EASTER
________________________
The Birthday of the Gods
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"For since by man came death,
By man came also the resurrection of the
dead."
Alvin Boyd Kuhn
1
* Electronically typed and edited by Juan Schoch for educational research purposes. This notice is not to be removed. I can be contacted at pc93@enlightenment-engine.net. I will be greatly indebted to the individual who can put me in touch with the Estate of Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn and/or any of the following: A. B. Kuhn’s graduation address at Chambersburg Academy "The Lyre of Orpheus", A. B. Kuhn’s unpublished autobiography, The Mighty Symbol of the Horizon, Nature as Symbol, The Rebellion of the Angels, The Ark and the Deluge, The True Meaning of Genesis, The Law of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, Rudolph Steiner's "Mystery of Golgotha", Krishnamurti and Theosophy.
I also would welcome any contact with someone who has any letters of Kuhn or has any personal knowledge of him. Thank you.
Recently (January 15, 2005) I was contacted by a 15 year old student of Upton High (state and city to be determined) who wanted to interview me in regards to the life of Sir Francis Bacon (Lord Verulam). The interview was conducted and this student asked me if there was anything else. This is what I relayed:
There is a nationally and worldwide known issue of a disabled person in my state (Florida) who is being subjected to attempted murder. Her name is Theresa Marie Schindler-Schiavo. The courts say that she is in a Persistent Vegetative State when in fact she is not, they lie. Videos were shown on CNN during a live feed that prove she is not comatose. She sits up in a chair. Her husband who lives with another woman for over 9 years and who has two children with this woman is trying to say that Theresa wants to die when in fact he has been denying her rehabilitation and therapy so that she can have her own voice and be back on to the road to her recovery. He has been with several women since he caused Theresa's incident and this is his latest live-in concubine who is in collusion with him to make Theresa dead. His attorneys are attempting to accomplish a heinous starvation/dehydration death on her for the third time. One of his attorneys wrote a book in which he talks about tearing out peoples feeding tubes and says he speaks to them by "soul speak" asking them if they want to die and they tell him along the lines "Yes, I want to die! Please kill me." The Hospice of the Florida Suncoast is holding her hostage for over 4 years. This feeding tube yanker attorney was chairman of the board of this hospice. This is the worst case of domestic terrorism happening in our country right now. While we are off in other countries helping helpless and disabled people the government has been remiss to save a human life from terrorism here in my state. There is a cover-up of mass proportions and I have the evidence on a CD to prove it. This message is to you and all of your classmates and teachers who may be reading this. Please contact others if you know of others who care to stop this murder. Perhaps you, or others, including activist friends, know people who have the power to stop what is happening here in my state or bring greater attention to what is going on. Contact me at pc93@enlightenment-engine.net or call me at 407-925-4141 and I will get whatever information you may need. Help me and others to stop the return of Nazi T4 days in Florida, the rest of the United States of America and the world. We must take a stand and make our voices heard.
Please join my Alvin Boyd Kuhn Yahoo!Group and Gnosis284! http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AlvinBoydKuhn/join : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gnosis284/join
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EASTER
THE BIRTHDAY OF THE GODS
When one begins even faintly to gain
some sound intellectual comprehension of the deep import of the Easter
festival, the challenge to express its message of consummative exaltation for
the human spirit must strike the mind with dismay. Marvelous as words are to
embody concepts of the mind, they here fail signally to carry to the inner
level of consciousness the reality of the experience which the Easter
halleluiahs and hosannas are designed to celebrate. It may even be said truly
that the meaning of the great festival of the vernal equinox is to be
registered not at all in the domain of mental concepts, even when these yield
full cognitive understanding, but is to be realized in the sphere of
transcendental recognitions that belong more to feeling than to thought.
Yet, even when the experience is
allocated to the realm of feeling, it is feeling elevated to the seventh degree
above what the word commonly connotes in human psychology. It is a feeling that
may be said to overpass the mind and soar into the heaven of mystical
ravishment of the soul in supernal delights. Yet it is feeling that is
generated by the mind itself, the child of pure cognition, so clear in its
insights that they lift the soul into the very ecstasy of lucid discernment of
exalted blessedness. Even at its highest peak of realization for mortals at the
present human stage the grade and dynamic force of sentiency which the Easter
message can
3
adumbrate is only a faint morning
glow of the full sun of divine glory which the future evolution of man's
consciousness is destined to bring to reality. The best that our minds can give
us now of our eventual divinization is only by the faintest analogy seen as a
foretaste of rapture that will greet us at the summit of our mount of
attainment. The mind can formulate a fairly true and correct construction of
the issues and elements combining to bring us to the shining Hill of the Lord,
can even see in what fashion the powers of deific unfoldment will open out for
us a grander vision of beatitude. Yet this is only an outline, a diagram. The
signs and symbols of its overpowering reality of being can not by sheer mental
genius be transformed into conscious immediacy of experience until the human
shall find himself transfigured by the inner radiance of his own final Easter
morn.
In venturing upon the attempt to
portray the significance of the Easter event one is moved to repeat as an invocation
the lines of Tennyson inspired by his observation of the waves breaking
eternally on the ocean strand:
Break, break, break on thy cold
gray stones, O sea!
And would that my tongue could
utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
If language, employing the very
remarkable psychic witchery of words, falls short of expressing the wonder of
our apotheosization, the one remaining mode of expressing the profundity and
the majesty of our uplift is song. The best that mortals can do, standing thus
in prospect of their destined home of glory, is to throw all the unction of
their mind and soul into rapturous contemplation of the delights of an
imperishable
4
in the measures and rhythms of
joyous song. Human throats should well nigh burst with strains of praise as
human hearts rise in anticipation of that glory which shall be theirs. Surely
the least that men can do is to raise to the heavens their anthems, their
chorals, their oratorios to hail in annual memorial their divinization to be.
For, be it said at the outset,
Easter celebrates an event that is yet to be, not an event that is past. To the
inevitable extent that past events lose their cogency for deep impressiveness
and become shadowy and unrealized memories, the mighty power of the Easter
occasion loses its pungent goad to conscious recognitions in proportion as its
celebration is taken to be the commemoration of an event that has long ago
happened and passed into history. It will therefore amaze most readers to be
shown that no less an authority than
5
EASTER OUR FUTURE GOAL
The great religion of the Western
world suffered a fatal loss when from about the third century down to the
present the cryptic sense of a purely dramatic representation of man's still
unattained burgeoning into godhood on the bright morn of his evolutionary
Easter was buried and forgotten under the ignorant misconception of the event
as the physical arising of one man's human body from its rocky hillside tomb on
a given first Easter dawn. If that is what, under Christian persuasion, we are
to believe happened two thousand years ago and that is what we are asked to
assume that the great equinoctial memorial celebrates, then the ceremony of
halleluiah merely embellishes the memory of an event long gone, whose
cosmically heralded universal deification of human life is in fact to be
searched for in vain in the record of history since it occurred. Christian
history records not a trace of the fulfilment of that human glorification which
the epochal event was proclaimed as promising. Every choral in the intervening
centuries rang with the exultant cry that "Death is swallowed up in
victory. The grave has lost its sting. Man no more shall die. Christ's
resurrection gave man his immortality." Yet death has seized every man
born since that day and the cemetery graves still hold their dead.
It is as
6
shining goal still gleams afar in
the distant horizon of our vision, an undimmed star of our radiant future.
Easter is the ceremonial that crowns
all the other religious festivals of the year with its springtime halo of
resurrected life. It is to dramatize the final end in victory of man's long
struggle through the inferior kingdoms of matter and bodily incarnation in
grades of fleshly existence. Other festivals around the year memorialize the
various stages of this slow progress through the recurring round of the cycles
of manifestation. Easter commemorates the end in triumph, all lower obstacles
overcome, all "enemies" conquered, all darkness of ignorance
vanquished, all fruits and the golden harvest of developed powers garnered in
the eternal barn of an inner holy of holies of consciousness, all battles won,
peace with aeonial victory assured at last.
The fight is o'er, the battle
done,
The victory of life is won!
The song of triumph hath begun,--
Halleluiah!
The Greek word for the resurrection
is anastasis, the "standing up," "the up-arising."
It has little if at all been noted that this anastasis is only by a
little prefix distinguished from "ecstasis," our
"ecstasy." With ec- (ex) meaning "out," the
etymology here brings us face to face with an item of unrecognized moment, that
our final dissociation of soul from body at the end of our last incarnation
will bring us an experience of ecstasy. Human life, a dour struggle,
will be measurably buoyed up in spirit if the peregrinating soul knows that at
the long terminal his release will come with rapture beyond
7
thought. If, as much religious
philosophy has it, man enters into this world of objective existence in tears,
his first utterance a cry, he will be strengthened throughout its long and
toilsome way by the assurance that he will make his final exit from his
"tomb" of the flesh in transports of Edenic bliss. His
"up-standing" is also his "outstanding" from his grave of
body. For the sage Greeks used the same term, with but a change of the vowel to
mark the distinction, for both the body and the tomb; for body
was soma and tomb was sema. In the esoteric philosophy
of this knowing race the human body was the living tomb, grave, sepulcher and
mummy-case in which the divine soul, in incarnation, lay in "death"
until resurrected by the sun of divine light and truth in the springtime turn
of the cycle following the winter of sleep. It may be said here that until this
sense of the terms "death" and "resurrection" is restored
to Biblical interpretation no true envisagement of the purport of the Easter
festival is at all possible.
Using solar symbolism and analogues
in depicting the divine soul's peregrinations round the cycles of existence,
the little sun of radiant spirit in man being the perfect parallel of the sun
in the heavens, and exactly copying its movements, the ancient Sages marked the
four cardinal "turns" of its progress round the zodiacal year as
epochal stages in soul evolution. As all life starts with conception in mind,
later to be extruded into physical manifestation, so the soul that is to be the
god of a human being is conceived in the divine mind at the station in the
zodiac marking the date of June 21. This is at the "top" of the
celestial arc, where mind is most completely detached from matter, meditating
in all its "purity."
8
Then the swing of the movement
begins to draw it "downward" to give it the satisfaction of its
inherent yearning for the Maya of experience which alone can bring its latent
capabilities for the evolution of consciousness to manifestation. Descending
then from June it reaches on September 21 the point where its direction becomes
straight downward and it there crosses the line of separation between spirit
and matter, the great Egyptian symbolic line of the "horizon," and
becomes incarnated in material body. Conceived in the aura of Infinite Mind in
June, it enters the realm of mortal flesh in September. It is born then as the
soul of a human; but at first and for a long period it lies like a seed in the
ground before germination, inert, unawakened, dormant, in the relative sense of
the word, "dead." This is the young god lying in the manger, asleep
in his cradle of the body, or as in the Jonah-fish allegory and the story of
Jesus in the boat in the storm on the lake, asleep in the "hold" of
the "ship" of life, with the tempest of the body's elemental passions
raging all about him. He must be awakened, arise, exert himself and use his
divine powers to still the storm, for the elements in the end will obey his
mighty will.
Once in the body, the soul power is
weighed in the scales of the balance, for the line of the border of the sign of
Libra, the Scales, runs across the September equinoctial station. For soul is
now equilibrated with body and out of this balance come all the manifestations
of the powers and faculties of consciousness. It is soul's immersion in body
and its equilibration with it that brings consciousness to function.
Then on past September, like any
seed sown in the soil, the soul entity sinks its roots deeper and deeper into
9
matter, for at its later stages of growth
it must be able to utilize the energy of matter's atomic force to effectuate
its ends for its own spiritual aggrandizement. It is itself to be lifted up to
heights of cosmic consciousness, but no more than an oak can exalt its majestic
form to highest reaches without the dynamic energization received from the
earth at its feet can soul rise up above body without drawing forth the
strength of body's dynamo of power. Down, down it descends then through the
October, November and December path of the sun, until it stands at the nadir of
its descent on December 21.
Here it has reached the
turning-point, at which the energies that were stored potentially in it in seed
form will feel the first touch of quickening power and will begin to stir into
activity. At the winter solstice of the cycle the process of involution of
spirit into matter comes to a stand-still--just what the solstice means
in relation to the sun--and while apparently stationary in its deep lodgment in
matter, like moving water locked up in winter's ice, it is slowly making the
turn as on a pivot from outward and downward direction to movement first
tangential, then more directly upward to its high point in spirit home.
So the winter solstice signalizes
the end of "death" and the rebirth of life in a new generation. It
therefore was inevitably named as the time of the "birth of the Divine
Sun" in man; the Christ-mas, the birthday of the Messianic child of
spirit. The incipient resurgence of the new growth, now based on and fructified
by roots struck deep in matter, begins at this "turn of the year,"
10
as the Old Testament phrases it, and
goes on with increasing vigor as, like the lengthening days of late winter, the
sun-power of the spiritual light bestirs into activity the latent capabilities
of life and consciousness, and the hidden beauty of the spirit breaks through
the confining soil of body and stands out in the fulness of its divine
expression on the morn of March 21. This brings the soul in a burst of glorious
light out of the tomb of fleshly "death," giving it verily its
"resurrection from the dead." It then has consummated its cycle's
work by bursting through the gates of death and of hell, and marches in triumph
upward to become a lord of life in higher spheres of the cosmos. No longer is
it to be a denizen of lower worlds, a prisoner chained in body's dungeon pit, a
soul nailed on matter's cross. It has conquered mortal decay and rises on wings
of ecstasy into the freedom of eternal life. Its trysting with earthly clay is
forever ended, as aloft it sweeps like a lark storming heaven's gate, with
"hymns of victory" pouring from its exuberant throat. From mortality
it has passed the bright portals into immortality. From man it has become god.
No more shall it enter the grim underworld of "death."
We've quaffed the soma bright
And are immortal grown;
We've entered into light
And all the gods have known.
Easter, then, is the climactic
festival of all the year, since it, signalizes the consummation of all man's
life in triumph and bliss transcending present knowing. It is set in the
calendar to intimate to the feeble human intellect the wonder of the
transfiguration of our earthly
11
life from periodical decay and death
into immortal grandeur of being. At his Easter man leaves forever the kingdom
of mortality, of his attachment to the elements of the world, and steps across
the golden threshold into the Paradise of a conscious bliss that indeed is not
too extravagantly poetized as a home of crystal radiance and bright seraphic
beatitude sweetened by transporting music.
At the point symbolized by September
21 in his cyclical evolution the divine soul is born into humanity,
making its descent from the realms of the Father's kingdom of noumenal being.
If, as says Shakespeare of man, "my mind to me a kingdom is," so the
Father's brooding mind is the mental kingdom of the universe, that substrate of
conscious purpose which permeates, in fact structuralizes, the whole animate
creation, as its constituent urge and driving force. It is that energy of the
Eternal Will which, as primary Cause, stamps its form and nature upon the
movement of all conscious life, first manifesting as unconscious, or
subconscious, directive toward the achievement of its ends, then becoming
gradually more clearly conscious of its own purpose and effort, as creatural
experience aligns developing mind with the Logos of the cosmos.
Unseen as yet by general religion,
it was necessary for God's sons, who must start as mortals to gain immortality,
to descend into matter and be long subjected to its sluggish dominance.
Ignorantly and mistakingly has conventional religion, in its hasty, superficial
and erratic interpretation of Biblical material, assumed that this ostracism of
his children by God himself to lower
12
worlds remote from the Father's
benignant presence, was somehow a sad consequence of the children's wayward
errancy and an untoward and disastrous misadventure of primal mankind. The
truth envisages no such direful miscarriage of the plans of Eternal Mind. God's
mental progeny could well be entrusted to the tutelary custodianship of nature,
indeed injected into her maternal womb, since nature was from the first and
eternally ensouled by the Father's energic mind power, and all nature's
processes exhibited the divine design at work in open manifestation. God could
safely consign his youthful offspring to the educative guardianship of the
"old nurse," Mother Nature. For as a pedagogue Mother Nature could
never misteach her divine pupils, herself being the preceptress, the living
examplar and expression of the cosmic mind.
13
SOUL IN NATURE'S WOMB
At the September point the soul
enters what the ancients called its "feminine phase," as it was in
its youth and under the care of its maternal, or material, parent. It became
the infant prince of a future kingship, being for its tutelage and education in
its childhood stage, and, as St. Paul says (4 Galatians), "under
tutors and guardians until the time appointed of the Father," at which
time it would have developed its capacity for kingly rule of the lower elements
of its dominion over man's life. Thus the apostle says that though it is
(potentially) Lord of all, it is at this stage in servitude to the elements (or
elementals) of the lower worlds until the day of its enthronement. In this
bondage to the laws of physis, the powers of matter, which is strictly for its
education, it is the unawakened soul in an animal body. As Plato puts it, it is
through its body an animal, while through its mind it is a god. It is then what
St. Paul distinguishes as the "first" or "natural" man, the
man of animal propensities, obeying the lusts of the flesh and the urges of the
"carnal mind," these being the instincts of the body in which it is
ensconced.
So one might say that at September the
soul is born "from above,"--the Bible phrase--into animality;
at December it is awakened enough to be born at the next higher stage, humanity;
and at Easter in March it is reborn into the still higher kingdom of the
immortal gods. If September is the birthday of man the human who is potentially
divine, March is the birthday of man as a god. Easter is the birthday of the
gods. Says the hoary
14
Book of the Dead, designating the soul by one of its several
specific titles, Pepi: "Pepi saileth with Ra to the eastern side of
heaven, where the gods are born."
We, as souls, go to our
"death" in matter at the equinox; at the winter solstice we cease
"dying" to matter and are quickened to incipient renewal of life; at
the spring equinox we rise to supernal life in exuberance of blessedness. Only
when the soul has traversed this aeonial path round the numberless cycles of
existence can it know the full reality of its Easter deification.
By apt and striking symbols the
Sages of old sought to impress dull mortal thought with imagery suggestive of
new birth. They pointed to the chick pecking its way out of its shell; the
snake shedding its old skin and coming forth sleek and shining; the locust
bursting out of its old body and winging its way up into the light and air; the
beetle emerging out of the earth; the butterfly from the cocoon; the
hibernating bear awaking from his sleep in the hollow tree; the emergence of
all life from the egg. Hence the egg became the basic symbol of the festival,
as the young god breaks finally the shell of his human body to effect his
delivery from the flesh and be released into the absolute freedom of the
spirit. The rabbit was brought in as concomitant symbol because, like the
pomegranate in the vegetable kingdom, its exuberant fecundity made it an apt
emblem of the boundless productivity of life. For God's children, under the
Biblical designation of Israelites, or children of Israel, were destined to be
as numberless as the stars of heaven or the seashore sands.
The Book of the Dead (so
called by the German scholar Lepsius) has for its Egyptian title the hieroglyph
15
Pert em Heru, the translation of which is given variously
as "The Day of Manifestation," or, more exactly, "The Coming
Forth by Day," referring to the emergence of Horus, the Egyptian Christ,
from the dark underworld of Amenta into the upper kingdom of light. Light here,
as universally in both Scripture and poetry, must be taken in its apt reference
to spiritual illumination or the expanded powers of consciousness. Like Jesus,
Horus had been overpowered by the darkness of the underworld and Sut its
Overlord, which are just the life of nature. In the person of his Father
Osiris, he had been crucified, dead and buried. Now in the enchanting wizardry
of the spring of a cycle of conscious growth, he had risen from the tomb of
bodily "death." He had rent the veil of the temple of his mortal
flesh and stood out arrayed in new garments of shining radiance. He had thrown
off his grave clothes, the cerements of "death", and walked out of
the sepulcher of clay clothed in the imperishable robes of solar light.
The day of resurrection,
Earth tell it out abroad
The Passover of gladness,
The Passover of God.
From death to life eternal,
From earth unto the sky,
Our Christ hath brought us over
With hymns of victory.
But alas, and again alas, the
consummative festival that was in its origin and in its deep esoteric
conception designed to impress annually, in the thrilling springtime rebirth of
earth's vegetation, the recognition of the apocalyptic glorification of
humanity at its eventual evolutionary Easter day, and therefore was intended to
serve
16
as a potent psychological agency of
moving power in the race's own push to divinity, has almost totally missed its
high objective, because from about the degenerate third century of the
Christian era the dull mind of Western humanity has mistaken the festival's
message as having meaning only in reference to the alleged resurrection of one
single man in remote history. That which was formulated to bring cogent
realization to all men of their ultimate apotheosization in glory has sunk to
the dimensions of the anniversary celebration of one single event in past
history,--which even St. Paul warns us is not past. All the fervor of majestic
significance and all the instigation to nobility of life that were designed to
grip all hearts and minds when celebrated under the almost magical mental spur
of the vernal transformation of nature, has been run out into the drain and emerged
as a mere sentimental celebration of a past event in one man's shadowy life.
And when the "celebration" each year is over, the "event"
is quickly forgotten, as is similarly and for the same reason the case with
Christmas. Never will these two great symbolic festivals exert their truly
divine potential for human uplift until, instead of being staged as memorials
of past events in the life of a Galilean peasant of two thousand years ago,
they are sensed as dramatizing, the one, the incipient "birth" of a
Christly consciousness, the other, the ultimate exaltation of that
consciousness in the interior life of all humanity. Never were they supposed to
be taken as memorials of objective history; they are eternally living
memorials of our subjective history, in the past, now and in the future.
The judgment here expressed that the
perversion, yea the transmogrification of the meaning of the Scrip-
17
tural dramas and allegories into
ostensible objective history allegedly localized in Judea in the first Christian
century (and Old Testament history antecedent to that time) has been
courageously endorsed by no less an authority in modern thought than the most
eminent psychologist, Carl G. Jung, who sums up the gist of the position here
advanced in the following paragraphs:
"The Imitatio Christi will
forever have this disadvantage: we worship a man as a divine model, embodying
the deepest meaning of life, and then out of sheer imitation we forget to make
real the profound meaning present in ourselves.
"If I accept the fact that a
god is absolute and beyond all human experience, he leaves me cold. I do not
affect him, nor does he affect me. But if I know, on the other hand, that God
is a mighty activity within my own soul, at once I must concern myself
with him."
In a later work (Psychology and
Alchemy, p. 7) Jung has elaborated this trenchant expression in greater
specification. These pronouncements from the great psychologist stand out in
modern study as judgments of the most arresting momentousness. They stand as a
forthright challenge to the system of Christianity in its ground-claims as the
religion wielding the highest moral-spiritual influence in the sphere of
psychology. This Imitatio Christi (the imitation of Christ) embodied the
faith's supreme mode of the manifestation of its beneficent power to exalt the
life of its votaries. Yet this, its mightiest arm of unction and its sharpest
sword of the spirit, Jung asserts is the feeblest of its psychological
instruments, a very vacuum indeed where real power should be at work. The
Church of Christ is certain that it has fulfilled the highest demand, the
ultimate proof of
18
the incontestable efficacy of its
code of doctrinal affirmations, when it asserts to the world that in the force
of its followers' sincere and consecrated effort to imitate the divine model in
Christ Jesus, the man, it has presented the most direct and dynamic power of
uplift in all the range of religious ideals. What, it has asked a thousand
times, can compare for downright practical efficacy with the earnest effort of
good people to imitate the paragon of Christliness, the Christ-man himself?
Jung is not unaware of the pregnancy of the question; he surely has canvassed
it from all quarters. Yet he reiterates his asseveration that it is this very
objective, and all the more decisively because of the very assiduity and
conscientiousness of its pursuit, that creates the spiritual vacuum in the
inner life of the devotee and defeats the one sole and final aim of any true
religion, which is the spiritualization of the individual worshipper in the
inner core of his soul's being. Since the psychologist's position is
controversial and seems highly paradoxical, it is well to cite the basic
statement that he has made.
"I am speaking, therefor, not
of the deepest and best understanding of Christianity, but of the
superficialities and disastrous misunderstandings that are plain for all to
see. The demand made by the Imitatio Christi--that we should follow the
ideal and seek to become like it--ought logically to have the result of
developing and exalting the inner man. In actual fact, however, the ideal has
been turned by superficial and formalistically-minded believers into an
external object of worship, and it is precisely this veneration for the object
that prevents it from reaching down into the depths of the soul and
transforming it into a wholeness in keeping with the ideal. Accordingly the
divine mediator stands outside as an image, while meaning remains fragmentary
and untouched in the deepest part of him."
19
The sincere effort to emulate the
Son of God, the psychologist affirms, should edify, spiritualize and
exalt the individual Christian. But, and not too strangely, he says it does not
work out to this result. And it fails to do so precisely in proportion to the
intensity of the effort exerted to push the imitative enterprise outward and
focus it upon the external historical model. To achieve true efficacy in
religious worship, he implies, the intensity of effort must be directed to
stirring to life a power resident within. The cause of failure is the outward
direction of the devotion. The very act of imitation of an external model
turns the edifying force away from its proper objective, the inner man. The
worship of an outer god leaves the divinity within untouched, unknown and
unawakened. To adore the exterior paragon, by so much leaves unrealized the
potential perfectibility of the soul itself.
While it can be contended--and Jung
concedes the point--that in sincere emulation of the divine man some at least
of his virtue and transforming power must rub off onto the imitator, it is
nevertheless an irrefutable deduction that the psychologist here makes from the
premises: if the devoted religionist focuses the potency of his psychological
consecration upon an external exemplar, he misses the benefaction of developing
his own inner deity. In proportion as one exalts and looks to the imaged
perfection without, he lets his own soul lie fallow. It is not a distant historical
Christ's soul that he needs to exalt; it is his own that cries for attention,
recognition and adoration. Like the knight who roamed afar to find the Holy
Grail, he will return from his quest to uplift the historical Jesus, only to
discover the real Christ pleading for his devotion deep down in his own soul.
20
IF CHRIST BE NOT RISEN . . . .
A thousand times has Christianity
proclaimed that if the Christ-man, Jesus of Nazareth, has not consummated his
conquest of physical death, and returned to physical life
following bodily decease, "then is our faith vain." We have cited the
very man--Paul--who promulgated this crucial averment, as himself saying that
the resurrection is certainly not a past event. How precarious the whole
edifice of the Christian faith is can be envisaged if we look also at the fact
that for some of the most learned, conscientious and eminent theologians of the
faith the veracity of the Gospel's account of the resurrection of Jesus has
come to stand in the gravest possible doubt. We face here the staggering
recognition of the collapse of this central arch of the whole Christian
structure, as it is undermined by the conclusions of leading Church spokesmen
and scholars, to the effect that it is questionable whether the Gospel Jesus character
was really a man of flesh. One of the most capable, conscientious and eminent
of exegetists in the Christian camp, Johannes Weiss, goes so far as to say that
nobody really believes that the deceased body of Jesus was reanimated, arose,
cast off its burial wrappings and walked out of its sealed hillside tomb on
that "first" Easter morn two thousand years ago. For its amazing
frankness and its devastating implications his statement is quite worth
citation (The History of Primitive Christianity):
"But for ourselves we must
admit that we can no longer think in such terms. To be exact, the majority of
Christians at the present time do not really believe in a resurrection of the
flesh on the last day."
21
And hence they do not believe it
happened in the case of Jesus in year 33 A.D.
Weiss, whom many rate as the
greatest of modern theological critics and exegetists, indeed cuts through the
restraints of orthodox caution and boldly asserts that--referring to Jesus--
"Not only did he not 'rise
again' in the real sense, i.e. to take up his earthly life once more, nor did
this take place either 'on the third day' or 'after three days.' Where did it
[the three-day period] originate? Since everything took place according to the
Scriptures, as St. Paul says, it is to the Scriptures that we must turn."
And he then cites the verses in Hosea
6:I ff, as the origin of the tradition. The second verse runs: "After
two days will he revive us; in the third day he will raise us up, and we shall
live in his sight." Even with this (and other similar verses in Old
Testament "prophecy") as legendary background of claimed divine
forecast of the Christian dispensation in history, one must ask by what
justification the literary fulfillers of prophecy twisted the divine promise of
a resurrection clearly stated to be the happy destiny of all of
"us," into the objectivized history of one single human. Debate may
rage until doomsday, but there is only one answer to this challenge, the only
one that will measure up to the demands of truth: a background of spiritual
tradition, which clearly dramatized the apotheosization of all humanity, was by
ignorant men converted into the quasi-history of the life of a hero of ancient
ritual, who himself was but a type-figure of our inchoate divinity in its full
flower.
22
In other works we have incontestably
shown that so-called Bible "prophecy" is not permissibly taken as
prophecy in the sense of foretelling future objective event. The word itself is
composed of pro, the prefix meaning "forth," and the phe
stem of the Greek word phemi, meaning "to speak." the word
therefore simply carries the signification of "speaking forth,"
"uttering," in fact "preaching." There is evidence to show
that it did not originally in Scriptural literature carry the connotation of
predicting future events, at any rate not events of objective history. Of
course, in the broad sense of viewing the course of human history and the
evolution of man in the large, the Scriptures teem with forecasts of the
"coming of Messiah." It was almost the dominant theme of ancient
religious literature. In fact the passages giving the promise of inspired
writing to this effect are just those portions of Scripture that have
erroneously been taken to refer to the objective event of a divine child's
birth on a given day and in a given locale. It is the old story of mistaking
exalted allegory for literal history.
The author of the Book of
Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament is in the book's very title called
"The Preacher." In ancient Egyptian religious books which dramatized
the forms and stages of the divinization of man, there was a character always
called "The Speaker." He it was who played the part of the
Christ-soul in the representations and in this exalted capacity uttered or
pronounced the divine "sermon" preached on the "mount of
earth," meaning here in our world. He spoke the words of the Christos in
his sermon to the men of earth. The "Sermon on the Mount" is just the
preach-
23
ment of the heavenly soul in our
nature to the human counterpart.
As showing the auspicious drift of
modern exegetists toward a sane and rational reading of the Scriptures, what
Weiss adds on the resurrection is much too valuable to be skipped. Referring
again to Jesus, and citing the disposition of the orthodox to think that his
resurrection must be differentiated from what ours is to be, and thus
warranting a treatment on different and special grounds, he says:
"Had we no other evidence of
his victory over death than that of our own departed, the whole thing would
fall into uncertainty. This objection really touches the essential point. If
his immortality is no different from ours, it can scarcely be used any longer
as proof of our hope for the life to come."
This view, continues the theologian,
flunks the hope and faith of steadfast believers, who therefore cling
tenaciously to the old view that the Gospel narratives still provide adequate
grounds for their indoctrinated belief that Jesus was physically restored to
life. But the exegetist goes on:
"Unfortunately it is to be
feared that this support will never again appear as firm and immovable as it
did to our forefathers. In some form or other, even among the most ardent
believers, doubt has begun to undermine the narrative of the Gospels. And when we
are admonished that we must 'believe' these narratives, the admonition lacks
sense and meaning today. The word 'believe' is misused in such a connection. It
is simply misapplied to a fact in the past. [How amazingly this statement
corroborates St. Paul's asseveration that the resurrection is not to be
considered a past event!] Either a fact is established beyond
24
all doubt--in which case there is no
need to 'believe' it; or else it is uncertain--in which case to believe it,
that is, to suppress and silence doubt, would be dishonorable . . . Alas, how
easily the structure may collapse and how frail it really is, even for many who
think they hold the true faith. Our belief in life to come, [which is not,
however, the specific Christian doctrine of the resurrection] if it is to have
permanence, must have other foundation than some narrative of events full of
contradictions and impossibilities. But even were the Gospel narratives far
less contradictory and far more reliable than they are, our faith could not be
based on such a foundation. For in so serious a question as this, one can
decide and believe only on the basis of his own experience and conviction, not
upon that of the strange and--as far as we are concerned--unexaminable
experience of others long ago."
What the learned German scholar is
courageously expressing in all his critique of the resurrection doctrine is the
conviction, to which his penetrating discernment forced him, that the Gospel
narrative of the Easter mystery is strictly not narrative at all in the sense
of literary record of outward physical event, but is dramatic or poetic
figurism of the consummative exaltation which all humanity is destined to
achieve at the cycle's end. The Christ's ritualistic arising out of
"death" is literary type-graph of our aeonial Easter beatification.
That and nothing more. But--let it be said here--not just that in the
slighting sense of only that. We must think of that as the
ineffable transporting deification of our mortal existence. And when it is
finally seen in all the majesty and splendor of its true significance as
portraying the climactic attainment of all human experience, as the lifting of
lowly mortal life "from earth
25
unto the sky," it will be
sensed at last that in this meaning the drama of the resurrection immeasurably
outshines in mystic beauty and dynamic motivation to nobility of life any
sentiment or inspiration that can be generated by the alleged
"miracle" of Jesus' physical resurrection. This will still be
obdurately denied, no doubt. But its truth must be recognized if the general
mind is to be liberated from groundless religious hypnotizations, no matter how
firmly pietistic inculcation has fixed them in the subconscious.
The effort to confirm the position
that the true original significance of the Easter memorial can not be made to
derive from a literal or physical interpretation of the resurrection
"event" has carried the essay afield from the main elucidation of the
essential meaning of Easter. But it was imperative that it be shown
conclusively how the import of the observance has deplorably miscarried into a
melange of false beliefs. It can be stated concisely that the whole devastating
debacle of sense and truth ensued from the egregious blunder--always imminent
when esoteric truths are given openly to the uninitiated masses--in reading the
substance of the Mystery plays, the spiritual allegories, myths and other
dramatizations of lofty truth conceptions, as the objectified and historicized
experience of one man, the central Christ figure. After nineteen centuries of
obscuration this catastrophic imbecility now emerges in clear light.
The resurrection had not come. But
the human mind needed the psychological spur and goad, or the allure of an
enchanting vision of its high calling in the perfection of its Christly nature,
to inspire it to the life of righteous-
26
ness that alone would consummate it.
Hence the death and resurrection drama was formulated--and not by any means
solely in Christian circles, but universally in the world of old--to typify in
beautiful imagery, in story and in the dynamic magic of the histrionic art, the
glory of the experience awaiting all humans on their morn of deification. It
was to impress on all minds, in forms of moving beauty and power, the "death"
and resurrection of that divine unit of soul essence which for our physical
life here had enwombed itself in the "grave" or "tomb" of
flesh. Mortals were to be kept in memory of the cardinal truth that the body,
though itself subject to decay, gives birth to the soul's innate
potentialities, as was represented in the Samson allegory of the bees (always
typical of the soul) building a nest of honey in the decaying carcass of the
slain lion.
But this incarnational
"death" of soul in body became horribly distorted into the physical
death of Jesus' quivering flesh on a wooden cross. The wood of the alleged
cross on Golgotha stands as quite an apt symbol of the woodenness of the crass
misinterpretation of the Fundamentalists. Likewise another beautiful poetic
symbol, the three hours of darkness over the earth from the sixth to the ninth
hour, i.e., figuratively from the aeonial Christmas birth to Easter
resurrection (the three dark months of winter), has generated in the minds of
misled "believers" the actual darkness of the Western theological
understanding. This darkness has brought, not three hours, but many centuries
of what the historians have been constrained to dub the "Dark Ages"
of Christian Europe. The Biblical prophecy that "darkness shall cover the
earth and gross darkness the peo-
27
ple has been all too realistically
and tragically fulfilled, at least for the Western world, by this staggering
miscarriage of recondite symbolism into implausible and impossible
"history."
For that which "died" on the
cross of matter was no single individual man, but the divine nucleus of soul
apportioned out among all men. It was sent forth by the heavenly Father to be
the spiritual grain of wheat planted in the ground of human flesh, therein to
lie long in inertness and "death," until resurrected by the rebirth
of its dormant powers in the springtime turn of the cycle. And this distortion
of the message of the Good Friday and the Easter rituals into the commemoration
of the crucifixion and resuscitation of one human body has destroyed--as Jung
so forthrightly insists--the enlightening and impelling power of the dramatized
reality.
28
THE SEED OF DIVINITY
Remote as it may at first seem in
its relevance to the subject, the ark and deluge allegory contains the seed-germ
of the truth beneath the Easter drama. Ark derives from the Greek arche,
meaning "beginning." When the life that has been embodied in an
organic form is released at the end of the cycle by the flood of dissolution of
all created things, what is life's provision for its perpetuation and eventual
renewal? Where can it retire to be tided over the flood of universal
destruction, the work of Shiva the Destroyer? Nature holds the answer for us in
her ever mysterious miracle of the seed. Before the end of their living cycle
all things produce their seed, in which they can ride out the period of
dissolution of form and at the cycle's turn begin a new era of growth and
advance. Truly enough when the flood overwhelms the formal creation, life
retires back into its arche, to betide the deluge and live again.
In the case of the individual man
the body is the organic vehicle of soul's manifestation, and the soul is the
body's life. On body's dissolution the life (soul) withdraws into the
"ark" of an inner spiritual body (which does not decay), from which
as seed it will emerge to begin the next cycle of physical life. But as soul,
in the words of Greek philosophy, "imparts of its excellent nature to the
beings of secondary rank," it thus suffers the diminution or loss of its
higher strain of life in sacrifice to the lower, the body. It "dies"
that body may live, and that more abundantly. From this aeonial
"death," which spirit, the god in us, suffers on our be-
29
half, it must in the turn of the
cycle be resurrected. While immersed in body, body profits by, lives on, the
"death" of soul; when the body is dissolved at what we call death,
the soul regains its lost Paradise in disembodied being in the heavens. Each in
turn "dies" to restore life to its polarized brother. Just as truly
it must be seen that flesh dies that soul may live again, as that soul
"dies" that body may live again. This is why we sing at Easter--
From death to life eternal,
From earth unto the sky--
only "life eternal" should
be understood as "life aeonial," i.e., enduring throughout the aeon,
or cycle; not eternal in the sense of a heavenly life forever.
Browning has discerned the
unsoundness of the philosophy which exalts spirit to the heights and defames
matter and body as its enemies:
Let us not always say
'Spite of this flesh today
I stove, made head, gained ground
upon the whole.'
As the bird wings and sings,
Let us cry: 'All good things
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh
nore now than flesh helps soul.
Flesh and soul find themselves
locked inseparably in the marriage bonds of polarity here in body. Philosophies
that place all value on spirit and decry and degrade the flesh are convicted of
gross misplacement of emphasis. All the ordinances of ancient systems that
dramatized animal sacrifice as a form of worship were designed to stress the
fact that the life of the animal body of man is likewise a sacrificial oblation
for the uplift of the soul.
30
All esoteric wisdom-religions of the
past built on the thesis that the soul lives a more resplendent life detached
from body in heaven than it does on the earth, albeit its residence in earthly
body is the necessary schooling for its growth; and that it goes
"dead" in seed or ark state while here in body, and must be
resurrected out of that inert condition "in the fulness of time."
It is said that all Scripture is
given for edification. Of first importance then it is to realize that the basic
edifying item of truth the Scriptures enshrine (in myth, allegory, drama and
symbol) is this underlying universal principle: the descent, the
"death" in ark-seed form and then the resurrection of the seed units
of divine life out of material embodiment. This single item is the lost clue to
the mystery and the meaning of both life itself and the great Scriptures which
pictorialize its significance.
Scriptural composition and ancient
mythology are twins, both chanting the same theme-song of human life in much
the same strain. So in mythology and in the wide range of folk-lore and social
tradition, the same majestic epos of soul and body in evolutionary wedlock was
formulated in the guise of the corn-myth, the agriculture-myth, the
vegetation-myth. The seed grain went to its "death" in the ground,
and the tribal or village ceremonials solemnized and ostensibly aided the
seed's germination and the crop's growth to a good harvest. The ancient
Egyptians symbolized the god's resurrection by the figure of the seed's
"germination." "I shall not die; I shall not rot; I shall not
decay; I shall not become worms," shouts the soul in the underland of
31
Amenta; "I shall germinate; I
shall live again." And Isaiah sings: "Thou wilt not let thy holy one
to see corruption in Sheol." And over and over the Scriptures herald God's
promise that, though he has had to commit his children to the underworld of
material existence, he will raise them up again when they shall have mastered
the inertia of matter and achieved their rejuvenation and "crossed"
the lower sea of life in watery bodies in what the Egyptian scripts in one
passage call "the three days of navigation." That this cryptic
(but how obvious!) fact of our aeonial history could ever have been converted
into the story of the physical death and miraculous (but impossible)
resurrection of the man Jesus of Nazareth, seems beyond credibility. But it is
the only key that unlocks the riddle of what has occurred in the history of
religion since the third century, and the world of Christianity is going to
have a harrowing time to expiate its crime of dolt-minded stupidity if it is to
regain its status of worthiness after the disclosure of its age-long crassness
in mistaking sublime allegory for bizarre and grotesque history.
The indisputable true resolution of
the whole frightfully muddled theology is found in the simple fact that the
poetic scenario of an evolutionary step from humanity to divinity that was of
course never anything but universal to the race at all times, came through
ignorance to be interpreted as an event in the career of the one man Jesus.
What was depicted as conveying meaning for all men came to be misunderstood as
the life experience of but one man. So the Western world has walked in the fog
of a dense hallucination for lo these many centuries, of which sorry fact its
outward history
32
bears dismal testimony in the record
of bigotry, superstition, persecution, hatred, war and the most fiendish
inhumanity ever to be entered in the world's annals.
Nothing short of such a hypnotism by
pious credulity as has been exhibited in Christendom from the third century to
the present could ever account for the slavish mental acceptance by the
sheepish millions of Western Christians of the unconscionable idea that one
man's physical death could exert the tiniest iota of influence to change any
individual's karmic relation to his cosmic problem of sin and salvation. For if
it could be that the suffering of one could in the least measure later the
status of all other men's moral relation to the law of life, the moral
equilibrium of the universe would be disrupted. Not only can the action of
another than himself not relieve any man of the full onus of his moral
accountability, but there would immediately be chaos in the spiritual sphere if
it were possible. The two ineffaceable and unalterable realities of the world
were, to the great philosopher, Emanuel Kant, "the starry heavens above
and the moral law within." The Christian dogma of the vicarious atonement,
a digest as it were of the alleged basic fact of the conquest of death (in its
physical sense, be it remembered) by the (physical) resurrection of Jesus long
ago, would--Kant must have seen--shatter the inviolability and integrity of his
supreme moral law into bits. As the Christian theologians have again and again
heralded it, the one unshakeable foundation of the faith is the (always
physical) resurrection of Jesus. What, then, do we have to contemplate? Not
only the repudiation of the veridical historicity of the bodily resurrection of
the man of Nazareth, but the irrefragible
33
truth of the logical determination
that no man's resurrection, either bodily or in grace, can in the minutest
fashion operate to save the soul of one single other man, much less, then, of a
whole planetary order of beings, from the necessity of effecting their own
resurrection by their own moral actions.
And what dismay must it also bring
to the Christian world to have now to face, not only its own scholars'
rejection of the historical resurrection narrative, by giving it a subjective
instead of an objective interpretation, but also the increasing conviction of
exegetists that the resurrection never occurred at all, with even the very
existence of the man Jesus falling under ever-growing doubt? Ere long it will
have to be seen, and welcomed gladly, that the only avenue of salvation for the
Christian system from shattering disruption will be found in a resort to the
purely allegorical rendering of its Scriptures, with total abandonment of the
Gospel narrative as history. Long ago in the Middle Ages the Christian mystic
Angelus Silesius immortalized the verse:
Though Christ a thousand times in
Bethlehem be born,
But not within thyself, thy soul
will be forlorn;
The cross on Golgotha thou
lookest to in vain
Unless within thyself it be set
up again.
Likewise any believer who looks to
the Gospel scenario of the resurrection as the already pledged certitude of his
own individual escape of (physical) death, must henceforth know that he is
hugging to his soul a fantastic delusion. For in spite of millions of voices
raised each Easter to chant
34
Our Lord is risen,
We, too, shall rise,--
ostensibly in the same presumed
bodily manner--not a soul has risen from a churchly grave since that auspicious
first Easter day. Like old John Brown's body, their cadavers "lie
moldering in the grave," though happily (in spite of their resurrection
blunder, let it be hoped) their souls go marching on. If Jesus' resurrection
was historical and was also physical, or if it is even believed to have been
physical, what a mocking sting of defeat and delusion must cut into the mind of
the Christian world, upon the inescapable realization now that not in two
thousand years has the primal, the central, premise of the Christian religion
had one single vindication. The resurrection promise, the one last bulwark of
the faith, has never once had fulfilment! Dolefully the Easter chant, all the
while magnificent and soul-lifting beyond words in its non-Christian esoteric
relevance, will have to be sung:
Our Lord may have risen!
We never shall rise.
As a sheer conclusion of simple
logic, it could long ago have been known, as the most irrefutable dialectical
outcome from the premises, that a physical resurrection, likewise a physical
death, could not affect or alter in the minutest degree the moral order and
stability of the world of sentient beings. Therefore it should long ago have
been concluded that the "death" and the "resurrection" that
were central in every national epic, myth and Scriptural allegory, as well as
in all tribal ceremonial, must be understood as a figurative or pictorialized
representation of another "death" and
"resurrection,"
35
that were never real in concrete
factuality, but were perennial as spiritual realities of all human life. That
recognition, which was the achievement of early Sages who inspired the
Scriptures, would have kept the common mind of the Western world in sane
balance. Alas! That balance was violently unsettled from the fateful third
century onward, and we have by no means even yet, in religion and psychology,
in theology and philosophy, emerged from its darksome shadows. Both our
Christmas and our Easter are dimmed in their joyousness by the lowering
delusion of a totally false reference of the dramatism.
In vindication of the position here
supported, that no man's single death could reorient all other men's relation
to their moral and evolutionary destiny, we have, in confirmation of Johannes
Weiss' sagacious pronouncement the very recent statement of one who stood at
the very summit of ecclesiastical position in the Protestant world, the Rt.
Rev. Ralph W. Inge, Dean of Canterbury Cathedral, in his late volume, The
End of an Age (p. 162):
"This emphasis on religious
experience as the seat of authority obviously alters the center of gravity in
apologetics. The traditional approach is from miracle to faith. We used to be
told that our religion stands or falls with the discovery of the empty tomb.
This is a disastrous line of argument, for not only does a miraculous event
require a cogency of evidence, which from the nature of the case is not to be
had, but it is not clear how the resuscitation of a dead body can prove
anything either as to the divinity of Him who was restored for a few days to
earthly life, or how this miracle can guarantee our own participation in
eternal life, since our bodies will return to dust. Miracle, many of us now
believe with Goethe, is the child, not the
36
parent of faith . . . The details of
what happened nineteen hundred years ago are not essential to our faith as Christians,
and certainty about them is not available."
No apology is needed for injecting
into our effort to limn the glory and sublimity of the Easter imagery a
digression into the field of theological debate or polemics. For no attempt to
orient the majestic import of Easter in its proper sphere of mental-mystical
recognitions can have even a modicum of success as long as the mind clings to
the merest vestige of the historical basis of the festival. Only when at last
the mind wipes away the "history," the alleged reanimation of a man's
cadaver in a rocky tomb in the long past (as St. Paul affirms we must), can the
spirit be free to soar into the clear pure upper air of the stupendous light of
understanding of the festival's meaning for all men. Only when the true
appehension of its portent for our life brings it all within the purview of the
individual's own history, will its anthems and halleluiahs begin to lift souls
into the heights of ecstasy and divine intoxication. The dust of
"history" that has settled heavily upon the structure has too
completely obscured vision and prevented recognition of the fundamental meaning
of this festival of consummative earthly jubilee. That true meaning, in a
nutshell, is that the soul's life in mundane bodies is the gestation or
pre-natal period of its enwombment in the body of Mother Matter and that Easter
is its birthday into the higher world of the gods.
37
THE DATE OF THE RESURRECTION
This, the esoteric understanding of
the Easter significance, was in the early days so clear and evident that, be it
known as historically a fact, the primitive Christians, for the first three and
one-half centuries, celebrated the birth of the Savior on--March 25!
This custom was changed by encyclical of Pope Julian II, who in the year 345
A.D. ordained the shift of December 25. The decree stated that it was fitting
that the Christians should be in accord with the custom of the followers of
Mithra and of Bacchus, who celebrated the rebirth of the solar deity at the
winter solstice. One must guess why so salient a fact of Christian history has
been kept from the knowledge of the people! Prayers offered up in Christian
worship in the earliest days of the faith were addressed to "Our Lord the
Sun," evidencing that "primitive" Christians were quite in the
spirit of Pagan forms and ideologies. But the shift of the date of the
celebration of the Lord's birth from March 25 to December 25 clearly
attests to the singular fact--one never apprehended hitherto--that the early
Christians, who were at least by the third century the most ignorant of the
population (attested to by more than one historian), simply had confused the
symbolism of the "quickening" at the winter solstice with the true birth
at the vernal equinox. This is not improbable, nor is it to be held as a
blunder of gross proportions, since in the aura of symbolic thought each one of
the four "points" of the zodiac--the two equinoxes and the two
solstices--can be regarded as a "birth." Is a babe not
38
"born" when it is
conceived; or again when it is quickened from "death" to life? And if
those early Christians were working in the indeterminate field of emblemism,
who shall say that they were in error in naming the soul's final deliverance
from the womb of fleshly body at Easter as its day of birth? For the
delivery is the birth.
Pagan usage, however, had designated
the winter solstice as the date of the rebirth of the solar god in the year,
and it is evident that by 345 A.D. the concensus of common tradition forced the
Christian party to conform to the Pagan calendar of festivals. And all this
strongly points to the obvious recognition that neither the vernal nor the
winter date was fixed with the remotest reference to the actual calendar date
of a babe's human birth. The question always debated in esoteric circles was
whether the birthday should be set at the equinox or at the solstice; never was
it--and why not?--a question simply of the day and date on which it actually
occurred! The day chosen was fixed on purely symbolic grounds; but if it
occurred as history, why was not the matter of historical factuality the only
considered ground of dating? We do not try to fix the birthdays of Abraham
Lincoln and George Washington by any zodiacal consideration, but go by precise
evidence that they fell on certain days of the month. Christians must face the
stern fact that their Christ's birth, as also his resurrection, is dated
astrologically and not historically. And will they be able to follow the
implications of this datum to their logical conclusion, that the events
themselves are obviously not historical? What must be considered a singular,
indeed wholly unaccountable fact in Christian annals, is that, if there was
doubt or ques-
39
tion or difference of opinion among
early century Christians as to the date that would fittingly celebrate Jesus'
birth, we have no evidence of dispute, quarrel or controversy over the actual
date. It must be concluded that no calendar date was even thought of as in
question; and that therefore the birth itself was not considered a matter of
factual occurrence. The only ground for difference and debate was a matter of
seasonal symbolism.
What we have to discern in all this
is that the content of meaning conceived by the millions of devotees as to the
Easter festival, and therefore the misguided spirit of its celebration, are all
one hollow travesty, yes, mockery of the true significance. It has been twisted
into a gross fantastic and deadening misinterpretation of a truly sublime and
transcendent fact, or epoch, in the living drama of the human evolution. The
millions go on believing in the resurrection of a corpse (though we have Weiss'
assurance that they really do not believe it), which they have been told
guarantees their own similar rehabilitation after decease. Yet their common
sense and their own observation make them wonder why such a doctrine was ever
promulgated. So the glorious potential of even the vicarious realization of
Easter joys is dissolved out in wonder, doubt, bafflement of logic and
all-around confusion -- a tragic disillusionment of Easter's potential
raptures.
No, Easter can not mean a physical
resurrection, for such is not in the order of nature, as Dean Inge flatly
states. We find the Book of Ecclesiastes saying: "The body returns
to dust, but the soul to God who gave it." Likewise St. Paul declares (1
Cor. I5:35) that "some
40
man will say, How are the dead
raised up; and with what body do they come?" And the apostle then gives
the answer to this pivotal question, which, had his Church heeded it, would
have spared it the agonizing doubt and confusion that has plagued it for
centuries. "It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual
body." And he reminds us that we have a spiritual body. That Church
which he, rather than the Jesus whom he seems never to have heard of, (since he
never once mentions him as a living person), is said to have founded, has never
unreservedly endorsed his claim to our possession of a sublimated body of
spirit essence, as being a bit too "theosophical." But since flesh
and blood can not inherit the kingdom of God, the soul must be resurrected in a
body of imperishable ethereal substance, which will not dissolve with that of
the flesh. Had Christian development held fast to the basic data of the archaic
science of the soul, of which the ancient Sages were adepts, the theology of
the Church would have preserved knowledge of the inner bodies of rarefied
essence that shared existence with the outer sheath of flesh, the "coat of
skin" of the Genesis allegory. The ancient Egyptians laid down the
particulars of the structure of man's interior constitution. The universe was
build on number, asserted Pythagoras; and the basic number underlying all life
on earth was seven. Partaking of the nature of this life, man had seven bodies,
and the Egyptians described, graded and named them (from the coarsest to the
finest): the khat, or khabit; the ren, or name; the
sekhem; the ba; the ka; the sahu and the khu.
At the present stage man's
consciousness ranges over the four lower levels, as these are the only ones
develop-
41
ed to function thus far. These are
the four sides of the base of the pyramid of life, and on this base the
three-sided development is being, and for the most part is yet to be, built up.
Man is therefore pressing on toward the unfoldment of the higher bodies, and in
these he will be resurrected out of the "tomb" of the lower four. So
St. Paul is quite right in saying that men's souls are sown in a natural body
(the lower four), and raised in a spiritual body (the developing upper three).
The evolution of the upper three is made possible by their ability to transmute
"into the likeness of their own glorious bodies" (St. Paul) the
atomic essence of the lower four, precisely as the flame of a candle is able to
transmute into its own fiery essence the coarser substance of the lower body of
tallow. So that again the very theosophically minded apostle tells the truth of
the hoary ancient science in saying that we are reborn in a radiant spiritual
body as we die unto the old heavier bodies of matter in which Mother Nature
gave us physical birth.
42
THE RESURRECTION BODY
And Oh! That body of our
resurrection! That body of many names, yet all reflecting the ineffable
splendor of the sun! Truly it is to be a body woven of the impalpable texture
of solar glory. It is that shining garment of the redeemed, who exult before
the regained throne of God "in robes of light arrayed." It is the
radiant vesture of the righteous, who, the Scripture says, "shall shine
like the sun in the kingdom of their Father." It is that garment without a
seam, woven of the imperishable cloth of sunlight. It is the spiritual body
which St. Paul insists we possess by virtue of our sonship of the heavenly
Father. Again he describes it as that house or tabernacle with which we wait to
be clothed upon from above; that house not made with hands, eternal in the
heavens, in whose construction there was heard neither sound of hammer, axe or
any tool of iron; that house that Wisdom hath builded on its seven pillars (Proverbs).
IT is that radiant Augoeides of the Greeks, the glorious sahu or khu of
the Egyptians, the Shekinah of the Hebrews. It is that body of the infant
Christ in us, which every thought, word and deed of kindliness, graciousness,
brotherhood and love causes to shine with ever increasing beauty, and which
every mean, sordid, selfish and brutal motive causes to dim and flicker low. It
is that body whose essence will transmute all the gross elements of sensuality
and brutishness into the beauteous flame of glowing love. For it is a fiery
alembic in which all the baser ingredients of the old Adam, first or natural
man, will be thrice refined to spiritual purity. It is that high atomic potency
of which one of our hymns sings:
43
The flame shall not hurt thee! I
only design
Thy dross to consume and thy gold
to refine.
It is the etherealized substance
which, when brought to bright pitch, will transfigure the mortal part of man so
that, like the Christ's, his face will "shine as the sun and his garments
will become white as the light." It is the robe of our immortality which
we don to appear in beauty when we return to the Father. Or it is the scarlet
robe with which the Father hastens to clothe us as we return victorious from
our adventure in the rougher country of earth.
No man can be told a fact of more
transcendent importance to his life than that in his physical body, as in a
womb, he is now slowly gestating this body of the infant god which he is to be.
And this is that glory-body that he will deliver to its birth as the wondrous
Sun of Righteousness rises in his being with healing in its wings. Beside this
stupendous fact all the mass of religious belief that a man in history two thousand
years ago died as we die, and rose as we shall not rise, and that in some
incredible way this "event" became the sole implementation of our
eternal life, falls dead and meaningless, indeed crushes down the spirit of
man. Beside this twisted fabric of untruth stands the thrilling realization
that our salvation, our resurrection, our hope, nay, our certitude of
immortality, rests securely upon the foundation fact that our divinization is a
process that works like yeast in the very body of our life. No man can
disillusion us of this salvation, or rob us of its reality, since, under God,
it is a process entrusted to our own hands, a living process, to be studied and
mastered for its final outcome in unspeakable blessedness.
44
THE MATING OF SUN AND MOON
Mention has already been made of the
fact that in the early Christian centuries up to 345 A.D. the community of the
"brethren" celebrated the birth of their Sun-Savior on March 25,
doubtless following the suggestiveness of springtime rebirth. Since that dating
has astrological and not historical significance, it will be most profitable to
inquire into several aspects of this feature of the festival. Indeed it will be
found that in these determinations lie hidden the cryptic, or
"occult" meanings of the festival itself.
To begin with, the date of Easter is
a moveable one, not fixed to a calendar day. It may fall on any Sunday between
March 22 and April 23, and is bound to shift each year. So again it must be
noted that no moveable date could be considered the anniversary of a historical
event. If it were such there would have been no resort to a shifting date.
Likewise no zodiacal configuration would have been made a guiding
consideration. The dating is clearly and purely semantic.
It is generally, first of all, not
known why the twenty-fifth of the months (of March and December) was chosen as
the day of the festivals. Such matters were treated of old as secrets of the
Mystery brotherhoods, and so remained veiled as "occult mysteries."
But when it is taken into account that in the Scriptures generally the
resurrection was to occur "on the third day," or "after three
days," it seems certain that these principal festivals of the religious
calendar were marked as tridua,
45
or festivals of three days duration,
counting from the actual date of the equinox of spring, in the one case March
21 (or 22), and December 21 (or 22) in the other. "On the third day"
reckoned from the twenty-second, or "after three days", counting from
the twenty-first, would bring it on the twenty-fifth. In the confusion of
Christmas and Easter symbology, the date became the twenty-fifth in both cases.
Twenty-five was not in itself of marked significance in religious numerology,
as were the first of the month (new moon), the seventh (Sabbath), the tenth
(the original zodiacal number, and the Sephirothal construction), or the
fourteenth (or fifteenth), the day of the full moon. Three-day periods were
frequent in the round of religious festivals of the year.
The date of Easter has been set in
relation to considerations having to do with the conjunction of the two
celestial orbs that give light to the earth, the one by day, the other by
night--sun and moon. The actual and vital significance of this astronimical
basis is close to vital significance of this astronomical basis is close to
being a great lost item of knowledge even in the religion of the Christianity
that most lavishly celebrates the festival. Again it will be noticed that the
basic feature of the ground-plan which allocates the date for the rite stands
utterly remote from any reference to an event of objective occurrence. It lies
sublimated in the rarefied upper atmosphere of symbolism. And in this higher
realm of abstract relevance alone it finds its meaning.
Easter, then, is fixed to fall on
the first Sunday coming on or after the first full moon occurring on or after
the vernal equinox. If there happens to be a full
46
moon on March 20, the date must wait
twenty-seven days for the first full moon following March 21. And if that
should fall on a Monday, six more days must pass before there is a Sunday. If
there should chance to be a full moon on March 21 and that were a Sunday,
Easter would come on that day.
The base of the symbolic reference
is the fact that in all archaic and arcane philosophy the sun and moon typified
respectively the divine spiritual and the earthly physical natures
in man. The deep secret of the entire matter lies buried under the forgotten
datum of ancient knowledge that the spiritual Christ, man's higher deity, his
innermost soul, is generated, birthed and glorified in the constitution of the
mortal human through the wedlock, or conjunction of the two natures, the divine
and the human. Therefore the analogical science of old, searching in outer
nature for the vivid types of the inner reality of man's experience, turned
first to the spring of the year, when nature herself staged the immortal drama
of rebirth in the outer scene. "Dead" nature, life congealed to
dormancy in winter's icy clutch, put on its resurrection in the spring. Easter
must therefore come in the season of resurrected nature.
And for the union of the two great
bodies, typifying the marriage and copulation of soul and body to give birth to
the divine child in man, the celebration must be dated relative to the
conjunction of sun and moon closest after the equinoctial date. The copulation
taking place at the dark day of the moon's round of twenty-eight days, the
festival then must wait for the consummation of the "pregnancy" of
Mother Moon,
47
which comes with the rounded orb of
light in fourteen (or by solar reckoning, fifteen) days, the full moon. The
complete coverage of her body with solar rays sublimely pictorialize the
completion of her divinization, or end of her pregnancy, as of a mother ready
to deliver her child. "Thy whole body shall be full of light," says
the Christian Scripture, and this child of soul-and-body creation, personalized
by Horus in the ancient Egyptian dramas, exultingly exclaims: "My whole
body is filled with light; there is no part of me that is not a god; I am
divine in every part." "I am one of those who are glorified in
Annu," he says again. When the Christos is glorified in the body, it is ready
to be delivered forever from its womb of flesh in mortal life, and be born into
the glorious company of the immortal gods. Easter, the birthday of the gods.
And finally, as this child of the
spiritual sun and moon is destined for solar glorification, as he is
spiritual-solar in essential being, only one day of the week can fittingly be
chosen to depict this majestic character of his life and destiny, and that of
course is Sunday. The seventh sub-cycle in any cycle was the crowning
epoch which consummated six preparatory days with the generation of the
spiritual product of the cycle at its last stage. The six preceding
"days" marked the creation of the planets and the seventh brought to
birth the sun-child of the higher spiritual consciousness. Plutarch affirmed that
man derived his physical body from the earth,--as he obviously does; his
emotion-body from the moon (the moon strongly affects our psychic, especially
emotional, states); his mental body from Venus; and his spiritual body from the
sun. One ancient legend
48
asserts that the soul spends the
first six "days" of its residence in a planetary system in one after
another of the six planets, and its seventh "day" in the sun of the
system. The birth of the spiritual body, which is essentially the ground fact
of Easter, must therefore be celebrated on a Sunday.
The conjunction of sun and moon at
the dark of the moon impregnates the lunar orb with the seed of divine light
and in two weeks she brings this child of the sun to full maturity. Easter,
then, carries in its significance the poetry of spring, of the equinox,--the
powers of spirit and matter being then equilibrated,--of the union of sun
(spirit) and moon (body), of the full moon and of the symbolism of Sunday. And
whereas the Christ-birth at the winter solstice is always dramatically pictured
as occuring at night, the resurrection must, for equally pertinent
semantic considerations, be placed on Easter morn. The sun of spring is
rising, that is, increasing daily in power, and spring is the morning of the
year. So at Easter the sun-in-man is rising out of his winter of embodiment in
the new morn of his generative cycle. And so, as sings the Psalmist,
"weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning." The
morn of resurrected life rhythmically follows every night of spirit's
incarnation in body.
From one point of view it is
legitimate to surmise that as the early Christians confused the Christmas
quickening with birth symbolism and placed the birth of the Sun of God in
March, so possibly they likewise were confused about the festival of forty days
which commemorated the period of incubation of life-seed in
49
the earth, and therefore shifted
Lent to the wrong side of the year! There is strong, indeed almost irrefutable
support for the assertion that all the significations of Lent appertain in
nature's book of typism to the autumn. The spirit of Lent is entirely negative,
the intimations are all dour, sad and dismal. Thus it rightly would find
fitting appositeness only in the fall, when the sun-in-man, descending like the
sun in the sky of autumn to shorter and feebler daily manifestation, or
obscuration of its power, and sinking under the dominion of darkness, is
pictured in the old Ember Days festivals as sitting like Cinderella in her
hovel trying to keep warm beside the dying embers of her hearth-fire. Many
forms of this dramatism survived in different lands and all were ritualized in
the autumn.
We have in fact in our year of
commemorative days a period of forty days, beginning with the fall equinox of
September 21 and ending on October 31. This "autumn Lent" is
terminated by our Hallowe'en carousal on October 31, and this is followed on
the following day, November 1, by All Souls' Day, or All Saints' Day, the more
ancient Michaelmas. In England Hallowe'en was formerly called Nutcracker's
Night. The four cardinal "corners" of the zodiac were dedicated to
the four chief Angles of the Presence, Gabriel, Raphael, Michael and Uriel.
Michael's station was at the fall equinox. It could be affirmed that the period
of forty days in the fall is the true Lent. This will no doubt be refuted by
orthodox religionism, which will point to the etymological derivation of Lent
from the German Lenz, meaning "spring." The evidence is not at
hand to support a claim that this German word is not the partent of
"Lent."
50
The change of a "z" to a
"t" is not frequent in language derivatives. But even if the claimed
source be correct, it does not alter the fact that the symbolic elements of the
Ember Days and the soul's descent to darkness and destitution of light in the
bodily milieu down here would suggest autumn as the fitting time for
dramatizing the crucifixion, death and burial and all the gloom of Passion
Week, as well as the whole of Lent. The observance of Lent in the spring, when
beyond all argument the psychological intimations of the Lenten message and
motive are entirely out of accord with the spirit of nature springing to new
life in every blade of grass, bud and leaf, in growing sunshine and beauty on
every side, must be considered an anachronism of the sorriest and most glaring
ineptitude. Certainly in the long run it has gone far to dim the sun of happy
springtime joyousness in all the life of Christianity.
By every suggestion of symbolism the
Christ-in-us suffers his agony, endures his crucifixion and makes his sacrifice
of life for our salvation most appropriately under the natural allegorism of
autumn and winter. To shift the focus of the human heart on this phase of the
religious life over to the spring is to cast a cloud over the face of the sun
itself. A devout heart and a philosophically balanced mind can without
psychological detriment synchronize pious sentiment in the fall with the idea
of the sufferings and "death" of our ensouling deity, for nature
herself is chanting the same melancholoy refrain. But to superinduce this gloom
in the spring is to flout the very spirit of the light. Ignorant misconception
perpetrated a gross blunder, which has darkened the brightness of the
springtime in the hearts
51
of men in the West. Can any verses
in our Scriptures be more thrilling than those of the Old Testament Song of
Solomon (2:10-13)?:
"Rise up, my love; my fair one,
and come away. For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the
flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the
voice of the turle [dove] is heard in our land. The fig tree putteth forth her
green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.
Arise, my love, my fair one, and
come away."
These inspiring lines must be taken
as a part of the dramatism which represented the life of the soul in matter. It
is indeed the Easter theme-song rhapsodizing in tune with greening boughs and
singing birds. The adjuration to "rise up" and "come away"
is addressed to the devine sun-soul in man, when the day of final victory and
release from the bondage of bodily existence has dawned, and the very voice of
God shouting through his creation bids the soul come forth to greet the morn of
its everlasting triumph.
52
THE SPRINGTIME OF THE SOUL
Beyond all argument, as it would be
inappropriate to stage the ritualism of resurrection in autumn (although fruit
gathering and harvest home festivals do in a measure just that), so it is an
error to set the crucifixion, the fasting, the scourging, the privation of
happy life in the spring. Likewise it appears that by some further inadvertence
or misconception the Christian leadership introduced Palm Sunday ahead of its
proper time in festival ordination. In the Christian year it stands a week
before Easter, and thus falls five days ahead of the crucifixion. By all
the logic of analogy the soul's entry in triumph into the "holy city"
of higher being, with choraled halleluiahs and floral carpets to welcome it,
marks the final consummation of the whole long run of its pilgrimage through
the kingdoms of matter and its return to heave above. In one view it even
represents a later stage than Easter itself. For the latter portrays the final
release of soul from its prison of flesh; the entry into the Holy City must
dramatize its reascension to its celestial home. It seems utterly inept to
introduce it ahead of the crucifixion. This Christian arragement presents the
illogical sequence of final reunion of the soul with its heavenly home, then
the crucifixion, which surely is the pain of its immersion in the body on
earth, and then its release from body. As Easter depicts its release from the
prison of matter, Palm Sunday must point to the later release from earth
altogether. Palm Sunday should therefore supplement and complete the Easter
event, bringing it to its ultimate conclusion in the world above. As intimated,
the
53
crucifixion should come in the fall,
and Easter and Palm Sunday should follow as crowning triumph in the vernal season.
There is only one way by which the
allocation of Lent's forty days to the spring may possibly be saved the charge
of anachronism. It has to do with the significance of the number forty. This
number, which occurs sixty-four times in the Old Testament, carries always the
emblemism of the incubation of spirit in matter. This connotation was based on
the item from nature that the wheat sown in the flooded fields bordering the
Nile River during its inundation was held to lie forty days in the earth before
germinating. Also the period of gestation of the seed of human life in the
mother's body is forty weeks.
Now it would obviously be impossible
to institute a festival of forty days to cover in its symbolism the autumn
gloom of the crucifixion motive and terminate with the springtime joy of Easter
resurrection, for forty days will not reach from autumn beginning to spring
end. To do this would require a whole six-months festival, from September 21 to
March 21. It doubtless seemed permissible then to insert the forty days period
in the spring, beginning it at such a date that the fortieth day would end it
on Easter morning. This scheme was saved from ineptitude--if intelligently
envisaged as pure symbolism and not outraged by historical appurtenances--by
the fact that the forty days of Lent ended in the glorious denouement of Easter
day.
Likewise, as the numbers three and
seven also carried the intimations of soul's life in body, it seemed pro-
54
per to insert periods of three and
seven days in the place where their termination would also coincide with Easter
morning. This gave us the seven days of Passion Week and the "three
days" in the tomb, if the actual time from Friday morning to Sunday
morning can be called three days. As all's well that ends well, all three
periods, Lent, Passion Week and the days in the tomb end the drama with the
burst of Easter glory.
The Fundamentalist will challenge us
to declare the authenticity of all this semantic flourish. To him the events
were historical occurrences, and they came when they occurred, not being
obligated to fall in with the scheme of poetic nature symbolism. The only
answer needed to rebut this contention is that, if he will study with
sufficient assiduity the history of ancient religious literature which produced
his venerated Bible and discover the strange methodology of religious writing
in that remote age, he will see that which will disconcert his entire system of
Scriptural interpretation,--the incontrovertible fact that those venerable
Sages never wrote religious books in the form of veridical personal or
national history. What they essayed to write was embalmed in forms of
suggestive typism, such as myth, allegory, drama, number graphs and
astrological pictography. By these methods they put forth the great truths of
life and consciousness in forms of representation that would eternally
adumbrate their reality to the human mind, however dull. Knowing that the
essence of spiritual experience and the mind's realization of high truth are
things that can not be expressed or conveyed by words alone, in fact never are
fully communicable by language, they resorted to the only method that can
55
impress true meaning even
unconsciously on the brain. Every natural object and phenomenon in the living
world is an objective photograph of an elemental truth. Every object in nature
mirrors a cosmic or spiritual truth. Man needs but to gaze at and reflect upon
outer nature to find glyphs of the basic principles of knowledge appertaining
to a higher world and level of consciousness. The laws and ordinances of spirit
are adumbrated in nature's operations and spectacles.
Have we not seen that the reality of
our eventual resurrection is foreshadowed by the vernal chanting of birds, the
leafing of trees, the outburst of life from wintry thraldom? Can we not see it
also in the insect's bursting out of its old shell, rending the veil of its
temple; in the snake's shedding of its old skin and coming forth in a sleek new
body--which even we humans imitate by an Easter parade of new garments;--in the
chick's breaking through its shell to be born into a higher kingdom of life?
Are we so crass that we can not discern the allegorical beauty and awesome
sublimity of ancient Scriptures, but must take their constructions of dramatic
genius as episodes of a history that is always dull and meaningless unless
haloed by the mind's apprehension of lofty truth?
Ages before Christianity took over
and ruinously travestied the secret traditions of a primeval revelation by
outrageous literalization of pictured truth, nature herself had staged so
impelling a drama of the Easter resurrection that nothing within the pale of
human genius can do more than faintly copy its impressiveness. We owe the
knowledge of it to the sapient Egyptians,
56
who manifested almost a sixth
psychic sense in discerning in the characteristic traits of animals many
striking analogies with abstract verities. Perhaps in no one respect have they
revealed a more astonishing correspondence between animal trait and cosmical
law than in the case of the cynocephalus, or dog-headed ape. There was a
wide-spread tradition that certain species of apes assembled at the time of
sunrise on a river bank or elevation facing the east, and with prostrations,
cries and a semblance of attempted speech which Gerald Massey describes as
"clicking," they saluted the lord of day as he appeared above the
horizon. Likewise members of the species were kept in Egyptian temples so that
the priests might know the precise time of the conjunction of the sun and moon
each month, because at the very moment of this occurrence the male bows down to
the ground as if lamenting the ravishment of the moon and goes blind, while the
female, also prostrated, menstruates. Then to denote the renovation of the moon
the priests depicted the animal standing upright with his hands raised to
heaven, and a diadem on his head.
Mere words can add little to what
nature has staged in her pantomime. In the mute action of the ape life was
promising the gift of speech with the rise of intellect. At the sheer symbolic
rise of the emblem of divine light the animal creation gave first expression of
the instinct to communicate ideas by speech. It was the foreshadowing of a far
later stage of advancement, when, one whole kingdom farther uplifted, the human
was to stage the drama of his rising into a supernal realm of being under the
symbol of the Easter resurrection. As the physical light rose on the sight of
the animal, the latter felt the
57
stir of the impulse to frame ideas
in speech. As the spiritual light is rising in the mind of man, he feels the
stir of the impulse to embrace and express immortal life and immortal love. The
physical sun caused the cynocephalus to break into speech; the sun of mind
caused the man to consummate the powers of speech. When the sun of the
spiritual resurrection at last breaks upon the soul, all speech will be
transcended by lightning flashes of perfect cognition.
Easter meaning and Easter ecstasy
will forever elude us if we can not understand it as the drama, not of one
man's history long passed and historically demonstrated as powerless to give us
the immortality it has been presumed to promise, but of our own life history,
the scenario of our transfiguration yet to come. If we chant at Easter the
unfolding of the portals everlasting, it can be only to refer to our own
opening the doors of sense to the entry of spirit. If we acclaim the Christ's
triumph over decay, it can mean only that a potency of Christly consciousness within
our own natures will not perish with our flesh, but will live on in higher
vehicles, returning to earth many times to build up their perfection. If we
sing of the Savior's taking captivity captive, it is that we can develop this
more dynamic power of godliness and with it subdue and govern the carnal nature
that held us captive, stepping out into freedom as the fiery power of spirit
melts down the chains that bound us. If we commemorate the Lord's bursting the
gates of hell and flinging wide the bolted bars to release the captives that
sat in darkness, it is that we shall in ecstasy abandon the last body of our
earthly incarnation and soar to freedom. When nature bursts out of her winter's
58
"death" and arrays herself
in new and glistening garments, it is the sign that we, too, shall burst out of
our underworld confinement and come forth clothed with light.
But only by lifting the reference of
all its imagery from ostensible ancient history and making it the drama of our
own experience will the great festival be able to exercise its exalting
efficacy upon our spirit. After all St. Paul is grandly right: if Christ be not
risen, then is our faith vain. For if Christ be not risen in us, risen
out of the pettiness, the sordidness, the ignorance, rapacity, greed and the
fell instincts of our brute nature, to breathe in the pure air of graciousness,
godliness and love, then indeed is our faith in the resurrection vain and
empty. If he be not risen in us, then truly enough we have no part in the
resurrection. Without this transformation in our own natures, we keep the
Christ still bound in his cerements of "death" in the only tomb in
which he ever lay "dead"--our mortal body.
The Judean myth is a supremely
beautiful emblemism of the miracle of the resurrection. But if we for a moment
permit it to lure us into the belief that another man's alleged conquest of
death in the long past in any degree relieves us of the evolutionary task of
achieving our own resurrection, the myth becomes the source of a tragic psychological
calamity for us. For to the extent to which we look to a man, or a miracle, or
any power outside ourselves, to that extent we will let the sleeping divinity
within us lie unawakened. Our great psychologist Jung has set this forth with
the courage of a crusader for truth.
59
Never has the logical purport of the
twenty-first verse of the inspiring fifteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians,
called the chapter of the resurrection, been grasped in its pregnant message
for all theology. "For since by man came death, by man came also the
resurrection of the dead." On the historical thesis of interpretation the
implication of the first clause of this declaration is that man generic brought
Jesus to his death. That is to say, it rests on the presupposition that mankind
killed Jesus, physically. This is of course absurd, and rules out the
possibility of such an egregious interpretation, which, however, the historical
thesis demands. The verse, as likewise many others, simply does not supply the
premises for the historical rendering. In the seventh chapter of his Epistle
to the Romans St. Paul also states that sin rose up and killed him and that
he had died. Yet he was sitting up alive when he wrote the verses! Nothing has
ever been so blind as the theology that has looked at these texts for
centuries, yet failed to see that the "death" referred to had never a
thing to do with bodily demise! It carried the Greek philosophical connotation
of the relative "death," that is, the inertness, torpidity, the
unawakened latency of the soul, when in incarnation it lay buried down
under the heavy stifling vibrations of the earthly animal nature of the body in
which it had been implanted.
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SKYLARK AT HEAVEN'S GATE.
In the light of this elucidation
provided by Greek philosophy the baffling mystery of Paul's language in the
letter to the Romans stands revealed in full clarity. There are two
"men" in our constitution, the first or natural man, first Adam, of
the earth, earthly; and the second or spiritual man, the new Adam (Christ),
born not of water (the physical body, which is seven-eights water) but of air (spiritus)
and fire, as says John the Baptist. St. Paul sets forth succinctly the relation
of these two natures, when (in 4th Galatians) he says, "he that was
born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the spirit."
"So also is it now," he reminds us. The lower sensual "man"
in us brings the divine soul to its "death" in the body. When soul
enters body, states Paul, sin, which was powerless when soul was yet in heaven,
springs to life and "kills" it. So we have at last the glowing
meaning of the apostle's vivid statement that by man came death,
"man" here standing clearly for the first Adam, the human animal,
earthly, sensual devilish. For this is the unregenerate carnal animal, product
of the purely biological evolution, that overwhelms the infant god when he
steps into the habitation of the flesh and smothers him to "death"
under the incubus of the animal nature.
But now emerges the thrilling second
part of the verse, the sequel to the first clause, the mighty truth that again
a blind theology has stubbornly refused to see. If by animal humanity came the
"death" of divine soul, by the same element in man's make-up will
come
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also the resurrection! One finds the
illuminating analogy that supports this conclusoin in that universal textbook
of answers to all riddles, the world of nature. The seed goes into the earth
and the earth brings it to its "death." But it is that same earth
that in the turn of the cycle, at the spring season, will bring that
"dead" seed to its resurrection, its germination. Says Jesus in the
Gospels, "Unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth
alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." And again St. Paul
clinches the interpretation in saying, "For as in [the first] Adam all
die, even so in Christ [the last Adam] shall all be made alive." All
spirit gives its life, goes to its "death" to uplift the physical
creation below its level. It pours out its lifeblood of divine potential so
that lower orders may have more abundant life. But for its sacrificial effort,
its divine oblation, it is wondrously repaid by matter with the baptism of a
new birth through its roots in matter's essence.
The ineffable tragedy of Western
religious history lies in this unconscionable blunder of Christian theology in
traducing surpassing spiritual allegory into ostensible personal history, in
mistaking the central figure in the universal Mystery drama for a man of flesh
in that history. When may it be realized that the actual divine power that was
personified in drama and ritual by a human actor, can be resurrected
from its torpor under the sluggish nature of the body and, thus lifted up, can,
as its personification says, draw all men up with it? And when, too, will it be
realized that the alleged personal man whom a hallucinated theology has
mistakenly substituted for the spiritual actuality he only represented
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in the play, never could in the
remotest degree be the means of effecting universal salvation? Once the
depressing psychological blanket of two thousand years of mentality stupefied
by the mirage of a personal man-God as the agent of human redemption from
animality to godliness is lifted from off the consciousness of the Western
world, then may be generated in all hearts the wondrous transforming power of
the Easter message. It is probably much truer as fact than as poetic figurism
to say that the heavy gravestone that the Christ-in-man still has the task of
rolling away from the mouth of his "tomb" of bodily flesh to
consummate his resurrection, is in large measure this very pall of ignorance
that keeps that stone sealed all the tighter. For it is religion itself, its
vision of truth beclouded by the mists of ghastly caricatures of the meaning of
its own Scriptures, that has helped to seal the stone of ignorance that shuts
us in the cave of mortal "death." It is as much as anything else the
common acceptation of the Easter legend as objective history that has operated
to keep the Christ still darkly imprisoned in his tomb.
In the finale, we can then reiterate
St. Paul's admonition to Timothy to shun the vain and profane babblings of such
as Hymenaeus and Philetus, who greatly err in declaring the resurrection
already past and thus weaken the potential of all men for the resurrection
still to come.
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