a long
toilsome trial and testing and crucifixion to become an eventual victor and
return with laurels. Said Jesus: "I came forth from the Father and am come
into the world."
Additional elucidation of basic
meaning flows from the consideration of the great doctrine of the Trinity in
theology. One is not too bold
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in asserting that this formula of
ancient truth is not comprehended in its clear and profound significance by the
Church which still blindly offers it. Once a year the pew occupants listen to a
sermon on the Trinity, but go away unenlightened. Yet it is the heart of the
mystery of life, the base of theology, and--easily comprehensible.
Plotinus, the Neo-Platonist of the
third century, who gave the doctrine to Christianity through Augustine, has
given us an analogy with a natural phenomenon by which it is possible, with the
additional link of a finding of modern science, to see the simple meaning of a
doctrine that has baffled comprehension for sixteen centuries. He said that we
can understand how one deity can have three aspects if we think of the sun, its
light and its active energy. The sun in heaven is comparable to the Father of
the Trinity. It is a glowing globe of fire. The fire of the sun does not
go forth into the ends of space, but abides at home. Like a match which you
strike in a dark room, the fire stays on the match; it does not leave
it. The fire stays’ but it generates and sends forth its son,--the light.
This is the second aspect or "person." It is of the same essence
with the Father, yet not he. And the Psalmist sings: "Send out thy
light"!
Now a flood of clear light is
released on the problem by following the implications as to the identity of the
third "person," the Holy Spirit. But here it is necessary to adduce
some pertinent data which is given to us by modern physical science to round
out our analogy. We are told that a ray of the sun’s light out in the void of
space (not near a planet) is inert. It is both cold and dark. If one could reduce
one’s body to the size of a pin-point, one would be in total darkness and the
intensest cold, though the sun be glaring overhead. The ray is impotent,
inactive, uncreative and can generate no life until--and here is the nub of all
philosophy--it falls upon a surface of a material body, a globe or planet! Only
by incidence upon its opposite pole, matter, can the light of spirit come to
its creative function. There is required the interplay of its rays with a
resistant surface to bring out its own powers from latency to potency. Matter
is, as already shown, the "mother" of life, while spirit (God) is its
father. And, as everywhere, father spirit can not become creative until it
unites with and fecundates mother matter! His ray of power, his son, is in a sense
the phallic emanation of his seed, and the seed must become coefficient with
the unfructified egg of life in matter’s bosom to bring a new birth to
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pass. Almost it might be said,--here
is all truth in a nutshell. The light of God would remain uncreative unless it
entered the body or womb of mother life and aroused the slumbering
potentialities therein. And here is the solution of a riddle of mythology which
has baffled and horrified Christian moralists no end. The fables of the gods
represent the son of deity as turning about and creating upon his own mother.
Horus is called "the Bull of his Mother"--Isis. The sons of God marry
their own mothers! Horrible! Detestable! shout the offended Church Fathers. Yet
the son of present life marries and impregnates his own mother every time an
acorn or grain of wheat falls into the ground and germinates! It is discernible
at last why the letter H comes a second time into the form of the sacred
tetragrammaton, or four-letter name of Jehovah, the Ineffable Name of ancient
Kabalism--JHVH. "J" is the Father God, the line that comes down from
on high, goes deep into the heart of matter and then turns upward to return to
deity. The H represents by its two vertical lines life divided into its two
aspects, spirit and matter, joined by the cross line, and so brings its
activity into the realm of the mother, matter. The V is their son, who goes
down in his turn into matter and returns. Now, why does the mother H come into
the formula of creation a second time? The J H V would be a formula covering
one--the first--generation of life. It would take it through one cycle. But
that would not be a glyph that would represent life as perpetuating itself
through endless cycles of renewal. It would end there. The graph must carry it
on. As, then, the son must take up the line and become father in his turn, he
must unite his productive fecundation with his old mother, matter. And so the
H, or mother, must be brought into the picture once more. And the holy name
becomes thus a descriptive form for all creation. For spirit is creatively
helpless, like the sunlight, without the co-operation of its opposite, matter,
which is dramatized as its wife and sister. Hence every mythological deity was
linked with his shakti or spouse, his creative potency, without whom he
would remain forever ungenerative. The implications of this determination are
tremendous, for if spirit can not give birth to its archetypal conceptions
without the implementation of matter in actual creation, neither can it function
apart from matter in philosophy! And a thousand fantastic "spiritual"
cult systems that have deluded uncritical minds in every age by a denial of the
utility of matter, are at one stroke given the coup de grâce as
illogical fallacies.
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Reverting to the Trinity, it is
desirable to go further with the Greek elaborators of the Orphic wisdom in
delineating the aspects of divine activity.
Of the Father they assert that he
"abides." A Hindu script has the passage in which Lord Krishna says:
"Having impregnated the universe with a portion of myself, I yet
remain." He remains on his own plane. He is the unmoved Mover and the
uncaused Cause. He is without experience himself, delegating the function of
acquiring it to his Son. He is unaffected, undivided, unchanging and
undiminished.
Of the Son they say that he
"proceeds." He bears the Father’s potentialities out into all the
universe. He is the radiating arm of his Father’s power. He goes out to do the
will of his parent and become his vicegerent in the worlds. He becomes God’s
spoken Word. He conveys the Logoic ideas out upon the bosom of his Father’s
emanations to stamp them upon plastic matter. And proceeding from the bosom of
the Father, he goes forth into every condition which is precisely the opposite
of that of the Father. He will become subject to experience and suffer all
things, while the Father abides unmoved. He will be affected, divided, changed
and be sadly diminished, suffering the loss of all that he enjoyed with the
Father. He will endure all experience in every kingdom, will be fragmented into
"partial natures," will enter a moving stream of endless change, and
will be reduced to a minimum of his glory on the cross of suffering.
Of the Holy Spirit they say that it
"converts" matter to its own likeness; "is converted" by
matter to its next higher estate; and finally "returns."
What, then, is the Holy Spirit, the
Third Person? It is the first Ray of divine life, undergoing its final
conversion into active creative agency. It is latent power of God’s mind,
transformed into working efficacy. It is static divinity become kinetic. It is
God’s Logos, or Word, carrying the command of his creative Voice, now converted
into an energy that moves matter and builds worlds. It is, finally, God’s
spirit at work; no longer static, or merely potential, but released upon matter
in moving force--kinesis.
It may be helpful to present a
diagrammatic sketch of this formulation, as it is a brief but complete graph of
the entire rationale of all incarnation, or involution of life in matter, and
its evolution back to
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spirit. It is thus a concise formula
comprehending all that ancient scriptures have been designed to elucidate.
SUN .............. FATHER ..........
ABIDES.
LIGHT .......... SON
................. PROCEEDS.
{{CONVERTS (Matter).
{{IS CONVERTED (By Matter).
EARTH ......... HOLY SPIRIT ..{
{
{ RETURNS
All "history" takes place
at the point where the light, or latent radiation of divine force, comes in
contact with matter, earth, the mother. For there involution is brought to a
halt and, spirit being implanted within the heart of matter and awakening its
slumbering potencies, there is begun at that point a new growth of life,
actuated by the union of intelligence with sheer energy. And this new growth
begins the evolutionary stage, or the return unto the father, or parent,
status.
When Trinities are given as Father,
Mother and Son, the aspect here characterized as the Holy Spirit is the
"Son," the product of the union of Father and Mother. When given as
Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Mother is implicit, being the material element
necessary at all times.
The Son’s, or the ray’s,
impregnation of Mother matter begins a new process of growth from seed to
adulthood, which through a cycle of "conversion" and "being
converted" lifts up the new form of Sonship of deity to the stage which
the Father had reached in its last previous cycle. The cycle is completed with
the "return"; but after aeonial rest life gets ready to make its next
rhythmic movement outward to unite again with the Mother.
Having set forth in the most compact
form the outline of the structure of ancient evolutionary knowledge, it is
incumbent on us now to trace the origin and fix the place of every single
doctrine of theology in the draft. It is requisite also that sufficient space
be granted to present as much as is permissible of the vast body of data
supporting each phase of the exegesis. The "descent" is the first
feature of the chart that relates heavenly creation to earthly life, and is
logically the first aspect of divine activity to be taken up. Its groundwork
and presuppositions having been laid down, its presence in ancient religion
must be demonstrated with sufficient fullness.
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Chapter VII
COLONISTS
FROM HEAVEN
To begin with there is that vast
mass of Medieval legend that became focused in Milton’s grand epic. The
tradition of man’s having lost a Paradise, having been cast out of heaven and
thrown into a prison, a dungeon, a pit, a lake of pitch, a dark cavernous
underground where suffering was intensified by fire, was almost universal in
the background of theological belief over a long period. This wide possession
might have remained highly instructive had not Milton, in common with all save
isolated groups of Hermeticists in Europe, lost in signal knowledge that the
fallen angels, the rebel hosts, the armies of Satan-Lucifer were, collectively,
man himself, and that the fiery lake into which they were hurled was
just our good earth! This tradition was the far-trailing descendant of the
ancient Mysteries, in which the entire drama of man’s evolution was enacted at
the great annual festivals. Says Thomas Taylor, perhaps the most understanding
of all Plato’s interpreters:
"I now proceed to prove that
the dramatic spectacles of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by the ancient
theologists, their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the
unpurified soul invested with the earthly body, and enveloped in a material and
physical nature: . . ."1
Cocker in his Greek Philosophy says
that Plato in the Phaedrus, under the allegory of the chariot and the
winged steeds, represents the lower or inferior part of man’s nature as
dragging the soul down to earth and subjecting it to a slavery under corporeal
conditions. Taylor says2 that
"the descent of the superior
intellect3 into the realms of generated existence becomes, indeed, the greatest
benefit and ornament which a material nature is capable of receiving; for
without this participation of intellect in the lowest department of corporeal
life, nothing but the irrational soul and a brutal life would subsist in the
dark and fluctuating abode of the body."
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The whole design of the Mysteries,
according to the great Plato himself, was "to lead us back to the
perfection from which, as our beginning, we first made our descent." One
of the mysterious significations of the Thyrsus or reed used in the Mysteries
was connected with the descent of the soul, for, "as it was a reed full of
knots," it became "an apt symbol of the diffusion of the higher
nature into the sensible world." Bacchus (the divine self) carried a reed
instead of a scepter, and it betokened the god’s "descent into our partial
nature." "Indeed the Titans are Thyrsus-bearers; and Prometheus
concealed fire in a Thyrsus or reed; after which he is considered as bringing
celestial light into generation, or leading the soul into the body."
The Greeks allegorized the descent
of the soul again in the fable of Ceres and Proserpine. Ceres is the higher
intellect, Proserpina being her daughter, the soul. Edward Carpenter says
"that there were ritual dramas
or passion plays [in the Mysteries], of which an important one dealt with the
descent of Kore or Proserpine into the underworld, as in the Eleusinian
representations, and her redemption and restoration to the upper world in
spring."4
No less applicable to the same
fundamental situation is the Greek fable of Eros and Psyche. Love, the divine
Eros, descends into the mortal sphere to redeem the human soul, or Psyche, from
suffering in its animal habitat by marrying her. In the Mystery celebrations
lasting nine days, Taylor tells us that on the eighth day the "fall of the
soul into the lunar orb" was commemorated,
"because the soul in this
situation is about to bid adieu to everything of a celestial nature; to sink
into a perfect oblivion of her divine origin and pristine felicity; and to rush
profoundly into the region of dissimilitude, ignorance and error. And lastly,
on the ninth day, when the soul falls into the sublunary world and becomes united
with a terrestrial body, a libation was performed such as is usual in the
sacred rites."5
Proclus, the great Neo-Platonist of
the fourth century, expounding Plato’s theology, says that it is the peculiar
function of "heroic souls" (an order above daemons) to express
"magnitude of operation, elevation and magnificence," but that this
order "descends indeed for the benefit of the life of man, as partaking of
a destiny inclining downwards."6
106
Iamblicus corroborates Plato as to
these grades of the hierarchy:
"Angles above dissolve the
bonds of generation. Daemons draw souls down into nature; but heroes lead them
to a providential attention to sensible works."7
Iamblichus makes an unequivocal
statement of the descent when he says:
"But from the first, divinity
sent souls hither in order that they might again return to him."8
He reiterates the idea (p. 68) when
speaking of the gods:
"These, therefore, descend with
invariable sameness for the salvation of the universe, and connectedly contain
the whole of generation after the same manner."
He utters a strange sentiment when
he affirms (p. 89) that the
"magnitude of the epiphanies
[or manifestations] in the Gods, indeed, is so great as sometimes to conceal
all heaven, the sun and the moon; and the earth itself, as the Gods descend,
is no longer able to stand still."
Greek philosophy, as we have seen,
embodies the traditions of the descent in several molds. In the cycle of the
twelve mystic operations of Hercules, the hero is ordered to go down into Hades
(our world) and bring up the three-headed Cerberus. His journey is a symbolic
tracing of the experiences undergone by the soul on earth, not in some
mysterious underworld below it. Orpheus descends to the underworld to recover
his lost Eurydice, the soul. In Virgil’s epic Aeneas finds the gate to Avernus
and descends for the inspection of the Tartarian regions. It is instructive to
note the etymology of this word "Avernus." It is the Greek ornos,
a
bird, and alpha (@insert greek alpha) privative, meaning "un-" or
"not" or "-less." The "v" is thrown in for
euphony between the two vowels, and the "o" is shortened to
"e." It would therefore read "not birds" or "no
birds," with the implication of "not a good place for birds."
When it is known that in all arcane systems the bird was the universal symbol
for the soul, the meaning comes clear that this earth was regarded as the place
where souls were poisoned by the noxious fumes arising from the carnal life,
since the birds were lethalized by the vapor rising from the mouth of the pit
of Avernus, became stupe-
107
fied and fell into the underworld.
The allegory tells the story of our descent with a force that no philosophical
descanting could match. So deftly has ancient philological skill woven a
theosophical meaning into the structure of language.
Dante’s tour of Purgatory and the
deeper Inferno is a treatment of the old myth, with political and other connotations.
Ulysses’ visit to the cave of Polyphemus is again a form of the representation,
and Theseus and his labyrinthine adventure underground is another rendering of
it. From Herodotus we have an account (II, 122) of the descent into Hades of
King Rhampsinitus, in whose honor the priests of Egypt instituted a rebirth
festival. The Rig Veda parallels this story with an account of the boy
Nachiketas, who descended into the realm of Yama, the deity of the earthly
underworld, in Yama-Loka, the kingdom of the dead, and then returned to the
world of life. Needless to say, neither Egyptians nor Hindus took their
theological myths for history.
A number of utterances in the Chaldean
Oracles point to a quite complete harmony with Orphic Platonism and
Neo-Platonism. Indeed opinion veers strongly to the conclusion that
Pythagorean, Platonic and Greek philosophy generally was formulated out of the
principles of theology promulgated through the powerful agency of the Orphic
Mysteries, and that those principles were brought by the Orphics into Greece
from Chaldean sources. The Oracles agree with Greek doctrine that higher
deific energies emanated outward from a spiritual focus into the material
worlds. One of them runs: "For all things thence begin to extend their
admirable rays downwards." The life of the gods rays outward into
corporeal beings and becomes the animating principle or soul of living things.
A passage from the Tibetan Book
of the Dead (p. 130) warns devotees to "be not attracted towards the
dull blue light of the brute world," under penalty of falling into that
kingdom of nature. It asserts (p. 125) that the predilection of our immortal
nature toward animal grossness will cause it to "stray downwards."
The text represents the human soul as beseeching the "Knowledge-Holding
Deities" not to let it drift further down, but to lead it to the holy
paradise. The soul exults that "These Knowledge-Holding Deities, the
Heroes and the Dakinis have come from the holy paradise realms to receive
me." The text traces the descent of these divinities who, false to
their oaths, fall
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from lower to still lower stages of
the Bardo, or world of dark embodiment.
A cuneiform tablet in the British
Museum holds a legend of the rebellious angels who broke into the Lord’s song
with impious shouts, destroying the harmony, and who, for punishment, were cast
down out of heaven. They are referred to in the Book of Jude (Ch. 6) in
the line: "They kept not their own habitations." These in the Book
of Enoch are the seven stars which "transgressed the commandment of
God and came not in their proper season" (Enoch 18, 21, 22). It is said in
the cuneiform text, "May the God of divine speech expel from his five
thousand those who in the midst of his heavenly song shouted evil
blasphemies."
Of tremendous significance to the
thesis that early Christian doctrine was intimately allied with and influenced
by the prevalent esoteric wisdom of environing cults, is a fragment called the
Naasene
Hymn, preserved by Hippolytus (Haer. V. 5). After describing the
woes and sufferings of the human soul during its wanderings on earth, the hymn
continues:
But Jesus said: Father, Behold
A war of evils has arisen upon
earth;
It comes from thy breath and ever
works;
Man strives to shun this bitter
chaos,
But knows not how he may pass
(safely) through it;
Therefore, do thou, O Father, send
me;
Bearing thy seals I will descend
(to
earth);
Throughout the ages I will pass;
All mysteries I will unfold,
All forms of Godhead I will unveil,
All secrets of thy holy path
Styled Gnosis (knowledge) I will
impart (to man).
The Jesus character alluded to here
is, it seems certain, the Gnostic Jesus, or Ieou, whom we shall see is
traceable to Egyptian origins many centuries B.C. Scholars will haggle over the
question of the date of the hymn, whether A.D. or B.C. The possibility that it
dates B.C. has already been repudiated with great speciousness.9 The name
Naasene, of apparently Ophite connection, seems to have etymological relation
to both the names of Essene and Nazarene. If an Essene production it could
109
readily be given a B.C. placing
without violent improbability. There is evidence that cults of Nazarenes (Nazaraioi)
teaching Egypto-Gnostic Christolatry antedated the coming of the Gospel Jesus.
The Ophites (serpent-symbolizers, not serpent-worshipers) were a Gnostic sect
of early Christianity, later persecuted as heretics, who believed in a
spiritual Christ-Aeon that descended into the material chaos to assist Sophia
(Wisdom) in her efforts to emancipate the soul from the bondage of the flesh.
Turning to the material of Egypt we
find the descent traced unmistakably in a thousand references. The conception
is so pervading that all three persons of the Egyptian Trinity, Isis, Osiris
and Horus, are represented as descending to the nether earth. Osiris, the
Father God, descends, is cut to pieces by Sut (Satan) and the fragments of his
body scattered over the earth. Isis, the Mother, descends to earth to search
for the fragments. Horus, the Son, comes down in the identical character as the
Christian Jesus in the advent at Christmas as the bringer of peace. As Jesus
descends into hell (Apostles’ Creed), so Horus came from heaven into the
realm of darkness as the light of the world. It is said that he descends into
the funeral land, the abode of darkness and of death. The Speaker in the
Egyptian Ritual (representing always the human soul) says: "I have
come upon this earth, and I take possession of it with my two feet." It is
said that Osiris goes down into Tattu (another name for Amenta) and finds there
the soul of the sun, and is united thereto. The Manes (again the human soul)
says: "I am he that cometh forth by day . . . I descend upon earth and
mine eye maketh me to walk thereon." It is said of him: "Thou
enterest in to the place where thy Father is, where Keb [Seb, the god of earth]
is." Again: "Thou descendest under protection. Ra ferries thee to
Amenta." In the Ritual (The Book of the Dead) it is said:
"This is he who in his resurrection says, ‘I am the Lord on high and I
descend to the earth of Seb that I may put a stop to evil.’"
Such references to the advent of
divinity in the scripts of Egypt could be multiplied to great length. Likewise
the religious lore of scores of aboriginal tribes in all continents hold
multitudinous corroboration of the fact and confirm its status as the basic
datum of all religious construction. A hundred folk-tales begin with the coming
of some hero from heaven to earth, or with the flinging down of some object em-
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blematic of divinity. The variety of
symbols used is wide, and to one lacking the keys of interpretation,
bewildering. It is enough to say that in all such legends the idea of the
descent is central.
Looking now at the Christian Bible
we shall find in plenty the features of the same myth. Bible students are not
generally aware of the directness with which the descent of the gods to earth
is there told. There is first the well-known declaration of God himself
(distorted into a reference to the historical Jesus) that he sent his
only-begotten son into the world that all believers might have everlasting
life. Then there is the remarkable pronouncement in the Gospel of John (3):
"No man ascendeth into heaven but he that cometh down from heaven."
From Luke (19:10) we have: "The Son of Man is come to seek and to
save that which is lost." Then there is Jesus’ direct statement to his
disciples: "Ye are from beneath; I am from above." The Lord’s
affirmation that he laid down his life for his sheep surely means not that he
was immolated on a wooden cross, but that he resigned his celestial life to
endure the burden of the cross (of flesh and matter). The Apocalyptist’s vision
of the New Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven is a reference to the
descent of divinity in its fragmented form. The line that follows--"Behold
the tabernacle of God is with men, and he shall dwell with them . . . and God
himself shall be with them and he shall be their God" (Rev. 21:1),
is to the same effect. Jesus declares that he came from the Father into the
earth.
Lifting from the term Christos the
Christian limitation of its personification in the body of the historical
Jesus, and reading for this distorted meaning the idea of the gods incarnated
distributively in all men, it is possible to discern allusions to the descent
all through the Bible. Though not so immediately obvious, the Lukan account
which states that Jesus came down from the mount and "stood on a level
place" (Ch. 6:17) before he delivered the Sermon, is another indirect
allusion to the same fact. For the Pistis Sophia, the Gnostic Gospel,
states that Jesus preached his discourse to his disciples "in the midst of
Amenta"! Later comparison of many texts discloses the surprising fact that
both the mount and the level plain, whereon the Sermon was delivered in the
Gospels, are diverse forms of the same symbolism! Both refer to our earth,
under the terms of equinoctial symbolism. The "mount" in the mythos
was never in any sense an earthly elevation. Paul in one passage propounds
the logical problem, which should have
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been given consideration,
analogically, by our scientists,--how we can envisage the resurrection without
the postulation of a previous descent from heaven. He asks (Ephesians
4:9): "Now he that ascended, what is it but that he also descended
first into the lower parts of the earth? He that descended is the same also
that ascended far above all heavens. . . ." The pertinence of this
material for science is that science has studied life as in evolution without
having postulated a necessary involution antecedently! Science must meet
Paul’s significant query. Likewise must theology restore to its high place the
doctrine of the descent.
Symbolizing the divine nature as
bread for man, John gives Jesus’ announcement of his descent (6:47, 48) :
"I am the bread of life . . . such is the bread that came down from
heaven, that a man shall eat of it and shall not die." The general
allegorism of scattering or sowing seed is employed to depict the Platonic
"distribution of divinity" among men. In the parable of the sower we
have a portraiture of the partitive incarnation of divine natures in mortal
bodies. The falling of the seed into various types of soil is a natural version
of the diversified embodiments the descending souls might have apportioned to
them. This interpretation raises the parable to infinite heights of dignity and
meaning above the feeble and ineffective rendering of uncomprehending thought,
which is able to see in the figured situation nothing higher than the sowing of
the "word," that is, the Sabbath droning from pulpits, impinging upon
different grades of mental acumen or moral character! The "Word" is
in no case the written Bible, even, but the Logos, or form of divine ideation,
powerfully stamped upon the physical universe by the deific utterance. No
student is in position to grasp the significance of the Logos doctrine until he
has mastered the principles of Platonic theology, as outlined by Proclus10 or
Plotinus. Christian interpretation has merely shuffled along in the darkness
without a light. "Like the streams in the circle of heaven I besprinkle
the seeds of men," runs a text in the Records of the Past (Vol.
III, 129).
The angels in Revelation pour
out the contents of their censers over the earth, granting a nucleus of solar
"fire" to each mortal to divinize him. As the Timaeus of Plato
reports, the deity was to furnish the collective seed of what was to be
immortal in humanity.
In Old Testament allegorism
the doctrine is found most unexpectedly to be the core of meaning in the
Abraham story. Like the Prodigal
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Son of the New Testament he
was sent out from his home, country and kinsfolk (in the heavenly Eden) to go
to a strange land (incidentally to the West, where was the Tuat, or gate of
entry to the earth!). There his seed was to multiply until it filled the earth
with his children, the heirs of supernal grace.
But the hidden sense of the name
Abraham or Abram has escaped notice, and it is of great moment, as are all
Bible names. Scholars may protest, but it seems obvious that the word is simply
A-Brahm, (Hindu), meaning "non-Brahm." Abraham, the Patriarch or
oldest of the aeons or emanations, was not Brahm, the Absolute, but the first
emanation from Brahm; the first ray, the first God, perhaps equivalent to
Ishwara of the Hindus. He was the first life that was not Absolute, yet from
the Absolute. He was to go forth into the realms of matter, divide and
multiply, and fill the world with his fragmented units. To return to Abraham’s
bosom would be just to complete the cycle of outgoing and return, to rest in
the bosom of the highest divinity close to the Absolute. Also he came out of
Ur, of the Chaldees (or Kasadim), which is another key word, since Ur is the
Chaldean word for "fire," the celestial empyrean, out of which all
souls, as fiery sparks, are emanated. Kasadim, or Kasdim, was a term given to
the highest celestial spirits, who fathered the production of the divine sparks
of soul. It is practically equivalent to "Archangels."
Then Abraham went straight to Egypt
from the land of Canaan, and his descendants were to suffer bondage in that
lower country. It is a crushing blow to the historical rendering of Bible
narrative to declare, on evidence that is incontrovertible, that the
"Egypt" of the scriptures is not the country on the map. It is the
term used in the allegories to designate the plane, state or "land"
of embodied life, life on earth. "Egypt" is just this earth, or the
state or locale of bodily life on it. It even at times connotes the physical
body itself, as in "the flesh pots of Egypt." Hence the descent of
Abraham, and later of the twelve sons of Jacob, into "Egypt" are
again the fable of the soul’s adventure here. If the term Egypt is taken as the
geographical unit, many passages in which it occurs will be found to read as
sheer nonsense. Had theology known that "the strange land" and
"the far country" were glyphs for this earth of ours, greater sanity
would have marked the counsels of ecclesiasticism down the centuries. If the
"bondage in
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Egypt, that slave pen," as the
Eternal repeatedly calls it (in the Moffatt translation), has been in some way
interlocked with an historical servitude (as may have been the case), it still
does not prove that the allegory intended to recount the bondage of a nation.
It was a bondage of spirit under sense that was thus portrayed. Many passages
from the Old Testament books refer to the Israelites as captives,
outcasts, expatriates and exiles, matching Greek, Egyptian and Gnostic
terminology, and alluding of course to the expulsion of the angelic hosts from
a celestial Paradise to a bleak earthly exile. The sons of God had to go to
Egypt also in order that fulfillment might be given to the hoary scriptural
line from the Mystery drama: "Out of Egypt have I called my Son." For
resurgent deity in the wandering exiles would eventually lead them back to
their home on high.
In Luke (10:18) Jesus says
that he "beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven." As Satan is
identical with Lucifer, the bringer of deific light, or the god (collectively),
and the hosts of angelic souls (distributively), Jesus’ utterance is readily
seen as another affirmation of the descent of the spiritual principle,
eternally symboled by "fire" from heaven. Again, in the resurrection
scene "an angel of the Lord descended from heaven." Once more this is
not a fragment of veridical history, but another brief figuration of the
descent. In an Egypto-Gnostic fragment the same ideograph is repeated under the
double representation,11 when "the heavens opened and two men descended
thence with great radiance," and both the young men entered the tomb. The
seer in Revelation descries an angel in flight toward the earth and also
sees the holy city of Zion, radiant with the glory of God, descending from the
skies.
One of the Old Testament allegories
has to do with the Lord’s reminding Israel that he had "opened the doors
of heaven" and "rained down manna upon them to eat." As bread is
the Johannine symbol of divine nature on which the mortal race was to feed, so
manna in the Mosaic narrative stands in the same usage. There is reason also to
suppose that manna is cognate by derivation with the Sanskrit "manas,"
the principle of intelligence, which was the gift of deity to
"man." Its distribution over the ground in a thin layer like frost
and glistening white is a symbolism of the spirit, which comes to us in the
form of a distillation over the ground of our concrete experience out of the
brood-
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ing atmosphere of divine
super-intelligence. And all deity is described as shining with radiance.
A frequent figure for the descending
spirits of light is the falling star. In the Egyptian Records of the Past (Vol.
II, p. 16) the Speaker says: "The place is empty into which the starry
ones fall down headlong upon their faces and find nothing by which they can
raise themselves up." In the same thought the Chinese have a venerable
proverb which runs: "The stars ceased shining in heaven and fell upon
earth, where they became men." That the star as an emblem of the divine
soul is not altogether a sheer poetic fancy, is shown by the fact that, as
Massey points out,
"The Elementaries or brute
forces of nature may be said to have obtained their souls in the stars. Hence,
as Plutarch says, the Dog-Star is the soul of Isis, Orion is the soul of Horus,
and the Bear is the soul of Typhon,--Soul and Star being synonymous in the
Egyptian word Seb."12
In one of the addresses to King Pepi
it is said to him: "Thy soul is a living star at the head of his
brethren."13 In the texts of Egypt the evil crocodile, typifying Paul’s
"carnal nature," is said to swallow the sinking stars," the
souls that fall into the darkness of incarnation. Among the ancients the stars
that dipped beneath the horizon were emblematic of souls in physical incarnation,
in contradistinction to those that never set, which typed the non-incarnating
gods. Souls in incarnation were dubbed by the Greeks "moist souls,"
since they were immersed in the body, which is seven-eighths water by
composition. The redeemed souls rejoiced in the Egyptian Ritual (Ch. 44)
at being lifted up "among the stars that never set." Those condemned
to descend were represented as falling stars in danger of being devoured by the
open jaws of the dragon (of mortal life). This reptile lurked in the
"bight of Amenta" or the bend of the river "where the starry
procession dipped down below the horizon." The Swabian
"Lindwurm" was another form of the dragon that "swallowed the
setting stars." Indeed the entire myth of the casting down of Saturn and
his hosts was figured under the symbolism of falling stars. The dragon that
"made war with the woman drew down into his kingdom many of the stars of
heaven." One of the phenomena of the Crucifixion mentioned in Revelation
along with the darkness over the earth, the
115
veiled sun, the blood-stained moon,
is that "the stars from the heavens fell." In the same place we read
that "when the message of the third angel was sounded forth, a great star
went down from heaven and it fell upon the earth." Another star fell at
the sounding of the trumpet of the firth angel. The various legends, then, of
falling stars become invested with unexpected significance as being disguised
allusions to the descent of the angelic myriads to our shores,--to become our
souls.
But nowhere is the statement of the
descent of soul made more explicitly than in the very Creed of the Christian
Church, wherein the second person of the Trinity is described as he "who
for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven . . . and was
made man." Our material will show that the idea was common to many early
nations, in whose literature it is stated with more definiteness than in the
Christian.
If the descent was in partial degree
a karmic punishment for sin, an enforced expiation of evolutionary dereliction
in past cycles, as is hinted in Greek philosophy, it was also pictured as a
seeking of refuge or a hiding for safety. Some contingency or crisis in
celestial affairs, not fully divulged, made it both obligatory and advantageous
for the angel hosts to flee heaven and find on earth, or in "Egypt,"
an escape from danger involved in some evolutionary impasse. It is not
customary to think of hell as a haven, but certain implications in the old
theology require us to do just that. At all events the legend of the hiding
away of the young divine heroes is too general to be without deep significance.
Adam hid himself when the Eternal walked in the garden. Moses as an infant was
hidden in the papyrus swamps of "Egypt"; later he was hidden by the
Eternal in a cleft of the rock as the majesty of the Lord swept by. Jonah ran
and hid from the Eternal when first commanded to execute a mission to the
Ninevites. The child Jesus had to be hidden away from danger in
"Egypt"! The Old Testament Joseph went down to
"Egypt" to be saved from danger. Jotham preserved his life from his
murderous brother Abimelech by hiding. Saul was found in hiding among the
baggage when he was chosen to be king in Israel. In Egypt, Buto, the nurse,
concealed Horus, the analogue of Jesus, in Sekhem, "the hidden shrine and
shut place,"--our earth. Horus’ birth was in a secret place. A similar
legend is related of the mythical Sargon in the cuneiform tablets. He says:
"My mother, the Princess, conceived me; in a secret place she brought me
forth." The
116
supreme Egyptian Sun-God, the mighty
spiritual divinity Ra, says to the earth: "I have hidden you."14 He
says that in the "Egypt" of this lower world he had prepared a secret
and mysterious dwelling for his children. This divine dwelling created by Ra as
the place of protection for the elect, is called "the Retreat." Amen,
an aspect of Ra, was termed "The Master of the Hidden Spheres"; and
Amen itself means "the hidden god." In the Ritual (Ch. 22)
Osiris cries: "I rise out of the egg in the hidden land." Under
another name, Qem-Ur, he addresses the earth (Aukert, the underworld) as the
land "which hidest thy companion who is in thee." The god again
speaks of "hiding himself to cast light upon his hidden place." This
is the typical Lucifer character of the descending god, the Light-Bringer. He
hides himself in order, it is said, to perform there the "mysteries of the
underworld." "These things shall be done secretly in the
underworld." (Rubric to Ch. 137A of the Ritual.) Under the title of
Unas he "gathers together his members which are in the hidden place."
He says that he has "made Horus enter into the Hidden Shrine to vivify the
heart of the god."
It is desirable to search a little
more closely for the rationale of this hiding in the secret place of earth, as
the bases of the whole theological situation are involved in this dark
background. Two causes can be assigned for the descent, a normal evolutionary
one, and another rising out of the motives for karmic punishment for error,
stubbornness, pride or wrong. As to the first, the Greeks postulated the Cycle
of Necessity, which required that all souls or fragments of divine being must
pass through the round of all the elements, in order to embody in their
finished perfection the qualities of every modification of life. The second
cause is less philosophically rationalized and--hints are given us--grew out of
a special situation involving the recalcitrant behavior of twelve legions of
angels, who, in retribution for evolutionary irregularities on their part, were
forced into an earthly incarnation distasteful to them. In the character of
King Teta, Osiris is made to say: "This Teta hath detestation of the
earth, and he will not enter into Seb" (god of earth). There are also references
to the anger of the higher gods, enkindled against them. Plato (Phaedrus)
speaks of those souls who were "subject through the ancient indignation of
the Gods in consequence of former guilt" to severe penalties on earth. In
the Cratylus he concurs with the doctrine of the Orphics that the soul
is punished through its union with body. Iamblicus (Mysteries of the
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Egyptians, Chaldeans and
Assyrians, p. 133) states
that a partial motive in the celebration of the Mysteries of Sabazius was the
appeasing of "the ancient divine anger." Clement of Alexandria (Stromata,
III) preserves a passage from a celebrated Pythagorean, Philolaus, which
runs: "The ancient theologists and priests also testify that the soul is
united with body as if for the sake of punishment." The Book of Enoch
points
to a motive for this punishment in that the deities "came not in their
proper season." It is given that they were ordered to incarnate at an
earlier period, when the bodies of the animal race were of a requisite
preparedness to receive the principle of intelligence, but that they refused
and in consequence were forced to descend much later, when the animal vehicles
were far gone in a state of degeneracy. Proclus in his Hymn to Minerva prays
to the goddess:
"Nor let these horrid
punishments be mine,
Which guilty souls in Tartarus
confine,
With fetters fastened to its broken
floors,
And locked by hell’s tremendous iron
doors."
Dante in the Inferno alludes
to the souls in bondage:
"Hither for failure of their
vows exiled."
There is ground for connecting all
this allusion to the penal character of our adventure on earth with the
oft-cited "rebellion of the angels." Theological students should be
more familiar with Plato’s version of the Demiurgic speech to the hosts about
to incarnate, the "junior gods," in the Timaeus. The Creator
covenants with them to insure their immortality, to support them with his
power; and then charge them to come to earth and "weave together mortal
and immortal natures." It is said they rebelled, procrastinated and, when
finally forced to descend by virtue of karma, missed the crest of a wave of
evolution that would have carried them more smoothly forward past a crucial
point. As it eventuated, their delay brought them to the earth when the lower
race they were to uplift had sunk back into brutal degradation, and their penal
infliction became the greater by the enhanced grossness of the bodies they were
to inhabit. Their proper season had passed, as say Jude and Enoch.
Strangely we find in an old Egyptian
inscription called "The De-
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struction of Mankind" a
parallel to this somewhat anomalous situation in Platonic systematism. There is
a rebellion against Ra, the Sun-God, followed by a great destruction and a
deluge. Atum-Ra had been established as the king of gods and men, the God
alone. There is a revolt against his supremacy. He calls the elder gods around
him for consultation and says to them:
"You ancient gods, behold the
beings who are born of myself; they utter words against me. Tell me, what would
you do in these circumstances? Behold, I have waited and I have not destroyed
them until I should hear what you have to say."15
The elder gods advise that he permit
them to go and smite the enemies who plot evil against Ra, and let none remain
alive. The rebels are then destroyed by being cast down for three days. Here
is the distinct clue to true meaning, for the three days are a glyph for the
time spent by evolutionary consciousness in the three lower kingdoms beneath
man, the mineral, vegetable and animal. And "destruction" in this
usage can not be taken as equivalent to actual annihilation or extirpation.
This latter point is an extremely important one, as it saves many a Biblical
allegory from utter perversion of meaning. After the exaction of the penalty,
the "majesty of Ra" declares that he will now protect men on this
account. "I raise my hand (in token) that I shall not again destroy
men." The similarity of this description to more than a score of such
narratives of the almighty anger against "a stiff-necked and rebellious
people," their being cast out from celestial court and favor, and the
eventual divine relenting and restoration of them to his providential care,
must strike any fair-minded student who has read the Old Testament.
It is charged that Job, when cause
is sought for his trial, had added "rebellion unto his sin."16 It
does not seem to be well known that the Old Testament contains an
account of the "rebellion of the angels" in the guise of alleged
Hebrew history. It is the rebellion of the "Sons of Korah," given in
the Mosaic books, and recalled to the attention of the Israelites several times
by the Eternal. It is told that at the rebellion the Lord caused the earth to
open and swallow them up. It should be noticed that they were engulfed by the earth.
It is known that two different groups of Psalms, thirteen to
forty-nine, and eighty-four to eighty-eight, are specialized as "Psalms of
the Sons of Korah." It is to
119
be remarked as significant also that
while swallowed up by earth, they were not destroyed! The rebel hosts, cast out
of heaven, were not annihilated! What can this mean but that the term
"destruction" is purely a glyph for the enforced descent to earth?
Here they could expiate their contumely by sojourning in the untoward conditions
of animal embodiment. Milton in the Paradise Lost, expresses Adam’s
surprise to find that his sentence of "death" for disobedience is a
long, living death, not extinction. The account of the Korahitic rebellion
expressly states that they were swallowed alive.
Happily Chaldean as well as Hindu
records reaffirm the correctness of our interpretation, for Massey says:
"The Chaldean and Hindu legends
know nothing of a human sin as a cause of the deluge. The sin against
the gods, however, is described as the cause of the deluge in the so-called
‘destruction of men.’ . . . But these beings in the case were elemental, not
mortal, and the sin was not human."17
This is quite important. The beings
were pre-human and angelic, not elemental in the theological sense. Their
rebellion, in short, occurred in heaven, not on earth, though indeed it has
been prolonged into the earthly life. They carried their rebellious attitude
down with them and exhibit phases of it to the present!
An Egyptian text says of the god Anhur
that he had seen the malice of these gods who "deserted their
allegiance to raise a rebellion," and "he refused to go forth with
them." Other texts contain references to "the children of impotent
revolt," and tell of their "inroad into the Eastern part of heaven,
whereupon there arose a battle in heaven and in all the earth." And
another passage alludes to the "carrying out of the sentence upon those
who are to die," and says it is "the withholding of that which is so
needful to the souls of the children of impotent revolt." The meaning here
is obviously their expatriation and consequent cutting off from participation
in the life of their celestial estate.
In general summary of this point, it
may be said that the implications and the moral of these traditions of
rebellious and outcast angels are these: our divine souls (for we are
those rebellious deities) fled under karmic pressure from heaven to earth, and
we have carried the same refractoriness down in our racial history. We refused
at first to incarnate in the animal forms, and we still are rebellious in our
refusal
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to take full charge and assume
complete mastery over the "animal" segment of our composite nature.
Hence the frequent injunctions in old scriptures to "kill out" the
lower elements in us, and such a statement as that in the Egyptian text of Unas
to "slay the rebel" in consummating our work of redemption.18 Angels
indeed were despatched to this realm, and their presence in the human
constitution accounts for the divine element apostrophized in all religion. In
the Epistle to the Hebrews (1:14) it is asked: "Are they not all
ministering spirits sent forth to minister for them who should be heirs of
salvation?"
The next step in the unfoldment of
the theme is to establish beyond dispute that it was to our earth that the
descent was made. This is tremendously vital to true interpretation.
In Egyptian scriptures we encounter
the promise that "if Pepi falleth on to the earth, Keb [Seb] will lift him
up." Pepi here stands for the divinity in man, the god come to earth. To
him in another place it is said: "Thou plowest the earth . . . Thou
journeyest on the road whereon the gods journeyed." Here is identification
of the earth as the place to which the gods were sent to travel the road of
evolution.
One of the most conclusive
statements of this fact in Christian scriptures is that memorable passage in Revelation
(12:7-9), where we have a succinct rehearsal of the "war in
heaven" and the casting down of the angel hosts in the character of Satan,
as the dragon or serpent.
"There was war in heaven.
Michael and his angels went forth to war with the dragon; and the dragon warred
and his angels; and they prevailed not, neither was their place found any more
in heaven. And the great dragon was cast down, the old serpent, he that is
called the Devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world; he was cast down into
the earth and his angels were cast out with him."
It is of prime interest to note that
the war in heaven was continued on earth, as has been intimated before. For after
the dragon had been cast down to earth, he "waxed wroth with the woman
and went away to make war with the rest of her seed."
This can be seen as the confirmation
of the narrative in Genesis, wherein the Lord swore to place enmity
between the serpent, or dragon, and the seed of the woman.
In the Egyptian Ritual, in
the "chapter by which one cometh forth by day," the spirit of the
descending god pleads:
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"Let me have possession of all
things soever which were offered ritualistically for me in the nether world.
Let me have possession of the table of offerings which was heaped up for me on
earth." He asks "that he may feed upon the bread of Seb [the
earth god] or the food of earth." Proceeding he urges: "Let
the Tuat be opened for me. Here am I."
This is an announcement of his
advent upon earth, for the Tuat is the gate of entrance to Amenta. He is coming
to this world to feed upon that type of concrete experience which the
conditions here alone afford, under the name of "the bread of Seb."
Later, following his resurrection, he says: "The tunnels of earth
have given me birth." "I rise as a god among men," he exclaims.
If there are men elsewhere than on earth, they are not those referred to in the
old scriptures. He is described again as "Thou who givest light to the
earth" (Rit., Ch. 15). Again he says: "I come that I may
overthrow my adversaries upon earth." It is on earth that his opposition
is to be met and hither he must come to conquer it, for his undeveloped
divinity must grow by overcoming opposition. He is spoken of again as "he
who has caused the authority of his father to be recognized in the great
dwelling of Seb,"--earth. Another passage (Ch. 64) describes the lower
self in man as saying: "I draw near to the god whose words were heard by
me in the lower earth." As the god-soul descends he says: "My body
shall be established and it shall neither fall into decay nor be destroyed
upon
this earth." His mission to earth is proclaimed as being to "vivify
every human being that walketh upon the regions which are upon the earth."
In another place we have a combined reference to the earth both as the
"hidden place" and as the globe where the young gods came to
progress. It is said of Isis that "she suckled the child in solitariness,
and none knew where his place was, and he grew in strength and his arm
increased in strength in the house of Keb," or the earth. Egypt will offer
us in later connections a superabundance of testimony to the thesis under
discussion, the relevance of which can not be so well appreciated until other
phases of the mundane journey of the god can be presented. The localization of
the place where the gods fell when ejected from heaven in the mythos as
being our earth is one of the three or four major postulates of the ancient
theology which this work is undertaken to establish, and its implications must
alter all religious construction drastically.
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The point was once known, but was
obscured by ignorant handling of the Gnosis and was lost. It is almost
unthinkable that it could have met such a fate when the Church had constantly
before its eyes the legend of Christmas, with its clear imputation of the
incarnation of the children of spiritual skies on earth. But the distributive
nature of the Christhood had been submerged, and the tradition of the fall of
the angels had been wrenched out of all relation to the Nativity at the winter
solstice.
The passage in Revelation (22:16)
that has left theological thought in such deep obscurity, may find acceptable
rendition of its meaning in the light of the thesis of the descent: "I,
Jesus, have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the
churches." To apprehend the statement clearly we are required to read the
name "Jesus" in the light of its Gnostic meaning as an Aeon, or
emanation of divine spirit, an interpretation that is not at odds with its
usage in the Book of Revelation. Students have been impressed with the
evident resemblance of the Apocalypse to Gnostic literature, and one writer has
ventured the opinion that it could have been written only by a Platonist versed
in Mystery and Magian symbology. It bears quite pointed resemblances to such a
Hermetic book as the Enoch. The Jesus referred to in it obviously has no
identic relation to the Jesus personalized in the Gospels. His figure here is
of cosmic proportions and equates the stature of the Logos. His dispatching of
his angels to testify unto the churches can mean only that the Demiurgus, or
Cosmic Intelligence embodied in an exalted being of the hierarchy, ordered the
incarnation of the legionary hosts in the interests of the human evolution on
earth. The "churches" can by no possible sophistry be distorted into
a reference to the early Christian congregations. This would be to bring the
dignity of cosmic operations down almost to the level of the monthly meeting of
the Ladies’ Auxiliary! The "churches" were groupings or gradations of
spiritual beings at or near the completed state of human development, if not the
"ecclesia" or "assembly" of the divinized mortals.
Theology has never adequately traced
the course of the evolutionary processes by which the simple fact of the
descent of the angels for incarnation took on the character of a
"fall," with the implication of disaster. Says Cocker: "The
present life is a fall and a punishment."19 Many passage from the Bible
could be adduced to show that the
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incarnation was held to have
resulted in a fall or debasement of pristine angelic virtue. The Revelation
apostrophe
to the fallen Babylon, the mighty, whose ancient glory had departed, giving
place to the glory of the Beast, whose courts had become the habitation of
devils, and whose fornicatory wines had made the nations drunk, is doubtless an
allusion to the situation here envisaged. To what else could St. Paul
conceivably be referring when, speaking of the Gentiles, he says:
"And they changed the glory of
the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of a corruptible man, and
of birds, and of four-footed beasts, and of creeping things."
An earlier paragraph has corrected
the miscomprehension of the meaning of the term "Gentiles," which has
beset the theological mind for centuries. It would be illogical to ascribe so
dire an evolutionary degeneration to the mere accident of non-membership in a
religious caste, or nation of allegedly "chosen" people. The Gentiles
were the as yet undivinized "sons of men," as distinct from the
"Sons of God," or Israelites, and it was their unpurified natures that
dragged down the gods who incarnated in their bodies and dimmed their glory.
The Gentile is the man "from beneath"; the Israelite is "from
above," as Jesus affirmed. "The first man is of the earth, earthy;
the second is the Lord from heaven," says St. Paul. The immersion of the
latter in the bodies of the former reduced their originally vivid intelligence
to such a point of stultification that they sank by degrees under the dominance
of the sensual disposition. And here is found the conversion of the
evolutionary "descent" into the theological "fall." The two
terms Gentiles and Israelites can not be attached to any historical nationals.
Their employment by several nations was at first only an allegorical flourish.
The Greek use of the term "barbarians" and our own recent literary
use of the word "Philistines" somewhat parallel this treatment of the
word "Gentiles." The Gentiles were the party of the first part in
evolution, who drew down the gods and changed their glory into the semblance of
grinning hyenas, chattering apes, braying asses and rapacious wolves, in spite
of "broad oaths fast sealed" and a covenant with deity.
The advent of the Prometheans to
earth was the oblation, the divine sacrifice, the sacrifice "for
sin." Yet it is only a perverted connotation of the word "sacrifice"
that has caused this act of cosmic policy to be
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taken in the light of a
self-privation on the part of the Luciferian hosts. Few words of noble meaning
have not been touched by the disfiguring hand of low human understanding.
Sacrifice (Latin: sacra and facio) means "to make
sacred," and has no immediate correlation with the denial to oneself of
benefits. If privation came in the process of incarnation, it was incidental,
not inherent. The angel legions descended to make a lower order of life holy--"to
adorn what was below them," as Plotinus puts it. Their labor was to the
end of "sacrifying" a merely natural kingdom of life. It was to
sanctify with the gift of divinity the mortal race, and make it immortal and
divine.
This is not to assert that the enterprise
did not entail hardship. The labor of evolution especially when
self-consciousness had been awakened and the Ego became aware of his failures,
and knew that he bore responsibility for his conduct, is more likely to be a Via
Dolorosa than a path of roses. The reason for the accentuation of the
denial aspect of the sacrifice is to be found in the fact that the upliftment
of the lower grade entailed a long relinquishment of paradisiacal blessedness
for the spirits of light, and a quenching of their deific fire in the moist
humors, or "water," of the body. The adventure brought privation,
torture, woe. It was an exile from a home of beatific happiness. To be plunged
from a state of dreamy blissfulness into a state of dull realism and concrete
objectivity, where the golden glow of idealism faded from every sight, was for
them a dimming of the bright lamp of life. It was indeed a plunge from lively
consciousness into partial unconsciousness. It was an ostracism from heaven
into a long, hard and unattractive migration. They were to become colonists of
a strange, distant land, if not castaways on its unfriendly shores. Cocker,
already quoted, comments, in reference to Plato’s Cave Allegory: "Their
sojourn on earth is . . . a dreary exile from their proper home." Earth
life is only a shadow of reality. In Egyptian scriptures the holy city of
Aarru-Hetep (Salem) was to be built up by "the outcasts or the colonists
from Egypt." St. Paul states that "we are a colony of heaven"
(Moffatt translation). This is a clear Biblical intimation that we are
expatriates from a higher world. Greek philosophy and mythology are replete
with allusions to souls wandering on earth, exhiles from a diviner sphere. Most
of the semi-divine heroes had long journeys and crusades assigned to them. And
the Prodigal Son is of course the unquestioned representative of the exile’s
role in Bible lore. From the
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Greek philosopher Empedocles comes
the echo of the sentiment that the soul has migrated to a foreign country:
"For this I weep, for this
indulge my woe,
That e’er my soul such novel realms
should know."
Moses’ son was Gershom, which the
Moffatt translation gives as meaning "Stranger," with the
parenthetical explanation: "For I have been a stranger in a foreign
land."
In this connection there is the
possibility of a rational solution of the meaning of a text in the Bible which,
in its conventional reading, has proven a perplexity and a "hard
saying." It appears to be a stroke at the fundamental integrity of human
kinship, family affection. In Luke (14:26) Jesus tells the multitude
that no one can be his disciple unless one hate father, mother, brother, sister
and all kin. In the great Gnostic-Christian work, the Pistis Sophia (Bk.
2, p. 341) a text runs to nearly the same effect:
"For this cause have I said
unto you aforetime, ‘he who shall not leave father and mother to follow after
me is not worthy of me.’ What I said then was, ye shall leave your parents, the
rulers, that ye may all be children of the first, everlasting mystery."
In the light of the additional
explanatory material given in the Pistis Sophia and omitted from the
Gospel account, it is possible to see that this necessity of the disciple’s
leaving father, mother and kin and breaking all home ties in an apparently
ruthless disruption of the most commendable of earthly loves, bore no original
reference to human parents and kindred, but was another of the many illusions
to the expatriation of the angelic orders. This breaking of home ties occurred
in the celestial paradise, which in all portrayal is called "the
Homeland." To be a follower of Jesus in his mission to a submerged
humanity was to accompany him in his descent to earth from heavenly Father and
empyrean home. If religion had kept its original knowledge of our cosmic
errand, we could have been saved the perennial perplexity of wondering why the
Lord’s disciples are commanded to flout the tenderest of human ties.
Many of the allusions to the
children of Israel as exiles, captives in a foreign land, hostages and
outcasts, are made during periods when the historical Hebrews were not in
either the Egyptian or the Babylon-
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ian or Assyrian captivities, and
were not in any mundane sense exiles. Empedocles describes mortals as
"Heaven’s exiles straying from the orb of light." In line with our
thought are the words of the Christian Advent hymn:
O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here,
Until the Son of God appear.
Nor less grandly true are the lines
of the "Gospel" hymn:
I’m but a stranger here;
Heaven is my home.
The various exiles, captivities and
wanderings of the children of Israel were not historical. They were symbolic
accounts of the descent of the twelve "tribes" of angelic spirits,
"chosen" by the higher Lords in heaven to come to earth and divinize
incipient humanity.
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Chapter VIII
IN
DURANCE VILE
Having established the place of the
soul’s fall or descent as our earth, the next task is to present the teaching
of ancient philosophy as to the character of the soul’s actual experience in
the dismal habitat of the animal bodies. Christian theology makes much of the
doctrine of the Incarnation, but a vast amount of primary knowledge that would
enlighten the mind with reference to this cardinal item has been lost by the
Church’s flouting of the early Gnosis. The doctrine has been to ecclesiasticism
such a baffling conundrum that it was shelved to a place of happy security in
the person of the historical Jesus. Indeed the evidence grows stronger, as
study proceeds, that the theory of a carnalized or personalized Savior,
comprehending in himself every divine attribute, became established in early
polity from the sheer fact of its serviceableness, it being found an easy
solution of many a knotty problem of exegesis to ascribe every aspect of
Godhood to the man Jesus. All divinity once safely localized in his person, a
hundred confusing questions arising from the entanglement of deity with mortal
flesh in all humanity could be summarily disposed of. Pagan philosophy required
the presence of divinity in every son of earth. But a decadent religionism
found the rationale of the situation too difficult to purvey to its ignorant
following, and the euhemerized Jesus proved an easy evasion. Was not Jesus the
only-begotten son of God? Insecure as this left the hierarchical status of
every other Christian, it was sufficient for pious zealotry. The Incarnation
was condensed in Jesus, touchingly born in the climate of tropical Egypt, and
heralded by a star which in any astronomical view whatever becomes a natural
monstrosity. All things considered it was a device of consummate utility to
consign the whole matter of the Incarnation to the distant and sacrosanct
person of the Nazarene. Beside bearing in his body the sins of the world, he
has borne also in
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his frail person the unsolved
problems of a blind and errant theology! The Jesus of Christianity was as much
an intellectual necessity to a befuddled ecclesiasticism as Voltaire’s God has
been to a humanity trying to rationalize the universe. To a theology plunged
into dialectical difficulties by its rejection of esotericism, a Jesus who
"paid it all" has indeed been "a very present help in
trouble." By cramming all the essence of divinity that came to earth into
the sainted confines of Jesus’ body and life, all qualms concerning the
neglected "Christ in you" could be overborne by a wave of the hand
toward the picture of the man of Galilee on the cross.
But pagan thought faced the
implications and the data of the incarnation problem squarely. A fragment of
deity was brought and lodged within the breast of every animal form evolved to
the verge of the human kingdom. The animal race awaited the implantation of the
divine spark, as their hope of a link with the order of responsible free agency
and self-conscious intelligence. They stood at the point at which physical
evolution could take them no farther toward mentality without the endowment of
a nucleus or seed of potential mind from the plane above. They awaited the
incubation of divine intelligence in their physical forms. The agents of such a
blessing were at hand in the legions of Asuras, who had evolved the desired
element of mind in former cycles elsewhere, but yet required some rounds of
incarnate experience to complete the perfection of their divinity. After
rebellion and delay they came to fulfill their cosmic destiny. We are
those "unwilling Nirvanees," those "junior gods," those
angelic hosts! By our coming and sharing our nature with the lesser creatures,
they, too, become the heirs of immortality; for the essence of which our higher
nature was nucleated is imperishable. If the animal could append it to his
being, he would be immortalized also. The Demiurgus in charging us with the
commission, assured us that we "should never be dissolved" (Timaeus).
The gist of Plato’s, as of Paul’s, writings is that man is a being compounded
of a lower perishable and a higher indestructible vesture, the two linked by an
intermediate principle which may be inclined to a union with either, and which
therefore stands at the place of the balance in human destiny. The fleshly form
was contributed by physical evolution on earth, but it was molded upon the
matrix of an emotional body of finer etheric substance supplied by the men of
the previous Moon race,
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or the Lunar Pitris, at the end of
their life period on our satellite.1 A higher race, concluding a course of
incarnations upon another planet of our system, Venus or Mercury, contributed
the mental or manasic principle, which was to control emotion and
sensation. And the highest spiritual node of being was the gift of entities
embodying the soul of the sun. We can see now why in ancient legends of the
formulation of mankind, the various gods are said to contribute each a bit of
his own nature to compile the final product, as in the Pandora myth. Manas
or
mind was the intermediary between emotion and spirit. Spirit was to control
mind as mind controlled emotion. With the descending Asuras2 came potential
mind and the germ of undying spirit.
To present briefly the archaic
legend of the advent, the accounts relate that of the twelve legions chosen to
undertake the adventure in the far country, two were lost and had to find their
place again in evolution later. Of the remaining ten, one group of five
responded willingly to the order. They were therefore known as the Suras, or
"willing Nirvanees." They are the obedient elder brother of
the Prodigal Son allegory! But in their effort they did not descend to full
incarnation in animal bodies, but remained suspended, so to say, over the
earthly scene in what might be called spiritual bodies. They never reached the
flesh, never became the souls of fleshly creatures. They were obedient, but
never fully executed their commission. The remaining group of five legions,
profiting by their example, at first refused to run the risk of the same
abortive effort, and were known as the Asuras, or "unwilling
ones." (Syrians and Assyrians became their earthly counterparts in the
handling of the uranograph, the ancient "u" changing always to a
"y" when Anglicized.) However, they could not avert their destiny,
and reluctantly obeying, they succeeded in linking their divine principle of
intelligence to the mortal forms of the animal-men awaiting them. "The
underworld awaits your coming" is a statement made to them in one of the
prophetic books of the Old Testament. They were the younger and wayward
son in the Prodigal Son allegory! But they did go out from home, as the elder brother
did not. Therefore they were worthy of the fatted calf and the shining robe on
their return, victorious. The elder brother, though obedient, had not earned
the reward. This is the solution of the difficult situation in the allegory, in
which the sulkiness and apparent neglect of the obedient son who had remained
faithfully at home, have so
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universally defeated the exegetical
efforts of the theologians. The parable of the five wise and five foolish
virgins is likewise a glyph of this same cosmic predicament. For one of the
names of the Asuras was Kumaras, meaning "celibate young men,"
or "spiritual virgins." They are the "Innocents" of the
Gospel story and the Hamemmet Beings of the Book of the Dead. Their
virginity is by virtue of the fact that they were entities of pure spiritual
nature, radiations of basic Spirit, who had not yet had full incarnation, which
was ever symbolized as a "marriage" of spirit with flesh! They were
cosmically unmarried, hence "virgin" young men.
We have here a new intimation of
profound meaning back of the feature of the "virgin birth" and the
"immaculate conception." The virginity pertained to both sides, the
spiritual as well as the material. If the matter that was to give birth to
spiritual mind was hitherto unwedded to spirit, never impregnated by spirit, so
likewise were the spiritual units who were sent to be the
"Bridegroom" of New Testament dramatism to wed these
immaculate virgins of the material nature. They were yet "innocent"
of copulation with matter. They were the ones chosen to descend to earth and
wed material forms, inoculating virgin matter with the principle of immortal
mind. They were "young men" and "celibate." Beside Hamemmet
Beings the Egyptians termed them "younglings in the egg" and the
"younglings of Shu," the god. And they dramatized them as birds’
(souls’) eggs in the nest in the tree of life in danger of being devoured by
the serpent--of the lower nature! One Egyptian name given, in addition to Apap
or Apep, or Apepi, to the great Hydra serpent that lay in wait to devour the
Manes in the "bight of Amenta" was Herut or Herrut. Evidence that is
not lightly to be brushed aside in derision can be adduced in support of the
suggestion that the name Herod, foisted on this serpent character in the myth when
drama was historicized, is just a cover for the Herut reptile that threatens
the Innocents! The historical Herod, tetrarch of Galilee, was dead at the year
4 B.C. Christian chronology has had to shift the "date" of Christ’s
"birth" to the year 4 B.C. in order to be able to include Herod in
the story. But Cyrenius (Quirinus), the "Governor in Syria" at the
time of Jesus’ birth according to the Gospel account, reigned from 13 to 11
B.C. Will another shift of seven to nine years be made to include him?
The Kumaras in the Egyptian books
exult in their escape from the
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serpent threat with the cry:
"Apap hath not found my nest. My egg has not been cracked!" The
infant Hercules in his cradle strangled the two great snakes that crept up to
devour him, and both Horus and his cat symbol stand with feet upon the giant
serpent’s neck, the cat severing its head with a knife.
Thomas Taylor, the discerning
Platonist, states that we mortal men are composed of the "fragments"
of the Titans. In Platonism generally the Titans were styled Thyrsus-bearers,
as having "led the soul into the body," or "brought ungenerated
into generated existence." Their part in implanting the seed of
intelligence in man is poetically set forth in Proclus’ Hymn to Minerva:
"Invigorated hence by thee we
find
A demiurgic impulse in the
mind."
Massey tells us that
"in the Latita-Vistara eight
heavenly beings are enumerated as the Gods or Devas. They are the Nagas,
Yakshas, Gandharvas, Asuras, Garudas, Kumaras and Mahorgas."3
They are the gods who (collectively)
in Leviticus (26) say to the Israelites:
"I will ratify my compact with
you; I will pitch my tent among you and never abhor you. I will live among
you and be your God, and you shall be my people."
In this great enterprise of leading
whole and impartible natures into the realm of division and darkness they were
said to have established "the garden of the Asuras" about the South
Pole of the heavens, the Paradise of Yama, Lord of the region of death, whilst
the Suras, or unfragmented deities, are said to have dwelt in the locality of
the North Polar region, the fabled Mt. Meru, or Paradise of Indra. This
opposition of the two races of divinities, termed the War in Heaven, was the
celestial counterpart and prototypal aspect of the later struggle inaugurated
between the heavenly and the earthly elements in human nature when the Asuras
descended to assume physical vestures. It was the pattern in the heavens of the
war between the first Adam, or natural man, and the second Adam, or the man
regenerated by the infusion of a spiritual consciousness.
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The point now to be demonstrated
beyond cavil is that the incarnation was localized in the bodies of a race that
at the beginning was animal and in the end was to be human. The
"tabernacling with men" which the deities undertook consisted in
effecting the incorporation of their subtler faculties and capacities in bodies
originally animal. The ancient apothegm of the sages--"Nature unaided
fails"--must be given due consideration in the scheme of things and
accepted as one of the canons of understanding. It seems to introduce into the
system of evolution a bizarre and unaccountable factor. It appears to thrust
the causative principle of mind, intelligence, into the order of natural
unfoldment in a purely arbitrary way, such as science can not countenance. It
appears to make evolution jump over the gap between beast and human, and
suddenly presents man endowed with self-determinative intelligence with no provision
made for his having earned it in orderly development. But the ancient wisdom
does supply the link that to science is missing. It reveals the
irrationality of science’s attempt to account for the presence and growth of a
plant without permitting the assumption that its seed was first planted in the
soil. Science has been straining to explain the presence of mind in man without
knowledge of the ancient theorem that each kingdom serves as the seed-bed for
the generation of life of the kingdom above it. It has been searching for
formulae of explanation in total want of the understanding that
"one long immortal chain, whose
sequence is never-ending, reaches by impact with that immediately above and by
contact with that immediately below, from the very lowest to the very
highest."4
It is possible to discern a replica
of this same linkage of principles in the functioning of our bodily organism,
reaching from spirit at the top to flesh and bone at the bottom. Spirit touches
and influences mind, mind touches emotion, emotion modifies nerve impulse,
which affects the composition of the blood, and blood builds cell structure,
eventuating in actual flesh and bone. The spirit in the human body is like a
power current in a dynamo, motivating a dynamic impulse which reaches to the
utmost bounds of the organism. But man, like nature, is composed of a series of
structures of different tenuity, and each member of the series is a link in the
chain, bound above and below to the contiguous links. The interrelation of the
links is governed by the Law of Incubation, by which the seed germ of life on
the level
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above is deposited in the soil of
the level below, there to be hatched to new generation. In the Egyptian Ritual
(Ch. 85) the incarnating Ego says: "I am the soul, the Creator of the
god Nu, who maketh his habitation in the underworld; my place of incubation
is
unseen and my egg is not cracked." And in the resurrection scene in
the Ritual the revivified Ego, figured as a dove, exclaims: "I am
the Dove; I am the Dove,"! as he rises from the realm of darkness wherein
the "egg of his future being was hatched by the divine incubator"
(Ch.
86).
In the Pistis Sophia of the
Gnostics the doctrine of the incubation finds clear expression when Jesus says:
"I found Mary, who is called my
mother, after the material body; I implanted in her the first power which I had
received from the hands of Barbelo, and I planted in her the power which I had
received from the hands of the great, the good Sabaoth" (Mead’s Trans.,
Bk. I, 13).
It is of transcendent importance to
note that the Greek (Gnostic) work directly identifies Mary, the mother of
divinity, with the physical body! Let Christian theology be advised of the
long-lost truth of this matter. The mother in all ancient allegories typifies nothing
more than the physical body which in man becomes the womb or matrix in which
the radiant Christ-body of spirit is brought to birth. Is Christianity to fall
below heathenism in its inability to rise above the level of the symbols to the
discernment of the abstract truth behind them?
Proclus speaks of the soul having
fallen like seed into the realms of generation.5 Paul’s characterization
of the nature of man as sown in corruption is a resort again to the
imagery of incubation. The "junior gods," potentially if not yet
actually divine, were sown, planted in a soil prepared by evolution to nourish
their latent fires to expansion and full function, and this was the
incarnation. The "fleshly" connotation of the word leaves no doubt as
to the full reality of the process; the ground prepared was the physical body
of animal-men. The entry of these divine seeds of life and mind into each
animal form made possible for those creatures their transition across the gap
of the "missing link" to the plane of humanhood. The link between
brute beast and thinking man is missing on earth; for it was forged by
evolutionary process in another realm, on another planet, and transferred to
earth at a given critical epoch in mundane history. As Plutarch tells us, only
one fourth of man, his physical body, is derived directly from
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the earth; the other three parts are
brought here and linked to his material frame by appropriate affinities. That
this may not remain an insoluble enigma to modern skepticism about such things,
it may be said that each of these principles intermixed in man’s constitution
was the product of an evolution on its particular globe, and that, since these
globes themselves are but cells or organs in a larger composite living stellar
being,
the possibility of their sustaining vital relations or co-operative linkage
in a common creative work is far from an unnatural presupposition. Science must
go several steps deeper than it has yet gone into the secret workshop of nature
before it can admit the legitimacy of such predications. Yet ancient
psycho-physics faced the problems of life with the knowledge that all living
organisms are concocted of a perishable material element and an imperishable
subjective element bound together in temporary union. When the corruptible
sheath fades away the imperishable nucleus floats free, persists and may later
be embodied in another form. Science is to be reminded that substances are the
more enduring in proportion to their tenuity, that "soul," as the
Greeks affirmed, is far more lasting than body. Hence impressions made upon it
are a more ineradicable book of life than any cemetery epitaph. Our emotional
body, our mental vehicle and our immortal spiritual vesture each brings the
record of its past indelibly imprinted upon the underlying etheric substance of
its composition.
From Greek Platonism we draw some of
the most direct and dialectically essential support for the thesis of the
bodily incarnation. From Olympiodorus’ Commentary on the Phaedo of
Plato we take the following:
"It is necessary, first of all,
for the soul to place a likeness of herself in the body. This is to ensoul the
body. Secondly, it is necessary for her to sympathize with the image, as being
of like idea. For every eternal form or substance is wrought into an identity
with its interior substance, through an integrated tendency thereto."
We are here enlightened about the
interior affinities which the two partners to the union manifest toward each
other, the bonds that draw and hold and eventually weld them together.
Another pointed assertion comes from
the Chaldean Oracles:
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"For the Father of Gods and men
placed our intellect in soul, but soul he deposited in sluggish body."
Perhaps we shall find nowhere else
so detailed and analytic a statement of the principles on which life and nature
regulate the metamorphoses which divine consciousness undergoes as it descends
the Jacob’s ladder from spirit heights to mortal sense on coming into
incarnation, as in a paragraph from Proclus in the quaint style of Thomas Taylor’s
rendering:
"In order likewise that this
may become manifest and also the arrangement, let us survey from on high the
descent, as Plato says, and defluxion of the wings of the soul. From the
beginning, therefore, and at first the soul, departing from this divine union,
descended into intellect, and no longer possessed real being unitedly and in
one, but apprehended and surveyed them by simple projections and, as it were,
contacts of its intellect. In the next place, departing from intellect, and descending
into reason and dianoia, it no longer apprehended real being by simple
intuitions, but syllogistically and transitively, proceeding from one thing to
another, from propositions to conclusions. Afterwards, abandoning true
reasoning and the dissolving peculiarity [analysis], it descended into
generation, and became filled with much irrationality and perturbation. It is
necessary, therefore, that it should recur to its proper principles and again
return to the place from whence it came."6
Nothing would so quickly aid modern
psychology to work for fruitful results in understanding as to adopt this table
of the successive "defluxions of the wings of the soul" in Plato’s
magnificent analysis. Surely the present status and modus of the psyche’s operation
are to be better envisaged if they are known to be the lowest and most darkened
activity of a spiritual intelligence that on the heights above functioned by
flashing intuition. Clearly outlined are the several steps which the soul takes
from piercing light into murky darkness as it descends into body: first from
identity with reality and direct inclusion of consciousness in it; then the
plunge downward into that form of intellect which apprehends by immediate
intuition; again the dip into the more sluggish processes of logical reasoning,
in which, the inner relations of things being lost, the mind must establish
them slowly by syllogistic process; and finally the dropping altogether from
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rational procedure into following
the lead of sheer sense and impulse of the lower nature. With mighty
realizations we are now able to see what St. Paul meant in saying, "Now we
see through a glass darkly."
From a dissertation on Theurgy translated
by the Renaissance Platonist, Ficinus, we take the following clear statement of
the gradations in the chain of the descent:
"So that all things are full of
divine natures; terrestrial natures receiving the plenitude of such as are
celestial, but celestial of supercelestial essences; while every order of
things proceeds gradually, in a beautiful descent, from the highest to the
lowest. For whatever particulars are collected into one above the order of
things, are afterwards dilated in descending, various souls being distributed
under their various ruling divinities."7
From the grand master of divine
knowledge himself, Plato (Timaeus, xliv), comes the remarkable
declaration:
"The Deity (Demiurgus) himself
formed the divine; and then delivered over to his celestial offspring
(the subordinate or generated gods), the task of creating the mortal. These
subordinate deities, copying the example of their parent, and receiving from
his hands the immortal principles of the human soul, fashioned after
this the mortal body, which was consigned to the soul as a vehicle, and in
which they placed also another kind of soul, which is mortal and is the seat of
violent and fatal passions."
For sheer enlightenment these
passages are worth whole libraries of modern speculation. The lower soul spoken
of is the one which emanated from the moon race, and is, strictly speaking, the
soul of the animal, not the god-soul of the man. It is this lower soul, called
often the "elemental," the seat of the animal instincts, that the god
has come to educate, and in the same body with which it has come to dwell. When
Plato describes it as "the seat of violent and fatal passions," he is
definitely identifying our mortal tenement with the body of an animal. This
conclusion is strengthened by one of the Zoroastrian Oracles, which declares:
"The wild beasts of the earth shall inhabit thy vessel."8
Edward Carpenter, in reviewing the
multifarious forms of the "sacrifice" doctrine in religions, says
that "Brahma, . . . Indra, Soma, Hari and other gods, became incarnate in
animals."9 And it is not without extreme significance that we have
such a statement as the following from a scholarly authority:
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"The sense of an absolute
psychical distinction between man and beast, so prevalent in the civilized
world, is hardly to be found among lower races."10
Naturally so, because the gap
between man and animal there is less wide than it now is in cultured
races. The animal did not at one jump land into full manhood. He was given the
as yet ungerminated seed of divinity to nurse within the depths of his own nature.
Only a tiny segment of the god’s life was in conscious manifestation in and
through the lower mentality of the beast at the start. The god could put little
of his full power and capacity into expression through the imperfect brain of
the animal. For a long time, or until the angel’s presence in the brute body
could refine the latter’s impulses and proclivities and increase brain
expansion, the deity could only lurk in the background of consciousness,
becoming what we now so ignorantly term "the subconscious mind."
There was obviously little difference between the first humans and the nearest
animals. The difference did not assume marked proportions until ages had rolled
by and the slow march of development had enabled the god to project more and more
of his innate endowment into the sluggish nature of the beast he was tutoring.
We have here, systematically propounded for the first time, the basic criterion
for evaluating the progress of human culture. Culture is essentially nothing
but the gradual modification of crude animal impulses into the gentler motions
of the higher self. Modernity has never concisely known the cosmic or
evolutionary foundations of this transaction. These lay hidden under the
rejected esotericism of Platonic and other arcane teachings.
The Bible sets forth the
implications of the incarnation in sensationally direct form in the Book of
Daniel. Addressing the king (always a figure for the god) Daniel tells him
that he will be taken away from human beings to dwell with the wild animals;
and he condenses volumes of Platonic philosophy dealing with the obscuration of
deific intellect in the descent, into the pithy statement, repeated three times
in the first five chapters, that "you shall be given the mind of an
animal"! An animal’s mind was given unto him and his dwelling was with the
wild beasts." Also: "He ate grass like cattle, and his nails grew
like the claws of a bird." (Incidentally, here is positive proof of the
non-historicity of Bible narrative, since these things did not happen
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to the historical King,
Nebuchadnezzar!) But the Paradise lost in the incarnation was regained in the
end, for finally, "When the time was over, I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted up my
eyes unto heaven; my reason returned unto me, and I blessed the Lord,
praising him and honoring him forever." The period of the duress in animal
habitat is given as "seven years," each cycle of incarnate life being
completed in seven ages! And all the mighty meaning of this grand allegory was
missed because Nebuchadnezzar was taken for an historical personage, instead of
a figure for the god in man.
Egypt furnishes us with one of the
most direct and indubitable bits of testimony to the animal incarnation of the
soul in one of the numberless prayers addressed to Osiris:
"Hail, Osiris Khenti-Amentiu
(Lord of Amenta)! Thou art the Lord of millions of years, the lifter-up of
wild animals, the Lord of cattle; . . ."
As Amenta is the region in which the
Osiris-soul contacts the body, the verse is of surpassing meaning in this
connection.
Massey writes in The Natural
Genesis (Vol. I, p. 71):
"A very comprehensive
designation for the divinities of all kinds, says Gill (Myths and Songs, p.
34), is the Mangaian ‘te anau tuarangi,’ the heavenly family. This
‘celestial race includes rats, lizards, beetles, sharks and several kinds of
birds. The supposition was that the heavenly family had taken up their abode
in these birds and fishes.’"
"Plutarch refers to the idea
‘that the Gods, being afraid of Typhon; did, as it were, hide themselves in the
bodies of ibises, dogs and hawks,’ and repudiated it as ‘foolery beyond
belief.’ This, however, is a matter of interpretation. We know that such
representations were part of the drama of the Mysteries. Many descriptions
might be quoted to show that in their religious ceremonies, the actors
performed their masquerade in the guise of animals."
We have here a sterling clue to the
lost meaning of most of the weird ritualism still carried out in our celebration
of Hallowe’en. The importance and gripping significance of this remnant of
ancient symbolic dramatism is not dreamed of today. The masks worn were
originally those of animal faces or hides. The festival, coming at the time of
the September equinox (with a forty-days’ interval), when the sun, eternal
symbol of the divine soul, was descending across the line which
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marked the boundary between
disembodied spirit and soul embodied, dramatized the entry of the god into the
animal body. "Mask" is in Latin "persona." The god
was then putting on the mask of his personality; and all the weird
capers, grimaces, horseplay and general buffoonery of the Hallowe’en revelry
most piquantly prefigure the deity’s ungainly animalish behavior when cavorting
behind the outward mask of the animal’s nature! The moon being the parent of
the mortal body, lunar symbolism was prominently introduced into the portrayal.
And all this is another strong proof that it was the primal religious ritual
drama that gave rise to social tradition and celebratory custom, and not
folk-practice that gave rise to the myth, as scholars have always so
erroneously contended.11
A patent hint of strong esoteric
significance is found in the following:
"Diodorus has it that the gods
were at one time hard pressed by the giants, and compelled to conceal themselves
for a while under the form of animals, which in consequence became
sacred."12
Here is straight anthropology hidden
under semi-fable. It is the true explanation of a vast amount of tribal custom
that has perplexed the learned world no end. Whole chapters of Frazers’s Golden
Bough and similar works, of which the authors have offered no rational
interpretation and believed none possible, become intelligible at one stroke,
and such a cultured people as the ancient Egyptians are exculpated from the
charge of crude animism and fetishism in "worshipping animals."
The incarnation was incontestably
the most fateful event that had ever taken place in the evolutionary career of
animal-man, giving him a status far above that of his former condition. It was
the far-away beginning of his apotheosis. It was his passport of entry into the
kingdom of mind. The folk-lore and Märchen of the nations carry the
story of this mighty crisis in evolution in an apparent mélange of
childish fancy, flippant caprice of invention and forms of the grossest
imagery. These seeming qualities have been the means of derailing the train of
our understanding of the hidden purport of the relics. We have but to use our
imagination constructively to see how mythography passed first into the realism
of dramatic representation, then
140
into legend lacking the original
spiritual meaning, and finally into a sadly distorted and barren folk-tale.
"Herodotus was told that the
Neurian wizards among the Scythians, settled about the Black Sea, became each
of them a wolf for a few days once a year. The Texan tribe of the Tonkaways did
the same, when, clothed in wolf-skins, they celebrated the resurrection of the
wolf from the Hades. The head of a wolf was worn in the Mysteries of Isis;
because the wolf (Anup) was her warder and guardian during the search for
Osiris in the underworld. . . . The candidate as the Loveteau of French Masonry
still enters as a young wolf."13
A Chinese remnant relates that a
maid conceived by air (the Holy Spirit!) and brought forth a child, which the
father then threw into the pig-yard! "It was the rightful heir, who
lived to become the monarch." If this seems tawdry and profane, let the
reader note the obvious resemblance to the Prodigal Son allegory and the
conception story of Mary.
The Shilluks have a tradition that
"Nyakang then created men and women out of the animals he found in the
country." The promise to mankind in the Genesis account, that the
human should be lord of the animal creation, ruler of the beasts of the field,
has obvious reference to the headship of the mental man over the body itself,
which would be assumed by the soul or god upon his entry therein, under the
terms of his covenant with Deity. His task in the incarnational assignment was
to tame, subdue, discipline and finally exalt the lower personality, which was
the depository of all animal experience in its soul,--our sub-conscious
mind. Passages in the Book of Enoch state that man shall dwell with the
wild beasts and shall subdue and overcome them. A verse in Ezekiel declares to
the soul: "I shall fill the wild beasts of the earth with thee." But
one of the most straightforward figurations of the incarnation in all religious
literature is found in the Epistle of Ignatius to the Romans, an
apocryphal New Testament Gospel, when the soul, speaking as one of the
characters in the drama, most beautifully poetizes his nature and mission in
this remarkable utterance: "Suffer me to be food to the wild beasts, by
whom I shall attain unto God. For I am the wheat of God, and I shall be ground
between the teeth of the wild animals that I may be found the pure bread of
Christ." The crushing of wheat into flour for bread was a
141
widely used symbol of the fragmentation
of unitary deity consequent upon his descent into bodies. The statement here
that the crushing was done by the teeth of the wild beasts is beyond cavil a
positive reference to the animal embodiment. And the added information that by
such lowly incarnation the soul shall attain unto God should restore to
theology the lost conception of the importance of the bodily life.
The Bible’s declaration that we
"shall be as sheep among wolves" is a slanting hint at the picture of
the gentle Christ spirit tenanting the bodies of the wild beasts of earth! And
the scene of Daniel, the man of God, in the lion’s den, is another suggestion
that the soul may safely reside in the animal’s body or "den," if it
holds true to its divine ideal.
An Egyptian text addresses Thoth as
"he who sendeth forth his heart to dwell in his body." Another
presents us with a definite corroboration of the incarnation thesis. It speaks
of Annu (in this case our earth) as "the land wherein souls are joined
unto their bodies even in thousands."
An Arunta legend describes the
animistic powers attributed to beings as the "ancestors who reproduce
themselves by incorporation in the life on earth in the course of becoming men
or animal."
It was the fundamental Egyptian
conception that the god, on descending to earth, became "fleshed."
The word Karas, which was used to designate the mummy, is traced to the
Greek kreas, flesh. The taking on of a carnal form was in its true
connotation the mummification of the Osiris or spirit.14 An Egyptian text
asserts most positively the union of soul and body. Chapter 163 of the Ritual
says: "Let his soul have its being within his body, and let his body
have its being within his soul." And another chapter (89) is entitled
"the chapter by which the soul is united to the body." This can not
mean the dead body, since obviously the soul is separated from, not united
with, the cadaver. It can mean nothing but the conjunction of the incoming soul
with the body at birth or a little later.
The amassing of so much data in
support of the Incarnation, a doctrine of theology that is still included in
ecclesiastical acceptance, may appear a labor of supererogation. Far from it.
The data presented have been assembled with the purpose of restoring the dogma
to its pivotal place of importance in the theological temple. It has been so
viciously emasculated that a mass of testimony as to its original cardinal
utility had to be adduced, if it is to be re-established in its rugged pristine
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meaning. Mankind works blindly at
the main problem confronting it so long as this doctrine is obscured. It was
never intended to mean that the whole of the power of the Logos was crowded
into the admittedly limited area of a single personality. It was not accepted
in this light by the intelligent Fathers of the early Church, such as Clement
and Origen; for they are on record as expressly repudiating such an
eventuality. They regarded a personalized embodiment of deity as infinitely
degrading to the Logos, verily a blasphemy.
Furthermore how can we understand
Paul’s preachment of the warfare between carnal and spiritual natures unless we
are assured that soul and flesh were conjoined in intimate and affective
relationship? If theology is to rise again to benignant influence, it must be
mounted again upon its ancient bases of anthropology. If the advent, the
incarnation, the birth, the temptation, the baptism, transfiguration,
crucifixion and resurrection can not be shown to be the type of our own actual
experience in present living, the temple of theology can not be expected to be
rebuilt on a foundation of mystical sentiment alone. If the cosmological and
anthropological aspects of the original esotericism had not been disdained,
theology would not now stand in such forlorn case before a world styling itself
intelligent. Thrown down from her pedestal of ancient dignity, she lies
prostrate in the courtyard of the Church, and the busy populace hurrying by on
worldly bent mocks her or heeds her not. She has no place in the hall of
science, no true home in the human heart. Hardly even in the somber pulpit does
she stand in honor. Her only place is in the dim and darksome alcoves of the
ecclesiastic’s library; and priestly zeal essays in vain to win back for her
the departed power.
On this score it is desirable to
give assent to one or two of Massey’s discerning judgments before passing on to
the corollaries of the doctrine:
"The doctrine of the
incarnation had been evolved and established in the Osirian religion at least
four thousand years, and possibly ten thousand years, before it was purloined
and perverted in Christianity."15
"The legend of the voluntary
victim who in a passion of divinest pity became incarnate and was clothed in
human form and feature for the salvation of the world, did not originate in a
belief that God had manifested once for all as an historic personage. It has
its roots in the remotest past. The same legend was repeated in many lands with
a change of name, and
143
at times of sex, for the sufferer,
but none of the initiated in the esoteric wisdom ever looked upon the Kamite
[Egyptian] Iusa, or Gnostic Horus, Jesus, Tammuz, Krishna, Buddha, Witoba, or
any other of the many saviors as historic in personality, for the simple reason
that they had been more truly taught."16
The incarnation, however, only
begins the impartation of deity to the human race. It inaugurated on the planet
a chain of events, the circumstances and trend of which must now be outlined.
All of these involvements are profoundly relevant to the system of theology.
Greek philosophy viewed the descent
and incarnation of the gods as entailing upon these exalted beings an almost
total loss of their pristine glory and felicity, and a devastating reduction of
their coefficient of consciousness. The soul became "cribbed, cabined and confined"
in the sorry limitations of the carnal body, as it lost a dimension of
consciousness at each step on the downward path. It becomes bound to the
sensual and the palpable, after having been able to range at will throughout
the limitless spaces of universal thought. It is impossible to surpass in
lucidity the language of Greek philosophy in delineating these matters.
Proclus, as reported by Iamblichus, avers that17
"the soul by descending into
the realms of generation, resembles a thing broken and relaxed. . . . Hence the
soul energizes partially and not according to the whole of itself . . . the
intellectual part of it is fettered . . . but the doxastic18 sustains many
fractures and turnings."
Proclus elucidates Plato’s findings
to the effect that
"it is impossible while here,
to lead a theoretic life in perfection, as is evident from the causes which are
enumerated in the Phaedo, viz., the occupations and molestations of the
body, which do not suffer us to energize theoretically without impediment and
disturbance."19
And his fellow-Platonist, the
learned Iamblichus, adds a forceful assertion of the same idea:
"For the human soul is
contained by one form and is on all sides darkened by body, which he who
denominates the River of Negligence or the Water of Oblivion, or ignorance and
delirium, or a bond through passions, will not by such appellations
sufficiently express its turpitude. How therefore is it possible that the soul
which is detained by so many evils can ever become sufficient to an energy of this
kind?"20
144
Empedocles, evidently drawing his
philosophical ideas from Orphic Mystery cultism, has a poem, a fragment of
which speaks of the "joyless region" in which the souls on earth
"Through Ate’s meads and
dreadful darkness stray."
The soul descends from the realms of
light to the region of gloom:
"She flies from deity and
heavenly light
To serve mad Discord in the realms
of night."
A dialectical echo of Plato’s Cave
Myth is heard seven centuries after the Republic was written, in the
language of the great Plotinus, mystic Neo-Platonist of the third century.
Dealing with the fable of Narcissus and elucidating its hidden purport, he
says:
"Hence, as Narcissus, by
catching at the shadow, plunged in the stream and disappeared, so he who is
captivated by beautiful bodies, and does not depart from their embrace, is
precipitated, not with the body, but with his soul, into a darkness profound
and repugnant to intellect, through which, remaining blind both here and in
Hades, he associates with shadows."21
In the Phaedrus Plato, in the
beautiful allegory of the Chariot and the Winged Steeds, portrays the soul as
being dragged down by the lower elements in man’s nature and subjected to a
slavery incident to corporeal embodiment. Out of these conditions he traces the
rise of numerous evils that disorder the mind and becloud the reason. Indeed he
shows with convincing dialectic that evil is just this breaking up of the
vision of whole natures into distracted particulars where the interconnection
of part with part is lost sight of. Evil is seen to be due to the condition of
partiality and multiformity inseparable from the incarnate state, "into
which we have fallen by our own fault." The rational element, formerly in
full function, now falls asleep. Life is thereupon more generally swayed by the
inclinations of the sensual part. Man becomes the slave of sense, the sport of
phantoms and illusions. This is the realm in which Plato’s noesis, or
godlike intellect, ceases to operate for our guidance and we are dominated by doxa,
or "opinion."22 This state of mental dimness is the true
"subterranean cave" of the Platonic myth, in which we see only
shadows, mistaking them for reality.
Thomas Taylor’s clear language
enforces these ideas for our benefit:
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"Such indeed is the wretched
situation of the soul when profoundly merged in a corporeal nature. She not
only becomes captive and fettered, but loses all her original splendor; she is
defiled with the impurity of matter; and the sharpness of her rational sight is
blunted and dimmed through the thick darkness of a material night."23
Proclus, an expounder of Plato rated
nearly equal with his great inspirer, writes:
"when it [the soul] energizes
according to nature, it is superior to the influence of Fate, but when it falls
into sense and becomes irrational and corporeal, it follows the natures that
are beneath it, and living with them as with intoxicated neighbors, is held in
subjection by a cause that has dominion over things that are different from the
rational essence."24
Indeed we have here the Greek
philosophical root of one of the pivotal phases of Pauline doctrine. It was the
descent and mooring of the soul "to the ruinous bonds of the body"
that brought the spirit of man under the dominion of what Paul calls "the
law"--of Fate, Karma and Necessity. This, too, was "the bondage in
Egypt" of the Old Testament. On her own high plane the soul was in
a state of liberty, "the glorious liberty of the sons of God." Only
by her incarceration in a vessel whose constitutional functions were under the
laws of physics and chemistry was she subjected to the rule of matter. The
Greek philosophers declared that her release from this bondage was to be won
only through the discipline of "philosophy." It taught the earnest man
to abjure the motions of the flesh and to rise to the delight and freedom of
the noetic consciousness. Paul couched the process in the language of religion,
and called it spirituality or "grace."
"The dark night of the
soul," no less than the Götterdämmerung, was, in the ancient mind,
just the condition of the soul’s embodiment in physical forms. Taylor reasons
that Minerva (the rational faculty, as Goddess of Wisdom) was by her attachment
to body given wholly "to the dangerous employment and abandons the proper
characteristics of her nature for the destructive revels of desire." All
this is the dialectic statement of the main theme of ancient theology--the
incarnation of the godlike intellect and divine soul in the darksome conditions
of animal bodies.
The modern student must adjust his
mind to the olden conception--
146
renewed again by Spinoza--of all
life as subsisting in one or another modification of one primordial essence,
called by the Hindus Mulaprakriti. This basic substance was held to make
a transit from its most rarefied form to the grossest state of material
objectivity and back again, in ceaseless round. Darkness was the only fit
symbol to give to the mind any suggestive realization of the conditions of
living intellectual energy when reduced in potential under the inertia of
matter.
So severely curtailed were the
soul’s powers in bodily life that it was denominated her incarceration. The
soul was a captive, caught in a prison, the doors of which were clamped fast
upon it. Its jailer was the body with its sensuous nature. And like Paul in
prison at Philippi, the soul would have to convert her jailer and transform his
nature to the likeness of her own, to gain her release.
The implications of this cardinal
item for ethics, pietism and spirituality are of the highest moment. For all
such philosophies as Buddhism, Christian Science and Spiritualism (of certain
forms), which seek escape from the rigors of incarnation by a sheer fiat of
philosophical thought, and look to a disembodied state for immediate bliss,
this principle is very directly an antidote and corrective. It points clearly
to the false premises of all philosophies of "escape." We can not
escape our obligation to the animal who is lending us his body for our own
advancement. We came hither to transfigure these brute bodies, and such a
miracle demands the exercise of the highest philosophical virtues and the fixed
habits of theoretic contemplation of the beautiful and the good. Job asks if
the days of man on earth "are not the days of an hireling," and
declares that he has "found a ransom."
The Greeks believed "that human
souls were confined in the body as in a prison, a condition which they
denominated generation; from which Dionysus would liberate them." Their
sufferings, their progress through the ascending stages of being, their catharsis
or purification, and their enlightenment constituted the theme of the
Orphic writers and the groundwork of the mystical rites.
We have Proclus declaring that Plato
in the Phaedo
"venerates with a becoming
silence the assertion delivered in the arcane discourses, that men are placed
in the body as in a prison, secured by a guard, and testifies, according to the
mystic ceremonies, the different allotments of purified and unpurified souls in
Hades."25
147
Here is evidence that the Mystery
Plays were dramatic representations of our earthly imprisonment, with all that
was corollary to it.
Of our condition of bondage Plato
speaks in the following manner: ". . . liberated from this surrounding
vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an
oyster in its shell." It is Plato who states that the function of
philosophy is to "disenthrall the soul from the bondage of sense." We
are "captives chained to sense."
It seems never to have occurred to
modern classical students that the many descriptions scattered through the Aeneid
of Virgil, of shadowy groves, vales and caves, are allegoric of the gloomy
conditions the soul encounters in her residence in bodies. The woods whose
bristling shades terrify the hero (the soul) are the dismal murks of physical
incarceration. Physical imagery must be translated over into spiritual or
psychic realities. For of such matters only were the early sages discoursing.
Speaking of the removal of the junior deities from heaven to earth, the poet
writes in the Aeneid: "Nor do they, thus enclosed in darkness and
the gloomy prison, behold the heavenly air."
One of the Egyptian texts says that
it is impossible for the shade (soul) to leave the body on earth until the latter
is raised up. After the telestic or perfecting work is finished, it is shown (Rit.,
Ch. 91) that the soul "does not [any longer] suffer imprisonment at
any door in Amenta," this lower earth, "either in coming in or going
out."
David echoes the Egyptian idea when
in
the cave (Ps. 142) he cries to the Lord: "Bring my soul out of
prison." In the great Kamite religion Horus, exactly as the Christian
Jesus, comes to "the spirits in prison" to set them free from bondage
and darkness and lead them to the land of light. The Manes, or soul in the
body, cries to the keepers: "Imprison not my soul, keep not in custody my
shade. Let the path be open to my soul. Let it not be made captive by those who
imprison the shades of the dead. O keep not captive my soul, O keep not ward
over my shadow" (Rit., Ch. 92). Says Massey:
"Horus is the Kamite prototype
of the chosen one, called the servant by Isaiah, who came ‘for a light to the
Gentiles,26 to open blind eyes, to bring out prisoners from the dungeons, and
them that sit in darkness out of the prison-house.’" (Isaiah 42:7.)27
An allied appellation of the
"spirits in prison" is "those who are in their cells."
Horus comes to wake "those who sleep in their cells."
148
Again the Manes in the prison of
Osiris cries" "Let not the Osiris enter into the dungeon of the
captives." "Let not Osiris advance into the valley of darkness."
Osiris says to the warders of the prisons" "May I not sit within your
dungeons, may I not fall into your pits." (Ch. 17.) Osiris elsewhere asks
to be delivered from "this land of bondage." Sut, the personified
evil one as opponent of the deliverer Horus, is called "the keeper of the
prison-house for death," to which Horus comes as the lord of life and
freedom. Horus, as deliverer, is said to come "to those who are in their
prison cells," held captive by Sut. An interesting sidelight is thrown on
one aspect of the function of the Goddess Hathor, who was the "habitation
of the hawk, or the birdcage of the soul"! Hathor was the goddess
of material creation, to which the body belonged, and the hawk represented the
soul. The soul is caged in the body. The latter is even called "the
chamber of torture" in the title to Ch. 85 of the Ritual. In Ch.
164 it is promised that the soul "shall not be shut in along with the
souls that are fettered," and the prayer is uttered: "Let him escape
from the evil chamber and let him not be imprisoned therein." The title of
Ch. 91 of the Ritual is: "The chapter of not letting the soul of Nu
. . . be captive in the underworld." In Ch. 130 there is a prayer:
"Let not the Osiris-Nu fall headlong among those who would lead him
captive."
In the Egyptian fable of the lion
and the mouse, the mouse, a symbol of the quick energic life that descends into
the underground and lives in subterranean darkness, comes like Jesus and Horus
to gnaw the bonds of the great lion, here seemingly standing for the animal
soul in the toils of flesh and matter.
In the Egypto-Gnostic text, the Pistis
Sophia, there were twelve dungeons of infernal torment, in which the twelve
legions of angels were imprisoned. The souls could only escape by pronouncing
the name of the god who guarded each dungeon door. To pronounce a god’s name
was to become equal to him in nature.
In the Bible Exodus recounts
that the children of Israel, who are figured as these twelve legions of devas
"chosen" for the specific work of incarnation, "were groaning
under their bondage, and the wail of their cries for help came up to God."
The land to which they had been sent to work their redemptive errand in bondage
to the flesh was "Egypt, that slave pen." In Leviticus (16) he
admonishes them: "Remember, you were once a slave in Egypt."
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A passage from the Logia, or
recovered "sayings of the Lord," declares that "whosoever
followeth the Beast, into captivity he goeth; for the Beast maketh captive all
who so will to follow him."
Beside Plato’s immortal allegory,
there are many uses of the cave as emblem of the dark chambers of the body.
David’s pleading in the cave to be delivered from his prison is paralleled by
Osiris’ crying for deliverance in the cavern of Sut in Amenta.
Thomas Taylor expressly says that
the cavern was used to "signify union with the terrestrial body."
In the fables of the Hercules cycle
the hero (the soul, as always) tracks the Nemean lion into a cave where its
capture is effected. As it was in the body that the divine nature in man was to
"capture" or embrace the animal soul to lift it up, the cave
symbolism for the body is again indicated.
In the Egyptian Ritual (Ch.
28) the soul affirms: "This whole heart of mine is laid upon the tablets
of Tum, who guideth me to the caverns of Sut," or through the dark
passages of Amenta. The tablets of Tum are records of the law, or Maat. They
are kept by Taht, the divine scribe, in the Hall of Judgment. Thus to come
under the law (St. Paul) brings the deity to the caverns of Sut, the physical
body. Of Horus it is written again that he comes to awaken the "prisoners
in their cells, the sleepers in their caves."
As ancient burial places were
frequently caves in the hillside, we shall have little difficulty in tracing
the symbolic meaning of the cave in both the birth and the resurrection scenes,
not less than in the raising of Lazarus at Bethany, in Palestine, and of
El-Asar(us) at Beth-Anu in Egypt.
Another direct employment of the
cave emblem in Egyptian scripture is in Ch. 182 of the Ritual: "Taht
says: ‘I gave Ra to enter the mysterious cave in order that he may revive the
heart of him whose heart is motionless.’" As Ra is always the divinest
spirit, there is again a clear allusion to the god descending into the cave of
the body. In the Egyptian Bethany scene the "dead" soul is called
aloud nine times to come forth from "the mysterious cave." Massey
traces the word "cave" to the Egyptian Kep, which he says
means a secret dwelling. It is obvious that, whether this etymology stand the
scrutiny of linguistic scholarship or not, the mythologists of old did at any
rate conceive the body to be that mysterious hidden dwelling, that shadowy
cavern into
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which the legionaries of heaven were
obliged to plunge for added physical experience. With this point established
beyond cavil, one of the great stones in the arch of ancient interpretation
will have been put in place and one of the supports of the structure of a
correct theology will have been set up.
From the idea of a cave it was but a
short step to that of a pit. In Job a remarkable verse adduces the
theory that in sleep, when the lower mind is in abeyance, the inner soul, the
god, speaks to Job and admonishes him as to the fluctuating issue of his battle
with the flesh: "He keepeth back his soul from the pit." "The
Lord is gracious unto him and saith, deliver him from going down into the pit."28
In the Biblical account of the
rebellion of the sons of Korah, already noticed, it is said that they went down
into the pit in death, but lived on, as did the Manes in the Egyptian Amenta.
As the earth opened to swallow these rebels (ourselves), the pit is equated with
our mundane home. In the Hebrew writings the pit is identical with the region
known as Sheol, equivalent to the Greek Hades and the Egyptian Amenta. Horus is
cast into the mire of the pit.
Jonah, upon being saved from the
sea-monster, exclaims: "Yet thou hast brought up my life from the pit, O
Lord, my God." Ezekiel contributes a reference both to the pit and
to Egypt in a passage which appears to be beyond question a replica of the myth
of Joseph in Egypt. The prophet says (19:1-5):
As "a lioness she couched among
the lions and she brought up one of her whelps; he became a young
lion"--Jesus as lion of the house of Judah--"nations also heard of
him; he was taken in their pit, and they brought him with hooks into the land
of Egypt."
On this portion of Bible text Massey
comments as follows:
"The descent of the sun-god
into the lower Egypt of Amenta is portrayed in the Marchen as the
casting of Joseph into the pit, and the ascent therefrom in his glory by the
coat of many colors," adding: "in an exodus from Egypt which can no
longer be considered historical."29
In the Book of Hades (10th
division) there is a scene "of making fast the dragon in the pit,"
which is preparatory to the rising of Ra, or the birth of the divine in and
from the human.
In Revelation (20:2, 3) the
seer visioned an angel coming down out
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of heaven, having the keys of the
abyss, or pit, and a great chain in his hand, with which he bound the dragon,
the devil or Satan, for a thousand years, and sealed him fast in the pit. Horus
makes war on the powers of evil for what they have done to his father Osiris,
and calls to the gods to strike them and "punish them in your pits."
To them he says: "Your particular duties in Amenta are to keep the pits of
fire in accordance with Ra’s command, which I made known to you."
Let the reader estimate how far
theology has departed from understanding that these "evil spirits"
that were cast down and bound for a thousand years, or a long series of
incarnations, were the angels of light, denominated Satan because of their
rebellious and recalcitrant behavior under the hard decrees of incorporation in
beastly bodies, and that these fiery pits are none other than our very physical
bodies. Is not Satan equated with Lucifer, and is he not the Promethean
Light-Bringer?
In Budge’s account of the functions
of the ba-soul in Egyptian spiritism, he states that in the Papyrus
of Nebqet the ba is seen, depicted as a human-headed hawk, flying
down the funeral pit, bearing air and food to the mutilated body lying in the
mummy-chamber. Here is additional confirmation that the pit designates the
human body. Another Egyptian text, the Book of Am-Tuat (Division 20)
describes the mutilation of the gods and their being cast down into pits of
fire. Revelation tells of the horsemen, ten thousand times ten thousand,
going forth to battle with those forms which had come up out of the smoke that
ascended from the pit of the abyss, emitting fire. These may be taken as the
forms of evil generated in the struggle between the gods and the animals whose
natures are long in combat with each other.
Massey links the Egyptian Tepht,
the
abyss, with our "depth." He equates it also with Tevthe, and
that with the Babylonian Tiamat, as well as the old Egyptian underworld
monster, Typhon, the Dragon of the Deep. As such it figured the original
birthplace of creation, and in a more human application it meant the human body
as the seat or birth-place of the spiritual life. For the body is composed of
matter, the infinite abysmal mother of all things. Typhon, who brought
forth her brood of chaos in the abyss, later brings forth the young Sun-god,
the divine immortal soul. The figure in this connection is common, we are
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told, in Akkad, China, Egypt and
inner Africa. It is but a step in etymology from Tepht to the Hebrew Tophet,
the dark pit.
There were said to be "seven
sons of the Abyss,"30 or the seven powers generated in nature, to be
matched later by seven phases of growth in the human constitution--the
ubiquitous seven in archaic literature.
The universal religious myth of the
descent of the solar hero, ever typical of deity, into some dark abysmal
region, emerging from it after ordeals of suffering, can have but one
explanation: the incarnation of the hosts of light in the dense physical body.
Another earthly figure much used to
type the dreary existence in the flesh was that of the "wilderness."
A variation of it was the "desert." The people in the Typhonian
darkness of Amenta were furnished a guide "through this wilderness."
The Quiché Popul Vuh portrays the ancestors of the race as wanderers in
a wilderness upon their way to their final homestead. A Hawaiian legend has it
that the progenitors "wandered in a desert wilderness until at last they
reached the promised land of Kane"--Canaan!
Numbers
(14:33, 34) reads: "Your children shall
be wanderers in this wilderness even forty days, for every day a year."
The same book supplies another highly elucidative text (14:31, 32) which says:
"Your little ones will I bring in, but as for you, your carcasses shall
fall in this wilderness." The spiritual meaning here adumbrated is that
the earthly or carnal nature in which the gods took residence would be
conquered and disintegrated, or die, as the substance of the old seed dies in
the ground in generating its offspring, while only the new-born god, the
"little ones," the resurrected sons of dying fatherhood, would
achieve the spiritual homeland of Canaan.
Elsewhere the term "desert in
the Amenta of Egypt" is used to name the locality of bodily life. The
people there are said to "dwell in darkness and black night."
The wanderings of the Biblical
Israelites are a symbolic graph of this spiritual and racial experience, and
have no other meaning, historical or literal, whatever. Hagar’s fleeing into
the wilderness under the compulsion of her situation, is but another similar
picture of the same truth.
The hiding of the various Sons of
God in a mysterious cave or secret earth of Amenta is but the mundane segment
of a drama, the full
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action of which is involved in the
grand play of forces and sweep of relations in higher spheres, as to the
complete outline and significance of which we have not been fully informed by
the archaic writers. Earth, it is clear, is but an appanage of heaven, and our
history here is without full meaning when detached from its celestial base. The
old books of Greece, Egypt, Chaldea, Persia, India are priceless for what they
give us of this material.
It has been impossible in these
excerpts entirely to avoid anticipation of the next symbol of earthly life,
darkness. The body was pictured as the abode of night and gloomy shadows.
We have noticed Plotinus’ statement
that in her descent the "soul was precipitated into a darkness profound
and repugnant to the intellect," which was obscured by it. The body is
"night’s dark region" and the soul’s "sojourn on earth is thus a
dark imprisonment in the body."
One of the riddles of Greek
mythology--why so intelligent a people as the Greeks symbolized deity as
Bacchus, the god of intoxication--is solved by the keys here presented.
Intoxication was used to image the befuddlement and mental darkness, the
scattering of the god’s high intellectual powers in mundane life. Says Thomas
Taylor:
"For Bacchus is the evident
symbol of the imperfect energies of intellect, and its scattering into the
obscure and lamentable dominions of sense."31
And Revelation declares that
even the Saints (the gods) have been made drunken with the power of the lower
contacts. Soul had been intoxicated with the wine of sense.
The body is thought of as actually
seizing souls. The Speaker in the Ritual cries to Ra:
"O deliver me from the god who
seizes souls. The darkness in which Sekari dwells is terrifying to the
weak."32
In this darkness Osiris suffers,
supplicating Ra for light. Ajax cries for light. Horus in his resurrection
rises "from the house of darkness." Sut (Satan), the twin of Horus,
is portrayed imprisoning his brother the soul of light, in the realm of
darkness. He is called "the power of darkness." A dozen sections of
the Pyramid Texts and the Records of the Past describe the
journey of the soul through a "valley of darkness." The place to
which the soul in the Egyptian scripts was con-
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ducted was termed "An-ar-ef,
the house of obscurity, the city of dreadful night." The mole or
shrewmouse was the animal symbol used by them to depict the god groping his
earthly way in an underworld region of darkness. Horus, coming as deliverer,
says: "I have sung praises unto those that dwell in darkness." The
chapter in which this occurs is entitled "the chapter of making the
transformation into the god who giveth light in the darkness." He comes to
set prisoners free, and also, it is said, "to dissipate darkness."
Incarnation being necessary for the higher birth of the soul, an Egyptian text
reads: "The soul is brought forth through the embrace of the Lord of
Darkness. He is Babi, the Lord of Darkness." In Ch. 175 "saith
Osiris, the scribe Ani: Hail, Tmu! What manner (of land) is this into which I
have come? . . . it is black as blackest night, and men wander helplessly
therein. In it a man may not live in quietness of heart, nor may the longings
of love be satisfied therein."
The very name of the great Egyptian
script, the Book of the Dead, hints at the realm of darkness from which
the soul emerges in its resurrection; for the title, translated, means
"The Coming Forth by Day,"--or into the daylight, ostensibly from
some region of darkness.
Our Hebrew and Christian scriptures
provide a multitude of fitting texts which might be used to enlarge vastly this
résumé of the old material that points to the earthly body of man as the
theological world of darkness. Notably there is that in Matthew (4:16)
which recites:
"The people which sat in
darkness saw a great light; and to them that sat in the shadow . . . did the
light spring up."
And is it not the universal prayer
of Christendom each Sabbath that the deific power should "enlighten our
darkness"?
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Chapter IX
ALIVE
IN DEATH
Such then was the archaic view of the
origin of the soul from on high, its fall into the darkness and distractions of
the body and its consequent submergence in carnal sense. And, drastic as is
seen to be the necessary rehabilitation of all scripture on the basis of this
revised understanding, it will be far overshadowed in theological importance by
a still more radical reconstruction arising from the ancient use of the figure
under which life in the body was mythically represented. For everywhere
throughout antiquity earthly life was depicted as our death! It is of
little avail that the portraiture be uproariously protested as not befitting
such a condition of vivid life as is ours in the body. We may indignantly cast
back upon ancient heads the obloquy of such an inappropriate metaphor. But our
repudiation of their choice of figure falls entirely wide of the mark as
affecting the meaning of ancient texts. The fact stands that they did call our
life here death, and that when they spoke of "the dead" in
sacred books, it is indubitable that they meant the living humans. The words
"death" and "the dead" are used in the old scriptures to
refer to living humanity in earthly embodiment. We scurrying mortals are
"the dead" of the Bible and other sacred books, and the "death"
spoken of there is our living existence here. We may reject the aptness of
their symbolism, but it is past our prerogative to read a meaning into their
books other than the one they intended; or to read out of them a meaning they
consistently deposited therein. The astonishing point, of revolutionary
significance for all religion, will receive textual treatment in the present
chapter, and a later one will further vindicate the correctness of the thesis.
It is perhaps the cardinal item of the whole theological corpus, the real "lost
key" to a correct reading of subterranean meaning in esoteric literature.
In ancient theology "death" means our life on earth.
Be the figure apt or be it
considered unthinkable--as it will be at
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first by many--the texts of
scripture will yield their cryptic meaning on no other terms. And the Bible is
a sealed book mostly because these two words, "death" and "the
dead," have not been read as covers of a far profounder sense than the
superficial one.
To be sure, it is death in a sense
to be understood as dramatic and relative only. And it pertains to the soul in
man, not to the body. Life and death are ever as the two end seats on a
"see-saw." As the one end goes to death the other rises to life. The
death of the body releases the soul to a higher life; conversely, the
"death" of the soul as it sinks in body opens the day of life to that
body. The theological death of the soul in incarnation is a death that does not
kill it in any final sense. It is a death from which it rises again at the cycle’s
end into a grander rebirth. It is a death that ends in resurrection. And
sixteen centuries of inane misconception of the resplendent glory of the
greatest of all doctrines, the resurrection from the dead, will be resolved at
long last into the bursting light of its true meaning when the dust of
ignorance is brushed away.
For animal man the advent of the
gods was propitious; indeed it was the very antithesis of death. The plunge
into carnality that brought "death and all our woe" to the soul,
brought life to the lower man. That was part of its purpose. The gods came to
"die" that we mortals might "live." They came that both
they and we might have life more abundantly, but at what cost to themselves--a
long "walk through the valley of the shadow of death." Theirs was the
death on the cross of flesh and matter.
The use of the term
"death" must be in any case a comparative one, for there strictly is
no death, in the form of total extinction of being, for any part of real being.
All death, so called, is but a transition from state to state, a change of
form, of that which is and can not cease to be. Life and death are eternally
locked in each other’s arms, for as Thales says, "Air lives the death of
water; fire lives the death of air," and so on. So body lives the death of
the soul, and soul lives the death of the body. It thrives by virtue of that
death. The germ and young shoot of any seed live the death of the body of the
seed. The law of incubation brings high deities into their Hades, into Pluto’s
dark kingdom. For the gods the cycle of incarnations was the descent into
hell--their crucifixion, death and burial, in all archaic literature!
The material demonstrating this
proposition must be of sufficient
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volume to obviate all doubt as to
its validity. Upon its successful vindication hinges the final determination of
meaning for hundreds of passages, and the ultimate interpretation of the main
theses of all theologies. As will be shown later, it carries with it the
purport of the resurrection doctrine, the cornerstone of religions. When we
come to that climactic doctrine, it will be possible to locate with exactness
what and where that tomb was whose gates and bars were rent asunder by the
resurgent Lord. Modern theology little dreams, to this day, the truth back of
its own mishandled, but still grandiose, symbols.
The incarnation, for the soul, was
its death and burial. But it was a living death and a burial alive. It was an
entombment that carried life on, but under conditions that could be poetically
dramatized as "death." Our inability to comprehend any but a physical
sense of the word "burial" has left us easy victims of ancient poetic
fancy, and led to the foisting upon ourselves perhaps the most degraded interpretation
of the crucifixion, death and resurrection of deity in mortal life ever to be
held by any religious group. Not even woodland tribes have so wretchedly missed
the true sense of the great doctrines. Literalism in this instance has debased
the human mind more atrociously than fetishism or totemism.
The textual testimony supporting the
thesis is so voluminous that practical considerations forbid its full amassing.
Nothing less, however, than the serried marshaling of much material will avail
to carry conviction to minds unalterably set to opposing views.
Proclus advises us that the
incarnating Egos were forewarned that their venture into flesh would be
successful on condition that they achieved it "without merging themselves
with the darkness of body." They were to make a magnetic connection with
the animal body by means of a linkage of their currents of higher life with the
forces playing through the nervous system of the animal. They were thus to be
in position to pour down streams of vital power into the body, but were not to
sink their total quantum of divine intellection into the sense life of the
beast. They were to hover over the physical life of the body, touch it with
divine flame, but not be drawn down into it. To fall into this dereliction would
be to sin, to lose a measure of their vivific life and eventually to die. For
there were always two deaths spoken of in the books of the past. It was death,
in the first place, for them to come under the heavy depression of fleshly
existence. This was the first
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death. But to sink farther down and
be lost in the murks of animal sensualism to a degree that made a return to
their heavenly state next to impossible, was to suffer the "second
death," of which the soul ever stood in fear and terror in the old texts.
The first death was the incarnation; the second was failure to rise and
"return unto the Father."
As Apuleius says, the soul, then,
approached the "confines of death." And on her approach, and at the
moment of her divulsion from her seat on high, there ensued an intermediate or
preparatory stage, a partial loss of consciousness termed by the writers a
"swoon." Corroboration of this experience is found in a very old
document known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead (44):
"In the Bardo Thödol the deceased1
is represented as retrograding step by step into the lower and lower states of
consciousness. Each step downward is preceded by a swooning into
unconsciousness; and possibly that which constitutes his mentality on the lower
levels of the Bardo is some mental element or compound of mental elements . . .
separated during the swooning from higher and more spiritually enlightened
elements. . . ."
This swooning on the downward path
to earthly death is likened to a falling asleep. Jesus’ assertion that Lazarus
was not dead but only sleeping, and needed only to be awakened, is a picturing
of the same condition. Incidentally the same thing is said of the earth-bound
Osiris in Egypt. "That is Osiris, who is not dead but sleeping in Annu,
the place of his repose, awaiting the call that bids him come forth to
day." Massey comments:
"Osiris in Annu, like Lazarus
in Bethany, was not dead but sleeping. In the text of Har-Hetep (Rit., Ch.
99), the Speaker, who personates Horus, is he who comes to awaken Asar (Osiris)
out of his sleep. Also in one of the earlier funeral texts it is said of the
sleeping Asar: ‘The Great One waketh, the Great One riseth . . .’ The Manes in
Amenta were not looked upon as dead, but sleeping, breathless of body,
motionless of heart. Hence Horus comes to awaken the sleepers in their coffins."2
Horus says (Rit., Ch. 64):
"I go to give movement to the Manes; I go to comfort him who is in a
swoon,"--showing the perfect matching of Egyptian and Tibetan
"necrological science.
The swoon attending each further
step matterward deepens by degrees until it amounts to the full
"sleep" or "dream" of mortal ex-
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istence, introduced by the incubus
of body upon spirits of light. It is the Oriental Maya. The vivid
awareness of existence which we feel so indubitably is to the ancient sages
only a dull slumber and stupor in comparison with that life of ecstatic realism
from which we were divulsed by the decree of our Fate.
Thomas Taylor expounds Greek
Platonism as holding that the soul "in the present life might be said to
die, as far as it is possible for a soul to die." He asserts directly that
the soul, until purified by "philosophy," "suffers death through
this union with the body."
We have the whole idea most tersely
expressed in the Gorgias of Plato:
"But indeed, as you say also,
life is a grievous thing. For I should not wonder if Euripides spoke the truth
when he says: ‘Who knows whether to live is not to die, and to die is not to
live?’ And we perhaps are in reality dead. For I have heard from one of
the wise that we are now dead; and that the body is our sepulchre; but that the
part of the soul in which the desires are contained is of such a nature that it
can be persuaded and hurled upward and downwards."
If incarnate life is the burden of
this death, then release from it must presuppose a liberation from the
thralling "dead weight." Our work aims to correct the misconceptions
that have vitiated previous studies in eschatology. Reputed savants in the
field give no evidence of having the remotest apprehension of textual meanings
pertaining to this phase of theology. Even Massey and Taylor have fallen just
short of that final step in comprehension which would have taken them into the
temple of truth, the threshold of which they never quite crossed. They knew
that the ancients styled this life "death," but they were unable,
apparently, to apply the connotations to the Bible and theology. The obsessions
of current thought were too strong for them, and overrode the logic of their
own premises.
The great Plotinus (Enneads I,
lviii) gives us a clear presentment of the Greek conception:
"When the soul had descended
into generation (from this first divine condition) she partakes of evil and is
carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity,
to be entirely merged in it . . . and death to her is, while baptized or
immersed in the present body, to
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descend into matter and be wholly
subjected to it. . . . This is what is meant by the falling asleep in Hades,
of those who have come there."
It is worth noting that he uses the
word "baptized" to describe incarnation. To incarnate was to be
plunged into the watery condition of the body! This is the whole of the meaning
of the baptism in ancient theology!
To the above may be added a
supplement from Pythagoras, according to Clement, "that whatever we see when
awake is death; and when asleep a dream."
It is sometimes true that archaic
usage of the word "death" makes it cover the period following the
occurrence of death in its common meaning, the demise of the body. Incarnation
was regarded as a continuing experience, the periodical rhythm of release from
the body no more breaking the sequence of lives than does our nightly sleep
break the continuity of the experience of the days. But as our waking days are
the important parts of our earthly activity, the nights being but interludes of
repose and renewals of strength, so the positive incarnate periods of our
larger lives are the primarily significant phases of our mundane history. The
ancient seers both knew more about the subjective experiences of the soul when
out of the body and were less concerned with them than modern Spiritualists.
They regarded the phenomena of discarnate manifestation as but the more or less
automatic reaction of the soul to the sum of its impressions in its last
incarnation, a kind of reflex, threshing over the events of the life just
closed. They would have regarded it as preposterous to use the vaporings of the
spirits for the tenets of a religion. They were but the products of a mental
automatism set up by the engrossments of the last life. The post mortem existence
of the soul was only the hidden side of the life on earth, and regarded as
comparatively inconsequential to the larger processes of conscious living.
Theologically, "death" was the bodily life on earth, but comprising
its two aspects of sleeping and waking, living and dying, in its comprehensive
unity. Activity in the body during the waking phase of the "death"
was alone determinative of destiny. By unfortunate diversion of the original
cryptic sense, the unimportant portion of the experience, the interlude between
lives, became the locale to which practically all religious values were shunted
when esoteric knowledge was lost. The meaning of all religion has in consequence
161
fled from earth, where it properly
belongs and where alone its true value is realized, to heaven, where present
focusing of meaning has little utility for man.
Taylor quotes the priests as
testifying "that the soul is buried in body as in a sepulchre."3
Alexander Wilder, in a note to Taylor’s Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries (p.
31), comments:
"Hades . . . supposed by
classical students to be the region or estate of departed souls, . . . is
regarded by Mr. Taylor and other Platonists as the human body, which they
consider to be the grave and place of punishment for the soul."
Virgil adds significant testimony.
In the Aeneid, writing of that "interior spirit" which
sustains the heavens and earth, men and beasts, "the vital souls of birds
and the brutes," he continues:
"In whom all is a potency . . .
and a celestial origin as the rudimentary principles, so far as they are not
clogged by noxious bodies. They are deadened by earthly forms and members subject
to death; hence they fear and desire, grieve and rejoice."
Plato’s able expounder Proclus,
writing that the soul brings life to the body, says that
"she becomes herself situated
in darkness; and by giving life to the body, destroys both herself and her own
intellect (in as great a degree as these are capable of receiving destruction).
For thus the mortal nature participates of intellect, but the intellectual
part, of death, and the whole, as Plato observes in the Laws, becomes
a prodigy composed of the mortal and the immortal, of the intellectual and that
which is deprived of intellect. For this physical law which binds the soul to
the body is the death of the immortal life, but vivifies the mortal
body."
Wilder in his Introduction to
Taylor’s Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries comments again:
"The soul was believed (by the
Greeks) to be a composite nature, linked on the one side to the eternal world,
emanating from God, and so partaking of Divinity. On the other hand, it was
also allied to the phenomenal and external world, and so liable to be subjected
to passion, lust and the bondage of evils. This condition is denominated
generation; and is supposed to be a kind of death to the higher form of
life. Evil is inherent in this condition; and the soul dwells in the body as in
a prison or a grave."
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It has been claimed in some quarters
that the death here mentioned is simply Greek tropology for a state of
spiritual decay into which mortal man sinks. But a proper view sees such
degeneracy as the result of the incarnation, which was the occasion of it. The
concrete and the moral situations do image each other; but it is a matter of
vast importance which one is primary and casts the reflection. There was a
descent in historical fact. From it flowed the moral delinquency.
Having seen the lucid presentation
of the "death" philosophy in Greek systems, we turn to Egypt. Does
the wisdom of this venerable nation support that of Greece? With such fullness
and positiveness does it agree with Greek conception that dispute as to the
legitimacy of the interpretation must henceforth be silenced forever. It is
from these unfathomable wells of Kamite knowledge that we draw the water which
nourishes our intellectual life. Again the volume of material is prodigious.
It must be prefaced that the
Egyptian writings use more than one character to personate the incarnating god.
We may find Osiris, or Ra himself, or Tum, Atum or Horus taking the role. Then
there are the two characters which we meet most often, the "Speaker"
and the Manes in the Ritual. These appear to be distinctly the human
soul. Sometimes again it is represented as the "deceased," again as
the "Osirified deceased." Besides, the names of four or more kings
are used to stand for deity: Unas, Ani, Pepi and Teta, frequently with
"the" prefixed.
It is definitely corroborative of
the thesis here defended that the central god figure in Egyptian religion,
Osiris, the Father, in distinction from Horus, the Son, is consistently
assigned the functions, prerogatives and sovereignty of the "king of the
dead." He is hailed in a hundred passages as the Ruler of the Underworld,
or as Lord of Amenta (Amenti, Amentiu), the Egyptian Hades, the correct
locating of which region in theology is one of the major aims of this work. He
is assimilable to the Greek Pluto, ruler of Hades, the dark underworld. That
this dismal limbo of theology is actually our earth is a fact which has never
once dawned upon the intellectual horizon of any modern savant, however high
his name. Osiris, the "Speaker," the "Manes," the incarnating
deity, is indeed the king in the realm of the dead. For we are those dead, and
the god within us came to rule this
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kingdom, according to the arcane
meaning of every religion. For the Egyptians called the coffin "the chest
of the living."4
A passage from Budge is of
importance here:
"About the middle of the
Ptolemaic period the attributes of Osiris were changed, and after his
identification with Serapis, i.e., Pluto, the god of death, his power and
influence declined rapidly, for he was no longer the god of life. In the final
state of the cult of Osiris and Isis, the former was the symbol of death and
the latter the symbol of life."5
This change does not betoken what
Budge supposes, but quite the contrary. It hints at the fact that the Egyptian
conception of the character of Osiris as Lord of the Underworld of death began
to weaken in the later days, as foreign influences crept in, and the profound
esoteric meaning of "death" became obscured. The god’s influence as
Lord of Death declined rapidly at this epoch, not because of the ascription to
him of a new and untrue character, but because of the decay of the true
comprehension of his place and function in the pantheon. His influence in his
perennial office decayed because knowledge of him in that role had decayed. With
many such misapprehensions must the battle for a sane grasp of the ancient
wisdom contend. The actual issue has been beclouded at almost every turn.
In confirmation of our claim that
death in the ancient usage did not imply extinction, the Manes in the Ritual
(Ch. 30 A) says: "After being buried on earth, I am not dead in
Amenta." Horus knows that though he enters the realm of the dead, he does
not suffer annihilation. He knows that he is that which survives all
overthrow. Even though, as he adds, he is "buried in the deep, deep
grave," he will not be destroyed there. He will rise out of the grave of
the (living) body in his final resurrection.
Such a passage as the following
carries in its natural sense the allocation of the term "dead" to
living inhabitants on earth, not to the spirits of the deceased: "The
peoples that have long been dead (?) come forth with cries of joy to see thy
beauties every day."6 It pertains to the resurrection. Another text says:
Tanenet is the burial-place of Osiris." Tanenet, along with Aukert,
Shekhem, Abydos, Tattu, Amenta and half a dozen others, is a designation for
the earth as the place of burial for the soul living in death.
Cognate with the idea of death is
the presumption of burial in a
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tomb, grave, coffin or sepulcher.
Evidence of the prominence of these terms in relation to the descent into earth
life is not wanting in the old texts. The matter is not left in any state of
doubt or confusion. A sentence from Cocker’s Greek Philosophy speaks in
terms of unmistakable directness: "The soul is now dwelling in ‘the grave
which we call the body.’"7 Here is indeed the undebatable clarification of
that poetic imagery, the confusion of which with the natural fact of bodily
decease has cost Christianity its heritage of wisdom.
In the Egyptian records we have
Osiris as the god who "descended into Hades, was dead and buried" in
Amenta. Massey’s succinct statement covering the point is: "The buried
Osiris represented the god in matter,"--not in a hillside grave. The
hillside grave, however, was the typograph used to designate the non-historical
burial in the body. What could be more pointed and conclusive than Massey’s
other declaration: "In the astronomical mythology the earth was the coffin
of Osiris, the coffin of Amenta, which Sut, the power of darkness, closed upon
his brother when he betrayed him to his death"?8 "The coffin of
Osiris is the earth of Amenta," he says again.9 It is worthy of note that
the shrine in the Egyptian temples, representing the vessel of salvation, was in
the form of a funeral chest, the front side of which was removed so that the
god might be seen. Chapter 39 of the Ritual contains a plea for the
welfare of the incarnated soul: "Let not the Osiris-Ani, triumphant, lie
down in death among those who lie down in Annu, the land wherein souls are
joined unto their bodies." So that it is quite apparent that the land
in which souls lie down in "death" is this old earth of ours. For
nowhere else are souls joined unto their bodies! This is the only sphere in the
range of cosmic activity where this transaction is possible, and this fact is
sufficient warrant for focusing upon it all that mass of vague meaning for
which theologians have been forced to seek a locale in various subterranean
worlds whose place is found at last only in their own imaginations.
Horus says in one text: "I
directed the ways of the god to his tomb in Peqar . . . and I caused gladness
to be in the dwellers in Amentet when they saw the Beauty as it landed at
Abydos."10 Abydos was claimed to be the place of entry to the lower world
where the "dead" lived, but in this use it was another of those
transfers of uranographic locality to a town on the map in some way
appropriately symbolizing the spiritual idea involved. There was no actual
entrance to an actual
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underworld at Abydos (or anywhere
else), but to complete the astral typology a temple, tomb and deep well (of
great symbolic value) had been constructed there to the god Osiris. It was
mythically and poetically the door of entry to the lower world, or realm of
death, Amenta. Budge does not realize that he is writing only of the historical
adaptation of a spiritual allegory when he says:
"But about Osiris’ burial-place
there is no doubt, for all tradition, both Egyptian and Greek, states that his
grave was at Abydos (Abtu) in upper Egypt."11
He argues that Osiris must have been
a living king, who was later deified. This is not likely, as there is little to
indicate that the Egyptian gods were other than abstract personifications of
the powers of nature and intelligence. The legend that his body was cut into
fourteen pieces, scattered over the land and then reassembled for the
resurrection could have no rational application to the life of an actual king.
Myth has been taken for history on a vast scale.
Another text carries straightforward
information of decided value: "In the text of Teta the dead king is
thus addressed: ‘Hail! hail! thou Teta! Rise up, thou Teta! . . . thou art not
a dead thing." 12 What can be the resolution of so evident a contradiction
of terms--telling a dead king he is not dead--unless the new interpretation of
"death" as herein advanced and supported be applicable?13 The souls
as deities entered the realm of death, our world, but were not dead; philosophy
dramatized them as such, however.
In a different symbolism the Eye of
Horus, an emblem typifying his life and said to contain his soul, was stolen
and carried off by Sut, the evil twin. Of this Budge says that "during the
period when Horus’ Eye was in the hands of Sut, he was a dead god." His
regaining possession of his Eye symbolized the recovery of his buried divinity
and his restoration to his original godhood. Horus elsewhere (Rit., Ch.
85) says: "I come that I may overthrow my adversaries upon earth, though
my dead body be buried." If such a declaration is not to be taken for a
species of after-death spiritism, it can have logical meaning only in reference
to the contention that the buried god is the soul in the fleshly body.
It is imperative to look next at the
conceptions of the sphere of death that were expressed through the use of the
term "underworld." This
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region of partial death in which the
outcast angels were imprisoned was styled the dark "underworld." A
variant name was "the nether earth." It is often actually pictured as
a subterranean cavern. It may be asked if it has ever occurred to any scholar
of our time that "the underworld" was but another figurative
appellation for the condition of life in the human body. Again a mass of data
is available.
All nations of antiquity show in
their literature traces of a legend in which the soul makes a journey through a
dark underworld. The vagueness of its location, however, has failed to give any
scholar an illuminating suggestion as to its totally figurative and unreal
character. Nobody has ever seriously presumed to locate this dreary region, in
spite of the fact that it was childishly regarded as an actual place. It was
hazily associated with the grave or assumed to lie in some dim region into
which the soul passed after death, somehow, somewhere "under," but
under what, it was not apparently ever determined. The cause of bafflement was
the ineradicable assumption that its "underness" was to be oriented
in relation to the earth! No one has caught the idea that its location was under
the heavens, and hence that it was our own earth itself! The surface of the
earth, man’s world, was assumed to be obviously not an "underworld."
But the problem of locating another limbo beneath it baffled theological
speculation through the ages. The outcome is that the locale of Pluto’s shadowy
kingdom has been hung indeterminately between the surface of the ground and the
dubious dim region of after-death spheres. All the while a thousand texts point
to its location in the physical body!
Lewis Spence cautiously admits that
the court of the Mayan underworld seems to have been conducted on the
principles of a secret society with a definite form of initiation, and that the
Mysteries of Eleusis and others in Greece were concerned with the life of an
underworld, especially dramatized in the story of Demeter and Kore.14 He admits
that the Greek deities were gods of the dead. But he mars his tentative
approach to the truth by advancing the conjecture that the Book of the Dead
may
have been the work of prehistoric Neolithic savages! We refrain from caustic
comment, save to aver that if the Egyptian Book of the Dead was the
product of Neolithic savages, the status of modern mentality which is as yet
totally incapable of understanding its high message, must by inference lie a
stratum or two below that level.
The Mystery Rituals did dramatize
the life of an underworld, but
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the gods, as kings of this nether
realm, were not subterranean deities. The gnomes and other nature sprites were
the only "deities" that were believed to subsist beneath the surface
of the physical earth. The gods of the underworld were always the gods of the
dead. And as the souls of deceased mortals were in all religions asserted to
ascent to heaven and never to remain in the burial ground with the corpse, it
was again impossible to place the underworld down with the gnomes. But it seems
next to incredible that academic diligence should have missed the plain
correlation which would have made the descent of spirits from heaven equate the
descent of all the divine heroes and sun-gods into the dark underworld--of
earth.
From the great Egyptian Ritual,
which
so cryptically allegorizes this earthly death, we learn that the mystery of the
Sphinx originated with the conception of the earth as the place of passage, of
burial and rebirth, for the humanized deities. An ancient Egyptian name for the
Sphinx was Akar.15 This was also the name for the tunnel through the
underworld. And it is said that the very bones of the deities quake as the
stars go on their triumphant courses through the tunnels of Akar (Pyramid
Texts: Teta, 319). As the stars were the descending deities, the metaphor
of stars passing through the underworld tunnels is entirely clear in its
implication. The riddle of the Sphinx is but the riddle of mankind on this
earth. The terms of the riddle at least become clearly defined if we know that
the mystery pertains to this our mortal life, above ground, and not to our
existence in some unlocalized underworld of theological fiction.
The entrance to Amenta, with its
twelve dungeons, consisted of a blind doorway which neither Manes nor mortal
knew the secret of and none but the god could open. Hence the need of a deity
who should come to unlock the portals and unbar the gates of hell, and be
"the door" and "the way." The god came not only to unlock
the door of divinity to human nature, but to be himself that door. The giving
of the keys to bolt and unbolt the doors of the underworld was but the allegory
of this evolutionary reinforcement of the human by the divine nature.
Descriptions of this dark realm of
our present state are given in the texts. "It is a land without an exit,
through which no passage has been made; from whose visitants, the dead, the
light was shut out." "The light they beheld not; in darkness they
dwell." Massey ventures the
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assertion that "the inferno,
the purgatory and the paradise of Dante Alighieri are extant recognizably in
the Book of the Dead as the domains of Amenta."16
The first chapter of the Book of
the Dead was repeated in the Mystery festivals on the day when Osiris was
buried. His entrance into the underworld as a Manes corresponds to that of
Osiris the corpse in Amenta, who represents the god rendered lifeless by his
suffocation in the body of matter. The dead Osiris is said to enter the place
of his burial called the Kasu. In this low domain of the dead there was nought
but darkness; the upper light had been shut out. But Horus, Ptah, Anup, Ra and
others of the savior gods would come in due time to awaken the sleepers
"in their sepulchres," open the gates and guide the souls out into
the light of the upper regions once more. One of the sayings of the soul
contemplating its plight in the underworld is: "I do not rot. I do not putrefy.
I do not turn to worms. My flesh is firm; it shall not be destroyed; it shall
not perish in the earth forever" (Ch. 154). Inasmuch as the flesh of the
physical body most certainly will perish, rot, putrefy, and turn to food
for worms in the only grave that Christian theology has been able to tell us
of, the term "flesh" in the excerpt can not be taken as that of the
human body. And that it is not to be so taken is obvious from other passages.
It refers to the substance of another body which does not rot away.
The same sense may distinctly be
caught in the term "body" as used in the prayer uttered by the soul
in the body when it says: "May my body neither perish nor suffer
corruption forever." Such a prayer directed to the physical body would be obviously
irrelevant, expecting the impossible. Horus, on his way to earth to ransom the
captives, says: "I pilot myself towards the darkness and the sufferings of
the deceased ones of Osiris" (Ch. 78). Massey sums the discussion:
"The wilderness of the nether
earth, being a land of graves, where the dead awaited the coming of Horus, Shu,
Apuat (Anup), the guide, and Taht . . . as servants of Ra, the supreme one god,
to wake them in their coffins and lead them forth from the land of darkness to
the land of day."17
Analysis of other types of
representation will disclose the fact that the Egyptians, in their lavish use
of animals as symbols, filled the underworld with a menagerie of mythical
monsters. Without trespassing on the ground of later discussion, it may be
briefly said that a
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number of animals--dragons,
serpents, crocodiles, dogs, lions, bears, etc.--lay in wait in the underworld
to devour the luckless Manes. What is the significance of this? Patently it
figures the menace to the soul of its subjection to the constant beat upon it
of the animal propensities, since it had taken residence in the very bodies of
the lower creatures. In a measure detached, it was yet not immune to being
drawn down into ever deeper alliance with the carnal nature. Ever to be
remembered is Daniel’s statement that "his mind was made like the mind of
an animal."
Etymology supplies a sensational
suggestion of the soundness of the present thesis in the similarity of the two
words "tomb" and "womb," which Massey avers rise from the
same root. At all events it is rigorously in accord with the Greek theory that
the body, as the tomb of the soul, is at the same time the womb of its new
birth. In the Egyptian Ritual the soul is addressed as he "who
cometh forth from the dusk, and whose birth is in the house of death."
This was Anu, Abydos, On (Heliopolis), or other uranographic center localized
on the map, or the zodiacal signs of Virgo and Pisces. The Greek language bears
striking testimony to the same kinship of the two words, as Plato points out in
the Cratylus, in the practical identity of soma, body, and sema,
tomb.
In the Christian Bible the textual
evidence is multitudinous. A few excerpts only can be culled. First is St.
Paul’s clarion cry to us ringing down through nineteen centuries: "Awake
thou that sleepest and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine upon
thee." Job, combining his death with its correlative resurrection,
exclaims: "I laid me down in death and slept; I awaked, for the Lord
sustaineth me." Paul cries in the anguish of the fleshly duress, "Who
shall deliver me from the body of this death?" And it is an open question
whether the final phrase might not as well have been rendered "this death
in the body." And Jonah, correlative name with Jesus, cries from the allegorical
whale’s belly: "Out of the belly of death have I cried unto thee, O
God." Paul again pronounces us "dead" in our trespasses and
sins, adding that "the wages of sin is death" and "to be
carnally minded is death." It is sin that brings us back again and again
into this "death" until we learn better. And the Apostle affirms that
we are dead and that our life is hid with Christ in God. Our true life is as
yet undeveloped, buried down in the depths of the latent capacities of being.
The Psalms say
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that we "like sheep are laid in
the grave," though "God will redeem my soul from the power of the
grave." The death spoken of is at one place defined as "even the
death of the cross," when spirit is bound to the cross of matter and the
flesh. Isaiah declares that "we live in darkness like the dead." And
Jesus broadcasts the promise that whosoever believeth on him, "though he
were dead, yet shall he live." Assurance is given (Peter 4:6) that
the Gospel is preached "to them that are dead." Would not such
addresses to the dead, as noted in several of these passages, be absurd if not
referable to the living on earth?
Then there is the ringing
declaration of the Father God in the Prodigal Son allegory, rebuking the
churlish jealousy of the obedient elder brother at the rejoicing over the
wastrel’s return: "This my son was dead and is alive again."
The thing described here as death was just the sojourn in that "far
country"--earth.
A most direct and unequivocal
declaration, however, is found in the first verse of chapter three of Revelation:
"Ye have the name of being alive, but ye are dead." And this is
at once followed by the adjuration to "Wake up; rally what is still left
to you, though it is on the very point of death." This is again a strong
hint of the danger that the soul might be so far submerged under sense as to
fail to rise again, and sink down into the dreaded "second death."
But the most astonishing material
corroborative of the thesis here propounded is found in St. Paul’s discussion
of the problem of sin and death in the seventh chapter of Romans. The
statements made can be rendered intelligible and enlightening only by reading
the term "death" in the sense here analyzed. He says first that
"the interests of the flesh meant death; the interests of the spirit meant
life and peace." And then he says: "For when we were in the flesh,
the motions of sins, which were by the law, did work in our members to
bring forth fruit unto death."
In this chapter Paul concatenates
the steps of a dialectical process which has not been understood in its deep
meaning for theology. It is concerned with the relation of the three things:
the law, sin and death. He asks: "Is the Law equivalent to sin?" And
he replies that sin developed in us "under the Law." What is this
mysterious Law that the Apostle harps on with such frequency? Theology has not
possessed the resources for a capable answer, beyond the mere statement that it
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is the power of the carnal nature in
man. It is that, in part; but the profounder meaning could not be gained
without the esoteric wisdom--which had been discarded. This Law--St. Paul’s bête
noir--is that cosmic impulsion which draws all spiritual entities down from
the heights into the coils of matter in incarnation. It is the ever-revolving
Wheel of Birth and Death, the Cyclic Law, the Cycle of Necessity. As every
cycle of embodiment runs through seven sub-cycles or stages, it is the
seven-coiled serpent of Genesis that encircles man in its folds.
Now, says the Mystery initiate, by
the Law came sin, and by sin came death. Here is the iron chain that binds man
on the cross. The Law brings the soul to the place where it sins and sin
condemns it to death. Death here must mean something other than the
natural demise of the body, for that comes to all men be they pure
or be they sinful. Reserving a more recondite elaboration of the doctrine of
sin for a later place, it may be asserted here that the great theological
bugaboo, sin, will be found to take its place close along the side of
"death" as the natural involvement of the incarnation itself. Sin is
just the soul’s condition of immersion or entanglement in the nature of the
flesh. And happily much of its gruesome and morbid taint by the theological
mind can be dismissed as a mistaken and needless gesture of ignorant pietism.
Neither as animal below our status
nor as angel above it can man sin. For the animal is not spiritually conscious
and hence not morally culpable. And the angel is under no temptation or
motivation from the sensual nature, which alone urges to "sin." Only
when the Law links the soul to animal flesh does sin become possible. Romans
(7:7) expressly declares: "Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law .
. . For without the law sin was dead." Paul even says that at one time he
lived without the law himself; this was before "the command" came to
him. And what was this command? Again theology has missed rational sense
because it has lost ancient cosmologies and anthropologies. The
"command" was the Demiurgus’ order to incarnate. It is found in
the Timaeus of Plato and Proclus’ work on Plato’s theology. Then the
Apostle states the entire case with such clarity that only purblind
benightedness of mind could miss it: "When the command came home to me, sin
sprang to life, and I died; . . ." He means to say that sin
sprang to life as he died, i.e., incarnated. And then he adds the
crowning utterance on this matter to be found in all sacred literature:
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"the command that meant life
proved death to me." He
explains further: "The command gave an impulse to sin, sin beguiled me and
used the command to kill me." And he proceeds to defend the entire
procedure of nature and life against the unwarranted imputations of its being
all an evil miscarriage of beneficence: "So the Law at any rate is holy,
the command is holy, just and for our good. Then did what was meant for my good
prove fatal to me? Never. It was sin; sin resulted in death for me to make
use of this good thing."18
The clarifying and sanifying
corollaries of this explication and St. Paul’s material are so expansive that
pause should be made to consider them. In this light it may be seen that the
whole of the negative and lugubrious posture of theology as to "sin,"
and "death" as its penalty, might be metamorphosed into an
understanding of the natural and beneficent character of all such things in the
drama. Ancient meaning has miscarried, with crushing weight upon the happy
spirit of humanity; and rectification of such misconstruction is urgently
needed.
In I Samuel (2:6) it is
written: "The Eternal kills, the Eternal life bestows; he lowers to death
and he lifts up." Job says: "I shall die in my nest, and I shall
renew my youth like the eagle."
And a most significant verse from Isaiah
(53) can be rescued from mutilation and sheer nonsense only by the application
of the new meaning of "death." Speaking of the divinity, it says that
"He hath made his grave with the wicked and the rich in his death."
A marginal note is honest enough to tell us that the word "death"
here used was in the plural number--"deaths"--in the original
manuscripts. Here is invincible evidence that the word carries the connotation
of "incarnations," for in no other possible sense can
"death" be rationally considered in the plural number. In one
incarnation the Christ soul is cast among the wicked; in another among the
rich. This is a common affirmation of most Oriental religious texts. And his
body is his grave.
St. Paul says some man will ask how
the dead are raised and in what body do they come. And Christian theology has
stultified the sanity of its millions of devotees by giving the answer in the
words of the Creed: "The resurrection of the body"--leaving untutored
minds to understand the physical body, or the corpse. The only comment provoked
is to say that the picture of the cemetery graves being opened at the last
trump, and the "dead" (cadavers) arising to array them-
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selves in line before the tribunal
of the judgment, has turned millions in disgust and revulsion away from the
fold of orthodoxy. Paul states in the verses immediately following that the
dead will rise in a spiritual body.
And then we face that climactic
assurance that "the last enemy to be overcome is death." In lack of
the covert intent of the word, Christian thought has ever believed that in some
way this promise meant we should overcome the incidence of bodily decease, and
live on in the physical vessel indefinitely. This would paralyze evolution. It
would wreck the Cyclical Law. The Trinity is the Creator, the Preserver and
the
Destroyer. Without the periodic destruction of form there could be no renewal
of life in higher and better forms. Life would be imprisoned forever in matter,
and choked to its real death. Its charter of liberty is its periodical release
from forms that while they enable, they also limit. What, then, means the
passage? If death is the incarnation, the significance is found in the
assurance that at the conclusion of the cycle, when the spirit has mastered all
its mundane instruction, it will be made a "pillar in the house of God and
shall go no more out." Its descents into the tombs of bodies will be at an
end at last. "Death" will then be finally overcome.
In the Egyptian Ritual the
soul rejoices in life, shouting, "He hath given me the beautiful Amenta,
through which the living pass from death to life." Amenta is
this world, and the soul is pictured as running through cycles of descent from
life to "death" and back again. The same sequence is set forth in the
first chapter of Revelation: "I am he that liveth and was dead,
and behold I am alive for evermore!" The Law precipitates us
from the life above to the "death" down here, but lifts us up again.
There is no sublimer chapter in the
entire Bible than the fifteenth of I Corinthians. And perhaps this
treatment could not possibly be more fittingly concluded than with some of St.
Paul’s magnificent utterances therein. It may give us at last the thrilling
realization of their grandeur when grasped in the majestic sense of their
restored original meaning. Need we be reminded that these words of the Apostle
will ring from our own throats in ecstatic jubilee, when, victorious at last
over "death" and the "grave," we arise out of our final
imprisonment in body and wing our flight like the skylark back to celestial mansions?
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"So when this corruptible shall
have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then
shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up in
victory."
"O death, where is thy sting? O
grave, where is thy victory?"
.
. . . . . .
We have drawn enough material from
the ancient fund now to have bountifully supplied the demand for
"evidence" that in archaic philosophy the field of our life here is
depicted as the dark cavern, the pit, the abyss, the bleak desert, the wilderness,
the grave, the tomb, the underworld and hell of a life that migrated here from
the skies. "We are a colony of heaven." Our deific souls are at the
very bottom of the arc of death, and can never be as dead again as they are
now, and have been.
But stranger revelations await us
still.
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Chapter X
THE
MUMMY IN AMENTA
We now approach a phase of the
general theme, the correction of popular misconception about which will be
attended with the most momentous consequences for the whole of world religion.
Only one or two other items of our revision of current belief will prove to be
of more sensational interest. The matter that promises so largely is the
Egyptian mummy and the practice of mummification. When the true signification
of this marvelous custom of a sage race begins to dawn in clear light, it will
assuredly seem as if modern appreciation of a great deposit of ancient
knowledge could hardly have suffered so utter a rout, so total a wreckage.
General opinion, expressed and
shared by the most learned of the Egyptologists, holds that the Egyptians
mummified their dead for the reason that, believing in reincarnation or forms
of transmigration, they desired the physical body to be preserved intact for
the reoccupancy of the Ego or soul upon its return to earth. Common belief
asserts that they hoped by this provision to make reincarnation easier for the
returning soul, inasmuch as he would find his former body ready for him, and
would not have to build a new one or enter the body of some animal. The
quantity of "explanation" of this sort that one reads in the works of
reputed scholars is indeed enough to drive any astute reasoner ad nauseam.
Nothing
betrays the shallow insufficiency of our knowledge so flagrantly as does this
matter.
It would seem as if it should be
unnecessary to issue a denial of the correctness of the popular theories just
indicated. The truth of the matter should be evident to anyone who can frame a
syllogism. One fact alone should have been sufficient to forestall the arrant
blunder in misconceiving the mummification motive. An act performed for the
alleged purpose of preservation began with a gross mutilation! The viscera, the
whole of the organs of the chest and abdominal cavity
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were first removed, and the entrails
placed in the Canopic jars at the four corners of the coffin. One does not
mutilate that which one wishes to preserve. If this be not conclusive, let us
add that at times both the head and the feet were cut off! Could the returning
soul profitably use this old shriveled, leathery and mutilated shell as its
next living tenement? Our idea has been a tacit insult to Egyptian
intelligence. Surely we might have credited them from the start with being no
such fools. Because we believed, under the lashing of medieval theologians,
that Christ rose in his flesh and that we should do likewise at the last trump,
we assumed that the Egyptians indulged their credulity in the same weird
fashion. We are yet as children essaying to frame an explanation of the most
profoundly symbolic act of the most illumined race of history.
It is the declaration drawn from our
studies and supported by the evidence to be submitted, that the practice of
embalmment was nothing more than a mighty rite of symbolism! One immediate item
of confirmation is the fact that it was performed for only a relatively few of
Egypt’s deceased, notably kings and functionaries. It was costly, required a
hundred days, and so was indulged in only in the case of those who could afford
such an elaborate funeral ritual. If the motive for mummification had been one
arising out of universal philosophy or accepted religious theory, it would have
been practiced generally, with rich and poor alike. Not all Catholic Christians
can afford elaborate masses. No enlightened nation would countenance for
centuries a practice based on a theory which made the difference in worldly
wealth critical for the whole future destiny of the great mass of its
inhabitants. If the hope of future evolutionary welfare depended on this
performance with the cadaver, then Egypt was guilty of a felonious neglect of
her general population in favor of her overlords. And we know that early
nations were, as we like to say, superstitious in the extreme about the
punctilious observance of funeral rites. Virgil tells of the dread of the
heroes of having their dead bodies lie unburied on the sand (inhumatus arena).
Egypt could not have given the benefit of a vital ceremony to only a limited
class.
The effort is here made for the
first time in our day to set forth the inner spiritual significance of this
great rite. Our development of the obsolete meaning of "death" in
primal theology has led us right up
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to the threshold of the denouement.
One further step will take us into the heart of the age-old mystery.
In the esoteric doctrine which
regarded the present life as death, and the living body as the soul’s tomb, we
have the necessary background for adequate elucidation of the matter. The body
was mummified to serve as a powerful moving symbol of the death of the soul in
matter, and the various features of the meaning of this mundane life! Nothing
more. But this far transcended in graphic impressiveness and cathartic virtue
any theoretic dramatization of the philosophy of life made by any people since
the days of Egypt’s glory. The mummy was designed to point the whole moral of
human life in a form of overwhelming psychological power. To a deeply
philosophical people the lifeless body became at once the most impressive
symbol of the entire import of life itself. The preserved corpse became the
mute but grandiloquent reminder of life and death, mortality and immortality,
in one mighty emblem.
The custom was an attempt to utilize the cadaver as the central object in a ritual designed to incorporate the essential features of their entire philosophy of