TrueRevivalFires 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Chambersburg Academy "The Lyre of Orpheus", A. B. Kuhn's unpublished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 endeav